The dead birds we now and
then find hanging from the nest, or from the limb of a tree, with a
string wound around their necks are no doubt criminals upon whom their
fellows have inflicted capital punishment!

Most of the observations upon which Romanes bases his conclusions are
like the incident which he quoted from Jesse, who tells of some
swallows that in the spirit of revenge tore down a nest from which
they had been ejected by the sparrows, in order to destroy the young
of their enemies--a feat impossible for swallows to do. Jesse does not
say he saw the swallows do it, but he "saw the young sparrows dead
upon the ground amid the ruins of the nest," and of course the nest
could get down in no other way!

Not to Romanes or Jesse or Michelet must we go for the truth about
animals, but to the patient, honest Darwin, to such calm, keen, and
philosophical investigators as Lloyd Morgan, and to the books of such
sportsmen as Charles St. John, or to our own candid, trained, and
many-sided Theodore Roosevelt,--men capable of disinterested
observation with no theories about animals to uphold.

IX

DO ANIMALS THINK AND REFLECT?

When we see the animals going about, living their lives in many ways
as we live ours, seeking their food, avoiding their enemies, building
their nests, digging their holes, laying up stores, migrating,
courting, playing, fighting, showing cunning, courage, fear, joy,
anger, rivalry, grief, profiting by experience, following their
leaders,--when we see all this, I say, what more natural than that we
should ascribe to them powers akin to our own, and look upon them as
thinking, reasoning, and reflecting. A hasty survey of animal life is
sure to lead to this conclusion. An animal is not a clod, nor a block,
nor a machine. It is alive and self-directing, it has some sort of
psychic life, yet the more I study the subject, the more I am
persuaded that with the probable exception of the dog on occasions,
and of the apes, animals do not think or reflect in any proper sense
of those words. As I have before said, animal life shows in an active
and free state that kind of intelligence that pervades and governs the
whole organic world,--intelligence that takes no thought of itself.
Here, in front of my window, is a black raspberry bush. A few weeks
ago its branches curved upward, with their ends swinging fully two
feet above the ground; now those