hawk-like in the wind, its long tail quivering, before it dares
descend on a hill-side of fir-trees where avenging presences may lurk.
It would be absurd to pretend that the naturalist does not also find
pleasure in observing the life of the birds, but his is a steady
pleasure, almost a sober and plodding occupation, compared to the
morning enthusiasm of the man who sees a cuckoo for the first time,
and, behold, the world is made new.

And, as to that, the happiness even of the naturalist depends in some
measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this
kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the
books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each
bright particular with his eyes. He wishes with his own eyes to see
the female cuckoo--rare spectacle!--as she lays her egg on the ground
and takes it in her bill to the nest in which it is destined to breed
infanticide. He would sit day after day with a field-glass against his
eyes in order personally to endorse or refute the evidence suggesting
that the cuckoo _does_ lay on the ground and not in a nest. And, if he
is so far fortunate as to discover this most secretive of birds in the
very act of laying, there still remain for him other fields to conquer
in a multitude of such disputed questions as whether the cuckoo's egg
is always of the same colour as the other eggs in the nest in which
she abandons it. Assuredly the men of science have no reason as yet to
weep over their lost ignorance. If they seem to know everything, it is
only because you and I know almost nothing. There will always be a
fortune of ignorance waiting for them under every fact they turn up.
They will never know what song the Sirens sang to Ulysses any more
than Sir Thomas Browne did.

If I have called in the cuckoo to illustrate the ordinary man's