# The Atlantic Monthly/Volume 106/Number 5/The Animal Mind

Featured in Volume 106, Number 5 of The Atlantic Monthly.
THE ANIMAL MIND
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
I
When I try to picture to myself the difference between the animal mind and the human mind, I seem to see the animal mind as limited by the organization and the physical needs of its possessor in a sense that the mind of man is not; its mental faculties, if we may call them such, are like its tools and weapons, a part of its physical make-up, and are almost entirely automatic in their action. Almost, I say; but in the case of the higher animals, not entirely so. In the anthropoid apes, in the dog, in the elephant, and maybe occasionally in some others, there do seem to be at times the rudiments of free intelligence, something like mind emancipated from the bondage of organization or inherited habit.
When an animal acts in obedience to its purely physical needs and according to its anatomical structure, as when ducks take to the water, or hens scratch, or hogs root, or woodpeckers drill, etc., we do not credit it with powers of thought. These and similar things animals do instinctively. When the wood-mice got into my cabin the other day and opened two small glass jars of butter that had loose tin tops, I did not credit them with anything like human intelligence, because to use their paws deftly—digging, climbing, manipulating—is natural to mice. I have seen a chipmunk come into a house from his den in the woods and open a pasteboard box with great deftness, and help himself to the nuts inside, which, of course, he smelled. We do not credit a bird with rational intelligence when it builds its nest, no matter how skillfully it may weave or sew, or how artfully it may hide it from its enemies. It is doing precisely as its forebears have done for countless generations. Hence it acts from inherited impulse.
But the monkey they told me about at the zoological park in Washington, that had been seen to select a stiff straw from the bottom of its cage, and use it to dislodge an insect from a crack, showed a gleam of free intelligence. It was an act of judgment on the part of the monkey, akin to human judgment. In like manner the chimpanzee Mr. Hornaday tells about, that used the trapeze-bar in the cage as a lever with which to pry off the horizontal bars on the side of the cage, and otherwise to demolish things, showed a kind of intelligence that is above instinct, and quite beyond the capacity, say, of a dog.
I would not say, as Mr. Hornaday does, that this ape discovered the principle of the lever as truly as Archimedes did. Would it not be better to say that he discovered the use to which he could put that particular stick, without any notion of the principle involved? just as he had doubtless found out that an object, or his own body, unsupported, would fall to the floor of his cage, without having grasped the principle of gravitation.
The earliest men must have discovered the uses of the lever long be​fore they had any true understanding of its principle. I do not believe that any of the orders below man grasp principles at all, though they may apply a principle in their act. The beaver applies the principle of the dam to the creek where he locates his house, but to say that he works from an intellectual conception of that principle, I think, would be to lift him to the human plane at once. The swallow, and the robin, and the phœbe-bird, all act upon the principle that mud will adhere to a rough surface, and that it will harden; shall we, therefore, credit them with a knowledge of the properties of mud? However, I freely admit that the act of the chimpanzee was of a higher order than the swallow's use of mud in sticking its nest to a rough surface. Its superior intelligence is seen in its purposeful use of a tool, an object in no wise related to itself, to bring about a definite end; just as another monkey, of which Mr. Hornaday speaks, did in using a stick to punch a banana out of a pipe.
I do not agree with those who urge that an animal, such as the beaver, for instance, gives proof of its gift of reason when it amputates its leg in order to escape from a trap. I dissent from it for several reasons. Animals apparently much lower in the scale of intelligence than the beaver, such as the musk-rat and the skunk, will do the same thing; and animals much higher, such as the dog, the fox, the wolf, will not do it. Indeed it has been found that an all but brainless animal, like the star-fish, will do it. In order to get free of a piece of rubber-tubing placed over one of its arms, the star-fish has, after exhausting other expedients, been known to amputate the arm. Hence, I infer that the beaver, caught in a trap, does not reason about it, and 'reach the conclusion that he must inflict upon himself the pain of amputating his foot.' He only shows the promptings of a very old and universal instinct, the instinct of self-preservation.
Every creature, little and big, that has powers of locomotion, struggles against that which would forcibly hold it, or which opposes it. A cricket or a grasshopper will leave a leg in your hand in order to escape. Try forcibly to retain the paw of your dog, or your cat, and see how it will struggle to be free. A four-footed animal caught in a trap is filled with rage and pain; it bites at everything within reach, the bushes, the logs, the rocks; of course it bites the trap, but upon the steel its teeth make no impression. If the animal is small, the part of the foot that protrudes on the inside of the jaws of the trap soon becomes numb and dead or frozen, and is gnawed off. The leg above the trap may become frozen and senseless, and the amputation of it give little pain. Trappers tell us that bears often resort to all manner of devices to get rid of the trap, some of which seem very intelligent, as for instance, when one climbs a tree, and getting the trap fast amid the branches, brings its weight to bear upon it, thus calling in the aid of gravity. But I would no sooner think that such behavior on the part of the bear was the result of a reasoning process a knowledge of the force of gravity than I would attribute reason to a tree because it tries to assume the perpendicular, or to clouds because they soar aloft in order to let down the rain. The bear is doing his best to get his paw out of the jaws of the trap, and in his blind fury and desperation he climbs a tree and tries to detach the trap there, but only succeeds in getting it fast, when, as a matter of course, he drops down and pulls out. He could have pulled his own weight and more upon the ground had he got the trap fast. The trapper's hope is that he will not get it fast.
​We reason for the brute when we interpret its action in this way. I do not suppose that with the anger, or joy, or fear, or love-making, of our brute-neighbors there goes any idea, or mental process, or image whatever; only involuntary impulse stimulated by outward conditions. We ourselves are often happy without thought, scared without reason, angry without volition, and act from spontaneous impulse. I suppose that if man were not a reasonable being he would never laugh, because it is the perception of some sort of incongruity that makes us laugh, though we may not be conscious of it.
Animals never laugh, and probably never experience in any degree the emotion that makes us laugh, because their minds do not perceive incongruities. Such perception is an intellectual act that is beyond them. The incongruous only strikes them as something strange, and excites their suspicion or their fears. When one day I suddenly appeared before my dog in a suit of khaki, a garb in which he had never before seen me, did it excite his mirth, as it did that of some of my neighbors? on the contrary, it alarmed him: he hesitated a moment, showing conflicting emotions, then edged away suspiciously, and when I made a hostile demonstration toward him, fled precipitately in a high state of anger and excitement. Not till I spoke to him in the old tone did he recover himself and approach me in a humiliated, apologetic way.
We are often glad in our sleep, but do we ever dream of laughing? Reason slumbers at such times, and we have no perception of incongruities.
Our anger, our joy, our sex-love, our selfishness, our cruelty, are of animal origin; but our sense of the ludicrous, which is the basis of our wit and humor, our hope, our faith, our feeling of reverence, of altruism, of worship, arc above the animal sphere, as is the faculty of reason. They are of animal origin only in the sense (hat man himself is of animal origin. They are not endowments from some external or extra-human source. They must have been potential in the lower orders, just as our limbs were potential in the fins of the fish, and our lungs potential in its bladder. Evolution must always have something to go upon, but that something may be quite beyond our human ken, as it certainly is in the case of man's higher nature. It is much easier to trace the feather of the bird to the scale of the fish than it is to trace our moral nature to its animal origin. Yet this is the only possible source science can assign to it, because it is the only source that falls within the sphere of physical causation, the only causation science knows.
When the lower animals laugh I shall believe they have the faculty of reason also. Think how long man must have lived before he became a laughing animal—before he was sufficiently developed mentally to take note of incongruities, or for this or that object or incident to excite his mirth instead of his fear! When I first saw a trolley-car running along the street without any apparent means of propulsion, it excited my surprise and curiosity. When my horse first saw it, he was filled with alarm. I do not suppose my horse had the same mental process about it that I had; an effect without an apparent cause could have been nothing to him. He was moved simply by the strangeness of the spectacle. It was a sight the like of which he had never seen before.
Stories are told of monkeys that would seem to indicate in them some perception of the humorous, however rudimentary, but I recall nothing of the kind in the other animals. Of course the impulse of play in animals ​springs from another source—the instinct to develop the particular powers that their life-careers will most require. Puppies and kittens fight mock battles and pursue and capture mock game, kids leap and bound, colts run and leap, birds swoop and dive as if to escape a hawk: in each case training the powers that are likely to be the most useful to them in after-life. Our play-instinct is no doubt of animal origin, but not in the same sense is our sense of the humorous of animal origin. It originated in man, as did so many of the higher emotions.
II
One of the best illustrations I ever had of the difference between animal and human behavior under like conditions, was afforded me one May day in the woods, when I unwittingly pulled down the stub of a small tree in which a pair of bluebirds had a nest and young. Now, if a man were to come home and find his house gone, and only empty space where it had stood, he would not go up to the place where the door had been and try repeatedly to find the entrance. But this is exactly what the bluebirds did. As I have elsewhere described, I had pulled down the stub that held their nest and young, not knowing there was a nest there; and then on discovering my mistake had set the stub up again twelve or fifteen feet from where I had found it. Presently the mother-bird came with food in her bill, and alighted on a limb a few feet above the spot where the trunk of the tree holding her nest had been, and where, doubtless, she was in the habit of alighting. She must have seen at once that her house was gone, but if she did, the fact made no impression upon her.
Quite undisturbed, she dropped down to the exact spot in the vacant space where the entrance to her nest used to be. She hovered there a moment and then, apparently greatly bewildered, flew back to the perch above. She waited there a moment, peering downward, and then tried it again. Could she not see that her house was gone? But the force of habit was stronger with her than any free intelligence she might possess. She had always found the nest there and it must be there still. An animal's reflexes are not influenced by the logic of the situation. Down she came again and hovered a moment at the point of the vanished nest, vainly seeking the entrance. This movement she repeated over and over. I have no doubt that she came each time to the precise spot in the air where her treasures had been. It seemed as if she could not convince herself that the nest was not there. She had brought a beetle in her bill, and this she hammered upon the limb each time she perched, as if it in some way might be at fault. How her blue wings flickered in the empty air above the dark water, not more than ten or twelve feet from the actual visible entrance to the nest she had lost!
Presently she dropped her bug and flew off through the woods, calling for her mate. Her action seemed very human. Surely he would clear up the mystery. In a moment or two, both birds with food in their bills were perched upon the branch a few feet above the spot where the nest had been. I can recall yet the confident air with which the male dropped down to that vacant spot. Could he not see that there was nothing there? No, seeing was not convincing. He must do just as he had done so many times before. He tried it again and again; then the two birds took turns in trying it. They assaulted the empty air vigorously, persistently, as if determined that it must give up their lost ones. Finally they perched ​upon a branch higher up and seemed to pause to consider. The machines ceased to act. At this instant the mother-bird spied the hole that was the entrance to her nest and flew straight to it. Her treasures were found.
In that moment did she cease to be a machine, and show a spark of free intelligence? It looks so at least. She acted like a rational being, she seemed at last to have got it into her head that the nest was no longer in the old place, and that she must look about her. I do not say that this is the true explanation of her conduct; it is rather putting one's self in her place. But how long it took the birds to break out of the rut of habit! It did not seem as if their intelligence was finally influenced; but as if their instincts had become discouraged or fatigued. They were not convinced, they were baffled. Of course you cannot convince an animal as you can a person, because there is no reason to. be convinced; but you can make an impression, you can start the formation of a new habit. See the caged animal try to escape, or the tethered one try to break its tether,—how long the struggle continues! A rational being would quickly be convinced, and would desist. But instinct is automatic, and the reaction continues. When the animal ceases its struggles, it is not as the result of a process of ratiocination,—'this cage or this chain is stronger than I am, therefore I cannot escape,'—but because the force of instinct has spent itself. Man, too, is more or less the creature of habit, but the lower animals are almost entirely so. Only now and then, as in the case of the mother-bluebird, is there a gleam of something like the power of free choice.
Darwin quotes the case of a pike in an aquarium that for three months dashed itself with great violence against a plate-glass that separated it from the fish upon which it was wont to feed. Then, he says, it learned caution, and would not seize the fish when the glass was removed. It was not convinced, I should say, but another habit had been formed.
The whole secret of the training of wild animals is to form new habits in them. A certain regular, absolutely regular, routine must be kept up till the habit is formed of doing the trick. The animal does not learn the trick in a sense that implies the exercise of free intelligence: it is shaped to it as literally as the root of a tree shapes itself to a rock; or, we may say, it is trained as we train a tree against a wall.
Animal intelligence is like the figures and designs made in a casting; it is not acquired or much changed by experience, while human intelligence is slowly developed through man's educative capacity. The animal is a creature of habits inherited and acquired, in a sense that man is not; certain things may be stamped into the animal's mind, and certain things may be stamped out; we can train it into the formation of new habits, but we cannot educate or develop its mind as we can that of a child, so that it will know the why and the wherefore. It does the trick or the task because we have shaped its mind to the particular pattern; we have stamped in this idea, which is not an idea to the animal but an involuntary impulse. That which exists in the mind of man as mental concepts, free ideas, exists in the mind of the animal as innate tendency to do certain things. The bird has an impulse to build its nest, not any free or abstract ideas about nest-building; probably the building is not preceded or attended by any mental processes whatever, but by an awakening instinct, an inherited impulse.
A man can be reached and moved or influenced through his mind, an animal ​can be reached and moved only through its senses.
The animal mind seems more like the mind we see manifested in the operations of outward nature, than like our own. The mind we see active in outward nature—if it is mind—is so unlike our own, that when we seek to describe it in terms of our own, ascribing to it design, plan, purpose, invention, rationality, etc., we are accused of anthropomorphism, and science will not listen to us. Yet all we know of laws and principles, of cause and effect, of mechanics and dynamics, of chemistry and evolution, etc., we learn from this outward nature. Through our gift of reason we draw out and formulate, or translate into our mental concepts, nature's method of procedure. Shall we say, then, that nature is rational without reason? wise without counsel? that she builds without rule, and dispenses without plan? is she full of mind-stuff, or does she only stimulate the mind-stuff in ourselves? It is evident that nature knows not our wisdom or economics, our prudence, our benevolence, our methods, our science. These things are the result of our reaction to the stimulus she affords, just as the sensation we call light is our reaction to certain vibrations, the sensation we call sound is the reaction to other kinds of vibrations, and the sensation we call heat, the reaction to still other. The mind, the reason, is in us; the cause of it is in nature. She has no mechanics, no chemistry, no philosophy, yet all we know of these things we draw from her.
When we translate her methods into our own terms, we call it the method of 'trial and error,'—a blind groping through infinite time and infinite space, till every goal is reached. If her arch falls, a stronger arch may be formed by its ruins; if her worlds collide, other worlds may be born of the collision; if one species perishes, other species may take its place; always if her 'bark sinks, 't is to another sea.' She is all in all, and all the parts are hers. Her delays, her failures, her trials, are like those of a blind man who seeks to reach a particular point in an unknown landscape; if his strength holds out, he will finally reach it. Nature's strength always holds out; she reaches her goal because she leaves no direction untried.
She felt her way to man through countless forms, through countless geological ages. If the development of man was possible at the outset, evolution was bound to fetch him in time; if not in a million years, then in a billion or a trillion. In the conflict of forces, mechanical and biological, his coming must have been delayed many times; the cup must have been spilled, or the vessel broken, times without number. Hence the surplus-age, the heaping measures in nature, her prodigality of seed and germ. To produce one brook trout, thousands of eggs perish; to produce one oak, thousands of acorns are cast. If there is the remotest chance that our solar system will come in collision with some other system,—and of course there is,—that collision is bound to occur, no matter if the time is so distant that it would take a row of figures miles in extent to express it.
I am aware that it is my anthropomorphism that compels me to speak of nature the way I am speaking; we have to describe that which is not man in terms of man, because we have no other terms, and thereby tell a kind of untruth. It is as when we put bird-songs or animal-calls into words, or write them on the musical scale—we only hint what we cannot express.
I look out of my window and see the tide in its endless quest, racing up and racing down the river; every day, every ​night, the year through, for a thousand, for a million ears it goes on, and no one is the wiser, yet the tides have played their part in the history of the globe. But nature's cradle keeps rocking after her child has left it. Only the land benefits from the rain, and yet it rains upon the sea as upon the land. The trees ripen their fruits and their nuts whether there is any creature to feed upon them, or any room to plant them or not. Nature's purpose (more anthropomorphism) embraces them all, she covers the full circle, she does not need to discriminate and husband her resources as we do.
Far and forgot to me are near, Shadow and sunshine are the same; The vanished gods to me appear, And one to me are shame and fame.
The animals are so wise in their own way, such a success, without thought, yet so provocative of thought in us! They are rational without reason, and wise without understanding. They communicate without language, and subsist without forethought. They weave and spin and drill and bore without tools, they traverse zones without guide or compass, they are cunning without instruction, and prudent without precept. They know the ends of the earth, the depths of the sea, the currents of the air, and are at home in the wilderness. We ascribe to them thought and reason, and discuss their psychology, because we are anthropomorphic; we have no other standards than those furnished by our own nature and experience.
Animal behavior, as I have said, is much more like the behavior of natural forces than is that of man: the animal goes along with nature, borne along by her currents, while the mind of man crosses and confronts nature, thwarts her, uses her, or turns her back upon herself. During the vast eons while the earth was peopled by the lower orders alone, nature went her way. But when this new animal, man, appeared, in due time nature began to go his way, to own him as master. Her steam and her currents did his work, her lightning carried his messages, her forces became his servants.
I am not aware that any animal in the least degree confronts nature in this way—cuts its paths through her, and arbitrarily shapes her. Probably the nearest approach to it is among the insects, such as the balloon-spiders, the agricultural ants, etc. In some parts of the country one might think that the cow was a landscape gardener, from the pretty cone-shaped forms that she carves out of the wild-apple and thorn trees, but she does this quite unwittingly through her taste for the young shoots of these trees. It is like her engineering skill in laying out paths, quite inevitable from the nature of her wants and activities.
Man is the only inventive and tool-using animal, because he alone has the faculty of reason, and can see the end of a thing before the beginning. With his mind's eye he sees a world hidden from the lower orders. There are hints of this gift in the lower orders, hints of reason, of language, of tool-using, and the like, but hints only.
The cries and calls of animals must have preceded human speech, but who can measure the gulf between them? Man must have had animal emotions—fear, hunger, joy, love, hate—long before he had ideas. His gift of language and his gift of ideas must have grown together, and mutually reacted upon one another. Without language could he possess ideas, or possess ideas without language? Which was first?
An animal's use of signals—warning signals and recognition signals, if this is the true significance of some of their markings is as unwitting as the flower's use of its perfume or its colors to attract insects. The deer ​flashes its shield to its foe as well as to its fellow.
III
Considering the gulf that separates man from the lower orders, I often wonder how, for instance, we can have such a sense of companionship with a dog. What is it in the dog that so appeals to us? It is probably his quick responsiveness to our attention. He meets us half-way. He gives caress for caress. Then he is that light-hearted, irresponsible vagabond that so many of us half-consciously long to be if we could and dared. To a dog, a walk is the best of good fortunes; he sniff's adventure at every turn, is sure something thrilling will happen around the next bend in the path. How much he gets out of it that escapes me! The excitement of all the different odors that my sense is too dull to take in; the ground written over with the scent of game of some sort, the air full of the lure of wild adventure. How human he is at such times: he is out on a lark. In his spirit of hilarity he will chase hens, pigs, sheep, cows, which ordinarily he would give no heed to, just as boys abroad in the fields and woods will commit depredations that they would be ashamed of at home.
When I go into my neighbor's house, his dog of many strains, and a great crony of mine, becomes riotous with delight. He whines with joy, hops up on my lap, caresses me, and then springs to the door, and with wagging tail and speaking looks and actions says, 'Come on! let's off.' I open the door and say, 'Go, if you want to.' He leaps back on my lap, and says, 'No, no, not without you.' Then to the door again with his eloquent pantomime, till I finally follow him forth into the street. Then he tears up the road to the woods, saying so plainly, 'Better one hour of Slabsides than a week of humdrum at home.' At such times, if we chance to meet his master or mistress on the road, he heeds them not, and is absolutely deaf to their calls.
Well, I do not suppose the dog is in our line of descent, but his stem-form must join ours not very far back. He is our brother at not very many removes, and he has been so modified and humanized by his long intercourse with our kind, stretching no doubt through hundreds of thousands of years, that we are near to him and he is near to us. I do not suppose that, if this affectionate intercourse were to continue any number of ages or cycles longer, the dog would ever be any more developed on his intellectual side; he can never share our thoughts any more than he does now. He has not, nor have any of the lower orders, that which Ray Lankester aptly calls educability, that which distinguishes man from all other creatures. We can train animals to do wonderful things, but we cannot develop in them, or graft upon them, this capacity for intellectual improvement, to grasp and wield and store up ideas. Man's effect on trained animals is like the effect of a magnet on a piece of steel: for the moment he imparts some of his own powers to them, and holds them up to the ideal plane, but they are not permanently intellectualized; no new power is developed in them; and they soon fall back to their natural state. What they seem to acquire is not free intelligence that they can apply to other problems. We have not enlarged their minds, but have shaped their impulses to a new pattern. They are no wiser, but they are more apt. They do a human stunt, but they do not think human thoughts.
IV
In all the millions of years that life has been upon the globe, working its ​wonders and its transformations, there had been no bit of matter possessing the power that the human brain-cortex possesses till man was developed. The reason of man, no matter how slow it may have been in finding itself, was a new thing in the world, apparently not contemplated by nature's plan, as, in a sense, it is at war with that plan, and a reversal of it.
Just as life was a new thing in the inorganic world, contravening the ordinary laws of matter, expressing a kind of energy not derived from gravitation, making chemical and physical forces its servants, so was the reason of man a new thing, evolved, of course, from preexisting conditions, or animal automatism, but, when fairly differentiated, a new mode of energy, making its possessor a new kind of animal, reversing or annulling many of the laws that have sway in the rest of the animal kingdom, defeating the law of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, rising superior to climate and to geographical conditions, controlling and changing his environment, making servants of the natural forces about him; in short, fairly facing and mastering nature in a way no other animal had ever done.
The conditions that have limited the increase and spread of the other animals, have been in a measure triumphed over by man. The British scientist I have quoted above, Ray Lankester, has described man as nature's rebel—he defies her and wrests her territory from her. 'Where nature says, "Die!" man says, "I will live." According to the law previously in universal operation, man should have been limited in geographical area, killed by extreme cold or heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable, and should have been unable to increase and multiply, just as arc his animal relatives, without losing his specific structure and acquiring new physical characters according to the requirements of the new conditions into which he strayed—should have perished except on the condition of becoming a new morphological species.'
All this because man in a measure rose (why did he rise? who or what insured his rising?) above the state of automatism of the lower orders. His blind animal intelligence became conscious human intelligence. It was a metamorphosis, as strictly so as anything in nature. In man, for the first time, an animal turned around and looked upon itself and considered its relations to the forces outside of self. In other words, it developed mental vision; it paused to consider; it began to understand.
The mechanism called instinct gave place slowly to the psychic principle of reason and free will. Trouble began with the new gift. This was the real fall of man, a fall from a state of animal innocence and non-self-consciousness to a state of error and struggle—thenceforth man knew good from evil, and was driven out of the paradise of animal innocency. Reason opened the door to error, and in the same moment it opened the door to progress. If failure became possible, success also became possible. The animal with his instincts was doomed to a ceaseless round of unprogressive life; man with his reason had open to him the possibility of progressive mastery over nature. His race-mind developed slowly, from period to period, going through an unfolding and a discipline analogous to that of a child from infancy to manhood: many failures, many sorrows, much struggle; but slowly, oh, so slowly, has he emerged into the light of reason in which we find him now. The price the lower animals pay for unerring instinct is the loss of progress; the price man pays for his erring reason is the chance of failure.
​ Man's mastery over nature has made him the victim of scores of diseases not known to the animals below him. The artificial conditions with which he has surrounded himself, his material comforts, his extra-natural aids and shields, have opened the way to the invasion of his kingdom by hosts of bacterial enemies from whose mischievous activities the lower orders are exempt. He has closed his door against wind and cold, and thereby opened it to a ruthless and invisible horde. Nature endows him with reason, and then challenges it at every turn. She puts a weapon into his hand that she has given to no other animal, and then confronts him with foes such as no other animal knows. He pays for his privileges. He has entered the lists as a free lance, and he must and does take his chances. For the privileges of mastering certain of nature's activities, he pays in a host of natural enemies. For the privilege of fire, he pays in the hazard of fire; for the privilege of steam, he pays in the risks of steam; for knowing how to overcome and use gravity, he pays in many a deadly surrender to gravity. He shakes out his sail to the wind at the risk of the wind's power and fury. So always does the new gift bring new danger and new responsibilities.
Man is endowed and blest above all other creatures, and above all other creatures is he exposed to defeat and death. But the problem is not as broad as it is long. The price paid does not always, or commonly, eat up all the profit. There has been a steady gain. Nature exacts her fee, but the service is more than worth it. Otherwise man would not be here. Unless man had been driven out of Paradise, what would he have come to? The lower orders are still in the Garden of Eden; they know not good from evil; but man's evolution has brought him out of the state of innocence and dependence, and he is supreme in the world.