Dec. 14, 1883.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



355 



:^^ MAGAZINE OF SGIENCE 



LONDON: FRIDAY, DEC, 14, 1883. 



Contents op No, 111. 



PAQB 



A Natnralist'a Year : RobinB Come 



for Crumbs , By Grant Alien ... 355 , 

 The Zone of Small Planets. By i 



R. A. Proctor 356 



Darwin on Instinct 357 , 



How 13 a Life Assurance Society j 



Worked? 358 I 



Beriewe : How to See — Nature's ! 



Energy, &c 359 I 



PIGB 



'he ^Earth-Flatteners' Challenge. 



{IUn><.) By R. A. Proctor 362 



["he Eclipse of Last May. {Illua.) -'itJS 



^ime Turned Back 363 



spondence : The Extraordinary 



Sunset; 



Straits Eruptif 



— Moon's Moti 



Dur Chess Colun 



Shadows — Sunda 

 n— Great Sea-wave 

 Dn — Saturn, &c. ... \ 



A NATURALIST'S YEAR. 



By Grant Allen. 



THE KOBIX COMES FOR CRUMBS. 



WINTER has set in at last in real earnest. The hoar 

 frost coats the naked boughs of the young birches 

 in the clump upon the snow-clad lawn ; the grasses by the 

 bank arch over in dainty filagree with the bending load of 

 drifted flakes that bow down their laden heads so hea\'ily ; 

 and the poor little freezing sparrows, huddled together, half 

 dazed, by the garden palings, hardly know how to move or 

 cheep in the bitter cold that seems to paralyse their feeble 

 ii uttering, limp, wee wings. The lime has fairly come for 

 the exercise of indiscriminate out-door-relicf to these small 

 winter pensioners of our inexpensive human bounty. Let 

 U8 throw o])cn the breakfast-room window wide and drop 

 out the crumbs from the trencher on to the flower-bed 

 below, for the benefit of these sad little frozen-out workmen, 

 who stand expectant with sidelong eye on the shrubbery 

 bushes in grateful anticipation of their accustomed 

 charitable feast See, now they fly down timidly from 

 their coign of vantage by the flowering laurustinus 

 shnib. They love to shelter thi'niselves there, close 

 by, or else below the aucuba and the Portugal laurels, 

 whose broad evergreen leaves hide them securely from our 

 too curious gaze^and they are busy picking up the precious 

 morsels, or squabbling with one another (like wee thieves 

 that they are) for the bigger bits that any one among their 

 numV)er may have chanced to annex in tlie general scramble. 

 But when they have all fed their fill, with much bickering 

 and snatching meanwhile, our own familiar robin, who lives 

 all winter in the garden as his fixed residence, comes boldly 

 up for his .share of the good things going so freely, and 

 takes his stand upon the window-sill itself without fear or 

 trembling, to eat the special meal that wo lay out there, 

 after the, others are satisfk'cl, for the sole gratification of 

 ■our particular ruddy-breastc<l favourite. 



It is curious how readily the acquired instinct of fear 

 for man in these naturally timid little birds dies out before 

 the exercise of a few weeks' steady kindness on tlie part of 

 A single household. It shows how much less rigid in its 

 action instinct really is, than most people in their hasty, 

 unthinking fashion are too easily prepared to admit. The 



ordinary idea about an instinct is that it is something 

 absolutely fixed and immovable — a tendency which will act 

 under given conditions, no matter what the final efiect ; 

 inexplicable, mysterious, and even perhaps a trifle mira- 

 culous. But when we come to consider a very simple case 

 like this one, it is easy to see both how the existing instinct 

 originally arose, and how it can even now be so rapidly 

 modified under favourable circumstances. And to begin 

 with, let us ask first, what is an instinct 1 in order to decide 

 whether the fear of man on the part of the small birds is 

 or is not really instinctive. 



According to Professor Bain's excellent definition, an 

 instinct is " an untaught ability," though it would perhaps 

 be still more correct to describe it as unlearnt than as un- 

 taught, for most knowledge acquired by the lower animals 

 is gained rather by experience than by actual communica- 

 tion. Knowledge or power, independent of personal ex- 

 perience, is indeed the key-note of instinct. Now, judged 

 by this standard, it is clear that the fear of man is instinc- 

 tive with each individual bird in England ; for even very 

 young birds, which have never seen a man before, are 

 known to be very much frightened at the first apparition 

 of that ancestrally alarming and very bloodthirsty animal, 

 who has hunted them down, shot them with gun, or still 

 earlier, with cross-bow, and shied stones at them (especially 

 in his immature or cub condition, when he is commonly 

 known as a boy) for many thousand generations at the very 

 shortest computation. In existing European birds terror 

 of this destructi\e and extremely cunning carnivore is 

 hereditary and intuitive in almost every unprotected 

 species. 



The origin of the instinct, however, as Mr. Darwin has 

 shown, is one on which we have an unusual amount of his- 

 torical proof ; for there are a few uninhabited oceanic 

 islands where the native birds show no fear at all of man, 

 and have to acquire the habit of fearing him by a long 

 and painful course of practical teaching. In other words, 

 the dread of human beings, though antecedent to expe- 

 rience in the individual, is not antecedent to experience in 

 the race as a whole. There is nothing in the mere out- 

 ward bodily features of the human face divine to make 

 it immediately and naturally an object of uneasiness and 

 terror to the eyes and brains of birds as such. It is only 

 by continuous persecution throughout many generations 

 that the fowls of the air at last come to inherit a nervous 

 system, so constituted that the very image of a human 

 being falling upon the retina causes an immediate and 

 intense desire to efiect an escape, without the bird itself being 

 able to understand the why and wherefore of iti singular 

 perturbation. What a melancholy tribute to our boasted 

 supremacy over all living things, that even the harm- 

 less small birds instinctively avoid us, as the here- 

 ditary enemies of their persecuted race ! The sight 

 of a man alarms them antecedently to all experience, 

 much as the roar of thunder alarms ourselves, as the 

 smell of lions alarms the camel, or as the sight of a 

 snake alarms the monkeys bred in the Zoo, and therefore 

 unfamiliar by personal experience with the feud which has 

 always raged between their respective ancestors in equatorial 

 forest glades. Yet, on the other hand, in the uninhabited 

 Galapagos archipelago Mr. Darwin found the whole animal 

 world so free from fear of man that he could push a hawk 

 off a tree with the muzzle of his gun, catch the big ambly- 

 rhyncus land-lizards quietly by the tail, and collect the 

 small birds to drink from a basin of water held between 

 his own hands. This primitive tameness is not easily lost, 

 either, for in the Falkland Islands, where the birds 

 have been more or les> liunted down at times for 

 nearly two centuries, they have not yet acquired any 



