Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 December 1895 — Educated Oysters. [ARTICLE]

Educated Oysters.

“As senseless as an oyster” is an every day saying, yet, according to the Brooklyn Citizen, the oyster has an amount of intelligence little to be expected in a creature of such low organization. Dicquemase assures us that oysters taken from a depth never uncovered by the sea, open their shellt, lose the water within and per-

Uh; bat oysters taken from the same place and depth, if kept in reservoirs, where they are occasionally left uncovered for a short time and are otherwise incommoded, learn to keep their shells shut, and then live for a much longer time when taken out of the water. First Darwin and then Romanes noted the above as a wonderful evidence of intelligence in a mollttsk. The fact is turned to advantage in the go-called “oyster schools” of France. The distance from the coast to Paris being too great for the newly dredged oysters to travel without opening their shells, they are first taught in the schools to bear a longer and longer exposure to the air without gaping, and, when their education in this respect is completed, they are sent on their journey to the metropolis, where they arrive with closed shells and in a healthy condition. Some of the mollusks possess the sense of direction in a marked degree, being able to find their way home from what must be, to them, great distances. For instance, the limpet, after an excursion in search of food, will invariably return to its home on some rock or stone. Insects likewise possess this faculty, and I have even seen the blind beetles of Mammoth Cave return to their domiciles beneath some log of wood or block of stone after a journey of fifty feet or more. This indicates beyond a shadow of a doubt that these creatures possess memory and conscious determination, coincidentally a certain degree of intelligence.