ot to forget that the resourcefulness and flexibility of
instinct which all animals show, some more and some less, is not
reason, though it is doubtless the first step toward it. Out of it the
conscious reason and intelligence of man probably have been evolved. I
do not object to hearing this variability and plasticity of instinct
called the twilight of mind or rudimentary mentality. It is that, or
something like that. What I object to is hearing those things in
animal life ascribed to reason that can be easier accounted for on the
theory of instinct.

I must differ from the ornithologist of the New York Zoological Park
when he says in a recent paper that a bird's affection for her young
is not an instinct, an uncontrollable emotion, but I quite agree with
him that it does not differ, in kind at least, from the emotion of the
human mother. In both cases the affection is instinctive, and not a
matter of reason, or forethought, or afterthought at all. The two
affections differ in this: that one is brief and transient, and the
other is deep and lasting. Under stress of circumstances the bird will
abandon her helpless young, while the human mother will not. When the
food supply fails, the lower animal will not share the last morsel
with its young; its fierce hunger makes it forget them. During the
cold, wet summer of 1903 a vast number of half-fledged birds--orioles,
finches, warblers--perished in the nest, probably from scarcity of
insect food and the neglect of the mothers to hover them.

In interpreting the action of the animals, we so often do the thinking
and reasoning ourselves which we attribute to them. Thus Mr. Beebe in
the paper referred to says: "Birds have early learned to take clams or
mussels in their beaks or claws at low tide and carry them out of the
reach of the water, so that at the death of the mollusk, the
relaxation of the adductor muscle would permit the shell to spring
open and afford easy access to the inmate." No doubt the advancing
tide would cause the bird to carry the shell-fish back out of the
reach of the waves, where it might hope to get at its meat, but where
it would be compelled to leave the shell unopened. But that the bird
knew the fish would die there and that its shell would then open--it
is in such particulars that the observer does the thinking.

Two other writers upon our birds have stated that pelicans will gather
in flocks along the shore, and by manoeuvring and beating the wate