23 AUGUST 1879, Page 3

Professor St. George Mivart, who presides over the Biological Section

of the Association, delivered an address on Thursday which raised again the old question of the distinction between .animal and human intelligence, a distinction which Professor• Mivart holds to be one of kind. Especially, he argued that con- certed action is impossible to the lower animals. To this, Sir John Lubbock replied thathe placed a dead blue-bottle fly near one of his ants' nests, and pinned it down ; and that an ant pulled at it for about twenty minutes, and then went to the neat, bringing back with him ten other ants, who joined in the effort to pall away the fly. Sir John thought it only fair to take away the pin, when the party of eleven carried off the blue-bottle in triumph to the nest. Is not that concerted action, and yet not a concerted action which can be traced. to a class-instinct P