124 Instinct and its Lessons 



fowl, will add this also to its repertory. Obviously it 

 cannot be parental training which enables it to do so. 



None of these instances, however, brings such weighty 

 testimony to bear upon the matter, as do the phenomena 

 of migration. These have ever been a marvel to the 

 mind of man, and, to explain the mystery they offer, he 

 has been prompt to believe that if the Stork knoweth 

 his way in the air, and the Turtle, and Swallow, and 

 Crane, the time of their coming, it has been because 

 they are in the leading strings of a power he cannot 

 see. 



The broader features of these phenomena are known 

 to everybody. We are all aware that the Swallow and 

 the Nightingale, the Cuckoo and the Corncrake, come 

 to us in spring and leave us in autumn, and that the 

 Woodcock, the Snow-bunting, and the Fieldfare reverse 

 the process, coming for the winter months and wander- 

 ing away to northern lands to breed. The journeys 

 they undertake, in their oft-repeated change of quarters, 

 are prodigious. The Stork, who spends his summer 

 season in close acquaintance with civilized men, his 

 net erected on the housetop of a Dutch or German 

 village, is to be found in winter by the great African 

 lakes, amid Crocodiles and Hippopotami ; the Warblers 

 travel to and fro between our woodlands and Morocco, 

 or Asia Minor, while our Wild Ducks and Fieldfares 

 betake themselves for the nesting time to Lapland or 

 Siberia, even within the Arctic circle. Why our summer 

 visitors should ever come to us, or our winter visitors 

 ever depart, we cannot tell. It is not food, it is not 

 warmth, we know not what it is, that they gain by the 

 exchange. Yet year after year they unhesitatingly em- 

 bark on the voyage, which we cannot understand how 

 some of them accomplish. The Corncrake, during his 

 stay with us, seems hardly able to fly the length of a 

 field ; how does he ever get across the seas ? How do 

 the tiny Gold-crests, five full-grown specimens of which 

 weigh less than an ounce, come, earning their title of 

 the Woodcock's pilots, across the German Ocean? 



