BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. ya 
just now reached the hither confine of the 
ancient domain of the birds. A mere outcrop 
here, a quarry there, with now and then a rail- 
way-cutting or a mining-drift or shaft, can 
afford no more than casual glimpses of what is 
pictured in the rocks. With V/algospiza as 
the initial, or rather the closing sketch, what if 
we could thumb the pages back through all 
the forms to Archeopteryx and beyond, should 
we not have a volume of almost weirdly unique 
impressions! I have imagined that we should, 
in fact, find a long series of editions of the 
same volume, amended, remodelled, revised, 
but ever showing the same great development 
purpose. The owl was before Minerva, music 
was before Pan, beauty was before Venus, 
love was before the woman was made for 
Adam; the spirit of God walked in the dawn. 
The labors of A. Milne-Edwards have, to 
my mind, opened mines of rich suggestion to 
the poet as well as the philosopher and scien- 
tist, and I am sure that there is as much stim- 
ulus for the imagination as there is food for 
the mere reason in the discoveries of Prof. 
Marsh. And yet I cannot join the group who 
regard science as the basis of future poetry. 
It is not science, but the atmosphere of sug- 
gestion that stirs the pages of science, that is 
generative of poetry. If genius cannot see 
past the hard, dry fossils of to-day, far back 
into the living by-gone and catch those tints 
that are faded forever from sea and land, then 
genius fails at the cheapest test. It is a func- 
tion of science to restore the lost head and 
breast bones to Archeopteryx, but it is the 
privilege of the poet to restore the colors to its 
feathers and to “flood its throat with song.” 
