360 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the river, and two English pointers were adopted by a venatorial ruralist 

 in the eastern part of Ohio. The puppies submitted to exile, but one 

 of the pointers, like the black friar in the halls of Amundeville, declined 

 to be driven away. He returned, by ways and means known to him- 

 self alone, once from Portsmouth and twice from Lucasville in Scioto 

 County, the last time in a blinding snow-storm and under circumstances 

 which led his owner to believe that he must have steered by memory 

 rather than by scent. But how had he managed it the first time ? The 

 matter was discussed at a reunion of sportsmen and amateur natural- 

 ists, and one opponent of the doctor's theory proposed as a crucial test 

 that the dog be chloroformed, and sent by a night-train to a certain 

 farm near Somerset, Kentucky (one hundred and sixty miles from 

 Cincinnati) : if he found his way back, he could not have done it by 

 memory. 



The doctor objected to chloroform, remembering that dogs and 

 cats often forget to awake from anaesthetic slumbers ; but finally Hec- 

 tor was drugged with a dose of Becker's elixir (an alcoholic solution of 

 morphine), and sent to Somerset in charge of a freight-train conduc- 

 tor. The conductor reports that his passenger groaned in his stupor 

 " like a Christian in a whisky-fit " ; at length relieved himself by 

 retching, and went to sleep again. But in the twilight of the next 

 morning, while the train was taking in wood at King's Mountain, 

 eighteen miles north of Somerset, the dog escaped from the caboose 

 and staggered toward the depot in a dazed sort of way. Two brake- 

 men started in pursuit, but, seeing them come, the dog gathered him- 

 self up, bolted across a pasture, and disappeared in the morning mist. 

 At 10 a. m. on the following day he turned up in Cincinnati, having 

 run a distance of one hundred and forty-two miles in about twenty- 

 eight hours. 



Still the test was not decisive. The dog might have recovered 

 from his lethargy in time to ascertain the general direction of his jour- 

 ney, and returned to the northern terminus by simply following the 

 railroad-track backward. The projector of the experiment, therefore, 

 proposed a new test with different amendments, to be tried on his next 

 hunting-trip to central Kentucky. On the last day of January the 

 dog was sent across the river, and, nem. con., the experimenter fuddled 

 him with ether, and put him in a wicker basket, after bandaging his 

 nose with a rag that had been scented with a musky perfume. Start- 

 ing with an evening train of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, he took 

 his patient southwest to Danville Junction, thence east to Crab Or- 

 chard, and finally northeast to a hunting rendezvous near Berea in 

 Madison County. Here the much-traveled quadruped was treated to 

 a handsome supper, but had to pass the night in a dark tool-shed. 

 The next morning they lugged him out to a clearing behind the farm, 

 and slipped his leash on top of a grassy knob, at some distance from 

 the next larger wood. The dog cringed and fawned at the feet of his 



