IX 

 THE ANIMAL AND THE PUZZLE-BOX 



I MUST beg my reader's indulgence in returning 

 to the subject of the last essay. As there pretty 

 clearly indicated, I have little sympathy with the 

 laboratory method of studying animal behavior. 

 I cannot make myself believe that much real insight 

 can be had into its hidden springs by such methods. 

 Of course, being a field observer of wild life, and a 

 lover of the open, I am out of sympathy with the 

 laboratory method to begin with. I am out of sym- 

 pathy with the cold, mechanical, and businesslike 

 procedures that it involves. The results have too 

 much the character of the forced, the artificial, the 

 unnatural. The laboratory method applied to man 

 often leads to valuable results, because man lives 

 and moves and has his being amid artificial con- 

 ditions. Animal intelligence in the laboratory is, 

 for the most part, conspicuous by its absence. The 

 poor creatures, confronted by the strange condi- 

 tions and the new problems, do not know what 

 they do know, any more than men usually do 

 under like circumstances. They are drilled into 

 forming new habits, — the puzzle-box habit, the 

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