278 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
with regard to the dog.” Strange indeed, almost 
incredible to our properly enlightened Western 
minds! We, who in a manner despise these 
“people of the East,’ and object to many of their 
habits with regard to personal cleanliness, and so 
on, to be told that our friend and associate the 
dog, our pet who shares our living and sleeping 
rooms, and is caressed with our hands and lips, is 
an unclean beast and unfit to be touched by man! 
And so we find that the East is East, and the West 
is West, with regard to this as well as to most 
things, and that there are two great dog supersti- 
tions. And now to proceed with the story of the 
one which is ours. 
In due time the evolutionists came, teaching 
that the earth is old, that all the living things on 
it are the descendants of one or of a very few 
primordial forms, and as a consequence of such 
teaching the special creation of the dog was no 
longer tenable. How then came the dog-super- 
stition—the belief in its superiority—to survive so 
rude a shock? For the evolutionists taught that all 
the brutes possess, potentially and in germ, all the 
faculties found in man, and the conclusion seems 
unavoidable that there must be a correspondence in 
the physical and psychical development, and that 
the root of the higher mental and moral powers 
must exist in the animals of the highest grades; 
that the mammal must be more rational than the 
bird, and the bird than the reptile, and the reptile 
than the fish; and that the hyena, civet, and 
