244 The Rate of Animal Development. [April, 
might say to every rustic youth who has ever robbed a nest 
and has attempted to bring up the callow young by hand. 
They are not known, it appears, to men of erudition. It 
was, we think, the Prime Minister of Gustavus Adolphus, 
of Sweden, who said to his son— “ Thou knowest not with 
how little wisdom the world is governed.” In like manner, 
and with even more truth, it might be said that we know 
not with how little accurate thorough knowledge books are 
compiled, the world is misinstru&ed, and imposing reputa- 
tions are built up. _ . 
We do not demand original observation from Professor 
Whewell. Everyone knows that the possessors of inherited 
wealth are apt to despise the man who has acquired a fortune 
by his own exertions. But there is a class of men— more 
numerous we fear in England than in any other civilised 
country — who, with a still more unjustifiable prejudice, 
contemn all knowledge that has not been derived from 
book, and scorn original research and discovery. Still it is 
strange that none of these writers should have met with the 
following observation from Gilbert White :*■ — “ On the fifth 
of July, 1775, I again untiled part of the roof over the nest 
of a swift. The squab young we brought down and placed 
upon the grass-plot, where they tumbled about and were as 
helpless as a new-born child. When we contemplated their 
naked bodies, their unwieldy, disproportionate abdomina, 
and their heads too heavy for their necks to support, we 
could not but marvel.” 
Davy and Whewell might, further, have found in Erasmus 
Darwin’s “Zoonomia”t some remarks on the different stages 
of maturity which animals of different species have reached 
when they are first brought into the world. The author 
uses these very words : — “ The chicks of the pheasant and 
the partridge have more perfect plumage, more perfect eyes, 
and greater aptitude for walking, than the callow nestlings 
of the dove or the wren. It is only necessary to show the 
first their food and teach them how to pick, whilst the latter 
for days obtrude a gaping mouth.” Would it have been too 
much trouble for a man of such extensive reading as Prof. 
Whewell to have run his eyes over the passage above 
quoted ? Being, moreover, a German scholar, — at least to 
the extent of an occasional mistranslation from the lan- 
guage, — the Professor might have read that Lorenz Oken 
divided the class Birds into two main subdivisions, nest- 
* Natural History of Selborne. Letter XXI. 
f Vol. i., pp. 187 — 194. 
