this particular way would be exactly what a monomaniac would do. The whole affair was almost too cruel to be true.

He set to work again, and returned every scrap of paper to its box, examining each as he put it back carefully, unfolding each, and shaking every book on the chance of seeing the will fall from between the leaves. It was all in vain.

"Give me the key of the chest. I must think over this," said he quietly-almost as if speaking in a dream. He locked the chest. "And now," he said, "I will keep the key. You would swear-in a court of justice, if need be-that in this chest you placed the will of old Harry Reid with your own hands?"

"I would swear it before Heaven," said Uncle Christopher.

"A jury would do," said Gideon, with what was almost a sneer. "I am not going to rest till I have won back my wife's rights. If you placed that will here, here it must be, and here it shall be. What was the will like?"

“I—I don't know, Gideon," said Uncle Christopher dismally. "It was in a blue envelope, sealed with the poor squire's own seal— his coat of arms. Poor Mrs. Reid did it up when she gave it

to me."

"How was it endorsed?"

"There was nothing. We-she-thought it best

"The old maniac-but she had cunning enough; more than you, Uncle Christopher, with all your wisdom.

"You are in church, Gideon. . . .”

By"

"Uncle Christopher," said Gideon, suddenly changing his tone, "I don't believe that swearing in church is as bad as trying to hide a will in one. I've not meant to be a bad you've been a particularly bad uncle to me.

come home to beg for

nephew to you, though You turned me out of

doors when I was a lad; you wouldn't have given me a crust if I'd one; you've made up to me because you thought me a rich man. I hate humbug; and I don't see how the chance of your being my grandfather's son should make any difference between you and me. I'm going to make a search for that will—a real search and not a sham. If I have to give it up, I'll get the law to help me. You'll have to go into the witness-box, and swear that you hid that will in this place; and as it can't be found, you'll see what people will say. It was to your new squire's interest to get that will destroyed; and you're a poor man, not above being bribed. Perjury shan't help you. Good-night; think it all over well. If you want to see me, I shall be at the 'George,' and I'll keep this key."

"I put it there-that's all I know-and it's gone," said Uncle Christopher. "I put it there-and it's gone."

He said nothing more till he and Gideon parted at the gate of the churchyard. Gideon leaned on the turnstile and pondered. "I believe in my soul he has destroyed that will," thought he. "That pretending to lose things that one has never hidden is a trick as old as the hills. He got the will out of the bank, and burned it out of sheer fright. But, by Heavens, lost or burnt, I've had enough of being trumped by knaves. And if it's only for Helen's sake-confound her!-I'll win."

(To be continued.)

THE DOG'S UNIVERSE.

SI sit here on a stile in the summer meadows of a bright afternoon, I am watching my dog running to and fro along the hedge, and sniffing vigorously at every hole for the faintest indication of rat or rabbit. Anacharsis—that is my dog's name has a sharp nose for sport, and takes kindly to ratting, as is the nature of terriers generally. I cannot look at him now, his nostrils close to the ground, and his body stretched eagerly forward on the scent, without thinking of many strange problems raised by his attitude. For many years the intelligence of dogs was a sore stumbling-block and puzzle to me in my rambling psychological inquiries; and I could not account for their obvious cleverness upon any known and accepted principle. Gradually, however, it began to dawn upon me that I had neglected this important element of scent, and that the neglect of so large a factor in the canine life had made me quite misread the dog's universe in many ways. A pregnant hint of Professor Croom Robertson's, thrown out in a letter to Nature, first set me on the right track. I have since tried to follow out that hint for myself by observation and experiment; and I propose now to set forth my developed notions on the nature of the universe as it appears to Anacharsis, so far as analogy or guesswork enables us to realise it. Let us, if possible, put ourselves mentally inside my terrier's head, and try for a moment to see and smell the world as he sees and smells it.

As long ago as the age of the Sophists, it was already suggested that man was perhaps the wisest of animals in virtue of his possessing a hand. Anaxagoras, like the prototype of all Bridgewater-Treatise writers that he was, thought fit to oppose this sensible view by asserting that, on the contrary, man was provided with a hand because he was the wisest of animals. Thus early do we get a first glimpse of the alternative ideas of design and evolution: for, unless somebody had propounded the evolutionist view, Anaxagoras would never have been at the trouble to contradict it. A couple of thousand years later Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out that intelligence varies amongst animals generally in a rough proportion to their special

organs of touch and prehension. Almost all the cleverest creatures possess some mechanism for grasping an object, so as to feel it on both sides, and gain a real tactual knowledge of its shape and solidity. For example, men and monkeys, the head and crown of the mammalian race, have hands with opposable thumbs, supplemented amongst our more distant quadrumanous relations by a prehensile tail. The elephant, second in sagacity to the monkey alone amongst the lower animals, has his very flexible and delicate trunk, with which he can embrace the boles and branches of trees, or lift up a man bodily from the ground. Moreover, at its tip, he possesses a still more discriminative tactile organ in the lip or finger, with which he can pick up a needle from the floor or gather small crumbs out of a bed of straw. This lip is largely supplied with nerves of touch, which make it probably almost as sensitive as our own tongues, and perhaps far more so than the tips of our fingers. Now, we must remember that the elephant (as Dr. Bastian well remarks) is really the wisest wild animal we know, save only our own ape-like allies; for elephants will not usually breed in captivity, and almost every one that we see has been captured as an untamed roamer among the forests of Ceylon or the Himalayan valleys. They have thus never enjoyed the same advantages of education as the dog and the horse, which have been domesticated by man for thousands of generations, and have accordingly inherited the accumulated effects of long intercourse with a superior race. But the elephant's cleverness is all his own. He has learned and developed it for himself in the course of his wanderings up and down the world, forever seeing and handling with curiosity every new object that comes in his way.

Again, if we look at the pouched animals, like kangaroos and wombats, we shall find that they are, as a rule, extremely stupid. The great kangaroo himself is said to be so hopelessly silly, that when he is beaten he turns to bite the senseless stick, instead of attacking the person who wields it. But there is one of these marsupials which shows great intelligence and cunning, so that its name has become as proverbial in America for sagacity as that of the fox in EnglandI mean the opossum. Now, the opossum is remarkable for the possession of a hand on its hind feet, with an opposable thumb, almost as perfect as the monkey's. Furthermore, many species of opossum have a prehensile tail, which stands them in good stead as a grasping organ. It is this faculty of grasping and handling things which accounts for their superior intelligence. The brain has become hereditarily enriched with all kinds of nervous connections answering

to the tactual facts disclosed to them by their developed organs of touch.

Similarly, amongst birds, as Mr. Spencer also points out, the parrots are universally acknowledged to rank first in intellectual order: and they are equally distinguished for their very hand-like claws, with which they can firmly grasp a nut or a lump of sugar, holding two toes on the opposite side from the other two, in a manner exactly analogous to the use of our own thumbs. Besides, the upper half of their bill is very freely movable, being specially articulated to the skull for that express purpose; and the advantage which parrots derive from this peculiarity must have been noted by everybody who has watched them climbing their cages, and holding on to the wires by beak and claws together. In fact, Polly is always handling and mumbling everything she comes across, with obvious curiosity to know what it is really like. Hence, once more, the high intelligence of the parrots as a tribe, derived from their large and varied experience of external bodies, both personal and inherited.

I might, if I liked, go on to show conversely that most animals with very ill-developed tactile organs have usually a low grade of intellectual development. But I have probably said enough already to illustrate the general principle involved, which is, briefly speaking, this: An animal cannot really know any object by merely seeing it : in order fully to understand the nature of the object, it must also feel it, handle it, grasp it all round. Thus alone can it translate the symbolical language of sight into the real language of touch. Visible forms and colours require to be reduced to tactual shapes and to solid or liquid resistances before they are really comprehended. Touch, as Mr. Herbert Spencer puts it, is the mother-sense of all the senses. Thus, those animals which can best feel a body on every side, and learn experimentally its material composition, are those which have the fullest groundwork for the growth of intelligence, and which consequently display, as a rule, the greatest sagacity of all.

Starting from this general principle, derived from Mr. Herbert Spencer, it appears difficult at first sight to account for the acknowledged cleverness of the dog and the horse. To be sure, in the latter case, Mr. Spencer calls attention to the extreme mobility of the horse's upper lip, which is constantly used for feeling and testing objects around it in a manner that remotely suggests the elephant's trunk. But this mobile lip seems hardly enough by itself to account for the equine intelligence, especially when we remember the excessive rigidity of the uncloven and seemingly toeless hoof. Again, even the long and intimate intercourse with man is scarcely alone VOL. CCXLVII. NO. 1797.

U