158 Journal of Comparative Neurology. 



as I had given him when a puppy, to President F. P. Hobgood, 

 and he had named him after me, with my consent. This dog 

 was sent to me from Salisbury, by my kinsman, Baldy Boyden, 

 and was said to have been of excellent stock. I do not think 

 he was more than two and a half years old at the time the inci- 

 dent occurred which I am about to relate. 



The dog leaped on the fence, not having smelt birds before; 

 for a time he remained stationary ; I saw him and knew that he 

 was standing birds. After a little while he carefully crawled 

 down on the same side of the fence from which he had ap- 

 proached it, and then went down the fence some forty or fifty 

 yards, leaped the fence, cautiously approached the covey from 

 the other side and when he got at the proper distance, stood 

 them as usual. I have often instanced this case as demonstrat- 

 ing the power of legitimate, logical reasoning in a dog. As a 

 mental process I believe it was as clear a case of reasoning as 

 was ever done by Sir Isaac Newton. He knew that if he 

 jumped over the fence, they were so near that they would fly, 

 which was a thing he must by all means avoid; so, after turn- 

 ing the matter over in his mind, whatever sort of mind it was 

 with which he was endowed, he concluded that he could reach 

 them by gonig down the fence and coming up on the other side. 



When this dog died his obituary was published in an Oxford 

 paper. In that obituary he was spoken of as President Hob- 

 good's faithful friend, Dr. Pritchard, and many persons thought 

 it was I that was dead." 



AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE TAXONOMIC APPLI- 

 CATION OF BRAIN MEASUREMENT.— FULICA. 



By E. G. Stanley. 



To illustrate the way in which the present system of bird 

 classification is looked on by ornithologists, we quote from the 

 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, Vol. Ill, p. 699 : 



" The difficulty of applying this very valuable morphologic- 

 al grouping [Professor Huxley's], and making it fit with one that 

 is more general and distinctively zoological (that is, having ref- 

 erence to every character, external and internal), does not take 



