SPECIES AND VARIETIES. 683 



bending what is said, even when the words are not specially 

 addressed to them. We must chiefly, however, ascribe their 

 power of doing so in any case to their faculty of minute ob- 

 servation, by which they are enabled to gather something of 

 the purport of what is said from the looks and motions of 

 the speaker. This faculty of nice observation is in itself 

 very remarkable, but yet more is the process of reasoning, if 

 we may so term it, by which the animal is able to draw cor- 

 rect inferences from what he observes. 



The story recorded by the illustrious Leibnitz of the dog 

 of the Saxon peasant who had been taught by his master, a 

 boy, to pronounce certain words, has been long familiar to 

 the learned of Europe. From the account given, however, 

 it does not appear whether the dog associated any ideas with 

 the words which he had been thus painfully taught to articu- 

 late ; but it is not improbable that he did, since it cannot be 

 more difficult for a dog"to associate ideas with his own words, 

 than with those of another. Something of this power has 

 been observed in the case of other animals far inferior in 

 intelligence to the dog. A parrot can readily be taught to 

 call for certain things, as a nut, a piece of bread, or a lump 

 of sugar ; and manifestly connects the sound with the sub- 

 stance and the act of bringing it to him. One of these birds, 

 long kept at the door of an inn, was in the habit, when a 

 stranger arrived, of calling out, waiter, hostler, and so forth, 

 as the case might require. A gentleman in Norfolk, now liv- 

 ing, kept a pack of fox-hounds, and had a tame Raven, which 

 had been taught to pronounce words, as that animal can be 

 readily taught to do even more perfectly than the parrot. 

 The raven, from being used to hear the huntsman call the 

 different hounds by name, as Jupiter, Juno, Ranger, and so 

 on, learned to imitate the same sounds ; and persons who ob- 

 served him closely, were of opinion that he knew the individual 

 dogs to which the names were applied. Be this as it may, the 

 raven contrived for himself a singular pastime. He used to 

 place himself by the side of a little hole in the door of the ken- 



