934 The American Naturalist. [November, 
untary and is as much under mental direction and control, as 
the action of a carpenter building a house. That the very 
lowest forms of animal life give evidences of intelligence can 
no longer be denied. A very common rotifer whose body is, 
cup-shaped and whose tail is armed with forceps, has been 
seen to seize a larger specimen with its forceps and thus 
attach itself to its cup. The larger rotifer immediately swung 
itself violently about until it met a piece of weed, this it seized 
with its forceps and began “the most extraordinary move- 
ments which were obviously directed toward ridding itself of 
its encumbrance.” This it finally succeeded in doing, and 
the entire scene was so like intelligent action that the observer 
concludes “so that if we were to depend upon appearances 
alone, this one observation would be sufficient to induce me to 
attribute conscious determination to these microscopical organ- 
isms.”” Conscious determination and ratiocination is found in 
animals as low down in the scale of animal life as the Rhizo- 
poda. Aethalia will confine themselves to the water in a 
watch-glass in which they are placed, but when the glass is 
placed on sawdust, they will leave the water and go to the 
dust—their natural habitat? These rhizopoda are content to 
remain in the water, as long as there is no sawdust.in their 
vicinity, but as soon as they recognize the sawdust through the 
glass, they erawl over the rim of the latter to get into a more 
pleasing abode. This is a wonderful example of conscious 
determination to be found in an organism so low in the scale 
of life. Once, while examining some fungal cells, Carter saw 
a still more wonderful instance of intelligence in a rhizopod. 
He noticed that one of the spore cells had ruptured and that 
grains of starch were escaping from the crevice. Suddenly an 
actinophrys came into the field of vision and proceeding to the 
ruptured cell seized a grain of starch and then retired to some 
distance. Presently it returned to the same cell and extracted 
another grain through the crevice. ^ All this was repeated 
several times showing that the actinophrys knew that those 
were nutritious grains, that they were contained in this cell, 
?*Romanes: Animal Intelligence, p. 18. 
3H. J. Carter: Annals of Natural History. 
