b
venturesomely to the very tip of the slippery limb, gnaw the cone
from its hold, then run down the tree and gnaw it to pieces for
the tiny seeds within. So light are these seeds, wing and
all, that it takes twenty to thirty thousand of them to weigh
a pound and it is probably fortunate that squirrels do not live by
pine seed alone. However, the gnawing means as much to the
squirrel as the eating, for the squirrel's teeth grow constantly
and he must continually wear them off or he dies, stabbed by his
own incisors which grow in the arc of a circle. Yet the squirrel
is an adept at getting at the tiny, toothsome seed and he can
strip a cone of its scales far faster than I can, even if I use my
knife. He holds the cone stem end upward in his fore paws which
are so like hands, severs the base of the scale with his ivory
shears and has munched the two little seeds that cling under the
very bottom of the scale, almost before you can see him do it.

Certain wise naturalists assure us that the squirrel does not use
reason in this handling of the cone, merely acting automatically
by blind instinct. Yet he gets his results in the shortest time
and with the least effort. The highest reasoning could teach him
no more and if instinct is such a splendid short cut to the
solution of problems it is a pity that it is not added to our
common school course. The squirrel, they say, does it because he
and his ancestors have done it in the same way for untold
generations, the automatic impulse being born in him and bound to
appear at the right moment, just as his teeth grow without his own
volition. Yet there must have been a time when the first squirrel
sat up on a limb with his first pine cone in his paws. Did he
reason out the way to get those seeds or did he know instinctively?
And if so what is instinct in his case?

For all the squirrels got so many cones that in some places in the
woods the ground is fairly carpeted with the brown scales which
they severed, prompted by this clever whatever-it-is that is such
an excellent substitute for wisdom, there are plenty still left on
the trees where they dangle from the branch tips, their scales
gaping and the seeds for the most part gone. Left to themselves
they have been flying away ever since September, a few at a time
on dry, windy days when their single wings would scull them
farthest. One might impute instinct or whatever it is to the pine
tree too, she works so methodically for the