DOG- GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. 
461 
going the intense excitement of the chase, deliberately trotted 
by a short cut to a hollow oak trunk, and crouching at its 
base calmly awaited the advent of the fleeing rabbit. And he 
was not disappointed (they frequently escaped without being 
reduced to this extremity), for the pursuing dogs pressed the 
rabbit so hard that, after making a long detour, it made for the 
phace of refuge. As it was about entering the hollow trunk, 
the crouching ‘ Bonus 9 captured the astonished rodent. 
Similarly, Dr. Andrew Wilson, F.R.S.E., writes me as 
follows : — 
There is a shrubbery near the house, about 200 or 300 yards 
long, and running in the shape of a horseshoe. A small terrier 
used to start a rabbit nearly every morning, at the end of the 
shrubbery next the house, and hunt him through the whole 
length of it to the other end, where the rabbit escaped into an 
old drain. The dog then appears to have come to the conclusion 
that the chord of a circle is shorter than its arc, for he raised 
the rabbit again, and instead of following him through the 
shrubbery as usual, he took the short cut to the drain, and was 
ready and in waiting on the rabbit when he arrived, and caught 
him. 
A somewhat similar instance is communicated to me 
by Mr. William Cairns, of Argyll House, N.B. : — 
I was watching the operations of a little Skye terrier on a 
wheatstack which was in the course of being thrashed, when 
suddenly a very large rat bounced off, just from under Fan’s 
nose. It darted into a pit of water about a dozen yards from 
the stack, and tried to escape. Fan, however, plunged after, 
and swam for some distance, but found she was being left be- 
hind. So she turned to the shore again and ran round to 
the other side of the pit , and was ready and caught it just on 
landing, 
I never saw anything more remarkable. If it was not rea- 
son, I do not know how it is possible that it could come much 
more closely to the exercise of that faculty. 
Dr. Bannister, editor of the 6 Journal of Nervous and 
Mental Diseases,’ writes me from Chicago, that having 
spent a winter in Alaska^ he 6 had a good opportunity to 
study animal intelligence in the Eskimo dogs,’ and he 
reports it as 6 a fact of common occurrence,’ when the 
dogs are drawing sledges on the ice near the coast, that 
