No one can watch the actions of a clever dog without seeing how practical he is. He is carrying your stick in his mouth, and comes to a stile. A young puppy will go blundering with the stick against the stile, and, perhaps, go back home, or get through the bars and leave the stick behind. But practical experience has taught the clever dog better. He lays down the stick, takes it by one end, and draws it backwards through the opening at one side of the stile. A friend tells me of a dog which was carrying a basket of eggs. He came to a stile which he was accustomed to leap, poked his head through the stile, deposited the basket, ran back a few yards, took the stile at a bound, picked up the basket, and continued on his course. "Intelligent fellow!" I exclaim. "Yes," says my friend, "he _knew the eggs would break_ if he attempted to leap with the basket!" This is just the little gratuitous, unwarrantable, human touch which is so often filled in, no doubt in perfect good faith, by the narrators of anecdotes. Against such interpolations we must be always on our guard. It is so difficult not to introduce a little dose of reason. Mr. Romanes obtained from the Zoological Gardens at Regent's Park a very intelligent capuchin monkey, on which his sister made a series of most interesting and valuable observations. This monkey on one occasion got hold of a hearth-brush, and soon found the way to unscrew the handle. After long trial, he succeeded in screwing it in again, and throughout his efforts always turned the handle the right way for screwing. Having once succeeded, he unscrewed it and screwed it in again several times in succession, each time with greater ease. A month afterwards he unscrewed the knob of the fender and the bell-handle beside the mantelpiece. Commenting on these actions, Mr. Romanes speaks[GY] of "the keen satisfaction which this monkey displayed when he had succeeded in making any little discovery, such as that of the mechanical principle of the screw." I once watched, near the little village of Ceres, in South Africa, a dung-beetle trundling his dung-ball over an uneven surface of sand. The ball chanced to roll into a sand hollow, from which the beetle in vain attempted to push it out. The sides were, however, too steep. Leaving the ball, he butted down the sand at one side of the hollow, so as to produce an inclined plane of much less angle, up which he then without difficulty pushed his unsavoury sphere.