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v THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIRDS' NESTS 113to make it into a kind of felt. The birds pressed it withtheir bodies, turning round upon them in every direction, soas to get it quite firm and smooth before raising the sides.These were added bit by bit, trimmed and beaten with thewings and feet, so as to felt the whole together, projectingfibres being now and then worked in with the bill.By thesesimple and apparently inefficient means, the inner surface ofthe nest was rendered almost as smooth and compact as apiece of cloth.Man'sWorks mainly ImitativeBut look at civilised man ! it is said ;look at Grecian, andEgyptian, and Koman, and Gothic, and modern architecture !What advance ! what improvement! what refinements ! Thisis what reason leads to, whereas birds remain for everstationary. If, however, such advances as these are requiredto prove the effects of reason as contrasted with instinct, thenall savage and many half-civilised tribes have no reason, butbuild instinctively quite as much as birds do.Man ranges over the whole earth, and exists under themost varied conditions, leading necessarily to equally variedhabits. He migrates he makes wars and conquests onerace mingles with another different customs are broughtinto contact the habits of a migrating or conquering race,are modified by the different circumstances of a new country.The civilised race which conquered Egypt must have developedits mode of building in a forest country where timberwas abundant, for it is not probable that the idea of cylindricalcolumns originated in a country destitute of trees. Thepyramids might have been built by an indigenous race, butnot the temples of Luxor and Karnak. In Grecian architecturealmost every characteristic feature can be traced to anorigin in wooden buildings. The columns, the architrave, thefrieze, the fillets, the cantilevers, the form of the roof, allpoint to an origin in some southern forest-clad country, andstrikingly corroborate the view derived from philology, thatGreece was colonised from north-western India. But to erectcolumns and span them with huge blocks of stone, or marble,is not an act of reason, but one of pure unreasoning imitation.The arch is the only true and reasonable mode ofcovering over wide spaces with stone, and, therefore, GrecianI