66 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 

 beHeved in by the mythologists are at least 

 spiritually true ; you cannot too carefully trace 

 or too accurately consider them. But the trans- 

 formations believed in by the anatomist are as 

 yet proved true in no single instance, and in 

 no substance, spiritual or material ; and I can- 

 not too often, or too earnestly, urge you not 

 to waste your time in guessing what animals 

 may once have been, while you remain in 

 nearly total ignorance of what they are. 



64. Do you even know distinctly from each 

 other, — (for that is the real naturalist's busi- 

 ness ; instead of confounding them with each 

 other), — do you know distinctly 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 careful observer of the 

 form of its most familiar species, — yet which 

 I do not find proposed, far less answered, in 

 any scientific book, — namely, why a swallow 

 has a swallow-tail ? 



