There is much in a hasty view of animal life that looks like reason, because instinct is a kind of intelligence and it acts in a reasonable manner. But when we get something like an inside view of the mind of the lower orders, we see how fundamentally it differs from the human. And we get this view of it, not in the ordinary course of the animal's life, because the ordinary course of its life is appointed by its inherited instincts, but under exceptional conditions, when it encounters a new problem. Now, when a reasoning intelligence is confronted by a new problem, it recognizes it as such, and, having a fund of knowledge and experience to draw upon, it proceeds to deal with it accordingly. Not so the animal; it does not know the new problem when it sees it, and in its dealings with it acts much like a machine that was made to do some other work.

Let me group together here a number of instances from animal life, some of which I have given elsewhere in my writings, which show how much nearer the lower orders come to being mere automata than they come to being reasoning intelligences.

Take the case of the robin or bluebird that may often be seen in the spring, day after day, dashing itself madly against a window-pane, fighting its fancied rival there in its own reflected image, and never discovering that it is being fooled even after it has taken a peep into the empty room inside

through a broken pane; or the case of the red squirrel that carried nuts all one day and put them into the end of a drain pipe that ran down an embankment wall and opened on to a pavement below, where the nuts behaved much as the water did that

the pipe was meant to carry· they dropped down and rolled away across the street pavement. Or the case of the beaver that cut down a tree four times because the tree was held by the branches of other trees at the top so that it could not fall, but only dropped at each cutting the distance of the piece cut off. What finally decided the beaver to desist, it would be interesting to know. Or take the case of Hamerton's cow that in affection for her calf licked its stuffed skin till it ripped open and the hay with which it was stuffed fell out, when the bereaved mother proceeded to eat the hay with the utmost matter-of-course air.

During some long-gone time in the history of the raccoon it seems to have been needful for it to wash its food. Maybe the habit was acquired when it lived more exclusively than it does now upon freshwater mussels, which it dug out of the mud along inland streams and lakes. At any rate, the coon now always washes its food, whether it needs washing or not, and in muddy water as promptly as in clear, so that the Germans call the coon the Waschbär. Ernest Harold Baynes tells me that he has taken young coons before their eyes were open, and

brought them up on milk, and that the first time he gave them solid food, one of them took it and ran to a pail of water which it had never before seen, thrust the food into it, washed it, and then ate it. When no water was within reach, he has seen the coon rub the food a moment in its paws and then drop it. Dallas Lore Sharp says that his tame coon would go through the motions of washing its food on the upturned bottom of its empty tub, and that it would try to wash its oysters in the straw on the floor of its cage. This habit, I say, doubtless had its origin in some past need or condition of the life of the race of coons, and it persists after that need is gone.

The story that is told of the brakeman upon a train of cars in Russia, who at each stop of the train went from wheel to wheel, as was once the custom in all countries, and hit it a sharp blow with a hammer, saying on being asked why he did it, “I do not know, sir, it is my orders," illustrates very well the unreasoning character of animal instinct. The animal has its orders, but it does not think or ask why.

At Bahia Blanca, in South America, Darwin saw a bird, the casarita, that builds its nest in holes which it drills in the banks of streams like our kingfisher. At one place where he was stopping, the walls around the house were built of hardened mud, and were bored through and through with holes by these

birds in their attempts to form their nests. The mud wall attracted them as if it had been a natural earth bank, and in trying to reach the proper depth for their nests, six feet or more, they invariably came through and out on the other side. Still they kept on drilling. Says Darwin:

"I do not doubt that each bird, as often as it came to daylight on the opposite side, was greatly surprised at the marvelous fact.”

I do not suppose the bird really experienced any feeling of surprise at all, any more than the bluebird above referred to did, when it looked into the vacant room and did not see the object of its wrath. The feeling of surprise comes to beings that understand the relation of cause and effect, which evi

dently the lower animals do not.

Had the casarita

been capable of the feeling of surprise, it would have been capable of seeing its own mistake.

Our high-hole is at times guilty of the same folly. When he drums on the metal ventilator or the tin leader upon your house, he has found a new thing, but it suits his purpose to make a noise to attract the attention of the female rather better than the dry stub did. And when he excavates a limb or treetrunk for his nest, he acts like a reasonable being; but when he drills a hole through the clapboards of an empty building, and, not finding that the interior is what he wants, drills again and again, or perforates over and over the covering of an ice-house and

lets out the sawdust, as I have often known him to do, what does he act like then?

Such instances reveal as by a flash of light the nature of animal mentality—how blindly, how automatically, the beasts act. If a person ever behaved in that way, we should say he had lost his mind, that reason was dethroned. We should not merely say he was unreasonable, we should say he was insane.

In its ordinary course of life the animal behaves in a reasonable manner, its course of action follows regular lines. Its progenitors have followed the same lines for countless generations; habit has worn a groove. But when a new, unheard-of condition confronts them, then there is no groove and their activity takes these irrational forms. When the phoebe-bird covers her nest in the ledge with moss, she does a reasonable thing; she blends it with the rock in a way that is both good art and good strategy. Now, if this were the result of reason, when she comes to the porch and to newly hewn timbers she would leave the moss off, because here it betrays rather than conceals her nest. But she sticks to her moss wherever she goes.

The same curious blundering may be seen in the insect world. For instance, the trap-door spiders in California make their nests in moss-covered ground and cover the lids of the doors with green growing moss. An English naturalist, as reported by Jordan