Phillips. — Oji a Common Vital Force. 607 



us, too, this bird is fond of decorating the walls of its living- 

 rooms with any brightly-painted or shining thing. It will 

 weave in a piece of sardine-tin, or a metal fork, or any bright 

 thing for a picture. If the Dutch farmers miss anything of 

 value, and there are shadow-birds' nests near, they always 

 search the nests for the lost articles. A Kafi&r's hut is much 

 like that of an enlarged shadow-bird's dwelling, save that it has 

 only one compartment, not three. From the round dome the 

 improvement has gone on to the hip-roof, and from the hip-roof 

 house right through the gamut of construction to the mar- 

 vellous Taj Mahal. There is, however, little or no evolution in 

 this, as beauty of design in construction or sculpture is all the 

 time in the womb of nature, so that an African pigmy queen, 

 once entering upon the gamut, might run through the scale to 

 the Taj Mahal. We can see that in the wondrous beauty of 

 form in flowers and plants, the construction of which should 

 guide us in many of our buildings. No sculpture of the pre- 

 sent day can equal the work, say, of Phidias, the Greek. By 

 the principle of evolution we ought to be better now than 

 Phidias. 



In dam-building we do not much excel the beaver. The 

 great dam-builders of India and Ceylon knew little or nothing, 

 I should suppose, of the beaver's plans, but, as there was only 

 one way in nature of doing the work, both the beaver and man 

 simply followed the natural law, which clearly is a rule quite 

 apart from natural selection. (I shall show later on, in sub- 

 sequent sections of this paper, wherein I think Darwin's great 

 theory of natural selection fails. In accounting for this law 

 of similarity of construction it also totally fails.) I think the 

 beavers' dams, however, are stronger than man's (in proportion, 

 of course, to size), seeing that the beaver makes his a living 

 dam, whilst ours is usually a dead structure. I think, too, 

 the beaver makes his dam slightly convex, so that the down- 

 pressure of the water always consolidates his structure. We 

 build our dams straight across, the consequence being that 

 they often belly out and carry away. Most of the great dams 

 in Ceylon, and, in fact, nearly all our dams, are liable to be 

 cut through by the wearing-action of flood-water. I have 

 noticed that water falls over the peat of a New Zealand 

 swamp, and does not wear that away. Living peat, I suppose, 

 is equal in its way to a living dam constructed by beavers. I 

 should recommend the trial of covering a great earth-dam 

 with peat, and keeping it wet on the lower side of the dam by 

 little trickling streams all along the face. 



When our engineers found that hollow beams or shafts 

 were as strong as, if not stronger than, solid ones they only dis- 

 covered a principle very commonly seen in nature. A wheat- 

 straw, if solid, could not support its head of grain. The bones 



