34 Habit and Instinct. 



nestle down between them, and poke out their little heads 

 confidingly between my fingers. Here, then, there is a 

 congenital and instinctive tendency, to nestle in any warm 

 place, modified in accordance with acquired individual 

 experience. It was pretty to see three little partridges, 

 two French and one English, following me about the room 

 wherever I went. And when the instinctive tendency is 

 thus modified, its natural end seems to lapse ; for chicks 

 even a few days old seem to have completely lost any 

 instinctive tendency they may have possessed to run to 

 and cuddle under the hen. As to the existence of any 

 such instinctive response to the sight of the hen, or to 

 her clucking, there is difference of opinion. 



Spalding describes * how a chick, which had been 

 blindfolded at birth, was placed, twenty minutes after it 

 had been unhooded, " on rough ground, within sight 

 and call of a hen with a brood of its own age. After 

 standing chirping for about a minute, it started off towards 

 the hen, displaying as keen a perception of the qualities 

 of the outer world as it was ever likely to possess in after- 

 life. It never required to knock its head against a stone 

 to discover that there was ' no road that way.' It leaped 

 over the smaller obstacles that lay in its path, and ran 

 round the larger, reaching the mother in as nearly straight 

 a line as the nature of the ground would permit. This, 

 let it be remembered, was the first time it had ever walked 

 by sight." 



Other chicks, which had been placed in a bag imme- 

 diately they were hatched and kept there for a day or 

 two, ran eagerly to the clucking of a hen hidden from 

 their view in a box nine or ten feet distant. This ob- 

 servation was repeated on nine different chicks. But 

 Spalding draws our attention to the fact that this 



* Loc. cit., p. 289. 



