Beecher said that “in evolution, the dog got up before the door was
shut.” If there were not reason, mirthfulness, love, honour, and
fidelity in a dog, he did not know where to look for them, And Huxley
has devoted much attention to the study of canine ability. He once
illustrated, by the skeleton of the animal being raised on hind legs,
that in internal construction the only difference between man and dog
was one of size and proportion. There was not a bone in one which did
not exist in the other, not a single constituent in the one that was not
to be found in the other, and by the same process he could prove that
the dog had a mind. His own dog was certainly not a mere piece of
animate machinery. He once possessed a dog which he frequently left
among the thousands frequenting Regent’s Park to secrete himself behind
a tree. So soon as the animal found that he had lost his master, he laid
his nose to the ground and soon tracked him to his hiding place. He
believed there was no fundamental faculty connected with the reasoning
powers that might not be demonstrated to exist in dogs. He did not
believe that dogs ever took any pleasure in music; but this seems not to
be always the case. Adelaide Phillips, the famous contralto, told me
that her splendid Newfoundland Cæsar was quite a musician. She gave him
singing lessons regularly. “I see him now,” she said, “his fore paws
resting on my knee. I would say: ‘Now the lesson begins. Look at me,
sir. Do as I do.’ Then I would run down the scale in thirds, and Cæsar,
with head thrown back and swaying from side to side, would really sing
the scale. He would sing the air of The Brook very correctly. But it was
the best sport to see him attempt the operatic.” Here her gestures
became showy and impressive, as if on the stage, and her mimicking of
the dog’s efforts to follow her were comical in the extreme. Sometimes
(so quickly did he catch all the tricks of the profession) he would not
sing until urged again and again. Sometimes he would be “out of voice,”
and make most discordant sounds. He has an honoured grave at her country
home in Marshfield, where Webster also put up a stone in memory of his
horse Greatheart.
Charlotte Cushman loved animals, especially dogs and horses; and her
blue Skye terrier Bushie, with her human eyes and uncommon intelligence,
has a permanent place in the memoirs of her mistress. Miss Cushman would
say, “Play the piano, Bushie,” and Bush knew perfectly well what was
meant, and would go through the performance, adding a few recitative
barks with great gravity and _éclat_. The phrase “human eyes” recalls
what Blackmore, the novelist—who has a genuine, loving appreciation of
our dear dumb animals—says of a dog in Christowell: “No lady in the land
has eyes more lucid, loving, eloquent, and even if she had, they would
be as nothing without the tan spots over them.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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