INSTINCT OR REASON?
[To THZ EDITOR OF THE " BYRCTATOR."1 SIR,—The following, received from a correspondent writing from Dieppe, is interesting in its way, and bears upon the subject of your recent article, "Animal Character."
"F. A. T." writes, under date October, 1888 :—
" I saw a very curious thing the other day. We were walking in the country past a lot of large orchards, and we noticed that the cows that were feeding in them had their heads fastened down by a kind of bearing-rein, so-that they could graze but could not raise their heads to eat the trees. While we were looking, we noticed a cow go up to an apple-tree and wedge-in the stem between her horns and neck, and deliberately shake the tree and bring down a shower of apples ; she and the others ate them up, and then she went to another tree and shook that, and so on. It was the funniest thing I ever saw : she always chose young trees that would shake easily. I pointed it out to a Frenchwoman standing near, and she said she had often watched them, and thought how clever the cow was. It was always the same cow that did it, and she did it as systematically as a schoolboy, never attempting to shake an old, stiff tree."
There seems to be more reason in French cows than in ours. A scientific gentleman wrote to a paper the other day to say that blackbirds did not eat fruit because they liked it, but because they were thirsty, and recommended we should place pans of water on the gravel walks and so save our garden fruit. A cottager in Montgomeryshire being told of this interesting fact, replied in the dialect of that part of the country,—" Dern the bruts ; they cross the bruck to come to my geerding." It would thus appear that the character of animals varies with the country, and that of blackbirds with the county.—I am,
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