sympathetic), there is established an association
of ideas between the human aspect and the pains, direct
and in-direct, suffered from human agency. And
we must further con-clude, that the state of consciousness
which compels the bird to take flight, is at first
nothing more than an ideal reproduction of those painful
impressions which before followed man’s approach;
that such ideal reproduction becomes more vivid and
more massive as the painful experiences, direct or
sympathetic, increase; and that thus the emotion,
in its incipient state, is nothing else than an aggregation
of the revived pains before experience.
“As, in the course of generations, the young
birds of this race begin to display a fear of man
before yet they have been injured by him, it is an
unavoidable inference that the nervous system of the
race has been organically modified by these experiences,
we have no choice but to conclude, that when a young
bird is led to fly, it is because the impression produced
in its senses by the approaching man entails, through
an incipiently reflex action, a partial excitement
of all those nerves which in its ancestors had been
excited under the like conditions; that this partial
excitement has its accompanying painful consciousness,
and that the vague painful consciousness thus arising
constitutes emotion proper—emotion undecomposable
into specific experiences, and, therefore, seemingly
homogeneous" (Essays, vol. i. p. 320.)]
It is comforting to know that the “unavoidable
inference” is, after all, erroneous, and that
the nervous system in birds has not yet been organically
altered as a result of man’s persecution; for
in that case it would take long to undo the mischief,
and we should be indeed far from that “better
friendship” with the children of the air which
many of us would like to see.
CHAPTER VI.
PARENTAL AND EARLY INSTINCTS.
Under this heading I have put together several notes
from my journals on subjects which have no connection
with each other, except that they relate chiefly to
the parental instincts of some animals I have observed,
and to the instincts of the young at a very early period
of life.
While taking bats one day in December, I captured
a female of our common Buenos Ayrean species (Molossus
bonariensis), with her two young attached to her,
so large that it seemed incredible she should be able
to fly and take insects with such a weight to drag
her down. The young were about a third less in
size than the mother, so that she had to carry a weight
greatly exceeding that of her own body. They were
fastened to her breast and belly, one on each side,
as when first born; and, possibly, the young bat does
not change its position, or move, like the young developed
opossum, to other parts of the body, until mature
enough to begin an independent life. On forcibly
separating them from their parent, I found that they
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The Naturalist in La Plata from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
