173. No concern with invisible structures. But much with invisible things; with passion, and with historical association. And in these two closing lectures, I hope partly to justify myself for pressing on your attention some matters as little hitherto thought of in drawing-schools, as the exact sciences have been highly, and, I believe, unjustly, esteemed;--mythology, namely, and heraldry. I can but in part justify myself now. Your experience of the interest which may be found in these two despised sciences will be my best justification. But to-day (as we are about to begin our exercises in bird-drawing) I think it may interest you to review some of the fables connected with the natural history of a single bird, and to consider what effect the knowledge of such tradition is likely to have on our mode of regarding the animated creation in general. 174. Let us take an instance of the feeling towards birds which is especially characteristic of the English temper at this day, in its entire freedom from superstition. You will find in your Rudimentary Series (225), Mr. Gould's plate of the lesser Egret,--the most beautiful, I suppose, of all birds that visit, or, at least, once visited, our English shores. Perfectly delicate in form, snow-white in plumage, the feathers like frost-work of dead silver, exquisitely slender, separating in the wind like the streams of a fountain, the creature looks a living cloud rather than a bird. It may be seen often enough in South France and Italy. The last (or last but one?) known of in England came thirty years ago, and this was its reception, as related by the present happy possessor of its feathers and bones:-- "The little Egret in my possession is a most beautiful specimen: it was killed by a labourer with a stick, in Ake Carr, near Beverley, about 1840, and was brought to me, tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, covered with black wet mud and blood, in which state it was sent to Mr. Reed, of Doncaster, and restored by him in a most marvellous manner." 175. Now, you will feel at once that, while the peasant was beating this bird into a piece of bloody flesh with his stick, he could not, in any true sense, see the bird; that he had no pleasure either in the sight of that, or of anything near it. You feel that he would become capable of seeing it in exact proportion to his desire not to kill it; but to watch it in its life. Well, that is a quite general law: in the degree in which you delight in the life of any creature, you can see it; no otherwise. And you would feel, would you not, that if you could enable the peasant rightly to see the bird, you had in great part educated him?