Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/376

348 appear to be)—by there being any check or obstacle in the way of the ordinary sexual instinct? To talk of perversion or vitiation seems to me merely to shirk difficulties, and substitute words for an attempt at a rational explanation. Here are two wild creatures, whose acts must, I think, be assumed to be the outcome of a genuine primary feeling or instinct, unchecked, on the one hand, by any sense of impropriety, and, on the other, unassisted by any pruriency of imagination as we understand it. Each of them acts—and must therefore, also, feel—in turn as the male and female. They are hermaphrodites, in fact, as far as feeling and—to the extent possible—acting is concerned. Vast as must be the interval between them and their hermaphrodite progenitors, I can, myself, see no other explanation of the facts than their having had such progenitors, and if a cause so remote can reach so far down the stream of time, why not farther still?

Returning, now, to the sport or antic which immediately preceded the pairing—or whatever it may be called—of these two Grebes, the special feature of this was, I think, the mutual holding by them, in their bills, of a piece of weed which the male had excitedly dived for and brought up. For the excitement of both birds appeared to me to refer in a special manner to this possession, nor do I think that the upright attitude was assumed in order to display the plumage, though it necessarily had this effect. The weed alone, as it seemed to me, was the occasion of the curious waddly steps backwards and forwards, and it was seized by the female either immediately before or immediately after she stood up. True it was at last dropped, but the instant it was both birds set out for the nest, and we have seen what followed. A suspicion may, perhaps, cross the minds of some that the supposed weed was a fish, and that the birds were fighting for it. But besides that the consummation which I have just alluded to is opposed to this theory, it is in other respects untenable. The birds were close, for the glasses, and I saw the dank, green, dripping substance quite distinctly. Not only, too, have these Grebes never fought (and they might as well fight for the water as for fish), but they have never had, whilst under my observation, one inimical moment. Nor is the particular matter which I have here