THE GREAT DOG-SUPERSTITION

No person can give a careful and loving study to animal life for a long period without meeting with species exhibiting aptitudes of which a great deal might be made in a domestic state, and which, together with their beauty and cleanly habits, seem specially to fit them for companionship with man in a greater degree than those which we now possess. For it is an undoubted fact that some animals are more intelligent than others, slight differences in this respect being perceptible even among the species of a single group or genus. We measure the animal mind by ours; and looking down from the summit of our mountain the earth beneath us at first seems level; but it is not quite level, as we are able to see by regarding it attentively. Even more important are the differences in temper, ranging from the morose and truculent to the placable and sweet; more important, because compared with this diversity in disposition that which we find in intelligence is not great. There are also animals solitary by nature, and almost or quite incapable of any attachment excepting that of the sexes; while others are gregarious or social, and able to form attachments not only among themselves, but also with those of other species, and, when domesticated, with man. There is a third matter, which is doubtless the most important of all, to be considered when weighing the comparative advantages of different kinds, namely, the habits, or instincts, which change so slowly that they are practically immutable, even in altered conditions, and which, in the domesticated or pet animal, according to their character, may prove a source of pleasure and profit to man, or, on the contrary, a perpetual annoyance and trouble. When our progenitors far back in time tamed the animals we now possess, it cannot be supposed that they expended much thought on such considerations as these: probably chance determined everything for them, and they took and tamed the animals which came first to hand, or which promised to be most useful to them, either as food or in assisting them to procure food. If they were barbarians they would think little of beauty, little of the small differences in intelligence, and of the much greater differences in disposition, and, naturally, nothing at all about certain instincts in some animals which would become increasingly repugnant to man in a civilised state.

We have the dog so constantly with us; the grand result of centuries of artificial selection and training is so patent to every one, that we have actually come to look on this animal as by nature superior in mental endowment, genial qualities, and general adaptiveness to all others. Yet the qualities which make the dog valuable to us now formed no part of its original character; it is valuable chiefly for its various instinctive tendencies, and these are a later growth and purely the result of individual spontaneous variations, and of man’s unconscious selection. The dog’s affection for his master--the anxiety to be constantly with and to be noticed and caressed by him, the impatience at his absence and grief at his loss, and the courage to defend him and his house and his belongings from strangers--this affection of which we are accustomed to think so highly, regarding it as something unique in Nature, is in reality a very small and a very low thing; and by low is here meant common in the animal world, for it exists in a great many, probably in a large majority, of mammalian brains in every order and every family. Nor is it confined to mammalians. The duck does not occupy a distinguished place in the scale of being, and the lame duck that attached itself to Mr. Caxton, and affectionately followed him up and down in his walk, might seem an exceptionally gifted bird to those who know little of animal life. It is of course here assumed that Bulwer did not invent the lame duck: a peacock or bird of paradise, with all its organs complete, would have suited his fancy better. Probably the incident--for such incidents are very common--was told to him as true, and thinking that it would give a touch of reality and homely pathos to the description of Mr. Caxton’s mild and lovable character he introduced it into his novel. A friend of the writer owned a duck far more worthy of admiration than Bulwer’s immortal bird. This was not a domestic duck, but a teal, which he brought down with his gun slightly wounded in the wing, and feeling all at once a strange compassion for it, he tied it up in a handkerchief and carried it to his home in the suburbs of a large town. The captive was turned into a courtyard and its wants attended to; it soon grew accustomed to its new mode of existence, and furthermore became strongly attached to all the members of the family, seeking for them in the rooms when it felt lonely, and always exhibiting distress of mind and anger in the presence of strangers. When a cat or dog was fondled in its presence it would run to the spot, administer a few vindictive blows to the animal with its soft bill, and solicit a caress for itself. The most curious thing in its history was that it took a special liking to its captor, and singled him out for its most marked attentions. When he went away to business in the morning the teal would accompany him to the street door to see him off, returning afterwards contentedly to the yard; and in the afternoon it would again repair to the door, always left open, and standing composedly on the middle of the step wait its master’s return--for this teal took count of time. If, while it stood there watching the road, a stranger came in, it would open its beak and hiss and strike at his legs, showing as much suspicion and “sense of proprietorship” as a dog does when it barks and snaps at a visitor. Its owner’s arrival would be greeted with demonstrations of affection and joy, and following him into the house it would spend an hour or two very happily if allowed to sit on his feet, or nestling close against them on the hearth-rug.

The behaviour of this poor teal might seem a very great thing, but it amounts to very little after all; the memory that all animals have, and perhaps a little judgement--the “small dose of reason” which Huber found that even insects possessed--and attachment to the beings it was accustomed to see and associate with, and who attended to all its wants and gently caressed it. In the matter of the affections it has no advantage even over Darwin’s celebrated snail. No doubt the self-sacrificing snail proved too much for Darwin’s argument, as Professor Mivart has pointed out; fortunately the case of the teal, which can be substantiated, does not prove too much for the argument contained in this article. To be astonished at the display of such faculties and affections in a bird so low down in the scale would show ignorance of Nature. And there is no doubt that most men are very ignorant about her; so ignorant that if the teal had the place in our life which belongs to the dog, and had been with us for centuries, a companion and pet in our houses to the exclusion of other kinds, we should now believe that it surpassed all other creatures in human-like feelings; our periodicals would teem with anecdotes of its marvellous intelligence; innumerable books would be written on the subject, and the psychological biologists would put it next to man in their systems, one step below him on the throne of life, and far above the general herd of animals.

It is a fact, that might well stagger belief in the dog’s superior intellect, that mammalians so low down as rats and mice when properly treated and trained make attached and intelligent pets; and that a mouse, or a sparrow, or a snake, or even a creature so small and far down in the organic scale as a flea, may be taught, without very great difficulty, to perform tricks which, if performed by a dog, would be pronounced very clever indeed. Most people who witness the pretty performances of small mammals, birds and insects--which are usually up to the level of the dog’s performances seen at the music-halls--probably think, if they think anything at all about the matter, that the exhibitor in such cases is the possessor of a mysterious kind of talent by means of which he is able to make these small creatures come for a few moments out of the instinctive groove they move in to do the things he wishes, much as little toy ducks and swans, which are hollow inside, are made to swim round in a basin of water after a stick of loadstone; only in the case of the exhibitor of animals the loadstone is hidden from the spectators. His trick, or mysterious talent, consists in the knowledge that the animal he wishes to train is not a little hollow duck or automaton, but that it has faculties corresponding to the lower psychical faculties in man, and that by the exercise of considerable patience it may be made, when the stimulus is applied, to repeat again and again a few actions in the same order. The question which concerns us to know is, has the dose of reason or have these lower psychical faculties in the dog been so greatly developed during its long companionship with man as to raise it a great deal nearer to man’s level, and place a great gulf between its mind and that of the pig or the crow? The gulf exists only in our imagination, and the “development” is a fairy-tale, of which Science was probably not the original author, but which she has thought proper to include, somewhat amplified and with new illustrations, in the recent editions of her collected works. The dog, taken directly from a wild life, if taken young, will be tame and understand and obey his master--numerous instances are on record--and if patiently trained will perform tricks just as wonderful as those that were related to an astonished audience at the late meeting of the British Association by a well-known writer and authority on zoological science. And in the mammalian division there are hundreds of species, some higher, some lower than the dog, which may be taught the same things, or other things equally wonderful. These greatly vaunted performances of the dog only prove that its mind is, and ever will be, what it was when, thousands of years ago, some compassionate woman took the pup her owner threw into her arms, and reared it, suckling it perhaps at her own breast; and when in after days it followed at the heels of its savage master and astonished him by assisting in the capture of his quarry.

It is not, then, the dog’s intelligence, which is less than that of many other species, and is non-progressive in spite of all that training and selection can do, which makes it valuable to us. Nor has it any advantage over other species in those qualities of affection, fidelity, and good temper about which we hear so much rapturous language; for these things are lower down than reason and exist throughout the mammalian world, in animals high and low, little and big, from the harvest mouse to the hippopotamus. The dog is more valuable to us than other species because we have got him. We inherited him and were thereby saved a large amount of trouble. He is tame; the others are wild. His intellect is small and stationary, but his structure is variable, and, more important still, so are his instincts; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that new propensities, which often prove hereditary, and which by selection and training may be fixed and strengthened until they are made to resemble instincts, are of frequent occurrence in him. The more or less settled propensities in our domestic animals, originating in the domestic state, are no doubt in one sense instincts, since they are of the nature of instinct and its beginnings; but the difference between them and the true natural instinct, which has had incalculable time to crystallise in, is greater than can be expressed. The last is the rock and eternal; the others are snow-flakes, formed in a moment, that settle and show white, and even before our sight is withdrawn melt away and vanish. This same variability, or habit of varying, is in some vague way taken as a proof of versatility; hence one reason of the popular notion that the dog is so vastly superior to other four-footed creatures. If a dog could be taught to turn a spit, find truffles, save a man from drowning or from perishing in a snow-drift, point out a partridge, retrieve a wounded duck, kill twenty rats in as many seconds, and herd a flock of sheep, then it would indeed be an animal to marvel at. These are special instincts or incipient instincts, and to bestow such epithets as “generous” and “noble” on a dog for pulling a drowning man out of the water, or scratching him out of a snow-drift, is fully as irrational as it would be to call the swallow and cuckoo intrepid explorers of the Dark Continent, or to praise the hive-bees of the working caste for their chastity, loyalty, and patriotism, and for their profound knowledge of chemistry and the higher mathematics, as shown in their works. Cross the dogs and these various propensities, which being useful to man and not to the animals themselves are preserved artificially, fade away and disappear, and from moving artificially apart in twenty different grooves the animals all revert to the one old simple groove in which they were first found by man. This much may then be said in favour of the dog: he is plastic. The plasticity is probably due to domestication, to the variety of conditions to which he is subjected as man’s companion in all regions of the globe, the selection which separates and preserves new varieties as they arise, and the crossing again of widely separated breeds. That he is plastic must be our excuse for determining to make the most we can of him to the complete exclusion of all other species, which might or might not prove plastic in the same degree. The fowl and pigeon are plastic, while the goose, guinea-fowl, pheasant, and peacock vary little or not at all. Nature may have better things than the dog, but we cannot guess her secrets, and to find them out by experiment would take a very long time. A bird in the hand, any bird, even a cock-sparrow, is better than all the birds of paradise that are in the bush. The other animals will serve us for sport while they last; and when they are gone we of this age shall be gone too, and deaf to whatever unkind things our posterity may say of us. The dog is with us, esteemed above all brutes, our favourite, and we shall give him no cause for jealousy.

If we had him not, if we had never had him or had forgotten his memory, and were to go out again to select a friend and companion from the beasts of the field, the wild dog would be passed by without a thought. There is nothing in him to attract, but on the contrary much to repel. In a state of nature he is an animal of disgusting habits, with a vulture-like preference for dead and decomposing meat. Cowardly he also is, yet when unopposed displays a bloodthirstiness almost without a parallel among true beasts of prey. Nor does he possess any compensating beauty or sagacity, and compared with many carnivores he is neither sharp-sighted nor fleet of foot. Some keen genealogist might be tempted to ask, Which wild dog is here meant? He may follow his fancy and choose his own wild dog--jackal, dhole, baunsuah, wolf; or take them all, and even include the coyote, as Darwin did. The multiple origin of the domestic dog is by no means an improbable theory; but it is also highly probable that the jackal had by far the largest share in his parentage. There are also reasons for believing that most of the wild dogs, including the dingo, have sprung from tame breeds; and, as a fact, the wild dogs with which the writer is most familiar are known to be the descendants of domestic animals which ran away from their masters and adopted a feral life.

Out of this same coarse material man, unconsciously imitating Nature’s method, has fashioned his favourite; or rather, since the dog has become so divergent in his keeping, his large group of favourites, with their various forms and propensities. Only now, too late by some thousands of years, he is able to see that it was a mistake to go so low in the first place, to have contentedly taken base metal, dull-witted barbarian that he was, when he might just as well have taken gold. For the baseness of the metal shows in spite of much polishing to make it shine. Polishing powders we have, but not the powders of projection; and the dog, with all his new propensities, remains mentally a jackal, above some mammalians and below others; nor can he outlive ancient, obscene instincts which become increasingly offensive as civilisation raises and refines his master man.

How did our belief in the mental superiority of this animal come to exist? Doubtless it came about through our intimacy with the dog, in the fields where he helped us, and in our houses where we made a pet of him, together with our ignorance of the true character of other animals. All animals were to us simply “brutes that perish,” and “natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed,” with no faculties at all resembling ours; and when it was discovered that the dog could be made to understand many things, and that he had some feelings in common with us, and was capable of great affection, which sometimes caused him to pine at his master’s loss, and in some instances even to die of grief; and that in all these things he was, or seemed to be, widely separated from other domestic brutes, the notion grew up that he was essentially different, an animal set apart for man’s benefit, and, finally, that he had been specially created for such an object. Thus, Youatt says, “The dog, next to the human being, ranks highest in intelligence, and was evidently designed to be the companion and friend of man”; and in another place he says that it is highly probable that he descended from no such inferior and worthless animal as the jackal or wolf, but was originally created, somewhat as we now find him--the associate and friend of man.

This was not so very hard to believe in the pre-Darwinian days, since domesticated dogs, and even some of the breeds which we now possess, were known to have existed between three and four thousand years ago, while the world was only supposed to have existed about six thousand years. It seems probable that this curious superstition of the dog’s special creation grew up gradually and only became popular in very recent times. It was gladly seized on by the poets, who made as much out of it as they had formerly done out of the melody of the dying swan; and the artists were not slow in following their example. A dog may be choked with pudding, but the human mind greedily gulped down as much of this mawkish dog-sentiment as any person, with misdirected talents, chose to manufacture for it.

Before proceeding with the story of our dog superstition, I will here interpose a remark anent that which obtains in the other half, or more than half, of the world--the East. “The people of the East,” says Youatt, “have a strange superstition with regard to the dog.” Strange indeed, almost incredible to our properly enlightened Western minds! We, who in a manner despise these “people of the East,” and object to many of their habits with regard to personal cleanliness, and so on, to be told that our friend and associate the dog, our pet who shares our living and sleeping rooms, and is caressed with our hands and lips, is an unclean beast and unfit to be touched by man! And so we find that the East is East, and the West is West, with regard to this as well as to most things, and that there are two great dog superstitions. And now to proceed with the story of the one which is ours.

In due time the evolutionists came, teaching that the earth is old, that all the living things on it are the descendants of one or of a very few primordial forms, and as a consequence of such teaching the special creation of the dog was no longer tenable. How then came the dog-superstition--the belief in its superiority--to survive so rude a shock? For the evolutionists taught that all the brutes possess, potentially and in germ, all the faculties found in man, and the conclusion seems unavoidable that there must be a correspondence in the physical and psychical development, and that the root of the higher mental and moral powers must exist in the animals of the highest grades; that the mammal must be more rational than the bird, and the bird than the reptile, and the reptile than the fish; and that the hyena, civet, and mongoose are nearer to us than the dog, the cats above the mongoose, and the monkeys higher still. Why then was not the dog relegated to a lower place? Dr. Lauder Lindsay has given the reason: “The mental scale--the scale of intellectual and moral development--is not quite synonymous with the zoological scale. The most intellectual and moral animals are not necessarily those nearest to man in the classification commonly adopted by zoologists.” Furthermore it has been assumed that contact with man has had the effect of enlarging the dog’s mind, and making him, beyond all other animals, intellectual, moral, and even religious.

It ought to be a great comfort to those who devote themselves to canine pets, and to canophilists generally, to know that the philosophers are at one with them. To some others it will perhaps add a new terror to existence if students of dog-psychology generally should feel themselves tempted to imitate a recent illustrious example, and go about the country lecturing on the marvellous development of mind in their respective pets. Leibnitz once gave an account of a dog that talked; and quite recently a writer in a London journal related how, in a sheltered spot among the rocks on a lonely Scotch moor, he stumbled on an old shepherd playing whist with his collie. Nothing approaching to these cases in dramatic interest can be looked for in the apprehended discourses. The animal to be described will as a rule be of a quiet, thoughtful character proper in a philosopher’s dog; not fond of display or much given to wild flights of imagination. He will only show that he possesses that faculty when asleep and barking at the heels of a dream-hare. He will show a deep affection for his master, like the teal spoken of in this article; also a strong sense of proprietorship, again like the teal and like the tame snake described by White of Selborne--a display of intellect which strangely simulates an instinct common to all creatures. And he will also show an intelligent curiosity, and examine things to find out what they are, and prove himself a very agreeable companion; as much so as Mr. Benjamin Kidd’s pet humble-bee. Moreover he will be accomplished enough to sit up and beg, retrieve a walking-stick from the Serpentine, close an open door, etc.; and besides these ordinary things he will do things extraordinary, such as picking up numbered or lettered cards, red, blue, and yellow, at his master’s bidding; in fact such tricks as a pig will perform without being very learned, not a Porson of its kind, but only possessing the ordinary porcine abilities. In conclusion the lecturer will bring up the savage, not in person, but a savage evolved from his inner consciousness, and compare its understanding with that of the dog, or of his dog, and the poor savage will have very much the worst of it.

We have come to the end of the dog’s mind, and have arrived at that other question to which allusion has been made. The dog has a body as well as a soul, senses, appetites, and instincts, and it is worth while inquiring whether contact with man has had the same ameliorating effect on these as it is supposed to have had on his psychical faculties. In other words, has he ceased to be a jackal? For if a negative answer must be given, it follows that, however fit to be the servant, the dog is scarcely fit to be the intimate associate and friend of man; for friendship implies a similarity in habits, if nothing more, and man is not by nature an unclean animal.

Dr. Romanes, in his work on _Mental Evolution in Animals_, speaks of what he calls unpleasant survivals in the dog, such as burying food until it becomes offensive before eating it, turning round and round on the hearth-rug before lying down, rolling in filth, etc., etc., and he says that they have remained unaffected by contact with man because these instincts being neither useful nor harmful have never been either cultivated or repressed. From which it may be inferred that in his opinion these disagreeable habits may be got rid of in time. But why does he call them survivals? If the action, so frequently observed in the dog, of turning round several times before lying down, is correctly ascribed to an ancient habit in the wild animal of treading down the grass to make a bed to sleep on, it is rightly called a survival, and is a habit neither useful nor harmful in the domesticated state, which has never been either cultivated or repressed, and will in time disappear. Thus far it is easy to agree with Dr. Romanes. The other offensive instinct of the dog, of which burying meat to make it putrid, rolling in filth, etc., etc., are different manifestations, is not a survival, in the sense in which zoologists use that word, any more than the desire of the well-fed cat for the canary, and of the hen-hatched ducklings for the pond, are survivals. These are important instincts which have never ceased to operate. The dog is a flesh-eater with a preference for carrion, and his senses of taste and smell are correlated, and carrion attracts him just as fruit attracts the frugivorous bat. Man’s smelling sense and the dog’s do not correspond; they are inverted, and what is delightful to one is disgusting to the other. “A cur’s tail may be warmed and pressed and bound round with ligatures, and after twelve years of labour bestowed on it, it will retain its original form,” is an Oriental saying. In like manner the dog may be shut up in an atmosphere of opoponax and frangipani for twelve hundred years and he will love the smell of carrion still. When the dog runs frisking and barking, he expresses gladness; and he expresses a still greater degree of gladness by madly rolling, feet up, on the grass, uttering a continuous purring growl. The discovery of a carrion smell on the grass will always cause the dog to behave in this way. It is the something wanting still in the life of enforced separation from the odours that delight him; and when he unexpectedly discovers a thing of this kind his joy is uncontrolled. His sense of smell is much keener than ours; it is probably more to him than sight is to us; he lives in it, and the odours that are agreeable to him afford him the highest pleasure of which he is capable. We can do much with a dog, but there is a limit to what we can do; we can no more alter the character of his sense of smell than we can alter the colour of his blood.

“The dog is a worshipper of man,” says Dr. Lauder Lindsay, “and is, or may be, made in the image of the being he worships.” That refers merely to the animal’s intellectual and moral nature; or, in other words, it is the fashionable “inverted or biological anthropomorphism” of the day, of which we shall all probably be heartily ashamed by and by; just now we are concerned with a more important matter, to wit, the dog’s nose. Its character may be seen even in the most artificial breeds, that is to say, in those which have most widely diverged from the parent-form and are entirely dependent on us, such as pugs and toy-terriers. The pampered lap-dog in the midst of his comforts has one great thorn in his side, one perpetual misery to endure, in the perfumes which please his mistress. He too is a little Venetian in his way, but his way is not hers. The camphor-wood chest in her room is an offence to him, the case of glass-stoppered scents an abomination. All fragrant flowers are as asafoetida to his exquisite nostrils, and his face is turned aside in very ill-concealed disgust from the sandal-wood box or fan. It is warm and soft on her lap, but an incurable grief to be so near her pocket-handkerchief, saturated with nasty white-rose or lavender. If she must perfume herself with flowery essences he would prefer an essential oil expressed from the gorgeous _Rafflesia Arnoldi_ of the Bornean forest, or even from the humble carrion-flower which blossoms nearer home.

The moral of all this is, that while the dog has become far too useful for us to think of parting with it--useful in a thousand ways, and likely to be useful in a thousand more, as new breeds arise with modified forms and with new unimagined propensities--it would be a blessed thing, both for man and dog, to draw the line at useful animals, to put and keep them in their place, which is not in the house, and value them at their proper worth, as we do our horses, pigs, cows, goats, sheep, and rabbits.

But there is a place in the human heart, the female heart especially, which would be vacant without an animal to love and fondle, a desire to have some furred creature for a friend--not a feathered creature, albeit feathered pets are common enough, because, owing to the bird’s organisation, to be handled is often painful and injurious to it, and in any case it deranges the feathers; and this love is unsatisfied and feels itself defrauded of its due unless it can be expressed in the legitimate mammalian way, which is to have contact with its object, to touch with the fingers and caress. Fortunately such a feeling or instinct can be amply gratified without the dog; there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of species incomparably before this animal in all estimable qualities, which can be touched with hand and lips without defilement. Only a few need be mentioned in this place.

One of the first animals worthy of so high a distinction, which would occur to many travelled men, is the marmoset: a fairy monkey in its smallness and extreme beauty, clothed in long soft hair with a lustre as of spun silk; in manners pleasantly tricksy, but not scatter-brained and wildly capricious like its larger irresponsible relations, which is an advantage. No visitor to the Brazils can have failed to be charmed with these small animals, which are frequently kept as pets by ladies, and among pets they are surpassed by none in attachment to their mistress.

A nobler animal, capable of endearing itself to man as well as woman, is the lemur, of which there are several very beautiful species. Strong, agile, swift and graceful in action as the monkey, to which it is related, but with an even, placid disposition; monkey-like in form, but without the monkey’s angularities and that appearance of spareness which reminds one of a naked, half-starved Hindoo, he has a better-proportioned figure for beauty, and his dark, richly coloured coat of woolly fur gives a pleasing roundness to his form. Moreover, he has not got the monkey’s pathetic old man’s withered countenance, but a sharp, somewhat vulpine face, black as ebony, a suitable setting for his chief glory--the luminous eyes, of every shining yellow colour seen in gold, topaz, and cat’s-eye. “Night wood-ghost,” the natives name it on account of its brilliant eyes which shine by night, and its motions in the trees, swift and noiseless as the flight of an owl. He is of ancient lineage, one of Nature’s aristocrats; a child of the savage forest, as you can see in the flashing hostile orbs, and in the combined ease and power of its motions; yet withal of a sweet and placable temper.

Even among the small-brained rodents we should not look in vain for favourites; and foremost in attractiveness are perhaps the squirrels, inhabiting all climates. Blithe-hearted as birds and as volatile in disposition, almost aerial in their habits, and in some tropical, richly coloured forms resembling cuckoos and other long-tailed, graceful avians, as they run leaping from branch to branch among the trees; what animation and marvellous swiftness of motion they display, what an endless variety of pretty whimsical attitudes and gestures! “All the motions of a squirrel imply spectators as much as those of a dancing-girl,” says Thoreau. They are easily tamed, coming at call to be fed from the hand; how strange it seems that they are not domestic, and found at every house in town and country where there are trees! Their unfailing spirits and fantastic performances would have a wholesome effect on our too sombre minds, and in cities like London would bring us a thought of the alert life and eternal gladness of Nature.

For those who would prefer a more terrestrial rodent, yet one more daintily fashioned than the rough-cast rabbit and guinea-pig, there are others. For a large animal the beautiful Patagonian dolichotis, like no other mammalian in its form, double the size of the hare, and a docile pet when tamed; and for a small one the charming lagidium or Andean vizcacha, with rabbit-like ears, long tail, arched like a squirrel’s, the fur blue-grey in colour above, and beneath golden yellow. And the chinchilla, white and pale grey, with round leaf-like ears, and soft dove’s eyes--a rare and delicate creature. There is in this small mountain troglodyte something poetic, tender, flower-like--a mammalian _edelweiss_. Poor little hunted chinchilla, did the Incas of old love you more than we do now, who love you only dead? For you were also of the great mountains, where Viracocha sat on his throne of snow, and the coming sun-god first touched your stony dwelling-places with rose and amber flame; and perhaps they regarded you as an animal sacred to the Immortals. If so, then you have indeed lost your friends, for we have no such fancies, and spare not.

It is a great descent, in more senses than one, to the prairie marmot--from the mountain to the plain, and from the beautiful to the grotesque; yet this dweller on the flat earth, gross in form and drab in colour, is a great pleasure-giver. He tickles the sense of the ludicrous, and it is good to laugh. His staring eyes, spasmodic gestures, and barking exclamations are almost painful, they are so genuine; for what an unearthly-looking monster one must seem to him! He is a gnome who has somehow stumbled out of his subterranean abode, and, like the young mole in Lessing’s fable, is overwhelmed with astonishment at everything he sees in this upper world. Then there is the agouti, with pointed head, beautifully arched back, and legs slender, proportionally, as the gazelle’s; its resemblance in form to the small musk deer has been remarked--a rodent moulded in the great Artist-Mother’s happiest mood. The colour of its coat, relieved only by its pink ears and a broad shining black stripe on the back, is red Venetian gold, the hue which the old Italian masters gave to the tresses of their angelic women. A mild-tempered animal, which may be taken from its native woods and made tame in a few days. Many of the smaller rodents might also be mentioned, such as the quaint, bird-like jerboa, and the variegated loucheres; and so on down even to the minute harvest-mouse. Forms and sizes to suit all tastes; for why should we all have alike? Let fashion in pets go out with the canines.

To go back to the other extreme, from low to high, there are the wild cats inhabiting all desert places on the globe. Tigers and leopards made small; clouded, or with a clear golden ground-colour, pale or red gold or grey, and black-striped, barred zebra-like, or spotted, or with the colours disposed in strange patterns, beautifully harmonious. As in the lemurs, and surpassing them, here are brilliant luminous eyes and great strength of sinew; but these are not of peace: the serpent-like silence of the movements and fateful stillness of the lithe form, and the round watchful orbs that seem like the two fiery gems set in a carved figure of rich stone--these betray the deadly purpose. Yet their hearts may also be conquered with kindness. The domestic cat is a proof of it; she is found in most houses, and whether we make a pet of her or not, long familiarity has given her a place in our affections. But when we go from home and visit regions infinitely richer in life than our own, it surprises and offends us to meet with the same cat still; for it looks as if man had failed, in the midst of so much variety, to find anything better or equally good. Nature abhors monotony; why should we force it on her to our own disadvantage?

Here then we have a few mammalian forms gathered at random from several widely separated families, each as it were the final and highest effort of Nature in one particular direction--“the bright consummate flower” in a group, the other members of which seem by comparison coarse and unfinished. We boast to be lovers of the beautiful, and it is here in its highest form. Birds may be said to have a greater beauty, but it is different in kind; and they are winged and far from us. They are of the sky and their forms are aerial; and their aerial nature is not in touch with ours. For the mammalians we, who are also mammals and bound to earth, have a greater sympathy, and their beauty has for us a more enduring charm. If it is out of our sight and far removed from most of us, and growing farther year by year, we have only ourselves to blame. For how rich are the mountains and forests and desert places of the earth, where we sometimes go to slay Nature’s untamed beautiful children, assisted in our task by that servant and friend that is so worthy of us! And on the other hand, how poor are our houses and villages and cities! The dog is there, inherited from barbarous progenitors, who tamed him not to be a pet or friend, but to assist them in their quest for flesh, and for other purposes; to be a scavenger, as he still is in Eastern countries, or, as in the case of the ancient Hyrcanians, to devour the corpses of their dead. He is there, but his title is bad; why should we suffer him? We may wash him daily with many waters, but the jackal taint remains. That which Nature has made unclean let it be unclean still, for we cannot make it different. Her lustral water which purifies for ever is a secret to our chemistry. Or if not altogether a secret, if, as some imagine, the ingredients may be dimly guessed, they are too slow for us in their working. Man’s years are limited and his purposes change. Nature has all time for her processes; “the eternal years of God are hers.” Moreover, there is nothing we can desire and not find in her garden, which has infinite variety. Why should we cherish a carrion-flower and wear it in our bosoms while carelessly trampling on so many bright and beautiful blooms? It is a pity to trample on them, since the effect of so destructive a habit is to make them rare; and “rarity,” as certain of our great naturalists have told us, “is the precursor to extinction.” And perhaps by and by, blaming ourselves for the past, we shall be diligently seeking everywhere for them, anxious to find and to bring them into our houses, where, after long companionship with the dog, they will serve to sweeten our imaginations and be a joy for ever.

NOTE.--I had pronounced the foregoing old magazine article unusable, partly because of the manner of it, its carefulness, and partly because it was somewhat polemical and touched on questions which are not natural history, pure and simple. Now at the last moment I have resolved to put it in--just for fun.

It appeared anonymously ages ago in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, then edited by Mowbray Morris, who wrote to me that my article had given him a painful shock, that it would hurt and disgust many readers of the Magazine, and, finally, that all I and others like me could say in derogation of the dog would have no effect on those who loved and esteemed that friend of man at its proper worth.

“All right,” I replied. “Send me back the MS. Of course you mustn’t let anything appear in your magazine to hurt the feelings of these dear people.”

No, he wouldn’t, he said. He had accepted the article and would print it. And in due time print it he did.

Just then a lady named Frances Power Cobbe, whom I greatly esteemed and admired for her courage in combating one of the most horrible forms of cruelty practised on animals, had a book in the press entitled “The Friend of Man and his Friends, the Poets.” Reading my unsigned paper in the Magazine, she picked up her pen in a noble rage to add some words to her Introduction, in which she hurled at me certain sayings of Schopenhauer describing man as a very contemptible creature when compared with the dog, and also saying that the writer of the article was “worse than a vivisectionist.”

This struck me as a bit thick, seeing that a vivisectionist had always been to her the most damnable being in the universe. One or two of my friends, who knew I had written the article, then remonstrated with the lady for using such expressions of one who, though tactless and somewhat brutal, was also a lover of all the creatures, and didn’t like to hear so much praise of the dog at the expense of the other animals. The result was that she smoothed her ruffled plumes and sent her regrets and a promise to excise the obnoxious passage in her preface in the next edition.

Of course it doesn’t matter two straws whether she ever had the opportunity of doing so or not: the best part of the story is still to come--the funny part, and a wise word which, though laughingly spoken, may yet do good.

The lady’s book in the meantime had fallen by chance into the hands of Andrew Lang, and as it was just the sort of thing to delight him, he made it the subject of one of his most charmingly amusing leaders in the _Daily News_ of that time. In this article, after the usual pleasant word for the book and its author, he deals with the subject of the dog and man’s feeling for it in ancient and modern times, and of the great length to which it has been carried recently, and concludes with a passage which I must quote in full, as I don’t think this article ever reappeared among his _Lost Leaders_, and it is worth preserving for the sake of its Andrew Langishness, as well as of its moral. After quoting some of the most notable sayings in praise of the dog, he concludes:

“There is perhaps some slight danger of reaction against all this, and Miss Cobbe seems to have anticipated it in a sharp attack on a writer hostile to dogs. This writer, as though in his turn anticipating the coming worship of the dog, has expressed himself with considerable force against the ‘great dog superstition,’ and has gone so far as to characterise the dog’s affection, devotion, and courage in defence of his master as a ‘very small and very low thing.’ It is easy to imagine how Miss Cobbe characterises _him_. Warned by this example, we shall take care not to say that, nowadays perhaps, the dog is too much with us in literature. It may be thought--we do not say it is our opinion--that the dog’s worst peril awaits him at the moment of his highest fortune, when he has become the pet and protégé of women. Women may spoil him, so the cynic might say--if a cynic could be expected to say anything unkind on such a subject--as they spoil all their favourites. Under their enervating patronage he may gradually lose some of his most cherished qualities, until he whines with the poet, ‘What is it, in this world of ours, that makes it fatal to be loved?’ For fatal it would be if the dog were gradually evolved into a thing of tricks, a suppliant for sugar at afternoon tea, a pert assailant only of the people who never mean to rob the house, or a being deaf to the cry of ‘rats,’ but fiercely active in the pursuit of a worsted ball--a fine-coated dandy with his initials embroidered on his back. His affection, his fidelity, his reasoning power are very good things, but it is not all a blessing for him that they are finding their way into literature. For literature never can take a thing simply for what it is worth. The plain dealing dog must be distinctly bored by the ever-growing obligation to live up to the anecdotes of him in the philosophic journals. These anecdotes are not told for his sake; they are told to save the self-respect of people who want an idol, and who are distorting him into a figure of pure convention for their domestic altars. He is now expected to discriminate between relations and mere friends of the house; to wag his tail at ‘God save the Queen’; to count up to five in chips of firewood, and to seven in mutton bones; to howl for all deaths in the family above the degree of second cousin; to post letters, and refuse them when they have been insufficiently stamped; and last and most intolerable, to show a tender solicitude when the tabby is out of sorts. He will do these things when they are required of him, for he is the most good-natured and obliging fellow in the world, but it ought never to be forgotten that he hates to do them, and that all he really cares for is his daily dinner, his run, his rat, and his occasional caress. He is not in the least concerned about the friendship of the poets, and the attempt to live up to their interest in him is playing havoc with his sincerity, and making him only less of a _nevrose_ than the quite unnecessary cat. His earlier difficulty with the Egyptians is a warning that ought to serve for all time. If he ate up Apis it was but as a rough and ready way of inviting the worshippers of Apis to leave him alone.”