WILD LIFE IN CHINA: 



Chats on Chinese Birds and Beasts. 



Chapter I. 



THE MYSTERIES OF MIGRATION. 



Rudyard Kipling has many admirers: but his only 

 worshippers are those who know his Jungle Stories. His 

 tale of "The Spring Running" comes irresistibly to mind 

 just now. A waving leaflet rouses the Black Panther, 

 Bagheera. "The year turns" he said. "The Jungle goes 

 forward. The Time of New Talk is near. That leaf knows. 

 It is very good." He was talking to Mowgli, the Jungle Boy. 

 It is very good. Sunshine and warmth, flowers and 

 fertility, the music of the woods, the fragrance of the fields: 

 good indeed are they all. Nature moves. As Kipling says, 

 we are in the spring running. Birds in particular are full of 

 life, of joy, of motion. The time of migration has come. 

 He would be brave indeed who dared to dogmatize on such 

 a mystery. The how, the why, the when, the wherefore of 

 it all is still to seek. Science collects her facts; that is her 

 ■duty, and perhaps in some long distant time, when men can 

 read the jungle life as Mowgli did, they then will be able to 

 fit their odds and ends of truth together and proceed to tell 

 the tale. Till then, it is to the poet we must go for inspir- 

 ation. He kows that 



"Nature never did betray 



The heart that loved her: this her privilege. 



Through all the years of this our life, to lead 



From joy to joy." 



That is our first clue. Wordsworth is right. "To lead from 

 joy to joy," that is the lure by which Nature coaxes her 

 children to do her will. "So careful of the type" is she. 

 But it would be foolish to shut our eyes to the few facts 

 which some of our ornithologists designate as laws. We 

 may take some of these almost as gospel. We find, for 

 ■example that every bird of the northern hemisphere breeds 

 in its most northern habitat. The "spring running," then, 

 is for the propagation of the species. That over, it seems to 

 be equally certain that the turning south again is for food. 



