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.”