ANIMAL BEHAVIOR. 



333 



her position, if she is a tame bird, and after some moments 

 begins to act as if the current of her feelings had been slightly 

 disturbed. At the most she only acts as if a little puzzled, as 

 if she realized dimly a change in feeling. She is accustomed 

 to the eggs, and now misses them, or, rather, misses some- 

 thing, she knows not what. Although she does not know or 

 show any care for the eggs out of the nest, she does appear to 

 sense a difference between having and not having. 



There is, then, something akin to memory and discrimina- 

 tion, and little as this implies it cannot mean less than some 

 faint adumbration of intelligence. Now this inkling of intelli- 

 gence, or, if you prefer, this nadir of stupidity, so remote from 

 the zenith of intelligence, is not something independent of 

 and foreign to instinct. It is instinct itself just moved by a 

 ripple of change in the environment. The usual adjustment is 

 slightly disturbed, and a little confusion in the currents of feel- 

 ing arises, which manifests itself in quasi-mental perplexity. 

 That is about as near as I can get to the contents of the 

 pigeon mind without being able, by a sort of metempsychosis 

 suggested by Bonnet, to live some time in the head of the 

 bird. 



In this feeble perplexity of the pigeon's instinct-mind, in 

 this "nethermost abyss" of stupidity, there is a glimmer of 

 light, and nature's least is always suggestive of more. The 

 pigeon has no hope of graduating into a homo sapiens, but 

 her little light may flicker a little higher, and all we need to 

 know is, how instinct behavior can take one step toward mind 

 behavior. This is the dark point on which I have nothing 

 really new to offer, although I hope not to make it darker. 



b. The Step from Instinct to Intelligence. 



Some notion of what is involved in the step may be gathered 

 by comparing wild with semi-domesticated and fully domesti- 

 cated species. These grades differ from each other in respects 

 that are highly suggestive. In the wild species the instincts 

 are kept up to the higher degrees of rigid invariability, while 

 in species under domestication they are reduced to various 



