expressed in a firman formally issued, declaring that vessels belonging to the children of darkness-the English especially-should not presume to do such a thing. 'I declare,' wrote the indignant sultan to the pacha of Cairo, 'that the sea of Suez was designed for the noble pilgrimage of Mecca; and that the port thereof is a port of two illustrious cities, which are those that make the light of the truth to shine and the law of the prophet, and are established to promote religion and justice-Mecca the enlightened, and Medina the honoured; wherefore I ordain that all such Christians as come there be imprisoned, and their effects confiscated; and let no one endeavour to set them free.' This remarkable firman, little more than seventy years old be it noticed-but a brief space in the life of nations-proceeds to give reasons for the vigorous enforcement of the conservative policy the angry sultan had resolved upon: 'We have informed ourselves from the wise men,' he writes, and those who study history, and have heard what has passed in former times from the dark policy of the Christians, who will undergo all fatigues, travelling by sea and land, and they take drawings of the countries through which they pass, and keep them, that by the help thereof they may make themselves masters of the kingdoms, as they have done in India and other places. Memorials have also come to us on the part of the Xerif of Mecca, the much honoured, representing that these Christians above named, not contented with their traffic to India, have taken coffee and other merchandise from Yemen, and carried it to Suez, to the great detriment of our port of Juddah. Seeing, therefore, what has happened, and our royal indignation being excited, particularly when we consider how things are in India by means of the Christians, who for many years have undergone long voyages, and at first declaring themselves to be merchants, meaning no harm or treachery, deceived the Indians, who were fools, and did not understand their subtlety and craft, and thus have taken their cities and reduced them to slavery.' Next follows a Turkish historical version of the Crusades :— 'And in the time of Talmon, with like craft, they entered the city of Damascus, under the mask of merchants, who do no harm, and paying the full duties, or even more. At that time it happened that there were differences between Talmon and Labasson, and the Christians turned them to their advantage, and made themselves masters of Damascus and Jerusalem, and kept possession of them for an hundred years, when Saladin appeared-to whom God give glory-and freed Damascus and Jerusalem, killing the Christians without number. Besides, it is well known how great a hatred they bear to Mussulmen on account of their religion, and seeing with an evil eye Jerusalem in our hands. Those, therefore, who connive at the Christians coming to Suez, will be punished by God both in this and the other world. Permit by no means Christian or other ships to pass and repass by Suez. Our royal sovereignty is powerful, and this is our royal mandate: when any Christian ships, and particularly the English, shall come to the port of Suez, imprison the captains and all the people, as rebels and offenders who deserve imprisonment and confiscation of their effects, which let them find,' &c. These angry orders of the orthodox grand seignior were not at first obeyed; inasmuch as the pacha of Cairo and chief bey, having an interest in the illicit trade, suffered the firman to sleep. At length a new pacha was sent from Constantinople, with strict orders to

enforce it, and a number of Englishmen were in consequence plundered of the cargoes of several ships, which they were conveying across the Desert from Suez to Cairo, and themselves left wounded and naked on the sands. All perished except one, who was succoured at some Arab huts about a league from Cairo. The Swallow sloop of war was despatched to the Gulf in consequence of this outrage, and a similar coup-de-main was not again ventured upon. We are certainly now a long way from such a state of affairs— farther, much farther than we are from a ship-canal on which to glide through the Isthmus to that same forbidden Suez. We remember, too, the merry shouts of Quarterly Reviewers at the thoroughly-absurd notion of men and women being shot through the air by steam at the rate of twenty miles an hour, which a presumptuous ignoramus of the name of Stephenson had ventured to say was within the verge of possibility, and many similar mockings, and can afford to smile at barren, unreasoning scepticism. Paralysing doubt and genial hope, pale distrust and sun-bright faith, pursue their course and play their parts in the physical as in the moral world; and the drag-chain, we will not deny, has its uses. Nor do we wish to disparage the great things which have been performed in the twilight of science and knowledge. England has gone to and fro on the earth, and her sounding steps have been those of a giant. 'Her morning drum-beat,' it has been truly and happily said, 'following the sun, and keeping pace with the circling hours, compasses the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of its martial airs.' But we believe she has great works to perform, and other nations have great works to perform, that will cast into shade the brightest passages in hers and their histories, and amongst them we reckon as not the least important the twin tasks of breaking through the Isthmus of Darien and Suez, and thus multiplying and drawing closer the golden links which unite her with countless peoples of every clime, and creed, and colour, beneath the sun, and bind up their prosperity with her welfare, their safety with her power, their freedom with her liberty!

ANIMAL INSTINCTS AND INTELLIGENCE.

THET

HE instincts and mental peculiarities of the brute creation, notwithstanding their immeasurable inferiority to the mind of man, have hitherto presented very high difficulties in the way of their rational explanation. These difficulties are partly real, having their origin in the nature of the subject, and partly artificial, or contracted through a mistaken manner of viewing it-that is to say, from the disposition, always more or less prevailing, to underrate the amount of intelligence, acquired knowledge, and wisdom from experience, actually belonging to the inferior animals.

This last-mentioned circumstance has contributed to keep up an ambiguity in the term 'instinct,' or rather to give to it a false meaning, in opposition to the more correct usage. Instinct properly means the native inborn capacities of a creature, as distinguished from the capacities that are acquired, whether from experience, tuition, or otherwise. The name is improperly applied when it is made to include the entire assemblage of powers and faculties possessed by any member of the lower creation-in other words, when it stands for the same designation to animals that Mind is to man. brute, in common with the human, nature, is a mixture of instincts and acquisitions, of native gifts with capacities the offspring of culture.

The

A mistaken fear of submerging the dignity of man should not prevent us from identifying the superior and inferior types of animal existence to the full extent of their agreement. It is by identification and comparison of like things that we derive a large portion of our insight into the obscurities of natural phenomena. The researches of eminent naturalists, brought to a consummation in our own day by Professor Owen, have shewn the exact identity in type of the vertebrate skeleton, and have thereby established a common plan of mechanism in the moving members of the human and animal frame through the whole kingdom of vertebrate animals. It follows as a consequence that the means possessed by this whole class of creatures for working out their ends and plying their various activities must be to a great extent the same; and there must also be a great deal in common in their wants and necessities, and in the mental framework having reference to these. Locomotion, mastication, deglutition, vocal utterance, pursuit, are all determined on an identical plan, with variations in the detail; and to the extent of this identity there is necessarily a mutual sympathy and understanding among the members of the class. We are perfectly justified

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in conceiving of the feelings engendered in a flying bird, a cantering horse, or by the loiterings of a flock of sheep; our own bodily states can approach sufficiently near to any of these to enable us to form some estimate of the resulting sensations. If we cannot appreciate the exact shades of effect in each animal, nor enter into all the other feelings mingling with these, the case is not essentially different from our position in regard to our fellowbeings. If a sedentary novelist is at liberty to imagine the experience of a fox-hunter or the happiness of a ploughman, so may an ordinary human being venture to sympathise with the dog or the nightingale in their ordinary avocations and pursuits.

But a community of backbone, limb, cranium, and jaw—the unity of the skeleton-is not the only field of identity in the vertebrate series. The organs of sense-the eye, ear, touch, smell, taste, digestion-have a common character throughout, and differ merely in degree and in the mode of setting in the different individuals. Consequently the outer world must impress the sentient organs in very nearly the same way. The picture of the landscape on the retina of a donkey is not radically different from the picture formed on the retina of its master. So the vibrations in the ear arising from the sonorous waves of the air are the same in kind in every vertebrate ear. There must be, moreover, much that is common in the sensations of smell, taste, and digestion; although there is evidently a much greater range of variety and difference in these than in the sensations resulting from sight, hearing, and the movements of the frame. We have, therefore, not only a community of active organs and working mechanism, but an extensive agreement among the sensations produced by the same outward objects on the sentient organs. This agreement enlarges to a still wider limit the basis of sympathy between us and the inferior orders of the vertebrate sub-kingdom.

Anatomists have gone a step farther, and have traced a unity of structure in the mechanism of the brain throughout the same series of animals, and to a certain extent through the whole animal kingdom. The brain can be divided into a number of distinct portions, and it can be seen whether these portions continue the same, or what changes they undergo, in the different species of creatures. The distinction between the brain of man and the brain of one of the higher mammalia lies chiefly in the size and proportions of the parts. There are certain portions of the human cerebrum that are wanting in other animals, but the deficiency is connected chiefly with the great inferiority of development of the organ. In man the cerebrum is distinguished by the number and the depth of the convolutions, indicating a much larger amount of the gray or ganglionic matter in which the force of the brain essentially resides.

No doubt can exist as to the identity of type or plan in the nervous system as well as in the skeleton and in the organs of sense. But the nervous system is the medium of all the instinctive, emotional, intelligent, and active processes of the animal; in so far as it is similar in two different creatures, these processes are usually found to be similar. The very great superiority of the human brain, and the inexhaustible train of differ ences between the human and brute minds, ought not to prevent us from comparing the two to the extent of their ascertained agreement. We shall afterwards see that the endowments we possess as members of the

civilised human family obstruct our view of some of the intelligent operations of the animals beneath us; but there ought not in any case to exist an insuperable bar to the comprehension of the less by the greater.

A fourth point of agreement may be seen in the organs and functions of reproduction so intimately allied with the nervous system, and so largely connected with the whole existence of the animal. In the emotions of sexual attachment and parental care, and in the general feeling of tenderness towards fellow-beings, no essential difference can be traced among the different orders of similarly organised creatures.

The agreements so rigorously traced by anatomists between the skeleton with its muscles, the organs of sense, and the nervous system of the vertebrate animals in general, are in exact accordance with the ordinary actings and sympathies of men towards the brute creation. We always presume in the animals about us feelings and necessities, likings and dislikings, akin to our own. We interpret their demeanour and expression exactly as in the case of our fellow-men. We take for granted that an animal is pleased when it imitates any of the human methods of indicating delight. Possibly we may sometimes be wrong in our interpretations of the signs of feeling and emotion in creatures so much removed from us in point of endowment, but nevertheless we cannot avoid applying our own experience to judge of theirs. The tendency to enter into the feelings of other beings on witnessing any expression of feeling on their part is born with us, and manifests itself with the earliest dawn of our perceptions; and we apply one rule to all cases and to all creatures. After being long in the world, we acquire more refined and indirect methods of judging of other people's states of mind, and depart in some degree from the instinctive method of proceeding; but this last method continues to prevail to the end of life. The discoveries in reference to the vertebrate skeleton, and the unity of type in the nervous system throughout the entire animal kingdom, are a justification of our habitual practice in this particular, such as we might not beforehand have been entitled to expect.

That the inferior creatures should have feelings similar to ours (allowing for differences not impossible to be estimated), and that they should have similar modes of acting and of expressing themselves under those feelings, is an inevitable consequence of the anatomical uniformity of plan observed in our organisation and theirs. If a total absence of a common mechanism had existed among the various creatures that usually club together, the current mode of interpreting one another's feelings would have been unsafe. Some creatures might have betaken themselves to groaning when they were happy, and lain down with an air of fatigue when in the height of good spirits, and all understanding of one another would have been completely nonplussed.

It is not to be denied, however, that there are appearances among the inferior races that, instead of being explained by a comparison with the human type, seem to be rendered more puzzling by such a comparison. We allude to the more mysterious of the animal instincts, and to the performance of acts implying a wide reach of intelligence by creatures evidently not possessed of a high order of mind in general. When we speak of the bee as a geometer, of the swallow as a meteorologist, and of the beaver as an architect, we seem to assume that these creatures have