These are among the patients whose cures are attested in Perkins’s publication, in which he has introduced them to show that his tractors do not cure by an influence on the imagination. The fallacy of any deductions, drawn from such cases, in favor of the tractors, will be apparent from the following most learned and elaborate investigation of the subject.
There are no animals in existence, I shall incontestably prove, that are more susceptible of impressions from imagination, than those above mentioned.
To begin with the crow. Strong mental faculties ever indicate a vivid imagination; and what being, except Minerva’s beauty, the owl, is more renowned for such faculties than the crow?—Who does not know that he will smell gunpowder three miles, if it be in a gun, and he imagine it be intended for his destruction? These emblems of sagacity, besides “fetching and carrying like a spaniel,” and talking as well or better than colonel Kelly’s parrot (which by the by I suspect to have been a crow) are, as Edwards assures us in his Natural History, “the planters of all sorts of wood and trees.” “I observed,” says he, “a great quantity of crows very busy at their work. I went out of my way on purpose to view their labor, and I found they were planting a grove of oaks.” Vol. v. Pref. xxxv.
These geniuses always can tell, and always have told, since the days of Virgil, the approach of rain. That poet says,
“Tum cornix plena pluviam vocat improba voce.”
They can likewise tell when bad news is approaching, as we learn from the same writer,
“Sæpe sinistra cava prædixit ab ilice cornix.”
Now I beg leave to know what mortal can do more? and to suppose a crow not blessed with those more brilliant parts, under which imagination is classed, is to do them a singular injustice, which I shall certainly resent on every occasion.
Now as to infants. Whoever has been in the way of an acquaintance with some of the more musical sort of these little gentry (like my seven last darlings for instance) and has been serenaded with the dulcet sonatas of their warbling strains, will not be disposed to deny their powers on the imagination of others. I have known the delusion practised so effectually by these young conjurers, that I have myself imagined my head was actually aching most violently, even on the point of cracking open; but on going beyond the reach of their magic spell, that is, out of hearing, my head has been as free from pain as it necessarily must be at this moment, while I am penning this lucid performance. Now, I maintain it to be most unphilosophical, and totally opposite to certain new principles in ethics, which I shall establish in a future publication, to suppose that infants should be able to impart either pleasure or pain, by operating on the imagination, and not themselves possess a large share of that imagination, by the aid of which they operate to so much effect upon others.
Next come dogs. Dr Shaw, in his Zoology, vol. i. p. 289, informs us, “that a dog belonging to a nobleman of the Medici family always attended his master’s table, changed the plates for him, carried him his wine in a glass placed on a salver, without spilling the smallest drop.” The celebrated Leibnitz mentions another, a subject of the elector of Saxony, who could discourse in an “intelligible manner,” especially on “tea, coffee, and chocolate;” whether in Greek, Latin, German, or English, however, he has not stated; but Dr Shaw, alluding to the same dog, says, undoubtedly under the influence of prejudice, “he was somewhat of a truant, and did not willingly exert his talents, being rather pressed into the service of literature.”