THE METHOD OF HOMING PIGEONS. 775 



ing. The three deer were in about the middle of a level grassy 

 plain fully half a mile from where I lay. I focused my field 

 glasses on the group, and soon became much interested in the 

 alertness of the doe. Not for an instant did she show the slightest 

 relaxation of attention. Generally, under such circumstances, a 

 deer is seen to sniff the air in every direction, but this time no 

 air was stirring, and the main feature of the watching was the 

 constant movement of the long ears. At a slight noise, occasioned 

 by my change of position, a noise not even noticed by myself, I 

 was surprised to see the doe start, turn about, and point her ears 

 in my direction. After a minute's silence, her attention was 

 attracted elsewhere, and this time I made the lowest possible 

 " ahem ! " Again both ears and head were directed toward me. 

 And so in turn for an hour, I tried all manners of slight sounds, 

 low whistles, snapping the fingers, tapping my rifle stock, scrap- 

 ing the grass with my foot ; all were followed, with the precision 

 of the response of a strychnized frog, with the attent turning of 

 the ears in my direction. The writer at that time was not famil- 

 iar with any special apparatus for the purpose, and so can give 

 no exact measure of the sounds employed. I can only say, how- 

 ever, that they were so slight that, if a deer could hear them half 

 a mile away over a grassy plain, it might be an easy matter for a 

 cat to hear a moderately loud " mew " a mile away, over the sur- 

 face of water on a still night. 



It is not rare to find great differences in keenness of sense 

 among different men. These differences become emphasized by 

 use, as we find in the sight of the sailor or savage, or in the touch 

 of the blind. There is every reason why we should expect to find 

 such differences much more pronounced between different species 

 of animals. So marked, in fact, do they appear that the tempta- 

 tion has always been to declare them differences in kind. Before 

 doing this, we ought to make a beginning, at least, to learn the 

 possibilities of the senses as they exist in different animals. So 

 far as the writer has gone in this direction, he is content to con- 

 clude that they are using the ordinary senses, highly refined, it 

 may be, by generations of development ; and the every-day logic 

 which tells man and animal alike that the shortest path between 

 two points is a straight line. 



IN the course of his journeyings in the Pamirs, the Earl of Dunrnore came 

 upon a beautifully clear sheet of water, ont of which the Yambulak River flows. 

 It is surrounded on three sides by stupendous cliffs, rising sheer up two thousand 

 feet from the water's edge, with one huge glacier standing out in bold relief in 

 the middle of them, "which doubtless," he says, "gave the water the most beau- 

 tiful emerald hue I ever saw." The altitude of the lake is 15,800 feet, and the 

 summit of the Yambulak Pass beyond it is 16,530 feet high. 



