The bird, we must confess, lives wholly in the air, in the light. If there be a sublime life, a life of fire, it is this.
Who surveys and descries all earth? Who measures it with his glance and his wing? Who knows all its paths? And not in any beaten route, but at the same time in every direction: for where is not the bird's track?
His relations with heat, electricity, and magnetism, all the imponderable forces, are scarcely known to us; we see them, however, in his singular meteorological prescience.
If we had seriously studied the matter, we should have had the balloon for some thousands of years; but even with the balloon, and the balloon capable of being steered, we should still be enormously behind the bird. To imitate its mechanism, and exactly reproduce its details, is not to possess the agreement, the ensemble, the unity of action, which moves the whole with so much facility and with such terrible swiftness.
Let us renounce, for this life at least, these higher gifts, and confine ourselves to examine the two machines—our own and the bird's—in those points where they differ least.
The human machine is superior in what is its smallest peculiarity, its susceptibility of adaptation to the most diverse purposes, and, above all, in its omnipuissance of the hand.
On the other hand, he has far less unity and centralization. Our inferior limbs, our thighs, and legs, which are very long, perform eccentric movements far from the central point of action. Circulation is very slow; a thing perceptible in those last moments, when the body is dead at the feet before the heart has ceased to throb.
The bird, almost spherical in form, is certainly the apex, divine and sublime, of living centralization. We can neither see nor imagine a higher degree of unity. From his excess of concentration he derives his great personal force, but it implies his extreme individuality, his isolation, his social weakness.
The profound, the marvellous solidarity, which is found in the higher genera of insects, as in the bees and ants, is not discovered among birds. Flocks of them are common, but true republics are rare.
Family ties are very strong in their influence, such as maternity and love. Brotherhood, the sympathy of species, the mutual assistance rendered even by different kinds, are not unknown. Nevertheless, fraternity is strong among them in the inferior line. The whole heart of the bird is in his love, in his nest.