246 THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEASONS 



thus that of gold-crests has been known to strike our coasts 

 simultaneously from the Channel Islands to the Shetlands. 

 The altitude is also noteworthy, for many birds migrate at a 

 great height. Contrast the "wild mad rush" of Spring, 

 when the birds fly on the whole northwards, north-east- 

 wards, and north-westwards, at their utmost speed, by the 

 shortest route, and almost without a break, as if love called 

 them clamantly, with the less urgent westerly and southerly 

 flight in Autumn, when the young birds, reversing the Spring 

 order, are the first to leave. Nor forbid the shadow 

 which falls over the picture, but remember of the birds as 

 they fly that theirs is by no means always " a pleasant path 

 in the wake of retreating Summer or in the van of advancing 

 Spring," for migration is the great effort of their life, and to 

 many it is the last. For the elimination which must have 

 been raising the standard of racial fitness through the ages, 

 since migration began, by weeding out the inept and the 

 feckless, the dull of sense and the foolhardy, is still a dread 

 reality. But must we not confess that the swallow flying 

 south is " too wonderful for us " ? 



IV 



Some one has defined life with autumnal melancholy 

 as a slow dying. For, apart from the quasi-immortal Protists, 

 whose simplicity makes its possible for them to make good 

 their waste by constant and perfect repair, organisms always 

 tend more or less rapidly to get into physiological arrears. 

 Autumn is the time for balancing accounts, and then Death 

 often claims what Love has placed in pawn. Thus, of the 

 wasps whose nuptial flight we observed one of those harvest 

 days, the drone-lovers are already dead, their mates have 

 found sheltered nooks for their maternal and hibernal 

 slumbers, and the residue, almost automatic Spartans, have 



