I 
WAYS OF NATURE 
WAS much amused lately by a half-dozen or 
more letters that came to me from some Califor- 
nian schoolchildren, who wrote to ask if I would 
please tell them whether or not birds have sense. 
One little girlsaid: “TI would be pleased if you would 
write and tell me if birds have sense. I wanted to 
see if I could n’t be the first one to know.” I felt 
obliged to reply to the children that we ourselves 
do not have sense enough to know just how much 
sense the birds and other wild creatures do have, 
and that they do appear to have some, though their 
actions are probably the result of what we call in- 
stinct, or natural prompting, like that of the bean- 
stalk when it climbs the pole. Yet a bean-stalk will 
sometimes show a kind of perversity or depravity 
that looks like the result of deliberate choice. Each 
season, among my dozen or more hills of pole-beans, 
there are usually two or three low-minded plants 
that will not climb the poles, but go groveling upon 
the ground, wandering off among the potato-vines or 
cucumbers, departing utterly from the traditions 
of their race, becoming shiftless and vagrant. When 
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