192 Animal Intelligence 
to be too long. The first fact makes the curves have too 
great a drop at the start, making them seem cases of too 
sudden learning, but the second fact makes the learning 
seem indefinite when it really is not. And in the long run 
the times taken do represent fairly well the amount of 
effort. I carefully recorded the amount of actual effort 
in a number of cases and the story it tells concerning the 
mental processes involved is the same as that told by the 
time-curves. 
/ Still another explanation is this: ;The monkeys learn 
quickly, it is true, but not quickly enough for us to suppose 
the pi presence of ideas, or the formation of associations among 
them. |For if there were such ideas, they should in the com- 
plex acts do even better than they did. The explanation 
then is a high degree of facility in the formation of associa- 
tions of just the same kind as we found in the chicks, dogs 
and cats.| \ 
-~Such an explanation we could hardly disapprove in any 
case. | No one can from objective evidence set up a standard 
of speed of learning below which all shall be learning with- 
out ideas and above which all shall be learning by ideas. | 
We should not expect any hard and fast demarcation. 
This whole matter of the rate of leaning should be studied 
in the light of other facts of behavior. ' My own judgment, 
if I had nothing but these time-curves ‘to rely on, would be 
that there was in them an appearance of learning by ideas 
which, while possibly explicable by the finer vision and 
freer movements of the monkey in connection with ordinary 
mammalian mentality, made it worth while to look farther 
into their behavior._| This we may now do. 
What leads the lay mind to attribute superior mental 
gifts to an animal is not so much the rate of learning as 
the amount learned. ‘The monkeys obviously form more 
