MIGRATION 



correct. From lighthouse and lightship we must 

 still ask the old question " Doth the hawk fly 

 by Thy wisdom and stretch her wings towards 

 the south ? " and we must still make the old 

 affirmation — " Yea, the stork in the heavens 

 knoweth her appointed time, and the turtle and 

 the crane and the swallow observe the time of 

 their coming." 



Dr. Eagle Clarke's " Studies in Bird Migra- 

 tion " may be taken as the latest and most ex- 

 haustive pronouncement that has been made 

 on this fascinating and baffling subject, and in 

 his opening chapters he states with precision not 

 alone the wide deductions of the seers and poets, 

 but the varied and often contradictory theories 

 of different philosophers, and it is in the nature 

 of the case that his work is mainly concerned with 

 the scientific side of the great mystery. With 

 perfect fairness, and without a touch of the cheap 

 superiority with which many modern scientific 

 writers regard the great fore-runners who worked 

 in the long past and darker times, he records the 

 view of each philosopher in his turn, and enables 

 us to see how " knowledge grows from more to 

 more " as the slow ages roll by. These chapters, 

 we take it, will stand as a clear and impartial 

 account of the thinking and of the evolution of 

 thought on the subject of bird migration for all 

 future time. Strange and varied ; some shrewd 

 guesses at the truth, others sufficiently absurd; 

 were the earliest replies given to the questions 

 with which we opened this chapter. As Dr. 

 Eagle Clarke shows, it was reserved to the illus- 

 trious Greek, Aristotle (B.C. 384 — 322), in the 

 eighth book of his " Historia Animalium," to 

 deal for the first time in living history with the 

 migration of birds and other animals as subjects 

 for scientific inquiry. Here it is stated that : — 



67 



