Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/633

On the whole, however, it may be safely said that birds seem to have much more capacity for perceiving beauty, much more gift for social enjoyment, a finer knowledge of distance and direction, and more power of vocal imitation, than any other order of animals of which we know any thing. On the other hand, they have less sense of power and sympathy than the dog, and therefore much less sense of responsibility to their superiors, whom they often love, but seldom serve. Perhaps we might generalize these mental qualifications by saying that birds are chiefly educated by perceptions, wonderfully accurate indeed, but still of things at a distance, of things at an almost telescopic range; that their rapidity of flight makes them creatures of wide experience, but not of full experience of any species but their own; and that, as a result, they cannot know men well enough to learn as much from men, as dogs, and cats, and elephants, and even other orders of creatures learn. Birds, in short, get bird's-eye views of the earth, and bird's-eye views, however instructive to those who have previously mastered the details carefully, do not exactly furnish a good basis for progressive knowledge. They obviously get a knowledge of geography, and, in some sense, of the air and its currents, such as no other creatures can have. They have an ear for music, and an eye for harmony of form and color, and probably of movement—for there are bird-dances which Taglioni would have despaired of imitating—such as no other member of the animal world possesses; and the perception of beauty, we know, depends on nothing so much as the coup d'œil, and this birds can always command. But they lose, by their great privilege of wings, that slow and sure experience of the ways of man which some less-gifted animals acquire. A swift which flies at the rate of 270 miles an hour, according to Mr. Leith Adams, clearly cannot have a brain to utilize an experience acquired at that rate in any but a very perfunctory way. Therefore, though birds have so strange a perception of beauty, which hardly needs close analysis, they are too fast, too migratory in their habits, to learn any thing which needs perfect fidelity and vigilance confined to a very narrow circle of facts. They are the musicians, and we might almost say the sensuous poets of the animal world; but musicians and sensuous poets do not conduce to progressive knowledge and ethical culture. Birds range too high and fly too fast for sympathy with man, and so it happens that their intellectual powers, remarkable and unique as they are in the animal world, never become so human and so almost spiritual as those of creatures which can only boast of very inferior powers.—Spectator.