d even the apes approach
nearest to humanity in virtue of their ever-active and busy little
fingers. The elephant, again, has his flexible trunk, which, as we have
all heard over and over again, _usque ad nauseam_, is equally well
adapted to pick up a pin or to break the great boughs of tropical
forest trees. (That pin, in particular, is now a well-worn classic.)
The squirrel, once more, celebrated for his unusual intelligence when
judged by a rodent standard, uses his pretty little paws as veritable
hands, by which he can grasp a nut or fruit all round, and so gain in
his small mind a clear conception of its true shape and properties.
Throughout the animal kingdom generally, indeed, this correspondence,
or rather this chain of causation, makes itself everywhere felt; no
high intelligence without a highly developed prehensile and grasping
organ.

Perhaps the opossum is the very best and most crucial instance that
could possibly be adduced of the intimate connection which exists
between touch and intellect. For the opossum is a marsupial; it belongs
to the same group of lowly-organized, antiquated, and pouch-bearing
animals as the kangaroo, the wombat, and the other belated Australian
mammals. Now everybody knows the marsupials as a class are nothing
short of preternaturally stupid. They are just about the very dullest
and silliest of all existing quadrupeds. And this is reasonable enough,
when one comes to think of it, for they represent a very antique and
early type, the first rough sketch of the mammalian idea, if I may so
describe them, with wits unsharpened as yet by contact with the world
in the fierce competition of the struggle for life as it displays
itself on the crowded stage of the great continents. They stand, in
short, to the lions and tigers, the elephants and horses, the monkeys
and squirrels, of Europe and America, as the Australian blackfellow
stands to the Englishman or the Yankee. They are the last relic of the
original secondary quadrupeds, stranded for ages in a remote southern
island, and still keeping up among Australian forests the antique type
of life that went out of fashion in Europe, Asia, and America before
the chalk was laid down or the London Clay deposited on the bed of our
northern oceans. Hence they have still very narrow brains, and are so
extremely stupid that a kangaroo, it is said--though I don't vouch for
it myself--when struck a smart blow, will turn and bite the stick that
hurts