ii4 The Animal Mind 



the men ; and at the point where I had turned to the right, 

 the seventh man turned to the left, followed by all the 

 remainder. The two parties . . . having walked in op- 

 posite directions for a considerable distance, concealed 

 themselves, and the bitch was put upon the common track 

 of the whole party before the point of divergence. Fol- 

 lowing this common track with rapidity, she at first over- 

 shot the point of divergence, but quickly recovering it, 

 without any hesitation chose the track which turned to the 

 right." It had previously been ascertained that she would 

 not follow the scent of any other man in the party save her 

 master, and failing him, the gamekeeper. "Yet . . . my 

 footprints," continued Romanes, "in the common track 

 were overlaid by eleven others, and in the track to the right 

 by five others. Moreover, as it was the gamekeeper who 

 brought up the rear, and as in the absence of my trail she 

 would always follow his, the fact of his scent being, so to 

 speak, uppermost in the series, was shown in no way to 

 disconcert the animal following another familiar scent 

 lowermost in the series" (644). Such behavior indicates 

 not only that the dog can experience a variety of smell 

 qualities, which is also the case with us human beings, but 

 that it has the power to analyze a fusion of different odors 

 and attend exclusively to one component, a power that 

 we lack almost entirely. When we experience two smell 

 stimuli at the same time, it is but rarely that we can detect 

 both of the two qualities in the mixture; usually one of 

 them swamps the other, or else a new odor unlike both 

 results. But the dog, and probably many other animals, 

 can analyze a smell fusion as a trained musician analyzes 

 a chord. In this respect, if not in the variety of smell 

 qualities, the olfactory sense has undergone degeneration 

 in us, and so far as we can judge, the fact is due to the habit 



