REASONINO. 349 



strain, and that the massing of weight at a given point con- 

 centrates there the strain, a Hindoo might quickly infer that 

 scattering would stop the cracking, and, by crying out to 

 his comrades to disperse, save the party from immersion. 

 But in the dog's case we need only suppose that they 

 have individually experienced wet skins after cracking, that 

 they have often noticed cracking to begin when they were 

 huddled together, and that they have observed it to cease 

 when they scattered. Naturally, therefore, the sound would 

 redintegrate all these former experiences, including that of 

 scattering, which latter they would promptly renew. It 

 would be a case of immediate suggestion or of that ' Logic 

 of Recepts ' as Mr. Romanes calls it, of which we spoke 

 above on p. 327. 



A friend of the writer gave as a proof of the almost 

 human intelligence of his dog that he took him one day 

 down to his boat on the shore, but found the boat full of 

 dirt and water. He remembered that the sponge was up at 

 the house, a third of a mile distant ; but, disliking to go back 

 himself, he made various gestures of wiping out the boat 

 and so forth, saying to his terrier, " Sponge, sponge ; go 

 fetch the sponge." But he had little expectation of a result, 

 since the dog had never received the slightest training with 

 the boat or the sponge. Nevertheless, off he trotted to the 

 house, and, to his owner's great surjjrise and admiration, 

 brought the sponge in his jaws. Sagacious as this was, it 

 required nothing but ordinary contiguous association of 

 ideas. The terrier was only exceptional in the minuteness 

 of his spontaneous observation. Most terriers would have 

 taken no interest in the boat-cleaning operation, nor no- 

 ticed what the sponge was for. This terrier, in having 

 picked those details out of the crude mass of his boat-expe- 

 rience distinctly enough to be reminded of them, was truly 

 enough ahead of his j^eers on the line which leads to human 

 reason. But his act was not yet an act of reasoning proper. 

 It might fairly have been called so if, unable to find the 

 sponge at the house, he had brought back a dipper or a 

 mop instead. Such a substitution would have shown that, 

 embedded in the very different appearances of these articles, 

 he had been able to discriminate the identical partial attri- 



