o the way in
which rooks, especially, as well as starlings, will find their way to
their usual roosting-places across wide valleys shrouded in dense
November fogs.

Nor must we succumb here to the temptations offered by the very mention
of migrants, though we may well ask, what is the power that enables a
swallow to leave the banks of the Upper Nile and arrive at the nest it
left the year before, beneath the eaves of a cottage standing on the
banks of the Upper Thames? Or what directs the turtle-dove, year by year,
from the oleander-grown banks of the streams of Morocco to the more
grateful shade of our English woodlands? Yet marked birds have proved the
truth of these and still more wonderful achievements.

Instinct, the dire necessity of obtaining proper food, the perpetuation
of the tribe--Nature's most imperious laws--lie no doubt at the back of
many mysteries. Yet to say this is not to account for the sense before
us, any more than it is to solve those innumerable problems that are
scattered all along our several roads, and that we stumble over every
step we take. Leaving out of count such systematic, and apparently
scientific, labours as those of the ants, bees, and wasps, we constantly
find in the animal kingdom powers being exercised, as, for instance, in
the case of the earthworms and the moles, that are not to be explained by
the use of the words instinct, intelligence, and necessity. The humblest
of animals appears often to be handling forces with ease and familiarity,
the range of which it must apparently, if not obviously, be unaware. But
if this last is true, and these animals that are blind walk blind, what
are we to say of ourselves, when we are frequently doing the same, and
handling forces that we are totally unable to define?

The digression is a lengthy one; but even now a further step must be
taken. The man has, in the dog, his one real intimate in the whole animal
world. It will be generally admitted that the dog depends exceptionally
upon the man and the man often largely also upon the dog, and that in
this we have yet another instance of that interdependence that is to be
found throughout Nature and wheresoever we look. This, however, is not
the chief point in considering the relationship existing between the two.
There is something much deeper, and that goes much further.

Man, we are told, holds supreme dominion on Earth. He is King over all
things living, both great and small; and this cons