INSTINCT. (Spectator.)

Waikato Times, Volume IV, Issue 181, 5 July 1873, Page 2

INSTINC T. (Spectator.)

Mr Dototas .Sfaidjjtg has been making lomo very curious and instructive, experiments on the instincts of chickens hooded by himself from, the moment of their birth till they wore several dav<J old, from which ho has clearly established tlwt $heir instinctive power of calculating distance, distinguishing objects which will serve them for food, and aiming at and wallowing them, is abundantly instinctive, i.e., requires no lessons of experience on this side of the eggshell to make it pet-feet. The experiments and the inferences ho draws from them are the subjects o/ a very striking article in Maomillan's Magazine for the present month. " A hungry chick that has never tasted food is able, on seeing a fly or a spider for the first time, to hring into action muscles that were never so exercised before, and to perform a series of delicately adjusted movements that end in the capture of the insect." Mr 9palding aays of the chickens whioh were the subjects of his experiment that, when first unhooded, " almost invariably they seemed a little stunned by the light, remained motionless for several minutes, and continued for some time less active than before they were unhoodod. Their behariour, however, was in every caso conclusive against the theory that the perceptions of distance and direction by the eye are the result of experience, of associations formed in the history of each individual life. Often at the end of two miuute3 they followed with their eyes the movements of crawling insects, turning their heads with all the precision of an old fowl. In from two to iiftoen minutes they pecked at some speck or insect, showing not merely an instinctive perception of distance, but an original ability to judge, to measure distances with something like infallible accuracy. They did not attempt to seize things beyond their reach, as babies are said to grasp at the moon ; and they may be said to have invariably hit the objects at which they struck,— they never missed more than a hair's breadth, and, that, too, when the specks at which they aimed were no bigger and less visible than the smallest dot of an ' i.' To seize between the points of the mandibles at the very instant of striking seemed a more difficult operation. I have seen a chicken seize and swallow an insect At the first attempt ; most frequently, however, they struck five or six times, lifting once or twice before succeeding in swallowing their first food." The experiments in hearing were no less demonstrative of the chicken's instinctive power of judging both of the significance of sounds and the direction from which they came. " Chickens hatched and kept in the »<ud bag for a day or two, when taken out and placed nine or ten feet from a box in which a hen with chicks was concealed, after standing for a minute or two, uniformly set of straight for the box in answer -to the call of the ben. which they had never seen and never before heard. This they did, struggling through grass and over rough ground when not yet able to stand steady on their legs. Nine chickens were thus experimented upon, and each individual gave the same positive results, running to the box scores of times, and from every possible position, ''o vary the experiment, I tried the effects of the mother's voice on hooded chickens. These, when left to themselves, seldom made a forward step — their movements were round, and round a.ud backward ; hut when placed, within five or six feet of the mother, they, in answer to her oall, became much more lively, bejan to make little forward journeys, and aoon followed her by sound aloqe, though of course blindly, keeping their heads close to the ground, and knocking against almost everything that lay in their path. Only three chickens were madf subjects of this experiment. ' ! Fr<un all which, and many other observations for which we must refer our readers to Maomillan's Magqzine, Mr Douglas Spalding justly infers that the chicken's eight-perceptiona of both direction and distance are properly instinctive, and that its sound, perceptions of direction are also instinctive. But Mr Scolding's inlerence from those facts, is the yery reverse of that of faley and the other " Natural" theologians of Paley's school. Ho is a very strong materialist in this sense, that he believes in " the intimate and variable dependence of all kinds of mental facts on nervous orgumsation;" further, that nervous organisations are inherited, and that so all the mental facts which depend on nervous organisation are susceptible of inheritance. He is disposedevidently to hold that such instincts as he has illustrated arise somewhat in this wny : — Some primeval hen or chicken learnt slowly and painfully to uieasuro distance, and to discover direotion, much as a child learns or would learn without a parent ; it* offspring inherited a nervous organisation affected by these acquired' habits, and therefore more capable of their acquisition, till at length the inherited facility of learning bi-came bv slow steps an inherited facility to dispense with learning! — the nervous organisation having become at the very time o( birth as well adapted to direct the ohicken'v »je and ear to its food, as it had been in long previous generations after half a life's individual teaching and experience. It does not matter, Mr Spalding thinks, koto a norv.ons organisation got to be what it is, whether by the experien.cn pf aHcesfprs and the transmission of the modifications caused by that experience', o\» bj! ihl? expeweuqe-qf' the individual - t the only real question is what is thc'jnervous organization? If the same modification is there, the mental phenomena due. to that modification will be there, whether the explanation is to be found in the life, of the individual or in the life of tbe nqecstrj. So far dpqs Mr Spalding go, that he expressly states his belief that if you could imagine a duplicate man to be suddenly created, with all the material organises and, all the nervous tnodlficatiqns of some existing friend, the duplicate, man would aUo be at onoj a duplicate friend, woujd have the si\mo meiupries, the same k.novfledge, the same expectations, the same, behefs, the same doubts, and the same affections. The difficulty lies not in getting the duplicate (rieud without the duplicate experience, but in "getting the duplicate physical organization without the duplicate experience ; if you could anyhow manage the latter feat, if by any process you could find a mode of obtaining a physical fac-simile of every organism without identity of individual experience^ you would have ipso facto accomplished also the former feat ; you would have got the duplicate of any particular friend's 'personal affections and, feeling towards yourself, without his having had' any of the moral experience by which in the original's case it was first obtained. And so far as inheritance goes, Mjr Spalding thinks inheritance is a mode of obtaining to- a very small extent a physical fac-simile of certain nervous modifications without the experience which led to those modifications ; i,n a word, inheritance is a short cut not to duplicate identity, — because it never gets nearly so far, — but to a certain degree of indentity of mental constitution with your ancestors, — enough to give you from the first the command of certain keys to locks, of which they had mastered the secret only by morear- leas difficult experience.

Lbgai fcoNQSvmr — The longevity of lawsuits, in this country is only equalled by that of lawsuits in the United States, as instanoed by a caie recently tried by the Supreme Court of that country. The case, it is ttated, involved immense landed, estates in Maryland, and it bad been on the dockets so long that not only the parties who originally brought the suit are all dead, but also the defendants, the counsel on both sides, and nearly all the witnesses. The property was admitted to have been once owned by two brothers named Crawford, one of whom was alleged to have beeu secretly marini to a certain Betsey Taylor. Both brothers died after a time, and Betsey claimed the property. The claim was disputed by the only relative! of th» deceived brothers — a family by the name of Blackburn. Before the caae came to be decided, however, Betsey Taylor died, and her children brought the suit. The Black burns maintained that Betsey was not the lawful wife qf Thomas, Crawford ; that, therefore, the children were illegitimate children, aud not entitled to a share of the property. The records, testimony, and rulings till many volumes. The case was before several Court*, and the Judges were always divided. .At last it reached the Supreme Court, and the Lower Court having decided that there was a marriage, the Supreme Court affirmed the decision aboub six weeks? ago, and tho Blackburn* were defeated. Since the case was first opened ,' Betsey Taylor «nd her four children have died, also the priest who married her to Crawford, her sister, mother, and brother, and all the original attorneys. The last claimants of the property were Betsey's grandchildren, who by marriage have become distant relatives of the Blackburns. In speaking of tho native difficulty, the Nelson Examiner of the 28th ultimo say« :—": — " We t liink wo are at last able to discern the position in which we eiand towards the Maori king and his followers. If Purukutu was not actually incited to uommit murder b.v Tawhiar, tho latter has avowed his intention to protect, the criminal from being seized and brought to jnsfcioo. The murderer of Sullivan n now a man of mark in Waikato ; with 450 followers in arms, supported by his Maori majesty, and in case of war certain to draw to his standard tlio disaffected and rtckltfgj of all the northern tribes, his position is n very strong one. The murder was a challenge to fight ; and whether wo acoopt or refuse, the consequences cannot be serious. If, as counselled by t>ome, we shrug our shoulders and regard Sullivan as only one more added to the list, of vjetims to Maori barbarism, «it is probable beforo long wo shall hoar of another, and (inotl)ot\nncl who shall a»y whom those victims shall be ? On the other hand, tho attempted capture of Purukutu will inevitably bring on a war, which, nit hough it must in the end put down Maori kingship, would cost numerous lives in the process, and a large sum of money.' The latter, however, would be of less consideration than the effect a war might hare on our credit, and anything which nt this juncture would prcront the completion of our public works would simply be ruinous/ The runs in Marl borough are so in foiled with pigs that pig-hunting has become a regular profession. One of its followers named Thomas Jones has a contract extending over the Starborough and Richmond Brook runs, Awatere, which adjoins Fuxbourno run. In this pursuit he uses six i dogs, and works on foot wit.li no weapon but. a short spear, some six feet long, with a blade of four inches. With these slight monns he succeeded in killing, between 3rd April and 18th Mnj, no less than 750 bend of swine, for which he received at the rafe of 6d per t*<l. Of this number 512 were, on, the Scarborough and 231 on Richmond Bank.