"ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY."

In his "Brier-patch Philosophy," Mr. William J. .Long ("Peter Rabbit"), the American naturalist, writes suggestlv^y on the futility of the elaborate and ofton intensely cruel experiments practised on animals with a view to test their sensory and observing facilities, and the limitations of their reasoning powers. All such experimental ho argues — as Dr. Garni Wilkinson pointed out long ago — are conducted under abnoimal conditions of the nervous system, duo to pain or terror, and tho conclusions drawn from such are hot only worthless, but often exactly opposite to the truth. Says Mt. Long: — "The point is not whether animals ttiink habitually or are governed by thought, but whether or not they ar»> tfcpabte of thinking. If you were to prepare an elaborate system of experiment* upon notno unknown trib6;of men from the Atlantic, you would probably arrive at the fact, which you already well know, that men in tho mass are generally thoughtless ; that they are largely governed by habiti, appetites, passions, prejudices, and traditions, and that thtre is little free will among them. Some of your exceptionally thoughtful men often remark that trno thinking ii tho tarest thing among men, though they have brains evidently Organisod for thoughtful purposes. If thought be rare among men, it will naturally be much more so among animals, whose lives ftro much simpler than your own. That auimali tometimos think is more than probauic. "These experiments themselves are of a kind to prove nothing, exoept peihrps your psychologist* 1 lack of ha'mour. Traps and cage*, wd spring-doors »re all so utterly foreign to the animal't daily life that to draw a. r&Uc-nfll conclusion from their actions under such clrcuimtanceo hats about a» much value as to judge men ond women in a shock-panic, or when they arc (shut up in a burning building. If the Rabbit could en toll a- China-man and fasten him in a devil-wagon, and fix tho HWfirker, and pull the lever, and send him off whizzing, and then watch his actions, ho wo-ald conclude, after the manner of your p*yehologists, that men aro governed by the peculiar form of reflex action known to you as hysteria, and to us as the March madness,. Yet tho conditions would be no moro confusing to the Chinaman than are thoso that confront the animal when ho is taken from the woods and liberty, to bo shut up in one of your trap-door inventions. A thousand experiments may prove to - a pipfeisor'.". k»tisfaction that nis particular caged animals are governed by blind' fright or blind habit, but hu> deduction that animals cannot think is ovorthiown by a single fact or obsoivation that points unmistakably to the opposite conclusion. . , . Tho mental quality of animals will nevo» bo determined by eiperiwentatba."