SENSE OF DIRECTION.
The always enthralling secret, how animals find their way, has been engaging the attention of the French ; and one-of these much too logical men of science has written in a de- lightful book* the history of his long and patient investigations. His conclusion is that they use their common or garden senses. The bumble bee and pigeon see ; the ants and hive bees smell. How simple it all is ! How logicians will be pleased ! We were all told in our logic lessons to " use Occam's razor," which meant that we must lop off all unnecessary theoretic causes, such' as moral, magnetic; or electric senses ; and, if need be, work- the workaday causes to death. Now M. Rabaud concentrates on pigeons and insects. He does not touch much the most marvellous of journeyings—the eel's, which I should put first, and the mammals'. He only mentions the wild birds to abuse the students for confusing migration, or movement compelled by hunger and cold, with orientation or discovery of direction.
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It is obviously true that pigeons and bees discover and learn their routes, often rather laboriously, by the help of their senses and their sense-memory. It is a pretty theoryi and a new, that they see a bit of scenery as a whole rather than more nicely in parts in the way -of more analytic man ; 'but can a young eel swim continuously in one direction throughout two whole years, from the.depths of the Atlantic to the mouth of the Severn, by aid of ear or eye ? Can a young bird, driven by suddenly felt biological pressure, dash off on 'a straight journey of several thousand miles, much of it travelled at night, by the mere compass of its eyes ? Can a dog or cat (whose movements though short are not less inexplicable) find its way home at great speed and very directly over an un- known course by nose or eye or ear ? The investigation of the use of the senses in movement makes an interesting para- graph in • biological history ; but what an immensegal') between the plain fact that the senses aid some animals to successful orientation and the mystery of the journey of the young eel or the young cuckoo However, investigators must proteed from the known-- to the unknown, and M. Rabaud has added his bit to the interpretation of the sense- impression of some animals. -
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