88 How Theories are Manufactured 



Not one of them shows the smallest tendency towards 

 " pure and dazzling hues." One is glossy black, another 

 rusty black with a white gorget, the third speckled with 

 various shades of buff and brown. Again, how is it 

 that the various birds which devastate our cherries and 

 currants should be of so dull hue compared with the 

 Crossbill who, living on fir seeds, goes bravely in red 

 and green? What again but the exigencies of theory 

 could tempt a writer to say that the key to the compara- 

 tive dinginess of the Blackcock is that he "does not 

 feed upon brilliant food-stuffs, but upon small bog 

 berries, hard seeds, and young shoots of heather," while 

 " our naturalized oriental Pheasants still delight in feeding 

 upon blackberries, sloes, haws, and the pretty fruit of 

 the honeysuckle and the holly." 1 Any one who has 

 walked a moor must know that cranberries and cow- 

 berries are quite as beautiful as those of the honeysuckle 

 or holly, while the whortleberry is a fair match for the 

 blackberry, which by the way also grows on hills, to say 

 nothing of haws and sloes ; and these various mountain 

 fruits are supplied to the Grouse and Blackcock in 

 far greater abundance than any aesthetic food to the 

 Pheasant, which as a matter of fact, as farmers will sadly 

 bear witness, prefers to anything else the grain of a 

 wheat-field. 



Again we are told that wading birds have had their 

 aesthetic tastes turned into a "sculpturesque" line, 2 

 and that they care for beauty of form, not for beauty 

 of tint. 



In support of this thesis, we are referred to "the 

 Herons, the Cranes, the Bitterns, the Plovers, and the 

 Snipes," with their various devices of crest and gorget 

 and wing plume. But, even within the limits of the list 

 furnished us, the Lapwing, a Plover, is surely a great 

 deal more remarkable for his colour than for any ex- 

 ceptional grace of outline ; while to go a little beyond it, 

 the Woodcock is in shape comparatively clumsy, and 



1 Evolutionist at Large, pp. 191, 194. 

 2 Vignettes from Nature , p. 105. 



