J 94 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



experience when it is a question of catching a hare, but he may be also 

 an intolerable dullard about opening a box." Herein lies a great truth 

 which the experimenters have failed in general to note. ISTo animal 

 and no man is equal to his fellows in all respects, and we know that 

 some very able men, some men of undoubted genius, are exceedingly 

 slow in certain directions. 



To test an animal's intelligence by mechanisms, seems to be about 

 on a par with gauging the nature of a man's intellect by certain "'' puz- 

 zles " in which, as is well-known, many able men are indeed "' intoler- 

 able dullards.'" A set of experiments better adapted for the examina- 

 tion of the intelligence of the group in question, white rats, was that 

 of Mr. Small. He used a maze, which was so arranged that when the 

 animal secured the food that was put in the central portion, he was 

 free from the maze and could return to his cage. The shortest path 

 to the food was 105 feet, and there were 27 corners ta be turned. 

 It is a very noteworthy fact that when monkeys were tried in a similar 

 maze they did no better than the rats, in fact scarcely as well. But 

 how fallacious it would be to conclude that the rat's intelligence is 

 equal to that of the monkey. However, Mr. Small seems to have been 

 a somewhat cautious investigator, and his work, including observa- 

 tions systematically carried out on the psychic development of 

 young white rats — which he has been good enough to say was suggested 

 by my own series on our domestic mammals and birds — his experi- 

 ments with, the white rat and his discerning criticism of the work of 

 others, had not a little advanced the subject of animal psychology. 



In quite another class and altogether less open to criticism, ara 

 certain experiments made by Mr. Hobhouse. He ascertained how a 

 dog, left upstairs in a building would get to his master who called him 

 from outside. While some of the laborators have almost wholly 

 ignored the individuality of animals, this criticism does not apply to 

 Mr. Hobhouse. As this writer seems to me to have taken, on the 

 whole, about the broadest, safest and most helpful views of animal 

 intelligence, I feel Justified even in so general a treatment of the sub- 

 ject, as the occasion permits in calling further attention to them. 

 Passing by his discussion of instinct for the present, after pointing out 

 that Dr. Thorndike"'s experiments with cats, dogs and chickens were 

 " quite outside the range of the animal's ordinary experience," he says, 

 '' What Mr. Thorndike's experiments prove so far, is not that cats and 

 dogs are invariably educated by the association process, that is by 

 habituation alone, but on the contrary that at least some cats and dogs 

 conform in at least one point to the method of acquisition by concrete 

 experience — they learn in a very few instances." 



