Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/828

808 the greatest agitation till he caught the bird, which was completely exhausted. For a long time the bird went through this manœuvre, showing that while he knew how to fly it could not alight, though it finally acquired this faculty. Professor L. A. Lee records a remarkable attack made on him by a marsh-hawk, and Mr. Abbott M. Frazer tells of a tame crow deliberately standing on an ant-hill and permitting the ants to remove the parasites from its feathers. In this connection a paper by Mr. Joseph F. James should be read, in which he shows by a number of arguments that animals not only present a reasoning faculty, but that this faculty has been the result of slow evolution.

Mr. Xenos Clark, in an exceedingly interesting article on the music of animals, and particularly the music of birds, concludes by saying there is "a theory for the origin of melody, whether human or extrahuman, which, besides the usual basis of physiological acoustics, employs the law of modified, inherited, selected, and adapted structure—i.e., the law of evolution."

Mr. Ruthven Deane records cases of albinism and melanism in a great many families of birds; and Mr. N. C. Brown shows the variable abundance of birds at the same locality in different years. In this connection it will be of interest to read Dr. L. P. Gratacap's paper entitled "Zoic Maxima, or Periods of Numerical Variations in Animals."

The behavior of wild birds when kept in confinement, and the attempts made in domesticating them, have always furnished an interesting field for study. The curious freaks and impulses which they often betray, the changes they show under the new conditions, indicate in some measure the plasticity of their organization.

Hon. John D. Caton in an interesting paper on "Unnatural Attachments among Animals," records a curious fondness shown by a crane for a number of pigs; and in another paper on the "Wild Turkey and its Domestication," this writer has made some valuable records of the successive changes which take place in the bird during this process: changes in color, during which the more conspicuous features of protective coloring are lost; changes in habit, in which is seen the undoing or relaxing of those features which indicate constant vigilance, from carrying itself in a semi-erect attitude, perching on the tallest trees, covering up the eggs carefully with leaves when off the nest, etc., to moving in an horizontal attitude, perching near the ground, covering the eggs but slightly, or carelessly, etc., and losing that wildness which characterizes the bird in its wild state. At the breeding season, however, the females became wild again, but this was a feature too deeply implanted to show modification in the time allotted to Mr.