LEAF AND TENDRIL 



next hour or the next day the ember had lost 

 its glow and had to be fanned again. Yet they 

 all did improve in doing their little "stunts," but 

 how much was awakened intelligence, and how 

 much mere force of habit, one could not be quite 

 sure. 



Hobhouse is no doubt right when he says that 

 intelligence arises within the sphere of instinct, and 

 that the former often modifies the action of the 

 latter. The extent to which the lower animals profit 

 by experience is a measure of their intelligence. 

 If they hit upon new and improved ways sponta- 

 neously, or adapt new means to an end, they show 

 a measure of intelligence. I once stopped up the 

 entrance to a black hornets' nest with cotton. The 

 hornets removed the cotton by chewing off the 

 fibres that held it to the nest, and then proceeded 

 to change the entrance by carrying it farther around 

 toward the wall of the house, so that the feat of 

 stopping it up was not so easy. Was this an act 

 of intelligence, or only an evidence of the plasti- 

 city or resourcefulness of instinct ? But if a dog 

 in stalking a woodchuck (and I have been told of 

 such things) at the critical moment were to rush 

 to the woodchuck's hole so as to get there before it, 

 this were an act of intelligence. To hunt and stalk 

 is instinctive in the dog, but to correlate its act to 

 that of its prey in this manner would show the tri- 

 umph of intelligence over instinct. 

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