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Mr. Hubert D. Astley.



and the gatherers of the gardens. “ Mere mawkish sentiment ” I

hear our ornithologists of science retort! But life is made up of

sentiment, and sentiment produces those miniature huts with their

surrounding parterres of fruit and blossom.


People talk of human reasoning and the lower animals’

instinct, but although their brain power is not as highly developed

as our’s, yet they along their own lines reason also. Just as well

might it be argued that because we do certain things according to

regular habits, that we too act by instinct. It is surely more than

what is usually taken to mean instinct, [that is, an unconscious

manner of performing certain acts and of living], that enables the

Gardener Bower Bird to select certain blossoms and fruits of par¬

ticular colours with which it adorns its garden, hidden away in the

great humid and darkening forests of New Guinea. Does every

little ‘ Gardener ’ select exactly the same species of orchid, exactly

the same kind of fruit, all of exactly the same colour ? I doubt it.

That the whole species forms the gardens after a certain fixed type

is true, just as an Englishman can be stamped as such in comparison

with a Frenchman or a Bussian, but if we could examine and

know each bower and garden, assuredly we should discern a differ¬

ence, brought about by the individuality, the personality of the

builder.


There is nothing' which is an exact duplicate of anything else,

not even a leaf on a tree, where thousands of its kind grow and

draw their life from one source.. And is not this because every¬

thing has, however lowly developed the life may be, its own per¬

sonality as it were ? “ Instinct in dumb animals,” one hears people


say- It is reasoning in things that are anything but dumb. Animals

which have their own language, apparently to most people as little

understood as would be Spanish to those who have never learnt it.

A language expressed in birds by very distinct sounds of alarm,

warning, affection, and the like—and again each individual differs in

tone of voice and power of song.


But my pen has run off the line, and I must bring it back to

the subject of the moment.


When that intrepid and wonderfully successful collector, Mr.

Goodfellow, brought back from New Guinea some few years ago, four



