ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 813 
of touch. (See, among other works, Huber, Vol des oiseaua de proie, 
1784). 
The wing is so rapid and so infallible only because it is aided by 
a visual faculty which has not its equal in all creation. 
The bird, we must confess, lives wholly in the air, in the light. 
If there be a sublime life, a life of fire, it is this, 
Who surveys and descries all earth? Who measures it with his 
glance and his wing? Who knows all its paths? And not in any 
beaten route, but at the same time in every direction: for where is 
not the bird’s track ? 
His relations with heat, electricity, and magnetism, all the impon- 
derable forces, are scarcely known to us; we see them, however, in 
his singular meteorological prescience. 
If we had seriously studied the matter, we should have had the 
ballcon for some thousands of years; but even with the balloon, and 
the balloon capable of being steered, we should still be enormously 
behind the bird. To imitate its mechanism, and exactly reproduce 
its details, is not to possess the agreement, the ensemble, the unity 
of action, which moves the whole with so much facility and with such 
terrible swiftness. 
Let us renounce, for this life at least, these higher gifts, and 
confine ourselves to examine the two machines—our own and the 
bird’s—in those points where they differ least. 
The human machine is superior in what is its smallest peculiarity, 
its susceptibility of adaptation to the most diverse purposes, and, above 
all, in its omnipuissance of the hand. 
On the other hand, he has far less unity and centralization. Our 
inferior limbs, our thighs and legs, which are very long, perform 
eccentric movements far from the central point of action. Circulation 
is very slow; a thing perceptible in those last moments, when the 
body is dead at the feet before the heart has ceased to throb. 
The bird, almost spherical in form, is certainly the apex, divine 
and sublime, of living centralization. We can neither see nor imagine 
a higher degree of unity. From his excess of concentration he derives 
