The Wit of the Wild 



r 



manifestations a good deal of intelligence seems 

 to be exercised the curing and garnering of 

 its hay by the pika, for example is not at all 

 incompatible with this view of the case. 



That this view is right seems plain, and an 

 alteration of circumstances would, no doubt, 

 prove it ; for should a sudden change of climate 

 by obliterating winter remove all need of their 

 exertion, the rodents would doubtless continue 

 for hundreds of years to come to heap up stores 

 in the season of abundance, just as that old- 

 fogey woodpecker of southern California still 

 hammers hundreds of acorns into holes in the 

 bark of sugar pines preparatory to a time of 

 scarcity which no longer arrives, so that the 

 bird of the present day will never need nor 

 care to make use of a single one of its treasures. 

 The European hamsters toil to lay up astonish- 

 ing masses of grain underground, not a tenth 

 of which, it is said, do they eat, because now 

 they sink into the cold trance and sleep for 

 months beside their almost untouched stores. 

 Here, as in the case of the opossum, elsewhere 

 described, an instinct has overshot its mark, 



