10 



HOMING AND RELATED ACTIVITIES OF BIRDS. 



until 1850 almost every army post and fort had its cote and was supplied with 

 pigeons from other military fortresses. Indeed, the French extended the use 

 of the homing pigeon to the field by equipping the cotes with wheels (traveling 

 cotes) and training the birds to return to these rolling habitations regardless 

 of their location. They further extended the use of the homing pigeon by 

 establishing cotes on board war vessels. The commercial value of the pigeon 

 post has been very great indeed. Practically all of the boards of trade in 

 the large cities of Europe were once supplied with homing pigeons. Their use 

 in obtaining advance information concerning crops, local insurrections, rumors 

 of war, etc., can hardly be overestimated. Newspapers likewise were supplied 

 with such pigeon posts. A rather lengthy dispatch could be sent, when it is 

 remembered that the message, after it was written, could be micro-photo- 

 graphed in such a way that 50,000 words could be contained on a paper which 

 had a weight of less than 0.5 gram. The dispatch could then be read under 

 the microscope by the receiver. 



The decline of the usefulness of the pigeon dates back to the establishment 

 of the telegraph and field telephone lines, and on sea to wireless telegraphy. 

 Even in the present European war, if reports may be trusted, the birds are 

 used to some extent in the scouting work of the balloon and aeroplane corps. 



Claparede* has given a very brief description of the theories of homing and 

 of the problems in homing. The theories he classifies as follows : 



1. Magnetic Sense (Viguier-Caustier?).f 



2. Atmospheric Currents, Winds, etc. (Toussenel, Ziegler?). 



"Ideas of the Atmosphere" (Thauzies?); Special Nasal Sense (Cyon). 



3. Direction of the Sun, of Light (Romanes, Lubbock, Wasmann). 



4. Special Force (Fabre); Attraction of Purely Reflex Origin (Netter, Bethe); Tropism 



(Loeb). 



5. Registration of Detours (Darwin, L. Morgan); Contrepied (Reynaud, P. Bonnier). 



6. Points de Repere, Topographical Memory (Wallace, Romanes, Lubbock, Forel, Fabre, 



Wasmann, Yung, Bouvier, Marchal, Marchand, Buttel-Reepen, Peckham, 

 Rodenbach, Ziegler). 



7. Direct Perception of Goal (Hachet-Souplet, Duchatel); Telepathy (Duchatel). 



8. Complex Phenomena Resting upon Intelligence (Cyon). 



9. Hereditary Topographical Memory (Kingsley, Parker and Newton). 



Claparede classifies the various problems in homing as follows: 



Goal J 



Already 

 known 



Unknown 



Non-perceptible 



IV. Perceptible. 

 . Non-perceptible 



II. Where landmarks are at hand. 

 III. With no apparent landmarks 

 at hand. 



V. Where intermediary stimulations 



are at hand. 

 VI. With no intermediate excitations. 



*Archives de Psychologic, n, 1906, p. 133. 



tWhere an author is hard to classify an interrogation point is placed after his name. In many 

 cases a given author makes use of more than one theory to account for the different phenomena 

 of homing. Many authors whose names appear in the above lists are not again mentioned in 

 this report. Reference to their work may be found in Claparede's bibliography. This bibliog- 

 raphy, which is fairly complete up to 1906, is not duplicated here. Many references supple- 

 mentary to our own are to be found in it. 



