sexual passion, and, moreover, it will often have been made mostly, if not altogether, by the male bird. Now, as everyone knows, numbers of ground-laying birds deposit their eggs in a depression made either wholly or partly by themselves; whilst others, such as the Great Plover and the Nightjar, do not—that, at least, is the common view—make any kind of artificial hollow, though they may, in some cases, take advantage of a natural one. We will suppose that in the former case, as well as in some instances of the latter, we see the primitive nest or pairing-place, produced or located in the manner indicated. Now, however, comes a farther stage which, it might well be thought, could have originated only in deliberate and purposive action on the part of the bird. I allude to the lining of grass, moss, sticks, or even stones or fragments of shells, with which many birds who lay their eggs in a hollow made by them in the ground, further improve it. That this process (or, at any rate, the later stages of it) has now, with most birds, become a deliberate one, I do not doubt. But, as every evolutionist will admit, it is the beginnings of anything which best explain and are most fraught with significance. Is it possible that even the actual building of the nest may have had a nervous—a frenzied—origin? Lions and other fierce carnivorous animals will, when wounded, bite at sticks, or anything else lying within their reach. That a bird, as accustomed to peck as is a Dog or Lion to bite, should, whilst in a state of the most intense nervous excitement, do the same, does not appear to me to be more strange, or, indeed, in any way peculiar; and that such a trick would be inherited, and, if beneficial, increased and modified, who (having evolution in his soul) can doubt? If a bird, whilst ecstatically rolling on the ground, were to pick up and throw aside either small sticks, or any other loose-lying and easily-seized objects—such as bits of grass or fibrous roots—I can see no reason why it should not, by stretching out its neck to such as lay only just within reach, and dropping them again when in an easier attitude, make a sort of collection of them close about it.[1] Then, if the eggs were laid
- ↑ Since writing this paper I have read that of Mr. Cronwright Schreiner on the Ostrich in 'The Zoologist' for 1897, and as a part of it seems to me to support my theory, I quote it here, though it should be read, also, with reference to some of those actions upon which I found it, and which I am about to recount:—
