'It is dangerous to show man how much he resembles the beasts, without
at the same time pointing out to him his own greatness. It is also
dangerous to show him his greatness, without pointing out his baseness.
It is more dangerous still to leave him in ignorance of both. But it
is greatly for his advantage to have both set before him.'--_Pensées
de Pascal_.
The man who wrote that, my dear child, did not trouble himself much
about children. He was one of the gravest specimens of literary
genius--a man who can scarcely be said to have ever been a child
himself; for as the story goes, he was found one day, when only twelve
years old, inventing geometry, and his father only saved him from
trouble, by putting the great book of Euclid into his hands; and, at
sixteen, he wrote a treatise on _Conic Sections_, which was the
wonder of all the learned men of the day. I have not a very clear idea
of what Conic Sections are myself; but I tell you this to show that
Pascal was a very profound and learned man, under whose authority,
therefore, I am very glad to take shelter, now that I am going to set
before you the very startling points of resemblance which exist between
you and the beasts.
As to your greatness, it delights me to explain it to you. It is not
due to the handsome clothes you wear when you are going out, nor to
the luxurious furniture of mamma's drawing-room, but to the possession
of that young soul which is beginning to dawn within you, as the sun
rises in the morning sky, and pierces through the early mists; in that
growing intelligence which has enabled you to understand so far all
the pretty stories I have told you; in that fresh unsullied conscience,
which congratulates you when you have been good, and reproves you when
you have done wrong: all of them gifts which are not bestowed on the
lower animals, or certainly not to the same extent as upon you--gifts
by which you rise more and more above them, the more they are developed
in yourself. Your baseness--but, begging Pascal's pardon, I cannot
call it baseness--your connecting link with the brute creation lies
in those other gifts of God which you and they share in common--in
those wonders of your organization, which we shall now meet with in
them again, in full perfection at first, and that in every respect;
by which fact you may learn, if you never thought of it before, that
the lower animals come from the same creating hand as yourself, and
ought to be looked upon to some extent as younger brothers, however
distasteful such a notion may seem at first. Societies have been
established of late, both in France and England, for the protection
of animals; and a noble and honorable task they have undertaken, in
spite of the jokes that have been made at their expense. It is a
mischievous cavil to tell people who are doing good in one direction,
that more might have been done somewhere else. Everything hangs together
in the progress of public morality, and you cannot strike a blow at
cruelty to animals without at the same time making a hit at cruelty
to man. And the best argument in favor of the rights of beasts to
protection, will be found in the tour you and I are now going to make
together through the different classes of the animal creation.
Let us begin with the horse--one of the beasts which oftenest needs
our protection. Give him the mouthful of bread whose history we have
just finished. He accepts it as a treat, and needs no pressing to eat
it. And if it could tell you all its adventures afterwards, you would
find that you were listening to precisely the same story as your own
over again; that nothing was different, nothing wanting. First of
all--teeth to grind it, and a tongue to swallow it with, as a matter
of course. Next a _larynx_, which hides itself to avoid it, and an
oesophagus,* which receives it, just as in your case; a stomach with its
_gastric juices_, the same as yours, in bagpipe form, and its _pylorus_,
like your own; a _lesser intestine_, into which bile pours from a liver
like yours; _chyliferous vessels_ which suck up a milky chyle, as with
you; farther on a _large intestine_; and so on to the end. Nor is this
all:--the horse has also a heart, with its two _ventricles_, and its
double play of valves; a heart which the little girl in our tale might
confidently have exhibited to the engineers as her own, but that it
would have been somewhat too big, of course; into which heart, as into
ours, comes _venous_ blood, to be changed afterwards to _arterial_; in
lungs to which the air keeps rushing, forced thither by the see-saw
action of a _diaphragm_, as faithful a servant to him as to you.
And those lungs like our own, are a charcoal market: the same exchange
takes place there, of carbonic acid for oxygen, as in ours, an
unanswerable proof that the stove inside the horse burns fuel in the
same way as our own: and if you were to place the thermometer inside
his mouth (for we are polite enough to call it his mouth), it would
mark 37 1-2 degrees of heat (centigrade)--a difference from ourselves
not worth mentioning. Finally, if you examine his blood, you will meet
with the same _serum_ and _clot_, the whole company of _hydroclorates,
phosphates, carbonates, &c._, from which we shrank before, and globules
made like your own; having the same construction, and the same life, or
action, if you like it better. I need scarcely add that 100 oz. of its
_fibrine_ and _albumen_ contain:
Of carbon......... 63 oz.
Of hydrogen........ 7
This is understood all along as being the case everywhere, from man
down to the turnip; so that, like you, this noble animal, as the horse
is called, is in point of fact only so much carbon, so much water, and
so much air, joined to a handful of salt, which represents the earth's
share in the bodies of animals.
You must confess that, if we cannot quite call the horse a
fellow-creature, he is nevertheless very like us. And it is the same
with all those animals which man makes use of as his servants, and
which have really a sort of right to the protection of society, since
they form, to a certain extent, a portion of the human family. I do
not speak here of the dog, who pays his taxes, poor fellow, in his
quality of friend to man.
When I think of the almost identical organization of man and his
next-door neighbors, I am astonished how it could possibly have come
into the head of a certain learned individual (I will not mention his
name), when drawing up a plan of natural history, to give to man a
separate kingdom, as a sequel to the three kingdoms already
established--the mineral, vegetable, and animal. One might have forgiven
Pascal if such an idea had got into his head after writing his treatise
on Conic Sections; there being nothing in them to throw light on such
a subject. But in a naturalist, an observer who had spent his life in
the study of living creatures, the thing seems almost incredible.
Possibly he had reasons for what he did, but he certainly did not find
them in the subjects of his studies.
Forgive me, my dear child, for forgetting you in this fit of indignation
upon a point you cannot care much about. It leads me naturally enough
to my present business, which is none of the easiest, but you must
help me by paying attention. I am going to describe the _classification
of the animal kingdom_.
There are a terrible number of animals, as you know; and if we wish
to study them to any real purpose, we must begin by introducing some
sort of order into the innumerable crowds which throng, pell-mell,
around us for observation. We should otherwise never know where to
begin, or when we had come to an end.
There are many ways of setting a crowd in order, but they all go upon
the same plan. The individuals composing the crowd are parcelled off
into companies, each company having a distinguishing mark peculiar to
those who compose it. Thus the first division is into a few large
companies, which are afterwards subdivided into smaller ones, and those
into others still less, until the divisions have gone far enough. And
this is what is called a _classification_.
Let us imagine, as an example, a large crowd in a public garden; I
will soon classify it for you. I shall put the men on one side and the
women on the other. Then--to begin with the women--I shall subdivide
them into married and single. Then among married women I shall make
a company of mammas, and another of those who have no children. Among
the unmarried I shall have a group of those who have never been
married--girls, that is--and another of widows--those who were once
married, but are so no longer. Then, following the girls, I shall
separate them into tall and short. And among the short ones I shall
divide the brunettes from the blondes, and so I shall get at last to
a little blonde girl, whose classification (were she a soldier) in
military rank would be as follows:--_squadron_ of blondes; _company_ of
shorts; _battalion_ of girls; _regiment_ of unmarried women; _division_
of women. The division of men could be carried out in the same manner;
and thus we should classify our mob into complete military order. This
is easy enough, however; but the classifying of animals is a very
different affair, and I will tell you why. We ourselves require a
classification to study them by, though none was needed for their
creation. The Almighty has formed them all on one uniform plan, around
which He has, if I may so express it, lavished an infinity of
modifications separating species from species, yet without placing
between the different species those fixed barriers which we should
require now to enable us to classify them strictly. You who are learning
the pianoforte have perhaps been told the meaning of a _theme_ of
music--the first idea of the composer who follows it throughout the
piece from one end to the other, embroidering on it, as on a bit of
canvas, a thousand variations melting one into another. Such is pretty
nearly, if we may venture the comparison, the way in which we can
picture to ourselves the Almighty moving through the work of animal
creation. Step in afterwards and divide away into regiments and
battalions, if you please. Nature permits it, but she will never,
to accommodate your classifications, separate what in her is really
united.
There is still a way, however, and that is to do as I did just now in
the case of the crowd. To take, viz., only one _character_ (as we call a
distinguishing mark in natural history), and to throw together all the
individuals which possess it, the blondes, the shorts, the girls, &c. In
this way it may soon be done; but what is the result? You are in one
class, your eldest sister is in another, your mamma in a third, and your
brother in a different division altogether, a long way from you all.
Such a classification is called _artificial_, and you can see at once
that it is worthless.
The most natural plan is to put together those that are of the same
family; and the classifications made on this principle are called
_natural_ classifications.
It is a classification of this sort which has been adopted for the
animal kingdom. People have taken all the animals which possess in
common not one character only, but a collection of characters of the
most important kind, _dominant characters_, as they are called;
and of these animals they have formed, to begin with, large primary
groups; subdividing these afterwards according to the secondary
differences, which distinguish different species in the same group
from each other.
In this manner all the different sorts of animals are included in
different systematic divisions of one vast whole, through which it is
easy to find one's way, because there is a beginning and an end; and
in which animals of the same family are always grouped side by side.
Were I to mention all the divisions of this immense classification at
once, you would find the account a little long, and not very amusing.
We will go through them by degrees therefore, and, to simplify matters,
will, throughout the whole, only consider those particular characters
which are connected with our special study, the nourishment of life,
that is to say: so that you will always find yourself on well-known
ground.
I must tell you once for all, however, that it is with this as it is
with grammar. Here and there are--and it cannot be avoided--certain
exceptional cases which keep protesting timidly against the
arbitrariness of rules; but no matter; we must be contented with what
we can get, and be grateful into the bargain to those who have given
us this skillful classification, at once so ingenious and useful, in
spite of its inevitable imperfections. What is impossible is expected
of nobody. You could not understand, even if I wished to explain it
to you, the amount of science, labor and genius requisite for making
out that long list, which, tiresome as it may seem to children, is
absolutely beautiful in the eyes of learned men; too beautiful, perhaps,
and I will tell you why when we have finished. Meantime, as the best
reward we can give to those who have done us some great service is to
teach their names to children, I will tell you, before bidding you
good-bye, to whom we owe this classification, the details of which I
do not enter upon to-day.
In the first place, we owe the method employed in its establishment,
the method of _natural classification, i.e._, to a learned man
of the last century--a learned Frenchman, Bernard de Jussieu--who tried
it upon plants; another large flock by no means very easy to put in
order, as you may convince yourself any day by studying botany. The
man who applied this system to animals was also a learned Frenchman,
the clearness of the French mind adapting them peculiarly for that
sort of work. And he, too, is one of the glories of that nation. His
labors and discoveries gave a perfectly new impulse to the study of
nature. It was George Cuvier, whose statue you may see at Montbéliard,
if you should ever go there. Not that Cuvier carried through this
gigantic work alone, though the credit of it is justly his due, he
having directed and inspired it. He was assisted by many. But among
his assistants there was one, Laurillard, the most modest, yet the
most active of all, whose name I will mention also, because, like the
others, more or less celebrated, he has never had his reward. [Footnote:
In the earlier editions of this work, there was, in this place, a
severe reproach upon Cuvier for not having given proper credit to
Laurillard. This reproach I have since learned was unjust. M.
Valenciennes himself, one of the most illustrious of the collaborators
of the great Cuvier, has written me a letter in which he defends the
reputation of his friend with a warm indignation which does honor to
both of them; and cites passages in which Cuvier has spoken of
Laurillard, and among others, in the third volume of the _Ossements
Fossiles_, p. 32, ed. of 1822.]
It only remains for me, therefore, to let the lash, which I was laying
upon the shoulders of another, fall now upon my own, and to deplore
the too great facility with which I had credited, without sufficient
proofs, an assertion which I had otherwise good reason to believe to
be exact--coming to me, as it did, from Montbéliard himself, on the
testimony, it is said, of the family of Laurillard. From this avowal,
a little painful, I confess, my young readers may learn the
inconvenience of rashly condemning others! As I said in the concluding
passage, which truth, only too late, now compels me to suppress--"The
truth is sure to come out at last."