I04 NATURE STUDY. 



furnishing the motive power with its own muscles. Ima- 

 gine a man meeting the air at the rate of two hundred and 

 forty miles an hour — the maximum estimate of a swallow's 

 flight — even if passively carried. Or a man ascends in a 

 balloon twenty five thousand feet, beyond which he loses 

 consciousness, or even life. A bird flies by him exulting 

 in the boyant air and fi3ang with greater ease because of 

 it — on and up — who can say how much higher ? It scarce- 

 ly seems an exaggeration to speak of ' ' The lark which sings 

 at heaven's gate." A bird can instantly adapt itself to a 

 different atmosphere. The condor sweeps down from its 

 home in the thin air and Arctic cold of the Andes' lofty 

 peaks to the heavy tropical heat of the ocean levels, ' ' trav- 

 ersing in a moment all climates." Birds of prey are still 

 further endowed with " pinions," that marvellous addition 

 •of muscle which enables them with motionless, outstretched 

 wing to float like a cloud in the blue ether, to swoop with 

 lightning flash upon their prey, or curve in slow ascending 

 spirals up the sky, and it is this " repose in motion" which 

 adds the last touch of grace. As the beginning of the wing 

 is found in birds of the sea, so its triumph is reached in the 

 little ocean eagle, the man-of-war or frigate bird. A bird 

 who is above even the demands of millinery to which all 

 else, including the lordly eagle, must pay tribute, — almost 

 above our envy; whose domain is the illimitable sky and 

 the vast wastes of waters. How it fires the imagination 

 even to read of him ! 



Jules Michelet has well said : " First and chief of the 

 winged race, the daring navigator who never furls his sails, 

 the lord of the tempest, the scorner of all peril. Here we 

 have a bird which is virtually nothing more than wings ; 

 scarcely any body — barely as large as a domestic cock — 

 while his prodigious pinions are fifteen feet in span. The 

 problem of flight is solved and overpassed, for the power o^ 



