Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/271

Rh dog has no desire except to obey and please us; the trouble is in explaining to him what we want of him.

A dog had been taught to go, when commanded, to the shed for wood for the fireplace. The exercise amused him; and, when he had brought one stick, he liked nothing better than to return for another, so that he had to be told to stop. But one time, when he was alone and lonesome, he pulled down all the wood, stick by stick. He had not comprehended the purpose of the act which they made him perform, supposing it to be a sport, like the ordinary carrying of a stick. Could this dog have been taught to count by sending him for two sticks and then for three, and so on to larger numbers? We doubt it, because he had not even disengaged from the act which he was ordered to do the general idea that all the pieces of wood which he brought were to be burned in the fireplace, that he was never sent for them except for that purpose, and that he should only fetch as many as were needed.

If efforts to educate animals have been even more fruitless in the hands of scientific investigators than of workingmen proceeding without theoretical views, it is because great errors have been committed in the analysis of human faculties, in making such suppositions, for instance, as that arithmetical notions are more elementary than geometrical ones. Having done this, they have sought to teach animals, whose capability is for measuring, to count. Having become habituated by our industrial civilization and the economical laws of exchange to the intervention of the idea of number in all our wants, acts, and works, we have lost perception of the insignificant part which it has in animal life as compared with that of the idea of size. Animals have a very exact sense of size. They can measure time and distance better than we can. The sparrows in our parks, when affecting the highest degree of confidence in us, know how to keep just enough distance from us to be able to evade us. It also seems to be demonstrated that all animals have more or less of the faculty of estimating the number of objects coexisting in space; that is, in a varying degree, of analyzing the similar or identical elements in their visual or auditive perceptions, so long as the number is small enough.

Have they also the faculty of estimating numbers as successive repetitions of the same facts in time, or of counting the reiteration of the same perceptions? I was once told of a workman who was in the habit of giving sugar every day to a dog which he met in going to his work. The dog counted on his daily return. He gave three pieces of sugar, one after the other, and the dog would wait and look till it had got the third piece, when it seemed satisfied and did not ask for any more. It had, therefore, the notion of these three successive facts, and could count them. I learn