v THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIRDS' NESTS 111 



to have been the result of their having been used to such a 

 nest. The one thing that remains, and which Mr. Lowne 

 thinks proves instinct, is their not forming their nest in the 

 box they had been accustomed to, and their using sticks and 

 twigs instead of straw only. But they evidently preferred 

 the light and air and movement of the branch. That was all 

 in harmony with their special organisation, and was a return to 

 the habits which were at once the result and the cause of that 

 organisation. They preferred to make the nest in this pleasant 

 place, but they did not know how to begin. As soon as the 

 sticks, lodged by accident, furnished a sufficient base, they car- 

 ried up more sticks and soon obtained a rude nest. They saw 

 that smooth straight twigs dropped to the ground, whereas 

 branched twigs kept in the branches, and they had quite 

 sense and observation enough to choose the branched twigs 

 for the purpose. In all this there seems to me to be no proof 

 of the operation of instinct as usually understood, and the 

 experiment yet requires trying with some of our native birds 

 that build elaborate and very distinctive nests, such as the 

 song-thrush, the gold-crest, the wren or the long-tailed tit. If 

 several of these could be brought up in strange nests, and 

 then be turned out into a large wired enclosure containing 

 shrubs and bushes, and if under these circumstances each built 

 an unmistakable nest of its own species, the nest-building 

 instinct would have to be admitted. 



The nearest approach to such a test experiment has been 

 recently furnished by Mr. Charles Dixon. He states that 

 some young chaffinches (Fringilla Ccelebs) were, taken to New 

 Zealand and there turned out. They throve well, and a nest 

 built by a pair of them was photographed, and from this photo- 

 graph the nest is thus described by Mr. Dixon : " It is evidently 

 built in the fork of a branch, and shows very little of that neat- 

 ness of fabrication for which this bird is noted in England. The 

 cup of the nest is small, loosely put together, apparently lined 

 with feathers, and the walls of the structure are prolonged 

 about eighteen inches and hang loosely down the side of the 

 supporting branch. The whole structure bears some resem- 

 blance to the nests of the hangnests, with the exception that 

 the cavity containing the eggs is situated on the top. Clearly 

 these New Zealand chaffinches were at a loss for a design 



