EARLY BIBLE SONGS.
78
with maternal solicitude for the fledgelings flight.
By
may be safely roused
by her
led
time when her
fluttering movements she supreme attempt. When conclude that their powers are
fitting signals
summons them
critical
to exert their energies in
and
at last to the
instincts to
matured, she tenderly but vigorously obliges them to leave the parent nest and if they seem inclined to linger softly in its warm bed, she breaks it about them, and urges them to make for some adjacent rocky sufficiently
;
Then she
shelf.
how
to extend
teaches
and
them by her own fluttering She watches and attempts at flight coming to
flap their wings.
directs their first juvenile
when they are abroad her own pinions
their relief
these early exercises.
;
tired or in danger, spreading
to support or guide
And when
the open reaches of heaven, she
them
in
at last they soar into
is
said to
sweep under
them with marvellous dexterity, and sustain them in their unwonted gyrations ^. Such is the fine comparison to illustrate the divine care and tuition of Israel and the measures God took for lifting them into a higher state.
A
^ well-known naturalist, Mr. Philip Henry Gosse, in his work on the birds of Jamaica, tells of a friend of his witnessing such a scene as Moses may have seen among the granite peaks of Horeb. * He distinctly saw the mother bird, after the first young one had flown a little way and was beginning to flutter downward, fly beneath it and present the back and wings for its support. He could not indeed say that the young one actually perhaps its confidence returned on rested on or even touched the parent seeing support so near, so that it managed to reach a high tree, when the other little one, invited by its parent, tried its infant wings in like manner.' And Sir Humphrey Davy, in his Salnionia, p. 99, thus describes what he witnessed at the Crags of Ben Wyvis, of the efforts of two eagles to teach ' their offspring the manoeuvres of flight. They began by rising from the peak of the mountain in the very eye of the sun. They at first made small they paused on their wings, circles, and the young birds imitated them ;
;
waiting
till
they had
made
their first flight,
and then took a second and
larger whirl, always rising towards the sun and enlarging the circle of The young ones slowly flight, so as to make a gradually extending spiral. followed, apparently flying better as they mounted ; and they continued this sublime kind of exercise till they were lost to our aching sight.'