A ZOOLOGICAL ENIGMA. 361 



traveling companion, as if to conciliate his consent to the meditated 

 enterprise, and then slunk off into a ravine, scrambled up the opposite 

 bank and scampered away at a trot first, and by and by at a gallop 

 not toward Crab Orchard, i. e., southeast, but due north, toward Mor- 

 gan's Ridge and Boonsboro in a bee-line to Cincinnati, Ohio. They 

 saw him cross a stubble-field, not a bit like an animal that has lost its 

 way and has to turn left and right to look for landmarks, but, " like a 

 horse on a tramway," straight ahead, with his nose well up, as if he 

 were following an air-line toward a visible goal. He made a short 

 detour to the left, to avoid a lateral ravine, but farther up he resumed 

 his original course, leaped a rail-fence, and went headlong into a cop- 

 pice of cedar-bushes, where they finally lost sight of him. 



A report to the above effect, duly countersigned by the Berea wit- 

 nesses, reached the dog's owner on February 4th, and on the after- 

 noon of the following day Hector met his master on the street, wet 

 and full of burrs and remorse, evidently ashamed of his tardiness. 

 That settled the memory question. Till they reached Crab Orchard 

 the dog had been under the full influence of ether, and the last thing 

 he could possibly know from memory was a misleading fact, viz., that 

 they had brought him from a southwesterly direction. Between 

 Berea and Cincinnati he had to cross two broad rivers and three steep 

 mountain-ranges, and had to pass by or through five good-sized towns, 

 the centers of a network of bewildering roads and by-roads. He had 

 never been in that part of Kentucky before, nor ever within sixty 

 miles of Berea. The inclination of the watershed might have guided 

 him to the Kentucky River, and by and by back to the Ohio, but far 

 below Cincinnati and by an exhaustingly circuitous route. The 

 weather, after a few days of warm rains, had turned clear and cool, 

 so that no thermal data could have suggested the fact that he was two 

 degrees south of his home. The wind, on that morning, varied from 

 west to northwest ; and, if it wafted a taint of city atmosphere across 

 the Kentucky River Mountains, it must have been from the direction 

 of Frankfort or Louisville. So, what induced the dog to start due 

 north ? 



" Instinct." Of course, but the demands of science are not to be 

 satisfied with conventional phrases. Blind instincts we may call such 

 feelings as hunger, the craving after fresh air, and other promptings 

 of our internal organs ; also, perhaps, the faculty of executing such 

 uniform mechanical functions as the construction of an hexagonal cell 

 or of a spheroid cocoon ; but, if such faculties have to adapt themselves 

 to variable and uncertain circumstances, they require the aid of a 

 sense i. e., of a discriminative organ. So the question comes back 

 upon us, What sense aided the dog in the choice of his direction ? 

 Scent ? It seems too impossible, though the assumption of a " sixth 

 sense " would be the only alternative. A blind man finds his way 

 through the mazes of a city, or an intricate system of halls and corri- 



