THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A DOG. 



519 



I have recorded another still more interesting act in the 

 comedy of the kitchen door, which act raises the question whether 

 animals are capable of emotions of a religious nature. Romanes 

 claims to have proved that some animals exercise all the human 

 emotions, " with the exception of those which refer to religion, 

 moral sense, and perception of the sublime." * On the other hand, 

 Mr. John Fiske makes a category for Toots. In discussing the 

 "' primeval ghost- world," he quotes from Nature as follows : " A 

 Skye terrier accustomed to sit on his haunches when wanting 

 favors from his master would also sit up before the mantelpiece 

 before his rubber ball. This illustrates Auguste Comte's re- 

 mark that dogs, apes, and elephants may have a few fetichistic 

 notions." f 



It is a habit of Toots, when alone and occasion requires, to per- 

 form his sitting and hand-waving supplications to inanimate 

 things as if they were capable of volition. He has been discov- 

 ered thus paying his addresses to a rubber doll, beseeching it to 

 descend from the mantelpiece for his benefit. But as to rubber 

 playthings, there is reason to believe that he conceives them to 

 possess real life on account of the resumption of their form by 

 elastic reaction after they are pressed. The same address, how- 

 ever, is made by him to a door he can not open, or to a glass of 

 water he can not reach or ought not to have without asking, when 

 no human friend is present to serve him. 



So also when he failed to force open the kitchen door that was 

 fastened, there followed his last effort a silence that led me to 

 conclude it was the little fellow's moment of prayer. Accord- 

 ingly, at the right instant, I thrust open the door, when I found 

 that he had been sitting up before the unyielding object and wav- 

 ing his suppliant hands with a genuine earnestness that would 

 shame the hollow formality of many a human worshiper. 



The question naturally arises, Does Toots believe in ghosts ? 

 And, if so, have we not found in him the evidence of an incipient 

 fetichism, an inspiration of rude religious emotion and a glim- 

 mering perception of the sublime ? 



From observations made at two Prnssian stations and Teneriffe in 1889, 1890, 

 and 1891, showing slight and continuous changes of position of the plane of the 

 horizon, Dr. von Rebeur Paachnitz has concluded that the relatively rigid surface 

 of the eartb is subject to a movement of rising and falling like the ocean move- 

 ment that produces the tides. The amplitude of the observations is very slight, 

 but the apparatus used made it clearly perceptible. The direction of the plumb 

 line also points to a daily disturbance, which is attributed, in conjecture, to solar 

 radiation. A third kind of movement may be referred to distant earthquakes. 



* Mental Evolution of Man, f Myths and Myth Makers. 



