290 BIRD LIFE GLIMPSES 



to justify which assertion the very naming of the 

 word "reversion" is sufficient. But if this be a 

 true explanation for the animal, what excuse have 

 we for disregarding it, and dragging in a trans- 

 cendental element, in our own case ? None what- 

 ever that I can see ; but by excluding from their 

 purview — to use their own favourite word — every 

 species except the human one, the Psychical Society, 

 in my opinion, are making a gigantic error, through 

 which all their conclusions suffer more or less, so 

 that the whole speculative structure, reared on too 

 narrow a basis of fact and observation, will, one day, 

 come tumbling to the ground. 



Why should so much be postulated, on the 

 strength of mysterious faculties existing in our- 

 selves, when equally mysterious, though less 

 abnormal ones, exist in various animals ^ Can we, 

 for instance, say that the sense of direction (and this 

 is common to savage man and animals) ^ is less 

 extraordinary than what we call clairvoyance, or 

 that the one is essentially different from the other .^^ 

 And what is more mysterious than this (which I 

 have on good authority), that a certain spot 

 should, year after year for some forty years, be 

 chosen as a nesting-site by a pair of sparrow-hawks, 

 although, during many of these years, not one only 

 of the breeding birds, but both of them ^ have been shot 

 by the game-keepers } What is it tells the new 

 pair, next year, that, somewhere or other in the wide 

 world, a certain spot is left vacant for them } Again, 

 I have brought forward evidence to show that the 



^ The facts of migration should be studied in regard to this. 

 See Professor Newton's "A Dictionary of Birds," pp. 562-570. 



