Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/529

Rh the group into which Toots would be placed in a bench show. I suspect he is a somewhat mixed individual. He has the pointed nose, large brain-capsule, small drooping ears, and rough coat of the collie, with the short legs of the dachshund, and weighs about ten pounds. His mother was left by an English gentleman in charge of a scissors-grinder in San Diego. She was stone-blind. Her most remarkable feat was a return to her home by the lead of her nose, after having been transported to a place six miles away.

The mental development of this dog so closely resembles the unfolding of the human intellect during infancy, that it will be well to bring the two sets of phenomena into comparison. Let us break the thread of this narrative long enough to refer to some mental characteristics of the baby.

A very old objection to the possession, by animals, of mind higher than that manifested in instinct is founded in an equally old fallacy, that thinking is impossible separate from an acquaintance with the language of speech. Particularly is it urged that general ideas, or concepts, are impossible without words to represent them. If we think only in words, then dogs, who have no words, can not think. Even what we call memory in animals has been restricted to mere "association" by those orthodox philosophers from whom some of us have learned our lessons. It has not been without a struggle against prejudice that we are able to give the dog his due.

Prof. Preyer, in his excellent work on The Development of the Intellect, has, to my thought, proved conclusively that the baby, even before it has learned to speak, thinks and forms general ideas. By carefully registered observations, extending through a period of forty months of infant life, the Jena psychologist finds that, so early as the second month, the baby begins the "association of memory-images." The possession of this primitive faculty is proved not only by many examples of infants who in due time learn to speak, but by the most remarkable practical demonstration in the development of deaf-mutes.

Nothing further could be desired in the way of positive proof of the power to generalize, in the first years of life, than that the deaf-mute expresses the concept "red" by touching his red lips, and then pointing to the redness of the sunset sky. From a wide induction of such facts. Prof. Preyer safely concludes that "many concepts are, without any learning of words whatever, plainly expressed and logically combined with one another, and their correctness is proved by the conduct of any and every untaught child born deaf." And he further sums up his case by declaring that "it was not language that generated the intellect; it is the intellect that formerly invented language; and even now the newborn