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 , she instantly flew out on to the opposite bank, and began to flap and struggle along the flat marshy meadow-land, of course in full view. I crossed the stream and pursued her, allowing her to "fool me to the top of my bent," and this she appeared to me to do, or to think she was doing, on much the same kind of indicia as one would go by in the case of a man. Now, unless this bird had wished to keep me in view, and thus judge of the effect of her stratagem, or unless she feared that "out of sight" would be "out of mind" with regard to herself (but this would be to credit her with yet greater powers of reflection), why should she have left the water, the element in which she usually and most naturally performs these actions, to modify them on the land? Yet to suppose that it has ever occurred suddenly, and as a new idea, to any bird to act a pious fraud of this kind, would be to suppose wonders, and also to be unevolutionary (almost as serious a matter nowadays as to be un-English).

But may we not think that an act, which in its origin has been of a nervous and, as it were, pathological character, has become, in time, blended with intelligence, and that natural selection has not only picked out those birds who best performed a mechanical action—which, though it sprung merely from mental disturbance, was yet of a beneficial nature—but also those whose intelligence began after a time to enable them to see whereto such action tended, and thus consciously to guide and improve it? There is evidence, I believe—though neither space nor the nature of this slight work will allow me to go into it—that such abnormal mental states as of old