pole-beans, there are usually two or three
low-minded plants that will not climb the poles, but go groveling upon
the ground, wandering off among the potato-vines or cucumbers,
departing utterly from the traditions of their race, becoming
shiftless and vagrant. When I lift them up and wind them around the
poles and tie them with a wisp of grass, they rarely stay. In some way
they seem to get a wrong start in life, or else are degenerates from
the first. I have never known anything like this among the wild
creatures, though it happens often enough among our own kind. The
trouble with the bean is doubtless this: the Lima bean is of South
American origin, and in the Southern Hemisphere, beans, it seems, go
the other way around the pole; that is, from right to left. When
transferred north of the equator, it takes them some time to learn the
new way, or from left to right, and a few of them are always
backsliding, or departing from the new way and vaguely seeking the
old; and not finding this, they become vagabonds.

How much or how little sense or judgment our wild neighbors have is
hard to determine. The crows and other birds that carry shell-fish
high in the air and then let them drop upon the rocks to break the
shell show something very much like reason, or a knowledge of the
relation of cause and effect, though it is probably an unthinking
habit formed in their ancestors under the pressure of hunger. Froude
tells of some species of bird that he saw in South Africa flying amid
the swarm of migrating locusts and clipping off the wings of the
insects so that they would drop to the earth, where the birds could
devour them at their leisure. Our squirrels will cut off the chestnut
burs before they have opened, allowing them to fall to the ground,
where, as they seem to know, the burs soon dry open. Feed a caged coon
soiled food,--a piece of bread or meat rolled on the ground,--and
before he eats it he will put it in his dish of water and wash it off.
The author of "Wild Life Near Home" says that muskrats "will wash what
they eat, whether washing is needed or not." If the coon washes his
food only when it needs washing, and not in every individual instance,
then the proceeding looks like an act of judgment; the same with the
muskrat. But if they always wash their food, whether soiled or not,
the act looks more like instinct or an inherited habit, the origin of
which is obscure.

Birds and animals probably think without knowi