SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 
| 
HOMING OF SEA-SWALLOWS 
OMING pigeons have been used by man for 
more than two thousand years, and still we 
have no satisfactory theory of their usually success- 
ful return from great distances to their cots. Still 
less can we explain the well-authenticated fact that 
a swallow may return from its wintering in the south 
to the Scottish farm-steading where it was born 
the year before. The problem of homing bristles 
with difficulties, and it is therefore with eagerness 
that we turn to a record of the experiments * which 
have been recently made on the sea-swallows at 
the Tortugas by Professor J. B. Watson and Dr. K. 
S. Lashley. The birds were the Noddy Tern and 
the Sooty Tern, which breed in tens of thousands 
upon Bird Key. That island of the Tortugas group 
was surely predestined for the experiments in 
question, for it is the northern limit of the migration 
of these two tropical terns, so that if the birds are 
taken anywhere to the north they will find them- 
* Papers from the Department of Marine Zoology, Carnegie 
Institution, Washington, vii. (1915) pp. 1-104, 7 pls. 9 figs. 
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