THE INSTINCT OF ANIMALS 168 



and beating heavily about in her attempts to escape. 

 The eye always momentarily loses sight of the young 

 birds in following these movements, and the duck- 

 Ungs invariably have disappeared when it seeks 

 them again. It is next to impossible to find them 

 afterward, although they are never far off. As to 

 the final scene, I quote my own words as I have 

 used them elsewhere to describe it : "As you 

 continue to move, you notice that the unusual 

 exertion is having a wonderfully curative effect on 

 the broken wing of the mother. She is already 

 taking short flights with it, still occasionally flopping 

 back heavily into the water. As you look she sits 

 up and flaps both wings airily enough. Now she 

 springs into the air, and wheeling several times 

 nimbly overhead, actually takes her departure 

 altogether, with a series of wild derisive quacks as a 

 parting salute. You feel somehow as if you had 

 not got the best of the encounter, and that you have 

 been treated throughout as a creature of inferior 

 intelligence." 



Darwin, in explanation of this instinct in the wild 

 duck, thought that it was impossible to conceive 

 the mother bird as consciously imitating the actions 

 of a wounded duck, for she, in the vast majority of 

 cases, could never have seen such. The original 

 groundwork of the habit he considered to have 

 been such action as one sees in the common hen, 

 which, when her chickens are approached by a 

 stranger, rushes excitedly about with ruffled plumage 

 and extended wings. Natural selection, he con- 

 sidered, had accumulated in the wild duck those 

 variations of this habit in which the actions of a 

 wounded bird were mimicked, until in time a fairly 



