254 The Bird 



field and stubble, the head, like the nose of a hound, is 

 held low, and, that not a rustle nor a motion of the little 

 field-mice may be lost, the ear-openings are turned down- 

 ward and the eyes look full upon the ground. Look a 

 Barn Owl in the face and you will see the entire cir- 

 cumference of both eyes, but a dove — one of the pursued 

 in life's race — shows in the front view only the profile 

 of the eyeballs. The same story is told in the eyes of 

 the fox and the rabbit — examples of Nature's parallels, 

 which are never repetitions. 



It is interesting to compare the eyes of owls with those 

 of mammals in general. With the exception of man, 

 and of some of the monkeys, we find that when the eyes 

 show but slight divergence the animal is invariably a 

 lover of the dusk, or is wholly nocturnal. We know that 

 when we are asleep, or are under the effects of ether, our 

 eyes tend to roll upward and outward, and now we realize 

 that the cause of this is the old ancestral pulling outward, 

 toward monocular vision, as in the fish or rabbit or dove. 

 Our distant ancestors, far from having books or work 

 which focussed their attention directly in front, had 

 most vital need of looking out for dangers in all direc- 

 tions. 



Another adaption found in the eyes of almost all noc- 

 turnal birds is the great size of the orbit, fully one half 

 of the skull being hollowed out to receive the eyeballs. 

 No degeneration of the eyes, as a result of nocturnal habits, 

 is recorded among birds, such as exists in moles and bats, 

 except in the case of the apteryx, the diminutive New 

 Zealand representative of the ostrich-like birds. The 



