MIND AND MEMORY OF BIRDS. 17 



woodpeckers from the parental nest and 

 reared them by hand. He kept them in a 

 cage nearly a year, and then freed them. 

 They lingered about the premises and soon 

 pecked a hole in a dead pear tree, after the 

 true picus pattern, and therein reared a 

 brood. Nest-architecture evidently was her- 

 editary with them. 



I have heard a mocking-bird, reared in 

 captivity and alone in a Northern state, utter, 

 with absolute precision, the characteristic cry 

 of a Southern bird whose voice it never had 

 heard in its life. 



It will be evident to every close observer 

 that the habit of living in a cage is becoming 

 hereditary with the canary bird. 



Domestic fowls are losing, by an infinitesi- 

 mal process, their wing power. The need for 

 flight is duninishing and with it the natural 

 desire for wings. The body and legs and 

 brain of these birds are rapidly increasing in 

 weight and strength. On the other hand, our 

 domestic fowls have largely lost their ances- 

 tral traits— hereditary memory with them is 

 beginning to go no farther back than to the 

 limit of this domestic state of existence. 



I witnessed a striking incident in bird life 

 which was very suggestive : a wild goose, by 

 sortie accident separated from its flock on the 

 spring flight northward, circled low in the 

 air uttering now and again its loud cry. A 

 domestic gander preening himself beside a 

 meadow brook, heard the clanging voice and 

 lifting his head answered it with emphasis. 

 I could not help wondering if an almost irre- 

 sistible wave of memory had indeed been 

 started in the brain of the domestic bird by 

 this low-flying migrant. Dimly, perhaps, but 

 wildly, sweetly, came in the old hereditary 



