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Inquiries into Human Faculty
inexpensive to him owing to the cheapness of manufactures and their
variety; change of scene is easy from the conveniences of locomotion. But
a barbarian has none of these facilities: his interests are few; his dress,
such as it is, is intended to stand the wear and tear of years, and all
weathers; it is relatively very costly, and is an investment, one may say, of
his capital rather than of his income; the invention of his people is
sluggish, and their arts are few, consequently he is perforce taught to be
conservative, his ideas are fixed, and he becomes scandalised even at the
suggestion of change.
The difficulty of indulging in variety is incomparably greater among
the rest of the animal world. If a pea-hen should take it into her head that
bars would be prettier than eyes in the tail of her spouse, she could not
possibly get what she wanted. It would require hundreds of generations in
which the pea-hens generally concurred in the same view before sexual
selection could effect the desired alteration. The feminine delight of
indulging her caprice in matters of ornament is a luxury denied to the
females of the brute world, and the law that rules changes in taste, if
studied at all, can only be ascertained by observing the alternations of
fashion in civilised communities.
There are long sequences of changes in character, which, like the tunes
of a musical snuff-box, are regulated by internal mechanism. They are
such as those of Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages,” and others due to the
progress of various diseases. The lives of birds are characterised by long
chains of these periodic sequences. They are mostly mute in winter, after
that they begin to sing; some species are seized in the early part of the
year with so strong a passion for migrating that if confined in a cage they
will beat themselves to death against its bars; then follow courtship and
pairing, accompanied by an access of ferocity among the males and severe
fighting for the females. Next an impulse seizes them to build nests, then a
desire for incubation, then one for the feeding of their young. After this a
newly-arisen tendency to gregariousness groups them into large flocks,
and finally they fly away to the place whence they came, goaded by a
similar instinct to that which drove them forth a few months previously.
These remarkable
