Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 59, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 March 1915 — INTERESTING ITEMS FROM THE CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

INTERESTING ITEMS FROM THE CITIES

Too Many Lessons Killed Educated Angleworm

BOSTON.— One-Eyed Pete, the educated angleworm of Harvard university, is dead. The rigors of a Harvard education have proved too much for him. Pete, before his matriculation at the psychological laboratory of Prof.

R. M. Yerkes, lived an idle and dissolute existence in a Cambridge back yard. The professor dug him up in an effort to disprove the claims of another scientist that worms have no intelligenca Pete was given ten lessons a day wriggling on prepared paths. The right one led to a soft bed of wet blotting paper. The wrong one took him to a place where he got an electric shock. Pete finally learned which was the way to worm paradise. But the 1,000 trips necessary

to teach him thia has sent him to his grave. Pete, according to the professor, thought like a regular human being and could distinguish between what was good for it and what was not so good for it. When Professor Yerkes took the worm in charge many months ago, it didn’t know enough to get in out of the rain. Professor Yerkes rigged up a device full of holes like a cheese, and one of the apertures was constructed in a manner that is particularly inviting to a poor, wandering worm, alone in a great city. Halfway through the hole the alimw-pajekad course spread out in two directions. At the end of one passage was a comfortable resting place—as comfortable resting places for worms go —and at the end of the other passage was an electric device which would give the creature a sharp shock as soon as it entered it. Every afternoon Professor Yerkes took the worm out of its cage and let it take a constitutional through the tricky hole with two ends. When it came to the parting of the ways, the worm didn’t care at first whether it went to the right or to the left, and so it was shocked considerably, and it generally retreated. But then the worm began avoiding the capital punishment aperture, and soon it invariably went into the hole that afforded comfort But about the time the Harvard professor was satisfied that the creature was educated enough to know which direction to take, Pete up and died, just on the eve of taking his examination for a ”B. A.”