No animal that Flies attack has a tail capable of whisking them from every part of its body. A Dog's teeth are beautifully adapted to many purposes, but he cannot remove a Tick from his skin. The Cat has particularly keen sight, adjustable to all degrees of light. But when the Ocelot was being photographed for the July number of BIRDS AND ALL NATURE the old Cat that purrs about the studio was not keen enough to see that it was a mounted animal. He came forward in a most belligerent attitude with glaring eyes and distended tail. When the artist gave the stuffed beast a slight motion the affrighted cat sped down the stairway and out of the building with the celerity hitherto entirely unsuspected in him.

There is no eye in Nature that sees perfectly and no ear that hears all that is going on. One animal is superior to others in certain ways, but none is perfect. All wings are not for flight. Some are better than others for sweeping through the air, but perfection is found in none.

In most animals are found organs which are not of use. They frequently resemble organs that are of the highest utility to some other form of life, but for the animal in question they are apparently waste material. When the Horse uses but one toe of each foot there seems to be little reason for his having the rudimentary forms of more. There are claws on the legs of many Dogs that have never been called into action. They are so far from the ground and so weak and immovable that the Dog himself does not know they are there.

In every man there are muscles beneath the scalp for moving the ear. We have no such need for ear motion as have many of the lower animals, but it is the despair of many a school boy to discover how few of the race are able to contract these muscles ever so slightly.

The Lammergeier, or Bearded Vulture, is instinctively instructed to carry marrow bones and Tortoises high into the air and drop them upon stones so as to obtain their contents. Yet he is not beyond making serious mistakes, for one of them is said to have taken the bald head of the great poet Aeschylus for a smooth stone, dropped a Tortoise upon it, and secured in lieu of a luscious meal the lamentable demise of one of the greatest of men.

A true view of Nature leads us to regard whatever we find in an organism not as a perfect instrument to a given end, but as a remnant of what may have been produced by desire on the part of ancestors more or less remote. Indeed, it has well been said that our whole body is but a museum of antiquity of no practical interest, but of great historical importance. What we find in ourselves and elsewhere among living things is not to be regarded as creations perfectly adapted to given ends, for there is no perfect adaptation. Plants and animals are continually striving for it, but conditions change more rapidly than they and the chase is unsuccessful. Perfect adaptation would be stagnation.

A manifest design of Nature is that things may live. But death is the rule and life the exception. Out of a million seeds but one can grow. All may make something of a struggle; a few fortunate individuals thrive. Not the fittest, but usually some among those most fit. The whole range of life from the Bathybius Haeckelii to the tailless Ape exhibits a grand struggle for perfect adaptation with a greater or less failure in store for every individual. The human race is carrying on the same enterprise with the same results. The instant we seem to be fitted for our environment there comes a change of affairs that leaves us confronted with a problem just as interesting and urgent as the old one we flattered ourselves we were able to solve.