CANINE PSYCHOLOGY 
103 
I won’t waste time arguing that animals reason. 
Certainly they do, about things that come within the 
circle of their cognizance, and just as well as we do. 
Our circle is larger, that is all the difference; enor¬ 
mously larger in the case of an educated, cultivated 
human mind—not so wonderfully different in that 
of a primitive savage. 
Some years ago a friend called my attention to a 
magazine article about an investigation of the case 
of a clever dog which gave the answers to simple 
arithmetical problems by picking up a card with the 
proper number on it. This was a spaniel, trained 
by a lady of some prominence, socially, purely as an 
amusement. My friend told me the conclusion 
reached was that it was done by telepathy. I de¬ 
murred, maintaining that pantomime must be the ex¬ 
planation. We got the magazine, and it proved that 
he had read the concluding paragraph carelessly, as 
one often does, and had missed the point. I was 
right. 
This was an interesting case. The lady gave the 
dog no signal that she was aware of. She had no 
idea how he picked out the right card. Her con¬ 
nection with it, so far as she knew, was to give him 
a piece of cooky when he was right, and to say 
“Hurry up; hurry up”; when he hesitated. At such 
times he would bark impatiently, a circumstance indi¬ 
cating to me that he wanted the signal made plainer. 
