Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/545

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IKE man, animals, especially those of the higher orders, are born with a latent, inherited education, the effects of which are manifested in the course of individual development. Our organs, for instance, which have been slowly built up during the evolution of the various specific types, act of themselves, each in its own way. They have their own memory. The digestive, circulatory, and respiratory organs, the senses, etc., discharge their functions spontaneously and without waiting for lessons from any master. The young animal left to its own impulses usually comes very soon to take care of itself in the great world, to avoid its enemies, and find food and a comfortable bed. Except in species that live in larger or smaller societies, parents drive away their young as soon as they have arrived at a stage in which they can take care of themselves. This fact is easily observable in birds, even when they are domesticated. The solicitous care of turtledoves for their young gives way to pecking and wing striking as soon as the latter are developed. Eagles drive their grown-up young from the nest, and even from the neighborhood. Some other species take care for the future of their offspring, and before sending them away teach them to fly, or swim, or hunt, or fish. Dureau de la Malle saw falcons, high up in the air, drop dead mice and swallows in order to teach their young to spring upon their prey when in rapid flight, and to estimate distances; and when the little hawklets were somewhat larger, they dropped living birds instead of dead game. American crested ducks teach their young to find seeds and to snap at flies and aquatic insects.

It is generally the female that exercises this care for her offspring, while the male concerns himself little about the matter. The female wild duck leads her brood to the water, and takes care to choose places of no very great depth for this first lesson, and trains the little ones to hunt flies, mosquitoes, and beetles. The female of the eider duck gently carries her ducklings one by one in her beak, escorts them to the deep water, and teaches them to dive for fish. When they are tired she glides under them, takes them on her back, and carefully carries them to the shore. It is undoubtedly very largely by virtue of instinct and ancestral education that birds swim or fly, and the mother has only to invite them to the act by her example; but, for a more complete training, the lessons are very useful, if not necessary. These lessons given by the parent birds to their young are the more impressive because birds have a vocal language, developed to a certain extent, and the example is enforced by admonitions,