34 COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 



Maupertuis alleges* that if animals were capable of under- 

 standing we could teach them to make themselves understood 

 by other signs in default of a voice. A strange aberration of 

 intellect for such a studious and learned man. This is the man 

 who makes an impossibility out of an everyday occurrence ; 

 for, first of all, most animals have some sort of voice, and if 

 they had it not, there are few persons who are ignorant of the 

 way in which certain mute dogs make themselves understood 

 when they particularly desire it. What would really be absurd 

 would be the hope of imparting ideas to animals, matters relat- 

 ing, indeed, to a higher order, since we see that even all men 

 are not capable of grasping them. Man has been able to train 

 animals, and to train implies precisely the idea of communicat- 

 ing a thought from man to an animal, and from the animal to 

 man. " Jump," says the shepherd to his dog, and the dog 

 knows that this vocal articulation orders him to make a given 

 muscular effort. The man has spoken to the dog. During the 

 night some one opens the gate of the farm-yard, and the 

 watch-dog barks ; he thus tells his master that something un- 

 usual is happening, f 



That which proves besides that the barking of the dog is 

 merely a conventional sign, an artificial language, so to say, is 

 the fact, that in certain countries the dogs do not bark ; 

 jackals and wolves learn how to bark when in company with 

 the dogs who can talk in this manner, and that the same dogs 

 lose the power, or rather the habit of barking, if they return to 

 a savage state.J 



We have already spoken of those inferior races which seem 

 to have borrowed from their better endowed neighbours a ru- 

 diment of civilisation, which, for a long time they did not know 



* Essai Philosophique sur I'&me des Betes, 1728, p. 217. 



f It may be seen, in analysing these two simple facts, that they lead us to 

 admit the existence of a notion of duty among animals, although, perhaps, 

 an obscure one : they know that they ought to act as they are doing from 

 fear of a whipping, and this is an operation of the mind which no one, we 

 think, will deny to be complex in its nature, and purely intellectual. 



Isid. G-eoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Histoire Naturelle Generale, vol. iii, 1860, p. 

 114. M. Roulin has remarked, that there is something analogous in this as 

 regards the cat, which loses, in the savage state, those troublesome mewings 

 which we hear so often during the night from the European race. Memoires 

 du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, vol. xvii. 



