Here, as throughout our study of animal behaviour in its conscious aspect, we have not only to conduct observations with due care, but to draw inferences with due caution. Douglas Spalding described how newly hatched turkeys showed signs of alarm at the cry of a hawk; and he inferred that, since this sound was quite new to their individual experience, the alarm was due to the inheritance of ancestral experience of hawks. But since young birds show signs of alarm at any sudden and unaccustomed sound--a sneeze, the noise of a toy horn, a loud violin note, and so forth--the safer inference seems to be that they may be frightened by strange sounds of many kinds. But this does not imply the inheritance of experience, which is essentially a discriminating process. There is no sufficient evidence that a peculiar cry suggests the hawk, of which the progenitors have acquired bitter experience; nothing to justify the belief that the sound carries with it inherited meaning. And as with hearing, so with sight. Young birds may be frightened by many strange objects. I have seen a group of several species, filled with apparent alarm at a large white jug suddenly placed among them, at balls of paper tossed towards them, at a handkerchief dropped in their midst. It is, in fact, their inexperience which is often the condition of such fear. As Mr. Hudson says:[19] “A piece of newspaper carried accidentally by the wind is as great an object of terror to an inexperienced young bird as a buzzard sweeping down with death in its talons.” Until recently it was commonly asserted that birds avoid gaudy but nauseous or harmful insects through the inheritance of experience gained by their ancestors through many generations. But here again the inference seems to have been incautiously drawn. Of the hundreds of young birds I have had under observation, not one has avoided the peculiarly distasteful cinnabar caterpillar, until it had gained for itself experience of its nauseous character. So too of wasps and bees. Only through experience are these avoided. It is true that chicks may shrink from them if they buzz or even walk rapidly towards them. But a large harmless fly will inspire just as much timidity. As the result of careful observations, Mr. Frank Finn[20] concludes “that each bird has to separately acquire its experience, and well remembers what it has learnt.” And with this conclusion my own observations are entirely in accord.