"'These humans tell stories about us owls, and about you, Mr Woodpecker, and Mr Badger, that would cause a sloth to dance with joy. They imagine they know how we see, how we fly, how we get our food, and how we make our abodes. As a matter of fact they have hopelessly wrong notions about all these things. They want, as my venerated father used to say, to tap the lightning off into nice little flasks, in order to study it conveniently. This they call Evolution. "'The idea was mostly developed in England, in a country where they are proud of thinking that they always "muddle through somehow." These three words they apply to Nature, and call it Evolution. Once upon a time, they say--it does not matter whether 200,000 or 300,000 years, or perchance 645,789 years ago--there was my ancestor who, by mere accident, had an eye that enabled him to see more clearly at night than other birds did. This eye enabled him to catch more prey, thus to live longer, and to transmit his _nocturne_ of an eye to his progeny. And so by degrees we muddled into owlship. "'Is that not charming? My father used to laugh at that idea until all the cuckoos came to inquire what illness had befallen him. He told me, that an owl's eye was in strict correlation with definite and strongly individual formations of the ears, of the neck, of the feet, and of the intestines, and that accordingly a mere accidental change in the supposed ancestor's eye was totally insufficient to account for the corresponding and correlative formations just mentioned. "'Such correlative and simultaneous changes in various organs can be the consequences only of a violent and, as it were, fulgurous shock to the whole system of a bird. Such shocks are not a matter of slow growth. As all individual animal life at present is called into existence by one shock of fulgurant forces, even so it arose originally. "'But the English think that Nature is by birth an Englishman who adopts new organisms as Englishmen adopt new systems of measures, calendars, inventions, or laws,--_i.e._ hundreds of years after someone else has fulgurated them out. "'They imagine Nature to be, by rank and profession, a middle-class man and muddler; by religion, a Nonconformist; and by politics, a Liberal. However, we know better. Nature is, by rank and profession, a free lance and a genius; by religion, a Roman Catholic; and by politics, a Tory of the Tories. Now this being so, you may imagine, Mr Woodpecker and Mr Badger, what capital fun it is to read these learned lucubrations about birds and other animals as written by humans. "'The other day I called on Master Fox in the neighbourhood. He was ill and, in order to amuse him, I told him what they say of him in human books. He fairly burst with laughter. He told me later on, that by narrating all the Don Quixote stories told of him by man, to a big brown bear, he became the court-favourite of that dreaded king of the place.