Page:BirdWatcherShetlands.djvu/321

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
IN THE SHETLANDS
291

or cupboard-love, in the other? Personally, I believe that both of these two latter brain-processes have to do in producing the result in question, but that the first—a tenderness, namely, on the part of the old birds—is the preponderating influence. We must remember that all these childless birds upon the ledges—and when I first came the ledges were crowded—must have had children with them only a short time ago. When, therefore, a chick runs suddenly up to them, just as their own chick used to, I can understand a train of recent memories being so strongly revived as to cause them to act as they do. I did, in fact, to my own senses, notice something in the manner of these non-parent birds thus acting parentally—in a certain degree, that is to say—which was different to that of the true parents. A certain surprise, I thought, was exhibited at first, and then the bird seemed to fall into the old train of things. If, indeed, as I am much inclined to believe, the mere bringing of a fish to the ledge may raise, for a time, in the mind of the bird that brings it, the hallucinatory image or impression of a chick that is not there, it is not wonderful that the actual running up to it of a chick not its own, should cause it to feel and act as though it were the true parent.

What, then, has been the origin of sympathy? Even amongst ourselves, to feel with a person (σὺν πάθος) is to feel very much as though one were that person, and the effort of reason which assures us to the contrary might well be beyond the power of an