Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/415

Rh always showed his joy whenever the emperor mounted him. He would permit but one groom in whose care he was placed to get on his back, but, when this groom was the rider, the whole bearing and movements of the horse were different from what they were when the emperor rode him. In the former case the horse seemed to be fully conscious that his rider was but a subordinate. When the emperor had lost his way while out riding or hunting, he simply placed the reins on the neck of this horse, and he had always speedily and surely found the right way. Whenever the emperor approached, the horse gave expression to his joy by a special sort of neighing, and often it had seemed to Napoleon as if the animal were trying to tell him something. Nicolardot, basing his assertion on experience, maintains that each animal has a language of its own, and that it is simply due to the imperfection of our organs that we do not understand this language. In this connection we would mention that Kasper Hauser, the well-known foundling, who had eaten no meat up to his twenty-first year, insisted at the time, shortly after he was found, and before he had grown accustomed to animal food, that he understood the language of all animals, and that very often, when a dog barked or a bird chirped, he knew exactly what was meant. The animals approached him without fear, and seemed to be conscious that he could understand them, but this all came to an end when he began to take animal food. Hence, it might be inferred that the eating of meat tends to remove us from the animal world and to weaken our understanding of its ways. But, if we turn our whole attention to animals, our superior intellect will soon place us in the way of understanding their language.

About 1770 Galliani had two cats which he always kept about him, and away from all other animals. He states that he understood them perfectly, and that they had a complete language of their own in which they always expressed the same wish and the same feeling by exactly the same sound. Lucian observed the common house-fly, and also maintains that this insect, so greatly despised and persecuted, possesses a complete language—that is to say, uses certain sounds in its buzzing to denote certain things, and in this way makes itself understood among kind. Lamartine, in his descriptions of travels in the East, tells of Arabian horses that used certain definite sounds to express certain things, just as Napoleon relates of his steed.

Birds, in addition to the sounds peculiar to them, are gifted with a great talent for imitation. There is hardly a bird, provided it has any voice at all, that can not imitate, at least to a certain extent, the sounds of Nature. Birds attempt to imitate each other, the voices of other animals, and in fact all possible sounds. Parrots are able to make a noise like that produced by a saw, the sound of a cork drawn from a bottle, and other noises still more peculiar. The mocking-bird is a perfect plagiarist in the feathered world; he imitates almost all songsters, even the nightingale. The kingfisher can reproduce most