22-4 THE ARTJ ISLANDS. [chap. xxxi. 



charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed 

 for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism ; while on the 

 other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant 

 lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light 

 into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure 

 that he will so disturb the nicely -balanced relations of 

 organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, 

 and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose 

 wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appre- 

 ciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us 

 that all living things were not made for man. Many of 

 them have no relation to him. The cycle of their exist- 

 ence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or 

 broken by every advance in man's intellectual develop- 

 ment ; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves 

 and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life 

 and early death, would seem to be immediately related to 

 their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only 

 by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the number- 

 less other organisms with which each is more or less inti- 

 mately connected. 



After the first king-bird was obtained, I went with my 

 men into the forest, and we were not only rewarded with 

 another in equally perfect plumage, but I was enabled to 

 see a little of the habits of both it and the larger species. 

 It frequents the lower trees of the less dense forests, and is 



