Instinct: Sense of Orientation

Abstract

YOUR article on this subject in the issue of March 20, insists very properly on the objection to Mr. Wallace's theory that “it it be solely by the aid of this memory of smells that the dog is to return to the place whence it was taken, it must needs make haste back.” I wish to contribute an anecdote of which the hero did not make haste back, and which seems to me to confirm rather the theory already suggested in this correspondence, namely, of a sense of polarity or orientation possessed by so many of the lower animals both domesticated and wild. Last summer I was at North Bridgewater, Mass, a shoe-making town about twenty miles south of Boston. At the railroad station I remarked an intelligent dog, whose owner told me, with a good deal of feeling, that he had sold the animal some time previously to be taken to Somervile—a suburb adjoining Boston on the north-west, therefore distant from North Bridgewater at least twenty miles. The dog wis carried thither in a closed box-car, probably making a change at Boston, where the railroad terminates. For some two or three weeks the dog made himself at home in his new premises as if perfectly contented, when suddenly he disappeared, and turned up again not at North Bridgewater, the home of his former owner, but at Bridgewater, a mile or two further south, where he had been raised, at the house of that owner's father; evidently not meaning to be sold again.