THE SENSE OF DIRECTION.
THE present September has seen no such vast assemblies of birds awaiting the right moment to launch them- selves on the southern migration as were last year seen in our river valleys. The weather, though unpleasant, has not been so violently cyclonic as to dam the migrating streams at their points of issue. Meantime some fresh light has been thrown on the physical facts and mental aspects of the ques- tion by the correspondence provoked in the Times by the despatch of Herr Andree's pigeons. Mr. Tegetmeier, one of the highest practical authorities on homing pigeons, empha- sised the rational side of the birds' performance, and main- taining that pigeons always needed training, drew a broad distinction between the " homing " of individual birds, and the instinct which directs migration, common to every indi- vidual of a species. It is doubtful if this distinction can be maintained. If the particular instances communicated to the Times are compared with the best authenticated examples of the homing instinct in animals already recorded, they will be found to correspond with certain typical developments of such performances. They can be graded and classified. More than this, without unduly pressing the connection between the classes, we believe that the results show on a graduated scale the connection between the least remarkable instances, which are based on reasoning or can be explained by reference to experience, and the most remarkable, such as the migrations of birds by night across wide intervals of sea, in which the sense of sight, on which the use of experience mainly depends, is in abeyance, and some other guiding power, independent of signs and tokens, must be assumed to texist. We give a possible surmise at the nature of this power later. Meantime the following are some of the classes into which the instances of the homing instinct may be grouped in referenoe to its highest development as seen in migration. A rather striking, but not in- explicable, group of cases comprises most instances of foxes, doge, and other quadrupeds which after removal to considerable distances have found their way back to their original homes. The Duke of Beanfort's vixen, which returned from Badminton across the Severn to its old quarters in the Forest of Dean, is typical of this class of " returning animals," though this case is far less extra- ordinary than that of a fox which returned from Sussex to its original home on Lord Hothfield's estate in Northumber- land. Both the fox and the dog are exceptionally intelligent animals, and, given a strong original faculty for finding their way across country, the roaming propensity of foxes at certain seasons, and the reasoning powers of the dog, must be held to account for much of their success in returning home from exile.
In the second class of instances experience plays a large apart; but an original faculty prior to experience is con- .ceded by the most competent observers. In this group are
• comprised all the feats of the domesticated homing pigeons, of whose original and surviving faculty of return, unaided by experience, the following two examples, given by Mr. James Hine, of Glasgow, in a paper on the Antwerp carrier- pigeon, which appeared in the Journal of Horticulture, may be quoted in addition to the examples published in the Times. Some Antwerp homing pigeons, brought from the Continent, were kept by Mr. Huie in Glasgow. After three years some 2young birds were sent from Glasgow, viti. Manchester, to iLedbury, in Herefordshire. At Ledbury these pigeons were kept confined until they were Bitting on a second :brood of eggs. Then they were liberated, and were found 'back at their home in Glasgow two days later. They had never been trained, and their experience of the journey was limited to what they could ascertain from inside their hamper. 'In the Fanciers' Chronicle of August 20th, 1880, a still more ,striking instance of a long return-flight of an untrained ,pigeon was recorded by Mr. J. P. Taylor, of Moss Croft, -Gateshead-on-Tyne. He bought some homing pigeons of a Mr. Mills, in Brussels, in February, 1879. On August 8th, 1880, one of these birds was set at liberty, and on the morning .of August 11th it was back in its loft in Brussels, a distance of four hundred miles. This pigeon was a hen bird three years old.
While training is nearly always necessary, the flights being increased in length each time the birds are released, -cases such as these indicate the direction in which the • origin of the homing power is to be sought. It is instinct modified by domestication. It occasionally survives in full force even in ea long domesticated a species as the pigeon ; but as a rule it is only the capacity for training which is transmitted. Incidentally it should be noticed that this acquired, or regained, faculty is transmitted; for whereas sixty years ago twenty-five miles was considered a creditable flight, the birds are now easily trained up to one hundred miles in their first season.
A third class of examples to which the Times' corre- spondence contributes some new and very striking first- hand experiences, comprises the instances of the homing faculty in man. The instances have for a general feature the fact that this faculty is most developed in the least " reason- ing " races, and seems, if not purely instinctive, to proceed from intuition to action, without any intervening process of reason or debate. One instance shows clearly how com- mon reasoning kills the faculty. We quote Mr. Stillman's account of his early experiences in the forest of the Andirondacks, where by much solitary adventure he had gained the homing faculty without reference to landmarks. 'I had set out with my skiff to explore the course of a stream which meandered through a forest absolutely un- explored. I abandoned the boat and the stream to ascertain if a short cut and ' carry ' might not lead to an unencum- bered continuation of navigation, and suddenly came on a stream (the same, of course), running, as it seemed, in a contrary direction. In less time than I could tell it I lost all sense of direction, and though the sun was still several hours high, I could not convince myself that it WAS not shining out of the north, and that to get back to my boat I must go in the direction contrary to that in which I had left it The agitation which supervened in an instant was little short of insanity." The ordinary course in such an emergency would be to torture the brain with recollection
and inferences, and recover the track by an appeal to reason. The traveller, having in his previous wanderings in the forest
acquired the "sense of direction," did exactly the opposite. "I sat down, covered my eyes, and had still sufficient command of my nerves to wait for will to regain the rower over reason ; and when I opened my eyes I had my compass again correctly." The sun was shining, so that by abandoning the minor promptings of reason the traveller might still have regained his course by referring to the sun as guide. But the point is that be regained the sense of direction without it. A corre- spondent familiar with the Central American forests states that the Indians there rely on experience to find their path. Mr. &Ions, on the other band, declares that "there is one faculty which the Bushmen possess in a remarkable degree, which enables them to find their way, by day or night, through level, pathless forests, where there are no landmarks what- ever, to any point they wish to reach where they have ever been before." This is the "homing instinct" exactly as we see it developed in animals, and seems exactly to coincide with the kind of mental projection of the attention to a definite known point, which the "sense of direction" supposes. There is nothing in the observed phenomena of the successful homing of the wild man in the forest to contradict the assumption that when once he has mentally fixed the point at which he desires to arrive, he keeps it before him in his mental vision, and "goes for it" without conscious reference to particular landmarks, tokens, or signs. It is open to him to use all these, as the traveller uses the stars when crossing the desert by night ; but we believe that in many cases the " homing " man projects himself by a mental effort, which abstracts his attention from landmarks, yet carries him surely to the goal. Into this abstraction particulars and inferences only introduce confusion, as in the position described by Mr. Stillman. A believer in the doctrines expounded by certain members of the Psychical Society would probably say that the Bushman aban- doned himself to the directions of his subliminal self, and that this subliminal self went forward like a homing pigeon. The best authenticated cases of distant migrations which form the last group of facts in the chain of the passage and returr, for example, the homing of Australian birds over one thousand miles of interment ocean to the islands of New Zealand, do not seem very far removed in kind from those of the Bushmen, or of Mr. Stillman in his acquired disuse of reason- ing, or the isolated cases of the return of untrained pigeons from a distance. No one acquainted with the recent records of migration claims to have discovered a solution of the faculty of return to a given spot across the open seas. What guides the old birds is the problem at present offered for solution. The case of the young, who are said to travel back to their parents' home before these start on their journey, we must set aside at present, until it can be proved that the route and time of their migration are separate and distinct.
But given that the bird, flying from Australia to New Zealand, knows, like the Bushman, the place to which it desires to go, the graduated instances of the exercise of the faculty which accomplishes this desire hint the direction in which the answer rang be sought. If a civilised English- man, planted on the sea-sands, can, when blindfolded, walk for some fifty yards almost straight in the direction of a point on which he has previously fixed his gaze, we must assume that he has "the sense of direction" in its rudimentary form. The ability to do this depends, first, on the actual or mental selection of a point to aim at ; secondly, on a sensibility to any deviation from the straight line towards this point. This sensibility is subjective and not objective, and is only liable to distraction and disturbance by landmarks. It should work best in a vacuum. The migrating bird, as it launches itself from the land into the high air, enjoys a high degree of free dom from these suggestions and hints to the reason suppliee by material objects. In its flight by night the isolation fron physical reminders between the starting point and the goal Le almost complete; and it should be noted that the main source. of error to the birds is precisely the occurrence of these, material signs, such as the lighthouse on Heligoland, and other beacons set in the sea.
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