animals: "But
their faculties of mind are no less proportioned to their state of
subjection than the shape and properties of their bodies. They have
knowledge peculiar to their several spheres and sufficient for the
under-part they have to act."

Let me be free from the delusion that it is possible to raise them above
this level, or in other words to add an inch to their mental stature.
I have nothing to forgive Jack after all. And so in spite of everything
Jack was suffered at home and accompanied me again and again in my walks
abroad; and there were more blank days, or if not altogether blank,
seeing that there was Jack himself to be observed and thought about,
they were not the kind of days I had counted on having. My only
consolation was that Jack failed to capture more than one out of every
hundred, or perhaps five hundred, of the creatures he hunted, and that I
was even able to save a few of these. But I could not help admiring
his tremendous energy and courage, especially in cliff-climbing when
we visited the headlands--those stupendous masses and lofty piles of
granite which rise like castles built by giants of old. He would almost
make me tremble for his life when, after climbing on to some projecting
rock, he would go to the extreme end and look down over it as if it
pleased him to watch the big waves break in foam on the black rocks a
couple of hundred feet below. But it was not the big green waves or any
sight in nature that drew him--he sniffed and sniffed and wriggled and
twisted his black nose, and raised and depressed his ears as he sniffed,
and was excited solely because the upward currents of air brought him
tidings of living creatures that lurked in the rocks below--badger and
fox and rabbit. One day when quitting one of these places, on looking
up I spied Jack standing on the summit of a precipice about seventy-five
feet high. Jack saw me and waved his tail, and then started to come
straight down to me! From the top a faint rabbit track was, visible
winding downwards to within twenty-four feet of the ground; the rest
was a sheer wall of rock. Down he dashed, faster and faster as he got
to where the track ended, and then losing his footing he fell swiftly to
the earth, but luckily dropped on a deep spongy turf and was not hurt.
After witnessing this reckless act I knew how he had come by those
frightful bruises on a former occasion. He had doubtless fallen a long
way down a cliff and had been almost c