A GIFT OF GOD 19 



poets and painters have attached to cupids and to 

 angels these would get little aid from their accom- 

 panying bodies. No, the human form does not lend 

 itself to wings. For one thing, it is to-day not 

 horizontal enough. 



By the bird's tail Nature gave the finishing touch 

 to flight. This made the masterpiece of motion. 

 Losing many, even all, of those strong, bold quills 

 that together form the fan of the tail, a bird can 

 still in a fashion fly, can keep its balance aloft and 

 steer its way. But the loss of this shapely, beautiful 

 thing makes flight by comparison ungainly, a laboured 

 effort ; and it would make the greater journeys 

 through space impossible. Who can picture the 

 windhover hung in mid-air, safely anchored, with- 

 out the aid of that winnowing fan, open to the 

 utmost ? or a tail-less eagle mounting, with rigid 

 wing, its grand spiral staircase into the heights ? 

 Take in thought this fan from bird flight, and you 

 throw back flight whole ages of creation. The part 

 the fan plays, not in special air feats as the hang 

 and hover of the hawk and the soaring of the great 

 sea fowl but in the common forms of flight, is clear 

 to me. The ringdove gives an easy illustration. 

 When this dove is hovering hawk-like over his 

 nesting-place in spring, his fan tail is open to the 

 utmost, lying on and tremulously winnowing the air 

 as the wings winnow it ; but with, I suppose, this 

 difference in motion that, whereas the wings are in 



