292 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS. 



seemed to have turned round him as a centre. In this con- 

 nection I may quote the following passage from a letter 

 published some years ago by Mr. Darwin in " Nature " 

 (vol. vii) : — 



" The manner in which the sense of direction is sometimes 

 suddenly disarranged in very old and feeble persons, and the 

 feeling of strong distress which, as I know, has been experi- 

 enced by persons when they have suddenly found out that 

 they have been proceeding in a wholly unexpected and wrong 

 direction, leads to the suspicion that some part of the brain 

 is specialized for the function of direction. Whether animals 

 may not possess the faculty of keeping a dead-reckoning of 

 their course in a much more perfect degree than man ; or 

 whether this faculty may not come into play on the com- 

 mencement of a journey, when an animal is shut up in a 

 basket, I will not attempt to discuss, as I have not sufficient 

 data." He also alludes to the case of Audubon's pinioned 

 wild goose, which showed a very determined impulse to 

 migrate at the proper season, but mistook the direction and 

 went due north instead of south. 



Lastly, I may quote the following from Dr. Bastian's 

 work on the Brain.* 



" On this subject, G. C. Merrill, writing from Kansas, 

 says : — 



* I have learned from the hunters and guides who spend 

 their lives on the plains and mountains w^est of us, that no 

 matter how far, or with what turns, they may have been led, 

 in chasing the bison or other game, they, on their return to 

 camp, always take a straight line. In explanation, they say 

 that, unconsciously to themselves, they have kept all the 

 turns in their mind.' 



" Referring to his travels in the State of Western Virginia, 

 Mr. Henry Forde ('Nature,' April 17, 1873, p. 463) writes 

 as follows : — ' It is said that even the most experienced hun- 

 ters of the forest-covered mountains in that unsettled region 

 are liable to a kind of seizure — that they 'lose their heads* 

 all at once, and become convinced that they are going in 

 quite the contrary direction to what they had intended, and 

 that no reasoning nor pointing out of land-marks by their 

 companions, nor observations of the position of the sun, can 



* Brain a-f an Organ of Mind, p. 215, wliere see also for cases of way- 

 finding in animals. 



