ANIMAL ARITHMETIC. 259 



dog has no desire except to obey and please ns ; the trouble is in 

 explaining to him what we want of him. 



A dog had been taught to go, when commanded, to the shed for 

 wood for the fireplace. The exercise amused him ; and, when he 

 had brought one stick, he liked nothing better than to return for 

 another, so that he had to be told to stop. But one time, when he 

 was alone and lonesome, he pulled down all the wood, stick by 

 stick. He had not comprehended the purpose of the act which 

 they made him perform, supposing it to be a sport, like the ordi- 

 nary carrying of a stick. Could this dog have been taught to 

 count by sending him for two sticks and then for three, and so on 

 to larger numbers ? We doubt it, because he had not even disen- 

 gaged from the act which he was ordered to do the general idea 

 that all the pieces of wood which he brought were to be burned in 

 the fireplace, that he was never sent for them except for that 

 purpose, and that he should only fetch as many as were needed. 



If efforts to educate animals have been even more fruitless in 

 the hands of scientific investigators than of workingmen proceed- 

 ing without theoretical views, it is because great errors have been 

 committed in the analysis of human faculties, in making such 

 suppositions, for instance, as that arithmetical notions are more 

 elementary than geometrical ones. Having done this, they have 

 sought to teach animals, whose capability is for measuring, to 

 count. Having become habituated by our industrial civilization 

 and the economical laws of exchange to the intervention of the 

 idea of number in all our wants, acts, and works, we have lost 

 perception of the insignificant part which it has in animal life as 

 compared with that of the idea of size. Animals have a very 

 exact sense of size. They can measure time and distance better 

 than we can. The sparrows in our parks, when affecting the 

 highest degree of confidence in us, know how to keep just enough 

 distance from us to be able to evade us. It also seems to be dem- 

 onstrated that all animals have more or less of the faculty of 

 estimating the number of objects coexisting in space ; that is, in 

 a varying degree, of analyzing the similar or identical elements in 

 their visual or auditive perceptions, so long as the number is 

 small enough. 



Have they also the faculty of estimating numbers as successive 

 repetitions of the same facts in time, or of counting the reiteration 

 of the same perceptions ? I was once told of a workman who was 

 in the habit of giving sugar every day to a dog which he met in 

 going to his work. The dog counted on his daily return. He 

 gave three pieces of sugar, one after the other, and the dog would 

 wait and look till it had got the third piece, when it seemed satis- 

 fied and did not ask for any more. It had, therefore, the notion 

 of these three successive facts, and could count them. I learn 



