I20 SMELL IN BIRDS 



an outsider, one who is rightly anxious not to incur 

 the displeasure of his masters in science and psy- 

 chology, and of all those who have exalted them- 

 selves to the seats of wisdom. 



So far I have said nothing about the sense of smell 

 in birds; there is, indeed, little to say. Birds have 

 the olfactory nerves, inherited from the reptiles, and 

 the passages are mere slits in the horny beak, which 

 they have in place of hands, and which serves them 

 also as an implement, or rather as a whole box of 

 tools — spear, hatchet, scraper, wedge, awl, spade or 

 pickaxe, knife and fork and spoon. The anatomical 

 ornithologists say that we know little about the 

 smelling nerves of birds, except that they are de- 

 generated and feeble compared with those of other 

 animals, also that some birds have quite lost the 

 sense. Nor is this to be wondered at when we consider 

 the extraordinary development of vision in the bird 

 — that the bird lives in his sense of sight as the dog, 

 mole, and rat live in the sense of smell. The growth 

 of one sense has caused the decay of the other. This 

 at all events is the present view of the matter, but 

 during the first three or four decades of the nine- 

 teenth century the question was discussed in the 

 journals with all the fury proper to that early period, 

 when passions were stronger and " language " more 

 free than with us, and when if one naturalist differed 

 from another about sight and smell in birds, he was 

 frankly told that he was a fool if not something worse. 



We smile at the chief argument of the smellists of 



