[Jerry of the Islands by Jack London]@TWC D-Link book
Jerry of the Islands

CHAPTER I
12/17

He possessed a dim, vague, imperative knowingness that it was not merely not good, but supremely disastrous, leading to the mistily glimpsed sense of utter endingness for a dog, for any dog, to go into the water where slipped and slid and noiselessly paddled, sometimes on top, sometimes emerging from the depths, great scaly monsters, huge- jawed and horribly-toothed, that snapped down and engulfed a dog in an instant just as the fowls of _Mister_ Haggin snapped and engulfed grains of corn.
Often he had heard his father and mother, on the safety of the sand, bark and rage their hatred of those terrible sea-dwellers, when, close to the beach, they appeared on the surface like logs awash.

"Crocodile" was no word in Jerry's vocabulary.

It was an image, an image of a log awash that was different from any log in that it was alive.

Jerry, who heard, registered, and recognized many words that were as truly tools of thought to him as they were to humans, but who, by inarticulateness of birth and breed, could not utter these many words, nevertheless in his mental processes, used images just as articulate men use words in their own mental processes.

And after all, articulate men, in the act of thinking, willy nilly use images that correspond to words and that amplify words.
Perhaps, in Jerry's brain, the rising into the foreground of consciousness of an image of a log awash connoted more intimate and fuller comprehension of the thing being thought about, than did the word "crocodile," and its accompanying image, in the foreground of a human's consciousness.


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