JSSTHETIC FEELING IN BIRDS. 663 



capable of distinguishing between comparatively minute shades and 

 degrees of beauty, just as we can distinguish between such minute 

 points in human faces as would doubtless absolutely escape the notice 

 of any other animal, it is yet improbable that they would be equally 

 discriminative outside the limits of their own species. Again the prin- 

 ciple of " gradation of characters " necessitates certain artistic effects 

 in their plumage which they themselves may be only half able to 

 admire. So, too, the necessarily symmetrical arrangement of the two 

 sides of the body and the mode of growth of feathers may often have 

 helped, unintentionally, as it were, in producing the total effect. In 

 other words, it may well be that the birds, while selecting their partners 

 on the ground of bright color, exceptionally long plumes, and other orna- 

 mental characters which they could understand and admire, may have 

 succeeded in producing harmonies of tone, delicate gradations of tint, 

 and other similar effects which they could not understand or admire, 

 or at least could only admire very partially. 



Yet, after making all allowances for possible reading in of human 

 feelings, it may probably be asserted with safety that the actual ap- 

 pearance of birds entitles them to rank, on the whole, higher in the 

 aesthetic scale than any other animals except man. Whether we look 

 at their graceful shapes, in the swan and the heron ; their beautiful 

 plumes, in the ostrich and the bird-of -paradise ; their exquisite color, 

 in the sunbird and the lory ; their ornamental crests and lappets, in the 

 humming-birds, the pigeons, and the parrots ; or their song in the lin- 

 net, the mocking-bird, and the nightingale we must confess that they 

 give extraordinary evidence of a taste for all that man considers lovely 

 or artistic. And this is just what we might expect from their free 

 mode of life, their rapid motion, their highly developed senses, their 

 comparative freedom from enemies, their long and almost uninter- 

 rupted rivalry between themselves for the possession of their mates. 

 Especially should we expect this splendid outburst of aesthetic sensi- 

 bility exactly where we find it in its greatest glory, among the flower- 

 haunting and fruit-eating species of the Brazilian forests, the Indian 

 jungles, and the Malay Archipelago. Surrounded for generations and 

 generations by gorgeous orchids and trumpet-creepers, from which 

 they sucked the stored-up nectar, by gleaming purple or golden fruits, 

 by burnished beetles, metallic butterflies, bronze-scaled lizards, and 

 coral snakes, their prey or their enemies, exercising their eyes perpetu- 

 ally in the search for food among the exquisite objects of their envi- 

 ronment, and safe from almost all foes except those of their own class, 

 tropical birds have naturally developed the most gorgeous and the 

 most perfect forms and colors in the whole animal ci-eation. And, above 

 all, they have stamped the mark of their peculiarly high aesthetic feel- 

 ings upon their own shapes by the wonderful definiteness of their pat- 

 terns and their ornamental adjuncts, nowhere equaled, save in the 

 most perfect decorative handicraft of man himself. 



