Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/498

480 among us he would write in his notebook that 'the stupidity of these people shows itself in the fact that they do not know or have no names for many of the flowers which they see every day and tread upon with their clumsy feet. What can not be eaten or put to some immediate use has very little value or interest to these fellows, and such dull-witted folk as these want reform and autonomy!' And he would be only a modest traveler. Another one would write a whole chapter over the incident, as illustrating the inferiority of all our people."

I might continue at greater length on this theme, but I believe that the reader will sufficiently apprehend from what I have said that the European and American whites have not made a good impression on the colored Filipinos, and that the Philippine Creoles feel as one with their colored brethren; that there is no spirit of caste in the matter like that which existed in the old colonial times, but they all call themselves simply Filipinos, and that the rule of the American Anglo-Saxons, who regard even the Creoles as a kind of "niggers," would be looked upon by educated Filipinos of all castes as a supreme loss of civic rights.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Deutsche Rundschau.

 

ROBABLY every reader who owns a dog or cat has already answered the question which forms our title, and the chance is ten to one that he has answered, "Yes." In spite of the declarations of the psychologists from Descartes to Lloyd Morgan, the man who likes his dog and the woman who pets a cat persist in the belief that their pets carry on thinking processes similar, at least in kind, to our own. And if one has nothing more to say for the opposite view than the stock arguments of the psychologists, he will make few converts. A series of experiments carried on for two years have, I hope, given me some things more to say—some things which may interest the believer in reason in animals, even if they do not convert him.

In trying to find out what sort of thinking animals were capable of I adopted a novel but very simple method. Dogs and cats were shut up, when hungry, in inclosures from which they could escape by performing some simple act, such as pulling a wire loop, stepping on a platform or lever, clawing down a string stretched across the inclosure, turning a wooden button, etc. In each case the act set