$04 
[Oct, is, 1808. 
This is a subject that I never would have thought of 
writing about, because it was so familiar to me as a 
fishculturist; but I find that all men do not know these 
facts, which, like the saws to the carpenter, are every- 
day affairs with a man who gives his life to fishculture 
and the study of animal life. Fred Mather. 
Origin of Animal Instincts. 
Editvr Forest and Stream: 
In my article of July 23 I had as little idea of arousing 
temper in reply as I had that my language could permit 
such utter misapprehension of my meaning as fills the 
letter of Hermit in your issue of Sept. 10. As to the 
personal portions my amiability rises superior to the 
shock. Some of the misapprehensions I will make an 
effort to correct in such irregular order as they come 
uppermost. 
First, Hermit says that I denied to animals reason 
and the power of intercommunication. I did no such 
thing. I spoke of their possessing instinct, but I neither 
said nor implied that some degree of reason might not 
coexist. Indeed I would scarcely attempt to draw a line 
between them. I did ridicule the theory that monkeys 
had a spoken language, and that dogs had a wig-wag 
alphabet for tail use. If Hermit is Prof. Garner, or the 
author of the tail alphabet theory, his spleen is ex- 
plained and excused. I only got what I deserved. But 
I never denied the existence of other methods of com- 
nsunication. Within certain limits it is a fact universally 
recognized, but it had nothing to do with my argu- 
ment, and I never referred to it. 
Agaia, Hermit objected to my use of the terms centri- 
petal and centrifugal as applied to those forces or ten- 
dencies which result respectively in nature's unities and 
in her varieties. These terms seem to me to greatly 
promote analysis, and clear thought upon the subject. 
All must recognize in heredity a centripetal force — one 
which preserves unity. About the force which pro- 
duces variety there may be different opinions, but it 
will facilitate the discussion to call it a or the centrifugal 
force. So I shall continue to use both terms. And there 
is also a phrase used in my first letter which I will con- 
tinue to use for brevity. I spoke of the theory that wary 
fish derived their excessive caution by inheritance from 
ancestors who had been hooked, but escaped capture, as 
the "three crippled grandparent theory." I submit 
that no other short descriptive phrase so exactly conveys 
the essential features of that theory; but, for short, I 
will merely call it the grandparent theory. 
Those who hold this theory not only use it to account 
for the new instincts we sometimes see animals acquire 
in a comparatively short time, but they Use it to account 
for all instincts, old and new, instincts by the dozen and 
the score. And they further ascribe to similar causes 
.all of nature's infinite variety of color, size, function, 
form and feature. In brief, they make the hodge-podge 
experiences of grandparents to be nature's centrifugal 
force. 
1 called this theory one of chance. Hermit retorts 
that as "there is no effect without a cause," there can be 
no such thing as chance in nature. In one sense that is 
entirely true, but the sense in which I used the word 
is at once very obvious and very different. It is illus- 
trated by the following quotations from Webster's 
definition of chance. "Time and chance happen to all." 
" 'By chance a priest came down that way/ — Luke x." 
" 'If a bird's nest chance to be before thee.' — Deut. xxii." 
" 'Ah, Casca! tell us what hath chanced to-day.' — Shaks." 
There is plenty of such chance as this in the world; and 
there are whole volumes of beautiful mathematics de- 
voted to calculating its laws and probabilities. The 
immense business of insurance — life, fire, marine, ac- 
cident and guarantee — are all built upon these laws and 
verify their soundness. So I called the "grandparent 
theory" a theory of chance. It is a fair and accurate 
statement of it. For it makes wariness in the trout 
depend on the previous happening of peculiar accidents 
to both parents, or to three grandparents. The orig- 
inal statement of it, which I criticised, was "an old 
trout often pricked learns caution and transmits that 
quality to its progeny. The heedless young trout takes 
the first lure and has no progeny. * * * The wound- 
ed that survived learned a lesson and transmitted it to 
their .posterity." If that does not make chance decide 
the possession of an instinct, words have lost their every- 
day meanings. And when the same theory is advanced 
to account for every one of nature's infinite adjustments, 
great and small, down to the lightest shade of the ob- 
scurest feather, it makes chance nature's sole centrifugal 
force. There seem to me two insuperable objections. 
This theory violates the mathematical laws of probability 
and it is opposed by the best known facts about hered- 
ity. Every one recognizes that in results controlled by 
ehance happenings there arc what we may call for short 
harum-scarum features. If a pack of cards is found 
with the cards in regular order, we know that design 
not chance arranged them. If type are found arranged 
to spell connected sentences, we know that chance hap- 
penings cut no figure in their arrangement. Now. to 
my mind, every work of nature is what I may call also 
a work of art. There is beauty, symmetry, delicacy, 
finenes3 of touch and finish, and adjustment in such num- 
berless details, that the only adequate comparison seems 
to me the adjustments of type in a printed chapter. . One 
is as free from harum-scarum as the other. My mind 
can no more accept chance as producing one than the 
other. 
But if there are those who do not see the art in nature 
as I do. to them I would commend the most patent 
facts that we know about heredity. There is very much 
that we do not know. There are occasional happenings 
whose causes are beyond our ken which produce strange 
anomalies, such as Siamese Twins, two-headed 
calves, and extra limbs and organs in great variety, We 
recognize such things as accidental happenings, and 
call them "freaks." But there is one fact about hered- 
ity in its normal operations which I think can be main- 
tained against all comers. I will express it briefly by 
saying that it is not easy to tamper with heredity. It 
will not easily pick up and adopt new features to be 
transmitted to posterity in its endless stream. By a 
figure- of speech we may say that heredity is very, very 
hard on trigger to all ordinal happenings. That fact 
is all I need maintain to make my argument good. For 
the grandparent theory assumes that every individual 
experience has a pull upon heredity, and that a con- 
current pull by two parents or three grandparents will 
infallibly bring it into action or fire it off. If I show 
great artificial modifications of parents and grand- 
parents for many generations without production of the 
slightest effect upon their offspring, I show that hered- 
ity is hard on trigger, that it is difficult to tamper with, 
that nature has not made it easy for accidental hap- 
penings to modify the forms, features and instincts which 
she has adopted as her own. In this fact, and ?.1so in the 
limited fertility imposed upon hybrids, nature seems 
to have actually erected obstacles to accidental inter- 
ference with her creations. She has actually seemed to 
bar chance from any interference with heredity. 
Hermit has paraded his misapprehension of this whole 
matter in telling of his double-toed cat, with its double- 
toed father. That is ordinary heredity of a feature al- 
ready adopted in the ancestry. As well tell us that a 
white cat produced a white kitten. But let him show 
that the original double toe was an artificial one. trans- 
planted and made to grow upon a normal cat and then 
transmitted to its posterity! Or let him show that a 
black cat artificially bleached afterward produced white 
kittens! No such examples can be produced. His robin 
incident is equally valueless. By cross-breeding and 
selection natural features can be modified, but to in- 
troduce new features is a different problem. As I 
instanced in my first paper, by selection we may breed 
dogs with short tails. But we can never accomplish it 
by trimming tails short. 
I am not an extensive reader, and when I wrote that 
paper I had never so much as heard of Weismann, to 
whose class Hermit assigns me with a sneer. But I 
have since read of an experiment of Weismann's upon 
this point which seems to me the very proof of the pud- 
ding. He tried to breed tailless mice by amputating 
tails at birth for a number of generations. He utterly 
failed to produce even the slightest effect upon the tail 
of a single mouse. And I am told that Weismann as- 
serts that neither compression of the feet practiced by 
Chinese, - circumcision by the Hebrews, tatooing by 
savages, nor any other religious or tribal mutilation 
known in the world has ever produced any hereditary 
result upon descendants of those operated upon. These 
facts all seem to me to be the very eating of the pudding. 
Plainly heredity must be very, very hard on trigger in- 
deed, when we cannot bring it into play even by mutilat- 
ing the bodies of ancestors and keeping it up for a hun- 
dred generations. 
Hermit is indignant that in a long article I did not 
use the word evolution. That word is one which is 
liable to be misunderstood if used without explanation. 
I believe in an evolution under the government of in- 
telligence, not of chance. T will illustrate it by referring 
to the evolution of the locomotive, which exactly paral- 
lels nature's methods as I understand them. I will en- 
deavor to show briefly the similarity of the methods by 
which certain locomotives developed the air brake 
attachment, and that by which certain serpents developed 
a venom fang attachment. First, needs existed; locomo- 
tives already had hand brakes, but often there was need 
for more brake power to make sudden stops. Serpents 
already had teeth and caught prey, but they swallowed 
it more or less alive, and tliat must have been often 
disagreeable and sometimes dangerous. And now comes 
in the absolute necessity for an intelligence in each 
case to recognize the need of improvement, or the room 
for it, and then to' devise the improvement. We all 
know about the intelligence which supervised the lo- 
comotive, where it resided and how it acted. It planned 
and devised; it drew diagrams and made blue prints. 
It also learned by experience and made intelligent modi- 
fications from time to time until the machine of to-day 
was arrived at. Can we dispense with the supposition 
of some equivalent intelligence which recognized the 
room for an improvement upon the serpent and then 
devised it? What happened was this; The saliva, of 
certain snakes began to acquire poisonous qualities, 
and the modification of salivary glands necessary was 
readily accepted and perpetuated by heredity. The ef- 
fect of this poison was to paralyze the struggles of the 
snake's prey and to make" the swallowing easier and 
safer. It was an intelligent device, and it was followed 
by others. First, the teeth in rear of the salivary glands 
were grooved to carry the venom more readily into the 
flesh of the victim. 'Next, these teeth were enlarged. 
Then they were moved forward from the rear of the 
jaw to the front, that the venom might be the sooner 
applied. Lastly, some of the ordinary teeth were omit- 
ted, the venom fangs growing larger and answering all 
purposes. Who can say that these are not the methods 
of intelligence? And is it not a fair.description of them 
to speak of them for short as "blue-print" methods? 
Who can believe that the original production of venom 
and all the successive changes that followed, and 
stranger still to say, were adopted by heredity, were all 
freaks of chance like the Siamese Twins? 
I will follow Hermit's misapprehensions but one step 
further. He does me too much credit in supposing the 
idea of what I called "sub-ego" to be original with me. 
It is as ancient as Socrates, who wrote of his Daimon; 
and as modern as the theories of sab-conscious cere- 
bration. I merely suggested the name sub-ego as in- 
dicative of the intensely personal part played in every 
individual organization by something entirely apart from 
and beyond its consciousness. One thing which it does 
is to make the heart beat, and any one who chooses 
might call it the "heart- worker." A recommendation 
to that name would be that even the most captious could 
scarcely deny its existence. But that name hardly seems 
sufficient. For the beating of the heart, beginning in 
the embryo, long before conscious life begins, is but 
one of an infinite chain of phenomena, which shade 
into each other on the one hand, and into the conscious 
life of the ego on the other; so that it is difficult to 
draw the line between them. In the contemplation of 
this force, familiar though it be, we are face to face with 
one of nature's great mysteries — to us. 
In nature's centrifugal force we are face to face with 
another. What is more obvious than to guess that the 
two mysteries are closely connected? What so natural 
as that the force which makes its heart beat should teach 
the bee to make honey, and the young bird to build a 
nest and choose its mate? In fact, so closely does the life 
of the ego depend upon the work of the sub-ego that it 
may almost be said to be secreted or produced by it, 
If the sub-ego stops its work the life of the ego ter- 
minates as suddenly as the noise made by machinery 
terminates when its motion ceases. And in this pro- 
ducing force it will not be strange to find the intelli- 
gence able to recognize the needs of an animal united 
with the power of modifying its organs and instincts 
to conform to its needs. That would be a natural work- 
ing union of power and intelligence; such as has pro- 
duced the evolution or development of the locomotive. 
A similar union is necessary to produce the orderly de- 
velopment of nature, or any other orderly development. 
Returning then to the starting point of these letters, I 
think we may say confidently that the wary trout and 
the shy wild ducks do not derive their shyness from the 
experiences of crippled parents or grandparents. Of 
that we may be quite sure. 
The only power in sight, which seems adequate, is that 
mysterious force manifest in the beating heart, and all 
the other phenomena of physical life and growth, which 
we have called here the sub-ego. It is a legitimate work- 
ing theory that this force is able to and does supply all 
needed instincts, the new as well as the old. 
E. P, Alexander. 
Ruffed Grouse in the City, 
Lockport, N. Y., Oct. 4. — Thursday evening, after 
6 o'clock, a young neighbor came to me and said that 
there was a bird in their yard that looked like a par- 
tridge. While he was writing the above to me (Forest 
and Stream knows that I am deaf), my daughter came 
to the door and said that there was a queer bird down 
at Mr. Chapman's (three houses below on opposite side 
of street), and they wanted me to come and see it. My 
young neighbor and myself went over, and on the roof 
of the veranda of the next house was a ruffed grouse. 
I walked underneath it and watched it for some time, 
and it never moved, although I was talking all the time. 
Finally I threw my canvas hat, and nearly hit it, when it 
flew down over the sidewalk to Genesee street, about 
twenty rods. As it flew low I expected it would fly 
against the houses on Genesee street, as the birds have 
a propensity for doing this when they get among build- 
ings, I found it sitting on the edge of the roof of a two- 
story house, where it remained until the electric light 
commenced burning. The strange thing about this bird 
being in the city is that, with the exception of one place 
ten miles east, you might hunt for ten weeks and not 
find a ruffed grouse in Niagara county. I have lived here 
thirty-five years, and have known of half a dozen in- 
stances where grouse has flown into or against buildings 
in my immediate vicinity, while I have never seen more 
than twice that number in all my tramping in the coun- 
ty, and I have done not a little of it. 
The same clay of the above occurrence Messrs. Ed- 
ward Moody, Earl Moody and Strathers Leonard se- 
cured forty-six snipe ten miles west of the city. 
J. L. Davison. 
Bull Bats. 
St. Augustine, Fla. — Editor Forest and Stream: "Are 
bull bats game?" No, with a big N. They are the most 
valuable of all our insectivorous birds. 
They come out to feed about sunset, and that is the 
time the mosquitoes also do business. It's a one-sided 
war, and the havoc the bull bats make on the mos- 
quitoes is equal to Kitchener's slaughter of the Der- 
vishes. 
I once had the curiosity to investigate a night-hawk 
and found the crop packed full of flying ants, etc. I 
have often felt sorely tempted to indulge in the sport 
of shooting them, but knowing their value as insect 
destroyers I never could bring m3'self to do it; and now 
that I am older and more considerate I would as soon 
go gunning for my grandmother. Nearly every civil- 
ized State places them in the insectivorous class, and 
protects them by a penalty. Without night-hawks and 
swallows mosquitoes would attack us in such swarms 
that we might well ask whether life would be worth 
living. 
Chimney swallows live on the same food as bull bats 
and must be equally good as game birds, but they are 
rather smaller, and that is probably all that saves them. 
Now what right have we to find fault with ladies 
for encouraging the destruction of innocent birds to 
gratify their vanity, while "horrid men" indulge in the 
same cruel business to gratify their carnal appetites? 
The bull bats always lay their eggs on the bare 
ground, but not necessarily on rocks. When I .was a 
boy. I often flushed them, and frequently found their 
eggs, and whenever I revisited the place I'd find the 
female sitting on the eggs, doing her own hatching, with 
no assistance from the sun, moon or stars. 
Didymus. 
A Hummingbird's Nest on a Wire* 
Arroyo Grande, Cal. — Editor Forest and Stream: I 
send you by mail a hummingbird's nest built on a piece 
of wire, which I know you will be glad to keep as a 
sample of a southern California hummingbird's enter- 
prise- The. nest was found by Master Lowel Lewis, of 
this place. It was hanging on a nail between two old 
buildings. There are plenty of trees here, and why 
the bird should have chosen to use the wire I don't 
know. W. T. Cook. 
Hybrid Ducks. 
Brewer, Me. — Col. Mather speaks of hybrids. I have 
in my collection two hybrids between black duck and 
mallard. One shows its mallard points the strongest, 
the other those of the black duck. I also have a half- 
blue-winged teal and half-cinnamon teal, and a half- 
widgeon and half-gadwall. I saw in Dover a half- 
shoveller and half-blue-winged teal. I tried to buy it, 
