254 ANIMAL LIFE 
shell itself into his mouth. This act was not instinctive. 
It was the work of pure reason. Evidently his race was 
not familiar with the use of eggs and had acquired no in- 
stincts regarding them. He would do it better next time. 
Reason is an inefficient agent at first, a weak tool; but 
when it is trained it becomes an agent more valuable and 
more powerful than any instinct. 
The monkey Jocko tried to eat the egg offered him in 
much the same way that Bob did, but, not liking the taste, 
he threw it away. 
The confusion of highly perfected instinct with intellect 
is very common in popular discussions. Instinct grows 
weak and less accurate in its automatic obedience as the 
intellect becomes available in its place. Both intellect and 
instinct are outgrowths from the simple reflex response to 
external conditions. But instinct insures a single definite 
response to the corresponding stimulus. The intellect has 
a choice of responses. In its lower stages it is vacillating 
and ineffective; but as its development goes on it becomes 
alert and adequate to the varied conditions of life. It 
grows with the need for improvement. It will therefore 
become impossible for the complexity of life to outgrow 
the adequacy of man to adapt himself to its conditions. 
Many animals currently believed to be of high intelli- 
gence are not so. The fur-seal, for example, finds it way 
back from the long swim of two or three thousand miles 
through a foggy and stormy sea, and is never too late or too 
early in arrival. The female fur-seal goes two hundred 
miles to her feeding grounds in summer, leaving the pup 
on the shore. After a week or two she returns to find him 
within a few rods of the rocks where she had left him. 
Both mother and young know each other by call and by 
odor, and neither is ever mistaken, though ten thousand 
other pups and other mothers occupy the same rookery. 
But this is not intelligence. It is simply instinct, because 
it has no element of choice in it. Whatever its ancestors 
