Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/686

670 the fall, but as a rule it lasts only a few days—it is a farewell their summer homes.

August is a most discouraging month to the student of birds. Birds leave their accustomed haunts and retire to secluded places to renew their worn plumages. They are silent and inactive, and therefore difficult to find. Late in the month they reappear clad in traveling costumes and ready for their southern journey. One by one they leave us, and there are days late in August and early in September when the woods are almost deserted of birds. Later the fall migration becomes continuous, and each night brings a host of new arrivals.

The spring migration is scarcely concluded before the fall migration begins. July 1st, Tree Swallows, which rarely nest near New York city, appear in numbers from the north and gather in immense flocks in our marshes. Later in the month they are joined by Bobolinks. Early in August the careful observer will detect occasional small nights of Warblers passing southward, and by September 10th the great southern march of the birds is well under way; it reaches its height between the 20th and last of the month, when most of the winter residents arrive, and from this time our bird life rapidly decreases. Some of the seed-and berry-eaters remain until driven southward by the cold weather in December. When they have gone our bird population is again reduced to the ever-present permanent residents and hardy winter visitants.

a careful study of the great divine's works, the Rev. J. A. Zahm finds that St. Augustine clearly distinguishes between creation, properly so called, and the work of formation and development. The former was direct and simultaneous, while the latter, he contends, was gradual and progressive. "As there is invisibly in the seed," he affirms, "all that which in the course of time constitutes the tree, so also are we to view the world, when it was created by God, as containing all that which was subsequently manifested, not only the heavens with the sun and moon and stars, but also those things which he produced potentially and causally, from the waters and the earth, before they appeared as we now know them." The formless matter, which God created from nothing, was first called heaven and earth, and it is written that "in the beginning God created heaven and earth," not because it was forthwith heaven and earth, but because it was destined to become heaven and earth. When we consider the seed of a tree, we say that it contains the roots, the trunk, the branches, the fruits, and the leaves, not because they are already there, but because they shall be produced from it. "Verily," says Mr. Zahm, "in reading these words, we can fancy that we are perusing some modern scientific treatise on cosmogony instead of an exposition of Genesis written by a father of the Church fifteen hundred years ago."