personally to endorse or refute the evidence suggesting that the cuckoo does lay on the ground and not in a nest.  And, if he is so far fortunate as to discover this most secretive of birds in the very act of laying, there still remain for him other fields to conquer in a multitude of such disputed questions as whether the cuckoo’s egg is always of the same colour as the other eggs in the nest in which she abandons it.  Assuredly the men of science have no reason as yet to weep over their lost ignorance.  If they seem to know everything, it is only because you and I know almost nothing.  There will always be a fortune of ignorance waiting for them under every fact they turn up.  They will never know what song the Sirens sang to Ulysses any more than Sir Thomas Browne did.

If I have called in the cuckoo to illustrate the ordinary man’s ignorance, it is not because I can speak with authority on that bird.  It is simply because, passing the spring in a parish that seemed to have been invaded by all the cuckoos of Africa, I realised how exceedingly little I, or anybody else I met, knew about them.  But your and my ignorance is not confined to cuckoos.  It dabbles in all created things, from the sun and moon down to the names of the flowers.  I once heard a clever lady asking whether the new moon always appears on the same day of the week.  She added that perhaps it is better not to know, because, if one does not know when or in what part of the sky to expect it, its appearance is always a pleasant surprise.  I fancy, however, the new moon always comes as a surprise even to those who are familiar with her time-tables.  And it is the same with the coming in of spring and the waves of the flowers.  We are not the less delighted to find an early primrose because we are sufficiently learned in the services of the year to look for it in March or April rather than in October.  We know, again, that the blossom precedes and not succeeds the fruit of the apple-tree, but this does not lessen our amazement at the beautiful holiday of a May orchard.

At the same time there is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring.  It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten.  Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had never read it before.  I have myself a capricious and leaking memory.  I can read Hamlet itself and The Pickwick Papers as though they were the work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much of them fades between one reading and another.  There are occasions on which a memory of this kind is an affliction, especially if one has a passion for accuracy.  But this is only when life has an object beyond entertainment.  In respect of mere luxury, it may be doubted whether there is not as much to be said for a bad memory as for a good one.  With a bad memory one can go on reading Plutarch and The Arabian Nights all one’s life.  Little shreds and tags, it is probable, will stick even in the worst memory, just as a succession of sheep cannot leap through a gap in a hedge without leaving a few wisps of wool on the thorns.  But the sheep themselves escape, and the great authors leap in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little enough behind.