But that savage cannot be fooled by a hand-mirror.  We must go lower down in the animal scale, to the monkey.  The monkey swiftly learns that the monkey it sees is not in the glass, wherefore it reaches craftily behind the glass.  Is this instinct?  No.  It is rudimentary reasoning.  Lower than the monkey in the scale of brain is the robin, and the robin fights its reflection in the window-pane.  Now climb with me for a space.  From the robin to the monkey, where is the impassable gulf? and where is the impassable gulf between the monkey and the feeding-child? between the feeding-child and the savage who seeks the man behind the partition? ay, and between the savage and the astute financiers Mrs. Chadwick fooled and the thousands who were fooled by the Keeley Motor swindle?

Let us be very humble.  We who are so very human are very animal.  Kinship with the other animals is no more repugnant to Mr. Burroughs than was the heliocentric theory to the priests who compelled Galileo to recant.  Not correct human reason, not the evidence of the ascertained fact, but pride of ego, was responsible for the repugnance.

In his stiff-necked pride, Mr. Burroughs runs a hazard more humiliating to that pride than any amount of kinship with the other animals.  When a dog exhibits choice, direction, control, and reason; when it is shown that certain mental processes in that dog’s brain are precisely duplicated in the brain of man; and when Mr. Burroughs convincingly proves that every action of the dog is mechanical and automatic—­then, by precisely the same arguments, can it be proved that the similar actions of man are mechanical and automatic.  No, Mr. Burroughs, though you stand on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick out that ladder from under your feet.  You must not deny your relatives, the other animals.  Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself.  By them you stand or fall.  What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself—­a pretty spectacle, truly, of an exalted animal striving to disown the stuff of life out of which it is made, striving by use of the very reason that was developed by evolution to deny the possession of evolution that developed it.  This may be good egotism, but it is not good science.

Papeete, Tahiti. 
March 1908.

THE YELLOW PERIL

No more marked contrast appears in passing from our Western land to the paper houses and cherry blossoms of Japan than appears in passing from Korea to China.  To achieve a correct appreciation of the Chinese the traveller should first sojourn amongst the Koreans for several months, and then, one fine day, cross over the Yalu into Manchuria.  It would be of exceptional advantage to the correctness of appreciation did he cross over the Yalu on the heels of a hostile and alien army.