10 THE BOOK OF NATURE STUDY 



It is interesting and suggestive to find among animals the 

 analogues of human industries hunting, fishing, shepherding, 

 farming, storing, making homes, etc. 



The mental aspect of animal behaviour is elusive and difficult, 

 and the teacher must try to avoid the extreme of reading the 

 man into the beast, endowing the bee or the bird with the 

 best human attributes, and the other extreme of thinking and 

 speaking of the creature as if it were an automatic machine. 

 Of the two extremes, the second is the worse, for the funda- 

 mental fallacy in regard to living creatures is to ignore their 

 creativeness. 



It may be useful to point out that animal activities occupy, as 

 it were, successive areas on a long inclined plane, and may be 

 thus arranged. But this is of no use unless the teacher can follow 

 it up by reading such a luminiferous book as Lloyd Morgan's 

 Habit and Instinct. 



7. Rational conduct in man requiring 



conceptual inference. 

 6. Intelligent behaviour, requiring perceptual 



inference. 



5. Habitual behaviour, which originally required in- 

 telligent control. 



4. Instinctive behaviour, as in ants and bees. 

 3. Complex reflex actions, as in walking. 

 2. Simple reflex actions, e.g. the knee-jerk. 

 i. Automatic internal activities, e.g. the beating of the heart. 



A Scheme of Study. It often happens that living specimens 

 of a peculiarly interesting kind are available for study close by 

 the school, or may be had as loans for exhibition in school, and 

 yet they are not adequately utilised for lack of a scheme. There 

 are many possible schemes, and the best one is probably that 

 which the teacher thinks out for himself. The point is to get 

 into the habit of almost automatically asking a certain rational 

 set of questions in regard to an animal, to have a method of intel- 

 ligent inquiry. 



Professor M. F. Guyer writes : " Animals, from their own point 

 of view, have two and only two occupations in the world. These 

 are (i) to care for themselves, and (2) to care for their offspring. 

 Consequently, every important thing to be seen about an animal 



