Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/170

158 were unhooded. Their behaviour, however, was in every case conclusive against the theory that the perceptions of distance and direction by the eye are the result of experience, or of associations formed in the history of each individual life. Often at the end of two minutes they followed with their eyes the movements of crawling insects, turning their heads with all the precision of an old fowl. In from two to fifteen minutes they pecked at some speck or insect, showing not merely an instinctive perception of distance, hut an original ability to judge, to measure distance, with something like infallible accuracy. They did not attempt to seize things beyond their reach, as babies are said to grasp at the moon; and they may be said to have invariably hit the objects at which they struck—they never missed by more than a hair's breadth, and that too when the specks at which they aimed were no bigger, and less visible, than the smallest dot of an i. To seize between the points of the mandibles at the very instant of striking seemed a more difficult operation. I have seen a chicken seize and swallow an insect at the first attempt; most frequently, however, they struck five or six times; lifting once or twice before they succeeded in swallowing their first food. The unacquired power of following by sight was very plainly exemplified in the case of a chicken that, after being unhooded, sat complaining and motionless for six minutes, when I placed my hand on it for a few seconds. On removing my hand the chicken immediately followed it by sight backward and forward, and all round the table. To take, by way of example, the observations in a single case a little in detail:—A chicken that had been made the subject of experiments on hearing, was unhooded when nearly three days old. For six minutes it sat chirping and looking about it; at the end of that time it followed with its head and eyes the movements of a fly twelve inches distant; at ten minutes it made a peck at its own toes, and the next instant it made a vigorous dart at the fly, which had come within reach of its neck, and seized and swallowed it at the first stroke; for seven minutes it sat calling and looking about it, when a hive bee coming sufficiently near was seized at a dart and thrown some distance, much disabled. For twenty minutes it sat on the spot where its eyes had been unveiled without attempting to walk a step. It was then placed on rough ground within sight and call of a hen with a brood of its own age. After standing chirping for about a minute it started off towards the hen, displaying as keen a perception of the qualities of the outer world as it was ever likely to possess in after life. It never required to knock its head against a stone to discover that there was "no road that way." It leaped over the smaller obstacles that lay in its path and ran round the larger, reaching the mother in as nearly a straight line as the nature of the ground would permit. This, let knowledge, small as compared to the acquired knowledge accumulated in subsequent life by such a bird as a