232 The Carnivora. 
Conscience is, perhaps, the highest expression of the moral 
sense, and if it does not exist in animals, it is impossible to 
account for some of their actions. Darwin says: “Besides love 
and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities which in us 
would be called moral; and I agree with Agassiz, that dogs 
possess something like a conscience.” In this connection I 
cannot refrain from quoting an instance from a delightful 
article “On the Moral Advantages of Keeping a Dog,” by 
Colonel R. D. Osborn, published in a weekly periodical now out 
of print. Master Jock Elliott was the name given to a black 
wiry-haired terrier who had taken up his quarters, unbidden, 
in Colonel Osborn’s family. “Until his domiciling with us,” 
he says, “his life had been predatory, and his notions as to 
property, and the distinction between mewm and tuum, exceed- 
ingly lax; he became aware of a new law of life when he got 
his dinner regularly at a fixed hour every day. At this stage 
of his career a psychologist would have found in him an ad- 
mirable subject of study. There might be discerned the per- 
ception of an external law gradually transforming itself into 
a law of the conscience, which Jock Hlliott, unfamiliar with 
philosophical abstraction, assumed to.be innate to the dog 
nature; at any rate, the fact that he had become the pos- 
sessor of a conscience revealed itself to Jock in this wise. 
We had been at supper, and there had been left a small piece 
of cold tongue. Jock saw and coveted this piece of tongue; 
in his predatory days he would have effected its appropriation 
without any other sensations than those of enjoyment and 
contentment; wherefore should he feel otherwise now? So, I 
doubt not, Jock reasoned within himself, not knowing what 
manner of. dog he had become. At any rate, when we had left 
the supper-room, Jock stole back, intent upon devouring 
that relict of the cold tongue. He ascended the table; he got 
the tongue into his mouth, when his newly developed con- 
science suddenly asserted its presence. He was overwhelmed 
by the enormity of his crime. He could neither eat the tongue 
nor drop it. And so, in extreme perturbation of spirit, he 
