THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE "HIGHER ANIMALS". 109 



food at the bottom of the cage and another none, a 

 monkey would not act from the obvious inference and 

 consistantly stay up or go down as the case might be, 

 but would make errors such as would be natural if he 

 acted under the growing influence of an association 

 between sense impression and idea, but quite incom- 

 prehensible if he had compared the two signals and 

 made a definite inference. V Finally "after experience 

 with several pairs of signals, the monkeys yet failed 

 when a new pair was used, to do the obvious thing 

 to a rational mind; viz, to compare the two, think 

 which meant food, and act on the knowledge directly. ' ' 

 Certainly animals can learn to perform new and even 

 complicated actions, but only if one succeeds in asso- 

 ciating in the soul of each individual a definite im- 

 pulse with the representation of a definite motion. 

 Thus, as Wasmann narrates in his book "Instinct and 

 Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom," x ) "L,ub- 

 bock's poodle Van finally learnt to 'read,' by being 

 trained to fetch the card with the word when it was 

 hungry. ' ' But ' ' in spite of its long course of training 

 Van often brought the wrong card, when it 

 was hungry. This fact shows that it never un- 

 derstood the relation between the graphic symbols and 

 their meaning. Nor did it occur to Van to give 'read- 

 ing lessons' to Patience, the lap-dog. Nor did Pa- 

 tience hit upon the idea of profiting by Van's experi- 

 ence, although she had often witnessed the reward 

 which Van received for fetching the proper card. ' ' 

 Besides, Mr. A. J. Kinnman 2 ) has applied Mr. 



) 2 ed. (Herder, St. Louis), p. 165. 



2 ) "Mental Life of two Macacus Rhesus Monkeys in cap- 

 tivity," Amer Journal of Psychology, XIII., 1902. 



