How Animals Talk 



And the hypothesis of silent communication cer- 

 tainly "works/' since it helps greatly to clarify 

 certain observed phenomena of animal life that 

 are otherwise darkly mysterious. 



When the same dimly defined telepathic power 

 appears in a man or woman so rarely that we are 

 filled with wonder, as in the shadow of a great 

 mystery or a great discovery it is not a new but 

 a very old matter, I think, being merely a survival 

 or reappearance of a faculty that may have once 

 been in common use among gregarious creatures. 

 All men seem to have some hint or suggestion of 

 telepathy in them, as shown by their ability to 

 "speak with their eyes" or to influence their 

 children by a look; and the few who have enough 

 of it to be conspicuous receive it, undoubtedly, 

 by some law or freak of heredity, such as enables 

 one man in a million to wag his ears, or one 

 in a thousand to follow a subconscious sense of 

 direction so confidently that, after wandering 

 about the big woods all day, he turns at nightfall 

 and heads straight for his camp like a homing 

 pigeon. The rest of us, meanwhile, by employing 

 speech exclusively to express thought or emotion, 

 and by habitually depending on five senses for all 

 our impressions of the external world, have not 

 only neglected but even lost all memory of the 

 gift that once was ours. As an inevitable conse- 



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