To these disconnected remarks still another must be added, addressed this time to the anecdote school. Some member of it who has chanced to read this may feel like saying: “This experimental work is all very well. Your cats and dogs represent, it is true, specimens from the top stratum of animal intelligence, and your negations, based on their conduct, may be authoritative so far as concerns the average, typical mammalian mind. But our anecdotes do not claim to be stories of the conduct of the average or type, but of those exceptional individuals who have begun to attain higher powers. And, if even a few dogs and cats have these higher powers, our contention is, in a modified form, upheld.” To all this I agree, provided the anecdote school now realize just what sort of a position they hold. They are clearly in pretty much the same position as spiritualists. Their anecdotes are on pretty much the same level as the anecdotes of thought-transference, materializations of spirits, supernormal knowledge, etc. Not in quite the same position, for far greater care has been given by the Psychical Research Society to establishing the criteria of authenticity, to insuring good observation, to explaining by normal psychology all that can be so explained, in the case of the latter than the anecdote school has done in the case of the former. The off-hand explanation of certain anecdotes by invoking reason, or imitation, or recognition, or feelings of qualities, is on a par with the explanation of trance-phenomena and such like by invoking the spirits of dead people. I do not deny that we may get lawfully a supernormal psychology, or that the supernormal acts it finds may turn out to be explained by these functions which I have denied to the normal animal mind. But I must soberly declare that I think there is less likelihood that such functions are the explanation of animal acts than that the existence of the spirits of dead people is the true explanation of the automatisms of spiritualistic phenomena. So much for the anecdote school, if it calls itself by its right name and pretends only to give an _abnormal_ animal psychology. The sad fact has been that it has always pushed forward these exceptions as the essential phenomena of animal mind. It has built up a general psychology from abnormal data. It is like an anatomy written from observations on dime-museum freaks. CONCLUSION