ut the dog
and the horse in your argument? _They've_ got no prehensile organ that
ever I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the
cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.' True, O most
sapient and courteous objector. I grant it you at once. But observe the
difference. The cleverness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not
original. It has probably arisen in the course of their long hereditary
intercourse and companionship with man, the cleverest and most
serviceable individuals being deliberately selected from generation to
generation, as dams and sires to breed from. We can't fairly compare
these artificial human products, therefore, with wild races whose
intelligence is all native and self-evolved. Moreover, the horse at
least _has_ to some slight extent a prehensile organ in his very mobile
and sensitive lip, which he uses like an undeveloped or rudimentary
proboscis to feel things all over with. So that the dog alone remains
as a contradictory instance; and even the dog derives his cleverness
indirectly from man, whose hand and thumb in the last resort are really
at the bottom of his vicarious wisdom.

We may conclude, then, I believe, that touch, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
admirably words it, is 'the mother-tongue of the senses;' and that in
proportion as animals have or have not highly developed and serviceable
tactile organs will they rank high or low in the intellectual hierarchy
of nature. Now, how does this bear upon the family of parrots? Well, in
the first place, everybody who has ever kept a cockatoo or a macaw in
domestic slavery is well aware that in no other birds do the claws so
closely resemble a human or simian hand, not indeed in outer form or
appearance, but in opposability of the thumbs and in perfection of
grasping power. The toes on each foot are arranged in opposite
pairs--two turning in front and two backward, which gives all parrots
their peculiar firmness in clinging on a perch or on the branch of a
tree with one foot only, while they extend the other to grasp a fruit
or to clutch at any object they desire to take possession of. True,
this peculiarity isn't entirely confined to the parrots alone, as such.
They share the division of the foot into two thumbs and two fingers
with a whole large group of allied birds, called, in the charmingly
concise and poetical language of technical ornithology, the Scansorial
Picarians, and more generally, known to the unlearned h