ADAPTIVENESS AND PURPOSIVENESS 335 



endeavours within our own experience. How careful we 

 must be in regard to the purposefulness of animals who are 

 very distantly related, whose language if they have any 

 we do not know, whose behaviour is cast on different lines 

 from ours. 



When we see a blacksmith take a twisted shoe from a 

 horse's foot, heat it in the fire, hammer it, cool it, file it, 

 and so on, we know from the very first what his purpose 

 is, and we understand more or less every step in relation 

 to the obvious end. But if we watch a potter or a glass 

 blower or the like for the first time we find it more difficult 

 from what we see to prove that he is not amusing himself; 

 he does things that we do not see the meaning of; he ends 

 just at the last moment by turning out something which 

 we did not expect. There is here the warning that a sequence 

 may be actuated by purpose through and through although 

 we do not recognise the domination not even when we know 

 the end. 



5. Purposiveness and Purposefulness in Animal 

 Behaviour. 



Let us pass to animal behaviour. When a dog hides an 

 unfinished bone in a very unusual place; when Lord Ave- 

 bury's dog Van goes to its box and brings out and arranges 

 the letters T-E-A; when rooks take fresh-water mussels to 

 a great height and let them fall on the shingle beneath so 

 that they are broken; when a mother weasel, accompanied 

 by one of her offspring, about to be overtaken on the links, 

 seizes the youngster in her mouth, dashes on ahead, and lays 

 it in a sandy hole; when beavers cut a canal right through 

 a large island in a river; when mares, some past foaling, 

 unite to lift up between them a number of foals on the 



