92 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



tion. Still, though the custom need not have been de- 

 liberately intelligent in its origin, it must have tended to 

 develop intelligence in the animals displaying it ; and 

 even now it has hardened into an inherited instinct, it 

 may often be a very conscious bit of prevision indeed 

 with old squirrels who have seen more than one winter, 

 and who know that nuts or berries cannot always be ob- 

 tained with equal ease. At any rate, the fact that squir- 

 rels, rats, and beavers are now very clever animals is un- 

 deniable ; and there is every reason to believe that their 

 cleverness has been partly brought out by their provident 

 habits. 



Another thing that probably adds to the physical 

 basis of intelligence in squirrels is their possession of a 

 pair of paws which almost serve them in the place of 

 hands. Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out that many 

 of the cleverest animals are those which can grasp an 

 object all round with some prehensile organ. Such ani- 

 mals, in fact, are the only ones that can really quite un- 

 derstand the nature of space of three dimensions. The 

 apes and monkeys with their opposable thumb, the ele- 

 phants with their flexible trunk and its finger-like process, 

 the parrots with their prehensile claws, are all instances 

 strictly in point. Even among the usually stupid marsu- 

 pials, the opossum has a true thumb to his hind foot, 

 which he uses like a hand, besides possessing a very flex- 

 ible tail ; and the opossum is not only proverbially cun- 

 ning, but he also has alone succeeded in holding his own 

 among the highly developed mammals of America, 

 while all the rest of his kind are now confined to Aus- 

 tralia, their compeers elsewhere having been killed out 

 without exception during the tertiary period by the 

 fierce competition of the larger continents. Wherever we 

 find a clever animal, like the dog, without any grasping 



