ely ever brought to grief by high water.
They have learned through many generations to keep at a safe distance.
I have never known a woodpecker to drill its nesting-cavity in a
branch or limb that was ready to fall. Not that woodpeckers look the
branch or tree over with a view to its stability, but that they will
cut into a tree only of a certain hardness; it is a family instinct.
Birds sometimes make the mistake of building their nests on slender
branches that a summer tempest will turn over, thus causing the eggs
or the young to spill upon the ground. Even instinct cannot always get
ahead of the weather.

It is almost impossible for us not to interpret the lives of the lower
animals in the terms of our own experience and our own psychology. I
entirely agree with Lloyd Morgan that we err when we do so, when we
attribute to them what we call sentiments or any of the emotions that
spring from our moral and aesthetic natures,--the sentiments of
justice, truth, beauty, altruism, goodness, duty, and the
like,--because these sentiments are the products of concepts and ideas
to which the brute natures are strangers. But all the emotions of our
animal nature--fear, anger, curiosity, local attachment, jealousy,
and rivalry--are undoubtedly the same in the lower orders.

Though almost anything may be affirmed of dogs, for they are nearly
half human, yet I doubt if even dogs experience the feeling of shame
or guilt or revenge that we so often ascribe to them. These feelings
are all complex and have a deep root. When I was a youth, my father
had a big churn-dog that appeared one morning with a small bullet-hole
in his hip. Day after day the old dog treated his wound with his
tongue, after the manner of dogs, until it healed, and the incident
was nearly forgotten. One day a man was going by on horseback, when
the old dog rushed out, sprang at the man, and came near pulling him
from the horse. It turned out that this was the person who had shot
the dog, and the dog recognized him.

This looks like revenge, and it would have been such in you or me, but
in the dog it was probably simple anger at the sight of the man who
had hurt him. The incident shows memory and the association of
impressions, but the complex feeling of vengeance, as we know it, is
another matter.

If animals do not share our higher intellectual nature, we have no
warrant for attributing to them anything like our higher and more
complex emotional nature. Musical