READING THE BOOK OF NATURE 
fell off its perch ; then when its parent flew away, 
it followed. 
I think it highly probable that the sense or fac- 
ulty by which animals find their way home over 
long stretches of country, and which keeps them 
from ever being lost as man so often is, is a faculty 
entirely unlike anything man now possesses. The 
same may be said of the faculty that guides the 
birds back a thousand miles or more to their old 
breeding-haunts. In caged or housed animals I 
fancy this faculty soon becomes blunted. President 
Roosevelt tells in his “Ranch Life” of a horse he 
owned that ran away two hundred miles across the 
plains, swimming rivers on the way to its old home. 
It is very certain, I think, that this homing feat is 
not accomplished by the aid of either sight or scent, 
for usually the returning animal seems to follow 
a comparatively straight line. It is, or seems to 
be, a consciousness of direction that is as unerring 
as the magnetic needle. Reason, calculation, and 
judgment err, but these primary instincts of the 
animal seem almost infallible. 
In Bronx Park in New York a grebe and a loon 
lived together in an inclosure in which was a large 
pool of water. The two birds became much at- 
tached to each other and were never long separated. 
One winter day on which the pool was frozen over, 
except a small opening in one end of it, the grebe 
dived under the ice and made its way to the far 
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