Is it not possible that birds living habitually together, as part of a crowd, may have acquired the faculty of thinking and acting all together, or in masses, each one's mind being a part of the general mind of the whole band, but each possessing, also, its individual mind and will, by virtue of which it is enabled to suspend its general crowd-acting, and act individually?
Perhaps a careful observation of gregarious animals in a wild state, or even (if a more special definition be wanted) of large crowds or masses of men, might throw some light upon this subject, and it would, at any rate, be approaching it upon a broader basis, and by methods less tainted with our silly prejudices, than has hitherto been done.
But when I speak of gregarious animals in a wild state, I am forgetting that such hardly any longer exist. The great herds of bisons, zebras, antelopes, giraffes, etc., that once roamed over places now given over to humanity (and inhumanity) have disappeared, and what have we learnt from them? Who has watched them—at least very carefully or patiently—with thoughts other than of their slaughter? I know of no careful record of their movements, taken from hour to hour and from day to day. A few generalities, conveying some of the more obvious and striking facts—or what seemed to be so—will alone survive their extinction. Enlightened curiosity has been drowned in bloodthirstiness, and the coarse pleasure of killing has over-ridden in us the higher ones of observation and inference. We have studied animals only to kill them, or killed them in order to study them. Our "zoologists" have been thanatologists. Thus the knowledge gleaned even by the sportsman-naturalist has been scant and bare, for—besides that the proportions of the mixture are generally as Falstaff and Falstaff's page—there is little to be seen between the sighting of the quarry and the crack of the rifle. Observation has commonly left off just where it should have begun.
Had we as often stalked animals in order to observe them, as we have in order to kill them, how much richer might be our knowledge!
CHAPTER IX
Watching Birds in the Greenwoods
I have called attention in the last chapter to that independent or self-reliant quality which so many birds possess, and by virtue of which they often act differently to their fellows, even when there is a strong inducement to them to act as they do. This seems to me an important point, for it must be as the foundation-stone upon which change of habit would be built, and change of habit points out a certain path along which change of structure, were it to occur, would be preserved, and a new species be thus formed.