Etudes sur les Facultés Mentales des Animaux comparées à celles de l'Homme

Abstract

IF this work had appeared a few years ago it would have created for its author a considerable reputation. Even now, had it been written in Europe after a careful study of all the best authorities on the subject, it might have been made a very valuable and important treatise. But its author tells us—and the fact is clearly reflected in its pages—that it has been mainly written during a residence in the less cultivated parts of America, without the means of consulting the more recent works on the various subjects of which it treats. It is true that M. Houzeau is a close and acute observer of the habits of animals, and he has furnished us with many curious and original facts; but his own observations and experiments are so overlaid by vast masses of less trustworthy and often irrelevant matter, and are so widely scattered owing to his elaborate classification and minute sub-division of the subject, that they lose much of their force and impressiveness.

Etudes sur les Facultés Mentales des Animáux comparées à celles de l'Homme.

Par J. C. Houzeau, Membre de l'Académie de Belgique. 2 vols. pp. 1,008. (Paris: Hachette, 1872. London: Williams and Norgate.)