DISCUSSIONS ON INSTINCT 281 
reference to the observation specially described in my 
letter, he plainly either misses the real point of my ob- 
servation or neatly evades it. One might as well say 
a puppy learns to smell by accident, for, in the case 
in question, the chick did not swallow water merely, 
but raised its head like an old fowl and drank perfectly 
well on the very first occasion that its beak had ever 
been immersed in water (as a puppy sucks when its lips 
first come in contact with a teat, etc.) ; and this I take 
it is what happens in nature. The young grouse in the 
forest, or even the chick on a grass plot or in a garden, 
would come in contact with water without any assistance 
from the mother bird. 
The assumption that “the chick might die of thirst in 
the presence of water, as the sight of water does not 
call up the movements of pecking at it, as do food and 
other small objects,” is purely gratuitous. It is not 
primarily so much the sight, but rather the touch of 
water—inevitable, as I have tried to show, in a wild 
state—that in the very first instance leads to drinking, 
though the bird would also peck at shining dewdrops, 
as my chick did at the drops on the rim of a vessel 
containing water. With a fair chance, and plenty of 
water about, in a condition at all resembling that in 
nature, there is no such thing for a vigorous, hardy 
chick as death from thirst. 
That habits may be hereditary in dogs I have many 
times observed in my own kennel, during the last eight 
years, and, without expressing any opinion as to the 
origin of instincts now, I can see no impossibility in 
their dating back to habits. 
A doctrine which asserts that eating is instinctive, 
but that drinking is not, is, to my mind, one to marvel 
at, and is a poor foundation for theories of evolution or 
heredity. 
