678 THE DOG. 



been known to follow the footsteps of his master through a 

 city where he had never before been. The ancient Blood- 

 hound, when put upon the track of his human victim, would 

 pursue it whatever steps might have crossed the path. The 

 Dog, when he meets any person from whom he has been long 

 separated, begins to smell him so as to assist the eye by his 

 recollection of odour, indicating alike the delicacy of his sense 

 of smell and his power of memory. When dogs meet they 

 smell one another, the glands with which they are furnished 

 giving off an odour, which probably conveys some intimation 

 of temper or other feeling from one to the other. 



The Dog is endowed with the faculty of remembering 

 places, times, and events. He knows he path which he has 

 once travelled, and can retrace it after an interval of years ; 

 nay, he possesses the faculty of being able to find his way 

 to a known place by a route different from that which he had 

 before travelled. A little Spaniel, reared on the banks of 

 the Tweed, was shipped to London at a sea-port town more 

 than twenty miles distant from his home. After an absence 

 of twenty days, he arrived at his former residence. He had 

 found his way through the enormous city, and over a tract of 

 country of more than 300 miles in which he had never once 

 been A dog can count intervals of time with surprising ac- 

 curacy. If he is used to perform any act which gives him 

 pleasure, or which from habit becomes a duty, on a certain 

 day of the week, and at a certain hour of that day, he knows 

 the hour as it comes round to a minute. How he calculates 

 the intervening time is unknown, but the instances are in- 

 numerable in which dogs of every race will perform this kind 

 of reckoning with the exactness of a clock.* 



* It was an old practice of the shepherds^ of the south of Scotland to be ac- 

 companied by their dogs on Sabbath morn to the parish church. The dogs 

 knew the day and the hour of setting forth as well as their masters. During 

 the time of the service they usually conducted themselves with great decorum, 

 but when, at the conclusion of it, the congregation rose from their seats, accord- 

 ing to the practice of the Scottish Church, to receive the parting benediction of 

 the pastor, the dogs likewise started on their feet, and, more audibly than con- 



