THE SEEING EYE 



THREE hundred yards away on the white road a bird 

 shows as a mere pinprick. It has but to hop once, 

 however, to be known infallibly as a chaffinch. The 

 eye soon learns a feat so easy as that, but in a life- 

 time its owner could not say what it is that makes 

 the hop of a chaffinch so different from all the other 

 passerine birds. Nor can the sportsman say how it 

 is that he knows a pochard from a mallard when it is 

 but a dot of flying pepper in the sky. It is fair to 

 assume that every creature has not only the anatomical 

 and feathered differences upon which the man of 

 science relies, but some separate manner of carriage, 

 trick of deportment, or other result of unique ancestry 

 by which it can be known. It is a great thing to be 

 able to distinguish between finely marked species 

 from dried skins in a drawer or from a bit of bone 

 or the stone mould of a bone that was alive a million 

 years ago, but surely we get a little nearer the 

 essence of things when we know a bird by its manner 

 of wiping its beak on a branch or a bee by the way it 

 probes a flower. 



The triumph of the field-eye is perhaps at its height 

 in the man who knows his insects. There are pairs 

 of species so minutely different in colour and pro- 

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