Usually at the moment of death a bird beats violently with its wings, and after death the wings remain half open. This was how the pewit had died, {86} the wings half folded. Picking it up, I saw that it had been dead several days, though the carrion beetles had not attacked it, owing to its being several inches above the ground. It had, in fact, no doubt been already dead when I first found the old pewits settled at that spot; yet during those four hot, long summer days they had been in a state of the most intense anxiety for the safety of these dead remains! This is to my mind not only a very pathetic spectacle, but one of the strangest facts in animal life. The reader may say that it is not at all strange, since it is very common. It is most strange to me because it is very common, since if it were rare we could say that it was due to individual aberration, or resulted through the bluntness of some sense or instinct. What is wonderful and almost incredible is that the higher vertebrates have no instinct to guide them in such a case as I have described, and no inherited knowledge of death. To make of Nature a person, we may see that in spite of her providential care for all her children, and wise ordering of their lives down to the minutest detail, she has yet failed in this one thing. Her only provision is that the dead shall be speedily devoured; but they are not thus removed in numberless instances; a very familiar one is the sight of living and dead young birds, the dead often in a state of decay, lying together in one nest: and here we cannot but see that the dead become a burden and a danger to the living. Birds and mammals are alike in this. They will call, and wait for, and bring food to, and try to rouse the dead {87} young or mate; day and night they will keep guard over it and waste themselves in fighting to save it from their enemies. Yet we can readily believe that an instinct fitted to save an animal from all this vain excitement, and labour, and danger, would be of infinite advantage to the species that possessed it. [Sidenote: Animals and their dead]