Note 1658 — XIX THE NATURE OF TRADITION

There is a tendency to exaggerate the importance of tradition among animals. Thus it has been said that nest building is ‘largely’ traditional among birds. But the Curator of Birds in the New York Zoological Park raised a number of wild birds from incubated eggs, and found that these birds, although they had never had parental care or example, nevertheless learnt to fly, to build nests, and to perform all these activities—though they were sometimes slower in so doing than they would otherwise have been—that are at times said to be ‘largely’ traditional (see Lull, Organic Evolution, p. 170).