Vor. II, Pr. IT] LOOMIS—A REVIEW OF THE TUBINARES 727 
Inheritance 
In the attempts to explain bird migration, inheritance has 
often been made to bear the whole burden of the matter. It 
has even been held that young birds but a few weeks from the 
nest possess faculties that enable them, without the guidance 
of their seniors, to perform journeys to definite destinations, in 
some instances thousands of miles distant. This belief arose 
from a partial knowledge of the facts of migration, like the 
belief in transformation and hibernation’ at an earlier period ; 
it was assumed that the young weak-winged birds that drop 
out of the ranks migrate alone, arrested migration thus being 
mistaken for migration. Even at this late day, the magic 
words, sense of direction, instinct, “inherited but unconscious 
experience,’ linger in the literature as answers to the ques- 
tions: How, and why do birds migrate? 
The novel experiments of Dr. John B. Watson with Noddy 
and Sooty Terns at the Dry Tortugas here demand attention. 
Dr. Watson sums up the results of his experiments as follows: 
“T think that these tests are significant. The return from Cape 
Hatteras is really startling. Cape Hatteras is hundreds of 
miles outside the range of distribution of the noddy and sooty 
terns. If my statement that the birds rarely leave the islands 
for distances greater than 15 knots for purposes of feeding 
corresponds with the facts, it becomes extremely improbable 
that they could have formed visual associations throughout 
such a vast territory as that described in these experiments. 
While these experiments are not in any way crucial, the facts 
obtained from them are extremely difficult for current theories 
of distant orientation to explain.’ 
In penning this paragraph Dr. Watson evidently lost sight 
of a preceding paragraph in his paper, in which he says: 
“Nearly all of the statements concerning the habits of these 
birds, like my own, refer to the nesting season. So far as I 
know to the contrary, almost nothing is known of their life 
outside of this period. Many of the reactions during the nest- 
ing season could be understood more easily if we knew the 
complete history of their life-cycle.’”* 
1 Curiously enough, this old belief has recently been given credence; cf. Condor, 
1917, pp. 7, 8, 26. 
2Pap. Tort. Lab. Carn. Inst. Wash., 1908, v. 2, p. 230. 
8L. c., p. 191. 
