90 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
his holes and inserting his acorns. As soon as he has finished 
one he feels, so I explain it, an impulse to begin another, and so on. 
I see nothing wonderful in this, but if, all the time, he were to be 
thinking of the coming winter, and how he would then enjoy the 
banquet he was now getting ready, I should think that wonder- 
ful. Never having been in America, I cannot, of course, say 
whether, or to what extent, the Californian Woodpecker now 
eats the acorns that he so busily studs the trees with; but that 
he once did so—or something inside them—and that the habit 
commenced with this object seems pretty plain both from the 
analogy of our own European species, and also because it is 
difficult to imagine another origin for it. But let a thing be 
once done with acharnement, and, where the reason is not strong 
enough to prevent this it is always liable to be done for its own 
sake—for the mere pleasure of the doing, which may come, in 
time, to eclipse or obscure the object for which it was at first 
performed. With birds it has always seemed to me that this 1s 
particularly the case, and the true philosophy of many of their 
actions must, I believe, escape us, if this principle is not kept 
steadily in view. But why then does not the Greater Spotted 
Woodpecker leave fir-cones uneaten, or but little eaten, all over 
the trunks of trees? The strength, and consequent blindness, 
of an instinct bears probably some relation to the number of 
generations through which it has descended, and the one in 
question may have had a later origin in the one species than in 
the other; with our own bird, in fact, it may be still a habit 
only, and not a true instinct, for that the first does, in some 
cases, pass into the second, there can, I think, be little doubt.* 
Habit or instinct, the custom is certainly one which two or more 
Woodpeckers might very well have developed independently, 
and the fact that it is not common to the family as a whole is 
evidence that such has been the case. But does the Huropean 
species show no traces of a disposition to follow in the footsteps 
of its American relative? I think myself that such traces can 
* Or rather I had better say that I think it likely, myself, that habits are 
inherited. Is not the blind performance of what seems obviously by origin 
a habit some evidence of this? Why should a creature starting only from 
its own individual experience, and thus acting at first intelligently, become 
such an automaton ? 
