254 MENTAL FACULTIES SEC. 



cates, seems to me, in face of these facts, to make no less a 

 demand on the understanding than miracles. 



The difference between the chickens I studied this year 

 and those last year in their first behaviour with regard to 

 food is possibly due to the fact that food was first set 

 before the former some time after hatching, so that they 

 pecked at the millet as soon as they saw it from hunger, 

 while the latter being fed immediately after they were 

 hatched, had to be attracted by the falling of the grains. 

 Only a repetition of the experiments can decide this question. 

 But the fact that the young birds, without ever having seen 

 seed or water before, began to eat and drink, is sufficient 

 alone to excite wonder at so high a degree of inheritance of 

 acquired powers. It is true that this fact is very general, for 

 we must not forget that the young of countless other animals 

 take food at once in the same way, for example, every newly- 

 hatched caterpillar; but closer relations of course between 

 the caterpillar and its food-plant exist and are inherited than 

 in the case of chickens. 



Experiments carried out by Mr. Douglas Spalding 1 on 

 newly-hatched chicks have afforded results similar to mine. 



That writer placed a cap over the heads of chickens 

 which he took out of the egg before their eyes had been 

 capable of sight. When after one to three days he withdrew 

 the cap, the chicks seemed almost without exception stunned 

 by the light, and remained for some minutes motionless. 



1 Douglas Spalding, Macmillan's Magazine, 1873. Cf. also W. Preyer : Die 

 Sede des Kindes, Leipzig, 1882, p. 82. The chickens preferred the yolk of egg 

 to the albumen from the first. The observation communicated to Romanes by 

 Allen Thomson, according to which chickens hatched on to a carpet did not 

 scratch as long as they were kept on it, but began at once to do so when some 

 gravel was strewn over it, is explained by the latter as due to the absence in the 

 one case, the action in the other, of the accustomed stimulus, the experience of 

 which is inherited (Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 174). 



