64 THE EGG. 



warm blood should surely stir up love, where the mother's womb is 

 so long the rest and home of her young, the cares of maternity are 

 also of minor import. The offspring is born fully formed, clothed 

 in all things like its mother ; and its food awaits it. And in many 

 species its education is accomplished without any further care on the 

 part of the mother than she bestowed when it grew in her bosom. 



Far otherwise is the destiny of the bird. It would die if it 

 /were not loved. 



Loved ! Every mother loves, from the ocean to the stars. I 

 should rather say anxiously tended, surrounded by infinite love, 

 enfolded in the warmth of the maternal magnetism. 



Even in the egg, where you see it protected by a calcareous 

 shell, it feels so keenly the access of air, that every chilled point 

 in the egg is a member the less for the future bird. Hence the 

 prolonged and disquieted labour of incubation, the self-inflicted cap- 

 tivity, the motionlessness of the most mobile of beings. And all 

 this so very pitiful ! A stone pressed so long to the heart, to the 

 flesh often the live flesh ! 



It is born, but born naked. While the baby-quadruped, even 

 from his first day of life, is clothed, and crawls, and already walks, 

 the young bird (especially in the higher species) lies motionless upon 

 its back, without the protection of any feathers. It is not only 

 while hatching it, but in anxiously rubbing it, that the mother main- 

 tains and stimulates warmth. The colt can readily suckle and 

 nourish itself; the young bird must wait while the mother seeks, 

 selects, and prepares its food. She cannot leave it; the father 

 must here supply her place ; behold the real, veritable family, faith- 

 fulness in love, and the first moral enlightenment. 



I will say nothing here of a protracted, very peculiar, and very 

 hazardous education that of flight. And nothing here of that of 

 song, so refined among the feathered artists. The quadruped soon 

 knows all that he will ever know : he gallops when born ; and if 

 he experiences an occasional fall, is it the same thing, tell me, to slide 

 without danger among the herbage, as to drop headlong from the skies? 



