JANUARY 83 



exact measure of an ox's intelligence. Here, where they are con- 

 fined in yards, fatting, it would seem to be almost entirely limited 

 to matters connected with the food which they gorge so persistently. 

 But that oxen are not altogether fools will be evident to anyone 

 who, like myself, has had considerable experience of them in 

 Southern Africa, where they are the draught animals of the land. 

 Notably they are very clever in finding their way across country to 

 the place where they were bred, or where they have lived a long 

 while, sometimes for a distance of hundreds of miles, though I 

 very much doubt whether, in the case of oxen, this is not instinct 

 rather than intelligence. 



That in the case of horses it is intelligence I think I can prove 

 by the following story : When I lived in Africa I had a hunting 

 horse called Moresco, a remarkable beast, of great speed, endurance, 

 and sure-footedness. This creature was so clever that I have known 

 him resort to extraordinary artifices to obtain food, such as lying 

 down and wriggling himself upon his side underneath a waggon 

 till he could reach the sack where the mealies were kept and gnaw 

 a hole in it with his teeth. Then, still lying on his side, he 

 devoured most of the contents. Also, once he broke open a door 

 to get at the forage stored behind it. When I was travelling with 

 him on circuit through New Scotland, the great horse-breeding 

 district of the Transvaal, Moresco one night broke the riem with 

 which he was tied to the waggon and made off after a troop of mares. 

 We searched for him without avail, and at length, as it was 

 absolutely necessary that we should open Court in a certain town 

 on a fixed day, we were obliged to abandon him. I think it was 

 three mornings afterwards that I climbed out of the waggon at day- 

 light to find Moresco standing untied among our other horses. As 

 roads in this part of South Africa in those days were nothing but 

 tracks wandering hither and thither across the veldt, of which we 

 had crossed many during the time while he was lost, I can only 

 suppose that this horse, when he was tired of the company of the 

 mares, had deliberately taken up our spoor and followed it till he 

 found us forty or fifty miles awav. 



