286 WILD TRAITS IN TAME ANIMALS. 



cover, and has been assisted in its first mo- 

 ments by the stockman, it is as tame as its 

 parents. Dr H. S. Williams,^ when speaking 

 of the plasticity of the infantile mind, says : — 



Young wild ducks, when they first come out of the 

 shell, have no fear whatever of a human intruder, but 

 will nestle contentedly in his hands ; but after a few 

 hours of maternal tutorage they become so timid and 

 shy that it is almost impossible to capture them, and if 

 taken they show extreme terror of the being that a few 

 hours before did not alarm them. Birds that pass their 

 early childhood in a nest do not develop quite so rapidly, 

 but undergo the same transition. The young crow, if 

 taken from the nest during the first week or ten days of 

 its life, becomes the most confiding and amusing of pets, 

 seeming to regard men as beings of its own kind. If a 

 few days later another nestling is taken, this one also 

 will become domesticated, but it will never be tame and 

 confiding as the first ; it will have something of the 

 suspicious nature of the wild crow. Yet another week 

 or ten days later and the remaining nestlings are able 

 to fly about with their parents and have become al- 

 together irreclaimable. No amount of training will ever 

 suffice to tame them. 



Doubtless the confidence and the lethareic 

 habits of the domestic mother -duck would in 



1 "Can the Criminal be Reclaimed?" 'North American Re- 

 view,' August 1896. 



