Probably the most forlorn and abject creature to be seen on the face of the earth is a masterless dog. Slouching and slinking along, cringing to every human being it chances to meet, running away with its tail between its legs from smaller dogs whom under other circumstances it would accost with a gruff who-the-dickens-are-you sort of growl,—it forms the very picture of utter humiliation and self-abasement. Grip and I have just come across such a lost specimen of stray doghood, trying to find his way back to his home across the fields—I fancy he belongs to a travelling show which left the village yesterday—and it is quite refreshing to watch the air of superior wisdom and calm but mute compassionateness with which Grip casts his eye sidelong upon that wretched masterless vagrant, and passes him by without even a nod. He looks up to me complacently as he trots along by my side, and seems to say with his eye, \'Poor fellow! he\'s lost his master, you know—careless dog that he is!\' I believe the lesson has had a good moral effect upon Grip\'s own conduct, too; for he has now spent ten whole minutes well within my sight, and has resisted the most tempting solicitations to ratting and rabbiting held out by half-a-dozen holes and burrows in the hedge-wall as we go along.

This total dependence of dogs upon a master is a very interesting example of the growth of inherited instincts. The original dog, who was a wolf or something very like it, could not have had any such artificial feeling. He was an independent, self-reliant animal, quite well able to look after himself on the boundless plains of Central Europe or High Asia. But at least as early as the days of the Danish shell-mounds, perhaps thousands of years earlier, man had learned to tame the dog and to employ him as a friend or servant for his own purposes. Those dogs which best served the ends of man were preserved and increased; those which followed too much their own original instincts were destroyed or at least discouraged. The savage hunter would be very apt to fling his stone axe at the skull of a hound which tried to eat the game he had brought down with his flint-tipped arrow, instead of retrieving it: he would be most likely to keep carefully and feed well on the refuse of his own meals the hound which aided him most in surprising, killing, and securing his quarry. Thus there sprang up between man and the dog a mutual and ever increasing sympathy which on the part of the dependent creature has at last become organised into an inherited instinct. If we could only thread the labyrinth of a dog\'s brain, we should find somewhere in it a group of correlated nerve-connections answering to this universal habit of his race; and the group in question would be quite without any analogous mechanism in the brain of the ancestral wolf. As truly as the wing of the bird is adapted to its congenital instinct of flying, as truly as the nervous system of the bee is adapted to its congenital instinct of honeycomb building, just so truly is the brain of the dog adapted to its now congenital instinct of following and obeying a master. The habit of attaching itself to a particular human being is nowadays engrained in the nerves of the modern dog just as really, though not quite so deeply, as the habit of running or biting is engrained in its bones and muscles. Every dog is born into the world with a certain inherited structure of limbs, sense-organs, and brain: and this inherited s............