habits through their having been brought into contact with mankind, they can still be trusted to show us whether certain fruits found in their native forests are poisonous or no; for if poisonous fruits are offered them they will refuse them with loud cries. Every animal will choose for its sustenance exactly those animal or vegetable substances which agree best with its digestive organs, without having received any instruction on the matter, and without testing them beforehand. Even, indeed, though we assume that the power of distinguishing the different kinds of food is due to sight and not to smell, it remains none the less mysterious how the animal can know what it is that will agree with it. Thus the kid which Galen took prematurely from its mother smelt at all the different kinds of food that were set before it, but drank only the milk without touching anything else. The cherry-finch opens a cherry-stone by turning it so that her beak can hit the part where the two sides join, and does this as much with the first stone she cracks as with the last. Fitchets, martens, and weasels make small holes on the opposite sides of an egg which they are about to suck, so that the air may come in while they are sucking. Not only do

animals know the food that will suit them best, but they find out the most suitable remedies when they are ill, and constantly form a correct diagnosis of their malady with a therapeutical knowledge which they cannot possibly have acquired. Dogs will often eat a great quantity of grass-particularly couch-grass-when they are unwell, especially after spring, if they have worms, which thus pass from them entangled in the grass, or if they want to get fragments of bone from out of their stomachs. As a purgative they make use of plants that sting. Hens and pigeons pick lime from walls and pavements if their food does not afford them lime enough to make their eggshells with. Little children eat chalk when suffering from acidity of the stomach, and pieces of charcoal if they are troubled with flatulence. We may observe these same instincts for certain kinds of food or drugs even among grown-up people, under circumstances in which their unconscious nature has unusual power; as, for example, among women when they are pregnant, whose capricious appetites are probably due to some special condition of the fœtus, which renders a certain state of the blood desirable. Field-mice bite off the germs of the corn which they collect together,

in order to prevent its growing during the winter. Some days before the beginning of cold weather the squirrel is most assiduous in augmenting its store, and then closes its dwelling. Birds of passage betake themselves to warmer countries at times when there is still no scarcity of food for them here, and when the temperature is considerably warmer than it will be when they return to us. The same holds good of the time when animals begin to prepare their winter quarters, which beetles constantly do during the very hottest days of autumn. When swallows and storks find their way back to their native places over distances of hundreds of miles, and though the aspect of the country is reversed, we say that this is due to the acuteness of their perception of locality; but the same cannot be said of dogs, which, though they have been carried in a bag from one place to another that they do not know, and have been turned round and round twenty times over, have still been known to find their way home. Here we can say no more than that their instinct has conducted themthat the clairvoyance of the unconscious has allowed them to conjecture their way."

1 "Das Hellsehen des Unbewussten hat sie den rechten Weg ahnen lassen."-Philosophy of the Unconscious, p. 90, 3d ed., 1871.

Before an early winter, birds of passage · collect themselves in preparation for their flight sooner than usual; but when the winter is going to be mild, they will either not migrate at all, or travel only a small distance southward. When a hard winter is coming, tortoises will make their burrows deeper. If wild geese, cranes, &c., soon return from the countries to which they had betaken themselves at the beginning of spring, it is a sign that a hot and dry summer is about to ensue in those countries, and that the drought will prevent their being able to rear their young. In years of flood, beavers construct their dwellings at a higher level than usual, and shortly before an inundation the field-mice in Kamtschatka come out of their holes in large bands. If the summer is going to be dry, spiders may be seen in May and April, hanging from the ends of threads several feet in length. If in winter spiders are seen running about much, fighting with one another and preparing new webs, there will be cold weather within the next nine days, or from that to twelve: when they again hide themselves there will be a thaw. I have no doubt that much of this power of prophesying the weather is due to a perception of certain atmospheric conditions

which escape ourselves, but this perception can only have relation to a certain actual and now present condition of the weather; and what can the impression made by this have to do with their idea of the weather that will ensue? No one will ascribe to animals a power of prognosticating the weather months beforehand by means of inferences drawn logically from a series of observations,1 to the extent of being able even to foretell floods. It is far more probable that the power of perceiving subtle differences of actual atmospheric condition is nothing more than the sensual perception which acts as motive-for a motive

1 "Man wird doch wahrlich nicht den Thieren zumuthen wollen, durch meteorologische Schlüsse das Wetter auf Monate im Voraus zu berechnen, ja sogar Ueberschwemmungen vorauszusehen. Vielmehr ist eine solche Gefühlswahrnehmung gegenwärtiger atmosphärischer Einflüsse nichts weiter als die sinnliche Wahrnehmung, welche als Motiv wirkt, und ein Motiv muss ja doch immer vorhanden sein, wenn ein Instinct functioniren soll. Es bleibt also trotzdem bestehen, dass das Voraussehen der Witterung ein unbewusstes Hellsehen ist, von dem der Storch, der vier Wochen früher nach Süden aufbricht, so wenig etwas weiss, als der Hirsch, der sich vor einem kalten Winter einen dickeren Pelz als gewöhnlich wachsen lässt. Die Thiere haben eben einerseits das gegenwärtige Witterungsgefühl im Bewusstsein, daraus folgt andererseits ihr Handeln gerade so, als ob sie die Vorstellung der zukünftigen Witterung hätten; im Bewusstsein haben sie dieselbe aber nicht, also bietet sich als einzig natürliches Mittelglied die unbewusste Vorstellung, die nun aber immer ein Hellsehen ist, weil sie etwas enthält, was dem Thier weder durch sinnliche Wahrnehmung direct gegeben ist, noch durch seine Verstandesmittel aus der Wahrnehmung geschlossen werden kann.”—Philosophy of the Unconscious, p. 91, 3d ed., 1871.