Part 14

Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous about the species than about the individual. She is no more solicitous about the one than the other. The same conditions apply to all. But the species are numerous; a dozen units may be devoured while a thousand remain. A general will sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will sacrifice one man to save ten, but Nature's ways are entirely different. Both contending armies are hers, and she is equally solicitous about both. She wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the desert animals to survive, and she favors both equally. All she asks of them is that they breed and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according to Van Dyke, Nature has taken such pains to protect her desert plants, he yet confesses that, although it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla--fruit, stem, and trunk--though it bristle with spines that will draw blood from the human hand at the slightest touch."

This question of spines and thorns in vegetation is a baffling one because Nature's ways are so unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly in his theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded upon the idea that Nature selects as man selects. You cannot put Nature into a formula.

Behold how every branch and twig of our red thorn bristles with cruel daggers! But if they are designed to keep away bird or beast from eating its fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own ends! If no creature ate its little red apples and thus scattered its seeds, the fruit would rot on the ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red thorns would not increase. And increase alone is Nature's end.

It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the animal kingdom is full of design. Every part and organ of our bodies has its purpose which serves the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any character of bird or beast, fish or insect, that does not show purpose, but in the plant world Nature seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not work on so economical a plan. What purpose do the spines on the prickly ash serve? or on the thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering raspberry has no prickles, and thrives as well as any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry do not save them from browsing cattle, nor their fruit from the birds. In fact, as I have said, the service of the birds is needed to sow their seeds. The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so encased in a spiny armor; but what purpose the armor serves is a mystery. We know that hard conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns on seedling pear-trees and plum-trees, but we cannot know why.

The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant, or American aloe (Agave americana), are thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them. They are no more edible than cordwood or hemp ropes. This fact alone settles the defense question about spines.

V. SEA-DOGS

There is a bit of live natural history out here in the sea in front of me that is new and interesting. A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have their rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the breakers, and keep together there week after week. To the naked eye they seem like a group of children sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed by the waves that sweep over them. Their heads and shoulders seem to show above the water, and they appear to be having a happy time.

Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall of green-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea, until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs or hounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when it has a half-muffled, smothered sound.

They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, and there seems something incongruous in their being at home there in the cold briny deep--badgers or marmots that burrow in the waves, wolves or coyotes that hunt their prey in the sea.

Their progenitors were once land animals, but Darwinism does not tell us what they were. The whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents. The origin of any new species is shrouded in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and the short span of human life, or of the whole human history, gives us no adequate vantage-ground from which to solve the problem.

I can easily believe that these hair seals are close akin to the dog. They have five digits; they bolt their food like dogs; their sense of smell is said to be very acute, though how it could serve them in the sea does not appear. The young are born upon the land and enter the water very reluctantly.

This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence of the dog and attaches itself to its master as does the dog. Its sense of direction and locality is very acute. This group of seals in front of me, day after day, and week after week, returns to the same spot in the ever-changing waters, without the variation of a single yard, so far as I can see. The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst, and it seems as if some sixth sense must guide them to it. Locality is as unreal in the sea as in the sky, but these few square yards of shifting waters seem as real to these seals as if they were a granite ledge. They keep massed there on the water at that particular point, with their flippers protruding above the surface, as if they were as free from danger as so many picnickers. Yet something attracts them to this particular place. I know of no other spot along the coast for a hundred miles or more where the seals congregate as they do here. What is the secret of it? Evidently it is a question of security from their enemies. At this point the waves break much farther out than usual, which indicates a hidden reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallow water. This would prevent their enemies, sharks and killer whales, from stealing up beneath them and pulling them down. I do not hear their barking in the early part of the night, but long before morning their half-muffled baying begins. Old fishermen tell me that they retire for the night to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards or more out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp also afford them some protection from their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them on account of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunity offers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning, I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on the unstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at short intervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my youth.

A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES

I. NATURE'S WIRELESS

The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems to give us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What one knows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as if they drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something like community of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual process, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but an impulse.

So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board in the hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. The members act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens to the queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to know it at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated. The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and coöperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part without scheme or direction.

This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these little creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or to commit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat in Norway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straight toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. When the coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course. Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annual migration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In the flocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vast armies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in our youth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. They came in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed in the same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders were as intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all our flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or of blackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the air with astonishing precision.

In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct is strong, I have seen a flock of white ibises waltzing about the sky, going through various intricate movements, with the precision of dancers in a ballroom quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance whatever. Let a body of men try it under the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and the tumbling over one another! At one moment the birds would wheel so as to bring their backs in shadow, and then would flash out the white of their breasts and under parts. It was like the opening and shutting of a giant hand, or the alternate rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock. When a hawk pursues a bird, the birds tack and turn as if linked together. When one robin dashes off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their movements exactly coincide! The hawk-hunted bird often escapes by reaching the cover of a tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer, as a rabbit or a squirrel will dodge a dog. Schools of fish act with the same machine-like unity.

In the South, I have seen a large area of water, acres in extent, uniformly agitated by a school of mullets apparently feeding upon some infusoria on the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given signal, the fish would dive and the rippling cease. It showed a unity of action as of ten thousand spindles controlled by electricity.

How quickly the emotion of fear is communicated among the wild animals! How wild and alarmed the deer become after the opening of the first day of the shooting season. Those who have not seen or heard a hunter seem to feel the impending danger.

The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the monarch) illustrate the same law. In the fall they are all seized with this impulse to go South and thousands of them march in one body. At night they roost in the trees. I have seen photographs of them in which they appeared like a new kind of colored foliage covering the trees. In the return flight in the spring, the same massing again occurs. Recently the Imperial Valley in California was invaded by a vast army of worms moving from east to west. In countries that have been cursed with a plague of grasshoppers witnesses of the spectacle describe them as moving in the same way. They stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles, their crushed bodies making the rails and highways as slippery as grease would have made them. Ten million or ten billion behaving as one.

This community of mind stands the lower orders in great stead. It makes up to them in a measure for the want of reason and judgment. In what we call telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves. Telepathy is probably a survival from our earlier animal state.

II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE

Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more intelligent than honey bees:

If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will persist till they die of exhaustion or hunger in their endeavors to discover an issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side.

The flies are more intelligent than the bees because their problems of life are much more complicated; they are fraught with many more dangers; their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have very few natural enemies. There are no bee-catchers in the sense that there are scores of flycatchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the worker bees. The kingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionally snaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies; the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while, besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them. Try to catch a big blow-fly upon the window-pane and see how difficult the trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. Or try to "swat" the ordinary house-fly with your hand. See how he squares himself and plants himself as your threatening hand approaches! He is ready for a trial of speed. He seems to know that your hand is slower than he is, and he is right in most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows no fear; and to crush it is as easy as to crush a beetle.

The wit and cunning of all animals are developed by their struggle for existence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Our skunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to take thought about their own safety; Nature has done that for them.

To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity for folly so great in itself argues intelligence," which amounts to saying that the more fool you are, the more you know.