age till they are passing between two minds. It is
the power and will to apply the symbols that alone gives life to money,
and as long as these are in abeyance the money is in abeyance also; the
coins may be safe in one's pocket, but they are as dead as a log till
they begin to burn in it, and so are our words till they begin to burn
within us.

The real question, however, as to the substantial underlying identity
between the language of the lower animals and our own, turns upon that
other question whether or no, in spite of an immeasurable difference of
degree, the thought and reason of man and of the lower animals is
essentially the same. No one will expect a dog to master and express the
varied ideas that are incessantly arising in connection with human
affairs. He is a pauper as against a millionaire. To ask him to do so
would be like giving a street-boy sixpence and telling him to go and buy
himself a founder's share in the New River Company. He would not even
know what was meant, and even if he did it would take several millions of
sixpences to buy one. It is astonishing what a clever workman will do
with very modest tools, or again how far a thrifty housewife will make a
very small sum of money go, or again in like manner how many ideas an
intelligent brute can receive and convey with its very limited
vocabulary; but no one will pretend that a dog's intelligence can ever
reach the level of a man's. What we do maintain is that, within its own
limited range, it is of the same essential character as our own, and that
though a dog's ideas in respect of human affairs are both vague and
narrow, yet in respect of canine affairs they are precise enough and
extensive enough to deserve no other name than thought or reason. We
hold moreover that they communicate their ideas in essentially the same
manner as we do--that is to say, by the instrumentality of a code of
symbols attached to certain states of mind and material objects, in the
first instance arbitrarily, but so persistently, that the presentation of
the symbol immediately carries with it the idea which it is intended to
convey. Animals can thus receive and impart ideas on all that most
concerns them. As my great namesake said some two hundred years ago,
they know "what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly."
And they not only know what's what themselves, but can impart to one
another any new what's-whatness that they may have acquired, for t