kind of natural stanchion--and not have wit enough to get it out
again, though she could have done so at once by lifting her head to a
horizontal position. But the best instance I know of the grotesque
ignorance of a cow is given by Hamerton in his "Chapters on Animals."
The cow would not "give down" her milk unless she had her calf before
her. But her calf had died, so the herdsman took the skin of the calf,
stuffed it with hay, and stood it up before the inconsolable mother.
Instantly she proceeded to lick it and to yield her milk. One day, in
licking it, she ripped open the seams, and out rolled the hay. This
the mother at once proceeded to eat, without any look of surprise or
alarm. She liked hay herself, her acquaintance with it was of long
standing, and what more natural to her than that her calf should turn
out to be made of hay! Yet this very cow that did not know her calf
from a bale of hay would have defended her young against the attack of
a bear or a wolf in the most skillful and heroic manner; and the horse
that was nearly frightened out of its skin by a white stone, or by the
flutter of a piece of newspaper by the roadside, would find its way
back home over a long stretch of country, or find its way to water in
the desert, with a certainty you or I could not approach.
The hen-hawk that the farm-boy finds so difficult to approach with his
gun will yet alight upon his steel trap fastened to the top of a pole
in the fields. The rabbit that can be so easily caught in a snare or
in a box-trap will yet conceal its nest and young in the most
ingenious manner. Where instinct or inherited knowledge can come into
play, the animals are very wise, but new conditions, new problems,
bring out their ignorance.
A college girl told me an incident of a red squirrel she had observed
at her home in Iowa that illustrates how shallow the wit of a squirrel
is when confronted by new conditions. This squirrel carried nuts all
day and stored them in the end of a drainpipe that discharged the
rain-water upon the pavement below. The nuts obeyed the same law that
the rain-water did, and all rolled through the pipe and fell upon the
sidewalk. In the squirrel's experience, and in that of his forbears,
all holes upon the ground were stopped at the far end, or they were
like pockets, and if nuts were put in them they stayed there. A hollow
tube open at both ends, that would not hold nuts--this was too much
for the wit of the squirrel. But how wise he is about the nuts
themselves!
Among the lower animals the ignorance of one is the ignorance of all,
and the knowledge of one is the knowledge of all, in a sense in which
the same is not true among men. Of course some are more stupid than
others of the same species, but probably, on the one hand, there are
no idiots among them, and, on the other, none is preëminent in wit.
Animals take the first step in knowledge--they perceive things and
discriminate between them; but they do not take the second
step--combine them, analyze them, and form concepts and judgments.
So that, whether animals know much or little, I think we are safe in
saying that what they know in the human way, that is, from a process
of reasoning, is very slight.
The animals all have in varying degrees perceptive intelligence. They
know what they see, hear, smell, feel, so far as it concerns them to
know it. They know their kind, their mates, their enemies, their food,
heat from cold, hard from soft, and a thousand other things that it is
important that they should know, and they know these things just as we
know them, through their perceptive powers.
We may ascribe intelligence to the animals in the same sense in which
we ascribe it to a child, as the perception of the differences or of
the likenesses and the relations of things--that is, perceptive
intelligence, but not reasoning intelligence. When the child begins to
"notice things," to know its mother, to fear strangers, to be
attracted by certain objects, we say it begins to show intelligence.
Development in this direction goes on for a long time before it can
form any proper judgment about things or take the step of reason.
If we were to subtract from the sum of the intelligence of an animal
that which it owes to nature or inherited knowledge, the amount left,
representing its own power of thought, would be very small. Darwin
tells of a pike in an aquarium separated by plate-glass from fish
which were its proper food, and that the pike, in trying to capture
the fish, would often dash with such violence against the glass as to
be completely stunned. This the pike did for three months before it
learned caution. After the glass was removed, the pike would not
attack those particular fishes, but would devour others that were
introduced. It did not yet understand the situation, but merely
associated the punishment it had received with a particular kind of
fish.
During the mating season the males of some of our birds may often be
seen dashing themselves against a window, and pecking and fluttering
against the pane for hours at a time, day after day. They take their
own images reflected in the glass to be rival birds, and are bent upon
demolishing them. They never comprehend the mystery of the glass,
because glass is not found in nature, and neither they nor their
ancestors have had any experience with it.
Contrast these incidents with those which Darwin relates of the
American monkeys. When the monkeys had cut themselves once with any
sharp tool, they would not touch it again, or else would handle it
with the greatest caution. They evinced the simpler forms of reason,
of which monkeys are no doubt capable.
Animals are wise as Nature is wise; they partake, each in its own
measure, of that universal intelligence, or mind-stuff, that is
operative in all things--in the vegetable as well as in the animal
world. Does the body, or the life that fills it, reason when it tries
to get rid of, or to neutralize the effects of, a foreign substance,
like a bullet, by encysting it? or when it thickens the skin on the
hand or on any other part of the body, even forming special pads
called callosities, as a result of the increased wear or friction?
This may be called physiological intelligence.
But how blind this intelligence is at times, or how wanting in
judgment, may be seen when it tries to develop a callosity upon the
foot as a result of the friction of the shoe, and overdoes the matter
and produces the corn. The corn is a physiological blunder. Or see an
unexpected manifestation of this intelligence when we cut off the
central and leading shoot of a spruce or of a pine tree, and
straightway one of the lateral and horizontal branches rises up, takes
the place of the lost leader, and carries the tree upward; or in the
roots of a tree working their way through the ground much like molten
metal, parting and uniting, taking the form of whatever object they
touch, shaping themselves to the rock, flowing into its seams, the
better to get a grip upon the earth and thus maintain an upright
position.
In the animal world this foresight becomes psychic intelligence,
developing in man the highest form of all, reasoned intelligence. When
an animal solves a new problem or meets a new condition as effectually
as the tree or the body does in the cases I have just cited, we are
wont to ascribe to it powers of reason. Reason we may call it, but it
is reason not its own.
This universal or cosmic intelligence makes up by far the greater part
of what animals know. The domestic animals, such as the dog, that have
long been under the tutelage of man, of course show more independent
power of thought than the uneducated beasts of the fields and woods.
The plant is wise in all ways to reproduce and perpetuate itself; see
the many ingenious devices for scattering seed. In the animal world
this intelligence is most keen and active in the same direction. The
wit of the animal comes out most clearly in looking out for its food
and safety. We are often ready to ascribe reason to it in feats shown
in these directions.
In man alone does this universal intelligence or mind-stuff reach out
beyond these primary needs and become aware of itself. What the plant
or the animal does without thought or rule, man takes thought about.
He considers his ways, I noticed that the scallops in the shallow
water on the beach had the power to anchor themselves to stones or to
some other object, by putting out a little tough but elastic cable
from near the hinge, and that they did so when the water was rough;
but I could not look upon It as an act of conscious or individual
intelligence on the part of the bivalve. It was as much an act of the
general intelligence to which I refer as was its hinge or its form.
But when the sailor anchors his ship, that is another matter. He
thinks about it, he reasons from cause to effect, he sees the storm
coming, he has a fund of experience, and his act is a special
individual act.
The muskrat builds its house instinctively, and all muskrats build
alike. Man builds his house from reason and forethought. Savages build
as nearly alike as the animals, but civilized man shows an endless
variety. The higher the intelligence, the greater the diversity.
The sitting bird that is so solicitous to keep its eggs warm, or to
feed and defend its young, probably shows no more independent and
individual intelligence than the plant that strives so hard to mature
and scatter its seed. A plant will grow toward the light; a tree will
try to get from under another tree that overshadows it; a willow will
run its roots toward the water: but these acts are the results of
external stimuli alone.
When I go to pass the winter in a warmer climate, the act is the
result of calculation and of weighing pros and cons. I can go, of I
can refrain from going. Not so with the migrating birds. Nature plans
and thinks for them; it is not an individual act on the part of each;
it is a race instinct: they must go; the life of the race demands it.
Or when the old goose covers up her nest, or the rabbit covers her
young with a blanket of hair and grass of her own weaving, I do not
look upon these things as independent acts of intelligence: it is the
cunning of nature; it is a race instinct.
Animals, on the whole, know what is necessary for them to know--what
the conditions of life have taught their ancestors through countless
generations. It is very important, for instance, that amphibians shall
have some sense that shall guide them to the water; and they have such
a sense. It is said that young turtles and crocodiles put down
anywhere will turn instantly toward the nearest water. It is certain
that the beasts of the field have such a sense much more fully
developed than has man. It is of vital importance that birds should
know how to fly, how to build their nests, how to find their proper
food, and when and where to migrate, without instruction or example,
otherwise the race might become extinct.
Richard Jefferies says that most birds'-nests need a structure around
them like a cage to keep the young from falling out or from leaving
the nest prematurely. Now, if such a structure were needed, either the
race of birds would have failed, or the structure would have been
added. Since neither has happened, we are safe in concluding it is not
needed.
We are not warranted in attributing to any wild, untrained animal a
degree of intelligence that its forbears could not have possessed. The
animals for the most part act upon inherited knowledge, that is,
knowledge that does not depend upon instruction or experience. For
instance, the red squirrels near me seem to know that chestnut-burs
will open if cut from the tree and allowed to lie upon the ground. At
least, they act upon this theory. I do not suppose this fact or
knowledge lies in the squirrel's mind as it would in that of a man--as
a deduction from facts of experience or of observation. The squirrel
cuts off the chestnuts because he is hungry for them, and because his
ancestors for long generations have cut them off in the same way. That
the air or sun will cause the burs to open is a bit of knowledge that
I do not suppose he possesses in the sense in which we possess it: he
is in a hurry for the nuts, and does not by any means always wait for
the burs to open; he frequently chips them up and eats the pale nuts.
The same squirrel will bite into the limbs of a maple tree in spring
and suck the sap. What does he know about maple trees and the spring
flow of sap? Nothing as a mental concept, as a bit of concrete
knowledge. He often finds the sap flowing from a crack or other wound
in the limbs of a maple, and he sips it and likes it. Then he sinks
his teeth into the limb, as his forbears undoubtedly did.
When I was a boy and saw, as I often did on my way to school, where a
squirrel had stopped on his course through the woods and dug down
through two or three feet of snow, bringing up a beech-nut or an
acorn, I used to wonder how he knew the nut was there. I am now
convinced that he smelled it.
Why should he not? It stands the squirrel in hand to smell nuts; they
are his life. He knows a false nut from a good one without biting into
it. Try the experiment upon your tame chipmunk or caged gray squirrel,
and see if this is not so. The false or dead nut is lighter, and most
persons think this fact guides the squirrel. But this, it seems to me,
implies an association of ideas beyond the reach of instinct. A young
squirrel will reject a worthless nut as promptly as an old one will.
Again the sense of smell is the guide; the sound-meated nut has an
odor which the other has not. All animals are keen and wise in
relation to their food and to their natural enemies. A red squirrel
will chip up green apples and pears for the seeds at the core: can he
know, on general principles, that these fruits contain seeds? Does not
some clue to them reach his senses?
I have known gray squirrels to go many hundred yards in winter across
fields to a barn that contained grain in the sheaf. They could have
had no other guide to the grain than the sense of smell. Watch a
chipmunk or any squirrel near at hand: as a friend of mine observed,
he seems to be smelling with his whole body; his abdomen fairly
palpitates with the effort.
The coon knows when the corn is in the milk, gaining that knowledge,
no doubt, through his nose. At times he seems to know enough, too, to
cut off his foot when caught in a trap, especially if the foot becomes
frozen; but if you tell me he will treat his wound by smearing it with
pitch or anything else, or in any way except by licking it, I shall
discredit you. The practice of the art of healing by the application
of external or foreign substances is a conception entirely beyond the
capacity of any of the lower animals. If such a practice had been
necessary for the continuance of the species, it would probably have
been used. The knowledge it implies could not be inherited; it must
needs come by experience. When a fowl eats gravel or sand, is it
probable that the fowl knows what the practice is for, or has any
notion at all about the matter? It has a craving for the gravel, that
is all. Nature is wise for it.
The ostrich is described by those who know it intimately as the most
stupid and witless of birds, and yet before leaving its eggs exposed
to the hot African sun, the parent bird knows enough to put a large
pinch of sand on the top of each of them, in order, it is said, to
shade and protect the germ, which always rises to the highest point of
the egg. This act certainly cannot be the result of knowledge, as we
use the term; the young ostrich does it as well as the old. It is the
inherited wisdom of the race, or instinct.
A sitting bird or fowl turns its eggs at regular intervals, which has
the effect of keeping the yolk from sticking to the shell. Is this act
the result of knowledge or of experience? It is again the result of
that untaught knowledge called instinct. Some kinds of eggs hatch in
two weeks, some in three, others in four. The mother bird has no
knowledge of this period. It is not important that she should have. If
the eggs are addled or sterile, she will often continue to sit beyond
the normal period. If the continuance of the species depended upon her
knowing the exact time required to hatch her eggs, as it depends upon
her having the incubating fever, of course she would know exactly, and
would never sit beyond the required period.
But what shall we say of Mrs. Annie Martin's story, in her "Home Life
on an Ostrich Farm," of the white-necked African crow that, in order
to feast upon the eggs of the ostrich, carries a stone high in the air
above them and breaks them by letting it fall? This looks like reason,
a knowledge of the relation of cause and effect. Mrs. Martin says the
crows break tortoise-shells in the same way, and have I not heard of
our own crows and gulls carrying clams and crabs into the air and
dropping them upon the rocks?
If Mrs. Martin's statements are literally true,--if she has not the
failing, so common among women observers, of letting her feeling and
her fancies color her observations,--then her story shows how the
pressure of hunger will develop the wit of a crow.
But the story goes one step beyond my credence. It virtually makes the
crow a tool-using animal, and Darwin knew of but two animals, the
man-like ape and the elephant, that used anything like a tool or
weapon to attain their ends. How could the crow gain the knowledge or
the experience which this trick implies? What could induce it to make
the first experiment of breaking an egg with a falling stone but an
acquaintance with physical laws such as man alone possesses? The first
step in this chain of causation it is easy to conceive of any animal
taking; namely, the direct application of its own powers or weapons to
the breaking of the shell. But the second step,--the making use of a
foreign substance or object in the way described,--that is what
staggers one.
Our own crow has great cunning, but it is only cunning. He is
suspicious of everything that looks like design, that suggests a trap,
even a harmless string stretched around a corn-field. As a natural
philosopher he makes a poor show, and the egg or the shell that he
cannot open with his own beak he leaves behind. Yet even his alleged
method of dropping clams upon the rocks to break the shells does not
seem incredible. He might easily drop a clam by accident, and then,
finding the shell broken, repeat the experiment. He is still only
taking the first step in the sequence of causations.
A recent English nature-writer, on the whole, I think, a good observer
and truthful reporter, Mr. Richard Kearton, tells of an osprey that
did this incredible thing: to prevent its eggs from being harmed by an
enforced exposure to the sun, the bird plunged into the lake, then
rose, and shook its dripping plumage over the nest. The writer
apparently reports this story at second-hand. It is incredible to me,
because it implies a knowledge that the hawk could not possibly
possess.
Such an emergency could hardly arise once in a lifetime to it or its
forbears. Hence the act could not have been the result of inherited
habit, or instinct, and as an original act on the part of the osprey
it is not credible. The bird probably plunged into the lake for a
fish, and then by accident shook itself above the eggs. In any case,
the amount of water that would fall upon the eggs under such
circumstances would be too slight to temper appreciably the heat.
There is little doubt that among certain of our common birds the male,
during periods of excessive heat, has been known to shade the female
with his outstretched wings, and the mother bird to shade her young in
the same way. But this is a different matter. This emergency must
have occurred for ages, and it, again, called only for the first step
from cause to effect, and called for the use of no intermediate agent.
If the robin were to hold a leaf or a branch above his mate at such
times, that would imply reflection.
It is said that elephants in India will besmear themselves with mud as
a protection against insects, and that they will break branches from
the trees and use them to brush away the flies. If this is true, it
shows, I think, something beyond instinct in the elephant; it shows
reflection.
All birds are secretive about their nests, and display great cunning
in hiding them; but whether they know the value of adaptive material,
such as moss, lichens, and dried grass, in helping to conceal them,
admits of doubt, because they so often use the results of our own
arts, as paper, rags, strings, tinsel, in such a reckless way. In a
perfectly wild state they use natural material because it is the
handiest and there is really no other. The phoebe uses the moss on
or near the rocks where she builds; the sparrows, the bobolinks, and
the meadowlarks use the dry grass of the bank or of the meadow bottom
where the nest is placed.
The English writer to whom I have referred says that the wren builds
the outside of its nest of old hay straws when placing it in the side
of a rick, of green moss when it is situated in a mossy bank, and of
dead leaves when in a hedge-row or a bramble-bush, in each case thus
rendering the nest very difficult of detection because it harmonizes
so perfectly with its surroundings, and the writer wonders if this
harmony is the result of accident or of design. He is inclined to
think that it is unpremeditated, as I myself do. The bird uses the
material nearest to hand.
Another case, which this same writer gives at second-hand, of a bird
recognizing the value of protective coloration, is not credible. A
friend of his told him that he had once visited a colony of terns "on
an island where the natural breeding accommodation was so limited that
many of them had conveyed patches of pebbles on to the grass and laid
their eggs thereon."
Here is the same difficulty we have encountered before--one more step
of reasoning than the bird is capable of. As a deduction from observed
facts, a bird, of course, knows nothing about protective coloring; its
wisdom in this respect is the wisdom of Nature, and Nature in animal
life never acts with this kind of foresight. A bird may exercise some
choice about the background of its nest, but it will not make both
nest and background.
Nature learns by endless experiment. Through a long and expensive
process of natural selection she seems to have brought the color of
certain animals and the color of their environment pretty close
together, the better to hide the animals from their enemies and from
their prey, as we are told; but the animals themselves do not know
this, though they may act as if they did. Young terns and gulls
instinctively squat upon the beach, where their colors so harmonize
with the sand and pebbles that the birds are virtually invisible.
Young partridges do the same in the woods, where the eye cannot tell
the reddish tuft of down from the dry leaves. How many gulls and terns
and partridges were sacrificed before Nature learned this trick!
I regard the lower animals as incapable of taking the step from the
fact to the principle. They have perceptions, but not conceptions.
They may recognize a certain fact, but any deduction from that fact to
be applied to a different case, or to meet new conditions, is beyond
them. Wolves and foxes soon learn to be afraid of poisoned meat: just
what gives them the hint it would be hard to say, as the survivors
could not know the poison's deadly effect from experience; their fear
of it probably comes from seeing their fellows suffer and die after
eating it, or maybe through that mysterious means of communication
between animals to which I have referred in a previous article. The
poison probably changes the odor of the meat, and this strange smell
would naturally put them on their guard.