BLOODHOUNDS are for the moment very decidedly to the front. Sir Charles Warren, it seems, has not - or had not yesterday - purchased the pair he had been testing; but the question of the sleuth-hound is for the moment the most prominent subsidiary subject into which the Whitechapel horrors have branched out. It is more than questionable whether anything will come of the matter, beyond perhaps a more intimate acquaintance with what the bloodhound can or cannot do. That he can follow a slender scent where that scent has not been "crossed" is well known. There needed no Commissioner of Police to take an early run in Hyde Park to tell us that. In rural districts, where wayfarers are few and the track of the criminal is pretty well isolated, these animals may do good service. But what chance would they have in such localities as Whitechapel, where the feet of wayfaring men and of crowds attracted by the latest horror would very quickly obliterate all traces of the fugitive? In such a case the services of the detective officer would be worth far more than those of the bloodhound. We would back the biped against the quadruped. Among the items of real information, however, which have cropped up even in the early stage of this inquiry there is one which will probably be of more interest to the naturalist than to the police. One ingenious gentleman in the suburbs of London has recently mastered the secrets of canine language, since he asserts that the sleuth-hound's scent is merely the high development of a faculty common to all dogs. As a humourist recently remarked, when two dogs meet and converse, they do not say, "Where have you been?" or "What have you seen?" but "What have you smelt?". So much, at all events, we shall have gained, even if nothing further results from the experiment. We shall know what our dogs are talking about for the future.
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