268 MOUND BIRDS 



The birds are very jealous of any interference with their 

 mounds. If one is meddled with, they desert it straight- 

 way, and start a new one. 



Far on every side extend the tracks of the builders, 

 sometimes crossing the short, close turf of mown rides, 

 as they laboriously kicked the leaves and grass behind 

 them to the appointed spot. Apparently, nothing can 

 be more complete than the acclimatisation of these anti- 

 podean fowls. The parents may be seen picking their 

 way through the herbage as much at home as com- 

 mon pheasants, and the eggs hatch with satisfactory 

 regularity. It is remarkable that some eggs removed 

 from a mound and placed in an incubator failed to 

 hatch. 



Now it is scarcely possible to account for the hereditary 

 ingenuity of megapodes as the mere result of instinct, if 

 instinct be interpreted as unconscious automatism. Still 

 more improbable is it that the birds act with a reflective 

 knowledge that the material they collect will generate 

 enough heat to save them from the tedium of incubation. 

 Scarcely more satisfactory is the hypothesis that the 

 ancestral megapode, happening to deposit her eggs on a 

 mass of fermenting vegetation, found that she could leave 

 them longer in such a position without their cooling to 

 the death-point (a matter on which all British birds are 

 intensely solicitous), and learned therefrom the trick of 

 artificial heating. Such a ratiocinative connection of 

 cause and effect far transcends the operation of instinctive 

 automatism. Then how, except by assuming that the 

 bird is obeying the mandate of some controlling and 

 guiding Power, are we to account for the hen scrupulously 

 placing her eggs in a vertical position in order to obviate 



