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Show UOKING ELEPHANT Meet Hattie, the elephant with a sense of humor. Hattls Is the star attraction at-traction at Central park zoo, New J York The day being hot, it occurs to Hat-Uie Hat-Uie that the kiddles around her cage I might like a cold shower bath. So j sue fills her trunk at the drinking lank and sprajs her young spectators again and again The kids like it They stage a young riot. Jule, a younger elephant, watches 'he performance, iumbcrs to the water supply and Joins in the tun. W hen the keeper comes running up, it appears that the elephants are having hav-ing more tport than the youngsters They drench the keeper, head to foot v s n?e of humor involves high j mentality. ; It makes you wonder, "Do animals think'" Aesop, the Greek slai e, i thought so when he wrote his fables some 2500 years ago. When Pellsson was a prisoner in the Bastille, ho amused himself by feeding 6plder which had spun a web near the cell window. Pelisson, being a privileged guest, had his valet with him. The ' ale'. played a bagpipe as 6O0n as Pelisson aught a fly and placed It on an outvr strand of the spider's web. Soon the spider was trained to come hurrying forth at the first sound of the music Eventually Pelisson had jthe spider educated to travel across the coll and climb his knee to get the flv. I'nquestionably the spider had the faculty of memory, also the rudiments oi reasoning Botb are Intellectual powers. You have observed the same sort of i Intelligence in pet dogs and horses. j In a good many ways, ants and bees have a higher form of civilization than man, measuring civilization in terms of community co-operation with delegation of work to individuals best fitted to handle certain tasks. Professor Hatchet Souplet, director I of the French Institute of zoological psychology, a docade ago decided, after studying animals for years, that they have no reasoning powers His theory was that animals 6ome times act intelligently because they are susceptible to the projection of human will power. He even applied this theory to Herr Krall's horse, Mohammed, Mo-hammed, which was said to be able to extract cube root, and to Herr Mockers Moc-kers dog, Rolf, which answered questions ques-tions by tapping letters of the alphabet alpha-bet with its paws. Yet we've all seen dogs "that know more than some people." Man is averse to crediting animals with Intelligence, because it doesn't please his vanity, basis of most of his troubles. |