228 PHYSICAL CAUSES OF MENTAL DIFFERENCE AND DISORDER. 



by virtue of the association therewith of unpleasant ideas, 

 of the memory of former wrongs. Several remarkable in- 

 stances have been recorded in the columns of ( Nature ' by 

 Darwin, Huggins and others of singular antipathies of dogs 

 to butchers and everything connected with slaughter-houses 

 and fleshers' shops. In some of these cases it might well 

 be supposed that smell had awakened unpleasant memories. 

 But this could not have been the case in young animals 

 with no experience of butchers and in whom the singular 

 antipathy had been hereditarily transmitted. 



Johnson ascribes the cause of the aversion in dogs to 

 butchers to the odour of raw flesh and blood constantly 

 adhering to their clothes and persons. But the same dislikes 

 are manifested when the flesher presents himself in the un- 

 expected garb of a fashionable gentleman, in new clothes 

 free from all contamination with the smells of shop or slaugh- 

 ter-house, his own person being also thoroughly cleansed 

 by bathing. That such changes in personal identity do not 

 deceive the dog may be held to prove I do not say that it 

 does so simply the keenness of its sense of smell. The 

 smell of a butcher seems to give rise in certain dogs to a 

 vivid desire for the revenge of former injuries, not necessarily 

 or usually, however, received at the hands of the individual 

 who is viciously attacked. 



Goldsmith asserted that the smell of blood in the horse 

 sometimes causes madness, and other authors have remarked 

 upon the irritation, marked by kicking or other symptoms, 

 in the same animal, arising from the same cause. Lewes 

 speaks of c convulsions of terror ' from certain scents in the 

 dog, while the 'Animal World' informs us of a bitch that 

 showed c frantic excitement' at the smell of kidneys, of which 

 she was very fond. Macaulay mentions an elephant that, 

 getting on the scent of a tiger in India, was at once seized 

 with a fugitive panic. The smell of straw that has littered 

 tigers and lions in menageries cannot be used for horses, in 

 whom it inspires instant and dangerous terror (Lay cock). 

 The mere smell left by a dog has been said to produce ex- 

 citement in cats, while the odour of the fat of the hysena is 

 represented as causing terror in the dog (Drake). 



