202 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



The intelligence of the dog, that is to say, is quite 

 different from that of the monkey in kind. Some 

 time ago the writer was standing watching a monkey 

 which was chained to a tree. The bystanders had 

 been throwing him nuts. The monkey had eaten all 

 within reach and had made several unsuccessful 

 attempts to reach others which had fallen outside 

 the radius of his chain. To the surprise and slight 

 consternation of the little crowd watching him he 

 snatched a stick from one of them and began deliber- 

 ately to use it to rake the distant nuts within his 

 reach. I have read how a dog, which had given 

 proof of the highest intelligence in other experiments, 

 was tried under somewhat similar circumstances. 

 The animal was chained up and was given a stick, 

 while a biscuit was put just out of his reach. When 

 the biscuit was placed in the crook of the stick the 

 dog rapidly learnt to pull in the stick with the 

 biscuit. But he could never get beyond this point. 

 The dog made no attempt to get the stick into the 

 position in which he could use it. When a monkey, 

 however, was tried in exactly the same circumstances 

 he proved to have no difficulty at all in learning to 

 obtain the biscuit by using a stick intelligently and 

 almost in the manner of a human being. The infer- 

 ence usually drawn from facts of this kind is that 

 the intelligence of the monkey is altogether superior 

 to that of the dog. In short, it is this fundamental 

 fact of the monkey's life, the perpetual handling 

 of things, which gives us the clue as to the line along 

 which the intelligence of the monkey has probably 

 been evolved. We are led therefore to ask if there 

 are similar clues by which we can better understand 

 the intelligence of other animals. What, for 



