70 TUB EDITOR OT TUB "SPECTATOR.'] Sin,—I should like to
suggest that the explanation of the incident narrated in your most interesting article in last week's issue is to be found perhaps in what I may call inherited memory. The young horse found himself down, a pack of wild beasts baying him. In just such a pass, held up by wolf—or wild—dog pack, the ancestors of that horse must often have found themselves in primeval days. Is it not possible that shadowy recollections of such a scene—its cries, its smells, its agonies—borne in the blood down the stream of race-life, and dormant for ages, were roused suddenly in the mind of the young horse by his position ? He remembered, as it were, and screamed, just as his ancestor in like case had scriamed. That scream in its turn roused in the minds of the dogs old and bloody memories. They forgot themselves, or, rather, they remembered forgotten selves. The domestic cloak was dropped. They went for that horse as their ancestors had gone for his ; and they went for the men because the men, too, were flesh, and the dogs. wild once more, were mad for blood.—I am, Sir, &c.,
6 Vicarage Drive, Eastbourne.
ALFRED OLLIVANT.
P.S.—Compare Socrates' favourite doctrine that knowledge is simply recollection,—" recollection is most commonly a process of recovering that which has been already forgotten through time and inattention " (" Phaedo," Jowett's translation).
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