420 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 



should be justified in suppressing it. And, after all, 

 regarded as an act of reason, the sprinkling of crumbs to 

 attract birds does not involve ideas or inferences very 

 much more abstruse or remote than those which are con- 

 cerned in some of the other and better corroborated 

 instances of the display of feline intelligence, which I shall 

 now proceed to state. 



In the understanding of mechanical appliances, cats 

 attain to a higher level of intelligence than any other 

 animals, except monkeys, and perhaps elephants. Doubt- 

 less it is not accidental that these three kinds of animals 

 fall to be associated in this particular. The monkey in 

 its hands, the elephant in its trunk, and the cat in its 

 agile limbs provided with mobile claws, all possess instru- 

 ments adapted to manipulation, with which no other organs 

 in the brute creation can properly be compared, except the 

 beak and toes of the parrot, where, as we have already 

 seen, a similar correlation with intelligence may be traced. 

 Probably, therefore, the higher aptitude which these 

 animals display in their understanding of mechanical 

 appliances is due to the reaction exerted upon their intel- 

 gence by these organs of manipulation. But, be this as 

 it may, I am quite sure that, excepting only the monkey 

 and elephant, the cat shows a higher intelligence of the 

 special kind in question than any other animal, not for- 

 getting even the dog. Thus, for instance, while I have 

 only heard of one solitary case (communicated to me by a 

 correspondent) of a dog which, without tuition, divined the 

 use of a thumb-latch, so as to open a closed door by 

 jumping upon the handle and depressing the thumb-piece, 

 I have received some half-dozen instances of this display 

 of intelligence on the part of cats. These instances are 

 all such precise repetitions of one another, that I conclude 

 the fact to be one of tolerably ordinary occurrence among 

 cats, while it is certainly very -rare among dogs. I may 

 add that my own coachman once had a cat which, cer- 

 tainly without tuition, learnt thus to open a door that led 

 into the stables from a yard into which looked some of the 

 windows of the house. Standing at these windows when 

 the cat did not see me, I have many times witnessed her 



