ngue is a very
short and stiff affair, and is fixed in the lower mandible as in a
trough. Ducks do not protrude the tongue when they feed; they cannot
protrude it; and if a duck can crush a mussel-shell with its beak,
what better position could it have the bivalve in than fast to the
tongue between the upper and the lower mandible? The story is
certainly a very "fishy" one. In all such cases the mind follows the
line of least resistance. If the ducks were deliberately holding their
bills under water, it is easier to believe that they did it because
they thereby found some relief from pain, than that they knew the
bivalves would let go their hold sooner in fresh water than in salt or
than in the air. A duck's mouth held open and the tongue pinched by a
shell-fish would doubtless soon be in a feverish and abnormal
condition, which cool water would tend to alleviate. One is unable to
see how the ducks could have acquired the kind of human experimental
knowledge attributed to them. A person might learn such a secret, but
surely not a duck. In discovering and in eluding its enemies, and in
many other ways, the duck's wits are very sharp, but to attribute to
them a knowledge of the virtues of fresh water over salt in a certain
unusual emergency--an emergency that could not have occurred to the
race of ducks, much less to individuals often enough for a special
instinct to have been developed to meet it--is to make them entirely
human.

[5] I have tried the experiment on two ordinary clams, and
they both died on the third day.

The whole idea of animal surgery which the incident implies--such as
mending broken legs with clay, salving wounds with pitch, or resorting
to bandages or amputations--is preposterous. Sick or wounded animals
will often seek relief from pain by taking to the water or to the mud,
or maybe to the snow, just as cows will seek the pond or the bushes to
escape the heat and the flies, and that is about the extent of their
surgery. The dog licks his wound; it no doubt soothes and relieves it.
The cow licks her calf; she licks him into shape; it is her instinct
to do so. That tongue of hers is a currycomb, plus warmth and moisture
and flexibility. The cat always carries her kittens by the back of
the neck; it is her best way to carry them, though I do not suppose
this act is the result of experiment on her part.

A chimney swift has taken up her abode in my study chimney. At
intervals, day or night,