NA TURE- S TUD Y NO TES 1 3 9 



To Keep Cut Flowers. Violets: in bowl of fresh water, cover, cold room 

 at night; not in a draft in daytime. Flowers in warm room: put small 

 pinch of salt in water. Holly and other woody stems: peel bark from 

 lower stem and put peeled part in water. Flowers with porous stems 

 (like asters): small piece of charcoal in water: Heliotrope: revived by 

 adding small drop of camphor to water. These are recommended in the 

 Garden Magazine. Will some readers try to find out the best methods 

 for keeping flowers in schoolrooms and report to The Review? 



Reasonable But Unreasoning Animals. In the Outlook recently, Mr. 

 John Burroughs again attacked the problem which he once discussed so 

 well in the "Ways of Nature." The following extracts indicate his main 

 points in his discussion of the question "Do Animals Reason?" which he 

 answers in harmony with the leading modern comparative psychologists 

 who agree with Lloyd Morgan that animals "do not perceive the why and 

 think the therefore." 



••There is much in a hasty view of animal life that looks like reason, 

 because instinct is a kind of intelligence and it acts in a reasonable manner. 

 But when we get something like an inside view of the mind of the lower 

 orders, we see how fundamentally it differs from the human. And we get 

 this view of it, not in the ordinary course of the animal's life, because the 

 ordinary course of its life is appointed by its inherited instincts, but under 

 exceptional conditions, when it is up against a new problem. Now, when 

 a reasoning intelligence is confronted by a new problem, it recognizes it as 

 such, and, having a fund of knowledge and experience to draw upon, it 

 proceeds to deal with it accordingly; not so the animal. It does not 

 know the new problem when it sees it, and in its dealings with it acts much 

 like a machine that was made to do something else. 



"Take the case of a robin or a bluebird fighting day after day its reflected 

 image in a window pane and never discovering how it is being fooled, or of 

 the birds that Darwin saw in South America drilling through and through 

 an artificial mud wall, mistaking it for the clay bank in which they nested 

 like our kingfisher. Such instances reveal as by a flash of light the nature 

 of animal mentality — how blindly, how unreasoningly the beasts act. If 

 a person ever behaved in that way, we would say he had lost his mind, 

 reason was dethroned. We would not merely say he was unreasonable, 

 we would say he was insane. 



"In its ordinary course of life the animal behavesin a reasonable manner, 

 its course of action follows regular lines. Its progenitors have followed 

 the same lines for countless generations; habit has worn a groove. But 

 when a new, unheard-of condition confronts it, then there is no groove 

 and its activity takes these irrational forms. When the phcebe-bird 

 covers her nest in the ledge with moss, she does a reasonable thing; she 

 blends it with the rock in a way that is both good art and good strategy. 

 Now, if this was the result of reason, when she comes to the porch and 

 to newly hewn timbers she would leave the moss off, because here it be- 

 trays rather than conceals her nest. But she sticks to her moss wherever 

 she goes. 



"Such natural history facts as the above, I say, reveal in the animal 

 w orld an order of mind that differs fundamentally from our own. Unless 



