168 THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 



he would not know how to play with it. Romanes 

 relates of the same ape that his sister so admirably de- 

 scribed: " I bought at a toyshop a very good imitation 

 of a monkey and brought it into the room with the real 

 monkey, stroking and speaking to it as if it were alive. 

 The monkey evidently mistook the figure for a real ani- 

 mal, manifesting intense curiosity, mixed with much 

 alarm if I made the figure approach him. Even when 

 I placed the figure on the table and left it standing 

 motionless the monkey was afraid to approach it." * 



My St. Bernard displayed feelings of curiosity min- 

 gled with fear when I held an imitation white poodle 

 before him, and as I made the figure bark his aston- 

 ishment recalled Schiller's verse on the power of song: 



" Amazed, and with delicious fear 

 He heard the minstrel's lay, and hid." 



There was no sign of a wish to play with the 

 doll. But this does not dispose of the subject. Real 

 dolls are not the only thing that children play with. 

 Little girls often prefer some make-believe, a comb, a 

 fork, a stone, a bit of bread, anything they happen to 

 fancy they will tenderly nurse, feed, put to bed, and dis- 

 cipline. And when we reflect that a dog treats a scrap 

 of wood as his prey, we can not regard as a priori out 

 of the question for the animal's fostering instinct to fix 

 on an object of the same kind. But while I admit 

 this as an a priori possibility, I confess that I am un- 

 able to find an a posteriori experimental proof. The 

 only cases that would serve in this connection that have 

 come under my observation are in the report of the 

 Loango Expedition. There Pechuel-Loesche says: "It 



* Animal Intelligence, p. 495. 



