WHAT DO ANIMALS KNOW? 
When I was a boy and saw, as I often did on my 
way to school, where a squirrel had stopped on his 
course through the woods and dug down through 
two or three feet of snow, bringing up a beech-nut 
or an acorn, I used to wonder how he knew the nut 
was there. I am now convinced that he smelled it. 
Why should he not? It stands the squirrel in hand 
to smell nuts; they are his life. He knows a false nut 
from a good one without biting into it. Try the 
experiment upon your tame chipmunk or caged gray 
squirrel, and see if this is not so. The false or dead 
nut is lighter, and most persons think this fact guides 
the squirrel. But this, it seems to me, implies an 
association of ideas beyond the reach of instinct. A 
young squirrel will reject a worthless nut as promptly 
as an old one will. Again the sense of smell is the 
guide; the sound-meated nut has an odor which the 
other has not. All animals are keen and wise in 
relation to their food and to their natural enemies. 
A red squirrel will chip up green apples and pears 
for the seeds at the core; can he know, on general 
principles, that these fruits contain seeds? Does 
not some clue to them reach his senses ? 
Ihave known gray squirrels to go many hundred 
yards in winter across fields to a barn that contained 
grain in the sheaf. They could have had no other 
guide to the grain than the sense of smell. Watch a 
chipmunk or any squirrel near at hand: as a friond 
of mine observed, he seems to be smelling with his 
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