Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/611

Rh This they continued to do, relieving guard, for three days, until they had built supporting pillars of wax. Some other bumble-bees, when shut up and so prevented from getting moss wherewith to cover their nests, tore threads from a piece of cloth, and "carded them with their feet into a fretted mass," which they used as moss. Lastly, Andrew Knight observed that his bees availed themselves of a kind of cement made of rosin and turpentine, with which he had covered some decorticated trees—using this ready-made material instead of their own propolis, the manufacture of which they discontinued; and more recently it has been observed that bees, "instead of searching for pollen, will gladly avail themselves of a very different substance, namely, oatmeal." Now, in all these cases it is evident that, if, from any change of environment, such accidental conditions were to occur in a state of nature, the bees would be ready at any time to meet them by intelligent adjustment, which, if continued sufficiently long and aided by selection, would pass into true instincts of building combs in new directions, of supporting combs during their construction, of carding threads of cloth, of substituting cement for propolis and oatmeal for pollen.

Turning to higher animals, Andrew Knight tells us of a bird which, having built her nest upon a forcing-house, ceased to visit it during the day when the heat of the house was sufficient to incubate the eggs; but always returned to sit upon the eggs at night when the temperature of the house fell. Again, thread and worsted are now habitually used by sundry species of birds in building their nests, instead of wool and horse-hair, which in turn were no doubt originally substitutes for vegetable fibers and grasses. This is especially noticeable in the case of the tailor-bird, which finds thread the best material wherewith to sew. The common house-sparrow furnishes another instance of intelligent adaptation of nest-building to circumstances, for in trees it builds a domed nest (presumably, therefore, the ancestral type), but in towns avails itself by preference of sheltered holes in buildings, where it can afford to save time and trouble by constructing a loosely-formed nest. Moreover, the chimney-and house-swallows have similarly changed their instincts of nidification, and in America this change has taken place within the last two or three hundred years. Indeed, according to Captain Elliott Coues, all the species of swallow on that continent (with one possible exception) have thug modified the sites and structures of their nests in accordance with the novel facilities afforded by the settlement of the country.

Another instructive case of an intelligent change of instinct in connection with nest-building is given from a letter by Mr. Haust, dated New Zealand, 1862, which I find among Mr. Darwin's manuscripts. Mr. Haust says that the Paradise duck, which naturally or usually builds its nest along the rivers on the ground, has been observed by him on the east of the island, when disturbed in their nests upon the