WAYS OF NATURE 
enemies and from their prey, as we are told; but the 
animals themselves do not know this, though they 
may act as if they did. Young terns and gulls in- 
stinctively squat upon the beach, where their colors 
so harmonize with the sand and pebbles that the 
birds are virtually invisible. Young partridges do 
the same in the woods, where the eye cannot tell the 
reddish tuft of down from the dry leaves. How many 
gulls and terns and partridges were sacrificed before 
Nature learned this trick! 
I regard the lower animals as incapable of taking 
the step from the fact to the principle. They have 
perceptions, but not conceptions. They may recog- 
nize a certain fact, but any deduction from that fact 
to be applied to a different case, or to meet new 
conditions, is beyond them. Wolves and foxes soon 
learn to be afraid of poisoned meat: just what gives 
them the hint it would be hard to say, as the sur- 
vivors could not know the poison’s deadly effect from 
experience; their fear of it probably comes from 
seeing their fellows suffer and die after eating it, or 
maybe through that mysterious means of communi- 
cation between animals to which I have referred in 
a previous article. The poison probably changes the 
odor of the meat, and this strange smell would 
naturally put them on their guard. 
We do not expect rats to succeed in putting a bell 
on the cat, but if they were capable of conceiving 
such a thing, that would establish their claim to be 
140 
