ODDITIES OF ARIMAL CHARACTER. 263 



a pigeon of exceedingly eccentric disposition, not unlike " the single 

 gentleman " in Dickens's " Curiosity Shop " in his habits. He keeps 

 seven pigeon-boxes all to himself, and persecutes relentlessly any 

 pigeons which propose to share their dwellings with him. He is as 

 averse to the society even of the gentler sex as was St. Anthony him- 

 self in the Egyptian deserts. Not a pigeon will he admit within the 

 circle of his sway. And yet, in spite of this resolute and inveterate 

 bachelorhood, this eccentric pigeon is always endeavoring to build 

 nests, and looking out for objects of an egg-like form, which he thinks 

 it possible to hatch. He will accumulate twigs and straws now here, 

 now there, at very great pains and labor. He will coo sometimes to 

 inanimate objects, sometimes to captive birds of another breed, some- 

 times to a kitten or a dog, or even a flower-pot, with the quaintest and 

 politest antics. He will sit patiently on china-saucers on the mantel- 

 piece of one room, while he accumulates the materials for a nest on 

 the top of a closet in another room. He does not even drive away the 

 possible mother of a family with more zeal than he shows in seeking 

 to be a good father to some imaginary chick which he seems to expect 

 to elicit from a ring-stand or a letter-weight. So far as the present 

 writer can judge, he is a pigeon of strong Malthusian views, who hopes 

 to inaugurate a new regime which may have the same relation to the 

 ordinary habits of pigeons which the Positivist worship bears to the 

 other religions of the world. He hopes to foster and cultivate the 

 family and parental idea without any corresponding reality, without 

 any aid from outside, indeed, except an apparatus of external ceremony, 

 which feigns the existence of a purely ideal mate, and affects to in- 

 dulge in the expectation of impossible offspring. Doubtless he thinks 

 that there is nothing so good as the courtly attitude of a pigeon to- 

 ward his mate, especially if there be no mate to justify it ; nothing 

 more touching than the patient preparation for offspring and the edu- 

 cation of the young, especially if there be no young to complicate the 

 problem of tenderness and foresight, by requiring a real supply of 

 food and attention. This eccentric pigeon seems to be a solitary 

 thinker of the Comtist kind, who hopes to solve the problem of pre- 

 serving to the full all the higher instincts of bird-life, without the 

 difficulties involved in supplying those instincts with real objects. If 

 a human thinker can empty religion of its meaning, and yet justify all 

 its forms and sentiments and external rites, and if he is to receive noth- 

 ing but praise for his achievement, why may we not regard with in- 

 terest and admiration the effort of an eccentric bird to retain all the 

 ceremonial forms of chivalrous observance and elaborate parental care 

 and patience, without, in fact, complicating the situation by admitting 

 the neighborhood of either wife or child ? To our mind, the idiosyn- 

 crasies of such a creature as this deserve the most attentive study. 

 Who knows whether we might not find in the world of eccentric in- 

 stinct all sorts of anticipations of eccentric intellect ? Who knows 



