The Dawn of Reason; or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals

by Jr. James Weir

Each variety of masons uses a different spider; the common blue mason is partial to the beautiful Argiope, which, banded as it is with gray and yellow, is a very conspicuous object when seen on its glistening, upright web.

The wasp larva, as soon as it emerges from the egg-membrane, finds fresh and palatable food before its very nose, and at once begins to eat.

In the case of the male larvæ, five spiders are deposited in each cell, while eight are always placed in the female compartments.[86] If one or more spiders are removed from the cell, the mother wasp does not appear to notice that her food-supply has been tampered with; she completes her quota, five for the males and eight for the females, and then closes the cell, no matter if there remains in the compartment one, two, or three spiders. Her count calls for five or eight, as the case may be, and, when she has put on top of the egg the requisite number according to her count, her responsibility ceases.

I have never known a mud-dauber to make a mistake in her computation, although I have endeavored to puzzle this little arithmetician time and again. If a wad of paper be placed in a cell after two or three spiders have been deposited, thus partially filling it, the insect knows at once that something is wrong, and will proceed to investigate. She will remove the spiders on top of the paper, will extract the wad, and will then proceed with her count. On the other hand, if several spiders be taken out when the count calls for only one or two more, the wasp does not appear to notice that the cell is almost empty; she finishes her count as if everything were correct, and then seals up the opening with mud.

The quail lays some twelve or fifteen eggs, and seems to be aware of the fact that some of her eggs are missing when several have been removed from the nest. When one of these birds has laid six or eight eggs, if two or three be removed she will abandon the nest and deposit the remainder of her eggs elsewhere. This behavior on the part of the bird has been attributed to her sense of smell; she, detecting the presence of an enemy by the scent of his hand left behind in the nest, recognizes the danger, and therefore abandons the nest. But numerous experiments along this line teach me that smell has nothing to do with it whatever. I have removed eggs with a long iron ladle, the bowl of which I had carefully refrained from touching, and also with sticks freshly cut in the wood, and yet the birds would invariably abandon their nests. On the contrary, when all, or nearly all, the eggs have been laid, several may be removed either with the ladle or with the naked hand, and yet the bird will not abandon her nest. She seems to be able to count up to six or eight; beyond this latter number her faculty of computing does not extend. After the full laying has been deposited in the nest and the process of incubation has become established, a large number of the eggs may be removed, and yet the bird will continue to set until the remaining eggs have been hatched out.

The faculty of computing seems to be present in other birds to some extent; the domesticated guinea-fowl and the turkey sometimes possess it in a marked degree, though in most of these fowls domestication has almost entirely eradicated it. The domestic barnyard hen has had her nest robbed for such a long period of time that she has lost the faculty of counting. But even this meek provider of food for mankind is able, in some instances, to count one: she will not lay in her nest unless a nest-egg be left to delude her. The nest-egg may be wholly factitious and made of china, marble, chalk, stone or iron painted white; the hen does not seem to care so long as it bears some resemblance to an egg.

That the turkey-hen can count, the following instance occurring under my own observation would seem to indicate. The bird had a nest in my garden in which she had deposited three eggs. One day another turkey, seized with a desire of ovipositing, spied this nest and laid an egg therein. The original owner of the nest came along soon after the interloper had left her egg; she examined the nest carefully, and turned the eggs with her beak. Finally she thrust her beak through the shell of an egg and bore it far from the nest before dropping it on the ground. Now, as far as I could tell, the eggs were alike, but the sharper and more discriminating eyes of the turkey undoubtedly saw, on close examination, some peculiarity in color or shape in the stranger's egg, and therefore bore it away and destroyed it. I believe, however, that her attention was arrested at first by the unexpected number of eggs in the nest, and that she was enabled to detect the stranger's egg only after much inspection and comparison.

Many animals have been taught to count, but none of them show that they fully appreciate the value of numerical rotation. Of course, in the vast majority of trained animals, the seeming appreciation is only a trick founded on the sense of smell, sight, touch, or taste.

An instance recently came under my personal observation in which a dog, a high-bred collie, seemingly evinced an abstract idea of numbers. The animal in question received an injury a year or so ago through which she became permanently and totally blind. Recently she gave birth to a litter of six puppies, all of which were uniform in size and markings. Immediately after the birth of the puppies, the dog's owner had mother and young removed from the dark cellar in which they then were, and carried to a warm and well-ventilated room in his stables.

In the darkness of the cellar one of the puppies was overlooked and left behind. As soon as the mother entered the box in which her young had been placed, she proceeded to examine them, nosing them about and licking them. Suddenly she appeared to become very much disturbed about something; she jumped out of the box and then jumped back again, nosing the puppies as before. Again she jumped from the box and then made her way toward the cellar, followed by her astonished owner, who had begun to have an inkling as to what disturbed her. She had counted her young ones, and had discovered that one had been left behind. Sure enough, the abandoned puppy was soon found and carried in triumph to the new home.