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[Illustration:
Photo, American Museum of Natural History]
[Illustration: _Giraffes in their native African haunts_]
POPULAR SCIENCE LIBRARY
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
GARRETT P. SERVISS
AUTHORS
WILLIAM J. MILLER HIPPOLYTE GRUENER A. RUSSELL BOND
D. W. HERING LOOMIS HAVEMEYER ERNEST G. MARTIN
ARTHUR SELWYN-BROWN ROBERT CHENAULT GIVLER
ERNEST INGERSOLL WILFRED MASON BARTON
WILLIAM B. SCOTT ERNEST J. STREUBEL
NORMAN TAYLOR DAVID TODD
CHARLES FITZHUGH TALMAN
ROBIN BEACH
ARRANGED IN SIXTEEN VOLUMES
WITH A HISTORY OF SCIENCE, GLOSSARIES
AND A GENERAL INDEX
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
VOLUME TWELVE
P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY
NEW YORK
Copyright 1922
BY P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY
MANUFACTURED IN U. S. A.
ZOÖLOGY
THE SCIENCE OF ANIMAL LIFE
BY
ERNEST INGERSOLL
[Illustration]
P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY
NEW YORK
PREFACE
In this volume, occupying the place in the series assigned to the
subject "Zoölogy," the writer was called upon to survey the whole
range of animal life on the globe, and to keep in view the fact that
these books were to be a library of science. The casual reader, with
no particular interest in natural history, seeks in such a book little
more than stories of animal life thought of mainly as "big game," with
an appetite for the adventurous and wonderful. But beasts and birds
and snakes, although they number in the aggregate thousands of kinds,
are but few compared with the almost innumerable hosts of the lower
orders of animal life that dwell in the wildernesses of the world,
or throng in the seas, or hover about us in the air; yet they are a
part of the zoölogy of the globe, and a most important part. Although
they may rarely have the picturesque interest that attaches to the
vertebrate groups, they exhibit great beauty in many cases, and are
the foundation on which the others rest, for they furnish the food
on which the more highly organized creatures subsist. To the student
this lower half is often more attractive than the upper half; and the
history and philosophy of animal life could not be understood unless it
was fully considered. The author has therefore devoted a proportionate
space to the lower orders, at the expense of detailed descriptions of
birds and beasts, knowing that these are easily accessible elsewhere.
The arrangement of the matter in the volume is according to the latest
results of critics of classification, and it illustrates, as well as
any lineal arrangement can, the principle of the development of the
higher classes from the inferior by a gradual evolution toward more and
more complex forms. Space did not permit of much exposition of methods
of development, as revealed by fossils; and the volume on Paleontology
should be read in connection with this one.
ERNEST INGERSOLL.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HOW THE GLOBE WAS STOCKED WITH LIFE 9
II. THE SEA A VAST AQUARIUM 16
III. A CHAPTER OF FOUNDATIONS 25
IV. THE HUMBLEST OF ANIMALS--SPONGES 30
V. FLOWERS OF THE SEA 33
VI. UNINVITED GUESTS 44
VII. DWELLERS BETWEEN TIDE MARKS 46
VIII. BUILDERS OF THE PEARLY SHELLS 57
IX. BUILDERS OF THE PEARLY SHELLS--_Continued_ 64
X. ANIMALS WITH JOINTED FRAMES 81
XI. FROM BUTTERFLIES TO BEETLES AND BEES 99
XII. AT THE DOORWAY OF THE "UPPER CLASSES" 127
XIII. FISHES--THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE WATERS 132
XIV. SHARKS--THE TIGERS OF THE SEA 142
XV. THE FEARFUL DEVILFISH AND OTHER RAYS 148
XVI. BONY FISHES--TELEOSTOMI 151
XVII. MODERN FISHES--TELEOSTEI 154
XVIII. AMPHIBIANS--A CONNECTING LINK 167
XIX. AMPHIBIANS--_Continued_ 174
XX. REPTILES--MONARCHS OF THE MESOZOIC WORLD 182
XXI. SERPENTS, GOOD AND BAD 211
XXII. BIRDS--KINGS OF THE AIR 239
XXIII. SOME NOTABLE WATER BIRDS 250
XXIV. VULTURES, FALCONS, AND GAME BIRDS 260
XXV. FROM GULLS TO KINGFISHERS 264
XXVI. PASSERINE BIRDS 268
XXVII. THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD--SOME PRIMITIVE TYPES 270
XXVIII. THE GNAWERS 285
XXIX. MAMMALS OF THE SEA 297
XXX. THE WORLD'S HERDS AND FLOCKS 300
XXXI. THE WORLD'S HERDS AND FLOCKS--_Continued_ 313
XXXII. SOME SUPREMELY USEFUL ANIMALS 324
XXXIII. BEASTS OF PREY--THE CARNIVORA 332
XXXIV. BEASTS OF PREY--_Continued_ 354
XXXV. INSECTIVORA--HEDGEHOGS, MOLES, AND SHREWS 366
XXXVI. THE BATS--WING-HANDED MAMMALS 369
XXXVII. MAN'S HUMBLE COUSINS 373
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
GIRAFFES, IN THEIR NATIVE AFRICAN HAUNTS _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
STARFISH AND OTHER TYPICAL LIFE IN A TIDE POOL 48
CORAL FORMATIONS OF THE GREAT BARRIER REEF, AUSTRALIA 49
CATERPILLAR BEGINNING TO WEAVE ITS COCOON 118
MOTH AND EGGS 119
CATERPILLAR PROTECTED BY FORM AND COLOR RESEMBLING THE TWIGS
OF A TREE 148
SEA HORSE PROTECTED BY FORM AND COLOR RESEMBLING THE MARINE
PLANTS AMONG WHICH IT LIVES 148
GILA MONSTER, FEARED, THOUGH ITS BITE IS NOT ALWAYS DEADLY
TO MAN 149
IGUANA, A REMARKABLE LIZARD OF THE NEW WORLD 149
PELICAN, NOTABLE FOR ITS THROAT POUCH 248
PEACOCK WITH BRILLIANT TAIL SPREAD 249
SACRED PHEASANT 249
OPOSSUM MOTHER AND YOUNG 272
ANTEATER, WHICH LIVES ON INSECTS CAUGHT IN THE STICKY SALIVA
OF ITS LONG TONGUE 273
SLOTH, AN ANIMAL WHICH KEEPS TO TREES AND IS ALMOST HELPLESS
ON THE GROUND 273
WART HOG, ONE OF THE UGLIEST ANIMALS TO SEE 304
MALAY TAPIR, RELATED TO THE PIG AND THE RHINOCEROS 304
MARKHOR, AN ASIATIC WILD GOAT 305
MOUNTAIN SHEEP OR BIGHORN OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS 305
THE KUDU, OR STRIPED ANTELOPE, OF AFRICA 312
HEAD OF THE GREATER SABLE ANTELOPE 312
HEAD OF ALASKAN MOOSE 312
AXIS, OR SPOTTED DEER OF THE EAST INDIES 313
AMERICAN DEER WITH HORNS IN VELVET 313
WOLVES IN WESTERN NORTH AMERICA 336
BEAR IN A ROCKY MOUNTAIN FOREST 337
BAT, WITH YOUNG BAT IN EACH POUCH 352
BLACK SPIDER MONKEY 353
RUFFED LEMUR, ATTRACTIVE BY ITS COLORING 353
MANDRILL, MOUTH OPEN TO SNARL 368
GORILLA, SOMEWHAT THOUGHTFUL 368
CHIMPANZEES, IMITATING SOME OF THE WAYS OF MAN 369
CHAPTER I
HOW THE GLOBE WAS STOCKED WITH LIFE
Ever since man began to think in the connected way that follows
self-consciousness, he has pondered, with a mixture of fear, reverence,
and curiosity, on the nature of life and its origin. The world in which
he found himself was a vast mystery which, very crudely at first, he
sought to penetrate. All his paths of thought led him circling back to
himself as the greatest mystery of all. He struggled with the problem
for thousands of years, framing fanciful guessworks, erecting elaborate
structures of logic on foundations of error, emotion, and presumption,
fashioning beautiful fables and theories (and waging wars to compel
other men to accept them), yet found no better solution than that life
must be a gift from some unknown, perhaps unknowable, source. Even
lately, learned philosophers, such as Helmholtz and Kelvin, supposed it
brought to the earth (in germs) by meteorites--fragments of exploded
planets that had borne life before they went to destruction; or, like
Arrhenius, postulated an impalpable dust, or "panspermia," scattered
through all space and borne from the atmosphere of one planet to
another. But all such hypotheses only threw the question of origin one
step further back.
Meanwhile, beginning a few hundred years ago, when greater privilege of
inquiry became possible in a jealous society, naturalists had tried
to attack the problem from a new angle. They asked themselves whether
they might not, by intensive study of living things, find the quality
of life itself, hoping that if that could be done the source of it
might be disclosed. In their earnest work they constantly improved
their methods and their instruments, and so penetrated deeper and
deeper into the constitution of plants and animals, until at last they
found the ultimate particle in the cell and discovered living things so
simple that they consisted of one cell alone; but why that microscopic
particle was _alive_, while the grain of crystal beside it, or the drop
of water in which it swam, was _not_ alive, remained unexplained.
Thereupon some of the naturalists fell back into the ranks of the
speculative and religious persons who were content to believe the
endowment of the world with life an act of a Divine Creator--something
above and outside of nature as otherwise manifested; others asserted
an equivalent but more materialistic doctrine that they styled
"spontaneous generation," which presently was shown to be untrue, at
least in the way they formulated it; and a third group confessed that
they did not know whence life came, nor were they much concerned to
know.
LIFE CONSTANTLY ORIGINATED BY NATURE'S PRODUCTIVE ENERGY
This quest having failed--although it had taught much by the way--the
chemists, who had been making marvelous discoveries in the inorganic
lifeless half of nature, undertook a far more serious exploration of
the organic living half. You have interpreted very fully, they told
the naturalists, the forms, and structure, and functions of organisms,
but can get no further; now let us chemists try whether we cannot find
the principle of life by analyzing the _substance_ of living things.
Profiting by their experience, they turned to the colloids in hope of a
clue. A colloid is a substance that shows no power of crystallization,
and is composed of molecules united by their own affinity, and not
by atomic affinity. They have a gelatinlike nature or composition,
although varying greatly in chemical composition and general character.
They differ widely in stability, for instance, some being easily upset
by a change in conditions; and this peculiarity is of great importance
in relation to the phenomena of life, for colloids enter largely into
the composition of all living bodies, but always in a delicately
balanced union with crystalloids. "The colloid is in fact," declared
Thomas Graham, who first investigated its properties, "a dynamical
state of matter; the crystalloid being the statical condition. The
colloid possesses Energia. It may be looked upon as the probable
primary source of the force appearing in the phenomena of vitality."
Now, many of the properties of inorganic colloids approximate those
found in living structures, which appear to be "alive" by reason of the
conversion of the energy of the sunlight into the chemical energy of
their constituent (organic) colloids. The agent in this conversion is
the green substance chlorophyll in the cell or cells of the plant; and,
directly or indirectly, all the energy in living things arises from
this one source, transmuted by this one transformer. Yet chlorophyll
is far too complex a substance to arise as a first step from inorganic
matter, even where conditions are suitable for life to appear; and the
spontaneous production of such a thing as a bacterium would not solve
the problem, for the new-born cell would have no organic food, and
must at once perish. In an utterly lifeless planet inorganic colloids
must first develop, and in time one of these must begin to evolve not
a living cell, or anything so complex as a bacillus, but something in
the way of a molecule holding a higher store of chemical energy than
anything before it. Later such colloids, perhaps uniting with others,
would begin to condense and form more complex organic molecules, and
finally effect unions with crystalloids. Thus would organic complexity
gradually be led up to, chlorophyll brought into being, and life
appear. One of the foremost of the biochemists, Prof. Benjamin Moore,
of the University of Liverpool, has summed this up picturesquely:
"It was no fortuitous combination of chances, and no cosmic dust, which
brought life to the womb of our ancient Mother Earth in the far-distant
Paleozoic ages, but a well-regulated orderly development, which comes
to every mother earth in the universe in the maturity of her creation
when the conditions arrive within the suitable limits. Given the
presence of matter and energy forms under the proper conditions, life
must come inevitably.... If this view be the true one, there must
exist a whole world of living creatures which the microscope has never
shown us, leading up to bacteria and the protozoa. The brink of life
lies ... away down among the colloids, and the beginning of life was
not a fortuitous event occurring millions of years ago and never again
repeated, but one which in its primordial stages keeps on repeating
itself all the time and in our generation. So that, if all intelligent
creatures were by some holocaust destroyed, up out of the depths in
process of millions of years intelligent beings would once more emerge."
That is to say, life arose through a recombination of forces
preexisting in the cosmos, and the fact was but a step in the
evolutionary process. "Such evolution," the American biologist, Henry
Fairfield Osborn, declares with emphasis, "is essentially constructive,
and ... is continually giving birth to an infinite variety of new forms
and functions which never appeared in the universe before. It is a
continuous creation or creative evolution. Although this creative power
is something new derived from the old, it presents the first of the
numerous contrasts between the living and the lifeless world."
LIFE'S BORDERLAND
Although in some respects a deceptive resemblance may appear between
the living and the nonliving, the distinction is definite. Living
bodies, plant or animal, are made up of protoplasm, which, although
mineral in substance, consists of a combination never found in the
mineral kingdom. It gives to the body containing it the power of
growth, and this growth is by additions from within. Minerals may
increase in size, but only by additions from without. The prime
characteristics of living organisms is that they reproduce their kind,
given favorable conditions. Minerals never do so. A correlative of
life and growth is death, but minerals never die. In the course of its
career every animal or plant, in proportion to its need or the degree
of complexity of its organs, develops within itself characteristic
compounds, such as albumin, gluten, starch, cellulose, fat and other
chemical results, not a trace of any of which is to be found in rocks
or soil, or in the water or in the air. No distinction in nature is
so absolute as that between the inorganic and the organic realms, the
nonliving and living things, so far as our senses can perceive them.
When, however, we consider the two prime divisions of the living
world--animal and vegetable--so diverse in their higher developments,
we find them springing from the same base in a single cell of almost
structureless protoplasm, and so alike in this simplest form as to
be in some cases indistinguishable--mere drops of living matter
whose functions are so limited that they present no discriminative
characteristics. Indeed, marking a definite boundary between animals
and plants may be difficult in cases much higher in the scale than
these primitive globules of protoplasm.
A fundamental distinction between plants and animals as we now know
them is the exclusive possession by plants of the green substance
chlorophyll, by the presence of which their food is transformed under
the influence of sunlight into vital energy in a manner essentially
different from that by which animals assimilate their substance.
Chlorophyll is a complex, nitrogenous, colloidal substance, produced
by and always associated with, protoplasm, and related to the coloring
matter of the blood of animals. It is restricted to plants, and usually
resides only in definite portions of the cell; yet we have good reason
for believing, as Prof. William F. Ganong tells us, that our present
green plants were preceded in time by a colorless kind of the utmost
simplicity, and without chlorophyll, which yet could make their own
food from carbon dioxide and water by using the energy of chemical
oxidation of soil-minerals in place of sunlight. "We have precisely
such chemosynthetic organisms, a kind of soil bacteria, still living on
the earth at this day; and they are doubtless the lineal descendants
of the ancient forms, which probably lived in the mud of shallow seas
that may be full of them yet." These ancient chemosynthetic organisms
were neither animal nor plant, but both and between. They must have
expanded, varied, evolved, thus originating a great many branches, most
of which perished.
Now, from this biochemical borderland of life, let us turn our
attention to the living world as we know it to-day, or as preserved
for us in the "record of the rocks," pausing only to fix well in our
minds the main distinctions between animals and plants. Plants have no
special organs for digestion or circulation, nor any nervous system.
Most plants absorb inorganic food, such as water, carbonic acid gas,
nitrate of ammonia, phosphates, silica, etc. No animal swallows any
of these minerals as food. On the other hand, plants manufacture from
such materials the food on which animals exist, by the production and
storage in their tissues of starch, sugar, and nitrogenous substances.
The two kingdoms supplement one another. They are mutually dependent,
and probably originated simultaneously.