OF ANIMAL SAGACITY 27 



fiction that are types or representations of real incidents or 

 character are borrowed or transferred from actual life are 

 taken or copied from nature. Exact representations of the 

 finer as well as the coarser traits in animal character, par- 

 ticularly as relates to the dog and horse., occur abundantly 

 in the works both of novelists and poets including, for 

 instance, those of Sir Walter Scott, Burns, Byron, Cowper, 

 Bulwer (Lord Lytton), and George Eliot. Such anecdotes, 

 however, are apt to be looked upon not as genuine illustrations 

 of animal character, feeling, or intelligence just because they 

 do occur in poetry or fiction. Nor is it easy, in such cases, 

 to distinguish the fiction from the fact ; the more so because 

 of the inexact or erroneous representations of animal mind 

 given by other poets and novelists, including Shakespeare 

 and Rogers. In this category of writers who are too imagi- 

 native to be depended upon, who are untrustworthy as to 

 their facts, who are figurative, fanciful, and sensational, 

 rather than accurate, in their descriptions of animal habits 

 must be included certain French and other so-called ' popu- 

 larisers ' of science, such as Michelet and Figuier. 



But the difficulty of discriminating between fact and 

 fiction of accepting facts as such, because to the ignorant 

 they appear to be improbabilities is daily being illustrated 

 in many other ways. For instance, there are many worthy 

 people living at a distance from the scene of the incident, 

 in whose case distance obviously lends enchantment or 

 romance to their view of a perfectly prosaic subject who 

 believe the whole of the well-known story of f Greyfriars 

 Bobby ' to be fiction, and who ascribe the dog's memorial 

 collar, monument, and other civic or private honours to the 

 tendency of imaginative men and women to idolise their 

 ideals of animal virtue. They regard the old dog of the 

 Greyfriars churchyard, Edinburgh long so familiar to the 

 dwellers in the precincts as a mere myth, the poetical 

 embodiment, however, of the human ideal of canine fidelity 

 and affection. On the other hand, people living in Edinburgh 

 itself, and having confidence in the observers and recorders 

 of the facts of Greyfriars Bobby's life, are convinced of the 

 former existence of the animal, and of the truthfulness of 



