The evening times. [volume] (Grand Forks, N.D.) 1906-1914, 1912-06-08
New York Evening SUM-


Do fish reason? Edineer. the pis-
catorial authority. said i'm 1899 that
they couldn't. NJ. OXner. formerly
connected With the Monaco ocean
agraphic institute. has recently pro-
sented Il. paper to the French academic
des sciences in which he asserts that
fish can and do associate ideas. James
terry aquarium, comes to the support
of NJ. ONner. Said Mr.. Legg:
"Fish certainly have intellectual
powers higher than instinct. | claim
that they can reason. for when ,
o'clock, our feeding time. approaches
all of them come to the surface II
remain there until ] have fed them.
Another point leads me to think that
they can distinguish between person
niities. Let a stranger go into the
feeding gallery along about meal time.
n fish will pay no attention to him.
However,. h moment ! swing open
the green gallery door and mount the
steps the fish jim every tank come to
the north side of their pools and rise
coming with my little fish box. They
follow me about in their circumscribed
limits just as faithfully as a collie
dog might do.
They show a fine discrimination in
the sort of food they eat, too, do my
pets. Take those brown lorays over
there, for instance. Last winter / put
Well. sir, after six or seven weeks l
noticed that the lorays had stopped
eating. l puzzled the thing over in
my mind for a while and then decid-
ed that perhaps they wanted a change
Of diet. took a couple herring and
cut them up in little chunks. The
lorays rose to the surface. snatched
| ornnIS1x, ~ tl,o 1;<- ,,l x.,, l.,.x:l,
disgorged them. They refused to cat
herring.
Here's a problem. I said to myself
at the time. They won't eat mullet nor
they won't eat herring. 1 gave them
perch. Nothing doing. Finally / de-
cided to get the lorays some pearl
roach. l cut a few mp and threw them
into the tank. Well, sir. if you could
have seen those lorays snatch at the
pearl reaches Inside of thirty Sec
onds there wasn't a scrap left in the
tank. You can't fool those loray on
the food problem. They know what's
what. They're connoisseurs.
'Ihe tllterman on the other side of
the aquarium told me the other day
that he was having trouble with his
Dig trout. They had gone on Il strike
and positively refused to cat CLAIMS.
We talked it Owe inc finally he de-
cided that he would try a little liver.
Well. the bigger and hungricr trout
gobblcd down the liver alphabetically,
but the smaller and more delicate
nosed ones refused to touch either the
CLAIMS or the liver. Finally he decided
to try the rainbow trout out on beef
heart. 1t was just what they wanted.
They called the strike off from that
moment n have been eating beet
heart for some weeks past now. They
have tickle %appetites. however. and
may get tired of the beef heart diet
just Is sailors do of a siN-months'
picked corncd beef menu"
In further support of the theory
that fish do reason the Geological So
ciety Bulletin for April. 1906. on file
at the aquarium office. has this to say:
I'm view OF the we'll known fact that
fishes can DO frightened and become
wild. that their confidence can be
gained to the extent of making them
tame. so that some of them will per-
NIT handling. that they learn to come
ut certain times to certain places to
be fed, that habits learned in the
aquarium are sometimes resumed aft
er the fish have been liberated for
months in a pond and then returned
to the aquarium and from the fact
that some fishes which have been in
iured by the hook and escape arc aft
erWard difficult to capture it is natural
To conclude that fish have some power
of memory. Certain actions in the