WHAT DO ANIMALS KNOW? 



filled the nest, crowding out the bird. If the bird 

 could have foreseen the danger, she would have 

 shown something like human reason. 



Birds that nest along streams, such as the water- 

 thrush and the water-ouzel, I suppose are rarely 

 ever brought to grief by high water. They have 

 learned through many generations to keep at a safe 

 distance. I have never known a woodpecker to drill 

 its nesting-cavity in a branch or limb that was ready 

 to fall. Not that woodpeckers look the branch or tree 

 over with a view to its stability, but that they will cut 

 into a tree only of a certain hardness ; it is a family 

 instinct. Birds sometimes make the mistake of 

 building their nests on slender branches that a sum 

 mer tempest will turn over, thus causing the eggs or 

 the young to spill upon the ground. Even instinct 

 cannot always get ahead of the weather. 



It is almost impossible for us not to interpret the 

 lives of the lower animals in the terms of our own 

 experience and our own psychology. I entirely agree 

 with Lloyd Morgan that we err when we do so, 

 when wiTattribute to them what we call sentiments 

 or any of the emotions that spring from our moral 

 and aesthetic natures, the sentiments of justice, 

 truth, beauty, altruism, goodness, duty, and the 

 like, because these sentiments are the products 

 of concepts and ideas to which the brute natures 

 are strangers. But all the emotions of our animal 

 nature fear, anger, curiosity, local attachment, 

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or 



