"_It is the form and flight of the bird alone that has given man at last the mastery of the atmosphere. Without the bird as a living model we have not the slightest reason to believe that he could have ever learned the mechanism of flight. Now it is the flight of the bird, studied under the American sky, that has given the_ nations the war engine that will perhaps rule the destiny of the human race henceforth. _The form of the bird will fly before our autumn-brown American armies as they cross the sea--leading them as the symbol of their victory. When they lie along the trenches of France as thick as fallen brown autumn leaves in woodland hollows, it will be the flight of bird-like emblems of destruction that will guide them like hurricane-rushing leaves as they sweep toward their evil enemy._" * * * * * "_Through all ages the flight of the bird alone has been the interpreter of the human spirit. The living, standing on the earth and seeing the souls of their dead pass beyond their knowledge, have fixed upon the bird as the symbol of their faith. When you are old enough, if not already, to know your Shakespeare, you will find in one line of one of his plays the whole vast human farewell of the living to the dead: they are the words of Horatio to Hamlet, his dying prince: 'the flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'_" * * * * * "_As far as we geologists know, this is the morning of the planet. Not its dawn but somewhere near its sunrise. The bird music we hear in these human ages are morning songs. Back of that morning stretches the earth's long dawn; and the rocks tell us that thrushes were singing in the green forests of the earth millions of years before man had been moulded of the dust and had awakened and begun to listen to them. Thus bird music which seems to us so fresh is the oldest music of the earth--millions of years older than man's. And yet all this is still but a morning song. The earth is young, the birds are young, man is young--all young together at the morning of the earth's geologic day. What the evening will be we do not know. It is possible that the birds will be singing their evening song to the earth and man already have vanished millions of years before._" "_Many questions vex us: all others lead to one: when man vanishes, does he pass into the stillness of the earth's atmosphere and sink toward the stillness of its rocks like every other species? He answers with his faith: that his spirit is here he knows not why, but takes flight from it he knows not how or whither. Only, faith discloses to him one picture: the snowy pinion folded and at rest in the Final Places._" * * * * *