ON SYBIPATHY AND FASCINATION. 



257 



through life, and live in distinct families with their offspring, till the last, 

 acquiring maturity, leave their paternal home, and found similar families 

 for themselves. Such, then, being the general fact with regard to other 

 animals, whence comes it to pass that the males among the bird-tribes should 

 evince, with a few exceptions, an attachment that is so rarely to be met 

 with elsewhere ? What is that wonderful power that rivets the greater 

 number of male birds to female birds during the time of nestUng and 

 incubation ; that impels them to take an equal part in constructing the 

 nestj and stimulates them with feelings unknown at any other season ? 

 Whence is it that several of them, as the male raven (corvus Corax^) 

 divide the toil and time of sitting, and incubate the eggs by day as the 

 female does by night ? or, that others of tliem, leaving to their respective 

 females the entire process of incubation, soothe them through the whole 

 of this tedious period, often extending to not less than six or eight weeks, 

 with their melodies from a neighbouring busli, and supply them with food 

 with the utmost tenderness and punctuality ? 



Whence is it, more especially amidst birds that feed their young with a 

 viscid chyle or milk, secreted at that peculiar period in the crop or craw, 

 that the crop of the male becomes enlarged and changed in its action, in 

 the very same manner as that of the female, so as to enable him to divide 

 the tender office of nursing, and to supply the young with an equal quan- 

 tity of nutriment ? In the body of tlie mother we can, perhaps, trace a 

 series of actions which, if they do not give us a full insight into the cause 

 of such a change, and such an additional function, at least prepare us to 

 contemplate it with less astonishment : it is a change, in a very consider- 

 able degree, analogous to what occurs in the female frame of most other 

 kinds and classes when similarly situated ; and which is evinced in its 

 highest and most beautiful perfection in our own race. But in the pro- 

 duction of a similar change in the crop of the male pigeon, we meet with 

 a fact altogether anomalous and alone : there is no connexion of organ 

 with organ ; no perceptible chain of actions that can have given rise to it ; 

 the frames of the individuals are distinct. It is a pure sympathy excited in 

 one being by a peculiar change produced in the organization of another, 

 and leading to a similar change in the being that is thus most wonderfully 

 and inexplicably operated upon. 



Let us pass from the bird tribes to fishes. There are various animals 

 of this class that on being touched, or even approached without being 

 touched, are enabled to exhaust the irritable or sensorial power, or both 

 together, of the hand or other limb that approaches them, so as to par- 

 alyze it, and render it incapable of exertion. Such especially, are those 

 fishes which we denominate the torpedo-ray, and the electric eel or gym- 

 note. Of these the former has been longest known to naturalists : for, 

 in consequence of its being an inhabitant of the Mediterranean sea, it is 

 described both by Greek and Roman writers, who impute its distinctive 

 faculty to magic ; and conceive that the animal has a puwer, not only of 

 concentrating this magical energy at option, but if seized hold of by a 

 fishing-hook, of impelling it through the whole length of the hook, line, 

 and rodj to the arm of the angler, and hence by palsying his arm, of efi'ect- 

 ing his escape. So Oppian in Greek verses, which I will take leave thus 

 to translate : 



The hook'd torpedo, with instinctive force — 

 Calls all his magic from its secret source ; 

 And throus:h tlie hook, the line, the tajper pole, 



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