1 62 Animal Intelligence 



out toward the shore. The hen may try to fly back into the 

 boat if it is dropped overboard, and whether dropped in or 

 slung in from the shore, will float about aimlessly for a while 

 and only very slowly reach the shore. The movements the 

 chick makes do look to be such as trying to run in water 

 might lead to, but it is hard to see why a hen shouldn't run 

 to get out of cold water as well as a chick. If, on the other 

 hand, the actions of the chick are due to a real swimming in- 

 stinct, it is easy to see that, being unused, the instinct might 

 wane as the animal grew up. 



Such instinctive coordinations as these, together with the 

 walking, running, preening of feathers, stretching out of leg 

 backward, scratching the head, etc., noted by other obser- 

 vers, make the infant chick a very interesting contrast to the 

 infant man. That the helplessness of the child is a sacrifice 

 to plasticity, instability and consequent power to develop we 

 all know ; but one begins to realize how much of a sacrifice 

 when one sees what twenty-one days of embryonic life do for 

 the chick brain. And one cannot help wondering whether 

 some of the space-perception we trace to experience, some 

 of the coordinations which we attribute to a gradual devel- 

 opment from random, accidentally caused movements may 

 not be more or less definitely provided for by the child's 

 inherited brain structure. Walking has been found to be 

 instinctive ; why not other things ? 



INSTINCTIVE EMOTIONAL REACTIONS 



The only experiments to which I wish to refer at length 

 under this heading are some concerning the chick's instinc- 

 tive fears. Before describing them, it may be well to men- 

 tion their general bearing on the results obtained by Spald- 

 ing and Morgan. They corroborate Morgan's decision that 

 no well-defined specific fears are present ; that the fears of 



