Page:Territory in Bird Life by Henry Eliot Howard (London, John Murray edition).djvu/345

Rh and we have seen that this conclusion is in accord with the facts of observation—that is the general result of our inquiry into the functioning of the two powerful impulses, the impulse associated with the disposition to secure a territory and the gregarious impulse.

The phenomenon of migration embraces a number of separate problems, each one of which presents features of great interest and of still greater difficulty. On some of these problems I do not intend to touch; I seek only to ascertain whether the impulses that are concerned in the securing of a territory, and in the search for society, bear any relation to the problem as a whole. I hold that the origin of migration is not to be found merely in conditions peculiar to a remote past, but that the conditions inhere in the organic complex of the bird, and are thus handed down from generation to generation. Starting with this assumption I examined the behaviour which normally accompanies the seasonal life-history of the individual, and found, in that behaviour, manifestations of cyclical change leading to definite biological consequences. I now propose to inquire whether those consequences are such as might, in the course of time, give rise to the seasonal change of abode.

We are apt to think of migration in terms of the Warbler that enlivens our hedgerows in the spring after travelling hundreds of miles from the south, or of the Redwing that comes from