their example has caused a strong reaction to take place in my own
mind, and has led me to set about examining the whole subject of
animal life and instinct in a way I have never done before.

In March, 1903, I contributed to "The Atlantic Monthly" a paper called
"Real and Sham Natural History," which was as vigorous a protest as I
could make against the growing tendency to humanize the lower
animals. The paper was widely read and discussed, and bore fruit in
many ways, much of it good and wholesome fruit, but a little of it
bitter and acrid. For obvious reasons that paper is not included in
this collection. But I have given all the essays that were the outcome
of the currents of thought and inquiry that it set going in my mind,
and I have given them nearly in the order in which they were written,
so that the reader may see the growth of my own mind and opinions in
relation to the subject. I confess I have not been fully able to
persuade myself that the lower animals ever show anything more than a
faint gleam of what we call thought and reflection,--the power to
evolve ideas from sense impressions,--except feebly in the case of the
dog and the apes, and possibly the elephant. Nearly all the animal
behavior that the credulous public looks upon as the outcome of reason
is simply the result of the adaptiveness and plasticity of instinct.
The animal has impulses and impressions where we have ideas and
concepts. Of our faculties I concede to them perception, sense memory,
and association of memories, and little else. Without these it would
be impossible for their lives to go on.

I am aware that there is much repetition in this volume, and that the
names of several of the separate chapters differ much more than do the
subjects discussed in them.

When I was a boy on the farm, we used to thrash our grain with the
hand-flail. Our custom was to thrash a flooring of sheaves on one side,
then turn the sheaves over and thrash them on the other, then unbind
them and thrash the loosened straw again, and then finish by turning
the whole over and thrashing it once more. I suspect my reader will
feel that I have followed the same method in many of these papers. I
have thrashed the same straw several times, but I have turned it each
time, and I trust have been rewarded by a few additional grains of truth.

Let me hope that the result of the discussion or thrashing will not be to
make the reader love the animals less, but rather to lo