THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 163 



cited in this way by the display of what might be called 

 their wedding finery, but this feeling may very well be 

 extended by association to other and unusual things, 

 all of which the birds are attracted to because of their 

 tendency to produce sexual excitement.* The follow- 

 ing anecdote, given to Eomanes by a lady, illustrates 

 this: 



" A white fantail pigeon lived with his family in a 

 pigeon house in our stable yard. He and his wife had 

 been brought originally from Sussex, and had lived, 

 respected and admired, to see their children of the third 

 generation, when he suddenly became the victim of 

 the infatuation I am about to describe. 



" No eccentricity whatever was remarked in his con- 

 duct until one day I chanced to pick up somewhere in 

 the garden a ginger-beer bottle of the ordinary brown- 

 stone description. I flung it into the yard, where it 

 fell immediately below the pigeon house. That instant 

 down flew 'pater familias, and to my no small astonish- 

 ment commenced a series of genuflections, evidently 

 doing homage to the bottle. He strutted round and 

 round it, bowing and scraping and cooing and per- 

 forming the most ludicrous antics I ever beheld on the 

 part of an enamoured pigeon. . . . Nor did he cease 

 these performances until we removed the bottle, and, 

 which proved that this singular aberration of instinct 

 had become a fixed delusion, whenever the bottle was 

 thrown or placed in the yard — no matter whether it 

 lay horizontally or was placed upright — the same ridic- 

 ulous scene was enacted; at that moment the pigeon 

 came flying down with quite as great alacrity as when 



* I find a similar idea advanced in Lloyd Morgan's Animal 

 Life and Intelligence, p. 408. 



