The statement that the emu is almost extinct is misleading, says an Australian correspondent to a scientific paper. The birds exist in large numbers in north and northwest New South Wales and practically all over Queensland, and South and Western Australia. And he adds that he does not think they will become extinct yet, "because they are practically valueless." Can this be an instance of the survival of the fittest? The naïve assumption that man destroys that which he values can but lead to the scientific inference that the world will become stocked with things which man does not value. Hence, whatever may be supposed to be the case in nature, the influence of man is to promote the survival of the unfit. True, this works out all right for nature, but man becomes reduced to a mere destructive agency whose influence nature eliminates. Eventually, on this theory, man will find himself the denizen of a world stocked with things which are to him "practically valueless"; and then, presumably, he will leave off destroying, for want of anything to destroy.
Still it must not be forgotten that man, even in such a destructive civilization as the present, is a creator. He is potent on the invisible planes where thoughts are things; and according to hints given in the ancient teachings, mankind is concerned in the processes by which the animated forms of nature are evolved.
* * * * *
With regard to instinct in animals, people are sometimes prone to take too extreme views. Experience teaches us that instinct which is so reliable in beaten tracks of habit proves a failure in unfamiliar circumstances. A bird in a room cannot find the way out, even when door and windows are open, but flies back and forth just above the level of the openings. But even here we must be cautious; for animals can adapt themselves to new circumstances. The timid wild-bird learns to feed from the hand. In this respect we notice degrees among different animals, some having more plastic minds than others; this marks different upward stages in the perfection of the animal monad.
Because instinct, the accumulation of age-long experience, is so infallible in ordinary cases, we must not assume that it cannot err. On the contrary we often meet with cases of dunderhead stupidity and of a blind addiction to custom that savors almost of automatism. Thus a correspondent of an English paper writes about a blackbird which had been brought up as a nestling in the house. When grown up and given her liberty, she insisted on coming back to build, and made her nest in a bookshelf. But the family was a failure, because the hen had no mate and nature failed to depart from her rule; there were no young; fertile eggs had to be procured for her to hatch.
Another story in the same paper tells of a mare which lost her foal and was given a calf dressed in the skin of the departed. The giving of stuffed calves to cows, while being milked, is a familiar practice. In animals we see minds in course of development, capable of considerable growth, but within limits. The self-conscious ego, characteristic of man, is not there. We must bear in mind that the animal is an animal soul (or monad) within a form; that it is the monad which undergoes the evolution; and that though an animal does not become a man, that which ensouls the animal will in some future cycle of evolution enter into the making of man. It is by the gift of the self-conscious Mind, which links the Spiritual to the terrestrial, that the animal consciousness was made to subserve the purposes of the human kingdom.
* * * * *
While the acknowledged scientific method of inquiry consists in logical inferences from observations, it is well known that a very limited amount of observation is frequently made to support an unlimited amount of inference. The "scientific use of the imagination" (Tyndall) is highly recommended, but may o'erleap itself and "give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name," unless checked by some sedater quality.
We see that a biologist has gone back in imaginative speculation beyond "protoplasm" as the origin of life; for, just as the physicists have subdivided their atom into electrons, so this theorist has subdivided his protoplasm into something still more elementary and primordial, which he calls "mycoplasm." The first part of the word means "fungus," so now we can speak of our ancestor as the primordial fungus; and indeed fungoid traits do seem to survive in some people. Science, we are told, knows a whole world of minute corpuscles which do not need oxygen for their existence and cannot be killed by boiling water. They do not make the amoeboid movements characteristic of protoplasm and are immune to the strongest poisons. This kind of creature, therefore, could exist on earth long before protoplasm could, as it is so very hardy; and from it, as soon as the crust had cooled and oxygen been formed, the protoplasm sprang. Such is the theory, but it may be wrong. What we want to know, however, is what the mycoplasms sprang from; because either they must have sprung from something else, or else they are the great "I Am," eternal and uncreate.