of the macrocosm, to the contemplation of the microcosm this same
ingrained contempt and misunderstanding of the animals has led to the
most amazing ideas. Descartes, whose study of the reflex actions of
the muscles curiously anticipated some of the subtlest discoveries
made recently in Chicago by Professor Loeb, propounded the theory, in
his "Réponses," that animals were mere automata--which ate without
pleasure, cried without pain, desired nothing, knew nothing, and only
simulated intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician. He says:
"Among the movements that take place in us there are many which do not
depend upon the mind at all, such as the beating of the heart, the
digestion of food, nutrition, and respiration, walking, singing, and
other similar actions when they are performed without the mind thinking
of them. And when one, who falls from a height throws his hands forward
to save his head, it is in virtue of no ratiocination that he performs
this action. It does not depend upon his mind, but takes place merely
because his senses being affected by present danger some change
arises in his brain which affects the nerves in such a manner as is
required to produce the motion, in the same manner as in a machine, and
without the mind being able to hinder it. Now since we observe this in
ourselves, why should we be so astonished if the light reflected from
the body of a wolf into the eye of a sheep has the same force to excite
it into the motion of flight?"
Why on the other hand should we refuse to think that the light
reflected from the body of a lion into the eye of Descartes himself
should have the power of exciting him into the motion of flight,
without his mind being concerned in the matter at all--except that
Descartes himself would assure us with his own lips that this was not
so.
Our ignorance of the dialects of animals, our inability to understand
the medium by which they convey their thoughts, makes it possible for
men of even Descartes' abilities to generate such childish hypotheses.
Even Huxley says blandly of animals that "Since they have no language
they can have no trains of thought," though he admits that most of them
possess that part of the brain which we have every reason to suppose to
be the organ of consciousness in man.
It is one of the most regrettable results of this human egotism, which
has dug so deep and permanent a gulf between ourselves and our fellow
creatures, that we have made no concerted or intelligent effort to find
a means of communication with our fellow beings. That such an effort
would produce results worth the labour it would entail we have reason
to infer from the surprising success that has followed our struggles
to elucidate the meaning of the fragments of language sculptured on
the broken stones that have been left by races extinct for thousands
of years. We know how great are the barriers the varying tongues raise
between living peoples: how much effort must be given to acquire a
language foreign to us, even when surrounded by the sound of it in our
daily life, and assisted by teachers, yet supreme human ingenuity has,
from these fragments of broken stones, reconstructed dead tongues and
forgotten histories of civilizations that for millenniums have been
but dust blown through voiceless deserts. Yet in all the great lapse
of ages during which man has been living in close intimacy with his
domesticated animals not the slightest attempt has been made to cross
the width of silence lying between him and his faithful companions.
The student who makes the acquaintance of animals only in the trap or
upon the vivisection table may well assert that the beast has
"No language but a cry,"
but those who approach their fellow beings with a mind divested of
this self-righteous cant are well aware that the animals have means of
communication as accurate as our own, and fully sufficient for all the
needs of their existence.
To an ant the man standing beside him is as a creature three thousand
feet high, would be to us. Now let us imagine this colossal person
stooping to examine the tiny beings hurrying to and fro in a channel
between a row of structures built of fragments that would appear to
him no bigger than grains of sand. He would, of course, be unaware
that this channel was called Broadway, or the Strand, or the Avenue de
l'Opera.
"Do these tiny atoms think, reason, or speak?" he would ask himself.
His ear, of course, would be unable to catch any vibrations of their
infinitesimal tones, but he would notice here and there two of them
pausing to touch their forepaws, remaining opposite one another for
some moments moving their minute lips, and that thereupon one or the
other would abandon his travel along this channel and move off in
another direction, apparently led thereto by the communication of a
command or suggestion from his companion. If this giant should chance
to be an intelligent giant he would certainly infer that these men had
a language.
Now let us step out upon the grass any day in June and in our turn use
an intelligent eye. Here lies a dead grasshopper. A foraging ant comes
wandering by. He surveys it carefully and estimates the horse power
requisite to move it, and then hurries away in the direction of home.
Meeting another ant he stops, touches antennae for a few moments, and
passes on. The second ant makes straight for the grasshopper and finds
it without trouble. Nothing can be plainer than that the first ant told
the second one where to go. "A glorious windfall!" he probably said,
"There's a dead Leviathan about two miles from here. Keep straight on
till you come to a three-cornered rock, then turn to the left and you
will come upon three grains of sand and a straw. Climb the straw, and
you can't miss it. It's big enough to be seen a mile away." The second
ant, when it finds the grasshopper, does not go home. It sits down and
waits till the first one returns with a great gang of labourers, and
then every one seizes hold of a leg or wing and the stupendous mass is
slowly removed to the nest. Would any person with ordinary common-sense
suppose these to be automata?
Had Huxley pondered the Scriptures and gone to the ant to consider her
ways he would have certainly been cured of his haughty illusions, for
not only has each species of ant a language in which he can communicate
with other ants of the same species, but each nest or clan has,
clearly, its own brogue; for an ant knows instantly whether another
belongs to its own nest or not. The ants of one nest murder those of
another. It is a point of honour with them.
We have seen that Huxley admits reluctantly that most animals have
those portions of brain development that we believe to be the seat
of consciousness, but here is an insect with organs and functions as
heterogeneous from our own as can well be imagined, and yet there is no
mode of life that men have tried which one or another of the races of
ants is not pursuing to-day. Beside the agriculturists and herdsmen,
some keep slaves to do everything for them, some live by hunting
and plunder, while others quarter themselves upon us and live by
confounding meum and tuum. Any ardent pomologist may study the herdsmen
tribes by simply turning over the leaves of his young apple tree in
the spring. Upon the broad succulent meadows of the under side of his
foliage he will discover fat flocks of aphis cows, tended by brawny ant
cow-herds, who keep a special eye upon the big brown bulls around which
the cows and calves gather to feed. The herdsmen conduct them from leaf
to leaf as they exhaust the sap, and at night by the long twig paths
and barky roads they carry the milk of the sweet honey dew with which
they are swollen. If the horticulturist be hard of heart and smear away
a whole herd with a sweep of his thumb, the horrified herdsmen will
rush frantically home, bursting into the nest to report to some hyksos
king of the termites, that the Philistines have fallen upon his charge
and that "I, only I, have escaped to tell the tale!"
The most interesting of the agricultural races of ants is that one
commonly known in the West Indies as the parasol ant, from its fashion
of carrying bits of flower petals over its shoulder at the angle
commonly used with a sunshade. This ant erects an enormous structure,
as large in proportion to its size as is the City of London to any
one of its inhabitants. The dwellers in these cities are divided into
classes: farmers, road-makers, explorers, nurses, soldiers, street
sweepers, policemen, and, of course, the Queen. The great town is kept
perfectly clean and sanitary by the scavengers, who remove all refuse
every day. In case of death the bodies are removed some distance and
buried. The soldiers guard the entrances to the city, and in case of
attack by one of the Attila hordes of the barbarian hunter ants, they
fight with a fury and courage so great that only after the entire army
is destroyed is the city ever given up to pillage.
The explorers belonging to the nest scour the surrounding country in
search of the material needed by the farmers, and following their
indications, the road-makers clear paths a quarter of an inch in width
and frequently a mile in length, through the immense tangles of the
tropical forests,--roads as straight and useful as those of the Romans.
Along these the farmers pass, often at the end of it to climb a tree
fifty feet high in search of the bits of flower petals, with which they
pass so continuously to the nest that the human observer will sometimes
see what appears to be a thin trickle of pink or yellow through the
jungle grass as far as the eye can reach. These flower petals are
packed in the city's cellars, moistened, and sown with the spores of a
minute fungus upon which the ants live.
Most curious of all is that these ants also keep pets--several
varieties of tiny insects which they feed and protect, and which
apparently serve no purpose save to give pleasure by their playful
gambols. In every well established city of the parasol ants there
resides a small green snake in a chamber built about him by the
ants themselves, who feed and guard him, and when by any accident
the little reptile is removed they abandon all their affairs until
another is found to replace him. Unless this snake serves them as a
fetish or deity there is no means of accounting for their desire for
his presence, for as far as can be discovered he fills no purpose of
utility. Mark Twain declares that the ants "vote, keep drilled armies,
hold slaves and dispute about religion," and for all we know this
little snake may be the centre of a complex system of theology.
Consider too Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," that remarkable study of
a civilization so unlike our own. It is common to dismiss the bee's
geometrical abilities with the futile word _instinct_, but honest
students of the work of these astonishing insects have shown that,
given a new situation to deal with, they first hold active counsel
together concerning it, and then adapt their means to new conditions
with all the skill and flexibility that suggest powers of trained
reasoning. Here is a race that works for an ideal. The general good
of the hive inspires in them as inflexible a severity, as ardent
an abandonment of the desires of the individual as did the Roman
patriotism of the elder Brutus, or of the young Scaevola. No more
remarkable story is to be found in literature than Maeterlinck's
description of the nuptial flight of the Queen Bee. Choosing a warm
and perfect day in the very prime of the season's glow, distilling as
she goes some intoxicating aroma--impalpable to our grosser senses--a
perfume of love that drives every drone of the hives in passionate
ardour to that deadly encounter, to which only he may obtain who can
follow her arrowy course into the blue, where, out of sight of our
feeble eyes, that one lethal embrace occurs after which the lover
comes hurtling from the skies, dead and eviscerated. To provide this
lover, whose potent tenderness shall ensure a myriad generation--this
lover with greater wing flight than any of his fellows--with countless
facetted eyes, with greater body and stronger limbs, this creature
of such passion as to sacrifice his life for one moment of joy--the
unflagging life work of not less than five of the sexless workers must
be given, and hundreds of drones are raised each year that among them
one may prove strong enough to attain to that dizzy aerial love.
Beside the stern, homogeneous, self-sacrificing civilization of
the bees that of even the Japanese shows but clumsy, disordered and
inadequate.
Many of the doings of these small brothers of ours seem
incomprehensible and unreasonable to us, but imagine that three
thousand foot giant looking down upon the mites in France and Germany
in 1870 without an inkling as to the Spanish succession; upon the
recent incredible scufflings and passagings back and forth over the
veldts of South Africa without being instructed as to the term of
residence required to obtain the franchise. To his ignorant eye how
purposeless, how amazingly futile the whole affair would have seemed.
And it is thus we move, stupid and contemptuous, amid great races and
events, heavily indifferent to their meaning, to their significance
to ourselves. We walk surrounded by powers whose forces we ignore,
who work out their ends independent of us, yet against whom we are
sometimes forced to battle mightily for existence. To the unreflecting
man in the street the cinch bug seems a matter of small interest.
No one interviews the coddling moth to inquire his intentions. War
correspondents pass by the locust and ignore the cotton worm; the fly
weevil and the ox bot seem to such an one but a feeble folk, yet every
year in the United States alone these small races cost us more than
three hundred and fifty millions of dollars, destroy one tenth of our
agricultural wealth, and are more expensive to us than was the yearly
cost of the Boer war to England.
We are the victims of pigmy captains of pernicious industries, beside
whose gigantic operations such magnates as Carnegie or Mr. Morgan
look--in the language of the streets--like thirty cents.
Darwin discovered that human and plant life would perish from the
face of the earth were it not for the labours of that humble annelid,
commonly known as the angle worm, through whose body the entire
superficial soil of the globe passes periodically, and by whose
digestive processes it is made amenable for agriculture. The termites
subserve the angle worm's efforts by turning over and aerating the
soil to an extent very nearly incredible to those who have given no
attention to their industry. Our very existence is made possible by
the myriad beings for whom our bodies serve as homes and battlefields,
and whose dimensions are so minute as to be invisible save under the
most powerful microscopes. Ferocious struggles take place within our
own tissues between the germs of disease and the white corpuscles of
the blood, those brave and sleepless warriors who patrol our veins,
and who die by thousands with unreflecting courage in combats with
malignant bacteria. When their ranks are thinned, their columns
crushed, we succumb helplessly to our invisible foes.
How many of the great and good have fallen victims to those
Brinvilliers of the swamps--the anopheles mosquitoes? And a greater
number of the young flower of the armies of America and England were
slaughtered by the enteric germs carried by flies than fell victims to
Boer or Spanish bullets.
How little have we regarded the fly, and yet the facts about this
little brother stagger the imagination! It is said to be certain that
he came to this country in the Mayflower; but compare his conquests and
fertility with that of the Pilgrims. Linnæus said that three flies
and the generations that could spring from them could eat a dead horse
more rapidly than could a lion, but later knowledge shows that, barring
mortality, the number of flies resulting from one female in a summer
would be something like seven hundred sextillions, and would in mere
bulk outweigh every man, woman, and child on earth. Happily the fly has
enemies.
In speaking of these smaller races an idea of their relations to us
can only be conveyed by figures; with the larger forms of life the
individual may be studied as a type of the race.
We, secure in a conviction of a unique value through the immortality we
claim, broadly stigmatize our living fellows as of "the lower orders
of life." They are different, it is true, but in what respect lower?
Their development is as commensurate with their needs as is ours.
The shibboleth of the Socialists--"To each according to his needs,
from each according to his abilities," has plainly been the rule with
nature. Whatever we boast of achieving has been accomplished as well
or better by these lower orders when their necessities have demanded
it. Even the Japanese create inferior paper to that made by the wasps,
who number among the species the most skilled of carpenters and masons.
Who can spin or weave as can the _arachnæ_ and their cognate families?
The beautiful manufactures of the mollusks--even of the diatoms,
invisible save with the microscope--leave us beggared of admiration and
envy.
If it be a question of physical qualities let us compare the eye of the
eagle, or of a fly, with our own--pit our dull sense of smell with the
subtle olfactories of a dog or a wolf--or let one of us test our sense
of hearing against that of a mouse or a robin. The albatross loafs in
indolent circles about the swiftest of our turbine ships; the porpoise
can pass from point to point in his dense element with greater speed
than that of our swiftest express engine. The wild goose can do his
eighty miles an hour for ten hours without rest. Scare up little Molly
Cottontail from your path, and as she flies through the autumn grasses
like a light leaf blown before the wind, her delicate and harmonious
play of muscular powers leaves our most skilled athletes but clumsy
cripples by comparison.
In sight, smell, hearing, speed, strength, grace, and endurance we are
immeasurably the inferiors of our dumb brothers. And turning from the
material to the spiritual and the ideal, we find that in industry,
courage, patriotism, loyalty, fidelity, friendship, chivalry, maternal
love, and racial solidity the lower orders have nothing to learn from
us. Indeed some races we find advanced in moral progress in certain
directions far beyond our most hopeful endeavours.
The needs and laws of their being have developed their morals in
differing degree, and the virtues of individuals vary as greatly as
among ourselves. Of the characters and ideals of wild creatures we can
snatch but brief and tantalizing glimpses; from the larger domestic
animals our daily life is too removed to make intimacy possible, but
dogs and cats, the free birds, and our caged pets--if considered with
a seeing eye--open a door through which we can learn much, though our
indolence and stupidity still shut us off from the free community of
speech.
Carlyle says: "No nobler feeling than that of admiration for one higher
than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is at this hour, and at
all hours the unifying influence in man's life. Religion, I find,
stands upon it ... what, therefore, is loyalty proper, the life breath
of all society, but an effluence of hero worship; submissive admiration
for the truly great! Society is founded upon hero worship."
Lockhart in his Life of Scot tells of a little pig who conceived a
passion of admiration and affection for Scott which much embarrassed
the great story teller. This susceptible little porker would lurk
about, waiting for Scott's appearance, squealing with joy when he came,
and trotting patiently all day at his heels through miles of wandering,
proud and contented at merely being allowed to attend on Scott. What
was this but Carlyle's hero worship. It is not by the way recorded that
any pig ever made a hero of Carlyle. I once had the pleasure of knowing
a goose who abandoned his kind for just such a human friendship, and
the same love of the admirable is mutual among the animals themselves.
A small green paroquet, who lived in the freedom of a bird fancier's
room with a canary, was possessed of a passionate admiration for his
more gifted companion. His every waking moment was spent in the most
touching efforts to imitate the thrilling songs and graceful airiness
of his more gifted friend, in no way discouraged by the contumely with
which the yellow tenor treated his lumberingly pathetic failures. But
there is no more confirmed hero worshipper than your dog. Stevenson
says of a dog whom he knew and loved: "It was no sinecure to be
Coolin's idol. He was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every
sign of levity in the man whom he respected he announced loudly the
death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth."
And, he adds, "for every station the dog has an ideal to which the
master--under pain of derogation--will do wisely to conform. How often
has not a cold glance informed me that my dog was disappointed, and how
much more gladly would he not have taken a beating than to be thus
wounded in the seat of piety."
"Because of all animals the dog is our nearest intimate we know more of
his ideals and of his moral traits than of those of the other races.
We know that he is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice,
singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to
the degree of frenzy."
To quote Stevenson again: "To the dog of gentlemanly feeling theft
and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The canine like the human
gentleman, demands in his misdemeanours Montaigne's 'je ne sais quoi
de genereux!' He is never more than half ashamed of having barked
or bitten, and for those faults into which he has been led by a
desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains, even under
physical correction, a share of pride. But to be caught lying, if he
understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece." "Among dull observers
the dog has been credited with modesty. It is amazing how the use of
language blunts the faculties of man. That because vain glory finds
no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to
detect a fault so gross and obvious is amazing. If a small spoiled dog
were to be endowed with speech he would prate interminably and still
about himself. In a year's time he would have gone far to weary out
our love. Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling
memoirs--thrilling from top to toe with excruciating vanity--scouting
the streets for cause of offence--here was your talking dog."
While an egregious, incurable snob the dog is yet the very flower of
chivalry. The beggar maid of his kind is sure of as distinguished a
consideration from him as is the queen of his race. Indeed he carries
his gallantry to so exquisite a point of quixotism that even a female
wolf is safe from his teeth. Gratitude is the keynote of his character;
to its claims he will subdue even his innate snobbishness, and his
devotion to the mysterious laws of his canine etiquette amount to
slavishness. "In the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog, moral
opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for ten
minutes in the street some swaggering canine cavalier is to receive
a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; and in
every act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception. For to
be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, and
gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog."
Of all persons now living I personally should most prefer to be
enabled to converse freely with that high-bred, subtle-natured lady
who follows me in my walks, who shares my meals and lies beside my
fire. She has learned with ease to understand my speech, but I, in my
gross sluggishness, have neglected to acquire her tongue, and yet how
different a place this dull world would appear could I learn all she
might tell me. What sights, sounds, and odours, what significances
escaping my dull senses, might become open to me! A thousand times I
have been aware of her pitying impatience of my slow-wittedness in
matters so obvious to her keener intelligence. A whole world lies
outside of my apprehension with which she is familiar, and all my life
I shall suffer unappeased curiosity as to how she becomes aware of
approaching changes in the weather; why a certain part of the wood is
taboo. What is it that warns her of a death in my family? Why does a
certain good and gentle woman fill her with loathing distrust, and what
was the peculiar refinement of insult she received in her puppyhood
from the family butcher, which has made it possible for her daily for
six years to detect the sound of the butcher's wheels among many others
while he is still not in sight, and daily produces in her a rage of
resentment that no punishment, no offer of tidbits, has ever been able
to allay?
All these things I shall never know. She shares my life, but I,
regretfully, protestingly, must stand almost wholly outside of hers.