Mr. Romanes, who read the interesting paper on "Animal intelligence"
before the British Association in Dublin to which we referred last week, has addressed a letter to Wednesday's Tinier, to declare his- "matured opinion" that there is no real distinction of kind between the power which man has over the order of his thoughts, and the power which the more intelligent of the lower animals have. The only difference is, he says, that 4, the intellectual faculties, being more highly developed in man than in animals, supply him with numberless ideas and complex inotives for the control of his emotional impulses, —ideas and motives which are necessarily absent in the case of animals." Only where does man get the idea of control at all? It appears to be the "matured opinion" of• Mr. Romanes that there is no such thing as control,—that what we mean when we talk of " control " is a resultant force, made up of all the motives which act on the mind, but rather nearer to the superior motive than to the inferior. In this sense, a wind might be said to control the tide which was running against it, or the beat of the sun to control the severity of the cold. If there were no other meaning for "control" than this, we should not need the word. "Preponderance" would express what is meant much better than "control," while preponderance recognises fully the adverse force, and the influence which it exerts in neutralising part of the energy which exceeds it in amount. Mr. Romance and his school have never explained the origin of a class of ideas for the .mere existence of-which, on their theory, there is no excuse.
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