16 BRITISH BIRDS, THEIR EGGS AND NESTS. 
know they do, and in thousands of cases, and with a great, pure 
pleasure. But that is a very different thing from saying that God 
made them so for no other reason, or even for that purpose as 
a principal reason. How many thousands of eggs, for ten that 
are seen by man, escape all human notice whatever! How 
many millions upon millions in the old-world times before there 
were men to see them, must have had their fair colours, and 
delicate symmetry, and harmonious intermingling of hues, for 
no purpose whatever according to this view! No, no. Nature 
should not be read so. God made the Beasts of the Field, and 
the Birds of the Air, and the Fishes of the Sea, and the Insects, 
and the Shells, and the Trees, and Herbs, and Flowers, all, as a 
rule, wonderfully, gloriously, harmoniously beautiful, because He 
is a God of order, and beauty, and harmony; because it would 
have been inconsistent with His own Being, with the necessary 
purposes of such a Being, with the declared objects of such a 
Being in Creation, not to have made all “very good;” and the 
same reason which accounts for the beauty of the myriad flowers 
* born to blush unseen,” for that of the innumerable shells and 
insects of past days and the present day, for that of the glorious 
birds of Tropic lands, is all that we want in the way of expla- 
nation of the symmetry and beauty of the Bird’s Egg—God made 
‘it as well as all other things “very good.” 
Something more to the point for the practical egg-hunter, and 
even although he may be not very juvenile, is to recommend the 
practice of jotting down notes of any peculiarity of either nes 
or eggs or behaviour of parent birds, in any supposable case 
alittle unusual. Such notes are always interesting and very often 
useful at some Jong subsequent period; useful in themselves, and 
useful too as commenting on or else illustrated by, the similar 
memoranda of other observers. Besides, what is put down upon 
