Abstract
THOSE who like dogs will find this tribute very interesting, and will, we think, be able to confirm much of it from personal experience. Those who begin the book with a prejudice in the other direction are, we think, likely to change their position. The story is told enthusiastically, but there is no nonsense about it, and the anthropomorphism is restrained. Some comparative psychologists of the severer sort have said that the fatal thing is a personal interest in the creature observed, and the danger of mingling emotion with inference, and inference with observation, is well known. We might admit this, and yet hold that comparative psychology is likely to be advanced by intimate studies such as Mr. Terhune has given us of “Lad.” There may be glimpses of reality to be got in this way which the analytic method does not reveal. In any case, the author has told, in a very delightful way, the story of a charming companion endowed with considerable complexity of character which nurture enhanced. For “Lad” was a “real” dog, and the chief happenings in nearly all the stories about him are “absolutely true.” He lived out a full span of sixteen years, and his epitaph reads “Thoroughbred in Body and Soul.”
Lad: A Dog.
Albert Payson
Terhune
By. Pp. 309. (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1920.) Price 6s. net.
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Lad: A Dog . Nature 105, 484 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/105484a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/105484a0