I think that the main interest of most of these experiments is the proof they afford that instinctive reactions are not necessarily definite, perfectly appropriate and unvarying responses to accurately sensed and, so to speak, estimated stimuli. The old notion that instinct was a God-given substitute for reason left us an unhappy legacy in the shape of the tendency to think of all inherited powers of reaction as [p. 167] definite particular acts invariably done in the presence of certain equally definite situations. Such an act as the spider's web-spinning might be a stock example. Of course, there are many such instinctive reactions in which a well-defined act follows a well-defined stimulus with the regularity and precision with which the needle approaches the magnet. But our experiments show that there are acts just as truly instinctive, depending in just the same way on inherited brain-structure, but characterized by being vague, irregular, and to some extent dissimilar, reactions to vague, complex situations.

For the running, crouching, silence, quivering, etc., that one gets by yelling, banging doors, tormenting a violin, throwing hats, bottles, or brushes at the chick is never anything like so pronounced and never lasts one tenth as long as it did with Spalding's chicks. But, as to the fear of man, Spalding must have been deluded. In the second, third and fourth days there is no such reaction to the sight of man as he thought he saw. Miss Battle E. Hunt, in the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. IX., No. I, asserts that there is no instinctive fear of a cat. Morgan did not find such. I myself put chicks of 2, 5, 9 and 17 days (different individuals each time, 11 in all) in the presence of a cat. They showed no fear, but went on eating as if there was nothing about. The

But, as a matter of fact, the pecking reaction may be as perfect at birth as it is [p. 160] after 10 or 12 days' experience. It certainly is not perfect then. I took nine chicks from 10 to 14 days old and placed them one at a time on a clear surface over which were scattered grains of cracked wheat (the food they had been eating in this same way for a week) and watched the accuracy of their pecking. Out of 214 objects pecked at, 159 were seized, 55 were not. Out of the 159 that were seized, only 116 were seized on the first peck, 25 on the second, 16 on the third, and the remaining two on the fourth. Of the 55 that were not successfully seized, 31 were pecked at only once, 10 twice, 10 three times, 3 four times and 1 five times. I fancy one would find that adult fowls would show by no means a perfect record. So long as chicks with ten days' experience fail to seize on the first trial 45 per cent of the time, it is hardly fair to argue against the perfection of the instinct on the ground of failures to seize during the first day.

I should attach no importance whatever to the quantitative estimate given in the table. The only fact of value so [p. 158] far is the evidence that from the first the chick reacts to all colors. In no case was there any random pecking at the white surface of the cardboard. On a black background the same chicks reacted to all the colors.

In the hopes of obtaining material capable of yielding in objective form the results of unconscious and natural mental processes, I asked the students of my class in Psychology to write out at their leisure one hundred words as rapidly as possible and to record the time. More definite instructions were purposely omitted, save that a caution against writing words in sentences was added. In this study I shall confine my results to those obtained from the papers of all the lady students in my class (twenty-five) and those of the twenty-five male students who happened to hand in their papers earliest. This material offer an embarrassing number of points of interest, amongst which I shall restrict myself to the following three: (a) the Community of Ideas and Thought-habits; (b) the Nature of the more usual Types of Association; and (c) the Time-relations of these Processes.

feminine series is: Bread, butter, meat, potato, turnip, cabbage, sugar, tea, coffee, milk, cream, mustard, catsup, pepper, salt, vinegar.

the peculiar field woman's household instincts

Omitting the three merely verbal classes, proper names, verbs, and adjectives, we find the next largest classes to be implements and utensils, interior furnishings; and articles of food. About one-third of all the words comes under these five categories. Referring again to the table for further illustrations I will select for special consideration the very interesting preferences of the sexes for different classes of words.

Rather than overload this paper with numerical results, I prefer to print the table in sufficient fulness[sic] to enable the reader to deduce from it a number of interesting points and proceed to the last point, the comparison of the male with the female students, regarding this mental community. The inference is unmistakable that the women repeat one another's words much more than the men.

The probable extent of such similarity depends upon the usualness of the mental task in question. In the present case the mind is put upon its mettle to work as speedily as possible, and it naturally draws upon the most familiar land accessible shelves of its storehouse. Accordingly I find that of the entire 5,000 words only 2,024 are different. This means that fifty persons independently writing any one hundred words from the large number with which they are familiar, all in all, select from the same limited number of some 2,000 words -- certainly a striking illustration of the limitations of the everyday workings of the mind and the community of our interests.