64 love's meinie. 



63. And yet be assured, as it cannot have been all these 

 creatures, so it has never, in truth, been any of them. 

 The transformations believed in by the mythologists are 

 at least spiritually true ; you cannot too carefully trace or 

 too accurately consider them. But the transformations 

 believed in by the anatomist are as yet proved true in no 

 single instance, and in no substance, spiritual or material ; 

 and I cannot too often, or too earnestly, urge you not to 

 waste your time in guessing what animals may once have 

 been, while you remain in neaiiy total ignorance of what 

 the}' are. 



04. Do you even know distinctly from each other, — 

 (for that is the real naturalist's business ; instead of con- 

 founding them with each other), — do you know dis- 

 tinctly the five great species of this familiar bird? — the 

 swallow, the house-martin, the sand-martin, the swift, 

 and the Alpine swift ? — or can you so much as answer 

 the first question which would suggest itself to any care- 

 ful observer of the form of its most familiar species, — 

 yet which I do not find proposed, far less answered, iu 

 any scientific book, — namely, why a swallow has a swal- 

 low-tail ? 



It is true that the tail feathers in many birds appear to 

 be entirely, — even cumbrously, decorative ; as in the pea- 

 cock, and birds of paradise. But I am confident that it is 

 not so in the swallow, and that the forked tail, so defined 

 in form and strong in plume, has indeed important func- 

 tions in guiding the flight ; yet notice how surrounded 



