Part 33

This art supposes a tenderness unlimited in justice and wisdom.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

The chief illustration of a book is incontestably the formula in which it is summed up. Here it is, then, in few words:--

This book has considered the bird in himself, and but little in relation to man.

The bird, born in a much lower condition than man (oviparous, like the serpent), possesses three advantages over him, which are his special mission:--

I. The wing, flight, an unique power, which is the dream of man. Every other creature is slow. Compared with the falcon or swallow, the Arab horse is a snail.

II. Flight itself does not appertain solely to the wing, but to an incomparable power of respiration and vision. The bird is peculiarly the son of air and light.

III. An essentially electrical being, the bird sees, knows, and foresees earth and sky, the weather, the seasons. Whether through an intimate relation with the globe, whether through a prodigious memory of localities and routes, he is always facing eastward, and always knows his path.

He swoops; he penetrates; he attains what man shall never attain. This is evident, particularly in his marvellous war against the reptile and the insect.

Add the marvellous work of continual purification of everything dangerous and unclean, which some species accomplish. If this war and this work ceased but for one day, man would disappear from the earth.

This daily victory of the beloved son of light over death, over a murderous and tenebrous life, is the fitting theme of his song, of that hymn of joy with which the bird salutes each Dawn.

But, besides song, the bird has many other languages. Like man, he prattles, recites, converses. He and man are the only beings which have really a language. Man and the bird are the voice of the world.

The bird, with its gift of augury, is ever drawing near to man, who is ever inflicting injury upon him. He undoubtedly divines, and has a presentiment of, what he will one day become when he emerges from the barbarism in which he is now unhappily plunged.

He recognizes in him the creature unique, sanctified, and blessed, who ought to be the arbiter of all, who should accomplish the destiny of this globe by one supreme act of good--the union of all life and the reconciliation of all beings.

This pacific union must after a time be effected by a great art of education and initiation, which man begins to comprehend.

Page 64. Training for flight (see also p. 84).--Is it wrong for man, in his reveries, to beguile himself into a belief that he will one day be more than man, to attribute to himself wings? Dream or presentiment, it matters not.

It is certain that a power of flight such as the bird possesses is truly a sixth sense. It would be absurd to see in it only an auxiliary of touch. (See, among other works, Huber, Vol des oiseaux de proie, 1784).

The wing is so rapid and so infallible only because it is aided by a visual faculty which has not its equal in all creation.

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.