WAYS OF NATURE 
If Mrs. Martin’s statements are literally true, — 
if she has not the failing, so common among women 
observers, of letting her feeling and her fancies color 
her observations, — then her story shows how the 
pressure of hunger will develop the wit of a crow. 
But the story goes one step beyond my credence. 
It virtually makes the crow a tool-using animal, and 
Darwin knew of but two animals, the man-like ape 
and the elephant, that used anything like a tool or 
weapon to attain their ends. How could the crow gain 
the knowledge or the experience which this trick 
implies? What could induce it to make the first 
experiment of breaking an egg with a falling stone 
but an acquaintance with physical laws such as man 
alone possesses ? ‘The first step in this chain of causa- 
tion it is easy to conceive of any animal taking ; 
namely, the direct application of its own powers or 
weapons to the breaking of the shell. But the second 
step,— the making use of a foreign substance or 
object in the way described, — that is what staggers 
one. 
Our own crow has great cunning, but it is only 
cunning. He is suspicious of everything that looks 
like design, that suggests a trap, even a harmless 
string stretched around a corn-field. As a natural 
philosopher he makes a poor show, and the egg or the 
shell that he cannot open with his own beak he leaves 
behind. Yet even his alleged method of dropping 
clams upon the rocks to break the shells does not 
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