At this point of Aristotle's speech, Aristophanes asked for leave to protest. Having obtained it from Zeus, he commenced forthwith: "O Father of Nature and Man, I can no longer stand the invective of the Stagirite. In his time he was prudent enough to postpone his birth till after my mortal days; otherwise I should have treated him as I did Meton and Socrates, and other philosophers. But here he shall not escape me. Just imagine, this man wants to deprive creation of the best fun that is offered to the thinking beings amongst animals and humans.
"I wish he had overheard, as I have, when the other night I passed through an old forest near Darlington, a conversation between an old owl, a black woodpecker, and a badger. The owl sat, somewhat lower than usual on a birch-tree, while the woodpecker stopped his work at the bark of the groaning tree, and the badger had left his hole in order to enjoy the cool breath of the night. The owl said: 'Good-evening, Mr Woodpecker, how is business? Many worms beneath the bark?' The woodpecker replied: 'Thanks, madam, there is a slump, but one must put up with what one can get.'
"The badger then complained that he passed tedious hours in the ground, and he wished he could again see the exciting times of a few hundred thousand years ago when earthquakes and other catastrophes made existence more entertaining. 'Quite so,' said the owl, 'the forest is getting too civilised, and too calm. But you see, my friends, I have provided for much solid amusement for my old days. I used to visit a human's room, who read a great number of books. I asked him to teach me that art. I found it easy enough, only that these humans will read in a straight line from left to right, and I am accustomed to circular looks all round.
"'When I had quite acquired the art, I read some of his books. They were all about us folk in the forest. Once I chanced upon a chapter on owls. You may easily imagine how interested I was. I had not yet read a few pages, when I was seized with such a laughter that the professor became very indignant and told me to leave him. This I did; but whenever he read his books, I read them too, perched on a tree not far from his study. I cannot tell you how amusing it was.
"'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.