2 4 o MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



its actions after perhaps considerable lapse of time. With 

 the higher animals this effect is not confined to cases in 

 which a simple reaction is encouraged or inhibited by the 

 immediately attendant pleasure or pain. 1 It is seen equally 

 in the speedy and long-retained recognition of places and 

 persons. The power of cats and dogs to find their way 

 home over a route once traversed, even among all the 

 turnings of a big town, is too familiar to need remark. 

 Similarly, Romanes correctly writes : 



" The memory of the horse is remarkably good, as almost every 

 one must have had occasion to observe who has driven one over 

 roads which the animal may have only once traversed a long time 

 before." 2 



A comparatively trivial event may also be " fixed " by 

 a single occurrence. 



" When I was at the Cape I used to take my two dogs up the 

 Devil's Peak, an outlying point of Table Mountain. There were 

 several places at which it was necessary that I should lift them 

 from ledge to ledge since they could not scramble up by them- 

 selves. After the first ascent they always remembered these 

 places and waited patiently to be lifted up." 3 



It would be useless to multiply instances. The question 

 is, how to interpret a familiar observation. In that inter- 

 pretation we cannot, if we go solely by the actions of the 

 animal, attribute to it a memory-judgment in the sense of 

 an act of thought about the past. But we can fairly say that 

 one condition of the memory-judgment is present, i.e., the 

 animal takes note of a single occurrence and guides his 

 conduct thereby on subsequent occasions. 



1 Inhibition is, of course, the least definite, and in that way the easiest 

 lesson that experience can teach. A case of inhibition by one experience 

 is alleged by Bingley (^quoted by Romanes, p. 25) from the Mollusca. I 

 should like to see it tested. It is also possible that in the matter of the 

 signs of approaching prey or danger, heredity prepares a machinery with 

 which the appropriate sound or sight fits not congenially, but after a 

 minimum of practice. In these cases there may be rapid learning, and 

 yet the operation of experience may be only of the mechanical, inarticulate 

 kind. But where a poodle remembers his way to any house where he has 

 once been, we have to do with an appreciation of space relations probably 

 very complex, which, one would say, must either be retained in an 

 articulate form, or not at all (see Brehm's Thierleben, 3rd ed., Vol. II., 



P- 157).. 



2 Animal Intelligence, p. 330. 



3 Lloyd Morgan, Comparative Psychology, p. 118. 



