February 26, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



349 



as a chicken's leg does when broken and al- 

 lowed to knit of itself. I examined hundreds 

 of woodcock in the markets in different locali- 

 ties, and found one whose leg had at one time 

 been broken by a shot and then had healed 

 perfectly. There were plain signs of dried mud 

 at the break; but that was also true of the 

 other leg near the foot, which only indicated 

 that the bird had been feeding in soft places. 



" All this proved nothing to an outsider, and. 

 I kept silence as to what I had seen until last 

 winter, twenty years afterwards, when the 

 confirmation came unexpectedly. I had been 

 speaking of animals before the Contemporary 

 Club of Bridgeport, when a gentleman, a 

 lawyer well known all over the state, came to 

 me and told me eagerly of a curious find he 

 had made the previous autumn. He was 

 gunning one day with a friend, when they 

 shot a woodcock, which on being brought in 

 by the dog was found to have a lump of hard 

 clay on one of its legs. Curious to know what 

 it meant, he chipped the clay off with his pen- 

 knife and found a broken bone, which was 

 then almost healed and as straight as ever. 

 A few weeks later the bird, had he lived, would 

 undoubtedly have taken off the cast himself, 

 by first soaking it in water, and there would 

 have been nothing to indicate anything un- 

 usual about him." 



Mr. Long virtually claims that a woodcock 

 not only has an understanding of the theory 

 of casts as adapted to fractured limbs, but is 

 able to apply this knowledge in practice. The 

 bird is represented as knowing the qualities of 

 clay and mud, their lack of cohesion unless 

 mixed with fibrous substances, their tendency 

 to harden on exposure to the air, and to dis- 

 integrate in water. Inasmuch as woodcocks 

 have for generations been living and feeding 

 in muddy places, we could, perhaps, although 

 not without some abuse of the imagination, 

 suppose the bird to possess this knowledge. 

 But the mental horizon of Mr. Long's wood- 

 cock is not bounded by the qualities of mud. 

 He is familiar with the theories of bone forma- 

 tion and regeneration — in a word, with osteo- 

 genesis, which, by the way, is never clearly 

 grasped by some of our university juniors. 

 This woodcock has never been hampered by 



a college training, has never been required to 

 study sections of decalcified bone — has, in fact, 

 never seen a bone, at least to recognize it as 

 corresponding to a part of his own anatomical 

 structure, and yet he divines the functions of 

 the periosteum and the necessity for proper 

 ' setting ' of the bony tissue. This wonderful 

 knowledge can not be the result either of ex- 

 perience or of instinct, for it would be as ab- 

 siird to claim that the same woodcock is contin- 

 ually breaking his legs and has learned to profit 

 by such accidents, as to maintain that wood- 

 cocks for innumerable generations past have all 

 broken their legs with sufficient frequency and 

 regularity to lead to the development of such 

 an exalted chirurgical instinct. We are in- 

 clined to believe that while the woodcock was 

 waiting for the cast to harden on his leg, his 

 versatile mind was revolving the problem 

 whether even his human observer, Mr. William 

 J. Long, would be capable of attaining to such 

 a priori knowledge of the surgery of fractures 

 without ever having seen such a thing as a 

 bone or a cast. 



Now, what are the proofs furnished by Mr. 

 Long ? First, reminiscences of ' twenty years 

 ago.' A recent apology by Ginn and Company 

 for the existence of Mr. Long's works informs 

 us that the gentleman was born in 186Y. He 

 was, therefore, a lad of sixteen when he met 

 that surgical genius among woodcocks. Grant- 

 ing that he was a most unusual and precocious 

 observer, are we to suppose that twenty years 

 can elapse in any human life without distort- 

 ing and exaggerating the impressions of ado- 

 lescence? Observe the wavering, nebulous 

 language zi the anecdote. The bird was ' act- 

 ing strangely,' but there was absolutely no 

 proof that his leg was broken. That such was 

 the case is- pure ' guesswork ' on Mr. Long's 

 part. He ' could see him plainly on the other 

 side of a little stream,' but he was too far 

 away for him to be ' absolutely sure of what 

 all his motions meant.' He ' seemed ' to be 

 smearing clay on his leg; he 'seemed to be 

 pulling tiny roots,' etc. Then the language 

 suddenly becomes positive as the unwarrant- 

 able inference crystallizes into definite form 

 in the brain of the observer. We can not 

 sufficiently deplore the fact that this rara avis 



