THE GREAT DOG-SUPERSTITION 273 
instincts, since they are of the nature of instinct 
and its beginnings; but the difference between 
them and the true natural instinct, which has had 
incalculable time to crystallise in, is greater than 
can be expressed. The last is the rock and eternal; 
the others are snow-flakes, formed in a moment, 
that settle and show white, and even before our 
sight is withdrawn melt away and vanish. This 
same variability, or habit of varying, is in some 
vague way taken as a proof of versatility; hence 
one reason of the popular notion that the dog is 
so vastly superior to other four-footed creatures. 
If a dog could be taught to turn a spit, find truffles, 
save a man from drowning or from perishing in a 
snow-drift, point out a partridge, retrieve a wounded 
duck, kill twenty rats in as many seconds, and herd 
a flock of sheep, then it would indeed be an animal 
to marvel at. These are special instincts or in- 
cipient instincts, and to bestow such epithets as 
“generous”? and “noble” on a dog for pulling a 
drowning man out of the water, or scratching him 
out of a snow-drift, is fully as irrational as it would 
be to call the swallow and cuckoo intrepid explorers 
of the Dark Continent, or to praise the hive-bees of 
the working caste for their chastity, loyalty, and 
patriotism, and for their profound knowledge of 
chemistry and the higher mathematics, as shown 
in their works. Cross the dogs and these various 
propensities, which being useful to man and not 
to the animals themselves are preserved artificially, 
fade away and disappear, and from moving arti- 
