Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/466

450 "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 duck's-eggs under a 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 anything to do with them," etc.

It would have been well if Mr. Spalding had stated whether these two hens belonged to the same breed; for, as is of course well known, different breeds exhibit great variations in the character of the incubatory instinct. Here, for instance, is a curious case: Spanish hens, as is notorious, scarcely ever sit at all; but I have one purely-bred one, just now, that sat on dummies for three days, after which time her patience became exhausted. However, she seemed to think that the self-sacrifice she had undergone during these three days merited some reward, for, on leaving the nest, she turned foster-mother to all the Spanish chickens in the yard. These were sixteen in number, and of all ages, from that at which their own mothers had just left them up to full-grown chickens. It is remarkable, too, that although there were Brahma and Hamburg chickens in the same yard, the Spanish hen only adopted those that were of her own breed. It is now four weeks since this adoption took place, but the mother as yet shows no signs of wishing to cast of her heterogeneous brood, notwithstanding some of her adopted chickens have grown nearly as large as herself.

The following, however, is a better example of what may be called plasticity of instinct: Three years ago I gave a pea-fowl's egg to a Brahma hen to hatch. The hen was an old one, and had previously reared many broods of ordinary chickens with unusual success even for one of her breed. In order to hatch the pea-chick she had to sit one week longer than is requisite to hatch an ordinary chick, but in this there is nothing very unusual, for, as Mr. Spalding observes, the same thing happens with every hen that hatches out a brood of