BIRD BEAUTY AND PERFECTION 



-WILLIAM E. RITTBR 



HAVE you studied the "lines" of the white swan as he moves leisurely 

 about in still waters? Have you followed the black-footed alba- 

 tross as he swings up in the face of a gale at sea and plunges 

 down before it? Have you watched for an hour some big rock-pile 

 on the border of a mountain meadow the silent undulations of the violet- 

 green swallow? Have you heard the zip of the white-throated swift over 

 the tip-top crags of a mountain two miles high? Have you examined 

 close at hand the texture and color-pattern of the great northern loon's 

 neck-feathers? Have you seen the male wood-duck in the height of his 

 nuptial splendor? Have you heard 'the western meadowlark as the April 

 sun peeps over the eastern hills? Have you stopped to listen to the sad 

 cadence of the golden-crowned sparrow as it comes from a shrub tangle 

 dripping wet with a hugging fog? If you have done all these, do you believe 

 Nature can go much beyond what she has already accomplished for these 

 birds in the way of subtilty and balance in form, of graceful power in 

 motion, of brilliancy and delicacy in color, of joyousness and melancholy in 

 sound? 



Beauty and perfection in animate nature were subjects of much dis- 

 cussion during the renaissance of biological science that took place in 

 the middle of the nineteenth century. The view that had prevailed in the 

 years immediately preceding was that they were placed in the world by a 

 beneficent Creator to gratify and ennoble men. Darwin's great work made 

 clear the insufficiency of this pleasant but selfish theory. It left no ground 

 for supposing that as to purpose beauty concerns any one but the beings 

 themselves which possess it. Darwin furthermore proposed the hypothesis 

 that beauty, like other qualities of organisms, is strictly a matter of busi- 

 ness; that it is a utility pure and simple, its usefulness consisting in the 

 help it gives toward victory in the struggle for life. This theory of Mr. 

 Darwin's overspread the whole face of living nature with somberness. 

 There can be no doubt about this. True, it afforded intelligent people a 

 satisfaction, in that it won another block of phenomena of nature from 

 the realm of miracle to that of rationality. But I believe every man of 

 science, not to speak of those outside its bounds, endowed with feeling 

 as well as intellect, has found at a level of his nature deeper than that of 

 pure intelligence some repellence at the heartlessness of the doctrine of 

 natural selection. 



From now on we may, whether scientist or layman, wander through 

 the canons and over the ridges of our mountains and enjoy the grandeur 

 of the forest, the boom of the sooty grouse, the hammering of the cock- 

 of-the-woods, and the whistle of the solitaire, free from the depressing 

 background of belief that whatever of beauty our senses find has been paid 

 for in blood and death. We may admire the flash of the hummingbird's 

 gorget even as we do that of Sirius on a moonless night or of a diamond 

 at a lady's throat. We may then subject the one as we do the others to 

 severe scientific examination to learn the physics and the chemistry of 

 these glorious color displays; but we do not have to suppose a death-dealing 

 conflict to have been the cause of one any more than of the others. 



As dwellers in a land among the most favored of the earth in the 

 variety and beauty of its animate nature, let us Californians one and all 

 live near to this nature, protecting it and using it always with love and 

 reason. As students of it, let us recognize that science cannot do her best 

 where a candid eager mind must ever pull along a reluctant heart. 



