8 The Animal Mind 



investigation and the comparative study of many facts to de- 

 cide 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 pos- 

 sible. 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 concep- 

 tion 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 sup- 

 posedly as a signal to be let out, and straightway this cat be- 

 comes the representative of the cat-mind in all the books " 



(393, 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 attitude 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 two others, and so on until all were 

 ready to march. First walked two ants bearing a body, 

 then two without a burden; then two others with another 



