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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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