Prof. Lloyd Morgan gives an example of what certainly looks like a dog’s merry make-believe in which man’s lead takes no part. The writer tells us that he used at one time to take an intelligent retriever to a sandy shore, where the dog engaged spontaneously in the following pastime. He buried a number of small crabs in the sand, and then stood waiting till a leg or a claw appeared, “upon which he would run backwards and forwards giving short barks of keen enjoyment”.[92] I find it hard to doubt that this was a genuine outburst of joyousness and of something indistinguishable from a love of fun, and that it was connected with the “coming off” of a practical joke. The repetitions of the burial when the dog had seen that it was ineffectual, points clearly to a consciousness of the make-believe character of the performance. Whatever a dog’s powers of jocosity when uninstructed by man, it seems safe to set down a good share of his highly developed sense of fun to his profound susceptibility to man’s educative influence; which again (as the difference between the educability of the dog and of the cat at once shows) implies an unusual strength of those instincts of attachment to man which have made him almost the type of fidelity. How far, one wonders, will this educative influence of man be likely to go in the case of the most companionable of our domestic pets? W. Preyer tells us, that the dog is capable of imitating the signs of human gaiety, that an {161} intelligent specimen, when confronted with our laughter will draw back the corners of his mouth and leap into the air with a bright lustre in the eye.[93] Here we seem to have a rudiment of a genuine laugh, and may perhaps cease to speak rather confusingly of a dog’s “laughing with his tail”. G. J. Romanes relates that he had a dog who went some way towards qualifying himself for the office of clown. This animal would perform a number of self-taught tricks which were clearly intended to excite laughter. “For instance, while lying on his side and violently grinning, he would hold one leg in his mouth.” Under these circumstances “nothing pleased him so much as having his joke duly appreciated, while, if no notice was taken of him, he would become sulky”.[94] This animal must, one supposes, have been in an exceptional degree a “funny dog”. It seems a pity that the observer did not take a “snapshot” at that grin so that it might be a shade less abstract and “in the air” than the grin of the Cheshire cat, as treated by Mr. Lewis Carroll. What seems clear is, that the physiognomy of a dog manages to execute a weirdly distorted semblance of our smile. With respect to the vocal part of the expression, we must not expect too much. The bark may not be able to adjust itself to our quick explosions of gaiety. It is commonly said that the dog has a special bark for expressing pleasure, and it seems likely that he employs this when he is said to be seized by the sense of the funniness of things.