does, often finds his direction less accurately than a man whose intellectual culture is limited; he makes an act which should be in some measure mechanical and impulsive an act of reason. As a result of these considerations, savages, deprived of improved instruments and possessed of sharpened senses, can furnish us with more interesting facts than can civilized peoples.
A former military attaché at Pekin told us that when undertaking long hunting expeditions he took with him two Mongolians, who, after many days' journey, would lead him back to the point of departure. The confidence which he reposed in these guides was never deceived; they found again in the return the path followed in going. American Indians also seem to make use of the law of retracement when, after many weeks of absence, hunting in very distant regions, they return to their home. The nomads of Africa and Asia follow in their wanderings laws based to some extent on those which govern the migrations of animals.
These facts are certainly very curious, but one must not draw too strict conclusions from them; the primitive man knows, in spite of his intellectual inferiority, how to reason out what he shall do. It is consequently very difficult in analyzing an act of orientation to discern in it the part played by reason.
VIII.
We have vainly sought in the works of naturalists a theory which might explain satisfactorily the acts of orientation performed by animals. Many very interesting notes have been made on their habits; the life of certain ones has no further secrets for us. But when it becomes necessary to pass from effect to cause the observer usually takes the wrong side. Erroneously taking himself as a term of comparison, he asks what he would do to accomplish such and such an action proved instinctive in an animal. However, if an animal has not reasoning power he possesses senses whose power surpasses anything that we can imagine.
We know the famous experiment of the female peacock moth shut up in a box and set out at night on a balcony in Paris where representatives of its species were very seldom found. The next morning there were four males, doubtless from the neighboring forest, settled on the box. How did they know that 20 kilometers away they would find a female in the midst of Paris, where they had never before ventured?
When in the Pyrenees the hunters run down an ibex, it is useless for them to hide the entrails under a bush or in a hole; vultures appear from every direction, although but a few minutes before not one was visible on the horizon.
Such facts as these are inexplicable from what we know of the senses—of our own especially. The acts of orientation are not less extraordinary; therefore the observers who have remarked these things have
