Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 March 1908 — THE “LANGUAGE” OF ANIMALS. [ARTICLE]

THE “LANGUAGE” OF ANIMALS.

Various Cries and Calls Not the Medium of Communication. Huxley thought that because of the absence of language the brutes can have no trains of thoughts, but only trains of feeling, and this is the opinion of most comparative psychologists. I am myself quit# ready to admit that the toiler animals come as near to reasoning as. they come to having a language. Their various cries and calls—the call to the mate, of alarm, ofpain, of joy-—do serve as the medium of some sort of communication, but they do not stand for mental concepts any more than the various cries of a child do. They are the result of simple reactions to outward objects or to inward wants, and do npt Imply any mental process whatever. A grown person may utter a cry of pain or fear or pleasures with a mind utterly blank of any ideas. Once on a moonlight night I lay in wait for some boy poachers in my vineyard. As I suddenly rose up, clad In a long black coat, and rushed for one and seized his leg as he was hastening over the fence, he uttered a wild, agonized scream precisely as -a wild animal does when suddenly seized. He told me afterward he was simply frightened out of his wits. For the moment he was simply an unreasoning animal.—John Burroughs, in Outing Magazine.