230 The Carnivora. 
effect of punishment. The student of the history of human 
progress can find, all along the tedious road, landmarks of 
great significance—such as the Roman lex talionis and our 
modern expression “the vengeance of the law”—which indi- 
cate the primitive necessity, common to us and animals, for 
resisting wrong, oppression, and violence. While these terms 
remain on our statute books, and are daily in the mouths of 
our judges, it may be well to reflect how closely our 
morality was once comparable to that of the higher animals, 
and also to that of the lowest savages, from whom we in 
England are removed by at most twenty centuries. When, 
then, a dog bites a man who has beaten him without suf- 
ficient cause, he must have a perception of the necessity for 
self-protection in the first place, and a sense of the injustice 
of the act stirring, however feebly, in his breast: that is to 
say, he experiences that sense of disproportion or disturbance 
of right relationships which we ourselves feel. If so, it is 
absurd to deny him a moral sense when we claim it for our- 
selves. 
I-should not have ventured to inflict this metaphysical dis- 
quisition on the indulgent reader had I not been able to offer 
him a case in point, given me by a gentleman—Mr. J. A; 
Gibbs—on whose accuracy of statement I can, from personal 
acquaintance, fully rely. The dog was an extremely quiet 
animal, devoted to the family, the playmate of the children, 
and particularly attached to the infant, beside whose cradle he 
would lie for hours, almost disregarding his master’s invi- 
tation to go for a walk. ‘Some years ago,” writes Mr. Gibbs, 
“Thad amarried sister living at Sudbury, near Harrow, whose 
husband was a breeder of horses and had an establishment 
for the purpose adjoining his house. He contemplated some 
alterations in the premises, and wished to borrow my black 
retriever, Carlo, owing to the number of workmen about the 
place. The dog and I had been, in a sense, inseparables, and I 
did not altogether like lending him. For the first time, as a 
daily habit, Carlo found himself chained up, being released 
