Volume 5 — The Souls of Animals

A number of years ago, when the census enumerators were going through Canada, they found an old lady in Quebec, who, to the question what religion she professed, replied that she believed in the transmigration of souls. To what particular form of the doctrine she clung; whether she believed, with the sages of the Ganges, that the soul begins its life in the mineral or vegetable world, and must pass through no fewer than eighty-eight progressive stages before it rises to human consciousness; or, with the priests of the Nile, that the spiritual part of a man has lived for three thousand years in the forms of lower animals before it gets a human body; whether she was a Pythagorean, or a Neo-Platonist, or a Cabalist; whether she refused animal food for fear of eating unwittingly the flesh of some deceased friend or relative, and could not see a roast chicken without thinking of a cannibal; these are curious questions which we fear will never be answered. Plato believed in ten grades of migrations, each of a thousand years, in which souls were purified and punished before their return to an incorporeal existence with God; and the more virtuously they lived, the fewer grades they had to pass through. For a good, honest philosopher, about three grades were thought sufficient. Porphyry taught that bodies themselves are punishments imposed upon souls for offences committed in a previous state of which we retain no consciousness. A gross, sensual, very material body indicated a very criminal career in the previous existence. A virtuous life led by degrees through the states of heroes, angels, and archangels; and an archangel, if he behaved himself, might hope to be absorbed, in the course of time, into the divine essence itself; while for the wicked there was a similar but descending scale of transformations into devils of various degrees of moral blackness. The Cabalists held that God created originally a certain number of Jewish souls, some of which are still on earth in human form, while there are always many others doing penance for their sins in the bodies of animals. So they were careful, we trust, in their treatment of dumb beasts, not knowing but any pig or jackass they encountered might be a Jew in disguise. A conscientious Cabalist would not dare turn a dog out of doors, for fear he might be kicking his grandfather, and ought to shun fish, flesh, and fowl as religiously as he would object to dining off a blood relation. The great Christian philosopher, Origen, himself believed in the transmigration of the souls of men into the bodies of the lower animals; and adopted this doctrine as the readiest way of explaining why there are so many imperfections in animated nature; the divine Creator purposely made animals imperfect, because he meant that bodies should be the instruments of punishment and expiation for sinful souls. The Gnostics, and Manichaeans, and some other heretical sects, had the same idea, and it was also a part of the doctrine of the ancient British Druids, as it is at the present day of the Druses and other tribes of Asia, as well as of some of the African nations. Fourier allowed the soul no fewer than eight hundred and ten lives, each of them averaging a hundred years in duration, and it was to pass one third, or twenty-seven thousand of all these years, on our earth. When all the transmigrations had been accomplished, the soul was to lose its separate existence, and become confounded with the soul of the planet. But the French philosopher did not stop here. The body of the planet was to be in its turn destroyed, and its soul to transmigrate into a new earth, rising by successive stages to the highest degrees in the hierarchy of worlds.

Which of these many systems of metempsychosis was the one embraced by the eccentric old lady of Quebec we have, as we said before, no means of deciding, nor perhaps, since she appears to have founded no school of disciples, is the problem worth investigation. We can imagine what a singular position the solitary adherent of that old pagan creed must have occupied in the society of the quaint French city; how pious Catholics must have stared at her with mingled awe and horror as a relic of the times of Pythagoras and Plato, or perchance as an Indian Buddhist some centuries old, whom Time in his flight had forgotten to gather into his garner, where all her kith and kin had been laid asleep for ages. It was certainly a very uncomfortable belief, and, if it ever became general, it would play the mischief with family relations. Just think of the possibility of a man's being his own grandmother or his own posthumous son! It may have had its conveniences, but, upon the whole, we are glad it has died out.

We once heard an accomplished theologian maintain that, however philosophically absurd that doctrine might be, and however inconsistent with the spirit of Catholic teaching, there was yet no dogmatic decision which forbade a man's holding it, if he chose to be such a fool. A man might be a good Catholic and still believe that one of God's ways of punishing sin was to imprison the offending soul after death in the body of a beast; this might be a sort of purgatory. Perhaps he was right; but so we might say there is no article of faith which forbids us to believe that the moon is made of green cheese, that the earth is flat instead of round, that the Rocky Mountains are five thousand miles high, or that King Arthur was the first President of the United States. There is a sort of transmigration, however, in which reputable Catholic theologians are not altogether unwilling to believe; and this brings us to the statement of a fact which, for all that it is admitted by the mass of authorities on such subjects, will, no doubt, sound paradoxical to a great many of our readers; that is, that dumb beasts, if they have not borrowed the souls of human beings, have, at any rate, souls of their own. In our loose way of talking about things, we are but too apt to speak of the soul as one of the distinguishing prerogatives of man, and reason as another; whereas the fact is that man shares both these in common with the brute kingdom. Every animal has a soul, though not an immortal soul; and all the higher animals—probably all animals—are gifted to a greater or less extent with reason. Deny souls to beasts, and you reduce them to a level with the vegetable creation, in which life and motion are merely the necessary operations of external laws which the plant has no power either to further or obstruct. Nor need we fear that, by admitting they have souls, we raise them too near an equality with ourselves. The divine gift of immortality, the power of knowing and loving God, the right to participate in his everlasting glory—these are distinctions which must separate us by an immeasurable gulf from all inferior creatures. If beasts have no souls, it will puzzle us to define the exact difference between a dead dog and a live one.

But we have wandered away, from our speculations about metempsychosis, and are apparently in danger of forgetting the proposition which we set forth in the last paragraph, namely, that there is a certain kind of transmigration of souls in which many good theologians seem very much inclined to believe. It is an open question whether the souls of animals pass from body to body; whether, for instance, when a dog dies, its soul is annihilated, or is transferred to the body of another brute just that moment born; whether the souls of the lower orders of creatures have only the brief life which appears to be granted them, or whether their existence may not be prolonged to the end of this world. It certainly accords with what we know of the divine economy, in which everything has its permanent use and no created object seems ever to be destroyed, to suppose that, after a soul has performed its functions in the body of one beast, it may be designed by Almighty God to perform similar functions in the body of another. The plant which springs up, and blossoms, and withers, returns to life in other forms; a part of it is consumed as food and passes into the tissue of animals; a part crumbles away into vegetable mould and is assimilated by the parent earth; a part, dissolving into the constituents of the atmosphere, serves to nourish and increase other plants. The animal body itself, which decays and is changed to dust, is destined to live again in other shapes. Modern science has discovered that not even a motion is lost. The blow of the hammer which is struck upon the anvil is perpetuated in one form or another through all time. The heat of the fire which blazes for an hour and is then extinct was not created at the moment the fire was kindled, and will not be lost when the fire goes out. The sum of all the forces which act in nature is constant, unchangeable. Heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, may be expended and apparently lost, but it is only to manifest themselves in other ways. Nothing, in a word, seems to be destroyed, and, so far as our knowledge enables us to judge, God has never annihilated any material object which he has once created. And if matter is thus preserved through various changes, processes of decay and processes of renovation, why should not spirit be likewise kept in existence? The soul of man, after it leaves this body, has still eternal functions to perform in another world, either of punishment or of reward. What objection is there, then, to believing that the incorporeal part of the brute has permanent use in this world as long as the world endures?

Perhaps when we have learned to look upon the brute soul as something rather more honorable than we have been wont to regard it; as something which it is quite possible (we won't say probable) God may have designed to last till the very end of time, and not as the creature of one short day, we may be prepared to recognize in its true dignity the brute's power of reason, which seems naturally to follow from the possession of a soul. It is a common fallacy to distinguish the intelligent faculty in man as reason, and in dumb animals as instinct. The truth is, reason and instinct are two things quite different in kind; neither takes the place of the other, and each of them belongs both to man and to beast. Without aiming at strict philosophical accuracy, we may define reason as the faculty by which we weigh the relations of things, and freely and deliberately choose what we deem eligible, and reject what we consider hurtful. Instinct is an innate force or impulse inciting us under certain circumstances to act in a certain way. For example, if a man walking on a plank should feel it unexpectedly shift under his feet, he would catch at the nearest object, or endeavor to balance his body by stretching out his hands. These acts would be acts of instinct, done on the impulse of the moment, before reason had time to consider whether they ought to be done or not. Max Müller has some excellent remarks on this subject in his Lectures on the Science of Language. Instinct, he observes, is more prominent in brutes than in man; but it exists in both, as much as intellect is shared by both. "A child takes his mother's breast by instinct; the spider weaves its net by instinct; the bee builds her cell by instinct. No one would ascribe to the child a knowledge of physiology because it employs the exact muscles which are required for sucking; nor shall we claim for the spider a knowledge of mechanics, or for the bee an acquaintance with geometry, because we could not do what they do without a study of these sciences. But what if we tear a spider's web, and see the spider examining the mischief that is done, and either giving up his work in despair, or endeavoring to mend it as well as may be? Surely here we have the instinct of weaving controlled by observation, by comparison, by reflection, by judgment." Brutes indeed have all the faculties which pertain to reasoning beings. They have sensation, perception, will, memory, and intellect. They see, hear, taste, smell, and feel, just like ourselves. They experience sensations of pleasure and pain, a dog that is fondled or chastised behaving exactly as a child would behave under the same circumstances. They are able to compare and distinguish; they show signs of shame and pride, of love and hatred. To admit all this, and deny that they have souls and reason, is merely to dispute about terms.

An interesting little book has just been published in England on The Reasoning Power in Animals, by the Rev. John Selby Watson, and we purpose giving our readers a few illustrative anecdotes from this work, together with some instances that have fallen under our own observation, confirmatory of the principles we have stated in the preceding pages.

Seneca denied memory to beasts. When a horse, he says, for instance, has travelled along a road and is brought the same way again, he recognizes it; but in the stable he remembers nothing of it. This, however, cannot be proved. Almost every one has seen a dog dreaming, and acting over in his dreams what he has done in his waking moments. If he thinks of events and places in his sleep, why should he not think of them awake? And if a dog can think of them, why cannot a horse? The stories of the memory of elephants are numberless. One of these animals was being exhibited some years ago in the west of England, when a practical joker among the spectators dealt out to him in small quantities some gingerbread nuts, and, after he had secured the elephant's confidence, presented him with a large parcel weighing several pounds. The beast swallowed it at once, but, finding it too hot, roared with pain, and handed his bucket to the keeper, as if asking for water, and, as soon as he had quenched his thirst, hurled the bucket with great force at the joker's head, fortunately missing his aim. A year afterward the elephant returned to the same place, and among the spectators was the joker, again provided with sweet cakes and hot cakes. He gave the elephant two or three from the best packet, and then offered a hot one. But no sooner had the animal proved the pungency of it than he seized the coat-tails of his tormentor, and whirled him aloft in the air, until, the tails giving way, he fell prostrate to the ground, half dead with fright. The elephant then quietly inserted his trunk into the pocket containing the best nuts, and, with his foot on the coat-tails, leisurely despatched every one of them. When he had finished, he trampled the hot nuts to a mash, tore the coat-tails to tatters, and flung the rags at the discomfited joker. The old story of the elephant revenging himself by spirting dirty water over a tailor who had wounded him with a needle is too well known to be repeated. A similar story is related in Captain Shipp's Memoirs. The captain had given an elephant cayenne pepper with bread and butter, and six weeks afterward the animal remembered it and punished Captain Shipp by drenching him with dirty water.

Dogs have excellent memories, and every child is familiar with narratives of their recollecting murderers and leading to their detection. The celebrated story of the dog of Montargis, who killed the assassin of his master; of the dog who pointed out to Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, two soldiers who had slain his master, as related by Plutarch; of the dog of Antioch, commemorated by St. Ambrose; and of a dog who, according to Giraldus Cambrensis, in the thirteenth century, fought a public combat with a suspected murderer, a sort of wager-of-battle, in fact, in which the dog proved his case, are examples of this memory. Benvenuto Cellini had a watch-dog that drove away a burglar who tried one night to break into the house, and some time afterward recognized the thief in the street and seized him. A lady removing from Poitou to Paris left a spaniel behind her. Ten years afterward she sent some clothes packed by herself to the person who had charge of the dog. The little creature no sooner smelt them than he gambolled round them and showed every mark of excessive joy.

The horse has an excellent memory both for persons and places. He never forgets a road he has once travelled. A horse accustomed to be employed once a week on a journey with the newsman of a provincial paper always stopped at the houses of the several customers, sixty or seventy in number. There were two persons on the route who took one paper between them, and each claimed the privilege of having it first on the alternate Sunday. The horse soon became accustomed to this regulation; and, though the parties lived two miles apart, he stopped at the door of each in his regular turn. Here was certainly a very remarkable exercise of memory. A wonderful example of the use of the same faculty is seen in the facility with which animals that have been carried away from home find their way back. The writer had a Newfoundland slut which was sent away with one of her pups a considerable distance by railroad, shut up in a box-car. A fortnight afterward Jet and her offspring were found at their old home, foot-sore and half starved. How they had made their way back over roads which they could only have seen in occasional glimpses from the door of the car always remained a mystery. But far more wonderful instances of canine memory than this are on record. A terrier that was taken from Arundel to London in a close cart, and tied up in the evening in a yard near Grosvenor square, was found at Arundel, sixty miles distant, the following afternoon. A Scotch dog having been taken to Frankfort, and having there seen its master drowned in the Oder, after having made ineffectual efforts to save him, found its way from Frankfort to Hamburg, from Hamburg to Hull, and from Hull to Edinburgh. Lord Lonsdale sent two hounds from Leicestershire to Ireland, and at the end of three weeks they reappeared in Leicestershire. A Mr. Edward Cook, having lived some time with his brother at Togsten in Northumberland, came to America, bringing with him a pointer dog, which, while shooting in the woods near Baltimore, he lost. Some time afterward Mr. Cook's brother, who continued to reside at Togsten, was aroused one night by the barking of a dog, which, on being let in, proved to be the lost pointer. He remained there until his master came back from America. By what vessel he had made his way across the Atlantic was never ascertained. The persistency with which cats will return to places from which they have been sent away is well known. Lord Brougham, in his Letters on Instinct, mentions one that was taken to the West Indies, and on the return of the ship to London, found her way through the city to Brompton, whence she had been taken. Mrs. Lee tells the following story in her Anecdotes of Animals:

"When living at Four Paths, Clarendon, Jamaica, I wanted a cat, and had one given to me which was nearly full-grown. It was brought from Morgan's Valley estate, where it was bred, and had never been removed from that place before. The distance was five miles. It was put into a canvas bag, and carried by a man on horseback. Between the two places there are two rivers, one of them about eighty feet broad and two and a half deep, and over these rivers there are no bridges. The cat was shut up at Four Paths for some days, and when considered to be reconciled to her new dwelling she was allowed to go about the house. The day after obtaining her liberty she was missing, and upon my next visiting the estate she was brought from, I was quite amazed to learn that the cat had come back again. Did she swim over the rivers at the fords where the horse came through with her, or did she ascend the banks for a considerable distance in search of a more shallow place, and where the stream was less powerful? At all events, she must have crossed the rivers in opposition to her natural habits."

A farmer living on the borders of the New Forest in Hampshire, bought a mare near Newport, in the Isle of Wight, and took it home with him, crossing to the main-land in a boat. During the night the animal escaped from the enclosure in which the farmer had fastened it, and made its way home again, swimming across the strait. The nearest distance from the Hampshire coast to the Isle of Wight is five miles. A cow which had been sent to grass at a place twenty-one miles from her owner's residence remained there contentedly all summer; but, as soon as the grass began to fail, travelled home to her old pasturage. A cow was separated from her young calf and driven twelve miles to Smithfield to be sold, but early the next morning she was found at home, having escaped from the market and made her way through all the intricacies of London. Dr. John Brown, in one of his inimitable dog-papers, gives an instance of a dog finding his way home from a distance, under circumstances which almost seem to justify his notion that the canine race have an idea of humor. A Scottish shepherd, having sold his sheep at a market, was asked by the buyer to lend him his dog to take them home. "'By a' manner o' means take Birkie, and when ye'r dune wi' him just play so,' (making a movement with his arm,) 'and he'll be hame in a jiffy.' Birkie was so clever, and useful, and gay, that the borrower coveted him; and on getting to his farm shut him up, intending to keep him. Birkie escaped during the night, and took the entire hirsel (flock) back to his own master! Fancy him trotting across the moor with them, they as willing as he."

There are some well-authenticated instances of animals finding their way home by roads they never travelled before which are difficult of explanation. In March, 1816, an ass, the property of Captain Dundas, R. N., was shipped at Gibraltar on board the Ister frigate, bound for Malta. The vessel having grounded off Point de Gat, the animal was thrown overboard to give it a chance of swimming ashore—a poor one, for the land was some distance off and the sea running very high. A few days afterward, however, when the gates of Gibraltar were opened in the morning, the ass presented himself for admittance, and proceeded to a stable which he had formerly occupied. He had not only swum ashore, but, without guide, compass, or travelling map, and with no previous knowledge of the route, had travelled from Point de Gat to Gibraltar, a distance of more than two hundred miles, through a mountainous and intricate country intersected by streams; and he had done it in so short a time that he could hardly have made single false turn. What directed him on this wonderful journey it is impossible to conjecture, unless we suppose that he had the good sense to follow the line of the coast; and that he should have known that such a course would lead him home certainly argues a very large share of the reasoning faculty. In point of fact, however, there is a curious and incomprehensible instinct for finding the way which belongs not only to the lower animals, but to man himself in the savage state. The migrations of birds afford familiar examples of it, swallows especially, returning year after year to build their nests in the same place. Two or three years ago six swallows were taken from their nests at Paris, and conveyed to Vienna, where a small roll of paper with a few words written on it was affixed to the wing of each; and they were let go one morning at a quarter past seven. Two arrived at Paris a little before one; one at a quarter past two; and one at four. The other two did not return at all, having perhaps met with some mishap. A falcon was taken from the Canaries to Andalusia and returned in sixteen hours, a distance of six hundred miles. Salmon are supposed to return in all cases to the river where they were bred. Crabs may be carried two or three miles out to sea, and they will find their way back to their old haunts. Mr. Jesse, in his Gleanings in Natural History, relates an extraordinary story of a tortoise which was captured at the Island of Ascension in the South Atlantic, and carried with several others to England. It had lost one fin, and was consequently named by the sailors the Lord Nelson. The voyage was very long, and most of the turtles died, and as the Lord Nelson seemed sickly when they drew near port, the sailors, in order "to give it a chance," threw it overboard in the English Channel, after it had been branded in the usual way, with certain letters and numbers burnt upon its under shell with a hot iron. Wonderful to relate, the same turtle was taken at the Island of Ascension two years afterward, having found its way three thousand five hundred miles through the watery waste to that little speck in the midst of the ocean. The unerring certainty with which bees fly in a straight line to their hives is proverbial, and bee-hunters discover the nests by catching two of the insects, carrying them to some distance apart, and letting them go. Each will at once take a straight line toward the nest, and by observing these lines and calculating where they ought to intersect, the honey is found. This instinct is the more remarkable as bees are very near-sighted, not being able, it is supposed, to see more than a yard before them. We have mentioned that savages have something of the same instinct, finding their way for long distances, not always by their acuteness of observation, but by an indescribable faculty which is like nothing so much as the instinct of birds. Mr. Jesse tells a story of a traveller in Australia, who lost his way in the interior, and was guided by one of the natives more than a hundred miles in a straight line to the place he wanted to reach. The savage, he was assured, could have led him almost as well blindfold, for he travelled as accurately when the sun was obscured as when it was visible, and was not assisted by marks on the barks of trees, or any of the other familiar landmarks of the wilderness. Our own frontiersmen have the same faculty to a greater or lesser degree. We ourselves, on two occasions, after a long day's hunt in the far West, in which we followed the game through so many twists and turns as to lose all idea of the points of the compass, were conducted by a trapper twelve or fifteen miles back to camp, on a perfectly dark night, across an utterly trackless prairie. There was neither tree, nor hill, nor footprint to mark the way, but our course was as straight as the bee flies. The trapper could not explain how he did it: it was by a species of instinct. The Newfoundland slut Jet, mentioned on a preceding page, once found her way to the writer's house, under circumstances which indicated the exercise of reason much more unmistakably than the instances just cited. The family were about moving from one house to another some two miles distant; but as the new dwelling was not ready for occupation when the lease of the old one expired, the furniture was stored in the neighborhood, and we all went away for a few weeks, leaving Jet behind. When we came to take possession of the new house, we found Jet there before us, although nothing belonging to us had yet been carried to the premises, and, so far as we knew, she had never been there in our company. Another dog belonging to us had been there, however, once or twice with one of the servants, and Jet perhaps had learned the secret from him. But it certainly showed great mental acuteness in the animal that she should not have followed the furniture, knowing apparently that it was only stowed away for a time, but, by putting this and that together, should have found out where her master meant to establish himself.

The power of putting this and that together is emphatically a reasoning faculty; in other words, it is the power of tracing the relation between cause and effect. The literature of natural history abounds in examples of the possession of this faculty by animals, and so does the experience of every one who has ever kept dogs or horses. Jet had it to an eminent degree. When she was about to bring forth a litter, she always tried to dig a cave for them under the steps of the front door. This, of course, was forbidden, but she was resolute, and many a time she had her cavern nearly finished before she was detected. The bell-wire passed under the steps, so that in the course of her digging she was very apt to ring the bell, and it was some time before the servants found out whence the mysterious ringing originated; but, when the secret was discovered, Jet was pulled out and punished. Punishment did not break her of the habit; indeed, she was an incorrigibly obstinate dog, and never was broken of any trick she once set her mind upon; but after that, whenever she heard the bell, she ran out of the hole and hid at the corner of the house until the coast was clear, when she would go back to work, taking more pains to avoid the wire. If her master was at home and suspected who rang the bell, he often answered the door himself, and looking toward the side of the house he was sure to see Jet peeping cautiously round the corner with such a mischievous and comical expression in her eyes that he rarely refrained from a hearty laugh; whereupon the dog would pluck up heart, and come forward, grinning and apologizing, as if to say, "I am very sorry I've given you so much trouble; I didn't know it was wrong, and I won't do so again." She was a dreadful liar, (for dogs can lie with their eyes and faces, as well as men can lie with their tongues.) but it was all very funny. Her understanding the use of a door-bell reminds us of a story told of an Italian greyhound at Bologna, which was accustomed every morning to visit a dog of its own species at a neighboring house. At first it used to wait in the street until the door was opened, but after a time it learned to use the knocker. Mr. Nassau Senior, in one of his articles in The Quarterly Review, gives an instance from his own knowledge of the way in which a terrier used to obtain admission to the common-room at Merton College, Oxford, whose sacred threshold, be it known, dogs are strictly forbidden to cross. "The animal's cunning," says Mr. Senior, "would have done honor to an Old Bailey attorney." We give the narrative in his own language: "It happened one evening that a couple of terriers had followed their masters to the door, and while they remained excluded, unhappily followed the habits rather of biped than of quadruped animals, and began to quarrel like a couple of Christians. The noise of the fight summoned their masters to separate them, and as it appeared that the hero of our tale had been much mauled by a superior adversary, the severe bienséances of the place were for once relaxed, and he was allowed to enjoy during the rest of the night the softness of a monastic rug and the blaze of a monastic fire, luxuries which every initiated dog and man will duly appreciate. The next day, soon after the common-room party had been assembled, the sounds of the preceding evening were renewed with tenfold violence. There was such snapping and tearing, and snarling and howling, as could be accounted for only by a general engagement:

But, instead of a battle royal, they found at the door their former guest, in solitude sitting on his rump, and acting a furious dog-fight, in the hope of again gaining admittance among the quieti ordines deorum. We have heard that he was rewarded with both the grandes and the petites entrées; but this does not rest on the same authority as the rest of the narrative."

Mr. Watson's book abounds with other instances of intelligence in animals, which it is almost impossible to avoid attributing to the operation of reason. He gives an anecdote, for instance, of an elephant which, seeing an artillery-man fall from the tumbril of a gun, in such a situation that in a second or two the wheel of the gun carriage must have gone over him, instantly, without any warning from its keeper, lifted the wheel with its trunk and kept it suspended until the carriage had passed clear of the soldier. Here the elephant manifestly reasoned for himself. A still more remarkable manifestation of the reasoning faculty is recorded of an animal of the same species. An elephant in a menagerie was trained to pick up coins with his trunk. On one occasion a sixpence was thrown down which fell a little beyond his reach (he was chained) and near the wall. After several vain attempts to pick it up, he stood motionless a few seconds, evidently considering how to act; he then stretched his proboscis as far as he could in a straight line, a little distance above the coin, and blew with great force against the wall. The blast of air, rebounding from the wall, caught up the sixpence and drove it toward him, as he evidently intended it should. Another elephant was once seen to blow a potato which was just beyond his reach against the wall, and catch it when it rebounded. The ingenuity displayed in these cases is something akin to the use of tools which has been declared a characteristic of man alone. This, however, is a mistake. The club which the gorilla is known to wield with such terrible power, the palm-branches with which elephants brush away flies, the stones which monkeys and even birds have been seen to use either in breaking open shells or keeping them distended while they extracted the shell-fish—what are these but tools? Foxes have been seen to set cods' heads as baits for crows, and pounce upon the birds when they came to eat them. The ingenuity of rats in getting at toothsome morsels is well known; there are many instances of their using their tails to extract oil from narrow-necked bottles—all these cases being equivalent to the use of tools. A Newfoundland dog at Torquay, wanting water, took a pail from the kitchen and carried it to the pump, where he sat down until one of the men-servants came out, to whom he made such significant gestures that the man pumped the pail full for him. The most remarkable part of the story is that, when the dog had finished, he carried back the pail to the place in the kitchen from which he had taken it. That was something all the same as a tool which the eagle of St. Kilda, mentioned by Macgillivray, used when, attacking two boys who had robbed her nest, she dipped her pinions first in water and then in sand, to give greater force to the blows which she struck with them. A rat has been seen conducting a blind companion by means of a stick, each of the animals holding one end of it in his mouth. Cats have often been known to learn the use of a latch; and a terrier pup, only two months old, belonging to the writer of this article, has so good an idea of the purpose of the same article that he manifests a desire to get out of the room by ineffectual jumps at the door-handle. A London pastry-cook had a number of eggs stolen from a store room at the top of the house; a watch being set for the thief, two rats were detected carrying an egg downstairs. One of the rats, going down one step, would stand on his hind-legs with his fore paws resting on the stair above, while the other rolled the egg toward him; then, putting his fore-legs tightly round it, he lifted it down to the step on which he was standing, and held it there till the other came down to take charge of it. Rats have been known to convey eggs up-stairs by a somewhat similar process.

A very clear example of reasoning occurs in a story told of a water-hen, which, having observed a pheasant feed out of a box which opened when the bird stood on a rail in front of it, went and stood in the same place as soon as the pheasant quitted it. Finding that its weight was not sufficient to raise the lid of the box, it kept jumping on the rail to give additional impetus. This only succeeded partially; so the clever bird went away and fetched another of its own species, and the weight of the two had the desired effect. An anecdote is told by Mrs. Lee of a magpie which is almost enough to persuade one that the creature had the gift of language. The bird used to watch about a neighboring toll-gate at times when he expected the toll-keeper's wife to be making pastry; and, if he observed her so employed, he would perch upon the gate and shout, "Gate ahoy!" when, of course, if her husband were absent, she would run out to open it; the bird would then dart into the house and carry away a billful of her pie-crust, eating and chattering over it with the greatest glee. Surely no one will deny that in this case the bird exercised the faculty of reason.

Somewhat analogous to this case are the many stories related of animals apparently understanding what is said in their presence. In reality they probably have no conception of the meaning of the words uttered, but their keenness of observation enables them to detect slight changes in the tone of voice and notice little things which escape our coarser vision; and from trifling signs they draw reasonable conclusions. The writer had a cat which always knew when the servant was told to fetch food for her, though the experiment was often tried of giving the order in various tones of voice and without any look or sign that would be likely to attract pussy's attention. During our last war with England there was an old Newfoundland dog on board the British ship Leander, stationed at Halifax. He had been attached to the ship several years, and the sailors one and all believed that he understood what was said. He was lying on the deck one day when the captain in passing remarked: "I shall be sorry to do it, but I must have Neptune shot, he is getting so old and infirm." The dog immediately jumped overboard and swam to another ship, where being taken on board he remained till he died. Nothing could ever induce him to go near the Leander again, and if he happened to meet any of her boats or crew on shore, he made off as fast as he could.

Animals certainly have the power of communicating thoughts to each other, as the following story proves: "At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, (a village where Milton passed some of his early days,) about the year 1818, a gentleman from London took possession of a house, the former tenant of which had moved to a farm about half a mile off. The new inmate brought with him a large French poodle, to take the duty of watchman in the place of a fine Newfoundland dog which went away with his master; but a puppy of the same breed was left behind; and he was incessantly persecuted by the poodle. As the puppy grew up, the persecution still continued. At length he was one day missing for some hours; but he did not come back alone; he returned with his old friend, the large house-dog, to whom he had made a communication; and in an instant the two fell upon the unhappy poodle and killed him before he could be rescued from their fury. In this case the injuries of the young dog must have been made known to his friend, a plan of revenge concerted, and the determination formed to carry the plan into effect with equal promptitude." Count Tilesius, a Russian traveller, who wrote at the beginning of the present century, tells a wonderful anecdote of a dog of his which had been sadly worried by a larger and stronger animal. For some days it was observed that he saved half his food and laid it up as a private store. When he had accumulated a large supply, he went out and gathered around him several dogs of the neighborhood, whom he brought to his home and feasted on his hoard. The singular spectacle of a dog giving a supper-party attracted the count's attention, and he determined to watch their proceedings. As soon as the feast was over, they went out in a body, marched deliberately through the streets to the outskirts of the town, and there, under the leadership of their entertainer, fell upon a large dog and punished him severely. This incident not only shows that dogs can communicate their thoughts to one another, and can follow out a fixed plan of action, but it looks very much as if they had what is generally supposed to be peculiar to man—namely, some idea of a bargain. They can be magnanimous in their behavior toward their fellows, and the measures which large dogs occasionally adopt to get rid of the annoyance of little curs display a great deal of judgment and good feeling. In Mr. Youatt's book, On the Dog, we have a story of a Newfoundland dog in the city of Cork which had been greatly worried by a number of noisy curs. He took no notice of them until one carried his presumption so far as to bite him in the leg, whereupon the large animal ran after the offender, caught him by the back of the neck, and carried him to the quay. There, after holding him suspended over the edge for a few moments, he dropped him into the river. But he had no purpose to inflict more than a mild punishment, for after the cur had been well ducked and frightened and was beginning to struggle for his life, the Newfoundland dog plunged into the water and brought him safe to land. That animal certainly showed good sense, a good heart, and a lively appreciation of what was just and proper. A very comical example of a dog's feeling of propriety is quoted by Mr. Watson from Jesse's Gleanings in Natural History. "A gentleman going out shooting obtained the loan of a pointer from a friend, who told him that the dog would behave very well as long as he killed his birds: but that, if he frequently missed, it would leave him and run home. Unhappily the borrower was extremely unskilful. Bird after bird was put up and fired at, but flew off untouched, till the pointer grew careless. As if willing, however, to give his client one chance more, he made a dead stop at a fern bush, with big nose pointed downward, his forefoot bent, and his tail straight and steady. In this position he remained firm till the sportsman was close to him, with both barrels cocked; he then moved steadily forward for a few paces, and at last stood still near a bunch of heather, his tail expressing his anxiety by moving slowly backward and forward. At last out sprang a fine old black cock. Bang, bang, went both barrels, but the bird escaped unhurt. This was more than the dog could bear; he turned boldly round, placed his tail between his legs, gave one long, loud howl, and set off homeward as fast as he could."

Perhaps, after all, one of the most curious exhibitions of reason is afforded by the crows, which, in the northern parts of Scotland and in the Faroe Islands, hold extraordinary meetings every now and then, apparently for the purpose of judging and punishing evil-doers among their community. The sessions are sometimes prolonged two or three days; and as long as they last, flocks of crows continue to arrive in great numbers from all quarters of the heavens. In the mean while, some of the assembly are active and noisy; others sit with drooping heads as grave as judges. When the gathering is complete, a very general noise ensues—we are tempted to call it talking—and then the whole body fall upon one or two individuals and put them to death. Justice thus vindicated, the convention straightway disperses. Now, the crows show every appearance of having been summoned to these councils; indeed, it is almost inconceivable that they should meet by chance; but how the summons is given; how they know when all have arrived; what are the offences they punish; whether the criminals know the fate that awaits them, and are restrained by force from making their escape; and how the knowledge of the crime is dispersed amongst the whole assembly—these are curious questions to which we fear no satisfactory answer will ever be given. The idea of hundreds of birds sitting in deliberation, like a court of justice, is indeed marvellous. We can only say that the narrative, as we have given it, seems to be well authenticated, and we leave our readers to draw their own conclusions.

We think we have quoted anecdotes enough to prove that brutes have souls and reason; or, if they have not, that they are much more wonderfully made than man, since they can perform without assistance from the reasoning faculty actions which in us require the exercise of the highest intelligence. And although we do not go to the length of saying, with the Rabbi Manasseh of old, and Dr. John Brown, the author of Spare Hours, in our own day, that there is a next world for the brute creation; and do not believe with another modern writer (the Rev. J. G. Wood) that divine justice absolutely requires that God should make amends to animals in the future life for the sufferings they endure in this—perhaps our readers will agree with us that we have shown it to be no ways impossible that God may have designed the souls of dumb beasts to outlast in this world their perishable bodies; that the intelligent part of the sagacious dog may animate a long succession of Rabs and Pontos; and the spirit of the dead pet may return into bodily form to delight new generations of masters.