8 The Animal Mind 



is seldom content with merely telling one what the animal 

 did and leaving future investigation and the comparative 

 study of many facts to decide what the animal's conscious 

 experience in doing it was like. The point of the anecdote 

 usually consists in showing that a human interpretation 

 of the animal's behavior is possible. Here is shown the 

 desire to tell a good story, which we mentioned among 

 the pitfalls of the anecdotal method; the wish to report 

 something unusual, not to get a just conception of the 

 normal behavior of an animal. As Thorndike has forcibly 

 put it : "Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever 

 notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific maga- 

 zine. But let one find his way from Brooklyn to Yonkers 

 and the fact immediately becomes 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" (704, p. 4). 



All this is not to deny that much of the testimony to be 

 found in Romanes's "Animal Intelligence" and Darwin's 

 "Descent of Man" is the trustworthy report of trained ob- 

 servers; but it is difficult to separate the grain from the 

 chaff, and one feels toward many of the anecdotes the atti- 

 tude of scepticism produced, for example, by this tale 

 which an Australian lady reported to the Linnaean Society. 

 The burial of some deceased comrades was accomplished, 

 she says, by a nest of "soldier ants" near Sydney, in the 

 following fashion. "All fell into rank walking regularly 

 and slowly two by two, until they arrived at the spot 

 where lay the dead bodies. . . . Two of the ants advanced 

 and took up the dead body of one of their comrades ; then 



