Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/187

Rh point of new species. A striking example of this perpetuation of individual peculiarities is the short-legged and long-backed Ancon sheep, a comparatively recent product of Nature rendered permanent by the care of man. A pointer, greyhound, or collie inherits and transmits to its offspring not only race attributes, but also acquired aptitudes in the same manner and to the same degree as a human being does who is distinguished for some special faculty. There are prodigies of dogs which do not beget prodigies of puppies, just as there are men of genius whose children are by no means eminent for their intellectual endowments.

If the conceptual world of the lower animals is limited and fragmentary, so is that of savages and of ignorant and uncultivated men, who live for the most part in the present and the immediate past, and have a relatively narrow range of thoughts and experiences. Long-lived animals, such as parrots, ravens, and elephants, have an advantage over short-lived animals in the development of intelligence. Civilized man, however, not only lives his own individual life, and profits, like other animals, from the wisdom of his parents and the influences of his environment, but also, by means of written records, lives the life of the race, of which he enjoys the selectest fruits garnered in history.

It must also be borne in mind that dogs are and always have been bred for special purposes, such as pointing, retrieving, running, watching, and biting, but not for general intelligence. Mr. Galton, who calls attention to this fact, suggests that it would be interesting as a psychological experiment to mate the cleverest dogs generation after generation, breeding and educating them solely for intellectual power and disregarding every other consideration.

In order to carry out this plan to perfection and to realize all the possibilities involved in such a comprehensive scheme, it would be necessary to devise some system of signs by which dogs would be able to communicate their ideas more fully and more clearly than they can do at present, both to each other and to man. That the invention of such a language is not impossible is evident from what has been already achieved in the training of dogs for exhibition, as well as from the extent to which they have learned to understand human speech by mere association with man. Prof. A. Graham Bell believes that they may be taught to pronounce words, and is now making scientific experiments in this direction. The same opinion was expressed two centuries ago by no less an authority than Leibnitz, who adduces some startling facts in support of it. The value of such a language as a means of enlarging the animal's sphere of thought and power of conception, and of giving a higher development to its intellectual faculties, is incalculable.