igent species of monkeys, will learn lessons
from isolated experiences. In this regard they are indeed quite as apt
as the lower kinds of men. Thus a dog who has had an unsavory or
painful experience with a skunk or a porcupine is apt to keep away
from these creatures for a long time thereafter. Where, as is not
infrequently the case, a cur takes to eating eggs, a single dose of
tartar emetic concealed in an egg which is placed where he can readily
find it, is apt to effect an immediate and complete reform. This ready
learning from experience is almost the gist of our human quality--at
least on the intellectual side of it.

Perhaps the greatest success to which man has attained in his education
of the dog is to be found in the measure in which he has overcome the
fierce rage which clearly characterized the ancestors of this creature
when they first felt the mastering hand. The reader cannot understand
the intensity of the rage motive in the carnivora unless he has studied
some of these brutes in their wild state, where from the time in the
remote ages when they first began to take on the qualities of their
species they have survived and won success by the fury of their assault.
In almost all our breeds of dogs this primal ferocity has been overlaid
by the various motives of rationality, sympathy, and conventional
demeanor, until one may live half a lifetime with well-bred dogs without
a chance to see the demon which we have buried in their breasts, as we
have in our own, beneath a host of civilizing influences. It is rare
indeed in our day that a dog, unless insane, will bite a human being.
The most of their assaults are pure bluster, mere pretence of fury, as
is shown by the fact that if, carried away by their pretence, they are
led to use their teeth, it is usually a mere sham assault, having no
semblance of the effectiveness of true combat.

Something of the pristine fury of the primitive dogs may still be noted
in a certain brutal variety of watch-dogs which are still to be found in
parts of continental Europe. The best types of this breed which I have
ever seen are to be found among the dogs which are kept to guard the
quarries of Solenhofen, in Bavaria, whence come all the fine
lithographic stones which are so extensively used in printing. These
quarries are scattered over several square miles of untilled country,
and the separate pits are to be numbered by the score. As much valuable
stone is necessarily left ov