24 WILD BIRDS 



yet latterly apart in one phase of song. It is the 

 same with the large skipper butterfly and the pearl 

 skipper butterfly. Replicas here again in all save 

 pearls. 



Pearls of a skipper, song-shake of a whitethroat, 

 these seem the toys of creation it's child play. 



In the great, grim work of life-making, of dividing 

 and walling off into separate species, what can be 

 the meaning of such differences that look so unes- 

 sential ? And how is the world richer except to 

 a few curious eyes and ears and those only the 

 eyes of a detached outsider by a few little four- 

 sided figures on the wing of a fly or a bubble in the 

 note of a bird ? If we in art make such little 

 differences in pattern, we agree they are trifles, and 

 soon abandon them as such. Yet Nature never 

 trifles, and these patterns that vary by a pearl or 

 a sound bubble are not abandoned. 



CHERVIL COUSINS 



For variation in plant pattern there is an example 

 that charms me in two common umbel flowers, the 

 wild chervil, or cow parsley, and the rough chervil. 

 The first is running fast to seed ere June is far ad- 

 vanced is quite beaked in English bird lanes, in 

 hedgerows and wood hedges facing south and west ; 

 the second is then coming everywhere into blossom. 

 The two chervils are intimately related cousin 

 chervils. No one can notice them, I think, and 

 doubt there was some chervil ancestor common to 

 both. They could not, the eye and thought assure 



