wrong. Was this of itself an
act of intelligence? Though it may be that its ceasing to cut off the
tree was simply the result of discouragement, and involved no mental
conclusion at all. It is a new problem, a new condition, that tests an
animal's intelligence. How long it takes a caged bird or beast to
learn that it cannot escape! What a man would see at a glance it takes
weeks or months to pound into the captive bird, or squirrel, or coon.
When the prisoner ceases to struggle, it is probably not because it
has at last come to understand the situation, but because it is
discouraged. It is checked, but not enlightened.

Even so careful an observer as Gilbert White credits the swallow with
an act of judgment to which it is not entitled. He says that in order
that the mud nest may not advance too rapidly and so fall of its own
weight, the bird works at it only in the morning, and plays and feeds
the rest of the day, thus giving the mud a chance to harden. Had not
the genial parson observed that this is the practice of all birds
during nest-building--that they work in the early morning hours and
feed and amuse themselves the rest of the day? In the case of the
mud-builders, this interim of course gives the mud a chance to harden,
but are we justified in crediting them with this forethought?

Such skill and intelligence as a bird seems to display in the building
of its nest, and yet at times such stupidity! I have known a
phoebe-bird to start four nests at once, and work more or less upon
all of them. She had deserted the ancestral sites under the shelving
rocks and come to a new porch, upon the plate of which she started her
four nests. She blundered because her race had had little or no
experience with porches. There were four or more places upon the plate
just alike, and whichever one of these she chanced to strike with her
loaded beak she regarded as the right one. Her instinct served her up
to a certain point, but it did not enable her to discriminate between
those rafters. Where a little original intelligence should have come
into play she was deficient. Her progenitors Had built under rocks
where there was little chance for mistakes of this sort, and they had
learned through ages of experience to blend the nest with its
surroundings, by the use of moss, the better to conceal it. My
phoebe brought her moss to the new timbers of the porch, where it
had precisely the opposite effect to what it had under the gray mossy