ornamental lines? "Beauty is its own excuse for being"; and that Nature
respects beauty is, to my mind, nothing less than fatal to the Darwinian
hypothesis. That his law exists as a _modifying_ influence I freely
admit, and accredit him with an important addition to our thought upon
such matters; that it is the sole formative influence I shall be better
prepared to believe when I see that beauty is not regarded in Nature,
but is a mere casual attendant upon use. The artist Greenough did,
indeed, strenuously maintain this last. But the sloth and the
bird-of-paradise are equally useful to themselves; if beauty were but an
aspect of use, these should be equally comely in our eyes. No; "the
struggle for life" has not grooved the bill of the auk, and painted the
tail of the peacock, any more, so far as I can see, than it has given to
evening and morning their scarlet and gold. And so my auk said to me,
"Any attempt to string existence upon a single thread has failed and
will fail, unless it be that thread which man can never formulate, never
stretch out into a straight line,--the Eternal Unity, God."

These birds have a catlike instinct of fidelity to old haunts, and,
having once chosen a habitat, adhere to it, despite many a year of
persecution. They prefer inaccessible cliffs, on every projecting shelf
and jut of which the eggs are laid, but also inhabit islands where are
many clefts, fissures, and holes made by tumbled masses of rock. This at
which we had arrived was not much more than a hundred feet high; and the
cliffs in which it terminated on one side were scarcely to be named
inaccessible. The number of birds upon it seemed to our novice-eyes
immense, but at a later period would have seemed trivial. They are
always flying about the shores, and have also a laudable curiosity,
which leads them to investigate when any strange form appears or any
strange noise is made in the neighborhood of their homes.

On landing, the Judge made off to the left, and was soon heard from,--as
it afterwards appeared, with immediate success. The Canadian and myself
took our station upon a broad platform some forty feet above the sea,
with steep rocks behind, and were soon busily engaged in--missing! It
was nothing but _bang! pish! bang! pshaw!_ for half an hour. It could
not be said that the birds were indifferent to the prospect of being
immortalized as specimens. On the contrary, they showed an appreciation
of the honor, and an open ze