A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES 



cated among the wild animals! How wild and 

 alarmed the deer become after the opening of the 

 first day of the shooting season. Those who have 

 not seen or heard a hunter seem to feel the impend- 

 ing danger. 



The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the 

 monarch) illustrate the same law. In the fall they 

 are all seized with this impulse to go South and 

 thousands of them march in one body. At night 

 they roost in the trees. I have seen photographs 

 of them in which they appeared like a new kind of 

 colored foliage covering the trees. In the return 

 flight in the spring, the same massing again occurs. 

 Recently the Imperial Valley in California was in- 

 vaded by a vast army of worms moving from east 

 to west. In countries that have been cursed with 

 a plague of grasshoppers witnesses of the spectacle 

 describe them as moving in the same way. They 

 stopped or delayed railway trains and auto- 

 mobiles, their crushed bodies making the rails 

 and highways as slippery as grease would have 

 made them. Ten million or ten billion behaving 

 as one. 



This community of mind stands the lower orders 

 in great stead. It makes up to them in a measure 

 for the want of reason and judgment. In what 

 we call telepathy we get hints of the same thing 

 among ourselves. Telepathy is probably a sur- 

 vival from our earlier animal state. 



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