Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/375

Rh traveling companion, as if to conciliate his consent to the meditated enterprise, and then slunk off into a ravine, scrambled up the opposite bank and scampered away at a trot first, and by and by at a gallop—not toward Crab Orchard, i. e., southeast, but due north, toward Morgan's Ridge and Boonsboro—in a bee-line to Cincinnati, Ohio. They saw him cross a stubble-field, not a bit like an animal that has lost its way and has to turn left and right to look for landmarks, but, "like a horse on a tramway," straight ahead, with his nose well up, as if he were following an air-line toward a visible goal. He made a short détour to the left, to avoid a lateral ravine, but farther up he resumed his original course, leaped a rail-fence, and went headlong into a coppice of cedar-bushes, where they finally lost sight of him.

A report to the above effect, duly countersigned by the Berea witnesses, reached the dog's owner on February 4th, and on the afternoon of the following day Hector met his master on the street, wet and full of burrs and remorse, evidently ashamed of his tardiness. That settled the memory question. Till they reached Crab Orchard the dog had been under the full influence of ether, and the last thing he could possibly know from memory was a misleading fact, viz., that they had brought him from a southwesterly direction. Between Berea and Cincinnati he had to cross two broad rivers and three steep mountain-ranges, and had to pass by or through five good-sized towns, the centers of a network of bewildering roads and by-roads. He had never been in that part of Kentucky before, nor ever within sixty miles of Berea. The inclination of the watershed might have guided him to the Kentucky River, and by and by back to the Ohio, but far below Cincinnati and by an exhaustingly circuitous route. The weather, after a few days of warm rains, had turned clear and cool, so that no thermal data could have suggested the fact that he was two degrees south of his home. The wind, on that morning, varied from west to northwest; and, if it wafted a taint of city atmosphere across the Kentucky River Mountains, it must have been from the direction of Frankfort or Louisville. So, what induced the dog to start due north?

"Instinct." Of course, but the demands of science are not to be satisfied with conventional phrases. Blind instincts we may call such feelings as hunger, the craving after fresh air, and other promptings of our internal organs; also, perhaps, the faculty of executing such uniform mechanical functions as the construction of an hexagonal cell or of a spheroid cocoon; but, if such faculties have to adapt themselves to variable and uncertain circumstances, they require the aid of a sense—i. e., of a discriminative organ. So the question comes back upon us, What sense aided the dog in the choice of his direction? Scent? It seems too impossible, though the assumption of a "sixth sense" would be the only alternative. A blind man finds his way through the mazes of a city, or an intricate system of halls and