THE STONE PICKER.
When the excellent Doctor Livingstone visited the poor Africans who
have so much difficulty in defending themselves against the Lion and
the slave merchant, the women, seeing him armed with all the
protecting arts of Europe, invoked him as their friend and providence
in these touching words--"Give us sleep!"
And such is the prayer which all beings in their own language address
to Nature. All desire, and all dream of, security. We cannot doubt of
that when we note the ingenious endeavors which are made to obtain it.
Those efforts have given birth to the arts. Man has not invented one,
which animals had not previously invented, under that strong and
abiding instinct, the desire of safety.
They suffer, they fear, they desire to live. We must not assume that
creatures little advanced, and as it were embryonic, have, therefore,
but little sensibility. The very contrary is certain. In every
embryon, that which first appears, is the nervous system, that is to
say, the organ and capacity of feeling and of suffering. Pain is the
spur by which the creature is urged to foresight and expedients.
Pleasure serves the like purpose, and it is already observable even in
those which seem the most cold. It has been observed that the snail,
after the painful researches of his love, is singularly happy on
meeting again the loved object. Both of them with a touching grace
wave their swan-like necks, and bestow upon each other the most lively
caresses. Who is it that tells us this? The rigid, the very exact
Blainville.
But alas! how largely and how widely is pain distributed! Who has not
noted with pity the painful efforts of the shell-less mollusc, as he
grovels along on his unguarded belly? Painful but faithful image of a
foetus untimely torn from the mother by some cruel chance, and cast
upon the ground naked and defenceless. The poor mollusc thickens and
indurates his skin as well as he can, softens the asperities of his
road, and renders it slippery. But at every contact with the ragged or
pointed stones, his writhings and contractions only too plainly show
how great is his sensibility to pain.
Notwithstanding all this, she loves, does that great Soul of Harmony
which is the unity of the world; she loves all beings, and by
alternations of pleasure and of pain, instructs them and compels them
to ascend. But to ascend, to pass into a superior grade, they must
first exhaust all that the lower one can furnish of trials more or
less painful, of instinctive art, and of stimulants to invention. They
must even have exaggerated their species, perceived its excesses, and,
by contrast, be inspired with the craving and the need of an opposite
one. Progress is thus made by a kind of oscillation between contrary
qualities, which by turns are separated from life, and incarnated with
it.
Let us translate these divine things into human language, familiar,
indeed, and little worthy of the grandeur of such things, but which
will make them understood:
Nature, having long delighted to make, unmake, and remake the Medusæ,
thus infinitely varying the theme of infant liberty, smote her
forehead one morning, and said--"I have a new and a delicious idea. I
forgot to secure the life of the poor creature. It can continue only
by the infinity of number, the very excess of its fecundity. I must
now have a creature at once better guarded and more prudent. It shall
if need be, be timid, even to excess, but above all, it is my will
that it shall survive."
These timid creatures, when they appeared, were of a prudence carried
to its extremest limits. They shut themselves in, shunning even the
light of day. To save themselves from the rude contact of sharp and
ragged stones, they employed the universal means, a glutinous mucus
from which they secreted an enveloping tube, which elongated in
proportion to the length of their journey. A poor expedient, that,
which kept these miners, the Tarets out of the light and out of the
free air, and which compelled an enormous expenditure of their
substance. Every step cost them enormously; a creature thus ruining
itself that it may live, can only vegetate--poor, and incapable of
progress.
The next resource was not much better, temporarily to bury themselves,
going below the sands at low water, and rising to the flood-tide; the
resource of the Solen. A varying life that, fugitive twice a day, and
consequently full of anxiety.
Among very inferior creatures a thing as yet obscure, which was in
time to change the world, began to appear. The simple sea stars had in
their fine rays a certain support, a sort of jointed carpentry, and on
the outside some thorns, suckers, which could be thrust forward or
withdrawn at will. An animal very humble, but timid and serious, seems
to have profited by this coarse specimen. It said, I imagine, to
Nature:
"I am quite without ambition. I do not ask for the brilliant gifts of
the molluscs; I covet neither pearl nor mother of pearl, much less the
brilliant colors, the gorgeous array which would discover and betray
me; least of all do I envy your silly medusæ, with the fatal charm of
their waving and fiery hair, which serves only to drown them, or give
them a helpless prey to fish below or birds above. Oh, mother Nature,
I ask but one thing, _to be_, to exist, to have life; to be one, self
concentrated, and without compromising external appendages; to be
strongly and solidly built, self centred, and of rounded figure, as
that is the figure that is least easily taken hold of. I have but
little desire to travel; sometimes to roll from high to low water will
suffice me. Fastened to my rock, I will solve the problem which your
future favorite, man, will vainly brood over, the problem of safety;
_the strict exclusion of enemies, and the free admission of friends_,
especially water, air, and light. I know that to achieve this, I must
work hard and work long. Covered with movable thorns, I shall be
avoided, I shall live a strictly retired life; and my name shall be
oursin, little Bear, or sea hedge-hog."
How superior is that prudent animal to the Polypes, in their own
stone, which they make from their own secretion, without hard labor,
indeed, but also without affording them any safety; how superior, even
to his superiors themselves, I mean to so many _molluscs_, who have
more various senses, but are destitute of the unity of his vertebral
provision, of his persevering labor, and of the skillful tools with
which that very labor has provided him.
The great marvel, however, of this poor rolling ball, which we might
mistake for a thorny chestnut, is that he is at once _one and
multiple_, _fixed and movable_, and consists of two thousand four
hundred pieces, which separate at his will and pleasure.
Let us see his history of creation.
It was in a narrow creek of the Sea of Brittany, where there was no
soft bed of polypes and of Algæ, such as the sea hedge-hogs of the
Indian Sea enjoy, in addition to their exemption from labor. Our
Breton, on the contrary, was in presence of great peril and
difficulty; like Ulysses, in the Odyssey, who, cast ashore, and anon
washed seaward again, endeavored to fasten himself to the rock, with
his torn and bleeding fingers. Every ebb and flow of the tide was to
our little Ulysses, as bad as a mighty tempest; but his iron will and
potent desire made him cling so closely and lovingly to the rock, that
he became fastened to it as though the air had been expelled from
between them by the cupping glass. At the same time his strong thorns
scratched and scratched, and endeavored to get a hold, and one of them
subdivided and formed a triple and real anchor of safety in aid of the
cupping glass, if this latter should fail to act quite perfectly on a
by no means smooth surface.
After he had thus doubly secured himself to his rock, he gradually
comprehended that he would be a great gainer if he could form a
concavity in it, gradually dig himself out a hole, and thus form
himself a snug nest, for the day of sickness or of age. For, in fact,
one is not always young and strong. And how pleasant it would be, if,
some day, the veteran oursin could relax somewhat of the effort
necessitated by this constant holding on, this anchorage by day and
night.
So he worked and worked, to make a hollow; it was for dear life that
he was working, and you may be sure that he never relaxed. Formed of
detached pieces, he worked with five claws, which, always pushing
together, united and formed an admirable pick. His pick of five teeth,
of the finest enamel, is attached to a frame work, delicate, but very
strong, and consisting of forty pieces, which work in a sort of
sheath, playing in and out, in the most perfect and regular manner,
with an elasticity preventing too violent shocks, and self-repairing,
in case of any accident.
Rarely, in the softer stone, which he holds in contempt, but almost
always in the solid rock, in the hardest granite, it is that this
heroically laborious sculptor goes to work. The harder the rock, the
firmer he feels himself secured. And, then, in fact, what does it
matter about the length of the task? Time is of no consequence to him,
centuries are before him; supposing that his tools and his life
should end to-morrow, another would take his place and continue his
work. During their life, they hold but little communication, these
hermits; but in death a brotherhood exists, even for them, and the
young survivor, who shall find the work half done, will bless the
memory of the good workman who has preceded him.
Do not fancy that he strikes, and strikes continually. He has an art,
a labor-saving art of his own. When he has well attacked the layers of
the rock, and well cleaned it, he tears away the asperities as with
little pincers. A work of great patience, and one which requires long
intervals, too, in order that the water may aid in doing the work upon
the denuded parts. He then proceeds to the second layer, then to the
next, and so on till the long, long labor is at length completed.
In this uniform life, however, there are occasional crises, even as in
the life of the poor human laborer. The sea retires from certain
shores; in the summer, this or that rock becomes quite insupportably
hot; and our oursin must have two houses, one for summer, and one for
winter. A great event, that, of moving from place to place, for a
creature without feet and covered all over with points. M. Cailland
had an opportunity of observing the conduct of the creature under
those circumstances. The weak and movable scoops which play backward
and forward, are by no means insensible though he protects them
somewhat by covering them with a little soft gelatine. At length he
steadies himself on his thorns, as on so many crutches, rolls his
Diogenes' tub, and attains his port as he best may. Arrived there, he
shuts himself up again, and in the little nest which he almost always
finds partly made, he concentrates himself in the enjoyment of his
solitary and thrice blessed security. Let a thousand enemies prowl
without, let the storm-lashed wave moan or rage, all that is for his
pleasure. Let the very rock tremble at the dash of the breakers; he
well knows that he has nothing to fear, that it is only his kind nurse
that is making all that noise; he is safe in his cradle, and with a
glad good night, he sleeps.