Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
I will leave the Chicadees and their companions to speak of another class of birds of different character and habits: these are the Jays, and their sable-plumed congeners of the Crow family. In all parts of the country that abound in woods of any description, we are sure to be greeted by the loud voice of the Blue Jay, one of the most conspicuous tenants of the forest.
However, the most striking effects of common life for the security of the individual, for its enjoyment of life, and for the development of its intellectual capacities, are seen in two great families of birds, the cranes and the parrots. The cranes are extremely sociable and live in most excellent relations, not only with their congeners, but also with most aquatic birds.
Creakle and his congeners were to be abolished. They were not to be put to a violent death, but they were to be starved out. The whole face of the country is studded with small grammar-schools or foundation-schools, like knots in a network; and these schools, enlarged and reformed, were to be the ordinary training-places of the Middle Class.
When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept waste to minister to pleasure; when the shibboleth of art is on every man's lips, but ideas of true beauty in very few men's souls; when the business-sharper is the greatest man in the city, and lords it even in the law courts; when class-magistrates, bidding for high office, deal out justice according to the rank of the criminal; when exchanges are turned into great gambling-houses, and senators and men of title are the chief gamblers; when, in short, 'corruption is universal, when there is increasing audacity, increasing greed, increasing fraud, increasing impurity, and these are fed by increasing indulgence and ostentation; when a considerable number of trials in the courts of law bring out the fact that the country in general is now regarded as a prey, upon which any number of vultures, scenting it from afar, may safely light and securely gorge themselves; when the foul tribe is amply replenished by its congeners at home, and foreign invaders find any number of men, bearing good names, ready to assist them in robberies far more cruel and sweeping than those of the footpad or burglar' when such is the tone of society, and such the idols before which it bends, a nation must be fast going down hill.
But these variations are rarely produced outside of a very restricted field political, military, religious. So it seems impossible to agree with Joly that neither primitive nor barbarian peoples produce superior minds, "unless," as he says, "by this name we mean those that simply surpass their congeners." But is there a criterion other than that? I see none.
For some time afterwards nothing more was seen of the animal, which Mr Banks, the naturalist, considered must be of some hitherto unknown species; so, indeed, it was, for it had no congeners in any quarter of the globe previously visited; though now the kangaroo is familiar enough to all readers of natural history, and it forms part of the arms of the colony of New South Wales.
Whether there was anything, in the independence of the position claimed by Pelagius for man, which specially appealed to the nature of the Britons and their Celtic congeners; anything in the claim of each individual to be good enough in himself, if he pleases to be good enough; which harmonised with the opinion those races had dare I say have? of themselves; these are questions to which I cannot venture to give an answer.
When once the slave-holding aristocracy in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as their congeners in the Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too be legitimized at the bar of the spirit of history; where it appears under other conditions of development, it is at once a caricature and a usurpation.
The birds were giving forth their last evening notes "bentivis," who hang their nests on the bank-side reeds; "niambus," a kind of partridge, whose song is composed of four notes, in perfect accord; "kamichis," with their plaintive melody; kingfishers, whose call responds like a signal to the last cry of their congeners; "canindes," with their sonorous trumpets; and red macaws, who fold their wings in the foliage of the "jaquetibas," when night comes on to dim their glowing colors.
The peculiar, dull vowel, for instance, known in Russian as "yeri" has Ural-Altaic analogues, but is entirely wanting in Germanic, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian, the nearest Indo-European congeners of Slavic. We may at least suspect that the Slavic vowel is not historically unconnected with its Ural-Altaic parallels.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking