March 20, 1909.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
455 
Animal Actions. 
Philadelphia, Pa., March 13.— Editor Forest 
and Stream: We have all heard of the two 
men who hopelessly disagreed about the color 
of a chameleon because they persisted in see¬ 
ing the creature from different points of view. 
On reading Julian Burroughs’ contribution to 
the instinct or intelligence discussion in Forest 
AND Stream of the 6th inst., it occurred, or 
rather recurred to me, that the persistence of 
this controversy may be due to a cause of sub¬ 
stantially the same nature. Of course it is 
freely admitted that in this particular communi¬ 
cation he exposes to public notice a palpable in¬ 
stance of untrustworthy observation. But the 
fact that false testimony is occasionally offered 
in its defense does not prove that a proposition 
is entirely unsupported by valid evidence. The 
issue remains just as it was before. And is it 
not obvious that the first step toward an agree¬ 
ment in a matter of this kind must be a com¬ 
mon understanding as to the meaning of the 
principal terms pertaining to the subject? If in 
using the word intelligence, John Doe mgans 
one thing and Richard Roe refers to something 
essentially different, they may argue about the 
intelligence of animals forever without reach¬ 
ing any result of more importance than if they 
were endeavoring to discover which could make 
the most noise by the beating of tom-toms. 
The late George J. Romains, who was a well 
known English scientist, provided us with defi¬ 
nitions of the terms in question which seem to 
me to be so accurate, so concisely comprehen¬ 
sive, and so completely adapted for perfecting 
the first step toward an agreement in regard to 
a classification of the various activities of or¬ 
ganic creation that I am induced to transcribe 
them here for that purpose. If they are ac¬ 
cepted as offered, each of the two parties to 
the present dispute will at least have the satis¬ 
faction of possessing a definite idea of what 
the other party is talking about. They are as 
follows: 
“Reflex action is non-mental neuro-muscular 
adjustment, due to the inherited mechanism of 
the nervous system, which is formed to respond 
to particular movements of an adaptive though 
not of an intentional kind. 
“Instinct is reflex action into which there is 
imported the element of consciousness. The 
term is, therefore, a generic one, comprising all 
those faculties of mind which are concerned in 
conscious and adaptive action, antecedent to in¬ 
dividual experience, without necessary knowl¬ 
edge of the relation between means employed 
and ends attained, but similarly performed 
under similar and frequently recurring circum¬ 
stances by all the individuals of the same species. 
“Reason or intelligence is the faculty which 
is concerned in the intentional adaptation of 
means to ends. It therefore implies the con¬ 
scious knowledge of the relation between means 
employed and ends attained, and may be exer¬ 
cised in adaptation to circumstances novel alike 
to the experience of the individual and to that 
of the species.” 
Using the word as here defined, doe^ Julian 
Burroughs believe that intelligence is confined 
to the human race? If he objects to using the 
word as here defined it will be of interest to 
know why he does so. 
It seems to me that any action which involves 
a conscious choice between thing and thing 
necessarily “implies a conscious knowledge of 
the relation between means employed and ends 
attained.” Is it not plain that a choice between 
thing and thing, or a decision to do this or 
that, requires an association of ideas which dif¬ 
fers in no essential feature from the intelligence 
of man? The fact that the ideas are extremely 
crude and the field of consciousness extremely 
limited, only means that the intelligence is vastly 
lower in the scale of development than the in- 
ELACK, MR. REEDEr’s GUIDE. 
COOKING THE EVENING MEAL ON THE EDGE OF THE 
DESERT. 
telligence of man. There is an enormous dif¬ 
ference in degree, but none in kind. 
Does not a stubborn mule make a choice be¬ 
tween doing this and that, and does he not con ■ 
sciously associate the idea of eating with the 
idea of the sound of the horn, when he per¬ 
emptorily refuses to remain at work in the 
field after the dinner horn blows? When I was 
a boy a neighbor of ours had a mule which once 
made a choice to turn around and go home when 
he was part way to mill, with a grist, in a snow¬ 
storm, and the frantic efforts of a man in oppo¬ 
sition did not prevent him. Surely this mule 
was conscious of some sort of an image of his 
comfortable stable, and it seems only reason¬ 
able to suppose that he consciously associated 
that mental image of the stable with some sort 
of a mental image of the means by which he 
could reach that stable in the shortest space of 
time. In resolutely turning back on that par¬ 
ticular occasion he was not led by blind instinct, 
for instinct is an outgrowth of heredity, and 
his situation was novel both to his own ex¬ 
perience and to that of his progenitors. In 
short, he manifested a “conscious knowledge of 
the relation between means employed and ends 
attained,” and he exercised that knowledge “in 
adaptation to circumstances novel alike to the 
experience of the individual and to that of the 
.species.” 
I once tied up a young dog to break him of 
eating eggs, and another dog, which was en¬ 
tirely free from the habit, got eggs from the 
nests and carried them in his mouth, unbroken, 
to the dog that was tied. Certainly this in¬ 
volved a conscious association of ideas, or of 
mental images, and an “adaptation to circum¬ 
stances novel alike to the experience of the in¬ 
dividual and to that of the species.” 
When bees are about to swarm and send out 
a delegation to select a new home, do not those 
delegates necessarily choose between thing and 
thing, or between place and place? And is it 
not plain that it is impossible to choose between 
several situations unless the creature carries 
with it a consciousness of some sort of an 
image of each one of those places? Choice 
necessarily involves a mental view of two or 
more things in contrast, and when those things 
are not in immediate juxtaposition there can be 
no contrast without memory. 
It is inconceivable that every swarm of bees 
that goes away without being hived should make 
a bee-line to a hollow tree, or other new home, 
without previous search, inspection and choice. 
Indeed, I have had ocular evidence that they 
do not. A swarm of bees from a neighboring 
village once took possession of an empty hive 
which was on a bench near other occupied hives 
in the yard, and by a mere chance three or four 
hours before the swarm arrived, on my way 
from the field to the house, I passed near the 
bees and stopped to examine them and then 
noticed a number of bees running in and out 
and over that empty hive in the greatest hurry 
and excitement; and the subsequent event con¬ 
vinced me that those bees were a delegation 
from the swarm on their expedition of home 
hunting and inspection. When the swarm came 
over later in the day it immediately settled on 
the front of that hive and in a very short time 
all the bees were inside, quietly attending to 
their domestic affairs as though nothing unusual 
had happened. 
It is known of all men that dogs have dreams, 
and how can a creature dream without an asso¬ 
ciation of ideas or a consciousness of cause and 
effect which is essentially intelligence? To my 
mind the evidence seems to point to. the con¬ 
clusion that where there is consciousness there 
is also intelligence, the two things being in¬ 
separable. I mean that all creatures which are- 
conscious of their own existence are endowed, 
in various degrees, with both instinct and in¬ 
telligence. I. W. G. 
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