l the chicken gets within reach, and then seizing it--are of the
same class, incredible because transcending the inherited knowledge of
those animals. I can believe that a fox might walk in a shallow creek
to elude the hound, because he may inherit this kind of cunning, and
in his own experience he may have come to associate loss of scent with
water. Animals stalk their prey, or lie in wait for it, instinctively,
not from a process of calculation, as man does. If a fox would bait
poultry with corn, why should he not, in his wild state, bait mice and
squirrels with nuts and seeds? Has a cat ever been known to bait a rat
with a piece of cheese?

Animals seem to have a certain association of ideas; one thing
suggests another to them, as with us. This fact is made use of by
animal-trainers. I can easily believe the story Charles St. John
tells of the fox he saw waylaying some hares, and which, to screen
himself the more completely from his quarry, scraped a small hollow in
the ground and threw up the sand about it. But if St. John had said
that the fox brought weeds or brush to make himself a blind, as the
hunter often does, I should have discredited him, just as I discredit
the observation of a man quoted by Romanes, who says that jackals,
ambushing deer at the latter's watering-place, deliberately wait till
the deer have filled themselves with water, knowing that in that state
they are more easily run down and captured!

President Roosevelt, in "The Wilderness Hunter,"--a book, by the way,
of even deeper interest to the naturalist than to the sportsman,--says
that the moose has to the hunter the "very provoking habit of making a
half or three-quarters circle before lying down, and then crouching
with its head so turned that it can surely perceive any pursuer who
may follow its trail." This is the cunning of the moose developed
through long generations of its hunted and wolf-pursued ancestors,--a
cunning that does not differ from that of a man under the same
circumstances, though, of course, it is not the result of the same
process of reasoning.

I have known a chipping sparrow to build her nest on a grape-vine just
beneath a bunch of small green grapes. Soon the bunch grew and
lengthened and filled the nest, crowding out the bird. If the bird
could have foreseen the danger, she would have shown something like
human reason.

Birds that nest along streams, such as the water-thrush and the
water-ouzel, I suppose are rar