158 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



the same thing happened every night. After a short 

 interval the muscles of the wings began to quiver, 

 this action being to all appearance involuntary. 

 The movement gradually increased, the bird other- 

 wise remaining quite still, until it grew to a noiseless 

 but rapid fanning motion of the kind that one sees 

 in a moth when dr5ring its wings on emerging from 

 the chrysaUs. This movement stiU tended to grow 

 both in degree and intensity, and it generally lasted 

 as long as I sat up during the night. In the early 

 stages of this mood the bird responded when I 

 spoke to it ; but in time it ceased to do this, and 

 became lost in a kind of trance, with eyes open and 

 wings ceaselessly moving. Brain, muscles, nervous 

 system, and will, all seemed inhibited by the stimu- 

 lus that excited it. The bird became, as it were, 

 locked in the passion of that sense by which the 

 movement of flying was thus simulated. It was 

 one of the strangest sights I have ever witnessed — 

 this young migratory creature of the air which had 

 never been out of my house, and which had never 

 known any of its kind, sitting beside me in the gloom 

 of our Northern winter, and in the dim lamplight, 

 and by a kind of inherited imagination, which was 

 yet not imagination in our sense, flying thus through 

 the night, league-long, over lands and oceans it had 

 never seen. 



There was, I think, no question of the exercise 

 of intelligence in this case. What had rather to 

 be noticed was the entire physical system of the 

 bird thus hereditarily attuned, and in an inconceiv- 

 able degree of perfection, to react to stimuli related 

 to the necessities of its migratory habit of life. In 

 instances like this the stimuU to which the organism 



