IO4 The Animal Mind 



at the point where I had turned to the right, the seventh man 

 turned to the left, followed by all the remainder. The two 

 parties . . . having walked in opposite directions for a con- 

 siderable distance, concealed themselves, and the bitch was 

 put upon the common track of the whole party before the 

 point of divergence. Following this common track with 

 rapidity, she at first overshot the point of divergence, but 

 quickly recovering it, without any hesitation chose the 

 track which turned to the right." It had previously been 

 ascertained that she would not follow the scent of any 

 other man in the party save her master, and failing him, 

 the gamekeeper. "Yet ... my footprints," continues Ro- 

 manes, "in the common track were overlaid by eleven 

 others, and in the track to the right by five others. More- 

 over, as it was the gamekeeper who brought up the rear, 

 and as in the absence of my trail she would always follow 

 his, the fact of his scent being, so to speak, uppermost in 

 the series, was shown in no way to disconcert the animal 

 following another familiar scent lowermost in the series" 

 (367). Such behavior indicates not only that the dog can 

 experience a variety of smell qualities, which is also the case 

 with us human beings, but that it has the power to analyze 

 a fusion of different odors and attend exclusively to one 

 component, a power that we lack almost entirely. When 

 we experience two smell stimuli at the same time, it is but 

 rarely that we can detect both of the two qualities in the 

 mixture; usually one of them swamps the other, or else a 

 new odor unlike both results. But the dog, and probably 

 many other animals, can analyze a smell fusion as a trained 

 musician analyzes a chord. In this respect, if not in the 

 variety of smell qualities, the olfactory sense has undergone 

 ti degeneration in us, and so far as we can judge, the fact 

 ' is due to the habit of relying rather upon the sense of sight. 



