DOG — GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. 457 



do well to remember that this grade of mental evolution 

 is reached very early in the psychical development of the 

 human child. In my next work I shall adduce evidence 

 to show that children of one year, or even less, are able to 

 distinguish pictures as representations of particular objects, 

 and will point at the proper pictures when asked to show 

 these objects. 



Coming now to cases more distinctly indicative of 

 reason in the strict sense of the word, numberless ordi- 

 nary acts performed by dogs indisputably show that they 

 possess this faculty. Thus, for instance, Livingstone 

 gives the following observation.^ A dog tracking his 

 master along a road came to a place where three roads 

 diverged. Scenting along two of the roads and not finding 

 the trail, he ran off on the third without waiting to smell. 

 Here, therefore, is a true act of inference. If the track is 

 not on A or B, it must be on C, there being no other 

 alternative. 



Again, it is not an unusual thing for intelligent dogs, 

 who know that their masters do not wish to take them 

 out, to leave the house and run a long distance in the 

 direction in which they suppose their masters are about to 

 go, in order that when they are there found the distance 

 may be too great for their masters to return home for the 

 purpose of shutting them up. I have myself known 

 several terriers that would do this, and one of the in- 

 stances I shall give in extenso (quoted from an account 

 which I published at the time in * Nature ' ) ; for I think 

 it displays remarkably complex processes of far-seeing 

 calculation : — 



The terrier in question followed a conveyance from the 

 house in which I resided in the country, to a town ten miles 

 distant. He only did this on one occasion^ and about five 

 months afterwards was taken by train to the same town as a 

 present to some friends there. Shortly afterwards I called 

 upon these friends in a different conveyance from the one 

 which the dog had previously followed ; but the latter may 

 have known that the two conveyances belonged to the same 



display of the recognition of a portrait by a dog. The portrait was 

 one of myself, and the dog a half-bred setter and retreiver of my own. 

 * Missionary Travels, chap. i. 



