THE PLAY OP ANIMALS. 89 



to kick a pebble before us, to step on all the acorns 

 on the pavement, to drum on the Avindow pane, to hit 

 the wine glasses together, to roll up litle balls of bread, 

 etc. Perhaps to this category, too, belongs that inex- 

 plicable piece of folly, of which we are all guilty, that 

 when, for instance, a perfectly trustworthy person reads 

 aloud a telegram " Can not come — Henry,'' we are never 

 satisfied till we read it ourselves. 



The case of animals is much like our own. The 

 impulse to experiment continues into advanced age, 

 and constantly tends to rise above its instinctive ori- 

 gin to freer, more individual activity, so that the 

 fully developed animal probably also feels some- 

 thing of the pleasure in exercising power, in being 

 a cause. 



Beckmann says, in speaking of the raccoon: " The 

 caged creature devised a thousand ways to relieve the 

 tedium of his many idle hours. Now^ he would sit up 

 in a corner and, with a most serious expression, busy 

 himself with binding a piece of straw across his nose; 

 now he played absorbedly with the toes of his hind feet, 

 or made dashes for the end of his waving tail. Then, 

 having packed a quantity of hay in his pouch, he lay 

 on his back and tried to keep the mass in place by hold- 

 ing his tail tightly across it with his fore feet. Wlien- 

 ever he could get at masonry he gnawed the mortar and 

 did incredible damage in a short time. Then he sits 

 down, like Jeremiah before the ruins of Jerusalem, in 

 the midst of his heap of rubbish, looks darkly about, 

 and, exhausted with so much work, loosens his col- 

 lar with his fore paws. After a long fit of sulks he 

 can be restored to good humor at once by the sight of 

 a full water bucket, and he will make any effort to get 

 near it. Then he proceeds to test the depth of the 



