524 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



decorum as rigid as our own; while we regard the eccentricities of a cat with 

 undisguised horror, as the mere prelude to dangerous insanity. No one who 

 watches can fail to see how bigoted we are against anything like a "new de- 

 parture " among our poor relations. If a man begins to save up against his old age, 

 we call it thrift, and praise him as a small capitalist who is giving hostages to 

 fortune; but if a dog accumulates a store of bones or food, we look upon him 

 as indulging in dangerous caprices, which may end in the necessity of putting a 

 bullet through his head. There may be exceptions here and there. Sometimes 

 you will find an old lady who will protect eccentricity in a parrot, a magpie, or a 

 jackdaw, as a bird that has a right to a certain freedom of movements in return 

 for its entertaining attempts at conversation. 



But, on the whole, there is no sterner standard of conventionality than that 

 which we enforce on our domestic animals. Pet dogs become perfect bigots in 

 favor of the usual, and persecute any attempt to deviate from it on the part even 

 of a more powerful and less favored colleague, as the Inquisition persecuted 

 heresy, or as the court of Russia persecutes Nihilism. There is nothing equal 

 to the indignation of an in-doors dog at any invasion of the privacy of the draw- 

 ing-room by an out doors dog, and nothing more melancholy than the servile 

 apologies which the big dog will make to the little one, for even proposing to 

 break through the animal etiquette of the house. The horror of the queen's 

 chamberlain, when once an officer presented himself at the kvee in the proper 

 court suit diversified by slippers, which he had forgotten to exchange for the reg- 

 ulation boots, was not so great as the horror of the terrier and the Pomeranian 

 when a collie or a setter presents himself on the threshhold of their mistress' 

 sitting-room. We smother the genius of our dogs with our conventionalisms, 

 and stifle the originality of our cats with luxurious bribes. We did, indeed, 

 meet the other day, within the precincts of a great cathedral, with a young cat 

 who was spoken of as "epoch-making" — as likely even to originate a new 

 hegira by the fervor of his genius. But even of his great promise we could 

 gather no articulate account. He was still in the period of early youth, and 

 perhaps was brooding over the designs by which he hoped to transform, in some 

 future day, the world of the cathedral close. But, as a rule, it is certain that we 

 teach our domestic animals as the Cingalese teach their tame elephants, to dis- 

 courage steadily and effectually everything like eccentricities, whether deliberate 

 or capricious, or assertions of liberty, on the part of their wilder colleagues, and 

 so drill them into our dead level of habit. 



What important variations of character, however, might we not promote if 

 we took more pains to foster what a writer of thirty years used to call "the in- 

 dividuality of the individual" among our friends of the lower races! Sir John 

 Lubbock thinks that he has partially taught a poodle to read, but, as a corres- 

 pondent of ours once suggested, that may be a step in the wrong direction — not 

 a development of the true genius of the dog, but an attempt to merge the genius 

 of the dog in the habits peculiar to man, and hkely rather to result in ingrafting 

 an imitative humanity on a totally different kind of capacity. On the other hand, 



