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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Falling in Love, by Grant Allen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Falling in Love
+       With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
+
+Author: Grant Allen
+
+Release Date: October 7, 2005 [EBook #16807]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FALLING IN LOVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, Annika Feilbach and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FALLING IN LOVE
+
+_WITH OTHER ESSAYS ON MORE EXACT BRANCHES OF SCIENCE_
+
+
+BY
+
+GRANT ALLEN
+
+
+LONDON
+SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
+1889
+
+[_All rights reserved_]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Some people complain that science is dry. That is, of course, a matter
+of taste. For my own part, I like my science and my champagne as dry as
+I can get them. But the public thinks otherwise. So I have ventured to
+sweeten accompanying samples as far as possible to suit the demand, and
+trust they will meet with the approbation of consumers.
+
+Of the specimens here selected for exhibition, my title piece originally
+appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_: 'Honey Dew' and 'The First Potter'
+were contributions to _Longman's Magazine_: and all the rest found
+friendly shelter between the familiar yellow covers of the good old
+_Cornhill_. My thanks are due to the proprietors and editors of those
+various periodicals for kind permission to reproduce them here.
+
+G.A.
+
+THE NOOK, DORKING:
+
+_September_, 1889.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                         PAGE
+
+FALLING IN LOVE             1
+RIGHT AND LEFT             18
+EVOLUTION                  31
+STRICTLY INCOG.            50
+SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS        72
+A FOSSIL CONTINENT         88
+A VERY OLD MASTER         106
+BRITISH AND FOREIGN       123
+THUNDERBOLTS              137
+HONEY-DEW                 159
+THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT  176
+FOOD AND FEEDING          193
+DE BANANA                 216
+GO TO THE ANT             233
+BIG ANIMALS               251
+FOSSIL FOOD               271
+OGBURY BARROWS            287
+FISH OUT OF WATER         302
+THE FIRST POTTER          316
+THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS     328
+DESERT SANDS              341
+
+
+
+
+FALLING IN LOVE
+
+
+An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir
+George Campbell has set his face against the time-honoured practice of
+Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces
+against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only
+attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the
+institution itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator,
+however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern. He would
+always like to regulate human life generally as a department of the
+India Office; and so Sir George Campbell would fain have husbands and
+wives selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson's principle, by
+the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future development of the race,
+in the process which he not very felicitously or elegantly describes as
+'man-breeding.' 'Probably,' he says, as reported in _Nature_, 'we have
+enough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in the
+pairing of individuals of the same or allied races if we could only
+apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, instead of giving way to
+foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whom we can
+hardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in a
+graver matter in which they are most likely to be influenced by
+frivolous prejudices.' He wants us, in other words, to discard the
+deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and to
+substitute for them some calm and dispassionate but artificial
+selection of a fitting partner as the father or mother of future
+generations.
+
+Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treated
+seriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir George Campbell's
+conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion now being
+forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and
+psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far
+from considering love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests
+of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists,
+especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it
+rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct developed
+and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring
+just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell
+thinks he could himself effect by a conscious and deliberate process of
+selection. More than that, I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure
+most evolutionists would cordially agree with me), that this beneficent
+inherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it has in view
+far more admirably, subtly, and satisfactorily, on the average of
+instances, than any clumsy human selective substitute could possibly
+effect it.
+
+In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and confiding belief
+that marriages are made in heaven: with the further corollary that
+heaven manages them, one time with another, a great deal better than Sir
+George Campbell.
+
+Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the standard of human
+efficiency; and then let us consider what would be the probable result
+of any definite conscious attempt to substitute for it some more
+deliberate external agency.
+
+Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing
+more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the
+human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin
+has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the
+animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aërial
+dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the
+delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of
+his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the
+eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty
+and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom
+he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the
+admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to
+be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it
+were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the
+fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability,
+producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in
+the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the
+case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the
+'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.
+
+In our own species, the selective process is marked by all the features
+common to selection throughout the whole animal kingdom; but it is also,
+as might be expected, far more specialised, far more individualised, far
+more cognisant of personal traits and minor peculiarities. It is
+furthermore exerted to a far greater extent upon mental and moral as
+well as physical peculiarities in the individual.
+
+We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of us fall in love
+with one person, some with another. This instinctive and deep-seated
+differential feeling we may regard as the outcome of complementary
+features, mental, moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; and
+experience shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a reciprocal
+affection, that is to say, in other words, an affection roused in unison
+by varying qualities in the respective individuals.
+
+Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency very little doubt
+can be reasonably entertained. We _do_ fall in love, taking us in the
+lump, with the young, the beautiful, the strong, and the healthy; we do
+_not_ fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the aged, the ugly, the
+feeble, and the sickly. The prohibition of the Church is scarcely needed
+to prevent a man from marrying his grandmother. Moralists have always
+borne a special grudge to pretty faces; but, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
+admirably put it (long before the appearance of Darwin's selective
+theory), 'the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but a
+skin-deep saying.' In reality, beauty is one of the very best guides we
+can possibly have to the desirability, so far as race-preservation is
+concerned, of any man or any woman as a partner in marriage. A fine
+form, a good figure, a beautiful bust, a round arm and neck, a fresh
+complexion, a lovely face, are all outward and visible signs of the
+physical qualities that on the whole conspire to make up a healthy and
+vigorous wife and mother; they imply soundness, fertility, a good
+circulation, a good digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness are
+roughly indicative of dyspepsia and anæmia; a flat chest is a symptom of
+deficient maternity; and what we call a bad figure is really, in one way
+or another, an unhealthy departure from the central norma and standard
+of the race. Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means an
+active liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean feeble virility. Nor
+are indications of mental and moral efficiency by any means wanting as
+recognised elements in personal beauty. A good-humoured face is in
+itself almost pretty. A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive
+features. Low, receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid,
+half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however regular their
+lines and contours. Intelligence and goodness are almost as necessary as
+health and vigour in order to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful
+human face and figure. The Apollo Belvedere is no fool; the murderers in
+the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's are for the most part no
+beauties.
+
+What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most cases
+efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love with individually is,
+I believe, our moral, mental, and physical complement. Not our like, not
+our counterpart; quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlike
+and our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a
+commonplace of ordinary conversation; that it is scientifically true,
+one time with another, when we take an extended range of cases, may, I
+think, be almost demonstrated by sure and certain warranty of human
+nature.
+
+Brothers and sisters have more in common, mentally and physically, than
+any other members of the same race can possibly have with one another.
+But nobody falls in love with his sister. A profound instinct has taught
+even the lower races of men (for the most part) to avoid such union of
+the all-but-identical. In the higher races the idea never so much as
+occurs to us. Even cousins seldom fall in love--seldom, that is to say,
+in comparison with the frequent opportunities of intercourse they enjoy,
+relatively to the remainder of general society. When they do, and when
+they carry out their perilous choice effectively by marriage, natural
+selection soon avenges Nature upon the offspring by cutting off the
+idiots, the consumptives, the weaklings, and the cripples, who often
+result from such consanguineous marriages. In narrow communities, where
+breeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural selection has
+similarly to exert itself upon a crowd of _crétins_ and other hapless
+incapables. But in wide and open champaign countries, where individual
+choice has free room for exercise, men and women as a rule (if not
+constrained by parents and moralists) marry for love, and marry on the
+whole their natural complements. They prefer outsiders, fresh blood,
+somebody who comes from beyond the community, to the people of their own
+immediate surroundings. In many men the dislike to marrying among the
+folk with whom they have been brought up amounts almost to a positive
+instinct; they feel it as impossible to fall in love with a
+fellow-townswoman as to fall in love with their own first cousins. Among
+exogamous tribes such an instinct (aided, of course, by other extraneous
+causes) has hardened into custom; and there is reason to believe (from
+the universal traces among the higher civilisations of marriage by
+capture) that all the leading races of the world are ultimately derived
+from exogamous ancestors, possessing this healthy and excellent
+sentiment.
+
+In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted that short men,
+as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men admire little women. Dark
+pairs by preference with fair; the commonplace often runs after the
+original. People have long noticed that this attraction towards one's
+opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race; they have not,
+perhaps, so generally observed that it also indicates roughly the
+existence in either individual of a desire for its own natural
+complement. It is difficult here to give definite examples, but
+everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there
+are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which
+strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with
+ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out
+and discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively than
+that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how
+trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do
+so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest
+promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest
+and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.
+
+How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in part by the
+apparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility of its occasional
+action. We know that some men and women fall in love easily, while
+others are only moved to love by some very special and singular
+combination of peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred by
+every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by
+intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we
+meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for
+some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love
+with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't,
+of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and
+women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has
+somewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner or
+later meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man or
+woman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of a
+lifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily find
+dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in love
+again if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like the
+Exchequer tallies, exactly intended to fit into one another's minor
+idiosyncrasies. Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with
+one another in the particular places and the particular societies they
+happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the
+world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at
+Denver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast number
+are purely indifferent to him; only one or two, here and there, strike
+him in the light of possible wives, and only one in the last resort
+(outside Salt Lake City) approves herself to his inmost nature as the
+actual wife of his final selection.
+
+Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellow-countrymen or
+fellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch of selective preference in the
+human species, is just one mark of our extraordinary specialisation, one
+stamp and token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick and
+choose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection plays a large
+part (for the very butterflies are coy, and must be wooed and won). It
+is only in the human race itself that selection descends into such
+minute, such subtle, such indefinable discriminations. Why should a
+universal and common impulse have in our case these special limits? Why
+should we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely affected? Surely
+for some good and sufficient purpose. No deep-seated want of our complex
+life would be so narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning.
+Sometimes we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see that
+beauty plays a great _rôle_; there, we recognise the importance of
+strength, of manner, of grace, of moral qualities. Vivacity, as Mr.
+Galton justly remarks, is one of the most powerful among human
+attractions, and often accounts for what might otherwise seem
+unaccountable preferences. But after all is said and done, there remains
+a vast mass of instinctive and inexplicable elements: a power deeper and
+more marvellous in its inscrutable ramifications than human
+consciousness. 'What on earth,' we say, 'could So-and-so see in
+So-and-so to fall in love with?' This very inexplicability I take to be
+the sign and seal of a profound importance. An instinct so conditioned,
+so curious, so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy with
+all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice within us, speaking
+for the good of the human race in all future generations.
+
+On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment (impossible supposition!)
+that mankind could conceivably divest itself of 'these foolish ideas
+about love and the tastes of young people,' and could hand over the
+choice of partners for life to a committee of anthropologists, presided
+over by Sir George Campbell. Would the committee manage things, I
+wonder, very much better than the Creator has managed them? Where would
+they obtain that intimate knowledge of individual structures and
+functions and differences which would enable them to join together in
+holy matrimony fitting and complementary idiosyncrasies? Is a living
+man, with all his organs, and powers, and faculties, and dispositions,
+so simple and easy a problem to read that anybody else can readily
+undertake to pick out off-hand a help meet for him? I trow not! A man is
+not a horse or a terrier. You cannot discern his 'points' by simple
+inspection. You cannot see _à priori_ why a Hanoverian bandsman and his
+heavy, ignorant, uncultured wife, should conspire to produce a Sir
+William Herschel. If you tried to improve the breed artificially, either
+by choice from outside, or by the creation of an independent moral
+sentiment, irrespective of that instinctive preference which we call
+Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving man, you would
+only do one of two things--either spoil his constitution, or produce a
+tame stereotyped pattern of amiable imbecility. You would crush out all
+initiative, all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would
+get an animated moral code instead of living men and women.
+
+Look at the analogy of domestic animals. That is the analogy to which
+breeding reformers always point with special pride: but what does it
+really teach us? That you can't improve the efficiency of animals in any
+one point to any high degree, without upsetting the general balance of
+their constitution. The race-horse can run a mile on a particular day at
+a particular place, bar accidents, with wonderful speed: but that is
+about all he is good for. His health as a whole is so surprisingly
+feeble that he has to be treated with as much care as a delicate exotic.
+'In regard to animals and plants,' says Sir George Campbell, 'we have
+very largely mastered the principles of heredity and culture, and the
+modes by which good qualities may be maximised, bad qualities
+minimised.' True, so far as concerns a few points prized by ourselves
+for our own purposes. But in doing this, we have so lowered the general
+constitutional vigour of the plants or animals that our vines fall an
+easy prey to oidium and phylloxera, our potatoes to the potato disease
+and the Colorado beetle; our sheep are stupid, our rabbits idiotic, our
+domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limb
+unknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to
+deal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hope
+would there be of our improving the breed by deliberate selection? If we
+developed the intellect, we would probably stunt the physique or the
+moral nature; if we aimed at a general culture of all faculties alike,
+we would probably end by a Chinese uniformity of mediocre dead level.
+
+The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very delicate organic
+equilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, from
+the correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spread
+effects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the
+Tasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different from
+those with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interfere
+with a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, in
+favour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it as
+helplessly as the modern system of higher education for women is
+wrecking the maternal powers of the best class in our English community!
+
+Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free choice, aided by
+natural selection, is actually improving every good point, and is for
+ever weeding out all the occasional failures and shortcomings of nature.
+For weakly children, feeble children, stupid children, heavy children,
+are undoubtedly born under this very régime of falling in love, whose
+average results I believe to be so highly beneficial. How is this? Well,
+one has to take into consideration two points in seeking for the
+solution of that obvious problem.
+
+In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All of them
+necessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, they
+are sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have to
+start in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable
+circumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world to
+supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the best
+woman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently far
+from perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good deal
+worse if somebody else made the choice for him, or if he made the choice
+himself on abstract biological and 'eugenic' principles. And, indeed,
+the very existence of better and worse in the world is a condition
+precedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, with
+individual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could be
+no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief
+besetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a very
+great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fully
+carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and the
+world would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily reckless
+and dissolute and imprudent. Even so, if eugenic principles were
+universally adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natures
+would be largely reduced, and natural selection would be in so much
+interfered with or sensibly retarded.
+
+In the second place, again, it must not be forgotten that falling in
+love has never yet, among civilised men at least, had a fair field and
+no favour. Many marriages are arranged on very different
+grounds--grounds of convenience, grounds of cupidity, grounds of
+religion, grounds of snobbishness. In many cases it is clearly
+demonstrable that such marriages are productive in the highest degree of
+evil consequences. Take the case of heiresses. An heiress is almost by
+necessity the one last feeble and flickering relic of a moribund
+stock--often of a stock reduced by the sordid pursuit of ill-gotten
+wealth almost to the very verge of actual insanity. But let her be ever
+so ugly, ever so unhealthy, ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody or
+other will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Considerations
+of this sort have helped to stock the world with many feeble and
+unhealthy persons. Among the middle and upper classes it may be safely
+said only a very small percentage of marriages is ever due to love
+alone; in other words, to instinctive feeling. The remainder have been
+influenced by various side advantages, and nature has taken her
+vengeance accordingly on the unhappy offspring. Parents and moralists
+are ever ready to drown her voice, and to counsel marriage within one's
+own class, among nice people, with a really religious girl, and so forth
+_ad infinitum_. By many well-meaning young people these deadly
+interferences with natural impulse are accepted as part of a higher and
+nobler law of conduct. The wretched belief that one should subordinate
+the promptings of one's own soul to the dictates of a miscalculating and
+misdirecting prudence has been instilled into the minds of girls
+especially, until at last many of them have almost come to look upon
+their natural instincts as wrong, and the immoral, race-destructive
+counsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest earthly
+wisdom. Among certain small religious sects, again, such as the Quakers,
+the duty of 'marrying in' has been strenuously inculcated, and only the
+stronger-minded and more individualistic members have had courage and
+initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the internal
+divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed law of their
+particular community. Even among wider bodies it is commonly held that
+Catholics must not marry Protestants; and the admirable results obtained
+by the mixture of Jewish with European blood have almost all been
+reached by male Jews having the temerity to marry 'Christian' women in
+the face of opposition and persecution from their co-nationalists. It is
+very rarely indeed that a Jewess will accept a European for a husband.
+In so many ways, and on so many grounds, does convention interfere with
+the plain and evident dictates of nature.
+
+Against all such evil parental promptings, however, a great safeguard is
+afforded to society by the wholesome and essentially philosophical
+teaching of romance and poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are for
+the most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature; and it may
+profoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demand
+should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in
+England, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the
+production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of
+art. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good to
+set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romantic
+literature--that it always appeals to the true internal promptings of
+inherited instinct, and opposes the foolish and selfish suggestions of
+interested outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished human
+nature against the expelling pitchfork of calculating expediency in the
+matrimonial market. While parents and moralists are for ever saying,
+'Don't marry for beauty; don't marry for inclination; don't marry for
+love: marry for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement,
+marry for our convenience, not for your own,' the romance-writer is for
+ever urging, on the other hand, 'Marry for love, and for love only.' His
+great theme in all ages has been the opposition between parental or
+other external wishes and the true promptings of the young and
+unsophisticated human heart. He has been the chief ally of sentiment and
+of nature. He has filled the heads of all our girls with what Sir George
+Campbell describes off-hand as 'foolish ideas about love.' He has
+preserved us from the hateful conventions of civilisation. He has
+exalted the claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious native
+yearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable element
+of mutual selection; and, in so doing, he has unconsciously proved
+himself the best friend of human improvement and the deadliest enemy of
+all those hideous 'social lies which warp us from the living truth.' His
+mission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and Sir George
+Campbell.
+
+For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who are
+always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists and the rebels who are
+always in the right in this matter. If the common moral maxims of
+society could have had their way--if we had all chosen our wives and our
+husbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not for their eyes or
+their moustaches, not for their attractiveness or their vivacity, but
+for their 'sterling qualities of mind and character,' we should now
+doubtless be a miserable race of prigs and bookworms, of martinets and
+puritans, of nervous invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young
+men and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms of
+shallow sophistry--because they often prefer _Romeo and Juliet_ to the
+'Whole Duty of Man,' and a beautiful face to a round balance at
+Coutts's--that we still preserve some vitality and some individual
+features, in spite of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men
+who marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out, leaving
+none to represent them: the men who marry women they have been weak
+enough and silly enough to fall in love with, recruit the race with fine
+and vigorous and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the
+complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted and mutually
+reinforcing individualities.
+
+I have spoken throughout, for argument's sake, as though the only
+interest to be considered in the married relation were the interests of
+the offspring, and so ultimately of the race at large, rather than of
+the persons themselves who enter into it. But I do not quite see why
+each generation should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the
+generations that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the strongest
+points in favour of the system of falling in love that it does, by
+common experience in the vast majority of instances, assort together
+persons who subsequently prove themselves thoroughly congenial and
+helpful to one another. And this result I look upon as one great proof
+of the real value and importance of the instinct. Most men and women
+select for themselves partners for life at an age when they know but
+little of the world, when they judge but superficially of characters and
+motives, when they still make many mistakes in the conduct of life and
+in the estimation of chances. Yet most of them find in after days that
+they have really chosen out of all the world one of the persons best
+adapted by native idiosyncrasy to make their joint lives enjoyable and
+useful. I make every allowance for the effects of habit, for the growth
+of sentiment, for the gradual approximation of tastes and sympathies;
+but surely, even so, it is a common consciousness with every one of us
+who has been long married, that we could hardly conceivably have made
+ourselves happy with any of the partners whom others have chosen; and
+that we have actually made ourselves so with the partners we chose for
+ourselves under the guidance of an almost unerring native instinct. Yet
+adaptation between husband and wife, so far as their own happiness is
+concerned, can have had comparatively little to do with the evolution of
+the instinct, as compared with adaptation for the joint production of
+vigorous and successful offspring. Natural selection lays almost all the
+stress on the last point, and hardly any at all upon the first one. If,
+then, the instinct is found on the whole so trustworthy in the minor
+matter, for which it has not specially been fashioned, how far more
+trustworthy and valuable must it probably prove in the greater
+matter--greater, I mean, as regards the interests of the race--for which
+it has been mainly or almost solely developed!
+
+I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense of moral
+responsibility in the matter of marriage will grow up among us. But it
+will not take the false direction of ignoring these our profoundest and
+holiest instincts. Marriage for money may go; marriage for rank may go;
+marriage for position may go; but marriage for love, I believe and
+trust, will last for ever. Men in the future will probably feel that a
+union with their cousins or near relations is positively wicked; that a
+union with those too like them in person or disposition is at least
+undesirable; that a union based upon considerations of wealth or any
+other consideration save considerations of immediate natural impulse, is
+base and disgraceful. But to the end of time they will continue to feel,
+in spite of doctrinaires, that the voice of nature is better far than
+the voice of the Lord Chancellor or the Royal Society; and that the
+instinctive desire for a particular helpmate is a surer guide for the
+ultimate happiness, both of the race and of the individual, than any
+amount of deliberate consultation. It is not the foolish fancies of
+youth that will have to be got rid of, but the foolish, wicked, and
+mischievous interference of parents or outsiders.
+
+
+
+
+RIGHT AND LEFT
+
+
+Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar scriptural phrase,
+'knoweth the right hand from the left.' This fact in his economy goes
+closely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal on
+this sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate
+language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.
+His right-handedness, in short, is part cause and part effect of his
+universal supremacy in animated nature. He is what he is, to a great
+extent, 'by his own right hand;' and his own right hand, we may shrewdly
+suspect, would never have differed at all from his left were it not for
+the manifold arts and trades and activities he practises.
+
+It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage ran. Man was
+once, in his childhood on earth, what Charles Reade wanted him again to
+be in his maturer centuries, ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers of
+this volume--in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoter
+portions of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton and the
+familiar knowledge of the Latin language have not yet penetrated--should
+complain that I speak with unknown tongues, I will further explain for
+their special benefit that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using the
+right and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang remarks
+in immortal verse, 'was the manner of Primitive Man.' He never minded
+twopence which hand he used, as long as he got the fruit or the scalp he
+wanted. How could he when twopence wasn't yet invented? His mamma never
+said to him in early youth, 'Why-why,' or 'Tomtom,' as the case might
+be, 'that's the wrong hand to hold your flint-scraper in.' He grew up to
+man's estate in happy ignorance of such minute and invidious
+distinctions between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that his
+hands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into shapely
+arrows; and he never even thought in his innocent soul which particular
+hand he did it with.
+
+How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about a gentleman whom
+I never personally saw, and whose habits the intervention of five
+hundred centuries has precluded me from studying at close quarters? At
+first sight, you would suppose the evidence on such a point must be
+purely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely be inventing
+_à priori_ facts, evolved, _more Germanico_, from his inner
+consciousness. Not so. See how clever modern archæology has become! I
+base my assertion upon solid evidence. I know that Primitive Man was
+ambidextrous, because he wrote and painted just as often with his left
+as with his right, and just as successfully.
+
+This seems once more a hazardous statement to make about a remote
+ancestor, in the age before the great glacial epoch had furrowed the
+mountains of Northern Europe; but, nevertheless, it is strictly true and
+strictly demonstrable. Just try, as you read, to draw with the
+forefinger and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile on
+the page on which these words are printed. Do you observe that (unless
+you are an artist, and therefore sophisticated) you naturally and
+instinctively draw it with the face turned towards your left shoulder?
+Try now to draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find it
+requires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. The hand moves
+of its own accord from without inward, not from within outward. Then,
+again, draw with your left thumb and forefinger another imaginary
+profile, and you will find, for the same reason, that the face in this
+case looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young children,
+whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of man or beast, with
+their right hand, draw it almost always with the face or head turned to
+the left, in accordance with this natural human instinct. Their doing so
+is a test of their perfect right-handedness.
+
+But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive men we know
+personally, the carvers of the figures from the French bone-caves, drew
+men and beasts, on bone or mammoth-tusk, turned either way
+indiscriminately. The inference is obvious. They must have been
+ambidextrous. Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; and
+indeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a piece of
+bone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a practised hand, be
+comparatively difficult.
+
+I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with this one very
+clear historical datum, because it is interesting to be able to say with
+tolerable certainty that there really was a period in our life as a
+species when man in the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he become
+otherwise? This question is not only of importance in itself, as helping
+to explain the origin and source of man's supremacy in nature--his
+tool-using faculty--but it is also of interest from the light it casts
+on that fallacy of poor Charles Reade's already alluded to--that we
+ought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition of
+savages. I think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised man
+now right-handed, we shall also see why it would be highly undesirable
+for him to return, after so many ages of practice, to the condition of
+his undeveloped stone-age ancestors.
+
+The very beginning of our modern right-handedness goes back, indeed, to
+the most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be different
+in use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spite
+of all appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally,
+indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn't show: but it shows
+internally. We all of us know, in spite of Sganarelle's assertion to the
+contrary, that the apex of the heart inclines to the left side, and that
+the liver and other internal organs show a generous disregard for strict
+and formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those human
+organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get the clue to the
+irregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even the
+particular direction of the printed letters now before you.
+
+For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His manners were
+strikingly deficient in that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de
+Vere. When primitive man felt the tender passion steal over his soul, he
+lay in wait in the hush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms had
+inspired his heart with young desire; and when she passed his
+hiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled her with a
+club, caught her tight by the hair of her head, and dragged her off in
+triumph to his cave or his rock-shelter. (Marriage by capture, the
+learned call this simple mode of primeval courtship.) When he found some
+Strephon or Damoetas rival him in the affections of the dusky sex, he
+and that rival fought the matter out like two bulls in a field; and the
+victor and his Phyllis supped that evening off the roasted remains of
+the vanquished suitor. I don't say these habits and manners were pretty;
+but they were the custom of the time, and there's no good denying them.
+
+Now, Primitive Man, being thus by nature a fighting animal, fought for
+the most part at first with his great canine teeth, his nails, and his
+fists; till in process of time he added to these early and natural
+weapons the further persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought,
+as Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the possession of
+the ladies of his kind, against other members of his own sex and
+species. And if you fight, you soon learn to protect the most exposed
+and vulnerable portion of your body; or, if you don't, natural selection
+manages it for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence. To
+the boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that most vulnerable
+portion is undoubtedly the heart. A hard blow, well delivered on the
+left breast, will easily kill, or at any rate stun, even a very strong
+man. Hence, from a very early period, men have used the right hand to
+fight with, and have employed the left arm chiefly to cover the heart
+and to parry a blow aimed at that specially vulnerable region. And when
+weapons of offence and defence supersede mere fists and teeth, it is the
+right hand that grasps the spear or sword, while the left holds over the
+heart for defence the shield or buckler.
+
+From this simple origin, then, the whole vast difference of right and
+left in civilised life takes its beginning. At first, no doubt, the
+superiority of the right hand was only felt in the matter of fighting.
+But that alone gave it a distinct pull, and paved the way, at last, for
+its supremacy elsewhere. For when weapons came into use, the habitual
+employment of the right hand to grasp the spear, sword, or knife made
+the nerves and muscles of the right side far more obedient to the
+control of the will than those of the left. The dexterity thus acquired
+by the right--see how the very word 'dexterity' implies this fact--made
+it more natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the same
+hand preferentially in the manufacture of flint hatchets, bows and
+arrows, and in all the other manifold activities of savage life. It was
+the hand with which he grasped his weapon; it was therefore the hand
+with which he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right hand
+remains especially 'the hand in which you hold your knife;' and that is
+exactly how our own children to this day decide the question which is
+which, when they begin to know their right hand from their left for
+practical purposes.
+
+A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter innumerable
+other differences which naturally flow from it. Some of them are
+extremely remote and derivative. Take, for example, the case of writing
+and printing. Why do these run from left to right? At first sight such a
+practice seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticed
+above--the tendency to draw from right to left, in accordance with the
+natural sweep of the hand and arm. And, indeed, it is a fact that all
+early writing habitually took the opposite direction from that which is
+now universal in western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance
+(or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay standard),
+that Hebrew is written from right to left, and that each book begins at
+the wrong cover. The reason is that words, and letters, and
+hieroglyphics were originally carved, scratched, or incised, instead of
+being written with coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to follow
+its natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in naïve drawing, with a
+free curve from the right leftward.
+
+Nevertheless, the very same fact--that we use the right hand alone in
+writing--made the letters run the opposite way in the end; and the
+change was due to the use of ink and other pigments for staining
+papyrus, parchment, or paper. If the hand in this case moved from right
+to left it would of course smear what it had already written; and to
+prevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of writing was
+reversed from left rightward. The use of wax tablets also, no doubt,
+helped forward the revolution, for in this case, too, the hand would
+cover and rub out the words written.
+
+The strict dependence of writing, indeed, upon the material employed is
+nowhere better shown than in the case of the Assyrian cuneiform
+inscriptions. The ordinary substitute for cream-laid note in the
+Euphrates valley in its palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, on
+which the words to be recorded--usually a deed of sale or something of
+the sort--were impressed while it was wet and then baked in, solid. And
+the method of impressing them was very simple; the workman merely
+pressed the end of his graver or wedge into the moist clay, thus giving
+rise to triangular marks which were arranged in the shapes of various
+letters. When alabaster, or any other hard material, was substituted for
+clay, the sculptor imitated these natural dabs or triangular imprints;
+and that was the origin of those mysterious and very learned-looking
+cuneiforms. This, I admit, is a palpable digression; but inasmuch as it
+throws an indirect light on the simple reasons which sometimes bring
+about great results, I hold it not wholly alien to the present serious
+philosophical inquiry.
+
+Printing, in turn, necessarily follows the rule of writing, so that in
+fact the order of letters and words on this page depends ultimately upon
+the remote fact that primitive man had to use his right hand to deliver
+a blow, and his left to parry, or to guard his heart.
+
+Some curious and hardly noticeable results flow once more from this
+order of writing from left to right. You will find, if you watch
+yourself closely, that in examining a landscape, or the view from a
+hill-top, your eye naturally ranges from left to right; and that you
+begin your survey, as you would begin reading a page of print, from the
+left-hand corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act of reading
+(for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised infant) has
+accustomed our eyes to this particular movement, and has made it
+especially natural when we are trying to 'read' or take in at a glance
+the meaning of any complex and varied total.
+
+In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has even gone a
+step farther. Not only do we usually take in the episodes of a painting
+from left to right, but the painter definitely and deliberately intends
+us so to take them in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes in
+succession are represented on a single plane in the same picture--as
+happens often in early art--they are invariably represented in the
+precise order of the words on a written or printed page, beginning at
+the upper left-hand corner, and ending at the lower right-hand angle. I
+first noticed this curious extension of the common principle in the
+mediæval frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have since verified
+it by observations on many other pictures elsewhere, both ancient and
+modern. The Campo Santo, however, forms an exceptionally good museum of
+such story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every picture
+consists of several successive episodes. The famous Benozzo Gozzoli, for
+example, of Noah's Vineyard represents on a single plane all the stages
+in that earliest drama of intoxication, from the first act of gathering
+the grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the _vergognosa di
+Pisa_, who covers her face with her hands in shocked horror at the
+patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand corner.
+
+Observe, too, that the very conditions of _technique_ demand this order
+almost as rigorously in painting as in writing. For the painter will
+naturally so work as not to smudge over what he has already painted: and
+he will also naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story he
+unfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From which two
+principles it necessarily results that he will begin at the upper left,
+and end at the lower right-hand corner.
+
+I have skipped lightly, I admit, over a considerable interval between
+primitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli. But consider further that during all
+that time the uses of the right and left hand were becoming by gradual
+degrees each day still further differentiated and specialised.
+Innumerable trades, occupations, and habits imply ever-widening
+differences in the way we use them. It is not the right hand alone that
+has undergone an education in this respect: the left, too, though
+subordinate, has still its own special functions to perform. If the
+savage chips his flints with a blow of the right, he holds the core, or
+main mass of stone from which he strikes it, firmly with his left. If
+one hand is specially devoted to the knife, the other grasps the fork to
+make up for it. In almost every act we do with both hands, each has a
+separate office to which it is best fitted. Take, for example, so simple
+a matter as buttoning one's coat, where a curious distinction between
+the habits of the sexes enables us to test the principle with ease and
+certainty. Men's clothes are always made with the buttons on the right
+side and the button-holes on the left. Women's, on the contrary, are
+always made with the buttons on the left side, and the button-holes on
+the right. (The occult reason for this curious distinction, which has
+long engaged the attention of philosophers, has never yet been
+discovered, but it is probably to be accounted for by the perversity of
+women.) Well, if a man tries to put on a woman's waterproof, or a woman
+to put on a man's ulster, each will find that neither hand is readily
+able to perform the part of the other. A man, in buttoning, grasps the
+button in his right hand, pushes it through with his right thumb, holds
+the button-hole open with his left, and pulls all straight with his
+right forefinger. Reverse the sides, and both hands at once seem
+equally helpless.
+
+It is curious to note how many little peculiarities of dress or
+manufacture are equally necessitated by this prime distinction of right
+and left. Here are a very few of them, which the reader can indefinitely
+increase for himself. (I leave out of consideration obvious cases like
+boots and gloves: to insult that proverbially intelligent person's
+intelligence with those were surely unpardonable.) A scarf habitually
+tied in a sailor's knot acquires one long side, left, and one short one,
+right, from the way it is manipulated by the right hand; if it were tied
+by the left, the relations would be reversed. The spiral of corkscrews
+and of ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with the
+natural twist of the right hand: try to drive in an imaginary corkscrew
+with the right hand, the opposite way, and you will see how utterly
+awkward and clumsy is the motion. The strap of the flap that covers the
+keyhole in trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to the
+right, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it be
+conveniently buckled by a right-handed person. The hands of watches and
+the numbers of dial-faced barometers run from left to right: this is a
+peculiarity dependent upon the left to right system of writing. A
+servant offers you dishes from the left side: you can't so readily help
+yourself from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired of
+the German race, because it could never be taught like the English to
+keep to the right side of the pavement in walking. A sword is worn at
+the left hip: a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at the
+side; in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the right
+hand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in the left
+breast; a pocket for railway tickets half-way down the right side. Try to
+reverse any one of these simple actions, and you will see at once that
+they are immediately implied in the very fact of our original
+right-handedness.
+
+And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles Reade's mistaken
+notion of the advantages of ambidexterity. You couldn't make both hands
+do everything alike without a considerable loss of time, effort,
+efficiency, and convenience. Each hand learns to do its own work and to
+do it well; if you made it do the other hand's into the bargain, it
+would have a great deal more to learn, and we should find it difficult
+even then to prevent specialisation. We should have to make things
+deliberately different for the two hands--to have rights and lefts in
+everything, as we have them now in boots and gloves--or else one hand
+must inevitably gain the supremacy. Sword-handles, shears, surgical
+instruments, and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed,
+while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are adapted to the
+left; in each case for a perfectly sufficient reason. You can't upset
+all this without causing confusion. More than that, the division of
+labour thus brought about is certainly a gain to those who possess it:
+for if it were not so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten the
+dextro-sinistrals in the struggle for existence; whereas we know that
+the exact opposite has been the case. Man's special use of the right
+hand is one of his points of superiority to the brutes. If ever his
+right hand should forget its cunning, his supremacy would indeed begin
+to totter. Depend upon it, Nature is wiser than even Charles Reade. What
+she finds most useful in the long run must certainly have many good
+points to recommend it.
+
+And this last consideration suggests another aspect of right and left
+which must not be passed over without one word in this brief survey of
+the philosophy of the subject. The superiority of the right caused it
+early to be regarded as the fortunate, lucky, and trusty hand; the
+inferiority of the left caused it equally to be considered as
+ill-omened, unlucky, and, in one expressive word, sinister. Hence come
+innumerable phrases and superstitions. It is the right hand of
+friendship that we always grasp; it is with our own right hand that we
+vindicate our honour against sinister suspicions. On the other hand, it
+is 'over the left' that we believe a doubtful or incredible statement; a
+left-handed compliment or a left-handed marriage carry their own
+condemnation with them. On the right hand of the host is the seat of
+honour; it is to the left that the goats of ecclesiastical controversy
+are invariably relegated. The very notions of the right hand and ethical
+right have got mixed up inextricably in every language: _droit_ and _la
+droite_ display it in French as much as right and the right in English.
+But to be _gauche_ is merely to be awkward and clumsy; while to be right
+is something far higher and more important.
+
+So unlucky, indeed, does the left hand at last become that merely to
+mention it is an evil omen; and so the Greeks refused to use the true
+old Greek word for left at all, and preferred euphemistically to
+describe it as _euonymos_, the well-named or happy-omened. Our own
+_left_ seems equally to mean the hand that is left after the right has
+been mentioned, or, in short, the other one. Many things which are lucky
+if seen on the right are fateful omens if seen to leftward. On the other
+hand, if you spill the salt, you propitiate destiny by tossing a pinch
+of it over the left shoulder. A murderer's left hand is said by good
+authorities to be an excellent thing to do magic with; but here I cannot
+speak from personal experience. Nor do I know why the wedding-ring is
+worn on the left hand; though it is significant, at any rate, that the
+mark of slavery should be put by the man with his own right upon the
+inferior member of the weaker vessel. Strong-minded ladies may get up an
+agitation if they like to alter this gross injustice of the centuries.
+
+One curious minor application of rights and lefts is the rule of the
+road as it exists in England. How it arose I can't say, any more than I
+can say why a lady sits her side-saddle to the left. Coachmen, to be
+sure, are quite unanimous that the leftward route enables them to see
+how close they are passing to another carriage; but, as all continental
+authority is equally convinced the other way, I make no doubt this is a
+mere illusion of long-continued custom. It is curious, however, that the
+English usage, having once obtained in these islands, has influenced
+railways, not only in Britain, but over all Europe. Trains, like
+carriages, go to the left when they pass; and this habit, quite natural
+in England, was transplanted by the early engineers to the Continent,
+where ordinary carriages, of course, go to the right. In America, to be
+sure, the trains also go right like the carriages; but then, those
+Americans have such a curiously un-English way of being strictly
+consistent and logical in their doings. In Britain we should have
+compromised the matter by going sometimes one way and sometimes the
+other.
+
+
+
+
+EVOLUTION
+
+
+Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the cholera
+germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question,
+it is 'in the air.' It pervades society everywhere with its subtle
+essence; it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its
+slang phrases; it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant
+Philistinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody believes
+he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everyday
+conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen,
+the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of
+authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous
+semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin,
+and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer--don't you know?--and a
+lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the
+best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for the most part in a
+belief about nature at large essentially similar to that applied by
+Topsy to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in short,
+that most things 'growed.' Especially is it known that in the opinion of
+the evolutionists as a body we are all of us ultimately descended from
+men with tails, who were the final offspring and improved edition of the
+common gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception of the
+various points in the great modern evolutionary programme.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, who of course
+differs fundamentally from that inferior class of human beings known to
+all of us in our own minds as 'other people,' that almost every point in
+the catalogue thus briefly enumerated is a popular fallacy of the
+wildest description. Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more than
+George Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the electric
+telegraph. We are not descended from men with tails, any more than we
+are descended from Indian elephants. There is no evidence that we have
+anything in particular more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship with
+our poor relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search of
+a 'missing link'; few links are anywhere missing, and those are for the
+most part wholly unimportant ones. If we found the imaginary link in
+question, he would not be a monkey, nor yet in any way a tailed man. And
+so forth generally through the whole list of popular beliefs and current
+fallacies as to the real meaning of evolutionary teaching. Whatever most
+people think evolutionary is for the most part a pure parody of the
+evolutionist's opinion.
+
+But a more serious error than all these pervades what we may call the
+drawing-room view of the evolutionist theory. So far as Society with a
+big initial is concerned, evolutionism first began to be talked about,
+and therefore known (for Society does not read; it listens, or rather it
+overhears and catches fragmentary echoes) when Darwin published his
+'Origin of Species.' That great book consisted simply of a theory as to
+the causes which led to the distinctions of kind between plants and
+animals. With evolution at large it had nothing to do; it took for
+granted the origin of sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, the
+earth and all that in it is, the sea and the dry land, the mountains and
+the valleys, nay even life itself in the crude form, everything in fact,
+save the one point of the various types and species of living beings.
+Long before Darwin's book appeared evolution had been a recognised force
+in the moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace had
+worked out the development of suns and earths from white-hot
+star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth's surface
+to its present highly complex geographical condition. Lamarck had worked
+out the descent of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slow
+modification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth of mind from its
+simplest beginnings to its highest outcome in human thought.
+
+But Society, like Gallio, cared nothing for all these things. The
+evolutionary principles had never been put into a single big book, asked
+for at Mudie's, and permitted to lie on the drawing-room table side by
+side with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court
+memoirs. Therefore Society ignored them and knew them not; the word
+evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into its polite and refined
+dinner-table vocabulary. It recognised only the 'Darwinian theory,'
+'natural selection,' 'the missing link,' and the belief that men were
+merely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon
+them. To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented and
+patented the entire business, including descent with modification, if
+such notions ever occurred at all to the world-at-large's speculative
+intelligence.
+
+Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth and older
+antecedents than this easy, superficial drawing-room view would lead us
+to imagine. It is a very ancient and respectable theory indeed, and it
+has an immense variety of minor developments. I am not going to push it
+back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the vague and
+indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Roman
+poet--the only original poet in the Latin language--did indeed hit out
+for himself a very good rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and
+shapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it
+was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the philosophies of
+the older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of the
+development of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all,
+but wholly evolved, like the German thinker's camel, out of its author's
+own pregnant inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt have
+built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a little
+straw to make his bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-making
+being still in its infancy, he could only construct in a day a shadowy
+Aladdin's palace of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary
+world of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void chaos into
+an orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is not thus that systems
+arise which regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build for
+all time must make sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound
+bricks in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.
+
+It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began to
+take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace,
+Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of our modern
+evolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who
+led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses
+had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the
+eighteenth century.
+
+Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical
+order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede
+in development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages without a
+world to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore reduced to
+comparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, and
+matter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle. It was no wonder,
+then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly
+apprehended and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's
+crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of living
+beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted at in a timid
+whisper.
+
+In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this
+world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as
+the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of fluid light,' a vast nebula of
+enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The world
+arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was
+composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable gasiness
+that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be compressed into a
+common antibilious pill-box. The pill-box itself, in fact, is the net
+result of a prolonged secular condensation of myriads of such enormous
+cubes of this primæval matter. Slowly setting around common centres,
+however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's gravitative theories, the
+fluid haze gradually collected into suns and stars, whose light and heat
+is presumably due to the clashing together of their component atoms as
+they fall perpetually towards the central mass. Just as in a burning
+candle the impact of the oxygen atoms in the air against the carbon and
+hydrogen atoms in the melted and rarefied wax or tallow produces the
+light and heat of the flame, so in nebula or sun the impact of the
+various gravitating atoms one against the other produces the light and
+heat by whose aid we are enabled to see and know those distant bodies.
+The universe, according to this now fashionable nebular theory, began as
+a single vast ocean of matter of immense tenuity, spread all alike over
+all space as far as nowhere, and comparatively little different within
+itself when looked at side by side with its own final historical
+outcome. In Mr. Spencer's perspicuous phrase, evolution in this aspect
+is a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the
+incoherent to the coherent, and from the indefinite to the definite
+condition. Difficult words at first to apprehend, no doubt, and
+therefore to many people, as to Mr. Matthew Arnold, very repellent, but
+full of meaning, lucidity, and suggestiveness, if only we once take the
+trouble fairly and squarely to understand them.
+
+Every sun and every star thus formed is for ever gathering in the hem of
+its outer robe upon itself, for ever radiating off its light and heat
+into surrounding space, and for ever growing denser and colder as it
+sets slowly towards its centre of gravity. Our own sun and solar system
+may be taken as good typical working examples of how the stars thus
+constantly shrink into smaller and ever smaller dimensions around their
+own fixed centre. Naturally, we know more about our own solar system
+than about any other in our own universe, and it also possesses for us a
+greater practical and personal interest than any outside portion of the
+galaxy. Nobody can pretend to be profoundly immersed in the internal
+affairs of Sirius or of Alpha Centauri. A fiery revolution in the belt
+of Orion would affect us less than a passing finger-ache in a certain
+single terrestrial baby of our own household. Therefore I shall not
+apologise in any way for leaving the remainder of the sidereal universe
+to its unknown fate, and concentrating my attention mainly on the
+affairs of that solitary little, out-of-the-way, second-rate system,
+whereof we form an inappreciable portion. The matter which now composes
+the sun and its attendant bodies (the satellites included) was once
+spread out, according to Laplace, to at least the furthest orbit of the
+outermost planet--that is to say, so far as our present knowledge goes,
+the planet Neptune. Of course, when it was expanded to that immense
+distance, it must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy
+human senses can even conceive of. An American would say, too thin; but
+I put Americans out of court at once as mere irreverent scoffers. From
+the orbit of Neptune, or something outside it, the faint and cloud-like
+mass which bore within it Cæsar and his fortunes, not to mention the
+remainder of the earth and the solar system, began slowly to converge
+and gather itself in, growing denser and denser but smaller and smaller
+as it gradually neared its existing dimensions. How long a time it took
+to do it is for our present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel
+physicists will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or so
+for the process, while the grasping and extravagant evolutionary
+geologists beg with tears for at least double or even ten times that
+limited period. But at any rate it has taken a good long while, and, as
+far as most of us are personally concerned, the difference of one or two
+hundred millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an
+appreciable one.
+
+As it condensed and lessened towards its central core, revolving rapidly
+on its great axis, the solar mist left behind at irregular intervals
+concentric rings or belts of cloud-like matter, cast off from its
+equator; which belts, once more undergoing a similar evolution on their
+own account, have hardened round their private centres of gravity into
+Jupiter or Saturn, the Earth or Venus. Round these again, minor belts or
+rings have sometimes formed, as in Saturn's girdle of petty satellites;
+or subsidiary planets, thrown out into space, have circled round their
+own primaries, as the moon does around this sublunary world of ours.
+Meanwhile, the main central mass of all, retreating ever inward as it
+dropped behind it these occasional little reminders of its temporary
+stoppages, formed at last the sun itself, the main luminary of our
+entire system. Now, I won't deny that this primitive Kantian and
+Laplacian evolutionism, this nebular theory of such exquisite
+concinnity, here reduced to its simplest terms and most elementary
+dimensions, has received many hard knocks from later astronomers, and
+has been a good deal bowled over, both on mathematical and astronomical
+grounds, by recent investigators of nebulæ and meteors. Observations on
+comets and on the sun's surface have lately shown that it contains in
+all likelihood a very considerable fanciful admixture. It isn't more
+than half true; and even the half now totters in places. Still, as a
+vehicle of popular exposition the crude nebular hypothesis in its rawest
+form serves a great deal better than the truth, so far as yet known, on
+the good old Greek principle of the half being often more than the
+whole. The great point which it impresses on the mind is the cardinal
+idea of the sun and planets, with their attendant satellites, not as
+turned out like manufactured articles, ready made, at measured
+intervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as due to the
+slow and gradual working of natural laws, in accordance with which each
+has assumed by force of circumstances its existing place, weight, orbit,
+and motion.
+
+The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead of a sudden making,
+which Kant and Laplace thus applied to the component bodies of the
+universe at large, was further applied by Lyell and his school to the
+outer crust of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the
+astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyell
+and his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth's
+surface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world began
+by being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal
+excitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it
+gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old is
+growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, discovers. As it passed
+from its fiery and volcanic youth to its staider and soberer middle age,
+a solid crust began to form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface.
+The aqueous vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated
+mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now hardened shell.
+Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into two or three main bodies that
+sank into hollows of the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic,
+Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the
+cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain
+ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very
+vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more
+diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the
+homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as aforesaid, with
+delightful regularity.
+
+At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands, peninsulas and
+islands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains, were wrought out by
+internal or external energies on the crust thus generally fashioned.
+Evaporation from the oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms;
+the water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys and river
+basins; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into streams, streams into
+primæval Niles, and Amazons, and Mississippis. Volcanic forces uplifted
+here an Alpine chain, or depressed there a deep-sea hollow. Sediment
+washed from the hills and plains, or formed from countless skeletons of
+marine creatures, gathered on the sinking bed of the ocean as soft ooze,
+or crumbling sand, or thick mud, or gravel and conglomerate. Now
+upheaved into an elevated table-land, now slowly carved again by rain
+and rill into valley and watershed, and now worn down once more into
+the mere degraded stump of a plateau, the crust underwent innumerable
+changes, but almost all of them exactly the same in kind, and mostly in
+degree, as those we still see at work imperceptibly in the world around
+us. Rain washing down the soil; weather crumbling the solid rock; waves
+dashing at the foot of the cliffs; rivers forming deltas at their barred
+mouths; shingle gathering on the low spits; floods sweeping before them
+the countryside; ice grinding ceaselessly at the mountain top; peat
+filling up the shallow lake--these are the chief factors which have gone
+to make the physical world as we now actually know it. Land and sea,
+coast and contour, hill and valley, dale and gorge, earth-sculpture
+generally--all are due to the ceaseless interaction of these separately
+small and unnoticeable causes, aided or retarded by the slow effects of
+elevation or depression from the earth's shrinkage towards its own
+centre. Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is what it is,
+not by virtue of a single sudden creative act, nor by virtue of
+successive terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but by virtue of the slow
+continuous action of causes still always equally operative.
+
+Evolution in geology leads up naturally to evolution in the science of
+life. If the world itself grew, why not also the animals and plants that
+inhabit it? Already in the eager active eighteenth century this obvious
+idea had struck in the germ a large number of zoologists and botanists,
+and in the hands of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin it took form as a
+distinct and elaborate system of organic evolution. Buffon had been the
+first to hint at the truth; but Buffon was an eminently respectable
+nobleman in the dubious days of the tottering monarchy, and he did not
+care personally for the Bastille, viewed as a place of permanent
+residence. In Louis Quinze's France, indeed, as things then went, a man
+who offended the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne was prone to find himself
+shortly ensconced in free quarters, and kept there for the term of his
+natural existence without expense to his heirs or executors. So Buffon
+did not venture to say outright that he thought all animals and plants
+were descended one from the other with slight modifications; that would
+have been wicked, and the Sorbonne would have proved its wickedness to
+him in a most conclusive fashion by promptly getting him imprisoned or
+silenced. It is so easy to confute your opponent when you are a hundred
+strong and he is one weak unit. Buffon merely said, therefore, that if
+we didn't know the contrary to be the case by sure warrant, we might
+easily have concluded (so fallible is our reason) that animals always
+varied slightly, and that such variations, indefinitely accumulated,
+would suffice to account for almost any amount of ultimate difference. A
+donkey might thus have grown into a horse, and a bird might have
+developed from a primitive lizard. Only we know it was quite otherwise!
+A quiet hint from Buffon was as good as a declaration from many less
+knowing or suggestive people. All over Europe, the wise took Buffon's
+hint for what he meant it; and the unwise blandly passed it by as a mere
+passing little foolish vagary of that great ironical writer and thinker.
+
+Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of his grandson, was no fool; on the
+contrary, he was the most far-sighted man of his day in England; he saw
+at once what Buffon was driving at; and he worked out 'Mr. Buffon's'
+half-concealed hint to all its natural and legitimate conclusions. The
+great Count was always plain Mr. Buffon to his English contemporary.
+Life, said Erasmus Darwin nearly a century since, began in very minute
+marine forms, which gradually acquired fresh powers and larger bodies,
+so as imperceptibly to transform themselves into different creatures.
+Man, he remarked, anticipating his descendant, takes rabbits or
+pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by immensely changing
+their shapes and colours. If man can make a pouter or a fantail out of
+the common runt, if he can produce a piebald lop-ear from the brown wild
+rabbit, if he can transform Dorkings into Black Spanish, why cannot
+Nature, with longer time to work in, and endless lives to try with,
+produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals out of one single common
+ancestor? It was a bold idea of the Lichfield doctor--bold, at least,
+for the times he lived in--when Sam Johnson was held a mighty sage, and
+physical speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangerous
+touch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold folk, and had the
+courage of their opinions more than most men. So even in Lichfield,
+cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenth
+century, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability that
+quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendants
+of a single similar original form, and even that 'one and the same kind
+of living filament is, and has been, the cause of organic life.'
+
+The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always laughed at all
+reformers. It said Dr. Darwin was very clever, but really a most
+eccentric man. His 'Temple of Nature,' now, and his 'Botanic Garden,'
+were vastly fine and charming poems--those sweet lines, you know, about
+poor Eliza!--but his zoological theories were built of course upon a
+most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, no sensible person could
+ever take the doctor seriously. A freak of genius--nothing more; a mere
+desire to seem clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig of
+time has brought around with it! By a strange irony of fate, those
+admired verses are now almost entirely forgotten; poor Eliza has
+survived only as our awful example of artificial pathos; and the
+zoological heresies, at which the eighteenth century shrugged its fat
+shoulders and dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to be
+the chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological science.
+
+In the first year of the present century, Lamarck followed Erasmus
+Darwin's lead with an open avowal that in his belief all animals and
+plants were really descended from one or a few common ancestors. He held
+that organisms were just as much the result of law, not of miraculous
+interposition, as suns and worlds and all the natural phenomena around
+us generally. He saw that what naturalists call a species differs from
+what naturalists call a variety, merely in the way of being a little
+more distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congeners
+elsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms by which in many
+cases one species after another merges into the next on either side of
+it. He observed the analogy between the modifications induced by man and
+the modifications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-going
+and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient opinion which Society
+still believes to have been due to the works of Charles Darwin. In one
+point only, a minor point to outsiders, though a point of cardinal
+importance to the inner brotherhood of evolutionism, he did not
+anticipate his more famous successor. He thought organic evolution was
+wholly due to the direct action of surrounding circumstances, to the
+intercrossing of existing forms, and above all to the actual efforts of
+animals themselves. In other words, he had not discovered natural
+selection, the cardinal idea of Charles Darwin's epoch-making book. For
+him, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant reaching up to
+the boughs of trees; the monkey had acquired its opposable thumb by
+constant grasping at the neighbouring branches; and the serpent had
+acquired its sinuous shape by constant wriggling through the grass of
+the meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by his suggestive
+hint of survival of the fittest, and in so far, but in so far alone, he
+became the real father of modern biological evolutionism.
+
+From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles Darwin himself
+published his wonderful 'Origin of Species,' this idea that plants and
+animals might really have grown, instead of having been made all of a
+piece, kept brewing everywhere in the minds and brains of scientific
+thinkers. The notions which to the outside public were startlingly new
+when Darwin's book took the world by storm, were old indeed to the
+thinkers and workers who had long been familiar with the principle of
+descent with modification and the speculations of the Lichfield doctor
+or the Paris philosopher. Long before Darwin wrote his great work,
+Herbert Spencer had put forth in plain language every idea which the
+drawing-room biologists attributed to Darwin. The supporters of the
+development hypothesis, he said seven years earlier--yes, he called it
+the 'development hypothesis' in so many words--'can show that
+modification has effected and is effecting great changes in all
+organisms, subject to modifying influences.' They can show, he goes on
+(if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), that any existing
+plant or animal, placed under new conditions, begins to undergo adaptive
+changes of form and structure; that in successive generations these
+changes continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new habits;
+that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals changes of the sort
+habitually occur; that the differences thus caused, as for example in
+dogs, are often greater than those on which species in the wild state
+are founded, and that throughout all organic nature there _is_ at work a
+modifying influence of the same sort as that which they believed to
+have caused the differences of species--'an influence which, to all
+appearance, would produce in the millions of years and under the great
+variety of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of
+change.' What is this but pure Darwinism, as the drawing-room
+philosopher still understands the word? And yet it was written seven
+years before Darwin published the 'Origin of Species.'
+
+The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians before
+Darwin. Here are a few of them--Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates,
+Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer.
+Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself discovered anything. As
+well say that Luther made the German Reformation, that Lionardo made the
+Italian Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution, as
+say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionary
+movement, even in the restricted field of life only. A thousand
+predecessors worked up towards him; a thousand contemporaries helped to
+diffuse and to confirm his various principles.
+
+Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea the special
+notion of natural selection. That is to say, he pointed out that while
+plants and animals vary perpetually and vary indefinitely, all the
+varieties so produced are not equally adapted to the circumstances of
+the species. If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, because
+every point of disadvantage tells against the individual in the struggle
+for life. If the variation is a good one, it tends to persist, because
+every point of advantage similarly tells in the individual's favour in
+that ceaseless and viewless battle. It was this addition to the
+evolutionary concept, fortified by Darwin's powerful advocacy of the
+general principle of descent with modification, that won over the whole
+world to the 'Darwinian theory.' Before Darwin, many men of science
+were evolutionists: after Darwin, all men of science became so at once,
+and the rest of the world is rapidly preparing to follow their
+leadership.
+
+As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly this--that
+plants and animals have all a natural origin from a single primitive
+living creature, which itself was the product of light and heat acting
+on the special chemical constituents of an ancient ocean. Starting from
+that single early form, they have gone on developing ever since, from
+the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more varied shapes,
+till at last they have reached their present enormous variety of tree,
+and shrub, and herb, and seaweed, of beast, and bird, and fish, and
+creeping insect. Evolution throughout has been one and continuous, from
+nebula to sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly-speck to man
+or elephant. So at least evolutionists say--and of course they ought to
+know most about it.
+
+But evolution, according to the evolutionists, does not even stop here.
+Psychology as well as biology has also its evolutionary explanation:
+mind is concerned as truly as matter. If the bodies of animals are
+evolved, their minds must be evolved likewise. Herbert Spencer and his
+followers have been mainly instrumental in elucidating this aspect of
+the case. They have shown, or they have tried to show (for I don't want
+to dogmatise on the subject), how mind is gradually built up from the
+simplest raw elements of sense and feeling; how emotions and intellect
+slowly arise; how the action of the environment on the organism begets a
+nervous system of ever greater and greater complexity, culminating at
+last in the brain of a Newton, a Shakespeare, or a Mendelssohn. Step by
+step, nerves have built themselves up out of the soft tissues as
+channels of communication between part and part. Sense-organs of
+extreme simplicity have first been formed on the outside of the body,
+where it comes most into contact with external nature. Use and wont have
+fashioned them through long ages into organs of taste and smell and
+touch; pigment spots, sensitive to light or shade, have grown by
+infinite gradations into the human eye or into the myriad facets of bee
+and beetle; tremulous nerve-ends, responsive sympathetically to waves of
+sound, have tuned themselves at last into a perfect gamut in the
+developed ear of men and mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipient
+centres have grown up in the brain, so that the coloured picture flashed
+by an external scene upon the eye is telegraphed from the sensitive
+mirror of the retina, through the many-stranded cable of the optic
+nerve, straight up to the appropriate headquarters in the thinking
+brain. Stage by stage the continuous process has gone on unceasingly,
+from the jelly-fish with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinite
+steps of progression, induced by ever-widening intercourse with the
+outer world, to the final outcome in the senses and the emotions, the
+intellect and the will, of civilised man. Mind begins as a vague
+consciousness of touch or pressure on the part of some primitive,
+shapeless, soft creature: it ends as an organised and co-ordinated
+reflection of the entire physical and psychical universe on the part of
+a great cosmical philosopher.
+
+Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists take to
+politics. Having shown us entirely to their own satisfaction the growth
+of suns, and systems, and worlds, and continents, and oceans, and
+plants, and animals, and minds, they proceed to show us the exactly
+analogous and parallel growth of communities, and nations, and
+languages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and
+literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others
+have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his
+early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of
+fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the
+earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became
+the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the
+tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually his
+excited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, the
+horse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings in
+the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the bread-fruit, and the
+coco-nut. He picked and improved the seeds of his wild cereals till he
+made himself from grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, his
+Indian corn. In time, he dug out ore from mines, and learnt the use
+first of gold, next of silver, then of copper, tin, bronze, and iron.
+Side by side with these long secular changes, he evolved the family,
+communal or patriarchal, polygamic or monogamous. He built the hut, the
+house, and the palace. He clothed or adorned himself first in skins and
+leaves and feathers; next in woven wool and fibre; last of all in purple
+and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. He gathered into
+hordes, tribes, and nations; he chose himself a king, gave himself laws,
+and built up great empires in Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru. He raised
+him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into
+hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps,
+into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His
+dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his
+boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and
+his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the
+telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution
+has really been most marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctly
+historical; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian,
+French, and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth of
+the trireme, the 'Great Harry,' the 'Victory,' and the 'Minotaur' from
+the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.
+
+The grand conception of the uniform origin and development of all
+things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us in the one word
+evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles Darwin nor to any other
+single thinker. It is the joint product of innumerable workers, all
+working up, though some of them unconsciously, towards a grand final
+unified philosophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the
+Herschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies; in biology,
+Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer; in psychology,
+Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor,
+Lubbock, and De Mortillet--these have been the chief evolutionary
+teachers and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself, and
+the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as a system of
+philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we owe to one man
+alone--Herbert Spencer. Many other minds--from Galileo and Copernicus,
+from Kepler and Newton, from Linnæus and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and
+Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius--had been
+piling together the vast collection of raw material from which that
+great and stately superstructure was to be finally edified. But the
+architect who placed each block in its proper niche, who planned and
+designed the whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the
+rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, was the author
+of the 'System of Synthetic Philosophy,' and none other. It is a strange
+proof of how little people know about their own ideas, that among the
+thousands who talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. are
+probably aware that both word and conception are alike due to the
+commanding intelligence and vast generalising power of Herbert Spencer.
+
+
+
+
+STRICTLY INCOG.
+
+
+Among the reefs of rock upon the Australian coast, an explorer's dredge
+often brings up to the surface some tangled tresses of reddish seaweed,
+which, when placed for a while in a bucket of water, begin slowly to
+uncoil themselves as if endowed with animal life, and finally to swim
+about with a gentle tremulous motion in a mute inquiring way from side
+to side of the pail that contains them. Looked at closely with an
+attentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself into
+two parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a
+strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating the
+weed itself in form and colour. When removed from the water, this queer
+pipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-known
+hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a
+mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny domestic museums.
+But the Australian species, instead of merely mimicking the knight on a
+chess-board, looks rather like a hippocampus in the most advanced stage
+of lunacy, with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spines
+flattened out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly
+indistinguishable in hue and shape from the fucus round which the
+creature clings for support with its prehensile tail. Only a rude and
+shapeless rough draught of a head, vaguely horse-like in contour, and
+inconspicuously provided with an unobtrusive snout and a pair of very
+unnoticeable eyes, at all suggests to the most microscopic observer its
+animal nature. Taken as a whole, nobody could at first sight distinguish
+it in any way from the waving weed among which it vegetates.
+
+Clearly, this curious Australian cousin of the Mediterranean sea-horses
+has acquired so marvellous a resemblance to a bit of fucus in order to
+deceive the eyes of its ever-watchful enemies, and to become
+indistinguishable from the uneatable weed whose colour and form it so
+surprisingly imitates. Protective resemblances of the sort are extremely
+common among the pipe-fish family, and the reason why they should be so
+is no doubt sufficiently obvious at first sight to any reflecting
+mind--such, for example, as the intelligent reader's. Pipe-fish, as
+everybody knows, are far from giddy. They do not swim in the vortex of
+piscine dissipation. Being mostly small and defenceless creatures,
+lurking among the marine vegetation of the shoals and reefs, they are
+usually accustomed to cling for support by their snake-like tails to the
+stalks or leaves of those submerged forests. The omniscient schoolboy
+must often have watched in aquariums the habits and manners of the
+common sea-horses, twisted together by their long thin bodies into one
+inextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly with a treble
+serpentine coil to some projecting branch of coralline or of quivering
+sea-wrack. Bad swimmers by nature, utterly unarmed, and wholly
+undefended by protective mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fight
+nor run away: and therefore they depend entirely for their lives upon
+their peculiar skulking and lurking habits. Their one mode of defence is
+not to show themselves; discretion is the better part of their valour;
+they hide as much as possible among the thickest seaweed, and trust to
+Providence to escape observation.
+
+Now, with any animals thus constituted, cowards by hereditary
+predilection, it must necessarily happen that the more brightly coloured
+or obtrusive individuals will most readily be spotted and most
+unceremoniously devoured by their sharp-sighted foes, the predatory
+fishes. On the other hand, just in proportion as any particular
+pipe-fish happens to display any chance resemblance in colour or
+appearance to the special seaweed in whose folds it lurks, to that
+extent will it be likely to escape detection, and to hand on its
+peculiarities to its future descendants. A long-continued course of the
+simple process thus roughly described must of necessity result at last
+in the elimination of all the most conspicuous pipe-fish, and the
+survival of all those unobtrusive and retiring individuals which in any
+respect happen to resemble the fucus or coralline among which they
+dwell. Hence, in many places, various kinds of pipe-fish exhibit an
+extraordinary amount of imitative likeness to the sargasso or seaweed to
+whose tags they cling; and in the three most highly developed Australian
+species the likeness becomes so ridiculously close that it is with
+difficulty one can persuade oneself one is really and truly looking at a
+fish, and not at a piece of strangely animated and locomotive fucus.
+
+Of course, the playful pipe-fish is by no means alone in his assumption
+of so neat and effective a disguise. Protective resemblances of just the
+same sort as that thus exhibited by this extraordinary little creature
+are common throughout the whole range of nature; instances are to be
+found in abundance, not only among beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes,
+but even among caterpillars, butterflies, and spiders, of species which
+preserve the strictest incognito. Everywhere in the world, animals and
+plants are perpetually masquerading in various assumed characters; and
+sometimes their make-up is so exceedingly good as to take in for a while
+not merely the uninstructed ordinary observer, but even the scientific
+and systematic naturalist.
+
+A few selected instances of such successful masquerading will perhaps
+best serve to introduce the general principles upon which all animal
+mimicry ultimately depends. Indeed, naturalists of late years have been
+largely employed in fishing up examples from the ends of the earth and
+from the depths of the sea for the elucidation of this very subject.
+There is a certain butterfly in the islands of the Malay Archipelago
+(its learned name, if anybody wishes to be formally introduced, is
+_Kallima paralekta_) which always rests among dead or dry leaves, and
+has itself leaf-like wings, all spotted over at intervals with wee
+speckles to imitate the tiny spots of fungi on the foliage it resembles.
+The well-known stick and leaf insects from the same rich neighbourhood
+in like manner exactly mimic the twigs and leaves of the forest among
+which they lurk: some of them look for all the world like little bits of
+walking bamboo, while others appear in all varieties of hue, as if
+opening buds and full-blown leaves and pieces of yellow foliage
+sprinkled with the tints and moulds of decay had of a sudden raised
+themselves erect upon six legs, and begun incontinently to perambulate
+the Malayan woodlands like vegetable Frankensteins in all their glory.
+The larva of one such deceptive insect, observed in Nicaragua by
+sharp-eyed Mr. Belt, appeared at first sight like a mere fragment of the
+moss on which it rested, its body being all prolonged into little
+thread-like green filaments, precisely imitating the foliage around it.
+Once more, there are common flies which secure protection for themselves
+by growing into the counterfeit presentment of wasps or hornets, and so
+obtaining immunity from the attacks of birds or animals. Many of these
+curiously mimetic insects are banded with yellow and black in the very
+image of their stinging originals, and have their tails sharpened, _in
+terrorem_, into a pretended sting, to give point and verisimilitude to
+the deceptive resemblance. More curious still, certain South American
+butterflies of a perfectly inoffensive and edible family mimic in every
+spot and line of colour sundry other butterflies of an utterly unrelated
+and fundamentally dissimilar type, but of so disagreeable a taste as
+never to be eaten by birds or lizards. The origin of these curious
+resemblances I shall endeavour to explain (after Messrs. Bates and
+Wallace) a little farther on: for the present it is enough to observe
+that the extraordinary resemblances thus produced have often deceived
+the very elect, and have caused experienced naturalists for a time to
+stick some deceptive specimen of a fly among the wasps and hornets, or
+some masquerading cricket into the midst of a cabinet full of saw-flies
+or ichneumons.
+
+Let us look briefly at the other instances of protective coloration in
+nature generally which lead up to these final bizarre exemplifications
+of the masquerading tendency.
+
+Wherever all the world around is remarkably uniform in colour and
+appearance, all the animals, birds, and insects alike necessarily
+disguise themselves in its prevailing tint to escape observation. It
+does not matter in the least whether they are predatory or defenceless,
+the hunters or the hunted: if they are to escape destruction or
+starvation, as the case may be, they must assume the hue of all the rest
+of nature about them. In the arctic snows, for example, all animals,
+without exception, must needs be snow-white. The polar bear, if he were
+brown or black, would immediately be observed among the unvaried
+ice-fields by his expected prey, and could never get a chance of
+approaching his quarry unperceived at close quarters. On the other hand,
+the arctic hare must equally be dressed in a snow-white coat, or the
+arctic fox would too readily discover him and pounce down upon him
+off-hand; while, conversely, the fox himself, if red or brown, could
+never creep upon the unwary hare without previous detection, which would
+defeat his purpose. For this reason, the ptarmigan and the willow grouse
+become as white in winter as the vast snow-fields under which they
+burrow; the ermine changes his dusky summer coat for the expensive
+wintry suit beloved of British Themis; the snow-bunting acquires his
+milk-white plumage; and even the weasel assimilates himself more or less
+in hue to the unvarying garb of arctic nature. To be out of the fashion
+is there quite literally to be out of the world: no half-measures will
+suit the stern decree of polar biology; strict compliance with the law
+of winter change is absolutely necessary to success in the struggle for
+existence.
+
+Now, how has this curious uniformity of dress in arctic animals been
+brought about? Why, simply by that unyielding principle of Nature which
+condemns the less adapted for ever to extinction, and exalts the better
+adapted to the high places of her hierarchy in their stead. The
+ptarmigan and the snow-buntings that look most like the snow have for
+ages been least likely to attract the unfavourable attention of arctic
+fox or prowling ermine; the fox or ermine that came most silently and
+most unperceived across the shifting drifts has been most likely to
+steal unawares upon the heedless flocks of ptarmigan and snow-bunting.
+In the one case protective colouring preserves the animal from himself
+being devoured; in the other case it enables him the more easily to
+devour others. And since 'Eat or be eaten' is the shrill sentence of
+Nature upon all animal life, the final result is the unbroken whiteness
+of the arctic fauna in all its developments of fur or feather.
+
+Where the colouring of nature is absolutely uniform, as among the arctic
+snows or the chilly mountain tops, the colouring of the animals is
+uniform too. Where it is slightly diversified from point to point, as in
+the sands of the desert, the animals that imitate it are speckled or
+diversified with various soft neutral tints. All the birds, reptiles,
+and insects of Sahara, says Canon Tristram, copy closely the grey or
+isabelline colour of the boundless sands that stretch around them. Lord
+George Campbell, in his amusing 'Log Letters from the "Challenger,"'
+mentions a butterfly on the shore at Amboyna which looked exactly like a
+bit of the beach, until it spread its wings and fluttered away gaily to
+leeward. Soles and other flat-fish similarly resemble the sands or banks
+on which they lie, and accommodate themselves specifically to the
+particular colour of their special bottom. Thus the flounder imitates
+the muddy bars at the mouths of rivers, where he loves to half bury
+himself in the congenial ooze; the sole, who rather affects clean hard
+sand-banks, is simply sandy and speckled with grey; the plaice, who goes
+in by preference for a bed of mixed pebbles, has red and yellow spots
+scattered up and down irregularly among the brown, to look as much as
+possible like agates and carnelians: the brill, who hugs a still rougher
+ledge, has gone so far as to acquire raised lumps or tubercles on his
+upper surface, which make him seem like a mere bit of the shingle-strewn
+rock on which he reposes. In short, where the environment is most
+uniform the colouring follows suit: just in proportion as the
+environment varies from place to place, the colouring must vary in order
+to simulate it. There is a deep biological joy in the term
+'environment'; it almost rivals the well-known consolatory properties of
+that sweet word 'Mesopotamia.' 'Surroundings,' perhaps, would equally
+well express the meaning, but then, as Mr. Wordsworth justly observes,
+'the difference to me!'
+
+Between England and the West Indies, about the time when one begins to
+recover from the first bout of sea-sickness, we come upon a certain
+sluggish tract of ocean, uninvaded by either Gulf Stream or arctic
+current, but slowly stagnating in a sort of endless eddy of its own, and
+known to sailors and books of physical geography as the Sargasso Sea.
+The sargasso or floating seaweed from which it takes its poetical name
+is a pretty yellow rootless alga, swimming in vast quantities on the
+surface of the water, and covered with tiny bladder-like bodies which at
+first sight might easily be mistaken for amber berries. If you drop a
+bucket over the ship's side and pull up a tangled mass of this beautiful
+seaweed, it will seem at first to be all plant alike; but, when you come
+to examine its tangles closely, you will find that it simply swarms with
+tiny crabs, fishes, and shrimps, all coloured so precisely to shade that
+they look exactly like the sargasso itself. Here the colour about is
+less uniform than in the arctic snows, but, so far as the
+sargasso-haunting animals are concerned, it comes pretty much to the
+same thing. The floating mass of weed is their whole world, and they
+have had to accommodate themselves to its tawny hue under pain of death,
+immediate and violent.
+
+Caterpillars and butterflies often show us a further step in advance in
+the direction of minute imitation of ordinary surroundings. Dr. Weismann
+has published a very long and learned memoir, fraught with the best
+German erudition and prolixity, upon this highly interesting and obscure
+subject. As English readers, however, not unnaturally object to trudging
+through a stout volume on the larva of the sphinx moth, conceived in the
+spirit of those patriarchal ages of Hilpa and Shalum, when man lived to
+nine hundred and ninety-nine years, and devoted a stray century or so
+without stint to the work of education, I shall not refer them to Dr.
+Weismann's original treatise, as well translated and still further
+enlarged by Mr. Raphael Meldola, but will present them instead with a
+brief _résumé_, boiled down and condensed into a patent royal elixir of
+learning. Your caterpillar, then, runs many serious risks in early life
+from the annoying persistence of sundry evil-disposed birds, who insist
+at inconvenient times in picking him off the leaves of gooseberry bushes
+and other his chosen places of residence. His infant mortality, indeed,
+is something simply appalling, and it is only by laying the eggs that
+produce him in enormous quantities that his fond mother the butterfly
+ever succeeds in rearing on an average two of her brood to replace the
+imago generation just departed. Accordingly, the caterpillar has been
+forced by adverse circumstances to assume the most ridiculous and
+impossible disguises, appearing now in the shape of a leaf or stem, now
+as a bundle of dark-green pine needles, and now again as a bud or
+flower, all for the innocent purpose of concealing his whereabouts from
+the inquisitive gaze of the birds his enemies.
+
+When the caterpillar lives on a plant like a grass, the ribs or veins of
+which run up and down longitudinally, he is usually striped or streaked
+with darker lines in the same direction as those on his native foliage.
+When, on the contrary, he lives upon broader leaves, provided with a
+midrib and branching veins, his stripes and streaks (not to be out of
+the fashion) run transversely and obliquely, at exactly the same angle
+as those of his wonted food-plant. Very often, if you take a green
+caterpillar of this sort away from his natural surroundings, you will be
+surprised at the conspicuousness of his pale lilac or mauve markings;
+surely, you will think to yourself, such very distinct variegation as
+that must betray him instantly to his watchful enemies. But no; if you
+replace him gently where you first found him, you will see that the
+lines exactly harmonise with the joints and shading of his native leaf:
+they are delicate representations of the soft shadow cast by a rib or
+vein, and the local colour is precisely what a painter would have had to
+use in order to produce the corresponding effect. The shadow of
+yellowish green is, of course, always purplish or lilac. It may at first
+sight seem surprising that a caterpillar should possess so much artistic
+sense and dexterity; but then the penalty for bungling or inharmonious
+work is so very severe as necessarily to stimulate his imitative genius.
+Birds are for ever hunting him down among the green leaves, and only
+those caterpillars which effectually deceive them by their admirable
+imitations can ever hope to survive and become the butterflies who hand
+on their larval peculiarities to after ages. Need I add that the
+variations are, of course, unconscious, and that accident in the first
+place is ultimately answerable for each fresh step in the direction of
+still closer simulation?
+
+The geometric moths have brown caterpillars, which generally stand erect
+when at rest on the branches of trees and so resemble small twigs; and,
+in order that the resemblance may be the more striking, they are often
+covered with tiny warts which look like buds or knots upon the surface.
+The larva of that familiar and much-dreaded insect, the death's-head
+hawk-moth, feeds as a rule on the foliage of the potato, and its very
+varied colouring, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, so beautifully
+harmonises with the brown of the earth, the yellow and green of the
+leaves, and the faint purplish blue of the lurid flowers, that it can
+only be distinguished when the eye happens accidentally to focus itself
+exactly upon the spot occupied by the unobtrusive caterpillar. Other
+larvæ which frequent pine trees have their bodies covered with tufts of
+green hairs that serve to imitate the peculiar pine foliage. One queer
+little caterpillar, which lives upon the hoary foliage of the
+sea-buckthorn, has a grey-green body, just like the buckthorn leaves,
+relieved by a very conspicuous red spot which really represents in size
+and colour one of the berries that grow around it. Finally the larva of
+the elephant hawk-moth, which grows to a very large size, has a pair of
+huge spots that seem like great eyes; and direct experiment establishes
+the fact that small birds mistake it for a young snake, and stand in
+terrible awe of it accordingly, though it is in reality a perfectly
+harmless insect, and also, as I am credibly informed (for I cannot speak
+upon the point from personal experience), a very tasty and
+well-flavoured insect, and 'quite good to eat' too, says an eminent
+authority. One of these big snake-like caterpillars once frightened Mr.
+Bates himself on the banks of the Amazon.
+
+Now, I know that cantankerous person, the universal objector, has all
+along been bursting to interrupt me and declare that he himself
+frequently finds no end of caterpillars, and has not the slightest
+difficulty at all in distinguishing them with the naked eye from the
+leaves and plants among which they are lurking. But observe how promptly
+we crush and demolish this very inconvenient and disconcerting critic.
+The caterpillars _he_ finds are almost all hairy ones, very conspicuous
+and easy to discover--'woolly bears,' and such like common and unclean
+creatures--and the reason they take no pains to conceal themselves from
+his unobservant eyes is simply this: nobody on earth wants to discover
+them. For either they are protectively encased in horrid hairs, which
+get down your throat and choke you and bother you (I speak as a bird,
+from the point of view of a confirmed caterpillar eater), or else they
+are bitter and nasty to the taste, like the larva of the spurge moth and
+the machaon butterfly. These are the ordinary brown and red and banded
+caterpillars that the critical objector finds in hundreds on his
+peregrinations about his own garden--commonplace things which the
+experienced naturalist has long since got utterly tired of. But has
+your rash objector ever lighted upon that rare larva which lives among
+the periwinkles, and exactly imitates a periwinkle petal? Has he ever
+discovered those deceptive creatures which pretend for all the world to
+be leaves of lady's-bedstraw, or dress themselves up as flowers of
+buttonweed? Has he ever hit upon those immoral caterpillars which
+wriggle through life upon the false pretence that they are only the
+shadows of projecting ribs on the under surface of a full-grown lime
+leaf? No, not he; he passes them all by without one single glance of
+recognition; and when the painstaking naturalist who has hunted them
+every one down with lens and butterfly net ventures tentatively to
+describe their personal appearance, he comes up smiling with his great
+russet woolly bear comfortably nestling upon a green cabbage leaf, and
+asks you in a voice of triumphant demonstration, where is the trace of
+concealment or disguise in that amiable but very inedible insect? Go to,
+Sir Critic, I will have none of you; I only use you for a metaphorical
+marionette to set up and knock down again, as Mr. Punch in the street
+show knocks down the policeman who comes to arrest him, and the grimy
+black personage of sulphurous antecedents who pops up with a fizz
+through the floor of his apartment.
+
+Queerer still than the caterpillars which pretend to be leaves or
+flowers for the sake of protection are those truly diabolical and
+perfidious Brazilian spiders which, as Mr. Bates observed, are
+brilliantly coloured with crimson and purple, but 'double themselves up
+at the base of leaf-stalks, so as to resemble flower buds, and thus
+deceive the insects upon which they prey.' There is something hideously
+wicked and cruel in this lowest depth of imitative infamy. A flower-bud
+is something so innocent and childlike; and to disguise oneself as such
+for purposes of murder and rapine argues the final abyss of arachnoid
+perfidy. It reminds one of that charming and amiable young lady in Mr.
+Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dynamiter,' who amused herself in moments of
+temporary gaiety by blowing up inhabited houses, inmates and all, out of
+pure lightness of heart and girlish frivolity. An Indian mantis or
+praying insect, a little less wicked, though no less cruel than the
+spiders, deceives the flies who come to his arms under the false
+pretence of being a quiet leaf, upon which they may light in safety for
+rest and refreshment. Yet another abandoned member of the same family,
+relying boldly upon the resources of tropical nature, gets itself up as
+a complete orchid, the head and fangs being moulded in the exact image
+of the beautiful blossom, and the arms folding treacherously around the
+unhappy insect which ventures to seek for honey in its deceptive jaws.
+
+Happily, however, the tyrants and murderers do not always have things
+all their own way. Sometimes the inoffensive prey turn the tables upon
+their torturers with distinguished success. For example, Mr. Wallace
+noticed a kind of sand-wasp, in Borneo, much given to devouring
+crickets; but there was one species of cricket which exactly reproduced
+the features of the sand-wasps, and mixed among them on equal terms
+without fear of detection. Mr. Belt saw a green leaf-like locust in
+Nicaragua, overrun by foraging ants in search of meat for dinner, but
+remaining perfectly motionless all the time, and evidently mistaken by
+the hungry foragers for a real piece of the foliage it mimicked. So
+thoroughly did this innocent locust understand the necessity for
+remaining still, and pretending to be a leaf under all advances, that
+even when Mr. Belt took it up in his hands it never budged an inch, but
+strenuously preserved its rigid leaf-like attitude. As other insects
+'sham dead,' this ingenious creature shammed vegetable.
+
+In order to understand how cases like these begin to arise, we must
+remember that first of all they start of necessity from very slight and
+indefinite resemblances, which succeed as it were by accident in
+occasionally eluding the vigilance of enemies. Thus, there are stick
+insects which only look like long round cylinders, not obviously
+stick-shaped, but rudely resembling a bit of wood in outline only. These
+imperfectly mimetic insects may often obtain a casual immunity from
+attack by being mistaken for a twig by birds or lizards. There are
+others, again, in which natural selection has gone a step further, so as
+to produce upon their bodies bark-like colouring and rough patches which
+imitate knots, wrinkles, and leaf-buds. In these cases the protection
+given is far more marked, and the chances of detection are
+proportionately lessened. But sharp-eyed birds, with senses quickened by
+hunger, the true mother of invention, must learn at last to pierce such
+flimsy disguises, and suspect a stick insect in the most
+innocent-looking and apparently rigid twigs. The final step, therefore,
+consists in the production of that extraordinary actor, the _Xeroxylus
+laceratus_, whose formidable name means no more than 'ragged dry-stick,'
+and which really mimics down to the minutest particular a broken twig,
+overgrown with mosses, liverworts, and lichens.
+
+Take, on the other hand, the well-known case of that predaceous mantis
+which exactly imitates the white ants, and, mixing with them like one of
+their own horde, quietly devours a stray fat termite or so, from time to
+time, as occasion offers. Here we must suppose that the ancestral mantis
+happened to be somewhat paler and smaller than most of its
+fellow-tribesmen, and so at times managed unobserved to mingle with the
+white ants, especially in the shade or under a dusky sky, much to the
+advantage of its own appetite. But the termites would soon begin to
+observe the visits of their suspicious friend, and to note their
+coincidence with the frequent mysterious disappearance of a
+fellow-townswoman, evaporated into space, like the missing young women
+in neat cloth jackets who periodically vanish from the London suburbs.
+In proportion as their reasonable suspicions increased, the termites
+would carefully avoid all doubtful looking mantises; but, at the same
+time, they would only succeed in making the mantises which survived
+their inquisition grow more and more closely to resemble the termite
+pattern in all particulars. For any mantis which happened to come a
+little nearer the white ants in hue or shape would thereby be enabled to
+make a more secure meal upon his unfortunate victims; and so the very
+vigilance which the ants exerted against his vile deception would itself
+react in time against their own kind, by leaving only the most ruthless
+and indistinguishable of their foes to become the parents of future
+generations of mantises.
+
+Once more, the beetles and flies of Central America must have learned by
+experience to get out of the way of the nimble Central American lizards
+with great agility, cunning, and alertness. But green lizards are less
+easy to notice beforehand than brown or red ones; and so the lizards of
+tropical countries are almost always bright green, with complementary
+shades of yellow, grey, and purple, just to fit them in with the foliage
+they lurk among. Everybody who has ever hunted the green tree-toads on
+the leaves of waterside plants on the Riviera must know how difficult it
+is to discriminate these brilliant leaf-coloured creatures from the
+almost identical background on which they rest. Now, just in proportion
+as the beetles and flies grow still more cautious, even the green
+lizards themselves fail to pick up a satisfactory livelihood; and so at
+last we get that most remarkable Nicaraguan form, decked all round with
+leaf-like expansions, and looking so like the foliage on which it rests
+that no beetle on earth can possibly detect it. The more cunning you get
+your detectives, the more cunning do the thieves become to outwit them.
+
+Look, again, at the curious life-history of the flies which dwell as
+unbidden guests or social parasites in the nests and hives of wild
+honey-bees. These burglarious flies are belted and bearded in the very
+self-same pattern as the bumble-bees themselves; but their larvæ live
+upon the young grubs of the hive, and repay the unconscious hospitality
+of the busy workers by devouring the future hope of their unwilling
+hosts. Obviously, any fly which entered a bee-hive could only escape
+detection and extermination at the hands (or stings) of its outraged
+inhabitants, provided it so far resembled the real householders as to be
+mistaken at a first glance by the invaded community for one of its own
+numerous members. Thus any fly which showed the slightest superficial
+resemblance to a bee might at first be enabled to rob honey for a time
+with comparative impunity, and to lay its eggs among the cells of the
+helpless larvæ. But when once the vile attempt was fairly discovered,
+the burglars could only escape fatal detection from generation to
+generation just in proportion as they more and more closely approximated
+to the shape and colour of the bees themselves. For, as Mr. Belt has
+well pointed out, while the mimicking species would become naturally
+more numerous from age to age, the senses of the mimicked species would
+grow sharper and sharper by constant practice in detecting and punishing
+the unwelcome intruders.
+
+It is only in external matters, however, that the appearance of such
+mimetic species can ever be altered. Their underlying points of
+structure and formative detail always show to the very end (if only one
+happens to observe them) their proper place in a scientific
+classification. For instance, these same parasitic flies which so
+closely resemble bees in their shape and colour have only one pair of
+wings apiece, like all the rest of the fly order, while the bees of
+course have the full complement of two pairs, an upper and an under,
+possessed by them in common with all other well-conducted members of the
+hymenopterous family. So, too, there is a certain curious American
+insect, belonging to the very unsavoury tribe which supplies London
+lodging-houses with one of their most familiar entomological specimens;
+and this cleverly disguised little creature is banded and striped in
+every part exactly like a local hornet, for whom it evidently wishes
+itself to be mistaken. If you were travelling in the wilder parts of
+Colorado you would find a close resemblance to Buffalo Bill was no mean
+personal protection. Hornets, in fact, are insects to which birds and
+other insectivorous animals prefer to give a very wide berth, and the
+reason why they should be imitated by a defenceless beetle must be
+obvious to the intelligent student. But while the vibrating wing-cases
+of this deceptive masquerader are made to look as thin and hornet-like
+as possible, in all underlying points of structure any competent
+naturalist would see at once that the creature must really be classed
+among the noisome Hemiptera. I seldom trouble the public with a Greek or
+Latin name, but on this occasion I trust I may be pardoned for not
+indulging in all the ingenuous bluntness of the vernacular.
+
+Sometimes this effective mimicry of stinging insects seems to be even
+consciously performed by the tiny actors. Many creatures, which do not
+themselves possess stings, nevertheless endeavour to frighten their
+enemies by assuming the characteristic hostile attitudes of wasps or
+hornets. Everybody in England must be well acquainted with those common
+British earwig-looking insects, popularly known as the devil's
+coach-horses, which, when irritated or interfered with, cock up their
+tails behind them in the most aggressive fashion, exactly reproducing
+the threatening action of an angry scorpion. Now, as a matter of fact,
+the devil's coach-horse is quite harmless, but I have often seen, not
+only little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds, and
+shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude. So, too, the
+bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects got up in sedulous
+imitation of various species of wild bee, flit about and buzz angrily in
+the sunlight, quite after the fashion of the insects they mimic; and
+when disturbed they pretend to get excited, and seem as if they wished
+to fly in their assailant's face and roundly sting him. This curious
+instinct may be put side by side with the parallel instinct of shamming
+dead, possessed by many beetles and other small defenceless species.
+
+Certain beetles have also been modified so as exactly to imitate wasps;
+and in these cases the beetle waist, usually so solid, thick, and
+clumsy, grows as slender and graceful as if the insects had been
+supplied with corsets by a fashionable West End house. But the greatest
+refinement of all is perhaps that noticed in certain allied species
+which mimic bees, and which have acquired useless little tufts of hair
+on their hind shanks to represent the dilated and tufted
+pollen-gathering apparatus of the true bees.
+
+I have left to the last the most marvellous cases of mimicry of
+all--those noticed among South American butterflies by Mr. Bates, who
+found that certain edible kinds exactly resembled a handsome and
+conspicuous but bitter-tasted species 'in every shade and stripe of
+colour.' Several of these South American imitative insects long deceived
+the very entomologists; and it was only by a close inspection of their
+structural differences that the utter distinctness of the mimickers and
+the mimicked was satisfactorily settled. Scarcely less curious is the
+case of Mr. Wallace's Malayan orioles, two species of which exactly copy
+two pugnacious honey-suckers in every detail of plumage and coloration.
+As the honey-suckers are avoided by birds of prey, owing to their
+surprising strength and pugnacity, the orioles gain immunity from attack
+by their close resemblance to the protected species. When Dr. Sclater,
+the distinguished ornithologist, was examining Mr. Forbes's collections
+from Timorlaut, even his experienced eye was so taken in by another of
+these deceptive bird-mimicries that he classified two birds of totally
+distinct families as two different individuals of the same species.
+
+Even among plants a few instances of true mimicry have been observed. In
+the stony African Karoo, where every plant is eagerly sought out for
+food by the scanty local fauna, there are tubers which exactly resemble
+the pebbles around them; and I have little doubt that our perfectly
+harmless English dead-nettle secures itself from the attacks of browsing
+animals by its close likeness to the wholly unrelated, but
+well-protected, stinging-nettle.
+
+Finally, we must not forget the device of those animals which not merely
+assimilate themselves in colour to the ordinary environment in a general
+way, but have also the power of adapting themselves at will to whatever
+object they may happen to lie against. Cases like that of the ptarmigan,
+which in summer harmonises with the brown heather and grey rock, while
+in winter it changes to the white of the snow-fields, lead us up
+gradually to such ultimate results of the masquerading tendency. There
+is a tiny crustacean, the chameleon shrimp, which can alter its hue to
+that of any material on which it happens to rest. On a sandy bottom it
+appears grey or sand-coloured; when lurking among seaweed it becomes
+green, or red, or brown, according to the nature of its momentary
+background. Probably the effect is quite unconscious, or at least
+involuntary, like blushing with ourselves--and nobody ever blushes on
+purpose, though they do say a distinguished poet once complained that an
+eminent actor did not follow his stage directions because he omitted to
+obey the rubrical remark, 'Here Harold purples with anger.' The change
+is produced by certain automatic muscles which force up particular
+pigment cells above the others, green coming to the top on a green
+surface, red on a ruddy one, and brown or grey where the circumstances
+demand them. Many kinds of fish similarly alter their colour to suit
+their background by forcing forward or backward certain special
+pigment-cells known as chromatophores, whose various combinations
+produce at will almost any required tone or shade. Almost all reptiles
+and amphibians possess the power of changing their hue in accordance
+with their environment in a very high degree; and among certain
+tree-toads and frogs it is difficult to say what is the normal
+colouring, as they vary indefinitely from buff and dove-colour to
+chocolate-brown, rose, and even lilac.
+
+But of all the particoloured reptiles the chameleon is by far the best
+known, and on the whole the most remarkable for his inconstancy of
+coloration. Like a lacertine Vicar of Bray, he varies incontinently from
+buff to blue, and from blue back to orange again, under stress of
+circumstances. The mechanism of this curious change is extremely
+complex. Tiny corpuscles of different pigments are sometimes hidden in
+the depths of the chameleon's skin, and sometimes spread out on its
+surface in an interlacing network of brown or purple. In addition to
+this prime colouring matter, however, the animal also possesses a normal
+yellow pigment, and a bluish layer in the skin which acts like the
+iridium glass so largely employed by Dr. Salviati, being seen as
+straw-coloured with a transmitted light, but assuming a faint lilac tint
+against an opaque absorbent surface. While sleeping the chameleon
+becomes almost white in the shade, but if light falls upon him he slowly
+darkens by an automatic process. The movements of the corpuscles are
+governed by opposite nerves and muscles, which either cause them to bury
+themselves under the true skin, or to form an opaque ground behind the
+blue layer, or to spread out in a ramifying mass on the outer surface,
+and so produce as desired almost any necessary shade of grey, green,
+black, or yellow. It is an interesting fact that many chrysalids undergo
+precisely similar changes of colour in adaptation to the background
+against which they suspend themselves, being grey on a grey surface,
+green on a green one, and even half black and half red when hung up
+against pieces of particoloured paper.
+
+Nothing could more beautifully prove the noble superiority of the human
+intellect than the fact that while our grouse are russet-brown to suit
+the bracken and heather, and our caterpillars green to suit the lettuce
+and the cabbage leaves, our British soldier should be wisely coated in
+brilliant scarlet to form an effective mark for the rifles of an enemy.
+Red is the easiest of all colours at which to aim from a great distance;
+and its selection by authority for the uniform of unfortunate Tommy
+Atkins reminds me of nothing so much as Mr. McClelland's exquisite
+suggestion that the peculiar brilliancy of the Indian river carps makes
+them serve 'as a better mark for kingfishers, terns, and other birds
+which are destined to keep the number of these fishes in check.' The
+idea of Providence and the Horse Guards conspiring to render any
+creature an easier target for the attacks of enemies is worthy of the
+decadent school of natural history, and cannot for a moment be
+dispassionately considered by a judicious critic. Nowadays we all know
+that the carp are decked in crimson and blue to please their partners,
+and that soldiers are dressed in brilliant red to please the æsthetic
+authorities who command them from a distance.
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS
+
+
+For many generations past that problematical animal, the toad-in-a-hole
+(literal, not culinary) has been one of the most familiar and
+interesting personages of contemporary folk-lore and popular natural
+history. From time to time he turns up afresh, with his own wonted
+perennial vigour, on paper at least, in company with the great
+sea-serpent, the big gooseberry, the shower of frogs, the two-headed
+calf, and all the other common objects of the country or the seaside in
+the silly season. No extraordinary natural phenomenon on earth was ever
+better vouched for--in the fashion rendered familiar to us by the
+Tichborne claimant--that is to say, no other could ever get a larger
+number of unprejudiced witnesses to swear positively and unreservedly in
+its favour. Unfortunately, however, swearing alone no longer settles
+causes off-hand, as if by show of hands, 'the Ayes have it,' after the
+fashion prevalent in the good old days when the whole Hundred used to
+testify that of its certain knowledge John Nokes did not commit such and
+such a murder; whereupon John Nokes was forthwith acquitted accordingly.
+Nowadays, both justice and science have become more exacting; they
+insist upon the unpleasant and discourteous habit of cross-examining
+their witnesses (as if they doubted them, forsooth!), instead of
+accepting the witnesses' own simple assertion that it's all right, and
+there's no need for making a fuss about it. Did you yourself see the
+block of stone in which the toad is said to have been found, before the
+toad himself was actually extracted? Did you examine it all round to
+make quite sure there was no hole, or crack, or passage in it anywhere?
+Did you satisfy yourself after the toad was released from his close
+quarters that no such hole, or crack, or passage had been dexterously
+closed up, with intent to deceive, by plaster, cement, or other
+artificial composition? Did you ever offer the workmen who found it a
+nominal reward--say five shillings--for the first perfectly unanswerable
+specimen of a genuine unadulterated antediluvian toad? Have you got the
+toad now present, and can you produce him here in court (on writ of
+_habeas corpus_ or otherwise), together with all the fragments of the
+stone or tree from which he was extracted? These are the disagreeable,
+prying, inquisitorial, I may even say insulting, questions with which a
+modern man of science is ready to assail the truthful and reputable
+gentlemen who venture to assert their discovery, in these degenerate
+days, of the ancient and unsophisticated toad-in-a-hole.
+
+Now, the worst of it is that the gentlemen in question, being unfamiliar
+with what is technically described as scientific methods of
+investigation, are very apt to lose their temper when thus
+cross-questioned, and to reply, after the fashion usually attributed to
+the female mind, with another question, whether the scientific person
+wishes to accuse them of downright lying. And as nothing on earth could
+be further from the scientific person's mind than such an imputation, he
+is usually fain in the end to give up the social pursuit of postprandial
+natural history (the subject generally crops up about the same time as
+the after-dinner coffee), and to let the prehistoric toad go on his own
+triumphant way, unheeded.
+
+As a matter of fact, nobody ever makes larger allowances for other
+people, in the estimate of their veracity, than the scientific
+inquirer. Knowing himself, by painful experience, how extremely
+difficult a matter it is to make perfectly sure you have observed
+anything on earth quite correctly, and have eliminated all possible
+chances of error, he acquires the fixed habit of doubting about one-half
+of whatever his fellow-creatures tell him in ordinary conversation,
+without for a single moment venturing to suspect them of deliberate
+untruthfulness. Children and servants, if they find that anything they
+have been told is erroneous, immediately jump at the conclusion that the
+person who told them meant deliberately to deceive them; in their own
+simple and categorical fashion they answer plumply, 'That's a lie.' But
+the man of science is only too well acquainted in his own person with
+the exceeding difficulty of ever getting at the exact truth. He has
+spent hours of toil, himself, in watching and observing the behaviour of
+some plant, or animal, or gas, or metal; and after repeated experiments,
+carefully designed to exclude all possibility of mistake, so far as he
+can foresee it, he at last believes he has really settled some moot
+point, and triumphantly publishes his final conclusions in a scientific
+journal. Ten to one, the very next number of that same journal contains
+a dozen supercilious letters from a dozen learned and high-salaried
+professors, each pointing out a dozen distinct and separate precautions
+which the painstaking observer neglected to take, and any one of which
+would be quite sufficient to vitiate the whole body of his observations.
+There might have been germs in the tube in which he boiled the water
+(germs are very fashionable just at present); or some of the germs might
+have survived and rather enjoyed the boiling; or they might have adhered
+to the under surface of the cork; or the mixture might have been
+tampered with during the experimenter's temporary absence by his son,
+aged ten years (scientific observers have no right, apparently, to have
+sons of ten years old, except perhaps for purposes of psychological
+research); and so forth, _ad infinitum_. And the worst of it all is that
+the unhappy experimenter is bound himself to admit that every one of the
+objections is perfectly valid, and that he very likely never really saw
+what with perfect confidence he thought and said he had seen.
+
+This being an unbelieving age, then, when even the book of Deuteronomy
+is 'critically examined,' let us see how much can really be said for and
+against our old friend, the toad-in-a-hole; and first let us begin with
+the antecedent probability, or otherwise, of any animal being able to
+live in a more or less torpid condition, without air or food, for any
+considerable period of time together.
+
+A certain famous historical desert snail was brought from Egypt to
+England as a conchological specimen in the year 1846. This particular
+mollusk (the only one of his race, probably, who ever attained to
+individual distinction), at the time of his arrival in London, was
+really alive and vigorous; but as the authorities of the British Museum,
+to whose tender care he was consigned, were ignorant of this important
+fact in his economy, he was gummed, mouth downward, on to a piece of
+cardboard, and duly labelled and dated with scientific accuracy, '_Helix
+desertorum_, March 25, 1846.' Being a snail of a retiring and contented
+disposition, however, accustomed to long droughts and corresponding naps
+in his native sand-wastes, our mollusk thereupon simply curled himself
+up into the topmost recesses of his own whorls, and went placidly to
+sleep in perfect contentment for an unlimited period. Every conchologist
+takes it for granted, of course, that the shells which he receives from
+foreign parts have had their inhabitants properly boiled and extracted
+before being exported; for it is only the mere outer shell or skeleton
+of the animal that we preserve in our cabinets, leaving the actual flesh
+and muscles of the creature himself to wither unobserved upon its
+native shores. At the British Museum the desert snail might have snoozed
+away his inglorious existence unsuspected, but for a happy accident
+which attracted public attention to his remarkable case in a most
+extraordinary manner. On March 7, 1850, nearly four years later, it was
+casually observed that the card on which he reposed was slightly
+discoloured; and this discovery led to the suspicion that perhaps a
+living animal might be temporarily immured within that papery tomb. The
+Museum authorities accordingly ordered our friend a warm bath (who shall
+say hereafter that science is unfeeling!), upon which the grateful
+snail, waking up at the touch of the familiar moisture, put his head
+cautiously out of his shell, walked up to the top of the basin, and
+began to take a cursory survey of British institutions with his four
+eye-bearing tentacles. So strange a recovery from a long torpid
+condition, only equalled by that of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
+deserved an exceptional amount of scientific recognition. The desert
+snail at once awoke and found himself famous. Nay, he actually sat for
+his portrait to an eminent zoological artist, Mr. Waterhouse; and a
+woodcut from the sketch thus procured, with a history of his life and
+adventures, may be found even unto this day in Dr. Woodward's 'Manual of
+the Mollusca,' to witness if I lie.
+
+I mention this curious instance first, because it is the best
+authenticated case on record (so far as my knowledge goes) of any animal
+existing in a state of suspended animation for any long period of time
+together. But there are other cases of encysted or immured animals
+which, though less striking as regards the length of time during which
+torpidity has been observed, are much more closely analogous to the real
+or mythical conditions of the toad-in-a-hole. That curious West African
+mud-fish, the Lepidosiren (familiar to all readers of evolutionary
+literature as one of the most singular existing links between fish and
+amphibians), lives among the shallow pools and broads of the Gambia,
+which are dried up during the greater part of the tropical summer. To
+provide against this annual contingency, the mud-fish retires into the
+soft clay at the bottom of the pools, where it forms itself a sort of
+nest, and there hibernates, or rather æstivates, for months together, in
+a torpid condition. The surrounding mud then hardens into a dry ball;
+and these balls are dug out of the soil of the rice-fields by the
+natives, with the fish inside them, by which means many specimens of
+lepidosiren have been sent alive to Europe, embedded in their natural
+covering. Here the strange fish is chiefly prized as a zoological
+curiosity for aquariums, because of its possessing gills and lungs
+together, to fit it for its double existence; but the unsophisticated
+West Africans grub it up on their own account as a delicacy, regardless
+of its claims to scientific consideration as the earliest known ancestor
+of all existing terrestrial animals. Now, the torpid state of the
+mud-fish in his hardened ball of clay closely resembles the real or
+supposed condition of the toad-in-a-hole; but with one important
+exception. The mud-fish leaves a small canal or pipe open in his cell at
+either end to admit the air for breathing, though he breathes (as I
+shall proceed to explain) in a very slight degree during his æstivation;
+whereas every proper toad-in-a-hole ought by all accounts to live
+entirely without either feeding or breathing in any way. However, this
+is a mere detail; and indeed, if toads-in-a-hole do really exist at all,
+we must in all probability ultimately admit that they breathe to some
+extent, though perhaps very slightly, during their long immurement.
+
+And this leads us on to consider what in reality hibernation is.
+Everybody knows nowadays, I suppose, that there is a very close analogy
+between an animal and a steam-engine. Food is the fuel that makes the
+animal engine go; and this food acts almost exactly as coal does in the
+artificial machine. But coal alone will not drive an engine; a free
+draught of open air is also required in order to produce combustion.
+Just in like manner the food we eat cannot be utilised to drive our
+muscles and other organs unless it is supplied with oxygen from the air
+to burn it slowly inside our bodies. This oxygen is taken into the
+system, in all higher animals, by means of lungs or gills. Now, when we
+are working at all hard, we require a great deal of oxygen, as most of
+us have familiarly discovered (especially if we are somewhat stout) in
+the act of climbing hills or running to catch a train. But when we are
+doing very little work indeed, as in our sleeping hours, during which
+muscular movement is suspended, and only the general organic life
+continues, we breathe much more slowly and at longer intervals. However,
+there is this important difference (generally speaking) between an
+animal and a steam-engine. You can let the engine run short of coals and
+come to a dead standstill, without impairing its future possibilities of
+similar motion; you have only to get fresh coals, after weeks or months
+of inaction, and light up a fresh fire, when your engine will
+immediately begin to work again, exactly the same as before. But if an
+animal organism once fairly runs down, either from want of food or any
+other cause--in short, if it dies--it very seldom comes to life again.
+
+I say 'very seldom' on purpose, because there are a few cases among the
+extreme lower animals where a water-haunting creature can be taken out
+of the water and can be thoroughly dried and desiccated, or even kept
+for an apparently unlimited period wrapped up in paper or on the slide
+of a microscope; and yet, the moment a drop of water is placed on top of
+it, it begins to move and live again exactly as before. This sort of
+thorough-going suspended animation is the kind we ought to expect from
+any well-constituted and proper-minded toad-in-a-hole. Whether anything
+like it ever really occurs in the higher ranks of animal life, however,
+is a different question; but there can be no doubt that to some slight
+extent a body to all intents and purposes quite dead (physically
+speaking) by long immersion in water--a drowned man, for example--may
+really be resuscitated by heat and stimulants, applied immediately,
+provided no part of the working organism has been seriously injured or
+decomposed. Such people may be said to be _pro tem._ functionally,
+though not structurally, dead. The heart has practically ceased to beat,
+the lungs have ceased to breathe, and physical life in the body is
+temporarily extinct. The fire, in short, has gone out. But if only it
+can be lighted again before any serious change in the system takes
+place, all may still go on precisely as of old.
+
+Many animals, however, find it convenient to assume a state of less
+complete suspended animation during certain special periods of the year,
+according to the circumstances of their peculiar climate and mode of
+life. Among the very highest animals, the most familiar example of this
+sort of semi-torpidity is to be found among the bears and the dormice.
+The common European brown bear is a carnivore by descent, who has become
+a vegetarian in practice, though whether from conscientious scruples or
+mere practical considerations of expediency, does not appear. He feeds
+chiefly on roots, berries, fruits, vegetables, and honey, all of which
+he finds it comparatively difficult to procure during winter weather.
+Accordingly, as everyone knows, he eats immoderately in the summer
+season, till he has grown fat enough to supply bear's grease to all
+Christendom. Then he hunts himself out a hollow tree or rock-shelter,
+curls himself up quietly to sleep, and snores away the whole livelong
+winter. During this period of hibernation, the action of the heart is
+reduced to a minimum, and the bear breathes but very slowly. Still, he
+does breathe, and his heart does beat; and in performing those
+indispensable functions, all his store of accumulated fat is gradually
+used up, so that he wakes in spring as thin as a lath and as hungry as a
+hunter. The machine has been working at very low pressure all the
+winter: but it _has_ been working for all that, and the continuity of
+its action has never once for a moment been interrupted. This is the
+central principle of all hibernation; it consists essentially of a very
+long and profound sleep, during which all muscular motion, except that
+of the heart and lungs, is completely suspended, while even these last
+are reduced to the very smallest amount compatible with the final
+restoration of full animal activity.
+
+Thus, even among warm-blooded animals like the bears and dormice,
+hibernation actually occurs to a very considerable degree; but it is far
+more common and more complete among cold-blooded creatures, whose bodies
+do not need to be kept heated to the same degree, and with whom,
+accordingly, hibernation becomes almost a complete torpor, the breathing
+and the action of the heart being still further reduced to very nearly
+zero. Mollusks in particular, like oysters and mussels, lead very
+monotonous and uneventful lives, only varied as a rule by the welcome
+change of being cut out of their shells and eaten alive; and their
+powers of living without food under adverse circumstances are really
+very remarkable. Freshwater snails and mussels, in cold weather, bury
+themselves in the mud of ponds or rivers; and land-snails hide
+themselves in the ground or under moss and leaves. The heart then
+ceases perceptibly to beat, but respiration continues in a very faint
+degree. The common garden snail closes the mouth of his shell when he
+wants to hibernate, with a slimy covering; but he leaves a very small
+hole in it somewhere, so as to allow a little air to get in, and keep up
+his breathing to a slight amount. My experience has been, however, that
+a great many snails go to sleep in this way, and never wake up again.
+Either they get frozen to death, or else the respiration falls so low
+that it never picks itself up properly when spring returns. In warm
+climates, it is during the summer that mollusks and other mud-haunting
+creatures go to sleep; and when they get well plastered round with clay,
+they almost approach in tenacity of life the mildest recorded specimens
+of the toad-in-a-hole.
+
+For example, take the following cases, which I extract, with needful
+simplifications, from Dr. Woodward.
+
+'In June 1850, a living pond mussel, which had been more than a year out
+of water, was sent to Mr. Gray, from Australia. The big pond snails of
+the tropics have been found alive in logs of mahogany imported from
+Honduras; and M. Caillaud carried some from Egypt to Paris, packed in
+sawdust. Indeed, it isn't easy to ascertain the limit of their
+endurance; for Mr. Laidlay, having placed a number in a drawer for this
+very purpose, found them alive after _five years'_ torpidity, although
+in the warm climate of Calcutta. The pretty snails called _cyclostomas_,
+which have a lid to their shells, are well known to survive
+imprisonments of many months; but in the ordinary open-mouthed
+land-snails such cases are even more remarkable. Several of the enormous
+tropical snails often used to decorate cottage mantelpieces, brought by
+Lieutenant Greaves from Valparaiso, revived after being packed, some for
+thirteen, others for twenty months. In 1849, Mr. Pickering received
+from Mr. Wollaston a basketful of Madeira snails (of twenty or thirty
+different kinds), three-fourths of which proved to be alive, after
+several months' confinement, including a sea voyage. Mr. Wollaston has
+himself recorded the fact that specimens of two Madeira snails survived
+a fast and imprisonment in pill-boxes of two years and a half duration,
+and that large numbers of a small species, brought to England at the
+same time, were _all_ living after being inclosed in a dry bag for a
+year and a half.'
+
+Whether the snails themselves liked their long deprivation of food and
+moisture we are not informed; their personal tastes and inclinations
+were very little consulted in the matter; but as they and their
+ancestors for many generations must have been accustomed to similar long
+fasts during tropical droughts, in all likelihood they did not much mind
+it.
+
+The real question, then, about the historical toad-in-a-hole narrows
+itself down in the end merely to this--how long is it credible that a
+cold-blooded creature might sustain life in a torpid or hibernating
+condition, without food, and with a very small quantity of fresh air,
+supplied (let us say) from time to time through an almost imperceptible
+fissure? It is well known that reptiles and amphibians are particularly
+tenacious of life, and that some turtles in particular will live for
+months, or even for years, without tasting food. The common Greek
+tortoise, hawked on barrows about the streets of London and bought by a
+confiding British public under the mistaken impression that its chief
+fare consists of slugs and cockroaches (it is really far more likely to
+feed upon its purchaser's choicest seakale and asparagus), buries itself
+in the ground at the first approach of winter, and snoozes away five
+months of the year in a most comfortable and dignified torpidity. A
+snake at the Zoo has even been known to live eighteen months in a
+voluntary fast, refusing all the most tempting offers of birds and
+rabbits, merely out of pique at her forcible confinement in a strange
+cage. As this was a lady snake, however, it is possible that she only
+went on living out of feminine obstinacy, so that this case really
+counts for very little.
+
+Toads themselves are well known to possess all the qualities of mind and
+body which go to make up the career of a successful and enduring
+anchorite. At the best of times they eat seldom and sparingly, while a
+forty days' fast, like Dr. Tanner's, would seem to them but an ordinary
+incident in their everyday existence. In the winter they hibernate by
+burying themselves in the mud, or by getting down cracks in the ground.
+It is also undoubtedly true that they creep into holes wherever they can
+find one, and that in these holes they lie torpid for a considerable
+period. On the other hand, there is every reason to believe that they
+cannot live for more than a certain fixed and relatively short time
+entirely without food or air. Dr. Buckland tried a number of experiments
+upon toads in this manner--experiments wholly unnecessary, considering
+the trivial nature of the point at issue--and his conclusion was that no
+toad could get beyond two years without feeding or breathing. There can
+be very little doubt that in this conclusion he was practically correct,
+and that the real fine old crusted antediluvian toad-in-a-hole is really
+a snare and a delusion.
+
+That, however, does not wholly settle the question about such toads,
+because, even though they may not be all that their admirers claim for
+them, they may yet possess a very respectable antiquity of their own,
+and may be very far from the category of mere vulgar cheats and
+impostors. Because a toad is not as old as Methuselah, it need not
+follow that he may not be as old as Old Parr; because he does not date
+back to the Flood, it need not follow that he cannot remember Queen
+Elizabeth. There are some toads-in-a-hole, indeed, which, however we may
+account for the origin of their legend, are on the very face of it
+utterly incredible. For example, there is the favourite and immensely
+popular toad who was extracted from a perfectly closed hole in a marble
+mantelpiece. The implication of the legend clearly is that the toad was
+coeval with the marble. But marble is limestone, altered in texture by
+pressure and heat, till it has assumed a crystalline structure. In other
+words we are asked to believe that that toad lived through an amount of
+fiery heat sufficient to burn him up into fine powder, and yet remains
+to tell the tale. Such a toad as this obviously deserves no credit. His
+discoverers may have believed in him themselves, but they will hardly
+get other people to do so.
+
+Still, there are a great many ways in which it is quite conceivable that
+toads might get into holes in rocks or trees so as to give rise to the
+common stories about them, and might even manage to live there for a
+considerable time with very small quantities of food or air. It must be
+remembered that from the very nature of the conditions the hole can
+never be properly examined and inspected until after it has been split
+open and the toad has been extracted from it. Now, if you split open a
+tree or a rock, and find a toad inside it, with a cavity which he
+exactly fills, it is extremely difficult to say whether there was or was
+not a fissure before you broke the thing to pieces with your hatchet or
+pickaxe. A very small fissure indeed would be quite sufficient to
+account for the whole delusion; for if the toad could get a little air
+to breathe slowly during his torpid period, and could find a few dead
+flies or worms among the water that trickled scantily into his hole, he
+could manage to drag out a peaceful and monotonous existence almost
+indefinitely. Here are a few possible cases, any one of which will
+quite suffice to give rise to at least as good a toad-in-the-hole as
+ninety-nine out of a hundred published instances.
+
+An adult toad buries himself in the mud by a dry pond, and gets coated
+with a hard solid coat of sun-baked clay. His nodule is broken open with
+a spade, and the toad himself is found inside, almost exactly filling
+the space within the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at
+the outside; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic mind
+looks as if it might have been there ever since the Deluge. Good blue
+lias clay, which dries as solid as limestone, would perform this trick
+to perfection; and the toad might easily be relegated accordingly to the
+secondary ages of geology. Observe, however, that the actual toads so
+found are not the geological toads we should naturally expect under such
+remarkable circumstances, but the common everyday toads of modern
+England. This shows a want of accurate scientific knowledge on the part
+of the toads which is truly lamentable. A toad who really wished to
+qualify himself for the post ought at least to avoid presenting himself
+before a critical eye in the foolish guise of an embodied anachronism.
+He reminds one of the Roman mother in a popular burlesque, who suspects
+her son of smoking, and vehemently declares that she smells tobacco,
+but, after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties, and mutters
+to herself, apologetically, 'No, not tobacco; that's not yet invented.'
+A would-be silurian or triassic toad ought, in like manner, to remember
+that in the ages to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was
+not yet developed. He ought rather to come out in the character of a
+ceratodus or a labyrinthodon.
+
+Again, another adult toad crawls into the hollow of a tree, and there
+hibernates. The bark partially closes over the slit by which he entered,
+but leaves a little crack by which air can enter freely. The grubs in
+the bark and other insects supply him from time to time with a frugal
+repast. There is no good reason why, under such circumstances, a placid
+and contented toad might not manage to prolong his existence for several
+consecutive seasons.
+
+Once more, the spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the
+individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal.
+Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to
+be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient
+water for its developement, and where the trickling drops brought down
+minute objects of food, enough to keep up its simple existence. A toad
+brought up under such peculiar circumstances might pass almost its
+entire life in a state of torpidity, and yet might grow and thrive in
+its own sleepy vegetative fashion.
+
+In short, while it would be difficult in any given case to prove to a
+certainty either that the particular toad-in-a-hole had or had not
+access to air and food, the ordinary conditions of toad life are exactly
+those under which the delusive appearance of venerable antiquity would
+be almost certain frequently to arise. The toad is a nocturnal animal;
+it lives through the daytime in dark and damp places; it shows a decided
+liking for crannies and crevices; it is wonderfully tenacious of life;
+it possesses the power of hibernation; it can live on extremely small
+quantities of food for very long periods of time together; it buries
+itself in mud or clay; it passes the early part of its life as a
+water-haunting tadpole; and last, not least, it can swell out its body
+to nearly double its natural size by inflating itself, which fully
+accounts for the stories of toads being taken out of holes every bit as
+big as themselves. Considering all these things, it would be wonderful
+indeed if toads were not often found in places and conditions which
+would naturally give rise to the familiar myth. Throw in a little
+allowance for human credulity, human exaggeration, and human love of the
+marvellous, and you have all the elements of a very excellent
+toad-in-the-hole in the highest ideal perfection.
+
+At the same time I think it quite possible that some toads, under
+natural circumstances, do really remain in a torpid or semi-torpid
+condition for a period far exceeding the twenty-four months allowed as
+the maximum in Dr. Buckland's unpleasant experiments. If the amount of
+air supplied through a crack or through the texture of the stone were
+exactly sufficient for keeping the animal alive in the very slightest
+fashion--the engine working at the lowest possible pressure, short of
+absolute cessation--I see no reason on earth why a toad might not remain
+dormant, in a moist place, with perhaps a very occasional worm or grub
+for breakfast, for at least as long a time as the desert snail slept
+comfortably in the British Museum. Altogether, while it is impossible to
+believe the stories about toads that have been buried in a mine for
+whole centuries, and still more impossible to believe in their being
+disentombed from marble mantelpieces or very ancient geological
+formations, it is quite conceivable that some toads-in-a-hole may really
+be far from mere vulgar impostors, and may have passed the traditional
+seven years of the Indian philosophers in solitary meditation on the
+syllable Om, or on the equally significant Ko-ax, Ko-ax of the
+irreverent Attic dramatist. "Certainly not a centenarian, but perhaps a
+good seven-year sleeper for all that," is the final verdict which the
+court is disposed to return, after due consideration of all the
+probabilities _in re_ the toad-in-a-hole.
+
+
+
+
+A FOSSIL CONTINENT
+
+
+If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly to be translated
+backward from Collins Street, Melbourne, into the flourishing woods of
+the secondary geological period--say about the precise moment of time
+when the English chalk downs were slowly accumulating, speck by speck,
+on the silent floor of some long-forgotten Mediterranean--the
+intelligent colonist would look around him with a sweet smile of
+cheerful recognition, and say to himself in some surprise, 'Why, this is
+just like Australia.' The animals, the trees, the plants, the insects,
+would all more or less vividly remind him of those he had left behind
+him in his happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth century.
+The sun would have moved back on the dial of ages for a few million
+summers or so, indefinitely (in geology we refuse to be bound by dates),
+and would have landed him at last, to his immense astonishment, pretty
+much at the exact point whence he first started.
+
+In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be made hereafter,
+Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent, a country still in its
+secondary age, a surviving fragment of the primitive world of the chalk
+period or earlier ages. Isolated from all the remainder of the earth
+about the beginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth and
+the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the stage of existence,
+long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on
+nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion,
+long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and
+colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their
+race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent
+found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from
+all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, and turned upon
+itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and
+animals out of its own inner consciousness. The natural consequence was
+that progress in Australia has been absurdly slow, and that the country
+as a whole has fallen most woefully behind the times in all matters
+pertaining to the existence of life upon its surface. Everybody knows
+that Australia as a whole is a very peculiar and original continent; its
+peculiarity, however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in the fact
+that it still remains at very nearly the same early point of development
+which Europe had attained a couple of million years ago or thereabouts.
+"Advance, Australia," says the national motto; and, indeed, it is quite
+time nowadays that Australia should advance; for, so far, she has been
+left out of the running for some four mundane ages or so at a rough
+computation.
+
+Example, says the wisdom of our ancestors, is better than precept; so
+perhaps, if I take a single example to start with, I shall make the
+principle I wish to illustrate a trifle clearer to the European
+comprehension. In Australia, when Cook or Van Diemen first visited it,
+there were no horses, cows, or sheep; no rabbits, weasels, or cats; no
+indigenous quadrupeds of any sort except the pouched mammals or
+marsupials, familiarly typified to every one of us by the mamma kangaroo
+in Regent's Park, who carries the baby kangaroos about with her, neatly
+deposited in the sac or pouch which nature has provided for them instead
+of a cradle. To this rough generalisation, to be sure, two special
+exceptions must needs be made; namely, the noble Australian black-fellow
+himself, and the dingo or wild dog whose ancestors no doubt came to the
+country in the same ship with him, as the brown rat came to England with
+George I. of blessed memory. But of these two solitary representatives
+of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more anon'; for the present we
+may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated
+Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to
+kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial
+animals, with names as strange and clumsy as their forms.
+
+Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family, viewed in the dry
+light of modern science? Well, they are simply one of the very oldest
+mammalian families, and therefore, I need hardly say, in the levelling
+and topsy-turvy view of evolutionary biology, the least entitled to
+consideration or respect from rational observers. For of course in the
+kingdom of science the last shall be first, and the first last; it is
+the oldest families that are accounted the worst, while the best
+families mean always the newest. Now, the earliest mammals to appear on
+earth were creatures of distinctly marsupial type. As long ago as the
+time when the red marl of Devonshire and the blue lias of Lyme Regis
+were laid down on the bed of the muddy sea that once covered the surface
+of Dorset and the English Channel, a little creature like the kangaroo
+rats of Southern Australia lived among the plains of what is now the
+south of England. In the ages succeeding the deposition of the red marl
+Europe seems to have been broken up into an archipelago of coral reefs
+and atolls; and the islands of this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted
+by numbers of tiny ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in
+appearance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while others
+resembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or turned into excellent
+imitation carnivores, like our modern friend the Tasmanian devil. Up to
+the end of the time when the chalk deposits of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex
+were laid down, indeed, there is no evidence of the existence anywhere
+in the world of any mammals differing in type from those which now
+inhabit Australia. In other words, so far as regards mammalian life, the
+whole of the world had then already reached pretty nearly the same point
+of evolution that poor Australia still sticks at.
+
+About the beginning of the tertiary period, however, just after the
+chalk was all deposited, and just before the comparatively modern clays
+and sandstones of the London basin began to be laid down, an arm of the
+sea broke up the connection which once subsisted between Australia and
+the rest of the world, probably by a land bridge, _viâ_ Java, Sumatra,
+the Malay peninsula, and Asia generally. 'But how do you know,' asks the
+candid inquirer, 'that such a connection ever existed at all?' Simply
+thus, most laudable investigator--because there are large land mammals
+in Australia. Now, large land mammals do not swim across a broad ocean.
+There are none in New Zealand, none in the Azores, none in Fiji, none in
+Tahiti, none in Madeira, none in Teneriffe--none, in short, in any
+oceanic island which never at any time formed part of a great continent.
+How could there be, indeed? The mammals must necessarily have got there
+from somewhere; and whenever we find islands like Britain, or Japan, or
+Newfoundland, or Sicily, possessing large and abundant indigenous
+quadrupeds, of the same general type as adjacent continents, we see at
+once that the island must formerly have been a mere peninsula, like
+Italy or Nova Scotia at the present day. The very fact that Australia
+incloses a large group of biggish quadrupeds, whose congeners once
+inhabited Europe and America, suffices in itself to prove beyond
+question that uninterrupted land communication must once have existed
+between Australia and those distant continents.
+
+In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as Wallace's Line,
+from the great naturalist who first pointed out its far-reaching
+zoological importance, separates what is called by science 'the
+Australian province' on the southwest from 'the Indo-Malayan province'
+to the north and east of it. This belt of deep sea divides off sharply
+the plants and animals of the Australian type from those of the common
+Indian and Burmese pattern. South of Wallace's Line we now find several
+islands, big and small, including New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the
+Moluccas, Celebes, Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands, whose
+precise geographical position on the map must of course be readily
+remembered, in this age of school boards and universal examination, by
+every pupil-teacher and every Girton girl, are now divided by minor
+straits of much shallower water; but they all stand on a great submarine
+bank, and obviously formed at one time parts of the same wide Australian
+continent, because animals of the Australian type are still found in
+every one of them. No Indian or Malayan animal, however, of the larger
+sort (other than birds) is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace's
+Line. That narrow belt of deep sea, in short, forms an ocean barrier
+which has subsisted there without alteration ever since the end of the
+secondary period. From that time to this, as the evidence shows us,
+there has never been any direct land communication between Australia and
+any part of the outer world beyond that narrow line of division.
+
+Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world by surprise for a
+moment, under the audacious title of 'Captain Lawson's Adventures in New
+Guinea.' The gallant captain, or his unknown creator in some London
+lodging, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles, and there to
+have met with marvellous escapes from terrible beasts of the common
+tropical Asiatic pattern--rhinoceroses, tigers, monkeys, and leopards.
+Everybody believed the new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists.
+Those canny folks saw through the wicked hoax on the very first blush of
+it. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must have got there by an
+overland route. If there had ever been a land connection between New
+Guinea and the Malay region, then, since Australian animals range into
+New Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia, and we
+should find Victoria and New South Wales at the present day peopled by
+tapirs, orang-outangs, wild boars, deer, elephants, and squirrels, like
+those which now people Borneo, instead of, or side by side with, the
+kangaroos, wombats, and other marsupials, which, as we know, actually
+form the sole indigenous mammalian population of Greater Britain beneath
+the Southern Cross. Of course, in the end, the mysterious and tremendous
+Captain Lawson proved to be a myth, an airy nothing upon whom
+imagination had bestowed a local habitation (in New Guinea) and a name
+(not to be found in the Army List). Wallace's Line was saved from
+reproach, and the intrusive rhinoceros was banished without appeal from
+the soil of Papua.
+
+After the deep belt of open sea was thus established between the bigger
+Australian continent and the Malayan region, however, the mammals of the
+great mainlands continued to develop on their own account, in accordance
+with the strictest Darwinian principles, among the wider plains of their
+own habitats. The competition there was fiercer and more general; the
+struggle for life was bloodier and more arduous. Hence, while the
+old-fashioned marsupials continued to survive and to evolve slowly along
+their own lines in their own restricted southern world, their
+collateral descendants in Europe and Asia and America or elsewhere went
+on progressing into far higher, stronger, and better adapted forms--the
+great central mammalian fauna. In place of the petty phalangers and
+pouched ant-eaters of the oolitic period, our tertiary strata in the
+larger continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development of the
+mammalian race into monstrous creatures, some of them now quite extinct,
+and some still holding their own undisturbed in India, Africa, and the
+American prairies. The palæotherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and
+the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeed
+to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata. Slowly
+the horses grow more horse-like, the shadowy camel begins to camelise
+himself, the buffaloes acquire the rudiments of horns, the deer branch
+out by tentative steps into still more complicated and more complicated
+antlers. Side by side with this wonderful outgrowth of the mammalian
+type, in the first plasticity of its vigorous youth, the older
+marsupials die away one by one in the geological record before the faces
+of their more successful competitors; the new carnivores devour them
+wholesale, the new ruminants eat up their pastures, the new rodents
+outwit them in the modernised forests. At last the pouched creatures all
+disappear utterly from all the world, save only Australia, with the
+solitary exception of a single advanced marsupial family, the familiar
+opossum of plantation melodies. And the history of the opossum himself
+is so very singular that it almost deserves to receive the polite
+attention of a separate paragraph for its own proper elucidation.
+
+For the opossums form the only members of the marsupial class now living
+outside Australia; and yet, what is at least equally remarkable, none of
+the opossums are found _per contra_ in Australia itself. They are, in
+fact, the highest and best product of the old dying marsupial stock,
+specially evolved in the great continents through the fierce competition
+of the higher mammals then being developed on every side of them.
+Therefore, being later in point of time than the separation, they could
+no more get over to Australia than the elephants and tigers and
+rhinoceroses could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race
+in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian cousins.
+In Europe and Asia the opossums lived on lustily, in spite of
+competition, during the whole of the Eocene period, side by side with
+hog-like creatures not yet perfectly piggish, with nondescript animals,
+half horse half tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and antelopes,
+unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment of budding antlers. But in
+the succeeding age they seem to disappear from the eastern continent,
+though in the western, thanks to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb,
+and tree-haunting life, they still drag out a precarious existence in
+many forms from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. It is
+worth while to notice, too, that whereas the kangaroos and other
+Australian marsupials are proverbially the very stupidest of mammals,
+the opossums, on the contrary, are well known to those accurate
+observers of animal psychology, the plantation negroes, to be the very
+cleverest, cunningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the fierce
+struggle for life of the crowded American lowlands, the opossum was
+absolutely forced to acquire a certain amount of Yankee smartness, or
+else to be improved off the face of the earth by the keen competition of
+the pouchless mammals.
+
+Up to the day, then, when Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, landing for
+the first time on the coast of New South Wales, saw an animal with short
+front limbs, huge hind legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit of
+hopping along the ground (called by the natives a kangaroo), the
+opossums of America were the only pouched mammals known to the European
+world in any part of the explored continents. Australia, severed from
+all the rest of the earth--_penitus toto orbe divisa_--ever since the
+end of the secondary period, remained as yet, so to speak, in the
+secondary age so far as its larger life-elements were concerned, and
+presented to the first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture of
+what 'the world before the flood' must have looked like. Only it was a
+very remote flood; an antediluvian age separated from our own not by
+thousands, but by millions, of seasons.
+
+To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry needful
+qualifications must be made at the very outset. No statement is ever
+quite correct until you have contradicted in minute detail about
+two-thirds of it.
+
+In the first place there are a good many modern elements in the
+indigenous population of Australia; but then they are elements of the
+stray and casual sort one always finds even in remote oceanic islands.
+They are waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example, the
+flora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a considerable
+number of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns always get blown by the
+wind, or washed by the sea, or carried on the feet or feathers of birds,
+from one part of the world to another. In all these various ways, no
+doubt, modern plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia at
+different times, and altered to some extent the character and aspect of
+its original native vegetation. Nevertheless, even in the matter of its
+plants and trees, Australia must still be considered a very
+old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud continent. The strange
+puzzle-monkeys, the quaint-jointed casuarinas (like horsetails grown
+into big willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, with
+their smooth stems robbed of their outer bark, impart a marvellously
+antiquated and unfamiliar tone to the general appearance of Australian
+woodland. All these types belong by birth to classes long since extinct
+in the larger continents. The scrub shows no turfy greensward; grasses,
+which elsewhere carpet the ground, were almost unknown till introduced
+from Europe; in the wild lands, bushes, and undershrubs of ancient
+aspect cover the soil, remarkable for their stiff, dry, wiry foliage,
+their vertically instead of horizontally flattened leaves, and their
+general dead blue-green or glaucous colour. Altogether, the vegetation
+itself, though it contains a few more modern forms than the animal
+world, is still essentially antique in type, a strange survival from the
+forgotten flora of the chalk age, the oolite, and even the lias.
+
+Again, to winged animals, such as birds and bats and flying insects, the
+ocean forms far less of a barrier than it does to quadrupeds, to
+reptiles, and to fresh-water fishes. Hence Australia has, to some
+extent, been invaded by later types of birds and other flying creatures,
+who live on there side by side with the ancient animals of the secondary
+pattern. Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and crows must all be
+comparatively recent immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. Even in this
+respect, however, the Australian life-region still bears an antiquated
+and undeveloped aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find those very
+oldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries, the emus, and the
+mooruk of New Britain. The extreme term in this exceedingly ancient set
+of creature is given us by the wingless bird, the apteryx or kiwi of New
+Zealand, whose feathers nearly resemble hair, and whose grotesque
+appearance makes it as much a wonder in its own class as the
+puzzle-monkey and the casuarina are among forest trees. No feathered
+creatures so closely approach the lizard-tailed birds of the oolite or
+the toothed birds of the cretaceous period as do these Australian and
+New Zealand emus and apteryxes. Again, while many characteristic
+Oriental families are quite absent, like the vultures, woodpeckers,
+pheasants and bulbuls, the Australian region has many other fairly
+ancient birds, found nowhere else on the surface of our modern planet.
+Such are the so-called brush turkeys and mound builders, the only
+feathered things that never sit upon their own eggs, but allow them to
+be hatched, after the fashion of reptiles, by the heat of the sand or of
+fermenting vegetable matter. The piping crows, the honey-suckers, the
+lyre-birds, and the more-porks are all peculiar to the Australian
+region. So are the wonderful and æsthetic bower-birds. Brush-tongued
+lories, black cockatoos, and gorgeously coloured pigeons, though
+somewhat less antique, perhaps, in type, give a special character to the
+bird-life of the country. And in New Guinea, an isolated bit of the same
+old continent, the birds of paradise, found nowhere else in the whole
+world, seem to recall some forgotten Eden of the remote past, some
+golden age of Saturnian splendour. Poetry apart, into which I have
+dropped for a moment like Mr. Silas Wegg, the birds of paradise are, in
+fact, gorgeously dressed crows, specially adapted to forest life in a
+rich fruit-bearing tropical country, where food is abundant and enemies
+unknown.
+
+Last of all, a certain small number of modern mammals have passed over
+to Australia at various times by pure chance. They fall into two
+classes--the rats and mice, who doubtless got transported across on
+floating logs or balks of timber; and the human importations, including
+the dog, who came, perhaps on their owners' canoes, perhaps on the wreck
+and _débris_ of inundations. Yet even in these cases again, Australia
+still maintains its proud pre-eminence as the most antiquated and
+unprogressive of continents. For the Australian black-fellow must have
+got there a very long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremely
+ancient human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull the
+Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while the
+woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally distinct human family,
+and perhaps the very lowest sample of humanity that has survived to
+modern times, must have crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his
+brethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on when
+the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon the
+continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.
+As for the dingo, or Australian wild dog, only half domesticated by the
+savage natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf and
+half jackal, incapable of the higher canine traits, and with a
+suspicious, ferocious, glaring eye that betrays at once his
+uncivilisable tendencies.
+
+Omitting these later importations, however--the modern plants, birds,
+and human beings--it may be fairly said that Australia is still in its
+secondary stage, while the rest of the world has reached the tertiary
+and quaternary periods. Here again, however, a deduction must be made,
+in order to attain the necessary accuracy. Even in Australia the world
+never stands still. Though the Australian animals are still at bottom
+the European and Asiatic animals of the secondary age, they are those
+animals with a difference. They have undergone an evolution of their
+own. It has not been the evolution of the great continents; but it has
+been evolution all the same; slower, more local, narrower, more
+restricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One might compare the
+difference to the difference between the civilisation of Europe and the
+civilisation of Mexico or Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted out
+their indigenous culture, were still, to be sure, in their stone age;
+but it was a very different stone age from that of the cave-dwellers or
+mound builders in Britain. Even so, though Australia is still
+zoologically in the secondary period, it is a secondary period a good
+deal altered and adapted in detail to meet the wants of special
+situations.
+
+The oldest types of animals in Australia are the ornithorhynchus and the
+echidna, the 'beast with a bill,' and the 'porcupine ant-eater' of
+popular natural history. These curious creatures, genuine living
+fossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate place between the
+mammals on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other. The
+echidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and body; the
+ornithorhynchus has a bill like a duck's, webbed feet, and a great many
+quaint anatomical peculiarities which closely ally it to the birds and
+reptiles. Both, in fact, are early arrested stages in the development of
+mammals from the old common vertebrate ancestor; and they could only
+have struggled on to our own day in a continent free from the severe
+competition of the higher types which have since been evolved in Europe
+and Asia. Even in Australia itself the ornithorhynchus and echidna have
+had to put up perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy of nature.
+The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, specialised in a thousand
+minute ways for his amphibious life and queer subterranean habits; the
+second is a spiny hedgehog-like nocturnal prowler, who buries himself in
+the earth during the day, and lives by night on insects which he licks
+up greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart from the
+specialisations brought about by their necessary adaptation to a
+particular niche in the economy of life, these two quaint and very
+ancient animals probably preserve for us in their general structure the
+features of an extremely early descendant of the common ancestor from
+whom mammals, birds, and reptiles alike are originally derived.
+
+The ordinary Australian pouched mammals belong to far less ancient types
+than ornithorhynchus and echidna, but they too are very old in
+structure, though they have undergone an extraordinary separate
+evolution to fit them for the most diverse positions in life. Almost
+every main form of higher mammal (except the biggest ones) has, as it
+were, its analogue or representative among the marsupial fauna of the
+Australasian region fitted to fill the same niche in nature. For
+instance, in the blue gum forests of New South Wales a small animal
+inhabits the trees, in form and aspect exactly like a flying squirrel.
+Nobody who was not a structural and anatomical naturalist would ever for
+a moment dream of doubting its close affinity to the flying squirrels of
+the American woodlands. It has just the same general outline, just the
+same bushy tail, just the same rough arrangement of colours, and just
+the same expanded parachute-like membrane stretching between the fore
+and hind limbs. Why should this be so? Clearly because both animals have
+independently adapted themselves to the same mode of life under the same
+general circumstances. Natural selection, acting upon unlike original
+types, but in like conditions, has produced in the end very similar
+results in both cases. Still, when we come to examine the more intimate
+underlying structure of the two animals, a profound fundamental
+difference at once exhibits itself. The one is distinctly a true
+squirrel, a rodent of the rodents, externally adapted to an arboreal
+existence; the other is equally a true phalanger, a marsupial of the
+marsupials, which has independently undergone on his own account very
+much the same adaptation, for very much the same reasons. Just so a
+dolphin looks externally very like a fish, in head and tail and form and
+movement; its flippers closely resemble fins; and nothing about it
+seems to differ very markedly from the outer aspect of a shark or a
+codfish. But in reality it has no gills and no swim-bladder; it lays no
+eggs; it does not own one truly fish-like organ. It breathes air, it
+possesses lungs, it has warm blood, it suckles its young; in heart and
+brain and nerves and organisation it is a thorough-going mammal, with an
+acquired resemblance to the fishy form, due entirely to mere similarity
+in place of residence.
+
+Running hastily through the chief marsupial developments, one may say
+that the wombats are pouched animals who take the place of rabbits or
+marmots in Europe, and resemble them both in burrowing habits and more
+or less in shape, which closely approaches the familiar and ungraceful
+guinea-pig outline. The vulpine phalanger does duty for a fox; the fat
+and sleepy little dormouse phalanger takes the place of a European
+dormouse. Both are so ridiculously like the analogous animals of the
+larger continents that the colonists always call them, in perfect good
+faith, by the familiar names of the old-country creatures. The koala
+poses as a small bear; the cuscus answers to the racoons of America. The
+pouched badgers explain themselves at once by their very name, like the
+Plyants, the Pinchwifes, the Brainsicks, and the Carelesses of the
+Restoration comedy. The 'native rabbit' of Swan River is a rabbit-like
+bandicoot; the pouched ant-eater similarly takes the place of the true
+ant-eaters of other continents. By way of carnivores, the Tasmanian
+devil is a fierce and savage marsupial analogue of the American
+wolverine; a smaller species of the same type usurps the name and place
+of the marten; and the dog-headed Thylacinus is in form and figure
+precisely like a wolf or a jackal. The pouched weasels are very
+weasel-like; the kangaroo rats and kangaroo mice run the true rats and
+mice a close race in every particular. And it is worth notice, in this
+connection, that the one marsupial family which could compete with
+higher American life, the opossums, are really, so to speak, the monkey
+development of the marsupial race. They have opposable thumbs, which
+make their feet almost into hands; they have prehensile tails, by which
+they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal
+omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, insects, and
+roots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, intelligent,
+tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys.
+
+Australia has also one still more ancient denizen than any of these, a
+living fossil of the very oldest sort, a creature of wholly immemorial
+and primitive antiquity. The story of its discovery teems with the
+strangest romance of natural history. To those who could appreciate the
+facts of the case it was just as curious and just as interesting as
+though we were now to discover somewhere in an unknown island or an
+African oasis some surviving mammoth, some belated megatherium, or some
+gigantic and misshapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct animals of
+the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in a
+tropical ramble, and you can faintly conceive the delight and
+astonishment of naturalists at large when the barramunda first 'swam
+into their ken' in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size and
+shape this 'extinct fish,' still living and grunting quietly in our
+midst, is comparatively insignificant beside the 'dragons of the prime'
+immortalised in a famous stanza by Tennyson: but, to the true
+enthusiast, size is nothing; and the barramunda is just as much a marvel
+and a monster as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he had
+suddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging fifty feet of
+lizard-like tail in a train behind him. And this is the plain story of
+that marvellous discovery of a 'missing link' in our own pedigree.
+
+In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there occur in
+abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as the Ceratodi.
+(I apologise for ganoid, though it is not a swear-word). These teeth
+reappear from time to time in several subsequent formations, but at last
+slowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists naturally
+concluded that the creature to which they belonged had died out also,
+and was long since numbered with the dodo and the mastodon. The idea
+that a Ceratodus could still be living, far less that it formed an
+important link in the development of all the higher animals, could never
+for a moment have occurred to anybody. As well expect to find a
+palæolithic man quietly chipping flints on a Pacific atoll, or to
+discover the ancestor of all horses on the isolated and crag-encircled
+summit of Roraima, as to unearth a real live Ceratodus from a modern
+estuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Krefft took away the breath of scientific
+Europe by informing it that he had found the extinct ganoid swimming
+about as large as life, and six feet long, without the faintest
+consciousness of its own scientific importance, in a river in Queensland
+at the present day. The unsophisticated aborigines knew it as
+barramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers called it with
+irreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head. On further examination,
+however, the despised barramunda proved to be a connecting link of
+primary rank between the oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowest
+air-breathing animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a true
+fish, it leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a foraging
+expedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring woodlands. There it
+browses on myrtle leaves and grasses, and otherwise behaves itself in a
+manner wholly unbecoming its piscine antecedents and aquatic education.
+To fit it for this strange amphibious life, the barramunda has both
+lungs and gills; it can breathe either air or water at will, or, if it
+chooses, the two together. Though covered with scales, and most
+fish-like in outline, it presents points of anatomical resemblance both
+to salamanders and lizards; and, as a connecting bond between the North
+American mud-fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren on the
+other, it forms a true member of the long series by which the higher
+animals generally trace their descent from a remote race of marine
+ancestors. It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this living
+fossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in the
+fossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has long since been
+beaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian descendants;
+in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the last
+relic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.
+
+
+
+
+A VERY OLD MASTER
+
+
+The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a good
+deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of his
+own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation of
+the world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a
+bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin than
+the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, the
+mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable British
+Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled
+eyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptors
+carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib's hair,
+just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primæval art was already
+hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the
+morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or
+Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying,
+already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in
+the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess
+authentic records of man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten
+epochs--an epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn't commit
+one to any definite chronology in particular--then it is probable that
+all known art, from the Egyptian onward, would fall into the tenth of
+the epochs thus loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief
+would fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I should
+say it was most likely about 244,000 years before the creation of Adam
+according to Ussher.
+
+The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer horn, and
+represents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following one
+another, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the air
+suspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite
+unfavourable comment at Newmarket. Their 'points' are undoubtedly coarse
+and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their
+manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and
+spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the
+domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing
+the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there is
+little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on the
+whole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedingly
+remote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of the
+prehistoric Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in hue
+and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once roam
+over the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush grass
+and tall water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only
+do the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, prove this,
+but quite recently the Russian traveller Prjevalsky (whose name is so
+much easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a similar living
+horse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high
+table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see, as I have only
+to write the word, without uttering it, I don't mind how often or how
+intrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat,
+or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master that we can't do
+better than begin by describing him _in propria persona_.
+
+The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other
+families, into two factions, which may be described for variety's sake
+as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including also
+the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names,
+in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent visitors at
+the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the chief broad
+distinction between these two great groups consists in the feathering of
+the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra and
+co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single bunch or
+fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle at the
+extreme tip. The horse, on the other hand, besides having horny patches
+or callosities on both fore and hind legs, while the donkeys have them
+on the fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long hairs are
+almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving it its
+peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But Prjevalsky's horse, as one
+would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands half-way
+in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a
+family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs collected in a
+final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them spring from the
+middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never from the very top,
+thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit without actually
+attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can make
+out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my prehistoric Phidias the
+horse of the quaternary epoch had much the same caudal peculiarity; his
+tail was bushy, but only in the lower half. He was still in the
+intermediate stage between horse and donkey, a natural mule still
+struggling up aspiringly toward perfect horsehood. In all other matters
+the two creatures--the cave man's horse and Prjevalsky's--closely agree.
+Both display large heads, thick necks, coarse manes, and a general
+disregard of 'points' which would strike disgust and dismay into the
+stout breasts of Messrs. Tattersall. In fact over a T.Y.C. it may be
+confidently asserted, in the pure Saxon of the sporting papers, that
+Prjevalsky's and the cave man's lot wouldn't be in it. Nevertheless a
+candid critic would be forced to admit that, in spite of clumsiness,
+they both mean staying.
+
+So much for the two sitters; now let us turn to the artist who sketched
+them. Who was he, and when did he live? Well, his name, like that of
+many other old masters, is quite unknown to us; but what does that
+matter so long as his work itself lives and survives? Like the Comtists
+he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The work, after all, is
+for the most part all we ever have to go upon. 'I have my own theory
+about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of
+'Alice in Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it is that
+they weren't really written by Homer, but by another person of the same
+name.' There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the
+authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if
+anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two unapproachable
+Greek epics; and all we know directly about my old master, viewed
+personally, is that he once carved with a rude flint flake on a fragment
+of reindeer horn these two clumsy prehistoric horses. Yet by putting two
+and two together we can make, not four, as might be naturally expected,
+but a fairly connected history of the old master himself and what Mr.
+Herbert Spencer would no doubt playfully term 'his environment.'
+
+The work of art was dug up from under the firm concreted floor of a cave
+in the Dordogne. That cave was once inhabited by the nameless artist
+himself, his wife, and family. It had been previously tenanted by
+various other early families, as well as by bears, who seem to have
+lived there in the intervals between the different human occupiers.
+Probably the bears ejected the men, and the men in turn ejected the
+bears, by the summary process of eating one another up. In any case the
+freehold of the cave was at last settled upon our early French artist.
+But the date of his occupancy is by no means recent; for since he lived
+there the long cold spell known as the Great Ice Age, or Glacial Epoch,
+has swept over the whole of Northern Europe, and swept before it the
+shivering descendants of my poor prehistoric old master. Now, how long
+ago was the Great Ice Age? As a rule, if you ask a geologist for a
+definite date, you will find him very chary of giving you a distinct
+answer. He knows that the chalk is older than the London clay, and the
+oolite than the chalk, and the red marl than the oolite; and he knows
+also that each of them took a very long time indeed to lay down, but
+exactly how long he has no notion. If you say to him, 'Is it a million
+years since the chalk was deposited?' he will answer, like the old lady
+of Prague, whose ideas were excessively vague, 'Perhaps.' If you suggest
+five millions, he will answer oracularly once more, 'Perhaps'; and if
+you go on to twenty millions, 'Perhaps,' with a broad smile, is still
+the only confession of faith that torture will wring out of him. But in
+the matter of the Glacial Epoch, a comparatively late and almost
+historical event, geologists have broken through their usual reserve on
+this chronological question and condescended to give us a numerical
+determination. And here is how Dr. Croll gets at it.
+
+Every now and again, geological evidence goes to show us, a long cold
+spell occurs in the northern or southern hemisphere. During these long
+cold spells the ice cap at the poles increases largely, till it spreads
+over a great part of what are now the temperate regions of the globe,
+and makes ice a mere drug in the market as far south as Covent Garden or
+the Halles at Paris. During the greatest extension of this ice sheet in
+the last glacial epoch, in fact, all England except a small
+south-western corner (about Torquay and Bournemouth) was completely
+covered by one enormous mass of glaciers, as is still the case with
+almost the whole of Greenland. The ice sheet, grinding slowly over the
+hills and rocks, smoothed and polished and striated their surfaces in
+many places till they resembled the _roches moutonnées_ similarly ground
+down in our own day by the moving ice rivers of Chamouni and
+Grindelwald. Now, since these great glaciations have occurred at various
+intervals in the world's past history, they must depend upon some
+frequently recurring cause. Such a cause, therefore, Dr. Croll began
+ingeniously to hunt about for.
+
+He found it at last in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit. This world
+of ours, though usually steady enough in its movements, is at times
+decidedly eccentric. Not that I mean to impute to our old and
+exceedingly respectable planet any occasional aberrations of intellect,
+or still less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and Venus);
+the word is here to be accepted strictly in its scientific or
+Pickwickian sense as implying merely an irregularity of movement, a
+slight wobbling out of the established path, a deviation from exact
+circularity. Owing to a combination of astronomical revolutions, the
+precession of the equinoxes and the motion of the aphelion (I am not
+going to explain them here; the names alone will be quite sufficient for
+most people; they will take the rest on trust)--owing to the
+combination of these profoundly interesting causes, I say, there occur
+certain periods in the world's life when for a very long time together
+(10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern hemisphere is warmer
+than the southern, or _vice versa_. Now, Dr. Croll has calculated that
+about 250,000 years ago this eccentricity of the earth's orbit was at
+its highest, so that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either
+hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it was that
+produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. They went on till about
+80,000 years ago, when they stopped short for the present, leaving the
+climate of Britain and the neighbouring continent with its existing
+inconvenient Laodicean temperature. And, as there are good reasons for
+believing that my old master and his contemporaries lived just before
+the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate
+descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of
+Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice
+sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere
+about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew
+Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that
+
+    He lived in the long long agoes;
+    'Twas the manner of primitive man.
+
+The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial Europe, just
+at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by
+the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the
+character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which
+species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously
+intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with the
+hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway
+lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits with the
+lion and the lynx, the leopard and the rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr.
+Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed out, we live to-day in a zoologically
+impoverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest, and most
+remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. And it was in all
+probability the coming on of the Ice Age that did the weeding. Our Zoo
+can boast no mammoth and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion has gone
+the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal ruminants of the
+Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of Seine. But our old
+master saw the last of some at least among those gigantic quadrupeds; it
+was his hand or that of one among his fellows that scratched the famous
+mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine and carved the figure of
+the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn ornaments of Laugerie Basse.
+Probably, therefore, he lived in the period immediately preceding the
+Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells
+with which the long secular winter of the northern hemisphere was then
+from time to time agreeably diversified.
+
+And what did the old master himself look like? Well, painters have
+always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have we not the
+familiar young Raffael, painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the
+Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, all
+flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man has drawn himself many
+times over, not indeed on this particular piece of reindeer horn, but on
+several other media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good
+copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave at
+Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massénat, where a very early pre-Glacial man
+is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting
+a flint-tipped javelin. In this, as in all other pictures of the same
+epoch, I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in the
+costume of Adam before the fall. Our old master's studies, in fact, are
+all in the nude. Primitive man was evidently unacquainted as yet with
+the use of clothing, though primitive woman, while still unclad, had
+already learnt how to heighten her natural charms by the simple addition
+of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, though dresses were still wholly
+unknown, rouge was even then extremely fashionable among French ladies,
+and lumps of the ruddle with which primitive woman made herself
+beautiful for ever are now to be discovered in the corner of the cave
+where she had her little prehistoric boudoir. To return to our hunter,
+however, who for aught we know to the contrary may be our old master
+himself in person, he is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with
+an arched back, recalling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head,
+long neck, pointed beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed legs. I
+fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man cut, on the whole, a very sorry
+and awkward figure.
+
+Was he black? That we don't certainly know, but all analogy would lead
+one to answer positively, Yes. White men seem, on the whole, to be a
+very recent and novel improvement on the original evolutionary pattern.
+At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of
+Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling
+and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us
+lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches,
+answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of
+the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old
+original hairy covering. The few skulls and other fragments of
+skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that our old master and his
+contemporaries much resembled in shape and build the Australian black
+fellows, though their foreheads were lower and more receding, while
+their front teeth still projected in huge fangs, faintly recalling the
+immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart from any theoretical
+considerations as to our probable descent (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin's
+hypothetical 'hairy arboreal quadrumanous ancestor,' whose existence may
+or may not be really true, there can be no doubt that the actual
+historical remains set before us pre-Glacial man as evidently
+approaching in several important respects the higher monkeys.
+
+It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the Time still
+retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old monkey-like
+progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly delineated
+for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the
+earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has admirably
+reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning with a little
+creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five toes to each hind
+foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically
+reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate stages show us an
+Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes on his front feet
+and three behind; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, with only three toes
+on the front foot, the two outer of which are smaller than the big
+middle one; and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one
+stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller ones, too short
+by far to reach the ground. In our own horse these lateral toes have
+become reduced to what are known by veterinaries as splint bones,
+combined with the canon in a single solidly morticed piece. But in the
+pre-Glacial horses the splint bones still generally remained quite
+distinct, thus pointing back to the still earlier period when they
+existed as two separate and independent side toes in the ancestral
+quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however, the splints are found
+united with the canons in a single piece, while conversely horses are
+sometimes, though very rarely, born at the present day with three-toed
+feet, exactly resembling those of their half-forgotten ancestor, the
+Pliocene hipparion.
+
+The reason why we know so much about the horses of the cave period is, I
+am bound to admit, simply and solely because the man of the period ate
+them. Hippophagy has always been popular in France; it was practised by
+pre-Glacial man in the caves of Périgord, and revived with immense
+enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards after the siege of Paris
+and the hunger of the Commune. The cave men hunted and killed the wild
+horse of their own times, and one of the best of their remaining works
+of art represents a naked hunter attacking two horses, while a huge
+snake winds itself unperceived behind close to his heel. In this rough
+prehistoric sketch one seems to catch some faint antique foreshadowing
+of the rude humour of the 'Petit Journal pour Rire.' Some archæologists
+even believe that the horse was domesticated by the cave men as a source
+of food, and argue that the familiarity with its form shown in the
+drawings could only have been acquired by people who knew the animal in
+its domesticated state; they declare that the cave man was obviously
+horsey. But all the indications seem to me to show that tame animals
+were quite unknown in the age of the cave men. The mammoth certainly was
+never domesticated; yet there is a famous sketch of the huge beast upon
+a piece of his own ivory, discovered in the cave of La Madelaine by
+Messrs. Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred times in works on
+archæology, which forms one of the finest existing relics of pre-Glacial
+art. In another sketch, less well known, but not unworthy of admiration,
+the early artist has given us with a few rapid but admirable strokes his
+own reminiscence of the effect produced upon him by the sudden onslaught
+of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide open, a perfect glimpse
+of elephantine fury. It forms a capital example of early impressionism,
+respectfully recommended to the favourable attention of Mr. J.M.
+Whistler.
+
+The reindeer, however, formed the favourite food and favourite model of
+the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the
+mammoth; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these early
+prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of palæolithic art is
+undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in
+Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing, in
+which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a Chinese
+artist would manage it at the present day. Another drawing of two
+reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and
+unearthed in one of the caves of Périgord, though far inferior to the
+Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit.
+The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for the
+head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of
+another. Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other extinct or
+existing animals are also found among the archaic sculptures. Probably
+all these creatures were used as food; and it is even doubtful whether
+the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. To quote Mr.
+Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, 'he lived in a cave by the seas;
+he lived upon oysters and foes.' The oysters are quite undoubted, and the
+foes may be inferred with considerable certainty.
+
+I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather
+question-begging style and title of primitive man. In reality, however,
+the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves to show
+how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive. You can't
+speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct
+animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense primordial.
+Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted cannibals;
+nevertheless they could design far better than the modern Esquimaux or
+Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilised being who is now
+calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own study.
+Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the hypothetical hairy
+quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have intervened innumerable
+generations of gradually improving intermediate forms. The old master,
+when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed, in his Swiss
+or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and necklet of bear's teeth
+dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is nevertheless in all essentials a
+completely evolved human being, with a whole past of slowly acquired
+culture lying dimly and mysteriously behind him. Already he had invented
+the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head,
+the bone harpoon, the barbed fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger,
+and the needle. Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements
+with artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with the
+figures of animals. I have no doubt that he even knew how to brew and to
+distil; and he was probably acquainted with the noble art of cookery as
+applied to the persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage
+cannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody has
+rightly remarked, is the first step on the road to civilisation.
+
+No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must go
+much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years with
+which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for
+pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably earlier
+fire-split flints which the Abbé Bourgeois--undaunted mortal!--ventured
+to discover among the Miocene strata of the _calcaire de Beauce_. Those
+flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and
+still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as
+genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial,
+one distinguished archæologist will not admit they can be in any way
+human; he will have it that they were really the handiwork of the great
+European anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothing
+more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does it matter whether
+you call the animal that fashioned these exceedingly rough and
+fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? The
+fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it.
+When you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed to
+manufacture himself a convenient implement, you may be sure that man,
+noble man, with all his glorious and admirable faculties--cannibal or
+otherwise--is lurking somewhere very close just round the corner. The
+more we examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does the
+conviction force itself upon us that he was very far indeed from being
+primitive--that we must push back the early history of our race not for
+250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years into
+the dim past of Tertiary ages.
+
+But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race by
+a very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he is
+separated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank space,
+the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial
+Epoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the
+relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows still
+cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. When the great ice sheet
+drove away palæolithic man--the man of the caves and the unwrought flint
+axes--from Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked
+savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, but armed
+only with roughly chipped stone implements, and wholly ignorant of
+taming animals or of the very rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing
+of the use of metals--_aurum irrepertum spernere fortior_--and he had
+not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone tomahawks to a
+finished edge. He couldn't make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery,
+and, if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing an
+intoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great
+anthropological truth, justly remarks, 'man, being reasonable, _must_
+get drunk'), he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from the
+capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of human
+being who alone inhabited France and England during the later
+pre-Glacial period.
+
+A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play-bills put it),
+and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile,
+loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet
+imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the
+important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made
+pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared away
+he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another man,
+physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow accumulations
+of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! how
+hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then comes the age
+of what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive antiquity--the age
+of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake
+dwellings. The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow,
+the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun to sow small
+ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley; they had learnt to weave flax
+and wear decent clothing: in a word, they had passed from the savage
+hunting condition to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists.
+That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose we must
+conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn't to be measured by mere
+calculations of ten or twenty centuries, but of ten or twenty thousand
+years. The perspective of the past is opening up rapidly before us; what
+looked quite close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere
+in the dim distance. Like our paleolithic artists, we fail to get the
+reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if we
+saw the whole scene properly foreshortened.
+
+On the table where I write there lie two paper-weights, preserving from
+the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which this
+essay is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet,
+produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows,
+and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age of
+the very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and
+it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of
+prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now
+serves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder, simpler, and
+more ineffective than any weapon or implement at present in use among
+the lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by
+the banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken forest
+two hundred thousand years ago and more; with it he has faced the angry
+cave bear and the original and only genuine British lion (for everybody
+knows that the existing mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a
+bastard modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I have
+very little doubt in my own mind that with it some æsthetic ancestor has
+brained and cut up for his use his next-door neighbour in the nearest
+cavern, and then carved upon his well-picked bones an interesting sketch
+of the entire performance. The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact,
+habitually drew their society pictures upon the personal remains of the
+mammoth or the man whom they wished to caricature in deathless
+bone-cuts. The other paper-weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk,
+belonging to the period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial
+Epoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels of
+civilisation with great accuracy. It is the military weapon of a trained
+barbaric warrior as opposed to the universal implement and utensil of a
+rude, solitary, savage hunter. Yet how curious it is that even in the
+midst of this 'so-called nineteenth century,' which perpetually
+proclaims itself an age of progress, men should still prefer to believe
+themselves inferior to their original ancestors, instead of being
+superior to them! The idea that man has risen is considered base,
+degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen is
+considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For
+myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucus
+that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men than ever were
+our fathers.
+
+
+
+
+BRITISH AND FOREIGN
+
+
+Strictly speaking, there is nothing really and truly British; everybody
+and everything is a naturalised alien. Viewed as Britons, we all of us,
+human and animal, differ from one another simply in the length of time
+we and our ancestors have continuously inhabited this favoured and foggy
+isle of Britain. Look, for example, at the men and women of us. Some of
+us, no doubt, are more or less remotely of Norman blood, and came over,
+like that noble family the Slys, with Richard Conqueror. Others of us,
+perhaps, are in the main Scandinavian, and date back a couple of
+generations earlier, to the bare-legged followers of Canute and Guthrum.
+Yet others, once more, are true Saxon Englishmen, descendants of
+Hengest, if there ever was a Hengest, or of Horsa, if a genuine Horsa
+ever actually existed. None of these, it is quite clear, have any just
+right or title to be considered in the last resort as true-born Britons;
+they are all of them just as much foreigners at bottom as the
+Spitalfields Huguenots or the Pembrokeshire Flemings, the Italian
+organ-boy and the Hindoo prince disguised as a crossing-sweeper. But
+surely the Welshman and the Highland Scot at least are undeniable
+Britishers, sprung from the soil and to the manner born! Not a bit of
+it; inexorable modern science, diving back remorselessly into the
+remoter past, traces the Cymry across the face of Germany, and fixes in
+shadowy hypothetical numbers the exact date, to a few centuries, of the
+first prehistoric Gaelic invasion. Even the still earlier brown
+Euskarians and yellow Mongolians, who held the land before the advent of
+the ancient Britons, were themselves immigrants; the very Autochthones
+in person turn out, on close inspection, to be vagabonds and wanderers
+and foreign colonists. In short, man as a whole is not an indigenous
+animal at all in the British Isles. Be he who he may, when we push his
+pedigree back to its prime original, we find him always arriving in the
+end by the Dover steamer or the Harwich packet. Five years, in fact, are
+quite sufficient to give him a legal title to letters of naturalisation,
+unless indeed he be a German grand-duke, in which case he can always
+become an Englishman off-hand by Act of Parliament.
+
+It is just the same with all the other animals and plants that now
+inhabit these isles of Britain. If there be anything at all with a claim
+to be considered really indigenous, it is the Scotch ptarmigan and the
+Alpine hare, the northern holygrass and the mountain flowers of the
+Highland summits. All the rest are sojourners and wayfarers, brought
+across as casuals, like the gipsies and the Oriental plane, at various
+times to the United Kingdom, some of them recently, some of them long
+ago, but not one of them (it seems), except the oyster, a true native.
+The common brown rat, for instance, as everybody knows, came over, not,
+it is true, with William the Conqueror, but with the Hanoverian dynasty
+and King George I. of blessed memory. The familiar cockroach, or 'black
+beetle,' of our lower regions, is an Oriental importation of the last
+century. The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard in
+the land, especially in some big London hotels. The Colorado beetle is
+hourly expected by Cunard steamer. The Canadian roadside erigeron is
+well established already in the remoter suburbs; the phylloxera battens
+on our hothouse vines; the American river-weed stops the navigation on
+our principal canals. The Ganges and the Mississippi have long since
+flooded the tawny Thames, as Juvenal's cynical friend declared the
+Syrian Orontes had flooded the Tiber. And what has thus been going on
+slowly within the memory of the last few generations has been going on
+constantly from time immemorial, and peopling Britain in all its parts
+with its now existing fauna and flora.
+
+But if all the plants and animals in our islands are thus ultimately
+imported, the question naturally arises, What was there in Great Britain
+and Ireland before any of their present inhabitants came to inherit
+them? The answer is, succinctly, Nothing. Or if this be a little too
+extreme, then let us imitate the modesty of Mr. Gilbert's hero and
+modify the statement into Hardly anything. In England, as in Northern
+Europe generally, modern history begins, not with the reign of Queen
+Elizabeth, but with the passing away of the Glacial Epoch. During that
+great age of universal ice our Britain, from end to end, was covered at
+various times by sea and by glaciers; it resembled on the whole the
+cheerful aspect of Spitzbergen or Nova Zembla at the present day. A few
+reindeer wandered now and then over its frozen shores; a scanty
+vegetation of the correlative reindeer-moss grew with difficulty under
+the sheets and drifts of endless snow; a stray walrus or an occasional
+seal basked in the chilly sunshine on the ice-bound coast. But during
+the greatest extension of the North-European ice-sheet it is probable
+that life in London was completely extinct; the metropolitan area did
+not even vegetate. Snow and snow and snow and snow was then the short
+sum-total of British scenery. Murray's Guides were rendered quite
+unnecessary, and penny ices were a drug in the market. England was given
+up to one unchanging universal winter.
+
+Slowly, however, times altered, as they are much given to doing; and a
+new era dawned upon Britain. The thermometer rose rapidly, or at least
+it would have risen, with effusion, if it had yet been invented. The
+land emerged from the sea, and southern plants and animals began to
+invade the area that was afterwards to be England, across the broad belt
+which then connected us with the Continental system. But in those days
+communications were slow and land transit difficult. You had to foot it.
+The European fauna and flora moved but gradually and tentatively
+north-westward, and before any large part of it could settle in England
+our island was finally cut off from the mainland by the long and gradual
+wearing away of the cliffs at Dover and Calais. That accounts for the
+comparative poverty of animal and vegetable life in England, and still
+more for its extreme paucity and meagreness in Ireland and the
+Highlands. It has been erroneously asserted, for example, that St.
+Patrick expelled snakes and lizards, frogs and toads, from the soil of
+Erin. This detail, as the French newspapers politely phrase it, is
+inexact. St. Patrick did not expel the reptiles, because there were
+never any reptiles in Ireland (except dynamiters) for him to expel. The
+creatures never got so far on their long and toilsome north-westward
+march before St. George's Channel intervened to prevent their passage
+across to Dublin. It is really, therefore, to St. George, rather than to
+St. Patrick, that the absence of toads and snakes from the soil of
+Ireland is ultimately due. The doubtful Cappadocian prelate is well
+known to have been always death on dragons and serpents.
+
+As long ago as the sixteenth century, indeed, Verstegan the antiquary
+clearly saw that the existence of badgers and foxes in England implied
+the former presence of a belt of land joining the British Islands to the
+Continent of Europe; for, as he acutely observed, nobody (before
+fox-hunting, at least) would ever have taken the trouble to bring them
+over. Still more does the presence in our islands of the red deer, and
+formerly of the wild white cattle, the wolf, the bear, and the wild
+boar, to say nothing of the beaver, the otter, the squirrel, and the
+weasel, prove that England was once conterminous with France or Belgium.
+At the very best of times, however, before Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel
+had killed positively the last 'last wolf' in Britain (several other
+'last wolves' having previously been despatched by various earlier
+intrepid exterminators), our English fauna was far from a rich one,
+especially as regards the larger quadrupeds. In bats, birds, and insects
+we have always done better, because to such creatures a belt of sea is
+not by any means an insuperable barrier; whereas in reptiles and
+amphibians, on the contrary, we have always been weak, seeing that most
+reptiles are bad swimmers, and very few can rival the late lamented
+Captain Webb in his feat of crossing the Channel, as Leander and Lord
+Byron did the Hellespont.
+
+Only one good-sized animal, so far as known, is now peculiar to the
+British Isles, and that is our familiar friend the red grouse of the
+Scotch moors. I doubt, however, whether even he is really indigenous in
+the strictest sense of the word: that is to say, whether he was evolved
+in and for these islands exclusively, as the moa and the apteryx were
+evolved for New Zealand, and the extinct dodo for Mauritius alone. It is
+far more probable that the red grouse is the original variety of the
+willow grouse of Scandinavia, which has retained throughout the year its
+old plumage, while its more northern cousins among the fiords and fjelds
+have taken, under stress of weather, to donning a complete white dress
+in winter, and a grey or speckled tourist suit for the summer season.
+
+Even since the insulation of Britain a great many new plants and
+animals have been added to our population, both by human design and in
+several other casual fashions. The fallow deer is said to have been
+introduced by the Romans, and domesticated ever since in the successive
+parks of Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman. The edible snail, still
+scattered thinly over our southern downs, and abundant at Box Hill and a
+few other spots in Surrey or Sussex, was brought over, they tell us, by
+the same luxurious Italian epicures, and is even now confined,
+imaginative naturalists declare, to the immediate neighbourhood of Roman
+stations. The mediæval monks, in like manner, introduced the carp for
+their Friday dinners. One of our commonest river mussels at the present
+day did not exist in England at all a century ago, but was ferried
+hither from the Volga, clinging to the bottoms of vessels from the Black
+Sea, and has now spread itself through all our brooks and streams to the
+very heart and centre of England. Thus, from day to day, as in society
+at large, new introductions constantly take place, and old friends die
+out for ever. The brown rat replaces the old English black rat; strange
+weeds kill off the weeds of ancient days; fresh flies and grubs and
+beetles crop up, and disturb the primitive entomological balance. The
+bustard is gone from Salisbury Plain; the fenland butterflies have
+disappeared with the drainage of the fens. In their place the red-legged
+partridge invades Norfolk; the American black bass is making himself
+quite at home, with Yankee assurance, in our sluggish rivers; and the
+spoonbill is nesting of its own accord among the warmer corners of the
+Sussex downs.
+
+In the plant world, substitution often takes place far more rapidly. I
+doubt whether the stinging nettle, which renders picnicking a nuisance
+in England, is truly indigenous; certainly the two worst kinds, the
+smaller nettle and the Roman nettle, are quite recent denizens, never
+straying, even at the present day, far from the precincts of farmyards
+and villages. The shepherd's-purse and many other common garden weeds of
+cultivation are of Eastern origin, and came to us at first with the
+seed-corn and the peas from the Mediterranean region. Corn-cockles and
+corn-flowers are equally foreign and equally artificial; even the
+scarlet poppy, seldom found except in wheat-fields or around waste
+places in villages, has probably followed the course of tillage from
+some remote and ancient Eastern origin. There is a pretty blue veronica
+which was unknown in England some thirty years since, but which then
+began to spread in gardens, and is now one of the commonest and most
+troublesome weeds throughout the whole country. Other familiar wild
+plants have first been brought over as garden flowers. There is the
+wall-flower, for instance, now escaped from cultivation in every part of
+Britain, and mantling with its yellow bunches both old churches and
+houses and also the crannies of the limestone cliffs around half the
+shores of England. The common stock has similarly overrun the sea-front
+of the Isle of Wight; the monkey-plant, originally a Chilian flower, has
+run wild in many boggy spots in England and Wales; and a North American
+balsam, seldom cultivated even in cottage gardens, has managed to
+establish itself in profuse abundance along the banks of the Wey about
+Guildford and Godalming. One little garden linaria, at first employed as
+an ornament for hanging-baskets, has become so common on old walls and
+banks as to be now considered a mere weed, and exterminated accordingly
+by fashionable gardeners. Such are the unaccountable reverses of
+fortune, that one age will pay fifty guineas a bulb for a plant which
+the next age grubs up unanimously as a vulgar intruder. White of
+Selborne noticed with delight in his own kitchen that rare insect, the
+Oriental cockroach, lately imported; and Mr. Brewer observed with joy
+in his garden at Reigate the blue Buxbaum speedwell, which is now the
+acknowledged and hated pest of the Surrey agriculturist.
+
+The history of some of these waifs and strays which go to make up the
+wider population of Britain is indeed sufficiently remarkable. Like all
+islands, England has a fragmentary fauna and flora, whose members have
+often drifted towards it in the most wonderful and varied manner.
+Sometimes they bear witness to ancient land connections, as in the case
+of the spotted Portuguese slug which Professor Allman found calmly
+disporting itself on the basking cliffs in the Killarney district. In
+former days, when Spain and Ireland joined hands in the middle of the
+Bay of Biscay, the ancestors of this placid Lusitanian mollusk must have
+ranged (good word to apply to slugs) from the groves of Cintra to the
+Cove of Cork. But, as time rolled on, the cruel crawling sea rolled on
+also, and cut away all the western world from the foot of the Asturias
+to Macgillicuddy's Reeks. So the spotted slug continued to survive in
+two distinct and divided bodies, a large one in South-western Europe,
+and a small isolated colony, all alone by itself, around the Kerry
+mountains and the Lakes of Killarney. At other times pure accident
+accounts for the presence of a particular species in the mainlands of
+Britain. For example, the Bermuda grass-lily, a common American plant,
+is known in a wild state nowhere in Europe save at a place called
+Woodford, in county Galway. Nobody ever planted it there; it has simply
+sprung up from some single seed, carried over, perhaps, on the feet of a
+bird, or cast ashore by the Gulf Stream on the hospitable coast of
+Western Ireland. Yet there it has flourished and thriven ever since, a
+naturalised British subject of undoubted origin, without ever spreading
+to north or south above a few miles from its adopted habitat.
+
+There are several of these unconscious American importations in various
+parts of Britain, some of them, no doubt, brought over with seed-corn or
+among the straw of packing-cases, but others unconnected in any way with
+human agency, and owing their presence here to natural causes. That
+pretty little Yankee weed, the claytonia, now common in parts of
+Lancashire and Oxfordshire, first made its appearance amongst us, I
+believe, by its seeds being accidentally included with the sawdust in
+which Wenham Lake ice is packed for transport. The Canadian river-weed
+is known first to have escaped from the botanical gardens at Cambridge,
+whence it spread rapidly through the congenial dykes and sluices of the
+fen country, and so into the entire navigable network of the Midland
+counties. But there are other aliens of older settlement amongst us,
+aliens of American origin which nevertheless arrived in Britain, in all
+probability, long before Columbus ever set foot on the low basking
+sandbank of Cat Island. Such is the jointed pond-sedge of the Hebrides,
+a water-weed found abundantly in the lakes and tarns of the Isle of
+Skye, Mull and Coll, and the west coast of Ireland, but occurring
+nowhere else throughout the whole expanse of Europe or Asia. How did it
+get there? Clearly its seeds were either washed by the waves or carried
+by birds, and thus deposited on the nearest European shores to America.
+But if Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace had been alive in pre-Columban days
+(which, as Euclid remarks, is absurd), he would readily have inferred,
+from the frequent occurrence of such unknown plants along the western
+verge of Britain, that a great continent lay unexplored to the westward,
+and would promptly have proceeded to discover and annex it. As Mr.
+Wallace was not yet born, however, Columbus took a mean advantage over
+him, and discovered it first by mere right of primogeniture.
+
+In other cases, the circumstances under which a particular plant appears
+in England are often very suspicious. Take the instance of the
+belladonna, or deadly nightshade, an extremely rare British species,
+found only in the immediate neighbourhood of old castles and monastic
+buildings. Belladonna, of course, is a deadly poison, and was much used
+in the half-magical, half-criminal sorceries of the Middle Ages. Did you
+wish to remove a troublesome rival or an elder brother, you treated him
+to a dose of deadly nightshade. Yet why should it, in company with many
+other poisonous exotics, be found so frequently around the ruins of
+monasteries? Did the holy fathers--but no, the thought is too
+irreverent. Let us keep our illusions, and forget the friar and the
+apothecary in 'Romeo and Juliet.'
+
+Belladonna has never fairly taken root in English soil. It remains, like
+the Roman snail and the Portuguese slug, a mere casual straggler about
+its ancient haunts. But there are other plants which have fairly
+established their claim to be considered as native-born Britons, though
+they came to us at first as aliens and colonists from foreign parts.
+Such, to take a single case, is the history of the common alexanders,
+now a familiar weed around villages and farmyards, but only introduced
+into England as a pot-herb about the eighth or ninth century. It was
+long grown in cottage gardens for table purposes, but has for ages been
+superseded in that way by celery. Nevertheless, it continues to grow all
+about our lanes and hedges, side by side with another quaintly-named
+plant, bishop-weed or gout-weed, whose very titles in themselves bear
+curious witness to its original uses in this isle of Britain. I don't
+know why, but it is an historical fact that the early prelates of the
+English Church, saintly or otherwise, were peculiarly liable to that
+very episcopal disease, the gout. Whether their frequent fasting
+produced this effect; whether, as they themselves piously alleged, it
+was due to constant kneeling on the cold stones of churches; or whether,
+as their enemies rather insinuated, it was due in greater measure to the
+excellent wines presented to them by their Italian _confrères_, is a
+minute question to be decided by Mr. Freeman, not by the present humble
+inquirer. But the fact remains that bishops and gout got indelibly
+associated in the public mind; that the episcopal toes were looked upon
+as especially subject to that insidious disease up to the very end of
+the last century; and that they do say the bishops even now--but I
+refrain from the commission of _scandalum magnatum_. Anyhow, this
+particular weed was held to be a specific for the bishop's evil; and,
+being introduced and cultivated for the purpose, it came to be known
+indifferently to herbalists as bishop-weed and gout-weed. It has now
+long since ceased to be a recognised member of the British
+Pharmacopoeia, but, having overrun our lanes and thickets in its
+flush period, it remains to this day a visible botanical and
+etymological memento of the past twinges of episcopal remorse.
+
+Taken as a whole, one may fairly say that the total population of the
+British Isles consists mainly of three great elements. The first and
+oldest--the only one with any real claim to be considered as truly
+native--is the cold Northern, Alpine and Arctic element, comprising such
+animals as the white hare of Scotland, the ptarmigan, the pine marten,
+and the capercailzie--the last once extinct, and now reintroduced into
+the Highlands as a game bird. This very ancient fauna and flora, left
+behind soon after the Glacial Epoch, and perhaps in part a relic of the
+type which still struggled on in favoured spots during that terrible
+period of universal ice and snow, now survives for the most part only in
+the extreme north and on the highest and chilliest mountain-tops, where
+it has gradually been driven, like tourists in August, by the increasing
+warmth and sultriness of the southern lowlands. The summits of the
+principal Scotch hills are occupied by many Arctic plants, now slowly
+dying out, but lingering yet as last relics of that old native British
+flora. The Alpine milk vetch thus loiters among the rocks of Braemar and
+Clova; the Arctic brook-saxifrage flowers but sparingly near the summit
+of Ben Lawers, Ben Nevis, and Lochnagar; its still more northern ally,
+the drooping saxifrage, is now extinct in all Britain, save on a single
+snowy Scotch height, where it now rarely blossoms, and will soon become
+altogether obsolete. There are other northern plants of this first and
+oldest British type, like the Ural oxytrope, the cloudberry, and the
+white dryas, which remain as yet even in the moors of Yorkshire, or over
+considerable tracts in the Scotch Highlands; there are others restricted
+to a single spot among the Welsh hills, an isolated skerry among the
+outer Hebrides, or a solitary summit in the Lake District. But wherever
+they linger, these true-born Britons of the old rock are now but
+strangers and outcasts in the land; the intrusive foreigner has driven
+them to die on the cold mountain-tops, as the Celt drove the Mongolian
+to the hills, and the Saxon, in turn, has driven the Celt to the
+Highlands and the islands. Yet as late as the twelfth century itself,
+even the true reindeer, the Arctic monarch of the Glacial Epoch, was
+still hunted by Norwegian jarls of Orkney on the mainland of Caithness
+and Sutherlandshire.
+
+Second in age is the warm western and south-western type, the type
+represented by the Portuguese slug, the arbutus trees and Mediterranean
+heaths of the Killarney district, the flora of Cornwall and the Scilly
+Isles, and the peculiar wild flowers of South Wales, Devonshire, and the
+west country generally. This class belongs by origin to the submerged
+land of Lyonesse, the warm champaign country that once spread westward
+over the Bay of Biscay, and derived from the Gulf Stream the genial
+climate still preserved by its last remnants at Tresco and St. Mary's.
+The animals belonging to this secondary stratum of our British
+population are few and rare, but of its plants there are not a few, some
+of them extending over the whole western shores of England, Wales,
+Scotland, and Ireland, wherever they are washed by the Gulf Stream, and
+others now confined to particular spots, often with the oddest apparent
+capriciousness. Thus, two or three southern types of clover are peculiar
+to the Lizard Point, in Cornwall; a little Spanish and Italian
+restharrow has got stranded in the Channel Islands and on the Mull of
+Galloway; the spotted rock-rose of the Mediterranean grows only in
+Kerry, Galway, and Anglesea; while other plants of the same warm habit
+are confined to such spots as Torquay, Babbicombe, Dawlish, Cork,
+Swansea, Axminster, and the Scilly Isles. Of course, all peninsulas and
+islands are warmer in temperature than inland places, and so these
+relics of the lost Lyonesse have survived here and there in Cornwall,
+Carnarvonshire, Kerry, and other very projecting headlands long after
+they have died out altogether from the main central mass of Britain.
+South-western Ireland in particular is almost Portuguese in the general
+aspect of its fauna and flora.
+
+Third and latest of all in time, though almost contemporary with the
+southern type, is the central European or Germanic element in our
+population. Sad as it is to confess it, the truth must nevertheless be
+told, that our beasts and birds, our plants and flowers, are for the
+most part of purely Teutonic origin. Even as the rude and hard-headed
+Anglo-Saxon has driven the gentle, poetical, and imaginative Celt ever
+westward before him into the hills and the sea, so the rude and vigorous
+Germanic beasts and weeds have driven the gentler and softer southern
+types into Wales and Cornwall, Galloway and Connemara. It is to the
+central European population that we owe or owed the red deer, the wild
+boar, the bear, the wolf, the beaver, the fox, the badger, the otter,
+and the squirrel. It is to the central European flora that we owe the
+larger part of the most familiar plants in all eastern and southeastern
+England. They crossed in bands over the old land belt before Britain was
+finally insulated, and they have gone on steadily ever since, with true
+Teutonic persistence, overrunning the land and pushing slowly westward,
+like all other German bands before or since, to the detriment and
+discomfort of the previous inhabitants. Let us humbly remember that we
+are all of us at bottom foreigners alike, but that it is the Teutonic
+English, the people from the old Low Dutch fatherland by the Elbe, who
+have finally given to this isle its name of England, and to every one of
+us, Celt or Teuton, their own Teutonic name of Englishmen. We are at
+best, as an irate Teuton once remarked, 'nozzing but segond-hand
+Chermans.' In the words of a distinguished modern philologist of our own
+blood, 'English is Dutch, spoken with a Welsh accent.'
+
+
+
+
+THUNDERBOLTS
+
+
+The subject of thunderbolts is a very fascinating one, and all the more
+so because there are no such things in existence at all as thunderbolts
+of any sort. Like the snakes of Iceland, their whole history might, from
+the positive point of view at least, be summed up in the simple
+statement of their utter nonentity. But does that do away in the least,
+I should like to know, with their intrinsic interest and importance? Not
+a bit of it. It only adds to the mystery and charm of the whole subject.
+Does anyone feel as keenly interested in any real living cobra or
+anaconda as in the non-existent great sea-serpent? Are ghosts and
+vampires less attractive objects of popular study than cats and donkeys?
+Can the present King of Abyssinia, interviewed by our own correspondent,
+equal the romantic charm of Prester John, or the butcher in the next
+street rival the personality of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne,
+Baronet? No, the real fact is this: if there _were_ thunderbolts, the
+question of their nature and action would be a wholly dull, scientific,
+and priggish one; it is their unreality alone that invests them with all
+the mysterious weirdness of pure fiction. Lightning, now, is a common
+thing that one reads about wearily in the books on electricity, a mere
+ordinary matter of positive and negative, density and potential, to be
+measured in ohms (whatever they may be), and partially imitated with
+Leyden jars and red sealing-wax apparatus. Why, did not Benjamin
+Franklin, a fat old gentleman in ill-fitting small clothes, bring it
+down from the clouds with a simple door-key, somewhere near
+Philadelphia? and does not Mr. Robert Scott (of the Meteorological
+Office) calmly predict its probable occurrence within the next
+twenty-four hours in his daily report, as published regularly in the
+morning papers? This is lightning, mere vulgar lightning, a simple
+result of electrical conditions in the upper atmosphere, inconveniently
+connected with algebraical formulas in _x_, _y_, _z_, with horrid
+symbols interspersed in Greek letters. But the real thunderbolts of
+Jove, the weapons that the angry Zeus, or Thor, or Indra hurls down upon
+the head of the trembling malefactor--how infinitely grander, more
+fearsome, and more mysterious!
+
+And yet even nowadays, I believe, there are a large number of
+well-informed people, who have passed the sixth standard, taken prizes
+at the Oxford Local, and attended the dullest lectures of the Society
+for University Extension, but who nevertheless in some vague and dim
+corner of their consciousness retain somehow a lingering faith in the
+existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in its entirety the
+simple truth that lightning is the reality of which thunderbolts are the
+mythical, or fanciful, or verbal representation. We all of us know now
+that lightning is a mere flash of electric light and heat; that it has
+no solid existence or core of any sort; in short, that it is dynamical
+rather than material, a state or movement rather than a body or thing.
+To be sure, local newspapers still talk with much show of learning about
+'the electric fluid' which did such remarkable damage last week upon the
+slated steeple of Peddlington Torpida Church; but the well-crammed
+schoolboy of the present day has long since learned that the electric
+fluid is an exploded fallacy, and that the lightning which pulled the
+ten slates off the steeple in question was nothing more in its real
+nature than a very big immaterial spark. However, the word thunderbolt
+has survived to us from the days when people still believed that the
+thing which did the damage during a thunderstorm was really and truly a
+gigantic white-hot bolt or arrow; and, as there is a natural tendency in
+human nature to fit an existence to every word, people even now continue
+to imagine that there must be actually something or other somewhere
+called a thunderbolt. They don't figure this thing to themselves as
+being identical with the lightning; on the contrary, they seem to regard
+it as something infinitely rarer, more terrible, and more mystic; but
+they firmly hold that thunderbolts do exist in real life, and even
+sometimes assert that they themselves have positively seen them.
+
+But, if seeing is believing, it is equally true, as all who have looked
+into the phenomena of spiritualism and 'psychical research' (modern
+English for ghost-hunting) know too well, that believing is seeing also.
+The origin of the faith in thunderbolts must be looked for (like the
+origin of the faith in ghosts and 'psychical phenomena') far back in the
+history of our race. The noble savage, at that early period when wild in
+woods he ran, naturally noticed the existence of thunder and lightning,
+because thunder and lightning are things that forcibly obtrude
+themselves upon the attention of the observer, however little he may by
+nature be scientifically inclined. Indeed, the noble savage, sleeping
+naked on the bare ground, in tropical countries where thunder occurs
+almost every night on an average, was sure to be pretty often awaked
+from his peaceful slumbers by the torrents of rain that habitually
+accompany thunderstorms in the happy realms of everlasting dog-days.
+Primitive man was thereupon compelled to do a little philosophising on
+his own account as to the cause and origin of the rumbling and flashing
+which he saw so constantly around him. Naturally enough, he concluded
+that the sound must be the voice of somebody; and that the fiery shaft,
+whose effects he sometimes noted upon trees, animals, and his
+fellow-man, must be the somebody's arrow. It is immaterial from this
+point of view whether, as the scientific anthropologists hold, he was
+led to his conception of these supernatural personages from his prior
+belief in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor Max Müller will
+have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive savage breast toward
+the Infinite and the Unknowable (which he would doubtless have spelt,
+like the Professor, with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with
+the intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet); but this much at least
+is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder and the lightning as
+in some sense the voice and the arrows of an aërial god.
+
+Now, this idea about the arrows is itself very significant of the mental
+attitude of primitive man, and of the way that mental attitude has
+coloured all subsequent thinking and superstition upon this very
+subject. Curiously enough, to the present day the conception of the
+thunderbolt is essentially one of a _bolt_--that is to say, an arrow, or
+at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (and there are plenty
+of them lying about casually in country houses and local museums) are
+more or less arrow-like in shape and appearance; some of them, indeed,
+as we shall see by-and-by, are the actual stone arrowheads of primitive
+man himself in person. Of course the noble savage was himself in the
+constant habit of shooting at animals and enemies with a bow and arrow.
+When, then, he tried to figure to himself the angry god, seated in the
+storm-clouds, who spoke with such a loud rumbling voice, and killed
+those who displeased him with his fiery darts, he naturally thought of
+him as using in his cloudy home the familiar bow and arrow of this
+nether planet. To us nowadays, if we were to begin forming the idea for
+ourselves all over again _de novo_, it would be far more natural to
+think of the thunder as the noise of a big gun, of the lightning as the
+flash of the powder, and of the supposed 'bolt' as a shell or bullet.
+There is really a ridiculous resemblance between a thunderstorm and a
+discharge of artillery. But the old conception derived from so many
+generations of primitive men has held its own against such mere modern
+devices as gunpowder and rifle balls; and none of the objects commonly
+shown as thunderbolts are ever round: they are distinguished, whatever
+their origin, by the common peculiarity that they more or less closely
+resemble a dart or arrowhead.
+
+Let us begin, then, by clearly disembarrassing our minds of any
+lingering belief in the existence of thunderbolts. There are absolutely
+no such things known to science. The two real phenomena that underlie
+the fable are simply thunder and lightning. A thunderstorm is merely a
+series of electrical discharges between one cloud and another, or
+between clouds and the earth; and these discharges manifest themselves
+to our senses under two forms--to the eye as lightning, to the ear as
+thunder. All that passes in each case is a huge spark--a commotion, not
+a material object. It is in principle just like the spark from an
+electrical machine; but while the most powerful machine of human
+construction will only send a spark for three feet, the enormous
+electrical apparatus provided for us by nature will send one for four,
+five, or even ten miles. Though lightning when it touches the earth
+always seems to us to come from the clouds to the ground, it is by no
+means certain that the real course may not at least occasionally be in
+the opposite direction. All we know is that sometimes there is an
+instantaneous discharge between one cloud and another, and sometimes an
+instantaneous discharge between a cloud and the earth.
+
+But this idea of a mere passage of highly concentrated energy from one
+point to another was far too abstract, of course, for primitive man, and
+is far too abstract even now for nine out of ten of our
+fellow-creatures. Those who don't still believe in the bodily
+thunderbolt, a fearsome aërial weapon which buries itself deep in the
+bosom of the earth, look upon lightning as at least an embodiment of the
+electric fluid, a long spout or line of molten fire, which is usually
+conceived of as striking the ground and then proceeding to hide itself
+under the roots of a tree or beneath the foundations of a tottering
+house. Primitive man naturally took to the grosser and more material
+conception. He figured to himself the thunderbolt as a barbed arrowhead;
+and the forked zigzag character of the visible flash, as it darts
+rapidly from point to point, seemed almost inevitably to suggest to him
+the barbs, as one sees them represented on all the Greek and Roman gems,
+in the red right hand of the angry Jupiter.
+
+The thunderbolt being thus an accepted fact, it followed naturally that
+whenever any dart-like object of unknown origin was dug up out of the
+ground, it was at once set down as being a thunderbolt; and, on the
+other hand, the frequent occurrence of such dart-like objects, precisely
+where one might expect to find them in accordance with the theory,
+necessarily strengthened the belief itself. So commonly are thunderbolts
+picked up to the present day that to disbelieve in them seems to many
+country people a piece of ridiculous and stubborn scepticism. Why,
+they've ploughed up dozens of them themselves in their time, and just
+about the very place where the thunderbolt struck the old elm-tree two
+years ago, too.
+
+The most favourite form of thunderbolt is the polished stone hatchet or
+'celt' of the newer stone age men. I have never heard the very rude
+chipped and unpolished axes of the older drift men or cave men described
+as thunderbolts: they are too rough and shapeless ever to attract
+attention from any except professed archæologists. Indeed, the wicked
+have been known to scoff at them freely as mere accidental lumps of
+broken flint, and to deride the notion of their being due in any way to
+deliberate human handicraft. These are the sort of people who would
+regard a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the shapely
+stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and herdsman is usually a
+beautifully polished wedge-shaped piece of solid greenstone; and its
+edge has been ground to such a delicate smoothness that it seems rather
+like a bit of nature's exquisite workmanship than a simple relic of
+prehistoric man. There is something very fascinating about the naïf
+belief that the neolithic axe is a genuine unadulterated thunderbolt.
+You dig it up in the ground exactly where you would expect a thunderbolt
+(if there were such things) to be. It is heavy, smooth, well shaped, and
+neatly pointed at one end. If it could really descend in a red-hot state
+from the depths of the sky, launched forth like a cannon-ball by some
+fierce discharge of heavenly artillery, it would certainly prove a very
+formidable weapon indeed; and one could easily imagine it scoring the
+bark of some aged oak, or tearing off the tiles from a projecting
+turret, exactly as the lightning is so well known to do in this prosaic
+workaday world of ours. In short, there is really nothing on earth
+against the theory of the stone axe being a true thunderbolt, except the
+fact that it unfortunately happens to be a neolithic hatchet.
+
+But the course of reasoning by which we discover the true nature of the
+stone axe is not one that would in any case appeal strongly to the
+fancy or the intelligence of the British farmer. It is no use telling
+him that whenever one opens a barrow of the stone age one is pretty sure
+to find a neolithic axe and a few broken pieces of pottery beside the
+mouldering skeleton of the old nameless chief who lies there buried. The
+British farmer will doubtless stolidly retort that thunderbolts often
+strike the tops of hills, which are just the places where barrows and
+tumuli (tumps, he calls them) most do congregate; and that as to the
+skeleton, isn't it just as likely that the man was killed by the
+thunderbolt as that the thunderbolt was made by a man? Ay, and a sight
+likelier, too.
+
+All the world over, this simple and easy belief, that the buried stone
+axe is a thunderbolt, exists among Europeans and savages alike. In the
+West of England, the labourers will tell you that the thunder-axes they
+dig up fell from the sky. In Brittany, says Mr. Tylor, the old man who
+mends umbrellas at Carnac, beside the mysterious stone avenues of that
+great French Stonehenge, inquires on his rounds for _pierres de
+tonnerre_, which of course are found with suspicious frequency in the
+immediate neighbourhood of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese
+Encyclopædia we are told that the 'lightning stones' have sometimes the
+shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and sometimes that of a
+mallet. And then, by a curious misapprehension, the sapient author of
+that work goes on to observe that these lightning stones are used by the
+wandering Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never seems to have
+struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols made the lightning
+stones instead of digging them up out of the earth. So deeply had the
+idea of the thunderbolt buried itself in the recesses of his soul, that
+though a neighbouring people were still actually manufacturing stone
+axes almost under his very eyes, he reversed mentally the entire
+process, and supposed they dug up the thunderbolts which he saw them
+using, and employed them as common hatchets. This is one of the finest
+instances on record of the popular figure which grammarians call the
+_hysteron proteron_, and ordinary folk describe as putting the cart
+before the horse. Just so, while in some parts of Brazil the Indians are
+still laboriously polishing their stone hatchets, in other parts the
+planters are digging up the precisely similar stone hatchets of earlier
+generations, and religiously preserving them in their houses as
+undoubted thunderbolts. I have myself had pressed upon my attention as
+genuine lightning stones, in the West Indies, the exquisitely polished
+greenstone tomahawks of the old Carib marauders. But then, in this
+matter, I am pretty much in the position of that philosophic sceptic
+who, when he was asked by a lady whether he believed in ghosts, answered
+wisely, 'No, madam, I have seen by far too many of them.'
+
+One of the finest accounts ever given of the nature of thunderbolts is
+that mentioned by Adrianus Tollius in his edition of 'Boethius on Gems.'
+He gives illustrations of some neolithic axes and hammers, and then
+proceeds to state that in the opinion of philosophers they are generated
+in the sky by a fulgureous exhalation (whatever that may look like)
+conglobed in a cloud by a circumfixed humour, and baked hard, as it
+were, by intense heat. The weapon, it seems, then becomes pointed by the
+damp mixed with it flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end
+denser; while the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks out
+through the cloud, and makes thunder and lightning. A very lucid
+explanation certainly, but rendered a little difficult of apprehension
+by the effort necessary for realising in a mental picture the
+conglobation of a fulgureous exhalation by a circumfixed humour.
+
+One would like to see a drawing of the process, though the sketch would
+probably much resemble the picture of a muchness, so admirably described
+by the mock turtle. The excellent Tollius himself, however, while
+demurring on the whole to this hypothesis of the philosophers, bases his
+objection mainly on the ground that, if this were so, then it is odd the
+thunderbolts are not round, but wedge-shaped, and that they have holes
+in them, and those holes not equal throughout, but widest at the ends.
+As a matter of fact, Tollius has here hit the right nail on the head
+quite accidentally; for the holes are really there, of course, to
+receive the haft of the axe or hammer. But if they were truly
+thunderbolts, and if the bolts were shafted, then the holes would have
+been lengthwise, as in an arrowhead, not crosswise, as in an axe or
+hammer. Which is a complete _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophic
+opinion.
+
+Some of the cerauniæ, says Pliny, are like hatchets. He would have been
+nearer the mark if he had said 'are hatchets' outright. But this
+_aperçu_, which was to Pliny merely a stray suggestion, became to the
+northern peoples a firm article of belief, and caused them to represent
+to themselves their god Thor or Thunor as armed, not with a bolt, but
+with an axe or hammer. Etymologically Thor, Thunor, and thunder are the
+self-same word; but while the southern races looked upon Zeus or Indra
+as wielding his forked darts in his red right hand, the northern races
+looked upon the Thunder-god as hurling down an angry hammer from his
+seat in the clouds. There can be but little doubt that the very notion
+of Thor's hammer itself was derived from the shape of the supposed
+thunderbolt, which the Scandinavians and Teutons rightly saw at once to
+be an axe or mallet, not an arrowhead. The 'fiery axe' of Thunor is a
+common metaphor in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Thus, Thor's hammer is itself
+merely the picture which our northern ancestors formed to themselves,
+by compounding the idea of thunder and lightning with the idea of the
+polished stone hatchets they dug up among the fields and meadows.
+
+Flint arrowheads of the stone age are less often taken for thunderbolts,
+no doubt because they are so much smaller that they look quite too
+insignificant for the weapons of an angry god. They are more frequently
+described as fairy-darts or fairy-bolts. Still, I have known even
+arrowheads regarded as thunderbolts, and preserved superstitiously
+under that belief. In Finland, stone arrows are universally so viewed;
+and the rainbow is looked upon as the bow of Tiermes, the thunder-god,
+who shoots with it the guilty sorcerers.
+
+But why should thunderbolts, whether stone axes or flint arrowheads, be
+preserved, not merely as curiosities, but from motives of superstition?
+The reason is a simple one. Everybody knows that in all magical
+ceremonies it is necessary to have something belonging to the person you
+wish to conjure against, in order to make your spells effectual. A bone,
+be it but a joint of the little finger, is sufficient to raise the ghost
+to which it once belonged; cuttings of hair or clippings of nails are
+enough to put their owner magically in your power; and that is the
+reason why, if you are a prudent person, you will always burn all such
+off-castings of your body, lest haply an enemy should get hold of them,
+and cast the evil eye upon you with their potent aid. In the same way,
+if you can lay hands upon anything that once belonged to an elf, such as
+a fairy-bolt or flint arrowhead, you can get its former possessor to do
+anything you wish by simply rubbing it and calling upon him to appear.
+This is the secret of half the charms and amulets in existence, most of
+which are either real old arrowheads, or carnelians cut in the same
+shape, which has now mostly degenerated from the barb to the
+conventional heart, and been mistakenly associated with the idea of
+love. This is the secret, too, of all the rings, lamps, gems, and boxes,
+possession of which gives a man power over fairies, spirits, gnomes, and
+genii. All magic proceeds upon the prime belief that you must possess
+something belonging to the person you wish to control, constrain, or
+injure. And, failing anything else, you must at least have a wax image
+of him, which you call by his name, and use as his substitute in your
+incantations.
+
+On this primitive principle, possession of a thunderbolt gives you some
+sort of hold, as it were, over the thunder-god himself in person. If you
+keep a thunderbolt in your house it will never be struck by lightning.
+In Shetland, stone axes are religiously preserved in every cottage as a
+cheap and simple substitute for lightning-rods. In Cornwall, the stone
+hatchets and arrowheads not only guard the house from thunder, but also
+act as magical barometers, changing colour with the changes of the
+weather, as if in sympathy with the temper of the thunder-god. In
+Germany, the house where a thunderbolt is kept is safe from the storm;
+and the bolt itself begins to sweat on the approach of lightning-clouds.
+Nay, so potent is the protection afforded by a thunderbolt that where
+the lightning has once struck it never strikes again; the bolt already
+buried in the soil seems to preserve the surrounding place from the
+anger of the deity. Old and pagan in their nature as are these beliefs,
+they yet survive so thoroughly into Christian times that I have seen a
+stone hatchet built into the steeple of a church to protect it from
+lightning. Indeed, steeples have always of course attracted the electric
+discharge to a singular degree by their height and tapering form,
+especially before the introduction of lighting-rods; and it was a sore
+trial of faith to mediæval reasoners to understand why heaven should
+hurl its angry darts so often against the towers of its very own
+churches. In the Abruzzi the flint axe has actually been Christianised
+into St. Paul's arrows--_saetti de San Paolo_. Families hand down the
+miraculous stones from father to son as a precious legacy; and mothers
+hang them on their children's necks side by side with medals of saints
+and madonnas, which themselves are hardly so highly prized as the stones
+that fall from heaven.
+
+Another and very different form of thunderbolt is the belemnite, a
+common English fossil often preserved in houses in the west country with
+the same superstitious reverence as the neolithic hatchets. The very
+form of the belemnite at once suggests the notion of a dart or
+lance-head, which has gained for it its scientific name. At the present
+day, when all our girls go to Girton and enter for the classical tripos,
+I need hardly translate the word belemnite 'for the benefit of the
+ladies,' as people used to do in the dark and unemancipated eighteenth
+century; but as our boys have left off learning Greek just as their
+sisters are beginning to act the 'Antigone' at private theatricals, I
+may perhaps be pardoned if I explain, 'for the benefit of the
+gentlemen,' that the word is practically equivalent to javelin-fossil.
+The belemnites are the internal shells of a sort of cuttle-fish which
+swam about in enormous numbers in the seas whose sediment forms our
+modern lias, oolite, and gault. A great many different species are known
+and have acquired charming names in very doubtful Attic at the hands of
+profoundly learned geological investigators, but almost all are equally
+good representatives of the mythical thunderbolt. The finest specimens
+are long, thick, cylindrical, and gradually tapering, with a hole at one
+end as if on purpose to receive the shaft. Sometimes they have
+petrified into iron pyrites or copper compounds, shining like gold, and
+then they make very noble thunderbolts indeed, heavy as lead, and
+capable of doing profound mischief if properly directed. At other times
+they have crystallised in transparent spar, and then they form very
+beautiful objects, as smooth and polished as the best lapidary could
+possibly make them. Belemnites are generally found in immense numbers
+together, especially in the marlstone quarries of the Midlands, and in
+the lias cliffs of Dorsetshire. Yet the quarrymen who find them never
+seem to have their faith shaken in the least by the enormous quantities
+of thunderbolts that would appear to have struck a single spot with such
+extraordinary frequency This little fact also tells rather hardly
+against the theory that the lightning never falls twice upon the same
+place.
+
+Only the largest and heaviest belemnites are known as thunder stones;
+the smaller ones are more commonly described as agate pencils. In
+Shakespeare's country their connection with thunder is well known, so
+that in all probability a belemnite is the original of the beautiful
+lines in 'Cymbeline':--
+
+    Fear no more the lightning flash,
+    Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone,
+
+where the distinction between the lightning and the thunderbolt is
+particularly well indicated. In every part of Europe belemnites and
+stone hatchets are alike regarded as thunderbolts; so that we have the
+curious result that people confuse under a single name a natural fossil
+of immense antiquity and a human product of comparatively recent but
+still prehistoric date. Indeed, I have had two thunderbolts shown me at
+once, one of which was a large belemnite, and the other a modern Indian
+tomahawk. Curiously enough, English sailors still call the nearest
+surviving relatives of the belemnites, the squids or calamaries of the
+Atlantic, by the appropriate name of sea-arrows.
+
+Many other natural or artificial objects have added their tittle to the
+belief in thunderbolts. In the Himalayas, for example, where awful
+thunderstorms are always occurring as common objects of the country, the
+torrents which follow them tear out of the loose soil fossil bones and
+tusks and teeth, which are universally looked upon as lightning-stones.
+The nodules of pyrites, often picked up on beaches, with their false
+appearance of having been melted by intense heat, pass muster easily
+with children and sailor folk for the genuine thunderbolts. But the
+grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable reality which has
+kept alive the thunderbolt even in a wicked and sceptical age, is,
+beyond all question, the occasional falling of meteoric stones. Your
+meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the
+British Museum itself you will find him duly classified and labelled and
+catalogued. Here, surely, we have the ultimate substratum of the
+thunderbolt myth. To be sure, meteors have no kind of natural connection
+with thunderstorms; they may fall anywhere and at any time; but to
+object thus is to be hypercritical. A stone that falls from heaven, no
+matter how or when, is quite good enough to be considered as a
+thunderbolt.
+
+Meteors, indeed, might very easily be confounded with lightning,
+especially by people who already have the full-blown conception of a
+thunderbolt floating about vaguely in their brains. The meteor leaps
+upon the earth suddenly with a rushing noise; it is usually red-hot when
+it falls, by friction against the air; it is mostly composed of native
+iron and other heavy metallic bodies; and it does its best to bury
+itself in the ground in the most orthodox and respectable manner. The
+man who sees this parlous monster come whizzing through the clouds from
+planetary space, making a fiery track like a great dragon as it moves
+rapidly across the sky, and finally ploughing its way into the earth in
+his own back garden, may well be excused for regarding it as a fine
+specimen of the true antique thunderbolt. The same virtues which belong
+to the buried stone are in some other places claimed for meteoric iron,
+small pieces of which are worn as charms, specially useful in protecting
+the wearer against thunder, lightning, and evil incantations. In many
+cases miraculous images have been hewn out of the stones that have
+fallen from heaven; and in others the meteorite itself is carefully
+preserved or worshipped as the actual representative of god or goddess,
+saint or madonna. The image that fell down from Jupiter may itself have
+been a mass of meteoric iron.
+
+Both meteorites and stone hatchets, as well as all other forms of
+thunderbolt, are in excellent repute as amulets, not only against
+lightning, but against the evil eye generally. In Italy they protect the
+owner from thunder, epidemics, and cattle disease, the last two of which
+are well known to be caused by witchcraft; while Prospero in the
+'Tempest' is a surviving proof how thunderstorms, too, can be magically
+produced. The tongues of sheep-bells ought to be made of meteoric iron
+or of elf-bolts, in order to insure the animals against foot-and-mouth
+disease or death by storm. Built into walls or placed on the threshold
+of stables, thunderbolts are capital preventives of fire or other
+damage, though not perhaps in this respect quite equal to a rusty
+horseshoe from a prehistoric battlefield. Thrown into a well they purify
+the water; and boiled in the drink of diseased sheep they render a cure
+positively certain. In Cornwall thunderbolts are a sovereign remedy for
+rheumatism; and in the popular pharmacopoeia of Ireland they have
+been employed with success for ophthalmia, pleurisy, and many other
+painful diseases. If finely powdered and swallowed piecemeal, they
+render the person who swallows them invulnerable for the rest of his
+lifetime. But they cannot conscientiously be recommended for dyspepsia
+and other forms of indigestion.
+
+As if on purpose to confuse our already very vague ideas about
+thunderbolts, there is one special kind of lightning which really seems
+intentionally to simulate a meteorite, and that is the kind known as
+fire-balls or (more scientifically) globular lightning. A fire-ball
+generally appears as a sphere of light, sometimes only as big as a Dutch
+cheese, sometimes as large as three feet in diameter. It moves along
+very slowly and demurely through the air, remaining visible for a whole
+minute or two together; and in the end it generally bursts up with great
+violence, as if it were a London railway station being experimented upon
+by Irish patriots. At Milan one day a fire-ball of this description
+walked down one of the streets so slowly that a small crowd walked after
+it admiringly, to see where it was going. It made straight for a church
+steeple, after the common but sacrilegious fashion of all lightning,
+struck the gilded cross on the topmost pinnacle, and then immediately
+vanished, like a Virgilian apparition, into thin air.
+
+A few years ago, too, Dr. Tripe was watching a very severe thunderstorm,
+when he saw a fire-ball come quietly gliding up to him, apparently
+rising from the earth rather than falling towards it. Instead of running
+away, like a practical man, the intrepid doctor held his ground quietly
+and observed the fiery monster with scientific nonchalance. After
+continuing its course for some time in a peaceful and regular fashion,
+however, without attempting to assault him, it finally darted off at a
+tangent in another direction, and turned apparently into forked
+lightning. A fire-ball, noticed among the Glendowan Mountains in
+Donegal, behaved even more eccentrically, as might be expected from its
+Irish antecedents. It first skirted the earth in a leisurely way for
+several hundred yards like a cannon-ball; then it struck the ground,
+ricochetted, and once more bounded along for another short spell; after
+which it disappeared in the boggy soil, as if it were completely
+finished and done for. But in another moment it rose again, nothing
+daunted, with Celtic irrepressibility, several yards away, pursued its
+ghostly course across a running stream (which shows, at least, there
+could have been no witchcraft in it), and finally ran to earth for good
+in the opposite bank, leaving a round hole in the sloping peat at the
+spot where it buried itself. Where it first struck, it cut up the peat
+as if with a knife, and made a broad deep trench which remained
+afterwards as a witness of its eccentric conduct. If the person who
+observed it had been of a superstitious turn of mind we should have had
+here one of the finest and most terrifying ghost stories on the entire
+record, which would have made an exceptionally splendid show in the
+'Transactions of the Society for Psychical Research.' Unfortunately,
+however, he was only a man of science, ungifted with the precious dower
+of poetical imagination; so he stupidly called it a remarkable
+fire-ball, measured the ground carefully like a common engineer, and
+sent an account of the phenomenon to that far more prosaic periodical,
+the 'Quarterly Journal of the Meteorological Society.' Another splendid
+apparition thrown away recklessly, for ever!
+
+There is a curious form of electrical discharge, somewhat similar to the
+fire-ball but on a smaller scale, which may be regarded as the exact
+opposite of the thunderbolt, inasmuch as it is always quite harmless.
+This is St. Elmo's fire, a brush of lambent light, which plays around
+the masts of ships and the tops of trees, when clouds are low and
+tension great. It is, in fact, the equivalent in nature of the brush
+discharge from an electric machine. The Greeks and Romans looked upon
+this lambent display as a sign of the presence of Castor and Pollux,
+'fratres Helenæ, lucida sidera,' and held that its appearance was an
+omen of safety, as everybody who has read the 'Lays of Ancient Rome'
+must surely remember. The modern name, St. Elmo's fire, is itself a
+curiously twisted and perversely Christianised reminiscence of the great
+twin brethren; for St. Elmo is merely a corruption of Helena, made
+masculine and canonised by the grateful sailors. It was as Helen's
+brothers that they best knew the Dioscuri in the good old days of the
+upper empire; and when the new religion forbade them any longer to
+worship those vain heathen deities, they managed to hand over the flames
+at the masthead to an imaginary St. Elmo, whose protection stood them in
+just as good stead as that of the original alternate immortals.
+
+Finally, the effects of lightning itself are sometimes such as to
+produce upon the mind of an impartial but unscientific beholder the firm
+idea that a bodily thunderbolt must necessarily have descended from
+heaven. In sand or rock, where lightning has struck, it often forms long
+hollow tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological intelligence
+as fulgurites, and looking for all the world like gigantic drills such
+as quarrymen make for putting in a blast. They are produced, of course,
+by the melting of the rock under the terrific heat of the electric
+spark; and they grow narrower and narrower as they descend till they
+finally disappear. But to a casual observer, they irresistibly suggest
+the notion that a material weapon has struck the ground, and buried
+itself at the bottom of the hole. The summit of Little Ararat, that
+weather-beaten and many-fabled peak (where an enterprising journalist
+not long ago discovered the remains of Noah's Ark), has been riddled
+through and through by frequent lightnings, till the rock is now a mere
+honeycombed mass of drills and tubes, like an old target at the end of a
+long day's constant rifle practice. Pieces of the red trachyte from the
+summit, a foot long, have been brought to Europe, perforated all over
+with these natural bullet marks, each of them lined with black glass,
+due to the fusion of the rock by the passage of the spark. Specimens of
+such thunder-drilled rock may be seen in most geological museums. On
+some which Humboldt collected from a peak in Mexico, the fused slag from
+the wall of the tube has overflowed on to the surrounding surface, thus
+conclusively proving (if proof were necessary) that the holes are due to
+melting heat alone, and not to the passage of any solid thunderbolt.
+
+But it was the introduction and general employment of lightning-rods
+that dealt a final deathblow to the thunderbolt theory. A
+lightning-conductor consists essentially of a long piece of metal,
+pointed at the end whose business it is, not so much (as most people
+imagine) to carry off the flash of lightning harmlessly, should it
+happen to strike the house to which the conductor is attached, but
+rather to prevent the occurrence of a flash at all, by gradually and
+gently drawing off the electricity as fast as it gathers before it has
+had time to collect in sufficient force for a destructive discharge. It
+resembles in effect an overflow pipe which drains off the surplus water
+of a pond as soon as it runs in, in such a manner as to prevent the
+possibility of an inundation, which might occur if the water were
+allowed to collect in force behind a dam or embankment. It is a
+flood-gate, not a moat: it carries away the electricity of the air
+quietly to the ground, without allowing it to gather in sufficient
+amount to produce a flash of lightning. It might thus be better called
+a lightning-preventer than a lightning-conductor: it conducts
+electricity, but it prevents lightning. At first, all lightning-rods
+used to be made with knobs on the top, and then the electricity used to
+collect at the surface until the electric force was sufficient to cause
+a spark. In those happy days, you had the pleasure of seeing that the
+lightning was actually being drawn off from your neighbourhood
+piecemeal. Knobs, it was held, must be the best things, because you
+could incontestably see the sparks striking them with your own eyes. But
+as time went on, electricians discovered that if you fixed a fine metal
+point to the conductor of an electric machine it was impossible to get
+up any appreciable charge because the electricity kept always leaking
+out by means of the point. Then it was seen that if you made your
+lightning-rods pointed at the end, you would be able in the same way to
+dissipate your electricity before it ever had time to come to a head in
+the shape of lightning. From that moment the thunderbolt was safely dead
+and buried. It was urged, indeed, that the attempt thus to rob Heaven of
+its thunders was wicked and impious; but the common-sense of mankind
+refused to believe that absolute omnipotence could be sensibly defied by
+twenty yards of cylindrical iron tubing. Thenceforth the thunderbolt
+ceased to exist, save in poetry, country houses, and the most rural
+circles; even the electric fluid was generally relegated to the
+provincial press, where it still keeps company harmoniously with
+caloric, the devouring element, nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, and
+many other like philosophical fossils: while lightning itself, shorn of
+its former glories, could no longer wage impious war against cathedral
+towers, but was compelled to restrict itself to blasting a solitary
+rider now and again in the open fields, or drilling more holes in the
+already crumbling summit of Mount Ararat. Yet it will be a thousand
+years more, in all probability, before the last thunderbolt ceases to be
+shown as a curiosity here and there to marvelling visitors, and takes
+its proper place in some village museum as a belemnite, a meteoric
+stone, or a polished axe-head of our neolithic ancestors. Even then, no
+doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in
+the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet.
+
+
+
+
+HONEY-DEW
+
+
+Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personæ, a couple of small
+brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green
+'plant-lice,' or 'blight,' or aphides. The exact scene is usually on the
+young and succulent branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft
+shoots the aphides have deeply buried their long trunk-like snouts, in
+search of the sap off which they live so contentedly through their brief
+lifetime. To them, enter the two small brown ants, their lawful
+possessors; for ants, too, though absolutely unrecognised by English law
+('de minimis non curat lex,' says the legal aphorism), are nevertheless
+in their own commonwealth duly seised of many and various goods and
+chattels; and these same aphides, as everybody has heard, stand to them
+in pretty much the same position as cows stand to human herdsmen. Throw
+in for sole spectator a loitering naturalist, and you get the entire
+_mise-en-scène_ of a quaint little drama that works itself out a dozen
+times among the wilted rose-trees beneath the latticed cottage windows
+every summer morning.
+
+It is a delightful sight to watch the two little lilliputian proprietors
+approaching and milking these their wee green motionless cattle. First
+of all, the ants quickly scent their way with protruded antennæ (for
+they are as good as blind, poor things!) up the prickly stem of the
+rose-bush, guided, no doubt, by the faint perfume exhaled from the
+nectar above them. Smelling their road cautiously to the ends of the
+branches, they soon reach their own particular aphides, whose bodies
+they proceed gently to stroke with their outstretched feelers, and then
+stand by quietly for a moment in happy anticipation of the coming
+dinner. Presently, the obedient aphis, conscious of its lawful master's
+friendly presence, begins slowly to emit from two long horn-like tubes
+near the centre of its back a couple of limpid drops of a sticky pale
+yellow fluid. Honey-dew our English rustics still call it, because, when
+the aphides are not milked often enough by ants, they discharge it
+awkwardly of their own accord, and then it falls as a sweet clammy dew
+upon the grass beneath them. The ant, approaching the two tubes with
+cautious tenderness, removes the sweet drops without injuring in any way
+his little _protégé_, and then passes on to the next in order of his
+tiny cattle, leaving the aphis apparently as much relieved by the
+process as a cow with a full hanging udder is relieved by the timely
+attention of the human milkmaid.
+
+Evidently, this is a case of mutual accommodation in the political
+economy of the ants and aphides: a free interchange of services between
+the ant as consumer and the aphis as producer. Why the aphides should
+have acquired the curious necessity for getting rid of this sweet,
+sticky, and nutritious secretion nobody knows with certainty; but it is
+at least quite clear that the liquid is a considerable nuisance to them
+in their very sedentary and monotonous existence--a waste product of
+which they are anxious to disembarrass themselves as easily as
+possible--and that while they themselves stand to the ants in the
+relation of purveyors of food supply, the ants in return stand to them
+in the relation of scavengers, or contractors for the removal of useless
+accumulations.
+
+Everybody knows the aphides well by sight, in one of their forms at
+least, the familiar rose aphis; but probably few people ever look at
+them closely and critically enough to observe how very beautiful and
+wonderful is the organisation of their tiny limbs in all its exquisite
+detail. If you pick off one good-sized wingless insect, however, from a
+blighted rose-leaf, and put him on a glass slide under a low power of
+the microscope, you will most likely be quite surprised to find what a
+lovely little creature it is that you have been poisoning wholesale all
+your life long with diluted tobacco-juice. His body is so transparent
+that you can see through it by transmitted light: a dainty glass globe,
+you would say, of emerald green, set upon six tapering, jointed, hairy
+legs, and provided in front with two large black eyes of many facets,
+and a pair of long and very flexible antennæ, easily moved in any
+direction, but usually bent backward when the creature is at rest so as
+to reach nearly to his tail as he stands at ease upon his native
+rose-leaf. There are, however, two other features about him which
+specially attract attention, as being very characteristic of the aphides
+and their allies among all other insects. In the first place, his mouth
+is provided with a very long snout or proboscis, classically described
+as a rostrum, with which he pierces the outer skin of the rose-shoot
+where he lives, and sucks up incessantly its sweet juices. This organ is
+common to the aphis with all the other bugs and plant-lice. In the
+second place, he has half-way down his back (or a little more) a pair of
+very peculiar hollow organs, the honey tubes, from which exudes that
+singular secretion, the honey-dew. These tubes are not found in quite
+all species of aphides, but they are very common among the class, and
+they form by far the most conspicuous and interesting organs in all
+those aphides which do possess them.
+
+The life-history of the rose-aphis, small and familiar as is the insect
+itself, forms one of the most marvellous and extraordinary chapters in
+all the fairy tales of modern science. Nobody need wonder why the blight
+attacks his roses so persistently when once he has learnt the unusual
+provision for exceptional fertility in the reproduction of these insect
+plagues. The whole story is too long to give at full length, but here is
+a brief recapitulation of a year's generations of common aphides.
+
+In the spring, the eggs of last year's crop, which have been laid by the
+mothers in nooks and crannies out of reach of the frost, are quickened
+into life by the first return of warm weather, and hatch out their brood
+of insects. All this brood consists of imperfect females, without a
+single male among them; and they all fasten at once upon the young buds
+of their native bush, where they pass a sluggish and uneventful
+existence in sucking up the juice from the veins on the one hand, and
+secreting honey-dew upon the other. Four times they moult their skins,
+these moults being in some respects analogous to the metamorphosis of
+the caterpillar into chrysalis and butterfly. After the fourth moult,
+the young aphides attain maturity; and then they give origin,
+parthenogenetically, to a second brood, also of imperfect females, all
+produced without any fathers. This second brood brings forth in like
+manner a third generation, asexual, as before; and the same process is
+repeated without intermission as long as the warm weather lasts. In each
+case, the young simply bud out from the ovaries of the mothers, exactly
+as new crops of leaves bud out from the rose-branch on which they grow.
+Eleven generations have thus been observed to follow one another rapidly
+in a single summer; and indeed, by keeping the aphides in a warm room,
+one may even make them continue their reproduction in this purely
+vegetative fashion for as many as four years running. But as soon as
+the cold weather begins to set in, perfect male and female insects are
+produced by the last swarm of parthenogenetic mothers; and these true
+females, after being fertilised, lay the eggs which remain through the
+winter, and from which the next summer's broods have to begin afresh the
+wonderful cycle. Thus, only one generation of aphides, out of ten or
+eleven, consists of true males and females: all the rest are false
+females, producing young by a process of budding.
+
+Setting aside for the present certain special modifications of this
+strange cycle which have been lately described by M. Jules Lichtenstein,
+let us consider for a moment what can be the origin and meaning of such
+an unusual and curious mode of reproduction.
+
+The aphides are on the whole the most purely inactive and vegetative of
+all insects, unless indeed we except a few very debased and degraded
+parasites. They fasten themselves early in life on to a particular shoot
+of a particular plant; they drink in its juices, digest them, grow, and
+undergo their incomplete metamorphoses; they produce new generations
+with extraordinary rapidity; and they vegetate, in fact, almost as much
+as the plant itself upon which they are living. Their existence is
+duller than that of the very dullest cathedral city. They are thus
+essentially degenerate creatures: they have found the conditions of life
+too easy for them, and they have reverted to something so low and simple
+that they are almost plant-like in some of their habits and
+peculiarities.
+
+The ancestors of the aphides were free winged insects; and, in certain
+stages of their existence, most living species of aphides possess at
+least some winged members. On the rose-bush, you can generally pick off
+a few such larger winged forms, side by side with the wee green wingless
+insects. But creatures which have taken to passing most of their life
+upon a single spot on a single plant hardly need the luxury of wings;
+and so, in nine cases out of ten, natural selection has dispensed with
+those needless encumbrances. Even the legs are comparatively little
+wanted by our modern aphides, which only require them to walk away in a
+stately sleepy manner when rudely disturbed by man, lady-birds, or other
+enemies; and indeed the legs are now very weak and feeble, and incapable
+of walking for more than a short distance at a time under exceptional
+provocation. The eyes remain, it is true; but only the big ones: the
+little ocelli at the top of the head, found amongst so many of their
+allies, are quite wanting in all the aphides. In short, the plant-lice
+have degenerated into mere mouths and sacks for sucking and storing food
+from the tissues of plants, provided with large honey-tubes for getting
+rid of the waste sugar.
+
+Now, the greater the amount of food any animal gets, and the less the
+amount of expenditure it performs in muscular action, the greater will
+be the surplus it has left over for the purposes of reproduction. Eggs
+or young, in fact, represent the amount thus left over after all the
+wants of the body have been provided for. But in the rose-aphis the
+wants of the body, when once the insect has reached its full growth, are
+absolutely nothing; and it therefore then begins to bud out new
+generations in rapid succession as fast as ever it can produce them.
+This is strictly analogous to what we see every day taking place in all
+the plants around us. New leaves are produced one after another, as fast
+as material can be supplied for their nutrition, and each of these new
+leaves is known to be a separate individual, just as much as the
+individual aphis. At last, however, a time comes when the reproductive
+power of the plant begins to fail, and then it produces flowers, that is
+to say stamens (male) and pistils (female), whose union results in
+fertilisation and the subsequent outgrowth of fruit and seeds. Thus a
+year's cycle of the plant-lice exactly answers to the life-history of an
+ordinary annual. The eggs correspond to the seeds; the various
+generations of aphides budding out from one another by parthenogenesis
+correspond to the leaves budded out by one another throughout the
+summer; and the final brood of perfect males and females answers to the
+flower with its stamen and pistils, producing the seeds, as they produce
+the eggs, for setting up afresh the next year's cycle.
+
+This consideration, I fancy, suggests to us the most probable
+explanation of the honey-tubes and honey-dew. Creatures that eat so much
+and reproduce so fast as the aphides are rapidly sucking up juices all
+the time from the plant on which they fasten, and converting most of the
+nutriment so absorbed into material for fresh generations. That is how
+they swarm so fast over all our shrubs and flowers. But if there is any
+one kind of material in their food in excess of their needs, they would
+naturally have to secrete it by a special organ developed or enlarged
+for the purpose. I don't mean that the organ would or could be developed
+all at once, by a sudden effort, but that as the habit of fixing
+themselves upon plants and sucking their juices grew from generation to
+generation with these descendants of originally winged insects, an organ
+for permitting the waste product to exude must necessarily have grown
+side by side with it. Sugar seems to have been such a waste product,
+contained in the juices of the plant to an extent beyond what the
+aphides could assimilate or use up in the production of new broods; and
+this sugar is therefore secreted by special organs, the honey-tubes. One
+can readily imagine that it may at first have escaped in small
+quantities, and that two pores on their last segment but two may have
+been gradually specialised into regular secreting organs, perhaps under
+the peculiar agency of the ants, who have regularly appropriated so many
+kinds of aphides as miniature milch cows.
+
+So completely have some species of ants come to recognise their own
+proprietary interest in the persons of the aphides, that they provide
+them with fences and cow-sheds on the most approved human pattern.
+Sometimes they build up covered galleries to protect their tiny cattle;
+and these galleries lead from the nest to the place where the aphides
+are fixed, and completely enclose the little creatures from all chance
+of harm. If intruders try to attack the farmyard, the ants drive them
+away by biting and lacerating them. Sir John Lubbock, who has paid great
+attention to the mutual relations of ants and aphides, has even shown
+that various kinds of ants domesticate various species of aphis. The
+common brown garden-ant, one of the darkest skinned among our English
+races, 'devotes itself principally to aphides which frequent twigs and
+leaves'; especially, so far as I have myself observed, the bright green
+aphis of the rose, and the closely allied little black aphis of the
+broad bean. On the other hand a nearly related reddish ant pays
+attention chiefly to those aphides which live on the bark of trees,
+while the yellow meadow-ants, a far more subterranean species, keep
+flocks and herds of the like-minded aphides which feed upon the roots of
+herbs and grasses.
+
+Sir John Lubbock, indeed, even suggests--and how the suggestion would
+have charmed 'Civilisation' Buckle!--that to this difference of food and
+habit the distinctive colours of the various species may very probably
+be due. The ground which he adduces for this ingenious idea is a capital
+example of the excellent use to which out-of-the-way evidence may be
+cleverly put by a competent evolutionary thinker. 'The Baltic amber,' he
+says, 'contains among the remains of many other insects a species of
+ant intermediate between our small brown garden-ants and the little
+yellow meadow-ants. This is possibly the stock from which these and
+other allied species are descended. One is tempted to suggest that the
+brown species which live so much in the open air, and climb up trees and
+bushes, have retained and even deepened their dark colour; while others,
+such as the yellow meadow-ant, which lives almost entirely below ground,
+have become much paler.' He might have added, as confirmatory evidence,
+the fact that the perfect winged males and females of the yellow
+species, which fly about freely during the brief honeymoon in the open
+air, are even darker in hue than the brown garden-ant. But how the light
+colour of the neuter workers gets transmitted through these dusky
+parents from one generation to another is part of that most insoluble
+crux of all evolutionary reasoning--the transmission of special
+qualities to neuters by parents who have never possessed them.
+
+This last-mentioned yellow meadow-ant has carried the system of
+domestication further in all probability than any other species among
+its congeners. Not only do the yellow ants collect the root-feeding
+aphides in their own nests, and tend them as carefully as their own
+young, but they also gather and guard the eggs of the aphides, which,
+till they come to maturity, are of course quite useless. Sir John
+Lubbock found that his yellow ants carried the winter eggs of a species
+of aphis into their nest, and there took great care of them. In the
+spring, the eggs hatched out; and the ants actually carried the young
+aphides out of the nest again, and placed them on the leaves of a daisy
+growing in the immediate neighbourhood. They then built up a wall of
+earth over and round them. The aphides went on in their usual lazy
+fashion throughout the summer, and in October they laid another lot of
+eggs, precisely like those of the preceding autumn. This case, as the
+practised observer himself remarks, is an instance of prudence
+unexampled, perhaps, in the animal kingdom, outside man. 'The eggs are
+laid early in October on the food-plant of the insect. They are of no
+direct use to the ants; yet they are not left where they are laid,
+exposed to the severity of the weather and to innumerable dangers, but
+brought into their nests by the ants, and tended by them with the utmost
+care through the long winter months until the following March, when the
+young ones are brought out again and placed on the young shoots of the
+daisy.' Mr. White of Stonehouse has also noted an exactly similar
+instance of formican providence.
+
+The connection between so many ants and so many species of the aphides
+being so close and intimate, it does not seem extravagant to suppose
+that the honey-tubes in their existing advanced form at least may be due
+to the deliberate selective action of these tiny insect-breeders.
+Indeed, when we consider that there are certain species of beetles which
+have never been found anywhere except in ants' nests, it appears highly
+probable that these domesticated forms have been produced by the ants
+themselves, exactly as the dog, the sheep, and the cow, in their
+existing types, have been produced by deliberate human selection. If
+this be so, then there is nothing very out-of-the-way in the idea that
+the ants have also produced the honey-tubes of aphides by their long
+selective action. It must be remembered that ants, in point of
+antiquity, date back, under one form or another, no doubt to a very
+remote period of geological time. Their immense variety of genera and
+species (over a thousand distinct kinds are known) show them to be a
+very ancient family, or else they would not have had time to be
+specially modified in such a wonderful multiformity of ways. Even as
+long ago as the time when the tertiary deposits of Oeningen and
+Radoboj were laid down, Dr. Heer of Zurich has shown that at least
+eighty-three distinct species of ants already existed; and the number
+that have left no trace behind is most probably far greater. Some of the
+beetles and woodlice which ants domesticate in their nests have been
+kept underground so long that they have become quite blind--that is to
+say, have ceased altogether to produce eyes, which would be of no use to
+them in their subterranean galleries; and one such blind beetle, known
+as Claviger, has even lost the power of feeding itself, and has to be
+fed by its masters from their own mandibles. Dr. Taschenberg enumerates
+300 species of true ants'-nest insects, mostly beetles, in Germany
+alone; and M. André gives a list of 584 kinds, habitually found in
+association with ants in one country or another. Compared with these
+singular results of formican selection, the mere production or further
+development of the honey-tubes appears to be a very small matter.
+
+But what good do the aphides themselves derive from the power of
+secreting honey-dew? For we know now that no animal or plant is ever
+provided with any organ or part merely for the benefit of another
+creature: the advantage must at least be mutual. Well, in the first
+place, it is likely that, in any case, the amount of sugary matter in
+the food of the aphides is quite in excess of their needs; they
+assimilate the nitrogenous material of the sap, and secrete its
+saccharine material as honey-dew. That, however, would hardly account
+for the development of special secretory ducts, like the honey-tubes, in
+which you can actually see the little drops of honey rolling, under the
+microscope. But the ants are useful allies to the aphides, in guarding
+them from another very dangerous type of insect. They are subject to the
+attacks of an ichneumon fly, which lays its eggs in them, meaning its
+larvæ to feed upon their living bodies; and the ants watch over the
+aphides with the greatest vigilance, driving off the ichneumons whenever
+they approach their little _protégés_.
+
+Many other insects besides ants, however, are fond of the sweet
+secretions of the aphides, and it is probable that the honey-dew thus
+acts to some extent as a preservative of the species, by diverting
+possible foes from the insects themselves, to the sugary liquid which
+they distil from their food-plants. Having more than enough and to spare
+for all their own needs, and the needs of their offspring, the
+plant-lice can afford to employ a little of their nutriment as a bribe
+to secure them from the attacks of possible enemies. Such compensatory
+bribes are common enough in the economy of nature. Thus our common
+English vetch secretes a little honey on the stipules or wing-like
+leaflets on the stem, and so distracts thieving ants from committing
+their depredations upon the nectaries in the flowers, which are intended
+for the attraction of the fertilising bees; and a South American acacia,
+as Mr. Belt has shown, bears hollow thorns and produces honey from a
+gland in each leaflet, in order to allure myriads of small ants which
+nest in the thorns, eat the honey, and repay the plant by driving away
+their leaf-cutting congeners. Indeed, as they sting violently, and issue
+forth in enormous swarms whenever the plant is attacked, they are even
+able to frighten off browsing cattle from their own peculiar acacia.
+
+Aphides, then, are essentially degraded insects, which have become
+almost vegetative in their habits, and even in their mode of
+reproduction, but which still retain a few marks of their original
+descent from higher and more locomotive ancestors. Their wings,
+especially, are useful to the perfect forms in finding one another, and
+to the imperfect ones in migrating from one plant to its nearest
+neighbours, where they soon become the parents of fresh hordes in rapid
+succession. Hence various kinds of aphides are among the most dreaded
+plagues of agriculturists. The 'fly,' which Kentish farmers know so well
+on hops, is an aphis specialised for that particular bine; and, when
+once it appears in the gardens, it spreads with startling rapidity from
+one end of the long rows to the other. The phylloxera which has spoilt
+the French vineyards is a root-feeding form that attacks the vine, and
+kills or maims the plant terribly, by sucking the vital juices on their
+way up into the fresh-forming foliage. The 'American blight' on apple
+trees is yet another member of the same family, a wee creeping cottony
+creature that hides among the fissures of the bark, and drives its very
+long beak far down into the green sappy layer underlying the dead outer
+covering. In fact, almost all the best-known 'blights' and
+bladder-forming insects are aphides of one kind or another, affecting
+leaves, or stalks, or roots, or branches.
+
+It is one of the most remarkable examples of the limitation of human
+powers that while we can easily exterminate large animals like the wolf
+and the bear in England, or the puma and the wolverine in the settled
+States of America, we should be so comparatively weak against the
+Colorado beetle or the fourteen-year locust, and so absolutely powerless
+against the hop-fly, the turnip-fly, and the phylloxera. The smaller and
+the more insignificant our enemy, viewed individually, the more
+difficult is he to cope with in the mass. All the elephants in the world
+could have been hunted down and annihilated, in all probability, with
+far less labour than has been expended upon one single little all but
+microscopic parasite in France alone. The enormous rapidity of
+reproduction in the family of aphides is the true cause of our
+helplessness before them. It has been calculated that a single aphis may
+during its own lifetime become the progenitor of 5,904,900,000
+descendants. Each imperfect female produces about ninety young ones,
+and lives long enough to see its children's children to the fifth
+generation. Now, ninety multiplied by ninety four times over gives the
+number above stated. Of course, this makes no allowance for casualties
+which must be pretty frequent: but even so, the sum-total of aphides
+produced within a small garden in a single summer must be something very
+extraordinary.
+
+It is curious, too, that aphides on the whole seem to escape the notice
+of insect-eating birds very tolerably. I cannot, in fact, discover that
+birds ever eat them, their chief real enemy being the little lizard-like
+larva of the lady-bird, which devours them everywhere greedily in
+immense numbers. Indeed, aphides form almost the sole food of the entire
+lady-bird tribe in their earlier stages of existence; and there is no
+better way of getting rid of blight on roses and other garden plants
+than to bring in a good boxful of these active and voracious little
+grubs from the fields and hedges. They will pounce upon the aphides
+forthwith as a cat pounces upon the mice in a well-stocked barn or
+farmyard. The two-spotted lady-bird in particular is the determined
+exterminator of the destructive hop-fly, and is much beloved accordingly
+by Kentish farmers. No doubt, one reason why birds do not readily see
+the aphis of the rose and most other species is because of their
+prevailing green tint, and the close way in which they stick to the
+leaves or shoots on whose juices they are preying. But in the case of
+many black and violet species, this protection of imitative colour is
+wanting, and yet the birds do not seem to care for the very conspicuous
+little insects on the broad bean, for example, whose dusky hue makes
+them quite noticeable in large masses. Here there may very likely be
+some special protection of nauseous taste in the aphides themselves (I
+will confess that I have not ventured to try the experiment in person),
+as in many other instances we know that conspicuously-coloured insects
+advertise their nastiness, as it were, to the birds by their own
+integuments, and so escape being eaten in mistake for any of their less
+protected relatives.
+
+On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that certain plants have
+efficiently armed themselves against the aphides, in turn, by secreting
+bitter or otherwise unpleasant juices. So far as I can discover, the
+little plunderers seldom touch the pungent 'nasturtiums' or tropsælums
+of our flower-gardens, even when these grow side by side with other
+plants on which the aphides are swarming. Often, indeed, I find winged
+forms upon the leaf-stem of a nasturtium, having come there evidently in
+hopes of starting a new colony; but usually in a dead or dying
+condition--the pungent juice seems to have poisoned them. So, too,
+spinach and lettuce may be covered with blight, while the bitter
+spurges, the woolly-leaved arabis, and the strong-scented thyme close by
+are utterly untouched. Plants seem to have acquired all these devices,
+such as close networks of hair upon the leaves, strong essences, bitter
+or pungent juices, and poisonous principles, mainly as deterrents for
+insect enemies, of which caterpillars and plant-lice are by far the most
+destructive. It would be unpardonable, of course, to write about
+honey-dew without mentioning tobacco; and I may add parenthetically that
+aphides are determined anti-tobacconists, nicotine, in fact, being a
+deadly poison to them. Smoking with tobacco, or sprinkling with
+tobacco-water, are familiar modes of getting rid of the unwelcome
+intruders in gardens. Doubtless this peculiar property of the tobacco
+plant has been developed as a prophylactic against insect enemies: and
+if so, we may perhaps owe the weed itself, as a smokable leaf, to the
+little aphides. Granting this hypothetical connection, the name of
+honey-dew would indeed be a peculiarly appropriate one. I may mention in
+passing that tobacco is quite fatal to almost all insects, a fact which
+I present gratuitously to the blowers of counterblasts, who are at
+liberty to make whatever use they choose of it. Quassia and aloes are
+also well-known preventives of fly or blight in gardens.
+
+The most complete life-history yet given of any member of the aphis
+family is that which M. Jules Lichtenstein has worked out with so much
+care in the case of the phylloxera of the oak-tree. In April, the winter
+eggs of this species, laid in the bark of an oak, each hatch out a
+wingless imperfect female, which M. Lichtenstein calls the foundress.
+After moulting four times, the foundress produces, by parthenogenesis, a
+number of false eggs, which it fastens to the leaf-stalks and under side
+of the foliage. These false eggs hatch out a larval form, wingless, but
+bigger than any of the subsequent generations; and the larvæ so produced
+themselves once more give origin to more larvæ, which acquire wings, and
+fly away from the oak on which they were born to another of a different
+species in the same neighbourhood. There these larvæ of the second crop
+once more lay false eggs, from which the third larval generation is
+developed. This brood is again wingless, and it proceeds at once to bud
+out several generations more, by internal gemmation, as long as the warm
+weather lasts. According to M. Lichtenstein, all previous observations
+have been made only on aphides of this third type; and he maintains that
+every species in the whole family really undergoes an analogous
+alternation of generations. At last, when the cold weather begins to set
+in, a fourth larval form appears, which soon obtains wings, and flies
+back to the same kind of oak on which the foundresses were first hatched
+out, all the intervening generations having passed their lives in
+sucking the juices of the other oak to which the second larval form
+migrated. The fourth type here produce perfect male and female insects,
+which are wingless, and have no sucking apparatus. The females, after
+being impregnated, lay a single egg each, which they hide in the bark,
+where it remains during the winter, till in spring it once more hatches
+out into a foundress, and the whole cycle begins over again. Whether all
+the aphides do or do not pass through corresponding stages is not yet
+quite certain. But Kentish farmers believe that the hop-fly migrates to
+hop-bines from plum-trees in the neighbourhood; and M. Lichtenstein
+considers that such migrations from one plant to another are quite
+normal in the family. We know, indeed, that many great plagues of our
+crops are thus propagated, sometimes among closely related plants, but
+sometimes also among the most widely separated species. For example,
+turnip-fly (which is not an aphis, but a small beetle) always begins its
+ravages (as Miss Ormerod has abundantly shown) upon a plot of charlock,
+and then spreads from patches of that weed to the neighbouring turnips,
+which are slightly diverse members of the same genus. But, on the other
+hand, it has long been well known that rust in wheat is specially
+connected with the presence of the barberry bush; and it has recently
+been proved that the fungus which produces the disease passes its early
+stages on the barberry leaves, and only migrates in later generations to
+the growing wheat. This last case brings even more prominently into
+light than ever the essential resemblance of the aphides to
+plant-parasites.
+
+
+
+
+THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT
+
+
+For many centuries the occult problem how to account for the milk in the
+coco-nut has awakened the profoundest interest alike of ingenuous
+infancy and of maturer scientific age. Though it cannot be truthfully
+affirmed of it, as of the cosmogony or creation of the world, in the
+'Vicar of Wakefield,' that it 'has puzzled the philosophers of all ages'
+(for Sanchoniathon was certainly ignorant of the very existence of that
+delicious juice, and Manetho doubtless went to his grave without ever
+having tasted it fresh from the nut under a tropical verandah), yet it
+may be safely asserted that for the last three hundred years the
+philosopher who has not at some time or other of his life meditated upon
+that abstruse question is unworthy of such an exalted name. The
+cosmogony and the milk in the coco-nut are, however, a great deal closer
+together in thought than Sanchoniathon or Manetho, or the rogue who
+quoted them so glibly, is ever at all likely, in his wildest moments, to
+have imagined.
+
+The coco-nut, in fact, is a subject well deserving of the most
+sympathetic treatment at the gentle hands of grateful humanity. No other
+plant is useful to us in so many diverse and remarkable manners. It has
+been truly said of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he is all
+good, from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail; but even the
+pig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries or luxuries--from
+tooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to lard, from pepsine wine to pork
+pies--does not nearly approach, in the multiplicity and variety of his
+virtues, the all-sufficing and world-supplying coco-nut. A Chinese
+proverb says that there are as many useful properties in the coco-nut
+palm as there are days in the year; and a Polynesian saying tells us
+that the man who plants a coco-nut plants meat and drink, hearth and
+home, vessels and clothing, for himself and his children after him. Like
+the great Mr. Whiteley, the invaluable palm-tree might modestly
+advertise itself as a universal provider. The solid part of the nut
+supplies food almost alone to thousands of people daily, and the milk
+serves them for drink, thus acting as an efficient filter to the water
+absorbed by the roots in the most polluted or malarious regions. If you
+tap the flower stalk you get a sweet juice, which can be boiled down
+into the peculiar sugar called (in the charming dialect of commerce)
+jaggery; or it can be fermented into a very nasty spirit known as
+palm-wine, toddy, or arrack; or it can be mixed with bitter herbs and
+roots to make that delectable compound 'native beer.' If you squeeze the
+dry nut you get coco-nut oil, which is as good as lard for frying when
+fresh, and is 'an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast,' on
+tropical tables. Under the mysterious name of copra (which most of us
+have seen with awe described in the market reports as 'firm' or 'weak,'
+'receding' or 'steady') it forms the main or only export of many Oceanic
+islands, and is largely imported into this realm of England, where the
+thicker portion is called stearine, and used for making sundry candles
+with fanciful names, while the clear oil is employed for burning in
+ordinary lamps. In the process of purification, it yields glycerine; and
+it enters largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps. The
+fibre that surrounds the nut makes up the other mysterious article of
+commerce known as coir, which is twisted into stout ropes, or woven into
+coco-nut matting and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are also
+made of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest fashion, in
+place of real horse-hair in stuffing cushions. The shell, cut in half,
+supplies good cups, and is artistically carved by the Polynesians,
+Japanese, Hindoos, and other benighted heathen, who have not yet learnt
+the true methods of civilised machine-made shoddy manufacture. The
+leaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades, prepared like
+papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts are written; the long
+mid-ribs or branches (strictly speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer
+admirably for rafters, posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath at the base
+is a remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed for strainers,
+wrappers, and native hats; while the trunk, or stem, passes in carpentry
+under the name of porcupine wood, and produces beautiful effects as a
+wonderfully coloured cabinet-makers' material. These are only a few
+selected instances out of the innumerable uses of the coco-nut palm.
+
+Apart even from the manifold merits of the tree that bears it, the milk
+itself has many and great claims to our respect and esteem, as everybody
+who has ever drunk it in its native surroundings will enthusiastically
+admit. In England, to be sure, the white milk in the dry nuts is a very
+poor stuff, sickly, and strong-flavoured, and rather indigestible. But
+in the tropics, coco-nut milk, or, as we oftener call it there, coco-nut
+water, is a very different and vastly superior sort of beverage. At
+eleven o'clock every morning, when you are hot and tired with the day's
+work, your black servant, clad from head to foot in his cool clean white
+linen suit, brings you in a tall soda glass full of a clear, light,
+crystal liquid, temptingly displayed against the yellow background of a
+chased Benares brass-work tray. The lump of ice bobs enticingly up and
+down in the centre of the tumbler, or clinks musically against the edge
+of the glass as he carries it along. You take the cool cup thankfully
+and swallow it down at one long draught; fresh as a May morning, pure as
+an English hillside spring, delicate as--well, as coco-nut water. None
+but itself can be its parallel. It is certainly the most delicious,
+dainty, transparent, crystal drink ever invented. How did it get there,
+and what is it for?
+
+In the early green stage at which coco-nuts are generally picked for
+household use in the tropics the shell hasn't yet solidified into a hard
+stony coat, but still remains quite soft enough to be readily cut
+through with a sharp table knife--just like young walnuts picked for
+pickling. If you cut one across while it's in this unsophisticated
+state, it is easy enough to see the arrangement of the interior, and the
+part borne by the milk in the development and growth of the mature nut.
+The ordinary tropical way of opening coco-nuts for table, indeed, is by
+cutting off the top of the shell and rind in successive slices, at the
+end where the three pores are situated, until you reach the level of the
+water, which fills up the whole interior. The nutty part around the
+inside of the shell is then extremely soft and jelly-like, so that it
+can be readily eaten with a spoon; but as a matter of fact very few
+people ever do eat the flesh at all. After their first few months in the
+tropics, they lose the taste for this comparatively indigestible part,
+and confine themselves entirely (like patients at a German spa) to
+drinking the water. A young coco-nut is thus seen to consist, first of a
+green outer skin, then of a fibrous coat, which afterwards becomes the
+hair, and next of a harder shell which finally gets quite woody; while
+inside all comes the actual seed or unripe nut itself. The office of the
+coco-nut water is the deposition of the nutty part around the side of
+the shell; it is, so to speak, the mother liquid, from which the harder
+eatable portion is afterwards derived. This state is not uncommon in
+embryo seeds. In a very young pea, for example, the inside is quite
+watery, and only the outer skin is at all solid, as we have all observed
+when green peas first come into season. But the special peculiarity of
+the coco-nut consists in the fact that this liquid condition of the
+interior continues even after the nut is ripe, and that is the really
+curious point about the milk in the coco-nut which does actually need
+accounting for.
+
+In order to understand it one ought to examine a coco-nut in the act of
+budding, and to do this it is by no means necessary to visit the West
+Indies or the Pacific Islands; all you need to do is to ask a Covent
+Garden fruit salesman to get you a few 'growers.' On the voyage to
+England, a certain number of precocious coco-nuts, stimulated by the
+congenial warmth and damp of most shipholds, usually begin to sprout
+before their time; and these waste nuts are sold by the dealers at a low
+rate to East-end children and inquiring botanists. An examination of a
+'grower' very soon convinces one what is the use of the milk in the
+coco-nut.
+
+It must be duly borne in mind, to begin with, that the prime end and
+object of the nut is not to be eaten raw by the ingenious monkey, or to
+be converted by lordly man into coco-nut biscuits, or coco-nut pudding,
+but simply and solely to reproduce the coco-nut palm in sufficient
+numbers to future generations. For this purpose the nut has slowly
+acquired by natural selection a number of protective defences against
+its numerous enemies, which serve to guard it admirably in the native
+state from almost all possible animal depredators. First of all, the
+actual nut or seed itself consists of a tiny embryo plant, placed just
+inside the softest of the three pores or pits at the end of the shell,
+and surrounded by a vast quantity of nutritious pulp, destined to feed
+and support it during its earliest unprotected days, if not otherwise
+diverted by man or monkey. But as whatever feeds a young plant will also
+feed an animal, and as many animals betray a felonious desire to
+appropriate to their own wicked ends the food-stuffs laid up by the palm
+for the use of its own seedling, the coco-nut has been compelled to
+inclose this particularly large and rich kernel in a very solid and
+defensive shell. And, once more, since the palm grows at a very great
+height from the ground--I have seen them up to ninety feet in favourable
+circumstances--this shell stands a very good chance of getting broken in
+tumbling to the earth, so that it has been necessary to surround it with
+a mass of soft and yielding fibrous material, which breaks its fall, and
+acts as a buffer to it when it comes in contact with the soil beneath.
+So many protections has the coco-nut gradually devised for itself by the
+continuous survival of the best adapted amid numberless and endless
+spontaneous variations of all its kind in past time.
+
+Now, when the coco-nut has actually reached the ground at last, and
+proceeds to sprout in the spot where chance (perhaps in the bodily shape
+of a disappointed monkey) has chosen to cast it, these numerous
+safeguards and solid envelopes naturally begin to prove decided
+nuisances to the embryo within. It starts under the great disadvantage
+of being hermetically sealed within a solid wooden shell, so that no
+water can possibly get at it to aid it as most other seeds are aided in
+the process of germination. Fancy yourself a seed-pea, anxious to
+sprout, but coated all round with a hard covering of impermeable
+sealing-wax, and you will be in a position faintly to appreciate the
+unfortunate predicament of a grower coco-nut. Natural selection,
+however--that _deus ex machinâ_ of modern science, which can perform
+such endless wonders, if only you give it time enough to work in and
+variations enough to work upon--natural selection has come to the rescue
+of the unhappy plant by leaving it a little hole at the top of the
+shell, out of which it can push its feathery green head without
+difficulty. Everybody knows that if you look at the sharp end of a
+coco-nut you will see three little brown pits or depressions on its
+surface. Most people also know that two of these are firmly stopped up
+(for a reason to which I shall presently recur), but that the third one
+is only closed by a slight film or very thin shell, which can be easily
+bored through with a pocket knife, so as to let the milk run off before
+cracking the shell. So much we have all learnt during our ardent pursuit
+of natural knowledge on half-holidays in early life. But we probably
+then failed to observe that just opposite this soft hole lies a small
+roundish knob, imbedded in the pulp or eatable portion, which knob is in
+fact the embryo palm or seedling, for whose ultimate benefit the whole
+arrangement (in brown and green) has been invented. That is very much
+the way with man: he notices what concerns his own appetite, and omits
+all the really important parts of the whole subject. _We_ think the use
+of the hole is to let out the milk; but the nut knows that its real
+object is to let out the seedling. The knob grows out at last into the
+young plantlet, and it is by means of the soft hole that it makes its
+escape through the shell to the air and the sunshine which it seeks
+without. This brings us really down at last to the true _raison d'être_
+for the milk in the coco-nut. As the seed or kernel cannot easily get at
+much water from outside, it has a good supply of water laid up for it
+ready beforehand within its own encircling shell. The mother liquid from
+which the pulp or nutty part has been deposited remains in the centre,
+as the milk, till the tiny embryo begins to sprout. As soon as it does
+so, the little knob which was at first so very small enlarges rapidly
+and absorbs the water, till it grows out into a big spongy cellular
+mass, which at last almost fills up the entire shell. At the same time,
+its other end pushes its way out through the soft hole, and then gives
+birth to a growing bud at the top--the future stem and leaves--and to a
+number of long threads beneath--the future roots. Meanwhile, the spongy
+mass inside begins gradually to absorb all the nutty part, using up its
+oils and starches for the purpose of feeding the young plant above,
+until it is of an age to expand its leaves to the open tropical sunlight
+and shift for itself in the struggle for life. It seems at first sight
+very hard to understand how any tissue so solid as the pulp of coco-nut
+can be thus softened and absorbed without any visible cause; but in the
+subtle chemistry of living vegetation such a transformation is
+comparatively simple and easy to perform. Nature sometimes works much
+greater miracles than this in the same way: for example, what is called
+vegetable ivory, a substance so solid that it can be carved or turned
+only with great difficulty, is really the kernel of another palm-nut,
+allied to the coco-palm, and its very stony particles are all similarly
+absorbed during germination by the dissolving power of the young
+seedling.
+
+Why, however, has the coco-nut three pores at the top instead of one,
+and why are two out of the three so carefully and firmly sealed up? The
+explanation of this strange peculiarity is only to be found in the
+ancestral history of the coco-nut kind. Most nuts, indeed, start in
+their earlier stage as if they meant to produce two or more seeds each;
+but as they ripen, all the seeds except one become abortive. The almond,
+for example, has in the flower two seeds or kernels to each nut; but in
+the ripe state there is generally only one, though occasionally we find
+an almond with two--a philipoena, as we commonly call it--just to
+keep in memory the original arrangement of its earlier ancestors. The
+reason for this is that plants whose fruits have no special protection
+for their seeds are obliged to produce a great many of them at once, in
+order that one seed in a thousand may finally survive the onslaughts of
+their Argus-eyed enemies; but when they learn to protect themselves by
+hard coverings from birds and beasts, they can dispense with some of
+these supernumerary seeds, and put more nutriment into each one of those
+that they still retain. Compare, for example, the innumerable small
+round seedlets of the poppyhead with the solitary large and richly
+stored seed of the walnut, or the tiny black specks of mustard and cress
+with the single compact and well-filled seed of the filbert and the
+acorn. To the very end, however, most nuts begin in the flower as if
+they meant to produce a whole capsuleful of small unstored and
+unprotected seeds, like their original ancestors; it is only at the last
+moment that they recollect themselves, suppress all their ovules except
+one, and store that one with all the best and oiliest food-stuffs at
+their disposal. The nuts, in fact, have learned by long experience that
+it is better to be the only son and heir of a wealthy house, set up in
+life with a good capital to begin upon, than to be one of a poor family
+of thirteen needy and unprovided children.
+
+Now, the coco-nuts are descended from a great tribe--the palms and
+lilies--which have as their main distinguishing peculiarity the
+arrangement of parts in their flowers and fruits by threes each. For
+example, in the most typical flowers of this great group, there are
+three green outer calyx-pieces, three bright-coloured petals, three long
+outer stamens, three short inner stamens, three valves to the capsule,
+and three seeds or three rows of seeds in each fruit. Many palms still
+keep pretty well to this primitive arrangement, but a few of them which
+have specially protected or highly developed fruits or nuts have lost in
+their later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and possess
+only one seed, often a very large one. There is no better and more
+typical nut in the whole world than a coco-nut--that is to say, from our
+present point of view at least, though the fear of that awful person,
+the botanical Smelfungus, compels me to add that this is not quite
+technically true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the
+coco-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delightful
+information, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which he
+is so great a master, that it is really 'a drupaceous fruit with a
+fibrous mesocarp.' Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nice
+hair-splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large will
+still call a nut a nut, and that the coco-nut is the highest known
+development of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and most
+richly stored seed of any known plant; and this seed is surrounded by
+one of the hardest and most unmanageable of any known shells. Hence the
+coco-nut has readily been able to dispense with the three kernels which
+each nut used in its earlier and less developed days to produce. But
+though the palm has thus taken to reducing the number of its seeds in
+each fruit to the lowest possible point consistent with its continued
+existence at all, it still goes on retaining many signs of its ancient
+threefold arrangement. The ancestral and most deeply ingrained habits
+persist in the earlier stages; it is only in the mature form that the
+later acquired habits begin fully to predominate. Even so our own boys
+pass through an essentially savage childhood of ogres and fairies, bows
+and arrows, sugar-plums and barbaric nursery tales, as well as a
+romantic boyhood of mediæval chivalry and adventure, before they steady
+down into that crowning glory of our race, the solid, sober,
+matter-of-fact, commercial British Philistine. Hence the coco-nut in its
+unstripped state is roughly triangular in form, its angles answering to
+the separate three fruits of simpler palms; and it has three pits or
+weak places in the shell, through which the embryos of the three
+original kernels used to force their way out. But as only one of them is
+now needed, that one alone is left soft; the other two, which would be
+merely a source of weakness to the plant if unprotected, are covered in
+the existing nut by harder shell. Doubtless they serve in part to
+deceive the too inquisitive monkey or other enemy, who probably
+concludes that if one of the pits is hard and impermeable, the other two
+are so likewise.
+
+Though I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted for the milk in the
+coco-nut, and incidentally for some other matters in its economy as
+well, I am loth to leave the young seedling whom I have brought so far
+on his way to the tender mercies of the winds and storms and tropical
+animals, some of whom are extremely fond of his juicy and delicate
+shoots. Indeed, the growing point or bud of most palms is a very
+pleasant succulent vegetable, and one kind--the West Indian mountain
+cabbage--deserves a better and more justly descriptive name, for it is
+really much more like seakale or asparagus. I shall try to follow our
+young seedling on in life, therefore, so as to give, while I am about
+it, a fairly comprehensive and complete biography of a single
+flourishing coco-nut palm.
+
+Beginning, then, with the fall of the nut from the parent-tree, the
+troubles of the future palm confront it at once in the shape of the
+nut-eating crab. This evil-disposed crustacean is common around the
+sea-coast of the eastern tropical islands, which is also the region
+mainly affected by the coco-nut palm; for coco-nuts are essentially
+shore-loving trees, and thrive best in the immediate neighbourhood of
+the sea. Among the fallen nuts, the clumsy-looking thief of a crab (his
+appropriate Latin name is _Birgus latro_) makes great and dreaded havoc.
+To assist him in his unlawful object he has developed a pair of front
+legs, with specially strong and heavy claws, supplemented by a last or
+tail-end pair armed only with very narrow and slender pincers. He
+subsists entirely upon a coco-nut diet. Setting to work upon a big
+fallen nut--with the husk on, coco-nuts measure in the raw state about
+twelve inches the long way--he tears off all the coarse fibre bit by
+bit, and gets down at last to the hard shell. Then he hammers away with
+his heavy claw on the softest eye-hole till he has pounded an opening
+right through it. This done he twists round his body so as to turn his
+back upon the coco-nut he is operating upon (crabs are never famous
+either for good manners or gracefulness) and proceeds awkwardly but
+effectually to extract all the white kernel or pulp through the breach
+with his narrow pair of hind pincers. Like man, too, the robber-crab
+knows the value of the outer husk as well as of the eatable nut itself,
+for he collects the fibre in surprising quantities to line his burrow,
+and lies upon it, the clumsy sybarite, for a luxurious couch. Alas,
+however, for the helplessness of crabs, and the rapacity and cunning of
+all-appropriating man! The spoil-sport Malay digs up the nest for the
+sake of the fibre it contains, which spares him the trouble of picking
+junk on his own account, and then he eats the industrious crab who has
+laid it all up, while he melts down the great lump of fat under the
+robber's capacious tail, and sometimes gets from it as much as a good
+quart of what may be practically considered as limpid coco-nut oil. _Sic
+vos non vobis_ is certainly the melancholy refrain of all natural
+history. The coco-nut palm intends the oil for the nourishment of its
+own seedling; the crab feloniously appropriates it and stores it up
+under his capacious tail for future personal use; the Malay steals it
+again from the thief for his own purposes; and ten to one the Dutch or
+English merchant beguiles it from him with sized calico or poisoned rum,
+and transmits it to Europe, where it serves to lighten our nights and
+assist at our matutinal tub, to point a moral and adorn the present
+tale.
+
+If, however, our coco-nut is lucky enough to escape the robber-crabs,
+the pigs, and the monkeys, as well as to avoid falling into the hands of
+man, and being converted into the copra of commerce, or sold from a
+costermonger's barrow in the chilly streets of ungenial London at a
+penny a slice, it may very probably succeed in germinating after the
+fashion I have already described, and pushing up its head through the
+surrounding foliage to the sunlight above. As a rule, the coco-nut has
+been dropped by its mother tree on the sandy soil of a sea-beach; and
+this is the spot it best loves, and where it grows to the stateliest
+height. Sometimes, however, it falls into the sea itself, and then the
+loose husk buoys it up, so that it floats away bravely till it is cast
+by the waves upon some distant coral reef or desert island. It is this
+power of floating and surviving a long voyage that has dispersed the
+coco-nut so widely among oceanic islands, where so few plants are
+generally to be found. Indeed, on many atolls or isolated reefs (for
+example, on Keeling Island) it is the only tree or shrub that grows in
+any quantity, and on it the pigs, the poultry, the ducks, and the land
+crabs of the place entirely subsist. In any case, wherever it happens to
+strike, the young coco-nut sends up at first a fine rosette of big
+spreading leaves, not raised as afterwards on a tall stem, but springing
+direct from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big and
+graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more beautiful or more
+essentially tropical in appearance than a plantation of young coco-nuts.
+Their long feathery leaves spreading out in great clumps from the buried
+stock, and waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of the
+Indies, are the very embodiment of those deceptive ideal tropics which,
+alas, are to be found in actual reality nowhere on earth save in the
+artificial palm-houses at Kew, and the Casino Gardens at too entrancing
+Monte Carlo.
+
+For the first two or three years the young palms must be well watered,
+and the soil around them opened; after which the tall graceful stem
+begins to rise rapidly into the open air. In this condition it may be
+literally said to make the tropics--those fallacious tropics, I mean, of
+painters and poets, of Enoch Arden and of Locksley Hall. You may observe
+that whenever an artist wants to make a tropical picture, he puts a
+group of coco-nut palms in the foreground, as much as to say, 'You see
+there's no deception; these are the genuine unadulterated tropics.' But
+as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just as well
+think of painting the desert without the camels. At eight or ten years
+old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms of the ordinary palm type,
+degraded likenesses of the lilies and yuccas, greenish and
+inconspicuous, but visited by insects for the sake of their pollen. The
+flower, however, is fertilised by the wind, which carries the pollen
+grains from one bunch of blossoms to another. Then the nuts gradually
+swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even under the
+brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though
+in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that
+precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in
+his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst
+thing about the coco-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the
+fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit
+uninterruptedly for forty years. This is very immoral and wrong of the
+ill-conditioned tree, because it encourages the idyllic Polynesian to
+lie under the palms, all day long, cooling his limbs in the sea
+occasionally, sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles
+of Neæra's hair, and waiting for the nuts to drop down in due time, when
+he ought (according to European notions) to be killing himself with hard
+work under a blazing sky, raising cotton, sugar, indigo, and coffee, for
+the immediate benefit of the white merchant, and the ultimate advantage
+of the British public. It doesn't enforce habits of steady industry and
+perseverance, the good missionaries say; it doesn't induce the native to
+feel that burning desire for Manchester piece-goods and the other
+blessings of civilisation which ought properly to accompany the
+propagation of the missionary in foreign parts. You stick your nut in
+the sand; you sit by a few years and watch it growing; you pick up the
+ripe fruits as they fall from the tree; and you sell them at last for
+illimitable red cloth to the Manchester piece-goods merchant. Nothing
+could be more simple or more satisfactory. And yet it is difficult to
+see the precise moral distinction between the owner of a coco-nut grove
+in the South Sea Islands and the owner of a coal-mine or a big estate in
+commercial England. Each lounges decorously through life after his own
+fashion; only the one lounges in a Russia leather chair at a club in
+Pall Mall, while the other lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a
+rolling surf in Tahiti or the Hawaiian Archipelago.
+
+Curiously enough, at a little distance from the sandy levels or alluvial
+flats of the sea-shore, the sea-loving coco-nut will not bring its nuts
+to perfection. It will grow, indeed, but it will not thrive or fruit in
+due season. On the coast-line of Southern India, immense groves of
+coco-nuts fringe the shore for miles and miles together; and in some
+parts, as in Travancore, they form the chief agricultural staple of the
+whole country. 'The State has hence facetiously been called
+Coconutcore,' says its historian; which charmingly illustrates the true
+Anglo-Indian notion of what constitutes facetiousness, and ought to
+strike the last nail into the coffin of a competitive examination
+system. A good tree in full bearing should produce 120 coco-nuts in a
+season; so that a very small grove is quite sufficient to maintain a
+respectable family in decency and comfort. Ah, what a mistake the
+English climate made when it left off its primitive warmth of the
+tertiary period, and got chilled by the ice and snow of the Glacial
+Epoch down to its present misty and dreary wheat-growing condition! If
+it were not for that, those odious habits of steady industry and
+perseverance might never have been developed in ourselves at all, and we
+might be lazily picking copra off our own coco-palms, to this day, to
+export in return for the piece-goods of some Arctic Manchester situated
+somewhere about the north of Spitzbergen or the New Siberian Islands.
+
+Even as things stand at the present day, however, it is wonderful how
+much use we modern Englishmen now make in our own houses of this far
+Eastern nut, whose very name still bears upon its face the impress of
+its originally savage origin. From morning to night we never leave off
+being indebted to it. We wash with it as old brown Windsor or glycerine
+soap the moment we leave our beds. We walk across our passages on the
+mats made from its fibre. We sweep our rooms with its brushes, and wipe
+our feet on it as we enter our doors. As rope, it ties up our trunks and
+packages; in the hands of the housemaid it scrubs our floors; or else,
+woven into coarse cloth, it acts as a covering for bales and furniture
+sent by rail or steamboat. The confectioner undermines our digestion in
+early life with coco-nut candy; the cook tempts us later on with
+coco-nut cake; and Messrs. Huntley and Palmer cordially invite us to
+complete the ruin with coco-nut biscuits. We anoint our chapped hands
+with one of its preparations after washing; and grease the wheels of our
+carriages with another to make them run smoothly. Finally, we use the
+oil to burn in our reading lamps, and light ourselves at last to bed
+with stearine candles. Altogether, an amateur census of a single small
+English cottage results in the startling discovery that it contains
+twenty-seven distinct articles which owe their origin in one way or
+another to the coco-nut palm. And yet we affect in our black ingratitude
+to despise the question of the milk in the coco-nut.
+
+
+
+
+FOOD AND FEEDING
+
+
+When a man and a bear meet together casually in an American forest, it
+makes a great deal of difference, to the two parties concerned at least,
+whether the bear eats the man or the man eats the bear. We haven't the
+slightest difficulty in deciding afterwards which of the two, in each
+particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten. Here, we say,
+is the grizzly that eat the man; or, here is the man that smoked and
+dined off the hams of the grizzly. Basing our opinion upon such familiar
+and well-known instances, we are apt to take it for granted far too
+readily that between eating and being eaten, between the active and the
+passive voice of the verb _edo_, there exists necessarily a profound and
+impassable native antithesis. To swallow an oyster is, in our own
+personal histories, so very different a thing from being swallowed by a
+shark that we can hardly realise at first the underlying fundamental
+identity of eating with mere coalescence. And yet, at the very outset of
+the art of feeding, when the nascent animal first began to indulge in
+this very essential animal practice, one may fairly say that no
+practical difference as yet existed between the creature that ate and
+the creature that was eaten. After the man and the bear had finished
+their little meal, if one may be frankly metaphorical, it was impossible
+to decide whether the remaining being was the man or the bear, or which
+of the two had swallowed the other. The dinner having been purely
+mutual, the resulting animal represented both the litigants equally;
+just as, in cannibal New Zealand, the chief who ate up his brother chief
+was held naturally to inherit the goods and chattels of the vanquished
+and absorbed rival, whom he had thus literally and physically
+incorporated.
+
+A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant water
+under the field of a microscope, collides accidentally with another
+jelly-speck who happens to be travelling in the opposite direction
+across the same miniature ocean. What thereupon occurs? One jelly-speck
+rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two, there is
+now one; and the united body proceeds to float away quite unconcernedly,
+without waiting to trouble itself for a second with the profound
+metaphysical question, which half of it is the original personality, and
+which half the devoured and digested. In these minute and very simple
+animals there is absolutely no division of labour between part and part;
+every bit of the jelly-like mass is alike head and foot and mouth and
+stomach. The jelly-speck has no permanent limbs, but it keeps putting
+forth vague arms and legs every now and then from one side or the other;
+and with these temporary and ever-dissolving members it crawls along
+merrily through its tiny drop of stagnant water. If two of the legs or
+arms happen to knock up casually against one another, they coalesce at
+once, just like two drops of water on a window-pane, or two strings of
+treacle slowly spreading along the surface of a plate. When the
+jelly-speck meets any edible thing--a bit of dead plant, a wee creature
+like itself, a microscopic egg--it proceeds to fold its own substance
+slimily around it, making, as it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose
+of swallowing it, and a temporary stomach for the purpose of quietly
+digesting and assimilating it afterwards. Thus what at one moment is a
+foot may at the next moment become a mouth, and at the moment after that
+again a rudimentary stomach. The animal has no skin and no body, no
+outside and no inside, no distinction of parts or members, no
+individuality, no identity. Roll it up into one with another of its
+kind, and it couldn't tell you itself a minute afterwards which of the
+two it had really been a minute before. The question of personal
+identity is here considerably mixed.
+
+But as soon as we get to rather larger creatures of the same type, the
+antithesis between the eater and the eaten begins to assume a more
+definite character. The big jelly-bag approaches a good many smaller
+jelly-bags, microscopic plants, and other appropriate food-stuffs, and,
+surrounding them rapidly with its crawling arms, envelopes them in its
+own substance, which closes behind them and gradually digests them.
+Everybody knows, by name at least, that revolutionary and evolutionary
+hero, the amoeba--the terror of theologians, the pet of professors,
+and the insufferable bore of the general reader. Well, this parlous and
+subversive little animal consists of a comparatively large mass of soft
+jelly, pushing forth slender lobes, like threads or fingers, from its
+own substance, and gliding about, by means of these tiny legs, over
+water-plants and other submerged surfaces. But though it can literally
+turn itself inside out, like a glove, it still has some faint beginnings
+of a mouth and stomach, for it generally takes in food and absorbs water
+through a particular part of its surface, where the slimy mass of its
+body is thinnest. Thus the amoeba may be said really to eat and
+drink, though quite devoid of any special organs for eating or drinking.
+
+The particular point to which I wish to draw attention here, however, is
+this: that even the very simplest and most primitive animals do
+discriminate somehow between what is eatable and what isn't. The
+amoeba has no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no tongue, no nerves of taste,
+no special means of discrimination of any kind; and yet, so long as it
+meets only grains of sand or bits of shell, it makes no effort in any
+way to swallow them; but, the moment it comes across a bit of material
+fit for its food, it begins at once to spread its clammy fingers around
+the nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the amoeba's body
+apparently possesses, in a very vague form, the first beginnings of
+those senses which in us are specialised and confined to a single spot.
+And it is because of the light which the amoeba thus incidentally
+casts upon the nature of the specialised senses in higher animals that I
+have ventured once more to drag out of the private life of his native
+pond that already too notorious and obtrusive rhizopod.
+
+With us lordly human beings, at the extreme opposite end in the scale of
+being from the microscopic jelly-specks, the art of feeding and the
+mechanism which provides for it have both reached a very high state of
+advanced perfection. We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the
+one hand, and French cooks and _pâté de foie gras_ on the other. But
+while everybody knows practically how things taste to us, and which
+things respectively we like and dislike, comparatively few people ever
+recognise that the sense of taste is not merely intended as a source of
+gratification, but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in
+informing us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. Paradoxical as it
+may sound at first to most people, nice things are, in the main, things
+that are good for us, and nasty things are poisonous or otherwise
+injurious. That we often practically find the exact contrary the case
+(alas!) is due, not to the provisions of nature, but to the artificial
+surroundings in which we live, and to the cunning way in which we
+flavour up unwholesome food, so as to deceive and cajole the natural
+palate. Yet, after all, it is a pleasant gospel that what we like is
+really good for us, and, when we have made some small allowances for
+artificial conditions, it is in the main a true one also.
+
+The sense of taste, which in the lowest animals is diffused equally over
+the whole frame, is in ourselves and other higher creatures concentrated
+in a special part of the body, namely the mouth, where the food about to
+be swallowed is chewed and otherwise prepared beforehand for the work of
+digestion. Now it is, of course, quite clear that some sort of
+supervision must be exercised by the body over the kind of food that is
+going to be put into it. Common experience teaches us that prussic acid
+and pure opium are undesirable food-stuffs in large quantities; that raw
+spirits, petroleum, and red lead should be sparingly partaken of by the
+judicious feeder; and that even green fruit, the bitter end of cucumber,
+and the berries of deadly nightshade are unsatisfactory articles of diet
+when continuously persisted in. If, at the very outset of our digestive
+apparatus, we hadn't a sort of automatic premonitory adviser upon the
+kinds of food we ought or ought not to indulge in, we should naturally
+commit considerable imprudences in the way of eating and drinking--even
+more than we do at present. Natural selection has therefore provided us
+with a fairly efficient guide in this respect in the sense of taste,
+which is placed at the very threshold, as it were, of our digestive
+mechanism. It is the duty of taste to warn us against uneatable things,
+and to recommend to our favourable attention eatable and wholesome ones;
+and, on the whole, in spite of small occasional remissness, it performs
+this duty with creditable success.
+
+Taste, however, is not equally distributed over the whole surface of the
+tongue alike. There are three distinct regions or tracts, each of which
+has to perform its own special office and function. The tip of the
+tongue is concerned mainly with pungent and acrid tastes; the middle
+portion is sensitive chiefly to sweets and bitters; while the back or
+lower portion confines itself almost entirely to the flavours of roast
+meats, butter, oils, and other rich or fatty substances. There are very
+good reasons for this subdivision of faculties in the tongue, the object
+being, as it were, to make each piece of food undergo three separate
+examinations (like 'smalls,' 'mods,' and 'greats' at Oxford), which must
+be successively passed before it is admitted into full participation in
+the human economy. The first examination, as we shall shortly see, gets
+rid at once of substances which would be actively and immediately
+destructive to the very tissues of the mouth and body; the second
+discriminates between poisonous and chemically harmless food-stuffs; and
+the third merely decides the minor question whether the particular food
+is likely to prove then and there wholesome or indigestible to the
+particular person. The sense of taste proceeds, in fact, upon the
+principle of gradual selection and elimination; it refuses first what is
+positively destructive, next what is more remotely deleterious, and
+finally what is only undesirable or over-luscious.
+
+When we want to assure ourselves, by means of taste, about any unknown
+object--say a lump of some white stuff, which may be crystal, or glass,
+or alum, or borax, or quartz, or rock-salt--we put the tip of the tongue
+against it gingerly. If it begins to burn us, we draw it away more or
+less rapidly with an accompaniment in language strictly dependent upon
+our personal habits and manners. The test we thus occasionally apply,
+even in the civilised adult state, to unknown bodies is one that is
+being applied every day and all day long by children and savages.
+Unsophisticated humanity is constantly putting everything it sees up to
+its mouth in a frank spirit of experimental inquiry as to its gustatory
+properties. In civilised life we find everything ready labelled and
+assorted for us; we comparatively seldom require to roll the contents of
+a suspicious bottle (in very small quantities) doubtfully upon the
+tongue in order to discover whether it is pale sherry or Chili vinegar,
+Dublin stout or mushroom ketchup. But in the savage state, from which,
+geologically and biologically speaking, we have only just emerged,
+bottles and labels do not exist. Primitive man, therefore, in his sweet
+simplicity, has only two modes open before him for deciding whether the
+things he finds are or are not strictly edible. The first thing he does
+is to sniff at them; and smell, being, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has well
+put it, an anticipatory taste, generally gives him some idea of what the
+thing is likely to prove. The second thing he does is to pop it into his
+mouth, and proceed practically to examine its further characteristics.
+
+Strictly speaking, with the tip of the tongue one can't really taste at
+all. If you put a small drop of honey or of oil of bitter almonds on
+that part of the mouth, you will find (no doubt to your great surprise)
+that it produces no effect of any sort; you only taste it when it begins
+slowly to diffuse itself, and reaches the true tasting region in the
+middle distance. But if you put a little cayenne or mustard on the same
+part, you will find that it bites you immediately--the experiment should
+be tried sparingly--while if you put it lower down in the mouth you will
+swallow it almost without noticing the pungency of the stimulant. The
+reason is, that the tip of the tongue is supplied only with nerves which
+are really nerves of touch, not nerves of taste proper; they belong to a
+totally different main branch, and they go to a different centre in the
+brain, together with the very similar threads which supply the nerves
+of smell for mustard and pepper. That is why the smell and taste of
+these pungent substances are so much alike, as everybody must have
+noticed, a good sniff at a mustard-pot producing almost the same
+irritating effects as an incautious mouthful. As a rule we don't
+accurately distinguish, it is true, between these different regions of
+taste in the mouth in ordinary life; but that is because we usually roll
+our food about instinctively, without paying much attention to the
+particular part affected by it. Indeed, when one is trying deliberate
+experiments in the subject, in order to test the varying sensitiveness
+of the different parts to different substances, it is necessary to keep
+the tongue quite dry, in order to isolate the thing you are
+experimenting with, and prevent its spreading to all parts of the mouth
+together. In actual practice this result is obtained in a rather
+ludicrous manner--by blowing upon the tongue, between each experiment,
+with a pair of bellows. To such undignified expedients does the pursuit
+of science lead the ardent modern psychologist. Those domestic rivals of
+Dr. Forbes Winslow, the servants, who behold the enthusiastic
+investigator alternately drying his tongue in this ridiculous fashion,
+as if he were a blacksmith's fire, and then squeezing out a single drop
+of essence of pepper, vinegar, or beef-tea from a glass syringe upon the
+dry surface, not unnaturally arrive at the conclusion that master has
+gone stark mad, and that, in their private opinion, it's the microscope
+and the skeleton as has done it.
+
+Above all things, we don't want to be flayed alive. So the kinds of
+tastes discriminated by the tip of the tongue are the pungent, like
+pepper, cayenne and mustard; the astringent, like borax and alum; the
+alkaline, like soda and potash; the acid, like vinegar and green fruit;
+and the saline, like salt and ammonia. Almost all the bodies likely to
+give rise to such tastes (or, more correctly, sensations of touch in
+the tongue) are obviously unwholesome and destructive in their
+character, at least when taken in large quantities. Nobody wishes to
+drink nitric acid by the quart. The first business of this part of the
+tongue is, therefore, to warn us emphatically against caustic substances
+and corrosive acids, against vitriol and kerosene, spirits of wine and
+ether, capsicums and burning leaves or roots, such as those of the
+common English lords-and-ladies. Things of this sort are immediately
+destructive to the very tissues of the tongue and palate; if taken
+incautiously in too large doses, they burn the skin off the roof of the
+mouth; and when swallowed they play havoc, of course, with our internal
+arrangements. It is highly advisable, therefore, to have an immediate
+warning of these extremely dangerous substances, at the very outset of
+our feeding apparatus.
+
+This kind of taste hardly differs from touch or burning. The sensibility
+of the tip of the tongue is only a very slight modification of the
+sensibility possessed by the skin generally, and especially by the inner
+folds over all delicate parts of the body. We all know that common
+caustic burns us wherever it touches; and it burns the tongue only in a
+somewhat more marked manner. Nitric or sulphuric acid attacks the
+fingers each after its own kind. A mustard plaster makes us tingle
+almost immediately; and the action of mustard on the tongue hardly
+differs, except in being more instantaneous and more discriminative.
+Cantharides work in just the same way. If you cut a red pepper in two
+and rub it on your neck, it will sting just as it does when put into
+soup (this experiment, however, is best tried upon one's younger
+brother; if made personally, it hardly repays the trouble and
+annoyance). Even vinegar and other acids, rubbed into the skin, are
+followed by a slight tingling; while the effect of brandy, applied,
+say, to the arms, is gently stimulating and pleasurable, somewhat in the
+same way as when normally swallowed in conjunction with the habitual
+seltzer. In short, most things which give rise to distinct tastes when
+applied to the tip of the tongue give rise to fainter sensations when
+applied to the skin generally. And one hardly needs to be reminded that
+pepper or vinegar placed (accidentally as a rule) on the inner surface
+of the eyelids produces a very distinct and unpleasant smart.
+
+The fact is, the liability to be chemically affected by pungent or acid
+bodies is common to every part of the skin; but it is least felt where
+the tough outer skin is thickest, and most felt where that skin is
+thinnest, and the nerves are most plentifully distributed near the
+surface. A mustard plaster would probably fail to draw at all on one's
+heel or the palm of one's hand; while it is decidedly painful on one's
+neck or chest; and a mere speck of mustard inside the eyelid gives one
+positive torture for hours together. Now, the tip of the tongue is just
+a part of one's body specially set aside for this very object, provided
+with an extremely thin skin, and supplied with an immense number of
+nerves, on purpose so as to be easily affected by all such pungent,
+alkaline, or spirituous substances. Sir Wilfrid Lawson would probably
+conclude that it was deliberately designed by Providence to warn us
+against a wicked indulgence in the brandy and seltzer aforesaid.
+
+At first sight it might seem as though there were hardly enough of such
+pungent and fiery things in existence to make it worth while for us to
+be provided with a special mechanism for guarding against them. That is
+true enough, no doubt, as regards our modern civilised life; though,
+even now, it is perhaps just as well that our children should have an
+internal monitor (other than conscience) to dissuade them immediately
+from indiscriminate indulgence in photographic chemicals, the contents
+of stray medicine bottles, and the best dried West India chilies. But in
+an earlier period of progress, and especially in tropical countries
+(where the Darwinians have now decided the human race made its first
+_début_ upon this or any other stage), things were very different
+indeed. Pungent and poisonous plants and fruits abounded on every side.
+We have all of us in our youth been taken in by some too cruelly waggish
+companion, who insisted upon making us eat the bright, glossy leaves of
+the common English arum, which without look pretty and juicy enough, but
+within are full of the concentrated essence of pungency and profanity.
+Well, there are hundreds of such plants, even in cold climates, to tempt
+the eyes and poison the veins of unsuspecting cattle or childish
+humanity. There is buttercup, so horribly acrid that cows carefully
+avoid it in their closest cropped pastures; and yet your cow is not
+usually a too dainty animal. There is aconite, the deadly poison with
+which Dr. Lamson removed his troublesome relatives. There is baneberry,
+whose very name sufficiently describes its dangerous nature. There are
+horse-radish, and stinging rocket, and biting wall-pepper, and still
+smarter water-pepper, and worm-wood, and nightshade, and spurge, and
+hemlock, and half a dozen other equally unpleasant weeds. All of these
+have acquired their pungent and poisonous properties, just as nettles
+have acquired their sting, and thistles their thorns, in order to
+prevent animals from browsing upon them and destroying them. And the
+animals in turn have acquired a very delicate sense of pungency on
+purpose to warn them beforehand of the existence of such dangerous and
+undesirable qualities in the plants which they might otherwise be
+tempted incautiously to swallow.
+
+In tropical woods, where our 'hairy quadrumanous ancestor' (Darwinian
+for the primæval monkey, from whom we are presumably descended) used
+playfully to disport himself, as yet unconscious of his glorious destiny
+as the remote progenitor of Shakespeare, Milton, and the late Mr.
+Peace--in tropical woods, such acrid or pungent fruits and plants are
+particularly common, and correspondingly annoying. The fact is, our
+primitive forefather and all the other monkeys are, or were, confirmed
+fruit-eaters. But to guard against their depredations a vast number of
+tropical fruits and nuts have acquired disagreeable or fiery rinds and
+shells, which suffice to deter the bold aggressor. It may not be nice to
+get your tongue burnt with a root or fruit, but it is at least a great
+deal better than getting poisoned; and, roughly speaking, pungency in
+external nature exactly answers to the rough gaudy labels which some
+chemists paste on bottles containing poisons. It means to say, 'This
+fruit or leaf, if you eat it in any quantities, will kill you.' That is
+the true explanation of capsicums, pimento, colocynth, croton oil, the
+upas tree, and the vast majority of bitter, acrid, or fiery fruits and
+leaves. If we had to pick up our own livelihood, as our naked ancestors
+had to do, from roots, seeds, and berries, we should far more readily
+appreciate this simple truth. We should know that a great many more
+plants than we now suspect are bitter or pungent, and therefore
+poisonous. Even in England we are familiar enough with such defences as
+those possessed by the outer rind of the walnut; but the tropical
+cashew-nut has a rind so intensely acrid that it blisters the lips and
+fingers instantaneously, in the same way as cantharides would do. I
+believe that on the whole, taking nature throughout, more fruits and
+nuts are poisonous, or intensely bitter, or very fiery, than are sweet,
+luscious, and edible.
+
+'But,' says that fidgety person, the hypothetical objector (whom one
+always sets up for the express purpose of promptly knocking him down
+again), 'if it be the business of the fore part of the tongue to warn us
+against pungent and acrid substances, how comes it that we purposely use
+such things as mustard, pepper, curry-powder, and vinegar?' Well, in
+themselves all these things are, strictly speaking, bad for us; but in
+small quantities they act as agreeable stimulants; and we take care in
+preparing most of them to get rid of the most objectionable properties.
+Moreover, we use them, not as foods, but merely as condiments. One drop
+of oil of capsicums is enough to kill a man, if taken undiluted; but in
+actual practice we buy it in such a very diluted form that comparatively
+little harm arises from using it. Still, very young children dislike all
+these violent stimulants, even in small quantities; they won't touch
+mustard, pepper, or vinegar, and they recoil at once from wine or
+spirits. It is only by slow degrees that we learn these unnatural
+tastes, as our nerves get blunted and our palates jaded; and we all know
+that the old Indian who can eat nothing but dry curries, devilled
+biscuits, anchovy paste, pepper-pot, mulligatawny soup, Worcestershire
+sauce, preserved ginger, hot pickles, fiery sherry, and neat cognac, is
+also a person with no digestion, a fragmentary liver, and very little
+chance of getting himself accepted by any safe and solvent insurance
+office. Throughout, the warning in itself is a useful one; it is we who
+foolishly and persistently disregard it. Alcohol, for example, tells us
+at once that it is bad for us; yet we manage so to dress it up with
+flavouring matters and dilute it with water that we overlook the fiery
+character of the spirit itself. But that alcohol is in itself a bad
+thing (when freely indulged in) has been so abundantly demonstrated in
+the history of mankind that it hardly needs any further proof.
+
+The middle region of the tongue is the part with which we experience
+sensations of taste proper--that is to say, of sweetness and bitterness.
+In a healthy, natural state all sweet things are pleasant to us, and all
+bitters (even if combined with sherry) unpleasant. The reason for this
+is easy enough to understand. It carries us back at once into those
+primæval tropical forests, where our 'hairy ancestor' used to diet
+himself upon the fruits of the earth in due season. Now, almost all
+edible fruits, roots, and tubers contain sugar; and therefore the
+presence of sugar is, in the wild condition, as good a rough test of
+whether anything is good to eat as one could easily find. In fact, the
+argument cuts both ways: edible fruits are sweet because they are
+intended for man and other animals to eat; and man and other animals
+have a tongue pleasurably affected by sugar because sugary things in
+nature are for them in the highest degree edible. Our early progenitors
+formed their taste upon oranges, mangoes, bananas, and grapes; upon
+sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, dates, and wild honey. There is scarcely
+anything fitted for human food in the vegetable world (and our earliest
+ancestors were most undoubted vegetarians) which does not contain sugar
+in considerable quantities. In temperate climates (where man is but a
+recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to regarding wheaten bread
+as the staff of life; but in our native tropics enormous populations
+still live almost exclusively upon plantains, bananas, bread-fruit,
+yams, sweet potatoes, dates, cocoanuts, melons, cassava, pine-apples,
+and figs. Our nerves have been adapted to the circumstances of our early
+life as a race in tropical forests; and we still retain a marked liking
+for sweets of every sort. Not content with our strawberries,
+raspberries, gooseberries, currants, apples, pears, cherries, plums and
+other northern fruits, we ransack the world for dates, figs, raisins,
+and oranges. Indeed, in spite of our acquired meat-eating propensities,
+it may be fairly said that fruits and seeds (including wheat, rice,
+peas, beans, and other grains and pulse) still form by far the most
+important element in the food-stuffs of human populations generally.
+
+But besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to producing
+artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realised the alarming condition
+of cookery in the benighted generations before the invention of sugar?
+It is really almost too appalling to think about. So many things that we
+now look upon as all but necessaries--cakes, puddings, made dishes,
+confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies, cooked fruits, tarts,
+and so forth--were then practically quite impossible. Fancy attempting
+nowadays to live a single day without sugar; no tea, no coffee, no jam,
+no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one goes to bed; the
+bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that was really the abject
+condition of all the civilised world up to the middle of the middle
+ages. Horace's punch was sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil
+never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went from
+his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the flavour of peppermint
+bull's eyes. How the children managed to spend their Saturday _as_, or
+their weekly _obolus_, is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had
+honey; but honey is rare, dear, and scanty; it can never have filled one
+quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affections. Try for a
+moment to realise drinking honey with one's whisky-and-water, or doing
+the year's preserving with a pot of best Narbonne, and you get at once a
+common measure of the difference between the two as practical
+sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beet-root in abundance,
+while sugar-maples and palm-trees of various sorts afford a considerable
+supply to remoter countries. But the childhood of the little Greeks and
+Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a single ray of joy from
+chocolate creams or Everton toffee.
+
+The consequence of this excessive production of sweets in modern times
+is, of course, that we have begun to distrust the indications afforded
+us by the sense of taste in this particular as to the wholesomeness of
+various objects. We can mix sugar with anything we like, whether it had
+sugar in it to begin with or otherwise; and by sweetening and flavouring
+we can give a false palatableness to even the worst and most
+indigestible rubbish, such as plaster-of-Paris, largely sold under the
+name of sugared almonds to the ingenuous youth of two hemispheres. But
+in untouched nature the test rarely or never fails. As long as fruits
+are unripe and unfit for human food, they are green and sour; as soon as
+they ripen they become soft and sweet, and usually acquire some bright
+colour as a sort of advertisement of their edibility. In the main, bar
+the accidents of civilisation, whatever is sweet is good to eat--nay
+more, is meant to be eaten; it is only our own perverse folly that makes
+us sometimes think all nice things bad for us, and all wholesome things
+nasty. In a state of nature, the exact opposite is really the case. One
+may observe, too, that children, who are literally young savages in more
+senses than one, stand nearer to the primitive feeling in this respect
+than grown-up people. They unaffectedly like sweets; adults, who have
+grown more accustomed to the artificial meat diet, don't, as a rule,
+care much for puddings, cakes, and made dishes. (May I venture
+parenthetically to add, any appearance to the contrary notwithstanding,
+that I am not a vegetarian, and that I am far from desiring to bring
+down upon my devoted head the imprecation pronounced against the rash
+person who would rob a poor man of his beer. It is quite possible to
+believe that vegetarianism was the starting point of the race, without
+wishing to consider it also as the goal; just as it is quite possible to
+regard clothes as purely artificial products of civilisation, without
+desiring personally to return to the charming simplicity of the Garden
+of Eden.)
+
+Bitter things in nature at large, on the contrary, are almost invariably
+poisonous. Strychnia, for example, is intensely bitter, and it is well
+known that life cannot be supported on strychnia alone for more than a
+few hours. Again, colocynth and aloes are far from being wholesome food
+stuffs, for a continuance; and the bitter end of cucumber does not
+conduce to the highest standard of good living. The bitter matter in
+decaying apples is highly injurious when swallowed, which it isn't
+likely to be by anybody who ever tastes it. Wormwood and walnut-shells
+contain other bitter and poisonous principles; absinthe, which is made
+from one of them, is a favourite slow poison with the fashionable young
+men of Paris, who wish to escape prematurely from 'Le monde où l'on
+s'ennuie.' But prussic acid is the commonest component in all natural
+bitters, being found in bitter almonds, apple pips, the kernels of
+mangosteens, and many other seeds and fruits. Indeed, one may say
+roughly that the object of nature generally is to prevent the actual
+seeds of edible fruits from being eaten and digested; and for this
+purpose, while she stores the pulp with sweet juices, she encloses the
+seed itself in hard stony coverings, and makes it nasty with bitter
+essences. Eat an orange-pip, and you will promptly observe how effectual
+is this arrangement. As a rule, the outer rind of nuts is bitter, and
+the inner kernel of edible fruits. The tongue thus warns us immediately
+against bitter things, as being poisonous, and prevents us automatically
+from swallowing them.
+
+'But how is it,' asks our objector again, 'that so many poisons are
+tasteless, or even, like sugar of lead, pleasant to the palate?' The
+answer is (you see, we knock him down again, as usual) because these
+poisons are themselves for the most part artificial products; they do
+not occur in a state of nature, at least in man's ordinary surroundings.
+Almost every poisonous thing that we are really liable to meet with in
+the wild state we are warned against at once by the sense of taste; but
+of course it would be absurd to suppose that natural selection could
+have produced a mode of warning us against poisons which have never
+before occurred in human experience. One might just as well expect that
+it should have rendered us dynamite-proof, or have given us a skin like
+the hide of a rhinoceros to protect us against the future contingency of
+the invention of rifles.
+
+Sweets and bitters are really almost the only tastes proper, almost the
+only ones discriminated by this central and truly gustatory region of
+the tongue and palate. Most so-called flavourings will be found on
+strict examination to be nothing more than mixtures with these of
+certain smells, or else of pungent, salty, or alkaline matters,
+distinguished as such by the tip of the tongue. For instance,
+paradoxical as it sounds to say so, cinnamon has really no taste at all,
+but only a smell. Nobody will ever believe this on first hearing, but
+nothing on earth is easier than to put it to the test. Take a small
+piece of cinnamon, hold your nose tightly, rather high up, between the
+thumb and finger, and begin chewing it. You will find that it is
+absolutely tasteless; you are merely chewing a perfectly insipid bit of
+bark. Then let go your nose, and you will find immediately that it
+'tastes' strongly, though in reality it is only the perfume from it that
+you now permit to rise into the smelling-chamber in the nose. So, again,
+cloves have only a pungent taste and a peculiar smell, and the same is
+the case more or less with almost all distinctive flavourings. When you
+come to find of what they are made up, they consist generally of sweets
+or bitters, intermixed with certain ethereal perfumes, or with pungent
+or acid tastes, or with both or several such together. In this way, a
+comparatively small number of original elements, variously combined,
+suffice to make up the whole enormous mass of recognisably different
+tastes and flavours.
+
+The third and lowest part of the tongue and throat is the seat of those
+peculiar tastes to which Professor Bain, the great authority upon this
+important philosophical subject, has given the names of relishes and
+disgusts. It is here, chiefly, that we taste animal food, fats, butters,
+oils, and the richer class of vegetables and made dishes. If we like
+them, we experience a sensation which may be called a relish, and which
+induces one to keep rolling the morsel farther down the throat, till it
+passes at last beyond the region of our voluntary control. If we don't
+like them, we get the sensation which may be called a disgust, and which
+is very different from the mere unpleasantness of excessively pungent or
+bitter things. It is far less of an intellectual and far more of a
+physical and emotional feeling. We say, and say rightly, of such things
+that we find it hard to swallow them; a something within us (of a very
+tangible nature) seems to rise up bodily and protest against them. As a
+very good example of this experience, take one's first attempt to
+swallow cod-liver oil. Other things may be unpleasant or unpalatable,
+but things of this class are in the strictest sense nasty and
+disgusting.
+
+The fact is, the lower part of the tongue is supplied with nerves in
+close sympathy with the digestion. If the food which has been passed by
+the two previous examiners is found here to be simple and digestible, it
+is permitted to go on unchallenged; if it is found to be too rich, too
+bilious, or too indigestible, a protest is promptly entered against it,
+and if we are wise we will immediately desist from eating any more of
+it. It is here that the impartial tribunal of nature pronounces
+definitely against roast goose, mince pies, _pâté de foie gras_, sally
+lunn, muffins and crumpets, and creamy puddings. It is here, too, that
+the slightest taint in meat, milk, or butter is immediately detected;
+that rancid pastry from the pastrycook's is ruthlessly exposed; and that
+the wiles of the fishmonger are set at naught by the judicious palate.
+It is the special duty, in fact, of this last examiner to discover, not
+whether food is positively destructive, not whether it is poisonous or
+deleterious in nature, but merely whether it is then and there
+digestible or undesirable.
+
+As our state of health varies greatly from time to time, however, so do
+the warnings of this last sympathetic adviser change and flicker. Sweet
+things are always sweet, and bitter things always bitter; vinegar is
+always sour, and ginger always hot in the mouth, too, whatever our state
+of health or feeling. But our taste for roast loin of mutton, high game,
+salmon cutlets, and Gorgonzola cheese varies immensely from time to
+time, with the passing condition of our health and digestion. In
+illness, and especially in sea-sickness, one gets the distaste carried
+to the extreme: you may eat grapes or suck an orange in the chops of the
+Channel, but you do not feel warmly attached to the steward who offers
+you a basin of greasy ox-tail, or consoles you with promises of ham
+sandwiches in half a minute. Under those two painful conditions it is
+the very light, fresh, and stimulating things that one can most easily
+swallow--champagne, soda-water, strawberries, peaches; not lobster
+salad, sardines on toast, green Chartreuse, or hot brandy-and-water. On
+the other hand, in robust health, and when hungry with exercise, you can
+eat fat pork with relish on a Scotch hillside, or dine off fresh salmon
+three days running without inconvenience. Even a Spanish stew, with
+plenty of garlic in it, and floating in olive oil, tastes positively
+delicious after a day's mountaineering in the Pyrenees.
+
+The healthy popular belief, still surviving in spite of cookery, that
+our likes and dislikes are the best guide to what is good for us, finds
+its justification in this fact, that whatever is relished will prove on
+the average wholesome, and whatever rouses disgust will prove on the
+whole indigestible. Nothing can be more wrong, for example, than to make
+children eat fat when they don't want it. A healthy child likes fat, and
+eats as much of it as he can get. If a child shows signs of disgust at
+fat, that proves that it is of a bilious temperament, and it ought never
+to be forced into eating it against its will. Most of us are bilious in
+after-life just because we were compelled to eat rich food in childhood,
+which we felt instinctively was unsuitable for us. We might still be
+indulging with impunity in thick turtle, canvas-back ducks, devilled
+whitebait, meringues, and Nesselrode puddings, if we hadn't been so
+persistently overdosed in our earlier years with things that we didn't
+want and knew were indigestible.
+
+Of course, in our existing modern cookery, very few simple and
+uncompounded tastes are still left to us; everything is so mixed up
+together that only by an effort of deliberate experiment can one
+discover what are the special effects of special tastes upon the tongue
+and palate. Salt is mixed with almost everything we eat--_sal sapit
+omnia_--and pepper or cayenne is nearly equally common. Butter is put
+into the peas, which have been previously adulterated by being boiled
+with mint; and cucumber is unknown except in conjunction with oil and
+vinegar. This makes it comparatively difficult for us to realise the
+distinctness of the elements which go to make up most tastes as we
+actually experience them. Moreover, a great many eatable objects have
+hardly any taste of their own, properly speaking, but only a feeling of
+softness, or hardness, or glutinousness in the mouth, mainly observed in
+the act of chewing them. For example, plain boiled rice is almost wholly
+insipid; but even in its plainest form salt has usually been boiled with
+it, and in practice we generally eat it with sugar, preserves, curry, or
+some other strongly flavoured condiment. Again, plain boiled tapioca and
+sago (in water) are as nearly tasteless as anything can be; they merely
+yield a feeling of gumminess; but milk, in which they are oftenest
+cooked, gives them a relish (in the sense here restricted), and sugar,
+eggs, cinnamon, or nutmeg are usually added by way of flavouring. Even
+turbot has hardly any taste proper, except in the glutinous skin, which
+has a faint relish; the epicure values it rather because of its
+softness, its delicacy, and its light flesh. Gelatine by itself is
+merely very swallowable; we must mix sugar, wine, lemon-juice, and other
+flavourings in order to make it into good jelly. Salt, spices, essences,
+vanilla, vinegar, pickles, capers, ketchups, sauces, chutneys,
+lime-juice, curry, and all the rest, are just our civilised expedients
+for adding the pleasure of pungency and acidity to naturally insipid
+foods, by stimulating the nerves of touch in the tongue, just as sugar
+is our tribute to the pure gustatory sense, and oil, butter, bacon,
+lard, and the various fats used in frying to the sense of relish which
+forms the last element in our compound taste. A boiled sole is all very
+well when one is just convalescent, but in robust health we demand the
+delights of egg and bread-crumb, which are after all only the vehicle
+for the appetising grease. Plain boiled macaroni may pass muster in the
+unsophisticated nursery, but in the pampered dining-room it requires the
+aid of toasted parmesan. Good modern cookery is the practical result of
+centuries of experience in this direction; the final flower of ages of
+evolution, devoted to the equalisation of flavours in all human food.
+Think of the generations of fruitless experiment that must have passed
+before mankind discovered that mint sauce (itself a cunning compound of
+vinegar and sugar) ought to be eaten with leg of lamb, that roast goose
+required a corrective in the shape of apple, and that while a
+pre-established harmony existed between salmon and lobster, oysters were
+ordained beforehand by nature as the proper accompaniment of boiled cod.
+Whenever I reflect upon such things, I become at once a good Positivist,
+and offer up praise in my own private chapel to the Spirit of Humanity
+which has slowly perfected these profound rules of good living.
+
+
+
+
+DE BANANA
+
+
+The title which heads this paper is intended to be Latin, and is
+modelled on the precedent of the De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Corona,
+and other time-honoured plagues of our innocent boyhood. It is meant to
+give dignity and authority to the subject with which it deals, as well
+as to rouse curiosity in the ingenuous breast of the candid reader, who
+may perhaps mistake it, at first sight, for negro-English, or for the
+name of a distinguished Norman family. In anticipation of the possible
+objection that the word 'Banana' is not strictly classical, I would
+humbly urge the precept and example of my old friend Horace--enemy I
+once thought him--who expresses his approbation of those happy
+innovations whereby Latium was gradually enriched with a copious
+vocabulary. I maintain that if Banana, bananæ, &c., is not already a
+Latin noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and it
+shall be in future. Linnæus indeed thought otherwise. He too assigned
+the plant and fruit to the first declension, but handed it over to none
+other than our earliest acquaintance in the Latin language, Musa. He
+called the banana _Musa sapientum_. What connection he could possibly
+conceive between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the ægis-bearing
+Zeus, or why he should consider it a proof of wisdom to eat a
+particularly indigestible and nightmare-begetting food-stuff, passes my
+humble comprehension. The muses, so far as I have personally noticed
+their habits, always greatly prefer the grape to the banana, and wise
+men shun the one at least as sedulously as they avoid the other.
+
+Let it not for a moment be supposed, however, that I wish to treat the
+useful and ornamental banana with intentional disrespect. On the
+contrary, I cherish for it--at a distance--feelings of the highest
+esteem and admiration. We are so parochial in our views, taking us as a
+species, that I dare say very few English people really know how
+immensely useful a plant is the common banana. To most of us it
+envisages itself merely as a curious tropical fruit, largely imported at
+Covent Garden, and a capital thing to stick on one of the tall
+dessert-dishes when you give a dinner-party, because it looks
+delightfully foreign, and just serves to balance the pine-apple at the
+opposite end of the hospitable mahogany. Perhaps such innocent readers
+will be surprised to learn that bananas and plantains supply the
+principal food-stuff of a far larger fraction of the human race than
+that which is supported by wheaten bread. They form the veritable staff
+of life to the inhabitants of both eastern and western tropics. What the
+potato is to the degenerate descendant of Celtic kings; what the oat is
+to the kilted Highlandman; what rice is to the Bengalee, and Indian corn
+to the American negro, that is the muse of sages (I translate literally
+from the immortal Swede) to African savages and Brazilian slaves.
+Humboldt calculated that an acre of bananas would supply a greater
+quantity of solid food to hungry humanity than could possibly be
+extracted from the same extent of cultivated ground by any other known
+plant. So you see the question is no small one; to sing the praise of
+this Linnæan muse is a task well worthy of the Pierian muses.
+
+Do you know the outer look and aspect of the banana plant? If not, then
+you have never voyaged to those delusive tropics. Tropical vegetation,
+as ordinarily understood by poets and painters, consists entirely of the
+coco-nut palm and the banana bush. Do you wish to paint a beautiful
+picture of a rich ambrosial tropical island, _à la_ Tennyson--a summer
+isle of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea?--then you introduce a
+group of coco-nuts, whispering in odorous heights of even, in the very
+foreground of your pretty sketch, just to let your public understand at
+a glance that these are the delicious poetical tropics. Do you desire to
+create an ideal paradise, _à la_ Bernardin de St. Pierre, where idyllic
+Virginies die of pure modesty rather than appear before the eyes of
+their beloved but unwedded Pauls in a lace-bedraped _peignoir_?--then
+you strike the keynote by sticking in the middle distance a hut or
+cottage, overshadowed by the broad and graceful foliage of the
+picturesque banana. ('Hut' is a poor and chilly word for these glowing
+descriptions, far inferior to the pretty and high-sounding original
+_chaumière_.) That is how we do the tropics when we want to work upon
+the emotions of the reader. But it is all a delicate theatrical
+illusion; a trick of art meant to deceive and impose upon the unwary who
+have never been there, and would like to think it all genuine. In
+reality, nine times out of ten, you might cast your eyes casually around
+you in any tropical valley, and, if there didn't happen to be a native
+cottage with a coco-nut grove and banana patch anywhere in the
+neighbourhood, you would see nothing in the way of vegetation which you
+mightn't see at home any day in Europe. But what painter would ever
+venture to paint the tropics without the palm trees? He might just as
+well try to paint the desert without the camels, or to represent St.
+Sebastian without a sheaf of arrows sticking unperceived in the calm
+centre of his unruffled bosom, to mark and emphasise his Sebastianic
+personality.
+
+Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with its practically
+almost identical relation, the plantain, is a real bit of tropical
+foliage. I confess to a settled prejudice against the tropics generally,
+but I allow the sunsets, the coco-nuts, and the bananas. The true stem
+creeps underground, and sends up each year an upright branch, thickly
+covered with majestic broad green leaves, somewhat like those of the
+canna cultivated in our gardens as 'Indian shot,' but far larger,
+nobler, and handsomer. They sometimes measure from six to ten feet in
+length, and their thick midrib and strongly marked diverging veins give
+them a very lordly and graceful appearance. But they are apt in practice
+to suffer much from the fury of the tropical storms. The wind rips the
+leaves up between the veins as far as the midrib in tangled tatters; so
+that after a good hurricane they look more like coco-nut palm leaves
+than like single broad masses of foliage as they ought properly to do.
+This, of course, is the effect of a gentle and balmy hurricane--a mere
+capful of wind that tears and tatters them. After a really bad storm
+(one of the sort when you tie ropes round your wooden house to prevent
+its falling bodily to pieces, I mean) the bananas are all actually blown
+down, and the crop for that season utterly destroyed. The apparent stem,
+being merely composed of the overlapping and sheathing leaf-stalks, has
+naturally very little stability; and the soft succulent trunk
+accordingly gives way forthwith at the slightest onslaught. This
+liability to be blown down in high winds forms the weak point of the
+plantain, viewed as a food-stuff crop. In the South Sea Islands, where
+there is little shelter, the poor Fijian, in cannibal days, often lost
+his one means of subsistence from this cause, and was compelled to
+satisfy the pangs of hunger on the plump persons of his immediate
+relatives. But since the introduction of Christianity, and of a dwarf
+stout wind-proof variety of banana, his condition in this respect, I am
+glad to say, has been greatly ameliorated.
+
+By descent the banana bush is a developed tropical lily, not at all
+remotely allied to the common iris, only that its flowers and fruit are
+clustered together on a hanging spike, instead of growing solitary and
+separate as in the true irises. The blossoms, which, though pretty, are
+comparatively inconspicuous for the size of the plant, show the
+extraordinary persistence of the lily type; for almost all the vast
+number of species, more or less directly descended from the primitive
+lily, continue to the very end of the chapter to have six petals, six
+stamens, and three rows of seeds in their fruits or capsules. But
+practical man, with his eye always steadily fixed on the one important
+quality of edibility--the sum and substance to most people of all
+botanical research--has confined his attention almost entirely to the
+fruit of the banana. In all essentials (other than the systematically
+unimportant one just alluded to) the banana fruit in its original state
+exactly resembles the capsule of the iris--that pretty pod that divides
+in three when ripe, and shows the delicate orange-coated seeds lying in
+triple rows within--only, in the banana, the fruit does not open; in the
+sweet language of technical botany, it is an indehiscent capsule; and
+the seeds, instead of standing separate and distinct, as in the iris,
+are embedded in a soft and pulpy substance which forms the edible and
+practical part of the entire arrangement.
+
+This is the proper appearance of the original and natural banana, before
+it has been taken in hand and cultivated by tropical man. When cut
+across the middle, it ought to show three rows of seeds, interspersed
+with pulp, and faintly preserving some dim memory of the dividing wall
+which once separated them. In practice, however, the banana differs
+widely from this theoretical ideal, as practice often _will_ differ
+from theory; for it has been so long cultivated and selected by
+man--being probably one of the very oldest, if not actually quite the
+oldest, of domesticated plants--that it has all but lost the original
+habit of producing seeds. This is a common effect of cultivation on
+fruits, and it is of course deliberately aimed at by horticulturists, as
+the seeds are generally a nuisance, regarded from the point of view of
+the eater, and their absence improves the fruit, as long as one can
+manage to get along somehow without them. In the pretty little
+Tangierine oranges (so ingeniously corrupted by fruiterers into
+mandarins) the seeds have almost been cultivated out; in the best
+pine-apples, and in the small grapes known in the dried state as
+currants, they have quite disappeared; while in some varieties of pears
+they survive only in the form of shrivelled, barren, and useless pips.
+But the banana, more than any other plant we know of, has managed for
+many centuries to do without seeds altogether. The cultivated sort,
+especially in America, is quite seedless, and the plants are propagated
+entirely by suckers.
+
+Still, you can never wholly circumvent nature. Expel her with a
+pitchfork, _tamen usque recurrit_. Now nature has settled that the right
+way to propagate plants is by means of seedlings. Strictly speaking,
+indeed, it is the only way; the other modes of growth from bulbs or
+cuttings are not really propagation, but mere reduplication by
+splitting, as when you chop a worm in two, and a couple of worms wriggle
+off contentedly forthwith in either direction. Just so when you divide a
+plant by cuttings, suckers, slips, or runners; the two apparent plants
+thus produced are in the last resort only separate parts of the same
+individual--one and indivisible, like the French Republic. Seedlings are
+absolutely distinct individuals; they are the product of the pollen of
+one plant and the ovules of another, and they start afresh in life with
+some chance of being fairly free from the hereditary taints or personal
+failings of either parent. But cuttings or suckers are only the same old
+plant over and over again in fresh circumstances, transplanted as it
+were, but not truly renovated or rejuvenescent. That is the real reason
+why our potatoes are now all going to--well, the same place as the army
+has been going ever since the earliest memories of the oldest officer in
+the whole service. We have gone on growing potatoes over and over again
+from the tubers alone, and hardly ever from seed, till the whole
+constitution of the potato kind has become permanently enfeebled by old
+age and dotage. The eyes (as farmers call them) are only buds or
+underground branches; and to plant potatoes as we usually do is nothing
+more than to multiply the apparent scions by fission. Odd as it may
+sound to say so, all the potato vines in a whole field are often, from
+the strict biological point of view, parts of a single much-divided
+individual. It is just as though one were to go on cutting up a single
+worm, time after time, as soon as he grew again, till at last the one
+original creature had multiplied into a whole colony of apparently
+distinct individuals. Yet, if the first worm happened to have the gout
+or the rheumatism (metaphorically speaking), all the other worms into
+which his compound personality had been divided would doubtless suffer
+from the same complaints throughout the whole of their joint lifetimes.
+
+The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevitable tendency to
+degeneration in plants thus artificially and unhealthily propagated.
+Potatoes have only been in cultivation for a few hundred years; and yet
+the potato constitution has become so far enfeebled by the practice of
+growing from the tuber that the plants now fall an easy prey to potato
+fungus, Colorado beetles, and a thousand other persistent enemies. It is
+just the same with the vine--propagated too long by layers or cuttings,
+its health has failed entirely, and it can no longer resist the ravages
+of the phylloxera or the slow attacks of the vine-disease fungus. But
+the banana, though of very ancient and positively immemorial antiquity
+as a cultivated plant, seems somehow gifted with an extraordinary power
+of holding its own in spite of long-continued unnatural propagation. For
+thousands of years it has been grown in Asia in the seedless condition,
+and yet it springs as heartily as ever still from the underground
+suckers. Nevertheless, there must in the end be some natural limit to
+this wonderful power of reproduction, or rather of longevity; for, in
+the strictest sense, the banana bushes that now grow in the negro
+gardens of Trinidad and Demerara are part and parcel of the very same
+plants which grew and bore fruit a thousand years ago in the native
+compounds of the Malay Archipelago.
+
+In fact, I think there can be but little doubt that the banana is the
+very oldest product of human tillage. Man, we must remember, is
+essentially by origin a tropical animal, and wild tropical fruits must
+necessarily have formed his earliest food-stuffs. It was among them of
+course that his first experiments in primitive agriculture would be
+tried; the little insignificant seeds and berries of cold northern
+regions would only very slowly be added to his limited stock in
+husbandry, as circumstances pushed some few outlying colonies northward
+and ever northward toward the chillier unoccupied regions. Now, of all
+tropical fruits, the banana is certainly the one that best repays
+cultivation. It has been calculated that the same area which will
+produce thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds of potatoes
+will produce 4,400 pounds of plantains or bananas. The cultivation of
+the various varieties in India, China, and the Malay Archipelago dates,
+says De Candolle, 'from an epoch impossible to realise.' Its diffusion,
+as that great but very oracular authority remarks, may go back to a
+period 'contemporary with or even anterior to that of the human races.'
+What this remarkably illogical sentence may mean I am at a loss to
+comprehend; perhaps M. de Candolle supposes that the banana was
+originally cultivated by pre-human gorillas; perhaps he merely intends
+to say that before men began to separate they sent special messengers on
+in front of them to diffuse the banana in the different countries they
+were about to visit. Even legend retains some trace of the extreme
+antiquity of the species as a cultivated fruit, for Adam and Eve are
+said to have reclined under the shadow of its branches, whence Linnæus
+gave to the sort known as the plantain the Latin name of _Musa
+paradisiaca_. If a plant was cultivated in Eden by the grand old
+gardener and his wife, as Lord Tennyson democratically styled them
+(before his elevation to the peerage), we may fairly conclude that it
+possesses a very respectable antiquity indeed.
+
+The wild banana is a native of the Malay region, according to De
+Candolle, who has produced by far the most learned and unreadable work
+on the origin of domestic plants ever yet written. (Please don't give me
+undue credit for having heroically read it through out of pure love of
+science: I was one of its unfortunate reviewers.) The wild form produces
+seed, and grows in Cochin China, the Philippines, Ceylon, and Khasia.
+Like most other large tropical fruits, it no doubt owes its original
+development to the selective action of monkeys, hornbills, parrots and
+other big fruit-eaters; and it shares with all fruits of similar origin
+one curious tropical peculiarity. Most northern berries, like the
+strawberry, the raspberry, the currant, and the blackberry, developed
+by the selective action of small northern birds, can be popped at once
+into the mouth and eaten whole; they have no tough outer rind or
+defensive covering of any sort. But big tropical fruits, which lay
+themselves out for the service of large birds or monkeys, have always
+hard outer coats, because they could only be injured by smaller animals,
+who would eat the pulp without helping in the dispersion of the useful
+seeds, the one object really held in view by the mother plant. Often, as
+in the case of the orange, the rind even contains a bitter, nauseous, or
+pungent juice, while at times, as in the pine-apple, the prickly pear,
+the sweet-sop, and the cherimoyer, the entire fruit is covered with
+sharp projections, stinging hairs, or knobby protuberances, on purpose
+to warn off the unauthorised depredator. It was this line of defence
+that gave the banana in the first instance its thick yellow skin; and,
+looking at the matter from the epicure's point of view, one may say
+roughly that all tropical fruits have to be skinned before they can be
+eaten. They are all adapted for being cut up with a knife and fork, or
+dug out with a spoon, on a civilised dessert-plate. As for that most
+delicious of Indian fruits, the mango, it has been well said that the
+only proper way to eat it is over a tub of water, with a couple of
+towels hanging gracefully across the side.
+
+The varieties of the banana are infinite in number, and, as in most
+other plants of ancient cultivation, they shade off into one another by
+infinitesimal gradations. Two principal sorts, however, are commonly
+recognised--the true banana of commerce, and the common plantain. The
+banana proper is eaten raw, as a fruit, and is allowed accordingly to
+ripen thoroughly before being picked for market; the plantain, which is
+the true food-stuff of all the equatorial region in both hemispheres, is
+gathered green and roasted as a vegetable, or, to use the more
+expressive West Indian negro phrase, as a bread-kind. Millions of human
+beings in Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean
+live almost entirely on the mild and succulent but tasteless plantain.
+Some people like the fruit; to me personally it is more suggestive of a
+very flavourless over-ripe pear than of anything else in heaven or earth
+or the waters that are under the earth--the latter being the most
+probable place to look for it, as its taste and substance are decidedly
+watery. Baked dry in the green state 'it resembles roasted chestnuts,'
+or rather baked parsnip; pulped and boiled with water it makes 'a very
+agreeable sweet soup,' almost as nice as peasoup with brown sugar in it;
+and cut into slices, sweetened, and fried, it forms 'an excellent
+substitute for fruit pudding,' having a flavour much like that of
+potatoes _à la maítre d'hótel_ served up in treacle.
+
+Altogether a fruit to be sedulously avoided, the plantain, though
+millions of our spiritually destitute African brethren haven't yet for a
+moment discovered that it isn't every bit as good as wheaten bread and
+fresh butter. Missionary enterprise will no doubt before long enlighten
+them on this subject, and create a good market in time for American
+flour and Manchester piece-goods.
+
+Though by origin a Malayan plant, there can be little doubt that the
+banana had already reached the mainland of America and the West India
+Islands long before the voyage of Columbus. When Pizarro disembarked
+upon the coast of Peru on his desolating expedition, the mild-eyed,
+melancholy, doomed Peruvians flocked down to the shore and offered him
+bananas in a lordly dish. Beds composed of banana leaves have been
+discovered in the tombs of the Incas, of date anterior, of course, to
+the Spanish conquest. How did they get there? Well, it is clearly an
+absurd mistake to suppose that Columbus discovered America; as Artemus
+Ward pertinently remarked, the noble Red Indian had obviously discovered
+it long before him. There had been intercourse of old, too, between Asia
+and the Western Continent; the elephant-headed god of Mexico, the
+debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion, the singular
+coincidences between India and Peru, all seem to show that a stream of
+communication, however faint, once existed between the Asiatic and
+American worlds. Garcilaso himself, the half-Indian historian of Peru,
+says that the banana was well known in his native country before the
+conquest, and that the Indians say 'its origin is Ethiopia.' In some
+strange way or other, then, long before Columbus set foot upon the low
+sandbank of Cat's Island, the banana had been transported from Africa or
+India to the Western hemisphere.
+
+If it were a plant propagated by seed, one would suppose that it was
+carried across by wind or waves, wafted on the feet of birds, or
+accidentally introduced in the crannies of drift timber. So the coco-nut
+made the tour of the world ages before either of the famous Cooks--the
+Captain or the excursion agent--had rendered the same feat easy and
+practicable; and so, too, a number of American plants have fixed their
+home in the tarns of the Hebrides or among the lonely bogs of Western
+Galway. But the banana must have been carried by man, because it is
+unknown in the wild state in the Western Continent; and, as it is
+practically seedless, it can only have been transported entire, in the
+form of a root or sucker. An exactly similar proof of ancient
+intercourse between the two worlds is afforded us by the sweet potato, a
+plant of undoubted American origin, which was nevertheless naturalised
+in China as early as the first centuries of the Christian era. Now that
+we all know how the Scandinavians of the eleventh century went to
+Massachusetts, which they called Vineland, and how the Mexican empire
+had some knowledge of Accadian astronomy, people are beginning to
+discover that Columbus himself was after all an egregious humbug.
+
+In the old world the cultivation of the banana and the plantain goes
+back, no doubt, to a most immemorial antiquity. Our Aryan ancestor
+himself, Professor Max Müller's especial _protégé_, had already invented
+several names for it, which duly survive in very classical Sanskrit. The
+Greeks of Alexander's expedition saw it in India, where 'sages reposed
+beneath its shade and ate of its fruit, whence the botanical name, _Musa
+sapientum_.' As the sages in question were lazy Brahmans, always
+celebrated for their immense capacity for doing nothing, the report, as
+quoted by Pliny, is no doubt an accurate one. But the accepted
+derivation of the word _Musa_ from an Arabic original seems to me highly
+uncertain; for Linnæus, who first bestowed it on the genus, called
+several other allied genera by such cognate names as Urania and
+Heliconia. If, therefore, the father of botany knew that his own word
+was originally Arabic, we cannot acquit him of the high crime and
+misdemeanour of deliberate punning. Should the Royal Society get wind of
+this, something serious would doubtless happen; for it is well known
+that the possession of a sense of humour is absolutely fatal to the
+pretensions of a man of science.
+
+Besides its main use as an article of food, the banana serves
+incidentally to supply a valuable fibre, obtained from the stem, and
+employed for weaving into textile fabrics and making paper. Several
+kinds of the plantain tribe are cultivated for this purpose exclusively,
+the best known among them being the so-called manilla hemp, a plant
+largely grown in the Philippine Islands. Many of the finest Indian
+shawls are woven from banana stems, and much of the rope that we use in
+our houses comes from the same singular origin. I know nothing more
+strikingly illustrative of the extreme complexity of our modern
+civilisation than the way in which we thus every day employ articles of
+exotic manufacture in our ordinary life without ever for a moment
+suspecting or inquiring into their true nature. What lady knows when she
+puts on her delicate wrapper, from Liberty's or from Swan and Edgar's,
+that the material from which it is woven is a Malayan plantain stalk?
+Who ever thinks that the glycerine for our chapped hands comes from
+Travancore coco-nuts, and that the pure butter supplied us from the farm
+in the country is coloured yellow with Jamaican annatto? We break a
+tooth, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out, because the grape-curers
+of Zante are not careful enough about excluding small stones from their
+stock of currants; and we suffer from indigestion because the Cape
+wine-grower has doctored his light Burgundies with Brazilian logwood and
+white rum, to make them taste like Portuguese port. Take merely this
+very question of dessert, and how intensely complicated it really is.
+The West Indian bananas keep company with sweet St. Michaels from the
+Azores, and with Spanish cobnuts from Barcelona. Dried fruits from Metz,
+figs from Smyrna, and dates from Tunis lie side by side on our table
+with Brazil nuts and guava jelly and damson cheese and almonds and
+raisins. We forget where everything comes from nowadays, in our general
+consciousness that they all come from the Queen Victoria Street Stores,
+and any real knowledge of common objects is rendered every day more and
+more impossible by the bewildering complexity and variety, every day
+increasing, of the common objects themselves, their substitutes,
+adulterates, and spurious imitations. Why, you probably never heard of
+manilla hemp before, until this very minute, and yet you have been
+familiarly using it all your lifetime, while 400,000 hundredweights of
+that useful article are annually imported into this country alone. It is
+an interesting study to take any day a list of market quotations, and
+ask oneself about every material quoted, what it is and what they do
+with it.
+
+For example, can you honestly pretend that you really understand the use
+and importance of that valuable object of everyday demand, fustic? I
+remember an ill-used telegraph clerk in a tropical colony once
+complaining to me that English cable operators were so disgracefully
+ignorant about this important staple as invariably to substitute for its
+name the word 'justice' in all telegrams which originally referred to
+it. Have you any clear and definite notions as to the prime origin and
+final destination of a thing called jute, in whose sole manufacture the
+whole great and flourishing town of Dundee lives and moves and has its
+being? What is turmeric? Whence do we obtain vanilla? How many
+commercial products are yielded by the orchids? How many totally
+distinct plants in different countries afford the totally distinct
+starches lumped together in grocers' lists under the absurd name of
+arrowroot? When you ask for sago do you really see that you get it? and
+how many entirely different objects described as sago are known to
+commerce? Define the uses of partridge canes and cohune oil. What
+objects are generally manufactured from tucum? Would it surprise you to
+learn that English door-handles are commonly made out of coquilla nuts?
+that your wife's buttons are turned from the indurated fruit of the
+Tagua palm? and that the knobs of umbrellas grew originally in the
+remote depths of Guatemalan forests? Are you aware that a plant called
+manioc supplies the starchy food of about one-half the population of
+tropical America? These are the sort of inquiries with which a new
+edition of 'Mangnall's Questions' would have to be filled; and as to
+answering them--why, even the pupil-teachers in a London Board School
+(who represent, I suppose, the highest attainable level of human
+knowledge) would often find themselves completely nonplussed. The fact
+is, tropical trade has opened out so rapidly and so wonderfully that
+nobody knows much about the chief articles of tropical growth; we go on
+using them in an uninquiring spirit of childlike faith, much as the
+Jamaica negroes go on using articles of European manufacture about whose
+origin they are so ridiculously ignorant that one young woman once asked
+me whether it was really true that cotton handkerchiefs were dug up out
+of the ground over in England. Some dim confusion between coal or iron
+and Manchester piece-goods seemed to have taken firm possession of her
+infantile imagination.
+
+That is why I have thought that a treatise De Banana might not, perhaps,
+be wholly without its usefulness to the modern English reading world.
+After all, a food-stuff which supports hundreds of millions among our
+beloved tropical fellow-creatures ought to be very dear to the heart of
+a nation which governs (and annually kills) more black people, taken in
+the mass, than all the other European powers put together. We have
+introduced the blessings of British rule--the good and well-paid
+missionary, the Remington rifle, the red-cotton pocket-handkerchief, and
+the use of 'the liquor called rum'--into so many remote corners of the
+tropical world that it is high time we should begin in return to learn
+somewhat about fetiches and fustic, Jamaica and jaggery, bananas and
+Buddhism. We know too little still about our colonies and dependencies.
+'Cape Breton an island!' cried King George's Minister, the Duke of
+Newcastle, in the well-known story, 'Cape Breton an island! Why, so it
+is! God bless my soul! I must go and tell the King that Cape Breton's
+an island.' That was a hundred years ago; but only the other day the
+Board of Trade placarded all our towns and villages with a flaming
+notice to the effect that the Colorado beetle had made its appearance at
+'a town in Canada called Ontario,' and might soon be expected to arrive
+at Liverpool by Cunard steamer. The right honourables and other high
+mightinesses who put forth the notice in question were evidently unaware
+that Ontario is a province as big as England, including in its borders
+Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, London, Hamilton, and other large and
+flourishing towns. Apparently, in spite of competitive examinations, the
+schoolmaster is still abroad in the Government offices.
+
+
+
+
+GO TO THE ANT
+
+
+In the market-place at Santa Fé, in Mexico, peasant women from the
+neighbouring villages bring in for sale trayfuls of living ants, each
+about as big and round as a large white currant, and each entirely
+filled with honey or grape sugar, much appreciated by the ingenuous
+Mexican youth as an excellent substitute for Everton toffee. The method
+of eating them would hardly command the approbation of the Society for
+the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It is simple and primitive, but
+decidedly not humane. Ingenuous youth holds the ant by its head and
+shoulders, sucks out the honey with which the back part is absurdly
+distended, and throws away the empty body as a thing with which it has
+now no further sympathy. Maturer age buys the ants by the quart, presses
+out the honey through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it into a very
+sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I am credibly
+informed by bold persons who have ventured to experiment upon it, taken
+internally.
+
+The curious insect which thus serves as an animated sweetmeat for the
+Mexican children is the honey-ant of the Garden of the Gods; and it
+affords a beautiful example of Mandeville's charming paradox that
+personal vices are public benefits--_vitia privata humana commoda_. The
+honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless nobly devoted
+himself for the good of the community by converting himself into a
+living honey-jar, from which all the other ants in his own nest may help
+themselves freely from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to
+which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed vault, and only one
+particular caste among the workers, known as rotunds from their
+expansive girth, is told off for this special duty of storing honey
+within their own bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest, with their
+round, transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules of skin
+enclosing the pale amber-coloured honey, these Daniel Lamberts of the
+insect race look for all the world like clusters of the little American
+Delaware grapes, with an ant's legs and head stuck awkwardly on to the
+end instead of a stalk. They have, in fact, realised in everyday life
+the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented sugar-broker, who laid on
+flesh and 'adipose deposit' until he became converted at last into a
+perfect rolling ball of globular humanity.
+
+The manners of the honey-ant race are very simple. Most of the members
+of each community are active and roving in their dispositions, and show
+no tendency to undue distension of the nether extremities. They go out
+at night and collect nectar or honey-dew from the gall-insects on
+oak-trees; for the gall-insect, like love in the old Latin saw, is
+fruitful both in sweets and bitters, _melle et felle_. This nectar they
+then carry home, and give it to the rotunds or honey-bearers, who
+swallow it and store it in their round abdomen until they can hold no
+more, having stretched their skins literally to the very point of
+bursting. They pass their time, like the Fat Boy in 'Pickwick,' chiefly
+in sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the roof of their
+residence. When the workers in turn require a meal, they go up to the
+nearest honey-bearer and stroke her gently with their antennæ. The
+honey-bearer thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop
+of the amber liquid. ('Regurgitates' is a good word which I borrow from
+Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great authority upon honey-ants; and it
+saves an immense deal of trouble in looking about for a respectable
+periphrasis.) The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded, two or three
+at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and lapping nectar
+together from the lips of their devoted comrade. This may seem at first
+sight rather an unpleasant practice on the part of the ants; but after
+all, how does it really differ from our own habit of eating honey which
+has been treated in very much the same unsophisticated manner by the
+domestic bee?
+
+Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to the discredit of
+the Colorado honey-ant. When he was opening some nests in the Garden of
+the Gods, he happened accidentally to knock down some of the rotunds,
+which straightway burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store
+of honey on the floor of the nest. At once the other ants, tempted away
+from their instinctive task of carrying off the cocoons and young grubs,
+clustered around their unfortunate companion, like street boys around a
+broken molasses barrel, and, instead of forming themselves forthwith
+into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the
+honey from their dying brother. On the other hand it must be said, to
+the credit of the race, that (unlike the members of Arctic expeditions)
+they never desecrate the remains of the dead. When a honey-bearer dies
+at his post, a victim to his zeal for the common good, the workers
+carefully remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings,
+clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen, and convey
+their deceased brother piecemeal, in two detachments, to the formican
+cemetery, undisturbed. If they chose, they might only bury the front
+half of their late relation, while they retained his remaining moiety
+as an available honey-bag: but from this cannibal proceeding
+ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes are 'pulled
+up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled into the graveyard, along
+with the juiceless heads, legs, and other members.' Such fraternal
+conduct would be very creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not
+for a horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the insects
+don't know they could get at the honey by breaking up the body of their
+lamented relative. If so, their apparent disregard of utilitarian
+considerations may really be due not to their sentimentality but to
+their hopeless stupidity.
+
+The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing honey in the living
+bodies of their own fellows is easy enough to understand. They want to
+lay up for the future like prudent insects that they are; but they can't
+make wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the purely human
+art of pottery. Consequently--happy thought--why not tell off some of
+our number to act as jars on behalf of the others? Some of the community
+work by going out and gathering honey; they also serve who only stand
+and wait--who receive it from the workers, and keep it stored up in
+their own capacious indiarubber maws till further notice. So obvious is
+this plan for converting ants into animated honey-jars, that several
+different kinds of ants in different parts of the world, belonging to
+the most widely distinct families, have independently hit upon the very
+self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there is a totally
+different Australian honey-ant, and another equally separate in Borneo
+and Singapore. This last kind does not store the honey in the hind part
+of the body technically known as the abdomen, but in the middle division
+which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a transparent
+bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature look as though it were
+suffering with an acute attack of dropsy. In any case, the life of a
+honey-bearer must be singularly uneventful, not to say dull and
+monotonous; but no doubt any small inconvenience in this respect must be
+more than compensated for by the glorious consciousness that one is
+sacrificing one's own personal comfort for the common good of universal
+anthood. Perhaps, however, the ants have not yet reached the Positivist
+stage, and may be totally ignorant of the enthusiasm of formicity.
+
+Equally curious are the habits and manners of the harvesting ants, the
+species which Solomon seems to have had specially in view when he
+advised his hearers to go to the ant--a piece of advice which I have
+also adopted as the title of the present article, though I by no means
+intend thereby to insinuate that the readers of this volume ought
+properly to be classed as sluggards. These industrious little creatures
+abound in India: they are so small that it takes eight or ten of them to
+carry a single grain of wheat or barley; and yet they will patiently
+drag along their big burden for five hundred or a thousand yards to the
+door of their formicary. To prevent the grain from germinating, they
+bite off the embryo root--a piece of animal intelligence outdone by
+another species of ant, which actually allows the process of budding to
+begin, so as to produce sugar, as in malting. After the last
+thunderstorms of the monsoon the little proprietors bring up all the
+grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sunshine. The quantity
+of grain stored up by the harvesting ants is often so large that the
+hair-splitting Jewish casuists of the Mishna have seriously discussed
+the question whether it belongs to the landowner or may lawfully be
+appropriated by the gleaners. 'They do not appear,' says Sir John
+Lubbock, 'to have considered the rights of the ants.' Indeed our duty
+towards insects is a question which seems hitherto to have escaped the
+notice of all moral philosophers. Even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the prophet
+of individualism, has never taken exception to our gross disregard of
+the proprietary rights of bees in their honey, or of silkworms in their
+cocoons. There are signs, however, that the obtuse human conscience is
+awakening in this respect; for when Dr. Loew suggested to bee-keepers
+the desirability of testing the commercial value of honey-ants, as
+rivals to the bee, Dr. McCook replied that 'the sentiment against the
+use of honey thus taken from living insects, which is worthy of all
+respect, would not be easily overcome.'
+
+There are no harvesting ants in Northern Europe, though they extend as
+far as Syria, Italy, and the Riviera, in which latter station I have
+often observed them busily working. What most careless observers take
+for grain in the nests of English ants are of course really the cocoons
+of the pupæ. For many years, therefore, entomologists were under the
+impression that Solomon had fallen into this popular error, and that
+when he described the ant as 'gathering her food in the harvest' and
+'preparing her meat in the summer,' he was speaking rather as a poet
+than as a strict naturalist. Later observations, however, have
+vindicated the general accuracy of the much-married king by showing that
+true harvesting ants do actually occur in Syria, and that they lay by
+stores for the winter in the very way stated by that early entomologist,
+whose knowledge of 'creeping things' is specially enumerated in the long
+list of his universal accomplishments.
+
+Dr. Lincecum of Texan fame has even improved upon Solomon by his
+discovery of those still more interesting and curious creatures, the
+agricultural ants of Texas. America is essentially a farming country,
+and the agricultural ants are born farmers. They make regular clearings
+around their nests, and on these clearings they allow nothing to grow
+except a particular kind of grain, known as ant-rice. Dr. Lincecum
+maintains that the tiny farmers actually sow and cultivate the ant-rice.
+Dr. McCook, on the other hand, is of opinion that the rice sows itself,
+and that the insects' part is limited to preventing any other plants or
+weeds from encroaching on the appropriated area. In any case, be they
+squatters or planters, it is certain that the rice, when ripe, is duly
+harvested, and that it is, to say the least, encouraged by the ants, to
+the exclusion of all other competitors. 'After the maturing and
+harvesting of the seed,' says Dr. Lincecum, 'the dry stubble is cut away
+and removed from the pavement, which is thus left fallow until the
+ensuing autumn, when the same species of grass, and in the same circle,
+appears again, and receives the same agricultural care as did the
+previous crop.' Sir John Lubbock, indeed, goes so far as to say that the
+three stages of human progress--the hunter, the herdsman, and the
+agriculturist--are all to be found among various species of existing
+ants.
+
+The Saüba ants of tropical America carry their agricultural operations a
+step further. Dwelling in underground nests, they sally forth upon the
+trees, and cut out of the leaves large round pieces, about as big as a
+shilling. These pieces they drop upon the ground, where another
+detachment is in waiting to convey them to the galleries of the nest.
+There they store enormous quantities of these round pieces, which they
+allow to decay in the dark, so as to form a sort of miniature mushroom
+bed. On the mouldering vegetable heap they have thus piled up, they
+induce a fungus to grow, and with this fungus they feed their young
+grubs during their helpless infancy. Mr. Belt, the 'Naturalist in
+Nicaragua,' found that native trees suffered far less from their
+depredations than imported ones. The ants hardly touched the local
+forests, but they stripped young plantations of orange, coffee, and
+mango trees stark naked. He ingeniously accounts for this curious fact
+by supposing that an internecine struggle has long been going on in the
+countries inhabited by the Saübas between the ants and the forest trees.
+Those trees that best resisted the ants, owing either to some unpleasant
+taste or to hardness of foliage, have in the long run survived
+destruction; but those which were suited for the purpose of the ants
+have been reduced to nonentity, while the ants in turn were getting
+slowly adapted to attack other trees. In this way almost all the native
+trees have at last acquired some special means of protection against the
+ravages of the leaf-cutters; so that they immediately fall upon all
+imported and unprotected kinds as their natural prey. This ingenious and
+wholly satisfactory explanation must of course go far to console the
+Brazilian planters for the frequent loss of their orange and coffee
+crops.
+
+Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Darwinian theory
+(whose honours he waived with rare generosity in favour of the older and
+more distinguished naturalist), tells a curious story about the
+predatory habits of these same Saübas. On one occasion, when he was
+wandering about in search of specimens on the Rio Negro, he bought a
+peck of rice, which was tied up, Indian fashion, in the local bandanna
+of the happy plantation slave. At night he left his rice incautiously on
+the bench of the hut where he was sleeping; and next morning the Saübas
+had riddled the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a gallon of
+the grain for their own felonious purposes. The underground galleries
+which they dig can often be traced for hundreds of yards; and Mr. Hamlet
+Clarke even asserts that in one case they have tunnelled under the bed
+of a river where it is a quarter of a mile wide. This beats Brunel on
+his own ground into the proverbial cocked hat, both for depth and
+distance.
+
+Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put themselves obtrusively
+forward in a manner little gratifying to any except the enthusiastically
+entomological mind. The winged females, after their marriage flight,
+have a disagreeable habit of flying in at the open doors and windows at
+lunch time, settling upon the table like the Harpies in the Æneid, and
+then quietly shuffling off their wings one at a time, by holding them
+down against the table-cloth with one leg, and running away vigorously
+with the five others. As soon as they have thus disembarrassed
+themselves of their superfluous members, they proceed to run about over
+the lunch as if the house belonged to them, and to make a series of
+experiments upon the edible qualities of the different dishes. One
+doesn't so much mind their philosophical inquiries into the nature of
+the bread or even the meat; but when they come to drowning themselves by
+dozens, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the soup and sherry, one feels
+bound to protest energetically against the spirit of martyrdom by which
+they are too profoundly animated. That is one of the slight drawbacks of
+the realms of perpetual summer; in the poets you see only one side of
+the picture--the palms, the orchids, the humming-birds, the great
+trailing lianas: in practical life you see the reverse side--the
+thermometer at 98°, the tepid drinking-water, the prickly heat, the
+perpetual languor, the endless shoals of aggressive insects. A lady of
+my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable entomological collection in her
+own dining-room, by the simple process of consigning to pill-boxes all
+the moths and flies and beetles that settled upon the mangoes and
+star-apples in the course of dessert.
+
+Another objectionable habit of the tropical ants, viewed practically,
+is their total disregard of vested interests in the case of house
+property. Like Mr. George and his communistic friends, they disbelieve
+entirely in the principle of private rights in real estate. They will
+eat their way through the beams of your house till there is only a
+slender core of solid wood left to support the entire burden. I have
+taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica, originally 18 inches
+thick each way, with a sound circular centre of no more than 6 inches in
+diameter, upon which all the weight necessarily fell. With the material
+extracted from the wooden beams they proceed to add insult to injury by
+building long covered galleries right across the ceiling of your
+drawing-room. As may be easily imagined, these galleries do not tend to
+improve the appearance of the ceiling; and it becomes necessary to form
+a Liberty and Property Defence League for the protection of one's
+personal interests against the insect enemy. I have no objection to ants
+building galleries on their own freehold, or even to their nationalising
+the land in their native forests; but I do object strongly to their
+unwarrantable intrusion upon the domain of private life. Expostulation
+and active warfare, however, are equally useless. The carpenter-ant has
+no moral sense, and is not amenable either to kindness or blows. On one
+occasion, when a body of these intrusive creatures had constructed an
+absurdly conspicuous brown gallery straight across the ceiling of my
+drawing-room, I determined to declare open war against them, and,
+getting my black servant to bring in the steps and a mop, I proceeded to
+demolish the entire gallery just after breakfast. It was about 20 feet
+long, as well as I can remember, and perhaps an inch in diameter. At one
+o'clock I returned to lunch. My black servant pointed, with a broad grin
+on his intelligent features, to the wooden ceiling. I looked up; in
+those three hours the carpenter-ants had reconstructed the entire
+gallery, and were doubtless mocking me at their ease, with their
+uplifted antennæ, under that safe shelter. I retired at once from the
+unequal contest. It was clearly impossible to go on knocking down a
+fresh gallery every three hours of the day or night throughout a whole
+lifetime.
+
+Ants, says Mr. Wallace, without one touch of satire, 'force themselves
+upon the attention of everyone who visits the tropics.' They do, indeed,
+and that most pungently; if by no other method, at least by the simple
+and effectual one of stinging. The majority of ants in every nest are of
+course neuters, or workers, that is to say, strictly speaking,
+undeveloped females, incapable of laying eggs. But they still retain the
+ovipositor, which is converted into a sting, and supplied with a
+poisonous liquid to eject afterwards into the wound. So admirably
+adapted to its purpose is this beautiful provision of nature, that some
+tropical ants can sting with such violence as to make your leg swell and
+confine you for some days to your room; while cases have even been known
+in which the person attacked has fainted with pain, or had a serious
+attack of fever in consequence. It is not every kind of ant, however,
+that can sting; a great many can only bite with their little hard horny
+jaws, and then eject a drop of formic poison afterwards into the hole
+caused by the bite. The distinction is a delicate physiological one, not
+much appreciated by the victims of either mode of attack. The perfect
+females can also sting, but not, of course, the males, who are poor,
+wretched, useless creatures, only good as husbands for the community,
+and dying off as soon as they have performed their part in the
+world--another beautiful provision, which saves the workers the trouble
+of killing them off, as bees do with drones after the marriage flight of
+the queen bee.
+
+The blind driver-ants of West Africa are among the very few species
+that render any service to man, and that, of course, only incidentally.
+Unlike most other members of their class, the driver-ants have no
+settled place of residence; they are vagabonds and wanderers upon the
+face of the earth, formican tramps, blind beggars, who lead a gipsy
+existence, and keep perpetually upon the move, smelling their way
+cautiously from one camping-place to another. They march by night, or on
+cloudy days, like wise tropical strategists, and never expose themselves
+to the heat of the day in broad sunshine, as though they were no better
+than the mere numbered British Tommy Atkins at Coomassie or in the
+Soudan. They move in vast armies across country, driving everything
+before them as they go; for they belong to the stinging division, and
+are very voracious in their personal habits. Not only do they eat up the
+insects in their line of march, but they fall even upon larger creatures
+and upon big snakes, which they attack first in the eyes, the most
+vulnerable portion. When they reach a negro village the inhabitants turn
+out _en masse_, and run away, exactly as if the visitors were English
+explorers or brave Marines, bent upon retaliating for the theft of a
+knife by nobly burning down King Tom's town or King Jumbo's capital.
+Then the negroes wait in the jungle till the little black army has
+passed on, after clearing out the huts by the way of everything eatable.
+When they return they find their calabashes and saucepans licked clean,
+but they also find every rat, mouse, lizard, cockroach, gecko, and
+beetle completely cleared out from the whole village. Most of them have
+cut and run at the first approach of the drivers; of the remainder, a
+few blanched and neatly-picked skeletons alone remain to tell the tale.
+
+As I wish to be considered a veracious historian, I will not retail the
+further strange stories that still find their way into books of natural
+history about the manners and habits of these blind marauders. They
+cross rivers, the West African gossips declare, by a number of devoted
+individuals flinging themselves first into the water as a living bridge,
+like so many six-legged Marcus Curtiuses, while over their drowning
+bodies the heedless remainder march in safety to the other side. If the
+story is not true, it is at least well invented; for the
+ant-commonwealth everywhere carries to the extremest pitch the old Roman
+doctrine of the absolute subjection of the individual to the State. So
+exactly is this the case that in some species there are a few large,
+overgrown, lazy ants in each nest, which do no work themselves, but
+accompany the workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of these
+idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds and other
+enemies, and so distract it from the useful workers, the mainstay of the
+entire community. It is almost as though an army, marching against a
+tribe of cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a hollow
+square formed of all the fattest people in the country, whose fine
+condition and fitness for killing might immediately engross the
+attention of the hungry enemy. Ants, in fact, have, for the most part,
+already reached the goal set before us as a delightful one by most
+current schools of socialist philosophers, in which the individual is
+absolutely sacrificed in every way to the needs of the community.
+
+The most absurdly human, however, among all the tricks and habits of
+ants are their well known cattle-farming and slaveholding instincts.
+Everybody has heard, of course, how they keep the common rose-blight as
+milch cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But everybody,
+probably, does not yet know the large number of insects which they herd
+in one form or another as domesticated animals. Man has, at most, some
+twenty or thirty such, including cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels,
+llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl, ducks,
+geese, turkeys, and silkworms. But ants have hundreds and hundreds, some
+of them kept obviously for purposes of food; others apparently as pets;
+and yet others again, as has been plausibly suggested, by reason of
+superstition or as objects of worship. There is a curious blind beetle
+which inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely dependent upon its
+hosts for support that it has even lost the power of feeding itself. It
+never quits the nest, but the ants bring it in food and supply it by
+putting the nourishment actually into its mouth. But the beetle, in
+return, seems to secrete a sweet liquid (or it may even be a stimulant
+like beer, or a narcotic like tobacco) in a tuft of hairs near the
+bottom of the hard wing-cases, and the ants often lick this tuft with
+every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. In this case, and in
+many others, there can be no doubt that the insects are kept for the
+sake of food or some other advantage yielded by them.
+
+But there are other instances of insects which haunt ants' nests, which
+it is far harder to account for on any hypothesis save that of
+superstitious veneration. There is a little weevil that runs about by
+hundreds in the galleries of English ants, in and out among the free
+citizens, making itself quite at home in their streets and public
+places, but as little noticed by the ants themselves as dogs are in our
+own cities. Then, again, there is a white woodlouse, something like the
+common little armadillo, but blind from having lived so long
+underground, which walks up and down the lanes and alleys of antdom,
+without ever holding any communication of any sort with its hosts and
+neighbours. In neither case has Sir John Lubbock ever seen an ant take
+the slightest notice of the presence of these strange fellow-lodgers.
+'One might almost imagine,' he says, 'that they had the cap of
+invisibility.' Yet it is quite clear that the ants deliberately sanction
+the residence of the weevils and woodlice in their nests, for any
+unauthorised intruder would immediately be set upon and massacred
+outright.
+
+Sir John Lubbock suggests that they may perhaps be tolerated as
+scavengers: or, again, it is possible that they may prey upon the eggs
+or larvæ of some of the parasites to whose attacks the ants are subject.
+In the first case, their use would be similar to that of the wild dogs
+in Constantinople or the common black John-crow vultures in tropical
+America: in the second case, they would be about equivalent to our own
+cats or to the hedgehog often put in farmhouse kitchens to keep down
+cockroaches.
+
+The crowning glory of owning slaves, which many philosophic Americans
+(before the war) showed to be the highest and noblest function of the
+most advanced humanity, has been attained by more than one variety of
+anthood. Our great English horse-ant is a moderate slaveholder; but the
+big red ant of Southern Europe carries the domestic institution many
+steps further. It makes regular slave-raids upon the nests of the small
+brown ants, and carries off the young in their pupa condition. By-and-by
+the brown ants hatch out in the strange nest, and never having known any
+other life except that of slavery, accommodate themselves to it readily
+enough. The red ant, however, is still only an occasional slaveowner; if
+necessary, he can get along by himself, without the aid of his little
+brown servants. Indeed, there are free states and slave states of red
+ants side by side with one another, as of old in Maryland and
+Pennsylvania: in the first, the red ants do their work themselves, like
+mere vulgar Ohio farmers; in the second, they get their work done for
+them by their industrious little brown servants, like the aristocratic
+first families of Virginia before the earthquake of emancipation.
+
+But there are other degraded ants, whose life-history may be humbly
+presented to the consideration of the Anti-Slavery Society, as speaking
+more eloquently than any other known fact for the demoralising effect of
+slaveowning upon the slaveholders themselves. The Swiss rufescent ant is
+a species so long habituated to rely entirely upon the services of
+slaves that it is no longer able to manage its own affairs when deprived
+by man of its hereditary bondsmen. It has lost entirely the art of
+constructing a nest; it can no longer tend its own young, whom it leaves
+entirely to the care of negro nurses; and its bodily structure even has
+changed, for the jaws have lost their teeth, and have been converted
+into mere nippers, useful only as weapons of war. The rufescent ant, in
+fact, is a purely military caste, which has devoted itself entirely to
+the pursuit of arms, leaving every other form of activity to its slaves
+and dependents. Officers of the old school will be glad to learn that
+this military insect is dressed, if not in scarlet, at any rate in very
+decent red, and that it refuses to be bothered in any way with questions
+of transport or commissariat. If the community changes its nest, the
+masters are carried on the backs of their slaves to the new position,
+and the black ants have to undertake the entire duty of foraging and
+bringing in stores of supply for their gentlemanly proprietors. Only
+when war is to be made upon neighbouring nests does the thin red line
+form itself into long file for active service. Nothing could be more
+perfectly aristocratic than the views of life entertained and acted upon
+by these distinguished slaveholders.
+
+On the other hand, the picture has its reverse side, exhibiting clearly
+the weak points of the slaveholding system. The rufescent ant has lost
+even the very power of feeding itself. So completely dependent is each
+upon his little black valet for daily bread, that he cannot so much as
+help himself to the food that is set before him. Hüber put a few
+slaveholders into a box with some of their own larvæ and pupæ, and a
+supply of honey, in order to see what they would do with them. Appalled
+at the novelty of the situation, the slaveholders seemed to come to the
+conclusion that something must be done; so they began carrying the larvæ
+about aimlessly in their mouths, and rushing up and down in search of
+the servants. After a while, however, they gave it up and came to the
+conclusion that life under such circumstances was clearly intolerable.
+They never touched the honey, but resigned themselves to their fate like
+officers and gentlemen. In less than two days, half of them had died of
+hunger, rather than taste a dinner which was not supplied to them by a
+properly constituted footman. Admiring their heroism or pitying their
+incapacity, Hüber at last gave them just one slave between them all. The
+plucky little negro, nothing daunted by the gravity of the situation,
+set to work at once, dug a small nest, gathered together the larvæ,
+helped several pupæ out of the cocoon, and saved the lives of the
+surviving slaveowners. Other naturalists have tried similar experiments,
+and always with the same result. The slaveowners will starve in the
+midst of plenty rather than feed themselves without attendance. Either
+they cannot or will not put the food into their own mouths with their
+own mandibles.
+
+There are yet other ants, such as the workerless _Anergates_, in which
+the degradation of slaveholding has gone yet further. These wretched
+creatures are the formican representatives of those Oriental despots who
+are no longer even warlike, but are sunk in sloth and luxury, and pass
+their lives in eating bang or smoking opium. Once upon a time, Sir John
+Lubbock thinks, the ancestors of _Anergates_ were marauding
+slaveowners, who attacked and made serfs of other ants. But gradually
+they lost not only their arts but even their military prowess, and were
+reduced to making war by stealth instead of openly carrying off their
+slaves in fair battle. It seems probable that they now creep into a nest
+of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen,
+and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest.
+'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled
+away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected
+themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition--weak in
+body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly extinct, the
+miserable representatives of far superior ancestors maintaining a
+precarious existence as contemptible parasites of their former slaves.'
+One may observe in passing that these wretched do-nothings cannot have
+been the ants which Solomon commended to the favourable consideration of
+the sluggard; though it is curious that the text was never pressed into
+the service of defence for the peculiar institution by the advocates of
+slavery in the South, who were always most anxious to prove the
+righteousness of their cause by most sure and certain warranty of Holy
+Scripture.
+
+
+
+
+BIG ANIMALS
+
+
+'The Atlantosaurus,' said I, pointing affectionately with a wave of my
+left hand to all that was immortal of that extinct reptile, 'is
+estimated to have had a total length of one hundred feet, and was
+probably the very biggest lizard that ever lived, even in Western
+America, where his earthly remains were first disinhumed by an
+enthusiastic explorer.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' my friend answered abstractedly. 'Of course, of course;
+things were all so very big in those days, you know, my dear fellow.'
+
+'Excuse me,' I replied with polite incredulity; 'I really don't know to
+what particular period of time the phrase "in those days" may be
+supposed precisely to refer.'
+
+My friend shuffled inside his coat a little uneasily. (I will admit that
+I was taking a mean advantage of him. The professorial lecture in
+private life, especially when followed by a strict examination, is quite
+undeniably a most intolerable nuisance.) 'Well,' he said, in a crusty
+voice, after a moment's hesitation, 'I mean, you know, in geological
+times ... well, there, my dear fellow, things used all to be so _very_
+big in those days, usedn't they?'
+
+I took compassion upon him and let him off easily. 'You've had enough of
+the museum,' I said with magnanimous self-denial. 'The Atlantosaurus has
+broken the camel's back. Let's go and have a quiet cigarette in the park
+outside.'
+
+But if you suppose, reader, that I am going to carry my forbearance so
+far as to let you, too, off the remainder of that geological
+disquisition, you are certainly very much mistaken. A discourse which
+would be quite unpardonable in social intercourse may be freely admitted
+in the privacy of print; because, you see, while you can't easily tell a
+man that his conversation bores you (though some people just avoid doing
+so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut up a book whenever you
+like, without the very faintest or remotest risk of hurting the author's
+delicate susceptibilities.
+
+The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like the
+conventional sermon, into two heads--the precise date of 'geological
+times,' and the exact bigness of the animals that lived in them. And I
+may as well begin by announcing my general conclusion at the very
+outset; first, that 'those days' never existed at all; and, secondly,
+that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet are, on the
+whole, about as big, taken in the lump, as any previous contemporary
+fauna that ever lived at any one time together upon its changeful
+surface. I know that to announce this sad conclusion is to break down
+one more universal and cherished belief; everybody considers that
+'geological animals' were ever so much bigger than their modern
+representatives; but the interests of truth should always be paramount,
+and, if the trade of an iconoclast is a somewhat cruel one, it is at
+least a necessary function in a world so ludicrously overstocked with
+popular delusions as this erring planet.
+
+What, then, is the ordinary idea of 'geological time' in the minds of
+people like my good friend who refused to discuss with me the exact
+antiquity of the Atlantosaurian? They think of it all as immediate and
+contemporaneous, a vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed
+for them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and the moa
+hob-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and the ammonite; in which the
+tertiary megatherium goes cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs
+and the primary trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris
+Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic club-mosses of
+the Carboniferous period, and to have been successfully hunted by the
+great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a
+picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a
+thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old
+times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid
+Tavern, while Shakespeare and Molière, crowned with summer roses, sipped
+their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the
+Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to
+produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of
+Napoleon's reception at Memphis by his victorious brother emperors,
+Ramses and Sardanapalus. This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at
+first sight imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing
+descriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a faint
+attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical time the glaring
+anachronisms perpetually committed as regards the vast lapse of
+geological chronology even by well-informed and intelligent people.
+
+We must remember, then, that in dealing with geological time we are
+dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and unimaginable series of æons,
+each of which occupied its own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each
+of which saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall of
+innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic clock, by whose
+pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief
+lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to
+the events narrated in this evening's _Pall Mall_, is less than a
+second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can
+possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the temples of
+Karnak and the New Law Courts would be absolutely contemporaneous; he
+has no means by which he could discriminate in date between a scarabæus
+of Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of her Most
+Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent authorities have shown good
+grounds for believing that the Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years
+ago; and everything that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from
+the geological point of view, described as 'recent.' A shell embedded in
+a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years ago, while short and
+swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed in Britain, ages before the
+irruption of the 'Ancient Britons' of our inadequate school-books, is,
+in the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely modern.
+
+But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, that eighty thousand
+years which coincides in part with the fraction of a single swing of the
+cosmical pendulum, there lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and
+years, and centuries, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an
+inconceivable past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves slowly, one
+beyond the other, to our aching vision in the half-deciphered pages of
+the geological record. Before the Glacial Epoch there comes the
+Pliocene, immeasurably longer than the whole expanse of recent time; and
+before that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene,
+immeasurably longer than all the others put together. These three make
+up in their sum the Tertiary period, which entire period can hardly have
+occupied more time in its passage than a single division of the
+Secondary, such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic; and
+the Secondary period, once more, though itself of positively appalling
+duration, seems but a patch (to use the expressive modernism) upon the
+unthinkable and unrealisable vastness of the endless successive Primary
+æons. So that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott's mystic
+head, 'Time was, Time is, Time will be.' The time we know affords us no
+measure at all for even the nearest and briefest epochs of the time we
+know not; and the time we know not seems to demand still vaster and more
+inexpressible figures as we pry back curiously, with wondering eyes,
+into its dimmest and earliest recesses.
+
+These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one's head swim; let us
+hark back once more from cosmical time to the puny bigness of our
+earthly animals, living or extinct.
+
+If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine and terrestrial,
+we shall soon see that we could bring together at the present moment a
+very goodly collection of extant monsters, most parlous monsters, too,
+each about as fairly big in its own kind as almost anything that has
+ever preceded it. Every age has its own _specialité_ in the way of
+bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly to developing
+overgrown creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in
+another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic
+proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax
+fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or
+the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs
+or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is
+most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist
+who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known
+to us only by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts' and 'Challengers,'
+but then upheaved into snow-clad Alps or vine-covered Apennines, will
+doubtless stand aghast at the huge skeletons of our whales and our
+razorbacks, and will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in
+the exact words of my friend at South Kensington, 'Things used all to be
+so very big in those days, usedn't they?'
+
+Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own cetaceans and of
+'geological' animals is just this. The Atlantosaurus of the Western
+American Jurassic beds, a great erect lizard, is the very largest
+creature ever known to have inhabited this sublunary sphere. His entire
+length is supposed to have reached about a hundred feet (for no complete
+skeleton has ever been discovered), while in stature he appears to have
+stood some thirty feet high, or over. In any case, he was undoubtedly a
+very big animal indeed, for his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet, or
+two feet taller than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a British
+Grenadier. This, of course, implies a very decent total of height and
+size; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a good length of
+seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to eighty, ninety, and
+even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly entitled to say that we have at
+least one species of animal now living which, occasionally at any rate,
+equals in size the very biggest and most colossal form known
+inferentially to geological science. Indeed when we consider the
+extraordinary compactness and rotundity of the modern cetaceans, as
+compared with the tall limbs and straggling skeleton of the huge
+Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined to believe that the tonnage of a
+decent modern rorqual must positively exceed that of the gigantic
+Atlantosaurus, the great lizard of the west, _in propria persona_. I
+doubt, in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deinosaur
+could ever have supported the prodigious weight of a full-grown family
+razor-back whale. The mental picture of these unwieldy monsters hopping
+casually about, like Alice's Gryphon in Tenniel's famous sketch, or
+like that still more parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must be
+left to the vivid imagination of the courteous reader, who may fill in
+the details for himself as well as he is able.
+
+If we turn from the particular comparison of selected specimens (always
+an unfair method of judging) to the general aspect of our contemporary
+fauna, I venture confidently to claim for our own existing human period
+as fine a collection of big animals as any other ever exhibited on this
+planet by any one single rival epoch. Of course, if you are going to
+lump all the extinct monsters and horrors into one imaginary unified
+fauna, regardless of anachronisms, I have nothing more to say to you; I
+will candidly admit that there were more great men in all previous
+generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from Agamemnon to
+Wellington, than there are now existing in this last quarter of our
+really very respectable nineteenth century. But if you compare honestly
+age with age, one at a time, I fearlessly maintain that, so far from
+there being any falling off in the average bigness of things generally
+in these latter days, there are more big things now living than there
+ever were in any one single epoch, even of much longer duration than the
+'recent' period.
+
+I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there
+have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our
+earth--the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type,
+and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial
+tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,'
+because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe
+that any one age has much surpassed another in the general size of its
+fauna, since the Permian Epoch at least; and where we do not get
+geological evidence of the existence of big animals in any particular
+deposit, we may take it for granted, I think, that that deposit was laid
+down under conditions unfavourable to the preservation of the remains of
+large species. For example, the sediment now being accumulated at the
+bottom of the Caspian cannot possibly contain the bones of any creature
+much larger than the Caspian seal, because there are no big species
+there swimming; and yet that fact does not negative the existence in
+other places of whales, elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, and hippopotami.
+Nevertheless, we can only go upon the facts before us; and if we compare
+our existing fauna with the fauna of Jurassic and Pliocene times, we
+shall at any rate be putting it to the test of the severest competition
+that lies within our power under the actual circumstances.
+
+In the Jurassic age there were undoubtedly a great many very big
+reptiles. 'A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth: For
+him did his high sun flame and his river billowing ran: And he felt
+himself in his pride to be nature's crowning race.' There was the
+ichthyosaurus, a fish-like marine lizard, familiar to us all from a
+thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body, his strong flippers,
+his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of staring goggle eyes. The
+ichthyosaurus was certainly a most unpleasant creature to meet alone in
+a narrow strait on a dark night; but if it comes to actual measurement,
+the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed does not exceed
+twenty-five feet from snout to tail. Now, this is an extremely decent
+size for a reptile, as reptiles go; for the crocodile and alligator, the
+two biggest existing lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of sixteen
+feet. But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the
+ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or rock-snakes,
+which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, and measure round the
+waist as much as a London alderman of the noblest proportions. Of
+course, other Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our
+British Megalosaurus only extended twenty-five feet in length, and
+carried weight not exceeding three tons; but, his rival Ceteosaurus
+stood ten feet high, and measured fifty feet from the tip of his snout
+to the end of his tail; while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be
+briefly described as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus as
+one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we have certainly nothing
+at all to come up to these; but our cetaceans, as a group, show an
+assemblage of species which could very favourably compete with the whole
+lot of Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came to
+tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right-whale could easily give points
+to any deinosaur that ever moved upon oolitic continents.
+
+The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as the deinotherium
+and the mastodon, were also, in their way, very big things in livestock;
+but they scarcely exceeded the modern elephant, and by no means came
+near the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same period
+could have held their own well against our existing giraffes, elks, and
+buffaloes; but, taking the group as a group, I don't think there is any
+reason to believe that it beat in general aspect the living fauna of
+this present age.
+
+For few people ever really remember how very many big animals we still
+possess. We have the Indian and the African elephant, the hippopotamus,
+the various rhinoceroses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison,
+the musk ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are
+generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and
+most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and
+ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment
+of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter of
+fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine animals now
+sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct from one another as the
+camel is from the ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New
+Zealand Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale is
+more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our rorqual, one
+hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of the gigantic American
+Atlantosaurus himself. Besides these exceptional monsters, our
+bottleheads reach to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four,
+our hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy. True
+fish generally fall far short of these enormous dimensions, but some of
+the larger sharks attain almost equal size with the biggest cetaceans.
+The common blue shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity,
+would have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe, for the best
+bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias ammonite. I would back our
+modern carcharodon, who grows to forty feet, against any plesiosaurus
+that ever swam the Jurassic sea. As for rhinodon, a gigantic shark of
+the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to a length of fifty
+feet, and is stated often to attain seventy. I will stake my reputation
+upon it that he would have cleared the secondary seas of their great
+saurians in less than a century. When we come to add to these enormous
+marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the great
+snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and manatees, and
+sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared fearlessly to challenge any
+other age that ever existed to enter the lists against our own for
+colossal forms of animal life.
+
+Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of the very big
+animals which people have in their minds when they talk vaguely about
+everything having been so very much bigger 'in those days' have become
+extinct within a very late period, and are often, from the geological
+point of view, quite recent.
+
+For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I suppose no animal is
+more frequently present to the mind of the non-geological speaker, when
+he talks indefinitely about the great extinct monsters, than the
+familiar figure of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the
+mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of yesterday. He was
+hunted here in England by men whose descendants are probably still
+living--at least so Professor Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in
+Siberia his frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the
+wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question as to its
+fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the yesterday of
+geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch that finally killed off
+the last mammoth. Then, again, there is his neighbour, the mastodon.
+That big tertiary proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is
+true, to be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he
+survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene--our day before
+yesterday--and he often fell very likely before the fire-split flint
+weapons of the Abbé Bourgeois' Miocene men. The period that separates
+him from our own day is as nothing compared with the vast and
+immeasurable interval that separates him from the huge marine saurians
+of the Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of time with human
+chronology, the mastodon stands to our own fauna as Beau Brummel stands
+to the modern masher, while the saurians stand to it as the Egyptian and
+Assyrian warriors stand to Lord Wolseley and the followers of the Mahdi.
+
+Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that enormous bird who
+was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to the antelope; a monstrous emu,
+as far surpassing the ostriches of to-day as the ostriches surpass all
+the other fowls of the air. Yet the moa, though now extinct, is in the
+strictest sense quite modern, a contemporary very likely of Queen
+Elizabeth or Queen Anne, exterminated by the Maoris only a very little
+time before the first white settlements in the great southern
+archipelago. It is even doubtful whether the moa did not live down to
+the days of the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori encampments are
+still discovered, with the ashes of the fireplace even now unscattered,
+and the close-gnawed bones of the gigantic bird lying in the very spot
+where the natives left them after their destructive feasts. So, too,
+with the big sharks. Our modern carcharodon, who runs (as I have before
+noted) to forty feet in length, is a very respectable monster indeed, as
+times go; and his huge snapping teeth, which measure nearly two inches
+long by one and a half broad, would disdain to make two bites of the
+able-bodied British seaman. But the naturalists of the 'Challenger'
+expedition dredged up in numbers from the ooze of the Pacific similar
+teeth, five inches long by four wide, so that the sharks to which they
+originally belonged must, by parity of reasoning, have measured nearly a
+hundred feet in length. This, no doubt, beats our biggest existing
+shark, the rhinodon, by some thirty feet. Still, the ooze of the Pacific
+is a quite recent or almost modern deposit, which is even now being
+accumulated on the sea bottom, and there would be really nothing
+astonishing in the discovery that some representatives of these colossal
+carcharodons are to this day swimming about at their lordly leisure
+among the coral reefs of the South Sea Islands. That very cautious
+naturalist, Dr. Günther, of the British Museum, contents himself indeed
+by merely saying: 'As we have no record of living individuals of that
+bulk having been observed, the gigantic species to which these teeth
+belonged must probably have become extinct within a comparatively recent
+period.'
+
+If these things are so, the question naturally suggests itself: Why
+should certain types of animals have attained their greatest size at
+certain different epochs, and been replaced at others by equally big
+animals of wholly unlike sorts? The answer, I believe, is simply this:
+Because there is not room and food in the world at any one time for more
+than a certain relatively small number of gigantic species. Each great
+group of animals has had successively its rise, its zenith, its
+decadence, and its dotage; each at the period of its highest development
+has produced a considerable number of colossal forms; each has been
+supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different structure,
+which have killed off their predecessors, not indeed by actual stress of
+battle, but by irresistible competition for food and prey. The great
+saurians were thus succeeded by the great mammals, just as the great
+mammals are themselves in turn being ousted, from the land at least, by
+the human species.
+
+Let us look briefly at the succession of big animals in the world, so
+far as we can follow it from the mutilated and fragmentary record of the
+geological remains.
+
+The very earliest existing fossils would lead us to believe what is
+otherwise quite probable, that life on our planet began with very small
+forms--that it passed at first through a baby stage. The animals of the
+Cambrian period are almost all small mollusks, star-fishes, sponges, and
+other simple, primitive types of life. There were as yet no vertebrates
+of any sort, not even fishes, far less amphibians, reptiles, birds, or
+mammals. The veritable giants of the Cambrian world were the
+crustaceans, and especially the trilobites, which, nevertheless, hardly
+exceeded in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest trilobite is
+some two feet long; and though we cannot by any means say that this was
+really the largest form of animal life then existing, owing to the
+extremely broken nature of the geological record, we have at least no
+evidence that anything bigger as yet moved upon the face of the waters.
+The trilobites, which were a sort of triple-tailed crabs (to speak very
+popularly), began in the Cambrian Epoch, attained their culminating
+point in the Silurian, waned in the Devonian, and died out utterly in
+the Carboniferous seas.
+
+It is in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the cuttle-fish
+tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus, the argonaut, the
+squid, and the octopus, first began to make their appearance upon this
+or any other stage. The cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of
+invertebrate animals; they are rapid swimmers; they have large and
+powerful eyes; and they can easily enfold their prey (_teste_ Victor
+Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms. With these natural
+advantages to back them up, it is not surprising that the cuttle family
+rapidly made their mark in the world. They were by far the most advanced
+thinkers and actors of their own age, and they rose almost at once to be
+the dominant creatures of the primæval ocean in which they swam. There
+were as yet no saurians or whales to dispute the dominion with these
+rapacious cephalopods, and so the cuttle family had things for the time
+all their own way. Before the end of the Silurian Epoch, according to
+that accurate census-taker, M. Barrande, they had blossomed forth into
+no less than 1,622 distinct species. For a single family to develop so
+enormous a variety of separate forms, all presumably derived from a
+single common ancestor, argues, of course, an immense success in life;
+and it also argues a vast lapse of time during which the different
+species were gradually demarcated from one another.
+
+Some of the ammonites, which belonged to this cuttle-fish group, soon
+attained a very considerable size; but a shell known as the orthoceras
+(I wish my subject didn't compel me to use such _very_ long words, but I
+am not personally answerable, thank heaven, for the vagaries of modern
+scientific nomenclature) grew to a bigger size than that of any other
+fossil mollusk, sometimes measuring as much as six feet in total length.
+At what date the gigantic cuttles of the present day first began to make
+their appearance it would be hard to say, for their shell-less bodies
+are so soft that they could leave hardly anything behind in a fossil
+state; but the largest known cuttle, measured by Mr. Gabriel, of
+Newfoundland, was eighty feet in length, including the long arms.
+
+These cuttles are the only invertebrates at all in the running so far as
+colossal size is concerned, and it will be observed that here the
+largest modern specimen immeasurably beats the largest fossil form of
+the same type. I do not say that there were not fossil forms quite as
+big as the gigantic calamaries of our own time--on the contrary, I
+believe there were; but if we go by the record alone we must confess
+that, in the matter of invertebrates at least, the balance of size is
+all in favour of our own period.
+
+The vertebrates first make their appearance, in the shape of fishes,
+towards the close of the Silurian period, the second of the great
+geological epochs. The earliest fish appear to have been small,
+elongated, eel-like creatures, closely resembling the lampreys in
+structure; but they rapidly developed in size and variety, and soon
+became the ruling race in the waters of the ocean, where they maintained
+their supremacy till the rise of the great secondary saurians. Even
+then, in spite of the severe competition thus introduced, and still
+later, in spite of the struggle for life against the huge modern
+cetaceans (the true monarchs of the recent seas), the sharks continued
+to hold their own as producers of gigantic forms; and at the present day
+their largest types probably rank second only to the whales in the whole
+range of animated nature. There seems no reason to doubt that modern
+fish, as a whole, quite equal in size the piscine fauna of any previous
+geological age.
+
+It is somewhat different with the next great vertebrate group, the
+amphibians, represented in our own world only by the frogs, the toads,
+the newts, and the axolotls. Here we must certainly with shame confess
+that the amphibians of old greatly surpassed their degenerate
+descendants in our modern waters. The Japanese salamander, by far the
+biggest among our existing newts, never exceeds a yard in length from
+snout to tail; whereas some of the labyrinthodonts (forgive me once
+more) of the Carboniferous Epoch must have reached at least seven or
+eight feet from stem to stern. But the reason of this falling off is not
+far to seek. When the adventurous newts and frogs of that remote period
+first dropped their gills and hopped about inquiringly on the dry land,
+under the shadow of the ancient tree-ferns and club-mosses, they were
+the only terrestrial vertebrates then existing, and they had the field
+(or, rather, the forest) all to themselves. For a while, therefore, like
+all dominant races for the time being, they blossomed forth at their
+ease into relatively gigantic forms. Frogs as big as donkeys, and efts
+as long as crocodiles, luxuriated to their hearts' content in the marshy
+lowlands, and lorded it freely over the small creatures which they found
+in undisturbed possession of the Carboniferous isles. But as ages passed
+away, and new improvements were slowly invented and patented by survival
+of the fittest in the offices of nature, their own more advanced and
+developed descendants, the reptiles and mammals, got the upper hand
+with them, and soon lived them down in the struggle for life, so that
+this essentially intermediate form is now almost entirely restricted to
+its one adapted seat, the pools and ditches that dry up in summer.
+
+The reptiles, again, are a class in which the biggest modern forms are
+simply nowhere beside the gigantic extinct species. First appearing on
+the earth at the very close of the vast primary periods--in the Permian
+age--they attained in secondary times the most colossal proportions, and
+have certainly never since been exceeded in size by any later forms of
+life in whatever direction. But one must remember that during the heyday
+of the great saurians, there were as yet no birds and no mammals. The
+place now filled in the ocean by the whales and grampuses, as well as
+the place now filled in the great continents by the elephants, the
+rhinoceroses, the hippopotami, and the other big quadrupeds, was then
+filled exclusively by huge reptiles, of the sort rendered familiar to us
+all by the restored effigies on the little island in the Crystal Palace
+grounds. Every dog has his day, and the reptiles had _their_ day in the
+secondary period. The forms into which they developed were certainly
+every whit as large as any ever seen on the surface of this planet, but
+not, as I have already shown, appreciably larger than those of the
+biggest cetaceans known to science in our own time.
+
+During the very period, however, when enaliosaurians and pterodactyls
+were playing such pranks before high heaven as might have made
+contemporary angels weep, if they took any notice of saurian morality, a
+small race of unobserved little prowlers was growing up in the dense
+shades of the neighbouring forests which was destined at last to oust
+the huge reptiles from their empire over earth, and to become in the
+fulness of time the exclusively dominant type of the whole planet. In
+the trias we get the first remains of mammalian life in the shape of
+tiny rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely related to the
+banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present day. Throughout the
+long lapse of the secondary ages, across the lias, the oolite, the
+wealden, and the chalk, we find the mammalian race slowly developing
+into opossums and kangaroos, such as still inhabit the isolated and
+antiquated continent of Australia. Gathering strength all the time for
+the coming contest, increasing constantly in size of brain and keenness
+of intelligence, the true mammals were able at last, towards the close
+of the secondary ages, to enter the lists boldly against the gigantic
+saurians. With the dawn of the tertiary period, the reign of the
+reptiles begins to wane, and the reign of the mammals to set in at last
+in real earnest. In place of the ichthyosaurs we get the huge cetaceans;
+in place of the deinosaurs we get the mammoth and the mastodon; in place
+of the dominant reptile groups we get the first precursors of man
+himself.
+
+The history of the great birds has been somewhat more singular. Unlike
+the other main vertebrate classes, the birds (as if on purpose to
+contradict the proverb) seem never yet to have had their day.
+Unfortunately for them, or at least for their chance of producing
+colossal species, their evolution went on side by side, apparently, with
+that of the still more intelligent and more powerful mammals; so that,
+wherever the mammalian type had once firmly established itself, the
+birds were compelled to limit their aspirations to a very modest and
+humble standard. Terrestrial mammals, however, cannot cross the sea; so
+in isolated regions, such as New Zealand and Madagascar, the birds had
+things all their own way. In New Zealand, there are no indigenous
+quadrupeds at all; and there the huge moa attained to dimensions almost
+equalling those of the giraffe. In Madagascar, the mammalian life was
+small and of low grade, so the gigantic æpyornis became the very biggest
+of all known birds. At the same time, these big species acquired their
+immense size at the cost of the distinctive birdlike habit of flight. A
+flying moa is almost an impossible conception; even the ostriches
+compete practically with the zebras and antelopes rather than with the
+eagles, the condors, or the albatrosses. In like manner, when a pigeon
+found its way to Mauritius, it developed into the practically wingless
+dodo; while in the northern penguins, on their icy perches, the fore
+limbs have been gradually modified into swimming organs, exactly
+analogous to the flippers of the seal.
+
+Are the great animals now passing away and leaving no representatives of
+their greatness to future ages? On land at least that is very probable.
+Man, diminutive man, who, if he walked on all fours, would be no bigger
+than a silly sheep, and who only partially disguises his native
+smallness by his acquired habit of walking erect on what ought to be his
+hind legs--man has upset the whole balanced economy of nature, and is
+everywhere expelling and exterminating before him the great herbivores,
+his predecessors. He needs for his corn and his bananas the fruitful
+plains which were once laid down in prairie or scrubwood. Hence it seems
+not unlikely that the elephant, the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and
+the buffalo must go. But we are still a long way off from that final
+consummation, even on dry land; while as for the water, it appears
+highly probable that there are as good fish still in the sea as ever
+came out of it. Whether man himself, now become the sole dominant animal
+of our poor old planet, will ever develop into Titanic proportions,
+seems far more problematical. The race is now no longer to the swift,
+nor the battle to the strong. Brain counts for more than muscle, and
+mind has gained the final victory over mere matter. Goliath of Gath has
+shrunk into insignificance before the Gatling gun; as in the fairy tales
+of old, it is cunning little Jack with his clever devices who wins the
+day against the heavy, clumsy, muddle-headed giants. Nowadays it is our
+'Minotaurs' and 'Warriors' that are the real leviathans and behemoths of
+the great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the fire-breathing krakens
+of the latter-day seas. Instead of developing individually into huge
+proportions, the human race tends rather to aggregate into vast empires,
+which compete with one another by means of huge armaments, and invent
+mitrailleuses and torpedos of incredible ferocity for their mutual
+destruction. The dragons of the prime that tare each other in their
+slime have yielded place to eighty-ton guns and armour-plated
+turret-ships. Those are the genuine lineal representatives on our modern
+seas of the secondary saurians. Let us hope that some coming geologist
+of the dim future, finding the fossil remains of the sunken 'Captain,'
+or the plated scales of the 'Comte de Grasse,' firmly embedded in the
+upheaved ooze of the existing Atlantic, may shake his head in solemn
+deprecation at the horrid sight, and thank heaven that such hideous
+carnivorous creatures no longer exist in his own day.
+
+
+
+
+FOSSIL FOOD
+
+
+There is something at first sight rather ridiculous in the idea of
+eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mammoths of Siberia were
+first discovered, though they had been dead for at least 80,000 years
+(according to Dr. Croll's minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice
+age), and might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty,
+they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of prehistoric
+Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigerators, that the wolves
+and bears greedily devoured the precious relics for which the
+naturalists of Europe would have been ready gladly to pay the highest
+market price of best beefsteak. Those carnivorous vandals gnawed off the
+skin and flesh with the utmost appreciation, and left nothing but the
+tusks and bones to adorn the galleries of the new Natural History Museum
+at South Kensington. But then wolves and bears, especially in Siberia,
+are not exactly fastidious about the nature of their meat diet.
+Furthermore, some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the
+stalagmitic floor of caves, in England and elsewhere, presumably of
+about the same age as the Siberian mammoths, still contain enough animal
+matter to produce a good strong stock for antediluvian broth, which has
+been scientifically described by a high authority as pre-Adamite jelly.
+The congress of naturalists at Tübingen a few years since had a smoking
+tureen of this cave-bone soup placed upon the dinner-table at their
+hotel one evening, and pronounced it with geological enthusiasm
+'scarcely inferior to prime ox-tail.' But men of science, too, are
+accustomed to trying unsavoury experiments, which would go sadly against
+the grain with less philosophic and more squeamish palates. They think
+nothing of tasting a caterpillar that birds will not touch, in order to
+discover whether it owes its immunity from attack to some nauseous,
+bitter, or pungent flavouring; and they even advise you calmly to
+discriminate between two closely similar species of snails by trying
+which of them when chewed has a delicate _soupçon_ of oniony aroma. So
+that naturalists in this matter, as the children say, don't count: their
+universal thirst for knowledge will prompt them to drink anything, down
+even to _consommé_ of quaternary cave-bear.
+
+There is one form of fossil food, however, which appears constantly upon
+all our tables at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day, and which is
+so perfectly familiar to every one of us that we almost forget entirely
+its immensely remote geological origin. The salt in our salt-cellars is
+a fossil product, laid down ages ago in some primæval Dead Sea or
+Caspian, and derived in all probability (through the medium of the
+grocer) from the triassic rocks of Cheshire or Worcestershire. Since
+that thick bed of rock-salt was first precipitated upon the dry floor of
+some old evaporated inland sea, the greater part of the geological
+history known to the world at large has slowly unrolled itself through
+incalculable ages. The dragons of the prime have begun and finished
+their long (and Lord Tennyson says slimy) race. The fish-like saurians
+and flying pterodactyls of the secondary period have come into existence
+and gone out of it gracefully again. The whole family of birds has been
+developed and diversified into its modern variety of eagles and titmice.
+The beasts of the field have passed through sundry stages of mammoth
+and mastodon, of sabre-toothed lion and huge rhinoceros. Man himself has
+progressed gradually from the humble condition of a 'hairy arboreal
+quadruped'--these bad words are Mr. Darwin's own--to the glorious
+elevation of an erect, two-handed creature, with a county suffrage
+question and an intelligent interest in the latest proceedings of the
+central divorce court. And after all those manifold changes, compared to
+which the entire period of English history, from the landing of Julius
+Cæsar to the appearance of this present volume (to take two important
+landmarks), is as one hour to a human lifetime, we quietly dig up the
+salt to-day from that dry lake bottom and proceed to eat it with the
+eggs laid by the hens this morning for this morning's breakfast, just as
+though the one food-stuff were not a whit more ancient or more dignified
+in nature than the other. Why, mammoth steak is really quite modern and
+commonplace by the side of the salt in the salt-cellar that we treat so
+cavalierly every day of our ephemeral existence.
+
+The way salt got originally deposited in these great rock beds is very
+well illustrated for us by the way it is still being deposited in the
+evaporating waters of many inland seas. Every schoolboy knows of course
+(though some persons who are no longer schoolboys may just possibly have
+forgotten) that the Caspian is in reality only a little bit of the
+Mediterranean, which has been cut off from the main sea by the gradual
+elevation of the country between them. For many ages the intermediate
+soil has been quite literally rising in the world; but to this day a
+continuous chain of salt lakes and marshes runs between the Caspian and
+the Black Sea, and does its best to keep alive the memory of the time
+when they were both united in a single basin. All along this intervening
+tract, once sea but now dry land, banks of shells belonging to kinds
+still living in the Caspian and the Black Sea alike testify to the old
+line of water communication. One fine morning (date unknown) the
+intermediate belt began to rise up between them; the water was all
+pushed off into the Caspian, but the shells remained to tell the tale
+even unto this day.
+
+Now, when a bit of the sea gets cut off in this way from the main ocean,
+evaporation of its waters generally takes place rather faster than the
+return supply of rain by rivers and lesser tributaries. In other words,
+the inland sea or salt lake begins slowly to dry up. This is now just
+happening in the Caspian, which is in fact a big pool in course of being
+slowly evaporated. By-and-by a point is reached when the water can no
+longer hold in solution the amount of salts of various sorts that it
+originally contained. In the technical language of chemists and
+physicists it begins to get supersaturated. Then the salts are thrown
+down as a sediment at the bottom of the sea or lake, exactly as crust
+formed on the bottom of a kettle. Gypsum is the first material to be so
+thrown down, because it is less soluble than common salt, and therefore
+sooner got rid of. It forms a thick bottom layer in the bed of all
+evaporating inland seas; and as plaster of Paris it not only gives rise
+finally to artistic monstrosities hawked about the streets for the
+degradation of national taste, but also plays an important part in the
+manufacture of bonbons, the destruction of the human digestion, and the
+ultimate ruin of the dominant white European race. Only about a third of
+the water in a salt lake need be evaporated before the gypsum begins to
+be deposited in a solid layer over its whole bed; it is not till 93 per
+cent. of the water has gone, and only 7 per cent. is left, that common
+salt begins to be thrown down. When that point of intensity is reached,
+the salt, too, falls as a sediment to the bottom, and there overlies the
+gypsum deposit. Hence all the world over, wherever we come upon a bed
+of rock salt, it almost invariably lies upon a floor of solid gypsum.
+
+The Caspian, being still a very respectable modern sea, constantly
+supplied with fresh water from the surrounding rivers, has not yet begun
+by any means to deposit salt on its bottom from its whole mass; but the
+shallow pools and long bays around its edge have crusts of beautiful
+rose-coloured salt-crystals forming upon their sides; and as these
+lesser basins gradually dry up, the sand, blown before the wind, slowly
+drifts over them, so as to form miniature rock-salt beds on a very small
+scale. Nevertheless, the young and vigorous Caspian only represents the
+first stage in the process of evaporation of an inland sea. It is still
+fresh enough to form the abode of fish and mollusks; and the
+irrepressible young lady of the present generation is perhaps even aware
+that it contains numbers of seals, being in fact the seat of one of the
+most important and valuable seal-fisheries in the whole world. It may be
+regarded as a typical example of a yet youthful and lively inland sea.
+
+The Dead Sea, on the other hand, is an old and decrepit salt lake in a
+very advanced state of evaporation. It lies several feet below the level
+of the Mediterranean, just as the Caspian lies several feet below the
+level of the Black Sea; and as in both cases the surface must once have
+been continuous, it is clear that the water of either sheet must have
+dried up to a very considerable extent. But, while the Caspian has
+shrunk only to 85 feet below the Black Sea, the Dead Sea has shrunk to
+the enormous depth of 1,292 feet below the Mediterranean. Every now and
+then, some enterprising De Lesseps or other proposes to dig a canal from
+the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and so re-establish the old high
+level. The effect of this very revolutionary proceeding would be to
+flood the entire Jordan Valley, connect the Sea of Galilee with the Dead
+Sea, and play the dickens generally with Scripture geography, to the
+infinite delight of Sunday school classes. Now, when the Dead Sea first
+began its independent career as a separate sheet of water on its own
+account, it no doubt occupied the whole bed of this imaginary engineers'
+lake--spreading, if not from Dan to Beersheba, at any rate from Dan to
+Edom, or, in other words, along the whole Jordan Valley from the Sea of
+Galilee and even the Waters of Merom to the southern desert. (I will not
+insult the reader's intelligence and orthodoxy by suggesting that
+perhaps he may not be precisely certain as to the exact position of the
+Waters of Merom; but I will merely recommend him just to refresh his
+memory by turning to his atlas, as this is an opportunity which may not
+again occur.) The modern Dead Sea is the last shrunken relic of such a
+considerable ancient lake. Its waters are now so very concentrated and
+so very nasty that no fish or other self-respecting animal can consent
+to live in them; and so buoyant that a man can't drown himself, even if
+he tries, because the sea is saturated with salts of various sorts till
+it has become a kind of soup or porridge, in which a swimmer floats,
+will he nill he. Persons in the neighbourhood who wish to commit suicide
+are therefore obliged to go elsewhere: much as in Tasmania, the
+healthiest climate in the world, people who want to die are obliged to
+run across for a week to Sydney or Melbourne.
+
+The waters of the Dead Sea are thus in the condition of having already
+deposited almost all their gypsum, as well as the greater part of the
+salt they originally contained. They are, in fact, much like sea water
+which has been boiled down till it has reached the state of a thick
+salty liquid; and though most of the salt is now already deposited in a
+deep layer on the bottom, enough still remains in solution to make the
+Dead Sea infinitely salter than the general ocean. At the same time,
+there are a good many other things in solution in sea water besides
+gypsum and common salt; such as chloride of magnesia sulphate of
+potassium, and other interesting substances with pretty chemical names,
+well calculated to endear them at first sight to the sentimental
+affections of the general public. These other by-contents of the water
+are often still longer in getting deposited than common salt; and, owing
+to their intermixture in a very concentrated form with the mother liquid
+of the Dead Sea, the water of that evaporating lake is not only salt but
+also slimy and fetid to the last degree, its taste being accurately
+described as half brine, half rancid oil. Indeed, the salt has been so
+far precipitated already that there is now five times as much chloride
+of magnesium left in the water as there is common salt. By the way, it
+is a lucky thing for us that these various soluble minerals are of such
+constitution as to be thrown down separately at different stages of
+concentration in the evaporating liquid; for, if it were otherwise, they
+would all get deposited together, and we should find on all old salt
+lake beds only a mixed layer of gypsum, salt, and other chlorides and
+sulphates, absolutely useless for any practical human purpose. In that
+case, we should be entirely dependent upon marine salt pans and
+artificial processes for our entire salt supply. As it is, we find the
+materials deposited one above another in regular layers; first, the
+gypsum at the bottom; then the rock-salt; and last of all, on top, the
+more soluble mineral constituents.
+
+The Great Salt Lake of Utah, sacred to the memory of Brigham Young,
+gives us an example of a modern saline sheet of very different origin,
+since it is in fact not a branch of the sea at all, but a mere shrunken
+remnant of a very large fresh-water lake system, like that of the
+still-existing St. Lawrence chain. Once upon a time, American geologists
+say, a huge sheet of water, for which they have even invented a
+definite name, Lake Bonneville, occupied a far larger valley among the
+outliers of the Rocky Mountains, measuring 300 miles in one direction by
+180 miles in the other. Beside this primitive Superior lay a second
+great sheet--an early Huron--(Lake Lahontan, the geologists call it)
+almost as big, and equally of fresh water. By-and-by--the precise dates
+are necessarily indefinite--some change in the rainfall, unregistered by
+any contemporary 'New York Herald,' made the waters of these big lakes
+shrink and evaporate. Lake Lahontan shrank away like Alice in
+Wonderland, till there was absolutely nothing left of it; Lake
+Bonneville shrank till it attained the diminished size of the existing
+Great Salt Lake. Terrace after terrace, running in long parallel lines
+on the sides of the Wahsatch Mountains around, mark the various levels
+at which it rested for awhile on its gradual downward course. It is
+still falling indeed; and the plain around is being gradually uncovered,
+forming the white salt-encrusted shore with which all visitors to the
+Mormon city are so familiar.
+
+But why should the water have become briny? Why should the evaporation
+of an old Superior produce at last a Great Salt Lake? Well, there is a
+small quantity of salt in solution even in the freshest of lakes and
+ponds, brought down to them by the streams or rivers; and, as the water
+of the hypothetical Lake Bonneville slowly evaporated, the salt and
+other mineral constituents remained behind. Thus the solution grew
+constantly more and more concentrated, till at the present day it is
+extremely saline. Professor Geikie (to whose works the present paper is
+much indebted) found that he floated on the water in spite of himself;
+and the under sides of the steps at the bathing-places are all encrusted
+with short stalactites of salt, produced from the drip of the bathers as
+they leave the water. The mineral constituents, however, differ
+considerably in their proportions from those found in true salt lakes of
+marine origin; and the point at which the salt is thrown down is still
+far from having been reached. Great Salt Lake must simmer in the sun for
+many centuries yet before the point arrives at which (as cooks say) it
+begins to settle.
+
+That is the way in which deposits of salt are being now produced on the
+world's surface, in preparation for that man of the future who, as we
+learn from a duly constituted authority, is to be hairless, toothless,
+web-footed, and far too respectable ever to be funny. Man of the present
+derives his existing salt-supply chiefly from beds of rock-salt
+similarly laid down against his expected appearance some hundred
+thousand æons or so ago. (An æon is a very convenient geological unit
+indeed to reckon by; as nobody has any idea how long it is, they can't
+carp at you for a matter of an æon or two one way or the other.)
+Rock-salt is found in most parts of the world, in beds of very various
+ages. The great Salt Range of the Punjaub is probably the earliest in
+date of all salt deposits; it was laid down at the bottom of some very
+ancient Asiatic Mediterranean, whose last shrunken remnant covered the
+upper basin of the Indus and its tributaries during the Silurian age.
+Europe had then hardly begun to be; and England was probably still
+covered from end to end by the primæval ocean. From this very primitive
+salt deposit the greater part of India and Central Asia is still
+supplied; and the Indian Government makes a pretty penny out of the dues
+in the shape of the justly detested salt-tax--a tax especially odious
+because it wrings the fraction of a farthing even from those unhappy
+agricultural labourers who have never tasted ghee with their rice.
+
+The thickness of the beds in each salt deposit of course depends
+entirely upon the area of the original sea or salt-lake, and the length
+of time during which the evaporation went on. Sometimes we may get a
+mere film of salt; sometimes a solid bed six hundred feet thick.
+Perfectly pure rock-salt is colourless and transparent; but one doesn't
+often find it pure. Alas for a degenerate world! even in its original
+site, Nature herself has taken the trouble to adulterate it beforehand.
+(If she hadn't done so, one may be perfectly sure that commercial
+enterprise would have proved equal to the occasion in the long run.) But
+the adulteration hasn't spoilt the beauty of the salt; on the contrary,
+it serves, like rouge, to give a fine fresh colour where none existed.
+When iron is the chief colouring matter, rock-salt assumes a beautiful
+clear red tint; in other cases it is emerald green or pale blue. As a
+rule, salt is prepared from it for table by a regular process; but it
+has become a fad of late with a few people to put crystals of native
+rock-salt on their tables; and they decidedly look very pretty, and have
+a certain distinctive flavour of their own that is not unpleasant.
+
+Our English salt supply is chiefly derived from the Cheshire and
+Worcestershire salt-regions, which are of triassic age. Many of the
+places at which the salt is mined have names ending in _wich_, such as
+Northwich, Middlewich, Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich.
+This termination _wich_ is itself curiously significant, as Canon Isaac
+Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea.
+The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans
+on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and
+Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still
+known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the
+inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the familiar
+name, a wich; and the places where the salt was manufactured came to be
+known as wych-houses. Droitwich, for example, was originally such a
+wich, where the droits or dues on salt were paid at the time when
+William the Conqueror's commissioners drew up their great survey for
+Domesday Book. But the good, easy-going mediæval people who gave these
+quaint names to the inland wiches had probably no idea that they were
+really and truly dried-up bays, and that the salt they mined from their
+pits was genuine ancient bay-salt, the deposit of an old inland sea,
+evaporated by slow degrees a countless number of ages since, exactly as
+the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake are getting evaporated in our own
+time.
+
+Such, nevertheless, is actually the case. A good-sized Caspian used to
+spread across the centre of England and north of Ireland in triassic
+times, bounded here and there, as well as Dr. Hull can make out, by the
+Welsh Mountains, the Cheviots, and the Donegal Hills, and with the Peak
+of Derbyshire and the Isle of Man standing out as separate islands from
+its blue expanse. (We will beg the question that the English seas were
+then blue. They are certainly marked so in a very fine cerulean tint on
+Dr. Hull's map of Triassic Britain.) Slowly, like most other inland
+seas, this early British Caspian began to lose weight and to shrivel
+away to ever smaller dimensions. In Devonshire, where it appears to have
+first dried up, we get no salt, but only red marl, with here and there a
+cubical cast, filling a hole once occupied by rock-salt, though the
+percolation of the rain has long since melted out that very soluble
+substance, and replaced it by a mere mould in the characteristic square
+shape of salt crystals. But Worcestershire and Cheshire were the seat of
+the inland sea when it had contracted to the dimensions of a mere salt
+lake, and begun to throw down its dissolved saline materials. One of the
+Cheshire beds is sometimes a hundred feet thick of almost pure and
+crystalline rock-salt. The absence of fossils shows that animals must
+have had as bad a time of it there as in the Dead Sea of our modern
+Palestine. The Droitwich brine-pits have been known for many centuries,
+since they were worked (and taxed) even before the Norman Conquest, as
+were many other similar wells elsewhere. But the actual mining of
+rock-salt as such in England dates back only as far as the reign of King
+Charles II. of blessed memory, or more definitely to the very year in
+which the 'Pilgrim's Progress' was conceived and written by John Bunyan.
+During that particular summer, an enterprising person at Nantwich had
+sunk a shaft for coal, which he failed to find; but on his way down he
+came unexpectedly across the bed of rock-salt, then for the first time
+discovered as a native mineral. Since that fortunate accident the beds
+have been so energetically worked and the springs so energetically
+pumped that some of the towns built on top of them have got undermined,
+and now threaten from year to year, in the most literal sense, to cave
+in. In fact, one or two subsidences of considerable extent have already
+taken place, due in part no doubt to the dissolving action of rain
+water, but in part also to the mode of working. The mines are approached
+by a shaft; and, when you get down to the level of the old sea bottom,
+you find yourself in a sort of artificial gallery, whose roof, with all
+the world on top of it, is supported every here and there by massive
+pillars about fifteen feet thick. Considering that the salt lies often a
+hundred and fifty yards deep, and that these pillars have to bear the
+weight of all that depth of solid rock, it is not surprising that
+subsidences should sometimes occur in abandoned shafts, where the water
+is allowed to collect, and slowly dissolve away the supporting columns.
+
+Salt is a necessary article of food for animals, but in a far less
+degree than is commonly supposed. Each of us eats on an average about
+ten times as much salt as we actually require. In this respect popular
+notions are as inexact as in the very similar case of the supply of
+phosphorus. Because phosphorus is needful for brain action, people jump
+forthwith to the absurd conclusion that fish and other foods rich in
+phosphates ought to be specially good for students preparing for
+examination, great thinkers, and literary men. Mark Twain indeed once
+advised a poetical aspirant, who sent him a few verses for his critical
+opinion, that fish was very feeding for the brains; he would recommend a
+couple of young whales to begin upon. As a matter of fact, there is more
+phosphorus in our daily bread than would have sufficed Shakespeare to
+write 'Hamlet,' or Newton to discover the law of gravitation. It isn't
+phosphorus that most of us need, but brains to burn it in. A man might
+as well light a fire in a carriage, because coal makes an engine go, as
+hope to mend the pace of his dull pate by eating fish for the sake of
+the phosphates.
+
+The question still remains, How did the salt originally get there? After
+all, when we say that it was produced, as rock-salt, by evaporation of
+the water in inland seas, we leave unanswered the main problem, How did
+the brine in solution get into the sea at all in the first place? Well,
+one might almost as well ask, How did anything come to be upon the earth
+at any time, in any way? How did the sea itself get there? How did this
+planet swim into existence at all? In the Indian mythology the world is
+supported upon the back of an elephant, who is supported upon the back
+of a tortoise; but what the tortoise in the last resort is supported
+upon the Indian philosophers prudently say not. If we once begin thus
+pushing back our inquiries into the genesis of the cosmos, we shall find
+our search retreating step after step _ad infinitum_. The negro
+preacher, describing the creation of Adam, and drawing slightly upon
+his imagination, observed that when our prime forefather first came to
+consciousness he found himself 'sot up agin a fence.' One of his hearers
+ventured sceptically to ejaculate, 'Den whar dat fence come from,
+ministah?' The outraged divine scratched his grey wool reflectively for
+a moment, and replied, after a pause, with stern solemnity, 'Tree more
+ob dem questions will undermine de whole system ob teology.'
+
+However, we are not permitted humbly to imitate the prudent reticence of
+the Indian philosophers. In these days of evolution hypotheses, and
+nebular theories, and kinetic energy, and all the rest of it, the
+question why the sea is salt rises up irrepressible and imperatively
+demands to get itself answered. There was a sapient inquirer, recently
+deceased, who had a short way out of this difficulty. He held that the
+sea was only salt because of all the salt rivers that run into it.
+Considering that the salt rivers are themselves salted by passing
+through salt regions, or being fed by saline springs, all of which
+derive their saltness from deposits laid down long ago by evaporation
+from earlier seas or lake basins, this explanation savours somewhat of
+circularity. It amounts in effect to saying that the sea is salt because
+of the large amount of saline matter which it holds in solution. Cheese
+is also a caseous preparation of milk; the duties of an archdeacon are
+to perform archidiaconal functions; and opium puts one to sleep because
+it possesses a soporific virtue.
+
+Apart from such purely verbal explanations of the saltness of the sea,
+however, one can only give some such account of the way it came to be
+'the briny' as the following:--
+
+This world was once a haze of fluid light, as the poets and the men of
+science agree in informing us. As soon as it began to cool down a
+little, the heavier materials naturally sank towards the centre, while
+the lighter, now represented by the ocean and the atmosphere, floated in
+a gaseous condition on the outside. But the great envelope of vapour
+thus produced did not consist merely of the constituents of air and
+water; many other gases and vapours mingled with them, as they still do
+to a far less extent in our existing atmosphere. By-and-by, as the
+cooling and condensing process continued, the water settled down from
+the condition of steam into one of a liquid at a dull red heat. As it
+condensed, it carried down with it a great many other substances, held
+in solution, whose component elements had previously existed in the
+primitive gaseous atmosphere. Thus the early ocean which covered the
+whole earth was in all probability not only very salt, but also quite
+thick with other mineral matters close up to the point of saturation. It
+was full of lime, and raw flint, and sulphates, and many other
+miscellaneous bodies. Moreover, it was not only just as salt as at the
+present day, but even a great deal salter. For from that time to this
+evaporation has constantly been going on in certain shallow isolated
+areas, laying down great beds of gypsum and then of salt, which still
+remain in the solid condition, while the water has, of course, been
+correspondingly purified. The same thing has likewise happened in a
+slightly different way with the lime and flint, which have been
+separated from the water chiefly by living animals, and afterwards
+deposited on the bottom of the ocean in immense layers as limestone,
+chalk, sandstone, and clay.
+
+Thus it turns out that in the end all our sources of salt-supply are
+alike ultimately derived from the briny ocean. Whether we dig it out as
+solid rock-salt from the open quarries of the Punjaub, or pump it up
+from brine-wells sunk into the triassic rocks of Cheshire, or evaporate
+it direct in the salt-pans of England and the shallow _salines_ of the
+Mediterranean shore, it is still at bottom essentially sea-salt.
+However distant the connection may seem, our salt is always in the last
+resort obtained from the material held in solution in some ancient or
+modern sea. Even the saline springs of Canada and the Northern States of
+America, where the wapiti love to congregate, and the noble hunter lurks
+in the thicket to murder them unperceived, derive their saltness, as an
+able Canadian geologist has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still
+retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates
+form the earliest known life-bearing rocks. To the Homeric Greek, as to
+Mr. Dick Swiveller, the ocean was always the briny: to modern science,
+on the other hand (which neither of those worthies would probably have
+appreciated at its own valuation), the briny is always the oceanic. The
+fossil food which we find to-day on all our dinner-tables dates back its
+origin primarily to the first seas that ever covered the surface of our
+planet, and secondarily to the great rock deposits of the dried-up
+triassic inland sea. And yet even our men of science habitually describe
+that ancient mineral as common salt.
+
+
+
+
+OGBURY BARROWS
+
+
+We went to Ogbury Barrows on an archæological expedition. And as the
+very name of archæology, owing to a serious misconception incidental to
+human nature, is enough to deter most people from taking any further
+interest in our proceedings when once we got there, I may as well begin
+by explaining, for the benefit of those who have never been to one, the
+method and manner of an archæological outing.
+
+The first thing you have to do is to catch your secretary. The genuine
+secretary is born, not made; and therefore you have got to catch him,
+not to appoint him. Appointing a secretary is pure vanity and vexation
+of spirit; you must find the right man made ready to your hand; and when
+you have found him you will soon see that he slips into the onerous
+duties of the secretariat as if to the manner born, by pure instinct.
+The perfect secretary is an urbane old gentleman of mature years and
+portly bearing, a dignified representative of British archæology, with
+plenty of money and plenty of leisure, possessing a heaven-born genius
+for organisation, and utterly unhampered by any foolish views of his own
+about archæological research or any other kindred subject. The secretary
+who archæologises is lost. His business is not to discourse of early
+English windows or of palæolithic hatchets, of buried villas or of
+Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile-work or of dolichocephalic skulls,
+but to provide abundant brakes, drags, and carriages, to take care that
+the owners of castles and baronial residences throw them open (with
+lunch provided) to the ardent student of British antiquities, to see
+that all the old ladies have somebody to talk to, and all the young ones
+somebody to flirt with, and generally to superintend the morals,
+happiness, and personal comfort of some fifty assorted scientific
+enthusiasts. The secretary who diverges from these his proper and
+elevated functions into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the
+antiquity of man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility of
+woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest (when he should
+by rights be concentrating the whole force of his massive intellect upon
+the arduous task of arranging for dinner), proves himself at once
+unworthy of his high position, and should forthwith be deposed from the
+secretariat by public acclamation.
+
+Having once entrapped your perfect secretary, you set him busily to work
+beforehand to make all the arrangements for your expected excursion, the
+archæologists generally cordially recognising the important principle
+that he pays all the expenses he incurs out of his own pocket, and
+drives splendid bargains on their account with hotel-keepers, coachmen,
+railway companies, and others to feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at
+fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition. You also
+understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the
+neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open
+their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the
+owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little
+preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your
+archæologists and set out upon your intended tour.
+
+An archæologist, it should be further premised, has no necessary
+personal connection with archæology in any way. He (or she) is a human
+being, of assorted origin, age, and sex, known as an archæologist then
+and there on no other ground than the possession of a ticket (price
+half-a-guinea) for that particular archæological meeting. Who would not
+be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting terms? Most
+archæologists within my own private experience, indeed, are ladies of
+various ages, many of them elderly, but many more young and pretty,
+whose views about the styles of English architecture or the exact
+distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the vaguest and
+most shadowy possible description. You all drive in brakes together to
+the various points of interest in the surrounding country. When you
+arrive at a point of interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his
+head reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there is
+fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are burning to learn all
+about it, you put your hand up to your ear, and assume an attitude of
+profound attention. If you are not burning with the desire for
+information, you stroll off casually about the grounds and gardens with
+the prettiest and pleasantest among the archæological sisters, whose
+acquaintance you have made on the way thither. Sometimes it rains, and
+then you obtain an admirable chance of offering your neighbour the
+protection afforded by your brand-new silk umbrella. By-and-by the dull
+paper gets finished, and somebody who lives in an adjoining house
+volunteers to provide you with luncheon. Then you adjourn to the parish
+church, where an old gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and
+tedious account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not to be
+found upon the walls of that poky little building. Nobody listens to
+him; but everybody carries away a vague impression that some one or
+other, temp. Henry the Second, married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of
+Sir Ralph de Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and
+twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble family with a
+correspondingly varied pedigree. Finally, you take tea and ices upon
+somebody's lawn, by special invitation, and drive home, not without much
+laughter, in the cool of the evening to an excellent table d'hôte dinner
+at the marvellously cheap hotel, presided over by the ever-smiling and
+urbane secretary. That is what we mean nowadays by being a member of an
+archæological association.
+
+It was on just such a pleasant excursion that we all went to Ogbury
+Barrows. I was overflowing, myself, with bottled-up information on the
+subject of those two prehistoric tumuli; for Ogbury Barrows have been
+the hobby of my lifetime; but I didn't read a paper upon their origin
+and meaning, first, because the secretary very happily forgot to ask me,
+and secondly, because I was much better employed in psychological
+research into the habits and manners of an extremely pretty
+pink-and-white archæologist who stood beside me. Instead, therefore, of
+boring her and my other companions with all my accumulated store of
+information about Ogbury Barrows, I locked it up securely in my own
+bosom, with the fell design of finally venting it all at once in one
+vast flood upon the present article.
+
+Ogbury Barrows, I would have said (had it not been for the praiseworthy
+negligence of our esteemed secretary), stand upon the very verge of a
+great chalk-down, overlooking a broad and fertile belt of valley, whose
+slopes are terraced in the quaintest fashion with long parallel lines of
+obviously human and industrial origin. The terracing must have been done
+a very long time ago indeed, for it is a device for collecting enough
+soil on a chalky hillside to grow corn in. Now, nobody ever tried to
+grow corn on open chalk-downs in any civilised period of history until
+the present century, because the downs are so much more naturally
+adapted for sheep-walks that the attempt to turn them into waving
+cornfields would never occur to anybody on earth except a barbarian or
+an advanced agriculturist. But when Ogbury Downs were originally
+terraced, I don't doubt that the primitive system of universal tribal
+warfare still existed everywhere in Britain. This system is aptly summed
+up in the familiar modern Black Country formula, 'Yon's a stranger.
+'Eave 'arf a brick at him.' Each tribe was then perpetually at war with
+every other tribe on either side of it: a simple plan which rendered
+foreign tariffs quite unnecessary, and most effectually protected home
+industries. The consequence was, each district had to produce for its
+own tribe all the necessaries of life, however ill-adapted by nature for
+their due production: because traffic and barter did not yet exist, and
+the only form ever assumed by import trade was that of raiding on your
+neighbours' territories, and bringing back with you whatever you could
+lay hands on. So the people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to
+grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and,
+in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil
+and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt
+as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in place by artificial
+barriers.
+
+On the top of the down, overlooking this curious vale of prehistoric
+terraces, rise the twin heights of Ogbury Barrows, familiar landmarks to
+all the country side around for many miles. One of them is a tall,
+circular mound or tumulus surrounded by a deep and well-marked trench:
+the other, which stands a little on one side, is long and narrow, shaped
+exactly like a modern grave, but of comparatively gigantic and colossal
+proportions. Even the little children of Ogbury village have noticed
+its close resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in
+their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when they play upon its
+summit that a great giant in golden armour lies buried in a stone vault
+underneath. But if only they knew the real truth, they would say instead
+that that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of a short,
+squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature to the Lapps and
+Finns, and about as much unlike a giant as human nature could easily
+manage. It maybe regarded as a general truth of history that the
+greatest men don't by any means always get the biggest monument.
+
+The archæologists in becoming prints who went with us to the top of
+Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised (with demonstrative parasol) that
+'these mounds must have been made a very long time ago, indeed.' So in
+fact they were: but though they stand now so close together, and look so
+much like sisters and contemporaries, one is ages older than the other,
+and was already green and grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the
+fresh earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its side,
+above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic warrior. Let us begin
+by considering the oldest first, and then pass on to its younger sister.
+
+Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument indeed. Not, to be sure,
+one quarter so ancient as the days of the extremely old master who
+carved the mammoth on the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the
+Dordogne, and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in an earlier
+portion of this volume: compared with that very antique personage, our
+long barrow on Ogbury hill-top may in fact be looked upon as almost
+modern. Still, when one isn't talking in geological language, ten or
+twenty thousand years may be fairly considered a very long time as time
+goes: and I have little doubt that from ten to twenty thousand years
+have passed since the short, squat chieftain aforesaid was first
+committed to his final resting-place in Ogbury Long Barrow. Two years
+since, we local archæologists--_not_ in becoming prints this
+time--opened the barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we
+expected, the 'stone vault' of the popular tradition, proving
+conclusively that some faint memory of the original interment had clung
+for all those long years around the grassy pile of that ancient tumulus.
+Its centre, in fact, was occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big
+Sarsen stones from the surrounding hillsides; and in the midst of the
+house of death thus rudely constructed lay the mouldering skeleton of
+its original possessor--an old prehistoric Mongoloid chieftain. When I
+stood for the first moment within that primæval palace of the dead,
+never before entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I
+must own, something like a burglar, something like a body-snatcher,
+something like a resurrection man, but most of all like a happy
+archæologist.
+
+The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in fact, a buried
+cromlech, covered all over (until we opened it) by the earth of the
+barrow. Almost every cromlech, wherever found, was once, I believe, the
+central chamber of just such a long barrow: but in some instances wind
+and rain have beaten down and washed away the surrounding earth (and
+then we call it a 'Druidical monument'), while in others the mound still
+encloses its original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric
+tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves are quite
+modern and commonplace personages compared with the short, squat
+chieftains of the long barrows. For all the indications we found in the
+long barrow at Ogbury (as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us
+at once to the strange conclusion that our new acquaintance, the
+skeleton, had once been a living cannibal king of the newer stone-age in
+Britain.
+
+The only weapons or implements we could discover in the barrow were two
+neatly chipped flint arrowheads, and a very delicate ground greenstone
+hatchet, or tomahawk. These were the weapons of the dead chief, laid
+beside him in the stone chamber where we found his skeleton, for his
+future use in his underground existence. A piece or two of rude
+hand-made pottery, no doubt containing food and drink for the ghost, had
+also been placed close to his side: but they had mouldered away with
+time and damp, till it was quite impossible to recover more than a few
+broken and shapeless fragments. There was no trace of metal in any way:
+whereas if the tribesmen of our friend the skeleton had known at all the
+art of smelting, we may be sure some bronze axe or spearhead would have
+taken the place of the flint arrows and the greenstone tomahawk: for
+savages always bury a man's best property together with his corpse,
+while civilised men take care to preserve it with pious care in their
+own possession, and to fight over it strenuously in the court of
+probate.
+
+The chief's own skeleton lay, or rather squatted, in the most
+undignified attitude, in the central chamber. His people when they put
+him there evidently considered that he was to sit at his ease, as he had
+been accustomed to do in his lifetime, in the ordinary savage squatting
+position, with his knees tucked up till they reached his chin, and his
+body resting entirely on the heels and haunches. The skeleton was
+entire: but just outside and above the stone vault we came upon a number
+of other bones, which told another and very different story. Some of
+them were the bones of the old prehistoric short-horned ox: others
+belonged to wild boars, red deer, and sundry similar animals, for the
+most part skulls and feet only, the relics of the savage funeral feast.
+It was clear that as soon as the builders of the barrow had erected the
+stone chamber of their dead chieftain, and placed within it his honoured
+remains, they had held a great banquet on the spot, and, after killing
+oxen and chasing red deer, had eaten all the eatable portions, and
+thrown the skulls, horns, and hoofs on top of the tomb, as offerings to
+the spirit of their departed master. But among these relics of the
+funeral baked meats there were some that specially attracted our
+attention--a number of broken human skulls, mingled indiscriminately
+with the horns of deer and the bones of oxen. It was impossible to look
+at them for a single moment, and not to recognise that we had here the
+veritable remains of a cannibal feast, a hundred centuries ago, on
+Ogbury hill-top.
+
+Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with a sword or
+bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt implement, presumably either
+a club or a stone tomahawk. The skull of the great chief inside was
+entire and his skeleton unmutilated: but we could see at a glance that
+the remains we found huddled together on the top were those of slaves or
+prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead chieftain's tomb, and eaten
+with the other products of the chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an
+inner chamber behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger
+relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skeletons squatted
+there in the same curious attitude as their lord's, as if in attendance
+upon him in a neighbouring ante-chamber. They were the skeletons of
+women--so our professional bone-scanner immediately told us--and each of
+their skulls had been carefully cleft right down the middle by a single
+blow from a sharp stone hatchet. But they were not the victims intended
+for the _pièce de résistance_ at the funeral banquet. They were clearly
+the two wives of the deceased chieftain, killed on his tomb by his son
+and successor, in order to accompany their lord and master in his new
+life underground as they had hitherto done in his rude wooden palace on
+the surface of the middle earth.
+
+We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old cannibal savage king
+(after abstracting for our local museum the arrowheads and tomahawk, as
+well as the skull of the very ancient Briton himself), and when our
+archæological society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two
+years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown again as green
+as ever, and not a sign remained of the sacrilegious act in which one of
+the party then assembled there had been a prime actor. Looking down from
+the summit of the long barrow on that bright summer morning, over the
+gay group of picnicking archæologists, it was a curious contrast to
+reinstate in fancy the scene at that first installation of the Ogbury
+monument. In my mind's eye I saw once more the howling band of naked,
+yellow-faced and yellow-limbed savages surge up the terraced slopes of
+Ogbury Down; I saw them bear aloft, with beating of breasts and loud
+gesticulations, the bent corpse of their dead chieftain; I saw the
+terrified and fainting wives haled along by thongs of raw oxhide, and
+the weeping prisoners driven passively like sheep to the slaughter; I
+saw the fearful orgy of massacre and rapine around the open tumulus, the
+wild priest shattering with his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his
+victims, the fire of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the
+heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered stone
+chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals around the mangled
+remains of men and oxen, and finally the long task of heaping up above
+the stone hut of the dead king the earthen mound that was never again to
+be opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we modern
+Britons invaded with our prying, sacrilegious mattock the sacred privacy
+of that cannibal ghost. All this passed like a vision before my mind's
+eye; but I didn't mention anything of it at that particular moment to my
+fellow-archæologists, because I saw they were all much more interested
+in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about an exalted personage and a
+distinguished actress with which the model secretary was just then duly
+entertaining them.
+
+Five thousand years or so slowly wore away, from the date of the
+erection of the long barrow, and a new race had come to occupy the soil
+of England, and had driven away or reduced to slavery the short, squat,
+yellow-skinned cannibals of the earlier epoch. They were a pastoral and
+agricultural people, these new comers, acquainted with the use and abuse
+of bronze, and far more civilised in every way than their darker
+predecessors. No trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce
+onslaught the Celtic invaders--for the bronze-age folk were presumably
+Celts--swept through the little Ogbury valley, and brained the men of
+the older race, while they made slaves of the younger women and
+serviceable children. Nothing now stands to tell us anything of the long
+years of Celtic domination, except the round barrow on the bare down,
+just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far earlier and more
+primitive neighbour.
+
+We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time as the other, and
+found in it, as we expected, no bones or skeleton of any sort, broken or
+otherwise, but simply a large cinerary urn. The urn was formed of coarse
+hand-made earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth, but not
+by any means so old or porous as the fragments we had discovered in the
+long barrow. A pretty pattern ran round its edge--a pattern in the
+simplest and most primitive style of ornamentation; for it consisted
+merely of the print of the potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the
+moist clay before baking. Beside the urn lay a second specimen of early
+pottery, one of those curious perforated jars which antiquaries call by
+the very question-begging name of incense-cups; and within it we
+discovered the most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful
+wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no
+consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated
+both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to
+the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full
+consent) on the land of his fathers.
+
+Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of burying their dead? Why
+did they anticipate the latest fashionable mode of disposal of corpses,
+and go in for cremation with such thorough conviction? They couldn't
+have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary considerations
+which so profoundly agitated the mind of 'Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation
+was still in a very rudimentary state in the year five thousand B.C.;
+and the ingenious Celt, who is still given to 'waking' his neighbours,
+when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference to the chances
+of infection, must have had some other and more powerful reason for
+adopting the comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference
+to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due to a further
+development of religious ideas on the part of the Celtic tribesmen above
+that of the primitive stone-age cannibals.
+
+When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the firm belief in
+another life, which life was regarded as the exact counterpart of this
+present one. The unsophisticated savage, holding that in that equal sky
+his faithful dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the dog
+in question killed and buried with him, in order that it might follow
+him to the happy hunting-grounds. Clearly, you can't hunt without your
+arrows and your tomahawk; so the flint weapons and the trusty bow
+accompanied their owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the
+deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and drink have
+long since decayed within the damp tumulus: but the harder stone and
+earthenware articles have survived till now, to tell the story of that
+crude and simple early faith. Very crude and illogical indeed it was,
+however, for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man was
+thought of as persisting to live a sort of underground life within the
+barrow. A stone hut was constructed for its use; real weapons and
+implements were left by its side; and slaves and wives were ruthlessly
+massacred, as still in Ashantee, in order that their bodies might
+accompany the corpse of the buried master in his subterranean dwelling.
+In all this we have clear evidence of a very inconsistent, savage,
+materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality of the soul, but in
+the continued underground life of the dead body.
+
+With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon these subjects
+began to grow more definite and more consistent. Instead of the corpse,
+we get the ghost; instead of the material underground world, we get the
+idealised and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world of
+shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits. With the growth of
+the idea in this ghostly nether world, there arises naturally the habit
+of burning the dead in order fully to free the liberated spirit from the
+earthly chains that clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable
+fact that wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly
+accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course; while wherever
+(among savage or barbaric races) burial is practised, there a more
+materialistic creed of bodily survival necessarily accompanies it. To
+carry out this theory to its full extent, not only must the body itself
+be burnt, but also all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in
+ghostly clothing; and the question has often been asked of modern
+spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, 'Where do the ghosts get their
+coats and dresses?' The true believer in cremation and the shadowy world
+has no difficulty at all in answering that crucial inquiry; he would say
+at once, 'They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with the
+body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as veraciously retailed for
+us by that dear old grandmotherly scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of
+Melissa refuses to communicate with her late husband, by medium or
+otherwise, on the ground that she found herself naked and shivering with
+cold, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and
+therefore were of no use to her in the world of shades. So Periander, to
+put a stop to this sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all
+the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a great
+trench, and received an immediate answer from the gratified shade, who
+was thenceforth enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of
+Hades among the best-dressed ghosts of that populous quarter.
+
+The belief which thus survived among the civilised Greeks of the age of
+the Despots is shared still by Fijis and Karens, and was derived by all
+in common from early ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury
+round barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt, to liberate
+their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as now, in Fiji, knives and
+axes have their spiritual counterparts, which can only be released when
+the material shape is destroyed or purified by the action of fire.
+Everything, in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own;
+and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free from all
+clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in the rite of suttee,
+the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon her husband's pyre, in order
+that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts
+whither he was bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge
+over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so remote as to
+merge together mentally to the casual eyes of modern observers, but yet
+in reality marking in their very shape and disposition an immense, long,
+and slow advance of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in
+form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut that surrounds and
+encloses it, so does the round barrow answer in form to the urn
+containing the calcined ashes of the cremated barbarian. And is it not a
+suggestive fact that when we turn to the little graveyard by the church
+below we find the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, as
+opposed to the pagan belief in the immortality of the soul, once more
+bringing us back to the small oblong mound which is after all but the
+dwarfed and humbler modern representative of the long barrow? So deep is
+the connection between that familiar shape and the practice of
+inhumation that the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere to have come into
+use again throughout all Europe, after whole centuries of continued
+cremation, as the natural concomitant and necessary mark of Christian
+burial.
+
+This is what I would have said, if I had been asked, at Ogbury Barrows.
+But I wasn't asked; so I devoted myself instead to psychological
+research, and said nothing.
+
+
+
+
+FISH OUT OF WATER
+
+
+Strolling one day in what is euphemistically termed, in equatorial
+latitudes, 'the cool of the evening,' along a tangled tropical American
+field-path, through a low region of lagoons and watercourses, my
+attention happened to be momentarily attracted from the monotonous
+pursuit of the nimble mosquito by a small animal scuttling along
+irregularly before me, as if in a great hurry to get out of my way
+before I could turn him into an excellent specimen. At first sight I
+took the little hopper, in the grey dusk, for one of the common, small
+green lizards, and wasn't much disposed to pay it any distinguished
+share either of personal or scientific attention. But as I walked on a
+little further through the dense underbrush, more and more of these
+shuffling and scurrying little creatures kept crossing the path,
+hastily, all in one direction, and all, as it were, in a formed body or
+marching phalanx. Looking closer, to my great surprise, I found they
+were actually fish out of water, going on a walking tour, for change of
+air, to a new residence--genuine fish, a couple of inches long each, not
+eel-shaped or serpentine in outline, but closely resembling a red mullet
+in miniature, though much more beautifully and delicately coloured, and
+with fins and tails of the most orthodox spiny and prickly description.
+They were travelling across country in a bee-line, thousands of them
+together, not at all like the helpless fish out of water of popular
+imagination, but as unconcernedly and naturally as if they had been
+accustomed to the overland route for their whole lifetimes, and were
+walking now on the king's highway without let or hindrance.
+
+I took one up in my hand and examined it more carefully; though the
+catching it wasn't by any means so easy as it sounds on paper, for these
+perambulatory fish are thoroughly inured to the dangers and difficulties
+of dry land, and can get out of your way when you try to capture them
+with a rapidity and dexterity which are truly surprising. The little
+creatures are very pretty, well-formed catfish, with bright, intelligent
+eyes, and a body armed all over, like the armadillo's, with a continuous
+coat of hard and horny mail. This coat is not formed of scales, as in
+most fish, but of toughened skin, as in crocodiles and alligators,
+arranged in two overlapping rows of imbricated shields, exactly like the
+round tiles so common on the roofs of Italian cottages. The fish walks,
+or rather shambles along ungracefully, by the shuffling movement of a
+pair of stiff spines placed close behind his head, aided by the steering
+action of his tail, and a constant snake-like wriggling motion of his
+entire body. Leg spines of somewhat the same sort are found in the
+common English gurnard, and in this age of Aquariums and Fisheries
+Exhibitions, most adult persons above the age of twenty-one years must
+have observed the gurnards themselves crawling along suspiciously by
+their aid at the bottom of a tank at the Crystal Palace or the
+polyonymous South Kensington building. But while the European gurnard
+only uses his substitutes for legs on the bed of the ocean, my itinerant
+tropical acquaintance (his name, I regret to say, is Callichthys) uses
+them boldly for terrestrial locomotion across the dry lowlands of his
+native country. And while the gurnard has no less than six of these
+pro-legs, the American land fish has only a single pair with which to
+accomplish his arduous journeys. If this be considered as a point of
+inferiority in the armour-plated American species, we must remember that
+while beetles and grasshoppers have as many as six legs apiece, man, the
+head and crown of things, is content to scramble through life
+ungracefully with no more than two.
+
+There are a great many tropical American pond-fish which share these
+adventurous gipsy habits of the pretty little Callichthys. Though they
+belong to two distinct groups, otherwise unconnected, the circumstances
+of the country they inhabit have induced in both families this queer
+fashion of waddling out courageously on dry land, and going on voyages
+of exploration in search of fresh ponds and shallows new, somewhere in
+the neighbourhood of their late residence. One kind in particular, the
+Brazilian Doras, takes land journeys of such surprising length, that he
+often spends several nights on the way, and the Indians who meet the
+wandering bands during their migrations fill several baskets full of the
+prey thus dropped upon them, as it were, from the kindly clouds.
+
+Both Doras and Callichthys, too, are well provided with means of defence
+against the enemies they may chance to meet during their terrestrial
+excursions; for in both kinds there are the same bony shields along the
+sides, securing the little travellers, as far as possible, from attack
+on the part of hungry piscivorous animals. Doras further utilises its
+powers of living out of water by going ashore to fetch dry leaves, with
+which it builds itself a regular nest, like a bird's, at the beginning
+of the rainy season. In this nest the affectionate parents carefully
+cover up their eggs, the hope of the race, and watch over them with the
+utmost attention. Many other fish build nests in the water, of
+materials naturally found at the bottom; but Doras, I believe, is the
+only one that builds them on the beach, of materials sought for on the
+dry land.
+
+Such amphibious habits on the part of certain tropical fish are easy
+enough to explain by the fashionable clue of 'adaptation to
+environment.' Ponds are always very likely to dry up, and so the animals
+that frequent ponds are usually capable of bearing a very long
+deprivation of water. Indeed, our evolutionists generally hold that land
+animals have in every case sprung from pond animals which have gradually
+adapted themselves to do without water altogether. Life, according to
+this theory, began in the ocean, spread up the estuaries into the
+greater rivers, thence extended to the brooks and lakes, and finally
+migrated to the ponds, puddles, swamps and marshes, whence it took at
+last, by tentative degrees, to the solid shore, the plains, and the
+mountains. Certainly the tenacity of life shown by pond animals is very
+remarkable. Our own English carp bury themselves deeply in the mud in
+winter, and there remain in a dormant condition many months entirely
+without food. During this long hibernating period, they can be preserved
+alive for a considerable time out of water, especially if their gills
+are, from time to time, slightly moistened. They may then be sent to any
+address by parcels post, packed in wet moss, without serious damage to
+their constitution; though, according to Dr. Günther, these dissipated
+products of civilisation prefer to have a piece of bread steeped in
+brandy put into their mouths to sustain them beforehand. In Holland,
+where the carp are not so sophisticated, they are often kept the whole
+winter through, hung up in a net to keep them from freezing. At first
+they require to be slightly wetted from time to time, just to
+acclimatise them gradually to so dry an existence; but after a while
+they adapt themselves cheerfully to their altered circumstances, and
+feed on an occasional frugal meal of bread and milk with Christian
+resignation.
+
+Of all land-frequenting fish, however, by far the most famous is the
+so-called climbing perch of India, which not only walks bodily out of
+the water, but even climbs trees by means of special spines, near the
+head and tail, so arranged as to stick into the bark and enable it to
+wriggle its way up awkwardly, something after the same fashion as the
+'looping' of caterpillars. The tree-climber is a small scaly fish,
+seldom more than seven inches long; but it has developed a special
+breathing apparatus to enable it to keep up the stock of oxygen on its
+terrestrial excursions, which may be regarded as to some extent the
+exact converse of the means employed by divers to supply themselves with
+air under water. Just above the gills, which form of course its natural
+hereditary breathing apparatus, the climbing perch has invented a new
+and wholly original water chamber, containing within it a frilled bony
+organ, which enables it to extract oxygen from the stored-up water
+during the course of its aërial peregrinations. While on shore it picks
+up small insects, worms, and grubs; but it also has vegetarian tastes of
+its own, and does not despise fruits and berries. The Indian jugglers
+tame the climbing perches and carry them about with them as part of
+their stock in trade; their ability to live for a long time out of water
+makes them useful confederates in many small tricks which seem very
+wonderful to people accustomed to believe that fish die almost at once
+when taken out of their native element.
+
+The Indian snakehead is a closely allied species, common in the shallow
+ponds and fresh-water tanks of India, where holy Brahmans bathe and
+drink and die and are buried, and most of which dry up entirely during
+the dry season. The snakehead, therefore, has similarly accommodated
+himself to this annual peculiarity in his local habitation by acquiring
+a special chamber for retaining water to moisten his gills throughout
+his long deprivation of that prime necessary. He lives composedly in
+semi-fluid mud, or lies torpid in the hard baked clay at the bottom of
+the dry tank from which all the water has utterly evaporated in the
+drought of summer. As long as the mud remains soft enough to allow the
+fish to rise slowly through it, they come to the surface every now and
+then to take in a good hearty gulp of air, exactly as gold fish do in
+England when confined with thoughtless or ignorant cruelty in a glass
+globe too small to provide sufficient oxygen for their respiration. But
+when the mud hardens entirely they hibernate or rather æstivate, in a
+dormant condition, until the bursting of the monsoon fills the ponds
+once more with the welcome water. Even in the perfectly dry state,
+however, they probably manage to get a little air every now and again
+through the numerous chinks and fissures in the sun-baked mud. Our Aryan
+brother then goes a-fishing playfully with a spade and bucket, and digs
+the snakehead in this mean fashion out of his comfortable lair, with an
+ultimate view to the manufacture of pillau. In Burmah, indeed, while the
+mud is still soft, the ingenious Burmese catch the helpless creatures by
+a still meaner and more unsportsmanlike device. They spread a large
+cloth over the slimy ooze where the snakeheads lie buried, and so cut
+off entirely for the moment their supply of oxygen. The poor fish,
+half-asphyxiated by this unkind treatment, come up gasping to the
+surface under the cloth in search of fresh air, and are then easily
+caught with the hand and tossed into baskets by the degenerate
+Buddhists.
+
+Old Anglo-Indians even say that some of these mud haunting Oriental
+fish will survive for many years in a state of suspended animation, and
+that when ponds or jhíls which are known to have been dry for several
+successive seasons are suddenly filled by heavy rains, they are found to
+be swarming at once with full-grown snakeheads released in a moment from
+what I may venture to call their living tomb in the hardened bottom.
+Whether such statements are absolutely true or not the present deponent
+would be loth to decide dogmatically; but, if we were implicitly to
+swallow everything that the old Anglo-Indian in his simplicity assures
+us he has seen--well, the clergy would have no further cause any longer
+to deplore the growing scepticism and unbelief of these latter
+unfaithful ages.
+
+This habit of lying in the mud and there becoming torpid may be looked
+upon as a natural alternative to the habit of migrating across country,
+when your pond dries up, in search of larger and more permanent sheets
+of water. Some fish solve the problem how to get through the dry season
+in one of these two alternative fashions and some in the other. In flat
+countries where small ponds and tanks alone exist, the burying plan is
+almost universal; in plains traversed by large rivers or containing
+considerable scattered lakes, the migratory system finds greater favour
+with the piscine population.
+
+One tropical species which adopts the tactics of hiding itself in the
+hard clay, the African mud-fish, is specially interesting to us human
+beings on two accounts--first, because, unlike almost all other kinds of
+fish, it possesses lungs as well as gills; and, secondly, because it
+forms an intermediate link between the true fish and the frogs or
+amphibians, and therefore stands in all probability in the direct line
+of human descent, being the living representative of one among our own
+remote and early ancestors. Scientific interest and filial piety ought
+alike to secure our attention for the African mud-fish. It lives its
+amphibious life among the rice-fields on the Nile, the Zambesi, and the
+Gambia, and is so greatly given to a terrestrial existence that its
+swim-bladder has become porous and cellular, so as to be modified into a
+pair of true and serviceable lungs. In fact, the lungs themselves in all
+the higher animals are merely the swim-bladders of fish, slightly
+altered so as to perform a new but closely allied office. The mud-fish
+is common enough in all the larger English aquariums, owing to a
+convenient habit in which it indulges, and which permits it to be
+readily conveyed to all parts of the globe on the same principle as the
+vans for furniture. When the dry season comes on and the rice-fields are
+reduced to banks of baking mud, the mud-fish retire to the bottom of
+their pools, where they form for themselves a sort of cocoon of hardened
+clay, lined with mucus, and with a hole at each end to admit the air;
+and in this snug retreat they remain torpid till the return of wet
+weather. As the fish usually reach a length of three or four feet, the
+cocoons are of course by no means easy to transport entire. Nevertheless
+the natives manage to dig them up whole, fish and all; and if the
+capsules are not broken, the unconscious inmates can be sent across by
+steamer to Europe with perfect safety. Their astonishment when they
+finally wake up after their long slumber, and find themselves inspecting
+the British public, as introduced to them by Mr. Farini, through a sheet
+of plate-glass, must be profound and interesting.
+
+In England itself, on the other hand, we have at least one kind of fish
+which exemplifies the opposite or migratory solution of the dry pond
+problem, and that is our familiar friend the common eel. The ways of
+eels are indeed mysterious, for nobody has ever yet succeeded in
+discovering where, when, or how they manage to spawn; nobody has ever
+yet seen an eel's egg, or caught a female eel in the spawning condition,
+or even observed a really adult male or female specimen of perfect
+development. All the eels ever found in fresh water are immature and
+undeveloped creatures. But eels do certainly spawn somewhere or other in
+the deep sea, and every year, in the course of the summer, flocks of
+young ones, known as elvers, ascend the rivers in enormous quantities,
+like a vast army under numberless leaders. At each tributary or
+affluent, be it river, brook, stream, or ditch, a proportionate
+detachment of the main body is given off to explore the various
+branches, while the central force wriggles its way up the chief channel,
+regardless of obstacles, with undiminished vigour. When the young elvers
+come to a weir, a wall, a floodgate, or a lasher, they simply squirm
+their way up the perpendicular barrier with indescribable wrigglings, as
+if they were wholly unacquainted, physically as well as mentally, with
+Newton's magnificent discovery of gravitation. Nothing stops them; they
+go wherever water is to be found; and though millions perish hopelessly
+in the attempt, millions more survive in the end to attain their goal in
+the upper reaches. They even seem to scent ponds or lakes mysteriously,
+at a distance, and will strike boldly straight across country, to sheets
+of water wholly cut off from communication with the river which forms
+their chief highway.
+
+The full-grown eels are also given to journeying across country in a
+more sober, sedate, and dignified manner, as becomes fish which have
+fully arrived at years, or rather months, of discretion. When the ponds
+in which they live dry up in summer, they make in a bee-line for the
+nearest sheet of fresh water, whose direction and distance they appear
+to know intuitively, through some strange instinctive geographical
+faculty. On their way across country, they do not despise the succulent
+rat, whom they swallow whole when caught with great gusto. To keep their
+gills wet during these excursions, eels have the power of distending the
+skin on each side of the neck, just below the head, so as to form a big
+pouch or swelling. This pouch they fill with water, to carry a good
+supply along with them, until they reach the ponds for which they are
+making. It is the pouch alone that enables eels to live so long out of
+water under all circumstances, and so incidentally exposes them to the
+disagreeable experience of getting skinned alive, which it is to be
+feared still forms the fate of most of those that fall into the clutches
+of the human species.
+
+A far more singular walking fish than any of these is the odd creature
+that rejoices (unfortunately) in the very classical surname of
+Periophthalmus, which is, being interpreted, Stare-about. (If he had a
+recognised English name of his own, I would gladly give it; but as he
+hasn't, and as it is clearly necessary to call him something, I fear we
+must stick to the somewhat alarming scientific nomenclature.)
+Periophthalmus, then, is an odd fish of the tropical Pacific shores,
+with a pair of very distinct forelegs (theoretically described as
+modified pectoral fins), and with two goggle eyes, which he can protrude
+at pleasure right outside the sockets, so as to look in whatever
+direction he chooses, without even taking the trouble to turn his head
+to left or right, backward or forward. At ebb tide this singular
+peripatetic goby literally walks straight out of the water, and
+promenades the bare beach erect on two legs, in search of small crabs
+and other stray marine animals left behind by the receding waters. If
+you try to catch him, he hops away briskly much like a frog, and stares
+back at you grimly over his left shoulder, with his squinting optics.
+So completely adapted is he for this amphibious long-shore existence,
+that his big eyes, unlike those of most other fish, are formed for
+seeing in the air as well as in the water. Nothing can be more ludicrous
+than to watch him suddenly thrusting these very movable orbs right out
+of their sockets like a pair of telescopes, and twisting them round in
+all directions so as to see in front, behind, on top, and below, in one
+delightful circular sweep.
+
+There is also a certain curious tropical American carp which, though it
+hardly deserves to be considered in the strictest sense as a fish out of
+water, yet manages to fall nearly half-way under that peculiar category,
+for it always swims with its head partly above the surface and partly
+below. But the funniest thing in this queer arrangement is the fact that
+one half of each eye is out in the air and the other half is beneath in
+the water. Accordingly, the eye is divided horizontally by a dark strip
+into two distinct and unlike portions, the upper one of which has a
+pupil adapted to vision in the air alone, while the lower is adapted to
+seeing in the water only. The fish, in fact, always swims with its eye
+half out of the water, and it can see as well on dry land as in its
+native ocean. Its name is Anableps, but in all probability it does not
+wish the fact to be generally known.
+
+The flying fish are fish out of water in a somewhat different and more
+transitory sense. Their aërial excursions are brief and rapid; they can
+only fly a very little way, and have soon to take once more for safety
+to their own more natural and permanent element. More than forty kinds
+of the family are known, in appearance very much like English herrings,
+but with the front fins expanded and modified into veritable wings. It
+is fashionable nowadays among naturalists to assert that the flying fish
+don't fly; that they merely jump horizontally out of the water with a
+powerful impulse, and fall again as soon as the force of the first
+impetus is entirely spent. When men endeavour to persuade you to such
+folly, believe them not. For my own part, I have _seen_ the flying fish
+fly--deliberately fly, and flutter, and rise again, and change the
+direction of their flight in mid-air, exactly after the fashion of a big
+dragonfly. If the other people who have watched them haven't succeeded
+in seeing them fly, that is their own fault, or at least their own
+misfortune; perhaps their eyes weren't quick enough to catch the rapid,
+though to me perfectly recognisable, hovering and fluttering of the
+gauze-like wings; but I have seen them myself, and I maintain that on
+such a question one piece of positive evidence is a great deal better
+than a hundred negative. The testimony of all the witnesses who didn't
+see the murder committed is as nothing compared with the single
+testimony of the one man who really did see it. And in this case I have
+met with many other quick observers who fully agreed with me, against
+the weight of scientific opinion, that they have seen the flying fish
+really fly with their own eyes, and no mistake about it. The German
+professors, indeed, all think otherwise; but then the German professors
+all wear green spectacles, which are the outward and visible sign of
+'blinded eyesight poring over miserable books.' The unsophisticated
+vision of the noble British seaman is unanimously with me on the matter
+of the reality of the fishes' flight.
+
+Another group of very interesting fish out of water are the flying
+gurnards, common enough in the Mediterranean and the tropical Atlantic.
+They are much heavier and bigger creatures than the true flying fish of
+the herring type, being often a foot and a half long, and their wings
+are much larger in proportion, though not, I think, really so powerful
+as those of their pretty little silvery rivals. All the flying fish fly
+only of necessity, not from choice. They leave the water when pursued
+by their enemies, or when frightened by the rapid approach of a big
+steamer. So swiftly do they fly, however, that they can far outstrip a
+ship going at the rate of ten knots an hour; and I have often watched
+one keep ahead of a great Pacific liner under full steam for many
+minutes together in quick successive flights of three or four hundred
+feet each. Oddly enough, they can fly further against the wind than
+before it--a fact acknowledged even by the spectacled Germans
+themselves, and very hard indeed to reconcile with the orthodox belief
+that they are not flying at all, but only jumping. I don't know whether
+the flying gurnards are good eating or not; but the silvery flying fish
+are caught for market (sad desecration of the poetry of nature!) in the
+Windward Islands, and when nicely fried in egg and bread-crumb are
+really quite as good for practical purposes as smelts or whiting or any
+other prosaic European substitute.
+
+On the whole, it will be clear, I think, to the impartial reader from
+this rapid survey that the helplessness and awkwardness of a fish out of
+water has been much exaggerated by the thoughtless generalisation of
+unscientific humanity. Granting, for argument's sake, that most fish
+prefer the water, as a matter of abstract predilection, to the dry land,
+it must be admitted _per contra_ that many fish cut a much better figure
+on terra firma than most of their critics themselves would cut in
+mid-ocean. There are fish that wriggle across country intrepidly with
+the dexterity and agility of the most accomplished snakes; there are
+fish that walk about on open sand-banks, semi-erect on two legs, as
+easily as lizards; there are fish that hop and skip on tail and fins in
+a manner that the celebrated jumping frog himself might have observed
+with envy; and there are fish that fly through the air of heaven with a
+grace and swiftness that would put to shame innumerable species among
+their feathered competitors. Nay, there are even fish, like some kinds
+of eels and the African mud-fish, that scarcely live in the water at
+all, but merely frequent wet and marshy places, where they lie snugly in
+the soft ooze and damp earth that line the bottom. If I have only
+succeeded, therefore, in relieving the mind of one sensitive and
+retiring fish from the absurd obloquy cast upon its appearance when it
+ventures away for awhile from its proper element, then, in the pathetic
+and prophetic words borrowed from a thousand uncut prefaces, this work
+will not, I trust, have been written in vain.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST POTTER
+
+
+Collective humanity owes a great debt of gratitude to the first potter.
+Before his days the art of boiling, though in one sense very simple and
+primitive indeed, was in another sense very complex, cumbersome, and
+lengthy. The unsophisticated savage, having duly speared and killed his
+antelope, proceeded to light a roaring fire, with flint or drill, by the
+side of some convenient lake or river in his tropical jungle. Then he
+dug a big hole in the soft mud close to the water's edge, and let the
+water (rather muddy) percolate into it, or sometimes even he plastered
+over its bottom with puddled clay. After that, he heated some smooth
+round stones red hot in the fire close by, and drawing them out gingerly
+between two pieces of stick, dropped them one by one, spluttering and
+fizzing, into his improvised basin or kettle. This, of course, made the
+water in the hole boil; and the unsophisticated savage thereupon thrust
+into it his joint of antelope, repeating the process over and over again
+until the sodden meat was completely seethed to taste on the outside. If
+one application was not sufficient, he gnawed off the cooked meat from
+the surface with his stout teeth, innocent as yet of the dentist's art,
+and plunged the underdone core back again, till it exactly suited his
+not over-delicate or dainty fancy.
+
+To be sure, the primitive savage, unversed as he was in pastes and
+glazes, in moulds and ornaments, did not pass his life entirely devoid
+of cups and platters. Coconut shell and calabash rind, horn of ox and
+skull of enemy, bamboo-joint and capacious rhomb-shell, all alike, no
+doubt, supplied him with congenial implements for drink or storage. Like
+Eve in the Miltonic Paradise, there lacked him not fit vessels pure;
+picking some luscious tropical fruit, the savoury pulp he chewed, and in
+the rind still as he thirsted scooped the brimming stream. This was
+satisfactory as far as it went, of course, but it was not pottery. He
+couldn't boil his joint for dinner in coco-nut or skull; he had to do it
+with stone pot-boilers, in a rude kettle of puddled clay.
+
+But at last one day, that inspired barbarian, the first potter, hit by
+accident upon his grand discovery. He had carried some water in a big
+calabash--the hard shell of a tropical fruit whose pulpy centre can be
+easily scooped out--and a happy thought suddenly struck him: why not put
+the calabash to boil upon the fire with a little clay smeared outside
+it? The savage is conservative, but he loves to save trouble. He tried
+the experiment, and it succeeded admirably. The water boiled, and the
+calabash was not burnt or broken. Our nameless philosopher took the
+primitive vessel off the fire with a forked branch and looked at it
+critically with the delighted eyes of a first inventor. A wonderful
+change had suddenly come over it. He had blundered accidentally upon the
+art of pottery. For what is this that has happened to the clay? It went
+in soft, brown, and muddy; it has come out hard, red, and stone-like.
+The first potter ruminated and wondered. He didn't fully realise, no
+doubt, what he had actually done; but he knew he had invented a means by
+which you could put a calabash upon a fire and keep it there without
+burning or bursting. That, after all, was at least something.
+
+All this, you say (which, in effect, is Dr. Tylor's view), is purely
+hypothetical. In one sense, yes; but not in another. We know that most
+savage races still use natural vessels, made of coco-nuts, gourds, or
+calabashes, for everyday purposes of carrying water; and we also know
+that all the simplest and earliest pottery is moulded on the shape of
+just such natural jars and bottles. The fact and the theory based on it
+are no novelties. Early in the sixteenth century, indeed, the Sieur
+Gonneville, skipper of Honfleur, sailing round the Cape of Good Hope,
+made his way right across the Southern Ocean to some vague point of
+South America where he found the people still just in the intermediate
+stage between the use of natural vessels and the invention of pottery.
+For these amiable savages (name and habitat unknown) had wooden pots
+'plastered with a kind of clay a good finger thick, which prevents the
+fire from burning them.' Here we catch industrial evolution in the very
+act, and the potter's art in its first infancy, fossilised and
+crystallised, as it were, in an embryo condition, and fixed for us
+immovably by the unprogressive conservatism of a savage tribe. It was
+this curious early observation of evolving keramic art that made
+Goguet--an anthropologist born out of due season--first hit upon that
+luminous theory of the origin of pottery now all but universally
+accepted.
+
+Plenty of evidence to the same effect is now forthcoming for the modern
+inquirer. Among the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, Squier
+and Davis found the kilns in which the primitive pottery had been baked;
+and among their relics were partially burnt pots retaining in part the
+rinds of the gourds or calabashes on which they had been actually
+modelled. Along the Gulf of Mexico gourds were also used to give shape
+to the pot; and all over the world, even to this day, the gourd form is
+a very common one for pottery of all sorts, thus pointing back, dimly
+and curiously, to the original mode in which fictile ware generally
+came to be invented. In Fiji and in many parts of Africa vessels
+modelled upon natural forms are still universal. Of course all such pots
+as these are purely hand-made; the invention of the potter's wheel, now
+so indissolubly associated in all our minds with the production of
+earthenware, belongs to an infinitely later and almost modern period.
+
+And that consideration naturally suggests the fundamental question, When
+did the first potter live? The world (as Sir Henry Taylor has oracularly
+told us) knows nothing of its greatest men; and the very name of the
+father of all potters has been utterly forgotten in the lapse of ages.
+Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, one may reasonably doubt
+whether there was ever actually any one single man on whom one could
+definitely lay one's finger, and say with confidence, Here we have the
+first potter. Pottery, no doubt, like most other things, grew by
+imperceptible degrees from wholly vague and rudimentary beginnings. Just
+as there were steam-engines before Watt, and locomotives before
+Stephenson, so there were pots before the first potter. Many men must
+have discovered separately, by half-unconscious trials, that a coat of
+mud rudely plastered over the bottom of a calabash prevented it from
+catching fire and spilling its contents; other men slowly learned to
+plaster the mud higher and ever higher up the sides; and yet others
+gradually introduced and patented new improvements for wholly encasing
+the entire cup in an inch thickness of carefully kneaded clay. Bit by
+bit the invention grew, like all great inventions, without any inventor.
+Thus the question of the date of the first potter practically resolves
+itself into the simpler question of the date of the earliest known
+pottery.
+
+Did palæolithic man, that antique naked crouching savage who hunted the
+mammoth, the reindeer, and the cave-bear among the frozen fields of
+interglacial Gaul and Britain--did palæolithic man himself, in his rude
+rock-shelters, possess a knowledge of the art of pottery? That is a
+question which has been much debated amongst archæologists, and which
+cannot even now be considered as finally settled before the tribunal of
+science. He must have drunk out of something or other, but whether he
+drank out of earthenware cups is still uncertain. It is pretty clear
+that the earliest drinking vessels used in Europe were neither bowls of
+earthenware nor shells of fruits, for the cold climate of interglacial
+times did not permit the growth in northern latitudes of such large
+natural vessels as gourds, calabashes, bamboos, or coco-nuts. In all
+probability the horns of the aurochs and the wild cattle, and the
+capacious skull of the fellow-man whose bones he had just picked at his
+ease for his cannibal supper, formed the aboriginal goblets and basins
+of the old black European savage. A curious verbal relic of the use of
+horns as drinking-cups survives indeed down to almost modern times in
+the Greek word _keramic_, still commonly applied to the art of pottery,
+and derived, of course, from _keras_, a horn; while as to skulls, not
+only were they frequently used as drinking-cups by our Scandinavian
+ancestors, but there still exists a very singular intermediate American
+vessel in which the clay has actually been moulded on a human skull as
+model, just as other vessels have been moulded on calabashes or other
+suitable vegetable shapes.
+
+Still, the balance of evidence certainly seems to show that a little
+very rude and almost shapeless hand-made pottery has really been
+discovered amongst the buried caves where palæolithic men made for ages
+their chief dwelling-places. Fragments of earthenware occurred in the
+Hohefels cave near Ulm, in company with the bones of reindeer,
+cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had doubtless been duly boiled,
+a hundred thousand years ago, by the intelligent producer of those
+identical sun-dried fleshpots; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his
+possession portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel,
+from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of the hand that
+moulded the clay are still clearly distinguishable on the baked
+earthenware. That is the great merit of pottery, viewed as an historical
+document; it retains its shape and peculiarities unaltered through
+countless centuries, for the future edification of unborn antiquaries.
+_Litera scripta manet_, and so does baked pottery. The hand itself that
+formed that rude bowl has long since mouldered away, flesh and bone
+alike, into the soil around it; but the print of its fingers, indelibly
+fixed by fire into the hardened clay, remains for us still to tell the
+story of that early triumph of nascent keramics.
+
+The relics of palæolithic pottery are, however, so very fragmentary, and
+the circumstances under which they have been discovered so extremely
+doubtful, that many cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now
+have nothing to say to the suspected impostors. Among the remains of the
+newer Stone Age, on the other hand, comparatively abundant keramic
+specimens have been unearthed, without doubt or cavil, from the long
+barrows--the burial-places of the early Mongoloid race, now represented
+by the Finns and Lapps, which occupied the whole of Western Europe
+before the advent of the Aryan vanguard. One of the best bits is a
+curious wide-mouthed, semi-globular bowl from Norton Bavant, in
+Wiltshire, whose singular shape suggests almost immediately the idea
+that it must at least have been based, if not actually modelled, upon a
+human skull. Its rim is rough and quite irregular, and there is no trace
+of ornamentation of any sort; a fact quite in accordance with all the
+other facts we know about the men of the newer Stone Age, who were far
+less artistic and æsthetic in every way than their ruder predecessors of
+the interglacial epoch.
+
+Ornamentation, when it does begin to appear, arises at first in a
+strictly practical and unintentional manner. Later examples elsewhere
+show us by analogy how it first came into existence. The Indians of the
+Ohio seem to have modelled their pottery in bags or nettings made of
+coarse thread or twisted bark. Those of the Mississippi moulded them in
+baskets of willow or splints. When the moist clay thus shaped and marked
+by the indentations of the mould was baked in the kiln, it of course
+retained the pretty dappling it received from the interlaced and woven
+thrums, which were burnt off in the process of firing. Thus a rude sort
+of natural diaper ornament was set up, to which the eye soon became
+accustomed, and which it learned to regard as necessary for beauty.
+Hence, wherever newer and more improved methods of modelling came into
+use, there would arise an instinctive tendency on the part of the early
+potter to imitate the familiar marking by artificial means. Dr. Klemm
+long ago pointed out that the oldest German fictile vases have an
+ornamentation in which plaiting is imitated by incised lines. 'What was
+no longer wanted as a necessity,' he says, 'was kept up as an ornament
+alone.'
+
+Another very simple form of ornamentation, reappearing everywhere all
+the world over on primitive bowls and vases, is the rope pattern, a line
+or string-course over the whole surface or near the mouth of the vessel.
+Many of the indented patterns on early British pottery have been
+produced, as Sir Daniel Wilson has pointed out, by the close impress of
+twisted cord on the wet clay. Sometimes these cords seem to have been
+originally left on the clay in the process of baking, and used as a
+mould; at other times they may have been employed afterwards as
+handles, as is still done in the case of some South African pots: and,
+when the rope handle wore off, the pattern made by its indentation on
+the plastic material before sun-baking would still remain as pure
+ornament. Probably the very common idea of string-course ornamentation
+just below the mouth or top of vases and bowls has its origin in this
+early and almost universal practice.
+
+When other conscious and intentional ornamentation began to supersede
+these rude natural and undesigned patterns, they were at first mere
+rough attempts on the part of the early potter to imitate, with the
+simple means at his disposal, the characteristic marks of the ropes or
+wickerwork by which the older vessels were necessarily surrounded. He
+had gradually learned, as Mr. Tylor well puts it, that clay alone or
+with some mixture of sand is capable of being used without any
+extraneous support for the manufacture of drinking and cooking vessels.
+He therefore began to model rudely thin globular bowls with his own
+hands, dispensing with the aid of thongs or basketwork. But he still
+naturally continued to imitate the original shapes--the gourd, the
+calabash, the plaited net, the round basket; and his eye required the
+familiar decoration which naturally resulted from the use of some one or
+other among these primitive methods. So he tried his hand at deliberate
+ornament in his own simple untutored fashion.
+
+It was quite literally his hand, indeed, that he tried at first; for the
+earliest decoration upon paleolithic pottery is made by pressing the
+fingers into the clay so as to produce a couple of deep parallel
+furrows, which is the sole attempt at ornament on M. Joly's Nabrigas
+specimen; while the urns and drinking-cups taken from our English long
+barrows are adorned with really pretty and effective patterns, produced
+by pressing the tip of the finger and the nail into the plastic
+material. It is wonderful what capital and varied results you can get
+with no more recondite graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes
+turned front downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes used to
+egg up the moist clay into small jagged and relieved designs. Most of
+these patterns are more or less plaitlike in arrangement, evidently
+suggested to the mind of the potter by the primitive marks of the old
+basketwork. But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into
+his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers, and the flint
+knife itself, with which he incised more regular patterns, straight or
+zigzag lines, rows of dots, squares and triangles, concentric circles,
+and even the mystic cross and swastika, the sacred symbols of yet unborn
+and undreamt-of religions. As yet, there was no direct imitation of
+plant or animal forms; once only, on a single specimen from a Swiss lake
+dwelling, are the stem and veins of a leaf dimly figured on the
+handiwork of the European prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form,
+as pattern merely, had begun to exist; imitative work as such was yet
+unknown, or almost unknown, to the eastern hemisphere.
+
+In America, it was quite otherwise. The forgotten people who built the
+mounds of Ohio and the great tumuli of the Mississippi valley decorated
+their pottery not only with animal figures, such as snakes, fish, frogs,
+and turtles, but also with human heads and faces, many of them evidently
+modelled from the life, and some of them quite unmistakably genuine
+portraits. On one such vase, found in Arkansas, and figured by the
+Marquis de Nadaillac in his excellent work on Prehistoric America, the
+ornamentation consists (in true Red Indian taste) of skeleton hands,
+interspersed with crossbones; and the delicacy and anatomical
+correctness of the detail inevitably suggest the idea that the unknown
+artist must have worked with the actual hand of his slaughtered enemy
+lying for a model on the table before him. Much of the early American
+pottery is also coloured as well as figured, and that with considerable
+real taste; the pigments were applied, however, after the baking, and so
+possess little stability or permanence of character. But pots and vases
+of these advanced styles have got so far ahead of the first potter that
+we have really little or no business with them in this paper.
+
+Prehistoric European pottery has never a spout, but it often indulges in
+some simple form of ear or handle. The very ancient British bowl from
+Bavant Long Barrow--produced by that old squat Finnlike race which
+preceded the 'Ancient Britons' of our old-fashioned school-books--has
+two ear-shaped handles projecting just below the rim, exactly as in the
+modern form of vessel known as a crock, and still familiarly used for
+household purposes. This long survival of a common domestic shape from
+the most remote prehistoric antiquity to our own time is very
+significant and very interesting. Many of the old British pots have also
+a hole or two holes pierced through them, near the top, evidently for
+the purpose of putting in a string or rope by way of a handle. With the
+round barrows, which belong to the Bronze Age, and contain the remains
+of a later and more civilised Celtic population, we get far more
+advanced forms of pottery. Burial here is preceded by cremation, and the
+ashes are enclosed in urns, many of which are very beautiful in form and
+exquisitely decorated. Cremation, as Professor Rolleston used feelingly
+to plead, is bad for the comparative anatomist and ethnographer, but it
+is passing well for the collector of pottery. Where burning exists as a
+common practice, there urns are frequent, and pottery an art in great
+request. Drinking-cups and perforated incense burners accompany the
+dead in the round barrows; but the use of the potter's wheel is still
+unknown, and all the urns and vases belonging to this age are still
+hand-moulded.
+
+It is a curious reflection, however, that in spite of all the later
+improvements in the fictile art--in spite of wheels and moulds, pastes
+and glazes, stamps and pigments, and all the rest of it--the most
+primitive methods of the first potter are still in use in many
+countries, side by side with the most finished products of modern
+European skill and industry. I have in my own possession some West
+Indian calabashes, cut and decorated under my own eye by a Jamaican
+negro for his personal use, and bought from him by me for the smallest
+coin there current--calabashes carved round the edge through the rind
+with a rude string-course, exactly like the common rope pattern of
+prehistoric pottery. I have seen the same Jamaican negroes kneading
+their hand-made porous earthenware beside a tropical stream, moulding it
+on fruits or shaping it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and
+drying it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily-formed kiln
+of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric types, locally
+known by the quaint West African name of 'yabbas.' Many of these yabbas,
+if buried in the ground and exposed to damp and frost, till they almost
+lost the effects of the baking, would be quite indistinguishable, even
+by the skilled archæologist, from the actual handicraft of the
+palæolithic potter. The West Indian negroes brought these simple arts
+with them from their African home, where they have been handed down in
+unbroken continuity from the very earliest age of fictile industry. New
+and better methods have slowly grown up everywhere around them, but
+these simplest, earliest, and easiest plans have survived none the less
+for the most ordinary domestic uses, and will survive for ages yet, as
+long as there remain any out-of-the-way places, remote from the main
+streams of civilised commerce. Thus, while hundreds of thousands of
+years, in all probability, separate us now from the ancient days of the
+first potter, it is yet possible for us to see the first potter's own
+methods and principles exemplified under our very eyes by people who
+derive them in unbroken succession from the direct teaching of that
+long-forgotten prehistoric savage.
+
+
+
+
+THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS
+
+
+Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet,
+is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him,
+it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his
+grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of
+those that precede him. Nevertheless, there _is_ a recipe for the
+production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet
+adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I
+believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown
+regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly
+anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their
+adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly
+demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a
+natural product, not a _lusus naturæ_. You get them only under sundry
+relatively definite and settled conditions; and though it isn't
+(unfortunately) quite true that the conditions will always infallibly
+bring forth the genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be
+brought forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes of
+thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet from a family of
+stockbrokers who have intermarried with the daughters of an eminent
+alderman, or make a philosopher out of a country grocer's eldest son
+whose amiable mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and
+sugar.
+
+In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for action, I am going
+to start even by getting rid once for all (so far as we are here
+concerned) of that famous but misleading old distinction between genius
+and talent. It is really a distinction without a difference. I suppose
+there is probably no subject under heaven on which so much high-flown
+stuff and nonsense has been talked and written as upon this well-known
+and much-debated hair-splitting discrimination. It is just like that
+other great distinction between fancy and imagination, about which poets
+and essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the present
+century, until at last one fine day the world at large woke up suddenly
+to the unpleasant consciousness that it had been wasting its time over a
+non-existent difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all
+absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert that talent and
+genius are exactly one and the same thing; but I do assert that genius
+is simply talent raised to a slightly higher power; it differs from it
+not in kind but merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no
+drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two. You might
+just as well try to classify all mankind into tall men and short men,
+and then endeavour to prove that a real distinction existed in nature
+between your two artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in
+height and in ability by infinitesimal gradations: some men are very
+short, others rather short, others medium-sized, others tall, and yet
+others again of portentous stature like Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So,
+too, some men are idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid,
+some are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever, and some
+geniuses. But genius is only the culminating point of ordinary
+cleverness, and if you were to try and draw up a list of all the real
+geniuses in the last hundred years, no two people could ever be found
+to agree among themselves as to which should be included and which
+excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard Kingsley and
+Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I have heard them both
+absolutely denied every sort of literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a
+poor creature, and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty windbag.
+
+The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast gulf which
+separates genius from mere talent has been published and set abroad by
+those fortunate persons who fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under
+the former highly satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short,
+real or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify itself
+at the expense of poor, commonplace, inferior talent. There is a
+certain type of great man in particular which is never tired of dilating
+upon the noble supremacy of its own greatness over the spurious
+imitation. It offers incense obliquely to itself in offering it
+generically to the class genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There
+are great men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor Hugo,
+the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose perpetually as great
+men; they cry aloud to the poor silly public so far beneath them, 'I am
+a genius! Admire me! Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on
+an aërial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and battling
+multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not unfortunately geniuses,
+are surely entitled to enter occasionally our humble protest. Our
+contention is that the genius only differs from the man of ability as
+the man of ability differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent
+man from the worthy person of sound common sense. The sliding scale of
+brains has infinite gradations; and the gradations merge insensibly into
+one another. There is no gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here
+as elsewhere, throughout the whole range of her manifold productions,
+our common mother _saltum non facit_.
+
+The question before the house, then, narrows itself down finally to
+this; what are the conditions under which exceptional ability or high
+talent is likely to arise?
+
+Now, I suppose everybody is ready to admit that two complete born fools
+are not at all likely to become the proud father and happy mother of a
+Shakespeare or a Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow
+that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable chance arise
+among the South African Bushmen, who cannot understand the arduous
+arithmetical proposition that two and two make four. No amount of
+education or careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the
+most profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who cannot even
+comprehend an English drawing of a dog or horse, into a respectable
+president of the Royal Academy. It is equally unlikely (as it seems to
+me) that a Mendelssohn or a Beethoven could be raised in the bosom of a
+family all of whose members on either side were incapable (like a
+distinguished modern English poet) of discriminating any one note in an
+octave from any other. Such leaps as these would be little short of pure
+miracles. They would be equivalent to the sudden creation, without
+antecedent cause, of a whole vast system of nerves and nerve-centres in
+the prodigious brain of some infant phenomenon.
+
+On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk
+about hereditary genius--I don't mean, of course, the talk of our
+Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy
+sciolists who can't understand them--is itself fully as absurd in its
+own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no
+explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary.
+You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor
+Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a
+poet before him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start
+with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing; it begins by
+positing the existence of one original genius, absolutely unaccounted
+for, and then proceeds blandly to point out that the other geniuses
+derive their characteristics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all
+the sons of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports the
+earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but who, pray, supports
+the tortoise? If the first chicken came out of an egg, what was the
+origin of the hen that laid it?
+
+Besides, the allegation as it stands is not even a true one. Genius, as
+we actually know it, is by no means hereditary. The great man is not
+necessarily the son of a great man or the father of a great man: often
+enough, he stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of
+baser metal on either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare woolstapler, of
+Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, was no doubt an eminently respectable
+person in his own trade, and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor
+of his native town once upon a time: but, so far as is known, none of
+his literary remains are at all equal to _Macbeth_ or _Othello_. Parson
+Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, may have preached
+a great many very excellent and convincing discourses, but there is no
+evidence of any sort that he ever attempted to write the _Principia_.
+_Per contra_ the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though
+of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed conspicuously in
+ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences and Mercies amongst whom
+their lot was cast; while the Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not
+seem to bud out spontaneously into great commanders in the second
+generation. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the
+Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the Caracci, or the
+Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, where the genius, once
+developed, has persisted for two or three, or even four lives: but these
+instances really cast no light at all upon our central problem, which is
+just this--How does the genius come in the first place to be developed
+at all from parents in whom individually no particular genius is
+ultimately to be seen?
+
+Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages in the
+earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we shall get really
+next to no personal peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of any sort amongst
+them. Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good
+scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of labour,
+and the other troublesome technicalities of our modern political
+economy, are as unknown among such folk as the modern nuisance of
+dressing for dinner. Each man performs all the functions of a citizen on
+his own account, because there is nobody else to perform them for
+him--the medium of exchange known as hard cash has not, so far as he is
+concerned, yet been invented; and he performs them well, such as they
+are, because he inherits from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and
+muscle in these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among
+his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a bird, or were
+hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint arrowheads, died out of
+starvation, leaving no representatives. The beneficent institution of
+the poor law does not exist among savages, in order to enable the
+helpless and incompetent to bring up families in their own image. There,
+survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately benevolent
+and useful end in its own directly cruel and relentless way, cutting
+off ruthlessly the stupid or the weak, and allowing only the strong and
+the cunning to become the parents of future generations.
+
+Hence every young savage, being descended on both sides from ancestors
+who in their own way perfectly fulfilled the ideal of complete
+savagery--were good hunters, good fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen
+of bow or boomerang--inherits from these his successful predecessors all
+those qualities of eye and hand and brain and nervous system which go to
+make up the abstractly Admirable Crichton of a savage. The qualities in
+question are ensured in him by two separate means. In the first place,
+survival of the fittest takes care that he and all his ancestors shall
+have duly possessed them to some extent to start with; in the second
+place, constant practice from boyhood upward increases and develops the
+original faculty. Thus savages, as a rule, display absolutely
+astonishing ability and cleverness in the few lines which they have made
+their own. Their cunning in hunting, their patience in fishing, their
+skill in trapping, their infinite dodges for deceiving and cajoling the
+animals or enemies that they need to outwit, have moved the wonder and
+admiration of innumerable travellers. The savage, in fact, is not
+stupid: in his own way his cleverness is extraordinary. But the way is a
+very narrow and restricted one, and all savages of the same race walk in
+it exactly alike. Cunning they have, skill they have, instinct they
+have, to a most marvellous degree; but of spontaneity, originality,
+initiative, variability, not a single spark. Know one savage of a tribe
+and you know them all. Their cleverness is not the cleverness of the
+individual man: it is the inherited and garnered intelligence or
+instinct of the entire race.
+
+How, then, do originality, diversity, individuality, genius, begin to
+come in? In this way, as it seems to me, looking at the matter both _à
+priori_ and by the light of actual experience.
+
+Suppose a country inhabited in its interior by a savage race of hunters
+and fighters, and on its seaboard by an equally savage race of pirates
+and fishermen, like the Dyaks of Borneo. Each of these races, if left to
+itself, will develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage
+cleverness. Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will adapt itself
+to its particular environment. The people of the interior will acquire
+and inherit a wonderful facility in spearing monkeys and knocking down
+parrots; while the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers
+of canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one another's
+villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates. These original
+differences of position and function will necessarily entail a thousand
+minor differences of intelligence and skill in a thousand different
+ways. For example, the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make
+themselves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate their
+handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the æsthetic taste thus aroused
+will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the façades of their wooden
+huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed
+at measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these
+naïve expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in
+the savage breast, but the æsthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate
+them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous
+precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.
+
+Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain
+distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties
+to any great extent will arise among them. But, as soon as you permit
+intermarriage to take place, the inherited and developed qualities of
+the one race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely
+intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed
+qualities of the other. The children may take after either parent in any
+combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted an apparently
+capricious element of individuality: a power on the part of the
+half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible
+in the two original homogeneous societies. In one word, you have made
+possible the future existence of diversity in character.
+
+If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage communities to our
+own very complex and heterogeneous world, what do we find? An endless
+variety of soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers,
+candlestick makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a
+certain rough number of classes, each with its own developed and
+inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world is made up, like the world
+of ancient Egypt and of modern India, of an immense variety of separate
+castes--not, indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those
+extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly hereditary in
+character, and given on the average to a tolerably close system of
+intermarriage within the caste.
+
+For example, there is the agricultural labourer caste--the Hodge
+Chawbacon of urban humour, who in his military avatar also reappears as
+Tommy Atkins, a little transfigured, but at bottom identical--the
+alternative aspect of a single undivided central reality. Hodge for the
+most part lives and dies in his ancestral village: marries Mary, the
+daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and begets assorted Hodges
+and Marys in vast quantities, all of the same pattern, to replenish the
+earth in the next generation. There you have a very well-marked
+hereditary caste, little given to intermixture with others, and from
+whose members, however recruited by fresh blood, the object of our
+quest, the Divine Genius, is very unlikely to find his point of origin.
+Then there is the town artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from
+the ranks of the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active,
+enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many generations
+standing in various forms of handicraft. This is a far higher and more
+promising type of humanity, from the judicious intermixture of whose
+best elements we are apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our
+Telfords, and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we
+find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only rarely blossoms
+out, under favourable circumstances on both sides, into a stray Cobbett
+or an almost miraculous miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of
+more varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense variety of
+brain elements are called into play by their diverse functions in
+diverse lines; and when we take them in conjunction with the upper
+mercantile grades, which are chiefly composed of their ablest and most
+successful members, we get considerable chances of those happy blendings
+of individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to make up
+talent, and, in their final outcome, genius. Last of all, in the
+professional and upper classes there is a freedom and play of faculty
+everywhere going on, which in the chances of intermarriage between
+lawyer-folk and doctor-folk, scientific people and artistic people,
+county families and bishops or law lords, and so forth _ad infinitum_,
+offers by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional
+development of that rare product of the highest humanity, the genuine
+genius.
+
+But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermixture of
+variously acquired hereditary characteristics that makes the best and
+truest geniuses. Left to itself, each separate line of caste ancestry
+would tend to produce a certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of
+handicraft in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably
+anything worth calling real genius. For example, a family of artists,
+starting with some sort of manual dexterity in imitating natural forms
+and colours with paint and pencil, and strictly intermarrying always
+with other families possessing exactly the same inherited endowments,
+would probably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its
+drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its grouping; more and
+more technically perfect in its perspective and light-and-shade, and so
+forth, by pure dint of accumulated hereditary experience from generation
+to generation. It would pass from the Egyptian to the Chinese style of
+art by slow degrees and with infinite gradations. But suppose, instead
+of thus rigorously confining itself to its own caste, this family of
+handicraft artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or
+seafaring, or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the consequence?
+Why, such an infiltration of other hereditary characteristics, otherwise
+acquired, as might make the young painters of future generations more
+wide minded, more diversified, more individualistic, more vivid and
+lifelike. Some divine spark of poetical imagination, some tenderness of
+sentiment, some play of fancy, unknown perhaps, to the hard, dry,
+matter-of-fact limners of the ancestral school, might thus be introduced
+into the original line of hereditary artists. In this way one can easily
+see how even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might improve the
+breed of a family of painters. For while each caste, left to itself, is
+liable to harden down into a mere technical excellence after its own
+kind, a wooden facility for drawing faces, or casting up columns of
+figures, or hacking down enemies, or building steam-engines, a healthy
+cross with other castes is liable to bring in all kinds of new and
+valuable qualities, each of which, though acquired perhaps in a totally,
+different line of life, is apt to bear a new application in the new
+complex whereof it now forms a part.
+
+In our very varied modern societies, every man and every woman, in the
+upper and middle ranks of life at least, has an individuality and an
+idiosyncrasy so compounded of endless varying stocks and races. Here is
+one whose father was an Irishman and his mother a Scotchwoman; here is
+another whose paternal line were country parsons, while his maternal
+ancestors were city merchants or distinguished soldiers. Take almost
+anybody's 'sixteen quarters'--his great-great grandfathers and
+great-great grandmothers, of whom he has sixteen all told--and what do
+you often find? A peer, a cobbler, a barrister, a common sailor, a Welsh
+doctor, a Dutch merchant, a Huguenot pastor, a cornet of horse, an Irish
+heiress, a farmer's daughter, a housemaid, an actress, a Devonshire
+beauty, a rich young lady of sugar-broking extraction, a Lady Carolina,
+a London lodging-house keeper. This is not by any means an exaggerated
+case; it would be easy, indeed, from one's own knowledge of family
+histories to supply a great many real examples far more startling than
+this partially imaginary one. With such a variety of racial and
+professional antecedents behind us, what infinite possibilities are
+opened before us of children with ability, folly, stupidity, genius?
+
+Infinite numbers of intermixtures everywhere exist in civilised
+societies. Most of them are passable; many of them are execrable; a few
+of them are admirable; and here and there, one of them consists of that
+happy blending of individual characteristics which we all immediately
+recognise as genius--at least after somebody else has told us so.
+
+The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to be somewhat after
+this fashion. Take a number of good, strong, powerful stocks, mentally
+or physically, endowed with something more than the average amount of
+energy and application. Let them be as varied as possible in
+characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include among them a
+considerable small-change of races, dispositions, professions, and
+temperaments. Mix, by marriage, to the proper consistency; educate the
+offspring, especially by circumstances and environment, as broadly,
+freely, and diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with
+other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies; and
+watch the result to find your genius in the fourth or fifth generation.
+If the experiment has been properly performed, and all the conditions
+have been decently favourable, you will get among the resultant five
+hundred persons a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair
+proportion of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and
+(in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your cards very
+carefully) perhaps among them all a single genius. But most probably the
+genius will have died young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through
+some tiny defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying
+this experiment unaided every day all around us, and, though she makes a
+great many misses, occasionally she makes a stray hit and then we get a
+Shakespeare or a Grimaldi.
+
+'But you haven't proved all this: you have only suggested it.' Does one
+prove a thesis of deep-reaching importance in a ten-page essay? And if
+one proved it in a big book, with classified examples and detailed
+genealogies of all the geniuses, would anybody on earth except Mr.
+Francis Galton ever take the trouble to read it?
+
+
+
+
+DESERT SANDS
+
+
+If deserts _have_ a fault (which their present biographer is far from
+admitting), that fault may doubtless be found in the fact that their
+scenery as a rule tends to be just a trifle monotonous. Though fine in
+themselves, they lack variety. To be sure, very few of the deserts of
+real life possess that absolute flatness, sandiness and sameness, which
+characterises the familiar desert of the poet and of the annual
+exhibitions--a desert all level yellow expanse, most bilious in its
+colouring, and relieved by but four allowable academy properties, a
+palm-tree, a camel, a sphinx, and a pyramid. For foreground, throw in a
+sheikh in appropriate drapery; for background, a sky-line and a
+bleaching skeleton; stir and mix, and your picture is finished. Most
+practical deserts one comes across in travelling, however, are a great
+deal less simple and theatrical than that; rock preponderates over sand
+in their composition, and inequalities of surface are often the rule
+rather than the exception. There is reason to believe, indeed, that the
+artistic conception of the common or Burlington House desert has been
+unduly influenced for evil by the accessibility and the poetic adjuncts
+of the Egyptian sand-waste, which, being situated in a great alluvial
+river valley is really flat, and, being the most familiar, has therefore
+distorted to its own shape the mental picture of all its kind elsewhere.
+But most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy; they
+present a considerable diversity and variety of surface, and their rocks
+are often unpleasantly obtrusive to the tender feet of the pedestrian
+traveller.
+
+A desert, in fact, is only a place where the weather is always and
+uniformly fine. The sand is there merely as what the logicians call, in
+their cheerful way, 'a separable accident'; the essential of a desert,
+as such, is the absence of vegetation, due to drought. The barometer in
+those happy, too happy, regions, always stands at Set Fair. At least, it
+would, if barometers commonly grew in the desert, where, however, in the
+present condition of science, they are rarely found. It is this dryness
+of the air, and this alone, that makes a desert; all the rest, like the
+camels, the sphinx, the skeleton, and the pyramid, is only thrown in to
+complete the picture.
+
+Now the first question that occurs to the inquiring mind--which is but a
+graceful periphrasis for the present writer--when it comes to examine in
+detail the peculiarities of deserts is just this: Why are there places
+on the earth's surface on which rain never falls? What makes it so
+uncommonly dry in Sahara when it's so unpleasantly wet and so
+unnecessarily foggy in this realm of England? And the obvious answer is,
+of course, that deserts exist only in those parts of the world where the
+run of mountain ranges, prevalent winds, and ocean currents conspire to
+render the average rainfall as small as possible. But, strangely enough,
+there is a large irregular belt of the great eastern continent where
+these peculiar conditions occur in an almost unbroken line for thousands
+of miles together, from the west coast of Africa to the borders of
+China: and it is in this belt that all the best known deserts of the
+world are actually situated. In one place it is the Atlas and the Kong
+mountains (now don't pretend, as David Copperfield's aunt would have
+said, you don't know the Kong mountains); at another place it is the
+Arabian coast range, Lebanon, and the Beluchi hills; at a third, it is
+the Himalayas and the Chinese heights that intercept and precipitate all
+the moisture from the clouds. But, from whatever variety of local causes
+it may arise, the fact still remains the same, that all the great
+deserts run in this long, almost unbroken series, beginning with the
+greater and the smaller Sahara, continuing in the Libyan and Egyptian
+desert, spreading on through the larger part of Arabia, reappearing to
+the north as the Syrian desert, and to the east as the desert of
+Rajputana (the Great Indian Desert of the Anglo-Indian mind), while
+further east again the long line terminates in the desert of Gobi on the
+Chinese frontier.
+
+In other parts of the world, deserts are less frequent. The peculiar
+combination of circumstances which goes to produce them does not
+elsewhere occur over any vast area, on so large a scale. Still, there is
+one region in western America where the necessary conditions are found
+to perfection. The high snow-clad peaks of the Rocky Mountains on the
+one side check and condense all the moisture that comes from the
+Atlantic; the Sierra Nevada and the Wahsatch range on the other, running
+parallel with them to the west, check and condense all the moisture that
+comes from the Pacific coast. In between these two great lines lies the
+dry and almost rainless district known to the ambitious western mind as
+the Great American Desert, enclosing in its midst that slowly
+evaporating inland sea, the Great Salt Lake, a last relic of some
+extinct chain of mighty waters once comparable to Superior, Erie, and
+Ontario. In Mexico, again, where the twin ranges draw closer together,
+desert conditions once more supervene. But it is in central Australia
+that the causes which lead to the desert state are, perhaps on the
+whole, best exemplified. There, ranges of high mountains extend almost
+all round the coasts, and so completely intercept the rainfall which
+ought to fertilise the great central plain that the rivers are almost
+all short and local, and one thirsty waste spreads for miles and miles
+together over the whole unexplored interior of the continent.
+
+But why are deserts rocky and sandy? Why aren't they covered, like the
+rest of the world, with earth, soil, mould, or dust? One can see plainly
+enough why there should be little or no vegetation where no rain falls,
+but one can't see quite so easily why there should be only sand and rock
+instead of arid clay-field.
+
+Well, the answer is that without vegetation there is no such thing as
+soil on earth anywhere. The top layer of the land in all ordinary and
+well-behaved countries is composed entirely of vegetable mould, the
+decaying remains of innumerable generations of weeds and grasses. Earth
+to earth is the rule of nature. Soil, in fact, consists entirely of dead
+leaves. And where there are no leaves to die and decay, there can be no
+mould or soil to speak of. Darwin showed, indeed, in his last great
+book, that we owe the whole earthy covering of our hills and plains
+almost entirely to the perennial exertions of that friend of the
+farmers, the harmless, necessary earthworm. Year after year the silent
+worker is busy every night pulling down leaves through his tunnelled
+burrow into his underground nest, and there converting them by means of
+his castings into the black mould which produces, in the end, for lordly
+man, all his cultivable fields and pasture-lands and meadows. Where
+there are no leaves and no earth-worms, therefore, there can be no soil;
+and under those circumstances we get what we familiarly know as a
+desert.
+
+The normal course of events where new land rises above the sea is
+something like this, as oceanic isles have sufficiently demonstrated.
+The rock when it first emerges from the water rises bare and rugged like
+a sea-cliff; no living thing, animal or vegetable, is harboured anywhere
+on its naked surface. In time, however, as rain falls upon its jutting
+peaks and barren pinnacles, disintegration sets in, or, to speak plainer
+English, the rock crumbles; and soon streams wash down tiny deposits of
+sand and mud thus produced into the valleys and hollows of the upheaved
+area. At the same time lichens begin to spring in yellow patches upon
+the bare face of the rock, and feathery ferns, whose spores have been
+wafted by the wind, or carried by the waves, or borne on the feet of
+unconscious birds, sprout here and there from the clefts and crannies.
+These, as they die and decay, in turn form a thin layer of vegetable
+mould, the first beginning of a local soil, in which the trusty
+earthworm (imported in the egg on driftwood or floating weeds)
+straightway sets to work to burrow, and which he rapidly increases by
+his constant labour. On the soil thus deposited, flowering plants and
+trees can soon root themselves, as fast as seeds, nuts or fruits are
+wafted to the island by various accidents from surrounding countries.
+The new land thrown up by the great eruption of Krakatoa has in this way
+already clothed itself from head to foot with a luxuriant sheet of
+ferns, mosses, and other vegetation.
+
+First soil, then plant and animal life, are thus in the last resort
+wholly dependent for their existence on the amount of rainfall. But in
+deserts, where rain seldom or never falls (except by accident) the first
+term in this series is altogether wanting. There can be no rivers,
+brooks or streams to wash down beds of alluvial deposit from the
+mountains to the valleys. Denudation (the term, though rather awful, is
+not an improper one) must therefore take a different turn. Practically
+speaking, there is no water action; the work is all done by sun and
+wind. Under these circumstances, the rocks crumble away very slowly by
+mere exposure into small fragments, which the wind knocks off and blows
+about the surface, forming sand or dust of them in all convenient
+hollows. The frequent currents, produced by the heated air that lies
+upon the basking layer of sand, continually keep the surface agitated,
+and so blow about the sand and grind one piece against the other till it
+becomes ever finer and finer. Thus for the most part the hollows or
+valleys of deserts are filled by plains of bare sand, while their higher
+portions consist rather of barren, rocky mountains or table-land.
+
+The effect upon whatever animal or vegetable life can manage here and
+there to survive under such circumstances is very peculiar. Deserts are
+the most exacting of all known environments, and they compel their
+inhabitants with profound imperiousness to knuckle under to their
+prejudices and preconceptions in ten thousand particulars.
+
+To begin with, all the smaller denizens of the desert--whether
+butterflies, beetles, birds, or lizards--must be quite uniformly
+isabelline or sand-coloured. This universal determination of the
+desert-haunting creatures to fall in with the fashion and to harmonise
+with their surroundings adds considerably to the painfully monotonous
+effect of desert scenery. A green plant, a blue butterfly, a red and
+yellow bird, a black or bronze-coloured beetle or lizard would improve
+the artistic aspect of the desert not a little. But no; the animals will
+hear nothing of such gaudy hues; with Quaker uniformity they will clothe
+themselves in dove-colour; they will all wear a sandy pepper-and-salt
+with as great unanimity as the ladies of the Court (on receipt of
+orders) wear Court mourning for the late lamented King of the Tongataboo
+Islands.
+
+In reality, this universal sombre tint of desert animals is a beautiful
+example of the imperious working of our modern _Deus ex machinâ_,
+natural selection. The more uniform in hue is the environment of any
+particular region, the more uniform in hue must be all its inhabitants.
+In the arctic snows, for example, we find this principle pushed to its
+furthest logical conclusion. There, everything is and must be
+white--hares, foxes, and ptarmigans alike; and the reason is
+obvious--there can be no exception. Any brown or black or reddish animal
+who ventured north would at once render himself unpleasantly conspicuous
+in the midst of the uniform arctic whiteness. If he were a brown hare,
+for example, the foxes and bears and birds of prey of the district would
+spot him at once on the white fields, and pounce down upon him forthwith
+on his first appearance. That hare would leave no similar descendants to
+continue the race of brown hares in arctic regions after him. Or,
+suppose, on the other hand, it were a brown fox who invaded the domain
+of eternal snow. All the hares and ptarmigans of his new district would
+behold him coming from afar and keep well out of his way, while he, poor
+creature, would never be able to spot them at all among the white
+snow-fields. He would starve for want of prey, at the very time when the
+white fox, his neighbour, was stealing unperceived with stealthy tread
+upon the hares and ptarmigans. In this way, from generation to
+generation of arctic animals, the blacker or browner have been
+constantly weeded out, and the greyer and whiter have been constantly
+encouraged, till now all arctic animals alike are as spotlessly snowy as
+the snow around them.
+
+In the desert much the same causes operate, in a slightly different way,
+in favour of a general greyness or brownness as against pronounced
+shades of black, white, red, green, or yellow. Desert animals, like
+intense South Kensington, go in only for neutral tints. In proportion as
+each individual approaches in hue to the sand about it will it succeed
+in life in avoiding its enemies or in creeping upon its prey, according
+to circumstances. In proportion as it presents a strikingly vivid or
+distinct appearance among the surrounding sand will it make itself a
+sure mark for its watchful foes, if it happen to be an unprotected
+skulker, or will it be seen beforehand and avoided by its prey, if it
+happen to be a predatory hunting or insect-eating beast. Hence on the
+sandy desert all species alike are uniformly sand-coloured. Spotty
+lizards bask on spotty sands, keeping a sharp look-out for spotty
+butterflies and spotty beetles, only to be themselves spotted and
+devoured in turn by equally spotty birds, or snakes, or tortoises. All
+nature seems to have gone into half-mourning together, or, converted by
+a passing Puritan missionary, to have clad itself incontinently in grey
+and fawn-colour.
+
+Even the larger beasts that haunt the desert take their tone not a
+little from their sandy surroundings. You have only to compare the
+desert-haunting lion with the other great cats to see at once the reason
+for his peculiar uniform. The tigers and other tropical jungle-cats have
+their coats arranged in vertical stripes of black and yellow, which,
+though you would hardly believe it unless you saw them in their native
+nullahs (good word 'nullah,' gives a convincing Indian tone to a
+narrative of adventure), harmonise marvellously with the lights and
+shades of the bamboos and cane-brakes through whose depths the tiger
+moves so noiselessly.
+
+Looking into the gloom of a tangled jungle, it is almost impossible to
+pick out the beast from the yellow stems and dark shadows in which it
+hides, save by the baleful gleam of those wicked eyes, catching the
+light for one second as they turn wistfully and bloodthirstily towards
+the approaching stranger. The jaguar, oncelot, leopard, and other
+tree-cats, on the other hand, are dappled or spotted--a type of
+coloration which exactly harmonises with the light and shade of the
+round sun-spots seen through the foliage of a tropical forest. They,
+too, are almost indistinguishable from the trees overhead as they creep
+along cautiously on the trunks and branches. But spots or stripes would
+at once betray the crouching lion among the bare rocks or desert sands;
+and therefore the lion is approximately sand-coloured. Seen in a cage at
+the Zoo, the British lion is a very conspicuous animal indeed; but
+spread at full length on a sandy patch or among bare yellow rocks under
+the Saharan sun, you may walk into his mouth before you are even aware
+of his august existence.
+
+The three other great desert beasts of Asia or Africa--the ostrich, the
+giraffe, and the camel--are less protectively coloured, for various
+reasons. Giraffes and ostriches go in herds; they trust for safety
+mainly to their swiftness of foot, and, when driven to bay, like most
+gregarious animals, they make common cause against the ill-advised
+intruder. In such cases it is often well, for the sake of stragglers,
+that the herd should be readily distinguished at a distance; and it is
+to insure this advantage, I believe, that giraffes have acquired their
+strongly marked spots, as zebras have acquired their distinctive
+stripes, and hyænas their similarly banded or dappled coats. One must
+always remember that disguise may be carried a trifle too far, and that
+recognisability in the parents often gives the young and giddy a point
+in their favour. For example, it seems certain that the general
+grey-brown tint of European rabbits serves to render them
+indistinguishable in a field of bracken, stubble, or dry grass. How hard
+it is, either for man or hawk, to pick out rabbits so long as they sit
+still, in an English meadow! But as soon as they begin to run towards
+their burrows the white patch by their tails inevitably betrays them;
+and this betrayal seems at first sight like a failure of adaptation.
+Certainly many a rabbit must be spotted and shot, or killed by birds of
+prey, solely on account of that tell-tale white patch as he makes for
+his shelter. Nevertheless, when we come to look closer, we can see, as
+Mr. Wallace acutely suggests, that the tell-tale patch has its function
+also. On the first alarm the parent rabbits take to their heels at once,
+and run at any untoward sight or sound toward the safety of the burrow.
+The white patch and the hoisted tail act as a danger-signal to the
+little bunnies, and direct them which way to escape the threatened
+misfortune. The young ones take the hint at once and follow their
+leader. Thus what may be sometimes a disadvantage to the individual
+animal becomes in the long run of incalculable benefit to the entire
+community.
+
+It is interesting to note, too, how much alike in build and gait are
+these three thoroughbred desert roamers, the giraffe, the ostrich, and
+the camel or dromedary. In their long legs, their stalking march, their
+tall necks, and their ungainly appearance they all betoken their common
+adaptation to the needs and demands of a special environment. Since food
+is scarce and shelter rare, they have to run about much over large
+spaces in search of a livelihood or to escape their enemies. Then the
+burning nature of the sand as well as the need for speed compels them to
+have long legs which in turn necessitate equally long necks, if they are
+to reach the ground or the trees overhead for food and drink. Their feet
+have to be soft and padded to enable them to run over the sand with
+ease; and hard horny patches must protect their knees and all other
+portions of the body liable to touch the sweltering surface when they
+lie down to rest themselves. Finally, they can all endure thirst for
+long periods together; and the camel, the most inveterate
+desert-haunter of the trio, is even provided with a special stomach to
+take in water for several days at a stretch, besides having a peculiarly
+tough skin in which perspiration is reduced to a minimum. He carries his
+own water-supply internally, and wastes as little of it by the way as
+possible.
+
+What the camel is among animals that is the cactus among plants--the
+most confirmed and specialised of desert-haunting organisms. It has been
+wholly developed in, by, and for the desert. I don't mean merely to say
+that cactuses resemble camels because they are clumsy, ungainly,
+awkward, and paradoxical; that would be a point of view almost as far
+beneath the dignity of science (which in spite of occasional lapses into
+the sin of levity I endeavour as a rule piously to uphold) as the old
+and fallacious reason 'because there's a B in both.' But cactuses, like
+camels, take in their water supply whenever they can get it, and never
+waste any of it on the way by needless evaporation. As they form the
+perfect central type of desert vegetation, and are also familiar plants
+to everyone, they may be taken as a good illustrative example of the
+effect that desert conditions inevitably produce upon vegetable
+evolution.
+
+Quaint, shapeless, succulent, jointed, the cactuses look at first sight
+as if they were all leaves, and had no stem or trunk worth mentioning.
+Of course, therefore, the exact opposite is really the case; for, as a
+late lamented poet has assured us in mournful numbers, things (generally
+speaking) are not what they seem. The true truth about the cactuses runs
+just the other way; they are all stem and no leaves; what look like
+leaves being really joints of the trunk or branches, and the foliage
+being all dwarfed and stunted into the prickly hairs that dot and
+encumber the surface. All plants of very arid soils--for example, our
+common English stonecrops--tend to be thick, jointed, and succulent;
+the distinction between stem and leaves tends to disappear; and the
+whole weed, accustomed at times to long drought, acquires the habit of
+drinking in water greedily at its rootlets after every rain, and storing
+it away for future use in its thick, sponge-like, and water-tight
+tissues. To prevent undue evaporation, the surface also is covered with
+a thick, shiny skin--a sort of vegetable macintosh, which effectually
+checks all unnecessary transpiration. Of this desert type, then, the
+cactus is the furthest possible term. It has no flat leaves with
+expanded blades, to wither and die in the scorching desert air; but in
+their stead the thick and jointed stems do the same work--absorb carbon
+from the carbonic acid of the air, and store up water in the driest of
+seasons. Then, to repel the attacks of herbivores, who would gladly get
+at the juicy morsel if they could, the foliage has been turned into
+sharp defensive spines and prickles. The cactus is tenacious of life to
+a wonderful degree; and for reproduction it trusts not merely to its
+brilliant flowers, fertilised for the most part by desert moths or
+butterflies, and to its juicy fruit, of which the common prickly pear is
+a familiar instance, but it has the special property of springing afresh
+from any stray bit or fragment of the stem that happens to fall upon the
+dry ground anywhere.
+
+True cactuses (in the native state) are confined to America; but the
+unhappy naturalist who ventures to say so in mixed society is sure to
+get sat upon (without due cause) by numberless people who have seen 'the
+cactus' wild all the world over. For one thing, the prickly pear and a
+few other common American species, have been naturalised and run wild
+throughout North Africa, the Mediterranean shores, and a great part of
+India, Arabia, and Persia. But what is more interesting and more
+confusing still, other desert plants which are _not_ cactuses, living
+in South Africa, Sind, Rajputana, and elsewhere unspecified, have been
+driven by the nature of their circumstances and the dryness of the soil
+to adopt precisely the same tactics, and therefore unconsciously to
+mimic or imitate the cactus tribe in the minutest details of their
+personal appearance. Most of these fallacious pseudo-cactuses are really
+spurges or euphorbias by family. They resemble the true Mexican type in
+externals only; that is to say, their stems are thick, jointed, and
+leaf-like, and they grow with clumsy and awkward angularity; but in the
+flower, fruit, seed, and in short in all structural peculiarities
+whatsoever, they differ utterly from the genuine cactus, and closely
+resemble all their spurge relations. Adaptive likenesses of this sort,
+due to mere stress of local conditions, have no more weight as
+indications of real relationship than the wings of the bat or the
+nippers of the seal, which don't make the one into a skylark, or the
+other into a mackerel.
+
+In Sahara, on the other hand, the prevailing type of vegetation
+(wherever there is any) belongs to the kind playfully described by Sir
+Lambert Playfair as 'salsolaceous,' that is to say, in plainer English,
+it consists of plants like the glass-wort and the kali-weed, which are
+commonly burnt to make soda. These fleshy weeds resemble the cactuses in
+being succulent and thick-skinned but they differ from them in their
+curious ability to live upon very salt and soda-laden water. All through
+the great African desert region, in fact, most of the water is more or
+less brackish; 'bitter lakes' are common, and gypsum often covers the
+ground over immense areas. These districts occupy the beds of vast
+ancient lakes, now almost dry, of which the existing _chotts_, or very
+salt pools, are the last shrunken and evanescent relics.
+
+And this point about the water brings me at last to a cardinal fact in
+the constitution of deserts which is almost always utterly misconceived
+in Europe. Most people at home picture the desert to themselves as
+wholly dead, flat, and sandy. To talk about the fauna and flora of
+Sahara sounds in their ears like self-contradictory nonsense. But, as a
+matter of fact, that uniform and lifeless desert of the popular fancy
+exists only in those sister arts that George II.--good, practical
+man--so heartily despised, 'boetry and bainting.' The desert of real
+life, though less impressive, is far more varied. It has its ups and
+downs, its hills and valleys. It has its sandy plains and its rocky
+ridges. It has its lakes and ponds, and even its rivers. It has its
+plants and animals, its oases and palm-groves. In short, like everything
+else on earth, it's a good deal more complex than people imagine.
+
+One may take Sahara as a very good example of the actual desert of
+physical geography, in contradistinction to the level and lifeless
+desert that stretches like the sea over illimitable spaces in verse or
+canvas. And here, I fear, I am going to dispel another common and
+cherished illusion. It is my fate to be an iconoclast, and perhaps long
+practice has made me rather like the trade than otherwise. A popular
+belief exists all over Europe that the late M. Roudaire--that De Lesseps
+who never quite 'came off'--proposed to cut a canal from the
+Mediterranean into the heart of Africa, which was intended, in the
+stereotyped phrase of journalism, to 'flood Sahara,' and convert the
+desert into an inland sea. He might almost as well have talked of
+cutting a canal from Brighton to the Devil's Dyke and 'submerging
+England,' as the devil wished to do in the old legend. As a matter of
+fact, good, practical M. Roudaire, sound engineer that he was, never
+even dreamt of anything so chimerical. What he did really propose was
+something far milder and simpler in its way, but, as his scheme has
+given rise to the absurd notion that Sahara as a whole lies below
+sea-level, it may be worth while briefly to explain what it was he
+really thought of doing.
+
+Some sixty miles south of Biskra, the most fashionable resort in the
+Algerian Sahara, there is a deep depression two hundred and fifty miles
+long, partly occupied by three salt lakes of the kind so common over the
+whole dried-up Saharan area. These three lakes, shrunken remnants of
+much larger sheets, lie below the level of the Mediterranean, but they
+are separated from it, and from one another, by upland ranges which rise
+considerably above the sea line. What M. Roudaire proposed to do was to
+cut canals through these three barriers, and flood the basins of the
+salt lakes. The result would have been, not as is commonly said to
+submerge Sahara, nor even to form anything worth seriously describing as
+'an inland sea,' but to substitute three larger salt lakes for the
+existing three smaller ones. The area so flooded, however, would bear to
+the whole area of Sahara something like the same proportion that Windsor
+Park bears to the entire surface of England. This is the true truth
+about that stupendous undertaking, which is to create a new
+Mediterranean in the midst of the Dark Continent, and to modify the
+climate of Northern Europe to something like the condition of the
+Glacial Epoch. A new Dead Sea would be much nearer the mark, and the
+only way Northern Europe would feel the change, if it felt it at all,
+would be in a slight fall in the price of dates in the wholesale market.
+
+No, Sahara as a whole is _not_ below sea-level; it is _not_ the dry bed
+of a recent ocean; and it is _not_ as flat as the proverbial pancake all
+over. Part of it, indeed, is very mountainous, and all of it is more or
+less varied in level. The Upper Sahara consists of a rocky plateau,
+rising at times into considerable peaks; the Lower, to which it
+descends by a steep slope, is 'a vast depression of clay and sand,' but
+still for the most part standing high above sea-level. No portion of the
+Upper Sahara is less than 1,300 feet high--a good deal higher than
+Dartmoor or Derbyshire. Most of the Lower reaches from two to three
+hundred feet--quite as elevated as Essex or Leicester. The few spots
+below sea-level consist of the beds of ancient lakes, now much shrunk by
+evaporation, owing to the present rainless condition of the country; the
+soil around these is deep in gypsum, and the water itself is
+considerably salter than the sea. That, however, is always the case with
+fresh-water lakes in their last dotage, as American geologists have amply
+proved in the case of the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Moving sand
+undoubtedly covers a large space in both divisions of the desert, but
+according to Sir Lambert Playfair, our best modern authority on the
+subject, it occupies not more than one-third part of the entire Algerian
+Sahara. Elsewhere rock, clay, and muddy lake are the prevailing
+features, interspersed with not infrequent date-groves and villages, the
+product of artesian wells, or excavated spaces, or river oases. Even
+Sahara, in short, to give it its due, is not by any means so black as
+it's painted.
+
+
+
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Falling in Love, with Other Essays on More
+      Exact Branches of Science, by Grant Allen.
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Falling in Love, by Grant Allen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Falling in Love
+       With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
+
+Author: Grant Allen
+
+Release Date: October 7, 2005 [EBook #16807]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FALLING IN LOVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, Annika Feilbach and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>FALLING IN LOVE</h1>
+
+<h3><i>WITH OTHER ESSAYS</i></h3>
+<h4><i>ON</i></h4>
+<h3><i>MORE EXACT BRANCHES OF SCIENCE</i></h3>
+
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>GRANT ALLEN</h2>
+
+
+<div class="center">LONDON</div>
+<div class="center">SMITH, ELDER, &amp; CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE</div>
+<div class="center">1889</div>
+
+<p class="center">[<i>All rights reserved</i>]</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Some people complain that science is dry. That is, of
+course, a matter of taste. For my own part, I like
+my science and my champagne as dry as I can get
+them. But the public thinks otherwise. So I have
+ventured to sweeten accompanying samples as far as
+possible to suit the demand, and trust they will meet
+with the approbation of consumers.</p>
+
+<p>Of the specimens here selected for exhibition, my
+title piece originally appeared in the <i>Fortnightly
+Review</i>: '<a href="#part10">Honey Dew</a>' and '<a href="#part19">The First Potter</a>' were
+contributions to <i>Longman's Magazine</i>: and all the
+rest found friendly shelter between the familiar yellow
+covers of the good old <i>Cornhill</i>. My thanks are due
+to the proprietors and editors of those various
+periodicals for kind permission to reproduce them
+here.</p>
+
+<p style="text-align:right">G.A.</p>
+
+<p>THE NOOK, DORKING:<br />
+<i>September</i>, 1889.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<table summary="table of contents">
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td><td>PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part1"><span class="sc">Falling in Love</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part2"><span class="sc">Right and Left</span></a></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part3"><span class="sc">Evolution</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page31">31</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part4"><span class="sc">Strictly Incog.</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page50">50</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part5"><span class="sc">Seven-Year Sleepers</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part6"><span class="sc">A Fossil Continent</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part7"><span class="sc">A Very Old Master</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page106">106</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part8"><span class="sc">British and Foreign</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page123">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part9"><span class="sc">Thunderbolts</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part10"><span class="sc">Honey-dew</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page159">159</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part11"><span class="sc">The Milk in the Coco-Nut</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page176">176</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part12"><span class="sc">Food and Feeding</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part13"><span class="sc">De Banana</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page216">216</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part14"><span class="sc">Go to the Ant</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page233">233</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part15"><span class="sc">Big Animals</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page251">251</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part16"><span class="sc">Fossil Food</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page271">271</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part17"><span class="sc">Ogbury Barrows</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page287">287</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part18"><span class="sc">Fish Out of Water</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page302">302</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part19"><span class="sc">The First Potter</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page316">316</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part20"><span class="sc">The Recipe for Genius</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page328">328</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#part21"><span class="sc">Desert Sands</span></a></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#page341">341</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="part1" id="part1"><i>FALLING IN LOVE</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<a name="page1" id="page1"></a>
+An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing
+danger. Sir George Campbell has set his face against the
+time-honoured practice of Falling in Love. Parents innumerable,
+it is true, have set their faces against it already
+from immemorial antiquity; but then they only attacked the
+particular instance, without venturing to impugn the institution
+itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator,
+however, goes to work in all things on a different
+pattern. He would always like to regulate human life
+generally as a department of the India Office; and so Sir
+George Campbell would fain have husbands and wives
+selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson's principle,
+by the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future development
+of the race, in the process which he not very
+felicitously or elegantly describes as 'man-breeding.' 'Probably,'
+he says, as reported in <i>Nature</i>, 'we have enough
+physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in
+the pairing of individuals of the same or allied races if we
+could only apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages,
+instead of giving way to foolish ideas about love and the
+tastes of young people, whom we can hardly trust to choose
+their own bonnets, much less to choose in a graver matter
+in which they are most likely to be influenced by frivolous
+prejudices.' He wants us, in other words, to discard the
+deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited
+instinct, and to substitute for them some calm and dispassionate
+<a name="page2" id="page2"></a>
+but artificial selection of a fitting partner as the
+father or mother of future generations.</p>
+
+<p>Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be
+treated seriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir
+George Campbell's conclusion is exactly the opposite one
+from the conclusion now being forced upon men of science
+by a study of the biological and psychological elements in
+this very complex problem of heredity. So far from considering
+love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests
+of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and
+psychologists, especially those of the modern evolutionary
+school, would regard it rather as an essentially beneficent
+and conservative instinct developed and maintained in us
+by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring just
+those precise advantages and improvements which Sir
+George Campbell thinks he could himself effect by a conscious
+and deliberate process of selection. More than that,
+I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure most evolutionists
+would cordially agree with me), that this beneficent
+inherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it
+has in view far more admirably, subtly, and satisfactorily,
+on the average of instances, than any clumsy human
+selective substitute could possibly effect it.</p>
+
+<p>In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and
+confiding belief that marriages are made in heaven: with
+the further corollary that heaven manages them, one time
+with another, a great deal better than Sir George Campbell.</p>
+
+<p>Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the
+standard of human efficiency; and then let us consider
+what would be the probable result of any definite conscious
+attempt to substitute for it some more deliberate external
+agency.</p>
+
+<p>Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe,
+<a name="page3" id="page3"></a>
+is nothing more than the latest, highest, and most
+involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost
+universal selective process which Mr. Darwin has enabled
+us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the
+animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in
+his a&euml;rial dance around his observant mate is endeavouring
+to charm her by the delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome
+her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock
+that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his
+attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty
+and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem
+through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable
+qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates
+in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be
+beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as
+it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection&mdash;a survival
+of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and
+mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum
+of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring.
+I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the case, because
+it is one with which, since the publication of the 'Descent
+of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.</p>
+
+<p>In our own species, the selective process is marked by
+all the features common to selection throughout the whole
+animal kingdom; but it is also, as might be expected, far
+more specialised, far more individualised, far more cognisant
+of personal traits and minor peculiarities. It is furthermore
+exerted to a far greater extent upon mental and moral
+as well as physical peculiarities in the individual.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of
+us fall in love with one person, some with another. This
+instinctive and deep-seated differential feeling we may
+regard as the outcome of complementary features, mental,
+moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; and experience
+<a name="page4" id="page4"></a>
+shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a
+reciprocal affection, that is to say, in other words, an
+affection roused in unison by varying qualities in the respective
+individuals.</p>
+
+<p>Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency
+very little doubt can be reasonably entertained. We <i>do</i>
+fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the young, the
+beautiful, the strong, and the healthy; we do <i>not</i> fall in
+love, taking us in the lump, with the aged, the ugly, the
+feeble, and the sickly. The prohibition of the Church is
+scarcely needed to prevent a man from marrying his grandmother.
+Moralists have always borne a special grudge to
+pretty faces; but, as Mr. Herbert Spencer admirably put it
+(long before the appearance of Darwin's selective theory),
+'the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but a
+skin-deep saying.' In reality, beauty is one of the very
+best guides we can possibly have to the desirability, so far
+as race-preservation is concerned, of any man or any
+woman as a partner in marriage. A fine form, a good
+figure, a beautiful bust, a round arm and neck, a fresh
+complexion, a lovely face, are all outward and visible signs
+of the physical qualities that on the whole conspire to
+make up a healthy and vigorous wife and mother; they
+imply soundness, fertility, a good circulation, a good
+digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness are roughly
+indicative of dyspepsia and an&aelig;mia; a flat chest is a
+symptom of deficient maternity; and what we call a bad
+figure is really, in one way or another, an unhealthy departure
+from the central norma and standard of the race.
+Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means an
+active liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean feeble
+virility. Nor are indications of mental and moral efficiency
+by any means wanting as recognised elements in personal
+beauty. A good-humoured face is in itself almost pretty.
+<a name="page5" id="page5"></a>
+A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive features. Low,
+receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid,
+half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however
+regular their lines and contours. Intelligence and goodness
+are almost as necessary as health and vigour in order
+to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful human face and
+figure. The Apollo Belvedere is no fool; the murderers in
+the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's are for the
+most part no beauties.</p>
+
+<p>What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most
+cases efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love
+with individually is, I believe, our moral, mental, and
+physical complement. Not our like, not our counterpart;
+quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlike and
+our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a
+commonplace of ordinary conversation; that it is scientifically
+true, one time with another, when we take an
+extended range of cases, may, I think, be almost demonstrated
+by sure and certain warranty of human nature.</p>
+
+<p>Brothers and sisters have more in common, mentally
+and physically, than any other members of the same race
+can possibly have with one another. But nobody falls in
+love with his sister. A profound instinct has taught even
+the lower races of men (for the most part) to avoid such
+union of the all-but-identical. In the higher races the idea
+never so much as occurs to us. Even cousins seldom fall
+in love&mdash;seldom, that is to say, in comparison with the
+frequent opportunities of intercourse they enjoy, relatively
+to the remainder of general society. When they do, and
+when they carry out their perilous choice effectively by
+marriage, natural selection soon avenges Nature upon the
+offspring by cutting off the idiots, the consumptives, the
+weaklings, and the cripples, who often result from such
+consanguineous marriages. In narrow communities, where
+<a name="page6" id="page6"></a>
+breeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural
+selection has similarly to exert itself upon a crowd of <i>cr&eacute;tins</i>
+and other hapless incapables. But in wide and open
+champaign countries, where individual choice has free room
+for exercise, men and women as a rule (if not constrained
+by parents and moralists) marry for love, and marry on the
+whole their natural complements. They prefer outsiders,
+fresh blood, somebody who comes from beyond the community,
+to the people of their own immediate surroundings.
+In many men the dislike to marrying among the folk with
+whom they have been brought up amounts almost to a
+positive instinct; they feel it as impossible to fall in love
+with a fellow-townswoman as to fall in love with their own
+first cousins. Among exogamous tribes such an instinct
+(aided, of course, by other extraneous causes) has hardened
+into custom; and there is reason to believe (from the
+universal traces among the higher civilisations of marriage
+by capture) that all the leading races of the world are
+ultimately derived from exogamous ancestors, possessing
+this healthy and excellent sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted
+that short men, as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men
+admire little women. Dark pairs by preference with
+fair; the commonplace often runs after the original.
+People have long noticed that this attraction towards
+one's opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race;
+they have not, perhaps, so generally observed that it also
+indicates roughly the existence in either individual of a
+desire for its own natural complement. It is difficult
+here to give definite examples, but everybody knows how, in
+the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there are involved
+innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which
+strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form
+with ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not
+<a name="page7" id="page7"></a>
+definitely seek out and discover such qualities; instinct works
+far more intuitively than that; but we find at last, by subsequent
+observation, how true and how trustworthy were
+its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do so
+who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the
+earliest promptings of their own hearts, and not to be
+ashamed of that divinest and deepest of human intuitions,
+love at first sight.</p>
+
+<p>How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in
+part by the apparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility
+of its occasional action. We know that some men and
+women fall in love easily, while others are only moved to
+love by some very special and singular combination of
+peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred by
+every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be
+roused by intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We
+know that sometimes we meet people possessing every
+virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for some unknown
+and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love
+with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments.
+I don't, of course, for a moment accept the
+silly romantic notion that men and women fall in love only
+once in their lives, or that each one of us has somewhere
+on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must
+sooner or later meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every
+healthy normal man or woman has probably fallen in love
+over and over again in the course of a lifetime (except in
+case of very early marriage), and could easily find
+dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of
+falling in love again if due occasion offered. We are not
+all created in pairs, like the Exchequer tallies, exactly
+intended to fit into one another's minor idiosyncrasies.
+Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with
+one another in the particular places and the particular
+<a name="page8" id="page8"></a>
+societies they happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch
+does not hunt the world over to find his pre-established
+harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at Denver,
+Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a
+vast number are purely indifferent to him; only one or two,
+here and there, strike him in the light of possible wives,
+and only one in the last resort (outside Salt Lake City)
+approves herself to his inmost nature as the actual wife of
+his final selection.</p>
+
+<p>Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellow-countrymen
+or fellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch
+of selective preference in the human species, is just one
+mark of our extraordinary specialisation, one stamp and
+token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick
+and choose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection
+plays a large part (for the very butterflies are coy, and
+must be wooed and won). It is only in the human race itself
+that selection descends into such minute, such subtle, such
+indefinable discriminations. Why should a universal and
+common impulse have in our case these special limits?
+Why should we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely
+affected? Surely for some good and sufficient purpose.
+No deep-seated want of our complex life would be so
+narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning. Sometimes
+we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see
+that beauty plays a great <i>r&ocirc;le</i>; there, we recognise the
+importance of strength, of manner, of grace, of moral
+qualities. Vivacity, as Mr. Galton justly remarks, is one
+of the most powerful among human attractions, and often
+accounts for what might otherwise seem unaccountable
+preferences. But after all is said and done, there remains
+a vast mass of instinctive and inexplicable elements: a
+power deeper and more marvellous in its inscrutable ramifications
+than human consciousness. 'What on earth,' we
+<a name="page9" id="page9"></a>
+say, 'could So-and-so see in So-and-so to fall in love with?'
+This very inexplicability I take to be the sign and seal of a
+profound importance. An instinct so conditioned, so curious,
+so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy
+with all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice
+within us, speaking for the good of the human race in all
+future generations.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment (impossible
+supposition!) that mankind could conceivably divest
+itself of 'these foolish ideas about love and the tastes
+of young people,' and could hand over the choice of partners
+for life to a committee of anthropologists, presided over
+by Sir George Campbell. Would the committee manage
+things, I wonder, very much better than the Creator has
+managed them? Where would they obtain that intimate
+knowledge of individual structures and functions and differences
+which would enable them to join together in holy
+matrimony fitting and complementary idiosyncrasies? Is
+a living man, with all his organs, and powers, and faculties,
+and dispositions, so simple and easy a problem to read that
+anybody else can readily undertake to pick out off-hand a
+help meet for him? I trow not! A man is not a horse
+or a terrier. You cannot discern his 'points' by simple
+inspection. You cannot see <i>&agrave; priori</i> why a Hanoverian
+bandsman and his heavy, ignorant, uncultured wife, should
+conspire to produce a Sir William Herschel. If you tried
+to improve the breed artificially, either by choice from
+outside, or by the creation of an independent moral sentiment,
+irrespective of that instinctive preference which we
+call Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving
+man, you would only do one of two things&mdash;either spoil his
+constitution, or produce a tame stereotyped pattern of
+amiable imbecility. You would crush out all initiative,
+all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would
+<a name="page10" id="page10"></a>
+get an animated moral code instead of living men and
+women.</p>
+
+<p>Look at the analogy of domestic animals. That is the
+analogy to which breeding reformers always point with
+special pride: but what does it really teach us? That you
+can't improve the efficiency of animals in any one point to
+any high degree, without upsetting the general balance of
+their constitution. The race-horse can run a mile on a
+particular day at a particular place, bar accidents, with
+wonderful speed: but that is about all he is good for. His
+health as a whole is so surprisingly feeble that he has to
+be treated with as much care as a delicate exotic. 'In
+regard to animals and plants,' says Sir George Campbell,
+'we have very largely mastered the principles of heredity
+and culture, and the modes by which good qualities may be
+maximised, bad qualities minimised.' True, so far as concerns
+a few points prized by ourselves for our own purposes.
+But in doing this, we have so lowered the general constitutional
+vigour of the plants or animals that our vines fall an
+easy prey to oidium and phylloxera, our potatoes to the
+potato disease and the Colorado beetle; our sheep are
+stupid, our rabbits idiotic, our domestic breeds generally
+threatened with dangers to life and limb unknown to their
+wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to
+deal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man,
+what hope would there be of our improving the breed by
+deliberate selection? If we developed the intellect, we
+would probably stunt the physique or the moral nature; if
+we aimed at a general culture of all faculties alike, we would
+probably end by a Chinese uniformity of mediocre dead
+level.</p>
+
+<p>The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very
+delicate organic equilibrium. How delicate we now know
+from thousands of examples, from the correlations of seemingly
+<a name="page11" id="page11"></a>
+unlike parts, from the wide-spread effects of small
+conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the Tasmanians
+or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances
+different from those with which their ancestors were
+familiar. What folly to interfere with a marvellous instinct
+which now preserves this balance intact, in favour of an
+untried artificial system which would probably wreck it as
+helplessly as the modern system of higher education for
+women is wrecking the maternal powers of the best class
+in our English community!</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free
+choice, aided by natural selection, is actually improving
+every good point, and is for ever weeding out all the occasional
+failures and shortcomings of nature. For weakly
+children, feeble children, stupid children, heavy children,
+are undoubtedly born under this very r&eacute;gime of falling in
+love, whose average results I believe to be so highly beneficial.
+How is this? Well, one has to take into consideration
+two points in seeking for the solution of that obvious
+problem.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All
+of them necessarily fail at some points. If on the average
+they do good, they are sufficiently justified. Now the
+material with which you have to start in this case is not
+perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable circumstances,
+not the abstractly best adapted woman in the
+world to supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities,
+but the best woman then and there obtainable for
+him. The result is frequently far from perfect; all I claim
+is that it would be as bad or a good deal worse if somebody
+else made the choice for him, or if he made the choice himself
+on abstract biological and 'eugenic' principles. And,
+indeed, the very existence of better and worse in the world
+is a condition precedent of all upward evolution. Without
+<a name="page12" id="page12"></a>
+an overstocked world, with individual variations, some progressive,
+some retrograde, there could be no natural selection,
+no survival of the fittest. That is the chief besetting
+danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a
+very great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint
+were fully carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce
+their like, and the world would be peopled in a few generations
+by the hereditarily reckless and dissolute and imprudent.
+Even so, if eugenic principles were universally
+adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natures
+would be largely reduced, and natural selection would be
+in so much interfered with or sensibly retarded.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, again, it must not be forgotten
+that falling in love has never yet, among civilised men at
+least, had a fair field and no favour. Many marriages are
+arranged on very different grounds&mdash;grounds of convenience,
+grounds of cupidity, grounds of religion, grounds of snobbishness.
+In many cases it is clearly demonstrable that such
+marriages are productive in the highest degree of evil consequences.
+Take the case of heiresses. An heiress is
+almost by necessity the one last feeble and flickering relic
+of a moribund stock&mdash;often of a stock reduced by the sordid
+pursuit of ill-gotten wealth almost to the very verge of
+actual insanity. But let her be ever so ugly, ever so unhealthy,
+ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody or other
+will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Considerations
+of this sort have helped to stock the world with
+many feeble and unhealthy persons. Among the middle
+and upper classes it may be safely said only a very small
+percentage of marriages is ever due to love alone; in other
+words, to instinctive feeling. The remainder have been influenced
+by various side advantages, and nature has taken her
+vengeance accordingly on the unhappy offspring. Parents
+and moralists are ever ready to drown her voice, and to
+<a name="page13" id="page13"></a>
+counsel marriage within one's own class, among nice people,
+with a really religious girl, and so forth <i>ad infinitum</i>. By
+many well-meaning young people these deadly interferences
+with natural impulse are accepted as part of a higher and
+nobler law of conduct. The wretched belief that one
+should subordinate the promptings of one's own soul to the
+dictates of a miscalculating and misdirecting prudence has
+been instilled into the minds of girls especially, until at
+last many of them have almost come to look upon their
+natural instincts as wrong, and the immoral, race-destructive
+counsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest
+earthly wisdom. Among certain small religious sects,
+again, such as the Quakers, the duty of 'marrying in' has
+been strenuously inculcated, and only the stronger-minded
+and more individualistic members have had courage and
+initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the
+internal divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed
+law of their particular community. Even among wider
+bodies it is commonly held that Catholics must not marry
+Protestants; and the admirable results obtained by the
+mixture of Jewish with European blood have almost all
+been reached by male Jews having the temerity to marry
+'Christian' women in the face of opposition and persecution
+from their co-nationalists. It is very rarely indeed
+that a Jewess will accept a European for a husband. In
+so many ways, and on so many grounds, does convention
+interfere with the plain and evident dictates of nature.</p>
+
+<p>Against all such evil parental promptings, however, a
+great safeguard is afforded to society by the wholesome
+and essentially philosophical teaching of romance and
+poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are for the
+most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature; and
+it may profoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of
+supply and demand should have diverted such an immense
+<a name="page14" id="page14"></a>
+number of the ablest minds in England, France, and America,
+from more serious subjects to the production of such very
+frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of art. But
+the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good
+to set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings
+of romantic literature&mdash;that it always appeals to
+the true internal promptings of inherited instinct, and
+opposes the foolish and selfish suggestions of interested
+outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished
+human nature against the expelling pitchfork of calculating
+expediency in the matrimonial market. While parents and
+moralists are for ever saying, 'Don't marry for beauty;
+don't marry for inclination; don't marry for love: marry
+for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement,
+marry for our convenience, not for your own,' the
+romance-writer is for ever urging, on the other hand,
+'Marry for love, and for love only.' His great theme in all
+ages has been the opposition between parental or other
+external wishes and the true promptings of the young and
+unsophisticated human heart. He has been the chief ally
+of sentiment and of nature. He has filled the heads of all
+our girls with what Sir George Campbell describes off-hand
+as 'foolish ideas about love.' He has preserved us from
+the hateful conventions of civilisation. He has exalted the
+claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious native
+yearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable
+element of mutual selection; and, in so doing,
+he has unconsciously proved himself the best friend of
+human improvement and the deadliest enemy of all those
+hideous 'social lies which warp us from the living truth.'
+His mission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and
+Sir George Campbell.</p>
+
+<p>For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires
+who are always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists
+<a name="page15" id="page15"></a>
+and the rebels who are always in the right in
+this matter. If the common moral maxims of society could
+have had their way&mdash;if we had all chosen our wives and
+our husbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not
+for their eyes or their moustaches, not for their attractiveness
+or their vivacity, but for their 'sterling qualities of mind and
+character,' we should now doubtless be a miserable race of
+prigs and bookworms, of martinets and puritans, of nervous
+invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young men
+and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms
+of shallow sophistry&mdash;because they often prefer
+<i>Romeo and Juliet</i> to the 'Whole Duty of Man,' and a
+beautiful face to a round balance at Coutts's&mdash;that we still
+preserve some vitality and some individual features, in spite
+of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men who
+marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out,
+leaving none to represent them: the men who marry
+women they have been weak enough and silly enough to
+fall in love with, recruit the race with fine and vigorous
+and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the
+complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted
+and mutually reinforcing individualities.
+</p>
+
+<p>I have spoken throughout, for argument's sake, as
+though the only interest to be considered in the married
+relation were the interests of the offspring, and so ultimately
+of the race at large, rather than of the persons themselves
+who enter into it. But I do not quite see why each generation
+should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the generations
+that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the
+strongest points in favour of the system of falling in love
+that it does, by common experience in the vast majority of
+instances, assort together persons who subsequently prove
+themselves thoroughly congenial and helpful to one another.
+And this result I look upon as one great proof of the real
+<a name="page16" id="page16"></a>
+value and importance of the instinct. Most men and
+women select for themselves partners for life at an age
+when they know but little of the world, when they judge
+but superficially of characters and motives, when they still
+make many mistakes in the conduct of life and in the estimation
+of chances. Yet most of them find in after days
+that they have really chosen out of all the world one of
+the persons best adapted by native idiosyncrasy to make
+their joint lives enjoyable and useful. I make every allowance
+for the effects of habit, for the growth of sentiment,
+for the gradual approximation of tastes and sympathies;
+but surely, even so, it is a common consciousness with
+every one of us who has been long married, that we could
+hardly conceivably have made ourselves happy with any of
+the partners whom others have chosen; and that we have
+actually made ourselves so with the partners we chose for
+ourselves under the guidance of an almost unerring native
+instinct. Yet adaptation between husband and wife, so
+far as their own happiness is concerned, can have had comparatively
+little to do with the evolution of the instinct, as
+compared with adaptation for the joint production of vigorous
+and successful offspring. Natural selection lays almost all
+the stress on the last point, and hardly any at all upon the
+first one. If, then, the instinct is found on the whole so
+trustworthy in the minor matter, for which it has not
+specially been fashioned, how far more trustworthy and
+valuable must it probably prove in the greater matter&mdash;greater,
+I mean, as regards the interests of the race&mdash;for
+which it has been mainly or almost solely developed!</p>
+
+<p>I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense
+of moral responsibility in the matter of marriage will grow
+up among us. But it will not take the false direction of
+ignoring these our profoundest and holiest instincts. Marriage
+for money may go; marriage for rank may go; marriage
+<a name="page17" id="page17"></a>
+for position may go; but marriage for love, I believe
+and trust, will last for ever. Men in the future will probably
+feel that a union with their cousins or near relations
+is positively wicked; that a union with those too like them
+in person or disposition is at least undesirable; that a union
+based upon considerations of wealth or any other consideration
+save considerations of immediate natural impulse, is
+base and disgraceful. But to the end of time they will
+continue to feel, in spite of doctrinaires, that the voice of
+nature is better far than the voice of the Lord Chancellor
+or the Royal Society; and that the instinctive desire for a
+particular helpmate is a surer guide for the ultimate happiness,
+both of the race and of the individual, than any
+amount of deliberate consultation. It is not the foolish
+fancies of youth that will have to be got rid of, but the
+foolish, wicked, and mischievous interference of parents or
+outsiders.<a name="page18" id="page18"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="part2" id="part2"><i>RIGHT AND LEFT</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar
+scriptural phrase, 'knoweth the right hand from the left.'
+This fact in his economy goes closely together with the
+other facts, that he is the only animal on this sublunary
+planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate
+language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the
+musical glasses. His right-handedness, in short, is part
+cause and part effect of his universal supremacy in animated
+nature. He is what he is, to a great extent, 'by his own
+right hand;' and his own right hand, we may shrewdly
+suspect, would never have differed at all from his left were
+it not for the manifold arts and trades and activities he
+practises.</p>
+
+<p>It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage
+ran. Man was once, in his childhood on earth, what Charles
+Reade wanted him again to be in his maturer centuries,
+ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers of this volume&mdash;in
+the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoter portions
+of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton
+and the familiar knowledge of the Latin language have not
+yet penetrated&mdash;should complain that I speak with unknown
+tongues, I will further explain for their special benefit
+that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using the right
+and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang
+<a name="page19" id="page19"></a>
+remarks in immortal verse, 'was the manner of Primitive
+Man.' He never minded twopence which hand he used,
+as long as he got the fruit or the scalp he wanted. How
+could he when twopence wasn't yet invented? His mamma
+never said to him in early youth, 'Why-why,' or 'Tomtom,'
+as the case might be, 'that's the wrong hand to hold
+your flint-scraper in.' He grew up to man's estate in
+happy ignorance of such minute and invidious distinctions
+between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that his
+hands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into
+shapely arrows; and he never even thought in his innocent
+soul which particular hand he did it with.</p>
+
+<p>How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about
+a gentleman whom I never personally saw, and whose
+habits the intervention of five hundred centuries has precluded
+me from studying at close quarters? At first sight,
+you would suppose the evidence on such a point must be
+purely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely
+be inventing <i>&agrave; priori</i> facts, evolved, <i>more Germanico</i>, from
+his inner consciousness. Not so. See how clever modern
+arch&aelig;ology has become! I base my assertion upon solid
+evidence. I know that Primitive Man was ambidextrous,
+because he wrote and painted just as often with his left as
+with his right, and just as successfully.</p>
+
+<p>This seems once more a hazardous statement to make
+about a remote ancestor, in the age before the great glacial
+epoch had furrowed the mountains of Northern Europe;
+but, nevertheless, it is strictly true and strictly demonstrable.
+Just try, as you read, to draw with the forefinger
+and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile
+on the page on which these words are printed. Do you
+observe that (unless you are an artist, and therefore
+sophisticated) you naturally and instinctively draw it with
+the face turned towards your left shoulder? Try now to
+<a name="page20" id="page20"></a>
+draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find
+it requires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers.
+The hand moves of its own accord from without inward,
+not from within outward. Then, again, draw with your
+left thumb and forefinger another imaginary profile, and
+you will find, for the same reason, that the face in this case
+looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young
+children, whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of
+man or beast, with their right hand, draw it almost always
+with the face or head turned to the left, in accordance with
+this natural human instinct. Their doing so is a test of
+their perfect right-handedness.</p>
+
+<p>But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive
+men we know personally, the carvers of the figures from
+the French bone-caves, drew men and beasts, on bone or
+mammoth-tusk, turned either way indiscriminately. The
+inference is obvious. They must have been ambidextrous.
+Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; and
+indeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a
+piece of bone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a
+practised hand, be comparatively difficult.</p>
+
+<p>I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with
+this one very clear historical datum, because it is interesting
+to be able to say with tolerable certainty that there
+really was a period in our life as a species when man in
+the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he become
+otherwise? This question is not only of importance in
+itself, as helping to explain the origin and source of man's
+supremacy in nature&mdash;his tool-using faculty&mdash;but it is also
+of interest from the light it casts on that fallacy of poor
+Charles Reade's already alluded to&mdash;that we ought all of us
+in this respect to hark back to the condition of savages. I
+think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised
+man now right-handed, we shall also see why it would be
+<a name="page21" id="page21"></a>highly undesirable for him to return, after so many ages
+of practice, to the condition of his undeveloped stone-age
+ancestors.</p>
+
+<p>The very beginning of our modern right-handedness
+goes back, indeed, to the most primitive savagery. Why
+did one hand ever come to be different in use and function
+from another? The answer is, because man, in spite of all
+appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally,
+indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn't show: but
+it shows internally. We all of us know, in spite of
+Sganarelle's assertion to the contrary, that the apex of the
+heart inclines to the left side, and that the liver and other
+internal organs show a generous disregard for strict and
+formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those
+human organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get
+the clue to the irregularity of right and left in the human
+arm, and finally even the particular direction of the printed
+letters now before you.</p>
+
+<p>For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His
+manners were strikingly deficient in that repose which
+stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. When primitive man
+felt the tender passion steal over his soul, he lay in wait in
+the hush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms had inspired
+his heart with young desire; and when she passed
+his hiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled
+her with a club, caught her tight by the hair of her head,
+and dragged her off in triumph to his cave or his rock-shelter.
+(Marriage by capture, the learned call this simple
+mode of primeval courtship.) When he found some
+Strephon or Dam&oelig;tas rival him in the affections of the
+dusky sex, he and that rival fought the matter out like two
+bulls in a field; and the victor and his Phyllis supped that
+evening off the roasted remains of the vanquished suitor.
+I don't say these habits and manners were pretty; but they
+<a name="page22" id="page22"></a>were the custom of the time, and there's no good denying
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Primitive Man, being thus by nature a fighting
+animal, fought for the most part at first with his great
+canine teeth, his nails, and his fists; till in process of time
+he added to these early and natural weapons the further
+persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought, as
+Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the
+possession of the ladies of his kind, against other members
+of his own sex and species. And if you fight, you soon
+learn to protect the most exposed and vulnerable portion of
+your body; or, if you don't, natural selection manages it
+for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence.
+To the boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that
+most vulnerable portion is undoubtedly the heart. A hard
+blow, well delivered on the left breast, will easily kill, or at
+any rate stun, even a very strong man. Hence, from a
+very early period, men have used the right hand to fight
+with, and have employed the left arm chiefly to cover the
+heart and to parry a blow aimed at that specially vulnerable
+region. And when weapons of offence and defence supersede
+mere fists and teeth, it is the right hand that grasps
+the spear or sword, while the left holds over the heart for
+defence the shield or buckler.</p>
+
+<p>From this simple origin, then, the whole vast difference
+of right and left in civilised life takes its beginning. At
+first, no doubt, the superiority of the right hand was only
+felt in the matter of fighting. But that alone gave it a
+distinct pull, and paved the way, at last, for its supremacy
+elsewhere. For when weapons came into use, the habitual
+employment of the right hand to grasp the spear, sword, or
+knife made the nerves and muscles of the right side far
+more obedient to the control of the will than those of the
+left. The dexterity thus acquired by the right&mdash;see how
+<a name="page23" id="page23"></a>the very word 'dexterity' implies this fact&mdash;made it more
+natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the
+same hand preferentially in the manufacture of flint
+hatchets, bows and arrows, and in all the other manifold
+activities of savage life. It was the hand with which he
+grasped his weapon; it was therefore the hand with which
+he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right hand
+remains especially 'the hand in which you hold your
+knife;' and that is exactly how our own children to this
+day decide the question which is which, when they begin
+to know their right hand from their left for practical purposes.</p>
+
+<p>A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter
+innumerable other differences which naturally flow from it.
+Some of them are extremely remote and derivative. Take,
+for example, the case of writing and printing. Why do
+these run from left to right? At first sight such a practice
+seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticed
+above&mdash;the tendency to draw from right to left, in accordance
+with the natural sweep of the hand and arm. And,
+indeed, it is a fact that all early writing habitually took
+the opposite direction from that which is now universal in
+western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance
+(or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay
+standard), that Hebrew is written from right to left, and
+that each book begins at the wrong cover. The reason is
+that words, and letters, and hieroglyphics were originally
+carved, scratched, or incised, instead of being written with
+coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to follow its
+natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in na&iuml;ve drawing,
+with a free curve from the right leftward.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the very same fact&mdash;that we use the right
+hand alone in writing&mdash;made the letters run the opposite
+way in the end; and the change was due to the use of ink
+<a name="page24" id="page24"></a>and other pigments for staining papyrus, parchment, or
+paper. If the hand in this case moved from right to left it
+would of course smear what it had already written; and to
+prevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of
+writing was reversed from left rightward. The use of wax
+tablets also, no doubt, helped forward the revolution, for in
+this case, too, the hand would cover and rub out the words
+written.</p>
+
+<p>The strict dependence of writing, indeed, upon the
+material employed is nowhere better shown than in the
+case of the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions. The ordinary
+substitute for cream-laid note in the Euphrates valley in its
+palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, on which the
+words to be recorded&mdash;usually a deed of sale or something
+of the sort&mdash;were impressed while it was wet and then
+baked in, solid. And the method of impressing them was
+very simple; the workman merely pressed the end of his
+graver or wedge into the moist clay, thus giving rise to
+triangular marks which were arranged in the shapes of
+various letters. When alabaster, or any other hard material,
+was substituted for clay, the sculptor imitated these natural
+dabs or triangular imprints; and that was the origin of
+those mysterious and very learned-looking cuneiforms.
+This, I admit, is a palpable digression; but inasmuch as
+it throws an indirect light on the simple reasons which
+sometimes bring about great results, I hold it not wholly
+alien to the present serious philosophical inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>Printing, in turn, necessarily follows the rule of writing,
+so that in fact the order of letters and words on this page
+depends ultimately upon the remote fact that primitive man
+had to use his right hand to deliver a blow, and his left to
+parry, or to guard his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Some curious and hardly noticeable results flow once
+more from this order of writing from left to right. You
+<a name="page25" id="page25"></a>will find, if you watch yourself closely, that in examining a
+landscape, or the view from a hill-top, your eye naturally
+ranges from left to right; and that you begin your survey,
+as you would begin reading a page of print, from the left-hand
+corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act
+of reading (for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised
+infant) has accustomed our eyes to this particular movement,
+and has made it especially natural when we are trying
+to 'read' or take in at a glance the meaning of any
+complex and varied total.</p>
+
+<p>In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has
+even gone a step farther. Not only do we usually take in
+the episodes of a painting from left to right, but the
+painter definitely and deliberately intends us so to take them
+in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes in
+succession are represented on a single plane in the same
+picture&mdash;as happens often in early art&mdash;they are invariably
+represented in the precise order of the words on a written
+or printed page, beginning at the upper left-hand corner,
+and ending at the lower right-hand angle. I first noticed
+this curious extension of the common principle in the
+medi&aelig;val frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have
+since verified it by observations on many other pictures
+elsewhere, both ancient and modern. The Campo Santo,
+however, forms an exceptionally good museum of such
+story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every
+picture consists of several successive episodes. The
+famous Benozzo Gozzoli, for example, of Noah's Vineyard
+represents on a single plane all the stages in that earliest
+drama of intoxication, from the first act of gathering the
+grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the <i>vergognosa
+di Pisa</i>, who covers her face with her hands in shocked
+horror at the patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand
+corner.<a name="page26" id="page26"></a></p>
+
+<p>Observe, too, that the very conditions of <i>technique</i>
+demand this order almost as rigorously in painting as in
+writing. For the painter will naturally so work as not to
+smudge over what he has already painted: and he will also
+naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story he
+unfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From
+which two principles it necessarily results that he will
+begin at the upper left, and end at the lower right-hand
+corner.</p>
+
+<p>I have skipped lightly, I admit, over a considerable
+interval between primitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli.
+But consider further that during all that time the uses of
+the right and left hand were becoming by gradual degrees
+each day still further differentiated and specialised. Innumerable
+trades, occupations, and habits imply ever-widening
+differences in the way we use them. It is not
+the right hand alone that has undergone an education in
+this respect: the left, too, though subordinate, has still its
+own special functions to perform. If the savage chips his
+flints with a blow of the right, he holds the core, or main
+mass of stone from which he strikes it, firmly with his left.
+If one hand is specially devoted to the knife, the other
+grasps the fork to make up for it. In almost every act we
+do with both hands, each has a separate office to which it
+is best fitted. Take, for example, so simple a matter as
+buttoning one's coat, where a curious distinction between
+the habits of the sexes enables us to test the principle with
+ease and certainty. Men's clothes are always made with
+the buttons on the right side and the button-holes on the
+left. Women's, on the contrary, are always made with
+the buttons on the left side, and the button-holes on the
+right. (The occult reason for this curious distinction,
+which has long engaged the attention of philosophers, has
+never yet been discovered, but it is probably to be accounted
+<a name="page27" id="page27"></a>for by the perversity of women.) Well, if a man tries to
+put on a woman's waterproof, or a woman to put on a man's
+ulster, each will find that neither hand is readily able to
+perform the part of the other. A man, in buttoning, grasps
+the button in his right hand, pushes it through with his
+right thumb, holds the button-hole open with his left, and
+pulls all straight with his right fore-finger. Reverse the
+sides, and both hands at once seem equally helpless.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to note how many little peculiarities of
+dress or manufacture are equally necessitated by this prime
+distinction of right and left. Here are a very few of them,
+which the reader can indefinitely increase for himself. (I
+leave out of consideration obvious cases like boots and
+gloves: to insult that proverbially intelligent person's intelligence
+with those were surely unpardonable.) A scarf
+habitually tied in a sailor's knot acquires one long side, left,
+and one short one, right, from the way it is manipulated by
+the right hand; if it were tied by the left, the relations
+would be reversed. The spiral of corkscrews and of
+ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with
+the natural twist of the right hand: try to drive in an
+imaginary corkscrew with the right hand, the opposite way,
+and you will see how utterly awkward and clumsy is the
+motion. The strap of the flap that covers the keyhole in
+trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to
+the right, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it
+be conveniently buckled by a right-handed person. The
+hands of watches and the numbers of dial-faced barometers
+run from left to right: this is a peculiarity dependent upon
+the left to right system of writing. A servant offers you
+dishes from the left side: you can't so readily help yourself
+from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired
+of the German race, because it could never be
+taught like the English to keep to the right side of the
+<a name="page28" id="page28"></a>pavement in walking. A sword is worn at the left hip: a
+handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at the side;
+in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the right
+hand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in
+the left breast; a pocket for railway tickets halfway down
+the right side. Try to reverse any one of these simple
+actions, and you will see at once that they are immediately
+implied in the very fact of our original right-handedness.</p>
+
+<p>And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles
+Reade's mistaken notion of the advantages of ambidexterity.
+You couldn't make both hands do everything alike without
+a considerable loss of time, effort, efficiency, and convenience.
+Each hand learns to do its own work and to do it well; if
+you made it do the other hand's into the bargain, it would
+have a great deal more to learn, and we should find it
+difficult even then to prevent specialisation. We should
+have to make things deliberately different for the two hands&mdash;to
+have rights and lefts in everything, as we have them
+now in boots and gloves&mdash;or else one hand must inevitably
+gain the supremacy. Sword-handles, shears, surgical instruments,
+and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed,
+while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are
+adapted to the left; in each case for a perfectly sufficient
+reason. You can't upset all this without causing confusion.
+More than that, the division of labour thus brought about is
+certainly a gain to those who possess it: for if it were not
+so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten the dextro-sinistrals
+in the struggle for existence; whereas we know
+that the exact opposite has been the case. Man's special
+use of the right hand is one of his points of superiority to
+the brutes. If ever his right hand should forget its cunning,
+his supremacy would indeed begin to totter. Depend
+upon it, Nature is wiser than even Charles Reade. What
+<a name="page29" id="page29"></a>she finds most useful in the long run must certainly have
+many good points to recommend it.</p>
+
+<p>And this last consideration suggests another aspect of
+right and left which must not be passed over without one
+word in this brief survey of the philosophy of the subject.
+The superiority of the right caused it early to be regarded
+as the fortunate, lucky, and trusty hand; the inferiority of
+the left caused it equally to be considered as ill-omened,
+unlucky, and, in one expressive word, sinister. Hence come
+innumerable phrases and superstitions. It is the right hand
+of friendship that we always grasp; it is with our own
+right hand that we vindicate our honour against sinister
+suspicions. On the other hand, it is 'over the left' that
+we believe a doubtful or incredible statement; a left-handed
+compliment or a left-handed marriage carry their own condemnation
+with them. On the right hand of the host is
+the seat of honour; it is to the left that the goats of ecclesiastical
+controversy are invariably relegated. The very
+notions of the right hand and ethical right have got mixed
+up inextricably in every language: <i>droit</i> and <i>la droite</i> display
+it in French as much as right and the right in English.
+But to be <i>gauche</i> is merely to be awkward and clumsy;
+while to be right is something far higher and more important.</p>
+
+<p>So unlucky, indeed, does the left hand at last become
+that merely to mention it is an evil omen; and so the
+Greeks refused to use the true old Greek word for left at
+all, and preferred euphemistically to describe it as <i>euonymos</i>,
+the well-named or happy-omened. Our own <i>left</i>
+seems equally to mean the hand that is left after the right
+has been mentioned, or, in short, the other one. Many
+things which are lucky if seen on the right are fateful
+omens if seen to leftward. On the other hand, if you spill
+the salt, you propitiate destiny by tossing a pinch of it over
+<a name="page30" id="page30"></a>the left shoulder. A murderer's left hand is said by good
+authorities to be an excellent thing to do magic with; but
+here I cannot speak from personal experience. Nor do I
+know why the wedding-ring is worn on the left hand;
+though it is significant, at any rate, that the mark of slavery
+should be put by the man with his own right upon the
+inferior member of the weaker vessel. Strong-minded
+ladies may get up an agitation if they like to alter this
+gross injustice of the centuries.</p>
+
+<p>One curious minor application of rights and lefts is the
+rule of the road as it exists in England. How it arose I
+can't say, any more than I can say why a lady sits her side-saddle
+to the left. Coachmen, to be sure, are quite unanimous
+that the leftward route enables them to see how close
+they are passing to another carriage; but, as all continental
+authority is equally convinced the other way, I make no
+doubt this is a mere illusion of long-continued custom. It
+is curious, however, that the English usage, having once
+obtained in these islands, has influenced railways, not only
+in Britain, but over all Europe. Trains, like carriages, go
+to the left when they pass; and this habit, quite natural
+in England, was transplanted by the early engineers to the
+Continent, where ordinary carriages, of course, go to the
+right. In America, to be sure, the trains also go right like
+the carriages; but then, those Americans have such a
+curiously un-English way of being strictly consistent and
+logical in their doings. In Britain we should have compromised
+the matter by going sometimes one way and sometimes
+the other.<a name="page31" id="page31"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="part3" id="part3"><i>EVOLUTION</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity,
+the cholera germ, woman's rights, the great mining
+boom, and the Eastern Question, it is 'in the air.' It pervades
+society everywhere with its subtle essence; it infects
+small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its slang phrases;
+it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant Philistinism,
+the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody
+believes he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in
+his everyday conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses
+he has never seen, the charms of peeresses he has
+never spoken to, and the demerits of authors he has never
+read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous semi-conscious
+fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr.
+Darwin, and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer&mdash;don't
+you know?&mdash;and a lot more of those scientific fellows.
+It is generally understood in the best-informed circles that
+evolutionism consists for the most part in a belief about
+nature at large essentially similar to that applied by Topsy
+to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in
+short, that most things 'growed.' Especially is it known
+that in the opinion of the evolutionists as a body we are
+all of us ultimately descended from men with tails, who
+were the final offspring and improved edition of the common
+gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception
+of the various points in the great modern evolutionary
+programme.<a name="page32" id="page32"></a></p>
+
+<p>It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader,
+who of course differs fundamentally from that inferior class of
+human beings known to all of us in our own minds as 'other
+people,' that almost every point in the catalogue thus briefly
+enumerated is a popular fallacy of the wildest description.
+Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more than George
+Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the
+electric telegraph. We are not descended from men with
+tails, any more than we are descended from Indian elephants.
+There is no evidence that we have anything in particular
+more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship with our poor
+relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search
+of a 'missing link'; few links are anywhere missing, and
+those are for the most part wholly unimportant ones. If
+we found the imaginary link in question, he would not be
+a monkey, nor yet in any way a tailed man. And so forth
+generally through the whole list of popular beliefs and
+current fallacies as to the real meaning of evolutionary
+teaching. Whatever most people think evolutionary is for
+the most part a pure parody of the evolutionist's opinion.</p>
+
+<p>But a more serious error than all these pervades what
+we may call the drawing-room view of the evolutionist
+theory. So far as Society with a big initial is concerned,
+evolutionism first began to be talked about, and therefore
+known (for Society does not read; it listens, or rather it
+overhears and catches fragmentary echoes) when Darwin
+published his 'Origin of Species.' That great book consisted
+simply of a theory as to the causes which led to the
+distinctions of kind between plants and animals. With
+evolution at large it had nothing to do; it took for granted
+the origin of sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, the
+earth and all that in it is, the sea and the dry land, the
+mountains and the valleys, nay even life itself in the crude
+form, everything in fact, save the one point of the various
+<a name="page33" id="page33"></a>types and species of living beings. Long before Darwin's
+book appeared evolution had been a recognised force in the
+moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace
+had worked out the development of suns and earths from
+white-hot star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution
+of the earth's surface to its present highly complex geographical
+condition. Lamarck had worked out the descent
+of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slow
+modification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth
+of mind from its simplest beginnings to its highest outcome
+in human thought.</p>
+
+<p>But Society, like Gallio, cared nothing for all these
+things. The evolutionary principles had never been put
+into a single big book, asked for at Mudie's, and permitted
+to lie on the drawing-room table side by side with the last
+new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court
+memoirs. Therefore Society ignored them and knew them
+not; the word evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into
+its polite and refined dinner-table vocabulary. It recognised
+only the 'Darwinian theory,' 'natural selection,' 'the missing
+link,' and the belief that men were merely monkeys
+who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon them.
+To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented
+and patented the entire business, including descent with
+modification, if such notions ever occurred at all to the
+world-at-large's speculative intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth
+and older antecedents than this easy, superficial drawing-room
+view would lead us to imagine. It is a very ancient
+and respectable theory indeed, and it has an immense
+variety of minor developments. I am not going to push it
+back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the
+vague and indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The
+great original Roman poet&mdash;the only original poet in the<a name="page34" id="page34"></a>
+Latin language&mdash;did indeed hit out for himself a very good
+rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and shapeless
+evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it
+was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the
+philosophies of the older world, was a mere speculative idea,
+a fancy picture of the development of things, not dependent
+upon observation of facts at all, but wholly evolved, like the
+German thinker's camel, out of its author's own pregnant
+inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt
+have built an excellent superstructure if he had only
+possessed a little straw to make his bricks of. As it was,
+however, scientific brick-making being still in its infancy,
+he could only construct in a day a shadowy Aladdin's palace
+of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary world
+of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void
+chaos into an orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is
+not thus that systems arise which regenerate the thought
+of humanity; he who would build for all time must make
+sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound bricks
+in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea
+really began to take form and shape in the separate conceptions
+of Kant, Laplace, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin.
+These were the true founders of our modern evolutionism.
+Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who
+led the chosen people into the land which more than one
+venturous Moses had already dimly descried afar off from
+the Pisgah top of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy
+comes first in logical order. Stars and suns, and planets
+and satellites, necessarily precede in development plants
+and animals. You can have no cabbages without a world
+to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore
+reduced to comparative system and order, while the sciences
+<a name="page35" id="page35"></a>of life, and mind, and matter were still a hopeless and inextricable
+muddle. It was no wonder, then, that the evolution
+of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly apprehended
+and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's
+crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of
+living beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted
+at in a timid whisper.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists,
+not only this world, but all the other worlds in the universe,
+existed potentially, as the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of
+fluid light,' a vast nebula of enormous extent and almost
+inconceivable material thinness. The world arose out of a
+sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was
+composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable
+gasiness that millions of cubic miles of it might easily
+be compressed into a common antibilious pill-box. The
+pill-box itself, in fact, is the net result of a prolonged
+secular condensation of myriads of such enormous cubes of
+this prim&aelig;val matter. Slowly setting around common
+centres, however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's
+gravitative theories, the fluid haze gradually collected into
+suns and stars, whose light and heat is presumably due to
+the clashing together of their component atoms as they fall
+perpetually towards the central mass. Just as in a burning
+candle the impact of the oxygen atoms in the air against
+the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the melted and rarefied
+wax or tallow produces the light and heat of the flame, so
+in nebula or sun the impact of the various gravitating atoms
+one against the other produces the light and heat by whose
+aid we are enabled to see and know those distant bodies.
+The universe, according to this now fashionable nebular
+theory, began as a single vast ocean of matter of immense
+tenuity, spread all alike over all space as far as nowhere,
+and comparatively little different within itself when looked
+<a name="page36" id="page36"></a>at side by side with its own final historical outcome. In
+Mr. Spencer's perspicuous phrase, evolution in this aspect
+is a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous,
+from the incoherent to the coherent, and from the indefinite
+to the definite condition. Difficult words at first to apprehend,
+no doubt, and therefore to many people, as to Mr.
+Matthew Arnold, very repellent, but full of meaning, lucidity,
+and suggestiveness, if only we once take the trouble fairly
+and squarely to understand them.</p>
+
+<p>Every sun and every star thus formed is for ever
+gathering in the hem of its outer robe upon itself, for ever
+radiating off its light and heat into surrounding space, and
+for ever growing denser and colder as it sets slowly towards
+its centre of gravity. Our own sun and solar system may
+be taken as good typical working examples of how the
+stars thus constantly shrink into smaller and ever smaller
+dimensions around their own fixed centre. Naturally, we
+know more about our own solar system than about any
+other in our own universe, and it also possesses for us a
+greater practical and personal interest than any outside
+portion of the galaxy. Nobody can pretend to be profoundly
+immersed in the internal affairs of Sirius or of Alpha
+Centauri. A fiery revolution in the belt of Orion would
+affect us less than a passing finger-ache in a certain single
+terrestrial baby of our own household. Therefore I shall
+not apologise in any way for leaving the remainder of the
+sidereal universe to its unknown fate, and concentrating
+my attention mainly on the affairs of that solitary little,
+out-of-the-way, second-rate system, whereof we form an inappreciable
+portion. The matter which now composes the
+sun and its attendant bodies (the satellites included) was
+once spread out, according to Laplace, to at least the
+furthest orbit of the outermost planet&mdash;that is to say, so
+far as our present knowledge goes, the planet Neptune. Of
+<a name="page37" id="page37"></a>course, when it was expanded to that immense distance, it
+must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy
+human senses can even conceive of. An American would
+say, too thin; but I put Americans out of court at once as
+mere irreverent scoffers. From the orbit of Neptune, or
+something outside it, the faint and cloud-like mass which
+bore within it C&aelig;sar and his fortunes, not to mention the
+remainder of the earth and the solar system, began slowly
+to converge and gather itself in, growing denser and denser
+but smaller and smaller as it gradually neared its existing
+dimensions. How long a time it took to do it is for our
+present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel physicists
+will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or
+so for the process, while the grasping and extravagant
+evolutionary geologists beg with tears for at least double or
+even ten times that limited period. But at any rate it has
+taken a good long while, and, as far as most of us are
+personally concerned, the difference of one or two hundred
+millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an appreciable
+one.</p>
+
+<p>As it condensed and lessened towards its central core,
+revolving rapidly on its great axis, the solar mist left behind
+at irregular intervals concentric rings or belts of cloud-like
+matter, cast off from its equator; which belts, once more
+undergoing a similar evolution on their own account, have
+hardened round their private centres of gravity into Jupiter
+or Saturn, the Earth or Venus. Round these again, minor
+belts or rings have sometimes formed, as in Saturn's girdle
+of petty satellites; or subsidiary planets, thrown out into
+space, have circled round their own primaries, as the moon
+does around this sublunary world of ours. Meanwhile, the
+main central mass of all, retreating ever inward as it
+dropped behind it these occasional little reminders of its
+temporary stoppages, formed at last the sun itself, the
+<a name="page38" id="page38"></a>main luminary of our entire system. Now, I won't deny
+that this primitive Kantian and Laplacian evolutionism,
+this nebular theory of such exquisite concinnity, here
+reduced to its simplest terms and most elementary
+dimensions, has received many hard knocks from later
+astronomers, and has been a good deal bowled over, both
+on mathematical and astronomical grounds, by recent
+investigators of nebul&aelig; and meteors. Observations on
+comets and on the sun's surface have lately shown that it
+contains in all likelihood a very considerable fanciful
+admixture. It isn't more than half true; and even the
+half now totters in places. Still, as a vehicle of popular
+exposition the crude nebular hypothesis in its rawest form
+serves a great deal better than the truth, so far as yet
+known, on the good old Greek principle of the half being
+often more than the whole. The great point which it impresses
+on the mind is the cardinal idea of the sun and
+planets, with their attendant satellites, not as turned out
+like manufactured articles, ready made, at measured
+intervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as
+due to the slow and gradual working of natural laws, in
+accordance with which each has assumed by force of circumstances
+its existing place, weight, orbit, and motion.</p>
+
+<p>The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead
+of a sudden making, which Kant and Laplace thus applied
+to the component bodies of the universe at large, was
+further applied by Lyell and his school to the outer crust
+of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the
+astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and
+worlds, Lyell and his geological brethren went in for the
+evolution of the earth's surface. As theirs was stellar, so
+his was mundane. If the world began by being a red-hot
+mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal excitement,
+boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it
+<a name="page39" id="page39"></a>gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing
+old is growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, discovers.
+As it passed from its fiery and volcanic youth to
+its staider and soberer middle age, a solid crust began to
+form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface. The aqueous
+vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated
+mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now
+hardened shell. Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into
+two or three main bodies that sank into hollows of the
+viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic, Pacific, and the
+Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the
+cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to
+baby mountain ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough
+draughts of the still very vague and sketchy continents.
+The world grew daily more complex and more diverse; it
+progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from
+the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as
+aforesaid, with delightful regularity.</p>
+
+<p>At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands,
+peninsulas and islands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains,
+were wrought out by internal or external energies on the
+crust thus generally fashioned. Evaporation from the
+oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms; the
+water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys
+and river basins; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into
+streams, streams into prim&aelig;val Niles, and Amazons, and
+Mississippis. Volcanic forces uplifted here an Alpine chain,
+or depressed there a deep-sea hollow. Sediment washed
+from the hills and plains, or formed from countless skeletons
+of marine creatures, gathered on the sinking bed of the
+ocean as soft ooze, or crumbling sand, or thick mud, or
+gravel and conglomerate. Now upheaved into an elevated
+table-land, now slowly carved again by rain and rill into
+valley and watershed, and now worn down once more into
+<a name="page40" id="page40"></a>the mere degraded stump of a plateau, the crust underwent
+innumerable changes, but almost all of them exactly the
+same in kind, and mostly in degree, as those we still see at
+work imperceptibly in the world around us. Rain washing
+down the soil; weather crumbling the solid rock; waves
+dashing at the foot of the cliffs; rivers forming deltas at their
+barred mouths; shingle gathering on the low spits; floods
+sweeping before them the countryside; ice grinding ceaselessly
+at the mountain top; peat filling up the shallow
+lake&mdash;these are the chief factors which have gone to make
+the physical world as we now actually know it. Land and
+sea, coast and contour, hill and valley, dale and gorge,
+earth-sculpture generally&mdash;all are due to the ceaseless
+interaction of these separately small and unnoticeable
+causes, aided or retarded by the slow effects of elevation or
+depression from the earth's shrinkage towards its own
+centre. Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is
+what it is, not by virtue of a single sudden creative act,
+nor by virtue of successive terrible and recurrent cataclysms,
+but by virtue of the slow continuous action of
+causes still always equally operative.</p>
+
+<p>Evolution in geology leads up naturally to evolution in
+the science of life. If the world itself grew, why not also
+the animals and plants that inhabit it? Already in the
+eager active eighteenth century this obvious idea had struck
+in the germ a large number of zoologists and botanists, and
+in the hands of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin it took
+form as a distinct and elaborate system of organic evolution.
+Buffon had been the first to hint at the truth; but Buffon was
+an eminently respectable nobleman in the dubious days of
+the tottering monarchy, and he did not care personally for
+the Bastille, viewed as a place of permanent residence. In
+Louis Quinze's France, indeed, as things then went, a man
+who offended the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne was prone to
+<a name="page41" id="page41"></a>find himself shortly ensconced in free quarters, and kept
+there for the term of his natural existence without expense
+to his heirs or executors. So Buffon did not venture to
+say outright that he thought all animals and plants were
+descended one from the other with slight modifications;
+that would have been wicked, and the Sorbonne would have
+proved its wickedness to him in a most conclusive fashion
+by promptly getting him imprisoned or silenced. It is so
+easy to confute your opponent when you are a hundred
+strong and he is one weak unit. Buffon merely said, therefore,
+that if we didn't know the contrary to be the case by
+sure warrant, we might easily have concluded (so fallible
+is our reason) that animals always varied slightly, and that
+such variations, indefinitely accumulated, would suffice to
+account for almost any amount of ultimate difference. A
+donkey might thus have grown into a horse, and a bird
+might have developed from a primitive lizard. Only we know
+it was quite otherwise! A quiet hint from Buffon was as
+good as a declaration from many less knowing or suggestive
+people. All over Europe, the wise took Buffon's hint for
+what he meant it; and the unwise blandly passed it by as
+a mere passing little foolish vagary of that great ironical
+writer and thinker.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of his grandson, was
+no fool; on the contrary, he was the most far-sighted man
+of his day in England; he saw at once what Buffon was
+driving at; and he worked out 'Mr. Buffon's' half-concealed
+hint to all its natural and legitimate conclusions. The
+great Count was always plain Mr. Buffon to his English
+contemporary. Life, said Erasmus Darwin nearly a century
+since, began in very minute marine forms, which gradually
+acquired fresh powers and larger bodies, so as imperceptibly
+to transform themselves into different creatures. Man, he
+remarked, anticipating his descendant, takes rabbits or
+<a name="page42" id="page42"></a>pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by immensely
+changing their shapes and colours. If man can make
+a pouter or a fantail out of the common runt, if he can produce
+a piebald lop-ear from the brown wild rabbit, if he
+can transform Dorkings into Black Spanish, why cannot
+Nature, with longer time to work in, and endless lives to
+try with, produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals out
+of one single common ancestor? It was a bold idea of the
+Lichfield doctor&mdash;bold, at least, for the times he lived in&mdash;when
+Sam Johnson was held a mighty sage, and physical
+speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangerous
+touch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold
+folk, and had the courage of their opinions more than
+most men. So even in Lichfield, cathedral city as it was,
+and in the politely somnolent eighteenth century, Erasmus
+Darwin ventured to point out the probability that quadrupeds,
+birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent
+descendants of a single similar original form, and even that
+'one and the same kind of living filament is, and has been,
+the cause of organic life.'</p>
+
+<p>The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always
+laughed at all reformers. It said Dr. Darwin was very
+clever, but really a most eccentric man. His 'Temple of
+Nature,' now, and his 'Botanic Garden,' were vastly fine
+and charming poems&mdash;those sweet lines, you know, about
+poor Eliza!&mdash;but his zoological theories were built of course
+upon a most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose,
+no sensible person could ever take the doctor seriously. A
+freak of genius&mdash;nothing more; a mere desire to seem
+clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig of
+time has brought around with it! By a strange irony of
+fate, those admired verses are now almost entirely forgotten;
+poor Eliza has survived only as our awful example
+of artificial pathos; and the zoological heresies, at which
+<a name="page43" id="page43"></a>the eighteenth century shrugged its fat shoulders and
+dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to be
+the chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological
+science.</p>
+
+<p>In the first year of the present century, Lamarck
+followed Erasmus Darwin's lead with an open avowal that
+in his belief all animals and plants were really descended
+from one or a few common ancestors. He held that
+organisms were just as much the result of law, not of
+miraculous interposition, as suns and worlds and all the
+natural phenomena around us generally. He saw that
+what naturalists call a species differs from what naturalists
+call a variety, merely in the way of being a little more
+distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congeners
+elsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms
+by which in many cases one species after another merges
+into the next on either side of it. He observed the analogy
+between the modifications induced by man and the modifications
+induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-going
+and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient
+opinion which Society still believes to have been due to
+the works of Charles Darwin. In one point only, a minor
+point to outsiders, though a point of cardinal importance
+to the inner brotherhood of evolutionism, he did not anticipate
+his more famous successor. He thought organic
+evolution was wholly due to the direct action of surrounding
+circumstances, to the intercrossing of existing forms,
+and above all to the actual efforts of animals themselves.
+In other words, he had not discovered natural selection, the
+cardinal idea of Charles Darwin's epoch-making book.
+For him, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant
+reaching up to the boughs of trees; the monkey had
+acquired its opposable thumb by constant grasping at the
+neighbouring branches; and the serpent had acquired its
+<a name="page44" id="page44"></a>sinuous shape by constant wriggling through the grass of
+the meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by
+his suggestive hint of survival of the fittest, and in so far,
+but in so far alone, he became the real father of modern
+biological evolutionism.</p>
+
+<p>From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles
+Darwin himself published his wonderful 'Origin of Species,'
+this idea that plants and animals might really have grown,
+instead of having been made all of a piece, kept brewing
+everywhere in the minds and brains of scientific thinkers.
+The notions which to the outside public were startlingly
+new when Darwin's book took the world by storm, were
+old indeed to the thinkers and workers who had long been
+familiar with the principle of descent with modification
+and the speculations of the Lichfield doctor or the Paris
+philosopher. Long before Darwin wrote his great work,
+Herbert Spencer had put forth in plain language every
+idea which the drawing-room biologists attributed to Darwin.
+The supporters of the development hypothesis, he said seven
+years earlier&mdash;yes, he called it the 'development hypothesis'
+in so many words&mdash;'can show that modification has
+effected and is effecting great changes in all organisms,
+subject to modifying influences.' They can show, he
+goes on (if I may venture to condense so great a thinker),
+that any existing plant or animal, placed under new conditions,
+begins to undergo adaptive changes of form and
+structure; that in successive generations these changes
+continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new
+habits; that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals
+changes of the sort habitually occur; that the differences
+thus caused, as for example in dogs, are often
+greater than those on which species in the wild state are
+founded, and that throughout all organic nature there <i>is</i>
+at work a modifying influence of the same sort as that
+<a name="page45" id="page45"></a>which they believed to have caused the differences of
+species&mdash;'an influence which, to all appearance, would
+produce in the millions of years and under the great variety
+of conditions which geological records imply, any amount
+of change.' What is this but pure Darwinism, as the
+drawing-room philosopher still understands the word?
+And yet it was written seven years before Darwin published
+the 'Origin of Species.'</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of
+Darwinians before Darwin. Here are a few of them&mdash;Buffon,
+Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates, Wallace, Lecoq,
+Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert
+Spencer. Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself
+discovered anything. As well say that Luther made the
+German Reformation, that Lionardo made the Italian
+Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution,
+as say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin
+alone, made the evolutionary movement, even in the
+restricted field of life only. A thousand predecessors
+worked up towards him; a thousand contemporaries helped
+to diffuse and to confirm his various principles.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea
+the special notion of natural selection. That is to say,
+he pointed out that while plants and animals vary perpetually
+and vary indefinitely, all the varieties so produced are
+not equally adapted to the circumstances of the species.
+If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, because
+every point of disadvantage tells against the individual in
+the struggle for life. If the variation is a good one, it
+tends to persist, because every point of advantage similarly
+tells in the individual's favour in that ceaseless and viewless
+battle. It was this addition to the evolutionary concept,
+fortified by Darwin's powerful advocacy of the general principle
+of descent with modification, that won over the whole
+<a name="page46" id="page46"></a>world to the 'Darwinian theory.' Before Darwin, many
+men of science were evolutionists: after Darwin, all men of
+science became so at once, and the rest of the world is
+rapidly preparing to follow their leadership.</p>
+
+<p>As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly
+this&mdash;that plants and animals have all a natural origin
+from a single primitive living creature, which itself was
+the product of light and heat acting on the special chemical
+constituents of an ancient ocean. Starting from that single
+early form, they have gone on developing ever since, from
+the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more
+varied shapes, till at last they have reached their present
+enormous variety of tree, and shrub, and herb, and seaweed,
+of beast, and bird, and fish, and creeping insect. Evolution
+throughout has been one and continuous, from nebula to
+sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly-speck to man
+or elephant. So at least evolutionists say&mdash;and of course
+they ought to know most about it.</p>
+
+<p>But evolution, according to the evolutionists, does not
+even stop here. Psychology as well as biology has also its
+evolutionary explanation: mind is concerned as truly as
+matter. If the bodies of animals are evolved, their minds
+must be evolved likewise. Herbert Spencer and his
+followers have been mainly instrumental in elucidating
+this aspect of the case. They have shown, or they have
+tried to show (for I don't want to dogmatise on the subject),
+how mind is gradually built up from the simplest raw
+elements of sense and feeling; how emotions and intellect
+slowly arise; how the action of the environment on the
+organism begets a nervous system of ever greater and
+greater complexity, culminating at last in the brain of a
+Newton, a Shakespeare, or a Mendelssohn. Step by step,
+nerves have built themselves up out of the soft tissues as
+channels of communication between part and part. Sense-organs
+<a name="page47" id="page47"></a>of extreme simplicity have first been formed on the
+outside of the body, where it comes most into contact with
+external nature. Use and wont have fashioned them
+through long ages into organs of taste and smell and touch;
+pigment spots, sensitive to light or shade, have grown by
+infinite gradations into the human eye or into the myriad
+facets of bee and beetle; tremulous nerve-ends, responsive
+sympathetically to waves of sound, have tuned themselves
+at last into a perfect gamut in the developed ear of men
+and mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipient centres
+have grown up in the brain, so that the coloured picture
+flashed by an external scene upon the eye is telegraphed
+from the sensitive mirror of the retina, through the many-stranded
+cable of the optic nerve, straight up to the appropriate
+headquarters in the thinking brain. Stage by stage
+the continuous process has gone on unceasingly, from the
+jelly-fish with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinite
+steps of progression, induced by ever-widening intercourse
+with the outer world, to the final outcome in the senses
+and the emotions, the intellect and the will, of civilised
+man. Mind begins as a vague consciousness of touch or
+pressure on the part of some primitive, shapeless, soft
+creature: it ends as an organised and co-ordinated reflection
+of the entire physical and psychical universe on the part
+of a great cosmical philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists
+take to politics. Having shown us entirely to their own
+satisfaction the growth of suns, and systems, and worlds,
+and continents, and oceans, and plants, and animals, and
+minds, they proceed to show us the exactly analogous and
+parallel growth of communities, and nations, and languages,
+and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and
+literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock,
+and others have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute
+aspect derived from his early ape-like ancestors, learned by
+<a name="page48" id="page48"></a>infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufacturing
+stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earliest beginnings
+of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became
+the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and
+dry leaves among the tertiary forests. By his nightly
+camp-fire he beat out gradually his excited gesture-language
+and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, the horse, the
+cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings
+in the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the
+bread-fruit, and the coco-nut. He picked and improved
+the seeds of his wild cereals till he made himself from
+grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, his Indian
+corn. In time, he dug out ore from mines, and learnt the
+use first of gold, next of silver, then of copper, tin, bronze,
+and iron. Side by side with these long secular changes,
+he evolved the family, communal or patriarchal, polygamic
+or monogamous. He built the hut, the house, and the
+palace. He clothed or adorned himself first in skins and
+leaves and feathers; next in woven wool and fibre; last of
+all in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every
+day. He gathered into hordes, tribes, and nations; he
+chose himself a king, gave himself laws, and built up great
+empires in Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru. He raised
+him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing
+grew into hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged,
+by imperceptible steps, into alphabetic symbols, the raw
+material of the art of printing. His dug-out canoe culminates
+in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his boomerang
+and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling
+pipkin and his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his
+picture-message in the telephone and the Atlantic cable.
+Here, where the course of evolution has really been most
+marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctly historical;
+so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian, French,
+and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth
+<a name="page49" id="page49"></a>of the trireme, the 'Great Harry,' the 'Victory,' and the 'Minotaur'
+from the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>The grand conception of the uniform origin and development
+of all things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us
+in the one word evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles
+Darwin nor to any other single thinker. It is the joint product
+of innumerable workers, all working up, though some of
+them unconsciously, towards a grand final unified philosophy
+of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the
+Herschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies;
+in biology, Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and
+Spencer; in psychology, Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and
+Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor, Lubbock, and De
+Mortillet&mdash;these have been the chief evolutionary teachers
+and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself,
+and the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as
+a system of philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we
+owe to one man alone&mdash;Herbert Spencer. Many other minds&mdash;from
+Galileo and Copernicus, from Kepler and Newton,
+from Linn&aelig;us and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and
+Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius&mdash;had
+been piling together the vast collection of raw
+material from which that great and stately superstructure
+was to be finally edified. But the architect who placed each
+block in its proper niche, who planned and designed the
+whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the
+rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle,
+was the author of the 'System of Synthetic Philosophy,'
+and none other. It is a strange proof of how little people
+know about their own ideas, that among the thousands who
+talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. are probably
+aware that both word and conception are alike due to
+the commanding intelligence and vast generalising power
+of Herbert Spencer.<a name="page50" id="page50"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="part4" id="part4"><i>STRICTLY INCOG.</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Among the reefs of rock upon the Australian coast, an
+explorer's dredge often brings up to the surface some
+tangled tresses of reddish seaweed, which, when placed for
+a while in a bucket of water, begin slowly to uncoil themselves
+as if endowed with animal life, and finally to swim
+about with a gentle tremulous motion in a mute inquiring
+way from side to side of the pail that contains them.
+Looked at closely with an attentive eye, the complex
+moving mass gradually resolves itself into two parts: one a
+ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a
+strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating
+the weed itself in form and colour. When removed
+from the water, this queer pipe-fish proves in general outline
+somewhat to resemble the well-known hippocampus or
+sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a
+mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny
+domestic museums. But the Australian species, instead of
+merely mimicking the knight on a chess-board, looks rather
+like a hippocampus in the most advanced stage of lunacy,
+with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spines flattened
+out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly indistinguishable
+in hue and shape from the fucus round which the
+creature clings for support with its prehensile tail. Only a
+rude and shapeless rough draught of a head, vaguely horse-like
+in contour, and inconspicuously provided with an unobtrusive
+snout and a pair of very unnoticeable eyes, at all
+<a name="page51" id="page51"></a>suggests to the most microscopic observer its animal nature.
+Taken as a whole, nobody could at first sight distinguish
+it in any way from the waving weed among which it
+vegetates.</p>
+
+<p>Clearly, this curious Australian cousin of the Mediterranean
+sea-horses has acquired so marvellous a resemblance
+to a bit of fucus in order to deceive the eyes of its ever-watchful
+enemies, and to become indistinguishable from
+the uneatable weed whose colour and form it so surprisingly
+imitates. Protective resemblances of the sort are extremely
+common among the pipe-fish family, and the reason why
+they should be so is no doubt sufficiently obvious at first
+sight to any reflecting mind&mdash;such, for example, as the
+intelligent reader's. Pipe-fish, as everybody knows, are far
+from giddy. They do not swim in the vortex of piscine
+dissipation. Being mostly small and defenceless creatures,
+lurking among the marine vegetation of the shoals and reefs,
+they are usually accustomed to cling for support by their
+snake-like tails to the stalks or leaves of those submerged
+forests. The omniscient schoolboy must often have watched
+in aquariums the habits and manners of the common sea-horses,
+twisted together by their long thin bodies into one
+inextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly
+with a treble serpentine coil to some projecting branch of
+coralline or of quivering sea-wrack. Bad swimmers by
+nature, utterly unarmed, and wholly undefended by protective
+mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fight nor run
+away: and therefore they depend entirely for their lives
+upon their peculiar skulking and lurking habits. Their one
+mode of defence is not to show themselves; discretion is
+the better part of their valour; they hide as much as
+possible among the thickest seaweed, and trust to Providence
+to escape observation.</p>
+
+<p>Now, with any animals thus constituted, cowards by
+<a name="page52" id="page52"></a>hereditary predilection, it must necessarily happen that the
+more brightly coloured or obtrusive individuals will most
+readily be spotted and most unceremoniously devoured by
+their sharp-sighted foes, the predatory fishes. On the other
+hand, just in proportion as any particular pipe-fish happens
+to display any chance resemblance in colour or appearance
+to the special seaweed in whose folds it lurks, to that extent
+will it be likely to escape detection, and to hand on its
+peculiarities to its future descendants. A long-continued
+course of the simple process thus roughly described must
+of necessity result at last in the elimination of all the most
+conspicuous pipe-fish, and the survival of all those unobtrusive
+and retiring individuals which in any respect
+happen to resemble the fucus or coralline among which
+they dwell. Hence, in many places, various kinds of pipe-fish
+exhibit an extraordinary amount of imitative likeness to
+the sargasso or seaweed to whose tags they cling; and in the
+three most highly developed Australian species the likeness
+becomes so ridiculously close that it is with difficulty one
+can persuade oneself one is really and truly looking at a
+fish, and not at a piece of strangely animated and locomotive
+fucus.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the playful pipe-fish is by no means alone in
+his assumption of so neat and effective a disguise. Protective
+resemblances of just the same sort as that thus
+exhibited by this extraordinary little creature are common
+throughout the whole range of nature; instances are to be
+found in abundance, not only among beasts, birds, reptiles,
+and fishes, but even among caterpillars, butterflies, and
+spiders, of species which preserve the strictest incognito.
+Everywhere in the world, animals and plants are perpetually
+masquerading in various assumed characters;
+and sometimes their make-up is so exceedingly good
+as to take in for a while not merely the uninstructed
+<a name="page53" id="page53"></a>ordinary observer, but even the scientific and systematic
+naturalist.</p>
+
+<p>A few selected instances of such successful masquerading
+will perhaps best serve to introduce the general principles
+upon which all animal mimicry ultimately depends. Indeed,
+naturalists of late years have been largely employed
+in fishing up examples from the ends of the earth and from
+the depths of the sea for the elucidation of this very subject.
+There is a certain butterfly in the islands of the Malay
+Archipelago (its learned name, if anybody wishes to be
+formally introduced, is <i>Kallima paralekta</i>) which always
+rests among dead or dry leaves, and has itself leaf-like
+wings, all spotted over at intervals with wee speckles to
+imitate the tiny spots of fungi on the foliage it resembles.
+The well-known stick and leaf insects from the same rich
+neighbourhood in like manner exactly mimic the twigs
+and leaves of the forest among which they lurk: some of
+them look for all the world like little bits of walking
+bamboo, while others appear in all varieties of hue, as if
+opening buds and full-blown leaves and pieces of yellow
+foliage sprinkled with the tints and moulds of decay had of
+a sudden raised themselves erect upon six legs, and begun
+incontinently to perambulate the Malayan woodlands like
+vegetable Frankensteins in all their glory. The larva of
+one such deceptive insect, observed in Nicaragua by sharp-eyed
+Mr. Belt, appeared at first sight like a mere fragment of
+the moss on which it rested, its body being all prolonged into
+little thread-like green filaments, precisely imitating the
+foliage around it. Once more, there are common flies which
+secure protection for themselves by growing into the counterfeit
+presentment of wasps or hornets, and so obtaining
+immunity from the attacks of birds or animals. Many of
+these curiously mimetic insects are banded with yellow and
+black in the very image of their stinging originals, and
+<a name="page54" id="page54"></a>have their tails sharpened, <i>in terrorem</i>, into a pretended
+sting, to give point and verisimilitude to the deceptive
+resemblance. More curious still, certain South American
+butterflies of a perfectly inoffensive and edible family mimic
+in every spot and line of colour sundry other butterflies of an
+utterly unrelated and fundamentally dissimilar type, but of
+so disagreeable a taste as never to be eaten by birds or
+lizards. The origin of these curious resemblances I shall
+endeavour to explain (after Messrs. Bates and Wallace) a
+little farther on: for the present it is enough to observe
+that the extraordinary resemblances thus produced have
+often deceived the very elect, and have caused experienced
+naturalists for a time to stick some deceptive specimen of a
+fly among the wasps and hornets, or some masquerading
+cricket into the midst of a cabinet full of saw-flies or
+ichneumons.</p>
+
+<p>Let us look briefly at the other instances of protective
+coloration in nature generally which lead up to these final
+bizarre exemplifications of the masquerading tendency.</p>
+
+<p>Wherever all the world around is remarkably uniform
+in colour and appearance, all the animals, birds, and insects
+alike necessarily disguise themselves in its prevailing tint
+to escape observation. It does not matter in the least
+whether they are predatory or defenceless, the hunters or
+the hunted: if they are to escape destruction or starvation,
+as the case may be, they must assume the hue of all the
+rest of nature about them. In the arctic snows, for
+example, all animals, without exception, must needs be
+snow-white. The polar bear, if he were brown or black,
+would immediately be observed among the unvaried ice-fields
+by his expected prey, and could never get a chance of
+approaching his quarry unperceived at close quarters. On
+the other hand, the arctic hare must equally be dressed in
+a snow-white coat, or the arctic fox would too readily discover
+<a name="page55" id="page55"></a>him and pounce down upon him off-hand; while,
+conversely, the fox himself, if red or brown, could never
+creep upon the unwary hare without previous detection,
+which would defeat his purpose. For this reason, the
+ptarmigan and the willow grouse become as white in winter
+as the vast snow-fields under which they burrow; the
+ermine changes his dusky summer coat for the expensive
+wintry suit beloved of British Themis; the snow-bunting
+acquires his milk-white plumage; and even the weasel
+assimilates himself more or less in hue to the unvarying
+garb of arctic nature. To be out of the fashion is there
+quite literally to be out of the world: no half-measures will
+suit the stern decree of polar biology; strict compliance
+with the law of winter change is absolutely necessary to
+success in the struggle for existence.</p>
+
+<p>Now, how has this curious uniformity of dress in arctic
+animals been brought about? Why, simply by that unyielding
+principle of Nature which condemns the less adapted
+for ever to extinction, and exalts the better adapted to the
+high places of her hierarchy in their stead. The ptarmigan
+and the snow-buntings that look most like the snow have
+for ages been least likely to attract the unfavourable attention
+of arctic fox or prowling ermine; the fox or ermine
+that came most silently and most unperceived across the
+shifting drifts has been most likely to steal unawares upon
+the heedless flocks of ptarmigan and snow-bunting. In
+the one case protective colouring preserves the animal from
+himself being devoured; in the other case it enables him
+the more easily to devour others. And since 'Eat or be
+eaten' is the shrill sentence of Nature upon all animal life,
+the final result is the unbroken whiteness of the arctic
+fauna in all its developments of fur or feather.</p>
+
+<p>Where the colouring of nature is absolutely uniform, as
+among the arctic snows or the chilly mountain tops, the
+<a name="page56" id="page56"></a>colouring of the animals is uniform too. Where it is
+slightly diversified from point to point, as in the sands of
+the desert, the animals that imitate it are speckled or
+diversified with various soft neutral tints. All the birds,
+reptiles, and insects of Sahara, says Canon Tristram, copy
+closely the grey or isabelline colour of the boundless sands
+that stretch around them. Lord George Campbell, in his
+amusing 'Log Letters from the &quot;Challenger,&quot;' mentions a
+butterfly on the shore at Amboyna which looked exactly
+like a bit of the beach, until it spread its wings and
+fluttered away gaily to leeward. Soles and other flat-fish
+similarly resemble the sands or banks on which they lie,
+and accommodate themselves specifically to the particular
+colour of their special bottom. Thus the flounder imitates
+the muddy bars at the mouths of rivers, where he loves to
+half bury himself in the congenial ooze; the sole, who
+rather affects clean hard sand-banks, is simply sandy and
+speckled with grey; the plaice, who goes in by preference for
+a bed of mixed pebbles, has red and yellow spots scattered
+up and down irregularly among the brown, to look as much
+as possible like agates and carnelians: the brill, who hugs
+a still rougher ledge, has gone so far as to acquire raised
+lumps or tubercles on his upper surface, which make him
+seem like a mere bit of the shingle-strewn rock on which
+he reposes. In short, where the environment is most uniform
+the colouring follows suit: just in proportion as the
+environment varies from place to place, the colouring must
+vary in order to simulate it. There is a deep biological joy
+in the term 'environment'; it almost rivals the well-known
+consolatory properties of that sweet word 'Mesopotamia.'
+'Surroundings,' perhaps, would equally well express the
+meaning, but then, as Mr. Wordsworth justly observes,
+'the difference to me!'</p>
+
+<p>Between England and the West Indies, about the time
+<a name="page57" id="page57"></a>when one begins to recover from the first bout of sea-sickness,
+we come upon a certain sluggish tract of ocean, uninvaded
+by either Gulf Stream or arctic current, but slowly stagnating
+in a sort of endless eddy of its own, and known to
+sailors and books of physical geography as the Sargasso Sea.
+The sargasso or floating seaweed from which it takes its
+poetical name is a pretty yellow rootless alga, swimming
+in vast quantities on the surface of the water, and covered
+with tiny bladder-like bodies which at first sight might
+easily be mistaken for amber berries. If you drop a bucket
+over the ship's side and pull up a tangled mass of this
+beautiful seaweed, it will seem at first to be all plant alike;
+but, when you come to examine its tangles closely, you will
+find that it simply swarms with tiny crabs, fishes, and
+shrimps, all coloured so precisely to shade that they look
+exactly like the sargasso itself. Here the colour about is
+less uniform than in the arctic snows, but, so far as the
+sargasso-haunting animals are concerned, it comes pretty
+much to the same thing. The floating mass of weed is
+their whole world, and they have had to accommodate
+themselves to its tawny hue under pain of death, immediate
+and violent.</p>
+
+<p>Caterpillars and butterflies often show us a further step
+in advance in the direction of minute imitation of ordinary
+surroundings. Dr. Weismann has published a very long
+and learned memoir, fraught with the best German erudition
+and prolixity, upon this highly interesting and obscure
+subject. As English readers, however, not unnaturally object
+to trudging through a stout volume on the larva of the sphinx
+moth, conceived in the spirit of those patriarchal ages of
+Hilpa and Shalum, when man lived to nine hundred and
+ninety-nine years, and devoted a stray century or so without
+stint to the work of education, I shall not refer them to Dr.
+Weismann's original treatise, as well translated and still
+<a name="page58" id="page58"></a>further enlarged by Mr. Raphael Meldola, but will present
+them instead with a brief <i>r&eacute;sum&eacute;</i>, boiled down and condensed
+into a patent royal elixir of learning. Your caterpillar,
+then, runs many serious risks in early life from the
+annoying persistence of sundry evil-disposed birds, who
+insist at inconvenient times in picking him off the leaves of
+gooseberry bushes and other his chosen places of residence.
+His infant mortality, indeed, is something simply appalling,
+and it is only by laying the eggs that produce him in
+enormous quantities that his fond mother the butterfly ever
+succeeds in rearing on an average two of her brood to
+replace the imago generation just departed. Accordingly,
+the caterpillar has been forced by adverse circumstances to
+assume the most ridiculous and impossible disguises, appearing
+now in the shape of a leaf or stem, now as a bundle of
+dark-green pine needles, and now again as a bud or flower,
+all for the innocent purpose of concealing his whereabouts
+from the inquisitive gaze of the birds his enemies.</p>
+
+<p>When the caterpillar lives on a plant like a grass, the
+ribs or veins of which run up and down longitudinally, he
+is usually striped or streaked with darker lines in the same
+direction as those on his native foliage. When, on the
+contrary, he lives upon broader leaves, provided with a
+midrib and branching veins, his stripes and streaks (not to
+be out of the fashion) run transversely and obliquely, at
+exactly the same angle as those of his wonted food-plant.
+Very often, if you take a green caterpillar of this sort away
+from his natural surroundings, you will be surprised at the
+conspicuousness of his pale lilac or mauve markings; surely,
+you will think to yourself, such very distinct variegation as
+that must betray him instantly to his watchful enemies.
+But no; if you replace him gently where you first found
+him, you will see that the lines exactly harmonise with the
+joints and shading of his native leaf: they are delicate
+<a name="page59" id="page59"></a>representations of the soft shadow cast by a rib or vein, and
+the local colour is precisely what a painter would have had
+to use in order to produce the corresponding effect. The
+shadow of yellowish green is, of course, always purplish
+or lilac. It may at first sight seem surprising that a
+caterpillar should possess so much artistic sense and dexterity;
+but then the penalty for bungling or inharmonious
+work is so very severe as necessarily to stimulate his imitative
+genius. Birds are for ever hunting him down among the
+green leaves, and only those caterpillars which effectually
+deceive them by their admirable imitations can ever hope
+to survive and become the butterflies who hand on their
+larval peculiarities to after ages. Need I add that the
+variations are, of course, unconscious, and that accident in
+the first place is ultimately answerable for each fresh step
+in the direction of still closer simulation?</p>
+
+<p>The geometric moths have brown caterpillars, which
+generally stand erect when at rest on the branches of trees
+and so resemble small twigs; and, in order that the resemblance
+may be the more striking, they are often covered with
+tiny warts which look like buds or knots upon the surface.
+The larva of that familiar and much-dreaded insect, the
+death's-head hawk-moth, feeds as a rule on the foliage of
+the potato, and its very varied colouring, as Sir John Lubbock
+has pointed out, so beautifully harmonises with the
+brown of the earth, the yellow and green of the leaves,
+and the faint purplish blue of the lurid flowers, that it can
+only be distinguished when the eye happens accidentally to
+focus itself exactly upon the spot occupied by the
+unobtrusive caterpillar. Other larv&aelig; which frequent
+pine trees have their bodies covered with tufts of green hairs
+that serve to imitate the peculiar pine foliage. One queer
+little caterpillar, which lives upon the hoary foliage of
+the sea-buckthorn, has a grey-green body, just like the
+<a name="page60" id="page60"></a>buckthorn leaves, relieved by a very conspicuous red spot
+which really represents in size and colour one of the berries
+that grow around it. Finally the larva of the elephant
+hawk-moth, which grows to a very large size, has a pair of
+huge spots that seem like great eyes; and direct experiment
+establishes the fact that small birds mistake it for a young
+snake, and stand in terrible awe of it accordingly, though
+it is in reality a perfectly harmless insect, and also, as I
+am credibly informed (for I cannot speak upon the point
+from personal experience), a very tasty and well-flavoured
+insect, and 'quite good to eat' too, says an eminent
+authority. One of these big snake-like caterpillars once
+frightened Mr. Bates himself on the banks of the Amazon.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I know that cantankerous person, the universal
+objector, has all along been bursting to interrupt me and
+declare that he himself frequently finds no end of caterpillars,
+and has not the slightest difficulty at all in distinguishing
+them with the naked eye from the leaves and
+plants among which they are lurking. But observe how
+promptly we crush and demolish this very inconvenient
+and disconcerting critic. The caterpillars <i>he</i> finds are
+almost all hairy ones, very conspicuous and easy to discover&mdash;'woolly
+bears,' and such like common and unclean creatures&mdash;and
+the reason they take no pains to conceal themselves
+from his unobservant eyes is simply this: nobody on
+earth wants to discover them. For either they are protectively
+encased in horrid hairs, which get down your
+throat and choke you and bother you (I speak as a bird,
+from the point of view of a confirmed caterpillar eater), or
+else they are bitter and nasty to the taste, like the larva of
+the spurge moth and the machaon butterfly. These are
+the ordinary brown and red and banded caterpillars that
+the critical objector finds in hundreds on his peregrinations
+about his own garden&mdash;commonplace things which the
+<a name="page61" id="page61"></a>experienced naturalist has long since got utterly tired of.
+But has your rash objector ever lighted upon that rare larva
+which lives among the periwinkles, and exactly imitates a
+periwinkle petal? Has he ever discovered those deceptive
+creatures which pretend for all the world to be leaves of
+lady's-bedstraw, or dress themselves up as flowers of
+buttonweed? Has he ever hit upon those immoral caterpillars
+which wriggle through life upon the false pretence
+that they are only the shadows of projecting ribs on the
+under surface of a full-grown lime leaf? No, not he; he
+passes them all by without one single glance of recognition;
+and when the painstaking naturalist who has hunted them
+every one down with lens and butterfly net ventures tentatively
+to describe their personal appearance, he comes up
+smiling with his great russet woolly bear comfortably nestling
+upon a green cabbage leaf, and asks you in a voice of
+triumphant demonstration, where is the trace of concealment
+or disguise in that amiable but very inedible insect?
+Go to, Sir Critic, I will have none of you; I only use you
+for a metaphorical marionette to set up and knock down
+again, as Mr. Punch in the street show knocks down the
+policeman who comes to arrest him, and the grimy black
+personage of sulphurous antecedents who pops up with a
+fizz through the floor of his apartment.</p>
+
+<p>Queerer still than the caterpillars which pretend to be
+leaves or flowers for the sake of protection are those truly
+diabolical and perfidious Brazilian spiders which, as Mr.
+Bates observed, are brilliantly coloured with crimson and
+purple, but 'double themselves up at the base of leaf-stalks,
+so as to resemble flower buds, and thus deceive the insects
+upon which they prey.' There is something hideously
+wicked and cruel in this lowest depth of imitative infamy.
+A flower-bud is something so innocent and childlike; and
+to disguise oneself as such for purposes of murder and
+<a name="page62" id="page62"></a>rapine argues the final abyss of arachnoid perfidy. It
+reminds one of that charming and amiable young lady in
+Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dynamiter,' who amused
+herself in moments of temporary gaiety by blowing up
+inhabited houses, inmates and all, out of pure lightness
+of heart and girlish frivolity. An Indian mantis or praying
+insect, a little less wicked, though no less cruel than the
+spiders, deceives the flies who come to his arms under the
+false pretence of being a quiet leaf, upon which they may
+light in safety for rest and refreshment. Yet another
+abandoned member of the same family, relying boldly upon
+the resources of tropical nature, gets itself up as a complete
+orchid, the head and fangs being moulded in the exact image
+of the beautiful blossom, and the arms folding treacherously
+around the unhappy insect which ventures to seek
+for honey in its deceptive jaws.</p>
+
+<p>Happily, however, the tyrants and murderers do not
+always have things all their own way. Sometimes the inoffensive
+prey turn the tables upon their torturers with
+distinguished success. For example, Mr. Wallace noticed
+a kind of sand-wasp, in Borneo, much given to devouring
+crickets; but there was one species of cricket which exactly
+reproduced the features of the sand-wasps, and mixed among
+them on equal terms without fear of detection. Mr. Belt
+saw a green leaf-like locust in Nicaragua, overrun by
+foraging ants in search of meat for dinner, but remaining
+perfectly motionless all the time, and evidently mistaken
+by the hungry foragers for a real piece of the foliage it
+mimicked. So thoroughly did this innocent locust understand
+the necessity for remaining still, and pretending to
+be a leaf under all advances, that even when Mr. Belt took
+it up in his hands it never budged an inch, but strenuously
+preserved its rigid leaf-like attitude. As other insects
+'sham dead,' this ingenious creature shammed vegetable.<a name="page63" id="page63"></a></p>
+
+<p>In order to understand how cases like these begin to
+arise, we must remember that first of all they start of
+necessity from very slight and indefinite resemblances,
+which succeed as it were by accident in occasionally eluding
+the vigilance of enemies. Thus, there are stick insects
+which only look like long round cylinders, not obviously
+stick-shaped, but rudely resembling a bit of wood in outline
+only. These imperfectly mimetic insects may often obtain
+a casual immunity from attack by being mistaken for a
+twig by birds or lizards. There are others, again, in which
+natural selection has gone a step further, so as to produce
+upon their bodies bark-like colouring and rough patches
+which imitate knots, wrinkles, and leaf-buds. In these
+cases the protection given is far more marked, and the
+chances of detection are proportionately lessened. But
+sharp-eyed birds, with senses quickened by hunger, the
+true mother of invention, must learn at last to pierce such
+flimsy disguises, and suspect a stick insect in the most
+innocent-looking and apparently rigid twigs. The final
+step, therefore, consists in the production of that extraordinary
+actor, the <i>Xeroxylus laceratus</i>, whose formidable
+name means no more than 'ragged dry-stick,' and which
+really mimics down to the minutest particular a broken
+twig, overgrown with mosses, liverworts, and lichens.</p>
+
+<p>Take, on the other hand, the well-known case of that
+predaceous mantis which exactly imitates the white ants,
+and, mixing with them like one of their own horde, quietly
+devours a stray fat termite or so, from time to time, as
+occasion offers. Here we must suppose that the ancestral
+mantis happened to be somewhat paler and smaller than
+most of its fellow-tribesmen, and so at times managed unobserved
+to mingle with the white ants, especially in the
+shade or under a dusky sky, much to the advantage of its
+own appetite. But the termites would soon begin to observe
+<a name="page64" id="page64"></a>the visits of their suspicious friend, and to note their
+coincidence with the frequent mysterious disappearance of
+a fellow-townswoman, evaporated into space, like the missing
+young women in neat cloth jackets who periodically
+vanish from the London suburbs. In proportion as their
+reasonable suspicions increased, the termites would carefully
+avoid all doubtful looking mantises; but, at the same
+time, they would only succeed in making the mantises
+which survived their inquisition grow more and more closely
+to resemble the termite pattern in all particulars. For
+any mantis which happened to come a little nearer the
+white ants in hue or shape would thereby be enabled to
+make a more secure meal upon his unfortunate victims;
+and so the very vigilance which the ants exerted against
+his vile deception would itself react in time against their
+own kind, by leaving only the most ruthless and indistinguishable
+of their foes to become the parents of future
+generations of mantises.</p>
+
+<p>Once more, the beetles and flies of Central America
+must have learned by experience to get out of the way of
+the nimble Central American lizards with great agility,
+cunning, and alertness. But green lizards are less easy to
+notice beforehand than brown or red ones; and so the
+lizards of tropical countries are almost always bright green,
+with complementary shades of yellow, grey, and purple, just
+to fit them in with the foliage they lurk among. Everybody
+who has ever hunted the green tree-toads on the leaves
+of waterside plants on the Riviera must know how difficult
+it is to discriminate these brilliant leaf-coloured creatures
+from the almost identical background on which they rest.
+Now, just in proportion as the beetles and flies grow still
+more cautious, even the green lizards themselves fail to
+pick up a satisfactory livelihood; and so at last we get that
+most remarkable Nicaraguan form, decked all round with
+<a name="page65" id="page65"></a>leaf-like expansions, and looking so like the foliage on which
+it rests that no beetle on earth can possibly detect it. The
+more cunning you get your detectives, the more cunning do
+the thieves become to outwit them.</p>
+
+<p>Look, again, at the curious life-history of the flies which
+dwell as unbidden guests or social parasites in the nests
+and hives of wild honey-bees. These burglarious flies are
+belted and bearded in the very selfsame pattern as the
+bumble-bees themselves; but their larv&aelig; live upon the
+young grubs of the hive, and repay the unconscious
+hospitality of the busy workers by devouring the future
+hope of their unwilling hosts. Obviously, any fly which
+entered a bee-hive could only escape detection and extermination
+at the hands (or stings) of its outraged inhabitants,
+provided it so far resembled the real householders as to be
+mistaken at a first glance by the invaded community for one
+of its own numerous members. Thus any fly which showed
+the slightest superficial resemblance to a bee might at first
+be enabled to rob honey for a time with comparative
+impunity, and to lay its eggs among the cells of the helpless
+larv&aelig;. But when once the vile attempt was fairly
+discovered, the burglars could only escape fatal detection
+from generation to generation just in proportion as they
+more and more closely approximated to the shape and
+colour of the bees themselves. For, as Mr. Belt has well
+pointed out, while the mimicking species would become
+naturally more numerous from age to age, the senses of the
+mimicked species would grow sharper and sharper by constant
+practice in detecting and punishing the unwelcome
+intruders.</p>
+
+<p>It is only in external matters, however, that the appearance
+of such mimetic species can ever be altered. Their
+underlying points of structure and formative detail always
+show to the very end (if only one happens to observe them)<a name="page66" id="page66"></a>
+their proper place in a scientific classification. For instance,
+these same parasitic flies which so closely resemble bees in
+their shape and colour have only one pair of wings apiece,
+like all the rest of the fly order, while the bees of course
+have the full complement of two pairs, an upper and an
+under, possessed by them in common with all other well-conducted
+members of the hymenopterous family. So, too,
+there is a certain curious American insect, belonging to the
+very unsavoury tribe which supplies London lodging-houses
+with one of their most familiar entomological specimens;
+and this cleverly disguised little creature is banded and
+striped in every part exactly like a local hornet, for whom
+it evidently wishes itself to be mistaken. If you were
+travelling in the wilder parts of Colorado you would find a
+close resemblance to Buffalo Bill was no mean personal
+protection. Hornets, in fact, are insects to which birds and
+other insectivorous animals prefer to give a very wide berth,
+and the reason why they should be imitated by a defenceless
+beetle must be obvious to the intelligent student. But
+while the vibrating wing-cases of this deceptive masquerader
+are made to look as thin and hornet-like as possible,
+in all underlying points of structure any competent
+naturalist would see at once that the creature must really
+be classed among the noisome Hemiptera. I seldom
+trouble the public with a Greek or Latin name, but on this
+occasion I trust I may be pardoned for not indulging in all
+the ingenuous bluntness of the vernacular.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes this effective mimicry of stinging insects
+seems to be even consciously performed by the tiny actors.
+Many creatures, which do not themselves possess stings,
+nevertheless endeavour to frighten their enemies by
+assuming the characteristic hostile attitudes of wasps or
+hornets. Everybody in England must be well acquainted
+with those common British earwig-looking insects, popularly
+<a name="page67" id="page67"></a>known as the devil's coach-horses, which, when irritated or
+interfered with, cock up their tails behind them in the most
+aggressive fashion, exactly reproducing the threatening
+action of an angry scorpion. Now, as a matter of fact, the
+devil's coach-horse is quite harmless, but I have often seen,
+not only little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds,
+and shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude.
+So, too, the bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects
+got up in sedulous imitation of various species of wild bee,
+flit about and buzz angrily in the sunlight, quite after the
+fashion of the insects they mimic; and when disturbed
+they pretend to get excited, and seem as if they wished to
+fly in their assailant's face and roundly sting him. This
+curious instinct may be put side by side with the parallel
+instinct of shamming dead, possessed by many beetles and
+other small defenceless species.</p>
+
+<p>Certain beetles have also been modified so as exactly to
+imitate wasps; and in these cases the beetle waist, usually
+so solid, thick, and clumsy, grows as slender and graceful
+as if the insects had been supplied with corsets by a
+fashionable West End house. But the greatest refinement
+of all is perhaps that noticed in certain allied
+species which mimic bees, and which have acquired useless
+little tufts of hair on their hind shanks to represent
+the dilated and tufted pollen-gathering apparatus of the
+true bees.</p>
+
+<p>I have left to the last the most marvellous cases of
+mimicry of all&mdash;those noticed among South American
+butterflies by Mr. Bates, who found that certain edible
+kinds exactly resembled a handsome and conspicuous but
+bitter-tasted species 'in every shade and stripe of colour.'
+Several of these South American imitative insects long
+deceived the very entomologists; and it was only by a close
+inspection of their structural differences that the utter
+<a name="page68" id="page68"></a>distinctness of the mimickers and the mimicked was satisfactorily
+settled. Scarcely less curious is the case of Mr.
+Wallace's Malayan orioles, two species of which exactly
+copy two pugnacious honey-suckers in every detail of
+plumage and coloration. As the honey-suckers are avoided
+by birds of prey, owing to their surprising strength and
+pugnacity, the orioles gain immunity from attack by their
+close resemblance to the protected species. When Dr.
+Sclater, the distinguished ornithologist, was examining
+Mr. Forbes's collections from Timorlaut, even his experienced
+eye was so taken in by another of these deceptive
+bird-mimicries that he classified two birds of totally
+distinct families as two different individuals of the same
+species.</p>
+
+<p>Even among plants a few instances of true mimicry
+have been observed. In the stony African Karoo, where
+every plant is eagerly sought out for food by the scanty
+local fauna, there are tubers which exactly resemble the
+pebbles around them; and I have little doubt that our
+perfectly harmless English dead-nettle secures itself from
+the attacks of browsing animals by its close likeness to the
+wholly unrelated, but well-protected, stinging-nettle.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, we must not forget the device of those
+animals which not merely assimilate themselves in colour
+to the ordinary environment in a general way, but have
+also the power of adapting themselves at will to whatever
+object they may happen to lie against. Cases like that of
+the ptarmigan, which in summer harmonises with the
+brown heather and grey rock, while in winter it changes to
+the white of the snow-fields, lead us up gradually to such
+ultimate results of the masquerading tendency. There is
+a tiny crustacean, the chameleon shrimp, which can alter
+its hue to that of any material on which it happens to
+<a name="page69" id="page69"></a>rest. On a sandy bottom it appears grey or sand-coloured;
+when lurking among seaweed it becomes green, or red, or
+brown, according to the nature of its momentary background.
+Probably the effect is quite unconscious, or at
+least involuntary, like blushing with ourselves&mdash;and nobody
+ever blushes on purpose, though they do say a distinguished
+poet once complained that an eminent actor did not follow
+his stage directions because he omitted to obey the rubrical
+remark, 'Here Harold purples with anger.' The change
+is produced by certain automatic muscles which force up
+particular pigment cells above the others, green coming to
+the top on a green surface, red on a ruddy one, and brown
+or grey where the circumstances demand them. Many
+kinds of fish similarly alter their colour to suit their background
+by forcing forward or backward certain special
+pigment-cells known as chromatophores, whose various
+combinations produce at will almost any required tone or
+shade. Almost all reptiles and amphibians possess the
+power of changing their hue in accordance with their environment
+in a very high degree; and among certain tree-toads
+and frogs it is difficult to say what is the normal
+colouring, as they vary indefinitely from buff and dove-colour
+to chocolate-brown, rose, and even lilac.</p>
+
+<p>But of all the particoloured reptiles the chameleon is by
+far the best known, and on the whole the most remarkable
+for his inconstancy of coloration. Like a lacertine Vicar
+of Bray, he varies incontinently from buff to blue, and from
+blue back to orange again, under stress of circumstances.
+The mechanism of this curious change is extremely complex.
+Tiny corpuscles of different pigments are sometimes
+hidden in the depths of the chameleon's skin, and sometimes
+spread out on its surface in an interlacing network of
+brown or purple. In addition to this prime colouring
+matter, however, the animal also possesses a normal yellow
+<a name="page70" id="page70"></a>pigment, and a bluish layer in the skin which acts like the
+iridium glass so largely employed by Dr. Salviati, being
+seen as straw-coloured with a transmitted light, but assuming
+a faint lilac tint against an opaque absorbent surface.
+While sleeping the chameleon becomes almost white
+in the shade, but if light falls upon him he slowly darkens
+by an automatic process. The movements of the corpuscles
+are governed by opposite nerves and muscles, which either
+cause them to bury themselves under the true skin, or to
+form an opaque ground behind the blue layer, or to spread
+out in a ramifying mass on the outer surface, and so produce
+as desired almost any necessary shade of grey, green,
+black, or yellow. It is an interesting fact that many
+chrysalids undergo precisely similar changes of colour in
+adaptation to the background against which they suspend
+themselves, being grey on a grey surface, green on a green
+one, and even half black and half red when hung up against
+pieces of particoloured paper.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could more beautifully prove the noble superiority
+of the human intellect than the fact that while our
+grouse are russet-brown to suit the bracken and heather,
+and our caterpillars green to suit the lettuce and the cabbage
+leaves, our British soldier should be wisely coated in brilliant
+scarlet to form an effective mark for the rifles of an enemy.
+Red is the easiest of all colours at which to aim from a
+great distance; and its selection by authority for the
+uniform of unfortunate Tommy Atkins reminds me of
+nothing so much as Mr. McClelland's exquisite suggestion
+that the peculiar brilliancy of the Indian river carps makes
+them serve 'as a better mark for kingfishers, terns, and
+other birds which are destined to keep the number of these
+fishes in check.' The idea of Providence and the Horse
+Guards conspiring to render any creature an easier target
+for the attacks of enemies is worthy of the decadent school
+<a name="page71" id="page71"></a>of natural history, and cannot for a moment be dispassionately
+considered by a judicious critic. Nowadays we all
+know that the carp are decked in crimson and blue to
+please their partners, and that soldiers are dressed in
+brilliant red to please the &aelig;sthetic authorities who command
+them from a distance.<a name="page72" id="page72"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="part5" id="part5"><i>SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>For many generations past that problematical animal, the
+toad-in-a-hole (literal, not culinary) has been one of the
+most familiar and interesting personages of contemporary
+folk-lore and popular natural history. From time to time
+he turns up afresh, with his own wonted perennial vigour,
+on paper at least, in company with the great sea-serpent,
+the big gooseberry, the shower of frogs, the two-headed
+calf, and all the other common objects of the country or
+the seaside in the silly season. No extraordinary natural
+phenomenon on earth was ever better vouched for&mdash;in
+the fashion rendered familiar to us by the Tichborne
+claimant&mdash;that is to say, no other could ever get a larger
+number of unprejudiced witnesses to swear positively and
+unreservedly in its favour. Unfortunately, however, swearing
+alone no longer settles causes offhand, as if by show of
+hands, 'the Ayes have it,' after the fashion prevalent in the
+good old days when the whole Hundred used to testify that
+of its certain knowledge John Nokes did not commit such
+and such a murder; whereupon John Nokes was forthwith
+acquitted accordingly. Nowadays, both justice and science
+have become more exacting; they insist upon the unpleasant
+and discourteous habit of cross-examining their witnesses
+(as if they doubted them, forsooth!), instead of accepting
+the witnesses' own simple assertion that it's all right, and
+there's no need for making a fuss about it. Did you
+yourself see the block of stone in which the toad is said
+<a name="page73" id="page73"></a>to have been found, before the toad himself was actually
+extracted? Did you examine it all round to make quite sure
+there was no hole, or crack, or passage in it anywhere?
+Did you satisfy yourself after the toad was released from
+his close quarters that no such hole, or crack, or passage
+had been dexterously closed up, with intent to deceive, by
+plaster, cement, or other artificial composition? Did you
+ever offer the workmen who found it a nominal reward&mdash;say
+five shillings&mdash;for the first perfectly unanswerable
+specimen of a genuine unadulterated antediluvian toad?
+Have you got the toad now present, and can you produce
+him here in court (on writ of <i>habeas corpus</i> or otherwise),
+together with all the fragments of the stone or tree from
+which he was extracted? These are the disagreeable,
+prying, inquisitorial, I may even say insulting, questions
+with which a modern man of science is ready to assail the
+truthful and reputable gentlemen who venture to assert
+their discovery, in these degenerate days, of the ancient
+and unsophisticated toad-in-a-hole.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the worst of it is that the gentlemen in question,
+being unfamiliar with what is technically described as
+scientific methods of investigation, are very apt to lose their
+temper when thus cross-questioned, and to reply, after the
+fashion usually attributed to the female mind, with another
+question, whether the scientific person wishes to accuse
+them of downright lying. And as nothing on earth could
+be further from the scientific person's mind than such an
+imputation, he is usually fain in the end to give up the
+social pursuit of postprandial natural history (the subject
+generally crops up about the same time as the after-dinner
+coffee), and to let the prehistoric toad go on his own
+triumphant way, unheeded.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, nobody ever makes larger allowances
+for other people, in the estimate of their veracity,
+<a name="page74" id="page74"></a>than the scientific inquirer. Knowing himself, by painful
+experience, how extremely difficult a matter it is to make
+perfectly sure you have observed anything on earth quite
+correctly, and have eliminated all possible chances of error,
+he acquires the fixed habit of doubting about one-half of
+whatever his fellow-creatures tell him in ordinary conversation,
+without for a single moment venturing to suspect them
+of deliberate untruthfulness. Children and servants, if they
+find that anything they have been told is erroneous, immediately
+jump at the conclusion that the person who told them
+meant deliberately to deceive them; in their own simple
+and categorical fashion they answer plumply, 'That's a lie.'
+But the man of science is only too well acquainted in his
+own person with the exceeding difficulty of ever getting at
+the exact truth. He has spent hours of toil, himself, in
+watching and observing the behaviour of some plant, or
+animal, or gas, or metal; and after repeated experiments,
+carefully designed to exclude all possibility of mistake, so
+far as he can foresee it, he at last believes he has really
+settled some moot point, and triumphantly publishes his
+final conclusions in a scientific journal. Ten to one, the
+very next number of that same journal contains a dozen
+supercilious letters from a dozen learned and high-salaried
+professors, each pointing out a dozen distinct and separate
+precautions which the painstaking observer neglected to
+take, and any one of which would be quite sufficient to vitiate
+the whole body of his observations. There might have been
+germs in the tube in which he boiled the water (germs are
+very fashionable just at present); or some of the germs
+might have survived and rather enjoyed the boiling; or
+they might have adhered to the under surface of the cork;
+or the mixture might have been tampered with during the
+experimenter's temporary absence by his son, aged ten years
+(scientific observers have no right, apparently, to have sons
+<a name="page75" id="page75"></a>of ten years old, except perhaps for purposes of psychological
+research); and so forth, <i>ad infinitum</i>. And the worst of it
+all is that the unhappy experimenter is bound himself to
+admit that every one of the objections is perfectly valid, and
+that he very likely never really saw what with perfect
+confidence he thought and said he had seen.</p>
+
+<p>This being an unbelieving age, then, when even the
+book of Deuteronomy is 'critically examined,' let us see how
+much can really be said for and against our old friend, the
+toad-in-a-hole; and first let us begin with the antecedent
+probability, or otherwise, of any animal being able to live
+in a more or less torpid condition, without air or food, for
+any considerable period of time together.</p>
+
+<p>A certain famous historical desert snail was brought
+from Egypt to England as a conchological specimen in the
+year 1846. This particular mollusk (the only one of his
+race, probably, who ever attained to individual distinction),
+at the time of his arrival in London, was really alive and
+vigorous; but as the authorities of the British Museum,
+to whose tender care he was consigned, were ignorant of
+this important fact in his economy, he was gummed, mouth
+downward, on to a piece of cardboard, and duly labelled
+and dated with scientific accuracy, '<i>Helix desertorum</i>,
+March 25, 1846.' Being a snail of a retiring and contented
+disposition, however, accustomed to long droughts
+and corresponding naps in his native sand-wastes, our
+mollusk thereupon simply curled himself up into the topmost
+recesses of his own whorls, and went placidly to sleep
+in perfect contentment for an unlimited period. Every
+conchologist takes it for granted, of course, that the shells
+which he receives from foreign parts have had their inhabitants
+properly boiled and extracted before being exported;
+for it is only the mere outer shell or skeleton of the animal
+that we preserve in our cabinets, leaving the actual flesh
+<a name="page76" id="page76"></a>and muscles of the creature himself to wither unobserved
+upon its native shores. At the British Museum the desert
+snail might have snoozed away his inglorious existence unsuspected,
+but for a happy accident which attracted public
+attention to his remarkable case in a most extraordinary
+manner. On March 7, 1850, nearly four years later, it
+was casually observed that the card on which he reposed
+was slightly discoloured; and this discovery led to the
+suspicion that perhaps a living animal might be temporarily
+immured within that papery tomb. The Museum authorities
+accordingly ordered our friend a warm bath (who shall
+say hereafter that science is unfeeling!), upon which the
+grateful snail, waking up at the touch of the familiar
+moisture, put his head cautiously out of his shell, walked
+up to the top of the basin, and began to take a cursory
+survey of British institutions with his four eye-bearing
+tentacles. So strange a recovery from a long torpid condition,
+only equalled by that of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
+deserved an exceptional amount of scientific recognition.
+The desert snail at once awoke and found himself famous.
+Nay, he actually sat for his portrait to an eminent zoological
+artist, Mr. Waterhouse; and a woodcut from the
+sketch thus procured, with a history of his life and adventures,
+may be found even unto this day in Dr. Woodward's
+'Manual of the Mollusca,' to witness if I lie.</p>
+
+<p>I mention this curious instance first, because it is the
+best authenticated case on record (so far as my knowledge
+goes) of any animal existing in a state of suspended animation
+for any long period of time together. But there are
+other cases of encysted or immured animals which, though
+less striking as regards the length of time during which
+torpidity has been observed, are much more closely
+analogous to the real or mythical conditions of the toad-in-a-hole.
+That curious West African mud-fish, the Lepidosiren<a name="page77" id="page77"></a>
+(familiar to all readers of evolutionary literature as
+one of the most singular existing links between fish and
+amphibians), lives among the shallow pools and broads of
+the Gambia, which are dried up during the greater part of
+the tropical summer. To provide against this annual contingency,
+the mud-fish retires into the soft clay at the
+bottom of the pools, where it forms itself a sort of nest,
+and there hibernates, or rather &aelig;stivates, for months
+together, in a torpid condition. The surrounding mud
+then hardens into a dry ball; and these balls are dug out
+of the soil of the rice-fields by the natives, with the fish
+inside them, by which means many specimens of lepidosiren
+have been sent alive to Europe, embedded in their natural
+covering. Here the strange fish is chiefly prized as a zoological
+curiosity for aquariums, because of its possessing
+gills and lungs together, to fit it for its double existence;
+but the unsophisticated West Africans grub it up on their
+own account as a delicacy, regardless of its claims to
+scientific consideration as the earliest known ancestor of
+all existing terrestrial animals. Now, the torpid state of
+the mud-fish in his hardened ball of clay closely resembles
+the real or supposed condition of the toad-in-a-hole; but
+with one important exception. The mud-fish leaves a
+small canal or pipe open in his cell at either end to admit
+the air for breathing, though he breathes (as I shall proceed
+to explain) in a very slight degree during his
+&aelig;stivation; whereas every proper toad-in-a-hole ought by
+all accounts to live entirely without either feeding or
+breathing in any way. However, this is a mere detail;
+and indeed, if toads-in-a-hole do really exist at all, we must
+in all probability ultimately admit that they breathe to
+some extent, though perhaps very slightly, during their
+long immurement.</p>
+
+<p>And this leads us on to consider what in reality hibernation
+<a name="page78" id="page78"></a>is. Everybody knows nowadays, I suppose, that
+there is a very close analogy between an animal and a
+steam-engine. Food is the fuel that makes the animal
+engine go; and this food acts almost exactly as coal does
+in the artificial machine. But coal alone will not drive an
+engine; a free draught of open air is also required in order
+to produce combustion. Just in like manner the food we
+eat cannot be utilised to drive our muscles and other organs
+unless it is supplied with oxygen from the air to burn it
+slowly inside our bodies. This oxygen is taken into the
+system, in all higher animals, by means of lungs or gills.
+Now, when we are working at all hard, we require a great
+deal of oxygen, as most of us have familiarly discovered
+(especially if we are somewhat stout) in the act of climbing
+hills or running to catch a train. But when we are doing
+very little work indeed, as in our sleeping hours, during
+which muscular movement is suspended, and only the
+general organic life continues, we breathe much more
+slowly and at longer intervals. However, there is this
+important difference (generally speaking) between an
+animal and a steam-engine. You can let the engine run
+short of coals and come to a dead standstill, without impairing
+its future possibilities of similar motion; you have
+only to get fresh coals, after weeks or months of inaction,
+and light up a fresh fire, when your engine will immediately
+begin to work again, exactly the same as before. But if an
+animal organism once fairly runs down, either from want
+of food or any other cause&mdash;in short, if it dies&mdash;it very
+seldom comes to life again.</p>
+
+<p>I say 'very seldom' on purpose, because there are a few
+cases among the extreme lower animals where a water-haunting
+creature can be taken out of the water and can
+be thoroughly dried and desiccated, or even kept for an
+apparently unlimited period wrapped up in paper or on the
+<a name="page79" id="page79"></a>slide of a microscope; and yet, the moment a drop of water
+is placed on top of it, it begins to move and live again
+exactly as before. This sort of thorough-going suspended
+animation is the kind we ought to expect from any well-constituted
+and proper-minded toad-in-a-hole. Whether
+anything like it ever really occurs in the higher ranks of
+animal life, however, is a different question; but there can
+be no doubt that to some slight extent a body to all intents
+and purposes quite dead (physically speaking) by long
+immersion in water&mdash;a drowned man, for example&mdash;may
+really be resuscitated by heat and stimulants, applied
+immediately, provided no part of the working organism has
+been seriously injured or decomposed. Such people may
+be said to be <i>pro tem.</i> functionally, though not structurally,
+dead. The heart has practically ceased to beat, the lungs
+have ceased to breathe, and physical life in the body is
+temporarily extinct. The fire, in short, has gone out. But
+if only it can be lighted again before any serious change in
+the system takes place, all may still go on precisely as of
+old.</p>
+
+<p>Many animals, however, find it convenient to assume a
+state of less complete suspended animation during certain
+special periods of the year, according to the circumstances
+of their peculiar climate and mode of life. Among the
+very highest animals, the most familiar example of this
+sort of semi-torpidity is to be found among the bears and
+the dormice. The common European brown bear is a
+carnivore by descent, who has become a vegetarian in
+practice, though whether from conscientious scruples or
+mere practical considerations of expediency, does not appear.
+He feeds chiefly on roots, berries, fruits, vegetables,
+and honey, all of which he finds it comparatively difficult
+to procure during winter weather. Accordingly, as everyone
+knows, he eats immoderately in the summer season, till
+<a name="page80" id="page80"></a>he has grown fat enough to supply bear's grease to all
+Christendom. Then he hunts himself out a hollow tree or
+rock-shelter, curls himself up quietly to sleep, and snores
+away the whole livelong winter. During this period of
+hibernation, the action of the heart is reduced to a minimum,
+and the bear breathes but very slowly. Still, he does
+breathe, and his heart does beat; and in performing those
+indispensable functions, all his store of accumulated fat is
+gradually used up, so that he wakes in spring as thin as a
+lath and as hungry as a hunter. The machine has been
+working at very low pressure all the winter: but it <i>has</i>
+been working for all that, and the continuity of its action
+has never once for a moment been interrupted. This is the
+central principle of all hibernation; it consists essentially
+of a very long and profound sleep, during which all muscular
+motion, except that of the heart and lungs, is completely
+suspended, while even these last are reduced to the very
+smallest amount compatible with the final restoration of
+full animal activity.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, even among warm-blooded animals like the bears
+and dormice, hibernation actually occurs to a very considerable
+degree; but it is far more common and more
+complete among cold-blooded creatures, whose bodies do
+not need to be kept heated to the same degree, and with
+whom, accordingly, hibernation becomes almost a complete
+torpor, the breathing and the action of the heart being still
+further reduced to very nearly zero. Mollusks in particular,
+like oysters and mussels, lead very monotonous and uneventful
+lives, only varied as a rule by the welcome change
+of being cut out of their shells and eaten alive; and their
+powers of living without food under adverse circumstances
+are really very remarkable. Freshwater snails and mussels,
+in cold weather, bury themselves in the mud of ponds or
+rivers; and land-snails hide themselves in the ground or
+<a name="page81" id="page81"></a>under moss and leaves. The heart then ceases perceptibly
+to beat, but respiration continues in a very faint degree.
+The common garden snail closes the mouth of his shell
+when he wants to hibernate, with a slimy covering; but he
+leaves a very small hole in it somewhere, so as to allow a
+little air to get in, and keep up his breathing to a slight
+amount. My experience has been, however, that a great
+many snails go to sleep in this way, and never wake up
+again. Either they get frozen to death, or else the respiration
+falls so low that it never picks itself up properly when
+spring returns. In warm climates, it is during the summer
+that mollusks and other mud-haunting creatures go to
+sleep; and when they get well plastered round with clay,
+they almost approach in tenacity of life the mildest recorded
+specimens of the toad-in-a-hole.</p>
+
+<p>For example, take the following cases, which I extract,
+with needful simplifications, from Dr. Woodward.</p>
+
+<p>'In June 1850, a living pond mussel, which had been
+more than a year out of water, was sent to Mr. Gray, from
+Australia. The big pond snails of the tropics have been
+found alive in logs of mahogany imported from Honduras;
+and M. Caillaud carried some from Egypt to Paris, packed
+in sawdust. Indeed, it isn't easy to ascertain the limit of
+their endurance; for Mr. Laidlay, having placed a number
+in a drawer for this very purpose, found them alive after
+<i>five years'</i> torpidity, although in the warm climate of
+Calcutta. The pretty snails called <i>cyclostomas</i>, which
+have a lid to their shells, are well known to survive imprisonments
+of many months; but in the ordinary open-mouthed
+land-snails such cases are even more remarkable.
+Several of the enormous tropical snails often used to decorate
+cottage mantelpieces, brought by Lieutenant Greaves from
+Valparaiso, revived after being packed, some for thirteen,
+others for twenty months. In 1849, Mr. Pickering received
+<a name="page82" id="page82"></a>from Mr. Wollaston a basketful of Madeira snails (of
+twenty or thirty different kinds), three-fourths of which
+proved to be alive, after several months' confinement,
+including a sea voyage. Mr. Wollaston has himself
+recorded the fact that specimens of two Madeira snails
+survived a fast and imprisonment in pill-boxes of two years
+and a half duration, and that large numbers of a small
+species, brought to England at the same time, were <i>all</i>
+living after being inclosed in a dry bag for a year and a
+half.'</p>
+
+<p>Whether the snails themselves liked their long deprivation
+of food and moisture we are not informed; their
+personal tastes and inclinations were very little consulted
+in the matter; but as they and their ancestors for many
+generations must have been accustomed to similar long
+fasts during tropical droughts, in all likelihood they did not
+much mind it.</p>
+
+<p>The real question, then, about the historical toad-in-a-hole
+narrows itself down in the end merely to this&mdash;how
+long is it credible that a cold-blooded creature might sustain
+life in a torpid or hibernating condition, without food,
+and with a very small quantity of fresh air, supplied (let
+us say) from time to time through an almost imperceptible
+fissure? It is well known that reptiles and amphibians
+are particularly tenacious of life, and that some turtles in
+particular will live for months, or even for years, without
+tasting food. The common Greek tortoise, hawked on
+barrows about the streets of London and bought by a confiding
+British public under the mistaken impression that
+its chief fare consists of slugs and cockroaches (it is really
+far more likely to feed upon its purchaser's choicest seakale
+and asparagus), buries itself in the ground at the first
+approach of winter, and snoozes away five months of the
+year in a most comfortable and dignified torpidity. A
+<a name="page83" id="page83"></a>snake at the Zoo has even been known to live eighteen
+months in a voluntary fast, refusing all the most tempting
+offers of birds and rabbits, merely out of pique at her
+forcible confinement in a strange cage. As this was a lady
+snake, however, it is possible that she only went on living
+out of feminine obstinacy, so that this case really counts for
+very little.</p>
+
+<p>Toads themselves are well known to possess all the qualities
+of mind and body which go to make up the career of a
+successful and enduring anchorite. At the best of times they
+eat seldom and sparingly, while a forty days' fast, like Dr.
+Tanner's, would seem to them but an ordinary incident in
+their everyday existence. In the winter they hibernate by
+burying themselves in the mud, or by getting down cracks
+in the ground. It is also undoubtedly true that they creep
+into holes wherever they can find one, and that in these
+holes they lie torpid for a considerable period. On the other
+hand, there is every reason to believe that they cannot live
+for more than a certain fixed and relatively short time
+entirely without food or air. Dr. Buckland tried a number
+of experiments upon toads in this manner&mdash;experiments
+wholly unnecessary, considering the trivial nature of the
+point at issue&mdash;and his conclusion was that no toad could
+get beyond two years without feeding or breathing. There
+can be very little doubt that in this conclusion he was
+practically correct, and that the real fine old crusted antediluvian
+toad-in-a-hole is really a snare and a delusion.</p>
+
+<p>That, however, does not wholly settle the question
+about such toads, because, even though they may not be
+all that their admirers claim for them, they may yet possess
+a very respectable antiquity of their own, and may be
+very far from the category of mere vulgar cheats and
+impostors. Because a toad is not as old as Methuselah, it
+need not follow that he may not be as old as Old Parr;
+<a name="page84" id="page84"></a>because he does not date back to the Flood, it need not
+follow that he cannot remember Queen Elizabeth. There
+are some toads-in-a-hole, indeed, which, however we may
+account for the origin of their legend, are on the very face
+of it utterly incredible. For example, there is the favourite
+and immensely popular toad who was extracted from a
+perfectly closed hole in a marble mantelpiece. The implication
+of the legend clearly is that the toad was coeval
+with the marble. But marble is limestone, altered in texture
+by pressure and heat, till it has assumed a crystalline
+structure. In other words we are asked to believe that
+that toad lived through an amount of fiery heat sufficient
+to burn him up into fine powder, and yet remains to tell
+the tale. Such a toad as this obviously deserves no credit.
+His discoverers may have believed in him themselves, but
+they will hardly get other people to do so.</p>
+
+<p>Still, there are a great many ways in which it is quite
+conceivable that toads might get into holes in rocks or
+trees so as to give rise to the common stories about them,
+and might even manage to live there for a considerable
+time with very small quantities of food or air. It must be
+remembered that from the very nature of the conditions
+the hole can never be properly examined and inspected
+until after it has been split open and the toad has been extracted
+from it. Now, if you split open a tree or a rock, and
+find a toad inside it, with a cavity which he exactly fills, it
+is extremely difficult to say whether there was or was not a
+fissure before you broke the thing to pieces with your
+hatchet or pickaxe. A very small fissure indeed would be
+quite sufficient to account for the whole delusion; for if the
+toad could get a little air to breathe slowly during his torpid
+period, and could find a few dead flies or worms among the
+water that trickled scantily into his hole, he could manage to
+drag out a peaceful and monotonous existence almost indefinitely.<a name="page85" id="page85"></a>
+Here are a few possible cases, any one of which
+will quite suffice to give rise to at least as good a toad-in-the-hole
+as ninety-nine out of a hundred published instances.</p>
+
+<p>An adult toad buries himself in the mud by a dry pond,
+and gets coated with a hard solid coat of sun-baked clay.
+His nodule is broken open with a spade, and the toad himself
+is found inside, almost exactly filling the space within
+the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at the
+outside; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic
+mind looks as if it might have been there ever since the
+Deluge. Good blue lias clay, which dries as solid as limestone,
+would perform this trick to perfection; and the toad
+might easily be relegated accordingly to the secondary
+ages of geology. Observe, however, that the actual toads
+so found are not the geological toads we should naturally
+expect under such remarkable circumstances, but the
+common everyday toads of modern England. This shows
+a want of accurate scientific knowledge on the part of the
+toads which is truly lamentable. A toad who really wished
+to qualify himself for the post ought at least to avoid presenting
+himself before a critical eye in the foolish guise of an
+embodied anachronism. He reminds one of the Roman
+mother in a popular burlesque, who suspects her son of
+smoking, and vehemently declares that she smells tobacco,
+but, after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties,
+and mutters to herself, apologetically, 'No, not tobacco;
+that's not yet invented.' A would-be silurian or triassic
+toad ought, in like manner, to remember that in the ages
+to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was
+not yet developed. He ought rather to come out in the
+character of a ceratodus or a labyrinthodon.</p>
+
+<p>Again, another adult toad crawls into the hollow of a
+tree, and there hibernates. The bark partially closes over
+the slit by which he entered, but leaves a little crack by
+<a name="page86" id="page86"></a>which air can enter freely. The grubs in the bark and other
+insects supply him from time to time with a frugal repast.
+There is no good reason why, under such circumstances, a
+placid and contented toad might not manage to prolong his
+existence for several consecutive seasons.</p>
+
+<p>Once more, the spawn of toads is very small, as regards
+the size of the individual eggs, compared with the size of
+the full-grown animal. Nothing would be easier than
+for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to be washed into
+some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient
+water for its developement, and where the trickling drops
+brought down minute objects of food, enough to keep up
+its simple existence. A toad brought up under such peculiar
+circumstances might pass almost its entire life in a state of
+torpidity, and yet might grow and thrive in its own sleepy
+vegetative fashion.</p>
+
+<p>In short, while it would be difficult in any given case to
+prove to a certainty either that the particular toad-in-a-hole
+had or had not access to air and food, the ordinary conditions
+of toad life are exactly those under which the delusive
+appearance of venerable antiquity would be almost certain
+frequently to arise. The toad is a nocturnal animal; it
+lives through the daytime in dark and damp places; it
+shows a decided liking for crannies and crevices; it is
+wonderfully tenacious of life; it possesses the power of
+hibernation; it can live on extremely small quantities of
+food for very long periods of time together; it buries itself
+in mud or clay; it passes the early part of its life as a
+water-haunting tadpole; and last, not least, it can swell out
+its body to nearly double its natural size by inflating itself,
+which fully accounts for the stories of toads being taken
+out of holes every bit as big as themselves. Considering
+all these things, it would be wonderful indeed if toads were
+not often found in places and conditions which would
+<a name="page87" id="page87"></a>naturally give rise to the familiar myth. Throw in a little
+allowance for human credulity, human exaggeration, and
+human love of the marvellous, and you have all the elements
+of a very excellent toad-in-the-hole in the highest ideal
+perfection.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time I think it quite possible that some
+toads, under natural circumstances, do really remain in a
+torpid or semi-torpid condition for a period far exceeding
+the twenty-four months allowed as the maximum in Dr.
+Buckland's unpleasant experiments. If the amount of air
+supplied through a crack or through the texture of the
+stone were exactly sufficient for keeping the animal alive
+in the very slightest fashion&mdash;the engine working at the
+lowest possible pressure, short of absolute cessation&mdash;I see
+no reason on earth why a toad might not remain dormant,
+in a moist place, with perhaps a very occasional worm or
+grub for breakfast, for at least as long a time as the desert
+snail slept comfortably in the British Museum. Altogether,
+while it is impossible to believe the stories about toads that
+have been buried in a mine for whole centuries, and still
+more impossible to believe in their being disentombed from
+marble mantelpieces or very ancient geological formations,
+it is quite conceivable that some toads-in-a-hole may really
+be far from mere vulgar impostors, and may have passed the
+traditional seven years of the Indian philosophers in solitary
+meditation on the syllable Om, or on the equally significant
+Ko-ax, Ko-ax of the irreverent Attic dramatist. &quot;Certainly
+not a centenarian, but perhaps a good seven-year sleeper for
+all that,&quot; is the final verdict which the court is disposed to
+return, after due consideration of all the probabilities <i>in re</i>
+the toad-in-a-hole.<a name="page88" id="page88"></a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="part6" id="part6"><i>A FOSSIL CONTINENT</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly to be
+translated backward from Collins Street, Melbourne, into
+the flourishing woods of the secondary geological period&mdash;say
+about the precise moment of time when the English
+chalk downs were slowly accumulating, speck by speck, on
+the silent floor of some long-forgotten Mediterranean&mdash;the
+intelligent colonist would look around him with a sweet
+smile of cheerful recognition, and say to himself in some
+surprise, 'Why, this is just like Australia.' The animals,
+the trees, the plants, the insects, would all more or less
+vividly remind him of those he had left behind him in his
+happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth century.
+The sun would have moved back on the dial of ages
+for a few million summers or so, indefinitely (in geology
+we refuse to be bound by dates), and would have landed
+him at last, to his immense astonishment, pretty much at
+the exact point whence he first started.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be
+made hereafter, Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent,
+a country still in its secondary age, a surviving fragment
+of the primitive world of the chalk period or earlier ages.
+Isolated from all the remainder of the earth about the beginning
+of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth
+and the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the
+stage of existence, long before the first shadowy ancestor
+of the horse had turned tail on nature's rough draft of the
+<a name="page89" id="page89"></a>still undeveloped and unspecialised lion, long before the
+extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and colossal
+giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their
+race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the
+Australian continent found itself at an early period of its
+development cut off entirely from all social intercourse with
+the remainder of our planet, and turned upon itself, like the
+German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and animals
+out of its own inner consciousness. The natural consequence
+was that progress in Australia has been absurdly
+slow, and that the country as a whole has fallen most woefully
+behind the times in all matters pertaining to the
+existence of life upon its surface. Everybody knows that
+Australia as a whole is a very peculiar and original continent;
+its peculiarity, however, consists, at bottom, for
+the most part in the fact that it still remains at very nearly
+the same early point of development which Europe had
+attained a couple of million years ago or thereabouts.
+&quot;Advance, Australia,&quot; says the national motto; and, indeed,
+it is quite time nowadays that Australia should advance;
+for, so far, she has been left out of the running for some
+four mundane ages or so at a rough computation.</p>
+
+<p>Example, says the wisdom of our ancestors, is better
+than precept; so perhaps, if I take a single example to
+start with, I shall make the principle I wish to illustrate a
+trifle clearer to the European comprehension. In Australia,
+when Cook or Van Diemen first visited it, there were no
+horses, cows, or sheep; no rabbits, weasels, or cats; no
+indigenous quadrupeds of any sort except the pouched
+mammals or marsupials, familiarly typified to every one of
+us by the mamma kangaroo in Regent's Park, who carries
+the baby kangaroos about with her, neatly deposited in the
+sac or pouch which nature has provided for them instead
+of a cradle. To this rough generalisation, to be sure, two
+<a name="page90" id="page90"></a>special exceptions must needs be made; namely, the noble
+Australian black-fellow himself, and the dingo or wild dog
+whose ancestors no doubt came to the country in the same
+ship with him, as the brown rat came to England with
+George I. of blessed memory. But of these two solitary
+representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more
+anon'; for the present we may regard it as approximately
+true that aboriginal and unsophisticated Australia in the
+lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to
+kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint
+marsupial animals, with names as strange and clumsy as
+their forms.</p>
+
+<p>Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family,
+viewed in the dry light of modern science? Well, they
+are simply one of the very oldest mammalian families, and
+therefore, I need hardly say, in the levelling and topsy-turvy
+view of evolutionary biology, the least entitled to
+consideration or respect from rational observers. For of
+course in the kingdom of science the last shall be first, and
+the first last; it is the oldest families that are accounted
+the worst, while the best families mean always the newest.
+Now, the earliest mammals to appear on earth were
+creatures of distinctly marsupial type. As long ago as the
+time when the red marl of Devonshire and the blue lias of
+Lyme Regis were laid down on the bed of the muddy sea
+that once covered the surface of Dorset and the English
+Channel, a little creature like the kangaroo rats of Southern
+Australia lived among the plains of what is now the south
+of England. In the ages succeeding the deposition of the
+red marl Europe seems to have been broken up into an
+archipelago of coral reefs and atolls; and the islands of
+this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted by numbers of tiny
+ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in appearance
+the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while
+<a name="page91" id="page91"></a>others resembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or
+turned into excellent imitation carnivores, like our modern
+friend the Tasmanian devil. Up to the end of the time
+when the chalk deposits of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex were
+laid down, indeed, there is no evidence of the existence
+anywhere in the world of any mammals differing in type
+from those which now inhabit Australia. In other words,
+so far as regards mammalian life, the whole of the world
+had then already reached pretty nearly the same point of
+evolution that poor Australia still sticks at.</p>
+
+<p>About the beginning of the tertiary period, however,
+just after the chalk was all deposited, and just before the
+comparatively modern clays and sandstones of the London
+basin began to be laid down, an arm of the sea broke up
+the connection which once subsisted between Australia and
+the rest of the world, probably by a land bridge, <i>vi&acirc;</i> Java,
+Sumatra, the Malay peninsula, and Asia generally. 'But
+how do you know,' asks the candid inquirer, 'that such a
+connection ever existed at all?' Simply thus, most laudable
+investigator&mdash;because there are large land mammals
+in Australia. Now, large land mammals do not swim
+across a broad ocean. There are none in New Zealand,
+none in the Azores, none in Fiji, none in Tahiti, none in
+Madeira, none in Teneriffe&mdash;none, in short, in any oceanic
+island which never at any time formed part of a great continent.
+How could there be, indeed? The mammals must
+necessarily have got there from somewhere; and whenever
+we find islands like Britain, or Japan, or Newfoundland, or
+Sicily, possessing large and abundant indigenous quadrupeds,
+of the same general type as adjacent continents, we
+see at once that the island must formerly have been a mere
+peninsula, like Italy or Nova Scotia at the present day.
+The very fact that Australia incloses a large group of
+biggish quadrupeds, whose congeners once inhabited Europe
+<a name="page92" id="page92"></a>and America, suffices in itself to prove beyond question
+that uninterrupted land communication must once have
+existed between Australia and those distant continents.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as
+Wallace's Line, from the great naturalist who first pointed
+out its far-reaching zoological importance, separates what
+is called by science 'the Australian province' on the southwest
+from 'the Indo-Malayan province' to the north and
+east of it. This belt of deep sea divides off sharply the
+plants and animals of the Australian type from those of
+the common Indian and Burmese pattern. South of
+Wallace's Line we now find several islands, big and small,
+including New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the Moluccas,
+Celebes, Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands,
+whose precise geographical position on the map must of
+course be readily remembered, in this age of school boards
+and universal examination, by every pupil-teacher and every
+Girton girl, are now divided by minor straits of much
+shallower water; but they all stand on a great submarine
+bank, and obviously formed at one time parts of the same
+wide Australian continent, because animals of the Australian
+type are still found in every one of them. No Indian
+or Malayan animal, however, of the larger sort (other than
+birds) is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace's
+Line. That narrow belt of deep sea, in short, forms an
+ocean barrier which has subsisted there without alteration
+ever since the end of the secondary period. From that
+time to this, as the evidence shows us, there has never been
+any direct land communication between Australia and any
+part of the outer world beyond that narrow line of division.</p>
+
+<p>Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world
+by surprise for a moment, under the audacious title of
+'Captain Lawson's Adventures in New Guinea.' The
+gallant captain, or his unknown creator in some London
+<a name="page93" id="page93"></a>lodging, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles,
+and there to have met with marvellous escapes from terrible
+beasts of the common tropical Asiatic pattern&mdash;rhinoceroses,
+tigers, monkeys, and leopards. Everybody believed the
+new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists. Those
+canny folks saw through the wicked hoax on the very first
+blush of it. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must
+have got there by an overland route. If there had ever
+been a land connection between New Guinea and the Malay
+region, then, since Australian animals range into New
+Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia,
+and we should find Victoria and New South Wales at the
+present day peopled by tapirs, orang-outangs, wild boars,
+deer, elephants, and squirrels, like those which now people
+Borneo, instead of, or side by side with, the kangaroos,
+wombats, and other marsupials, which, as we know, actually
+form the sole indigenous mammalian population of Greater
+Britain beneath the Southern Cross. Of course, in the end,
+the mysterious and tremendous Captain Lawson proved to
+be a myth, an airy nothing upon whom imagination had
+bestowed a local habitation (in New Guinea) and a name
+(not to be found in the Army List). Wallace's Line was
+saved from reproach, and the intrusive rhinoceros was
+banished without appeal from the soil of Papua.</p>
+
+<p>After the deep belt of open sea was thus established
+between the bigger Australian continent and the Malayan
+region, however, the mammals of the great mainlands
+continued to develop on their own account, in accordance
+with the strictest Darwinian principles, among the wider
+plains of their own habitats. The competition there was
+fiercer and more general; the struggle for life was bloodier
+and more arduous. Hence, while the old-fashioned marsupials
+continued to survive and to evolve slowly along
+their own lines in their own restricted southern world,
+<a name="page94" id="page94"></a>their collateral descendants in Europe and Asia and America
+or elsewhere went on progressing into far higher, stronger,
+and better adapted forms&mdash;the great central mammalian
+fauna. In place of the petty phalangers and pouched ant-eaters
+of the oolitic period, our tertiary strata in the larger
+continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development
+of the mammalian race into monstrous creatures, some of
+them now quite extinct, and some still holding their own
+undisturbed in India, Africa, and the American prairies.
+The pal&aelig;otherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and
+the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier
+times, succeed to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of
+the secondary strata. Slowly the horses grow more horse-like,
+the shadowy camel begins to camelise himself, the
+buffaloes acquire the rudiments of horns, the deer branch
+out by tentative steps into still more complicated and more
+complicated antlers. Side by side with this wonderful outgrowth
+of the mammalian type, in the first plasticity of its
+vigorous youth, the older marsupials die away one by one
+in the geological record before the faces of their more
+successful competitors; the new carnivores devour them
+wholesale, the new ruminants eat up their pastures, the
+new rodents outwit them in the modernised forests. At
+last the pouched creatures all disappear utterly from all the
+world, save only Australia, with the solitary exception of a
+single advanced marsupial family, the familiar opossum of
+plantation melodies. And the history of the opossum
+himself is so very singular that it almost deserves to receive
+the polite attention of a separate paragraph for its own
+proper elucidation.</p>
+
+<p>For the opossums form the only members of the marsupial
+class now living outside Australia; and yet, what is
+at least equally remarkable, none of the opossums are
+found <i>per contra</i> in Australia itself. They are, in fact, the
+<a name="page95" id="page95"></a>highest and best product of the old dying marsupial stock,
+specially evolved in the great continents through the fierce
+competition of the higher mammals then being developed
+on every side of them. Therefore, being later in point of
+time than the separation, they could no more get over to
+Australia than the elephants and tigers and rhinoceroses
+could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race
+in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian
+cousins. In Europe and Asia the opossums lived
+on lustily, in spite of competition, during the whole of the
+Eocene period, side by side with hog-like creatures not yet
+perfectly piggish, with nondescript animals, half horse half
+tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and antelopes,
+unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment of budding
+antlers. But in the succeeding age they seem to disappear
+from the eastern continent, though in the western, thanks
+to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb, and tree-haunting
+life, they still drag out a precarious existence in many forms
+from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. It
+is worth while to notice, too, that whereas the kangaroos
+and other Australian marsupials are proverbially the very
+stupidest of mammals, the opossums, on the contrary, are
+well known to those accurate observers of animal psychology,
+the plantation negroes, to be the very cleverest,
+cunningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the
+fierce struggle for life of the crowded American lowlands,
+the opossum was absolutely forced to acquire a certain
+amount of Yankee smartness, or else to be improved off the
+face of the earth by the keen competition of the pouchless
+mammals.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the day, then, when Captain Cook and Sir Joseph
+Banks, landing for the first time on the coast of New South
+Wales, saw an animal with short front limbs, huge hind
+legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit of hopping along
+<a name="page96" id="page96"></a>the ground (called by the natives a kangaroo), the opossums
+of America were the only pouched mammals known to the
+European world in any part of the explored continents.
+Australia, severed from all the rest of the earth&mdash;<i>penitus
+toto orbe divisa</i>&mdash;ever since the end of the secondary period,
+remained as yet, so to speak, in the secondary age so far as
+its larger life-elements were concerned, and presented to
+the first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture of
+what 'the world before the flood' must have looked like.
+Only it was a very remote flood; an antediluvian age
+separated from our own not by thousands, but by millions,
+of seasons.</p>
+
+<p>To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry
+needful qualifications must be made at the very outset.
+No statement is ever quite correct until you have contradicted
+in minute detail about two-thirds of it.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place there are a good many modern
+elements in the indigenous population of Australia; but
+then they are elements of the stray and casual sort one
+always finds even in remote oceanic islands. They are
+waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example,
+the flora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a
+considerable number of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns
+always get blown by the wind, or washed by the sea, or
+carried on the feet or feathers of birds, from one part of the
+world to another. In all these various ways, no doubt, modern
+plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia
+at different times, and altered to some extent the character
+and aspect of its original native vegetation. Nevertheless,
+even in the matter of its plants and trees, Australia
+must still be considered a very old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud
+continent. The strange puzzle-monkeys, the
+quaint-jointed casuarinas (like horsetails grown into big
+willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, with
+<a name="page97" id="page97"></a>their smooth stems robbed of their outer bark, impart a
+marvellously antiquated and unfamiliar tone to the general
+appearance of Australian woodland. All these types belong
+by birth to classes long since extinct in the larger continents.
+The scrub shows no turfy greensward; grasses,
+which elsewhere carpet the ground, were almost unknown
+till introduced from Europe; in the wild lands, bushes, and
+undershrubs of ancient aspect cover the soil, remarkable
+for their stiff, dry, wiry foliage, their vertically instead of
+horizontally flattened leaves, and their general dead blue-green
+or glaucous colour. Altogether, the vegetation itself,
+though it contains a few more modern forms than the
+animal world, is still essentially antique in type, a strange
+survival from the forgotten flora of the chalk age, the oolite,
+and even the lias.</p>
+
+<p>Again, to winged animals, such as birds and bats and
+flying insects, the ocean forms far less of a barrier than it
+does to quadrupeds, to reptiles, and to fresh-water fishes.
+Hence Australia has, to some extent, been invaded by later
+types of birds and other flying creatures, who live on there
+side by side with the ancient animals of the secondary
+pattern. Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and
+crows must all be comparatively recent immigrants from
+the Asiatic mainland. Even in this respect, however, the
+Australian life-region still bears an antiquated and undeveloped
+aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find
+those very oldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries,
+the emus, and the mooruk of New Britain. The
+extreme term in this exceedingly ancient set of creature
+is given us by the wingless bird, the apteryx or kiwi of
+New Zealand, whose feathers nearly resemble hair, and
+whose grotesque appearance makes it as much a wonder in
+its own class as the puzzle-monkey and the casuarina are
+among forest trees. No feathered creatures so closely
+<a name="page98" id="page98"></a>approach the lizard-tailed birds of the oolite or the toothed
+birds of the cretaceous period as do these Australian and
+New Zealand emus and apteryxes. Again, while many
+characteristic Oriental families are quite absent, like the
+vultures, woodpeckers, pheasants and bulbuls, the Australian
+region has many other fairly ancient birds, found nowhere
+else on the surface of our modern planet. Such
+are the so-called brush turkeys and mound builders, the
+only feathered things that never sit upon their own eggs,
+but allow them to be hatched, after the fashion of reptiles,
+by the heat of the sand or of fermenting vegetable matter.
+The piping crows, the honeysuckers, the lyre-birds, and
+the more-porks are all peculiar to the Australian region.
+So are the wonderful and &aelig;sthetic bower-birds. Brush-tongued
+lories, black cockatoos, and gorgeously coloured
+pigeons, though somewhat less antique, perhaps, in type,
+give a special character to the bird-life of the country.
+And in New Guinea, an isolated bit of the same old continent,
+the birds of paradise, found nowhere else in the
+whole world, seem to recall some forgotten Eden of the
+remote past, some golden age of Saturnian splendour.
+Poetry apart, into which I have dropped for a moment like
+Mr. Silas Wegg, the birds of paradise are, in fact, gorgeously
+dressed crows, specially adapted to forest life in a
+rich fruit-bearing tropical country, where food is abundant
+and enemies unknown.</p>
+
+<p>Last of all, a certain small number of modern mammals
+have passed over to Australia at various times by pure
+chance. They fall into two classes&mdash;the rats and mice, who
+doubtless got transported across on floating logs or balks
+of timber; and the human importations, including the dog,
+who came, perhaps on their owners' canoes, perhaps on the
+wreck and <i>d&eacute;bris</i> of inundations. Yet even in these cases
+again, Australia still maintains its proud pre-eminence as
+<a name="page99" id="page99"></a>the most antiquated and unprogressive of continents.
+For the Australian black-fellow must have got there a very
+long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremely ancient
+human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull
+the Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races;
+while the woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally
+distinct human family, and perhaps the very lowest sample
+of humanity that has survived to modern times, must have
+crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his brethren on
+the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on
+when the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast
+ashore upon the continent inhabited by the yet more
+barbaric and helpless negrito race. As for the dingo, or
+Australian wild dog, only half domesticated by the savage
+natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf
+and half jackal, incapable of the higher canine traits, and
+with a suspicious, ferocious, glaring eye that betrays at once
+his uncivilisable tendencies.</p>
+
+<p>Omitting these later importations, however&mdash;the modern
+plants, birds, and human beings&mdash;it may be fairly said that
+Australia is still in its secondary stage, while the rest of
+the world has reached the tertiary and quaternary periods.
+Here again, however, a deduction must be made, in order
+to attain the necessary accuracy. Even in Australia the
+world never stands still. Though the Australian animals
+are still at bottom the European and Asiatic animals of the
+secondary age, they are those animals with a difference.
+They have undergone an evolution of their own. It has
+not been the evolution of the great continents; but it has
+been evolution all the same; slower, more local, narrower,
+more restricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One
+might compare the difference to the difference between
+the civilisation of Europe and the civilisation of Mexico or
+Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted out their indigenous
+<a name="page100" id="page100"></a>culture, were still, to be sure, in their stone age;
+but it was a very different stone age from that of the cave-dwellers
+or mound builders in Britain. Even so, though
+Australia is still zoologically in the secondary period, it is
+a secondary period a good deal altered and adapted in detail
+to meet the wants of special situations.</p>
+
+<p>The oldest types of animals in Australia are the
+ornithorhynchus and the echidna, the 'beast with a bill,'
+and the 'porcupine ant-eater' of popular natural history.
+These curious creatures, genuine living fossils, occupy in
+some respects an intermediate place between the mammals
+on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other.
+The echidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and
+body; the ornithorhynchus has a bill like a duck's, webbed
+feet, and a great many quaint anatomical peculiarities
+which closely ally it to the birds and reptiles. Both, in fact,
+are early arrested stages in the development of mammals
+from the old common vertebrate ancestor; and they could
+only have struggled on to our own day in a continent free
+from the severe competition of the higher types which have
+since been evolved in Europe and Asia. Even in Australia
+itself the ornithorhynchus and echidna have had to put up
+perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy of nature.
+The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, specialised
+in a thousand minute ways for his amphibious life and
+queer subterranean habits; the second is a spiny hedgehog-like
+nocturnal prowler, who buries himself in the earth
+during the day, and lives by night on insects which he
+licks up greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart
+from the specialisations brought about by their necessary
+adaptation to a particular niche in the economy of life,
+these two quaint and very ancient animals probably
+preserve for us in their general structure the features of
+an extremely early descendant of the common ancestor
+<a name="page101" id="page101"></a>from whom mammals, birds, and reptiles alike are originally
+derived.</p>
+
+<p>The ordinary Australian pouched mammals belong to
+far less ancient types than ornithorhynchus and echidna,
+but they too are very old in structure, though they have
+undergone an extraordinary separate evolution to fit them
+for the most diverse positions in life. Almost every main
+form of higher mammal (except the biggest ones) has, as it
+were, its analogue or representative among the marsupial
+fauna of the Australasian region fitted to fill the same niche
+in nature. For instance, in the blue gum forests of New
+South Wales a small animal inhabits the trees, in form and
+aspect exactly like a flying squirrel. Nobody who was not
+a structural and anatomical naturalist would ever for a
+moment dream of doubting its close affinity to the flying
+squirrels of the American woodlands. It has just the
+same general outline, just the same bushy tail, just the
+same rough arrangement of colours, and just the same
+expanded parachute-like membrane stretching between the
+fore and hind limbs. Why should this be so? Clearly
+because both animals have independently adapted themselves
+to the same mode of life under the same general
+circumstances. Natural selection, acting upon unlike original
+types, but in like conditions, has produced in the end
+very similar results in both cases. Still, when we come to
+examine the more intimate underlying structure of the two
+animals, a profound fundamental difference at once exhibits
+itself. The one is distinctly a true squirrel, a rodent of the
+rodents, externally adapted to an arboreal existence; the
+other is equally a true phalanger, a marsupial of the marsupials,
+which has independently undergone on his own
+account very much the same adaptation, for very much the
+same reasons. Just so a dolphin looks externally very like a
+fish, in head and tail and form and movement; its flippers
+<a name="page102" id="page102"></a>closely resemble fins; and nothing about it seems to differ
+very markedly from the outer aspect of a shark or a codfish.
+But in reality it has no gills and no swim-bladder;
+it lays no eggs; it does not own one truly fish-like organ.
+It breathes air, it possesses lungs, it has warm blood, it
+suckles its young; in heart and brain and nerves and
+organisation it is a thoroughgoing mammal, with an acquired
+resemblance to the fishy form, due entirely to mere
+similarity in place of residence.</p>
+
+<p>Running hastily through the chief marsupial developments,
+one may say that the wombats are pouched animals
+who take the place of rabbits or marmots in Europe, and
+resemble them both in burrowing habits and more or less
+in shape, which closely approaches the familiar and ungraceful
+guinea-pig outline. The vulpine phalanger does
+duty for a fox; the fat and sleepy little dormouse phalanger
+takes the place of a European dormouse. Both are so ridiculously
+like the analogous animals of the larger continents
+that the colonists always call them, in perfect good faith,
+by the familiar names of the old-country creatures. The
+koala poses as a small bear; the cuscus answers to the
+racoons of America. The pouched badgers explain themselves
+at once by their very name, like the Plyants, the
+Pinchwifes, the Brainsicks, and the Carelesses of the
+Restoration comedy. The 'native rabbit' of Swan River
+is a rabbit-like bandicoot; the pouched ant-eater similarly
+takes the place of the true ant-eaters of other continents.
+By way of carnivores, the Tasmanian devil is a fierce and
+savage marsupial analogue of the American wolverine; a
+smaller species of the same type usurps the name and place
+of the marten; and the dog-headed Thylacinus is in form
+and figure precisely like a wolf or a jackal. The pouched
+weasels are very weasel-like; the kangaroo rats and kangaroo
+mice run the true rats and mice a close race in every
+<a name="page103" id="page103"></a>particular. And it is worth notice, in this connection, that
+the one marsupial family which could compete with higher
+American life, the opossums, are really, so to speak, the
+monkey development of the marsupial race. They have
+opposable thumbs, which make their feet almost into hands;
+they have prehensile tails, by which they hang from
+branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal
+omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs,
+insects, and roots; and altogether they are just active,
+cunning, intelligent, tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys.</p>
+
+<p>Australia has also one still more ancient denizen than
+any of these, a living fossil of the very oldest sort, a
+creature of wholly immemorial and primitive antiquity.
+The story of its discovery teems with the strangest romance
+of natural history. To those who could appreciate
+the facts of the case it was just as curious and just as
+interesting as though we were now to discover somewhere
+in an unknown island or an African oasis some surviving
+mammoth, some belated megatherium, or some gigantic
+and misshapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct
+animals of the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing
+to our dazzled eyes in a tropical ramble, and you can
+faintly conceive the delight and astonishment of naturalists
+at large when the barramunda first 'swam into their
+ken' in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size
+and shape this 'extinct fish,' still living and grunting
+quietly in our midst, is comparatively insignificant beside
+the 'dragons of the prime' immortalised in a famous stanza
+by Tennyson: but, to the true enthusiast, size is nothing;
+and the barramunda is just as much a marvel and a monster
+as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he
+had suddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging
+fifty feet of lizard-like tail in a train behind him. And
+<a name="page104" id="page104"></a>this is the plain story of that marvellous discovery of a
+'missing link' in our own pedigree.</p>
+
+<p>In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere
+there occur in abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid
+fishes known as the Ceratodi. (I apologise for ganoid,
+though it is not a swear-word). These teeth reappear from
+time to time in several subsequent formations, but at last
+slowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists
+naturally concluded that the creature to which they
+belonged had died out also, and was long since numbered
+with the dodo and the mastodon. The idea that a Ceratodus
+could still be living, far less that it formed an important
+link in the development of all the higher animals,
+could never for a moment have occurred to anybody. As
+well expect to find a pal&aelig;olithic man quietly chipping
+flints on a Pacific atoll, or to discover the ancestor of all
+horses on the isolated and crag-encircled summit of Roraima,
+as to unearth a real live Ceratodus from a modern
+estuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Krefft took away the
+breath of scientific Europe by informing it that he had
+found the extinct ganoid swimming about as large as life,
+and six feet long, without the faintest consciousness of its
+own scientific importance, in a river in Queensland at the
+present day. The unsophisticated aborigines knew it as
+barramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers
+called it with irreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head.
+On further examination, however, the despised barramunda
+proved to be a connecting link of primary rank between the
+oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowest air-breathing
+animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a true
+fish, it leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a
+foraging expedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring
+woodlands. There it browses on myrtle leaves and grasses,
+and otherwise behaves itself in a manner wholly unbecoming
+<a name="page105" id="page105"></a>its piscine antecedents and aquatic education. To
+fit it for this strange amphibious life, the barramunda has
+both lungs and gills; it can breathe either air or water at
+will, or, if it chooses, the two together. Though covered
+with scales, and most fish-like in outline, it presents points
+of anatomical resemblance both to salamanders and lizards;
+and, as a connecting bond between the North American
+mud-fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren
+on the other, it forms a true member of the long series
+by which the higher animals generally trace their descent
+from a remote race of marine ancestors. It is very
+interesting, therefore, to find that this living fossil link
+between fish and reptiles should have survived only in
+the fossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has
+long since been beaten out of the field by its own more developed
+amphibian descendants; in Australia alone it still
+drags on a lonely existence as the last relic of an otherwise
+long-forgotten and extinct family.<a name="page106" id="page106"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="part7" id="part7"><i>A VERY OLD MASTER</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably
+old; a good deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher
+(who invented all out of his own archiepiscopal head the
+date commonly assigned for the creation of the world)
+would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a
+bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in
+origin than the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo
+Borbonico at Naples, the mildly decorous Louvre in Paris,
+or the eminently respectable British Museum, which is the
+glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled eyes of
+German professors, all put together. When Assyrian
+sculptors carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls
+of Sennacherib's hair, just like a modern coachman's wig,
+this work of prim&aelig;val art was already hoary with the rime
+of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the morning
+twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or
+Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft
+was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted
+floor of a cave in the Dordogne. If we were to
+divide the period for which we possess authentic records of
+man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten epochs&mdash;an
+epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn't
+commit one to any definite chronology in particular&mdash;then
+it is probable that all known art, from the Egyptian
+onward, would fall into the tenth of the epochs thus
+<a name="page107" id="page107"></a>loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief would
+fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I
+should say it was most likely about 244,000 years before
+the creation of Adam according to Ussher.</p>
+
+<p>The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer
+horn, and represents two horses, of a very early and heavy
+type, following one another, with heads stretched forward,
+as if sniffing the air suspiciously in search of enemies.
+The horses would certainly excite unfavourable comment
+at Newmarket. Their 'points' are undoubtedly coarse
+and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and
+ungainly; their manes are bushy and ill-defined; their
+legs are distinctly feeble and spindle-shaped; their tails
+more closely resemble the tail of the domestic pig than
+that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing the
+love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless
+there is little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old
+master did, on the whole, accurately represent the ancestral
+steed of his own exceedingly remote period. There were
+once horses even as is the horse of the prehistoric
+Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun
+in hue and striped down the back like modern donkeys,
+did actually once roam over the low plains where Paris
+now stands, and browse off lush grass and tall water-plants
+around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only do
+the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves,
+prove this, but quite recently the Russian traveller
+Prjevalsky (whose name is so much easier to spell than to
+pronounce) has discovered a similar living horse, which
+drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high
+table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see,
+as I have only to write the word, without uttering it, I
+don't mind how often or how intrepidly I use it) is so
+singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat, or rather stood,
+<a name="page108" id="page108"></a>for their portraits to my old master that we can't do better
+than begin by describing him <i>in propria persona</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The horse family of the present day is divided, like
+most other families, into two factions, which may be
+described for variety's sake as those of the true horses and
+the donkeys, these latter including also the zebras, quaggas,
+and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names, in
+very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent
+visitors at the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have
+noticed that the chief broad distinction between these two
+great groups consists in the feathering of the tail. The
+domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra and
+co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single
+bunch or fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a
+tufted bundle at the extreme tip. The horse, on the other
+hand, besides having horny patches or callosities on both
+fore and hind legs, while the donkeys have them on the
+fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long hairs are
+almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving
+it its peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But
+Prjevalsky's horse, as one would naturally expect from an
+early intermediate form, stands halfway in this respect
+between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a
+family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs
+collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of
+them spring from the middle distance, as in the genuine
+Arab, though never from the very top, thus showing an
+approach to the true horsey habit without actually attaining
+that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can
+make out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my prehistoric
+Phidias the horse of the quaternary epoch had
+much the same caudal peculiarity; his tail was bushy, but
+only in the lower half. He was still in the intermediate
+stage between horse and donkey, a natural mule still
+<a name="page109" id="page109"></a>struggling up aspiringly toward perfect horsehood. In all
+other matters the two creatures&mdash;the cave man's horse
+and Prjevalsky's&mdash;closely agree. Both display large heads,
+thick necks, coarse manes, and a general disregard of
+'points' which would strike disgust and dismay into the
+stout breasts of Messrs. Tattersall. In fact over a T.Y.C.
+it may be confidently asserted, in the pure Saxon of the
+sporting papers, that Prjevalsky's and the cave man's lot
+wouldn't be in it. Nevertheless a candid critic would be
+forced to admit that, in spite of clumsiness, they both
+mean staying.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the two sitters; now let us turn to the
+artist who sketched them. Who was he, and when did he
+live? Well, his name, like that of many other old masters,
+is quite unknown to us; but what does that matter so
+long as his work itself lives and survives? Like the
+Comtists he has managed to obtain objective immortality.
+The work, after all, is for the most part all we ever have
+to go upon. 'I have my own theory about the authorship
+of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of 'Alice in
+Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it
+is that they weren't really written by Homer, but by
+another person of the same name.' There you have the
+Iliad in a nutshell as regards the authenticity of great
+works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if
+anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two
+unapproachable Greek epics; and all we know directly
+about my old master, viewed personally, is that he once
+carved with a rude flint flake on a fragment of reindeer
+horn these two clumsy prehistoric horses. Yet by putting
+two and two together we can make, not four, as might be
+naturally expected, but a fairly connected history of the
+old master himself and what Mr. Herbert Spencer would
+no doubt playfully term 'his environment.'<a name="page110" id="page110"></a></p>
+
+<p>The work of art was dug up from under the firm concreted
+floor of a cave in the Dordogne. That cave was
+once inhabited by the nameless artist himself, his wife,
+and family. It had been previously tenanted by various
+other early families, as well as by bears, who seem to have
+lived there in the intervals between the different human
+occupiers. Probably the bears ejected the men, and the
+men in turn ejected the bears, by the summary process of
+eating one another up. In any case the freehold of the
+cave was at last settled upon our early French artist. But
+the date of his occupancy is by no means recent; for since
+he lived there the long cold spell known as the Great Ice
+Age, or Glacial Epoch, has swept over the whole of
+Northern Europe, and swept before it the shivering
+descendants of my poor prehistoric old master. Now,
+how long ago was the Great Ice Age? As a rule, if you
+ask a geologist for a definite date, you will find him very
+chary of giving you a distinct answer. He knows that
+the chalk is older than the London clay, and the oolite
+than the chalk, and the red marl than the oolite; and he
+knows also that each of them took a very long time indeed
+to lay down, but exactly how long he has no notion. If
+you say to him, 'Is it a million years since the chalk was
+deposited?' he will answer, like the old lady of Prague,
+whose ideas were excessively vague, 'Perhaps.' If you
+suggest five millions, he will answer oracularly once more,
+'Perhaps'; and if you go on to twenty millions, 'Perhaps,'
+with a broad smile, is still the only confession of faith that
+torture will wring out of him. But in the matter of the
+Glacial Epoch, a comparatively late and almost historical
+event, geologists have broken through their usual reserve
+on this chronological question and condescended to give
+us a numerical determination. And here is how Dr. Croll
+gets at it.<a name="page111" id="page111"></a></p>
+
+<p>Every now and again, geological evidence goes to show
+us, a long cold spell occurs in the northern or southern
+hemisphere. During these long cold spells the ice cap at
+the poles increases largely, till it spreads over a great part
+of what are now the temperate regions of the globe, and
+makes ice a mere drug in the market as far south as Covent
+Garden or the Halles at Paris. During the greatest
+extension of this ice sheet in the last glacial epoch, in fact,
+all England except a small south-western corner (about
+Torquay and Bournemouth) was completely covered by
+one enormous mass of glaciers, as is still the case with
+almost the whole of Greenland. The ice sheet, grinding
+slowly over the hills and rocks, smoothed and polished and
+striated their surfaces in many places till they resembled
+the <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i> similarly ground down in our own
+day by the moving ice rivers of Chamouni and Grindelwald.
+Now, since these great glaciations have occurred at various
+intervals in the world's past history, they must depend
+upon some frequently recurring cause. Such a cause,
+therefore, Dr. Croll began ingeniously to hunt about for.</p>
+
+<p>He found it at last in the eccentricity of the earth's
+orbit. This world of ours, though usually steady enough
+in its movements, is at times decidedly eccentric. Not
+that I mean to impute to our old and exceedingly respectable
+planet any occasional aberrations of intellect, or still
+less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and
+Venus); the word is here to be accepted strictly in its
+scientific or Pickwickian sense as implying merely an
+irregularity of movement, a slight wobbling out of the
+established path, a deviation from exact circularity.
+Owing to a combination of astronomical revolutions, the
+precession of the equinoxes and the motion of the aphelion
+(I am not going to explain them here; the names alone
+will be quite sufficient for most people; they will take the
+<a name="page112" id="page112"></a>rest on trust)&mdash;owing to the combination of these profoundly
+interesting causes, I say, there occur certain
+periods in the world's life when for a very long time together
+(10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern
+hemisphere is warmer than the southern, or <i>vice versa</i>.
+Now, Dr. Croll has calculated that about 250,000 years ago
+this eccentricity of the earth's orbit was at its highest, so
+that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either
+hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it
+was that produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe.
+They went on till about 80,000 years ago, when they
+stopped short for the present, leaving the climate of
+Britain and the neighbouring continent with its existing
+inconvenient Laodicean temperature. And, as there are
+good reasons for believing that my old master and his
+contemporaries lived just before the greatest cold of the
+Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate descendants, with
+the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of
+Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the
+enormous ice sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that
+his date was somewhere about B.C. 248,000. In any case
+we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew Lang, the
+laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>He lived in the long long agoes;<br /></span>
+<span>'Twas the manner of primitive man.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial
+Europe, just at the moment before the temporary
+extinction of his race in France by the coming on of the
+Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the character
+of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in
+which species of cold and warm climates are at times
+quite capriciously intermingled. We get the reindeer and
+the mammoth side by side with the hippopotamus and the
+<a name="page113" id="page113"></a>hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway
+lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same
+deposits with the lion and the lynx, the leopard and the
+rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace
+has pointed out, we live to-day in a zoologically impoverished
+world, from which all the largest, fiercest, and
+most remarkable animals have lately been weeded out.
+And it was in all probability the coming on of the Ice Age
+that did the weeding. Our Zoo can boast no mammoth
+and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion has gone the
+way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal ruminants
+of the Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks
+of Seine. But our old master saw the last of some at least
+among those gigantic quadrupeds; it was his hand or that
+of one among his fellows that scratched the famous
+mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine and
+carved the figure of the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn
+ornaments of Laugerie Basse. Probably, therefore,
+he lived in the period immediately preceding the Great Ice
+Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells
+with which the long secular winter of the northern
+hemisphere was then from time to time agreeably diversified.</p>
+
+<p>And what did the old master himself look like? Well,
+painters have always been fond of reproducing their own
+lineaments. Have we not the familiar young Raffael,
+painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the Titian,
+and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits,
+all flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man
+has drawn himself many times over, not indeed on this
+particular piece of reindeer horn, but on several other
+media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good
+copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the
+old cave at Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Mass&eacute;nat, where a
+<a name="page114" id="page114"></a>very early pre-Glacial man is represented in the act of
+hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting a flint-tipped
+javelin. In this, as in all other pictures of the same epoch,
+I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in
+the costume of Adam before the fall. Our old master's
+studies, in fact, are all in the nude. Primitive man was
+evidently unacquainted as yet with the use of clothing,
+though primitive woman, while still unclad, had already
+learnt how to heighten her natural charms by the simple
+addition of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, though
+dresses were still wholly unknown, rouge was even then
+extremely fashionable among French ladies, and lumps of
+the ruddle with which primitive woman made herself
+beautiful for ever are now to be discovered in the corner of
+the cave where she had her little prehistoric boudoir. To
+return to our hunter, however, who for aught we know to
+the contrary may be our old master himself in person, he
+is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with an arched
+back, recalling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head,
+long neck, pointed beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed
+legs. I fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man
+cut, on the whole, a very sorry and awkward figure.</p>
+
+<p>Was he black? That we don't certainly know, but all
+analogy would lead one to answer positively, Yes. White
+men seem, on the whole, to be a very recent and novel
+improvement on the original evolutionary pattern. At any
+rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines
+of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has
+drawn so startling and sensational a picture. Several of
+the pre-Glacial sketches show us lank and gawky savages
+with the body covered with long scratches, answering exactly
+to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of
+the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained
+his old original hairy covering. The few skulls and other
+<a name="page115" id="page115"></a>fragments of skeletons now preserved to us also indicate
+that our old master and his contemporaries much resembled
+in shape and build the Australian black fellows, though
+their foreheads were lower and more receding, while their
+front teeth still projected in huge fangs, faintly recalling
+the immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart
+from any theoretical considerations as to our probable
+descent (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin's hypothetical 'hairy
+arboreal quadrumanous ancestor,' whose existence may or
+may not be really true, there can be no doubt that the
+actual historical remains set before us pre-Glacial man as
+evidently approaching in several important respects the
+higher monkeys.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the
+Time still retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many
+traces of the old monkey-like progenitor, the horses which
+our old master has so cleverly delineated for us on his
+scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the earlier
+united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has
+admirably reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse,
+beginning with a little creature from the Eocene beds of
+New Mexico, with five toes to each hind foot, and ending
+with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically reduced
+to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate stages
+show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four
+toes on his front feet and three behind; a Miocene kind as
+big as a sheep, with only three toes on the front foot, the
+two outer of which are smaller than the big middle one;
+and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one
+stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller
+ones, too short by far to reach the ground. In our own
+horse these lateral toes have become reduced to what are
+known by veterinaries as splint bones, combined with the
+canon in a single solidly morticed piece. But in the pre-Glacial
+<a name="page116" id="page116"></a>horses the splint bones still generally remained
+quite distinct, thus pointing back to the still earlier period
+when they existed as two separate and independent side
+toes in the ancestral quadruped. In a few cave specimens,
+however, the splints are found united with the canons in a
+single piece, while conversely horses are sometimes, though
+very rarely, born at the present day with three-toed feet,
+exactly resembling those of their half-forgotten ancestor,
+the Pliocene hipparion.</p>
+
+<p>The reason why we know so much about the horses of
+the cave period is, I am bound to admit, simply and solely
+because the man of the period ate them. Hippophagy has
+always been popular in France; it was practised by pre-Glacial
+man in the caves of P&eacute;rigord, and revived with
+immense enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards
+after the siege of Paris and the hunger of the Commune.
+The cave men hunted and killed the wild horse of their
+own times, and one of the best of their remaining works of
+art represents a naked hunter attacking two horses, while
+a huge snake winds itself unperceived behind close to his
+heel. In this rough prehistoric sketch one seems to catch
+some faint antique foreshadowing of the rude humour of
+the 'Petit Journal pour Rire.' Some arch&aelig;ologists even
+believe that the horse was domesticated by the cave men
+as a source of food, and argue that the familiarity with its
+form shown in the drawings could only have been acquired
+by people who knew the animal in its domesticated state;
+they declare that the cave man was obviously horsey. But
+all the indications seem to me to show that tame animals
+were quite unknown in the age of the cave men. The
+mammoth certainly was never domesticated; yet there is
+a famous sketch of the huge beast upon a piece of his own
+ivory, discovered in the cave of La Madelaine by Messrs.
+Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred times in works
+<a name="page117" id="page117"></a>on arch&aelig;ology, which forms one of the finest existing relics
+of pre-Glacial art. In another sketch, less well known, but
+not unworthy of admiration, the early artist has given us
+with a few rapid but admirable strokes his own reminiscence
+of the effect produced upon him by the sudden onslaught
+of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide
+open, a perfect glimpse of elephantine fury. It forms a
+capital example of early impressionism, respectfully recommended
+to the favourable attention of Mr. J.M. Whistler.</p>
+
+<p>The reindeer, however, formed the favourite food and
+favourite model of the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was
+a better sitter than the mammoth; certainly it is much
+more frequently represented on these early prehistoric bas-reliefs.
+The high-water mark of pal&aelig;olithic art is undoubtedly
+to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen,
+in Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation
+of a buck grazing, in which the perspective of the two
+horns is better managed than a Chinese artist would
+manage it at the present day. Another drawing of two
+reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock
+and unearthed in one of the caves of P&eacute;rigord, though far
+inferior to the Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is
+yet not without real merit. The perspective, however,
+displays one marked infantile trait, for the head and legs
+of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of another.
+Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other
+extinct or existing animals are also found among the
+archaic sculptures. Probably all these creatures were used
+as food; and it is even doubtful whether the artistic
+troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. To quote
+Mr. Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, 'he lived
+in a cave by the seas; he lived upon oysters and foes.'
+The oysters are quite undoubted, and the foes may be inferred
+with considerable certainty.<a name="page118" id="page118"></a></p>
+
+<p>I have spoken of our old master more than once under
+this rather question-begging style and title of primitive
+man. In reality, however, the very facts which I have here
+been detailing serve themselves to show how extremely far
+our hero was from being truly primitive. You can't speak
+of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct
+animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense
+primordial. Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed
+light-hearted cannibals; nevertheless they could design far
+better than the modern Esquimaux or Polynesians, and
+carve far better than the civilised being who is now calmly
+discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own
+study. Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and
+the hypothetical hairy quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid
+there must have intervened innumerable generations of
+gradually improving intermediate forms. The old master,
+when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed,
+in his Swiss or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and
+necklet of bear's teeth dropping loosely on his hairy bosom,
+is nevertheless in all essentials a completely evolved human
+being, with a whole past of slowly acquired culture lying
+dimly and mysteriously behind him. Already he had invented
+the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly
+chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed fish-hook,
+the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle.
+Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements with
+artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with
+the figures of animals. I have no doubt that he even
+knew how to brew and to distil; and he was probably
+acquainted with the noble art of cookery as applied to the
+persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage
+cannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as
+somebody has rightly remarked, is the first step on the
+road to civilisation.<a name="page119" id="page119"></a></p>
+
+<p>No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive
+man we must go much further back in time than the
+mere trifle of 250,000 years with which Dr. Croll and the
+cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for pre-Glacial
+humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably
+earlier fire-split flints which the Abb&eacute; Bourgeois&mdash;undaunted
+mortal!&mdash;ventured to discover among the Miocene
+strata of the <i>calcaire de Beauce</i>. Those flints, if of human
+origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and still more
+hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as
+genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently
+artificial, one distinguished arch&aelig;ologist will not
+admit they can be in any way human; he will have it that
+they were really the handiwork of the great European
+anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is
+nothing more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does
+it matter whether you call the animal that fashioned these
+exceedingly rough and fire-marked implements a man-like
+ape or an ape-like human being? The fact remains quite
+unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it. When
+you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed
+to manufacture himself a convenient implement, you may
+be sure that man, noble man, with all his glorious and
+admirable faculties&mdash;cannibal or otherwise&mdash;is lurking
+somewhere very close just round the corner. The more we
+examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does
+the conviction force itself upon us that he was very far
+indeed from being primitive&mdash;that we must push back the
+early history of our race not for 250,000 winters alone, but
+perhaps for two or three million years into the dim past of
+Tertiary ages.</p>
+
+<p>But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the
+origin of the race by a very long interval indeed, it is none
+the less true that he is separated from our own time by
+<a name="page120" id="page120"></a>the intervention of a vast blank space, the space occupied
+by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial Epoch.
+A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the
+relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy
+barrows still cap the summits of our southern chalk downs.
+When the great ice sheet drove away pal&aelig;olithic man&mdash;the
+man of the caves and the unwrought flint axes&mdash;from
+Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked
+savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed,
+but armed only with roughly chipped stone implements,
+and wholly ignorant of taming animals or of the very
+rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing of the use of
+metals&mdash;<i>aurum irrepertum spernere fortior</i>&mdash;and he had
+not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone
+tomahawks to a finished edge. He couldn't make himself
+a bowl of sun-baked pottery, and, if he had discovered the
+almost universal art of manufacturing an intoxicating liquor
+from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great anthropological
+truth, justly remarks, 'man, being reasonable, <i>must</i>
+get drunk'), he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy
+from the capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That
+was the kind of human being who alone inhabited France
+and England during the later pre-Glacial period.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the
+play-bills put it), and then the curtain rises afresh upon
+neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile, loitering somewhere
+behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet imperfectly explored
+from this point of view), had acquired the important
+arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made
+pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice
+sheet cleared away he followed the returning summer into
+Northern Europe, another man, physically, intellectually,
+and morally, with all the slow accumulations of nearly two
+thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! how
+<a name="page121" id="page121"></a>hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then
+comes the age of what older antiquaries used to regard
+as primitive antiquity&mdash;the age of the English barrows, of
+the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake dwellings.
+The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow,
+the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun
+to sow small ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley;
+they had learnt to weave flax and wear decent clothing:
+in a word, they had passed from the savage hunting condition
+to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists.
+That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose
+we must conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn't to be
+measured by mere calculations of ten or twenty centuries,
+but of ten or twenty thousand years. The perspective of
+the past is opening up rapidly before us; what looked quite
+close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere
+in the dim distance. Like our paleolithic artists, we fail
+to get the reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground,
+as we ought to do if we saw the whole scene properly foreshortened.</p>
+
+<p>On the table where I write there lie two paper-weights,
+preserving from the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of
+foolscap to which this essay is now being committed.
+One of them is a very rude flint hatchet, produced by
+merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows,
+and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs
+to the age of the very old master (or possibly even to a
+slightly earlier epoch), and it was sent me from Ightham,
+in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of prehistoric
+memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now
+serves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder,
+simpler, and more ineffective than any weapon or implement
+at present in use among the lowest savages. Yet with
+it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by the banks of
+<a name="page122" id="page122"></a>the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken
+forest two hundred thousand years ago and more; with it
+he has faced the angry cave bear and the original and only
+genuine British lion (for everybody knows that the existing
+mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a bastard
+modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I
+have very little doubt in my own mind that with it some
+&aelig;sthetic ancestor has brained and cut up for his use his
+next-door neighbour in the nearest cavern, and then carved
+upon his well-picked bones an interesting sketch of the entire
+performance. The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact,
+habitually drew their society pictures upon the personal
+remains of the mammoth or the man whom they wished
+to caricature in deathless bone-cuts. The other paper-weight
+is a polished neolithic tomahawk, belonging to the
+period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial
+Epoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels
+of civilisation with great accuracy. It is the military
+weapon of a trained barbaric warrior as opposed to the
+universal implement and utensil of a rude, solitary, savage
+hunter. Yet how curious it is that even in the midst of
+this 'so-called nineteenth century,' which perpetually proclaims
+itself an age of progress, men should still prefer to
+believe themselves inferior to their original ancestors,
+instead of being superior to them! The idea that man
+has risen is considered base, degrading, and positively
+wicked; the idea that he has fallen is considered to be
+immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For myself,
+I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric
+Glaucus that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much
+better men than ever were our fathers.<a name="page123" id="page123"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part8" id="part8"><i>BRITISH AND FOREIGN</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Strictly speaking, there is nothing really and truly
+British; everybody and everything is a naturalised alien.
+Viewed as Britons, we all of us, human and animal, differ
+from one another simply in the length of time we and our
+ancestors have continuously inhabited this favoured and
+foggy isle of Britain. Look, for example, at the men and
+women of us. Some of us, no doubt, are more or less remotely
+of Norman blood, and came over, like that noble
+family the Slys, with Richard Conqueror. Others of us,
+perhaps, are in the main Scandinavian, and date back a
+couple of generations earlier, to the bare-legged followers
+of Canute and Guthrum. Yet others, once more, are true
+Saxon Englishmen, descendants of Hengest, if there ever
+was a Hengest, or of Horsa, if a genuine Horsa ever actually
+existed. None of these, it is quite clear, have any just
+right or title to be considered in the last resort as true-born
+Britons; they are all of them just as much foreigners at
+bottom as the Spitalfields Huguenots or the Pembrokeshire
+Flemings, the Italian organ-boy and the Hindoo prince
+disguised as a crossing-sweeper. But surely the Welshman
+and the Highland Scot at least are undeniable Britishers,
+sprung from the soil and to the manner born! Not a bit
+of it; inexorable modern science, diving back remorselessly
+into the remoter past, traces the Cymry across the face of
+Germany, and fixes in shadowy hypothetical numbers the
+exact date, to a few centuries, of the first prehistoric Gaelic
+<a name="page124" id="page124"></a>invasion. Even the still earlier brown Euskarians and
+yellow Mongolians, who held the land before the advent of
+the ancient Britons, were themselves immigrants; the very
+Autochthones in person turn out, on close inspection, to
+be vagabonds and wanderers and foreign colonists. In
+short, man as a whole is not an indigenous animal at all
+in the British Isles. Be he who he may, when we push
+his pedigree back to its prime original, we find him always
+arriving in the end by the Dover steamer or the Harwich
+packet. Five years, in fact, are quite sufficient to give him
+a legal title to letters of naturalisation, unless indeed he be
+a German grand-duke, in which case he can always become
+an Englishman offhand by Act of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>It is just the same with all the other animals and plants
+that now inhabit these isles of Britain. If there be anything
+at all with a claim to be considered really indigenous,
+it is the Scotch ptarmigan and the Alpine hare, the northern
+holygrass and the mountain flowers of the Highland summits.
+All the rest are sojourners and wayfarers, brought
+across as casuals, like the gipsies and the Oriental plane,
+at various times to the United Kingdom, some of them
+recently, some of them long ago, but not one of them (it
+seems), except the oyster, a true native. The common
+brown rat, for instance, as everybody knows, came over,
+not, it is true, with William the Conqueror, but with the
+Hanoverian dynasty and King George I. of blessed memory.
+The familiar cockroach, or 'black beetle,' of our lower
+regions, is an Oriental importation of the last century.
+The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard
+in the land, especially in some big London hotels. The
+Colorado beetle is hourly expected by Cunard steamer.
+The Canadian roadside erigeron is well established already
+in the remoter suburbs; the phylloxera battens on our
+hothouse vines; the American river-weed stops the navigation
+<a name="page125" id="page125"></a>on our principal canals. The Ganges and the Mississippi
+have long since flooded the tawny Thames, as
+Juvenal's cynical friend declared the Syrian Orontes had
+flooded the Tiber. And what has thus been going on
+slowly within the memory of the last few generations has
+been going on constantly from time immemorial, and
+peopling Britain in all its parts with its now existing fauna
+and flora.</p>
+
+<p>But if all the plants and animals in our islands are
+thus ultimately imported, the question naturally arises,
+What was there in Great Britain and Ireland before any of
+their present inhabitants came to inherit them? The
+answer is, succinctly, Nothing. Or if this be a little too
+extreme, then let us imitate the modesty of Mr. Gilbert's
+hero and modify the statement into Hardly anything. In
+England, as in Northern Europe generally, modern history
+begins, not with the reign of Queen Elizabeth, but with
+the passing away of the Glacial Epoch. During that great
+age of universal ice our Britain, from end to end, was
+covered at various times by sea and by glaciers; it resembled
+on the whole the cheerful aspect of Spitzbergen
+or Nova Zembla at the present day. A few reindeer
+wandered now and then over its frozen shores; a scanty
+vegetation of the correlative reindeer-moss grew with
+difficulty under the sheets and drifts of endless snow; a
+stray walrus or an occasional seal basked in the chilly
+sunshine on the ice-bound coast. But during the greatest
+extension of the North-European ice-sheet it is probable
+that life in London was completely extinct; the metropolitan
+area did not even vegetate. Snow and snow and snow
+and snow was then the short sum-total of British scenery.
+Murray's Guides were rendered quite unnecessary, and
+penny ices were a drug in the market. England was given
+up to one unchanging universal winter.<a name="page126" id="page126"></a></p>
+
+<p>Slowly, however, times altered, as they are much given
+to doing; and a new era dawned upon Britain. The thermometer
+rose rapidly, or at least it would have risen, with
+effusion, if it had yet been invented. The land emerged
+from the sea, and southern plants and animals began to
+invade the area that was afterwards to be England, across
+the broad belt which then connected us with the Continental
+system. But in those days communications were slow and
+land transit difficult. You had to foot it. The European
+fauna and flora moved but gradually and tentatively
+north-westward, and before any large part of it could settle in
+England our island was finally cut off from the mainland
+by the long and gradual wearing away of the cliffs at Dover
+and Calais. That accounts for the comparative poverty of
+animal and vegetable life in England, and still more for its
+extreme paucity and meagreness in Ireland and the Highlands.
+It has been erroneously asserted, for example, that
+St. Patrick expelled snakes and lizards, frogs and toads, from
+the soil of Erin. This detail, as the French newspapers
+politely phrase it, is inexact. St. Patrick did not expel the
+reptiles, because there were never any reptiles in Ireland
+(except dynamiters) for him to expel. The creatures never
+got so far on their long and toilsome north-westward march
+before St. George's Channel intervened to prevent their
+passage across to Dublin. It is really, therefore, to St.
+George, rather than to St. Patrick, that the absence of
+toads and snakes from the soil of Ireland is ultimately due.
+The doubtful Cappadocian prelate is well known to have
+been always death on dragons and serpents.</p>
+
+<p>As long ago as the sixteenth century, indeed, Verstegan
+the antiquary clearly saw that the existence of badgers and
+foxes in England implied the former presence of a belt of
+land joining the British Islands to the Continent of Europe;
+for, as he acutely observed, nobody (before fox-hunting, at
+<a name="page127" id="page127"></a>least) would ever have taken the trouble to bring them
+over. Still more does the presence in our islands of the
+red deer, and formerly of the wild white cattle, the wolf,
+the bear, and the wild boar, to say nothing of the beaver,
+the otter, the squirrel, and the weasel, prove that England
+was once conterminous with France or Belgium. At the
+very best of times, however, before Sir Ewen Cameron of
+Lochiel had killed positively the last 'last wolf' in Britain
+(several other 'last wolves' having previously been despatched
+by various earlier intrepid exterminators), our
+English fauna was far from a rich one, especially as regards
+the larger quadrupeds. In bats, birds, and insects we have
+always done better, because to such creatures a belt of sea is
+not by any means an insuperable barrier; whereas in reptiles
+and amphibians, on the contrary, we have always been
+weak, seeing that most reptiles are bad swimmers, and very
+few can rival the late lamented Captain Webb in his feat
+of crossing the Channel, as Leander and Lord Byron did
+the Hellespont.</p>
+
+<p>Only one good-sized animal, so far as known, is now
+peculiar to the British Isles, and that is our familiar
+friend the red grouse of the Scotch moors. I doubt, however,
+whether even he is really indigenous in the strictest
+sense of the word: that is to say, whether he was evolved
+in and for these islands exclusively, as the moa and the apteryx
+were evolved for New Zealand, and the extinct dodo for
+Mauritius alone. It is far more probable that the red grouse
+is the original variety of the willow grouse of Scandinavia,
+which has retained throughout the year its old plumage,
+while its more northern cousins among the fiords and fjelds
+have taken, under stress of weather, to donning a complete
+white dress in winter, and a grey or speckled tourist suit
+for the summer season.</p>
+
+<p>Even since the insulation of Britain a great many new
+<a name="page128" id="page128"></a>plants and animals have been added to our population,
+both by human design and in several other casual fashions.
+The fallow deer is said to have been introduced by the
+Romans, and domesticated ever since in the successive
+parks of Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman. The edible
+snail, still scattered thinly over our southern downs, and
+abundant at Box Hill and a few other spots in Surrey or
+Sussex, was brought over, they tell us, by the same luxurious
+Italian epicures, and is even now confined, imaginative
+naturalists declare, to the immediate neighbourhood
+of Roman stations. The medi&aelig;val monks, in like manner,
+introduced the carp for their Friday dinners. One of our
+commonest river mussels at the present day did not exist
+in England at all a century ago, but was ferried hither
+from the Volga, clinging to the bottoms of vessels from the
+Black Sea, and has now spread itself through all our brooks
+and streams to the very heart and centre of England.
+Thus, from day to day, as in society at large, new introductions
+constantly take place, and old friends die out for ever.
+The brown rat replaces the old English black rat; strange
+weeds kill off the weeds of ancient days; fresh flies and
+grubs and beetles crop up, and disturb the primitive
+entomological balance. The bustard is gone from Salisbury
+Plain; the fenland butterflies have disappeared with
+the drainage of the fens. In their place the red-legged
+partridge invades Norfolk; the American black bass is
+making himself quite at home, with Yankee assurance, in
+our sluggish rivers; and the spoonbill is nesting of its
+own accord among the warmer corners of the Sussex downs.</p>
+
+<p>In the plant world, substitution often takes place far
+more rapidly. I doubt whether the stinging nettle, which
+renders picnicking a nuisance in England, is truly indigenous;
+certainly the two worst kinds, the smaller nettle
+and the Roman nettle, are quite recent denizens, never
+<a name="page129" id="page129"></a>straying, even at the present day, far from the precincts of
+farmyards and villages. The shepherd's-purse and many
+other common garden weeds of cultivation are of Eastern
+origin, and came to us at first with the seed-corn and the
+peas from the Mediterranean region. Corn-cockles and
+corn-flowers are equally foreign and equally artificial; even
+the scarlet poppy, seldom found except in wheat-fields or
+around waste places in villages, has probably followed the
+course of tillage from some remote and ancient Eastern
+origin. There is a pretty blue veronica which was unknown
+in England some thirty years since, but which then began
+to spread in gardens, and is now one of the commonest and
+most troublesome weeds throughout the whole country.
+Other familiar wild plants have first been brought over as
+garden flowers. There is the wall-flower, for instance, now
+escaped from cultivation in every part of Britain, and mantling
+with its yellow bunches both old churches and houses
+and also the crannies of the limestone cliffs around half
+the shores of England. The common stock has similarly
+overrun the sea-front of the Isle of Wight; the monkey-plant,
+originally a Chilian flower, has run wild in many
+boggy spots in England and Wales; and a North American
+balsam, seldom cultivated even in cottage gardens, has
+managed to establish itself in profuse abundance along the
+banks of the Wey about Guildford and Godalming. One
+little garden linaria, at first employed as an ornament for
+hanging-baskets, has become so common on old walls and
+banks as to be now considered a mere weed, and exterminated
+accordingly by fashionable gardeners. Such are the
+unaccountable reverses of fortune, that one age will pay
+fifty guineas a bulb for a plant which the next age grubs
+up unanimously as a vulgar intruder. White of Selborne
+noticed with delight in his own kitchen that rare insect,
+the Oriental cockroach, lately imported; and Mr. Brewer
+<a name="page130" id="page130"></a>observed with joy in his garden at Reigate the blue Buxbaum
+speedwell, which is now the acknowledged and hated
+pest of the Surrey agriculturist.</p>
+
+<p>The history of some of these waifs and strays which go
+to make up the wider population of Britain is indeed sufficiently
+remarkable. Like all islands, England has a fragmentary
+fauna and flora, whose members have often drifted
+towards it in the most wonderful and varied manner.
+Sometimes they bear witness to ancient land connections,
+as in the case of the spotted Portuguese slug which Professor
+Allman found calmly disporting itself on the basking
+cliffs in the Killarney district. In former days, when Spain
+and Ireland joined hands in the middle of the Bay of
+Biscay, the ancestors of this placid Lusitanian mollusk
+must have ranged (good word to apply to slugs) from the
+groves of Cintra to the Cove of Cork. But, as time rolled
+on, the cruel crawling sea rolled on also, and cut away all
+the western world from the foot of the Asturias to
+Macgillicuddy's Reeks. So the spotted slug continued to
+survive in two distinct and divided bodies, a large one in
+South-western Europe, and a small isolated colony, all
+alone by itself, around the Kerry mountains and the Lakes
+of Killarney. At other times pure accident accounts for
+the presence of a particular species in the mainlands of
+Britain. For example, the Bermuda grass-lily, a common
+American plant, is known in a wild state nowhere in Europe
+save at a place called Woodford, in county Galway. Nobody
+ever planted it there; it has simply sprung up from some
+single seed, carried over, perhaps, on the feet of a bird, or
+cast ashore by the Gulf Stream on the hospitable coast of
+Western Ireland. Yet there it has flourished and thriven
+ever since, a naturalised British subject of undoubted
+origin, without ever spreading to north or south above a
+few miles from its adopted habitat.<a name="page131" id="page131"></a></p>
+
+<p>There are several of these unconscious American importations
+in various parts of Britain, some of them, no doubt,
+brought over with seed-corn or among the straw of packing-cases,
+but others unconnected in any way with human
+agency, and owing their presence here to natural causes.
+That pretty little Yankee weed, the claytonia, now common
+in parts of Lancashire and Oxfordshire, first made its
+appearance amongst us, I believe, by its seeds being
+accidentally included with the sawdust in which Wenham
+Lake ice is packed for transport. The Canadian river-weed
+is known first to have escaped from the botanical gardens
+at Cambridge, whence it spread rapidly through the congenial
+dykes and sluices of the fen country, and so into
+the entire navigable network of the Midland counties. But
+there are other aliens of older settlement amongst us, aliens
+of American origin which nevertheless arrived in Britain,
+in all probability, long before Columbus ever set foot on the
+low basking sandbank of Cat Island. Such is the jointed
+pond-sedge of the Hebrides, a water-weed found abundantly
+in the lakes and tarns of the Isle of Skye, Mull and Coll,
+and the west coast of Ireland, but occurring nowhere else
+throughout the whole expanse of Europe or Asia. How
+did it get there? Clearly its seeds were either washed by
+the waves or carried by birds, and thus deposited on the
+nearest European shores to America. But if Mr. Alfred
+Russel Wallace had been alive in pre-Columban days
+(which, as Euclid remarks, is absurd), he would readily
+have inferred, from the frequent occurrence of such unknown
+plants along the western verge of Britain, that a
+great continent lay unexplored to the westward, and would
+promptly have proceeded to discover and annex it. As Mr.
+Wallace was not yet born, however, Columbus took a mean
+advantage over him, and discovered it first by mere right
+of primogeniture.<a name="page132" id="page132"></a></p>
+
+<p>In other cases, the circumstances under which a particular
+plant appears in England are often very suspicious.
+Take the instance of the belladonna, or deadly nightshade,
+an extremely rare British species, found only in the
+immediate neighbourhood of old castles and monastic
+buildings. Belladonna, of course, is a deadly poison, and
+was much used in the half-magical, half-criminal sorceries
+of the Middle Ages. Did you wish to remove a troublesome
+rival or an elder brother, you treated him to a dose
+of deadly nightshade. Yet why should it, in company with
+many other poisonous exotics, be found so frequently
+around the ruins of monasteries? Did the holy fathers&mdash;but
+no, the thought is too irreverent. Let us keep our
+illusions, and forget the friar and the apothecary in 'Romeo
+and Juliet.'</p>
+
+<p>Belladonna has never fairly taken root in English soil.
+It remains, like the Roman snail and the Portuguese slug,
+a mere casual straggler about its ancient haunts. But
+there are other plants which have fairly established their
+claim to be considered as native-born Britons, though they
+came to us at first as aliens and colonists from foreign
+parts. Such, to take a single case, is the history of the
+common alexanders, now a familiar weed around villages
+and farmyards, but only introduced into England as a pot-herb
+about the eighth or ninth century. It was long grown
+in cottage gardens for table purposes, but has for ages been
+superseded in that way by celery. Nevertheless, it continues
+to grow all about our lanes and hedges, side by side
+with another quaintly-named plant, bishop-weed or gout-weed,
+whose very titles in themselves bear curious witness
+to its original uses in this isle of Britain. I don't know
+why, but it is an historical fact that the early prelates of
+the English Church, saintly or otherwise, were peculiarly
+liable to that very episcopal disease, the gout. Whether
+<a name="page133" id="page133"></a>their frequent fasting produced this effect; whether, as
+they themselves piously alleged, it was due to constant
+kneeling on the cold stones of churches; or whether, as
+their enemies rather insinuated, it was due in greater
+measure to the excellent wines presented to them by their
+Italian <i>confr&egrave;res</i>, is a minute question to be decided by Mr.
+Freeman, not by the present humble inquirer. But the
+fact remains that bishops and gout got indelibly associated
+in the public mind; that the episcopal toes were looked
+upon as especially subject to that insidious disease up to
+the very end of the last century; and that they do say the
+bishops even now&mdash;but I refrain from the commission of
+<i>scandalum magnatum</i>. Anyhow, this particular weed was
+held to be a specific for the bishop's evil; and, being introduced
+and cultivated for the purpose, it came to be known
+indifferently to herbalists as bishop-weed and gout-weed.
+It has now long since ceased to be a recognised member of
+the British Pharmacop&oelig;ia, but, having overrun our lanes
+and thickets in its flush period, it remains to this day a
+visible botanical and etymological memento of the past
+twinges of episcopal remorse.</p>
+
+<p>Taken as a whole, one may fairly say that the total
+population of the British Isles consists mainly of three
+great elements. The first and oldest&mdash;the only one with
+any real claim to be considered as truly native&mdash;is the cold
+Northern, Alpine and Arctic element, comprising such
+animals as the white hare of Scotland, the ptarmigan, the
+pine marten, and the capercailzie&mdash;the last once extinct,
+and now reintroduced into the Highlands as a game bird.
+This very ancient fauna and flora, left behind soon after
+the Glacial Epoch, and perhaps in part a relic of the type
+which still struggled on in favoured spots during that
+terrible period of universal ice and snow, now survives for
+the most part only in the extreme north and on the highest
+<a name="page134" id="page134"></a>and chilliest mountain-tops, where it has gradually been
+driven, like tourists in August, by the increasing warmth
+and sultriness of the southern lowlands. The summits of
+the principal Scotch hills are occupied by many Arctic
+plants, now slowly dying out, but lingering yet as last
+relics of that old native British flora. The Alpine milk
+vetch thus loiters among the rocks of Braemar and Clova;
+the Arctic brook-saxifrage flowers but sparingly near the
+summit of Ben Lawers, Ben Nevis, and Lochnagar; its
+still more northern ally, the drooping saxifrage, is now extinct
+in all Britain, save on a single snowy Scotch height,
+where it now rarely blossoms, and will soon become
+altogether obsolete. There are other northern plants of
+this first and oldest British type, like the Ural oxytrope,
+the cloudberry, and the white dryas, which remain as yet
+even in the moors of Yorkshire, or over considerable tracts
+in the Scotch Highlands; there are others restricted to a
+single spot among the Welsh hills, an isolated skerry
+among the outer Hebrides, or a solitary summit in the
+Lake District. But wherever they linger, these true-born
+Britons of the old rock are now but strangers and outcasts
+in the land; the intrusive foreigner has driven them to die
+on the cold mountain-tops, as the Celt drove the Mongolian
+to the hills, and the Saxon, in turn, has driven the Celt to
+the Highlands and the islands. Yet as late as the twelfth
+century itself, even the true reindeer, the Arctic monarch
+of the Glacial Epoch, was still hunted by Norwegian jarls
+of Orkney on the mainland of Caithness and Sutherlandshire.</p>
+
+<p>Second in age is the warm western and south-western
+type, the type represented by the Portuguese slug, the
+arbutus trees and Mediterranean heaths of the Killarney
+district, the flora of Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, and the
+peculiar wild flowers of South Wales, Devonshire, and the
+<a name="page135" id="page135"></a>west country generally. This class belongs by origin to
+the submerged land of Lyonesse, the warm champaign
+country that once spread westward over the Bay of Biscay,
+and derived from the Gulf Stream the genial climate still
+preserved by its last remnants at Tresco and St. Mary's.
+The animals belonging to this secondary stratum of our
+British population are few and rare, but of its plants there
+are not a few, some of them extending over the whole
+western shores of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland,
+wherever they are washed by the Gulf Stream, and others
+now confined to particular spots, often with the oddest
+apparent capriciousness. Thus, two or three southern
+types of clover are peculiar to the Lizard Point, in Cornwall;
+a little Spanish and Italian restharrow has got
+stranded in the Channel Islands and on the Mull of
+Galloway; the spotted rock-rose of the Mediterranean
+grows only in Kerry, Galway, and Anglesea; while other
+plants of the same warm habit are confined to such spots
+as Torquay, Babbicombe, Dawlish, Cork, Swansea, Axminster,
+and the Scilly Isles. Of course, all peninsulas
+and islands are warmer in temperature than inland places,
+and so these relics of the lost Lyonesse have survived here
+and there in Cornwall, Carnarvonshire, Kerry, and other
+very projecting headlands long after they have died out
+altogether from the main central mass of Britain. South-western
+Ireland in particular is almost Portuguese in the
+general aspect of its fauna and flora.</p>
+
+<p>Third and latest of all in time, though almost contemporary
+with the southern type, is the central European
+or Germanic element in our population. Sad as it is to
+confess it, the truth must nevertheless be told, that our
+beasts and birds, our plants and flowers, are for the most
+part of purely Teutonic origin. Even as the rude and
+hard-headed Anglo-Saxon has driven the gentle, poetical,
+<a name="page136" id="page136"></a>and imaginative Celt ever westward before him into the
+hills and the sea, so the rude and vigorous Germanic beasts
+and weeds have driven the gentler and softer southern
+types into Wales and Cornwall, Galloway and Connemara.
+It is to the central European population that we owe or
+owed the red deer, the wild boar, the bear, the wolf, the
+beaver, the fox, the badger, the otter, and the squirrel. It
+is to the central European flora that we owe the larger
+part of the most familiar plants in all eastern and southeastern
+England. They crossed in bands over the old
+land belt before Britain was finally insulated, and they
+have gone on steadily ever since, with true Teutonic persistence,
+overrunning the land and pushing slowly westward,
+like all other German bands before or since, to the
+detriment and discomfort of the previous inhabitants. Let
+us humbly remember that we are all of us at bottom
+foreigners alike, but that it is the Teutonic English, the
+people from the old Low Dutch fatherland by the Elbe,
+who have finally given to this isle its name of England,
+and to every one of us, Celt or Teuton, their own Teutonic
+name of Englishmen. We are at best, as an irate Teuton
+once remarked, 'nozzing but segond-hand Chermans.' In
+the words of a distinguished modern philologist of our own
+blood, 'English is Dutch, spoken with a Welsh accent.'<a name="page137" id="page137"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part9" id="part9"><i>THUNDERBOLTS</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>The subject of thunderbolts is a very fascinating one, and
+all the more so because there are no such things in existence
+at all as thunderbolts of any sort. Like the snakes of
+Iceland, their whole history might, from the positive point
+of view at least, be summed up in the simple statement of
+their utter nonentity. But does that do away in the least,
+I should like to know, with their intrinsic interest and importance?
+Not a bit of it. It only adds to the mystery
+and charm of the whole subject. Does anyone feel as
+keenly interested in any real living cobra or anaconda as
+in the non-existent great sea-serpent? Are ghosts and
+vampires less attractive objects of popular study than cats
+and donkeys? Can the present King of Abyssinia, interviewed
+by our own correspondent, equal the romantic charm
+of Prester John, or the butcher in the next street rival
+the personality of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne,
+Baronet? No, the real fact is this: if there <i>were</i> thunderbolts,
+the question of their nature and action would be a
+wholly dull, scientific, and priggish one; it is their unreality
+alone that invests them with all the mysterious
+weirdness of pure fiction. Lightning, now, is a common
+thing that one reads about wearily in the books on electricity,
+a mere ordinary matter of positive and negative, density and
+potential, to be measured in ohms (whatever they may be),
+and partially imitated with Leyden jars and red sealing-wax
+apparatus. Why, did not Benjamin Franklin, a fat old
+<a name="page138" id="page138"></a>gentleman in ill-fitting small clothes, bring it down from
+the clouds with a simple door-key, somewhere near Philadelphia?
+and does not Mr. Robert Scott (of the Meteorological
+Office) calmly predict its probable occurrence within
+the next twenty-four hours in his daily report, as published
+regularly in the morning papers? This is lightning, mere
+vulgar lightning, a simple result of electrical conditions
+in the upper atmosphere, inconveniently connected with
+algebraical formulas in <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, <i>z</i>, with horrid symbols interspersed
+in Greek letters. But the real thunderbolts of
+Jove, the weapons that the angry Zeus, or Thor, or Indra
+hurls down upon the head of the trembling malefactor&mdash;how
+infinitely grander, more fearsome, and more mysterious!</p>
+
+<p>And yet even nowadays, I believe, there are a large
+number of well-informed people, who have passed the sixth
+standard, taken prizes at the Oxford Local, and attended
+the dullest lectures of the Society for University Extension,
+but who nevertheless in some vague and dim corner of their
+consciousness retain somehow a lingering faith in the
+existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in
+its entirety the simple truth that lightning is the reality of
+which thunderbolts are the mythical, or fanciful, or verbal
+representation. We all of us know now that lightning is
+a mere flash of electric light and heat; that it has no solid
+existence or core of any sort; in short, that it is dynamical
+rather than material, a state or movement rather than a
+body or thing. To be sure, local newspapers still talk
+with much show of learning about 'the electric fluid'
+which did such remarkable damage last week upon the
+slated steeple of Peddlington Torpida Church; but the
+well-crammed schoolboy of the present day has long since
+learned that the electric fluid is an exploded fallacy, and
+that the lightning which pulled the ten slates off the
+<a name="page139" id="page139"></a>steeple in question was nothing more in its real nature
+than a very big immaterial spark. However, the word
+thunderbolt has survived to us from the days when people
+still believed that the thing which did the damage during
+a thunderstorm was really and truly a gigantic white-hot
+bolt or arrow; and, as there is a natural tendency in human
+nature to fit an existence to every word, people even now
+continue to imagine that there must be actually something
+or other somewhere called a thunderbolt. They don't
+figure this thing to themselves as being identical with the
+lightning; on the contrary, they seem to regard it as
+something infinitely rarer, more terrible, and more mystic;
+but they firmly hold that thunderbolts do exist in real life,
+and even sometimes assert that they themselves have positively
+seen them.</p>
+
+<p>But, if seeing is believing, it is equally true, as all who
+have looked into the phenomena of spiritualism and
+'psychical research' (modern English for ghost-hunting)
+know too well, that believing is seeing also. The origin
+of the faith in thunderbolts must be looked for (like the
+origin of the faith in ghosts and 'psychical phenomena')
+far back in the history of our race. The noble savage, at
+that early period when wild in woods he ran, naturally
+noticed the existence of thunder and lightning, because
+thunder and lightning are things that forcibly obtrude
+themselves upon the attention of the observer, however
+little he may by nature be scientifically inclined. Indeed,
+the noble savage, sleeping naked on the bare ground, in
+tropical countries where thunder occurs almost every night
+on an average, was sure to be pretty often awaked from
+his peaceful slumbers by the torrents of rain that habitually
+accompany thunderstorms in the happy realms of everlasting
+dog-days. Primitive man was thereupon compelled
+to do a little philosophising on his own account as to the
+<a name="page140" id="page140"></a>cause and origin of the rumbling and flashing which he
+saw so constantly around him. Naturally enough, he concluded
+that the sound must be the voice of somebody; and
+that the fiery shaft, whose effects he sometimes noted upon
+trees, animals, and his fellow-man, must be the somebody's
+arrow. It is immaterial from this point of view whether,
+as the scientific anthropologists hold, he was led to his
+conception of these supernatural personages from his prior
+belief in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor Max
+M&uuml;ller will have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive
+savage breast toward the Infinite and the Unknowable
+(which he would doubtless have spelt, like the Professor,
+with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with the
+intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet); but this much
+at least is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder
+and the lightning as in some sense the voice and the arrows
+of an a&euml;rial god.</p>
+
+<p>Now, this idea about the arrows is itself very significant
+of the mental attitude of primitive man, and of the
+way that mental attitude has coloured all subsequent
+thinking and superstition upon this very subject. Curiously
+enough, to the present day the conception of the thunderbolt
+is essentially one of a <i>bolt</i>&mdash;that is to say, an arrow,
+or at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (and
+there are plenty of them lying about casually in country
+houses and local museums) are more or less arrow-like in
+shape and appearance; some of them, indeed, as we shall
+see by-and-by, are the actual stone arrowheads of primitive
+man himself in person. Of course the noble savage was
+himself in the constant habit of shooting at animals and
+enemies with a bow and arrow. When, then, he tried to
+figure to himself the angry god, seated in the storm-clouds,
+who spoke with such a loud rumbling voice, and killed
+those who displeased him with his fiery darts, he naturally
+<a name="page141" id="page141"></a>thought of him as using in his cloudy home the familiar
+bow and arrow of this nether planet. To us nowadays, if
+we were to begin forming the idea for ourselves all over
+again <i>de novo</i>, it would be far more natural to think of the
+thunder as the noise of a big gun, of the lightning as the
+flash of the powder, and of the supposed 'bolt' as a shell
+or bullet. There is really a ridiculous resemblance between
+a thunderstorm and a discharge of artillery. But the old
+conception derived from so many generations of primitive
+men has held its own against such mere modern devices
+as gunpowder and rifle balls; and none of the objects
+commonly shown as thunderbolts are ever round: they
+are distinguished, whatever their origin, by the common
+peculiarity that they more or less closely resemble a dart
+or arrowhead.</p>
+
+<p>Let us begin, then, by clearly disembarrassing our
+minds of any lingering belief in the existence of thunderbolts.
+There are absolutely no such things known to
+science. The two real phenomena that underlie the fable
+are simply thunder and lightning. A thunderstorm is
+merely a series of electrical discharges between one cloud
+and another, or between clouds and the earth; and these
+discharges manifest themselves to our senses under two
+forms&mdash;to the eye as lightning, to the ear as thunder. All
+that passes in each case is a huge spark&mdash;a commotion,
+not a material object. It is in principle just like the spark
+from an electrical machine; but while the most powerful
+machine of human construction will only send a spark for
+three feet, the enormous electrical apparatus provided for
+us by nature will send one for four, five, or even ten miles.
+Though lightning when it touches the earth always seems
+to us to come from the clouds to the ground, it is by no
+means certain that the real course may not at least occasionally
+be in the opposite direction. All we know is that
+<a name="page142" id="page142"></a>sometimes there is an instantaneous discharge between
+one cloud and another, and sometimes an instantaneous
+discharge between a cloud and the earth.</p>
+
+<p>But this idea of a mere passage of highly concentrated
+energy from one point to another was far too abstract, of
+course, for primitive man, and is far too abstract even now
+for nine out of ten of our fellow-creatures. Those who
+don't still believe in the bodily thunderbolt, a fearsome
+a&euml;rial weapon which buries itself deep in the bosom of the
+earth, look upon lightning as at least an embodiment of
+the electric fluid, a long spout or line of molten fire, which
+is usually conceived of as striking the ground and then
+proceeding to hide itself under the roots of a tree or
+beneath the foundations of a tottering house. Primitive
+man naturally took to the grosser and more material conception.
+He figured to himself the thunderbolt as a barbed
+arrowhead; and the forked zigzag character of the visible
+flash, as it darts rapidly from point to point, seemed almost
+inevitably to suggest to him the barbs, as one sees them
+represented on all the Greek and Roman gems, in the red
+right hand of the angry Jupiter.</p>
+
+<p>The thunderbolt being thus an accepted fact, it followed
+naturally that whenever any dart-like object of unknown
+origin was dug up out of the ground, it was at once set
+down as being a thunderbolt; and, on the other hand, the
+frequent occurrence of such dart-like objects, precisely
+where one might expect to find them in accordance with
+the theory, necessarily strengthened the belief itself. So
+commonly are thunderbolts picked up to the present day
+that to disbelieve in them seems to many country people a
+piece of ridiculous and stubborn scepticism. Why, they've
+ploughed up dozens of them themselves in their time, and
+just about the very place where the thunderbolt struck the
+old elm-tree two years ago, too.<a name="page143" id="page143"></a></p>
+
+<p>The most favourite form of thunderbolt is the polished
+stone hatchet or 'celt' of the newer stone age men. I
+have never heard the very rude chipped and unpolished
+axes of the older drift men or cave men described as
+thunderbolts: they are too rough and shapeless ever to
+attract attention from any except professed arch&aelig;ologists.
+Indeed, the wicked have been known to scoff at them freely
+as mere accidental lumps of broken flint, and to deride the
+notion of their being due in any way to deliberate human
+handicraft. These are the sort of people who would regard
+a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the
+shapely stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and
+herdsman is usually a beautifully polished wedge-shaped
+piece of solid greenstone; and its edge has been ground to
+such a delicate smoothness that it seems rather like a bit
+of nature's exquisite workmanship than a simple relic of
+prehistoric man. There is something very fascinating
+about the na&iuml;f belief that the neolithic axe is a genuine
+unadulterated thunderbolt. You dig it up in the ground
+exactly where you would expect a thunderbolt (if there
+were such things) to be. It is heavy, smooth, well shaped,
+and neatly pointed at one end. If it could really descend
+in a red-hot state from the depths of the sky, launched
+forth like a cannon-ball by some fierce discharge of
+heavenly artillery, it would certainly prove a very formidable
+weapon indeed; and one could easily imagine it
+scoring the bark of some aged oak, or tearing off the tiles
+from a projecting turret, exactly as the lightning is so well
+known to do in this prosaic workaday world of ours. In
+short, there is really nothing on earth against the theory
+of the stone axe being a true thunderbolt, except the fact
+that it unfortunately happens to be a neolithic hatchet.</p>
+
+<p>But the course of reasoning by which we discover the
+true nature of the stone axe is not one that would in any
+<a name="page144" id="page144"></a>case appeal strongly to the fancy or the intelligence of the
+British farmer. It is no use telling him that whenever
+one opens a barrow of the stone age one is pretty sure to
+find a neolithic axe and a few broken pieces of pottery
+beside the mouldering skeleton of the old nameless chief
+who lies there buried. The British farmer will doubtless
+stolidly retort that thunderbolts often strike the tops of
+hills, which are just the places where barrows and tumuli
+(tumps, he calls them) most do congregate; and that as to
+the skeleton, isn't it just as likely that the man was killed
+by the thunderbolt as that the thunderbolt was made by a
+man? Ay, and a sight likelier, too.</p>
+
+<p>All the world over, this simple and easy belief, that the
+buried stone axe is a thunderbolt, exists among Europeans
+and savages alike. In the West of England, the labourers
+will tell you that the thunder-axes they dig up fell from
+the sky. In Brittany, says Mr. Tylor, the old man who
+mends umbrellas at Carnac, beside the mysterious stone
+avenues of that great French Stonehenge, inquires on his
+rounds for <i>pierres de tonnerre</i>, which of course are found
+with suspicious frequency in the immediate neighbourhood
+of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese Encyclop&aelig;dia we
+are told that the 'lightning stones' have sometimes the
+shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and sometimes
+that of a mallet. And then, by a curious misapprehension,
+the sapient author of that work goes on to observe
+that these lightning stones are used by the wandering
+Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never seems to
+have struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols
+made the lightning stones instead of digging them up out
+of the earth. So deeply had the idea of the thunderbolt
+buried itself in the recesses of his soul, that though a
+neighbouring people were still actually manufacturing
+stone axes almost under his very eyes, he reversed mentally
+<a name="page145" id="page145"></a>the entire process, and supposed they dug up the thunderbolts
+which he saw them using, and employed them as
+common hatchets. This is one of the finest instances on
+record of the popular figure which grammarians call the
+<i>hysteron proteron</i>, and ordinary folk describe as putting the
+cart before the horse. Just so, while in some parts of
+Brazil the Indians are still laboriously polishing their
+stone hatchets, in other parts the planters are digging up
+the precisely similar stone hatchets of earlier generations,
+and religiously preserving them in their houses as
+undoubted thunderbolts. I have myself had pressed upon
+my attention as genuine lightning stones, in the West
+Indies, the exquisitely polished greenstone tomahawks of
+the old Carib marauders. But then, in this matter, I am
+pretty much in the position of that philosophic sceptic
+who, when he was asked by a lady whether he believed in
+ghosts, answered wisely, 'No, madam, I have seen by far
+too many of them.'</p>
+
+<p>One of the finest accounts ever given of the nature of
+thunderbolts is that mentioned by Adrianus Tollius in his
+edition of 'Boethius on Gems.' He gives illustrations of
+some neolithic axes and hammers, and then proceeds to
+state that in the opinion of philosophers they are generated
+in the sky by a fulgureous exhalation (whatever that may
+look like) conglobed in a cloud by a circumfixed humour,
+and baked hard, as it were, by intense heat. The weapon,
+it seems, then becomes pointed by the damp mixed with
+it flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end
+denser; while the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks
+out through the cloud, and makes thunder and lightning.
+A very lucid explanation certainly, but rendered a little
+difficult of apprehension by the effort necessary for realising
+in a mental picture the conglobation of a fulgureous exhalation
+by a circumfixed humour.<a name="page146" id="page146"></a></p>
+
+<p>One would like to see a drawing of the process, though
+the sketch would probably much resemble the picture of a
+muchness, so admirably described by the mock turtle.
+The excellent Tollius himself, however, while demurring
+on the whole to this hypothesis of the philosophers, bases
+his objection mainly on the ground that, if this were so,
+then it is odd the thunderbolts are not round, but wedge-shaped,
+and that they have holes in them, and those holes
+not equal throughout, but widest at the ends. As a matter
+of fact, Tollius has here hit the right nail on the head
+quite accidentally; for the holes are really there, of course,
+to receive the haft of the axe or hammer. But if they
+were truly thunderbolts, and if the bolts were shafted, then
+the holes would have been lengthwise, as in an arrowhead,
+not crosswise, as in an axe or hammer. Which is a complete
+<i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of the philosophic opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the cerauni&aelig;, says Pliny, are like hatchets.
+He would have been nearer the mark if he had said 'are
+hatchets' outright. But this <i>aper&ccedil;u</i>, which was to Pliny
+merely a stray suggestion, became to the northern peoples
+a firm article of belief, and caused them to represent to
+themselves their god Thor or Thunor as armed, not with
+a bolt, but with an axe or hammer. Etymologically Thor,
+Thunor, and thunder are the self-same word; but while
+the southern races looked upon Zeus or Indra as wielding
+his forked darts in his red right hand, the northern races
+looked upon the Thunder-god as hurling down an angry
+hammer from his seat in the clouds. There can be but
+little doubt that the very notion of Thor's hammer itself
+was derived from the shape of the supposed thunderbolt,
+which the Scandinavians and Teutons rightly saw at once
+to be an axe or mallet, not an arrow-head. The 'fiery
+axe' of Thunor is a common metaphor in Anglo-Saxon
+poetry. Thus, Thor's hammer is itself merely the picture
+<a name="page147" id="page147"></a>which our northern ancestors formed to themselves, by
+compounding the idea of thunder and lightning with the
+idea of the polished stone hatchets they dug up among
+the fields and meadows.</p>
+
+<p>Flint arrowheads of the stone age are less often taken
+for thunderbolts, no doubt because they are so much
+smaller that they look quite too insignificant for the
+weapons of an angry god. They are more frequently
+described as fairy-darts or fairy-bolts. Still, I have known
+even arrow-heads regarded as thunderbolts, and preserved
+superstitiously under that belief. In Finland, stone arrows
+are universally so viewed; and the rainbow is looked upon
+as the bow of Tiermes, the thunder-god, who shoots with
+it the guilty sorcerers.</p>
+
+<p>But why should thunderbolts, whether stone axes or
+flint arrowheads, be preserved, not merely as curiosities,
+but from motives of superstition? The reason is a simple
+one. Everybody knows that in all magical ceremonies it
+is necessary to have something belonging to the person
+you wish to conjure against, in order to make your spells
+effectual. A bone, be it but a joint of the little finger, is
+sufficient to raise the ghost to which it once belonged;
+cuttings of hair or clippings of nails are enough to put
+their owner magically in your power; and that is the
+reason why, if you are a prudent person, you will always
+burn all such off-castings of your body, lest haply an enemy
+should get hold of them, and cast the evil eye upon you
+with their potent aid. In the same way, if you can lay
+hands upon anything that once belonged to an elf, such as
+a fairy-bolt or flint arrowhead, you can get its former
+possessor to do anything you wish by simply rubbing it
+and calling upon him to appear. This is the secret of half
+the charms and amulets in existence, most of which are
+either real old arrowheads, or carnelians cut in the same
+<a name="page148" id="page148"></a>shape, which has now mostly degenerated from the barb
+to the conventional heart, and been mistakenly associated
+with the idea of love. This is the secret, too, of all the
+rings, lamps, gems, and boxes, possession of which gives
+a man power over fairies, spirits, gnomes, and genii. All
+magic proceeds upon the prime belief that you must
+possess something belonging to the person you wish to
+control, constrain, or injure. And, failing anything else,
+you must at least have a wax image of him, which you
+call by his name, and use as his substitute in your incantations.</p>
+
+<p>On this primitive principle, possession of a thunderbolt
+gives you some sort of hold, as it were, over the thunder-god
+himself in person. If you keep a thunderbolt in your
+house it will never be struck by lightning. In Shetland,
+stone axes are religiously preserved in every cottage as a
+cheap and simple substitute for lightning-rods. In Cornwall,
+the stone hatchets and arrowheads not only guard
+the house from thunder, but also act as magical barometers,
+changing colour with the changes of the weather, as if
+in sympathy with the temper of the thunder-god. In
+Germany, the house where a thunderbolt is kept is safe
+from the storm; and the bolt itself begins to sweat on the
+approach of lightning-clouds. Nay, so potent is the protection
+afforded by a thunderbolt that where the lightning
+has once struck it never strikes again; the bolt already
+buried in the soil seems to preserve the surrounding place
+from the anger of the deity. Old and pagan in their
+nature as are these beliefs, they yet survive so thoroughly
+into Christian times that I have seen a stone hatchet built
+into the steeple of a church to protect it from lightning.
+Indeed, steeples have always of course attracted the
+electric discharge to a singular degree by their height and
+tapering form, especially before the introduction of lighting-rods;
+<a name="page149" id="page149"></a>and it was a sore trial of faith to medi&aelig;val
+reasoners to understand why heaven should hurl its angry
+darts so often against the towers of its very own churches.
+In the Abruzzi the flint axe has actually been Christianised
+into St. Paul's arrows&mdash;<i>saetti de San Paolo</i>. Families
+hand down the miraculous stones from father to son as a
+precious legacy; and mothers hang them on their children's
+necks side by side with medals of saints and
+madonnas, which themselves are hardly so highly prized
+as the stones that fall from heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Another and very different form of thunderbolt is the
+belemnite, a common English fossil often preserved in
+houses in the west country with the same superstitious
+reverence as the neolithic hatchets. The very form of the
+belemnite at once suggests the notion of a dart or lance-head,
+which has gained for it its scientific name. At the
+present day, when all our girls go to Girton and enter for
+the classical tripos, I need hardly translate the word
+belemnite 'for the benefit of the ladies,' as people used to
+do in the dark and unemancipated eighteenth century;
+but as our boys have left off learning Greek just as their
+sisters are beginning to act the 'Antigone' at private
+theatricals, I may perhaps be pardoned if I explain, 'for
+the benefit of the gentlemen,' that the word is practically
+equivalent to javelin-fossil. The belemnites are the internal
+shells of a sort of cuttle-fish which swam about in
+enormous numbers in the seas whose sediment forms our
+modern lias, oolite, and gault. A great many different
+species are known and have acquired charming names in
+very doubtful Attic at the hands of profoundly learned
+geological investigators, but almost all are equally good
+representatives of the mythical thunderbolt. The finest
+specimens are long, thick, cylindrical, and gradually tapering,
+with a hole at one end as if on purpose to receive the
+<a name="page150" id="page150"></a>shaft. Sometimes they have petrified into iron pyrites or
+copper compounds, shining like gold, and then they make
+very noble thunderbolts indeed, heavy as lead, and capable
+of doing profound mischief if properly directed. At other
+times they have crystallised in transparent spar, and then
+they form very beautiful objects, as smooth and polished
+as the best lapidary could possibly make them. Belemnites
+are generally found in immense numbers together, especially
+in the marlstone quarries of the Midlands, and in the lias
+cliffs of Dorsetshire. Yet the quarrymen who find them
+never seem to have their faith shaken in the least by the
+enormous quantities of thunderbolts that would appear to
+have struck a single spot with such extraordinary frequency
+This little fact also tells rather hardly against the theory
+that the lightning never falls twice upon the same place.</p>
+
+<p>Only the largest and heaviest belemnites are known as
+thunder stones; the smaller ones are more commonly
+described as agate pencils. In Shakespeare's country
+their connection with thunder is well known, so that in all
+probability a belemnite is the original of the beautiful lines
+in 'Cymbeline':&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>Fear no more the lightning flash,<br /></span>
+<span>Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>where the distinction between the lightning and the thunderbolt
+is particularly well indicated. In every part of
+Europe belemnites and stone hatchets are alike regarded
+as thunderbolts; so that we have the curious result that
+people confuse under a single name a natural fossil of
+immense antiquity and a human product of comparatively
+recent but still prehistoric date. Indeed, I have had two
+thunderbolts shown me at once, one of which was a large
+belemnite, and the other a modern Indian tomahawk.
+Curiously enough, English sailors still call the nearest
+<a name="page151" id="page151"></a>surviving relatives of the belemnites, the squids or calamaries
+of the Atlantic, by the appropriate name of sea-arrows.</p>
+
+<p>Many other natural or artificial objects have added
+their tittle to the belief in thunderbolts. In the Himalayas,
+for example, where awful thunderstorms are always
+occurring as common objects of the country, the torrents
+which follow them tear out of the loose soil fossil bones
+and tusks and teeth, which are universally looked upon as
+lightning-stones. The nodules of pyrites, often picked up
+on beaches, with their false appearance of having been
+melted by intense heat, pass muster easily with children
+and sailor folk for the genuine thunderbolts. But the
+grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable
+reality which has kept alive the thunderbolt even in a
+wicked and sceptical age, is, beyond all question, the
+occasional falling of meteoric stones. Your meteor is an
+incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the
+British Museum itself you will find him duly classified
+and labelled and catalogued. Here, surely, we have the
+ultimate substratum of the thunderbolt myth. To be
+sure, meteors have no kind of natural connection with
+thunderstorms; they may fall anywhere and at any time;
+but to object thus is to be hypercritical. A stone that falls
+from heaven, no matter how or when, is quite good enough
+to be considered as a thunderbolt.</p>
+
+<p>Meteors, indeed, might very easily be confounded with
+lightning, especially by people who already have the full-blown
+conception of a thunderbolt floating about vaguely
+in their brains. The meteor leaps upon the earth suddenly
+with a rushing noise; it is usually red-hot when it falls, by
+friction against the air; it is mostly composed of native
+iron and other heavy metallic bodies; and it does its best
+to bury itself in the ground in the most orthodox and
+<a name="page152" id="page152"></a>respectable manner. The man who sees this parlous
+monster come whizzing through the clouds from planetary
+space, making a fiery track like a great dragon as it moves
+rapidly across the sky, and finally ploughing its way into
+the earth in his own back garden, may well be excused for
+regarding it as a fine specimen of the true antique thunderbolt.
+The same virtues which belong to the buried stone
+are in some other places claimed for meteoric iron, small
+pieces of which are worn as charms, specially useful in
+protecting the wearer against thunder, lightning, and
+evil incantations. In many cases miraculous images have
+been hewn out of the stones that have fallen from heaven;
+and in others the meteorite itself is carefully preserved or
+worshipped as the actual representative of god or goddess,
+saint or madonna. The image that fell down from Jupiter
+may itself have been a mass of meteoric iron.</p>
+
+<p>Both meteorites and stone hatchets, as well as all other
+forms of thunderbolt, are in excellent repute as amulets,
+not only against lightning, but against the evil eye generally.
+In Italy they protect the owner from thunder,
+epidemics, and cattle disease, the last two of which are
+well known to be caused by witchcraft; while Prospero in
+the 'Tempest' is a surviving proof how thunderstorms,
+too, can be magically produced. The tongues of sheep-bells
+ought to be made of meteoric iron or of elf-bolts, in
+order to insure the animals against foot-and-mouth disease
+or death by storm. Built into walls or placed on the
+threshold of stables, thunderbolts are capital preventives
+of fire or other damage, though not perhaps in this respect
+quite equal to a rusty horseshoe from a prehistoric battlefield.
+Thrown into a well they purify the water; and
+boiled in the drink of diseased sheep they render a cure
+positively certain. In Cornwall thunderbolts are a sovereign
+remedy for rheumatism; and in the popular pharmacop&oelig;ia
+<a name="page153" id="page153"></a>of Ireland they have been employed with success
+for ophthalmia, pleurisy, and many other painful diseases.
+If finely powdered and swallowed piecemeal, they render
+the person who swallows them invulnerable for the rest of
+his lifetime. But they cannot conscientiously be recommended
+for dyspepsia and other forms of indigestion.</p>
+
+<p>As if on purpose to confuse our already very vague ideas
+about thunderbolts, there is one special kind of lightning
+which really seems intentionally to simulate a meteorite,
+and that is the kind known as fireballs or (more scientifically)
+globular lightning. A fireball generally appears as
+a sphere of light, sometimes only as big as a Dutch cheese,
+sometimes as large as three feet in diameter. It moves
+along very slowly and demurely through the air, remaining
+visible for a whole minute or two together; and in the end it
+generally bursts up with great violence, as if it were a
+London railway station being experimented upon by Irish
+patriots. At Milan one day a fireball of this description
+walked down one of the streets so slowly that a small
+crowd walked after it admiringly, to see where it was going.
+It made straight for a church steeple, after the common but
+sacrilegious fashion of all lightning, struck the gilded cross
+on the topmost pinnacle, and then immediately vanished,
+like a Virgilian apparition, into thin air.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago, too, Dr. Tripe was watching a very
+severe thunderstorm, when he saw a fire-ball come quietly
+gliding up to him, apparently rising from the earth rather
+than falling towards it. Instead of running away, like a
+practical man, the intrepid doctor held his ground quietly
+and observed the fiery monster with scientific nonchalance.
+After continuing its course for some time in a peaceful and
+regular fashion, however, without attempting to assault
+him, it finally darted off at a tangent in another direction,
+and turned apparently into forked lightning. A fire-ball,
+<a name="page154" id="page154"></a>noticed among the Glendowan Mountains in Donegal,
+behaved even more eccentrically, as might be expected
+from its Irish antecedents. It first skirted the earth in a
+leisurely way for several hundred yards like a cannon-ball;
+then it struck the ground, ricochetted, and once more
+bounded along for another short spell; after which it disappeared
+in the boggy soil, as if it were completely finished
+and done for. But in another moment it rose again,
+nothing daunted, with Celtic irrepressibility, several yards
+away, pursued its ghostly course across a running stream
+(which shows, at least, there could have been no witchcraft
+in it), and finally ran to earth for good in the opposite bank,
+leaving a round hole in the sloping peat at the spot where
+it buried itself. Where it first struck, it cut up the peat as
+if with a knife, and made a broad deep trench which remained
+afterwards as a witness of its eccentric conduct.
+If the person who observed it had been of a superstitious
+turn of mind we should have had here one of the finest
+and most terrifying ghost stories on the entire record,
+which would have made an exceptionally splendid show in
+the 'Transactions of the Society for Psychical Research.'
+Unfortunately, however, he was only a man of science, ungifted
+with the precious dower of poetical imagination; so
+he stupidly called it a remarkable fire-ball, measured the
+ground carefully like a common engineer, and sent an
+account of the phenomenon to that far more prosaic periodical,
+the 'Quarterly Journal of the Meteorological Society.'
+Another splendid apparition thrown away recklessly, for
+ever!</p>
+
+<p>There is a curious form of electrical discharge, somewhat
+similar to the fire-ball but on a smaller scale, which
+may be regarded as the exact opposite of the thunderbolt,
+inasmuch as it is always quite harmless. This is St. Elmo's
+fire, a brush of lambent light, which plays around the
+<a name="page155" id="page155"></a>masts of ships and the tops of trees, when clouds are low
+and tension great. It is, in fact, the equivalent in nature
+of the brush discharge from an electric machine. The
+Greeks and Romans looked upon this lambent display as a
+sign of the presence of Castor and Pollux, 'fratres Helen&aelig;,
+lucida sidera,' and held that its appearance was an omen of
+safety, as everybody who has read the 'Lays of Ancient
+Rome' must surely remember. The modern name, St.
+Elmo's fire, is itself a curiously twisted and perversely
+Christianised reminiscence of the great twin brethren; for
+St. Elmo is merely a corruption of Helena, made masculine
+and canonised by the grateful sailors. It was as
+Helen's brothers that they best knew the Dioscuri in the
+good old days of the upper empire; and when the new
+religion forbade them any longer to worship those vain
+heathen deities, they managed to hand over the flames at
+the masthead to an imaginary St. Elmo, whose protection
+stood them in just as good stead as that of the original
+alternate immortals.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the effects of lightning itself are sometimes
+such as to produce upon the mind of an impartial but unscientific
+beholder the firm idea that a bodily thunderbolt
+must necessarily have descended from heaven. In sand or
+rock, where lightning has struck, it often forms long hollow
+tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological
+intelligence as fulgurites, and looking for all the world like
+gigantic drills such as quarrymen make for putting in a
+blast. They are produced, of course, by the melting of
+the rock under the terrific heat of the electric spark; and
+they grow narrower and narrower as they descend till they
+finally disappear. But to a casual observer, they irresistibly
+suggest the notion that a material weapon has struck the
+ground, and buried itself at the bottom of the hole. The summit
+of Little Ararat, that weather-beaten and many-fabled
+<a name="page156" id="page156"></a>peak (where an enterprising journalist not long ago discovered
+the remains of Noah's Ark), has been riddled
+through and through by frequent lightnings, till the rock
+is now a mere honeycombed mass of drills and tubes, like
+an old target at the end of a long day's constant rifle
+practice. Pieces of the red trachyte from the summit, a
+foot long, have been brought to Europe, perforated all over
+with these natural bullet marks, each of them lined with
+black glass, due to the fusion of the rock by the passage of
+the spark. Specimens of such thunder-drilled rock may
+be seen in most geological museums. On some which
+Humboldt collected from a peak in Mexico, the fused slag
+from the wall of the tube has overflowed on to the surrounding
+surface, thus conclusively proving (if proof were
+necessary) that the holes are due to melting heat alone,
+and not to the passage of any solid thunderbolt.</p>
+
+<p>But it was the introduction and general employment of
+lightning-rods that dealt a final deathblow to the thunderbolt
+theory. A lightning-conductor consists essentially of a
+long piece of metal, pointed at the end whose business it
+is, not so much (as most people imagine) to carry off the
+flash of lightning harmlessly, should it happen to strike the
+house to which the conductor is attached, but rather to prevent
+the occurrence of a flash at all, by gradually and
+gently drawing off the electricity as fast as it gathers before
+it has had time to collect in sufficient force for a destructive
+discharge. It resembles in effect an overflow pipe which
+drains off the surplus water of a pond as soon as it runs
+in, in such a manner as to prevent the possibility of an
+inundation, which might occur if the water were allowed
+to collect in force behind a dam or embankment. It is a
+flood-gate, not a moat: it carries away the electricity of the
+air quietly to the ground, without allowing it to gather in
+sufficient amount to produce a flash of lightning. It might
+<a name="page157" id="page157"></a>thus be better called a lightning-preventer than a lightning-conductor:
+it conducts electricity, but it prevents lightning.
+At first, all lightning-rods used to be made with knobs on
+the top, and then the electricity used to collect at the
+surface until the electric force was sufficient to cause a spark.
+In those happy days, you had the pleasure of seeing that
+the lightning was actually being drawn off from your
+neighbourhood piecemeal. Knobs, it was held, must be
+the best things, because you could incontestably see the
+sparks striking them with your own eyes. But as time
+went on, electricians discovered that if you fixed a fine
+metal point to the conductor of an electric machine it was
+impossible to get up any appreciable charge because the
+electricity kept always leaking out by means of the point.
+Then it was seen that if you made your lightning-rods
+pointed at the end, you would be able in the same way
+to dissipate your electricity before it ever had time to come
+to a head in the shape of lightning. From that moment
+the thunderbolt was safely dead and buried. It was
+urged, indeed, that the attempt thus to rob Heaven of its
+thunders was wicked and impious; but the common-sense
+of mankind refused to believe that absolute omnipotence
+could be sensibly defied by twenty yards of cylindrical iron
+tubing. Thenceforth the thunderbolt ceased to exist, save
+in poetry, country houses, and the most rural circles; even
+the electric fluid was generally relegated to the provincial
+press, where it still keeps company harmoniously with
+caloric, the devouring element, nature's abhorrence of a
+vacuum, and many other like philosophical fossils: while
+lightning itself, shorn of its former glories, could no longer
+wage impious war against cathedral towers, but was compelled
+to restrict itself to blasting a solitary rider now
+and again in the open fields, or drilling more holes in the
+already crumbling summit of Mount Ararat. Yet it will
+<a name="page158" id="page158"></a>be a thousand years more, in all probability, before the last
+thunderbolt ceases to be shown as a curiosity here and
+there to marvelling visitors, and takes its proper place in
+some village museum as a belemnite, a meteoric stone, or
+a polished axe-head of our neolithic ancestors. Even then,
+no doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised
+property in the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet.<a name="page159" id="page159"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="part10" id="part10"><i>HONEY-DEW</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis person&aelig;,
+a couple of small brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering
+colony of wee green 'plant-lice,' or 'blight,' or aphides.
+The exact scene is usually on the young and succulent
+branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft shoots
+the aphides have deeply buried their long trunk-like snouts,
+in search of the sap off which they live so contentedly
+through their brief lifetime. To them, enter the two
+small brown ants, their lawful possessors; for ants, too,
+though absolutely unrecognised by English law ('de
+minimis non curat lex,' says the legal aphorism), are
+nevertheless in their own commonwealth duly seised of
+many and various goods and chattels; and these same
+aphides, as everybody has heard, stand to them in pretty
+much the same position as cows stand to human herdsmen.
+Throw in for sole spectator a loitering naturalist, and you
+get the entire <i>mise-en-sc&egrave;ne</i> of a quaint little drama that
+works itself out a dozen times among the wilted rose-trees
+beneath the latticed cottage windows every summer
+morning.</p>
+
+<p>It is a delightful sight to watch the two little lilliputian
+proprietors approaching and milking these their wee green
+motionless cattle. First of all, the ants quickly scent their
+way with protruded antenn&aelig; (for they are as good as blind,
+poor things!) up the prickly stem of the rose-bush, guided,
+<a name="page160" id="page160"></a>no doubt, by the faint perfume exhaled from the nectar
+above them. Smelling their road cautiously to the ends
+of the branches, they soon reach their own particular
+aphides, whose bodies they proceed gently to stroke with
+their outstretched feelers, and then stand by quietly for a
+moment in happy anticipation of the coming dinner.
+Presently, the obedient aphis, conscious of its lawful
+master's friendly presence, begins slowly to emit from two
+long horn-like tubes near the centre of its back a couple of
+limpid drops of a sticky pale yellow fluid. Honey-dew our
+English rustics still call it, because, when the aphides
+are not milked often enough by ants, they discharge it
+awkwardly of their own accord, and then it falls as a sweet
+clammy dew upon the grass beneath them. The ant,
+approaching the two tubes with cautious tenderness,
+removes the sweet drops without injuring in any way his
+little <i>prot&eacute;g&eacute;</i>, and then passes on to the next in order of
+his tiny cattle, leaving the aphis apparently as much
+relieved by the process as a cow with a full hanging udder
+is relieved by the timely attention of the human milkmaid.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently, this is a case of mutual accommodation in the
+political economy of the ants and aphides: a free interchange
+of services between the ant as consumer and the
+aphis as producer. Why the aphides should have acquired
+the curious necessity for getting rid of this sweet, sticky,
+and nutritious secretion nobody knows with certainty; but
+it is at least quite clear that the liquid is a considerable
+nuisance to them in their very sedentary and monotonous
+existence&mdash;a waste product of which they are anxious to
+disembarrass themselves as easily as possible&mdash;and that
+while they themselves stand to the ants in the relation of
+purveyors of food supply, the ants in return stand to them
+in the relation of scavengers, or contractors for the removal
+of useless accumulations.<a name="page161" id="page161"></a></p>
+
+<p>Everybody knows the aphides well by sight, in one of
+their forms at least, the familiar rose aphis; but probably
+few people ever look at them closely and critically enough
+to observe how very beautiful and wonderful is the organisation
+of their tiny limbs in all its exquisite detail. If you
+pick off one good-sized wingless insect, however, from a
+blighted rose-leaf, and put him on a glass slide under a low
+power of the microscope, you will most likely be quite surprised
+to find what a lovely little creature it is that you
+have been poisoning wholesale all your life long with
+diluted tobacco-juice. His body is so transparent that you
+can see through it by transmitted light: a dainty glass
+globe, you would say, of emerald green, set upon six
+tapering, jointed, hairy legs, and provided in front with
+two large black eyes of many facets, and a pair of long
+and very flexible antenn&aelig;, easily moved in any direction,
+but usually bent backward when the creature is at rest so
+as to reach nearly to his tail as he stands at ease upon his
+native rose-leaf. There are, however, two other features
+about him which specially attract attention, as being very
+characteristic of the aphides and their allies among all
+other insects. In the first place, his mouth is provided
+with a very long snout or proboscis, classically described as
+a rostrum, with which he pierces the outer skin of the rose-shoot
+where he lives, and sucks up incessantly its sweet
+juices. This organ is common to the aphis with all the
+other bugs and plant-lice. In the second place, he has
+half-way down his back (or a little more) a pair of very
+peculiar hollow organs, the honey tubes, from which exudes
+that singular secretion, the honey-dew. These tubes are
+not found in quite all species of aphides, but they are very
+common among the class, and they form by far the most
+conspicuous and interesting organs in all those aphides
+which do possess them.<a name="page162" id="page162"></a></p>
+
+<p>The life-history of the rose-aphis, small and familiar
+as is the insect itself, forms one of the most marvellous
+and extraordinary chapters in all the fairy tales of modern
+science. Nobody need wonder why the blight attacks his
+roses so persistently when once he has learnt the unusual
+provision for exceptional fertility in the reproduction of
+these insect plagues. The whole story is too long to give
+at full length, but here is a brief recapitulation of a year's
+generations of common aphides.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring, the eggs of last year's crop, which have
+been laid by the mothers in nooks and crannies out of reach
+of the frost, are quickened into life by the first return of
+warm weather, and hatch out their brood of insects. All
+this brood consists of imperfect females, without a single
+male among them; and they all fasten at once upon the young
+buds of their native bush, where they pass a sluggish and
+uneventful existence in sucking up the juice from the veins
+on the one hand, and secreting honey-dew upon the other.
+Four times they moult their skins, these moults being in
+some respects analogous to the metamorphosis of the caterpillar
+into chrysalis and butterfly. After the fourth moult,
+the young aphides attain maturity; and then they give
+origin, parthenogenetically, to a second brood, also of imperfect
+females, all produced without any fathers. This
+second brood brings forth in like manner a third generation,
+asexual, as before; and the same process is repeated without
+intermission as long as the warm weather lasts. In
+each case, the young simply bud out from the ovaries of
+the mothers, exactly as new crops of leaves bud out from
+the rose-branch on which they grow. Eleven generations
+have thus been observed to follow one another rapidly in
+a single summer; and indeed, by keeping the aphides in a
+warm room, one may even make them continue their reproduction
+in this purely vegetative fashion for as many as
+<a name="page163" id="page163"></a>four years running. But as soon as the cold weather begins
+to set in, perfect male and female insects are produced by
+the last swarm of parthenogenetic mothers; and these true
+females, after being fertilised, lay the eggs which remain
+through the winter, and from which the next summer's
+broods have to begin afresh the wonderful cycle. Thus,
+only one generation of aphides, out of ten or eleven, consists
+of true males and females: all the rest are false
+females, producing young by a process of budding.</p>
+
+<p>Setting aside for the present certain special modifications
+of this strange cycle which have been lately described
+by M. Jules Lichtenstein, let us consider for a moment
+what can be the origin and meaning of such an unusual
+and curious mode of reproduction.</p>
+
+<p>The aphides are on the whole the most purely inactive
+and vegetative of all insects, unless indeed we except a few
+very debased and degraded parasites. They fasten themselves
+early in life on to a particular shoot of a particular
+plant; they drink in its juices, digest them, grow, and
+undergo their incomplete metamorphoses; they produce
+new generations with extraordinary rapidity; and they
+vegetate, in fact, almost as much as the plant itself upon
+which they are living. Their existence is duller than that
+of the very dullest cathedral city. They are thus essentially
+degenerate creatures: they have found the conditions
+of life too easy for them, and they have reverted to something
+so low and simple that they are almost plant-like in
+some of their habits and peculiarities.</p>
+
+<p>The ancestors of the aphides were free winged insects;
+and, in certain stages of their existence, most living species
+of aphides possess at least some winged members. On
+the rose-bush, you can generally pick off a few such larger
+winged forms, side by side with the wee green wingless
+insects. But creatures which have taken to passing most
+<a name="page164" id="page164"></a>of their life upon a single spot on a single plant hardly
+need the luxury of wings; and so, in nine cases out of ten,
+natural selection has dispensed with those needless encumbrances.
+Even the legs are comparatively little wanted by
+our modern aphides, which only require them to walk away
+in a stately sleepy manner when rudely disturbed by man,
+lady-birds, or other enemies; and indeed the legs are now
+very weak and feeble, and incapable of walking for more
+than a short distance at a time under exceptional provocation.
+The eyes remain, it is true; but only the big ones:
+the little ocelli at the top of the head, found amongst so
+many of their allies, are quite wanting in all the aphides.
+In short, the plant-lice have degenerated into mere mouths
+and sacks for sucking and storing food from the tissues of
+plants, provided with large honey-tubes for getting rid of
+the waste sugar.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the greater the amount of food any animal gets,
+and the less the amount of expenditure it performs in
+muscular action, the greater will be the surplus it has left
+over for the purposes of reproduction. Eggs or young, in
+fact, represent the amount thus left over after all the wants
+of the body have been provided for. But in the rose-aphis
+the wants of the body, when once the insect has reached
+its full growth, are absolutely nothing; and it therefore
+then begins to bud out new generations in rapid succession
+as fast as ever it can produce them. This is strictly
+analogous to what we see every day taking place in all the
+plants around us. New leaves are produced one after
+another, as fast as material can be supplied for their nutrition,
+and each of these new leaves is known to be a separate
+individual, just as much as the individual aphis. At last,
+however, a time comes when the reproductive power of the
+plant begins to fail, and then it produces flowers, that is to
+say stamens (male) and pistils (female), whose union results
+<a name="page165" id="page165"></a>in fertilisation and the subsequent outgrowth of fruit and
+seeds. Thus a year's cycle of the plant-lice exactly answers
+to the life-history of an ordinary annual. The eggs correspond
+to the seeds; the various generations of aphides
+budding out from one another by parthenogenesis correspond
+to the leaves budded out by one another throughout
+the summer; and the final brood of perfect males and
+females answers to the flower with its stamen and pistils,
+producing the seeds, as they produce the eggs, for setting
+up afresh the next year's cycle.</p>
+
+<p>This consideration, I fancy, suggests to us the most
+probable explanation of the honey-tubes and honey-dew.
+Creatures that eat so much and reproduce so fast as the
+aphides are rapidly sucking up juices all the time from the
+plant on which they fasten, and converting most of the
+nutriment so absorbed into material for fresh generations.
+That is how they swarm so fast over all our shrubs and
+flowers. But if there is any one kind of material in their
+food in excess of their needs, they would naturally have to
+secrete it by a special organ developed or enlarged for the
+purpose. I don't mean that the organ would or could be
+developed all at once, by a sudden effort, but that as the
+habit of fixing themselves upon plants and sucking their
+juices grew from generation to generation with these
+descendants of originally winged insects, an organ for
+permitting the waste product to exude must necessarily have
+grown side by side with it. Sugar seems to have been such
+a waste product, contained in the juices of the plant to
+an extent beyond what the aphides could assimilate or use
+up in the production of new broods; and this sugar is therefore
+secreted by special organs, the honey-tubes. One can
+readily imagine that it may at first have escaped in small
+quantities, and that two pores on their last segment but
+two may have been gradually specialised into regular
+<a name="page166" id="page166"></a>secreting organs, perhaps under the peculiar agency of the
+ants, who have regularly appropriated so many kinds of
+aphides as miniature milch cows.</p>
+
+<p>So completely have some species of ants come to
+recognise their own proprietary interest in the persons of
+the aphides, that they provide them with fences and cow-sheds
+on the most approved human pattern. Sometimes
+they build up covered galleries to protect their tiny cattle;
+and these galleries lead from the nest to the place where
+the aphides are fixed, and completely enclose the little
+creatures from all chance of harm. If intruders try to
+attack the farmyard, the ants drive them away by biting
+and lacerating them. Sir John Lubbock, who has paid
+great attention to the mutual relations of ants and aphides,
+has even shown that various kinds of ants domesticate
+various species of aphis. The common brown garden-ant,
+one of the darkest skinned among our English races,
+'devotes itself principally to aphides which frequent twigs
+and leaves'; especially, so far as I have myself observed,
+the bright green aphis of the rose, and the closely allied
+little black aphis of the broad bean. On the other hand a
+nearly related reddish ant pays attention chiefly to those
+aphides which live on the bark of trees, while the yellow
+meadow-ants, a far more subterranean species, keep flocks
+and herds of the like-minded aphides which feed upon the
+roots of herbs and grasses.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John Lubbock, indeed, even suggests&mdash;and how the
+suggestion would have charmed 'Civilisation' Buckle!&mdash;that
+to this difference of food and habit the distinctive
+colours of the various species may very probably be due.
+The ground which he adduces for this ingenious idea is a
+capital example of the excellent use to which out-of-the-way
+evidence may be cleverly put by a competent evolutionary
+thinker. 'The Baltic amber,' he says, 'contains
+<a name="page167" id="page167"></a>among the remains of many other insects a species of ant
+intermediate between our small brown garden-ants and the
+little yellow meadow-ants. This is possibly the stock from
+which these and other allied species are descended. One
+is tempted to suggest that the brown species which live so
+much in the open air, and climb up trees and bushes, have
+retained and even deepened their dark colour; while others,
+such as the yellow meadow-ant, which lives almost entirely
+below ground, have become much paler.' He might have
+added, as confirmatory evidence, the fact that the perfect
+winged males and females of the yellow species, which fly
+about freely during the brief honeymoon in the open air, are
+even darker in hue than the brown garden-ant. But how
+the light colour of the neuter workers gets transmitted
+through these dusky parents from one generation to another
+is part of that most insoluble crux of all evolutionary
+reasoning&mdash;the transmission of special qualities to neuters
+by parents who have never possessed them.</p>
+
+<p>This last-mentioned yellow meadow-ant has carried the
+system of domestication further in all probability than any
+other species among its congeners. Not only do the yellow
+ants collect the root-feeding aphides in their own nests,
+and tend them as carefully as their own young, but they
+also gather and guard the eggs of the aphides, which, till
+they come to maturity, are of course quite useless. Sir
+John Lubbock found that his yellow ants carried the winter
+eggs of a species of aphis into their nest, and there took
+great care of them. In the spring, the eggs hatched out;
+and the ants actually carried the young aphides out of the
+nest again, and placed them on the leaves of a daisy
+growing in the immediate neighbourhood. They then built
+up a wall of earth over and round them. The aphides
+went on in their usual lazy fashion throughout the summer,
+and in October they laid another lot of eggs, precisely like
+<a name="page168" id="page168"></a>those of the preceding autumn. This case, as the practised
+observer himself remarks, is an instance of prudence
+unexampled, perhaps, in the animal kingdom, outside man.
+'The eggs are laid early in October on the food-plant of
+the insect. They are of no direct use to the ants; yet
+they are not left where they are laid, exposed to the
+severity of the weather and to innumerable dangers, but
+brought into their nests by the ants, and tended by them
+with the utmost care through the long winter months until
+the following March, when the young ones are brought out
+again and placed on the young shoots of the daisy.' Mr.
+White of Stonehouse has also noted an exactly similar
+instance of formican providence.</p>
+
+<p>The connection between so many ants and so many
+species of the aphides being so close and intimate, it does
+not seem extravagant to suppose that the honey-tubes in
+their existing advanced form at least may be due to the
+deliberate selective action of these tiny insect-breeders.
+Indeed, when we consider that there are certain species of
+beetles which have never been found anywhere except in
+ants' nests, it appears highly probable that these domesticated
+forms have been produced by the ants themselves,
+exactly as the dog, the sheep, and the cow, in their
+existing types, have been produced by deliberate human
+selection. If this be so, then there is nothing very out-of-the-way
+in the idea that the ants have also produced the
+honey-tubes of aphides by their long selective action. It
+must be remembered that ants, in point of antiquity, date
+back, under one form or another, no doubt to a very remote
+period of geological time. Their immense variety of genera
+and species (over a thousand distinct kinds are known) show
+them to be a very ancient family, or else they would not
+have had time to be specially modified in such a wonderful
+multiformity of ways. Even as long ago as the time
+<a name="page169" id="page169"></a>when the tertiary deposits of &OElig;ningen and Radoboj were
+laid down, Dr. Heer of Zurich has shown that at least
+eighty-three distinct species of ants already existed; and
+the number that have left no trace behind is most probably
+far greater. Some of the beetles and woodlice which ants
+domesticate in their nests have been kept underground so
+long that they have become quite blind&mdash;that is to say,
+have ceased altogether to produce eyes, which would be of
+no use to them in their subterranean galleries; and one
+such blind beetle, known as Claviger, has even lost the
+power of feeding itself, and has to be fed by its masters
+from their own mandibles. Dr. Taschenberg enumerates
+300 species of true ants'-nest insects, mostly beetles, in
+Germany alone; and M. Andr&eacute; gives a list of 584 kinds,
+habitually found in association with ants in one country or
+another. Compared with these singular results of formican
+selection, the mere production or further development
+of the honey-tubes appears to be a very small matter.</p>
+
+<p>But what good do the aphides themselves derive from the
+power of secreting honey-dew? For we know now that
+no animal or plant is ever provided with any organ or
+part merely for the benefit of another creature: the
+advantage must at least be mutual. Well, in the first
+place, it is likely that, in any case, the amount of sugary
+matter in the food of the aphides is quite in excess of
+their needs; they assimilate the nitrogenous material of
+the sap, and secrete its saccharine material as honey-dew.
+That, however, would hardly account for the development
+of special secretory ducts, like the honey-tubes, in which
+you can actually see the little drops of honey rolling, under
+the microscope. But the ants are useful allies to the
+aphides, in guarding them from another very dangerous
+type of insect. They are subject to the attacks of an
+ichneumon fly, which lays its eggs in them, meaning its
+<a name="page170" id="page170"></a>larv&aelig; to feed upon their living bodies; and the ants watch
+over the aphides with the greatest vigilance, driving off the
+ichneumons whenever they approach their little <i>prot&eacute;g&eacute;s</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Many other insects besides ants, however, are fond of
+the sweet secretions of the aphides, and it is probable that
+the honey-dew thus acts to some extent as a preservative
+of the species, by diverting possible foes from the insects
+themselves, to the sugary liquid which they distil from
+their food-plants. Having more than enough and to spare
+for all their own needs, and the needs of their offspring,
+the plant-lice can afford to employ a little of their nutriment
+as a bribe to secure them from the attacks of possible
+enemies. Such compensatory bribes are common enough
+in the economy of nature. Thus our common English
+vetch secretes a little honey on the stipules or wing-like
+leaflets on the stem, and so distracts thieving ants from
+committing their depredations upon the nectaries in the
+flowers, which are intended for the attraction of the fertilising
+bees; and a South American acacia, as Mr. Belt has
+shown, bears hollow thorns and produces honey from a
+gland in each leaflet, in order to allure myriads of small
+ants which nest in the thorns, eat the honey, and repay the
+plant by driving away their leaf-cutting congeners. Indeed,
+as they sting violently, and issue forth in enormous swarms
+whenever the plant is attacked, they are even able to frighten
+off browsing cattle from their own peculiar acacia.</p>
+
+<p>Aphides, then, are essentially degraded insects, which
+have become almost vegetative in their habits, and even in
+their mode of reproduction, but which still retain a few
+marks of their original descent from higher and more
+locomotive ancestors. Their wings, especially, are useful
+to the perfect forms in finding one another, and to the imperfect
+ones in migrating from one plant to its nearest
+neighbours, where they soon become the parents of fresh
+<a name="page171" id="page171"></a>hordes in rapid succession. Hence various kinds of aphides
+are among the most dreaded plagues of agriculturists. The
+'fly,' which Kentish farmers know so well on hops, is an
+aphis specialised for that particular bine; and, when once
+it appears in the gardens, it spreads with startling rapidity
+from one end of the long rows to the other. The phylloxera
+which has spoilt the French vineyards is a root-feeding
+form that attacks the vine, and kills or maims the plant
+terribly, by sucking the vital juices on their way up into
+the fresh-forming foliage. The 'American blight' on apple
+trees is yet another member of the same family, a wee
+creeping cottony creature that hides among the fissures of
+the bark, and drives its very long beak far down into the
+green sappy layer underlying the dead outer covering. In
+fact, almost all the best-known 'blights' and bladder-forming
+insects are aphides of one kind or another, affecting
+leaves, or stalks, or roots, or branches.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the most remarkable examples of the
+limitation of human powers that while we can easily exterminate
+large animals like the wolf and the bear in
+England, or the puma and the wolverine in the settled
+States of America, we should be so comparatively weak
+against the Colorado beetle or the fourteen-year locust, and
+so absolutely powerless against the hop-fly, the turnip-fly,
+and the phylloxera. The smaller and the more insignificant
+our enemy, viewed individually, the more difficult is he to
+cope with in the mass. All the elephants in the world could
+have been hunted down and annihilated, in all probability,
+with far less labour than has been expended upon one single
+little all but microscopic parasite in France alone. The
+enormous rapidity of reproduction in the family of aphides
+is the true cause of our helplessness before them. It has
+been calculated that a single aphis may during its own lifetime
+become the progenitor of 5,904,900,000 descendants.<a name="page172" id="page172"></a>
+Each imperfect female produces about ninety young ones,
+and lives long enough to see its children's children to the
+fifth generation. Now, ninety multiplied by ninety four
+times over gives the number above stated. Of course,
+this makes no allowance for casualties which must be
+pretty frequent: but even so, the sum-total of aphides
+produced within a small garden in a single summer must
+be something very extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious, too, that aphides on the whole seem to
+escape the notice of insect-eating birds very tolerably. I
+cannot, in fact, discover that birds ever eat them, their
+chief real enemy being the little lizard-like larva of the
+lady-bird, which devours them everywhere greedily in
+immense numbers. Indeed, aphides form almost the sole
+food of the entire lady-bird tribe in their earlier stages of
+existence; and there is no better way of getting rid of
+blight on roses and other garden plants than to bring in a
+good boxful of these active and voracious little grubs from
+the fields and hedges. They will pounce upon the aphides
+forthwith as a cat pounces upon the mice in a well-stocked
+barn or farmyard. The two-spotted lady-bird in particular
+is the determined exterminator of the destructive hop-fly,
+and is much beloved accordingly by Kentish farmers. No
+doubt, one reason why birds do not readily see the aphis of
+the rose and most other species is because of their prevailing
+green tint, and the close way in which they stick to the
+leaves or shoots on whose juices they are preying. But in
+the case of many black and violet species, this protection
+of imitative colour is wanting, and yet the birds do not seem
+to care for the very conspicuous little insects on the broad
+bean, for example, whose dusky hue makes them quite
+noticeable in large masses. Here there may very likely be
+some special protection of nauseous taste in the aphides
+themselves (I will confess that I have not ventured to try
+<a name="page173" id="page173"></a>the experiment in person), as in many other instances we
+know that conspicuously-coloured insects advertise their
+nastiness, as it were, to the birds by their own integuments,
+and so escape being eaten in mistake for any of their less
+protected relatives.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that certain
+plants have efficiently armed themselves against the
+aphides, in turn, by secreting bitter or otherwise unpleasant
+juices. So far as I can discover, the little
+plunderers seldom touch the pungent 'nasturtiums' or
+trops&aelig;lums of our flower-gardens, even when these grow
+side by side with other plants on which the aphides are
+swarming. Often, indeed, I find winged forms upon the
+leaf-stem of a nasturtium, having come there evidently in
+hopes of starting a new colony; but usually in a dead or
+dying condition&mdash;the pungent juice seems to have poisoned
+them. So, too, spinach and lettuce may be covered with
+blight, while the bitter spurges, the woolly-leaved arabis,
+and the strong-scented thyme close by are utterly untouched.
+Plants seem to have acquired all these devices,
+such as close networks of hair upon the leaves, strong
+essences, bitter or pungent juices, and poisonous principles,
+mainly as deterrents for insect enemies, of which caterpillars
+and plant-lice are by far the most destructive. It
+would be unpardonable, of course, to write about honey-dew
+without mentioning tobacco; and I may add parenthetically
+that aphides are determined anti-tobacconists,
+nicotine, in fact, being a deadly poison to them. Smoking
+with tobacco, or sprinkling with tobacco-water, are familiar
+modes of getting rid of the unwelcome intruders in gardens.
+Doubtless this peculiar property of the tobacco plant has
+been developed as a prophylactic against insect enemies:
+and if so, we may perhaps owe the weed itself, as a
+smokable leaf, to the little aphides. Granting this hypothetical
+<a name="page174" id="page174"></a>connection, the name of honey-dew would indeed
+be a peculiarly appropriate one. I may mention in passing
+that tobacco is quite fatal to almost all insects, a fact which
+I present gratuitously to the blowers of counterblasts, who
+are at liberty to make whatever use they choose of it.
+Quassia and aloes are also well-known preventives of fly or
+blight in gardens.</p>
+
+<p>The most complete life-history yet given of any member
+of the aphis family is that which M. Jules Lichtenstein
+has worked out with so much care in the case of the
+phylloxera of the oak-tree. In April, the winter eggs of
+this species, laid in the bark of an oak, each hatch out a
+wingless imperfect female, which M. Lichtenstein calls the
+foundress. After moulting four times, the foundress
+produces, by parthenogenesis, a number of false eggs, which
+it fastens to the leaf-stalks and under side of the foliage.
+These false eggs hatch out a larval form, wingless, but
+bigger than any of the subsequent generations; and the
+larv&aelig; so produced themselves once more give origin to
+more larv&aelig;, which acquire wings, and fly away from the
+oak on which they were born to another of a different
+species in the same neighbourhood. There these larv&aelig; of
+the second crop once more lay false eggs, from which the
+third larval generation is developed. This brood is again
+wingless, and it proceeds at once to bud out several generations
+more, by internal gemmation, as long as the warm
+weather lasts. According to M. Lichtenstein, all previous
+observations have been made only on aphides of this third
+type; and he maintains that every species in the whole
+family really undergoes an analogous alternation of generations.
+At last, when the cold weather begins to set in,
+a fourth larval form appears, which soon obtains wings,
+and flies back to the same kind of oak on which the foundresses
+were first hatched out, all the intervening generations
+<a name="page175" id="page175"></a>having passed their lives in sucking the juices of the other
+oak to which the second larval form migrated. The fourth
+type here produce perfect male and female insects, which
+are wingless, and have no sucking apparatus. The females,
+after being impregnated, lay a single egg each, which they
+hide in the bark, where it remains during the winter, till
+in spring it once more hatches out into a foundress, and
+the whole cycle begins over again. Whether all the aphides
+do or do not pass through corresponding stages is not yet
+quite certain. But Kentish farmers believe that the hop-fly
+migrates to hop-bines from plum-trees in the neighbourhood;
+and M. Lichtenstein considers that such migrations
+from one plant to another are quite normal in the family.
+We know, indeed, that many great plagues of our crops are
+thus propagated, sometimes among closely related plants,
+but sometimes also among the most widely separated
+species. For example, turnip-fly (which is not an aphis, but
+a small beetle) always begins its ravages (as Miss Ormerod
+has abundantly shown) upon a plot of charlock, and then
+spreads from patches of that weed to the neighbouring
+turnips, which are slightly diverse members of the same
+genus. But, on the other hand, it has long been well known
+that rust in wheat is specially connected with the presence
+of the barberry bush; and it has recently been proved that
+the fungus which produces the disease passes its early
+stages on the barberry leaves, and only migrates in later
+generations to the growing wheat. This last case brings
+even more prominently into light than ever the essential
+resemblance of the aphides to plant-parasites.<a name="page176" id="page176"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="part11" id="part11"><i>THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>For many centuries the occult problem how to account for
+the milk in the coco-nut has awakened the profoundest
+interest alike of ingenuous infancy and of maturer scientific
+age. Though it cannot be truthfully affirmed of it,
+as of the cosmogony or creation of the world, in the 'Vicar
+of Wakefield,' that it 'has puzzled the philosophers of all
+ages' (for Sanchoniathon was certainly ignorant of the
+very existence of that delicious juice, and Manetho doubtless
+went to his grave without ever having tasted it fresh
+from the nut under a tropical verandah), yet it may be
+safely asserted that for the last three hundred years the
+philosopher who has not at some time or other of his life
+meditated upon that abstruse question is unworthy of such
+an exalted name. The cosmogony and the milk in the
+coco-nut are, however, a great deal closer together in
+thought than Sanchoniathon or Manetho, or the rogue who
+quoted them so glibly, is ever at all likely, in his wildest
+moments, to have imagined.</p>
+
+<p>The coco-nut, in fact, is a subject well deserving of the
+most sympathetic treatment at the gentle hands of grateful
+humanity. No other plant is useful to us in so many
+diverse and remarkable manners. It has been truly said
+of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he is all good,
+from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail; but even
+the pig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries
+<a name="page177" id="page177"></a>or luxuries&mdash;from tooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to
+lard, from pepsine wine to pork pies&mdash;does not nearly approach,
+in the multiplicity and variety of his virtues, the
+all-sufficing and world-supplying coco-nut. A Chinese
+proverb says that there are as many useful properties in
+the coco-nut palm as there are days in the year; and a
+Polynesian saying tells us that the man who plants a coco-nut
+plants meat and drink, hearth and home, vessels and
+clothing, for himself and his children after him. Like
+the great Mr. Whiteley, the invaluable palm-tree might
+modestly advertise itself as a universal provider. The
+solid part of the nut supplies food almost alone to thousands
+of people daily, and the milk serves them for drink,
+thus acting as an efficient filter to the water absorbed by
+the roots in the most polluted or malarious regions. If you
+tap the flower stalk you get a sweet juice, which can be
+boiled down into the peculiar sugar called (in the charming
+dialect of commerce) jaggery; or it can be fermented into
+a very nasty spirit known as palm-wine, toddy, or arrack;
+or it can be mixed with bitter herbs and roots to make that
+delectable compound 'native beer.' If you squeeze the
+dry nut you get coco-nut oil, which is as good as lard for
+frying when fresh, and is 'an excellent substitute for butter
+at breakfast,' on tropical tables. Under the mysterious
+name of copra (which most of us have seen with awe described
+in the market reports as 'firm' or 'weak,' 'receding'
+or 'steady') it forms the main or only export of many
+Oceanic islands, and is largely imported into this realm of
+England, where the thicker portion is called stearine, and
+used for making sundry candles with fanciful names, while
+the clear oil is employed for burning in ordinary lamps. In
+the process of purification, it yields glycerine; and it enters
+largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps.
+The fibre that surrounds the nut makes up the other
+<a name="page178" id="page178"></a>mysterious article of commerce known as coir, which is
+twisted into stout ropes, or woven into coco-nut matting
+and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are also
+made of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest
+fashion, in place of real horse-hair in stuffing cushions.
+The shell, cut in half, supplies good cups, and is artistically
+carved by the Polynesians, Japanese, Hindoos, and other
+benighted heathen, who have not yet learnt the true
+methods of civilised machine-made shoddy manufacture.
+The leaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades,
+prepared like papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts
+are written; the long mid-ribs or branches (strictly
+speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer admirably for rafters,
+posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath at the base is a
+remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed for
+strainers, wrappers, and native hats; while the trunk, or
+stem, passes in carpentry under the name of porcupine
+wood, and produces beautiful effects as a wonderfully
+coloured cabinet-makers' material. These are only a few
+selected instances out of the innumerable uses of the coconut
+palm.</p>
+
+<p>Apart even from the manifold merits of the tree that
+bears it, the milk itself has many and great claims to our
+respect and esteem, as everybody who has ever drunk it in
+its native surroundings will enthusiastically admit. In
+England, to be sure, the white milk in the dry nuts is a
+very poor stuff, sickly, and strong-flavoured, and rather indigestible.
+But in the tropics, coco-nut milk, or, as we
+oftener call it there, coco-nut water, is a very different and
+vastly superior sort of beverage. At eleven o'clock every
+morning, when you are hot and tired with the day's work,
+your black servant, clad from head to foot in his cool clean
+white linen suit, brings you in a tall soda glass full of a
+clear, light, crystal liquid, temptingly displayed against the
+<a name="page179" id="page179"></a>yellow background of a chased Benares brass-work tray.
+The lump of ice bobs enticingly up and down in the centre
+of the tumbler, or clinks musically against the edge of the
+glass as he carries it along. You take the cool cup thankfully
+and swallow it down at one long draught; fresh as a
+May morning, pure as an English hillside spring, delicate
+as&mdash;well, as coco-nut water. None but itself can be its
+parallel. It is certainly the most delicious, dainty, transparent,
+crystal drink ever invented. How did it get there,
+and what is it for?</p>
+
+<p>In the early green stage at which coco-nuts are generally
+picked for household use in the tropics the shell hasn't
+yet solidified into a hard stony coat, but still remains quite
+soft enough to be readily cut through with a sharp table
+knife&mdash;just like young walnuts picked for pickling. If you
+cut one across while it's in this unsophisticated state, it is
+easy enough to see the arrangement of the interior, and
+the part borne by the milk in the development and growth
+of the mature nut. The ordinary tropical way of opening
+coco-nuts for table, indeed, is by cutting off the top of the
+shell and rind in successive slices, at the end where the
+three pores are situated, until you reach the level of the
+water, which fills up the whole interior. The nutty part
+around the inside of the shell is then extremely soft and
+jelly-like, so that it can be readily eaten with a spoon; but
+as a matter of fact very few people ever do eat the flesh at
+all. After their first few months in the tropics, they lose
+the taste for this comparatively indigestible part, and confine
+themselves entirely (like patients at a German spa) to
+drinking the water. A young coco-nut is thus seen to
+consist, first of a green outer skin, then of a fibrous coat,
+which afterwards becomes the hair, and next of a harder
+shell which finally gets quite woody; while inside all comes
+the actual seed or unripe nut itself. The office of the coco-nut
+<a name="page180" id="page180"></a>water is the deposition of the nutty part around the
+side of the shell; it is, so to speak, the mother liquid, from
+which the harder eatable portion is afterwards derived.
+This state is not uncommon in embryo seeds. In a very
+young pea, for example, the inside is quite watery, and only
+the outer skin is at all solid, as we have all observed when
+green peas first come into season. But the special peculiarity
+of the coco-nut consists in the fact that this liquid
+condition of the interior continues even after the nut is
+ripe, and that is the really curious point about the milk in
+the coco-nut which does actually need accounting for.</p>
+
+<p>In order to understand it one ought to examine a coco-nut
+in the act of budding, and to do this it is by no means
+necessary to visit the West Indies or the Pacific Islands;
+all you need to do is to ask a Covent Garden fruit salesman
+to get you a few 'growers.' On the voyage to England, a
+certain number of precocious coco-nuts, stimulated by the
+congenial warmth and damp of most shipholds, usually
+begin to sprout before their time; and these waste nuts
+are sold by the dealers at a low rate to East-end children
+and inquiring botanists. An examination of a 'grower'
+very soon convinces one what is the use of the milk in the
+coco-nut.</p>
+
+<p>It must be duly borne in mind, to begin with, that the
+prime end and object of the nut is not to be eaten raw by
+the ingenious monkey, or to be converted by lordly man
+into coco-nut biscuits, or coco-nut pudding, but simply and
+solely to reproduce the coco-nut palm in sufficient numbers
+to future generations. For this purpose the nut has
+slowly acquired by natural selection a number of protective
+defences against its numerous enemies, which serve to
+guard it admirably in the native state from almost all
+possible animal depredators. First of all, the actual nut
+or seed itself consists of a tiny embryo plant, placed just
+<a name="page181" id="page181"></a>inside the softest of the three pores or pits at the end of
+the shell, and surrounded by a vast quantity of nutritious
+pulp, destined to feed and support it during its earliest unprotected
+days, if not otherwise diverted by man or monkey.
+But as whatever feeds a young plant will also feed an
+animal, and as many animals betray a felonious desire to
+appropriate to their own wicked ends the food-stuffs laid
+up by the palm for the use of its own seedling, the coco-nut
+has been compelled to inclose this particularly large
+and rich kernel in a very solid and defensive shell. And,
+once more, since the palm grows at a very great height
+from the ground&mdash;I have seen them up to ninety feet in
+favourable circumstances&mdash;this shell stands a very good
+chance of getting broken in tumbling to the earth, so that
+it has been necessary to surround it with a mass of soft
+and yielding fibrous material, which breaks its fall, and
+acts as a buffer to it when it comes in contact with the
+soil beneath. So many protections has the coco-nut gradually
+devised for itself by the continuous survival of the
+best adapted amid numberless and endless spontaneous
+variations of all its kind in past time.</p>
+
+<p>Now, when the coco-nut has actually reached the
+ground at last, and proceeds to sprout in the spot where
+chance (perhaps in the bodily shape of a disappointed monkey)
+has chosen to cast it, these numerous safeguards and
+solid envelopes naturally begin to prove decided nuisances
+to the embryo within. It starts under the great disadvantage
+of being hermetically sealed within a solid wooden
+shell, so that no water can possibly get at it to aid it as
+most other seeds are aided in the process of germination.
+Fancy yourself a seed-pea, anxious to sprout, but coated
+all round with a hard covering of impermeable sealing-wax,
+and you will be in a position faintly to appreciate
+the unfortunate predicament of a grower coco-nut. Natural
+<a name="page182" id="page182"></a>selection, however&mdash;that <i>deus ex machina</i> of modern
+science, which can perform such endless wonders, if only
+you give it time enough to work in and variations enough to
+work upon&mdash;natural selection has come to the rescue of the
+unhappy plant by leaving it a little hole at the top of the
+shell, out of which it can push its feathery green head
+without difficulty. Everybody knows that if you look at
+the sharp end of a coco-nut you will see three little brown
+pits or depressions on its surface. Most people also know
+that two of these are firmly stopped up (for a reason to
+which I shall presently recur), but that the third one is
+only closed by a slight film or very thin shell, which can
+be easily bored through with a pocket knife, so as to let
+the milk run off before cracking the shell. So much we
+have all learnt during our ardent pursuit of natural knowledge
+on half-holidays in early life. But we probably then
+failed to observe that just opposite this soft hole lies a
+small roundish knob, imbedded in the pulp or eatable
+portion, which knob is in fact the embryo palm or seedling,
+for whose ultimate benefit the whole arrangement (in brown
+and green) has been invented. That is very much the way
+with man: he notices what concerns his own appetite,
+and omits all the really important parts of the whole subject.
+<i>We</i> think the use of the hole is to let out the milk; but
+the nut knows that its real object is to let out the seedling.
+The knob grows out at last into the young plantlet, and it
+is by means of the soft hole that it makes its escape through
+the shell to the air and the sunshine which it seeks without.
+This brings us really down at last to the true <i>raison
+d'&ecirc;tre</i> for the milk in the coco-nut. As the seed or kernel
+cannot easily get at much water from outside, it has a good
+supply of water laid up for it ready beforehand within its
+own encircling shell. The mother liquid from which the
+pulp or nutty part has been deposited remains in the centre,
+<a name="page183" id="page183"></a>as the milk, till the tiny embryo begins to sprout. As
+soon as it does so, the little knob which was at first so
+very small enlarges rapidly and absorbs the water, till it
+grows out into a big spongy cellular mass, which at last
+almost fills up the entire shell. At the same time, its
+other end pushes its way out through the soft hole, and
+then gives birth to a growing bud at the top&mdash;the future
+stem and leaves&mdash;and to a number of long threads beneath&mdash;the
+future roots. Meanwhile, the spongy mass inside
+begins gradually to absorb all the nutty part, using up its
+oils and starches for the purpose of feeding the young
+plant above, until it is of an age to expand its leaves to
+the open tropical sunlight and shift for itself in the struggle
+for life. It seems at first sight very hard to understand
+how any tissue so solid as the pulp of coco-nut can be thus
+softened and absorbed without any visible cause; but in
+the subtle chemistry of living vegetation such a transformation
+is comparatively simple and easy to perform.
+Nature sometimes works much greater miracles than this
+in the same way: for example, what is called vegetable
+ivory, a substance so solid that it can be carved or turned
+only with great difficulty, is really the kernel of another
+palm-nut, allied to the coco-palm, and its very stony particles
+are all similarly absorbed during germination by the
+dissolving power of the young seedling.</p>
+
+<p>Why, however, has the coco-nut three pores at the top
+instead of one, and why are two out of the three so carefully
+and firmly sealed up? The explanation of this
+strange peculiarity is only to be found in the ancestral
+history of the coco-nut kind. Most nuts, indeed, start in
+their earlier stage as if they meant to produce two or more
+seeds each; but as they ripen, all the seeds except one
+become abortive. The almond, for example, has in the
+flower two seeds or kernels to each nut; but in the ripe
+<a name="page184" id="page184"></a>state there is generally only one, though occasionally we
+find an almond with two&mdash;a philip&oelig;na, as we commonly
+call it&mdash;just to keep in memory the original arrangement
+of its earlier ancestors. The reason for this is that plants
+whose fruits have no special protection for their seeds are
+obliged to produce a great many of them at once, in order
+that one seed in a thousand may finally survive the onslaughts
+of their Argus-eyed enemies; but when they learn
+to protect themselves by hard coverings from birds and
+beasts, they can dispense with some of these supernumerary
+seeds, and put more nutriment into each one of those that
+they still retain. Compare, for example, the innumerable
+small round seedlets of the poppyhead with the solitary
+large and richly stored seed of the walnut, or the tiny black
+specks of mustard and cress with the single compact and
+well-filled seed of the filbert and the acorn. To the very
+end, however, most nuts begin in the flower as if they
+meant to produce a whole capsuleful of small unstored and
+unprotected seeds, like their original ancestors; it is only
+at the last moment that they recollect themselves, suppress
+all their ovules except one, and store that one with all the
+best and oiliest food-stuffs at their disposal. The nuts, in
+fact, have learned by long experience that it is better to be
+the only son and heir of a wealthy house, set up in life
+with a good capital to begin upon, than to be one of a poor
+family of thirteen needy and unprovided children.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the coco-nuts are descended from a great tribe&mdash;the
+palms and lilies&mdash;which have as their main distinguishing
+peculiarity the arrangement of parts in their flowers
+and fruits by threes each. For example, in the most
+typical flowers of this great group, there are three green
+outer calyx-pieces, three bright-coloured petals, three long
+outer stamens, three short inner stamens, three valves to
+the capsule, and three seeds or three rows of seeds in each
+<a name="page185" id="page185"></a>fruit. Many palms still keep pretty well to this primitive
+arrangement, but a few of them which have specially protected
+or highly developed fruits or nuts have lost in their
+later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and possess
+only one seed, often a very large one. There is no better
+and more typical nut in the whole world than a coco-nut&mdash;that
+is to say, from our present point of view at least,
+though the fear of that awful person, the botanical Smelfungus,
+compels me to add that this is not quite technically
+true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the
+coco-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the
+delightful information, innocently conveyed in that delicious
+dialect of which he is so great a master, that it is really
+'a drupaceous fruit with a fibrous mesocarp.' Still, in
+spite of Smelfungus with his nice hair-splitting distinctions,
+it remains true that humanity at large will still call a nut
+a nut, and that the coco-nut is the highest known development
+of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and
+most richly stored seed of any known plant; and this seed
+is surrounded by one of the hardest and most unmanageable
+of any known shells. Hence the coco-nut has readily
+been able to dispense with the three kernels which each
+nut used in its earlier and less developed days to produce.
+But though the palm has thus taken to reducing the
+number of its seeds in each fruit to the lowest possible
+point consistent with its continued existence at all, it still
+goes on retaining many signs of its ancient threefold arrangement.
+The ancestral and most deeply ingrained
+habits persist in the earlier stages; it is only in the mature
+form that the later acquired habits begin fully to predominate.
+Even so our own boys pass through an essentially
+savage childhood of ogres and fairies, bows and
+arrows, sugar-plums and barbaric nursery tales, as well as
+a romantic boyhood of medi&aelig;val chivalry and adventure,
+<a name="page186" id="page186"></a>before they steady down into that crowning glory of our
+race, the solid, sober, matter-of-fact, commercial British
+Philistine. Hence the coco-nut in its unstripped state is
+roughly triangular in form, its angles answering to the
+separate three fruits of simpler palms; and it has three
+pits or weak places in the shell, through which the embryos
+of the three original kernels used to force their way
+out. But as only one of them is now needed, that one
+alone is left soft; the other two, which would be merely
+a source of weakness to the plant if unprotected, are
+covered in the existing nut by harder shell. Doubtless
+they serve in part to deceive the too inquisitive monkey or
+other enemy, who probably concludes that if one of the
+pits is hard and impermeable, the other two are so likewise.</p>
+
+<p>Though I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted
+for the milk in the coco-nut, and incidentally for some
+other matters in its economy as well, I am loth to leave the
+young seedling whom I have brought so far on his way to
+the tender mercies of the winds and storms and tropical
+animals, some of whom are extremely fond of his juicy and
+delicate shoots. Indeed, the growing point or bud of most
+palms is a very pleasant succulent vegetable, and one kind&mdash;the
+West Indian mountain cabbage&mdash;deserves a better
+and more justly descriptive name, for it is really much more
+like seakale or asparagus. I shall try to follow our young
+seedling on in life, therefore, so as to give, while I am about
+it, a fairly comprehensive and complete biography of a single
+flourishing coco-nut palm.</p>
+
+<p>Beginning, then, with the fall of the nut from the
+parent-tree, the troubles of the future palm confront it at
+once in the shape of the nut-eating crab. This evil-disposed
+crustacean is common around the sea-coast of
+the eastern tropical islands, which is also the region
+<a name="page187" id="page187"></a>mainly affected by the coco-nut palm; for coco-nuts are
+essentially shore-loving trees, and thrive best in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the sea. Among the fallen
+nuts, the clumsy-looking thief of a crab (his appropriate
+Latin name is <i>Birgus latro</i>) makes great and dreaded havoc.
+To assist him in his unlawful object he has developed a
+pair of front legs, with specially strong and heavy claws,
+supplemented by a last or tail-end pair armed only with very
+narrow and slender pincers. He subsists entirely upon a
+coco-nut diet. Setting to work upon a big fallen nut&mdash;with
+the husk on, coco-nuts measure in the raw state about twelve
+inches the long way&mdash;he tears off all the coarse fibre bit by
+bit, and gets down at last to the hard shell. Then he
+hammers away with his heavy claw on the softest eye-hole
+till he has pounded an opening right through it. This done
+he twists round his body so as to turn his back upon the
+coco-nut he is operating upon (crabs are never famous
+either for good manners or gracefulness) and proceeds
+awkwardly but effectually to extract all the white kernel or
+pulp through the breach with his narrow pair of hind
+pincers. Like man, too, the robber-crab knows the value
+of the outer husk as well as of the eatable nut itself, for
+he collects the fibre in surprising quantities to line his
+burrow, and lies upon it, the clumsy sybarite, for a luxurious
+couch. Alas, however, for the helplessness of crabs, and
+the rapacity and cunning of all-appropriating man! The
+spoil-sport Malay digs up the nest for the sake of the fibre
+it contains, which spares him the trouble of picking junk
+on his own account, and then he eats the industrious crab
+who has laid it all up, while he melts down the great lump
+of fat under the robber's capacious tail, and sometimes gets
+from it as much as a good quart of what may be practically
+considered as limpid coco-nut oil. <i>Sic vos non vobis</i> is
+certainly the melancholy refrain of all natural history.<a name="page188" id="page188"></a>
+The coco-nut palm intends the oil for the nourishment of
+its own seedling; the crab feloniously appropriates it and
+stores it up under his capacious tail for future personal use;
+the Malay steals it again from the thief for his own purposes;
+and ten to one the Dutch or English merchant
+beguiles it from him with sized calico or poisoned rum, and
+transmits it to Europe, where it serves to lighten our nights
+and assist at our matutinal tub, to point a moral and adorn
+the present tale.</p>
+
+<p>If, however, our coco-nut is lucky enough to escape the
+robber-crabs, the pigs, and the monkeys, as well as to avoid
+falling into the hands of man, and being converted into
+the copra of commerce, or sold from a costermonger's
+barrow in the chilly streets of ungenial London at a penny
+a slice, it may very probably succeed in germinating after
+the fashion I have already described, and pushing up its
+head through the surrounding foliage to the sunlight above.
+As a rule, the coco-nut has been dropped by its mother tree
+on the sandy soil of a sea-beach; and this is the spot it
+best loves, and where it grows to the stateliest height.
+Sometimes, however, it falls into the sea itself, and then
+the loose husk buoys it up, so that it floats away bravely
+till it is cast by the waves upon some distant coral reef or
+desert island. It is this power of floating and surviving
+a long voyage that has dispersed the coco-nut so widely
+among oceanic islands, where so few plants are generally
+to be found. Indeed, on many atolls or isolated reefs (for
+example, on Keeling Island) it is the only tree or shrub
+that grows in any quantity, and on it the pigs, the poultry,
+the ducks, and the land crabs of the place entirely subsist.
+In any case, wherever it happens to strike, the young coconut
+sends up at first a fine rosette of big spreading leaves,
+not raised as afterwards on a tall stem, but springing direct
+from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big
+<a name="page189" id="page189"></a>and graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more
+beautiful or more essentially tropical in appearance than a
+plantation of young coco-nuts. Their long feathery leaves
+spreading out in great clumps from the buried stock, and
+waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of
+the Indies, are the very embodiment of those deceptive
+ideal tropics which, alas, are to be found in actual reality
+nowhere on earth save in the artificial palm-houses at Kew,
+and the Casino Gardens at too entrancing Monte Carlo.</p>
+
+<p>For the first two or three years the young palms must
+be well watered, and the soil around them opened; after
+which the tall graceful stem begins to rise rapidly into the
+open air. In this condition it may be literally said to make
+the tropics&mdash;those fallacious tropics, I mean, of painters
+and poets, of Enoch Arden and of Locksley Hall. You
+may observe that whenever an artist wants to make a
+tropical picture, he puts a group of coco-nut palms in the
+foreground, as much as to say, 'You see there's no deception;
+these are the genuine unadulterated tropics.' But
+as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just
+as well think of painting the desert without the camels.
+At eight or ten years old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms
+of the ordinary palm type, degraded likenesses of the lilies
+and yuccas, greenish and inconspicuous, but visited by insects
+for the sake of their pollen. The flower, however, is
+fertilised by the wind, which carries the pollen grains from
+one bunch of blossoms to another. Then the nuts gradually
+swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even
+under the brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics
+are hot, though in other respects I hold them to be arrant
+impostors, like that precocious American youth who
+announced on his tenth birthday that in his opinion life
+wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst
+thing about the coco-nut palm, the missionaries always
+<a name="page190" id="page190"></a>say, is the fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes
+on bearing fruit uninterruptedly for forty years. This is
+very immoral and wrong of the ill-conditioned tree, because
+it encourages the idyllic Polynesian to lie under the palms,
+all day long, cooling his limbs in the sea occasionally,
+sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles
+of Ne&aelig;ra's hair, and waiting for the nuts to drop down in
+due time, when he ought (according to European notions)
+to be killing himself with hard work under a blazing sky,
+raising cotton, sugar, indigo, and coffee, for the immediate
+benefit of the white merchant, and the ultimate advantage
+of the British public. It doesn't enforce habits of steady
+industry and perseverance, the good missionaries say; it
+doesn't induce the native to feel that burning desire for
+Manchester piece-goods and the other blessings of civilisation
+which ought properly to accompany the propagation of
+the missionary in foreign parts. You stick your nut in
+the sand; you sit by a few years and watch it growing;
+you pick up the ripe fruits as they fall from the tree; and you
+sell them at last for illimitable red cloth to the Manchester
+piece-goods merchant. Nothing could be more simple or
+more satisfactory. And yet it is difficult to see the precise
+moral distinction between the owner of a coco-nut grove in
+the South Sea Islands and the owner of a coal-mine or a
+big estate in commercial England. Each lounges decorously
+through life after his own fashion; only the one
+lounges in a Russia leather chair at a club in Pall Mall,
+while the other lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a
+rolling surf in Tahiti or the Hawaiian Archipelago.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously enough, at a little distance from the sandy
+levels or alluvial flats of the sea-shore, the sea-loving coco-nut
+will not bring its nuts to perfection. It will grow,
+indeed, but it will not thrive or fruit in due season. On
+the coast-line of Southern India, immense groves of coco-nuts
+<a name="page191" id="page191"></a>fringe the shore for miles and miles together; and in
+some parts, as in Travancore, they form the chief agricultural
+staple of the whole country. 'The State has hence
+facetiously been called Coconutcore,' says its historian;
+which charmingly illustrates the true Anglo-Indian notion
+of what constitutes facetiousness, and ought to strike the
+last nail into the coffin of a competitive examination system.
+A good tree in full bearing should produce 120 coco-nuts
+in a season; so that a very small grove is quite sufficient
+to maintain a respectable family in decency and comfort.
+Ah, what a mistake the English climate made when it left
+off its primitive warmth of the tertiary period, and got
+chilled by the ice and snow of the Glacial Epoch down to its
+present misty and dreary wheat-growing condition! If it
+were not for that, those odious habits of steady industry
+and perseverance might never have been developed in ourselves
+at all, and we might be lazily picking copra off our
+own coco-palms, to this day, to export in return for the
+piece-goods of some Arctic Manchester situated somewhere
+about the north of Spitzbergen or the New Siberian
+Islands.</p>
+
+<p>Even as things stand at the present day, however, it is
+wonderful how much use we modern Englishmen now
+make in our own houses of this far Eastern nut, whose
+very name still bears upon its face the impress of its
+originally savage origin. From morning to night we never
+leave off being indebted to it. We wash with it as old
+brown Windsor or glycerine soap the moment we leave our
+beds. We walk across our passages on the mats made
+from its fibre. We sweep our rooms with its brushes, and
+wipe our feet on it as we enter our doors. As rope, it ties
+up our trunks and packages; in the hands of the housemaid
+it scrubs our floors; or else, woven into coarse cloth,
+it acts as a covering for bales and furniture sent by rail or
+<a name="page192" id="page192"></a>steamboat. The confectioner undermines our digestion in
+early life with coco-nut candy; the cook tempts us later
+on with coco-nut cake; and Messrs. Huntley and Palmer
+cordially invite us to complete the ruin with coco-nut
+biscuits. We anoint our chapped hands with one of its
+preparations after washing; and grease the wheels of our
+carriages with another to make them run smoothly. Finally,
+we use the oil to burn in our reading lamps, and light ourselves
+at last to bed with stearine candles. Altogether, an
+amateur census of a single small English cottage results in
+the startling discovery that it contains twenty-seven distinct
+articles which owe their origin in one way or another to
+the coco-nut palm. And yet we affect in our black ingratitude
+to despise the question of the milk in the coconut.<a name="page193" id="page193"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part12" id="part12"><i>FOOD AND FEEDING</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>When a man and a bear meet together casually in an
+American forest, it makes a great deal of difference, to the
+two parties concerned at least, whether the bear eats the
+man or the man eats the bear. We haven't the slightest
+difficulty in deciding afterwards which of the two, in each
+particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten.
+Here, we say, is the grizzly that eat the man; or, here is
+the man that smoked and dined off the hams of the grizzly.
+Basing our opinion upon such familiar and well-known
+instances, we are apt to take it for granted far too readily
+that between eating and being eaten, between the active
+and the passive voice of the verb <i>edo</i>, there exists necessarily
+a profound and impassable native antithesis. To
+swallow an oyster is, in our own personal histories, so very
+different a thing from being swallowed by a shark that we
+can hardly realise at first the underlying fundamental
+identity of eating with mere coalescence. And yet, at the
+very outset of the art of feeding, when the nascent animal
+first began to indulge in this very essential animal practice,
+one may fairly say that no practical difference as yet
+existed between the creature that ate and the creature that
+was eaten. After the man and the bear had finished their
+little meal, if one may be frankly metaphorical, it was impossible
+to decide whether the remaining being was the
+man or the bear, or which of the two had swallowed the
+<a name="page194" id="page194"></a>other. The dinner having been purely mutual, the resulting
+animal represented both the litigants equally; just as,
+in cannibal New Zealand, the chief who ate up his brother
+chief was held naturally to inherit the goods and chattels
+of the vanquished and absorbed rival, whom he had thus
+literally and physically incorporated.</p>
+
+<p>A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of
+stagnant water under the field of a microscope, collides
+accidentally with another jelly-speck who happens to be
+travelling in the opposite direction across the same miniature
+ocean. What thereupon occurs? One jelly-speck
+rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two,
+there is now one; and the united body proceeds to float
+away quite unconcernedly, without waiting to trouble itself
+for a second with the profound metaphysical question,
+which half of it is the original personality, and which half
+the devoured and digested. In these minute and very
+simple animals there is absolutely no division of labour
+between part and part; every bit of the jelly-like mass is
+alike head and foot and mouth and stomach. The jelly-speck
+has no permanent limbs, but it keeps putting forth
+vague arms and legs every now and then from one side or
+the other; and with these temporary and ever-dissolving
+members it crawls along merrily through its tiny drop of
+stagnant water. If two of the legs or arms happen to
+knock up casually against one another, they coalesce at
+once, just like two drops of water on a window-pane, or
+two strings of treacle slowly spreading along the surface of
+a plate. When the jelly-speck meets any edible thing&mdash;a
+bit of dead plant, a wee creature like itself, a microscopic
+egg&mdash;it proceeds to fold its own substance slimily around
+it, making, as it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose
+of swallowing it, and a temporary stomach for the purpose
+of quietly digesting and assimilating it afterwards. Thus
+<a name="page195" id="page195"></a>what at one moment is a foot may at the next moment
+become a mouth, and at the moment after that again a
+rudimentary stomach. The animal has no skin and no
+body, no outside and no inside, no distinction of parts or
+members, no individuality, no identity. Roll it up into
+one with another of its kind, and it couldn't tell you itself
+a minute afterwards which of the two it had really been a
+minute before. The question of personal identity is here
+considerably mixed.</p>
+
+<p>But as soon as we get to rather larger creatures of the
+same type, the antithesis between the eater and the eaten
+begins to assume a more definite character. The big jelly-bag
+approaches a good many smaller jelly-bags, microscopic
+plants, and other appropriate food-stuffs, and, surrounding
+them rapidly with its crawling arms, envelopes them in its
+own substance, which closes behind them and gradually
+digests them. Everybody knows, by name at least, that
+revolutionary and evolutionary hero, the am&oelig;ba&mdash;the
+terror of theologians, the pet of professors, and the insufferable
+bore of the general reader. Well, this parlous
+and subversive little animal consists of a comparatively
+large mass of soft jelly, pushing forth slender lobes, like
+threads or fingers, from its own substance, and gliding
+about, by means of these tiny legs, over water-plants and
+other submerged surfaces. But though it can literally turn
+itself inside out, like a glove, it still has some faint beginnings
+of a mouth and stomach, for it generally takes
+in food and absorbs water through a particular part of its
+surface, where the slimy mass of its body is thinnest.
+Thus the am&oelig;ba may be said really to eat and drink,
+though quite devoid of any special organs for eating or
+drinking.</p>
+
+<p>The particular point to which I wish to draw attention
+here, however, is this: that even the very simplest and
+<a name="page196" id="page196"></a>most primitive animals do discriminate somehow between
+what is eatable and what isn't. The am&oelig;ba has no eyes,
+no nose, no mouth, no tongue, no nerves of taste, no
+special means of discrimination of any kind; and yet, so
+long as it meets only grains of sand or bits of shell, it
+makes no effort in any way to swallow them; but, the
+moment it comes across a bit of material fit for its food, it
+begins at once to spread its clammy fingers around the
+nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the am&oelig;ba's
+body apparently possesses, in a very vague form, the first
+beginnings of those senses which in us are specialised and
+confined to a single spot. And it is because of the light
+which the am&oelig;ba thus incidentally casts upon the nature
+of the specialised senses in higher animals that I have ventured
+once more to drag out of the private life of his native
+pond that already too notorious and obtrusive rhizopod.</p>
+
+<p>With us lordly human beings, at the extreme opposite
+end in the scale of being from the microscopic jelly-specks,
+the art of feeding and the mechanism which provides for
+it have both reached a very high state of advanced perfection.
+We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the
+one hand, and French cooks and <i>p&acirc;t&eacute; de foie gras</i> on the
+other. But while everybody knows practically how things
+taste to us, and which things respectively we like and dislike,
+comparatively few people ever recognise that the sense
+of taste is not merely intended as a source of gratification,
+but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in informing
+us what we ought to eat and what to refuse.
+Paradoxical as it may sound at first to most people, nice
+things are, in the main, things that are good for us, and
+nasty things are poisonous or otherwise injurious. That
+we often practically find the exact contrary the case (alas!)
+is due, not to the provisions of nature, but to the artificial
+surroundings in which we live, and to the cunning way in
+<a name="page197" id="page197"></a>which we flavour up unwholesome food, so as to deceive
+and cajole the natural palate. Yet, after all, it is a pleasant
+gospel that what we like is really good for us, and, when
+we have made some small allowances for artificial conditions,
+it is in the main a true one also.</p>
+
+<p>The sense of taste, which in the lowest animals is diffused
+equally over the whole frame, is in ourselves and
+other higher creatures concentrated in a special part of
+the body, namely the mouth, where the food about to be
+swallowed is chewed and otherwise prepared beforehand for
+the work of digestion. Now it is, of course, quite clear
+that some sort of supervision must be exercised by the
+body over the kind of food that is going to be put into it.
+Common experience teaches us that prussic acid and pure
+opium are undesirable food-stuffs in large quantities; that
+raw spirits, petroleum, and red lead should be sparingly
+partaken of by the judicious feeder; and that even green
+fruit, the bitter end of cucumber, and the berries of deadly
+nightshade are unsatisfactory articles of diet when continuously
+persisted in. If, at the very outset of our
+digestive apparatus, we hadn't a sort of automatic premonitory
+adviser upon the kinds of food we ought or ought not
+to indulge in, we should naturally commit considerable
+imprudences in the way of eating and drinking&mdash;even
+more than we do at present. Natural selection has therefore
+provided us with a fairly efficient guide in this respect
+in the sense of taste, which is placed at the very threshold,
+as it were, of our digestive mechanism. It is the duty of
+taste to warn us against uneatable things, and to recommend
+to our favourable attention eatable and wholesome
+ones; and, on the whole, in spite of small occasional
+remissness, it performs this duty with creditable success.</p>
+
+<p>Taste, however, is not equally distributed over the
+whole surface of the tongue alike. There are three
+<a name="page198" id="page198"></a>distinct regions or tracts, each of which has to perform its
+own special office and function. The tip of the tongue is
+concerned mainly with pungent and acrid tastes; the
+middle portion is sensitive chiefly to sweets and bitters;
+while the back or lower portion confines itself almost
+entirely to the flavours of roast meats, butter, oils, and
+other rich or fatty substances. There are very good reasons
+for this subdivision of faculties in the tongue, the object
+being, as it were, to make each piece of food undergo three
+separate examinations (like 'smalls,' 'mods,' and 'greats'
+at Oxford), which must be successively passed before it is
+admitted into full participation in the human economy.
+The first examination, as we shall shortly see, gets rid at
+once of substances which would be actively and immediately
+destructive to the very tissues of the mouth and
+body; the second discriminates between poisonous and
+chemically harmless food-stuffs; and the third merely
+decides the minor question whether the particular food is
+likely to prove then and there wholesome or indigestible to
+the particular person. The sense of taste proceeds, in fact,
+upon the principle of gradual selection and elimination; it
+refuses first what is positively destructive, next what is
+more remotely deleterious, and finally what is only undesirable
+or over-luscious.</p>
+
+<p>When we want to assure ourselves, by means of taste,
+about any unknown object&mdash;say a lump of some white
+stuff, which may be crystal, or glass, or alum, or borax, or
+quartz, or rocksalt&mdash;we put the tip of the tongue against it
+gingerly. If it begins to burn us, we draw it away more
+or less rapidly with an accompaniment in language strictly
+dependent upon our personal habits and manners. The
+test we thus occasionally apply, even in the civilised adult
+state, to unknown bodies is one that is being applied every
+day and all day long by children and savages. Unsophisticated
+<a name="page199" id="page199"></a>humanity is constantly putting everything it sees
+up to its mouth in a frank spirit of experimental inquiry as
+to its gustatory properties. In civilised life we find everything
+ready labelled and assorted for us; we comparatively
+seldom require to roll the contents of a suspicious bottle
+(in very small quantities) doubtfully upon the tongue in
+order to discover whether it is pale sherry or Chili vinegar,
+Dublin stout or mushroom ketchup. But in the savage
+state, from which, geologically and biologically speaking,
+we have only just emerged, bottles and labels do not exist.
+Primitive man, therefore, in his sweet simplicity, has only
+two modes open before him for deciding whether the
+things he finds are or are not strictly edible. The first
+thing he does is to sniff at them; and smell, being, as Mr.
+Herbert Spencer has well put it, an anticipatory taste,
+generally gives him some idea of what the thing is likely
+to prove. The second thing he does is to pop it into his
+mouth, and proceed practically to examine its further
+characteristics.</p>
+
+<p>Strictly speaking, with the tip of the tongue one can't
+really taste at all. If you put a small drop of honey or of
+oil of bitter almonds on that part of the mouth, you will find
+(no doubt to your great surprise) that it produces no effect of
+any sort; you only taste it when it begins slowly to diffuse
+itself, and reaches the true tasting region in the middle
+distance. But if you put a little cayenne or mustard on
+the same part, you will find that it bites you immediately&mdash;the
+experiment should be tried sparingly&mdash;while if you
+put it lower down in the mouth you will swallow it almost
+without noticing the pungency of the stimulant. The
+reason is, that the tip of the tongue is supplied only with
+nerves which are really nerves of touch, not nerves of
+taste proper; they belong to a totally different main branch,
+and they go to a different centre in the brain, together
+<a name="page200" id="page200"></a>with the very similar threads which supply the nerves of
+smell for mustard and pepper. That is why the smell and
+taste of these pungent substances are so much alike, as
+everybody must have noticed, a good sniff at a mustard-pot
+producing almost the same irritating effects as an incautious
+mouthful. As a rule we don't accurately distinguish,
+it is true, between these different regions of taste in
+the mouth in ordinary life; but that is because we usually
+roll our food about instinctively, without paying much
+attention to the particular part affected by it. Indeed,
+when one is trying deliberate experiments in the subject,
+in order to test the varying sensitiveness of the different
+parts to different substances, it is necessary to keep the
+tongue quite dry, in order to isolate the thing you are experimenting
+with, and prevent its spreading to all parts of
+the mouth together. In actual practice this result is obtained
+in a rather ludicrous manner&mdash;by blowing upon the
+tongue, between each experiment, with a pair of bellows.
+To such undignified expedients does the pursuit of science
+lead the ardent modern psychologist. Those domestic
+rivals of Dr. Forbes Winslow, the servants, who behold
+the enthusiastic investigator alternately drying his tongue
+in this ridiculous fashion, as if he were a blacksmith's fire,
+and then squeezing out a single drop of essence of pepper,
+vinegar, or beef-tea from a glass syringe upon the dry surface,
+not unnaturally arrive at the conclusion that master
+has gone stark mad, and that, in their private opinion, it's
+the microscope and the skeleton as has done it.</p>
+
+<p>Above all things, we don't want to be flayed alive. So the
+kinds of tastes discriminated by the tip of the tongue are the
+pungent, like pepper, cayenne and mustard; the astringent,
+like borax and alum; the alkaline, like soda and potash;
+the acid, like vinegar and green fruit; and the saline, like
+salt and ammonia. Almost all the bodies likely to give
+<a name="page201" id="page201"></a>rise to such tastes (or, more correctly, sensations of touch
+in the tongue) are obviously unwholesome and destructive
+in their character, at least when taken in large quantities.
+Nobody wishes to drink nitric acid by the quart. The first
+business of this part of the tongue is, therefore, to warn us
+emphatically against caustic substances and corrosive acids,
+against vitriol and kerosene, spirits of wine and ether, capsicums
+and burning leaves or roots, such as those of the
+common English lords-and-ladies. Things of this sort are
+immediately destructive to the very tissues of the tongue
+and palate; if taken incautiously in too large doses, they
+burn the skin off the roof of the mouth; and when
+swallowed they play havoc, of course, with our internal
+arrangements. It is highly advisable, therefore, to have an
+immediate warning of these extremely dangerous substances,
+at the very outset of our feeding apparatus.</p>
+
+<p>This kind of taste hardly differs from touch or
+burning. The sensibility of the tip of the tongue is
+only a very slight modification of the sensibility possessed
+by the skin generally, and especially by the inner folds
+over all delicate parts of the body. We all know that
+common caustic burns us wherever it touches; and it
+burns the tongue only in a somewhat more marked
+manner. Nitric or sulphuric acid attacks the fingers each
+after its own kind. A mustard plaster makes us tingle
+almost immediately; and the action of mustard on the
+tongue hardly differs, except in being more instantaneous
+and more discriminative. Cantharides work in just the
+same way. If you cut a red pepper in two and rub it on
+your neck, it will sting just as it does when put into soup
+(this experiment, however, is best tried upon one's younger
+brother; if made personally, it hardly repays the trouble
+and annoyance). Even vinegar and other acids, rubbed
+into the skin, are followed by a slight tingling; while the
+<a name="page202" id="page202"></a>effect of brandy, applied, say, to the arms, is gently stimulating
+and pleasurable, somewhat in the same way as when
+normally swallowed in conjunction with the habitual
+seltzer. In short, most things which give rise to distinct
+tastes when applied to the tip of the tongue give rise to
+fainter sensations when applied to the skin generally. And
+one hardly needs to be reminded that pepper or vinegar
+placed (accidentally as a rule) on the inner surface of the
+eyelids produces a very distinct and unpleasant smart.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, the liability to be chemically affected by
+pungent or acid bodies is common to every part of the
+skin; but it is least felt where the tough outer skin is
+thickest, and most felt where that skin is thinnest, and
+the nerves are most plentifully distributed near the surface.
+A mustard plaster would probably fail to draw at all on
+one's heel or the palm of one's hand; while it is decidedly
+painful on one's neck or chest; and a mere speck of mustard
+inside the eyelid gives one positive torture for hours
+together. Now, the tip of the tongue is just a part of one's
+body specially set aside for this very object, provided with
+an extremely thin skin, and supplied with an immense
+number of nerves, on purpose so as to be easily affected by
+all such pungent, alkaline, or spirituous substances. Sir
+Wilfrid Lawson would probably conclude that it was
+deliberately designed by Providence to warn us against a
+wicked indulgence in the brandy and seltzer aforesaid.</p>
+
+<p>At first sight it might seem as though there were
+hardly enough of such pungent and fiery things in existence
+to make it worth while for us to be provided with a
+special mechanism for guarding against them. That is
+true enough, no doubt, as regards our modern civilised life;
+though, even now, it is perhaps just as well that our children
+should have an internal monitor (other than conscience)
+to dissuade them immediately from indiscriminate
+<a name="page203" id="page203"></a>indulgence in photographic chemicals, the contents of
+stray medicine bottles, and the best dried West India
+chilies. But in an earlier period of progress, and especially
+in tropical countries (where the Darwinians have now
+decided the human race made its first <i>d&eacute;but</i> upon this or
+any other stage), things were very different indeed. Pungent
+and poisonous plants and fruits abounded on every
+side. We have all of us in our youth been taken in by
+some too cruelly waggish companion, who insisted upon
+making us eat the bright, glossy leaves of the common
+English arum, which without look pretty and juicy enough,
+but within are full of the concentrated essence of pungency
+and profanity. Well, there are hundreds of such plants,
+even in cold climates, to tempt the eyes and poison the
+veins of unsuspecting cattle or childish humanity. There
+is buttercup, so horribly acrid that cows carefully avoid it
+in their closest cropped pastures; and yet your cow is not
+usually a too dainty animal. There is aconite, the deadly
+poison with which Dr. Lamson removed his troublesome
+relatives. There is baneberry, whose very name sufficiently
+describes its dangerous nature. There are horse-radish,
+and stinging rocket, and biting wall-pepper, and still
+smarter water-pepper, and worm-wood, and nightshade,
+and spurge, and hemlock, and half a dozen other equally
+unpleasant weeds. All of these have acquired their pungent
+and poisonous properties, just as nettles have acquired
+their sting, and thistles their thorns, in order to prevent
+animals from browsing upon them and destroying them.
+And the animals in turn have acquired a very delicate
+sense of pungency on purpose to warn them beforehand of
+the existence of such dangerous and undesirable qualities
+in the plants which they might otherwise be tempted incautiously
+to swallow.</p>
+
+<p>In tropical woods, where our 'hairy quadrumanous
+<a name="page204" id="page204"></a>ancestor' (Darwinian for the prim&aelig;val monkey, from whom
+we are presumably descended) used playfully to disport
+himself, as yet unconscious of his glorious destiny as the
+remote progenitor of Shakespeare, Milton, and the late
+Mr. Peace&mdash;in tropical woods, such acrid or pungent fruits
+and plants are particularly common, and correspondingly
+annoying. The fact is, our primitive forefather and all
+the other monkeys are, or were, confirmed fruit-eaters.
+But to guard against their depredations a vast number of
+tropical fruits and nuts have acquired disagreeable or fiery
+rinds and shells, which suffice to deter the bold aggressor.
+It may not be nice to get your tongue burnt with a root or
+fruit, but it is at least a great deal better than getting
+poisoned; and, roughly speaking, pungency in external
+nature exactly answers to the rough gaudy labels which
+some chemists paste on bottles containing poisons. It
+means to say, 'This fruit or leaf, if you eat it in any quantities,
+will kill you.' That is the true explanation of
+capsicums, pimento, colocynth, croton oil, the upas tree,
+and the vast majority of bitter, acrid, or fiery fruits and
+leaves. If we had to pick up our own livelihood, as our
+naked ancestors had to do, from roots, seeds, and berries,
+we should far more readily appreciate this simple truth.
+We should know that a great many more plants than we
+now suspect are bitter or pungent, and therefore poisonous.
+Even in England we are familiar enough with such defences
+as those possessed by the outer rind of the walnut; but
+the tropical cashew-nut has a rind so intensely acrid that
+it blisters the lips and fingers instantaneously, in the same
+way as cantharides would do. I believe that on the whole,
+taking nature throughout, more fruits and nuts are poisonous,
+or intensely bitter, or very fiery, than are sweet,
+luscious, and edible.</p>
+
+<p>'But,' says that fidgety person, the hypothetical objector<a name="page205" id="page205"></a>
+(whom one always sets up for the express purpose of
+promptly knocking him down again), 'if it be the business
+of the fore part of the tongue to warn us against pungent
+and acrid substances, how comes it that we purposely
+use such things as mustard, pepper, curry-powder, and
+vinegar?' Well, in themselves all these things are, strictly
+speaking, bad for us; but in small quantities they act as
+agreeable stimulants; and we take care in preparing most
+of them to get rid of the most objectionable properties.
+Moreover, we use them, not as foods, but merely as condiments.
+One drop of oil of capsicums is enough to kill a
+man, if taken undiluted; but in actual practice we buy it in
+such a very diluted form that comparatively little harm
+arises from using it. Still, very young children dislike all
+these violent stimulants, even in small quantities; they
+won't touch mustard, pepper, or vinegar, and they recoil at
+once from wine or spirits. It is only by slow degrees that
+we learn these unnatural tastes, as our nerves get blunted and
+our palates jaded; and we all know that the old Indian who
+can eat nothing but dry curries, devilled biscuits, anchovy
+paste, pepper-pot, mulligatawny soup, Worcestershire sauce,
+preserved ginger, hot pickles, fiery sherry, and neat cognac,
+is also a person with no digestion, a fragmentary liver, and
+very little chance of getting himself accepted by any safe
+and solvent insurance office. Throughout, the warning in
+itself is a useful one; it is we who foolishly and persistently
+disregard it. Alcohol, for example, tells us at once that it
+is bad for us; yet we manage so to dress it up with flavouring
+matters and dilute it with water that we overlook the
+fiery character of the spirit itself. But that alcohol is in
+itself a bad thing (when freely indulged in) has been so
+abundantly demonstrated in the history of mankind that it
+hardly needs any further proof.</p>
+
+<p>The middle region of the tongue is the part with which
+<a name="page206" id="page206"></a>we experience sensations of taste proper&mdash;that is to say, of
+sweetness and bitterness. In a healthy, natural state all
+sweet things are pleasant to us, and all bitters (even if
+combined with sherry) unpleasant. The reason for this is
+easy enough to understand. It carries us back at once into
+those prim&aelig;val tropical forests, where our 'hairy ancestor'
+used to diet himself upon the fruits of the earth in due
+season. Now, almost all edible fruits, roots, and tubers
+contain sugar; and therefore the presence of sugar is, in
+the wild condition, as good a rough test of whether anything
+is good to eat as one could easily find. In fact, the
+argument cuts both ways: edible fruits are sweet because
+they are intended for man and other animals to eat; and
+man and other animals have a tongue pleasurably affected
+by sugar because sugary things in nature are for them in
+the highest degree edible. Our early progenitors formed
+their taste upon oranges, mangoes, bananas, and grapes;
+upon sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, dates, and wild honey.
+There is scarcely anything fitted for human food in the
+vegetable world (and our earliest ancestors were most undoubted
+vegetarians) which does not contain sugar in considerable
+quantities. In temperate climates (where man is
+but a recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to regarding
+wheaten bread as the staff of life; but in our native
+tropics enormous populations still live almost exclusively
+upon plantains, bananas, bread-fruit, yams, sweet potatoes,
+dates, cocoanuts, melons, cassava, pine-apples, and figs.
+Our nerves have been adapted to the circumstances of our
+early life as a race in tropical forests; and we still retain a
+marked liking for sweets of every sort. Not content with
+our strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, currants, apples,
+pears, cherries, plums and other northern fruits, we ransack
+the world for dates, figs, raisins, and oranges. Indeed, in
+spite of our acquired meat-eating propensities, it may be
+<a name="page207" id="page207"></a>fairly said that fruits and seeds (including wheat, rice, peas,
+beans, and other grains and pulse) still form by far the
+most important element in the food-stuffs of human populations
+generally.</p>
+
+<p>But besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to
+producing artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realised
+the alarming condition of cookery in the benighted generations
+before the invention of sugar? It is really almost
+too appalling to think about. So many things that we now
+look upon as all but necessaries&mdash;cakes, puddings, made
+dishes, confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies,
+cooked fruits, tarts, and so forth&mdash;were then practically
+quite impossible. Fancy attempting nowadays to live a
+single day without sugar; no tea, no coffee, no jam, no
+pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one goes
+to bed; the bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that
+was really the abject condition of all the civilised world up
+to the middle of the middle ages. Horace's punch was
+sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil never tasted
+the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went
+from his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the
+flavour of peppermint bull's eyes. How the children
+managed to spend their Saturday <i>as</i>, or their weekly <i>obolus</i>,
+is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had honey; but
+honey is rare, dear, and scanty; it can never have filled
+one quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affections.
+Try for a moment to realise drinking honey with
+one's whisky-and-water, or doing the year's preserving
+with a pot of best Narbonne, and you get at once a common
+measure of the difference between the two as practical
+sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beet-root
+in abundance, while sugar-maples and palm-trees of
+various sorts afford a considerable supply to remoter
+countries. But the childhood of the little Greeks and<a name="page208" id="page208"></a>
+Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a single
+ray of joy from chocolate creams or Everton toffee.</p>
+
+<p>The consequence of this excessive production of sweets
+in modern times is, of course, that we have begun to distrust
+the indications afforded us by the sense of taste in
+this particular as to the wholesomeness of various objects.
+We can mix sugar with anything we like, whether it had
+sugar in it to begin with or otherwise; and by sweetening
+and flavouring we can give a false palatableness to even
+the worst and most indigestible rubbish, such as plaster-of-Paris,
+largely sold under the name of sugared almonds to
+the ingenuous youth of two hemispheres. But in untouched
+nature the test rarely or never fails. As long as
+fruits are unripe and unfit for human food, they are green
+and sour; as soon as they ripen they become soft and
+sweet, and usually acquire some bright colour as a sort of
+advertisement of their edibility. In the main, bar the accidents
+of civilisation, whatever is sweet is good to eat&mdash;nay
+more, is meant to be eaten; it is only our own perverse
+folly that makes us sometimes think all nice things bad for
+us, and all wholesome things nasty. In a state of nature,
+the exact opposite is really the case. One may observe,
+too, that children, who are literally young savages in more
+senses than one, stand nearer to the primitive feeling in
+this respect than grown-up people. They unaffectedly like
+sweets; adults, who have grown more accustomed to the
+artificial meat diet, don't, as a rule, care much for
+puddings, cakes, and made dishes. (May I venture parenthetically
+to add, any appearance to the contrary notwithstanding,
+that I am not a vegetarian, and that I am far
+from desiring to bring down upon my devoted head the
+imprecation pronounced against the rash person who
+would rob a poor man of his beer. It is quite possible to
+believe that vegetarianism was the starting point of the
+<a name="page209" id="page209"></a>race, without wishing to consider it also as the goal; just
+as it is quite possible to regard clothes as purely artificial
+products of civilisation, without desiring personally to
+return to the charming simplicity of the Garden of Eden.)</p>
+
+<p>Bitter things in nature at large, on the contrary, are
+almost invariably poisonous. Strychnia, for example, is
+intensely bitter, and it is well known that life cannot be
+supported on strychnia alone for more than a few hours.
+Again, colocynth and aloes are far from being wholesome
+food stuffs, for a continuance; and the bitter end of
+cucumber does not conduce to the highest standard of good
+living. The bitter matter in decaying apples is highly
+injurious when swallowed, which it isn't likely to be by
+anybody who ever tastes it. Wormwood and walnut-shells
+contain other bitter and poisonous principles; absinthe,
+which is made from one of them, is a favourite slow poison
+with the fashionable young men of Paris, who wish to
+escape prematurely from 'Le monde o&ugrave; l'on s'ennuie.'
+But prussic acid is the commonest component in all
+natural bitters, being found in bitter almonds, apple
+pips, the kernels of mangosteens, and many other seeds
+and fruits. Indeed, one may say roughly that the object
+of nature generally is to prevent the actual seeds of
+edible fruits from being eaten and digested; and for this
+purpose, while she stores the pulp with sweet juices, she
+encloses the seed itself in hard stony coverings, and makes
+it nasty with bitter essences. Eat an orange-pip, and you
+will promptly observe how effectual is this arrangement.
+As a rule, the outer rind of nuts is bitter, and the inner
+kernel of edible fruits. The tongue thus warns us immediately
+against bitter things, as being poisonous, and
+prevents us automatically from swallowing them.</p>
+
+<p>'But how is it,' asks our objector again, 'that so many
+poisons are tasteless, or even, like sugar of lead, pleasant
+<a name="page210" id="page210"></a>to the palate?' The answer is (you see, we knock him
+down again, as usual) because these poisons are themselves
+for the most part artificial products; they do not occur in
+a state of nature, at least in man's ordinary surroundings.
+Almost every poisonous thing that we are really liable to
+meet with in the wild state we are warned against at once
+by the sense of taste; but of course it would be absurd to
+suppose that natural selection could have produced a mode
+of warning us against poisons which have never before
+occurred in human experience. One might just as well
+expect that it should have rendered us dynamite-proof, or
+have given us a skin like the hide of a rhinoceros to protect
+us against the future contingency of the invention of
+rifles.</p>
+
+<p>Sweets and bitters are really almost the only tastes
+proper, almost the only ones discriminated by this central
+and truly gustatory region of the tongue and palate. Most
+so-called flavourings will be found on strict examination
+to be nothing more than mixtures with these of certain
+smells, or else of pungent, salty, or alkaline matters, distinguished
+as such by the tip of the tongue. For instance,
+paradoxical as it sounds to say so, cinnamon has really no
+taste at all, but only a smell. Nobody will ever believe
+this on first hearing, but nothing on earth is easier than to
+put it to the test. Take a small piece of cinnamon, hold
+your nose tightly, rather high up, between the thumb and
+finger, and begin chewing it. You will find that it is
+absolutely tasteless; you are merely chewing a perfectly
+insipid bit of bark. Then let go your nose, and you will
+find immediately that it 'tastes' strongly, though in
+reality it is only the perfume from it that you now permit
+to rise into the smelling-chamber in the nose. So, again,
+cloves have only a pungent taste and a peculiar smell, and
+the same is the case more or less with almost all distinctive
+<a name="page211" id="page211"></a>flavourings. When you come to find of what they are
+made up, they consist generally of sweets or bitters, intermixed
+with certain ethereal perfumes, or with pungent or
+acid tastes, or with both or several such together. In this
+way, a comparatively small number of original elements,
+variously combined, suffice to make up the whole enormous
+mass of recognisably different tastes and flavours.</p>
+
+<p>The third and lowest part of the tongue and throat is
+the seat of those peculiar tastes to which Professor Bain,
+the great authority upon this important philosophical subject,
+has given the names of relishes and disgusts. It is
+here, chiefly, that we taste animal food, fats, butters, oils,
+and the richer class of vegetables and made dishes. If we
+like them, we experience a sensation which may be called
+a relish, and which induces one to keep rolling the morsel
+farther down the throat, till it passes at last beyond the
+region of our voluntary control. If we don't like them,
+we get the sensation which may be called a disgust, and
+which is very different from the mere unpleasantness of
+excessively pungent or bitter things. It is far less of an
+intellectual and far more of a physical and emotional
+feeling. We say, and say rightly, of such things that we
+find it hard to swallow them; a something within us (of a
+very tangible nature) seems to rise up bodily and protest
+against them. As a very good example of this experience,
+take one's first attempt to swallow cod-liver oil. Other
+things may be unpleasant or unpalatable, but things of this
+class are in the strictest sense nasty and disgusting.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, the lower part of the tongue is supplied
+with nerves in close sympathy with the digestion. If the
+food which has been passed by the two previous examiners
+is found here to be simple and digestible, it is permitted to
+go on unchallenged; if it is found to be too rich, too
+bilious, or too indigestible, a protest is promptly entered
+<a name="page212" id="page212"></a>against it, and if we are wise we will immediately desist
+from eating any more of it. It is here that the impartial
+tribunal of nature pronounces definitely against roast
+goose, mince pies, <i>p&acirc;t&eacute; de foie gras</i>, sally lunn, muffins and
+crumpets, and creamy puddings. It is here, too, that the
+slightest taint in meat, milk, or butter is immediately detected;
+that rancid pastry from the pastrycook's is ruthlessly
+exposed; and that the wiles of the fishmonger are set
+at naught by the judicious palate. It is the special duty,
+in fact, of this last examiner to discover, not whether food
+is positively destructive, not whether it is poisonous or
+deleterious in nature, but merely whether it is then and
+there digestible or undesirable.</p>
+
+<p>As our state of health varies greatly from time to time,
+however, so do the warnings of this last sympathetic adviser
+change and flicker. Sweet things are always sweet,
+and bitter things always bitter; vinegar is always sour,
+and ginger always hot in the mouth, too, whatever our
+state of health or feeling. But our taste for roast loin of
+mutton, high game, salmon cutlets, and Gorgonzola cheese
+varies immensely from time to time, with the passing
+condition of our health and digestion. In illness, and
+especially in sea-sickness, one gets the distaste carried to
+the extreme: you may eat grapes or suck an orange in the
+chops of the Channel, but you do not feel warmly attached
+to the steward who offers you a basin of greasy ox-tail, or
+consoles you with promises of ham sandwiches in half a
+minute. Under those two painful conditions it is the very
+light, fresh, and stimulating things that one can most
+easily swallow&mdash;champagne, soda-water, strawberries,
+peaches; not lobster salad, sardines on toast, green Chartreuse,
+or hot brandy-and-water. On the other hand, in
+robust health, and when hungry with exercise, you can eat
+fat pork with relish on a Scotch hillside, or dine off fresh
+<a name="page213" id="page213"></a>salmon three days running without inconvenience. Even
+a Spanish stew, with plenty of garlic in it, and floating in
+olive oil, tastes positively delicious after a day's mountaineering
+in the Pyrenees.</p>
+
+<p>The healthy popular belief, still surviving in spite of
+cookery, that our likes and dislikes are the best guide to
+what is good for us, finds its justification in this fact, that
+whatever is relished will prove on the average wholesome,
+and whatever rouses disgust will prove on the whole indigestible.
+Nothing can be more wrong, for example, than
+to make children eat fat when they don't want it. A
+healthy child likes fat, and eats as much of it as he can
+get. If a child shows signs of disgust at fat, that proves
+that it is of a bilious temperament, and it ought never to
+be forced into eating it against its will. Most of us are
+bilious in after-life just because we were compelled to eat
+rich food in childhood, which we felt instinctively was unsuitable
+for us. We might still be indulging with impunity
+in thick turtle, canvas-back ducks, devilled whitebait,
+meringues, and Nesselrode puddings, if we hadn't been so
+persistently overdosed in our earlier years with things that
+we didn't want and knew were indigestible.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, in our existing modern cookery, very few
+simple and uncompounded tastes are still left to us; everything
+is so mixed up together that only by an effort of deliberate
+experiment can one discover what are the special
+effects of special tastes upon the tongue and palate. Salt
+is mixed with almost everything we eat&mdash;<i>sal sapit omnia</i>&mdash;and
+pepper or cayenne is nearly equally common. Butter
+is put into the peas, which have been previously adulterated
+by being boiled with mint; and cucumber is unknown except
+in conjunction with oil and vinegar. This makes it
+comparatively difficult for us to realise the distinctness of
+the elements which go to make up most tastes as we
+<a name="page214" id="page214"></a>actually experience them. Moreover, a great many eatable
+objects have hardly any taste of their own, properly speaking,
+but only a feeling of softness, or hardness, or glutinousness
+in the mouth, mainly observed in the act of chewing
+them. For example, plain boiled rice is almost wholly
+insipid; but even in its plainest form salt has usually been
+boiled with it, and in practice we generally eat it with
+sugar, preserves, curry, or some other strongly flavoured
+condiment. Again, plain boiled tapioca and sago (in
+water) are as nearly tasteless as anything can be; they
+merely yield a feeling of gumminess; but milk, in which
+they are oftenest cooked, gives them a relish (in the sense
+here restricted), and sugar, eggs, cinnamon, or nutmeg are
+usually added by way of flavouring. Even turbot has
+hardly any taste proper, except in the glutinous skin,
+which has a faint relish; the epicure values it rather because
+of its softness, its delicacy, and its light flesh.
+Gelatine by itself is merely very swallowable; we must mix
+sugar, wine, lemon-juice, and other flavourings in order to
+make it into good jelly. Salt, spices, essences, vanilla,
+vinegar, pickles, capers, ketchups, sauces, chutneys, lime-juice,
+curry, and all the rest, are just our civilised expedients
+for adding the pleasure of pungency and acidity to naturally
+insipid foods, by stimulating the nerves of touch in the
+tongue, just as sugar is our tribute to the pure gustatory
+sense, and oil, butter, bacon, lard, and the various fats used
+in frying to the sense of relish which forms the last
+element in our compound taste. A boiled sole is all very
+well when one is just convalescent, but in robust health we
+demand the delights of egg and bread-crumb, which are
+after all only the vehicle for the appetising grease. Plain
+boiled macaroni may pass muster in the unsophisticated
+nursery, but in the pampered dining-room it requires the
+aid of toasted parmesan. Good modern cookery is the
+<a name="page215" id="page215"></a>practical result of centuries of experience in this direction;
+the final flower of ages of evolution, devoted to the equalisation
+of flavours in all human food. Think of the generations
+of fruitless experiment that must have passed before
+mankind discovered that mint sauce (itself a cunning compound
+of vinegar and sugar) ought to be eaten with leg of
+lamb, that roast goose required a corrective in the shape
+of apple, and that while a pre-established harmony existed
+between salmon and lobster, oysters were ordained beforehand
+by nature as the proper accompaniment of boiled cod.
+Whenever I reflect upon such things, I become at once a
+good Positivist, and offer up praise in my own private
+chapel to the Spirit of Humanity which has slowly perfected
+these profound rules of good living.<a name="page216" id="page216"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part13" id="part13"><i>DE BANANA</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>The title which heads this paper is intended to be Latin,
+and is modelled on the precedent of the De Amicitia, De
+Senectute, De Corona, and other time-honoured plagues of
+our innocent boyhood. It is meant to give dignity and
+authority to the subject with which it deals, as well as to
+rouse curiosity in the ingenuous breast of the candid
+reader, who may perhaps mistake it, at first sight, for negro-English,
+or for the name of a distinguished Norman
+family. In anticipation of the possible objection that the
+word 'Banana' is not strictly classical, I would humbly
+urge the precept and example of my old friend Horace&mdash;enemy
+I once thought him&mdash;who expresses his approbation
+of those happy innovations whereby Latium was
+gradually enriched with a copious vocabulary. I maintain
+that if Banana, banan&aelig;, &amp;c., is not already a Latin
+noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and
+it shall be in future. Linn&aelig;us indeed thought otherwise.
+He too assigned the plant and fruit to the first declension, but
+handed it over to none other than our earliest acquaintance
+in the Latin language, Musa. He called the banana <i>Musa
+sapientum</i>. What connection he could possibly conceive
+between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the &aelig;gis-bearing
+Zeus, or why he should consider it a proof of
+wisdom to eat a particularly indigestible and nightmare-begetting
+food-stuff, passes my humble comprehension.<a name="page217" id="page217"></a>
+The muses, so far as I have personally noticed their habits,
+always greatly prefer the grape to the banana, and wise men
+shun the one at least as sedulously as they avoid the other.</p>
+
+<p>Let it not for a moment be supposed, however, that I
+wish to treat the useful and ornamental banana with intentional
+disrespect. On the contrary, I cherish for it&mdash;at
+a distance&mdash;feelings of the highest esteem and admiration.
+We are so parochial in our views, taking us as a species,
+that I dare say very few English people really know how
+immensely useful a plant is the common banana. To most
+of us it envisages itself merely as a curious tropical fruit,
+largely imported at Covent Garden, and a capital thing to
+stick on one of the tall dessert-dishes when you give a dinner-party,
+because it looks delightfully foreign, and just serves
+to balance the pine-apple at the opposite end of the hospitable
+mahogany. Perhaps such innocent readers will be
+surprised to learn that bananas and plantains supply the
+principal food-stuff of a far larger fraction of the human
+race than that which is supported by wheaten bread. They
+form the veritable staff of life to the inhabitants of both
+eastern and western tropics. What the potato is to the
+degenerate descendant of Celtic kings; what the oat is
+to the kilted Highlandman; what rice is to the Bengalee,
+and Indian corn to the American negro, that is the muse
+of sages (I translate literally from the immortal Swede) to
+African savages and Brazilian slaves. Humboldt calculated
+that an acre of bananas would supply a greater
+quantity of solid food to hungry humanity than could
+possibly be extracted from the same extent of cultivated
+ground by any other known plant. So you see the question
+is no small one; to sing the praise of this Linn&aelig;an muse
+is a task well worthy of the Pierian muses.</p>
+
+<p>Do you know the outer look and aspect of the banana
+plant? If not, then you have never voyaged to those
+<a name="page218" id="page218"></a>delusive tropics. Tropical vegetation, as ordinarily understood
+by poets and painters, consists entirely of the coco-nut
+palm and the banana bush. Do you wish to paint a
+beautiful picture of a rich ambrosial tropical island, <i>&agrave; la</i>
+Tennyson&mdash;a summer isle of Eden lying in dark purple
+spheres of sea?&mdash;then you introduce a group of coco-nuts,
+whispering in odorous heights of even, in the very foreground
+of your pretty sketch, just to let your public understand
+at a glance that these are the delicious poetical tropics.
+Do you desire to create an ideal paradise, <i>&agrave; la</i> Bernardin
+de St. Pierre, where idyllic Virginies die of pure modesty
+rather than appear before the eyes of their beloved but unwedded
+Pauls in a lace-bedraped <i>peignoir</i>?&mdash;then you
+strike the keynote by sticking in the middle distance a hut
+or cottage, overshadowed by the broad and graceful foliage
+of the picturesque banana. ('Hut' is a poor and chilly word
+for these glowing descriptions, far inferior to the pretty
+and high-sounding original <i>chaumi&egrave;re</i>.) That is how we
+do the tropics when we want to work upon the emotions of
+the reader. But it is all a delicate theatrical illusion; a
+trick of art meant to deceive and impose upon the unwary
+who have never been there, and would like to think
+it all genuine. In reality, nine times out of ten, you
+might cast your eyes casually around you in any tropical
+valley, and, if there didn't happen to be a native cottage
+with a coco-nut grove and banana patch anywhere in the
+neighbourhood, you would see nothing in the way of vegetation
+which you mightn't see at home any day in Europe.
+But what painter would ever venture to paint the tropics
+without the palm trees? He might just as well try to
+paint the desert without the camels, or to represent St.
+Sebastian without a sheaf of arrows sticking unperceived in
+the calm centre of his unruffled bosom, to mark and emphasise
+his Sebastianic personality.<a name="page219" id="page219"></a></p>
+
+<p>Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with
+its practically almost identical relation, the plantain, is a
+real bit of tropical foliage. I confess to a settled prejudice
+against the tropics generally, but I allow the sunsets, the
+coco-nuts, and the bananas. The true stem creeps underground,
+and sends up each year an upright branch, thickly
+covered with majestic broad green leaves, somewhat like
+those of the canna cultivated in our gardens as 'Indian shot,'
+but far larger, nobler, and handsomer. They sometimes measure
+from six to ten feet in length, and their thick midrib
+and strongly marked diverging veins give them a very
+lordly and graceful appearance. But they are apt in practice
+to suffer much from the fury of the tropical storms. The
+wind rips the leaves up between the veins as far as the
+midrib in tangled tatters; so that after a good hurricane
+they look more like coco-nut palm leaves than like single
+broad masses of foliage as they ought properly to do. This,
+of course, is the effect of a gentle and balmy hurricane&mdash;a
+mere capful of wind that tears and tatters them. After a
+really bad storm (one of the sort when you tie ropes round
+your wooden house to prevent its falling bodily to pieces,
+I mean) the bananas are all actually blown down, and the
+crop for that season utterly destroyed. The apparent stem,
+being merely composed of the overlapping and sheathing
+leaf-stalks, has naturally very little stability; and the
+soft succulent trunk accordingly gives way forthwith at the
+slightest onslaught. This liability to be blown down in
+high winds forms the weak point of the plantain, viewed
+as a food-stuff crop. In the South Sea Islands, where
+there is little shelter, the poor Fijian, in cannibal days,
+often lost his one means of subsistence from this cause,
+and was compelled to satisfy the pangs of hunger on the
+plump persons of his immediate relatives. But since the
+introduction of Christianity, and of a dwarf stout wind-proof
+<a name="page220" id="page220"></a>variety of banana, his condition in this respect, I am
+glad to say, has been greatly ameliorated.</p>
+
+<p>By descent the banana bush is a developed tropical lily,
+not at all remotely allied to the common iris, only that its
+flowers and fruit are clustered together on a hanging spike,
+instead of growing solitary and separate as in the true
+irises. The blossoms, which, though pretty, are comparatively
+inconspicuous for the size of the plant, show the
+extraordinary persistence of the lily type; for almost all
+the vast number of species, more or less directly descended
+from the primitive lily, continue to the very end of the
+chapter to have six petals, six stamens, and three rows of
+seeds in their fruits or capsules. But practical man, with
+his eye always steadily fixed on the one important quality
+of edibility&mdash;the sum and substance to most people of all
+botanical research&mdash;has confined his attention almost
+entirely to the fruit of the banana. In all essentials (other
+than the systematically unimportant one just alluded to)
+the banana fruit in its original state exactly resembles the
+capsule of the iris&mdash;that pretty pod that divides in three
+when ripe, and shows the delicate orange-coated seeds
+lying in triple rows within&mdash;only, in the banana, the fruit
+does not open; in the sweet language of technical botany,
+it is an indehiscent capsule; and the seeds, instead of
+standing separate and distinct, as in the iris, are embedded
+in a soft and pulpy substance which forms the edible and
+practical part of the entire arrangement.</p>
+
+<p>This is the proper appearance of the original and
+natural banana, before it has been taken in hand and
+cultivated by tropical man. When cut across the middle,
+it ought to show three rows of seeds, interspersed with
+pulp, and faintly preserving some dim memory of the
+dividing wall which once separated them. In practice,
+however, the banana differs widely from this theoretical
+<a name="page221" id="page221"></a>ideal, as practice often <i>will</i> differ from theory; for it has
+been so long cultivated and selected by man&mdash;being probably
+one of the very oldest, if not actually quite the oldest,
+of domesticated plants&mdash;that it has all but lost the original
+habit of producing seeds. This is a common effect of
+cultivation on fruits, and it is of course deliberately aimed
+at by horticulturists, as the seeds are generally a nuisance,
+regarded from the point of view of the eater, and their
+absence improves the fruit, as long as one can manage to
+get along somehow without them. In the pretty little
+Tangierine oranges (so ingeniously corrupted by fruiterers
+into mandarins) the seeds have almost been cultivated
+out; in the best pine-apples, and in the small grapes
+known in the dried state as currants, they have quite disappeared;
+while in some varieties of pears they survive
+only in the form of shrivelled, barren, and useless pips.
+But the banana, more than any other plant we know of,
+has managed for many centuries to do without seeds altogether.
+The cultivated sort, especially in America, is
+quite seedless, and the plants are propagated entirely by
+suckers.</p>
+
+<p>Still, you can never wholly circumvent nature. Expel
+her with a pitchfork, <i>tamen usque recurrit</i>. Now nature
+has settled that the right way to propagate plants is by
+means of seedlings. Strictly speaking, indeed, it is the
+only way; the other modes of growth from bulbs or
+cuttings are not really propagation, but mere reduplication
+by splitting, as when you chop a worm in two, and a
+couple of worms wriggle off contentedly forthwith in
+either direction. Just so when you divide a plant by
+cuttings, suckers, slips, or runners; the two apparent
+plants thus produced are in the last resort only separate
+parts of the same individual&mdash;one and indivisible, like the
+French Republic. Seedlings are absolutely distinct individuals;
+<a name="page222" id="page222"></a>they are the product of the pollen of one plant
+and the ovules of another, and they start afresh in life with
+some chance of being fairly free from the hereditary taints
+or personal failings of either parent. But cuttings or
+suckers are only the same old plant over and over again in
+fresh circumstances, transplanted as it were, but not truly
+renovated or rejuvenescent. That is the real reason why
+our potatoes are now all going to&mdash;well, the same place as
+the army has been going ever since the earliest memories
+of the oldest officer in the whole service. We have gone
+on growing potatoes over and over again from the tubers
+alone, and hardly ever from seed, till the whole constitution
+of the potato kind has become permanently enfeebled by
+old age and dotage. The eyes (as farmers call them) are
+only buds or underground branches; and to plant potatoes
+as we usually do is nothing more than to multiply the
+apparent scions by fission. Odd as it may sound to say so,
+all the potato vines in a whole field are often, from the
+strict biological point of view, parts of a single much-divided
+individual. It is just as though one were to go on
+cutting up a single worm, time after time, as soon as he
+grew again, till at last the one original creature had multiplied
+into a whole colony of apparently distinct individuals.
+Yet, if the first worm happened to have the gout
+or the rheumatism (metaphorically speaking), all the other
+worms into which his compound personality had been
+divided would doubtless suffer from the same complaints
+throughout the whole of their joint lifetimes.</p>
+
+<p>The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevitable
+tendency to degeneration in plants thus artificially and
+unhealthily propagated. Potatoes have only been in cultivation
+for a few hundred years; and yet the potato
+constitution has become so far enfeebled by the practice of
+growing from the tuber that the plants now fall an easy
+<a name="page223" id="page223"></a>prey to potato fungus, Colorado beetles, and a thousand
+other persistent enemies. It is just the same with the
+vine&mdash;propagated too long by layers or cuttings, its health
+has failed entirely, and it can no longer resist the ravages
+of the phylloxera or the slow attacks of the vine-disease
+fungus. But the banana, though of very ancient and
+positively immemorial antiquity as a cultivated plant,
+seems somehow gifted with an extraordinary power of
+holding its own in spite of long-continued unnatural propagation.
+For thousands of years it has been grown in
+Asia in the seedless condition, and yet it springs as heartily
+as ever still from the underground suckers. Nevertheless,
+there must in the end be some natural limit to this wonderful
+power of reproduction, or rather of longevity; for, in
+the strictest sense, the banana bushes that now grow in the
+negro gardens of Trinidad and Demerara are part and
+parcel of the very same plants which grew and bore fruit
+a thousand years ago in the native compounds of the Malay
+Archipelago.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, I think there can be but little doubt that the
+banana is the very oldest product of human tillage. Man,
+we must remember, is essentially by origin a tropical
+animal, and wild tropical fruits must necessarily have
+formed his earliest food-stuffs. It was among them of
+course that his first experiments in primitive agriculture
+would be tried; the little insignificant seeds and berries of
+cold northern regions would only very slowly be added to
+his limited stock in husbandry, as circumstances pushed
+some few outlying colonies northward and ever northward
+toward the chillier unoccupied regions. Now, of all tropical
+fruits, the banana is certainly the one that best repays cultivation.
+It has been calculated that the same area which will
+produce thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds
+of potatoes will produce 4,400 pounds of plantains or bananas.<a name="page224" id="page224"></a>
+The cultivation of the various varieties in India, China,
+and the Malay Archipelago dates, says De Candolle, 'from
+an epoch impossible to realise.' Its diffusion, as that great
+but very oracular authority remarks, may go back to a
+period 'contemporary with or even anterior to that of the
+human races.' What this remarkably illogical sentence
+may mean I am at a loss to comprehend; perhaps M. de
+Candolle supposes that the banana was originally cultivated
+by pre-human gorillas; perhaps he merely intends to say
+that before men began to separate they sent special
+messengers on in front of them to diffuse the banana in
+the different countries they were about to visit. Even
+legend retains some trace of the extreme antiquity of the
+species as a cultivated fruit, for Adam and Eve are said to
+have reclined under the shadow of its branches, whence
+Linn&aelig;us gave to the sort known as the plantain the Latin
+name of <i>Musa paradisiaca</i>. If a plant was cultivated in
+Eden by the grand old gardener and his wife, as Lord
+Tennyson democratically styled them (before his elevation
+to the peerage), we may fairly conclude that it possesses a
+very respectable antiquity indeed.</p>
+
+<p>The wild banana is a native of the Malay region,
+according to De Candolle, who has produced by far the
+most learned and unreadable work on the origin of domestic
+plants ever yet written. (Please don't give me undue credit
+for having heroically read it through out of pure love of
+science: I was one of its unfortunate reviewers.) The wild
+form produces seed, and grows in Cochin China, the
+Philippines, Ceylon, and Khasia. Like most other large
+tropical fruits, it no doubt owes its original development to
+the selective action of monkeys, hornbills, parrots and
+other big fruit-eaters; and it shares with all fruits of
+similar origin one curious tropical peculiarity. Most
+northern berries, like the strawberry, the raspberry, the
+<a name="page225" id="page225"></a>currant, and the blackberry, developed by the selective
+action of small northern birds, can be popped at once into
+the mouth and eaten whole; they have no tough outer
+rind or defensive covering of any sort. But big tropical
+fruits, which lay themselves out for the service of large
+birds or monkeys, have always hard outer coats, because
+they could only be injured by smaller animals, who would
+eat the pulp without helping in the dispersion of the useful
+seeds, the one object really held in view by the mother
+plant. Often, as in the case of the orange, the rind even
+contains a bitter, nauseous, or pungent juice, while at times,
+as in the pine-apple, the prickly pear, the sweet-sop, and
+the cherimoyer, the entire fruit is covered with sharp projections,
+stinging hairs, or knobby protuberances, on purpose
+to warn off the unauthorised depredator. It was this
+line of defence that gave the banana in the first instance
+its thick yellow skin; and, looking at the matter from the
+epicure's point of view, one may say roughly that all
+tropical fruits have to be skinned before they can be eaten.
+They are all adapted for being cut up with a knife and fork,
+or dug out with a spoon, on a civilised dessert-plate. As
+for that most delicious of Indian fruits, the mango, it has
+been well said that the only proper way to eat it is over a tub
+of water, with a couple of towels hanging gracefully across
+the side.</p>
+
+<p>The varieties of the banana are infinite in number, and,
+as in most other plants of ancient cultivation, they shade
+off into one another by infinitesimal gradations. Two principal
+sorts, however, are commonly recognised&mdash;the true
+banana of commerce, and the common plantain. The
+banana proper is eaten raw, as a fruit, and is allowed accordingly
+to ripen thoroughly before being picked for market;
+the plantain, which is the true food-stuff of all the equatorial
+region in both hemispheres, is gathered green and
+<a name="page226" id="page226"></a>roasted as a vegetable, or, to use the more expressive West
+Indian negro phrase, as a bread-kind. Millions of human
+beings in Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the
+Pacific Ocean live almost entirely on the mild and succulent
+but tasteless plantain. Some people like the fruit; to me
+personally it is more suggestive of a very flavourless over-ripe
+pear than of anything else in heaven or earth or the waters
+that are under the earth&mdash;the latter being the most probable
+place to look for it, as its taste and substance are decidedly
+watery. Baked dry in the green state 'it resembles roasted
+chestnuts,' or rather baked parsnip; pulped and boiled
+with water it makes 'a very agreeable sweet soup,' almost
+as nice as peasoup with brown sugar in it; and cut into
+slices, sweetened, and fried, it forms 'an excellent substitute
+for fruit pudding,' having a flavour much like that of
+potatoes <i>&agrave; la ma&iacute;tre d'h&oacute;tel</i> served up in treacle.</p>
+
+<p>Altogether a fruit to be sedulously avoided, the plantain,
+though millions of our spiritually destitute African brethren
+haven't yet for a moment discovered that it isn't every bit
+as good as wheaten bread and fresh butter. Missionary
+enterprise will no doubt before long enlighten them on
+this subject, and create a good market in time for American
+flour and Manchester piece-goods.</p>
+
+<p>Though by origin a Malayan plant, there can be little
+doubt that the banana had already reached the mainland
+of America and the West India Islands long before the
+voyage of Columbus. When Pizarro disembarked upon
+the coast of Peru on his desolating expedition, the mild-eyed,
+melancholy, doomed Peruvians flocked down to the
+shore and offered him bananas in a lordly dish. Beds
+composed of banana leaves have been discovered in the
+tombs of the Incas, of date anterior, of course, to the
+Spanish conquest. How did they get there? Well, it is
+clearly an absurd mistake to suppose that Columbus discovered<a name="page227" id="page227"></a>
+America; as Artemus Ward pertinently remarked,
+the noble Red Indian had obviously discovered it long
+before him. There had been intercourse of old, too, between
+Asia and the Western Continent; the elephant-headed god
+of Mexico, the debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion,
+the singular coincidences between India and Peru, all
+seem to show that a stream of communication, however
+faint, once existed between the Asiatic and American
+worlds. Garcilaso himself, the half-Indian historian of
+Peru, says that the banana was well known in his native
+country before the conquest, and that the Indians say 'its
+origin is Ethiopia.' In some strange way or other, then,
+long before Columbus set foot upon the low sandbank of
+Cat's Island, the banana had been transported from Africa
+or India to the Western hemisphere.</p>
+
+<p>If it were a plant propagated by seed, one would suppose
+that it was carried across by wind or waves, wafted on
+the feet of birds, or accidentally introduced in the crannies
+of drift timber. So the coco-nut made the tour of the
+world ages before either of the famous Cooks&mdash;the Captain
+or the excursion agent&mdash;had rendered the same feat easy
+and practicable; and so, too, a number of American plants
+have fixed their home in the tarns of the Hebrides or
+among the lonely bogs of Western Galway. But the
+banana must have been carried by man, because it is unknown
+in the wild state in the Western Continent; and,
+as it is practically seedless, it can only have been transported
+entire, in the form of a root or sucker. An exactly
+similar proof of ancient intercourse between the two worlds
+is afforded us by the sweet potato, a plant of undoubted
+American origin, which was nevertheless naturalised in
+China as early as the first centuries of the Christian era.
+Now that we all know how the Scandinavians of the
+eleventh century went to Massachusetts, which they called<a name="page228" id="page228"></a>
+Vineland, and how the Mexican empire had some knowledge
+of Accadian astronomy, people are beginning to discover
+that Columbus himself was after all an egregious
+humbug.</p>
+
+<p>In the old world the cultivation of the banana and the
+plantain goes back, no doubt, to a most immemorial antiquity.
+Our Aryan ancestor himself, Professor Max M&uuml;ller's
+especial <i>prot&eacute;g&eacute;</i>, had already invented several names for it,
+which duly survive in very classical Sanskrit. The Greeks
+of Alexander's expedition saw it in India, where 'sages
+reposed beneath its shade and ate of its fruit, whence the
+botanical name, <i>Musa sapientum</i>.' As the sages in question
+were lazy Brahmans, always celebrated for their
+immense capacity for doing nothing, the report, as quoted
+by Pliny, is no doubt an accurate one. But the accepted
+derivation of the word <i>Musa</i> from an Arabic original seems
+to me highly uncertain; for Linn&aelig;us, who first bestowed
+it on the genus, called several other allied genera by such
+cognate names as Urania and Heliconia. If, therefore,
+the father of botany knew that his own word was originally
+Arabic, we cannot acquit him of the high crime and
+misdemeanour of deliberate punning. Should the Royal
+Society get wind of this, something serious would doubtless
+happen; for it is well known that the possession of a
+sense of humour is absolutely fatal to the pretensions of a
+man of science.</p>
+
+<p>Besides its main use as an article of food, the banana
+serves incidentally to supply a valuable fibre, obtained from
+the stem, and employed for weaving into textile fabrics and
+making paper. Several kinds of the plantain tribe are
+cultivated for this purpose exclusively, the best known
+among them being the so-called manilla hemp, a plant
+largely grown in the Philippine Islands. Many of the
+finest Indian shawls are woven from banana stems, and
+<a name="page229" id="page229"></a>much of the rope that we use in our houses comes from the
+same singular origin. I know nothing more strikingly
+illustrative of the extreme complexity of our modern civilisation
+than the way in which we thus every day employ
+articles of exotic manufacture in our ordinary life without
+ever for a moment suspecting or inquiring into their true
+nature. What lady knows when she puts on her delicate
+wrapper, from Liberty's or from Swan and Edgar's, that
+the material from which it is woven is a Malayan plantain
+stalk? Who ever thinks that the glycerine for our chapped
+hands comes from Travancore coco-nuts, and that the
+pure butter supplied us from the farm in the country is
+coloured yellow with Jamaican annatto? We break a
+tooth, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out, because
+the grape-curers of Zante are not careful enough about
+excluding small stones from their stock of currants; and
+we suffer from indigestion because the Cape wine-grower
+has doctored his light Burgundies with Brazilian logwood
+and white rum, to make them taste like Portuguese port.
+Take merely this very question of dessert, and how intensely
+complicated it really is. The West Indian bananas
+keep company with sweet St. Michaels from the Azores,
+and with Spanish cobnuts from Barcelona. Dried fruits
+from Metz, figs from Smyrna, and dates from Tunis lie
+side by side on our table with Brazil nuts and guava jelly
+and damson cheese and almonds and raisins. We forget
+where everything comes from nowadays, in our general
+consciousness that they all come from the Queen Victoria
+Street Stores, and any real knowledge of common objects
+is rendered every day more and more impossible by the
+bewildering complexity and variety, every day increasing,
+of the common objects themselves, their substitutes,
+adulterates, and spurious imitations. Why, you probably
+never heard of manilla hemp before, until this very minute,
+<a name="page230" id="page230"></a>and yet you have been familiarly using it all your lifetime,
+while 400,000 hundredweights of that useful article are
+annually imported into this country alone. It is an interesting
+study to take any day a list of market quotations,
+and ask oneself about every material quoted, what it is and
+what they do with it.</p>
+
+<p>For example, can you honestly pretend that you really
+understand the use and importance of that valuable object
+of everyday demand, fustic? I remember an ill-used
+telegraph clerk in a tropical colony once complaining to me
+that English cable operators were so disgracefully ignorant
+about this important staple as invariably to substitute for
+its name the word 'justice' in all telegrams which originally
+referred to it. Have you any clear and definite notions
+as to the prime origin and final destination of a thing
+called jute, in whose sole manufacture the whole great and
+flourishing town of Dundee lives and moves and has its
+being? What is turmeric? Whence do we obtain vanilla?
+How many commercial products are yielded by the orchids?
+How many totally distinct plants in different countries
+afford the totally distinct starches lumped together in
+grocers' lists under the absurd name of arrowroot? When
+you ask for sago do you really see that you get it? and
+how many entirely different objects described as sago are
+known to commerce? Define the uses of partridge canes
+and cohune oil. What objects are generally manufactured
+from tucum? Would it surprise you to learn that English
+door-handles are commonly made out of coquilla nuts?
+that your wife's buttons are turned from the indurated
+fruit of the Tagua palm? and that the knobs of umbrellas
+grew originally in the remote depths of Guatemalan
+forests? Are you aware that a plant called manioc supplies
+the starchy food of about one-half the population of
+tropical America? These are the sort of inquiries with
+<a name="page231" id="page231"></a>which a new edition of 'Mangnall's Questions' would have
+to be filled; and as to answering them&mdash;why, even the
+pupil-teachers in a London Board School (who represent,
+I suppose, the highest attainable level of human knowledge)
+would often find themselves completely nonplussed.
+The fact is, tropical trade has opened out so rapidly and so
+wonderfully that nobody knows much about the chief
+articles of tropical growth; we go on using them in an uninquiring
+spirit of childlike faith, much as the Jamaica
+negroes go on using articles of European manufacture
+about whose origin they are so ridiculously ignorant that
+one young woman once asked me whether it was really true
+that cotton handkerchiefs were dug up out of the ground
+over in England. Some dim confusion between coal or
+iron and Manchester piece-goods seemed to have taken firm
+possession of her infantile imagination.</p>
+
+<p>That is why I have thought that a treatise De Banana
+might not, perhaps, be wholly without its usefulness to the
+modern English reading world. After all, a food-stuff
+which supports hundreds of millions among our beloved
+tropical fellow-creatures ought to be very dear to the heart
+of a nation which governs (and annually kills) more black
+people, taken in the mass, than all the other European
+powers put together. We have introduced the blessings of
+British rule&mdash;the good and well-paid missionary, the Remington
+rifle, the red-cotton pocket-handkerchief, and the
+use of 'the liquor called rum'&mdash;into so many remote
+corners of the tropical world that it is high time we should
+begin in return to learn somewhat about fetiches and fustic,
+Jamaica and jaggery, bananas and Buddhism. We know
+too little still about our colonies and dependencies. 'Cape
+Breton an island!' cried King George's Minister, the Duke
+of Newcastle, in the well-known story, 'Cape Breton an
+island! Why, so it is! God bless my soul! I must go and
+<a name="page232" id="page232"></a>tell the King that Cape Breton's an island.' That was a
+hundred years ago; but only the other day the Board of
+Trade placarded all our towns and villages with a flaming
+notice to the effect that the Colorado beetle had made its
+appearance at 'a town in Canada called Ontario,' and might
+soon be expected to arrive at Liverpool by Cunard steamer.
+The right honourables and other high mightinesses who
+put forth the notice in question were evidently unaware
+that Ontario is a province as big as England, including in
+its borders Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, London, Hamilton,
+and other large and flourishing towns. Apparently, in
+spite of competitive examinations, the schoolmaster is still
+abroad in the Government offices.<a name="page233" id="page233"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part14" id="part14"><i>GO TO THE ANT</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>In the market-place at Santa F&eacute;, in Mexico, peasant
+women from the neighbouring villages bring in for sale
+trayfuls of living ants, each about as big and round as a
+large white currant, and each entirely filled with honey or
+grape sugar, much appreciated by the ingenuous Mexican
+youth as an excellent substitute for Everton toffee. The
+method of eating them would hardly command the approbation
+of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
+Animals. It is simple and primitive, but decidedly not
+humane. Ingenuous youth holds the ant by its head and
+shoulders, sucks out the honey with which the back part is
+absurdly distended, and throws away the empty body as a
+thing with which it has now no further sympathy. Maturer
+age buys the ants by the quart, presses out the honey
+through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it into a very
+sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I
+am credibly informed by bold persons who have ventured
+to experiment upon it, taken internally.</p>
+
+<p>The curious insect which thus serves as an animated
+sweetmeat for the Mexican children is the honey-ant of
+the Garden of the Gods; and it affords a beautiful
+example of Mandeville's charming paradox that personal
+vices are public benefits&mdash;<i>vitia privata humana commoda</i>.
+The honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless
+nobly devoted himself for the good of the community by
+<a name="page234" id="page234"></a>converting himself into a living honey-jar, from which all
+the other ants in his own nest may help themselves freely
+from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to
+which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed
+vault, and only one particular caste among the workers,
+known as rotunds from their expansive girth, is told off
+for this special duty of storing honey within their own
+bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest, with their round,
+transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules
+of skin enclosing the pale amber-coloured honey, these
+Daniel Lamberts of the insect race look for all the world
+like clusters of the little American Delaware grapes, with
+an ant's legs and head stuck awkwardly on to the end
+instead of a stalk. They have, in fact, realised in everyday
+life the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented sugar-broker,
+who laid on flesh and 'adipose deposit' until he
+became converted at last into a perfect rolling ball of
+globular humanity.</p>
+
+<p>The manners of the honey-ant race are very simple.
+Most of the members of each community are active and
+roving in their dispositions, and show no tendency to undue
+distension of the nether extremities. They go out at
+night and collect nectar or honey-dew from the gall-insects
+on oak-trees; for the gall-insect, like love in the old Latin
+saw, is fruitful both in sweets and bitters, <i>melle et felle</i>.
+This nectar they then carry home, and give it to the rotunds
+or honey-bearers, who swallow it and store it in their round
+abdomen until they can hold no more, having stretched
+their skins literally to the very point of bursting. They
+pass their time, like the Fat Boy in 'Pickwick,' chiefly in
+sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the
+roof of their residence. When the workers in turn
+require a meal, they go up to the nearest honey-bearer and
+stroke her gently with their antenn&aelig;. The honey-bearer
+<a name="page235" id="page235"></a>thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop
+of the amber liquid. ('Regurgitates' is a good word which
+I borrow from Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great
+authority upon honey-ants; and it saves an immense deal
+of trouble in looking about for a respectable periphrasis.)
+The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded, two or three
+at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and
+lapping nectar together from the lips of their devoted
+comrade. This may seem at first sight rather an unpleasant
+practice on the part of the ants; but after all, how does it
+really differ from our own habit of eating honey which has
+been treated in very much the same unsophisticated
+manner by the domestic bee?</p>
+
+<p>Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to
+the discredit of the Colorado honey-ant. When he was opening
+some nests in the Garden of the Gods, he happened accidentally
+to knock down some of the rotunds, which straightway
+burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store
+of honey on the floor of the nest. At once the other ants,
+tempted away from their instinctive task of carrying off the
+cocoons and young grubs, clustered around their unfortunate
+companion, like street boys around a broken molasses barrel,
+and, instead of forming themselves forthwith into a volunteer
+ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the
+honey from their dying brother. On the other hand it must
+be said, to the credit of the race, that (unlike the members
+of Arctic expeditions) they never desecrate the remains of
+the dead. When a honey-bearer dies at his post, a victim
+to his zeal for the common good, the workers carefully
+remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings,
+clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen,
+and convey their deceased brother piecemeal, in two detachments,
+to the formican cemetery, undisturbed. If they
+chose, they might only bury the front half of their late relation,
+<a name="page236" id="page236"></a>while they retained his remaining moiety as an available
+honey-bag: but from this cannibal proceeding ant-etiquette
+recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes
+are 'pulled up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled
+into the graveyard, along with the juiceless heads, legs, and
+other members.' Such fraternal conduct would be very
+creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not for a
+horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the
+insects don't know they could get at the honey by breaking
+up the body of their lamented relative. If so, their apparent
+disregard of utilitarian considerations may really be due not
+to their sentimentality but to their hopeless stupidity.</p>
+
+<p>The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing
+honey in the living bodies of their own fellows is easy
+enough to understand. They want to lay up for the future
+like prudent insects that they are; but they can't make
+wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the
+purely human art of pottery. Consequently&mdash;happy thought&mdash;why
+not tell off some of our number to act as jars on behalf
+of the others? Some of the community work by
+going out and gathering honey; they also serve who only
+stand and wait&mdash;who receive it from the workers, and keep
+it stored up in their own capacious indiarubber maws till
+further notice. So obvious is this plan for converting ants
+into animated honey-jars, that several different kinds of
+ants in different parts of the world, belonging to the most
+widely distinct families, have independently hit upon the
+very self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there
+is a totally different Australian honey-ant, and another
+equally separate in Borneo and Singapore. This last kind
+does not store the honey in the hind part of the body
+technically known as the abdomen, but in the middle division
+which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a
+transparent bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature
+<a name="page237" id="page237"></a>look as though it were suffering with an acute attack of
+dropsy. In any case, the life of a honey-bearer must be
+singularly uneventful, not to say dull and monotonous; but
+no doubt any small inconvenience in this respect must be
+more than compensated for by the glorious consciousness
+that one is sacrificing one's own personal comfort for the
+common good of universal anthood. Perhaps, however,
+the ants have not yet reached the Positivist stage, and may
+be totally ignorant of the enthusiasm of formicity.</p>
+
+<p>Equally curious are the habits and manners of the
+harvesting ants, the species which Solomon seems to have
+had specially in view when he advised his hearers to go to
+the ant&mdash;a piece of advice which I have also adopted as the
+title of the present article, though I by no means intend
+thereby to insinuate that the readers of this volume
+ought properly to be classed as sluggards. These industrious
+little creatures abound in India: they are so
+small that it takes eight or ten of them to carry a single
+grain of wheat or barley; and yet they will patiently drag
+along their big burden for five hundred or a thousand
+yards to the door of their formicary. To prevent the grain
+from germinating, they bite off the embryo root&mdash;a piece
+of animal intelligence outdone by another species of ant,
+which actually allows the process of budding to begin, so
+as to produce sugar, as in malting. After the last thunderstorms
+of the monsoon the little proprietors bring up all
+the grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sunshine.
+The quantity of grain stored up by the harvesting
+ants is often so large that the hair-splitting Jewish casuists
+of the Mishna have seriously discussed the question whether
+it belongs to the landowner or may lawfully be appropriated
+by the gleaners. 'They do not appear,' says Sir John
+Lubbock, 'to have considered the rights of the ants.' Indeed
+our duty towards insects is a question which seems
+<a name="page238" id="page238"></a>hitherto to have escaped the notice of all moral philosophers.
+Even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the prophet of individualism,
+has never taken exception to our gross disregard of the
+proprietary rights of bees in their honey, or of silkworms
+in their cocoons. There are signs, however, that the
+obtuse human conscience is awakening in this respect; for
+when Dr. Loew suggested to bee-keepers the desirability
+of testing the commercial value of honey-ants, as rivals to
+the bee, Dr. McCook replied that 'the sentiment against
+the use of honey thus taken from living insects, which is
+worthy of all respect, would not be easily overcome.'</p>
+
+<p>There are no harvesting ants in Northern Europe,
+though they extend as far as Syria, Italy, and the Riviera,
+in which latter station I have often observed them busily
+working. What most careless observers take for grain in
+the nests of English ants are of course really the cocoons
+of the pup&aelig;. For many years, therefore, entomologists
+were under the impression that Solomon had fallen into
+this popular error, and that when he described the ant as
+'gathering her food in the harvest' and 'preparing her
+meat in the summer,' he was speaking rather as a poet
+than as a strict naturalist. Later observations, however,
+have vindicated the general accuracy of the much-married
+king by showing that true harvesting ants do actually
+occur in Syria, and that they lay by stores for the winter
+in the very way stated by that early entomologist, whose
+knowledge of 'creeping things' is specially enumerated in
+the long list of his universal accomplishments.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Lincecum of Texan fame has even improved upon
+Solomon by his discovery of those still more interesting
+and curious creatures, the agricultural ants of Texas.
+America is essentially a farming country, and the agricultural
+ants are born farmers. They make regular clearings
+around their nests, and on these clearings they allow
+<a name="page239" id="page239"></a>nothing to grow except a particular kind of grain, known
+as ant-rice. Dr. Lincecum maintains that the tiny farmers
+actually sow and cultivate the ant-rice. Dr. McCook, on
+the other hand, is of opinion that the rice sows itself, and
+that the insects' part is limited to preventing any other
+plants or weeds from encroaching on the appropriated area.
+In any case, be they squatters or planters, it is certain that
+the rice, when ripe, is duly harvested, and that it is, to say
+the least, encouraged by the ants, to the exclusion of all
+other competitors. 'After the maturing and harvesting of
+the seed,' says Dr. Lincecum, 'the dry stubble is cut away
+and removed from the pavement, which is thus left fallow
+until the ensuing autumn, when the same species of grass,
+and in the same circle, appears again, and receives the
+same agricultural care as did the previous crop.' Sir
+John Lubbock, indeed, goes so far as to say that the three
+stages of human progress&mdash;the hunter, the herdsman, and
+the agriculturist&mdash;are all to be found among various species
+of existing ants.</p>
+
+<p>The Sa&uuml;ba ants of tropical America carry their agricultural
+operations a step further. Dwelling in underground
+nests, they sally forth upon the trees, and cut out of the
+leaves large round pieces, about as big as a shilling. These
+pieces they drop upon the ground, where another detachment
+is in waiting to convey them to the galleries of the
+nest. There they store enormous quantities of these
+round pieces, which they allow to decay in the dark, so
+as to form a sort of miniature mushroom bed. On the
+mouldering vegetable heap they have thus piled up, they
+induce a fungus to grow, and with this fungus they feed
+their young grubs during their helpless infancy. Mr. Belt,
+the 'Naturalist in Nicaragua,' found that native trees
+suffered far less from their depredations than imported
+ones. The ants hardly touched the local forests, but they
+<a name="page240" id="page240"></a>stripped young plantations of orange, coffee, and mango
+trees stark naked. He ingeniously accounts for this curious
+fact by supposing that an internecine struggle has long
+been going on in the countries inhabited by the Sa&uuml;bas
+between the ants and the forest trees. Those trees that
+best resisted the ants, owing either to some unpleasant
+taste or to hardness of foliage, have in the long run survived
+destruction; but those which were suited for the
+purpose of the ants have been reduced to nonentity, while
+the ants in turn were getting slowly adapted to attack
+other trees. In this way almost all the native trees have
+at last acquired some special means of protection against
+the ravages of the leaf-cutters; so that they immediately
+fall upon all imported and unprotected kinds as their
+natural prey. This ingenious and wholly satisfactory explanation
+must of course go far to console the Brazilian
+planters for the frequent loss of their orange and coffee
+crops.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the
+Darwinian theory (whose honours he waived with rare
+generosity in favour of the older and more distinguished
+naturalist), tells a curious story about the predatory habits
+of these same Sa&uuml;bas. On one occasion, when he was wandering
+about in search of specimens on the Rio Negro, he
+bought a peck of rice, which was tied up, Indian fashion, in
+the local bandanna of the happy plantation slave. At night
+he left his rice incautiously on the bench of the hut where
+he was sleeping; and next morning the Sa&uuml;bas had riddled
+the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a gallon of
+the grain for their own felonious purposes. The underground
+galleries which they dig can often be traced for
+hundreds of yards; and Mr. Hamlet Clarke even asserts
+that in one case they have tunnelled under the bed of a
+river where it is a quarter of a mile wide. This beats<a name="page241" id="page241"></a>
+Brunel on his own ground into the proverbial cocked hat,
+both for depth and distance.</p>
+
+<p>Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put themselves
+obtrusively forward in a manner little gratifying to
+any except the enthusiastically entomological mind. The
+winged females, after their marriage flight, have a disagreeable
+habit of flying in at the open doors and windows
+at lunch time, settling upon the table like the Harpies in
+the &AElig;neid, and then quietly shuffling off their wings one
+at a time, by holding them down against the table-cloth
+with one leg, and running away vigorously with the five
+others. As soon as they have thus disembarrassed themselves
+of their superfluous members, they proceed to run
+about over the lunch as if the house belonged to them,
+and to make a series of experiments upon the edible
+qualities of the different dishes. One doesn't so much
+mind their philosophical inquiries into the nature of the
+bread or even the meat; but when they come to drowning
+themselves by dozens, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the
+soup and sherry, one feels bound to protest energetically
+against the spirit of martyrdom by which they are too profoundly
+animated. That is one of the slight drawbacks
+of the realms of perpetual summer; in the poets you see
+only one side of the picture&mdash;the palms, the orchids, the
+humming-birds, the great trailing lianas: in practical life
+you see the reverse side&mdash;the thermometer at 98&deg;, the
+tepid drinking-water, the prickly heat, the perpetual
+languor, the endless shoals of aggressive insects. A lady
+of my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable entomological
+collection in her own dining-room, by the simple process
+of consigning to pill-boxes all the moths and flies and
+beetles that settled upon the mangoes and star-apples in
+the course of dessert.</p>
+
+<p>Another objectionable habit of the tropical ants,
+<a name="page242" id="page242"></a>viewed practically, is their total disregard of vested interests
+in the case of house property. Like Mr. George and his
+communistic friends, they disbelieve entirely in the principle
+of private rights in real estate. They will eat their way
+through the beams of your house till there is only a slender
+core of solid wood left to support the entire burden. I
+have taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica,
+originally 18 inches thick each way, with a sound circular
+centre of no more than 6 inches in diameter, upon which all
+the weight necessarily fell. With the material extracted from
+the wooden beams they proceed to add insult to injury by building
+long covered galleries right across the ceiling of your drawing-room.
+As may be easily imagined, these galleries do not
+tend to improve the appearance of the ceiling; and it
+becomes necessary to form a Liberty and Property Defence
+League for the protection of one's personal interests against
+the insect enemy. I have no objection to ants building
+galleries on their own freehold, or even to their nationalising
+the land in their native forests; but I do object strongly
+to their unwarrantable intrusion upon the domain of private
+life. Expostulation and active warfare, however, are
+equally useless. The carpenter-ant has no moral sense,
+and is not amenable either to kindness or blows. On one
+occasion, when a body of these intrusive creatures had constructed
+an absurdly conspicuous brown gallery straight
+across the ceiling of my drawing-room, I determined to
+declare open war against them, and, getting my black servant
+to bring in the steps and a mop, I proceeded to
+demolish the entire gallery just after breakfast. It was
+about 20 feet long, as well as I can remember, and perhaps
+an inch in diameter. At one o'clock I returned to lunch.
+My black servant pointed, with a broad grin on his intelligent
+features, to the wooden ceiling. I looked up; in
+those three hours the carpenter-ants had reconstructed the
+<a name="page243" id="page243"></a>entire gallery, and were doubtless mocking me at their
+ease, with their uplifted antenn&aelig;, under that safe shelter.
+I retired at once from the unequal contest. It was clearly
+impossible to go on knocking down a fresh gallery every
+three hours of the day or night throughout a whole lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>Ants, says Mr. Wallace, without one touch of satire,
+'force themselves upon the attention of everyone who visits
+the tropics.' They do, indeed, and that most pungently;
+if by no other method, at least by the simple and effectual
+one of stinging. The majority of ants in every nest are of
+course neuters, or workers, that is to say, strictly speaking,
+undeveloped females, incapable of laying eggs. But they
+still retain the ovipositor, which is converted into a sting,
+and supplied with a poisonous liquid to eject afterwards
+into the wound. So admirably adapted to its purpose is
+this beautiful provision of nature, that some tropical ants
+can sting with such violence as to make your leg swell and
+confine you for some days to your room; while cases have
+even been known in which the person attacked has fainted
+with pain, or had a serious attack of fever in consequence.
+It is not every kind of ant, however, that can sting; a
+great many can only bite with their little hard horny jaws,
+and then eject a drop of formic poison afterwards into the
+hole caused by the bite. The distinction is a delicate
+physiological one, not much appreciated by the victims of
+either mode of attack. The perfect females can also sting,
+but not, of course, the males, who are poor, wretched, useless
+creatures, only good as husbands for the community,
+and dying off as soon as they have performed their part in
+the world&mdash;another beautiful provision, which saves the
+workers the trouble of killing them off, as bees do with
+drones after the marriage flight of the queen bee.</p>
+
+<p>The blind driver-ants of West Africa are among the
+<a name="page244" id="page244"></a>very few species that render any service to man, and that,
+of course, only incidentally. Unlike most other members
+of their class, the driver-ants have no settled place of residence;
+they are vagabonds and wanderers upon the face of
+the earth, formican tramps, blind beggars, who lead a
+gipsy existence, and keep perpetually upon the move,
+smelling their way cautiously from one camping-place to
+another. They march by night, or on cloudy days, like
+wise tropical strategists, and never expose themselves to
+the heat of the day in broad sunshine, as though they were
+no better than the mere numbered British Tommy Atkins
+at Coomassie or in the Soudan. They move in vast armies
+across country, driving everything before them as they go;
+for they belong to the stinging division, and are very
+voracious in their personal habits. Not only do they eat
+up the insects in their line of march, but they fall even
+upon larger creatures and upon big snakes, which they
+attack first in the eyes, the most vulnerable portion. When
+they reach a negro village the inhabitants turn out <i>en
+masse</i>, and run away, exactly as if the visitors were English
+explorers or brave Marines, bent upon retaliating for
+the theft of a knife by nobly burning down King Tom's
+town or King Jumbo's capital. Then the negroes wait in
+the jungle till the little black army has passed on, after
+clearing out the huts by the way of everything eatable.
+When they return they find their calabashes and saucepans
+licked clean, but they also find every rat, mouse, lizard,
+cockroach, gecko, and beetle completely cleared out from
+the whole village. Most of them have cut and run at the
+first approach of the drivers; of the remainder, a few
+blanched and neatly-picked skeletons alone remain to tell
+the tale.</p>
+
+<p>As I wish to be considered a veracious historian, I will
+not retail the further strange stories that still find their
+<a name="page245" id="page245"></a>way into books of natural history about the manners and
+habits of these blind marauders. They cross rivers, the
+West African gossips declare, by a number of devoted individuals
+flinging themselves first into the water as a
+living bridge, like so many six-legged Marcus Curtiuses,
+while over their drowning bodies the heedless remainder
+march in safety to the other side. If the story is not true,
+it is at least well invented; for the ant-commonwealth
+everywhere carries to the extremest pitch the old Roman
+doctrine of the absolute subjection of the individual to the
+State. So exactly is this the case that in some species
+there are a few large, overgrown, lazy ants in each
+nest, which do no work themselves, but accompany the
+workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of these
+idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds
+and other enemies, and so distract it from the useful
+workers, the mainstay of the entire community. It is
+almost as though an army, marching against a tribe of
+cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a hollow
+square formed of all the fattest people in the country,
+whose fine condition and fitness for killing might immediately
+engross the attention of the hungry enemy. Ants,
+in fact, have, for the most part, already reached the
+goal set before us as a delightful one by most current
+schools of socialist philosophers, in which the individual
+is absolutely sacrificed in every way to the needs of the
+community.</p>
+
+<p>The most absurdly human, however, among all the
+tricks and habits of ants are their well known cattle-farming
+and slave-holding instincts. Everybody has heard,
+of course, how they keep the common rose-blight as milch
+cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But
+everybody, probably, does not yet know the large number
+of insects which they herd in one form or another as
+<a name="page246" id="page246"></a>domesticated animals. Man has, at most, some twenty or
+thirty such, including cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels,
+llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl,
+ducks, geese, turkeys, and silkworms. But ants have hundreds
+and hundreds, some of them kept obviously for purposes
+of food; others apparently as pets; and yet others
+again, as has been plausibly suggested, by reason of superstition
+or as objects of worship. There is a curious blind
+beetle which inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely dependent
+upon its hosts for support that it has even lost the
+power of feeding itself. It never quits the nest, but the ants
+bring it in food and supply it by putting the nourishment
+actually into its mouth. But the beetle, in return, seems
+to secrete a sweet liquid (or it may even be a stimulant
+like beer, or a narcotic like tobacco) in a tuft of hairs near
+the bottom of the hard wing-cases, and the ants often lick
+this tuft with every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment.
+In this case, and in many others, there can be no
+doubt that the insects are kept for the sake of food or some
+other advantage yielded by them.</p>
+
+<p>But there are other instances of insects which haunt
+ants' nests, which it is far harder to account for on any hypothesis
+save that of superstitious veneration. There is a
+little weevil that runs about by hundreds in the galleries
+of English ants, in and out among the free citizens, making
+itself quite at home in their streets and public places, but
+as little noticed by the ants themselves as dogs are in our
+own cities. Then, again, there is a white woodlouse, something
+like the common little armadillo, but blind from having
+lived so long underground, which walks up and down the
+lanes and alleys of antdom, without ever holding any communication
+of any sort with its hosts and neighbours. In
+neither case has Sir John Lubbock ever seen an ant take
+the slightest notice of the presence of these strange fellow-lodgers.<a name="page247" id="page247"></a>
+'One might almost imagine,' he says, 'that
+they had the cap of invisibility.' Yet it is quite clear
+that the ants deliberately sanction the residence of the
+weevils and woodlice in their nests, for any unauthorised
+intruder would immediately be set upon and massacred
+outright.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John Lubbock suggests that they may perhaps be
+tolerated as scavengers: or, again, it is possible that they
+may prey upon the eggs or larv&aelig; of some of the parasites to
+whose attacks the ants are subject. In the first case, their
+use would be similar to that of the wild dogs in Constantinople
+or the common black John-crow vultures in tropical
+America: in the second case, they would be about equivalent
+to our own cats or to the hedgehog often put in
+farmhouse kitchens to keep down cockroaches.</p>
+
+<p>The crowning glory of owning slaves, which many philosophic
+Americans (before the war) showed to be the highest
+and noblest function of the most advanced humanity, has been
+attained by more than one variety of anthood. Our great
+English horse-ant is a moderate slaveholder; but the big
+red ant of Southern Europe carries the domestic institution
+many steps further. It makes regular slave-raids
+upon the nests of the small brown ants, and carries off
+the young in their pupa condition. By-and-by the brown
+ants hatch out in the strange nest, and never having known
+any other life except that of slavery, accommodate themselves
+to it readily enough. The red ant, however, is still
+only an occasional slaveowner; if necessary, he can get
+along by himself, without the aid of his little brown servants.
+Indeed, there are free states and slave states of red
+ants side by side with one another, as of old in Maryland
+and Pennsylvania: in the first, the red ants do their work
+themselves, like mere vulgar Ohio farmers; in the second,
+they get their work done for them by their industrious
+<a name="page248" id="page248"></a>little brown servants, like the aristocratic first families of
+Virginia before the earthquake of emancipation.</p>
+
+<p>But there are other degraded ants, whose life-history
+may be humbly presented to the consideration of the Anti-Slavery
+Society, as speaking more eloquently than any
+other known fact for the demoralising effect of slaveowning
+upon the slaveholders themselves. The Swiss rufescent
+ant is a species so long habituated to rely entirely upon the
+services of slaves that it is no longer able to manage its
+own affairs when deprived by man of its hereditary bondsmen.
+It has lost entirely the art of constructing a nest;
+it can no longer tend its own young, whom it leaves entirely
+to the care of negro nurses; and its bodily structure even
+has changed, for the jaws have lost their teeth, and have
+been converted into mere nippers, useful only as weapons
+of war. The rufescent ant, in fact, is a purely military
+caste, which has devoted itself entirely to the pursuit of
+arms, leaving every other form of activity to its slaves and
+dependents. Officers of the old school will be glad to learn
+that this military insect is dressed, if not in scarlet, at any
+rate in very decent red, and that it refuses to be bothered
+in any way with questions of transport or commissariat.
+If the community changes its nest, the masters are carried
+on the backs of their slaves to the new position, and the
+black ants have to undertake the entire duty of foraging and
+bringing in stores of supply for their gentlemanly proprietors.
+Only when war is to be made upon neighbouring
+nests does the thin red line form itself into long file for
+active service. Nothing could be more perfectly aristocratic
+than the views of life entertained and acted upon by these
+distinguished slaveholders.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the picture has its reverse side,
+exhibiting clearly the weak points of the slaveholding
+system. The rufescent ant has lost even the very power of
+<a name="page249" id="page249"></a>feeding itself. So completely dependent is each upon his
+little black valet for daily bread, that he cannot so much
+as help himself to the food that is set before him. H&uuml;ber
+put a few slaveholders into a box with some of their own
+larv&aelig; and pup&aelig;, and a supply of honey, in order to see
+what they would do with them. Appalled at the novelty
+of the situation, the slaveholders seemed to come to the
+conclusion that something must be done; so they began
+carrying the larv&aelig; about aimlessly in their mouths, and
+rushing up and down in search of the servants. After a
+while, however, they gave it up and came to the conclusion
+that life under such circumstances was clearly intolerable.
+They never touched the honey, but resigned themselves to
+their fate like officers and gentlemen. In less than two
+days, half of them had died of hunger, rather than taste a
+dinner which was not supplied to them by a properly constituted
+footman. Admiring their heroism or pitying their
+incapacity, H&uuml;ber at last gave them just one slave between
+them all. The plucky little negro, nothing daunted by the
+gravity of the situation, set to work at once, dug a small
+nest, gathered together the larv&aelig;, helped several pup&aelig; out
+of the cocoon, and saved the lives of the surviving slaveowners.
+Other naturalists have tried similar experiments,
+and always with the same result. The slaveowners will
+starve in the midst of plenty rather than feed themselves
+without attendance. Either they cannot or will not put
+the food into their own mouths with their own mandibles.</p>
+
+<p>There are yet other ants, such as the workerless <i>Anergates</i>,
+in which the degradation of slaveholding has gone yet
+further. These wretched creatures are the formican representatives
+of those Oriental despots who are no longer even
+warlike, but are sunk in sloth and luxury, and pass their
+lives in eating bang or smoking opium. Once upon a time,
+Sir John Lubbock thinks, the ancestors of <i>Anergates</i> were
+<a name="page250" id="page250"></a>marauding slaveowners, who attacked and made serfs of
+other ants. But gradually they lost not only their arts but
+even their military prowess, and were reduced to making
+war by stealth instead of openly carrying off their slaves
+in fair battle. It seems probable that they now creep into
+a nest of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or
+assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer
+usurpation in the queenless nest. 'Gradually,' says Sir
+John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled away
+under the enervating influence to which they had subjected
+themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition&mdash;weak
+in body and mind, few in numbers, and
+apparently nearly extinct, the miserable representatives of
+far superior ancestors maintaining a precarious existence
+as contemptible parasites of their former slaves.' One
+may observe in passing that these wretched do-nothings
+cannot have been the ants which Solomon commended to
+the favourable consideration of the sluggard; though it is
+curious that the text was never pressed into the service of
+defence for the peculiar institution by the advocates of
+slavery in the South, who were always most anxious to
+prove the righteousness of their cause by most sure and
+certain warranty of Holy Scripture.<a name="page251" id="page251"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part15" id="part15"><i>BIG ANIMALS</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>'The Atlantosaurus,' said I, pointing affectionately with a
+wave of my left hand to all that was immortal of that extinct
+reptile, 'is estimated to have had a total length of one
+hundred feet, and was probably the very biggest lizard that
+ever lived, even in Western America, where his earthly
+remains were first disinhumed by an enthusiastic explorer.'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, yes,' my friend answered abstractedly. 'Of
+course, of course; things were all so very big in those
+days, you know, my dear fellow.'</p>
+
+<p>'Excuse me,' I replied with polite incredulity; 'I really
+don't know to what particular period of time the phrase
+&quot;in those days&quot; may be supposed precisely to refer.'</p>
+
+<p>My friend shuffled inside his coat a little uneasily. (I
+will admit that I was taking a mean advantage of him.
+The professorial lecture in private life, especially when
+followed by a strict examination, is quite undeniably a most
+intolerable nuisance.) 'Well,' he said, in a crusty voice,
+after a moment's hesitation, 'I mean, you know, in geological
+times ... well, there, my dear fellow, things used
+all to be so <i>very</i> big in those days, usedn't they?'</p>
+
+<p>I took compassion upon him and let him off easily.
+'You've had enough of the museum,' I said with magnanimous
+self-denial. 'The Atlantosaurus has broken the
+camel's back. Let's go and have a quiet cigarette in the
+park outside.'<a name="page252" id="page252"></a></p>
+
+<p>But if you suppose, reader, that I am going to carry my
+forbearance so far as to let you, too, off the remainder of
+that geological disquisition, you are certainly very much mistaken.
+A discourse which would be quite unpardonable in
+social intercourse may be freely admitted in the privacy of
+print; because, you see, while you can't easily tell a man
+that his conversation bores you (though some people just
+avoid doing so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut
+up a book whenever you like, without the very faintest
+or remotest risk of hurting the author's delicate susceptibilities.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like
+the conventional sermon, into two heads&mdash;the precise
+date of 'geological times,' and the exact bigness of the
+animals that lived in them. And I may as well begin by
+announcing my general conclusion at the very outset;
+first, that 'those days' never existed at all; and, secondly,
+that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet
+are, on the whole, about as big, taken in the lump, as any
+previous contemporary fauna that ever lived at any one
+time together upon its changeful surface. I know that to
+announce this sad conclusion is to break down one more
+universal and cherished belief; everybody considers that
+'geological animals' were ever so much bigger than their
+modern representatives; but the interests of truth should
+always be paramount, and, if the trade of an iconoclast is
+a somewhat cruel one, it is at least a necessary function
+in a world so ludicrously overstocked with popular delusions
+as this erring planet.</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the ordinary idea of 'geological time'
+in the minds of people like my good friend who refused to
+discuss with me the exact antiquity of the Atlantosaurian?
+They think of it all as immediate and contemporaneous, a
+vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed for
+<a name="page253" id="page253"></a>them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and
+the moa hob-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and
+the ammonite; in which the tertiary megatherium goes
+cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs and the primary
+trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris
+Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic
+club-mosses of the Carboniferous period, and to have been
+successfully hunted by the great marine lizards and flying
+dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a picture is really
+just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a thousand
+times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand
+old times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together
+in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespeare and
+Moli&egrave;re, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Falernian
+at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the
+Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they
+were to produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on
+the occasion of Napoleon's reception at Memphis by his
+victorious brother emperors, Ramses and Sardanapalus.
+This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at first sight
+imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing descriptions
+that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a
+faint attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical
+time the glaring anachronisms perpetually committed as
+regards the vast lapse of geological chronology even by
+well-informed and intelligent people.</p>
+
+<p>We must remember, then, that in dealing with geological
+time we are dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and
+unimaginable series of &aelig;ons, each of which occupied its
+own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each of which
+saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall
+of innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic
+clock, by whose pendulum alone we can faintly measure
+the dim ages behind us, the brief lapse of historical time,
+<a name="page254" id="page254"></a>from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to the events narrated
+in this evening's <i>Pall Mall</i>, is less than a second, less
+than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can
+possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the
+temples of Karnak and the New Law Courts would be
+absolutely contemporaneous; he has no means by which
+he could discriminate in date between a scarab&aelig;us of
+Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of
+her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent
+authorities have shown good grounds for believing that the
+Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years ago; and everything
+that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from
+the geological point of view, described as 'recent.' A shell
+embedded in a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years
+ago, while short and swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed
+in Britain, ages before the irruption of the
+'Ancient Britons' of our inadequate school-books, is, in
+the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely
+modern.</p>
+
+<p>But behind that indivisible moment of recent time,
+that eighty thousand years which coincides in part with the
+fraction of a single swing of the cosmical pendulum, there
+lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and years,
+and centuries, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an inconceivable
+past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves
+slowly, one beyond the other, to our aching vision in the
+half-deciphered pages of the geological record. Before the
+Glacial Epoch there comes the Pliocene, immeasurably
+longer than the whole expanse of recent time; and before
+that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene,
+immeasurably longer than all the others put together.
+These three make up in their sum the Tertiary period,
+which entire period can hardly have occupied more time
+in its passage than a single division of the Secondary,
+<a name="page255" id="page255"></a>such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic;
+and the Secondary period, once more, though itself of
+positively appalling duration, seems but a patch (to use the
+expressive modernism) upon the unthinkable and unrealisable
+vastness of the endless successive Primary &aelig;ons. So
+that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott's
+mystic head, 'Time was, Time is, Time will be.' The
+time we know affords us no measure at all for even the
+nearest and briefest epochs of the time we know not; and
+the time we know not seems to demand still vaster and
+more inexpressible figures as we pry back curiously, with
+wondering eyes, into its dimmest and earliest recesses.</p>
+
+<p>These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one's
+head swim; let us hark back once more from cosmical time
+to the puny bigness of our earthly animals, living or extinct.</p>
+
+<p>If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine
+and terrestrial, we shall soon see that we could bring together
+at the present moment a very goodly collection of
+extant monsters, most parlous monsters, too, each about as
+fairly big in its own kind as almost anything that has ever
+preceded it. Every age has its own <i>specialit&eacute;</i> in the way
+of bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly
+to developing overgrown creatures, the monarchs of
+creation in their little day; in another, it is the fishes that
+blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic proportions; in a
+third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and
+kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds
+or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages
+into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians.
+The present period is most undoubtedly the
+period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist who goes
+hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now
+known to us only by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts'
+and 'Challengers,' but then upheaved into snow-clad Alps
+<a name="page256" id="page256"></a>or vine-covered Apennines, will doubtless stand aghast at
+the huge skeletons of our whales and our razorbacks, and
+will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in the
+exact words of my friend at South Kensington, 'Things
+used all to be so very big in those days, usedn't they?'</p>
+
+<p>Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own
+cetaceans and of 'geological' animals is just this. The
+Atlantosaurus of the Western American Jurassic beds, a
+great erect lizard, is the very largest creature ever known
+to have inhabited this sublunary sphere. His entire length
+is supposed to have reached about a hundred feet (for no
+complete skeleton has ever been discovered), while in stature
+he appears to have stood some thirty feet high, or over. In
+any case, he was undoubtedly a very big animal indeed, for
+his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet, or two feet taller
+than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a British Grenadier.
+This, of course, implies a very decent total of height
+and size; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a good
+length of seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to
+eighty, ninety, and even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly
+entitled to say that we have at least one species of animal
+now living which, occasionally at any rate, equals in size
+the very biggest and most colossal form known inferentially
+to geological science. Indeed when we consider the extraordinary
+compactness and rotundity of the modern cetaceans,
+as compared with the tall limbs and straggling
+skeleton of the huge Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined
+to believe that the tonnage of a decent modern rorqual
+must positively exceed that of the gigantic Atlantosaurus,
+the great lizard of the west, <i>in propria persona</i>. I doubt,
+in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deinosaur
+could ever have supported the prodigious weight of a
+full-grown family razor-back whale. The mental picture
+of these unwieldy monsters hopping casually about, like<a name="page257" id="page257"></a>
+Alice's Gryphon in Tenniel's famous sketch, or like that
+still more parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must
+be left to the vivid imagination of the courteous reader,
+who may fill in the details for himself as well as he is
+able.</p>
+
+<p>If we turn from the particular comparison of selected
+specimens (always an unfair method of judging) to the
+general aspect of our contemporary fauna, I venture confidently
+to claim for our own existing human period as fine
+a collection of big animals as any other ever exhibited on
+this planet by any one single rival epoch. Of course, if
+you are going to lump all the extinct monsters and horrors
+into one imaginary unified fauna, regardless of anachronisms,
+I have nothing more to say to you; I will candidly
+admit that there were more great men in all previous
+generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from
+Agamemnon to Wellington, than there are now existing in
+this last quarter of our really very respectable nineteenth
+century. But if you compare honestly age with age, one
+at a time, I fearlessly maintain that, so far from there
+being any falling off in the average bigness of things
+generally in these latter days, there are more big things
+now living than there ever were in any one single epoch,
+even of much longer duration than the 'recent' period.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before
+us, that there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals
+in the history of our earth&mdash;the Jurassic period, which was
+the zenith of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which
+was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals.
+I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,' because,
+as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe
+that any one age has much surpassed another in the
+general size of its fauna, since the Permian Epoch at
+least; and where we do not get geological evidence of the
+<a name="page258" id="page258"></a>existence of big animals in any particular deposit, we may
+take it for granted, I think, that that deposit was laid
+down under conditions unfavourable to the preservation of
+the remains of large species. For example, the sediment
+now being accumulated at the bottom of the Caspian
+cannot possibly contain the bones of any creature much
+larger than the Caspian seal, because there are no big
+species there swimming; and yet that fact does not
+negative the existence in other places of whales, elephants,
+giraffes, buffaloes, and hippopotami. Nevertheless, we
+can only go upon the facts before us; and if we compare
+our existing fauna with the fauna of Jurassic and Pliocene
+times, we shall at any rate be putting it to the test of the
+severest competition that lies within our power under the
+actual circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>In the Jurassic age there were undoubtedly a great
+many very big reptiles. 'A monstrous eft was of old the
+lord and master of earth: For him did his high sun flame
+and his river billowing ran: And he felt himself in his
+pride to be nature's crowning race.' There was the
+ichthyosaurus, a fishlike marine lizard, familiar to us all
+from a thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body,
+his strong flippers, his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of
+staring goggle eyes. The ichthyosaurus was certainly a
+most unpleasant creature to meet alone in a narrow strait
+on a dark night; but if it comes to actual measurement,
+the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed
+does not exceed twenty-five feet from snout to tail. Now,
+this is an extremely decent size for a reptile, as reptiles
+go; for the crocodile and alligator, the two biggest existing
+lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of sixteen feet.
+But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the
+ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or
+rock-snakes, which not infrequently reach to thirty feet,
+<a name="page259" id="page259"></a>and measure round the waist as much as a London
+alderman of the noblest proportions. Of course, other
+Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our
+British Megalosaurus only extended twenty-five feet in
+length, and carried weight not exceeding three tons; but,
+his rival Ceteosaurus stood ten feet high, and measured
+fifty feet from the tip of his snout to the end of his tail;
+while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be briefly described
+as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus
+as one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we
+have certainly nothing at all to come up to these; but our
+cetaceans, as a group, show an assemblage of species
+which could very favourably compete with the whole lot of
+Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came
+to tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right-whale could
+easily give points to any deinosaur that ever moved upon
+oolitic continents.</p>
+
+<p>The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as
+the deinotherium and the mastodon, were also, in their
+way, very big things in livestock; but they scarcely exceeded
+the modern elephant, and by no means came near
+the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same
+period could have held their own well against our existing
+giraffes, elks, and buffaloes; but, taking the group as a
+group, I don't think there is any reason to believe that it
+beat in general aspect the living fauna of this present age.</p>
+
+<p>For few people ever really remember how very many
+big animals we still possess. We have the Indian and the
+African elephant, the hippopotamus, the various rhinoceroses,
+the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison, the musk
+ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals
+are generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial
+rivals, and most people lump all our big existing
+cetaceans under the common and ridiculous title of whales,
+<a name="page260" id="page260"></a>which makes this vast and varied assortment of gigantic
+species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter
+of fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine
+animals now sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct
+from one another as the camel is from the ox, or the
+elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New Zealand
+Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale
+is more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur;
+our rorqual, one hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions
+of the gigantic American Atlantosaurus himself.
+Besides these exceptional monsters, our bottleheads reach
+to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four, our
+hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy.
+True fish generally fall far short of these enormous
+dimensions, but some of the larger sharks attain almost
+equal size with the biggest cetaceans. The common blue
+shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity, would
+have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe, for
+the best bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias
+ammonite. I would back our modern carcharodon, who
+grows to forty feet, against any plesiosaurus that ever
+swam the Jurassic sea. As for rhinodon, a gigantic shark
+of the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to a
+length of fifty feet, and is stated often to attain seventy.
+I will stake my reputation upon it that he would have
+cleared the secondary seas of their great saurians in less
+than a century. When we come to add to these enormous
+marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the
+great snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and
+manatees, and sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared
+fearlessly to challenge any other age that ever existed to enter
+the lists against our own for colossal forms of animal life.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of
+the very big animals which people have in their minds
+<a name="page261" id="page261"></a>when they talk vaguely about everything having been so
+very much bigger 'in those days' have become extinct
+within a very late period, and are often, from the geological
+point of view, quite recent.</p>
+
+<p>For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I
+suppose no animal is more frequently present to the mind
+of the non-geological speaker, when he talks indefinitely
+about the great extinct monsters, than the familiar figure
+of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the
+mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of
+yesterday. He was hunted here in England by men whose
+descendants are probably still living&mdash;at least so Professor
+Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in Siberia his
+frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the
+wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question
+as to its fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the
+yesterday of geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch
+that finally killed off the last mammoth. Then, again,
+there is his neighbour, the mastodon. That big tertiary
+proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is true, to
+be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he
+survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene&mdash;our day
+before yesterday&mdash;and he often fell very likely before the
+fire-split flint weapons of the Abb&eacute; Bourgeois' Miocene
+men. The period that separates him from our own day is
+as nothing compared with the vast and immeasurable
+interval that separates him from the huge marine saurians
+of the Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of
+time with human chronology, the mastodon stands to our
+own fauna as Beau Brummel stands to the modern masher,
+while the saurians stand to it as the Egyptian and Assyrian
+warriors stand to Lord Wolseley and the followers of the
+Mahdi.</p>
+
+<p>Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that
+<a name="page262" id="page262"></a>enormous bird who was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to
+the antelope; a monstrous emu, as far surpassing the
+ostriches of to-day as the ostriches surpass all the other
+fowls of the air. Yet the moa, though now extinct, is in
+the strictest sense quite modern, a contemporary very
+likely of Queen Elizabeth or Queen Anne, exterminated by
+the Maoris only a very little time before the first white
+settlements in the great southern archipelago. It is even
+doubtful whether the moa did not live down to the days of
+the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori encampments
+are still discovered, with the ashes of the fireplace even now
+unscattered, and the close-gnawed bones of the gigantic
+bird lying in the very spot where the natives left them after
+their destructive feasts. So, too, with the big sharks.
+Our modern carcharodon, who runs (as I have before noted)
+to forty feet in length, is a very respectable monster indeed,
+as times go; and his huge snapping teeth, which measure
+nearly two inches long by one and a half broad, would
+disdain to make two bites of the able-bodied British seaman.
+But the naturalists of the 'Challenger' expedition
+dredged up in numbers from the ooze of the Pacific similar
+teeth, five inches long by four wide, so that the sharks to
+which they originally belonged must, by parity of reasoning,
+have measured nearly a hundred feet in length. This, no
+doubt, beats our biggest existing shark, the rhinodon, by
+some thirty feet. Still, the ooze of the Pacific is a quite
+recent or almost modern deposit, which is even now being accumulated
+on the sea bottom, and there would be really
+nothing astonishing in the discovery that some representatives
+of these colossal carcharodons are to this day swimming
+about at their lordly leisure among the coral reefs of
+the South Sea Islands. That very cautious naturalist, Dr.
+G&uuml;nther, of the British Museum, contents himself indeed
+by merely saying: 'As we have no record of living individuals
+<a name="page263" id="page263"></a>of that bulk having been observed, the gigantic
+species to which these teeth belonged must probably have
+become extinct within a comparatively recent period.'</p>
+
+<p>If these things are so, the question naturally suggests
+itself: Why should certain types of animals have attained
+their greatest size at certain different epochs, and been replaced
+at others by equally big animals of wholly unlike
+sorts? The answer, I believe, is simply this: Because
+there is not room and food in the world at any one time
+for more than a certain relatively small number of gigantic
+species. Each great group of animals has had successively
+its rise, its zenith, its decadence, and its dotage; each at
+the period of its highest development has produced a considerable
+number of colossal forms; each has been supplanted
+in due time by higher groups of totally different
+structure, which have killed off their predecessors, not
+indeed by actual stress of battle, but by irresistible competition
+for food and prey. The great saurians were thus
+succeeded by the great mammals, just as the great mammals
+are themselves in turn being ousted, from the land at least,
+by the human species.</p>
+
+<p>Let us look briefly at the succession of big animals in
+the world, so far as we can follow it from the mutilated and
+fragmentary record of the geological remains.</p>
+
+<p>The very earliest existing fossils would lead us to believe
+what is otherwise quite probable, that life on our
+planet began with very small forms&mdash;that it passed at first
+through a baby stage. The animals of the Cambrian
+period are almost all small mollusks, star-fishes, sponges,
+and other simple, primitive types of life. There were as
+yet no vertebrates of any sort, not even fishes, far less
+amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals. The veritable
+giants of the Cambrian world were the crustaceans, and
+especially the trilobites, which, nevertheless, hardly exceeded
+<a name="page264" id="page264"></a>in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest
+trilobite is some two feet long; and though we cannot by
+any means say that this was really the largest form of animal
+life then existing, owing to the extremely broken nature of
+the geological record, we have at least no evidence that
+anything bigger as yet moved upon the face of the waters.
+The trilobites, which were a sort of triple-tailed crabs (to
+speak very popularly), began in the Cambrian Epoch,
+attained their culminating point in the Silurian, waned in
+the Devonian, and died out utterly in the Carboniferous
+seas.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the
+cuttle-fish tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus,
+the argonaut, the squid, and the octopus, first began to
+make their appearance upon this or any other stage. The
+cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of invertebrate
+animals; they are rapid swimmers; they have large and
+powerful eyes; and they can easily enfold their prey (<i>teste</i>
+Victor Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms.
+With these natural advantages to back them up, it is not
+surprising that the cuttle family rapidly made their mark
+in the world. They were by far the most advanced thinkers
+and actors of their own age, and they rose almost at once
+to be the dominant creatures of the prim&aelig;val ocean in
+which they swam. There were as yet no saurians or
+whales to dispute the dominion with these rapacious
+cephalopods, and so the cuttle family had things for the
+time all their own way. Before the end of the Silurian
+Epoch, according to that accurate census-taker, M. Barrande,
+they had blossomed forth into no less than 1,622 distinct
+species. For a single family to develop so enormous a
+variety of separate forms, all presumably derived from a
+single common ancestor, argues, of course, an immense
+success in life; and it also argues a vast lapse of time
+<a name="page265" id="page265"></a>during which the different species were gradually demarcated
+from one another.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the ammonites, which belonged to this cuttle-fish
+group, soon attained a very considerable size; but a
+shell known as the orthoceras (I wish my subject didn't
+compel me to use such <i>very</i> long words, but I am not personally
+answerable, thank heaven, for the vagaries of
+modern scientific nomenclature) grew to a bigger size than
+that of any other fossil mollusk, sometimes measuring as
+much as six feet in total length. At what date the gigantic
+cuttles of the present day first began to make their appearance
+it would be hard to say, for their shell-less bodies are
+so soft that they could leave hardly anything behind in a
+fossil state; but the largest known cuttle, measured by Mr.
+Gabriel, of Newfoundland, was eighty feet in length,
+including the long arms.</p>
+
+<p>These cuttles are the only invertebrates at all in the
+running so far as colossal size is concerned, and it will be
+observed that here the largest modern specimen immeasurably
+beats the largest fossil form of the same type. I do
+not say that there were not fossil forms quite as big as the
+gigantic calamaries of our own time&mdash;on the contrary, I
+believe there were; but if we go by the record alone we
+must confess that, in the matter of invertebrates at least,
+the balance of size is all in favour of our own period.</p>
+
+<p>The vertebrates first make their appearance, in the
+shape of fishes, towards the close of the Silurian period,
+the second of the great geological epochs. The earliest
+fish appear to have been small, elongated, eel-like creatures,
+closely resembling the lampreys in structure; but they
+rapidly developed in size and variety, and soon became the
+ruling race in the waters of the ocean, where they maintained
+their supremacy till the rise of the great secondary
+saurians. Even then, in spite of the severe competition
+<a name="page266" id="page266"></a>thus introduced, and still later, in spite of the struggle for
+life against the huge modern cetaceans (the true monarchs
+of the recent seas), the sharks continued to hold their own
+as producers of gigantic forms; and at the present day
+their largest types probably rank second only to the whales
+in the whole range of animated nature. There seems no
+reason to doubt that modern fish, as a whole, quite equal
+in size the piscine fauna of any previous geological age.</p>
+
+<p>It is somewhat different with the next great vertebrate
+group, the amphibians, represented in our own world only
+by the frogs, the toads, the newts, and the axolotls. Here
+we must certainly with shame confess that the amphibians
+of old greatly surpassed their degenerate descendants in our
+modern waters. The Japanese salamander, by far the
+biggest among our existing newts, never exceeds a yard in
+length from snout to tail; whereas some of the labyrinthodonts
+(forgive me once more) of the Carboniferous Epoch
+must have reached at least seven or eight feet from stem to
+stern. But the reason of this falling off is not far to seek.
+When the adventurous newts and frogs of that remote
+period first dropped their gills and hopped about inquiringly
+on the dry land, under the shadow of the ancient
+tree-ferns and club-mosses, they were the only terrestrial
+vertebrates then existing, and they had the field (or, rather,
+the forest) all to themselves. For a while, therefore, like
+all dominant races for the time being, they blossomed forth
+at their ease into relatively gigantic forms. Frogs as big
+as donkeys, and efts as long as crocodiles, luxuriated to
+their hearts' content in the marshy lowlands, and lorded it
+freely over the small creatures which they found in undisturbed
+possession of the Carboniferous isles. But as ages
+passed away, and new improvements were slowly invented
+and patented by survival of the fittest in the offices of
+nature, their own more advanced and developed descendants,
+<a name="page267" id="page267"></a>the reptiles and mammals, got the upper hand with
+them, and soon lived them down in the struggle for life, so
+that this essentially intermediate form is now almost entirely
+restricted to its one adapted seat, the pools and
+ditches that dry up in summer.</p>
+
+<p>The reptiles, again, are a class in which the biggest
+modern forms are simply nowhere beside the gigantic
+extinct species. First appearing on the earth at the very
+close of the vast primary periods&mdash;in the Permian age&mdash;they
+attained in secondary times the most colossal proportions,
+and have certainly never since been exceeded in size
+by any later forms of life in whatever direction. But one
+must remember that during the heyday of the great
+saurians, there were as yet no birds and no mammals.
+The place now filled in the ocean by the whales and grampuses,
+as well as the place now filled in the great continents
+by the elephants, the rhinoceroses, the hippopotami,
+and the other big quadrupeds, was then filled exclusively
+by huge reptiles, of the sort rendered familiar to us all by
+the restored effigies on the little island in the Crystal Palace
+grounds. Every dog has his day, and the reptiles had
+<i>their</i> day in the secondary period. The forms into which
+they developed were certainly every whit as large as any
+ever seen on the surface of this planet, but not, as I have
+already shown, appreciably larger than those of the biggest
+cetaceans known to science in our own time.</p>
+
+<p>During the very period, however, when enaliosaurians
+and pterodactyls were playing such pranks before high
+heaven as might have made contemporary angels weep, if
+they took any notice of saurian morality, a small race of
+unobserved little prowlers was growing up in the dense
+shades of the neighbouring forests which was destined at
+last to oust the huge reptiles from their empire over earth,
+and to become in the fulness of time the exclusively
+<a name="page268" id="page268"></a>dominant type of the whole planet. In the trias we get
+the first remains of mammalian life in the shape of tiny
+rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely related to
+the banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present
+day. Throughout the long lapse of the secondary ages,
+across the lias, the oolite, the wealden, and the chalk, we
+find the mammalian race slowly developing into opossums
+and kangaroos, such as still inhabit the isolated and antiquated
+continent of Australia. Gathering strength all the
+time for the coming contest, increasing constantly in size
+of brain and keenness of intelligence, the true mammals
+were able at last, towards the close of the secondary ages,
+to enter the lists boldly against the gigantic saurians.
+With the dawn of the tertiary period, the reign of the reptiles
+begins to wane, and the reign of the mammals to set
+in at last in real earnest. In place of the ichthyosaurs we
+get the huge cetaceans; in place of the deinosaurs we get
+the mammoth and the mastodon; in place of the dominant
+reptile groups we get the first precursors of man
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the great birds has been somewhat more
+singular. Unlike the other main vertebrate classes, the
+birds (as if on purpose to contradict the proverb) seem
+never yet to have had their day. Unfortunately for them,
+or at least for their chance of producing colossal species,
+their evolution went on side by side, apparently, with that
+of the still more intelligent and more powerful mammals;
+so that, wherever the mammalian type had once firmly
+established itself, the birds were compelled to limit their
+aspirations to a very modest and humble standard. Terrestrial
+mammals, however, cannot cross the sea; so in
+isolated regions, such as New Zealand and Madagascar, the
+birds had things all their own way. In New Zealand, there
+are no indigenous quadrupeds at all; and there the huge
+<a name="page269" id="page269"></a>moa attained to dimensions almost equalling those of the
+giraffe. In Madagascar, the mammalian life was small
+and of low grade, so the gigantic &aelig;pyornis became the
+very biggest of all known birds. At the same time, these
+big species acquired their immense size at the cost of the
+distinctive birdlike habit of flight. A flying moa is almost
+an impossible conception; even the ostriches compete
+practically with the zebras and antelopes rather than with
+the eagles, the condors, or the albatrosses. In like manner,
+when a pigeon found its way to Mauritius, it developed into
+the practically wingless dodo; while in the northern penguins,
+on their icy perches, the fore limbs have been gradually
+modified into swimming organs, exactly analogous to
+the flippers of the seal.</p>
+
+<p>Are the great animals now passing away and leaving no
+representatives of their greatness to future ages? On land
+at least that is very probable. Man, diminutive man, who,
+if he walked on all fours, would be no bigger than a silly
+sheep, and who only partially disguises his native smallness
+by his acquired habit of walking erect on what ought
+to be his hind legs&mdash;man has upset the whole balanced
+economy of nature, and is everywhere expelling and exterminating
+before him the great herbivores, his predecessors.
+He needs for his corn and his bananas the fruitful plains
+which were once laid down in prairie or scrubwood. Hence
+it seems not unlikely that the elephant, the hippopotamus,
+the rhinoceros, and the buffalo must go. But we are still
+a long way off from that final consummation, even on dry
+land; while as for the water, it appears highly probable
+that there are as good fish still in the sea as ever came out
+of it. Whether man himself, now become the sole dominant
+animal of our poor old planet, will ever develop into
+Titanic proportions, seems far more problematical. The
+race is now no longer to the swift, nor the battle to the
+<a name="page270" id="page270"></a>strong. Brain counts for more than muscle, and mind has
+gained the final victory over mere matter. Goliath of Gath
+has shrunk into insignificance before the Gatling gun; as
+in the fairy tales of old, it is cunning little Jack with his
+clever devices who wins the day against the heavy, clumsy,
+muddle-headed giants. Nowadays it is our 'Minotaurs'
+and 'Warriors' that are the real leviathans and behemoths
+of the great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the
+fire-breathing krakens of the latter-day seas. Instead of
+developing individually into huge proportions, the human
+race tends rather to aggregate into vast empires, which
+compete with one another by means of huge armaments,
+and invent mitrailleuses and torpedos of incredible ferocity
+for their mutual destruction. The dragons of the prime
+that tare each other in their slime have yielded place to
+eighty-ton guns and armour-plated turret-ships. Those are
+the genuine lineal representatives on our modern seas of
+the secondary saurians. Let us hope that some coming
+geologist of the dim future, finding the fossil remains of
+the sunken 'Captain,' or the plated scales of the 'Comte
+de Grasse,' firmly embedded in the upheaved ooze of the
+existing Atlantic, may shake his head in solemn deprecation
+at the horrid sight, and thank heaven that such hideous
+carnivorous creatures no longer exist in his own day.<a name="page271" id="page271"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part16" id="part16"><i>FOSSIL FOOD</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>There is something at first sight rather ridiculous in the
+idea of eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mammoths
+of Siberia were first discovered, though they had
+been dead for at least 80,000 years (according to Dr. Croll's
+minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice age), and
+might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty,
+they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of prehistoric
+Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigerators,
+that the wolves and bears greedily devoured the
+precious relics for which the naturalists of Europe would
+have been ready gladly to pay the highest market price of
+best beefsteak. Those carnivorous vandals gnawed off
+the skin and flesh with the utmost appreciation, and left
+nothing but the tusks and bones to adorn the galleries of
+the new Natural History Museum at South Kensington. But
+then wolves and bears, especially in Siberia, are not exactly
+fastidious about the nature of their meat diet. Furthermore,
+some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the
+stalagmitic floor of caves, in England and elsewhere, presumably
+of about the same age as the Siberian mammoths,
+still contain enough animal matter to produce a good strong
+stock for antediluvian broth, which has been scientifically
+described by a high authority as pre-Adamite jelly. The
+congress of naturalists at T&uuml;bingen a few years since had
+a smoking tureen of this cave-bone soup placed upon the
+<a name="page272" id="page272"></a>dinner-table at their hotel one evening, and pronounced it
+with geological enthusiasm 'scarcely inferior to prime ox-tail.'
+But men of science, too, are accustomed to trying
+unsavoury experiments, which would go sadly against the
+grain with less philosophic and more squeamish palates.
+They think nothing of tasting a caterpillar that birds will
+not touch, in order to discover whether it owes its immunity
+from attack to some nauseous, bitter, or pungent
+flavouring; and they even advise you calmly to discriminate
+between two closely similar species of snails by trying which
+of them when chewed has a delicate <i>soup&ccedil;on</i> of oniony
+aroma. So that naturalists in this matter, as the children
+say, don't count: their universal thirst for knowledge will
+prompt them to drink anything, down even to <i>consomm&eacute;</i> of
+quaternary cave-bear.</p>
+
+<p>There is one form of fossil food, however, which appears
+constantly upon all our tables at breakfast, lunch, and
+dinner, every day, and which is so perfectly familiar to
+every one of us that we almost forget entirely its immensely
+remote geological origin. The salt in our salt-cellars is a
+fossil product, laid down ages ago in some prim&aelig;val Dead
+Sea or Caspian, and derived in all probability (through the
+medium of the grocer) from the triassic rocks of Cheshire
+or Worcestershire. Since that thick bed of rock-salt was
+first precipitated upon the dry floor of some old evaporated
+inland sea, the greater part of the geological history known
+to the world at large has slowly unrolled itself through incalculable
+ages. The dragons of the prime have begun
+and finished their long (and Lord Tennyson says slimy)
+race. The fish-like saurians and flying pterodactyls of the
+secondary period have come into existence and gone out of
+it gracefully again. The whole family of birds has been
+developed and diversified into its modern variety of eagles
+and titmice. The beasts of the field have passed through
+<a name="page273" id="page273"></a>sundry stages of mammoth and mastodon, of sabre-toothed
+lion and huge rhinoceros. Man himself has progressed
+gradually from the humble condition of a 'hairy arboreal
+quadruped'&mdash;these bad words are Mr. Darwin's own&mdash;to
+the glorious elevation of an erect, two-handed creature, with
+a county suffrage question and an intelligent interest in the
+latest proceedings of the central divorce court. And after
+all those manifold changes, compared to which the entire
+period of English history, from the landing of Julius C&aelig;sar
+to the appearance of this present volume (to take two important
+landmarks), is as one hour to a human lifetime,
+we quietly dig up the salt to-day from that dry lake bottom
+and proceed to eat it with the eggs laid by the hens this
+morning for this morning's breakfast, just as though the
+one food-stuff were not a whit more ancient or more dignified
+in nature than the other. Why, mammoth steak is really
+quite modern and common-place by the side of the salt in
+the salt-cellar that we treat so cavalierly every day of our
+ephemeral existence.</p>
+
+<p>The way salt got originally deposited in these great
+rock beds is very well illustrated for us by the way it is still
+being deposited in the evaporating waters of many inland
+seas. Every schoolboy knows of course (though some
+persons who are no longer schoolboys may just possibly
+have forgotten) that the Caspian is in reality only a little
+bit of the Mediterranean, which has been cut off from the
+main sea by the gradual elevation of the country between
+them. For many ages the intermediate soil has been quite
+literally rising in the world; but to this day a continuous
+chain of salt lakes and marshes runs between the Caspian
+and the Black Sea, and does its best to keep alive the
+memory of the time when they were both united in a
+single basin. All along this intervening tract, once sea
+but now dry land, banks of shells belonging to kinds still
+<a name="page274" id="page274"></a>living in the Caspian and the Black Sea alike testify to the
+old line of water communication. One fine morning (date
+unknown) the intermediate belt began to rise up between
+them; the water was all pushed off into the Caspian,
+but the shells remained to tell the tale even unto this day.</p>
+
+<p>Now, when a bit of the sea gets cut off in this way
+from the main ocean, evaporation of its waters generally
+takes place rather faster than the return supply of rain by
+rivers and lesser tributaries. In other words, the inland
+sea or salt lake begins slowly to dry up. This is now just
+happening in the Caspian, which is in fact a big pool in
+course of being slowly evaporated. By-and-by a point is
+reached when the water can no longer hold in solution the
+amount of salts of various sorts that it originally contained.
+In the technical language of chemists and physicists it
+begins to get supersaturated. Then the salts are thrown
+down as a sediment at the bottom of the sea or lake, exactly
+as crust formed on the bottom of a kettle. Gypsum is
+the first material to be so thrown down, because it is less
+soluble than common salt, and therefore sooner got rid of.
+It forms a thick bottom layer in the bed of all evaporating
+inland seas; and as plaster of Paris it not only gives rise
+finally to artistic monstrosities hawked about the streets
+for the degradation of national taste, but also plays an important
+part in the manufacture of bonbons, the destruction
+of the human digestion, and the ultimate ruin of the
+dominant white European race. Only about a third of the
+water in a salt lake need be evaporated before the gypsum
+begins to be deposited in a solid layer over its whole bed;
+it is not till 93 per cent. of the water has gone, and only
+7 per cent. is left, that common salt begins to be thrown
+down. When that point of intensity is reached, the salt,
+too, falls as a sediment to the bottom, and there overlies
+the gypsum deposit. Hence all the world over, wherever we
+<a name="page275" id="page275"></a>come upon a bed of rock salt, it almost invariably lies upon
+a floor of solid gypsum.</p>
+
+<p>The Caspian, being still a very respectable modern sea,
+constantly supplied with fresh water from the surrounding
+rivers, has not yet begun by any means to deposit salt on
+its bottom from its whole mass; but the shallow pools and
+long bays around its edge have crusts of beautiful rose-coloured
+salt-crystals forming upon their sides; and as
+these lesser basins gradually dry up, the sand, blown before
+the wind, slowly drifts over them, so as to form miniature
+rock-salt beds on a very small scale. Nevertheless, the
+young and vigorous Caspian only represents the first stage
+in the process of evaporation of an inland sea. It is still
+fresh enough to form the abode of fish and mollusks; and
+the irrepressible young lady of the present generation is
+perhaps even aware that it contains numbers of seals, being
+in fact the seat of one of the most important and valuable
+seal-fisheries in the whole world. It may be regarded as a
+typical example of a yet youthful and lively inland sea.</p>
+
+<p>The Dead Sea, on the other hand, is an old and decrepit
+salt lake in a very advanced state of evaporation. It
+lies several feet below the level of the Mediterranean, just
+as the Caspian lies several feet below the level of the Black Sea;
+and as in both cases the surface must once have been continuous,
+it is clear that the water of either sheet must have
+dried up to a very considerable extent. But, while the
+Caspian has shrunk only to 85 feet below the Black Sea,
+the Dead Sea has shrunk to the enormous depth of 1,292
+feet below the Mediterranean. Every now and then, some
+enterprising De Lesseps or other proposes to dig a canal
+from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and so re-establish
+the old high level. The effect of this very revolutionary
+proceeding would be to flood the entire Jordan Valley,
+connect the Sea of Galilee with the Dead Sea, and play
+<a name="page276" id="page276"></a>the dickens generally with Scripture geography, to the infinite
+delight of Sunday school classes. Now, when the
+Dead Sea first began its independent career as a separate
+sheet of water on its own account, it no doubt occupied the
+whole bed of this imaginary engineers' lake&mdash;spreading, if
+not from Dan to Beersheba, at any rate from Dan to Edom,
+or, in other words, along the whole Jordan Valley from the
+Sea of Galilee and even the Waters of Merom to the
+southern desert. (I will not insult the reader's intelligence
+and orthodoxy by suggesting that perhaps he may not be
+precisely certain as to the exact position of the Waters of
+Merom; but I will merely recommend him just to refresh
+his memory by turning to his atlas, as this is an opportunity
+which may not again occur.) The modern Dead Sea is
+the last shrunken relic of such a considerable ancient lake.
+Its waters are now so very concentrated and so very nasty
+that no fish or other self-respecting animal can consent
+to live in them; and so buoyant that a man can't drown
+himself, even if he tries, because the sea is saturated with
+salts of various sorts till it has become a kind of soup or porridge,
+in which a swimmer floats, will he nill he. Persons
+in the neighbourhood who wish to commit suicide are therefore
+obliged to go elsewhere: much as in Tasmania, the
+healthiest climate in the world, people who want to die are
+obliged to run across for a week to Sydney or Melbourne.</p>
+
+<p>The waters of the Dead Sea are thus in the condition
+of having already deposited almost all their gypsum, as
+well as the greater part of the salt they originally contained.
+They are, in fact, much like sea water which has
+been boiled down till it has reached the state of a thick
+salty liquid; and though most of the salt is now already
+deposited in a deep layer on the bottom, enough still
+remains in solution to make the Dead Sea infinitely salter
+than the general ocean. At the same time, there are a
+<a name="page277" id="page277"></a>good many other things in solution in sea water besides
+gypsum and common salt; such as chloride of magnesia
+sulphate of potassium, and other interesting substances
+with pretty chemical names, well calculated to endear them
+at first sight to the sentimental affections of the general
+public. These other by-contents of the water are often
+still longer in getting deposited than common salt; and,
+owing to their intermixture in a very concentrated form
+with the mother liquid of the Dead Sea, the water of that
+evaporating lake is not only salt but also slimy and fetid to
+the last degree, its taste being accurately described as half
+brine, half rancid oil. Indeed, the salt has been so far
+precipitated already that there is now five times as much
+chloride of magnesium left in the water as there is common
+salt. By the way, it is a lucky thing for us that these
+various soluble minerals are of such constitution as to be
+thrown down separately at different stages of concentration
+in the evaporating liquid; for, if it were otherwise, they
+would all get deposited together, and we should find on all old
+salt lake beds only a mixed layer of gypsum, salt, and other
+chlorides and sulphates, absolutely useless for any practical
+human purpose. In that case, we should be entirely dependent
+upon marine salt pans and artificial processes for
+our entire salt supply. As it is, we find the materials deposited
+one above another in regular layers; first, the
+gypsum at the bottom; then the rock-salt; and last of all,
+on top, the more soluble mineral constituents.</p>
+
+<p>The Great Salt Lake of Utah, sacred to the memory
+of Brigham Young, gives us an example of a modern
+saline sheet of very different origin, since it is in fact not
+a branch of the sea at all, but a mere shrunken remnant
+of a very large fresh-water lake system, like that of the
+still-existing St. Lawrence chain. Once upon a time,
+American geologists say, a huge sheet of water, for which
+<a name="page278" id="page278"></a>they have even invented a definite name, Lake Bonneville,
+occupied a far larger valley among the outliers of the
+Rocky Mountains, measuring 300 miles in one direction by
+180 miles in the other. Beside this primitive Superior lay
+a second great sheet&mdash;an early Huron&mdash;(Lake Lahontan,
+the geologists call it) almost as big, and equally of fresh
+water. By-and-by&mdash;the precise dates are necessarily indefinite&mdash;some
+change in the rainfall, unregistered by any
+contemporary 'New York Herald,' made the waters of
+these big lakes shrink and evaporate. Lake Lahontan
+shrank away like Alice in Wonderland, till there was
+absolutely nothing left of it; Lake Bonneville shrank till
+it attained the diminished size of the existing Great Salt
+Lake. Terrace after terrace, running in long parallel lines
+on the sides of the Wahsatch Mountains around, mark the
+various levels at which it rested for awhile on its gradual
+downward course. It is still falling indeed; and the plain
+around is being gradually uncovered, forming the white
+salt-encrusted shore with which all visitors to the Mormon
+city are so familiar.</p>
+
+<p>But why should the water have become briny? Why
+should the evaporation of an old Superior produce at last
+a Great Salt Lake? Well, there is a small quantity of salt
+in solution even in the freshest of lakes and ponds, brought
+down to them by the streams or rivers; and, as the water
+of the hypothetical Lake Bonneville slowly evaporated,
+the salt and other mineral constituents remained behind.
+Thus the solution grew constantly more and more concentrated,
+till at the present day it is extremely saline.
+Professor Geikie (to whose works the present paper is much
+indebted) found that he floated on the water in spite of
+himself; and the under sides of the steps at the bathing-places
+are all encrusted with short stalactites of salt, produced
+from the drip of the bathers as they leave the water.<a name="page279" id="page279"></a>
+The mineral constituents, however, differ considerably in
+their proportions from those found in true salt lakes of
+marine origin; and the point at which the salt is thrown
+down is still far from having been reached. Great Salt
+Lake must simmer in the sun for many centuries yet
+before the point arrives at which (as cooks say) it begins to
+settle.</p>
+
+<p>That is the way in which deposits of salt are being now
+produced on the world's surface, in preparation for that
+man of the future who, as we learn from a duly constituted
+authority, is to be hairless, toothless, web-footed, and far
+too respectable ever to be funny. Man of the present
+derives his existing salt-supply chiefly from beds of rock-salt
+similarly laid down against his expected appearance
+some hundred thousand &aelig;ons or so ago. (An &aelig;on is a very
+convenient geological unit indeed to reckon by; as nobody
+has any idea how long it is, they can't carp at you for a
+matter of an &aelig;on or two one way or the other.) Rock-salt
+is found in most parts of the world, in beds of very various
+ages. The great Salt Range of the Punjaub is probably
+the earliest in date of all salt deposits; it was laid down
+at the bottom of some very ancient Asiatic Mediterranean,
+whose last shrunken remnant covered the upper basin of
+the Indus and its tributaries during the Silurian age.
+Europe had then hardly begun to be; and England was
+probably still covered from end to end by the prim&aelig;val
+ocean. From this very primitive salt deposit the greater
+part of India and Central Asia is still supplied; and the
+Indian Government makes a pretty penny out of the dues
+in the shape of the justly detested salt-tax&mdash;a tax especially
+odious because it wrings the fraction of a farthing even
+from those unhappy agricultural labourers who have never
+tasted ghee with their rice.</p>
+
+<p>The thickness of the beds in each salt deposit of course
+<a name="page280" id="page280"></a>depends entirely upon the area of the original sea or
+salt-lake, and the length of time during which the evaporation
+went on. Sometimes we may get a mere film of salt;
+sometimes a solid bed six hundred feet thick. Perfectly
+pure rock-salt is colourless and transparent; but one
+doesn't often find it pure. Alas for a degenerate world!
+even in its original site, Nature herself has taken the
+trouble to adulterate it beforehand. (If she hadn't done
+so, one may be perfectly sure that commercial enterprise
+would have proved equal to the occasion in the long run.)
+But the adulteration hasn't spoilt the beauty of the salt;
+on the contrary, it serves, like rouge, to give a fine fresh
+colour where none existed. When iron is the chief colouring
+matter, rock-salt assumes a beautiful clear red tint; in
+other cases it is emerald green or pale blue. As a rule,
+salt is prepared from it for table by a regular process; but
+it has become a fad of late with a few people to put crystals
+of native rock-salt on their tables; and they decidedly look
+very pretty, and have a certain distinctive flavour of their
+own that is not unpleasant.</p>
+
+<p>Our English salt supply is chiefly derived from the
+Cheshire and Worcestershire salt-regions, which are of triassic
+age. Many of the places at which the salt is mined
+have names ending in <i>wich</i>, such as Northwich, Middlewich,
+Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich. This
+termination <i>wich</i> is itself curiously significant, as Canon
+Isaac Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection
+between salt and the sea. The earliest known way of producing
+salt was of course in shallow pans on the sea-shore,
+at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and Early
+English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is
+still known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people
+came to discover the inland brine-pits and salt mines, they
+transferred to them the familiar name, a wich; and the
+<a name="page281" id="page281"></a>places where the salt was manufactured came to be known as
+wych-houses. Droitwich, for example, was originally such
+a wich, where the droits or dues on salt were paid at the time
+when William the Conqueror's commissioners drew up their
+great survey for Domesday Book. But the good, easy-going
+medi&aelig;val people who gave these quaint names to the inland
+wiches had probably no idea that they were really and truly
+dried-up bays, and that the salt they mined from their pits
+was genuine ancient bay-salt, the deposit of an old inland
+sea, evaporated by slow degrees a countless number of ages
+since, exactly as the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake are
+getting evaporated in our own time.</p>
+
+<p>Such, nevertheless, is actually the case. A good-sized
+Caspian used to spread across the centre of England and
+north of Ireland in triassic times, bounded here and there,
+as well as Dr. Hull can make out, by the Welsh Mountains,
+the Cheviots, and the Donegal Hills, and with the Peak of
+Derbyshire and the Isle of Man standing out as separate
+islands from its blue expanse. (We will beg the question
+that the English seas were then blue. They are certainly
+marked so in a very fine cerulean tint on Dr. Hull's map
+of Triassic Britain.) Slowly, like most other inland seas,
+this early British Caspian began to lose weight and to
+shrivel away to ever smaller dimensions. In Devonshire,
+where it appears to have first dried up, we get no salt, but
+only red marl, with here and there a cubical cast, filling a
+hole once occupied by rock-salt, though the percolation of
+the rain has long since melted out that very soluble substance,
+and replaced it by a mere mould in the characteristic
+square shape of salt crystals. But Worcestershire and
+Cheshire were the seat of the inland sea when it had contracted
+to the dimensions of a mere salt lake, and begun to
+throw down its dissolved saline materials. One of the
+Cheshire beds is sometimes a hundred feet thick of almost
+<a name="page282" id="page282"></a>pure and crystalline rock-salt. The absence of fossils shows
+that animals must have had as bad a time of it there as in
+the Dead Sea of our modern Palestine. The Droitwich
+brine-pits have been known for many centuries, since they
+were worked (and taxed) even before the Norman Conquest,
+as were many other similar wells elsewhere. But the
+actual mining of rock-salt as such in England dates back
+only as far as the reign of King Charles II. of blessed
+memory, or more definitely to the very year in which the
+'Pilgrim's Progress' was conceived and written by John
+Bunyan. During that particular summer, an enterprising
+person at Nantwich had sunk a shaft for coal, which he
+failed to find; but on his way down he came unexpectedly
+across the bed of rock-salt, then for the first time discovered
+as a native mineral. Since that fortunate accident the beds
+have been so energetically worked and the springs so
+energetically pumped that some of the towns built on top
+of them have got undermined, and now threaten from year
+to year, in the most literal sense, to cave in. In fact, one
+or two subsidences of considerable extent have already taken
+place, due in part no doubt to the dissolving action of rain
+water, but in part also to the mode of working. The mines
+are approached by a shaft; and, when you get down to the
+level of the old sea bottom, you find yourself in a sort of
+artificial gallery, whose roof, with all the world on top of
+it, is supported every here and there by massive pillars
+about fifteen feet thick. Considering that the salt lies
+often a hundred and fifty yards deep, and that these pillars
+have to bear the weight of all that depth of solid rock, it
+is not surprising that subsidences should sometimes occur
+in abandoned shafts, where the water is allowed to collect,
+and slowly dissolve away the supporting columns.</p>
+
+<p>Salt is a necessary article of food for animals, but in a
+far less degree than is commonly supposed. Each of us
+<a name="page283" id="page283"></a>eats on an average about ten times as much salt as we
+actually require. In this respect popular notions are as
+inexact as in the very similar case of the supply of phosphorus.
+Because phosphorus is needful for brain action,
+people jump forthwith to the absurd conclusion that fish
+and other foods rich in phosphates ought to be specially
+good for students preparing for examination, great thinkers,
+and literary men. Mark Twain indeed once advised a
+poetical aspirant, who sent him a few verses for his critical
+opinion, that fish was very feeding for the brains; he
+would recommend a couple of young whales to begin upon.
+As a matter of fact, there is more phosphorus in our daily
+bread than would have sufficed Shakespeare to write
+'Hamlet,' or Newton to discover the law of gravitation.
+It isn't phosphorus that most of us need, but brains to burn
+it in. A man might as well light a fire in a carriage, because
+coal makes an engine go, as hope to mend the pace of his
+dull pate by eating fish for the sake of the phosphates.</p>
+
+<p>The question still remains, How did the salt originally
+get there? After all, when we say that it was produced,
+as rock-salt, by evaporation of the water in inland seas, we
+leave unanswered the main problem, How did the brine in
+solution get into the sea at all in the first place? Well, one
+might almost as well ask, How did anything come to be
+upon the earth at any time, in any way? How did the sea
+itself get there? How did this planet swim into existence
+at all? In the Indian mythology the world is supported
+upon the back of an elephant, who is supported upon the
+back of a tortoise; but what the tortoise in the last resort
+is supported upon the Indian philosophers prudently say
+not. If we once begin thus pushing back our inquiries
+into the genesis of the cosmos, we shall find our search
+retreating step after step <i>ad infinitum</i>. The negro preacher,
+describing the creation of Adam, and drawing slightly
+<a name="page284" id="page284"></a>upon his imagination, observed that when our prime forefather
+first came to consciousness he found himself 'sot up
+agin a fence.' One of his hearers ventured sceptically to
+ejaculate, 'Den whar dat fence come from, ministah?' The
+outraged divine scratched his grey wool reflectively for a
+moment, and replied, after a pause, with stern solemnity,
+'Tree more ob dem questions will undermine de whole
+system ob teology.'</p>
+
+<p>However, we are not permitted humbly to imitate the
+prudent reticence of the Indian philosophers. In these
+days of evolution hypotheses, and nebular theories, and
+kinetic energy, and all the rest of it, the question why the
+sea is salt rises up irrepressible and imperatively demands
+to get itself answered. There was a sapient inquirer,
+recently deceased, who had a short way out of this difficulty.
+He held that the sea was only salt because of all
+the salt rivers that run into it. Considering that the
+salt rivers are themselves salted by passing through salt
+regions, or being fed by saline springs, all of which derive
+their saltness from deposits laid down long ago by evaporation
+from earlier seas or lake basins, this explanation
+savours somewhat of circularity. It amounts in effect
+to saying that the sea is salt because of the large amount
+of saline matter which it holds in solution. Cheese is also
+a caseous preparation of milk; the duties of an archdeacon
+are to perform archidiaconal functions; and opium puts one
+to sleep because it possesses a soporific virtue.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from such purely verbal explanations of the saltness
+of the sea, however, one can only give some such
+account of the way it came to be 'the briny' as the
+following:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>This world was once a haze of fluid light, as the poets
+and the men of science agree in informing us. As soon as it
+began to cool down a little, the heavier materials naturally
+<a name="page285" id="page285"></a>sank towards the centre, while the lighter, now represented
+by the ocean and the atmosphere, floated in a gaseous condition
+on the outside. But the great envelope of vapour
+thus produced did not consist merely of the constituents of
+air and water; many other gases and vapours mingled with
+them, as they still do to a far less extent in our existing
+atmosphere. By-and-by, as the cooling and condensing process
+continued, the water settled down from the condition of
+steam into one of a liquid at a dull red heat. As it condensed,
+it carried down with it a great many other substances, held in
+solution, whose component elements had previously existed
+in the primitive gaseous atmosphere. Thus the early ocean
+which covered the whole earth was in all probability not
+only very salt, but also quite thick with other mineral matters
+close up to the point of saturation. It was full of lime,
+and raw flint, and sulphates, and many other miscellaneous
+bodies. Moreover, it was not only just as salt as at the present
+day, but even a great deal salter. For from that time
+to this evaporation has constantly been going on in certain
+shallow isolated areas, laying down great beds of gypsum
+and then of salt, which still remain in the solid condition,
+while the water has, of course, been correspondingly purified.
+The same thing has likewise happened in a slightly
+different way with the lime and flint, which have been
+separated from the water chiefly by living animals, and
+afterwards deposited on the bottom of the ocean in immense
+layers as limestone, chalk, sandstone, and clay.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it turns out that in the end all our sources of
+salt-supply are alike ultimately derived from the briny
+ocean. Whether we dig it out as solid rock-salt from the
+open quarries of the Punjaub, or pump it up from brine-wells
+sunk into the triassic rocks of Cheshire, or evaporate
+it direct in the salt-pans of England and the shallow <i>salines</i>
+of the Mediterranean shore, it is still at bottom essentially
+<a name="page286" id="page286"></a>sea-salt. However distant the connection may seem, our
+salt is always in the last resort obtained from the material
+held in solution in some ancient or modern sea. Even the
+saline springs of Canada and the Northern States of
+America, where the wapiti love to congregate, and the
+noble hunter lurks in the thicket to murder them unperceived,
+derive their saltness, as an able Canadian geologist
+has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still retained
+among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates
+form the earliest known life-bearing rocks. To
+the Homeric Greek, as to Mr. Dick Swiveller, the ocean
+was always the briny: to modern science, on the other
+hand (which neither of those worthies would probably have
+appreciated at its own valuation), the briny is always the
+oceanic. The fossil food which we find to-day on all
+our dinner-tables dates back its origin primarily to the
+first seas that ever covered the surface of our planet, and
+secondarily to the great rock deposits of the dried-up
+triassic inland sea. And yet even our men of science
+habitually describe that ancient mineral as common salt.<a name="page287" id="page287"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part17" id="part17"><i>OGBURY BARROWS</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>We went to Ogbury Barrows on an arch&aelig;ological expedition.
+And as the very name of arch&aelig;ology, owing to a
+serious misconception incidental to human nature, is
+enough to deter most people from taking any further
+interest in our proceedings when once we got there, I may
+as well begin by explaining, for the benefit of those who
+have never been to one, the method and manner of an
+arch&aelig;ological outing.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing you have to do is to catch your secretary.
+The genuine secretary is born, not made; and
+therefore you have got to catch him, not to appoint
+him. Appointing a secretary is pure vanity and vexation
+of spirit; you must find the right man made ready to your
+hand; and when you have found him you will soon see
+that he slips into the onerous duties of the secretariat as if
+to the manner born, by pure instinct. The perfect secretary
+is an urbane old gentleman of mature years and portly
+bearing, a dignified representative of British arch&aelig;ology,
+with plenty of money and plenty of leisure, possessing a
+heaven-born genius for organisation, and utterly unhampered
+by any foolish views of his own about arch&aelig;ological
+research or any other kindred subject. The secretary who
+arch&aelig;ologises is lost. His business is not to discourse
+of early English windows or of pal&aelig;olithic hatchets, of
+buried villas or of Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile-work
+<a name="page288" id="page288"></a>or of dolichocephalic skulls, but to provide abundant
+brakes, drags, and carriages, to take care that the owners
+of castles and baronial residences throw them open (with
+lunch provided) to the ardent student of British antiquities,
+to see that all the old ladies have somebody to talk to, and
+all the young ones somebody to flirt with, and generally to
+superintend the morals, happiness, and personal comfort of
+some fifty assorted scientific enthusiasts. The secretary
+who diverges from these his proper and elevated functions
+into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the antiquity of
+man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility
+of woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest
+(when he should by rights be concentrating the whole
+force of his massive intellect upon the arduous task of
+arranging for dinner), proves himself at once unworthy of
+his high position, and should forthwith be deposed from
+the secretariat by public acclamation.</p>
+
+<p>Having once entrapped your perfect secretary, you set
+him busily to work beforehand to make all the arrangements
+for your expected excursion, the arch&aelig;ologists
+generally cordially recognising the important principle
+that he pays all the expenses he incurs out of his own
+pocket, and drives splendid bargains on their account with
+hotel-keepers, coachmen, railway companies, and others to
+feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at fabulously low
+prices throughout the whole expedition. You also understand
+that the secretary will call upon everybody in the
+neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to
+throw open their churches, square the housekeepers of
+absentee dukes, and beard the owners of Elizabethan
+mansions in their own dens. These little preliminaries
+being amicably settled, you get together your arch&aelig;ologists
+and set out upon your intended tour.</p>
+
+<p>An arch&aelig;ologist, it should be further premised, has no
+<a name="page289" id="page289"></a>necessary personal connection with arch&aelig;ology in any way.
+He (or she) is a human being, of assorted origin, age, and
+sex, known as an arch&aelig;ologist then and there on no other
+ground than the possession of a ticket (price half-a-guinea)
+for that particular arch&aelig;ological meeting. Who would
+not be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting
+terms? Most arch&aelig;ologists within my own
+private experience, indeed, are ladies of various ages, many
+of them elderly, but many more young and pretty, whose
+views about the styles of English architecture or the exact
+distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the
+vaguest and most shadowy possible description. You all
+drive in brakes together to the various points of interest in
+the surrounding country. When you arrive at a point of
+interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his head
+reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there
+is fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are
+burning to learn all about it, you put your hand up to
+your ear, and assume an attitude of profound attention.
+If you are not burning with the desire for information,
+you stroll off casually about the grounds and gardens
+with the prettiest and pleasantest among the arch&aelig;ological
+sisters, whose acquaintance you have made on the way
+thither. Sometimes it rains, and then you obtain an
+admirable chance of offering your neighbour the protection
+afforded by your brand-new silk umbrella. By-and-by the
+dull paper gets finished, and somebody who lives in an
+adjoining house volunteers to provide you with luncheon.
+Then you adjourn to the parish church, where an old
+gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and tedious
+account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not
+to be found upon the walls of that poky little building.
+Nobody listens to him; but everybody carries away a vague
+impression that some one or other, temp. Henry the Second,
+<a name="page290" id="page290"></a>married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of Sir Ralph de
+Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and
+twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble
+family with a correspondingly varied pedigree. Finally,
+you take tea and ices upon somebody's lawn, by special
+invitation, and drive home, not without much laughter, in
+the cool of the evening to an excellent table d'h&ocirc;te dinner
+at the marvellously cheap hotel, presided over by the ever-smiling
+and urbane secretary. That is what we mean nowadays
+by being a member of an arch&aelig;ological association.</p>
+
+<p>It was on just such a pleasant excursion that we all
+went to Ogbury Barrows. I was overflowing, myself, with
+bottled-up information on the subject of those two prehistoric
+tumuli; for Ogbury Barrows have been the hobby
+of my lifetime; but I didn't read a paper upon their origin
+and meaning, first, because the secretary very happily forgot
+to ask me, and secondly, because I was much better
+employed in psychological research into the habits and
+manners of an extremely pretty pink-and-white arch&aelig;ologist
+who stood beside me. Instead, therefore, of boring
+her and my other companions with all my accumulated
+store of information about Ogbury Barrows, I locked it up
+securely in my own bosom, with the fell design of finally
+venting it all at once in one vast flood upon the present
+article.</p>
+
+<p>Ogbury Barrows, I would have said (had it not been for
+the praiseworthy negligence of our esteemed secretary),
+stand upon the very verge of a great chalk-down, overlooking
+a broad and fertile belt of valley, whose slopes are
+terraced in the quaintest fashion with long parallel lines of
+obviously human and industrial origin. The terracing
+must have been done a very long time ago indeed, for it is
+a device for collecting enough soil on a chalky hillside to
+grow corn in. Now, nobody ever tried to grow corn on
+<a name="page291" id="page291"></a>open chalk-downs in any civilised period of history until
+the present century, because the downs are so much more
+naturally adapted for sheep-walks that the attempt to turn
+them into waving cornfields would never occur to anybody
+on earth except a barbarian or an advanced agriculturist.
+But when Ogbury Downs were originally terraced, I don't
+doubt that the primitive system of universal tribal warfare
+still existed everywhere in Britain. This system is aptly
+summed up in the familiar modern Black Country
+formula, 'Yon's a stranger. 'Eave 'arf a brick at him.'
+Each tribe was then perpetually at war with every other
+tribe on either side of it: a simple plan which rendered
+foreign tariffs quite unnecessary, and most effectually protected
+home industries. The consequence was, each district
+had to produce for its own tribe all the necessaries
+of life, however ill-adapted by nature for their due production:
+because traffic and barter did not yet exist, and
+the only form ever assumed by import trade was that of
+raiding on your neighbours' territories, and bringing back
+with you whatever you could lay hands on. So the people
+of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to grow corn for
+themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't;
+and, in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances
+of soil and climate, they terraced off the entire
+hillside, by catching the silt as it washed slowly down, and
+keeping it in place by artificial barriers.</p>
+
+<p>On the top of the down, overlooking this curious vale
+of prehistoric terraces, rise the twin heights of Ogbury
+Barrows, familiar landmarks to all the country side around
+for many miles. One of them is a tall, circular mound or
+tumulus surrounded by a deep and well-marked trench:
+the other, which stands a little on one side, is long and
+narrow, shaped exactly like a modern grave, but of comparatively
+gigantic and colossal proportions. Even the
+<a name="page292" id="page292"></a>little children of Ogbury village have noticed its close
+resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in
+their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when
+they play upon its summit that a great giant in golden
+armour lies buried in a stone vault underneath. But if
+only they knew the real truth, they would say instead that
+that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of
+a short, squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature
+to the Lapps and Finns, and about as much unlike a giant
+as human nature could easily manage. It maybe regarded
+as a general truth of history that the greatest men don't
+by any means always get the biggest monument.</p>
+
+<p>The arch&aelig;ologists in becoming prints who went with
+us to the top of Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised
+(with demonstrative parasol) that 'these mounds must
+have been made a very long time ago, indeed.' So in fact
+they were: but though they stand now so close together,
+and look so much like sisters and contemporaries, one is
+ages older than the other, and was already green and
+grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the fresh
+earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its
+side, above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic
+warrior. Let us begin by considering the oldest first, and
+then pass on to its younger sister.</p>
+
+<p>Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument indeed.
+Not, to be sure, one quarter so ancient as the days
+of the extremely old master who carved the mammoth on
+the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the Dordogne,
+and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in <a href="#part7">an earlier
+portion of this volume</a>: compared with that very antique
+personage, our long barrow on Ogbury hill-top may in fact
+be looked upon as almost modern. Still, when one isn't
+talking in geological language, ten or twenty thousand
+years may be fairly considered a very long time as time
+<a name="page293" id="page293"></a>goes: and I have little doubt that from ten to twenty
+thousand years have passed since the short, squat chieftain
+aforesaid was first committed to his final resting-place in
+Ogbury Long Barrow. Two years since, we local arch&aelig;ologists&mdash;<i>not</i>
+in becoming prints this time&mdash;opened the
+barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we expected,
+the 'stone vault' of the popular tradition, proving
+conclusively that some faint memory of the original interment
+had clung for all those long years around the grassy
+pile of that ancient tumulus. Its centre, in fact, was
+occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big Sarsen
+stones from the surrounding hillsides; and in the midst of
+the house of death thus rudely constructed lay the mouldering
+skeleton of its original possessor&mdash;an old prehistoric
+Mongoloid chieftain. When I stood for the first moment
+within that prim&aelig;val palace of the dead, never before
+entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I
+must own, something like a burglar, something like a body-snatcher,
+something like a resurrection man, but most of
+all like a happy arch&aelig;ologist.</p>
+
+<p>The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in
+fact, a buried cromlech, covered all over (until we opened
+it) by the earth of the barrow. Almost every cromlech,
+wherever found, was once, I believe, the central chamber
+of just such a long barrow: but in some instances wind
+and rain have beaten down and washed away the surrounding
+earth (and then we call it a 'Druidical monument'),
+while in others the mound still encloses its
+original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric
+tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves
+are quite modern and common-place personages compared
+with the short, squat chieftains of the long barrows. For
+all the indications we found in the long barrow at Ogbury
+(as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us at
+<a name="page294" id="page294"></a>once to the strange conclusion that our new acquaintance,
+the skeleton, had once been a living cannibal king of the
+newer stone-age in Britain.</p>
+
+<p>The only weapons or implements we could discover in the
+barrow were two neatly chipped flint arrowheads, and a very
+delicate ground greenstone hatchet, or tomahawk. These
+were the weapons of the dead chief, laid beside him in the
+stone chamber where we found his skeleton, for his future
+use in his underground existence. A piece or two of rude
+hand-made pottery, no doubt containing food and drink for
+the ghost, had also been placed close to his side: but they
+had mouldered away with time and damp, till it was quite
+impossible to recover more than a few broken and shapeless
+fragments. There was no trace of metal in any way:
+whereas if the tribesmen of our friend the skeleton had
+known at all the art of smelting, we may be sure some
+bronze axe or spearhead would have taken the place of the
+flint arrows and the greenstone tomahawk: for savages
+always bury a man's best property together with his corpse,
+while civilised men take care to preserve it with pious care
+in their own possession, and to fight over it strenuously in
+the court of probate.</p>
+
+<p>The chief's own skeleton lay, or rather squatted, in the
+most undignified attitude, in the central chamber. His
+people when they put him there evidently considered that
+he was to sit at his ease, as he had been accustomed to do
+in his lifetime, in the ordinary savage squatting position,
+with his knees tucked up till they reached his chin, and
+his body resting entirely on the heels and haunches.
+The skeleton was entire: but just outside and above the
+stone vault we came upon a number of other bones, which
+told another and very different story. Some of them were
+the bones of the old prehistoric short-horned ox: others
+belonged to wild boars, red deer, and sundry similar
+<a name="page295" id="page295"></a>animals, for the most part skulls and feet only, the relics of
+the savage funeral feast. It was clear that as soon as the
+builders of the barrow had erected the stone chamber of
+their dead chieftain, and placed within it his honoured
+remains, they had held a great banquet on the spot, and,
+after killing oxen and chasing red deer, had eaten all the
+eatable portions, and thrown the skulls, horns, and hoofs
+on top of the tomb, as offerings to the spirit of their departed
+master. But among these relics of the funeral
+baked meats there were some that specially attracted our
+attention&mdash;a number of broken human skulls, mingled
+indiscriminately with the horns of deer and the bones of
+oxen. It was impossible to look at them for a single
+moment, and not to recognise that we had here the veritable
+remains of a cannibal feast, a hundred centuries ago,
+on Ogbury hill-top.</p>
+
+<p>Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with
+a sword or bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt
+implement, presumably either a club or a stone tomahawk.
+The skull of the great chief inside was entire and his skeleton
+unmutilated: but we could see at a glance that the
+remains we found huddled together on the top were those
+of slaves or prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead
+chieftain's tomb, and eaten with the other products of the
+chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an inner chamber
+behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger
+relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skeletons
+squatted there in the same curious attitude as their
+lord's, as if in attendance upon him in a neighbouring
+ante-chamber. They were the skeletons of women&mdash;so our
+professional bone-scanner immediately told us&mdash;and each of
+their skulls had been carefully cleft right down the middle
+by a single blow from a sharp stone hatchet. But they
+were not the victims intended for the <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i> at
+<a name="page296" id="page296"></a>the funeral banquet. They were clearly the two wives of
+the deceased chieftain, killed on his tomb by his son
+and successor, in order to accompany their lord and master
+in his new life underground as they had hitherto done in
+his rude wooden palace on the surface of the middle earth.</p>
+
+<p>We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old cannibal
+savage king (after abstracting for our local museum
+the arrowheads and tomahawk, as well as the skull of the
+very ancient Briton himself), and when our arch&aelig;ological
+society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two
+years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown
+again as green as ever, and not a sign remained of the
+sacrilegious act in which one of the party then assembled
+there had been a prime actor. Looking down from the
+summit of the long barrow on that bright summer
+morning, over the gay group of picnicking arch&aelig;ologists, it
+was a curious contrast to reinstate in fancy the scene at
+that first installation of the Ogbury monument. In my
+mind's eye I saw once more the howling band of naked,
+yellow-faced and yellow-limbed savages surge up the
+terraced slopes of Ogbury Down; I saw them bear aloft,
+with beating of breasts and loud gesticulations, the bent
+corpse of their dead chieftain; I saw the terrified and
+fainting wives haled along by thongs of raw oxhide, and
+the weeping prisoners driven passively like sheep to the
+slaughter; I saw the fearful orgy of massacre and rapine
+around the open tumulus, the wild priest shattering with
+his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his victims, the fire
+of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the
+heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered
+stone chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals
+around the mangled remains of men and oxen, and finally
+the long task of heaping up above the stone hut of the
+dead king the earthen mound that was never again to be
+<a name="page297" id="page297"></a>opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we
+modern Britons invaded with our prying, sacrilegious
+mattock the sacred privacy of that cannibal ghost. All this
+passed like a vision before my mind's eye; but I didn't
+mention anything of it at that particular moment to my
+fellow-arch&aelig;ologists, because I saw they were all much
+more interested in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about
+an exalted personage and a distinguished actress with which
+the model secretary was just then duly entertaining them.</p>
+
+<p>Five thousand years or so slowly wore away, from
+the date of the erection of the long barrow, and a
+new race had come to occupy the soil of England, and
+had driven away or reduced to slavery the short, squat,
+yellow-skinned cannibals of the earlier epoch. They were
+a pastoral and agricultural people, these new comers,
+acquainted with the use and abuse of bronze, and far more
+civilised in every way than their darker predecessors. No
+trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce onslaught
+the Celtic invaders&mdash;for the bronze-age folk were presumably
+Celts&mdash;swept through the little Ogbury valley, and
+brained the men of the older race, while they made slaves
+of the younger women and serviceable children. Nothing
+now stands to tell us anything of the long years of Celtic
+domination, except the round barrow on the bare down,
+just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far
+earlier and more primitive neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time
+as the other, and found in it, as we expected, no bones or
+skeleton of any sort, broken or otherwise, but simply a
+large cinerary urn. The urn was formed of coarse hand-made
+earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth,
+but not by any means so old or porous as the fragments we
+had discovered in the long barrow. A pretty pattern ran
+round its edge&mdash;a pattern in the simplest and most primitive
+<a name="page298" id="page298"></a>style of ornamentation; for it consisted merely of the
+print of the potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the
+moist clay before baking. Beside the urn lay a second
+specimen of early pottery, one of those curious perforated
+jars which antiquaries call by the very question-begging
+name of incense-cups; and within it we discovered the
+most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful wedge-shaped
+bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having
+no consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly
+appropriated both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and
+cup as a peace-offering to the lord of the manor for our
+desecration of a tomb (with his full consent) on the land
+of his fathers.</p>
+
+<p>Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of
+burying their dead? Why did they anticipate the latest
+fashionable mode of disposal of corpses, and go in for
+cremation with such thorough conviction? They couldn't
+have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary
+considerations which so profoundly agitated the mind of
+'Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation was still in a very rudimentary
+state in the year five thousand B.C.; and the
+ingenious Celt, who is still given to 'waking' his neighbours,
+when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference
+to the chances of infection, must have had
+some other and more powerful reason for adopting the
+comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference
+to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due
+to a further development of religious ideas on the part of
+the Celtic tribesmen above that of the primitive stone-age
+cannibals.</p>
+
+<p>When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the
+firm belief in another life, which life was regarded as the
+exact counterpart of this present one. The unsophisticated
+savage, holding that in that equal sky his faithful
+<a name="page299" id="page299"></a>dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the
+dog in question killed and buried with him, in order that it
+might follow him to the happy hunting-grounds. Clearly,
+you can't hunt without your arrows and your tomahawk;
+so the flint weapons and the trusty bow accompanied their
+owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the
+deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and
+drink have long since decayed within the damp tumulus:
+but the harder stone and earthenware articles have survived
+till now, to tell the story of that crude and simple early
+faith. Very crude and illogical indeed it was, however,
+for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man
+was thought of as persisting to live a sort of underground
+life within the barrow. A stone hut was constructed for
+its use; real weapons and implements were left by its side;
+and slaves and wives were ruthlessly massacred, as still in
+Ashantee, in order that their bodies might accompany the
+corpse of the buried master in his subterranean dwelling.
+In all this we have clear evidence of a very inconsistent,
+savage, materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality
+of the soul, but in the continued underground life of the
+dead body.</p>
+
+<p>With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon
+these subjects began to grow more definite and more consistent.
+Instead of the corpse, we get the ghost; instead
+of the material underground world, we get the idealised
+and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world
+of shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits.
+With the growth of the idea in this ghostly nether world,
+there arises naturally the habit of burning the dead in order
+fully to free the liberated spirit from the earthly chains that
+clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable fact that
+wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly
+accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course;
+<a name="page300" id="page300"></a>while wherever (among savage or barbaric races) burial is
+practised, there a more materialistic creed of bodily survival
+necessarily accompanies it. To carry out this theory to its
+full extent, not only must the body itself be burnt, but also
+all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in ghostly
+clothing; and the question has often been asked of modern
+spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, 'Where do the ghosts
+get their coats and dresses?' The true believer in cremation
+and the shadowy world has no difficulty at all in
+answering that crucial inquiry; he would say at once,
+'They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with
+the body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as veraciously
+retailed for us by that dear old grandmotherly
+scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of Melissa refuses to
+communicate with her late husband, by medium or otherwise,
+on the ground that she found herself naked and
+shivering with cold, because the garments buried with her
+had not been burnt, and therefore were of no use to her in
+the world of shades. So Periander, to put a stop to this
+sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all the best
+dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a
+great trench, and received an immediate answer from the
+gratified shade, who was thenceforth enabled to walk about
+in the principal promenades of Hades among the best-dressed
+ghosts of that populous quarter.</p>
+
+<p>The belief which thus survived among the civilised
+Greeks of the age of the Despots is shared still by Fijis and
+Karens, and was derived by all in common from early
+ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury round
+barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt,
+to liberate their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as
+now, in Fiji, knives and axes have their spiritual counterparts,
+which can only be released when the material shape
+is destroyed or purified by the action of fire. Everything,
+<a name="page301" id="page301"></a>in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own;
+and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free
+from all clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in
+the rite of suttee, the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon
+her husband's pyre, in order that her spirit might follow
+him unhampered to the world of ghosts whither he was
+bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge
+over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so
+remote as to merge together mentally to the casual eyes of
+modern observers, but yet in reality marking in their very
+shape and disposition an immense, long, and slow advance
+of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in
+form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut
+that surrounds and encloses it, so does the round barrow
+answer in form to the urn containing the calcined ashes of
+the cremated barbarian. And is it not a suggestive fact
+that when we turn to the little graveyard by the church
+below we find the Christian belief in the resurrection of the
+body, as opposed to the pagan belief in the immortality of
+the soul, once more bringing us back to the small oblong
+mound which is after all but the dwarfed and humbler
+modern representative of the long barrow? So deep is
+the connection between that familiar shape and the practice
+of inhumation that the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere
+to have come into use again throughout all Europe, after
+whole centuries of continued cremation, as the natural concomitant
+and necessary mark of Christian burial.</p>
+
+<p>This is what I would have said, if I had been asked, at
+Ogbury Barrows. But I wasn't asked; so I devoted myself
+instead to psychological research, and said nothing.<a name="page302" id="page302"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part18" id="part18"><i>FISH OUT OF WATER</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Strolling one day in what is euphemistically termed, in
+equatorial latitudes, 'the cool of the evening,' along a
+tangled tropical American field-path, through a low region
+of lagoons and watercourses, my attention happened to be
+momentarily attracted from the monotonous pursuit of
+the nimble mosquito by a small animal scuttling along
+irregularly before me, as if in a great hurry to get out
+of my way before I could turn him into an excellent
+specimen. At first sight I took the little hopper, in the
+grey dusk, for one of the common, small green lizards,
+and wasn't much disposed to pay it any distinguished
+share either of personal or scientific attention. But as I
+walked on a little further through the dense underbrush,
+more and more of these shuffling and scurrying little
+creatures kept crossing the path, hastily, all in one direction,
+and all, as it were, in a formed body or marching
+phalanx. Looking closer, to my great surprise, I found
+they were actually fish out of water, going on a walking
+tour, for change of air, to a new residence&mdash;genuine fish,
+a couple of inches long each, not eel-shaped or serpentine
+in outline, but closely resembling a red mullet in
+miniature, though much more beautifully and delicately
+coloured, and with fins and tails of the most orthodox
+spiny and prickly description. They were travelling
+across country in a bee-line, thousands of them together,
+<a name="page303" id="page303"></a>not at all like the helpless fish out of water of popular
+imagination, but as unconcernedly and naturally as if they
+had been accustomed to the overland route for their whole
+lifetimes, and were walking now on the king's highway
+without let or hindrance.</p>
+
+<p>I took one up in my hand and examined it more carefully;
+though the catching it wasn't by any means so easy
+as it sounds on paper, for these perambulatory fish are
+thoroughly inured to the dangers and difficulties of dry
+land, and can get out of your way when you try to capture
+them with a rapidity and dexterity which are truly surprising.
+The little creatures are very pretty, well-formed
+catfish, with bright, intelligent eyes, and a body armed all
+over, like the armadillo's, with a continuous coat of hard
+and horny mail. This coat is not formed of scales, as in
+most fish, but of toughened skin, as in crocodiles and
+alligators, arranged in two overlapping rows of imbricated
+shields, exactly like the round tiles so common on the
+roofs of Italian cottages. The fish walks, or rather
+shambles along ungracefully, by the shuffling movement
+of a pair of stiff spines placed close behind his head, aided
+by the steering action of his tail, and a constant snake-like
+wriggling motion of his entire body. Leg spines of somewhat
+the same sort are found in the common English
+gurnard, and in this age of Aquariums and Fisheries
+Exhibitions, most adult persons above the age of twenty-one
+years must have observed the gurnards themselves
+crawling along suspiciously by their aid at the bottom of a
+tank at the Crystal Palace or the polyonymous South
+Kensington building. But while the European gurnard
+only uses his substitutes for legs on the bed of the ocean,
+my itinerant tropical acquaintance (his name, I regret to
+say, is Callichthys) uses them boldly for terrestrial locomotion
+across the dry lowlands of his native country.<a name="page304" id="page304"></a>
+And while the gurnard has no less than six of these
+pro-legs, the American land fish has only a single pair
+with which to accomplish his arduous journeys. If this
+be considered as a point of inferiority in the armour-plated
+American species, we must remember that while
+beetles and grasshoppers have as many as six legs apiece,
+man, the head and crown of things, is content to scramble
+through life ungracefully with no more than two.</p>
+
+<p>There are a great many tropical American pond-fish
+which share these adventurous gipsy habits of the pretty
+little Callichthys. Though they belong to two distinct
+groups, otherwise unconnected, the circumstances of the
+country they inhabit have induced in both families this
+queer fashion of waddling out courageously on dry land,
+and going on voyages of exploration in search of fresh
+ponds and shallows new, somewhere in the neighbourhood
+of their late residence. One kind in particular, the
+Brazilian Doras, takes land journeys of such surprising
+length, that he often spends several nights on the way,
+and the Indians who meet the wandering bands during
+their migrations fill several baskets full of the prey thus
+dropped upon them, as it were, from the kindly clouds.</p>
+
+<p>Both Doras and Callichthys, too, are well provided
+with means of defence against the enemies they may
+chance to meet during their terrestrial excursions; for in
+both kinds there are the same bony shields along the sides,
+securing the little travellers, as far as possible, from attack
+on the part of hungry piscivorous animals. Doras further
+utilises its powers of living out of water by going ashore
+to fetch dry leaves, with which it builds itself a regular
+nest, like a bird's, at the beginning of the rainy season.
+In this nest the affectionate parents carefully cover up
+their eggs, the hope of the race, and watch over them with
+the utmost attention. Many other fish build nests in the
+<a name="page305" id="page305"></a>water, of materials naturally found at the bottom; but
+Doras, I believe, is the only one that builds them on the
+beach, of materials sought for on the dry land.</p>
+
+<p>Such amphibious habits on the part of certain tropical
+fish are easy enough to explain by the fashionable clue of
+'adaptation to environment.' Ponds are always very
+likely to dry up, and so the animals that frequent ponds
+are usually capable of bearing a very long deprivation
+of water. Indeed, our evolutionists generally hold that
+land animals have in every case sprung from pond animals
+which have gradually adapted themselves to do without
+water altogether. Life, according to this theory, began in
+the ocean, spread up the estuaries into the greater rivers,
+thence extended to the brooks and lakes, and finally
+migrated to the ponds, puddles, swamps and marshes,
+whence it took at last, by tentative degrees, to the solid
+shore, the plains, and the mountains. Certainly the
+tenacity of life shown by pond animals is very remarkable.
+Our own English carp bury themselves deeply in the mud
+in winter, and there remain in a dormant condition many
+months entirely without food. During this long hibernating
+period, they can be preserved alive for a considerable
+time out of water, especially if their gills are, from time
+to time, slightly moistened. They may then be sent to
+any address by parcels post, packed in wet moss, without
+serious damage to their constitution; though, according
+to Dr. G&uuml;nther, these dissipated products of civilisation
+prefer to have a piece of bread steeped in brandy put into
+their mouths to sustain them beforehand. In Holland,
+where the carp are not so sophisticated, they are often
+kept the whole winter through, hung up in a net to keep
+them from freezing. At first they require to be slightly
+wetted from time to time, just to acclimatise them gradually
+to so dry an existence; but after a while they adapt
+<a name="page306" id="page306"></a>themselves cheerfully to their altered circumstances, and
+feed on an occasional frugal meal of bread and milk with
+Christian resignation.</p>
+
+<p>Of all land-frequenting fish, however, by far the most
+famous is the so-called climbing perch of India, which not
+only walks bodily out of the water, but even climbs trees
+by means of special spines, near the head and tail, so
+arranged as to stick into the bark and enable it to wriggle
+its way up awkwardly, something after the same fashion
+as the 'looping' of caterpillars. The tree-climber is a
+small scaly fish, seldom more than seven inches long; but
+it has developed a special breathing apparatus to enable it
+to keep up the stock of oxygen on its terrestrial excursions,
+which may be regarded as to some extent the exact converse
+of the means employed by divers to supply themselves
+with air under water. Just above the gills, which
+form of course its natural hereditary breathing apparatus,
+the climbing perch has invented a new and wholly original
+water chamber, containing within it a frilled bony organ,
+which enables it to extract oxygen from the stored-up
+water during the course of its a&euml;rial peregrinations.
+While on shore it picks up small insects, worms, and
+grubs; but it also has vegetarian tastes of its own, and
+does not despise fruits and berries. The Indian jugglers
+tame the climbing perches and carry them about with
+them as part of their stock in trade; their ability to live
+for a long time out of water makes them useful confederates
+in many small tricks which seem very wonderful to
+people accustomed to believe that fish die almost at once
+when taken out of their native element.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian snakehead is a closely allied species,
+common in the shallow ponds and fresh-water tanks of
+India, where holy Brahmans bathe and drink and die and
+are buried, and most of which dry up entirely during the
+<a name="page307" id="page307"></a>dry season. The snakehead, therefore, has similarly accommodated
+himself to this annual peculiarity in his local
+habitation by acquiring a special chamber for retaining
+water to moisten his gills throughout his long deprivation
+of that prime necessary. He lives composedly in semi-fluid
+mud, or lies torpid in the hard baked clay at the
+bottom of the dry tank from which all the water has
+utterly evaporated in the drought of summer. As long as
+the mud remains soft enough to allow the fish to rise
+slowly through it, they come to the surface every now and
+then to take in a good hearty gulp of air, exactly as gold
+fish do in England when confined with thoughtless or
+ignorant cruelty in a glass globe too small to provide
+sufficient oxygen for their respiration. But when the mud
+hardens entirely they hibernate or rather &aelig;stivate, in a
+dormant condition, until the bursting of the monsoon fills
+the ponds once more with the welcome water. Even in
+the perfectly dry state, however, they probably manage to
+get a little air every now and again through the numerous
+chinks and fissures in the sun-baked mud. Our Aryan
+brother then goes a-fishing playfully with a spade and
+bucket, and digs the snakehead in this mean fashion out
+of his comfortable lair, with an ultimate view to the manufacture
+of pillau. In Burmah, indeed, while the mud is
+still soft, the ingenious Burmese catch the helpless creatures
+by a still meaner and more unsportsmanlike device. They
+spread a large cloth over the slimy ooze where the snakeheads
+lie buried, and so cut off entirely for the moment
+their supply of oxygen. The poor fish, half-asphyxiated by
+this unkind treatment, come up gasping to the surface under
+the cloth in search of fresh air, and are then easily caught
+with the hand and tossed into baskets by the degenerate
+Buddhists.</p>
+
+<p>Old Anglo-Indians even say that some of these mud
+<a name="page308" id="page308"></a>haunting Oriental fish will survive for many years in a
+state of suspended animation, and that when ponds or
+jh&iacute;ls which are known to have been dry for several successive
+seasons are suddenly filled by heavy rains, they
+are found to be swarming at once with full-grown snakeheads
+released in a moment from what I may venture to
+call their living tomb in the hardened bottom. Whether
+such statements are absolutely true or not the present
+deponent would be loth to decide dogmatically; but, if we
+were implicitly to swallow everything that the old Anglo-Indian
+in his simplicity assures us he has seen&mdash;well, the
+clergy would have no further cause any longer to deplore
+the growing scepticism and unbelief of these latter unfaithful
+ages.</p>
+
+<p>This habit of lying in the mud and there becoming
+torpid may be looked upon as a natural alternative to the
+habit of migrating across country, when your pond dries
+up, in search of larger and more permanent sheets of
+water. Some fish solve the problem how to get through
+the dry season in one of these two alternative fashions and
+some in the other. In flat countries where small ponds
+and tanks alone exist, the burying plan is almost universal;
+in plains traversed by large rivers or containing
+considerable scattered lakes, the migratory system finds
+greater favour with the piscine population.</p>
+
+<p>One tropical species which adopts the tactics of hiding
+itself in the hard clay, the African mud-fish, is specially
+interesting to us human beings on two accounts&mdash;first,
+because, unlike almost all other kinds of fish, it possesses
+lungs as well as gills; and, secondly, because it forms an
+intermediate link between the true fish and the frogs or
+amphibians, and therefore stands in all probability in the
+direct line of human descent, being the living representative
+of one among our own remote and early ancestors.<a name="page309" id="page309"></a>
+Scientific interest and filial piety ought alike to secure our
+attention for the African mud-fish. It lives its amphibious
+life among the rice-fields on the Nile, the Zambesi,
+and the Gambia, and is so greatly given to a terrestrial
+existence that its swim-bladder has become porous and
+cellular, so as to be modified into a pair of true and
+serviceable lungs. In fact, the lungs themselves in all the
+higher animals are merely the swim-bladders of fish,
+slightly altered so as to perform a new but closely allied
+office. The mud-fish is common enough in all the larger
+English aquariums, owing to a convenient habit in which
+it indulges, and which permits it to be readily conveyed to
+all parts of the globe on the same principle as the vans for
+furniture. When the dry season comes on and the rice-fields
+are reduced to banks of baking mud, the mud-fish
+retire to the bottom of their pools, where they form for
+themselves a sort of cocoon of hardened clay, lined with
+mucus, and with a hole at each end to admit the air; and
+in this snug retreat they remain torpid till the return of
+wet weather. As the fish usually reach a length of three
+or four feet, the cocoons are of course by no means easy to
+transport entire. Nevertheless the natives manage to dig
+them up whole, fish and all; and if the capsules are not
+broken, the unconscious inmates can be sent across by
+steamer to Europe with perfect safety. Their astonishment
+when they finally wake up after their long slumber, and find
+themselves inspecting the British public, as introduced to
+them by Mr. Farini, through a sheet of plate-glass, must
+be profound and interesting.</p>
+
+<p>In England itself, on the other hand, we have at
+least one kind of fish which exemplifies the opposite or
+migratory solution of the dry pond problem, and that is
+our familiar friend the common eel. The ways of eels are
+indeed mysterious, for nobody has ever yet succeeded in
+<a name="page310" id="page310"></a>discovering where, when, or how they manage to spawn;
+nobody has ever yet seen an eel's egg, or caught a
+female eel in the spawning condition, or even observed
+a really adult male or female specimen of perfect development.
+All the eels ever found in fresh water are
+immature and undeveloped creatures. But eels do certainly
+spawn somewhere or other in the deep sea, and
+every year, in the course of the summer, flocks of young
+ones, known as elvers, ascend the rivers in enormous
+quantities, like a vast army under numberless leaders. At
+each tributary or affluent, be it river, brook, stream, or
+ditch, a proportionate detachment of the main body is
+given off to explore the various branches, while the
+central force wriggles its way up the chief channel, regardless
+of obstacles, with undiminished vigour. When the
+young elvers come to a weir, a wall, a floodgate, or a
+lasher, they simply squirm their way up the perpendicular
+barrier with indescribable wrigglings, as if they were
+wholly unacquainted, physically as well as mentally, with
+Newton's magnificent discovery of gravitation. Nothing
+stops them; they go wherever water is to be found; and
+though millions perish hopelessly in the attempt, millions
+more survive in the end to attain their goal in the upper
+reaches. They even seem to scent ponds or lakes mysteriously,
+at a distance, and will strike boldly straight across
+country, to sheets of water wholly cut off from communication
+with the river which forms their chief highway.</p>
+
+<p>The full-grown eels are also given to journeying across
+country in a more sober, sedate, and dignified manner, as
+becomes fish which have fully arrived at years, or rather
+months, of discretion. When the ponds in which they
+live dry up in summer, they make in a bee-line for the
+nearest sheet of fresh water, whose direction and distance
+they appear to know intuitively, through some strange
+<a name="page311" id="page311"></a>instinctive geographical faculty. On their way across
+country, they do not despise the succulent rat, whom they
+swallow whole when caught with great gusto. To keep
+their gills wet during these excursions, eels have the power
+of distending the skin on each side of the neck, just below
+the head, so as to form a big pouch or swelling. This
+pouch they fill with water, to carry a good supply along
+with them, until they reach the ponds for which they are
+making. It is the pouch alone that enables eels to live so
+long out of water under all circumstances, and so incidentally
+exposes them to the disagreeable experience of getting
+skinned alive, which it is to be feared still forms the fate
+of most of those that fall into the clutches of the human
+species.</p>
+
+<p>A far more singular walking fish than any of these is
+the odd creature that rejoices (unfortunately) in the very
+classical surname of Periophthalmus, which is, being interpreted,
+Stare-about. (If he had a recognised English name
+of his own, I would gladly give it; but as he hasn't, and
+as it is clearly necessary to call him something, I fear we
+must stick to the somewhat alarming scientific nomenclature.)
+Periophthalmus, then, is an odd fish of the
+tropical Pacific shores, with a pair of very distinct forelegs
+(theoretically described as modified pectoral fins), and with
+two goggle eyes, which he can protrude at pleasure right
+outside the sockets, so as to look in whatever direction he
+chooses, without even taking the trouble to turn his
+head to left or right, backward or forward. At ebb tide
+this singular peripatetic goby literally walks straight
+out of the water, and promenades the bare beach erect
+on two legs, in search of small crabs and other stray
+marine animals left behind by the receding waters. If you
+try to catch him, he hops away briskly much like a frog,
+and stares back at you grimly over his left shoulder, with
+<a name="page312" id="page312"></a>his squinting optics. So completely adapted is he for this
+amphibious long-shore existence, that his big eyes, unlike
+those of most other fish, are formed for seeing in the air
+as well as in the water. Nothing can be more ludicrous
+than to watch him suddenly thrusting these very movable
+orbs right out of their sockets like a pair of telescopes, and
+twisting them round in all directions so as to see in front,
+behind, on top, and below, in one delightful circular sweep.</p>
+
+<p>There is also a certain curious tropical American carp
+which, though it hardly deserves to be considered in the
+strictest sense as a fish out of water, yet manages to fall
+nearly half-way under that peculiar category, for it always
+swims with its head partly above the surface and partly
+below. But the funniest thing in this queer arrangement
+is the fact that one half of each eye is out in the air and
+the other half is beneath in the water. Accordingly, the
+eye is divided horizontally by a dark strip into two distinct
+and unlike portions, the upper one of which has a pupil
+adapted to vision in the air alone, while the lower is
+adapted to seeing in the water only. The fish, in fact,
+always swims with its eye half out of the water, and it can
+see as well on dry land as in its native ocean. Its name is
+Anableps, but in all probability it does not wish the fact to
+be generally known.</p>
+
+<p>The flying fish are fish out of water in a somewhat
+different and more transitory sense. Their a&euml;rial excursions
+are brief and rapid; they can only fly a very little
+way, and have soon to take once more for safety to their
+own more natural and permanent element. More than
+forty kinds of the family are known, in appearance very
+much like English herrings, but with the front fins
+expanded and modified into veritable wings. It is fashionable
+nowadays among naturalists to assert that the flying
+fish don't fly; that they merely jump horizontally out of
+<a name="page313" id="page313"></a>the water with a powerful impulse, and fall again as soon
+as the force of the first impetus is entirely spent. When
+men endeavour to persuade you to such folly, believe them
+not. For my own part, I have <i>seen</i> the flying fish fly&mdash;deliberately
+fly, and flutter, and rise again, and change the
+direction of their flight in mid-air, exactly after the fashion
+of a big dragonfly. If the other people who have watched
+them haven't succeeded in seeing them fly, that is their
+own fault, or at least their own misfortune; perhaps their
+eyes weren't quick enough to catch the rapid, though to me
+perfectly recognisable, hovering and fluttering of the gauze-like
+wings; but I have seen them myself, and I maintain
+that on such a question one piece of positive evidence is a
+great deal better than a hundred negative. The testimony
+of all the witnesses who didn't see the murder committed
+is as nothing compared with the single testimony of the
+one man who really did see it. And in this case I have
+met with many other quick observers who fully agreed with
+me, against the weight of scientific opinion, that they have
+seen the flying fish really fly with their own eyes, and no
+mistake about it. The German professors, indeed, all think
+otherwise; but then the German professors all wear green
+spectacles, which are the outward and visible sign of 'blinded
+eyesight poring over miserable books.' The unsophisticated
+vision of the noble British seaman is unanimously
+with me on the matter of the reality of the fishes' flight.</p>
+
+<p>Another group of very interesting fish out of water are
+the flying gurnards, common enough in the Mediterranean
+and the tropical Atlantic. They are much heavier and bigger
+creatures than the true flying fish of the herring type,
+being often a foot and a half long, and their wings are
+much larger in proportion, though not, I think, really so
+powerful as those of their pretty little silvery rivals. All
+the flying fish fly only of necessity, not from choice. They
+<a name="page314" id="page314"></a>leave the water when pursued by their enemies, or when
+frightened by the rapid approach of a big steamer. So
+swiftly do they fly, however, that they can far outstrip a
+ship going at the rate of ten knots an hour; and I have
+often watched one keep ahead of a great Pacific liner under
+full steam for many minutes together in quick successive
+flights of three or four hundred feet each. Oddly enough,
+they can fly further against the wind than before it&mdash;a fact
+acknowledged even by the spectacled Germans themselves,
+and very hard indeed to reconcile with the orthodox belief
+that they are not flying at all, but only jumping. I don't
+know whether the flying gurnards are good eating or not;
+but the silvery flying fish are caught for market (sad desecration
+of the poetry of nature!) in the Windward Islands,
+and when nicely fried in egg and bread-crumb are really
+quite as good for practical purposes as smelts or whiting or
+any other prosaic European substitute.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, it will be clear, I think, to the impartial
+reader from this rapid survey that the helplessness and
+awkwardness of a fish out of water has been much exaggerated
+by the thoughtless generalisation of unscientific
+humanity. Granting, for argument's sake, that most fish
+prefer the water, as a matter of abstract predilection, to
+the dry land, it must be admitted <i>per contra</i> that many
+fish cut a much better figure on terra firma than most of
+their critics themselves would cut in mid-ocean. There
+are fish that wriggle across country intrepidly with the
+dexterity and agility of the most accomplished snakes;
+there are fish that walk about on open sand-banks, semi-erect
+on two legs, as easily as lizards; there are fish that
+hop and skip on tail and fins in a manner that the celebrated
+jumping frog himself might have observed with envy; and
+there are fish that fly through the air of heaven with a
+grace and swiftness that would put to shame innumerable
+<a name="page315" id="page315"></a>species among their feathered competitors. Nay, there are
+even fish, like some kinds of eels and the African mud-fish,
+that scarcely live in the water at all, but merely frequent
+wet and marshy places, where they lie snugly in the soft
+ooze and damp earth that line the bottom. If I have only
+succeeded, therefore, in relieving the mind of one sensitive
+and retiring fish from the absurd obloquy cast upon its
+appearance when it ventures away for awhile from its
+proper element, then, in the pathetic and prophetic words
+borrowed from a thousand uncut prefaces, this work will
+not, I trust, have been written in vain.<a name="page316" id="page316"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part19" id="part19"><i>THE FIRST POTTER</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Collective humanity owes a great debt of gratitude to the
+first potter. Before his days the art of boiling, though in
+one sense very simple and primitive indeed, was in another
+sense very complex, cumbersome, and lengthy. The unsophisticated
+savage, having duly speared and killed his
+antelope, proceeded to light a roaring fire, with flint or
+drill, by the side of some convenient lake or river in his
+tropical jungle. Then he dug a big hole in the soft mud
+close to the water's edge, and let the water (rather muddy)
+percolate into it, or sometimes even he plastered over its
+bottom with puddled clay. After that, he heated some
+smooth round stones red hot in the fire close by, and
+drawing them out gingerly between two pieces of stick,
+dropped them one by one, spluttering and fizzing, into his
+improvised basin or kettle. This, of course, made the
+water in the hole boil; and the unsophisticated savage
+thereupon thrust into it his joint of antelope, repeating the
+process over and over again until the sodden meat was
+completely seethed to taste on the outside. If one application
+was not sufficient, he gnawed off the cooked meat from
+the surface with his stout teeth, innocent as yet of the
+dentist's art, and plunged the underdone core back again,
+till it exactly suited his not over-delicate or dainty fancy.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, the primitive savage, unversed as he was in
+pastes and glazes, in moulds and ornaments, did not pass
+<a name="page317" id="page317"></a>his life entirely devoid of cups and platters. Coconut
+shell and calabash rind, horn of ox and skull of enemy,
+bamboo-joint and capacious rhomb-shell, all alike, no doubt,
+supplied him with congenial implements for drink or storage.
+Like Eve in the Miltonic Paradise, there lacked him not
+fit vessels pure; picking some luscious tropical fruit, the
+savoury pulp he chewed, and in the rind still as he thirsted
+scooped the brimming stream. This was satisfactory as
+far as it went, of course, but it was not pottery. He
+couldn't boil his joint for dinner in coconut or skull; he
+had to do it with stone pot-boilers, in a rude kettle of
+puddled clay.</p>
+
+<p>But at last one day, that inspired barbarian, the first
+potter, hit by accident upon his grand discovery. He had
+carried some water in a big calabash&mdash;the hard shell of a
+tropical fruit whose pulpy centre can be easily scooped out&mdash;and
+a happy thought suddenly struck him: why not put
+the calabash to boil upon the fire with a little clay smeared
+outside it? The savage is conservative, but he loves to save
+trouble. He tried the experiment, and it succeeded admirably.
+The water boiled, and the calabash was not burnt
+or broken. Our nameless philosopher took the primitive
+vessel off the fire with a forked branch and looked at it
+critically with the delighted eyes of a first inventor. A
+wonderful change had suddenly come over it. He had
+blundered accidentally upon the art of pottery. For what
+is this that has happened to the clay? It went in soft,
+brown, and muddy; it has come out hard, red, and stone-like.
+The first potter ruminated and wondered. He didn't
+fully realise, no doubt, what he had actually done; but he
+knew he had invented a means by which you could put a
+calabash upon a fire and keep it there without burning or
+bursting. That, after all, was at least something.</p>
+
+<p>All this, you say (which, in effect, is Dr. Tylor's view),
+<a name="page318" id="page318"></a>is purely hypothetical. In one sense, yes; but not in
+another. We know that most savage races still use natural
+vessels, made of coconuts, gourds, or calabashes, for everyday
+purposes of carrying water; and we also know that all
+the simplest and earliest pottery is moulded on the shape of
+just such natural jars and bottles. The fact and the theory
+based on it are no novelties. Early in the sixteenth century,
+indeed, the Sieur Gonneville, skipper of Honfleur, sailing
+round the Cape of Good Hope, made his way right across
+the Southern Ocean to some vague point of South America
+where he found the people still just in the intermediate
+stage between the use of natural vessels and the invention
+of pottery. For these amiable savages (name and habitat
+unknown) had wooden pots 'plastered with a kind of clay
+a good finger thick, which prevents the fire from burning
+them.' Here we catch industrial evolution in the very act,
+and the potter's art in its first infancy, fossilised and
+crystallised, as it were, in an embryo condition, and fixed
+for us immovably by the unprogressive conservatism of a
+savage tribe. It was this curious early observation of evolving
+keramic art that made Goguet&mdash;an anthropologist born
+out of due season&mdash;first hit upon that luminous theory of
+the origin of pottery now all but universally accepted.</p>
+
+<p>Plenty of evidence to the same effect is now forthcoming
+for the modern inquirer. Among the ancient monuments
+of the Mississippi valley, Squier and Davis found
+the kilns in which the primitive pottery had been baked;
+and among their relics were partially burnt pots retaining
+in part the rinds of the gourds or calabashes on which they
+had been actually modelled. Along the Gulf of Mexico
+gourds were also used to give shape to the pot; and all
+over the world, even to this day, the gourd form is a very
+common one for pottery of all sorts, thus pointing back,
+dimly and curiously, to the original mode in which fictile
+<a name="page319" id="page319"></a>ware generally came to be invented. In Fiji and in many
+parts of Africa vessels modelled upon natural forms are
+still universal. Of course all such pots as these are purely
+hand-made; the invention of the potter's wheel, now so
+indissolubly associated in all our minds with the production
+of earthenware, belongs to an infinitely later and almost
+modern period.</p>
+
+<p>And that consideration naturally suggests the fundamental
+question, When did the first potter live? The
+world (as Sir Henry Taylor has oracularly told us) knows
+nothing of its greatest men; and the very name of the
+father of all potters has been utterly forgotten in the lapse
+of ages. Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, one
+may reasonably doubt whether there was ever actually any
+one single man on whom one could definitely lay one's
+finger, and say with confidence, Here we have the first
+potter. Pottery, no doubt, like most other things, grew by
+imperceptible degrees from wholly vague and rudimentary
+beginnings. Just as there were steam-engines before Watt,
+and locomotives before Stephenson, so there were pots before
+the first potter. Many men must have discovered separately,
+by half-unconscious trials, that a coat of mud rudely
+plastered over the bottom of a calabash prevented it from
+catching fire and spilling its contents; other men slowly
+learned to plaster the mud higher and ever higher up the
+sides; and yet others gradually introduced and patented
+new improvements for wholly encasing the entire cup in an
+inch thickness of carefully kneaded clay. Bit by bit the
+invention grew, like all great inventions, without any inventor.
+Thus the question of the date of the first potter
+practically resolves itself into the simpler question of the
+date of the earliest known pottery.</p>
+
+<p>Did pal&aelig;olithic man, that antique naked crouching
+savage who hunted the mammoth, the reindeer, and the
+<a name="page320" id="page320"></a>cave-bear among the frozen fields of interglacial Gaul and
+Britain&mdash;did pal&aelig;olithic man himself, in his rude rock-shelters,
+possess a knowledge of the art of pottery? That
+is a question which has been much debated amongst
+arch&aelig;ologists, and which cannot even now be considered
+as finally settled before the tribunal of science. He must
+have drunk out of something or other, but whether he
+drank out of earthenware cups is still uncertain. It is
+pretty clear that the earliest drinking vessels used in Europe
+were neither bowls of earthenware nor shells of fruits, for
+the cold climate of interglacial times did not permit the
+growth in northern latitudes of such large natural vessels
+as gourds, calabashes, bamboos, or coco-nuts. In all
+probability the horns of the aurochs and the wild cattle,
+and the capacious skull of the fellow-man whose bones he
+had just picked at his ease for his cannibal supper, formed
+the aboriginal goblets and basins of the old black European
+savage. A curious verbal relic of the use of horns as
+drinking-cups survives indeed down to almost modern
+times in the Greek word <i>keramic</i>, still commonly applied
+to the art of pottery, and derived, of course, from <i>keras</i>, a
+horn; while as to skulls, not only were they frequently
+used as drinking-cups by our Scandinavian ancestors, but
+there still exists a very singular intermediate American
+vessel in which the clay has actually been moulded on a
+human skull as model, just as other vessels have been
+moulded on calabashes or other suitable vegetable shapes.</p>
+
+<p>Still, the balance of evidence certainly seems to show
+that a little very rude and almost shapeless hand-made
+pottery has really been discovered amongst the buried
+caves where pal&aelig;olithic men made for ages their chief
+dwelling-places. Fragments of earthenware occurred in
+the Hohefels cave near Ulm, in company with the bones
+of reindeer, cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had
+<a name="page321" id="page321"></a>doubtless been duly boiled, a hundred thousand years ago,
+by the intelligent producer of those identical sun-dried
+fleshpots; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his possession
+portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel,
+from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of
+the hand that moulded the clay are still clearly distinguishable
+on the baked earthenware. That is the great
+merit of pottery, viewed as an historical document; it
+retains its shape and peculiarities unaltered through
+countless centuries, for the future edification of unborn
+antiquaries. <i>Litera scripta manet</i>, and so does baked
+pottery. The hand itself that formed that rude bowl has
+long since mouldered away, flesh and bone alike, into the
+soil around it; but the print of its fingers, indelibly fixed
+by fire into the hardened clay, remains for us still to tell
+the story of that early triumph of nascent keramics.</p>
+
+<p>The relics of pal&aelig;olithic pottery are, however, so very
+fragmentary, and the circumstances under which they
+have been discovered so extremely doubtful, that many
+cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now have
+nothing to say to the suspected impostors. Among the
+remains of the newer Stone Age, on the other hand, comparatively
+abundant keramic specimens have been unearthed,
+without doubt or cavil, from the long barrows&mdash;the
+burial-places of the early Mongoloid race, now represented
+by the Finns and Lapps, which occupied the
+whole of Western Europe before the advent of the Aryan
+vanguard. One of the best bits is a curious wide-mouthed,
+semi-globular bowl from Norton Bavant, in Wiltshire,
+whose singular shape suggests almost immediately the
+idea that it must at least have been based, if not actually
+modelled, upon a human skull. Its rim is rough and quite
+irregular, and there is no trace of ornamentation of any
+sort; a fact quite in accordance with all the other facts we
+<a name="page322" id="page322"></a>know about the men of the newer Stone Age, who were
+far less artistic and &aelig;sthetic in every way than their ruder
+predecessors of the interglacial epoch.</p>
+
+<p>Ornamentation, when it does begin to appear, arises at
+first in a strictly practical and unintentional manner.
+Later examples elsewhere show us by analogy how it first
+came into existence. The Indians of the Ohio seem to
+have modelled their pottery in bags or nettings made of
+coarse thread or twisted bark. Those of the Mississippi
+moulded them in baskets of willow or splints. When the
+moist clay thus shaped and marked by the indentations of
+the mould was baked in the kiln, it of course retained the
+pretty dappling it received from the interlaced and woven
+thrums, which were burnt off in the process of firing.
+Thus a rude sort of natural diaper ornament was set up,
+to which the eye soon became accustomed, and which it
+learned to regard as necessary for beauty. Hence, wherever
+newer and more improved methods of modelling came into
+use, there would arise an instinctive tendency on the part
+of the early potter to imitate the familiar marking by artificial
+means. Dr. Klemm long ago pointed out that the
+oldest German fictile vases have an ornamentation in which
+plaiting is imitated by incised lines. 'What was no longer
+wanted as a necessity,' he says, 'was kept up as an ornament
+alone.'</p>
+
+<p>Another very simple form of ornamentation, reappearing
+everywhere all the world over on primitive bowls and vases,
+is the rope pattern, a line or string-course over the whole
+surface or near the mouth of the vessel. Many of the
+indented patterns on early British pottery have been produced,
+as Sir Daniel Wilson has pointed out, by the close
+impress of twisted cord on the wet clay. Sometimes these
+cords seem to have been originally left on the clay in the
+process of baking, and used as a mould; at other times
+<a name="page323" id="page323"></a>they may have been employed afterwards as handles, as is
+still done in the case of some South African pots: and,
+when the rope handle wore off, the pattern made by its
+indentation on the plastic material before sun-baking
+would still remain as pure ornament. Probably the very
+common idea of string-course ornamentation just below
+the mouth or top of vases and bowls has its origin in this
+early and almost universal practice.</p>
+
+<p>When other conscious and intentional ornamentation
+began to supersede these rude natural and undesigned
+patterns, they were at first mere rough attempts on the
+part of the early potter to imitate, with the simple means
+at his disposal, the characteristic marks of the ropes or
+wickerwork by which the older vessels were necessarily
+surrounded. He had gradually learned, as Mr. Tylor well
+puts it, that clay alone or with some mixture of sand is
+capable of being used without any extraneous support for
+the manufacture of drinking and cooking vessels. He
+therefore began to model rudely thin globular bowls with
+his own hands, dispensing with the aid of thongs or
+basketwork. But he still naturally continued to imitate
+the original shapes&mdash;the gourd, the calabash, the plaited
+net, the round basket; and his eye required the familiar
+decoration which naturally resulted from the use of some
+one or other among these primitive methods. So he tried
+his hand at deliberate ornament in his own simple untutored
+fashion.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite literally his hand, indeed, that he tried at
+first; for the earliest decoration upon paleolithic pottery
+is made by pressing the fingers into the clay so as to produce
+a couple of deep parallel furrows, which is the sole
+attempt at ornament on M. Joly's Nabrigas specimen;
+while the urns and drinking-cups taken from our English
+long barrows are adorned with really pretty and effective
+<a name="page324" id="page324"></a>patterns, produced by pressing the tip of the finger and the
+nail into the plastic material. It is wonderful what capital
+and varied results you can get with no more recondite
+graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes turned front
+downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes
+used to egg up the moist clay into small jagged and relieved
+designs. Most of these patterns are more or less
+plaitlike in arrangement, evidently suggested to the mind
+of the potter by the primitive marks of the old basketwork.
+But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into
+his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers,
+and the flint knife itself, with which he incised more
+regular patterns, straight or zigzag lines, rows of dots,
+squares and triangles, concentric circles, and even the
+mystic cross and swastika, the sacred symbols of yet unborn
+and undreamt-of religions. As yet, there was no direct
+imitation of plant or animal forms; once only, on a single
+specimen from a Swiss lake dwelling, are the stem and
+veins of a leaf dimly figured on the handiwork of the European
+prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form, as pattern
+merely, had begun to exist; imitative work as such was
+yet unknown, or almost unknown, to the eastern hemisphere.</p>
+
+<p>In America, it was quite otherwise. The forgotten
+people who built the mounds of Ohio and the great tumuli
+of the Mississippi valley decorated their pottery not only
+with animal figures, such as snakes, fish, frogs, and
+turtles, but also with human heads and faces, many of
+them evidently modelled from the life, and some of them
+quite unmistakably genuine portraits. On one such vase,
+found in Arkansas, and figured by the Marquis de Nadaillac
+in his excellent work on Prehistoric America, the
+ornamentation consists (in true Red Indian taste) of
+skeleton hands, interspersed with crossbones; and the
+delicacy and anatomical correctness of the detail inevitably
+<a name="page325" id="page325"></a>suggest the idea that the unknown artist must have worked
+with the actual hand of his slaughtered enemy lying for
+a model on the table before him. Much of the early
+American pottery is also coloured as well as figured, and
+that with considerable real taste; the pigments were
+applied, however, after the baking, and so possess little
+stability or permanence of character. But pots and vases
+of these advanced styles have got so far ahead of the first
+potter that we have really little or no business with them
+in this paper.</p>
+
+<p>Prehistoric European pottery has never a spout, but
+it often indulges in some simple form of ear or handle.
+The very ancient British bowl from Bavant Long Barrow&mdash;produced
+by that old squat Finnlike race which preceded
+the 'Ancient Britons' of our old-fashioned school-books&mdash;has
+two ear-shaped handles projecting just below the rim,
+exactly as in the modern form of vessel known as a crock,
+and still familiarly used for household purposes. This long
+survival of a common domestic shape from the most remote
+prehistoric antiquity to our own time is very significant
+and very interesting. Many of the old British pots have
+also a hole or two holes pierced through them, near the
+top, evidently for the purpose of putting in a string or rope
+by way of a handle. With the round barrows, which
+belong to the Bronze Age, and contain the remains of a
+later and more civilised Celtic population, we get far more
+advanced forms of pottery. Burial here is preceded by
+cremation, and the ashes are enclosed in urns, many of
+which are very beautiful in form and exquisitely decorated.
+Cremation, as Professor Rolleston used feelingly
+to plead, is bad for the comparative anatomist and ethnographer,
+but it is passing well for the collector of pottery.
+Where burning exists as a common practice, there urns
+are frequent, and pottery an art in great request. Drinking-cups
+<a name="page326" id="page326"></a>and perforated incense burners accompany the
+dead in the round barrows; but the use of the potter's
+wheel is still unknown, and all the urns and vases belonging
+to this age are still hand-moulded.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious reflection, however, that in spite of all
+the later improvements in the fictile art&mdash;in spite of wheels
+and moulds, pastes and glazes, stamps and pigments, and
+all the rest of it&mdash;the most primitive methods of the first
+potter are still in use in many countries, side by side with
+the most finished products of modern European skill and
+industry. I have in my own possession some West Indian
+calabashes, cut and decorated under my own eye by a
+Jamaican negro for his personal use, and bought from him
+by me for the smallest coin there current&mdash;calabashes
+carved round the edge through the rind with a rude
+string-course, exactly like the common rope pattern of
+prehistoric pottery. I have seen the same Jamaican
+negroes kneading their hand-made porous earthenware
+beside a tropical stream, moulding it on fruits or shaping
+it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and drying
+it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily-formed
+kiln of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric
+types, locally known by the quaint West African name of
+'yabbas.' Many of these yabbas, if buried in the ground
+and exposed to damp and frost, till they almost lost the
+effects of the baking, would be quite indistinguishable,
+even by the skilled arch&aelig;ologist, from the actual handicraft
+of the pal&aelig;olithic potter. The West Indian negroes
+brought these simple arts with them from their African
+home, where they have been handed down in unbroken
+continuity from the very earliest age of fictile industry.
+New and better methods have slowly grown up everywhere
+around them, but these simplest, earliest, and easiest plans
+have survived none the less for the most ordinary domestic
+<a name="page327" id="page327"></a>uses, and will survive for ages yet, as long as there
+remain any out-of-the-way places, remote from the main
+streams of civilised commerce. Thus, while hundreds of
+thousands of years, in all probability, separate us now
+from the ancient days of the first potter, it is yet possible
+for us to see the first potter's own methods and principles
+exemplified under our very eyes by people who derive
+them in unbroken succession from the direct teaching of
+that long-forgotten prehistoric savage.<a name="page328" id="page328"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part20" id="part20"><i>THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like
+the poet, is born and not made. If you wish to apply the
+recipe for producing him, it is unfortunately necessary to
+set out by selecting beforehand his grandfathers and
+grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of those
+that precede him. Nevertheless, there <i>is</i> a recipe for the
+production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who
+ever yet adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours
+has been produced, I believe, in strict accordance with its
+unwritten rules and unknown regulations. In other words,
+geniuses don't crop up irregularly anywhere, 'quite
+promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their
+adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain
+fairly demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they
+are, in short, a natural product, not a <i>lusus natur&aelig;</i>. You
+get them only under sundry relatively definite and settled
+conditions; and though it isn't (unfortunately) quite true
+that the conditions will always infallibly bring forth the
+genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be brought
+forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes
+of thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet
+from a family of stockbrokers who have intermarried with
+the daughters of an eminent alderman, or make a philosopher
+out of a country grocer's eldest son whose amiable
+mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and
+sugar.<a name="page329" id="page329"></a></p>
+
+<p>In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for
+action, I am going to start even by getting rid once for all
+(so far as we are here concerned) of that famous but misleading
+old distinction between genius and talent. It is
+really a distinction without a difference. I suppose there
+is probably no subject under heaven on which so much
+high-flown stuff and nonsense has been talked and written
+as upon this well-known and much-debated hair-splitting
+discrimination. It is just like that other great distinction
+between fancy and imagination, about which poets and
+essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the
+present century, until at last one fine day the world at
+large woke up suddenly to the unpleasant consciousness
+that it had been wasting its time over a non-existent
+difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all
+absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert
+that talent and genius are exactly one and the same thing;
+but I do assert that genius is simply talent raised to a
+slightly higher power; it differs from it not in kind but
+merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no
+drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the
+two. You might just as well try to classify all mankind
+into tall men and short men, and then endeavour to prove
+that a real distinction existed in nature between your two
+artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in height
+and in ability by infinitesimal gradations: some men are
+very short, others rather short, others medium-sized,
+others tall, and yet others again of portentous stature like
+Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So, too, some men are
+idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid, some
+are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever,
+and some geniuses. But genius is only the culminating
+point of ordinary cleverness, and if you were to try and
+draw up a list of all the real geniuses in the last hundred
+<a name="page330" id="page330"></a>years, no two people could ever be found to agree among
+themselves as to which should be included and which
+excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard
+Kingsley and Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I
+have heard them both absolutely denied every sort of
+literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a poor creature,
+and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty windbag.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast
+gulf which separates genius from mere talent has been
+published and set abroad by those fortunate persons who
+fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under the former highly
+satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short, real
+or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify
+itself at the expense of poor, common-place, inferior talent.
+There is a certain type of great man in particular which is
+never tired of dilating upon the noble supremacy of its own
+greatness over the spurious imitation. It offers incense
+obliquely to itself in offering it generically to the class
+genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There are great
+men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor
+Hugo, the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose
+perpetually as great men; they cry aloud to the poor silly
+public so far beneath them, 'I am a genius! Admire me!
+Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on an
+a&euml;rial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and
+battling multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not
+unfortunately geniuses, are surely entitled to enter occasionally
+our humble protest. Our contention is that the genius
+only differs from the man of ability as the man of ability
+differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent man
+from the worthy person of sound common sense. The
+sliding scale of brains has infinite gradations; and the
+gradations merge insensibly into one another. There is no
+<a name="page331" id="page331"></a>gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here as elsewhere,
+throughout the whole range of her manifold productions,
+our common mother <i>saltum non facit</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The question before the house, then, narrows itself
+down finally to this; what are the conditions under which
+exceptional ability or high talent is likely to arise?</p>
+
+<p>Now, I suppose everybody is ready to admit that
+two complete born fools are not at all likely to become the
+proud father and happy mother of a Shakespeare or a
+Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow
+that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable
+chance arise among the South African Bushmen, who cannot
+understand the arduous arithmetical proposition that
+two and two make four. No amount of education or
+careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the most
+profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who
+cannot even comprehend an English drawing of a dog or
+horse, into a respectable president of the Royal Academy.
+It is equally unlikely (as it seems to me) that a Mendelssohn
+or a Beethoven could be raised in the bosom of a family all
+of whose members on either side were incapable (like a
+distinguished modern English poet) of discriminating any
+one note in an octave from any other. Such leaps as these
+would be little short of pure miracles. They would be
+equivalent to the sudden creation, without antecedent
+cause, of a whole vast system of nerves and nerve-centres
+in the prodigious brain of some infant phenomenon.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow
+fashionable talk about hereditary genius&mdash;I don't mean, of
+course, the talk of our Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap
+drawing-room philosophy of easy sciolists who can't understand
+them&mdash;is itself fully as absurd in its own way as the
+idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is
+no explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is
+<a name="page332" id="page332"></a>hereditary. You only put the difficulty one place back.
+Granting that young Alastor Jones is a budding poet
+because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a poet before
+him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start
+with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing;
+it begins by positing the existence of one original genius,
+absolutely unaccounted for, and then proceeds blandly to
+point out that the other geniuses derive their characteristics
+from him, by virtue of descent, just as all the sons
+of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports
+the earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but
+who, pray, supports the tortoise? If the first chicken
+came out of an egg, what was the origin of the hen that
+laid it?</p>
+
+<p>Besides, the allegation as it stands is not even a true
+one. Genius, as we actually know it, is by no means
+hereditary. The great man is not necessarily the son of a
+great man or the father of a great man: often enough, he
+stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of
+baser metal on either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare
+woolstapler, of Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, was no
+doubt an eminently respectable person in his own trade,
+and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor of his native
+town once upon a time: but, so far as is known, none of
+his literary remains are at all equal to <i>Macbeth</i> or <i>Othello</i>.
+Parson Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire,
+may have preached a great many very excellent and
+convincing discourses, but there is no evidence of any sort
+that he ever attempted to write the <i>Principia</i>. <i>Per contra</i>
+the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though
+of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed conspicuously
+in ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences
+and Mercies amongst whom their lot was cast; while the
+Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not seem to bud out
+<a name="page333" id="page333"></a>spontaneously into great commanders in the second generation.
+True, there are numerous cases such as that of the
+Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the
+Caracci, or the Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more,
+where the genius, once developed, has persisted for two
+or three, or even four lives: but these instances really cast
+no light at all upon our central problem, which is just this&mdash;How
+does the genius come in the first place to be developed
+at all from parents in whom individually no particular
+genius is ultimately to be seen?</p>
+
+<p>Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages
+in the earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we
+shall get really next to no personal peculiarities or idiosyncrasies
+of any sort amongst them. Every one of them
+will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good scalper and
+a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of
+labour, and the other troublesome technicalities of our
+modern political economy, are as unknown among such
+folk as the modern nuisance of dressing for dinner. Each
+man performs all the functions of a citizen on his own
+account, because there is nobody else to perform them for
+him&mdash;the medium of exchange known as hard cash has
+not, so far as he is concerned, yet been invented; and he
+performs them well, such as they are, because he inherits
+from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and muscle in
+these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among
+his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a
+bird, or were hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint
+arrowheads, died out of starvation, leaving no representatives.
+The beneficent institution of the poor law does not
+exist among savages, in order to enable the helpless and
+incompetent to bring up families in their own image.
+There, survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately
+benevolent and useful end in its own directly cruel
+<a name="page334" id="page334"></a>and relentless way, cutting off ruthlessly the stupid or the
+weak, and allowing only the strong and the cunning to
+become the parents of future generations.</p>
+
+<p>Hence every young savage, being descended on both
+sides from ancestors who in their own way perfectly fulfilled
+the ideal of complete savagery&mdash;were good hunters, good
+fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen of bow or boomerang&mdash;inherits
+from these his successful predecessors all those
+qualities of eye and hand and brain and nervous system
+which go to make up the abstractly Admirable Crichton of
+a savage. The qualities in question are ensured in him by
+two separate means. In the first place, survival of the
+fittest takes care that he and all his ancestors shall have
+duly possessed them to some extent to start with; in the
+second place, constant practice from boyhood upward
+increases and develops the original faculty. Thus savages,
+as a rule, display absolutely astonishing ability and cleverness
+in the few lines which they have made their own.
+Their cunning in hunting, their patience in fishing, their
+skill in trapping, their infinite dodges for deceiving and
+cajoling the animals or enemies that they need to outwit,
+have moved the wonder and admiration of innumerable
+travellers. The savage, in fact, is not stupid: in his own
+way his cleverness is extraordinary. But the way is a very
+narrow and restricted one, and all savages of the same race
+walk in it exactly alike. Cunning they have, skill they
+have, instinct they have, to a most marvellous degree; but of
+spontaneity, originality, initiative, variability, not a single
+spark. Know one savage of a tribe and you know them all.
+Their cleverness is not the cleverness of the individual
+man: it is the inherited and garnered intelligence or instinct
+of the entire race.</p>
+
+<p>How, then, do originality, diversity, individuality,
+genius, begin to come in? In this way, as it seems to
+<a name="page335" id="page335"></a>me, looking at the matter both <i>&agrave; priori</i> and by the light
+of actual experience.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose a country inhabited in its interior by a savage
+race of hunters and fighters, and on its seaboard by an
+equally savage race of pirates and fishermen, like the
+Dyaks of Borneo. Each of these races, if left to itself, will
+develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage
+cleverness. Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will
+adapt itself to its particular environment. The people
+of the interior will acquire and inherit a wonderful facility
+in spearing monkeys and knocking down parrots; while
+the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers of
+canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one
+another's villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates.
+These original differences of position and function will
+necessarily entail a thousand minor differences of intelligence
+and skill in a thousand different ways. For example,
+the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make themselves
+canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate
+their handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the
+&aelig;sthetic taste thus aroused will, no doubt, finally lead
+them to adorn the fa&ccedil;ades of their wooden huts with the
+grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed at
+measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh,
+indeed, at these na&iuml;ve expressions of the nascent artistic
+and decorative faculties in the savage breast, but the
+&aelig;sthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate them at
+their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous
+precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.</p>
+
+<p>Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours
+continue to remain distinct and separate, it is not likely
+that idiosyncrasies or varieties to any great extent will
+arise among them. But, as soon as you permit intermarriage
+<a name="page336" id="page336"></a>to take place, the inherited and developed
+qualities of the one race will be liable to crop up in the
+next generation, diversely intermixed in every variety of
+degree with the inherited and developed qualities of the
+other. The children may take after either parent in any
+combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted
+an apparently capricious element of individuality: a power
+on the part of the half-breeds of differing from one another
+to an extent quite impossible in the two original homogeneous
+societies. In one word, you have made possible
+the future existence of diversity in character.</p>
+
+<p>If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage
+communities to our own very complex and heterogeneous
+world, what do we find? An endless variety of soldiers,
+sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers, candlestick
+makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a
+certain rough number of classes, each with its own developed
+and inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world is
+made up, like the world of ancient Egypt and of modern
+India, of an immense variety of separate castes&mdash;not,
+indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those
+extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly hereditary
+in character, and given on the average to a tolerably
+close system of intermarriage within the caste.</p>
+
+<p>For example, there is the agricultural labourer caste&mdash;the
+Hodge Chawbacon of urban humour, who in his military
+avatar also reappears as Tommy Atkins, a little transfigured,
+but at bottom identical&mdash;the alternative aspect
+of a single undivided central reality. Hodge for the
+most part lives and dies in his ancestral village: marries
+Mary, the daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and
+begets assorted Hodges and Marys in vast quantities, all
+of the same pattern, to replenish the earth in the next
+generation. There you have a very well-marked hereditary
+<a name="page337" id="page337"></a>caste, little given to intermixture with others, and
+from whose members, however recruited by fresh blood,
+the object of our quest, the Divine Genius, is very unlikely
+to find his point of origin. Then there is the town
+artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from the ranks of
+the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active,
+enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many
+generations standing in various forms of handicraft. This
+is a far higher and more promising type of humanity, from
+the judicious intermixture of whose best elements we are
+apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our Telfords,
+and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we
+find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only
+rarely blossoms out, under favourable circumstances on
+both sides, into a stray Cobbett or an almost miraculous
+miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of more
+varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense
+variety of brain elements are called into play by their diverse
+functions in diverse lines; and when we take them
+in conjunction with the upper mercantile grades, which are
+chiefly composed of their ablest and most successful members,
+we get considerable chances of those happy blendings of
+individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to
+make up talent, and, in their final outcome, genius. Last of
+all, in the professional and upper classes there is a freedom
+and play of faculty everywhere going on, which in the
+chances of intermarriage between lawyer-folk and doctor-folk,
+scientific people and artistic people, county families
+and bishops or law lords, and so forth <i>ad infinitum</i>, offers
+by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional development
+of that rare product of the highest humanity,
+the genuine genius.</p>
+
+<p>But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermixture
+of variously acquired hereditary characteristics that
+<a name="page338" id="page338"></a>makes the best and truest geniuses. Left to itself, each
+separate line of caste ancestry would tend to produce a
+certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of handicraft
+in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably
+anything worth calling real genius. For example, a family
+of artists, starting with some sort of manual dexterity in
+imitating natural forms and colours with paint and pencil,
+and strictly intermarrying always with other families possessing
+exactly the same inherited endowments, would probably
+go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its
+drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its
+grouping; more and more technically perfect in its perspective
+and light-and-shade, and so forth, by pure dint of
+accumulated hereditary experience from generation to
+generation. It would pass from the Egyptian to the
+Chinese style of art by slow degrees and with infinite gradations.
+But suppose, instead of thus rigorously confining
+itself to its own caste, this family of handicraft
+artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or seafaring,
+or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the
+consequence? Why, such an infiltration of other hereditary
+characteristics, otherwise acquired, as might make the
+young painters of future generations more wide minded,
+more diversified, more individualistic, more vivid and lifelike.
+Some divine spark of poetical imagination, some
+tenderness of sentiment, some play of fancy, unknown
+perhaps, to the hard, dry, matter-of-fact limners of the
+ancestral school, might thus be introduced into the original
+line of hereditary artists. In this way one can easily see
+how even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might improve
+the breed of a family of painters. For while each
+caste, left to itself, is liable to harden down into a mere
+technical excellence after its own kind, a wooden facility
+for drawing faces, or casting up columns of figures, or
+<a name="page339" id="page339"></a>hacking down enemies, or building steam-engines, a healthy
+cross with other castes is liable to bring in all kinds of new
+and valuable qualities, each of which, though acquired perhaps
+in a totally, different line of life, is apt to bear a new
+application in the new complex whereof it now forms a part.</p>
+
+<p>In our very varied modern societies, every man and
+every woman, in the upper and middle ranks of life at
+least, has an individuality and an idiosyncrasy so compounded
+of endless varying stocks and races. Here is one
+whose father was an Irishman and his mother a Scotchwoman;
+here is another whose paternal line were country
+parsons, while his maternal ancestors were city merchants
+or distinguished soldiers. Take almost anybody's 'sixteen
+quarters'&mdash;his great-great grandfathers and great-great
+grandmothers, of whom he has sixteen all told&mdash;and what
+do you often find? A peer, a cobbler, a barrister, a common
+sailor, a Welsh doctor, a Dutch merchant, a Huguenot
+pastor, a cornet of horse, an Irish heiress, a farmer's
+daughter, a housemaid, an actress, a Devonshire beauty,
+a rich young lady of sugar-broking extraction, a Lady
+Carolina, a London lodging-house keeper. This is not by
+any means an exaggerated case; it would be easy, indeed,
+from one's own knowledge of family histories to supply a
+great many real examples far more startling than this partially
+imaginary one. With such a variety of racial and
+professional antecedents behind us, what infinite possibilities
+are opened before us of children with ability, folly,
+stupidity, genius?</p>
+
+<p>Infinite numbers of intermixtures everywhere exist in
+civilised societies. Most of them are passable; many of
+them are execrable; a few of them are admirable; and
+here and there, one of them consists of that happy blending of
+individual characteristics which we all immediately recognise
+as genius&mdash;at least after somebody else has told us so.<a name="page340" id="page340"></a></p>
+
+<p>The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to
+be somewhat after this fashion. Take a number of good,
+strong, powerful stocks, mentally or physically, endowed
+with something more than the average amount of energy
+and application. Let them be as varied as possible in
+characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include
+among them a considerable small-change of races, dispositions,
+professions, and temperaments. Mix, by marriage,
+to the proper consistency; educate the offspring, especially
+by circumstances and environment, as broadly, freely, and
+diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with
+other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies;
+and watch the result to find your genius in the fourth
+or fifth generation. If the experiment has been properly
+performed, and all the conditions have been decently favourable,
+you will get among the resultant five hundred persons
+a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair proportion
+of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and
+(in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your
+cards very carefully) perhaps among them all a single
+genius. But most probably the genius will have died
+young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through some tiny
+defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying
+this experiment unaided every day all around us, and, though
+she makes a great many misses, occasionally she makes a
+stray hit and then we get a Shakespeare or a Grimaldi.</p>
+
+<p>'But you haven't proved all this: you have only suggested
+it.' Does one prove a thesis of deep-reaching
+importance in a ten-page essay? And if one proved it in
+a big book, with classified examples and detailed genealogies
+of all the geniuses, would anybody on earth except
+Mr. Francis Galton ever take the trouble to read it?<a name="page341" id="page341"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="part21" id="part21"><i>DESERT SANDS</i></a></h2>
+
+
+<p>If deserts <i>have</i> a fault (which their present biographer is far
+from admitting), that fault may doubtless be found in the
+fact that their scenery as a rule tends to be just a trifle
+monotonous. Though fine in themselves, they lack variety.
+To be sure, very few of the deserts of real life possess that
+absolute flatness, sandiness and sameness, which characterises
+the familiar desert of the poet and of the annual
+exhibitions&mdash;a desert all level yellow expanse, most bilious
+in its colouring, and relieved by but four allowable academy
+properties, a palm-tree, a camel, a sphinx, and a pyramid.
+For foreground, throw in a sheikh in appropriate drapery;
+for background, a sky-line and a bleaching skeleton; stir
+and mix, and your picture is finished. Most practical
+deserts one comes across in travelling, however, are a great
+deal less simple and theatrical than that; rock preponderates
+over sand in their composition, and inequalities of
+surface are often the rule rather than the exception.
+There is reason to believe, indeed, that the artistic conception
+of the common or Burlington House desert has
+been unduly influenced for evil by the accessibility and the
+poetic adjuncts of the Egyptian sand-waste, which, being
+situated in a great alluvial river valley is really flat, and,
+being the most familiar, has therefore distorted to its own
+shape the mental picture of all its kind elsewhere. But
+most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy;
+<a name="page342" id="page342"></a>they present a considerable diversity and variety of surface,
+and their rocks are often unpleasantly obtrusive to the
+tender feet of the pedestrian traveller.</p>
+
+<p>A desert, in fact, is only a place where the weather is
+always and uniformly fine. The sand is there merely as
+what the logicians call, in their cheerful way, 'a separable
+accident'; the essential of a desert, as such, is the absence
+of vegetation, due to drought. The barometer in those
+happy, too happy, regions, always stands at Set Fair. At
+least, it would, if barometers commonly grew in the desert,
+where, however, in the present condition of science, they
+are rarely found. It is this dryness of the air, and this
+alone, that makes a desert; all the rest, like the camels,
+the sphinx, the skeleton, and the pyramid, is only thrown
+in to complete the picture.</p>
+
+<p>Now the first question that occurs to the inquiring
+mind&mdash;which is but a graceful periphrasis for the present
+writer&mdash;when it comes to examine in detail the peculiarities
+of deserts is just this: Why are there places on the earth's
+surface on which rain never falls? What makes it so
+uncommonly dry in Sahara when it's so unpleasantly wet
+and so unnecessarily foggy in this realm of England?
+And the obvious answer is, of course, that deserts exist
+only in those parts of the world where the run of mountain
+ranges, prevalent winds, and ocean currents conspire to
+render the average rainfall as small as possible. But,
+strangely enough, there is a large irregular belt of the great
+eastern continent where these peculiar conditions occur in
+an almost unbroken line for thousands of miles together,
+from the west coast of Africa to the borders of China: and
+it is in this belt that all the best known deserts of the
+world are actually situated. In one place it is the Atlas
+and the Kong mountains (now don't pretend, as David
+Copperfield's aunt would have said, you don't know the<a name="page343" id="page343"></a>
+Kong mountains); at another place it is the Arabian coast
+range, Lebanon, and the Beluchi hills; at a third, it is the
+Himalayas and the Chinese heights that intercept and
+precipitate all the moisture from the clouds. But, from
+whatever variety of local causes it may arise, the fact still
+remains the same, that all the great deserts run in this
+long, almost unbroken series, beginning with the greater
+and the smaller Sahara, continuing in the Libyan and
+Egyptian desert, spreading on through the larger part of
+Arabia, reappearing to the north as the Syrian desert, and
+to the east as the desert of Rajputana (the Great Indian
+Desert of the Anglo-Indian mind), while further east again
+the long line terminates in the desert of Gobi on the Chinese
+frontier.</p>
+
+<p>In other parts of the world, deserts are less frequent.
+The peculiar combination of circumstances which goes to
+produce them does not elsewhere occur over any vast area,
+on so large a scale. Still, there is one region in western
+America where the necessary conditions are found to perfection.
+The high snow-clad peaks of the Rocky Mountains
+on the one side check and condense all the moisture
+that comes from the Atlantic; the Sierra Nevada and the
+Wahsatch range on the other, running parallel with them
+to the west, check and condense all the moisture that
+comes from the Pacific coast. In between these two great
+lines lies the dry and almost rainless district known to the
+ambitious western mind as the Great American Desert,
+enclosing in its midst that slowly evaporating inland sea,
+the Great Salt Lake, a last relic of some extinct chain
+of mighty waters once comparable to Superior, Erie, and
+Ontario. In Mexico, again, where the twin ranges draw
+closer together, desert conditions once more supervene.
+But it is in central Australia that the causes which lead to
+the desert state are, perhaps on the whole, best exemplified.<a name="page344" id="page344"></a>
+There, ranges of high mountains extend almost all round
+the coasts, and so completely intercept the rainfall which
+ought to fertilise the great central plain that the rivers are
+almost all short and local, and one thirsty waste spreads
+for miles and miles together over the whole unexplored
+interior of the continent.</p>
+
+<p>But why are deserts rocky and sandy? Why aren't
+they covered, like the rest of the world, with earth, soil,
+mould, or dust? One can see plainly enough why there
+should be little or no vegetation where no rain falls, but
+one can't see quite so easily why there should be only sand
+and rock instead of arid clay-field.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the answer is that without vegetation there is no
+such thing as soil on earth anywhere. The top layer of the
+land in all ordinary and well-behaved countries is composed
+entirely of vegetable mould, the decaying remains of innumerable
+generations of weeds and grasses. Earth to
+earth is the rule of nature. Soil, in fact, consists entirely
+of dead leaves. And where there are no leaves to die and
+decay, there can be no mould or soil to speak of. Darwin
+showed, indeed, in his last great book, that we owe the
+whole earthy covering of our hills and plains almost
+entirely to the perennial exertions of that friend of the
+farmers, the harmless, necessary earthworm. Year after
+year the silent worker is busy every night pulling down
+leaves through his tunnelled burrow into his underground
+nest, and there converting them by means of his castings
+into the black mould which produces, in the end, for
+lordly man, all his cultivable fields and pasture-lands and
+meadows. Where there are no leaves and no earth-worms,
+therefore, there can be no soil; and under those circumstances
+we get what we familiarly know as a desert.</p>
+
+<p>The normal course of events where new land rises
+above the sea is something like this, as oceanic isles have
+<a name="page345" id="page345"></a>sufficiently demonstrated. The rock when it first emerges
+from the water rises bare and rugged like a sea-cliff; no
+living thing, animal or vegetable, is harboured anywhere
+on its naked surface. In time, however, as rain falls upon
+its jutting peaks and barren pinnacles, disintegration sets
+in, or, to speak plainer English, the rock crumbles; and
+soon streams wash down tiny deposits of sand and mud
+thus produced into the valleys and hollows of the upheaved
+area. At the same time lichens begin to spring in yellow
+patches upon the bare face of the rock, and feathery ferns,
+whose spores have been wafted by the wind, or carried by
+the waves, or borne on the feet of unconscious birds, sprout
+here and there from the clefts and crannies. These, as
+they die and decay, in turn form a thin layer of vegetable
+mould, the first beginning of a local soil, in which the
+trusty earthworm (imported in the egg on driftwood or
+floating weeds) straightway sets to work to burrow, and
+which he rapidly increases by his constant labour. On the
+soil thus deposited, flowering plants and trees can soon
+root themselves, as fast as seeds, nuts or fruits are wafted
+to the island by various accidents from surrounding
+countries. The new land thrown up by the great eruption
+of Krakatoa has in this way already clothed itself from
+head to foot with a luxuriant sheet of ferns, mosses, and
+other vegetation.</p>
+
+<p>First soil, then plant and animal life, are thus in the
+last resort wholly dependent for their existence on the
+amount of rainfall. But in deserts, where rain seldom or
+never falls (except by accident) the first term in this series
+is altogether wanting. There can be no rivers, brooks or
+streams to wash down beds of alluvial deposit from the
+mountains to the valleys. Denudation (the term, though
+rather awful, is not an improper one) must therefore take
+a different turn. Practically speaking, there is no water
+<a name="page346" id="page346"></a>action; the work is all done by sun and wind. Under
+these circumstances, the rocks crumble away very slowly
+by mere exposure into small fragments, which the wind
+knocks off and blows about the surface, forming sand or
+dust of them in all convenient hollows. The frequent
+currents, produced by the heated air that lies upon the
+basking layer of sand, continually keep the surface agitated,
+and so blow about the sand and grind one piece against
+the other till it becomes ever finer and finer. Thus for
+the most part the hollows or valleys of deserts are filled by
+plains of bare sand, while their higher portions consist
+rather of barren, rocky mountains or table-land.</p>
+
+<p>The effect upon whatever animal or vegetable life can
+manage here and there to survive under such circumstances
+is very peculiar. Deserts are the most exacting of all
+known environments, and they compel their inhabitants
+with profound imperiousness to knuckle under to their
+prejudices and preconceptions in ten thousand particulars.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, all the smaller denizens of the desert&mdash;whether
+butterflies, beetles, birds, or lizards&mdash;must be
+quite uniformly isabelline or sand-coloured. This universal
+determination of the desert-haunting creatures to
+fall in with the fashion and to harmonise with their
+surroundings adds considerably to the painfully monotonous
+effect of desert scenery. A green plant, a blue
+butterfly, a red and yellow bird, a black or bronze-coloured
+beetle or lizard would improve the artistic aspect
+of the desert not a little. But no; the animals will hear
+nothing of such gaudy hues; with Quaker uniformity they
+will clothe themselves in dove-colour; they will all wear a
+sandy pepper-and-salt with as great unanimity as the
+ladies of the Court (on receipt of orders) wear Court
+mourning for the late lamented King of the Tongataboo
+Islands.<a name="page347" id="page347"></a></p>
+
+<p>In reality, this universal sombre tint of desert animals
+is a beautiful example of the imperious working of our
+modern <i>Deus ex machin&acirc;</i>, natural selection. The more
+uniform in hue is the environment of any particular region,
+the more uniform in hue must be all its inhabitants. In
+the arctic snows, for example, we find this principle pushed
+to its furthest logical conclusion. There, everything is and
+must be white&mdash;hares, foxes, and ptarmigans alike; and
+the reason is obvious&mdash;there can be no exception. Any
+brown or black or reddish animal who ventured north
+would at once render himself unpleasantly conspicuous in
+the midst of the uniform arctic whiteness. If he were a
+brown hare, for example, the foxes and bears and birds of
+prey of the district would spot him at once on the white
+fields, and pounce down upon him forthwith on his first
+appearance. That hare would leave no similar descendants
+to continue the race of brown hares in arctic regions after
+him. Or, suppose, on the other hand, it were a brown fox
+who invaded the domain of eternal snow. All the hares
+and ptarmigans of his new district would behold him
+coming from afar and keep well out of his way, while he,
+poor creature, would never be able to spot them at all
+among the white snow-fields. He would starve for want
+of prey, at the very time when the white fox, his neighbour,
+was stealing unperceived with stealthy tread upon the
+hares and ptarmigans. In this way, from generation to
+generation of arctic animals, the blacker or browner have
+been constantly weeded out, and the greyer and whiter
+have been constantly encouraged, till now all arctic
+animals alike are as spotlessly snowy as the snow around
+them.</p>
+
+<p>In the desert much the same causes operate, in a
+slightly different way, in favour of a general greyness or
+brownness as against pronounced shades of black, white,
+<a name="page348" id="page348"></a>red, green, or yellow. Desert animals, like intense South
+Kensington, go in only for neutral tints. In proportion as
+each individual approaches in hue to the sand about it will
+it succeed in life in avoiding its enemies or in creeping
+upon its prey, according to circumstances. In proportion
+as it presents a strikingly vivid or distinct appearance
+among the surrounding sand will it make itself a sure
+mark for its watchful foes, if it happen to be an unprotected
+skulker, or will it be seen beforehand and
+avoided by its prey, if it happen to be a predatory hunting
+or insect-eating beast. Hence on the sandy desert all
+species alike are uniformly sand-coloured. Spotty lizards
+bask on spotty sands, keeping a sharp look-out for spotty
+butterflies and spotty beetles, only to be themselves spotted
+and devoured in turn by equally spotty birds, or snakes, or
+tortoises. All nature seems to have gone into half-mourning
+together, or, converted by a passing Puritan missionary,
+to have clad itself incontinently in grey and fawn-colour.</p>
+
+<p>Even the larger beasts that haunt the desert take their
+tone not a little from their sandy surroundings. You have
+only to compare the desert-haunting lion with the other
+great cats to see at once the reason for his peculiar uniform.
+The tigers and other tropical jungle-cats have their
+coats arranged in vertical stripes of black and yellow, which,
+though you would hardly believe it unless you saw them in
+their native nullahs (good word 'nullah,' gives a convincing
+Indian tone to a narrative of adventure), harmonise
+marvellously with the lights and shades of the bamboos
+and cane-brakes through whose depths the tiger moves so
+noiselessly.</p>
+
+<p>Looking into the gloom of a tangled jungle, it is almost
+impossible to pick out the beast from the yellow stems and
+dark shadows in which it hides, save by the baleful gleam
+of those wicked eyes, catching the light for one second as
+<a name="page349" id="page349"></a>they turn wistfully and bloodthirstily towards the approaching
+stranger. The jaguar, oncelot, leopard, and other tree-cats,
+on the other hand, are dappled or spotted&mdash;a type of
+coloration which exactly harmonises with the light and
+shade of the round sun-spots seen through the foliage of a
+tropical forest. They, too, are almost indistinguishable
+from the trees overhead as they creep along cautiously
+on the trunks and branches. But spots or stripes would
+at once betray the crouching lion among the bare rocks or
+desert sands; and therefore the lion is approximately sand-coloured.
+Seen in a cage at the Zoo, the British lion is a
+very conspicuous animal indeed; but spread at full length
+on a sandy patch or among bare yellow rocks under the
+Saharan sun, you may walk into his mouth before you are
+even aware of his august existence.</p>
+
+<p>The three other great desert beasts of Asia or Africa&mdash;the
+ostrich, the giraffe, and the camel&mdash;are less protectively
+coloured, for various reasons. Giraffes and ostriches go in
+herds; they trust for safety mainly to their swiftness of
+foot, and, when driven to bay, like most gregarious animals,
+they make common cause against the ill-advised intruder.
+In such cases it is often well, for the sake of stragglers,
+that the herd should be readily distinguished at a distance;
+and it is to insure this advantage, I believe, that giraffes
+have acquired their strongly marked spots, as zebras have
+acquired their distinctive stripes, and hy&aelig;nas their similarly
+banded or dappled coats. One must always remember that
+disguise may be carried a trifle too far, and that recognisability
+in the parents often gives the young and giddy a
+point in their favour. For example, it seems certain that
+the general grey-brown tint of European rabbits serves to
+render them indistinguishable in a field of bracken, stubble,
+or dry grass. How hard it is, either for man or hawk, to
+pick out rabbits so long as they sit still, in an English
+<a name="page350" id="page350"></a>meadow! But as soon as they begin to run towards their
+burrows the white patch by their tails inevitably betrays
+them; and this betrayal seems at first sight like a failure
+of adaptation. Certainly many a rabbit must be spotted and
+shot, or killed by birds of prey, solely on account of that
+tell-tale white patch as he makes for his shelter. Nevertheless,
+when we come to look closer, we can see, as Mr.
+Wallace acutely suggests, that the tell-tale patch has its
+function also. On the first alarm the parent rabbits take
+to their heels at once, and run at any untoward sight or
+sound toward the safety of the burrow. The white patch
+and the hoisted tail act as a danger-signal to the little
+bunnies, and direct them which way to escape the threatened
+misfortune. The young ones take the hint at once and
+follow their leader. Thus what may be sometimes a disadvantage
+to the individual animal becomes in the long
+run of incalculable benefit to the entire community.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to note, too, how much alike in build
+and gait are these three thoroughbred desert roamers, the
+giraffe, the ostrich, and the camel or dromedary. In their
+long legs, their stalking march, their tall necks, and their
+ungainly appearance they all betoken their common adaptation
+to the needs and demands of a special environment.
+Since food is scarce and shelter rare, they have to run about
+much over large spaces in search of a livelihood or to escape
+their enemies. Then the burning nature of the sand as
+well as the need for speed compels them to have long legs
+which in turn necessitate equally long necks, if they are to
+reach the ground or the trees overhead for food and drink.
+Their feet have to be soft and padded to enable them to
+run over the sand with ease; and hard horny patches must
+protect their knees and all other portions of the body
+liable to touch the sweltering surface when they lie down
+to rest themselves. Finally, they can all endure thirst for
+<a name="page351" id="page351"></a>long periods together; and the camel, the most inveterate
+desert-haunter of the trio, is even provided with a special
+stomach to take in water for several days at a stretch,
+besides having a peculiarly tough skin in which perspiration
+is reduced to a minimum. He carries his own water-supply
+internally, and wastes as little of it by the way as possible.</p>
+
+<p>What the camel is among animals that is the cactus
+among plants&mdash;the most confirmed and specialised of
+desert-haunting organisms. It has been wholly developed
+in, by, and for the desert. I don't mean merely to say that
+cactuses resemble camels because they are clumsy, ungainly,
+awkward, and paradoxical; that would be a point of view
+almost as far beneath the dignity of science (which in spite
+of occasional lapses into the sin of levity I endeavour as a
+rule piously to uphold) as the old and fallacious reason
+'because there's a B in both.' But cactuses, like camels,
+take in their water supply whenever they can get it, and
+never waste any of it on the way by needless evaporation.
+As they form the perfect central type of desert vegetation,
+and are also familiar plants to everyone, they may be taken
+as a good illustrative example of the effect that desert conditions
+inevitably produce upon vegetable evolution.</p>
+
+<p>Quaint, shapeless, succulent, jointed, the cactuses look
+at first sight as if they were all leaves, and had no stem or
+trunk worth mentioning. Of course, therefore, the exact
+opposite is really the case; for, as a late lamented poet has
+assured us in mournful numbers, things (generally speaking)
+are not what they seem. The true truth about the
+cactuses runs just the other way; they are all stem and no
+leaves; what look like leaves being really joints of the trunk
+or branches, and the foliage being all dwarfed and stunted
+into the prickly hairs that dot and encumber the surface.
+All plants of very arid soils&mdash;for example, our common
+English stonecrops&mdash;tend to be thick, jointed, and succulent;
+<a name="page352" id="page352"></a>the distinction between stem and leaves tends to disappear;
+and the whole weed, accustomed at times to long
+drought, acquires the habit of drinking in water greedily
+at its rootlets after every rain, and storing it away for future
+use in its thick, sponge-like, and water-tight tissues. To
+prevent undue evaporation, the surface also is covered with
+a thick, shiny skin&mdash;a sort of vegetable macintosh, which
+effectually checks all unnecessary transpiration. Of this
+desert type, then, the cactus is the furthest possible term.
+It has no flat leaves with expanded blades, to wither and
+die in the scorching desert air; but in their stead the thick
+and jointed stems do the same work&mdash;absorb carbon from
+the carbonic acid of the air, and store up water in the driest
+of seasons. Then, to repel the attacks of herbivores, who
+would gladly get at the juicy morsel if they could, the
+foliage has been turned into sharp defensive spines and
+prickles. The cactus is tenacious of life to a wonderful
+degree; and for reproduction it trusts not merely to its
+brilliant flowers, fertilised for the most part by desert moths
+or butterflies, and to its juicy fruit, of which the common
+prickly pear is a familiar instance, but it has the special
+property of springing afresh from any stray bit or fragment
+of the stem that happens to fall upon the dry ground anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>True cactuses (in the native state) are confined to
+America; but the unhappy naturalist who ventures to say
+so in mixed society is sure to get sat upon (without due
+cause) by numberless people who have seen 'the cactus'
+wild all the world over. For one thing, the prickly pear
+and a few other common American species, have been
+naturalised and run wild throughout North Africa, the
+Mediterranean shores, and a great part of India, Arabia,
+and Persia. But what is more interesting and more confusing
+still, other desert plants which are <i>not</i> cactuses, living in<a name="page353" id="page353"></a>
+South Africa, Sind, Rajputana, and elsewhere unspecified,
+have been driven by the nature of their circumstances and
+the dryness of the soil to adopt precisely the same tactics,
+and therefore unconsciously to mimic or imitate the cactus
+tribe in the minutest details of their personal appearance.
+Most of these fallacious pseudo-cactuses are really spurges
+or euphorbias by family. They resemble the true Mexican
+type in externals only; that is to say, their stems are thick,
+jointed, and leaf-like, and they grow with clumsy and awkward
+angularity; but in the flower, fruit, seed, and in short
+in all structural peculiarities whatsoever, they differ utterly
+from the genuine cactus, and closely resemble all their
+spurge relations. Adaptive likenesses of this sort, due to
+mere stress of local conditions, have no more weight as
+indications of real relationship than the wings of the bat
+or the nippers of the seal, which don't make the one into
+a skylark, or the other into a mackerel.</p>
+
+<p>In Sahara, on the other hand, the prevailing type of
+vegetation (wherever there is any) belongs to the kind
+playfully described by Sir Lambert Playfair as 'salsolaceous,'
+that is to say, in plainer English, it consists of
+plants like the glass-wort and the kali-weed, which are
+commonly burnt to make soda. These fleshy weeds
+resemble the cactuses in being succulent and thick-skinned
+but they differ from them in their curious ability to live
+upon very salt and soda-laden water. All through the
+great African desert region, in fact, most of the water is
+more or less brackish; 'bitter lakes' are common, and
+gypsum often covers the ground over immense areas.
+These districts occupy the beds of vast ancient lakes, now
+almost dry, of which the existing <i>chotts</i>, or very salt pools,
+are the last shrunken and evanescent relics.</p>
+
+<p>And this point about the water brings me at last to a
+cardinal fact in the constitution of deserts which is almost
+<a name="page354" id="page354"></a>always utterly misconceived in Europe. Most people at
+home picture the desert to themselves as wholly dead, flat,
+and sandy. To talk about the fauna and flora of Sahara
+sounds in their ears like self-contradictory nonsense. But,
+as a matter of fact, that uniform and lifeless desert of the
+popular fancy exists only in those sister arts that George
+II.&mdash;good, practical man&mdash;so heartily despised, 'boetry and
+bainting.' The desert of real life, though less impressive,
+is far more varied. It has its ups and downs, its hills and
+valleys. It has its sandy plains and its rocky ridges. It
+has its lakes and ponds, and even its rivers. It has its
+plants and animals, its oases and palm-groves. In short,
+like everything else on earth, it's a good deal more complex
+than people imagine.</p>
+
+<p>One may take Sahara as a very good example of the
+actual desert of physical geography, in contradistinction to
+the level and lifeless desert that stretches like the sea over
+illimitable spaces in verse or canvas. And here, I fear, I
+am going to dispel another common and cherished illusion.
+It is my fate to be an iconoclast, and perhaps long practice
+has made me rather like the trade than otherwise. A
+popular belief exists all over Europe that the late M.
+Roudaire&mdash;that De Lesseps who never quite 'came off'&mdash;proposed
+to cut a canal from the Mediterranean into the
+heart of Africa, which was intended, in the stereotyped
+phrase of journalism, to 'flood Sahara,' and convert the
+desert into an inland sea. He might almost as well have
+talked of cutting a canal from Brighton to the Devil's
+Dyke and 'submerging England,' as the devil wished to
+do in the old legend. As a matter of fact, good, practical
+M. Roudaire, sound engineer that he was, never even
+dreamt of anything so chimerical. What he did really
+propose was something far milder and simpler in its way,
+but, as his scheme has given rise to the absurd notion that<a name="page355" id="page355"></a>
+Sahara as a whole lies below sea-level, it may be worth
+while briefly to explain what it was he really thought of
+doing.</p>
+
+<p>Some sixty miles south of Biskra, the most fashionable
+resort in the Algerian Sahara, there is a deep depression
+two hundred and fifty miles long, partly occupied by three
+salt lakes of the kind so common over the whole dried-up
+Saharan area. These three lakes, shrunken remnants of
+much larger sheets, lie below the level of the Mediterranean,
+but they are separated from it, and from one another, by
+upland ranges which rise considerably above the sea line.
+What M. Roudaire proposed to do was to cut canals through
+these three barriers, and flood the basins of the salt
+lakes. The result would have been, not as is commonly
+said to submerge Sahara, nor even to form anything worth
+seriously describing as 'an inland sea,' but to substitute
+three larger salt lakes for the existing three smaller ones.
+The area so flooded, however, would bear to the whole
+area of Sahara something like the same proportion that
+Windsor Park bears to the entire surface of England.
+This is the true truth about that stupendous undertaking,
+which is to create a new Mediterranean in the midst of the
+Dark Continent, and to modify the climate of Northern
+Europe to something like the condition of the Glacial
+Epoch. A new Dead Sea would be much nearer the mark,
+and the only way Northern Europe would feel the change,
+if it felt it at all, would be in a slight fall in the price of
+dates in the wholesale market.</p>
+
+<p>No, Sahara as a whole is <i>not</i> below sea-level; it is <i>not</i>
+the dry bed of a recent ocean; and it is <i>not</i> as flat as the
+proverbial pancake all over. Part of it, indeed, is very
+mountainous, and all of it is more or less varied in level.
+The Upper Sahara consists of a rocky plateau, rising at
+times into considerable peaks; the Lower, to which it
+<a name="page356" id="page356"></a>descends by a steep slope, is 'a vast depression of clay and
+sand,' but still for the most part standing high above sea-level.
+No portion of the Upper Sahara is less than 1,300
+feet high&mdash;a good deal higher than Dartmoor or Derbyshire.
+Most of the Lower reaches from two to three
+hundred feet&mdash;quite as elevated as Essex or Leicester.
+The few spots below sea-level consist of the beds of ancient
+lakes, now much shrunk by evaporation, owing to the
+present rainless condition of the country; the soil around
+these is deep in gypsum, and the water itself is considerably
+salter than the sea. That, however, is always the case
+with freshwater lakes in their last dotage, as American
+geologists have amply proved in the case of the Great Salt
+Lake of Utah. Moving sand undoubtedly covers a large
+space in both divisions of the desert, but according to Sir
+Lambert Playfair, our best modern authority on the subject,
+it occupies not more than one-third part of the entire
+Algerian Sahara. Elsewhere rock, clay, and muddy lake
+are the prevailing features, interspersed with not infrequent
+date-groves and villages, the product of artesian wells, or
+excavated spaces, or river oases. Even Sahara, in short,
+to give it its due, is not by any means so black as it's
+painted.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%" />
+
+<div class="center"><b>PRINTED BY</b></div>
+<div class="center"><b>SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE</b></div>
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+<pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Falling in Love, by Grant Allen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Falling in Love
+       With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
+
+Author: Grant Allen
+
+Release Date: October 7, 2005 [EBook #16807]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FALLING IN LOVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, Annika Feilbach and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FALLING IN LOVE
+
+_WITH OTHER ESSAYS ON MORE EXACT BRANCHES OF SCIENCE_
+
+
+BY
+
+GRANT ALLEN
+
+
+LONDON
+SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
+1889
+
+[_All rights reserved_]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Some people complain that science is dry. That is, of course, a matter
+of taste. For my own part, I like my science and my champagne as dry as
+I can get them. But the public thinks otherwise. So I have ventured to
+sweeten accompanying samples as far as possible to suit the demand, and
+trust they will meet with the approbation of consumers.
+
+Of the specimens here selected for exhibition, my title piece originally
+appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_: 'Honey Dew' and 'The First Potter'
+were contributions to _Longman's Magazine_: and all the rest found
+friendly shelter between the familiar yellow covers of the good old
+_Cornhill_. My thanks are due to the proprietors and editors of those
+various periodicals for kind permission to reproduce them here.
+
+G.A.
+
+THE NOOK, DORKING:
+
+_September_, 1889.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                         PAGE
+
+FALLING IN LOVE             1
+RIGHT AND LEFT             18
+EVOLUTION                  31
+STRICTLY INCOG.            50
+SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS        72
+A FOSSIL CONTINENT         88
+A VERY OLD MASTER         106
+BRITISH AND FOREIGN       123
+THUNDERBOLTS              137
+HONEY-DEW                 159
+THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT  176
+FOOD AND FEEDING          193
+DE BANANA                 216
+GO TO THE ANT             233
+BIG ANIMALS               251
+FOSSIL FOOD               271
+OGBURY BARROWS            287
+FISH OUT OF WATER         302
+THE FIRST POTTER          316
+THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS     328
+DESERT SANDS              341
+
+
+
+
+FALLING IN LOVE
+
+
+An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir
+George Campbell has set his face against the time-honoured practice of
+Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces
+against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only
+attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the
+institution itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator,
+however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern. He would
+always like to regulate human life generally as a department of the
+India Office; and so Sir George Campbell would fain have husbands and
+wives selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson's principle, by
+the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future development of the race,
+in the process which he not very felicitously or elegantly describes as
+'man-breeding.' 'Probably,' he says, as reported in _Nature_, 'we have
+enough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in the
+pairing of individuals of the same or allied races if we could only
+apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, instead of giving way to
+foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whom we can
+hardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in a
+graver matter in which they are most likely to be influenced by
+frivolous prejudices.' He wants us, in other words, to discard the
+deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and to
+substitute for them some calm and dispassionate but artificial
+selection of a fitting partner as the father or mother of future
+generations.
+
+Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treated
+seriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir George Campbell's
+conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion now being
+forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and
+psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far
+from considering love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests
+of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists,
+especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it
+rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct developed
+and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring
+just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell
+thinks he could himself effect by a conscious and deliberate process of
+selection. More than that, I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure
+most evolutionists would cordially agree with me), that this beneficent
+inherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it has in view
+far more admirably, subtly, and satisfactorily, on the average of
+instances, than any clumsy human selective substitute could possibly
+effect it.
+
+In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and confiding belief
+that marriages are made in heaven: with the further corollary that
+heaven manages them, one time with another, a great deal better than Sir
+George Campbell.
+
+Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the standard of human
+efficiency; and then let us consider what would be the probable result
+of any definite conscious attempt to substitute for it some more
+deliberate external agency.
+
+Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing
+more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the
+human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin
+has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the
+animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aerial
+dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the
+delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of
+his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the
+eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty
+and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom
+he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the
+admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to
+be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it
+were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the
+fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability,
+producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in
+the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the
+case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the
+'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.
+
+In our own species, the selective process is marked by all the features
+common to selection throughout the whole animal kingdom; but it is also,
+as might be expected, far more specialised, far more individualised, far
+more cognisant of personal traits and minor peculiarities. It is
+furthermore exerted to a far greater extent upon mental and moral as
+well as physical peculiarities in the individual.
+
+We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of us fall in love
+with one person, some with another. This instinctive and deep-seated
+differential feeling we may regard as the outcome of complementary
+features, mental, moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; and
+experience shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a reciprocal
+affection, that is to say, in other words, an affection roused in unison
+by varying qualities in the respective individuals.
+
+Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency very little doubt
+can be reasonably entertained. We _do_ fall in love, taking us in the
+lump, with the young, the beautiful, the strong, and the healthy; we do
+_not_ fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the aged, the ugly, the
+feeble, and the sickly. The prohibition of the Church is scarcely needed
+to prevent a man from marrying his grandmother. Moralists have always
+borne a special grudge to pretty faces; but, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
+admirably put it (long before the appearance of Darwin's selective
+theory), 'the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but a
+skin-deep saying.' In reality, beauty is one of the very best guides we
+can possibly have to the desirability, so far as race-preservation is
+concerned, of any man or any woman as a partner in marriage. A fine
+form, a good figure, a beautiful bust, a round arm and neck, a fresh
+complexion, a lovely face, are all outward and visible signs of the
+physical qualities that on the whole conspire to make up a healthy and
+vigorous wife and mother; they imply soundness, fertility, a good
+circulation, a good digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness are
+roughly indicative of dyspepsia and anaemia; a flat chest is a symptom of
+deficient maternity; and what we call a bad figure is really, in one way
+or another, an unhealthy departure from the central norma and standard
+of the race. Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means an
+active liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean feeble virility. Nor
+are indications of mental and moral efficiency by any means wanting as
+recognised elements in personal beauty. A good-humoured face is in
+itself almost pretty. A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive
+features. Low, receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid,
+half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however regular their
+lines and contours. Intelligence and goodness are almost as necessary as
+health and vigour in order to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful
+human face and figure. The Apollo Belvedere is no fool; the murderers in
+the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's are for the most part no
+beauties.
+
+What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most cases
+efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love with individually is,
+I believe, our moral, mental, and physical complement. Not our like, not
+our counterpart; quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlike
+and our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a
+commonplace of ordinary conversation; that it is scientifically true,
+one time with another, when we take an extended range of cases, may, I
+think, be almost demonstrated by sure and certain warranty of human
+nature.
+
+Brothers and sisters have more in common, mentally and physically, than
+any other members of the same race can possibly have with one another.
+But nobody falls in love with his sister. A profound instinct has taught
+even the lower races of men (for the most part) to avoid such union of
+the all-but-identical. In the higher races the idea never so much as
+occurs to us. Even cousins seldom fall in love--seldom, that is to say,
+in comparison with the frequent opportunities of intercourse they enjoy,
+relatively to the remainder of general society. When they do, and when
+they carry out their perilous choice effectively by marriage, natural
+selection soon avenges Nature upon the offspring by cutting off the
+idiots, the consumptives, the weaklings, and the cripples, who often
+result from such consanguineous marriages. In narrow communities, where
+breeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural selection has
+similarly to exert itself upon a crowd of _cretins_ and other hapless
+incapables. But in wide and open champaign countries, where individual
+choice has free room for exercise, men and women as a rule (if not
+constrained by parents and moralists) marry for love, and marry on the
+whole their natural complements. They prefer outsiders, fresh blood,
+somebody who comes from beyond the community, to the people of their own
+immediate surroundings. In many men the dislike to marrying among the
+folk with whom they have been brought up amounts almost to a positive
+instinct; they feel it as impossible to fall in love with a
+fellow-townswoman as to fall in love with their own first cousins. Among
+exogamous tribes such an instinct (aided, of course, by other extraneous
+causes) has hardened into custom; and there is reason to believe (from
+the universal traces among the higher civilisations of marriage by
+capture) that all the leading races of the world are ultimately derived
+from exogamous ancestors, possessing this healthy and excellent
+sentiment.
+
+In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted that short men,
+as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men admire little women. Dark
+pairs by preference with fair; the commonplace often runs after the
+original. People have long noticed that this attraction towards one's
+opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race; they have not,
+perhaps, so generally observed that it also indicates roughly the
+existence in either individual of a desire for its own natural
+complement. It is difficult here to give definite examples, but
+everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there
+are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which
+strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with
+ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out
+and discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively than
+that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how
+trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do
+so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest
+promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest
+and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.
+
+How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in part by the
+apparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility of its occasional
+action. We know that some men and women fall in love easily, while
+others are only moved to love by some very special and singular
+combination of peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred by
+every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by
+intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we
+meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for
+some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love
+with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't,
+of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and
+women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has
+somewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner or
+later meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man or
+woman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of a
+lifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily find
+dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in love
+again if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like the
+Exchequer tallies, exactly intended to fit into one another's minor
+idiosyncrasies. Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with
+one another in the particular places and the particular societies they
+happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the
+world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at
+Denver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast number
+are purely indifferent to him; only one or two, here and there, strike
+him in the light of possible wives, and only one in the last resort
+(outside Salt Lake City) approves herself to his inmost nature as the
+actual wife of his final selection.
+
+Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellow-countrymen or
+fellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch of selective preference in the
+human species, is just one mark of our extraordinary specialisation, one
+stamp and token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick and
+choose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection plays a large
+part (for the very butterflies are coy, and must be wooed and won). It
+is only in the human race itself that selection descends into such
+minute, such subtle, such indefinable discriminations. Why should a
+universal and common impulse have in our case these special limits? Why
+should we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely affected? Surely
+for some good and sufficient purpose. No deep-seated want of our complex
+life would be so narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning.
+Sometimes we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see that
+beauty plays a great _role_; there, we recognise the importance of
+strength, of manner, of grace, of moral qualities. Vivacity, as Mr.
+Galton justly remarks, is one of the most powerful among human
+attractions, and often accounts for what might otherwise seem
+unaccountable preferences. But after all is said and done, there remains
+a vast mass of instinctive and inexplicable elements: a power deeper and
+more marvellous in its inscrutable ramifications than human
+consciousness. 'What on earth,' we say, 'could So-and-so see in
+So-and-so to fall in love with?' This very inexplicability I take to be
+the sign and seal of a profound importance. An instinct so conditioned,
+so curious, so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy with
+all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice within us, speaking
+for the good of the human race in all future generations.
+
+On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment (impossible supposition!)
+that mankind could conceivably divest itself of 'these foolish ideas
+about love and the tastes of young people,' and could hand over the
+choice of partners for life to a committee of anthropologists, presided
+over by Sir George Campbell. Would the committee manage things, I
+wonder, very much better than the Creator has managed them? Where would
+they obtain that intimate knowledge of individual structures and
+functions and differences which would enable them to join together in
+holy matrimony fitting and complementary idiosyncrasies? Is a living
+man, with all his organs, and powers, and faculties, and dispositions,
+so simple and easy a problem to read that anybody else can readily
+undertake to pick out off-hand a help meet for him? I trow not! A man is
+not a horse or a terrier. You cannot discern his 'points' by simple
+inspection. You cannot see _a priori_ why a Hanoverian bandsman and his
+heavy, ignorant, uncultured wife, should conspire to produce a Sir
+William Herschel. If you tried to improve the breed artificially, either
+by choice from outside, or by the creation of an independent moral
+sentiment, irrespective of that instinctive preference which we call
+Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving man, you would
+only do one of two things--either spoil his constitution, or produce a
+tame stereotyped pattern of amiable imbecility. You would crush out all
+initiative, all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would
+get an animated moral code instead of living men and women.
+
+Look at the analogy of domestic animals. That is the analogy to which
+breeding reformers always point with special pride: but what does it
+really teach us? That you can't improve the efficiency of animals in any
+one point to any high degree, without upsetting the general balance of
+their constitution. The race-horse can run a mile on a particular day at
+a particular place, bar accidents, with wonderful speed: but that is
+about all he is good for. His health as a whole is so surprisingly
+feeble that he has to be treated with as much care as a delicate exotic.
+'In regard to animals and plants,' says Sir George Campbell, 'we have
+very largely mastered the principles of heredity and culture, and the
+modes by which good qualities may be maximised, bad qualities
+minimised.' True, so far as concerns a few points prized by ourselves
+for our own purposes. But in doing this, we have so lowered the general
+constitutional vigour of the plants or animals that our vines fall an
+easy prey to oidium and phylloxera, our potatoes to the potato disease
+and the Colorado beetle; our sheep are stupid, our rabbits idiotic, our
+domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limb
+unknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to
+deal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hope
+would there be of our improving the breed by deliberate selection? If we
+developed the intellect, we would probably stunt the physique or the
+moral nature; if we aimed at a general culture of all faculties alike,
+we would probably end by a Chinese uniformity of mediocre dead level.
+
+The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very delicate organic
+equilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, from
+the correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spread
+effects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the
+Tasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different from
+those with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interfere
+with a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, in
+favour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it as
+helplessly as the modern system of higher education for women is
+wrecking the maternal powers of the best class in our English community!
+
+Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free choice, aided by
+natural selection, is actually improving every good point, and is for
+ever weeding out all the occasional failures and shortcomings of nature.
+For weakly children, feeble children, stupid children, heavy children,
+are undoubtedly born under this very regime of falling in love, whose
+average results I believe to be so highly beneficial. How is this? Well,
+one has to take into consideration two points in seeking for the
+solution of that obvious problem.
+
+In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All of them
+necessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, they
+are sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have to
+start in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable
+circumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world to
+supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the best
+woman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently far
+from perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good deal
+worse if somebody else made the choice for him, or if he made the choice
+himself on abstract biological and 'eugenic' principles. And, indeed,
+the very existence of better and worse in the world is a condition
+precedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, with
+individual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could be
+no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief
+besetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a very
+great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fully
+carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and the
+world would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily reckless
+and dissolute and imprudent. Even so, if eugenic principles were
+universally adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natures
+would be largely reduced, and natural selection would be in so much
+interfered with or sensibly retarded.
+
+In the second place, again, it must not be forgotten that falling in
+love has never yet, among civilised men at least, had a fair field and
+no favour. Many marriages are arranged on very different
+grounds--grounds of convenience, grounds of cupidity, grounds of
+religion, grounds of snobbishness. In many cases it is clearly
+demonstrable that such marriages are productive in the highest degree of
+evil consequences. Take the case of heiresses. An heiress is almost by
+necessity the one last feeble and flickering relic of a moribund
+stock--often of a stock reduced by the sordid pursuit of ill-gotten
+wealth almost to the very verge of actual insanity. But let her be ever
+so ugly, ever so unhealthy, ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody or
+other will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Considerations
+of this sort have helped to stock the world with many feeble and
+unhealthy persons. Among the middle and upper classes it may be safely
+said only a very small percentage of marriages is ever due to love
+alone; in other words, to instinctive feeling. The remainder have been
+influenced by various side advantages, and nature has taken her
+vengeance accordingly on the unhappy offspring. Parents and moralists
+are ever ready to drown her voice, and to counsel marriage within one's
+own class, among nice people, with a really religious girl, and so forth
+_ad infinitum_. By many well-meaning young people these deadly
+interferences with natural impulse are accepted as part of a higher and
+nobler law of conduct. The wretched belief that one should subordinate
+the promptings of one's own soul to the dictates of a miscalculating and
+misdirecting prudence has been instilled into the minds of girls
+especially, until at last many of them have almost come to look upon
+their natural instincts as wrong, and the immoral, race-destructive
+counsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest earthly
+wisdom. Among certain small religious sects, again, such as the Quakers,
+the duty of 'marrying in' has been strenuously inculcated, and only the
+stronger-minded and more individualistic members have had courage and
+initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the internal
+divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed law of their
+particular community. Even among wider bodies it is commonly held that
+Catholics must not marry Protestants; and the admirable results obtained
+by the mixture of Jewish with European blood have almost all been
+reached by male Jews having the temerity to marry 'Christian' women in
+the face of opposition and persecution from their co-nationalists. It is
+very rarely indeed that a Jewess will accept a European for a husband.
+In so many ways, and on so many grounds, does convention interfere with
+the plain and evident dictates of nature.
+
+Against all such evil parental promptings, however, a great safeguard is
+afforded to society by the wholesome and essentially philosophical
+teaching of romance and poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are for
+the most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature; and it may
+profoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demand
+should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in
+England, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the
+production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of
+art. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good to
+set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romantic
+literature--that it always appeals to the true internal promptings of
+inherited instinct, and opposes the foolish and selfish suggestions of
+interested outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished human
+nature against the expelling pitchfork of calculating expediency in the
+matrimonial market. While parents and moralists are for ever saying,
+'Don't marry for beauty; don't marry for inclination; don't marry for
+love: marry for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement,
+marry for our convenience, not for your own,' the romance-writer is for
+ever urging, on the other hand, 'Marry for love, and for love only.' His
+great theme in all ages has been the opposition between parental or
+other external wishes and the true promptings of the young and
+unsophisticated human heart. He has been the chief ally of sentiment and
+of nature. He has filled the heads of all our girls with what Sir George
+Campbell describes off-hand as 'foolish ideas about love.' He has
+preserved us from the hateful conventions of civilisation. He has
+exalted the claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious native
+yearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable element
+of mutual selection; and, in so doing, he has unconsciously proved
+himself the best friend of human improvement and the deadliest enemy of
+all those hideous 'social lies which warp us from the living truth.' His
+mission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and Sir George
+Campbell.
+
+For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who are
+always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists and the rebels who are
+always in the right in this matter. If the common moral maxims of
+society could have had their way--if we had all chosen our wives and our
+husbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not for their eyes or
+their moustaches, not for their attractiveness or their vivacity, but
+for their 'sterling qualities of mind and character,' we should now
+doubtless be a miserable race of prigs and bookworms, of martinets and
+puritans, of nervous invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young
+men and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms of
+shallow sophistry--because they often prefer _Romeo and Juliet_ to the
+'Whole Duty of Man,' and a beautiful face to a round balance at
+Coutts's--that we still preserve some vitality and some individual
+features, in spite of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men
+who marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out, leaving
+none to represent them: the men who marry women they have been weak
+enough and silly enough to fall in love with, recruit the race with fine
+and vigorous and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the
+complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted and mutually
+reinforcing individualities.
+
+I have spoken throughout, for argument's sake, as though the only
+interest to be considered in the married relation were the interests of
+the offspring, and so ultimately of the race at large, rather than of
+the persons themselves who enter into it. But I do not quite see why
+each generation should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the
+generations that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the strongest
+points in favour of the system of falling in love that it does, by
+common experience in the vast majority of instances, assort together
+persons who subsequently prove themselves thoroughly congenial and
+helpful to one another. And this result I look upon as one great proof
+of the real value and importance of the instinct. Most men and women
+select for themselves partners for life at an age when they know but
+little of the world, when they judge but superficially of characters and
+motives, when they still make many mistakes in the conduct of life and
+in the estimation of chances. Yet most of them find in after days that
+they have really chosen out of all the world one of the persons best
+adapted by native idiosyncrasy to make their joint lives enjoyable and
+useful. I make every allowance for the effects of habit, for the growth
+of sentiment, for the gradual approximation of tastes and sympathies;
+but surely, even so, it is a common consciousness with every one of us
+who has been long married, that we could hardly conceivably have made
+ourselves happy with any of the partners whom others have chosen; and
+that we have actually made ourselves so with the partners we chose for
+ourselves under the guidance of an almost unerring native instinct. Yet
+adaptation between husband and wife, so far as their own happiness is
+concerned, can have had comparatively little to do with the evolution of
+the instinct, as compared with adaptation for the joint production of
+vigorous and successful offspring. Natural selection lays almost all the
+stress on the last point, and hardly any at all upon the first one. If,
+then, the instinct is found on the whole so trustworthy in the minor
+matter, for which it has not specially been fashioned, how far more
+trustworthy and valuable must it probably prove in the greater
+matter--greater, I mean, as regards the interests of the race--for which
+it has been mainly or almost solely developed!
+
+I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense of moral
+responsibility in the matter of marriage will grow up among us. But it
+will not take the false direction of ignoring these our profoundest and
+holiest instincts. Marriage for money may go; marriage for rank may go;
+marriage for position may go; but marriage for love, I believe and
+trust, will last for ever. Men in the future will probably feel that a
+union with their cousins or near relations is positively wicked; that a
+union with those too like them in person or disposition is at least
+undesirable; that a union based upon considerations of wealth or any
+other consideration save considerations of immediate natural impulse, is
+base and disgraceful. But to the end of time they will continue to feel,
+in spite of doctrinaires, that the voice of nature is better far than
+the voice of the Lord Chancellor or the Royal Society; and that the
+instinctive desire for a particular helpmate is a surer guide for the
+ultimate happiness, both of the race and of the individual, than any
+amount of deliberate consultation. It is not the foolish fancies of
+youth that will have to be got rid of, but the foolish, wicked, and
+mischievous interference of parents or outsiders.
+
+
+
+
+RIGHT AND LEFT
+
+
+Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar scriptural phrase,
+'knoweth the right hand from the left.' This fact in his economy goes
+closely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal on
+this sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate
+language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.
+His right-handedness, in short, is part cause and part effect of his
+universal supremacy in animated nature. He is what he is, to a great
+extent, 'by his own right hand;' and his own right hand, we may shrewdly
+suspect, would never have differed at all from his left were it not for
+the manifold arts and trades and activities he practises.
+
+It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage ran. Man was
+once, in his childhood on earth, what Charles Reade wanted him again to
+be in his maturer centuries, ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers of
+this volume--in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoter
+portions of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton and the
+familiar knowledge of the Latin language have not yet penetrated--should
+complain that I speak with unknown tongues, I will further explain for
+their special benefit that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using the
+right and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang remarks
+in immortal verse, 'was the manner of Primitive Man.' He never minded
+twopence which hand he used, as long as he got the fruit or the scalp he
+wanted. How could he when twopence wasn't yet invented? His mamma never
+said to him in early youth, 'Why-why,' or 'Tomtom,' as the case might
+be, 'that's the wrong hand to hold your flint-scraper in.' He grew up to
+man's estate in happy ignorance of such minute and invidious
+distinctions between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that his
+hands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into shapely
+arrows; and he never even thought in his innocent soul which particular
+hand he did it with.
+
+How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about a gentleman whom
+I never personally saw, and whose habits the intervention of five
+hundred centuries has precluded me from studying at close quarters? At
+first sight, you would suppose the evidence on such a point must be
+purely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely be inventing
+_a priori_ facts, evolved, _more Germanico_, from his inner
+consciousness. Not so. See how clever modern archaeology has become! I
+base my assertion upon solid evidence. I know that Primitive Man was
+ambidextrous, because he wrote and painted just as often with his left
+as with his right, and just as successfully.
+
+This seems once more a hazardous statement to make about a remote
+ancestor, in the age before the great glacial epoch had furrowed the
+mountains of Northern Europe; but, nevertheless, it is strictly true and
+strictly demonstrable. Just try, as you read, to draw with the
+forefinger and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile on
+the page on which these words are printed. Do you observe that (unless
+you are an artist, and therefore sophisticated) you naturally and
+instinctively draw it with the face turned towards your left shoulder?
+Try now to draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find it
+requires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. The hand moves
+of its own accord from without inward, not from within outward. Then,
+again, draw with your left thumb and forefinger another imaginary
+profile, and you will find, for the same reason, that the face in this
+case looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young children,
+whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of man or beast, with
+their right hand, draw it almost always with the face or head turned to
+the left, in accordance with this natural human instinct. Their doing so
+is a test of their perfect right-handedness.
+
+But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive men we know
+personally, the carvers of the figures from the French bone-caves, drew
+men and beasts, on bone or mammoth-tusk, turned either way
+indiscriminately. The inference is obvious. They must have been
+ambidextrous. Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; and
+indeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a piece of
+bone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a practised hand, be
+comparatively difficult.
+
+I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with this one very
+clear historical datum, because it is interesting to be able to say with
+tolerable certainty that there really was a period in our life as a
+species when man in the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he become
+otherwise? This question is not only of importance in itself, as helping
+to explain the origin and source of man's supremacy in nature--his
+tool-using faculty--but it is also of interest from the light it casts
+on that fallacy of poor Charles Reade's already alluded to--that we
+ought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition of
+savages. I think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised man
+now right-handed, we shall also see why it would be highly undesirable
+for him to return, after so many ages of practice, to the condition of
+his undeveloped stone-age ancestors.
+
+The very beginning of our modern right-handedness goes back, indeed, to
+the most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be different
+in use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spite
+of all appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally,
+indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn't show: but it shows
+internally. We all of us know, in spite of Sganarelle's assertion to the
+contrary, that the apex of the heart inclines to the left side, and that
+the liver and other internal organs show a generous disregard for strict
+and formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those human
+organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get the clue to the
+irregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even the
+particular direction of the printed letters now before you.
+
+For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His manners were
+strikingly deficient in that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de
+Vere. When primitive man felt the tender passion steal over his soul, he
+lay in wait in the hush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms had
+inspired his heart with young desire; and when she passed his
+hiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled her with a
+club, caught her tight by the hair of her head, and dragged her off in
+triumph to his cave or his rock-shelter. (Marriage by capture, the
+learned call this simple mode of primeval courtship.) When he found some
+Strephon or Damoetas rival him in the affections of the dusky sex, he
+and that rival fought the matter out like two bulls in a field; and the
+victor and his Phyllis supped that evening off the roasted remains of
+the vanquished suitor. I don't say these habits and manners were pretty;
+but they were the custom of the time, and there's no good denying them.
+
+Now, Primitive Man, being thus by nature a fighting animal, fought for
+the most part at first with his great canine teeth, his nails, and his
+fists; till in process of time he added to these early and natural
+weapons the further persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought,
+as Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the possession of
+the ladies of his kind, against other members of his own sex and
+species. And if you fight, you soon learn to protect the most exposed
+and vulnerable portion of your body; or, if you don't, natural selection
+manages it for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence. To
+the boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that most vulnerable
+portion is undoubtedly the heart. A hard blow, well delivered on the
+left breast, will easily kill, or at any rate stun, even a very strong
+man. Hence, from a very early period, men have used the right hand to
+fight with, and have employed the left arm chiefly to cover the heart
+and to parry a blow aimed at that specially vulnerable region. And when
+weapons of offence and defence supersede mere fists and teeth, it is the
+right hand that grasps the spear or sword, while the left holds over the
+heart for defence the shield or buckler.
+
+From this simple origin, then, the whole vast difference of right and
+left in civilised life takes its beginning. At first, no doubt, the
+superiority of the right hand was only felt in the matter of fighting.
+But that alone gave it a distinct pull, and paved the way, at last, for
+its supremacy elsewhere. For when weapons came into use, the habitual
+employment of the right hand to grasp the spear, sword, or knife made
+the nerves and muscles of the right side far more obedient to the
+control of the will than those of the left. The dexterity thus acquired
+by the right--see how the very word 'dexterity' implies this fact--made
+it more natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the same
+hand preferentially in the manufacture of flint hatchets, bows and
+arrows, and in all the other manifold activities of savage life. It was
+the hand with which he grasped his weapon; it was therefore the hand
+with which he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right hand
+remains especially 'the hand in which you hold your knife;' and that is
+exactly how our own children to this day decide the question which is
+which, when they begin to know their right hand from their left for
+practical purposes.
+
+A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter innumerable
+other differences which naturally flow from it. Some of them are
+extremely remote and derivative. Take, for example, the case of writing
+and printing. Why do these run from left to right? At first sight such a
+practice seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticed
+above--the tendency to draw from right to left, in accordance with the
+natural sweep of the hand and arm. And, indeed, it is a fact that all
+early writing habitually took the opposite direction from that which is
+now universal in western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance
+(or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay standard),
+that Hebrew is written from right to left, and that each book begins at
+the wrong cover. The reason is that words, and letters, and
+hieroglyphics were originally carved, scratched, or incised, instead of
+being written with coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to follow
+its natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in naive drawing, with a
+free curve from the right leftward.
+
+Nevertheless, the very same fact--that we use the right hand alone in
+writing--made the letters run the opposite way in the end; and the
+change was due to the use of ink and other pigments for staining
+papyrus, parchment, or paper. If the hand in this case moved from right
+to left it would of course smear what it had already written; and to
+prevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of writing was
+reversed from left rightward. The use of wax tablets also, no doubt,
+helped forward the revolution, for in this case, too, the hand would
+cover and rub out the words written.
+
+The strict dependence of writing, indeed, upon the material employed is
+nowhere better shown than in the case of the Assyrian cuneiform
+inscriptions. The ordinary substitute for cream-laid note in the
+Euphrates valley in its palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, on
+which the words to be recorded--usually a deed of sale or something of
+the sort--were impressed while it was wet and then baked in, solid. And
+the method of impressing them was very simple; the workman merely
+pressed the end of his graver or wedge into the moist clay, thus giving
+rise to triangular marks which were arranged in the shapes of various
+letters. When alabaster, or any other hard material, was substituted for
+clay, the sculptor imitated these natural dabs or triangular imprints;
+and that was the origin of those mysterious and very learned-looking
+cuneiforms. This, I admit, is a palpable digression; but inasmuch as it
+throws an indirect light on the simple reasons which sometimes bring
+about great results, I hold it not wholly alien to the present serious
+philosophical inquiry.
+
+Printing, in turn, necessarily follows the rule of writing, so that in
+fact the order of letters and words on this page depends ultimately upon
+the remote fact that primitive man had to use his right hand to deliver
+a blow, and his left to parry, or to guard his heart.
+
+Some curious and hardly noticeable results flow once more from this
+order of writing from left to right. You will find, if you watch
+yourself closely, that in examining a landscape, or the view from a
+hill-top, your eye naturally ranges from left to right; and that you
+begin your survey, as you would begin reading a page of print, from the
+left-hand corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act of reading
+(for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised infant) has
+accustomed our eyes to this particular movement, and has made it
+especially natural when we are trying to 'read' or take in at a glance
+the meaning of any complex and varied total.
+
+In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has even gone a
+step farther. Not only do we usually take in the episodes of a painting
+from left to right, but the painter definitely and deliberately intends
+us so to take them in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes in
+succession are represented on a single plane in the same picture--as
+happens often in early art--they are invariably represented in the
+precise order of the words on a written or printed page, beginning at
+the upper left-hand corner, and ending at the lower right-hand angle. I
+first noticed this curious extension of the common principle in the
+mediaeval frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have since verified
+it by observations on many other pictures elsewhere, both ancient and
+modern. The Campo Santo, however, forms an exceptionally good museum of
+such story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every picture
+consists of several successive episodes. The famous Benozzo Gozzoli, for
+example, of Noah's Vineyard represents on a single plane all the stages
+in that earliest drama of intoxication, from the first act of gathering
+the grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the _vergognosa di
+Pisa_, who covers her face with her hands in shocked horror at the
+patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand corner.
+
+Observe, too, that the very conditions of _technique_ demand this order
+almost as rigorously in painting as in writing. For the painter will
+naturally so work as not to smudge over what he has already painted: and
+he will also naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story he
+unfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From which two
+principles it necessarily results that he will begin at the upper left,
+and end at the lower right-hand corner.
+
+I have skipped lightly, I admit, over a considerable interval between
+primitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli. But consider further that during all
+that time the uses of the right and left hand were becoming by gradual
+degrees each day still further differentiated and specialised.
+Innumerable trades, occupations, and habits imply ever-widening
+differences in the way we use them. It is not the right hand alone that
+has undergone an education in this respect: the left, too, though
+subordinate, has still its own special functions to perform. If the
+savage chips his flints with a blow of the right, he holds the core, or
+main mass of stone from which he strikes it, firmly with his left. If
+one hand is specially devoted to the knife, the other grasps the fork to
+make up for it. In almost every act we do with both hands, each has a
+separate office to which it is best fitted. Take, for example, so simple
+a matter as buttoning one's coat, where a curious distinction between
+the habits of the sexes enables us to test the principle with ease and
+certainty. Men's clothes are always made with the buttons on the right
+side and the button-holes on the left. Women's, on the contrary, are
+always made with the buttons on the left side, and the button-holes on
+the right. (The occult reason for this curious distinction, which has
+long engaged the attention of philosophers, has never yet been
+discovered, but it is probably to be accounted for by the perversity of
+women.) Well, if a man tries to put on a woman's waterproof, or a woman
+to put on a man's ulster, each will find that neither hand is readily
+able to perform the part of the other. A man, in buttoning, grasps the
+button in his right hand, pushes it through with his right thumb, holds
+the button-hole open with his left, and pulls all straight with his
+right forefinger. Reverse the sides, and both hands at once seem
+equally helpless.
+
+It is curious to note how many little peculiarities of dress or
+manufacture are equally necessitated by this prime distinction of right
+and left. Here are a very few of them, which the reader can indefinitely
+increase for himself. (I leave out of consideration obvious cases like
+boots and gloves: to insult that proverbially intelligent person's
+intelligence with those were surely unpardonable.) A scarf habitually
+tied in a sailor's knot acquires one long side, left, and one short one,
+right, from the way it is manipulated by the right hand; if it were tied
+by the left, the relations would be reversed. The spiral of corkscrews
+and of ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with the
+natural twist of the right hand: try to drive in an imaginary corkscrew
+with the right hand, the opposite way, and you will see how utterly
+awkward and clumsy is the motion. The strap of the flap that covers the
+keyhole in trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to the
+right, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it be
+conveniently buckled by a right-handed person. The hands of watches and
+the numbers of dial-faced barometers run from left to right: this is a
+peculiarity dependent upon the left to right system of writing. A
+servant offers you dishes from the left side: you can't so readily help
+yourself from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired of
+the German race, because it could never be taught like the English to
+keep to the right side of the pavement in walking. A sword is worn at
+the left hip: a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at the
+side; in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the right
+hand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in the left
+breast; a pocket for railway tickets half-way down the right side. Try to
+reverse any one of these simple actions, and you will see at once that
+they are immediately implied in the very fact of our original
+right-handedness.
+
+And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles Reade's mistaken
+notion of the advantages of ambidexterity. You couldn't make both hands
+do everything alike without a considerable loss of time, effort,
+efficiency, and convenience. Each hand learns to do its own work and to
+do it well; if you made it do the other hand's into the bargain, it
+would have a great deal more to learn, and we should find it difficult
+even then to prevent specialisation. We should have to make things
+deliberately different for the two hands--to have rights and lefts in
+everything, as we have them now in boots and gloves--or else one hand
+must inevitably gain the supremacy. Sword-handles, shears, surgical
+instruments, and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed,
+while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are adapted to the
+left; in each case for a perfectly sufficient reason. You can't upset
+all this without causing confusion. More than that, the division of
+labour thus brought about is certainly a gain to those who possess it:
+for if it were not so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten the
+dextro-sinistrals in the struggle for existence; whereas we know that
+the exact opposite has been the case. Man's special use of the right
+hand is one of his points of superiority to the brutes. If ever his
+right hand should forget its cunning, his supremacy would indeed begin
+to totter. Depend upon it, Nature is wiser than even Charles Reade. What
+she finds most useful in the long run must certainly have many good
+points to recommend it.
+
+And this last consideration suggests another aspect of right and left
+which must not be passed over without one word in this brief survey of
+the philosophy of the subject. The superiority of the right caused it
+early to be regarded as the fortunate, lucky, and trusty hand; the
+inferiority of the left caused it equally to be considered as
+ill-omened, unlucky, and, in one expressive word, sinister. Hence come
+innumerable phrases and superstitions. It is the right hand of
+friendship that we always grasp; it is with our own right hand that we
+vindicate our honour against sinister suspicions. On the other hand, it
+is 'over the left' that we believe a doubtful or incredible statement; a
+left-handed compliment or a left-handed marriage carry their own
+condemnation with them. On the right hand of the host is the seat of
+honour; it is to the left that the goats of ecclesiastical controversy
+are invariably relegated. The very notions of the right hand and ethical
+right have got mixed up inextricably in every language: _droit_ and _la
+droite_ display it in French as much as right and the right in English.
+But to be _gauche_ is merely to be awkward and clumsy; while to be right
+is something far higher and more important.
+
+So unlucky, indeed, does the left hand at last become that merely to
+mention it is an evil omen; and so the Greeks refused to use the true
+old Greek word for left at all, and preferred euphemistically to
+describe it as _euonymos_, the well-named or happy-omened. Our own
+_left_ seems equally to mean the hand that is left after the right has
+been mentioned, or, in short, the other one. Many things which are lucky
+if seen on the right are fateful omens if seen to leftward. On the other
+hand, if you spill the salt, you propitiate destiny by tossing a pinch
+of it over the left shoulder. A murderer's left hand is said by good
+authorities to be an excellent thing to do magic with; but here I cannot
+speak from personal experience. Nor do I know why the wedding-ring is
+worn on the left hand; though it is significant, at any rate, that the
+mark of slavery should be put by the man with his own right upon the
+inferior member of the weaker vessel. Strong-minded ladies may get up an
+agitation if they like to alter this gross injustice of the centuries.
+
+One curious minor application of rights and lefts is the rule of the
+road as it exists in England. How it arose I can't say, any more than I
+can say why a lady sits her side-saddle to the left. Coachmen, to be
+sure, are quite unanimous that the leftward route enables them to see
+how close they are passing to another carriage; but, as all continental
+authority is equally convinced the other way, I make no doubt this is a
+mere illusion of long-continued custom. It is curious, however, that the
+English usage, having once obtained in these islands, has influenced
+railways, not only in Britain, but over all Europe. Trains, like
+carriages, go to the left when they pass; and this habit, quite natural
+in England, was transplanted by the early engineers to the Continent,
+where ordinary carriages, of course, go to the right. In America, to be
+sure, the trains also go right like the carriages; but then, those
+Americans have such a curiously un-English way of being strictly
+consistent and logical in their doings. In Britain we should have
+compromised the matter by going sometimes one way and sometimes the
+other.
+
+
+
+
+EVOLUTION
+
+
+Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the cholera
+germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question,
+it is 'in the air.' It pervades society everywhere with its subtle
+essence; it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its
+slang phrases; it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant
+Philistinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody believes
+he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everyday
+conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen,
+the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of
+authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous
+semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin,
+and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer--don't you know?--and a
+lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the
+best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for the most part in a
+belief about nature at large essentially similar to that applied by
+Topsy to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in short,
+that most things 'growed.' Especially is it known that in the opinion of
+the evolutionists as a body we are all of us ultimately descended from
+men with tails, who were the final offspring and improved edition of the
+common gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception of the
+various points in the great modern evolutionary programme.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, who of course
+differs fundamentally from that inferior class of human beings known to
+all of us in our own minds as 'other people,' that almost every point in
+the catalogue thus briefly enumerated is a popular fallacy of the
+wildest description. Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more than
+George Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the electric
+telegraph. We are not descended from men with tails, any more than we
+are descended from Indian elephants. There is no evidence that we have
+anything in particular more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship with
+our poor relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search of
+a 'missing link'; few links are anywhere missing, and those are for the
+most part wholly unimportant ones. If we found the imaginary link in
+question, he would not be a monkey, nor yet in any way a tailed man. And
+so forth generally through the whole list of popular beliefs and current
+fallacies as to the real meaning of evolutionary teaching. Whatever most
+people think evolutionary is for the most part a pure parody of the
+evolutionist's opinion.
+
+But a more serious error than all these pervades what we may call the
+drawing-room view of the evolutionist theory. So far as Society with a
+big initial is concerned, evolutionism first began to be talked about,
+and therefore known (for Society does not read; it listens, or rather it
+overhears and catches fragmentary echoes) when Darwin published his
+'Origin of Species.' That great book consisted simply of a theory as to
+the causes which led to the distinctions of kind between plants and
+animals. With evolution at large it had nothing to do; it took for
+granted the origin of sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, the
+earth and all that in it is, the sea and the dry land, the mountains and
+the valleys, nay even life itself in the crude form, everything in fact,
+save the one point of the various types and species of living beings.
+Long before Darwin's book appeared evolution had been a recognised force
+in the moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace had
+worked out the development of suns and earths from white-hot
+star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth's surface
+to its present highly complex geographical condition. Lamarck had worked
+out the descent of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slow
+modification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth of mind from its
+simplest beginnings to its highest outcome in human thought.
+
+But Society, like Gallio, cared nothing for all these things. The
+evolutionary principles had never been put into a single big book, asked
+for at Mudie's, and permitted to lie on the drawing-room table side by
+side with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court
+memoirs. Therefore Society ignored them and knew them not; the word
+evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into its polite and refined
+dinner-table vocabulary. It recognised only the 'Darwinian theory,'
+'natural selection,' 'the missing link,' and the belief that men were
+merely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon
+them. To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented and
+patented the entire business, including descent with modification, if
+such notions ever occurred at all to the world-at-large's speculative
+intelligence.
+
+Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth and older
+antecedents than this easy, superficial drawing-room view would lead us
+to imagine. It is a very ancient and respectable theory indeed, and it
+has an immense variety of minor developments. I am not going to push it
+back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the vague and
+indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Roman
+poet--the only original poet in the Latin language--did indeed hit out
+for himself a very good rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and
+shapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it
+was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the philosophies of
+the older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of the
+development of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all,
+but wholly evolved, like the German thinker's camel, out of its author's
+own pregnant inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt have
+built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a little
+straw to make his bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-making
+being still in its infancy, he could only construct in a day a shadowy
+Aladdin's palace of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary
+world of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void chaos into
+an orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is not thus that systems
+arise which regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build for
+all time must make sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound
+bricks in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.
+
+It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began to
+take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace,
+Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of our modern
+evolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who
+led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses
+had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the
+eighteenth century.
+
+Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical
+order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede
+in development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages without a
+world to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore reduced to
+comparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, and
+matter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle. It was no wonder,
+then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly
+apprehended and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's
+crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of living
+beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted at in a timid
+whisper.
+
+In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this
+world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as
+the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of fluid light,' a vast nebula of
+enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The world
+arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was
+composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable gasiness
+that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be compressed into a
+common antibilious pill-box. The pill-box itself, in fact, is the net
+result of a prolonged secular condensation of myriads of such enormous
+cubes of this primaeval matter. Slowly setting around common centres,
+however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's gravitative theories, the
+fluid haze gradually collected into suns and stars, whose light and heat
+is presumably due to the clashing together of their component atoms as
+they fall perpetually towards the central mass. Just as in a burning
+candle the impact of the oxygen atoms in the air against the carbon and
+hydrogen atoms in the melted and rarefied wax or tallow produces the
+light and heat of the flame, so in nebula or sun the impact of the
+various gravitating atoms one against the other produces the light and
+heat by whose aid we are enabled to see and know those distant bodies.
+The universe, according to this now fashionable nebular theory, began as
+a single vast ocean of matter of immense tenuity, spread all alike over
+all space as far as nowhere, and comparatively little different within
+itself when looked at side by side with its own final historical
+outcome. In Mr. Spencer's perspicuous phrase, evolution in this aspect
+is a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the
+incoherent to the coherent, and from the indefinite to the definite
+condition. Difficult words at first to apprehend, no doubt, and
+therefore to many people, as to Mr. Matthew Arnold, very repellent, but
+full of meaning, lucidity, and suggestiveness, if only we once take the
+trouble fairly and squarely to understand them.
+
+Every sun and every star thus formed is for ever gathering in the hem of
+its outer robe upon itself, for ever radiating off its light and heat
+into surrounding space, and for ever growing denser and colder as it
+sets slowly towards its centre of gravity. Our own sun and solar system
+may be taken as good typical working examples of how the stars thus
+constantly shrink into smaller and ever smaller dimensions around their
+own fixed centre. Naturally, we know more about our own solar system
+than about any other in our own universe, and it also possesses for us a
+greater practical and personal interest than any outside portion of the
+galaxy. Nobody can pretend to be profoundly immersed in the internal
+affairs of Sirius or of Alpha Centauri. A fiery revolution in the belt
+of Orion would affect us less than a passing finger-ache in a certain
+single terrestrial baby of our own household. Therefore I shall not
+apologise in any way for leaving the remainder of the sidereal universe
+to its unknown fate, and concentrating my attention mainly on the
+affairs of that solitary little, out-of-the-way, second-rate system,
+whereof we form an inappreciable portion. The matter which now composes
+the sun and its attendant bodies (the satellites included) was once
+spread out, according to Laplace, to at least the furthest orbit of the
+outermost planet--that is to say, so far as our present knowledge goes,
+the planet Neptune. Of course, when it was expanded to that immense
+distance, it must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy
+human senses can even conceive of. An American would say, too thin; but
+I put Americans out of court at once as mere irreverent scoffers. From
+the orbit of Neptune, or something outside it, the faint and cloud-like
+mass which bore within it Caesar and his fortunes, not to mention the
+remainder of the earth and the solar system, began slowly to converge
+and gather itself in, growing denser and denser but smaller and smaller
+as it gradually neared its existing dimensions. How long a time it took
+to do it is for our present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel
+physicists will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or so
+for the process, while the grasping and extravagant evolutionary
+geologists beg with tears for at least double or even ten times that
+limited period. But at any rate it has taken a good long while, and, as
+far as most of us are personally concerned, the difference of one or two
+hundred millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an
+appreciable one.
+
+As it condensed and lessened towards its central core, revolving rapidly
+on its great axis, the solar mist left behind at irregular intervals
+concentric rings or belts of cloud-like matter, cast off from its
+equator; which belts, once more undergoing a similar evolution on their
+own account, have hardened round their private centres of gravity into
+Jupiter or Saturn, the Earth or Venus. Round these again, minor belts or
+rings have sometimes formed, as in Saturn's girdle of petty satellites;
+or subsidiary planets, thrown out into space, have circled round their
+own primaries, as the moon does around this sublunary world of ours.
+Meanwhile, the main central mass of all, retreating ever inward as it
+dropped behind it these occasional little reminders of its temporary
+stoppages, formed at last the sun itself, the main luminary of our
+entire system. Now, I won't deny that this primitive Kantian and
+Laplacian evolutionism, this nebular theory of such exquisite
+concinnity, here reduced to its simplest terms and most elementary
+dimensions, has received many hard knocks from later astronomers, and
+has been a good deal bowled over, both on mathematical and astronomical
+grounds, by recent investigators of nebulae and meteors. Observations on
+comets and on the sun's surface have lately shown that it contains in
+all likelihood a very considerable fanciful admixture. It isn't more
+than half true; and even the half now totters in places. Still, as a
+vehicle of popular exposition the crude nebular hypothesis in its rawest
+form serves a great deal better than the truth, so far as yet known, on
+the good old Greek principle of the half being often more than the
+whole. The great point which it impresses on the mind is the cardinal
+idea of the sun and planets, with their attendant satellites, not as
+turned out like manufactured articles, ready made, at measured
+intervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as due to the
+slow and gradual working of natural laws, in accordance with which each
+has assumed by force of circumstances its existing place, weight, orbit,
+and motion.
+
+The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead of a sudden making,
+which Kant and Laplace thus applied to the component bodies of the
+universe at large, was further applied by Lyell and his school to the
+outer crust of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the
+astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyell
+and his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth's
+surface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world began
+by being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal
+excitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it
+gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old is
+growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, discovers. As it passed
+from its fiery and volcanic youth to its staider and soberer middle age,
+a solid crust began to form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface.
+The aqueous vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated
+mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now hardened shell.
+Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into two or three main bodies that
+sank into hollows of the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic,
+Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the
+cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain
+ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very
+vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more
+diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the
+homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as aforesaid, with
+delightful regularity.
+
+At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands, peninsulas and
+islands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains, were wrought out by
+internal or external energies on the crust thus generally fashioned.
+Evaporation from the oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms;
+the water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys and river
+basins; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into streams, streams into
+primaeval Niles, and Amazons, and Mississippis. Volcanic forces uplifted
+here an Alpine chain, or depressed there a deep-sea hollow. Sediment
+washed from the hills and plains, or formed from countless skeletons of
+marine creatures, gathered on the sinking bed of the ocean as soft ooze,
+or crumbling sand, or thick mud, or gravel and conglomerate. Now
+upheaved into an elevated table-land, now slowly carved again by rain
+and rill into valley and watershed, and now worn down once more into
+the mere degraded stump of a plateau, the crust underwent innumerable
+changes, but almost all of them exactly the same in kind, and mostly in
+degree, as those we still see at work imperceptibly in the world around
+us. Rain washing down the soil; weather crumbling the solid rock; waves
+dashing at the foot of the cliffs; rivers forming deltas at their barred
+mouths; shingle gathering on the low spits; floods sweeping before them
+the countryside; ice grinding ceaselessly at the mountain top; peat
+filling up the shallow lake--these are the chief factors which have gone
+to make the physical world as we now actually know it. Land and sea,
+coast and contour, hill and valley, dale and gorge, earth-sculpture
+generally--all are due to the ceaseless interaction of these separately
+small and unnoticeable causes, aided or retarded by the slow effects of
+elevation or depression from the earth's shrinkage towards its own
+centre. Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is what it is,
+not by virtue of a single sudden creative act, nor by virtue of
+successive terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but by virtue of the slow
+continuous action of causes still always equally operative.
+
+Evolution in geology leads up naturally to evolution in the science of
+life. If the world itself grew, why not also the animals and plants that
+inhabit it? Already in the eager active eighteenth century this obvious
+idea had struck in the germ a large number of zoologists and botanists,
+and in the hands of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin it took form as a
+distinct and elaborate system of organic evolution. Buffon had been the
+first to hint at the truth; but Buffon was an eminently respectable
+nobleman in the dubious days of the tottering monarchy, and he did not
+care personally for the Bastille, viewed as a place of permanent
+residence. In Louis Quinze's France, indeed, as things then went, a man
+who offended the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne was prone to find himself
+shortly ensconced in free quarters, and kept there for the term of his
+natural existence without expense to his heirs or executors. So Buffon
+did not venture to say outright that he thought all animals and plants
+were descended one from the other with slight modifications; that would
+have been wicked, and the Sorbonne would have proved its wickedness to
+him in a most conclusive fashion by promptly getting him imprisoned or
+silenced. It is so easy to confute your opponent when you are a hundred
+strong and he is one weak unit. Buffon merely said, therefore, that if
+we didn't know the contrary to be the case by sure warrant, we might
+easily have concluded (so fallible is our reason) that animals always
+varied slightly, and that such variations, indefinitely accumulated,
+would suffice to account for almost any amount of ultimate difference. A
+donkey might thus have grown into a horse, and a bird might have
+developed from a primitive lizard. Only we know it was quite otherwise!
+A quiet hint from Buffon was as good as a declaration from many less
+knowing or suggestive people. All over Europe, the wise took Buffon's
+hint for what he meant it; and the unwise blandly passed it by as a mere
+passing little foolish vagary of that great ironical writer and thinker.
+
+Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of his grandson, was no fool; on the
+contrary, he was the most far-sighted man of his day in England; he saw
+at once what Buffon was driving at; and he worked out 'Mr. Buffon's'
+half-concealed hint to all its natural and legitimate conclusions. The
+great Count was always plain Mr. Buffon to his English contemporary.
+Life, said Erasmus Darwin nearly a century since, began in very minute
+marine forms, which gradually acquired fresh powers and larger bodies,
+so as imperceptibly to transform themselves into different creatures.
+Man, he remarked, anticipating his descendant, takes rabbits or
+pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by immensely changing
+their shapes and colours. If man can make a pouter or a fantail out of
+the common runt, if he can produce a piebald lop-ear from the brown wild
+rabbit, if he can transform Dorkings into Black Spanish, why cannot
+Nature, with longer time to work in, and endless lives to try with,
+produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals out of one single common
+ancestor? It was a bold idea of the Lichfield doctor--bold, at least,
+for the times he lived in--when Sam Johnson was held a mighty sage, and
+physical speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangerous
+touch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold folk, and had the
+courage of their opinions more than most men. So even in Lichfield,
+cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenth
+century, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability that
+quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendants
+of a single similar original form, and even that 'one and the same kind
+of living filament is, and has been, the cause of organic life.'
+
+The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always laughed at all
+reformers. It said Dr. Darwin was very clever, but really a most
+eccentric man. His 'Temple of Nature,' now, and his 'Botanic Garden,'
+were vastly fine and charming poems--those sweet lines, you know, about
+poor Eliza!--but his zoological theories were built of course upon a
+most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, no sensible person could
+ever take the doctor seriously. A freak of genius--nothing more; a mere
+desire to seem clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig of
+time has brought around with it! By a strange irony of fate, those
+admired verses are now almost entirely forgotten; poor Eliza has
+survived only as our awful example of artificial pathos; and the
+zoological heresies, at which the eighteenth century shrugged its fat
+shoulders and dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to be
+the chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological science.
+
+In the first year of the present century, Lamarck followed Erasmus
+Darwin's lead with an open avowal that in his belief all animals and
+plants were really descended from one or a few common ancestors. He held
+that organisms were just as much the result of law, not of miraculous
+interposition, as suns and worlds and all the natural phenomena around
+us generally. He saw that what naturalists call a species differs from
+what naturalists call a variety, merely in the way of being a little
+more distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congeners
+elsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms by which in many
+cases one species after another merges into the next on either side of
+it. He observed the analogy between the modifications induced by man and
+the modifications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-going
+and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient opinion which Society
+still believes to have been due to the works of Charles Darwin. In one
+point only, a minor point to outsiders, though a point of cardinal
+importance to the inner brotherhood of evolutionism, he did not
+anticipate his more famous successor. He thought organic evolution was
+wholly due to the direct action of surrounding circumstances, to the
+intercrossing of existing forms, and above all to the actual efforts of
+animals themselves. In other words, he had not discovered natural
+selection, the cardinal idea of Charles Darwin's epoch-making book. For
+him, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant reaching up to
+the boughs of trees; the monkey had acquired its opposable thumb by
+constant grasping at the neighbouring branches; and the serpent had
+acquired its sinuous shape by constant wriggling through the grass of
+the meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by his suggestive
+hint of survival of the fittest, and in so far, but in so far alone, he
+became the real father of modern biological evolutionism.
+
+From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles Darwin himself
+published his wonderful 'Origin of Species,' this idea that plants and
+animals might really have grown, instead of having been made all of a
+piece, kept brewing everywhere in the minds and brains of scientific
+thinkers. The notions which to the outside public were startlingly new
+when Darwin's book took the world by storm, were old indeed to the
+thinkers and workers who had long been familiar with the principle of
+descent with modification and the speculations of the Lichfield doctor
+or the Paris philosopher. Long before Darwin wrote his great work,
+Herbert Spencer had put forth in plain language every idea which the
+drawing-room biologists attributed to Darwin. The supporters of the
+development hypothesis, he said seven years earlier--yes, he called it
+the 'development hypothesis' in so many words--'can show that
+modification has effected and is effecting great changes in all
+organisms, subject to modifying influences.' They can show, he goes on
+(if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), that any existing
+plant or animal, placed under new conditions, begins to undergo adaptive
+changes of form and structure; that in successive generations these
+changes continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new habits;
+that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals changes of the sort
+habitually occur; that the differences thus caused, as for example in
+dogs, are often greater than those on which species in the wild state
+are founded, and that throughout all organic nature there _is_ at work a
+modifying influence of the same sort as that which they believed to
+have caused the differences of species--'an influence which, to all
+appearance, would produce in the millions of years and under the great
+variety of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of
+change.' What is this but pure Darwinism, as the drawing-room
+philosopher still understands the word? And yet it was written seven
+years before Darwin published the 'Origin of Species.'
+
+The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians before
+Darwin. Here are a few of them--Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates,
+Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer.
+Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself discovered anything. As
+well say that Luther made the German Reformation, that Lionardo made the
+Italian Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution, as
+say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionary
+movement, even in the restricted field of life only. A thousand
+predecessors worked up towards him; a thousand contemporaries helped to
+diffuse and to confirm his various principles.
+
+Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea the special
+notion of natural selection. That is to say, he pointed out that while
+plants and animals vary perpetually and vary indefinitely, all the
+varieties so produced are not equally adapted to the circumstances of
+the species. If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, because
+every point of disadvantage tells against the individual in the struggle
+for life. If the variation is a good one, it tends to persist, because
+every point of advantage similarly tells in the individual's favour in
+that ceaseless and viewless battle. It was this addition to the
+evolutionary concept, fortified by Darwin's powerful advocacy of the
+general principle of descent with modification, that won over the whole
+world to the 'Darwinian theory.' Before Darwin, many men of science
+were evolutionists: after Darwin, all men of science became so at once,
+and the rest of the world is rapidly preparing to follow their
+leadership.
+
+As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly this--that
+plants and animals have all a natural origin from a single primitive
+living creature, which itself was the product of light and heat acting
+on the special chemical constituents of an ancient ocean. Starting from
+that single early form, they have gone on developing ever since, from
+the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more varied shapes,
+till at last they have reached their present enormous variety of tree,
+and shrub, and herb, and seaweed, of beast, and bird, and fish, and
+creeping insect. Evolution throughout has been one and continuous, from
+nebula to sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly-speck to man
+or elephant. So at least evolutionists say--and of course they ought to
+know most about it.
+
+But evolution, according to the evolutionists, does not even stop here.
+Psychology as well as biology has also its evolutionary explanation:
+mind is concerned as truly as matter. If the bodies of animals are
+evolved, their minds must be evolved likewise. Herbert Spencer and his
+followers have been mainly instrumental in elucidating this aspect of
+the case. They have shown, or they have tried to show (for I don't want
+to dogmatise on the subject), how mind is gradually built up from the
+simplest raw elements of sense and feeling; how emotions and intellect
+slowly arise; how the action of the environment on the organism begets a
+nervous system of ever greater and greater complexity, culminating at
+last in the brain of a Newton, a Shakespeare, or a Mendelssohn. Step by
+step, nerves have built themselves up out of the soft tissues as
+channels of communication between part and part. Sense-organs of
+extreme simplicity have first been formed on the outside of the body,
+where it comes most into contact with external nature. Use and wont have
+fashioned them through long ages into organs of taste and smell and
+touch; pigment spots, sensitive to light or shade, have grown by
+infinite gradations into the human eye or into the myriad facets of bee
+and beetle; tremulous nerve-ends, responsive sympathetically to waves of
+sound, have tuned themselves at last into a perfect gamut in the
+developed ear of men and mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipient
+centres have grown up in the brain, so that the coloured picture flashed
+by an external scene upon the eye is telegraphed from the sensitive
+mirror of the retina, through the many-stranded cable of the optic
+nerve, straight up to the appropriate headquarters in the thinking
+brain. Stage by stage the continuous process has gone on unceasingly,
+from the jelly-fish with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinite
+steps of progression, induced by ever-widening intercourse with the
+outer world, to the final outcome in the senses and the emotions, the
+intellect and the will, of civilised man. Mind begins as a vague
+consciousness of touch or pressure on the part of some primitive,
+shapeless, soft creature: it ends as an organised and co-ordinated
+reflection of the entire physical and psychical universe on the part of
+a great cosmical philosopher.
+
+Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists take to
+politics. Having shown us entirely to their own satisfaction the growth
+of suns, and systems, and worlds, and continents, and oceans, and
+plants, and animals, and minds, they proceed to show us the exactly
+analogous and parallel growth of communities, and nations, and
+languages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and
+literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others
+have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his
+early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of
+fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the
+earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became
+the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the
+tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually his
+excited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, the
+horse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings in
+the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the bread-fruit, and the
+coco-nut. He picked and improved the seeds of his wild cereals till he
+made himself from grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, his
+Indian corn. In time, he dug out ore from mines, and learnt the use
+first of gold, next of silver, then of copper, tin, bronze, and iron.
+Side by side with these long secular changes, he evolved the family,
+communal or patriarchal, polygamic or monogamous. He built the hut, the
+house, and the palace. He clothed or adorned himself first in skins and
+leaves and feathers; next in woven wool and fibre; last of all in purple
+and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. He gathered into
+hordes, tribes, and nations; he chose himself a king, gave himself laws,
+and built up great empires in Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru. He raised
+him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into
+hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps,
+into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His
+dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his
+boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and
+his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the
+telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution
+has really been most marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctly
+historical; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian,
+French, and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth of
+the trireme, the 'Great Harry,' the 'Victory,' and the 'Minotaur' from
+the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.
+
+The grand conception of the uniform origin and development of all
+things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us in the one word
+evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles Darwin nor to any other
+single thinker. It is the joint product of innumerable workers, all
+working up, though some of them unconsciously, towards a grand final
+unified philosophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the
+Herschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies; in biology,
+Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer; in psychology,
+Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor,
+Lubbock, and De Mortillet--these have been the chief evolutionary
+teachers and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself, and
+the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as a system of
+philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we owe to one man
+alone--Herbert Spencer. Many other minds--from Galileo and Copernicus,
+from Kepler and Newton, from Linnaeus and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and
+Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius--had been
+piling together the vast collection of raw material from which that
+great and stately superstructure was to be finally edified. But the
+architect who placed each block in its proper niche, who planned and
+designed the whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the
+rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, was the author
+of the 'System of Synthetic Philosophy,' and none other. It is a strange
+proof of how little people know about their own ideas, that among the
+thousands who talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. are
+probably aware that both word and conception are alike due to the
+commanding intelligence and vast generalising power of Herbert Spencer.
+
+
+
+
+STRICTLY INCOG.
+
+
+Among the reefs of rock upon the Australian coast, an explorer's dredge
+often brings up to the surface some tangled tresses of reddish seaweed,
+which, when placed for a while in a bucket of water, begin slowly to
+uncoil themselves as if endowed with animal life, and finally to swim
+about with a gentle tremulous motion in a mute inquiring way from side
+to side of the pail that contains them. Looked at closely with an
+attentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself into
+two parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a
+strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating the
+weed itself in form and colour. When removed from the water, this queer
+pipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-known
+hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a
+mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny domestic museums.
+But the Australian species, instead of merely mimicking the knight on a
+chess-board, looks rather like a hippocampus in the most advanced stage
+of lunacy, with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spines
+flattened out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly
+indistinguishable in hue and shape from the fucus round which the
+creature clings for support with its prehensile tail. Only a rude and
+shapeless rough draught of a head, vaguely horse-like in contour, and
+inconspicuously provided with an unobtrusive snout and a pair of very
+unnoticeable eyes, at all suggests to the most microscopic observer its
+animal nature. Taken as a whole, nobody could at first sight distinguish
+it in any way from the waving weed among which it vegetates.
+
+Clearly, this curious Australian cousin of the Mediterranean sea-horses
+has acquired so marvellous a resemblance to a bit of fucus in order to
+deceive the eyes of its ever-watchful enemies, and to become
+indistinguishable from the uneatable weed whose colour and form it so
+surprisingly imitates. Protective resemblances of the sort are extremely
+common among the pipe-fish family, and the reason why they should be so
+is no doubt sufficiently obvious at first sight to any reflecting
+mind--such, for example, as the intelligent reader's. Pipe-fish, as
+everybody knows, are far from giddy. They do not swim in the vortex of
+piscine dissipation. Being mostly small and defenceless creatures,
+lurking among the marine vegetation of the shoals and reefs, they are
+usually accustomed to cling for support by their snake-like tails to the
+stalks or leaves of those submerged forests. The omniscient schoolboy
+must often have watched in aquariums the habits and manners of the
+common sea-horses, twisted together by their long thin bodies into one
+inextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly with a treble
+serpentine coil to some projecting branch of coralline or of quivering
+sea-wrack. Bad swimmers by nature, utterly unarmed, and wholly
+undefended by protective mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fight
+nor run away: and therefore they depend entirely for their lives upon
+their peculiar skulking and lurking habits. Their one mode of defence is
+not to show themselves; discretion is the better part of their valour;
+they hide as much as possible among the thickest seaweed, and trust to
+Providence to escape observation.
+
+Now, with any animals thus constituted, cowards by hereditary
+predilection, it must necessarily happen that the more brightly coloured
+or obtrusive individuals will most readily be spotted and most
+unceremoniously devoured by their sharp-sighted foes, the predatory
+fishes. On the other hand, just in proportion as any particular
+pipe-fish happens to display any chance resemblance in colour or
+appearance to the special seaweed in whose folds it lurks, to that
+extent will it be likely to escape detection, and to hand on its
+peculiarities to its future descendants. A long-continued course of the
+simple process thus roughly described must of necessity result at last
+in the elimination of all the most conspicuous pipe-fish, and the
+survival of all those unobtrusive and retiring individuals which in any
+respect happen to resemble the fucus or coralline among which they
+dwell. Hence, in many places, various kinds of pipe-fish exhibit an
+extraordinary amount of imitative likeness to the sargasso or seaweed to
+whose tags they cling; and in the three most highly developed Australian
+species the likeness becomes so ridiculously close that it is with
+difficulty one can persuade oneself one is really and truly looking at a
+fish, and not at a piece of strangely animated and locomotive fucus.
+
+Of course, the playful pipe-fish is by no means alone in his assumption
+of so neat and effective a disguise. Protective resemblances of just the
+same sort as that thus exhibited by this extraordinary little creature
+are common throughout the whole range of nature; instances are to be
+found in abundance, not only among beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes,
+but even among caterpillars, butterflies, and spiders, of species which
+preserve the strictest incognito. Everywhere in the world, animals and
+plants are perpetually masquerading in various assumed characters; and
+sometimes their make-up is so exceedingly good as to take in for a while
+not merely the uninstructed ordinary observer, but even the scientific
+and systematic naturalist.
+
+A few selected instances of such successful masquerading will perhaps
+best serve to introduce the general principles upon which all animal
+mimicry ultimately depends. Indeed, naturalists of late years have been
+largely employed in fishing up examples from the ends of the earth and
+from the depths of the sea for the elucidation of this very subject.
+There is a certain butterfly in the islands of the Malay Archipelago
+(its learned name, if anybody wishes to be formally introduced, is
+_Kallima paralekta_) which always rests among dead or dry leaves, and
+has itself leaf-like wings, all spotted over at intervals with wee
+speckles to imitate the tiny spots of fungi on the foliage it resembles.
+The well-known stick and leaf insects from the same rich neighbourhood
+in like manner exactly mimic the twigs and leaves of the forest among
+which they lurk: some of them look for all the world like little bits of
+walking bamboo, while others appear in all varieties of hue, as if
+opening buds and full-blown leaves and pieces of yellow foliage
+sprinkled with the tints and moulds of decay had of a sudden raised
+themselves erect upon six legs, and begun incontinently to perambulate
+the Malayan woodlands like vegetable Frankensteins in all their glory.
+The larva of one such deceptive insect, observed in Nicaragua by
+sharp-eyed Mr. Belt, appeared at first sight like a mere fragment of the
+moss on which it rested, its body being all prolonged into little
+thread-like green filaments, precisely imitating the foliage around it.
+Once more, there are common flies which secure protection for themselves
+by growing into the counterfeit presentment of wasps or hornets, and so
+obtaining immunity from the attacks of birds or animals. Many of these
+curiously mimetic insects are banded with yellow and black in the very
+image of their stinging originals, and have their tails sharpened, _in
+terrorem_, into a pretended sting, to give point and verisimilitude to
+the deceptive resemblance. More curious still, certain South American
+butterflies of a perfectly inoffensive and edible family mimic in every
+spot and line of colour sundry other butterflies of an utterly unrelated
+and fundamentally dissimilar type, but of so disagreeable a taste as
+never to be eaten by birds or lizards. The origin of these curious
+resemblances I shall endeavour to explain (after Messrs. Bates and
+Wallace) a little farther on: for the present it is enough to observe
+that the extraordinary resemblances thus produced have often deceived
+the very elect, and have caused experienced naturalists for a time to
+stick some deceptive specimen of a fly among the wasps and hornets, or
+some masquerading cricket into the midst of a cabinet full of saw-flies
+or ichneumons.
+
+Let us look briefly at the other instances of protective coloration in
+nature generally which lead up to these final bizarre exemplifications
+of the masquerading tendency.
+
+Wherever all the world around is remarkably uniform in colour and
+appearance, all the animals, birds, and insects alike necessarily
+disguise themselves in its prevailing tint to escape observation. It
+does not matter in the least whether they are predatory or defenceless,
+the hunters or the hunted: if they are to escape destruction or
+starvation, as the case may be, they must assume the hue of all the rest
+of nature about them. In the arctic snows, for example, all animals,
+without exception, must needs be snow-white. The polar bear, if he were
+brown or black, would immediately be observed among the unvaried
+ice-fields by his expected prey, and could never get a chance of
+approaching his quarry unperceived at close quarters. On the other hand,
+the arctic hare must equally be dressed in a snow-white coat, or the
+arctic fox would too readily discover him and pounce down upon him
+off-hand; while, conversely, the fox himself, if red or brown, could
+never creep upon the unwary hare without previous detection, which would
+defeat his purpose. For this reason, the ptarmigan and the willow grouse
+become as white in winter as the vast snow-fields under which they
+burrow; the ermine changes his dusky summer coat for the expensive
+wintry suit beloved of British Themis; the snow-bunting acquires his
+milk-white plumage; and even the weasel assimilates himself more or less
+in hue to the unvarying garb of arctic nature. To be out of the fashion
+is there quite literally to be out of the world: no half-measures will
+suit the stern decree of polar biology; strict compliance with the law
+of winter change is absolutely necessary to success in the struggle for
+existence.
+
+Now, how has this curious uniformity of dress in arctic animals been
+brought about? Why, simply by that unyielding principle of Nature which
+condemns the less adapted for ever to extinction, and exalts the better
+adapted to the high places of her hierarchy in their stead. The
+ptarmigan and the snow-buntings that look most like the snow have for
+ages been least likely to attract the unfavourable attention of arctic
+fox or prowling ermine; the fox or ermine that came most silently and
+most unperceived across the shifting drifts has been most likely to
+steal unawares upon the heedless flocks of ptarmigan and snow-bunting.
+In the one case protective colouring preserves the animal from himself
+being devoured; in the other case it enables him the more easily to
+devour others. And since 'Eat or be eaten' is the shrill sentence of
+Nature upon all animal life, the final result is the unbroken whiteness
+of the arctic fauna in all its developments of fur or feather.
+
+Where the colouring of nature is absolutely uniform, as among the arctic
+snows or the chilly mountain tops, the colouring of the animals is
+uniform too. Where it is slightly diversified from point to point, as in
+the sands of the desert, the animals that imitate it are speckled or
+diversified with various soft neutral tints. All the birds, reptiles,
+and insects of Sahara, says Canon Tristram, copy closely the grey or
+isabelline colour of the boundless sands that stretch around them. Lord
+George Campbell, in his amusing 'Log Letters from the "Challenger,"'
+mentions a butterfly on the shore at Amboyna which looked exactly like a
+bit of the beach, until it spread its wings and fluttered away gaily to
+leeward. Soles and other flat-fish similarly resemble the sands or banks
+on which they lie, and accommodate themselves specifically to the
+particular colour of their special bottom. Thus the flounder imitates
+the muddy bars at the mouths of rivers, where he loves to half bury
+himself in the congenial ooze; the sole, who rather affects clean hard
+sand-banks, is simply sandy and speckled with grey; the plaice, who goes
+in by preference for a bed of mixed pebbles, has red and yellow spots
+scattered up and down irregularly among the brown, to look as much as
+possible like agates and carnelians: the brill, who hugs a still rougher
+ledge, has gone so far as to acquire raised lumps or tubercles on his
+upper surface, which make him seem like a mere bit of the shingle-strewn
+rock on which he reposes. In short, where the environment is most
+uniform the colouring follows suit: just in proportion as the
+environment varies from place to place, the colouring must vary in order
+to simulate it. There is a deep biological joy in the term
+'environment'; it almost rivals the well-known consolatory properties of
+that sweet word 'Mesopotamia.' 'Surroundings,' perhaps, would equally
+well express the meaning, but then, as Mr. Wordsworth justly observes,
+'the difference to me!'
+
+Between England and the West Indies, about the time when one begins to
+recover from the first bout of sea-sickness, we come upon a certain
+sluggish tract of ocean, uninvaded by either Gulf Stream or arctic
+current, but slowly stagnating in a sort of endless eddy of its own, and
+known to sailors and books of physical geography as the Sargasso Sea.
+The sargasso or floating seaweed from which it takes its poetical name
+is a pretty yellow rootless alga, swimming in vast quantities on the
+surface of the water, and covered with tiny bladder-like bodies which at
+first sight might easily be mistaken for amber berries. If you drop a
+bucket over the ship's side and pull up a tangled mass of this beautiful
+seaweed, it will seem at first to be all plant alike; but, when you come
+to examine its tangles closely, you will find that it simply swarms with
+tiny crabs, fishes, and shrimps, all coloured so precisely to shade that
+they look exactly like the sargasso itself. Here the colour about is
+less uniform than in the arctic snows, but, so far as the
+sargasso-haunting animals are concerned, it comes pretty much to the
+same thing. The floating mass of weed is their whole world, and they
+have had to accommodate themselves to its tawny hue under pain of death,
+immediate and violent.
+
+Caterpillars and butterflies often show us a further step in advance in
+the direction of minute imitation of ordinary surroundings. Dr. Weismann
+has published a very long and learned memoir, fraught with the best
+German erudition and prolixity, upon this highly interesting and obscure
+subject. As English readers, however, not unnaturally object to trudging
+through a stout volume on the larva of the sphinx moth, conceived in the
+spirit of those patriarchal ages of Hilpa and Shalum, when man lived to
+nine hundred and ninety-nine years, and devoted a stray century or so
+without stint to the work of education, I shall not refer them to Dr.
+Weismann's original treatise, as well translated and still further
+enlarged by Mr. Raphael Meldola, but will present them instead with a
+brief _resume_, boiled down and condensed into a patent royal elixir of
+learning. Your caterpillar, then, runs many serious risks in early life
+from the annoying persistence of sundry evil-disposed birds, who insist
+at inconvenient times in picking him off the leaves of gooseberry bushes
+and other his chosen places of residence. His infant mortality, indeed,
+is something simply appalling, and it is only by laying the eggs that
+produce him in enormous quantities that his fond mother the butterfly
+ever succeeds in rearing on an average two of her brood to replace the
+imago generation just departed. Accordingly, the caterpillar has been
+forced by adverse circumstances to assume the most ridiculous and
+impossible disguises, appearing now in the shape of a leaf or stem, now
+as a bundle of dark-green pine needles, and now again as a bud or
+flower, all for the innocent purpose of concealing his whereabouts from
+the inquisitive gaze of the birds his enemies.
+
+When the caterpillar lives on a plant like a grass, the ribs or veins of
+which run up and down longitudinally, he is usually striped or streaked
+with darker lines in the same direction as those on his native foliage.
+When, on the contrary, he lives upon broader leaves, provided with a
+midrib and branching veins, his stripes and streaks (not to be out of
+the fashion) run transversely and obliquely, at exactly the same angle
+as those of his wonted food-plant. Very often, if you take a green
+caterpillar of this sort away from his natural surroundings, you will be
+surprised at the conspicuousness of his pale lilac or mauve markings;
+surely, you will think to yourself, such very distinct variegation as
+that must betray him instantly to his watchful enemies. But no; if you
+replace him gently where you first found him, you will see that the
+lines exactly harmonise with the joints and shading of his native leaf:
+they are delicate representations of the soft shadow cast by a rib or
+vein, and the local colour is precisely what a painter would have had to
+use in order to produce the corresponding effect. The shadow of
+yellowish green is, of course, always purplish or lilac. It may at first
+sight seem surprising that a caterpillar should possess so much artistic
+sense and dexterity; but then the penalty for bungling or inharmonious
+work is so very severe as necessarily to stimulate his imitative genius.
+Birds are for ever hunting him down among the green leaves, and only
+those caterpillars which effectually deceive them by their admirable
+imitations can ever hope to survive and become the butterflies who hand
+on their larval peculiarities to after ages. Need I add that the
+variations are, of course, unconscious, and that accident in the first
+place is ultimately answerable for each fresh step in the direction of
+still closer simulation?
+
+The geometric moths have brown caterpillars, which generally stand erect
+when at rest on the branches of trees and so resemble small twigs; and,
+in order that the resemblance may be the more striking, they are often
+covered with tiny warts which look like buds or knots upon the surface.
+The larva of that familiar and much-dreaded insect, the death's-head
+hawk-moth, feeds as a rule on the foliage of the potato, and its very
+varied colouring, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, so beautifully
+harmonises with the brown of the earth, the yellow and green of the
+leaves, and the faint purplish blue of the lurid flowers, that it can
+only be distinguished when the eye happens accidentally to focus itself
+exactly upon the spot occupied by the unobtrusive caterpillar. Other
+larvae which frequent pine trees have their bodies covered with tufts of
+green hairs that serve to imitate the peculiar pine foliage. One queer
+little caterpillar, which lives upon the hoary foliage of the
+sea-buckthorn, has a grey-green body, just like the buckthorn leaves,
+relieved by a very conspicuous red spot which really represents in size
+and colour one of the berries that grow around it. Finally the larva of
+the elephant hawk-moth, which grows to a very large size, has a pair of
+huge spots that seem like great eyes; and direct experiment establishes
+the fact that small birds mistake it for a young snake, and stand in
+terrible awe of it accordingly, though it is in reality a perfectly
+harmless insect, and also, as I am credibly informed (for I cannot speak
+upon the point from personal experience), a very tasty and
+well-flavoured insect, and 'quite good to eat' too, says an eminent
+authority. One of these big snake-like caterpillars once frightened Mr.
+Bates himself on the banks of the Amazon.
+
+Now, I know that cantankerous person, the universal objector, has all
+along been bursting to interrupt me and declare that he himself
+frequently finds no end of caterpillars, and has not the slightest
+difficulty at all in distinguishing them with the naked eye from the
+leaves and plants among which they are lurking. But observe how promptly
+we crush and demolish this very inconvenient and disconcerting critic.
+The caterpillars _he_ finds are almost all hairy ones, very conspicuous
+and easy to discover--'woolly bears,' and such like common and unclean
+creatures--and the reason they take no pains to conceal themselves from
+his unobservant eyes is simply this: nobody on earth wants to discover
+them. For either they are protectively encased in horrid hairs, which
+get down your throat and choke you and bother you (I speak as a bird,
+from the point of view of a confirmed caterpillar eater), or else they
+are bitter and nasty to the taste, like the larva of the spurge moth and
+the machaon butterfly. These are the ordinary brown and red and banded
+caterpillars that the critical objector finds in hundreds on his
+peregrinations about his own garden--commonplace things which the
+experienced naturalist has long since got utterly tired of. But has
+your rash objector ever lighted upon that rare larva which lives among
+the periwinkles, and exactly imitates a periwinkle petal? Has he ever
+discovered those deceptive creatures which pretend for all the world to
+be leaves of lady's-bedstraw, or dress themselves up as flowers of
+buttonweed? Has he ever hit upon those immoral caterpillars which
+wriggle through life upon the false pretence that they are only the
+shadows of projecting ribs on the under surface of a full-grown lime
+leaf? No, not he; he passes them all by without one single glance of
+recognition; and when the painstaking naturalist who has hunted them
+every one down with lens and butterfly net ventures tentatively to
+describe their personal appearance, he comes up smiling with his great
+russet woolly bear comfortably nestling upon a green cabbage leaf, and
+asks you in a voice of triumphant demonstration, where is the trace of
+concealment or disguise in that amiable but very inedible insect? Go to,
+Sir Critic, I will have none of you; I only use you for a metaphorical
+marionette to set up and knock down again, as Mr. Punch in the street
+show knocks down the policeman who comes to arrest him, and the grimy
+black personage of sulphurous antecedents who pops up with a fizz
+through the floor of his apartment.
+
+Queerer still than the caterpillars which pretend to be leaves or
+flowers for the sake of protection are those truly diabolical and
+perfidious Brazilian spiders which, as Mr. Bates observed, are
+brilliantly coloured with crimson and purple, but 'double themselves up
+at the base of leaf-stalks, so as to resemble flower buds, and thus
+deceive the insects upon which they prey.' There is something hideously
+wicked and cruel in this lowest depth of imitative infamy. A flower-bud
+is something so innocent and childlike; and to disguise oneself as such
+for purposes of murder and rapine argues the final abyss of arachnoid
+perfidy. It reminds one of that charming and amiable young lady in Mr.
+Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dynamiter,' who amused herself in moments of
+temporary gaiety by blowing up inhabited houses, inmates and all, out of
+pure lightness of heart and girlish frivolity. An Indian mantis or
+praying insect, a little less wicked, though no less cruel than the
+spiders, deceives the flies who come to his arms under the false
+pretence of being a quiet leaf, upon which they may light in safety for
+rest and refreshment. Yet another abandoned member of the same family,
+relying boldly upon the resources of tropical nature, gets itself up as
+a complete orchid, the head and fangs being moulded in the exact image
+of the beautiful blossom, and the arms folding treacherously around the
+unhappy insect which ventures to seek for honey in its deceptive jaws.
+
+Happily, however, the tyrants and murderers do not always have things
+all their own way. Sometimes the inoffensive prey turn the tables upon
+their torturers with distinguished success. For example, Mr. Wallace
+noticed a kind of sand-wasp, in Borneo, much given to devouring
+crickets; but there was one species of cricket which exactly reproduced
+the features of the sand-wasps, and mixed among them on equal terms
+without fear of detection. Mr. Belt saw a green leaf-like locust in
+Nicaragua, overrun by foraging ants in search of meat for dinner, but
+remaining perfectly motionless all the time, and evidently mistaken by
+the hungry foragers for a real piece of the foliage it mimicked. So
+thoroughly did this innocent locust understand the necessity for
+remaining still, and pretending to be a leaf under all advances, that
+even when Mr. Belt took it up in his hands it never budged an inch, but
+strenuously preserved its rigid leaf-like attitude. As other insects
+'sham dead,' this ingenious creature shammed vegetable.
+
+In order to understand how cases like these begin to arise, we must
+remember that first of all they start of necessity from very slight and
+indefinite resemblances, which succeed as it were by accident in
+occasionally eluding the vigilance of enemies. Thus, there are stick
+insects which only look like long round cylinders, not obviously
+stick-shaped, but rudely resembling a bit of wood in outline only. These
+imperfectly mimetic insects may often obtain a casual immunity from
+attack by being mistaken for a twig by birds or lizards. There are
+others, again, in which natural selection has gone a step further, so as
+to produce upon their bodies bark-like colouring and rough patches which
+imitate knots, wrinkles, and leaf-buds. In these cases the protection
+given is far more marked, and the chances of detection are
+proportionately lessened. But sharp-eyed birds, with senses quickened by
+hunger, the true mother of invention, must learn at last to pierce such
+flimsy disguises, and suspect a stick insect in the most
+innocent-looking and apparently rigid twigs. The final step, therefore,
+consists in the production of that extraordinary actor, the _Xeroxylus
+laceratus_, whose formidable name means no more than 'ragged dry-stick,'
+and which really mimics down to the minutest particular a broken twig,
+overgrown with mosses, liverworts, and lichens.
+
+Take, on the other hand, the well-known case of that predaceous mantis
+which exactly imitates the white ants, and, mixing with them like one of
+their own horde, quietly devours a stray fat termite or so, from time to
+time, as occasion offers. Here we must suppose that the ancestral mantis
+happened to be somewhat paler and smaller than most of its
+fellow-tribesmen, and so at times managed unobserved to mingle with the
+white ants, especially in the shade or under a dusky sky, much to the
+advantage of its own appetite. But the termites would soon begin to
+observe the visits of their suspicious friend, and to note their
+coincidence with the frequent mysterious disappearance of a
+fellow-townswoman, evaporated into space, like the missing young women
+in neat cloth jackets who periodically vanish from the London suburbs.
+In proportion as their reasonable suspicions increased, the termites
+would carefully avoid all doubtful looking mantises; but, at the same
+time, they would only succeed in making the mantises which survived
+their inquisition grow more and more closely to resemble the termite
+pattern in all particulars. For any mantis which happened to come a
+little nearer the white ants in hue or shape would thereby be enabled to
+make a more secure meal upon his unfortunate victims; and so the very
+vigilance which the ants exerted against his vile deception would itself
+react in time against their own kind, by leaving only the most ruthless
+and indistinguishable of their foes to become the parents of future
+generations of mantises.
+
+Once more, the beetles and flies of Central America must have learned by
+experience to get out of the way of the nimble Central American lizards
+with great agility, cunning, and alertness. But green lizards are less
+easy to notice beforehand than brown or red ones; and so the lizards of
+tropical countries are almost always bright green, with complementary
+shades of yellow, grey, and purple, just to fit them in with the foliage
+they lurk among. Everybody who has ever hunted the green tree-toads on
+the leaves of waterside plants on the Riviera must know how difficult it
+is to discriminate these brilliant leaf-coloured creatures from the
+almost identical background on which they rest. Now, just in proportion
+as the beetles and flies grow still more cautious, even the green
+lizards themselves fail to pick up a satisfactory livelihood; and so at
+last we get that most remarkable Nicaraguan form, decked all round with
+leaf-like expansions, and looking so like the foliage on which it rests
+that no beetle on earth can possibly detect it. The more cunning you get
+your detectives, the more cunning do the thieves become to outwit them.
+
+Look, again, at the curious life-history of the flies which dwell as
+unbidden guests or social parasites in the nests and hives of wild
+honey-bees. These burglarious flies are belted and bearded in the very
+self-same pattern as the bumble-bees themselves; but their larvae live
+upon the young grubs of the hive, and repay the unconscious hospitality
+of the busy workers by devouring the future hope of their unwilling
+hosts. Obviously, any fly which entered a bee-hive could only escape
+detection and extermination at the hands (or stings) of its outraged
+inhabitants, provided it so far resembled the real householders as to be
+mistaken at a first glance by the invaded community for one of its own
+numerous members. Thus any fly which showed the slightest superficial
+resemblance to a bee might at first be enabled to rob honey for a time
+with comparative impunity, and to lay its eggs among the cells of the
+helpless larvae. But when once the vile attempt was fairly discovered,
+the burglars could only escape fatal detection from generation to
+generation just in proportion as they more and more closely approximated
+to the shape and colour of the bees themselves. For, as Mr. Belt has
+well pointed out, while the mimicking species would become naturally
+more numerous from age to age, the senses of the mimicked species would
+grow sharper and sharper by constant practice in detecting and punishing
+the unwelcome intruders.
+
+It is only in external matters, however, that the appearance of such
+mimetic species can ever be altered. Their underlying points of
+structure and formative detail always show to the very end (if only one
+happens to observe them) their proper place in a scientific
+classification. For instance, these same parasitic flies which so
+closely resemble bees in their shape and colour have only one pair of
+wings apiece, like all the rest of the fly order, while the bees of
+course have the full complement of two pairs, an upper and an under,
+possessed by them in common with all other well-conducted members of the
+hymenopterous family. So, too, there is a certain curious American
+insect, belonging to the very unsavoury tribe which supplies London
+lodging-houses with one of their most familiar entomological specimens;
+and this cleverly disguised little creature is banded and striped in
+every part exactly like a local hornet, for whom it evidently wishes
+itself to be mistaken. If you were travelling in the wilder parts of
+Colorado you would find a close resemblance to Buffalo Bill was no mean
+personal protection. Hornets, in fact, are insects to which birds and
+other insectivorous animals prefer to give a very wide berth, and the
+reason why they should be imitated by a defenceless beetle must be
+obvious to the intelligent student. But while the vibrating wing-cases
+of this deceptive masquerader are made to look as thin and hornet-like
+as possible, in all underlying points of structure any competent
+naturalist would see at once that the creature must really be classed
+among the noisome Hemiptera. I seldom trouble the public with a Greek or
+Latin name, but on this occasion I trust I may be pardoned for not
+indulging in all the ingenuous bluntness of the vernacular.
+
+Sometimes this effective mimicry of stinging insects seems to be even
+consciously performed by the tiny actors. Many creatures, which do not
+themselves possess stings, nevertheless endeavour to frighten their
+enemies by assuming the characteristic hostile attitudes of wasps or
+hornets. Everybody in England must be well acquainted with those common
+British earwig-looking insects, popularly known as the devil's
+coach-horses, which, when irritated or interfered with, cock up their
+tails behind them in the most aggressive fashion, exactly reproducing
+the threatening action of an angry scorpion. Now, as a matter of fact,
+the devil's coach-horse is quite harmless, but I have often seen, not
+only little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds, and
+shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude. So, too, the
+bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects got up in sedulous
+imitation of various species of wild bee, flit about and buzz angrily in
+the sunlight, quite after the fashion of the insects they mimic; and
+when disturbed they pretend to get excited, and seem as if they wished
+to fly in their assailant's face and roundly sting him. This curious
+instinct may be put side by side with the parallel instinct of shamming
+dead, possessed by many beetles and other small defenceless species.
+
+Certain beetles have also been modified so as exactly to imitate wasps;
+and in these cases the beetle waist, usually so solid, thick, and
+clumsy, grows as slender and graceful as if the insects had been
+supplied with corsets by a fashionable West End house. But the greatest
+refinement of all is perhaps that noticed in certain allied species
+which mimic bees, and which have acquired useless little tufts of hair
+on their hind shanks to represent the dilated and tufted
+pollen-gathering apparatus of the true bees.
+
+I have left to the last the most marvellous cases of mimicry of
+all--those noticed among South American butterflies by Mr. Bates, who
+found that certain edible kinds exactly resembled a handsome and
+conspicuous but bitter-tasted species 'in every shade and stripe of
+colour.' Several of these South American imitative insects long deceived
+the very entomologists; and it was only by a close inspection of their
+structural differences that the utter distinctness of the mimickers and
+the mimicked was satisfactorily settled. Scarcely less curious is the
+case of Mr. Wallace's Malayan orioles, two species of which exactly copy
+two pugnacious honey-suckers in every detail of plumage and coloration.
+As the honey-suckers are avoided by birds of prey, owing to their
+surprising strength and pugnacity, the orioles gain immunity from attack
+by their close resemblance to the protected species. When Dr. Sclater,
+the distinguished ornithologist, was examining Mr. Forbes's collections
+from Timorlaut, even his experienced eye was so taken in by another of
+these deceptive bird-mimicries that he classified two birds of totally
+distinct families as two different individuals of the same species.
+
+Even among plants a few instances of true mimicry have been observed. In
+the stony African Karoo, where every plant is eagerly sought out for
+food by the scanty local fauna, there are tubers which exactly resemble
+the pebbles around them; and I have little doubt that our perfectly
+harmless English dead-nettle secures itself from the attacks of browsing
+animals by its close likeness to the wholly unrelated, but
+well-protected, stinging-nettle.
+
+Finally, we must not forget the device of those animals which not merely
+assimilate themselves in colour to the ordinary environment in a general
+way, but have also the power of adapting themselves at will to whatever
+object they may happen to lie against. Cases like that of the ptarmigan,
+which in summer harmonises with the brown heather and grey rock, while
+in winter it changes to the white of the snow-fields, lead us up
+gradually to such ultimate results of the masquerading tendency. There
+is a tiny crustacean, the chameleon shrimp, which can alter its hue to
+that of any material on which it happens to rest. On a sandy bottom it
+appears grey or sand-coloured; when lurking among seaweed it becomes
+green, or red, or brown, according to the nature of its momentary
+background. Probably the effect is quite unconscious, or at least
+involuntary, like blushing with ourselves--and nobody ever blushes on
+purpose, though they do say a distinguished poet once complained that an
+eminent actor did not follow his stage directions because he omitted to
+obey the rubrical remark, 'Here Harold purples with anger.' The change
+is produced by certain automatic muscles which force up particular
+pigment cells above the others, green coming to the top on a green
+surface, red on a ruddy one, and brown or grey where the circumstances
+demand them. Many kinds of fish similarly alter their colour to suit
+their background by forcing forward or backward certain special
+pigment-cells known as chromatophores, whose various combinations
+produce at will almost any required tone or shade. Almost all reptiles
+and amphibians possess the power of changing their hue in accordance
+with their environment in a very high degree; and among certain
+tree-toads and frogs it is difficult to say what is the normal
+colouring, as they vary indefinitely from buff and dove-colour to
+chocolate-brown, rose, and even lilac.
+
+But of all the particoloured reptiles the chameleon is by far the best
+known, and on the whole the most remarkable for his inconstancy of
+coloration. Like a lacertine Vicar of Bray, he varies incontinently from
+buff to blue, and from blue back to orange again, under stress of
+circumstances. The mechanism of this curious change is extremely
+complex. Tiny corpuscles of different pigments are sometimes hidden in
+the depths of the chameleon's skin, and sometimes spread out on its
+surface in an interlacing network of brown or purple. In addition to
+this prime colouring matter, however, the animal also possesses a normal
+yellow pigment, and a bluish layer in the skin which acts like the
+iridium glass so largely employed by Dr. Salviati, being seen as
+straw-coloured with a transmitted light, but assuming a faint lilac tint
+against an opaque absorbent surface. While sleeping the chameleon
+becomes almost white in the shade, but if light falls upon him he slowly
+darkens by an automatic process. The movements of the corpuscles are
+governed by opposite nerves and muscles, which either cause them to bury
+themselves under the true skin, or to form an opaque ground behind the
+blue layer, or to spread out in a ramifying mass on the outer surface,
+and so produce as desired almost any necessary shade of grey, green,
+black, or yellow. It is an interesting fact that many chrysalids undergo
+precisely similar changes of colour in adaptation to the background
+against which they suspend themselves, being grey on a grey surface,
+green on a green one, and even half black and half red when hung up
+against pieces of particoloured paper.
+
+Nothing could more beautifully prove the noble superiority of the human
+intellect than the fact that while our grouse are russet-brown to suit
+the bracken and heather, and our caterpillars green to suit the lettuce
+and the cabbage leaves, our British soldier should be wisely coated in
+brilliant scarlet to form an effective mark for the rifles of an enemy.
+Red is the easiest of all colours at which to aim from a great distance;
+and its selection by authority for the uniform of unfortunate Tommy
+Atkins reminds me of nothing so much as Mr. McClelland's exquisite
+suggestion that the peculiar brilliancy of the Indian river carps makes
+them serve 'as a better mark for kingfishers, terns, and other birds
+which are destined to keep the number of these fishes in check.' The
+idea of Providence and the Horse Guards conspiring to render any
+creature an easier target for the attacks of enemies is worthy of the
+decadent school of natural history, and cannot for a moment be
+dispassionately considered by a judicious critic. Nowadays we all know
+that the carp are decked in crimson and blue to please their partners,
+and that soldiers are dressed in brilliant red to please the aesthetic
+authorities who command them from a distance.
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS
+
+
+For many generations past that problematical animal, the toad-in-a-hole
+(literal, not culinary) has been one of the most familiar and
+interesting personages of contemporary folk-lore and popular natural
+history. From time to time he turns up afresh, with his own wonted
+perennial vigour, on paper at least, in company with the great
+sea-serpent, the big gooseberry, the shower of frogs, the two-headed
+calf, and all the other common objects of the country or the seaside in
+the silly season. No extraordinary natural phenomenon on earth was ever
+better vouched for--in the fashion rendered familiar to us by the
+Tichborne claimant--that is to say, no other could ever get a larger
+number of unprejudiced witnesses to swear positively and unreservedly in
+its favour. Unfortunately, however, swearing alone no longer settles
+causes off-hand, as if by show of hands, 'the Ayes have it,' after the
+fashion prevalent in the good old days when the whole Hundred used to
+testify that of its certain knowledge John Nokes did not commit such and
+such a murder; whereupon John Nokes was forthwith acquitted accordingly.
+Nowadays, both justice and science have become more exacting; they
+insist upon the unpleasant and discourteous habit of cross-examining
+their witnesses (as if they doubted them, forsooth!), instead of
+accepting the witnesses' own simple assertion that it's all right, and
+there's no need for making a fuss about it. Did you yourself see the
+block of stone in which the toad is said to have been found, before the
+toad himself was actually extracted? Did you examine it all round to
+make quite sure there was no hole, or crack, or passage in it anywhere?
+Did you satisfy yourself after the toad was released from his close
+quarters that no such hole, or crack, or passage had been dexterously
+closed up, with intent to deceive, by plaster, cement, or other
+artificial composition? Did you ever offer the workmen who found it a
+nominal reward--say five shillings--for the first perfectly unanswerable
+specimen of a genuine unadulterated antediluvian toad? Have you got the
+toad now present, and can you produce him here in court (on writ of
+_habeas corpus_ or otherwise), together with all the fragments of the
+stone or tree from which he was extracted? These are the disagreeable,
+prying, inquisitorial, I may even say insulting, questions with which a
+modern man of science is ready to assail the truthful and reputable
+gentlemen who venture to assert their discovery, in these degenerate
+days, of the ancient and unsophisticated toad-in-a-hole.
+
+Now, the worst of it is that the gentlemen in question, being unfamiliar
+with what is technically described as scientific methods of
+investigation, are very apt to lose their temper when thus
+cross-questioned, and to reply, after the fashion usually attributed to
+the female mind, with another question, whether the scientific person
+wishes to accuse them of downright lying. And as nothing on earth could
+be further from the scientific person's mind than such an imputation, he
+is usually fain in the end to give up the social pursuit of postprandial
+natural history (the subject generally crops up about the same time as
+the after-dinner coffee), and to let the prehistoric toad go on his own
+triumphant way, unheeded.
+
+As a matter of fact, nobody ever makes larger allowances for other
+people, in the estimate of their veracity, than the scientific
+inquirer. Knowing himself, by painful experience, how extremely
+difficult a matter it is to make perfectly sure you have observed
+anything on earth quite correctly, and have eliminated all possible
+chances of error, he acquires the fixed habit of doubting about one-half
+of whatever his fellow-creatures tell him in ordinary conversation,
+without for a single moment venturing to suspect them of deliberate
+untruthfulness. Children and servants, if they find that anything they
+have been told is erroneous, immediately jump at the conclusion that the
+person who told them meant deliberately to deceive them; in their own
+simple and categorical fashion they answer plumply, 'That's a lie.' But
+the man of science is only too well acquainted in his own person with
+the exceeding difficulty of ever getting at the exact truth. He has
+spent hours of toil, himself, in watching and observing the behaviour of
+some plant, or animal, or gas, or metal; and after repeated experiments,
+carefully designed to exclude all possibility of mistake, so far as he
+can foresee it, he at last believes he has really settled some moot
+point, and triumphantly publishes his final conclusions in a scientific
+journal. Ten to one, the very next number of that same journal contains
+a dozen supercilious letters from a dozen learned and high-salaried
+professors, each pointing out a dozen distinct and separate precautions
+which the painstaking observer neglected to take, and any one of which
+would be quite sufficient to vitiate the whole body of his observations.
+There might have been germs in the tube in which he boiled the water
+(germs are very fashionable just at present); or some of the germs might
+have survived and rather enjoyed the boiling; or they might have adhered
+to the under surface of the cork; or the mixture might have been
+tampered with during the experimenter's temporary absence by his son,
+aged ten years (scientific observers have no right, apparently, to have
+sons of ten years old, except perhaps for purposes of psychological
+research); and so forth, _ad infinitum_. And the worst of it all is that
+the unhappy experimenter is bound himself to admit that every one of the
+objections is perfectly valid, and that he very likely never really saw
+what with perfect confidence he thought and said he had seen.
+
+This being an unbelieving age, then, when even the book of Deuteronomy
+is 'critically examined,' let us see how much can really be said for and
+against our old friend, the toad-in-a-hole; and first let us begin with
+the antecedent probability, or otherwise, of any animal being able to
+live in a more or less torpid condition, without air or food, for any
+considerable period of time together.
+
+A certain famous historical desert snail was brought from Egypt to
+England as a conchological specimen in the year 1846. This particular
+mollusk (the only one of his race, probably, who ever attained to
+individual distinction), at the time of his arrival in London, was
+really alive and vigorous; but as the authorities of the British Museum,
+to whose tender care he was consigned, were ignorant of this important
+fact in his economy, he was gummed, mouth downward, on to a piece of
+cardboard, and duly labelled and dated with scientific accuracy, '_Helix
+desertorum_, March 25, 1846.' Being a snail of a retiring and contented
+disposition, however, accustomed to long droughts and corresponding naps
+in his native sand-wastes, our mollusk thereupon simply curled himself
+up into the topmost recesses of his own whorls, and went placidly to
+sleep in perfect contentment for an unlimited period. Every conchologist
+takes it for granted, of course, that the shells which he receives from
+foreign parts have had their inhabitants properly boiled and extracted
+before being exported; for it is only the mere outer shell or skeleton
+of the animal that we preserve in our cabinets, leaving the actual flesh
+and muscles of the creature himself to wither unobserved upon its
+native shores. At the British Museum the desert snail might have snoozed
+away his inglorious existence unsuspected, but for a happy accident
+which attracted public attention to his remarkable case in a most
+extraordinary manner. On March 7, 1850, nearly four years later, it was
+casually observed that the card on which he reposed was slightly
+discoloured; and this discovery led to the suspicion that perhaps a
+living animal might be temporarily immured within that papery tomb. The
+Museum authorities accordingly ordered our friend a warm bath (who shall
+say hereafter that science is unfeeling!), upon which the grateful
+snail, waking up at the touch of the familiar moisture, put his head
+cautiously out of his shell, walked up to the top of the basin, and
+began to take a cursory survey of British institutions with his four
+eye-bearing tentacles. So strange a recovery from a long torpid
+condition, only equalled by that of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
+deserved an exceptional amount of scientific recognition. The desert
+snail at once awoke and found himself famous. Nay, he actually sat for
+his portrait to an eminent zoological artist, Mr. Waterhouse; and a
+woodcut from the sketch thus procured, with a history of his life and
+adventures, may be found even unto this day in Dr. Woodward's 'Manual of
+the Mollusca,' to witness if I lie.
+
+I mention this curious instance first, because it is the best
+authenticated case on record (so far as my knowledge goes) of any animal
+existing in a state of suspended animation for any long period of time
+together. But there are other cases of encysted or immured animals
+which, though less striking as regards the length of time during which
+torpidity has been observed, are much more closely analogous to the real
+or mythical conditions of the toad-in-a-hole. That curious West African
+mud-fish, the Lepidosiren (familiar to all readers of evolutionary
+literature as one of the most singular existing links between fish and
+amphibians), lives among the shallow pools and broads of the Gambia,
+which are dried up during the greater part of the tropical summer. To
+provide against this annual contingency, the mud-fish retires into the
+soft clay at the bottom of the pools, where it forms itself a sort of
+nest, and there hibernates, or rather aestivates, for months together, in
+a torpid condition. The surrounding mud then hardens into a dry ball;
+and these balls are dug out of the soil of the rice-fields by the
+natives, with the fish inside them, by which means many specimens of
+lepidosiren have been sent alive to Europe, embedded in their natural
+covering. Here the strange fish is chiefly prized as a zoological
+curiosity for aquariums, because of its possessing gills and lungs
+together, to fit it for its double existence; but the unsophisticated
+West Africans grub it up on their own account as a delicacy, regardless
+of its claims to scientific consideration as the earliest known ancestor
+of all existing terrestrial animals. Now, the torpid state of the
+mud-fish in his hardened ball of clay closely resembles the real or
+supposed condition of the toad-in-a-hole; but with one important
+exception. The mud-fish leaves a small canal or pipe open in his cell at
+either end to admit the air for breathing, though he breathes (as I
+shall proceed to explain) in a very slight degree during his aestivation;
+whereas every proper toad-in-a-hole ought by all accounts to live
+entirely without either feeding or breathing in any way. However, this
+is a mere detail; and indeed, if toads-in-a-hole do really exist at all,
+we must in all probability ultimately admit that they breathe to some
+extent, though perhaps very slightly, during their long immurement.
+
+And this leads us on to consider what in reality hibernation is.
+Everybody knows nowadays, I suppose, that there is a very close analogy
+between an animal and a steam-engine. Food is the fuel that makes the
+animal engine go; and this food acts almost exactly as coal does in the
+artificial machine. But coal alone will not drive an engine; a free
+draught of open air is also required in order to produce combustion.
+Just in like manner the food we eat cannot be utilised to drive our
+muscles and other organs unless it is supplied with oxygen from the air
+to burn it slowly inside our bodies. This oxygen is taken into the
+system, in all higher animals, by means of lungs or gills. Now, when we
+are working at all hard, we require a great deal of oxygen, as most of
+us have familiarly discovered (especially if we are somewhat stout) in
+the act of climbing hills or running to catch a train. But when we are
+doing very little work indeed, as in our sleeping hours, during which
+muscular movement is suspended, and only the general organic life
+continues, we breathe much more slowly and at longer intervals. However,
+there is this important difference (generally speaking) between an
+animal and a steam-engine. You can let the engine run short of coals and
+come to a dead standstill, without impairing its future possibilities of
+similar motion; you have only to get fresh coals, after weeks or months
+of inaction, and light up a fresh fire, when your engine will
+immediately begin to work again, exactly the same as before. But if an
+animal organism once fairly runs down, either from want of food or any
+other cause--in short, if it dies--it very seldom comes to life again.
+
+I say 'very seldom' on purpose, because there are a few cases among the
+extreme lower animals where a water-haunting creature can be taken out
+of the water and can be thoroughly dried and desiccated, or even kept
+for an apparently unlimited period wrapped up in paper or on the slide
+of a microscope; and yet, the moment a drop of water is placed on top of
+it, it begins to move and live again exactly as before. This sort of
+thorough-going suspended animation is the kind we ought to expect from
+any well-constituted and proper-minded toad-in-a-hole. Whether anything
+like it ever really occurs in the higher ranks of animal life, however,
+is a different question; but there can be no doubt that to some slight
+extent a body to all intents and purposes quite dead (physically
+speaking) by long immersion in water--a drowned man, for example--may
+really be resuscitated by heat and stimulants, applied immediately,
+provided no part of the working organism has been seriously injured or
+decomposed. Such people may be said to be _pro tem._ functionally,
+though not structurally, dead. The heart has practically ceased to beat,
+the lungs have ceased to breathe, and physical life in the body is
+temporarily extinct. The fire, in short, has gone out. But if only it
+can be lighted again before any serious change in the system takes
+place, all may still go on precisely as of old.
+
+Many animals, however, find it convenient to assume a state of less
+complete suspended animation during certain special periods of the year,
+according to the circumstances of their peculiar climate and mode of
+life. Among the very highest animals, the most familiar example of this
+sort of semi-torpidity is to be found among the bears and the dormice.
+The common European brown bear is a carnivore by descent, who has become
+a vegetarian in practice, though whether from conscientious scruples or
+mere practical considerations of expediency, does not appear. He feeds
+chiefly on roots, berries, fruits, vegetables, and honey, all of which
+he finds it comparatively difficult to procure during winter weather.
+Accordingly, as everyone knows, he eats immoderately in the summer
+season, till he has grown fat enough to supply bear's grease to all
+Christendom. Then he hunts himself out a hollow tree or rock-shelter,
+curls himself up quietly to sleep, and snores away the whole livelong
+winter. During this period of hibernation, the action of the heart is
+reduced to a minimum, and the bear breathes but very slowly. Still, he
+does breathe, and his heart does beat; and in performing those
+indispensable functions, all his store of accumulated fat is gradually
+used up, so that he wakes in spring as thin as a lath and as hungry as a
+hunter. The machine has been working at very low pressure all the
+winter: but it _has_ been working for all that, and the continuity of
+its action has never once for a moment been interrupted. This is the
+central principle of all hibernation; it consists essentially of a very
+long and profound sleep, during which all muscular motion, except that
+of the heart and lungs, is completely suspended, while even these last
+are reduced to the very smallest amount compatible with the final
+restoration of full animal activity.
+
+Thus, even among warm-blooded animals like the bears and dormice,
+hibernation actually occurs to a very considerable degree; but it is far
+more common and more complete among cold-blooded creatures, whose bodies
+do not need to be kept heated to the same degree, and with whom,
+accordingly, hibernation becomes almost a complete torpor, the breathing
+and the action of the heart being still further reduced to very nearly
+zero. Mollusks in particular, like oysters and mussels, lead very
+monotonous and uneventful lives, only varied as a rule by the welcome
+change of being cut out of their shells and eaten alive; and their
+powers of living without food under adverse circumstances are really
+very remarkable. Freshwater snails and mussels, in cold weather, bury
+themselves in the mud of ponds or rivers; and land-snails hide
+themselves in the ground or under moss and leaves. The heart then
+ceases perceptibly to beat, but respiration continues in a very faint
+degree. The common garden snail closes the mouth of his shell when he
+wants to hibernate, with a slimy covering; but he leaves a very small
+hole in it somewhere, so as to allow a little air to get in, and keep up
+his breathing to a slight amount. My experience has been, however, that
+a great many snails go to sleep in this way, and never wake up again.
+Either they get frozen to death, or else the respiration falls so low
+that it never picks itself up properly when spring returns. In warm
+climates, it is during the summer that mollusks and other mud-haunting
+creatures go to sleep; and when they get well plastered round with clay,
+they almost approach in tenacity of life the mildest recorded specimens
+of the toad-in-a-hole.
+
+For example, take the following cases, which I extract, with needful
+simplifications, from Dr. Woodward.
+
+'In June 1850, a living pond mussel, which had been more than a year out
+of water, was sent to Mr. Gray, from Australia. The big pond snails of
+the tropics have been found alive in logs of mahogany imported from
+Honduras; and M. Caillaud carried some from Egypt to Paris, packed in
+sawdust. Indeed, it isn't easy to ascertain the limit of their
+endurance; for Mr. Laidlay, having placed a number in a drawer for this
+very purpose, found them alive after _five years'_ torpidity, although
+in the warm climate of Calcutta. The pretty snails called _cyclostomas_,
+which have a lid to their shells, are well known to survive
+imprisonments of many months; but in the ordinary open-mouthed
+land-snails such cases are even more remarkable. Several of the enormous
+tropical snails often used to decorate cottage mantelpieces, brought by
+Lieutenant Greaves from Valparaiso, revived after being packed, some for
+thirteen, others for twenty months. In 1849, Mr. Pickering received
+from Mr. Wollaston a basketful of Madeira snails (of twenty or thirty
+different kinds), three-fourths of which proved to be alive, after
+several months' confinement, including a sea voyage. Mr. Wollaston has
+himself recorded the fact that specimens of two Madeira snails survived
+a fast and imprisonment in pill-boxes of two years and a half duration,
+and that large numbers of a small species, brought to England at the
+same time, were _all_ living after being inclosed in a dry bag for a
+year and a half.'
+
+Whether the snails themselves liked their long deprivation of food and
+moisture we are not informed; their personal tastes and inclinations
+were very little consulted in the matter; but as they and their
+ancestors for many generations must have been accustomed to similar long
+fasts during tropical droughts, in all likelihood they did not much mind
+it.
+
+The real question, then, about the historical toad-in-a-hole narrows
+itself down in the end merely to this--how long is it credible that a
+cold-blooded creature might sustain life in a torpid or hibernating
+condition, without food, and with a very small quantity of fresh air,
+supplied (let us say) from time to time through an almost imperceptible
+fissure? It is well known that reptiles and amphibians are particularly
+tenacious of life, and that some turtles in particular will live for
+months, or even for years, without tasting food. The common Greek
+tortoise, hawked on barrows about the streets of London and bought by a
+confiding British public under the mistaken impression that its chief
+fare consists of slugs and cockroaches (it is really far more likely to
+feed upon its purchaser's choicest seakale and asparagus), buries itself
+in the ground at the first approach of winter, and snoozes away five
+months of the year in a most comfortable and dignified torpidity. A
+snake at the Zoo has even been known to live eighteen months in a
+voluntary fast, refusing all the most tempting offers of birds and
+rabbits, merely out of pique at her forcible confinement in a strange
+cage. As this was a lady snake, however, it is possible that she only
+went on living out of feminine obstinacy, so that this case really
+counts for very little.
+
+Toads themselves are well known to possess all the qualities of mind and
+body which go to make up the career of a successful and enduring
+anchorite. At the best of times they eat seldom and sparingly, while a
+forty days' fast, like Dr. Tanner's, would seem to them but an ordinary
+incident in their everyday existence. In the winter they hibernate by
+burying themselves in the mud, or by getting down cracks in the ground.
+It is also undoubtedly true that they creep into holes wherever they can
+find one, and that in these holes they lie torpid for a considerable
+period. On the other hand, there is every reason to believe that they
+cannot live for more than a certain fixed and relatively short time
+entirely without food or air. Dr. Buckland tried a number of experiments
+upon toads in this manner--experiments wholly unnecessary, considering
+the trivial nature of the point at issue--and his conclusion was that no
+toad could get beyond two years without feeding or breathing. There can
+be very little doubt that in this conclusion he was practically correct,
+and that the real fine old crusted antediluvian toad-in-a-hole is really
+a snare and a delusion.
+
+That, however, does not wholly settle the question about such toads,
+because, even though they may not be all that their admirers claim for
+them, they may yet possess a very respectable antiquity of their own,
+and may be very far from the category of mere vulgar cheats and
+impostors. Because a toad is not as old as Methuselah, it need not
+follow that he may not be as old as Old Parr; because he does not date
+back to the Flood, it need not follow that he cannot remember Queen
+Elizabeth. There are some toads-in-a-hole, indeed, which, however we may
+account for the origin of their legend, are on the very face of it
+utterly incredible. For example, there is the favourite and immensely
+popular toad who was extracted from a perfectly closed hole in a marble
+mantelpiece. The implication of the legend clearly is that the toad was
+coeval with the marble. But marble is limestone, altered in texture by
+pressure and heat, till it has assumed a crystalline structure. In other
+words we are asked to believe that that toad lived through an amount of
+fiery heat sufficient to burn him up into fine powder, and yet remains
+to tell the tale. Such a toad as this obviously deserves no credit. His
+discoverers may have believed in him themselves, but they will hardly
+get other people to do so.
+
+Still, there are a great many ways in which it is quite conceivable that
+toads might get into holes in rocks or trees so as to give rise to the
+common stories about them, and might even manage to live there for a
+considerable time with very small quantities of food or air. It must be
+remembered that from the very nature of the conditions the hole can
+never be properly examined and inspected until after it has been split
+open and the toad has been extracted from it. Now, if you split open a
+tree or a rock, and find a toad inside it, with a cavity which he
+exactly fills, it is extremely difficult to say whether there was or was
+not a fissure before you broke the thing to pieces with your hatchet or
+pickaxe. A very small fissure indeed would be quite sufficient to
+account for the whole delusion; for if the toad could get a little air
+to breathe slowly during his torpid period, and could find a few dead
+flies or worms among the water that trickled scantily into his hole, he
+could manage to drag out a peaceful and monotonous existence almost
+indefinitely. Here are a few possible cases, any one of which will
+quite suffice to give rise to at least as good a toad-in-the-hole as
+ninety-nine out of a hundred published instances.
+
+An adult toad buries himself in the mud by a dry pond, and gets coated
+with a hard solid coat of sun-baked clay. His nodule is broken open with
+a spade, and the toad himself is found inside, almost exactly filling
+the space within the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at
+the outside; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic mind
+looks as if it might have been there ever since the Deluge. Good blue
+lias clay, which dries as solid as limestone, would perform this trick
+to perfection; and the toad might easily be relegated accordingly to the
+secondary ages of geology. Observe, however, that the actual toads so
+found are not the geological toads we should naturally expect under such
+remarkable circumstances, but the common everyday toads of modern
+England. This shows a want of accurate scientific knowledge on the part
+of the toads which is truly lamentable. A toad who really wished to
+qualify himself for the post ought at least to avoid presenting himself
+before a critical eye in the foolish guise of an embodied anachronism.
+He reminds one of the Roman mother in a popular burlesque, who suspects
+her son of smoking, and vehemently declares that she smells tobacco,
+but, after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties, and mutters
+to herself, apologetically, 'No, not tobacco; that's not yet invented.'
+A would-be silurian or triassic toad ought, in like manner, to remember
+that in the ages to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was
+not yet developed. He ought rather to come out in the character of a
+ceratodus or a labyrinthodon.
+
+Again, another adult toad crawls into the hollow of a tree, and there
+hibernates. The bark partially closes over the slit by which he entered,
+but leaves a little crack by which air can enter freely. The grubs in
+the bark and other insects supply him from time to time with a frugal
+repast. There is no good reason why, under such circumstances, a placid
+and contented toad might not manage to prolong his existence for several
+consecutive seasons.
+
+Once more, the spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the
+individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal.
+Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to
+be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient
+water for its developement, and where the trickling drops brought down
+minute objects of food, enough to keep up its simple existence. A toad
+brought up under such peculiar circumstances might pass almost its
+entire life in a state of torpidity, and yet might grow and thrive in
+its own sleepy vegetative fashion.
+
+In short, while it would be difficult in any given case to prove to a
+certainty either that the particular toad-in-a-hole had or had not
+access to air and food, the ordinary conditions of toad life are exactly
+those under which the delusive appearance of venerable antiquity would
+be almost certain frequently to arise. The toad is a nocturnal animal;
+it lives through the daytime in dark and damp places; it shows a decided
+liking for crannies and crevices; it is wonderfully tenacious of life;
+it possesses the power of hibernation; it can live on extremely small
+quantities of food for very long periods of time together; it buries
+itself in mud or clay; it passes the early part of its life as a
+water-haunting tadpole; and last, not least, it can swell out its body
+to nearly double its natural size by inflating itself, which fully
+accounts for the stories of toads being taken out of holes every bit as
+big as themselves. Considering all these things, it would be wonderful
+indeed if toads were not often found in places and conditions which
+would naturally give rise to the familiar myth. Throw in a little
+allowance for human credulity, human exaggeration, and human love of the
+marvellous, and you have all the elements of a very excellent
+toad-in-the-hole in the highest ideal perfection.
+
+At the same time I think it quite possible that some toads, under
+natural circumstances, do really remain in a torpid or semi-torpid
+condition for a period far exceeding the twenty-four months allowed as
+the maximum in Dr. Buckland's unpleasant experiments. If the amount of
+air supplied through a crack or through the texture of the stone were
+exactly sufficient for keeping the animal alive in the very slightest
+fashion--the engine working at the lowest possible pressure, short of
+absolute cessation--I see no reason on earth why a toad might not remain
+dormant, in a moist place, with perhaps a very occasional worm or grub
+for breakfast, for at least as long a time as the desert snail slept
+comfortably in the British Museum. Altogether, while it is impossible to
+believe the stories about toads that have been buried in a mine for
+whole centuries, and still more impossible to believe in their being
+disentombed from marble mantelpieces or very ancient geological
+formations, it is quite conceivable that some toads-in-a-hole may really
+be far from mere vulgar impostors, and may have passed the traditional
+seven years of the Indian philosophers in solitary meditation on the
+syllable Om, or on the equally significant Ko-ax, Ko-ax of the
+irreverent Attic dramatist. "Certainly not a centenarian, but perhaps a
+good seven-year sleeper for all that," is the final verdict which the
+court is disposed to return, after due consideration of all the
+probabilities _in re_ the toad-in-a-hole.
+
+
+
+
+A FOSSIL CONTINENT
+
+
+If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly to be translated
+backward from Collins Street, Melbourne, into the flourishing woods of
+the secondary geological period--say about the precise moment of time
+when the English chalk downs were slowly accumulating, speck by speck,
+on the silent floor of some long-forgotten Mediterranean--the
+intelligent colonist would look around him with a sweet smile of
+cheerful recognition, and say to himself in some surprise, 'Why, this is
+just like Australia.' The animals, the trees, the plants, the insects,
+would all more or less vividly remind him of those he had left behind
+him in his happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth century.
+The sun would have moved back on the dial of ages for a few million
+summers or so, indefinitely (in geology we refuse to be bound by dates),
+and would have landed him at last, to his immense astonishment, pretty
+much at the exact point whence he first started.
+
+In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be made hereafter,
+Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent, a country still in its
+secondary age, a surviving fragment of the primitive world of the chalk
+period or earlier ages. Isolated from all the remainder of the earth
+about the beginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth and
+the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the stage of existence,
+long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on
+nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion,
+long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and
+colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their
+race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent
+found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from
+all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, and turned upon
+itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and
+animals out of its own inner consciousness. The natural consequence was
+that progress in Australia has been absurdly slow, and that the country
+as a whole has fallen most woefully behind the times in all matters
+pertaining to the existence of life upon its surface. Everybody knows
+that Australia as a whole is a very peculiar and original continent; its
+peculiarity, however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in the fact
+that it still remains at very nearly the same early point of development
+which Europe had attained a couple of million years ago or thereabouts.
+"Advance, Australia," says the national motto; and, indeed, it is quite
+time nowadays that Australia should advance; for, so far, she has been
+left out of the running for some four mundane ages or so at a rough
+computation.
+
+Example, says the wisdom of our ancestors, is better than precept; so
+perhaps, if I take a single example to start with, I shall make the
+principle I wish to illustrate a trifle clearer to the European
+comprehension. In Australia, when Cook or Van Diemen first visited it,
+there were no horses, cows, or sheep; no rabbits, weasels, or cats; no
+indigenous quadrupeds of any sort except the pouched mammals or
+marsupials, familiarly typified to every one of us by the mamma kangaroo
+in Regent's Park, who carries the baby kangaroos about with her, neatly
+deposited in the sac or pouch which nature has provided for them instead
+of a cradle. To this rough generalisation, to be sure, two special
+exceptions must needs be made; namely, the noble Australian black-fellow
+himself, and the dingo or wild dog whose ancestors no doubt came to the
+country in the same ship with him, as the brown rat came to England with
+George I. of blessed memory. But of these two solitary representatives
+of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more anon'; for the present we
+may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated
+Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to
+kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial
+animals, with names as strange and clumsy as their forms.
+
+Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family, viewed in the dry
+light of modern science? Well, they are simply one of the very oldest
+mammalian families, and therefore, I need hardly say, in the levelling
+and topsy-turvy view of evolutionary biology, the least entitled to
+consideration or respect from rational observers. For of course in the
+kingdom of science the last shall be first, and the first last; it is
+the oldest families that are accounted the worst, while the best
+families mean always the newest. Now, the earliest mammals to appear on
+earth were creatures of distinctly marsupial type. As long ago as the
+time when the red marl of Devonshire and the blue lias of Lyme Regis
+were laid down on the bed of the muddy sea that once covered the surface
+of Dorset and the English Channel, a little creature like the kangaroo
+rats of Southern Australia lived among the plains of what is now the
+south of England. In the ages succeeding the deposition of the red marl
+Europe seems to have been broken up into an archipelago of coral reefs
+and atolls; and the islands of this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted
+by numbers of tiny ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in
+appearance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while others
+resembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or turned into excellent
+imitation carnivores, like our modern friend the Tasmanian devil. Up to
+the end of the time when the chalk deposits of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex
+were laid down, indeed, there is no evidence of the existence anywhere
+in the world of any mammals differing in type from those which now
+inhabit Australia. In other words, so far as regards mammalian life, the
+whole of the world had then already reached pretty nearly the same point
+of evolution that poor Australia still sticks at.
+
+About the beginning of the tertiary period, however, just after the
+chalk was all deposited, and just before the comparatively modern clays
+and sandstones of the London basin began to be laid down, an arm of the
+sea broke up the connection which once subsisted between Australia and
+the rest of the world, probably by a land bridge, _via_ Java, Sumatra,
+the Malay peninsula, and Asia generally. 'But how do you know,' asks the
+candid inquirer, 'that such a connection ever existed at all?' Simply
+thus, most laudable investigator--because there are large land mammals
+in Australia. Now, large land mammals do not swim across a broad ocean.
+There are none in New Zealand, none in the Azores, none in Fiji, none in
+Tahiti, none in Madeira, none in Teneriffe--none, in short, in any
+oceanic island which never at any time formed part of a great continent.
+How could there be, indeed? The mammals must necessarily have got there
+from somewhere; and whenever we find islands like Britain, or Japan, or
+Newfoundland, or Sicily, possessing large and abundant indigenous
+quadrupeds, of the same general type as adjacent continents, we see at
+once that the island must formerly have been a mere peninsula, like
+Italy or Nova Scotia at the present day. The very fact that Australia
+incloses a large group of biggish quadrupeds, whose congeners once
+inhabited Europe and America, suffices in itself to prove beyond
+question that uninterrupted land communication must once have existed
+between Australia and those distant continents.
+
+In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as Wallace's Line,
+from the great naturalist who first pointed out its far-reaching
+zoological importance, separates what is called by science 'the
+Australian province' on the southwest from 'the Indo-Malayan province'
+to the north and east of it. This belt of deep sea divides off sharply
+the plants and animals of the Australian type from those of the common
+Indian and Burmese pattern. South of Wallace's Line we now find several
+islands, big and small, including New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the
+Moluccas, Celebes, Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands, whose
+precise geographical position on the map must of course be readily
+remembered, in this age of school boards and universal examination, by
+every pupil-teacher and every Girton girl, are now divided by minor
+straits of much shallower water; but they all stand on a great submarine
+bank, and obviously formed at one time parts of the same wide Australian
+continent, because animals of the Australian type are still found in
+every one of them. No Indian or Malayan animal, however, of the larger
+sort (other than birds) is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace's
+Line. That narrow belt of deep sea, in short, forms an ocean barrier
+which has subsisted there without alteration ever since the end of the
+secondary period. From that time to this, as the evidence shows us,
+there has never been any direct land communication between Australia and
+any part of the outer world beyond that narrow line of division.
+
+Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world by surprise for a
+moment, under the audacious title of 'Captain Lawson's Adventures in New
+Guinea.' The gallant captain, or his unknown creator in some London
+lodging, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles, and there to
+have met with marvellous escapes from terrible beasts of the common
+tropical Asiatic pattern--rhinoceroses, tigers, monkeys, and leopards.
+Everybody believed the new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists.
+Those canny folks saw through the wicked hoax on the very first blush of
+it. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must have got there by an
+overland route. If there had ever been a land connection between New
+Guinea and the Malay region, then, since Australian animals range into
+New Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia, and we
+should find Victoria and New South Wales at the present day peopled by
+tapirs, orang-outangs, wild boars, deer, elephants, and squirrels, like
+those which now people Borneo, instead of, or side by side with, the
+kangaroos, wombats, and other marsupials, which, as we know, actually
+form the sole indigenous mammalian population of Greater Britain beneath
+the Southern Cross. Of course, in the end, the mysterious and tremendous
+Captain Lawson proved to be a myth, an airy nothing upon whom
+imagination had bestowed a local habitation (in New Guinea) and a name
+(not to be found in the Army List). Wallace's Line was saved from
+reproach, and the intrusive rhinoceros was banished without appeal from
+the soil of Papua.
+
+After the deep belt of open sea was thus established between the bigger
+Australian continent and the Malayan region, however, the mammals of the
+great mainlands continued to develop on their own account, in accordance
+with the strictest Darwinian principles, among the wider plains of their
+own habitats. The competition there was fiercer and more general; the
+struggle for life was bloodier and more arduous. Hence, while the
+old-fashioned marsupials continued to survive and to evolve slowly along
+their own lines in their own restricted southern world, their
+collateral descendants in Europe and Asia and America or elsewhere went
+on progressing into far higher, stronger, and better adapted forms--the
+great central mammalian fauna. In place of the petty phalangers and
+pouched ant-eaters of the oolitic period, our tertiary strata in the
+larger continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development of the
+mammalian race into monstrous creatures, some of them now quite extinct,
+and some still holding their own undisturbed in India, Africa, and the
+American prairies. The palaeotherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and
+the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeed
+to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata. Slowly
+the horses grow more horse-like, the shadowy camel begins to camelise
+himself, the buffaloes acquire the rudiments of horns, the deer branch
+out by tentative steps into still more complicated and more complicated
+antlers. Side by side with this wonderful outgrowth of the mammalian
+type, in the first plasticity of its vigorous youth, the older
+marsupials die away one by one in the geological record before the faces
+of their more successful competitors; the new carnivores devour them
+wholesale, the new ruminants eat up their pastures, the new rodents
+outwit them in the modernised forests. At last the pouched creatures all
+disappear utterly from all the world, save only Australia, with the
+solitary exception of a single advanced marsupial family, the familiar
+opossum of plantation melodies. And the history of the opossum himself
+is so very singular that it almost deserves to receive the polite
+attention of a separate paragraph for its own proper elucidation.
+
+For the opossums form the only members of the marsupial class now living
+outside Australia; and yet, what is at least equally remarkable, none of
+the opossums are found _per contra_ in Australia itself. They are, in
+fact, the highest and best product of the old dying marsupial stock,
+specially evolved in the great continents through the fierce competition
+of the higher mammals then being developed on every side of them.
+Therefore, being later in point of time than the separation, they could
+no more get over to Australia than the elephants and tigers and
+rhinoceroses could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race
+in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian cousins.
+In Europe and Asia the opossums lived on lustily, in spite of
+competition, during the whole of the Eocene period, side by side with
+hog-like creatures not yet perfectly piggish, with nondescript animals,
+half horse half tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and antelopes,
+unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment of budding antlers. But in
+the succeeding age they seem to disappear from the eastern continent,
+though in the western, thanks to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb,
+and tree-haunting life, they still drag out a precarious existence in
+many forms from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. It is
+worth while to notice, too, that whereas the kangaroos and other
+Australian marsupials are proverbially the very stupidest of mammals,
+the opossums, on the contrary, are well known to those accurate
+observers of animal psychology, the plantation negroes, to be the very
+cleverest, cunningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the fierce
+struggle for life of the crowded American lowlands, the opossum was
+absolutely forced to acquire a certain amount of Yankee smartness, or
+else to be improved off the face of the earth by the keen competition of
+the pouchless mammals.
+
+Up to the day, then, when Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, landing for
+the first time on the coast of New South Wales, saw an animal with short
+front limbs, huge hind legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit of
+hopping along the ground (called by the natives a kangaroo), the
+opossums of America were the only pouched mammals known to the European
+world in any part of the explored continents. Australia, severed from
+all the rest of the earth--_penitus toto orbe divisa_--ever since the
+end of the secondary period, remained as yet, so to speak, in the
+secondary age so far as its larger life-elements were concerned, and
+presented to the first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture of
+what 'the world before the flood' must have looked like. Only it was a
+very remote flood; an antediluvian age separated from our own not by
+thousands, but by millions, of seasons.
+
+To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry needful
+qualifications must be made at the very outset. No statement is ever
+quite correct until you have contradicted in minute detail about
+two-thirds of it.
+
+In the first place there are a good many modern elements in the
+indigenous population of Australia; but then they are elements of the
+stray and casual sort one always finds even in remote oceanic islands.
+They are waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example, the
+flora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a considerable
+number of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns always get blown by the
+wind, or washed by the sea, or carried on the feet or feathers of birds,
+from one part of the world to another. In all these various ways, no
+doubt, modern plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia at
+different times, and altered to some extent the character and aspect of
+its original native vegetation. Nevertheless, even in the matter of its
+plants and trees, Australia must still be considered a very
+old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud continent. The strange
+puzzle-monkeys, the quaint-jointed casuarinas (like horsetails grown
+into big willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, with
+their smooth stems robbed of their outer bark, impart a marvellously
+antiquated and unfamiliar tone to the general appearance of Australian
+woodland. All these types belong by birth to classes long since extinct
+in the larger continents. The scrub shows no turfy greensward; grasses,
+which elsewhere carpet the ground, were almost unknown till introduced
+from Europe; in the wild lands, bushes, and undershrubs of ancient
+aspect cover the soil, remarkable for their stiff, dry, wiry foliage,
+their vertically instead of horizontally flattened leaves, and their
+general dead blue-green or glaucous colour. Altogether, the vegetation
+itself, though it contains a few more modern forms than the animal
+world, is still essentially antique in type, a strange survival from the
+forgotten flora of the chalk age, the oolite, and even the lias.
+
+Again, to winged animals, such as birds and bats and flying insects, the
+ocean forms far less of a barrier than it does to quadrupeds, to
+reptiles, and to fresh-water fishes. Hence Australia has, to some
+extent, been invaded by later types of birds and other flying creatures,
+who live on there side by side with the ancient animals of the secondary
+pattern. Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and crows must all be
+comparatively recent immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. Even in this
+respect, however, the Australian life-region still bears an antiquated
+and undeveloped aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find those very
+oldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries, the emus, and the
+mooruk of New Britain. The extreme term in this exceedingly ancient set
+of creature is given us by the wingless bird, the apteryx or kiwi of New
+Zealand, whose feathers nearly resemble hair, and whose grotesque
+appearance makes it as much a wonder in its own class as the
+puzzle-monkey and the casuarina are among forest trees. No feathered
+creatures so closely approach the lizard-tailed birds of the oolite or
+the toothed birds of the cretaceous period as do these Australian and
+New Zealand emus and apteryxes. Again, while many characteristic
+Oriental families are quite absent, like the vultures, woodpeckers,
+pheasants and bulbuls, the Australian region has many other fairly
+ancient birds, found nowhere else on the surface of our modern planet.
+Such are the so-called brush turkeys and mound builders, the only
+feathered things that never sit upon their own eggs, but allow them to
+be hatched, after the fashion of reptiles, by the heat of the sand or of
+fermenting vegetable matter. The piping crows, the honey-suckers, the
+lyre-birds, and the more-porks are all peculiar to the Australian
+region. So are the wonderful and aesthetic bower-birds. Brush-tongued
+lories, black cockatoos, and gorgeously coloured pigeons, though
+somewhat less antique, perhaps, in type, give a special character to the
+bird-life of the country. And in New Guinea, an isolated bit of the same
+old continent, the birds of paradise, found nowhere else in the whole
+world, seem to recall some forgotten Eden of the remote past, some
+golden age of Saturnian splendour. Poetry apart, into which I have
+dropped for a moment like Mr. Silas Wegg, the birds of paradise are, in
+fact, gorgeously dressed crows, specially adapted to forest life in a
+rich fruit-bearing tropical country, where food is abundant and enemies
+unknown.
+
+Last of all, a certain small number of modern mammals have passed over
+to Australia at various times by pure chance. They fall into two
+classes--the rats and mice, who doubtless got transported across on
+floating logs or balks of timber; and the human importations, including
+the dog, who came, perhaps on their owners' canoes, perhaps on the wreck
+and _debris_ of inundations. Yet even in these cases again, Australia
+still maintains its proud pre-eminence as the most antiquated and
+unprogressive of continents. For the Australian black-fellow must have
+got there a very long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremely
+ancient human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull the
+Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while the
+woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally distinct human family,
+and perhaps the very lowest sample of humanity that has survived to
+modern times, must have crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his
+brethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on when
+the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon the
+continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.
+As for the dingo, or Australian wild dog, only half domesticated by the
+savage natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf and
+half jackal, incapable of the higher canine traits, and with a
+suspicious, ferocious, glaring eye that betrays at once his
+uncivilisable tendencies.
+
+Omitting these later importations, however--the modern plants, birds,
+and human beings--it may be fairly said that Australia is still in its
+secondary stage, while the rest of the world has reached the tertiary
+and quaternary periods. Here again, however, a deduction must be made,
+in order to attain the necessary accuracy. Even in Australia the world
+never stands still. Though the Australian animals are still at bottom
+the European and Asiatic animals of the secondary age, they are those
+animals with a difference. They have undergone an evolution of their
+own. It has not been the evolution of the great continents; but it has
+been evolution all the same; slower, more local, narrower, more
+restricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One might compare the
+difference to the difference between the civilisation of Europe and the
+civilisation of Mexico or Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted out
+their indigenous culture, were still, to be sure, in their stone age;
+but it was a very different stone age from that of the cave-dwellers or
+mound builders in Britain. Even so, though Australia is still
+zoologically in the secondary period, it is a secondary period a good
+deal altered and adapted in detail to meet the wants of special
+situations.
+
+The oldest types of animals in Australia are the ornithorhynchus and the
+echidna, the 'beast with a bill,' and the 'porcupine ant-eater' of
+popular natural history. These curious creatures, genuine living
+fossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate place between the
+mammals on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other. The
+echidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and body; the
+ornithorhynchus has a bill like a duck's, webbed feet, and a great many
+quaint anatomical peculiarities which closely ally it to the birds and
+reptiles. Both, in fact, are early arrested stages in the development of
+mammals from the old common vertebrate ancestor; and they could only
+have struggled on to our own day in a continent free from the severe
+competition of the higher types which have since been evolved in Europe
+and Asia. Even in Australia itself the ornithorhynchus and echidna have
+had to put up perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy of nature.
+The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, specialised in a thousand
+minute ways for his amphibious life and queer subterranean habits; the
+second is a spiny hedgehog-like nocturnal prowler, who buries himself in
+the earth during the day, and lives by night on insects which he licks
+up greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart from the
+specialisations brought about by their necessary adaptation to a
+particular niche in the economy of life, these two quaint and very
+ancient animals probably preserve for us in their general structure the
+features of an extremely early descendant of the common ancestor from
+whom mammals, birds, and reptiles alike are originally derived.
+
+The ordinary Australian pouched mammals belong to far less ancient types
+than ornithorhynchus and echidna, but they too are very old in
+structure, though they have undergone an extraordinary separate
+evolution to fit them for the most diverse positions in life. Almost
+every main form of higher mammal (except the biggest ones) has, as it
+were, its analogue or representative among the marsupial fauna of the
+Australasian region fitted to fill the same niche in nature. For
+instance, in the blue gum forests of New South Wales a small animal
+inhabits the trees, in form and aspect exactly like a flying squirrel.
+Nobody who was not a structural and anatomical naturalist would ever for
+a moment dream of doubting its close affinity to the flying squirrels of
+the American woodlands. It has just the same general outline, just the
+same bushy tail, just the same rough arrangement of colours, and just
+the same expanded parachute-like membrane stretching between the fore
+and hind limbs. Why should this be so? Clearly because both animals have
+independently adapted themselves to the same mode of life under the same
+general circumstances. Natural selection, acting upon unlike original
+types, but in like conditions, has produced in the end very similar
+results in both cases. Still, when we come to examine the more intimate
+underlying structure of the two animals, a profound fundamental
+difference at once exhibits itself. The one is distinctly a true
+squirrel, a rodent of the rodents, externally adapted to an arboreal
+existence; the other is equally a true phalanger, a marsupial of the
+marsupials, which has independently undergone on his own account very
+much the same adaptation, for very much the same reasons. Just so a
+dolphin looks externally very like a fish, in head and tail and form and
+movement; its flippers closely resemble fins; and nothing about it
+seems to differ very markedly from the outer aspect of a shark or a
+codfish. But in reality it has no gills and no swim-bladder; it lays no
+eggs; it does not own one truly fish-like organ. It breathes air, it
+possesses lungs, it has warm blood, it suckles its young; in heart and
+brain and nerves and organisation it is a thorough-going mammal, with an
+acquired resemblance to the fishy form, due entirely to mere similarity
+in place of residence.
+
+Running hastily through the chief marsupial developments, one may say
+that the wombats are pouched animals who take the place of rabbits or
+marmots in Europe, and resemble them both in burrowing habits and more
+or less in shape, which closely approaches the familiar and ungraceful
+guinea-pig outline. The vulpine phalanger does duty for a fox; the fat
+and sleepy little dormouse phalanger takes the place of a European
+dormouse. Both are so ridiculously like the analogous animals of the
+larger continents that the colonists always call them, in perfect good
+faith, by the familiar names of the old-country creatures. The koala
+poses as a small bear; the cuscus answers to the racoons of America. The
+pouched badgers explain themselves at once by their very name, like the
+Plyants, the Pinchwifes, the Brainsicks, and the Carelesses of the
+Restoration comedy. The 'native rabbit' of Swan River is a rabbit-like
+bandicoot; the pouched ant-eater similarly takes the place of the true
+ant-eaters of other continents. By way of carnivores, the Tasmanian
+devil is a fierce and savage marsupial analogue of the American
+wolverine; a smaller species of the same type usurps the name and place
+of the marten; and the dog-headed Thylacinus is in form and figure
+precisely like a wolf or a jackal. The pouched weasels are very
+weasel-like; the kangaroo rats and kangaroo mice run the true rats and
+mice a close race in every particular. And it is worth notice, in this
+connection, that the one marsupial family which could compete with
+higher American life, the opossums, are really, so to speak, the monkey
+development of the marsupial race. They have opposable thumbs, which
+make their feet almost into hands; they have prehensile tails, by which
+they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal
+omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, insects, and
+roots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, intelligent,
+tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys.
+
+Australia has also one still more ancient denizen than any of these, a
+living fossil of the very oldest sort, a creature of wholly immemorial
+and primitive antiquity. The story of its discovery teems with the
+strangest romance of natural history. To those who could appreciate the
+facts of the case it was just as curious and just as interesting as
+though we were now to discover somewhere in an unknown island or an
+African oasis some surviving mammoth, some belated megatherium, or some
+gigantic and misshapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct animals of
+the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in a
+tropical ramble, and you can faintly conceive the delight and
+astonishment of naturalists at large when the barramunda first 'swam
+into their ken' in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size and
+shape this 'extinct fish,' still living and grunting quietly in our
+midst, is comparatively insignificant beside the 'dragons of the prime'
+immortalised in a famous stanza by Tennyson: but, to the true
+enthusiast, size is nothing; and the barramunda is just as much a marvel
+and a monster as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he had
+suddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging fifty feet of
+lizard-like tail in a train behind him. And this is the plain story of
+that marvellous discovery of a 'missing link' in our own pedigree.
+
+In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there occur in
+abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as the Ceratodi.
+(I apologise for ganoid, though it is not a swear-word). These teeth
+reappear from time to time in several subsequent formations, but at last
+slowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists naturally
+concluded that the creature to which they belonged had died out also,
+and was long since numbered with the dodo and the mastodon. The idea
+that a Ceratodus could still be living, far less that it formed an
+important link in the development of all the higher animals, could never
+for a moment have occurred to anybody. As well expect to find a
+palaeolithic man quietly chipping flints on a Pacific atoll, or to
+discover the ancestor of all horses on the isolated and crag-encircled
+summit of Roraima, as to unearth a real live Ceratodus from a modern
+estuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Krefft took away the breath of scientific
+Europe by informing it that he had found the extinct ganoid swimming
+about as large as life, and six feet long, without the faintest
+consciousness of its own scientific importance, in a river in Queensland
+at the present day. The unsophisticated aborigines knew it as
+barramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers called it with
+irreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head. On further examination,
+however, the despised barramunda proved to be a connecting link of
+primary rank between the oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowest
+air-breathing animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a true
+fish, it leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a foraging
+expedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring woodlands. There it
+browses on myrtle leaves and grasses, and otherwise behaves itself in a
+manner wholly unbecoming its piscine antecedents and aquatic education.
+To fit it for this strange amphibious life, the barramunda has both
+lungs and gills; it can breathe either air or water at will, or, if it
+chooses, the two together. Though covered with scales, and most
+fish-like in outline, it presents points of anatomical resemblance both
+to salamanders and lizards; and, as a connecting bond between the North
+American mud-fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren on the
+other, it forms a true member of the long series by which the higher
+animals generally trace their descent from a remote race of marine
+ancestors. It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this living
+fossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in the
+fossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has long since been
+beaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian descendants;
+in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the last
+relic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.
+
+
+
+
+A VERY OLD MASTER
+
+
+The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a good
+deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of his
+own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation of
+the world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a
+bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin than
+the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, the
+mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable British
+Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled
+eyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptors
+carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib's hair,
+just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primaeval art was already
+hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the
+morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or
+Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying,
+already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in
+the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess
+authentic records of man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten
+epochs--an epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn't commit
+one to any definite chronology in particular--then it is probable that
+all known art, from the Egyptian onward, would fall into the tenth of
+the epochs thus loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief
+would fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I should
+say it was most likely about 244,000 years before the creation of Adam
+according to Ussher.
+
+The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer horn, and
+represents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following one
+another, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the air
+suspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite
+unfavourable comment at Newmarket. Their 'points' are undoubtedly coarse
+and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their
+manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and
+spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the
+domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing
+the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there is
+little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on the
+whole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedingly
+remote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of the
+prehistoric Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in hue
+and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once roam
+over the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush grass
+and tall water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only
+do the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, prove this,
+but quite recently the Russian traveller Prjevalsky (whose name is so
+much easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a similar living
+horse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high
+table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see, as I have only
+to write the word, without uttering it, I don't mind how often or how
+intrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat,
+or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master that we can't do
+better than begin by describing him _in propria persona_.
+
+The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other
+families, into two factions, which may be described for variety's sake
+as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including also
+the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names,
+in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent visitors at
+the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the chief broad
+distinction between these two great groups consists in the feathering of
+the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra and
+co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single bunch or
+fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle at the
+extreme tip. The horse, on the other hand, besides having horny patches
+or callosities on both fore and hind legs, while the donkeys have them
+on the fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long hairs are
+almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving it its
+peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But Prjevalsky's horse, as one
+would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands half-way
+in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a
+family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs collected in a
+final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them spring from the
+middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never from the very top,
+thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit without actually
+attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can make
+out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my prehistoric Phidias the
+horse of the quaternary epoch had much the same caudal peculiarity; his
+tail was bushy, but only in the lower half. He was still in the
+intermediate stage between horse and donkey, a natural mule still
+struggling up aspiringly toward perfect horsehood. In all other matters
+the two creatures--the cave man's horse and Prjevalsky's--closely agree.
+Both display large heads, thick necks, coarse manes, and a general
+disregard of 'points' which would strike disgust and dismay into the
+stout breasts of Messrs. Tattersall. In fact over a T.Y.C. it may be
+confidently asserted, in the pure Saxon of the sporting papers, that
+Prjevalsky's and the cave man's lot wouldn't be in it. Nevertheless a
+candid critic would be forced to admit that, in spite of clumsiness,
+they both mean staying.
+
+So much for the two sitters; now let us turn to the artist who sketched
+them. Who was he, and when did he live? Well, his name, like that of
+many other old masters, is quite unknown to us; but what does that
+matter so long as his work itself lives and survives? Like the Comtists
+he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The work, after all, is
+for the most part all we ever have to go upon. 'I have my own theory
+about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of
+'Alice in Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it is that
+they weren't really written by Homer, but by another person of the same
+name.' There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the
+authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if
+anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two unapproachable
+Greek epics; and all we know directly about my old master, viewed
+personally, is that he once carved with a rude flint flake on a fragment
+of reindeer horn these two clumsy prehistoric horses. Yet by putting two
+and two together we can make, not four, as might be naturally expected,
+but a fairly connected history of the old master himself and what Mr.
+Herbert Spencer would no doubt playfully term 'his environment.'
+
+The work of art was dug up from under the firm concreted floor of a cave
+in the Dordogne. That cave was once inhabited by the nameless artist
+himself, his wife, and family. It had been previously tenanted by
+various other early families, as well as by bears, who seem to have
+lived there in the intervals between the different human occupiers.
+Probably the bears ejected the men, and the men in turn ejected the
+bears, by the summary process of eating one another up. In any case the
+freehold of the cave was at last settled upon our early French artist.
+But the date of his occupancy is by no means recent; for since he lived
+there the long cold spell known as the Great Ice Age, or Glacial Epoch,
+has swept over the whole of Northern Europe, and swept before it the
+shivering descendants of my poor prehistoric old master. Now, how long
+ago was the Great Ice Age? As a rule, if you ask a geologist for a
+definite date, you will find him very chary of giving you a distinct
+answer. He knows that the chalk is older than the London clay, and the
+oolite than the chalk, and the red marl than the oolite; and he knows
+also that each of them took a very long time indeed to lay down, but
+exactly how long he has no notion. If you say to him, 'Is it a million
+years since the chalk was deposited?' he will answer, like the old lady
+of Prague, whose ideas were excessively vague, 'Perhaps.' If you suggest
+five millions, he will answer oracularly once more, 'Perhaps'; and if
+you go on to twenty millions, 'Perhaps,' with a broad smile, is still
+the only confession of faith that torture will wring out of him. But in
+the matter of the Glacial Epoch, a comparatively late and almost
+historical event, geologists have broken through their usual reserve on
+this chronological question and condescended to give us a numerical
+determination. And here is how Dr. Croll gets at it.
+
+Every now and again, geological evidence goes to show us, a long cold
+spell occurs in the northern or southern hemisphere. During these long
+cold spells the ice cap at the poles increases largely, till it spreads
+over a great part of what are now the temperate regions of the globe,
+and makes ice a mere drug in the market as far south as Covent Garden or
+the Halles at Paris. During the greatest extension of this ice sheet in
+the last glacial epoch, in fact, all England except a small
+south-western corner (about Torquay and Bournemouth) was completely
+covered by one enormous mass of glaciers, as is still the case with
+almost the whole of Greenland. The ice sheet, grinding slowly over the
+hills and rocks, smoothed and polished and striated their surfaces in
+many places till they resembled the _roches moutonnees_ similarly ground
+down in our own day by the moving ice rivers of Chamouni and
+Grindelwald. Now, since these great glaciations have occurred at various
+intervals in the world's past history, they must depend upon some
+frequently recurring cause. Such a cause, therefore, Dr. Croll began
+ingeniously to hunt about for.
+
+He found it at last in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit. This world
+of ours, though usually steady enough in its movements, is at times
+decidedly eccentric. Not that I mean to impute to our old and
+exceedingly respectable planet any occasional aberrations of intellect,
+or still less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and Venus);
+the word is here to be accepted strictly in its scientific or
+Pickwickian sense as implying merely an irregularity of movement, a
+slight wobbling out of the established path, a deviation from exact
+circularity. Owing to a combination of astronomical revolutions, the
+precession of the equinoxes and the motion of the aphelion (I am not
+going to explain them here; the names alone will be quite sufficient for
+most people; they will take the rest on trust)--owing to the
+combination of these profoundly interesting causes, I say, there occur
+certain periods in the world's life when for a very long time together
+(10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern hemisphere is warmer
+than the southern, or _vice versa_. Now, Dr. Croll has calculated that
+about 250,000 years ago this eccentricity of the earth's orbit was at
+its highest, so that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either
+hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it was that
+produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. They went on till about
+80,000 years ago, when they stopped short for the present, leaving the
+climate of Britain and the neighbouring continent with its existing
+inconvenient Laodicean temperature. And, as there are good reasons for
+believing that my old master and his contemporaries lived just before
+the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate
+descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of
+Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice
+sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere
+about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew
+Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that
+
+    He lived in the long long agoes;
+    'Twas the manner of primitive man.
+
+The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial Europe, just
+at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by
+the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the
+character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which
+species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously
+intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with the
+hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway
+lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits with the
+lion and the lynx, the leopard and the rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr.
+Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed out, we live to-day in a zoologically
+impoverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest, and most
+remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. And it was in all
+probability the coming on of the Ice Age that did the weeding. Our Zoo
+can boast no mammoth and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion has gone
+the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal ruminants of the
+Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of Seine. But our old
+master saw the last of some at least among those gigantic quadrupeds; it
+was his hand or that of one among his fellows that scratched the famous
+mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine and carved the figure of
+the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn ornaments of Laugerie Basse.
+Probably, therefore, he lived in the period immediately preceding the
+Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells
+with which the long secular winter of the northern hemisphere was then
+from time to time agreeably diversified.
+
+And what did the old master himself look like? Well, painters have
+always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have we not the
+familiar young Raffael, painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the
+Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, all
+flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man has drawn himself many
+times over, not indeed on this particular piece of reindeer horn, but on
+several other media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good
+copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave at
+Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massenat, where a very early pre-Glacial man
+is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting
+a flint-tipped javelin. In this, as in all other pictures of the same
+epoch, I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in the
+costume of Adam before the fall. Our old master's studies, in fact, are
+all in the nude. Primitive man was evidently unacquainted as yet with
+the use of clothing, though primitive woman, while still unclad, had
+already learnt how to heighten her natural charms by the simple addition
+of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, though dresses were still wholly
+unknown, rouge was even then extremely fashionable among French ladies,
+and lumps of the ruddle with which primitive woman made herself
+beautiful for ever are now to be discovered in the corner of the cave
+where she had her little prehistoric boudoir. To return to our hunter,
+however, who for aught we know to the contrary may be our old master
+himself in person, he is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with
+an arched back, recalling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head,
+long neck, pointed beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed legs. I
+fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man cut, on the whole, a very sorry
+and awkward figure.
+
+Was he black? That we don't certainly know, but all analogy would lead
+one to answer positively, Yes. White men seem, on the whole, to be a
+very recent and novel improvement on the original evolutionary pattern.
+At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of
+Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling
+and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us
+lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches,
+answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of
+the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old
+original hairy covering. The few skulls and other fragments of
+skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that our old master and his
+contemporaries much resembled in shape and build the Australian black
+fellows, though their foreheads were lower and more receding, while
+their front teeth still projected in huge fangs, faintly recalling the
+immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart from any theoretical
+considerations as to our probable descent (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin's
+hypothetical 'hairy arboreal quadrumanous ancestor,' whose existence may
+or may not be really true, there can be no doubt that the actual
+historical remains set before us pre-Glacial man as evidently
+approaching in several important respects the higher monkeys.
+
+It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the Time still
+retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old monkey-like
+progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly delineated
+for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the
+earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has admirably
+reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning with a little
+creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five toes to each hind
+foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically
+reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate stages show us an
+Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes on his front feet
+and three behind; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, with only three toes
+on the front foot, the two outer of which are smaller than the big
+middle one; and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one
+stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller ones, too short
+by far to reach the ground. In our own horse these lateral toes have
+become reduced to what are known by veterinaries as splint bones,
+combined with the canon in a single solidly morticed piece. But in the
+pre-Glacial horses the splint bones still generally remained quite
+distinct, thus pointing back to the still earlier period when they
+existed as two separate and independent side toes in the ancestral
+quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however, the splints are found
+united with the canons in a single piece, while conversely horses are
+sometimes, though very rarely, born at the present day with three-toed
+feet, exactly resembling those of their half-forgotten ancestor, the
+Pliocene hipparion.
+
+The reason why we know so much about the horses of the cave period is, I
+am bound to admit, simply and solely because the man of the period ate
+them. Hippophagy has always been popular in France; it was practised by
+pre-Glacial man in the caves of Perigord, and revived with immense
+enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards after the siege of Paris
+and the hunger of the Commune. The cave men hunted and killed the wild
+horse of their own times, and one of the best of their remaining works
+of art represents a naked hunter attacking two horses, while a huge
+snake winds itself unperceived behind close to his heel. In this rough
+prehistoric sketch one seems to catch some faint antique foreshadowing
+of the rude humour of the 'Petit Journal pour Rire.' Some archaeologists
+even believe that the horse was domesticated by the cave men as a source
+of food, and argue that the familiarity with its form shown in the
+drawings could only have been acquired by people who knew the animal in
+its domesticated state; they declare that the cave man was obviously
+horsey. But all the indications seem to me to show that tame animals
+were quite unknown in the age of the cave men. The mammoth certainly was
+never domesticated; yet there is a famous sketch of the huge beast upon
+a piece of his own ivory, discovered in the cave of La Madelaine by
+Messrs. Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred times in works on
+archaeology, which forms one of the finest existing relics of pre-Glacial
+art. In another sketch, less well known, but not unworthy of admiration,
+the early artist has given us with a few rapid but admirable strokes his
+own reminiscence of the effect produced upon him by the sudden onslaught
+of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide open, a perfect glimpse
+of elephantine fury. It forms a capital example of early impressionism,
+respectfully recommended to the favourable attention of Mr. J.M.
+Whistler.
+
+The reindeer, however, formed the favourite food and favourite model of
+the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the
+mammoth; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these early
+prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of palaeolithic art is
+undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in
+Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing, in
+which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a Chinese
+artist would manage it at the present day. Another drawing of two
+reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and
+unearthed in one of the caves of Perigord, though far inferior to the
+Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit.
+The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for the
+head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of
+another. Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other extinct or
+existing animals are also found among the archaic sculptures. Probably
+all these creatures were used as food; and it is even doubtful whether
+the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. To quote Mr.
+Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, 'he lived in a cave by the seas;
+he lived upon oysters and foes.' The oysters are quite undoubted, and the
+foes may be inferred with considerable certainty.
+
+I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather
+question-begging style and title of primitive man. In reality, however,
+the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves to show
+how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive. You can't
+speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct
+animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense primordial.
+Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted cannibals;
+nevertheless they could design far better than the modern Esquimaux or
+Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilised being who is now
+calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own study.
+Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the hypothetical hairy
+quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have intervened innumerable
+generations of gradually improving intermediate forms. The old master,
+when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed, in his Swiss
+or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and necklet of bear's teeth
+dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is nevertheless in all essentials a
+completely evolved human being, with a whole past of slowly acquired
+culture lying dimly and mysteriously behind him. Already he had invented
+the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head,
+the bone harpoon, the barbed fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger,
+and the needle. Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements
+with artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with the
+figures of animals. I have no doubt that he even knew how to brew and to
+distil; and he was probably acquainted with the noble art of cookery as
+applied to the persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage
+cannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody has
+rightly remarked, is the first step on the road to civilisation.
+
+No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must go
+much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years with
+which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for
+pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably earlier
+fire-split flints which the Abbe Bourgeois--undaunted mortal!--ventured
+to discover among the Miocene strata of the _calcaire de Beauce_. Those
+flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and
+still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as
+genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial,
+one distinguished archaeologist will not admit they can be in any way
+human; he will have it that they were really the handiwork of the great
+European anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothing
+more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does it matter whether
+you call the animal that fashioned these exceedingly rough and
+fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? The
+fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it.
+When you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed to
+manufacture himself a convenient implement, you may be sure that man,
+noble man, with all his glorious and admirable faculties--cannibal or
+otherwise--is lurking somewhere very close just round the corner. The
+more we examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does the
+conviction force itself upon us that he was very far indeed from being
+primitive--that we must push back the early history of our race not for
+250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years into
+the dim past of Tertiary ages.
+
+But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race by
+a very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he is
+separated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank space,
+the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial
+Epoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the
+relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows still
+cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. When the great ice sheet
+drove away palaeolithic man--the man of the caves and the unwrought flint
+axes--from Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked
+savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, but armed
+only with roughly chipped stone implements, and wholly ignorant of
+taming animals or of the very rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing
+of the use of metals--_aurum irrepertum spernere fortior_--and he had
+not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone tomahawks to a
+finished edge. He couldn't make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery,
+and, if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing an
+intoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great
+anthropological truth, justly remarks, 'man, being reasonable, _must_
+get drunk'), he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from the
+capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of human
+being who alone inhabited France and England during the later
+pre-Glacial period.
+
+A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play-bills put it),
+and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile,
+loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet
+imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the
+important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made
+pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared away
+he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another man,
+physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow accumulations
+of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! how
+hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then comes the age
+of what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive antiquity--the age
+of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake
+dwellings. The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow,
+the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun to sow small
+ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley; they had learnt to weave flax
+and wear decent clothing: in a word, they had passed from the savage
+hunting condition to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists.
+That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose we must
+conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn't to be measured by mere
+calculations of ten or twenty centuries, but of ten or twenty thousand
+years. The perspective of the past is opening up rapidly before us; what
+looked quite close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere
+in the dim distance. Like our paleolithic artists, we fail to get the
+reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if we
+saw the whole scene properly foreshortened.
+
+On the table where I write there lie two paper-weights, preserving from
+the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which this
+essay is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet,
+produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows,
+and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age of
+the very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and
+it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of
+prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now
+serves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder, simpler, and
+more ineffective than any weapon or implement at present in use among
+the lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by
+the banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken forest
+two hundred thousand years ago and more; with it he has faced the angry
+cave bear and the original and only genuine British lion (for everybody
+knows that the existing mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a
+bastard modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I have
+very little doubt in my own mind that with it some aesthetic ancestor has
+brained and cut up for his use his next-door neighbour in the nearest
+cavern, and then carved upon his well-picked bones an interesting sketch
+of the entire performance. The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact,
+habitually drew their society pictures upon the personal remains of the
+mammoth or the man whom they wished to caricature in deathless
+bone-cuts. The other paper-weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk,
+belonging to the period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial
+Epoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels of
+civilisation with great accuracy. It is the military weapon of a trained
+barbaric warrior as opposed to the universal implement and utensil of a
+rude, solitary, savage hunter. Yet how curious it is that even in the
+midst of this 'so-called nineteenth century,' which perpetually
+proclaims itself an age of progress, men should still prefer to believe
+themselves inferior to their original ancestors, instead of being
+superior to them! The idea that man has risen is considered base,
+degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen is
+considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For
+myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucus
+that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men than ever were
+our fathers.
+
+
+
+
+BRITISH AND FOREIGN
+
+
+Strictly speaking, there is nothing really and truly British; everybody
+and everything is a naturalised alien. Viewed as Britons, we all of us,
+human and animal, differ from one another simply in the length of time
+we and our ancestors have continuously inhabited this favoured and foggy
+isle of Britain. Look, for example, at the men and women of us. Some of
+us, no doubt, are more or less remotely of Norman blood, and came over,
+like that noble family the Slys, with Richard Conqueror. Others of us,
+perhaps, are in the main Scandinavian, and date back a couple of
+generations earlier, to the bare-legged followers of Canute and Guthrum.
+Yet others, once more, are true Saxon Englishmen, descendants of
+Hengest, if there ever was a Hengest, or of Horsa, if a genuine Horsa
+ever actually existed. None of these, it is quite clear, have any just
+right or title to be considered in the last resort as true-born Britons;
+they are all of them just as much foreigners at bottom as the
+Spitalfields Huguenots or the Pembrokeshire Flemings, the Italian
+organ-boy and the Hindoo prince disguised as a crossing-sweeper. But
+surely the Welshman and the Highland Scot at least are undeniable
+Britishers, sprung from the soil and to the manner born! Not a bit of
+it; inexorable modern science, diving back remorselessly into the
+remoter past, traces the Cymry across the face of Germany, and fixes in
+shadowy hypothetical numbers the exact date, to a few centuries, of the
+first prehistoric Gaelic invasion. Even the still earlier brown
+Euskarians and yellow Mongolians, who held the land before the advent of
+the ancient Britons, were themselves immigrants; the very Autochthones
+in person turn out, on close inspection, to be vagabonds and wanderers
+and foreign colonists. In short, man as a whole is not an indigenous
+animal at all in the British Isles. Be he who he may, when we push his
+pedigree back to its prime original, we find him always arriving in the
+end by the Dover steamer or the Harwich packet. Five years, in fact, are
+quite sufficient to give him a legal title to letters of naturalisation,
+unless indeed he be a German grand-duke, in which case he can always
+become an Englishman off-hand by Act of Parliament.
+
+It is just the same with all the other animals and plants that now
+inhabit these isles of Britain. If there be anything at all with a claim
+to be considered really indigenous, it is the Scotch ptarmigan and the
+Alpine hare, the northern holygrass and the mountain flowers of the
+Highland summits. All the rest are sojourners and wayfarers, brought
+across as casuals, like the gipsies and the Oriental plane, at various
+times to the United Kingdom, some of them recently, some of them long
+ago, but not one of them (it seems), except the oyster, a true native.
+The common brown rat, for instance, as everybody knows, came over, not,
+it is true, with William the Conqueror, but with the Hanoverian dynasty
+and King George I. of blessed memory. The familiar cockroach, or 'black
+beetle,' of our lower regions, is an Oriental importation of the last
+century. The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard in
+the land, especially in some big London hotels. The Colorado beetle is
+hourly expected by Cunard steamer. The Canadian roadside erigeron is
+well established already in the remoter suburbs; the phylloxera battens
+on our hothouse vines; the American river-weed stops the navigation on
+our principal canals. The Ganges and the Mississippi have long since
+flooded the tawny Thames, as Juvenal's cynical friend declared the
+Syrian Orontes had flooded the Tiber. And what has thus been going on
+slowly within the memory of the last few generations has been going on
+constantly from time immemorial, and peopling Britain in all its parts
+with its now existing fauna and flora.
+
+But if all the plants and animals in our islands are thus ultimately
+imported, the question naturally arises, What was there in Great Britain
+and Ireland before any of their present inhabitants came to inherit
+them? The answer is, succinctly, Nothing. Or if this be a little too
+extreme, then let us imitate the modesty of Mr. Gilbert's hero and
+modify the statement into Hardly anything. In England, as in Northern
+Europe generally, modern history begins, not with the reign of Queen
+Elizabeth, but with the passing away of the Glacial Epoch. During that
+great age of universal ice our Britain, from end to end, was covered at
+various times by sea and by glaciers; it resembled on the whole the
+cheerful aspect of Spitzbergen or Nova Zembla at the present day. A few
+reindeer wandered now and then over its frozen shores; a scanty
+vegetation of the correlative reindeer-moss grew with difficulty under
+the sheets and drifts of endless snow; a stray walrus or an occasional
+seal basked in the chilly sunshine on the ice-bound coast. But during
+the greatest extension of the North-European ice-sheet it is probable
+that life in London was completely extinct; the metropolitan area did
+not even vegetate. Snow and snow and snow and snow was then the short
+sum-total of British scenery. Murray's Guides were rendered quite
+unnecessary, and penny ices were a drug in the market. England was given
+up to one unchanging universal winter.
+
+Slowly, however, times altered, as they are much given to doing; and a
+new era dawned upon Britain. The thermometer rose rapidly, or at least
+it would have risen, with effusion, if it had yet been invented. The
+land emerged from the sea, and southern plants and animals began to
+invade the area that was afterwards to be England, across the broad belt
+which then connected us with the Continental system. But in those days
+communications were slow and land transit difficult. You had to foot it.
+The European fauna and flora moved but gradually and tentatively
+north-westward, and before any large part of it could settle in England
+our island was finally cut off from the mainland by the long and gradual
+wearing away of the cliffs at Dover and Calais. That accounts for the
+comparative poverty of animal and vegetable life in England, and still
+more for its extreme paucity and meagreness in Ireland and the
+Highlands. It has been erroneously asserted, for example, that St.
+Patrick expelled snakes and lizards, frogs and toads, from the soil of
+Erin. This detail, as the French newspapers politely phrase it, is
+inexact. St. Patrick did not expel the reptiles, because there were
+never any reptiles in Ireland (except dynamiters) for him to expel. The
+creatures never got so far on their long and toilsome north-westward
+march before St. George's Channel intervened to prevent their passage
+across to Dublin. It is really, therefore, to St. George, rather than to
+St. Patrick, that the absence of toads and snakes from the soil of
+Ireland is ultimately due. The doubtful Cappadocian prelate is well
+known to have been always death on dragons and serpents.
+
+As long ago as the sixteenth century, indeed, Verstegan the antiquary
+clearly saw that the existence of badgers and foxes in England implied
+the former presence of a belt of land joining the British Islands to the
+Continent of Europe; for, as he acutely observed, nobody (before
+fox-hunting, at least) would ever have taken the trouble to bring them
+over. Still more does the presence in our islands of the red deer, and
+formerly of the wild white cattle, the wolf, the bear, and the wild
+boar, to say nothing of the beaver, the otter, the squirrel, and the
+weasel, prove that England was once conterminous with France or Belgium.
+At the very best of times, however, before Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel
+had killed positively the last 'last wolf' in Britain (several other
+'last wolves' having previously been despatched by various earlier
+intrepid exterminators), our English fauna was far from a rich one,
+especially as regards the larger quadrupeds. In bats, birds, and insects
+we have always done better, because to such creatures a belt of sea is
+not by any means an insuperable barrier; whereas in reptiles and
+amphibians, on the contrary, we have always been weak, seeing that most
+reptiles are bad swimmers, and very few can rival the late lamented
+Captain Webb in his feat of crossing the Channel, as Leander and Lord
+Byron did the Hellespont.
+
+Only one good-sized animal, so far as known, is now peculiar to the
+British Isles, and that is our familiar friend the red grouse of the
+Scotch moors. I doubt, however, whether even he is really indigenous in
+the strictest sense of the word: that is to say, whether he was evolved
+in and for these islands exclusively, as the moa and the apteryx were
+evolved for New Zealand, and the extinct dodo for Mauritius alone. It is
+far more probable that the red grouse is the original variety of the
+willow grouse of Scandinavia, which has retained throughout the year its
+old plumage, while its more northern cousins among the fiords and fjelds
+have taken, under stress of weather, to donning a complete white dress
+in winter, and a grey or speckled tourist suit for the summer season.
+
+Even since the insulation of Britain a great many new plants and
+animals have been added to our population, both by human design and in
+several other casual fashions. The fallow deer is said to have been
+introduced by the Romans, and domesticated ever since in the successive
+parks of Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman. The edible snail, still
+scattered thinly over our southern downs, and abundant at Box Hill and a
+few other spots in Surrey or Sussex, was brought over, they tell us, by
+the same luxurious Italian epicures, and is even now confined,
+imaginative naturalists declare, to the immediate neighbourhood of Roman
+stations. The mediaeval monks, in like manner, introduced the carp for
+their Friday dinners. One of our commonest river mussels at the present
+day did not exist in England at all a century ago, but was ferried
+hither from the Volga, clinging to the bottoms of vessels from the Black
+Sea, and has now spread itself through all our brooks and streams to the
+very heart and centre of England. Thus, from day to day, as in society
+at large, new introductions constantly take place, and old friends die
+out for ever. The brown rat replaces the old English black rat; strange
+weeds kill off the weeds of ancient days; fresh flies and grubs and
+beetles crop up, and disturb the primitive entomological balance. The
+bustard is gone from Salisbury Plain; the fenland butterflies have
+disappeared with the drainage of the fens. In their place the red-legged
+partridge invades Norfolk; the American black bass is making himself
+quite at home, with Yankee assurance, in our sluggish rivers; and the
+spoonbill is nesting of its own accord among the warmer corners of the
+Sussex downs.
+
+In the plant world, substitution often takes place far more rapidly. I
+doubt whether the stinging nettle, which renders picnicking a nuisance
+in England, is truly indigenous; certainly the two worst kinds, the
+smaller nettle and the Roman nettle, are quite recent denizens, never
+straying, even at the present day, far from the precincts of farmyards
+and villages. The shepherd's-purse and many other common garden weeds of
+cultivation are of Eastern origin, and came to us at first with the
+seed-corn and the peas from the Mediterranean region. Corn-cockles and
+corn-flowers are equally foreign and equally artificial; even the
+scarlet poppy, seldom found except in wheat-fields or around waste
+places in villages, has probably followed the course of tillage from
+some remote and ancient Eastern origin. There is a pretty blue veronica
+which was unknown in England some thirty years since, but which then
+began to spread in gardens, and is now one of the commonest and most
+troublesome weeds throughout the whole country. Other familiar wild
+plants have first been brought over as garden flowers. There is the
+wall-flower, for instance, now escaped from cultivation in every part of
+Britain, and mantling with its yellow bunches both old churches and
+houses and also the crannies of the limestone cliffs around half the
+shores of England. The common stock has similarly overrun the sea-front
+of the Isle of Wight; the monkey-plant, originally a Chilian flower, has
+run wild in many boggy spots in England and Wales; and a North American
+balsam, seldom cultivated even in cottage gardens, has managed to
+establish itself in profuse abundance along the banks of the Wey about
+Guildford and Godalming. One little garden linaria, at first employed as
+an ornament for hanging-baskets, has become so common on old walls and
+banks as to be now considered a mere weed, and exterminated accordingly
+by fashionable gardeners. Such are the unaccountable reverses of
+fortune, that one age will pay fifty guineas a bulb for a plant which
+the next age grubs up unanimously as a vulgar intruder. White of
+Selborne noticed with delight in his own kitchen that rare insect, the
+Oriental cockroach, lately imported; and Mr. Brewer observed with joy
+in his garden at Reigate the blue Buxbaum speedwell, which is now the
+acknowledged and hated pest of the Surrey agriculturist.
+
+The history of some of these waifs and strays which go to make up the
+wider population of Britain is indeed sufficiently remarkable. Like all
+islands, England has a fragmentary fauna and flora, whose members have
+often drifted towards it in the most wonderful and varied manner.
+Sometimes they bear witness to ancient land connections, as in the case
+of the spotted Portuguese slug which Professor Allman found calmly
+disporting itself on the basking cliffs in the Killarney district. In
+former days, when Spain and Ireland joined hands in the middle of the
+Bay of Biscay, the ancestors of this placid Lusitanian mollusk must have
+ranged (good word to apply to slugs) from the groves of Cintra to the
+Cove of Cork. But, as time rolled on, the cruel crawling sea rolled on
+also, and cut away all the western world from the foot of the Asturias
+to Macgillicuddy's Reeks. So the spotted slug continued to survive in
+two distinct and divided bodies, a large one in South-western Europe,
+and a small isolated colony, all alone by itself, around the Kerry
+mountains and the Lakes of Killarney. At other times pure accident
+accounts for the presence of a particular species in the mainlands of
+Britain. For example, the Bermuda grass-lily, a common American plant,
+is known in a wild state nowhere in Europe save at a place called
+Woodford, in county Galway. Nobody ever planted it there; it has simply
+sprung up from some single seed, carried over, perhaps, on the feet of a
+bird, or cast ashore by the Gulf Stream on the hospitable coast of
+Western Ireland. Yet there it has flourished and thriven ever since, a
+naturalised British subject of undoubted origin, without ever spreading
+to north or south above a few miles from its adopted habitat.
+
+There are several of these unconscious American importations in various
+parts of Britain, some of them, no doubt, brought over with seed-corn or
+among the straw of packing-cases, but others unconnected in any way with
+human agency, and owing their presence here to natural causes. That
+pretty little Yankee weed, the claytonia, now common in parts of
+Lancashire and Oxfordshire, first made its appearance amongst us, I
+believe, by its seeds being accidentally included with the sawdust in
+which Wenham Lake ice is packed for transport. The Canadian river-weed
+is known first to have escaped from the botanical gardens at Cambridge,
+whence it spread rapidly through the congenial dykes and sluices of the
+fen country, and so into the entire navigable network of the Midland
+counties. But there are other aliens of older settlement amongst us,
+aliens of American origin which nevertheless arrived in Britain, in all
+probability, long before Columbus ever set foot on the low basking
+sandbank of Cat Island. Such is the jointed pond-sedge of the Hebrides,
+a water-weed found abundantly in the lakes and tarns of the Isle of
+Skye, Mull and Coll, and the west coast of Ireland, but occurring
+nowhere else throughout the whole expanse of Europe or Asia. How did it
+get there? Clearly its seeds were either washed by the waves or carried
+by birds, and thus deposited on the nearest European shores to America.
+But if Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace had been alive in pre-Columban days
+(which, as Euclid remarks, is absurd), he would readily have inferred,
+from the frequent occurrence of such unknown plants along the western
+verge of Britain, that a great continent lay unexplored to the westward,
+and would promptly have proceeded to discover and annex it. As Mr.
+Wallace was not yet born, however, Columbus took a mean advantage over
+him, and discovered it first by mere right of primogeniture.
+
+In other cases, the circumstances under which a particular plant appears
+in England are often very suspicious. Take the instance of the
+belladonna, or deadly nightshade, an extremely rare British species,
+found only in the immediate neighbourhood of old castles and monastic
+buildings. Belladonna, of course, is a deadly poison, and was much used
+in the half-magical, half-criminal sorceries of the Middle Ages. Did you
+wish to remove a troublesome rival or an elder brother, you treated him
+to a dose of deadly nightshade. Yet why should it, in company with many
+other poisonous exotics, be found so frequently around the ruins of
+monasteries? Did the holy fathers--but no, the thought is too
+irreverent. Let us keep our illusions, and forget the friar and the
+apothecary in 'Romeo and Juliet.'
+
+Belladonna has never fairly taken root in English soil. It remains, like
+the Roman snail and the Portuguese slug, a mere casual straggler about
+its ancient haunts. But there are other plants which have fairly
+established their claim to be considered as native-born Britons, though
+they came to us at first as aliens and colonists from foreign parts.
+Such, to take a single case, is the history of the common alexanders,
+now a familiar weed around villages and farmyards, but only introduced
+into England as a pot-herb about the eighth or ninth century. It was
+long grown in cottage gardens for table purposes, but has for ages been
+superseded in that way by celery. Nevertheless, it continues to grow all
+about our lanes and hedges, side by side with another quaintly-named
+plant, bishop-weed or gout-weed, whose very titles in themselves bear
+curious witness to its original uses in this isle of Britain. I don't
+know why, but it is an historical fact that the early prelates of the
+English Church, saintly or otherwise, were peculiarly liable to that
+very episcopal disease, the gout. Whether their frequent fasting
+produced this effect; whether, as they themselves piously alleged, it
+was due to constant kneeling on the cold stones of churches; or whether,
+as their enemies rather insinuated, it was due in greater measure to the
+excellent wines presented to them by their Italian _confreres_, is a
+minute question to be decided by Mr. Freeman, not by the present humble
+inquirer. But the fact remains that bishops and gout got indelibly
+associated in the public mind; that the episcopal toes were looked upon
+as especially subject to that insidious disease up to the very end of
+the last century; and that they do say the bishops even now--but I
+refrain from the commission of _scandalum magnatum_. Anyhow, this
+particular weed was held to be a specific for the bishop's evil; and,
+being introduced and cultivated for the purpose, it came to be known
+indifferently to herbalists as bishop-weed and gout-weed. It has now
+long since ceased to be a recognised member of the British
+Pharmacopoeia, but, having overrun our lanes and thickets in its
+flush period, it remains to this day a visible botanical and
+etymological memento of the past twinges of episcopal remorse.
+
+Taken as a whole, one may fairly say that the total population of the
+British Isles consists mainly of three great elements. The first and
+oldest--the only one with any real claim to be considered as truly
+native--is the cold Northern, Alpine and Arctic element, comprising such
+animals as the white hare of Scotland, the ptarmigan, the pine marten,
+and the capercailzie--the last once extinct, and now reintroduced into
+the Highlands as a game bird. This very ancient fauna and flora, left
+behind soon after the Glacial Epoch, and perhaps in part a relic of the
+type which still struggled on in favoured spots during that terrible
+period of universal ice and snow, now survives for the most part only in
+the extreme north and on the highest and chilliest mountain-tops, where
+it has gradually been driven, like tourists in August, by the increasing
+warmth and sultriness of the southern lowlands. The summits of the
+principal Scotch hills are occupied by many Arctic plants, now slowly
+dying out, but lingering yet as last relics of that old native British
+flora. The Alpine milk vetch thus loiters among the rocks of Braemar and
+Clova; the Arctic brook-saxifrage flowers but sparingly near the summit
+of Ben Lawers, Ben Nevis, and Lochnagar; its still more northern ally,
+the drooping saxifrage, is now extinct in all Britain, save on a single
+snowy Scotch height, where it now rarely blossoms, and will soon become
+altogether obsolete. There are other northern plants of this first and
+oldest British type, like the Ural oxytrope, the cloudberry, and the
+white dryas, which remain as yet even in the moors of Yorkshire, or over
+considerable tracts in the Scotch Highlands; there are others restricted
+to a single spot among the Welsh hills, an isolated skerry among the
+outer Hebrides, or a solitary summit in the Lake District. But wherever
+they linger, these true-born Britons of the old rock are now but
+strangers and outcasts in the land; the intrusive foreigner has driven
+them to die on the cold mountain-tops, as the Celt drove the Mongolian
+to the hills, and the Saxon, in turn, has driven the Celt to the
+Highlands and the islands. Yet as late as the twelfth century itself,
+even the true reindeer, the Arctic monarch of the Glacial Epoch, was
+still hunted by Norwegian jarls of Orkney on the mainland of Caithness
+and Sutherlandshire.
+
+Second in age is the warm western and south-western type, the type
+represented by the Portuguese slug, the arbutus trees and Mediterranean
+heaths of the Killarney district, the flora of Cornwall and the Scilly
+Isles, and the peculiar wild flowers of South Wales, Devonshire, and the
+west country generally. This class belongs by origin to the submerged
+land of Lyonesse, the warm champaign country that once spread westward
+over the Bay of Biscay, and derived from the Gulf Stream the genial
+climate still preserved by its last remnants at Tresco and St. Mary's.
+The animals belonging to this secondary stratum of our British
+population are few and rare, but of its plants there are not a few, some
+of them extending over the whole western shores of England, Wales,
+Scotland, and Ireland, wherever they are washed by the Gulf Stream, and
+others now confined to particular spots, often with the oddest apparent
+capriciousness. Thus, two or three southern types of clover are peculiar
+to the Lizard Point, in Cornwall; a little Spanish and Italian
+restharrow has got stranded in the Channel Islands and on the Mull of
+Galloway; the spotted rock-rose of the Mediterranean grows only in
+Kerry, Galway, and Anglesea; while other plants of the same warm habit
+are confined to such spots as Torquay, Babbicombe, Dawlish, Cork,
+Swansea, Axminster, and the Scilly Isles. Of course, all peninsulas and
+islands are warmer in temperature than inland places, and so these
+relics of the lost Lyonesse have survived here and there in Cornwall,
+Carnarvonshire, Kerry, and other very projecting headlands long after
+they have died out altogether from the main central mass of Britain.
+South-western Ireland in particular is almost Portuguese in the general
+aspect of its fauna and flora.
+
+Third and latest of all in time, though almost contemporary with the
+southern type, is the central European or Germanic element in our
+population. Sad as it is to confess it, the truth must nevertheless be
+told, that our beasts and birds, our plants and flowers, are for the
+most part of purely Teutonic origin. Even as the rude and hard-headed
+Anglo-Saxon has driven the gentle, poetical, and imaginative Celt ever
+westward before him into the hills and the sea, so the rude and vigorous
+Germanic beasts and weeds have driven the gentler and softer southern
+types into Wales and Cornwall, Galloway and Connemara. It is to the
+central European population that we owe or owed the red deer, the wild
+boar, the bear, the wolf, the beaver, the fox, the badger, the otter,
+and the squirrel. It is to the central European flora that we owe the
+larger part of the most familiar plants in all eastern and southeastern
+England. They crossed in bands over the old land belt before Britain was
+finally insulated, and they have gone on steadily ever since, with true
+Teutonic persistence, overrunning the land and pushing slowly westward,
+like all other German bands before or since, to the detriment and
+discomfort of the previous inhabitants. Let us humbly remember that we
+are all of us at bottom foreigners alike, but that it is the Teutonic
+English, the people from the old Low Dutch fatherland by the Elbe, who
+have finally given to this isle its name of England, and to every one of
+us, Celt or Teuton, their own Teutonic name of Englishmen. We are at
+best, as an irate Teuton once remarked, 'nozzing but segond-hand
+Chermans.' In the words of a distinguished modern philologist of our own
+blood, 'English is Dutch, spoken with a Welsh accent.'
+
+
+
+
+THUNDERBOLTS
+
+
+The subject of thunderbolts is a very fascinating one, and all the more
+so because there are no such things in existence at all as thunderbolts
+of any sort. Like the snakes of Iceland, their whole history might, from
+the positive point of view at least, be summed up in the simple
+statement of their utter nonentity. But does that do away in the least,
+I should like to know, with their intrinsic interest and importance? Not
+a bit of it. It only adds to the mystery and charm of the whole subject.
+Does anyone feel as keenly interested in any real living cobra or
+anaconda as in the non-existent great sea-serpent? Are ghosts and
+vampires less attractive objects of popular study than cats and donkeys?
+Can the present King of Abyssinia, interviewed by our own correspondent,
+equal the romantic charm of Prester John, or the butcher in the next
+street rival the personality of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne,
+Baronet? No, the real fact is this: if there _were_ thunderbolts, the
+question of their nature and action would be a wholly dull, scientific,
+and priggish one; it is their unreality alone that invests them with all
+the mysterious weirdness of pure fiction. Lightning, now, is a common
+thing that one reads about wearily in the books on electricity, a mere
+ordinary matter of positive and negative, density and potential, to be
+measured in ohms (whatever they may be), and partially imitated with
+Leyden jars and red sealing-wax apparatus. Why, did not Benjamin
+Franklin, a fat old gentleman in ill-fitting small clothes, bring it
+down from the clouds with a simple door-key, somewhere near
+Philadelphia? and does not Mr. Robert Scott (of the Meteorological
+Office) calmly predict its probable occurrence within the next
+twenty-four hours in his daily report, as published regularly in the
+morning papers? This is lightning, mere vulgar lightning, a simple
+result of electrical conditions in the upper atmosphere, inconveniently
+connected with algebraical formulas in _x_, _y_, _z_, with horrid
+symbols interspersed in Greek letters. But the real thunderbolts of
+Jove, the weapons that the angry Zeus, or Thor, or Indra hurls down upon
+the head of the trembling malefactor--how infinitely grander, more
+fearsome, and more mysterious!
+
+And yet even nowadays, I believe, there are a large number of
+well-informed people, who have passed the sixth standard, taken prizes
+at the Oxford Local, and attended the dullest lectures of the Society
+for University Extension, but who nevertheless in some vague and dim
+corner of their consciousness retain somehow a lingering faith in the
+existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in its entirety the
+simple truth that lightning is the reality of which thunderbolts are the
+mythical, or fanciful, or verbal representation. We all of us know now
+that lightning is a mere flash of electric light and heat; that it has
+no solid existence or core of any sort; in short, that it is dynamical
+rather than material, a state or movement rather than a body or thing.
+To be sure, local newspapers still talk with much show of learning about
+'the electric fluid' which did such remarkable damage last week upon the
+slated steeple of Peddlington Torpida Church; but the well-crammed
+schoolboy of the present day has long since learned that the electric
+fluid is an exploded fallacy, and that the lightning which pulled the
+ten slates off the steeple in question was nothing more in its real
+nature than a very big immaterial spark. However, the word thunderbolt
+has survived to us from the days when people still believed that the
+thing which did the damage during a thunderstorm was really and truly a
+gigantic white-hot bolt or arrow; and, as there is a natural tendency in
+human nature to fit an existence to every word, people even now continue
+to imagine that there must be actually something or other somewhere
+called a thunderbolt. They don't figure this thing to themselves as
+being identical with the lightning; on the contrary, they seem to regard
+it as something infinitely rarer, more terrible, and more mystic; but
+they firmly hold that thunderbolts do exist in real life, and even
+sometimes assert that they themselves have positively seen them.
+
+But, if seeing is believing, it is equally true, as all who have looked
+into the phenomena of spiritualism and 'psychical research' (modern
+English for ghost-hunting) know too well, that believing is seeing also.
+The origin of the faith in thunderbolts must be looked for (like the
+origin of the faith in ghosts and 'psychical phenomena') far back in the
+history of our race. The noble savage, at that early period when wild in
+woods he ran, naturally noticed the existence of thunder and lightning,
+because thunder and lightning are things that forcibly obtrude
+themselves upon the attention of the observer, however little he may by
+nature be scientifically inclined. Indeed, the noble savage, sleeping
+naked on the bare ground, in tropical countries where thunder occurs
+almost every night on an average, was sure to be pretty often awaked
+from his peaceful slumbers by the torrents of rain that habitually
+accompany thunderstorms in the happy realms of everlasting dog-days.
+Primitive man was thereupon compelled to do a little philosophising on
+his own account as to the cause and origin of the rumbling and flashing
+which he saw so constantly around him. Naturally enough, he concluded
+that the sound must be the voice of somebody; and that the fiery shaft,
+whose effects he sometimes noted upon trees, animals, and his
+fellow-man, must be the somebody's arrow. It is immaterial from this
+point of view whether, as the scientific anthropologists hold, he was
+led to his conception of these supernatural personages from his prior
+belief in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor Max Mueller will
+have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive savage breast toward
+the Infinite and the Unknowable (which he would doubtless have spelt,
+like the Professor, with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with
+the intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet); but this much at least
+is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder and the lightning as
+in some sense the voice and the arrows of an aerial god.
+
+Now, this idea about the arrows is itself very significant of the mental
+attitude of primitive man, and of the way that mental attitude has
+coloured all subsequent thinking and superstition upon this very
+subject. Curiously enough, to the present day the conception of the
+thunderbolt is essentially one of a _bolt_--that is to say, an arrow, or
+at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (and there are plenty
+of them lying about casually in country houses and local museums) are
+more or less arrow-like in shape and appearance; some of them, indeed,
+as we shall see by-and-by, are the actual stone arrowheads of primitive
+man himself in person. Of course the noble savage was himself in the
+constant habit of shooting at animals and enemies with a bow and arrow.
+When, then, he tried to figure to himself the angry god, seated in the
+storm-clouds, who spoke with such a loud rumbling voice, and killed
+those who displeased him with his fiery darts, he naturally thought of
+him as using in his cloudy home the familiar bow and arrow of this
+nether planet. To us nowadays, if we were to begin forming the idea for
+ourselves all over again _de novo_, it would be far more natural to
+think of the thunder as the noise of a big gun, of the lightning as the
+flash of the powder, and of the supposed 'bolt' as a shell or bullet.
+There is really a ridiculous resemblance between a thunderstorm and a
+discharge of artillery. But the old conception derived from so many
+generations of primitive men has held its own against such mere modern
+devices as gunpowder and rifle balls; and none of the objects commonly
+shown as thunderbolts are ever round: they are distinguished, whatever
+their origin, by the common peculiarity that they more or less closely
+resemble a dart or arrowhead.
+
+Let us begin, then, by clearly disembarrassing our minds of any
+lingering belief in the existence of thunderbolts. There are absolutely
+no such things known to science. The two real phenomena that underlie
+the fable are simply thunder and lightning. A thunderstorm is merely a
+series of electrical discharges between one cloud and another, or
+between clouds and the earth; and these discharges manifest themselves
+to our senses under two forms--to the eye as lightning, to the ear as
+thunder. All that passes in each case is a huge spark--a commotion, not
+a material object. It is in principle just like the spark from an
+electrical machine; but while the most powerful machine of human
+construction will only send a spark for three feet, the enormous
+electrical apparatus provided for us by nature will send one for four,
+five, or even ten miles. Though lightning when it touches the earth
+always seems to us to come from the clouds to the ground, it is by no
+means certain that the real course may not at least occasionally be in
+the opposite direction. All we know is that sometimes there is an
+instantaneous discharge between one cloud and another, and sometimes an
+instantaneous discharge between a cloud and the earth.
+
+But this idea of a mere passage of highly concentrated energy from one
+point to another was far too abstract, of course, for primitive man, and
+is far too abstract even now for nine out of ten of our
+fellow-creatures. Those who don't still believe in the bodily
+thunderbolt, a fearsome aerial weapon which buries itself deep in the
+bosom of the earth, look upon lightning as at least an embodiment of the
+electric fluid, a long spout or line of molten fire, which is usually
+conceived of as striking the ground and then proceeding to hide itself
+under the roots of a tree or beneath the foundations of a tottering
+house. Primitive man naturally took to the grosser and more material
+conception. He figured to himself the thunderbolt as a barbed arrowhead;
+and the forked zigzag character of the visible flash, as it darts
+rapidly from point to point, seemed almost inevitably to suggest to him
+the barbs, as one sees them represented on all the Greek and Roman gems,
+in the red right hand of the angry Jupiter.
+
+The thunderbolt being thus an accepted fact, it followed naturally that
+whenever any dart-like object of unknown origin was dug up out of the
+ground, it was at once set down as being a thunderbolt; and, on the
+other hand, the frequent occurrence of such dart-like objects, precisely
+where one might expect to find them in accordance with the theory,
+necessarily strengthened the belief itself. So commonly are thunderbolts
+picked up to the present day that to disbelieve in them seems to many
+country people a piece of ridiculous and stubborn scepticism. Why,
+they've ploughed up dozens of them themselves in their time, and just
+about the very place where the thunderbolt struck the old elm-tree two
+years ago, too.
+
+The most favourite form of thunderbolt is the polished stone hatchet or
+'celt' of the newer stone age men. I have never heard the very rude
+chipped and unpolished axes of the older drift men or cave men described
+as thunderbolts: they are too rough and shapeless ever to attract
+attention from any except professed archaeologists. Indeed, the wicked
+have been known to scoff at them freely as mere accidental lumps of
+broken flint, and to deride the notion of their being due in any way to
+deliberate human handicraft. These are the sort of people who would
+regard a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the shapely
+stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and herdsman is usually a
+beautifully polished wedge-shaped piece of solid greenstone; and its
+edge has been ground to such a delicate smoothness that it seems rather
+like a bit of nature's exquisite workmanship than a simple relic of
+prehistoric man. There is something very fascinating about the naif
+belief that the neolithic axe is a genuine unadulterated thunderbolt.
+You dig it up in the ground exactly where you would expect a thunderbolt
+(if there were such things) to be. It is heavy, smooth, well shaped, and
+neatly pointed at one end. If it could really descend in a red-hot state
+from the depths of the sky, launched forth like a cannon-ball by some
+fierce discharge of heavenly artillery, it would certainly prove a very
+formidable weapon indeed; and one could easily imagine it scoring the
+bark of some aged oak, or tearing off the tiles from a projecting
+turret, exactly as the lightning is so well known to do in this prosaic
+workaday world of ours. In short, there is really nothing on earth
+against the theory of the stone axe being a true thunderbolt, except the
+fact that it unfortunately happens to be a neolithic hatchet.
+
+But the course of reasoning by which we discover the true nature of the
+stone axe is not one that would in any case appeal strongly to the
+fancy or the intelligence of the British farmer. It is no use telling
+him that whenever one opens a barrow of the stone age one is pretty sure
+to find a neolithic axe and a few broken pieces of pottery beside the
+mouldering skeleton of the old nameless chief who lies there buried. The
+British farmer will doubtless stolidly retort that thunderbolts often
+strike the tops of hills, which are just the places where barrows and
+tumuli (tumps, he calls them) most do congregate; and that as to the
+skeleton, isn't it just as likely that the man was killed by the
+thunderbolt as that the thunderbolt was made by a man? Ay, and a sight
+likelier, too.
+
+All the world over, this simple and easy belief, that the buried stone
+axe is a thunderbolt, exists among Europeans and savages alike. In the
+West of England, the labourers will tell you that the thunder-axes they
+dig up fell from the sky. In Brittany, says Mr. Tylor, the old man who
+mends umbrellas at Carnac, beside the mysterious stone avenues of that
+great French Stonehenge, inquires on his rounds for _pierres de
+tonnerre_, which of course are found with suspicious frequency in the
+immediate neighbourhood of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese
+Encyclopaedia we are told that the 'lightning stones' have sometimes the
+shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and sometimes that of a
+mallet. And then, by a curious misapprehension, the sapient author of
+that work goes on to observe that these lightning stones are used by the
+wandering Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never seems to have
+struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols made the lightning
+stones instead of digging them up out of the earth. So deeply had the
+idea of the thunderbolt buried itself in the recesses of his soul, that
+though a neighbouring people were still actually manufacturing stone
+axes almost under his very eyes, he reversed mentally the entire
+process, and supposed they dug up the thunderbolts which he saw them
+using, and employed them as common hatchets. This is one of the finest
+instances on record of the popular figure which grammarians call the
+_hysteron proteron_, and ordinary folk describe as putting the cart
+before the horse. Just so, while in some parts of Brazil the Indians are
+still laboriously polishing their stone hatchets, in other parts the
+planters are digging up the precisely similar stone hatchets of earlier
+generations, and religiously preserving them in their houses as
+undoubted thunderbolts. I have myself had pressed upon my attention as
+genuine lightning stones, in the West Indies, the exquisitely polished
+greenstone tomahawks of the old Carib marauders. But then, in this
+matter, I am pretty much in the position of that philosophic sceptic
+who, when he was asked by a lady whether he believed in ghosts, answered
+wisely, 'No, madam, I have seen by far too many of them.'
+
+One of the finest accounts ever given of the nature of thunderbolts is
+that mentioned by Adrianus Tollius in his edition of 'Boethius on Gems.'
+He gives illustrations of some neolithic axes and hammers, and then
+proceeds to state that in the opinion of philosophers they are generated
+in the sky by a fulgureous exhalation (whatever that may look like)
+conglobed in a cloud by a circumfixed humour, and baked hard, as it
+were, by intense heat. The weapon, it seems, then becomes pointed by the
+damp mixed with it flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end
+denser; while the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks out
+through the cloud, and makes thunder and lightning. A very lucid
+explanation certainly, but rendered a little difficult of apprehension
+by the effort necessary for realising in a mental picture the
+conglobation of a fulgureous exhalation by a circumfixed humour.
+
+One would like to see a drawing of the process, though the sketch would
+probably much resemble the picture of a muchness, so admirably described
+by the mock turtle. The excellent Tollius himself, however, while
+demurring on the whole to this hypothesis of the philosophers, bases his
+objection mainly on the ground that, if this were so, then it is odd the
+thunderbolts are not round, but wedge-shaped, and that they have holes
+in them, and those holes not equal throughout, but widest at the ends.
+As a matter of fact, Tollius has here hit the right nail on the head
+quite accidentally; for the holes are really there, of course, to
+receive the haft of the axe or hammer. But if they were truly
+thunderbolts, and if the bolts were shafted, then the holes would have
+been lengthwise, as in an arrowhead, not crosswise, as in an axe or
+hammer. Which is a complete _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophic
+opinion.
+
+Some of the cerauniae, says Pliny, are like hatchets. He would have been
+nearer the mark if he had said 'are hatchets' outright. But this
+_apercu_, which was to Pliny merely a stray suggestion, became to the
+northern peoples a firm article of belief, and caused them to represent
+to themselves their god Thor or Thunor as armed, not with a bolt, but
+with an axe or hammer. Etymologically Thor, Thunor, and thunder are the
+self-same word; but while the southern races looked upon Zeus or Indra
+as wielding his forked darts in his red right hand, the northern races
+looked upon the Thunder-god as hurling down an angry hammer from his
+seat in the clouds. There can be but little doubt that the very notion
+of Thor's hammer itself was derived from the shape of the supposed
+thunderbolt, which the Scandinavians and Teutons rightly saw at once to
+be an axe or mallet, not an arrowhead. The 'fiery axe' of Thunor is a
+common metaphor in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Thus, Thor's hammer is itself
+merely the picture which our northern ancestors formed to themselves,
+by compounding the idea of thunder and lightning with the idea of the
+polished stone hatchets they dug up among the fields and meadows.
+
+Flint arrowheads of the stone age are less often taken for thunderbolts,
+no doubt because they are so much smaller that they look quite too
+insignificant for the weapons of an angry god. They are more frequently
+described as fairy-darts or fairy-bolts. Still, I have known even
+arrowheads regarded as thunderbolts, and preserved superstitiously
+under that belief. In Finland, stone arrows are universally so viewed;
+and the rainbow is looked upon as the bow of Tiermes, the thunder-god,
+who shoots with it the guilty sorcerers.
+
+But why should thunderbolts, whether stone axes or flint arrowheads, be
+preserved, not merely as curiosities, but from motives of superstition?
+The reason is a simple one. Everybody knows that in all magical
+ceremonies it is necessary to have something belonging to the person you
+wish to conjure against, in order to make your spells effectual. A bone,
+be it but a joint of the little finger, is sufficient to raise the ghost
+to which it once belonged; cuttings of hair or clippings of nails are
+enough to put their owner magically in your power; and that is the
+reason why, if you are a prudent person, you will always burn all such
+off-castings of your body, lest haply an enemy should get hold of them,
+and cast the evil eye upon you with their potent aid. In the same way,
+if you can lay hands upon anything that once belonged to an elf, such as
+a fairy-bolt or flint arrowhead, you can get its former possessor to do
+anything you wish by simply rubbing it and calling upon him to appear.
+This is the secret of half the charms and amulets in existence, most of
+which are either real old arrowheads, or carnelians cut in the same
+shape, which has now mostly degenerated from the barb to the
+conventional heart, and been mistakenly associated with the idea of
+love. This is the secret, too, of all the rings, lamps, gems, and boxes,
+possession of which gives a man power over fairies, spirits, gnomes, and
+genii. All magic proceeds upon the prime belief that you must possess
+something belonging to the person you wish to control, constrain, or
+injure. And, failing anything else, you must at least have a wax image
+of him, which you call by his name, and use as his substitute in your
+incantations.
+
+On this primitive principle, possession of a thunderbolt gives you some
+sort of hold, as it were, over the thunder-god himself in person. If you
+keep a thunderbolt in your house it will never be struck by lightning.
+In Shetland, stone axes are religiously preserved in every cottage as a
+cheap and simple substitute for lightning-rods. In Cornwall, the stone
+hatchets and arrowheads not only guard the house from thunder, but also
+act as magical barometers, changing colour with the changes of the
+weather, as if in sympathy with the temper of the thunder-god. In
+Germany, the house where a thunderbolt is kept is safe from the storm;
+and the bolt itself begins to sweat on the approach of lightning-clouds.
+Nay, so potent is the protection afforded by a thunderbolt that where
+the lightning has once struck it never strikes again; the bolt already
+buried in the soil seems to preserve the surrounding place from the
+anger of the deity. Old and pagan in their nature as are these beliefs,
+they yet survive so thoroughly into Christian times that I have seen a
+stone hatchet built into the steeple of a church to protect it from
+lightning. Indeed, steeples have always of course attracted the electric
+discharge to a singular degree by their height and tapering form,
+especially before the introduction of lighting-rods; and it was a sore
+trial of faith to mediaeval reasoners to understand why heaven should
+hurl its angry darts so often against the towers of its very own
+churches. In the Abruzzi the flint axe has actually been Christianised
+into St. Paul's arrows--_saetti de San Paolo_. Families hand down the
+miraculous stones from father to son as a precious legacy; and mothers
+hang them on their children's necks side by side with medals of saints
+and madonnas, which themselves are hardly so highly prized as the stones
+that fall from heaven.
+
+Another and very different form of thunderbolt is the belemnite, a
+common English fossil often preserved in houses in the west country with
+the same superstitious reverence as the neolithic hatchets. The very
+form of the belemnite at once suggests the notion of a dart or
+lance-head, which has gained for it its scientific name. At the present
+day, when all our girls go to Girton and enter for the classical tripos,
+I need hardly translate the word belemnite 'for the benefit of the
+ladies,' as people used to do in the dark and unemancipated eighteenth
+century; but as our boys have left off learning Greek just as their
+sisters are beginning to act the 'Antigone' at private theatricals, I
+may perhaps be pardoned if I explain, 'for the benefit of the
+gentlemen,' that the word is practically equivalent to javelin-fossil.
+The belemnites are the internal shells of a sort of cuttle-fish which
+swam about in enormous numbers in the seas whose sediment forms our
+modern lias, oolite, and gault. A great many different species are known
+and have acquired charming names in very doubtful Attic at the hands of
+profoundly learned geological investigators, but almost all are equally
+good representatives of the mythical thunderbolt. The finest specimens
+are long, thick, cylindrical, and gradually tapering, with a hole at one
+end as if on purpose to receive the shaft. Sometimes they have
+petrified into iron pyrites or copper compounds, shining like gold, and
+then they make very noble thunderbolts indeed, heavy as lead, and
+capable of doing profound mischief if properly directed. At other times
+they have crystallised in transparent spar, and then they form very
+beautiful objects, as smooth and polished as the best lapidary could
+possibly make them. Belemnites are generally found in immense numbers
+together, especially in the marlstone quarries of the Midlands, and in
+the lias cliffs of Dorsetshire. Yet the quarrymen who find them never
+seem to have their faith shaken in the least by the enormous quantities
+of thunderbolts that would appear to have struck a single spot with such
+extraordinary frequency This little fact also tells rather hardly
+against the theory that the lightning never falls twice upon the same
+place.
+
+Only the largest and heaviest belemnites are known as thunder stones;
+the smaller ones are more commonly described as agate pencils. In
+Shakespeare's country their connection with thunder is well known, so
+that in all probability a belemnite is the original of the beautiful
+lines in 'Cymbeline':--
+
+    Fear no more the lightning flash,
+    Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone,
+
+where the distinction between the lightning and the thunderbolt is
+particularly well indicated. In every part of Europe belemnites and
+stone hatchets are alike regarded as thunderbolts; so that we have the
+curious result that people confuse under a single name a natural fossil
+of immense antiquity and a human product of comparatively recent but
+still prehistoric date. Indeed, I have had two thunderbolts shown me at
+once, one of which was a large belemnite, and the other a modern Indian
+tomahawk. Curiously enough, English sailors still call the nearest
+surviving relatives of the belemnites, the squids or calamaries of the
+Atlantic, by the appropriate name of sea-arrows.
+
+Many other natural or artificial objects have added their tittle to the
+belief in thunderbolts. In the Himalayas, for example, where awful
+thunderstorms are always occurring as common objects of the country, the
+torrents which follow them tear out of the loose soil fossil bones and
+tusks and teeth, which are universally looked upon as lightning-stones.
+The nodules of pyrites, often picked up on beaches, with their false
+appearance of having been melted by intense heat, pass muster easily
+with children and sailor folk for the genuine thunderbolts. But the
+grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable reality which has
+kept alive the thunderbolt even in a wicked and sceptical age, is,
+beyond all question, the occasional falling of meteoric stones. Your
+meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the
+British Museum itself you will find him duly classified and labelled and
+catalogued. Here, surely, we have the ultimate substratum of the
+thunderbolt myth. To be sure, meteors have no kind of natural connection
+with thunderstorms; they may fall anywhere and at any time; but to
+object thus is to be hypercritical. A stone that falls from heaven, no
+matter how or when, is quite good enough to be considered as a
+thunderbolt.
+
+Meteors, indeed, might very easily be confounded with lightning,
+especially by people who already have the full-blown conception of a
+thunderbolt floating about vaguely in their brains. The meteor leaps
+upon the earth suddenly with a rushing noise; it is usually red-hot when
+it falls, by friction against the air; it is mostly composed of native
+iron and other heavy metallic bodies; and it does its best to bury
+itself in the ground in the most orthodox and respectable manner. The
+man who sees this parlous monster come whizzing through the clouds from
+planetary space, making a fiery track like a great dragon as it moves
+rapidly across the sky, and finally ploughing its way into the earth in
+his own back garden, may well be excused for regarding it as a fine
+specimen of the true antique thunderbolt. The same virtues which belong
+to the buried stone are in some other places claimed for meteoric iron,
+small pieces of which are worn as charms, specially useful in protecting
+the wearer against thunder, lightning, and evil incantations. In many
+cases miraculous images have been hewn out of the stones that have
+fallen from heaven; and in others the meteorite itself is carefully
+preserved or worshipped as the actual representative of god or goddess,
+saint or madonna. The image that fell down from Jupiter may itself have
+been a mass of meteoric iron.
+
+Both meteorites and stone hatchets, as well as all other forms of
+thunderbolt, are in excellent repute as amulets, not only against
+lightning, but against the evil eye generally. In Italy they protect the
+owner from thunder, epidemics, and cattle disease, the last two of which
+are well known to be caused by witchcraft; while Prospero in the
+'Tempest' is a surviving proof how thunderstorms, too, can be magically
+produced. The tongues of sheep-bells ought to be made of meteoric iron
+or of elf-bolts, in order to insure the animals against foot-and-mouth
+disease or death by storm. Built into walls or placed on the threshold
+of stables, thunderbolts are capital preventives of fire or other
+damage, though not perhaps in this respect quite equal to a rusty
+horseshoe from a prehistoric battlefield. Thrown into a well they purify
+the water; and boiled in the drink of diseased sheep they render a cure
+positively certain. In Cornwall thunderbolts are a sovereign remedy for
+rheumatism; and in the popular pharmacopoeia of Ireland they have
+been employed with success for ophthalmia, pleurisy, and many other
+painful diseases. If finely powdered and swallowed piecemeal, they
+render the person who swallows them invulnerable for the rest of his
+lifetime. But they cannot conscientiously be recommended for dyspepsia
+and other forms of indigestion.
+
+As if on purpose to confuse our already very vague ideas about
+thunderbolts, there is one special kind of lightning which really seems
+intentionally to simulate a meteorite, and that is the kind known as
+fire-balls or (more scientifically) globular lightning. A fire-ball
+generally appears as a sphere of light, sometimes only as big as a Dutch
+cheese, sometimes as large as three feet in diameter. It moves along
+very slowly and demurely through the air, remaining visible for a whole
+minute or two together; and in the end it generally bursts up with great
+violence, as if it were a London railway station being experimented upon
+by Irish patriots. At Milan one day a fire-ball of this description
+walked down one of the streets so slowly that a small crowd walked after
+it admiringly, to see where it was going. It made straight for a church
+steeple, after the common but sacrilegious fashion of all lightning,
+struck the gilded cross on the topmost pinnacle, and then immediately
+vanished, like a Virgilian apparition, into thin air.
+
+A few years ago, too, Dr. Tripe was watching a very severe thunderstorm,
+when he saw a fire-ball come quietly gliding up to him, apparently
+rising from the earth rather than falling towards it. Instead of running
+away, like a practical man, the intrepid doctor held his ground quietly
+and observed the fiery monster with scientific nonchalance. After
+continuing its course for some time in a peaceful and regular fashion,
+however, without attempting to assault him, it finally darted off at a
+tangent in another direction, and turned apparently into forked
+lightning. A fire-ball, noticed among the Glendowan Mountains in
+Donegal, behaved even more eccentrically, as might be expected from its
+Irish antecedents. It first skirted the earth in a leisurely way for
+several hundred yards like a cannon-ball; then it struck the ground,
+ricochetted, and once more bounded along for another short spell; after
+which it disappeared in the boggy soil, as if it were completely
+finished and done for. But in another moment it rose again, nothing
+daunted, with Celtic irrepressibility, several yards away, pursued its
+ghostly course across a running stream (which shows, at least, there
+could have been no witchcraft in it), and finally ran to earth for good
+in the opposite bank, leaving a round hole in the sloping peat at the
+spot where it buried itself. Where it first struck, it cut up the peat
+as if with a knife, and made a broad deep trench which remained
+afterwards as a witness of its eccentric conduct. If the person who
+observed it had been of a superstitious turn of mind we should have had
+here one of the finest and most terrifying ghost stories on the entire
+record, which would have made an exceptionally splendid show in the
+'Transactions of the Society for Psychical Research.' Unfortunately,
+however, he was only a man of science, ungifted with the precious dower
+of poetical imagination; so he stupidly called it a remarkable
+fire-ball, measured the ground carefully like a common engineer, and
+sent an account of the phenomenon to that far more prosaic periodical,
+the 'Quarterly Journal of the Meteorological Society.' Another splendid
+apparition thrown away recklessly, for ever!
+
+There is a curious form of electrical discharge, somewhat similar to the
+fire-ball but on a smaller scale, which may be regarded as the exact
+opposite of the thunderbolt, inasmuch as it is always quite harmless.
+This is St. Elmo's fire, a brush of lambent light, which plays around
+the masts of ships and the tops of trees, when clouds are low and
+tension great. It is, in fact, the equivalent in nature of the brush
+discharge from an electric machine. The Greeks and Romans looked upon
+this lambent display as a sign of the presence of Castor and Pollux,
+'fratres Helenae, lucida sidera,' and held that its appearance was an
+omen of safety, as everybody who has read the 'Lays of Ancient Rome'
+must surely remember. The modern name, St. Elmo's fire, is itself a
+curiously twisted and perversely Christianised reminiscence of the great
+twin brethren; for St. Elmo is merely a corruption of Helena, made
+masculine and canonised by the grateful sailors. It was as Helen's
+brothers that they best knew the Dioscuri in the good old days of the
+upper empire; and when the new religion forbade them any longer to
+worship those vain heathen deities, they managed to hand over the flames
+at the masthead to an imaginary St. Elmo, whose protection stood them in
+just as good stead as that of the original alternate immortals.
+
+Finally, the effects of lightning itself are sometimes such as to
+produce upon the mind of an impartial but unscientific beholder the firm
+idea that a bodily thunderbolt must necessarily have descended from
+heaven. In sand or rock, where lightning has struck, it often forms long
+hollow tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological intelligence
+as fulgurites, and looking for all the world like gigantic drills such
+as quarrymen make for putting in a blast. They are produced, of course,
+by the melting of the rock under the terrific heat of the electric
+spark; and they grow narrower and narrower as they descend till they
+finally disappear. But to a casual observer, they irresistibly suggest
+the notion that a material weapon has struck the ground, and buried
+itself at the bottom of the hole. The summit of Little Ararat, that
+weather-beaten and many-fabled peak (where an enterprising journalist
+not long ago discovered the remains of Noah's Ark), has been riddled
+through and through by frequent lightnings, till the rock is now a mere
+honeycombed mass of drills and tubes, like an old target at the end of a
+long day's constant rifle practice. Pieces of the red trachyte from the
+summit, a foot long, have been brought to Europe, perforated all over
+with these natural bullet marks, each of them lined with black glass,
+due to the fusion of the rock by the passage of the spark. Specimens of
+such thunder-drilled rock may be seen in most geological museums. On
+some which Humboldt collected from a peak in Mexico, the fused slag from
+the wall of the tube has overflowed on to the surrounding surface, thus
+conclusively proving (if proof were necessary) that the holes are due to
+melting heat alone, and not to the passage of any solid thunderbolt.
+
+But it was the introduction and general employment of lightning-rods
+that dealt a final deathblow to the thunderbolt theory. A
+lightning-conductor consists essentially of a long piece of metal,
+pointed at the end whose business it is, not so much (as most people
+imagine) to carry off the flash of lightning harmlessly, should it
+happen to strike the house to which the conductor is attached, but
+rather to prevent the occurrence of a flash at all, by gradually and
+gently drawing off the electricity as fast as it gathers before it has
+had time to collect in sufficient force for a destructive discharge. It
+resembles in effect an overflow pipe which drains off the surplus water
+of a pond as soon as it runs in, in such a manner as to prevent the
+possibility of an inundation, which might occur if the water were
+allowed to collect in force behind a dam or embankment. It is a
+flood-gate, not a moat: it carries away the electricity of the air
+quietly to the ground, without allowing it to gather in sufficient
+amount to produce a flash of lightning. It might thus be better called
+a lightning-preventer than a lightning-conductor: it conducts
+electricity, but it prevents lightning. At first, all lightning-rods
+used to be made with knobs on the top, and then the electricity used to
+collect at the surface until the electric force was sufficient to cause
+a spark. In those happy days, you had the pleasure of seeing that the
+lightning was actually being drawn off from your neighbourhood
+piecemeal. Knobs, it was held, must be the best things, because you
+could incontestably see the sparks striking them with your own eyes. But
+as time went on, electricians discovered that if you fixed a fine metal
+point to the conductor of an electric machine it was impossible to get
+up any appreciable charge because the electricity kept always leaking
+out by means of the point. Then it was seen that if you made your
+lightning-rods pointed at the end, you would be able in the same way to
+dissipate your electricity before it ever had time to come to a head in
+the shape of lightning. From that moment the thunderbolt was safely dead
+and buried. It was urged, indeed, that the attempt thus to rob Heaven of
+its thunders was wicked and impious; but the common-sense of mankind
+refused to believe that absolute omnipotence could be sensibly defied by
+twenty yards of cylindrical iron tubing. Thenceforth the thunderbolt
+ceased to exist, save in poetry, country houses, and the most rural
+circles; even the electric fluid was generally relegated to the
+provincial press, where it still keeps company harmoniously with
+caloric, the devouring element, nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, and
+many other like philosophical fossils: while lightning itself, shorn of
+its former glories, could no longer wage impious war against cathedral
+towers, but was compelled to restrict itself to blasting a solitary
+rider now and again in the open fields, or drilling more holes in the
+already crumbling summit of Mount Ararat. Yet it will be a thousand
+years more, in all probability, before the last thunderbolt ceases to be
+shown as a curiosity here and there to marvelling visitors, and takes
+its proper place in some village museum as a belemnite, a meteoric
+stone, or a polished axe-head of our neolithic ancestors. Even then, no
+doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in
+the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet.
+
+
+
+
+HONEY-DEW
+
+
+Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personae, a couple of small
+brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green
+'plant-lice,' or 'blight,' or aphides. The exact scene is usually on the
+young and succulent branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft
+shoots the aphides have deeply buried their long trunk-like snouts, in
+search of the sap off which they live so contentedly through their brief
+lifetime. To them, enter the two small brown ants, their lawful
+possessors; for ants, too, though absolutely unrecognised by English law
+('de minimis non curat lex,' says the legal aphorism), are nevertheless
+in their own commonwealth duly seised of many and various goods and
+chattels; and these same aphides, as everybody has heard, stand to them
+in pretty much the same position as cows stand to human herdsmen. Throw
+in for sole spectator a loitering naturalist, and you get the entire
+_mise-en-scene_ of a quaint little drama that works itself out a dozen
+times among the wilted rose-trees beneath the latticed cottage windows
+every summer morning.
+
+It is a delightful sight to watch the two little lilliputian proprietors
+approaching and milking these their wee green motionless cattle. First
+of all, the ants quickly scent their way with protruded antennae (for
+they are as good as blind, poor things!) up the prickly stem of the
+rose-bush, guided, no doubt, by the faint perfume exhaled from the
+nectar above them. Smelling their road cautiously to the ends of the
+branches, they soon reach their own particular aphides, whose bodies
+they proceed gently to stroke with their outstretched feelers, and then
+stand by quietly for a moment in happy anticipation of the coming
+dinner. Presently, the obedient aphis, conscious of its lawful master's
+friendly presence, begins slowly to emit from two long horn-like tubes
+near the centre of its back a couple of limpid drops of a sticky pale
+yellow fluid. Honey-dew our English rustics still call it, because, when
+the aphides are not milked often enough by ants, they discharge it
+awkwardly of their own accord, and then it falls as a sweet clammy dew
+upon the grass beneath them. The ant, approaching the two tubes with
+cautious tenderness, removes the sweet drops without injuring in any way
+his little _protege_, and then passes on to the next in order of his
+tiny cattle, leaving the aphis apparently as much relieved by the
+process as a cow with a full hanging udder is relieved by the timely
+attention of the human milkmaid.
+
+Evidently, this is a case of mutual accommodation in the political
+economy of the ants and aphides: a free interchange of services between
+the ant as consumer and the aphis as producer. Why the aphides should
+have acquired the curious necessity for getting rid of this sweet,
+sticky, and nutritious secretion nobody knows with certainty; but it is
+at least quite clear that the liquid is a considerable nuisance to them
+in their very sedentary and monotonous existence--a waste product of
+which they are anxious to disembarrass themselves as easily as
+possible--and that while they themselves stand to the ants in the
+relation of purveyors of food supply, the ants in return stand to them
+in the relation of scavengers, or contractors for the removal of useless
+accumulations.
+
+Everybody knows the aphides well by sight, in one of their forms at
+least, the familiar rose aphis; but probably few people ever look at
+them closely and critically enough to observe how very beautiful and
+wonderful is the organisation of their tiny limbs in all its exquisite
+detail. If you pick off one good-sized wingless insect, however, from a
+blighted rose-leaf, and put him on a glass slide under a low power of
+the microscope, you will most likely be quite surprised to find what a
+lovely little creature it is that you have been poisoning wholesale all
+your life long with diluted tobacco-juice. His body is so transparent
+that you can see through it by transmitted light: a dainty glass globe,
+you would say, of emerald green, set upon six tapering, jointed, hairy
+legs, and provided in front with two large black eyes of many facets,
+and a pair of long and very flexible antennae, easily moved in any
+direction, but usually bent backward when the creature is at rest so as
+to reach nearly to his tail as he stands at ease upon his native
+rose-leaf. There are, however, two other features about him which
+specially attract attention, as being very characteristic of the aphides
+and their allies among all other insects. In the first place, his mouth
+is provided with a very long snout or proboscis, classically described
+as a rostrum, with which he pierces the outer skin of the rose-shoot
+where he lives, and sucks up incessantly its sweet juices. This organ is
+common to the aphis with all the other bugs and plant-lice. In the
+second place, he has half-way down his back (or a little more) a pair of
+very peculiar hollow organs, the honey tubes, from which exudes that
+singular secretion, the honey-dew. These tubes are not found in quite
+all species of aphides, but they are very common among the class, and
+they form by far the most conspicuous and interesting organs in all
+those aphides which do possess them.
+
+The life-history of the rose-aphis, small and familiar as is the insect
+itself, forms one of the most marvellous and extraordinary chapters in
+all the fairy tales of modern science. Nobody need wonder why the blight
+attacks his roses so persistently when once he has learnt the unusual
+provision for exceptional fertility in the reproduction of these insect
+plagues. The whole story is too long to give at full length, but here is
+a brief recapitulation of a year's generations of common aphides.
+
+In the spring, the eggs of last year's crop, which have been laid by the
+mothers in nooks and crannies out of reach of the frost, are quickened
+into life by the first return of warm weather, and hatch out their brood
+of insects. All this brood consists of imperfect females, without a
+single male among them; and they all fasten at once upon the young buds
+of their native bush, where they pass a sluggish and uneventful
+existence in sucking up the juice from the veins on the one hand, and
+secreting honey-dew upon the other. Four times they moult their skins,
+these moults being in some respects analogous to the metamorphosis of
+the caterpillar into chrysalis and butterfly. After the fourth moult,
+the young aphides attain maturity; and then they give origin,
+parthenogenetically, to a second brood, also of imperfect females, all
+produced without any fathers. This second brood brings forth in like
+manner a third generation, asexual, as before; and the same process is
+repeated without intermission as long as the warm weather lasts. In each
+case, the young simply bud out from the ovaries of the mothers, exactly
+as new crops of leaves bud out from the rose-branch on which they grow.
+Eleven generations have thus been observed to follow one another rapidly
+in a single summer; and indeed, by keeping the aphides in a warm room,
+one may even make them continue their reproduction in this purely
+vegetative fashion for as many as four years running. But as soon as
+the cold weather begins to set in, perfect male and female insects are
+produced by the last swarm of parthenogenetic mothers; and these true
+females, after being fertilised, lay the eggs which remain through the
+winter, and from which the next summer's broods have to begin afresh the
+wonderful cycle. Thus, only one generation of aphides, out of ten or
+eleven, consists of true males and females: all the rest are false
+females, producing young by a process of budding.
+
+Setting aside for the present certain special modifications of this
+strange cycle which have been lately described by M. Jules Lichtenstein,
+let us consider for a moment what can be the origin and meaning of such
+an unusual and curious mode of reproduction.
+
+The aphides are on the whole the most purely inactive and vegetative of
+all insects, unless indeed we except a few very debased and degraded
+parasites. They fasten themselves early in life on to a particular shoot
+of a particular plant; they drink in its juices, digest them, grow, and
+undergo their incomplete metamorphoses; they produce new generations
+with extraordinary rapidity; and they vegetate, in fact, almost as much
+as the plant itself upon which they are living. Their existence is
+duller than that of the very dullest cathedral city. They are thus
+essentially degenerate creatures: they have found the conditions of life
+too easy for them, and they have reverted to something so low and simple
+that they are almost plant-like in some of their habits and
+peculiarities.
+
+The ancestors of the aphides were free winged insects; and, in certain
+stages of their existence, most living species of aphides possess at
+least some winged members. On the rose-bush, you can generally pick off
+a few such larger winged forms, side by side with the wee green wingless
+insects. But creatures which have taken to passing most of their life
+upon a single spot on a single plant hardly need the luxury of wings;
+and so, in nine cases out of ten, natural selection has dispensed with
+those needless encumbrances. Even the legs are comparatively little
+wanted by our modern aphides, which only require them to walk away in a
+stately sleepy manner when rudely disturbed by man, lady-birds, or other
+enemies; and indeed the legs are now very weak and feeble, and incapable
+of walking for more than a short distance at a time under exceptional
+provocation. The eyes remain, it is true; but only the big ones: the
+little ocelli at the top of the head, found amongst so many of their
+allies, are quite wanting in all the aphides. In short, the plant-lice
+have degenerated into mere mouths and sacks for sucking and storing food
+from the tissues of plants, provided with large honey-tubes for getting
+rid of the waste sugar.
+
+Now, the greater the amount of food any animal gets, and the less the
+amount of expenditure it performs in muscular action, the greater will
+be the surplus it has left over for the purposes of reproduction. Eggs
+or young, in fact, represent the amount thus left over after all the
+wants of the body have been provided for. But in the rose-aphis the
+wants of the body, when once the insect has reached its full growth, are
+absolutely nothing; and it therefore then begins to bud out new
+generations in rapid succession as fast as ever it can produce them.
+This is strictly analogous to what we see every day taking place in all
+the plants around us. New leaves are produced one after another, as fast
+as material can be supplied for their nutrition, and each of these new
+leaves is known to be a separate individual, just as much as the
+individual aphis. At last, however, a time comes when the reproductive
+power of the plant begins to fail, and then it produces flowers, that is
+to say stamens (male) and pistils (female), whose union results in
+fertilisation and the subsequent outgrowth of fruit and seeds. Thus a
+year's cycle of the plant-lice exactly answers to the life-history of an
+ordinary annual. The eggs correspond to the seeds; the various
+generations of aphides budding out from one another by parthenogenesis
+correspond to the leaves budded out by one another throughout the
+summer; and the final brood of perfect males and females answers to the
+flower with its stamen and pistils, producing the seeds, as they produce
+the eggs, for setting up afresh the next year's cycle.
+
+This consideration, I fancy, suggests to us the most probable
+explanation of the honey-tubes and honey-dew. Creatures that eat so much
+and reproduce so fast as the aphides are rapidly sucking up juices all
+the time from the plant on which they fasten, and converting most of the
+nutriment so absorbed into material for fresh generations. That is how
+they swarm so fast over all our shrubs and flowers. But if there is any
+one kind of material in their food in excess of their needs, they would
+naturally have to secrete it by a special organ developed or enlarged
+for the purpose. I don't mean that the organ would or could be developed
+all at once, by a sudden effort, but that as the habit of fixing
+themselves upon plants and sucking their juices grew from generation to
+generation with these descendants of originally winged insects, an organ
+for permitting the waste product to exude must necessarily have grown
+side by side with it. Sugar seems to have been such a waste product,
+contained in the juices of the plant to an extent beyond what the
+aphides could assimilate or use up in the production of new broods; and
+this sugar is therefore secreted by special organs, the honey-tubes. One
+can readily imagine that it may at first have escaped in small
+quantities, and that two pores on their last segment but two may have
+been gradually specialised into regular secreting organs, perhaps under
+the peculiar agency of the ants, who have regularly appropriated so many
+kinds of aphides as miniature milch cows.
+
+So completely have some species of ants come to recognise their own
+proprietary interest in the persons of the aphides, that they provide
+them with fences and cow-sheds on the most approved human pattern.
+Sometimes they build up covered galleries to protect their tiny cattle;
+and these galleries lead from the nest to the place where the aphides
+are fixed, and completely enclose the little creatures from all chance
+of harm. If intruders try to attack the farmyard, the ants drive them
+away by biting and lacerating them. Sir John Lubbock, who has paid great
+attention to the mutual relations of ants and aphides, has even shown
+that various kinds of ants domesticate various species of aphis. The
+common brown garden-ant, one of the darkest skinned among our English
+races, 'devotes itself principally to aphides which frequent twigs and
+leaves'; especially, so far as I have myself observed, the bright green
+aphis of the rose, and the closely allied little black aphis of the
+broad bean. On the other hand a nearly related reddish ant pays
+attention chiefly to those aphides which live on the bark of trees,
+while the yellow meadow-ants, a far more subterranean species, keep
+flocks and herds of the like-minded aphides which feed upon the roots of
+herbs and grasses.
+
+Sir John Lubbock, indeed, even suggests--and how the suggestion would
+have charmed 'Civilisation' Buckle!--that to this difference of food and
+habit the distinctive colours of the various species may very probably
+be due. The ground which he adduces for this ingenious idea is a capital
+example of the excellent use to which out-of-the-way evidence may be
+cleverly put by a competent evolutionary thinker. 'The Baltic amber,' he
+says, 'contains among the remains of many other insects a species of
+ant intermediate between our small brown garden-ants and the little
+yellow meadow-ants. This is possibly the stock from which these and
+other allied species are descended. One is tempted to suggest that the
+brown species which live so much in the open air, and climb up trees and
+bushes, have retained and even deepened their dark colour; while others,
+such as the yellow meadow-ant, which lives almost entirely below ground,
+have become much paler.' He might have added, as confirmatory evidence,
+the fact that the perfect winged males and females of the yellow
+species, which fly about freely during the brief honeymoon in the open
+air, are even darker in hue than the brown garden-ant. But how the light
+colour of the neuter workers gets transmitted through these dusky
+parents from one generation to another is part of that most insoluble
+crux of all evolutionary reasoning--the transmission of special
+qualities to neuters by parents who have never possessed them.
+
+This last-mentioned yellow meadow-ant has carried the system of
+domestication further in all probability than any other species among
+its congeners. Not only do the yellow ants collect the root-feeding
+aphides in their own nests, and tend them as carefully as their own
+young, but they also gather and guard the eggs of the aphides, which,
+till they come to maturity, are of course quite useless. Sir John
+Lubbock found that his yellow ants carried the winter eggs of a species
+of aphis into their nest, and there took great care of them. In the
+spring, the eggs hatched out; and the ants actually carried the young
+aphides out of the nest again, and placed them on the leaves of a daisy
+growing in the immediate neighbourhood. They then built up a wall of
+earth over and round them. The aphides went on in their usual lazy
+fashion throughout the summer, and in October they laid another lot of
+eggs, precisely like those of the preceding autumn. This case, as the
+practised observer himself remarks, is an instance of prudence
+unexampled, perhaps, in the animal kingdom, outside man. 'The eggs are
+laid early in October on the food-plant of the insect. They are of no
+direct use to the ants; yet they are not left where they are laid,
+exposed to the severity of the weather and to innumerable dangers, but
+brought into their nests by the ants, and tended by them with the utmost
+care through the long winter months until the following March, when the
+young ones are brought out again and placed on the young shoots of the
+daisy.' Mr. White of Stonehouse has also noted an exactly similar
+instance of formican providence.
+
+The connection between so many ants and so many species of the aphides
+being so close and intimate, it does not seem extravagant to suppose
+that the honey-tubes in their existing advanced form at least may be due
+to the deliberate selective action of these tiny insect-breeders.
+Indeed, when we consider that there are certain species of beetles which
+have never been found anywhere except in ants' nests, it appears highly
+probable that these domesticated forms have been produced by the ants
+themselves, exactly as the dog, the sheep, and the cow, in their
+existing types, have been produced by deliberate human selection. If
+this be so, then there is nothing very out-of-the-way in the idea that
+the ants have also produced the honey-tubes of aphides by their long
+selective action. It must be remembered that ants, in point of
+antiquity, date back, under one form or another, no doubt to a very
+remote period of geological time. Their immense variety of genera and
+species (over a thousand distinct kinds are known) show them to be a
+very ancient family, or else they would not have had time to be
+specially modified in such a wonderful multiformity of ways. Even as
+long ago as the time when the tertiary deposits of Oeningen and
+Radoboj were laid down, Dr. Heer of Zurich has shown that at least
+eighty-three distinct species of ants already existed; and the number
+that have left no trace behind is most probably far greater. Some of the
+beetles and woodlice which ants domesticate in their nests have been
+kept underground so long that they have become quite blind--that is to
+say, have ceased altogether to produce eyes, which would be of no use to
+them in their subterranean galleries; and one such blind beetle, known
+as Claviger, has even lost the power of feeding itself, and has to be
+fed by its masters from their own mandibles. Dr. Taschenberg enumerates
+300 species of true ants'-nest insects, mostly beetles, in Germany
+alone; and M. Andre gives a list of 584 kinds, habitually found in
+association with ants in one country or another. Compared with these
+singular results of formican selection, the mere production or further
+development of the honey-tubes appears to be a very small matter.
+
+But what good do the aphides themselves derive from the power of
+secreting honey-dew? For we know now that no animal or plant is ever
+provided with any organ or part merely for the benefit of another
+creature: the advantage must at least be mutual. Well, in the first
+place, it is likely that, in any case, the amount of sugary matter in
+the food of the aphides is quite in excess of their needs; they
+assimilate the nitrogenous material of the sap, and secrete its
+saccharine material as honey-dew. That, however, would hardly account
+for the development of special secretory ducts, like the honey-tubes, in
+which you can actually see the little drops of honey rolling, under the
+microscope. But the ants are useful allies to the aphides, in guarding
+them from another very dangerous type of insect. They are subject to the
+attacks of an ichneumon fly, which lays its eggs in them, meaning its
+larvae to feed upon their living bodies; and the ants watch over the
+aphides with the greatest vigilance, driving off the ichneumons whenever
+they approach their little _proteges_.
+
+Many other insects besides ants, however, are fond of the sweet
+secretions of the aphides, and it is probable that the honey-dew thus
+acts to some extent as a preservative of the species, by diverting
+possible foes from the insects themselves, to the sugary liquid which
+they distil from their food-plants. Having more than enough and to spare
+for all their own needs, and the needs of their offspring, the
+plant-lice can afford to employ a little of their nutriment as a bribe
+to secure them from the attacks of possible enemies. Such compensatory
+bribes are common enough in the economy of nature. Thus our common
+English vetch secretes a little honey on the stipules or wing-like
+leaflets on the stem, and so distracts thieving ants from committing
+their depredations upon the nectaries in the flowers, which are intended
+for the attraction of the fertilising bees; and a South American acacia,
+as Mr. Belt has shown, bears hollow thorns and produces honey from a
+gland in each leaflet, in order to allure myriads of small ants which
+nest in the thorns, eat the honey, and repay the plant by driving away
+their leaf-cutting congeners. Indeed, as they sting violently, and issue
+forth in enormous swarms whenever the plant is attacked, they are even
+able to frighten off browsing cattle from their own peculiar acacia.
+
+Aphides, then, are essentially degraded insects, which have become
+almost vegetative in their habits, and even in their mode of
+reproduction, but which still retain a few marks of their original
+descent from higher and more locomotive ancestors. Their wings,
+especially, are useful to the perfect forms in finding one another, and
+to the imperfect ones in migrating from one plant to its nearest
+neighbours, where they soon become the parents of fresh hordes in rapid
+succession. Hence various kinds of aphides are among the most dreaded
+plagues of agriculturists. The 'fly,' which Kentish farmers know so well
+on hops, is an aphis specialised for that particular bine; and, when
+once it appears in the gardens, it spreads with startling rapidity from
+one end of the long rows to the other. The phylloxera which has spoilt
+the French vineyards is a root-feeding form that attacks the vine, and
+kills or maims the plant terribly, by sucking the vital juices on their
+way up into the fresh-forming foliage. The 'American blight' on apple
+trees is yet another member of the same family, a wee creeping cottony
+creature that hides among the fissures of the bark, and drives its very
+long beak far down into the green sappy layer underlying the dead outer
+covering. In fact, almost all the best-known 'blights' and
+bladder-forming insects are aphides of one kind or another, affecting
+leaves, or stalks, or roots, or branches.
+
+It is one of the most remarkable examples of the limitation of human
+powers that while we can easily exterminate large animals like the wolf
+and the bear in England, or the puma and the wolverine in the settled
+States of America, we should be so comparatively weak against the
+Colorado beetle or the fourteen-year locust, and so absolutely powerless
+against the hop-fly, the turnip-fly, and the phylloxera. The smaller and
+the more insignificant our enemy, viewed individually, the more
+difficult is he to cope with in the mass. All the elephants in the world
+could have been hunted down and annihilated, in all probability, with
+far less labour than has been expended upon one single little all but
+microscopic parasite in France alone. The enormous rapidity of
+reproduction in the family of aphides is the true cause of our
+helplessness before them. It has been calculated that a single aphis may
+during its own lifetime become the progenitor of 5,904,900,000
+descendants. Each imperfect female produces about ninety young ones,
+and lives long enough to see its children's children to the fifth
+generation. Now, ninety multiplied by ninety four times over gives the
+number above stated. Of course, this makes no allowance for casualties
+which must be pretty frequent: but even so, the sum-total of aphides
+produced within a small garden in a single summer must be something very
+extraordinary.
+
+It is curious, too, that aphides on the whole seem to escape the notice
+of insect-eating birds very tolerably. I cannot, in fact, discover that
+birds ever eat them, their chief real enemy being the little lizard-like
+larva of the lady-bird, which devours them everywhere greedily in
+immense numbers. Indeed, aphides form almost the sole food of the entire
+lady-bird tribe in their earlier stages of existence; and there is no
+better way of getting rid of blight on roses and other garden plants
+than to bring in a good boxful of these active and voracious little
+grubs from the fields and hedges. They will pounce upon the aphides
+forthwith as a cat pounces upon the mice in a well-stocked barn or
+farmyard. The two-spotted lady-bird in particular is the determined
+exterminator of the destructive hop-fly, and is much beloved accordingly
+by Kentish farmers. No doubt, one reason why birds do not readily see
+the aphis of the rose and most other species is because of their
+prevailing green tint, and the close way in which they stick to the
+leaves or shoots on whose juices they are preying. But in the case of
+many black and violet species, this protection of imitative colour is
+wanting, and yet the birds do not seem to care for the very conspicuous
+little insects on the broad bean, for example, whose dusky hue makes
+them quite noticeable in large masses. Here there may very likely be
+some special protection of nauseous taste in the aphides themselves (I
+will confess that I have not ventured to try the experiment in person),
+as in many other instances we know that conspicuously-coloured insects
+advertise their nastiness, as it were, to the birds by their own
+integuments, and so escape being eaten in mistake for any of their less
+protected relatives.
+
+On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that certain plants have
+efficiently armed themselves against the aphides, in turn, by secreting
+bitter or otherwise unpleasant juices. So far as I can discover, the
+little plunderers seldom touch the pungent 'nasturtiums' or tropsaelums
+of our flower-gardens, even when these grow side by side with other
+plants on which the aphides are swarming. Often, indeed, I find winged
+forms upon the leaf-stem of a nasturtium, having come there evidently in
+hopes of starting a new colony; but usually in a dead or dying
+condition--the pungent juice seems to have poisoned them. So, too,
+spinach and lettuce may be covered with blight, while the bitter
+spurges, the woolly-leaved arabis, and the strong-scented thyme close by
+are utterly untouched. Plants seem to have acquired all these devices,
+such as close networks of hair upon the leaves, strong essences, bitter
+or pungent juices, and poisonous principles, mainly as deterrents for
+insect enemies, of which caterpillars and plant-lice are by far the most
+destructive. It would be unpardonable, of course, to write about
+honey-dew without mentioning tobacco; and I may add parenthetically that
+aphides are determined anti-tobacconists, nicotine, in fact, being a
+deadly poison to them. Smoking with tobacco, or sprinkling with
+tobacco-water, are familiar modes of getting rid of the unwelcome
+intruders in gardens. Doubtless this peculiar property of the tobacco
+plant has been developed as a prophylactic against insect enemies: and
+if so, we may perhaps owe the weed itself, as a smokable leaf, to the
+little aphides. Granting this hypothetical connection, the name of
+honey-dew would indeed be a peculiarly appropriate one. I may mention in
+passing that tobacco is quite fatal to almost all insects, a fact which
+I present gratuitously to the blowers of counterblasts, who are at
+liberty to make whatever use they choose of it. Quassia and aloes are
+also well-known preventives of fly or blight in gardens.
+
+The most complete life-history yet given of any member of the aphis
+family is that which M. Jules Lichtenstein has worked out with so much
+care in the case of the phylloxera of the oak-tree. In April, the winter
+eggs of this species, laid in the bark of an oak, each hatch out a
+wingless imperfect female, which M. Lichtenstein calls the foundress.
+After moulting four times, the foundress produces, by parthenogenesis, a
+number of false eggs, which it fastens to the leaf-stalks and under side
+of the foliage. These false eggs hatch out a larval form, wingless, but
+bigger than any of the subsequent generations; and the larvae so produced
+themselves once more give origin to more larvae, which acquire wings, and
+fly away from the oak on which they were born to another of a different
+species in the same neighbourhood. There these larvae of the second crop
+once more lay false eggs, from which the third larval generation is
+developed. This brood is again wingless, and it proceeds at once to bud
+out several generations more, by internal gemmation, as long as the warm
+weather lasts. According to M. Lichtenstein, all previous observations
+have been made only on aphides of this third type; and he maintains that
+every species in the whole family really undergoes an analogous
+alternation of generations. At last, when the cold weather begins to set
+in, a fourth larval form appears, which soon obtains wings, and flies
+back to the same kind of oak on which the foundresses were first hatched
+out, all the intervening generations having passed their lives in
+sucking the juices of the other oak to which the second larval form
+migrated. The fourth type here produce perfect male and female insects,
+which are wingless, and have no sucking apparatus. The females, after
+being impregnated, lay a single egg each, which they hide in the bark,
+where it remains during the winter, till in spring it once more hatches
+out into a foundress, and the whole cycle begins over again. Whether all
+the aphides do or do not pass through corresponding stages is not yet
+quite certain. But Kentish farmers believe that the hop-fly migrates to
+hop-bines from plum-trees in the neighbourhood; and M. Lichtenstein
+considers that such migrations from one plant to another are quite
+normal in the family. We know, indeed, that many great plagues of our
+crops are thus propagated, sometimes among closely related plants, but
+sometimes also among the most widely separated species. For example,
+turnip-fly (which is not an aphis, but a small beetle) always begins its
+ravages (as Miss Ormerod has abundantly shown) upon a plot of charlock,
+and then spreads from patches of that weed to the neighbouring turnips,
+which are slightly diverse members of the same genus. But, on the other
+hand, it has long been well known that rust in wheat is specially
+connected with the presence of the barberry bush; and it has recently
+been proved that the fungus which produces the disease passes its early
+stages on the barberry leaves, and only migrates in later generations to
+the growing wheat. This last case brings even more prominently into
+light than ever the essential resemblance of the aphides to
+plant-parasites.
+
+
+
+
+THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT
+
+
+For many centuries the occult problem how to account for the milk in the
+coco-nut has awakened the profoundest interest alike of ingenuous
+infancy and of maturer scientific age. Though it cannot be truthfully
+affirmed of it, as of the cosmogony or creation of the world, in the
+'Vicar of Wakefield,' that it 'has puzzled the philosophers of all ages'
+(for Sanchoniathon was certainly ignorant of the very existence of that
+delicious juice, and Manetho doubtless went to his grave without ever
+having tasted it fresh from the nut under a tropical verandah), yet it
+may be safely asserted that for the last three hundred years the
+philosopher who has not at some time or other of his life meditated upon
+that abstruse question is unworthy of such an exalted name. The
+cosmogony and the milk in the coco-nut are, however, a great deal closer
+together in thought than Sanchoniathon or Manetho, or the rogue who
+quoted them so glibly, is ever at all likely, in his wildest moments, to
+have imagined.
+
+The coco-nut, in fact, is a subject well deserving of the most
+sympathetic treatment at the gentle hands of grateful humanity. No other
+plant is useful to us in so many diverse and remarkable manners. It has
+been truly said of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he is all
+good, from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail; but even the
+pig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries or luxuries--from
+tooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to lard, from pepsine wine to pork
+pies--does not nearly approach, in the multiplicity and variety of his
+virtues, the all-sufficing and world-supplying coco-nut. A Chinese
+proverb says that there are as many useful properties in the coco-nut
+palm as there are days in the year; and a Polynesian saying tells us
+that the man who plants a coco-nut plants meat and drink, hearth and
+home, vessels and clothing, for himself and his children after him. Like
+the great Mr. Whiteley, the invaluable palm-tree might modestly
+advertise itself as a universal provider. The solid part of the nut
+supplies food almost alone to thousands of people daily, and the milk
+serves them for drink, thus acting as an efficient filter to the water
+absorbed by the roots in the most polluted or malarious regions. If you
+tap the flower stalk you get a sweet juice, which can be boiled down
+into the peculiar sugar called (in the charming dialect of commerce)
+jaggery; or it can be fermented into a very nasty spirit known as
+palm-wine, toddy, or arrack; or it can be mixed with bitter herbs and
+roots to make that delectable compound 'native beer.' If you squeeze the
+dry nut you get coco-nut oil, which is as good as lard for frying when
+fresh, and is 'an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast,' on
+tropical tables. Under the mysterious name of copra (which most of us
+have seen with awe described in the market reports as 'firm' or 'weak,'
+'receding' or 'steady') it forms the main or only export of many Oceanic
+islands, and is largely imported into this realm of England, where the
+thicker portion is called stearine, and used for making sundry candles
+with fanciful names, while the clear oil is employed for burning in
+ordinary lamps. In the process of purification, it yields glycerine; and
+it enters largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps. The
+fibre that surrounds the nut makes up the other mysterious article of
+commerce known as coir, which is twisted into stout ropes, or woven into
+coco-nut matting and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are also
+made of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest fashion, in
+place of real horse-hair in stuffing cushions. The shell, cut in half,
+supplies good cups, and is artistically carved by the Polynesians,
+Japanese, Hindoos, and other benighted heathen, who have not yet learnt
+the true methods of civilised machine-made shoddy manufacture. The
+leaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades, prepared like
+papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts are written; the long
+mid-ribs or branches (strictly speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer
+admirably for rafters, posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath at the base
+is a remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed for strainers,
+wrappers, and native hats; while the trunk, or stem, passes in carpentry
+under the name of porcupine wood, and produces beautiful effects as a
+wonderfully coloured cabinet-makers' material. These are only a few
+selected instances out of the innumerable uses of the coco-nut palm.
+
+Apart even from the manifold merits of the tree that bears it, the milk
+itself has many and great claims to our respect and esteem, as everybody
+who has ever drunk it in its native surroundings will enthusiastically
+admit. In England, to be sure, the white milk in the dry nuts is a very
+poor stuff, sickly, and strong-flavoured, and rather indigestible. But
+in the tropics, coco-nut milk, or, as we oftener call it there, coco-nut
+water, is a very different and vastly superior sort of beverage. At
+eleven o'clock every morning, when you are hot and tired with the day's
+work, your black servant, clad from head to foot in his cool clean white
+linen suit, brings you in a tall soda glass full of a clear, light,
+crystal liquid, temptingly displayed against the yellow background of a
+chased Benares brass-work tray. The lump of ice bobs enticingly up and
+down in the centre of the tumbler, or clinks musically against the edge
+of the glass as he carries it along. You take the cool cup thankfully
+and swallow it down at one long draught; fresh as a May morning, pure as
+an English hillside spring, delicate as--well, as coco-nut water. None
+but itself can be its parallel. It is certainly the most delicious,
+dainty, transparent, crystal drink ever invented. How did it get there,
+and what is it for?
+
+In the early green stage at which coco-nuts are generally picked for
+household use in the tropics the shell hasn't yet solidified into a hard
+stony coat, but still remains quite soft enough to be readily cut
+through with a sharp table knife--just like young walnuts picked for
+pickling. If you cut one across while it's in this unsophisticated
+state, it is easy enough to see the arrangement of the interior, and the
+part borne by the milk in the development and growth of the mature nut.
+The ordinary tropical way of opening coco-nuts for table, indeed, is by
+cutting off the top of the shell and rind in successive slices, at the
+end where the three pores are situated, until you reach the level of the
+water, which fills up the whole interior. The nutty part around the
+inside of the shell is then extremely soft and jelly-like, so that it
+can be readily eaten with a spoon; but as a matter of fact very few
+people ever do eat the flesh at all. After their first few months in the
+tropics, they lose the taste for this comparatively indigestible part,
+and confine themselves entirely (like patients at a German spa) to
+drinking the water. A young coco-nut is thus seen to consist, first of a
+green outer skin, then of a fibrous coat, which afterwards becomes the
+hair, and next of a harder shell which finally gets quite woody; while
+inside all comes the actual seed or unripe nut itself. The office of the
+coco-nut water is the deposition of the nutty part around the side of
+the shell; it is, so to speak, the mother liquid, from which the harder
+eatable portion is afterwards derived. This state is not uncommon in
+embryo seeds. In a very young pea, for example, the inside is quite
+watery, and only the outer skin is at all solid, as we have all observed
+when green peas first come into season. But the special peculiarity of
+the coco-nut consists in the fact that this liquid condition of the
+interior continues even after the nut is ripe, and that is the really
+curious point about the milk in the coco-nut which does actually need
+accounting for.
+
+In order to understand it one ought to examine a coco-nut in the act of
+budding, and to do this it is by no means necessary to visit the West
+Indies or the Pacific Islands; all you need to do is to ask a Covent
+Garden fruit salesman to get you a few 'growers.' On the voyage to
+England, a certain number of precocious coco-nuts, stimulated by the
+congenial warmth and damp of most shipholds, usually begin to sprout
+before their time; and these waste nuts are sold by the dealers at a low
+rate to East-end children and inquiring botanists. An examination of a
+'grower' very soon convinces one what is the use of the milk in the
+coco-nut.
+
+It must be duly borne in mind, to begin with, that the prime end and
+object of the nut is not to be eaten raw by the ingenious monkey, or to
+be converted by lordly man into coco-nut biscuits, or coco-nut pudding,
+but simply and solely to reproduce the coco-nut palm in sufficient
+numbers to future generations. For this purpose the nut has slowly
+acquired by natural selection a number of protective defences against
+its numerous enemies, which serve to guard it admirably in the native
+state from almost all possible animal depredators. First of all, the
+actual nut or seed itself consists of a tiny embryo plant, placed just
+inside the softest of the three pores or pits at the end of the shell,
+and surrounded by a vast quantity of nutritious pulp, destined to feed
+and support it during its earliest unprotected days, if not otherwise
+diverted by man or monkey. But as whatever feeds a young plant will also
+feed an animal, and as many animals betray a felonious desire to
+appropriate to their own wicked ends the food-stuffs laid up by the palm
+for the use of its own seedling, the coco-nut has been compelled to
+inclose this particularly large and rich kernel in a very solid and
+defensive shell. And, once more, since the palm grows at a very great
+height from the ground--I have seen them up to ninety feet in favourable
+circumstances--this shell stands a very good chance of getting broken in
+tumbling to the earth, so that it has been necessary to surround it with
+a mass of soft and yielding fibrous material, which breaks its fall, and
+acts as a buffer to it when it comes in contact with the soil beneath.
+So many protections has the coco-nut gradually devised for itself by the
+continuous survival of the best adapted amid numberless and endless
+spontaneous variations of all its kind in past time.
+
+Now, when the coco-nut has actually reached the ground at last, and
+proceeds to sprout in the spot where chance (perhaps in the bodily shape
+of a disappointed monkey) has chosen to cast it, these numerous
+safeguards and solid envelopes naturally begin to prove decided
+nuisances to the embryo within. It starts under the great disadvantage
+of being hermetically sealed within a solid wooden shell, so that no
+water can possibly get at it to aid it as most other seeds are aided in
+the process of germination. Fancy yourself a seed-pea, anxious to
+sprout, but coated all round with a hard covering of impermeable
+sealing-wax, and you will be in a position faintly to appreciate the
+unfortunate predicament of a grower coco-nut. Natural selection,
+however--that _deus ex machina_ of modern science, which can perform
+such endless wonders, if only you give it time enough to work in and
+variations enough to work upon--natural selection has come to the rescue
+of the unhappy plant by leaving it a little hole at the top of the
+shell, out of which it can push its feathery green head without
+difficulty. Everybody knows that if you look at the sharp end of a
+coco-nut you will see three little brown pits or depressions on its
+surface. Most people also know that two of these are firmly stopped up
+(for a reason to which I shall presently recur), but that the third one
+is only closed by a slight film or very thin shell, which can be easily
+bored through with a pocket knife, so as to let the milk run off before
+cracking the shell. So much we have all learnt during our ardent pursuit
+of natural knowledge on half-holidays in early life. But we probably
+then failed to observe that just opposite this soft hole lies a small
+roundish knob, imbedded in the pulp or eatable portion, which knob is in
+fact the embryo palm or seedling, for whose ultimate benefit the whole
+arrangement (in brown and green) has been invented. That is very much
+the way with man: he notices what concerns his own appetite, and omits
+all the really important parts of the whole subject. _We_ think the use
+of the hole is to let out the milk; but the nut knows that its real
+object is to let out the seedling. The knob grows out at last into the
+young plantlet, and it is by means of the soft hole that it makes its
+escape through the shell to the air and the sunshine which it seeks
+without. This brings us really down at last to the true _raison d'etre_
+for the milk in the coco-nut. As the seed or kernel cannot easily get at
+much water from outside, it has a good supply of water laid up for it
+ready beforehand within its own encircling shell. The mother liquid from
+which the pulp or nutty part has been deposited remains in the centre,
+as the milk, till the tiny embryo begins to sprout. As soon as it does
+so, the little knob which was at first so very small enlarges rapidly
+and absorbs the water, till it grows out into a big spongy cellular
+mass, which at last almost fills up the entire shell. At the same time,
+its other end pushes its way out through the soft hole, and then gives
+birth to a growing bud at the top--the future stem and leaves--and to a
+number of long threads beneath--the future roots. Meanwhile, the spongy
+mass inside begins gradually to absorb all the nutty part, using up its
+oils and starches for the purpose of feeding the young plant above,
+until it is of an age to expand its leaves to the open tropical sunlight
+and shift for itself in the struggle for life. It seems at first sight
+very hard to understand how any tissue so solid as the pulp of coco-nut
+can be thus softened and absorbed without any visible cause; but in the
+subtle chemistry of living vegetation such a transformation is
+comparatively simple and easy to perform. Nature sometimes works much
+greater miracles than this in the same way: for example, what is called
+vegetable ivory, a substance so solid that it can be carved or turned
+only with great difficulty, is really the kernel of another palm-nut,
+allied to the coco-palm, and its very stony particles are all similarly
+absorbed during germination by the dissolving power of the young
+seedling.
+
+Why, however, has the coco-nut three pores at the top instead of one,
+and why are two out of the three so carefully and firmly sealed up? The
+explanation of this strange peculiarity is only to be found in the
+ancestral history of the coco-nut kind. Most nuts, indeed, start in
+their earlier stage as if they meant to produce two or more seeds each;
+but as they ripen, all the seeds except one become abortive. The almond,
+for example, has in the flower two seeds or kernels to each nut; but in
+the ripe state there is generally only one, though occasionally we find
+an almond with two--a philipoena, as we commonly call it--just to
+keep in memory the original arrangement of its earlier ancestors. The
+reason for this is that plants whose fruits have no special protection
+for their seeds are obliged to produce a great many of them at once, in
+order that one seed in a thousand may finally survive the onslaughts of
+their Argus-eyed enemies; but when they learn to protect themselves by
+hard coverings from birds and beasts, they can dispense with some of
+these supernumerary seeds, and put more nutriment into each one of those
+that they still retain. Compare, for example, the innumerable small
+round seedlets of the poppyhead with the solitary large and richly
+stored seed of the walnut, or the tiny black specks of mustard and cress
+with the single compact and well-filled seed of the filbert and the
+acorn. To the very end, however, most nuts begin in the flower as if
+they meant to produce a whole capsuleful of small unstored and
+unprotected seeds, like their original ancestors; it is only at the last
+moment that they recollect themselves, suppress all their ovules except
+one, and store that one with all the best and oiliest food-stuffs at
+their disposal. The nuts, in fact, have learned by long experience that
+it is better to be the only son and heir of a wealthy house, set up in
+life with a good capital to begin upon, than to be one of a poor family
+of thirteen needy and unprovided children.
+
+Now, the coco-nuts are descended from a great tribe--the palms and
+lilies--which have as their main distinguishing peculiarity the
+arrangement of parts in their flowers and fruits by threes each. For
+example, in the most typical flowers of this great group, there are
+three green outer calyx-pieces, three bright-coloured petals, three long
+outer stamens, three short inner stamens, three valves to the capsule,
+and three seeds or three rows of seeds in each fruit. Many palms still
+keep pretty well to this primitive arrangement, but a few of them which
+have specially protected or highly developed fruits or nuts have lost in
+their later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and possess
+only one seed, often a very large one. There is no better and more
+typical nut in the whole world than a coco-nut--that is to say, from our
+present point of view at least, though the fear of that awful person,
+the botanical Smelfungus, compels me to add that this is not quite
+technically true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the
+coco-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delightful
+information, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which he
+is so great a master, that it is really 'a drupaceous fruit with a
+fibrous mesocarp.' Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nice
+hair-splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large will
+still call a nut a nut, and that the coco-nut is the highest known
+development of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and most
+richly stored seed of any known plant; and this seed is surrounded by
+one of the hardest and most unmanageable of any known shells. Hence the
+coco-nut has readily been able to dispense with the three kernels which
+each nut used in its earlier and less developed days to produce. But
+though the palm has thus taken to reducing the number of its seeds in
+each fruit to the lowest possible point consistent with its continued
+existence at all, it still goes on retaining many signs of its ancient
+threefold arrangement. The ancestral and most deeply ingrained habits
+persist in the earlier stages; it is only in the mature form that the
+later acquired habits begin fully to predominate. Even so our own boys
+pass through an essentially savage childhood of ogres and fairies, bows
+and arrows, sugar-plums and barbaric nursery tales, as well as a
+romantic boyhood of mediaeval chivalry and adventure, before they steady
+down into that crowning glory of our race, the solid, sober,
+matter-of-fact, commercial British Philistine. Hence the coco-nut in its
+unstripped state is roughly triangular in form, its angles answering to
+the separate three fruits of simpler palms; and it has three pits or
+weak places in the shell, through which the embryos of the three
+original kernels used to force their way out. But as only one of them is
+now needed, that one alone is left soft; the other two, which would be
+merely a source of weakness to the plant if unprotected, are covered in
+the existing nut by harder shell. Doubtless they serve in part to
+deceive the too inquisitive monkey or other enemy, who probably
+concludes that if one of the pits is hard and impermeable, the other two
+are so likewise.
+
+Though I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted for the milk in the
+coco-nut, and incidentally for some other matters in its economy as
+well, I am loth to leave the young seedling whom I have brought so far
+on his way to the tender mercies of the winds and storms and tropical
+animals, some of whom are extremely fond of his juicy and delicate
+shoots. Indeed, the growing point or bud of most palms is a very
+pleasant succulent vegetable, and one kind--the West Indian mountain
+cabbage--deserves a better and more justly descriptive name, for it is
+really much more like seakale or asparagus. I shall try to follow our
+young seedling on in life, therefore, so as to give, while I am about
+it, a fairly comprehensive and complete biography of a single
+flourishing coco-nut palm.
+
+Beginning, then, with the fall of the nut from the parent-tree, the
+troubles of the future palm confront it at once in the shape of the
+nut-eating crab. This evil-disposed crustacean is common around the
+sea-coast of the eastern tropical islands, which is also the region
+mainly affected by the coco-nut palm; for coco-nuts are essentially
+shore-loving trees, and thrive best in the immediate neighbourhood of
+the sea. Among the fallen nuts, the clumsy-looking thief of a crab (his
+appropriate Latin name is _Birgus latro_) makes great and dreaded havoc.
+To assist him in his unlawful object he has developed a pair of front
+legs, with specially strong and heavy claws, supplemented by a last or
+tail-end pair armed only with very narrow and slender pincers. He
+subsists entirely upon a coco-nut diet. Setting to work upon a big
+fallen nut--with the husk on, coco-nuts measure in the raw state about
+twelve inches the long way--he tears off all the coarse fibre bit by
+bit, and gets down at last to the hard shell. Then he hammers away with
+his heavy claw on the softest eye-hole till he has pounded an opening
+right through it. This done he twists round his body so as to turn his
+back upon the coco-nut he is operating upon (crabs are never famous
+either for good manners or gracefulness) and proceeds awkwardly but
+effectually to extract all the white kernel or pulp through the breach
+with his narrow pair of hind pincers. Like man, too, the robber-crab
+knows the value of the outer husk as well as of the eatable nut itself,
+for he collects the fibre in surprising quantities to line his burrow,
+and lies upon it, the clumsy sybarite, for a luxurious couch. Alas,
+however, for the helplessness of crabs, and the rapacity and cunning of
+all-appropriating man! The spoil-sport Malay digs up the nest for the
+sake of the fibre it contains, which spares him the trouble of picking
+junk on his own account, and then he eats the industrious crab who has
+laid it all up, while he melts down the great lump of fat under the
+robber's capacious tail, and sometimes gets from it as much as a good
+quart of what may be practically considered as limpid coco-nut oil. _Sic
+vos non vobis_ is certainly the melancholy refrain of all natural
+history. The coco-nut palm intends the oil for the nourishment of its
+own seedling; the crab feloniously appropriates it and stores it up
+under his capacious tail for future personal use; the Malay steals it
+again from the thief for his own purposes; and ten to one the Dutch or
+English merchant beguiles it from him with sized calico or poisoned rum,
+and transmits it to Europe, where it serves to lighten our nights and
+assist at our matutinal tub, to point a moral and adorn the present
+tale.
+
+If, however, our coco-nut is lucky enough to escape the robber-crabs,
+the pigs, and the monkeys, as well as to avoid falling into the hands of
+man, and being converted into the copra of commerce, or sold from a
+costermonger's barrow in the chilly streets of ungenial London at a
+penny a slice, it may very probably succeed in germinating after the
+fashion I have already described, and pushing up its head through the
+surrounding foliage to the sunlight above. As a rule, the coco-nut has
+been dropped by its mother tree on the sandy soil of a sea-beach; and
+this is the spot it best loves, and where it grows to the stateliest
+height. Sometimes, however, it falls into the sea itself, and then the
+loose husk buoys it up, so that it floats away bravely till it is cast
+by the waves upon some distant coral reef or desert island. It is this
+power of floating and surviving a long voyage that has dispersed the
+coco-nut so widely among oceanic islands, where so few plants are
+generally to be found. Indeed, on many atolls or isolated reefs (for
+example, on Keeling Island) it is the only tree or shrub that grows in
+any quantity, and on it the pigs, the poultry, the ducks, and the land
+crabs of the place entirely subsist. In any case, wherever it happens to
+strike, the young coco-nut sends up at first a fine rosette of big
+spreading leaves, not raised as afterwards on a tall stem, but springing
+direct from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big and
+graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more beautiful or more
+essentially tropical in appearance than a plantation of young coco-nuts.
+Their long feathery leaves spreading out in great clumps from the buried
+stock, and waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of the
+Indies, are the very embodiment of those deceptive ideal tropics which,
+alas, are to be found in actual reality nowhere on earth save in the
+artificial palm-houses at Kew, and the Casino Gardens at too entrancing
+Monte Carlo.
+
+For the first two or three years the young palms must be well watered,
+and the soil around them opened; after which the tall graceful stem
+begins to rise rapidly into the open air. In this condition it may be
+literally said to make the tropics--those fallacious tropics, I mean, of
+painters and poets, of Enoch Arden and of Locksley Hall. You may observe
+that whenever an artist wants to make a tropical picture, he puts a
+group of coco-nut palms in the foreground, as much as to say, 'You see
+there's no deception; these are the genuine unadulterated tropics.' But
+as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just as well
+think of painting the desert without the camels. At eight or ten years
+old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms of the ordinary palm type,
+degraded likenesses of the lilies and yuccas, greenish and
+inconspicuous, but visited by insects for the sake of their pollen. The
+flower, however, is fertilised by the wind, which carries the pollen
+grains from one bunch of blossoms to another. Then the nuts gradually
+swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even under the
+brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though
+in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that
+precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in
+his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst
+thing about the coco-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the
+fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit
+uninterruptedly for forty years. This is very immoral and wrong of the
+ill-conditioned tree, because it encourages the idyllic Polynesian to
+lie under the palms, all day long, cooling his limbs in the sea
+occasionally, sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles
+of Neaera's hair, and waiting for the nuts to drop down in due time, when
+he ought (according to European notions) to be killing himself with hard
+work under a blazing sky, raising cotton, sugar, indigo, and coffee, for
+the immediate benefit of the white merchant, and the ultimate advantage
+of the British public. It doesn't enforce habits of steady industry and
+perseverance, the good missionaries say; it doesn't induce the native to
+feel that burning desire for Manchester piece-goods and the other
+blessings of civilisation which ought properly to accompany the
+propagation of the missionary in foreign parts. You stick your nut in
+the sand; you sit by a few years and watch it growing; you pick up the
+ripe fruits as they fall from the tree; and you sell them at last for
+illimitable red cloth to the Manchester piece-goods merchant. Nothing
+could be more simple or more satisfactory. And yet it is difficult to
+see the precise moral distinction between the owner of a coco-nut grove
+in the South Sea Islands and the owner of a coal-mine or a big estate in
+commercial England. Each lounges decorously through life after his own
+fashion; only the one lounges in a Russia leather chair at a club in
+Pall Mall, while the other lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a
+rolling surf in Tahiti or the Hawaiian Archipelago.
+
+Curiously enough, at a little distance from the sandy levels or alluvial
+flats of the sea-shore, the sea-loving coco-nut will not bring its nuts
+to perfection. It will grow, indeed, but it will not thrive or fruit in
+due season. On the coast-line of Southern India, immense groves of
+coco-nuts fringe the shore for miles and miles together; and in some
+parts, as in Travancore, they form the chief agricultural staple of the
+whole country. 'The State has hence facetiously been called
+Coconutcore,' says its historian; which charmingly illustrates the true
+Anglo-Indian notion of what constitutes facetiousness, and ought to
+strike the last nail into the coffin of a competitive examination
+system. A good tree in full bearing should produce 120 coco-nuts in a
+season; so that a very small grove is quite sufficient to maintain a
+respectable family in decency and comfort. Ah, what a mistake the
+English climate made when it left off its primitive warmth of the
+tertiary period, and got chilled by the ice and snow of the Glacial
+Epoch down to its present misty and dreary wheat-growing condition! If
+it were not for that, those odious habits of steady industry and
+perseverance might never have been developed in ourselves at all, and we
+might be lazily picking copra off our own coco-palms, to this day, to
+export in return for the piece-goods of some Arctic Manchester situated
+somewhere about the north of Spitzbergen or the New Siberian Islands.
+
+Even as things stand at the present day, however, it is wonderful how
+much use we modern Englishmen now make in our own houses of this far
+Eastern nut, whose very name still bears upon its face the impress of
+its originally savage origin. From morning to night we never leave off
+being indebted to it. We wash with it as old brown Windsor or glycerine
+soap the moment we leave our beds. We walk across our passages on the
+mats made from its fibre. We sweep our rooms with its brushes, and wipe
+our feet on it as we enter our doors. As rope, it ties up our trunks and
+packages; in the hands of the housemaid it scrubs our floors; or else,
+woven into coarse cloth, it acts as a covering for bales and furniture
+sent by rail or steamboat. The confectioner undermines our digestion in
+early life with coco-nut candy; the cook tempts us later on with
+coco-nut cake; and Messrs. Huntley and Palmer cordially invite us to
+complete the ruin with coco-nut biscuits. We anoint our chapped hands
+with one of its preparations after washing; and grease the wheels of our
+carriages with another to make them run smoothly. Finally, we use the
+oil to burn in our reading lamps, and light ourselves at last to bed
+with stearine candles. Altogether, an amateur census of a single small
+English cottage results in the startling discovery that it contains
+twenty-seven distinct articles which owe their origin in one way or
+another to the coco-nut palm. And yet we affect in our black ingratitude
+to despise the question of the milk in the coco-nut.
+
+
+
+
+FOOD AND FEEDING
+
+
+When a man and a bear meet together casually in an American forest, it
+makes a great deal of difference, to the two parties concerned at least,
+whether the bear eats the man or the man eats the bear. We haven't the
+slightest difficulty in deciding afterwards which of the two, in each
+particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten. Here, we say,
+is the grizzly that eat the man; or, here is the man that smoked and
+dined off the hams of the grizzly. Basing our opinion upon such familiar
+and well-known instances, we are apt to take it for granted far too
+readily that between eating and being eaten, between the active and the
+passive voice of the verb _edo_, there exists necessarily a profound and
+impassable native antithesis. To swallow an oyster is, in our own
+personal histories, so very different a thing from being swallowed by a
+shark that we can hardly realise at first the underlying fundamental
+identity of eating with mere coalescence. And yet, at the very outset of
+the art of feeding, when the nascent animal first began to indulge in
+this very essential animal practice, one may fairly say that no
+practical difference as yet existed between the creature that ate and
+the creature that was eaten. After the man and the bear had finished
+their little meal, if one may be frankly metaphorical, it was impossible
+to decide whether the remaining being was the man or the bear, or which
+of the two had swallowed the other. The dinner having been purely
+mutual, the resulting animal represented both the litigants equally;
+just as, in cannibal New Zealand, the chief who ate up his brother chief
+was held naturally to inherit the goods and chattels of the vanquished
+and absorbed rival, whom he had thus literally and physically
+incorporated.
+
+A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant water
+under the field of a microscope, collides accidentally with another
+jelly-speck who happens to be travelling in the opposite direction
+across the same miniature ocean. What thereupon occurs? One jelly-speck
+rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two, there is
+now one; and the united body proceeds to float away quite unconcernedly,
+without waiting to trouble itself for a second with the profound
+metaphysical question, which half of it is the original personality, and
+which half the devoured and digested. In these minute and very simple
+animals there is absolutely no division of labour between part and part;
+every bit of the jelly-like mass is alike head and foot and mouth and
+stomach. The jelly-speck has no permanent limbs, but it keeps putting
+forth vague arms and legs every now and then from one side or the other;
+and with these temporary and ever-dissolving members it crawls along
+merrily through its tiny drop of stagnant water. If two of the legs or
+arms happen to knock up casually against one another, they coalesce at
+once, just like two drops of water on a window-pane, or two strings of
+treacle slowly spreading along the surface of a plate. When the
+jelly-speck meets any edible thing--a bit of dead plant, a wee creature
+like itself, a microscopic egg--it proceeds to fold its own substance
+slimily around it, making, as it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose
+of swallowing it, and a temporary stomach for the purpose of quietly
+digesting and assimilating it afterwards. Thus what at one moment is a
+foot may at the next moment become a mouth, and at the moment after that
+again a rudimentary stomach. The animal has no skin and no body, no
+outside and no inside, no distinction of parts or members, no
+individuality, no identity. Roll it up into one with another of its
+kind, and it couldn't tell you itself a minute afterwards which of the
+two it had really been a minute before. The question of personal
+identity is here considerably mixed.
+
+But as soon as we get to rather larger creatures of the same type, the
+antithesis between the eater and the eaten begins to assume a more
+definite character. The big jelly-bag approaches a good many smaller
+jelly-bags, microscopic plants, and other appropriate food-stuffs, and,
+surrounding them rapidly with its crawling arms, envelopes them in its
+own substance, which closes behind them and gradually digests them.
+Everybody knows, by name at least, that revolutionary and evolutionary
+hero, the amoeba--the terror of theologians, the pet of professors,
+and the insufferable bore of the general reader. Well, this parlous and
+subversive little animal consists of a comparatively large mass of soft
+jelly, pushing forth slender lobes, like threads or fingers, from its
+own substance, and gliding about, by means of these tiny legs, over
+water-plants and other submerged surfaces. But though it can literally
+turn itself inside out, like a glove, it still has some faint beginnings
+of a mouth and stomach, for it generally takes in food and absorbs water
+through a particular part of its surface, where the slimy mass of its
+body is thinnest. Thus the amoeba may be said really to eat and
+drink, though quite devoid of any special organs for eating or drinking.
+
+The particular point to which I wish to draw attention here, however, is
+this: that even the very simplest and most primitive animals do
+discriminate somehow between what is eatable and what isn't. The
+amoeba has no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no tongue, no nerves of taste,
+no special means of discrimination of any kind; and yet, so long as it
+meets only grains of sand or bits of shell, it makes no effort in any
+way to swallow them; but, the moment it comes across a bit of material
+fit for its food, it begins at once to spread its clammy fingers around
+the nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the amoeba's body
+apparently possesses, in a very vague form, the first beginnings of
+those senses which in us are specialised and confined to a single spot.
+And it is because of the light which the amoeba thus incidentally
+casts upon the nature of the specialised senses in higher animals that I
+have ventured once more to drag out of the private life of his native
+pond that already too notorious and obtrusive rhizopod.
+
+With us lordly human beings, at the extreme opposite end in the scale of
+being from the microscopic jelly-specks, the art of feeding and the
+mechanism which provides for it have both reached a very high state of
+advanced perfection. We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the
+one hand, and French cooks and _pate de foie gras_ on the other. But
+while everybody knows practically how things taste to us, and which
+things respectively we like and dislike, comparatively few people ever
+recognise that the sense of taste is not merely intended as a source of
+gratification, but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in
+informing us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. Paradoxical as it
+may sound at first to most people, nice things are, in the main, things
+that are good for us, and nasty things are poisonous or otherwise
+injurious. That we often practically find the exact contrary the case
+(alas!) is due, not to the provisions of nature, but to the artificial
+surroundings in which we live, and to the cunning way in which we
+flavour up unwholesome food, so as to deceive and cajole the natural
+palate. Yet, after all, it is a pleasant gospel that what we like is
+really good for us, and, when we have made some small allowances for
+artificial conditions, it is in the main a true one also.
+
+The sense of taste, which in the lowest animals is diffused equally over
+the whole frame, is in ourselves and other higher creatures concentrated
+in a special part of the body, namely the mouth, where the food about to
+be swallowed is chewed and otherwise prepared beforehand for the work of
+digestion. Now it is, of course, quite clear that some sort of
+supervision must be exercised by the body over the kind of food that is
+going to be put into it. Common experience teaches us that prussic acid
+and pure opium are undesirable food-stuffs in large quantities; that raw
+spirits, petroleum, and red lead should be sparingly partaken of by the
+judicious feeder; and that even green fruit, the bitter end of cucumber,
+and the berries of deadly nightshade are unsatisfactory articles of diet
+when continuously persisted in. If, at the very outset of our digestive
+apparatus, we hadn't a sort of automatic premonitory adviser upon the
+kinds of food we ought or ought not to indulge in, we should naturally
+commit considerable imprudences in the way of eating and drinking--even
+more than we do at present. Natural selection has therefore provided us
+with a fairly efficient guide in this respect in the sense of taste,
+which is placed at the very threshold, as it were, of our digestive
+mechanism. It is the duty of taste to warn us against uneatable things,
+and to recommend to our favourable attention eatable and wholesome ones;
+and, on the whole, in spite of small occasional remissness, it performs
+this duty with creditable success.
+
+Taste, however, is not equally distributed over the whole surface of the
+tongue alike. There are three distinct regions or tracts, each of which
+has to perform its own special office and function. The tip of the
+tongue is concerned mainly with pungent and acrid tastes; the middle
+portion is sensitive chiefly to sweets and bitters; while the back or
+lower portion confines itself almost entirely to the flavours of roast
+meats, butter, oils, and other rich or fatty substances. There are very
+good reasons for this subdivision of faculties in the tongue, the object
+being, as it were, to make each piece of food undergo three separate
+examinations (like 'smalls,' 'mods,' and 'greats' at Oxford), which must
+be successively passed before it is admitted into full participation in
+the human economy. The first examination, as we shall shortly see, gets
+rid at once of substances which would be actively and immediately
+destructive to the very tissues of the mouth and body; the second
+discriminates between poisonous and chemically harmless food-stuffs; and
+the third merely decides the minor question whether the particular food
+is likely to prove then and there wholesome or indigestible to the
+particular person. The sense of taste proceeds, in fact, upon the
+principle of gradual selection and elimination; it refuses first what is
+positively destructive, next what is more remotely deleterious, and
+finally what is only undesirable or over-luscious.
+
+When we want to assure ourselves, by means of taste, about any unknown
+object--say a lump of some white stuff, which may be crystal, or glass,
+or alum, or borax, or quartz, or rock-salt--we put the tip of the tongue
+against it gingerly. If it begins to burn us, we draw it away more or
+less rapidly with an accompaniment in language strictly dependent upon
+our personal habits and manners. The test we thus occasionally apply,
+even in the civilised adult state, to unknown bodies is one that is
+being applied every day and all day long by children and savages.
+Unsophisticated humanity is constantly putting everything it sees up to
+its mouth in a frank spirit of experimental inquiry as to its gustatory
+properties. In civilised life we find everything ready labelled and
+assorted for us; we comparatively seldom require to roll the contents of
+a suspicious bottle (in very small quantities) doubtfully upon the
+tongue in order to discover whether it is pale sherry or Chili vinegar,
+Dublin stout or mushroom ketchup. But in the savage state, from which,
+geologically and biologically speaking, we have only just emerged,
+bottles and labels do not exist. Primitive man, therefore, in his sweet
+simplicity, has only two modes open before him for deciding whether the
+things he finds are or are not strictly edible. The first thing he does
+is to sniff at them; and smell, being, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has well
+put it, an anticipatory taste, generally gives him some idea of what the
+thing is likely to prove. The second thing he does is to pop it into his
+mouth, and proceed practically to examine its further characteristics.
+
+Strictly speaking, with the tip of the tongue one can't really taste at
+all. If you put a small drop of honey or of oil of bitter almonds on
+that part of the mouth, you will find (no doubt to your great surprise)
+that it produces no effect of any sort; you only taste it when it begins
+slowly to diffuse itself, and reaches the true tasting region in the
+middle distance. But if you put a little cayenne or mustard on the same
+part, you will find that it bites you immediately--the experiment should
+be tried sparingly--while if you put it lower down in the mouth you will
+swallow it almost without noticing the pungency of the stimulant. The
+reason is, that the tip of the tongue is supplied only with nerves which
+are really nerves of touch, not nerves of taste proper; they belong to a
+totally different main branch, and they go to a different centre in the
+brain, together with the very similar threads which supply the nerves
+of smell for mustard and pepper. That is why the smell and taste of
+these pungent substances are so much alike, as everybody must have
+noticed, a good sniff at a mustard-pot producing almost the same
+irritating effects as an incautious mouthful. As a rule we don't
+accurately distinguish, it is true, between these different regions of
+taste in the mouth in ordinary life; but that is because we usually roll
+our food about instinctively, without paying much attention to the
+particular part affected by it. Indeed, when one is trying deliberate
+experiments in the subject, in order to test the varying sensitiveness
+of the different parts to different substances, it is necessary to keep
+the tongue quite dry, in order to isolate the thing you are
+experimenting with, and prevent its spreading to all parts of the mouth
+together. In actual practice this result is obtained in a rather
+ludicrous manner--by blowing upon the tongue, between each experiment,
+with a pair of bellows. To such undignified expedients does the pursuit
+of science lead the ardent modern psychologist. Those domestic rivals of
+Dr. Forbes Winslow, the servants, who behold the enthusiastic
+investigator alternately drying his tongue in this ridiculous fashion,
+as if he were a blacksmith's fire, and then squeezing out a single drop
+of essence of pepper, vinegar, or beef-tea from a glass syringe upon the
+dry surface, not unnaturally arrive at the conclusion that master has
+gone stark mad, and that, in their private opinion, it's the microscope
+and the skeleton as has done it.
+
+Above all things, we don't want to be flayed alive. So the kinds of
+tastes discriminated by the tip of the tongue are the pungent, like
+pepper, cayenne and mustard; the astringent, like borax and alum; the
+alkaline, like soda and potash; the acid, like vinegar and green fruit;
+and the saline, like salt and ammonia. Almost all the bodies likely to
+give rise to such tastes (or, more correctly, sensations of touch in
+the tongue) are obviously unwholesome and destructive in their
+character, at least when taken in large quantities. Nobody wishes to
+drink nitric acid by the quart. The first business of this part of the
+tongue is, therefore, to warn us emphatically against caustic substances
+and corrosive acids, against vitriol and kerosene, spirits of wine and
+ether, capsicums and burning leaves or roots, such as those of the
+common English lords-and-ladies. Things of this sort are immediately
+destructive to the very tissues of the tongue and palate; if taken
+incautiously in too large doses, they burn the skin off the roof of the
+mouth; and when swallowed they play havoc, of course, with our internal
+arrangements. It is highly advisable, therefore, to have an immediate
+warning of these extremely dangerous substances, at the very outset of
+our feeding apparatus.
+
+This kind of taste hardly differs from touch or burning. The sensibility
+of the tip of the tongue is only a very slight modification of the
+sensibility possessed by the skin generally, and especially by the inner
+folds over all delicate parts of the body. We all know that common
+caustic burns us wherever it touches; and it burns the tongue only in a
+somewhat more marked manner. Nitric or sulphuric acid attacks the
+fingers each after its own kind. A mustard plaster makes us tingle
+almost immediately; and the action of mustard on the tongue hardly
+differs, except in being more instantaneous and more discriminative.
+Cantharides work in just the same way. If you cut a red pepper in two
+and rub it on your neck, it will sting just as it does when put into
+soup (this experiment, however, is best tried upon one's younger
+brother; if made personally, it hardly repays the trouble and
+annoyance). Even vinegar and other acids, rubbed into the skin, are
+followed by a slight tingling; while the effect of brandy, applied,
+say, to the arms, is gently stimulating and pleasurable, somewhat in the
+same way as when normally swallowed in conjunction with the habitual
+seltzer. In short, most things which give rise to distinct tastes when
+applied to the tip of the tongue give rise to fainter sensations when
+applied to the skin generally. And one hardly needs to be reminded that
+pepper or vinegar placed (accidentally as a rule) on the inner surface
+of the eyelids produces a very distinct and unpleasant smart.
+
+The fact is, the liability to be chemically affected by pungent or acid
+bodies is common to every part of the skin; but it is least felt where
+the tough outer skin is thickest, and most felt where that skin is
+thinnest, and the nerves are most plentifully distributed near the
+surface. A mustard plaster would probably fail to draw at all on one's
+heel or the palm of one's hand; while it is decidedly painful on one's
+neck or chest; and a mere speck of mustard inside the eyelid gives one
+positive torture for hours together. Now, the tip of the tongue is just
+a part of one's body specially set aside for this very object, provided
+with an extremely thin skin, and supplied with an immense number of
+nerves, on purpose so as to be easily affected by all such pungent,
+alkaline, or spirituous substances. Sir Wilfrid Lawson would probably
+conclude that it was deliberately designed by Providence to warn us
+against a wicked indulgence in the brandy and seltzer aforesaid.
+
+At first sight it might seem as though there were hardly enough of such
+pungent and fiery things in existence to make it worth while for us to
+be provided with a special mechanism for guarding against them. That is
+true enough, no doubt, as regards our modern civilised life; though,
+even now, it is perhaps just as well that our children should have an
+internal monitor (other than conscience) to dissuade them immediately
+from indiscriminate indulgence in photographic chemicals, the contents
+of stray medicine bottles, and the best dried West India chilies. But in
+an earlier period of progress, and especially in tropical countries
+(where the Darwinians have now decided the human race made its first
+_debut_ upon this or any other stage), things were very different
+indeed. Pungent and poisonous plants and fruits abounded on every side.
+We have all of us in our youth been taken in by some too cruelly waggish
+companion, who insisted upon making us eat the bright, glossy leaves of
+the common English arum, which without look pretty and juicy enough, but
+within are full of the concentrated essence of pungency and profanity.
+Well, there are hundreds of such plants, even in cold climates, to tempt
+the eyes and poison the veins of unsuspecting cattle or childish
+humanity. There is buttercup, so horribly acrid that cows carefully
+avoid it in their closest cropped pastures; and yet your cow is not
+usually a too dainty animal. There is aconite, the deadly poison with
+which Dr. Lamson removed his troublesome relatives. There is baneberry,
+whose very name sufficiently describes its dangerous nature. There are
+horse-radish, and stinging rocket, and biting wall-pepper, and still
+smarter water-pepper, and worm-wood, and nightshade, and spurge, and
+hemlock, and half a dozen other equally unpleasant weeds. All of these
+have acquired their pungent and poisonous properties, just as nettles
+have acquired their sting, and thistles their thorns, in order to
+prevent animals from browsing upon them and destroying them. And the
+animals in turn have acquired a very delicate sense of pungency on
+purpose to warn them beforehand of the existence of such dangerous and
+undesirable qualities in the plants which they might otherwise be
+tempted incautiously to swallow.
+
+In tropical woods, where our 'hairy quadrumanous ancestor' (Darwinian
+for the primaeval monkey, from whom we are presumably descended) used
+playfully to disport himself, as yet unconscious of his glorious destiny
+as the remote progenitor of Shakespeare, Milton, and the late Mr.
+Peace--in tropical woods, such acrid or pungent fruits and plants are
+particularly common, and correspondingly annoying. The fact is, our
+primitive forefather and all the other monkeys are, or were, confirmed
+fruit-eaters. But to guard against their depredations a vast number of
+tropical fruits and nuts have acquired disagreeable or fiery rinds and
+shells, which suffice to deter the bold aggressor. It may not be nice to
+get your tongue burnt with a root or fruit, but it is at least a great
+deal better than getting poisoned; and, roughly speaking, pungency in
+external nature exactly answers to the rough gaudy labels which some
+chemists paste on bottles containing poisons. It means to say, 'This
+fruit or leaf, if you eat it in any quantities, will kill you.' That is
+the true explanation of capsicums, pimento, colocynth, croton oil, the
+upas tree, and the vast majority of bitter, acrid, or fiery fruits and
+leaves. If we had to pick up our own livelihood, as our naked ancestors
+had to do, from roots, seeds, and berries, we should far more readily
+appreciate this simple truth. We should know that a great many more
+plants than we now suspect are bitter or pungent, and therefore
+poisonous. Even in England we are familiar enough with such defences as
+those possessed by the outer rind of the walnut; but the tropical
+cashew-nut has a rind so intensely acrid that it blisters the lips and
+fingers instantaneously, in the same way as cantharides would do. I
+believe that on the whole, taking nature throughout, more fruits and
+nuts are poisonous, or intensely bitter, or very fiery, than are sweet,
+luscious, and edible.
+
+'But,' says that fidgety person, the hypothetical objector (whom one
+always sets up for the express purpose of promptly knocking him down
+again), 'if it be the business of the fore part of the tongue to warn us
+against pungent and acrid substances, how comes it that we purposely use
+such things as mustard, pepper, curry-powder, and vinegar?' Well, in
+themselves all these things are, strictly speaking, bad for us; but in
+small quantities they act as agreeable stimulants; and we take care in
+preparing most of them to get rid of the most objectionable properties.
+Moreover, we use them, not as foods, but merely as condiments. One drop
+of oil of capsicums is enough to kill a man, if taken undiluted; but in
+actual practice we buy it in such a very diluted form that comparatively
+little harm arises from using it. Still, very young children dislike all
+these violent stimulants, even in small quantities; they won't touch
+mustard, pepper, or vinegar, and they recoil at once from wine or
+spirits. It is only by slow degrees that we learn these unnatural
+tastes, as our nerves get blunted and our palates jaded; and we all know
+that the old Indian who can eat nothing but dry curries, devilled
+biscuits, anchovy paste, pepper-pot, mulligatawny soup, Worcestershire
+sauce, preserved ginger, hot pickles, fiery sherry, and neat cognac, is
+also a person with no digestion, a fragmentary liver, and very little
+chance of getting himself accepted by any safe and solvent insurance
+office. Throughout, the warning in itself is a useful one; it is we who
+foolishly and persistently disregard it. Alcohol, for example, tells us
+at once that it is bad for us; yet we manage so to dress it up with
+flavouring matters and dilute it with water that we overlook the fiery
+character of the spirit itself. But that alcohol is in itself a bad
+thing (when freely indulged in) has been so abundantly demonstrated in
+the history of mankind that it hardly needs any further proof.
+
+The middle region of the tongue is the part with which we experience
+sensations of taste proper--that is to say, of sweetness and bitterness.
+In a healthy, natural state all sweet things are pleasant to us, and all
+bitters (even if combined with sherry) unpleasant. The reason for this
+is easy enough to understand. It carries us back at once into those
+primaeval tropical forests, where our 'hairy ancestor' used to diet
+himself upon the fruits of the earth in due season. Now, almost all
+edible fruits, roots, and tubers contain sugar; and therefore the
+presence of sugar is, in the wild condition, as good a rough test of
+whether anything is good to eat as one could easily find. In fact, the
+argument cuts both ways: edible fruits are sweet because they are
+intended for man and other animals to eat; and man and other animals
+have a tongue pleasurably affected by sugar because sugary things in
+nature are for them in the highest degree edible. Our early progenitors
+formed their taste upon oranges, mangoes, bananas, and grapes; upon
+sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, dates, and wild honey. There is scarcely
+anything fitted for human food in the vegetable world (and our earliest
+ancestors were most undoubted vegetarians) which does not contain sugar
+in considerable quantities. In temperate climates (where man is but a
+recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to regarding wheaten bread
+as the staff of life; but in our native tropics enormous populations
+still live almost exclusively upon plantains, bananas, bread-fruit,
+yams, sweet potatoes, dates, cocoanuts, melons, cassava, pine-apples,
+and figs. Our nerves have been adapted to the circumstances of our early
+life as a race in tropical forests; and we still retain a marked liking
+for sweets of every sort. Not content with our strawberries,
+raspberries, gooseberries, currants, apples, pears, cherries, plums and
+other northern fruits, we ransack the world for dates, figs, raisins,
+and oranges. Indeed, in spite of our acquired meat-eating propensities,
+it may be fairly said that fruits and seeds (including wheat, rice,
+peas, beans, and other grains and pulse) still form by far the most
+important element in the food-stuffs of human populations generally.
+
+But besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to producing
+artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realised the alarming condition
+of cookery in the benighted generations before the invention of sugar?
+It is really almost too appalling to think about. So many things that we
+now look upon as all but necessaries--cakes, puddings, made dishes,
+confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies, cooked fruits, tarts,
+and so forth--were then practically quite impossible. Fancy attempting
+nowadays to live a single day without sugar; no tea, no coffee, no jam,
+no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one goes to bed; the
+bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that was really the abject
+condition of all the civilised world up to the middle of the middle
+ages. Horace's punch was sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil
+never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went from
+his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the flavour of peppermint
+bull's eyes. How the children managed to spend their Saturday _as_, or
+their weekly _obolus_, is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had
+honey; but honey is rare, dear, and scanty; it can never have filled one
+quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affections. Try for a
+moment to realise drinking honey with one's whisky-and-water, or doing
+the year's preserving with a pot of best Narbonne, and you get at once a
+common measure of the difference between the two as practical
+sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beet-root in abundance,
+while sugar-maples and palm-trees of various sorts afford a considerable
+supply to remoter countries. But the childhood of the little Greeks and
+Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a single ray of joy from
+chocolate creams or Everton toffee.
+
+The consequence of this excessive production of sweets in modern times
+is, of course, that we have begun to distrust the indications afforded
+us by the sense of taste in this particular as to the wholesomeness of
+various objects. We can mix sugar with anything we like, whether it had
+sugar in it to begin with or otherwise; and by sweetening and flavouring
+we can give a false palatableness to even the worst and most
+indigestible rubbish, such as plaster-of-Paris, largely sold under the
+name of sugared almonds to the ingenuous youth of two hemispheres. But
+in untouched nature the test rarely or never fails. As long as fruits
+are unripe and unfit for human food, they are green and sour; as soon as
+they ripen they become soft and sweet, and usually acquire some bright
+colour as a sort of advertisement of their edibility. In the main, bar
+the accidents of civilisation, whatever is sweet is good to eat--nay
+more, is meant to be eaten; it is only our own perverse folly that makes
+us sometimes think all nice things bad for us, and all wholesome things
+nasty. In a state of nature, the exact opposite is really the case. One
+may observe, too, that children, who are literally young savages in more
+senses than one, stand nearer to the primitive feeling in this respect
+than grown-up people. They unaffectedly like sweets; adults, who have
+grown more accustomed to the artificial meat diet, don't, as a rule,
+care much for puddings, cakes, and made dishes. (May I venture
+parenthetically to add, any appearance to the contrary notwithstanding,
+that I am not a vegetarian, and that I am far from desiring to bring
+down upon my devoted head the imprecation pronounced against the rash
+person who would rob a poor man of his beer. It is quite possible to
+believe that vegetarianism was the starting point of the race, without
+wishing to consider it also as the goal; just as it is quite possible to
+regard clothes as purely artificial products of civilisation, without
+desiring personally to return to the charming simplicity of the Garden
+of Eden.)
+
+Bitter things in nature at large, on the contrary, are almost invariably
+poisonous. Strychnia, for example, is intensely bitter, and it is well
+known that life cannot be supported on strychnia alone for more than a
+few hours. Again, colocynth and aloes are far from being wholesome food
+stuffs, for a continuance; and the bitter end of cucumber does not
+conduce to the highest standard of good living. The bitter matter in
+decaying apples is highly injurious when swallowed, which it isn't
+likely to be by anybody who ever tastes it. Wormwood and walnut-shells
+contain other bitter and poisonous principles; absinthe, which is made
+from one of them, is a favourite slow poison with the fashionable young
+men of Paris, who wish to escape prematurely from 'Le monde ou l'on
+s'ennuie.' But prussic acid is the commonest component in all natural
+bitters, being found in bitter almonds, apple pips, the kernels of
+mangosteens, and many other seeds and fruits. Indeed, one may say
+roughly that the object of nature generally is to prevent the actual
+seeds of edible fruits from being eaten and digested; and for this
+purpose, while she stores the pulp with sweet juices, she encloses the
+seed itself in hard stony coverings, and makes it nasty with bitter
+essences. Eat an orange-pip, and you will promptly observe how effectual
+is this arrangement. As a rule, the outer rind of nuts is bitter, and
+the inner kernel of edible fruits. The tongue thus warns us immediately
+against bitter things, as being poisonous, and prevents us automatically
+from swallowing them.
+
+'But how is it,' asks our objector again, 'that so many poisons are
+tasteless, or even, like sugar of lead, pleasant to the palate?' The
+answer is (you see, we knock him down again, as usual) because these
+poisons are themselves for the most part artificial products; they do
+not occur in a state of nature, at least in man's ordinary surroundings.
+Almost every poisonous thing that we are really liable to meet with in
+the wild state we are warned against at once by the sense of taste; but
+of course it would be absurd to suppose that natural selection could
+have produced a mode of warning us against poisons which have never
+before occurred in human experience. One might just as well expect that
+it should have rendered us dynamite-proof, or have given us a skin like
+the hide of a rhinoceros to protect us against the future contingency of
+the invention of rifles.
+
+Sweets and bitters are really almost the only tastes proper, almost the
+only ones discriminated by this central and truly gustatory region of
+the tongue and palate. Most so-called flavourings will be found on
+strict examination to be nothing more than mixtures with these of
+certain smells, or else of pungent, salty, or alkaline matters,
+distinguished as such by the tip of the tongue. For instance,
+paradoxical as it sounds to say so, cinnamon has really no taste at all,
+but only a smell. Nobody will ever believe this on first hearing, but
+nothing on earth is easier than to put it to the test. Take a small
+piece of cinnamon, hold your nose tightly, rather high up, between the
+thumb and finger, and begin chewing it. You will find that it is
+absolutely tasteless; you are merely chewing a perfectly insipid bit of
+bark. Then let go your nose, and you will find immediately that it
+'tastes' strongly, though in reality it is only the perfume from it that
+you now permit to rise into the smelling-chamber in the nose. So, again,
+cloves have only a pungent taste and a peculiar smell, and the same is
+the case more or less with almost all distinctive flavourings. When you
+come to find of what they are made up, they consist generally of sweets
+or bitters, intermixed with certain ethereal perfumes, or with pungent
+or acid tastes, or with both or several such together. In this way, a
+comparatively small number of original elements, variously combined,
+suffice to make up the whole enormous mass of recognisably different
+tastes and flavours.
+
+The third and lowest part of the tongue and throat is the seat of those
+peculiar tastes to which Professor Bain, the great authority upon this
+important philosophical subject, has given the names of relishes and
+disgusts. It is here, chiefly, that we taste animal food, fats, butters,
+oils, and the richer class of vegetables and made dishes. If we like
+them, we experience a sensation which may be called a relish, and which
+induces one to keep rolling the morsel farther down the throat, till it
+passes at last beyond the region of our voluntary control. If we don't
+like them, we get the sensation which may be called a disgust, and which
+is very different from the mere unpleasantness of excessively pungent or
+bitter things. It is far less of an intellectual and far more of a
+physical and emotional feeling. We say, and say rightly, of such things
+that we find it hard to swallow them; a something within us (of a very
+tangible nature) seems to rise up bodily and protest against them. As a
+very good example of this experience, take one's first attempt to
+swallow cod-liver oil. Other things may be unpleasant or unpalatable,
+but things of this class are in the strictest sense nasty and
+disgusting.
+
+The fact is, the lower part of the tongue is supplied with nerves in
+close sympathy with the digestion. If the food which has been passed by
+the two previous examiners is found here to be simple and digestible, it
+is permitted to go on unchallenged; if it is found to be too rich, too
+bilious, or too indigestible, a protest is promptly entered against it,
+and if we are wise we will immediately desist from eating any more of
+it. It is here that the impartial tribunal of nature pronounces
+definitely against roast goose, mince pies, _pate de foie gras_, sally
+lunn, muffins and crumpets, and creamy puddings. It is here, too, that
+the slightest taint in meat, milk, or butter is immediately detected;
+that rancid pastry from the pastrycook's is ruthlessly exposed; and that
+the wiles of the fishmonger are set at naught by the judicious palate.
+It is the special duty, in fact, of this last examiner to discover, not
+whether food is positively destructive, not whether it is poisonous or
+deleterious in nature, but merely whether it is then and there
+digestible or undesirable.
+
+As our state of health varies greatly from time to time, however, so do
+the warnings of this last sympathetic adviser change and flicker. Sweet
+things are always sweet, and bitter things always bitter; vinegar is
+always sour, and ginger always hot in the mouth, too, whatever our state
+of health or feeling. But our taste for roast loin of mutton, high game,
+salmon cutlets, and Gorgonzola cheese varies immensely from time to
+time, with the passing condition of our health and digestion. In
+illness, and especially in sea-sickness, one gets the distaste carried
+to the extreme: you may eat grapes or suck an orange in the chops of the
+Channel, but you do not feel warmly attached to the steward who offers
+you a basin of greasy ox-tail, or consoles you with promises of ham
+sandwiches in half a minute. Under those two painful conditions it is
+the very light, fresh, and stimulating things that one can most easily
+swallow--champagne, soda-water, strawberries, peaches; not lobster
+salad, sardines on toast, green Chartreuse, or hot brandy-and-water. On
+the other hand, in robust health, and when hungry with exercise, you can
+eat fat pork with relish on a Scotch hillside, or dine off fresh salmon
+three days running without inconvenience. Even a Spanish stew, with
+plenty of garlic in it, and floating in olive oil, tastes positively
+delicious after a day's mountaineering in the Pyrenees.
+
+The healthy popular belief, still surviving in spite of cookery, that
+our likes and dislikes are the best guide to what is good for us, finds
+its justification in this fact, that whatever is relished will prove on
+the average wholesome, and whatever rouses disgust will prove on the
+whole indigestible. Nothing can be more wrong, for example, than to make
+children eat fat when they don't want it. A healthy child likes fat, and
+eats as much of it as he can get. If a child shows signs of disgust at
+fat, that proves that it is of a bilious temperament, and it ought never
+to be forced into eating it against its will. Most of us are bilious in
+after-life just because we were compelled to eat rich food in childhood,
+which we felt instinctively was unsuitable for us. We might still be
+indulging with impunity in thick turtle, canvas-back ducks, devilled
+whitebait, meringues, and Nesselrode puddings, if we hadn't been so
+persistently overdosed in our earlier years with things that we didn't
+want and knew were indigestible.
+
+Of course, in our existing modern cookery, very few simple and
+uncompounded tastes are still left to us; everything is so mixed up
+together that only by an effort of deliberate experiment can one
+discover what are the special effects of special tastes upon the tongue
+and palate. Salt is mixed with almost everything we eat--_sal sapit
+omnia_--and pepper or cayenne is nearly equally common. Butter is put
+into the peas, which have been previously adulterated by being boiled
+with mint; and cucumber is unknown except in conjunction with oil and
+vinegar. This makes it comparatively difficult for us to realise the
+distinctness of the elements which go to make up most tastes as we
+actually experience them. Moreover, a great many eatable objects have
+hardly any taste of their own, properly speaking, but only a feeling of
+softness, or hardness, or glutinousness in the mouth, mainly observed in
+the act of chewing them. For example, plain boiled rice is almost wholly
+insipid; but even in its plainest form salt has usually been boiled with
+it, and in practice we generally eat it with sugar, preserves, curry, or
+some other strongly flavoured condiment. Again, plain boiled tapioca and
+sago (in water) are as nearly tasteless as anything can be; they merely
+yield a feeling of gumminess; but milk, in which they are oftenest
+cooked, gives them a relish (in the sense here restricted), and sugar,
+eggs, cinnamon, or nutmeg are usually added by way of flavouring. Even
+turbot has hardly any taste proper, except in the glutinous skin, which
+has a faint relish; the epicure values it rather because of its
+softness, its delicacy, and its light flesh. Gelatine by itself is
+merely very swallowable; we must mix sugar, wine, lemon-juice, and other
+flavourings in order to make it into good jelly. Salt, spices, essences,
+vanilla, vinegar, pickles, capers, ketchups, sauces, chutneys,
+lime-juice, curry, and all the rest, are just our civilised expedients
+for adding the pleasure of pungency and acidity to naturally insipid
+foods, by stimulating the nerves of touch in the tongue, just as sugar
+is our tribute to the pure gustatory sense, and oil, butter, bacon,
+lard, and the various fats used in frying to the sense of relish which
+forms the last element in our compound taste. A boiled sole is all very
+well when one is just convalescent, but in robust health we demand the
+delights of egg and bread-crumb, which are after all only the vehicle
+for the appetising grease. Plain boiled macaroni may pass muster in the
+unsophisticated nursery, but in the pampered dining-room it requires the
+aid of toasted parmesan. Good modern cookery is the practical result of
+centuries of experience in this direction; the final flower of ages of
+evolution, devoted to the equalisation of flavours in all human food.
+Think of the generations of fruitless experiment that must have passed
+before mankind discovered that mint sauce (itself a cunning compound of
+vinegar and sugar) ought to be eaten with leg of lamb, that roast goose
+required a corrective in the shape of apple, and that while a
+pre-established harmony existed between salmon and lobster, oysters were
+ordained beforehand by nature as the proper accompaniment of boiled cod.
+Whenever I reflect upon such things, I become at once a good Positivist,
+and offer up praise in my own private chapel to the Spirit of Humanity
+which has slowly perfected these profound rules of good living.
+
+
+
+
+DE BANANA
+
+
+The title which heads this paper is intended to be Latin, and is
+modelled on the precedent of the De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Corona,
+and other time-honoured plagues of our innocent boyhood. It is meant to
+give dignity and authority to the subject with which it deals, as well
+as to rouse curiosity in the ingenuous breast of the candid reader, who
+may perhaps mistake it, at first sight, for negro-English, or for the
+name of a distinguished Norman family. In anticipation of the possible
+objection that the word 'Banana' is not strictly classical, I would
+humbly urge the precept and example of my old friend Horace--enemy I
+once thought him--who expresses his approbation of those happy
+innovations whereby Latium was gradually enriched with a copious
+vocabulary. I maintain that if Banana, bananae, &c., is not already a
+Latin noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and it
+shall be in future. Linnaeus indeed thought otherwise. He too assigned
+the plant and fruit to the first declension, but handed it over to none
+other than our earliest acquaintance in the Latin language, Musa. He
+called the banana _Musa sapientum_. What connection he could possibly
+conceive between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the aegis-bearing
+Zeus, or why he should consider it a proof of wisdom to eat a
+particularly indigestible and nightmare-begetting food-stuff, passes my
+humble comprehension. The muses, so far as I have personally noticed
+their habits, always greatly prefer the grape to the banana, and wise
+men shun the one at least as sedulously as they avoid the other.
+
+Let it not for a moment be supposed, however, that I wish to treat the
+useful and ornamental banana with intentional disrespect. On the
+contrary, I cherish for it--at a distance--feelings of the highest
+esteem and admiration. We are so parochial in our views, taking us as a
+species, that I dare say very few English people really know how
+immensely useful a plant is the common banana. To most of us it
+envisages itself merely as a curious tropical fruit, largely imported at
+Covent Garden, and a capital thing to stick on one of the tall
+dessert-dishes when you give a dinner-party, because it looks
+delightfully foreign, and just serves to balance the pine-apple at the
+opposite end of the hospitable mahogany. Perhaps such innocent readers
+will be surprised to learn that bananas and plantains supply the
+principal food-stuff of a far larger fraction of the human race than
+that which is supported by wheaten bread. They form the veritable staff
+of life to the inhabitants of both eastern and western tropics. What the
+potato is to the degenerate descendant of Celtic kings; what the oat is
+to the kilted Highlandman; what rice is to the Bengalee, and Indian corn
+to the American negro, that is the muse of sages (I translate literally
+from the immortal Swede) to African savages and Brazilian slaves.
+Humboldt calculated that an acre of bananas would supply a greater
+quantity of solid food to hungry humanity than could possibly be
+extracted from the same extent of cultivated ground by any other known
+plant. So you see the question is no small one; to sing the praise of
+this Linnaean muse is a task well worthy of the Pierian muses.
+
+Do you know the outer look and aspect of the banana plant? If not, then
+you have never voyaged to those delusive tropics. Tropical vegetation,
+as ordinarily understood by poets and painters, consists entirely of the
+coco-nut palm and the banana bush. Do you wish to paint a beautiful
+picture of a rich ambrosial tropical island, _a la_ Tennyson--a summer
+isle of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea?--then you introduce a
+group of coco-nuts, whispering in odorous heights of even, in the very
+foreground of your pretty sketch, just to let your public understand at
+a glance that these are the delicious poetical tropics. Do you desire to
+create an ideal paradise, _a la_ Bernardin de St. Pierre, where idyllic
+Virginies die of pure modesty rather than appear before the eyes of
+their beloved but unwedded Pauls in a lace-bedraped _peignoir_?--then
+you strike the keynote by sticking in the middle distance a hut or
+cottage, overshadowed by the broad and graceful foliage of the
+picturesque banana. ('Hut' is a poor and chilly word for these glowing
+descriptions, far inferior to the pretty and high-sounding original
+_chaumiere_.) That is how we do the tropics when we want to work upon
+the emotions of the reader. But it is all a delicate theatrical
+illusion; a trick of art meant to deceive and impose upon the unwary who
+have never been there, and would like to think it all genuine. In
+reality, nine times out of ten, you might cast your eyes casually around
+you in any tropical valley, and, if there didn't happen to be a native
+cottage with a coco-nut grove and banana patch anywhere in the
+neighbourhood, you would see nothing in the way of vegetation which you
+mightn't see at home any day in Europe. But what painter would ever
+venture to paint the tropics without the palm trees? He might just as
+well try to paint the desert without the camels, or to represent St.
+Sebastian without a sheaf of arrows sticking unperceived in the calm
+centre of his unruffled bosom, to mark and emphasise his Sebastianic
+personality.
+
+Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with its practically
+almost identical relation, the plantain, is a real bit of tropical
+foliage. I confess to a settled prejudice against the tropics generally,
+but I allow the sunsets, the coco-nuts, and the bananas. The true stem
+creeps underground, and sends up each year an upright branch, thickly
+covered with majestic broad green leaves, somewhat like those of the
+canna cultivated in our gardens as 'Indian shot,' but far larger,
+nobler, and handsomer. They sometimes measure from six to ten feet in
+length, and their thick midrib and strongly marked diverging veins give
+them a very lordly and graceful appearance. But they are apt in practice
+to suffer much from the fury of the tropical storms. The wind rips the
+leaves up between the veins as far as the midrib in tangled tatters; so
+that after a good hurricane they look more like coco-nut palm leaves
+than like single broad masses of foliage as they ought properly to do.
+This, of course, is the effect of a gentle and balmy hurricane--a mere
+capful of wind that tears and tatters them. After a really bad storm
+(one of the sort when you tie ropes round your wooden house to prevent
+its falling bodily to pieces, I mean) the bananas are all actually blown
+down, and the crop for that season utterly destroyed. The apparent stem,
+being merely composed of the overlapping and sheathing leaf-stalks, has
+naturally very little stability; and the soft succulent trunk
+accordingly gives way forthwith at the slightest onslaught. This
+liability to be blown down in high winds forms the weak point of the
+plantain, viewed as a food-stuff crop. In the South Sea Islands, where
+there is little shelter, the poor Fijian, in cannibal days, often lost
+his one means of subsistence from this cause, and was compelled to
+satisfy the pangs of hunger on the plump persons of his immediate
+relatives. But since the introduction of Christianity, and of a dwarf
+stout wind-proof variety of banana, his condition in this respect, I am
+glad to say, has been greatly ameliorated.
+
+By descent the banana bush is a developed tropical lily, not at all
+remotely allied to the common iris, only that its flowers and fruit are
+clustered together on a hanging spike, instead of growing solitary and
+separate as in the true irises. The blossoms, which, though pretty, are
+comparatively inconspicuous for the size of the plant, show the
+extraordinary persistence of the lily type; for almost all the vast
+number of species, more or less directly descended from the primitive
+lily, continue to the very end of the chapter to have six petals, six
+stamens, and three rows of seeds in their fruits or capsules. But
+practical man, with his eye always steadily fixed on the one important
+quality of edibility--the sum and substance to most people of all
+botanical research--has confined his attention almost entirely to the
+fruit of the banana. In all essentials (other than the systematically
+unimportant one just alluded to) the banana fruit in its original state
+exactly resembles the capsule of the iris--that pretty pod that divides
+in three when ripe, and shows the delicate orange-coated seeds lying in
+triple rows within--only, in the banana, the fruit does not open; in the
+sweet language of technical botany, it is an indehiscent capsule; and
+the seeds, instead of standing separate and distinct, as in the iris,
+are embedded in a soft and pulpy substance which forms the edible and
+practical part of the entire arrangement.
+
+This is the proper appearance of the original and natural banana, before
+it has been taken in hand and cultivated by tropical man. When cut
+across the middle, it ought to show three rows of seeds, interspersed
+with pulp, and faintly preserving some dim memory of the dividing wall
+which once separated them. In practice, however, the banana differs
+widely from this theoretical ideal, as practice often _will_ differ
+from theory; for it has been so long cultivated and selected by
+man--being probably one of the very oldest, if not actually quite the
+oldest, of domesticated plants--that it has all but lost the original
+habit of producing seeds. This is a common effect of cultivation on
+fruits, and it is of course deliberately aimed at by horticulturists, as
+the seeds are generally a nuisance, regarded from the point of view of
+the eater, and their absence improves the fruit, as long as one can
+manage to get along somehow without them. In the pretty little
+Tangierine oranges (so ingeniously corrupted by fruiterers into
+mandarins) the seeds have almost been cultivated out; in the best
+pine-apples, and in the small grapes known in the dried state as
+currants, they have quite disappeared; while in some varieties of pears
+they survive only in the form of shrivelled, barren, and useless pips.
+But the banana, more than any other plant we know of, has managed for
+many centuries to do without seeds altogether. The cultivated sort,
+especially in America, is quite seedless, and the plants are propagated
+entirely by suckers.
+
+Still, you can never wholly circumvent nature. Expel her with a
+pitchfork, _tamen usque recurrit_. Now nature has settled that the right
+way to propagate plants is by means of seedlings. Strictly speaking,
+indeed, it is the only way; the other modes of growth from bulbs or
+cuttings are not really propagation, but mere reduplication by
+splitting, as when you chop a worm in two, and a couple of worms wriggle
+off contentedly forthwith in either direction. Just so when you divide a
+plant by cuttings, suckers, slips, or runners; the two apparent plants
+thus produced are in the last resort only separate parts of the same
+individual--one and indivisible, like the French Republic. Seedlings are
+absolutely distinct individuals; they are the product of the pollen of
+one plant and the ovules of another, and they start afresh in life with
+some chance of being fairly free from the hereditary taints or personal
+failings of either parent. But cuttings or suckers are only the same old
+plant over and over again in fresh circumstances, transplanted as it
+were, but not truly renovated or rejuvenescent. That is the real reason
+why our potatoes are now all going to--well, the same place as the army
+has been going ever since the earliest memories of the oldest officer in
+the whole service. We have gone on growing potatoes over and over again
+from the tubers alone, and hardly ever from seed, till the whole
+constitution of the potato kind has become permanently enfeebled by old
+age and dotage. The eyes (as farmers call them) are only buds or
+underground branches; and to plant potatoes as we usually do is nothing
+more than to multiply the apparent scions by fission. Odd as it may
+sound to say so, all the potato vines in a whole field are often, from
+the strict biological point of view, parts of a single much-divided
+individual. It is just as though one were to go on cutting up a single
+worm, time after time, as soon as he grew again, till at last the one
+original creature had multiplied into a whole colony of apparently
+distinct individuals. Yet, if the first worm happened to have the gout
+or the rheumatism (metaphorically speaking), all the other worms into
+which his compound personality had been divided would doubtless suffer
+from the same complaints throughout the whole of their joint lifetimes.
+
+The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevitable tendency to
+degeneration in plants thus artificially and unhealthily propagated.
+Potatoes have only been in cultivation for a few hundred years; and yet
+the potato constitution has become so far enfeebled by the practice of
+growing from the tuber that the plants now fall an easy prey to potato
+fungus, Colorado beetles, and a thousand other persistent enemies. It is
+just the same with the vine--propagated too long by layers or cuttings,
+its health has failed entirely, and it can no longer resist the ravages
+of the phylloxera or the slow attacks of the vine-disease fungus. But
+the banana, though of very ancient and positively immemorial antiquity
+as a cultivated plant, seems somehow gifted with an extraordinary power
+of holding its own in spite of long-continued unnatural propagation. For
+thousands of years it has been grown in Asia in the seedless condition,
+and yet it springs as heartily as ever still from the underground
+suckers. Nevertheless, there must in the end be some natural limit to
+this wonderful power of reproduction, or rather of longevity; for, in
+the strictest sense, the banana bushes that now grow in the negro
+gardens of Trinidad and Demerara are part and parcel of the very same
+plants which grew and bore fruit a thousand years ago in the native
+compounds of the Malay Archipelago.
+
+In fact, I think there can be but little doubt that the banana is the
+very oldest product of human tillage. Man, we must remember, is
+essentially by origin a tropical animal, and wild tropical fruits must
+necessarily have formed his earliest food-stuffs. It was among them of
+course that his first experiments in primitive agriculture would be
+tried; the little insignificant seeds and berries of cold northern
+regions would only very slowly be added to his limited stock in
+husbandry, as circumstances pushed some few outlying colonies northward
+and ever northward toward the chillier unoccupied regions. Now, of all
+tropical fruits, the banana is certainly the one that best repays
+cultivation. It has been calculated that the same area which will
+produce thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds of potatoes
+will produce 4,400 pounds of plantains or bananas. The cultivation of
+the various varieties in India, China, and the Malay Archipelago dates,
+says De Candolle, 'from an epoch impossible to realise.' Its diffusion,
+as that great but very oracular authority remarks, may go back to a
+period 'contemporary with or even anterior to that of the human races.'
+What this remarkably illogical sentence may mean I am at a loss to
+comprehend; perhaps M. de Candolle supposes that the banana was
+originally cultivated by pre-human gorillas; perhaps he merely intends
+to say that before men began to separate they sent special messengers on
+in front of them to diffuse the banana in the different countries they
+were about to visit. Even legend retains some trace of the extreme
+antiquity of the species as a cultivated fruit, for Adam and Eve are
+said to have reclined under the shadow of its branches, whence Linnaeus
+gave to the sort known as the plantain the Latin name of _Musa
+paradisiaca_. If a plant was cultivated in Eden by the grand old
+gardener and his wife, as Lord Tennyson democratically styled them
+(before his elevation to the peerage), we may fairly conclude that it
+possesses a very respectable antiquity indeed.
+
+The wild banana is a native of the Malay region, according to De
+Candolle, who has produced by far the most learned and unreadable work
+on the origin of domestic plants ever yet written. (Please don't give me
+undue credit for having heroically read it through out of pure love of
+science: I was one of its unfortunate reviewers.) The wild form produces
+seed, and grows in Cochin China, the Philippines, Ceylon, and Khasia.
+Like most other large tropical fruits, it no doubt owes its original
+development to the selective action of monkeys, hornbills, parrots and
+other big fruit-eaters; and it shares with all fruits of similar origin
+one curious tropical peculiarity. Most northern berries, like the
+strawberry, the raspberry, the currant, and the blackberry, developed
+by the selective action of small northern birds, can be popped at once
+into the mouth and eaten whole; they have no tough outer rind or
+defensive covering of any sort. But big tropical fruits, which lay
+themselves out for the service of large birds or monkeys, have always
+hard outer coats, because they could only be injured by smaller animals,
+who would eat the pulp without helping in the dispersion of the useful
+seeds, the one object really held in view by the mother plant. Often, as
+in the case of the orange, the rind even contains a bitter, nauseous, or
+pungent juice, while at times, as in the pine-apple, the prickly pear,
+the sweet-sop, and the cherimoyer, the entire fruit is covered with
+sharp projections, stinging hairs, or knobby protuberances, on purpose
+to warn off the unauthorised depredator. It was this line of defence
+that gave the banana in the first instance its thick yellow skin; and,
+looking at the matter from the epicure's point of view, one may say
+roughly that all tropical fruits have to be skinned before they can be
+eaten. They are all adapted for being cut up with a knife and fork, or
+dug out with a spoon, on a civilised dessert-plate. As for that most
+delicious of Indian fruits, the mango, it has been well said that the
+only proper way to eat it is over a tub of water, with a couple of
+towels hanging gracefully across the side.
+
+The varieties of the banana are infinite in number, and, as in most
+other plants of ancient cultivation, they shade off into one another by
+infinitesimal gradations. Two principal sorts, however, are commonly
+recognised--the true banana of commerce, and the common plantain. The
+banana proper is eaten raw, as a fruit, and is allowed accordingly to
+ripen thoroughly before being picked for market; the plantain, which is
+the true food-stuff of all the equatorial region in both hemispheres, is
+gathered green and roasted as a vegetable, or, to use the more
+expressive West Indian negro phrase, as a bread-kind. Millions of human
+beings in Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean
+live almost entirely on the mild and succulent but tasteless plantain.
+Some people like the fruit; to me personally it is more suggestive of a
+very flavourless over-ripe pear than of anything else in heaven or earth
+or the waters that are under the earth--the latter being the most
+probable place to look for it, as its taste and substance are decidedly
+watery. Baked dry in the green state 'it resembles roasted chestnuts,'
+or rather baked parsnip; pulped and boiled with water it makes 'a very
+agreeable sweet soup,' almost as nice as peasoup with brown sugar in it;
+and cut into slices, sweetened, and fried, it forms 'an excellent
+substitute for fruit pudding,' having a flavour much like that of
+potatoes _a la maitre d'hotel_ served up in treacle.
+
+Altogether a fruit to be sedulously avoided, the plantain, though
+millions of our spiritually destitute African brethren haven't yet for a
+moment discovered that it isn't every bit as good as wheaten bread and
+fresh butter. Missionary enterprise will no doubt before long enlighten
+them on this subject, and create a good market in time for American
+flour and Manchester piece-goods.
+
+Though by origin a Malayan plant, there can be little doubt that the
+banana had already reached the mainland of America and the West India
+Islands long before the voyage of Columbus. When Pizarro disembarked
+upon the coast of Peru on his desolating expedition, the mild-eyed,
+melancholy, doomed Peruvians flocked down to the shore and offered him
+bananas in a lordly dish. Beds composed of banana leaves have been
+discovered in the tombs of the Incas, of date anterior, of course, to
+the Spanish conquest. How did they get there? Well, it is clearly an
+absurd mistake to suppose that Columbus discovered America; as Artemus
+Ward pertinently remarked, the noble Red Indian had obviously discovered
+it long before him. There had been intercourse of old, too, between Asia
+and the Western Continent; the elephant-headed god of Mexico, the
+debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion, the singular
+coincidences between India and Peru, all seem to show that a stream of
+communication, however faint, once existed between the Asiatic and
+American worlds. Garcilaso himself, the half-Indian historian of Peru,
+says that the banana was well known in his native country before the
+conquest, and that the Indians say 'its origin is Ethiopia.' In some
+strange way or other, then, long before Columbus set foot upon the low
+sandbank of Cat's Island, the banana had been transported from Africa or
+India to the Western hemisphere.
+
+If it were a plant propagated by seed, one would suppose that it was
+carried across by wind or waves, wafted on the feet of birds, or
+accidentally introduced in the crannies of drift timber. So the coco-nut
+made the tour of the world ages before either of the famous Cooks--the
+Captain or the excursion agent--had rendered the same feat easy and
+practicable; and so, too, a number of American plants have fixed their
+home in the tarns of the Hebrides or among the lonely bogs of Western
+Galway. But the banana must have been carried by man, because it is
+unknown in the wild state in the Western Continent; and, as it is
+practically seedless, it can only have been transported entire, in the
+form of a root or sucker. An exactly similar proof of ancient
+intercourse between the two worlds is afforded us by the sweet potato, a
+plant of undoubted American origin, which was nevertheless naturalised
+in China as early as the first centuries of the Christian era. Now that
+we all know how the Scandinavians of the eleventh century went to
+Massachusetts, which they called Vineland, and how the Mexican empire
+had some knowledge of Accadian astronomy, people are beginning to
+discover that Columbus himself was after all an egregious humbug.
+
+In the old world the cultivation of the banana and the plantain goes
+back, no doubt, to a most immemorial antiquity. Our Aryan ancestor
+himself, Professor Max Mueller's especial _protege_, had already invented
+several names for it, which duly survive in very classical Sanskrit. The
+Greeks of Alexander's expedition saw it in India, where 'sages reposed
+beneath its shade and ate of its fruit, whence the botanical name, _Musa
+sapientum_.' As the sages in question were lazy Brahmans, always
+celebrated for their immense capacity for doing nothing, the report, as
+quoted by Pliny, is no doubt an accurate one. But the accepted
+derivation of the word _Musa_ from an Arabic original seems to me highly
+uncertain; for Linnaeus, who first bestowed it on the genus, called
+several other allied genera by such cognate names as Urania and
+Heliconia. If, therefore, the father of botany knew that his own word
+was originally Arabic, we cannot acquit him of the high crime and
+misdemeanour of deliberate punning. Should the Royal Society get wind of
+this, something serious would doubtless happen; for it is well known
+that the possession of a sense of humour is absolutely fatal to the
+pretensions of a man of science.
+
+Besides its main use as an article of food, the banana serves
+incidentally to supply a valuable fibre, obtained from the stem, and
+employed for weaving into textile fabrics and making paper. Several
+kinds of the plantain tribe are cultivated for this purpose exclusively,
+the best known among them being the so-called manilla hemp, a plant
+largely grown in the Philippine Islands. Many of the finest Indian
+shawls are woven from banana stems, and much of the rope that we use in
+our houses comes from the same singular origin. I know nothing more
+strikingly illustrative of the extreme complexity of our modern
+civilisation than the way in which we thus every day employ articles of
+exotic manufacture in our ordinary life without ever for a moment
+suspecting or inquiring into their true nature. What lady knows when she
+puts on her delicate wrapper, from Liberty's or from Swan and Edgar's,
+that the material from which it is woven is a Malayan plantain stalk?
+Who ever thinks that the glycerine for our chapped hands comes from
+Travancore coco-nuts, and that the pure butter supplied us from the farm
+in the country is coloured yellow with Jamaican annatto? We break a
+tooth, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out, because the grape-curers
+of Zante are not careful enough about excluding small stones from their
+stock of currants; and we suffer from indigestion because the Cape
+wine-grower has doctored his light Burgundies with Brazilian logwood and
+white rum, to make them taste like Portuguese port. Take merely this
+very question of dessert, and how intensely complicated it really is.
+The West Indian bananas keep company with sweet St. Michaels from the
+Azores, and with Spanish cobnuts from Barcelona. Dried fruits from Metz,
+figs from Smyrna, and dates from Tunis lie side by side on our table
+with Brazil nuts and guava jelly and damson cheese and almonds and
+raisins. We forget where everything comes from nowadays, in our general
+consciousness that they all come from the Queen Victoria Street Stores,
+and any real knowledge of common objects is rendered every day more and
+more impossible by the bewildering complexity and variety, every day
+increasing, of the common objects themselves, their substitutes,
+adulterates, and spurious imitations. Why, you probably never heard of
+manilla hemp before, until this very minute, and yet you have been
+familiarly using it all your lifetime, while 400,000 hundredweights of
+that useful article are annually imported into this country alone. It is
+an interesting study to take any day a list of market quotations, and
+ask oneself about every material quoted, what it is and what they do
+with it.
+
+For example, can you honestly pretend that you really understand the use
+and importance of that valuable object of everyday demand, fustic? I
+remember an ill-used telegraph clerk in a tropical colony once
+complaining to me that English cable operators were so disgracefully
+ignorant about this important staple as invariably to substitute for its
+name the word 'justice' in all telegrams which originally referred to
+it. Have you any clear and definite notions as to the prime origin and
+final destination of a thing called jute, in whose sole manufacture the
+whole great and flourishing town of Dundee lives and moves and has its
+being? What is turmeric? Whence do we obtain vanilla? How many
+commercial products are yielded by the orchids? How many totally
+distinct plants in different countries afford the totally distinct
+starches lumped together in grocers' lists under the absurd name of
+arrowroot? When you ask for sago do you really see that you get it? and
+how many entirely different objects described as sago are known to
+commerce? Define the uses of partridge canes and cohune oil. What
+objects are generally manufactured from tucum? Would it surprise you to
+learn that English door-handles are commonly made out of coquilla nuts?
+that your wife's buttons are turned from the indurated fruit of the
+Tagua palm? and that the knobs of umbrellas grew originally in the
+remote depths of Guatemalan forests? Are you aware that a plant called
+manioc supplies the starchy food of about one-half the population of
+tropical America? These are the sort of inquiries with which a new
+edition of 'Mangnall's Questions' would have to be filled; and as to
+answering them--why, even the pupil-teachers in a London Board School
+(who represent, I suppose, the highest attainable level of human
+knowledge) would often find themselves completely nonplussed. The fact
+is, tropical trade has opened out so rapidly and so wonderfully that
+nobody knows much about the chief articles of tropical growth; we go on
+using them in an uninquiring spirit of childlike faith, much as the
+Jamaica negroes go on using articles of European manufacture about whose
+origin they are so ridiculously ignorant that one young woman once asked
+me whether it was really true that cotton handkerchiefs were dug up out
+of the ground over in England. Some dim confusion between coal or iron
+and Manchester piece-goods seemed to have taken firm possession of her
+infantile imagination.
+
+That is why I have thought that a treatise De Banana might not, perhaps,
+be wholly without its usefulness to the modern English reading world.
+After all, a food-stuff which supports hundreds of millions among our
+beloved tropical fellow-creatures ought to be very dear to the heart of
+a nation which governs (and annually kills) more black people, taken in
+the mass, than all the other European powers put together. We have
+introduced the blessings of British rule--the good and well-paid
+missionary, the Remington rifle, the red-cotton pocket-handkerchief, and
+the use of 'the liquor called rum'--into so many remote corners of the
+tropical world that it is high time we should begin in return to learn
+somewhat about fetiches and fustic, Jamaica and jaggery, bananas and
+Buddhism. We know too little still about our colonies and dependencies.
+'Cape Breton an island!' cried King George's Minister, the Duke of
+Newcastle, in the well-known story, 'Cape Breton an island! Why, so it
+is! God bless my soul! I must go and tell the King that Cape Breton's
+an island.' That was a hundred years ago; but only the other day the
+Board of Trade placarded all our towns and villages with a flaming
+notice to the effect that the Colorado beetle had made its appearance at
+'a town in Canada called Ontario,' and might soon be expected to arrive
+at Liverpool by Cunard steamer. The right honourables and other high
+mightinesses who put forth the notice in question were evidently unaware
+that Ontario is a province as big as England, including in its borders
+Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, London, Hamilton, and other large and
+flourishing towns. Apparently, in spite of competitive examinations, the
+schoolmaster is still abroad in the Government offices.
+
+
+
+
+GO TO THE ANT
+
+
+In the market-place at Santa Fe, in Mexico, peasant women from the
+neighbouring villages bring in for sale trayfuls of living ants, each
+about as big and round as a large white currant, and each entirely
+filled with honey or grape sugar, much appreciated by the ingenuous
+Mexican youth as an excellent substitute for Everton toffee. The method
+of eating them would hardly command the approbation of the Society for
+the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It is simple and primitive, but
+decidedly not humane. Ingenuous youth holds the ant by its head and
+shoulders, sucks out the honey with which the back part is absurdly
+distended, and throws away the empty body as a thing with which it has
+now no further sympathy. Maturer age buys the ants by the quart, presses
+out the honey through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it into a very
+sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I am credibly
+informed by bold persons who have ventured to experiment upon it, taken
+internally.
+
+The curious insect which thus serves as an animated sweetmeat for the
+Mexican children is the honey-ant of the Garden of the Gods; and it
+affords a beautiful example of Mandeville's charming paradox that
+personal vices are public benefits--_vitia privata humana commoda_. The
+honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless nobly devoted
+himself for the good of the community by converting himself into a
+living honey-jar, from which all the other ants in his own nest may help
+themselves freely from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to
+which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed vault, and only one
+particular caste among the workers, known as rotunds from their
+expansive girth, is told off for this special duty of storing honey
+within their own bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest, with their
+round, transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules of skin
+enclosing the pale amber-coloured honey, these Daniel Lamberts of the
+insect race look for all the world like clusters of the little American
+Delaware grapes, with an ant's legs and head stuck awkwardly on to the
+end instead of a stalk. They have, in fact, realised in everyday life
+the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented sugar-broker, who laid on
+flesh and 'adipose deposit' until he became converted at last into a
+perfect rolling ball of globular humanity.
+
+The manners of the honey-ant race are very simple. Most of the members
+of each community are active and roving in their dispositions, and show
+no tendency to undue distension of the nether extremities. They go out
+at night and collect nectar or honey-dew from the gall-insects on
+oak-trees; for the gall-insect, like love in the old Latin saw, is
+fruitful both in sweets and bitters, _melle et felle_. This nectar they
+then carry home, and give it to the rotunds or honey-bearers, who
+swallow it and store it in their round abdomen until they can hold no
+more, having stretched their skins literally to the very point of
+bursting. They pass their time, like the Fat Boy in 'Pickwick,' chiefly
+in sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the roof of their
+residence. When the workers in turn require a meal, they go up to the
+nearest honey-bearer and stroke her gently with their antennae. The
+honey-bearer thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop
+of the amber liquid. ('Regurgitates' is a good word which I borrow from
+Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great authority upon honey-ants; and it
+saves an immense deal of trouble in looking about for a respectable
+periphrasis.) The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded, two or three
+at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and lapping nectar
+together from the lips of their devoted comrade. This may seem at first
+sight rather an unpleasant practice on the part of the ants; but after
+all, how does it really differ from our own habit of eating honey which
+has been treated in very much the same unsophisticated manner by the
+domestic bee?
+
+Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to the discredit of
+the Colorado honey-ant. When he was opening some nests in the Garden of
+the Gods, he happened accidentally to knock down some of the rotunds,
+which straightway burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store
+of honey on the floor of the nest. At once the other ants, tempted away
+from their instinctive task of carrying off the cocoons and young grubs,
+clustered around their unfortunate companion, like street boys around a
+broken molasses barrel, and, instead of forming themselves forthwith
+into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the
+honey from their dying brother. On the other hand it must be said, to
+the credit of the race, that (unlike the members of Arctic expeditions)
+they never desecrate the remains of the dead. When a honey-bearer dies
+at his post, a victim to his zeal for the common good, the workers
+carefully remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings,
+clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen, and convey
+their deceased brother piecemeal, in two detachments, to the formican
+cemetery, undisturbed. If they chose, they might only bury the front
+half of their late relation, while they retained his remaining moiety
+as an available honey-bag: but from this cannibal proceeding
+ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes are 'pulled
+up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled into the graveyard, along
+with the juiceless heads, legs, and other members.' Such fraternal
+conduct would be very creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not
+for a horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the insects
+don't know they could get at the honey by breaking up the body of their
+lamented relative. If so, their apparent disregard of utilitarian
+considerations may really be due not to their sentimentality but to
+their hopeless stupidity.
+
+The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing honey in the living
+bodies of their own fellows is easy enough to understand. They want to
+lay up for the future like prudent insects that they are; but they can't
+make wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the purely human
+art of pottery. Consequently--happy thought--why not tell off some of
+our number to act as jars on behalf of the others? Some of the community
+work by going out and gathering honey; they also serve who only stand
+and wait--who receive it from the workers, and keep it stored up in
+their own capacious indiarubber maws till further notice. So obvious is
+this plan for converting ants into animated honey-jars, that several
+different kinds of ants in different parts of the world, belonging to
+the most widely distinct families, have independently hit upon the very
+self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there is a totally
+different Australian honey-ant, and another equally separate in Borneo
+and Singapore. This last kind does not store the honey in the hind part
+of the body technically known as the abdomen, but in the middle division
+which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a transparent
+bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature look as though it were
+suffering with an acute attack of dropsy. In any case, the life of a
+honey-bearer must be singularly uneventful, not to say dull and
+monotonous; but no doubt any small inconvenience in this respect must be
+more than compensated for by the glorious consciousness that one is
+sacrificing one's own personal comfort for the common good of universal
+anthood. Perhaps, however, the ants have not yet reached the Positivist
+stage, and may be totally ignorant of the enthusiasm of formicity.
+
+Equally curious are the habits and manners of the harvesting ants, the
+species which Solomon seems to have had specially in view when he
+advised his hearers to go to the ant--a piece of advice which I have
+also adopted as the title of the present article, though I by no means
+intend thereby to insinuate that the readers of this volume ought
+properly to be classed as sluggards. These industrious little creatures
+abound in India: they are so small that it takes eight or ten of them to
+carry a single grain of wheat or barley; and yet they will patiently
+drag along their big burden for five hundred or a thousand yards to the
+door of their formicary. To prevent the grain from germinating, they
+bite off the embryo root--a piece of animal intelligence outdone by
+another species of ant, which actually allows the process of budding to
+begin, so as to produce sugar, as in malting. After the last
+thunderstorms of the monsoon the little proprietors bring up all the
+grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sunshine. The quantity
+of grain stored up by the harvesting ants is often so large that the
+hair-splitting Jewish casuists of the Mishna have seriously discussed
+the question whether it belongs to the landowner or may lawfully be
+appropriated by the gleaners. 'They do not appear,' says Sir John
+Lubbock, 'to have considered the rights of the ants.' Indeed our duty
+towards insects is a question which seems hitherto to have escaped the
+notice of all moral philosophers. Even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the prophet
+of individualism, has never taken exception to our gross disregard of
+the proprietary rights of bees in their honey, or of silkworms in their
+cocoons. There are signs, however, that the obtuse human conscience is
+awakening in this respect; for when Dr. Loew suggested to bee-keepers
+the desirability of testing the commercial value of honey-ants, as
+rivals to the bee, Dr. McCook replied that 'the sentiment against the
+use of honey thus taken from living insects, which is worthy of all
+respect, would not be easily overcome.'
+
+There are no harvesting ants in Northern Europe, though they extend as
+far as Syria, Italy, and the Riviera, in which latter station I have
+often observed them busily working. What most careless observers take
+for grain in the nests of English ants are of course really the cocoons
+of the pupae. For many years, therefore, entomologists were under the
+impression that Solomon had fallen into this popular error, and that
+when he described the ant as 'gathering her food in the harvest' and
+'preparing her meat in the summer,' he was speaking rather as a poet
+than as a strict naturalist. Later observations, however, have
+vindicated the general accuracy of the much-married king by showing that
+true harvesting ants do actually occur in Syria, and that they lay by
+stores for the winter in the very way stated by that early entomologist,
+whose knowledge of 'creeping things' is specially enumerated in the long
+list of his universal accomplishments.
+
+Dr. Lincecum of Texan fame has even improved upon Solomon by his
+discovery of those still more interesting and curious creatures, the
+agricultural ants of Texas. America is essentially a farming country,
+and the agricultural ants are born farmers. They make regular clearings
+around their nests, and on these clearings they allow nothing to grow
+except a particular kind of grain, known as ant-rice. Dr. Lincecum
+maintains that the tiny farmers actually sow and cultivate the ant-rice.
+Dr. McCook, on the other hand, is of opinion that the rice sows itself,
+and that the insects' part is limited to preventing any other plants or
+weeds from encroaching on the appropriated area. In any case, be they
+squatters or planters, it is certain that the rice, when ripe, is duly
+harvested, and that it is, to say the least, encouraged by the ants, to
+the exclusion of all other competitors. 'After the maturing and
+harvesting of the seed,' says Dr. Lincecum, 'the dry stubble is cut away
+and removed from the pavement, which is thus left fallow until the
+ensuing autumn, when the same species of grass, and in the same circle,
+appears again, and receives the same agricultural care as did the
+previous crop.' Sir John Lubbock, indeed, goes so far as to say that the
+three stages of human progress--the hunter, the herdsman, and the
+agriculturist--are all to be found among various species of existing
+ants.
+
+The Saueba ants of tropical America carry their agricultural operations a
+step further. Dwelling in underground nests, they sally forth upon the
+trees, and cut out of the leaves large round pieces, about as big as a
+shilling. These pieces they drop upon the ground, where another
+detachment is in waiting to convey them to the galleries of the nest.
+There they store enormous quantities of these round pieces, which they
+allow to decay in the dark, so as to form a sort of miniature mushroom
+bed. On the mouldering vegetable heap they have thus piled up, they
+induce a fungus to grow, and with this fungus they feed their young
+grubs during their helpless infancy. Mr. Belt, the 'Naturalist in
+Nicaragua,' found that native trees suffered far less from their
+depredations than imported ones. The ants hardly touched the local
+forests, but they stripped young plantations of orange, coffee, and
+mango trees stark naked. He ingeniously accounts for this curious fact
+by supposing that an internecine struggle has long been going on in the
+countries inhabited by the Sauebas between the ants and the forest trees.
+Those trees that best resisted the ants, owing either to some unpleasant
+taste or to hardness of foliage, have in the long run survived
+destruction; but those which were suited for the purpose of the ants
+have been reduced to nonentity, while the ants in turn were getting
+slowly adapted to attack other trees. In this way almost all the native
+trees have at last acquired some special means of protection against the
+ravages of the leaf-cutters; so that they immediately fall upon all
+imported and unprotected kinds as their natural prey. This ingenious and
+wholly satisfactory explanation must of course go far to console the
+Brazilian planters for the frequent loss of their orange and coffee
+crops.
+
+Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Darwinian theory
+(whose honours he waived with rare generosity in favour of the older and
+more distinguished naturalist), tells a curious story about the
+predatory habits of these same Sauebas. On one occasion, when he was
+wandering about in search of specimens on the Rio Negro, he bought a
+peck of rice, which was tied up, Indian fashion, in the local bandanna
+of the happy plantation slave. At night he left his rice incautiously on
+the bench of the hut where he was sleeping; and next morning the Sauebas
+had riddled the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a gallon of
+the grain for their own felonious purposes. The underground galleries
+which they dig can often be traced for hundreds of yards; and Mr. Hamlet
+Clarke even asserts that in one case they have tunnelled under the bed
+of a river where it is a quarter of a mile wide. This beats Brunel on
+his own ground into the proverbial cocked hat, both for depth and
+distance.
+
+Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put themselves obtrusively
+forward in a manner little gratifying to any except the enthusiastically
+entomological mind. The winged females, after their marriage flight,
+have a disagreeable habit of flying in at the open doors and windows at
+lunch time, settling upon the table like the Harpies in the AEneid, and
+then quietly shuffling off their wings one at a time, by holding them
+down against the table-cloth with one leg, and running away vigorously
+with the five others. As soon as they have thus disembarrassed
+themselves of their superfluous members, they proceed to run about over
+the lunch as if the house belonged to them, and to make a series of
+experiments upon the edible qualities of the different dishes. One
+doesn't so much mind their philosophical inquiries into the nature of
+the bread or even the meat; but when they come to drowning themselves by
+dozens, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the soup and sherry, one feels
+bound to protest energetically against the spirit of martyrdom by which
+they are too profoundly animated. That is one of the slight drawbacks of
+the realms of perpetual summer; in the poets you see only one side of
+the picture--the palms, the orchids, the humming-birds, the great
+trailing lianas: in practical life you see the reverse side--the
+thermometer at 98 deg., the tepid drinking-water, the prickly heat, the
+perpetual languor, the endless shoals of aggressive insects. A lady of
+my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable entomological collection in her
+own dining-room, by the simple process of consigning to pill-boxes all
+the moths and flies and beetles that settled upon the mangoes and
+star-apples in the course of dessert.
+
+Another objectionable habit of the tropical ants, viewed practically,
+is their total disregard of vested interests in the case of house
+property. Like Mr. George and his communistic friends, they disbelieve
+entirely in the principle of private rights in real estate. They will
+eat their way through the beams of your house till there is only a
+slender core of solid wood left to support the entire burden. I have
+taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica, originally 18 inches
+thick each way, with a sound circular centre of no more than 6 inches in
+diameter, upon which all the weight necessarily fell. With the material
+extracted from the wooden beams they proceed to add insult to injury by
+building long covered galleries right across the ceiling of your
+drawing-room. As may be easily imagined, these galleries do not tend to
+improve the appearance of the ceiling; and it becomes necessary to form
+a Liberty and Property Defence League for the protection of one's
+personal interests against the insect enemy. I have no objection to ants
+building galleries on their own freehold, or even to their nationalising
+the land in their native forests; but I do object strongly to their
+unwarrantable intrusion upon the domain of private life. Expostulation
+and active warfare, however, are equally useless. The carpenter-ant has
+no moral sense, and is not amenable either to kindness or blows. On one
+occasion, when a body of these intrusive creatures had constructed an
+absurdly conspicuous brown gallery straight across the ceiling of my
+drawing-room, I determined to declare open war against them, and,
+getting my black servant to bring in the steps and a mop, I proceeded to
+demolish the entire gallery just after breakfast. It was about 20 feet
+long, as well as I can remember, and perhaps an inch in diameter. At one
+o'clock I returned to lunch. My black servant pointed, with a broad grin
+on his intelligent features, to the wooden ceiling. I looked up; in
+those three hours the carpenter-ants had reconstructed the entire
+gallery, and were doubtless mocking me at their ease, with their
+uplifted antennae, under that safe shelter. I retired at once from the
+unequal contest. It was clearly impossible to go on knocking down a
+fresh gallery every three hours of the day or night throughout a whole
+lifetime.
+
+Ants, says Mr. Wallace, without one touch of satire, 'force themselves
+upon the attention of everyone who visits the tropics.' They do, indeed,
+and that most pungently; if by no other method, at least by the simple
+and effectual one of stinging. The majority of ants in every nest are of
+course neuters, or workers, that is to say, strictly speaking,
+undeveloped females, incapable of laying eggs. But they still retain the
+ovipositor, which is converted into a sting, and supplied with a
+poisonous liquid to eject afterwards into the wound. So admirably
+adapted to its purpose is this beautiful provision of nature, that some
+tropical ants can sting with such violence as to make your leg swell and
+confine you for some days to your room; while cases have even been known
+in which the person attacked has fainted with pain, or had a serious
+attack of fever in consequence. It is not every kind of ant, however,
+that can sting; a great many can only bite with their little hard horny
+jaws, and then eject a drop of formic poison afterwards into the hole
+caused by the bite. The distinction is a delicate physiological one, not
+much appreciated by the victims of either mode of attack. The perfect
+females can also sting, but not, of course, the males, who are poor,
+wretched, useless creatures, only good as husbands for the community,
+and dying off as soon as they have performed their part in the
+world--another beautiful provision, which saves the workers the trouble
+of killing them off, as bees do with drones after the marriage flight of
+the queen bee.
+
+The blind driver-ants of West Africa are among the very few species
+that render any service to man, and that, of course, only incidentally.
+Unlike most other members of their class, the driver-ants have no
+settled place of residence; they are vagabonds and wanderers upon the
+face of the earth, formican tramps, blind beggars, who lead a gipsy
+existence, and keep perpetually upon the move, smelling their way
+cautiously from one camping-place to another. They march by night, or on
+cloudy days, like wise tropical strategists, and never expose themselves
+to the heat of the day in broad sunshine, as though they were no better
+than the mere numbered British Tommy Atkins at Coomassie or in the
+Soudan. They move in vast armies across country, driving everything
+before them as they go; for they belong to the stinging division, and
+are very voracious in their personal habits. Not only do they eat up the
+insects in their line of march, but they fall even upon larger creatures
+and upon big snakes, which they attack first in the eyes, the most
+vulnerable portion. When they reach a negro village the inhabitants turn
+out _en masse_, and run away, exactly as if the visitors were English
+explorers or brave Marines, bent upon retaliating for the theft of a
+knife by nobly burning down King Tom's town or King Jumbo's capital.
+Then the negroes wait in the jungle till the little black army has
+passed on, after clearing out the huts by the way of everything eatable.
+When they return they find their calabashes and saucepans licked clean,
+but they also find every rat, mouse, lizard, cockroach, gecko, and
+beetle completely cleared out from the whole village. Most of them have
+cut and run at the first approach of the drivers; of the remainder, a
+few blanched and neatly-picked skeletons alone remain to tell the tale.
+
+As I wish to be considered a veracious historian, I will not retail the
+further strange stories that still find their way into books of natural
+history about the manners and habits of these blind marauders. They
+cross rivers, the West African gossips declare, by a number of devoted
+individuals flinging themselves first into the water as a living bridge,
+like so many six-legged Marcus Curtiuses, while over their drowning
+bodies the heedless remainder march in safety to the other side. If the
+story is not true, it is at least well invented; for the
+ant-commonwealth everywhere carries to the extremest pitch the old Roman
+doctrine of the absolute subjection of the individual to the State. So
+exactly is this the case that in some species there are a few large,
+overgrown, lazy ants in each nest, which do no work themselves, but
+accompany the workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of these
+idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds and other
+enemies, and so distract it from the useful workers, the mainstay of the
+entire community. It is almost as though an army, marching against a
+tribe of cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a hollow
+square formed of all the fattest people in the country, whose fine
+condition and fitness for killing might immediately engross the
+attention of the hungry enemy. Ants, in fact, have, for the most part,
+already reached the goal set before us as a delightful one by most
+current schools of socialist philosophers, in which the individual is
+absolutely sacrificed in every way to the needs of the community.
+
+The most absurdly human, however, among all the tricks and habits of
+ants are their well known cattle-farming and slaveholding instincts.
+Everybody has heard, of course, how they keep the common rose-blight as
+milch cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But everybody,
+probably, does not yet know the large number of insects which they herd
+in one form or another as domesticated animals. Man has, at most, some
+twenty or thirty such, including cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels,
+llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl, ducks,
+geese, turkeys, and silkworms. But ants have hundreds and hundreds, some
+of them kept obviously for purposes of food; others apparently as pets;
+and yet others again, as has been plausibly suggested, by reason of
+superstition or as objects of worship. There is a curious blind beetle
+which inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely dependent upon its
+hosts for support that it has even lost the power of feeding itself. It
+never quits the nest, but the ants bring it in food and supply it by
+putting the nourishment actually into its mouth. But the beetle, in
+return, seems to secrete a sweet liquid (or it may even be a stimulant
+like beer, or a narcotic like tobacco) in a tuft of hairs near the
+bottom of the hard wing-cases, and the ants often lick this tuft with
+every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. In this case, and in
+many others, there can be no doubt that the insects are kept for the
+sake of food or some other advantage yielded by them.
+
+But there are other instances of insects which haunt ants' nests, which
+it is far harder to account for on any hypothesis save that of
+superstitious veneration. There is a little weevil that runs about by
+hundreds in the galleries of English ants, in and out among the free
+citizens, making itself quite at home in their streets and public
+places, but as little noticed by the ants themselves as dogs are in our
+own cities. Then, again, there is a white woodlouse, something like the
+common little armadillo, but blind from having lived so long
+underground, which walks up and down the lanes and alleys of antdom,
+without ever holding any communication of any sort with its hosts and
+neighbours. In neither case has Sir John Lubbock ever seen an ant take
+the slightest notice of the presence of these strange fellow-lodgers.
+'One might almost imagine,' he says, 'that they had the cap of
+invisibility.' Yet it is quite clear that the ants deliberately sanction
+the residence of the weevils and woodlice in their nests, for any
+unauthorised intruder would immediately be set upon and massacred
+outright.
+
+Sir John Lubbock suggests that they may perhaps be tolerated as
+scavengers: or, again, it is possible that they may prey upon the eggs
+or larvae of some of the parasites to whose attacks the ants are subject.
+In the first case, their use would be similar to that of the wild dogs
+in Constantinople or the common black John-crow vultures in tropical
+America: in the second case, they would be about equivalent to our own
+cats or to the hedgehog often put in farmhouse kitchens to keep down
+cockroaches.
+
+The crowning glory of owning slaves, which many philosophic Americans
+(before the war) showed to be the highest and noblest function of the
+most advanced humanity, has been attained by more than one variety of
+anthood. Our great English horse-ant is a moderate slaveholder; but the
+big red ant of Southern Europe carries the domestic institution many
+steps further. It makes regular slave-raids upon the nests of the small
+brown ants, and carries off the young in their pupa condition. By-and-by
+the brown ants hatch out in the strange nest, and never having known any
+other life except that of slavery, accommodate themselves to it readily
+enough. The red ant, however, is still only an occasional slaveowner; if
+necessary, he can get along by himself, without the aid of his little
+brown servants. Indeed, there are free states and slave states of red
+ants side by side with one another, as of old in Maryland and
+Pennsylvania: in the first, the red ants do their work themselves, like
+mere vulgar Ohio farmers; in the second, they get their work done for
+them by their industrious little brown servants, like the aristocratic
+first families of Virginia before the earthquake of emancipation.
+
+But there are other degraded ants, whose life-history may be humbly
+presented to the consideration of the Anti-Slavery Society, as speaking
+more eloquently than any other known fact for the demoralising effect of
+slaveowning upon the slaveholders themselves. The Swiss rufescent ant is
+a species so long habituated to rely entirely upon the services of
+slaves that it is no longer able to manage its own affairs when deprived
+by man of its hereditary bondsmen. It has lost entirely the art of
+constructing a nest; it can no longer tend its own young, whom it leaves
+entirely to the care of negro nurses; and its bodily structure even has
+changed, for the jaws have lost their teeth, and have been converted
+into mere nippers, useful only as weapons of war. The rufescent ant, in
+fact, is a purely military caste, which has devoted itself entirely to
+the pursuit of arms, leaving every other form of activity to its slaves
+and dependents. Officers of the old school will be glad to learn that
+this military insect is dressed, if not in scarlet, at any rate in very
+decent red, and that it refuses to be bothered in any way with questions
+of transport or commissariat. If the community changes its nest, the
+masters are carried on the backs of their slaves to the new position,
+and the black ants have to undertake the entire duty of foraging and
+bringing in stores of supply for their gentlemanly proprietors. Only
+when war is to be made upon neighbouring nests does the thin red line
+form itself into long file for active service. Nothing could be more
+perfectly aristocratic than the views of life entertained and acted upon
+by these distinguished slaveholders.
+
+On the other hand, the picture has its reverse side, exhibiting clearly
+the weak points of the slaveholding system. The rufescent ant has lost
+even the very power of feeding itself. So completely dependent is each
+upon his little black valet for daily bread, that he cannot so much as
+help himself to the food that is set before him. Hueber put a few
+slaveholders into a box with some of their own larvae and pupae, and a
+supply of honey, in order to see what they would do with them. Appalled
+at the novelty of the situation, the slaveholders seemed to come to the
+conclusion that something must be done; so they began carrying the larvae
+about aimlessly in their mouths, and rushing up and down in search of
+the servants. After a while, however, they gave it up and came to the
+conclusion that life under such circumstances was clearly intolerable.
+They never touched the honey, but resigned themselves to their fate like
+officers and gentlemen. In less than two days, half of them had died of
+hunger, rather than taste a dinner which was not supplied to them by a
+properly constituted footman. Admiring their heroism or pitying their
+incapacity, Hueber at last gave them just one slave between them all. The
+plucky little negro, nothing daunted by the gravity of the situation,
+set to work at once, dug a small nest, gathered together the larvae,
+helped several pupae out of the cocoon, and saved the lives of the
+surviving slaveowners. Other naturalists have tried similar experiments,
+and always with the same result. The slaveowners will starve in the
+midst of plenty rather than feed themselves without attendance. Either
+they cannot or will not put the food into their own mouths with their
+own mandibles.
+
+There are yet other ants, such as the workerless _Anergates_, in which
+the degradation of slaveholding has gone yet further. These wretched
+creatures are the formican representatives of those Oriental despots who
+are no longer even warlike, but are sunk in sloth and luxury, and pass
+their lives in eating bang or smoking opium. Once upon a time, Sir John
+Lubbock thinks, the ancestors of _Anergates_ were marauding
+slaveowners, who attacked and made serfs of other ants. But gradually
+they lost not only their arts but even their military prowess, and were
+reduced to making war by stealth instead of openly carrying off their
+slaves in fair battle. It seems probable that they now creep into a nest
+of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen,
+and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest.
+'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled
+away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected
+themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition--weak in
+body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly extinct, the
+miserable representatives of far superior ancestors maintaining a
+precarious existence as contemptible parasites of their former slaves.'
+One may observe in passing that these wretched do-nothings cannot have
+been the ants which Solomon commended to the favourable consideration of
+the sluggard; though it is curious that the text was never pressed into
+the service of defence for the peculiar institution by the advocates of
+slavery in the South, who were always most anxious to prove the
+righteousness of their cause by most sure and certain warranty of Holy
+Scripture.
+
+
+
+
+BIG ANIMALS
+
+
+'The Atlantosaurus,' said I, pointing affectionately with a wave of my
+left hand to all that was immortal of that extinct reptile, 'is
+estimated to have had a total length of one hundred feet, and was
+probably the very biggest lizard that ever lived, even in Western
+America, where his earthly remains were first disinhumed by an
+enthusiastic explorer.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' my friend answered abstractedly. 'Of course, of course;
+things were all so very big in those days, you know, my dear fellow.'
+
+'Excuse me,' I replied with polite incredulity; 'I really don't know to
+what particular period of time the phrase "in those days" may be
+supposed precisely to refer.'
+
+My friend shuffled inside his coat a little uneasily. (I will admit that
+I was taking a mean advantage of him. The professorial lecture in
+private life, especially when followed by a strict examination, is quite
+undeniably a most intolerable nuisance.) 'Well,' he said, in a crusty
+voice, after a moment's hesitation, 'I mean, you know, in geological
+times ... well, there, my dear fellow, things used all to be so _very_
+big in those days, usedn't they?'
+
+I took compassion upon him and let him off easily. 'You've had enough of
+the museum,' I said with magnanimous self-denial. 'The Atlantosaurus has
+broken the camel's back. Let's go and have a quiet cigarette in the park
+outside.'
+
+But if you suppose, reader, that I am going to carry my forbearance so
+far as to let you, too, off the remainder of that geological
+disquisition, you are certainly very much mistaken. A discourse which
+would be quite unpardonable in social intercourse may be freely admitted
+in the privacy of print; because, you see, while you can't easily tell a
+man that his conversation bores you (though some people just avoid doing
+so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut up a book whenever you
+like, without the very faintest or remotest risk of hurting the author's
+delicate susceptibilities.
+
+The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like the
+conventional sermon, into two heads--the precise date of 'geological
+times,' and the exact bigness of the animals that lived in them. And I
+may as well begin by announcing my general conclusion at the very
+outset; first, that 'those days' never existed at all; and, secondly,
+that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet are, on the
+whole, about as big, taken in the lump, as any previous contemporary
+fauna that ever lived at any one time together upon its changeful
+surface. I know that to announce this sad conclusion is to break down
+one more universal and cherished belief; everybody considers that
+'geological animals' were ever so much bigger than their modern
+representatives; but the interests of truth should always be paramount,
+and, if the trade of an iconoclast is a somewhat cruel one, it is at
+least a necessary function in a world so ludicrously overstocked with
+popular delusions as this erring planet.
+
+What, then, is the ordinary idea of 'geological time' in the minds of
+people like my good friend who refused to discuss with me the exact
+antiquity of the Atlantosaurian? They think of it all as immediate and
+contemporaneous, a vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed
+for them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and the moa
+hob-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and the ammonite; in which the
+tertiary megatherium goes cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs
+and the primary trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris
+Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic club-mosses of
+the Carboniferous period, and to have been successfully hunted by the
+great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a
+picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a
+thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old
+times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid
+Tavern, while Shakespeare and Moliere, crowned with summer roses, sipped
+their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the
+Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to
+produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of
+Napoleon's reception at Memphis by his victorious brother emperors,
+Ramses and Sardanapalus. This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at
+first sight imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing
+descriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a faint
+attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical time the glaring
+anachronisms perpetually committed as regards the vast lapse of
+geological chronology even by well-informed and intelligent people.
+
+We must remember, then, that in dealing with geological time we are
+dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and unimaginable series of aeons,
+each of which occupied its own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each
+of which saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall of
+innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic clock, by whose
+pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief
+lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to
+the events narrated in this evening's _Pall Mall_, is less than a
+second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can
+possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the temples of
+Karnak and the New Law Courts would be absolutely contemporaneous; he
+has no means by which he could discriminate in date between a scarabaeus
+of Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of her Most
+Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent authorities have shown good
+grounds for believing that the Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years
+ago; and everything that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from
+the geological point of view, described as 'recent.' A shell embedded in
+a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years ago, while short and
+swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed in Britain, ages before the
+irruption of the 'Ancient Britons' of our inadequate school-books, is,
+in the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely modern.
+
+But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, that eighty thousand
+years which coincides in part with the fraction of a single swing of the
+cosmical pendulum, there lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and
+years, and centuries, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an
+inconceivable past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves slowly, one
+beyond the other, to our aching vision in the half-deciphered pages of
+the geological record. Before the Glacial Epoch there comes the
+Pliocene, immeasurably longer than the whole expanse of recent time; and
+before that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene,
+immeasurably longer than all the others put together. These three make
+up in their sum the Tertiary period, which entire period can hardly have
+occupied more time in its passage than a single division of the
+Secondary, such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic; and
+the Secondary period, once more, though itself of positively appalling
+duration, seems but a patch (to use the expressive modernism) upon the
+unthinkable and unrealisable vastness of the endless successive Primary
+aeons. So that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott's mystic
+head, 'Time was, Time is, Time will be.' The time we know affords us no
+measure at all for even the nearest and briefest epochs of the time we
+know not; and the time we know not seems to demand still vaster and more
+inexpressible figures as we pry back curiously, with wondering eyes,
+into its dimmest and earliest recesses.
+
+These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one's head swim; let us
+hark back once more from cosmical time to the puny bigness of our
+earthly animals, living or extinct.
+
+If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine and terrestrial,
+we shall soon see that we could bring together at the present moment a
+very goodly collection of extant monsters, most parlous monsters, too,
+each about as fairly big in its own kind as almost anything that has
+ever preceded it. Every age has its own _specialite_ in the way of
+bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly to developing
+overgrown creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in
+another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic
+proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax
+fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or
+the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs
+or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is
+most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist
+who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known
+to us only by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts' and 'Challengers,'
+but then upheaved into snow-clad Alps or vine-covered Apennines, will
+doubtless stand aghast at the huge skeletons of our whales and our
+razorbacks, and will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in
+the exact words of my friend at South Kensington, 'Things used all to be
+so very big in those days, usedn't they?'
+
+Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own cetaceans and of
+'geological' animals is just this. The Atlantosaurus of the Western
+American Jurassic beds, a great erect lizard, is the very largest
+creature ever known to have inhabited this sublunary sphere. His entire
+length is supposed to have reached about a hundred feet (for no complete
+skeleton has ever been discovered), while in stature he appears to have
+stood some thirty feet high, or over. In any case, he was undoubtedly a
+very big animal indeed, for his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet, or
+two feet taller than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a British
+Grenadier. This, of course, implies a very decent total of height and
+size; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a good length of
+seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to eighty, ninety, and
+even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly entitled to say that we have at
+least one species of animal now living which, occasionally at any rate,
+equals in size the very biggest and most colossal form known
+inferentially to geological science. Indeed when we consider the
+extraordinary compactness and rotundity of the modern cetaceans, as
+compared with the tall limbs and straggling skeleton of the huge
+Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined to believe that the tonnage of a
+decent modern rorqual must positively exceed that of the gigantic
+Atlantosaurus, the great lizard of the west, _in propria persona_. I
+doubt, in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deinosaur
+could ever have supported the prodigious weight of a full-grown family
+razor-back whale. The mental picture of these unwieldy monsters hopping
+casually about, like Alice's Gryphon in Tenniel's famous sketch, or
+like that still more parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must be
+left to the vivid imagination of the courteous reader, who may fill in
+the details for himself as well as he is able.
+
+If we turn from the particular comparison of selected specimens (always
+an unfair method of judging) to the general aspect of our contemporary
+fauna, I venture confidently to claim for our own existing human period
+as fine a collection of big animals as any other ever exhibited on this
+planet by any one single rival epoch. Of course, if you are going to
+lump all the extinct monsters and horrors into one imaginary unified
+fauna, regardless of anachronisms, I have nothing more to say to you; I
+will candidly admit that there were more great men in all previous
+generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from Agamemnon to
+Wellington, than there are now existing in this last quarter of our
+really very respectable nineteenth century. But if you compare honestly
+age with age, one at a time, I fearlessly maintain that, so far from
+there being any falling off in the average bigness of things generally
+in these latter days, there are more big things now living than there
+ever were in any one single epoch, even of much longer duration than the
+'recent' period.
+
+I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there
+have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our
+earth--the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type,
+and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial
+tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,'
+because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe
+that any one age has much surpassed another in the general size of its
+fauna, since the Permian Epoch at least; and where we do not get
+geological evidence of the existence of big animals in any particular
+deposit, we may take it for granted, I think, that that deposit was laid
+down under conditions unfavourable to the preservation of the remains of
+large species. For example, the sediment now being accumulated at the
+bottom of the Caspian cannot possibly contain the bones of any creature
+much larger than the Caspian seal, because there are no big species
+there swimming; and yet that fact does not negative the existence in
+other places of whales, elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, and hippopotami.
+Nevertheless, we can only go upon the facts before us; and if we compare
+our existing fauna with the fauna of Jurassic and Pliocene times, we
+shall at any rate be putting it to the test of the severest competition
+that lies within our power under the actual circumstances.
+
+In the Jurassic age there were undoubtedly a great many very big
+reptiles. 'A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth: For
+him did his high sun flame and his river billowing ran: And he felt
+himself in his pride to be nature's crowning race.' There was the
+ichthyosaurus, a fish-like marine lizard, familiar to us all from a
+thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body, his strong flippers,
+his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of staring goggle eyes. The
+ichthyosaurus was certainly a most unpleasant creature to meet alone in
+a narrow strait on a dark night; but if it comes to actual measurement,
+the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed does not exceed
+twenty-five feet from snout to tail. Now, this is an extremely decent
+size for a reptile, as reptiles go; for the crocodile and alligator, the
+two biggest existing lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of sixteen
+feet. But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the
+ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or rock-snakes,
+which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, and measure round the
+waist as much as a London alderman of the noblest proportions. Of
+course, other Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our
+British Megalosaurus only extended twenty-five feet in length, and
+carried weight not exceeding three tons; but, his rival Ceteosaurus
+stood ten feet high, and measured fifty feet from the tip of his snout
+to the end of his tail; while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be
+briefly described as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus as
+one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we have certainly nothing
+at all to come up to these; but our cetaceans, as a group, show an
+assemblage of species which could very favourably compete with the whole
+lot of Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came to
+tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right-whale could easily give points
+to any deinosaur that ever moved upon oolitic continents.
+
+The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as the deinotherium
+and the mastodon, were also, in their way, very big things in livestock;
+but they scarcely exceeded the modern elephant, and by no means came
+near the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same period
+could have held their own well against our existing giraffes, elks, and
+buffaloes; but, taking the group as a group, I don't think there is any
+reason to believe that it beat in general aspect the living fauna of
+this present age.
+
+For few people ever really remember how very many big animals we still
+possess. We have the Indian and the African elephant, the hippopotamus,
+the various rhinoceroses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison,
+the musk ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are
+generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and
+most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and
+ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment
+of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter of
+fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine animals now
+sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct from one another as the
+camel is from the ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New
+Zealand Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale is
+more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our rorqual, one
+hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of the gigantic American
+Atlantosaurus himself. Besides these exceptional monsters, our
+bottleheads reach to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four,
+our hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy. True
+fish generally fall far short of these enormous dimensions, but some of
+the larger sharks attain almost equal size with the biggest cetaceans.
+The common blue shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity,
+would have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe, for the best
+bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias ammonite. I would back our
+modern carcharodon, who grows to forty feet, against any plesiosaurus
+that ever swam the Jurassic sea. As for rhinodon, a gigantic shark of
+the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to a length of fifty
+feet, and is stated often to attain seventy. I will stake my reputation
+upon it that he would have cleared the secondary seas of their great
+saurians in less than a century. When we come to add to these enormous
+marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the great
+snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and manatees, and
+sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared fearlessly to challenge any
+other age that ever existed to enter the lists against our own for
+colossal forms of animal life.
+
+Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of the very big
+animals which people have in their minds when they talk vaguely about
+everything having been so very much bigger 'in those days' have become
+extinct within a very late period, and are often, from the geological
+point of view, quite recent.
+
+For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I suppose no animal is
+more frequently present to the mind of the non-geological speaker, when
+he talks indefinitely about the great extinct monsters, than the
+familiar figure of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the
+mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of yesterday. He was
+hunted here in England by men whose descendants are probably still
+living--at least so Professor Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in
+Siberia his frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the
+wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question as to its
+fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the yesterday of
+geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch that finally killed off
+the last mammoth. Then, again, there is his neighbour, the mastodon.
+That big tertiary proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is
+true, to be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he
+survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene--our day before
+yesterday--and he often fell very likely before the fire-split flint
+weapons of the Abbe Bourgeois' Miocene men. The period that separates
+him from our own day is as nothing compared with the vast and
+immeasurable interval that separates him from the huge marine saurians
+of the Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of time with human
+chronology, the mastodon stands to our own fauna as Beau Brummel stands
+to the modern masher, while the saurians stand to it as the Egyptian and
+Assyrian warriors stand to Lord Wolseley and the followers of the Mahdi.
+
+Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that enormous bird who
+was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to the antelope; a monstrous emu,
+as far surpassing the ostriches of to-day as the ostriches surpass all
+the other fowls of the air. Yet the moa, though now extinct, is in the
+strictest sense quite modern, a contemporary very likely of Queen
+Elizabeth or Queen Anne, exterminated by the Maoris only a very little
+time before the first white settlements in the great southern
+archipelago. It is even doubtful whether the moa did not live down to
+the days of the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori encampments are
+still discovered, with the ashes of the fireplace even now unscattered,
+and the close-gnawed bones of the gigantic bird lying in the very spot
+where the natives left them after their destructive feasts. So, too,
+with the big sharks. Our modern carcharodon, who runs (as I have before
+noted) to forty feet in length, is a very respectable monster indeed, as
+times go; and his huge snapping teeth, which measure nearly two inches
+long by one and a half broad, would disdain to make two bites of the
+able-bodied British seaman. But the naturalists of the 'Challenger'
+expedition dredged up in numbers from the ooze of the Pacific similar
+teeth, five inches long by four wide, so that the sharks to which they
+originally belonged must, by parity of reasoning, have measured nearly a
+hundred feet in length. This, no doubt, beats our biggest existing
+shark, the rhinodon, by some thirty feet. Still, the ooze of the Pacific
+is a quite recent or almost modern deposit, which is even now being
+accumulated on the sea bottom, and there would be really nothing
+astonishing in the discovery that some representatives of these colossal
+carcharodons are to this day swimming about at their lordly leisure
+among the coral reefs of the South Sea Islands. That very cautious
+naturalist, Dr. Guenther, of the British Museum, contents himself indeed
+by merely saying: 'As we have no record of living individuals of that
+bulk having been observed, the gigantic species to which these teeth
+belonged must probably have become extinct within a comparatively recent
+period.'
+
+If these things are so, the question naturally suggests itself: Why
+should certain types of animals have attained their greatest size at
+certain different epochs, and been replaced at others by equally big
+animals of wholly unlike sorts? The answer, I believe, is simply this:
+Because there is not room and food in the world at any one time for more
+than a certain relatively small number of gigantic species. Each great
+group of animals has had successively its rise, its zenith, its
+decadence, and its dotage; each at the period of its highest development
+has produced a considerable number of colossal forms; each has been
+supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different structure,
+which have killed off their predecessors, not indeed by actual stress of
+battle, but by irresistible competition for food and prey. The great
+saurians were thus succeeded by the great mammals, just as the great
+mammals are themselves in turn being ousted, from the land at least, by
+the human species.
+
+Let us look briefly at the succession of big animals in the world, so
+far as we can follow it from the mutilated and fragmentary record of the
+geological remains.
+
+The very earliest existing fossils would lead us to believe what is
+otherwise quite probable, that life on our planet began with very small
+forms--that it passed at first through a baby stage. The animals of the
+Cambrian period are almost all small mollusks, star-fishes, sponges, and
+other simple, primitive types of life. There were as yet no vertebrates
+of any sort, not even fishes, far less amphibians, reptiles, birds, or
+mammals. The veritable giants of the Cambrian world were the
+crustaceans, and especially the trilobites, which, nevertheless, hardly
+exceeded in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest trilobite is
+some two feet long; and though we cannot by any means say that this was
+really the largest form of animal life then existing, owing to the
+extremely broken nature of the geological record, we have at least no
+evidence that anything bigger as yet moved upon the face of the waters.
+The trilobites, which were a sort of triple-tailed crabs (to speak very
+popularly), began in the Cambrian Epoch, attained their culminating
+point in the Silurian, waned in the Devonian, and died out utterly in
+the Carboniferous seas.
+
+It is in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the cuttle-fish
+tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus, the argonaut, the
+squid, and the octopus, first began to make their appearance upon this
+or any other stage. The cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of
+invertebrate animals; they are rapid swimmers; they have large and
+powerful eyes; and they can easily enfold their prey (_teste_ Victor
+Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms. With these natural
+advantages to back them up, it is not surprising that the cuttle family
+rapidly made their mark in the world. They were by far the most advanced
+thinkers and actors of their own age, and they rose almost at once to be
+the dominant creatures of the primaeval ocean in which they swam. There
+were as yet no saurians or whales to dispute the dominion with these
+rapacious cephalopods, and so the cuttle family had things for the time
+all their own way. Before the end of the Silurian Epoch, according to
+that accurate census-taker, M. Barrande, they had blossomed forth into
+no less than 1,622 distinct species. For a single family to develop so
+enormous a variety of separate forms, all presumably derived from a
+single common ancestor, argues, of course, an immense success in life;
+and it also argues a vast lapse of time during which the different
+species were gradually demarcated from one another.
+
+Some of the ammonites, which belonged to this cuttle-fish group, soon
+attained a very considerable size; but a shell known as the orthoceras
+(I wish my subject didn't compel me to use such _very_ long words, but I
+am not personally answerable, thank heaven, for the vagaries of modern
+scientific nomenclature) grew to a bigger size than that of any other
+fossil mollusk, sometimes measuring as much as six feet in total length.
+At what date the gigantic cuttles of the present day first began to make
+their appearance it would be hard to say, for their shell-less bodies
+are so soft that they could leave hardly anything behind in a fossil
+state; but the largest known cuttle, measured by Mr. Gabriel, of
+Newfoundland, was eighty feet in length, including the long arms.
+
+These cuttles are the only invertebrates at all in the running so far as
+colossal size is concerned, and it will be observed that here the
+largest modern specimen immeasurably beats the largest fossil form of
+the same type. I do not say that there were not fossil forms quite as
+big as the gigantic calamaries of our own time--on the contrary, I
+believe there were; but if we go by the record alone we must confess
+that, in the matter of invertebrates at least, the balance of size is
+all in favour of our own period.
+
+The vertebrates first make their appearance, in the shape of fishes,
+towards the close of the Silurian period, the second of the great
+geological epochs. The earliest fish appear to have been small,
+elongated, eel-like creatures, closely resembling the lampreys in
+structure; but they rapidly developed in size and variety, and soon
+became the ruling race in the waters of the ocean, where they maintained
+their supremacy till the rise of the great secondary saurians. Even
+then, in spite of the severe competition thus introduced, and still
+later, in spite of the struggle for life against the huge modern
+cetaceans (the true monarchs of the recent seas), the sharks continued
+to hold their own as producers of gigantic forms; and at the present day
+their largest types probably rank second only to the whales in the whole
+range of animated nature. There seems no reason to doubt that modern
+fish, as a whole, quite equal in size the piscine fauna of any previous
+geological age.
+
+It is somewhat different with the next great vertebrate group, the
+amphibians, represented in our own world only by the frogs, the toads,
+the newts, and the axolotls. Here we must certainly with shame confess
+that the amphibians of old greatly surpassed their degenerate
+descendants in our modern waters. The Japanese salamander, by far the
+biggest among our existing newts, never exceeds a yard in length from
+snout to tail; whereas some of the labyrinthodonts (forgive me once
+more) of the Carboniferous Epoch must have reached at least seven or
+eight feet from stem to stern. But the reason of this falling off is not
+far to seek. When the adventurous newts and frogs of that remote period
+first dropped their gills and hopped about inquiringly on the dry land,
+under the shadow of the ancient tree-ferns and club-mosses, they were
+the only terrestrial vertebrates then existing, and they had the field
+(or, rather, the forest) all to themselves. For a while, therefore, like
+all dominant races for the time being, they blossomed forth at their
+ease into relatively gigantic forms. Frogs as big as donkeys, and efts
+as long as crocodiles, luxuriated to their hearts' content in the marshy
+lowlands, and lorded it freely over the small creatures which they found
+in undisturbed possession of the Carboniferous isles. But as ages passed
+away, and new improvements were slowly invented and patented by survival
+of the fittest in the offices of nature, their own more advanced and
+developed descendants, the reptiles and mammals, got the upper hand
+with them, and soon lived them down in the struggle for life, so that
+this essentially intermediate form is now almost entirely restricted to
+its one adapted seat, the pools and ditches that dry up in summer.
+
+The reptiles, again, are a class in which the biggest modern forms are
+simply nowhere beside the gigantic extinct species. First appearing on
+the earth at the very close of the vast primary periods--in the Permian
+age--they attained in secondary times the most colossal proportions, and
+have certainly never since been exceeded in size by any later forms of
+life in whatever direction. But one must remember that during the heyday
+of the great saurians, there were as yet no birds and no mammals. The
+place now filled in the ocean by the whales and grampuses, as well as
+the place now filled in the great continents by the elephants, the
+rhinoceroses, the hippopotami, and the other big quadrupeds, was then
+filled exclusively by huge reptiles, of the sort rendered familiar to us
+all by the restored effigies on the little island in the Crystal Palace
+grounds. Every dog has his day, and the reptiles had _their_ day in the
+secondary period. The forms into which they developed were certainly
+every whit as large as any ever seen on the surface of this planet, but
+not, as I have already shown, appreciably larger than those of the
+biggest cetaceans known to science in our own time.
+
+During the very period, however, when enaliosaurians and pterodactyls
+were playing such pranks before high heaven as might have made
+contemporary angels weep, if they took any notice of saurian morality, a
+small race of unobserved little prowlers was growing up in the dense
+shades of the neighbouring forests which was destined at last to oust
+the huge reptiles from their empire over earth, and to become in the
+fulness of time the exclusively dominant type of the whole planet. In
+the trias we get the first remains of mammalian life in the shape of
+tiny rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely related to the
+banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present day. Throughout the
+long lapse of the secondary ages, across the lias, the oolite, the
+wealden, and the chalk, we find the mammalian race slowly developing
+into opossums and kangaroos, such as still inhabit the isolated and
+antiquated continent of Australia. Gathering strength all the time for
+the coming contest, increasing constantly in size of brain and keenness
+of intelligence, the true mammals were able at last, towards the close
+of the secondary ages, to enter the lists boldly against the gigantic
+saurians. With the dawn of the tertiary period, the reign of the
+reptiles begins to wane, and the reign of the mammals to set in at last
+in real earnest. In place of the ichthyosaurs we get the huge cetaceans;
+in place of the deinosaurs we get the mammoth and the mastodon; in place
+of the dominant reptile groups we get the first precursors of man
+himself.
+
+The history of the great birds has been somewhat more singular. Unlike
+the other main vertebrate classes, the birds (as if on purpose to
+contradict the proverb) seem never yet to have had their day.
+Unfortunately for them, or at least for their chance of producing
+colossal species, their evolution went on side by side, apparently, with
+that of the still more intelligent and more powerful mammals; so that,
+wherever the mammalian type had once firmly established itself, the
+birds were compelled to limit their aspirations to a very modest and
+humble standard. Terrestrial mammals, however, cannot cross the sea; so
+in isolated regions, such as New Zealand and Madagascar, the birds had
+things all their own way. In New Zealand, there are no indigenous
+quadrupeds at all; and there the huge moa attained to dimensions almost
+equalling those of the giraffe. In Madagascar, the mammalian life was
+small and of low grade, so the gigantic aepyornis became the very biggest
+of all known birds. At the same time, these big species acquired their
+immense size at the cost of the distinctive birdlike habit of flight. A
+flying moa is almost an impossible conception; even the ostriches
+compete practically with the zebras and antelopes rather than with the
+eagles, the condors, or the albatrosses. In like manner, when a pigeon
+found its way to Mauritius, it developed into the practically wingless
+dodo; while in the northern penguins, on their icy perches, the fore
+limbs have been gradually modified into swimming organs, exactly
+analogous to the flippers of the seal.
+
+Are the great animals now passing away and leaving no representatives of
+their greatness to future ages? On land at least that is very probable.
+Man, diminutive man, who, if he walked on all fours, would be no bigger
+than a silly sheep, and who only partially disguises his native
+smallness by his acquired habit of walking erect on what ought to be his
+hind legs--man has upset the whole balanced economy of nature, and is
+everywhere expelling and exterminating before him the great herbivores,
+his predecessors. He needs for his corn and his bananas the fruitful
+plains which were once laid down in prairie or scrubwood. Hence it seems
+not unlikely that the elephant, the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and
+the buffalo must go. But we are still a long way off from that final
+consummation, even on dry land; while as for the water, it appears
+highly probable that there are as good fish still in the sea as ever
+came out of it. Whether man himself, now become the sole dominant animal
+of our poor old planet, will ever develop into Titanic proportions,
+seems far more problematical. The race is now no longer to the swift,
+nor the battle to the strong. Brain counts for more than muscle, and
+mind has gained the final victory over mere matter. Goliath of Gath has
+shrunk into insignificance before the Gatling gun; as in the fairy tales
+of old, it is cunning little Jack with his clever devices who wins the
+day against the heavy, clumsy, muddle-headed giants. Nowadays it is our
+'Minotaurs' and 'Warriors' that are the real leviathans and behemoths of
+the great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the fire-breathing krakens
+of the latter-day seas. Instead of developing individually into huge
+proportions, the human race tends rather to aggregate into vast empires,
+which compete with one another by means of huge armaments, and invent
+mitrailleuses and torpedos of incredible ferocity for their mutual
+destruction. The dragons of the prime that tare each other in their
+slime have yielded place to eighty-ton guns and armour-plated
+turret-ships. Those are the genuine lineal representatives on our modern
+seas of the secondary saurians. Let us hope that some coming geologist
+of the dim future, finding the fossil remains of the sunken 'Captain,'
+or the plated scales of the 'Comte de Grasse,' firmly embedded in the
+upheaved ooze of the existing Atlantic, may shake his head in solemn
+deprecation at the horrid sight, and thank heaven that such hideous
+carnivorous creatures no longer exist in his own day.
+
+
+
+
+FOSSIL FOOD
+
+
+There is something at first sight rather ridiculous in the idea of
+eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mammoths of Siberia were
+first discovered, though they had been dead for at least 80,000 years
+(according to Dr. Croll's minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice
+age), and might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty,
+they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of prehistoric
+Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigerators, that the wolves
+and bears greedily devoured the precious relics for which the
+naturalists of Europe would have been ready gladly to pay the highest
+market price of best beefsteak. Those carnivorous vandals gnawed off the
+skin and flesh with the utmost appreciation, and left nothing but the
+tusks and bones to adorn the galleries of the new Natural History Museum
+at South Kensington. But then wolves and bears, especially in Siberia,
+are not exactly fastidious about the nature of their meat diet.
+Furthermore, some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the
+stalagmitic floor of caves, in England and elsewhere, presumably of
+about the same age as the Siberian mammoths, still contain enough animal
+matter to produce a good strong stock for antediluvian broth, which has
+been scientifically described by a high authority as pre-Adamite jelly.
+The congress of naturalists at Tuebingen a few years since had a smoking
+tureen of this cave-bone soup placed upon the dinner-table at their
+hotel one evening, and pronounced it with geological enthusiasm
+'scarcely inferior to prime ox-tail.' But men of science, too, are
+accustomed to trying unsavoury experiments, which would go sadly against
+the grain with less philosophic and more squeamish palates. They think
+nothing of tasting a caterpillar that birds will not touch, in order to
+discover whether it owes its immunity from attack to some nauseous,
+bitter, or pungent flavouring; and they even advise you calmly to
+discriminate between two closely similar species of snails by trying
+which of them when chewed has a delicate _soupcon_ of oniony aroma. So
+that naturalists in this matter, as the children say, don't count: their
+universal thirst for knowledge will prompt them to drink anything, down
+even to _consomme_ of quaternary cave-bear.
+
+There is one form of fossil food, however, which appears constantly upon
+all our tables at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day, and which is
+so perfectly familiar to every one of us that we almost forget entirely
+its immensely remote geological origin. The salt in our salt-cellars is
+a fossil product, laid down ages ago in some primaeval Dead Sea or
+Caspian, and derived in all probability (through the medium of the
+grocer) from the triassic rocks of Cheshire or Worcestershire. Since
+that thick bed of rock-salt was first precipitated upon the dry floor of
+some old evaporated inland sea, the greater part of the geological
+history known to the world at large has slowly unrolled itself through
+incalculable ages. The dragons of the prime have begun and finished
+their long (and Lord Tennyson says slimy) race. The fish-like saurians
+and flying pterodactyls of the secondary period have come into existence
+and gone out of it gracefully again. The whole family of birds has been
+developed and diversified into its modern variety of eagles and titmice.
+The beasts of the field have passed through sundry stages of mammoth
+and mastodon, of sabre-toothed lion and huge rhinoceros. Man himself has
+progressed gradually from the humble condition of a 'hairy arboreal
+quadruped'--these bad words are Mr. Darwin's own--to the glorious
+elevation of an erect, two-handed creature, with a county suffrage
+question and an intelligent interest in the latest proceedings of the
+central divorce court. And after all those manifold changes, compared to
+which the entire period of English history, from the landing of Julius
+Caesar to the appearance of this present volume (to take two important
+landmarks), is as one hour to a human lifetime, we quietly dig up the
+salt to-day from that dry lake bottom and proceed to eat it with the
+eggs laid by the hens this morning for this morning's breakfast, just as
+though the one food-stuff were not a whit more ancient or more dignified
+in nature than the other. Why, mammoth steak is really quite modern and
+commonplace by the side of the salt in the salt-cellar that we treat so
+cavalierly every day of our ephemeral existence.
+
+The way salt got originally deposited in these great rock beds is very
+well illustrated for us by the way it is still being deposited in the
+evaporating waters of many inland seas. Every schoolboy knows of course
+(though some persons who are no longer schoolboys may just possibly have
+forgotten) that the Caspian is in reality only a little bit of the
+Mediterranean, which has been cut off from the main sea by the gradual
+elevation of the country between them. For many ages the intermediate
+soil has been quite literally rising in the world; but to this day a
+continuous chain of salt lakes and marshes runs between the Caspian and
+the Black Sea, and does its best to keep alive the memory of the time
+when they were both united in a single basin. All along this intervening
+tract, once sea but now dry land, banks of shells belonging to kinds
+still living in the Caspian and the Black Sea alike testify to the old
+line of water communication. One fine morning (date unknown) the
+intermediate belt began to rise up between them; the water was all
+pushed off into the Caspian, but the shells remained to tell the tale
+even unto this day.
+
+Now, when a bit of the sea gets cut off in this way from the main ocean,
+evaporation of its waters generally takes place rather faster than the
+return supply of rain by rivers and lesser tributaries. In other words,
+the inland sea or salt lake begins slowly to dry up. This is now just
+happening in the Caspian, which is in fact a big pool in course of being
+slowly evaporated. By-and-by a point is reached when the water can no
+longer hold in solution the amount of salts of various sorts that it
+originally contained. In the technical language of chemists and
+physicists it begins to get supersaturated. Then the salts are thrown
+down as a sediment at the bottom of the sea or lake, exactly as crust
+formed on the bottom of a kettle. Gypsum is the first material to be so
+thrown down, because it is less soluble than common salt, and therefore
+sooner got rid of. It forms a thick bottom layer in the bed of all
+evaporating inland seas; and as plaster of Paris it not only gives rise
+finally to artistic monstrosities hawked about the streets for the
+degradation of national taste, but also plays an important part in the
+manufacture of bonbons, the destruction of the human digestion, and the
+ultimate ruin of the dominant white European race. Only about a third of
+the water in a salt lake need be evaporated before the gypsum begins to
+be deposited in a solid layer over its whole bed; it is not till 93 per
+cent. of the water has gone, and only 7 per cent. is left, that common
+salt begins to be thrown down. When that point of intensity is reached,
+the salt, too, falls as a sediment to the bottom, and there overlies the
+gypsum deposit. Hence all the world over, wherever we come upon a bed
+of rock salt, it almost invariably lies upon a floor of solid gypsum.
+
+The Caspian, being still a very respectable modern sea, constantly
+supplied with fresh water from the surrounding rivers, has not yet begun
+by any means to deposit salt on its bottom from its whole mass; but the
+shallow pools and long bays around its edge have crusts of beautiful
+rose-coloured salt-crystals forming upon their sides; and as these
+lesser basins gradually dry up, the sand, blown before the wind, slowly
+drifts over them, so as to form miniature rock-salt beds on a very small
+scale. Nevertheless, the young and vigorous Caspian only represents the
+first stage in the process of evaporation of an inland sea. It is still
+fresh enough to form the abode of fish and mollusks; and the
+irrepressible young lady of the present generation is perhaps even aware
+that it contains numbers of seals, being in fact the seat of one of the
+most important and valuable seal-fisheries in the whole world. It may be
+regarded as a typical example of a yet youthful and lively inland sea.
+
+The Dead Sea, on the other hand, is an old and decrepit salt lake in a
+very advanced state of evaporation. It lies several feet below the level
+of the Mediterranean, just as the Caspian lies several feet below the
+level of the Black Sea; and as in both cases the surface must once have
+been continuous, it is clear that the water of either sheet must have
+dried up to a very considerable extent. But, while the Caspian has
+shrunk only to 85 feet below the Black Sea, the Dead Sea has shrunk to
+the enormous depth of 1,292 feet below the Mediterranean. Every now and
+then, some enterprising De Lesseps or other proposes to dig a canal from
+the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and so re-establish the old high
+level. The effect of this very revolutionary proceeding would be to
+flood the entire Jordan Valley, connect the Sea of Galilee with the Dead
+Sea, and play the dickens generally with Scripture geography, to the
+infinite delight of Sunday school classes. Now, when the Dead Sea first
+began its independent career as a separate sheet of water on its own
+account, it no doubt occupied the whole bed of this imaginary engineers'
+lake--spreading, if not from Dan to Beersheba, at any rate from Dan to
+Edom, or, in other words, along the whole Jordan Valley from the Sea of
+Galilee and even the Waters of Merom to the southern desert. (I will not
+insult the reader's intelligence and orthodoxy by suggesting that
+perhaps he may not be precisely certain as to the exact position of the
+Waters of Merom; but I will merely recommend him just to refresh his
+memory by turning to his atlas, as this is an opportunity which may not
+again occur.) The modern Dead Sea is the last shrunken relic of such a
+considerable ancient lake. Its waters are now so very concentrated and
+so very nasty that no fish or other self-respecting animal can consent
+to live in them; and so buoyant that a man can't drown himself, even if
+he tries, because the sea is saturated with salts of various sorts till
+it has become a kind of soup or porridge, in which a swimmer floats,
+will he nill he. Persons in the neighbourhood who wish to commit suicide
+are therefore obliged to go elsewhere: much as in Tasmania, the
+healthiest climate in the world, people who want to die are obliged to
+run across for a week to Sydney or Melbourne.
+
+The waters of the Dead Sea are thus in the condition of having already
+deposited almost all their gypsum, as well as the greater part of the
+salt they originally contained. They are, in fact, much like sea water
+which has been boiled down till it has reached the state of a thick
+salty liquid; and though most of the salt is now already deposited in a
+deep layer on the bottom, enough still remains in solution to make the
+Dead Sea infinitely salter than the general ocean. At the same time,
+there are a good many other things in solution in sea water besides
+gypsum and common salt; such as chloride of magnesia sulphate of
+potassium, and other interesting substances with pretty chemical names,
+well calculated to endear them at first sight to the sentimental
+affections of the general public. These other by-contents of the water
+are often still longer in getting deposited than common salt; and, owing
+to their intermixture in a very concentrated form with the mother liquid
+of the Dead Sea, the water of that evaporating lake is not only salt but
+also slimy and fetid to the last degree, its taste being accurately
+described as half brine, half rancid oil. Indeed, the salt has been so
+far precipitated already that there is now five times as much chloride
+of magnesium left in the water as there is common salt. By the way, it
+is a lucky thing for us that these various soluble minerals are of such
+constitution as to be thrown down separately at different stages of
+concentration in the evaporating liquid; for, if it were otherwise, they
+would all get deposited together, and we should find on all old salt
+lake beds only a mixed layer of gypsum, salt, and other chlorides and
+sulphates, absolutely useless for any practical human purpose. In that
+case, we should be entirely dependent upon marine salt pans and
+artificial processes for our entire salt supply. As it is, we find the
+materials deposited one above another in regular layers; first, the
+gypsum at the bottom; then the rock-salt; and last of all, on top, the
+more soluble mineral constituents.
+
+The Great Salt Lake of Utah, sacred to the memory of Brigham Young,
+gives us an example of a modern saline sheet of very different origin,
+since it is in fact not a branch of the sea at all, but a mere shrunken
+remnant of a very large fresh-water lake system, like that of the
+still-existing St. Lawrence chain. Once upon a time, American geologists
+say, a huge sheet of water, for which they have even invented a
+definite name, Lake Bonneville, occupied a far larger valley among the
+outliers of the Rocky Mountains, measuring 300 miles in one direction by
+180 miles in the other. Beside this primitive Superior lay a second
+great sheet--an early Huron--(Lake Lahontan, the geologists call it)
+almost as big, and equally of fresh water. By-and-by--the precise dates
+are necessarily indefinite--some change in the rainfall, unregistered by
+any contemporary 'New York Herald,' made the waters of these big lakes
+shrink and evaporate. Lake Lahontan shrank away like Alice in
+Wonderland, till there was absolutely nothing left of it; Lake
+Bonneville shrank till it attained the diminished size of the existing
+Great Salt Lake. Terrace after terrace, running in long parallel lines
+on the sides of the Wahsatch Mountains around, mark the various levels
+at which it rested for awhile on its gradual downward course. It is
+still falling indeed; and the plain around is being gradually uncovered,
+forming the white salt-encrusted shore with which all visitors to the
+Mormon city are so familiar.
+
+But why should the water have become briny? Why should the evaporation
+of an old Superior produce at last a Great Salt Lake? Well, there is a
+small quantity of salt in solution even in the freshest of lakes and
+ponds, brought down to them by the streams or rivers; and, as the water
+of the hypothetical Lake Bonneville slowly evaporated, the salt and
+other mineral constituents remained behind. Thus the solution grew
+constantly more and more concentrated, till at the present day it is
+extremely saline. Professor Geikie (to whose works the present paper is
+much indebted) found that he floated on the water in spite of himself;
+and the under sides of the steps at the bathing-places are all encrusted
+with short stalactites of salt, produced from the drip of the bathers as
+they leave the water. The mineral constituents, however, differ
+considerably in their proportions from those found in true salt lakes of
+marine origin; and the point at which the salt is thrown down is still
+far from having been reached. Great Salt Lake must simmer in the sun for
+many centuries yet before the point arrives at which (as cooks say) it
+begins to settle.
+
+That is the way in which deposits of salt are being now produced on the
+world's surface, in preparation for that man of the future who, as we
+learn from a duly constituted authority, is to be hairless, toothless,
+web-footed, and far too respectable ever to be funny. Man of the present
+derives his existing salt-supply chiefly from beds of rock-salt
+similarly laid down against his expected appearance some hundred
+thousand aeons or so ago. (An aeon is a very convenient geological unit
+indeed to reckon by; as nobody has any idea how long it is, they can't
+carp at you for a matter of an aeon or two one way or the other.)
+Rock-salt is found in most parts of the world, in beds of very various
+ages. The great Salt Range of the Punjaub is probably the earliest in
+date of all salt deposits; it was laid down at the bottom of some very
+ancient Asiatic Mediterranean, whose last shrunken remnant covered the
+upper basin of the Indus and its tributaries during the Silurian age.
+Europe had then hardly begun to be; and England was probably still
+covered from end to end by the primaeval ocean. From this very primitive
+salt deposit the greater part of India and Central Asia is still
+supplied; and the Indian Government makes a pretty penny out of the dues
+in the shape of the justly detested salt-tax--a tax especially odious
+because it wrings the fraction of a farthing even from those unhappy
+agricultural labourers who have never tasted ghee with their rice.
+
+The thickness of the beds in each salt deposit of course depends
+entirely upon the area of the original sea or salt-lake, and the length
+of time during which the evaporation went on. Sometimes we may get a
+mere film of salt; sometimes a solid bed six hundred feet thick.
+Perfectly pure rock-salt is colourless and transparent; but one doesn't
+often find it pure. Alas for a degenerate world! even in its original
+site, Nature herself has taken the trouble to adulterate it beforehand.
+(If she hadn't done so, one may be perfectly sure that commercial
+enterprise would have proved equal to the occasion in the long run.) But
+the adulteration hasn't spoilt the beauty of the salt; on the contrary,
+it serves, like rouge, to give a fine fresh colour where none existed.
+When iron is the chief colouring matter, rock-salt assumes a beautiful
+clear red tint; in other cases it is emerald green or pale blue. As a
+rule, salt is prepared from it for table by a regular process; but it
+has become a fad of late with a few people to put crystals of native
+rock-salt on their tables; and they decidedly look very pretty, and have
+a certain distinctive flavour of their own that is not unpleasant.
+
+Our English salt supply is chiefly derived from the Cheshire and
+Worcestershire salt-regions, which are of triassic age. Many of the
+places at which the salt is mined have names ending in _wich_, such as
+Northwich, Middlewich, Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich.
+This termination _wich_ is itself curiously significant, as Canon Isaac
+Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea.
+The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans
+on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and
+Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still
+known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the
+inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the familiar
+name, a wich; and the places where the salt was manufactured came to be
+known as wych-houses. Droitwich, for example, was originally such a
+wich, where the droits or dues on salt were paid at the time when
+William the Conqueror's commissioners drew up their great survey for
+Domesday Book. But the good, easy-going mediaeval people who gave these
+quaint names to the inland wiches had probably no idea that they were
+really and truly dried-up bays, and that the salt they mined from their
+pits was genuine ancient bay-salt, the deposit of an old inland sea,
+evaporated by slow degrees a countless number of ages since, exactly as
+the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake are getting evaporated in our own
+time.
+
+Such, nevertheless, is actually the case. A good-sized Caspian used to
+spread across the centre of England and north of Ireland in triassic
+times, bounded here and there, as well as Dr. Hull can make out, by the
+Welsh Mountains, the Cheviots, and the Donegal Hills, and with the Peak
+of Derbyshire and the Isle of Man standing out as separate islands from
+its blue expanse. (We will beg the question that the English seas were
+then blue. They are certainly marked so in a very fine cerulean tint on
+Dr. Hull's map of Triassic Britain.) Slowly, like most other inland
+seas, this early British Caspian began to lose weight and to shrivel
+away to ever smaller dimensions. In Devonshire, where it appears to have
+first dried up, we get no salt, but only red marl, with here and there a
+cubical cast, filling a hole once occupied by rock-salt, though the
+percolation of the rain has long since melted out that very soluble
+substance, and replaced it by a mere mould in the characteristic square
+shape of salt crystals. But Worcestershire and Cheshire were the seat of
+the inland sea when it had contracted to the dimensions of a mere salt
+lake, and begun to throw down its dissolved saline materials. One of the
+Cheshire beds is sometimes a hundred feet thick of almost pure and
+crystalline rock-salt. The absence of fossils shows that animals must
+have had as bad a time of it there as in the Dead Sea of our modern
+Palestine. The Droitwich brine-pits have been known for many centuries,
+since they were worked (and taxed) even before the Norman Conquest, as
+were many other similar wells elsewhere. But the actual mining of
+rock-salt as such in England dates back only as far as the reign of King
+Charles II. of blessed memory, or more definitely to the very year in
+which the 'Pilgrim's Progress' was conceived and written by John Bunyan.
+During that particular summer, an enterprising person at Nantwich had
+sunk a shaft for coal, which he failed to find; but on his way down he
+came unexpectedly across the bed of rock-salt, then for the first time
+discovered as a native mineral. Since that fortunate accident the beds
+have been so energetically worked and the springs so energetically
+pumped that some of the towns built on top of them have got undermined,
+and now threaten from year to year, in the most literal sense, to cave
+in. In fact, one or two subsidences of considerable extent have already
+taken place, due in part no doubt to the dissolving action of rain
+water, but in part also to the mode of working. The mines are approached
+by a shaft; and, when you get down to the level of the old sea bottom,
+you find yourself in a sort of artificial gallery, whose roof, with all
+the world on top of it, is supported every here and there by massive
+pillars about fifteen feet thick. Considering that the salt lies often a
+hundred and fifty yards deep, and that these pillars have to bear the
+weight of all that depth of solid rock, it is not surprising that
+subsidences should sometimes occur in abandoned shafts, where the water
+is allowed to collect, and slowly dissolve away the supporting columns.
+
+Salt is a necessary article of food for animals, but in a far less
+degree than is commonly supposed. Each of us eats on an average about
+ten times as much salt as we actually require. In this respect popular
+notions are as inexact as in the very similar case of the supply of
+phosphorus. Because phosphorus is needful for brain action, people jump
+forthwith to the absurd conclusion that fish and other foods rich in
+phosphates ought to be specially good for students preparing for
+examination, great thinkers, and literary men. Mark Twain indeed once
+advised a poetical aspirant, who sent him a few verses for his critical
+opinion, that fish was very feeding for the brains; he would recommend a
+couple of young whales to begin upon. As a matter of fact, there is more
+phosphorus in our daily bread than would have sufficed Shakespeare to
+write 'Hamlet,' or Newton to discover the law of gravitation. It isn't
+phosphorus that most of us need, but brains to burn it in. A man might
+as well light a fire in a carriage, because coal makes an engine go, as
+hope to mend the pace of his dull pate by eating fish for the sake of
+the phosphates.
+
+The question still remains, How did the salt originally get there? After
+all, when we say that it was produced, as rock-salt, by evaporation of
+the water in inland seas, we leave unanswered the main problem, How did
+the brine in solution get into the sea at all in the first place? Well,
+one might almost as well ask, How did anything come to be upon the earth
+at any time, in any way? How did the sea itself get there? How did this
+planet swim into existence at all? In the Indian mythology the world is
+supported upon the back of an elephant, who is supported upon the back
+of a tortoise; but what the tortoise in the last resort is supported
+upon the Indian philosophers prudently say not. If we once begin thus
+pushing back our inquiries into the genesis of the cosmos, we shall find
+our search retreating step after step _ad infinitum_. The negro
+preacher, describing the creation of Adam, and drawing slightly upon
+his imagination, observed that when our prime forefather first came to
+consciousness he found himself 'sot up agin a fence.' One of his hearers
+ventured sceptically to ejaculate, 'Den whar dat fence come from,
+ministah?' The outraged divine scratched his grey wool reflectively for
+a moment, and replied, after a pause, with stern solemnity, 'Tree more
+ob dem questions will undermine de whole system ob teology.'
+
+However, we are not permitted humbly to imitate the prudent reticence of
+the Indian philosophers. In these days of evolution hypotheses, and
+nebular theories, and kinetic energy, and all the rest of it, the
+question why the sea is salt rises up irrepressible and imperatively
+demands to get itself answered. There was a sapient inquirer, recently
+deceased, who had a short way out of this difficulty. He held that the
+sea was only salt because of all the salt rivers that run into it.
+Considering that the salt rivers are themselves salted by passing
+through salt regions, or being fed by saline springs, all of which
+derive their saltness from deposits laid down long ago by evaporation
+from earlier seas or lake basins, this explanation savours somewhat of
+circularity. It amounts in effect to saying that the sea is salt because
+of the large amount of saline matter which it holds in solution. Cheese
+is also a caseous preparation of milk; the duties of an archdeacon are
+to perform archidiaconal functions; and opium puts one to sleep because
+it possesses a soporific virtue.
+
+Apart from such purely verbal explanations of the saltness of the sea,
+however, one can only give some such account of the way it came to be
+'the briny' as the following:--
+
+This world was once a haze of fluid light, as the poets and the men of
+science agree in informing us. As soon as it began to cool down a
+little, the heavier materials naturally sank towards the centre, while
+the lighter, now represented by the ocean and the atmosphere, floated in
+a gaseous condition on the outside. But the great envelope of vapour
+thus produced did not consist merely of the constituents of air and
+water; many other gases and vapours mingled with them, as they still do
+to a far less extent in our existing atmosphere. By-and-by, as the
+cooling and condensing process continued, the water settled down from
+the condition of steam into one of a liquid at a dull red heat. As it
+condensed, it carried down with it a great many other substances, held
+in solution, whose component elements had previously existed in the
+primitive gaseous atmosphere. Thus the early ocean which covered the
+whole earth was in all probability not only very salt, but also quite
+thick with other mineral matters close up to the point of saturation. It
+was full of lime, and raw flint, and sulphates, and many other
+miscellaneous bodies. Moreover, it was not only just as salt as at the
+present day, but even a great deal salter. For from that time to this
+evaporation has constantly been going on in certain shallow isolated
+areas, laying down great beds of gypsum and then of salt, which still
+remain in the solid condition, while the water has, of course, been
+correspondingly purified. The same thing has likewise happened in a
+slightly different way with the lime and flint, which have been
+separated from the water chiefly by living animals, and afterwards
+deposited on the bottom of the ocean in immense layers as limestone,
+chalk, sandstone, and clay.
+
+Thus it turns out that in the end all our sources of salt-supply are
+alike ultimately derived from the briny ocean. Whether we dig it out as
+solid rock-salt from the open quarries of the Punjaub, or pump it up
+from brine-wells sunk into the triassic rocks of Cheshire, or evaporate
+it direct in the salt-pans of England and the shallow _salines_ of the
+Mediterranean shore, it is still at bottom essentially sea-salt.
+However distant the connection may seem, our salt is always in the last
+resort obtained from the material held in solution in some ancient or
+modern sea. Even the saline springs of Canada and the Northern States of
+America, where the wapiti love to congregate, and the noble hunter lurks
+in the thicket to murder them unperceived, derive their saltness, as an
+able Canadian geologist has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still
+retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates
+form the earliest known life-bearing rocks. To the Homeric Greek, as to
+Mr. Dick Swiveller, the ocean was always the briny: to modern science,
+on the other hand (which neither of those worthies would probably have
+appreciated at its own valuation), the briny is always the oceanic. The
+fossil food which we find to-day on all our dinner-tables dates back its
+origin primarily to the first seas that ever covered the surface of our
+planet, and secondarily to the great rock deposits of the dried-up
+triassic inland sea. And yet even our men of science habitually describe
+that ancient mineral as common salt.
+
+
+
+
+OGBURY BARROWS
+
+
+We went to Ogbury Barrows on an archaeological expedition. And as the
+very name of archaeology, owing to a serious misconception incidental to
+human nature, is enough to deter most people from taking any further
+interest in our proceedings when once we got there, I may as well begin
+by explaining, for the benefit of those who have never been to one, the
+method and manner of an archaeological outing.
+
+The first thing you have to do is to catch your secretary. The genuine
+secretary is born, not made; and therefore you have got to catch him,
+not to appoint him. Appointing a secretary is pure vanity and vexation
+of spirit; you must find the right man made ready to your hand; and when
+you have found him you will soon see that he slips into the onerous
+duties of the secretariat as if to the manner born, by pure instinct.
+The perfect secretary is an urbane old gentleman of mature years and
+portly bearing, a dignified representative of British archaeology, with
+plenty of money and plenty of leisure, possessing a heaven-born genius
+for organisation, and utterly unhampered by any foolish views of his own
+about archaeological research or any other kindred subject. The secretary
+who archaeologises is lost. His business is not to discourse of early
+English windows or of palaeolithic hatchets, of buried villas or of
+Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile-work or of dolichocephalic skulls,
+but to provide abundant brakes, drags, and carriages, to take care that
+the owners of castles and baronial residences throw them open (with
+lunch provided) to the ardent student of British antiquities, to see
+that all the old ladies have somebody to talk to, and all the young ones
+somebody to flirt with, and generally to superintend the morals,
+happiness, and personal comfort of some fifty assorted scientific
+enthusiasts. The secretary who diverges from these his proper and
+elevated functions into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the
+antiquity of man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility of
+woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest (when he should
+by rights be concentrating the whole force of his massive intellect upon
+the arduous task of arranging for dinner), proves himself at once
+unworthy of his high position, and should forthwith be deposed from the
+secretariat by public acclamation.
+
+Having once entrapped your perfect secretary, you set him busily to work
+beforehand to make all the arrangements for your expected excursion, the
+archaeologists generally cordially recognising the important principle
+that he pays all the expenses he incurs out of his own pocket, and
+drives splendid bargains on their account with hotel-keepers, coachmen,
+railway companies, and others to feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at
+fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition. You also
+understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the
+neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open
+their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the
+owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little
+preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your
+archaeologists and set out upon your intended tour.
+
+An archaeologist, it should be further premised, has no necessary
+personal connection with archaeology in any way. He (or she) is a human
+being, of assorted origin, age, and sex, known as an archaeologist then
+and there on no other ground than the possession of a ticket (price
+half-a-guinea) for that particular archaeological meeting. Who would not
+be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting terms? Most
+archaeologists within my own private experience, indeed, are ladies of
+various ages, many of them elderly, but many more young and pretty,
+whose views about the styles of English architecture or the exact
+distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the vaguest and
+most shadowy possible description. You all drive in brakes together to
+the various points of interest in the surrounding country. When you
+arrive at a point of interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his
+head reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there is
+fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are burning to learn all
+about it, you put your hand up to your ear, and assume an attitude of
+profound attention. If you are not burning with the desire for
+information, you stroll off casually about the grounds and gardens with
+the prettiest and pleasantest among the archaeological sisters, whose
+acquaintance you have made on the way thither. Sometimes it rains, and
+then you obtain an admirable chance of offering your neighbour the
+protection afforded by your brand-new silk umbrella. By-and-by the dull
+paper gets finished, and somebody who lives in an adjoining house
+volunteers to provide you with luncheon. Then you adjourn to the parish
+church, where an old gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and
+tedious account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not to be
+found upon the walls of that poky little building. Nobody listens to
+him; but everybody carries away a vague impression that some one or
+other, temp. Henry the Second, married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of
+Sir Ralph de Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and
+twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble family with a
+correspondingly varied pedigree. Finally, you take tea and ices upon
+somebody's lawn, by special invitation, and drive home, not without much
+laughter, in the cool of the evening to an excellent table d'hote dinner
+at the marvellously cheap hotel, presided over by the ever-smiling and
+urbane secretary. That is what we mean nowadays by being a member of an
+archaeological association.
+
+It was on just such a pleasant excursion that we all went to Ogbury
+Barrows. I was overflowing, myself, with bottled-up information on the
+subject of those two prehistoric tumuli; for Ogbury Barrows have been
+the hobby of my lifetime; but I didn't read a paper upon their origin
+and meaning, first, because the secretary very happily forgot to ask me,
+and secondly, because I was much better employed in psychological
+research into the habits and manners of an extremely pretty
+pink-and-white archaeologist who stood beside me. Instead, therefore, of
+boring her and my other companions with all my accumulated store of
+information about Ogbury Barrows, I locked it up securely in my own
+bosom, with the fell design of finally venting it all at once in one
+vast flood upon the present article.
+
+Ogbury Barrows, I would have said (had it not been for the praiseworthy
+negligence of our esteemed secretary), stand upon the very verge of a
+great chalk-down, overlooking a broad and fertile belt of valley, whose
+slopes are terraced in the quaintest fashion with long parallel lines of
+obviously human and industrial origin. The terracing must have been done
+a very long time ago indeed, for it is a device for collecting enough
+soil on a chalky hillside to grow corn in. Now, nobody ever tried to
+grow corn on open chalk-downs in any civilised period of history until
+the present century, because the downs are so much more naturally
+adapted for sheep-walks that the attempt to turn them into waving
+cornfields would never occur to anybody on earth except a barbarian or
+an advanced agriculturist. But when Ogbury Downs were originally
+terraced, I don't doubt that the primitive system of universal tribal
+warfare still existed everywhere in Britain. This system is aptly summed
+up in the familiar modern Black Country formula, 'Yon's a stranger.
+'Eave 'arf a brick at him.' Each tribe was then perpetually at war with
+every other tribe on either side of it: a simple plan which rendered
+foreign tariffs quite unnecessary, and most effectually protected home
+industries. The consequence was, each district had to produce for its
+own tribe all the necessaries of life, however ill-adapted by nature for
+their due production: because traffic and barter did not yet exist, and
+the only form ever assumed by import trade was that of raiding on your
+neighbours' territories, and bringing back with you whatever you could
+lay hands on. So the people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to
+grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and,
+in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil
+and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt
+as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in place by artificial
+barriers.
+
+On the top of the down, overlooking this curious vale of prehistoric
+terraces, rise the twin heights of Ogbury Barrows, familiar landmarks to
+all the country side around for many miles. One of them is a tall,
+circular mound or tumulus surrounded by a deep and well-marked trench:
+the other, which stands a little on one side, is long and narrow, shaped
+exactly like a modern grave, but of comparatively gigantic and colossal
+proportions. Even the little children of Ogbury village have noticed
+its close resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in
+their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when they play upon its
+summit that a great giant in golden armour lies buried in a stone vault
+underneath. But if only they knew the real truth, they would say instead
+that that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of a short,
+squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature to the Lapps and
+Finns, and about as much unlike a giant as human nature could easily
+manage. It maybe regarded as a general truth of history that the
+greatest men don't by any means always get the biggest monument.
+
+The archaeologists in becoming prints who went with us to the top of
+Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised (with demonstrative parasol) that
+'these mounds must have been made a very long time ago, indeed.' So in
+fact they were: but though they stand now so close together, and look so
+much like sisters and contemporaries, one is ages older than the other,
+and was already green and grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the
+fresh earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its side,
+above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic warrior. Let us begin
+by considering the oldest first, and then pass on to its younger sister.
+
+Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument indeed. Not, to be sure,
+one quarter so ancient as the days of the extremely old master who
+carved the mammoth on the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the
+Dordogne, and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in an earlier
+portion of this volume: compared with that very antique personage, our
+long barrow on Ogbury hill-top may in fact be looked upon as almost
+modern. Still, when one isn't talking in geological language, ten or
+twenty thousand years may be fairly considered a very long time as time
+goes: and I have little doubt that from ten to twenty thousand years
+have passed since the short, squat chieftain aforesaid was first
+committed to his final resting-place in Ogbury Long Barrow. Two years
+since, we local archaeologists--_not_ in becoming prints this
+time--opened the barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we
+expected, the 'stone vault' of the popular tradition, proving
+conclusively that some faint memory of the original interment had clung
+for all those long years around the grassy pile of that ancient tumulus.
+Its centre, in fact, was occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big
+Sarsen stones from the surrounding hillsides; and in the midst of the
+house of death thus rudely constructed lay the mouldering skeleton of
+its original possessor--an old prehistoric Mongoloid chieftain. When I
+stood for the first moment within that primaeval palace of the dead,
+never before entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I
+must own, something like a burglar, something like a body-snatcher,
+something like a resurrection man, but most of all like a happy
+archaeologist.
+
+The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in fact, a buried
+cromlech, covered all over (until we opened it) by the earth of the
+barrow. Almost every cromlech, wherever found, was once, I believe, the
+central chamber of just such a long barrow: but in some instances wind
+and rain have beaten down and washed away the surrounding earth (and
+then we call it a 'Druidical monument'), while in others the mound still
+encloses its original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric
+tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves are quite
+modern and commonplace personages compared with the short, squat
+chieftains of the long barrows. For all the indications we found in the
+long barrow at Ogbury (as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us
+at once to the strange conclusion that our new acquaintance, the
+skeleton, had once been a living cannibal king of the newer stone-age in
+Britain.
+
+The only weapons or implements we could discover in the barrow were two
+neatly chipped flint arrowheads, and a very delicate ground greenstone
+hatchet, or tomahawk. These were the weapons of the dead chief, laid
+beside him in the stone chamber where we found his skeleton, for his
+future use in his underground existence. A piece or two of rude
+hand-made pottery, no doubt containing food and drink for the ghost, had
+also been placed close to his side: but they had mouldered away with
+time and damp, till it was quite impossible to recover more than a few
+broken and shapeless fragments. There was no trace of metal in any way:
+whereas if the tribesmen of our friend the skeleton had known at all the
+art of smelting, we may be sure some bronze axe or spearhead would have
+taken the place of the flint arrows and the greenstone tomahawk: for
+savages always bury a man's best property together with his corpse,
+while civilised men take care to preserve it with pious care in their
+own possession, and to fight over it strenuously in the court of
+probate.
+
+The chief's own skeleton lay, or rather squatted, in the most
+undignified attitude, in the central chamber. His people when they put
+him there evidently considered that he was to sit at his ease, as he had
+been accustomed to do in his lifetime, in the ordinary savage squatting
+position, with his knees tucked up till they reached his chin, and his
+body resting entirely on the heels and haunches. The skeleton was
+entire: but just outside and above the stone vault we came upon a number
+of other bones, which told another and very different story. Some of
+them were the bones of the old prehistoric short-horned ox: others
+belonged to wild boars, red deer, and sundry similar animals, for the
+most part skulls and feet only, the relics of the savage funeral feast.
+It was clear that as soon as the builders of the barrow had erected the
+stone chamber of their dead chieftain, and placed within it his honoured
+remains, they had held a great banquet on the spot, and, after killing
+oxen and chasing red deer, had eaten all the eatable portions, and
+thrown the skulls, horns, and hoofs on top of the tomb, as offerings to
+the spirit of their departed master. But among these relics of the
+funeral baked meats there were some that specially attracted our
+attention--a number of broken human skulls, mingled indiscriminately
+with the horns of deer and the bones of oxen. It was impossible to look
+at them for a single moment, and not to recognise that we had here the
+veritable remains of a cannibal feast, a hundred centuries ago, on
+Ogbury hill-top.
+
+Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with a sword or
+bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt implement, presumably either
+a club or a stone tomahawk. The skull of the great chief inside was
+entire and his skeleton unmutilated: but we could see at a glance that
+the remains we found huddled together on the top were those of slaves or
+prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead chieftain's tomb, and eaten
+with the other products of the chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an
+inner chamber behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger
+relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skeletons squatted
+there in the same curious attitude as their lord's, as if in attendance
+upon him in a neighbouring ante-chamber. They were the skeletons of
+women--so our professional bone-scanner immediately told us--and each of
+their skulls had been carefully cleft right down the middle by a single
+blow from a sharp stone hatchet. But they were not the victims intended
+for the _piece de resistance_ at the funeral banquet. They were clearly
+the two wives of the deceased chieftain, killed on his tomb by his son
+and successor, in order to accompany their lord and master in his new
+life underground as they had hitherto done in his rude wooden palace on
+the surface of the middle earth.
+
+We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old cannibal savage king
+(after abstracting for our local museum the arrowheads and tomahawk, as
+well as the skull of the very ancient Briton himself), and when our
+archaeological society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two
+years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown again as green
+as ever, and not a sign remained of the sacrilegious act in which one of
+the party then assembled there had been a prime actor. Looking down from
+the summit of the long barrow on that bright summer morning, over the
+gay group of picnicking archaeologists, it was a curious contrast to
+reinstate in fancy the scene at that first installation of the Ogbury
+monument. In my mind's eye I saw once more the howling band of naked,
+yellow-faced and yellow-limbed savages surge up the terraced slopes of
+Ogbury Down; I saw them bear aloft, with beating of breasts and loud
+gesticulations, the bent corpse of their dead chieftain; I saw the
+terrified and fainting wives haled along by thongs of raw oxhide, and
+the weeping prisoners driven passively like sheep to the slaughter; I
+saw the fearful orgy of massacre and rapine around the open tumulus, the
+wild priest shattering with his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his
+victims, the fire of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the
+heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered stone
+chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals around the mangled
+remains of men and oxen, and finally the long task of heaping up above
+the stone hut of the dead king the earthen mound that was never again to
+be opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we modern
+Britons invaded with our prying, sacrilegious mattock the sacred privacy
+of that cannibal ghost. All this passed like a vision before my mind's
+eye; but I didn't mention anything of it at that particular moment to my
+fellow-archaeologists, because I saw they were all much more interested
+in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about an exalted personage and a
+distinguished actress with which the model secretary was just then duly
+entertaining them.
+
+Five thousand years or so slowly wore away, from the date of the
+erection of the long barrow, and a new race had come to occupy the soil
+of England, and had driven away or reduced to slavery the short, squat,
+yellow-skinned cannibals of the earlier epoch. They were a pastoral and
+agricultural people, these new comers, acquainted with the use and abuse
+of bronze, and far more civilised in every way than their darker
+predecessors. No trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce
+onslaught the Celtic invaders--for the bronze-age folk were presumably
+Celts--swept through the little Ogbury valley, and brained the men of
+the older race, while they made slaves of the younger women and
+serviceable children. Nothing now stands to tell us anything of the long
+years of Celtic domination, except the round barrow on the bare down,
+just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far earlier and more
+primitive neighbour.
+
+We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time as the other, and
+found in it, as we expected, no bones or skeleton of any sort, broken or
+otherwise, but simply a large cinerary urn. The urn was formed of coarse
+hand-made earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth, but not
+by any means so old or porous as the fragments we had discovered in the
+long barrow. A pretty pattern ran round its edge--a pattern in the
+simplest and most primitive style of ornamentation; for it consisted
+merely of the print of the potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the
+moist clay before baking. Beside the urn lay a second specimen of early
+pottery, one of those curious perforated jars which antiquaries call by
+the very question-begging name of incense-cups; and within it we
+discovered the most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful
+wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no
+consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated
+both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to
+the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full
+consent) on the land of his fathers.
+
+Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of burying their dead? Why
+did they anticipate the latest fashionable mode of disposal of corpses,
+and go in for cremation with such thorough conviction? They couldn't
+have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary considerations
+which so profoundly agitated the mind of 'Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation
+was still in a very rudimentary state in the year five thousand B.C.;
+and the ingenious Celt, who is still given to 'waking' his neighbours,
+when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference to the chances
+of infection, must have had some other and more powerful reason for
+adopting the comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference
+to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due to a further
+development of religious ideas on the part of the Celtic tribesmen above
+that of the primitive stone-age cannibals.
+
+When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the firm belief in
+another life, which life was regarded as the exact counterpart of this
+present one. The unsophisticated savage, holding that in that equal sky
+his faithful dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the dog
+in question killed and buried with him, in order that it might follow
+him to the happy hunting-grounds. Clearly, you can't hunt without your
+arrows and your tomahawk; so the flint weapons and the trusty bow
+accompanied their owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the
+deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and drink have
+long since decayed within the damp tumulus: but the harder stone and
+earthenware articles have survived till now, to tell the story of that
+crude and simple early faith. Very crude and illogical indeed it was,
+however, for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man was
+thought of as persisting to live a sort of underground life within the
+barrow. A stone hut was constructed for its use; real weapons and
+implements were left by its side; and slaves and wives were ruthlessly
+massacred, as still in Ashantee, in order that their bodies might
+accompany the corpse of the buried master in his subterranean dwelling.
+In all this we have clear evidence of a very inconsistent, savage,
+materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality of the soul, but in
+the continued underground life of the dead body.
+
+With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon these subjects
+began to grow more definite and more consistent. Instead of the corpse,
+we get the ghost; instead of the material underground world, we get the
+idealised and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world of
+shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits. With the growth of
+the idea in this ghostly nether world, there arises naturally the habit
+of burning the dead in order fully to free the liberated spirit from the
+earthly chains that clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable
+fact that wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly
+accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course; while wherever
+(among savage or barbaric races) burial is practised, there a more
+materialistic creed of bodily survival necessarily accompanies it. To
+carry out this theory to its full extent, not only must the body itself
+be burnt, but also all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in
+ghostly clothing; and the question has often been asked of modern
+spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, 'Where do the ghosts get their
+coats and dresses?' The true believer in cremation and the shadowy world
+has no difficulty at all in answering that crucial inquiry; he would say
+at once, 'They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with the
+body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as veraciously retailed for
+us by that dear old grandmotherly scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of
+Melissa refuses to communicate with her late husband, by medium or
+otherwise, on the ground that she found herself naked and shivering with
+cold, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and
+therefore were of no use to her in the world of shades. So Periander, to
+put a stop to this sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all
+the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a great
+trench, and received an immediate answer from the gratified shade, who
+was thenceforth enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of
+Hades among the best-dressed ghosts of that populous quarter.
+
+The belief which thus survived among the civilised Greeks of the age of
+the Despots is shared still by Fijis and Karens, and was derived by all
+in common from early ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury
+round barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt, to liberate
+their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as now, in Fiji, knives and
+axes have their spiritual counterparts, which can only be released when
+the material shape is destroyed or purified by the action of fire.
+Everything, in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own;
+and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free from all
+clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in the rite of suttee,
+the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon her husband's pyre, in order
+that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts
+whither he was bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge
+over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so remote as to
+merge together mentally to the casual eyes of modern observers, but yet
+in reality marking in their very shape and disposition an immense, long,
+and slow advance of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in
+form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut that surrounds and
+encloses it, so does the round barrow answer in form to the urn
+containing the calcined ashes of the cremated barbarian. And is it not a
+suggestive fact that when we turn to the little graveyard by the church
+below we find the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, as
+opposed to the pagan belief in the immortality of the soul, once more
+bringing us back to the small oblong mound which is after all but the
+dwarfed and humbler modern representative of the long barrow? So deep is
+the connection between that familiar shape and the practice of
+inhumation that the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere to have come into
+use again throughout all Europe, after whole centuries of continued
+cremation, as the natural concomitant and necessary mark of Christian
+burial.
+
+This is what I would have said, if I had been asked, at Ogbury Barrows.
+But I wasn't asked; so I devoted myself instead to psychological
+research, and said nothing.
+
+
+
+
+FISH OUT OF WATER
+
+
+Strolling one day in what is euphemistically termed, in equatorial
+latitudes, 'the cool of the evening,' along a tangled tropical American
+field-path, through a low region of lagoons and watercourses, my
+attention happened to be momentarily attracted from the monotonous
+pursuit of the nimble mosquito by a small animal scuttling along
+irregularly before me, as if in a great hurry to get out of my way
+before I could turn him into an excellent specimen. At first sight I
+took the little hopper, in the grey dusk, for one of the common, small
+green lizards, and wasn't much disposed to pay it any distinguished
+share either of personal or scientific attention. But as I walked on a
+little further through the dense underbrush, more and more of these
+shuffling and scurrying little creatures kept crossing the path,
+hastily, all in one direction, and all, as it were, in a formed body or
+marching phalanx. Looking closer, to my great surprise, I found they
+were actually fish out of water, going on a walking tour, for change of
+air, to a new residence--genuine fish, a couple of inches long each, not
+eel-shaped or serpentine in outline, but closely resembling a red mullet
+in miniature, though much more beautifully and delicately coloured, and
+with fins and tails of the most orthodox spiny and prickly description.
+They were travelling across country in a bee-line, thousands of them
+together, not at all like the helpless fish out of water of popular
+imagination, but as unconcernedly and naturally as if they had been
+accustomed to the overland route for their whole lifetimes, and were
+walking now on the king's highway without let or hindrance.
+
+I took one up in my hand and examined it more carefully; though the
+catching it wasn't by any means so easy as it sounds on paper, for these
+perambulatory fish are thoroughly inured to the dangers and difficulties
+of dry land, and can get out of your way when you try to capture them
+with a rapidity and dexterity which are truly surprising. The little
+creatures are very pretty, well-formed catfish, with bright, intelligent
+eyes, and a body armed all over, like the armadillo's, with a continuous
+coat of hard and horny mail. This coat is not formed of scales, as in
+most fish, but of toughened skin, as in crocodiles and alligators,
+arranged in two overlapping rows of imbricated shields, exactly like the
+round tiles so common on the roofs of Italian cottages. The fish walks,
+or rather shambles along ungracefully, by the shuffling movement of a
+pair of stiff spines placed close behind his head, aided by the steering
+action of his tail, and a constant snake-like wriggling motion of his
+entire body. Leg spines of somewhat the same sort are found in the
+common English gurnard, and in this age of Aquariums and Fisheries
+Exhibitions, most adult persons above the age of twenty-one years must
+have observed the gurnards themselves crawling along suspiciously by
+their aid at the bottom of a tank at the Crystal Palace or the
+polyonymous South Kensington building. But while the European gurnard
+only uses his substitutes for legs on the bed of the ocean, my itinerant
+tropical acquaintance (his name, I regret to say, is Callichthys) uses
+them boldly for terrestrial locomotion across the dry lowlands of his
+native country. And while the gurnard has no less than six of these
+pro-legs, the American land fish has only a single pair with which to
+accomplish his arduous journeys. If this be considered as a point of
+inferiority in the armour-plated American species, we must remember that
+while beetles and grasshoppers have as many as six legs apiece, man, the
+head and crown of things, is content to scramble through life
+ungracefully with no more than two.
+
+There are a great many tropical American pond-fish which share these
+adventurous gipsy habits of the pretty little Callichthys. Though they
+belong to two distinct groups, otherwise unconnected, the circumstances
+of the country they inhabit have induced in both families this queer
+fashion of waddling out courageously on dry land, and going on voyages
+of exploration in search of fresh ponds and shallows new, somewhere in
+the neighbourhood of their late residence. One kind in particular, the
+Brazilian Doras, takes land journeys of such surprising length, that he
+often spends several nights on the way, and the Indians who meet the
+wandering bands during their migrations fill several baskets full of the
+prey thus dropped upon them, as it were, from the kindly clouds.
+
+Both Doras and Callichthys, too, are well provided with means of defence
+against the enemies they may chance to meet during their terrestrial
+excursions; for in both kinds there are the same bony shields along the
+sides, securing the little travellers, as far as possible, from attack
+on the part of hungry piscivorous animals. Doras further utilises its
+powers of living out of water by going ashore to fetch dry leaves, with
+which it builds itself a regular nest, like a bird's, at the beginning
+of the rainy season. In this nest the affectionate parents carefully
+cover up their eggs, the hope of the race, and watch over them with the
+utmost attention. Many other fish build nests in the water, of
+materials naturally found at the bottom; but Doras, I believe, is the
+only one that builds them on the beach, of materials sought for on the
+dry land.
+
+Such amphibious habits on the part of certain tropical fish are easy
+enough to explain by the fashionable clue of 'adaptation to
+environment.' Ponds are always very likely to dry up, and so the animals
+that frequent ponds are usually capable of bearing a very long
+deprivation of water. Indeed, our evolutionists generally hold that land
+animals have in every case sprung from pond animals which have gradually
+adapted themselves to do without water altogether. Life, according to
+this theory, began in the ocean, spread up the estuaries into the
+greater rivers, thence extended to the brooks and lakes, and finally
+migrated to the ponds, puddles, swamps and marshes, whence it took at
+last, by tentative degrees, to the solid shore, the plains, and the
+mountains. Certainly the tenacity of life shown by pond animals is very
+remarkable. Our own English carp bury themselves deeply in the mud in
+winter, and there remain in a dormant condition many months entirely
+without food. During this long hibernating period, they can be preserved
+alive for a considerable time out of water, especially if their gills
+are, from time to time, slightly moistened. They may then be sent to any
+address by parcels post, packed in wet moss, without serious damage to
+their constitution; though, according to Dr. Guenther, these dissipated
+products of civilisation prefer to have a piece of bread steeped in
+brandy put into their mouths to sustain them beforehand. In Holland,
+where the carp are not so sophisticated, they are often kept the whole
+winter through, hung up in a net to keep them from freezing. At first
+they require to be slightly wetted from time to time, just to
+acclimatise them gradually to so dry an existence; but after a while
+they adapt themselves cheerfully to their altered circumstances, and
+feed on an occasional frugal meal of bread and milk with Christian
+resignation.
+
+Of all land-frequenting fish, however, by far the most famous is the
+so-called climbing perch of India, which not only walks bodily out of
+the water, but even climbs trees by means of special spines, near the
+head and tail, so arranged as to stick into the bark and enable it to
+wriggle its way up awkwardly, something after the same fashion as the
+'looping' of caterpillars. The tree-climber is a small scaly fish,
+seldom more than seven inches long; but it has developed a special
+breathing apparatus to enable it to keep up the stock of oxygen on its
+terrestrial excursions, which may be regarded as to some extent the
+exact converse of the means employed by divers to supply themselves with
+air under water. Just above the gills, which form of course its natural
+hereditary breathing apparatus, the climbing perch has invented a new
+and wholly original water chamber, containing within it a frilled bony
+organ, which enables it to extract oxygen from the stored-up water
+during the course of its aerial peregrinations. While on shore it picks
+up small insects, worms, and grubs; but it also has vegetarian tastes of
+its own, and does not despise fruits and berries. The Indian jugglers
+tame the climbing perches and carry them about with them as part of
+their stock in trade; their ability to live for a long time out of water
+makes them useful confederates in many small tricks which seem very
+wonderful to people accustomed to believe that fish die almost at once
+when taken out of their native element.
+
+The Indian snakehead is a closely allied species, common in the shallow
+ponds and fresh-water tanks of India, where holy Brahmans bathe and
+drink and die and are buried, and most of which dry up entirely during
+the dry season. The snakehead, therefore, has similarly accommodated
+himself to this annual peculiarity in his local habitation by acquiring
+a special chamber for retaining water to moisten his gills throughout
+his long deprivation of that prime necessary. He lives composedly in
+semi-fluid mud, or lies torpid in the hard baked clay at the bottom of
+the dry tank from which all the water has utterly evaporated in the
+drought of summer. As long as the mud remains soft enough to allow the
+fish to rise slowly through it, they come to the surface every now and
+then to take in a good hearty gulp of air, exactly as gold fish do in
+England when confined with thoughtless or ignorant cruelty in a glass
+globe too small to provide sufficient oxygen for their respiration. But
+when the mud hardens entirely they hibernate or rather aestivate, in a
+dormant condition, until the bursting of the monsoon fills the ponds
+once more with the welcome water. Even in the perfectly dry state,
+however, they probably manage to get a little air every now and again
+through the numerous chinks and fissures in the sun-baked mud. Our Aryan
+brother then goes a-fishing playfully with a spade and bucket, and digs
+the snakehead in this mean fashion out of his comfortable lair, with an
+ultimate view to the manufacture of pillau. In Burmah, indeed, while the
+mud is still soft, the ingenious Burmese catch the helpless creatures by
+a still meaner and more unsportsmanlike device. They spread a large
+cloth over the slimy ooze where the snakeheads lie buried, and so cut
+off entirely for the moment their supply of oxygen. The poor fish,
+half-asphyxiated by this unkind treatment, come up gasping to the
+surface under the cloth in search of fresh air, and are then easily
+caught with the hand and tossed into baskets by the degenerate
+Buddhists.
+
+Old Anglo-Indians even say that some of these mud haunting Oriental
+fish will survive for many years in a state of suspended animation, and
+that when ponds or jhils which are known to have been dry for several
+successive seasons are suddenly filled by heavy rains, they are found to
+be swarming at once with full-grown snakeheads released in a moment from
+what I may venture to call their living tomb in the hardened bottom.
+Whether such statements are absolutely true or not the present deponent
+would be loth to decide dogmatically; but, if we were implicitly to
+swallow everything that the old Anglo-Indian in his simplicity assures
+us he has seen--well, the clergy would have no further cause any longer
+to deplore the growing scepticism and unbelief of these latter
+unfaithful ages.
+
+This habit of lying in the mud and there becoming torpid may be looked
+upon as a natural alternative to the habit of migrating across country,
+when your pond dries up, in search of larger and more permanent sheets
+of water. Some fish solve the problem how to get through the dry season
+in one of these two alternative fashions and some in the other. In flat
+countries where small ponds and tanks alone exist, the burying plan is
+almost universal; in plains traversed by large rivers or containing
+considerable scattered lakes, the migratory system finds greater favour
+with the piscine population.
+
+One tropical species which adopts the tactics of hiding itself in the
+hard clay, the African mud-fish, is specially interesting to us human
+beings on two accounts--first, because, unlike almost all other kinds of
+fish, it possesses lungs as well as gills; and, secondly, because it
+forms an intermediate link between the true fish and the frogs or
+amphibians, and therefore stands in all probability in the direct line
+of human descent, being the living representative of one among our own
+remote and early ancestors. Scientific interest and filial piety ought
+alike to secure our attention for the African mud-fish. It lives its
+amphibious life among the rice-fields on the Nile, the Zambesi, and the
+Gambia, and is so greatly given to a terrestrial existence that its
+swim-bladder has become porous and cellular, so as to be modified into a
+pair of true and serviceable lungs. In fact, the lungs themselves in all
+the higher animals are merely the swim-bladders of fish, slightly
+altered so as to perform a new but closely allied office. The mud-fish
+is common enough in all the larger English aquariums, owing to a
+convenient habit in which it indulges, and which permits it to be
+readily conveyed to all parts of the globe on the same principle as the
+vans for furniture. When the dry season comes on and the rice-fields are
+reduced to banks of baking mud, the mud-fish retire to the bottom of
+their pools, where they form for themselves a sort of cocoon of hardened
+clay, lined with mucus, and with a hole at each end to admit the air;
+and in this snug retreat they remain torpid till the return of wet
+weather. As the fish usually reach a length of three or four feet, the
+cocoons are of course by no means easy to transport entire. Nevertheless
+the natives manage to dig them up whole, fish and all; and if the
+capsules are not broken, the unconscious inmates can be sent across by
+steamer to Europe with perfect safety. Their astonishment when they
+finally wake up after their long slumber, and find themselves inspecting
+the British public, as introduced to them by Mr. Farini, through a sheet
+of plate-glass, must be profound and interesting.
+
+In England itself, on the other hand, we have at least one kind of fish
+which exemplifies the opposite or migratory solution of the dry pond
+problem, and that is our familiar friend the common eel. The ways of
+eels are indeed mysterious, for nobody has ever yet succeeded in
+discovering where, when, or how they manage to spawn; nobody has ever
+yet seen an eel's egg, or caught a female eel in the spawning condition,
+or even observed a really adult male or female specimen of perfect
+development. All the eels ever found in fresh water are immature and
+undeveloped creatures. But eels do certainly spawn somewhere or other in
+the deep sea, and every year, in the course of the summer, flocks of
+young ones, known as elvers, ascend the rivers in enormous quantities,
+like a vast army under numberless leaders. At each tributary or
+affluent, be it river, brook, stream, or ditch, a proportionate
+detachment of the main body is given off to explore the various
+branches, while the central force wriggles its way up the chief channel,
+regardless of obstacles, with undiminished vigour. When the young elvers
+come to a weir, a wall, a floodgate, or a lasher, they simply squirm
+their way up the perpendicular barrier with indescribable wrigglings, as
+if they were wholly unacquainted, physically as well as mentally, with
+Newton's magnificent discovery of gravitation. Nothing stops them; they
+go wherever water is to be found; and though millions perish hopelessly
+in the attempt, millions more survive in the end to attain their goal in
+the upper reaches. They even seem to scent ponds or lakes mysteriously,
+at a distance, and will strike boldly straight across country, to sheets
+of water wholly cut off from communication with the river which forms
+their chief highway.
+
+The full-grown eels are also given to journeying across country in a
+more sober, sedate, and dignified manner, as becomes fish which have
+fully arrived at years, or rather months, of discretion. When the ponds
+in which they live dry up in summer, they make in a bee-line for the
+nearest sheet of fresh water, whose direction and distance they appear
+to know intuitively, through some strange instinctive geographical
+faculty. On their way across country, they do not despise the succulent
+rat, whom they swallow whole when caught with great gusto. To keep their
+gills wet during these excursions, eels have the power of distending the
+skin on each side of the neck, just below the head, so as to form a big
+pouch or swelling. This pouch they fill with water, to carry a good
+supply along with them, until they reach the ponds for which they are
+making. It is the pouch alone that enables eels to live so long out of
+water under all circumstances, and so incidentally exposes them to the
+disagreeable experience of getting skinned alive, which it is to be
+feared still forms the fate of most of those that fall into the clutches
+of the human species.
+
+A far more singular walking fish than any of these is the odd creature
+that rejoices (unfortunately) in the very classical surname of
+Periophthalmus, which is, being interpreted, Stare-about. (If he had a
+recognised English name of his own, I would gladly give it; but as he
+hasn't, and as it is clearly necessary to call him something, I fear we
+must stick to the somewhat alarming scientific nomenclature.)
+Periophthalmus, then, is an odd fish of the tropical Pacific shores,
+with a pair of very distinct forelegs (theoretically described as
+modified pectoral fins), and with two goggle eyes, which he can protrude
+at pleasure right outside the sockets, so as to look in whatever
+direction he chooses, without even taking the trouble to turn his head
+to left or right, backward or forward. At ebb tide this singular
+peripatetic goby literally walks straight out of the water, and
+promenades the bare beach erect on two legs, in search of small crabs
+and other stray marine animals left behind by the receding waters. If
+you try to catch him, he hops away briskly much like a frog, and stares
+back at you grimly over his left shoulder, with his squinting optics.
+So completely adapted is he for this amphibious long-shore existence,
+that his big eyes, unlike those of most other fish, are formed for
+seeing in the air as well as in the water. Nothing can be more ludicrous
+than to watch him suddenly thrusting these very movable orbs right out
+of their sockets like a pair of telescopes, and twisting them round in
+all directions so as to see in front, behind, on top, and below, in one
+delightful circular sweep.
+
+There is also a certain curious tropical American carp which, though it
+hardly deserves to be considered in the strictest sense as a fish out of
+water, yet manages to fall nearly half-way under that peculiar category,
+for it always swims with its head partly above the surface and partly
+below. But the funniest thing in this queer arrangement is the fact that
+one half of each eye is out in the air and the other half is beneath in
+the water. Accordingly, the eye is divided horizontally by a dark strip
+into two distinct and unlike portions, the upper one of which has a
+pupil adapted to vision in the air alone, while the lower is adapted to
+seeing in the water only. The fish, in fact, always swims with its eye
+half out of the water, and it can see as well on dry land as in its
+native ocean. Its name is Anableps, but in all probability it does not
+wish the fact to be generally known.
+
+The flying fish are fish out of water in a somewhat different and more
+transitory sense. Their aerial excursions are brief and rapid; they can
+only fly a very little way, and have soon to take once more for safety
+to their own more natural and permanent element. More than forty kinds
+of the family are known, in appearance very much like English herrings,
+but with the front fins expanded and modified into veritable wings. It
+is fashionable nowadays among naturalists to assert that the flying fish
+don't fly; that they merely jump horizontally out of the water with a
+powerful impulse, and fall again as soon as the force of the first
+impetus is entirely spent. When men endeavour to persuade you to such
+folly, believe them not. For my own part, I have _seen_ the flying fish
+fly--deliberately fly, and flutter, and rise again, and change the
+direction of their flight in mid-air, exactly after the fashion of a big
+dragonfly. If the other people who have watched them haven't succeeded
+in seeing them fly, that is their own fault, or at least their own
+misfortune; perhaps their eyes weren't quick enough to catch the rapid,
+though to me perfectly recognisable, hovering and fluttering of the
+gauze-like wings; but I have seen them myself, and I maintain that on
+such a question one piece of positive evidence is a great deal better
+than a hundred negative. The testimony of all the witnesses who didn't
+see the murder committed is as nothing compared with the single
+testimony of the one man who really did see it. And in this case I have
+met with many other quick observers who fully agreed with me, against
+the weight of scientific opinion, that they have seen the flying fish
+really fly with their own eyes, and no mistake about it. The German
+professors, indeed, all think otherwise; but then the German professors
+all wear green spectacles, which are the outward and visible sign of
+'blinded eyesight poring over miserable books.' The unsophisticated
+vision of the noble British seaman is unanimously with me on the matter
+of the reality of the fishes' flight.
+
+Another group of very interesting fish out of water are the flying
+gurnards, common enough in the Mediterranean and the tropical Atlantic.
+They are much heavier and bigger creatures than the true flying fish of
+the herring type, being often a foot and a half long, and their wings
+are much larger in proportion, though not, I think, really so powerful
+as those of their pretty little silvery rivals. All the flying fish fly
+only of necessity, not from choice. They leave the water when pursued
+by their enemies, or when frightened by the rapid approach of a big
+steamer. So swiftly do they fly, however, that they can far outstrip a
+ship going at the rate of ten knots an hour; and I have often watched
+one keep ahead of a great Pacific liner under full steam for many
+minutes together in quick successive flights of three or four hundred
+feet each. Oddly enough, they can fly further against the wind than
+before it--a fact acknowledged even by the spectacled Germans
+themselves, and very hard indeed to reconcile with the orthodox belief
+that they are not flying at all, but only jumping. I don't know whether
+the flying gurnards are good eating or not; but the silvery flying fish
+are caught for market (sad desecration of the poetry of nature!) in the
+Windward Islands, and when nicely fried in egg and bread-crumb are
+really quite as good for practical purposes as smelts or whiting or any
+other prosaic European substitute.
+
+On the whole, it will be clear, I think, to the impartial reader from
+this rapid survey that the helplessness and awkwardness of a fish out of
+water has been much exaggerated by the thoughtless generalisation of
+unscientific humanity. Granting, for argument's sake, that most fish
+prefer the water, as a matter of abstract predilection, to the dry land,
+it must be admitted _per contra_ that many fish cut a much better figure
+on terra firma than most of their critics themselves would cut in
+mid-ocean. There are fish that wriggle across country intrepidly with
+the dexterity and agility of the most accomplished snakes; there are
+fish that walk about on open sand-banks, semi-erect on two legs, as
+easily as lizards; there are fish that hop and skip on tail and fins in
+a manner that the celebrated jumping frog himself might have observed
+with envy; and there are fish that fly through the air of heaven with a
+grace and swiftness that would put to shame innumerable species among
+their feathered competitors. Nay, there are even fish, like some kinds
+of eels and the African mud-fish, that scarcely live in the water at
+all, but merely frequent wet and marshy places, where they lie snugly in
+the soft ooze and damp earth that line the bottom. If I have only
+succeeded, therefore, in relieving the mind of one sensitive and
+retiring fish from the absurd obloquy cast upon its appearance when it
+ventures away for awhile from its proper element, then, in the pathetic
+and prophetic words borrowed from a thousand uncut prefaces, this work
+will not, I trust, have been written in vain.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST POTTER
+
+
+Collective humanity owes a great debt of gratitude to the first potter.
+Before his days the art of boiling, though in one sense very simple and
+primitive indeed, was in another sense very complex, cumbersome, and
+lengthy. The unsophisticated savage, having duly speared and killed his
+antelope, proceeded to light a roaring fire, with flint or drill, by the
+side of some convenient lake or river in his tropical jungle. Then he
+dug a big hole in the soft mud close to the water's edge, and let the
+water (rather muddy) percolate into it, or sometimes even he plastered
+over its bottom with puddled clay. After that, he heated some smooth
+round stones red hot in the fire close by, and drawing them out gingerly
+between two pieces of stick, dropped them one by one, spluttering and
+fizzing, into his improvised basin or kettle. This, of course, made the
+water in the hole boil; and the unsophisticated savage thereupon thrust
+into it his joint of antelope, repeating the process over and over again
+until the sodden meat was completely seethed to taste on the outside. If
+one application was not sufficient, he gnawed off the cooked meat from
+the surface with his stout teeth, innocent as yet of the dentist's art,
+and plunged the underdone core back again, till it exactly suited his
+not over-delicate or dainty fancy.
+
+To be sure, the primitive savage, unversed as he was in pastes and
+glazes, in moulds and ornaments, did not pass his life entirely devoid
+of cups and platters. Coconut shell and calabash rind, horn of ox and
+skull of enemy, bamboo-joint and capacious rhomb-shell, all alike, no
+doubt, supplied him with congenial implements for drink or storage. Like
+Eve in the Miltonic Paradise, there lacked him not fit vessels pure;
+picking some luscious tropical fruit, the savoury pulp he chewed, and in
+the rind still as he thirsted scooped the brimming stream. This was
+satisfactory as far as it went, of course, but it was not pottery. He
+couldn't boil his joint for dinner in coco-nut or skull; he had to do it
+with stone pot-boilers, in a rude kettle of puddled clay.
+
+But at last one day, that inspired barbarian, the first potter, hit by
+accident upon his grand discovery. He had carried some water in a big
+calabash--the hard shell of a tropical fruit whose pulpy centre can be
+easily scooped out--and a happy thought suddenly struck him: why not put
+the calabash to boil upon the fire with a little clay smeared outside
+it? The savage is conservative, but he loves to save trouble. He tried
+the experiment, and it succeeded admirably. The water boiled, and the
+calabash was not burnt or broken. Our nameless philosopher took the
+primitive vessel off the fire with a forked branch and looked at it
+critically with the delighted eyes of a first inventor. A wonderful
+change had suddenly come over it. He had blundered accidentally upon the
+art of pottery. For what is this that has happened to the clay? It went
+in soft, brown, and muddy; it has come out hard, red, and stone-like.
+The first potter ruminated and wondered. He didn't fully realise, no
+doubt, what he had actually done; but he knew he had invented a means by
+which you could put a calabash upon a fire and keep it there without
+burning or bursting. That, after all, was at least something.
+
+All this, you say (which, in effect, is Dr. Tylor's view), is purely
+hypothetical. In one sense, yes; but not in another. We know that most
+savage races still use natural vessels, made of coco-nuts, gourds, or
+calabashes, for everyday purposes of carrying water; and we also know
+that all the simplest and earliest pottery is moulded on the shape of
+just such natural jars and bottles. The fact and the theory based on it
+are no novelties. Early in the sixteenth century, indeed, the Sieur
+Gonneville, skipper of Honfleur, sailing round the Cape of Good Hope,
+made his way right across the Southern Ocean to some vague point of
+South America where he found the people still just in the intermediate
+stage between the use of natural vessels and the invention of pottery.
+For these amiable savages (name and habitat unknown) had wooden pots
+'plastered with a kind of clay a good finger thick, which prevents the
+fire from burning them.' Here we catch industrial evolution in the very
+act, and the potter's art in its first infancy, fossilised and
+crystallised, as it were, in an embryo condition, and fixed for us
+immovably by the unprogressive conservatism of a savage tribe. It was
+this curious early observation of evolving keramic art that made
+Goguet--an anthropologist born out of due season--first hit upon that
+luminous theory of the origin of pottery now all but universally
+accepted.
+
+Plenty of evidence to the same effect is now forthcoming for the modern
+inquirer. Among the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, Squier
+and Davis found the kilns in which the primitive pottery had been baked;
+and among their relics were partially burnt pots retaining in part the
+rinds of the gourds or calabashes on which they had been actually
+modelled. Along the Gulf of Mexico gourds were also used to give shape
+to the pot; and all over the world, even to this day, the gourd form is
+a very common one for pottery of all sorts, thus pointing back, dimly
+and curiously, to the original mode in which fictile ware generally
+came to be invented. In Fiji and in many parts of Africa vessels
+modelled upon natural forms are still universal. Of course all such pots
+as these are purely hand-made; the invention of the potter's wheel, now
+so indissolubly associated in all our minds with the production of
+earthenware, belongs to an infinitely later and almost modern period.
+
+And that consideration naturally suggests the fundamental question, When
+did the first potter live? The world (as Sir Henry Taylor has oracularly
+told us) knows nothing of its greatest men; and the very name of the
+father of all potters has been utterly forgotten in the lapse of ages.
+Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, one may reasonably doubt
+whether there was ever actually any one single man on whom one could
+definitely lay one's finger, and say with confidence, Here we have the
+first potter. Pottery, no doubt, like most other things, grew by
+imperceptible degrees from wholly vague and rudimentary beginnings. Just
+as there were steam-engines before Watt, and locomotives before
+Stephenson, so there were pots before the first potter. Many men must
+have discovered separately, by half-unconscious trials, that a coat of
+mud rudely plastered over the bottom of a calabash prevented it from
+catching fire and spilling its contents; other men slowly learned to
+plaster the mud higher and ever higher up the sides; and yet others
+gradually introduced and patented new improvements for wholly encasing
+the entire cup in an inch thickness of carefully kneaded clay. Bit by
+bit the invention grew, like all great inventions, without any inventor.
+Thus the question of the date of the first potter practically resolves
+itself into the simpler question of the date of the earliest known
+pottery.
+
+Did palaeolithic man, that antique naked crouching savage who hunted the
+mammoth, the reindeer, and the cave-bear among the frozen fields of
+interglacial Gaul and Britain--did palaeolithic man himself, in his rude
+rock-shelters, possess a knowledge of the art of pottery? That is a
+question which has been much debated amongst archaeologists, and which
+cannot even now be considered as finally settled before the tribunal of
+science. He must have drunk out of something or other, but whether he
+drank out of earthenware cups is still uncertain. It is pretty clear
+that the earliest drinking vessels used in Europe were neither bowls of
+earthenware nor shells of fruits, for the cold climate of interglacial
+times did not permit the growth in northern latitudes of such large
+natural vessels as gourds, calabashes, bamboos, or coco-nuts. In all
+probability the horns of the aurochs and the wild cattle, and the
+capacious skull of the fellow-man whose bones he had just picked at his
+ease for his cannibal supper, formed the aboriginal goblets and basins
+of the old black European savage. A curious verbal relic of the use of
+horns as drinking-cups survives indeed down to almost modern times in
+the Greek word _keramic_, still commonly applied to the art of pottery,
+and derived, of course, from _keras_, a horn; while as to skulls, not
+only were they frequently used as drinking-cups by our Scandinavian
+ancestors, but there still exists a very singular intermediate American
+vessel in which the clay has actually been moulded on a human skull as
+model, just as other vessels have been moulded on calabashes or other
+suitable vegetable shapes.
+
+Still, the balance of evidence certainly seems to show that a little
+very rude and almost shapeless hand-made pottery has really been
+discovered amongst the buried caves where palaeolithic men made for ages
+their chief dwelling-places. Fragments of earthenware occurred in the
+Hohefels cave near Ulm, in company with the bones of reindeer,
+cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had doubtless been duly boiled,
+a hundred thousand years ago, by the intelligent producer of those
+identical sun-dried fleshpots; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his
+possession portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel,
+from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of the hand that
+moulded the clay are still clearly distinguishable on the baked
+earthenware. That is the great merit of pottery, viewed as an historical
+document; it retains its shape and peculiarities unaltered through
+countless centuries, for the future edification of unborn antiquaries.
+_Litera scripta manet_, and so does baked pottery. The hand itself that
+formed that rude bowl has long since mouldered away, flesh and bone
+alike, into the soil around it; but the print of its fingers, indelibly
+fixed by fire into the hardened clay, remains for us still to tell the
+story of that early triumph of nascent keramics.
+
+The relics of palaeolithic pottery are, however, so very fragmentary, and
+the circumstances under which they have been discovered so extremely
+doubtful, that many cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now
+have nothing to say to the suspected impostors. Among the remains of the
+newer Stone Age, on the other hand, comparatively abundant keramic
+specimens have been unearthed, without doubt or cavil, from the long
+barrows--the burial-places of the early Mongoloid race, now represented
+by the Finns and Lapps, which occupied the whole of Western Europe
+before the advent of the Aryan vanguard. One of the best bits is a
+curious wide-mouthed, semi-globular bowl from Norton Bavant, in
+Wiltshire, whose singular shape suggests almost immediately the idea
+that it must at least have been based, if not actually modelled, upon a
+human skull. Its rim is rough and quite irregular, and there is no trace
+of ornamentation of any sort; a fact quite in accordance with all the
+other facts we know about the men of the newer Stone Age, who were far
+less artistic and aesthetic in every way than their ruder predecessors of
+the interglacial epoch.
+
+Ornamentation, when it does begin to appear, arises at first in a
+strictly practical and unintentional manner. Later examples elsewhere
+show us by analogy how it first came into existence. The Indians of the
+Ohio seem to have modelled their pottery in bags or nettings made of
+coarse thread or twisted bark. Those of the Mississippi moulded them in
+baskets of willow or splints. When the moist clay thus shaped and marked
+by the indentations of the mould was baked in the kiln, it of course
+retained the pretty dappling it received from the interlaced and woven
+thrums, which were burnt off in the process of firing. Thus a rude sort
+of natural diaper ornament was set up, to which the eye soon became
+accustomed, and which it learned to regard as necessary for beauty.
+Hence, wherever newer and more improved methods of modelling came into
+use, there would arise an instinctive tendency on the part of the early
+potter to imitate the familiar marking by artificial means. Dr. Klemm
+long ago pointed out that the oldest German fictile vases have an
+ornamentation in which plaiting is imitated by incised lines. 'What was
+no longer wanted as a necessity,' he says, 'was kept up as an ornament
+alone.'
+
+Another very simple form of ornamentation, reappearing everywhere all
+the world over on primitive bowls and vases, is the rope pattern, a line
+or string-course over the whole surface or near the mouth of the vessel.
+Many of the indented patterns on early British pottery have been
+produced, as Sir Daniel Wilson has pointed out, by the close impress of
+twisted cord on the wet clay. Sometimes these cords seem to have been
+originally left on the clay in the process of baking, and used as a
+mould; at other times they may have been employed afterwards as
+handles, as is still done in the case of some South African pots: and,
+when the rope handle wore off, the pattern made by its indentation on
+the plastic material before sun-baking would still remain as pure
+ornament. Probably the very common idea of string-course ornamentation
+just below the mouth or top of vases and bowls has its origin in this
+early and almost universal practice.
+
+When other conscious and intentional ornamentation began to supersede
+these rude natural and undesigned patterns, they were at first mere
+rough attempts on the part of the early potter to imitate, with the
+simple means at his disposal, the characteristic marks of the ropes or
+wickerwork by which the older vessels were necessarily surrounded. He
+had gradually learned, as Mr. Tylor well puts it, that clay alone or
+with some mixture of sand is capable of being used without any
+extraneous support for the manufacture of drinking and cooking vessels.
+He therefore began to model rudely thin globular bowls with his own
+hands, dispensing with the aid of thongs or basketwork. But he still
+naturally continued to imitate the original shapes--the gourd, the
+calabash, the plaited net, the round basket; and his eye required the
+familiar decoration which naturally resulted from the use of some one or
+other among these primitive methods. So he tried his hand at deliberate
+ornament in his own simple untutored fashion.
+
+It was quite literally his hand, indeed, that he tried at first; for the
+earliest decoration upon paleolithic pottery is made by pressing the
+fingers into the clay so as to produce a couple of deep parallel
+furrows, which is the sole attempt at ornament on M. Joly's Nabrigas
+specimen; while the urns and drinking-cups taken from our English long
+barrows are adorned with really pretty and effective patterns, produced
+by pressing the tip of the finger and the nail into the plastic
+material. It is wonderful what capital and varied results you can get
+with no more recondite graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes
+turned front downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes used to
+egg up the moist clay into small jagged and relieved designs. Most of
+these patterns are more or less plaitlike in arrangement, evidently
+suggested to the mind of the potter by the primitive marks of the old
+basketwork. But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into
+his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers, and the flint
+knife itself, with which he incised more regular patterns, straight or
+zigzag lines, rows of dots, squares and triangles, concentric circles,
+and even the mystic cross and swastika, the sacred symbols of yet unborn
+and undreamt-of religions. As yet, there was no direct imitation of
+plant or animal forms; once only, on a single specimen from a Swiss lake
+dwelling, are the stem and veins of a leaf dimly figured on the
+handiwork of the European prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form,
+as pattern merely, had begun to exist; imitative work as such was yet
+unknown, or almost unknown, to the eastern hemisphere.
+
+In America, it was quite otherwise. The forgotten people who built the
+mounds of Ohio and the great tumuli of the Mississippi valley decorated
+their pottery not only with animal figures, such as snakes, fish, frogs,
+and turtles, but also with human heads and faces, many of them evidently
+modelled from the life, and some of them quite unmistakably genuine
+portraits. On one such vase, found in Arkansas, and figured by the
+Marquis de Nadaillac in his excellent work on Prehistoric America, the
+ornamentation consists (in true Red Indian taste) of skeleton hands,
+interspersed with crossbones; and the delicacy and anatomical
+correctness of the detail inevitably suggest the idea that the unknown
+artist must have worked with the actual hand of his slaughtered enemy
+lying for a model on the table before him. Much of the early American
+pottery is also coloured as well as figured, and that with considerable
+real taste; the pigments were applied, however, after the baking, and so
+possess little stability or permanence of character. But pots and vases
+of these advanced styles have got so far ahead of the first potter that
+we have really little or no business with them in this paper.
+
+Prehistoric European pottery has never a spout, but it often indulges in
+some simple form of ear or handle. The very ancient British bowl from
+Bavant Long Barrow--produced by that old squat Finnlike race which
+preceded the 'Ancient Britons' of our old-fashioned school-books--has
+two ear-shaped handles projecting just below the rim, exactly as in the
+modern form of vessel known as a crock, and still familiarly used for
+household purposes. This long survival of a common domestic shape from
+the most remote prehistoric antiquity to our own time is very
+significant and very interesting. Many of the old British pots have also
+a hole or two holes pierced through them, near the top, evidently for
+the purpose of putting in a string or rope by way of a handle. With the
+round barrows, which belong to the Bronze Age, and contain the remains
+of a later and more civilised Celtic population, we get far more
+advanced forms of pottery. Burial here is preceded by cremation, and the
+ashes are enclosed in urns, many of which are very beautiful in form and
+exquisitely decorated. Cremation, as Professor Rolleston used feelingly
+to plead, is bad for the comparative anatomist and ethnographer, but it
+is passing well for the collector of pottery. Where burning exists as a
+common practice, there urns are frequent, and pottery an art in great
+request. Drinking-cups and perforated incense burners accompany the
+dead in the round barrows; but the use of the potter's wheel is still
+unknown, and all the urns and vases belonging to this age are still
+hand-moulded.
+
+It is a curious reflection, however, that in spite of all the later
+improvements in the fictile art--in spite of wheels and moulds, pastes
+and glazes, stamps and pigments, and all the rest of it--the most
+primitive methods of the first potter are still in use in many
+countries, side by side with the most finished products of modern
+European skill and industry. I have in my own possession some West
+Indian calabashes, cut and decorated under my own eye by a Jamaican
+negro for his personal use, and bought from him by me for the smallest
+coin there current--calabashes carved round the edge through the rind
+with a rude string-course, exactly like the common rope pattern of
+prehistoric pottery. I have seen the same Jamaican negroes kneading
+their hand-made porous earthenware beside a tropical stream, moulding it
+on fruits or shaping it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and
+drying it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily-formed kiln
+of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric types, locally
+known by the quaint West African name of 'yabbas.' Many of these yabbas,
+if buried in the ground and exposed to damp and frost, till they almost
+lost the effects of the baking, would be quite indistinguishable, even
+by the skilled archaeologist, from the actual handicraft of the
+palaeolithic potter. The West Indian negroes brought these simple arts
+with them from their African home, where they have been handed down in
+unbroken continuity from the very earliest age of fictile industry. New
+and better methods have slowly grown up everywhere around them, but
+these simplest, earliest, and easiest plans have survived none the less
+for the most ordinary domestic uses, and will survive for ages yet, as
+long as there remain any out-of-the-way places, remote from the main
+streams of civilised commerce. Thus, while hundreds of thousands of
+years, in all probability, separate us now from the ancient days of the
+first potter, it is yet possible for us to see the first potter's own
+methods and principles exemplified under our very eyes by people who
+derive them in unbroken succession from the direct teaching of that
+long-forgotten prehistoric savage.
+
+
+
+
+THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS
+
+
+Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet,
+is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him,
+it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his
+grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of
+those that precede him. Nevertheless, there _is_ a recipe for the
+production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet
+adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I
+believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown
+regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly
+anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their
+adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly
+demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a
+natural product, not a _lusus naturae_. You get them only under sundry
+relatively definite and settled conditions; and though it isn't
+(unfortunately) quite true that the conditions will always infallibly
+bring forth the genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be
+brought forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes of
+thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet from a family of
+stockbrokers who have intermarried with the daughters of an eminent
+alderman, or make a philosopher out of a country grocer's eldest son
+whose amiable mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and
+sugar.
+
+In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for action, I am going
+to start even by getting rid once for all (so far as we are here
+concerned) of that famous but misleading old distinction between genius
+and talent. It is really a distinction without a difference. I suppose
+there is probably no subject under heaven on which so much high-flown
+stuff and nonsense has been talked and written as upon this well-known
+and much-debated hair-splitting discrimination. It is just like that
+other great distinction between fancy and imagination, about which poets
+and essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the present
+century, until at last one fine day the world at large woke up suddenly
+to the unpleasant consciousness that it had been wasting its time over a
+non-existent difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all
+absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert that talent and
+genius are exactly one and the same thing; but I do assert that genius
+is simply talent raised to a slightly higher power; it differs from it
+not in kind but merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no
+drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two. You might
+just as well try to classify all mankind into tall men and short men,
+and then endeavour to prove that a real distinction existed in nature
+between your two artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in
+height and in ability by infinitesimal gradations: some men are very
+short, others rather short, others medium-sized, others tall, and yet
+others again of portentous stature like Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So,
+too, some men are idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid,
+some are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever, and some
+geniuses. But genius is only the culminating point of ordinary
+cleverness, and if you were to try and draw up a list of all the real
+geniuses in the last hundred years, no two people could ever be found
+to agree among themselves as to which should be included and which
+excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard Kingsley and
+Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I have heard them both
+absolutely denied every sort of literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a
+poor creature, and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty windbag.
+
+The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast gulf which
+separates genius from mere talent has been published and set abroad by
+those fortunate persons who fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under
+the former highly satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short,
+real or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify itself
+at the expense of poor, commonplace, inferior talent. There is a
+certain type of great man in particular which is never tired of dilating
+upon the noble supremacy of its own greatness over the spurious
+imitation. It offers incense obliquely to itself in offering it
+generically to the class genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There
+are great men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor Hugo,
+the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose perpetually as great
+men; they cry aloud to the poor silly public so far beneath them, 'I am
+a genius! Admire me! Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on
+an aerial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and battling
+multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not unfortunately geniuses,
+are surely entitled to enter occasionally our humble protest. Our
+contention is that the genius only differs from the man of ability as
+the man of ability differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent
+man from the worthy person of sound common sense. The sliding scale of
+brains has infinite gradations; and the gradations merge insensibly into
+one another. There is no gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here
+as elsewhere, throughout the whole range of her manifold productions,
+our common mother _saltum non facit_.
+
+The question before the house, then, narrows itself down finally to
+this; what are the conditions under which exceptional ability or high
+talent is likely to arise?
+
+Now, I suppose everybody is ready to admit that two complete born fools
+are not at all likely to become the proud father and happy mother of a
+Shakespeare or a Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow
+that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable chance arise
+among the South African Bushmen, who cannot understand the arduous
+arithmetical proposition that two and two make four. No amount of
+education or careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the
+most profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who cannot even
+comprehend an English drawing of a dog or horse, into a respectable
+president of the Royal Academy. It is equally unlikely (as it seems to
+me) that a Mendelssohn or a Beethoven could be raised in the bosom of a
+family all of whose members on either side were incapable (like a
+distinguished modern English poet) of discriminating any one note in an
+octave from any other. Such leaps as these would be little short of pure
+miracles. They would be equivalent to the sudden creation, without
+antecedent cause, of a whole vast system of nerves and nerve-centres in
+the prodigious brain of some infant phenomenon.
+
+On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk
+about hereditary genius--I don't mean, of course, the talk of our
+Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy
+sciolists who can't understand them--is itself fully as absurd in its
+own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no
+explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary.
+You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor
+Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a
+poet before him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start
+with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing; it begins by
+positing the existence of one original genius, absolutely unaccounted
+for, and then proceeds blandly to point out that the other geniuses
+derive their characteristics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all
+the sons of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports the
+earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but who, pray, supports
+the tortoise? If the first chicken came out of an egg, what was the
+origin of the hen that laid it?
+
+Besides, the allegation as it stands is not even a true one. Genius, as
+we actually know it, is by no means hereditary. The great man is not
+necessarily the son of a great man or the father of a great man: often
+enough, he stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of
+baser metal on either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare woolstapler, of
+Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, was no doubt an eminently respectable
+person in his own trade, and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor
+of his native town once upon a time: but, so far as is known, none of
+his literary remains are at all equal to _Macbeth_ or _Othello_. Parson
+Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, may have preached
+a great many very excellent and convincing discourses, but there is no
+evidence of any sort that he ever attempted to write the _Principia_.
+_Per contra_ the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though
+of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed conspicuously in
+ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences and Mercies amongst whom
+their lot was cast; while the Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not
+seem to bud out spontaneously into great commanders in the second
+generation. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the
+Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the Caracci, or the
+Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, where the genius, once
+developed, has persisted for two or three, or even four lives: but these
+instances really cast no light at all upon our central problem, which is
+just this--How does the genius come in the first place to be developed
+at all from parents in whom individually no particular genius is
+ultimately to be seen?
+
+Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages in the
+earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we shall get really
+next to no personal peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of any sort amongst
+them. Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good
+scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of labour,
+and the other troublesome technicalities of our modern political
+economy, are as unknown among such folk as the modern nuisance of
+dressing for dinner. Each man performs all the functions of a citizen on
+his own account, because there is nobody else to perform them for
+him--the medium of exchange known as hard cash has not, so far as he is
+concerned, yet been invented; and he performs them well, such as they
+are, because he inherits from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and
+muscle in these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among
+his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a bird, or were
+hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint arrowheads, died out of
+starvation, leaving no representatives. The beneficent institution of
+the poor law does not exist among savages, in order to enable the
+helpless and incompetent to bring up families in their own image. There,
+survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately benevolent
+and useful end in its own directly cruel and relentless way, cutting
+off ruthlessly the stupid or the weak, and allowing only the strong and
+the cunning to become the parents of future generations.
+
+Hence every young savage, being descended on both sides from ancestors
+who in their own way perfectly fulfilled the ideal of complete
+savagery--were good hunters, good fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen
+of bow or boomerang--inherits from these his successful predecessors all
+those qualities of eye and hand and brain and nervous system which go to
+make up the abstractly Admirable Crichton of a savage. The qualities in
+question are ensured in him by two separate means. In the first place,
+survival of the fittest takes care that he and all his ancestors shall
+have duly possessed them to some extent to start with; in the second
+place, constant practice from boyhood upward increases and develops the
+original faculty. Thus savages, as a rule, display absolutely
+astonishing ability and cleverness in the few lines which they have made
+their own. Their cunning in hunting, their patience in fishing, their
+skill in trapping, their infinite dodges for deceiving and cajoling the
+animals or enemies that they need to outwit, have moved the wonder and
+admiration of innumerable travellers. The savage, in fact, is not
+stupid: in his own way his cleverness is extraordinary. But the way is a
+very narrow and restricted one, and all savages of the same race walk in
+it exactly alike. Cunning they have, skill they have, instinct they
+have, to a most marvellous degree; but of spontaneity, originality,
+initiative, variability, not a single spark. Know one savage of a tribe
+and you know them all. Their cleverness is not the cleverness of the
+individual man: it is the inherited and garnered intelligence or
+instinct of the entire race.
+
+How, then, do originality, diversity, individuality, genius, begin to
+come in? In this way, as it seems to me, looking at the matter both _a
+priori_ and by the light of actual experience.
+
+Suppose a country inhabited in its interior by a savage race of hunters
+and fighters, and on its seaboard by an equally savage race of pirates
+and fishermen, like the Dyaks of Borneo. Each of these races, if left to
+itself, will develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage
+cleverness. Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will adapt itself
+to its particular environment. The people of the interior will acquire
+and inherit a wonderful facility in spearing monkeys and knocking down
+parrots; while the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers
+of canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one another's
+villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates. These original
+differences of position and function will necessarily entail a thousand
+minor differences of intelligence and skill in a thousand different
+ways. For example, the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make
+themselves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate their
+handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the aesthetic taste thus aroused
+will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the facades of their wooden
+huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed
+at measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these
+naive expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in
+the savage breast, but the aesthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate
+them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous
+precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.
+
+Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain
+distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties
+to any great extent will arise among them. But, as soon as you permit
+intermarriage to take place, the inherited and developed qualities of
+the one race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely
+intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed
+qualities of the other. The children may take after either parent in any
+combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted an apparently
+capricious element of individuality: a power on the part of the
+half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible
+in the two original homogeneous societies. In one word, you have made
+possible the future existence of diversity in character.
+
+If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage communities to our
+own very complex and heterogeneous world, what do we find? An endless
+variety of soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers,
+candlestick makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a
+certain rough number of classes, each with its own developed and
+inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world is made up, like the world
+of ancient Egypt and of modern India, of an immense variety of separate
+castes--not, indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those
+extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly hereditary in
+character, and given on the average to a tolerably close system of
+intermarriage within the caste.
+
+For example, there is the agricultural labourer caste--the Hodge
+Chawbacon of urban humour, who in his military avatar also reappears as
+Tommy Atkins, a little transfigured, but at bottom identical--the
+alternative aspect of a single undivided central reality. Hodge for the
+most part lives and dies in his ancestral village: marries Mary, the
+daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and begets assorted Hodges
+and Marys in vast quantities, all of the same pattern, to replenish the
+earth in the next generation. There you have a very well-marked
+hereditary caste, little given to intermixture with others, and from
+whose members, however recruited by fresh blood, the object of our
+quest, the Divine Genius, is very unlikely to find his point of origin.
+Then there is the town artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from
+the ranks of the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active,
+enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many generations
+standing in various forms of handicraft. This is a far higher and more
+promising type of humanity, from the judicious intermixture of whose
+best elements we are apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our
+Telfords, and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we
+find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only rarely blossoms
+out, under favourable circumstances on both sides, into a stray Cobbett
+or an almost miraculous miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of
+more varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense variety of
+brain elements are called into play by their diverse functions in
+diverse lines; and when we take them in conjunction with the upper
+mercantile grades, which are chiefly composed of their ablest and most
+successful members, we get considerable chances of those happy blendings
+of individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to make up
+talent, and, in their final outcome, genius. Last of all, in the
+professional and upper classes there is a freedom and play of faculty
+everywhere going on, which in the chances of intermarriage between
+lawyer-folk and doctor-folk, scientific people and artistic people,
+county families and bishops or law lords, and so forth _ad infinitum_,
+offers by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional
+development of that rare product of the highest humanity, the genuine
+genius.
+
+But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermixture of
+variously acquired hereditary characteristics that makes the best and
+truest geniuses. Left to itself, each separate line of caste ancestry
+would tend to produce a certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of
+handicraft in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably
+anything worth calling real genius. For example, a family of artists,
+starting with some sort of manual dexterity in imitating natural forms
+and colours with paint and pencil, and strictly intermarrying always
+with other families possessing exactly the same inherited endowments,
+would probably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its
+drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its grouping; more and
+more technically perfect in its perspective and light-and-shade, and so
+forth, by pure dint of accumulated hereditary experience from generation
+to generation. It would pass from the Egyptian to the Chinese style of
+art by slow degrees and with infinite gradations. But suppose, instead
+of thus rigorously confining itself to its own caste, this family of
+handicraft artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or
+seafaring, or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the consequence?
+Why, such an infiltration of other hereditary characteristics, otherwise
+acquired, as might make the young painters of future generations more
+wide minded, more diversified, more individualistic, more vivid and
+lifelike. Some divine spark of poetical imagination, some tenderness of
+sentiment, some play of fancy, unknown perhaps, to the hard, dry,
+matter-of-fact limners of the ancestral school, might thus be introduced
+into the original line of hereditary artists. In this way one can easily
+see how even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might improve the
+breed of a family of painters. For while each caste, left to itself, is
+liable to harden down into a mere technical excellence after its own
+kind, a wooden facility for drawing faces, or casting up columns of
+figures, or hacking down enemies, or building steam-engines, a healthy
+cross with other castes is liable to bring in all kinds of new and
+valuable qualities, each of which, though acquired perhaps in a totally,
+different line of life, is apt to bear a new application in the new
+complex whereof it now forms a part.
+
+In our very varied modern societies, every man and every woman, in the
+upper and middle ranks of life at least, has an individuality and an
+idiosyncrasy so compounded of endless varying stocks and races. Here is
+one whose father was an Irishman and his mother a Scotchwoman; here is
+another whose paternal line were country parsons, while his maternal
+ancestors were city merchants or distinguished soldiers. Take almost
+anybody's 'sixteen quarters'--his great-great grandfathers and
+great-great grandmothers, of whom he has sixteen all told--and what do
+you often find? A peer, a cobbler, a barrister, a common sailor, a Welsh
+doctor, a Dutch merchant, a Huguenot pastor, a cornet of horse, an Irish
+heiress, a farmer's daughter, a housemaid, an actress, a Devonshire
+beauty, a rich young lady of sugar-broking extraction, a Lady Carolina,
+a London lodging-house keeper. This is not by any means an exaggerated
+case; it would be easy, indeed, from one's own knowledge of family
+histories to supply a great many real examples far more startling than
+this partially imaginary one. With such a variety of racial and
+professional antecedents behind us, what infinite possibilities are
+opened before us of children with ability, folly, stupidity, genius?
+
+Infinite numbers of intermixtures everywhere exist in civilised
+societies. Most of them are passable; many of them are execrable; a few
+of them are admirable; and here and there, one of them consists of that
+happy blending of individual characteristics which we all immediately
+recognise as genius--at least after somebody else has told us so.
+
+The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to be somewhat after
+this fashion. Take a number of good, strong, powerful stocks, mentally
+or physically, endowed with something more than the average amount of
+energy and application. Let them be as varied as possible in
+characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include among them a
+considerable small-change of races, dispositions, professions, and
+temperaments. Mix, by marriage, to the proper consistency; educate the
+offspring, especially by circumstances and environment, as broadly,
+freely, and diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with
+other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies; and
+watch the result to find your genius in the fourth or fifth generation.
+If the experiment has been properly performed, and all the conditions
+have been decently favourable, you will get among the resultant five
+hundred persons a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair
+proportion of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and
+(in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your cards very
+carefully) perhaps among them all a single genius. But most probably the
+genius will have died young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through
+some tiny defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying
+this experiment unaided every day all around us, and, though she makes a
+great many misses, occasionally she makes a stray hit and then we get a
+Shakespeare or a Grimaldi.
+
+'But you haven't proved all this: you have only suggested it.' Does one
+prove a thesis of deep-reaching importance in a ten-page essay? And if
+one proved it in a big book, with classified examples and detailed
+genealogies of all the geniuses, would anybody on earth except Mr.
+Francis Galton ever take the trouble to read it?
+
+
+
+
+DESERT SANDS
+
+
+If deserts _have_ a fault (which their present biographer is far from
+admitting), that fault may doubtless be found in the fact that their
+scenery as a rule tends to be just a trifle monotonous. Though fine in
+themselves, they lack variety. To be sure, very few of the deserts of
+real life possess that absolute flatness, sandiness and sameness, which
+characterises the familiar desert of the poet and of the annual
+exhibitions--a desert all level yellow expanse, most bilious in its
+colouring, and relieved by but four allowable academy properties, a
+palm-tree, a camel, a sphinx, and a pyramid. For foreground, throw in a
+sheikh in appropriate drapery; for background, a sky-line and a
+bleaching skeleton; stir and mix, and your picture is finished. Most
+practical deserts one comes across in travelling, however, are a great
+deal less simple and theatrical than that; rock preponderates over sand
+in their composition, and inequalities of surface are often the rule
+rather than the exception. There is reason to believe, indeed, that the
+artistic conception of the common or Burlington House desert has been
+unduly influenced for evil by the accessibility and the poetic adjuncts
+of the Egyptian sand-waste, which, being situated in a great alluvial
+river valley is really flat, and, being the most familiar, has therefore
+distorted to its own shape the mental picture of all its kind elsewhere.
+But most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy; they
+present a considerable diversity and variety of surface, and their rocks
+are often unpleasantly obtrusive to the tender feet of the pedestrian
+traveller.
+
+A desert, in fact, is only a place where the weather is always and
+uniformly fine. The sand is there merely as what the logicians call, in
+their cheerful way, 'a separable accident'; the essential of a desert,
+as such, is the absence of vegetation, due to drought. The barometer in
+those happy, too happy, regions, always stands at Set Fair. At least, it
+would, if barometers commonly grew in the desert, where, however, in the
+present condition of science, they are rarely found. It is this dryness
+of the air, and this alone, that makes a desert; all the rest, like the
+camels, the sphinx, the skeleton, and the pyramid, is only thrown in to
+complete the picture.
+
+Now the first question that occurs to the inquiring mind--which is but a
+graceful periphrasis for the present writer--when it comes to examine in
+detail the peculiarities of deserts is just this: Why are there places
+on the earth's surface on which rain never falls? What makes it so
+uncommonly dry in Sahara when it's so unpleasantly wet and so
+unnecessarily foggy in this realm of England? And the obvious answer is,
+of course, that deserts exist only in those parts of the world where the
+run of mountain ranges, prevalent winds, and ocean currents conspire to
+render the average rainfall as small as possible. But, strangely enough,
+there is a large irregular belt of the great eastern continent where
+these peculiar conditions occur in an almost unbroken line for thousands
+of miles together, from the west coast of Africa to the borders of
+China: and it is in this belt that all the best known deserts of the
+world are actually situated. In one place it is the Atlas and the Kong
+mountains (now don't pretend, as David Copperfield's aunt would have
+said, you don't know the Kong mountains); at another place it is the
+Arabian coast range, Lebanon, and the Beluchi hills; at a third, it is
+the Himalayas and the Chinese heights that intercept and precipitate all
+the moisture from the clouds. But, from whatever variety of local causes
+it may arise, the fact still remains the same, that all the great
+deserts run in this long, almost unbroken series, beginning with the
+greater and the smaller Sahara, continuing in the Libyan and Egyptian
+desert, spreading on through the larger part of Arabia, reappearing to
+the north as the Syrian desert, and to the east as the desert of
+Rajputana (the Great Indian Desert of the Anglo-Indian mind), while
+further east again the long line terminates in the desert of Gobi on the
+Chinese frontier.
+
+In other parts of the world, deserts are less frequent. The peculiar
+combination of circumstances which goes to produce them does not
+elsewhere occur over any vast area, on so large a scale. Still, there is
+one region in western America where the necessary conditions are found
+to perfection. The high snow-clad peaks of the Rocky Mountains on the
+one side check and condense all the moisture that comes from the
+Atlantic; the Sierra Nevada and the Wahsatch range on the other, running
+parallel with them to the west, check and condense all the moisture that
+comes from the Pacific coast. In between these two great lines lies the
+dry and almost rainless district known to the ambitious western mind as
+the Great American Desert, enclosing in its midst that slowly
+evaporating inland sea, the Great Salt Lake, a last relic of some
+extinct chain of mighty waters once comparable to Superior, Erie, and
+Ontario. In Mexico, again, where the twin ranges draw closer together,
+desert conditions once more supervene. But it is in central Australia
+that the causes which lead to the desert state are, perhaps on the
+whole, best exemplified. There, ranges of high mountains extend almost
+all round the coasts, and so completely intercept the rainfall which
+ought to fertilise the great central plain that the rivers are almost
+all short and local, and one thirsty waste spreads for miles and miles
+together over the whole unexplored interior of the continent.
+
+But why are deserts rocky and sandy? Why aren't they covered, like the
+rest of the world, with earth, soil, mould, or dust? One can see plainly
+enough why there should be little or no vegetation where no rain falls,
+but one can't see quite so easily why there should be only sand and rock
+instead of arid clay-field.
+
+Well, the answer is that without vegetation there is no such thing as
+soil on earth anywhere. The top layer of the land in all ordinary and
+well-behaved countries is composed entirely of vegetable mould, the
+decaying remains of innumerable generations of weeds and grasses. Earth
+to earth is the rule of nature. Soil, in fact, consists entirely of dead
+leaves. And where there are no leaves to die and decay, there can be no
+mould or soil to speak of. Darwin showed, indeed, in his last great
+book, that we owe the whole earthy covering of our hills and plains
+almost entirely to the perennial exertions of that friend of the
+farmers, the harmless, necessary earthworm. Year after year the silent
+worker is busy every night pulling down leaves through his tunnelled
+burrow into his underground nest, and there converting them by means of
+his castings into the black mould which produces, in the end, for lordly
+man, all his cultivable fields and pasture-lands and meadows. Where
+there are no leaves and no earth-worms, therefore, there can be no soil;
+and under those circumstances we get what we familiarly know as a
+desert.
+
+The normal course of events where new land rises above the sea is
+something like this, as oceanic isles have sufficiently demonstrated.
+The rock when it first emerges from the water rises bare and rugged like
+a sea-cliff; no living thing, animal or vegetable, is harboured anywhere
+on its naked surface. In time, however, as rain falls upon its jutting
+peaks and barren pinnacles, disintegration sets in, or, to speak plainer
+English, the rock crumbles; and soon streams wash down tiny deposits of
+sand and mud thus produced into the valleys and hollows of the upheaved
+area. At the same time lichens begin to spring in yellow patches upon
+the bare face of the rock, and feathery ferns, whose spores have been
+wafted by the wind, or carried by the waves, or borne on the feet of
+unconscious birds, sprout here and there from the clefts and crannies.
+These, as they die and decay, in turn form a thin layer of vegetable
+mould, the first beginning of a local soil, in which the trusty
+earthworm (imported in the egg on driftwood or floating weeds)
+straightway sets to work to burrow, and which he rapidly increases by
+his constant labour. On the soil thus deposited, flowering plants and
+trees can soon root themselves, as fast as seeds, nuts or fruits are
+wafted to the island by various accidents from surrounding countries.
+The new land thrown up by the great eruption of Krakatoa has in this way
+already clothed itself from head to foot with a luxuriant sheet of
+ferns, mosses, and other vegetation.
+
+First soil, then plant and animal life, are thus in the last resort
+wholly dependent for their existence on the amount of rainfall. But in
+deserts, where rain seldom or never falls (except by accident) the first
+term in this series is altogether wanting. There can be no rivers,
+brooks or streams to wash down beds of alluvial deposit from the
+mountains to the valleys. Denudation (the term, though rather awful, is
+not an improper one) must therefore take a different turn. Practically
+speaking, there is no water action; the work is all done by sun and
+wind. Under these circumstances, the rocks crumble away very slowly by
+mere exposure into small fragments, which the wind knocks off and blows
+about the surface, forming sand or dust of them in all convenient
+hollows. The frequent currents, produced by the heated air that lies
+upon the basking layer of sand, continually keep the surface agitated,
+and so blow about the sand and grind one piece against the other till it
+becomes ever finer and finer. Thus for the most part the hollows or
+valleys of deserts are filled by plains of bare sand, while their higher
+portions consist rather of barren, rocky mountains or table-land.
+
+The effect upon whatever animal or vegetable life can manage here and
+there to survive under such circumstances is very peculiar. Deserts are
+the most exacting of all known environments, and they compel their
+inhabitants with profound imperiousness to knuckle under to their
+prejudices and preconceptions in ten thousand particulars.
+
+To begin with, all the smaller denizens of the desert--whether
+butterflies, beetles, birds, or lizards--must be quite uniformly
+isabelline or sand-coloured. This universal determination of the
+desert-haunting creatures to fall in with the fashion and to harmonise
+with their surroundings adds considerably to the painfully monotonous
+effect of desert scenery. A green plant, a blue butterfly, a red and
+yellow bird, a black or bronze-coloured beetle or lizard would improve
+the artistic aspect of the desert not a little. But no; the animals will
+hear nothing of such gaudy hues; with Quaker uniformity they will clothe
+themselves in dove-colour; they will all wear a sandy pepper-and-salt
+with as great unanimity as the ladies of the Court (on receipt of
+orders) wear Court mourning for the late lamented King of the Tongataboo
+Islands.
+
+In reality, this universal sombre tint of desert animals is a beautiful
+example of the imperious working of our modern _Deus ex machina_,
+natural selection. The more uniform in hue is the environment of any
+particular region, the more uniform in hue must be all its inhabitants.
+In the arctic snows, for example, we find this principle pushed to its
+furthest logical conclusion. There, everything is and must be
+white--hares, foxes, and ptarmigans alike; and the reason is
+obvious--there can be no exception. Any brown or black or reddish animal
+who ventured north would at once render himself unpleasantly conspicuous
+in the midst of the uniform arctic whiteness. If he were a brown hare,
+for example, the foxes and bears and birds of prey of the district would
+spot him at once on the white fields, and pounce down upon him forthwith
+on his first appearance. That hare would leave no similar descendants to
+continue the race of brown hares in arctic regions after him. Or,
+suppose, on the other hand, it were a brown fox who invaded the domain
+of eternal snow. All the hares and ptarmigans of his new district would
+behold him coming from afar and keep well out of his way, while he, poor
+creature, would never be able to spot them at all among the white
+snow-fields. He would starve for want of prey, at the very time when the
+white fox, his neighbour, was stealing unperceived with stealthy tread
+upon the hares and ptarmigans. In this way, from generation to
+generation of arctic animals, the blacker or browner have been
+constantly weeded out, and the greyer and whiter have been constantly
+encouraged, till now all arctic animals alike are as spotlessly snowy as
+the snow around them.
+
+In the desert much the same causes operate, in a slightly different way,
+in favour of a general greyness or brownness as against pronounced
+shades of black, white, red, green, or yellow. Desert animals, like
+intense South Kensington, go in only for neutral tints. In proportion as
+each individual approaches in hue to the sand about it will it succeed
+in life in avoiding its enemies or in creeping upon its prey, according
+to circumstances. In proportion as it presents a strikingly vivid or
+distinct appearance among the surrounding sand will it make itself a
+sure mark for its watchful foes, if it happen to be an unprotected
+skulker, or will it be seen beforehand and avoided by its prey, if it
+happen to be a predatory hunting or insect-eating beast. Hence on the
+sandy desert all species alike are uniformly sand-coloured. Spotty
+lizards bask on spotty sands, keeping a sharp look-out for spotty
+butterflies and spotty beetles, only to be themselves spotted and
+devoured in turn by equally spotty birds, or snakes, or tortoises. All
+nature seems to have gone into half-mourning together, or, converted by
+a passing Puritan missionary, to have clad itself incontinently in grey
+and fawn-colour.
+
+Even the larger beasts that haunt the desert take their tone not a
+little from their sandy surroundings. You have only to compare the
+desert-haunting lion with the other great cats to see at once the reason
+for his peculiar uniform. The tigers and other tropical jungle-cats have
+their coats arranged in vertical stripes of black and yellow, which,
+though you would hardly believe it unless you saw them in their native
+nullahs (good word 'nullah,' gives a convincing Indian tone to a
+narrative of adventure), harmonise marvellously with the lights and
+shades of the bamboos and cane-brakes through whose depths the tiger
+moves so noiselessly.
+
+Looking into the gloom of a tangled jungle, it is almost impossible to
+pick out the beast from the yellow stems and dark shadows in which it
+hides, save by the baleful gleam of those wicked eyes, catching the
+light for one second as they turn wistfully and bloodthirstily towards
+the approaching stranger. The jaguar, oncelot, leopard, and other
+tree-cats, on the other hand, are dappled or spotted--a type of
+coloration which exactly harmonises with the light and shade of the
+round sun-spots seen through the foliage of a tropical forest. They,
+too, are almost indistinguishable from the trees overhead as they creep
+along cautiously on the trunks and branches. But spots or stripes would
+at once betray the crouching lion among the bare rocks or desert sands;
+and therefore the lion is approximately sand-coloured. Seen in a cage at
+the Zoo, the British lion is a very conspicuous animal indeed; but
+spread at full length on a sandy patch or among bare yellow rocks under
+the Saharan sun, you may walk into his mouth before you are even aware
+of his august existence.
+
+The three other great desert beasts of Asia or Africa--the ostrich, the
+giraffe, and the camel--are less protectively coloured, for various
+reasons. Giraffes and ostriches go in herds; they trust for safety
+mainly to their swiftness of foot, and, when driven to bay, like most
+gregarious animals, they make common cause against the ill-advised
+intruder. In such cases it is often well, for the sake of stragglers,
+that the herd should be readily distinguished at a distance; and it is
+to insure this advantage, I believe, that giraffes have acquired their
+strongly marked spots, as zebras have acquired their distinctive
+stripes, and hyaenas their similarly banded or dappled coats. One must
+always remember that disguise may be carried a trifle too far, and that
+recognisability in the parents often gives the young and giddy a point
+in their favour. For example, it seems certain that the general
+grey-brown tint of European rabbits serves to render them
+indistinguishable in a field of bracken, stubble, or dry grass. How hard
+it is, either for man or hawk, to pick out rabbits so long as they sit
+still, in an English meadow! But as soon as they begin to run towards
+their burrows the white patch by their tails inevitably betrays them;
+and this betrayal seems at first sight like a failure of adaptation.
+Certainly many a rabbit must be spotted and shot, or killed by birds of
+prey, solely on account of that tell-tale white patch as he makes for
+his shelter. Nevertheless, when we come to look closer, we can see, as
+Mr. Wallace acutely suggests, that the tell-tale patch has its function
+also. On the first alarm the parent rabbits take to their heels at once,
+and run at any untoward sight or sound toward the safety of the burrow.
+The white patch and the hoisted tail act as a danger-signal to the
+little bunnies, and direct them which way to escape the threatened
+misfortune. The young ones take the hint at once and follow their
+leader. Thus what may be sometimes a disadvantage to the individual
+animal becomes in the long run of incalculable benefit to the entire
+community.
+
+It is interesting to note, too, how much alike in build and gait are
+these three thoroughbred desert roamers, the giraffe, the ostrich, and
+the camel or dromedary. In their long legs, their stalking march, their
+tall necks, and their ungainly appearance they all betoken their common
+adaptation to the needs and demands of a special environment. Since food
+is scarce and shelter rare, they have to run about much over large
+spaces in search of a livelihood or to escape their enemies. Then the
+burning nature of the sand as well as the need for speed compels them to
+have long legs which in turn necessitate equally long necks, if they are
+to reach the ground or the trees overhead for food and drink. Their feet
+have to be soft and padded to enable them to run over the sand with
+ease; and hard horny patches must protect their knees and all other
+portions of the body liable to touch the sweltering surface when they
+lie down to rest themselves. Finally, they can all endure thirst for
+long periods together; and the camel, the most inveterate
+desert-haunter of the trio, is even provided with a special stomach to
+take in water for several days at a stretch, besides having a peculiarly
+tough skin in which perspiration is reduced to a minimum. He carries his
+own water-supply internally, and wastes as little of it by the way as
+possible.
+
+What the camel is among animals that is the cactus among plants--the
+most confirmed and specialised of desert-haunting organisms. It has been
+wholly developed in, by, and for the desert. I don't mean merely to say
+that cactuses resemble camels because they are clumsy, ungainly,
+awkward, and paradoxical; that would be a point of view almost as far
+beneath the dignity of science (which in spite of occasional lapses into
+the sin of levity I endeavour as a rule piously to uphold) as the old
+and fallacious reason 'because there's a B in both.' But cactuses, like
+camels, take in their water supply whenever they can get it, and never
+waste any of it on the way by needless evaporation. As they form the
+perfect central type of desert vegetation, and are also familiar plants
+to everyone, they may be taken as a good illustrative example of the
+effect that desert conditions inevitably produce upon vegetable
+evolution.
+
+Quaint, shapeless, succulent, jointed, the cactuses look at first sight
+as if they were all leaves, and had no stem or trunk worth mentioning.
+Of course, therefore, the exact opposite is really the case; for, as a
+late lamented poet has assured us in mournful numbers, things (generally
+speaking) are not what they seem. The true truth about the cactuses runs
+just the other way; they are all stem and no leaves; what look like
+leaves being really joints of the trunk or branches, and the foliage
+being all dwarfed and stunted into the prickly hairs that dot and
+encumber the surface. All plants of very arid soils--for example, our
+common English stonecrops--tend to be thick, jointed, and succulent;
+the distinction between stem and leaves tends to disappear; and the
+whole weed, accustomed at times to long drought, acquires the habit of
+drinking in water greedily at its rootlets after every rain, and storing
+it away for future use in its thick, sponge-like, and water-tight
+tissues. To prevent undue evaporation, the surface also is covered with
+a thick, shiny skin--a sort of vegetable macintosh, which effectually
+checks all unnecessary transpiration. Of this desert type, then, the
+cactus is the furthest possible term. It has no flat leaves with
+expanded blades, to wither and die in the scorching desert air; but in
+their stead the thick and jointed stems do the same work--absorb carbon
+from the carbonic acid of the air, and store up water in the driest of
+seasons. Then, to repel the attacks of herbivores, who would gladly get
+at the juicy morsel if they could, the foliage has been turned into
+sharp defensive spines and prickles. The cactus is tenacious of life to
+a wonderful degree; and for reproduction it trusts not merely to its
+brilliant flowers, fertilised for the most part by desert moths or
+butterflies, and to its juicy fruit, of which the common prickly pear is
+a familiar instance, but it has the special property of springing afresh
+from any stray bit or fragment of the stem that happens to fall upon the
+dry ground anywhere.
+
+True cactuses (in the native state) are confined to America; but the
+unhappy naturalist who ventures to say so in mixed society is sure to
+get sat upon (without due cause) by numberless people who have seen 'the
+cactus' wild all the world over. For one thing, the prickly pear and a
+few other common American species, have been naturalised and run wild
+throughout North Africa, the Mediterranean shores, and a great part of
+India, Arabia, and Persia. But what is more interesting and more
+confusing still, other desert plants which are _not_ cactuses, living
+in South Africa, Sind, Rajputana, and elsewhere unspecified, have been
+driven by the nature of their circumstances and the dryness of the soil
+to adopt precisely the same tactics, and therefore unconsciously to
+mimic or imitate the cactus tribe in the minutest details of their
+personal appearance. Most of these fallacious pseudo-cactuses are really
+spurges or euphorbias by family. They resemble the true Mexican type in
+externals only; that is to say, their stems are thick, jointed, and
+leaf-like, and they grow with clumsy and awkward angularity; but in the
+flower, fruit, seed, and in short in all structural peculiarities
+whatsoever, they differ utterly from the genuine cactus, and closely
+resemble all their spurge relations. Adaptive likenesses of this sort,
+due to mere stress of local conditions, have no more weight as
+indications of real relationship than the wings of the bat or the
+nippers of the seal, which don't make the one into a skylark, or the
+other into a mackerel.
+
+In Sahara, on the other hand, the prevailing type of vegetation
+(wherever there is any) belongs to the kind playfully described by Sir
+Lambert Playfair as 'salsolaceous,' that is to say, in plainer English,
+it consists of plants like the glass-wort and the kali-weed, which are
+commonly burnt to make soda. These fleshy weeds resemble the cactuses in
+being succulent and thick-skinned but they differ from them in their
+curious ability to live upon very salt and soda-laden water. All through
+the great African desert region, in fact, most of the water is more or
+less brackish; 'bitter lakes' are common, and gypsum often covers the
+ground over immense areas. These districts occupy the beds of vast
+ancient lakes, now almost dry, of which the existing _chotts_, or very
+salt pools, are the last shrunken and evanescent relics.
+
+And this point about the water brings me at last to a cardinal fact in
+the constitution of deserts which is almost always utterly misconceived
+in Europe. Most people at home picture the desert to themselves as
+wholly dead, flat, and sandy. To talk about the fauna and flora of
+Sahara sounds in their ears like self-contradictory nonsense. But, as a
+matter of fact, that uniform and lifeless desert of the popular fancy
+exists only in those sister arts that George II.--good, practical
+man--so heartily despised, 'boetry and bainting.' The desert of real
+life, though less impressive, is far more varied. It has its ups and
+downs, its hills and valleys. It has its sandy plains and its rocky
+ridges. It has its lakes and ponds, and even its rivers. It has its
+plants and animals, its oases and palm-groves. In short, like everything
+else on earth, it's a good deal more complex than people imagine.
+
+One may take Sahara as a very good example of the actual desert of
+physical geography, in contradistinction to the level and lifeless
+desert that stretches like the sea over illimitable spaces in verse or
+canvas. And here, I fear, I am going to dispel another common and
+cherished illusion. It is my fate to be an iconoclast, and perhaps long
+practice has made me rather like the trade than otherwise. A popular
+belief exists all over Europe that the late M. Roudaire--that De Lesseps
+who never quite 'came off'--proposed to cut a canal from the
+Mediterranean into the heart of Africa, which was intended, in the
+stereotyped phrase of journalism, to 'flood Sahara,' and convert the
+desert into an inland sea. He might almost as well have talked of
+cutting a canal from Brighton to the Devil's Dyke and 'submerging
+England,' as the devil wished to do in the old legend. As a matter of
+fact, good, practical M. Roudaire, sound engineer that he was, never
+even dreamt of anything so chimerical. What he did really propose was
+something far milder and simpler in its way, but, as his scheme has
+given rise to the absurd notion that Sahara as a whole lies below
+sea-level, it may be worth while briefly to explain what it was he
+really thought of doing.
+
+Some sixty miles south of Biskra, the most fashionable resort in the
+Algerian Sahara, there is a deep depression two hundred and fifty miles
+long, partly occupied by three salt lakes of the kind so common over the
+whole dried-up Saharan area. These three lakes, shrunken remnants of
+much larger sheets, lie below the level of the Mediterranean, but they
+are separated from it, and from one another, by upland ranges which rise
+considerably above the sea line. What M. Roudaire proposed to do was to
+cut canals through these three barriers, and flood the basins of the
+salt lakes. The result would have been, not as is commonly said to
+submerge Sahara, nor even to form anything worth seriously describing as
+'an inland sea,' but to substitute three larger salt lakes for the
+existing three smaller ones. The area so flooded, however, would bear to
+the whole area of Sahara something like the same proportion that Windsor
+Park bears to the entire surface of England. This is the true truth
+about that stupendous undertaking, which is to create a new
+Mediterranean in the midst of the Dark Continent, and to modify the
+climate of Northern Europe to something like the condition of the
+Glacial Epoch. A new Dead Sea would be much nearer the mark, and the
+only way Northern Europe would feel the change, if it felt it at all,
+would be in a slight fall in the price of dates in the wholesale market.
+
+No, Sahara as a whole is _not_ below sea-level; it is _not_ the dry bed
+of a recent ocean; and it is _not_ as flat as the proverbial pancake all
+over. Part of it, indeed, is very mountainous, and all of it is more or
+less varied in level. The Upper Sahara consists of a rocky plateau,
+rising at times into considerable peaks; the Lower, to which it
+descends by a steep slope, is 'a vast depression of clay and sand,' but
+still for the most part standing high above sea-level. No portion of the
+Upper Sahara is less than 1,300 feet high--a good deal higher than
+Dartmoor or Derbyshire. Most of the Lower reaches from two to three
+hundred feet--quite as elevated as Essex or Leicester. The few spots
+below sea-level consist of the beds of ancient lakes, now much shrunk by
+evaporation, owing to the present rainless condition of the country; the
+soil around these is deep in gypsum, and the water itself is
+considerably salter than the sea. That, however, is always the case with
+fresh-water lakes in their last dotage, as American geologists have amply
+proved in the case of the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Moving sand
+undoubtedly covers a large space in both divisions of the desert, but
+according to Sir Lambert Playfair, our best modern authority on the
+subject, it occupies not more than one-third part of the entire Algerian
+Sahara. Elsewhere rock, clay, and muddy lake are the prevailing
+features, interspersed with not infrequent date-groves and villages, the
+product of artesian wells, or excavated spaces, or river oases. Even
+Sahara, in short, to give it its due, is not by any means so black as
+it's painted.
+
+
+
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