BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 167 
rare, pungent, strangely powerful suggestive- 
ness of that which fills the atmosphere sur- 
ounding facts. The chief fallacy of the scien- 
tific attitude is that which leans with conf 
dence on the prosy for the sake of its prose, 
at the same time shrinking from the poetical 
on account of its poetry. The geologist feels 
in some way honor-bound to avoid coming to 
a picturesque conclusion with his catalogue of 
facts. The catalogue must remain a catalogue. 
A sense of shame would accompany any 
thought of connecting imagination with his 
theory of the record of the rocks. 
But, despite the geologists, there is a great 
deal of picturesqueness and poetry in the dis- 
closures of the fossil beds. Set in matrices of 
carbonate of lime, magnesia, silica, and the 
oxides of iron, one may find the compressed 
and fragmentary remains of a life that flour- 
ished before our hills and mountains were 
made. This is a statement as trite, dry, and 
lifeless as the fossils themselves. But when 
one comes upon a mass of feathers disposed 
about a strange bird-skeleton imbedded in rock 
many thousands of years old, one may as well 
think of what song Archeopteryx sang as of 
what food it ate, or of how it used its long ver- 
tebrate tail. What colors had its wings and 
breast and crest? Were the rectrices that 
flared out on each side of the twenty vertebre 
of that strange tail dyed with rainbow hues? 
These are the questions with which the scien- 
tist is ashamed to play; but the poet may ask 
them of the rocks, and work out the answers, 
by the rules of the imagination, to his fullest 
satisfaction. 
In accordance with some unchangeable law 
