In our judgments of the respective intellectual capacities of the animals which lend themselves to human companionship, any approach to scientific accuracy in our comparative psychology demands that we should compare our subjects in their native condition. Heredity plays a part which often overtops Nature, and we have no means of ascertaining the effect of such intellectual progress in the animal as may be due to the influence of the mind of man in the process of domestication. When I was living

In my favourite summer resort at the lower edge of the Black Forest, the quaint old town of Laufenburg, a farmer’s boy one day brought me a young squirrel for sale. He was a tiny creature, probably not yet weaned, a variation on the ordinary type of the European squirrel, dark grey instead of the usual red, and with black tail and ears, so that at first, as he contented himself with drinking his milk and sleeping, I was not sure that he was not a dormouse. But examination of the paws, with their