Everybody is familiar with the way in which a dog, when it wishes to propitiate its master and to deprecate punishment when scolded, throws itself on its back with its tail turned up between its legs. Now this is a habit which every dog has brought with it from its wild ancestry, and one may be often seen to employ it towards another when it is afraid to fight, knowing that it would be well beaten. It is the converse, as it were, of the bristled back and elevated tail, with which dogs approach each other when they really mean to fight, and with neither of these two _expressions_, as one may call them, can man have had anything to do. We now see to what use the first of them is put by wild, canine species, and if it was not on this occasion effective, we may be sure that on many others it both has been and will be. There is another very curious and interesting thing in connection with this habit amongst domesticated dogs. If man has not taught it to them, they possibly may have taught it to him. Somewhere in the _Odyssey_ of Homer—I cannot give the place, but I have often read references to it—it is told how when travellers come to a village, and a lot of fierce dogs belonging to the inhabitants rush out upon them, they immediately squat down on the ground, and that then the dogs cease to molest them. Now Dr. Schliemann, when he travelled in the Ionian Islands, found that this was the regular habit with the peasants on coming to strange villages, or when they visited shepherds living, with their sheep, in the open country. The same expedient is resorted to by the peasantry of Hungary and Macedonia and other countries of Europe, where the conditions of life are more or less primitive; also, I believe, in the East, or parts of it, and—most interesting of all, as showing the habit to be almost universal—the Kaffirs of South Africa, under similar circumstances, act in the same way. The chief Lo Bengula, before he learnt, too late, the real ends and aims of the Aryan, had some large, fierce dogs, which used to rush out to attack any native that came to see him, at his primitive palace. To offer any resistance to their onset would have been death to anyone, and the resource employed, just as in the other cases, was to crouch on the ground, in which lowly and defenceless position—though sometimes one of the men would get a bite—they were generally let alone.