The Mental Life of the Monkeys 213 
forming an association between the sight of the object and 
the act towards it through an idea gained from watching 
you. | You may have caused his act simply by attracting his 
attention to the object. Perhaps if you had pointed at it or 
held it passively in your hand, you would have brought to 
pass just the same action on his part. There are several 
cases among my records where an act which an animal failed 
totally to do of himself was done after I had so attracted his 
attention to the object concerned,. 
\Throughout all the time that I had my monkeys under ob- 
servation I never noticed in their general behavior any act 
which seemed due to genuine imitation of me or the other 
persons about. I also gave them special opportunities to 
show such by Means of a number of experiments of the fol- 
lowing type: where an animal failed by himself to get into 
some box or operate some mechanism, I would operate it in 
his presence a number of times and then give him a chance to 
profit by the tuition. |His failure might be due to (1) the 
absence of instinctive impulses to make the movement in 
that situation, (2) to lack of precision in the movement, (3) 
to lack of force, or (4) to failure to notice and attack some 
special part of the mechanism.) LAn instance of (1) was the 
failure to push away from them a bar which held a door; 
an instance of (2) was the failure to pull a wire loop off a 
nail; an instance of (2) or (3) was the failure to pull up a 
bolt ; an instance of (4) was the failure to pull up an inside 
bar. | Failures due to (3) occur rarely in the case of such 
mechanisms as were used in my investigations. 
The general method of experiment was to make sure that 
the animal would not of itself perform a certain act in a cer- 
tain situation, then to make sure that his failure could not 
be remedied by attracting his attention to the object, then 
to perform the act for him a number of times, letting him get 
