Reason and Instinct, 5465 



at home with them in all their evolutions as if golden and not gray. How 

 often, too, on the oozes of the Essex coast may tens of thousands of 

 the there-called ox-bird be seen in a flock, and with them redshanks, 

 a few gray plover, ring dotterel, &c. The whole spring together, fly 

 together, wheel together, presenting to the spectator this moment a 

 sheet of brilliant white, and the next, as they execute one of their 

 marvellous turns, nothing but a dusky cloud of rapidly moving dark 

 objects. All this would be not simply unintelligible, but impossible, 

 except on the supposition that they have some feathered fugleman to 

 give the word and the time, and that their code of signals, however 

 expressed, is not only intelligible but thoroughly understood and im- 

 plicitly acted on by every bird in the flock. 



But again ; a flock of wild geese alight to feed in a given field ; one 

 of the number invariably undertakes the post of sentinel, the others 

 straightway fall to on the corn or pease. How is he appointed,* if 

 they have no means of communication, no language, and no substitute 

 for language ? The same of rooks, of deer feeding, indeed of all 

 gregarious tribes of birds and beasts. 



I adduce another instance : in my garden here I grow a good many 

 strawberries, and, from my vicinity to the moors, 1 am liable to the 

 visits and depredations of a number of ring ouzels, in addition to the 

 customary detachments of blackbirds and thrushes. At first, one 

 bird, or perhaps a pair, appears. If I shoot these first visitors, after a 

 day or two another arrives ; and if he, too, is shot, a third and a fourth 

 come straggling in at intervals of a day or so. But suppose I permit 

 the first comers to feast unmolested, in three days I have twenty-five 

 or thirty of the boldest, most persevering, and — as far as ring ouzels 

 prevail amid the numbers — most insolent robbers, always engaged in 

 plundering my strawberry-beds, nor can I succeed in expelling them, 

 save for a short time after the gun has been discharged, as long as 

 I have any fruit which is palatable to them left in the garden. But, 

 further, Bishop Stanley gives the following anecdote, and vouches for 

 its truth : — "At a gentleman's house in Staffordshire the pheasants are 

 fed out of one of those boxes, the lid of which rises with the pressure 

 of the pheasant standing on the rail in front of the box. A waterhen 

 observing this, went and stood upon the rail as soon as the pheasant 

 quitted it; but the weight of the bird being insufficient to raise the lid 

 of the box, so as to enable it to get at the corn, the waterhen kept 



* " By what language, or by what instinct, is this bird made to watch for the 

 safety of others, when he was probably as hungry as those which were feeding near 

 him ?"— 'Gleanings,' ii. 206. 



XV. R 



