How Animals Speak.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 4, 22 January 1913, Page 13

How Animals Speak.

After spending several years in the Sierra Nevada Mountains studying the habits of birds and animals, Mr. Charles Kellogg, the well-known American naturalist, has returned to civilisation, claiming that lie has mastered the hidden languages by which the lower animals communicate with each other; and at the present time his claims are being closely investigated by leading American scientists and professors. Mr. Kellogg contends that wherever animals associate freely they communicate with each other, though animals of the same species have a more clear and perfect understanding than those of different species; and it is by years of constant observation of the sounds by which animals communicate with one another that Mr Kellogg claims to have mastered no fewer than fifteen animal and bird languages, ranging from the language of a chicken to that of a bear or a rattlesnake.

In his opinion the most highly developed language of any kind of animal, bird, or insect is that of the ordinary hearth erieket, while he has reason to suspect that monkeys are superior, too, in this respect. According to a dictionary which lie has compiled, there are twenty-seven elementary words or sounds in the language of a monkey, while the number of words or sounds in the languages of other animals varies from twelve to twenty-five. “Strangely enough,” he says, “the dog, which we arc accustomed to regard as of a rather high order of intelligence, is markedly deficient in the matter of language, both the grizzly bear and the rattlesnake being vastly his superior. In the vocabulary of the ordinary watch-dcg there axe but seventeen sounds. I know one dqg, an exceptionally intelligent collie, who regularly used twenty-one sounds in ordinary conversation. “This lack of linguistic development on the part of dogs proceeds, I believe, not from any laek of intelligence, but rather from laek of means of expression. To a far greater extent than any other animal of my acquaintance dogs depend upon their intuition, a faculty which is developed in them to a remarkable degree. They seem almost to read each other's minds without any exchange of signals whatever.”