Our ignorance of the dialects of animals, our inability to understand the medium by which they convey their thoughts, makes it possible for men of even Descartes' abilities to generate such childish hypotheses. Even Huxley says blandly of animals that "Since they have no language they can have no trains of thought," though he admits that most of them possess that part of the brain which we have every reason to suppose to be the organ of consciousness in man. It is one of the most regrettable results of this human egotism, which has dug so deep and permanent a gulf between ourselves and our fellow creatures, that we have made no concerted or intelligent effort to find a means of communication with our fellow beings. That such an effort would produce results worth the labour it would entail we have reason to infer from the surprising success that has followed our struggles to elucidate the meaning of the fragments of language sculptured on the broken stones that have been left by races extinct for thousands of years. We know how great are the barriers the varying tongues raise between living peoples: how much effort must be given to acquire a language foreign to us, even when surrounded by the sound of it in our daily life, and assisted by teachers, yet supreme human ingenuity has, from these fragments of broken stones, reconstructed dead tongues and forgotten histories of civilizations that for millenniums have been but dust blown through voiceless deserts. Yet in all the great lapse of ages during which man has been living in close intimacy with his domesticated animals not the slightest attempt has been made to cross the width of silence lying between him and his faithful companions. The student who makes the acquaintance of animals only in the trap or upon the vivisection table may well assert that the beast has "No language but a cry," but those who approach their fellow beings with a mind divested of this self-righteous cant are well aware that the animals have means of communication as accurate as our own, and fully sufficient for all the needs of their existence. To an ant the man standing beside him is as a creature three thousand feet high, would be to us. Now let us imagine this colossal person stooping to examine the tiny beings hurrying to and fro in a channel between a row of structures built of fragments that would appear to him no bigger than grains of sand. He would, of course, be unaware that this channel was called Broadway, or the Strand, or the Avenue de l'Opera.