questions. It belongs in all our scientific classifications to the
group of lung-breathing mollusks, like the common garden snail. Yet it
has one remarkable peculiarity: it possesses an operculum, or door to
its shell, like that of the periwinkle. This operculum represents among
the univalves the under-shell of the oyster or other bivalves; but it
has completely disappeared in most land and fresh-water snails, as well
as among many marine species. The fact of its occurrence in the
cyclostoma would thus be quite inexplicable if we were compelled to
regard it as a descendant of the other lung-breathing mollusks. So far
as I know, all naturalists have till lately always so regarded it; but
there can be very little doubt, with the new light cast upon the
question by Darwinism, that they are wrong. There exists in all our
ponds and rivers another snail, not breathing by means of lungs, but
provided with gills, known as paludina. This paludina has a door to its
shell, like the cyclostoma; and so, indeed, have all its allies. Now,
strange as it sounds to say so, it is pretty certain that we must
really class this lung-breathing cyclostoma among the gill-breathers,
because of its close resemblance to the paludina. It is, in fact, one
of these gill-breathing pond-snails which has taken to living on dry
land, and so has acquired the habit of producing lungs. All molluscan
lungs are very simple: they consist merely of a small sac or hollow
behind the head, lined with blood-vessels; and every now and then the
snail opens this sac, allowing the air to get in and out by natural
change, exactly as when we air a room by opening the windows. So
primitive a mechanism as this could be easily acquired by any
soft-bodied animal like a snail. Besides, we have many intermediate
links between the pond-snails and my cyclostoma here. There are some
species which live in moist moss, or the beds of trickling streams.
There are others which go further from the water, and spend their days
in damp grass. And there are yet others which have taken to a wholly
terrestrial existence in woods or meadows and under heaps of stones.
All of them agree with the pond-snails in having an operculum, and so
differ from the ordinary land and river snails, the mouths of whose
shells are quite unprotected. Thus land-nails have two separate
origins--one large group (including the garden-snail) being derived
from the common fresh-water mollusks, while another much smaller group
(including the cyclostoma) is derived from the operculated pond-snails.
How is it, then, that naturalists had so long overlooked this
distinction? Simply because their artificial classification is based
entirely upon the nature of the breathing apparatus. But, as Mr.
Wallace has well pointed out, obvious and important functional
differences are of far less value in tracing relationship than
insignificant and unimportant structural details. Any water-snail may
have to take to a terrestrial life if the ponds in which it lives are
liable to dry up during warm weather. Those individuals alone will then
survive which display a tendency to oxygenise their blood by some
rudimentary form of lung. Hence the possession of lungs is not the mark
of a real genealogical class, but a mere necessary result of a
terrestrial existence. On the other hand, the possession of an
operculum, unimportant as it may be to the life of the animal, is a
good test of relationship by descent. All snails which take to living
on land, whatever their original form, will acquire lungs: but an
operculated snail will retain its operculum, and so bear witness to its
ancestry; while a snail which is not operculated will of course show no
tendency to develop such a structure, and so will equally give a true
testimony as to its origin. In short, the less functionally useful any
organ is, the higher is its value as a gauge of its owner's pedigree,
like a Bourbon nose or an Austrian lip.
XIX.
_DOGS AND MASTERS._
Probably the most forlorn and abject creature to be seen on the face of
the earth is a masterless dog. Slouching and slinking along, cringing
to every human being it chances to meet, running away with its tail
between its legs from smaller dogs whom under other circumstances it
would accost with a gruff who-the-dickens-are-you sort of growl,--it
forms the very picture of utter humiliation and self-abasement. Grip
and I have just come across such a lost specimen of stray doghood,
trying to find his way back to his home across the fields--I fancy he
belongs to a travelling show which left the village yesterday--and it
is quite refreshing to watch the air of superior wisdom and calm but
mute compassionateness with which Grip casts his eye sidelong upon that
wretched masterless vagrant, and passes him by without even a nod. He
looks up to me complacently as he trots along by my side, and seems to
say with his eye, 'Poor fellow! he's lost his master, you
know--careless dog that he is!' I believe the lesson has had a good
moral effect upon Grip's own conduct, too; for he has now spent ten
whole minutes well within my sight, and has resisted the most tempting
solicitations to ratting and rabbiting held out by half-a-dozen holes
and burrows in the hedge-wall as we go along.
This total dependence of dogs upon a master is a very interesting
example of the growth of inherited instincts. The original dog, who was
a wolf or something very like it, could not have had any such
artificial feeling. He was an independent, self-reliant animal, quite
well able to look after himself on the boundless plains of Central
Europe or High Asia. But at least as early as the days of the Danish
shell-mounds, perhaps thousands of years earlier, man had learned to
tame the dog and to employ him as a friend or servant for his own
purposes. Those dogs which best served the ends of man were preserved
and increased; those which followed too much their own original
instincts were destroyed or at least discouraged. The savage hunter
would be very apt to fling his stone axe at the skull of a hound which
tried to eat the game he had brought down with his flint-tipped arrow,
instead of retrieving it: he would be most likely to keep carefully and
feed well on the refuse of his own meals the hound which aided him most
in surprising, killing, and securing his quarry. Thus there sprang up
between man and the dog a mutual and ever increasing sympathy which on
the part of the dependent creature has at last become organised into an
inherited instinct. If we could only thread the labyrinth of a dog's
brain, we should find somewhere in it a group of correlated
nerve-connections answering to this universal habit of his race; and
the group in question would be quite without any analogous mechanism in
the brain of the ancestral wolf. As truly as the wing of the bird is
adapted to its congenital instinct of flying, as truly as the nervous
system of the bee is adapted to its congenital instinct of honeycomb
building, just so truly is the brain of the dog adapted to its now
congenital instinct of following and obeying a master. The habit of
attaching itself to a particular human being is nowadays engrained in
the nerves of the modern dog just as really, though not quite so
deeply, as the habit of running or biting is engrained in its bones and
muscles. Every dog is born into the world with a certain inherited
structure of limbs, sense-organs, and brain: and this inherited
structure governs all its future actions, both bodily and mental. It
seeks a master because it is endowed with master-seeking brain organs;
it is dissatisfied until it finds one, because its native functions can
have free play in no other way. Among a few dogs, like those of
Constantinople, the instinct may have died out by disuse, as the eyes
of cave animals have atrophied for want of light; but when a dog has
once been brought up from puppyhood under a master, the instinct is
fully and freely developed, and the masterless condition is thenceforth
for him a thwarting and disappointing of all his natural feelings and
affections.
Not only have dogs as a class acquired a special instinct with regard
to humanity generally, but particular breeds of dogs have acquired
particular instincts with regard to certain individual acts. Nobody
doubts that the muscles of a greyhound are specially correlated to the
acts of running and leaping; or that the muscles of a bull-dog are
specially correlated to the act of fighting. The whole external form of
these creatures has been modified by man's selective action for a
deliberate purpose: we breed, as we say, from the dog with the best
points. But besides being able to modify the visible and outer
structure of the animal, we are also able to modify, by indirect
indications, the hidden and inner structure of the brain. We choose the
best ratter among our terriers, the best pointer, retriever, or setter
among other breeds, to become the parents of our future stock. We thus
half unconsciously select particular types of nervous system in
preference to others. Once upon a time we used even to rear a race of
dogs with a strange instinct for turning the spit in our kitchens; and
to this day the Cubans rear blood-hounds with a natural taste for
hunting down the trail of runaway negroes. Now, everybody knows that
you cannot teach one sort of dog the kind of tricks which come by
instinct to a different sort. No amount of instruction will induce a
well-bred terrier to retrieve your handkerchief: he insists upon
worrying it instead. So no amount of instruction will induce a
well-bred retriever to worry a rat: he brings it gingerly to your feet,
as if it was a dead partridge. The reason is obvious, because no one
would breed from a retriever which worried or from a terrier which
treated its natural prey as if it were a stick. Thus the brain of each
kind is hereditarily supplied with certain nervous connections wanting
in the brain of other kinds. We need no more doubt the reality of the
material distinction in the brain than we need doubt it in the limbs
and jaws of the greyhound and the bull-dog. Those who have watched
closely the different races of men can hardly hesitate to believe that
something analogous exists in our own case. While the highest types
are, as Mr. Herbert Spencer well puts it, to some extent 'organically
moral' and structurally intelligent, the lowest types are congenitally
deficient. A European child learns to read almost by nature (for
Dogberry was essentially right after all), while a Negro child learns
to read by painful personal experience. And savages brought to Europe
and 'civilised' for years often return at last with joy to their native
home, cast off their clothes and their outer veneering, and take once
more to the only life for which their nervous organisation naturally
fits them. 'What is bred in the bone,' says the wise old proverb, 'will
out in the blood.'
XX.
_BLACKCOCK._
Just at the present moment the poor black grouse are generally having a
hot time of it. After their quiet spring and summer they suddenly find
their heath-clad wastes invaded by a strange epidemic of men, dogs, and
hideous shooting implements; and being as yet but young and
inexperienced, they are falling victims by the thousand to their
youthful habit of clinging closely for protection to the treacherous
reed-beds. A little later in the season, those of them that survive
will have learned more wary ways: they will pack among the juniper
thickets, and become as cautious on the approach of perfidious man as
their cunning cousins, the red grouse of the Scottish moors. But so far
youthful innocence prevails; no sentinels as yet are set to watch for
the distant gleam of metal, and no foreshadowing of man's evil intent
disturbs their minds as they feed in fancied security upon the dry
seeds of the marsh plants in their favourite sedges.
The great families of the pheasants and partridges, in which the
blackcock must be included, may be roughly divided into two main
divisions so far as regards their appearance and general habits. The
first class consists of splendidly coloured and conspicuous birds, such
as the peacock, the golden pheasant, and the tragopan; and these are,
almost without exception, originally jungle-birds of tropical or
sub-tropical lands, though a few of them have been acclimatised or
domesticated in temperate countries. They live in regions where they
have few natural enemies, and where they are little exposed to the
attacks of man. Most of them feed more or less upon fruits and
bright-coloured food-stuffs, and they are probably every one of them
polygamous in their habits. Thus we can hardly doubt that the male
birds, which alone possess the brilliant plumage of their kind, owe
their beauty to the selective preference of their mates; and that the
taste thus displayed has been aroused by their relation to their
specially gay and bright natural surroundings. The most lovely species
of pheasants are found among the forests of the Himalayas and the Malay
Archipelago, with their gorgeous fruits and flowers and their exquisite
insects. Even in England our naturalised Oriental pheasants still
delight in feeding upon blackberries, sloes, haws, and the pretty fruit
of the honeysuckle and the holly; while our dingier partridges and
grouse subsist rather upon heather, grain, and small seeds. Since there
must always be originally nearly as many cocks as hens in each brood,
it will follow that only the handsomest or most attractive in the
polygamous species will succeed in attracting to them a harem; and as
beauty and strength usually go hand in hand, they will also be the
conquerors in those battles which are universal with all polygamists in
the animal world. Thus we account for the striking and conspicuous
difference between the peacock and the peahen, or between the two sexes
in the pheasant, the turkey, and the domestic fowl.
On the other hand, the second class consists of those birds which are
exposed to the hostility of many wild animals, and more especially of
man. These kinds, typified by the red grouse, partridges, quails, and
guinea-fowls, are generally dingy in hue, with a tendency to
pepper-and-salt in their plumage; and they usually display very little
difference between the sexes, both cocks and hens being coloured and
feathered much alike. In short, they are protectively designed, while
the first class are attractive. Their plumage resembles as nearly as
possible the ground on which they sit or the covert in which they
skulk. They are thus enabled to escape the notice of their natural
enemies, the birds of prey, from whose ravages they suffer far more in
a state of nature than from any other cause. We may take the ptarmigans
as the most typical example of this class of birds; for in summer their
zigzagged black-and-brown attire harmonises admirably with the patches
of faded heath and soil upon the mountain-side, as every sportsman well
knows; while in the winter their pure white plumage can scarcely be
distinguished from the snow in which they lie huddled and crouching
during the colder months. Even in the brilliant species, Mr. Darwin and
Mr. Wallace have pointed out that the ornamental colours and crest are
never handed down to female descendants when the habits of nesting are
such that the mothers would be exposed to danger by their
conspicuousness during incubation. Speaking broadly, only those female
birds which build in hollow trees or make covered nests have bright
hues at all equal to those of the males. A female bird nesting in the
open would be cut off if it showed any tendency to reproduce the
brilliant colouring of its male relations.
Now the blackcock occupies to some extent an intermediate position
between these two types of pheasant life, though it inclines on the
whole to that first described. It is a polygamous bird, and it differs
most conspicuously in plumage from its consort, the grey-hen, as may be
seen from the very names by which they are each familiarly known. Yet,
though the blackcock is handsome enough and shows evident marks of
selective preference on the part of his ancestral hens, this preference
has not exerted itself largely in the direction of bright colour, and
that for two reasons. In the first place the blackcock does not feed
upon brilliant foodstuffs, but upon small bog-berries, hard seeds, and
young shoots of heather, and it is probable that an æsthetic taste for
pure and dazzling hues is almost confined to those creatures which,
like butterflies, hummingbirds, and parrots, seek their livelihood
amongst beautiful fruits or flowers. In the second place, red, yellow,
or orange ornaments would render the blackcock too conspicuous a mark
for the hawk, the falcon, or the weapons of man; for we must remember
that only those blackcocks survive from year to year and hand down
their peculiarities to descendants which succeed in evading the talons
of birds of prey or the small-shot of sportsmen. Feeding as they do on
the open, they are not protected, like jungle-birds, by the shade of
trees. Thus any bird which showed any marked tendency to develop
brighter or more conspicuous plumage would almost infallibly fall a
victim to one or other of his many foes; and however much his beauty
might possibly charm his mates (supposing them for the moment to
possess a taste for colour), he would have no chance of transmitting it
to a future generation. Accordingly, the decoration of the blackcock is
confined to glossy plumage and a few ornamental tail-feathers. The
grey-hen herself still retains the dull and imitative colouring of the
grouse race generally; and as for the cocks, even if a fair percentage
of them is annually cut off through their comparative conspicuousness
as marks, their loss is less felt than it would be in a monogamous
community. Every spring the blackcock hold a sort of assembly or court
of love, at which the pairing for the year takes place. The cocks
resort to certain open and recognised spots, and there invite the
grey-hens by their calls, a little duelling going on meanwhile. During
these meetings they show off their beauty with great emulation, after
the fashion with which we are all familiar in the case of the peacock;
and when they have gained the approbation of their mates and maimed or
driven away their rivals, they retire with their respective families.
Unfortunately, like most polygamists, they make bad fathers, leaving
the care of their young almost entirely to the hens. According to the
veracious account of Artemus Ward, the great Brigham Young himself
pathetically descanted upon the difficulty of extending his parental
affections to 131 children. The imperious blackcock seems to labour
under the same sentimental disadvantage.
XXI.
_BINDWEED._
Not the least beautiful among our native wild flowers are many of those
which grow, too often unheeded, along the wayside of every country
road. The hedge-bordered highway on which I am walking to-day, to take
my letters to the village post, is bordered on either side with such a
profusion of colour as one may never see equalled during many years'
experience of tropical or sub-tropical lands. Jamaica and Ceylon could
produce nothing so brilliant as this tangled mass of gorse, and
thistle, and St. John's-wort, and centaury, intermingled with the lithe
and whitening sprays of half-opened clematis. And here, on the very
edge of the road, half-smothered in its grey dust, I have picked a
pretty little convolvulus blossom, with a fly buried head-foremost in
its pink bell; and I am carrying them both along with me as I go, for
contemplation and study. For this little flower, the lesser bindweed,
is rich in hints as to the strange ways in which Nature decks herself
with so much waste loveliness, whose meaning can only be fully read by
the eyes of man, the latest comer among her children. The old school of
thinkers imagined that beauty was given to flowers and insects for the
sake of man alone: it would not, perhaps, be too much to say that, if
the new school be right, the beauty is not in the flowers and insects
themselves at all, but is read into them by the fancy of the human
race. To the butterfly the world is a little beautiful; to the
farm-labourer it is only a trifle more beautiful: but to the cultivated
man or the artist it is lovely in every cloud and shadow, in every tiny
blossom and passing bird.
The outer face of the bindweed, the exterior of the cup, so to speak,
is prettily marked with five dark russet-red bands, between which the
remainder of the corolla is a pale pinky-white in hue. Nothing could be
simpler and prettier than this alternation of dark and light belts; but
how is it produced? Merely thus. The convolvulus blossom in the bud is
twisted or contorted round and round, part of the cup being folded
inside, while the five joints of the corolla are folded outside, much
after the fashion of an umbrella when rolled up. And just as the bits
of the umbrella which are exposed when it is folded become faded in
colour, so the bits of the bindweed blossom which are outermost in the
bud become more deeply oxidised than the other parts, and acquire a
russet-red hue. The belted appearance which thus results is really as
accidental, if I may use that unphilosophical expression, as the belted
appearance of the old umbrella, or the wrinkles caused by the waves on
the sea-sands. The flower happened to be folded so, and got coloured,
or discoloured, accordingly. But when a man comes to look at it, he
recognises in the alternation of colours and the symmetrical
arrangement one of those elements of beauty with which he is familiar
in the handicraft of his own kind. He reads an intention into this
result of natural causes, and personifies Nature as though she worked
with an æsthetic design in view, just as a decorative artist works when
he similarly alternates colours or arranges symmetrical and radial
figures on a cup or other piece of human pottery. The beauty is not in
the flower itself; it is in the eye which sees and the brain which
recognises the intellectual order and perfection of the work.
I turn the bindweed blossom mouth upward, and there I see that these
russet marks, though paler on the inner surface, still show faintly
through the pinky-white corolla. This produces an effect not unlike
that of a delicate shell cameo, with its dainty gradations of
semi-transparent white and interfusing pink. But the inner effect can
be no more designed with an eye to beauty than the outer one was; and
the very terms in which I think of it clearly show that my sense of its
loveliness is largely derived from comparison with human handicraft. A
farmer would see in the convolvulus nothing but a useless weed; a
cultivated eye sees in it just as much as its nature permits it to see.
I look closer, and observe that there are also thin lines running from
the circumference to the centre, midway between the dark belts. These
lines, which add greatly to the beauty of the flower, by marking it out
into zones, are also due to the folding in the bud; they are the inner
angles of the folds, just as the dark belts are the overlapping edges
of the outer angles. But, in addition to the minor beauty of these
little details, there is the general beauty of the cup as a whole,
which also calls for explanation. Its shape is as graceful as that of
any Greek or Etruscan vase, as swelling and as simply beautiful as any
beaker. Can I account for these peculiarities on mere natural grounds
as well as for the others? I somehow fancy I can.