Mf ORATION IN ITS BEARING ON LAMARCKISM 103 



vidual California salmon seem to act alike, and as the young 

 salmon has no opportunity for parental instruction, it seems 

 probable that everything it does is the result of its structure, 

 or of such nurture as this structure provides for ; but we can 

 safely say that no one now living is at all likely to discover or 

 to predict its migration from the study of its body, although the 

 reason why the migration takes place is obvious. 



Whole books, and not a few of them, have been devoted to 

 learned speculations on the nature of the impulse which leads to 

 the migration of birds, and, while the subject is most fascinating, 

 the value of the result has not, in all cases, been commensurate 

 with the labor. 



Newton " Encyclopaedia Britannica," article Birds says : " We 

 have here more than enough to excite our wonder, and indeed 

 are brought face to face with perhaps the greatest mystery which 

 the whole animal kingdom presents, — a mystery which attracted 

 the attention of the earliest writers, and can in its chief point be 

 no more explained by the modern man of science than by the 

 simple minded savage or the poet or prophet of antiquity. Some 

 facts are almost universally known and have been the theme of 

 comment in all ages and in all lands. The hawk that stretches 

 her wings toward the south is as familiar to the latest Nile-boat 

 traveller or dweller on the Bosphorus, as of old to the author of 

 the Book of Job. 



"The autumnal thronging of myriads of water-fowl by the 

 rivers of Asia is witnessed by the modern sportsman, as it was of 

 old by Homer. Anacreon welcomed the returning swallow, in num- 

 bers which his imitators of the colder north, to whom the associa- 

 tions connected with it are doubly strong, have tried in vain to 

 excel. The Indian of the fur-countries, in forming his rude 

 calendar, names the recurring moons after the birds of passage 

 whose arrival is coincident with their changes. But there is no 

 need to multiply instances. The flow and ebb of the mighty 

 feathered wave has been sung by poets and reasoned by philoso- 

 phers, has given rise to proverbs, and entered into popular 

 superstitions, and yet we may say of it still that our ignorance is 

 immense." 



While this author does not exaggerate either the interest or our 



