1835.] TAMENESS OF BIRDS. 395 



black-necked swan — a bird of passage, which probably 

 brought with it the wisdom learnt in foreign countries. 



I may add that, according to Du Bois, all the birds 

 £t Bourbon in 1571-72, with the exception of the flamingoes 

 and geese, were so extremely tame, that they could be 

 caught by the hand, or killed in any number with a stick. 

 Again, at Tristan d'Acunha in the Atlantic, Carmichael"^ 

 states that the only two land-birds, a thrush and a bunting, 

 were " so tame as to suffer themselves to be caught with 

 a hand-net." From these several facts we may, I think, 

 conclude, first, that the wildness of birds with regard 

 to man is a particular instinct directed against him^ and 

 not dependent on any general degree of caution arising 

 from other sources of danger ; secondly, that it is not 

 acquired by individual birds in a short time, even when 

 much persecuted ; but that in the course of successive 

 generations it becomes hereditary. With domesticated 

 animals we are accustomed to see new mental habits or 

 instincts acquired and rendered hereditary ; but with 

 animals in a state of nature, it must always be most difficult 

 to discover instances of acquired hereditary knowledge. 

 In regard to the wildness of birds towards man, there is 

 no way of accounting for it, except as an inherited habit : 

 comparatively few young birds, in any one year, have 

 been injured by man in England, yet almost all, even 

 nestlings, are afraid of him ; many individuals, on the 

 other hand, both at the Galapagos and at the Falklands, 

 have been pursued and injured by man, but yet have not 

 learned a salutary dread of him. We may infer from these 

 facts, what havoc the introduction of any new beast of 

 prey must cause in a country, before the instincts of 

 the indigenous inhabitants have become adapted to the 

 stranger's craft or power. 



* '* Linnean Transactions," vol. xii. p. 406. The most anomalous fact on this 

 subject which I have met with is the wildness ot the small birds in the Arctic 

 parts of North America (as described by Richardson, " Fauna Bor.," vol. ii. 

 p. 332), where they are said never to be persecuted. This case is the more 

 strangle, because it is asserted that some of the same species in their winter* 

 quarters in the United .States are tame. There is much, as Dr. Richardson 

 well remarks, utterly inexplicable connected with the different degrees ot 

 shyness and care with which birds conceal their nests. How strange it is 

 that the English wood-pigeon, generally so wild a bird, should very frequently 

 rear its young in shrubberies close to houses I 



