Please see the Transcriber’s Notes at the end of this text.
Copyright 1900 by A. R. Dugmore.
SNAPPING-TURTLES FIGHTING.
INTELLIGENCE
IN
PLANTS AND ANIMALS
BEING A NEW EDITION OF THE AUTHOR’S
PRIVATELY ISSUED “SOUL AND IMMORTALITY”
BY
THOMAS G. GENTRY, Sc. D.
AUTHOR OF “LIFE-HISTORIES OF BIRDS OF EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA,”
“THE HOUSE SPARROW,” “NESTS AND EGGS OF BIRDS
OF THE UNITED STATES,” ETC., ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
1900
Copyright 1900,
BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
TO
All Human Beings
WHO ARE GOOD AND KIND
TO THE HUMBLEST OF GOD’S CREATURES
THIS VOLUME
IS MOST AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR.
“Every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousandhills.
“I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of thefield are mine.”—Psalm 1:10, 11.
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PREFACE.
Nothing is more charming to the mind of man than the study ofNature. Religion, moderation and magnanimity have been made apart of his inner being through her teachings, and the soul has beenrescued by her influence from obscurity. No longer doth man grovelin the dust, seeking, animal-like, the gratification of low and basedesires, as was his wont, but on the wings of thought is enabled to soarto the very gates of Heaven and hold communion with God.
Though made “a little lower than the angels,” yet, through themighty play of forces that have been at work in the world, which we,in the latter half of this enlightened century, are just beginning torecognize and comprehend, he has been lifted from the mire of degradationand placed upon a higher social, intellectual, moral and spirituallevel. Out of the animal, in the scheme of Deity, the spiritual systemof things is to be elaborated, and not the animal out of the spiritual.This natural world, so to speak, is the raw material of the spiritual.Therefore, ere man can understand the spiritual, he must understandthe natural. Though his knowledge was at first about material things,or such as pertained to natural phenomena, yet from this through theages has been builded, little by little, that mountain-height of knowledge,intellectual and moral, which, if rightly directed, is to bring himinto fellowship with Deity. “As we have borne the image of the earthy,we shall also bear t