32 'Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology. 



tion presented to the rat when it is introduced into the maze at 

 some one of these positions. The animal must perforce run up 

 and down the alleys until it experiences some one or several of 

 these characteristic motor situations w^hich would give rise to the 

 necessary stimulations to release the old automatic movement. 

 The rat may run the length of the alleys, around corners, or tra- 

 verse several alleys before getting the cue. Moreover, on this 

 basis, one can conceive why at times the cue should be gradually 

 attained. At such times, a summation of stimuli would be re- 

 quired. 



On the other hand, it may with justice be argued, as we our- 

 selves above suggested, that if the cue is received through data 

 from some distance sense, the animal must still run about at 

 random until it receives some one or several such characteristic 

 stimuli. This argument cannot be met wholly, but if our own 

 behavior under similar circumstances can by analogy be made 

 to apply to the case of the rat, we should be allowed to assume, 

 when our elimination experiments are considered, that this period 

 of random activity would be much shorter when distance sense 

 data are employed than when kinaesthetic are used. It must be 

 frankly admitted that the purpose of our work was to see whether 

 the facts of orientation offered insuperable difficulties to our theory 

 rather than to attempt to rule out all possibility of the rats' receiv- 

 ing aid from extraorganic sense data. 



This assumption granted us, our argument may now be stated 

 as follows. If the animals orient themselves in the maze in the 

 majority of cases by running at least the full length of one alley, 

 by rounding corners into a second alley, or by running through 

 several alleys before picking up the cue, the facts will be explicable 

 in terms of the kinaesthetic hypothesis, and consequently there 

 will be no theoretical difficulty in supposing that the rat's auto- 

 matic movements in the maze as a whole are controlled by kin- 

 aesthetic impulses alone. If, on the other hand, the rats orient 

 themselves in the majority of cases with a minimum of random 

 movement, the facts will not be so easily explicable in terms of 

 our hypothesis, as in terms of some other which would admit that 

 control is inaugurated by data from some distance sense and con- 

 sequently, that automatic behavior in the maze may be guided 

 and controlled effectually as occasion demands by such means. 



In order to make a careful test of the facts of orientation, sev- 



