ciated with age, to do the tackling. In this present
question of nature-faking, the old men did the tackling, while I, as one
young man, kept quiet a long time. But here goes at last. And first of
all let Mr. Burroughs's position be stated, and stated in his words.

"Why impute reason to an animal if its behaviour can be explained on the
theory of instinct?" Remember these words, for they will be referred to
later. "A goodly number of persons seem to have persuaded themselves
that animals do reason." "But instinct suffices for the animals . . .
they get along very well without reason." "Darwin tried hard to convince
himself that animals do at times reason in a rudimentary way; but Darwin
was also a much greater naturalist than psychologist." The preceding
quotation is tantamount, on Mr. Burroughs's part, to a flat denial that
animals reason even in a rudimentary way. And when Mr. Burrough denies
that animals reason even in a rudimentary way, it is equivalent to
affirming, in accord with the first quotation in this paragraph, that
instinct will explain every animal act that might be confounded with
reason by the unskilled or careless observer.

Having bitten off this large mouthful, Mr. Burroughs proceeds with serene
and beautiful satisfaction to masticate it in the following fashion. He
cites a large number of instances of purely instinctive actions on the
part of animals, and triumphantly demands if they are acts of reason. He
tells of the robin that fought day after day its reflected image in a
window-pane; of the birds in South America that were guilty of drilling
clear through a mud wall, which they mistook for a solid clay bank: of
the beaver that cut down a tree four times because it was held at the top
by the branches of other trees; of the cow that licked the skin of her
stuffed calf so affectionately that it came apart, whereupon she
proceeded to eat the hay with which it was stuffed. He tells of the
phoebe-bird that betrays her nest on the porch by trying to hide it with
moss in similar fashion to the way all phoebe-birds hide their nests when
they are built among rocks. He tells of the highhole that repeatedly
drills through the clap-boards of an empty house in a vain attempt to
find a thickness of wood deep enough in which to build its nest. He
tells of the migrating lemmings of Norway that plunge into the sea and
drown in vast numbers because of their instinct to swim lakes and rivers
in the c