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These three distinct stages of progress from the inorganic world of matter and motion up to man, point clearly to an unseen universe-to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate.*

And again:

Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now adduced-strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which are clearly what ought not to be on the materialistic theory-will be able to accept the spiritual nature of man, as not in any way inconsistent with the theory of evolution, but as dependent upon those fundamental laws and causes which furnish the very materials for evolution to work with.t

Declarations such as these, coming from such an authority, must doubtless be very comforting to those minds which feel themselves compelled to receive the evidence for evolution but shrink from materialism, which feel convinced that materialism can not be true, and yet have an uneasy suspicion that evolution points to it as a logical conclusion. But if we admit with Mr. Wallace that variation and natural selection are not adequate to explain the evolution of man's higher qualities and faculties, we are not merely delivered from the acceptance of materialism, we are invited and even compelled (as has been urged in a former part of this paper) to review the whole question of the extent of the application of Mr. Darwin's great principle. He would be a rash man who, in the face of Mr. Darwin, Mr. Wallace, and the whole generation of naturalists who have followed in their steps, should deny that natural selection was a vera causa in creative work; but there is no rashness or audacity in maintaining what Mr. Darwin did not deny, and what Mr. Wallace emphatically affirms, namely, that there is needed for the explanation of phenomena something beyond, and essentially different from, the process of natural selection. All seems to point beyond matter into the region of mind, beyond mechanical sequence to purpose, beyond all veræ cause to the causa causarum, beyond Nature to God.

I will close this paper by recording an incident which was communicated to me some years ago in the course of conversation by Dr. Thompson, the late Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Dr. Thompson was walking, in his college days, with two companions, one of whom was Alfred Tennyson; of the name of the other I am not sure. The path by which they went was one which all Cambridge men know, namely, that which leads from the backs of the colleges through the fields toward Coton. After passing the brook, which used to be crossed (and perhaps is now) by a rude wooden bridge, it was perceived that Tennyson had lagged behind. He had paused by the side of the brook, brought his eyes as near as he could to the surface of the water, and was examining with intense interest the subaqueous life which the little stream contained. After a time he rejoined his companions, and this was his utterance when he joined them: "What an imagination God has!" The words must have made a deep impression upon my informant's mind; otherwise he would not have retained them in memory, and would not have thought it worth while to repeat them to me. They made a similar impression upon myself when so repeated; and I can not but regard them as containing a true philosophy of Nature. Whatever may be the power of natural selection, and whatever causes may be at work to produce the varied scene of life which the world contains, you need some underlying cause, both of life itself and of reproduction and variation, and of all natural phenomena; and if causally the existence of the universe may be attributed to God's will and purpose, so the endless variety of vital manifestations may be attributed to that which in the case of man we should call imagination.

* Page 476.

VOL. XXXVII.-7

+ Ibid.

In reality, whatever may be the actual historical genesis of Nature, we seem to need a quasi-Platonic doctrine of antecedent ideas in the divine mind as the basis, the underlying condition, of the existence of things as we see them. It is matter for fair discussion among naturalists how much may be attributed to natural selection, how much to sexual, how much to physiological, and so forth. But such discussions can not go to the root of things; they do not reach the original thought out of which the works of Nature, as we call them, originally spring. Michael Angelo, as we are told, used to sit with his hammer and chisel before his marble block, and shape it without any previous modeling process into the figure which he intended to produce; other sculptors, I believe, with only this one grand exception, make their model in clay, and thence proceed by semi-mechanical steps to the finished work; but Michael Angelo and all other sculptors have alike the seminal idea in their minds, and the manner of its evolution is comparatively a matter of detail. Something of the same kind may be said of the production of natural things. It may be possible for naturalists to discover some of the steps by which the finished work comes to be what it is; but the actual origin of natural things-the wonders of life, the varied beauties of the universe, above all, the mind of man, which is capable of understanding, appreciating, and discussing the problems to which natural things give rise-is to be sought in no region lower than that which may, with all reverence, be described as the mind, or as the imagination of God.-Nineteenth Century.

I

CATS AND THEIR FRIENDSHIPS.

BY W. H. LARRABEE.

HAD for ten years a cat whose intelligence interested me greatly and was considered remarkable by all persons who took notice of her. Her confidence in her master and mistress, her evident enjoyment of their society, her happy faculty of putting herself upon an understanding with them, her familiar interest in matters of the household, the shifts and devices of which she was master, and her sagacity manifested in ways as various as the exigencies she had to meet, evoked frequent admiration and praise. These manifestations led me to look into the subject of knowledge in cats, and I have found that she was not singular, or even exceptional, in the quality of her faculties. She appears to have been a type to which a great many of the more happily trained members of her race can easily measure up. My observations have been naturally extended to other animals, and have led to the conclusion that most domesticated species and many wild ones are capable of and often manifest equally high degrees of mental development. But cats and dogs too-are more at home with us, have more opportunities to learn, and come under closer and more constant observation than the others.

The cat belongs to a large and highly specialized family; to one that is clearly distinguishable from the other families of animals, while the resemblances between its own members is so strong that even the careless, unprofessional observer will hardly fail to assign at a glance an individual of any of its species to it. All the members of the family are, according to Wood, light, stealthy, and silent of foot, quick of ear and eye. They are exceedingly graceful in form and movement, have flexible bodies and limbs-walk, we might say, on tiptoe-are alert and swift in action, and are exceedingly cunning. Between many of them and the cat itself there is hardly any prominently visible difference except in size. Curious resemblances in features of line or expression may be remarked between the portraits of the Felida in Wood's Natural History and cats with which the observer is acquainted. A copy of the photograph of the head and breast of a tiger at rest, in a portfolio by our side, might be easily mistaken, except for a few differences in the shading of the hair, for a life-size portrait of the cat that has given the occasion of this article. St. George Mivart recognizes fifty living species of the cat family, forty-eight of which he includes in the genus Felis.

The history of the domestic cat has been traced back to the ancient Egyptians, among whom the earliest notices of it appear on the monuments of the second empire of the twelfth dynasty (about 2400 B. c.), at Beni Hassan. It seems to have appeared there just after the Egyptians had made considerable conquests in Nubia, whence it may have been brought, already domesticated, among the spoils of war. The mummified cats in the Egyptian tombs are not identical with our house cat, but seem to belong to a native species (Felis maniculata, Fig. 1) which is said to be still indigenous in Nubia, where it is found on the western side of the Nile, in a stony district in which brushwood

[graphic]

FIG. 1.-EGYPTIAN CAT (Felis maniculata.)

grows.

The domesticated animal was slow in making its way from Egypt into the neighboring nations. The Hebrews were apparently without it, and it is not once mentioned in the Bible. No evidence has been found that the Assyrians and Babylonians were acquainted with it. According to authors who have investigated the philological branch of the history, these people possessed a binary nomenclature for animals, with generic and specific names, and included their lions and panthers among the dogs-a thing they would hardly have done if they had been familiar with house cats. It was not known to the Greeks and Romans till a comparatively late period; and all the earlier representations of cats on their monuments are referred by the authorities to the wild cat or some other animal than the domestic cat. According to the most careful conclusions on this subject, the mouser of the Greeks and Romans was a weasel, and led an independent, not a domestic, life. The Aryans of India had cats at a very early but not at their earliest period; for while the names of the animal are all Aryan, it was not, according to Pictet, designated by any simple term such as would have been given it in primitive times, but by composite names, having such meanings as "house-animal," "rateater," and "mouse-enemy.” The name of the wild cat (Fig. 2), however, embodied a root common to many of the European languages. It becomes in Persian, pushak; in Afghan, pishik ; in Kurdish, psiq; in Lithuanian, pnije; in Irish, pus and feisag; and in Erse, pusag and piseag; whence the English "puss." It is derived by Pictet from a Sanskrit root puchha or pitchha, that means "tail," and therefore points to one of the most striking external features of the animal. The name by which the cat was known to the later Greeks-αἴλουρος-and which was originally applied to the weasel, refers to the same feature. It is compounded from two words that give the meaning of "wavy tail."

The Latin name of the cat tribe (Felis) appears to have been originally applied to the weasel and other mousers, and afterward to the wild cat. The word catus or cattus came into use in about the fourth century, and is found first in the agricultural writer, Palladius, who recommends that cats be kept in artichokegardens for protection against mice and moles, and remarks that men had previously been served for this purpose by weasels. The name catta is found later in

[graphic]

the Greek church historian, Evagrius Scholasticus, about A. D. 594. Historical inferences have been drawn from the absence of the remains of cats in the ruins of Pompeii, and from the fact that the name common to all the other Romance languages does not occur in Wallachian. It is concluded

FIG. 2.-WILD CAT (Felis catus.)

that the domesticated animal had not become common when Pompeii was destroyed, in A. D. 79, or when Dacia was isolated from the rest of the Roman world by barbarian conquest, in the third century. Mr. W. Boyd Dawkins infers, from his researches in the caves in which the Celts took refuge from the Saxons, that cats were unknown in Great Britain before about the year 800.

Cats easily commended themselves as efficient vermin-destroyers to such extensive grain-raisers as the ancient Egyptians; and a people so ready to deify everything needed little prompting to put them in their pantheon. They may also have made themselves useful in killing snakes, an occupation in which, if the stories are true, they sometimes become very expert. Rengger, who has written of the mammals of Paraguay, declares that he has more than once seen cats pursue and kill snakes, even rattlesnakes, on the sandy, grassless plains of that land. "With their rare skill," he says, "they would strike the snake with their paw, and at the same time avoid its spring. If the snake coiled itself, they would not attack it directly, but would go round it till it became tired of turning its head after them; then they would strike it another blow, and instantly turn aside. If the snake started to run away, they would seize its tail, as if to play with it. By virtue of these continued attacks they usually destroyed their enemy in less than an hour, but would never eat its flesh."

Cats are represented on some of the Egyptian monuments as accompanying their masters on hunting expeditions. In a wall

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