72 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE 



By inherited instinct, as well as by all those life 

 experiences which had taught them that quiet and 

 concealment of their usual activities were associated 

 with escape from threatened evils, these little animals 

 were naturally led, under the unwonted circumstances 

 of their confinement, to disguise, in an extraordinary 

 degree, their real condition, and even to imitate an 

 unusual and unreal one. The mental process is a 

 complex of instinct pure and simple, with higher 

 intellectual factors added, and the cases of these 

 squirrels, thus feigning, are among the clearest that, 

 so far as I am aware, have ever been recorded. The 

 adaptations to effect escape prove that there was the 

 employment of intellectual processes of a pretty high 

 order, possibly too complex, however, for analysis with 

 safety, but not beyond realisation in our own conscious- 

 ness, and without the employment of any abstract idea 

 of death. 



That, however, the hypnotic element may play a 

 part in the apparent feigning of death by squirrels 

 seems clear from a case communicated to me by a 

 student of the Montreal Veterinary College, Mr Craig. 

 He had caught a Chipmunk and placed it in a box, 

 to find in a few moments that it was lying as if dead. 

 Giving the creature liberty to escape, it presently did 

 so. On recapture the same followed. Considering the 

 relatively low intelligence of this species of squirrel, 

 and taking into account the case that Dr Eomanes 

 mentions of his watching an apparently feigning 

 squirrel he had caught when he found that it had 

 really died of fright, it seems to me, upon the whole, 

 most reasonable to attribute the behaviour of the 

 Chipmunk in question to cataleptic or allied effects. 



It thus becomes manifest how varied, and also how 

 complex, these cases of so-called feigning may be. 

 The subject is all the more interesting because it shows 



