^°*19^2^^T TowNSEND, Bird Genealogy. 291 



orous to a seed-eating habit. The Myrtle Warbler thrives through 

 the cold winters chiefly on a diet of bayberries, while all the other 

 members of this family seek more genial climes, where they may 

 continue to live on insects. Not only this, but a large number 

 of its own species go south, and winter in the Greater Antilles, 

 Mexico and Panama, where insect food is of course abundant. 

 The New England birds eat not only bayberries, but also the seeds 

 of grass and weeds that extend above the snow, and they glean 

 the bark of trees like Titmice. 



Now birds like men are clannish ; in fact there is a remarkable 

 similarity between animal and human nature, — which is not so 

 surprising when one considers our origin and relationships. Among 

 savages slight differences due to different environment, set apart 

 one group or race from another. Each race considers itself the 

 people, and despises,.fights and refuses to mix with the other. The 

 Eskimo and the Indian, although both manifestly of Eastern 

 origin, so dislike each other that intermarriage, except under the 

 influence of civiliza,tion, is rare. This tendency makes of course 

 for differentiation; without this tendency the constant mixture 

 of races would make the production of new species more difficult. 

 While this clannishness is most marked among savages, it is also 

 so pronounced in civilized races that each nation classes all foreign- 

 ers, especially those that speak a different tongue, as their inferiors 

 with whom intermarriage is not to be thought of. The more 

 ignorant the individuals", that;, is "to say the more primitive or 

 animal-like, the more intense is this clannishness, and, its boun- 

 ^Jaries may be limited, not by the nation or state, but even by the 

 village in which the individuals live. Mr. Punch's collier who 

 proposed ' 'caving 'alf a brick' at -the stranger in town is an in- 

 stance in point. 



The element of home also enters into this exclusiveness which 

 favors the formation of races,, and hence of new species. This 

 factor is strongly shown in the human species unless the individual 

 has become cosmopolitan by travel and education; and the in- 

 habitants of what appears to an outsider to be a most desolate 

 region regard their home as superior to any other country on the 

 globe, and pine if taken away from it. 



Now the seed-eating Myrtle Warbler that spends its winters 

 in the cold and stormy north is undoubtedly as clannish as the 



