And Sir William Hoste records a closely similar case. One of his officers, coming home after a long day’s shooting, saw a female monkey running along the rocks, with her young one in her arms. He immediately fired, and the animal fell. On his coming up, she grasped her little one close to her breast, and with her other hand pointed to the wound which the ball had made, and which had entered above her breast. Dipping her finger in the blood and holding it up, she seemed to reproach him with having been the cause of her pain, and also of that of the young one, to which she frequently pointed. “I never,” says Sir William, “felt so much as when I heard the story, and I determined never to shoot one of these animals as long as I lived” (p. 476). Lastly, as proof that the more intelligent of the lower animals admit of being _taught the use of signs of the most conventional character_ (or most remote from any natural expression of their feelings and ideas), I may allude to the recent experiments by Sir John Lubbock on “teaching animals to converse.” These experiments consisted in writing on separate and similar cards such words as “bone,” “water,” “out,” “pet me,” &c., and teaching a dog to bring a card bearing the word expressive of his want at the time of bringing it. In this way an association of ideas was established between the appearance of a certain number and form of written signs, and the meaning which they severally betokened. Sir John Lubbock found that his dog learnt the correct use of those signs.[65] Of course in these experiments marks of any other kind would have served as well as written words; for it clearly would be absurd to suppose that the dog could read the letters, so as mentally to construct them into the equivalent of a spoken word, in any such way as a child would spell b-o-n-e, bone. But, all the same, these experiments are of great interest as showing that it falls within the mental capacity of the more intelligent animals to appreciate the use of signs so conventional as those which constitute a stage of writing _above_ the drawing of pictures, and _below_ the employment of an alphabet. * * * * * Enough has now been said to prove incontestably that animals present what I have called the germ of the sign-making faculty. As the main object of these chapters is to estimate the probability of human language having arisen by way of a continuous development from this germ, we may next turn to take a general survey of human language in its largest sense, or as comprising all the manifestations of the sign-making faculty.