192 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



been drawn seem to us to rest upon no better foundation than a great 

 many other metaphysical distinctions : that is, the assumption that, 

 because you can give two things different names, they must therefore 

 have different natures. It is difficult to understand how anybody who 

 has ever kept a dog, or seen an elephant, can have any doubts as to ai 

 animal's power of performing the essential processes of reasoning. 

 We have been saying in thousands of treatises on logic, All men are 

 mortal : Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. The elephant 

 reasons : All boys are bun-giving animals ; that biped is a boy : there- 

 fore I will hold out my trunk to him. A philosopher says, The 

 barometer is rising, and therefore we shall have fine weather ; his dog 

 says, My master is putting on his hat, and therefore I am going to 

 have a walk. A dog equals a detective in the sharpness with which 

 he infers general objectionableness from ragged clothes. A clever 

 dog draws more refined inferences. If he is not up to enough simple 

 arithmetic to count seven, he can at least say, Everybody is looking 

 so gloomy that it must be Sunday morning. If he is a sheep-dog, he 

 is probably more capable of finding his way over hills than most 

 members of the Alpine Club, and capable of combining his actions 

 with a view to making the sheep whose reasoning powers are limited 

 follow the right track. He can found judgments on cautious 

 experiment, as anybody will admit who has seen a dog testing the 

 strength of a plank which he has to cross, or measuring the height of 

 a jump. In fact, a dog is constantly performing rudimentary acts of 

 reason, which can only be distinguished from our own by the fact that 

 he cannot put them into words. He can understand a few simple 

 words ; and, though he cannot articulate, he can make sounds indica- 

 tive of his wants and emotions, which are to words what the embryo 

 is to the perfect organism. He cannot put together a sentence ; but 

 to found a distinction of kind between his intellectual performances 

 and those of man upon that circumstance, seems to be as unreasonable 

 as to make a similar distinction between the intellect of the savage 

 who cannot count five, and that of the philosopher who can use mathe 

 matical symbols. The power of abstraction has been carried a step, 

 and a very important step, farther in each case; but there is no more 

 cause to suspect the introduction of an entirely new element in one 

 case than the other. 



The condemnation of the poor brutes as non-moral (if we may use 

 such a word) seems to be still more monstrous. We need not speak 

 of exceptional stories, such as the legend in a recent French news- 

 paper of the sensitive dog who committed suicide when deserted by 

 his friends ; but who can doubt that his dog has something which 

 serves as a very fair substitute for a sense of duty ? Could any thing 

 be more like human heroism than the conduct of the poor collie who 

 drove home her master's sheep, leaving her new-born puppies by the 

 side of the road ? Or, to avoid particular instances, is there a barris- 



