244 CHILDHOOD OF ANIMALS 



taken them once, and chewed and swallowed them, they recognise 

 them again and seize them greedily. Green onions, celery and 

 some other wholesome but strong-smelling leaves most of the 

 animals to which I have offered them have taken at once. I do 

 not think that there is any instinctive recognition of or rejection of 

 poisonous plants ; the young animals have good memories, and if 

 a plant is unpleasant either to the sense of smell or still more to the 

 palate, it is rejected after trial and not taken again. 



Young mammals which naturally would have their food brought 

 to them by their parents, seem to have a very small amount of 

 instinctive selection or rejection, and when they are brought up 

 by hand will take very unsuitable food. This at least has the 

 convenience that they are not at all difficult to get to feed when 

 they are being brought up artificially, and will often live for a time 

 on very erroneous diet. Many of them that have been treated in this 

 way acquire unwholesome tastes which are not easy to replace. 

 Young walruses and polar bears have reached zoological collections 

 after having been kept alive since their capture on whales' blubber, 

 which is certainly an unsatisfactory diet for a growing animal, and 

 there has been the greatest difficulty in getting them to take fish 

 or flesh. 



Thus even in the simplest and most necessary parts of their 

 activities, young birds and mammals do not spring fully equipped 

 into life, but have to learn by trying. They have instincts, but 

 these carry them only a little way. Few of them can walk or swim 

 or fly without laborious practice, often aided by help or coercion 

 from their parents. They have not full control even over their 

 muscular powers, and there is not a proper adjustment of the co- 

 ordination between eyesight and movement. They overbalance 

 themselves, totter, outrun themselves, stumble and bump about, 

 miscalculating distances, and are blundering creatures in an un- 

 familiar world, whilst the lower animals take up the game of life 

 as if they were only renewing it after a sleep. At first sight, the 

 advantage seems to rest with the animals guided and ruled by 

 perfected instincts, but we have to remember that they are at the 

 mercy of the chance of finding the right conditions and the right 

 stimulations to awaken these instincts. If the conditions are wrong, 

 the world is not merely strange, but forbidding, hostile, impossible, 

 and they perish. The higher types, being less accurately adjusted 

 to any particular environment, can become accustomed to a much 

 wider range of environment. No conditions are quite right for 



