164 THE HOMING FACULTY. 
we must either cast science to the winds and say, as our 
pious fathers (and mothers) said, that “ God guides the 
birds; or we must accept the view that they return by aid 
of their own intelligent observation of the direction taken in 
the outward route. No one here will doubt that this is the 
true solution, but the “ how, and by the exercise of what 
faculties ” does not lie on the surface, and the achievement 
being outside our own capacities, the explanation can be 
reached only by advancing hypotheses and putting them to 
the test. 
Apart from the negative evidence that the homing faculty 
is an intelligent one, we have the positive evidence that it 
is improvable by experience. The feat of returning to the 
cote from points several hundred miles distant, and over 
unknown country, although frequently performed by Homing 
Pigeons, requires more or less preparatory training. Young 
birds are liberated at comparatively short distances from 
home, and the distance lengthened with their growing ex- 
perience, until with their faculties fully developed, and 
their powers of observation quickened by practice, they may 
be taken several hundred miles across the ocean with the 
confidence that, barring accidents, they will return by an 
approximately straight course. The bird. being liberated 
rises into the air and starts on its return journey. Intel- 
ligence cannot point the way without a basis of perceptions 
derived through the senses, nor can the senses act directly. 
At a few hundred miles distance keenness of sight can avail 
nothing, as the desired haven is below the horizon; nor is it 
conceivable that the superior acuteness of any sense which 
the bird shares in common with us could afford any possible 
guidance. It appears to me, then, that the homing faculty must 
be due to an ever-present consciousness of direction taken, 
aided by close observation awakened by the desire to return 
to the cote. I do not, of course, by “ consciousness of direc- 
tion ” mean that the bird has an inborn faculty of determining 
the direction of the distant place he wishes to reach. If this 
