Puslapio vaizdai
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approach them closely except from leeward. Similarly, Mr. Slater has pointed out that male butterflies can be attracted from a very great distance by a female enclosed in a box; and such insects always sail up from leeward; that is to say, from the direction in which the wind carried the scent. I have myself occasionally detected the smell of brickfields and of breweries at a distance of a couple of miles, while burning spice or paraffin can be smelt at enormous distances and there is no difficulty in supposing that to the acute olfactory nerves of dogs, accustomed as they are to track a single human trail along a road crossed and recrossed by a hundred others in every direction, much less powerful perfumes might be perceived and recognised within far greater limits of space. Wolves discover travellers at immense distances. It seems to me not at all improbable, therefore, that the dog which ran straight from Dublin to its old home may have been guided in a direct line by certain combinations of well-known though very faint odours, borne to it by the wind across an interval which seems extravagantly great to us, only because of the relative inferiority of our senses. When we recollect that home was probably just as much known to it under the form of a bundle of odours as under the form of a bundle of visual impressions, this conjecture becomes really far from remarkable.

A word or two may be given, not unprofitably, to the probable course of evolution as regards the olfactory sense in dogs. We must remember that all mammals doubtless received the sense of smell in a highly developed condition from their original pre-mammalian ancestors. But amongst carnivores generally, this primitive endowment would be continuously exercised and improved in the search for game a hunting species needs keen senses to discover the trail of its swift-footed prey. Those wild dogs or wolves which had the sharpest scent would best track down and destroy the animals upon whose flesh they fed; while those whose noses were less acute would die out under stress of competition. Thus the original sense would be perpetually sharpened by natural selection, till at length it reached the extraordinary development which we find to-day in the bloodhound and the setter. At the same time, as the brain was increased during the struggle for existence between the keen-witted mammalian tribes, the connections linking the organs of scent to the great central co-ordinating structures would become more and more numerous, complex, and important. So would arise the developed canine intelligence an intelligence shared by the dog with his close relatives the wolf, the fox, and the dingo. On the other hand, as the early common ancestors of the lemurs, monkeys, and men grew more and

more decidedly arboreal in their habits and frugivorous in their tastes, they would exercise their sense of smell less and less from day to day. They have not to hunt living and wary animals, but merely to search for immovable fruits or nuts on trees and bushes. Monkeys sniff at their food, to be sure; but they never seem to smell their way about, as dogs and other carnivores must necessarily do. Moreover, it seems pretty clear that their chief intellectual sense and their practical guide is sight, because the fruits developed to suit their tastes are bright in colour and often conspicuous in their contrast with the surrounding green leaves; but they have generally little or no perfume, and what little they possess is apparently accidental, being only perceived when they are crushed or bruised: whereas most flowers, developed to suit the tastes of bees, whose senses of sight and smell are equally evolved, possess piercing and abundant perfumes which seem to be almost as important in attracting insects as are their brightly-coloured corollas. So monkeys have naturally little need of acute nostrils. Their olfactory lobes are accordingly much less relatively large than are those of carnivores or ruminants : the disuse of the faculty has caused dwindling of the correlated organ, and doubtless also of its connections with other portions of the brain. In man, apparently, only those few emotional waves, already mentioned, now survive to give us some dim idea of the great system of chords, silent in our race, but once resonant to a thousand varying moods in our earlier ancestors.

But, as smell becomes less and less an intellectual sense, it becomes more and more purely a source of direct sensuous pleasure or discomfort. Man, and especially civilised man, is extremely sensitive to perfumes, viewed as agreeable or disagreeable; while the dog takes little note of their immediate pleasurableness or painfulness, being more engaged in considering their remoter intellectual implications. We ourselves delight in the breath of violets and roses; while a dog, as Geiger says, takes not the slightest notice of what seem to us the most exquisite perfumes of flowers or leaves. On the other hand, we are repelled at once by the effluvia of dead animals and other noisome odours; while the dog quietly regards them as fit subjects for scientific contemplation. He pokes his nose unconcernedly into the midst of carrion, merely to investigate what sort of rubbish it may be. But Geiger is quite wrong in supposing that this canine insensibility to olfactory pleasures and pains is a mark of sensuous inferiority. It is, on the contrary, an accompaniment of high discriminativeness. The dog can distinguish between a thousand different individual trails of scent, left by a thousand speci

fically identical human beings: while we ourselves can at best distinguish the smell of dogs from the smell of cats, if indeed we can accurately do even that. In fact, though Sir William Hamilton framed his law far too stringently in its antithetical conciseness, there is much rough truth in his generalisation, that the emotional and intellectual elements in every sense-perception are inversely proportional to one another. Only, we must remember that the principle applies merely to the direct and immediate emotional effects, not to those awakened by association. For, while the dog is little moved directly by what seem to us pleasant or unpleasant smells, he is much moved by emotional associations which are never aroused with us to anything like the same extent by perfumes alone. And this is the true reason why no fine art can be based upon odours, for the human race at least. There are no associated emotions upon which the art could play. One of our great humourists has given a whimsical account of an imaginary instrument for yielding æsthetic combinations of perfumes, by means of stoppers opened and shut in certain orders, so as to give rise to harmonies and contrasts, the perfumes being made to succeed one another rapidly by means of a current of air, over which the nose of the amateur was held. Now, such an instrument could never yield high artistic results with mankind, because odours do not arouse indirect trains of emotion in our minds, as musical combinations do. We could appreciate, perhaps, the mere sensuous beauty of the perfume-melody, but we could not feel in it any of that higher emotional delight which musical minds experience from a sonata of Beethoven. If, however, we had a highly cultivated race of animals descended from dogs, it is probable that they would be able to receive just the same sort of enjoyment from the scent-piano, with its deftly interwoven harmonies arousing relatively large waves of associated emotion, which we ourselves receive from the sound-piano, with its similar potentiality for awakening infinite resonances of feeling and thought in the human brain. With the dog, the direct emotional effect of perfumes is less than with ourselves, but the indirect emotional effect is greater.

Finally, I should like, in concluding, to express once more my obligations to Professor Croom Robertson and Dr. Bastian, some of whose ideas I have done little more than expand and illustrate, merely adding such minor aperçus of my own as happened to occur in the course of working out their original hints to the fullest natural conclusion. Animal psychology is still, however, a comparatively ungarnered field, and there is yet much to be gleaned by careful workers who are prepared to go independently over the ground

already broken by Mr. Herbert Spencer and his contemporaries. In these rough notes I have confined myself entirely to a single aspect of dog psychology, and yet how large an amount of curious analogy with man and diversity from man they display even on this solitary point! The complete psychological treatment of a butterfly's mind, gathered from such fragmentary evidences or indications as we can collect, would alone, I believe, form sufficient matter for a thick and interesting volume.

GRANT ALLEN.

THE ECLIPSE OF SHAKESPEARE.

Is

'S it altogether" a false notion that the general sympathy with the merits of Shakespeare ever beat with a languid or intermittent pulse?" that the noble dramas

Those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James-

were much less esteemed in the reign of Charles I., and for a long time afterwards? Malone and Steevens ventured to deny in effect that the poet was illustrious in the century succeeding his own, and adduced evidence in support of their opinion. As a consequence, De Quincey, in his biography of Shakespeare, written for the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, expressed himself very wrathfully in their regard, even accusing them of absolute untruth. He sought to demolish these "confident dogmatists," as he called them, by simply contradicting them. He wrote confessedly without books to assist him, admitting that for many of his dates and other materials he had been obliged to depend solely on his memory.

They had cited Dryden. "To cite Dryden as a witness for any purpose against Shakespeare," De Quincey wrote indignantly-"Dryden, who of all men had the most ransacked wit and exhausted language in celebrating the supremacy of Shakespeare's genius-does indeed require as much shamelessness in feeling as mendacity in principle." De Quincey's memory was here at fault. Dryden, it is true, pays tribute of a sort to the merits of Shakespeare, but plainly shows that the poet was less valued than once he had been. In the "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," while stating that in his own age Shakespeare was prized beyond all his contemporaries, and that "in the last King's court, when Ben's reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him," Dryden admits that others were then (1666) "generally preferred before him," and proceeds to describe the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher as "now. the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage: two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's. The reason," he explains, "is because there is a certain gaiety in their comedies and pathos in

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