142 STELLA B. VINCENT 



an animal has taken. Animals which do not prey upon others 

 for food have little need for tracking. Experimentation has 

 failed to show such ability in these animals. 



Sex odor calls forth specific behavior. This odor, however, 

 does not seem to carry from cage to cage even though the cages 

 are placed side by side. Efforts to establish the tracking of one 

 sex by the other have been made 4 . Watson said he found no 

 good evidence of tracking but that adult rats showed preferences 

 for entrances that contained the odor of the opposite sex. 5 Small 

 insists that he had no evidence to show that the males followed 

 their own tracks or those of other males or that females followed 

 the tracks of the males. 6 Possibly these attempts have not been 

 made at the right periods; at least the results are inconclusive. 



How well rats or other animals can localize odors is still an 

 open experimental field as is also the possibility of olfaction 

 functioning in giving distance values. 



The object of this work was to see whether an olfactory control 

 could be introduced into the learning of the maze, and, if it 

 could be, to discover how it would affect the learning process as 

 compared with other forms of control. 



The modified Hampton Court maze was used, the same one 

 which served for the experiments with vision. 7 Before beginning 

 the work, the inside of the maze was heavily coated with white 

 enamel paint to cover and to destroy any previous odors, and 

 upon the floor of all of the runways were laid long strips of heavy 

 white paper. The paper was cut 4 in. in width and where the 

 strips overlapped they were fastened with gummed paper. Upon 

 this papered floor was rubbed in, down the center of the runways, 

 a narrow trail of alternating beef extract and cream cheese. It 

 was thought better to use two substances in order to guard 

 against a possible olfactory fatigue. The trail was laid upon 

 paper because of the ease with which such a covering could be 

 removed in varying the experiment and because of a desire to 

 avoid a permanent odor in the maze. 



The rats used in this work were young, untrained rats about 



4 Watson, J. B. Animal Education, p. 51. 

 Small, W. S. Experimental study of the mental processes of the rat. Am. 

 Jour, of Psych., 12, 232. 

 6 Op. cit., p. 53. 



6 Op. cit., p. 213. 



7 Vincent, S. B. Vision in the maze. Jour. Animal Behav., 5, t. 



