48 THE THIRD YEARBOOK 



was cut, and often there would be a number of victims in one night. 

 One day while in the door-yard I saw something like a flash dart 

 down a gatepost and enter a knot-hole on the side. Investigation 

 revealed the devastator of the chicken-coop. This creature had 

 managed to maintain itself on the fowls and to live within one 

 hundred feet of the door of the dwelling, in a gatepost which was 

 passed scores of times every day by the different members of the 

 family. It appeared that he had the habit of entering the hole by 

 coming down the post, and that he traveled to and from the chicken 

 house on a fence so that he was safe from discovery by the dogs. 



An even more remarkable case was that of a polecat that 

 made her nest and reared her young almost to maturity in a pile of 

 old fence rails that lay within a few feet of a path between the 

 house and barn. There were two or three dogs about whose sole 

 business was to look after " varmints," but this family was able 

 to thrive undiscovered, and their presence was revealed only by 

 an accident. Of course, this animal is nocturnal in its habits, but 

 how, even so, it was able to leave and return to the wood-pile for 

 almost an entire summer without once rousing the suspicions of the 

 inquisitive dogs must always remain a mystery. 



These animals adapted themselves to new and novel situations. 

 It seems almost impossible to believe that they obey merely the 

 instincts of the type, the traditions of the race. Apparently they 

 had to invent ways of getting along that were made necessary by 

 the strange and dangerous surroundings. 



The knowledge acquired by working out the customs of indi- 

 viduals is more interesting and stimulating in the direction of 

 further study than anything that can be gotten from books or from 

 a more general study of types. The same principle must be applied 

 to the study of nature that we observe in the study of human beings. 

 No one is interested, except in a general way, for example, in the 

 study of tailors as a class. But the study of how the individual 

 tailor makes his way, by contriving special forms of advertising, 

 by changing the cut of his clothes, and by other devices that are 

 peculiar to himself, and which tend to distinguish him — these 

 are full of mterest. The same applies to all living things. The 

 fact that they are on the earth today shows how skilful they have 

 been in devising ways and means of self-support. Those less 

 skilful are embalmed in the rocks as fossils or have utterly disap- 



