166 Chafer VIII. 



neither the one nor the other was endowed with the 

 faculty of thought. 



Stories are often told about instructions in walking, 

 flying, eating, hunting, etc., which higher animals are 

 said to impart to their offspring. 1 However, on strip- 

 ping these facts of all arbitrary additions, the pretended 

 "lesson" turns out to be an instinctive stimulation of 

 the impulse to imitate, which has been aroused by the 

 parent animals, and helps the young to practice their 

 natural reflex mechanisms. The latter in turn furnish 

 the occasion for many individual sense experiences 

 which the young animals would not have had, if left to 

 themselves. Such phenomena belong to the fourth 

 form of learning, and include the first and the second. 

 They do not furnish the slightest evidence in favor of 

 an intelligent instruction on the part of the parent ani- 

 mals. Indeed, it is the purest anthropomorphism, even 

 to apply the terms "instruction" or "lesson" to such 

 phenomena. 



There are still other striking anecdotes about par- 

 rots, starlings, and various birds which "learned to 

 speak" by human instruction. But a closer examina- 

 tion of the recorded facts shows that they have nothing 

 to do with an intelligent learning on the part of the 

 animal. In training an animal we rely on its instinct of 

 imitation, in order that it may learn to utter a certain 

 succession of sounds. But there is not a single proof 

 that any bird ever really understood the intelligent con- 

 nection of those sounds. On the contrary, the wrong 

 and awkward way, in which the animal generally ap- 

 plies its treasures of wisdom, is the cause of our amuse- 



l ) See Altum, "Der Vogel und sein Leben" (6th edition), p. 208. 



