Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/618

600 each of these three distinct dogs is made up of separate elements, and can not possibly be regarded as being located in a single cell or fiber alone. Dog auditory is made up of the audible consonantal sound D, the audible vowel-sound aŭ or ŏ (unhappily we have no universally recognized phonetic system), and the other audible consonantal sound G hard; in that precise order of sequence and no other. Dog pronounceable is made up of an effort of breath against tongue and teeth, producing the soft dental sound D, followed by an unimpeded vocalized breath, producing the audible vowel-sound aŭ or ŏ, and closed by a stoppage of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, producing the soft palatal G. Finally, dog legible, in print at least, is composed of the separate symbols D and O and G, or d and o and g, or d and o and g. Yet all these distinct and unlike dogs would be unhesitatingly classed by most people under the head of language, and be located by phrenologists, with their clumsy lumping glibness, in the imaginary "bump" thereto assigned, or by more modern physiologists (whose excellent scientific work I should be the last to undervalue) in the particular convolution of the left hemisphere found to be diseased in many cases of "atactic aphasia," or loss of speech.

How infinitely more complex and varied, then, is the idea of dog, for which all these heard, spoken, written, or printed dogs are but so many rough and incomplete symbols! For the idea of dog comprises the head thereof, and the tail, the four legs, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the neck, the body, the toes, the hair, the bark, the bite, the canine teeth that inflict it, and all the other known and remembered peculiarities of perfect doghood as ideally realizable. If we are to assign peradventure a special tract in the brain to the concept dog, it must be clear at once that that tract will be itself a very large and much subdivided region. For it must include all the separate visible attributes of the dog in general; and also it must contain as sub-species in subordination to it every kind of known dog, not only those already enumerated, but also the Eskimau dog, the Pomeranian, the French poodle, the turnspit, the Australian dingo, the Cuban bloodhound, the Gordon setter, and so forth, through every other form of dog the particular possessor of that individual brain has ever seen, cognized, or heard of. Is it not clear that, on the hypothesis of such definite and distinct localization, dog-tract alone ought to monopolize a region about one sixth as big every way as our whole assignable provision of brain-surface?

Moreover, about this point we seem to be getting ourselves into a sad muddle. For we have next to remember our own private dog, Grip, let us call him, or if you prefer it. Prince or Ponto. Now, I suppose, his name, viewed as a name, will be localized in the language department of our particular brain, and will there be arranged under the general heading of proper names, division dog-names. But there must be some intimate cross-connection between the cell or cells