at least as it was evil, seems to have lost its power. It is to them that American literature looks for her future Macmillan's Magazine.

strength. May they not be found want

ing.

H. Sheffield Clapham.

It is, or before the days of School Boards was, a common article of faith of country boys that no bird can count beyond three.

The imaginative powers of man reach a little farther; but they also have their limitations. But for this poverty of imagination, which is to blame for half the uncharitableness and harsh judgments of everyday life, the feelings with which a thoughtful man would put down any honestly-written book telling the latest conclusions of research in any branch of science would be a mingling of abasement, reverence and encouragement. Abasement at the thought of the very small spot in the scheme of the universe which the individual man at best can occupy; reverence in the presence of the stupendous mysteries which it is the fashion just now to speak of as "Natural laws," which lie hidden behind the veil, small corners of which seem to have been lifted by modern searchers for the truth; encouragement to hope: for, if in the past and present are to be seen things which it could not have entered into the heart of man to conceive, no promise for the future can be beyond possibility of belief only because the conception of its fulfilment may be beyond our present powers.

But imagination fails: and this is why good men in the past have shrunk from enquiry and too often sought refuge from doubts in abuse of enquirers. It was only by publicly recanting the blasphemous heresy that it was the

earth that moved and not the sun, and by undertaking to repeat once a week for three weeks the seven Penitential Psalms that Galileo escaped from the torture-chamber of the Inquisition. "The thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord."

"It moves all the same," was his whispered aside to the friend and disciple who stood by him as he rose from his knees.

We can, after a fashion, picture to ourselves a six-day creation of perfected forms, and poets such as Milton may even venture to fill in grotesque details: "The tawny lion," like a great daddy-long-legs escaping from its underground nymph case, "Pawing to get free his hinder parts," and birds bursting full-fledged from eggs.

But the grander idea of a creation of infinite progression such as that of which from their different points of view geologists, astronomers and biologists seem to be catching glimpses, is "Broader than the measure of man's mind." We cannot take it in, nor picture an endless creation, begun when, before time, itself a created thing, was, forces were set in motion, which, working in obedience to "Laws which never can be broken," should spin a beautiful world from floating atoms, and people it with ever-changing; forms of life.

Of the many dissolving views which the light of Science is now throwing on the screen, none is more wonderful or more perplexing than the evolution of

birds from reptiles. And yet, up to a certain point at least, the pedigree seems fairly conclusively proved. Birds and reptiles alike are produced from eggs. The framework of both is, with modifications, the same; and, in an immature stage, the likeness is often marked. A newly-hatched cormorant is much more like an exceptionally ugly reptile than a bird.

The missing link has been found in the Archæopteris, of which fossil remains have been discovered in the lithographic rocks of Bavaria. It was a bird about the size of a rook, with three free fingers tipped with claws. It had teeth, a lizard-like head, and a long tail like a rat's, from each joint of which at an angle of forty-five sprang pairs of feathers.

Three-toed footprints, left ages ago in mud which has since hardened to limestone rock, were until lately believed to be those of gigantic birds. They are now commonly accepted as having been made by extinct lizards.

The three-clawed fingers on the wings of the Archæopteris are met half-way by two serviceable claws on the wings of the young of an existing bird, the Hoatzin, the "stinking pheasant" of the Valley of the Amazon. With the help of their claws and the beak, which is used like a parrot's, as an extra hand, the nestlings of this strange bird, which commonly builds its nest over a stream, before they can fly crawl about the bushes. The young birds if they fall into the water swim and dive like newts.

The Hoatzin is the only known bird still retaining two clawed wing-fingers; but a single claw or spur on the wing is still to be found in several birds. The Spur-winged Geese, and the Horned Screamers, whose concerts on the plains of La Plata Mr. Hudson has graphically described are instances of the kind.

But in such deep matters as the ori

gin or special use of anything we see in Nature it is prudent to accept with reserve even the most apparently selfevident conclusions. For proof of this, if proof is needed, it is unnecessary to look beyond birds' bones. These are in most cases hollow, and connected with air sacks-a wonderful contrivance, in the days of our youth we were taught to believe, for lightening a body which was to be lifted in flight. Nowhere in the realm of Nature was a clearer or more beautiful adaptation of means to end; unquestionable,-until a meddlesome anatomist went out of his way to notice that there were exceptions to the rule and that these were the birds of greatest powers of flight. The Albatrosses, Swifts and Swallows have, like ourselves, honest well-filled marrow bones. We are apt, the best of us, to read into the text our own ideas and to see the things which best fit in with them, like the boy with a taste for birds and sport who, when asked in his examination what he knew of the circumstances of the death of Ahab, answered, "One drew a bow at a Vulture and killed the king."

To form some notion of what the evolution of a bird from a lizard implies it is enough to read two articles in Newton's Dictionary of Birds by Professor Gadow, the one on "Feathers," the other on "Colors," and then,-remembering that no lizard has, nor so far as we know ever had, a feather,-to pay a visit to the Natural History Museum. In an alcove to the west of the Great Central Hall is a case containing, with other marvels, magnified models of a section of the web of a light feathera perfect mechanical contrivance for combining, by means of elaborate hooks and eyes and other devices, lightness and strength. The arrangements for decoration are even more amazing than the mechanism of the frame.

In the box used for painting birds, Nature, so far as the learned have as

yet been able to ascertain, has only five cakes of actual colors. There is a black, more than half of it pure carbon; two distinct reds, one of which, containing a good deal of copper, dyes the water when the bird painted with it splashes itself; a yellow and a green, the last containing no copper but a good deal of iron. All color effects seem to be produced by combinations of these, mixed or laid one over another, with or without the help of surface cuttings and polishings. Strange as it may sound when we think of the numbers of Kingfishers and other blue birds to be found almost all over the world, "blue has not yet been discovered as a pigment." The shot metallic colorings of our English Starlings and of the more gorgeous tropical birds are due to surface chisellings on the feathers which (Nature is not wasteful of labor) are to be found only on the parts of the feathers exposed to view.

as a

Without quoting at length Professor Gadow's article, which is a model of condensation, it is impossible to do justice to his subject. But a few lines extracted from the section dealing with "Structural, Prismatic, or Metallic Colors" are enough to give some idea of the wonders of contrivance described. These "prismatic colors change," he writes, "according to the position of the observer," and "they always change in the order of those of the rainbow." They are restricted rule to one particular part of the web, "the metallic portions of which are composed of one row of compartments, which often partly overlap each other like curved tiles. In the inside black or blackish-brown pigment is collected; and each compartment is covered with a transparent colorless layer of extreme thinness, e.g., 0.0008 mm. in Sturnus" (the Starling family). "The surface of this coat is either smooth and polished as in Nectarinia" (the Sunbirds), "or exhibits very fine 884

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XVII.

longitudinal wavy ridges when the feather is violet, or numerous small dot-like irregularities as in Galbula" (bright-colored South American birds which, to the eye of the uninitiated, look many of them not unlike Kingfishers.) "The coating seems to act like a number of prisms. All metallic feathers appear black when their surface is parallel to the rays of the light in the same level with the eye and the light. To the eye of the observer the metallic collar of Ptilorhis magnifica" (the Rifleman, Bird of Paradise) will in one position "appear absolutely black;" in others "bright coppery red" or "rich green;" the metallic feathers "of the sides of the breast in the same bird will change" with the position from which it is seen "from black to green and to blue." The "beautiful Pharomacrus Moccino" (the Trogon which Montezuma in the days of Cortez kept as a royal bird and with a staff of attendants to wait upon it, and which is now the national emblem of Guatemala, as is the Eagle of a more northerly American Republic) "changes from greenish bronze through golden green. green, and indigo to violet. "Oreotrochilus Chimborazo" (one of the humming birds) "exhibits the whole solar spectrum, namely, violet and red on the head, followed by orange and green on the back, blue, violet, and lastly purple on the long tail feathers." When we remember that every feather thus marvellously built and decorated is changed, probably, at least once a year, the marvel is not lessened. Many birds are known to moult much oftener than once in the year.

On the same floor of the Museum as the case arranged to show the structure, uses, arrangement and differing forms of feathers (to the left of the entrance of the Bird Gallery), is another which, though not designed with this object, shows the perfection to which the color decoration of birds is carried.

It contains twenty-six varieties of Birds of Paradise, no two at all alike. One is richly dressed in plain black velvet, and carries as a tiara six emeralds mounted, three on each side of the head, on long spikes. Others are almost vulgarly gorgeous in reds and greens and yellows. Some wear long Courttrains of filmy feathers, in buff, or cream, or strawberry and cream. One, over a mantle of orange gold, wears an Elizabethan ruff tipped with emeralds; another, a still broader ruff brightening gradually to sparkling amethysts at the outer rim. The black head of another is seen, half-hidden through a haze of pale blues and browns. One or two carry tails of honest feathers of which, for length, an old cock pheasant might feel proud. In another the only apology for tail feathers visible when the wings are closed are two stiff little wires curled in circles in opposite directions.

Another-more wonderful, perhaps, than all, of which there are specimens in the Museum, but which is as yet too rare and precious for exposure to the bleaching effects of sunlight in a glass case (the King of Saxony's Bird of Paradise), carries on its head two wires, reaching beyond the tail, gemmed from tip to base with turquoises.

The development of even a cormorant from a featherless reptile by the mere operation of blind laws would be a tough morsel to swallow. To believe, if any could be found now to believe it, that in birds of the same internal structure, living under like conditions, and in the same surroundings, effects so exquisitely varied as are to be seen in the group of Paradise birds could result without aid from some Omnipotent directing intelligence without, would demand a surrender of reason to faith even more complete than would the acceptance of the inspired poetry of the first three chapters of Genesis as history true to the letter.

Another fact which cannot altogether

be put aside in considering the possible limits of such forces as "Natural Selection," far stretching as they seem to be, is the apparent permanence of existing forms of animal life.

The habits of a bird may change rapidly to meet altered circumstances. Within the memory of middle-aged colonists, a harmless vegetable-eating parrot has become a mischievous bird of prey, feeding when it gets the chance on the kidneys of the sheep on the backs of which it alights. Wood-pigeons -in the country among the wariest and most difficult to approach of birds-in St. James's Park and the gardens of the Tuileries think it scarcely worth their while to move out of the way of the perambulators. Another pigeon-the tooth-billed-the nearest surviving relation of the dodo, has during the last few years completely changed its habits. It is, writes Doctor Sharp in his "Wonders of the Bird World," only "found in the Navigator's Island, as Samoa is sometimes called. It has perfectly formed wings, but until recently never used them as it had no natural enemies in its island home, and was accustomed not only to live on the ground, but to breed in colonies and to deposit its eggs on the side of a hill. As Samoa became civilized, however, the usual accompaniments of civilization prevailed in the shape of cats and rats, the former devouring the birds, the latter their eggs, and speedy extermination appeared to be the fate in store for the Didimculus." These birds have taken the hint in time and are now, happily, a thriving and prosperous colony, "building, feeding and roosting on the high trees."

While on the subject of relations of the poor old Dodo, it is worth while noticing in passing an odd instance of adaptation of form for special ends. On the island of Rodriguez, not far from the Mauritius, whch was the home of the Dodo, lived in former days

another bird, in many respects like it -the Solitaire. It seems, according to the accounts left of it by Leguat, a Huguenot, who took refuge in Rodriguez in the seventeenth century, when the Solitaire was still plentiful, to have been a pugnacious bird, and, having little or no use for its wings in other directions-it was a flightless birdused them mainly as a weapon in free fights for the favor of the females. Nature, apparently with this object in view, doubled the bird's fists. On the wings, wrote Leguat, whom nabody until lately believed, "were knobs of bone as big as a musket ball." Of late years many bones of the Solitaire have been discovered in caves and elsewhere, and have fully confirmed the story. "The number of the bones that had been broken and crushed in life contained in the collections brought to this country is,"-writes Professor Newton, whose brother, Sir Edward, was one of the most successful collectors-"considerable, showing the effects of the cestus-like armature of the wing."

As Leguat's story has proved true in one incredible particular, we may accept another tale he tells of this strange bird. "We have often," he says in his narrative, "remarked that some days after the young one leaves the nest a company of thirty or forty brings another young one to it; and the new fledged bird with its father and mother joining with the band march to some bye place. We frequently followed them and found that afterwards the old ones went each their own way alone or in couples and left the two young ones together, which we called a marriage." The French have a precedent for their weddings by family arrangement.

Birds can only too easily disappear either locally or entirely. But for the timely change of habits described above, the "Dodlet" would probably

before now have joined its distinguished cousin in the Valhalla of extinct birds. One of the effects of the great hurricane of September, 1898, was the entire, and so far as can yet be seen, permanent extinction in St. Vincent, in little more than an hour and a half, of a humming bird which the day before had been one of the commonest birds in the island.

Among domesticated birds artificial varieties are produced without much difficulty. A pigeon with a perfectly webbed foot, evolved at Cambridge by only three years' selected crossings, was in January last exhibited as a curiosity at, the meeting of the Ornithological Club.

But it would be difficult-perhaps "impossible" would not be too strong a word to use to point to a single instance in which a wild species has structurally changed in the slightest particular of any importance within the knowledge of man. The eider duck, which now on the Farne Islands sits as closely as an Aylesbury in a farmyard, and the drake which rides at anchor watching to join her in the open the moment she leaves her nest, are, so far as we know, feather for feather the same as those which twelve hundred years ago were blessed and tamed by St. Cuthbert.

In the vegetable world-as if by way of compensation for disabilities in other directions-forms seem to be more easily changed. A white geranium found in South Africa is said to have adapted itself to the thirsty life of the veldt by developing a bulb like an onion.

But fascinating as such speculations are, it is pleasant to step from the mists and find oneself in the sunshine with the birds as they now exist. On the threshold we are met by a wonderful instance of the care of Nature for her children—a present mystery as great as any in the past.