376 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



wearers, or rather of their wearers' mates, and the list might be almost 

 indefinitely prolonged. But it will he better worth while, perhaps, to 

 glance briefly at another set of facts connected with feathers I mean 

 their artificial employment by human beings for the exactly identical 

 purpose of aesthetic decoration. Could any fact show more clearly the 

 similarity of artistic feeling which runs through the whole animal 

 series than this thought, that man makes use, for his own adornment, 

 of the very self-same beautiful colored baubles which the birds origi- 

 nally developed to charm the eyes of their fastidious brides ? 



I need not recall by name the various kinds of plumage so em- 

 ployed the feathers of the ostrich, the marabou, the bird-of-paradise, 

 the emu, the pheasant, and the gull ; the sun-birds and the humming- 

 birds mercilessly slaughtered by the million in the Malay Archipelago, 

 Ceylon, and Trinidad to supply the bonnets of London and Paris ; the 

 swan's-down, the grebe, the widow-birds, the cockatoos, the parrots, 

 the macaws, which decorate our wives and children with barbaric 

 spoils. It will suffice to remember, in passing, that from the feather 

 mantles of Hawaian kings, the feather kirtles of American Indians, 

 and the feather mosaics of Mexico, to the plumes of our own court- 

 dress, our own military uniforms, and our own quaintly surviving 

 funeral processions, these same " dermal modifications " of birds have 

 served an aesthetic purpose, better or worse, throughout the whole 

 course of human history. 



Nor does the resemblance stop here. Mankind employs tufts of 

 feathers for decorative display in just the same manner as the birds 

 who originally developed them. The Red Indian in his war-paint 

 dressed out his head with a row of quills, arranged in exactly the same 

 order as the top-knot of a hoopoe or a cockatoo. The feather collars 

 of so many savage tribes recall to the letter the frills and lappets of 

 the humming-bird or the epimachus. The ostrich-plumes of our 

 English royal receptions, and the panache of our European officers' 

 dress, are adaptations from the primitive idea of the crane and the um- 

 brella-bird. Everywhere, the tuft of feathers is placed on some promi- 

 nent part of the person some " constructive point " in the human or 

 avian system of architecture. 



A ring at the bell warns me that a visitor is standing at the door. 

 I throw my little feather hastily into the fire, and cut short my reflec- 

 tions to welcome my expected guest. But one last thought occurs to 

 me before I close my afternoon's meditation. To be " pleased with a 

 feather " appeared to the great metaphysical poet of the eighteenth 

 century a mark of childish simplicity. Perhaps it may be so ; but, 

 after all, is there not some solace in that new philosophy which can 

 enable one to pass a whole hour, this murky afternoon, in pleasurable 

 contemplation of that tiny plume which seems no contemptible subject 

 of human study to Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer? Corn/till 



