le's
ideas the advantage of appearing under their own well-received name,
while any remonstrance from the real producer becomes an each person who
has paid complimentary tributes in the wrong place.

Hardly any kind of false reasoning is more ludicrous than this on the
probabilities of origination. It would be amusing to catechise the
guessers as to their exact reasons for thinking their guess "likely:"
why Hoopoe of John's has fixed on Toucan of Magdalen; why Shrike
attributes its peculiar style to Buzzard, who has not hitherto been
known as a writer; why the fair Columba thinks it must belong to the
reverend Merula; and why they are all alike disturbed in their previous
judgment of its value by finding that it really came from Skunk, whom
they had either not thought of at all, or thought of as belonging to a
species excluded by the nature of the case. Clearly they were all wrong
in their notion of the specific conditions, which lay unexpectedly in
the small Skunk, and in him alone--in spite of his education nobody
knows where, in spite of somebody's knowing his uncles and cousins, and
in spite of nobody's knowing that he was cleverer than they thought him.

Such guesses remind one of a fabulist's imaginary council of animals
assembled to consider what sort of creature had constructed a honeycomb
found and much tasted by Bruin and other epicures. The speakers all
started from the probability that the maker was a bird, because this was
the quarter from which a wondrous nest might be expected; for the
animals at that time, knowing little of their own history, would have
rejected as inconceivable the notion that a nest could be made by a
fish; and as to the insects, they were not willingly received in society
and their ways were little known. Several complimentary presumptions
were expressed that the honeycomb was due to one or the other admired
and popular bird, and there was much fluttering on the part of the
Nightingale and Swallow, neither of whom gave a positive denial, their
confusion perhaps extending to their sense of identity; but the Owl
hissed at this folly, arguing from his particular knowledge that the
animal which produced honey must be the Musk-rat, the wondrous nature of
whose secretions required no proof; and, in the powerful logical
procedure of the Owl, from musk to honey was but a step. Some
disturbance arose hereupon, for the Musk-rat began to make himself
obtrusive, believing in the Owl's opinion of