184 NATURAL HISTORY READER. 



peers up at me, takes its food, then looks again, attitudiniz- 

 ing, jerking, flirting its tail, with a thousand inquisitive 

 and fantastic motions, although I have power to grasp it in 

 my hand and crush its life out, yet I can not gain its secret 

 thus, and the center of its consciousness is really farther 

 from mine than the remotest planetary orbit. "We do 

 not steadily bear in mind," says Darwin, with a noble sci- 

 entific humility, "how profoundly ignorant we are of the 

 condition of existence of every animal." 



2. What "sympathetic penetration" can fathom the 

 life, for instance, of yonder mysterious, almost voiceless 

 humming-bird, smallest of feathery things, and loneliest, 

 whirring among birds, insect-like, and among insects, bird- 

 like, his path untraceable, his home unseen ? An image 

 of airy motion, yet it sometimes seems as if there were 

 nothing joyous in him. He seems like some exiled pygmy 

 prince, banished, but still regal, and doomed to wings. 

 Did gems turn to flowers, flowers to feathers, in that long- 

 past dynasty of the humming-birds ? It is strange to come 

 upon his tiny nest, in some gray and tangled swamp, with 

 this brilliant atom perched disconsolately near it, upon 

 some mossy twig ; it is like visiting Cinderella among her 

 ashes. And from humming-bird to eagle, the daily exist- 

 ence of every bird is a remote and bewitching mystery. 



3. Pythagoras has been charged, both before and since 

 the days of Malvolio, with holding that "the soul of our 

 grandam might haply inhabit a fowl," that delinquent 

 men must revisit earth as women, and delinquent women as 

 birds. Malvolio thought nobly of the soul, and in no way 

 approved his opinion ; but I remember that Harriet Rohan, 

 in her school-days, accepted this, her destiny, with glee. 

 "When I saw the oriole," she wrote to me, "from his nest 

 among the plum-trees in the garden, sail over the air and 

 high above the Gothic arches of the elm, a stream of flash- 

 ing light, or watched him swinging silently on jiendent 



