36 WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIKDS. 



discovery, that each individual of them possessed eyes of his 

 own, and might lawfully use them for himself, and that it was 

 only by the exercise of this primitive and obsolete right that 

 truth was to be known the universal mind has been restless 

 on this point. 



Who has not noticed how common a thing it is, in the 

 modern book of travel, to meet with surmises, doubts, hints, 

 and even broad denials, in regard to the doctrine of in- 

 stinct. Scarcely a relation of a trait or fact in natural his- 

 tory can be met with now, to which something of this kind 

 is not applied. These men have left Locke, and Brown, and 

 Stewart, upon the mouldy shelves at home, and there is no 

 stern eye of scholastic bigot to rebuke them, out amidst the 

 wilds and freedom of nature ; and removed from the imme- 

 diate terror of the lash, they dare to write what they see, and 

 draw their own conclusions. 



Shakspeare has writ the motto of these times 



" What custom wills, in all things should we do it, 

 The dust on antique time would lie unswept, 

 And mountainous error be too highly heaped 

 For truth to overpeer !" 



Are we not in danger of " mountainous error" here? 



Aye ! and since by its side the tumulus of Truth, under the 

 slow heaping of atoms through the ages, has grown and grown, 

 until now even a pigmy upon tip-toe may out-peer and shout 

 to the multitude in shadow beneath shout that pigmy must ! 



Though the spectacled and lamp-dried book-man may shake 

 his withered sides, and curl his thin lips in scorn, yet will 

 that small voice be made articulate, the voice which has so 

 long been struggling in mankind for utterance. It will pro- 

 nounce, there are no blind, fatal impulses known to Na- 

 ture! Keason is the impulse of volition! and whatever 

 animal life exists, whether in the dumb stock or stone, the 

 herb or molecule, brute or man, Keason directs it ! 



The self-same principle which, through our organization, 



