F. M. CAMPBELL-ON INSTINCT. 
129 
affected by fright, and, though motionless, to have retained suffi¬ 
cient consciousness to have observed that its enemy passed by 
unheedingly. It may afterwards have so frequently and uninten¬ 
tionally repeated the attitude that the passive state became habitual 
in presence of danger. Or again, the apparent device might be 
developed (and I think with greater probability) totally irrespective 
of intelligence, by the many ancestral or individual occasions of 
fright-paralysis diminishing in intensity in proportion to their 
recurrence. Fright would soon be reduced to anxiety, or cease 
altogether, and the still position would become gradually the reflex 
of a sudden occurrence, and only historically related to paralysis. 
Rut supposing the possession of the highest intelligence, it would 
well be a question whether or not the best thing for a creature to 
do, if it did not know where to run, was to remain still. 
This habit of feigning injury is highly developed in the humming¬ 
bird hawk-moths. If one of them be confined, and when quiet be 
tipped on to its back, it will move headforemost so slowly and 
steadily that it will appear on a cursory glance to be stationary. 
Should the moth rest more on one side than on the other, it will 
continue so and will not attempt to balance itself more evenly. The 
movement seems to be due to the almost imperceptibly rapid vibra¬ 
tion of the fore-wings. The other limbs are all motionless, and the 
moth looks like a moving corpse, but it can right itself at any time. 
Analogous to the practice of “shamming death” is that of 
“ feigning injury,” which is a common act of some birds (partridges, 
peewits, and ducks). They thus draw a pursuer away from the 
nest and their young. The two expressions are of course purely 
subjective; indeed, in the one case the still attitudes are totally 
unlike those of death, and in the other case the instances of wounded 
birds cannot so frequently occur as to offer patterns for imitation, 
inasmuch as maimed animals soon fall victims to their carnivorous 
enemies. There is also the fundamental objection that, if the 
animal kingdom, apart from man, shows such ratiocination as is 
implied by both terms, the members of it possess an intelligence 
almost, if not quite, equal to that of humanity. Darwin suggested 
as an explanation that “a female bird which, from solicitude for 
her nestlings, would endeavour to fight a threatening quadruped 
as a hen does a dog, might, by alternately attacking and retreating, 
inadvertently draw the enemy away from the nest. ^Natural selec¬ 
tion, acting on this primitive habit, might then develope the running 
away from the nest as an instinct; and if, as is probable, carnivorous 
quadrupeds would be more likely to follow birds unable to fly than 
birds apparently well, the action of drooping the wing, etc., might 
have been slowly developed.” * Romanes, whilst admitting that the 
greatest difficulty is to account for the drooping of the wing, thinks 
that the instinct of the mother must have been assisted by intelli¬ 
gence, i.e. she might have observed “ that on retreating without 
taking wing she was followed up,”f and acted afterwards with 
* See ‘Mental Evolution in Animals,’ p. 316. f lb ., p. 317. 
