about dogs than I am, and I speak from a long acquaintance and friendship with them.

My dog Waldmann1 was once in his younger days sent to a show at the Crystal Palace. He had been on his stand for three days with thousands of other dogs, and looked at by thousands of human beings. When I went there on a Saturday to fetch him back, I was most careful not to speak, not even to look where he was. I moved by in a dense crowd, but long before I came near him, the dog jumped from the table to which he was chained, and nearly hanged himself by trying to reach me. How did he know me? It may be by scent, but this must have enabled him to distinguish me from thousands of other people with a greater assurance than that which enables us to distinguish black from white. How did I know my dog, or rather, I ought to say how should I have known him among hundreds of Dachs-hunds, all being black and tan, all having crooked legs and very long backs? First of all, by a general vague impression, afterwards by one or two salient points, but probably never with that assurance with which he knew me, unless he had first spoken to me.

And what applies to the highly developed sense of scent in dogs, applies equally to the highly developed sense of sight, for instance, in pigeons. How can we attempt to realise what passes within the mind of an animal whose organ of sight is actually larger than the whole of its brain, as is the case with certain pigeons remarkable for their long flights? We can imagine anything we like about what passes

He is the father of Matthew Arnold's Geist, and is still in good health and spirits.

in the mind of an animal,—we can know absolutely nothing.

The teaching of Animals by Men.

very

A great deal has often been made of what animals can be taught to do, but we must remember that to be taught a thing is different from producing it ourselves. If a dog or an elephant or a parrot were to learn the whole of Littré's Dictionary of the French Language by heart, that would not prove that dogs could have produced the French language. It is said that our children too are taught English or French. That is true, but they are the descendants and so far the representatives of a race which produced language, and if there is hereditary transmission in body, there is hereditary transmission in thought also.

Even the most unintelligent of animals can be Lessons taught very strange lessons; but the taught a Pike. question remains to be answered whether these lessons are performed intelligently. We must be careful not to believe all that is told us about the intelligence of dogs and cats and ants, for no ancient MS. is more difficult to decipher than the acts of animals, and no loving parents are more foolish about what they see in their children than fanciers of bees and ants are about the cleverness of their pets. The following experiment, however, is vouched for by an exceptionally trustworthy authority. It was very ingeniously contrived by Mr. Amtsberg of Stralsund with a view of discovering the powers of generalisation in the ordinary habits of animals, and was described by Dr. Möbius, Professor of Zoology at Kiel'.

1 Schriften des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins für SchleswigHolstein; Separatabdruck, Kiel, 1873.

'A pike, who swallowed all small fishes which were put into his aquarium, was separated from them by a pane of glass, so that, whenever he tried to pounce on them, he struck his gills against the glass, and sometimes so violently that he remained lying on his back, like dead. He recovered, however, and repeated his onslaughts, till they became rarer and rarer, and at last, after three months, ceased altogether. After having been in solitary confinement for six months, the pane of glass was removed from the aquarium, so that the pike could again roam about freely among the other fishes. He at once swam towards them, but he never touched any one of them, but always halted at a respectful distance of about an inch, and was satisfied to share with the rest the meat that was thrown into the aquarium. He had therefore been trained so as not to attack the other fishes which he knew as inhabitants of the same tank. As soon, however, as a strange fish was thrown into the aquarium, the pike in nowise respected him, but swallowed him at once. After he had done this forty times, all the time respecting the old companions of his imprisonment, he had to be removed from the aquarium on account of his large size.

'The training of this pike,' as Professor Möbius remarks, was not, therefore, based on judgment; it consisted only in the establishment of a certain direction of will, in consequence of uniformly recurrent sensuous impressions. The merciful treatment of the fishes which were familiar to him, or, as some would say, which he knew, shows only that the pike acted without reflection. Their view provoked in him, no doubt, the natural desire to swallow them,

but it evoked at the same time the recollection of the pain he had suffered on their account, and the sad impression that it was impossible to reach the prey which he so much desired. These impressions acquired a greater power than his voracious instinct, and repressed it, at least for a time. The same sensuous impression, proceeding from the same fishes, was always in his soul the beginning of the same series of psychic acts. He could not help repeating this series, like a machine, but like a machine with a soul, which has this advantage over mechanical machines, that it can adapt its work to unforeseen circumstances, while a mechanical machine cannot. The pane of glass was to the organism of the pike one of these unforeseen circumstances.'

The same process is sometimes adopted in the earliest education of children and with much the same result, only that in the case of a child we are apt to say that it reasons, even before it can speak, though in reality it is only influenced by the memory of repeated uniform experiences. A child therefore may well be said to have memory, before it has language, just as the pike remembers, though it cannot speak. What a pike cannot do is to learn to speak, and to do anything which can be done by speech alone. And this, it seems to me, was clearly perceived by Hume when he somewhat boldly said that animals in their inferences are not guided by reasoning,' or when Mill said: There is no ground for attributing to any of the lower animals the use of signs of such a nature as to render general proposi

The Instinct

of the Em

tions possible. But,' he adds, 'those animals profit by experience, and avoid what they have found to cause them pain, in the same manner, though not always with the same skill (I should say, often with far greater skill) as a human creature. Not only the burnt child, but the burnt dog, dreads the fire '.' There are other instances, however, of animal intelligence, or whatever else we like to call it, which are simply beyond all comprehension. We may apply to them what names we please, instinct, light of nature, divine guidance or anything else, but we can only stand by and admire. I shall give one case only, but again, one which I believe to be perfectly well authenticated, and for the explanation of which neither inheritance, nor habit, nor imitation can be any avail 2.

of

peror Moth.

The grub of the "Saturnia Pavonia minor" spins, at the upper end of its case, a double roof of stiff bristles, held together at the end by very fine threads. This roof opens through a very light pressure from within, but offers a strong resistance to any pressure from without. If the grub acted according to judgment and reason, it would, according to human ideas, have had to consider as follows:-That it might possibly become a chrysalis, and be exposed to all sorts of accidents without any chance of escape, unless it took sufficient precautions; that it would rise from the chrysalis as a butterfly, without having the organs and power to break the covering which it had spun as a grub, or without being able, like other

2 Autenrieth, Ansichten über Natur und Seelenleben, 1835.