WHITE PINE GROVES 243 



grow constantly and he must continually wear 

 them off or he dies, stabbed by his own incisors 

 which grow in the arc of a circle. Yet the squir- 

 rel is an adept at getting at the tiny, toothsome 

 seed and he can strip a cone of its scales far faster 

 than I can, even if I use my knife. He holds 

 the cone stem end upward in his fore paws which 

 are so like hands, severs the base of the scale 

 with his ivory shears and has munched the two 

 little seeds that cling under the very bottom of 

 the scale, almost before you can see him do it. 



Certain wise naturalists assure us that the 

 squirrel does not use reason in this handling of 

 the cone, merely acting automatically by blind in- 

 stinct. Yet he gets his results in the shortest 

 time and with the least effort. The highest rea- 

 soning could teach him no more and if instinct 

 is such a splendid short cut to the solution of 

 problems it is a pity that it is not added to our 

 common school course. The squirrel, they say, 

 does it because he and his ancestors have done 

 it in the same way for untold generations, the au- 

 tomatic impulse being born in him and bound to 

 appear at the right moment, just as his teeth 

 grow without his own volition. Yet there must 

 have been a time when the first squirrel sat up on 



