' HABITS OF THE GREAT CRESTED GREBE. 461 



sexual passion, and, moreover, it will often have been made 

 mostly, if not altogether, by the male bird. Now, as everyone 

 knows, numbers of ground-laying birds deposit their eggs in a 

 depression made either wholly or partly by themselves ; whilst 

 others, such as the Great Plover and the Nightjar, do not — that, 

 at least, is the common view — make any kind of artificial hollow, 

 though they may, in some cases, take advantage of a natural one. 

 We will suppose that in the former case, as well as in some in- 

 stances of the latter, we see the primitive nest or pairing-place, 

 produced or located in the manner indicated. Now, however, 

 comes a farther stage which, it might well be thought, could have 

 originated only in deliberate and purposive action on the part of 

 the bird. I allude to the lining of grass, moss, sticks, or even 

 stones or fragments of shells, with which many birds who lay 

 their eggs in a hollow made by them in the ground, further im- 

 prove it. That this process (or, at any rate, the later stages of 

 it) has now, with most birds, become a deliberate one, I do not 

 doubt. But, as every evolutionist will admit, it is the beginnings 

 of anything which best explain and are most fraught with signifi- 

 cance. Is it possible that even the actual building of the nest 

 may have had a nervous — a frenzied — origin ? Lions and other 

 fierce carnivorous animals will, when wounded, bite at sticks, or 

 anything else lying within their reach. That a bird, as accus- 

 tomed to peck as is a Dog or Lion to bite, should, wliilst in a 

 state of the most intense nervous excitement, do the same, does 

 not appear to me to be more strange, or, indeed, in any way 

 peculiar ; and that such a trick would be inherited, and, if bene- 

 ficial, increased and modified, who (having evolution in his soul) 

 can doubt ? If a bird, whilst ecstatically rolling on the ground, 

 were to pick up and throw aside either small sticks, or any other 

 loose-lying and easily-seized objects — such as bits of grass or 

 fibrous roots — I can see no reason why it should not, by stretch- 

 ing out its neck to such as lay only just within reach, and drop- 

 ping them again when in an easier attitude, make a sort of 

 collection of them close about it.* Then, if the eggs were laid 



'■' Since writing this paper I have read that of Mr. Cronwright Sehreiner 

 on the Ostrich in ' Tlie Zoologist ' for 1897, and as a part of it seems to me to 

 support my theory, I quote it here, though it should be read, also, with refer- 

 ence to some of those actions upon which I found it, and which I am about 

 to recount ; — 



