but had carried it home to her family. They must have died in the burrow, for it was evident from the signs that she had dragged them out into the fresh air, to revive them, and deposited them gently on the sand by the hole. Then in her perplexity she had brought various tidbits of mouse and bird and rabbit and placed at their noses to tempt them to wake up out of their strange sleep and eat as hungry children ought to eat. Who knows how long she watched beside the still forms, and what her emotions were? She must have left the neighborhood soon after, however, for no one has seen her since about the

estate.

I have elsewhere told of the cat, Calico, and her strange family; the thwarted cat-mother making good the loss of her kittens by adopting a nest of young gray squirrels. A similar story comes to me from a reader in New York State. I will quote my correspondent's letter verbatim, not because there is an item in her account, remarkable as it is, that the most careful and experienced of observers would find hard to credit, but because it reads so much like a page out of the Natural History of Selborne. She writes:

'Our Tootsy became a mother of several little kittens; as she was not in the best of health we thought best not to let her raise any of them. For a day or two she mourned for her little ones. As she was the pet of the family, we consoled her as best we could. This day I had her out on the lawn. I looked down to the bridge, saw a little squirrel up on one of the bridge-posts. I picked Tootsy up and let her climb the post and catch the squirrel, thinking it would take her mind off from her grief for a while.

'She brought it up on the lawn, and in place of playing with it and finally eating it, as is the nature of cats, she wanted to mother it. We then left her,

and soon we discovered she had taken it upstairs in mother's bed and hid it. She staid with it all night, and we see the little squirrel could take nourishment.

"The next day she found two more squirrels and brought them home, so we had a family of three. She brought them up until they were able to eat, meanwhile giving loads of pleasure; when they became so large and frisky we could do nothing with them, they would get into everything. We kept one, which disappeared shortly after. We think it had gotten with other squirrels, for sometimes when it did get out on the trees the cat would sit under the tree for hours at a time coaxing it back.'

I have known a hen, too, deprived of her chickens, to adopt a litter of tiny kittens, brooding them and guarding them as her own.

The birds are structurally lower than the most primitive of the mammals; they are close kin to the cold-hearted reptiles, yet it is the bird, the mother bird, rather, that has touched our imaginations as perhaps the most nearly human of all wild things.

'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem... how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.'

And an earlier Hebrew prophet, likening God's harsh providences to the rending of a lion, hastened on with the assurance that in his heart God hovers over Jerusalem as little mother birds hover over their nests.

Hovering He will deliver it,
And passing back and forth
He will preserve it.1

The bird-mother is the bravest, tenderest, most solicitous, most appealing

1 Author's translation from the Hebrew, Isa., chap. 31.

thing one ever comes upon in the fields; the problem of her presence or absence, the degree or intensity of her being, and her behavior under stress, add more than anything else to the interest and charm of bird-study. It is the rare exception, but we sometimes find the mother-instinct wholly lacking among the birds, as in the case of our notorious cowbird, who sneaks around, watching her chance when some smaller bird is gone, to drop her egg into its nest. The egg must be laid, the burden of the race has been put upon the cowbird, but not the precious burden of the child. Hers are only the functions of maternity. She is not a mother. She is body only, not a soul.

The same is true of the European cuckoo, but not quite true of our American cuckoo, in spite of popular belief. For our birds (both species) build rude, elementary nests as a rule, and brood their eggs. Occasionally they may steal a robin's or a catbird's nest, may even destroy the owner's eggs (though never to my knowledge), in order to save labor-the unimaginative labor of laying one stick across another when one does not know how. But here is a plain case of knowledge waiting on desire. So undeveloped is the mother in the cuckoo that if you touch her eggs she will leave them abandon her rude nest and eggs, as if any excuse were excuse enough for an escape from the cares of motherhood. How should a bird with so little motherlove ever learn to build a firm-walled, safe, and love-lined nest?

The great California condor, according to the records of the only one ever studied, is a most faithful and anxious mother, the dumb affection of both parents indeed, for their single offspring, being at times pathetically human. On the other hand, the mother in our Eastern turkey-buzzard is so evenly balanced against the vulture in

her that I have known a brooding bird to be entirely undone by the sudden approach of a man and to rise from off her eggs and devour them instantly, greedily, and then make off on her serenely soaring wings into the clouds.

Such bird-mothers, however, are not the rule. The buzzard, the cuckoo, and the cowbird are striking exceptions. The flicker will keep on laying eggs as fast as you take them from the nest hole, until she has no more eggs to lay. The quail, like the cuckoo, will sometimes desert her nest if even an egg is so much as touched, but only because she knows that her nest has been discovered and must be started anew, in some more hidden place, for safety. She is a wise and devoted mother, keeping her brood with her as a 'covey' all winter long.

One of the most interesting instances of variation of the mother-instinct in the same species of birds, which has ever come under my observation, occurred in the summer of 1912 in the rookeries of the Three-Arch Rocks Reservation off the coast of Oregon.

We had gone out to the Reservation in order to study and photograph its wild life, and were making our slow way toward the top of the outer rock. Up the sheer south face of the cliff we had climbed, through rookery after rookery of nesting birds, until we reached the edge of the blade-like back, or top, that ran up to the peak. Scrambling over this edge we found ourselves in the midst of a great colony of nesting murres-hundreds of them-covering the steep rocky part of the top.

As our heads appeared above the rim, many of the colony took wing and whirred over us out to sea, but most of them sat close, each bird upon her egg or over her chick, loath to leave, and so expose to us her hidden treasure.

The top of the rock was somewhat cone-shaped, and in order to reach the

peak, and the colonies on the west side, we had to make our way through this rookery of the murres. The first step among them, and the whole colony was gone, with a rush of wings and feet that sent several of the top-shaped eggs rolling, and several of the young birds toppling, over the cliff to the pounding waves and ledges far below.

We stopped instantly. We had not come to frighten and kill. Our climb up had been very disturbing to the birds, and had been attended with some loss of both eggs and young. This we could not help; and we had been too much concerned for our own lives really to notice what was happening. But here on the top, with the climb beneath us, the sight of a young murre going over the rim, clawing and clinging with beak and nails and unfledged wings, down from jutting point to shelf, to ledge, down, down - the sight of it made one dizzy and sick.

We stopped, but the colony had bolted, leaving scores of eggs and scores of downy young squealing and running together for shelter, like so many beetles under a lifted board.

But the birds had not every one bolted, for here sat two of the colony among the broken rocks. These two had not been frightened off. That both of them were greatly alarmed, any one could see from their open beaks, their rolling eyes, their tense bodies on tiptoe for flight. Yet here they sat, their wings out like props, or more like gripping hands, as if they were trying to hold themselves down to the rocks against their wild desire to fly.

One of the monsters stood stock still a moment for the other one, the photographer, to come up. Then both of them took a step nearer. It was very interesting. I had often come slowly up to quails on their nests, and to other birds. Once I crept upon a killdeer in a bare field until my fingers were almost touching her. She did not move because she thought I did not see her, it being her trick thus to hide within her own feathers, colored as they are to blend with the pebbly fields where she lays her eggs. So the brown quail also blends with its brown grass nest. But those murres, though colored in harmony with the rocks, were still, not because they hoped I did not see them. I did see them. They knew it. Every bird in the great colony had known it, and had gone - with the exception of these two.

What was different about these two? They had their young ones to protect. But so had every bird in the great colony its young one, or its egg, to protect; yet all the others had gone. Did these two have more love than the others, and with it, or because of it, more courage, more intelligence?

We took another step towards them, and one of the two birds sprang into the air, knocking her baby over and over with the stroke of her wing, coming within an inch of hurling it across the rim to be battered on the ledges below. The other bird raised her wings to follow, then clapped them back over her baby. Fear is the most contagious thing in the world; and that flap of fear by the other bird thrilled her, too, but as she had withstood the stampede of the colony, so she caught herself again and held on.

She was now alone on the bare top of the rock, with ten thousand circling birds screaming to her in the air above, and with two men creeping up to her with a big black camera which clicked

ominously. She let the multitude scream, and with threatening beak watched the two men come on. A motherless baby spying her, ran down the rock squealing for his life. She spread her wing, put her bill behind him and shoved him quickly in out of sight with her own baby. The man with the camera saw the act, for I heard his machine click, and I heard him say something under his breath that you would hardly expect a mere man and a gamewarden to say. But most men have a good deal of the mother in them; and the old bird had acted with such decision, such courage, such swift, compelling instinct, that any man, short of the wildest savage, would have felt his heart quicken at the sight.

Just how compelling might that mother-instinct be? I wondered. Just how much would that mother-love stand?

I had dropped to my knees, and on all fours had crept up within about three feet of the bird. She still had a chance for flight. Would she allow us to crawl any nearer? Slowly, very slowly, I stretched forward on my hands, like a measuring worm, until my body lay flat on the rocks, and my fingers were within three inches of her. But her wings were twitching; a wild light danced in her eyes; and her head turned itself toward the sea.

For a whole minute I did not stir. Then the wings again began to tighten about the babies; the wild light in the eyes died down; the long sharp beak turned once more toward me. Then slowly, very slowly, I raised my hand, and gently touched her feathers with the tip of one finger - with two fingers - with my whole hand, while the loud camera click-clacked, hardly four feet away!

click-clacked

It was a thrilling moment. I was

not killing anything. I had no highpowered rifle in my hands, coming up against the wind toward an unsuspecting creature hundreds of yards away. This was no wounded leopard charging me; no mother bear defending with her giant might a captured cub. It was only a mother bird, the size of a wild duck, with swift wings at her command, hiding under those wings her own and another's young, and her own boundless fear!

For the second time in my life I had taken captive with my bare hands a free wild bird. No, I had not taken her captive. She had made herself a captive; she had taken herself in the strong net of her mother-love.

And now her terror seemed quite gone. At the first touch of my hand she felt, I think, the love restraining it, and without fear or fret allowed me to push my hand under her and pull out the two downy babies. But she reached after them with her bill to tuck them back out of sight, and when I did not let them go, she sidled toward me, quacking softly, quacking softly, a language that I perfectly understood, and was quick to

answer.

I gave them back, fuzzy, and black and white. She got them under her, stood up over them, pushed her wings down hard around them, her stout tail down hard behind them, and together with them pushed in an abandoned egg which was close at hand. Her own baby, some one else's baby, and some one else's forsaken egg! She could cover no more; she had not feathers enough. But she had heart enough; and into her mother's heart she had already tucked every motherless egg and nestling of the thousands of frightened birds that were screaming and wheeling in the air high over her head.

I

EUGENICS may be understood by us to mean, in general, what Francis Galton meant it to be when he defined it as 'the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.' In particular it means taking advantage of the facts of heredity to make the human race better, or to make a better human tribe or people. It means good breeding of the human species.

Militarism may be understood to mean war and the preparedness for war. The maintenance of standing armies and manned navies, the constant recruiting of young men by voluntary enlistment or by conscription, and the mustering out of time-served older men, are features of militarism no less important, perhaps, in the eugenist's consideration of war, than the sanctioned wholesale, reciprocal murder by which it is more dramatically characterized.

Examples of conditions which the eugenist considers as calling for improvement through better breeding, and whose existence, therefore, is a reason and a stimulus for eugenic study and action, are, to name but two or three, the following:

Twelve out of one hundred children born in England die before reaching one year of age. These deaths, says one of the surgeons in a Liverpool infirmary for children, 'can scarcely be regarded as due to perils of infant life

as they are due to prenatal influences.' It is exactly this peril of parentage that the eugenist recognizes as the greatest peril of them all, to infant life. It is a peril of bad breeding.

The investigations of a dozen competent men, confirming one another, have shown that feeble-mindedness and epilepsy are directly heritable defects, and that they follow, in their order of inheritance, practically the Mendelian formula. That is, the fate of the children of feeble-minded and epileptic parents can be foretold with confidence. Feeble-mindedness is not sporadic, spontaneous, or environmental in origin. It is a heritable characteristic of certain stocks or family strains. The eugenist sees in these facts a plain suggestion for action that will benefit racially the human species.

Karl Pearson and his assistants have proved that one fourth of the British married population is producing one half of the next generation. And that this one fourth- which is really only one sixth of the whole adult populationis a part of the population least able to give its offspring the care and general environment necessary to the best human nurture. Also, that in it there exists a larger proportion of members possessing heritable defects. than among the rest of the population. The birth-rate is not merely decreasing, but it is decreasing selectively. The production of English children is becoming a process of increasing one type of the English population at the expense of other types. The eugenist,