“Dogs,” said the Philosopher, “are a most intelligent race of people—” “People, my granny!” said the sergeant. “From the earliest ages their intelligence has been observed and recorded, so that ancient literatures are bulky with references to their sagacity and fidelity—” “Will you shut your old jaw?” said the sergeant. “I will not,” said the Philosopher. “Elephants also are credited with an extreme intelligence and devotion to their masters, and they will build a wall or nurse a baby with equal skill and happiness. Horses have received high recommendations in this respect, but crocodiles, hens, beetles, armadillos, and fish do not evince any remarkable partiality for man—” “I wish,” said the sergeant bitterly, “that all them beasts were stuffed down your throttle the way you’d have to hold your prate.” “It doesn’t matter,” said the Philosopher. “I do not know why these animals should attach themselves to men with gentleness and love and yet be able to preserve intact their initial bloodthirstiness, so that while they will allow their masters to misuse them in any way they will yet fight most willingly with each other, and are never really happy saving in the conduct of some private and nonsensical battle of their own. I do not believe that it is fear which tames these creatures into mildness, but that the most savage animal has a capacity for love which has not been sufficiently noted, and which, if more intelligent attention had been directed upon it, would have raised them to the status of intellectual animals as against intelligent ones, and, perhaps, have opened to us a correspondence which could not have been other than beneficial.” “Keep your eyes out for that gap in the trees, Shawn,” said the sergeant. “I’m doing that,” said Shawn. The Philosopher continued: “Why can I not exchange ideas with a cow? I am amazed at the incompleteness of my growth when I and a fellow-creature stand dumbly before each other without one glimmer of comprehension, locked and barred from all friendship and intercourse—” “Shawn,” cried the sergeant. “Don’t interrupt,” said the Philosopher; “you are always talking.—The lower animals, as they are foolishly called, have abilities at which we can only wonder. The mind of an ant is one to which I would readily go to school. Birds have atmospheric and levitational information which millions of years will not render accessible to us; who that has seen a spider weaving his labyrinth, or a bee voyaging safely in the trackless air, can refuse to credit that a vivid, trained intelligence animates these small enigmas? and the commonest earthworm is the heir to a culture before which I bow with the profoundest veneration—” “Shawn,” said the sergeant, “say something for goodness’ sake to take the sound of that man’s clack out of my ear.”