Instinct 

 Intellect 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



348 



for the first day take no distant flight till 

 they have thoroughly scrutinized every ob- 

 ject in its neighborhood. ROMANES Animal 

 Intelligence, ch. 4, p. 149. (A., 1899.) 



17 O2. Dog Tries To 



Bury Food under Carpet Automatic Action 

 without Purpose Transitoriness of Impulse. 

 I have observed a Scotch terrier, born on 

 the floor of a stable in December, and trans- 

 ferred six weeks later to a carpeted house, 

 make, when he was less than four months 

 old, a very elaborate pretense of burying 

 things, such as gloves, etc., with which he 

 had played till he was tired. He scratched 

 the carpet with his forefeet, dropped the 

 object from his mouth upon the spot, and 

 then scratched all about it (with both fore- 

 and hind-feet, if I remember rightly), and 

 finally went away and let it lie. Of course 

 the act was entirely useless. I saw him per- 

 form it at that age, some four or five times, 

 and never again in his life. The conditions 

 were not present to fix a habit which should 

 last when the prompting instinct died away. 

 But suppose meat instead of a glove, earth 

 instead of a carpet, hunger-pangs instead of 

 a fresh supper a few hours later, and it is 

 easy to see how this dog might have got 

 into a habit of burying superfluous food, 

 which might have lasted all his life. Who 

 can swear that the strictly instinctive part 

 of the food-burying propensity in the wild 

 Canidce may not be as short-lived as it was 

 in this terrier? JAMES Psychology* vol. ii, 

 ch. 24, p. 399. (H. H. & Co., 1899.) 



1703. INSTINCT, MATERNAL, OF 

 THE SPIDER The courage and rapacity 

 of spiders as a class are too well and gen- 

 erally known to require special illustration. 

 One instance, however, may be quoted to 

 show the strength of their maternal emo- 

 tions. Bonnet threw a spider with her bag 

 of eggs into the pit of an ant-lion. The 

 latter seized the eggs and tore them away 

 from the spider; but altho Bonnet forced her 

 out of the pit she returned, and chose to 

 be dragged in and buried alive rather than 

 leave her charge. ROMANES Animal Intel- 

 ligence, ch. 6, p. 205. (A., 1899.) 



1704. INSTINCTS COMPLEX Div- 

 ing Spider Carrying Air to Its Watery 

 Home. [The] strangest of all [spiders is] 

 the Argyroneta that has its luminous dwell- 

 ing at the bottom of streams; and just as a 

 mason carries bricks and mortar to its 

 building, so does this spider carry down 

 bubbles of air from the surface to enlarge 

 its mysterious house in which it lays its 

 eggs and rears its young. Community of 

 descent must be supposed of species having 

 such curious and complex instincts; but 

 how came these feeble creatures, unable to 

 transport themselves over seas and conti- 

 nents like the aerial gossamer, to be so 

 widely distributed and inhabiting regions 

 with such different conditions? This can 

 only be attributed to the enormous an- 



tiquity of the species. HUDSON Naturalist 

 in La Plata, ch. 14, p. 195. (C. & H., 1895.) 



1705. INSTINCTS INNATE Young 

 Animals Follow Ancestral Habits without 

 Instruction. Among the lower animals, 

 young ones taken from the litter or the 

 nest and brought up under conditions wholly 

 removed from the teaching of their parents, 

 whether by imitation or otherwise, will re- 

 produce exactly all those habits of their race 

 which belong to their natural modes of life. 

 Many of these habits perhaps it may be 

 safely said all of them imply ideas that 

 is to say, they imply instincts ; and instincts 

 are in the nature of ideas that is to say, 

 they belong to the phenomena of mind. And 

 of this there is another indication in a fact 

 which at first sight may seem trivial or ir- 

 relevant. It has been often said that one 

 great difficulty in reasoning on this subject 

 is the inaccessibility to observation of the 

 mental condition of all infant creatures. 

 But even if this were more true than it 

 really is there are some creatures, not low 

 in the scale of creation, of which it may 

 be said that, comparatively, they have no 

 infancy at all. These are the gallinaceous 

 birds in general, and some species in particu- 

 lar. They come forth from the egg perfect 

 miniatures of their parents, and with minds 

 as fully equipped with parental instincts 

 as their bodies are provided with feathers 

 or their wings with quills. Antecedent to 

 all experience of injury they exhibit fear, 

 and not only fear, but fear of the proper 

 objects. They will flee when they see a 

 hawk, and they will carefully avoid a sting- 

 ing insect. In Europe the young of the 

 wood-grouse or gelinotte are able to fly from 

 the moment they break the shell. ARGYLL 

 Reign of Law, ch. 6, p. 176. (Burt.) 



1706. INSTINCTS, NATURAL, FOL- 

 LOWED IN DOMESTICATION An ani- 

 mal in domesticity, says M. F. Cuvier, is 

 not essentially in a different situation, in 

 regard to the feeling of restraint, from one 

 left to itself. It lives in society without 

 constraint, because, without doubt, it was a 

 social animal; and it conforms itself to the 

 will of man because it had a chief to which, 

 in a wild state, it would have yielded obe- 

 dience. There is nothing in its new situ- 

 ation that is not conformable to its pro- 

 pensities; it is satisfying its wants by sub- 

 mission to a master, and makes no sacrifice 

 of its natural inclinations. All the social 

 animals when left to themselves form herds 

 more or less numerous; and all the individ- 

 uals of the same herd know each other, are 

 mutually attached, and will not allow a 

 strange individual to join them. In a wild 

 state, moreover, they obey some individual, 

 which by its superiority has become the chief 

 of the herd. Our domestic species had orig- 

 inally this sociability of disposition, and no 

 solitary species, however easy it may be to 

 tame it, has yet afforded true domestic races. 

 We merely, therefore, develop to our own 



