near to keep him moving, would undoubtedly 

 lie down and die. More than that, it seems 

 to be largely a matter of obedience to the 

 strongest impulse of the moment, to which 

 all animals are accustomed or trained from 

 their birthday. And that is not quite the 

 same thing as instinct, unless one is disposed & 

 to go to the extreme of Berkeley's philosophy 

 and make instinct a kind of spirit-personality 

 that watches over animals all the time. Often 

 the knowledge of healing or of primitive sur- 

 gery seems to be the discovery or possession 

 of a few rare individual animals, instead of 

 being spread widecast among the species, as 

 instincts are. This knowledge, or what-you- 

 may-call-it, is sometimes shared, and so hints 

 at a kind of communication among animals, 

 of whose method we catch only fleeting 

 glimpses and suggestions but that will be 

 the subject of another article. The object 

 of this is, not to answer the questions of 

 how or whence, but simply to suggest one 

 or two things I have seen in the woods 

 as the basis for further and more detailed 

 observations. 



