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Cornugaya Directory 05
Page 04
If all that Professor Max Muller means to say is, that no animal but
man commands an articulate language, with verbs and nouns, or is
ever likely to command one (and I question whether in reality he
means much more than this), no one will differ from him. No dog or
elephant has one word for bread, another for meat, and another for
water. Yet, when we watch a cat or dog dreaming, as they often
evidently do, can we doubt that the dream is accompanied by a mental
image of the thing that is dreamed of, much like what we experience
in dreams ourselves, and much doubtless like the mental images which
must have passed through the mind of my deaf and dumb waiter? If
they have mental images in sleep, can we doubt that waking, also,
they picture things before their mind's eyes, and see them much as
we do--too vaguely indeed to admit of our thinking that we actually
see the objects themselves, but definitely enough for us to be able
to recognise the idea or object of which we are thinking, and to
connect it with any other idea, object, or sign that we may think
appropriate?
The less skilful builders sometimes depart from their usual habit, and
take up with the abandoned nest of some other species. The blue-jay
now and then lays in an old crow's-nest or cuckoo's-nest. The
crow-blackbird, seized with a fit of indolence, drops its eggs in the
cavity of a decayed branch. I heard of a cuckoo that dispossessed a
robin of its nest; of another that set a blue-jay adrift. Large, loose
structures, like the nests of the osprey and certain of the herons,
have been found with half a dozen nests of the blackbird set in the
outer edges, like so many parasites, or, as Audubon says, like the
retainers about the rude court of a feudal baron.
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