Singing Birds Sacrificed. l8i 



at all events one of the main causes of organic evolu- 

 tion." ■■ 



Now, with the fact clear in our minds of the 

 quandary in which Mr. Romanes found himself when 

 he proposed the question, why Nature had not armed 

 the small birds with counter-instincts as against that 

 " strange and cruel instinct " of the cuckoo ; and was, 

 poor man, compelled to the flimsy, and ill-founded 

 consolation that nature had not done so, because 

 " comparatively, the deposition of a cuckoo's egg was 

 so exceedingly rare an event " that she had not 

 deemed it worth her while to call in there a counter- 

 acting instinct. Mr. Romanes certainly could not 

 have had that fact in mind when he wrote as above in 

 " Darwin and after Darwin." The case of the gullible 

 and gulled little birds by the cuckoo is absolutely a 

 case where an instinct — Mr. Darwin would call it " a 

 misleading instinct " — actually makes for the absolute 

 benefit of another species and not only that, but to 

 the absolute destruction of the bird's own progeny 

 and risk of extinction of the species. " Nature had 

 not called in there," says Mr. Romanes, " a counter 

 instinct ; " that is, had left the poor little birds with 

 no instinct other than to serve the purposes of the 

 cuckoo — an instinct not counter to that of the cuckoo, 

 as Mr. Romanes put it, not nearly so adroitly as he 

 might. From first to last, here is a case, where the 

 instinct of the little birds not only benefits and is of 

 use to the cuckoo, and is systematically used by it, 

 but in the process their own progeny are ruthlessly 

 sacrificed ; as Goethe says, forcibly, from half-a-dozen 

 to a dozen singing birds sacrificed for one cuckoo ; for 



* Darwin and after Darwin, pp. 286-7. 



