grotesque
ignorance of a cow is given by Hamerton in his "Chapters on Animals."
The cow would not "give down" her milk unless she had her calf before
her. But her calf had died, so the herdsman took the skin of the calf,
stuffed it with hay, and stood it up before the inconsolable mother.
Instantly she proceeded to lick it and to yield her milk. One day, in
licking it, she ripped open the seams, and out rolled the hay. This
the mother at once proceeded to eat, without any look of surprise or
alarm. She liked hay herself, her acquaintance with it was of long
standing, and what more natural to her than that her calf should turn
out to be made of hay! Yet this very cow that did not know her calf
from a bale of hay would have defended her young against the attack of
a bear or a wolf in the most skillful and heroic manner; and the horse
that was nearly frightened out of its skin by a white stone, or by the
flutter of a piece of newspaper by the roadside, would find its way
back home over a long stretch of country, or find its way to water in
the desert, with a certainty you or I could not approach.

The hen-hawk that the farm-boy finds so difficult to approach with his
gun will yet alight upon his steel trap fastened to the top of a pole
in the fields. The rabbit that can be so easily caught in a snare or
in a box-trap will yet conceal its nest and young in the most
ingenious manner. Where instinct or inherited knowledge can come into
play, the animals are very wise, but new conditions, new problems,
bring out their ignorance.

A college girl told me an incident of a red squirrel she had observed
at her home in Iowa that illustrates how shallow the wit of a squirrel
is when confronted by new conditions. This squirrel carried nuts all
day and stored them in the end of a drainpipe that discharged the
rain-water upon the pavement below. The nuts obeyed the same law that
the rain-water did, and all rolled through the pipe and fell upon the
sidewalk. In the squirrel's experience, and in that of his forbears,
all holes upon the ground were stopped at the far end, or they were
like pockets, and if nuts were put in them they stayed there. A hollow
tube open at both ends, that would not hold nuts--this was too much
for the wit of the squirrel. But how wise he is about the nuts
themselves!

Among the lower animals the ignorance of one is the ignorance of all,
and the knowledge of one is the knowledge of all, in a sense in which
th