boundless in promise because oological investigation is destined to throw a powerful 

 and revealing light upon the development of life itself. 



Although a little aside from the main discussion of function, the writer cannot 

 refrain from emphasizing this last point. There is more meat in it than has been sup- 

 posed. Oology is not a frivolous super-refinement of science, a sort of attenuated imi- 

 tation, existing by courtesy. It is basic and revealing. Let us see why this should be 

 so. Life on any analysis you please is seen to exist in two phases, or to comprise 

 fundamentally two lines of development, the nutritive and the reproductive. The 

 nutritive individuates; it embodies itself; it exists for its own ends. Arising, indeed, 

 from the reproductive stream, the individual also harbors that stream and transmits it, 

 but it does not profoundly modify it any more than it completely exemplifies it. The 

 reproductive stream, or the life current, does not fully express itself nor exhaust itself 

 in the individual, for it has character and content of its own in addition. What, its 

 characteristics are and its tendencies we are left to conjecture. Its purpose we cannot 



The Kingbird Drawer 



at all discern, save, imperfectly, as it manifests itself in individuals. And so, because its 

 substance is so plastic, so fluid, so subtile, we have learned little enough of the moving 

 stream of life itself, little of the foundations of life, little of the mechanism of the 

 creative idea. But in one realm of nature this moving plasma, this reproductive stream, 

 has embodied itself, it has built a house in its own right. In the eggs of birds, and to a 

 lesser degree in the eggs of reptiles, the moving stream has left records of its own 

 nodes, of its own quasi-independent activities. To be sure, the individual parent fur- 

 nishes the material, but it furnishes it only on demand and according to orders. The 

 constructive design of an egg-shell belongs to the reproductive order, whose obscure 

 workings we are endeavoring to trace. The life stream is the architect, and the bird 

 is only the builder. 



Can you not see how unique and challenging is the opportunity here afforded? 

 The elan vital has exposed itself; the "divine urge" has put itself on record in a new 

 fashion. The opportunity for fundamental research is priceless. How far the testi- 

 mony of the egg keeps pace with that of the bird itself, is precisely the point of interest. 

 That it sometimes measurably parallels it, we grant; that it usually lags behind, and so 

 offers unimpeachable testimony to the character of older and otherwise forgotten rela- 



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