Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/325

Rh Though the instincts of animals appear and disappear in such seasonable correspondence with their own wants and the wants of their offspring as to be a standing subject of wonder, they have by no means the fixed and unalterable character by which some would distinguish them from the higher faculties of the human race. They vary in the individuals as does their physical structure. Animals can learn what they did not know by instinct and forget the instinctive knowledge which they never learned, while their instincts will often accommodate themselves to considerable changes in the order of external events. Everybody knows it to be a common practice to hatch ducks'-eggs under the common hen, though in such cases the hen has to sit a week longer than on her own eggs. I tried an experiment to ascertain how far the time of sitting could be interfered with in the opposite direction. Two hens became broody on the same day, and I set them on dummies. On the third day I put two chicks a day old to one of the hens. She pecked at them once or twice; seemed rather fidgety, then took to them, called them to her and entered on all the cares of a mother. The other hen was similarly tried, but with a very different result. She pecked at the chickens viciously, and both that day and the next stubbornly refused to have any thing to do with them.

The pig is an animal that has its wits about it quite as soon after birth as the chicken. I therefore selected it as a subject of observation. The following are some of my observations: That vigorous young pigs get up and search for the teat at once, or within one minute after their entrance into the world. That if removed several feet from their mother, when aged only a few minutes, they soon find their way back to her, guided apparently by the grunting she makes in answer to their squeaking. In the case I observed the old sow rose in less than an hour and a half after pigging, and went out to eat; the pigs ran about, tried to eat various matters, followed their mother out, and sucked while she stood eating. One pig I put in a bag the moment it was born and kept it in the dark until it was seven hours old, when I placed it outside the sty, a distance of ten feet from where the sow lay concealed inside the house. The pig soon recognized the low grunting of its mother, went along outside the sty struggling to get under or over the lower bar. At the end of five minutes it succeeded in forcing itself through under the bar at one of the few places where that was possible. No sooner in than it went without a pause into the pig-house to its mother, and was at once like the others in its behavior. Two little pigs I blindfolded at their birth. One of them I placed with its mother at once: it soon found the teat and began to suck. Six hours later I placed the other a little distance from the sow; it reached her in half a minute, after going about rather vaguely; in half a minute more it found the teat. Next day I found that one of the two left with the mother, blindfolded, had got the blinders off; the