"Behold the Birds of the Air" 67 



on like conditions the Sparrow would have been a 

 Sparrow-hawk. 



With the general fact of development I am not con- 

 cerned. The arguments in its favour are held by pro- 

 fessed men of science to be too strong to gainsay, and 

 indeed there seems no more difficulty in understanding 

 how the divisions of animals and plants have been 

 brought about by its agency than by any other. But if 

 there has been development it has been upon a plan. 

 It has been along lines laid down and intended, and in 

 obedience to laws intelligently framed and artfully con- 

 trived. To say that Nature as we see it is organized by 

 blind forces without a guiding hand, that the dice have 

 fallen so regularly without being previously loaded, 

 appears so incredible, as to make me wonder with 

 Newton that any man "with a competent faculty of 

 thinking " can fall into such an absurdity. 



Sir John Herschel's observation is well known. 

 "When we see a great number of things precisely alike, 

 we do not believe this similarity to have originated 

 except from a common principle independent of them : 

 a line of spinning jennies or a regiment of soldiers, 

 dressed exactly alike and going through precisely the 

 same evolutions, gives us no idea of independent exist- 

 ence." J Now coming back to observations of the class 

 whereof I have been speaking, is there anything more 

 absolutely uniform, more obviously fashioned to a plan, 

 than the various tribes of birds? What can be more 

 absolutely identical than the depgrtment in similar 

 circumstances of different individuals of one race? 

 This is indeed a point which must soon impress an 

 observer with a sense of weirdness and mystery. Looked 

 at apart from his fellows, each individual would appear 

 to be a perfectly spontaneous agent going through his 

 tricks and devices at his own sweet will, with a thousand 

 eccentricities of his own. But when we find the myriads 

 of his fellows so faithful in their imitation that the books 



1 Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 29. 



