WAYS OF NATURE 



I lift them up and wind them around the poles and 

 tie them with a wisp of grass, they rarely stay. In 

 some way they seem to get a wrong start in life, or 

 else are degenerates from the first. I have never 

 known anything like this among the wild creatures, 

 though it happens often enough among our own 

 kind. The trouble with the bean is doubtless this: 

 the Lima bean is of South American origin, and in 

 the Southern Hemisphere, beans, it seems, go the 

 other way around the pole; that is, from right to 

 left. When transferred north of the equator, it takes 

 them some time to learn the new way, or from left to 

 right, and a few of them are always backsliding, 

 or departing from the new way and vaguely seeking 

 the old; and not finding this, they become vaga- 

 bonds. 



How much or how little sense or judgment our 

 wild neighbors have is hard to determine. The 

 crows and other birds that carry shell-fish high in 

 the air and then let them drop upon the rocks to 

 break the shell show something very much like 

 reason, or a knowledge of the relation of cause and 

 effect, though it is probably an unthinking habit 

 formed in their ancestors under the pressure of 

 hunger. Froude tells of some species of bird that 

 he saw in South Africa flying amid the swarm of 

 migrating locusts and clipping off the wings of the 

 insects so that they would drop to the earth, where 

 the birds could devour them at their leisure. Our 

 2 



