CHAPTER II 



Experimental Literature on Vision in the Chick 



During the course of the investigation which is reported in 

 Part II, the question was asked by a Harvard undergraduate: 

 Why is it that a chicken always wants to get on the other side 

 of the road when it sees an automobile? The question has 

 nothing in common with my investigation but it is suggestive 

 of a prevalent notion regarding the stupidity of the domestic 

 fowl. The chick seems to rank low in intelligence according to 

 unscientific observers. Eulogistic literature, in which anec- 

 dotes and remarkable stories abound, often contains accounts of 

 exceptional and almost incredible behavior of dogs, cats, horses, 

 parrots and the like, but in such collections of stories and inci- 

 dents, it is noteworthy that the chick has been generally 

 neglected. 



One may incidentally hear of such stories as that of a hen 

 finding her w^ay through an open window to a bedroom in a farm 

 house and selecting the top of the old-fashioned bureau on which 

 to make a nest. In her efforts to collect all of the articles that 

 might be used in a hen's nest, she knocked from the bureau 

 a kerosene lamp and made use of a doily on which the lamp had 

 been standing. In this extraordinary nest, composed of pin- 

 cushions, ribbons, laces, doilies, and handerchiefs, she laid an egg. 



The above anecdote was related to me by people who per- 

 sonally observed "biddy's stolen nest" and the results. Though 

 trivial to the extent of absurdity in science, it is nevertheless 

 typical of much that one may read about cats and dogs in the 

 eulogies of the anecdotists. Chicken anecodotes of this sort 

 seldom appear in print, but let one cat claw at the knob of a door 

 supposedly as a singnal .to be let out, and she becomes (see 

 Thorndike (30)) "the representative of the cat-mind in all the 

 books." It seems that no chicken has performed any act which 

 might furnish the aspiring eulogist with a representation of the 

 chick-mind. 



Considering the apparent delight of the naturalists and semi- 

 experimentalists in repeating animal stories of an exceptional 



