Locomotion in Young Birds. TJ 



Speaking of the allied Maleo (Megacephalon rubripes) 

 of Celebes, which lays its eggs in warm volcanic sand, 

 Mr. A. R. Wallace says,* " The young birds, on breaking 

 the shell, work their way up through the sand and run 

 off at once to the forest ; and I was assured by Mr. 

 Duivenboden, of Ternate, that they can fly the very day 

 they are hatched. He had taken some eggs on board his 

 schooner, which hatched during the night, and in the 

 morning the little birds flew readily across the cabin." 



Here, then, we have birds in which the instinctive 

 co-ordination for flight is not, as in the great majority of 

 birds, more or less deferred, but is connate. And there is 

 in this case no opportunity for either parental instruction 

 or the imitation of older birds. 



A congenital basis of flight may therefore be taken 

 as established. And on this basis is built the finished 

 and most admirable product. For no one would be likely 

 to contend that the consummate skill evinced in fully 

 developed flight at its best — that activity which is per- 

 formed sometimes with perhaps the maximum, at other 

 times it would seem with the minimum, of animal effort — 

 the hurtling flight of the falcon ; the hovering of the kestrel; 

 the wheeling of swifts ; the rapid dart and sudden poise of 

 the humming-bird ; the easy sweep of the seagull ; the 

 downward glide of the stork, which has been observed to 

 slide down an inclined plane of air with a descent of about 

 one foot in five from the high rock on which the town of 

 Constantine is built, and reach the ground at a distance 

 of more than a mile from its starting-point ; t or even the 

 easy descent from the house-roof of a pigeon, with never 

 a vibration of the wings, till just as it turns to windward 

 in alighting ; — no one, I say, would be likely to contend 



* "Malay Archipelago," edit. 1894, p. 204. 



t Britonniere, quoted in the * Dictionary of Birds/'" p 263. 



