166 Animal Intelligence 
he had been stung: probably he tasted the poison” (‘Intro- 
duction to Comparative Psychology,’ p. 86). I fed seven 
bees apiece to three chicks from ten to twenty days old. 
ground violently in arather dexterous manner. Apparently 
this method of treatment is peculiar to the object. Chicks 
three days old did not eat the bees. Some pecked at 
them, but none would snap them up, and when the bee 
approached, they sometimes sounded the danger note. 
Finally an account may be given of the reaction of chicks 
at different ages, up to twenty-six days, to loud sounds. 
These were the sounds made by clapping the hands, slam- 
ming a door, whistling sharply, banging a tin pan on the 
floor, mewing like a cat, playing a violin, thumping a coal 
scuttle with a shovel, etc. Two chicks were together in 
each experiment. Three fourths of the times no effect 
was produced. On the other occasions there was some run- 
ning or crouching or, at least, starting to run or crouch; 
but, as was said, nothing like what Spalding reports as the 
reaction to the ‘cheep’ of the hawk. It is interesting to 
notice that the two most emphatic reactions were to the 
imitation mew. One time a chick ran wildly, chirring, and 
then crouched and stayed still until I had counted 105. The 
other time a chick crouched and stayed still until I counted 
40. But the other chick with them did not; and in a dozen 
other cases the ‘meaw’ had no effect. 
I think that the main interest of most of these experiments 
is the proof they afford that instinctive reactions are not 
necessarily definite, perfectly appropriate and unvarying re- 
sponses to accurately sensed and, so to speak, estimated 
stimuli. The old notion that instinct was a God-given sub- 
stitute for reason left us an unhappy legacy in the shape 
of the tendency to think of all inherited powers of reaction as 
