360 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANLMALS. 



[I will give one case of migration which seemed to me at 

 first to offer especial difficulty. It is asserted that in the 

 extreme north of America, Elk and Eeindeer annually cross, as 

 if they could smell the herbage at the distance of a hundred 

 miles, a tract of absolute desert, to visit certain islands where 

 there is a better (but still scanty) su^^ply of food. How 

 could their migration have been first established ? If the 

 climate formerly liad been a little more favourable, the desert 

 a hundred miles in width might then have been clothed with 

 vegetation sufficient to have just tempted the quadrupeds 

 over it, and so to have found out the more fertile northern 

 islet. But the intense Glacial preceded our present climate, 

 and therefore the idea of a former better climate seemed quite 

 untenable; but if those American geologists are right who 

 believe, from the range of recent shells, that subsequently to 

 the Glacial period there was one slightly warmer than the 

 present period, then perhaps we have a key to the migration 

 across the desert of the Elk and Eeindeer.*] 



Instmctive Fear. — I have already discussed the hereditary 

 tameness of our domestic animals ; from what follows I have 

 no doubt that the fear of man has always first to be acquired 

 in a state of nature, and that under domestication it is merely 

 lost. In all the few archipelagoes and islands inhabited by 

 man, of which I have been able to find an early account, the 

 native animals w^ere entirely void of fear of man : I have 

 ascertained this in six cases in the most distant parts of the 

 world, and wdth birds and mammals of the most different 

 kinds.! At the Galapagos Islands I pushed a hawk off a 



Azores, thougli lie thinks tliat perliaps tlie Quail, wliicli migrates fi'oiu 

 island to island, may leave the Archipelago. [In pencil it is added " Canaries 

 none."— a. J. R.] 



In the Falkland Islands, so far as I can find, no land-bird is migratory. 

 From enquiries which I have made, I find there is no migratory bird in 

 Mam'itius or Boiirbon. Colenso asserts {Tasmanian Journal, \o\. li, p. 227) 

 that a cuckoo, C. lucidus, is migratory, remaining only three or four months 

 in New Zealand ; but IN'ew Zealand is so large an island that it may yery 

 easily migrate to the south and remain there quite unknown to the natives of 

 the north. Faroe, situated about 180 miles from the north of Scotland, have 

 several migratory birds (Gi-aber, Tagehuch, 1830, s. 205) ; Iceland seems to 

 be the strongest exception to the general ride, but it lies only miles 



from the line of 100 fathoms. [The last ten words are added 



in pencil with the blanks left for subsequent filling in. — Gr. J. R.] 



* [The paragraph which I have enclosed in square brackets is faintly 

 struck out in pencil. — Gr. J. R.]. 



t I have given in my Journal of Researches (1845), p. 378, details on the 

 Falkland and Galapagos. Mr. Cada Mosto (Kerr's Collection of Voyages-, 



