It
was seized and carried to the mouth and here discarded. This
tentacle after one or two experiments refused to have anything more
to do with it. But other tentacles could be successively cheated.
The nerve-cells governing each tentacle appear to have been able to
learn by experience, but each group in the diffuse nervous system
had to learn separately. The dawn of this much of intelligence far
down in the animal kingdom would not be surprising, for the
selection and grasping of food has always involved higher mental
power than most of the actions of these lowest animals. Memory goes
far down in the animal kingdom. Perhaps, as Professor Haeckel has
urged, it is an ultimate mental property of protoplasm. And the
memory of past experience would continually tend to modify habit or
instinct.
[Footnote A: These experiments have been continued with most
interesting and valuable results by Dr. G.H. Parker, of Harvard
University.]
It is unsafe, therefore, to say just where intelligence begins. At a
certain point we find dim traces of it; below that we have failed to
find them. But that they will not be found, we dare not affirm. In
the highest insects instinct predominates, but marks of intelligence
are fairly abundant. Ants and wasps modify their habits to suit
emergencies which instinct alone could hardly cope with.
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