  The chief illustration of a book is incontestably the formula in which it is summed up. Here it is, then, in few words:— This book has considered the bird in himself, and but little in relation to man. The bird, born in a much lower condition than man (oviparous, like the serpent), possesses three advantages over him, which are his special mission:— I. The wing, flight, an unique power, which is the dream of man. Every other creature is slow. Compared with the falcon or swallow, the Arab horse is a snail. II. Flight itself does not appertain solely to the wing, but to an incomparable power of respiration and vision. The bird is peculiarly the son of air and light. III. An essentially electrical being, the bird sees, knows, and foresees earth and sky, the weather, the seasons. Whether through an intimate relation with the globe, whether through a prodigious memory of localities and routes, he is always facing eastward, and always knows his path. He swoops; he penetrates; he attains what man shall never attain. This is evident, particularly in his marvellous war against the reptile and the insect. Add the marvellous work of continual purification of everything dangerous and unclean, which some species accomplish. If this war and this work ceased but for one day, man would disappear from the earth. This daily victory of the beloved son of light over death, over a murderous and tenebrous life, is the fitting theme of his song, of that hymn of joy with which the bird salutes each Dawn. But, besides song, the bird has many other languages. Like man, he prattles, recites, converses. He and man are the only beings which have really a language. Man and the bird are the voice of the world. The bird, with its gift of augury, is ever drawing near to man, who is ever inflicting injury upon him. He undoubtedly divines, and has a presentiment of, what he will one day become when he emerges from the barbarism in which he is now unhappily plunged. He recognizes in him the creature unique, sanctified, and blessed, who ought to be the arbiter of all, who should accomplish the destiny of this globe by one supreme act of good—the union of all life and the reconciliation of all beings. This pacific union must after a time be effected by a great art of education and initiation, which man begins to comprehend. Page 64. Training for flight (see also p. 84).—Is it wrong for man, in his reveries, to beguile himself into a belief that he will one day be more than man, to attribute to himself wings? Dream or presentiment, it matters not. It is certain that a power of flight such as the bird possesses is truly a sixth sense. It would be absurd to see in it only an auxiliary The wing is so rapid and so infallible only because it is aided by a visual faculty which has not its equal in all creation. The bird, we must confess, lives wholly in the air, in the light. If there be a sublime life, a life of fire, it is this. Who surveys and descries all earth? Who measures it with his glance and his wing? Who knows all its paths? And not in any beaten route, but at the same time in every direction: for where is not the bird's track? His relations with heat, electricity, and magnetism, all the imponderable forces, are scarcely known to us; we see them, however, in his singular meteorological prescience. If we had seriously studied the matter, we should have had the balloon for some thousands of years; but even with the balloon, and the balloon capable of being steered, we should still be enormously behind the bird. To imitate its mechanism, and exactly reproduce its details, is not to possess the agreement, the ensemble, the unity of action, which moves the whole with so much facility and with such terrible swiftness. Let us renounce, for this life at least, these higher gifts, and confine ourselves to examine the two machines—our own and the bird's—in those points where they differ least. The human machine is superior in what is its smallest peculiarity, its susceptibility of adaptation to the most diverse purposes, and, above all, in its omnipuissance of the hand. On the other hand, he has far less unity and centralization. Our inferior limbs, our thighs, and legs, which are very long, perform eccentric movements far from the central point of action. Circulation is very slow; a thing perceptible in those last moments, when the body is dead at the feet before the heart has ceased to throb. The bird, almost spherical in form, is certainly the apex, divine and sublime, of living centralization. We can neither see nor imagine a higher degree of unity. From his excess of concentration he derives The profound, the marvellous solidarity, which is found in the higher genera of insects, as in the bees and ants, is not discovered among birds. Flocks of them are common, but true republics are rare. Family ties are very strong in their influence, such as maternity and love. Brotherhood, the sympathy of species, the mutual assistance rendered even by different kinds, are not unknown. Nevertheless, fraternity is strong among them in the inferior line. The whole heart of the bird is in his love, in his nest. There lies his isolation, his feebleness, his dependence; there also the temptation to seek for himself a defender. The most exalted of living beings is not the less one of those which the most eagerly demand protection. Page 67. On the life of the bird in the egg.—I draw these details from the accurate M. Duvernoy. Ovology in our days has become a science. Yet I know but a few treatises specially devoted to the bird's egg. The oldest is that of an AbbÉ Manesse, written in the last century, very verbose, and not very instructive (the MS. is preserved in the Museum Library). The same library possesses the German work of Wirfing and Gunther on nests and eggs; and another, also German, Page 74. Gelatinous and nourishing seas.—Humboldt, in one of his early works ("Scenes in the Tropics"), was the first, I think, to authenticate this fact. He attributes it to the prodigious quantity of medusÆ, and other analogous creatures, in a decomposed state in these waters. If, however, such a cadaverous dissolution really prevailed there, would it not render the waters fatal to the fish, instead of nourishing them? Perhaps this phenomenon should be attributed rather to nascent life than to life extinct, to that first living fermentation in which the lowest microscopic organizations develop themselves. It is especially in the Polar Seas, whose aspect is so wild and desolate, that this characteristic is observed. Life there abounds in such excess that the colour of the waters is completely changed by it. They are of an intense olive-green, thick with living matter and nutriment. Page 91. Our Museum.—In speaking of its collections, I may not forget its valuable library, which now includes that of Cuvier, and has been enriched by donations from all the physicists of Europe. I have had occasion to acknowledge very warmly the courtesy of the conservator, M. Desnoyers, and of M. le Docteur Lemercier, who has Page 94. Buffon.—I think that now-a-days too readily forget that this great generalizer has not the less received and recorded a number of very accurate observations furnished him by men of special vocations, officers of the royal hunt, gamekeepers, marines, and persons of every profession. Page 96. The Penguin.—The brother of the auk, but less degraded; he carries his wings like a veritable bird, though they are only membranes floating on an evoided breast. The more rarified air of our northern pole, where he lives, has already expanded his lungs, and the breast-bone begins to project. The legs, less closely confined to the body, better maintain its equilibrium, and the port and attitude gain in confidence. There is here a notable difference between the analogous products of the two hemispheres. Page 103. The Petrel, the mariner's terror.—The legend of the petrel gliding upon the waves, around the ship which he appears to lead to perdition, is of Dutch origin. This is just as it ought to be. The Dutch, who voyage en famille, and carry with them their wives, their children, even their domestic animals, have been more susceptible to evil auguries than other navigators. The hardiest of all, perhaps—true amphibians—they have not the less been anxious and imaginative, hazarding not only their lives, but their affections, Page 113. Epiornis.—The remains of this gigantic bird and its enormous egg may be seen in the Museum. It is computed that its size was fivefold that of the ostrich. How much we must regret that our rich collection of fossils, or the major part, lies buried in the drawers of the Museum for want of room. For thirty or forty thousand francs a wooden gallery might be constructed, in which the whole could find opportunities of display. Meanwhile, we argue as if these vast studies, now in their very infancy, had already been exhausted. Who knows but that man has only seen the threshold of the prodigious world of the dead? He has scarcely scratched the surface of the globe. The deeper explorations to which he is constrained by the thousand novel needs of art and industry (as that, for example, of piercing the Alps for a new railway) will open to science unexpected prospects. PalÆontology as yet is built upon the narrow foundation of a minimum number of facts. If we remember that the dead—owing to the thousands of years the globe has already lived—are enormously more numerous than the living, we cannot but consider this method of reasoning Page 113. Man had perished a hundred times.—Here we trace one of the early causes of the limited confederacy originally existing between man and the animal—a compact forgotten by our ungrateful pride, and without which, nevertheless, the existence of man had been impossible. When the colossal birds whose remains we are constantly exhuming had prepared for him the globe, had subjugated the crawling, climbing life which at first predominated—when man came upon the earth to confront what remained of the reptiles, to confront those new but not less formidable inhabitants of our planet, the tiger and the lion—he found on his side the bird, the dog, and the elephant. At Alexandria may be seen the last few individuals of those giant dogs which could strangle a lion. It was not through terror that these formidable animals allied themselves with man, but through natural sympathy, and their peculiar antipathy to the feline race, the giant cat (the tiger or lion). Without the alliance of the dog against beasts of prey, and that of the bird against serpents and crocodiles (which the bird kills in the very egg), man had assuredly been lost. The useful friendship of the horse originated in the same cause. You may trace it in the indescribable and convulsive horror which every young horse experiences at the mere odour of the lion. He attaches, he surrenders himself to man. Had he not possessed the horse, the ox, and the camel—had he been compelled to bear on his back and shoulders the heavy burdens Page 132. On the power of insects.—It is not only in the Tropical world that they are formidable; at the commencement of the last century half Holland perished because the piles which strengthen its dykes simultaneously gave way, invisibly undermined by a worm named the taret. This redoubtable nibbler, which is often a foot in length, never betrays itself; it only works within. One morning the beam breaks, the framework yields, the ship engulfed founders in the waves. How shall we reach, how discover it? A bird knows it—the lapwing, the guardian of Holland. And it is thus a notable imprudence to destroy, as has been done, his eggs. (Quatrefages, Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste.) France, for more than a century, has suffered from the importation of a monster not less terrible—the termite, which devours dry wood just as the taret consumes wet wood. The single female of each swarm has the horrible fecundity of laying daily eighty thousand eggs. La Rochelle begins to fear the fate of that American city which is suspended in the air, the termites having devoured all its foundations, and excavated immense catacombs beneath. In Guiana the dwellings of the termites are enormous hillocks, fifteen feet in height, which men only venture to attack from a distance, and by means of gunpowder. You may judge, therefore, the importance of the ant-eater, which dares to enter this gulf, and seek out the horrible female whence issues so accursed a torrent. (Smeathmann, MÉmoire sur les Termites.) Does climate save us? The termites prosper in France. Here, too, the cockchafer flourishes; and even on the northern slopes of the Alps, under the very breath of the glaciers, it devours vegetation. In the presence of such an enemy every insectivorous bird should be respected; at least, the canton of Vaud has recently placed the swallow under the protection of the law. (See the work of Tschudi.) Page 134. You frequently detect there a strong odour of musk.—The plain of Cumana, says Humboldt, presents, after heavy rains, an extraordinary phenomenon. The earth, moistened and reheated by the sun's rays, gives forth that odour of musk which, under the torrid zone, is common to animals of very different classes—to the jaguar, the small species of the tiger-cat, the cabiai, the galinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations which are the vehicles of this aroma appear only to disengage themselves in proportion as the soil enclosing the dÉbris of an innumerable quantity of reptiles, worms, and insects, becomes impregnated with water. Everywhere that one stirs up the soil, one is struck by the mass of organic substances which alternately develop, transform, or decompose. Nature in these climates appears more active, more prolific, one might say more lavish of life. Pages 136, 137. Humming-birds and colibris.—The eminent naturalists (Lesson, Azara, Stedmann, &c.) who have supplied so many excellent descriptions of these birds, are not, unfortunately, as rich in details of their manners, their food, their character. As to the terrible unhealthiness of the places where they live (and live with so intense a life), the narratives of the old travellers—of Labat and others—are folly confirmed by the moderns. Messieurs Durville and Lesson, in their voyage to New Guiana, scarcely dared to cross the threshold of its profound virgin forests, with their strange and terrible beauty. The most fantastic aspect of these forests—their prodigious fairylike enchantment of nocturnal illumination by myriads of fire-flies—is attested and very forcibly described, as far as relates to the countries adjoining Panama, by a French traveller, M. Caqueray, who has recently visited them. (See his Journal in the new Revue FranÇaise, 10th June 1855.) Page 153. The valuable museum of anatomical collections—that of Doctor Auzoux.—I cannot too warmly thank, on this occasion, our esteemed and skilful professor, who condescends to instruct us ignorant people, men of letters, men of the world, and women. He willed that anatomy should descend to all, should become popular; and it is done. His admirable imitations, his lucid demonstrations, America, I may add, appears more keenly sensible of these advantages than we are. An American speculator had desired M. Auzoux to supply him yearly with two thousand copies of his figure of man, being certain of disposing of them in all the small towns, and even in the villages. Every American village, says M. Auzoux, endeavours to obtain a museum, an observatory, &c. Page 157. The suppression of pain.—To prevent death is undoubtedly impossible; but we may prolong life. We may eventually render rarer, less cruel, and almost suppress pain. That the hardened old world laughs at this expression is so much the better. We have seen this spectacle in the days when our Europe, barbarized by war, centred all medical art in surgery, and only knew how to cure by the knife by a horrible prodigality of suffering, young America discovered the miracle of that profound dream in which all pain is annihilated. Page 157. The useful equilibrium of life and death.—Numerous species of birds no longer make a halt in France. One with difficulty descries them flying at inaccessible elevations, deploying their wings in haste, accelerating their passage, saying,—"Pass on, pass on quickly! Let us avoid the land of death, the land of destruction!" Provence, and many other departments in the south, are barren deserts, peopled by every living tribe, and therefore vegetable nature is sadly impoverished. You do not interrupt with impunity the natural harmonies. The bird levies a tax on the plant, but he is its protector. It is a matter of notoriety that the bustard has almost disappeared from Champagne and Provence. The heron has passed away; the stork is rare. As we gradually encroach upon the soil, these species, partial to dusty wastes and morasses, depart to seek a livelihood elsewhere. Our progress in one sense is our poverty. In England the same fact has been observed. (See the excellent articles on Sport and Natural History, translated from Messrs. St. John, Knox, Gosse, and others, in the Revue Britannique.) The heath-cock retires before the step of the cultivator; the quail passes into Ireland. The ranks of the herons grow daily thinner before the utilitarian improvements of the nineteenth century. But to these causes we must add the barbarism of man, which so heedlessly destroys a throng of innocent species. Nowhere, says M. Pavie, a French traveller, is game more timid than in our fields. Woe to the ungrateful people! And by this phrase I mean the sporting crowd who, unmindful of the numerous benefits we owe to animals, have exterminated innocent life. A terrible sentence of the Creator weighs upon the tribes of sportsmen,—they can create nothing. Do not believe the axiom that huntsmen gradually develop into agriculturists. It is not so—they kill or die; such is their whole destiny. We see it clearly through experience. He who has killed, will kill; he who has created, will create. In the want of emotion which every man suffers from his birth, the child who satisfies it habitually by murder, by a miniature ferocious drama of surprise and treason, of the torture of the weak, will find no great enjoyment in the gentle and tranquil emotions arising from the progressive success of toil and study, from the limited industry which does everything itself. To create, to destroy—these are the two raptures of infancy: to create is a long, slow process; to destroy is quick and easy. The least act of creation implies those best gifts of the Creator and of kindly Nature: gentleness and patience. It is a shocking and hideous thing to see a child partial to "sport;" to see woman enjoying and admiring murder, and encouraging her child. That delicate and sensitive woman would not give him a knife, but she gives him a gun: kill at a distance—be it so! for we do not see the suffering. And this mother will think it admirable that her son, kept confined to his room, shall drive off ennui by plucking the wings from flies, by torturing a bird or a little dog. Far-seeing mother! She will know when too late the evil of having formed a hard heart. Aged and weak, rejected of the world, she will experience in her turn her son's brutality. But rifle practice? They will object to you. Must not the child grow skilful in killing, that, from murder to murder, he may at last arrive at the surpassing feat of killing the flying swallow? The only country in Europe where everybody knows how to handle a musket is France is not cruel. Why, then, this love of murder, this extermination of the animal world? It is the impatient people, the young people, the childish people, in a rude and restless childhood. If they cannot be doing in creating, they will be doing by destroying. But what they most fatally injure is—themselves! A violent education, stormily impassioned in love or severity, crushes in the child, withers, chokes up the first moral flower of natural sensitiveness, all that was purest of the maternal milk, the germ of universal love which rarely blooms again. Among too many children we are saddened by their almost incredible sterility. A few recover from it in the long circle of life, when they have become experienced and enlightened men. But the first freshness of the heart? It shall return no more. How is it that this nation, otherwise born under such felicitous circumstances, is, with rare and local exceptions, accursed with so singular an incapacity for harmony? It has its own peculiar songs, its charming little melodies of vivacity and mirth. But it needs a prolonged effort, a special education, to attain to harmony. Page 158. Flattening of the brain.—The weight of the brain, compared with that of the body, is, in the
(Estimate of Haller and Leuret.) Page 158. The noble falcon.—The noble birds (the falcon, gerfalcon, saker) are those which hold their prey by the talon, and kill it with the bill: their bill, for this purpose, is toothed. The ignoble birds (the eagle, the kite, &c.) are for the most part swift of flight (voiliers): these employ their talons to rend and choke their victims. The rameurs rise with difficulty, which enables the voiliers to escape them the more easily. The tactics of the former are to feign, in the first place, to rise to a great height; and then, by suffering themselves to drop, they disconcert the manoeuvres of the voiliers. (Huber, Vol des Oiseaux de Proie, 1784, 4to. He was the first of that clever lineage, Huber of the birds, Huber of the bees, Huber of the ants.) Page 177. Its happiness in the morning, when terrors vanish!—"Before" (says Tschudi) "the vermeil tints of the early dew have announced the approach of the sun, oftentimes before even the lightest gleam has heralded dawn in the east, while the stars still sparkle in "Thin columns of white smoke escape from the roof of the cottages; the dogs bark around the farm-yards; and the bells ring suspended to the neck of the cow. The birds now quit their thickets, flutter their wings, and dart into the air to salute the sun, which once more comes to bless them with his bounteous light. More than one poor little sparrow rejoices that he has escaped the perils of the darkness. Perched on a little twig, he had trusted to enjoy his slumber without alarm, his head buried beneath his wing, when, by the ray of a star, he discerned the noiseless screech-owl gliding through the trees, intent upon some misdeed. The pole-cat stole from the valley-depth, the ermine descended from the rock, the pine-marten quitted his nest, the fox prowled among the bushes. All these enemies the poor little one watched during this terrible night. On his tree, on the earth, in the air—destruction menaced him on every side. How long, how long were the hours when, not daring to move, his only protection was the young leaves which screened him! And now, how great the pleasure to ply his unfettered wing, to live in safety, protected, defended by the light! "The chaffinch raises with all his energy his clear and sonorous note; the robin sings from the summit of the larch, the goldfinch amid the alder-groves, the blackbird and the bullfinch beneath the leafy arbours. The tomtit, the wren, and the troglodyte mingle their voices. The stockdove coos, and the woodpecker smites his tree. But far above these joyous utterances re-echo the melodious strains of the woodlark and the inimitable song of the thrush." Page 185. Migrations.—For the famished Arab, the lank inhabitant of the desert, the arrival of the migrating birds, weary and heavy at this season, and, therefore, easy to catch, is a blessing from God, a celestial manna. The Bible tells us of the raptures of the Israelites, when, during their wanderings in Arabia PetrÆa, fasting and enfeebled, they suddenly saw descending upon them the winged food: not the locusts of abstemious Elias, not the bread with which the raven nourished his bowels, but the quail heavy with fat, delicious and yet substantial, which voluntarily fell into their hands. They ate to repletion; and no longer regretted the rich flesh-pots of Pharaoh. I willingly excuse the gluttony of the famished. But what shall I say of our people, in the richest countries of Europe, who, after harvest and vintage-time, with barns and cellars brimming full, pursue with no less fury these poor travellers? Thin or fat, they are equally good: they would eat even the swallows; they devour the song-birds, "those which have only a voice." Their wild frenzy dooms the nightingale to the spit, plucks and kills the household guest, the poor robin, which yesterday fed from their hands. The migration season is a season of slaughter. The law which impels southward the tribes of birds is, for millions, a law of death. Migrations are exchanges for every country (except the poles, at the epoch of winter). The particular condition of climate or food, which decides the departure of one species of birds, is precisely that which determines the arrival of another species. When the swallow quits us at the autumn rains, we note the arrival of the army of plovers and peewits in quest of the lobworms driven from their lurking-places by the floods. In October, and as the cold increases, the greenfinches, the yellow-hammers, the wrens, replace the song-birds which have deserted us. The snipes and partridges descend from their mountains at the moment when the quail and the thrush emigrate towards the south. It is then, too, that the legions of the aquatic species quit the extreme north for those temperate climes where the seas, the lakes, and the pools, do not freeze. The wild geese, the swans, the divers, the ducks, the teal, cleave the air in battle array, and swoop down upon the lakes of Scotland and Hungary, and our marshes of the south. The delicate stork flies southward, when his cousin, the crane, sets out from the north, where his supplies begin to fail him. Passing over our lands, he pays us tribute by delivering us from the Page 188. My muse is the light.—And yet the nightingale loses it when he returns to us from Asia. But all true artists require that it should be softly ordered, blended with rays and shadows. Rembrandt in his paintings has exhausted the effects, at once warm and soft, of the science of chiaro-oscuro. The nightingale begins his song when the gloom of evening mingles with the last beams of the sun; and hence it is that we tremble at his voice. Our soul in the misty and uncertain hours of the gloaming regains possession of the inner light. Page 215. Do not say, "Winter is on my side."—While M. de Custine was travelling in Russia, he tells us that, at the fair of Nijni-Novgorod, he was frightened by the multitude of blattes which thronged his chamber, with an infectious smell, and which could not be got rid of. Dr. Tschudi, a careful traveller, who has explored Switzerland in its smallest details, assures us that at the breath of the south wind, which melts the snow in twelve hours, innumerable hosts of cockchafers ravage the country. They are not a less terrible scourge than the locusts to the south. During our Italian tour, my wife and I made an observation which will not have escaped the notice of naturalists; namely, that the cockchafer does not die in autumn. From the inhabited portions of our palazzo, almost entirely shut up in winter, we saw clouds of these insects emerge in the spring, which had slept peacefully in expectation of its warmth. Moreover, in that country, even ephemeral insects do not perish. Gigantic gnats wage war against us every night, demanding our blood with sharp and strident voice. If, by the side of these proofs of the multiplication of insects, even I offer the reader a very incomplete summary of the services rendered to us by the birds of our climate. Many are the assiduous guardians of our herds. The heron garde-boeuf, making use of his bill as a lancet, cuts the flesh of the ox to extract from it a parasitical worm which sucks the blood and life of the animal. The wagtails and the starlings render very similar services to our cattle. The swallows destroy myriads of winged insects which never rest, and which we see dancing in the sun's rays; gnats, midges, flies. The goat-suckers and the martinets, twilight hunters, effect the disappearance of the cockchafers, the gnats, the moths, and a swarm of nibbling insects (rongeurs), which work only by night. The magpie hunts after the insects which, concealed beneath the bark of the tree, live upon its sap. The humming-bird, the fly-catcher, the soui-mangas, in tropical countries, purify the chalice of the flower. The bee-eater, in all lands, carries on a fierce hostility against the wasps which ruin our fruit. The goldfinch, partial to uncultivated soil and the seeds of the thistle, prevents the latter from spreading over the ground. Our garden birds, the chaffinches, blackcaps, blackbirds, tits, strip our fruit-bushes and great trees of the grubs, caterpillars, and beetles, whose ravages would be incalculable. A large number of these insects remain during winter in the egg or the larva, waiting for spring to burst into life; but in this state they are diligently hunted up by the mavis, the wren, the troglodyte. The former turn over the leaves which strew the earth; the latter climb to the loftiest branches, or clear out the trunk. In wet meadows, you may see the crows and storks boring the ground Here we pause, not to weary our reader, and yet the list of useful birds is scarcely glanced at. Page 228. The woodpecker, as an augur.—Are the methods of observation adopted by meteorology serious and efficacious? Some men of science doubt it. It might, perhaps, be worth while examining if we could not deduce any part of the meteorology of the ancients from their divination by birds. The principal passages are pointed out in Pauly's EncyclopÆdia (Stuttgard), article Divinatio. "The woodpecker is a favoured bird in the steppes of Poland and Russia. In these sparsely wooded plains he constantly directs his course towards the trees; by following him, you discover a hidden ravine, a little later some springs, and finally descend towards the river. Under the bird's guidance you may thus explore and reconnoitre the country." (Mickiewicz, Les Slaves, vol. i., p. 200.) Page 235. Song.—Do not separate what God has joined together. If you place a bird in a cage beside you, his song quickly fatigues you with its sonorous timbre and its monotony. But in the grand concert of Nature, that bird would supply his note, and complete the harmony. This powerful voice would subdue itself to the modulations of the air; soft and tender it would glide, borne upon the breeze. And then, in the deep woody depths, the singer incessantly moves from place to place, now drawing near, and now receding; hence arise those distant effects which induce a delightful reverie, and that delicate cadence which thrills the heart. Under our roof his song would be ever the same; but on the pinions of the wind the music is divine, it penetrates and ravishes the soul. Page 241. The robin hastens, singing, to enjoy his share of the warmth.—I find this admirable passage in "The Conquest of England by the Normans" (by Augustin Thierry). The chief of the barbarous Saxons assembles his priests and wise men to ascertain if they will become Christians. One of them speaks as follows:— "Thou mayst remember, O king, a thing which sometimes happens, when thou art seated at table with thy captains and men-at-arms, in the winter season, and when a fire is kindled and the hall well warmed, while there are wind and rain and snow without. There comes a little bird, which traverses the room on fluttering wing, entering by one door and flying out at another: the moment of its passage is full of sweetness for it, it feels neither the rain nor the storm; but this interval is brief, the bird vanishes in the twinkling of an eye, and from winter passes away into winter. Such seems to me the life of man upon this earth, and its limited duration, compared with the length of the time which precedes and follows it." From winter he passes into winter. "Of wintra in winter eft cymeth." Page 247. Nests and Hatching.—In the vast extent of the islands linking India to Australia, a species of bird of the family GallinaceÆ dispenses with the labour of hatching her eggs. Raising an enormous hillock of grasses whose fermentation will produce a degree of heat favourable to the process, the parents, as soon as this task is completed, trust to Nature for the reproduction of their kind. Mr. Gould, who furnishes these curious details, speaks also of some curious nests constructed by another species of bird. It consists of an avenue formed by small branches planted in the ground, and woven together at their upper extremities in the fashion of a dome. The structure is consolidated by enlaced and intertwined herbs. This first stage of their labour accomplished, the artists proceed to the work of decoration. They seek in every direction, and often at a distance, the gaudiest feathers, the finest polished shells, and the most brilliant stones, to strew over the entrance. This avenue would seem, however, not to be the nest, but the place where the birds hold their first rendezvous. (See the coloured plates in Mr. Gould's magnificent volume, "Australian Birds.") Page 266. Instinct and Reason.—The ignorant and inattentive think all things nearly alike. And Science perceives that all things differ. According as we learn to observe, do these differences become apparent; that imperceptible "shade," and worthless "almost," which at the outset does not prevent us from confusing all things with one another, really distinguishes them, and points out a notable discrepancy, a wide interval betwixt this object and that, a blank, a hiatus, It has been asserted and repeated that the works of insects presented an absolute similarity, a mechanical regularity. And yet our Reaumurs and our Hubers have discovered numerous facts which positively contradict this pretended symmetry, especially in the case of the ant, whose life is complicated with so many incidents, so many unforeseen exigencies, that she would never provide against them but for the rapid discernment, the promptitude of mind, which is one of the most striking characteristics of her individuality. It has been supposed that the nests of birds are always constructed on identical principles. Not at all. A close observation reveals the fact that they differ according to the climate and the weather. At New York, the baltimore makes a closely fitted nest, to shelter him from the cold. At New Orleans his nest is left with a free passage for the air to diminish the heat. The Canadian partridges, which in winter cover themselves with a kind of small pent-roof at CompiÈgne, under a milder sky do away with this protection, because they judge it to be useless. The same discernment prevails in relation to the seasons. The American spring, in the opening years of the present century, occurring very late, the woodpecker (of Wilson) wisely made his nest two weeks later. I will venture to add that I have seen, in southern France, this delicate appreciation of climatic changes varying from year to year; by an inexplicable foresight, when the summer was likely to be cold, the nests were always more thickly woven. The guillemot of the north (mergula), which fears above all things the fox, on account of his partiality for her eggs, builds her nest on a rock level with the water, so that, no sooner are they hatched than the brood, however closely dogged by the plunderer, have time to escape in the waves. On the other hand, here, on our coasts, where her only enemy is man, she makes her nest on the loftiest and most precipitous cliffs, where man can with difficulty reach it. Ignorant persons, and no less those naturalists who study natural history in books only, acknowledge the differences existing between species, but believe that the actions and labours of the individuals of a species invariably correspond. Such a view is possible when you have only seen things from above and afar, in a sublime generality. But when the naturalist takes in hand his pilgrim's staff—when, as a modest, resolute, indefatigable pilgrim of Nature, he assumes his shoes of iron—all things change their aspect: he sees, notes, compares numerous individual works in the labours of each species, seizes their points of difference, and soon arrives at the conclusion which logic had already suggested,—that, in truth, no one thing resembles another. In those works which appear identical to inexperienced eyes, a Wilson and an Audubon have detected the diversities of an art very variable—according to means and places, according to the characters and talents of the artists—in a spontaneous infinity. So extensive is the region of liberty, fancy, and ingegno. Let us hope that our collections will bring together several specimens of each species, arranged and classified according to the talent and progress of the individual, recording as near as may be the age of the birds which constructed the nests. If these boundless diversities do not result from unrestrained activity and personal spontaneity, if you wish to refer them all to an identical instinct, you must, to support so miraculous a theory, make us believe another miracle: that this instinct, although identical, possesses the singular elasticity of accommodating and proportioning itself to a variety of circumstances which are incessantly changing, to an infinity of hazardous chances. What, then, will be the case if we find, in the history of animals, such an act of pretended instinct as supposes a resistance to that very course our instinctive nature would apparently desire? What will you say to the wounded elephant spoken of by FouchÉ d'Obsonville? That judicious traveller, so utterly disinclined to romantic tendencies, saw an elephant in India, which, having been wounded in battle, went daily to the hospital that his wound might be dressed. Plainly this elephant acted upon reflection, and upon a blind instinct; he acted against nature in the strength and enlightenment of his will. Page 270. The master-nightingale.—I owe this anecdote to a lady well entitled to a judgment upon such questions—to Madame Garcia Viardot (the great singer). The Russian peasants, who possess a fine ear and a keen sensibility for Nature (compared with her harshness towards them), said, when they occasionally heard the Spanish cantatrice: "The nightingale does not sing so well." Page 273. Still the little one hesitates, &c.—"One day I was walking with my son in the neighbourhood of Montier. We perceived towards the north, on the Little SalÈve, an eagle emerging from the Page 304. The small Chili falcon (cernicula).—I extract this statement from a new, curious, but little known work, written in French by a Chilian: Le Chili, by B. Vicuna Mackenna (ed. 1855, p. 100). Chili I take to be a most interesting country, which, by the energy of its citizens, should considerably modify the unfavourable opinion entertained by the citizens of the United States in reference to South Americans. America will not exist as a world, so long as a common feeling shall be wanting between the two opposite poles which ought to create her majestic harmony. Final Note on the Winged Life.—To appreciate beings so alien To-day even, in a place infinitely unpoetic, neglected, squalid, and obscure, among the black mud of Paris, and in the dank darkness of an apartment scarcely better than a cavern, I saw, and I heard chirping, in a subdued voice, a little creature which seemed not to belong to this low world. It was a warbler, and one of a common species—not the blackcap, which is prized so highly for his song. This one was not then singing; she chattered to herself, just a few notes, as monotonous as her situation. For winter, shadow, captivity, all were around her. The captive of a rough, rude man, of a speculator in birds, she heard on every side sounds which silenced her song; powerful voices were above her head, a mocking-bird among them, which rang out every moment their brilliant clarions. Generally, she would be condemned to silence. She was accustomed, one could perceive, to sing in a low tone. But in this limited flight, this habitual resignation and half lamentation, might be detected a charming delicacy, a more than feminine softness (morbidezza). Add to this the unique grace of her bosom and her motions, of her modest red and white attire, which sparkled, however, with a bright sheeny reflex. I recalled to my mind the pictures in which Ingres and Delacroix have shown us the captives of Algiers or the East, and exactly depicted the dull resignation, the indifference, the weariness of their monotonous lives, and also the decline (must we say the extinction?) of the inner fire. But, alas! it was wholly different here. The flame burned in all its strength. She was more and less than a woman. No comparison was of any use. Inferior by right of her animal nature, by her |
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