e
laws of hydrostatics. The bear would doubtless have pawed a cloth in
the same way, vaguely seeking to draw the bread within reach. But when
an elephant blows through his trunk upon the ground _beyond_ an object
which he wants, but which is beyond his reach, so that the rebounding
air will drive it toward him, he shows something very much like
reason.

Instinct is a kind of natural reason,--reason that acts without proof
or experience. The principle of life in organic nature seeks in all
ways to express and to perpetuate itself. It finds many degrees of
expression and fulfillment in the vegetable world; it finds higher
degrees of expression and fulfillment in the animal world, reaching
its highest development in man.

That the animals, except those that have been long associated with
man, and they only in occasional gleams and hints, are capable of any
of our complex mental processes, that they are capable of an act of
reflection, of connecting cause and effect, of putting this and that
together, is to me void of proof. Why, there are yet savage tribes in
which the woman is regarded as the sole parent of the child. When the
mother is sick at childbirth, the father takes to his bed and feigns
the illness he does not feel, in order to establish his relationship
to the child. It is not at all probable that the males of any species
of animals, or the females either, are guided or influenced in their
actions by the desire for offspring, or that they possess anything
like knowledge of the connection between their love-making and their
offspring. This knowledge comes of reflection, and reflection the
lower animals are not capable of. But I shall have more to say upon
this point in another chapter, entitled "What do Animals Know?" I will
only say here that animals are almost as much under the dominion of
absolute nature, or what we call instinct, innate tendency, habit of
growth, as are the plants and trees. Their lives revolve around three
wants or needs--the want of food, of safety, and of offspring. It is
in securing these ends that all their wit is developed. They have no
wants outside of these spheres, as man has. Their social wants and
their love of beauty, as in some of the birds, are secondary. It is
quite certain that the animals that store up food for the winter do
not take any thought of the future. Nature takes thought for them and
gives them their provident instinct. The jay, by his propensity to
carry away and