enemy," says Darwin, "is certainly
an instinctive quality." It has been said that kittens confined in a
box, and which have never known a dog, will spit and put up their
backs at a hand that has just stroked a dog,--even before their eyes
are opened, one authority says, but this I doubt. My son's tame gray
squirrel had never seen chestnuts, nor learned about them in the
school of the woods, and yet when he was offered some, he fairly
danced with excitement; he put his paws eagerly around them and drew
them to him, and chattered, and looked threateningly at all about him.
Does man know his proper food in the same way? The child has only the
instinct to eat, and will put anything into its mouth.

How the instinctive wildness of the turkey crops out in the young! Let
the mother turkey while hovering her brood give the danger-signal, and
the young will run from under her and hide in the grass. Why? To give
her a chance to fly and decoy away the enemy. I think young chickens
will do the same. Young partridges hatched under a hen run away at
once. Pheasants in England reared under a domestic fowl are as wild as
in a state of nature. Some California quail hatched under a bantam hen
in the Zoo in New York did not heed the calls of their foster-mother
at all the first week, but at her alarm-note they instantly squatted,
showing that the danger-cry of a fowl is a kind of universal language
that all species understand. One may prove this at any time by
arousing the fears of any wild bird: how all the other birds catch the
alarm! Charles St. John says that in Scotland the stag you are
stalking is sure to be put to flight if it hears the alarm-cry of the
cock-grouse. You see it is more important that the wild creatures
should understand the danger-signals of one another than that they
should understand the rest of their language.

To what extent animals reason, or show any glimmering of what we call
reason, is a much-debated question among animal psychologists, and I
shall have more to say upon the subject later on. Dogs undoubtedly
show gleams of reason, and other animals in domestication, such as the
elephant and the monkey. One does not often feel like questioning
Darwin's conclusions, yet the incident of the caged bear which he
quotes, that pawed the water in front of its cage to create a current
that should float within its reach a piece of bread that had been
placed there, does not, in my judgment, show any reasoning about th