INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 81 



suppose that an ordinarily intelligent animal would 

 have learnt by sheer force of example to avoid the 

 danger, by seeing those which preceded it in difficulties 

 sinking deeper and deeper out of sight. Or that at 

 least it would have got an inkling that something or 

 other out of the common was up, and so have become 

 careful and suspicious as to how and where it went. 

 Or again, that there would have been a mutual ex- 

 change of sympathy in a common danger, which certain 

 gregarious and associated animals do evince at such 

 times ; evidently too much to expect from a camel, 

 however. For, in spite of numerous examples, before 

 their very eyes, and under their very noses, our camels 

 plodded on, and followed one after the other, neither 

 sniffing nor seeing danger utterly oblivious, in fact, to 

 what was taking place around them, and supremely 

 indifferent to their fate, walking anyhow or anywhere. 

 A clearer case and a more convincing proof of sheer 

 stupidity, arising evidently from a deficiency of either 

 sense power or of instinct, or a combination of both, 

 I have not experienced. 



Not so with the elephants, horses, and mules. The Compared 

 contrast was most marked, and I was much struck at 

 the time by the vast difference between these and the 

 camels. None of them were lost, and no wonder, for and mules 

 they displayed throughout a marked and consistent 

 caution which, I am quite convinced, was more clearly 

 the result of reason than of instinct ; a caution which 

 may have at first been set in motion by the latter, but 

 which was carried on and worked out by the former. 



One elephant in particular, which the officer com- instance 

 manding 6/11 Battery, Eoyal Artillery, lent me to phantme 



reason 



