of the nest is questioned, a man is
found who makes affidavit that he saw the orioles build it! After such
a proceeding, how long will it be before the water-birds are building
little rush cradles for their young, or rush boats to be driven about
the ponds and lakes by means of leaf sails, or before Jenny Wren will
be living in a log cabin of her own construction? How long will it be
before some one makes affidavit that the sparrow with his bow and
arrow has actually been seen to kill Cock Robin, and the beetle with
his thread and needle engaged in making the shroud? Birds show the
taste and skill of their kind in building their nests, but rarely any
individual ingenuity and inventiveness. The nest referred to is on a
plane entirely outside of Nature and her processes. It belongs to a
different order of things, the order of mechanical contrivances, and
was of course "made up," probably from a real oriole's nest, and the
writer who vouches for its genuineness has been the victim of a clever
practical joke--a willing victim, no doubt, since he is looking in
Nature for just this kind of thing, and since he believes there is
"absolutely no limit to the variety and adaptiveness of Nature even in
a single species." If there is no such limit, then I suppose we need
not be surprised to meet a winged horse, or a centaur, or a mermaid at
any time.

It is as plain as anything can be that the animals share our emotional
nature in vastly greater measure than they do our intellectual or our
moral nature; and because they do this, because they show fear, love,
joy, anger, sympathy, jealousy, because they suffer and are glad,
because they form friendships and local attachments and have the home
and paternal instincts, in short, because their lives run parallel to
our own in so many particulars, we come, if we are not careful, to
ascribe to them the whole human psychology. But it is equally plain
that of what we mean by mind, intellect, they show only a trace now
and then. They do not accumulate a store of knowledge any more than
they do a store of riches. A store of knowledge is impossible without
language. Man began to emerge from the lower orders when he invented a
language of some sort. As the language of animals is little more than
various cries expressive of pleasure or pain, or fear or suspicion,
they do not think in any proper sense, because they have no terms in
which to think--no language. I shall have more to say upon this po