Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/617

Rh Some of these insects he then killed, and he found that in no case did the attitude in which they feigned death resemble the attitude in which they really died. Consequently we must conclude that all the instinct amounts to is that of remaining motionless, and therefore inconspicuous, in the presence of danger; and there is no more difficulty in understanding how such an instinct as this should be developed by natural selection in an animal which has no great powers of locomotion than there is in understanding how the instinct to run away from danger should be developed in another animal with powers of rapid locomotion. The case, however, is not, I think, quite so easy to understand in the feigning death of higher animals. From the evidence which I have I find it almost impossible to doubt that certain birds, foxes, wolves, and monkeys, not to mention some other and more doubtful cases, exhibit the peculiarity of appearing dead when captured by man. As all these animals are highly locomotive, we can not here attribute the fact to protective causes. Moreover, in these animals this behavior is not truly instinctive, inasmuch as it is not presented by all or even most individuals. As yet, however, observation of the facts is insufficient to furnish any data as to their explanation, although I may remark that possibly they may be due to the occurrence of the mesmeric or hypnotic state, which we know from recent researches may be induced in animals under the influence of forcible manipulation.

The instinct of feigning injury by certain birds presents a peculiar difficulty. As we all know, partridges, ducks, and plovers, when they have a brood of young ones, and are alarmed by the approach of a carnivorous quadruped, such as a dog, will pretend to be wounded, flapping along the ground with an apparently broken wing in order to induce the four-footed enemy to follow, and thus to give time for the young brood to disperse and hide themselves. The difficulty here, of course, is to understand how the birds can have acquired the idea of pretending to have a broken wing, for the occasions must be very rare on which any bird has seen a companion thus wounded followed by a carnivorous quadruped; and even if such observations on their part were of frequent occurrence, it would be difficult to accredit the animals with so high a degree of reasoning power as would be required for them intentionally to imitate such movements. When I consulted Mr. Darwin with reference to this difficulty, he gave me a provisional hypothesis by which it appeared to him that it might be met. He said that any one might observe, when a hen has a brood of young chickens and is threatened by a dog, that she will alternately rush at the dog and back again to the chickens. Now, if we could suppose that under these circumstances the mother-bird is sufficiently intelligent to observe that, when she runs away from the dog, she is followed by the dog, it is not impossible that the maternal instinct might induce her to run away from a brood in order to lead the dog away from it. If this happened in any cases, natural selection would