212 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
Instinct is one thing, the migratory impulse another: we must 
also take into account, when considering the migration of birds, 
except the very young, the wonderful powers of memory dis- 
played by animals. ‘Those who are accustomed to ride and drive 
much, must have noticed how rarely a horse forgets any road he 
has once travelled, or any house he has stopped at, it may be years 
previously. Out of many instances, I will mention one of this 
memory in birds. In ‘The Zoologist’ for 1875, p. 4698, Mr. 
Nicholls, writing from South Devon, mentions the case of a young 
Herring Gull taken from the nest in May, 1871, and brought up 
in a state of domestication. In May, 1872, it left its quarters, and 
was given up as entirely lost, but, strange to say, in November, 1873, 
it returned, then in beautiful plumage, and allowed its old friend 
and playfellow, a little boy of eight years old, to take the same 
familiarities with it as formerly. 
The migratory seasons are undoubtedly the most important 
periods in the life of a bird: without these regularly recurring 
periods life would be impossible for them; their existence and 
the continuation of their race is dependent on these annually 
recurring voyages through the air. If, then, the instinct has 
been so strongly and rapidly developed in birds in the case of 
the paper kite and telegraph-wires, how much stronger may we 
suppose it to be in guiding the bird along its air-path towards 
that bourne which countless generations of its kind have sought 
before. 
Knough I think has been said to prove the untenability of 
this new automaton hypothesis. Indeed, the more it is considered 
the more absurd does it appear. Nothing short of a miracle 
would be required to cause a gust of wind to take the same 
Stone Curlew, in the case above cited (and it is impossible it 
could have been otherwise than the same bird), year after year, 
from its winter quarters somewhere in Africa and set it down 
in its former nesting haunt in what is now the middle of a 
Suffolk wood. 
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