ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 31?? 



of touch. (See, among other works, Hiiber, Vol des oiseaux de prole, 

 1784). 



The wing is so rapid and so infallible only because it is aided by 

 a visual faculty which has not its equal in all creation. 



The bird, we must confess, lives wholly in the air, in the light. 

 If there be a sublime life, a life of fire, it is this. 



Wlio surveys and descries all earth ? Wlio measures it with his 

 glance and his wing ? Who knows all its paths ? And not in any 

 beaten route, but at the same time in every direction : for where is 

 not the bird's track ? 



His relations with heat, electricity, and magnetism, all the impon- 

 derable forces, are scarcely known to us ; we see them, however, in 

 his singular meteorological prescience. 



If we had seriously studied the matter, we should have had the 

 balloon for some thousands of years ; but even with the balloon, and 

 the balloon capable of being steered, we should still be enormously 

 behind the bird. To imitate its mechanism, and exactly reproduce 

 its details, is not to possess the agreement, the ensemble, the unity 

 of action, whicli moves the whole with so much facility and with such 

 teiTible swiftness. 



Let us renounce, for this life at least, these higher gifts, and 

 confine ourselves to examine the two machines — our own and the 

 bird's — in those points where they differ least. 



The human machine is superior in what is its smallest peculiarity, 

 its susceptibility of adaptation to the most diverse purposes, and, above 

 all, in its omnipuissance of the hand. 



On the other hand, he has far less unity and centralization. Our 

 inferior limbs, our thighs and legs, which are very long, perform 

 eccentric movements far from the central point of action. Circulation 

 is very slow ; a thing perceptible in those last moments, when the 

 body is dead at the feet before the heart has ceased to throb. 



The bird, almost spherical in form, is certainly the apex, divine 

 and sublime, of living centralization. We can neither see nor imagine 

 a higher degi-ee of unity. From his excess of concentration he derives 



