Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/531

Rh to the starting-point, as if to get its bearings, and started out afresh. In every case the second attempt resulted in a direct and unusually quick journey to the nest. Very frequently halts just in front of the holes were noticed. It looked as if the animal were meditating upon the course to be taken. Had one seen a man in a similar situation he would unhesitatingly have said that the person was trying to decide which way to go. There can be little doubt, however, that the mental attitude of the turtle was extremely simple compared with a man's under similar conditions. There are those who would claim that even the turtle was thinking about its environmental conditions, but it seems far more probable that it stopped in order the better to get those sensory data by which it was enabled to follow its former course. Smell and sight furnish the most important elements in the associative processes of lower animals. This interpretation of the action is supported

by the fact that it occurred most frequently after the course had been gone over a few times.

A more complex and novel labyrinth was now substituted. Its new features were a blind alley (see F, Fig. 4) and three inclined planes (3, 4 and 6 of Fig. 4). A plan of the labyrinth is shown in Fig. 4. At the left of the nest a side view of the inclines 3 and 4 is shown. Each was one foot long, and the middle point (M) was four inches from the floor.

Labyrinth No. 2 was used in the same way as No. 1, the turtle being placed in A and permitted to seek the nest, which was this time a box filled with moist sand. The inclines at first baffled the little fellow, and it was an hour and thirty-one minutes before he reached the nest. A and B seemed to offer no difficulties, but the new features—the blind alley and the inclines—were puzzles. By the fifth trial, however, these had become somewhat familiar. The route taken in this experiment has been produced in Fig. 5.