C. F. AMERY. 167 



that emboldens me to hazard it. The method of testing it 

 which occurs to me is to take half-a-dozen well-trained reli- 

 able two-year-old birds, and send them round the globe east- 

 ward from New York, landing them at San Francisco, and 

 carrying them thence to locations unfamiliar to them, within, 

 say, two hundred miles of their former cote. If my hypo- 

 thesis is sound the birds would realize that the feat of return, 

 ing along the course travelled would be beyond their powers, 

 moreover they would have lost calculation in sleep. They 

 would be lost birds when liberated, and could probably be 

 attached to their new home. If on the contrary they should 

 fly direct to their cote I should be dumb " as a sheep before 

 his shearers." To control the experiment two of the birds 

 might be liberated at a like distance from the cote, but in 

 country they have already flown over more than once. 



