The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations. William T. Hornaday

that spur he became a wonderful architect and engineer.

      For present purposes we are concerned with three savage tribes which might have been rich and prosperous agriculturists or herdsmen had they developed sufficient intelligence to see the wisdom of regular industry.

      Consider first the lowest of three primitive tribes that inhabit the extreme southern point of Patagonia, whose real estate holdings front on the Strait of Magellan. That region is treeless, rocky, windswept, cold and inhospitable. I can not imagine a place better fitted for an anarchist penal colony. North of it lie plains less rigorous, and by degrees less sterile, and finally there are lands quite habitable by cattle-and-crop-growing men.

      But those three tribes elect to stick to the worst spot in South America. The most primitive is the tribe of "canoe Indians" of Tierra del Fuego, which probably represents the lowest rung of the human ladder. Beside them the cave men of 30,000 years ago were kings and princes. Their only rivals seem to be the Poonans of Central Borneo, who, living in a hot country, make no houses or shelters of any kind, and have no clothing but a long strip of bark cloth around the loins.

      The Fuegians have long been known to mariners and travellers. They inhabit a region that half the year is bleak, cold and raw, but they make nothing save the rudest of the rude in canoes—of rough slabs tied together and caulked with moss,—and rough bone- pointed spears, bows, arrows and paddles. Their only clothing consists of skins of the guanacos loosely hung from the neck, and flapping over the naked and repulsive body. They make no houses, and on shore their only shelters from the wind and snow and chilling rains are rabbit-like forms of brush, broken off by hand.

      These people are lower in the scale of intelligence than any wild animal species known to me; for they are mentally too dull and low to maintain themselves on a continuing basis. Their hundred years of contact with man has taught them little; and numerically they are decreasing so rapidly that the world will soon see the absolute finish of the tribe.

      In the best of the three tribes, the Tchuelclus, the birth rate is so low that within recent times the tribe has diminished from about 5,000 to a remnant of about 500.

      Now, have those primitive creatures "immortal souls?" Are they entitled to call chimpanzees, elephants, bears and dogs "lower animals?" Do they "think," or "reason," any more than the animals I have named?

      It is a far cry from the highest to the lowest of the human race; and we hold that the highest animals intellectually are higher than the lowest men.

      Now go with me for a moment to the lofty and dense tropical forest in the heart of the Territory of Selangor, in the Malay Peninsula. That forest is the home of the wild elephant, rhinoceros and sladang. And there dwells a jungle tribe called the Jackoons, some members of which I met at their family home, and observed literally in their own ancestral tree. Their house was not wholly bad, but it might have been 100 per cent better. It was merely a platform of small poles, placed like a glorified bird's nest in the spreading forks of a many-branched tree, about twenty feet from the ground. The main supports were bark-lashed to the large branches of the family tree. Over this there was a rude roof of long grass, which had a fairly intelligent slope. As a shelter from rain, the Jackoon house left much to be desired. The scanty loin cloths of the habitants knew no such thing as wash-day or line. With all its drawbacks, however, this habitation was far more adequate to the needs of its builders than the cold brush rabbit-forms of the Patagonian canoe Indians.

      We now come to a tribe which has reduced the problem of housing and home life to its lowest common denominator. The Poonans of Central Borneo, discovered and described by Carl Bock, build no houses of any kind, not even huts of green branches; and their only overture toward the promotion of personal comfort in the home is a five-foot grass mat spread upon the sodden earth, to lie upon when at rest. And this, in a country where in the so-called "dry season" it rains half the time, and in the "wet season" all the time.

      The Poonans have rudely-made spears for taking the wild pig, deer and smaller game, their clothes consist of bark cloth, around the loins only. They know no such thing as agriculture, and they live off the jungle.

      It was said some years ago that a similarly primitive jungle tribe of Ceylon, known as the Veddahs, could count no more than five, that they could not comprehend "day after to-morrow," and that their vocabulary was limited to about 200 words.

      It is very probable that the language of the Poonans and the Jackoons is equally limited. And what are we to conclude from all the foregoing? Briefly, I should say that the architectural skill of the orioles, the caciques and the weaver birds is greater than that of the South Patagonia native, the Jackoon and the Poonan. I should say that those bird homes yield to their makers more comfort and protection, and a better birth-rate, than are yielded by the homes of those ignorant, unambitious and retrogressive tribes of men now living and thinking, and supposed to be possessed of reasoning powers. If the whole truth could be known, I believe it would be found that the stock of ideas possessed and used by the groups of highly-endowed birds would fully equal the ideas of such tribes of simple-minded men as those mentioned. If caught young, those savages could be trained by civilized men, and taught to perform many tricks, but so can chimpanzees and elephants.

      Curiously enough, it is a common thing for even the higher types of civilized men to make in home-building just as serious mistakes as are made by wild animals and savages. For example, among the men of our time it is a common mistake to build in the wrong place, to build entirely too large or too ugly, and to build a Colossal Burden instead of a real Home. From many a palace there stands forth the perpetual question: "Why did he do it?"

      Any reader who at any time inclines toward an opinion that the author is unduly severe on the mentality of the human race, even as it exists today in the United States, is urged to read in the Scientific Monthly for January, 1922, an article by Professor L. M. Tennan entitled "Adventures in Stupidity.—A Partial Analysis of the Intellectual Inferiority of a College Student." He should particularly note the percentages on page 34 in the second paragraph under the subtitle "The Psychology of Stupidity."