Hens hatching duck’s eggs and sitting on pieces of chalk.
This want of thinking sometimes leads to some queer mistakes. If you put a duck’s eggs in a hen’s nest, she will sit on them as if they were her own eggs, and after the ducks are hatched she will take care of them, not seeming to know that, they are not chickens. One would suppose that she would know, because they look so different from chickens, and have bills so unlike theirs. But she does not seem to think of this. And it is amusing to see her after the ducks get large enough to go into the water. Off they run, and plunge in, and swim about, while the old hen stands by the water, greatly alarmed lest they should be drowned. She does not understand it; she does not know that ducklings have an instinct different from chickens.
So, too, if the hen has rounded pieces of chalk put in her nest, she will sit on them as if they were real eggs. Her instinct makes her sit; but if she had much reason she would not sit on pieces of chalk. If she thought much, she would find out what they were and quit her nest.
The building instinct of the beaver.
I have mentioned the building instinct of the beavers. An English gentleman caught a young one and put him at first in a cage. After a while he let him out in a room where there was a great variety of things. As soon as he was let out he began to exercise his building instinct. He gathered together whatever he could find, brushes, baskets, boots, clothes, sticks, bits of coal, etc., and arranged them as if to build a dam. Now, if he had his wits about him, as we should say, he would have thought that there was no use in building a dam where there is no water. It is from such mistakes as these that I have mentioned that the instinct of animals is said to be blind.
It is plain that, while animals learn about things by their senses as we do, they do not think nearly as much about what they learn, and this is one reason that they do not know as much as we do. Even the wisest of them, as the elephant and the dog, do not think over what they see and hear very much.
How the minds of animals differ from ours.
But this is not all. There are some things that we understand about which animals know nothing. They know nothing about what happened before they were born, or what happens now in their lifetime away from them in other places. They know nothing about what is to happen. They know nothing about God and another world. You can not teach them any thing about any such subjects. The reason is, that while their minds are like ours in some things, they are different in other things.
You can see this great difference between your minds and the minds of animals in one thing. You never would think of telling a story to a dog or a cat as you would to a child, for you know that it would not be understood.