ent on the White Pass trail.
Shall we say these horses deliberately committed suicide? Suicide it
certainly was in effect, but of course not in intention. What does or
can a horse know about death, or about self-destruction? These animals
were maddened by their hardships, and blindly plunged down the rocks.

The tendency to humanize the animals is more and more marked in all
recent nature books that aim at popularity. A recent British book on
animal life has a chapter entitled "Animal Materia Medica." The
writer, to make out his case, is forced to treat as medicine the salt
which the herbivorous animals eat, and the sand and gravel which grain
and nut-eating birds take into their gizzards to act as millstones to
grind their grist. He might as well treat their food as medicine and
be done with it. So far as I know, animals have no remedies whatever
for their ailments. Even savages have, for the most part, only "fake"
medicines.

A Frenchman has published a book, which has been translated into
English, on the "Industries of Animals." Some of these Frenchmen could
give points even to our "Modern School of Nature Study." It may be
remembered that Michelet said the bird floated, and that it could puff
itself up so that it was lighter than the air! Not a little
contemporary natural science can beat the bird in this respect.

The serious student of nature can have no interest in belittling or in
exaggerating the intelligence of animals. What he wants is the truth
about them, and this he will not get from our natural history
romancers, nor from the casual, untrained observers, who are sure to
interpret the lives of the wood-folk in terms of their own motives and
experiences, nor from Indians, trappers, or backwoodsmen, who give
such free rein to their fancies and superstitions.

Such a book as Romanes's "Animal Intelligence" is not always a safe
guide. It is like a lawyer's plea to the jury for his client. Romanes
was so intent upon making out his case that he allowed himself to be
imposed upon by the tales of irresponsible observers. Many of his
stories of the intelligence of birds and beasts are antecedently
improbable. He evidently credits the story of the Bishop of Carlisle,
who thinks he saw a jackdaw being tried by a jury of rooks for some
misdemeanor. Jack made a speech and the jury cawed back at him, and
after a time appeared to acquit Jack! What a child's fancy to be put
in a serious work on "Animal Intelligence"!