[[137]]
[1] I am speaking of starlings as they now appear in southern New England. They were brought from Europe a few years ago, and are multiplying at an alarming rate. They have formed some curious new habits here; even their voices are very different from the voices of starlings as I have heard them in Europe. [↑]
VI
Where Silence is Eloquent
Looking back a moment on our trail of animal “talk” before following it onward, we see, first, that birds and beasts have certain audible cries which convey a more or less definite meaning of food or danger or assembly; and second, that they apparently have also some “telepathic” faculty of sending emotional impulses to others of their kind at a distance. The last has not been proved, to be sure; we have seen little more than enough to establish it as a working hypothesis; but whether we study science or history or an individual bird or beast, it is better to follow some integrating method or principle than to blunder around in a chaos of unrelated details. [[138]]And the hypothesis of silent communication certainly “works,” since it helps greatly to clarify certain observed phenomena of animal life that are otherwise darkly mysterious.
When the same dimly defined telepathic power appears in a man or woman—so rarely that we are filled with wonder, as in the shadow of a great mystery or a great discovery—it is not a new but a very old matter, I think, being merely a survival or reappearance of a faculty that may have once been in common use among gregarious creatures. All men seem to have some hint or suggestion of telepathy in them, as shown by their ability to “speak with their eyes” or to influence their children by a look; and the few who have enough of it to be conspicuous receive it, undoubtedly, by some law or freak of heredity, such as enables one man in a million to wag his ears, or one in a thousand to follow a subconscious sense of direction so confidently that, after wandering about the big woods all day, he turns at nightfall and heads straight for his camp like a homing pigeon. The rest of us, meanwhile, by employing speech exclusively to express thought or emotion, and by habitually depending on five senses for all our impressions of the external world, have not only neglected but even lost all memory of the gift that once was ours. As an inevitable consequence [[139]]Nature has taken her gift away, as she atrophies a muscle that is no longer used, or devitalizes the nerve of sight in creatures, such as the fishes of Mammoth Cave, that have lived long time in darkness.