BIRDS' NESTS AND SONGS. 
185 
Individual experience, association, and imitation are the main 
factors of intelligence ; explanation and intentional adaptation 
are the goal of reason. 
The activities of instinct are those in which there is no 
variability, and in which, therefore, there is no necessity for any 
intelligent acquisition of skill ; thus, though animals, when acting 
from instinct, adopt means subservient to the end to be attained, 
and are uniformly found to do so, they are not in the least degree 
conscious that these means are subservient to the ends. An in- 
stinctive action originates in the brain, and is probably accom- 
panied by consciousness ; but there is no conscious working 
towards an object in view. 
The subject is, however, beset with difficulties, which such 
considerations as these do not enable us to overcome. It is very 
difficult to distinguish between what birds learn, and what they 
seem to know by some innate faculty. Pheasants have been 
found to feed quietly while rifle balls were passing over them ; 
they have either learnt to distinguish between a shot-gun and a 
rifle, or are acting from utter greediness. Frank Buckland gives 
an account of a fisherman’s drawing up his line suddenly and 
whipping out the eye of a pike, which at his next cast, the eye 
still on the hook, was gulped by the bleeding pike. Swifts, 
swallows, and martins have, in comparatively recent times, 
learnt how to avail themselves of barns, chimneys and house- 
roofs ; and similar adaptabilities have been shown by other birds. 
The single note of the cuckoo is, no doubt, the very easiest for 
such a bird, as for all boys, to make, and this we may take to be 
a good reason why, amid all the chorus of the woods, the cuckoo 
adopts this cry. 
Then again, we must recognize that some birds have a sense 
of beauty, and derive pleasure from objects that are to them, as 
to us, delightful to the eye. The humming-birds decorate their 
nests with great taste, weaving into the structure pieces of 
lichen ; and the bower-birds collect flowers and fruits of bright 
and varied colours wherewith to decorate their home, and are 
careful to strew the ground with tender moss, and to get rid of 
all unsightly things from their vicinity. 
Thus, save in moral matters, and such things as truth and 
falsehood, it is difficult to see what, in fact, it is that really does lie 
beyond the limits of animal intelligence ; and even here some 
animals seem now and then to show themselves quite conscious 
that they have done wrong. 
Perhaps in regard to song, we may not be far wrong in think- 
ing that, in birds, the knowledge of it comes nearer to instinct than 
anything they do ; that, as a rule, it needs simply to be awakened, 
and that the awakening is easy ; if the bird hears his own parent 
sing, he picks up the song so soon that it seems absurd to speak 
of the learning as instruction ; if he hears other birds sing, he no 
doubt learns to imitate them, but the process is often a long one, 
and the foreign notes are only an addition to his own proper song, 
