298 BIRDS IX THEIR RELATIONS TO MAN. 



crows are depraved. We have even known a tame crow, 

 reared in opulence, exposed to the influence of honest prin- 

 ciples, away from all of its kind, a crow that disdained corn 

 as a food, and yet which, constrained by a hereditary taint of 

 evil, was accustomed to pull it right and left, only to throw it 

 down again. He began to pull corn before he was a year old. 

 After this experience we are not surprised to learn that crows 

 sometimes pull corn when there is plenty above ground. 



There is certainly more difference in crows than appears 

 as they fly over. Schemes that serve to keep them from 

 molesting corn in one place are frequently useless in another. 

 Moreover, it sometimes happens that a remedy employed with 

 success year after year in a given locality suddenly becomes 

 ineffectual. All naturalists who have had occasion to examine 

 a large series of specimens of any sort of organism are well 

 aware that there is always considerable variation among them 

 in size, proportion, or color, as may be. Now it surely is not 

 preposterous to suppose there are psychic variations as well 

 as bodily variations. Variations in size or proportion of parts, 

 when associated with environment, — climate, soil, food, etc., — 

 are sufficient to account for geographical races or even species. 

 By analogy it is not difficult to set up a working hypothesis 

 to account for the occasional failure of devices that previously 

 had been successful. The crows that have inhabited a given 

 locality for generations, we will suppose, have a particular 

 fear of the twine put up on corn-land, suspecting it to be a 

 kind of trap for their entanglement. Another race in another 

 region, from a less painful experience with traps, or with enough 

 intelligence to see there is no danger in it, or with too little 

 to suspect any, regards twine with indifference. Again, an 

 old fear may wear off with long familiarity or be removed by 

 an improved temperament, while a fatal lesson or an increas- 

 ing wariness of purely organic origin would account for a new 

 fear. 



Whatever may be the philosophy of the ways of the crow 



