Few persons realize the comparative un-worth of the dog. There is even a hazy notion in most minds that he is to be classed with the horse, the cow, the sheep, and the gentle swine, that he is entitled to lift up his voice with the morn-saluting cock, or to roam with the mouse-disturbing cat, or with that patient pair, the harnessed billy- and the lactiferous nanny-goat.[A] Hence an enormous revenue is required for his support. For example, we are told that "the dogs in Iowa eat enough annually to feed a hundred thousand workmen, and cost the State nine million dollars, or double the education of all its children." I should like to know how many of these costly and pampered creatures earn their salt. They toil not, they spin not, they contribute neither food nor wool nor "power." There are extreme cases where they have proved serviceable for defence and special purposes. The Laplanders are forced to make shift with them in default of better draught-animals. There was a time when the dogs of St. Bernard were a great convenience to the philanthropic monks,--who, by the way, never received one-hundredth part of the credit which has been lavished by the sentimentalists upon their half-automaton assistants. The slave-hunters have found the race still more serviceable for their ends. On great moors and lonely mountains and in the exigencies of frontier-life, the shepherd, the hunter, and the pioneer have turned them to account. Far be it from me to disparage their assistance in these exceptional instances and in others which might be named. The dog, like the bull or the frogs of Egypt, is good in his place. But it does not follow that we should have a bull in every door-yard, nor that it was an advantage to the land of Egypt to be covered with frogs in-doors and out. The notion that a dog is needful for defence in settled, civilized communities is on a par with the delusion that a man is safer for carrying a loaded pistol, more harm being done to honest people, and even to those of them who resort to fire-arms, than to their enemies. One needs only to consider the dogs of one's own neighborhood and compare the number of burglars they have routed with the number of children or innocent passers-by they have scared or bitten. My experience convinces me that more houses and hen roosts are robbed where there are dogs than where there are none. And it is easily explained. People who have a blind trust in watch-dogs cease to watch for themselves. Moreover, the false alarms of the dog are so numerous, and his barking so indiscriminating of the difference between friend and foe, and even between real and imaginary persons, that his owner soon ceases to take note of them. For who is going to get up every time the dog barks in the night? The dog is, of course, one of the conditions to be provided for in the burglar's plan. But when he has silenced, overpowered, or eluded the watch, he has turned the defence over to his own side, and proceeds with a special