ITS EAR.]
Birds have no ears, nor have crocodiles, nor frogs, nor snakes. Ears
seem to be for beasts only. And not for all beasts. Seals are divided by
naturalists into two great families--those with ears, and those without.
The common seal belongs to the latter class, and the sea-lion to the
former. A common seal lives in the sea, and when it does wriggle up on
the beach of an iceberg there is nothing to hear, I suppose, or perhaps
when it wants to listen it raises a flipper to its ear. I never saw one
doing so, but we do not see everything that happens in the world. The
sea-lion, with its stouter limbs, can lift its forepart, raise its head
and look about it, and even flop about the ice-fields at a respectable
rate. And there is no doubt that one of these is as much above an
earless seal as fifty years of Europe are better than a cycle of Cathay.
When performing seals are exhibited at a circus sitting on chairs,
catching balls on the points of their noses and playing diabolo with
them, or balancing billiard cues on their snouts, and doing other
miraculous things, they are always sea-lions, not common seals. Of
course, I do not mean to insinuate that sea-lions invented the ear and
stuck it on: that would be unscientific; but I mean that their general
intelligence and interest in affairs created that demand for more
distinct hearing which led to the development of an ear trumpet. This
view is wholly scientific, though pedants may quarrel with my way of
putting it.
The sea-lion's ears are very minute, mere apologies one might think; but
don't be hasty. The finny prey of the sea-lion makes no sound as it
skims through the water; and perhaps the padded foot of that stealthy
garrotter, the Polar bear, makes as little on the smooth ice; for
catching the one and not being caught by the other the sea-lion must
trust to the keenness of its great goggle eyes. But it is a social
beast, and it wants to catch the bellowing of its fellows far across
the foggy waste of ice-floes; and that little leather scoop standing
behind the ear-hole seems to be just the instrument required to catch
and send down those sounds which would otherwise glance off the glossy
fur and never find entrance to the tiny orifice at all. If it were any
larger than is absolutely necessary it would be a serious impediment to
a professional diver and swimmer like the sea-lion. This is the reason
why otters have very small ears, and why whales and porpoises have none
at all.
But when a beast lives on land the conditions are all altered, and then
the ear blossoms out into an infinite variety of forms and sizes, from
each of which the true naturalist may divine the manner of life of its
wearer as surely as the palmist tells your past, present and future from
the lines on your hand. First, he will divide all beasts into those that
pursue and those that flee, oppressors and oppressed. The former point
their ears forwards, but the latter backwards. There may be a good deal
of free play in both cases, but I am thinking of the habitual position.
When a cat is making its felonious way along the garden wall, wrapped in
thoughts of blackbirds and thrushes, its ears look straight forwards,
and this is the way in which a cat's portrait is always taken, because
it is characteristic, It cannot turn them round to catch sounds from
behind, and would scorn to do so; when accosted from behind, it turns
its head and looks danger in the face. It can fold them down backwards
when the danger is a terrier and the decks are cleared for action, but
that is another story. Contrast Brer Rabbit as he comes "lopin' up de
big road," His ears are turning every way scouting for danger, not
always in unison, but independently; but when he is at rest they are set
to alarm from the flank and rear.
[Illustration: "TEAR OUT THE HOUSE LIKE THE DOGS WUZ ATTER HIM."]
But when he "tear out the house like the dogs wuz atter him," then they
point straight back. He was made to be eaten, and he knows it. So it is
with the whole tribe of deer, and even with the horse, pampered and
cared for and unacquainted with danger; his ears are a weathercock
registering the drift of all his petty hopes and fears. I see the left
ear go forward and prepare for a desperate shy at that wheelbarrow. He
knows a wheelbarrow familiarly--there is one in his stall all day--but I
am taking him a road he does not want to go, and so the hypocrite is
going to pretend that barrow is of a dangerous sort. I prepare to apply
a counter-irritant: he sees it with the corner of his eye, and both ears
turn back like a tuning-fork.
The size and quality of the ear serve to show how far the owner depends
on it. You will never begin to understand Nature until you see clearly
that every life is dominated by two supreme anxieties which push aside
all other concerns--viz., to eat, and not to be eaten. The one is
uppermost in those that pursue, and the other in those that flee. Now if
the pursuer fails he loses a dinner, but if the fugitive fails he loses
his life, from which it follows that the very best sort of ears will be
found among those beasts that do not ravage but run.
But there is another matter to be taken into account. The ears are not
the whole of the beast's outfit. It has eyes, and it has a nose. Which
of the three it most relies on depends upon the manner of its life. A
bird lives in trees or the air, looking down at the prowling cat or up
at the hawk hovering in the clear sky; so it does not keep ears, and its
nose is of no account. But what four-footed thing can see like a bird?
The squirrel also lives in the trees, and its ears are frivolously
decorated with tufts of hair. You will not find many beasts that can
afford to prostitute their ears to ornamental purposes. The only other
beast that I can think of at this moment which has tufted ears is the
lynx. Now the lynx is a tree cat, and there is proverbial wisdom in the
saying "Eyes like a lynx."
[Illustration: A GREAT CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF DISTINGUISHED EARS.]
But go to the timid beasts that spend their lives on the ground among
grass and brushwood and woods and coppices, where murderous foes are
prowling unseen, and you will see ears indeed--expansive, tremulous,
turning lightly on well-oiled pivots, and catching, like large
sea-shells, the mingled murmur of rustling leaves and snapping twigs and
chirping insects and falling seeds, and the slight, occasional, abrupt,
fateful sound which is none of these. It is impossible, no doubt, for us
ever to think ourselves into the life which these beasts live--moving,
thinking and sleeping in a circumambient atmosphere of never-ceasing
sound; sitting, as it were, at the receiving station of a system of
wireless telegraphy, and catching cross-currents of floating
intelligence from all quarters, mostly undiscernible by us if we
listened for it, but which they, by long practice, instantly locate and
interpret without conscious effort.
The zoologist classifies them under many heads. The field mouse and
rabbits are rodentia, the deer ungulata, the kangaroos marsupialia. In
my museum they are all one family, and their labels are their ears. In
these days of international conferences, parliaments of religion,
pan-everything-in-turn councils, might we not arrange for a great
catholic congress of distinguished ears? What a glow of new life it
would shed upon our straitened, traditional ways of thinking about the
social problems of our humble fellow-creatures! I would exclude the
eared owls, whose ears are a mere sport of fashion, like the hideous
imitations of birds' wings which ladies stick on their hats.
But just when this peep into the rare show of Nature is lifting my soul
into sublimity, I am brought down to the base earth again by an
exception. This is the plague of all high science. You design a stately
theory, collect from many quarters a wealth of facts to establish it
with, and have arranged them with cumulative and irresistible force,
when some disgusting, uninvited case thrusts itself in on your notice
and refuses to fit into your argument at all. In this instance it is
"my lord the elephant." That he has no need to concern himself about any
bloodthirsty beast that may be lurking in the jungle is not more obvious
than that his ears are the biggest in the world. Now there are two ways
of getting rid of an obstruction of this kind. One is to betake yourself
to your thinking chair and pipe and to rake up the possibilities of the
Pleiocene and Meiocene ages, and prove that when the immense ear of the
elephant was evolved there must have been some carnivorous monster, some
sabre-toothed tiger or cave bear, which preyed on elephants.
The other way is to get acquainted with the elephant, cultivate an
intimacy with him, and find out what his ears are to him. I prefer the
second way. I would patiently watch him as he stands drowsily under an
umbrageous banian tree on a sultry day before the monsoon has burst and
refreshed earth and air. So might I note that his ears are incessantly
moving, but not turning this way and that to catch sounds--just
flapping, flapping, as if to cool his great temples. So have I seen the
gigantic fruit bats, called flying foxes in India, hanging in hundreds
in the upper branches of a tall peepul tree at noon, feeling too hot to
sleep, and all fanning themselves in unison with one wing--a comic
spectacle. And at each flap of the elephant's ears I would observe that
a cloud of flies (for the elephant is not too great to be pestered by
the despicable hordes of beggars for blood) were dislodged from their
feeding grounds about his head and neck, and, trying to settle about his
rear parts, were driven back again by the swinging of his tail. Then I
should say that ear is just a fan. How significant it is that among the
emblems of royalty in the East the three chiefest are an
umbrella-bearer, two men who stand behind and swing great punkahs
modelled on the elephant's ear, and two others carrying yak's tails
wherewith to scare the flies from the royal person! The elephant is a
rajah!
There is another mysterious ear which is a stumbling-block to the simple
theory-monger. It is in fashion among a tribe of bats to which belongs
the so-called vampire of India. This monster is fond of coming into your
bedroom at midnight through the open windows, but not to suck your
blood, for it has little in common with the true vampire of South
America. It brings its dinner with it and hangs from the ceiling,
"feeding like horses when you hear them feed." You hear its jaws
working--crunch, crunch, crunch, but feel too drowsy to get up and expel
it.
When you get up in the morning there on your clean dressing table, just
below the place where it hung, are the bloody remains of a sparrow, or
the crumbs of a tree-frog. The servants will tell you that the sparrow
was killed and eaten by a rat, but if you rise softly next night when
you hear the sound of feeding, and shut the windows, you will find a
goblin hanging from the ceiling in the morning, hideous beyond the
power of words to tell. Its ears, thin, membranous and longer than its
head, tremble incessantly. Inside of them is another pair, much smaller
than the first, and tuned to their octave, I should guess, while two
membranous smelling trumpets of similar pattern rise over the nose. What
is the meaning of these repulsive instruments, and how does that strange
beast catch sparrows? When it comes out after dark and quarters the
garden, passing swiftly under and through the branches of trees, they
are sound asleep hidden among the leaves, motionless and silent. But
their flesh may be scented, and their gentle breathing heard if you have
instruments sufficiently delicate. Then the ample wings may suddenly
enfold the sleeping body, and the savage jaws grip the startled head
before there is time even to scream. Without a doubt this is the secret
of the vampire bat's ears.
But to find food and flee death are not the only interests in life even
to the meanest creature. There are social pleasures, family affections
and fellowship, sympathy and co-operation in the struggles of life. And
there is love.
Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque,
Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres,
In furias ignemque ruunt: amor omnibus idem.
The chirping of the cricket, the song of the lark, the call of the
sentinel crane, the watchword with which the migratory geese keep their
squadrons together, the howling of jackals, the lowing of cows, the hum
of the hive, the chatter of the drawing-room, and a hundred other voices
in forest and field and town remind us that the voice and the ear are
the pair of wheels on which society runs.
And this thought points the way out of another contradictious puzzle,
that which confronts my argument from the ears of an ass. It roams
treeless deserts where no foe can approach unseen. Thistles make no
sound. Why should it be adorned with ears which in their amplitude are
scarcely surpassed by those of the rabbit and the hare. There is no
answer unless their function is to hear the bray of a fellow-ass.... One
may object that that majestic sound is surely of force to impress itself
without any aid from an external ear; but that is a vain argument built
on the costermonger's moke--dreary exile from its fatherland. Remember
that its ancestors wandered on the steppes of Central Asia or the
borders of the Sahara. In those boundless solitudes, with nothing that
eye can see or that common ear can hear to remind her that she is not
the sole inhabitant of the universe, the wild ass "snuffeth up the wind
in her desire," and lifting her windsails to the hot blast, hears, borne
across miles of white sand and shimmering mirage, the joyful
reverberations of that music which tells of old comrades and boon
companions scouring the plain and kicking up their exultant heels.
Monkeys taking to trees were like the birds, they scarcely needed ears.
And so by the high road of evolution you arrive at man and the enigma of
his ear. It is a shrunken and shrivelled remnant, a moss-grown ruin, a
derelict ship. It is to a pattern ear what the old shoe which you find
in a country lane, shed from the foot of some "unemployed," is to one of
Waukenphast's "five-miles-an-hour-easy" boots. We ought to temper our
contempt for what it is with respect for what it was. All the parts of
it are there and recognisable, even to the muscles that should move it,
but we have lost control of them. I believe anyone could regain that by
persevering exercise of his will power for a time--that is, if he has
any. I have a friend who, if you treat him with disrespect, shrivels you
up with a sarcastic wag of his right ear.
The ears of dogs open up another vista for the questioning philosopher.
Their day is past, too, and man may cut them short to match his own, but
the dog grows them longer than before. When he first took service with
man, and grew careless and lazy, the muscles got slack and the ears
dropped, which is in accordance with Nature. Then, instead of being
allowed to wither away, they have been handed over to the milliner and
shaped and trimmed in harmony with the "style" of each breed of dogs.
How it has been done is one of those mysteries which will not open to
the iron keys of Darwin, But there it is for those to see who have eyes.
[Illustration: THE CURLS OF A MOTHER'S DARLING.]
The ears of the little dogs bred for ladies' laps are the curls of a
mother's darling; the pendant love-locks of the old, old maid who,
despite of changeful fashions, clings to those memorials of the pensive
beauty of her youth, are repeated in solemn mimicry by the dachshund
trotting at her heels; but the sensible fur cap of the dignified
Newfoundland reminds us of the cold regions from which his forefathers
came. Some kinds of terriers still have their ears starched up to look
perky, and I have occasionally seen a dog with one ear up and the other
down as if straining after the elusive idea expressed in the
Baden-Powell hat. All which shows that "one touch of nature makes the
whole world kin."
VI
TOMMY
THE STORY OF AN OWL
Among the many and various strangers within my gates who have helped to
enliven the days of my exile, Tommy was one towards whom I still feel a
certain sense of obligation because he taught me for the first time what
an owl is. For Tommy was an owl. From any dictionary you may ascertain
that an owl is a nocturnal, carnivorous bird, of a short, stout form,
with downy feathers and a large head; and if that does not satisfy you,
there is no lack of books which will furnish fuller and more precise
descriptions.
But descriptions cannot impart acquaintance. I had sought acquaintance
and had gained some knowledge such as books cannot supply, not only of
owls in general, but of that particular species of owls to which Tommy
belonged, who, in the heraldry of ornithology, was _Carine brahma_, an
Indian spotted owlet. This branch of the ancient family of owls has
always been eccentric. It does not mope and to the moon complain. It
flouts the moon and the sun and everyone who passes by, showing its
round face at its door and even coming out, at odd times of the day, to
stare and bob and play the clown. It does not cry "Tuwhoo, Tuwhoo," as
the poets would have it, but laughs, jabbers, squeaks and chants
clamorous duets with its spouse.
All this I knew. I had also gathered from his public appearances that a
spotted owlet is happy in his domestic life and that he is fond of fat
white ants, for, when their winged swarms were flying, I had seen him
making short flights from his perch in a tree and catching them with his
feet; and I believed that he fed in secret on mice and lizards. But all
that did not amount to understanding an owl, as I discovered when Tommy
became a member of our chummery.
Tommy was born in "the second city of the British Empire," to wit,
Bombay, in the month of March, 1901. His birthplace was a hole in an old
"Coral" tree. Domestic life in that hole was not conducted with
regularity. Meals were at uncertain hours and uncertain also in their
quantity and quality. The parents were hunters and were absent for long
periods, and though there was incredible shouting and laughter when they
returned, they came at such irregular times that we did not suspect that
they were permanent residents and had a family. One night, however,
Tommy, being precocious and, as we discovered afterwards, keen on seeing
life, took advantage of parental absence to clamber to the entrance of
the nursery and, losing his balance, toppled over into the garden. He
kept cool, however, and tried to conceal himself, but Hurree the malee,
watering the plants early in the morning, spied him lying with his face
on the earth and brought him to us.
He seemed dead, but he was very much alive, as appeared when he was made
to sit up and turned those wonderful eyes of his upon us. He was a droll
little object at that time, nearly globular in form and covered with
down, like a toy for children to play with. His head turned like a
revolving lighthouse and flared those eyes upon you wherever you went,
great luminous orbs, black-centred and gold-ringed and full of silent
wonder, or, I should rather say, surprise. This never left him. To the
last everything that presented itself to his gaze, though he had seen it
a hundred times, seemed to fill him with fresh surprise. Nothing ever
became familiar. What an enviable cast of mind! It must make the
brightness of childhood perennial.
There was some discussion as to how Tommy should be fed, and we finally
decided that one should try to open the small hooked beak, whose point
could just be detected protruding from a nest of fluff, while another
held a piece of raw meat ready to pop in. It did not look an easy job,
but we had scarcely set about it when Tommy himself solved the
difficulty by plucking the meat out of our fingers and swallowing it.
This early intimation that, however absent he might look, he was "all
there" was never belied, and there was no further difficulty about the
feeding of him. When he saw us coming he always fell into the same
ridiculous attitude, with his face in the dust, but we just picked him
up and stood him on his proper end and showed him the meat and his
bashfulness vanished at once.
After sunset he would get lively and begin calling for his mother in a
strange husky voice. At this time we would let him out in the garden,
watching him closely, for, if he thought he was alone, he would sneak
away slyly, then make a run for liberty, hobbling along at a good rate
with the aid of his wings, though he never attempted to fly as yet. When
detected and overtaken, he fell on his face as before. One memorable day
he found a hole in a stone wall and, before we could stop him, he was
in. The hole was too small to admit a hand, though not a rat or a snake,
so the prospect was gloomy. Suddenly a happy inspiration came to me.
That sad, husky cry with which he expressed his need of a mother was not
difficult to mimic, and he might be cheated into thinking that a lost
brother or sister was looking for him. I retired and made the attempt,
and, hark! a faint echo came from the wall. At each repetition it became
clearer, until the round face and great eyes appeared at the mouth of
the hole. Then the round body tumbled out, and little Tommy was hobbling
about, looking, with pathetic eagerness, for "the old familiar faces."
When he discovered how he had been betrayed, his face went down and he
suffered himself to be carried quietly to the canary's cage in which he
was kept.
It seemed to be time now to begin Tommy's education, for I judged that,
if he had been at home, he would ere then have been getting nightly
lessons in the poacher's art. So I procured a small gecko, one of those
grey house lizards, with pellets at the ends of their toes, which come
down from the roof after the lamps are lit and gorge themselves on the
foolish moths and plant bugs that come to the light. Securing it with a
thin cord tied round its waist, I introduced it into Tommy's cage. He
looked surprised, very much surprised. He raised himself to his full
height. He gazed at it. He curtseyed. He gave a little jump and was
standing with both feet on the lizard. A moment more and the lizard was
gliding down his throat with my thin cord after it. Mr. Seton Thompson
would have us believe that all young things are laboriously trained by
their parents, just like human children, and if he was an eye-witness of
all the scenes that he describes so vividly, it must be so with other
young things. But he did not know Tommy, who is the bird of Minerva and
evidently sprang into being, like his patron goddess, with all his
armour on.
After a time, when he had exchanged his infant down for a suit of
feathers, he was promoted to a large cage out in the garden, and his
regular diet was a little raw meat or a mutton bone tied to one of his
perches, but, by way of a treat, I would offer him, whenever I could get
it, a locust, or large grasshopper. His way of accepting this was unique
and pretty. He would look surprised, stare, curtsey once or twice, stare
again and then, suddenly, noiselessly and as lightly as a fairy, flit
across the cage and, without alighting, pluck the insect from my fingers
with both his feet and return to his perch.