PRETTY POLL. 75 



sake our ostensible subject, pretty Poll, altogether, 1 

 must just pause for one moment more to answer an 

 objection which I know has been trembling on the tip of 

 your tongue any time the last five minutes. You've 

 been waiting till you could get a word in edgeways to 

 give me a friendly nudge and remark very wisely, ' But 

 look here, I say ; how about the dog and the horse in your 

 argument ? They've got no prehensile organ that ever 

 I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the 

 cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.' 

 True, most sapient and courteous objector. I grant it 

 you at once. But observe the difference. The clever- 

 ness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not original. 

 It has probably arisen in the course of their long 

 hereditary intercourse and companionship with man, the 

 cleverest and most serviceable individuals being deliber- 

 ately selected from generation to generation as dams and 

 sires to breed from. We can't fairly compare these 

 artificial human products, therefore, with wild races 

 whose intelligence is all native and self-evolved. More- 

 over, the horse at least has to some slight extent a 

 prehensile organ in his very mobile and sensitive lip, which 

 he uses like an undeveloped or rudimentary proboscis to 

 feel things all over with. So that the dog alone remains as 

 a contradictory instance ; and even the dog derives his 

 cleverness indirectly from man, whose hand and thumb 

 in the last resort are really at the bottom of his vicarious 

 wisdom. 



We may conclude, then, I believe, that touch, as Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer admirably words it, is ' the mother-tongue 

 of the senses ; ' and that in proportion as animals have or 



