1790: Henry Mallard, Gentleman Explorer
Ornithological Room of the Chancery Club, London
Your most recent epistle has reached our damp island after what the postmaster reports as “a series of navigational hesitations.” Such hesitations, I find, are contagious; I have been several days deciding whether to thank you or to reply at all. Since gratitude, like migration, is commendable mainly when performed in public, I choose the latter.
You write to inform me that your Moral Table of Earthly Species is near completion, and that, pending certain refinements in the Porcine and Marsupial columns, the work “may stand as a preliminary draft of Creation’s conscience.” A bold announcement, worthy of trumpet or at least French horn. Yet buried in the accompanying sheets was a passage which, to my mixed amusement and alarm, devoted four considerable pages to Anas platyrhynchos—the Mallard, whose portrait, you note with gratifying inaccuracy, “embodies a cheerful mediocrity between the swagger of the swan and the indignity of the goose.”
I cannot help noticing that your description places me at a distinctly middle point, neither noble nor ridiculous. The safe accuracy of it is offensive. To call the Mallard moderate, my dear Weatherby, is to praise tepid water for not scalding tea.
You proceed with your habitual generosity to assign us the virtue of “measured sociability, prone to vanity in calm weather,” and to remark on “a moral buoyancy ill‑suited to serious enterprise.” I see in this the familiar stroke of your pen, simultaneously affectionate and diagnostic—the mark, in short, of a colleague who cannot forgive another’s composure upon the pond.
Might I remind you that composure, when one lives among currents, is not negligence but craft. The river teaches poise as surely as philosophy teaches doubt; one learns to drift contrariwise without apology. Had you wings adapted to air rather than argument, you might appreciate the labour involved in appearing effortless.
I was, however, delighted to observe your revised classification of the mammalia. To rank the horse above the otter in moral worth, on account of “honesty of movement,” strikes me as an act of pure aesthetic prejudice. The otter at least plays at his work—a quality which distinguishes him from theologians and civil servants.
Your entire system carries the faint odour of the pulpit. When you speak of virtue in beasts, you infect them with humanity, as if Creation existed chiefly to flatter the parish. Even your commentary on the serpent—“a creature resigned to its low estate, preserving decorum by absence of limbs”—suggests that you admire good posture above salvation.
You quote, I see, from the Refined Menagerie of the Soul (1784) by that curious Reverend Digby Lale, who held the view that animals were “unripened persons awaiting moral fermentation.” A noble mistake. Lale’s theory expired, as all fermentation does, in its own vapour.
Forgive me if I return to the question of the Mallard. Are we—I use the plural with the self‑importance befitting the species—to infer from your pages that you intended flattery or rebuke? The ambiguity pricks at me. Perhaps you hoped to draw my attention by describing my kind as “faithful, yet easily distracted by bread.” If so, you have succeeded; I am both attentive and hungry.
Were we seated together at the club fire, I could demonstrate that bread, in sufficient quantity, produces states of contemplative virtue quite compatible with your own philosophical ideal. Indeed, in his otherwise unreadable On the Civic Uses of Appetite (Dr. Erasmus Finch, 1769), it was proposed that “no moral being can rise above his crumbs.”
I have lately performed certain investigations—aided by my valet, who finds this eccentricity less exhausting than my prior experiments with pneumatic chemistry—into the conduct of ducks versus men when observed unawares. The result is discouraging to your theory. Men, offered corn, debate ownership, method of division, and proper blessings; ducks, offered corn, eat it. If virtue is an economy of hesitation, the score leans decisively toward waterfowl.
You will be amused to learn that I have also constructed a small mirror apparatus, loosely adapted from Dr. Crabble’s “Machine for the Encouragement of Self‑Awareness among Apes.” When presented to various birds, the device produced responses ranging from horror (the rook) to vanity (the pheasant). The Mallard alone regarded its reflection with comfortable indifference—a moral serenity which, I submit, transcends philosophy.
Permit me a slight mythological aside. In the Norse fragments recently translated by young Beckett of Cambridge, there appears a tale of a duck that laid the first world upon the waters, then departed without comment. Creation, it seems, owes its existence to a diffident gesture. There is grandeur in reluctance, dear Weatherby, though one’s peers seldom credit it.
You mention you intend next to grade the creatures of your new continent—the kangaroo, the emu, the platypus—according to their conformity to Reason. I shall follow your progress with both admiration and schadenfreude. The platypus, I am told, was designed either by committee or prank. If morality attaches to comprehensibility, you are lost.
A final observation, less in anger than in melancholy amusement. You accuse the Mallard of “fickleness in pair‑bonding when observed across multiple seasons.” An ungentlemanly remark. Let it be known that constancy, like latitude, varies by necessity. In the great aviary of the world, fidelity is but a migration delayed.
You will think me defensive—and perhaps I am; one must guard one’s plumage in a society that mistakes brightness for vanity. Yet beneath your analytical flourish I suspect genuine fondness. It has been so with us both, has it not? Our quarrels are merely the conversational equivalent of courtship displays: noisy, circular, but harmless.
Pray continue your enterprise. When your Moral Table meets the printer, I shall order two copies bound in duck‑green calf, one for my library and one to float—symbolically and with due ceremony—down the Serpentine. If that act appears frivolous, recall that posterity often rewards the frivolous with the title experimental.
Should the southern sun continue to treat you kindly, and your conscience remain less spotted than your specimens, send me a few observations on your local waterfowl. I am eager to know whether the Australian pintail shares our refined indifference, or whether distance has bred degeneracy of manners.
I close, as ever, with affection moderated by reason (and vice versa). You remain, dear Weatherby, the only naturalist I would willingly share a pond with.
Yours, with plumage slightly ruffled but heart warm,
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