736 
Canine Intelligence . 
[December, 
stindtive adtions is accompanied by consciousness or not, 
no answer can be given, except the answer that we do not 
know. They may be conscious, they may not. They may, 
perhaps, be performed somewhat in the same manner as 
adts done under mesmeric influence. Merely to hazard a 
guess — though I think it is a guess that has foundations — I 
am disposed to think that automatic adtions performed im- 
mediately after birth, at least in such imperfedtly developed 
creatures as babies and puppies, are unconscious. 
Besides those instindtive adtions which can be performed 
at once and without practice immediately after birth, there 
are other instindtive adtions which cannot be performed 
until the nervous and muscular mechanism is further deve- 
loped, but which are then performed at once and without 
pradtice. Throw a new-born puppy into the river, and after 
some helpless floundering it will be drowned. Throw its 
brother, when fully grown, into the river, and, though he 
may never before have been in water, he will swim to shore. 
He has not to learn to swim. Swimming is with him an 
instindtive adtion. We cannot suppose that this instindtive 
adtion is also unconscious. At the same time it is probable 
that consciousness is occupied with a determination to 
get to shore, not with a determination to use these or 
those muscles in a particular way. The dog simply 
inherits the power which the boy must with some little diffi- 
culty acquire. When the boy is swimming leisurely across 
a river he is scarcely, if at all, conscious of the adt of swim- 
ming (no more so than he would be under ordinary circum- 
stances of the adt of walking) ; he is only conscious of his 
wish to pick the water lilies near the further bank. 
Instindts are well termed by Herbert Spencer inherited 
habits ; and viewed in this way there is nothing particularly 
mysterious about most of them. Around some, however, 
our ignorance, or the limitation of our own powers, throws 
a halo of wonder. “ A hound,” for example, “ was sent 
from Newbridge, county Dublin, to Moynalty, county Meath, 
and thence, long afterwards, conveyed to Dublin. The 
hound broke loose in Dublin, and the same morning made 
his way back to his old kennel at Newbridge, thus com- 
pleting the third side of a triangle by a road he had never 
travelled in his life.” This is but one instance out of many 
which might be quoted of an animal being guided by a sense 
of diredtion. But this sense is so undeveloped, or so very 
little developed in most of us, though it is possessed to some 
extent by North American Indians, and, as I am informed 
on good authority, by Kaffirs, that we are apt to regard it as 
