ass, wherefore it reaches craftily behind
the glass. Is this instinct? No. It is rudimentary reasoning. Lower
than the monkey in the scale of brain is the robin, and the robin fights
its reflection in the window-pane. Now climb with me for a space. From
the robin to the monkey, where is the impassable gulf? and where is the
impassable gulf between the monkey and the feeding-child? between the
feeding-child and the savage who seeks the man behind the partition? ay,
and between the savage and the astute financiers Mrs. Chadwick fooled and
the thousands who were fooled by the Keeley Motor swindle?

Let us be very humble. We who are so very human are very animal.
Kinship with the other animals is no more repugnant to Mr. Burroughs than
was the heliocentric theory to the priests who compelled Galileo to
recant. Not correct human reason, not the evidence of the ascertained
fact, but pride of ego, was responsible for the repugnance.

In his stiff-necked pride, Mr. Burroughs runs a hazard more humiliating
to that pride than any amount of kinship with the other animals. When a
dog exhibits choice, direction, control, and reason; when it is shown
that certain mental processes in that dog's brain are precisely
duplicated in the brain of man; and when Mr. Burroughs convincingly
proves that every action of the dog is mechanical and automatic--then, by
precisely the same arguments, can it be proved that the similar actions
of man are mechanical and automatic. No, Mr. Burroughs, though you stand
on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick out that ladder from
under your feet. You must not deny your relatives, the other animals.
Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the
abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself. By them you stand or
fall. What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself--a pretty
spectacle, truly, of an exalted animal striving to disown the stuff of
life out of which it is made, striving by use of the very reason that was
developed by evolution to deny the possession of evolution that developed
it. This may be good egotism, but it is not good science.

PAPEETE, TAHITI.
_March_ 1908.

THE YELLOW PERIL

No more marked contrast appears in passing from our Western land to the
paper houses and cherry blossoms of Japan than appears in passing from
Korea to China. To achieve a correct appreciation of the Chinese the
traveller should first sojourn a