of evolution is plainly shown by the instances of such combinations which, from an æsthetic point of view, are lamentable failures. In some cases the failure is transitional, for example, where the wrong kind of blue appears upon green, when a little change towards the violet end of the scale may improve matters. In other cases the whole problem is one of enormous complexity. Some of the markings, singly or collectively, may be of protective value, or necessary for some unknown purpose, or the production of better colours in that particular place may be incompatible with constitutional or other prevailing conditions. In some groups of birds the colours have run riot. Not only are there all the colours of the rainbow and many others besides, in one and the same plumage, but they are jumbled together, or put side by side in bewildering, often jarring disorder. As this statement may be challenged as too biassed it requires some detailed justification.

The two largest groups of birds in which colours have most frequently run riot are the Parrots and, among the Pigeons, the feather-legged genus Ptilopus and its kindred which have their headquarters in the Pacific Islands.

Of the Parrot tribe let us consider three of the largest Macaws of our Zoological Gardens. First the 'red and blue Macaw,' Ara chloroptera, the largest and heaviest of all. Its prevailing colour is a saturated, rather dark red; the wings and mantle are green, shading into blue on the rump and the upper tailcoverts; the tail itself is red like the head and all the underparts. The total effect is somewhat severe, but there is nothing jarring in it. In his close relative, A. macao, the red and yellow Macaw,' the green is to a great extent supplanted by bright yellow; many of these feathers are coloured half and half, especially the larger wingcoverts, while on some of the lesser at least the edges are still half green, and with age the yellow becomes more and more dominant. This bird actually shows red, yellow, green, and blue to deep indigo, and black on the big flight-feathers. There is not much doubt as to what changes will still take place provided this species lives long enough. The green is bound to disappear, yielding to the coming yellow, so that this Macaw will glory in the powerful combination of the three fundamental colours-red, yellow, and blue. We even can go

one step further. The yellow, as already indicated on some of the wingcoverts may be superseded by red, and then this bird will be dressed in nothing but the two royal colours red and blue, beyond which no bird can go. All this is an expression of orthogenesis, and, as such, clear enough. As to the want of 'good taste,' the green in A. macao is wrong, but explicable and amply 'excused' as a case of lingering inheritance. In A. militaris, the 'red and green Macaw' of Mexico, the coloration is patchwork, in a very unsettled condition, in spite of which he is as successful as the others. It is a transitional species, its adult and apparently permanent coloration happening to be what in another species would be an immature phase, only with this difference that the change of one species into another is not accomplished within a few years or moults, but requires an unknown number of generations.

We are not arguing in a circle when we have just now concluded that one species compared with another behaves like an individual, of which we know that it recapitulates during its own life those stages which its ancestral species presumably have passed through. Provided the chance of observing an individual during a number of successive moults, we find that yellow feathers, scattered, or cropping up, within a green dress tend to change into red, and are ultimately supplanted by red. Therefore given three species, say red, yellow, or green respectively, we conclude that the yellow one is intermediate, transitional, between the others, and if, as in the case of one Ara, half-yellow half-green feathers seem out of place in the harmony of colours, we are fairly justified in assuming that this may not be a final but a passing stage, a discord, but a discord having its place in the nature of things.

In most of the multicoloured Ptilopus pigeons the dominant colour is a somewhat mottled green, and many are entirely of this colour when young. The only ornament of the female of Ptilopus formosus is a lilac head; in the adult male is added a reddish collar on the hind neck, the chest is black and violet, the belly white and the under tailcoverts white and green. It is not at all a pretty combination, the colours of these birds, especially the lilac, being suggestive of crude aniline dyes, while there is no pure blue. The numerous species present

a kaleidoscopic jumble, quite bewildering. The head lilac, or pink, or grey with a black crown, combined with under tailcoverts white and green, yellow, brown, or pink, rest of under parts green, yellow, white, and the upper parts varying between green, grey and yellow. And yet, by paying attention to one part at a time, it is possible so to arrange the species as to show the drift of these changes; for instance, changes from green through yellow towards red; pink or red instead of lilac; an unmistakable tendency of the under parts to become white, beginning perhaps with a grey wash or with whitish tips to the green feathers, until such a strikingly handsome species as P. jambu is produced; pure white below, with a pink blush on the lower neck and chest; the whole head deep pink-red, all the rest of the upper parts pure green and the under tailcoverts rich cinnamon-brown. Just as with the Parrots, there are among these pigeons some with an ancestral humble dress, others with an abundance of colours with jarring, even vulgar, effects, and lastly some beauties in perfect taste, crowning efforts which have been effected by the suppression of superfluous colours.

It is safe to say that multi- and richly-coloured birds have gained their truly harmonious dress only through many vicissitudes. It looks as if Nature had first to exhaust all the possibilities before approaching something like perfection. The genus Ptilopus has an enormous range, comprising Australia and hundreds of large and small islands, where the kaleidoscopic game has been and is being played incessantly, with the result that there are now some seventy species to whose welfare it does not matter in the least whether the under tailcoverts are pink or yellow, and it is against countless odds that in two distant lands the same combinations are hit upon. Such a large genus is but the expression of the making of species in very active operation and freed from the control of selection.

FENCE TV

Art. 7.-SOCIALISM.

II. ITS PRESENT POSITION AND FUTURE PROSPECTS.

1. Modern Socialism. By R. C. K. Ensor. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910.

London and

2. Socialism and the Social Movement. By Werner Sombart. Translated by M. Epstein, Ph.D. London: Dent, 1909.

3. A Critical Examination of Socialism. By W. H. Mallock. London: Murray, 1908.

4. Collectivism. By P. Leroy Beaulieu.

Sir Arthur Clay. London: Murray, 1908.

Translated by

5. Das Philosophisch-ökonomische System des Marxismus. Von Dr Emil Hammacher. Leipzig: Duncker und

Humblot, 1909.

6. Socialism and Religion. By the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, the Rev. Percy Dearmer, the Rev. John Clifford and John Woolman. London: A. C. Fifield, 1908. 7. Report of Tenth Annual Conference of the Labour Party, February 9, 1910. London: The Labour Party.

8. The Socialist Annual for 1910. London: Twentieth Century Press.

IN the previous article Socialism was regarded as a particular and extreme manifestation of a great fermentative process which is changing our views of life and causing us to attribute to physical and material conditions a new importance unrecognised in the earlier stages of our civilisation. This change is general; it is both older and wider than Socialism, and it has manifested itself in many directions quite independent of that movement and altogether apart from the economic structure of society, which is the particular concern of Socialism, if the term is to have any definite meaning at all. Further, the rise of Socialism was traced from its earliest antecedents through the first period of organisation and failure in the second quarter of the nineteenth century down to its revival under the influence of Marx. If any exact date is to be assigned to the beginning of the new movement it must be the year 1864, when the International Workmen's

* Quarterly Review,' April 1910.

Association was founded in London by Marx; but very little came of it for years, and the Association itself expired of inanition in 1876 after a struggling existence marked chiefly by the inevitable conflict between the Collectivist and the Anarchist types of Socialism represented by Marx and Bakunin respectively. It was after this that the movement began to make effective progress, slowly at first but with increasing momentum down to a recent period.

The features which broadly characterise the advance of Socialism during the last thirty years, as an organised movement having for its object the economic reconstruction of society, are its wide international range, the effective participation of the working classes, and, with certain exceptions, a growing reliance on political action accompanied by the growth of political strength. In all these points the influence of Marx's leadership and inspiration can be traced in some measure, but the international character of the movement was especially his work. The earlier forms of Socialism were confined to England and France, except for some transplanted experiments in America, and they were quite independent even in those two countries. The international note was first loudly struck by the Communist Manifesto drawn up in 1847 by Marx and Engels and issued in several languages. It was itself international in origin, having been issued in Brussels but arranged in London by German Socialists who were refugees from Paris, and it called on the 'proletarians' of all lands to unite. The conception of a common interest independent of nationality follows from the theory of the class war, which formed the historical basis of Marx's doctrine, as explained in the previous article. In itself it was not new; the class antagonism between capitalists and wage-earners had been recognised as an economic development years before in England and that between workers and the idle rich in France. But neither its historical significance, the idea of which Marx derived from Hegel, nor its international application had been perceived; these must be credited to the new teaching, and both were fruitful. The manifesto pointed out that the interests of the proletariate were class interests common to all countries, and that the members of this class, scattered as they were in different lands and divided Vol. 213.-No. 424.

M