Birds and All Nature, Vol. 4, No. 2, August 1898: Illustrated by Color PhotographyVarious
History
Birds and All Nature, Vol. 4, No. 2, August 1898: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
There is no eye in Nature that sees perfectly and no ear that hears all
that is going on. One animal is superior to others in certain ways, but
none is perfect. All wings are not for flight. Some are better than
others for sweeping through the air, but perfection is found in none.
In most animals are found organs which are not of use. They frequently
resemble organs that are of the highest utility to some other form
of life, but for the animal in question they are apparently waste
material. When the Horse uses but one toe of each foot there seems to
be little reason for his having the rudimentary forms of more. There
are claws on the legs of many Dogs that have never been called into
action. They are so far from the ground and so weak and immovable that
the Dog himself does not know they are there.
In every man there are muscles beneath the scalp for moving the ear. We
have no such need for ear motion as have many of the lower animals, but
it is the despair of many a school boy to discover how few of the race
are able to contract these muscles ever so slightly.
The Lammergeier, or Bearded Vulture, is instinctively instructed to
carry marrow bones and Tortoises high into the air and drop them upon
stones so as to obtain their contents. Yet he is not beyond making
serious mistakes, for one of them is said to have taken the bald head
of the great poet Aeschylus for a smooth stone, dropped a Tortoise upon
it, and secured in lieu of a luscious meal the lamentable demise of one
of the greatest of men.
A true view of Nature leads us to regard whatever we find in an
organism not as a perfect instrument to a given end, but as a remnant
of what may have been produced by desire on the part of ancestors more
or less remote. Indeed, it has well been said that our whole body
is but a museum of antiquity of no practical interest, but of great
historical importance. What we find in ourselves and elsewhere among
living things is not to be regarded as creations perfectly adapted to
given ends, for there is no perfect adaptation. Plants and animals
are continually striving for it, but conditions change more rapidly
than they and the chase is unsuccessful. Perfect adaptation would be
stagnation.
A manifest design of Nature is that things may live. But death is the
rule and life the exception. Out of a million seeds but one can grow.
All may make something of a struggle; a few fortunate individuals
thrive. Not the fittest, but usually some among those most fit. The
whole range of life from the Bathybius Haeckelii to the tailless Ape
exhibits a grand struggle for perfect adaptation with a greater or less
failure in store for every individual. The human race is carrying on
the same enterprise with the same results. The instant we seem to be
fitted for our environment there comes a change of affairs that leaves
us confronted with a problem just as interesting and urgent as the old
one we flattered ourselves we were able to solve.
REASONING POWERS OF BIRDS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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