THE ANIMAL MIND
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
I
When I try to picture to myself the difference between the animal mind and the human mind, I seem to see the animal mind as limited by the organization and the physical needs of its possessor in a sense that the mind of man is not; its mental faculties, if we may call them such, are like its tools and weapons, a part of its physical make-up, and are almost entirely automatic in their action. Almost, I say; but in the case of the higher animals, not entirely so. In the anthropoid apes, in the dog, in the elephant, and maybe occasionally in some others, there do seem to be at times the rudiments of free intelligence, something like mind emancipated from the bondage of organization or inherited habit.
When an animal acts in obedience to its purely physical needs and according to its anatomical structure, as when ducks take to the water, or hens scratch, or hogs root, or woodpeckers drill, etc., we do not credit it with powers of thought. These and similar things animals do instinctively. When the wood-mice got into my cabin the other day and opened two small glass jars of butter that had loose tin tops, I did not credit them with anything like human intelligence, because to use their paws deftly—digging, climbing, manipulating—is natural to mice. I have seen a chipmunk come into a house from his den in the woods and open a pasteboard box with great deftness, and help himself to the nuts inside, which, of course, he smelled. We do not credit a bird with rational intelligence when it builds its nest, no matter how skillfully it may weave or sew, or how artfully it may hide it from its enemies. It is doing precisely as its forebears have done for countless generations. Hence it acts from inherited impulse.
But the monkey they told me about at the zoological park in Washington, that had been seen to select a stiff straw from the bottom of its cage, and use it to dislodge an insect from a crack, showed a gleam of free intelligence. It was an act of judgment on the part of the monkey, akin to human judgment. In like manner the chimpanzee Mr. Hornaday tells about, that used the trapeze-bar in the cage as a lever with which to pry off the horizontal bars on the side of the cage, and otherwise to demolish things, showed a kind of intelligence that is above instinct, and quite beyond the capacity, say, of a dog.
I would not say, as Mr. Hornaday does, that this ape discovered the principle of the lever as truly as Archimedes did. Would it not be better to say that he discovered the use to which he could put that particular stick, without any notion of the principle involved? just as he had doubtless found out that an object, or his own body, unsupported, would fall to the floor of his cage, without having grasped the principle of gravitation.
The earliest men must have discovered the uses of the lever long be-
