Views of Old New Zealand

Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 24, 1891, Page 691

Mr. R. C. Harding, in seconding the resolution, said he could not speak with practical knowledge, like the gentlemen who had already given their views, but, even without such knowledge, the necessity of such a department would be recognised. Many present would remember the cumbrous and oppressive Thistle Acts of the old provincial days, when every province had a different ordinance. These Acts were now acknowledged to have been ill-advised, while in regard to the thistles they were about as effective as a Papal bull against a comet. The present fashion seemed to be to launch a separate and voluminous Act of Parliament against each individual nuisance. The public suffered from ill-considered legislation, and the pests flourished apace. The Act just passed relating to small birds was a case in point. It was crude and unwieldy to the last degree, would prove an intolerable nuisance, and would probably produce all manner of effects other than those intended. Parliament was not qualified to deal with such matters; they lay altogether outside of the scope of its duties. If only in the interests of economy, Mr. Maskell's proposition deserved all support. The resolution was carried, and it was ordered that a copy thereof should be forwarded to the Hon. the Minister of Lands. 2. “Animal Intelligence,” by W. W. Carlile, M.A. (Transactions, p. 349.) Sir James Hector said the author had succeeded in making a very abstract and difficult point in mental philosophy quite interesting. He agreed with the side he took in the much-discussed question of whether animal intelligence differed from our own in kind or only in degree, and whether the production of the highest intellect was the result of progressive

and accumulated development. The story of the horses gnawing down the cabbage-trees to obtain moisture is parallel with the well-known habit of the mules in Mexico kicking the great cactus-trees for the same purpose. Mr. Hulke remarked that the reasoning of animals differed from that of man only in degree. He mentioned several facts relating to insects and animals to illustrate what he meant. Mr. Hudson gave an account of experiments made by Sir J. Lubbock with ants, which appeared, to indicate that insects, when placed out of their ordinary sphere of action, exhibited very limited reasoning-powers. Mr. R. C. Harding said that the vulgar discrimination between instinct and reason might not be so unscientific as had been assumed. He considered it was based on a difference, not one of degree. Instinct he regarded as the intuitive perception of interior qualities, as distinguished from those merely exterior properties made known to us by the five senses. The instincts might therefore be taken as supplementary senses, on a different plane from the five ordinarily recognised. Between the perception by means of a sense and the intellectual result of rational effort there was an evident distinction, and a parallel distinction could be traced between instinct and reason. The terror of a horse at the odour of an unknown wild beast might be accounted for by inherited memory, but it seemed more reasonable to attribute it to the immediate perception of a maleficent quality. Protective instincts like this were found through-out nature, but were so rudimentary in man that, physically, as compared with beasts and insects, he was the inferior animal. The nearer man approximated to the lower animals in his mode of life and intellectual development the more powerful these instincts appeared to be; but as his rational capacity increased they were ignored, and seemed gradually to disappear. Yet they were by no means to be despised, as where they existed they enabled him to arrive by a short cut at a point which would otherwise only be attained by great and laborious mental effort. Sometimes a child was found to possess almost in infancy faculties which showed how great the undeveloped possibilities of mankind were in this direction. There were well-attested cases of children knowing neither letters nor figures—one a negro boy—who had a natural perception of qualities and relations of numbers, and a skill in dealing with them exceeding that of trained mathematicians. The mental quality that could at once recognise a prime of almost any number of figures at sight, and the power of analysis which could immediately resolve any divisible number into its factors, were not to be attained by the severest training; but this gift was actually possessed by a calculating child. Young Mozart in early infancy possessed a similar grasp of the qualities of sound—a practical as well as a theoretical perception, for he was able to play any instrument at sight. Hereditary memory would scarcely account for phenomena like these, which were interesting as showing how immeasurably human instinct in its higher forms transcended that of the animal creation. Regarding Sir J. Lubbock's celebrated experiments with ants, careful and systematic as they were, and completely as they failed to show anything like intelligent or connected action, he did not think their results warranted us in rejecting the accumulated testimony of past ages on the subject. The President said that Mr. Carlile's illustration of heredity recalled to his mind that many years ago, when riding a very quiet horse, the animal suddenly leapt aside, and began trembling in great fear, on seeing a piece of rata vine coiled up and lying in the road, recalling the appearance of a snake. This horse was two generations from an Australian progenitor. It had been said that instinct is “inherited memory,” and, although that might seem to explain such facts as the orderly movements and almost automatically-regulated actions of ants and bees, it by

no means explained any unusual cleverness or exceptional genius. For instance, the musical genius of Mozart could hardly be expected to be produced out of thin air, and yet it could certainly not be called “inherited.” Reason had little to explain to us why Mozart as a child was a finished musician, and analogies drawn from one order of beings should be used with great caution if applied to explain difficulties in regard to other kinds of creatures. Experiments had recently been made which show that when insects are subjected to the different-coloured bands of light thrown down by the spectroscope they display different modes of action—lying dormant under one colour, growing intensely excited under another, and so on. It is possible that they live in quite another world than ours so far as impression produced by the senses is concerned; that phenomena which appear beautiful or terrifying to us make no impression upon them; and that knowledge which to us is a sealed book may be to them as an open scroll. The sense of touch in human beings is absolutely null and void compared with that sense in the ant, which almost certainly communicates intelligibly with its fellows by means of contacting antennæ; while the sense of smell in civilised man is almost as feeble as it is useless. It is quite conceivable that other creatures have other senses the effects of which are no more to be appreciated by us than the tints of a landscape or a flower would be by a blind man. Mr. Carlile, in reply, said he found that he had not been wrong in his anticipation that his instances of animal intelligence would be capped by others. He could not see how Mr. Harding's view as to what appeared to be the results of hereditary memory would square with the facts. The qualities of a thing were simply the impressions it made on the senses-its colour, smell, and so on; and to say that the horror which a New-Zealand-bred horse felt for what looked like a snake was possibly not owing to hereditary memory, but to the horse's perception of some, to us, occult quality, conveyed no meaning to his mind. The theory of an inverse ratio between instinct and reason, started, he thought, by Sir W. Hamilton, accorded with some of the facts of natural history, but was far from being true universally. He cited from Wallace's “Malayan Archipelago” what seemed an instance in point of its truth. A baby orangoutang which they captured, belonging as it did to the anthropomorphic apes, showed all the characteristics of the human baby as regarded its utter helplessness, the result being that its captors nursed and tended it, and became greatly attached to it. The young of monkeys, however low down in the intellectual scale, were much more capable of taking care of themselves at an early age.