Take the egg in your hand. This elliptic
form, the most comprehensive, the most
beautiful, offering the least possible liability
to external injury, gives you the idea of a
complete microcosm, of a world in little, of a
total harmony, from which you can take
nothing, and to which you can add nothing.
Inorganic things hardly affect so perfect a
form. One has a presentiment that beneath
this inert appearance there lies a high
mystery of life and some accomplished work
of the Creator. What is it? What creature
is destined to proceed from it? We may not
know: but she, the mother, knows; she who,
trembling, with outstretched wings, folds it
in her embrace, and ripens it with her vital
heat; she who, hitherto free and the queen
of the air, has suddenly become a fixed
prisoner over this mute object, which you
might take to be a stone. Her faith, powerful
and efficacious, is sufficient to create a world,
and perhaps one of the most surprising. Say
nothing about suns and the elementary
chemistry of globes: a humming-bird's egg is
as great a marvel as the Milky Way. If
you wish to admire the fecundity of nature,
the vigour of invention, the enchanting riches
(fearful in one sense) which from an identical
creation draws, by millions, opposite miracles,
consider this egg, which is just like any other,
from which nevertheless will spring the
infinity of tribes who will disperse
themselves across the world. From an obscure
unity, nature pours and throws out in
innumerable and prodigiously divergent rays,
those winged flames which you call birds,
beaming with ardour and vitality, with colour
and song, From the burning hand of the
Deity there incessantly escapes this immense,
spreading swarm of overwhelming diversity,
wherein everything glitters, everything sings,
where everything inundates us with harmony
and light.

The most primitive form of bird is what
may be called the Fish-bird. The navigators
who first discovered polar islands, found
them inhabited by simple auks and
penguins, who stared at their visitors with
friendly curiosity. Unsuspicious of harm,
they allowed themselves to be taken by the
hand, and to be massacred without attempting
to escape. The attitudes of these new
creatures were a constant cause of pleasant
mistakes; their upright position, and the
contrasted colours of their plumage, made
them look like troops of children in white
pinafores. The stiffness of their little arms
(you can hardly talk of wings as belonging to
these rudimentary birds), their awkwardness
on land, the difficulty which they have in
walking, awards them as the property of
Ocean, in whose bosom they swim so
marvellously well, as to prove that it is their
natural and legitimate element. You might
easily fancy that they were his (Ocean's) first
emancipated sons; that they were ambitious
fish, candidates for promotion to the rank of
birds, who had already contrived to transform
their fins into scaly winglets. The
metamorphosis was not crowned with complete
success; clumsy and impotent as birds, they
are dexterous and agile as fish. Or again,
from their large feet attached so close to their
body, from their short neck fixed to a
cylindrical trunk, with a flattened head, you might
judge them to be related to their neighbours,
the seals, whose good-nature they share,
though not their intelligence. These first-born
sons of nature, witnesses of her old ages
of transformation, offered a strange hieroglyphical
aspect to their first beholders. With
their mild eye, but dim and pale as the face
of Ocean, they seemed to regard man, the
last-born of the planet, from out the depth of
their antiquity.

"Wings!—Give us wings!" is the cry
uttered by all creation, even by the inorganic
world. The most inert bodies rush rapidly
into chemical transformations, which cause
them to enter into the current of universal life,
and give them the wings of movement and
fermentation. Vegetables, fixed to the soil
by their root, confide their odours and their
seeds to the wind and strive after a flight
refused to them by nature. On earth, we
pity animals whom we style sloths, or
tardigrades; but if slowness is relative to the
desire of motion, to the ever-disappointed
effort to act and advance, the true tardigrade
is Man. His powers of dragging himself
from one point of the earth to another, the
ingenious instruments which he has recently
invented to aid these powers,—all these
efforts do not diminish his adherence to the
earth: he is not the less glued to it by the
tyranny of gravitation.

There exists on earth only one class of
creatures to whom is given the faculty of
escaping, by free and rapid motion, from this
universal sadness of impotent aspiration; it
is the class which holds on to the world
merely by the tip of the wing, so to speak;
which is cradled and borne on the air itself,
generally without having to take any further
trouble than to steer according to need or
caprice. Easy and sublime mode of life!
With what an eye must the humblest bird
regard and despise the strongest, the swiftest
of quadrupeds, a tiger or a lion! How he
must smile to see him in his powerlessness,
adhering fixedly to the ground, making it
tremble with vain and useless roarings and
nocturnal groans, which bear witness to the
servile condition of the false king of the
animals, who is bound, like all the rest of us,
in the Inferior existence which is imposed on
us equally by hunger and gravitation!

Let us try an experiment. Let us ask the
bird, still in his shell, what he would like to
be; let us give him the choice. "Will you
be a man, and share the dominion of the
globe, which our art and labour have
acquired for us?" He will answer "No," most
assuredly. Without reckoning the immense