V 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIRDS’ NESTS 
111 
to have been the result of their having been used to such a 
nest. The one thing that remains, and which Mr. Lowne 
thinks proves instinct, is their not forming their nest in the 
box they had been accustomed to, and their using sticks and 
twigs instead of straw only. But they evidently preferred 
the light and air and movement of the branch. That was all 
in harmony with their special organisation, and was a return to 
the habits which were at once the result and the cause of that 
organisation. They preferred to make the nest in this pleasant 
place, but they did not know how to begin. As soon as the 
sticks, lodged by accident, furnished a sufficient base, they car- 
ried up more sticks and soon obtained a rude nest. They saw 
that smooth straight twigs dropped to the ground, whereas 
branched twigs kept in the branches, and they had quite 
sense and observation enough to choose the branched twigs 
for the purpose. In all this there seems to me to be no proof 
of the operation of instinct as usually understood, and the 
experiment yet requires trying with some of our native birds 
that build elaborate and very distinctive nests, such as the 
song-thrush, the gold-crest, the wren or the long-tailed tit. If 
several of these could be brought up in strange nests, and 
then be turned out into a large wired enclosure containing 
shrubs and bushes, and if under these circumstances each built 
an unmistakable nest of its own species, the nest-building 
instinct would have to be admitted. 
The nearest approach to such a test experiment has been 
recently furnished by Mr. Charles Dixon. He states that 
some young chaffinches (Fringilla Ccelebs) were taken to New 
Zealand and there turned out. They throve well, and a nest 
built by a pair of them was photographed, and from this photo- 
graph the nest is thus described by Mr. Dixon : “It is evidently 
built in the fork of a branch, and shows very little of that neat- 
ness of fabrication for which this bird is noted in England. The 
cup of the nest is small, loosely put together, apparently lined 
with feathers, and the walls of the structure are prolonged 
about eighteen inches and hang loosely down the side of the 
supporting branch. The whole structure bears some resem- 
blance to the nests of the hangnests, with the exception that 
the cavity containing the eggs is situated on the top. Clearly 
these New Zealand chaffinches were at a loss for a design 
