ESTHETIC FEELING IN BIRDS. 655 



of-paradise, and parrots, induces the belief that in these classes the 

 exercise of the structures upon the search for food has led to the for- 

 mation of a very strong taste for color, ultimately resulting in sexual 

 modifications. 



As for the harmony of color usually observable in birds, it must be 

 remembered that our feeling of harmony probably depends upon the 

 due intermission and alternation of sense-stimulants, and therefore 

 ought naturally to be shared by us more or less definitely with all 

 other animals having a like constitution of the eye. Now, the mam- 

 malian and avian eye being derived from a common ancestor, who 

 already possessed a highly developed power of vision, we might reason- 

 ably expect that our feelings of harmony would be essentially identi- 

 cal ; and this expectation is fully borne out both by the coloration of 

 fruits and of birds themselves, which seldom or never present what 

 we should regard as discordant coloring. Furthermore, as the most 

 beautiful classes of birds are those which live perpetually among trop- 

 ical flowers and fruits, in the most beautiful forests or meadows, sur- 

 rounded by exquisite insects and reptiles, and for ever exercising their 

 vision upon the most diversely colored environment in the whole world, 

 it would seem far from impossible that their chromatic sensibility 

 is even more highly developed than that of average humanity, and 

 therefore that harmony or discord of colour would bear a relatively 

 greater importance in their eyes than in those of any human being 

 except the most artistically endowed. This conclusion will doubtless 

 sound strange and even grotesque to those who are always accustomed 

 to postulate for man a kind of absolute supremacy in the scheme of 

 Nature ; but it appears to me almost as obvious and as simply accounted 

 for as the superiority of scent in the dog and the deer, or of distant 

 vision in the eagle and the vulture. Lastly, it may be noted that 

 much of the beauty of birds, as of insects, fruits, and flowers, is due 

 to the delicate gradation of tints which they display. But in all 

 natural products such gradation is an almost necessary result of the 

 mode by which they have been evolved. It is only in human manu- 

 factures, where pigment is laid on with a brush or stamp, that colors 

 can be placed in crude juxtaposition to one another, giving rise to the 

 worst form of chromatic discord. Doubtless our native feeling of dis- 

 like to such discords, based upon their immediately fatiguing effect 

 upon the nerves employed, has been heightened intellectually by the 

 knowledge that they differ so widely from the dainty gradations to be 

 found in the handiwork of Nature. Besides being sensuously recog- 

 nized as discordant, they are intellectually recognized as inartistic. 

 Thus a large part of our art-progress has consisted in an advance from 

 the harsh and monotonous fields of primary red and blue, divided 

 by very hard and definite lines, which we find in Egyptian painting, 

 to the faithful representation of graduated tints and shades which 

 appears upon a modern canvas. But in the petal of a rose, the ray of 



