350 Ornithological Observations and Reflections in Shetland. 



evidence that rebuts the apparent absurdity. On the other 

 hand, what seems clearly indicated as the cause of this sudden 

 collective action, is precisely the same one, which, in the 

 opinion of some men eminent in varous branches of science, 

 as well as of others representing the mens sana order — the 

 whole now a very large body — has been proved upon the 

 evidence, both spontaneous and experimental, to be a factor in 

 human psychology. Thus two lines of evidence, widely 

 different — nothing, I think, is more different from psychical 

 research, of the ordinary kind, than field natural history — 

 converge and support one another, a fact, the significance of 

 which it would not be easy. to over-estimate. 



The fact would seem to be this. Physiologists have 

 demonstrated that special sense organs exist, and not being in 

 the possession of evidence to show that such perception as is 

 imparted to living beings through special sense-organs, or any 

 other kind of perception, can be otherwise conveyed, have 

 concluded, on the ordinary principle of seeing's believing, that 

 no other is or can be so conveyed. But physiologists have 

 interrogated nature in the laboratory, and have not specially 

 interested themselves in control questionings outside it. Had 

 part of their province been the study of free animal life, amidst 

 its natural surroundings, and had they, thus, of their own 

 observation and discovery, become acquainted with the 

 phenomenon of simultaneous movement amongst large bodies 

 of birds, they would, probably, in many cases, have been as 

 puzzled to conceive of them as due to impressions received 

 through the special sense organs of sight, hearing, touch, 

 taste or smell, as are Mr. Pearson and myself — to go no farther. 

 This inability to explain them would have raised a doubt 

 as to whether they could be so explained, and such doubt 

 having arisen in a way, and through a channel, calculated to 

 impress physiologists, would have got into the physiological 

 text-books, and the bounds of orthodox science have been 

 thereby a little enlarged. It may, perhaps, seem ' a wild 

 surmise,' but to me it comes disguised as a necessity, that the 

 special perceptions received through their corresponding sense- 

 organs were founded on some more generalised kind of per- 

 ception, which existed before these even began to be separately 

 developed ; but, setting aside first origins, there was probably 

 something on which each of these structures grew up, the 

 existence of which, if they never had done so, could only have 

 been conjectured through observation of the activities of the 

 being not possessing them. Further, this somexhing, though 

 inferior, we must suppose to have been of the same essential 

 nature as that which the structure, if present, would have 

 assisted. 



{To be continued). 



Naturalifi, 



