beast soars and sings to its sweetheart; no beast remains in lifelong
partnership with the wife of its youth; no beast builds itself a
summer-house and decks it with feathers and bright shells. A beast is a
grovelling denizen of the earth; a bird is a free citizen of the air.
And who can say that there is not a connection between this difference
and other developments? The beast, thinking only of its appetites, has
evolved a delicate nose, a discriminating palate, three kinds of teeth
to cut, tear, and grind its food, salivary glands to moisten the same,
and a perfected apparatus of digestion.

[Illustration: GOOD FOR ANY ROUGH JOB]

The bird, occupied with thoughts of love and beauty, with "fields, or
waves, or mountains" and "shapes of sky or plain," has made little
advance in the art and instruments of good living. It swallows its food
whole, scarcely knowing the taste of it, and a pair of forceps for
picking it up, tipped and cased with horn, is the whole of its dining
furniture. For the bill of a bird, primarily and essentially, is that
and nothing else. In the chickens and the sparrows that come to steal
their food, and the robin that looks on, and all the little dicky-birds,
you may see it in its simplicity. The size and shape may vary, as a
Canadian axe differs from a Scotch axe; some are short and stout and
have a sharp edge for shelling seeds; some are longer and fine-pointed,
for picking worms and caterpillars out of their hiding-places; some a
little hooked at their points, and one, that of the crossbill, with
points crossed for picking the small seeds out of fir-cones; but all
are practically the same tool. Yet the last distinctly points the way to
those modifications by which the simple bill is gradually adapted to one
special purpose or another, until it becomes a wonderful mechanism in
which the original intention is quite out of sight.