the sophistical wool over a great many pairs of eyes.  No, no, Mr. Burroughs; you can’t disprove that animals reason by proving that they possess instincts.  But the worst of it is that you have at the same time pulled the wool over your own eyes.  You have set up a straw man and knocked the stuffing out of him in the complacent belief that it was the reasoning of lower animals you were knocking out of the minds of those who disagreed with you.  When the highhole perforated the icehouse and let out the sawdust, you called him a lunatic . . .

But let us be charitable—­and serious.  What Mr. Burroughs instances as acts of instinct certainly are acts of instincts.  By the same method of logic one could easily adduce a multitude of instinctive acts on the part of man and thereby prove that man is an unreasoning animal.  But man performs actions of both sorts.  Between man and the lower animals Mr. Burroughs finds a vast gulf.  This gulf divides man from the rest of his kin by virtue of the power of reason that he alone possesses.  Man is a voluntary agent.  Animals are automatons.  The robin fights its reflection in the window-pane because it is his instinct to fight and because he cannot reason out the physical laws that make this reflection appear real.  An animal is a mechanism that operates according to fore-ordained rules.  Wrapped up in its heredity, and determined long before it was born, is a certain limited capacity of ganglionic response to eternal stimuli.  These responses have been fixed in the species through adaptation to environment.  Natural selection has compelled the animal automatically to respond in a fixed manner and a certain way to all the usual external stimuli it encounters in the course of a usual life.  Thus, under usual circumstances, it does the usual thing.  Under unusual circumstances it still does the usual thing, wherefore the highhole perforating the ice-house is guilty of lunacy—­of unreason, in short.  To do the unusual thing under unusual circumstances, successfully to adjust to a strange environment for which his heredity has not automatically fitted an adjustment, Mr. Burroughs says is impossible.  He says it is impossible because it would be a non-instinctive act, and, as is well known animals act only through instinct.  And right here we catch a glimpse of Mr. Burroughs’s cart standing before his horse.  He has a thesis, and though the heavens fall he will fit the facts to the thesis.  Agassiz, in his opposition to evolution, had a similar thesis, though neither did he fit the facts to it nor did the heavens fall.  Facts are very disagreeable at times.