160 Animal Intelligence 



after 10 or 12 days' experience. It certainly is not perfect 

 then. I took nine chicks from 10 to 14 days old and placed 

 them one at a time on a clear surface over which were scat- 

 tered grains of cracked wheat (the food they had been eat- 

 ing in this same way for a week) and watched the accuracy 

 of their pecking. Out of 214 objects pecked at, 159 were 

 seized, 55 were not. Out of the 159 that were seized, only 

 116 were seized on the first peck, 25 on the second, 16 on the 

 third, and the remaining two on the fourth. Of the 55 that 

 were not successfully seized, 31 were pecked at only once, 

 10 twice, 10 three times, 3 four times and i five times. I 

 fancy one would find that adult fowls would show by no 

 means a perfect record. So long as chicks with ten days' 

 experience fail to seize on the first trial 45 per cent of the 

 time, it is hardly fair to argue against the perfection of the 

 instinct on the ground of failures to seize during the first day. 

 The chick's practical appreciation of space-facts is seen 

 further in his attempts to escape when confined. Put chicks 

 only twenty or thirty hours old in a box with walls three or 

 four inches high and they will react to the perpendicularity 

 of the confining walls by trying to jump over them. In fact, 

 in the ways he moves, the directions he takes and the objects 

 he reacts to, the chicken has prior to experience the power 

 of appropriate reaction to colors and facts of all three dimen- 

 sions. 



INSTINCTIVE MUSCULAR COORDINATIONS 



In the acts already described we see fitting coordinations 

 at work in the chick's reactions to space-facts. A few more 

 samples may be given. In jumping down from heights the 

 chick does not walk off or fall off (save rarely), but jumps 

 off. He meets the situation ' f loneliness on a small eminence ' : 

 by walking around the edge and peering down ; he meets the 



