426 
GALAPAGOS ARCHIPELAGO 
CHAP. 
with a wand he killed ten in half an hour. At that period the 
birds must have been about as tame as they now are at the 
Galapagos. They appear to have learnt caution more slowly 
at these latter islands than at the Falklands, where they have 
had proportionate means of experience ; for besides frequent 
visits from vessels, those islands have been at intervals colonised 
during the entire period. Even formerly, when all the birds 
were so tame, it was impossible by Pernety’s account to kill 
the black-necked swan—a bird of passage, which probably 
brought with it the wisdom learnt in foreign countries. 
I may add that, according to Du Bois, all the birds at 
Bourbon in 1571-72, with the exception of the flamingoes and 
geese, were so extremely tame, that they could be caught by 
the hand, or killed in any number with a stick. Again, at 
Tristan d’Acunha in the Atlantic, Carmichael 1 states that the 
only two land-birds, a thrush and a bunting, were “ so tame as 
to suffer themselves to be caught with a hand-net.” From 
these several facts we may, I think, conclude, first, that the 
wildness of birds with regard to man is a particular instinct 
directed against him, and not dependent on any general degree 
of caution arising from other sources of danger ; secondly, that 
it is not acquired by individual birds in a short time, even when 
much persecuted ; but that in the course of successive genera¬ 
tions it becomes hereditary. With domesticated animals we 
are accustomed to see new mental habits or instincts acquired 
and rendered hereditary ; but with animals in a state of nature 
it must always be most difficult to discover instances of acquired 
hereditary knowledge. In regard to the wildness of birds 
towards man, there is no way of accounting for it, except as 
an inherited habit: comparatively few young birds, in any one 
year, have been injured by man in England, yet almost all, 
even nestlings, are afraid of him ; many individuals, on the 
other hand, both at the Galapagos and at the Falklands, have 
1 Linn, Trans, vol. xii. p. 496. The most anomalous fact on this subject which 
I have met with, is the wildness of the small birds in the Arctic parts of North 
America (as described by Richardson, Fauna Bor. vol. ii. p. 332), where they are 
said never to be persecuted. This case is the more strange, because it is asserted 
that some of the same species in their winter-quarters in the United States are tame. 
There is much, as Dr. Richardson well remarks, utterly inexplicable connected with 
the different degrees of shyness and care with which birds conceal their nests. How 
strange it is that the English wood-pigeon, generally so wild a bird, should very 
frequently rear its young in shrubberies close to houses ! 
