between his twenty-fifth and forty-fifth years, one thousand eight hundred and twenty of the best working hours of his existence in the quite gratuitous operation of scraping a part of his face with a piece of steel! Six working hours a day for three hundred days wasted in a short life!

The soldier has, as said, no choice in dress; and military dress is at this moment a matter of national importance in a degree of which the reader can form no adequate idea who has never crossed a tract of country with arms and ammunition upon him. Now as the question of the best dress for the sportsman, explorer or soldier, is one to which I have devoted much thought and practical trial both in the tropical heats of Canton and in the very piercing sort of cold which winter brings with it at Shanghae and Ningpo, I have felt called on to state in an Appendix (A) the conclusions arrived at.

I have left myself little time to apply my test of civilization to our treatment of that section of animate nature which is composed of the higher zoological world. In dealing with this, the Chinese are beyond all doubt in a considerably higher stage of civilization than Anglo-Saxons. The great difference between the Confucian, and the Christian civilizations, as carried out practically, lies in the deliberate preference widely given in the former to the mental agencies in dealing with men and animals. During the last few centuries, we have far outstripped the Orient in contending with inanimate nature; but previous to that time the agriculture, manufactures and commerce of the Chinese-their grains, their tea and fruits-their silks, cottons and their pottery-their use of gunpowder and the compass-their river and sea craft-their canals and their bridges made them, in the material not less than in the mental domain, the most civilized people in the world.

We call the people who fit our young horses for riding not horse teachers or horse trainers, but horse breakers. The word is well suited to the barbarism of our method of dealing with the animal. Richardson, one of our recent writers on Horsemanship, after two paragraphs, the purport

of which is that the horse being endowed with a moral and intellectual nature, is susceptible of being wrought on by moral and intellectual agencies, says :

"The fact is, we are greatly wanting in our endeavours to cultivate his intellectual powers. We are profuse in our attempts to overcome the inequalities of his disposition by physical means; but in brute force he is our superior; and when this secret once becomes palpable to his senses, it is a most difficult and arduous undertaking to disabuse him of the knowledge and to cure him of the propensity for vice and wickedness."

In some countries the shepherds lead the sheep. We always drive them, and we hunt them in with dogs; which dogs, again, the collies, we fit for our uses more by beating than by kind training.

In the southern half of China, horses are rarely seen; but we have ample opportunity of observing how, in dealing with other animals, the Chinese succeed by training rather than by violence. On the rivers and canals, individual men will be seen, each rearing a flock of ducks numbering thousands; which at his call return and walk up the plank into the large barge that forms their home. All my readers have heard of the fishing cormorants. At no great distances from Shanghae and Ningpo, we meet the men who use them, each paddling along in a little low boat with half-a-dozen of these curious birds sitting gravely in a row on each gunnel, from whence they descend to hunt the fish under the water, at the pleasure of their master. There are few fences in China, yet oxen and buffaloes, when out feeding, are controlled by very small children, who may often be seen sitting on the back of the buffalo while the latter is grazing. The domestic animals generally, not being beaten or chased by the children, look on them rather as their friends. At Ningpo, the brother of the writer once saw a goose, which was feeding in the fields, making vain attempts to waddle up an incline of a foot or two of earth, in order to get at a desirable morsel of food

which it had descried on the higher level. The little China boy who was "herding the geese," as soon as he observed what this one was after, ran up to it, applied a hand to each side and lifted it nicely up to the top of the low bank; whereupon the goose, without even turning its head, ran forward to the desired food,-just as a child might hurry eagerly off when aided in similar circumstances by its mother.

The following is equally characteristic of the Chinese procedure. Our poultry in Shanghae consists of the big longlegged fowls many of which have in recent years been sent home, where "Punch" has immortalized them as "Cochins." I can testify to their not being good eating at Shanghae, unless they are carefully fed for some time; for which purpose I had a coop in a yard at the back of my house. When on the point, one day, of letting my dogs into this yard for their daily meal, I observed a fowl feeding at large; and called on my servants to put it into the coop. My body servant, a native of the south of China, with my cook and coolie, natives of a central province,-three men varying in age from twentytwo to thirty, set to work, not to hunt the fowl or to drive it in by violence, but gently to urge or train it into the coop. Without any previous consultation, they took up stations at short distances from each other, and then, with extended arms, advanced slowly on the young hen. Every one of her motions was closely and seriously watched by the men; and if one of these remarked that a too hasty advance of his leg, or motion of his hand, had produced a slight symptom of alarm in her, he immediately checked himself. When the business began, she was not more than six yards distant from the coop. It took about a minute gradually to surround her into it. She was not terrified in: she was constrained to come to the conclusion that on the whole it was most expedient to walk in. I have no doubt that after two or three lessons of this kind, one man made her at once return to the coop by merely motioning her toward it; and consequently that, without devoting the yard to the feeding of

fowls, the utmost possible advantage was taken of it for such purpose, and with an ultimate saving of time to man. We know how three Englishmen would have acted under the circumstances above described. They would have scared the fowl at the beginning by the violence of their first attempts to drive her into the coop; and then, when she began fluttering and screaming about the yard, they would have commenced making abrupt rushes to seize her, in which, -the yard being surrounded by high walls-they would have succeeded, after a good deal of bouncing against each other and tumbling over the bird. But when put into the coop, she would probably have thinned from the fright; and it would, in every case, have been useless to let her out to feed again in a place where every motion of the persons passing and repassing, would have terrified her.

Such experience as I have had of dogs has led me to the conclusion, not merely that we do not in England make sufficient use of the moral agencies in our dealings with animals -which is now pretty generally admitted-but that in particular we do not attend sufficiently, or rather do not attend at all, to the native vocal languages of animals. We make use of a language of signs, and we teach them to understand our human language to a certain extent, but we do not study systematically to understand their own language, though it is their chief means of making their feelings known to us.

My observations have not been sufficiently close and extensive to permit me to regard it as an established fact, that animals-dogs for instance-do not understand consonants, but there are grounds for believing that to be the case. The nearest approaches that the dog himself makes to consonants, are in the growl by which he expresses the combative, threatening or warning-off feeling; where we hear something like the r; and in the word, if I may so term it, by which he expresses surprise or awakened attention, viz., wuh! in which we hear something of those very weak consonants w and h. My impression is that in those sentences

which gamekeepers, shepherds, &c. address to their dogs, the latter are guided by the vowel sounds only, the articulations being lost upon them. Were it a matter of importance to me, I should construct a vocabulary for speaking to dogs composed mainly of the three extreme vowel sounds of the human organs of speech, viz. the extreme throat vowel of e, as in meet; the extreme tongue vowel of a, as in father; and the extreme lip vowel of oo, as in mood, or say u, in bull. To the nonlinguistical reader I may say, that all other simple vowel sounds, in every language, lie between these; the o in lord, for instance, lying between the a in father, and the u (00) in bull; the a in fate between the a in father and the e in feet, &c. If these two intermediate vowels just instanced, together with the three extreme vowels, and, (to make the pronunciation for man more easy) the weak consonants h, w, m, and 7, were systematically combined by people who had carefully studied the language of dogs themselves, I am convinced that a vocabulary might be constructed which, from its distinctness and shortness, would enable the masters to get their work much more quickly, because intelligently performed, and save the poor animals many a beating now inflicted on them. An obedient, gooddispositioned dog, who would be only puzzled by a "Come in here, you brute," or a "Lie down there, you beast," might, I know from experience, be taught to run rapidly to his master's heels, or drop on the spot where addressed, by a distinct prolonged ah or ee; while a great deal of irritated gesticulation and useless English injunction might be spared by training him to attach definite ideas to dissyllables, vocally so distinct, as woomah, eeloo, &c. As to dogs' own language, I have found that it is possible not only to understand, but to learn to employ it to a certain extent, even with the very slight attention I have been able to devote to it. Apart from the wuh! of surprise, I have found that I can awaken the attention of the most sagacious and oldest dog (who is not getting superannuated) by the distinctive introductory whin