miniature precipice of the gorge, this pool was a thing of clay. It
was milky in consistence, from the roiling of suspended clay; and
when the surface caught a glint of light and reflected it, only the
clay and mud walls about came to the eye. It was a very regular pool,
a man's height in diameter, and, for all I knew, from two inches to
two miles deep. I became absorbed in a sort of subaquatic mirage, in
which I seemed to distinguish reflections beneath the surface. My eyes
refocused with a jerk, and I realized that something had unconsciously
been perceived by my rods and cones, and short-circuited to my duller
brain. Where a moment before was an unbroken translucent surface, were
now thirteen strange beings who had appeared from the depths, and were
mumbling oxygen with trembling lips.
In days to come, through all the months, I should again and again be
surprised and cheated and puzzled--all phases of delight in the beings
who share the earth's life with me. This was one of the first of the
year, and I stiffened into one large eye.
I did not know whether they were fish, fairy shrimps, or frogs; I had
never seen anything like them, and they were wholly unexpected. I so
much desired to know what they were, that I sat quietly--as I enjoy
keeping a treasured letter to the last, or reserving the frosting
until the cake is eaten. It occurred to me that, had it not been for
the Kaiser, I might have been forbidden this mystery; a chain of
occurrences: Kaiser--war--submarines--glass-shortage for
dreadnoughts--mica port-holes needed--Guiana prospector--abandoned
pits--rainy season--mysterious tenants--me!
When I squatted by the side of the pool, no sign of life was visible.
Far up through the green foliage of the jungle I could see a solid
ceiling of cloud, while beneath me the liquid clay of the pool was
equally opaque and lifeless. As a seer watches the surface of his
crystal ball, so I gazed at my six-foot circle of milky water. My
shift forward was like the fall of a tree: it brought into existence
about it a temporary circle of silence and fear--a circle whose
periphery began at once to contract; and after a few minutes the gorge
again accepted me as a part of its harmless self. A huge bee zoomed
past, and just behind my head a hummingbird beat the air into a froth
of sound, as vibrant as the richest tones of a cello. My concentrated
interest seemed to become known to the life of the surrounding glade,
and I was bombarded with sight, sound, and odor, as if on purpose to
distract my attention. But I remained unmoved, and indications of rare
and desirable beings passed unheeded.
A flotilla of little water-striders came rowing themselves along,
racing for a struggling ant which had fallen into the milky quicksand.
These were in my line of vision, so I watched them for a while,
letting the corner of my eye keep guard for the real aristocrats of
the milky sea--whoever they were. My eye was close enough, my
elevation sufficiently low to become one with the water-striders, and
to become excited over the adventures of these little petrels; and in
my absorption I almost forgot my chief quest. As soaring birds seem at
times to rest against the very substance of cloud, as if upheld by
some thin lift of air, so these insects glided as easily and skimmed
as swiftly upon the surface film of water. I did not know even the
genus of this tropical form; but insect taxonomists have been
particularly happy in their given names--I recalled _Hydrobates_,
_Aquarius_, and _remigis_.
The spur-winged jacanas are very skilful in their dainty treading of
water-lily leaves; but here were good-sized insects rowing about on
the water itself. They supported themselves on the four hinder legs,
rowing with the middle pair, and steering with the hinder ones, while
the front limbs were held aloft ready for the seizing of prey. I
watched three of them approach the ant, which was struggling to reach
the shore, and the first to reach it hesitated not a moment, but
leaped into the air from a take-off of mere aqueous surface film,
landed full upon the drowning unfortunate, grasped it, and at the same
instant gave a mighty sweep with its oars, to escape from its
pursuing, envious companions. Off went the twelve dimples, marking the
aquatic footprints of the trio of striders; and as the bearer of the
ant dodged one of its own kind, it was suddenly threatened by a small,
jet submarine of a diving beetle. At the very moment when the pursuit
was hottest, and it seemed anybody's ant, I looked aside, and the
little water-bugs passed from my sight forever--for scattered over the
surface were seven strange, mumbling mouths. Close as I was, their
nature still eluded me. At my slightest movement all vanished, not
with the virile splash of a fish or the healthy roll and dip of a
porpoise, but with a weird, vertical withdrawing--the seven
dissolving into the milk to join their six fellows.
This was sufficient to banish further meditative surmising, and I
crept swiftly to a point of vantage, and with sweep-net awaited their
reappearance. It was five minutes before faint, discolored spots
indicated their rising, and at least two minutes more before they
actually disturbed the surface. With eight or nine in view, I dipped
quickly and got nothing. Then I sank my net deeply and waited again.
This time ten minutes passed, and then I swept deep and swiftly, and
drew up the net with four flopping, struggling super-tadpoles. They
struggled for only a moment, and then lay quietly waiting for what
might be sent by the guardian of the fate of tadpoles--surely some
quaint little god-relation of Neptune, Pan, and St. Vitus. Gently
shunted into a glass jar, these surprising tads accepted the new
environment with quiet philosophy; and when I reached the laboratory
and transferred them again, they dignifiedly righted themselves in the
swirling current, and hung in mid-aquarium, waiting--forever waiting.
It was difficult to think of them as tadpoles, when the word brought
to mind hosts of little black wrigglers filling puddles and swamps of
our northern country. These were slow-moving, graceful creatures,
partly transparent, partly reflecting every hue of the spectrum, with
broad, waving scarlet and hyaline fins, and strange, fish-like mouths
and eyes. Their habits were as unpollywoglike as their appearance. I
visited their micaceous pool again and again; and if I could have
spent days instead of hours with them, no moment of ennui would have
intervened.
My acquaintanceship with tadpoles in the past had not aroused me to
enthusiasm in the matter of their mental ability; as, for example, the
inmates of the next aquarium to that of the Redfins, where I kept a
herd or brood or school of Short-tailed Blacks--pollywogs of the Giant
Toad (_Bufo marinus_). At earliest dawn they swam aimlessly about and
mumbled; at high noon they mumbled and still swam; at midnight they
refused to be otherwise occupied. It was possible to alarm them; but
even while they fled they mumbled.
In bodily form my Redfins were fish, but mentally they had advanced a
little beyond the usual tadpole train of reactions, reaching forward
toward the varied activities of the future amphibian. One noticeable
thing was their segregation, whether in the mica pools, or in two
other smaller ones near by, in which I found them. Each held a pure
culture of Redfins, and I found that this was no accident, but aided
and enforced by the tads themselves. Twice, while I watched them, I
saw definite pursuit of an alien pollywog,--the larva of the
Scarlet-thighed Leaf-walker (_Phyllobates inguinalis_),--which fled
headlong. The second time the attack was so persistent that the lesser
tadpole leaped from the water, wriggled its way to a damp heap of
leaves, and slipped down between them. For tadpoles to take such
action as this was as reasonable as for an orchid to push a fellow
blossom aside on the approach of a fertilizing hawk-moth. This
momentary co-operation, and the concerted elimination of the undesired
tadpole, affected me as the thought of the first consciousness of
power of synchronous rhythm coming to ape men: it seemed a spark of
tadpole genius--an adumbration of possibilities which now would end in
the dull consciousness of the future frog, but which might, in past
ages, have been a vital link in the development of an ancestral
Ereops.
My Redfins were assuredly no common tadpoles, and an intolerant
pollywog offers worthy research for the naturalist. Straining their
medium of its opacity, I drew off the clayey liquid and replaced it
with the clearer brown, wallaba-stained water of the Mazaruni; and
thereafter all their doings, all their intimacies, were at my mercy. I
felt as must have felt the first aviator who flew unheralded over an
oriental city, with its patios and house-roofs spread naked beneath
him.
It was on one of the early days of observation that an astounding
thought came to me--before I had lost perspective in intensive
watching, before familiarity had assuaged some of the marvel of these
super-tadpoles. Most of those in my jar were of a like size, just
short of an inch; but one was much larger, and correspondingly
gorgeous in color and graceful in movement. As she swept slowly past
my line of vision, she turned and looked, first at me, then up at the
limits of her world, with a slow deliberateness and a hint of
expression which struck deep into my memory. Green came to
mind,--something clad in a smock of emerald, with a waist-coat of
mother-of-pearl, and great sprawling arms,--and I found myself
thinking of Gawain, our mystery frog of a year ago, who came without
warning, and withheld all the secrets of his life. And I glanced again
at this super-tad,--as unlike her ultimate development as the grub is
unlike the beetle,--and one of us exclaimed, "It is the same, or
nearly, but more delicate, more beautiful; it must be Guinevere." And
so, probably for the first time in the world, there came to be a pet
tadpole, one with an absurd name which will forever be more
significant to us than the term applied by a forgotten herpetologist
many years ago.
And Guinevere became known to all who had to do with the laboratory.
Her health and daily development and color-change were things to be
inquired after and discussed; one of us watched her closely and made
notes of her life, one painted every radical development of color and
pattern, another photographed her, and another brought her delectable
scum. She was waited upon as sedulously as a termite queen. And she
rewarded us by living, which was all we asked.
It is difficult for a diver to express his emotions on paper, and
verbal arguments with a dentist are usually one-sided. So must the
spirit of a tadpole suffer greatly from handicaps of the flesh. A
mumbling mouth and an uncontrollable, flagellating tail, connected by
a pinwheel of intestine, are scant material wherewith to attempt new
experiments, whereon to nourish aspirations. Yet the Redfins, as
typified by Guinevere, have done both, and given time enough, they may
emulate or surpass the achievements of larval axolotls, or the
astounding egg-producing maggots of certain gnats, thus realizing all
the possibilities of froghood while yet cribbed within the lowly
casing of a pollywog.
In the first place Guinevere had ceased being positively thigmotactic,
and, writing as a technical herpetologist, I need add no more. In
fact, all my readers, whether Batrachologists or Casuals, will agree
that this is an unheard-of achievement. But before I loosen the
technical etymology and become casually more explicit, let me hold
this term in suspense a moment, as I once did, fascinated by the sheer
sound of the syllables, as they first came to my ears years ago in a
university lecture. There is that of possibility in being positively
thigmotactic which makes one dread the necessity of exposing and
limiting its meaning, of digging down to its mathematically accurate
roots. It could never be called a flower of speech: it is an over-ripe
fruit rather: heavy-stoned, thin-fleshed--an essentially practical
term. It is eminently suited to its purpose, and so widely used that
my friend the editor must accept it; not looking askance as he did at
my definition of a vampire as a vespertilial anæsthetist, or breaking
into open but wholly ineffectual rebellion, at the past tense of the
verb to candelabra. I admit that the conjugation
I candelabra
You candelabra
He candelabras
arouses a ripple of confusion in the mind; but it is far more
important to use words than to parse them, anyway, so I acclaim
perfect clarity for "The fireflies candelabraed the trees!"
Not to know the precise meaning of being positively thigmotactic is a
stimulant to the imagination, which opens the way to an entire essay
on the disadvantages of education--a thought once strongly aroused by
the glorious red-and-gold hieroglyphic signs of the Peking
merchants--signs which have always thrilled me more than the utmost
efforts of our modern psychological advertisers.
Having crossed unconsciously by such a slender etymological bridge
from my jungle tadpole to China, it occurs to me that the Chinese are
the most positively thigmotactic people in the world. I have walked
through block after block of subterranean catacombs, beneath city
streets which were literally packed full of humanity, and I have seen
hot mud pondlets along the Min River wholly eclipsed by shivering
Chinamen packed sardinewise, twenty or thirty in layers, or radiating
like the spokes of a great wheel which has fallen into the mud.
From my brood of Short-tailed Blacks, a half-dozen tadpoles wandered
off now and then, each scum-mumbling by himself. Shortly his
positivism asserted itself and back he wriggled, twisting in and out
of the mass of his fellows, or at the approach of danger nuzzling into
the dead leaves at the bottom, content only with the feeling of
something pressing against his sides and tail. His physical make-up,
simple as it is, has proved perfectly adapted to this touch system of
life: flat-bottomed, with rather narrow, paddle-shaped tail-fins
which, beginning well back of the body, interfere in no way with the
pollywog's instincts, he can thigmotact to his heart's content. His
eyes are also adapted to looking upward, discerning dimly dangers
from above, and whatever else catches the attention of a bottom-loving
pollywog. His mouth is well below, as best suits bottom mumbling.
Compared with these _polloi_ pollywogs, Redfins were as hummingbirds
to quail. Their very origin was unique; for while the toad tadpoles
wriggled their way free from egg gelatine deposited in the water
itself, the Redfins were literally rained down. Within a folded leaf
the parents left the eggs--a leaf carefully chosen as overhanging a
suitable ditch, or pit, or puddle. If all signs of weather and season
failed and a sudden drought set in, sap would dry, leaf would shrivel,
and the pitiful gamble for life of the little jungle frogs would be
lost; the spoonful of froth would collapse bubble by bubble, and,
finally, a thin dry film on the brown leaf would in turn vanish, and
Guinevere and her companions would never have been.
But untold centuries of unconscious necessity have made these
tree-frogs infallible weather prophets, and the liberating rain soon
sifted through the jungle foliage. In the streaming drops which
funneled from the curled leaf, tadpole after tadpole hurtled downward
and splashed headlong into the water; their parents and the rain and
gravitation had performed their part, and from now on fate lay with
the super-tads themselves--except when a passing naturalist brought
new complications, new demands of Karma, as strange and unpredictable
as if from another planet or universe.
Only close examination showed that these were tadpoles, not fish,
judged by the staring eyes, and broad fins stained above and below
with orange-scarlet--colors doomed to oblivion in the native, milky
waters, but glowing brilliantly in my aquarium. Although they were
provided with such an expanse of fin, the only part used for ordinary
progression was the extreme tip, a mere threadlike streamer, which
whipped in never-ending spirals, lashing forward, backward, and
sideways. So rapid was this motion, and so short the flagellum, that
the tadpole did not even tremble or vibrate as it moved, but forged
steadily onward, without a tremor.
The head was buffy yellow, changing to bittersweet orange back of the
eyes and on the gills. The body was dotted with a host of minute
specks of gold and silver. On the sides and below, this gave place to
a rich bronze, and then to a clear, iridescent silvery blue. The eye
proper was silvery white, but the upper part of the eyeball fairly
glowed with color. In front it was jet black flecked with gold,
merging behind into a brilliant blue. Yet this patch of jeweled tissue
was visible only rarely as the tadpole turned forward, and in the
opaque liquid of the mica pool must have ever been hidden. And even if
plainly seen, of what use was a shred of rainbow to a sexless tadpole
in the depths of a shady pool!
With high-arched fins, beginning at neck and throat, body compressed
as in a racing yacht, there could be no bottom life for Guinevere.
Whenever she touched a horizontal surface,--whether leaf or twig,--she
careened; when she sculled through a narrow passage in the floating
algæ, her fins bent and rippled as they were pressed bodywards. So she
and her fellow brood lived in mid-aquarium, or at most rested lightly
against stem or glass, suspended by gentle suction of the complex
mouth. Once, when I inserted a long streamer of delicate water-weed,
it remained upright, like some strange tree of carboniferous memory.
After an hour I found this the perching-place of fourteen Redfin tads,
and at the very summit was Guinevere. The rest were arranged nearly
in altitudinal size--two large tadpoles being close below Guinevere,
and a bevy of six tiny chaps lowest down. All were lightly poised,
swaying in mid-water, at a gently sloping angle, like some unheard-of,
orange-stained, aquatic autumn foliage.
For two weeks Guinevere remained almost as I have described her,
gaining slightly in size, but with little alteration of color or
pattern. Then came the time of the great change: we felt it to be
imminent before any outward signs indicated its approach. And for four
more days there was no hint except the sudden growth of the hind legs.
From tiny dangling appendages with minute toes and indefinite knees,
they enlarged and bent, and became miniature but perfect frog's limbs.
She had now reached a length of two inches, and her delicate colors
and waving fins made her daily more marvelous. The strange thing about
the hind limbs was that, although so large and perfect, they were
quite useless. They could not even be unflexed; and other mere
pollywogs near by were wriggling toes, calves, and thighs while yet
these were but imperfect buds. When she dived suddenly, the toes
occasionally moved a little; but as a whole, they merely sagged and
drifted like some extraneous things entangled in the body.
Smoothly and gracefully Guinevere moved about the aquarium. Her gills
lifted and closed rhythmically--twice as slowly as compared with the
three or four times every second of her breathless young tadpolehood.
Several times on the fourteenth day, she came quietly to the surface
for a gulp of air.
Looking at her from above, two little bulges were visible on either
side of the body--the ensheathed elbows pressing outward. Twice, when
she lurched forward in alarm, I saw these front limbs jerk
spasmodically; and when she was resting quietly, they rubbed and
pushed impatiently against their mittened tissue.
And now began a restless shifting, a slow, strange dance in mid-water,
wholly unlike any movement of her smaller companions; up and down,
slowly revolving on oblique planes, with rhythmical turns and
sinkings--this continued for an hour, when I was called for lunch. And
as if to punish me for this material digression and desertion, when I
returned, in half an hour, the miracle had happened.
Guinevere still danced in stately cadence, with the other Redfins at a
distance going about their several businesses. She danced alone--a
dance of change, of happenings of tremendous import, of symbolism as
majestic as it was age-old. Here in this little glass aquarium the
tadpole Guinevere had just freed her arms--she, with waving scarlet
fins, watching me with lidless white and staring eyes, still with
fish-like, fin-bound body. She danced upright, with new-born arms
folded across her breast, tail-tip flagellating frenziedly, stretching
long fingers with disks like cymbals, reaching out for the land she
had never trod, limbs flexed for leaps she had never made.
A few days before and Guinevere had been a fish, then a helpless
biped, and now suddenly, somewhere between my salad and coffee, she
became an aquatic quadruped. Strangest of all, her hands were mobile,
her feet useless; and when the dance was at an end, and she sank
slowly to the bottom, she came to rest on the very tips of her two
longest fingers; her legs and toes still drifting high and useless.
Just before she ceased, her arms stretched out right froggily, her
weird eyes rolled about, and she gulped a mighty gulp of the strange
thin medium that covered the surface of her liquid home.
At midnight of this same day only three things existed in the
world--on my table I turned from the _Bhagavad-Gita_ to Drinkwater's
_Reverie_ and back again; then I looked up to the jar of clear water
and watched Guinevere hovering motionless. At six the next morning she
was crouched safely on a bit of paper a foot from the aquarium. She
had missed the open window, the four-foot drop to the floor, and a
neighboring aquarium stocked with voracious fish: surely the gods of
pollywogs were kind to me. The great fins were gone--dissolved into
blobs of dull pink; the tail was a mere stub, the feet drawn close,
and a glance at her head showed that Guinevere had become a frog
almost within an hour. Three things I hastened to observe: the pupils
of her eyes were vertical, revealing her genus _Phyllomedusa_ (making
apt our choice of the feminine); by a gentle urging I saw that the
first and second toes were equal in length; and a glance at her little
humped back showed a scattering of white calcareous spots, giving the
clue to her specific personality--_bicolor_: thus were we introduced
to _Phyllomedusa bicolor_, alias Guinevere, and thus was established
beyond doubt her close relationship to Gawain.
During that first day, within three hours, during most of which I
watched her closely, Guinevere's change in color was beyond belief.
For an hour she leaped from time to time; but after that, and for the
rest of her life, she crept in strange unfroglike fashion, raised high
on all four limbs, with her stubby tail curled upward, and reaching
out one weird limb after another. If one's hand approached within a
foot, she saw it and stretched forth appealing, skinny fingers.
At two o'clock she was clad in a general cinnamon buff; then a shade
of glaucous green began to creep over head and upper eyelids, onward
over her face, finally coloring body and limbs. Beneath, the little
pollyfrog fairly glowed with bright apricot orange, throat and tail
amparo purple, mouth green, and sides rich pale blue. To this maze of
color we must add a strange, new expression, born of the prominent
eyes, together with the line of the mouth extending straight back with
a final jeering, upward lift; in front, the lower lip thick and
protruding, which, with the slanting eyes, gave a leering, devilish
smirk, while her set, stiff, exact posture compelled a vivid thought
of the sphinx. Never have I seen such a remarkable combination. It
fascinated us. We looked at Guinevere, and then at the tadpoles
swimming quietly in their tank, and evolution in its wildest
conceptions appeared a tame truism.