160 Animal Intelligence 
after 10 or 12 days’ experience. It certainly is not perfect. 
then. I took niné chicks from 10 to 14 days old and placed 
them one at a time on a clear surface over which were scat- 
tered grains of cricked wheat (the food they had been eat- 
ing in this same way for a week) and watched the accuracy 
of their pecking. | Out of 214 objects pecked at, 159 were 
seized, 55 were not. Out of the 159 that were seized, only 
116 were seized o1{ the first peck, 25 on the second, 16 on the 
third, and the rerhaining two on the fourth. Of the 55 that 
were not successfully seized, 31 were pecked at only once, 
10 twice, 10 three times, 3 four times and 1 five times. I 
fancy one would find that adult fowls would show by no 
means a perfect/record. So long as chicks with ten days’ — 
experience fail tb seize on the first trial 45 per cent of the 
time, it is hardly fair to argue against the perfection of the 
instinct on the ground of failures to seize during thefirst day. 
The chick’s practical appreciation of space-facts is seen 
further in his attempts to escape when confined. Put chicks 
only twenty or thirty hours old in a box with walls three or 
four inches high and they will react to the perpendicularity 
of the confining’ walls by trying to jump over them. In fact, 
in the ways he moves, the directions he takes and the objects 
he reacts to, the chicken has prior to experience the power 
of appropriate reaction to colors and facts of all three dimen- 
sions. 
INSTINCTIVE MUSCULAR COORDINATIONS 
In the acts already described we see fitting « coérdinations 
at work in the chick’s reactions to space-facts. A few more 
samples may be given. In jumping down from heights the 
chick does not walk off or fall off (save rarely), but jumps 
off. He meets the situation “loneliness on a small eminence” 
by walking around the edge and peering down; he meets the 
