GENERAL NOTES 5 



mals. In a third stage he will depend upon crops 

 which require less labor and cost in general, but this 

 stage will presumably not be reached until he has 

 fought many wars in the interest of his thought- 

 habit grain crops. The wild turkey following a line 

 of grains of corn through an opening beneath a log 

 pen holds his proud head erect after disposing of the 

 food that was in sight. Looking upward toward 

 Heaven for ways of escape he sees no outlet from 

 his predicament. His pen is already over-populated 

 and he would favor restriction of the birth rate. 

 The turkey might be out of the pen and in the 

 midst of an abundance o-f delicious beechnuts and 

 wild grapes in two minutes excepting for his 

 thought-habit. As a highly intelligent bird he is 

 too nearly human to attend to that matter. 



The author asked Professor Knight Dunlap if 

 psychologists had an explanation for the fact that 

 men have so many resources for resisting the intro- 

 duction of knowledge into themselves. Professor 

 Dunlap answered as follows : 



"I do not believe that there is any specific 'mech- 

 anism by means of which men resist the introduc- 

 tion of knowledge into themselves.' I think the 

 resistance to introduction is just one phase of the 

 general tendency of the mechanism to function in 

 the ways established by instinct and habit. If you 

 consider the organism as a machine, which has cer- 

 tain specific lines of action through heredity, which 

 lines are developed and modified through experience 

 (habit formation), we should expect to find that an 



