780 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the finches, the marsh wrens, red-winged blackbirds, meadow larks, 

 thrashers, and myrtle warblers are frequently seen in these localities 

 through the winter. I spent one first day of February some years ago 

 among the dunes below Atlantic City, 1ST. J. At Philadelphia 

 that morning it was bleak winter weather, but two hours later we 

 found ourselves in a warm expanse of sunlight on the seaward beaches. 

 The balmy air was filled with bird notes, and the holly thickets and 

 bay bushes fairly swarmed with myrtle warblers. It seems to be a 

 fact that many birds thus make comparatively short migratory move- 

 ments between the seacoast plain and the mountains, up and down the 

 river valleys. 



The phenomenon of the migrating bird has always appealed in a 

 wonderful manner to the human mind. The guiding geographical 

 sense that all animals, and wild animals and birds in particular, possess 

 is peculiarly attractive to men of civilized society, because they have 

 largely lost this same natural instinct of direction, and now look 

 upon it in wonderment. Birds have very sure landmarks ; their senses 

 are keen for noting features of topography. They undoubtedly know 

 the Potomac, the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Hudson, and the 

 Connecticut, and never confuse one with another. They know to 

 which side the sea lies and that the rivers flow down from a wild, 

 wooded region where there are plenty of food and the best possible 

 places to raise their young. All these facts get fixed in their brains. 

 The bird's brain-cell structure is built on these lines and is only waiting 

 to get the impressions of the first migratory experience. They keep 

 in with one another, follow their chirpings in the night, learn to 

 tell the Hudson from the Delaware, or where this or that stretch of 

 woodland lies, just as they learned when first out of the nest how to 

 tell good from bad sorts of food, or how to find their way about the 

 home woods, and that an owl or a fox was an undesirable acquaintance. 

 In the fall migration the young birds follow the older ones in the 

 general movement southward, and are often belated, showing that 

 the impulse to leave their birthplaces is forced upon them, rather 

 from necessity than choice, and is not the well-developed instinct im- 

 pressed by former experience which their elders seem to possess. The 

 old birds who have bred and reared these young ones set the example 

 of early departure which the birds of the year through inexperience 

 are tardy in appreciating. The habit waits upon experience. 



Each year, from midwinter, when the first warmth of advancing 

 sunlight calls to the sleeping life, on to the first fervid heat of the 

 reproductive summer, we have the joyous pageant of the spring. 

 This steady waxing of the new light appealed to the pagan mind of 

 western Europe with a far deeper sense than the modern mind can 

 appreciate. To our rude ancestors it was the goddess Eastre, bountiful 



