86 Animal Intelligence 



through the door thus opened and eat the fish outside. 

 When put in this compartment, the top being covered by 

 a large box, a cat soon gave up efforts to claw through the 

 screen, quieted down and watched more or less the proceed- 

 ings going on in the other compartment. Thus this appara- 

 tus could be used to test the power of imitation. A cat who 

 had no experience with the means of escape from the large 

 compartment was put in the closed one ; another cat, who 

 would do it readily, was allowed to go through the per- 

 formance of pulling the string, going out, and eating the 

 fish. Record was made of the number of times he did so 

 and of the number of times the imitator had his eyes clearly 

 fixed on him. These were called 'times seen.' Cases 

 where the imitator was looking in the general direction 

 of the 'imitatee' and might very well have seen him and 

 probably did, were marked 'doubtful/ In the remaining 

 cases the cat did not see what was done by his instructor. 

 After the imitatee had done the thing a number of times, 

 the other was put in the big compartment alone, and the 

 time it took him before pulling the string was noted and 

 his general behavior closely observed. If he failed in 5 or 10 

 or 15 minutes to do so, he was released and not fed. This 

 entire experiment was repeated a number of times. From 

 the times taken by the imitator to escape and from obser- 

 vation of the way that he did it, we can decide whether imi- 

 tation played any part. The history of several cases are 

 given in the following tables. In the first column are given 

 the lengths of time that the imitator was shut up in the box 

 watching the imitatee. In the second column is the number 

 of times that the latter did the trick. In the third and 

 fourth are the times that the imitator surely and possibly 

 saw it done, while in the last is given the time that, when 

 tried alone, the imitator took to pull the string, or if 



