“So he cried ‘Ho, Ball! Ho, Ball!’ and it pleased God that his horse stood still until somebody came along, which was a quarter of an hour or more. He ordered that this horse should be kept as long as he should live, which was so; he lived till 1646.”
The history of animals abounds in examples of their intelligence and docility; and probably no one who has a favorite animal has failed to notice some such instance for himself.
LOVE LEADING THE ORCHESTRA.
(After painting by A. Gill. )
The idea of teaching animals to perform tricks is certainly a very old one. The trained horses, dogs and elephants of our modern circus had their predecessors more than two thousand years ago, in Roman amphitheaters.
We learn from historians that, when Tiberius was emperor, his kinsman Germanicus exhibited a play in which the actors were elephants. They were dressed in regular garments, danced, performed various tricks, and finally, at a given signal, seated themselves around a table on couches spread with velvet, and concluded the performance by eating and drinking with perfect propriety. A modern artist has amusingly represented this ancient bit of comedy.
Plutarch mentions a trained dog which was exhibited before Vespasian, in the theater of Marcellus, and which won great applause from that jolly emperor.
