Feb. 22, 1908.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
2 Q 3 
THE SPIDER’S WEB. 
From a photograph by F. F. Sornberger. 
until the drouth and the cultivator stopped in 
September. Immediately thousands of red roots 
came up, which instead of growing to be tall, 
luxuriant, branching plants, as is their habit of 
growth, put out only one or two leaves and a 
seed stalk. Ordinarily the red root grows shoul¬ 
der high; those plants tried—and many succeeded 
—to ripen a few seeds, often one hundredth part 
of what a red root bears, an inch or two off the 
ground. Now, those weeds reasoned that since 
the season was late, it being September, there 
was no time for their customary growth. Who 
would say a weed can reason? Yet this act, 
not of one but of thousands, is just as much an 
act of reason as any dog, wild animal or bird 
story that I have yet encountered. 
Lloyd Morgan, the most careful of our com¬ 
parative psychologists, tried to get his dog to 
come through a picket fence with a cane in his 
mouth. He found that it was quite beyond the 
dog’s powers of reason to see that he must tip 
his head over until the cane cleared the pickets 
and that there was plenty of room for the cane 
up and down. It ended by the dog dropping the 
cane. Yet a house wren carries a stick into a 
hole, taking it by one end and squeezing merrily 
in. This is the difference between instinct and 
reason. 
A beaver, taken when very young and brought 
up in a city flat, will build dams of any material 
he can get. This is instinct. If a dog built ever 
so small a dam in a brook to make a puddle in 
which to cool himself on a hot day this would 
be an act of reason. 
My uncle once had a fine shepherd dog named 
Tige who was an enemy of my cousin’s dog 
Cuff. Whenever my cousin came over the hill 
to -visit, Cuff followed them as close to my uncle’s 
house as he dared come. Often Tige, while 
Spot charged Cuff from in front, would execute 
a flank movement in silence around behind the 
wood house and pig pen and so into the road, 
hoping to cut off Cuff’s line of retreat. It was 
a clever move, executed with great speed and 
absolute silence, and showed clearly his intent 
and purpose. It is not what a psychologist would 
call an act of reason. Not only that, but I 
proved repeatedly that poor old Tige could not 
reason or form mental concepts. It was a link 
in the great chain of instinctive stalking. No 
doubt many dog lovers, of which, by the way, I 
am one, would have called it an act of reason, 
yet it was nothing more than what nearly all 
predatory animals do instinctively. One has but 
to watch a cat stalking a sparrow to have proof 
of this. 
W. T. Hornaday, in his “Camp-Fires in the 
Canadian Rockies,” tells how his guide caught 
a wolverine by setting a trap in his cabin door 
left ajar, and another one under a piece of meat 
hung up outside. He said to himself in making 
these preparations that the wolverine would rea¬ 
son it out that since the trap was set in the door 
so carefully the hunter must have forgotten the 
meat left outside. The wolverine was so accom¬ 
modating as to reason it out as per directions 
and get caught. Now not only is it unreason¬ 
able to suppose any such mental process went 
on in the wolverine’s brain—and to suggest a 
dozen other explanations more natural and likely 
—but even if it did, no man is warranted in say¬ 
ing that it did—simply because he did not know 
what the wolverine thought, if he thought at all. 
And this fallacy is at the bottom of nearly all 
stories about animals reasoning. We find it hard 
work to let common sense have its due and ac- 
,cept the simple and the obvious. We want to 
put our own interpretation on what we see. 
Animals are our superiors in every direction but 
one. In reasoning alone we stand above them, 
on a height which they have never in any in¬ 
stance approached. Our arts, sciences and 
written languages, a monumental product of 
man’s reasoning, is tangible and covincing proof 
that in that one direction we dwell in a world 
apart from the brutes. 
Julian Burroughs. 
Butcher Bird as a Mouser. 
Alton, Ill., Jan. 23 . —Editor Forest and 
Stream: One winter, when I was a youngster, 
I was working on my uncle’s farm and he put 
me to shucking shock corn out in a field on two 
sides of which there was a tall hedge. While I 
was at work a butcher bird used to sit in the 
top of the hedge, and when I would tear a shock 
down he would come and flutter in the air over 
me, and when a mouse ran out he would pounce 
down on it and carry it away. It would only- be 
a minute or two till he would be back again wait¬ 
ing for another. 
I was very careful not to scare him, and soon 
he got so tame that he would catch them almost 
under my feet. He kept that up early and late 
as long as I worked there. 
What he wanted with so many mice I do not 
know for he could not have eaten the half of 
what he caught in his lifetime. 
I suppose he was a born hunter and caught 
them for sport. John Chandler. 
[Records of the butcher bird or shrike, watch¬ 
ing men at work when tearing down corn shocks 
or removing weed piles and capturing the mice 
which run out from them, have often before been 
published. It is always interesting to read such 
accounts, because they show how readily a bird 
may adapt itself to circumstance, and how readily 
under such conditions it loses its fear /if man. 
. We see something of the same thing in the 
familiar way in which the gray jay, moose bird, 
meat hawk, or whiskeyjohn comes about the camp 
and associates on terms of great familiarity with 
the camper. We do not recall any case in which 
a shrike became so tame as the one described 
by our correspondent.— Editor.] 
A Remarkable Photograph. 
The spider’s web, spangled with dew which is 
seen on this page, is a wonderful example of 
photography, and speaks volumes for the 
patience, care and skill of Mr. Sornberger. Just 
• such webs we have all of us seen in early morn¬ 
ing, when starting out on a shooting or fishing 
excursion, and it is certain that such a photo¬ 
graph belongs especially in Forest and Stream 
whose readers know such things so well. This 
is a picture of early autumn when goldenrod 
and black-eyed susans are in bloom, taken per¬ 
haps early some day when one might be look¬ 
ing for the very first of the fall woodcock, or 
even after a warm night when the quail season 
had just opened. 
