spring for me with good-natured, menacing jaws, and the wild romp
would go on. I had scored a point. Then he hit upon a trick. Pursuing
him into the woodshed, I would find him in a far corner, pretending to
sulk. Now, he dearly loved the play, and never got enough of it. But at
first he fooled me. I thought I had somehow hurt his feelings and I came
and knelt before him, petting him, and speaking lovingly. Promptly, in a
wild outburst, he was up and away, tumbling me over on the floor as he
dashed out in a mad skurry around the yard. He had scored a point.
After a time, it became largely a game of wits. I reasoned my acts, of
course, while his were instinctive. One day, as he pretended to sulk in
the corner, I glanced out of the woodshed doorway, simulated pleasure in
face, voice, and language, and greeted one of my schoolboy friends.
Immediately Rollo forgot to sulk, rushed out to see the newcomer, and saw
empty space. The laugh was on him, and he knew it, and I gave it to him,
too. I fooled him in this way two or three times; then be became wise.
One day I worked a variation. Suddenly looking out the door, making
believe that my eyes had been attracted by a moving form, I said coldly,
as a child educated in turning away bill-collectors would say: "No my
father is not at home." Like a shot, Rollo was out the door. He even
ran down the alley to the front of the house in a vain attempt to find
the man I had addressed. He came back sheepishly to endure the laugh and
resume the game.
And now we come to the test. I fooled Rollo, but how was the fooling
made possible? What precisely went on in that brain of his? According
to Mr. Burroughs, who denies even rudimentary reasoning to the lower
animals, Rollo acted instinctively, mechanically responding to the
external stimulus, furnished by me, which led him to believe that a man
was outside the door.
Since Rollo acted instinctively, and since all instincts are very
ancient, tracing back to the pre-domestication period, we can conclude
only that Rollo's wild ancestors, at the time this particular instinct
was fixed into the heredity of the species, must have been in close,
long-continued, and vital contact with man, the voice of man, and the
expressions on the face of man. But since the instinct must have been
developed during the pre-domestication period, how under the sun could
his wild, undomesticated ancestors have experienced the close,
long-contin
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