302 LAWRENCE W. COLE 



Living as they do, mainly in trees, and securing their food 

 chiefly by means of sight, these animals may need to depend 

 but little on the sense of smell. Doubtless they are susceptible 

 to odors coming through the air, as the smoke of forest fires, 

 but the two cases above described are the only ones which I 

 observed of the use of this sense. I believe that they have no 

 gift of trailing other animals as dogs do, though it has been 

 assumed that they have the power to do so. 



Vision: The raccoon has a keen sense of sight. As in the 

 case of Clever Hans, a movement of the experimenter so slight 

 as to be unconscious on his part was promptly seen by the 

 animals and responded to as a food signal. Consequently it 

 was necessary to make the movements involved in giving the 

 animal a morsel of food even when he was not fed. Otherwise 

 he would respond to the unconscious movements preliminary 

 to feeding him and cease to pay attention to the different forms 

 or sizes of the cards to which we wished him to respond. Atten- 

 tion to the experimenter's movements must have been estab- 

 lished very early for within a week after we began work with 

 the young animals one of them climbed to the top of a barrel 

 on which the bottle of milk had been placed. It was impossible 

 that he could have seen the bottle so his climbing for it must 

 have been due to his having seen it placed there. 



Later all of the raccoons recognized the food basin by means 

 of sight and developed great cunning in their attempts to get 

 food from it. 



Hearing: This appears to be the special protective sense of 

 the raccoon. The slightest sound produced (ist) perfect immo- 

 bility, and (2d) fear and scurrying to the highest part of their 

 place of confinement. If the experimenter tried during this 

 fear to reach up and take hold of one of the animals it would 

 retreat and snap though a moment before it was eager to be 

 fed and quite willing to be handled. 



Every sound at a distance was listened to intently for several 

 seconds after the experimenter had ceased to hear it. On one 

 occasion all the raccoons became still and yet the observers 

 could hear no sound. Investigation showed that a man was 

 trundling a wheelbarrow over the grass plot at least 100 yards 

 distant from the house in which the raccoons were kept. 



The sound caused by dropping on the floor a piece of meat, 



