276 ANIMAL INTELLIftBNCB 



irksome duty of personal incubation to be superfluous, 

 she abandoned the practice. 



It will be observed that this hypothesis assigns to 

 the mother megapode a high degree of - intelligent 

 observation and sagacious application of experience. 

 It may be compared with the discovery made long 

 since by human mothers that the substitution of the 

 bottle for the breast in rearing their babes exempted 

 them from the necessity of forgoing social pleasures 

 and from close attendance in the nursery. But the 

 human mother has been careful to transmit the dis- 

 covery to posterity. The enigma remains how succes- 

 sive generations of megapodes are able to put the 

 experience of their progenitors into practice, seeing that 

 the mother birds not only evade the tedium of personal 

 incubation, but entirely neglect the education, instruc- 

 tion, and nurture of their young, which, fortunately 

 for ourselves, human mothers have not learnt to do. 



From the examples given above, chosen almost at 

 random from thousands of others which present them- 

 selves to every observer of nature, some material may 

 be gathered for an answer to the first question pro- 

 pounded above. It is an answer very far from authori- 

 tative, explicit, or final, consisting mainly of a 

 summary of what is probable. It must consist, indeed, 

 of no more than this, that all animals arrive at birth 

 endowed with congenital automatism co-ordinate with 

 a specific inherited organic mechanism, ready to dis- 

 charge certain functions without the intervention of 

 conscious volition. But part of the inherited mechan- 

 ism consists, at least in animals above the lowest 



