A Letter from Mr. Long 
Teaching is not primarily instruction, by the way. It 
is not giving something new to the young animal or 
boy, but rather an inducement bringing out what is 
already in him. This is the theory of all good teachers 
from Froebel to the Boston super- 
fo visors. But let that pass. How any 
.. man could watch the mother birds 
Ss ’ and animals for a single season, to 
say nothing of fifty years, and write 
that statement passes my comprehen- 
sion. In my notes are a hundred 
instances to deny it (and my notes 
were not intended to be published 
e when they were written), but, lest my own 
Py witness should be cast out, let me bring in 
is & two others on a single subject... Anna Bots- 
eT ford Comstock, who is one of our best and 
most careful naturalists, tells of a cat that 
learned to open a door, and taught two out 
of her litter of kittens to do the same thing. 
Rev. Magee Pratt of Hartford, formerly lit- 
erary editor of the Connecticut Magazine, who is an 
authority on horticulture, had a cat that learned from 
a dog to sit up on her hind legs and beg food. She 
taught four out of five kittens to do the same thing. 
I could quote a hundred other instances, in both wild 
and domestic animals, and show the same thing. 
Mr. Burroughs’ whole argu- 
ment in this connection misses 
the point altogether. He tells SS 
us what animals do by instinct ane” 
(though he i Peery a 
gh he is vastly mistaken «1 
in saying that young birds build 
their nests as well as old ones) 
and says simply that this is 
enough. “school otathe 
Woods” does not deny 
instinct, — I have watched the ant and the bee and the 
water spider too long for that, —it shows, and conclu- 
sively I think, that instinct is not enough. Foran ani- 
mal’s knowledge is, like our own, the result of three 
factors: instinct, training, and experience. Instinct 
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