288 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 



me by correspondents, similarly relating to individual vari- 

 ations of the ancestral instinct of incubation in order to 

 meet the requirements of a novel environment. Thug 

 Mr. J. F. Fisher tells me that while he was a commander 

 in the East India trade he always took a quantity of fowls 

 to sea for food. The laying-boxes being in a confined 

 space, the hens used to quarrel over their occupancy ; and 

 one of the hens adopted the habit of removing the ' nest- 

 eggs ' which Mr. Fisher placed in one of the boxes to 

 another box of the same kind not very far away. He 

 watched the process through a chink of a door, and ' saw 

 her curl her neck round the egg, thus forming a cup by 

 which she lifted the egg,^ and conveyed it to the other 

 box. He adds : — 



I can give no information as to the more recondite question 

 why the egg was removed, or the fastidious preference of the 

 one box over the other, or the inventive faculty that suggested 

 the neck as a makeshift hand; but from the despatch with 

 which she effected the removal of the egg in the case I saw, I 

 have no doubt that this hen was the one which had performed 

 the feat so often before. 



The explanation of the preference shown for the one 

 box over the other may, I think, be gathered from another 

 part of my correspondent's letter, for he there mentions 

 incidentally that the box in which he placed the nest-egg, 

 and from which the hen removed it, was standing near a 

 door which was usually open, and thus situated in a more 

 exposed position than the other box. But be this as it 

 may, considering that among domestic fowls the habit of 

 conveying eggs is not usual, such isolated cases are inte- 

 resting as showing how instincts may originate. Jesse 

 gives an exactly similar case (' Crieanings,' vol. i., p. 149) 

 of the Cape goose, which removed eggs from a nest at- 

 tacked by rats, and another case of a wild duck doing the 

 same. 



In the same connection, and with the same remarks, I 

 may quote the following case in which a fowl adopted the 

 habit of conveying, not her eggs, but her young chickens. 

 I quote it from Houzeau (' Journ.,' i., p. 332), who gives 



