A CONGRESS OF EARS 67 



of never-ceasing sound ; sitting, as it were, at the 

 receiving station of a system of wireless telegraphy, 

 and catching cross-currents of floating intelligence 

 from all quarters, mostly undiscernible by us if we 

 listened for it, but which they, by long practice, 

 instantly locate and interpret without conscious 

 effort. 



The zoologist classifies them under many heads. 

 The field mouse and rabbits are rodentia, the deer 

 ungulata, the kangaroos marsupialia. In my 

 museum they are all one family, and their labels are 

 their ears. In these days of international confer- 

 ences, parliaments of religion, pan-everything-in- 

 turn councils, might we not arrange for a great 

 catholic congress of distinguished ears ? What a 

 glow of new life it would shed upon our straitened, 

 traditional ways of thinking about the social prob- 

 lems of our humble fellow-creatures ! I would exclude 

 the eared owls, whose ears are a mere sport of 

 fashion, like the hideous imitations of birds' wings 

 which ladies stick on their hats. 



But just when this peep into the rare show of 

 Nature is lifting my soul into sublimity, I am brought 

 down to the base earth again by an exception. 

 This is the plague of all high science. You design a 

 stately theory, collect from many quarters a wealth 

 of facts to establish it with, and have arranged them 

 with cumulative and irresistible force, when some 

 disgusting, uninvited case thrusts itself in on your 

 notice and refuses to fit into your argument at all. 



