26l 



have had no egg since they left their breeder's bird 

 room. If we go to this gentleman and ask him why 

 such an extraordinary age should have been attained 

 to we shall quickly get the answer that mules live 

 long because they do not breed. This dictum, as by 

 this time we are not surprised to find on examination, 

 IS based on nothing better than our old friends! 

 tradition and so called " experience." Buffonandhis 

 prototypes, Hervieux and others, noticed the fact that 

 males of both the Canary and other finches lived 

 several years longer when kept for singing only than 

 when they were allowed to breed; and as befitted 

 writers of those days of rashly speculative philosophy 

 garnished by almost complete absence of exact scien- 

 tific knowledge, they immediately jumped to the con- 

 clusion that this great difference in longevity had its 

 basis 111 the gratification or otherwise of the sexual 

 faculty. They, like those who have come later, were 

 quite ignorant of the connection between egg food and 

 death, and so overlooked the facts that being kept in 

 solitary confinement for song only meant a healthy 

 • diet of seed alone, and that the sexual life of the 

 breeding birds, which had really nothing to do with 

 their mortality, was accompanied by the egg food 

 which we find from their writings was then onhT given 

 to them while breeding, and which we now see had so 

 much to do with it. The sexual life in birds is in the 

 natural order of things : as the season approaches it is 

 duly provided for by, relatively to other animals, an 

 enormous increase in the size and physiological activity 

 of the male organs ; and this is found on dissection to 

 be as strongly marked in the hybrid as in the pure 

 species. Governed as it is by purely phvsiological con- 

 ditions and wants, absolutely free of any promptinc^s 

 to unhealthy limits by unhealthy mental conditions, 

 and entirely uncomplicated by those destructive con- 

 comitants which so often involve and surround the 

 human subject in this connection, the gratification of 



