Next after the cocks and hens the most important birds of economic value have come from the water fowl. In this field there are great opportunities for domestication, only a few of which have been adequately used. The aquatic birds, save for the fact that they are in all cases inspired with a more or less strong migratory humor, lend themselves to the shaping hand of man more readily than most other forms. These creatures have the habit of association in a much more perfect way than our ground birds. They normally dwelt in rather close order and in relations which are necessarily very sympathetic. Whoever has watched the flight of wild geese must have remarked the beautiful way in which they arrange at once for close companionship and for safety in the violent movements which impel their heavy bodies at high speed through the air. In the order of their flight the alignment is more perfect than in the march of trained soldiers. Each bird keeps as near to his neighbor as possible; but manages always to preserve the interval which will insure against a collision of the strong and swift-moving wings, an accident which might well disable them for flight. I have repeatedly undertaken to confound their motion by firing a rifle bullet at the head of the moving wedge. Although the sound of the projectile, if well directed, will disturb their processional order, it never brings confusion. The startled birds sink down or rise above the plane of the air in which their comrades are moving, but they never strike against them. [Illustration: An Eider Colony] The admirable sense of interval which the wild birds exhibit in their flight is to be seen also when they move over the surface of the water, where the fleet of living forms is always so arranged that each individual does not interfere with its neighbor. I recall with much pleasure an occasion when, from a ship becalmed in a thick fog off the southern shore of Labrador, within sound of the breakers, I undertook to find something about the lay of the land and the chance of harborage by paddling in a small boat toward the shore. I had hardly lost sight of the ship when my boat glided into an assemblage of eider ducks, where the mothers, with their fledgling young, were lazily swimming to and fro, as if to practise the ducklings in the art of swimming. Each brood appeared to have its own space of water, and between each of the chicks there was likewise a less but equally well measured interval. The same features of orderly association, which I have just noted in the swimming and flying of these wild birds, may be seen in a somewhat degraded state in our domesticated varieties of the group. They all indicate in these forms a keen sense of their neighbors and a habit of association based upon sympathetic emotions. [Illustration: Terns Aiding a Wounded Comrade]