CHAT Tile 2X Vue 
WHAT A BIRD KNOWS ABOUT GEOGRAPHY AND 
ARITHMETIC. 
Tuatr a bird has received its ideas of geography 
from its ancestors there can be but little doubt. If 
some progenitor had not once gone south, or set up 
the habit of going south, no nestling now would yearn 
for the sunny land as the winter approaches. But 
just how it holds through the ages, this experience of 
its forefathers, we only can say in our ignorance that 
the capacity for this is a special endowment of low 
creatures that man does not possess. If instinct be 
not an inspiration, the faculties out of which it is 
evolved are as remarkable as the thing itself. 
But we can sometimes see where a knowledge of 
geography in the feathered learners is a matter purely 
of experience, the proper direction or “short cut” 
being not instinctively perceived. Thus it is stated 
that such bobolinks as have gone West and are build- 
ing beyond the Rocky Mountains have not yet learned 
how to take a short cut south to their winter homes 
by passing west of the Gulf of Mexico, but must re- 
turn (as they worked their way out) to the Atlantic 
slope, and go south as their tribe has done for ages. 
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