342 SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS [Sym 



Sympathy. ^ 



Sympathy for each other in suffering is not confined to man- 

 kind. There is one trait, says Mr. Jesse, in the character 

 of rooks, which is, I believe, peculiar to that sort of birds, and 

 which does them no little credit. It is the distress which they 

 exhibit when one of them has been killed or wounded by a 

 gun while they have been feeding in a field or flying over it. 

 Instead of being scared away by the report of the gun, leaving 

 their wounded or dead companion to his fate, they show the 

 greatest anxiety or sympathy for him, uttering cries of distress, 

 and plainly proving that they wish to render him assistance, by 

 hovering over him, or sometimes making a dart from the air 

 close up to him, apparently to try and find out the reason why 

 he did not follow them : 



" While circling round and round, 

 They call their lifeless comrade from the ground." 



If he is wounded, and can flutter along the ground, the Tooks 

 appear to animate him to make fresh exertions by incessant 

 cries, flying a little distance before him, and calling to him to 

 follow them. n. 



The Law of Sympathy. 



Sympathy, as Edmund Burke has well said, may be considered 

 as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of 

 another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected. 

 And by the operation of the law of sympathy, Coleridge 

 declares that all powerful souls have kindred with each other. 

 But no words of description can convey so good an idea of this 

 mystic power, and of its workings, as we may obtain by looking 

 at its emblem, the Mimosa sensitiva the sensitive plant. As a 

 friend feels for a friend, so each of its leaves seems to feel for 

 each other. Who that knows, who that has seen it, has not also 

 remarked the strange sensibility of its leave's 1 ? The slightest 

 touch suffices to make its folioles close upon their supports, the 

 petiolar twigs upon the common petiole, and the common petiole 

 upon the stem. If we wound the extreme end of one foliole, 



