POLYGLOT ANIMALS 215 



communication, except perhaps by gesture, are not 

 greater than those of many other quadrupeds, notably 

 the cat, and less than those of certain birds. 



Touch, especially in the case of insects, and the 

 highly developed power of scent, appealing to the 

 senses by channels unknown to man, and interpreted 

 by a process of thought with which we are only 

 partly acquainted, convey ideas by other means than 

 speech, and supplement the want of language. The 

 silence of most quadrupeds is accounted for by the 

 limited number of wants encountered in their daily 

 life, and the constant recurrence of these wants in 

 the same order. Many of their ideas need no ex- 

 pressing. They simply act on them at once or after 

 a little reflection, and their companions follow suit. 



Brain-power has no necessary result in efforts at 

 oral communication. The elephant exerts all its 

 persuasion on another elephant by touches with the 

 trunk, without uttering a sound, while the howling 

 monkeys, not the most intelligent of their race, are 

 the most vociferous. Tigers and cats express them- 

 selves by the voice far more distinctly than the 

 chimpanzee. A particularly tame tiger cub at the 

 London Zoological Gardens purred to show pleasure, 

 mewed in recognition of its keeper, uttered another 

 and different sound at the sight of food, and pos- 

 sessed a vocabulary of modulated howls and groans 

 quite as expressive as the " calls " of a cat ; while 

 the fox, one of the cleverest of our wild animals, is 

 almost mute, though the fox which twice travelled 

 back from Sussex to its home in Northumberland 



