FACTORS IN ANIMAL LIFE 



Darwin, "is certainly an instinctive quality." It has 

 been said that kittens confined in a box, and which 

 have never known a dog, will spit and put up their 

 backs at a hand that has just stroked a dog, — even 

 before their eyes are opened, one authority says, 

 but this I doubt. My son's tame gray squirrel had 

 never seen chestnuts, nor learned about them in the 

 school of the woods, and yet when he was offered 

 some, he fairly danced with excitement; he put his 

 paws eagerly around them and drew them to him, 

 and chattered, and looked threateningly at all about 

 him. Does man know his proper food in the same 

 way ? The child has only the instinct to eat, and 

 will put anything into its mouth. 



How the instinctive wildness of the turkey crops 

 out in the young! Let the mother turkey while 

 hovering her brood give the danger-signal, and the 

 young will run from under her and hide in the grass. 

 Why ? To give her a chance to fly and decoy away 

 the enemy. I think young chickens will do the same. 

 Young partridges hatched under a hen run away at 

 once. Pheasants in England reared under a domes- 

 tic fowl are as wild as in a state of nature. Some 

 California quail hatched under a bantam hen in the 

 Zoo in New York did not heed the calls of their 

 foster-mother at all the first week, but at her alarm- 

 note they instantly squatted, showing that the dan- 

 ger-cry of a fowl is a kind of universal language that 

 all species understand. One may prove this at any 

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