XXI
Where Some Of The Animals Do Their Thinking

It really is a great advantage to us to bring all our thinking into one small spot, where everything is handy to everything else. It is, in fact, almost like the convenient little kitchens they have on railway dining cars, where the cook can reach every dish and pan and kettle, cupboard, stove, refrigerator, coal-bin, pantry, china closet, and all, without shifting his feet or hardly even turning round. If you want to understand how great this advantage is, consider the case of some animals who not only have no words to think with, but in addition, do their remembering and thinking, such little as they do, at several different places or all over their bodies.

There, for example, is the sea-anemone, such as one finds at the sea side, in the salt water pools, after the tide has gone out. Beautiful creatures they are, set solidly on thick muscular bodies, and pushing out their long pink or yellow tentacles, a dozen or twenty of them, sometimes, like the petals of a daisy. Only you must be careful not to alarm this animal flower. If you do, sometimes if you so much as let your shadow fall across him, in an instant he will pull in those pretty tentacle-petals, and turn to a lump of tough jelly, almost as hard, and not much more interesting, than half a rubber ball; and there you will have to sit and wait and wait for something to happen, only it never does, until somebody makes you come in and change your shoes.

[ A sea-anemone. ]

However, if you are careful, you can begin to feed this animal flower with bits of meat or fish. Drop a morsel cautiously on one of the tentacles, and he will reach out with the tentacles near by and roll the food slowly over and over, until finally, with much difficulty, he will get it into the center of the disk where his mouth is. Then he will slowly open his mouth and work it in. In short, the tentacles are the sea-anemone’s hands and fingers; but he feeds himself clumsily enough, and cannot make any movement quickly or certainly, except shutting up when he is frightened.

If you think you can fool the little animal by feeding him with pieces of shell, or wood, or pebbles, or anything that is not food, you will soon find out that he is wiser than he looks. These things, which he cannot eat, he simply lets fall off his tentacles to the ground. But real food he will eat and eat and eat, till he swells up and up and up, and you think he is going to burst, only he never does; and in time, if you do not get tired feeding him first, he will take the food more and more slowly, and finally will refuse it altogether.

Now if instead of feeding the sea-anemone with pieces of meat, you press the meat against blotting paper so that the paper soaks up the juice, and then feed the creature, sometimes with real meat, sometimes with blotting paper and meat taste, at first he will swallow both with equal avidity, not knowing apparently the difference. After a half dozen trials, however, he will begin to take in the blotting paper somewhat less rapidly than the meat. He will continue to take the paper with more and more hesitation until after some twenty trials or so, while he swallows the meat as before, he will refuse to take the paper at all. He has learned the difference.

All this time, you must have taken pains to offer the real food or the imitation to the same tentacle, so that the same fingers shall have stuffed the morsel into the mouth. If now, after the polyp has thoroly learned the difference between meat and paper, on one side of his mouth, you try feeding him in the same way on the other side, you will discover that the new side knows nothing whatever about what has been happening on the other. The anemone which has learned to take meat and leave paper on one half of his body, still takes them both on the other half, and it will take just as long to teach the difference to the second side as it has already taken to teach it to the first.

The reason for this peculiar behavior is simple. The sea-anemone, instead of doing the remembering for his whole body, all in one spot, as we do, spreads it out over a ring of brain which circles the mouth, between the mouth and the base of the tentacles. He does the remembering for each tentacle close to the base of the tentacle itself. Each therefore remembers something of what has happened to itself, something less of what has happened to its next neighbor, still less of those beyond, and almost nothing at all of what has happened to the tentacles clear over on the other side, a whole inch away.