This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1835 edition. Excerpt: ... and the young colt, can move about almost as soon as they are born, and can immediately use their organs of sight; whereas the progeny of beasts of prey usually come into the world blind, and some time elapses before they can run about, so that the dam, if she wishes to remove them, must carry them herself, which she generally does, in her mouth. As the proper food of herbivorous quadrupeds is almost every where abundant, they are soon tempted, without the intervention of the mother, to browse upon the herbage: but the predaceous beast whose food must be pursued and captured, takes more pains to instruct her young how to maintain themselves; thus the cat lays the mouse or bird, that she has caught, before her kittens; and it is laughable to observe how they are excited, and with what resolution and ferocity the little furies endeavour to keep possession of the prey their dam has brought to them. But of all classes of animals the birds are the 'most remarkable for the labours they undergo preparatory to laying their eggs. In those that migrate a long aerial voyage is previously to be undertaken, the stimulus to which, in the swallow, appears to be altogether physical, ' and is 1 VoL. I. p. 102. See Jenner, Philos. Trans. 1824, 20. probably so in other migrators. But what is it that directs them in their flight, and enables them to return to the countries from which they had migrated'! Did the swallow' steer her course within sight of land, it might, perhaps, be supposed that her memory was her director: but these birds are often found at sea, hundreds of miles from any shore,2 where, one would think, there could be no index either in the clouds or the ocean to instruct her which way to steer her adventurous course....