PETS. 2l? 



To a creature whose nose can distinguish the " cold 

 trail" of a rabbit at a distance of sixty yards, odors which 

 offend even our blunt olfactories must be as irritating as 

 the continuous screech of a steam-whistle would be to 

 the human ear or the sound of a fiddle to the ear of a 

 bat The upper story of the Salzburg Acropolis is in- 

 fested with innumerable horseshoe bats, and the steward 

 often uses them for a curious experiment. He claps one 

 into a wire cage, puts the cage on top of a desk, and on 

 a lower shelf of the desk a Hackbrett, or Styrian zither. 

 At every twang of the zither the bat will start as if a fine 

 needle had pierced its body, and a prolonged perform- 

 ance will throw it into a fit, a convulsive twitching of the 

 whole flying-membrane. This same nervous twitching 

 I sometimes believe I recognize in the grimaces of a town 

 dog averting his head with a sort of shudder or rubbing 

 his nose against the ground. Life would be a curse to 

 some dogs if nature had not mitigated their martyrdom 

 by blunting their senses. The effluvia of the sheep-fold 

 have made the shepherd-dog almost scentless, though 

 his form most unmistakably betrays his descent from the 

 sharp-nosed jackal. 



Arthur Schopenhauer maintains that the development 

 of artificial faculties weakens our natural instincts ; but 

 it is likewise true that in lieu of lost instincts our do- 

 mestic animals have gained several new faculties. If 

 domestication has spoiled the nose of the average house- 

 dog, it has certainly improved his ear. Dogs and horses 



