V

THE abundance of kinds and of individuals of our plant and animal neighbors is not commonly realized. We have discovered, classified, and named as distinct species at least three-quarters of a million of them, not taking into account those of past ages, now extinct, which we know through their fossils. And this total is being added to at a present rate of about fifty thousand a year by our constant discoveries of "new species," not newly produced, of course, but newly found.

But not only is there an abundance of kinds of animals and plants beyond familiar conception, but the numbers of individuals of some of these kinds-indeed, one may say of most of them are literally beyond the conception of any of us. These numbers go into astronomical figures. The great chalk beds and cliffs of England, France, Greece, Spain, and America are composed of countless numbers of tiny shells of certain lime-secreting one-celled animals, while the rock called Tripoli found in Sicily, and the Barbados earth from the island of Barbados, are composed of the silicious shells of other such minute animals. An unusually inquisitive entomologist once set himself to the task of counting the plum aphids on a single small plum-tree in a badly infested orchard. After he had counted some hundreds of thousands he stopped, appalled by the number of these little creatures thus charted for the whole orchard. And there are many orchards. We know fifteen hundred different species of ants in the world. Examine a single populous ant-hill-one of a million community homes of a single kind of ant. How many individuals are there in it? There are over three hundred kinds of insects that find board and lodging in apple-trees. How many insect individuals are harbored by the apple-trees of the world? The gauzy-winged Mayflies which, after a night's dance of courtship, mating, and death, fall along the shores of Lake Michigan, form long windrows of uncountable bodies. We used to think of the soil as an inert covering of the land spaces of the earth. We know it now as teeming with life, various and multitudinous. The earthworms in it are sufficient

to plough it, the bacteria as abundant as the very grains of it. We are impressed by the crowding human populations of China and India, the swarming human hosts of London and New York. But the locusts of Argentine and Syria outnumber the human population of the earth, and a single termite's nest in Central Africa is a greater metropolis than Paris. If numbers count for importance our neighbors deserve our attention.

These excessive numbers, both of kinds and individuals, bring about a severe competition for place and food which, in turn, leads to the adoption of many "shifts for a living," some of them of most complex and extraordinary character. These adaptive modifications occur in connection with all the structural parts, physiological functions and environmental relations of our neighbors. Variety in adaptation is not less than in species, and to most observers it is decidedly of more interest. Especially is this true of those adaptations which involve an element of mind, a psychological element—and most of the adaptations of animals do this. Reflex, instinct, intelligence, and reason, these are the animal attributes whose manifestations excite our liveliest interest.

VI

In comparing ourselves with our neighbors we readily recognize that our superiority over them lies in our capacity of mind, and not in any peculiar bodily advantage or special physiological fitness. How far, then, are our neighbors unlike us, or like us, psychologically? What do their varying types of behavior reveal as regards their development of mind?

The mechanist biologists and behaviorist psychologists, running to one extreme, and the personifying and humanizing naturalists to the other, leave many of us in a state of bewilderment regarding this matter. The observers and experimenters bring back from field and laboratory differing and often conflicting stories. But an analysis of these reports suggests that their differences depend first, upon the different animal kinds studied, and, second, upon the different attitudes and points of view assumed by the students. If I am searching for a physico-chemical

explanation of animal behavior and choose a one-celled animal like Amoeba or Paramocium to study, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that nearly all the behavior of one of these simple creatures is the direct outcome of the colloidal make-up of its body, and the varying chemical and physical environment in which it finds itself. Its movements are so directly responsive to obvious external stimuli of light, of temperature, of gravitation, of contact, of chemical variation in medium. Mind, in this case, and to this type of student, seems to be all physics and chemistry. The name, mind, even seems to be superfluous.

But if Köhler and Yerkes are the students, and an anthropoid ape is the object of their study, we get a very different story. Their close observations and ingenious experimentation reveal in our cousin, the chimpanzee, a behavior which suggests to these competent psychologists that the chimpanzee's mind is everything that ours is, only in quantitatively lesser degree. Yerkes says bluntly that his anthropoid apes show an unmistakable ideational element in their behavior.

Between these extremes in the animal scale are half a million animal kinds, and between these extremes of behavior runs a long series of observed gradations, or rather run two series, one culminating in the extraordinary instinctive performances of the solitary wasps and the social bees, and the other in the unmistakably intelligent behavior of the elephants and apes. Nowhere can one say, here is the place where nature supplanted, through some catastrophic action, behavior controlled by physico-chemical mechanism with behavior controlled by the vitalistic phenomena of instinct, intelligence, and reason. In our own behavior reflex and instinct play a part; in the behavior of even the simplest animals there is something that physics and chemistry do not explain.

But our mental experience is that of human beings alone; we cannot put our

selves in the place of a dog, a bird, a fish, or an insect, and be conscious, as we can be of our own mentality, of the character of the mental workings of one of these animals. So we have to interpret their behavior and their condition of mind from a human basis and in the presence of human prejudices. These prejudices tend to make us lean strongly toward humanizing animal behavior; or, on the other hand, quite as strongly toward mechanicalizing it.

For myself, recognizing the unity of all life and the kinship of all living creatures, and thrilling always with a certain responsive feeling whenever I come to make close acquaintanceship with any living thing from chimpanzee to Amoeba, I cannot escape the belief that we shall do better, in our endeavor to understand the behavior of our neighbors, to trace downward from our own behavior the manifestations in them of that strange and distinguishing attribute of life that we call mind, rather than to try and trace these manifestations upward from physics and chemistry. I feel a strong sympathy for that one-time most rigorous of all mechanists, Hans Driesch, who has become, by virtue of his own many carefully guarded experiments, one of the most convinced of scientific vitalists.

Some of us take pride in claiming for man the unique possession of self-consciousness. But have we any more convincing proof of that than we have for the conclusion that all life has self-consciousness? I am not at all sure of it. And if the second possibility is, indeed, the actual state of affairs, then what a new significance has every action of every one of our neighbors, all the multitudinous denizens of land and sea, in all their manifoldness of form and manner. What a new meaning of every little cheeping from the hedgerows; of every movement of the industrious bee among the flowers; of every swift scuttling of the crabs in the tide-pools! What a new significance the attribution of the friendly cognomen of neighbor to all of the creatures of earth!

T was a foolish name, given in a moment of jocularity and ecclesiastical unbending. He had been a curate only a few months, and it was the first occasion on which he had been intrusted with the dignity and responsibility of the Sunday-morning sermon. The vicar had settled himself back in his stall, abstractedly counting the wealth of cherubim and seraphim who (or should it be which?) floated around the apostolic figure in the great east window. It may have been that he enjoyed an intermittent dose-but, if he did, the preacher was unconscious of the fact. The church had been very still that morning, only the cry of a sea-gull on the rocks outside breaking into the silence. But suddenly, as his topic, adventure-the adventure of living, the adventure of dying, the adventure of loving and being loved, of believing and serving and praying-had begun to grow vivid in his words, there had arisen in his brain the consciousness of another noise, unnatural and not unghostly. It had seemed to him that the church was filled with the sound of water lapping round the prows of a ship, of wind straining at slender sails, of voices raised in command and hushed in benediction. He saw before him the picture of pilgrims landing on a barren coast. He watched them kneel, and then rise up and scan with flat hands above their eyes the boundless sweep of a new romantic country; and the thrill of their supreme adventure for God seized powerfully upon him. Then it had been that he had used that foolish phrase: "Would to heaven that I might have been the chaplain of the Mayflower."

It was a fancy bred in a moment, as fancies are. And he could not let it die. He played with it and fondled it, and it grew to meet his wish. He pictured him

self as the minister of that God for the sake of whom mankind has ever left his home, bringing the guidance of the church to lighten all the ideals, longings, hopes, and fears that formed in that alien company. He saw them grouped in prayer through many an Atlantic morning, his voice leading in the appeal of wayfarers to their friend. He watched them in their disappointments and cheered them in their tedium. He saw himself exalted among them with the spirit of Ruth: "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me."

The vicar had twitted him unmercifully, assuring him that most of his congregation had never heard of the Mayflower, and would have despised her company as a dissolute band of apostatic non-conformists if they had. The fathers of this quiet English seaside town, he asserted, and their forefathers to the approximate generation of Noah, had been born, baptized, reared, raised, confirmed, married, communicated, and buried with full contentment in the matchless shelter of the Established Church, and God alone knew why any one should want to adventure his soul and skin outside the folds of her protecting mantle. In a singularly undignified manner he even referred to his curate in the presence of the Lord Bishop, on the next day of visitation, as "the chaplain of the Mayflower." He had waggled his thumb as he had said it, and the Lord Bishop had laughed.

But the fancy had taken root in the curate's soul. It was perfectly true that the loyal parishioners of Appleton-cumCodmore showed no interest in, or knowledge of, the Mayflower. They shook their heads when he taxed them with their ignorance, and looked meditatively out to

sea as though they timed the imminent arrival of Drake's squadron with a line of galleons in tow. It was true the Mother Church did seem amazingly restful and beneficent, like the copper glint of the channel at daybreak. And the spirit of adventure was singularly lacking, perhaps because the clarion call to adventure was singularly infrequent. Storms came, but the little fleet of fishing-boats sought shelter in the harbor at the first warning. Big ships sometimes made signals of distress-but that was the affair of the lifeboat crew, semiprofessional adventurers who liked to play with death. It was true that Samuel Trevarth had been drowned a few years ago trying to rescue his pipe which had slipped overboard-but Samuel Trevarth had never been really normal. It is true that a woman occasionally screamed in childbirth; but on the whole even they did not suffer so much as their more stylish and careless sisters of the city. And there were practically no motorcars, and no fire-alarms, and no mad dogs. With a strong head and plenty of determination one could possibly make fiery trial of one's soul in the public-houses along the esplanade; but a taint of aboriginal crudeness lingered about the effort; and in any case that were a course of procedure obviously impossible for a minister of the parish. Such things simply were not done, even for the sake of testing a curate's salvation.

But, while he brooded over the decadent state of Romance in his adopted village, the unexpected happened. An uncle who, in the late years of the nineteenth century, had forsaken England and Mother Church and the comfortable fastnesses of feudalism to make cutlery in New Jersey, had become senior warden of the village church where his factory was situated. He described in infrequent letters the charm of the locality, the squares of streets, the splashing river by the main hotel, "as broad as the Avon and much more enterprising," the steam-heat and elevated railroads in the houses and cities, and the red riot of the ramblers trespassing in June over all the porches. He called them "stoops," which, for a time, his correspondent assumed to be some such phenomenon of nature as a field or a wood where ramblers would most naturally ramble. He wrote to suggest that the cu

rate should come over to be rector of his church. The last incumbent had been made an executive secretary of some progressive board. He was ready and able, he said, to "fix" the bishop. He could promise fifteen hundred dollars and a house; also a good golf-links and a Ford car.

The curate showed this letter to the vicar.

"And where is New Jersey?" said he. Its geographical position was elucidated with the aid of a map.

"And what is the stipend, you say?" "Fifteen hundred dollars and a house." "And how much is that in Christian money?"

"About three hundred pounds-and a house."

"And what are you getting now?" "One hundred and twenty, sir, out of which I pay my board." "Oh!"

The vicar turned once more to the letter he held and tapped it with an appraising forefinger.

"I see your uncle calls his church St. Luke's. What-ah-what kind of a church do you imagine it is?"

"What kind of a church?" his curate repeated vaguely.

"I fancy"-the vicar was growing pompous-"that these Americans do not see things quite the same as we do. Now I should be very remiss to advise you to throw in your lot with any congregation of-may I say?-free thinkers. You see what I mean."

Certainly, sir, certainly," replied the curate, "but I do not think you need have any fears on that score. This church is an Anglican church. In the United States they call it the Protestant Episcopal Church. It's the same thing as ours."

"The what?" snorted the vicar, much aggravated. "I am not aware that I represent a Protestant Episcopal organization. Explain yourself."

The curate explained. That is to say, he floundered in a rough sea of explanation. That is to say, the bark of his knowledge twisted about in the flood of his conviction. He made it plain that the Protestant Episcopal Church possessed bishops, a prayer-book, and an occasional candle.

"But how," complained the vicar at

last, "can you tolerate becoming a Protestant Episcopalian? The word is offensive and uncanonical."

It was the ramblers that really turned the scale, their soft petals outweighing the charm even of the elevated railroad and the onus of the church with the unsympathetic name. It took four weeks to find out what ramblers were; but the explanation was decisive. Millions of red rosesshot with every shade of carmine and crimson and pink. Of course there were flowers in England-but not roses by the million, except in the gardens of the squire. And the only good they did was to substantiate the pardonable and garrulous pride of the gardener. No one else ever saw them.

And so it was settled. The chaplain of the Mayflower, after a parish supper at which he kissed all the babies, wrung the hands of all the men, received a pipe and tobacco-pouch "with the affectionate regards of the people of St. Dunstan church," and was bedewed with the moist affection of all the old ladies, went overseas in the second cabin of the Mauretania. His uncle met him at the pier in New York, shook his hand in the manner of one endeavoring to make bricks without straw, and objected immediately to his flat, round, clerical hat. "Only high churchmen wear those things over here. I'll buy you a real honest-to-goodness hat as soon as we get up-town." And he presented him with a gray felt fedora, ornate with little, long, silver hairs that glistened. The curate felt almost unfrocked.

And so a ride in a strident subway; a welcome change into a train in which every one faced the same way throughout the length of a long omnibus, and the man in front sat without a coat; and a furious trip in the back yards of sooty houses, where people hung out clean sheets to catch the grime of the engine.

His church was a brown frame structure standing in its own plot of well-trimmed lawn half-way down Main Street. He first saw it in the steely incandescent light of a bright November morning, and his heart gave an unaccountable thump in the deepest recesses of his being. It looked so preternaturally and indecently bare. A wooden church was a concrete abstraction which he had never even imagined. The interior was, if possible, more surprising and alarming than the

outside-naked stucco walls tinged a reddish pink, small dark pews of unlovely stained wood, no pillars, no chancelscreen, a wooden altar at the head of a shallow depression clogged with choirstalls, and an atrocious window emitting a riot of highly colored light which suggested nothing so much as a brass band playing "Thaïs." There surged unbidden into his mind the recollection of his last service in the parish church of Appletoncum-Cudmore, with all the little intimate details that filled remembrance to make it live-the soft tread of the feet as the great door, nail-studded, swung open, and admitted to the temple of a Presence-musty, perhaps, and somewhat damp, but mellowed with the sanctity of centuries of prayer; the odd and holy memorials jutting out from every square yard of wall, and thrusting marble legs and swords from dark and forgotten corners; the grating of the choir-screen twisted into iron contortions, playing with the subdued and reverent rays that fell lightly from the tracery of the old windows. The paved floor was uneven, but it suggested the march of saintly generations; there was more than a suspicion of dust in the air, but it seemed like the outpouring of medieval censors, left to crystallize; the shadows, even at midday, were dim ghosts of vanished lives, mellowing in the afterglow of the spirit. And God was almost visibly present-at least a mystic's God, immaterial, immobile, and calm, but wonderfully pervading.

It was hard to get used to the apparent absence of God in his new surroundings. Divines may preach as they please of the inwardness of the spirit, but the average man-and the chaplain of the Mayflower was no more than an average man-requires an external impetus to call out the indwelling response. He pondered this, many a sunlit morning, kneeling alone in the cold church, his head buried in the hollows of his arms; and his soul longed for a visible semblance of God-even a bare pinewood crucifix, a holy mustiness, a mysterious shadow-anything in the world to take his thoughts away from the nakedness of a void which, it seemed, would require centuries of God to fill. God is like a spiritual perfume that grows into the cloistered atmosphere of a quiet room until it pervades. The essence of