BIRD-HAUNTED LONDON 135 



upon the cocoa-nut instead. What had happened was 

 not a casual but a regular displacement and reversal 

 of power between these two particular male birds, the 

 discomfited one not only belonging to the largest and 

 strongest species of the tit family, but one notorious 

 for its boldness, resolution and pugnacity. 



What is the explanation of this ? Physical dis- 

 ability I can dismiss at once, for the oxeye was 

 perfectly healthy. I can see no other but that of the 

 individual differences between birds of the same 

 species, differences as great upon their plane as 

 human ones upon theirs. This particular tomtit was 

 very much more of a tomtit than this particular 

 oxeye was an oxeye. Birds, in fact, are variable 

 individuals, each with its own peculiar composite of 

 character. 



But this is only a negative statement. The personal 

 reality of the living universe is the thing " personal 

 agency," in the words of Professor Pringle-Pattison, 

 " is the only clue to the mystery of existence " and 

 the emergence and development of personal agency 

 both from the life of the race and to further its ends 

 and growth (" Everything for the species ; everything 

 by the individual ; nothing for the individual," as 

 Cresson says) is one of the greatest products of the 

 evolutionary process. 



By what process, again, have species evolved and 

 perpetuated themselves in all their differences from 

 primitive forms ? By luck, mechanical adaptation, 

 brute force or fertility ? These are a very dry and 

 poor soil for the flower of life as we see it to grow 

 in. No, it is by individual effort, resource, character 

 and initiative, profiting by the variational genius of 

 the germ-plasm, by learning how to live, as Genus 

 Homo learned how to be a man, by no other way 

 than the development of his mind. " The living 

 organism," as Professor Thomson says in The Bible of 

 Nature, " is characterized by the power of effective 

 response." It is the call upon life which comes from 

 without, and upon the response of the living creature 

 to the summons depends the history of evolution. 



