EDITORIAL GLEANINGS, 239 



number of non-breeding birds of both sexes exist, prevented from 

 breeding simply by the fact that they have no suitable ground. The 

 chief and primary use of song, he conceives, is to advertise the 

 presence in a certain area of an unvanquished cock-bird, who claims 

 that area as his, and will allow no other cock-bird to enter it without 

 a battle. Hence bright male colours — apart from what is called 

 " Sexual Selection " — are means to a definite end ; they are means by 

 which cock-birds impress certain lessons on one another, and if they 

 do not help a bird to win his plot of ground, they, at any rate, render 

 his subsequent possession of it less liable to disturbance. He con- 

 cludes that Natural Selection does not — as far as birds are concerned 

 — require a wholesale annihilation of the weaker ones as Darwin pro- 

 posed, "but can, and probably does, largely work by condemning to 

 unproductiveness the less powerful adults." 



Among the many objectors to the recently expressed views of Dr. 

 A. E. Wallace on ' Man's Place in the Universe,' the distinguished 

 French astronomer, M. Camille Flammarion, has entered the lists in 

 the last issue of ' Knowledge.' - 



Of the infinite, he remarks that it is " that to which nothing can be 

 added." Of space, that "if we imagine any confine to it whatever, 

 immediately we pass in thought beyond it." He continues: — "In 

 our solar system this little earth has not obtained any special privileges 

 from Nature, and it is strange to wish to confine life withiu the circle 

 of terrestrial chemistry. Nor is it less so to see a naturalist (whose 

 theories of evolution demand the action of time as the principal factor 

 in the succession of species) forgetting that the epoch in which we now 

 happen to be has no special importance ; that the different worlds of 

 our solar family are at different stages of their evolution ; and that, 

 for instance, if the Moon is a waif of the past, Jupiter, on the contrary, 

 is a world of the future. The effect of the hypothesis of Dr. Wallace 

 is to narrow our horizon, and to take us back again to the time of 

 Ptolemy, into the prison of a useless firmament. The greatness of 

 modern astronomy, on the contrary, is to burst all barriers, for our 

 science is but a shadow in the face of the reality. Infinity encom- 

 passes us on all sides, life asserts itself, universal and eternal, our 

 existence is but a fleeting moment, the vibration of an atom in a ray 

 of the sun, and our planet is but an island floating in the celestial 

 archipelago, to which no thought will ever place any bounds. The 

 careful study of our planet shows that the forces of Nature have Life 



