QUEER PHASES OF ANIMAL LIFE. 603 



especially in countries where the sapient one has become the monopo- 

 list of all the good things of this earth. Let any one sweep the snow 

 from his balcony, scatter the cleared space with crumbs, and put the 

 balcony-key where the children can not find it, and see how soon his 

 place will become the resort of feathered guests not of town-spar- 

 rows only, but of linnets, titmice, and other birds that are rarely seen 

 out of the woods. A little discretion will soon encourage them to 

 enter the window and fetch their lunch from the breakfast-table by- 

 and-by even in the presence of their host for the fear of men is a fac- 

 titious instinct, unsupported by the elder intuition that teaches animals 

 to distinguish a frugivorous creature from a beast of prey. With so 

 simple a contrivance as a wooden box with a round hole, starlings, 

 blackbirds, martins, crows, jays, and even owls, can be induced to rear 

 their young under the roof of a human habitation ; squirrels, hedge- 

 hogs, and raccoons soon find out a place where they can get an occa- 

 sional snack without having to pay with their hides. Hamman, the 

 famous German skeptic, used to feed a swarm of sea-gulls, often the 

 only visitors to his lonely cottage on the shore of the Baltic. The 

 neighbors suspected him of necromantic tricks, but he assured them 

 that his whole secret consisted in never interfering with his guests 

 keeping a free lunch on hand, and letting them take their own time and 

 way about eating it. 



The same magic had probably bewitched the pets of Miss Meirin- 

 ger, the daughter of a German colonist of New Freyburg, Brazil. 

 Her father was a self-taught naturalist, and his collections have been 

 described by several South American travelers ; but in the ojDinion of 

 the natives his curiosity-shop was eclipsed by the menagerie of his 

 daughter, who had tamed some of the wildest denizens of the forest, 

 though evidently on the suaviter in modo plan, since most of her pets 

 boarded themselves, or only took an occasional breakfast at the fazenda. 

 Among her more regular guests were a couple of red coaties, or nose- 

 bears, several bush-snakes, and one large boa, a formidable-looking 

 monster with the disposition of a lap-dog, for at a signal from his 

 benefactress he would try to curl himself up in her apron, with a 

 supernumerary coil or two around her knees. 



There is hardly any doubt that animals must possess some means 

 of communicating their ideas. Arsenic has no perceptible taste or odor, 

 and an ounce of it mixed with a bushel of corn-meal will destroy a 

 cart-load of sewer-rats in a single day ; but all professional vermin- 

 killers agree that such receipts lose their efficacy in a very short time. 

 Somehow or other the survivors manage to trace the mischief to its 

 cause ; and old rats have been observed in the act of driving their 

 young from a dish of poisoned hash. When the British first effected 

 a settlement in Singapore, the traffic in monkeys soon became a regu- 

 lar branch of industry. The ubiquitous Chinamen used to go on trap- 



