XI COLOUR AND SONG 303 
Pheasants had no ocelli. Slowly, in thousands of 
generations, they have attained to their present beauty, 
and the record of the process is written on their 
feathers. 
To show how similar patterns run through nature, 
a writer in the Sfectator! points out that the peacock 
eye is found not only in the Peacock, the Peacock 
Butterfly, the Eyed Hawkmoth, and other allied 
insects, but also in a small fish (Guppy’s Cypri- 
nodon) and in a kind of Iris. The fish in question, 
recently to be seen at the insect house at the Zoo- 
logical Gardens, is very minute, hardly more than an 
inch long, but the males are adorned with several un- 
mistakable and very beautiful “eyes.” Thus we have 
the same form of decoration in birds, insects, fish, 
and flowers. 
Perhaps the beauty of birds is not due mainly 
either to their brilliant colours, or to the patterns in 
which they are arranged. Some sober-coloured birds 
are far more beautiful than some of the most gaudy, 
The lines of the figure have often a grace almost un- 
equalled in Nature. Take for instances, the Crane’s 
neck, the gentle curve where it joins the body, or the 
lines of the Gull’s expanded wings as he floats in the 
air. Colour and fine symmetry are, of course, often 
combined, but the less gaudy birds seem to have the 
advantage in figure, unless it is that over-brilliancy of 
colour distracts the attention from other charms. And 
even in the dullest the eye is always bright. A wild 
bird must be in a bad way if he has a lacklustre 
look. 
1 June 3rd, 1893. 
