STUDIES OF ANIMAL SPEECH. 435 



f ectly intelligible to the person thus addressed. If any one called 

 when the clergyman was out, Fido barked once ; and he did the 

 same if his master did not wish to be disturbed and bade him tell 

 the caller that he was not at home. He announced a visitor by 

 scratching on the door and barking twice. A Bavarian family at 

 Munich has a dog that deems it highly improper for gentlemen 

 to wear their hats in the house, but is sufficiently gallant not to 

 find fault with ladies for doing so. An American, who wished to 

 test the animal's discriminating sense of the fitness of things in 

 this respect, entered the room and sat down with his hat on. The 

 dog looked at him disapprovingly for a moment and then began 

 to bark, with eyes intently fixed upon the hat. As the unmannerly 

 visitor continued the conversation without paying any attention 

 to these admonitions, the dog sprang up and, seizing the hat by 

 the brim, pulled it off and quietly laid it on a chair. 



Wenzel also tells the story of a dog whom his master used to 

 send to the market for meat, and who would stand before the kind 

 of meat he was instructed to get, beef, mutton, or veal, and bark 

 once, twice, or thrice, according to the number of pounds desired. 

 The butcher filled the order, and the dog trotted home with his 

 purchase and the cheerful consciousness of having done his duty. 

 Wenzel's little book is full of interesting anecdotes illustrating 

 his subject, and has a frontispiece representing a landscape, re- 

 sembling the traditional pictures of the garden of Eden found in 

 old Bibles, with an ape, a dog, a horse, and a bull in the fore- 

 ground, and the legend underneath: "They do not lie; their 

 speech is truth." 



The French physicist, R. Radeau, in a work on acoustics, pub- 

 lished in 1869, treats incidentally of the language of animals, 

 which he thinks one could, by careful observation, learn to under- 

 stand and even to speak with fluency. Mersenne, in his Harmonie 

 Universelle, asserts that men speak from a volitional impulse and 

 utter vocal sounds in the exercise of a power of the mind which 

 they are free not to exercise unless they choose to do so, whereas 

 the lower animals use their voices under the influence of natural 

 necessity, howling, shrieking, singing, etc., because under the cir- 

 cumstances they can not do otherwise, being subject to forces 

 which they are absolutely unable to resist. The vexed question 

 of the freedom or necessity of the will in human action, which 

 metaphysics has vainly endeavored to solve, has been reopened 

 by natural science and evolutionary biology and is now discussed 

 on a broader basis and with the prospect of positive result. What- 

 ever may be the final issue of these investigations, it is certain 

 that the old Cartesian distinction between man and brute in this 

 respect can no longer be maintained. Radeau is right in reject- 

 ing Mersenne's theory as involving a too subtile psychological 



