y repetition and
determined by relationships in the external environment.

CHAPTER III

THE DISPOSITION TO DEFEND THE TERRITORY

In the previous chapter I endeavoured to show that each male establishes
a territory at the commencement of the breeding season, and there
isolates itself from members of its own sex. And further I gave my
reasons for believing that this particular mode of behaviour is
determined by the inherited nature of the bird, and that we are
justified in speaking of it as "a disposition to secure a territory"
because we can perceive its prospective value. But the act of
establishment is only one step towards "securing." By itself it can
achieve nothing; for any number of different individuals might fix upon
the same situation, and if there were nothing in the inherited
constitution of the bird to prevent this happening, where would be the
security, or how could any benefit accrue to the species?

In withdrawing from its companions in the spring, the male is breaking
with the past, and this action marks a definite change in its routine of
existence. But the change does not end in attempted isolation; it is
carried farther and extends to the innermost life and affects what,
humanly speaking, we should term its emotional nature, so that the bird
becomes openly hostile towards other males with whom previously it had
lived on amicable terms.

The seasonal organic condition is responsible for the functioning of the
disposition which results in this intolerance, just as it is for the
functioning of the disposition which leads to the establishment of the
territory; and the effect of these two dispositions is that a space of
ground is not only occupied but made secure from intrusion. The process
is a simple one. There is no reason to believe, there is no necessity to
believe, that any part of the procedure is conditioned by anticipatory
meaning; the behaviour is "instinctive" in Professor Lloyd Morgan's
definition of the word, since it is of a "specific congenital type,
dependent upon purely biological conditions, nowise guided by conscious
experience though affording data for the life of consciousness."

That the males of many animals are apt to become quarrelsome during the
mating period is notorious. Darwin collected a number of facts, many of
which related to birds, showing the nature and extent of the strife when
the sexual instinct dominated the situation. And pondering over these
facts, he