1 66 Animal Intelligence 



he had been stung : probably he tasted the poison" (' Intro- 

 duction to Comparative Psychology,' p. 86). I fed seven 

 bees apiece to three chicks from ten to twenty days old. 

 They ate them all greedily, first smashing them down on the 

 ground violently in a rather dexterous manner. Apparently 

 this method of treatment is peculiar to the object. Chicks 

 three days old did not eat the bees. Some pecked at 

 them, but none would snap them up, and when the bee 

 approached, they sometimes sounded the danger note. 



Finally an account may be given of the reaction of chicks 

 at different ages, up to twenty-six days, to loud sounds. 

 These were the sounds made by clapping the hands, slam- 

 ming a door, whistling sharply, banging a tin pan on the 

 floor, mewing like a cat, playing a violin, thumping a coal 

 scuttle with a shovel, etc. Two chicks were together in 

 each experiment. Three fourths of the times no effect 

 was produced. On the other occasions there was some run- 

 ning or crouching or, at least, starting to run or crouch; 

 but, as was said, nothing like what Spalding reports as the 

 reaction to the 'cheep ' of the hawk. It is interesting to 

 notice that the two most emphatic reactions were to the 

 imitation mew. One time a chick ran wildly, chirring, and 

 then crouched and stayed still until I had counted 105. The 

 other time a chick crouched and stayed still until I counted 

 40. But the other chick with them did not; and in a dozen 

 other cases the ' meaw ' had no effect. 



I think that the main interest of most of these experiments 

 is the proof they afford that instinctive reactions are not 

 necessarily definite, perfectly appropriate and unvarying re- 

 sponses to accurately sensed and, so to speak, estimated 

 stimuli. The old notion that instinct was a God-given sub- 

 stitute for reason left us an unhappy legacy in the shape 

 of the tendency to think of all inherited powers of reaction as 



