The Dawn of Mind 237 



was discovered. Kinnaman taught two macaques the Hampton 

 Court Maze, a feat which probably means a memory of move- 

 ments, and we get an interesting glimpse in his observation that 

 they began to smack their lips audibly when they reached the 

 latter part of their course, and began to feel, dare one say, "We 

 are right this time." 



In getting into "puzzle-boxes" and into "combination- 

 boxes" (where the barriers must be overcome in a definite order) , 

 monkeys learn by the trial and error method much more quickly 

 than cats and dogs do, and a very suggestive fact emphasized 

 by Professor Thorndike is "a process of sudden acquisition by a 

 rapid, often apparently instantaneous abandonment of the un- 

 successful movements and selection of the appropriate one, which 

 rivals in suddenness the selections made by human beings in simi- 

 lar performances." A higher note still was sounded by one of 

 Thorndike's monkeys which opened a puzzle-box at once, eight 

 months after his previous experience with it. For here was some 

 sort of registration of a solution. 



Imitation 



Two chimpanzees in the Dublin Zoo were often to be seen 

 washing the two shelves of their cupboard and "wringing" the 

 wet cloth in the approved fashion. It was like a caricature of a 

 washerwoman, and someone said, "What mimics they are!" 

 Now we do not know whether that was or was not the case with 

 the chimpanzees, but the majority of the experiments that have 

 been made do not lead us to attach to imitation so much impor- 

 tance as is usually given to it by the popular interpreter. There 

 are instances where a monkey that had given up a puzzle in 

 despair returned to it when it had seen its neighbour succeed, but 

 most of the experiments suggested that the creature has to find 

 out for itself. Even with such a simple problem as drawing 

 food near with a stick, it often seems of little use to show the 

 monkey how it is done. Placing a bit of food outside his mon- 



