200 The Carnivora. 
overmastered all other considerations, and impelled her to 
make a desperate attempt to find him. 
The fact that every year great numbers of dogs are lost, 
and subsequently restored to their owners through the agency 
of the police stations and of the Dogs’ Home—1985 were so 
restored by that useful institution ii 1883— seems to me 
incontrovertible evidence against the possession by these 
animals of any “instinct” or special sense enabling them 
to find their way home without previous knowledge or experi- 
ence. It is at least certain that all dogs are not endowed 
with this mysterious faculty, and that is a presumption 
against its existence in any of them, for no such individual 
deficiency is found in other animals which exhibit well- 
marked instincts. 
When that great metaphysician, John Locke, laid down the 
law thus, as to the faculties of animals: “This, I think, I 
may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at 
all in them, and that the having of general ideas’ is that 
which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and 
is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means 
attain to,” he could never have imagined that, in the’ nine- 
teenth century, another distinguished philosopher should have 
deliberately set himself the task of teaching his dog to read! 
This, however, Sir John Lubbock has done, and with a con- 
siderable measure of success. He began by giving the dog 
food in a saucer, over which he laid a card with the word 
“food” printed on it in large letters, placing also by its side 
an empty saucer covered by a plain card. The dog soon 
learned the distinction between the cards, and to bring that 
on which “food” was written. One morning he brought the 
“food” card nine times in succession, selecting it from 
among other plain cards, though the relative position was 
changed every time. When, as happened sometimes at first, 
he brought a plain card, his mistake was pointed out to him, 
and he took it back and changed it. Of course, the dog was 
rewarded with a little food when he brought the proper card. 
