the animal, 'to such a place, but don't go in, mind you, and come back directly,'-then to M. Blaze, 'I tell him not to go in, because he would fight with the other dogs.' The dog did as he was bid, conducted M. Blaze to the house, and returned to his master. Here it is clear that the house to which he was sent was a familiar word like his own name, and equally clear that he had been often scolded for venturing within its precincts, and embroiling himself with his kindred, so that he would readily comprehend the scope of the prohibition from the monitory voice with which it was uttered. It was certainly a beautiful display of docility; but as regards the capacity of the dog to catch the meaning of words, it proves nothing more than that he attaches ideas to a few customary well-defined and expressive sounds. He would seem, however, to have an accurate sense of the lapse of time. That he distinguishes Sunday is nothing. Everything wears such a different aspect that he might identify it at a glance. But he is also conscious of the recurrence of any other day of the week. A dog that belongs to the brother of Sir Thomas Wilde runs away on the Saturday night, and remains from home till the Monday morning, in order to escape being chained on the Sunday. Southey says in his Omniana,' that he knew of a dog which grew up with a Catholic, and was sold to a Protestant, that would never eat on a Friday. His grandfather had one which every Saturday (the killing-day of the week) went a couple of miles to pick up offal at the butcher's shop. A bull-dog mentioned by M. Blaze, who was accustomed to go on the same errand, kept to the propitious hour as well as the day. This dog was always present at family prayers, and when the last Pater was commenced he got up and stood at the door, that he might be ready to go out the instant it was opened. We suspect that he was instructed here by a slight movement in the circle, or by a variation in the pitch of reading; and not, as M. Blaze infers, by his ability to count the number of Paters. The dog also recognises colours. Prisoners have written letters, according to M. Blaze, on yellow, red, or blue paper, and sent them by their dogs, who knew by the tint to whom they were addressed. It is certain that the dog with a little training makes an excellent messenger. Mr. Kirby mentions in his Bridgewater treatise that one that was accustomed to carry packets to a house, went to the kitchen to be fed when he had deposited his charge, and, as soon as he had done, appeared barking at the parlourwindow, to give notice that he was ready to return. Some have gone so far as to knock at the door, or ring the bell. The Spanish writer quoted by Lord Brougham, says that a friend was wont when he called to leave his mastiff at the door of the house,

and

and the animal, in imitation of his master, pulled the bell in order to get in. The dog of a shop-keeper, who ran in and out of the street-door during the week, had always recourse to the knocker on Sunday when it was shut. Priscilla Wakefield, who tells this anecdote, adds two or three more of the same nature. M. Blaze knew a dog whose habit was, not to ring the bell, but to answer it. He regularly followed the servant from the kitchen to the door, and the visitor from the door to the parlour. In his old age, becoming too deaf to hear the sound, he took up his quarters where he could see the bell, that by watching its motion he might continue to know when anybody called.

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The dog possesses the to us incomprehensible instinct-in common, however, with other animals-of finding his way by a road that he has never traversed. Mr. Blain tells of a dog that was sent by sea from London to Scotland, and escaped back to the metropolis by land. Boisrot de Lacour, a French writer on the chase, took a terrier from Rochefort to Paris, and though the dog made the journey in a carriage, and slept all the way, he returned when he was liberated to his former master. Once again he borrowed a hound of a brother sportsman, who resided at a considerable distance; the next day, when he was let out to hunt, he slipped away and ran off home, not, as was discovered, by the road he had been brought, but in a straight line across flood and field. M. Blaze calls this instinct a sixth sense, of which we can frame no sort of idea. Experience, however,' he continues, 'demonstrates that it exists. The camel conducts his master three hundred leagues through the sands of the desert, where there is no track to guide him. The pigeon carries letters through the pathless air. The birds of passage born in Europe emigrate to India; and, what is remarkable, travel ordinarily without their parents who have made the voyage before. The horse finds his road across the snow; and probably all animals have the same faculty.' On the other hand, an extraordinary circumstance, related by Dupont de Nemours, in a memoir read before the French Institute, can only be attributed to the effects of intelligence. The dog in question was the property of a shoe-black at Paris, whose trade he sustained by dipping his paws into the mud and soiling the shoes of the first person that passed along. If the pedestrian continued his progress, he dirtied the next; if he stopped to have the mischief repaired, he remained quiet till his master was at leisure for a fresh customer, and then the game recommenced. He was purchased by an Englishman, enchanted with his cleverness, and taken to London. He contrived to escape, went to the inn where the coach that brought him put up, followed it back to Dover, and, after crossing in a packet-boat

packet-boat to Calais, again placed himself in the wake of a carriage, which pioneered him to Paris. One habit of dogs, that of deserting a town an hour or two before an earthquake, which is frequently ascribed to some strange and unaccountable instinct, depends simply on their every-day perceptions. The rumbling sound strikes their quick ears before it is heard by any one else, and scares them away. In our observation of the dog we seldom attach sufficient importance to the fineness of his senses. They are so acute that a sleeping dog knows whether he is touched by his master or a stranger, remaining quiet in the first case, and growling in the last.

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Another feature of the dog, which is really singular, is the exceeding strength of his hereditary instincts. We will not build on the assertion that the progeny of the dogs trained by Cortez and Pizarro to destroy the Indians, attacked the savages with the same fury as their parents before them, because we think that the occurrence is not properly authenticated: nor do we attach any weight to the circumstance, recorded by White, in his Natural History of Selborne,' of the pups of the Chinese dogs that were taken from teat showing a dislike to animal food, because the vegetable diet of the mother must have affected her milk, and might very well have formed the taste of her offspring. But we confine ourselves to notorious and indisputable facts, such as that the peculiarities of the pointer, which are entirely artificial, have become nearly innate in a succession of generations; or as that the produce of a shepherd's dog, who is in active service, instinctively keeps the flocks, while, if his father or grandfather have been taken away from their natural occupation, he will have lost the art, and be difficult to teach.

'I ascertained,' says Mr. Knight, who investigated this subject for a long series of years, that a terrier, whose parents had been in the habit of fighting with polecats, will instantly show every mark of anger when he first perceives the scent of that animal, though the animal itself be wholly concealed from his sight. A young spaniel, brought up with the terrier, showed no marks of emotion at the scent of the polecat, but it pursued a woodcock, the first time it saw one, with clamour and exultation; and a young pointer, which I am certain had never seen a partridge, stood trembling with anxiety, its eyes fixed, and its muscles rigid, when conducted into the midst of a covey of those birds. Yet each of these dogs are mere varieties of the same species, and to that species none of these habits are given by nature.'

Woodcocks resort in frosty weather to streams and rills that remain unfrozen, and the old dogs, who can always tell the deof cold which induces them to shift their quarters, make, on gree such occasions, for the water. Not only did Mr. Knight find

that

that their young did the same thing, but that the amount of their skill was proportioned to the experience of their parents at the time of their birth. The hunting dogs of Mexico seize behind, and never in front, the large deer of the country, who would otherwise throw them down and break their backs. Their offspring inherit the tactics of their fathers; whereas all other dogs commit the error of facing the game, and are killed in consequence. A pup of the St. Bernard's breed, that was born in London, took, when winter came, and the snow was on the ground, to tracing footsteps after the fashion of his Alpine ancestors, which he had never done in the previous seasons. The dog who dug a hole in the sand of the sea-shore to protect himself from the rays of a burning sun, while his companion, instead of imitating him, lay howling with pain, was probably the descendant of one of those canine colonies who burrow in the ground. It would be useless to comment on this strange propensity: hitherto it has remained as inexplicable as it is certain. If more attention was paid to it in practice, it might be possible to bring the qualities of the dog to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown.

More marvellous than all, in the eyes of the vulgar, are the tricks that have been taught to dogs by showmen. Plutarch saw a dog that would pretend to be poisoned. He swallowed the drug, and then went through the stages of dying, death, and gradual revival. M. Blaze witnessed the exhibition of some dancing dogs, who took a citadel by assault: part feigned to be vanquishers, part to be killed, others affected to be wounded, and went about limping. They have been brought to spell two or three hundred words, to perform the three first rules of arithmetic, to play at cards, at draughts, and at dominos; and, if one of the number committed a mistake, the others corrected him. But, however calculated to raise ignorant wonder, we take no pleasure in these learned feats, which are mere mechanical exercises, impressed upon the dog with infinite labour and cruelty; and of the meaning of which he knows absolutely nothing. So it was with the dog that Leibnitz heard pronounce, after his master, reluctantly and indistinctly, above thirty words. Shortly after, a man at Berlin contrived to extort a species of resemblance to double that number, by exciting a dog to growl, and then working his jaws. It cost him six years to attain this idle result. 'I love better,' says M. Blaze, the natural language of the dog: it is a thousand times more expressive than the mechanical repetition of all the words in the dictionary.' Assuredly, it could not be more intelligible if he was gifted with speech; and among dogs themselves it appears to enable them to communicate past events and future intentions. A dog that has been bitten by one larger than

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himself,

himself, has been repeatedly seen to assemble his friends, who have gone in a troop to punish the offender.

This brings us to say a word upon the intercourse of dogs with one another, which is by no means of so amiable a cast as that which they maintain with ourselves. Their casual greetings are often of an angry, and generally of a mistrustful, surly nature. When strange dogs have once quarrelled they can never meet without renewing hostilities. M. Blaze avers that he had known the enmity of a dog extend to the master of his opponent, and no conciliation could disarm his wrath. They long retain the remembrance of any injury inflicted on them by one of their race. Tallemant des Reaux says that in his time the Bishop of Vence had a little dog who barked and pulled his cassock, as if to demand vengeance, whenever any one pronounced the name of a mastiff that had bitten him, and he continued to do this two years after the event. When the manifest superiority is combined with good nature, the dog will sometimes take only a playful vengeance. Colonel Hamilton Smith witnessed a curious scene between a cur and a shepherd's dog, in which the former had bitten a sheep, and the latter to punish him dragged him by his ear to a puddle, where he kept dabbling him in the mud. On another occasion the Colonel was present when a water-dog showed to a stranger of his kind a perfect generosity. He plunged unbidden into the current of a roaring sluice to save a small cur maliciously flung in. In almost every case dogs contract an exceeding attachment when once they become companions. If one is attacked the other usually rushes to his aid. Though extremely jealous of their food, even appetite has been known to give way to affection. A Newfoundland dog who roamed at large was seen more than once, says Sheppard, in his Autumn Dream,' to leap the gate which separated the yard of the house from the farmyard, and carry large bones that had been given him to a sporting dog who was tied up in the stable. We have often ourselves observed a greyhound suffer a little spaniel who lived with him to take away his food. In moments of danger they show the deepest sympathy. When a poor creature stuck fast in a burrow, his companions spent two days in digging him out with their feet. And Wordsworth commemorates another faithful friend, who stood moaning with outstretched paws to see a fellow-dog, with whom he was hunting, lost beneath the ice upon which he had trusted himself in pursuit of a hare. No one is ignorant of the love which the female bears to her young, and few are unacquainted with that marvellous and affecting instance of it quoted by Addison in a paper of the Spectator':-A person who was well skilled in dissections opened a bitch, and, as she lay in the most exquisite

tortures,