their own or a foreign language, and every gesture or action which is
performed near them. Desor has remarked that no animal voluntarily
imitates an action performed by man, until, in the ascending scale, we
come to monkeys, which are well known to be ridiculous mockers. Animals,
however, sometimes imitate each other's actions; thus two species of
wolves, which had been reared by dogs, learned to bark, as does
sometimes the jackal, but whether this can be called voluntary imitation
is another question. Birds imitate the songs of their parents, and
sometimes of other birds; and parrots are notorious imitators of any
sound which they often hear. Dureau de la Malle gives an account of a
dog reared by a cat, who learned to imitate the well-known action of a
cat licking her paws, and thus washing her ears and face; this was also
witnessed by the celebrated naturalist Audouin. I have received several
confirmatory accounts; in one of these, a dog had not been suckled by a
cat, but had been brought up with one, together with kittens, and had
thus acquired the above habit, which he ever afterward practised during
his life of thirteen years. Dureau de la Malle's dog likewise learned
from the kittens to play with a ball by rolling it about with his
fore-paws and springing on it. A correspondent assures me that a cat in
his house used to put her paws into jugs of milk having too narrow a
mouth for her head. A kitten of this cat soon learned the same trick,
and practised it ever afterward whenever there was an opportunity.

The parents of many animals, trusting to the principle of imitation in
their young, and more especially to their instinctive or inherited
tendencies, may be said to educate them. We see this when a cat brings a
live mouse to her kittens; and Dureau de la Malle has given a curious
account (in the paper above quoted) of his observations on hawks which
taught their young dexterity, as well as judgment of distances, by first
dropping through the air dead mice and sparrows, which the young