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 
