846 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dike what possible reason could a cat 

 have to suppose that what happened 

 once must needs happen again? Does 

 Dr. Thorndike fancy his own knowledge 

 of a million like matters was acquired 

 by reason, and not empirically elabo- 

 rated by processes of exactly the same 

 sort as the cats went through? Let 

 this experiment be tried on a healthy 

 infant of two years, and I am of the 

 opinion that the results would be the 

 same as with the cat; yet the infant 

 undoubtedly carries on " thinking pro- 

 cesses similar, at least in kind, to our 

 own," which Dr. Thorndike implicitly 

 denies to his cats. 



The chief cause of the inability of 

 students to reach concordant results in 

 this matter of animal intelligence ap- 

 pears to lie in a certain uncritical as- 

 sumption often made. That all con- 

 sciousnesses have a certain field of pres- 

 entations, that to this field they attain, 

 that because of it they feel and will, 

 are fundamental facts; but the belief 

 that attention or feeling or will differs 

 per se in different consciousnesses, other 

 than as the field to which they are at 

 the moment related, differs this is an 

 utterly unwarranted assumption. Ac- 

 cording to the action of its environment, 

 each conscious being must know the 

 world just so far as is needed to con- 

 form its existence thereto, or else it 

 must perish; but whether such knowl- 

 edge, which is acquired by experience 

 only, be quite small, as with animals, 

 or somewhat larger, as with man, there 

 is no reason to suppose that the atten- 

 tion, feeling, or will of the animal dif- 

 fers in itself from the same psychologi- 

 cal state in man. 



MB. ANDREW VAN BIBBER, of Cin- 

 cinnati, Ohio, says: Animals, and espe- 

 cially wild ones, have no bank account 

 or reserve, and have to face new condi- 

 tions daily, and yet they make a liv- 

 ing where man would starve. 



When I was out in Colorado and 

 Utah, years ago, I used to know of ani- 

 mals removing the bait nicely from dan- 

 gerous traps without springing the trap. 

 I knew of a dog who went over a mile 

 to call his owner to the aid of a boy 

 who had broken his leg, and who would 

 not be refused till understood. This is 

 brutish "instinct," is it? something 

 that Dr. Thorndike can't define. Will 

 " instinct " teach a tired, half-starved 

 horse to eat oats if you set them before 

 him? Dr. Thorndike would say "Yes," 

 but Dr. Thorndike would be wrong 

 unless that horse knew from personal 

 past experience what oats were. What 

 animals learn (like the human animal) 



they learn chiefly by experience. They 

 accumulate facts in their minds and use 

 them. 



I served in the cavalry of the Armies 

 of the Tennessee and the Cumberland, 

 and I know that instinct will not cause 

 a hungry horse to touch oats unless he 

 knows from his own experience what 

 oats are. We used to capture horses in 

 Mississippi which had never seen oats. 

 It is all corn down there. We would 

 bring them into camp tired out and 

 hungry, and would pour out our oats 

 for them. Not one of them would touch 

 the oats. You could leave the hungry 

 horses hitched for twenty-four hours be- 

 fore oats, and not one grain would they 

 touch. They would stand there and 

 starve. We had to throw up their 

 heads and fill their mouths full of oats. 

 If we stopped there, they would spit 

 them out. We had to grab their jaws 

 and work them sideways until they had 

 a good taste. Then they understood, 

 and ate oats right along. Plenty of 

 such horses in Mississippi to-day. . . . 



If Dr. Thorndike tried his intelli- 

 gent " Experiment No. 11 " with a two- 

 year-old cat, why didn't he try it with 

 a two-year-old human? I guess he 

 would have found an equal amount of 

 ignorance of the mechanism of door fas- 

 tenings, which comes only with teach- 

 ing, and would have produced only 

 struggles and screaming. 



THE TREND OF POPULATION IN 

 MAINE. 



Editor Popular Sciente MontJdy : 



SIR: In the article contributed to 

 your magazine for the month of Au- 

 gust on Recent Legislation against the 

 Drink Evil, I notice what appears to 

 me to be a misstatement of fact. The 

 writer speaks of the results of prohibi- 

 tion in the State of Maine, and says, 

 " In sixty-three years Maine has seen 

 her commerce disappear and her popu- 

 lation dwindle." 



I have not investigated the matter 

 of Maine's commerce, but I find that 

 her population has not dwindled in any 

 possible sense of the term during the 

 period indicated above. 



It is, perhaps, a common impression 

 that Maine has had such an exodus of 

 her people to other States of the Union 

 that she has suffered a loss in popula- 

 tion. What are the real facts of the 

 case? The census taken by the Govern- 

 ment in 1840 gave the State 501,000 

 people, and that taken in 1890, 661,000, 

 which shows, during the interval be- 

 tween 1840 and 1890, an increase of 



