Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 106.djvu/639

Rh flashes its shield to its foe as well as to its fellow.

Considering the gulf that separates man from the lower orders, I often wonder how, for instance, we can have such a sense of companionship with a dog. What is it in the dog that so appeals to us? It is probably his quick responsiveness to our attention. He meets us half-way. He gives caress for caress. Then he is that light-hearted, irresponsible vagabond that so many of us half-consciously long to be if we could and dared. To a dog, a walk is the best of good fortunes; he sniff's adventure at every turn, is sure something thrilling will happen around the next bend in the path. How much he gets out of it that escapes me! The excitement of all the different odors that my sense is too dull to take in; the ground written over with the scent of game of some sort, the air full of the lure of wild adventure. How human he is at such times: he is out on a lark. In his spirit of hilarity he will chase hens, pigs, sheep, cows, which ordinarily he would give no heed to, just as boys abroad in the fields and woods will commit depredations that they would be ashamed of at home.

When I go into my neighbor's house, his dog of many strains, and a great crony of mine, becomes riotous with delight. He whines with joy, hops up on my lap, caresses me, and then springs to the door, and with wagging tail and speaking looks and actions says, 'Come on! let's off.' I open the door and say, 'Go, if you want to.' He leaps back on my lap, and says, 'No, no, not without you.' Then to the door again with his eloquent pantomime, till I finally follow him forth into the street. Then he tears up the road to the woods, saying so plainly, 'Better one hour of Slabsides than a week of humdrum at home.' At such times, if we chance to meet his master or mistress on the road, he heeds them not, and is absolutely deaf to their calls.

Well, I do not suppose the dog is in our line of descent, but his stem-form must join ours not very far back. He is our brother at not very many removes, and he has been so modified and humanized by his long intercourse with our kind, stretching no doubt through hundreds of thousands of years, that we are near to him and he is near to us. I do not suppose that, if this affectionate intercourse were to continue any number of ages or cycles longer, the dog would ever be any more developed on his intellectual side; he can never share our thoughts any more than he does now. He has not, nor have any of the lower orders, that which Ray Lankester aptly calls educability, that which distinguishes man from all other creatures. We can train animals to do wonderful things, but we cannot develop in them, or graft upon them, this capacity for intellectual improvement, to grasp and wield and store up ideas. Man's effect on trained animals is like the effect of a magnet on a piece of steel: for the moment he imparts some of his own powers to them, and holds them up to the ideal plane, but they are not permanently intellectualized; no new power is developed in them; and they soon fall back to their natural state. What they seem to acquire is not free intelligence that they can apply to other problems. We have not enlarged their minds, but have shaped their impulses to a new pattern. They are no wiser, but they are more apt. They do a human stunt, but they do not think human thoughts.

In all the millions of years that life has been upon the globe, working its