EDUCATION 253 



away from their kind achieve only a feeble and halting song, but 

 rapidly acquire elaboration and richness when they hear others 

 singing. There is a kind of local tradition of song, and now and 

 again you will find a wood resonant, season after season, with 

 songsters of a more mellowed sweetness, due to the example of 

 some genius amongst them. Our own mtell gence is so remote 

 from that of birds that we come into little organic contact with 

 them, and I doubt if birds ever imitate human beings except in 

 sound, and it is certainly ridiculous to suppose that the cleverest 

 talking birds have any consciousness of the occasional appropriate- 

 ness of their remarks. 



With mammals we own kinship in every fibre of our bodies and 

 we can establish i elations with them in many different ways. Their 

 senses of smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing, their muscular 

 movements and reflexes, their passions and their pleasures, the 

 instincts with which they start life and their mode of modifying 

 them, are all like our own. This very similarity makes it difficult 

 not to confuse between real imitation and corresponding action 

 in corresponding circumstances. There seems no conceivable 

 doubt about imitation, however, in the case of man and the great 

 apes. Chimpanzees and orangs watch what is happening round 

 about them. If you take a wooden match-box out of your pocket 

 and open and shut it, and then give it to one of them, it will try 

 to repeat the movement. They copy their keeper in sweeping out 

 their cage. They are taught many kinds of tricks and perform- 

 ances almost as much by doing the various motions required in 

 front of them as by actually guiding them. They will run when 

 you run, danc when you dance, shoot out their lips and scream 

 when you set them the example. No doubt there is a pitfall even 

 here. Monkeys are, as it were, caricatures of human beings ; in 

 a sense they ape man, although they may never have seen him. I 

 am convinced however, that they constantly perform new actions 

 because similar action have been carried out in their sight, and 

 I find it difficult to avoid the belief that the anthropoid apes at 

 least have some dim consciousness of what they are about. Not- 

 withstanding the innumerable anecdotes about the intelligence 

 of other mammals, and the great difficulty there is in describing 

 or even thinking over one's own personal experience in taming 

 and training animals without slipping into language that implies 

 conscious imitation, I do not think that there is any real evidence 

 for it outside the group of monkeys. Curiosity, attention and 



