But let us see.  Let us test Mr. Burroughs’s test of reason and instinct.  When I was a small boy I had a dog named Rollo.  According to Mr. Burroughs, Rollo was an automaton, responding to external stimuli mechanically as directed by his instincts.  Now, as is well known, the development of instinct in animals is a dreadfully slow process.  There is no known case of the development of a single instinct in domestic animals in all the history of their domestication.  Whatever instincts they possess they brought with them from the wild thousands of years ago.  Therefore, all Rollo’s actions were ganglionic discharges mechanically determined by the instincts that had been developed and fixed in the species thousands of years ago.  Very well.  It is clear, therefore, that in all his play with me he would act in old-fashioned ways, adjusting himself to the physical and psychical factors in his environment according to the rules of adjustment which had obtained in the wild and which had become part of his heredity.

Rollo and I did a great deal of rough romping.  He chased me and I chased him.  He nipped my legs, arms, and hands, often so hard that I yelled, while I rolled him and tumbled him and dragged him about, often so strenuously as to make him yelp.  In the course of the play many variations arose.  I would make believe to sit down and cry.  All repentance and anxiety, he would wag his tail and lick my face, whereupon I would give him the laugh.  He hated to be laughed at, and promptly he would spring for me with good-natured, menacing jaws, and the wild romp would go on.  I had scored a point.  Then he hit upon a trick.  Pursuing him into the woodshed, I would find him in a far corner, pretending to sulk.  Now, he dearly loved the play, and never got enough of it.  But at first he fooled me.  I thought I had somehow hurt his feelings and I came and knelt before him, petting him, and speaking lovingly.  Promptly, in a wild outburst, he was up and away, tumbling me over on the floor as he dashed out in a mad skurry around the yard.  He had scored a point.

After a time, it became largely a game of wits.  I reasoned my acts, of course, while his were instinctive.  One day, as he pretended to sulk in the corner, I glanced out of the woodshed doorway, simulated pleasure in face, voice, and language, and greeted one of my schoolboy friends.  Immediately Rollo forgot to sulk, rushed out to see the newcomer, and saw empty space.  The laugh was on him, and he knew it, and I gave it to him, too.  I fooled him in this way two or three times; then be became wise.  One day I worked a variation.  Suddenly looking out the door, making believe that my eyes had been attracted by a moving form, I said coldly, as a child educated in turning away bill-collectors would say:  “No my father is not at home.”  Like a shot, Rollo was out the door.  He even ran down the alley to the front of the house in a vain attempt to find the man I had addressed.  He came back sheepishly to endure the laugh and resume the game.