FACTORS IN ANIMAL LIFE 
Darwin, “is certainly an instinctive quality.” It has 
been said that kittens confined in a box, and which 
have never known a dog, will spit and put up their 
backs at a hand that has just stroked a dog, — even 
before their eyes are opened, one authority says, 
but this I doubt. My son’s tame gray squirrel had 
never seen chestnuts, nor learned about them in the 
school of the woods, and yet when he was offered 
some, he fairly danced with excitement; he put his 
paws eagerly around them and drew them to him, 
and chattered, and looked threateningly at all about 
him. Does man know his proper food in the same 
way? The child has only the instinct to eat, and 
will put anything into its mouth. 
How the instinctive wildness of the turkey crops 
out in the young! Let the mother turkey while 
hovering her brood give the danger-signal, and the 
young will run from under her and hide in the grass. 
Why? To give her a chance to fly and decoy away 
the enemy. I think young chickens will do the same. 
Young partridges hatched under a hen run away at 
once. Pheasants in England reared under a domes- 
tic fowl are as wild as in a state of nature. Some 
California quail hatched under a bantam hen in the 
Zoo in New York did not heed the calls of their 
foster-mother at all the first week, but at her alarm- 
note they instantly squatted, showing that the dan- 
ger-cry of a fowl is a kind of universal language that 
all species understand. One may prove this at any 
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