DO ANIMALS REASON ?
[TO Till EDITOR OF TIlE SY ROTATOR."] Si,—As I see you have of late published letters from several correspondents giving instances of cleverness on the part of animals, may I contribute the following ? I had a pet monkey in India, and one day I placed a looking-glass on the ground in front of him to see what he would make of it. He saw his reflection in the glass, and, supposing it to be another monkey, he sprang round to the back of the glass, but of course found nothing there. He came back and looked at the reflection again, and again rushed round and was again disappointed. He then came back, fixed his gaze on the monkey in the glass, and kept him in sight while he stretched his paw round to the back of the glass and felt for him. Another day I was sitting in the verandah receiving the report of my company, and the monkey was chained to a pillar of the verandah. A soldier was standing before me with his. rifle at the order. The monkey's curiosity was excited by the rifle, and he tried to reach it, but the length of his tether did not admit of his touching it. He looked about him, picked up a stick that was lying on the ground, reached out, and with it tapped the barrel and stock of the rifle as if to discover what it was made of. Mr. Ainslie Hight's Story of Wagner's parrot, and his query, "Are birds capable of irony ?" recall to mind the story of the sutler's parrot in• "Le Desastre," by the brothers Margueritte. While the routed French army of MacMahon is streaming in wild con- fusion along the roads from the battlefield of Worth, horse and foot, guns and baggage waggons • all mixed up together, a parrot in a cage atop of a sutler's cart keeps on screaming out: "A Berlin! A Berlin ! "—I am, Sir, 81.c., F. H. TYRRELL, Lieut.-General.
Grand Hotel de la Pierre a Voir, Canton Valais, Switzerland.
Previous page
