The Mental Life of the Monkeys 211 



is a different question. Such may be present and function 

 as the excitants of acts. 



It is likely that this question could have been definitely 

 solved if it had been possible for me to work with a larger 

 number of animals. With enough subjects one could use 

 the method mentioned on page 105 of Chapter II, of 

 giving the animals tuition in acts which they would 

 eventually do themselves without it, and then leaving them 

 to their efforts, noting any differences in the way they 

 learned from that in which other subjects who had no tui- 

 tion learned the same acts. The chief of such differences to 

 note would be differences in the time of their first trial, in the 

 slope of the time-curve and in the number of useless acts. 



It would also be possible to extend experiments of the 

 type of the (on chair) experiment, where a subject is given 

 first a certain time (calculated by the experimenter to be 

 somewhat less than would be needed for the animal to hit 

 upon the act) and if he does fail is then given certain tuition 

 and then a second trial. The influence of the tuition is esti- 

 mated by the presence or absence of cases where after tuition 

 the act is done within the time. 



There is nothing necessarily insoluble in the problem. 

 Given ten or twenty monkeys that can be handled without 

 any difficulty and it could be settled in a month. 



With this general preface we may turn to the more special 

 questions connected with the experiments on imitation of 

 human acts and of the acts of other monkeys and on the for- 

 mation of associations apart from the selection of impulses. 



IMITATION OF HUMAN BEINGS 



It has been a common opinion that monkeys learned 

 to do things from seeing them done by human beings. 



