270 MENTAL LIFE OF APES AND MONKEYS 
improvement in its application. He made but a moderate 
success in disentangling his chain when it became twisted 
around among the legs of a chair or table. 
While monkeys are generally credited with unusual powers 
of imitation, the experiments of recent years have shown 
that imitation is far less frequent than was supposed. Thorn- 
dike tried to find if monkeys would learn to enter a puzzle 
box any more quickly after having witnessed a number of 
times how he opened the various fastenings. Several 
kinds of boxes were used, but the monkeys did not, in any 
case, make sufficient progress to justify the conclusion that 
they learned by imitation. Neither did monkeys which 
failed to learn how to enter the puzzle boxes after several 
trials imitate others which had learned to operate the fasten- 
ings. No evidence of imitation was furnished by the general 
behavior of these animals, but since two of the monkeys 
were on very unfriendly terms and the third was exceedingly 
timid their social relations were not such as to favor the 
imitation of one another’s acts. 
Further experiments were carried on by Watson on four 
monkeys, a baboon, a Cebus, and two rhesus monkeys. 
Watson tested his animals by performing in their presence 
a number of acts which resulted in securing food, such as 
drawing in food with a rake or a cloth, getting it from a 
bottle with a fork, and poking it out of a glass cylinder with 
a stick. After witnessing his operations a number of times 
there was no effort on the part of any of the monkeys to get 
the food in the way they had every opportunity to see was 
effective. Experiments with puzzle boxes in which the 
monkeys were given a chance to imitate either the experi- 
menter or a monkey which had already learned the trick 
gave the same negative results. 
While they yielded no evidence of imitation in its higher 
