Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/867

Rh in the sixth forty," etc., and remarks: "Suppose the cat had, after the third accidental success, been able to reason? She would then have, the next time and all succeeding times, performed the act as soon as put in." Not long ago the writer and a man whose high intelligence can not be questioned, in moments of relaxation were trying to do one of the familiar ring puzzles—endeavoring to separate a ring from two others of peculiar shape and then to join the three. After repeated trials, one would loosen it, but could not replace it; the other finally succeeded in replacing it, but could not loosen it. Then the one could replace it, but not loosen it; the other loosen, but not replace it, and each was closely watching the other all the time. It was half an hour or more before either could both loosen and replace the ring, occasional successful attempts not being repeated until after several succeeding failures. Contrast the relation of the brain of the dazed and indifferent and peculiarly bedeviled cat to the puzzle presented to it by the inside of the box with the earnest effort of the two men to solve the ring puzzle. Who has not found a task more difficult the fifth or sixth time than the second or third, and has only performed it with ease after repeated attempts of varying degrees of success and failure?

In conclusion, the writer begs leave to relate an incident, which has not before appeared in print, that profoundly impressed him with the belief that at least in one instance one particular animal displayed reason. One Sunday morning, a dozen years or more ago, he was standing on the bank of the Ohio River at the Sewickley Ferry. A family group, accompanied by a large Newfoundland dog, hailed the ferryman and got in his boat, leaving the dog, which persuasively barked and wagged his tail, on the bank. As the boat pulled out into the stream the dog whined, and then made ready to leap in after it. Then he stopped at the water's edge, and, with head down, gazed intently at the river for several seconds—it seemed a minute or more. Then he ran up the bank more than a hundred feet, stopped, looked at the receding boat, plunged into the stream, and swam vigorously. The current, bearing him down, made his course diagonal to the bank. A boy standing by my side said: "Isn't that a smart dog? If he'd been a crazy dog he'd have jumped in where he was, but he ran up the bank so the current wouldn't wash him down away from the boat."

But the dog, swimming with all his vigor, was borne past the boat when within twenty feet or so of it; he endeavored to straighten his course without success, and then, in a long semicircle, swam around to the near bank, landing two or three hundred feet below the place whence the ferryboat had started.

What this dog would have done if placed, utterly hungry, in a box from which he could only liberate himself by stepping on a platform or turning a wooden button, I do not know.

, of 413 South Forty-fourth Street, Philadelphia, writes: Of the accuracy of Dr. Thorndike's experiments I have no doubt, but certain facts connected with them seem to deprive the observations of much of their relevance.

Dr. Thorndike states that he arranged his experiments to give reasoning every chance to display itself, if it existed, and to observe those in which the acts required and the thinking involved were not far removed from the acts and feelings of ordinary animal life. Of these experiments one of the chief was to determine whether and in what way a cat would escape from a box opening by turning a button. Now, I submit that in this and the succeeding experiments the conditions Dr. Thorndike fancied to exist by no means did so. Simple as the release of a door by a button seems to us, the apparent simplicity arises merely from our empirical knowledge of what does happen in such a situation. Actually to think out the rationale of the matter, as an animal having no experience either personally or from heredity would have to do, involves very complex mental processes. The environment of a human being is vastly different from an animal's, though of this fact we constantly lose sight in reasoning; of mechanical appliances and principles, for example, an animal knows nothing, and yet we are too apt to suppose it regarding the world with a store of ancestral and individual experiences utterly foreign to it; and then, on its failing to do what, in the light of such experience, seems to us easy, we proceed to call into question its possession of reason.…

That the cats did finally learn to escape shows, according to Dr. Thorndike, "the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness." May I ask Dr.