WHAT DO ANIMALS KNOW? 
his steel trap fastened to the top of a pole in the 
fields. The rabbit that can be so easily caught in a 
snare or in a box-trap will yet conceal its nest and 
young in the most ingenious manner. Where instinct 
or inherited knowledge can come into play, the 
animals are very wise, but new conditions, new 
problems, bring out their ignorance. 
A college girl told me an incident of a red squirrel 
she had observed at her home in Iowa, that illus- 
trates how shallow the wit of a squirrel is when con- 
fronted by new conditions. This squirrel carried 
nuts all day and stored them in the end of a drain- 
pipe that discharged the rain-water upon the pave- 
ment below. The nuts obeyed the same law that the 
rain-water did, and all rolled through the pipe and 
fell upon the sidewalk. In the squirrel’s experience, 
and in that of his forbears, all holes upon the ground 
were stopped at the far end, or they were like pockets, 
and if nuts were put in them they stayed there. A 
hollow tube open at both ends, that would not hold 
nuts — this was too much for the wit of the squir- 
rel. But how wise he is about the nuts themselves! 
Among the lower animals the ignorance of one is 
the ignorance of all, and the knowledge of one is the 
knowledge of all, in a sense in which the same is not 
true among men. Of course some are more stupid 
than others of the same species, but probably, on the 
one hand, there are no idiots among them, and, on 
the other, none is preéminent in wit. 
125 
