272 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE 



in first attempts. No such variation — no such im- 

 perfection — can be detected. There is no "prentice 

 hand ' among spiders. The first web of the spider is ot 

 normal design and perfect construction. Destroy it, 

 and the creature will execute another of exactly the 

 same design, no better and no worse adapted for the 

 capture of passing flies. 



Very different is human performance directed by 

 personal intelligence. Suppose that the child of a 

 herring-fisher or a rabbit-catcher had been left as an 

 orphan at five years old, and removed from the scene 

 of his father's industry to the care of some relatives in 

 Glasgow. Circumstances prevail to bring him back to 

 his birthplace as a young man, and to make it expedient 

 that he should earn a living by the same industry as 

 his father did. Motor or functional co-ordination will 

 not help him much, for he can neither swim like a 

 herring nor burrow like a rabbit. He sets his intelli- 

 gence to work, seeking instruction from adepts in the 

 craft, and then he must obtain suitable apparatus 

 which he could not himself construct, in the use of 

 which he will certainly be very unskilful at first. Even 

 so, he has to avail himself of the example of eon- 

 temporary fishers and trappers, who are themselves 

 indebted for success to the accumulated experience and 

 progressive inventions of bygone generations. But the 

 net spread - yesterday on your rose bush by Epeira 

 is of precisely the same design as those which her 

 ancestors suspended in the primeval forest when our 

 ancestors were spearing salmon with bone harpoons 

 and shooting deer with flint-tipped arrows. 



