SENSES IN DOG AND DEER 5 



twitching of the nose. He is receiving a constant 

 succession of messages, and albeit some are cryptic, 

 they mostly tell him something he understands and 

 takes a keen interest in. And they all come to him 

 by one avenue — that of smeU; for when we look 

 closely at him we see that his eyes, often half-closed 

 and blinking, have that appearance of blindness or 

 of not seeing consciously which is familiar to us in 

 a man whose sight is turned inwards, who is thinking 

 and is so absorbed in his thoughts that the visible 

 world becomes invisible to him. The dimmed eye 

 in the reposing dog and the absent-minded philo- 

 sopher is in both cases due to the fact that vision is 

 not wanted for the time, and has been put aside. 

 The resting, but wakeful, deer and dog differ only 

 in this, that the first is living in a bath of vibrations, 

 the other of emanations. 



To return to our listening hind. The sounds that 

 held her attention were inaudible to me, but I dare 

 say that a primitive man or pure savage who had 

 existed all his life in a state of nature in a woodland 

 district would have been able to hear them, although 

 not so well as the hind on account of the difference 

 in the structure of the outer ear in the two species. 

 But what significance could these same little wood- 

 land sounds have in the life of this creature in its 

 present guarded, semi-domestic condition — the con- 

 dition in which the herd has existed for generations ? 

 It is nothing but a survival — the perpetual alertness 

 and acute senses of the wild animal, which are no 

 longer necessary, but are still active and shining. 



