9 
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. ils 
I went a-fishing one day in the Mimram, a pretty little 
chalk stream in Hertfordshire. From a little fishing-house 
on the bank I noticed several trout rising in a reach of the 
stream meandering through a meadow below. I made ready 
to approach them with all the craft I could muster. There 
happened to be three or four cart-horse colts careering about 
in the meadow, thundering along the water edge close to the 
rising trout, which showed not the slightest alarm or inten- 
tion of desisting from the capture of ephemeride. My host’s 
keeper, solicitous for my comfort, sent a tiny maiden of some 
seven or eight summers to drive away the colts. This she 
did effectively, but her appearance on the bank made every 
trout quit the surface and flee for shelter. In fisherman’s 
parlance, she had ‘‘ put them down.’’ Now, these trout, of 
mature age, no doubt had acquired enough experience to 
fight shy of an angler and all his works, and, though fearless 
of cart horses, would be apt to scuttle off at the first gleam 
of his rod. But how came they to recognise this child as an 
immature specimen of Homo sapiens? Neither anglers nor 
poachers are in the habit of plying their calling in pinafore 
and petticoats. She can scarcely have been an unfamiliar 
apparition to the trout, for her father’s house was close at 
hand, and she must have played many times upon that 
flowery marge. If the trout recognised her, they could not 
associate her with any experience of hurt or harm. On the 
other hand, it is still more difficult to account for their recog- 
nising this child as belonging to a hostile species and the 
cart horses to a harmless one through intelligence imparted 
by or inherited from other fish. One cannot assign limits to 
the measure of warning and instruction which animals can 
convey to the young that they rear; but trout undertake no 
parental cares. They shed their ova in the shallows, and, 
long before these are hatched into sentient creatures, the 
parents have dropped back into the deeper waters, and if ever 
they meet their own offspring in after life are very apt to 
regard them as legitimate food. 
It was written of old :—‘‘ The fear of you and the dread 
of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every 
fowl of the air; upon all that moveth upon the earth, and 
a 
