FALLING IN LOVE, WITH OTHER 
 
 ESSAYS ON MORE EXACT 
 
 BRANCHES OF 
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 „'.^ 
 
 li.O'^ ■ 
 
 BY 
 
 GRANT ALLEN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 
 1890 
 
 2 7 4 2 u ;- 
 
Authorized Edition. 
 
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 i^ublic 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 
 
 Revieiv : * Honey Dew ' and * The First Potter ' were 
 
 contributions to Longman's Magazine : and all tbe 
 
 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. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAOH 
 
 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 10(j 
 
 British and Foreign IT.i 
 
 Thunderbolts ,, 137 
 
 Honey-dew lo'j 
 
 The Milk in the Coco-Nut ITO 
 
 Food and Feeding 193 
 
 De Banana 210 
 
 Go to the Ant 233 
 
 Big Animals 251 
 
 Fossil Food ■ . . . , 271 
 
 OoBtTRY Barrows 287 
 
 Fish Out of Water 302 
 
 The First Potter 316 
 
 The Recipe for Genius 328 
 
 Desert Sands 341 
 
FALLING LW 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 innu- 
 merable, it is true, have set their faces against it already 
 from immemorial antiquity ; but then they only attacked the 
 particular instanci without venturing to impugn the insti- 
 tution itself on general principles. An old Indian adminis- 
 trator, 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 futu 3 develop- 
 ment of the race, in the process which he not very 
 felicitously or elegantly describes as ' man-breeding.' * Pro- 
 bably,' 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 foohsh 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 dis- 
 
2 FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 I»assionato but artificial selection of a fitting;; partner as the 
 father or niotlicr of future generations. 
 
 Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be 
 treated seriously and reverently. But, it seems to nie, 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 fiir from con- 
 sidering love as a * foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests 
 of the race, I believe most competent pliysiologists 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 con- 
 scious and deliberate process of selection. More than that, 
 I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure most evolution- 
 ists 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 Camp- 
 bell. 
 
 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 modem biology teaches us to be- 
 
FALLING IN LOVE 8 
 
 lieve, ig nothin;? moro than tho latest, highest, and most 
 involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost 
 universal selective process which ^fr. Darwin has cnahled 
 us to recognise throughout tho 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 over- 
 come her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacoi'k 
 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 aduiiration of liis mates 
 in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to bo 
 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 pecxiliarities. It is further- 
 more 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 faU 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 ex* 
 
4 FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 perience 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 quahties in the re- 
 spective 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 grand- 
 mother. Morahsts 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-preser\ation 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. Conversf.iy, sallowncss and paleness are roughly 
 indicative of dyspepsia and anasmia ; 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 de- 
 parture from the central norma and standard of the race. 
 Good teeth mean good deglutition ; a clear eye means an 
 active liver ; scrubbiness and undcrsizedness 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. 
 
FALLING m LOVE 5 
 
 A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive features. Low, 
 receding foreheads strike us uniavourably. Heavy, stolid, 
 half-idioti(; countenances can never be beautiful, however 
 regular tiieir lines and contours. Intelligence and good- 
 ness are almost as necessary as health and vigour in order 
 to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful hmnan 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 
 casf^s efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love 
 with individually is, I beheve, 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 scien- 
 tifically true, one time with another, when we take an 
 extended range of cases, may, I think, be almost demon- 
 strated 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 
 
C FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 breeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural 
 selection has similarly to exert itself upon a crowd of crdtins 
 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 com- 
 munity, 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 follow-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 FalUng 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 
 
FALLING IN LOVE 7 
 
 definitely seek out and discover such qualities ; instinct works 
 far more intuitively than that ; but we find at last, by sub- 
 sequent 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 Com- 
 mandments. 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 some- 
 where 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 hfetime (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 ofiered. 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 
 
8 FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 societies they happen to be cast among. A nmn at Ashby- 
 (le-la-Zouch does not hunt the world over to find his pre- 
 estabhshed 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 ^vlves, 
 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 speciahsation, one stamp and 
 token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick 
 and choose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selec- 
 tion 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. Some- 
 times 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 rami- 
 fications than human consciousness. ' What on earth,' we 
 
FALLING IN LOVE 9 
 
 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 (im- 
 possible supposition ! ) that manldnd could conceivably di- 
 vest 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 differ- 
 ences which would enable them to join together in holy 
 matrimony ^tting 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 d 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 senti- 
 ment, irrespective of that instinctive preference which we 
 call Falling in Love, I beheve that so far from improving 
 man, you would only do one of two things — either spoil his 
 constitution, or produce a tame stereotj-ped pattern of 
 amiable imbecility. You would crush out all initiative, 
 all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality ; you would 
 
10 FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 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 lie 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 rnay be 
 maximised, bad quahties minimised.' True, so far as con- 
 cerns a few points prized by ourselves for our own purposes. 
 But in doing this, we have so lowered the general constitu- 
 tional 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 hmb unknown to their 
 wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to 
 deal with the mfinitely 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 seem- 
 
FALLING IN LOVE 11 
 
 ingly unlike parts, from the wide-f.preai effects of small 
 conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the Tas- 
 manians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances 
 different from those with which their ancestors w^ere 
 familiar. \Vhat folly to interfere with a marvellous instinct 
 wliich 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 
 eery good point, and is for ever weeding out all the occa- 
 sional 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 bene- 
 ficial. How is this ? Well, one has to take into considera- 
 tion 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 circum- 
 stances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the 
 world to supplement or counteract his individual pecuUar- 
 ities, 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 him- 
 self 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 
 
12 FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 an overstoclccd world, with individual variations, some pro- 
 gressive, some retro<,'rado, there could be no natural selec- 
 tion, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief besetting 
 danger of cut-and-dricd 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 genera- 
 tions by the hereditarily reckless and dissolute and impru- 
 dent. 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 snobbish- 
 ness. In many cases it is clearly demonstrable that such 
 marriages are productive in the highest degree of evil con- 
 sequences. 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 un- 
 healthy, ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody or other 
 will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Con- 
 siderations 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 in- 
 fluenced by various side advantages, and nature has takenher 
 vengeance accordingly on the unhappy offspring. Parents 
 and moraUsts are ever ready to drown her voice, and to 
 
FALLING IN LOVE 13 
 
 counsel marriage within one's own class, among nice people, 
 with a really religious girl, and so forth ad infinitwn. 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 
 sbiould 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 connnonly 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 persecu- 
 tion 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 aftbrded 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 
 
14 FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 numLer of the ablest minds in En;^'land, 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 tliis one great countcrp(3ise of undoubted good 
 to sot against all the manifold disadvantages and short- 
 comings of romantic literature — that it always appeals to 
 the true internal promptings of inherited instinct, and 
 oi)poses the foolish and selfish suggestions of interested 
 outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished 
 human natui'e against the expelling pitchfork of calculating 
 expediency in the matrimonial marketc While parents and 
 moralists are for ever saying, ' Don't marry for beauty ; 
 don't marry for incluiation ; don't marry for love : marry 
 for money, marry for social position, marry for advance- 
 ment, 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 tilled 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 inde- 
 scribable 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 doc- 
 trinaires who are always in the wrong : it is the senti- 
 
FALLING IN LOVE 15 
 
 mcntalists and the rebels "svlio 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 * sterlinj^ qualities of mind and 
 character,' we should now doubtless bo a miserable race of 
 prigs and bookworms, of martinets and puritans, of nervous 
 invalids and fueble idiots. It is because our young men 
 and maidens will not hearken to these peimy-wise apoph- 
 thegms of Gliallow sophistry — because t^'^y often prefer 
 Borneo awl 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 
 maiTy balances, as Mr. Cialton has shown, happily die out, 
 leaving none to represent them : the men who marry 
 women they liave been weak enough and silly enough to 
 fall in love with, recruit the race with fine and vigorous 
 and intelligent cliildren, fortunately compounded of the 
 complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted 
 and mutual] v reinforcuig 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 genera- 
 tion should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the genera- 
 tions 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 
 
16 FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 value and importance of the instinct. ^lost men and 
 women select for themselves ])urtnerH for life at an a<?e 
 when they know but little of tlie world, when thoy judge 
 but superficially of characters and motives, ^vlu'n they still 
 make many mistakes in the conduct of life and in the esti- 
 mation 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 allow- 
 ance 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 wo 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 com- 
 paratively 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 
 wliich 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. Mar- 
 riage for money may go ; marriage for rank may go ; mar- 
 
FALLING IN LOVE 17 
 
 riago for position may go ; but marriapje for love, I believo 
 and trust, will last for ever. Men in the future will prob- 
 ably feel tbat a union with their cousins or near relaaona 
 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 considera- 
 tion save considerations of immediate natural impidse, ia 
 base and dis<,'raceful. But to the end of time the 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 Eoyal Society ; and that the instinctive desire for a 
 particular helpmate is a surer guide for the ultimate happi- 
 ness, 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. 
 
18 EIGHT AND LEFT 
 
 BIGHT AND LEFT 
 
 Adult man is the only animal who, in the famihar 
 scriptural phrase, ' knoAveth 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 laiife and fork, articulate 
 language, the art of cooivery, the common pump, and the 
 musical glasses. Ilis 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 acti\ities ho 
 practises. 
 
 It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage 
 ran. Man was once, in his childliood on earth, what Charles 
 Eeade 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 por- 
 tions 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 un- 
 known tongues, I will further explain for their special benefit 
 that arabidextrous means equally-handed, using the right 
 and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang 
 
RIGHT AND LEFT 19 
 
 rcmcarkg in immortal verse, * was the manner of Primitive 
 Man.' Il3 never minded twopence which hand he used, 
 as long as he got tlie Iruit or the scalp he wanted. IIow 
 could he when twopence wasn't yet invented ? Ilis manmia 
 never said to him in early youth, ' Why-why,' or * Tom- 
 tom,' as the case might he, ' that's the wrong hand to hold 
 your llint-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 malce this conlident assertion, you ask, about 
 a gentleman whom 1 never personally saw, and whose 
 habits the intervention of five hundred centuries has pre- 
 cluded 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 d priori facts, evolved, more Germanico, from 
 his inner consciousness. Not so. See how clever modern 
 arclucology 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 demon- 
 strable. 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 
 
20 RIGHT AND LEFT 
 
 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, draAV 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 fiint 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 interest- 
 ing 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 Eeade'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 
 
RIGHT AND LEFT 21 
 
 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 riglit-hand( Iness 
 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 wliich 
 stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. When primitive man 
 felt the tender passion steal over his soul, he lay in wait in 
 the bush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms had in- 
 spired 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 
 Btrephon 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 PliyHis supped that 
 evening off the roasted remains of the vanquished suitor. 
 I don't say these habits and manners were pretty ; but they 
 
22 EIGHT AND LEFT 
 
 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 super- 
 sede 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 buclder. 
 
 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 
 distmct 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 
 
RIGHT AND LEFT 23 
 
 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 Hint 
 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 whicli 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 pur- 
 poses. 
 
 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 accord- 
 ance with the natural sweep of the hand and arm. And, 
 mdced, it is a fact tliat ah early writing habitually touk 
 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 
 thai 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 m writing — made the letters run the opposite 
 way in the end ; and the change was due to the use of ink 
 
24 RIGHT AND LEFT 
 
 and othei' pigments for staining papjTus, parchment, or 
 paper. If the hand in this case moved from right to left it 
 would of course smear what it had aheady written ; and to 
 prevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of 
 writing was reversed from left right ward. The use of wax 
 tahlets also, no douht, helped forward the revolution, for in 
 this case, too, the hand would cover and ruh 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 whic> 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 masmuch 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 writmg, 
 so that in fact the order of letters and words on this page 
 depends ultimately upon the remote fact that i)rimitive 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 
 
RIGHT AND LEFT 25 
 
 will find, if you watcli yourself closely, that in examining a 
 landscape, or the view from a liill-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 move- 
 ment, and has made it especially natural when we are try- 
 ing 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 throe 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 vcrgognosa 
 di Pisa, who covers her face with her hands in shocked 
 horror at the patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand 
 corner. 
 
26 RIGHT AND LEFT 
 
 Observe, too, that the very conditions of technique 
 demand tliis order almost as rij^orously in painting as in 
 ■writing. 1 or 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. In- 
 numerable 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 loft, 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 loft. 
 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 wdiich it 
 is best fitted. Take, for example, so simple a matter as 
 buttonmg one's coat, where a curious distinction between 
 the habits of the sexes enables us to test the principle wdth 
 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 
 
RIGUT AND LI:FT 27 
 
 for by the pGi'vcrsity 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 huttonin;^, p^raspa 
 the button in his ri^jht hand, pushes it throu,u;h with his 
 ri;^lit thumb, holds the button-hole open with his loft, and 
 pulls all strai.u:ht with his right fore-finger. 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 in- 
 telligence 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 clumsv 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 de- 
 spaired of the German race, because it could never be 
 taught like the English to keep to the right side of the 
 3 
 
28 RIGHT AND LEIT 
 
 pavement in walkiiir,'. A sword is worn at the left hip : a 
 handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at tlie side ; 
 in the left, if in the coat-tails : in either case for the right 
 hand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in 
 the left breast ; a pocket for railway tickets halfway down 
 the right side. Try to reverse any one of these simple 
 actions, and you will see at once that they are imme- 
 diately implied in the very fact of our original right- 
 handedness. 
 
 And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles 
 Eeade'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 instru- 
 ments, 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 suflicient 
 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 Imow 
 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 cun- 
 ning, his supremacy would indeed begin to totter. Depend 
 upon it. Nature is wiser than even Charles Eeade. What 
 
RIGHT AND LEFT 29 
 
 bHg finds most useful in the low^ run must certainly have 
 many good pomts to recommend it. 
 
 And this last consitleration suggests another aspect of 
 right and left which must not be passed over without ono 
 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 bo considered as ill-omened, 
 unlucky, and, in one expressive word, sinister. Hence como 
 innumerable phrases and superstitions. It is the right hand 
 of friendship that we always grasp ; it is witli our own 
 right hand tliat we vhidicato 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 con- 
 demnation with them. On the right hand of the host is 
 the seat of honour ; it is to the left that the goats of eccle- 
 siastical 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 droitc dis- 
 play it in French as nuich 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 im- 
 portant. 
 
 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 cuony- 
 mos, 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 desti'^vby tossing a pinch of it over 
 
30 RIGHT AND LEFT 
 
 the left shoulder. A munloror's left Imnd is said by f^ood 
 authorities to be an excellent thini? to do ma;,'ic with ; but 
 here I cannot speak from personal experience. Nor do I 
 know why the vvcdding-rin^' is worn on the left hand; 
 th()u;,'h it is si;^'nilicant, at any rate, that the mark of slavery 
 should be put by the man with his own rii,'lit npon the 
 iiifcrior mond)er of the weaker vessel. Stron.ijf-mindcd 
 ladies may jc^et up an a^ntalion if they like to alter this 
 gross injustice of the centuries. 
 
 One curious minor application of li'-^hts and lefts is tho 
 rule of the road as it exists in Eiij^dand. ITow 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 unani- 
 mous 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 I'higland, was transplanted by the early engineers to tho 
 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 com- 
 promised the matter by gomg sometimes one way and some- 
 times the other 
 
EVOLUTION 31 
 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like cloo- 
 tricity, the cholera ^ci'm, woman's rights, the great mining 
 boom, and the Eastern Question, it is • in the air.' It per- 
 vades society everywliere with its sul)tle essence ; it infects 
 small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its slang phrases ; 
 it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant Pliilis- 
 tinism, 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 race- 
 horses he has never seen, the charms of peeresses ho 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-infonned 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. 
 
32 EVOLUTION 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, 
 ■who of course ditTors fiindiimcntally from that inferior class of 
 human beings known to nil 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-engii'j, 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 !st cf 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 fiir 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 con- 
 sisted 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 
 
EVOLUTION 33 
 
 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 geo- 
 graphical condition. Lamarck had worked out the descent 
 of plants and animals from a connnon 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 miss- 
 ing 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. Darwdn 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 
 
34 EVOLUTION 
 
 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 thmker's camel, out of its author's own pregnant 
 inner consciousness. The Eoman 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 tliought 
 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 con- 
 ceptions 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 
 
EVOLUTION 35 
 
 of life, and mind, and matter were still a hopeless and inex- 
 tricable muddle. It was no wonder, then, that the evolution 
 of the heavenly bodies should h xve been clearly apprehended 
 and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's 
 crust was still imperfectly imderstood, and the evolution of 
 living beings was only tentatively and hypothotically 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 
 mconceivable material thinness. The world arose out of a 
 sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of Avhich it was 
 composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimagin- 
 able 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 primajval 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 fiame, so 
 m 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 
 
86 EVOLUTION 
 
 at side by side with its own final historical outcome. In 
 Mr. Spencer's perspicuous phrase, evolution in this aspect 
 is a chanrje 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 appre- 
 hend, no doubt, and therefore to many people, as to Mv. 
 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 profoimdly 
 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 afi'airs of that solitary little, 
 out-of-the-way, second-rate system, whereof we form an in- 
 appreciable 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 
 
EVOLUTION 37 
 
 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 
 sometliing outside it, the faint and cloud-like mass which 
 bore within it Cfcsar 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 appreci- 
 able 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, tlio 
 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 
 
38 EVOLUTION 
 
 main luminary of our entire system. Now, I won't deny 
 that this primitive Kantian and Laplacian evohitionism, 
 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 nebulie 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 tlie 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 im- 
 presses 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 circum- 
 stances 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 excite- 
 ment, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it 
 
EVOLUTIN 39 
 
 gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing 
 old is growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, dis- 
 covers. 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. AVrhiklings 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 
 
40 EVOLUTION 
 
 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 cease- 
 lessly 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 shrinliage 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 cata- 
 clysms, 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 BuiTon 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 
 
EVOLUTION 41 
 
 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 outri,i,'ht 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, there- 
 fore, 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 Buflbn's hmt 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, Avas 
 no fool ; on the contrary, he was the most far-sighted man 
 of liis day in England ; he saw at once what Buffon was 
 driving at ; and he worked out ' Mr. Buffbn'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. Mmi, he 
 remarked, anticipating his descendant, takes rabbits or 
 
42 EVOLUTION 
 
 pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by im- 
 mensely changing their ahapos and colours. If man can make 
 a pouter or a fan tail out of the common runt, if he can pro- 
 duce a piebidd 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 parwins were always a bold 
 folk, and liad the courage of their opinions more than 
 most men. Bo even in Lichfield, cathedral city as it was, 
 and in the politely somnolent eighteenth century, Erasmus 
 Darwin ventured to point out the probability that quadru- 
 peds, 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 w^liat a Nemesis the whirligig of 
 time has brought around with it ! By a strange irony of 
 fate, those admired verses are now almost entirely for- 
 gotten ; poor Eliza has sur^dved only as our awful example 
 of artificial pathos ; and the zoological heresies, at which 
 
EVOLUTION 43 
 
 the eighteenth century shrugged its fiit shoulders and 
 dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to he 
 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. lie held that 
 organisms v/ere just as much the result of law, not of 
 miraculous interposition, as suns and worlds and all tlie 
 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 modi- 
 fications 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 antici- 
 pate his more famous successor. He thought organic 
 evolution was wholly due to the direct action of surround- 
 ing 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 
 4 
 
44 EVOLUTION -^ 
 
 sinuous sliape by constant wriggling through the grass of 
 the meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by 
 liis suggestive hint of survival of the fittest, and in so far, 
 but in so far alone, ho became the real father of modern 
 biological evolutionism. 
 
 From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles 
 Darwin himself pul)lished 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 scientilic 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 speculatioiiS 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 hypo- 
 thesis ' 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 con- 
 ditions, 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 diffe- 
 rences 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 
 
EVOLUTION 45 
 
 which they beHeved to have caused the differoncea of 
 species — * an influence which, to all appearance, would 
 produce in the millions of years and under the great variety 
 of conditions which geolo;^ical records imply, any amouiib 
 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 any tiling. As well say that Luther made the 
 German Reformation, that Lionardo made the Italian 
 Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revo- 
 lution, 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 perpe- 
 tually 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 prin- 
 ciple of descent with modification, that won over the whole 
 
46 EVOLUTION 
 
 world to the * Danvinian 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 instrumentoi in elucidating 
 this aspect of the case. They have shown, or they have 
 tried to show (for I don't want to dogmatise oritlie subject), 
 how mind is gradually built up from the snnplest 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- 
 
EVOLUTION 47 
 
 organs of extreme simplicity have first been formed on the 
 outside of tlie 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 myiiad 
 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 appro- 
 priate 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 showTi 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 
 
48 EVOLUTION 
 
 infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufactur- 
 ing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earUest be- 
 ginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he be- 
 came 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 lade himself from 
 grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, his Indian 
 corni 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 sldns 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, Stoneiienges 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 culmi- 
 nates in the iron-clad and the * Great Eastern ' ; his boome- 
 rang 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 liistorical ; 
 80 that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian, French, 
 and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth 
 
EVOLUTION 49 
 
 of the trireme, the ' Great Harry,' the ' Victory,'and the ' Mi- 
 notaur ' from the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity. 
 The grand conception of the uniform origin and develop- 
 ment 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 pro- 
 duct of innumerable woi-kcrs, all working up, though some of 
 them unconsciously, towards a grand final unified philo- 
 sophy 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 Linnreus 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 tjie thousands who 
 talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent, are pro- 
 bably aware that both word and conception are alike due to 
 the commanding intelligence and vast generalising power 
 of Herbert Spencer. 
 
50 STRICTLY INCOO. 
 
 STBICTLY INCOG, 
 
 Among the reefs of rock upon the Austrahan coast, an 
 explorer's dredge often brmgs up to tlie surface some 
 tangled tresses of reddish seaweed, which, when placed for 
 a while in a bucket of water, begin slowly to uncoil them- 
 selves as if endowed with animal life, and finally to swim 
 abjut 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 imi- 
 tating the weed itself in form and colour. When removed 
 from the water, this queer pipe-fish proves in general out- 
 line 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 fiaitened 
 out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly indistinguish- 
 able 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 a^^ un- 
 obtrusive snout and a pair of very unnoticeable eyes, at all 
 
STRICTLY INCOG. 51 
 
 suggests to the most microscopic observer its animcal nature. 
 Taken as a wliole, nobody could at first sight distinguish 
 it in any way from the waving weed among which it 
 vegetates. 
 
 Clearlv, this curious Austrahan cousin of the Mediter- 
 ranean sea-horses lias acquired so marvellous a resemblance 
 to a bit of fucus in order to deceive the eves of its ever- 
 watchful enemies, and to become indistinguishable from 
 the uneatable weed whoso 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 suHlcicntly 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 sui)port 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 protec- 
 tive 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 Provi- 
 dence to escape observation. 
 
 Now, with any animals thus constituted, cowards by 
 
52 STRICTLY INCOG. 
 
 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 ex- 
 tent 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 un- 
 obtrusive 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 
 tixe 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 locomo- 
 tive fucus. 
 
 Of course, the playful pipe-fish is by no means alone in 
 his assumption of so neat and eliective a disguise. Pro- 
 tective 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 perpe- 
 tually 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 
 
STEICTLY INCOG. 53 
 
 ordinary observer, but even the scientific and systematic 
 naturalist. 
 
 A few selected instances of sucli successful masquerading 
 will perhaps best serve to introduce the general principles 
 upon which all animal mimicry ultimately depends. In- 
 deed, 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 KalUma imralckta) 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 sick 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 counter- 
 feit 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 
 
54 STKICTLY INCOG. 
 
 have their tails sliarpenccl, in terrorem, into a prcLondcd 
 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 otlu^r 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 hmited : 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 w^ould too readily dis- 
 
STRICTLY INCOG. 55 
 
 cover him and poimcft 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 
 ptarmig:an and the willow grouse become as white in winter 
 as the vast snow-fields under which thoy 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 un- 
 yielding 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 atten- 
 tion 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 
 
66 STRICTLY INCOG. 
 
 colouring of tlio 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 hirds, 
 reptiles, and insects of Sahara, says Canon Tristram, copy 
 closely the grey or isabelline colour of the boundless sands 
 that strct^^h around them. Lord George Campbell, in his 
 amusing 'Log Letters from the " Challenger," ' mentions a 
 butterfly on the sliore 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 fiat-lish 
 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 afi'ects 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 uni- 
 form 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 
 
STRICTLY INCOG. 51 
 
 when one begins to recover from the first bout of sca-sickncss, 
 we come upon a certain shigj,nsh tract of ocean, uninvaded 
 by either Gulf Stream or arctic current, but slowly stag- 
 nating in a sort of endless eddy of its own, and known to 
 sailors and books of physical geograpliy 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, immedi- 
 ate and violent. 
 
 Caterpillars and butterflies often show us a further step 
 in advance in the direction of minute imitiaton of ordinary 
 surroundings. Dr. Weismann has published a very long 
 and learned memoir, fraught with the best German erudi- 
 tion and prolixity, upon this highly interesting and obscure 
 subject. As English readers, however, not mmaturally 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 
 
58 STRICTLY INCOG. 
 
 further enlarf^cd by Mr. Raphael Meldola, but will present 
 them instead with a brief rdsuine, boiled down and con- 
 densed into a patent royal elixir of learnincf. Your cater- 
 pillar, then, runs many serious risks in early life from the 
 annoyinjif persistence of sundry evil-dispo3ed birds, who 
 insist at inconvenient times in pickinj:^ him oil' the leaves of 
 Pfooseberry bushes and other his chosen places of residence. 
 His infant mortality, indeed, is something,' simply appal- 
 linfj;, and it is only by layinp^ the ej?,G[s 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, appear- 
 ing 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 pm'pose 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 
 
STRICTLY INCOO. 69 
 
 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 corrospondinj,' eilect. Tlio 
 shadow of yellowish prcon is, of course, always purplish 
 or lilac. It may at first sight seem surprising that a 
 caterpillar should possess so much artistic sense and dex- 
 terity ; but then the penalty for bunghng 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 ho])e 
 to sur\'ive 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 motlis have brown caterpillars, wliich 
 generally stand erect when at rest on the branches of trees 
 and so resemble small twigs ; and, in order that the resem- 
 blance 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 Lub- 
 bock 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 larvcB which frequent 
 pine trees have their bodies covered with tufts of green hairs 
 that serve to imitate the peculiar pine foliage. One queer 
 httle caterpillar, which lives upon the hoary foliage of 
 the sea-buckthorn, has a grey-green body, just like the 
 
60 STKICTLY INCOG. 
 
 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 Uke 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 cater- 
 pillars, and has not the slightest difliculty at all in distin- 
 guishing 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 crea- 
 tures — and the reason they take no pains to conceal them- 
 selves from his unobservant eyes is simply this : nobody on 
 earth wants to discover them. For either they are pro- 
 tectively 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 objoctor finds in hundreds on his peregrinations 
 about his own garden — commonplace things which the 
 
STIIICTLY INCOO. 61 
 
 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 cater- 
 pillars 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 tenta- 
 tively to describe their personal appearance, he comes up 
 smiling with his great russet woolly bear comfortably nest- 
 ling upon a green cabbage leaf, and asks you in a voice of 
 triumphant demonstration, where is the trace of conceal- 
 ment 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. Pimch in the street show knocks down the 
 policeman who comes to arrest liim, 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-stalka, 
 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 
 
62 STRICTLY INCOG, 
 
 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 girUsh 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 treacher- 
 ously 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 in- 
 offensive prey tm'n 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 fohage it 
 mimicked. So thoroughly did this innocent locust under- 
 stand 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. 
 
STRICTLY INCOG. 63 
 
 In order to understand how cases like these begfin 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 Uzards. 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 
 wliich 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 extra- 
 ordinary 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 wliite 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 ofters. 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 un- 
 observed 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 ob- 
 
64 STRICTLY INCOG. 
 
 serve the visits of their suspicious friend, and to note their 
 coincidence with the frequent mysterious disappearance of 
 a fellow-townsworaan, evaporated into space, hke the miss- 
 ing young women in neat cloth jackets who periodically 
 vanish from the London suburbs. In proportion as their 
 reasonable suspicions increased, the termites would care- 
 fully 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 imfortunate victims ; 
 and so the very vigilance which the ants exerted agiinst 
 his vile deception would itself react in time against their 
 own kind, by leaving only the most ruthless and indistin- 
 guishable 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. Every- 
 body 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 
 
STRICTLY INCOG. 65 
 
 leaf-like expansions, and lookincf 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 Hies are 
 belted and bearded in the very selfsame 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 extermi- 
 nation 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 help- 
 less larvcTB. 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 con- 
 stant practice in detecting and punishing the unwelcome 
 intruders. 
 
 It is only in external matters, however, that the appear- 
 ance of such mimetic species can ever be altered. Their 
 imderlying points of structure and formative detail always 
 show to the very end (if only one happens to observe them) 
 
6(> STRICTLY INCOG. 
 
 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 horaet, 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 masque- 
 rader 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 efi'ective 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 
 
STRICTLY INCOG. 67 
 
 known as the devil's coacli-horses, which, when irritated or 
 interfered with, cock up their tails hehind them in the most 
 ag^essive 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 refine- 
 ment of all is perhaps that noticed in certain allied 
 species which mimic bees, and which have acquired use- 
 less 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 
 
68 STRICTLY INCOG. 
 
 distinctness of the mimicliers and the mimicked was satis- 
 factorily 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 experi- 
 enced eye was so taken in by another of these decep- 
 tive 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 
 
STRICTLY INCOG. 69 
 
 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 back- 
 ground. 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 fisli similarly alter their colour to suit their back- 
 ground 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 en- 
 vironment 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 com- 
 plex. Tiny corpuscles of different pigments are sometimes 
 hidden in the depths of the chameleon's skin, and some- 
 times 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 
 
70 STRICTLY INCOG. 
 
 pigment, and a bluish layor in the skin which acts hke the 
 iridium glass so largely employed by Dr. Salviati, being 
 seen as straw-coloured with a transmitted light, but as- 
 suming a faint lilac tint against an opaque absorbent sur- 
 face. 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 pro- 
 duce 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 supe- 
 riority 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, 
 lied 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 
 
STRICTLY INCOG. 71 
 
 of natural history, and cannot for a moment be dispassioi.- 
 ately 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 sfisthctic authorities who com- 
 mand them from a distance. 
 
72 fcJEVJiN-YEAK SLIOiPERS 
 
 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, swear- 
 ing alone no longer settles causes oH'hand, as if by show of 
 hands, * the Ayes have it,' after the fashion prevalent in the 
 good old days when the whole Plundred 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 unpleas- 
 ant and discourteous habit of cross-examining their witnesses 
 (as if they doubted them, forsooth 1), 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 
 
8KVKN-YEAR SLEEI'KRS 73 
 
 to have been found, before the toad himself was actually 
 extracted ? Did you examine it all round to make quite sure 
 thert^ was no hole, or crack, or passa^'c in it anywhere? 
 Did you satisfy yourself after the toad was released from 
 his close quarters that no such hole, or crack, or passa<j;e 
 had been dexterously closed up, with intent to deceive, by 
 plaster, cement, or other aitilicial 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 alter-diimer 
 coffee), and to let the prehistoric toad go on his own 
 triumphant way, unheeded. 
 
 As a matter of fact, nobody ever makes larger allow- 
 ances for other people, in the estimate of their veracity, 
 
74 SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 
 
 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 conversa- 
 tion, 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, immedi- 
 ately 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 tlie 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 pubhshes his 
 final conclusions in a scientific journal. Ten to one, the 
 very next number of that same journal contains a dozen 
 Bupercilious 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 ijiight 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 boihng; 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 
 
SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 75 
 
 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 unliappy 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 
 probabihty, 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 v^hosG 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 descrtorum, 
 March 25, 184G.' Being a snail of a retiring and con- 
 tented disposition, however, accustomed to long droughts 
 and corresponding naps in his native sand-wastes, our 
 mollusk thereupon simply curled himself up into the top- 
 most 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 sliells 
 which he receives from foreign parts have had their inhabi- 
 tants 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 
 
76 SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 
 
 and muscles of the creature himself to wither unobserved 
 upon its native shores. At the IJritish Museum the desert 
 snail might have snoozed away his inglorious existence un- 
 suspected, 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 sHghtly discoloured ; and this discovery led to the 
 suspicion that perhaps a living aninuil might be temporarily 
 immured within that papery tomb. The Museum author- 
 ities 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. Ho strange a recovery from a long torpid condi- 
 tion, 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 zoo- 
 logical artist, Mr. Waterh,use; and a woodcut from the 
 sketch thus procured, with a history of his life and ad- 
 ventures, may bo found even unto this day in Dr. Wood- 
 ward's ' Manual of the Mollusca,' to witness if I lie. 
 
 I montion 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 anima- 
 tion for any long period of time together. But there are 
 other cases of encysted or immured animals which, though 
 less striking as regards tho 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 Lepido* 
 
SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 77 
 
 siren (familiar to all readers of evolutionary literature as 
 one of the most singular existing links between fish and 
 amphibians), lives among tlie shallow pools and broads of 
 the Gambia, which are dried up during the greater part of 
 the tropical summer. To provide against this animal con- 
 tingency, 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 test'"ates, 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 lish is chiefly prized as a zoo- 
 logical curiosity for aquariums, because of its possessing 
 gills and lungs togetli r, 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 tlie 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, thougli he breathes (as I shall pro- 
 ceed to explain) in a very slight degree during his 
 flBstivatioii ; 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 wiiat in reality hiber- 
 
78 SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 
 
 nation 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 
 Blowly inside our bodies. This oxygen is taken into the 
 system, in all higher animals, by means of limgs 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 tram. 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 im- 
 pairing 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 uned and desiccated, or even kept for an 
 j^pparently unlimited period wrapped up in paper or on the 
 
SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 70 
 
 slide of a microscope ; and yet, the moment a drop of water 
 is placed on top of it, it bej^ins 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 yro tcm. 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 comple>:e 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 ap- 
 pear. 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 every- 
 one knows, he eats immoderately in the summer season, till 
 
80 SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 
 
 he has pn^own fat enoii^^h to supply bear's pfrease to all 
 Christendom. Tlicn he hunts himself out a hollow tree or 
 rock-shelter, curls himself up quietly to sleep, and snores 
 away the whole livelonp; winter. Durinfr 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 con- 
 siderable 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 un- 
 eventful 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 
 
SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 81 
 
 under moss and leaves. Tlie heart tlien ceases perceptibly 
 to beat, but respiration continues in a very faint deforce. 
 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 ^'et in, and keep up his breathing,' to a sli^'ht 
 amount. J\Iy 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 respira- 
 tion Tails so low that it never picks itself up properly when 
 spring returns. In warm climates, it is during the sunnner 
 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' toi'pidity, although in the warm climate of 
 Calcutta. The pretty snails called cyclostomas, which 
 have a lid to their shells, are well known to survive im- 
 prisonments 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 
 
82 SEVEN-YEAR SLICEPERS 
 
 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 depri- 
 vation 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 sus- 
 tain 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 
 f?.ssure ? It is well known that reptiles and amphibians 
 are particularly tenacious of life, and that some turtles in 
 particular will live for raonths, or even for years, without 
 tasting food. The common Greek tortoise, hawked on 
 barrows about the streets of London and bought by a con- 
 fiding 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 sea- 
 kale 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 
 
SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 83 
 
 snake at the Zoo has even heen known to Hve eighteen 
 months in a voluntary fust, refusing all the most tempting 
 offers of birds and rabbits, merely out of pique at hw 
 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 quali- 
 ties 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 bo very little doubt that in this conclusion he was 
 practically correct, and that the real fine old crusted ante- 
 diluvian 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 pos- 
 sess 9. very respectable antiquity of their own, and may be 
 very far from the category of mere vulgar cheats and 
 impcytors. Because a toad is not as old as Methuselah, it 
 need not follow that he may not be as old as Old Parr ; 
 
84 SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 
 
 because he does not da-fee 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 orii^in of their le^'end, are on thai very face 
 of it utterly incredible. For example, there is the favour- 
 ite and immensely popular toad who was extracted from a 
 perfectly closed hole in a marble mantelpiece. The impli- 
 cation of the le;j[end clearly is that the toad was coeval 
 with the marble. Ihit nuirble is limestone, altered in tex- 
 ture by pressure and heat, till it has assumed a crystalline 
 structure. In other words we are asked to believe that 
 that toad lived throu;,'h an amount of fiery heat suflicient 
 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 ^'reat many ways in which it is quite 
 conceivable that toads might get into lioles 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 ex- 
 tracted 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 indefi-* 
 
SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 85 
 
 nitely. Here are a few possible cases, any one of which 
 will quite suffice to^'iverise to at least as f^ood a toad-in-the- 
 hole as ninety-nine out of a hundrod published instances. 
 
 An adult toad buries himself in thu 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 him- 
 self 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 lime- 
 stone, 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 ougbf at Ipjist to avoid pre- 
 senting 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 maimer, 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 
 
86 SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 
 
 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 condi- 
 tions 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 
 
SEVEN-YEAR SI,EEPERS 87 
 
 naturally give rise to the familiar myth. Throw in a little 
 allowance for human credulity, humar 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 possihle 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. 
 Bucldand'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, 
 wliile 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 toacl-in-a-hole. 
 
88 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 ' 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 
 vi\ddly remind him of those he had left behind him in his 
 happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. 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 iragment 
 of the primitive world of the chalk period or earlier ages. 
 Isolated from all the remainder of the earth about the be- 
 ginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mannnoth 
 and the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the 
 stage of existence, long before the first shadowy ancestor 
 of the horse had turned tail on nature's rough draft of the 
 
A FOSSIL CONTINENT 89 
 
 still undeveloped and unspecialised lion, long before the 
 extinct dinotheriums and ^'if^antic Irish elks and colossal 
 giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run tlieir 
 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 conse- 
 quence was that progress in Australia has been absurdly 
 slow, and that the country as a whole has fallen most woe- 
 fully 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 con- 
 tinent ; 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 
 
90 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 special exceptions must rxeeds be made ; namely, the noble 
 Australian black-fellow himself, and the dingo or wild dog, 
 whore 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 i id 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, th i 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 reefu and atolls ; and the islands of 
 this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted by numbers of tiny 
 ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in appear- 
 ance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while 
 
A FOSSIL CONTINENT 91 
 
 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 wore 
 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, vid 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 laud- 
 able 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 con- 
 tinent. 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 quadru- 
 peds, 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 
 7 
 
92 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 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 south- 
 west 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 Austra- 
 lian 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 betw^een 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 
 
A FOSSIL CONTINENT 9:> 
 
 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, l^verybody believed the 
 new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists. Thoso 
 canny folks saw through the wicked hoax on the very first 
 blush of it. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must 
 haVe got tliere by an overland route. If there had ever 
 been a land connection between New Guinea and the ^lalay 
 region, then, since Australian animals range into New 
 Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia, 
 and v.'e 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 mar- 
 supials continued to survive and to evolve slowly along 
 their own lines in their own restricted southern world. 
 
a4 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 their collateral dcsccndanta in Europe and Asia and America 
 or elsewhere went on progressing into far hit,'her, 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 palffiotherium 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 out- 
 growth 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 mar- 
 supial class now living outside Australia ; and yet, what is 
 at least equally remarkable, none of the opossums are 
 found ]^cr contra in Australia itself. They are, in fact, the 
 
A FOSSIL CONTINENT 95 
 
 highest and best product of the old dying marsupial stock, 
 specially evolved in the great continents tlirough 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 anl rhinoceroses 
 could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race 
 in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mam- 
 malian 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, -oo, 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 psycho- 
 logy, 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 
 
96 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 the /i^round (called by the natives a lianf,'aroo), the opossums 
 of America were the only pouched mammals known to the 
 European world in any i)art of the explored continents. 
 Australia, severed from all the rest of the earth — ^)c«i7?<s 
 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 ard indefinite picture of 
 what * the world before the Hood ' 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 contra- 
 dicted 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 fiora 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, mo- 
 dern plants from the Asiatic region have in\ aded Australia 
 at different times, and altered to some extent the character 
 and aspect of its original native vegetation. Neverthe- 
 less, 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 grow^n into big 
 willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, with 
 
A FOSSIL CONTINENT 97 
 
 their smooth stems robbed of tlioir outer bark, impart a 
 marvellously antiquated and unfamiliar tone to the general 
 appearance of Australian woodland. Vll these types belong 
 by birth to classes long since extinct in the larger conti- 
 nents. The scrub shows no turfy greensward ; grasses, 
 which elsewhere carpet the ground, were almost unknown 
 till introduced from I'jurope ; 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 bine- 
 green or glaucous colour. Altogether, the vegetation itself, 
 though it contains a few more modern fonns 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-wat 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 un- 
 developed aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find 
 those very oldest types of birds represented by the casso- 
 waries, the emus, and the mooruk of New Britain. The 
 extreme term in this exceedingly ancient >set of creatures 
 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 
 
98 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 upproiicli tlio li/ard-liiikHl binl.s of tlio oolito or tlio tootliod 
 birds of tlic crotiu-oous i)oriod as do tlioso Australian and 
 Now Zealand ennis and apteryxos. Aj^niin, Avliile many 
 cliaractoristic Oriontal familios aro quito a,hsi>iit, liko tho 
 vultiiros, woodpockors, ])lu'asants and hiilhtils, Iho Austra- 
 lian ri'j^ion has many other fairly anciiMit birds, found no- 
 where olso on tho surface of our modern pl:nu>t. Sueh 
 aro tho so-ealled brush turkeys and mound buiidtM's, tho 
 only feather(>d things that n(>viM" sit upon tlu>ir own oiX'A^, 
 but allow them to bo hatched, aftiu' tho fiishion of r(^ptiles. 
 by tho lieat of the sand or of fermentinti: vegetaldo matter. 
 Tlie pipinj]; crows, tho houoysuckers, the lyre-birds, and 
 tiu) moro-porks aro all peculiar to tho Australian rejj^ion. 
 So aro tho wonderful and aesthetic bower-birds. I>rush- 
 toujjfucd lories, black cockatoos, and L!:ori;;eously coloured 
 pisj;uons, though somewhat loss anticpie, pcn-haps, in type, 
 {jfive a spoi'ial character to the bird-life of tho country. 
 And in New (luinea, an isolated bit of the same old con- 
 tinent, tho birds of paradise, fomid nowhoro else in t]u> 
 whole W(n'ld, si'cm to recall some fori,'otten l^jden of the 
 remote })ast, some golden ago of Saturnian splendoin*. 
 l\)etry apart, into which I have di'op])ed for a nu>nuMit like 
 Mr. Silas Wegg, tho birds of paradise aro, in fact, gor- 
 geously drissed crows, specijilly 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 modcM'n nuimmals 
 have passtnl over to Australia at various tim(>s by pure 
 chance. Thev fall into two classes — tho rats and mice, who 
 doubtless got transported across on floating logs or balks 
 of timber ; and the hunum importations, including the dog, 
 who came, pc^rhaps on their owners' cano(>s, perhaps on tho 
 wreck and di'^bris of inundations. Yet even in these cases 
 again, Australia still maintains its proud pre-eminence as 
 
A FOSSIL CONTINKNT 99 
 
 tho most iuitinu!ii(>(l niul unproiifn'ssivo of contincnls. 
 For tho Ausiniliiiii bhu-k-l'i'llow must liiivo jjfot tluTc a vory 
 lonjj; timo aufo iiulct'd ; lio bt'loni^^H to an oxtrcnu'ly iincicnt 
 lnim;ui ty|H<, and strikiii^dy nu-alls in liis jaws and sUull 
 tlio Ni'andiM'tlial savajjjo and otlior early prehistoric races ; 
 whiU) the wooUv-headed Tasmaniiin, a memhi'r of a totally 
 distinct lunnun family, and perhaps tho very lowest sample 
 of Innnanity that has survived to modern times, nnist have 
 crossed over to Tasmania t>ven earlier still, his brethren on 
 tho mainland having no doubt bt>en exterminated latt>r on 
 when tho stone-ai:;o Australian black-ftdlows first jjfot cast 
 ashore upon the continiMit inhabited by tlu? yi't more 
 barbaric and helpless nejj:i'ito race. As for the dini^o, or 
 Australian wild doi,', only half (bnuesticated by the savasj^e 
 natives, he repr(>sents a low anc(>sira.l do.u; type, half wolf 
 and half jackal, incapable of the hii^her canine traits, and 
 with a susincious, ferocious, <;larin!j; eyc^ thatbi^travs at once 
 his uncivilisable tiMid(MU'i(>s. 
 
 Omittinfjf th(>se latcM' importations, however — the modern 
 ])lants, birds, and human beinjjfs it may be fairly said that 
 Australia is still in its secondary sta,L,'e, while tlu^ rest of 
 tho world has i'c>ached the* t(>rtiary and (juattM'nary piM'iods. 
 ller(> aj^ain, howevtn", a (Uuluction nmst luMuade, in ordi-r 
 to attain the ncH'essary accm'acy. Kven in Australia the 
 world never stands still, 'rhouj^'h the Australian animals 
 aro still at bottom tho Kuroiunin and Asiatic animals of tho 
 siH'ondary a^'(\ they are those animals with a ditViM-ence. 
 Thoy liave underjj^ono an evolution of tlu>ir own. It has 
 not been tho evolution of the great continents; but it has 
 boon evolution all the same ; slowm*, nun'o local, narrower, 
 more restricted, y(^t evolution in tho tru(>st sensi>. ()n«» 
 mij^lit compare tho dilViM'cnce to tho dilVc'rence between 
 tho civilisation of Murope and tlu» civilisation of ]\Ie\ico or 
 Poru. Tho -Mexicans, when Cortez blotted out their in- 
 
100 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 digenoiis culture, were still, to be aure, in their stone age ; 
 but it was a very dillerent 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 
 omithorhynchus 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 omithorhynchus 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 omithorhynchus 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 hedge- 
 hog-like nocturnal prowler, who buries himself in the earth 
 during the day, and lives by night on insects which he 
 licks up greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart 
 from the specialisations brought about by their necessary 
 adaptation to a particular niche in the economy of life, 
 these two quaint and very ancient animals probably 
 preserve for us in their general structure the features of 
 an extremely early descendant of the common ancestor 
 
A FOSSIL CONTINENT 101 
 
 from whom mammals, birds, and reptiles alike are originally 
 derived. 
 
 The ordinary Australian pouched mammals belonj]f to 
 far less ancient types than ornithorhynehus 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 
 "svero, 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 them- 
 selves to the same mode of life under the same general 
 circumstances. Natural selection, acting upon unlike ori- 
 ginal 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 difierence 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 mar- 
 supials, 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 
 
102 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 closely resemble fins ; and nothing about it seems to differ 
 very markedly from the outer aspect of a shark or a cod- 
 fish. But in reality ic has no gills and no swim-bladder ; 
 it lays no eggs ; it does not own one truly fish-like organ. 
 It breathes air, it possesses lungs, it has warm blood, it 
 suckles its young ; in heart and brain and nerves and 
 organisation it is a thoroughgoing mammal, with an ac- 
 quired resemblance to the fishy form, due entirely to mere 
 similarity in place of residence. 
 
 Running hastily through the chief marsupial develop- 
 ments, 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 un- 
 graceful 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 ridi- 
 culously 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 answ^ers to the 
 racoons of America. The pouched badgers explain them- 
 selves at once by their very name, like the Plyants, the 
 Pinchwifes, the Brainsicks, and the Carelesses of the 
 Eestoration comedy. The * native rabbit ' of Swan River 
 is a rabbit-liko 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 kanga- 
 roo mice run the true rats and mice a close race in every 
 
t 
 
 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 103 
 
 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, whicli make their feet almost into hands ; 
 tliey have prehensile tails, by which they hang from 
 branches in true monkey fashion ; they lead an arboreax 
 omnivorous existence ; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, 
 insects, and roots ; and altogether they are just active, 
 cunnmg, intelligent, tree-haunting marsupial spider-mon- 
 keys, 
 
 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 ro- 
 mance of natural history. To those who could appre- 
 ciate the facts of the case it was just as curious and just as 
 interesting as though we were now to discover somewliere 
 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 natural- 
 ists 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 mon- 
 ster 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 
 
104 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 
 
 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 ahun dance 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 Cera- 
 todus could still be living, far less that it formed an impor- 
 tant link in the development of all the higher animals, 
 could never for a moment have occurred to anybody. As 
 well expect to find a palasolithic man quietly chipping 
 flints on a Pacific atoll, or to discover the ancestor of all 
 horses on the isolated and crag-encircled summit of Eorai- 
 ma, as to unearth a real hve Ceratodus from a modern 
 estuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Krefi't 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 Queenslaiid 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 sur\iving 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 maimer wholly unbe- 
 
A FOSSIL CONTINENT 105 
 
 coming 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 de- 
 veloped amphibian descendants ; in Australia alone it still 
 drags on a lonely existence as the last relic of an otherwise 
 long-forgotten and exinct family. 
 
106 A VERY OLD MASTEB 
 
 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-rehef 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 primeval 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 con- 
 creted 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 
 
A VEIIY OLD MASTER 107 
 
 loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief would 
 
 fiill 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 pre-historic 
 
 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 a-nd 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, 
 8 
 
108 A VERY OLD MASTER 
 
 for their portraits to my old master that we can't do bettor 
 than begin by describing him in projma persona. 
 
 The horse family of the present day is divided, like 
 most other families, into two factions, which may bo 
 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 knoAvn 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. Tho 
 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. ]5ut 
 Prjevalsky's horse, as one would naturally expect from an 
 early intermediate form, stands halfway in this respect 
 between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a 
 family mediator ; for it has most of its long tail-hairs 
 collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of 
 them spring from the middle distance, as in the genuine 
 Arab, though never from the very top, thus showing an 
 approach to the true horsey habit without actually attaining 
 that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can 
 make out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my pre- 
 historic 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 
 Btage between horse and donkey, a natural mule still 
 
A VERY OLD MASTER 109 
 
 strugglinjj up aspiringly toward perfect horsohood. 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 hreasts of ^lessrs. 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 
 Iliac" in a nutshell as regards the anther*^' -^.ity 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 
 tw^o 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.' 
 
110 A VERY OLD MASTER 
 
 The work of art was dug up from under tlio firm con- 
 creted floor of a ciivo in tho Dordogno. That cave was 
 once nliabitcd by the nameless artist himself, his wife, 
 and family. It had been previously tenantful by various 
 other early families, as well as by bears, who seem to have 
 lived there in tho intervals between the dill'erent human 
 occupiers. Probably the bears ejected the men, and the 
 men in turn ejected the boars, 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. lie 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 tho 
 Glacial Epoch, a comparatively late and almost historical 
 event, geologists have broken through their usual reserve 
 on this chronological question and condescended to give 
 us a numerical determination. And here is how Dr. Croll 
 gets at it. 
 
A VERY OLD MASTER HI 
 
 Evfiry now and a^ifain, poolo^Mcal evidence poeato show 
 us, a lontj cold spell occurs in the northern or southern 
 heiiiinphore. Durinj:^ these long cold spells tlie ice cap at 
 the poles increases largely, till it spreads over a great part 
 of what are now the temperate regions of the glohe, and 
 makes ice a mere drug in the market as far south as Covent 
 Garden or tho Halles a "^aris. During the greatest 
 extension of this ice sheet ii ,ne 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 roclies moiiionnics 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 eccontnc. Not 
 that I mean to impute to our old and exceedinf.ly respect- 
 able planet any occasional aberrations of intelloct, or still 
 less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and 
 Venus) ; the word is here to be accepted strictly in itd 
 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 ; I he names alone 
 will be quite sufficient for most people ; they will take the 
 
112 A VERY OLD MASTER 
 
 rest on trust) — owinpf to tlio combination of those pro- 
 foundly intiTcstinij; causes, I say, there occur certain 
 pcriotls in the world's life when for a very long time to- 
 gether (10,500 years, to bo quite precise) the northern 
 hemisphcro is warmer than the southern, or vice versa. 
 Now, Dr. Croll has calculated tluit 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 Kuropo. 
 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 n.c. 218,000. In any case 
 we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew Lang, the 
 laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that 
 
 Ho livotl in the long long agocs ; 
 'Twiis the manner of primitive man. 
 
 The old master, thc>n, 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. Wo can infer this fact from the character 
 of the fauna by which he was surromided, a fauna in 
 which species of cold and warm climates are at times 
 quite capriciously intermingled. We get the reindeer and 
 the mammoth side by side with the hippopotamus and the 
 
A VKRY OLD MASTER 113 
 
 hyona , -wo find tho chilly cnvo bear and tlio Norway 
 lemniinfi;, the musk slioop and tho Arctic fox in tho same 
 doposits with tho lion and tho lynx, tho leopard and tho 
 rhinocoroa. The fact ia, as JMr. Alfred IIushoI Wallace 
 has pointed out, wo livo to-day in a zooloufically im- 
 poverished world, from which all tho larjj^est, iiorcest, and 
 most remarkable animals have lately been wcmhUhI out. 
 And it was in all ])rohal)ility tho cominj]^ on of tho Ico A.u;o 
 that did tho weeding. Our Zoo can boast no manmiotl} 
 and no mastodon. Tho sabre-toothed lion has gone tho 
 way of all flesh ; tho deinotherium and the colossal rumi- 
 nants of the riioceno A{^e no longer browse beside the banks 
 of Seine. Ihit 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 tho famous 
 mannnoth etching on tho ivory of La IMadelaino and 
 carved the ligure of the extinc^t cave bear on the reindeer- 
 horn ornaments of Laugerie l^asse. Probably, therefore, 
 he lived in the ))eriod innnediately preceding tho (Ireat Ice 
 Age, or else perha})s in one of tho warm interglacial sjjoUs 
 with which tho long secular winter of tho northern 
 hemisphere was then from time to time agreeably diversi- 
 fied. 
 
 And what did the old master himself look like ? Well, 
 painters have always been fond of reproducing their own 
 hneaments. Have we not tho familiar young Ilaflael, 
 painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and tho Titian, 
 and the llubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, 
 all flattering and all famous? l'A"en so priniitive man 
 has drawn himself many times over, iu)t indeed on tiiis 
 particular piece of reindeer horn, but on several other 
 media to be seen elsewhere, in tho 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 u 
 
114 A VERY OLD MASTER 
 
 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 fail. 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 necklacg and bracelets. Indeed, though 
 dresses were still wholly unlcnown, 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-de- 
 veloped legs. I fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man 
 cut, on the whole, a very sorry and awlavard 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 ^liss 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 ex- 
 actly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of 
 the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained 
 his old original hairy covering. The few skulls and other 
 
A VERY OLD MASTER 115 
 
 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 re- 
 duced 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- 
 
116 A VERY OLD MASTER 
 
 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 foresliadowing of the rude humour of 
 the * Petit Journal pour Eire.' 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 
 
A VERY OLD MASTER 117 
 
 on archaeology, which forms oneof idie finest existing rehcg 
 of pre-Glacial art. In anotlier sketch, less well known, but 
 not unworthy of admiration, the early artist has given us 
 with a few rapid but admirable strokes his own remini- 
 scence of the effect produced upon him by the sudden on- 
 slaught of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide 
 open, a perfect glimpse of elephantii e fury. It forms a 
 capital example of early impressionism, respectfully recom- 
 mended 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 un- 
 doubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Tliayn- 
 gen, 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 in- 
 ferred with considerable certainty. 
 
118 A VERY OLD MASTER 
 
 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 in- 
 vented the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly 
 chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed fish- 
 hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle. 
 Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements with 
 artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with 
 the figures of animals. I have no doubt that he even 
 knew how to brew and to distil ; and he was probably 
 acquainted with the noble art of cookery as applied to the 
 persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage 
 cannot reasonably be called primitive ; cannibalism, as 
 somebody has rightly remarked, is the first step on the 
 road to civilisation. 
 
A VERY OLD MASTER 119 
 
 No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primi- 
 tive man we must go much further back in time than the 
 mere trifle of 250,000 years with which Dr. CroU 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 — un- 
 daunted mortal ! — ventured to discover among the Miocene 
 strata of the calcairc de Beaiice. Those Hints, 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, ^o rude are they that, though evi- 
 dently artificial, one distinguished archa}ologist will not 
 admit they can be in any way human ; he will have it that 
 they were really the handiwork of the great European 
 anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is 
 nothing more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does 
 it matter whether you call the animal that fashioned these 
 exceedingly rough and fire-marked implements a man-like 
 ape or an ape-like human being ? The fact remains quite 
 unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it. When 
 you have got to a monkey who can light a tire 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 
 
120 A VERY OLD MASTER 
 
 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-buildors, whose grassy 
 barrows still cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. 
 When the great ice sheet drove away palfeolithic man — the 
 man of the caves and the unwrouglit 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 — aiiruin irrcpertum cpernere 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 anthropo- 
 logical 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 ex- 
 plored from this point of view), had acquired the important 
 arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand- 
 made pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice 
 sheet cleared away he followed the returning summer into 
 Northern Europe, another man, physically, intellectually, 
 and morally, with all the slow accumulations of nearly two 
 thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words ! how 
 
A VERY OLD MASTER 121 
 
 hard to realise them !) upon his matiirer 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 iiad domesticatod the dog, the cow, 
 the sheep, the goat, and tlio 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 condi- 
 tion 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 palajolithic 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 fore- 
 shortened. 
 
 On the table where I write there lie two paper- weiglits, 
 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 uneartlier of preliistoric 
 memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, wbich now 
 serves me in the oflice of a paper-weight, is far ruder, 
 simpler, and more inefl'ective than any weapon or imple- 
 ment at present in use among the lowest savages. Yet with 
 it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by the banks of 
 
122 A VERY OLD MASTER 
 
 tLo Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken 
 forest two hundred thousand years af,'o and more ; with it 
 he has faced tlio angry cave bear and the origiiuil and only 
 genuine British hon (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 
 fcsthetic 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 
 miiversal 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 pro- 
 claims 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 w^e indeed maintain ourselves to be much 
 better men than ever were our fathers. 
 
BRITISU AND FOREIGN 123 
 
 BBITISH AND FOUEIGN 
 
 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 re- 
 motely of Norman blood, and came over, like that noble 
 family the Slys, with llicluird 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 Ilorsa, if a genuine liorsa 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 Pembroke- 
 shire 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 
 
124 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 
 
 invasion. Even tlie still earlier brown Euskarians and 
 yellow Mongolians, who hold the land before the advent of 
 the ancient Britons, were themselves imnii^'ranbs ; 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 ]5ritish 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 otihand 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 any- 
 thing 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 sum- 
 mits. All the rest are sojourners and wayfarers, brought 
 across as casuaL, 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 naviga- 
 
BRITISH AND FOREIGN 125 
 
 tion on our principal canals. The Ganges and the Missis- 
 sippi have lon^ since flooded the tawny Tliamos, ag 
 Juvenal's cynical friend declared the Syrian Orontcs had 
 flooded the Tiher. And what has thus hjen going on 
 slowly within the memory of the last few generations has 
 been going on constantly from tinie 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 re- 
 sembled 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 roiTidjcr-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 metropoli- 
 tan 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. 
 
126 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 
 
 Slowly, however, times altered, as they are much given 
 to doing ; and a new era dawned upon Britain. The ther- 
 mometer 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 Euro- 
 pean 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 
 ex' 3me paucity and meagreness in Ireland and the High- 
 lands. 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 
 
BRITISH AND FOREIGN 127 
 
 least) would ever have taken the trouble to bring tliem 
 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 des- 
 patched 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 liis 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, how- 
 ever, 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 ap- 
 teryx 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 
 
128 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 
 
 plants and animals have been added to our population, 
 both by human desijj^n 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 lux- 
 urious Italian epicures, and is even now confined, imagi- 
 native 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 introduc- 
 tions 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 Salis- 
 bury 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 in- 
 digenous ; certainly the two worst kinds, the smaller nettle 
 and the Roman nettle, are quite recent denizens, never 
 
BRITISH AND FOREIGN 129 
 
 straying, even at the present day, far from the precincts of 
 farmyards and villages. The shepherd's-purse und 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 ^^'om 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 mant- 
 ling with its yellow bunches both old churches and houses 
 and also the crannies of the limestone clift's around lialf 
 the shores of England. The common stock has similarly 
 overrun the sea-front of the Isle of AVight ; 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 extermi- 
 nated accordingly by fashionable gardeners. Such are the 
 miaccountable 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 Belborne 
 noticed with delight in his own kitchen that rare insect, 
 the Oriental coclyoach, lately imported ; and Mr. Brewer 
 
130 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 
 
 observed with joy in his garden at Reigate the blue Bux- 
 baum spoedweU, 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 sulli- 
 ciently remarkable. Like all islands, England has a frag- 
 mentary 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 Pro- 
 fessor 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, ail 
 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 cxaraple, 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 Gahvay. 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. 
 
BRITISH AND FOREIGN 131 
 
 There are several of those unconscious American importa- 
 tions in various parts of Britain, some of them, no doubt, 
 brought over with seeJ-corn or among the straw of packing- 
 cases, but others unconnected in any way with human 
 agency, and owing tlieir 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 Wenhara 
 Lake ice is packed for transport. The Canadian rivei weed 
 is known first to have escaped from tlie botanical gardens 
 at Cambridge, whence it spread rapidly through the con- 
 genial 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 tliere ? 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 
 Eussel 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 un- 
 known 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. 
 
132 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 
 
 In other cases, the circumstances under ■which a par- 
 ticular 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 trouble- 
 some 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 con- 
 tinues 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 
 tlie English Church, saintly or otherwise, were peculiarly 
 liable to that very episcopal disease, the gout. Whether 
 
BKITISU AND FOREIGN 133 
 
 their frequent fasting produced this effect ; •svhctlicr, 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 
 Itolisbn con frdres, is a minute question to be decided by ^Ir. 
 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 intro- 
 duced 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 
 
134 imiTISH AND FOREIGN 
 
 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 ex- 
 tinct 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 Sutherland- 
 shire. 
 
 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 
 
BRITISH AND FOREIGN 13.) 
 
 west country generally. This class belongs by origin to 
 the submerged land of Lyonesse, the -warm champaign 
 country that once spread westward over the l)uy 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 Corn- 
 wall ; a little Spanish and Italian restharrow has got 
 stranded in the Channel Islands and on tiie Mull of 
 Galloway ; the spotted rock-rose of the Mediterranean 
 grows only in Kerry, Gahvay, and Anglesea ; while other 
 plants of the same warm habit are confined to such spots 
 as Torquay, Babbicombe, Dawlish, Cork, Swansea, Ax- 
 minster, 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 con- 
 temporary 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, 
 
13G BRITISH AND FOREIGN 
 
 and imaginative Celt ever westward before him into tlie 
 hills and the sea, so the rude and vif(orous Germanic beasts 
 and weeds liave driven the gentler and softer southern 
 types into Wales and Cornwall, Galloway and Conneinara. 
 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, tlie badger, the otter, and the squirrel. It 
 is to the central European flora that wo owe the larger 
 imrt of the most familiar plants in all eastern and south- 
 eastern 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 per- 
 sistence, overrunning the land and pushing slowly west- 
 ward, 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. Wo 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.' 
 
TUUNDERBOLTS 137 
 
 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 The subject of thunderbolts is a very fascinating one, and 
 all the more so because there are no such things in exist- 
 ence 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 no]ioiitity. But does that do away in the least, 
 I should like to know, with their intrinsic interest and im- 
 portance '? 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, inter- 
 viewed 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 icere thunder- 
 bolts, the question of their nature and action would be a 
 wholly dull, scientific, and priggish one ; it is their un- 
 reality 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 
 
138 TlIUNDKUnOLTS 
 
 gentlciiiaii in ill-fittin;^' Hiiiall clotlics, bring it down from 
 tho clouda "witli a siuiplc! door-koy, sonicwlioro near Tiiila- 
 dc'lphia? and docs not Mr. Ilobcrt Scott (of tlio Meteoro- 
 logical Ofliee) calndy predict its probable occurrence witbiii 
 tlio next twenty-four bours in bis daily re|)ort, as publisbed 
 regularly in tbc morning jjapers? Tbis is ligbtning, nu'ro 
 vulgar ligbtning, a sinkplo result of electrical conditions 
 in tbo upper atniospbere, inconveniently connected witb 
 algebraical formulas in x, ij, z, witb borrid syndjols inter- 
 spersed in Greek betters. But tbo real tbunderbolts of 
 Jove, the weapons tbat tlie angry Zeus, or Tbor, or Indra 
 liurls down upon tbo bead of tbo trembling malefactor — 
 bow inlinitely grander, more fearsome, and more myste- 
 rious ! 
 
 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 tbo 
 existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in 
 its entirety the simple truth tbat ligbtning is the reality of 
 which tbunderbolts are the mythical, or fanciful, or verbal 
 representation. We all of us know now that lightning is 
 a mere Hash of electric light a) id beat ; tbat it has no solid 
 existence or core of any sort ; in short, tbat it is dynamical 
 rather than material, a state or movement rather than a 
 body or thing. To be sure, local newspa])crs 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 tho 
 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 oif the 
 
TIIUNDEUBOLTS 139 
 
 Bteoplo in question was nothing]; more in its real niituro 
 than a very big inunatorial spark, llowevei, tho word 
 tlnniderbolt has survived to us from tlie days when peoplo 
 still l)eheved tiiat tlio thing whicli did the damage during 
 a thunderstorm was really and truly a gigantic white-hot 
 bolt or arrow ; arid, as there is a naturiil tendency in human 
 nature to lit an existence to every word, people even now 
 continue to inuigine that there must be actually something 
 or other somewhere called a thundi'rbolt. ^I'liey don't 
 iigure this thing to themselves as being identical with tho 
 lightning ; o)i tho contrary, they sisem to regard it as 
 something inlinitely 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 posi- 
 tively seen them. 
 
 l>ut, if seeing is believing, it is C(iually true, as all who 
 have looked into the phenomena of spiritualism and 
 ' psychical research ' (modern Englisli for ghost-hunting) 
 know too well, thiit believing is seemg 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, luitu rally 
 noticed the existence of thunder and lightning, because 
 thunder and lightning arc 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 tliat habitually 
 accompany thunderstorms in the happy realms of ever- 
 lasting dog-days. Primitive man was thereupon compelled 
 to do a little philosophising on his own account as to the 
 10 
 
140 TIIUNDEUHOLTS 
 
 cause and origin of tlio rumbling and flashing which he 
 saw so constantly around him. Naturally enough, ho con- 
 clud(Hl that tho sound must bo tho voice of somobody ; and 
 that tho fiery shaft, wlioso elTects he sometimes noted upon 
 trees, animals, and his fellow-man, must be the somebody'a 
 arrow. It is immateriiil from this point of view whether, 
 as tho scientific anthropologists hold, he was led to his 
 conception of these supernatural personages from his prior 
 beli(>f in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor INIax 
 !Miiller will have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive 
 savage breast toward the Infhiito and the Unknowable 
 (which he would doubtless have spelt, like the Professor, 
 with a capital initial, had ho been acquainted with tha 
 intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet) ; but this mucii 
 at least is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder 
 and tho lightning as in some sense the voice and the arrows 
 of an aerial god. 
 
 Now, this idea about the arrows is itself very signifi- 
 cant of the mental attitude of primitive man, and of tho 
 way that mental attitude has coloured all subsequent 
 thinking and superstition upon this very subject. Curiously 
 enough, to the present day the concejition of the thunder- 
 bolt is essentially one of a holt — ilmt is to say, an arrow, 
 or at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (aiul 
 there are plenty of them lying about casually in country 
 houses and local museums) are more or less arrow-like in 
 shape and appeju'ance ; some of them, indeed, as we i-hall 
 see by-and-by, are the actual stone arrowlieads of primitive 
 man himself in person. Of course the noble savage was 
 himself in the constant habit of shooting at aninuils and 
 enemies with a bow and arrow. Wlien, then, he tried to 
 figure to himself tho angry god, seated in the storm-clouds, 
 ■who spolvQ with such a loud rumbling voice, and killed 
 those who displeased him with his fiery darts, ho naturally 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 141 
 
 thought of him as using in liis cloudy home tlio famihar 
 bow and arrow of this nether phmot. To us nowaihiys, if 
 wo were to begin forming the idea for ourselves all over 
 again dc novo, it would be far more natural to tliink of tlio 
 thunder as the noise of a big gun, of the lightning as the 
 ilasli of the powder, and of the sM|)|)osed ' bolt ' as a sliell 
 or bullet. There is really a ridiculous resemblance between 
 a thunderstorm and a discharge of artillery. ]>ut the old 
 conception derived from so numy generations of primitive 
 men has Jicld its own against such mere modern devices 
 as gunpowder and rillo balls ; and none of the objects 
 connnonly shown as thunderbolts are ever round : they 
 are distinguished, whatever their origin, by the connnon 
 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 thunder- 
 bolts. 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 discharge's between one cloud 
 and another, or between clouds and tiio eaith ; and these 
 discharges manifest themselves to our senses under two 
 forms — to the eye as liglitnhig, 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 l)y nature will seiul one for four, five, or even ten miles. 
 Though lightning when it touches the earth always secuna 
 to us to come from the clouds to the ground, it is by no 
 moans certain that the real course nuiy not at least occa- 
 sionally be in the opposite direction. All we know is that 
 
142 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 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 pon 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 con- 
 ception. 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 piclied 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. 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 143 
 
 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 archreologists. 
 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 formid- 
 able 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 
 
144 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 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 some- 
 times that of a mallet. And then, by a curious misappre- 
 hension, 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 diggmg 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 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 145 
 
 the entire process, and supposed they dug up the thunder- 
 bolts 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 
 hystcron 'protcron, 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 AVest 
 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 eflbrt necessary for realising 
 in a mental picture the conglobation of a fulgureous ex- 
 halation by a circumfixed humour. 
 
146 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 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- 
 pliaped, and that they have holes in them, and those holes 
 not equal throughout, but widest at the ends. As a inatter 
 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 com- 
 plete reductio ad ahsurdum of the philosophic opinion. 
 
 Some of the cerauniie, says Pliny, are like hatchets. 
 He would have been nearer the mark if he had said * are 
 hatchets ' outright. But this aycrqu, which was to Pliny 
 merely a stray suggestion, became to the northern peoples 
 a firm article of belief, and caused them to represent to 
 themselves their god Thor or Thunor as armed, not with 
 a bolt, but with an axe or hammer. Etymologically Thor, 
 Thunor, and thunder are the self- same word ; but while 
 the southern races looked upon Zeus or Indra as wielding 
 his forked darts in his red right hand, the northern races 
 looked upon the Thunder-god as hurling down an angry 
 hammer from his seat in the clouds. There can be but 
 little doubt that the very notion of Thor's hammer itself 
 was derived from the shape of the supposed thunderbolt, 
 which the Scandinavians and Teutons rightly saw at once 
 to be an axe or mallet, not an arrow-head. The 'fiery 
 axe ' of Thunor is a common metaphor in Anglo-Saxon 
 poetry. Thus, Thor's hammer is itself merely the picture 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 147 
 
 which our northern ancestors formed to themselves, by 
 compounding the idea of thunder and hghtniug with the 
 idea of the pohshed stone hatchets they dug up among 
 the fields and meadows. • 
 
 Fhnt arrowheads of the stone age are less often taken 
 for thunderbolts, no doubt because they are so much 
 smaller that they look quite too insignificant for the 
 weapons of an angry god. They are more frequently 
 described as fairy-darts or fairy-bolts. Still, I have known 
 even arrow-heads regarded as thunderbolts, and preserved 
 superstitiously under that belief. In Finland, stone arrows 
 are universally so viewed ; and the rainbow is looked upon 
 as the bow of Tiermes, the thunder-god, who shoots with 
 it the guilty sorcerers. 
 
 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 
 
148 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 shape, which has now mostly degenerated from tlie 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 anytlhng else, 
 you must at least have a wax image of him, which you 
 call by his name, and use as his substitute in your incanta- 
 tions. 
 
 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 Corn- 
 wall, 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 pro- 
 tection 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 light- 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 149 
 
 ning-rods ; and it was a sore trial of faith to mcdifcval 
 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 chil- 
 dren'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 
 belemnitti * for the benefit of the ladies,' as people used to 
 do in the dark and unemancipated eighteenth century ; 
 but as our boys liave 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 gentlenen,' that the word is practically 
 equivalent to javelin-fossil. The belemnites are the in- 
 ternal 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 taper- 
 ing, with a hole at one end as if on purpose to receive the 
 
] 60 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 shaft. Sometimes they have petrified into iron pyrites or 
 copper compounds, shining hke gold, and then they make 
 very noble tlmnderbolts 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 i)ossibly make them. Belenniites 
 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 fiiitli 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 thun- 
 derbolt 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 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 151 
 
 Burvivinp; relatives of the belciniiitea, the squids or cala- 
 maries of the Atlantic, by the ai)pi'opriato name of sea- 
 arrows. 
 
 Many other natural or artificial objects have added 
 their tittle to the belief in thunderbolts. In the Hima- 
 layas, for example, where awful thunderstorms are always 
 occurrin^^ 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 classitied 
 and labelled and catalogued. Here, surely, we have the 
 ultimate substratum of the thunderbolt myth. To bo 
 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 
 
152 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 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 thunder- 
 bolt. 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 madoima. 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 gene- 
 rally. 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 battle- 
 field. 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 sove- 
 reign remedy for rheumatism ; and in the popular pharma- 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 153 
 
 copoDia 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 
 liis lifetime. But they cannot conscientiously be recom- 
 mended for dyspepsia and other forms of indi^'cstion. 
 
 As if on purpose to confuse our already very vague ideas 
 about thunderbolts, there is one special kind of lightning 
 which really seems intentionally to simulate a meteorite, 
 and that is the kind known as fireballs or (more scientifi- 
 cally) globular lightning. A fireball generally appears as 
 a sphere of light, sometimes oidy as big as a Dutch cheese, 
 sometimes as large as three feet in diameter. It moves 
 along very slowly and demurely through the air, remaining 
 visible for a whole minute or two together ; and in the end it 
 generally bursts up with great violence, as if it were a 
 London railway station being experimented upon by Irish 
 patriots. At Milan one day a fireball of this description 
 walked down one of tlie 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. 
 
154 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 noticed among the Glendowan Mountains in Donegal, 
 behaved even more eccentrically, as might be expected 
 from its Irish antecedents. It first siiirtod the earth in a 
 leisurely way for several hundred yards like a cannon-ball ; 
 then it struck the ground, ricocliotted, and once more 
 bounded along for another short spell ; after which it dis- 
 appeared 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 re- 
 mained afterwards as a witness of its eccentric conduct. 
 If the person who observed it had been of a superstitious 
 turn of mind we sliould 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 ' Transactioiis of the Society for Psychical Kesearch.' 
 Unfortunately, however, he was only a man of science, un- 
 gifted 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 perio- 
 dical, the ' Quarterly Journal of the Meteorological Society.' 
 Another splendid apparition thrown away recklessly, for 
 ever ! 
 
 There is a curious form of electrical discharge, some- 
 what 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 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 155 
 
 masts of ships and the tops of trees, when clouds are low 
 and tension great. It is, in fact, the equivalent in nature 
 of tlie brush discharfj^e from an electric machine. The 
 Greeks and Romans looked upon this lambent display as a 
 sign of the presence of Castor and Pollux, ' fratres Helenas 
 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 lire, is itself a curiously twisted and perversely 
 Christianised reminiscence of the great twin brethren ; for 
 St. Elmo is merely a corruption of Helena, made mascu- 
 line 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 Hames 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 un- 
 scientific 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 hol- 
 low tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological 
 intelligence as fulgurites, and looking for all the world hke 
 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 sum- 
 mit of Little Ararat, that weather-beaten and many-fabled 
 11 
 
156 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 peak (■w'licre an enterprising journalist not long ago dis- 
 covered 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 sur- 
 rounding 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 thunder- 
 bolt 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 pre- 
 vent 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 suflicient force for a destructive 
 discharge. It resembles in eft'ect 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 
 Bufficient amount to produce a flash of lightning. It mighc 
 
THUNDERBOLTS 157 
 
 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 com- 
 pelled 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 
 
J 58 THUNDERBOLTS 
 
 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 159 
 
 HONEY-DEW 
 
 Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personre, 
 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 hve 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-cn-sctne 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 httle lilliputian 
 proprietors approaching and milking these their wee green 
 motionless cattle. First of all, the ants quickly scent their 
 way with protruded antenncB (for they are as good as blind, 
 poor things !) up the prickly stem of the rose-bush, guided. 
 
160 HONEY-DEW 
 
 no doubt, by the faint porfumc exhaled from tho nectar 
 iil)ove thein. Siiiellhif^ their road cautiously to tho ends 
 of the branches, they soon reach their own particular 
 aphides, whose bodit s 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 tho centre of its back a couple of 
 limpid drops of a sticky pale yellow fluid. Iloney-dewour 
 English rustics still call it, because, when tlio 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 tho grass beneath them. Tho ant, 
 approaching the two tubes with cautious tenderness, 
 removes the sweet drops without injuring in any way his 
 little protdgd, 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 udd(;r 
 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 inter- 
 change 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. 
 
nONEY-DEW IGl 
 
 Everybody Icnows tho aphides well by aipflit, in ono of 
 their forma at least, tho famihar rose aphis ; l)iit pr()l)ahly 
 few people ever look at tliem closely and critically enough 
 to observe how very beautiful and wonderful is the or<,'!inisa- 
 tion of tlieir tiny limbs in all its extiuisito detail. If you 
 pick off ono good-si/ed win.tjflcss insect, however, from a 
 bli<,dited rose-leaf, and put him on a ^dass shde under alow 
 power of tho microscope, you will mosf likely be quite sur- 
 prised to find what a lovely little creature it is tiiat 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 ghiss 
 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 antenna^, easily moved in any direction, 
 but usually bent backward when the creature is at rest so 
 as to reach nearly to his tail as ho stands at ease; upon liis 
 native rose-leaf. There are, however, two other features 
 about him which s])ecially attract attention, as being very 
 characteristic of tho 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 ho pierces the outer skin of the rose- 
 shoot where he lives, and sucks up incessantly its sweet 
 juices. This organ is connnon to the aphis with all the 
 other bugs and plant-lice. In the second place, ho 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 mosl; 
 conspicuous and interesting organs in all those aphides 
 which do possess them. 
 
162 HONEY-DEW 
 
 The lifc-liisfcory of tho rose-aphis, small and familiar 
 a is the insect itself, forms one of the most marvellous 
 and exti-aonlinary 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 ins(!cts. 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 suckihg 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 cater- 
 pillar 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 im- 
 perfect 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 with- 
 out 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 re- 
 production in this purely vegetative fashion for as many as 
 
HONEY-DEW 163 
 
 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, con- 
 sists 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 modifica- 
 tions 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 them- 
 selves 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 essen- 
 tially degenerate creatures : they have found the conditions 
 of life too easy for them, and they have reverted to some- 
 thing 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 
 
1G4 HONEY-DEW 
 
 of their life upon a sinprlc! 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 encum- 
 brances. 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 provoca- 
 tion. 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 alhes, 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 
 
HONEY-DEW 165 
 
 in fertilisation and tlie subsoqucnt outprrowth of fruit and 
 seeds. Tims a year's cycle of the plant-lice exactly answers 
 to the life-history of an ordinary annual. Thecf?f,'s corre- 
 spond to the seeds ; the various generations of aphides 
 budding out from one another by parthenogenesis corre- 
 spond 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 mat.^rial in their 
 food in excess of their needs, they would nati rally have to 
 secrete it by a special organ developed or enlaiged 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 liav'3 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 there- 
 fore 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 
 
1 66 HONEY- DEW 
 
 Becreting organs, pcrliaps 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 fi'om 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 1 — 
 that to this difiference o^' 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 evolu- 
 tionary thinker. ' The Baltic amber,' he says, ' contains 
 
nONEY-DEW 167 
 
 among tho remains of many other insects a species of ant 
 intermediate between our small brown garden-ants and the 
 little yellow meadow-onts. Tliis 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 tre(,'S and bushes, have 
 retained and even deepened their dark colour ; while others, 
 such as tho 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 tho 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 moadow-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 
 
1G8 IIONEY-DEW 
 
 tlioRo of tlio preceding' autimm. This case, as the prac- 
 tised ob;,t'rvci' hiinsolf remarks, is an iiistaiico of prudeiico 
 unexampled, pcrlmiJS, in tlie animal kingdom, outside man. 
 • The ogg"^ ^ro laid early in October on the ibod-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 tlie -weatlier and to innumerable dan^'ers, but 
 brought into their nests by the ants, and t(!nd(>d l)y them 
 with the utmost care througli the long winter months until 
 the folhjwing March, wlien the young ones are brought out 
 again and phiced on the young shoots of tlie daisy.' Mr. 
 White of Stonehouse has also noted an exactly simiUir 
 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 extra\agant to suppose that the honey-tubes in 
 their existing advanced form at least nuiy 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 ajjpears highly probable that these domesti- 
 cated 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 ])roduced the 
 honey-tubes of aphides by their long s(dectiv(i action. It 
 must be reniend)ered 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 bo a very ancient family, or else they would not 
 liave had time to be specially modified in such a wondtir- 
 ful multiformity of ways. Even as long ago as the time 
 
HONEY-DEW 1G9 
 
 wlion tlio tertiary deposits of (Kninpon aiul Radoboj wcro 
 laid down, Dr. Hcer of Zuricli has shown that at least 
 eighty-three distinct species of ants ah'cady existed ; and 
 the number that have left no trace behind is most ])robahly 
 far greater. Home of the beetles and woodlice which ants 
 domesticate in tlieir nests have been kept underground so 
 long that tliey have become quite blind — that is to say, 
 have ceased altogether to produce eyes, which would be of 
 no use to them in their subterraiman galleries ; and one 
 such blind beetle, known as Claviger, has even lost the 
 power of feeding itself, and has to bo led by its masters 
 from their own mandibles. Dr. Taschenlx^rg enumerates 
 800 species of true ants'-nest insects, mostly beetles, in 
 Germany alone; and ]\I. Andre gives a list of OHl kinds, 
 habitually found in association with ants in one country or 
 another. Compared with tluise singular results of formi- 
 can selection, the mere production or further dev(;lopment 
 of the honey-tubes apjiears to bo a very small nuitter. 
 
 But what good do the aphides themselves derive from the 
 power of secreting honc^-dew ? For we know now that 
 no animal or plant is ever provided with any organ or 
 part merely for the benefit of another creat)n'e : 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 a|)hides is (juite in excess of 
 their needs ; they assimilate the nitrogenous material of 
 the sap, and secrete its saccharine nuiterial as honi^y-dcw. 
 That, however, would luirdly account for the devel()])nu'nt 
 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 usehil allies to tho 
 aphides, in guarding them from another very dangc^'ous 
 type of insect. They are Bul)ject to tlie attacks of an 
 ichneumon lly, which lays its eggs in them, meaning ita 
 
170 HONEY-DEW 
 
 larvas to feed upon their living bodies ; rnd the ants watch 
 over the aphides with the greatest vigilance, driving off the 
 ichneumons whenever they approach tlieir little protdrjis. 
 
 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 pntservative 
 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 nutri- 
 ment 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 fertilis- 
 ing 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 al)le 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 im- 
 perfect ones in migrating from one plant to its nearest 
 neighbours, where they soon become the parents of fresh 
 
HONEY-DEW 171 
 
 hordes in rapid succession. Ilonco various kinds of aphides 
 are among tlie most droadod plapfuos of af,'ricnlturists. The 
 *ily,' whicli Kentish farmers know so well on liops, is an 
 aphis specialised for that piirticiilar hine ; and, wlicn once 
 it appears hi the f^'iirdens, il spreads with startlin,!jf rapidity 
 from one end of the l()n<,' rows to the other. Tiie pliylloxera 
 which has spoilt the French vineyards is a root-feediii'^ 
 form that r backs 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, affect, 
 ing leaves, or stalks, or roots, or branches. 
 
 It is one of the most remarkable examples of the 
 Hmitation of Imman ])o\vers that while we can easily ex- 
 terminate large animals like the wolf and the bear in 
 England, or the punui and the wolverine in the settled 
 States of America, we should be so comparatively weak 
 against the Colorado Ix-etle or the fourteen-year locust, and 
 so absolutely powerless against the hop-ily, the turnip-fly, 
 and the phylloxera. The smaller and the more insignificant 
 our enemy, viewed individually, the more dilKcult is he to 
 cope with in the mass. All the elephants in the world could 
 have been hunted down and annibilated, in all probability, 
 with far less labour than has been expended upon one single 
 little all but microscopic parasite in ]'']'ance alone. The 
 enormous rapidity of reproduction in the family of a])hides 
 is the true cause of our helplessness before them. It has 
 been calculated that a single aphis may during its own life- 
 time become the progenitor of 5,yOi,yOO,000 descendants. 
 12 
 
172 HONEY-DEW 
 
 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 fanners. No 
 doubt, one reason why birds do not readily see the aphis of 
 the rose and most other species is because of their prevail- 
 ing 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 
 
HONEY-DEW 173 
 
 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 un- 
 pleasant juices. So far as I can discover, the little 
 plunderers seldom touch the pungent 'nasturtiums' or 
 tropceolums 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 un- 
 touched. 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 cater- 
 pillars 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 paren- 
 thetically 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 \veed itself, as a 
 emokable leaf, to the little aphides. Granting this hypo- 
 
174 HONEY-DEW 
 
 thetical connection, the name of honey-dew would mdeed 
 be a peeuhorly 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 apliis family is that wliich 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 
 larvo3 so produced themselves once more give origin to 
 more larvje, which acquire wings, and fly away from the 
 oak on wliich 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 gene- 
 rations 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 gene- 
 rations. 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 found- 
 resses were first hatched out, all the intervening generations 
 
HONEY-DEW 175 
 
 Laving passed their lives in sucking tlie juices of the otlier 
 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 heing impregnated, lay a single egg each, which they 
 hide in the hark, 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 neighbour- 
 hood ; 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. 
 
176 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 
 
 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 scien- 
 tific 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 doubt- 
 less went to his grave witliout ever having tasted it fre-h 
 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 grate- 
 ful humanity. No other plant is useful to us in so many 
 diverse and remarkable maimers. It has been tiuly said 
 of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he iti all good, 
 from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail ; biit even 
 the pig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries 
 
THE MIUC IN THE COCO-NUT 177 
 
 or luxuries — from tooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to 
 lard, from pepsine wine to pork pies— does not nearly ap- 
 proach, in the multiplicity and variety of his virtues, the 
 all-suflicing 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 
 Tolynesian 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 thou- 
 sands of people daily, and the milk serves them for drink, 
 thus acting as an eilicient 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 de- 
 scribed 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 
 
178 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 
 
 mysterious article of commerce known ns coir, which is 
 twisted into stout ropes, or woven into coco-nut matting 
 and ordinary door-mats. Jkushes 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 stufhnj,' cushions. 
 Th? shell, cut in half, supplies good cups, and is artistically 
 carved by the Polynesians, Japanese, Hindoos, and otiier 
 beni{,'hted heathen, who have not yet learnt the true 
 methods of civilised machine-made shoddy manufacture. 
 The leaves servo as excellent thatch ; on the flat blades, 
 prepared like papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manu- 
 scripts 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, atid 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 his 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 in- 
 digestible. 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 
 
THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 179 
 
 yellow backi,'ioiiiul of a chasfcl Ik'iiares brass- work tiay. 
 The lump of ice bohs enticin^'ly up and down in the centre 
 of the tumbler, or clinks musically against tho edge of the 
 glass as he carries it along. You take tlie cool cup tliank- 
 fully and swallow it down at one long draught ; fresh as a 
 ^lay morning, pure as an English hillside spring, delicate 
 as -well, as coco-nut water. Is'one but itself can be its 
 parallel. It is certainly the most delicious, dainty, trans- 
 parent, crystal drink ever invented. How did it get there, 
 and what is it for ? 
 
 In the early green stage at which coco-nuts are gene- 
 rally picked for houscliold use in the tropics the shell hasn't 
 yet solidilicd 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 tlu; level of iha 
 water, which fills up the whole intc'rior. 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 f^w people ever do eat the flesk at 
 all. After their first few months in the tropics, they lose 
 the taste for this comparatively indigestible part, and con- 
 fine themselves entirely (like patients at a (ierman 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- 
 
180 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 
 
 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 pecu- 
 liarity 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 shipliolds, 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 p.nd 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 protec- 
 tive 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 
 
THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 181 
 
 inside the softest of the three pores or p ts at the end of 
 the shell, and surrounded by a vast quantity of nutritious 
 pulp, destined to feed and support it during its earliest un- 
 protected 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 sohd 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 fibrons material, which breaks its fall, and 
 acts as a bufi'er to it when it comes in contact with the 
 soil beneath. So many protections has the coco-nut gra- 
 dually devised for itself by the continuous survival of the 
 best adapted amid numberless and endless spontaneous 
 variations of all its kind in pc st 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 mon- 
 key) 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 disadvan- 
 tage 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 
 
182 THE MILK IN THE COCO-TsUT 
 
 selection, however — that deus ex machina of modern 
 Bcience, 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 oif before cracking the shell. So much we 
 have all learnt during our ardent pursuit of natural know- 
 ledge 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 sub- 
 ject. 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 
 Bupply 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, 
 
THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 183 
 
 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 transfor- 
 mation 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 par- 
 ticles are all similarly absorbed during germination by the 
 dissolving power of the young seedlinj^. 
 
 Why, however, has the coco-nut three pores at the top 
 instead of one, and why are two out of the three so care- 
 fully 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 
 
184 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 
 
 state there is generally only one, though occasionally we 
 find an almond with two — a philipa?na, 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 on- 
 slaughts 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 tlie 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 cihest 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 distinguish- 
 ing 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 
 
THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 185 
 
 fruit. Many palms still keep pretty well to this primitive 
 arrangement, but a few of them which have specially pro- 
 tected 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 Smel- 
 fungus, 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 dehcious 
 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 kno^vn develop- 
 ment 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 unmanage- 
 able 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 ar- 
 rangement. 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 pre- 
 dominate. Even so our own boys pass through an es- 
 Bentially 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, 
 
186 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 
 
 before they steady down into that crowninj:? Priory of our 
 race, the soHd, sober, matter-of-fact, commercial British 
 Phihstine. 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 wliicli the em- 
 bryos 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 like- 
 wise. 
 
 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 
 
THE MILK IN TUE COCO-NUT 187 
 
 mainly affected by the coco-nut palm; for cojo-nuts are 
 essentially shore-lovinf? trees, and thrive best in the im- 
 mediate neighbourhood of the sea. Amonf, 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 piiir 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 nun vohis is 
 certainly the melancholy refrain of all natural history. 
 13 
 
188 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 
 
 The coco-nut palm intends the oil for the nourishment of 
 its own seedlinf^ ; 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 pur- 
 poses ; and ten to one the Dutch or English merchant 
 beguiles it from him with sized calico or poisoned rum, and 
 transmits it to Europe, whore 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 fohage 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 
 
THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 189 
 
 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 tlioso Teceptive 
 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 condit'on it may be literally said to make 
 the tropics — those fallacious tropics, I mean, cf 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 decep- 
 tion ; these are the genuine unadulterated tropics.' But 
 as to painting the tropics witaout 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 anu inconspicuous, but visited by in- 
 sects 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 
 
190 THE MIT-K IN THE COCO-NUT 
 
 Bay, is the fatal fact that, when onco fairly started, it goea 
 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 8e& occasionally, 
 sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles 
 of Neffira'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 civilisa- 
 tion 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 th^m 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 codl-mine or a 
 big estate in commercial England. Each lounges deco- 
 rously 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- 
 
THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 191 
 
 nuts fringe the shore for miles and miles together ; and in 
 Bome parts, as in Travancore, they form the chief agri- 
 cultural staple of the ^vhole country. ' The State has henco 
 facetiously been called Coconutcore,' says its historian ; 
 which charmingly illustrates the true Anglo-Indian notion 
 of what constitutes facetiousness, nnd 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 our- 
 selves 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 some- 
 where about the north of Spitzbergen or the New Siberian 
 Islands. 
 
 Even as things stand at the present day, however, it is 
 wonderful bow 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 house- 
 maid it scrubs our floors ; or else, woven into coarse cloth, 
 it acts as a covering for bales and furniture sent by rail or 
 
192 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 
 
 steamboat. The confcctionor 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 our- 
 selves 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 in- 
 gratitude to despise the questioa of the milk in the coco- 
 nut. 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 193 
 
 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 When a man and a bear meet together casually in an 
 American forest, it makes a great deal of diifereuce, 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 eclo, there exists neces- 
 sarily a profound and impassable native antitliesis. 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 gay 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 im- 
 possible to decide whether the remaining being was the 
 man or the bear, or which of the two had swallowed the 
 
194 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 other. The dinner liaving been purely miitnai, the result- 
 ing animal represented both the litigants equally ; just as, 
 in cannibal New Zealand, tlie chief who ate up his brother 
 chief was held naturally to inherit the goods and chattels 
 of the vanquished and absorbed rival, wliom 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 minia- 
 ture 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 tho 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 platd. 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 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 195 
 
 ■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 individuahty, no identity. Roll it up into 
 one with another of its kind, and it couldn't tell you itself 
 a minute afterwards w^hich 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 in- 
 sufferable 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 be- 
 ginnings 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 amceba 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 
 
196 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 most primitive animals do discriminate somehow between 
 what is eatable and what isn't. The amcoba has no eyes, 
 no nose, no mouth, no tonj^me, 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 w;iy to swallow them ; but, the 
 moment it comes across a bit of material tit for its food, it 
 begins at once to spi'ead its clammy fingers around the 
 nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the amoBba'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 amceba thus incidentally casts upon the nature 
 of the specialised senses in higher animals that I have ven- 
 tured 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 perfec- 
 tion. We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the 
 one hand, and French cooks and pate de fuie gras on the 
 other. But while everybody knows practically how things 
 taste to us, and which things respectively we like and dis- 
 like, 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 in- 
 forming 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 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 197 
 
 wliicli 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 condi- 
 tions, it is in the main a true one also. 
 
 The sense of taste, which in the lowest animals is dif- 
 fused 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-stuiTs 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 con- 
 tinuously persisted in. If, at the very outset of our 
 digestive apparatus, we hadn't a sort of automatic premoni- 
 tory adviser upon the kinds of food we ought or ought not 
 to indulge in, we sliould naturally commit considerable 
 imprudences in the way of eating and drinking — even 
 more than we do at present. Natural selection has there- 
 fore 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 recom- 
 mend 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 
 
198 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 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 'S 
 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 imme- 
 diately destructive to the very tissues of the mouth and 
 body ; the second discrimmates 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 undesi- 
 rable or over-luscious. 
 
 When we v/ant 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 roeksalt— 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. Unsophis- 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 199 
 
 ticated humanity is constantly putting everything it sees 
 up to its mouth in a frank spirit of experimental inquiry as 
 to its gustatory properties. In civihscd life we find every- 
 thing 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 
 
200 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 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 annost the same irritating effects as an in- 
 cautious mouthful. As a rule we don't accurately distin- 
 guish, 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, witliout 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 diil'erent substances, it is necessary to keep the 
 tongue quite dry, in order to isolate the thing you are ex- 
 perimenting with, and prevent its spreading to all parts of 
 the mouth together. In actual practice this result is ob- 
 tained 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 sur- 
 face, 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 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 201 
 
 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 m 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, cap- 
 sicums and burning leaves or roots, such as those of the 
 common Enghsh 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 higlily advisable, therefore, to have an 
 immediate warning of these extremely dangerous sub- 
 stances, 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 marlced 
 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 
 
202 FOOD AND FKEDINO 
 
 effect of brandy, applied, say, to the arms, is gently stimu- 
 lating and pleasurable, somewhat in the same way as when 
 normally swallowed in conjunction with the liabitual 
 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 mus- 
 tard inside the eyelid gives one positive torture for hours 
 together. Now, the tip of t}ie 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 lierves, on purpose so as to be easily affected by 
 all such pungent, alkahne, 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 exist- 
 ence 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 perliaps just as well that our chil- 
 dren should have an internal monitor (other than con- 
 science) to dissuade them immediately from indiscriminate 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 203 
 
 indulgence in photographic chemicals, the contents of 
 stray medicine bottles, and the best dried West India 
 chilios. ]Uit in an earlier period of progress, and especi- 
 ally in tropical countries (where the Darwinians have now 
 decided the human race made its first ddbut upon this or 
 any other stage), things were very difterent indeed. Pun- 
 gent 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 -Uier equally 
 unpleasant weeds. All of these have acquired their pun- 
 gent 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 in- 
 cautiously to swallow. 
 
 In tropical woods, where our ' hairy quadrumanous 
 U 
 
204 FOOD AND FKKDINO 
 
 ancestor ' (Darwinian for the prinneval nionkty, from whom 
 wo are presiuuably iloscended) used phiyfully to disport 
 himself, as yot unconscious of his glorious destiny as tho 
 remote progenitor of Shakespeare, Milton, and the late 
 Mr. Peace— in tropical woods, such acrid or piuij^^ent fruits 
 and plants are particularly connnon, and correspondingly 
 annoying. The fact is, our primitive forefather and all 
 the other monkeys are, or were, confirmed fruit-eaters. 
 ]Jnt to guard against their depredations a vast number of 
 tropical fruits and nuts have acquired disagreeable or fiery 
 rinds and sheila, which suffice to dctcu* 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 quan- 
 tities, 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 poison- 
 ous, or intensely bitter, or very fiery, than are sweet, 
 luscious, and edible. 
 
 ' But,' says that fidgety person, the hypothetical objector 
 
FOOD AND rEHDlNQ 205 
 
 (whom one always sets up for the express purpose of 
 proiiiplly kiiockiii^' him tlovvii a;;ain), ' if it bo the business 
 of tlie fore purl of the tonj^ue to warn us ngiiiiist pungent 
 and acrid substances, how comes it that wo purposely 
 use such tliinj^'s as mustard, pepper, cmry-powilor, and 
 vinegar ? ' ^Vc'll, in themselves all these things are, strictly 
 speaking, bad for us ; but ' snuiU quantities they act as 
 agreeable stinudants ; and v «ake care in preparing most 
 of them to get rid of the most objectionable properties. 
 Moreover, we use them, not as foods, but merely as condi- 
 ments. 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 ofiice. 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 flavour- 
 ing 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 
 
206 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 WO experience sensations of taste proper — that is to say, of 
 sweetness and bitterness. In a healthy, natural state all 
 sweet thinjj:s are pleasant to us, and all bitters (even if 
 combined with sherry) unpleasant. The reason for tliis is 
 easy enough to understand. It carries us back at once into 
 those prinneval trojiical forests, where our ' hairy ancestor ' 
 used to diet himself upon the fruits of the eartli in duo 
 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 any- 
 thing is good to eat as one could easily fhid. In fact, the 
 argument cuts both ways : edible fruits are sweet because 
 they are intended for man and other aninuils to eat ; and 
 man and other animals have a tongue pleasurably ail'ected 
 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 un- 
 doubted vegetarians) which does not contain sugar in con- 
 siderable quantities. In temperate climates (where man is 
 but a recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to regard- 
 ing 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, ir.elons, cassava, pine-apples, and ligs. 
 Our nerves have been adapted to the circumstances of our 
 early life as a race in tropical forests ; and wo still retain a 
 marked liking for sweets of evei*y 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 
 
FOOD AND FKEDINO 207 
 
 fairly said that fruits iiiid seeds (including wheat, rice, pcaa, 
 beans, and other ;;rains and pulse) still form by far tho 
 most important element in the food stull's of Imman popula- 
 tions generally. 
 
 liut besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to 
 producing artificial ones, lias any housewife ever realised 
 tho alarming condition of cookery in the benighted gene- 
 rations 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 — wore then practically 
 quite impossible. Fancy attempting nowadays to live a 
 single day without sugar ; no tea, no colYee, 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 tho abject condition of all tho 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 
 llavour of peppermint bull's eyes. How tho children 
 niaiuigcdto spend their Saturday as, or their weekly oholus, 
 is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had honey ; but 
 lioney is rare, dear, and scanty ; it can never have filled 
 one quarter the place that sugar tills in our modern affec- 
 tions. Try for a monunit to realise drinking lioney wdth 
 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 littld Greeks and 
 
208 FOOD AND FEP:DING 
 
 Eomans must have been absolutely unliglited 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 dis- 
 trust 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 un- 
 touched 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 acci- 
 dents 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 paren- 
 thetically to add, any appearance to the contrary notwith- 
 standing, 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 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 209 
 
 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, ^'ithout 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 Ton 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 imme- 
 diately 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 
 
210 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 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 pro- 
 tect 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, dis- 
 tinguished 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 tigh tly, 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 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 211 
 
 flavourings. When you come to find of what they are 
 made up, they consist generally of sweets or bitters, inter- 
 mixed 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 loweso part of the tongue and throat is 
 the seat of those peculiar tastes to which Professor Bain, 
 the great authority upon this important philosophical sub- 
 ject, 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 
 
212 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 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, 2)dt4 dc foie gras, sally lunn, muftinsand 
 crumpets, and creamy puddings. It is here, too, that the 
 slightest taint in meat, milk, or butter is immediately de- 
 tected ; that rancid pastry from the pastrycook's is ruth- 
 lessly exposed ; and tliat 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 ad- 
 viser 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 Char- 
 treuse, 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 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 213 
 
 salmon three days running without inconvenience. Even 
 a Spanish stew, with plenty of garlic in i J, and floating in 
 olive oil, tastes positively delicious after a day's mountain- 
 eering 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 in- 
 digestible. 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 un- 
 suitable 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 ; every- 
 thing is so mixed up together that only by an effort of de- 
 liberate 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 l)een previously adulterated 
 by being boiled with mint ; and cucumber is unknown ex- 
 cept 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 
 
214 FOOD AND FEEDING 
 
 actually experience them. Moreover, a great many eatable 
 objects have hardly any taste of their own, properly speak- 
 ing, but only a feeling of softness, or hardness, or glutinous- 
 ness 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 witJi 
 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 
 liprdly any taste proper, except in the glutinous skin, 
 which has a faint relish ; the epicure values it rather be- 
 cause 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 
 
FOOD AND FEEDING 215 
 
 practical result of centuries of experience in this direction ; 
 the final flower of a^'es of evolution, devoted to the equalisa- 
 tion of flavours in all human food. Think of the genera- 
 tions of fruitless experiment that must have passed before 
 mankind discovered that mint sauce (itself a cunning com- 
 pound 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 before- 
 hand 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, 
 
21G I)E BANANA 
 
 DE BANANA 
 
 The title wlilcli 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 siglit, 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 appro- 
 bation of those happy innovations whereby Latium was 
 gradually enriched with a copious vocabulary. I main- 
 tain that if Banana, banana?, &c., is not already a Latin 
 noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and 
 it shall be in future. Linnajus indeed thought otherwise. 
 He too assigned the plant and fruit to tlie first declension, but 
 handed it over to none other than our earliest acquaintance 
 in the Latin language, Musa. He called the banana Musa 
 sapicntum. What connection he could possibly conceive 
 between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the £egis- 
 bearing Zeus, or why he sliould consider it a proof of 
 wisdom to eat a particularly indigestible and nightmare- 
 begetting food-stuff, passes my humble comprehension. 
 
DE BANANA 217 
 
 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 in- 
 tentional disrespect. On the contrary, I cherish for it — 
 atadistance -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 eiivisages 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 hos- 
 pitable mahogany. Terhaps 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 calcu- 
 lated 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 
 
218 DE BANANA 
 
 delusive tropics. Tropical vegetation, as ordinarily under- 
 stood 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, d 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 fore- 
 ground of your pretty sketch, just to let your public under- 
 stand 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 un- 
 wedded Pauls in a lace-bedraped ^w/[/«oir? — 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 cJiaumidrc.) 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 vege- 
 tation 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 ? Pie 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 empha- 
 eise his Sebastian.'c personality. 
 
DE BANANA 219 
 
 Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with 
 its practically almost identical relation, the plantain, is a 
 real bit of tropical folia^.'^e. 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 under- 
 ground, and sends up each year an uprij:,'ht branch, thickly 
 covered with majestic broad green leaves, somewhat like 
 tlioseof thecannacultivatedinour gardens a^ • Indian shot,' 
 but far larger, nobler, and handsomer. They sometimes mea- 
 sure from six to ten feet in length, and their thick midrib 
 and strongly marked di'\3rging veins give them .a very 
 lordly and graceful fip, earance. But they are apt in prac- 
 tice 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 
 shghtest 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 
 introductioii of Christianity, and of a dwarf stout wind- 
 15 
 
2*20 DE BANANA 
 
 proof variety of Laiuuia, liis condition in this respect, I am 
 glad to say, has been greatly ameliorated. 
 
 13y 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 truo 
 irises. The blossoms, which, though pretty, are compara- 
 tively 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 lixed on the one important quality 
 of edibility — the sum and substance to most people of all 
 beta: za\ research — lias conihicd his attention almost 
 entirely to the fruit of the banana. In all csser.tials (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 throe 
 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 
 
DE BANANA 221 
 
 iiloal, as practice often tvlll dilTor from theory ; for it has 
 been so lonj^' cultivated and selected by man —being pro- 
 bably one of tlio very oldest, if not actually quite the oldest, 
 of doniesti(;ated plants — that it has all but lost the ori;^nnal 
 habit of producinc^ seeds. This is a common cU'ect 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 numage 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 dis- 
 appeared ; 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 managcnl for many centurica to do without seeds alto- 
 gether. 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, tamcii 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 indi- 
 
222 DE BANANA 
 
 viduals ; tlicy arc 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 jsually 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 mul- 
 tiplied into a whole colony of apparently distinct indivi- 
 duals. Yet, if the first worm happened to have the gout 
 or the rheumatism (metaphorically bpeaking), 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 inevit- 
 able tendency to degeneration in plants thus artificially and 
 unhealthily propagated. Potatoes have only been in culti- 
 vation 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 
 
DE BANANA 223 
 
 prev 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 die 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 pro- 
 pagation. For thousands of years it has been grown in 
 Asia in tlie 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 wonder- 
 ful 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. i\Ian, 
 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 outlving colonies northward and ever northward 
 toward the chillier unoccupied regions. Now, of all tropical 
 fruits, the banana is certainly the one that best repays culti- 
 vation. It has been calculated that the same area whicli will ' 
 produce thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds \ 
 of potatoes will produce 4, 400 pounds of plantains or bananas, ' 
 
224 DE BANANA 
 
 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 imder the shadov/ of its branches, whence 
 Linnaeus gave to the sort known as the plantain the Latin 
 name of Musa pciradisiaca. 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, Hke the strawberry, the raspberry, the 
 
DE BANANA 225 
 
 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 largo 
 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 pimgent 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 pro- 
 jections, stinging hairs, or knobby protuberances, on pur- 
 pose 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 prin- 
 cipal 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 accord- 
 ingly to ripen thoroughly before being picked for market ; 
 the plantain, which is the true food- stuff of all the equa- 
 torial region in both hemispheres, is gathered green and 
 
226 DE BANANA 
 
 roasted as a vegetable, or, to use the more expressive West 
 Indian negro pln-ase, as a bread-kind. Millions of liuinan 
 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 substi- 
 tute for fruit pudding,' having a flavour much like that of 
 potatoes d la maitre dliotel 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 Ameri- 
 can flour and Manchester piece-goods. 
 
 Though by origin a Malayan plant, there can be little 
 doubt thai the banana had already reached the mainland 
 of America and the West India Islands long before ^e 
 voyage of Columbus. When Pizarro disembarked upon 
 the coast of Peru on his desolating expedition, the mild- 
 eyed, melancholy, doomed Peruvians flocked dowrb>to the 
 shore and offered him bananas in a lordly dish. Bede 
 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 dis- 
 
DE BANANA 227 
 
 covered America ; as Artemus Ward pertinently remarked, 
 the noble Red Indian had obviously discovered it long 
 before him. There had been intercotu'se of old, too, between 
 Asia and the Western Continent ; the elephant-headed god 
 of Mexico, the debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec reli- 
 gion, 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 sup- 
 pose that it was carried across by wind or waves, wafted on 
 the lect 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 Hebu'ides or 
 among the lonely bogs of Western Galway. But the 
 banana must have been carried by man, because it is un- 
 known in the wild state in the Western Continent ; and, 
 as it is practically seedless, it can only have been trans- 
 ported entire, in the form of a root or sucker. An exactly 
 similar proof of ancient intercourse between the two worlds 
 is ajfforded 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 
 
228 DE BANANA 
 
 Vineland, and how the ^Icxican empire had some know- 
 ledge of Accadian astronomy, people are beginning to dis- 
 cover 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 anti- 
 quity. Our Aryan ancestor himself, Professor Max Midler's 
 especial protcfjc^ 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 sapientuni.' As the sages in ques- 
 tion 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 Linnteus, 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 tliat 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 doubt- 
 less 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 
 
DE BANANA 229 
 
 much of the rope that we use in our houses comos from the 
 same singuhir origin. I know notliing more strikingly 
 iUustrative of the extreme complexity of our modern civili- 
 sation 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. ^Vhat lady knows when she puts on her delicate 
 wrapper, from Liberty's or from Swan and Kdgar's, that 
 the material from which it is woven is a Mala}i)n plantain 
 stalk ? Who ever thinks that the glycerine for our chapped 
 hands comes from Travancore coco-nuts, and that the 
 pure butter supplied us frcm 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 in- 
 tensely complicated it really is. The ^^'est 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 obiects themselves, their substitutes, 
 adulterates, and spurious imitations. Why, you probably 
 never heard of manilla hemp before, until this very minute, 
 
230 DE BANANA 
 
 and yet you have been familiarly using it all your lifetime, 
 while 400,000 hundredweights of that useful article are 
 annually iniporti'd into this country alone. It is an in- 
 teresting 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 origin- 
 ally 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 sup- 
 plies the starchy food of about one-half the population of 
 tropical America? These are the sort of inquiries with 
 
DE BANANA 231 
 
 which a new eilition of • Miin^^'naH's Questions ' would liave 
 to bo filled ; and as to answeiinijf them — why, even the 
 pupil-teaehei'H in a London Board School (who represent, 
 I suppose, the higliest attainable level of human know- 
 ledge) would often find themselves completi'ly 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 un- 
 inquiring spirit of childlike faith, much as tlie 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. 
 
 Tluit 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 oug]it 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 Rem- 
 ington 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 
 
232 DE BANANA 
 
 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 tlio 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 Ontaxio 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 233 
 
 00 TO THE ANT 
 
 In the marliet-place at Santa F^, 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 appro- 
 bation 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 
 
234 00 TO tup: ant 
 
 converting liimsclf into a living' honey -jar, from which all 
 the other ants in liis own nest may help themselves freely 
 from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to 
 wliicli lio belonfj's lives under<,'round, 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 hoiu^y within their own 
 bodies. Clinging to tlie top of their nest, with their round, 
 transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules 
 of skin enclosing the pale amber-coloured honey, these 
 Daniel Land)erts of the insect race look for all the world 
 like clusters of the little American Delaw'aro grapes, with 
 an ant's legs and liead stuck awkwardly on to the end 
 instead of a stulk. Tlu'y have, in fact, realised in every- 
 day life the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented sugar- 
 broker, who laid on flesh and ' adipose deposit ' until ho 
 became converted at last into a perfect rolling ball of 
 globular humanity. 
 
 The manners of the honoy-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 froni the gall-insects 
 on oak-trees ; for the gall-insect, like love in tlie old Latin 
 saw, is fruitful both in sweets and hitter's, mdle ctfelle. 
 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 * Pickwic k,' chiiifly 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 antennie. The honey-bearer 
 
GO TO THE ANT 235 
 
 thereupon throws up her head and regiu-gitatos a hivgo drop 
 of the amber hc^uid. (' llegiu'gitates ' is a good word which 
 I borrow from Dr. McCook, of Philadeljjhia, the great 
 autliority upon lioney-ants ; and it saves an innncnse deal 
 of trouble in looking about for a re.speftable peripbrasis.) 
 The workers feed up(m the drops tliiis exuded, two or thnni 
 at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and 
 hipping nectar together from the lips of their devoted 
 conu'ade. Tliis may seem at iirst sight rather an unpleasant 
 practice on the part of the ants ; but after all, how does it 
 really diller from our own habit of eating honey which has 
 been treated in very much the same uusopliisticated 
 manner by the domestic bee ? 
 
 Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to 
 the discredit of the Colorado honey-ant. When he wasopcn- 
 ing some nests in the Clarden of the Gods, he happened acci- 
 dentally to knock down some of the rotunds, which straight- 
 way burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store 
 of lioney on the lloor 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 avolunteer 
 ambulance company, proceedt'd 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 detach- 
 ments, to the formican cemetery, undisturbed. If they 
 chose, they might only bury the front half of their late rela- 
 IG 
 
236 GO TO THE ANT 
 
 tion, while they retained his remaining moiety as an avail- 
 able 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 condiict 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 o. 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 fellov^s 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 ofif some of our number to act as jars on be- 
 half 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 divi- 
 sion which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a 
 transparent bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature 
 
GO TO THE ANT 237 
 
 look as though it were suffering with an acute attack of 
 dropsy. In any case, the life of a honey-bearer must he 
 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 in- 
 dustrious 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 dra?? 
 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 intelligenca outdone by another species of ant, 
 which actually allows the process of budding to begin, so 
 as to produce sugar, as in malting. After tlie last thunder- 
 storms of the monsoon the little prop'"'etors bring up all 
 the grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sun- 
 shine. 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 Johu 
 Lubbock, ' to have considered the rights of the ants.' In- 
 deed our duty towards insects is a question which seems 
 
238 GO TO THE ANT 
 
 hitherto to have escaped the notice of all moral philosophers. 
 Even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the prophet of individualism, 
 lias never taken exception to onr gross disregard of tlio 
 proprietary rights of bees in their honey, or of silkworms 
 in their cocoons. Tliere 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 Eivicra, 
 in which latter station I have often observed them busily 
 working. What most careless observers talve for grain in 
 the nests of English ants are of course really the cocoons 
 of the pupjE. 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 rother 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 agricul- 
 tural ants are born farmers. They make regular clearings 
 around their nests, and on these clearings they allow 
 
GO TO THE ANT 239 
 
 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 th*^ 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 Saiiba ants of tropical America carry their agricul- 
 tural 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 detach- 
 ment 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 
 Buffered far less from their depredations than imported 
 ones. The ants hardly touched the local forests, but they 
 
240 GO TO THE ANT 
 
 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 Saiibas 
 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 sur- 
 vived destruction ; but those wliich 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 ex- 
 planation 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 Saiibas. On one occasion, when he was wan- 
 dering 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 hu t where 
 he was sleeping; and next morning the Saiibas had riddled 
 the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a gallon of 
 the grain for their own felonious purposes. The under- 
 ground 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 
 
GO TO THE ANT 241 
 
 Brunei on liis own ground into the proverbial cocked hat, 
 both for depth and distance. 
 
 Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put them- 
 selves obtrusively forward in a manner little gratifying to 
 any except the enthusiastically entomological mind. The 
 winged females, after tlieir marriage flight, have a disagree- 
 able habit of flying in at the open doors and windows 
 at luncli time, settling upon the table like the Harpies in 
 the iEneid, and then quietly shuflling ofi 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 them- 
 selves 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 tlieir 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 pro- 
 foundly animated. That is one of the slight drawbacks 
 of the realms of perpetual summer ; in the poets you see 
 only one side of the picture — the palms, the orchids, the 
 humming-birds, the great trailing lianas : in practical life 
 you see the reverse side — the thermometer at 98°, the 
 tepid drinking-water, the prickly heat, the perpetual 
 languor, the endless shoals of aggressive insects. A lady 
 of my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable entomologi- 
 cal 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,. 
 
242 GO TO THE ANT 
 
 viewed practically, is the ir 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 -svill cat 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 extractedfrom 
 the wooden beams they proceed to add insult to injury by build- 
 inglong covered galleries right acrosstheceilingof your draw- 
 ing-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 pri- 
 vate 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 con- 
 structed 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 ser- 
 vant 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 intelli- 
 gent features, to the wooden ceiling. I looked up ; in 
 those three hours the carpenter-ants had reconstructed the 
 
GO TO THE ANT 243 
 
 entire gallery, and were doubtlesa mocking me at their 
 ease, with their uplifted antennne, luider that safe shelter. 
 I retired at once from the miequal contest. It was clearly 
 impossible to go on knocking down a fresh gallery every 
 three hours of the day or night throughout a whole life- 
 time. 
 
 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, use- 
 less 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 
 
244 GO TO THE ANT 
 
 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 resi- 
 dence ; they are vaj^abonds and wanderers iijion the face of 
 the earth, formican tramps, blind bogi^ars, who lead a 
 gipsy existence, and k(!ep j)crpetually 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 e?i 
 masse, and run away, exactly as if the visitors were Eng- 
 lish 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-pi(!ked 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 
 
GO TO THE ANT 245 
 
 vray into books of natural history about the manners and 
 habits of these bhnd marauders. They cross rivers, the 
 West African gossips dechire, by a number of devoted in- 
 dividuals flinginr* 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 extrcmest pitch the old lioman 
 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 immedi- 
 ately 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 slave-holding instincts. Everybody has heard, 
 of course, how they keep the common rose-blight as milch 
 cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But 
 everybody, probably, does not yet know the large number 
 of insects which they herd in one form or another as 
 
246 GO TO THE ANT 
 
 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 hun- 
 dreds and hundreds, some of them kept obviously for pur- 
 poses of food ; others apparently as pets ; and yet others 
 again, as has been plausibly suggested, by reason of super- 
 stition or as objects of worship. There is a curious blind 
 beetlewhich inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely depen- 
 dent 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 enjoy- 
 ment. 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 hypo- 
 thesis 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, some- 
 thing 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 com- 
 munication 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- 
 
00 TO THE ANT 247 
 
 lodgers. ' One miglit almost imagine,' he says, * that 
 they had the cap of invisibiHty.' Yet it is quite clear 
 that the ants deliberately sanction tlie renidencc 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 larvji^ 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 Constanti- 
 nople or the common black John-crow vultures in tropical 
 America : in the second case, they would be about equi- 
 valent to our own cats or to the hedgehog often put in 
 farmhouse kitchens to keep doAvn cockroaches. 
 
 The crowning glory of owning slaves, which many philo- 
 sophic 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 tho domestic institu- 
 tion 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 them- 
 selves 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 ser- 
 vants. 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 
 
248 GO TO THE ANT 
 
 Uttlo bro^vn servants, like the aristocratic first families of 
 Virujinia before the earthquake of emancipation. 
 
 Jiiit there are other degraded anta, -whose lifo-history 
 may be humbly presented to tlie consideration of the Anti- 
 Slavery Society, as speaking more ckxiuently 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 tho 
 services of slaves that it is no longer able to manage its 
 own affairs when depriv(>d by man of its hereditary bonds- 
 men. 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 teetli, and have 
 been converted into mere nippers, useful only as weapons 
 of war. The rufescent ant, in fact, is a purely mihtary 
 caste, which has devoted itself entirely to the i)ursuit of 
 arms, leaving every other form of activity to its slaves and 
 dependents. Ollicers 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 w^itli 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 pro- 
 prietors. Only when war is to be made upon neighbouring 
 nests does the thin red line form itself into long lile for 
 active service. Nothing could be more perfectly aristocratic 
 than the views of life entertained and acted upon by those 
 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 
 
GO TO THE ANT 249 
 
 foedinp: itself. So conipletoly dcpoiulcnt is each upon his 
 little black valot for daily bread, that he cannot so much 
 as help hinisolf to the food that is set before him. Iliiber 
 put a few slav(>holders into a box with some of their own 
 larvic and pnpje, 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 bej^an 
 carrying the larva; 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 'ike ollicers 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 con- 
 stituted footman. A.dmiring tlieir heroism or pitying their 
 incapacity, Iliiber 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 larvju, helped several pupje out 
 of the cocoon, and saved the lives of the surviving slave- 
 owners. Other naturalists have tried similar experiments, 
 and always with the same result. The slaveowners will 
 starve in the midst of plenty rather than feed tluMuselves 
 without attendance. Either tlu y cannot or will not put 
 the food into their own mouths with their own mandibles. 
 There are yet other ants, such as the workerless Ancr- 
 (jatcs, in which the degradation of slaveholding has gone yet 
 further. These wretched creatures are theformican repre- 
 sentatives 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 Ancrgatcs were 
 
250 GO TO THE ANT 
 
 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 con- 
 dition — 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 caus., by most sure and 
 certain warranty of Holy Scripture. 
 
BIG ANIMALS 251 
 
 BIG ANIMALS 
 
 * The Atlantosaurus,' said I, pointing affectionately with a 
 wave of my left hand to all t}iat was immortal of that ex- 
 tinct 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 shufiled 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 geo- 
 logical 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 mag- 
 nanimous self-denial. ' The Atlantosaurus has broken the 
 camel's back. Let's go and have a quiet cigarette iu the 
 park outside.' 
 
 17 
 
252 BIG ANIMALS 
 
 But if you suppose, reader, that I am {,'oing to carry my 
 forbearance so far as to let you, too, off the remainder of 
 that geological disquisition, you are certainly very much mis- 
 taken. A discourse which would be quite unpardonable in 
 social intercourse may be freely admitted in the privacy of 
 print ; because, you see, wliile 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 suscep- 
 tibilities. 
 
 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 lunction 
 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 
 
BIPx ANIMALS 253 
 
 them on to a single mental sheet, in wiiich the dotlo and 
 the moa hoh-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and 
 the ammonite ; in wliich the tertiary megatherium goes 
 check by jowl with the secondary doinosuurs and the })ri- 
 mary trilobites ; in wliich the huge herbivores of the Paris 
 Dasin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic 
 club-mosse's of the Carboniferous period, and to luive been 
 successfully hunted by the great marine li/ards 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 to- 
 gether in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespeare and 
 Moliere, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Faler- 
 nian 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, llamses and Sardanapalus. 
 This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at first sight 
 imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing de- 
 scriptions 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 geologi- 
 cal time we are dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and 
 unimaginable series of aeons, each of wliich 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* 
 
254 BIG ANIMALS 
 
 from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to the events nar- 
 rated 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 bo 
 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 every- 
 thing 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 un- 
 disturbed 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 in- 
 conceivable 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, 
 
BIG ANIMALS 255 
 
 Buch 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 unreali- 
 sable vastness of the endless successive Primary ceons. 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 wo 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 to- 
 gether 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 specialiti in the way 
 of bigness ; in one epoch it is the lizards that take sud- 
 denly to developing overgrown creatures, the monarch s 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 Brob- 
 dingnagians. 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 
 
256 BIG ANIMALS 
 
 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 iu 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 Grena- 
 dier. 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 tlie extra- 
 ordinary compactness and rotundity of the modem ceta- 
 ceans, 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 went, in projJria persona. I doubt, 
 in sliort, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deino- 
 saur 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 
 
BIO ANIMALS 257 
 
 Alice's Gryphon in Tenniel's famous sketch, or hke 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 con- 
 fidently 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 anachron- 
 isms, 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 ofl: 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 be- 
 lieve 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 
 
258 BIG ANIMALS 
 
 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 witli 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 fishlike marine lizard, familiar to us all 
 from a thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body, 
 his strong flippers, his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of 
 staring goggle eyes. The ichthyosaurus was certainly a 
 most unpleasant creature to meet alone in a narrow strait 
 on a dark night ; but if it comes to actual measurement, 
 the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed 
 does not exceed twenty-five feet from snout to tail. Now, 
 this is an extremely decent size for a reptile, as reptiles 
 go ; for the crocodile and alligator, the two biggest existing 
 lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of sixteen feet. 
 But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the 
 ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or 
 rock- snakes, which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, 
 
BIO ANBIALS 259 
 
 and measure round the v*aiat as much as a London 
 alderman of the noblest proportion?. Of course, other 
 Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our 
 British Megalosaurus only extended tweiity-fivo 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 Titanosauru3 may be briefly de- 
 scribed 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, agiin, such as 
 the deinotherium and the mastodon, were a^so, in their 
 way, very big things in livestock; but they scarcely ex- 
 ceeded 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 rhinoce- 
 roses, 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 terres- 
 trial rivals, and most people lump all our big existing 
 cetaceans under the common and ridiculous title of whales, 
 
2G0 BIO ANIMAI.S 
 
 which makes this vast and varied assortment of gigantio 
 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 dimen- 
 sions of the gigantic American Atlantosaurus himself. 
 Besides these exceptional monsters, our bottlcheads reach 
 to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four, our 
 hump-backs to fifty, andour 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 rhi\iodon, 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 v.'ill 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 
 
BIO ANIMALS 261 
 
 when they talk vaguely about everything having been so 
 very much bigger ' in those days ' liavo become extinct 
 within a very late period, and are often, from the geological 
 point of view, quite recent. 
 
 For exani))le, there is our friend the mammoth. I 
 suppose no aniniiil is more frecjucntly present to the mind 
 of the non-geoiogical speaker, when he talks indefinitely 
 about the groat extinct monsters, than the familiar iigure 
 of that huge-tusked, liairy 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 
 Uoyd Uawkins solenmly assures us ; while in Siberia his 
 frozen body, llesh 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 (jlacial 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 
 
262 BIG ANIiMALS 
 
 enormous bird wlio 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 raoa, 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 respectnble 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 sea- 
 man. 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 reasoi hig, 
 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 representa- 
 tives of these colossal carcharodons are to this day swim- 
 ming about at their lordly leisure among the coral reefs of 
 the South Sea Islands. That very cautious naturalist, Dr. 
 Giinther, of the British Museum, contents himself indeed 
 by merely saying : ' As we have no record of living indi- 
 
BIG ANIMALS 263 
 
 viduals of that balk liaving 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 si/e at certain dilVerent epochs, and been re- 
 placed 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 certahi 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 higliest development has produced a con- 
 siderable number of colossal forms ; each has been sup- 
 planted in due time by higher groups of totally dill'erent 
 structure, which have killed oil' their predecessors, not 
 indeed by actual stress of battle, but by irresistible compe- 
 tion for food and prey. The great saurians were tlma 
 succeeded by the great mammals, just as the great mammals 
 are themselves ni turn being ousted, from the land at least, 
 by the human species. 
 
 Let us look brieily at the succession of big animals in 
 the world, so far as wo can follow it from the mutilated and 
 fragmentary record of the geological remains. 
 
 The very earliest existing fossils would load us to be- 
 lieve what is otherwise quite probable, that hfo on our 
 planet began with very snuiU 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 ex- 
 
2G4 BIG ANIMALS 
 
 ceeded in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest 
 trilobite is some two feet long ; and though we cannot by 
 any means say that tliis 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 y(^t moved upon the face of the waters. 
 The trilol)ites, 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 scjuid, and the octopus, first began to 
 make their appearance upon this or any other stage, "i'lio 
 cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of invertebrato 
 animals ; they are rapid swimmers ; they have large and 
 powerful eyes ; and they can easily enfold their prey {testa 
 Victor Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms. 
 With these luitural 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 thoy rose almost at once 
 to be the dominant creatures of the primeval ocean hi 
 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 1,022 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 
 
BIG ANIMALS 265 
 
 durinj? which the different species were gradually demar- 
 cated from one another. 
 
 Some of the ammonites, which hclonged 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 per- 
 sonally answerable, thank heaven, for the vagaries of 
 modern f:cie- tilic 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 appear- 
 ance it would be hard to say, for their shell-less bodies are 
 80 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, 
 imduding the long arms. 
 
 These cuttles are the only invertebrates at all in the 
 running so far as colossal 8iz3 is concerned, and it will bo 
 observed that here the largest modern specimen immeasur- 
 ably 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 wo 
 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-liko 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 main- 
 tained their supremacy till the rise of the great secondary 
 saurians. Even then, in spite of the severe competition 
 
266 BIO ANIMALS 
 
 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 labyrin- 
 tliodonts (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 inquir- 
 ingly 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 undis- 
 turbed 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 descend- 
 
BIO ANIMALS 267 
 
 ants, the reptiles and mammals, got the upper hand with 
 them, and soon lived them down in tho strug^^le for life, so 
 that this essentially intermediate form is now almost en- 
 tirely 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 nowliere 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 propor- 
 tions, 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 gram- 
 puses, as well as the place now filled in the great conti- 
 nents 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 
 tlieir 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 
 18 
 
268 BIQ ANIMALS 
 
 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 handed ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present 
 day. Throughout the long lapse of the secondary agee, 
 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 anti- 
 quated continent of Australia. Gathering strength all tho 
 time for the coming contest, increasing constantly in size 
 of brain and keenness of intelligence, tho 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 rep- 
 tiles 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 manmioth and the mastodon ; in place of the domi- 
 nant 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 ; 
 BO 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. Ter- 
 restrial 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 
 
BIG ANIMALS 269 
 
 moa attained to dimensions almost equalling those of the 
 giraffe. In Madagascar, the mammalian life was small 
 and of low grade, so the gigantic rcpyornis 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 birdliko 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 pen- 
 guins, on their icy perches, the fore limbs have been gradu- 
 ally modified into swimming organs, exactly analogous to 
 the flippers of the seal. 
 
 Are the great aniniiUs now passing away and leaving no 
 representatives of their greatness to future ages ? On land 
 at least that is very probable. INIan, diminutive man, who, 
 if he walked on all fours, would be no bigger than a silly 
 sheep, and who only partially disguises his native small- 
 ness 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 exter- 
 minating 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 domi- 
 nant 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 
 
270 I3IG ANIMALS 
 
 Btrong. Brain counts for more than muscle, and mind haa 
 gained the iinal victory over mere matter. Gohath of Gath 
 has shrunk into insignificance before the GatHng 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 271 
 
 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 There is something at first sight rather ridiculous in the 
 idea of eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mam- 
 moths 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 pre- 
 historic Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigera- 
 tors, 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. Further- 
 more, some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the 
 stalagmitic floor of caves, in England and elsewhere, pre- 
 sumably 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 aa pre- Adamite jelly. The 
 congress of naturalists at Tiibiugen a few years since had 
 a smoking tureen of this cave-bone soup placed upon the 
 
272 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 dinner-table at their hotel one evenin,f», 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 im- 
 munity 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 soupqon 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 consomvU 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 primaBval 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 in- 
 calculable ages. The dragons of the prime have begun 
 and finished their long (and Lord Tennyson says slimy) 
 race. The fisli-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 
 
FOSSIL FOOD 273 
 
 sundry stages of mammoth and mastodon, of sabre-toothed 
 lion and huge rliinoceros. Man himself has progressed 
 gradually from the humble condition of a * hairy arboreal 
 (juadruped ' — 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 Cfrsar 
 to the appearance of tliis present volume (to take two im- 
 portant landmarks), is as one hour to a human lifetime, 
 we quietly dig up the salt to-day from that dry lake bottom 
 and proceed to eat it with the eggs laid by the hens this 
 morning for this morning's breakfast, just as though the 
 one food-stuff were not a whit more ancient or more dignified 
 in nature than the other. Why, mammoth steak is really 
 quite modern and common-place by the side of the salt in 
 the salt-cellar that we treat so cavalierly every day of our 
 ephemeral existence. 
 
 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 tiie 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 
 
274 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 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 im- 
 portant 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 
 
FOSSIL FOOD 275 
 
 come upon a bed of rock salt, it almost invariably lies upon 
 a floor of solid gypsum. 
 
 The Caspian, being still a very respectable modem 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 j)ools 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 moliusks ; 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 de- 
 crepit salt lake in a very advanced state of evaporation. It 
 lies several feet below the level of the Mediterranean, just 
 as the Caspianlies several feet below the level of the Black Sea ; 
 and as in both cases the surface must once have been con- 
 tinuous, 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-esta- 
 blish the old high level. The effect of this very revolutionary 
 proceeding woul(J be to flood the entire Jordan Valley^ 
 connect the Sea of Galilee with the Dead Sea, and play 
 
276 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 the dickens generally with Scripture geography, to the in- 
 finite 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 Bcersheba, 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 opportu- 
 nity which may not again occur.) The modern Dead Sea is 
 the last shrunken relic of such a corsiderable 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 por- 
 ridge, in which a swimmer floats, will he nill he. Persons 
 in the neighbourhood who wish to commit suicide are there- 
 fore 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 con- 
 tained. 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 
 
FOSSIL FOOD 277 
 
 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 arc 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 de- 
 pendent upon marine salt pans and artificial processes for 
 our entire salt supply. As it is, we find the materials de- 
 posited 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 
 stiU-existing St. Lawrence chain. Once upon a time, 
 American geologists say, a huge sheet of water, for which 
 
278 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 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 in- 
 definite — 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 con- 
 centrated, 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, pro- 
 duced from the drip of the bathers as they leave the water. 
 
FOSSIL FOOD 279 
 
 The mineral constituents, however, differ considerahly in 
 their proportions from those found in true salt laken 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 a}ons or so ago. (An aon 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 teon 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 Eange 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 
 
280 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 depends entirely upon the area of the original sea or 
 salt-lake, and the length of time during which the evapora- 
 tion 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 I 
 even in its original site, Nature herself has taken the 
 trouble to adulterate it beforeliand. (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 tri- 
 assic age. Many of the places at which the salt is mined 
 have names ending in wich, such asNorthwich, Middlewich, 
 Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich. This 
 termination tvicJi is itself curiously significant, as Canon 
 Isaac Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection 
 between salt and the sea. The earliest known way of pro- 
 ducing 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 
 
FOSSIL FOOD 281 
 
 places where the salt was manufactured came to ho known as 
 wych-liouses. Droitwicli, for example, was orifjinally such 
 a wich, whore 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 f^ood, easy-going 
 mediiGval people who gave these quaint names to the inland 
 wiches had prohahly no idea that they were really and truly 
 dried-up hays, 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 Caspiiin began to lose weight and to 
 shrivel away to ever smaller dimensions. In Devonshire, 
 where it appears to havo 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 sub- 
 stance, and replaced it by a mere mould in the character- 
 istic square shape of salt crystals. But Worcestershire and 
 Cheshire were the seat of the inland sea when it had con- 
 tracted 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 
 
282 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 pure and crystalliiio rock-sjilt. The absftnce 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 ether 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 
 
FOSSIL FOOD 283 
 
 eats on an average about ten times as much salt as wo 
 actually require. In this respect popular notions are as 
 inexact as in the very similar case of the supply of phos- 
 phorus. Because ]»hosphorus is needful for bniin action, 
 people jump fortliwith to the absurd conclusion tliat fish 
 and other foods rich in pliosphatos ou,L,dit to be specially 
 good for students preparing for examination, great thinkers, 
 and literary men. j\Iark Twain indeed once advised a 
 poetical aspirant, who sent him a few verses for his criti- 
 cal opinion, that fish was very feeding for the brains ; ho 
 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 sufliced 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 brhie 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 infinitmn. The negro preacher, 
 describing the creation of Adam, and drawing slightly 
 19 
 
284 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 upon his imagination, observed that when our prime fore- 
 father first came to consciousness he found himself* sot up 
 a^^in a fence.' One of liis hearers ventured sceptically to 
 ejaculate, ' Den whar dat fence come from, ministah ? ' The 
 outraged divine scratched his groy wool reflectively for a 
 moment, and replied, after a puuse, with stern solemnity, 
 * Tree more ob dem questions will underi iUie 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 q'' "^tion 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 diffi- 
 culty. 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 eva- 
 poration from earlier seas or lake basins, thig explanation 
 savours somewhai 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 salt- 
 ness 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 
 
FOSSIL FOOD 285 
 
 sank towards the centre, while the hfjfhtor, now represented 
 by the ocean and the atmosphere, floated in a gaseous con- 
 dition 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. ])y-and-by, as the cooling and condensing pro- 
 cess 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 ail prol>ability not 
 only very salt, but also quite thick with other mineral mat- 
 ters close up to the point of saturation. It was full of lime, 
 and raw Hint, and sulpliates, and many other miscellaneous 
 bodies. Moreover, it was not only just as salt as at the pre- 
 sent 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 bec^s of gypsum 
 and then of salt, which still remain in the sohd condition, 
 while the water has, of course, been correspondingly puri- 
 fied. 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 saZi/iC5 
 of the Mediterranean shore, it is still at bottom essentially 
 
286 FOSSIL FOOD 
 
 S3a-salt. However distant the connection may seem, our 
 salt is always in the last resort ohtained 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 congre<j^ato, and the 
 nohle hunter lurks in the thicket to murder them unper- 
 ceived, derive their saltnoss, as an able Canadian geologist 
 has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still retained 
 among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose pre- 
 cipitates 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. 
 
OGBUKY BARROWS 287 
 
 OGBURY BARROWS 
 
 We went to Ogbury Barrows on an archnoological expedi- 
 tion. And as the very name of archfeology, 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 Avho 
 have never been to one, the method and manner of an 
 archfEological outing. 
 
 The first thing you have to do is to catch your secre- 
 tary. 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 secre- 
 tary 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 unham- 
 pered by any foolish views of his own about archaeological 
 research or any other kindred subject. The secretary who 
 archfleologises is lost. His business is not to discourse 
 of early English windows or of palasolithic hatchets, of 
 buried villas or of Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile- 
 
288 OGBURY BARROWS 
 
 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 
 Bome fifty assorted scientific enthusiasts. The secretary 
 who diverges from these his proper and elevated functions 
 into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon ihe antiquity of 
 man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility 
 of woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon con- 
 quest (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 arrange- 
 ments for your expected excursion, the archjEologists 
 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 under- 
 stand 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 archseologists 
 and set out upon your intended tour. 
 
 An archaeologist, it should be further premised, has no 
 
OGBURY BARROWS 289 
 
 necessary personal connection witli arclineology in any way. 
 He (or she) is a human being, of assorted origin, age, and 
 sex, known as an archtcologist then and there on no other 
 ground than the possession of a ticket (price half-a-guinea) 
 for that particular archfeological meeting. Who would 
 not be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and un- 
 exacting terms ? Moft 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 bis 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 stro]l 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 som.ebody 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, 
 
290 OGBURY BARROWS 
 
 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 now- 
 adays by being a member of an archa?ological 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 pre- 
 historic 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 for- 
 got 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 archaeo- 
 logist 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, over- 
 looking 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 
 
OGBURY BARROWS 291 
 
 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 Powns v;cre originally terraced, I don't 
 doubt that the primitive system c/ 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 eflectually pro- 
 tected home industries. The consequence was, each dis- 
 trict had to produce for its own tribe all the necessaries 
 of life, however ill- adapted by nature for their due pro- 
 duction : 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 cir- 
 cumstances 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 com- 
 paratively gigantic and colossal proportions. Even the 
 
292 OGBURY BARKOWS 
 
 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 th it the greatest men don't 
 by any means always get the bi^^gest monument. 
 
 The archfEologists 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 in- 
 deed. 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 
 
OGBURY BARROWS 293 
 
 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 archteo- 
 logists — 7iot in becoming prints this time — opened the 
 barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we ex- 
 pected, the ' stone vault ' of the popular tradition, proving 
 conclusively that some faint memory of the original inter- 
 ment 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 moulder- 
 ing 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 archfeologist. 
 
 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 sur- 
 rounding earth (and then we call it a ' Druidical monu- 
 ment ' ), while in others the mound still encloses its 
 original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric 
 tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves 
 are quite modern and common-place personages compared 
 with the short, squat chieftains of the long barrows. For 
 all the indications we found in the long barrow at Ogbury 
 (as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us at 
 
294 OGBURY BARROWS 
 
 onco to the strani^e conclusion tliiit our new acquaintance, 
 the skeleton, had once been a living cannibal king of the 
 newer stone-a^^e 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. Tliese 
 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 
 liand-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 shape- 
 less 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 
 
OGBURY BARROWS 295 
 
 animals, for the most part skulls and feet only, the relics of 
 the savage funeral feast. It was clear that as soon as the 
 })uilder8 of the barrow had erected the stone chamber of 
 their dead chieftain, and placed within it his lionoured 
 remains, they had held a {^'reat banquet on tlie 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 otfurings to the spirit of their de- 
 parted 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 veri- 
 table 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 skele- 
 ton 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 witli the other products of the 
 chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an inner cliambor 
 behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger 
 relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skele- 
 tons 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 tie r&sistance at 
 
296 OGBURY BARROWS 
 
 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 underj^'round 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 canni- 
 bal savage king (alter abstracting for our local nuiseum 
 the arrowheads and tomahawk, as well as the skull of the 
 very ancient Driton himself), and when our archa}ological 
 society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two 
 years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown 
 again as green as ever, and not a sign remained of the 
 sacrilegious act in which one of the party then assembled 
 there had been a prime actor. Looking down from the 
 summit of the long barrow on that bright summer 
 morning, over the gay group of picnicking arclucologists, 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 
 
OGIJURY BARROWS 297 
 
 opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we 
 modern Britons invaded with our pryinj,', sacrik'f,'ioua 
 mattock the sacred privacy of that cannihal ghost. All this 
 passed liiio a vision hefore my mind's eye ; hut I didn't 
 mention anything of it at that particular moment to my 
 fcllow-archffiologists, because I saw they were all nnich 
 more interested in the pigeon-pie and the funny story ahout 
 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 presum- 
 ably 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 'ue 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 primi- 
 
298 OGEUIIY BARROWS 
 
 tive stylo of ornamentation ; for it consisted merely of the 
 print of tlio potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into tho 
 moist clay before i)aking. Ik^sido the urn lay a second 
 specimen of early pottery, one of those curious perforated 
 jara ■which antiquaries call by tho very question-bej,'}^Mn|^ 
 name of incense-cups ; and within it we discovered the 
 most precious part of all our * find,' a beautiful wed<,'e- 
 shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having 
 no consideration for the feelings of the ashes, w<> promptly 
 appropriated both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and 
 cup as a peace-olfering to the lord of the nuinor 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 intluenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary 
 considerations which so profoundly agitated the mind of 
 * Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation was still in a very rudi- 
 mentary state in the year five thousand B.C. ; and tho 
 ingenious Celt, who is still given to ' waking ' his neigh- 
 bours, when they die of snudl-pox, with a sublime in- 
 difference to the chances of infection, must have had 
 Bome 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 unsophisti- 
 cated savage, holding that in tliat equal sky his faithful 
 
OOBURY BARROWS 299 
 
 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 liunt without your arrows and your tomahawk ; 
 80 the flint weapons and the trusty bow accompanied their 
 owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the 
 det inew bow-string, tlie perishable articles of food and 
 driiK iiavo long since decayed within the dump tunmlus : 
 but the harder stone and earthoiware 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 
 Ashanteo, 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 innnortality 
 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 con- 
 sistent. 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 ; 
 20 
 
300 OGBURY BARRCWS 
 
 while wherever (among savage or bnrbaric 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, ' \Vhere do the ghosts 
 get their coats and dresses ? ' The true believer in crema- 
 tion 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 vera- 
 ciously retailed for us by that dear old grandmotherly 
 scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of Melissa refuses to 
 communicate with her late husband, by medium or other- 
 wise, 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 counter- 
 parts, which can only be released when the material shape 
 is destroyed or purified by the action of fire. Everything, 
 
OGBURY BARROWS 301 
 
 in sucli 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 horself upon 
 lier 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 tliat the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere 
 to have come into use again throughout all Europe, after 
 whole centuries of continued cremation, as tlie natural con- 
 comitant 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. 
 
302 FISH OUT OF WATEB 
 
 FISH OUT OF WATER 
 
 Steolling 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 di- 
 rection, 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 serpen- 
 tine 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, 
 
FISH OUT OF WATER 303 
 
 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 care- 
 fully ; 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 sur- 
 prising. 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 some- 
 what 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 loco- 
 motion across the dry lowlands of his native country. 
 
304 FISH OUT OF WATER 
 
 And while the gurnard lias 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 
 
FISH OUT OF WATER 305 
 
 water, of materials naturally found at the bottom ; but 
 Doras, I believe, is the only one that builds them on the 
 beach, of mateiiuls 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 fhially 
 migrated to tlie 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 hibernat- 
 ing 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 poet, packed in wet moss, without 
 serious damage to their constitution ; though, according 
 to Dr. Giinther, 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 gradu- 
 ally to so dry an existence ; but after a while they adapt 
 
306 FISH OUT OF WATER 
 
 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 bo regarded as to some extent the exact con- 
 verse of the means employed by divers to supply them- 
 selves 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 livo 
 for a long time out of water makes them useful confede- 
 rates 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, Avhere holy Brahmans bathe and drink and die and 
 are buried, and most of which dry up entirely during the 
 
FISH OUT OF WATER 307 
 
 dry season. The snakeliead, therefore, has similarly ac- 
 commodated 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 oxygon for their respiration. But when the mud 
 hardens entirely they hibernate or rather testivate, in a 
 dormant condition, until the bursting )f 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 eveiy now and again through the numerous 
 chinks and fissures in the sun-baked mud. Our A'yan 
 brother then goes a-fishing playfully with a spade and 
 bucket, and digs the snakeliead in this mean fashion out 
 of his comfortable lair, with an ultim.ate view to the manu- 
 facture 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 snake- 
 heads 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 
 
308 FISH OUT OF WATER 
 
 haunting Oriental iisli will survive for many years in a 
 state of suspended animation, and that when ponds or 
 jhfls which are known to have been dry for several suc- 
 cessive seasons are suddenly filled by heavy rains, they 
 are found to be swarming at once with full-grown snake- 
 heads released in a moment from what I may venture to 
 call their living tomb in tlie hardened bottom. \Vhether 
 Buch 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 un- 
 faithful 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, wlien your pond dries 
 up, in search of larger and more permanent sheets ol 
 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 uni- 
 versal ; 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 
 intormediate link between the true fish and the fi'ogs or 
 amphibians, and therefore stands in all probability in the 
 direct line of human descent, being the living representa- 
 tive of one among our own remote and early ancestors. 
 
FISH OUT OF WATER 309 
 
 Scientific interest ami filial piety ou^jht alike to secure our 
 attention for the African mud-fish. It lives its amphi- 
 bious life amonj^ 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 swiin-bladdcrs of iisli, 
 slightly altered so as to perform a now but closely allied 
 ollice. 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 
 
310 FISH OUT OF WATER 
 
 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 deve- 
 lopment. All the eels ever found in fresh water are 
 immature and undeveloped creatures. But eels do cer- 
 tainly 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 tlie main body is 
 given off to explore the various branches, while the 
 central force wriggles its way up the chief channel, regard- 
 less 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 mys- 
 teriously, at a distance, and will strike boldly straight across 
 country, to sheets of water wholly cut off from communi- 
 cation 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 
 
FISH OUT OF WATER 311 
 
 instinctive gcof^rapliical faculty. On tlieir way across 
 country, they do not despise tlie succulent rat, whom they 
 swallow whole when caught with great gusto. To keep 
 tlieir 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 tliey are 
 making. It is the pouch alone that enables eels to live so 
 long out of water under all circumstances, and so incident- 
 ally 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 Perioplithalmus, which is, being inter- 
 preted. 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 nomen- 
 clature.) Perioplithalmus, 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 lie can protrude at pleasure right 
 outside the sockets, so as to look in whatever direction lie 
 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 
 
312 FISH OUT OF WATER 
 
 Ilia S(iuiiitinp; optics. So completely adapted ia he for thia 
 ninpiiihious lon^'-sliore exiHtence, tliat his big eyea, unlike 
 those of most other lish, are formed for seeing in the air 
 ns well as in tlie water. Nothing can be more ludicrous 
 tlian 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 Anua*ican 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 tlio surface and partly 
 below. I)ut 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 docs not wish the fact to 
 be generally known. 
 
 The ilying fish are fish out of water in a somewhat 
 different and more transitory sense. Their aerial excur- 
 sions are brief and rapid ; they can only fly a very little 
 ■way, and have soon to take once more for safety to their 
 o^vn more natural and permanent element. More than 
 forty kinds of tlie family are known, in appearance very 
 much like English herrings, but with the front fins 
 expanded and modified into veritable wings. It is fashion- 
 able now^adays among naturalists to assert that the flying 
 fish don't fly ; that they merely jump horizontally out of 
 
I'ISII OUT OF WATER 313 
 
 the water with a powerful impulse, and full aj^ain as soon 
 as the force of the first impetus is entirely spent. When 
 men endeavour to persuade you to such folly, helieve theui 
 not. For my own pint, I have scon the llyinj; fish fly- - 
 deliberately lly, and Ihitter, and rise a<jfain, and cluui^'e tho 
 direction of thiir lli^'ht in mid-air, exactly after the fasinon 
 of a bij^ dragonfly. If the otlier people who have watched 
 tliem 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 mo 
 perfectly recognisable, hovering andlluttering of the gauze- 
 like wings ; but 1 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 tlie witnesses who didn't see the murder connnitted 
 is as nothing comv ired 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 unsophisti- 
 cated 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 
 
 \ 
 
 1 
 
314 FISH OUT OF WATER 
 
 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 silve 'y flying fish are caught for market (sad dese- 
 cration 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 tlie 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 ex- 
 aggerated 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 pe?' 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 
 
FISH OUT OF WATER 315 
 
 species among their feathered competitors. Nay, there are 
 even fish, hke 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 
 Bucceeded, 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. 
 
 21 
 
316 THE HRST POTTER 
 
 THE FIRST POTTER 
 
 Collective humanity owes a great debt of gratitude to the 
 first potter. Before his days the art of boihng, though in 
 one sense very simple and primitive indeed, was in another 
 sense very complex, cumbersome, and lengthy. The un- 
 sophisticated 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 applica- 
 tion was not sufficient, he gnawed off t}'.e 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 
 
THE FIRST POTTER 317 
 
 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 brimmirig stream. This was satisfactory as 
 far as it went, of course, but it was not pottery. He 
 couldn't boil his joint for dinner in coconut or skull ; he 
 had to do it with stone pot-boilers, iu a rude kettle of 
 puddled clay. 
 
 But at last one day, that inspired barbariar , 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 w4tli a little clay smeared 
 outside it ? The savage is conservative, but he loves to save 
 trouble. He tried the experiment, and it succeeded admir- 
 ably. 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, w^as at least something. 
 
 All this, you say (which, in effect, is Dr. Tylor's view), 
 
318 IIIE FIRST POTTER 
 
 is purely liypotliotical. In one sense, yes ; but not in 
 another. We know that most savage races still use natural 
 vessels, made of coconuts, gourds, or calabashes, for every- 
 day 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 Honfieur, 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 evolv- 
 ing 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 forthcom- 
 ing for the modern inquirer. Among the ancient monu- 
 ments 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 wliich fictile 
 
THE FIRST POTTER 319 
 
 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 funda- 
 mental 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 wliether 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 higlier 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. I3it by bit the 
 invention grew, like all great inventions, without any in- 
 ventor. 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 paleolithic man, that antique naked crouching 
 savage who hunted the mammoth, the reindeer, and the 
 
320 THE FIRST POTTER 
 
 cave-bear among the frozen fields of interglacial Gaul and 
 Britain — did palicolitliic 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 
 archa?ologists, and which cannot even now be considered 
 as finally settled before the tribunal of science. He must 
 have drunk out of something or other, but whether he 
 drank out of earthenware cups is still uncertain. It is 
 pretty clear that the earliest drinking vessels used in Europe 
 were ncitlier 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 whoso 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 w^ord keramic, still commonly applied 
 to the art of pottery, and derived, of course, from Jceras, 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 pala3olitliic men made for ages their chief 
 dwelling-places. Fragments of earthenware occurred in 
 the Hohefels cave near Dim, in company with the bones 
 of reindeer, cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had 
 
THE FIRST POTTER 321 
 
 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, fhit-bottomed vessel, 
 from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of 
 the hand that moulded the clay are still clearly dis- 
 tinguishable 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. Litcra scripta onanct, 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 paheolithic 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, com- 
 paratively abundant keramic specimens have been un- 
 earthed, without doubt or cavil, from the long barrows — 
 the burial-places of the early Mongoloid race, now re- 
 presented 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 
 
322 THE FIRST POTTER 
 
 know about the men of the newer Stone Ago, who were 
 far less artistic and testhetic in every way than their ruder 
 predecessors of the interghicial 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 twinted 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 Avoven 
 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 arti- 
 ficial 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 orna- 
 ment 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 pro- 
 duced, 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 
 
THE FIRST POTTKIl 323 
 
 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. 
 
 AVhen 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. lie 
 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 fi'om the use of some 
 one or other among these primitive methods. So he tried 
 his hand at deliberate ornament in his own simple un- 
 tutored fashion. 
 
 It was quite literally his hand, indeed, that he tried at 
 first ; for the earliest decoration upon palaeolithic pottery 
 is made by pressing the fingers into the clay so as to pro- 
 duce 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 
 
324 THE FIRST POTTER 
 
 patterns, produced by pressing tlie tip of the finj^er and the 
 jiail into tlio plastic material. It is wonderful what capital 
 and varied results you can get witli no more recondite 
 graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes turned front 
 downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes 
 used to eff^ up the moist clay into small jagged and re- 
 lieved 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 Euro- 
 pean prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form, as pat- 
 tern 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 Na- 
 daillac 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 
 
THE FIRST POTTER 32,5 
 
 Bnp^f^est the idea that the uiiknown artist must have worked 
 with the actual hand of his shauglitered enemy lying for 
 a model on tlie tahlo boforo 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 tlie 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 liritish bowl from Bavant Long Barrow 
 — produced by tliat old squat Finnliko 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 tlie 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. ]\[any 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 de- 
 corated. Cremation, as Professor Rolleston used feelingly 
 to plead, is bad for the comparative anatomist and etlino 
 grapher, but it is passing well for the collector of pottery 
 Where burning exists as a common practice, there urng 
 are frequent, and pottery an art in great request. Drink- 
 
326 Tllli FIRST rOTTKR 
 
 ing-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 belong- 
 ing to this age are still hand-moulded. 
 
 It is a curious reflection, however, tliat 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 sliill and 
 industry. I liave 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 tliere 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 hiside with a free sweep of the curved liand, 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 handi- 
 craft of the paleolithic 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 l;he less for the most ordinary domestic 
 
THE riRST POTTER 327 
 
 uses, and will survivo for npfos yet, as lonj> 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 prolnihility, separate us now 
 from the anc-iont days of the first potter, it is yet possible 
 for us to see the iirst potter's own methods and priuciples 
 exemplified under our very eyes by people who derive 
 them in unbroken succession from tho direct teaching of 
 that long- forgotten prehistoric savage. 
 
328 THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 
 
 THE EECIPE 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 
 unv/ritten 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 naturce. 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 tliistles ? 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 philo- 
 sopher out of a country grocer's eldest son whose amiable 
 mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and 
 sugar. 
 
THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 329 
 
 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 mis- 
 leading old distinction between genius and talent. It is 
 really a distinction without a difterence. 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. iSo, 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 culminatnig 
 point of ordinary cleverness, and if you were to try and 
 draw up a list of all the real geniuses in the last hundred 
 
330 THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 
 
 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 wind- 
 bag. 
 
 The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast 
 gulf which separates genius from mere talent has been 
 published and set abroad by those fortunate persons who 
 fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under the former highly 
 satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short, real 
 or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify 
 itself at the expense of poor, common-place, inferior talent. 
 There is a certain type of great man in particular winch is 
 never tired of dilating upon the noble supremacy of its own 
 greatness over the spurious imitation. It otters 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 geniines, are surely entitled to enter occasion- 
 ally 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 
 
THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 331 
 
 gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature ; here as else- 
 where, throughout the whole range of her manifold pro- 
 ductions, our common mother saltiim 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 hkely 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 can- 
 not understand the -arduous arithmetical proposition tliat 
 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 lioyal Academy. 
 It is equally unlikely (as it seems to me) that a Mendelssohn 
 or a Beethoven could be raised in the bosom of a famih' 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 tc 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 under- 
 stand 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 
 22 
 
332 THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 
 
 hereditary. You only put the difiiculty one place back. 
 Granting that young Alastor Jones is a budding poet 
 because his father, Percy Bysslie 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 character- 
 istics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all the sons 
 of a peer are born honourablcs. 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. 
 Pars jn Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincoln- 
 shire, 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 con- 
 spicuously 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 
 
THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 333 
 
 Spontaneously into ^reat commanders in the second genera- 
 tion. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the 
 Hcrschels, father and son, or the two Scahgers, 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 tlie genius come in the first place to be de- 
 veloped at all from parents in whom individually no par- 
 ticular 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 idio- 
 syncrasies 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 representa- 
 tives. The beneficent institution of the poor law does not 
 exist among savages, in order to enable the lielpless and 
 incompetent to bring up families in their own image. 
 There, survival of the fittest still works out its own ulti- 
 mately benevolent and useful end in its own directly cruel 
 
334 THE RECirE FOR GENIUS 
 
 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 clever- 
 ness 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 
 
THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 335 
 
 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 intelli- 
 gence and skill in a thousand different ways. Eor example, 
 the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make them- 
 selves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate 
 their handicraft with ornamental patterns ; and the 
 SDsthetic 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 West- 
 minster. 
 
 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 inter- 
 
336 THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 
 
 marriage 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 homo- 
 geneous societies. In one word, you have made possible 
 tlie 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 deve- 
 loped and inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world ia 
 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 here- 
 ditary 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 mili- 
 tary avatar also reappears as Tommy Atkins, a little trans- 
 figured, 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 lieredi- 
 
THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 337 
 
 tary 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 un- 
 likely to find his point of ori,Q;in. Then there is the town 
 artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from the ranks of 
 the Ilodges, 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, wo 
 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 di- 
 verse functions in diverse lines ; and when wo take them 
 in conjunction with the upper mercantile grades, which are 
 chiefly composed of their ablest and most successful mem- 
 bers, 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 de- 
 velopment of that rare product of the highest humanity, 
 the genuine genius. 
 
 But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermix- 
 ture of variously acquired hereditary characteristics that 
 
338 THE IIKCIVE FOIi GENIUS 
 
 malics the best and truest pfoniuscs. Left to itself, each 
 separate lino of casto ancestry would tend to produce a ' 
 certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of handicraft 
 in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably 
 nnythin.G; 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 pos- 
 sessing exactly the same inherited endowments, would pro- 
 bably 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 per- 
 spective 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 gra- 
 dations. But suppose, instead of thus rigorously con- 
 fining itself to its own caste, this family of handicraft 
 artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or sea- 
 faring, or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the 
 consequence ? Why, such an infiltration of other heredi- 
 tary characteristics, otherwise acquired, as might make the 
 young painters of future generations more wide minded, 
 more diversified, more individualistic; more vivid and life- 
 like. 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 
 bow even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might im- 
 prove 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 
 
THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 339 
 
 Iiac'kinpjdown enemies, or buildinpf steam-enfj;incs, a healthy 
 cross with other castes is Hablo to brinj? in all kinds of new 
 and valuable qualities, each of which, thoiiurh acquired per- 
 haps 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 indiviiluality and an idiosyncrasy so com- 
 pounded of endless varyin}^ stocks and races. Hero is one 
 whose lather was an Irishman and his mother a Scotch- 
 woman ; liere is another whose putcrnal 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 — ajid what 
 do you often find ? A peer, a cobbler, a barrister, a com- 
 mon sailor, a Welsh doctor, a Dutch merchant, a Hugue- 
 not 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 par- 
 tially imaginary one. With such a variety of racial and 
 professional antecedents behind us, what infinite possi- 
 bilities 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 recog- 
 nise as genius — at least after somebody else has told us so. 
 
340 THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 
 
 The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to 
 bo somewlnit after this fashion. Take a number of good, 
 strong, powerful stockH, 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 tlicm a considerable small-change of races, disposi. 
 tions, 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, idiosyn- 
 crasies ; and watch the result to find your genius in the fourth 
 or fifth generation. If the experiment has been pi'oporly 
 performed, and all the conditions have been decently favour- 
 able, 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 shuflled 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 througli 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. 
 
 ' Bat you haven't proved all this : you have only sug- 
 gested 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 genea- 
 logies of all the geniuses, would anybody on earth except 
 Mr. Francis Galton ever take the trouble to read it? 
 
DESERT SANDS 341 
 
 DESERT SANDS 
 
 If deserts have a fault (wliich 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 tritlo 
 monotonous. Thoui,'h Ihie in themselves, they lack variety. 
 To be sure, very few of the deserts of real life possess that 
 absolute flatness, sandiness and sameness, which charac- 
 terises the familiar desert of the poet and of the annual 
 exhibitions — a desert all level yellow expanse, most bilious 
 in its colournig, 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 ; 
 fcr 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 prepon- 
 derates 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 con- 
 ception 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 ; 
 
342 DESERT SANDS 
 
 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 'sveathor 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. Ai 
 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 skcl.jton, 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 situatod. In one place it is the Atlas 
 and the Kong mountains (now don't pretend, as David 
 Copperlield's aunt would have said, you don't know the 
 
DESEKT SANDS 343 
 
 Kong mountains) ; at another place it is the Arabian coast 
 range, Lebanon, and the lieluchi 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 Groat 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 per- 
 fection. The high snow-clad peaks of the Rocky Moun- 
 tains 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 Groat American Desert, 
 enclosing i)i 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. 
 
344 DESERT SANDS 
 
 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 in- 
 numerable generations of weeds and grasses. Earth to 
 earth is ti}G 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 circum- 
 stances we get what we familiarly k^ow as a desert. 
 
 The normal course of events where new land rises 
 above the sea is something like this, as oceanic isles have 
 
DESEliT SANDS 345 
 
 sufficiently demonstrated. The rock wlicn it first emerges 
 from the water rises bare and rugged like a sea-clifl" ; no 
 living thing, annnal 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, mi sses, 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 alluvif.1 depcjsit from the 
 mountains to the valleys. Denudation (the term, though 
 rather awful, is not an improper one) must therefore take 
 a difterent turn. Practically speaking, there is no water 
 
346 DESERT SANDS 
 
 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 uni- 
 versal determination of the desert-haunting creatures to 
 fall in with the fashion and to harmonise with their 
 surroundings adds considerably to the painfully mono- 
 tonous 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. 
 
DESERT SANDS 347 
 
 In reality, this universal sombre tint of desert animals 
 is a beautiful example of the imperious working of our 
 modern Dciis ex viacJiind, 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, 
 23 
 
348 DESERT SANDS 
 
 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 un- 
 protected 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-mourn- 
 ing 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 uni- 
 form. 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 convinc- 
 ing 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 
 
DESERT SANDS 349 
 
 they turn wistfully and bloocltliirstily towards the approach- 
 in{3f 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 brandies. But spots or stripes would 
 at once betray the croucliing 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 hyrenas their similarly 
 banded or dappled coats. One must always remember that 
 disguise may be cariied a trifle too far, and that recognisa- 
 bility 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 
 
350 DESERT SANDS 
 
 meadow I But as soon as tlioy 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. Never- 
 theless, 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 dis- 
 advantage 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 adapta- 
 tion 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 
 
DESERT SANDS 351 
 
 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 con- 
 ditions 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 speak- 
 ing) are not what they seem. The true truth about the 
 cactuses runs just the other v/ay ; 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 succu- 
 
352 DESERT SANDS 
 
 lent ; the distinction between stem and leaves tends to dis- 
 appear ; and the wliole weed, aceustonied 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 Hat 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 any- 
 where. 
 
 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 confus- 
 ing still, other desert plants which are not cactuses, living in 
 
DESERT SANDS 353 
 
 South Africa, Siiid, Rajputaim, 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 awk- 
 ward 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, duo to 
 mere stress of local conditions, have no more weight as 
 indications of real relationship than the wings of the bat 
 or the flippers of the seal, which don't make the one into 
 a skylark, or the oth.'^r 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 ' salso- 
 laceous,' 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 difter 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 
 
354 DKSERT SANDS 
 
 always utterly misconceived in Europe. Most people at 
 home picture the doeert to themselves as wholly doatl, 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 verso 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 thai 
 
DESERT SANDS 355 
 
 Sahara as a whole hes below sea-level, it may bo worth 
 while briefly to explain what it was ho really thought of 
 doing. 
 
 Some sixty miles south of Biskra, the most fashionablo 
 resort in the Aljjferian Sahara, there is a deep depression 
 two hundred and fifty miles Ion*,', partly occupied by three 
 salt lal.es of the kind so common over the whole dried-up 
 Saharan area. These three hikes, shrunken renniants 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. 
 ^Vhat M. lloudaire proposed to do was to cut canals through 
 these three barriers, and Hood 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 Hooded, however, would bear to the whole 
 area of Sahara something like the same proportion that 
 ^Vindsor 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 Hat 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 
 
356 DESERT SANDS 
 
 descends by a steep slope, is • a vast depression of clay and 
 Band,' but still for the most part standing high above sea- 
 level. No portion of the Upper Sahara is less than 1,800 
 feet high — a good deal higher than Dartmoor or Derby- 
 shire. 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 Vi^ater itself is considerably 
 Baiter than the sea. That, however, is always the case 
 with freshwater lakes in their last dotage, as American 
 geologists have amply proved in the case of the Great Salt 
 Lake of Utah. Moving sand undoubtedly covers a large 
 space in both divisions of the desert, but according to Sir 
 Lambert Playfair, our best modern authority on the sub- 
 ject, 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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