us bolts and bars have to be dealt with in
a particular order, and yet many mammals master the problem. What is
plain is that they gradually eliminate useless movements, that they make
fewer and fewer mistakes, that they eventually succeed, and that they
register the solution within themselves so that it remains with them for
a time. It looks a little like the behaviour of a man who learns a game
of skill without thinking. It is a learning by experience, not by ideas
or reflection. Thus it is very difficult to suppose that a rat or a cat
could form any idea or even picture of the Hampton Court maze--which
they nevertheless master.

Learning Tricks

Given sufficient inducement many of the cleverer mammals will learn to
do very sensible things, and no one is wise enough to say that they
never understand what they are doing. Yet it is certain that trained
animals often exhibit pieces of behaviour which are not nearly so clever
as they look. The elephant at the Belle Vue Gardens in Manchester used
to collect pennies from benevolent visitors. When it got a penny in its
trunk it put it in the slot of an automatic machine which delivered up a
biscuit. When a visitor gave the elephant a halfpenny it used to throw
it back with disgust. At first sight this seemed almost wise, and there
was no doubt some intelligent appreciation of the situation. But it was
largely a matter of habituation, the outcome of careful and prolonged
training. The elephant was laboriously taught to put the penny in the
slot and to discriminate between the useful pennies and the useless
halfpennies. It was not nearly so clever as it looked.

Using their Wits

In the beautiful Zoological Park in Edinburgh the Polar Bear was wont to
sit on a rocky peninsula of a water-filled quarry. The visitors threw in
buns, some of which floated on the surface. It was often easy for the
Polar Bear to collect half a dozen by plunging into the pool. But it had
discovered a more interesting way. At the edge of the peninsula it
scooped the water gently with its huge paw and made a current which
brought the buns ashore. This was a simple piece of behaviour, but it
has the smack of intelligence--of putting two and two together in a
novel way. It suggests the power of making what is called a "perceptual
inference."

On the occasion of a great flood in a meadow it was observed that a
number of mares brought their foals to the top of a knoll, and stood
round about them p