270 MENTAL LIFE OF APES AND MONKEYS 



improvement in its application. He made but a moderate 

 success in disentangling his chain when it became twisted 

 around among the legs of a chair or table. 



While monkeys are generally credited with unusual powers 

 of imitation, the experiments of recent years have shown 

 that imitation is far less frequent than was supposed. Thorn- 

 dike tried to find if monkeys would learn to enter a puzzle 

 box any more quickly after having witnessed a number of 

 times how he opened the various fastenings. Several 

 kinds of boxes were used, but the monkeys did not, in any 

 case, make sufficient progress to justify the conclusion that 

 they learned by imitation. Neither did monkeys which 

 failed to learn how to enter the puzzle boxes after several 

 trials imitate others which had learned to operate the fasten- 

 ings. No evidence of imitation was furnished by the general 

 behavior of these animals, but since two of the monkeys 

 were on very unfriendly terms and the third was exceedingly 

 timid their social relations were not such as to favor the 

 imitation of one another's acts. 



Further experiments were carried on by Watson on four 

 monkeys, a baboon, a Cebus, and two rhesus monkeys. 

 Watson tested his animals by performing in their presence 

 a number of acts which resulted in securing food, such as 

 drawing in food with a rake or a cloth, getting it from a 

 bottle with a fork, and poking it out of a glass cylinder with 

 a stick. After witnessing his operations a number of times 

 there was no effort on the part of any of the monkeys to get 

 the food in the way they had every opportunity to see was 

 effective. Experiments with puzzle boxes in which the 

 monkeys were given a chance to imitate either the experi- 

 menter or a monkey which had already learned the trick 

 gave the same negative results. 



While they yielded no evidence of imitation in its higher 



