Part 34

There lies his isolation, his feebleness, his dependence; there also the temptation to seek for himself a defender.

The most exalted of living beings is not the less one of those which the most eagerly demand protection.

Page 67. On the life of the bird in the egg.--I draw these details from the accurate M. Duvernoy. Ovology in our days has become a science. Yet I know but a few treatises specially devoted to the bird's egg. The oldest is that of an Abbé Manesse, written in the last century, very verbose, and not very instructive (the MS. is preserved in the Museum Library). The same library possesses the German work of Wirfing and Gunther on nests and eggs; and another, also German, whose illustrations appear of a superior character, although still defective. I have seen a part of a new collection of engravings, much more carefully executed.

Page 74. Gelatinous and nourishing seas.--Humboldt, in one of his early works ("Scenes in the Tropics"), was the first, I think, to authenticate this fact. He attributes it to the prodigious quantity of medusæ, and other analogous creatures, in a decomposed state in these waters. If, however, such a cadaverous dissolution really prevailed there, would it not render the waters fatal to the fish, instead of nourishing them? Perhaps this phenomenon should be attributed rather to nascent life than to life extinct, to that first living fermentation in which the lowest microscopic organizations develop themselves.

It is especially in the Polar Seas, whose aspect is so wild and desolate, that this characteristic is observed. Life there abounds in such excess that the colour of the waters is completely changed by it. They are of an intense olive-green, thick with living matter and nutriment.

Page 91. Our Museum.--In speaking of its collections, I may not forget its valuable library, which now includes that of Cuvier, and has been enriched by donations from all the physicists of Europe. I have had occasion to acknowledge very warmly the courtesy of the conservator, M. Desnoyers, and of M. le Docteur Lemercier, who has obligingly supplied me with a number of pamphlets and curious memoirs from his private collection.

Page 94. Buffon.--I think that now-a-days too readily forget that this great generalizer has not the less received and recorded a number of very accurate observations furnished him by men of special vocations, officers of the royal hunt, gamekeepers, marines, and persons of every profession.

Page 96. The Penguin.--The brother of the auk, but less degraded; he carries his wings like a veritable bird, though they are only membranes floating on an evoided breast. The more rarified air of our northern pole, where he lives, has already expanded his lungs, and the breast-bone begins to project. The legs, less closely confined to the body, better maintain its equilibrium, and the port and attitude gain in confidence. There is here a notable difference between the analogous products of the two hemispheres.

Page 103. The Petrel, the mariner's terror.--The legend of the petrel gliding upon the waves, around the ship which he appears to lead to perdition, is of Dutch origin. This is just as it ought to be. The Dutch, who voyage en famille, and carry with them their wives, their children, even their domestic animals, have been more susceptible to evil auguries than other navigators. The hardiest of all, perhaps--true amphibians--they have not the less been anxious and imaginative, hazarding not only their lives, but their affections, and exposing to the fantastic chances of the sea the beloved home, a world of tenderness. That small lumbering bark, which is in truth a floating house, will nevertheless go, ever rolling across the seas of the North, the great Arctic Ocean, and the furious Baltic, accomplishing without pause the most dangerous voyages, as from Amsterdam to Cronstadt. We laugh at these ugly vessels and their antiquated build, but he who observes how plenteously they combine the two purposes of store-room for the cargo and accommodation for the family, can never see them in the ports of Holland without a lively interest, or without lavishing on them his good wishes.

Page 113. Epiornis.--The remains of this gigantic bird and its enormous egg may be seen in the Museum. It is computed that its size was fivefold that of the ostrich. How much we must regret that our rich collection of fossils, or the major part, lies buried in the drawers of the Museum for want of room. For thirty or forty thousand francs a wooden gallery might be constructed, in which the whole could find opportunities of display.

Meanwhile, we argue as if these vast studies, now in their very infancy, had already been exhausted. Who knows but that man has only seen the threshold of the prodigious world of the dead? He has scarcely scratched the surface of the globe. The deeper explorations to which he is constrained by the thousand novel needs of art and industry (as that, for example, of piercing the Alps for a new railway) will open to science unexpected prospects. Palæontology as yet is built upon the narrow foundation of a minimum number of facts. If we remember that the dead--owing to the thousands of years the globe has already lived--are enormously more numerous than the living, we cannot but consider this method of reasoning upon a few specimens very audacious. It is a hundred, nay, a thousand to one, that so many millions of dead, once disinterred, will convict us of having erred, at least, through incomplete enumeration.

Page 113. Man had perished a hundred times.--Here we trace one of the early causes of the limited confederacy originally existing between man and the animal--a compact forgotten by our ungrateful pride, and without which, nevertheless, the existence of man had been impossible.

When the colossal birds whose remains we are constantly exhuming had prepared for him the globe, had subjugated the crawling, climbing life which at first predominated--when man came upon the earth to confront what remained of the reptiles, to confront those new but not less formidable inhabitants of our planet, the tiger and the lion--he found on his side the bird, the dog, and the elephant.

At Alexandria may be seen the last few individuals of those giant dogs which could strangle a lion. It was not through terror that these formidable animals allied themselves with man, but through natural sympathy, and their peculiar antipathy to the feline race, the giant cat (the tiger or lion).

Without the alliance of the dog against beasts of prey, and that of the bird against serpents and crocodiles (which the bird kills in the very egg), man had assuredly been lost.

The useful friendship of the horse originated in the same cause. You may trace it in the indescribable and convulsive horror which every young horse experiences at the mere odour of the lion. He attaches, he surrenders himself to man.

Had he not possessed the horse, the ox, and the camel--had he been compelled to bear on his back and shoulders the heavy burdens of which they relieve him--man would have remained the miserable slave of his feeble organization. Borne down by the habitual disproportion of weight and strength, either he would have abandoned labour, have lived upon chance victims, without art or progress; or, rather, he would have lived earth's everlasting porter--crooked, dragging, and drawing, with sunken head, never gazing on the sky, never thinking, never raising himself to the heights of invention.

Page 132. On the power of insects.--It is not only in the Tropical world that they are formidable; at the commencement of the last century half Holland perished because the piles which strengthen its dykes simultaneously gave way, invisibly undermined by a worm named the taret.

This redoubtable nibbler, which is often a foot in length, never betrays itself; it only works within. One morning the beam breaks, the framework yields, the ship engulfed founders in the waves.

How shall we reach, how discover it? A bird knows it--the lapwing, the guardian of Holland. And it is thus a notable imprudence to destroy, as has been done, his eggs. (Quatrefages, Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste.)

France, for more than a century, has suffered from the importation of a monster not less terrible--the termite, which devours dry wood just as the taret consumes wet wood. The single female of each swarm has the horrible fecundity of laying daily eighty thousand eggs. La Rochelle begins to fear the fate of that American city which is suspended in the air, the termites having devoured all its foundations, and excavated immense catacombs beneath.

In Guiana the dwellings of the termites are enormous hillocks, fifteen feet in height, which men only venture to attack from a distance, and by means of gunpowder. You may judge, therefore, the importance of the ant-eater, which dares to enter this gulf, and seek out the horrible female whence issues so accursed a torrent. (Smeathmann, Mémoire sur les Termites.)

Does climate save us? The termites prosper in France. Here, too, the cockchafer flourishes; and even on the northern slopes of the Alps, under the very breath of the glaciers, it devours vegetation. In the presence of such an enemy every insectivorous bird should be respected; at least, the canton of Vaud has recently placed the swallow under the protection of the law. (See the work of Tschudi.)

Page 134. You frequently detect there a strong odour of musk.--The plain of Cumana, says Humboldt, presents, after heavy rains, an extraordinary phenomenon. The earth, moistened and reheated by the sun's rays, gives forth that odour of musk which, under the torrid zone, is common to animals of very different classes--to the jaguar, the small species of the tiger-cat, the cabiai, the galinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations which are the vehicles of this aroma appear only to disengage themselves in proportion as the soil enclosing the débris of an innumerable quantity of reptiles, worms, and insects, becomes impregnated with water. Everywhere that one stirs up the soil, one is struck by the mass of organic substances which alternately develop, transform, or decompose. Nature in these climates appears more active, more prolific, one might say more lavish of life.

Pages 136, 137. Humming-birds and colibris.--The eminent naturalists (Lesson, Azara, Stedmann, &c.) who have supplied so many excellent descriptions of these birds, are not, unfortunately, as rich in details of their manners, their food, their character.

As to the terrible unhealthiness of the places where they live (and live with so intense a life), the narratives of the old travellers--of Labat and others--are folly confirmed by the moderns. Messieurs Durville and Lesson, in their voyage to New Guiana, scarcely dared to cross the threshold of its profound virgin forests, with their strange and terrible beauty.

The most fantastic aspect of these forests--their prodigious fairylike enchantment of nocturnal illumination by myriads of fire-flies--is attested and very forcibly described, as far as relates to the countries adjoining Panama, by a French traveller, M. Caqueray, who has recently visited them. (See his Journal in the new Revue Française, 10th June 1855.)

Page 153. The valuable museum of anatomical collections--that of Doctor Auzoux.--I cannot too warmly thank, on this occasion, our esteemed and skilful professor, who condescends to instruct us ignorant people, men of letters, men of the world, and women. He willed that anatomy should descend to all, should become popular; and it is done. His admirable imitations, his lucid demonstrations, gradually work out that great revolution whose full extent can already be perceived. Shall I dare to tell men of science my inmost thought? They themselves will have an advantage in possessing always at hand these objects of study under so convenient a form and in enlarged proportions, which greatly diminish the fatigue of attention. A thousand objects, which seem to us different because different in size, recover their analogies, and reappear in their true relative forms, through the simple process of enlargement.