Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/390

 wearers, or rather of their wearers' mates, and the list might be almost indefinitely prolonged. But it will he better worth while, perhaps, to glance briefly at another set of facts connected with feathers—I mean their artificial employment by human beings for the exactly identical purpose of aesthetic decoration. Could any fact show more clearly the similarity of artistic feeling which runs through the whole animal series than this thought, that man makes use, for his own adornment, of the very self-same beautiful colored baubles which the birds originally developed to charm the eyes of their fastidious brides?

I need not recall by name the various kinds of plumage so employed—the feathers of the ostrich, the marabou, the bird-of-paradise, the emu, the pheasant, and the gull; the sun-birds and the hummingbirds mercilessly slaughtered by the million in the Malay Archipelago, Ceylon, and Trinidad to supply the bonnets of London and Paris; the swan's-down, the grebe, the widow-birds, the cockatoos, the parrots, the macaws, which decorate our wives and children with barbaric spoils. It will suffice to remember, in passing, that from the feather mantles of HawaianHawaiian [sic] kings, the feather kirtles of American Indians, and the feather mosaics of Mexico, to the plumes of our own court-dress, our own military uniforms, and our own quaintly surviving funeral processions, these same "dermal modifications" of birds have served an aesthetic purpose, better or worse, throughout the whole course of human history.

Nor does the resemblance stop here. Mankind employs tufts of feathers for decorative display in just the same manner as the birds who originally developed them. The Red Indian in his war-paint dressed out his head with a row of quills, arranged in exactly the same order as the top-knot of a hoopoe or a cockatoo. The feather collars of so many savage tribes recall to the letter the frills and lappets of the humming-bird or the epimachus. The ostrich-plumes of our English royal receptions, and the panache of our European officers' dress, are adaptations from the primitive idea of the crane and the umbrella-bird. Everywhere, the tuft of feathers is placed on some prominent part of the person—some "constructive point" in the human or avian system of architecture.

A ring at the bell warns me that a visitor is standing at the door. I throw my little feather hastily into the fire, and cut short my reflections to welcome my expected guest. But one last thought occurs to me before I close my afternoon's meditation. To be "pleased with a feather" appeared to the great metaphysical poet of the eighteenth century a mark of childish simplicity. Perhaps it may be so; but, after all, is there not some solace in that new philosophy which can enable one to pass a whole hour, this murky afternoon, in pleasurable contemplation of that tiny plume which seems no contemptible subject of human study to Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer?—Cornhill.