Having often disturbed birds under these or similar conditions, I can say confidently that the moorhen employs no ruse, to divert attention from its young. The following circumstance, therefore, as bearing on my theory of the origin of such stratagems, especially interested me. In this case I came suddenly upon a point of the stream where the bank was precipitous, on which a moorhen flew out upon the water, with a loud clacking note, and then, after some very disturbed motions, swam to the opposite shore, giving constant, violent flirts of the tail, the white feathers of which were, each time, broadened out, as when two male birds fight, or threaten one another. In this state she went but slowly, though most birds in her position would have flown right off. On my coming closer to the edge of the bank, six or seven young chicks started out, all in different directions, as though from a central point where they had been sitting together on the water, as, no doubt, they had been, the mother with them, just as though upon the nest. No one could have thought that this moorhen had any idea of diverting attention from her young to herself. Sudden alarm, producing, at first, a nervous shock, and then distress and apprehension, seemed to me, clearly, the cause of her actions, which yet bore a rude resemblance to highly specialised ones, and had much the same effect. From such beginnings, in my opinion, and not from successive “small doses of reason,” have the most elaborate “ruses” been evolved and perfected.
In one or two other instances—in a wood-pigeon, for example, and a pheasant—I have noticed the strange effect—amounting, for a few moments, to a sort of paralysis—which a very sudden surprise may produce in a bird, even when its young do not come into question. Moorhens, too, are excitable, even as birds. Their nerves, I think, are highly strung. I have often noticed that the report of a gun in the distance—even in the far distance—will be followed by half-a-dozen clanging cries from as many birds—in fact, from as many as are about. Especially is the hen moorhen of a nervous and sensitive temperament, open to “thick-coming fancies,” varying from minute to minute. How often have I watched her pacing, like a bride, on cold, winter mornings, along the banks of our little stream. Easy, elastic steps; head nodding and tail flirting in unison. She nestles, a moment, on the frosted grass, then rises and paces, as before, stops now, stands on one leg a little, puts the other down, again makes a step or two, then another pause, glances about, thinks she will preen herself, but does not, nestles once more, gives a glance over her shoulder, half spies a danger, rises and tip-toes out of sight. What a little bundle of caprices and apprehensions! But they all become her, “all her acts are queens.” Some special savour lies in each motion, in each frequent flirt of the tail. Though this flirtation of the tail is very habitual with moorhens, though nine times out of ten, almost, when you see them either on land or water, they are flirting it, still they do not always do so. “Nonnunquam dormitat bonus Homerus”—“Non semper tendit arcum Apollo.” It can be quite still, that tail. I have seen it so—even twenty together, whose owners were reposefully browsing. But let there be any kind of emotion, almost, and heavens! how it flirts!
Moorhens are pugnacious birds, even in the winter. At any time, one amongst several browsing over the meadow-land, may make a sudden, bull-like rush—its head down and held straight out—at another, and this, often, from a considerable distance. The bird thus suddenly attacked generally takes flight, and afterwards, as a solace to its feelings, runs at some other one, and drives it about, in its turn. This second bird will do the same by a third, and thus, in wild nature, we have a curious reproduction—much to the credit of Sheridan—of that scene in “The Rivals” where Sir Anthony bullies his son, his son the servant, and the servant the page. “It is still the sport” in natural history, to see poor humanity aped. Such likenesses are humiliating but humorous, and, by making us less proud, may do good. But chases like this are not in the grand style. There is nothing stately about them, no “pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war”—little, perhaps, of its true spirit. As the spring comes on it is different. Then male birds that, at three yards apart, have been quietly feeding, walk, if they come a yard nearer, with wary, measured steps, in a crouched attitude, holding their heads low, and with their tails swelled out. On the water these mannerisms are still more marked, and then it is that the bird’s true beauty—for beauty it is, and of no mean order—is displayed. Two will lie all along, facing each other, with the neck stretched out, and the head and bill, which are in one line with it, pointing straight forward, like the ram of a war-ship. Their tails, however, are turned straight up, in bold contrast with all the rest of them, so that, with the white feathers which this part bears, and which are now finely displayed, they have a most striking and handsome appearance. There is a little bunch of these feathers—the under tail-coverts—on either side of the true tail, and each of these is frilled and expanded outwards, to the utmost possible extent, which gives it the shape and appearance of one half, or almost half, of a palm-leaf fan. The tail is the whole fan, so that, what with its size, and the graceful form that it has now assumed, and the pure white contrasting with the rich brown in the centre, it has become quite beautiful, more so, I think, than the fan of any fan-tail pigeon. Indeed the whole bird seems to be different, and looks more than twice as handsome as it does under ordinary circumstances. Its spirit, which is now exalted and warlike, “shines through” it, and, with its rich crimson bill, it glows and burns on the water, like Cleopatra’s barge. A fierce and fiery little prow this bill makes, indeed, and there is the poop, too, for the elevated tail, with the part of the body adjoining, which has, also, a bold upward curve, has very much that appearance. Thus, in this most salient of attitudes, with tail erect, and with beak and throat laid, equally with the whole body, along the water, with proud and swelling port the birds make little impetuous rushes at one another, driving, each, their little ripple before them, from the vermilion prow-point. They circle one about another, approach and then glide away again, looking, for all the world, like two miniature war-ships of proud opposing nations: for their pride seems more than belongs to individuals—it is like a national pride. Yet even so, and just as great deeds seem about to be achieved, the two may turn and swim off in a stately manner, their tails still fanned, their heads, now, proudly erect, each scorning, yet, also, respecting the other, each seeming to say, “Satan, I know thy strength, and thou know’st mine.” Otherwise, however, as the upshot of all this warlike pomp, they close in fierce and doubtful conflict. This is extremely interesting to see. After lying, for some time, with the points of their beaks almost touching, both the birds make a spring, and, in a moment, are sitting upright in the water, on their tails, so to speak, and clawing forwards and downwards with their feet. The object of each bird seems to be to drag his adversary down in the water, so as to drown him, but what always happens is that the long claws interlock, and then, holding and pulling, both of them fall backwards from their previously upright position, and would be soon lying right on their backs, were it not that, to prevent this, they spread their wings on the water, so that they act as a prop and support, which, together with their hold on one another, prevents their sinking farther. Their heads are still directed as much as possible forward, and in this singular attitude they glare at each other, presenting an appearance which one would never have thought it possible they could do, from seeing them in their more usual, everyday life. They may sit thus, leaning backwards, as though in an arm-chair, and inactive from necessity, for a time which sometimes seems like several minutes, but which is, more probably, several seconds. Then, at length, with violent strugglings, they get loose, and either instantly grapple again, or, as is more usual, float about with the same proud display as before, each seeming to breathe out menace for the future, with present indignation at what has just taken place.
Moorhens fight in just the same manner as coots, and seeing what a very curious and uncommon-looking manner this is, it might be thought that it was specially adapted to the aquatic habits of the two species. It is not. It is related to their terrestrial ancestry, and the terrestrial portion of their own lives. One has only to see them fighting on land to become, at once, aware that they are doing so in exactly the same way as they do in the water, and, also, that this way, on land, is by no means peculiar, but very much that in which cocks, pheasants, partridges, and, indeed, most birds, fight. For, jumping up against one another, moorhens, like these, strike down with the feet, but, having no spurs, use their long claws and toes in the way most natural to them. And this, no doubt, their fathers did before them, in deeper and deeper water, as from land-rails they passed into water-rails, until, at last, they were doing it when bottom was not to be touched, and they had only water to leap up from. Even the falling back with the claws interlocked has nothing specially aquatic in it. I have seen moorhens do so in the meadows, and they then spread out their wings, to support themselves on the ground, just as they do in the water. The continual leaping up from the water, as from the ground, is extremely noticeable, especially in the coot, and, in fact, the strange appearance presented by the whole thing—its bizarrerie, which is very great—is entirely due to our seeing something which belongs, essentially, to the land, carried on in another element, for which it is not really fitted. How differently do the grebes fight—by diving, and using the beak under water! Yet they, like the coot, are only fin-footed, whilst the coot is almost as good a diver as themselves. No one, however, comparing the structure and general habits of the two families, can doubt that the one is much more distantly separated from its land ancestry than the other. In both the coot and the moorhen, indeed, we see an interesting example of the early stages of an evolution, but the coot has gone farther than the moorhen, for besides that it dives much better, and swims out farther from the shore, it bathes floating on the water, whilst the moorhen does so only where it is shallow enough to stand.
Readers of “The Naturalist in La Plata,” may remember the account there given of the curious screaming-dances—social, not sexual—of the Ypecaha rails. “First one bird among the rushes emits a powerful cry, thrice repeated; and this is a note of invitation, quickly responded to by other birds from all sides, as they hurriedly repair to the usual place.... While screaming, the birds rush from side to side, as if possessed with madness, the wings spread and vibrating, the long beak wide open and raised vertically.” Do moorhens do anything analogous to this, anything that might in time grow into it, or into something like it? In my opinion they do, for I think that I have seen a hint of it, on a few occasions, and on one in particular, of which I made a note. Two birds, in this case, had been floating, for some time, quietly on the water, when one of them, suddenly, threw up its wings, waved them violently and excitedly, and scudded, thus, rather than flew, along the surface, into a reed-bed not far off. Before it had got there the other moorhen, first making a quick turn or two in the water, threw up its wings also, and scudded after its friend, in just the same way. Then came from the reeds, and was continued for a little time, that melancholy-sounding, wailing, clucking note that I have so often listened to, wondering what it might mean, and convinced that it meant something interesting. But if “the heart of man at a foot’s distance is unknowable,” as a Chinese proverb says—and doubtless rightly—that it is, so is the whole of a moorhen, when it has got as far as that, amongst reeds and rushes. Here, however—and I have seen something very similar, which began on the land—we have the sudden, contagious excitement, à propos de rien it would seem, the motion of the wings—not so very common with moorhens, under ordinary circumstances—and the darting to a certain spot, with the cries immediately proceeding from it: all which, together, bears a not inconsiderable resemblance to the more finished performance of the Ypecaha rail, a bird belonging to the same family as the moorhen.
It is a pity, I think, that our commoner birds, when related to foreign ones in which some strikingly peculiar habit has long been matter for wonder, should not be more carefully and continuously observed, with a view to detecting something in their own daily routine, which might throw light on the origin of such eccentricities—something either just starting along, or already some way on the road to, the wonderful house at which their kinsfolk have arrived. Unfortunately, whilst the end arouses great interest, the beginnings, or, even, something more than the beginnings, either escape observation altogether, or are not observed properly. When a thing, by its saliency, has been forced upon our notice, it is comparatively easy to find out more about it; but when it is not known whether there is anything or not, but only that, if there is, it cannot be very remarkable, the initial incentive to investigation seems wanting. Yet the starting-place and the half-way house are as interesting as the final goal, and our efforts to find the former, in particular, ought to be unremitting. In a previous chapter, I have given my reasons for thinking that we might learn something in regard to the origin of the bower-building instinct—that crowning wonder, perhaps, of all that is wonderful in birds—by making a closer study of rooks. But for this proper observatories are needed, and whilst those who possess both the means of making these and the rookeries in which to make them, are not, as a rule, interested, those who are have too often neither the one nor the other—I, at least, stand in this predicament.
It may be thought that the above-described sudden excitement and activity on the part of these two moorhens was, more probably, of a nuptial character; but I do not myself think so, for the nuptial antics—or, rather, the nuptial pose—of the bird, is of a quite different character, being slow and stiff, a sort of solemn formality. It belongs to the land and not the water, where, indeed, it could hardly be carried out. In making it, the two birds advance, for a little—one behind the other—with a certain something peculiar and highly strung in their gait and general appearance. Then the foremost one stops, and whilst a strange rigidity seems to possess every part of him, he slowly bends the head downwards, till the beak, almost touching the ground, points inwards towards himself. Meantime the other bird walks on, with an increasingly stilted, and, withal, stealthy-looking step, and when a little way in front of its companion, makes the same pose in even an exaggerated manner, curving the bill so much inwards, with the head held so low down, that it may even overbalance and have to make a quick step forward, or two, in order to recover itself. Here we have another example—and there are many—of a nuptial pose—between which and true sexual display it is hard, even if it be possible, to fix a line of demarcation—common to both the sexes; and, just as with the peewit, it is seen to the greatest advantage, not before, but immediately after, coition, in the act, or, rather, the two acts of which, the male and female play interchangeable parts. There is hermaphroditism, in fact, which must be real, emotionally, if not functionally—for what else is its raison d’être?
Surely facts such as these deserve more attention than they seem to have received. To me it appears that not only must they have a most important bearing on the question of the nature and origin of sexual display, and whether there is or is not, amongst certain birds, an intersexual selection, but that some of those odd facts, such as dual or multiplex personality, which have been made too exclusively the subject of psychical research—or rather of psychical societies—may receive, through them, a truer explanation than that suggested by the hypothesis of the subliminal self, in that they may help us to see the true nature of that part of us to which this name has been applied. Surely if both the male and the female bird act, in an important office for the performance of which they are structurally distinct, as though they were one and the same, this proves that the nature of either sex, though, for the most part, it may lie latent in the opposite one, must yet reside equally in each. Here, then, we have a subliminal element, but as this can only have been passed on, through individuals in the bird’s ancestral line, by the ordinary laws of inheritance, is it not likely that other characteristics which seldom, or perhaps never, emerge, have also been passed on, in the same way, thus making many subliminal selves, instead of one subliminal self, merely? Of what, indeed, is any self—is any personality—made up, but of those countless ones which have gone before it, in the direct line of its ancestry? What is any bird or beast but a blend between its parents, their parents, and the parents before those parents, going back to the beginnings of life? But that much—more, probably, than nineteen twentieths—of this complicated mosaic lies latent, is an admitted fact both in physiology and psychology, to justify which assertion the very naming of the word “reversion” is sufficient. But if this be a true explanation for the animal, what excuse have we for disregarding it, and dragging in a transcendental element, in our own case? None whatever that I can see; but by excluding from their purview—to use their own favourite word—every species except the human one, the Psychical Society, in my opinion, are making a gigantic error, through which all their conclusions suffer more or less, so that the whole speculative structure, reared on too narrow a basis of fact and observation, will, one day, come tumbling to the ground.
Why should so much be postulated, on the strength of mysterious faculties existing in ourselves, when equally mysterious, though less abnormal ones, exist in various animals? Can we, for instance, say that the sense of direction (and this is common to savage man and animals)[30] is less extraordinary than what we call clairvoyance, or that the one is essentially different from the other? And what is more mysterious than this (which I have on good authority), that a certain spot should, year after year for some forty years, be chosen as a nesting-site by a pair of sparrow-hawks, although, during many of these years, not one only of the breeding birds, but both of them, have been shot by the game-keepers? What is it tells the new pair, next year, that, somewhere or other in the wide world, a certain spot is left vacant for them? Again, I have brought forward evidence to show that the same thought or desire can communicate itself, instantaneously, to a number of birds, in a way difficult to account for, other than on the hypothesis of thought-transference, or, as I should prefer to call it, collective thinking. Who can imagine, however—or, rather, why should we imagine—that faculties which, though we may not be able to understand them, yet do exist in animals, have become developed in them by other than the ordinary earth-laws of heredity and natural selection? It is, indeed, easy to imagine, that the power of conveying and receiving impressions, otherwise than through specialised sense-organs, may have been—and still be—of great advantage to creatures not possessing these; and how can such structures have come into being, except in relation to a certain generalised capacity which was there before them? Darwin, for instance, in speculating on the origin of the eye, has to presuppose a sensitiveness to light in the, as yet, eyeless organism. Again, it does not seem impossible that the hypnotic state—or something resembling it—may be the normal one in low forms of life, and this would make ordinary sleep, which occurs for the most part when the waking faculties are not needed, a return to that early semiconscious condition out of which a waking consciousness has been evolved. Be this as it may, we ought surely to assume that any sense or capacity, however mysterious, with which animals are endowed, was acquired by them on the same principles that others which we better understand were; and, moreover, where all is mystery—for ultimately we can explain nothing—why should one thing in nature be deemed more mysterious than another? It seems foolish to make a wonder out of our own ignorance; which, however, we are always doing. But, now, if such powers and faculties as we have been considering, transmitted, in a more or less latent condition, through millions of generations that no longer needed them, had come, at last, to man, they could, it seems probable, only manifest themselves in him, through and in connection with his own higher psychology; just, in fact, as sexual love does, for this, of course, is essentially the same in man and beast. Yet we have our novels and our plays. Thus, such endowments, answering no longer to the lowly needs which had brought them into being, would present, when wrought into the skein of our human mentality, a far higher and more exalted appearance, well calculated to put us in love with ourselves—never a very difficult business—to the tune of such lines as “We feel that we are greater than we know,” “Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,” and many another d’este jaez, which, though they issue from the lips of great poets, may be born, none the less, of mere human pride and complacency. Yet, all the time, animal reversion, as opposed to godlike development, might be, as I believe it is, the vera causa of what seems so high and so holy.
Were the late Mr. Myers’ conception of the subliminal self—a part of us belonging, as far as one can understand the idea, not to this earth but to a spiritual state of things beyond and without it, and bringing with it intuitive knowledge and enlarged powers, from this outer sea, these extra-territorial waters—were, I say, this conception a true one, it is difficult to see why such knowledge and such powers should always have stood in an ordered relation to the various culture-states through which man—the terrestrial or supraliminal part of him, that is to say—has passed, and to his earthly advantages and means of acquiring knowledge. It is difficult to see why the subliminal part of such a gifted race as the Greeks, though proportionately high, yet knew, apparently, so much less than this same sleeping partner in the joint-firm, so to speak, of far less gifted, but later-living peoples: why genius, which is “a welling-up of the subliminal into the supraliminal region,” should bear, always, the impress of its age, race, and country: why it is governed by the law of deviation from an average, as laid down by Galton: why it should so often be ignorant in matters which ought to be well known to the subliminal ego, as thus conceived of: why it asserts what is false as frequently as what is true, and with the same inspired eloquence:[31] why “the dæmon of Socrates” was either ignorant of its own nature, or else deceived Socrates, who of all men, surely, was fitted to know the truth: why Aristotle perceived less than Darwin: why Pythagoras grasped only imperfectly what Copernicus saw fully: why no other Greek astronomer had an inkling of the same truths: why Shakespeares and Newtons do not spring out of low savage tribes: why the negro race has produced no man higher than Toussaint l’Ouverture, who to the giants of the Aryan stock is as Ben Nevis to Mount Everest: and so on, and so on—a multitude of difficulties, as it appears to me, which the theory has neither answered, nor, as far as I know, has yet been called upon to answer.