160 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



facts will be familiar to most persons who have had 

 experience with horses. They have been related to 

 me in great number by cattlemen in the Western 

 States of America, and by Australians who have 

 lived in the bush. A similar faculty is highly 

 developed in dogs, cats, and other domestic animals. 

 It has been proved not to be due to any conscious 

 noting of landmarks, for animals have found their 

 way back over immense distances, even when they 

 have been sent on the outward journey in closed 

 boxes. 



It is interesting to note that this faculty of judging 

 direction seems to bear no relation to the place of 

 the animal in the general scale of intelligence. It is 

 possessed to a considerable degree by dogs and 

 cats ; but it is possessed in a very high degree by 

 seals, who find their way unerringly back every 

 year to their rookeries from enormous distances to 

 which they disperse in the open sea. It reaches an 

 extremely high degree of perfection in migratory 

 birds not otherwise noted for intelligence. Even 

 animals low in the scale, like fish, find their way 

 regularly for great distances to their spawning- 

 grounds. A case is related of a snake, carried in a 

 closed carriage from Madras to Pondicherry, a 

 distance of 100 miles, which found its way back. 



Possibly we have in man in this case also a sugges- 

 tion of the survival in rudimentary form of a faculty 

 far more highly developed in lower animals. Those 

 used to the open life of the West have told me that 

 many of those bred to it come to carry with them, 

 even when out of sight of all landmarks, an over- 

 powering instinct of direction. In the case of men 

 this sense appears to work by a process of sub- 



