NATURE AND NURTURE 5 1 



they follow an actual blow. The color of his eyes and the other 

 marks are racial characteristics which show what his ancestry 

 has been; how his parents and more remote progenitors have 

 behaved under similar assaults. With this scientific knowledge of 

 dogs we may conjecture, with some confidence, how this one will 

 behave ; but in order to compute his conduct with anything like 

 accuracy, we must have still more information. If his master 

 habitually beat or bully him, he will not act like a dog brought 

 up with more discretion. If he be young, and have not learned in- 

 dependence and self-reliance and distrust of strangers, he will not 

 act like an older and wiser dog ; and if eyes and teeth and limbs 

 be failing from old age, his conduct will be still different. If the 

 kick wake him from sleep, he will not act like a dog disturbed 

 while eating ; nor will a lost dog, oppressed by a sense of his 

 own friendlessness, act like one whose master is near; nor one 

 assaulted at home like one on strange ground, where he has no 

 rights; nor one attacked in the discharge of his duty like one 

 detected in forbidden pleasure or in theft. The attitude of the 

 assailant, or even such little things as the size of the pupil of his 

 eye, or the contraction of one or another facial muscle, will tell 

 the dog what emotions accompany the kick; and, if I myself be 

 accompanied by a dog, this third party may modify the result 

 without any share in the assault. 



What a difference between a kick against a dog and one 

 against a stone ! In one case the simple conditions may be stated 

 in few words, and the result may be computed; while in the 

 other, a book would not suffice for the statement of all the facts, 

 and the best science of our day is powerless to compute the 

 result. 



I am fully prepared to believe, whenever it is proved, that all 

 the conditions which modify the result are embodied, in one way 

 or another, in the structure of the dog; for I know no reason 

 why we should seek them anywhere else. While there will be 

 plenty of time for a positive opinion when it is proved, I see no 

 reason to doubt that, if the dog's body could be preserved without 

 change, it might, some day in the ages to come, be studied by a 

 naturalist who would be able to tell what conduct would have 

 followed the kick, just as we foresee the effect of an opened valve 



