The instance cited by Dr. H. D. Schmidt is an excellent illustration of this inability of an animal to appreciate either the utility or futility of its instinctive behavior. Having described the instinct of squirrels to bury nuts by ramming them into the ground with their teeth, and then using their paws to cover them with earth, he continues as follows: “Now, as regards the young squirrel, which, of course, never had been present at the burial of a nut, I observed that, after having eaten a number of hickory nuts to appease its appetite, it would take one between its teeth, then sit upright and listen in all directions. Finding all right, it would scratch upon the smooth blanket on which I was playing with it as if to make a hole, then hammer with the nut between its teeth upon the blanket, and finally perform all the motions required to fill up a hole—_in the air_; after which it would jump away, leaving the nut, of course, uncovered.” (_Transactions of the Am. Neurological Ass’n_, 1875, vol. I, p. 129—italics his.) This whole pantomime of purposeless gesticulations, from the useless “Stop, look and listen!” down to the final desertion of the uncovered nut, is overwhelming evidence of the fact that the brute is destitute of any rational faculty capable of recognizing the telic aspect of its own instinctive conduct. The claim is sometimes made that certain forms of animal behavior are not unconsciously, but _consciously_, telic. Bouvier, for example, claims that in the rare cases of the _use of tools_ among the Arthropoda, we have evidence of the existence of intelligent inventiveness of a rudimentary kind. Thus the crab _Melia_ carries a sea-anemone in its chela as a weapon wherewith to sting its prey into a condition of paralysis. The leaf-cutting ants of India and Brazil use their own thread-spinning larvæ as tools for cementing together the materials out of which their nests are constructed. The predatory wasp _Ammophila urnaria_ uses a pebble to tamp the filling of its burrow. According to the Wheelers (cf. _Science_, May 30, 1924, p. 486), the hunting wasp _Sphex_ (_Ammophila_) _gryphus_ (Sm.) makes similar use of a pebble. As Bouvier notes, however, this use of tools appears “to be rather exceptional ..., showing itself only in the primitive state consisting of the use of foreign bodies as implements.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 456.) Moreover, the animals in question are limited to a concretely determinate kind of tool, which their environment supplies ready-made. Such a use of implements _does not presuppose any power of abstraction and generalization_. In fact, the presence of such a power is expressly excluded by the consideration that the animal’s so-called “inventiveness” is confined exclusively to _one particularized manifestation_.