76 Animal Intelligence 
ising problems, of which the first, and not the least im- 
portant, concerns the facts and theories of zmztation. 
IMITATION 
To the question, ‘Do animals imitate?’ science has 
uniformly answered, ‘Yes.’ But so long as the question 
is left in this general form, no correct answer to it is possible. 
It will be seen, from the results of numerous experiments 
soon to be described, that imitation of a certain sort is 
not possible for animals, and before entering upon that 
description it will be helpful to differentiate this matter of 
imitation into several varieties or aspects. The presence 
of some sorts of imitation does not imply that of other 
sorts. 
There are, to begin with, the well-known phenomena 
presented by the imitative birds. The power is extended 
widely, ranging from the parrot who knows a hundred or 
more articulate sounds to the sparrow whom a patient 
shoemaker taught to get through a tune. Now, if abird 
really gets a sound in his mind from hearing it and sets out 
forthwith to imitate it, as mocking birds are said at times to 
do, it is a mystery and deserves closest study. If a bird, 
out of a lot of random noises that it makes, chooses those 
for repetition which are like sounds that he has heard, it 
is again a mystery why, though not as in the previous case 
a mystery how, he does it. The important fact for our pur- 
pose is that, though the imitation of sounds is so habitual, 
there does not appear to be any marked general imitative 
tendency in these birds. There is no proof that parrots do : 
muscular acts from having seen other parrots do them. 
But this should be studied. At any rate, until we know 
what sort of sounds birds imitate, what circumstanse{ 
