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ming Birds, which visit us here in summer, are really descendants 
of the Swifts and Swallows. The young of the Humming Bird 
would starve if you tried to feed it on honey alone, for Humming 
Birds are really insect-eaters far more than honey-suckers ; and the 
young birds are only, in their tender, youthful stage, immature 
Swifts, and must he fed accordingly. Finally, it was argued that 
this migratory instinct was not a forced, immutable, perfect law, 
but an imperfect, improvable, and gradually acquired method of 
adjusting action to the surrounding conditions. 
Mr. Taylor’s closing remarks are given in full; he said: 
“ I have now sought to give you some facts which will ena¬ 
ble you to answer to a certain extent, the query which I have 
adopted as the title of this paper, namely: 4 What does the 
Migration of Birds Mean ? ’ It means much. It means that far 
back in the dim ages of the past, long before man appeared in a 
world which he seeks in vain to comprehend, there lived and flit¬ 
ted in the sunshine of southern climes, a happy tribe of winged 
creatures, whose descendants, century after century, perhaps aeon 
after ajon, wandered away in search of wider, safer and more 
bountiful resting places. It means, that by inheritance and selec¬ 
tion, the memories of those wanderings deepened and deepened 
in those birds; while climate and altered surroundings modified 
many of their forms, as slowly hut as surely as the ocean waves 
and the frost alter the silent rocks. It means, that not alone from 
the strata which lie beneath us and which chronicle the geological 
changes in the formation and surface of this earth from age to age, 
but also from the birds which everv summer flash from distant 
•/ 
regions, flooding us with song and dazzling us with beauty, do we 
gather impressive and significant teachings of the mighty past. 
These migratory birds are living letters of nature, which write, in 
unmistakable characters, the history of ice-barriers long melted 
away, of submerged continents, of altered and altering climatic 
conditions. They further record, in these annual migrations, the 
persistence of habit, the accumulation of experience, the tenden¬ 
cies of heredity, and, it may be, in those actions which we do not 
yet understand, they preserve the memory of special incidents 
which once deeply affected the feathered race, but of which we 
never heard or dreamed. Surely such a view of migration in birds 
surpasses, in its reach, the old idea which simply regarded this 
