518 COMMISSION OF ERROR. 



formly without success. I should fancy that to be recog- 

 nised by an animal, a painting should be executed on certain 

 peculiar principles, divesting the representation as much 

 as possible of everything likely to puzzle the animal- 

 such as foreshortening effect, &c. Even human beings, en- 

 tirely without culture, do not always easily recognise painted 

 work, and the more consummate it is, the less they recog- 

 nise it. Millais told me that many people could not under- 

 stand foreshortening in drawing : so that if you foreshortened 

 one arm, and not the other, they would ask, " Why have you 

 made that one so short ? " 



I have met with no recorded instances of animals of any 

 kind recognising in any way pictures of places, or of things, 

 other than articles of food. 



Nor have I facts to show, whether or how far animals are 

 deceived by the beautiful artificial flowers for which Parisian 

 artistes are so famous, and which so frequently impose upon 

 man, so long as he is guided merely by his distant vision. 

 But the subject is one of much interest ; and the flowers in 

 question, like the mirror and pictures, open up an important 

 means of experiment and field of inquiry to the comparative 

 psychologist. 



I have certainly been assured by the vendors of artificial 

 flowers in ornamental pots, used for the purposes of drawing- 

 room decoration, that bees and butterflies frequent these 

 flowers, and the inference drawn is that the animals are pay- 

 ing an unwitting compliment to the fidelity with which the imi- 

 tator has reproduced nature, so far as mere look is concerned. 

 These, and other insects, however, alight upon dozens of 

 other objects of the most opposite kinds that bear no sort of 

 resemblance to flowers, and there is nothing at present ap- 

 proaching a proof that the animals above named, in such a 

 case, mistake artificial flowers for real ones. The probability, 

 however, is great that they do so. I have myself, over and 

 over again, been deceived by the exquisite imitations of 

 flowers made by foreign, and even by home artists, and I 

 have repeatedly experimentally caused similar mistakes in 

 other persons, all familiar with real flowers, by placing potted 

 artificial and other flowers in drawing rooms or parlours. 



