Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/275

a pigeon of exceedingly eccentric disposition, not unlike "the single gentleman" in Dickens's "Curiosity Shop" in his habits. He keeps seven pigeon-boxes all to himself, and persecutes relentlessly any pigeons which propose to share their dwellings with him. He is as averse to the society even of the gentler sex as was St. Anthony himself in the Egyptian deserts. Not a pigeon will he admit within the circle of his sway. And yet, in spite of this resolute and inveterate bachelorhood, this eccentric pigeon is always endeavoring to build nests, and looking out for objects of an egg-like form, which he thinks it possible to hatch. He will accumulate twigs and straws now here, now there, at very great pains and labor. He will coo sometimes to inanimate objects, sometimes to captive birds of another breed, sometimes to a kitten or a dog, or even a flower-pot, with the quaintest and politest antics. He will sit patiently on china-saucers on the mantelpiece of one room, while he accumulates the materials for a nest on the top of a closet in another room. He does not even drive away the possible mother of a family with more zeal than he shows in seeking to be a good father to some imaginary chick which he seems to expect to elicit from a ring-stand or a letter-weight. So far as the present writer can judge, he is a pigeon of strong Malthusian views, who hopes to inaugurate a new régime which may have the same relation to the ordinary habits of pigeons which the Positivist worship bears to the other religions of the world. He hopes to foster and cultivate the family and parental idea without any corresponding reality, without any aid from outside, indeed, except an apparatus of external ceremony, which feigns the existence of a purely ideal mate, and affects to indulge in the expectation of impossible offspring. Doubtless he thinks that there is nothing so good as the courtly attitude of a pigeon toward his mate, especially if there be no mate to justify it; nothing more touching than the patient preparation for offspring and the education of the young, especially if there be no young to complicate the problem of tenderness and foresight, by requiring a real supply of food and attention. This eccentric pigeon seems to be a solitary thinker of the Comtist kind, who hopes to solve the problem of preserving to the full all the higher instincts of bird-life, without the difficulties involved in supplying those instincts with real objects. If a human thinker can empty religion of its meaning, and yet justify all its forms and sentiments and external rites, and if he is to receive nothing but praise for his achievement, why may we not regard with interest and admiration the effort of an eccentric bird to retain all the ceremonial forms of chivalrous observance and elaborate parental care and patience, without, in fact, complicating the situation by admitting the neighborhood of either wife or child? To our mind, the idiosyncrasies of such a creature as this deserve the most attentive study. Who knows whether we might not find in the world of eccentric instinct all sorts of anticipations of eccentric intellect? Who knows