540 Mr. C. F. M. Swyimerton on 



quantity by continuous watching and special experi- 

 mentation. 



4. The Use of unsuitable Animals. — This criticism was made 

 of the offering of terrestrial eggs to a lemur and arboreal 

 eggs to a rat. I had probably not been sufficiently explicit. 

 1 offered to each animal eggs of both categories^ and each 

 showed preferences in his own department, as well as 

 confirming the other's preferences in his. The former fact 

 is all that need really matter, and the additional confirmation 

 was, at any rate, useful and suggestive. 



The critic's point was that refusals of unaccustomed objects 

 might be merely due to their non-recognition as possible 

 food. Had a totally new kind of food been offered the 

 criticism was perfectly sound, as I could quote numerous 

 instances to show : horses transferred for the first time 

 from an arid pasture to lucerne (Burtt-Davy), nestlings 

 reared on a very limited diet and dogs put on to a quite new 

 food (my own observations), camels and natives of Jeru>alem 

 (Cyril Crossland) ! But within the classes of food that 

 they are accustomed to prey upon, wild animals are great 

 experimenters, and, as anyone who has experimented much 

 on them will know, a new appearance hei-e is merely a 

 special incentive to trial. My African birds, though not 

 hungry, attacked with the greatest zest various Oriental and 

 South American butterflies that I showed them — some of 

 them of liighly nauseous species, and all representing 

 appearances that they had never seen before. Similarly, to 

 an egg-eater an egg is recognizable as such whatever iis 

 coloration. If the pattern be new, so much the worse for 

 the egg. A Monitor that came into the possession of my 

 friend Mr.- T. Honey, the energetic Curator of the Lourengo 

 Marques Gardens, refused raw beef until forcible feeding 

 with it showed it that it was a suitable food, but from the 

 first it readily attacked fowls' eggs, though it had probably 

 never met with them before. A lemur that I captured in 

 the thick of the Jihu jungle, far from any human hahitatioti, 

 and to which I offered an unbroken hen's egg that very day, 

 did the same. In the same way the rat, the lemur, and the 



