Abstract
I HAVE failed to meet with a satisfactory treatment of this subject either in works of mental philosophy or natural history. Sir John Lubbock, in “Prehistoric Times,” refers to the likelihood of the sagacity of man and the wariness of animals proceeding pari passu; but he does not develop the idea or aid it by illustration, and I find that the tradition still widely prevails that the instinct and intelligence of animals is a thing fixed and unchangeable; and that the mammals which roamed over the world during the earlier and middle tertiary epoch must be credited with the same amount of sagacity as their representatives of the present day. Such statements are assumptions opposed to the current of any facts we possess on the subject. Much of what has been termed cunning in animals will be found to have been very much sharpened and made evident in quadrupeds and birds, owing to the new necessities imposed upon them by man the tamer or man the destroyer.
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S., J. Mental Progress of Animals. Nature 1, 169 (1869). https://doi.org/10.1038/001169a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/001169a0
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