ight. A bird may exercise some
choice about the background of its nest, but it will not make both
nest and background.

Nature learns by endless experiment. Through a long and expensive
process of natural selection she seems to have brought the color of
certain animals and the color of their environment pretty close
together, the better to hide the animals from their enemies and from
their prey, as we are told; but the animals themselves do not know
this, though they may act as if they did. Young terns and gulls
instinctively squat upon the beach, where their colors so harmonize
with the sand and pebbles that the birds are virtually invisible.
Young partridges do the same in the woods, where the eye cannot tell
the reddish tuft of down from the dry leaves. How many gulls and terns
and partridges were sacrificed before Nature learned this trick!

I regard the lower animals as incapable of taking the step from the
fact to the principle. They have perceptions, but not conceptions.
They may recognize a certain fact, but any deduction from that fact to
be applied to a different case, or to meet new conditions, is beyond
them. Wolves and foxes soon learn to be afraid of poisoned meat: just
what gives them the hint it would be hard to say, as the survivors
could not know the poison's deadly effect from experience; their fear
of it probably comes from seeing their fellows suffer and die after
eating it, or maybe through that mysterious means of communication
between animals to which I have referred in a previous article. The
poison probably changes the odor of the meat, and this strange smell
would naturally put them on their guard.

We do not expect rats to succeed in putting a bell on the cat, but if
they were capable of conceiving such a thing, that would establish
their claim to be regarded as reasonable beings. I should as soon
expect a fox or a wolf to make use of a trap to capture its prey as to
make use of poison in any way. Why does not the fox take a stick and
spring the trap he is so afraid of? Simply because the act would
involve a mental process beyond him. He has not yet learned to use
even the simplest implement to attain his end. Then he would probably
be just as afraid of the trap after it was sprung as before. He in
some way associates it with his arch-enemy, man.

Such stories, too, as a chained fox or a coyote getting possession of
corn or other grain and baiting the chickens with it--feigning sleep
til