farming in order to join the ranks of the overcrowded professions.

In England the University of Cambridge, ever in the van of scientific teaching, has already instituted courses in biology and chemistry leading to a diploma in agricultural science.

The great secrets of successful work in natural history are perseverance and concentration. In this study, as in every other occupation, it is only the man who keeps steadily at it year after year who ever achieves anything. But concentration is of equal importance. The animal kingdom is such an enormously wide field, that unless the energies of the natural historian are confined to one small part of it they are dissipated and wasted. We want to be specialists in this society; we want not merely those who take a more or less active interest in Natural History as a whole, but we want also the special student of insects, the lover of shells, the sportsman who knows all about game birds, and so on. There is no fear that the man who makes a specialty of one branch will find it dull to listen to the record of the observations of the students of another department. Any honest study of even a small part of the field rouses far more interest in the field as a whole than a hazy and languid study of general zoology. And here perhaps I may make a suggestion or two with regard to our field. work. It is one of the great disadvantages of our society that owing to the peculiarity of our Canadian climate, the time when we hold our meetings is just the time when we can do no out-of-doors work. The summer before last I was privileged to take part in some of our excursions, and the defect which struck me most about

them was the absence of definite aim. It seems to me

that we should know what we are going to look for before we start, else we are not likely to accomplish anything. We should go out in search of flowers, or of insects, or of shells, but not of everything together. After all, however, the work that is really important in this line is done by each for himself, and our great need is the accession of more young enthusiasts to our ranks. Let us hope that in the future all who have any love for any department of Natural History will be drawn to a society where they shall meet with sympathy and support.

THE NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE : -By WESLEY MILLS, M.A., M.D., D.V.S., F.R.S.C., Professor of Physiology in McGill University, Montreal, Canada. London, T. Fisher Unwin, Paternoster Square, 1898.

Few men possess such eminent qualifications for dealing with the subject treated of in this volume as Dr. Wesley Mills possesses. To begin with, he is well known as the friend and protector of all animals. An ancient poet-philosopher took credit to himself that he counted nothing relating to man foreign to him. The range of Professor Mills' interest and sympathies is vastly more comprehensive; it embraces everything that lives. To him no bird or beast is an object of indifference. And this is a prime qualification for one who would interpret animal life. To understand them one must love them, as indeed love is the true organ of man's perception and his interpretation of the entire field of his observations. It is inconceivable that any one who is repelled by the lower creatures, or to whom their welfare is a matter even of indifference, could ever do them justice in any opinion he formed of them. Longfellow ascribes the remarkable skill in various kinds of woodcraft of his Indian hero, Hiawatha, to the tenderness of his sympathies with the tenants of the forest; in consequence, they readily yielded up their secrets to him. He learned of every bird its language; where they built their nests in summer; where they hid themselves in winter." According to this law, animal nature must be an open book to Dr. Wesley Mills.

Then our author loves truth above all things. This disposition is manifest throughout the treatise before us. How earnestly he plans, and how patiently he waits and works to get at the truth. The scientific spirit is his pre-eminently. Nothing is taken for granted, and no detail is deemed unimportant in his observations on the development of the intelligence of the animals under study. In no portion of this book is his love of truth more conspicuously shown than in the correspondence regarding instinct, with which it closes. Dr. Wesley Mills is well known to be an evolutionist in a general way; but he evidently prefers facts, and is prepared to cling to them rather than to any hard and fast theory of

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evolution. If the theory will not square with the facts, so much the worse for the theory.

Dr. Mills' devotion to science is exhibited not only in the time and patient labour he has bestowed upon it, but also in the expenditure to which he has gone in its interest. It was Agassiz who said that he had not time to make money. Put Prof. Wesley Mills is not only indifferent to the making of money, which he deems an aim beneath a philosopher; what little he has or earns he spends largely on the prosecution of scientific investigations. These long continued observations on animals could be carried on only at great expense: but he has borne it willingly, and how could filthy lucre be laid out to better purpose? And he is amply repaid by the results achieved; no chapters in human biography are more interesting than his diaries of dogs and cats, and squirrels, and rabbits. What he does not know of dogs especially is not worth knowing.

The main thesis he sets out to establish is that brute creatures have mind; and he has undoubtedly made it good. Of course, this is no new claim put forth on behalf of the lower creation. Long ago, unthrifty people were sent to the ants to learn lessons of prudence; mental qualities being predicated of them which the sluggard was to emulate. Virgil and Ovid wrote about the domestic bee in a way which showed what high mental qualities that active little creature possessed. No one of an observing turn of mind who has had much to do with domestic animals will deny them the possession of reasoning powers. As the author properly maintains, most of the lower creatures in some one or more particulars, show greater mentality than man himself. The faculty of memory is specially highly developed in several of them. Whether there is any means by which the different genera can hold intercommunication or not, there can be little question but that there are signs and sounds employed by which the same species can hold converse together-the equivalent of speech among men. Rev. James George, D.D., Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy in Queen's College, Kingston, when the writer was a student in that institution, nearly fifty years ago-a most original thinker and an inspiring teacher-did not hesitate to give forth that the brutes have mind; no matter what consequences the admission might lead to, and this before "The Origin of Species" was written. But he went beyond allowing them to be possessed of mental faculties, although he held that such capacities

were hedged about by their "life in sensuism," to use his own phrase; he claimed for many of them high degrees of intelligence, and used to entertain his students by relating to them the results of his own observations and experiments with bees, ants and other creatures, carried on much in the same way as those of Dr. Wesley Mills. He especially maintained that all creatures have a language of their own. And who that has heard a squirrel or catbird scold, or a sentinel crow give warning to the flock he belongs to of the approach of a gunner, can doubt that they have a most effective capacity of utterance?

Prof. Mills' second thesis is that the hereditary mental capacity of the lower animals, which usually goes by the name of instinct, is capable of great expansion, from the moment of the creature's birth until the time it has reached its full growth and maturity. The series of observations he has recorded go to show that while certain tokens of the possession of power for gaining sustenance are exhibited from the first, there is a rapid development of intelligence in the way of experimental knowledge, on the part of each individual. Of course, such acquirements as any animal makes by experience, have relation to the sphere it fills in the total sum of being. Each species has its own functions and displays its characteristic capacity and applies its intelligence in attaining those functions, and whilst the individual species learn from each other, by imitation and otherwise, they do not seem to take lessons from beyond the limits of their own kind, unless, indeed, domestic animals generally are helped upward in the scale of being, as our author hints at, by their contact with

man.

At the same time, Dr. Mills has given instances in which individuals have risen higher in intelligence than the ordinary level of their species. Any one who has taken note of the cats and dogs with which he has been acquainted, to go no further, must have marked great differences in their capacity, and in the degree of intelligence which they reached. In herds of cattle, too, there is often one cow that has a power of initiative that gives her pre-eminence, and often makes her exceedingly troublesome. It may be that it was by accident that she first learned to open the gate leading to the cabbage garden; but once having acquired such knowledge, it becomes hard to keep the "breachy" animal out of mischief. The same is true of horses in breaking down fences with their bodies, or in learning to jump the fences