In every man there are muscles beneath the scalp for moving the ear. We have no such need for ear motion as have many of the lower animals, but it is the despair of many a school boy to discover how few of the race are able to contract these muscles ever so slightly.
The Lammergeier, or Bearded Vulture, is instinctively instructed to carry marrow bones and Tortoises high into the air and drop them upon stones so as to obtain their contents. Yet he is not beyond making serious mistakes, for one of them is said to have taken the bald head of the great poet Aeschylus for a smooth stone, dropped a Tortoise upon it, and secured in lieu of a luscious meal the lamentable demise of one of the greatest of men.
A true view of Nature leads us to regard whatever we find in an organism not as a perfect instrument to a given end, but as a remnant of what may have been produced by desire on the part of ancestors more or less remote. Indeed, it has well been said that our whole body is but a museum of antiquity of no practical interest, but of great historical importance. What we find in ourselves and elsewhere among living things is not to be regarded as creations perfectly adapted to given ends, for there is no perfect adaptation. Plants and animals are continually striving for it, but conditions change more rapidly than they and the chase is unsuccessful. Perfect adaptation would be stagnation.
A manifest design of Nature is that things may live. But death is the rule and life the exception. Out of a million seeds but one can grow. All may make something of a struggle; a few fortunate individuals thrive. Not the fittest, but usually some among those most fit. The whole range of life from the Bathybius Haeckelii to the tailless Ape exhibits a grand struggle for perfect adaptation with a greater or less failure in store for every individual. The human race is carrying on the same enterprise with the same results. The instant we seem to be fitted for our environment there comes a change of affairs that leaves us confronted with a problem just as interesting and urgent as the old one we flattered ourselves we were able to solve.
REASONING POWERS OF BIRDS.
THERE is something very remarkable in the almost reasoning powers manifested occasionally by birds in eluding pursuit or in turning attention from their nests and young, but in few is this more noticeable than in the Duck tribes. In Capt. Black's narrative of his Arctic land expedition the following instance of this is given:
"One of his companions, Mr. King, having shot a female Duck, fired again, and, as he thought, disabled its male companion. Accordingly, leaving the dead bird, which he had the mortification of seeing shortly afterward carried off by one of the white-headed Eagles, he waded into the water after the drake, which, far from being fluttered or alarmed, remained motionless, as if waiting to be taken up. Still, as he neared it, it glided easily away through innumerable little nooks and windings. Several times he reached out his hand to seize it, and having at last with great patience managed to coop it up in a corner, from which there appeared to be no escape, he was triumphantly bending down to take it, when, to his utter astonishment, it looked around at him, cried 'Quack!' and then flew away so strongly that he was convinced he had never hit it at all. The bird's object clearly was to draw the gunner away from its companion."