DOG-GIVING 45 



NOTE. " It is certain," says Darwin, " that associated 

 animals have a feeling of love for each other," and he 

 gives some examples of the " sympathy " which animals 

 " certainly " feel for each other's distress or danger. The 

 terns who carried off a wounded member of the flock, the 

 curlew who warns the seal of the gunner's presence by 

 flicking him with his wings, are actions in the same nota- 

 tion as this dog's friendship and sacrifice for the hen. The 

 dog's affection for the hen is indeed more highly de- 

 veloped, more individual, than the sympathy discharged 

 by the terns and the curlew, for the dog has the unique 

 educational advantage of familiarity with man. It was 

 not an amateur lover of Nature who translated wishes into 

 thoughts, but Charles Darwin who said : " Besides love 

 and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected 

 with the social instincts which in us would be called 

 moral;" and he even goes so far as to say that " there 

 seems no great improbability in animals developing the 

 higher forms of abstraction and self-consciousness through 

 the development and co-ordination of the simpler ones ' ' 

 a statement very much more audacious than any made by 

 the writers of these letters. We are apt, in fact, to 

 underrate the mental, moral, and emotional effects of mil- 

 lions of years' pressure of the social instinct, and Prince 

 Kropotkin's " Man did not make society, but society 

 man , ' ' was wisely uttered . In spite of modern knowledge , 

 we are so ignorant of animal psychology that I feel these 

 letters, particularly those concerned with the emotional 

 relationships of animals, are of great value as data for 

 experiment and principle. 



A CANINE AMOBET 



Walking in the garden on Saturday, March 28, I en- 

 countered my butcher coming up from the gate with a 

 joint in his basket and a very handsome black-and-white, 

 smooth-haired sheep-dog at his heels. On my observing 

 that he had a new dog, the man told me the following 



