But thus our Bird of Paradise is quite flown and vanished into a figment or fable. But if any one will condole the loss of so convincing an argument for a Providence that fits one thing to another, I must take the freedom to tell him, that, unless he be a greater admirer of novelty than a searcher into the indissoluble consequences of things, I shall supply his meditation with what of this nature is as strongly conclusive, and remind, that it will be his own reproach if he cannot spy as clear an inference from an ordinary truth as from either an uncertainty or a fiction. And in this regard, the bringing this doubtful narration into play may not justly seem to no purpose, it carrying so serious and castigatory a piece of pleasantry with it.
The manucodiata’s living on the dew is no part of the convictiveness of a Providence in this story: But the being excellently well provided of wings and feathers, tanta levitatis supellectile exornata, as Nierembergius speaks, being so well furnished with all advantages for lightness, that it seems harder for her to sink down, as he conceits, than to be borne up in the air; that a bird thus fitted for that region should have no legs to stand on the earth, this would be a considerable indication of a discriminating Providence, that on purpose avoids all uselessness and superfluities.
The other remarkable, and it is a notorious one, is the cavity on the back of the male and in the breast of the female, for incubation; and the third and last, the use of those strings, as Cardan supposes, for the better keeping them together in incubiture.
If these considerations of this strange story strike so strongly upon thee as to convince thee of a Providence, think it humour and not judgment, if what I put in lieu of them, and is but ordinary, have not the same force with thee.
For is not the fish’s wanting feet, (as we observed before,) she being sufficiently supplied with fins in so thick an element as the water, as great an argument for a Providence as so light a bird’s wanting feet in that thinner element of the air, the extream lightness of her furniture being appropriated to the thinness of that element? And is not the same Providence seen, and that as conspicuously, in allotting but very short legs to those birds that are called Apodeo both in Plinie and Aristotle, upon whom she has bestowed such large and strong wings, and a power of flying so long and swift, as in giving no legs at all to the manucodiata, who has still a greater power of wing and lightness of body?
And as for the cavities on the back of the male and in the breast of the female, is that design of nature any more certain and plain than in the genital parts of the male and female in all kinds of animals? What greater argument of counsel and purpose of fitting one thing for another can there be than that? And if we should make a more inward search into the contrivances of these parts in an ordinary hen, and consider how or by what force an egg of so great a growth and bigness is transmitted from the ovarium through the infundibulum into the processus of the uterus, the membranes being go thin and the passage so very small, to see to the principle of that motion cannot be thought less than divine.
And if you would compare the protuberant paps of teats in the females of beasts with that cavity in the breast of the she-manucodiata, whether of them, think you, is the plainer pledge of a knowing and a designing Providence?
And, lastly, for the strings that are conceived to hold together the male and female in their incubiture, what a toy is it, if compared with those invisible links and ties that engage ordinary birds to sit upon their eggs, they having no visible allurement to such a tedious service?—Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism, book 2. ch. 11.
And Brama’s region, where the heavenly hours
Weave the vast circle of his age-long day.—XXIII. p. 113.
They who are acquainted with day and night know that the day of Brahma is as a thousand revolutions of the Yoogs, and that his night extendeth for a thousand more. On the coming of that day all things proceed from invisibility to visibility; so, on the approach of night, they are all dissolved away in that which is called invisible. The universe, even, having existed, is again dissolved; and now again, on the approach of day, by divine necessity, it is reproduced. That which, upon the dissolution of all things else, is not destroyed, is superior and of another nature from that visibility: it is invisible and eternal. He who is thus called invisible and incorruptible is even he who is called the Supreme Abode; which men having once obtained, they never more return to earth: that is my mansion.—Kreeshna, in the Bhagavat-Geeta.