But to find food and flee death are not the only interests in life even to the meanest creature.  There are social pleasures, family affections and fellowship, sympathy and co-operation in the struggles of life.  And there is love.

  Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque,
  Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres,
  In furias ignemque ruunt:  amor omnibus idem.

The chirping of the cricket, the song of the lark, the call of the sentinel crane, the watchword with which the migratory geese keep their squadrons together, the howling of jackals, the lowing of cows, the hum of the hive, the chatter of the drawing-room, and a hundred other voices in forest and field and town remind us that the voice and the ear are the pair of wheels on which society runs.

And this thought points the way out of another contradictious puzzle, that which confronts my argument from the ears of an ass.  It roams treeless deserts where no foe can approach unseen.  Thistles make no sound.  Why should it be adorned with ears which in their amplitude are scarcely surpassed by those of the rabbit and the hare.  There is no answer unless their function is to hear the bray of a fellow-ass....  One may object that that majestic sound is surely of force to impress itself without any aid from an external ear; but that is a vain argument built on the costermonger’s moke—­dreary exile from its fatherland.  Remember that its ancestors wandered on the steppes of Central Asia or the borders of the Sahara.  In those boundless solitudes, with nothing that eye can see or that common ear can hear to remind her that she is not the sole inhabitant of the universe, the wild ass “snuffeth up the wind in her desire,” and lifting her windsails to the hot blast, hears, borne across miles of white sand and shimmering mirage, the joyful reverberations of that music which tells of old comrades and boon companions scouring the plain and kicking up their exultant heels.

Monkeys taking to trees were like the birds, they scarcely needed ears.  And so by the high road of evolution you arrive at man and the enigma of his ear.  It is a shrunken and shrivelled remnant, a moss-grown ruin, a derelict ship.  It is to a pattern ear what the old shoe which you find in a country lane, shed from the foot of some “unemployed,” is to one of Waukenphast’s “five-miles-an-hour-easy” boots.  We ought to temper our contempt for what it is with respect for what it was.  All the parts of it are there and recognisable, even to the muscles that should move it, but we have lost control of them.  I believe anyone could regain that by persevering exercise of his will power for a time—­that is, if he has any.  I have a friend who, if you treat him with disrespect, shrivels you up with a sarcastic wag of his right ear.