: 
T ERG 
AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
Vol. VI.— DECEMBER, 1872.— No. 12. 
~LERAGMWO)ODO-> 
THE BALTIMORE ORIOLE AND CARPENTER-BEE. 
BY REV. SAMUEL LOCKWOOD, PH. D. 
——_+#O4e—_—— 
Dovstiess the ancients were as honest as the moderns. But 
_ Were they as painstaking and therefore as trustworthy? Those 
Olden treatises on Nature stood upon a sort of exacting didactic 
dignity of their own, even when they discoursed of marvels akin to 
“ The Anthropophagi and men whose heads 
Do grow beneath their shoulders !” 
Ithas always been easier to imagine than observe. Thus has 
__ Instinct too long been regarded in the beast as the functional equiv- 
alent of reason in man ; as if man had no instinct, and the beast no 
_ Teason.* And how vitiating an element has this proved in our 
: 
Soipatered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872. by the PEABODY ACADEMY OF 
: DENGE, in the Omics of the Lees Congress, at Washington. 
46 
natural theology. How many believe the pseudo-axiom that of 
a cessity every bird builds its nest to-day as did its ancestors six 
y Ousand years ago? Is not instinct transmitted, or inherited 
habit? And so there may be relatively new instincts as well as 
old Ones. The trained animal—the setter, the pointer, the re- 
_triever—transmits to its offspring those traits which have become 
the habit, the resultant of long training. The cow migrates to 
Norway and, contrary to the bovine instinct, eats the fucus off the 
“ea rocks, and finally becomes an eater of fish. Her offspring 
take to it naturally, that is, instinctively. The mountain parrot, 
(Nestor notabilis) called by the Maories, Kea, is a simple honey 
* pD, A 
“Pythagoras taught that animals had reason but no mind.—Eds. 
ON | OS a spe a een 
AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. VI (721) 
