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 sight is withdrawn melt away and vanish.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- 



