The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1880-04-10 00:00:00

PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON DOGS.

In London, on Tuesday, at the Royal Institution Professor
Huxley gave the first of a short course of lectures on "Dogs,
and the problems connected with them."
The Professor first dwelt on the physical resemblance
between dogs and men. We were in the habit of using
the terms head, limbs, backbone, &c., alike for men and
dogs in ordinary language, and when we came more
strictly to compare the anatomy of dogs and men
we found the resemblance was very close. So also
in reference to mental characteristics, we commonly
spoke of dogs as good or bad tempered, worthless,
intelligent, &c. In fact, we measured them ac-
cording to our own standard. And all the re-
sults of modern science tended to strengthen the.
teaching of our everyday language. In their structure,
their nervous organization, and their moral nature
dogs were in every way comparable with men. A
diagram of a dog on his hind legs and of a man, with
the similar bones coloured similarly, showed how
closely man and dog approached in bony structure.
Anatomists used the same names for the similar bones.
Professor Huxley pointed out how the neck, the thoraic,
lumbar, and sacral regionshad practically the same bones.
The cranial cavity was different in size, so were the jaws,
but the bones were relatively the same. The same ap-
plied to the limbs. The relative sizes were different though
the same bones were recognized. It was shown by
diagrams that the front paw of the dog had bone for
bone the same bones as the hand of man, though in the
dog the thumb was shorter. In the foot the same held
good, except that in the dog the great toe was reduced
to " splint " bones, though clearly recognizable. The
collar-bone of man was but rudimentary in the dog, but
it was clearly to be traced. Taking all the bones through-
out, there was no difference except in relative size.
The habitual attitude of the dog on all fours had had
much to do with the modification. For example, the
dog walked on pads under his fingers. These com-
parisons between men and dogs were not speculations,
they are facts.

As regarded the mental capacity of a dog, we in-
ferred he had a mind on the same principle that we in-
ferred other human beings had minds. We saw dogs
subject to pain from causes which gave human beings
pain, and so with pleasure. But it was not to he sup-
posed that dogs felt exactly as we did. Indeed, there
was nothing in which human beings differed more than
in their sensation of pain. For example, an English-
man roughing it in Australia would feel pain less than
when comfortably living at home. The order of the
sense of pleasure in (logs seemed different from what
it was with us. Dogs could not see so well as we
did. Their hearing was more acute, but it seemed
to give them pleasure in a different way from what
it did with us. For example, a dog would howl
at a band giving what we might regard as fairly good
music. Their smell was more acute than ours, but
dogs did
.not appear to care for patchouli, eau de
cologne, or ess bouquet, while garbage, which we
loathed, they revelled in. The way in which a dog
would follow the footsteps of his master's shoe-leather
and recognize the difference of that shoe-leather from
all others was truly marvellous to us with our sense
of smell.

Taking the whole range of dog-like animals, Pro-
fessor Huxley recognised the number of species as
about thirty. Drawings of many of the different
forms of dog-like animals, including the icticyon, the
fennec, and the otocyon, were shown. The second
lecture is to be given on Tuesday next.