184 THE STORY OF THE BIRDS. - 
instinct. Birds, however, often lose their routes and 
grow confused in fogs, darkness, storms, ete. Their 
instinct of direction is not unerring. They are cer- 
tainly within limits reasoning creatures, and a yield- 
ing to the influences of reason may sometimes confuse 
instinct as well as aid it. We can not here enter into 
any discussion of instinct. It is not impossible, how- 
ever, for its pure manifestations to be more nearly 
unerring than we think. But it is an inheritance 
from the past out of which all present experience 
and intelligence tend to lead, and the Great Beyond 
of all creatures lies above it. If we could separate it, 
we might find it perfect for its purposes and unerring 
when its promptings only were obeyed. Especially 
would this be true if the same conditions and envi- 
ronment could prevail now which were present when 
the instinct was evolved. In so many cases, however, 
as we shall see in Chapter X XIX, the conditions have 
outgrown the instinct or fixed habit; and the bird 
stands tied to the past with the emergencies of the 
present pressing upon it. 
There are some other peculiarities concerning daily 
bird routes—hunter’s “ crossings,” so called—whereby 
upon a certain day all wild geese will enter a field at 
or near a certain point, though one flock can not see 
the other ahead of it, and certain deflections in the 
“fly lines” of plovers, etc., which show that birds are 
peculiarly endowed with some sense of direction not 
yet understood. But no dissection hints of any special 
organ originating it. 
After fifty years of study of the migration of birds 
