236 . THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP 



Go not to the foul dens and fiery chambers of 

 men. Go to the boudoir of the bower-bird, or to 

 the subterranean hollow where the wild wolf rears 

 her litter. 



Man is not the surpassingly pre-eminent indi- 

 vidual he so actively advertises himself to be. 

 Indeed, in many particulars he is excelled, and 

 excelled seriously, by those whom he calls * lower.' 

 The locomotion of the bird is far superior in ease 

 and expedition to the shuffling locomotion of man. 

 The horse has a sense which guides it through 

 darkness in which human eyes are blind ; and the 

 manner in which a cat, who has been carried in a 

 bag and put down miles away, will turn up at 

 the back-door of the old home next morning 

 dumfounds science. The eye of the vulture is a 

 telescope. The hound will track his master along 

 a frequented street an hour behind his footsteps, 

 by the imponderable odour of his soles. The cat- 

 bird, without atlas or geographic manuals, will 

 find her way back over hundreds of trackless 

 leagues, season after season, to the same old 

 nesting-place in the thicket. Birds, thousands of 

 them, journey from Mexico to Arctic America, 

 from Algiers and Italy to Spitzbergen, from Egypt 

 to Siberia, and from Australia and the Polynesian 

 Islands to New Zealand, and build their nests and 

 rear their young, year after year, in the same vale, 

 grove, or tundra. The nightingale, who pours 

 out his incomparable lovesong in the twilight of 

 English lanes during May and June, winters in 

 the heart of Africa ; and some birds nest within the 



