About Parrots 



By Lawrence Irwell 



Xaturalists place the parrot group at the head of bird creation. This is 

 done. not. of course, because parrots can talk, but because they display, on the 

 whole, a greater amount of intelligence, of cleverness and adaptability to circum- 

 stances than other birds, including even their cunning rivals, the ravens and the 

 jackdaws. 



It may well be asked what are the causes of the exceptionally high intelligence 

 in parrots. The answer which I suggest is that an intimate connection exists 

 throughout the animal world between mental development and the power of 

 grasping an object all round, so as to know exactly its shape and its tactile 

 properties. The possession of an effective prehensile organ — a hand or its 

 equivalent — seems to be the first great requisite for the evolution of a high order 

 of intellect. Man and the monkeys, for example, have a pair of hands ; and in 

 their case one can see at a glance how dependent is their intelligence upon these 

 grasping organs. All human arts base themselves ultimately upon the human 

 hand ; and our nearest relatives, the anthropoid apes, approach humanity to some 

 extent by reason of their ever-active and busy little fingers. The elephant, again, 

 has his flexible trunk, which, as we have all heard over and over again, is equally 

 well adapted to pick up a pin or to break the great boughs of tropical forest trees. 

 The squirrel also, remarkable for his unusual intelligence when judged by a 

 rodent standard, uses his little paws as hands by which he can grasp a nut or 

 fruit all round, and so gain in his small mind a clear conception of its true shape 

 and properties. Throughout the animal kingdom generally, indeed, this chain 

 of causation makes itself everywhere felt : no high intelligence without a highly- 

 developed prehensile and grasping organ. 



Perhaps the opossum is the best and most crucial instance that can be found 

 of the intimate connection which exists between touch and intellect. The oppos- 

 sum is a marsupial ; it belongs to the same group of lowly-organized, antiquated 

 and pouch-bearing animals as the kangaroo, the wombat, and other Australian 

 mammals. Everybody knows that the marsupials, as a class, are preternaturally 

 dull — are perhaps the least intelligent of all existing quadrupeds. And this is 

 reasonable when one considers the subject, for they represent a very early type, 

 the first "rough sketch" of the mammalian idea, with brains unsharpened as yet 

 by contact with the world in the fierce competition of the struggle for life as it 

 displays itself on the crowded stage of the great continents. They stand, in fact, 

 to the lions and tigers, the elephants and horses, the monkeys and squirrels of 

 America and Europe, as the native Australian stands to the American or the 

 Englishman. They are the last relic of the original secondary quadrupeds, stranded 

 for centuries on a Southern island, and still keeping up among Australian forests 

 the antique type of life that went out of fashion elsewhere a vast number of years 



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