orse, in whose eye still
hovers the infatuation of the elk or gazelle that sees us for the first
time, or with the dull stupor of the ruminants, who look upon us as a
momentary and useless accident of the pasture.

For thousands of years, they have been living at our side, as foreign
to our thoughts, our affections, our habits as though the least
fraternal of the stars had dropped them but yesterday on our globe. In
the boundless interval that separates man from all the other creatures,
we have succeeded only, by dint of patience, in making them take two or
three illusory steps. And if, to-morrow, leaving their feelings toward
us untouched, nature were to give them the intelligence and the weapons
wherewith to conquer us, I confess that I should distrust the hasty
vengeance of the horse, the obstinate reprisals of the ass and the
maddened meekness of the sheep. I should shun the cat as I should shun
the tiger; and even the good cow, solemn and somnolent, would inspire me
with but a wary confidence. As for the hen, with her round, quick eye,
as when discovering a slug or a worm, I am sure that she would devour me
without a thought.

III

Now, in this indifference and this total want of comprehension in which
everything that surrounds us lives; in this incommunicable world, where
everything has its object hermetically contained within itself, where
every destiny is self-circumscribed, where there exist among the
creatures no other relations than those of executioners and victims,
eaters and eaten, where nothing is able to leave its steel-bound
sphere, where death alone establishes cruel relations of cause and
effect between neighbouring lives, where not the smallest sympathy has
ever made a conscious leap from one species to another, one animal
alone, among all that breathes upon the earth, has succeeded in breaking
through the prophetic circle, in escaping from itself to come bounding
toward us, definitely to cross the enormous zone of darkness, ice and
silence that isolates each category of existence in nature's
unintelligible plan. This animal, our good familiar dog, simple and
unsurprising as may to-day appear to us what he has done, in thus
perceptibly drawing nearer to a world in which he was not born and for
which he was not destined, has nevertheless performed one of the most
unusual and improbable acts that we can find in the general history of
life. When was this recognition of man by beast, this extr