Tombstone epitaph., 1890-07-05
MIND supERsEoEs INSTINCT.
How Man Has Lost Many Gifts Possessed
 by the Lower Animals.

MIND SUPERSEOES INSTINCT. How Man Has Lost Many Gifts Possessed by the Lower Animals.
 If the doctrine be true that man is really the heir of all the various species and genera of the animal kingdom, it seems a little hard upon us, says the American Analyst, that even by way of ! exception we inherit none of the most marvellous instincts of those species and genera, and have to be content with those greater but purely human fac ulties by which even the most wonder ful of animal instincts have been some how extinguished. Sir John Lubbock maintains with good deal of plausi- bility that there are insects, and very likely even higher animals, which per ceive colors of which we have no glimpse and hear sounds which are to us inaudible. Yet we never hear of human retina that includes in it's vision those colors depending on vibrations of the ether which are too slow or too rapid for our ordinary eyes, nor of human ear which is entranced with mu- sic that to the great majority of our species is absolutely inaudible.
 Again, we never hear of a human be- ing who could perform the feat, of which we were told only recently, of bloodhound. In dark night it fol- lowed up for three miles the trail of a thief with whom the bloodhound could have never been in contact Che had just purloined some rolls of tan from the 4o, nd iv 1o, ol,o ol up), and finally sat down under the tree in which the man had taken refuge. Why, we wonder, are those finer pow CTS for discriminating and following the track of the scent which so many of the lower animals possess entirely ex tinguished in man, if man be the real heir of all the various genera which show power inferior to his own?
 We see no trace in animals of that high enjoyment of the finer scents which make the blossoming of the spring flowers so great a delight to human beings, and yet men are entirely destitute of that almost unerring power of tracking the path of an odor, which seems to be one of the principal gifts of many quadrupeds and some birds. It is the same with the power of dog or cat to find it's way back to home to which it is attached, but from which it has been taken by Q route that it can not possibly follow on it's return, even if it had the power of observing that route, which usually it has not. Nothing could be more convenient than such power to lost child. But no one ever heard of any child who possessed it.
 Still more enviable is that instinct possessed by so many birds of crossing great tracts of land and sea without ap- | parently any landmarks or seamarks to guide them, and of reaching quarter of the globe which many of them have never visited before, while those who have visited it before have not visited it often enough to learn the way-at least by any rule which, in like circum- stances, would be of any use to human intelligence. The migratory birds must certainly be in possession of either senses or instincts entirely beyond the range of human imagination, and yet no one ever heard of the survival of such a sense of instinct in any member of our race. It may be said, indeed, that men have either inherited or reproduced the slave-making instinct of some of the military ants, though that unfortunate and degrading instinct does not appear to have been inherited by any of the higher animals which intervene between the insects and our own race; but this only enhances the irony of our destiny, if 1Un dn in6an1 in irh from these insect artistocracies one of the most disastrous instincts of the audacious but indolent creat- ures which fight so much better than they work. If we have not inherited the architectural instincts of bees or beavers, nor the spinning in- stincts of spiders, nor the power of the dog to track out his home, it is little sad that we should have inherited the one disastrous instinct of the ant by which it makes itself dependent on more timid and industrious species of it's own race, and thereby loses the power to help itself.
 What is still more curious is that even where human beings have wholly excep- tional and unheard-of powers they be-  tray no traces of the exceptional and unheard-of powers of the races whose vital organization we are said to inher- it. The occasional appearance of very rare mathematical powers, for instance, so far from being in any sense explica- ble from below, looks much more like inspiration from above. The calculat- ing boy who could not even give any ac- count of the process whereby he arrived at correct results which the educated mathematician took some time to verify, certainly was not reviving in himself any of the rare powers of the lower tribes of animals. Nor do the prodigies in music who show such marvellous power in infancy recall to us any in- stinct of the bird, the only musical creature except ourselves. Still less, of course, does great moral genius-the genius of Howard or a Clarkson-sug- gest any reminiscence of what happens in the world of animal life.
 
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