68 love's meinie. 



must be for the perfect aid and work of every 

 feather in them. There is a problem for you, 

 students of mechanics, — How does a swallow 

 turn ? 



You shall see, at all events, to begin with, 

 to-day, how it gets along. 



65. I say you shall see; but indeed you 

 have often seen, and felt, — at least with your 

 hands, if not with your shoulders, — when you 

 chanced to be holding the sheet of a sail. 



I have said that I never got into scrapes 

 by blaming people wrongly ; but I often do 

 by praising them wrongl3\ I never praised, 

 without qualification, but one scientific book 

 in my life (that I remember) — this of Dr. 

 Pettigrew's on the Wing ; * — and now I must 



* "On the Physiology of Wings." Transactions of the 

 Royal Society of Edinburgh. Vol. xxvi., Part ii. I cannot 

 sufficiently express either my wonder or regret at the petu- 

 lance in which men of science are continually tempted into 

 immature publicity, by their rivalship with each other. 

 Page after page of this book, which, slowly digested and 

 taken counsel upon, might have been a noble contribution 

 to natural history, is occupied with dispute utterly useless to 

 the reader, on the question of the priority of the author, by 

 some months, to a French savant, in the statement of a 

 principle which neither has yet proved ; while page after 

 page is rendered worse than useless to the reader by the 

 author's passionate endeavour to contradict the ideas o( 



