44 THE CONDOR Vol. XXIII 
That there are instinctive responses on the part of animals to certain qual- 
ities in sound is a matter of common experience. The distress quality in bird 
notes is difficult to define and may sometimes be wholly imaginary, yet it is 
many times the stimulus of an instinctive response. Individuals representing 
many varieties of birds will, in a state of nature, come hurrying through the 
woods, each one giving its own call, to the spot where a bird of an alien race is 
uttering its note of distress. It was interesting in this connection to observe 
the response of these young linnets to the distress call of chicks, a sound en- 
tirely foreign to their individual and, doubtless, to their racial experience. 
The little birds were kept upon the lecture room desk where their frequent 
meals could be administered by student or by instructor with a minimum of 
disturbance. One morning, while the twins were serenely quiet beneath their 
cotton blanket, a discussion of the quality of bird sounds brought about the 
illustration of a certain point by an imitation of the chick’s distress call. Im- 
mediately the cotton blanket was heaved up and two excited young linnets 
tumbled about in the nest in response to the stimulus of a sound they had 
never before heard. The incident means much to us when we consider the 
many times we have seen the distress calls of excited bird parents rouse the 
nest full of young to efforts at flight. We so often say that the mother is 
teaching her young to fly when, in reality, all she is doing is to apply unconsci- 
ously a stimulus. An Anglo-Saxon reared pack mule when treated to a series 
of expletives in Mexican-Spanish, gets the same psychic message from his 
driver as though he were an accomplished linguist. So Nip responded to the 
complaint of a lost chick by rising up on his wobbly legs and uttering the eall 
note of his race. 
I am obliged to confess to an undercurrent of guilty feeling within me 
when I recognize in‘my own offspring a perfectly orderly sequence of events 
as they develop the grasping reflex, the suckling reflex, or later on, the self 
assertion and the play instincts, a chain of natural traits that follows the law 
of a million ancestors. It seems a bit underhanded, especially in the presence 
of that other and happily less analytic partner in the infant’s ancestry, even 
to admit the possibility that ours is not the first child who has performed such 
a wonderful and so perfectly adorable a trick. However, no such sense of 
treachery marred my pleasure in watching the twins’ orderly progress. That 
progress was so rapid that it seemed like twenty years of human experience 
concentrated into a twenty days resumé. Sometimes there even arose a half 
formed wish that human young might be still more biologic than they are. 
Take the bathing instinct as an illustration. One day the very masculine Nip, 
without coaxing of any zealous parent but wholly from some inward urge, took 
a bath and made an impressionistic toilet. Oh, that our own young might feel 
that heaven-born inspiration toward clean hands and a smooth part! 
Really though, the trouble is not with our children but with our own im- 
patient selves. If we were willing to wait fourteen long years for that tor- 
nado of new instincts at adolescence, we would find that even the human male 
would think of his personal appearance and would voluntarily wash at least 
the front part of his face and polish the toes of his boots. Nip waited six weeks 
for the inspiration toward cleanliness, but it came all in good time. Let me not, 
be understood as favoring fourteen years of unwashedness for boys. No in- 
deed. We must live with them and some of us actually enjoy the living, arti- 
ficial as life may seem to the boy. But isn’t it interesting to note how four- 
