IN THE SHETLANDS 275 
How ill do such facts as the above accord with the 
theory that the male bird is too eager to exercise 
choice in regard to the female. Darwin also (p. 420) 
adduces evidence to show that the domestic cock 
prefers the younger to the older hens; that the male 
pheasant, when hybridised with the fowl, has the 
opposite taste, “is most capricious in his attachments, 
and, from some inexplicable cause, shows the most 
determined aversion to certain hens”; that some hens 
are quite unattractive, even to the males of their own 
species ; and that, with the long-tailed duck, certain 
females are much more courted than the rest, of 
which last state of things I have, if I mistake not, 
seen a hint with the eider-duck. Again, then, what 
becomes of the supposed indiscriminate eagerness 
of the male? MHas not this theory been accepted too 
unreservedly, and on a too slender foundation of 
evidence? 
It is significant that most of the above-quoted 
observations were made on birds in confinement, or 
under domestication, in which states, of course, they 
are very much easier to watch. Of the intimate 
domestic habits of birds—that is to say, of most birds 
—in a wild state, we know, I believe, very little, and 
have assumed very much. I might give here two 
cases—I have elsewhere given some instances—of 
what appeared to me to be violent rivalry on the part 
of hen blackbirds ; but I refer again to what I have 
noticed in regard to the nuptial habits of those sea- 
birds, the bright interior colouring of whose mouths 
