36 "INTUITION OF SNOW" 



penetrative, special, individual, as if the quality of 

 the thing itself had entered into us, changing us, 

 affecting body and mind. 



It is possible that something of this feeling was 

 in the mind, or at the back of it, of Willughby, the 

 Elizabethan writer and " Father of British Ornith- 

 ology," when he suggested that the white colour in 

 birds and beasts in the Arctic regions was due to the 

 constant intuition of snow, and the force of imagina- 

 tion. A notion which, after having seemed fantastic 

 enough to cause many a man to smile during the last 

 three centuries, will probably be seized upon and 

 made much of by the biologists by-and-by. For who 

 at this day can believe that the winter snow-white 

 fur and feathers of hare, weasel, grouse and other 

 arctic species, the sand-colouring of animals which 

 is almost universal in sandy deserts, and the green 

 plumage of many hundreds of species of birds in 

 tropical forests, have been brought about by means 

 of the Darwinian principle — the gradual accumula- 

 tion and inheritance of a long series of small individual 

 variations favourable to the individual itself and 

 its descendants in the struggle for life? The insur- 

 mountable objection is and always will be that such 

 variations are of the individual. 



One drops into the language of metaphor in speak- 

 ing of the evolutionary processes. The " better way " 

 of one human protagonist may eventually triumph 

 because he finds believers and helpers from the very 

 birth of the thought, and they face the hostile world 

 together. Nature also abounds in reformers, prophets. 



