4 E. L. THORNDIKE. 



for investigation. How can scientists who write like lawyers, 

 defending animals against the charge of having no power of 

 rationality, be at the same time impartial judges on the bench? 

 Unfortunately the real work in this field has been done in this 

 spirit. The level-headed thinkers who might have won valuable 

 results have contented themselves with arguing against the 

 theories of the eulogists. They have not made investigations 

 of their own. 



In the second place the facts have generally been derived 

 from anecdotes. Now quite apart from such pedantry as insists 

 that a man's word about a scientific fact is worthless unless he 

 is a trained scientist, there are really in this field special ob- 

 jections to the acceptance of the testimony about animals' intelli- 

 gent acts which one gets from anecdotes. Such testimony is 

 by no means on a par with testimony about the size of a fish or 

 the migration of birds, etc. For here one has to deal not 

 merely with ignorant or inaccurate testimony, but also with 

 prejudiced testimony. Human folk are as a matter of fact 

 eager to find intelligence in animals. They like to. And 

 when the animal observed is a pet belonging to them or their 

 friends, or when the story is one that has been told as a story to 

 entertain, further complications are introduced. Nor is this 

 all. Besides commonly misstating what fact sthe}"- report, they 

 report only such facts as show the animal at his best. Dogs 

 get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends 

 an account of it to a scientific magazine. But let one find his 

 way from Brooklyn to Yonkers and the fact immediately be- 

 comes a circulating anecdote. Thousands of cats on thousands 

 of occasions sit helplessly yowling, and no one^takes thought of 

 it or writes to his friend, the professor ; but let one cat claw at 

 the knob of a door supposedly as a signal to be let out, and 

 straightway this cat becomes the representative of the cat-mind 

 in all the books. The unconscious distortion of the facts is 

 almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an 

 animal's mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvel- 

 ous. It is as if some denizen of a planet where communication 

 was by thought-transference, who was surveying humankind 

 and reporting their psychology, should be oblivious to all our 



