Intelligence of animals

Allow me, gentlemen, to request your attention for a few moments. You concern yourselves greatly with the Spirit of your inferiors in Nature, of those little beings intelligent enough to make popular the belief, today admitted by a significant number of great Spirits, that on the ascending scale of creations man is the summit, after having passed through all the hierarchical degrees of beings.

For my part, I shall here pay homage to the Harmonies [Harmonices mundi, Ioannis Keppleri] of Kepler, the predestined sage who, so to speak, conceived and dictated to future generations the unshakable foundations of the laws that today guide conscientious researchers.

At first I lived with difficulty from my work; then, as facilities arrived, I was able to study and learn. As a companion, I had a gentle and intelligent woman, and, without children, we awaited the whitening of our hair in tranquility. When my wife died, I was sixty years old; my sorrow was so great that, ever solitary with my memories, I would roam the great woods that surround Mézières; I wished to die and could not.

One day, a bird fell at my feet, a little jay. My first impulse was to pick it up from the ground, warm it, revive it; and, indeed, the poor little animal soon became large, gentle, and, as much as possible, amusing. It followed me everywhere, it seemed to divine my thoughts. If I was sad, it would lean against me, make a thousand grimaces and utter a thousand strange cries, forcing me to laugh. Before a visitor, it was threatening. It followed me in the gardening, crumbling the earth and casting aside the pebbles. At the table, it insistently demanded its provision and sang or imitated the canary, the warbler, the cat, the dog, etc.… What would you have? The days so sad for me became joyful, and this little friend, this singular providence, animated me inwardly. It made me love life and think that God always placed within our reach a compensation for our sorrows. Like you, I thought that the animal should be treated as a friend, as a companion at table, and that the last word of human selfishness and pride should be destroyed by the teaching that your venerated master sought to propagate. This consoling idea became a certainty, and of it I made the object of my favorite studies. In these readings I found friends among the commentators and the philosophers; and if today I am worth something in the world of the invisible, without any doubt I owe it to my jackdaw, brutally cast from the nest by some malevolent enemy of its race. At times small causes produce great effects. I sought death and found life, radiant and full of the seductive and true promises of erraticity.

Sylvestre. n Observation. – During the session in which this communication was obtained, the notable work of Kepler on the Harmonies of the Worlds was discussed, some passages of which were read and commented upon by one of those present. It is no doubt to this incident that the Spirit alludes.

We are happy to announce that Kepler's work, n the translation of which is well advanced, will be published in the near future. We propose to make a minute analysis of it in the Review and to point out particularly to our readers a great number of chapters in which most of the spiritist problems are treated with an elevation of thought and a power of logic capable, who knows, of seriously drawing the attention of the learned world to our philosophy. [1]

The work The Harmonies of the Worlds will form a fine octavo volume of 500 pages, at the price of 5 francs. Persons who wish to acquire it as soon as it appears may, from now on, address their order to Mr. Bittard, manager of the Bookshop, 7, rue de Lille, in Paris.

[2] [v.

Sylvestre François de Lacroix.]