Project Gutenberg #20417
The Outline of Science, Volume 1
J. Arthur Thomson
1922Thomson's broad popular-science survey of astronomy, biology, and Earth science, prepared section by section from Project Gutenberg HTML.
Project Gutenberg #20417 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for MojiMori from public-domain source metadata
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Given sufficient inducement many of the cleverer mammals will learn to do very sensible things, and no one is wise enough to[Pg 229] say that they never understand what they are doing. Yet it is certain that trained animals often exhibit pieces of behaviour which are not nearly so clever as they look. The elephant at the Belle Vue Gardens in Manchester used to collect pennies from benevolent visitors. When it got a penny in its trunk it put it in the slot of an automatic machine which delivered up a biscuit. When a visitor gave the elephant a halfpenny it used to throw it back with disgust. At first sight this seemed almost wise, and there was no doubt some intelligent appreciation of the situation. But it was largely a matter of habituation, the outcome of careful and prolonged training. The elephant was laboriously taught to put the penny in the slot and to discriminate between the useful pennies and the useless halfpennies. It was not nearly so clever as it looked.