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Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science

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Title: Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science

Author: Grant Allen


        
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                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

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FALLING IN LOVE

_WITH OTHER ESSAYS ON MORE EXACT BRANCHES OF SCIENCE_


BY

GRANT ALLEN


LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1889

[_All rights reserved_]




PREFACE


Some people complain that science is dry. That is, of course, a matter
of taste. For my own part, I like my science and my champagne as dry as
I can get them. But the public thinks otherwise. So I have ventured to
sweeten accompanying samples as far as possible to suit the demand, and
trust they will meet with the approbation of consumers.

Of the specimens here selected for exhibition, my title piece originally
appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_: 'Honey Dew' and 'The First Potter'
were contributions to _Longman's Magazine_: and all the rest found
friendly shelter between the familiar yellow covers of the good old
_Cornhill_. My thanks are due to the proprietors and editors of those
various periodicals for kind permission to reproduce them here.

G.A.

THE NOOK, DORKING:

_September_, 1889.




CONTENTS


                         PAGE

FALLING IN LOVE             1
RIGHT AND LEFT             18
EVOLUTION                  31
STRICTLY INCOG.            50
SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS        72
A FOSSIL CONTINENT         88
A VERY OLD MASTER         106
BRITISH AND FOREIGN       123
THUNDERBOLTS              137
HONEY-DEW                 159
THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT  176
FOOD AND FEEDING          193
DE BANANA                 216
GO TO THE ANT             233
BIG ANIMALS               251
FOSSIL FOOD               271
OGBURY BARROWS            287
FISH OUT OF WATER         302
THE FIRST POTTER          316
THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS     328
DESERT SANDS              341




FALLING IN LOVE


An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir
George Campbell has set his face against the time-honoured practice of
Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces
against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only
attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the
institution itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator,
however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern. He would
always like to regulate human life generally as a department of the
India Office; and so Sir George Campbell would fain have husbands and
wives selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson's principle, by
the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future development of the race,
in the process which he not very felicitously or elegantly describes as
'man-breeding.' 'Probably,' he says, as reported in _Nature_, 'we have
enough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in the
pairing of individuals of the same or allied races if we could only
apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, instead of giving way to
foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whom we can
hardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in a
graver matter in which they are most likely to be influenced by
frivolous prejudices.' He wants us, in other words, to discard the
deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and to
substitute for them some calm and dispassionate but artificial
selection of a fitting partner as the father or mother of future
generations.

Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treated
seriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir George Campbell's
conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion now being
forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and
psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far
from considering love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests
of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists,
especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it
rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct developed
and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring
just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell
thinks he could himself effect by a conscious and deliberate process of
selection. More than that, I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure
most evolutionists would cordially agree with me), that this beneficent
inherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it has in view
far more admirably, subtly, and satisfactorily, on the average of
instances, than any clumsy human selective substitute could possibly
effect it.

In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and confiding belief
that marriages are made in heaven: with the further corollary that
heaven manages them, one time with another, a great deal better than Sir
George Campbell.

Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the standard of human
efficiency; and then let us consider what would be the probable result
of any definite conscious attempt to substitute for it some more
deliberate external agency.

Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing
more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the
human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin
has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the
animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aërial
dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the
delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of
his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the
eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty
and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom
he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the
admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to
be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it
were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the
fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability,
producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in
the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the
case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the
'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.

In our own species, the selective process is marked by all the features
common to selection throughout the whole animal kingdom; but it is also,
as might be expected, far more specialised, far more individualised, far
more cognisant of personal traits and minor peculiarities. It is
furthermore exerted to a far greater extent upon mental and moral as
well as physical peculiarities in the individual.

We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of us fall in love
with one person, some with another. This instinctive and deep-seated
differential feeling we may regard as the outcome of complementary
features, mental, moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; and
experience shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a reciprocal
affection, that is to say, in other words, an affection roused in unison
by varying qualities in the respective individuals.

Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency very little doubt
can be reasonably entertained. We _do_ fall in love, taking us in the
lump, with the young, the beautiful, the strong, and the healthy; we do
_not_ fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the aged, the ugly, the
feeble, and the sickly. The prohibition of the Church is scarcely needed
to prevent a man from marrying his grandmother. Moralists have always
borne a special grudge to pretty faces; but, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
admirably put it (long before the appearance of Darwin's selective
theory), 'the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but a
skin-deep saying.' In reality, beauty is one of the very best guides we
can possibly have to the desirability, so far as race-preservation is
concerned, of any man or any woman as a partner in marriage. A fine
form, a good figure, a beautiful bust, a round arm and neck, a fresh
complexion, a lovely face, are all outward and visible signs of the
physical qualities that on the whole conspire to make up a healthy and
vigorous wife and mother; they imply soundness, fertility, a good
circulation, a good digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness are
roughly indicative of dyspepsia and anæmia; a flat chest is a symptom of
deficient maternity; and what we call a bad figure is really, in one way
or another, an unhealthy departure from the central norma and standard
of the race. Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means an
active liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean feeble virility. Nor
are indications of mental and moral efficiency by any means wanting as
recognised elements in personal beauty. A good-humoured face is in
itself almost pretty. A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive
features. Low, receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid,
half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however regular their
lines and contours. Intelligence and goodness are almost as necessary as
health and vigour in order to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful
human face and figure. The Apollo Belvedere is no fool; the murderers in
the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's are for the most part no
beauties.

What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most cases
efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love with individually is,
I believe, our moral, mental, and physical complement. Not our like, not
our counterpart; quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlike
and our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a
commonplace of ordinary conversation; that it is scientifically true,
one time with another, when we take an extended range of cases, may, I
think, be almost demonstrated by sure and certain warranty of human
nature.

Brothers and sisters have more in common, mentally and physically, than
any other members of the same race can possibly have with one another.
But nobody falls in love with his sister. A profound instinct has taught
even the lower races of men (for the most part) to avoid such union of
the all-but-identical. In the higher races the idea never so much as
occurs to us. Even cousins seldom fall in love--seldom, that is to say,
in comparison with the frequent opportunities of intercourse they enjoy,
relatively to the remainder of general society. When they do, and when
they carry out their perilous choice effectively by marriage, natural
selection soon avenges Nature upon the offspring by cutting off the
idiots, the consumptives, the weaklings, and the cripples, who often
result from such consanguineous marriages. In narrow communities, where
breeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural selection has
similarly to exert itself upon a crowd of _crétins_ and other hapless
incapables. But in wide and open champaign countries, where individual
choice has free room for exercise, men and women as a rule (if not
constrained by parents and moralists) marry for love, and marry on the
whole their natural complements. They prefer outsiders, fresh blood,
somebody who comes from beyond the community, to the people of their own
immediate surroundings. In many men the dislike to marrying among the
folk with whom they have been brought up amounts almost to a positive
instinct; they feel it as impossible to fall in love with a
fellow-townswoman as to fall in love with their own first cousins. Among
exogamous tribes such an instinct (aided, of course, by other extraneous
causes) has hardened into custom; and there is reason to believe (from
the universal traces among the higher civilisations of marriage by
capture) that all the leading races of the world are ultimately derived
from exogamous ancestors, possessing this healthy and excellent
sentiment.

In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted that short men,
as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men admire little women. Dark
pairs by preference with fair; the commonplace often runs after the
original. People have long noticed that this attraction towards one's
opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race; they have not,
perhaps, so generally observed that it also indicates roughly the
existence in either individual of a desire for its own natural
complement. It is difficult here to give definite examples, but
everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there
are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which
strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with
ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out
and discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively than
that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how
trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do
so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest
promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest
and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.

How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in part by the
apparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility of its occasional
action. We know that some men and women fall in love easily, while
others are only moved to love by some very special and singular
combination of peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred by
every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by
intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we
meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for
some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love
with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't,
of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and
women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has
somewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner or
later meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man or
woman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of a
lifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily find
dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in love
again if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like the
Exchequer tallies, exactly intended to fit into one another's minor
idiosyncrasies. Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with
one another in the particular places and the particular societies they
happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the
world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at
Denver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast number
are purely indifferent to him; only one or two, here and there, strike
him in the light of possible wives, and only one in the last resort
(outside Salt Lake City) approves herself to his inmost nature as the
actual wife of his final selection.

Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellow-countrymen or
fellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch of selective preference in the
human species, is just one mark of our extraordinary specialisation, one
stamp and token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick and
choose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection plays a large
part (for the very butterflies are coy, and must be wooed and won). It
is only in the human race itself that selection descends into such
minute, such subtle, such indefinable discriminations. Why should a
universal and common impulse have in our case these special limits? Why
should we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely affected? Surely
for some good and sufficient purpose. No deep-seated want of our complex
life would be so narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning.
Sometimes we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see that
beauty plays a great _rôle_; there, we recognise the importance of
strength, of manner, of grace, of moral qualities. Vivacity, as Mr.
Galton justly remarks, is one of the most powerful among human
attractions, and often accounts for what might otherwise seem
unaccountable preferences. But after all is said and done, there remains
a vast mass of instinctive and inexplicable elements: a power deeper and
more marvellous in its inscrutable ramifications than human
consciousness. 'What on earth,' we say, 'could So-and-so see in
So-and-so to fall in love with?' This very inexplicability I take to be
the sign and seal of a profound importance. An instinct so conditioned,
so curious, so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy with
all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice within us, speaking
for the good of the human race in all future generations.

On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment (impossible supposition!)
that mankind could conceivably divest itself of 'these foolish ideas
about love and the tastes of young people,' and could hand over the
choice of partners for life to a committee of anthropologists, presided
over by Sir George Campbell. Would the committee manage things, I
wonder, very much better than the Creator has managed them? Where would
they obtain that intimate knowledge of individual structures and
functions and differences which would enable them to join together in
holy matrimony fitting and complementary idiosyncrasies? Is a living
man, with all his organs, and powers, and faculties, and dispositions,
so simple and easy a problem to read that anybody else can readily
undertake to pick out off-hand a help meet for him? I trow not! A man is
not a horse or a terrier. You cannot discern his 'points' by simple
inspection. You cannot see _à priori_ why a Hanoverian bandsman and his
heavy, ignorant, uncultured wife, should conspire to produce a Sir
William Herschel. If you tried to improve the breed artificially, either
by choice from outside, or by the creation of an independent moral
sentiment, irrespective of that instinctive preference which we call
Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving man, you would
only do one of two things--either spoil his constitution, or produce a
tame stereotyped pattern of amiable imbecility. You would crush out all
initiative, all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would
get an animated moral code instead of living men and women.

Look at the analogy of domestic animals. That is the analogy to which
breeding reformers always point with special pride: but what does it
really teach us? That you can't improve the efficiency of animals in any
one point to any high degree, without upsetting the general balance of
their constitution. The race-horse can run a mile on a particular day at
a particular place, bar accidents, with wonderful speed: but that is
about all he is good for. His health as a whole is so surprisingly
feeble that he has to be treated with as much care as a delicate exotic.
'In regard to animals and plants,' says Sir George Campbell, 'we have
very largely mastered the principles of heredity and culture, and the
modes by which good qualities may be maximised, bad qualities
minimised.' True, so far as concerns a few points prized by ourselves
for our own purposes. But in doing this, we have so lowered the general
constitutional vigour of the plants or animals that our vines fall an
easy prey to oidium and phylloxera, our potatoes to the potato disease
and the Colorado beetle; our sheep are stupid, our rabbits idiotic, our
domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limb
unknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to
deal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hope
would there be of our improving the breed by deliberate selection? If we
developed the intellect, we would probably stunt the physique or the
moral nature; if we aimed at a general culture of all faculties alike,
we would probably end by a Chinese uniformity of mediocre dead level.

The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very delicate organic
equilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, from
the correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spread
effects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the
Tasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different from
those with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interfere
with a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, in
favour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it as
helplessly as the modern system of higher education for women is
wrecking the maternal powers of the best class in our English community!

Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free choice, aided by
natural selection, is actually improving every good point, and is for
ever weeding out all the occasional failures and shortcomings of nature.
For weakly children, feeble children, stupid children, heavy children,
are undoubtedly born under this very régime of falling in love, whose
average results I believe to be so highly beneficial. How is this? Well,
one has to take into consideration two points in seeking for the
solution of that obvious problem.

In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All of them
necessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, they
are sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have to
start in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable
circumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world to
supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the best
woman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently far
from perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good deal
worse if somebody else made the choice for him, or if he made the choice
himself on abstract biological and 'eugenic' principles. And, indeed,
the very existence of better and worse in the world is a condition
precedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, with
individual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could be
no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief
besetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a very
great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fully
carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and the
world would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily reckless
and dissolute and imprudent. Even so, if eugenic principles were
universally adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natures
would be largely reduced, and natural selection would be in so much
interfered with or sensibly retarded.

In the second place, again, it must not be forgotten that falling in
love has never yet, among civilised men at least, had a fair field and
no favour. Many marriages are arranged on very different
grounds--grounds of convenience, grounds of cupidity, grounds of
religion, grounds of snobbishness. In many cases it is clearly
demonstrable that such marriages are productive in the highest degree of
evil consequences. Take the case of heiresses. An heiress is almost by
necessity the one last feeble and flickering relic of a moribund
stock--often of a stock reduced by the sordid pursuit of ill-gotten
wealth almost to the very verge of actual insanity. But let her be ever
so ugly, ever so unhealthy, ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody or
other will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Considerations
of this sort have helped to stock the world with many feeble and
unhealthy persons. Among the middle and upper classes it may be safely
said only a very small percentage of marriages is ever due to love
alone; in other words, to instinctive feeling. The remainder have been
influenced by various side advantages, and nature has taken her
vengeance accordingly on the unhappy offspring. Parents and moralists
are ever ready to drown her voice, and to counsel marriage within one's
own class, among nice people, with a really religious girl, and so forth
_ad infinitum_. By many well-meaning young people these deadly
interferences with natural impulse are accepted as part of a higher and
nobler law of conduct. The wretched belief that one should subordinate
the promptings of one's own soul to the dictates of a miscalculating and
misdirecting prudence has been instilled into the minds of girls
especially, until at last many of them have almost come to look upon
their natural instincts as wrong, and the immoral, race-destructive
counsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest earthly
wisdom. Among certain small religious sects, again, such as the Quakers,
the duty of 'marrying in' has been strenuously inculcated, and only the
stronger-minded and more individualistic members have had courage and
initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the internal
divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed law of their
particular community. Even among wider bodies it is commonly held that
Catholics must not marry Protestants; and the admirable results obtained
by the mixture of Jewish with European blood have almost all been
reached by male Jews having the temerity to marry 'Christian' women in
the face of opposition and persecution from their co-nationalists. It is
very rarely indeed that a Jewess will accept a European for a husband.
In so many ways, and on so many grounds, does convention interfere with
the plain and evident dictates of nature.

Against all such evil parental promptings, however, a great safeguard is
afforded to society by the wholesome and essentially philosophical
teaching of romance and poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are for
the most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature; and it may
profoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demand
should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in
England, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the
production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of
art. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good to
set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romantic
literature--that it always appeals to the true internal promptings of
inherited instinct, and opposes the foolish and selfish suggestions of
interested outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished human
nature against the expelling pitchfork of calculating expediency in the
matrimonial market. While parents and moralists are for ever saying,
'Don't marry for beauty; don't marry for inclination; don't marry for
love: marry for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement,
marry for our convenience, not for your own,' the romance-writer is for
ever urging, on the other hand, 'Marry for love, and for love only.' His
great theme in all ages has been the opposition between parental or
other external wishes and the true promptings of the young and
unsophisticated human heart. He has been the chief ally of sentiment and
of nature. He has filled the heads of all our girls with what Sir George
Campbell describes off-hand as 'foolish ideas about love.' He has
preserved us from the hateful conventions of civilisation. He has
exalted the claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious native
yearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable element
of mutual selection; and, in so doing, he has unconsciously proved
himself the best friend of human improvement and the deadliest enemy of
all those hideous 'social lies which warp us from the living truth.' His
mission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and Sir George
Campbell.

For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who are
always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists and the rebels who are
always in the right in this matter. If the common moral maxims of
society could have had their way--if we had all chosen our wives and our
husbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not for their eyes or
their moustaches, not for their attractiveness or their vivacity, but
for their 'sterling qualities of mind and character,' we should now
doubtless be a miserable race of prigs and bookworms, of martinets and
puritans, of nervous invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young
men and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms of
shallow sophistry--because they often prefer _Romeo and Juliet_ to the
'Whole Duty of Man,' and a beautiful face to a round balance at
Coutts's--that we still preserve some vitality and some individual
features, in spite of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men
who marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out, leaving
none to represent them: the men who marry women they have been weak
enough and silly enough to fall in love with, recruit the race with fine
and vigorous and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the
complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted and mutually
reinforcing individualities.

I have spoken throughout, for argument's sake, as though the only
interest to be considered in the married relation were the interests of
the offspring, and so ultimately of the race at large, rather than of
the persons themselves who enter into it. But I do not quite see why
each generation should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the
generations that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the strongest
points in favour of the system of falling in love that it does, by
common experience in the vast majority of instances, assort together
persons who subsequently prove themselves thoroughly congenial and
helpful to one another. And this result I look upon as one great proof
of the real value and importance of the instinct. Most men and women
select for themselves partners for life at an age when they know but
little of the world, when they judge but superficially of characters and
motives, when they still make many mistakes in the conduct of life and
in the estimation of chances. Yet most of them find in after days that
they have really chosen out of all the world one of the persons best
adapted by native idiosyncrasy to make their joint lives enjoyable and
useful. I make every allowance for the effects of habit, for the growth
of sentiment, for the gradual approximation of tastes and sympathies;
but surely, even so, it is a common consciousness with every one of us
who has been long married, that we could hardly conceivably have made
ourselves happy with any of the partners whom others have chosen; and
that we have actually made ourselves so with the partners we chose for
ourselves under the guidance of an almost unerring native instinct. Yet
adaptation between husband and wife, so far as their own happiness is
concerned, can have had comparatively little to do with the evolution of
the instinct, as compared with adaptation for the joint production of
vigorous and successful offspring. Natural selection lays almost all the
stress on the last point, and hardly any at all upon the first one. If,
then, the instinct is found on the whole so trustworthy in the minor
matter, for which it has not specially been fashioned, how far more
trustworthy and valuable must it probably prove in the greater
matter--greater, I mean, as regards the interests of the race--for which
it has been mainly or almost solely developed!

I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense of moral
responsibility in the matter of marriage will grow up among us. But it
will not take the false direction of ignoring these our profoundest and
holiest instincts. Marriage for money may go; marriage for rank may go;
marriage for position may go; but marriage for love, I believe and
trust, will last for ever. Men in the future will probably feel that a
union with their cousins or near relations is positively wicked; that a
union with those too like them in person or disposition is at least
undesirable; that a union based upon considerations of wealth or any
other consideration save considerations of immediate natural impulse, is
base and disgraceful. But to the end of time they will continue to feel,
in spite of doctrinaires, that the voice of nature is better far than
the voice of the Lord Chancellor or the Royal Society; and that the
instinctive desire for a particular helpmate is a surer guide for the
ultimate happiness, both of the race and of the individual, than any
amount of deliberate consultation. It is not the foolish fancies of
youth that will have to be got rid of, but the foolish, wicked, and
mischievous interference of parents or outsiders.




RIGHT AND LEFT


Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar scriptural phrase,
'knoweth the right hand from the left.' This fact in his economy goes
closely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal on
this sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate
language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.
His right-handedness, in short, is part cause and part effect of his
universal supremacy in animated nature. He is what he is, to a great
extent, 'by his own right hand;' and his own right hand, we may shrewdly
suspect, would never have differed at all from his left were it not for
the manifold arts and trades and activities he practises.

It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage ran. Man was
once, in his childhood on earth, what Charles Reade wanted him again to
be in his maturer centuries, ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers of
this volume--in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoter
portions of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton and the
familiar knowledge of the Latin language have not yet penetrated--should
complain that I speak with unknown tongues, I will further explain for
their special benefit that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using the
right and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang remarks
in immortal verse, 'was the manner of Primitive Man.' He never minded
twopence which hand he used, as long as he got the fruit or the scalp he
wanted. How could he when twopence wasn't yet invented? His mamma never
said to him in early youth, 'Why-why,' or 'Tomtom,' as the case might
be, 'that's the wrong hand to hold your flint-scraper in.' He grew up to
man's estate in happy ignorance of such minute and invidious
distinctions between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that his
hands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into shapely
arrows; and he never even thought in his innocent soul which particular
hand he did it with.

How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about a gentleman whom
I never personally saw, and whose habits the intervention of five
hundred centuries has precluded me from studying at close quarters? At
first sight, you would suppose the evidence on such a point must be
purely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely be inventing
_à priori_ facts, evolved, _more Germanico_, from his inner
consciousness. Not so. See how clever modern archæology has become! I
base my assertion upon solid evidence. I know that Primitive Man was
ambidextrous, because he wrote and painted just as often with his left
as with his right, and just as successfully.

This seems once more a hazardous statement to make about a remote
ancestor, in the age before the great glacial epoch had furrowed the
mountains of Northern Europe; but, nevertheless, it is strictly true and
strictly demonstrable. Just try, as you read, to draw with the
forefinger and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile on
the page on which these words are printed. Do you observe that (unless
you are an artist, and therefore sophisticated) you naturally and
instinctively draw it with the face turned towards your left shoulder?
Try now to draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find it
requires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. The hand moves
of its own accord from without inward, not from within outward. Then,
again, draw with your left thumb and forefinger another imaginary
profile, and you will find, for the same reason, that the face in this
case looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young children,
whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of man or beast, with
their right hand, draw it almost always with the face or head turned to
the left, in accordance with this natural human instinct. Their doing so
is a test of their perfect right-handedness.

But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive men we know
personally, the carvers of the figures from the French bone-caves, drew
men and beasts, on bone or mammoth-tusk, turned either way
indiscriminately. The inference is obvious. They must have been
ambidextrous. Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; and
indeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a piece of
bone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a practised hand, be
comparatively difficult.

I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with this one very
clear historical datum, because it is interesting to be able to say with
tolerable certainty that there really was a period in our life as a
species when man in the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he become
otherwise? This question is not only of importance in itself, as helping
to explain the origin and source of man's supremacy in nature--his
tool-using faculty--but it is also of interest from the light it casts
on that fallacy of poor Charles Reade's already alluded to--that we
ought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition of
savages. I think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised man
now right-handed, we shall also see why it would be highly undesirable
for him to return, after so many ages of practice, to the condition of
his undeveloped stone-age ancestors.

The very beginning of our modern right-handedness goes back, indeed, to
the most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be different
in use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spite
of all appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally,
indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn't show: but it shows
internally. We all of us know, in spite of Sganarelle's assertion to the
contrary, that the apex of the heart inclines to the left side, and that
the liver and other internal organs show a generous disregard for strict
and formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those human
organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get the clue to the
irregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even the
particular direction of the printed letters now before you.

For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His manners were
strikingly deficient in that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de
Vere. When primitive man felt the tender passion steal over his soul, he
lay in wait in the hush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms had
inspired his heart with young desire; and when she passed his
hiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled her with a
club, caught her tight by the hair of her head, and dragged her off in
triumph to his cave or his rock-shelter. (Marriage by capture, the
learned call this simple mode of primeval courtship.) When he found some
Strephon or Damoetas rival him in the affections of the dusky sex, he
and that rival fought the matter out like two bulls in a field; and the
victor and his Phyllis supped that evening off the roasted remains of
the vanquished suitor. I don't say these habits and manners were pretty;
but they were the custom of the time, and there's no good denying them.

Now, Primitive Man, being thus by nature a fighting animal, fought for
the most part at first with his great canine teeth, his nails, and his
fists; till in process of time he added to these early and natural
weapons the further persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought,
as Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the possession of
the ladies of his kind, against other members of his own sex and
species. And if you fight, you soon learn to protect the most exposed
and vulnerable portion of your body; or, if you don't, natural selection
manages it for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence. To
the boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that most vulnerable
portion is undoubtedly the heart. A hard blow, well delivered on the
left breast, will easily kill, or at any rate stun, even a very strong
man. Hence, from a very early period, men have used the right hand to
fight with, and have employed the left arm chiefly to cover the heart
and to parry a blow aimed at that specially vulnerable region. And when
weapons of offence and defence supersede mere fists and teeth, it is the
right hand that grasps the spear or sword, while the left holds over the
heart for defence the shield or buckler.

From this simple origin, then, the whole vast difference of right and
left in civilised life takes its beginning. At first, no doubt, the
superiority of the right hand was only felt in the matter of fighting.
But that alone gave it a distinct pull, and paved the way, at last, for
its supremacy elsewhere. For when weapons came into use, the habitual
employment of the right hand to grasp the spear, sword, or knife made
the nerves and muscles of the right side far more obedient to the
control of the will than those of the left. The dexterity thus acquired
by the right--see how the very word 'dexterity' implies this fact--made
it more natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the same
hand preferentially in the manufacture of flint hatchets, bows and
arrows, and in all the other manifold activities of savage life. It was
the hand with which he grasped his weapon; it was therefore the hand
with which he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right hand
remains especially 'the hand in which you hold your knife;' and that is
exactly how our own children to this day decide the question which is
which, when they begin to know their right hand from their left for
practical purposes.

A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter innumerable
other differences which naturally flow from it. Some of them are
extremely remote and derivative. Take, for example, the case of writing
and printing. Why do these run from left to right? At first sight such a
practice seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticed
above--the tendency to draw from right to left, in accordance with the
natural sweep of the hand and arm. And, indeed, it is a fact that all
early writing habitually took the opposite direction from that which is
now universal in western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance
(or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay standard),
that Hebrew is written from right to left, and that each book begins at
the wrong cover. The reason is that words, and letters, and
hieroglyphics were originally carved, scratched, or incised, instead of
being written with coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to follow
its natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in naïve drawing, with a
free curve from the right leftward.

Nevertheless, the very same fact--that we use the right hand alone in
writing--made the letters run the opposite way in the end; and the
change was due to the use of ink and other pigments for staining
papyrus, parchment, or paper. If the hand in this case moved from right
to left it would of course smear what it had already written; and to
prevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of writing was
reversed from left rightward. The use of wax tablets also, no doubt,
helped forward the revolution, for in this case, too, the hand would
cover and rub out the words written.

The strict dependence of writing, indeed, upon the material employed is
nowhere better shown than in the case of the Assyrian cuneiform
inscriptions. The ordinary substitute for cream-laid note in the
Euphrates valley in its palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, on
which the words to be recorded--usually a deed of sale or something of
the sort--were impressed while it was wet and then baked in, solid. And
the method of impressing them was very simple; the workman merely
pressed the end of his graver or wedge into the moist clay, thus giving
rise to triangular marks which were arranged in the shapes of various
letters. When alabaster, or any other hard material, was substituted for
clay, the sculptor imitated these natural dabs or triangular imprints;
and that was the origin of those mysterious and very learned-looking
cuneiforms. This, I admit, is a palpable digression; but inasmuch as it
throws an indirect light on the simple reasons which sometimes bring
about great results, I hold it not wholly alien to the present serious
philosophical inquiry.

Printing, in turn, necessarily follows the rule of writing, so that in
fact the order of letters and words on this page depends ultimately upon
the remote fact that primitive man had to use his right hand to deliver
a blow, and his left to parry, or to guard his heart.

Some curious and hardly noticeable results flow once more from this
order of writing from left to right. You will find, if you watch
yourself closely, that in examining a landscape, or the view from a
hill-top, your eye naturally ranges from left to right; and that you
begin your survey, as you would begin reading a page of print, from the
left-hand corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act of reading
(for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised infant) has
accustomed our eyes to this particular movement, and has made it
especially natural when we are trying to 'read' or take in at a glance
the meaning of any complex and varied total.

In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has even gone a
step farther. Not only do we usually take in the episodes of a painting
from left to right, but the painter definitely and deliberately intends
us so to take them in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes in
succession are represented on a single plane in the same picture--as
happens often in early art--they are invariably represented in the
precise order of the words on a written or printed page, beginning at
the upper left-hand corner, and ending at the lower right-hand angle. I
first noticed this curious extension of the common principle in the
mediæval frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have since verified
it by observations on many other pictures elsewhere, both ancient and
modern. The Campo Santo, however, forms an exceptionally good museum of
such story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every picture
consists of several successive episodes. The famous Benozzo Gozzoli, for
example, of Noah's Vineyard represents on a single plane all the stages
in that earliest drama of intoxication, from the first act of gathering
the grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the _vergognosa di
Pisa_, who covers her face with her hands in shocked horror at the
patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand corner.

Observe, too, that the very conditions of _technique_ demand this order
almost as rigorously in painting as in writing. For the painter will
naturally so work as not to smudge over what he has already painted: and
he will also naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story he
unfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From which two
principles it necessarily results that he will begin at the upper left,
and end at the lower right-hand corner.

I have skipped lightly, I admit, over a considerable interval between
primitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli. But consider further that during all
that time the uses of the right and left hand were becoming by gradual
degrees each day still further differentiated and specialised.
Innumerable trades, occupations, and habits imply ever-widening
differences in the way we use them. It is not the right hand alone that
has undergone an education in this respect: the left, too, though
subordinate, has still its own special functions to perform. If the
savage chips his flints with a blow of the right, he holds the core, or
main mass of stone from which he strikes it, firmly with his left. If
one hand is specially devoted to the knife, the other grasps the fork to
make up for it. In almost every act we do with both hands, each has a
separate office to which it is best fitted. Take, for example, so simple
a matter as buttoning one's coat, where a curious distinction between
the habits of the sexes enables us to test the principle with ease and
certainty. Men's clothes are always made with the buttons on the right
side and the button-holes on the left. Women's, on the contrary, are
always made with the buttons on the left side, and the button-holes on
the right. (The occult reason for this curious distinction, which has
long engaged the attention of philosophers, has never yet been
discovered, but it is probably to be accounted for by the perversity of
women.) Well, if a man tries to put on a woman's waterproof, or a woman
to put on a man's ulster, each will find that neither hand is readily
able to perform the part of the other. A man, in buttoning, grasps the
button in his right hand, pushes it through with his right thumb, holds
the button-hole open with his left, and pulls all straight with his
right forefinger. Reverse the sides, and both hands at once seem
equally helpless.

It is curious to note how many little peculiarities of dress or
manufacture are equally necessitated by this prime distinction of right
and left. Here are a very few of them, which the reader can indefinitely
increase for himself. (I leave out of consideration obvious cases like
boots and gloves: to insult that proverbially intelligent person's
intelligence with those were surely unpardonable.) A scarf habitually
tied in a sailor's knot acquires one long side, left, and one short one,
right, from the way it is manipulated by the right hand; if it were tied
by the left, the relations would be reversed. The spiral of corkscrews
and of ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with the
natural twist of the right hand: try to drive in an imaginary corkscrew
with the right hand, the opposite way, and you will see how utterly
awkward and clumsy is the motion. The strap of the flap that covers the
keyhole in trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to the
right, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it be
conveniently buckled by a right-handed person. The hands of watches and
the numbers of dial-faced barometers run from left to right: this is a
peculiarity dependent upon the left to right system of writing. A
servant offers you dishes from the left side: you can't so readily help
yourself from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired of
the German race, because it could never be taught like the English to
keep to the right side of the pavement in walking. A sword is worn at
the left hip: a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at the
side; in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the right
hand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in the left
breast; a pocket for railway tickets half-way down the right side. Try to
reverse any one of these simple actions, and you will see at once that
they are immediately implied in the very fact of our original
right-handedness.

And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles Reade's mistaken
notion of the advantages of ambidexterity. You couldn't make both hands
do everything alike without a considerable loss of time, effort,
efficiency, and convenience. Each hand learns to do its own work and to
do it well; if you made it do the other hand's into the bargain, it
would have a great deal more to learn, and we should find it difficult
even then to prevent specialisation. We should have to make things
deliberately different for the two hands--to have rights and lefts in
everything, as we have them now in boots and gloves--or else one hand
must inevitably gain the supremacy. Sword-handles, shears, surgical
instruments, and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed,
while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are adapted to the
left; in each case for a perfectly sufficient reason. You can't upset
all this without causing confusion. More than that, the division of
labour thus brought about is certainly a gain to those who possess it:
for if it were not so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten the
dextro-sinistrals in the struggle for existence; whereas we know that
the exact opposite has been the case. Man's special use of the right
hand is one of his points of superiority to the brutes. If ever his
right hand should forget its cunning, his supremacy would indeed begin
to totter. Depend upon it, Nature is wiser than even Charles Reade. What
she finds most useful in the long run must certainly have many good
points to recommend it.

And this last consideration suggests another aspect of right and left
which must not be passed over without one word in this brief survey of
the philosophy of the subject. The superiority of the right caused it
early to be regarded as the fortunate, lucky, and trusty hand; the
inferiority of the left caused it equally to be considered as
ill-omened, unlucky, and, in one expressive word, sinister. Hence come
innumerable phrases and superstitions. It is the right hand of
friendship that we always grasp; it is with our own right hand that we
vindicate our honour against sinister suspicions. On the other hand, it
is 'over the left' that we believe a doubtful or incredible statement; a
left-handed compliment or a left-handed marriage carry their own
condemnation with them. On the right hand of the host is the seat of
honour; it is to the left that the goats of ecclesiastical controversy
are invariably relegated. The very notions of the right hand and ethical
right have got mixed up inextricably in every language: _droit_ and _la
droite_ display it in French as much as right and the right in English.
But to be _gauche_ is merely to be awkward and clumsy; while to be right
is something far higher and more important.

So unlucky, indeed, does the left hand at last become that merely to
mention it is an evil omen; and so the Greeks refused to use the true
old Greek word for left at all, and preferred euphemistically to
describe it as _euonymos_, the well-named or happy-omened. Our own
_left_ seems equally to mean the hand that is left after the right has
been mentioned, or, in short, the other one. Many things which are lucky
if seen on the right are fateful omens if seen to leftward. On the other
hand, if you spill the salt, you propitiate destiny by tossing a pinch
of it over the left shoulder. A murderer's left hand is said by good
authorities to be an excellent thing to do magic with; but here I cannot
speak from personal experience. Nor do I know why the wedding-ring is
worn on the left hand; though it is significant, at any rate, that the
mark of slavery should be put by the man with his own right upon the
inferior member of the weaker vessel. Strong-minded ladies may get up an
agitation if they like to alter this gross injustice of the centuries.

One curious minor application of rights and lefts is the rule of the
road as it exists in England. How it arose I can't say, any more than I
can say why a lady sits her side-saddle to the left. Coachmen, to be
sure, are quite unanimous that the leftward route enables them to see
how close they are passing to another carriage; but, as all continental
authority is equally convinced the other way, I make no doubt this is a
mere illusion of long-continued custom. It is curious, however, that the
English usage, having once obtained in these islands, has influenced
railways, not only in Britain, but over all Europe. Trains, like
carriages, go to the left when they pass; and this habit, quite natural
in England, was transplanted by the early engineers to the Continent,
where ordinary carriages, of course, go to the right. In America, to be
sure, the trains also go right like the carriages; but then, those
Americans have such a curiously un-English way of being strictly
consistent and logical in their doings. In Britain we should have
compromised the matter by going sometimes one way and sometimes the
other.




EVOLUTION


Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the cholera
germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question,
it is 'in the air.' It pervades society everywhere with its subtle
essence; it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its
slang phrases; it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant
Philistinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody believes
he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everyday
conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen,
the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of
authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous
semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin,
and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer--don't you know?--and a
lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the
best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for the most part in a
belief about nature at large essentially similar to that applied by
Topsy to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in short,
that most things 'growed.' Especially is it known that in the opinion of
the evolutionists as a body we are all of us ultimately descended from
men with tails, who were the final offspring and improved edition of the
common gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception of the
various points in the great modern evolutionary programme.

It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, who of course
differs fundamentally from that inferior class of human beings known to
all of us in our own minds as 'other people,' that almost every point in
the catalogue thus briefly enumerated is a popular fallacy of the
wildest description. Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more than
George Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the electric
telegraph. We are not descended from men with tails, any more than we
are descended from Indian elephants. There is no evidence that we have
anything in particular more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship with
our poor relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search of
a 'missing link'; few links are anywhere missing, and those are for the
most part wholly unimportant ones. If we found the imaginary link in
question, he would not be a monkey, nor yet in any way a tailed man. And
so forth generally through the whole list of popular beliefs and current
fallacies as to the real meaning of evolutionary teaching. Whatever most
people think evolutionary is for the most part a pure parody of the
evolutionist's opinion.

But a more serious error than all these pervades what we may call the
drawing-room view of the evolutionist theory. So far as Society with a
big initial is concerned, evolutionism first began to be talked about,
and therefore known (for Society does not read; it listens, or rather it
overhears and catches fragmentary echoes) when Darwin published his
'Origin of Species.' That great book consisted simply of a theory as to
the causes which led to the distinctions of kind between plants and
animals. With evolution at large it had nothing to do; it took for
granted the origin of sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, the
earth and all that in it is, the sea and the dry land, the mountains and
the valleys, nay even life itself in the crude form, everything in fact,
save the one point of the various types and species of living beings.
Long before Darwin's book appeared evolution had been a recognised force
in the moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace had
worked out the development of suns and earths from white-hot
star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth's surface
to its present highly complex geographical condition. Lamarck had worked
out the descent of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slow
modification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth of mind from its
simplest beginnings to its highest outcome in human thought.

But Society, like Gallio, cared nothing for all these things. The
evolutionary principles had never been put into a single big book, asked
for at Mudie's, and permitted to lie on the drawing-room table side by
side with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court
memoirs. Therefore Society ignored them and knew them not; the word
evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into its polite and refined
dinner-table vocabulary. It recognised only the 'Darwinian theory,'
'natural selection,' 'the missing link,' and the belief that men were
merely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon
them. To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented and
patented the entire business, including descent with modification, if
such notions ever occurred at all to the world-at-large's speculative
intelligence.

Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth and older
antecedents than this easy, superficial drawing-room view would lead us
to imagine. It is a very ancient and respectable theory indeed, and it
has an immense variety of minor developments. I am not going to push it
back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the vague and
indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Roman
poet--the only original poet in the Latin language--did indeed hit out
for himself a very good rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and
shapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it
was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the philosophies of
the older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of the
development of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all,
but wholly evolved, like the German thinker's camel, out of its author's
own pregnant inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt have
built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a little
straw to make his bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-making
being still in its infancy, he could only construct in a day a shadowy
Aladdin's palace of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary
world of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void chaos into
an orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is not thus that systems
arise which regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build for
all time must make sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound
bricks in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.

It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began to
take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace,
Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of our modern
evolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who
led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses
had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the
eighteenth century.

Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical
order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede
in development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages without a
world to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore reduced to
comparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, and
matter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle. It was no wonder,
then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly
apprehended and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's
crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of living
beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted at in a timid
whisper.

In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this
world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as
the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of fluid light,' a vast nebula of
enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The world
arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was
composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable gasiness
that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be compressed into a
common antibilious pill-box. The pill-box itself, in fact, is the net
result of a prolonged secular condensation of myriads of such enormous
cubes of this primæval matter. Slowly setting around common centres,
however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's gravitative theories, the
fluid haze gradually collected into suns and stars, whose light and heat
is presumably due to the clashing together of their component atoms as
they fall perpetually towards the central mass. Just as in a burning
candle the impact of the oxygen atoms in the air against the carbon and
hydrogen atoms in the melted and rarefied wax or tallow produces the
light and heat of the flame, so in nebula or sun the impact of the
various gravitating atoms one against the other produces the light and
heat by whose aid we are enabled to see and know those distant bodies.
The universe, according to this now fashionable nebular theory, began as
a single vast ocean of matter of immense tenuity, spread all alike over
all space as far as nowhere, and comparatively little different within
itself when looked at side by side with its own final historical
outcome. In Mr. Spencer's perspicuous phrase, evolution in this aspect
is a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the
incoherent to the coherent, and from the indefinite to the definite
condition. Difficult words at first to apprehend, no doubt, and
therefore to many people, as to Mr. Matthew Arnold, very repellent, but
full of meaning, lucidity, and suggestiveness, if only we once take the
trouble fairly and squarely to understand them.

Every sun and every star thus formed is for ever gathering in the hem of
its outer robe upon itself, for ever radiating off its light and heat
into surrounding space, and for ever growing denser and colder as it
sets slowly towards its centre of gravity. Our own sun and solar system
may be taken as good typical working examples of how the stars thus
constantly shrink into smaller and ever smaller dimensions around their
own fixed centre. Naturally, we know more about our own solar system
than about any other in our own universe, and it also possesses for us a
greater practical and personal interest than any outside portion of the
galaxy. Nobody can pretend to be profoundly immersed in the internal
affairs of Sirius or of Alpha Centauri. A fiery revolution in the belt
of Orion would affect us less than a passing finger-ache in a certain
single terrestrial baby of our own household. Therefore I shall not
apologise in any way for leaving the remainder of the sidereal universe
to its unknown fate, and concentrating my attention mainly on the
affairs of that solitary little, out-of-the-way, second-rate system,
whereof we form an inappreciable portion. The matter which now composes
the sun and its attendant bodies (the satellites included) was once
spread out, according to Laplace, to at least the furthest orbit of the
outermost planet--that is to say, so far as our present knowledge goes,
the planet Neptune. Of course, when it was expanded to that immense
distance, it must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy
human senses can even conceive of. An American would say, too thin; but
I put Americans out of court at once as mere irreverent scoffers. From
the orbit of Neptune, or something outside it, the faint and cloud-like
mass which bore within it Cæsar and his fortunes, not to mention the
remainder of the earth and the solar system, began slowly to converge
and gather itself in, growing denser and denser but smaller and smaller
as it gradually neared its existing dimensions. How long a time it took
to do it is for our present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel
physicists will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or so
for the process, while the grasping and extravagant evolutionary
geologists beg with tears for at least double or even ten times that
limited period. But at any rate it has taken a good long while, and, as
far as most of us are personally concerned, the difference of one or two
hundred millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an
appreciable one.

As it condensed and lessened towards its central core, revolving rapidly
on its great axis, the solar mist left behind at irregular intervals
concentric rings or belts of cloud-like matter, cast off from its
equator; which belts, once more undergoing a similar evolution on their
own account, have hardened round their private centres of gravity into
Jupiter or Saturn, the Earth or Venus. Round these again, minor belts or
rings have sometimes formed, as in Saturn's girdle of petty satellites;
or subsidiary planets, thrown out into space, have circled round their
own primaries, as the moon does around this sublunary world of ours.
Meanwhile, the main central mass of all, retreating ever inward as it
dropped behind it these occasional little reminders of its temporary
stoppages, formed at last the sun itself, the main luminary of our
entire system. Now, I won't deny that this primitive Kantian and
Laplacian evolutionism, this nebular theory of such exquisite
concinnity, here reduced to its simplest terms and most elementary
dimensions, has received many hard knocks from later astronomers, and
has been a good deal bowled over, both on mathematical and astronomical
grounds, by recent investigators of nebulæ and meteors. Observations on
comets and on the sun's surface have lately shown that it contains in
all likelihood a very considerable fanciful admixture. It isn't more
than half true; and even the half now totters in places. Still, as a
vehicle of popular exposition the crude nebular hypothesis in its rawest
form serves a great deal better than the truth, so far as yet known, on
the good old Greek principle of the half being often more than the
whole. The great point which it impresses on the mind is the cardinal
idea of the sun and planets, with their attendant satellites, not as
turned out like manufactured articles, ready made, at measured
intervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as due to the
slow and gradual working of natural laws, in accordance with which each
has assumed by force of circumstances its existing place, weight, orbit,
and motion.

The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead of a sudden making,
which Kant and Laplace thus applied to the component bodies of the
universe at large, was further applied by Lyell and his school to the
outer crust of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the
astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyell
and his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth's
surface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world began
by being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal
excitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it
gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old is
growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, discovers. As it passed
from its fiery and volcanic youth to its staider and soberer middle age,
a solid crust began to form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface.
The aqueous vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated
mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now hardened shell.
Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into two or three main bodies that
sank into hollows of the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic,
Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the
cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain
ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very
vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more
diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as aforesaid, with
delightful regularity.

At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands, peninsulas and
islands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains, were wrought out by
internal or external energies on the crust thus generally fashioned.
Evaporation from the oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms;
the water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys and river
basins; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into streams, streams into
primæval Niles, and Amazons, and Mississippis. Volcanic forces uplifted
here an Alpine chain, or depressed there a deep-sea hollow. Sediment
washed from the hills and plains, or formed from countless skeletons of
marine creatures, gathered on the sinking bed of the ocean as soft ooze,
or crumbling sand, or thick mud, or gravel and conglomerate. Now
upheaved into an elevated table-land, now slowly carved again by rain
and rill into valley and watershed, and now worn down once more into
the mere degraded stump of a plateau, the crust underwent innumerable
changes, but almost all of them exactly the same in kind, and mostly in
degree, as those we still see at work imperceptibly in the world around
us. Rain washing down the soil; weather crumbling the solid rock; waves
dashing at the foot of the cliffs; rivers forming deltas at their barred
mouths; shingle gathering on the low spits; floods sweeping before them
the countryside; ice grinding ceaselessly at the mountain top; peat
filling up the shallow lake--these are the chief factors which have gone
to make the physical world as we now actually know it. Land and sea,
coast and contour, hill and valley, dale and gorge, earth-sculpture
generally--all are due to the ceaseless interaction of these separately
small and unnoticeable causes, aided or retarded by the slow effects of
elevation or depression from the earth's shrinkage towards its own
centre. Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is what it is,
not by virtue of a single sudden creative act, nor by virtue of
successive terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but by virtue of the slow
continuous action of causes still always equally operative.

Evolution in geology leads up naturally to evolution in the science of
life. If the world itself grew, why not also the animals and plants that
inhabit it? Already in the eager active eighteenth century this obvious
idea had struck in the germ a large number of zoologists and botanists,
and in the hands of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin it took form as a
distinct and elaborate system of organic evolution. Buffon had been the
first to hint at the truth; but Buffon was an eminently respectable
nobleman in the dubious days of the tottering monarchy, and he did not
care personally for the Bastille, viewed as a place of permanent
residence. In Louis Quinze's France, indeed, as things then went, a man
who offended the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne was prone to find himself
shortly ensconced in free quarters, and kept there for the term of his
natural existence without expense to his heirs or executors. So Buffon
did not venture to say outright that he thought all animals and plants
were descended one from the other with slight modifications; that would
have been wicked, and the Sorbonne would have proved its wickedness to
him in a most conclusive fashion by promptly getting him imprisoned or
silenced. It is so easy to confute your opponent when you are a hundred
strong and he is one weak unit. Buffon merely said, therefore, that if
we didn't know the contrary to be the case by sure warrant, we might
easily have concluded (so fallible is our reason) that animals always
varied slightly, and that such variations, indefinitely accumulated,
would suffice to account for almost any amount of ultimate difference. A
donkey might thus have grown into a horse, and a bird might have
developed from a primitive lizard. Only we know it was quite otherwise!
A quiet hint from Buffon was as good as a declaration from many less
knowing or suggestive people. All over Europe, the wise took Buffon's
hint for what he meant it; and the unwise blandly passed it by as a mere
passing little foolish vagary of that great ironical writer and thinker.

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of his grandson, was no fool; on the
contrary, he was the most far-sighted man of his day in England; he saw
at once what Buffon was driving at; and he worked out 'Mr. Buffon's'
half-concealed hint to all its natural and legitimate conclusions. The
great Count was always plain Mr. Buffon to his English contemporary.
Life, said Erasmus Darwin nearly a century since, began in very minute
marine forms, which gradually acquired fresh powers and larger bodies,
so as imperceptibly to transform themselves into different creatures.
Man, he remarked, anticipating his descendant, takes rabbits or
pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by immensely changing
their shapes and colours. If man can make a pouter or a fantail out of
the common runt, if he can produce a piebald lop-ear from the brown wild
rabbit, if he can transform Dorkings into Black Spanish, why cannot
Nature, with longer time to work in, and endless lives to try with,
produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals out of one single common
ancestor? It was a bold idea of the Lichfield doctor--bold, at least,
for the times he lived in--when Sam Johnson was held a mighty sage, and
physical speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangerous
touch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold folk, and had the
courage of their opinions more than most men. So even in Lichfield,
cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenth
century, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability that
quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendants
of a single similar original form, and even that 'one and the same kind
of living filament is, and has been, the cause of organic life.'

The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always laughed at all
reformers. It said Dr. Darwin was very clever, but really a most
eccentric man. His 'Temple of Nature,' now, and his 'Botanic Garden,'
were vastly fine and charming poems--those sweet lines, you know, about
poor Eliza!--but his zoological theories were built of course upon a
most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, no sensible person could
ever take the doctor seriously. A freak of genius--nothing more; a mere
desire to seem clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig of
time has brought around with it! By a strange irony of fate, those
admired verses are now almost entirely forgotten; poor Eliza has
survived only as our awful example of artificial pathos; and the
zoological heresies, at which the eighteenth century shrugged its fat
shoulders and dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to be
the chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological science.

In the first year of the present century, Lamarck followed Erasmus
Darwin's lead with an open avowal that in his belief all animals and
plants were really descended from one or a few common ancestors. He held
that organisms were just as much the result of law, not of miraculous
interposition, as suns and worlds and all the natural phenomena around
us generally. He saw that what naturalists call a species differs from
what naturalists call a variety, merely in the way of being a little
more distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congeners
elsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms by which in many
cases one species after another merges into the next on either side of
it. He observed the analogy between the modifications induced by man and
the modifications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-going
and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient opinion which Society
still believes to have been due to the works of Charles Darwin. In one
point only, a minor point to outsiders, though a point of cardinal
importance to the inner brotherhood of evolutionism, he did not
anticipate his more famous successor. He thought organic evolution was
wholly due to the direct action of surrounding circumstances, to the
intercrossing of existing forms, and above all to the actual efforts of
animals themselves. In other words, he had not discovered natural
selection, the cardinal idea of Charles Darwin's epoch-making book. For
him, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant reaching up to
the boughs of trees; the monkey had acquired its opposable thumb by
constant grasping at the neighbouring branches; and the serpent had
acquired its sinuous shape by constant wriggling through the grass of
the meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by his suggestive
hint of survival of the fittest, and in so far, but in so far alone, he
became the real father of modern biological evolutionism.

From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles Darwin himself
published his wonderful 'Origin of Species,' this idea that plants and
animals might really have grown, instead of having been made all of a
piece, kept brewing everywhere in the minds and brains of scientific
thinkers. The notions which to the outside public were startlingly new
when Darwin's book took the world by storm, were old indeed to the
thinkers and workers who had long been familiar with the principle of
descent with modification and the speculations of the Lichfield doctor
or the Paris philosopher. Long before Darwin wrote his great work,
Herbert Spencer had put forth in plain language every idea which the
drawing-room biologists attributed to Darwin. The supporters of the
development hypothesis, he said seven years earlier--yes, he called it
the 'development hypothesis' in so many words--'can show that
modification has effected and is effecting great changes in all
organisms, subject to modifying influences.' They can show, he goes on
(if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), that any existing
plant or animal, placed under new conditions, begins to undergo adaptive
changes of form and structure; that in successive generations these
changes continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new habits;
that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals changes of the sort
habitually occur; that the differences thus caused, as for example in
dogs, are often greater than those on which species in the wild state
are founded, and that throughout all organic nature there _is_ at work a
modifying influence of the same sort as that which they believed to
have caused the differences of species--'an influence which, to all
appearance, would produce in the millions of years and under the great
variety of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of
change.' What is this but pure Darwinism, as the drawing-room
philosopher still understands the word? And yet it was written seven
years before Darwin published the 'Origin of Species.'

The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians before
Darwin. Here are a few of them--Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates,
Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer.
Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself discovered anything. As
well say that Luther made the German Reformation, that Lionardo made the
Italian Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution, as
say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionary
movement, even in the restricted field of life only. A thousand
predecessors worked up towards him; a thousand contemporaries helped to
diffuse and to confirm his various principles.

Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea the special
notion of natural selection. That is to say, he pointed out that while
plants and animals vary perpetually and vary indefinitely, all the
varieties so produced are not equally adapted to the circumstances of
the species. If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, because
every point of disadvantage tells against the individual in the struggle
for life. If the variation is a good one, it tends to persist, because
every point of advantage similarly tells in the individual's favour in
that ceaseless and viewless battle. It was this addition to the
evolutionary concept, fortified by Darwin's powerful advocacy of the
general principle of descent with modification, that won over the whole
world to the 'Darwinian theory.' Before Darwin, many men of science
were evolutionists: after Darwin, all men of science became so at once,
and the rest of the world is rapidly preparing to follow their
leadership.

As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly this--that
plants and animals have all a natural origin from a single primitive
living creature, which itself was the product of light and heat acting
on the special chemical constituents of an ancient ocean. Starting from
that single early form, they have gone on developing ever since, from
the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more varied shapes,
till at last they have reached their present enormous variety of tree,
and shrub, and herb, and seaweed, of beast, and bird, and fish, and
creeping insect. Evolution throughout has been one and continuous, from
nebula to sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly-speck to man
or elephant. So at least evolutionists say--and of course they ought to
know most about it.

But evolution, according to the evolutionists, does not even stop here.
Psychology as well as biology has also its evolutionary explanation:
mind is concerned as truly as matter. If the bodies of animals are
evolved, their minds must be evolved likewise. Herbert Spencer and his
followers have been mainly instrumental in elucidating this aspect of
the case. They have shown, or they have tried to show (for I don't want
to dogmatise on the subject), how mind is gradually built up from the
simplest raw elements of sense and feeling; how emotions and intellect
slowly arise; how the action of the environment on the organism begets a
nervous system of ever greater and greater complexity, culminating at
last in the brain of a Newton, a Shakespeare, or a Mendelssohn. Step by
step, nerves have built themselves up out of the soft tissues as
channels of communication between part and part. Sense-organs of
extreme simplicity have first been formed on the outside of the body,
where it comes most into contact with external nature. Use and wont have
fashioned them through long ages into organs of taste and smell and
touch; pigment spots, sensitive to light or shade, have grown by
infinite gradations into the human eye or into the myriad facets of bee
and beetle; tremulous nerve-ends, responsive sympathetically to waves of
sound, have tuned themselves at last into a perfect gamut in the
developed ear of men and mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipient
centres have grown up in the brain, so that the coloured picture flashed
by an external scene upon the eye is telegraphed from the sensitive
mirror of the retina, through the many-stranded cable of the optic
nerve, straight up to the appropriate headquarters in the thinking
brain. Stage by stage the continuous process has gone on unceasingly,
from the jelly-fish with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinite
steps of progression, induced by ever-widening intercourse with the
outer world, to the final outcome in the senses and the emotions, the
intellect and the will, of civilised man. Mind begins as a vague
consciousness of touch or pressure on the part of some primitive,
shapeless, soft creature: it ends as an organised and co-ordinated
reflection of the entire physical and psychical universe on the part of
a great cosmical philosopher.

Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists take to
politics. Having shown us entirely to their own satisfaction the growth
of suns, and systems, and worlds, and continents, and oceans, and
plants, and animals, and minds, they proceed to show us the exactly
analogous and parallel growth of communities, and nations, and
languages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and
literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others
have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his
early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of
fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the
earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became
the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the
tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually his
excited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, the
horse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings in
the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the bread-fruit, and the
coco-nut. He picked and improved the seeds of his wild cereals till he
made himself from grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, his
Indian corn. In time, he dug out ore from mines, and learnt the use
first of gold, next of silver, then of copper, tin, bronze, and iron.
Side by side with these long secular changes, he evolved the family,
communal or patriarchal, polygamic or monogamous. He built the hut, the
house, and the palace. He clothed or adorned himself first in skins and
leaves and feathers; next in woven wool and fibre; last of all in purple
and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. He gathered into
hordes, tribes, and nations; he chose himself a king, gave himself laws,
and built up great empires in Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru. He raised
him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into
hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps,
into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His
dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his
boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and
his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the
telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution
has really been most marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctly
historical; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian,
French, and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth of
the trireme, the 'Great Harry,' the 'Victory,' and the 'Minotaur' from
the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.

The grand conception of the uniform origin and development of all
things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us in the one word
evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles Darwin nor to any other
single thinker. It is the joint product of innumerable workers, all
working up, though some of them unconsciously, towards a grand final
unified philosophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the
Herschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies; in biology,
Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer; in psychology,
Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor,
Lubbock, and De Mortillet--these have been the chief evolutionary
teachers and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself, and
the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as a system of
philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we owe to one man
alone--Herbert Spencer. Many other minds--from Galileo and Copernicus,
from Kepler and Newton, from Linnæus and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and
Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius--had been
piling together the vast collection of raw material from which that
great and stately superstructure was to be finally edified. But the
architect who placed each block in its proper niche, who planned and
designed the whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the
rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, was the author
of the 'System of Synthetic Philosophy,' and none other. It is a strange
proof of how little people know about their own ideas, that among the
thousands who talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. are
probably aware that both word and conception are alike due to the
commanding intelligence and vast generalising power of Herbert Spencer.




STRICTLY INCOG.


Among the reefs of rock upon the Australian coast, an explorer's dredge
often brings up to the surface some tangled tresses of reddish seaweed,
which, when placed for a while in a bucket of water, begin slowly to
uncoil themselves as if endowed with animal life, and finally to swim
about with a gentle tremulous motion in a mute inquiring way from side
to side of the pail that contains them. Looked at closely with an
attentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself into
two parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a
strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating the
weed itself in form and colour. When removed from the water, this queer
pipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-known
hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a
mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny domestic museums.
But the Australian species, instead of merely mimicking the knight on a
chess-board, looks rather like a hippocampus in the most advanced stage
of lunacy, with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spines
flattened out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly
indistinguishable in hue and shape from the fucus round which the
creature clings for support with its prehensile tail. Only a rude and
shapeless rough draught of a head, vaguely horse-like in contour, and
inconspicuously provided with an unobtrusive snout and a pair of very
unnoticeable eyes, at all suggests to the most microscopic observer its
animal nature. Taken as a whole, nobody could at first sight distinguish
it in any way from the waving weed among which it vegetates.

Clearly, this curious Australian cousin of the Mediterranean sea-horses
has acquired so marvellous a resemblance to a bit of fucus in order to
deceive the eyes of its ever-watchful enemies, and to become
indistinguishable from the uneatable weed whose colour and form it so
surprisingly imitates. Protective resemblances of the sort are extremely
common among the pipe-fish family, and the reason why they should be so
is no doubt sufficiently obvious at first sight to any reflecting
mind--such, for example, as the intelligent reader's. Pipe-fish, as
everybody knows, are far from giddy. They do not swim in the vortex of
piscine dissipation. Being mostly small and defenceless creatures,
lurking among the marine vegetation of the shoals and reefs, they are
usually accustomed to cling for support by their snake-like tails to the
stalks or leaves of those submerged forests. The omniscient schoolboy
must often have watched in aquariums the habits and manners of the
common sea-horses, twisted together by their long thin bodies into one
inextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly with a treble
serpentine coil to some projecting branch of coralline or of quivering
sea-wrack. Bad swimmers by nature, utterly unarmed, and wholly
undefended by protective mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fight
nor run away: and therefore they depend entirely for their lives upon
their peculiar skulking and lurking habits. Their one mode of defence is
not to show themselves; discretion is the better part of their valour;
they hide as much as possible among the thickest seaweed, and trust to
Providence to escape observation.

Now, with any animals thus constituted, cowards by hereditary
predilection, it must necessarily happen that the more brightly coloured
or obtrusive individuals will most readily be spotted and most
unceremoniously devoured by their sharp-sighted foes, the predatory
fishes. On the other hand, just in proportion as any particular
pipe-fish happens to display any chance resemblance in colour or
appearance to the special seaweed in whose folds it lurks, to that
extent will it be likely to escape detection, and to hand on its
peculiarities to its future descendants. A long-continued course of the
simple process thus roughly described must of necessity result at last
in the elimination of all the most conspicuous pipe-fish, and the
survival of all those unobtrusive and retiring individuals which in any
respect happen to resemble the fucus or coralline among which they
dwell. Hence, in many places, various kinds of pipe-fish exhibit an
extraordinary amount of imitative likeness to the sargasso or seaweed to
whose tags they cling; and in the three most highly developed Australian
species the likeness becomes so ridiculously close that it is with
difficulty one can persuade oneself one is really and truly looking at a
fish, and not at a piece of strangely animated and locomotive fucus.

Of course, the playful pipe-fish is by no means alone in his assumption
of so neat and effective a disguise. Protective resemblances of just the
same sort as that thus exhibited by this extraordinary little creature
are common throughout the whole range of nature; instances are to be
found in abundance, not only among beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes,
but even among caterpillars, butterflies, and spiders, of species which
preserve the strictest incognito. Everywhere in the world, animals and
plants are perpetually masquerading in various assumed characters; and
sometimes their make-up is so exceedingly good as to take in for a while
not merely the uninstructed ordinary observer, but even the scientific
and systematic naturalist.

A few selected instances of such successful masquerading will perhaps
best serve to introduce the general principles upon which all animal
mimicry ultimately depends. Indeed, naturalists of late years have been
largely employed in fishing up examples from the ends of the earth and
from the depths of the sea for the elucidation of this very subject.
There is a certain butterfly in the islands of the Malay Archipelago
(its learned name, if anybody wishes to be formally introduced, is
_Kallima paralekta_) which always rests among dead or dry leaves, and
has itself leaf-like wings, all spotted over at intervals with wee
speckles to imitate the tiny spots of fungi on the foliage it resembles.
The well-known stick and leaf insects from the same rich neighbourhood
in like manner exactly mimic the twigs and leaves of the forest among
which they lurk: some of them look for all the world like little bits of
walking bamboo, while others appear in all varieties of hue, as if
opening buds and full-blown leaves and pieces of yellow foliage
sprinkled with the tints and moulds of decay had of a sudden raised
themselves erect upon six legs, and begun incontinently to perambulate
the Malayan woodlands like vegetable Frankensteins in all their glory.
The larva of one such deceptive insect, observed in Nicaragua by
sharp-eyed Mr. Belt, appeared at first sight like a mere fragment of the
moss on which it rested, its body being all prolonged into little
thread-like green filaments, precisely imitating the foliage around it.
Once more, there are common flies which secure protection for themselves
by growing into the counterfeit presentment of wasps or hornets, and so
obtaining immunity from the attacks of birds or animals. Many of these
curiously mimetic insects are banded with yellow and black in the very
image of their stinging originals, and have their tails sharpened, _in
terrorem_, into a pretended sting, to give point and verisimilitude to
the deceptive resemblance. More curious still, certain South American
butterflies of a perfectly inoffensive and edible family mimic in every
spot and line of colour sundry other butterflies of an utterly unrelated
and fundamentally dissimilar type, but of so disagreeable a taste as
never to be eaten by birds or lizards. The origin of these curious
resemblances I shall endeavour to explain (after Messrs. Bates and
Wallace) a little farther on: for the present it is enough to observe
that the extraordinary resemblances thus produced have often deceived
the very elect, and have caused experienced naturalists for a time to
stick some deceptive specimen of a fly among the wasps and hornets, or
some masquerading cricket into the midst of a cabinet full of saw-flies
or ichneumons.

Let us look briefly at the other instances of protective coloration in
nature generally which lead up to these final bizarre exemplifications
of the masquerading tendency.

Wherever all the world around is remarkably uniform in colour and
appearance, all the animals, birds, and insects alike necessarily
disguise themselves in its prevailing tint to escape observation. It
does not matter in the least whether they are predatory or defenceless,
the hunters or the hunted: if they are to escape destruction or
starvation, as the case may be, they must assume the hue of all the rest
of nature about them. In the arctic snows, for example, all animals,
without exception, must needs be snow-white. The polar bear, if he were
brown or black, would immediately be observed among the unvaried
ice-fields by his expected prey, and could never get a chance of
approaching his quarry unperceived at close quarters. On the other hand,
the arctic hare must equally be dressed in a snow-white coat, or the
arctic fox would too readily discover him and pounce down upon him
off-hand; while, conversely, the fox himself, if red or brown, could
never creep upon the unwary hare without previous detection, which would
defeat his purpose. For this reason, the ptarmigan and the willow grouse
become as white in winter as the vast snow-fields under which they
burrow; the ermine changes his dusky summer coat for the expensive
wintry suit beloved of British Themis; the snow-bunting acquires his
milk-white plumage; and even the weasel assimilates himself more or less
in hue to the unvarying garb of arctic nature. To be out of the fashion
is there quite literally to be out of the world: no half-measures will
suit the stern decree of polar biology; strict compliance with the law
of winter change is absolutely necessary to success in the struggle for
existence.

Now, how has this curious uniformity of dress in arctic animals been
brought about? Why, simply by that unyielding principle of Nature which
condemns the less adapted for ever to extinction, and exalts the better
adapted to the high places of her hierarchy in their stead. The
ptarmigan and the snow-buntings that look most like the snow have for
ages been least likely to attract the unfavourable attention of arctic
fox or prowling ermine; the fox or ermine that came most silently and
most unperceived across the shifting drifts has been most likely to
steal unawares upon the heedless flocks of ptarmigan and snow-bunting.
In the one case protective colouring preserves the animal from himself
being devoured; in the other case it enables him the more easily to
devour others. And since 'Eat or be eaten' is the shrill sentence of
Nature upon all animal life, the final result is the unbroken whiteness
of the arctic fauna in all its developments of fur or feather.

Where the colouring of nature is absolutely uniform, as among the arctic
snows or the chilly mountain tops, the colouring of the animals is
uniform too. Where it is slightly diversified from point to point, as in
the sands of the desert, the animals that imitate it are speckled or
diversified with various soft neutral tints. All the birds, reptiles,
and insects of Sahara, says Canon Tristram, copy closely the grey or
isabelline colour of the boundless sands that stretch around them. Lord
George Campbell, in his amusing 'Log Letters from the "Challenger,"'
mentions a butterfly on the shore at Amboyna which looked exactly like a
bit of the beach, until it spread its wings and fluttered away gaily to
leeward. Soles and other flat-fish similarly resemble the sands or banks
on which they lie, and accommodate themselves specifically to the
particular colour of their special bottom. Thus the flounder imitates
the muddy bars at the mouths of rivers, where he loves to half bury
himself in the congenial ooze; the sole, who rather affects clean hard
sand-banks, is simply sandy and speckled with grey; the plaice, who goes
in by preference for a bed of mixed pebbles, has red and yellow spots
scattered up and down irregularly among the brown, to look as much as
possible like agates and carnelians: the brill, who hugs a still rougher
ledge, has gone so far as to acquire raised lumps or tubercles on his
upper surface, which make him seem like a mere bit of the shingle-strewn
rock on which he reposes. In short, where the environment is most
uniform the colouring follows suit: just in proportion as the
environment varies from place to place, the colouring must vary in order
to simulate it. There is a deep biological joy in the term
'environment'; it almost rivals the well-known consolatory properties of
that sweet word 'Mesopotamia.' 'Surroundings,' perhaps, would equally
well express the meaning, but then, as Mr. Wordsworth justly observes,
'the difference to me!'

Between England and the West Indies, about the time when one begins to
recover from the first bout of sea-sickness, we come upon a certain
sluggish tract of ocean, uninvaded by either Gulf Stream or arctic
current, but slowly stagnating in a sort of endless eddy of its own, and
known to sailors and books of physical geography as the Sargasso Sea.
The sargasso or floating seaweed from which it takes its poetical name
is a pretty yellow rootless alga, swimming in vast quantities on the
surface of the water, and covered with tiny bladder-like bodies which at
first sight might easily be mistaken for amber berries. If you drop a
bucket over the ship's side and pull up a tangled mass of this beautiful
seaweed, it will seem at first to be all plant alike; but, when you come
to examine its tangles closely, you will find that it simply swarms with
tiny crabs, fishes, and shrimps, all coloured so precisely to shade that
they look exactly like the sargasso itself. Here the colour about is
less uniform than in the arctic snows, but, so far as the
sargasso-haunting animals are concerned, it comes pretty much to the
same thing. The floating mass of weed is their whole world, and they
have had to accommodate themselves to its tawny hue under pain of death,
immediate and violent.

Caterpillars and butterflies often show us a further step in advance in
the direction of minute imitation of ordinary surroundings. Dr. Weismann
has published a very long and learned memoir, fraught with the best
German erudition and prolixity, upon this highly interesting and obscure
subject. As English readers, however, not unnaturally object to trudging
through a stout volume on the larva of the sphinx moth, conceived in the
spirit of those patriarchal ages of Hilpa and Shalum, when man lived to
nine hundred and ninety-nine years, and devoted a stray century or so
without stint to the work of education, I shall not refer them to Dr.
Weismann's original treatise, as well translated and still further
enlarged by Mr. Raphael Meldola, but will present them instead with a
brief _résumé_, boiled down and condensed into a patent royal elixir of
learning. Your caterpillar, then, runs many serious risks in early life
from the annoying persistence of sundry evil-disposed birds, who insist
at inconvenient times in picking him off the leaves of gooseberry bushes
and other his chosen places of residence. His infant mortality, indeed,
is something simply appalling, and it is only by laying the eggs that
produce him in enormous quantities that his fond mother the butterfly
ever succeeds in rearing on an average two of her brood to replace the
imago generation just departed. Accordingly, the caterpillar has been
forced by adverse circumstances to assume the most ridiculous and
impossible disguises, appearing now in the shape of a leaf or stem, now
as a bundle of dark-green pine needles, and now again as a bud or
flower, all for the innocent purpose of concealing his whereabouts from
the inquisitive gaze of the birds his enemies.

When the caterpillar lives on a plant like a grass, the ribs or veins of
which run up and down longitudinally, he is usually striped or streaked
with darker lines in the same direction as those on his native foliage.
When, on the contrary, he lives upon broader leaves, provided with a
midrib and branching veins, his stripes and streaks (not to be out of
the fashion) run transversely and obliquely, at exactly the same angle
as those of his wonted food-plant. Very often, if you take a green
caterpillar of this sort away from his natural surroundings, you will be
surprised at the conspicuousness of his pale lilac or mauve markings;
surely, you will think to yourself, such very distinct variegation as
that must betray him instantly to his watchful enemies. But no; if you
replace him gently where you first found him, you will see that the
lines exactly harmonise with the joints and shading of his native leaf:
they are delicate representations of the soft shadow cast by a rib or
vein, and the local colour is precisely what a painter would have had to
use in order to produce the corresponding effect. The shadow of
yellowish green is, of course, always purplish or lilac. It may at first
sight seem surprising that a caterpillar should possess so much artistic
sense and dexterity; but then the penalty for bungling or inharmonious
work is so very severe as necessarily to stimulate his imitative genius.
Birds are for ever hunting him down among the green leaves, and only
those caterpillars which effectually deceive them by their admirable
imitations can ever hope to survive and become the butterflies who hand
on their larval peculiarities to after ages. Need I add that the
variations are, of course, unconscious, and that accident in the first
place is ultimately answerable for each fresh step in the direction of
still closer simulation?

The geometric moths have brown caterpillars, which generally stand erect
when at rest on the branches of trees and so resemble small twigs; and,
in order that the resemblance may be the more striking, they are often
covered with tiny warts which look like buds or knots upon the surface.
The larva of that familiar and much-dreaded insect, the death's-head
hawk-moth, feeds as a rule on the foliage of the potato, and its very
varied colouring, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, so beautifully
harmonises with the brown of the earth, the yellow and green of the
leaves, and the faint purplish blue of the lurid flowers, that it can
only be distinguished when the eye happens accidentally to focus itself
exactly upon the spot occupied by the unobtrusive caterpillar. Other
larvæ which frequent pine trees have their bodies covered with tufts of
green hairs that serve to imitate the peculiar pine foliage. One queer
little caterpillar, which lives upon the hoary foliage of the
sea-buckthorn, has a grey-green body, just like the buckthorn leaves,
relieved by a very conspicuous red spot which really represents in size
and colour one of the berries that grow around it. Finally the larva of
the elephant hawk-moth, which grows to a very large size, has a pair of
huge spots that seem like great eyes; and direct experiment establishes
the fact that small birds mistake it for a young snake, and stand in
terrible awe of it accordingly, though it is in reality a perfectly
harmless insect, and also, as I am credibly informed (for I cannot speak
upon the point from personal experience), a very tasty and
well-flavoured insect, and 'quite good to eat' too, says an eminent
authority. One of these big snake-like caterpillars once frightened Mr.
Bates himself on the banks of the Amazon.

Now, I know that cantankerous person, the universal objector, has all
along been bursting to interrupt me and declare that he himself
frequently finds no end of caterpillars, and has not the slightest
difficulty at all in distinguishing them with the naked eye from the
leaves and plants among which they are lurking. But observe how promptly
we crush and demolish this very inconvenient and disconcerting critic.
The caterpillars _he_ finds are almost all hairy ones, very conspicuous
and easy to discover--'woolly bears,' and such like common and unclean
creatures--and the reason they take no pains to conceal themselves from
his unobservant eyes is simply this: nobody on earth wants to discover
them. For either they are protectively encased in horrid hairs, which
get down your throat and choke you and bother you (I speak as a bird,
from the point of view of a confirmed caterpillar eater), or else they
are bitter and nasty to the taste, like the larva of the spurge moth and
the machaon butterfly. These are the ordinary brown and red and banded
caterpillars that the critical objector finds in hundreds on his
peregrinations about his own garden--commonplace things which the
experienced naturalist has long since got utterly tired of. But has
your rash objector ever lighted upon that rare larva which lives among
the periwinkles, and exactly imitates a periwinkle petal? Has he ever
discovered those deceptive creatures which pretend for all the world to
be leaves of lady's-bedstraw, or dress themselves up as flowers of
buttonweed? Has he ever hit upon those immoral caterpillars which
wriggle through life upon the false pretence that they are only the
shadows of projecting ribs on the under surface of a full-grown lime
leaf? No, not he; he passes them all by without one single glance of
recognition; and when the painstaking naturalist who has hunted them
every one down with lens and butterfly net ventures tentatively to
describe their personal appearance, he comes up smiling with his great
russet woolly bear comfortably nestling upon a green cabbage leaf, and
asks you in a voice of triumphant demonstration, where is the trace of
concealment or disguise in that amiable but very inedible insect? Go to,
Sir Critic, I will have none of you; I only use you for a metaphorical
marionette to set up and knock down again, as Mr. Punch in the street
show knocks down the policeman who comes to arrest him, and the grimy
black personage of sulphurous antecedents who pops up with a fizz
through the floor of his apartment.

Queerer still than the caterpillars which pretend to be leaves or
flowers for the sake of protection are those truly diabolical and
perfidious Brazilian spiders which, as Mr. Bates observed, are
brilliantly coloured with crimson and purple, but 'double themselves up
at the base of leaf-stalks, so as to resemble flower buds, and thus
deceive the insects upon which they prey.' There is something hideously
wicked and cruel in this lowest depth of imitative infamy. A flower-bud
is something so innocent and childlike; and to disguise oneself as such
for purposes of murder and rapine argues the final abyss of arachnoid
perfidy. It reminds one of that charming and amiable young lady in Mr.
Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dynamiter,' who amused herself in moments of
temporary gaiety by blowing up inhabited houses, inmates and all, out of
pure lightness of heart and girlish frivolity. An Indian mantis or
praying insect, a little less wicked, though no less cruel than the
spiders, deceives the flies who come to his arms under the false
pretence of being a quiet leaf, upon which they may light in safety for
rest and refreshment. Yet another abandoned member of the same family,
relying boldly upon the resources of tropical nature, gets itself up as
a complete orchid, the head and fangs being moulded in the exact image
of the beautiful blossom, and the arms folding treacherously around the
unhappy insect which ventures to seek for honey in its deceptive jaws.

Happily, however, the tyrants and murderers do not always have things
all their own way. Sometimes the inoffensive prey turn the tables upon
their torturers with distinguished success. For example, Mr. Wallace
noticed a kind of sand-wasp, in Borneo, much given to devouring
crickets; but there was one species of cricket which exactly reproduced
the features of the sand-wasps, and mixed among them on equal terms
without fear of detection. Mr. Belt saw a green leaf-like locust in
Nicaragua, overrun by foraging ants in search of meat for dinner, but
remaining perfectly motionless all the time, and evidently mistaken by
the hungry foragers for a real piece of the foliage it mimicked. So
thoroughly did this innocent locust understand the necessity for
remaining still, and pretending to be a leaf under all advances, that
even when Mr. Belt took it up in his hands it never budged an inch, but
strenuously preserved its rigid leaf-like attitude. As other insects
'sham dead,' this ingenious creature shammed vegetable.

In order to understand how cases like these begin to arise, we must
remember that first of all they start of necessity from very slight and
indefinite resemblances, which succeed as it were by accident in
occasionally eluding the vigilance of enemies. Thus, there are stick
insects which only look like long round cylinders, not obviously
stick-shaped, but rudely resembling a bit of wood in outline only. These
imperfectly mimetic insects may often obtain a casual immunity from
attack by being mistaken for a twig by birds or lizards. There are
others, again, in which natural selection has gone a step further, so as
to produce upon their bodies bark-like colouring and rough patches which
imitate knots, wrinkles, and leaf-buds. In these cases the protection
given is far more marked, and the chances of detection are
proportionately lessened. But sharp-eyed birds, with senses quickened by
hunger, the true mother of invention, must learn at last to pierce such
flimsy disguises, and suspect a stick insect in the most
innocent-looking and apparently rigid twigs. The final step, therefore,
consists in the production of that extraordinary actor, the _Xeroxylus
laceratus_, whose formidable name means no more than 'ragged dry-stick,'
and which really mimics down to the minutest particular a broken twig,
overgrown with mosses, liverworts, and lichens.

Take, on the other hand, the well-known case of that predaceous mantis
which exactly imitates the white ants, and, mixing with them like one of
their own horde, quietly devours a stray fat termite or so, from time to
time, as occasion offers. Here we must suppose that the ancestral mantis
happened to be somewhat paler and smaller than most of its
fellow-tribesmen, and so at times managed unobserved to mingle with the
white ants, especially in the shade or under a dusky sky, much to the
advantage of its own appetite. But the termites would soon begin to
observe the visits of their suspicious friend, and to note their
coincidence with the frequent mysterious disappearance of a
fellow-townswoman, evaporated into space, like the missing young women
in neat cloth jackets who periodically vanish from the London suburbs.
In proportion as their reasonable suspicions increased, the termites
would carefully avoid all doubtful looking mantises; but, at the same
time, they would only succeed in making the mantises which survived
their inquisition grow more and more closely to resemble the termite
pattern in all particulars. For any mantis which happened to come a
little nearer the white ants in hue or shape would thereby be enabled to
make a more secure meal upon his unfortunate victims; and so the very
vigilance which the ants exerted against his vile deception would itself
react in time against their own kind, by leaving only the most ruthless
and indistinguishable of their foes to become the parents of future
generations of mantises.

Once more, the beetles and flies of Central America must have learned by
experience to get out of the way of the nimble Central American lizards
with great agility, cunning, and alertness. But green lizards are less
easy to notice beforehand than brown or red ones; and so the lizards of
tropical countries are almost always bright green, with complementary
shades of yellow, grey, and purple, just to fit them in with the foliage
they lurk among. Everybody who has ever hunted the green tree-toads on
the leaves of waterside plants on the Riviera must know how difficult it
is to discriminate these brilliant leaf-coloured creatures from the
almost identical background on which they rest. Now, just in proportion
as the beetles and flies grow still more cautious, even the green
lizards themselves fail to pick up a satisfactory livelihood; and so at
last we get that most remarkable Nicaraguan form, decked all round with
leaf-like expansions, and looking so like the foliage on which it rests
that no beetle on earth can possibly detect it. The more cunning you get
your detectives, the more cunning do the thieves become to outwit them.

Look, again, at the curious life-history of the flies which dwell as
unbidden guests or social parasites in the nests and hives of wild
honey-bees. These burglarious flies are belted and bearded in the very
self-same pattern as the bumble-bees themselves; but their larvæ live
upon the young grubs of the hive, and repay the unconscious hospitality
of the busy workers by devouring the future hope of their unwilling
hosts. Obviously, any fly which entered a bee-hive could only escape
detection and extermination at the hands (or stings) of its outraged
inhabitants, provided it so far resembled the real householders as to be
mistaken at a first glance by the invaded community for one of its own
numerous members. Thus any fly which showed the slightest superficial
resemblance to a bee might at first be enabled to rob honey for a time
with comparative impunity, and to lay its eggs among the cells of the
helpless larvæ. But when once the vile attempt was fairly discovered,
the burglars could only escape fatal detection from generation to
generation just in proportion as they more and more closely approximated
to the shape and colour of the bees themselves. For, as Mr. Belt has
well pointed out, while the mimicking species would become naturally
more numerous from age to age, the senses of the mimicked species would
grow sharper and sharper by constant practice in detecting and punishing
the unwelcome intruders.

It is only in external matters, however, that the appearance of such
mimetic species can ever be altered. Their underlying points of
structure and formative detail always show to the very end (if only one
happens to observe them) their proper place in a scientific
classification. For instance, these same parasitic flies which so
closely resemble bees in their shape and colour have only one pair of
wings apiece, like all the rest of the fly order, while the bees of
course have the full complement of two pairs, an upper and an under,
possessed by them in common with all other well-conducted members of the
hymenopterous family. So, too, there is a certain curious American
insect, belonging to the very unsavoury tribe which supplies London
lodging-houses with one of their most familiar entomological specimens;
and this cleverly disguised little creature is banded and striped in
every part exactly like a local hornet, for whom it evidently wishes
itself to be mistaken. If you were travelling in the wilder parts of
Colorado you would find a close resemblance to Buffalo Bill was no mean
personal protection. Hornets, in fact, are insects to which birds and
other insectivorous animals prefer to give a very wide berth, and the
reason why they should be imitated by a defenceless beetle must be
obvious to the intelligent student. But while the vibrating wing-cases
of this deceptive masquerader are made to look as thin and hornet-like
as possible, in all underlying points of structure any competent
naturalist would see at once that the creature must really be classed
among the noisome Hemiptera. I seldom trouble the public with a Greek or
Latin name, but on this occasion I trust I may be pardoned for not
indulging in all the ingenuous bluntness of the vernacular.

Sometimes this effective mimicry of stinging insects seems to be even
consciously performed by the tiny actors. Many creatures, which do not
themselves possess stings, nevertheless endeavour to frighten their
enemies by assuming the characteristic hostile attitudes of wasps or
hornets. Everybody in England must be well acquainted with those common
British earwig-looking insects, popularly known as the devil's
coach-horses, which, when irritated or interfered with, cock up their
tails behind them in the most aggressive fashion, exactly reproducing
the threatening action of an angry scorpion. Now, as a matter of fact,
the devil's coach-horse is quite harmless, but I have often seen, not
only little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds, and
shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude. So, too, the
bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects got up in sedulous
imitation of various species of wild bee, flit about and buzz angrily in
the sunlight, quite after the fashion of the insects they mimic; and
when disturbed they pretend to get excited, and seem as if they wished
to fly in their assailant's face and roundly sting him. This curious
instinct may be put side by side with the parallel instinct of shamming
dead, possessed by many beetles and other small defenceless species.

Certain beetles have also been modified so as exactly to imitate wasps;
and in these cases the beetle waist, usually so solid, thick, and
clumsy, grows as slender and graceful as if the insects had been
supplied with corsets by a fashionable West End house. But the greatest
refinement of all is perhaps that noticed in certain allied species
which mimic bees, and which have acquired useless little tufts of hair
on their hind shanks to represent the dilated and tufted
pollen-gathering apparatus of the true bees.

I have left to the last the most marvellous cases of mimicry of
all--those noticed among South American butterflies by Mr. Bates, who
found that certain edible kinds exactly resembled a handsome and
conspicuous but bitter-tasted species 'in every shade and stripe of
colour.' Several of these South American imitative insects long deceived
the very entomologists; and it was only by a close inspection of their
structural differences that the utter distinctness of the mimickers and
the mimicked was satisfactorily settled. Scarcely less curious is the
case of Mr. Wallace's Malayan orioles, two species of which exactly copy
two pugnacious honey-suckers in every detail of plumage and coloration.
As the honey-suckers are avoided by birds of prey, owing to their
surprising strength and pugnacity, the orioles gain immunity from attack
by their close resemblance to the protected species. When Dr. Sclater,
the distinguished ornithologist, was examining Mr. Forbes's collections
from Timorlaut, even his experienced eye was so taken in by another of
these deceptive bird-mimicries that he classified two birds of totally
distinct families as two different individuals of the same species.

Even among plants a few instances of true mimicry have been observed. In
the stony African Karoo, where every plant is eagerly sought out for
food by the scanty local fauna, there are tubers which exactly resemble
the pebbles around them; and I have little doubt that our perfectly
harmless English dead-nettle secures itself from the attacks of browsing
animals by its close likeness to the wholly unrelated, but
well-protected, stinging-nettle.

Finally, we must not forget the device of those animals which not merely
assimilate themselves in colour to the ordinary environment in a general
way, but have also the power of adapting themselves at will to whatever
object they may happen to lie against. Cases like that of the ptarmigan,
which in summer harmonises with the brown heather and grey rock, while
in winter it changes to the white of the snow-fields, lead us up
gradually to such ultimate results of the masquerading tendency. There
is a tiny crustacean, the chameleon shrimp, which can alter its hue to
that of any material on which it happens to rest. On a sandy bottom it
appears grey or sand-coloured; when lurking among seaweed it becomes
green, or red, or brown, according to the nature of its momentary
background. Probably the effect is quite unconscious, or at least
involuntary, like blushing with ourselves--and nobody ever blushes on
purpose, though they do say a distinguished poet once complained that an
eminent actor did not follow his stage directions because he omitted to
obey the rubrical remark, 'Here Harold purples with anger.' The change
is produced by certain automatic muscles which force up particular
pigment cells above the others, green coming to the top on a green
surface, red on a ruddy one, and brown or grey where the circumstances
demand them. Many kinds of fish similarly alter their colour to suit
their background by forcing forward or backward certain special
pigment-cells known as chromatophores, whose various combinations
produce at will almost any required tone or shade. Almost all reptiles
and amphibians possess the power of changing their hue in accordance
with their environment in a very high degree; and among certain
tree-toads and frogs it is difficult to say what is the normal
colouring, as they vary indefinitely from buff and dove-colour to
chocolate-brown, rose, and even lilac.

But of all the particoloured reptiles the chameleon is by far the best
known, and on the whole the most remarkable for his inconstancy of
coloration. Like a lacertine Vicar of Bray, he varies incontinently from
buff to blue, and from blue back to orange again, under stress of
circumstances. The mechanism of this curious change is extremely
complex. Tiny corpuscles of different pigments are sometimes hidden in
the depths of the chameleon's skin, and sometimes spread out on its
surface in an interlacing network of brown or purple. In addition to
this prime colouring matter, however, the animal also possesses a normal
yellow pigment, and a bluish layer in the skin which acts like the
iridium glass so largely employed by Dr. Salviati, being seen as
straw-coloured with a transmitted light, but assuming a faint lilac tint
against an opaque absorbent surface. While sleeping the chameleon
becomes almost white in the shade, but if light falls upon him he slowly
darkens by an automatic process. The movements of the corpuscles are
governed by opposite nerves and muscles, which either cause them to bury
themselves under the true skin, or to form an opaque ground behind the
blue layer, or to spread out in a ramifying mass on the outer surface,
and so produce as desired almost any necessary shade of grey, green,
black, or yellow. It is an interesting fact that many chrysalids undergo
precisely similar changes of colour in adaptation to the background
against which they suspend themselves, being grey on a grey surface,
green on a green one, and even half black and half red when hung up
against pieces of particoloured paper.

Nothing could more beautifully prove the noble superiority of the human
intellect than the fact that while our grouse are russet-brown to suit
the bracken and heather, and our caterpillars green to suit the lettuce
and the cabbage leaves, our British soldier should be wisely coated in
brilliant scarlet to form an effective mark for the rifles of an enemy.
Red is the easiest of all colours at which to aim from a great distance;
and its selection by authority for the uniform of unfortunate Tommy
Atkins reminds me of nothing so much as Mr. McClelland's exquisite
suggestion that the peculiar brilliancy of the Indian river carps makes
them serve 'as a better mark for kingfishers, terns, and other birds
which are destined to keep the number of these fishes in check.' The
idea of Providence and the Horse Guards conspiring to render any
creature an easier target for the attacks of enemies is worthy of the
decadent school of natural history, and cannot for a moment be
dispassionately considered by a judicious critic. Nowadays we all know
that the carp are decked in crimson and blue to please their partners,
and that soldiers are dressed in brilliant red to please the æsthetic
authorities who command them from a distance.




SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS


For many generations past that problematical animal, the toad-in-a-hole
(literal, not culinary) has been one of the most familiar and
interesting personages of contemporary folk-lore and popular natural
history. From time to time he turns up afresh, with his own wonted
perennial vigour, on paper at least, in company with the great
sea-serpent, the big gooseberry, the shower of frogs, the two-headed
calf, and all the other common objects of the country or the seaside in
the silly season. No extraordinary natural phenomenon on earth was ever
better vouched for--in the fashion rendered familiar to us by the
Tichborne claimant--that is to say, no other could ever get a larger
number of unprejudiced witnesses to swear positively and unreservedly in
its favour. Unfortunately, however, swearing alone no longer settles
causes off-hand, as if by show of hands, 'the Ayes have it,' after the
fashion prevalent in the good old days when the whole Hundred used to
testify that of its certain knowledge John Nokes did not commit such and
such a murder; whereupon John Nokes was forthwith acquitted accordingly.
Nowadays, both justice and science have become more exacting; they
insist upon the unpleasant and discourteous habit of cross-examining
their witnesses (as if they doubted them, forsooth!), instead of
accepting the witnesses' own simple assertion that it's all right, and
there's no need for making a fuss about it. Did you yourself see the
block of stone in which the toad is said to have been found, before the
toad himself was actually extracted? Did you examine it all round to
make quite sure there was no hole, or crack, or passage in it anywhere?
Did you satisfy yourself after the toad was released from his close
quarters that no such hole, or crack, or passage had been dexterously
closed up, with intent to deceive, by plaster, cement, or other
artificial composition? Did you ever offer the workmen who found it a
nominal reward--say five shillings--for the first perfectly unanswerable
specimen of a genuine unadulterated antediluvian toad? Have you got the
toad now present, and can you produce him here in court (on writ of
_habeas corpus_ or otherwise), together with all the fragments of the
stone or tree from which he was extracted? These are the disagreeable,
prying, inquisitorial, I may even say insulting, questions with which a
modern man of science is ready to assail the truthful and reputable
gentlemen who venture to assert their discovery, in these degenerate
days, of the ancient and unsophisticated toad-in-a-hole.

Now, the worst of it is that the gentlemen in question, being unfamiliar
with what is technically described as scientific methods of
investigation, are very apt to lose their temper when thus
cross-questioned, and to reply, after the fashion usually attributed to
the female mind, with another question, whether the scientific person
wishes to accuse them of downright lying. And as nothing on earth could
be further from the scientific person's mind than such an imputation, he
is usually fain in the end to give up the social pursuit of postprandial
natural history (the subject generally crops up about the same time as
the after-dinner coffee), and to let the prehistoric toad go on his own
triumphant way, unheeded.

As a matter of fact, nobody ever makes larger allowances for other
people, in the estimate of their veracity, than the scientific
inquirer. Knowing himself, by painful experience, how extremely
difficult a matter it is to make perfectly sure you have observed
anything on earth quite correctly, and have eliminated all possible
chances of error, he acquires the fixed habit of doubting about one-half
of whatever his fellow-creatures tell him in ordinary conversation,
without for a single moment venturing to suspect them of deliberate
untruthfulness. Children and servants, if they find that anything they
have been told is erroneous, immediately jump at the conclusion that the
person who told them meant deliberately to deceive them; in their own
simple and categorical fashion they answer plumply, 'That's a lie.' But
the man of science is only too well acquainted in his own person with
the exceeding difficulty of ever getting at the exact truth. He has
spent hours of toil, himself, in watching and observing the behaviour of
some plant, or animal, or gas, or metal; and after repeated experiments,
carefully designed to exclude all possibility of mistake, so far as he
can foresee it, he at last believes he has really settled some moot
point, and triumphantly publishes his final conclusions in a scientific
journal. Ten to one, the very next number of that same journal contains
a dozen supercilious letters from a dozen learned and high-salaried
professors, each pointing out a dozen distinct and separate precautions
which the painstaking observer neglected to take, and any one of which
would be quite sufficient to vitiate the whole body of his observations.
There might have been germs in the tube in which he boiled the water
(germs are very fashionable just at present); or some of the germs might
have survived and rather enjoyed the boiling; or they might have adhered
to the under surface of the cork; or the mixture might have been
tampered with during the experimenter's temporary absence by his son,
aged ten years (scientific observers have no right, apparently, to have
sons of ten years old, except perhaps for purposes of psychological
research); and so forth, _ad infinitum_. And the worst of it all is that
the unhappy experimenter is bound himself to admit that every one of the
objections is perfectly valid, and that he very likely never really saw
what with perfect confidence he thought and said he had seen.

This being an unbelieving age, then, when even the book of Deuteronomy
is 'critically examined,' let us see how much can really be said for and
against our old friend, the toad-in-a-hole; and first let us begin with
the antecedent probability, or otherwise, of any animal being able to
live in a more or less torpid condition, without air or food, for any
considerable period of time together.

A certain famous historical desert snail was brought from Egypt to
England as a conchological specimen in the year 1846. This particular
mollusk (the only one of his race, probably, who ever attained to
individual distinction), at the time of his arrival in London, was
really alive and vigorous; but as the authorities of the British Museum,
to whose tender care he was consigned, were ignorant of this important
fact in his economy, he was gummed, mouth downward, on to a piece of
cardboard, and duly labelled and dated with scientific accuracy, '_Helix
desertorum_, March 25, 1846.' Being a snail of a retiring and contented
disposition, however, accustomed to long droughts and corresponding naps
in his native sand-wastes, our mollusk thereupon simply curled himself
up into the topmost recesses of his own whorls, and went placidly to
sleep in perfect contentment for an unlimited period. Every conchologist
takes it for granted, of course, that the shells which he receives from
foreign parts have had their inhabitants properly boiled and extracted
before being exported; for it is only the mere outer shell or skeleton
of the animal that we preserve in our cabinets, leaving the actual flesh
and muscles of the creature himself to wither unobserved upon its
native shores. At the British Museum the desert snail might have snoozed
away his inglorious existence unsuspected, but for a happy accident
which attracted public attention to his remarkable case in a most
extraordinary manner. On March 7, 1850, nearly four years later, it was
casually observed that the card on which he reposed was slightly
discoloured; and this discovery led to the suspicion that perhaps a
living animal might be temporarily immured within that papery tomb. The
Museum authorities accordingly ordered our friend a warm bath (who shall
say hereafter that science is unfeeling!), upon which the grateful
snail, waking up at the touch of the familiar moisture, put his head
cautiously out of his shell, walked up to the top of the basin, and
began to take a cursory survey of British institutions with his four
eye-bearing tentacles. So strange a recovery from a long torpid
condition, only equalled by that of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
deserved an exceptional amount of scientific recognition. The desert
snail at once awoke and found himself famous. Nay, he actually sat for
his portrait to an eminent zoological artist, Mr. Waterhouse; and a
woodcut from the sketch thus procured, with a history of his life and
adventures, may be found even unto this day in Dr. Woodward's 'Manual of
the Mollusca,' to witness if I lie.

I mention this curious instance first, because it is the best
authenticated case on record (so far as my knowledge goes) of any animal
existing in a state of suspended animation for any long period of time
together. But there are other cases of encysted or immured animals
which, though less striking as regards the length of time during which
torpidity has been observed, are much more closely analogous to the real
or mythical conditions of the toad-in-a-hole. That curious West African
mud-fish, the Lepidosiren (familiar to all readers of evolutionary
literature as one of the most singular existing links between fish and
amphibians), lives among the shallow pools and broads of the Gambia,
which are dried up during the greater part of the tropical summer. To
provide against this annual contingency, the mud-fish retires into the
soft clay at the bottom of the pools, where it forms itself a sort of
nest, and there hibernates, or rather æstivates, for months together, in
a torpid condition. The surrounding mud then hardens into a dry ball;
and these balls are dug out of the soil of the rice-fields by the
natives, with the fish inside them, by which means many specimens of
lepidosiren have been sent alive to Europe, embedded in their natural
covering. Here the strange fish is chiefly prized as a zoological
curiosity for aquariums, because of its possessing gills and lungs
together, to fit it for its double existence; but the unsophisticated
West Africans grub it up on their own account as a delicacy, regardless
of its claims to scientific consideration as the earliest known ancestor
of all existing terrestrial animals. Now, the torpid state of the
mud-fish in his hardened ball of clay closely resembles the real or
supposed condition of the toad-in-a-hole; but with one important
exception. The mud-fish leaves a small canal or pipe open in his cell at
either end to admit the air for breathing, though he breathes (as I
shall proceed to explain) in a very slight degree during his æstivation;
whereas every proper toad-in-a-hole ought by all accounts to live
entirely without either feeding or breathing in any way. However, this
is a mere detail; and indeed, if toads-in-a-hole do really exist at all,
we must in all probability ultimately admit that they breathe to some
extent, though perhaps very slightly, during their long immurement.

And this leads us on to consider what in reality hibernation is.
Everybody knows nowadays, I suppose, that there is a very close analogy
between an animal and a steam-engine. Food is the fuel that makes the
animal engine go; and this food acts almost exactly as coal does in the
artificial machine. But coal alone will not drive an engine; a free
draught of open air is also required in order to produce combustion.
Just in like manner the food we eat cannot be utilised to drive our
muscles and other organs unless it is supplied with oxygen from the air
to burn it slowly inside our bodies. This oxygen is taken into the
system, in all higher animals, by means of lungs or gills. Now, when we
are working at all hard, we require a great deal of oxygen, as most of
us have familiarly discovered (especially if we are somewhat stout) in
the act of climbing hills or running to catch a train. But when we are
doing very little work indeed, as in our sleeping hours, during which
muscular movement is suspended, and only the general organic life
continues, we breathe much more slowly and at longer intervals. However,
there is this important difference (generally speaking) between an
animal and a steam-engine. You can let the engine run short of coals and
come to a dead standstill, without impairing its future possibilities of
similar motion; you have only to get fresh coals, after weeks or months
of inaction, and light up a fresh fire, when your engine will
immediately begin to work again, exactly the same as before. But if an
animal organism once fairly runs down, either from want of food or any
other cause--in short, if it dies--it very seldom comes to life again.

I say 'very seldom' on purpose, because there are a few cases among the
extreme lower animals where a water-haunting creature can be taken out
of the water and can be thoroughly dried and desiccated, or even kept
for an apparently unlimited period wrapped up in paper or on the slide
of a microscope; and yet, the moment a drop of water is placed on top of
it, it begins to move and live again exactly as before. This sort of
thorough-going suspended animation is the kind we ought to expect from
any well-constituted and proper-minded toad-in-a-hole. Whether anything
like it ever really occurs in the higher ranks of animal life, however,
is a different question; but there can be no doubt that to some slight
extent a body to all intents and purposes quite dead (physically
speaking) by long immersion in water--a drowned man, for example--may
really be resuscitated by heat and stimulants, applied immediately,
provided no part of the working organism has been seriously injured or
decomposed. Such people may be said to be _pro tem._ functionally,
though not structurally, dead. The heart has practically ceased to beat,
the lungs have ceased to breathe, and physical life in the body is
temporarily extinct. The fire, in short, has gone out. But if only it
can be lighted again before any serious change in the system takes
place, all may still go on precisely as of old.

Many animals, however, find it convenient to assume a state of less
complete suspended animation during certain special periods of the year,
according to the circumstances of their peculiar climate and mode of
life. Among the very highest animals, the most familiar example of this
sort of semi-torpidity is to be found among the bears and the dormice.
The common European brown bear is a carnivore by descent, who has become
a vegetarian in practice, though whether from conscientious scruples or
mere practical considerations of expediency, does not appear. He feeds
chiefly on roots, berries, fruits, vegetables, and honey, all of which
he finds it comparatively difficult to procure during winter weather.
Accordingly, as everyone knows, he eats immoderately in the summer
season, till he has grown fat enough to supply bear's grease to all
Christendom. Then he hunts himself out a hollow tree or rock-shelter,
curls himself up quietly to sleep, and snores away the whole livelong
winter. During this period of hibernation, the action of the heart is
reduced to a minimum, and the bear breathes but very slowly. Still, he
does breathe, and his heart does beat; and in performing those
indispensable functions, all his store of accumulated fat is gradually
used up, so that he wakes in spring as thin as a lath and as hungry as a
hunter. The machine has been working at very low pressure all the
winter: but it _has_ been working for all that, and the continuity of
its action has never once for a moment been interrupted. This is the
central principle of all hibernation; it consists essentially of a very
long and profound sleep, during which all muscular motion, except that
of the heart and lungs, is completely suspended, while even these last
are reduced to the very smallest amount compatible with the final
restoration of full animal activity.

Thus, even among warm-blooded animals like the bears and dormice,
hibernation actually occurs to a very considerable degree; but it is far
more common and more complete among cold-blooded creatures, whose bodies
do not need to be kept heated to the same degree, and with whom,
accordingly, hibernation becomes almost a complete torpor, the breathing
and the action of the heart being still further reduced to very nearly
zero. Mollusks in particular, like oysters and mussels, lead very
monotonous and uneventful lives, only varied as a rule by the welcome
change of being cut out of their shells and eaten alive; and their
powers of living without food under adverse circumstances are really
very remarkable. Freshwater snails and mussels, in cold weather, bury
themselves in the mud of ponds or rivers; and land-snails hide
themselves in the ground or under moss and leaves. The heart then
ceases perceptibly to beat, but respiration continues in a very faint
degree. The common garden snail closes the mouth of his shell when he
wants to hibernate, with a slimy covering; but he leaves a very small
hole in it somewhere, so as to allow a little air to get in, and keep up
his breathing to a slight amount. My experience has been, however, that
a great many snails go to sleep in this way, and never wake up again.
Either they get frozen to death, or else the respiration falls so low
that it never picks itself up properly when spring returns. In warm
climates, it is during the summer that mollusks and other mud-haunting
creatures go to sleep; and when they get well plastered round with clay,
they almost approach in tenacity of life the mildest recorded specimens
of the toad-in-a-hole.

For example, take the following cases, which I extract, with needful
simplifications, from Dr. Woodward.

'In June 1850, a living pond mussel, which had been more than a year out
of water, was sent to Mr. Gray, from Australia. The big pond snails of
the tropics have been found alive in logs of mahogany imported from
Honduras; and M. Caillaud carried some from Egypt to Paris, packed in
sawdust. Indeed, it isn't easy to ascertain the limit of their
endurance; for Mr. Laidlay, having placed a number in a drawer for this
very purpose, found them alive after _five years'_ torpidity, although
in the warm climate of Calcutta. The pretty snails called _cyclostomas_,
which have a lid to their shells, are well known to survive
imprisonments of many months; but in the ordinary open-mouthed
land-snails such cases are even more remarkable. Several of the enormous
tropical snails often used to decorate cottage mantelpieces, brought by
Lieutenant Greaves from Valparaiso, revived after being packed, some for
thirteen, others for twenty months. In 1849, Mr. Pickering received
from Mr. Wollaston a basketful of Madeira snails (of twenty or thirty
different kinds), three-fourths of which proved to be alive, after
several months' confinement, including a sea voyage. Mr. Wollaston has
himself recorded the fact that specimens of two Madeira snails survived
a fast and imprisonment in pill-boxes of two years and a half duration,
and that large numbers of a small species, brought to England at the
same time, were _all_ living after being inclosed in a dry bag for a
year and a half.'

Whether the snails themselves liked their long deprivation of food and
moisture we are not informed; their personal tastes and inclinations
were very little consulted in the matter; but as they and their
ancestors for many generations must have been accustomed to similar long
fasts during tropical droughts, in all likelihood they did not much mind
it.

The real question, then, about the historical toad-in-a-hole narrows
itself down in the end merely to this--how long is it credible that a
cold-blooded creature might sustain life in a torpid or hibernating
condition, without food, and with a very small quantity of fresh air,
supplied (let us say) from time to time through an almost imperceptible
fissure? It is well known that reptiles and amphibians are particularly
tenacious of life, and that some turtles in particular will live for
months, or even for years, without tasting food. The common Greek
tortoise, hawked on barrows about the streets of London and bought by a
confiding British public under the mistaken impression that its chief
fare consists of slugs and cockroaches (it is really far more likely to
feed upon its purchaser's choicest seakale and asparagus), buries itself
in the ground at the first approach of winter, and snoozes away five
months of the year in a most comfortable and dignified torpidity. A
snake at the Zoo has even been known to live eighteen months in a
voluntary fast, refusing all the most tempting offers of birds and
rabbits, merely out of pique at her forcible confinement in a strange
cage. As this was a lady snake, however, it is possible that she only
went on living out of feminine obstinacy, so that this case really
counts for very little.

Toads themselves are well known to possess all the qualities of mind and
body which go to make up the career of a successful and enduring
anchorite. At the best of times they eat seldom and sparingly, while a
forty days' fast, like Dr. Tanner's, would seem to them but an ordinary
incident in their everyday existence. In the winter they hibernate by
burying themselves in the mud, or by getting down cracks in the ground.
It is also undoubtedly true that they creep into holes wherever they can
find one, and that in these holes they lie torpid for a considerable
period. On the other hand, there is every reason to believe that they
cannot live for more than a certain fixed and relatively short time
entirely without food or air. Dr. Buckland tried a number of experiments
upon toads in this manner--experiments wholly unnecessary, considering
the trivial nature of the point at issue--and his conclusion was that no
toad could get beyond two years without feeding or breathing. There can
be very little doubt that in this conclusion he was practically correct,
and that the real fine old crusted antediluvian toad-in-a-hole is really
a snare and a delusion.

That, however, does not wholly settle the question about such toads,
because, even though they may not be all that their admirers claim for
them, they may yet possess a very respectable antiquity of their own,
and may be very far from the category of mere vulgar cheats and
impostors. Because a toad is not as old as Methuselah, it need not
follow that he may not be as old as Old Parr; because he does not date
back to the Flood, it need not follow that he cannot remember Queen
Elizabeth. There are some toads-in-a-hole, indeed, which, however we may
account for the origin of their legend, are on the very face of it
utterly incredible. For example, there is the favourite and immensely
popular toad who was extracted from a perfectly closed hole in a marble
mantelpiece. The implication of the legend clearly is that the toad was
coeval with the marble. But marble is limestone, altered in texture by
pressure and heat, till it has assumed a crystalline structure. In other
words we are asked to believe that that toad lived through an amount of
fiery heat sufficient to burn him up into fine powder, and yet remains
to tell the tale. Such a toad as this obviously deserves no credit. His
discoverers may have believed in him themselves, but they will hardly
get other people to do so.

Still, there are a great many ways in which it is quite conceivable that
toads might get into holes in rocks or trees so as to give rise to the
common stories about them, and might even manage to live there for a
considerable time with very small quantities of food or air. It must be
remembered that from the very nature of the conditions the hole can
never be properly examined and inspected until after it has been split
open and the toad has been extracted from it. Now, if you split open a
tree or a rock, and find a toad inside it, with a cavity which he
exactly fills, it is extremely difficult to say whether there was or was
not a fissure before you broke the thing to pieces with your hatchet or
pickaxe. A very small fissure indeed would be quite sufficient to
account for the whole delusion; for if the toad could get a little air
to breathe slowly during his torpid period, and could find a few dead
flies or worms among the water that trickled scantily into his hole, he
could manage to drag out a peaceful and monotonous existence almost
indefinitely. Here are a few possible cases, any one of which will
quite suffice to give rise to at least as good a toad-in-the-hole as
ninety-nine out of a hundred published instances.

An adult toad buries himself in the mud by a dry pond, and gets coated
with a hard solid coat of sun-baked clay. His nodule is broken open with
a spade, and the toad himself is found inside, almost exactly filling
the space within the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at
the outside; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic mind
looks as if it might have been there ever since the Deluge. Good blue
lias clay, which dries as solid as limestone, would perform this trick
to perfection; and the toad might easily be relegated accordingly to the
secondary ages of geology. Observe, however, that the actual toads so
found are not the geological toads we should naturally expect under such
remarkable circumstances, but the common everyday toads of modern
England. This shows a want of accurate scientific knowledge on the part
of the toads which is truly lamentable. A toad who really wished to
qualify himself for the post ought at least to avoid presenting himself
before a critical eye in the foolish guise of an embodied anachronism.
He reminds one of the Roman mother in a popular burlesque, who suspects
her son of smoking, and vehemently declares that she smells tobacco,
but, after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties, and mutters
to herself, apologetically, 'No, not tobacco; that's not yet invented.'
A would-be silurian or triassic toad ought, in like manner, to remember
that in the ages to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was
not yet developed. He ought rather to come out in the character of a
ceratodus or a labyrinthodon.

Again, another adult toad crawls into the hollow of a tree, and there
hibernates. The bark partially closes over the slit by which he entered,
but leaves a little crack by which air can enter freely. The grubs in
the bark and other insects supply him from time to time with a frugal
repast. There is no good reason why, under such circumstances, a placid
and contented toad might not manage to prolong his existence for several
consecutive seasons.

Once more, the spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the
individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal.
Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to
be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient
water for its developement, and where the trickling drops brought down
minute objects of food, enough to keep up its simple existence. A toad
brought up under such peculiar circumstances might pass almost its
entire life in a state of torpidity, and yet might grow and thrive in
its own sleepy vegetative fashion.

In short, while it would be difficult in any given case to prove to a
certainty either that the particular toad-in-a-hole had or had not
access to air and food, the ordinary conditions of toad life are exactly
those under which the delusive appearance of venerable antiquity would
be almost certain frequently to arise. The toad is a nocturnal animal;
it lives through the daytime in dark and damp places; it shows a decided
liking for crannies and crevices; it is wonderfully tenacious of life;
it possesses the power of hibernation; it can live on extremely small
quantities of food for very long periods of time together; it buries
itself in mud or clay; it passes the early part of its life as a
water-haunting tadpole; and last, not least, it can swell out its body
to nearly double its natural size by inflating itself, which fully
accounts for the stories of toads being taken out of holes every bit as
big as themselves. Considering all these things, it would be wonderful
indeed if toads were not often found in places and conditions which
would naturally give rise to the familiar myth. Throw in a little
allowance for human credulity, human exaggeration, and human love of the
marvellous, and you have all the elements of a very excellent
toad-in-the-hole in the highest ideal perfection.

At the same time I think it quite possible that some toads, under
natural circumstances, do really remain in a torpid or semi-torpid
condition for a period far exceeding the twenty-four months allowed as
the maximum in Dr. Buckland's unpleasant experiments. If the amount of
air supplied through a crack or through the texture of the stone were
exactly sufficient for keeping the animal alive in the very slightest
fashion--the engine working at the lowest possible pressure, short of
absolute cessation--I see no reason on earth why a toad might not remain
dormant, in a moist place, with perhaps a very occasional worm or grub
for breakfast, for at least as long a time as the desert snail slept
comfortably in the British Museum. Altogether, while it is impossible to
believe the stories about toads that have been buried in a mine for
whole centuries, and still more impossible to believe in their being
disentombed from marble mantelpieces or very ancient geological
formations, it is quite conceivable that some toads-in-a-hole may really
be far from mere vulgar impostors, and may have passed the traditional
seven years of the Indian philosophers in solitary meditation on the
syllable Om, or on the equally significant Ko-ax, Ko-ax of the
irreverent Attic dramatist. "Certainly not a centenarian, but perhaps a
good seven-year sleeper for all that," is the final verdict which the
court is disposed to return, after due consideration of all the
probabilities _in re_ the toad-in-a-hole.




A FOSSIL CONTINENT


If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly to be translated
backward from Collins Street, Melbourne, into the flourishing woods of
the secondary geological period--say about the precise moment of time
when the English chalk downs were slowly accumulating, speck by speck,
on the silent floor of some long-forgotten Mediterranean--the
intelligent colonist would look around him with a sweet smile of
cheerful recognition, and say to himself in some surprise, 'Why, this is
just like Australia.' The animals, the trees, the plants, the insects,
would all more or less vividly remind him of those he had left behind
him in his happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth century.
The sun would have moved back on the dial of ages for a few million
summers or so, indefinitely (in geology we refuse to be bound by dates),
and would have landed him at last, to his immense astonishment, pretty
much at the exact point whence he first started.

In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be made hereafter,
Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent, a country still in its
secondary age, a surviving fragment of the primitive world of the chalk
period or earlier ages. Isolated from all the remainder of the earth
about the beginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth and
the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the stage of existence,
long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on
nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion,
long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and
colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their
race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent
found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from
all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, and turned upon
itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and
animals out of its own inner consciousness. The natural consequence was
that progress in Australia has been absurdly slow, and that the country
as a whole has fallen most woefully behind the times in all matters
pertaining to the existence of life upon its surface. Everybody knows
that Australia as a whole is a very peculiar and original continent; its
peculiarity, however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in the fact
that it still remains at very nearly the same early point of development
which Europe had attained a couple of million years ago or thereabouts.
"Advance, Australia," says the national motto; and, indeed, it is quite
time nowadays that Australia should advance; for, so far, she has been
left out of the running for some four mundane ages or so at a rough
computation.

Example, says the wisdom of our ancestors, is better than precept; so
perhaps, if I take a single example to start with, I shall make the
principle I wish to illustrate a trifle clearer to the European
comprehension. In Australia, when Cook or Van Diemen first visited it,
there were no horses, cows, or sheep; no rabbits, weasels, or cats; no
indigenous quadrupeds of any sort except the pouched mammals or
marsupials, familiarly typified to every one of us by the mamma kangaroo
in Regent's Park, who carries the baby kangaroos about with her, neatly
deposited in the sac or pouch which nature has provided for them instead
of a cradle. To this rough generalisation, to be sure, two special
exceptions must needs be made; namely, the noble Australian black-fellow
himself, and the dingo or wild dog whose ancestors no doubt came to the
country in the same ship with him, as the brown rat came to England with
George I. of blessed memory. But of these two solitary representatives
of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more anon'; for the present we
may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated
Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to
kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial
animals, with names as strange and clumsy as their forms.

Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family, viewed in the dry
light of modern science? Well, they are simply one of the very oldest
mammalian families, and therefore, I need hardly say, in the levelling
and topsy-turvy view of evolutionary biology, the least entitled to
consideration or respect from rational observers. For of course in the
kingdom of science the last shall be first, and the first last; it is
the oldest families that are accounted the worst, while the best
families mean always the newest. Now, the earliest mammals to appear on
earth were creatures of distinctly marsupial type. As long ago as the
time when the red marl of Devonshire and the blue lias of Lyme Regis
were laid down on the bed of the muddy sea that once covered the surface
of Dorset and the English Channel, a little creature like the kangaroo
rats of Southern Australia lived among the plains of what is now the
south of England. In the ages succeeding the deposition of the red marl
Europe seems to have been broken up into an archipelago of coral reefs
and atolls; and the islands of this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted
by numbers of tiny ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in
appearance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while others
resembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or turned into excellent
imitation carnivores, like our modern friend the Tasmanian devil. Up to
the end of the time when the chalk deposits of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex
were laid down, indeed, there is no evidence of the existence anywhere
in the world of any mammals differing in type from those which now
inhabit Australia. In other words, so far as regards mammalian life, the
whole of the world had then already reached pretty nearly the same point
of evolution that poor Australia still sticks at.

About the beginning of the tertiary period, however, just after the
chalk was all deposited, and just before the comparatively modern clays
and sandstones of the London basin began to be laid down, an arm of the
sea broke up the connection which once subsisted between Australia and
the rest of the world, probably by a land bridge, _viâ_ Java, Sumatra,
the Malay peninsula, and Asia generally. 'But how do you know,' asks the
candid inquirer, 'that such a connection ever existed at all?' Simply
thus, most laudable investigator--because there are large land mammals
in Australia. Now, large land mammals do not swim across a broad ocean.
There are none in New Zealand, none in the Azores, none in Fiji, none in
Tahiti, none in Madeira, none in Teneriffe--none, in short, in any
oceanic island which never at any time formed part of a great continent.
How could there be, indeed? The mammals must necessarily have got there
from somewhere; and whenever we find islands like Britain, or Japan, or
Newfoundland, or Sicily, possessing large and abundant indigenous
quadrupeds, of the same general type as adjacent continents, we see at
once that the island must formerly have been a mere peninsula, like
Italy or Nova Scotia at the present day. The very fact that Australia
incloses a large group of biggish quadrupeds, whose congeners once
inhabited Europe and America, suffices in itself to prove beyond
question that uninterrupted land communication must once have existed
between Australia and those distant continents.

In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as Wallace's Line,
from the great naturalist who first pointed out its far-reaching
zoological importance, separates what is called by science 'the
Australian province' on the southwest from 'the Indo-Malayan province'
to the north and east of it. This belt of deep sea divides off sharply
the plants and animals of the Australian type from those of the common
Indian and Burmese pattern. South of Wallace's Line we now find several
islands, big and small, including New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the
Moluccas, Celebes, Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands, whose
precise geographical position on the map must of course be readily
remembered, in this age of school boards and universal examination, by
every pupil-teacher and every Girton girl, are now divided by minor
straits of much shallower water; but they all stand on a great submarine
bank, and obviously formed at one time parts of the same wide Australian
continent, because animals of the Australian type are still found in
every one of them. No Indian or Malayan animal, however, of the larger
sort (other than birds) is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace's
Line. That narrow belt of deep sea, in short, forms an ocean barrier
which has subsisted there without alteration ever since the end of the
secondary period. From that time to this, as the evidence shows us,
there has never been any direct land communication between Australia and
any part of the outer world beyond that narrow line of division.

Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world by surprise for a
moment, under the audacious title of 'Captain Lawson's Adventures in New
Guinea.' The gallant captain, or his unknown creator in some London
lodging, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles, and there to
have met with marvellous escapes from terrible beasts of the common
tropical Asiatic pattern--rhinoceroses, tigers, monkeys, and leopards.
Everybody believed the new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists.
Those canny folks saw through the wicked hoax on the very first blush of
it. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must have got there by an
overland route. If there had ever been a land connection between New
Guinea and the Malay region, then, since Australian animals range into
New Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia, and we
should find Victoria and New South Wales at the present day peopled by
tapirs, orang-outangs, wild boars, deer, elephants, and squirrels, like
those which now people Borneo, instead of, or side by side with, the
kangaroos, wombats, and other marsupials, which, as we know, actually
form the sole indigenous mammalian population of Greater Britain beneath
the Southern Cross. Of course, in the end, the mysterious and tremendous
Captain Lawson proved to be a myth, an airy nothing upon whom
imagination had bestowed a local habitation (in New Guinea) and a name
(not to be found in the Army List). Wallace's Line was saved from
reproach, and the intrusive rhinoceros was banished without appeal from
the soil of Papua.

After the deep belt of open sea was thus established between the bigger
Australian continent and the Malayan region, however, the mammals of the
great mainlands continued to develop on their own account, in accordance
with the strictest Darwinian principles, among the wider plains of their
own habitats. The competition there was fiercer and more general; the
struggle for life was bloodier and more arduous. Hence, while the
old-fashioned marsupials continued to survive and to evolve slowly along
their own lines in their own restricted southern world, their
collateral descendants in Europe and Asia and America or elsewhere went
on progressing into far higher, stronger, and better adapted forms--the
great central mammalian fauna. In place of the petty phalangers and
pouched ant-eaters of the oolitic period, our tertiary strata in the
larger continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development of the
mammalian race into monstrous creatures, some of them now quite extinct,
and some still holding their own undisturbed in India, Africa, and the
American prairies. The palæotherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and
the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeed
to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata. Slowly
the horses grow more horse-like, the shadowy camel begins to camelise
himself, the buffaloes acquire the rudiments of horns, the deer branch
out by tentative steps into still more complicated and more complicated
antlers. Side by side with this wonderful outgrowth of the mammalian
type, in the first plasticity of its vigorous youth, the older
marsupials die away one by one in the geological record before the faces
of their more successful competitors; the new carnivores devour them
wholesale, the new ruminants eat up their pastures, the new rodents
outwit them in the modernised forests. At last the pouched creatures all
disappear utterly from all the world, save only Australia, with the
solitary exception of a single advanced marsupial family, the familiar
opossum of plantation melodies. And the history of the opossum himself
is so very singular that it almost deserves to receive the polite
attention of a separate paragraph for its own proper elucidation.

For the opossums form the only members of the marsupial class now living
outside Australia; and yet, what is at least equally remarkable, none of
the opossums are found _per contra_ in Australia itself. They are, in
fact, the highest and best product of the old dying marsupial stock,
specially evolved in the great continents through the fierce competition
of the higher mammals then being developed on every side of them.
Therefore, being later in point of time than the separation, they could
no more get over to Australia than the elephants and tigers and
rhinoceroses could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race
in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian cousins.
In Europe and Asia the opossums lived on lustily, in spite of
competition, during the whole of the Eocene period, side by side with
hog-like creatures not yet perfectly piggish, with nondescript animals,
half horse half tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and antelopes,
unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment of budding antlers. But in
the succeeding age they seem to disappear from the eastern continent,
though in the western, thanks to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb,
and tree-haunting life, they still drag out a precarious existence in
many forms from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. It is
worth while to notice, too, that whereas the kangaroos and other
Australian marsupials are proverbially the very stupidest of mammals,
the opossums, on the contrary, are well known to those accurate
observers of animal psychology, the plantation negroes, to be the very
cleverest, cunningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the fierce
struggle for life of the crowded American lowlands, the opossum was
absolutely forced to acquire a certain amount of Yankee smartness, or
else to be improved off the face of the earth by the keen competition of
the pouchless mammals.

Up to the day, then, when Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, landing for
the first time on the coast of New South Wales, saw an animal with short
front limbs, huge hind legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit of
hopping along the ground (called by the natives a kangaroo), the
opossums of America were the only pouched mammals known to the European
world in any part of the explored continents. Australia, severed from
all the rest of the earth--_penitus toto orbe divisa_--ever since the
end of the secondary period, remained as yet, so to speak, in the
secondary age so far as its larger life-elements were concerned, and
presented to the first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture of
what 'the world before the flood' must have looked like. Only it was a
very remote flood; an antediluvian age separated from our own not by
thousands, but by millions, of seasons.

To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry needful
qualifications must be made at the very outset. No statement is ever
quite correct until you have contradicted in minute detail about
two-thirds of it.

In the first place there are a good many modern elements in the
indigenous population of Australia; but then they are elements of the
stray and casual sort one always finds even in remote oceanic islands.
They are waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example, the
flora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a considerable
number of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns always get blown by the
wind, or washed by the sea, or carried on the feet or feathers of birds,
from one part of the world to another. In all these various ways, no
doubt, modern plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia at
different times, and altered to some extent the character and aspect of
its original native vegetation. Nevertheless, even in the matter of its
plants and trees, Australia must still be considered a very
old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud continent. The strange
puzzle-monkeys, the quaint-jointed casuarinas (like horsetails grown
into big willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, with
their smooth stems robbed of their outer bark, impart a marvellously
antiquated and unfamiliar tone to the general appearance of Australian
woodland. All these types belong by birth to classes long since extinct
in the larger continents. The scrub shows no turfy greensward; grasses,
which elsewhere carpet the ground, were almost unknown till introduced
from Europe; in the wild lands, bushes, and undershrubs of ancient
aspect cover the soil, remarkable for their stiff, dry, wiry foliage,
their vertically instead of horizontally flattened leaves, and their
general dead blue-green or glaucous colour. Altogether, the vegetation
itself, though it contains a few more modern forms than the animal
world, is still essentially antique in type, a strange survival from the
forgotten flora of the chalk age, the oolite, and even the lias.

Again, to winged animals, such as birds and bats and flying insects, the
ocean forms far less of a barrier than it does to quadrupeds, to
reptiles, and to fresh-water fishes. Hence Australia has, to some
extent, been invaded by later types of birds and other flying creatures,
who live on there side by side with the ancient animals of the secondary
pattern. Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and crows must all be
comparatively recent immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. Even in this
respect, however, the Australian life-region still bears an antiquated
and undeveloped aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find those very
oldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries, the emus, and the
mooruk of New Britain. The extreme term in this exceedingly ancient set
of creature is given us by the wingless bird, the apteryx or kiwi of New
Zealand, whose feathers nearly resemble hair, and whose grotesque
appearance makes it as much a wonder in its own class as the
puzzle-monkey and the casuarina are among forest trees. No feathered
creatures so closely approach the lizard-tailed birds of the oolite or
the toothed birds of the cretaceous period as do these Australian and
New Zealand emus and apteryxes. Again, while many characteristic
Oriental families are quite absent, like the vultures, woodpeckers,
pheasants and bulbuls, the Australian region has many other fairly
ancient birds, found nowhere else on the surface of our modern planet.
Such are the so-called brush turkeys and mound builders, the only
feathered things that never sit upon their own eggs, but allow them to
be hatched, after the fashion of reptiles, by the heat of the sand or of
fermenting vegetable matter. The piping crows, the honey-suckers, the
lyre-birds, and the more-porks are all peculiar to the Australian
region. So are the wonderful and æsthetic bower-birds. Brush-tongued
lories, black cockatoos, and gorgeously coloured pigeons, though
somewhat less antique, perhaps, in type, give a special character to the
bird-life of the country. And in New Guinea, an isolated bit of the same
old continent, the birds of paradise, found nowhere else in the whole
world, seem to recall some forgotten Eden of the remote past, some
golden age of Saturnian splendour. Poetry apart, into which I have
dropped for a moment like Mr. Silas Wegg, the birds of paradise are, in
fact, gorgeously dressed crows, specially adapted to forest life in a
rich fruit-bearing tropical country, where food is abundant and enemies
unknown.

Last of all, a certain small number of modern mammals have passed over
to Australia at various times by pure chance. They fall into two
classes--the rats and mice, who doubtless got transported across on
floating logs or balks of timber; and the human importations, including
the dog, who came, perhaps on their owners' canoes, perhaps on the wreck
and _débris_ of inundations. Yet even in these cases again, Australia
still maintains its proud pre-eminence as the most antiquated and
unprogressive of continents. For the Australian black-fellow must have
got there a very long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremely
ancient human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull the
Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while the
woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally distinct human family,
and perhaps the very lowest sample of humanity that has survived to
modern times, must have crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his
brethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on when
the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon the
continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.
As for the dingo, or Australian wild dog, only half domesticated by the
savage natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf and
half jackal, incapable of the higher canine traits, and with a
suspicious, ferocious, glaring eye that betrays at once his
uncivilisable tendencies.

Omitting these later importations, however--the modern plants, birds,
and human beings--it may be fairly said that Australia is still in its
secondary stage, while the rest of the world has reached the tertiary
and quaternary periods. Here again, however, a deduction must be made,
in order to attain the necessary accuracy. Even in Australia the world
never stands still. Though the Australian animals are still at bottom
the European and Asiatic animals of the secondary age, they are those
animals with a difference. They have undergone an evolution of their
own. It has not been the evolution of the great continents; but it has
been evolution all the same; slower, more local, narrower, more
restricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One might compare the
difference to the difference between the civilisation of Europe and the
civilisation of Mexico or Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted out
their indigenous culture, were still, to be sure, in their stone age;
but it was a very different stone age from that of the cave-dwellers or
mound builders in Britain. Even so, though Australia is still
zoologically in the secondary period, it is a secondary period a good
deal altered and adapted in detail to meet the wants of special
situations.

The oldest types of animals in Australia are the ornithorhynchus and the
echidna, the 'beast with a bill,' and the 'porcupine ant-eater' of
popular natural history. These curious creatures, genuine living
fossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate place between the
mammals on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other. The
echidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and body; the
ornithorhynchus has a bill like a duck's, webbed feet, and a great many
quaint anatomical peculiarities which closely ally it to the birds and
reptiles. Both, in fact, are early arrested stages in the development of
mammals from the old common vertebrate ancestor; and they could only
have struggled on to our own day in a continent free from the severe
competition of the higher types which have since been evolved in Europe
and Asia. Even in Australia itself the ornithorhynchus and echidna have
had to put up perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy of nature.
The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, specialised in a thousand
minute ways for his amphibious life and queer subterranean habits; the
second is a spiny hedgehog-like nocturnal prowler, who buries himself in
the earth during the day, and lives by night on insects which he licks
up greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart from the
specialisations brought about by their necessary adaptation to a
particular niche in the economy of life, these two quaint and very
ancient animals probably preserve for us in their general structure the
features of an extremely early descendant of the common ancestor from
whom mammals, birds, and reptiles alike are originally derived.

The ordinary Australian pouched mammals belong to far less ancient types
than ornithorhynchus and echidna, but they too are very old in
structure, though they have undergone an extraordinary separate
evolution to fit them for the most diverse positions in life. Almost
every main form of higher mammal (except the biggest ones) has, as it
were, its analogue or representative among the marsupial fauna of the
Australasian region fitted to fill the same niche in nature. For
instance, in the blue gum forests of New South Wales a small animal
inhabits the trees, in form and aspect exactly like a flying squirrel.
Nobody who was not a structural and anatomical naturalist would ever for
a moment dream of doubting its close affinity to the flying squirrels of
the American woodlands. It has just the same general outline, just the
same bushy tail, just the same rough arrangement of colours, and just
the same expanded parachute-like membrane stretching between the fore
and hind limbs. Why should this be so? Clearly because both animals have
independently adapted themselves to the same mode of life under the same
general circumstances. Natural selection, acting upon unlike original
types, but in like conditions, has produced in the end very similar
results in both cases. Still, when we come to examine the more intimate
underlying structure of the two animals, a profound fundamental
difference at once exhibits itself. The one is distinctly a true
squirrel, a rodent of the rodents, externally adapted to an arboreal
existence; the other is equally a true phalanger, a marsupial of the
marsupials, which has independently undergone on his own account very
much the same adaptation, for very much the same reasons. Just so a
dolphin looks externally very like a fish, in head and tail and form and
movement; its flippers closely resemble fins; and nothing about it
seems to differ very markedly from the outer aspect of a shark or a
codfish. But in reality it has no gills and no swim-bladder; it lays no
eggs; it does not own one truly fish-like organ. It breathes air, it
possesses lungs, it has warm blood, it suckles its young; in heart and
brain and nerves and organisation it is a thorough-going mammal, with an
acquired resemblance to the fishy form, due entirely to mere similarity
in place of residence.

Running hastily through the chief marsupial developments, one may say
that the wombats are pouched animals who take the place of rabbits or
marmots in Europe, and resemble them both in burrowing habits and more
or less in shape, which closely approaches the familiar and ungraceful
guinea-pig outline. The vulpine phalanger does duty for a fox; the fat
and sleepy little dormouse phalanger takes the place of a European
dormouse. Both are so ridiculously like the analogous animals of the
larger continents that the colonists always call them, in perfect good
faith, by the familiar names of the old-country creatures. The koala
poses as a small bear; the cuscus answers to the racoons of America. The
pouched badgers explain themselves at once by their very name, like the
Plyants, the Pinchwifes, the Brainsicks, and the Carelesses of the
Restoration comedy. The 'native rabbit' of Swan River is a rabbit-like
bandicoot; the pouched ant-eater similarly takes the place of the true
ant-eaters of other continents. By way of carnivores, the Tasmanian
devil is a fierce and savage marsupial analogue of the American
wolverine; a smaller species of the same type usurps the name and place
of the marten; and the dog-headed Thylacinus is in form and figure
precisely like a wolf or a jackal. The pouched weasels are very
weasel-like; the kangaroo rats and kangaroo mice run the true rats and
mice a close race in every particular. And it is worth notice, in this
connection, that the one marsupial family which could compete with
higher American life, the opossums, are really, so to speak, the monkey
development of the marsupial race. They have opposable thumbs, which
make their feet almost into hands; they have prehensile tails, by which
they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal
omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, insects, and
roots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, intelligent,
tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys.

Australia has also one still more ancient denizen than any of these, a
living fossil of the very oldest sort, a creature of wholly immemorial
and primitive antiquity. The story of its discovery teems with the
strangest romance of natural history. To those who could appreciate the
facts of the case it was just as curious and just as interesting as
though we were now to discover somewhere in an unknown island or an
African oasis some surviving mammoth, some belated megatherium, or some
gigantic and misshapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct animals of
the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in a
tropical ramble, and you can faintly conceive the delight and
astonishment of naturalists at large when the barramunda first 'swam
into their ken' in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size and
shape this 'extinct fish,' still living and grunting quietly in our
midst, is comparatively insignificant beside the 'dragons of the prime'
immortalised in a famous stanza by Tennyson: but, to the true
enthusiast, size is nothing; and the barramunda is just as much a marvel
and a monster as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he had
suddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging fifty feet of
lizard-like tail in a train behind him. And this is the plain story of
that marvellous discovery of a 'missing link' in our own pedigree.

In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there occur in
abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as the Ceratodi.
(I apologise for ganoid, though it is not a swear-word). These teeth
reappear from time to time in several subsequent formations, but at last
slowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists naturally
concluded that the creature to which they belonged had died out also,
and was long since numbered with the dodo and the mastodon. The idea
that a Ceratodus could still be living, far less that it formed an
important link in the development of all the higher animals, could never
for a moment have occurred to anybody. As well expect to find a
palæolithic man quietly chipping flints on a Pacific atoll, or to
discover the ancestor of all horses on the isolated and crag-encircled
summit of Roraima, as to unearth a real live Ceratodus from a modern
estuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Krefft took away the breath of scientific
Europe by informing it that he had found the extinct ganoid swimming
about as large as life, and six feet long, without the faintest
consciousness of its own scientific importance, in a river in Queensland
at the present day. The unsophisticated aborigines knew it as
barramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers called it with
irreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head. On further examination,
however, the despised barramunda proved to be a connecting link of
primary rank between the oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowest
air-breathing animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a true
fish, it leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a foraging
expedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring woodlands. There it
browses on myrtle leaves and grasses, and otherwise behaves itself in a
manner wholly unbecoming its piscine antecedents and aquatic education.
To fit it for this strange amphibious life, the barramunda has both
lungs and gills; it can breathe either air or water at will, or, if it
chooses, the two together. Though covered with scales, and most
fish-like in outline, it presents points of anatomical resemblance both
to salamanders and lizards; and, as a connecting bond between the North
American mud-fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren on the
other, it forms a true member of the long series by which the higher
animals generally trace their descent from a remote race of marine
ancestors. It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this living
fossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in the
fossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has long since been
beaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian descendants;
in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the last
relic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.




A VERY OLD MASTER


The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a good
deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of his
own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation of
the world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a
bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin than
the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, the
mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable British
Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled
eyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptors
carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib's hair,
just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primæval art was already
hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the
morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or
Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying,
already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in
the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess
authentic records of man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten
epochs--an epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn't commit
one to any definite chronology in particular--then it is probable that
all known art, from the Egyptian onward, would fall into the tenth of
the epochs thus loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief
would fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I should
say it was most likely about 244,000 years before the creation of Adam
according to Ussher.

The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer horn, and
represents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following one
another, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the air
suspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite
unfavourable comment at Newmarket. Their 'points' are undoubtedly coarse
and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their
manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and
spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the
domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing
the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there is
little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on the
whole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedingly
remote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of the
prehistoric Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in hue
and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once roam
over the low plains w

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