her
bottom in the nest and carrying up the sides to correspond, she shows
something very much like sense and judgment, though of a clumsy kind.
How much simpler and easier it would be to throw out the strange egg!
I have known the cowbird herself to carry an egg from a nest in which
she wished to deposit one of her own. Again, how stupid and ludicrous
it seems on the part of the mother sparrow, or warbler, or vireo, when
she goes about toiling desperately to satisfy the hunger of her big
clamorous bantling of a cowbird, never suspecting that she has been
imposed upon!

Of course the line that divides man from the lower orders is not a
straight line. It has many breaks and curves and deep indentations.
The man-like apes, as it were, mark where the line rises up into the
domain of man. Furthermore, the elephant and the dog, especially as we
know them in domestication, encroach upon man's territory.

Men are born with aptitudes for different things, but the art and the
science of them all they have to learn; proficiency comes with
practice. Man must learn to spin his web, to build his house, to sing
his song, to know his food, to sail his craft, to find his way--things
that the animals know "from the jump." The animal inherits its
knowledge and its skill: man must acquire his by individual effort;
all he inherits is capacity in varying degrees for these things. The
animal does rational things without an exercise of reason. It is
intelligent as nature is intelligent. It does not know that it knows,
or how it knows, while man does. Man's knowledge is the light of his
mind that shines on many and widely different objects, while the
knowledge of animals cannot be symbolized by the term "light" at all.
The animal acts blindly so far as any conscious individual
illumination or act of judgment is concerned. It does the thing
unwittingly, because it must. Confront it with a new condition, and it
has no resources to meet that condition. The animal knows what
necessity taught its progenitors, and it knows that only as a
spontaneous impulse to do certain things.

Instinct, I say, is a great matter, and often shames reason. It adapts
means to an end, it makes few or no mistakes, it takes note of times
and seasons, it delves, it bores, it spins, it weaves, it sews, it
builds, it makes paper, it constructs a shelter, it navigates the air
and the water, it is provident and thrifty, it knows its enemies, it
outwits its foes, it crosse