ticated but alleged - instances could be out of which I shot my first blackbird was produced. Is there one in a million-Ia wheat-field; and I think I never saw a will not say one in ten thousand, one in a thousand, or one in a hundred - but is there one in a million, or one in ten millions, that has ever been heard of, or that possibly could be ferreted out? field in which the still standing wheat was more damaged by the sparrows than that field. It was a large one, twelve or fifteen acres, the upper part of it being not more than a hundred yards from the barnyard, stabling, and other offices. But the sparrows did not spread themselves indiscriminately over the whole area of the field; their attentions seemed to be limited to its upper part, and to the strip of it adjoining the aforesaid hedge. The Again, I wonder what we should think of an observing foreigner coming to England for the first time, and recording his observations, and prominent among them the note, founded on the fact that among the first natives he had seen on landing, two or three very swarthy individuals" stetches" lying alongside that hedge had come under his observations: "The English are singularly dark in complex ion; indeed, they might be described as tawny rather than fair!" Yet that is the way the sparrow's character is writ, wide generalizations based on two or three, or a few separate instances. When the charges against an accused person or party are found on examination to resolve themselves into random aspersions, or, at least, misrepresentations, it is usually held to be unnecessary to proceed very much further with the defence. Still there is the old saying, "Throw plenty of mud, and some of it is sure to stick;" and, as it seems to me, few birds have been so thoroughly well bespattered as the sparrow. Now I am not going to bring witnesses to his character, as I saw done the other day in a periodical, where the Reverends F. O. Morris, J. G. Wood, Mr. Harting, and others, were put into the witness-box, but simply to state what the general result of the observations made during a period of more than sixty-five years' close if not intimate acquaintance with him really is, as regards his character and conduct. I have seen a good deal of mischief done by him in wheat-fields when the grain was ripening. But even here I think it would be fairer to qualify the charges brought against him. According to my observation the area of his depredations is not as wide as the area of the wheat-lands said to be affected. He does not find the wheat-fields out, and fly to them on pilfering intent, in whatever part of the farm-hold they may be situated. The fields near home, within easy flight of the farmstead, are the feeding-grounds that he affects; and even then it is not the whole breadth of the wheat-field that is injured by his plundering propensities. I remember when I was first big enough to be trusted with a gun (the adequate dimensions seem to have been attained in the course of my twelfth year) the field separated from my father's garden by the hedge (a nice bushy one, affording plentiful shelter for them if disturbed), and for about half down the side of the field, were verily and indeed subjected to "visitation of sparrows." The rest of the field was not touched. I have noticed the same thing again and again within the last halfscore years; only here the inclosures are few of them of any great size, and even in these smaller fields the damage done is limited to the lands near the hedge. Yet to read the tirades against the sparrow and his mischievous propensities, one is left to infer that it is the great total of the wheat field that is harried and wasted by his unscrupulous maraudings. Again, he is charged with dire mischief on the flower-beds, and still worse in the kitchen-garden. My experience in a large garden is that half-a-dozen slugs do more mischief among the springing flower-seeds than all the birds I have about the place, inclusive of the fifteen to twenty pair of sparrows that nest in my ivy, the starlingboxes, and the fir-trees near the house. In the kitchen-garden it is true much damage is (or would be, if I permitted it) done by the small birds; but I candidly own I should not have thought of incriminating the sparrows as the principal agents. What I have found is, that the three or four pairs of greenfinches which annually nest in my shrubs do five times the mis chief in stooking up the germinating seeds they affect, than all my sparrows put together. I don't say these last are entirely innocent; but I do say that, if I had only the sparrows to contend with for the integrity of my drills of radish-seed, cabbage. seed, and that of other members of the brassica family, I should not have to trouble myself greatly. As it is, I find that my mustard and cress, radishes, and so forth, are most safely and efficiently protected by a few lengths of wire peaguards, as they are called, but which might just as well be termed seed-guards from their extensive utility when so em ployed. I don't deny that mischief is done | no small part of the entire year, doing no by the sparrows, and in the garden as well appreciable harm, utilizing what otherwise as in the field; but I do say that they are would be wasted, consuming what would, credited with a great deal that they are if left uninterfered with, have been more not responsible for, and that very much or less noxious to the land and its cultiof that mischief, by whatsoever birds ef- vators. fected, is easily preventible. My raspberries are under galvanized wire netting, and my strawberries, gooseberries, currants, red and black, are under herringnets spread over rough frames, or low posts and wires; about a quarter of an acre of the old nets named having been procured at an expense of less than twentyfive shillings. I have noted above that, during the last four months the sparrows here have been practically innocuous, and I may add that they are quite safe to continue so for some time to come, even in the ways that they are so unjustly blamed for. But in the mean while, as in the past, and prospectively, they are "maintaining themselves." But how? If they are not living on the farmers' corn or the gardeners' seed, how are they keeping body and soul together? The ornithologists say they live on grain, seeds, insects, soft vegetables, and so on. But if we eliminate the grain and garden-seeds, as we must for so great a portion of the year, what have they to fall back upon for their subsistence? Well, I go into a farmyard, and, as I let the gate clash behind me, I disturb a flock of five-and-twenty or thirty sparrows, which fly quickly up into some adjoining tree, or to the roofs of the farm premises close at hand, from the middenstead or dunghill, or manure-heap, or from the long litter in the fold-yard, or some such like place; and, if they are not further disturbed, in a minute or two you see them dropping down again by ones and twos to the place they had flown from. Disturb the surface of the middenstead or dunghill, always warm from the natural "heating" going on below, and even in the winter's day you see, if not "any amount," yet certainly no small amount of animal life in the shape of insects in some stage or other of their development. Or see the flock of sparrows again at or near the barn door, or wherever the dust and sweepings of the barn floor are thrown out; any one who knows the nature of that refuse that, for one grain of corn (probably imperfect at the best), it contains a hundred seeds of plants that are certainly no good to the farmer-knows also what the sparrows find there to reward their sharp-eyed and diligent search. That is the way the sparrow lives through But further, I have the sparrow close under my eye and actual observation any day or every day, but especially in times of continued frost and snow, and also when the cares and occupations of the nesting season are upon him. What I am told by the sentimental or perfunctory observer is one thing; what I see is another. I am told he is a bully and injurious to other small birds, that he is a feathered dog-inthe-manger and usurper, that he is bellicose and pugnacious. Of course he is pugnacious and fights; he would not be bird if it was otherwise. But it is with his own kind, and I really don't think that he is worse than other birds, or different from them in that respect. I have seen his neighbors in my ivy, the starlings, so resolute and so bitter in their hostilities one with the other, that they did not in the least mind my quoting good Dr. Watts to them from the window, but kept on with their scrimmage, grappled together in a struggling, dishevelled, feather-mass till I had had time to leave the room, tread the passage to the door, and go round most part of two sides of the house, stoop down and almost touch them with my outstretched hand before they would give over and try to escape from a man's clutch. The sparrows, on the other hand, are much more amenable; the gentle reminder that Your little claws were never made To scratch each other's eyes, addressed to them from the window, has generally a soothing effect. One day too, in this garden, I saw a triangular duel between three cock partridges for the love of one lady partridge, who sat calmly by on a flower-bed, taking no apparent interest in the issue of the fight. Perhaps she took a pride in being fought about; perhaps she was totally indifferent as to who got the mastery, thinking them all equally game birds. Any way she sat there, stolid and immobile, save that now and then she preened a feather or two. But the three combatants fought heroically on, although I had advanced within four or five yards of them, and but for the fact that Miss P. felt shy at my approach, they might have been fighting still for all I can tell. Often too, in the old days before driving was, and when old grouse had the dominancy of the moor, I have seen from three to five old cocks holding a private | were present to the number of four pairs, tournament as to which of them should win contrary to all precedent), robins, cuddies, some as yet undeclared moor-bird queen chaffinches, etc., formed against the spar. of beauty. They wheeled and they flew rows; although if I did, it would be just in wide circles, but never in a straight as reasonable and just as well supported course, never heeding me or my gun, as these contrary statements under notice. sometimes two only, then three or four, I used to see great flocks of greenfinches, then all in a rough-and-tumble together, numbering many scores, sometimes even so that if I had been sanguinarily inclined two or three hundreds, in our corn stubI could have bagged the whole lot with bles during the late autumn and early wina couple of well-considered shots. And ter, while of late years the numbers are certainly the sparrows are no exception strangely reduced. But I think there is to this bird-rule; though (probably from another way of accounting for such dimitheir more intimate acquaintance with hu- nution, besides attributing it to any cause manity) they never lose their presence of analogous to the alleged hostile action of mind in such cases to the same extent as the sparrow, - a cause too much more in the starling, partridge, and grouse do. harmony with the ascertained laws of nature. There are fewer slovenly farmers than there used to be. The greenfinches had, what a gardener of mine once termed, "a lavishing time of it " when whole farms had their cornfields yellow with charlock while the corn was growing, and strewed with its seed after harvest. And real observers know well enough that the ques tions of adequate supply of food and varying climatic influences have more to do with the presence or absence of birds in successive seasons than any such utterly inadequate causes as the alleged hostility or usurping aggression of some other, and especially only a single, species of birds. But as to the rest of it: in the hungriest times I never see the sparrow attack his marrows in size or nearly so; and, what is very much more to the purpose, I never see, nor ever have seen, any signs of apprehension, of even striking recognition on the part of other small birds, occasioned by the advent of one or a dozen sparrows. If a cat or a kitten, or even a dog, shows itself anywhere near, up fly the birds, some into the ivy, some to the neighboring thorn, the blackbirds and so on to more distant shelter. If I show myself abruptly at the window, much the same sort of stampede takes place. But the advent of a whole troop of sparrows makes not the slightest apparent difference to the company assembled, hedge-sparrows, chaffinches, robins, or what not. To be sure, if one of the new arrivals seems to affect a morsel to which a robin has already attached himself, or even appears likely to direct his attention that way, the robin, in nine cases out of ten, gives him a decided hint with his sharp bill to "keep out of that;" and I never yet saw even the pawkiest sparrow venture to stand up to the aggressive redbreast. As to what I have seen well called "the ridiculous notion of his driving other birds away," or "displacing other birds more valuable than himself," or having to do with the diminution in the numbers of whitethroats, chaffinches, and tits, and all the rest of that farrago of nonsense, I do not so much question the alleged facts on which it is made to depend, as deny them altogether. It is a fact that during the severe snowy weather we had a few weeks ago my usual number of pensioner sparrows had dwindled down to four or five couple in place of the pristine ten, twelve, or fifteen couple. But I do not allege it as a fact that these diminished numbers are due to a league of the starlings (who As to my friend the sparrow's "graceless, heavy motions," his "monotonous chirp," and (to put it gently) painful lack of beauty, one would think that ordinary dwellers in the country have neither ears nor eyes. And yet, I used to think that "monotonous was hardly the word to apply when a dozen or two of sparrows were having, as they so frequently do have, a good lively little squabble among themselves. Their gamut seemed to me to be one of very considerable range. And besides, although I should be sorry to claim for them the merits of distin guished vocalists, still there are to my ear few country sounds more pleasant than the soft chirp of a flock of sparrows when the day with all its occupations and excitements is ended, and they are just cosily talking it over before bidding good-night with mutual assurances of good feeling. As to his vesture, it may not be a Joseph's coat; nor am I quite sure that the matutinal walking-dress of a certain distinguished character when about to "visit his snug little farm," entirely commends itself to my taste. Certainly the sparrow is not arrayed like that particular "old gentleman," and, for one, I had rather that he was not. I have as delicately painted a portrait of the cock sparrow as any that, so far as I know, exists in any gallery, now before me; and as I look at the well-chosen shades of his costume, so harmoniously arranged and so good in themselves, chestnuts, and browns thrown up and relieved by pure whites and good blacks, and himself so well groomed and nattily arranged, I think I admire him considerably more than the great majority of those lords of the bird realm whose court-dress has given occasion to the somewhat sarcastic remark that "fine feathers make fine birds." Of course I may be, very likely am, only manifesting my bad taste, or showing that I have "no eye for beauty." Indeed, I am almost afraid that I may have no eye at all, because I have never yet perceived the "graceless, heavy motions" of these inferior and reprobate birds. In my blindness, or at least incapacity to see clearly, I had fancied that the movements of the "pert," the "impudent" sparrow were the reverse of heavy; were, rather, active, brisk, alert. The motions of a toad are possibly somewhat graceless and heavy; nor would I call those of a gawky Cochin China fowl, as it hurries out of the way of an advancing vehicle, either light or graceful. But then, the imperfection of my vision is such that I cannot compare the quick, brisk flight of the sparrow, his natural, easy equilibrium as he alights, his perfect self-possession as with bright eye he surveys the scene, to the movements of either the chicken or the toad. simple that we can hardly conceive the human mind without them, must grow and with difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerful generalization thrown into some salient phrase, such as the návra pei of Heraclitus, may startle a particular age by its novelty; but takes possession there only because its root, all along, was somewhere among the natural though but half-developed instincts of the human mind itself. Plato has seemed to many no less than the creator of philosophy; and it is an immense step he makes, from the crude or turbid beginnings of scientific inquiry with the Ionians or the Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical literature. His encyclopædic view of the whole domain of knowledge is more than a mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for compass and power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato's achievement may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning of the mind's history. Yet, in truth, the world Plato had entered into was already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and the processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he breathed sickly with offcast speculative atoms. In the "Timæus," dealing with the origin of the universe, he figures less as the author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic of older ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory. Some of the results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone, are of the structure of his philosophy; not like the stray, carved corner of some older edifice, here or there amid the new, but everywhere in it, like minute relics of earlier organic life in the very stone he builds with. The central and most intimate principles of his WITH the world of intellectual produc- teaching challenge us to go back beyond tion, as with that of organic generation, them, not merely to his own immediate, nature makes no sudden starts. Natura somewhat enigmatic, master-to Socra nihil facit per saltum; and in the history tes, who survives chiefly in his pages of philosophy there are no absolute begin- but to various precedent schools of specunings. Fix where we may the origin of lative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; this or that doctrine or idea, the doctrine beyond these into that age of poetry, of "reminiscence," for instance, or of "the in which the first efforts of philosophic Perpetual Flux," the theory of "induc-apprehension had hardly understood themtion," or the philosophic view of things generally, the specialist will still be able to find us some earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental tendency. The most elementary act of mental analysis takes time to do; the most rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so J. C. ATKINSON. From Macmillan's Magazine. I. selves; beyond that unconscious philosophy, again, to certain constitutional tendencies, persuasions, forecasts of the intellect itself, such as had given birth, it would seem, to thoughts akin to Plato's in the older civilizations of India and of Egypt as they still exercise their authority over our selves. The thoughts of Plato like the language he has to use (we find it so again, in turn, with those predecessors of his when we pass from him to them), are covered with the traces of previous labor and have had their earlier proprietors. If at times we become aware in reading him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic, or half-visionary world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savor of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new; or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before; or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness, which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art, form (in the full signification of that word), form is everything, and the mere matter is nothing. II. century, under the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of the ever-changing "Time-spirit" or Zeitgeist, given way to a third method of criticism, the historic method; which bids us replace the doctrine, the system, we may be busy with, or such an ancient monument of philosophic thought as the "Republic," as far as possible in the group of conditions, intellectual, social, material, amid which it was actually produced, if we would really understand it. That ages have their genius as well as the individual; that in every age there is a peculiar ensemble of conditions which determine a common character in every product of that age, in business and art, in fashion and speculation, in religion and manners, in men's very faces; that nothing man has projected from himself is really intelligible except at its own date, and from its proper point of view in the never-resting secular process; the solidarity of philosophy, of the intellectual life, with common or general history; that what it behoves the student of philosophic systems to cultivate is the "historic sense;" by force of these convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us. As the strangely twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English lawn, is seen to have been the creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending forces of the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth; so beliefs the most fantastic, the THERE are three different ways in which the criticism of philosophic, of all speculative opinion whatever, may be conducted. The doctrines of Plato's "Republic," for instance, may be regarded as so much truth or falsehood, to be accepted, Communism" of Plato, for instance, or rejected, as such by the student of to have their natural propriety when duly day. That is the dogmatic method of correlated with those facts, those condicriticism; judging every product of human tions round about them, of which they are thought, however alien or distant from in truth a part. In the intellectual, as in one's self, by its congruity with the as- the organic, world the given product, its sumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or normal or abnormal characteristics, are Hegel, according to the mental preference determined, as people say, by the "enviof the particular critic. There is, sec-ronment." The business of the young ondly, the more generous Eclectic, or scholar, therefore, in reading Plato, is not Syncretic, method, which aims at a selec- to take his side in a controversy, to adopt tion from contending schools of the vari- or refute Plato's opinions, to modify, or ous grains of truth dispersed among them. make apology for, what may seem erratic It is the method which has prevailed in or impossible in him; still less, to furnish periods of large reading but with littie himself with arguments on behalf of some inceptive force of their own, like that of theory or conviction of his own. His duty the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism in the is rather to watch intelligently, but with third century, or the Neo-Platonism of strict indifference, the mental process Florence in the fifteenth. Its natural de- there, as he might watch a game of skill; fect is in the tendency to misrepresent better still, as in reading "Hamlet" or the true character of the doctrine it pro- the "Divine Comedy," so in reading the fesses to explain, that it may harmonize "Republic," to entertain for its dramatic so much the better with other elements of interest the spectacle of a powerful, of a a pre-conceived system. Dogmatic and sovereign intellect translating itself, amid Eclectic criticism alike have in our own a complex group of conditions which can |