preconceived views or theories to support; that he has confined his generalisations within altogether safe limits; that he has avoided all discussion of such unmanageable topics as brute immortality and soul; and that he has simply presented the conclusion which results from his facts. All this seems to indicate a very desirable disposition for an observer who ventures upon so wide and difficult a field, and the promise which it implies might be at once accepted with ready faith if it were not for the provoking circumstance that it points to just the frame of mind which all philosophic authors believe themselves to possess. On this account it becomes necessary to take some little note, in the first instance, of the way in which Dr. Lindsay has proceeded to carry out his purpose and design.

The main proposition which he aspires to establish is that mind is the same thing in the lower animals that it is in man, and that there are no mental faculties in man which have not their full counterpart in what have been erroneously termed the lower animals.' The author himself says:

'Man's claim to pre-eminence on the ground of the uniqueness of his mental constitution is as absurd and puerile, therefore, as it is fallacious. His overweening pride or vanity has led to his futile contention with the evidence of facts. He has trusted to a series of gratuitous assumptions. The supposed criteria of human supremacy, as the preceding chapter has shown, the alleged psychical distinctions between man and other animals, cannot stand examination. One after another they have proved to be fallacious, built upon unsatisfactory grounds.'

At the end of the paragraph from which this extract is taken Dr. Lindsay further remarks:

That man's specific designation then-Homo sapiens-is far from being deserved or appropriate becomes obvious when we compare him in his lowest savage or primitive condition with such other animals as the dog or the ant.'

It will be observed that in this passage Dr. Lindsay implies that man does not deserve his imputed reputation for superior wisdom because in his lowest state he is inferior to such sagacious animals as the dog and the ant. This particular clause of the argument is worthy of pointed notice, because it is a turn of thought which crops up again and again, and which indeed is so frequently expressed, that it virtually becomes the keynote of the performance. Thus the dog, horse, elephant, parrot, and ape in psychical capacity are often superior, it is said, to the human child, and even to the human adult. The naturally intelligent and well-trained dog is mentally and mo

rally higher than the human infant and child, and frequently also than the full-grown man. Any definition of morality, moral sense, or religious feeling, which is so framed as to exclude the lower animals, must also exclude entire races and ranks of men. Particular definitions of religion are more appropriate to the state of the dog than of the savage. The despised ass is often too clever for stupid man. Women have sometimes much to learn in the matter of dress from birds. Twenty-seven of the virtues of man, beginning with heroism, patriotism, and self-sacrifice, and ending with knowledge and due performance of professional occupation, are specified in which the lower animals exhibit a superiority to whole races or classes of men, whether civilised or savage. The real tendency of this line of argument, of course, is to show that the worst forms of humanity are lower than the brutes. But the impression sought to be conveyed to the reader is that the lower animals must be mentally the equals of man because they are superior to him sometimes. This is a very amusing instance of what is commonly called begging the question, and may possibly and fairly suggest a doubt whether the author of these ingenious passages is as entirely without a preconceived view as he supposes himself to be. The language in these instances certainly savours more of plausible advocacy than it does of a philosophical and unbiassed search for truth.

But when the reader passes on to examine the very numerous instances of the sagacity of animals which have been here collected together to establish their mental equality with man, the impression that Dr. Lindsay must be somewhat facile of belief for so experienced an investigator is added to the suspicion that there is a bias in his reasoning. He is, in fact, the most credulous philosopher we remember to have met with. A few chance illustrations of this capacity for swallowing strange stories may be advantageously glanced at. From one paragraph it appears that ships are signalled off the coast of Tahiti, by the crowing of the cocks, long before they are in sight, and that this occurs with such regularity and certainty that the pilots, both native and French, forthwith proceed out to sea to meet the ships whenever they hear the crowing, and do find them in the offing without any exception. Then, again, a small dog, which had been assaulted by a large one, saved up its rations day by day, and at last gave a dinner to a number of his dog friends, and by that means secured their services to avenge his injuries by worrying the bully who had attacked him. A terrier dog upon one occasion roused his master's

household in the middle of the night to point out that a bolt on the front door had not been duly fastened. Certain swallows, which had played a successful practical joke upon a cat, set up a laugh at the disappointed enemy very much like the laugh of a young child when tickled.' A Skye terrier, whenever he wished to be particularly jovial, used to enter so thoroughly into the necessities of the situation, that his sides 'shook with convulsive laughter.' A dog and cat, which were confederates for dishonest purposes, had an understanding together that the cat should give notice, by mewing, when the coast was clear, and the two then proceeded to the larder, where the cat, availing herself of her superior scansorial powers, climbed to the shelf and held the cover of a dish raised with one paw, whilst with the other she distributed his share of the plunder to the dog below. A young rat having fallen into a pail of pig-food, six older ones held an earnest consultation as to what should be done in the emergency, and having settled their plans formed themselves into a chain, and so dropped the lowest one of the series down into the pail until he could get hold of the drowning young one. This having been accomplished, the chain was drawn up by the rats above. But the attempt at rescue proved to be too late. The young rat was dead. The disappointed elder ones thereupon first gazed at their young comrade in mute despair, then wiped the tears from their eyes with their fore paws, and sadly walked away. The human witnesses of this touching occurrence do not say that the old rats made any attempt to carry out the instructions of the Royal Humane Society, but the sagacious animals no doubt would have done so if they had not been aware, through the operation of their superhuman intelligence, that their interposition had come too late. A big dog, whose fine moral nature happily had not been much tampered with by human agency, when he saw a canary chased by a cat, opened his mouth wide and afforded the fugitive bird a safe refuge from the feline claws within his own protecting jaws. Another dog, who had heedlessly soiled the floor by running across it with his mudcovered feet, immediately set matters straight by scraping up all the mud with his teeth. A Newfoundland dog kept his pocket-money under the mat, and took from it a halfpenny or a penny, according to the urgency of his appetite. He was quite aware of the value of his coins, and occasionally changed pennies and sixpences, taking care that only the proper value of his purchases was deducted. Two other dogs of a similar turn of mind, who were wide awake to human depravity and tricks, always kept their paws upon their pennies until they

had got their buns; and another dog, who had once been deceived by a baker of whom he had expected better things, not only transferred his custom to a rival establishment on the opposite side of the way, but always called first at the deceiver's door to show him the money he was going to spend, and to keep him alive to the fact of the valuable custom he had forfeited. The horse which used to pump its own water and drink from the spout, and the cow which was in the habit of slicing its own turnips, may possibly be almost too commonplace to be worthy of special notice; but this can hardly be held to be the case in the matter of the dog, who after a severe fight went home, and took to his master's bed, first making it up comfortably, and then getting in between the sheets and laying his bruised and wounded head upon the pillow. This dog, however, was not quite so conspicuous for delicacy of feeling as he was for intelligence; for he neglected to wash himself before he went to bed, and so allowed both the blood and the mud from his coat to soak into the sheets. A foxterrier was cured of an inveterate habit of thieving by having his pilferings always restored to their proper owners in his presence. The bulldog who brought a companion with a broken leg to the surgery where he had seen his master's injured leg dressed, and who scratched at the door until it was opened, and then formally introduced the patient, must have been a pleasant dog to know; but scarcely more so than the injured dog himself, for he at once held up his damaged foreleg to indicate the nature of his hurt. The surgeon concerned in these cases appears to have enjoyed a good practice amongst the dogs, for another shortly afterwards came to him with a pin sticking in one of his legs, and asked to have it extracted. It is not actually stated that either of these dogs offered the surgeon his proper fee, but, in the face of their quite unexceptionable behaviour in other points, it must be hoped that they did so. An Eskimo dog, called Fire King, had not quite so clear a sense of the beneficent influence of the healing art, for he could not be induced to submit his broken leg to the manipulations of the veterinary surgeon until he had seen his master go through the pantomimic performance of having a broken leg dressed and cured. Dogs and cats, it is affirmed, physic themselves much more rationally than the majority, at least, of most civilised men and women. It can scarcely be necessary to extend this series of illustrations further than has been done. But there is still one final instance which must be told in Dr. Lindsay's own words, to give full force to the caution which it

conveys.

'There is a very distinct appointment, and by a kind of universal suffrage, where the street dogs of Constantinople, as they sometimes do, select as their leader some animal belonging to a different quarter of the town-from among their natural enemies therefore the motive for such a choice being signal bravery displayed by the favoured individual, either in attack or defence. There are certain other official appointments, both of a public and private kind, in which selection may or may not be made by and from the general body of a community, and with or without prominent candidature, or candidature or competition at all by the individual selected. Thus there must be some sort of appointment, by selection of the fittest, in the case of 1. Mayors of towns.

2. Commissioners or ambassadors.
3. Spies or scouts.

4. Sentinels, sentries, or outposts.
5. Nurses.'

It is necessary to state in reference to these illustrations that Dr. Lindsay remarks, in regard to some two or three of them, that the incidents recorded may possibly require verification; but the fact nevertheless remains that by far the greater part of them have been unreservedly accepted by an enquirer who prides himself on his habit of generalising only upon safe scientific grounds.

Dr. Lindsay selects, from the 914 species of animals which have engaged his attention, the dog as the one which stands facile princeps near to man in moral and intellectual excellence, and he marks the elephant, the anthropoid ape, the parrot, and the ant as approaching most nearly in this particular to rivalship with the dog. He thinks, however, that the supremacy of the dog over the anthropoid ape may be properly ascribed to the domestic life which the dog leads in the companionship of man, and to the advantages which it enjoys in this connexion; and that, if the anthropoid apes were to receive the same education, they might possibly surpass the dog in mental attainment. Dr. Lindsay is assuredly right in his assumption that much of the intelligence and charm of the dog must be attributed to the circumstance that it associates itself so readily and so closely with man. keys have never received anything like the same attention and care, and no one can venture to say what they might not become if they were once permanently domesticated in human households, as the dog is. For the present, however, on account of his long-established and almost universal domestication, the most remarkable and instructive of the studies of animal intelligence have been furnished by the dog, and he accordingly figures most largely in these pages. The mental

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