The Dawn of Mind 221 



It is emotional art, expressing feelings in the medium of sound. 

 On the part of the females, who are supposed to listen, it betokens 

 a cultivated ear. 



As to the other senses, touch is not highly developed except 

 about the bill, where it reaches a climax in birds like the wood- 

 cock, which probe for unseen earthworms in the soft soil. Taste 

 seems to be poorly developed, for most birds bolt their food, but 

 there is sometimes an emphatic rejection of unpalatable things, 

 like toads and caterpillars. Of smell in birds little is known, but 

 it has been proved to be present in certain cases, e.g. in some noc- 

 turnal birds of prey. It seems certain that it is by sight, not by 

 smell, that the eagles gather to the carcass; but perhaps there is 

 more smell in birds than they are usually credited with. One 

 would like to experiment with the oil from the preen gland of 

 birds to see whether the scent of this does not help in the recogni- 

 tion of kin by kin at night or amid the darkness of the forest. 

 There may be other senses in birds, such as a sense of temperature 

 and a sense of balance ; but no success has attended the attempts 

 made to demonstrate a magnetic sense, which has been impa- 

 tiently postulated by students of bird migration in order to "ex- 

 plain" how the birds find their way. The big fact is that in birds 

 there are two widely open gateways of knowledge, the sense of 

 sight and the sense of hearing. 



Instinctive Aptitudes 



Many a young water-bird, such as a coot, swims right away 

 when it is tumbled into water for the first time. So chicks peck 

 without any learning or teaching, very young ducklings catch 

 small moths that flit by, and young plovers lie low when the dan- 

 ger-signal sounds. But birds seem strangely limited as regards 

 many of these instinctive capacities limited when compared with 

 the ''little-brained" ants and bees, which have from the first such 

 a rich repertory of ready-made cleverness. The limitation in 

 birds is of great interest, for it means that intelligence is coming 



