36 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
discovery, tliat each individual of them possessed eyes of his 
own, and might lawfully use them for himself, and that it was 
only by the exercise of this primitive and obsolete right that 
truth was to be known — ^the universal mind has been restless 
on this point. 
Who has not noticed how common a thing it is, in the 
modern book of travel, to meet with surmises, doubts, hints, 
and even broad denials, in regard to the doctrine of in- 
stinct. Scarcely a relation of a trait or fact in natural his- 
tory can be met with now, to which something of this kind 
is not applied. These men have left Locke, and Brown, and 
Stewart, upon the mouldy shelves at home, and there is no 
stern eye of scholastic bigot to rebuke them, out amidst the 
wilds and freedom of nature ; and removed from the imme- 
diate terror of the lash, they dare to write what they see, and 
draw their own conclusions. 
Shakspeare has writ the motto of these times — 
" What custom wills, in all things should we do it, 
The dust on antique time would lie unswept, 
And mountainous error be too liighly heaped 
For truth to overpeer!" 
Are w^e not in danger of "mountainous error"' here? 
Aye ! and since by its side the tumulus of Truth, under the 
slow heaping of atoms through the ages, has grown and grown, 
until now even a pigmy upon tip-toe may out-peer and shout 
to the multitude in shadow beneath — shout that pigmy must ! 
Though the spectacled and lamp-dried book-man may shake 
his withered sides, and curl his thin lips in scorn, yet will 
that small voice be made articulate, the voice which has so 
long been struggling in mankind for utterance. It will pro- 
nounce, there are no blind, fatal impulses known to Na- 
ture ! Reason is the impulse of volition ! and Avhatever 
animal life exists, whether in the dumb stock or stone, the 
herb or molecule, brute or man, Reason directs it ! 
The self-same principle which, through our organization, 
