lavish on him — that black-hearted, thankless,
infamous scoundrel, Lady Tallis, is—
Sir John Gale."

         THE END OF THE FIRST BOOK.

         WHY DOES A POINTER POINT?

IT is an accomplishment which has
introduced him to polite society, and we can
understand why he goes on doing it; but what made
him begin? I asked the question the other
day when my liver-and-white puppy, Don,
first "snuffed the tainted gale." I tried him in
a bean stubble one evening in August, after a
shower. This field and the next barley stubble
are alive with birds calling in all directions.
The ground is hot and damp, and there can
be no doubt about the scent. I enter by the
gap next the four-acre pond, and let him draw
up the wind. He begins to be affected strangely;
his large, mild, puppy face is turned towards
the game. The rigidity of the tail becomes
general. No more capers, no more gambols
for Don at present! He is paralysed by his
sensations: not a muscle moves except those of
his sensitive nose. I mutter warningly, "To-o,
Ho, Don!" but there is no need; the breed is
too true; he does not stir. I pause a few
minutes. Now I'll move him. "Hold up, Don!
hold up, good dog!" But his emotions are too
strong for action; he only opens his mouth and
slobbers, and bends a very stiff neck very slightly
towards me. I encourage him to move, and at
last he lifts one leg very slowly, and after that
another; and so by dint of great encouragement,
I partly break the spell and we advance
towards the game—at the rate, say, of a mile in
two or three days.

Some ancestor of Don's, undoubtedly set out
with pointing a little. No matter why; the
motives of men and dogs are very various. All
must admit that somebody took it into his head
to invent a Chinese puzzle; in the nature of
things why might not some dog take it into his
head to point? The birds rose close to his
nose perhaps; his master was near; he was a
timid dog (pointers are very timid to this day),
and an obedient dog. "Steady, Don the first!"
He stops the pursuit, he glances round at his
master, then he crouches to the ground looking
towards the birds. As his nose is stretched
out in one direction, his tail, by the law of
contraries, will naturally be extended in the other.
Grant the first faint indication of a point, and
all the rest of his curious performance follows
in time by the simple law of "development."

The breeder's art can both eliminate qualities
and produce them. As with qualities of the
dog's mind so with peculiarities of the body in
other creatures. Sir John Sebright declared
that "he would produce any given feather (in
his bantams) in three years, but it would take
him six years to obtain head and beak." Those
who have seen the parti-coloured little herds of
the Channel Islands, seldom exceeding three or
four in number, would be surprised at the
novelty of a herd of fifty self-coloured "Alderneys,"
(so called) obtained in Buckinghamshire
by about thirty years' selection. In this, as in
all similar cases of long selection, persistence of
type was strongly marked. Colour is the least
important, and the least permanent mark of
breed; but so great was the effect of selection
and purity of blood, that the self-coloured and
lion-skinned bulls, in this unrivalled herd, were
invariably the sires of self-coloured calves, even
when the mother was spotted; such is the
potency of pure blood, which overcomes the
less persistent qualities of inferior animals.

The term, "pure blood," is a very pregnant
one. It does not refer to chemical composition.
The "base puddle" of a common hack
does not differ in form, colour, and
chemical composition of its corpuscles, from the
"noble blood" that runs in the veins of a
"descendant of many sires;" but in-and-in
breeding endows the blood with qualities
which are hereditary. "High-bred" is an
arbitrary term, signifying that certain qualities
have been accumulated by ancestral selection.
When applied to a bantam or a pigeon, it
means that he and his family are and have been
true to feather, etc. A high-bred sheep is a
south-down, for example, which hands down
its peculiar qualities of form, and colour, and
disposition with great persistence, because it is
an old breed, which has been "selected" by
nature and art until the type is almost as
uniform as if the animals had been cast like
bullets, in one mould. Habits and qualities,
however they may be first acquired, become
hereditary. And this holds good with plants
as with animals. The ornamental shrubs,
called by nurserymen, Americans, have been
accustomed at home to the soft light soil,
free from chalk or clay, which prevails there;
and here they require peat, soft loam,
leaf-mould, etc. The cause can in this case be
traced to the delicate structure of the root.
The pineapple ripens better in our hot-houses
in the spring than in the summer, because it
cannot bear the bright light of our atmosphere.
In its home in the tropics, the heat is
accompanied by vapour, and the sun's rays do not
burn, however high the temperature. The fig,
the vine, and the orange-tree, love bright
skies; but tropical plants are soon exhausted
with us, if we give them the heat which makes
them live fast, and do not protect them from
the strong light which exhausts them.

In the great conservatory at Kew, newly
built for Dr. Hooker's Sikkim rhododendrons,
we read many similar lessons. The lofty
mountains that spring from the plains of Bengal,
are swathed in fog and mist, particularly at
their base. When ascending the Himalayas,
Dr. Hooker collected the seeds of pines and
rhododendrons in the three zones of vegetation
through which he passed: from the tropics at
the base, to the Arctic region where the little
rhododendron nivale spreads its tiny blossoms
in the snow. The seedlings were found in
this country to possess different constitutional
powers of resisting cold; and those from the