How Animals Talk 



carved from marble, while the buck seemed to 

 rest on air and to be compounded of some ethereal 

 essence. His eyes fairly radiated light and color. 

 The velvet on his antlers seemed to grow as I 

 looked upon it, like the velvet moss in which the 

 fairies are said to rest. Every hair of him from 

 nose to tail tip was gloriously alive. A moment 

 only he stood, but long enough for me to carry a 

 picture of him forever afterward ; then he bounded 

 up the old road, and Rab came running over to 

 ask me what new thing he had discovered. 



This marvelous alertness of the natural animal 

 is commonly attributed to the fact that his physi- 

 cal senses are more acute than ours; but that is 

 true only of some particular sense of a certain 

 creature. The wolf's nose, the deer's ear, the 

 vulture's eye, these are probably keener than any 

 similar human organ; but, on the other hand, a 

 man's eye is very much keener for details than the 

 eye of wolf or deer; his senses of touch and taste 

 are finer than anything to be found among the 

 lower orders, and the average of his five senses is 

 probably the highest upon earth. Yet the animal 

 is more responsive to impressions of the external 

 world, and this is due, I think, to the fact that he 

 lives more in his sensations; that he is not cum- 

 bered, as we are, by inner phenomena; that he is 

 free from pain, care, fear, regret, anxiety and 



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