18 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



in skill and finish, but because the bird is beaten 

 by want of food. 



I have taken the chaffinch and the partridge to 

 illustrate the virtue of the body as parcel of this 

 machine. But a dozen other instances occur to me. 

 By our Hampshire coast I watched that noble sea 

 fowl, the great black-backed gull, flying home from 

 the mud flats in the very teeth of a hard wind. It 

 flew as if there were no wind stately, unembar- 

 rassed ; and, powerful though the great slow-beating 

 wings must be, I could not doubt that the heavy 

 body slinging through the ah- was a strong support. 

 The speedy guillemot, with a wing that looks more 

 like a fin for the water than a sail for the air, tells 

 me the same. Even the little hawk- moths, the 

 sphinx moths, may depend for some of their speed 

 on the body. We have to turn to the wizened 

 bodies of feeble butterflies and flittering moths, such 

 as " the carpets," to find fliers who seem to draw 

 no aid from the body. An orange-tip butterfly's body 

 cannot avail much an orange-tip butterfly being 

 chiefly wing ; he is feeble in flight, without momen- 

 tum: Still feebler, the wood-white butterfly has little 

 control over the air he is controlled by the air 

 and can only flutter where he will when the breeze 

 is light and kindly. 



The bird's body and the hawk-moth's body here 

 is matter moulded to the very shape for flight, and 

 for aid and relief of wings. But the wings which 



