The Chicken and the Egg

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 512, 14 April 1949, Page 5

The Chicken and the Egg

T is a good rule in life never to be too sure; in journalism a fundamental rule. It is in fact a Listener rule not to be sure at all. We remember, even when we think we know, that we may be wrong, and we never forget, however much we may know we know on some subject, that there is a reader who knows more. But we are going to break all our rules in this issue. We are going to suggest, in fact to say, that the photograph on to-day’s cover is something that has never ~ before been published in the world, big place though the world is. We do not say that a takahe chick, until this one was captured and photographed, had not been seen before by man. Man is-a fairly old animal even in New Zealand. We do not say that this photograph, or one taken at the same time, is not now in othér hands, has not reached the office of some other journal, and has not been seen by others than our own readers. We do not think that has happened, but we have enough respect for the enterprise of journalists to know that it could have happened. We say however that even if it has happened the photograph others have seen is of the chick dangling from Dr. Falla’s hands on to-day’s cover-and that this is the first notornis chick ever seen by civilised eyes. Nor is it

only a famous chick. It is clever. It broke into history before the egg (though we shall not explain how until our next issue). It is so famous and so clever that it justifies all the space we have devoted lately to ornithology. And here, if we were wise, we might stop. But we have caught the fever too, and therefore announce, but in muted taps of our typewriter, that this chick did something to the men of science who found it that nothing had ever done before. It made some of them (we don’t know how many) wonder if they were not close to a greater discovery still — the greatest, if it comes off, in the modern history of birds.