To test the influence, if any, of imitation in cats, the following method was adopted. A box was arranged with two compartments separated by a wire screen. “The larger of these had a front of wooden bars with a door which fell open when a string stretched across the top was bitten or clawed down. The smaller was closed by boards on three sides and by the wire screen on the fourth. Through the screen a cat within could see the one to be imitated pull the string, go out through the door thus opened, and eat the fish outside. When put in this compartment, the top being covered by a large box, a cat soon gave up efforts to claw through the screen, quieted down, and watched more or less the proceedings going on in the other compartment. Thus this apparatus could be used to test the power of imitation. A cat who had no experience with the means of escape from the large compartment was put in the closed one; another cat, who would do it readily, was allowed to go through the performance of pulling the string, going out, and eating the fish. Record was made of the number of times he did so, and of the number of times the imitator had his eyes clearly fixed on him.... After the imitatee had done the thing a number of times, the other was put in the big compartment alone, and the time it took him before pulling the string was noted and his general behaviour closely observed. If he failed in five or ten or fifteen minutes to do so, he was released and not fed. This entire experiment was repeated a number of times. From the times taken by the imitator to escape and from observation of the way that he did it, we can decide whether imitation played any part.... No one, I am sure, who had seen the behaviour of the cats would have claimed that their conduct was at all influenced by what they had seen. When they did hit the string the act looked just like the accidental success of the ordinary association experiment. But, besides these personal observations, we have in the impersonal time-records sufficient proofs of the absence of imitation.” Some observations on dogs are also described. From these it appears that the three individuals on which experiments were made failed to learn the way of getting out of a cage from seeing another dog escape. One of them was also allowed to see another dog beg for meat 110 times. But he never tried to imitate him and thus secure a piece of meat as a reward. It therefore “seems sure,” says Mr. Thorndike, “that we should give up imitation as an _a priori_ explanation of any novel intelligent performance. To say that a dog who opens a gate, for instance, need not have reasoned it out if he had seen another dog do the same thing, is to offer instead of one false explanation another equally false. Imitation in any form is too doubtful a factor to be presupposed without evidence.”