The ability to use weapons, tools, and war instruments is not exclusively human. Even fish are capable of reaching their prey at a long distance. The toxotes jaculator, which lives in the rivers of India, and feeds upon insects, cannot afford to wait until the insects which thrive upon the leaves of aquatic plants fall into the water. So as he cannot leap high enough to catch them, he fills his mouth with water and squirts it at an insect with such aim and force that he rarely fails to knock the insect into the water where he can easily catch it. Many other animals squirt various liquids, occasionally in attack, but most times in defence. The fish makes a veritable squirt-gun of his mouth.
Beavers use sticks, chips, and even stones in building their dams; and their engineering abilities are astounding. They are also capable of meeting emergencies, as shown by the following incident. A farmer in Michigan discovered one morning, just after a flood, that all his potato sacks, which had been hung on a back fence to dry, had suddenly disappeared. A few days later he found them in a nearby beavers' colony, used in rebuilding their dam, which had suddenly overflowed. The beavers wasted no time, when they discovered their danger, in meeting the emergency by using the sacks to prevent the destruction of their home.
Monkeys make skilled use of clubs and stones in capturing their prey and fighting their enemies.
The skill with which some of them throw pebbles would lead us to believe they have already reached the degree of civilisation that many tribes of savages had reached only a few years ago, when they learned to use the boomerang and lasso. Some naturalists claim that monkeys actually set pitfalls for their enemies and lie in wait for them to be caught, just as a hunter would do.
Elephants also know the value of clubs in warfare, and will often use a broken limb of a dead tree as a weapon of defence. The story is told and vouched for by Mr. William B. Smith that on his farm, near Mount Lookout, a few years ago a donkey grazed in the same pasture with a ferocious bull. He was frequently attacked by the bull, and always got the worst of the fight. His feet were no match for the bull's horns, but one day the mule grabbed a long pole in his mouth, and, whirling it about, almost killed the bull, and henceforth the two lived on the best of terms in the same pasture.
I have a friend who owns a cow that knows exactly how to lift an iron latch to the barn door with her tongue and open the door. Innumerable times she has opened a gate in the same way to permit her calf to go free with her. So skilled is she in the manipulation of doors and latches that we are tempted to believe in some previous state of existence she was a professional lock-picker!
Cats and dogs are famed for their ability to open doors by pulling latch-strings. And not a few cats show a strong desire to study music by walking up and down the keyboard of a piano!
Monkeys who live near the seashore show wonderful aptness in opening oysters and shell-fish with sharp stones, exactly as a man would do. Monkeys have already reached the degree of civilization where they select the stones best suited for their work, and from their progress in the past it is reasonable to believe that in the near future they will not only be able to make their own tools—thus placing themselves on a mental footing with our flint-chipping ancestors of the early stone age,—but will also learn the use of fire and eventually the use of guns and ammunition, which marks one of the most important epochs in the evolution of the human species.
The chimpanzees, gorillas, and apes of the African forests have many times been observed in the act of piling brushwood upon the fires left by travellers, and though they do not know how to kindle a fire, they have learned how to keep it burning. The tame ones soon learn how to ignite matches, and often do great harm by starting forest fires.
But they show quite as much intelligence about the use of fire as the average small child. In fact, it has been thought by a number of great scholars that man had not yet made his appearance upon the earth in the miocene age, and that all the marvellous chipped flints of that age belong to semi-human pithecoid apes of wonderful intelligence. There is surely nothing in the facts of natural history, nor in Darwin's theory of evolution, that makes such a supposition unbelievable.