Examination of Some Objections. 69 



it as an ingenious satire on the stale and worn-out 

 "arguments" for animal intelligence. He surely in- 

 tended to show the readers of the Naturwissenschaft- 

 liche Wochenschrift by an interesting example, how 

 brilliant a proof of ant-intelligence can be fabricated 

 from an observation which is easily explained by 

 "simple instincts." And as we know that the critic is 

 an entomologist of name, we prefer this explanation as 

 the most appropriate. 



In his otherwise well-meant criticism of the first 

 edition of our two publications "Instinct and Intelli- 

 gence in the Animal Kingdom" and "Comparative 

 Studies of the Psychic Life of Ants and Higher Ani- 

 mals," Prof. H. E. Ziegler 1 made a statement which 

 cannot be passed over in silence. In the first of these 

 works, we examined his notion of "intelligence," and 

 came to the result that what he called animal intelligence 

 was nothing more than the exercise of hereditary in- 

 stincts, governed and modified by individual sense 

 experience. Furthermore, we dwelt in the second work 

 on his attempted proof for the psychic development of 

 our social customs from the gregarious habits of higher 

 animals. Ziegler replies to our argumentation in these 

 words : "I shall answer Wasmann neither here nor else- 

 where, for his objections arise solely from his firm 

 adherence to scholastic psychology. It is a principle 

 with Wasmann to distinguish the actions of man from 

 those of animals, because in his view the former are 

 always conscious and free actions. But I hold, with 

 many other naturalists, that it is impossible to discern 



l ) In "Zoologisches Centralblatt," 1897, No. 26. 



