Department IX; Sub-Department 8; Folio A.

Department IX; Sub-Department 8; Folio A.

Curing

Food--Preservation

Having an overview of the collection of scrapbooks, this page, in particular, stood out to me due to its polished look and small newspaper clipping on the title page. Found in the Scrapbooks titled “Ag, Fowls, and Eggs,” this scrapbook focuses on ways in which to manage wildlife and animals as a food resource. The small newspaper clipping, unidentifiable as to which newspaper it came from, included on page states: “Darwin gives several instances of inherited animal antipathies which appear equally striking. The excessive fear shown by young rabbits which for the first time smell a ferrit[sic] and of young turkeys which hear the shrill cry of a hawk they have never heard or seen before, are proved examples of the strength of those instinctive antipathies.” As to why this clipping was chosen to be present on the title page of the scrapbook is unknown. The words, themselves, stood out to me for their simplicity direct message of animals having a fear of things unknown but could possible be dangerous to them. It reminded me of one of the criticizing letters to Owen that were mentioned in Ray Reynold’s Cat’spaw Utopia, “The human nature of the Sinaloa colony will be just like the average human nature that lives all over this and other lands. The evils they propose to flee from are not so great as those they flee to” (22-23). Unknown dangers awaited the colonists that destroyed their dreams of living in a utopian-like society, but perhaps when they sensed the dangers, they should have acted on their instincts to abandon Owen’s project.

1896

Special Collections Research Center, Henry Madden Library, California State University, Fresno

Text

English

Handwritten

Darwin gives several instances of inherited animal antipathies which appear equally striking. The excessive fear shown by young rabbits which for the first time smell a ferrit and of young turkeys which hear the shrill cry of a hawk they have never heard or seen before, are proved examples of the strength of those instinctive antipathies.

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