158 BEHAVIOR OF PIGEONS. 



(4) A common pigeon mated with a small ring-dove shows great care in mounting its 

 mate, apparently fearing to injure or treat it roughly. 



(5) A male dove, when it sees another male in the act of soliciting or mounting its 

 mate, appears to understand instantly what the purpose is, and often makes frantic efforts 

 to intercept this act, giving the danger signal in the loudest and most excited form and 

 flying directly at the offending bird. 



An archangel brings straws from the yard and, in reaching his nest, goes in at a door 

 B, which is kept open, and then jumps off the partition C to get to the nest. The first egg 

 was already laid; the door B had been open during all the time of preparing the nest, but 

 the door A, which led directly to the nest, was kept closed. He had learned the indirect 

 way completely. I opened A while he was off after a straw; when he returned he went 

 through A, taking the direct way rather than the indirect. He did this the first time the 

 opportunity was presented, and repeated the same the second time. The third time he 

 entered at B, apparently from habit and not noticing that A was open. 



Obedience to impulse, or dependence upon it at all times, conduces to its power; 

 i. e., yielding to its promptings makes its promptings absolute master. These promptings 

 are the voice of instincts. Perhaps the extraordinary keenness of the sense-organs is due 

 largely to the obedient attention given to their messages. Obedience is practically complete; 

 the connection between ingoing message and outgoing response becomes strong and invio- 

 lable. The instinctive act follows the signal given. The signals are literally watched for 

 and the acts are fitted to them. If we continually listened to and depended upon our 

 instincts, they would soon control and exclude judgment or reason. If we followed our 

 senses as animals do we should have keener senses. (R 7, R 17.) 



INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE. 



In order to see how instinctive action may graduate into intelligent action it is well to 

 study closely animals in which the instincts have attained a high degree of complexity and 

 in which there can be no doubt about the automatic character of the activities. These 

 conditions are perfectly fulfilled in the pigeons, a group in which we have the further 

 advantage that wild and domestic species can be studied comparatively. 



It is quite certain that pigeons are totally blind to the meanings which we discover in 

 incubation. They follow the impulse to sit without a thought of consequences; and no 

 matter how many times the act has been performed, no idea of young pigeons ever enters 

 into the act. 1 They sit because they feel like it, begin when they feel impelled to do so, 

 and stop when the feeling is satisfied. Their time is generally correct, but they measure 

 it as blindly as a child measures its hours of sleep. A bird that sits after failing to lay an 

 egg, or after its eggs have been removed, is not acting from "expectation," but because 

 she finds it agreeable to do so and disagreeable not to do so. The same holds true of the 

 feeding instinct. The young are not fed from any desire to do them any good, but solely 

 for the relief of the parent. The evidence on this point can not be given here, 2 but I 

 believe it is conclusive. 



But if all this be true, where does the graduation towards intelligence manifest itself? 

 Certainly not in a comprehension of utilities which are discoverable only by human intel- 

 ligence. Whatever the pigeon instinct-mind contains, it is safe to say that the intelligence 

 is hardly more than a grain hidden in bushels of instinct, and one may search more than 

 a day and not find it. 



1 Professor James (Psychology, II, p. 390) thinks such an idea may arise and that it may encourage the bird to 

 sit. " Every instinctive act in an animal with memory," says James, "must cease to be 'blind' after being once repeated." 

 That must depend on the kind of memory the animal has. It is possible to have memory of a certain kind in some 

 things, while having absolutely none of any kind on other things. That is the case in pigeons, as I feel very sure. 



1 See Chapter VI. EDITOR. 



