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Gerard Terburg, whose pictures now have an enormous value, had two sisters, Maria and Gezina, whose genre pictures were not unworthy of comparison with the works of their famous brother. Gottfried Schalken, remarkable for his skill in the representation of scenes by candle light, was scarcely more famous than his sister Maria. Eglon van der Neer is famous for his pictures of elegant women in marvellous satin gowns. He married Adriana Spilberg, a favorite portrait painter. The daughters of the eminent engraver Cornelius Visscher, Anna and Maria, were celebrated for their fine etching on glass, and by reason of their poems and their scholarly acquirements they were called the "Dutch Muses," and were associated with the learned men of their day. This list, though incomplete, suggests that the co-education of artists bore good fruit in their co-operation in their profession.

As the result of much more explosive life, animals have to deal with much in the way of nitrogenous waste products, the ashes of the living fire, but these are usually got rid of very effectively, e.g. in the kidney filters, and do not clog the system by being deposited as crystals and the like, as happens in plants. Sluggish animals like sea-squirts which have no kidneys are exceptions that prove the rule, and it need hardly be said that the statements that have been made in regard to the contrasts between plants and animals are general statements. There is often a good deal of the plant about the animal, as in sedentary sponges, zoophytes, corals, and sea-squirts, and there is often a little of the animal about the plant, as we see in the movements of all shoots and roots and leaves, and occasionally in the parts of the flower. But the important fact is that on the early forking of the genealogical tree, i.e. the divergence of plants and animals, there depended and depends all the higher life of the animal kingdom, not to speak of mankind. The continuance of civilisation, the upkeep of the human and animal population of the globe, and even the supply of oxygen to the air we breathe, depend on the silent laboratories of the green leaves, which are able with the help of the sunlight to use carbonic acid, water, and salts to build up the bread of life.

The real question, however, as to the substantial underlying identity between the language of the lower animals and our own, turns upon that other question whether or no, in spite of an immeasurable difference of degree, the thought and reason of man and of the lower animals is essentially the same. No one will expect a dog to master and express the varied ideas that are incessantly arising in connection with human affairs. He is a pauper as against a millionaire. To ask him to do so would be like giving a streetboy sixpence and telling him to go and buy himself a founder's share in the New River Company. He would not even know what was meant, and even if he did it would take several millions of sixpences to buy one. It is astonishing what a clever workman will do with very modest tools, or again how far a thrifty housewife will make a very small sum of money go, or again in like manner how many ideas an intelligent brute can receive and convey with its very limited vocabulary; but no one will pretend that a dog's intelligence can ever reach the level of a man's. What we do maintain is that, within its own limited range, it is of the same essential character as our own, and that though a dog's ideas in respect of human affairs are both vague and narrow, yet in respect of canine affairs they are precise enough and extensive enough to deserve no other name than thought or reason. We hold moreover that they communicate their ideas in essentially the same manner as we do--that is to say, by the instrumentality of a code of symbols attached to certain states of mind and material objects, in the first instance arbitrarily, but so persistently, that the presentation of the symbol immediately carries with it the idea which it is intended to convey. Animals can thus receive and impart ideas on all that most concerns them. As my great namesake said some two hundred years ago, they know "what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly." And they not only know what's what themselves, but can impart to one another any new what's-whatness that they may have acquired, for they are notoriously able to instruct and correct one another.

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