into the water. They did not dive like the mother, but went in like a
dog, with their head above water, and it was not till the middle of
October that they were observed to plunge into the water like the old
ones. When the water was let out of the pond for the purpose of cleaning
it they were shut up, but got out, and into the pond when it was half
full of water. The young ones were not able to get out without help, and
for some minutes the mother appeared very anxious, and made several
attempts to reach them from the side of the pond where she was standing,
but without success, as they were not within reach.
“She then plunged into the water to them, and began to play with one of
them for a short time, and put her head close to its ears, as if to make
it understand what she meant; the next moment she made a spring out of
the pond, with the _young one holding on to the fur_ at the root of the
tail _by its teeth_; this she did several times during a quarter of an
hour, as the young ones kept going into the water as fast as she got
them out. Sometimes the young held on by the fur of her sides, sometimes
by that at the tail. As soon as there was sufficient water for her to
reach them from the side of the pond, she took hold of them near the
ears with her mouth, and drew them out, and led them round the pond
close to the fence, and kept chattering to them, as if telling them not
to go into the pond again.”
[Illustration:
OTTER PURSUING FISH. _From a Japanese Drawing._
]
A litter of young raccoons were born in the spring of 1894.
Unfortunately they all died, just as it was hoped that they had passed
the most dangerous time of infancy. On the other hand, the little
Caucasian bear cubs, which arrived at Easter, throve amazingly, and in
three months grew to the size of a retriever dog, though they had not
abandoned the youthful habit of sucking the paws and “humming,” to
signify that they wanted to be fed. But the great and notable birth of
the year, almost contemporaneous with that of the infant prince, and
worthy to be noted as a _prodigium_, if the keeping of Sibylline books
were part of the English Constitution, was the arrival of a young “gnu.”
It was even uglier than its mother, whose compound features of a horse’s
body, a bull’s horns, and a goat’s beard combine to make her one of the
strangest beasts existing. The infant was exactly like its mamma, minus
the horns, but plus a high nose, and a curly beard, which makes it in
profile rather like a portrait of Sennacherib or Shalmanezar. Another
most beautiful calf of the wild cattle, a cross between the Chartley
bull and the white cow from the Bangor herd, is as pretty and pleasing
as the gnu calf is ugly. But in each case the mother is vastly proud of
its infant, and they are probably the best judges of what their
offspring should be.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANIMAL COLOURING.
THE conclusions of naturalists as to the laws which govern the colouring
of animals must, it seems, be modified. There is no reason, however, to
fear any loss of interest in one of the prettiest and most attractive
sides of natural history. The collection and comparison of the wonderful
analogies in colour between animals and their environment, and between
one animal and another, will still be guided by the leading principles
which Bates and Wallace detected; and the delight and surprise with
which the non-scientific world welcomed these discoveries need neither
be regretted nor diminished. But without wishing to grudge one iota of
the praise awarded to explanations, the dexterity and aptness of which
would alone entitle them to admiration, it is still possible to doubt
whether some of the minor hypotheses framed to account for facts which
seemed to stand outside the explanation of colour mimicry by the general
law of the survival of the fittest, are not almost too ingenious. The
fascination of the subject is so great that it seems to develop an
over-keenness of scientific insight. The facts of resemblance themselves
are so wonderful, and the contrast between the colours of the sexes in
birds so startling, that the temptation to make a great principle like
that of natural selection fit the exact requirements of each case, and
to explain the complexity of Nature in a sentence, is almost
irresistible. It is quite possible that the principle of natural
selection, which gives a perfect explanation of the wonderful phenomena
of “protective mimicry,” may also be the master-key to the remaining
problems of animal hues. The chief difficulties which remain, after
accounting for protective coloration, are, first, the extraordinary
differences between the tints and plumage of male and female in many
birds; and, secondly, the conspicuous colours of certain creatures by
which the attention of their enemies must necessarily be attracted. The
first of these obvious difficulties has been explained by what is called
“sexual selection,” which is an auxiliary to the general law of natural
selection. The female pheasants, or birds of paradise, or pigeons, as
the case may be, by an enduring good taste in choosing for their mates
those with the brightest plumage and finest wattles and spurs, have
played their part in the general scheme of evolution so well, that their
progeny have in time developed all the beauties which they now possess.
That theory is obviously quite consistent with the general law. It
accounts logically in part, if not entirely, for the perilous beauties
of the stronger sex. But there are creatures in gorgeous attire for
which “sexual selection” could give no justification—caterpillars, for
instance, which run additional risks by their conspicuous hues. “That,”
said the naturalist, “is in order to advertise their inedible
qualities!” “They require,” writes Mr. Wallace, “some signal, or danger
flag, which shall serve as a warning to would-be enemies not to attack
them, and they have usually obtained this in the form of conspicuous or
brilliant coloration, very distinct from the protective tints of the
defenceless animals allied to them.” There is one obvious objection to
this explanation. It is really too clever. It fits the case so perfectly
that, in the absence of further experiment and observation, one is
reluctantly obliged to pause before yielding entirely to such a
brilliant surmise, and to welcome the note of warning which Mr. Beddard,
the Prosector of the Zoological Society, utters in his admirable work on
“Animal Coloration.”[9] It is evident, from the space given to the two
points of “Sexual Selection” and “Warning Colours” in this work, which
aims only at furnishing a general notion of the facts and theories
relating to animal coloration, that room exists for doubt as to the
value to be attached to either theory. The contribution which Mr.
Beddard makes towards solving the difficulty is threefold. He presents
as alternatives to the theories of sexual selection and warning
coloration, the ingenious speculations of Mr. Stoltzmann and Dr. Eisig,
neither of which have yet found their way into works of a popular
character; and he gives an account of numerous and careful experiments
made at the Zoo, with insects of brilliant colouring and reputed evil
flavour, as food for birds and reptiles. No care or pains was omitted to
get at the truth of these supposed instances of warning colouring. No
augurs, with the purest motives to guide their interpretation of the
omens, ever watched the feeding of the sacred chickens in the Capitol
with a more ardent desire to mark the real appetite of the prophetic
fowls, than did Mr. Beddard and his predecessors, in observing the
practical results of “warning coloration” when making trial of the birds
at the Zoo. But the list of experiments does not give any clear line of
refusal or acceptance between the “protectively coloured” insects and
their more sober relations, and Mr. Beddard’s conclusion is that “the
experiments which have been made might be taken to prove anything.” That
is, so far, disappointing. But it is probable that with time and
patience a body of evidence will be accumulated which will throw more
light on the vexed question of the palatability of these gaudy insects
or reptiles. Meantime, the discoveries of Dr. Eisig, to which Mr.
Beddard introduces us, throw light on the question from a different
point of view. If his surmises are confirmed, the fact will be
additional evidence in favour of that minute and laborious
specialization which so often goes without reward. His researches were
devoted to the history of a small group of sea-worms. One of these he
found living parasitically upon a marine sponge in the Bay of Naples.
The sponge was of a yellow colour, caused by the presence of small
particles of colouring-matter. The worm was of the same colour, with
bright orange spots, and the _pigment_ which coloured the sponge was
found to be the same which coloured the worm, having been simply
transferred from the tissues of the sponge to the skin of the worm,
after going through part of the alimentary canal. Dr. Eisig is of
opinion that the “pigment” so transferred from the alimentary canal to
the skin is itself the cause of the creature being distasteful, which
suggests the conclusion that the brilliant colour—that is, the secretion
of a quantity of colouring-matter—has itself caused the inedibility of
species, rather than that the inedibility has made necessary the
production of bright colour as an advertisement. “This explanation,” Mr.
Beddard remarks, “is not entirely contrary to the views of Wallace,
Poulton, and others; for we may still suppose that the bright colours
are actually ‘warning’ colours, although they have not been evolved for
this purpose.” But the weakness, as well as the attraction, of the
unmodified theory really lies in the supposition of the creation in the
creature of colour, for the express purpose of advertisement. The modest
conjecture of Dr. Eisig transfers the explanation to safer ground.
Footnote 9:
_Animal Coloration_, by F. E. Beddard, M.A., Prosector to the
Zoological Society of London. Swan, Sonnenschein, and Co., London.
Macmillan and Co., New York.
The mode by which, in the simple organisms which he observed, the colour
was transferred from the food to the feeder, also suggests the existence
of some simple and natural relation between the tints in the skin, or
hair, and external conditions of food and temperature, to account for
the strange changes of colour to suit outside conditions in animals
exposed to the rigours of a northern winter. The mountain hare of
Ireland does not always change its colour to white in winter, though in
the colder climate of Scotland and Norway the change is the rule. So the
Arctic fox seems always to be “bleached” in the extreme north, though
often retaining its darker dress throughout the year when further south.
Yet exactly the same effects are found in connection with want of food
as with want of warmth. The rats in a large iron ship which was recently
wrecked off the coast of Northumberland,[10] and remained stranded for
many weeks without connection with the shore, turned quite white—a
change due apparently to starvation.
Footnote 10:
Near Blyth. When some shipwrights visited the vessel to remove rigging
and fittings, the starving rats swarmed round them, and ate the food
which they had brought for their dinners.
In strong contrast with the modifications of the part played by
evolution in animal colouring, suggested by Dr. Eisig, is the
alternative which Mr. Stoltzmann proposes to the theory of sexual
selection. It is not a change which will flatter the masculine
imagination. Contrasted with the view which accounted for the
predominance of male strength, and in some cases of masculine beauty,
over the weaker sex by a long course of discerning feminine selection,
it has an unconscious irony. Going quite outside the merits of the male
sex _per se_, Mr. Stoltzmann weighs its worth in view of the survival of
a species. So considered, an excess of males is an evil, which the law
of natural selection is under obligations to remedy.[11] The tendency of
Nature is to produce a superabundance of males, observations on the
origin of sex having shown that the percentage of male birds among birds
is greater than that of females. Further inquiries into the influence of
nutrition on sex go to show that badly-nourished eggs produce males,
while well-nourished eggs produce females; and scarcity of food is a
more common condition than its abundance. The fine feathers which “make
fine birds” have therefore been given to the males with a view to
exposing them to the attacks of their enemies, and so reducing their
numbers, always—be it observed—in accordance with the law of the
survival of the fittest, but by a curiously different line of argument
from that which lent its weight to the theory of sexual selection.
Probably neither the one nor the other should stand alone; nor is this
result to be feared. Bigotry seems almost unknown to the spirit of the
natural history research of to-day; the only danger of the open mind of
its followers is in the constructive ingenuity of theory which it seems
to foster.
Footnote 11:
The bad result of an excess of males is perhaps best ascertained in
the case of grouse moors. See Mr. A. Stuart Wortley’s remarks upon
this in _The Grouse_ (Fur and Feathers Series, Longmans, Green & Co.).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WILD-CATS AT THE ZOO.
THE reservation of one-tenth of the area of Scotland for deer-forests
has probably arrested the extermination of three, if not of four, of the
largest and rarest of our birds and beasts of prey for at least a
century. The great increase in the numbers of the golden eagle, and the
migration of the ospreys from the lakes to the forests, are among the
results of the protection so afforded. It was reasonable to expect that
the wild-cat would also benefit by the policy, now generally in favour
with owners of forests, of encouraging animals of prey to keep down the
grouse and hares. The arrival at the Zoological Gardens of two genuine
Scotch wild-cats, trapped during last year on the same estate in
Inverness-shire, is evidence that even there the rarest and wildest of
all British quadrupeds are recovering from the persecution of half a
century of grouse and black-cock preserving. Both were caught in steel
traps, and each had lost part of a fore-foot; but with the wonderful
vitality of all cats, they so far recovered from their injuries that, on
being confronted with each other, they at once joined battle, like the
Border rider at Chevy Chase, who—
“When his legs were smitten off,
Did fight upon his stumps.”
These bold and courageous beasts, fresh from the remnants of the
Caledonian Forest, have not diminished either in size or courage since
the wild-cat was described by John Bossewell in 1597:—“He is slye and
wittie, and seeth so sharply that he overcometh the darkness of night by
the shyninge light of his eyen. In shape of body he is like unto a
leopard”—[this is not the case, however]—“and hathe a great mouth. He
doth delight that he enjoyeth his liberty; and in his youth he is swift,
plyante, and merye. He maketh a rueful noise and a gasteful when he
profereth to fight with another.” The growling of the wild-cats is
“gasteful” indeed, not only when they proffer to fight with another, but
whenever a friendly visitor proffers to look at them. That owned by Lord
Lilford, which has been in the Zoological Gardens for some time, when
exhibited at the cat show at the Westminster Aquarium, performed the
singular and creditable feat in wild-cat annals of growling without
ceasing for two whole days, varied only by explosions of hisses and
spitting. This cat is somewhat lighter, and has fewer dark markings than
the Scotch wild-cats; the ground hue of the fur is pepper-colour, its
eyes pale-green, its nose very small—not a usual feature in
wild-cats—and covered with fur, its face round and bushy, and its
expression infinitely surly. The only stripes distinctly marked are two
on either side of the head.
Though the list of so-called wild-cats includes nearly twenty species,
there is only one, besides the animal we have described, which seems to
compete with it as the possible undescended great original of the
“bundle of concepts” which civilized man has in his mind when, with
reference to all the varieties of the domestic animal, he uses the
abstract term “cat.” This is the “chaus,” or jungle-cat, which bears
somewhat the same geographical and tribal relation to a Scotch or
Russian wild-cat as a Pathan tribesman to a Highlander. The Scotch
wild-cat is found with very little variation throughout Northern and
Central Europe, across the steppes of Northern Asia, as far as the
southern limits of the Nepaul Hills. At a height of some 8000 ft. his
place is taken by another cat, equally bold, and far less retiring and
solitary, the “chaus,” which is common not only in India, but at the
roots of the Caucasus, and throughout Northern Africa and Upper Egypt. A
splendid specimen of this Oriental cousin of our wild-cats occupies a
cage in the same house at the Zoo, under the somewhat misleading name of
the “Egyptian cat.” Nothing could well be more different from the
paintings of the sleek tabbies of ancient Egypt, the sacred animals of
the goddess Bast, petted by priests, and taught to catch wild-fowl for
their masters in the reedy banks of the Nile, than this rough, round,
broad-headed, bushy-whiskered, “upstanding” savage, who has held his own
till the present day in the swamps of Asia and Africa, and in the
immediate neighbourhood of every Indian country village or tank, just as
the European wild-cat did in England till the days of the Tudors. The
late General Douglas Hamilton, in his journals of sport in Southern
India, tells a story of the courage of this Indian wild-cat, which
matches exactly the experience of Charles St. John in Sutherlandshire.
St. John’s terriers had brought a wild-cat to bay under a rock, and when
he approached, the animal sprang straight at his face, and was only
stopped by a blow from a stick which he had cut before coming up to aid
the dogs. General Hamilton says of the chaus—“One of these animals came
into our cantonment evidently on the prowl for fowls, or anything it
could pick up; so we collected all the dogs we could, and had a hunt. We
came to a long check, the dogs being quite at fault. After looking for
some time, I spied the cat squatting in a hedge, and called for the
dogs. When they came I knelt down and began clapping my hands and
cheering them on; the cat suddenly made a clean spring at my face; I had
just time to catch it as one would a cricket-ball, and giving its ribs a
strong squeeze, I threw it to the dogs, not, however, before it had made
its teeth meet in my arm, just above my wrist. For some weeks I had to
carry my arm in a sling, and I shall carry the marks of the bite to my
grave.” The chaus is a far finer animal even than the European wild-cat.
It is larger and more powerful, though its proportions and movements are
almost the same. In colour it is a fine tawny-grey, with long bushy
hair, a ruff round its face, yellow cheeks shading into white, a long,
very broad nose, long ears slightly tufted, yellow eyes, and bars on its
tail. There are also two dark bars on the inside of the arm, above the
elbow; when laying its ears back, spitting and uttering growls like
distant thunder, it is the “very moral” of a big, ill-tempered domestic
tom-cat, which poaches all day, fights all night, and sleeps by choice
in the coal-cellar. Apart from their general resemblance to the tame
cat, both the chaus and the Scotch cat in their moments of repose
exactly resemble the domestic species. They never “pace” their cages—a
habit which distinguishes all leopards and tigers, and all the
tiger-cats _when young_. They sleep all day, if possible, either curled
up on their backs with their noses upwards, like a tame cat in a sunny
window; or with their backs drawn up and their fore-paws tucked neatly
under their chests. When feeding, they do not lie down like the
leopards, but crouch over their food, with their jaws almost upon the
ground, and their backs somewhat arched, like a tame cat with a mouse.
Anatomists state that the European wild-cat differs from the tame animal
in the dimensions of that part of its interior which is in such request
for violin-strings. If this objection is fatal to the claim of the
former to be the ancestor of our cats, we should be inclined to find its
direct ancestor in the chaus—a view which need not conflict with the
conclusions of M. Champfleury, who considers that the Egyptian cat was
acclimatized in Egypt at the same time as the horse, in 1668 B.C.
All the other wild “cats” are either tiger-cats, leopard-cats, or
puma-cats, names in which the last half of the compound should, we
think, be read rather as a “diminutive” than as an index to race. In
them the habits and appearance of the larger rather than the smaller
animal appear to the writer to bear the greater proportion in the
affinities of the whole. From first impressions, the Bengal tiger-cat,
for example, appears to be a variety of the domestic cat with the coat
and colouring of a leopard, or rather of a cheetah. Its attitudes, or
rather those of the full-grown specimen in the Society’s collection, are
those of a tired house-cat. It sleeps in the same positions, and like
the true cats never “paces” for exercise. But a young one of the same
species, shown this year at the Westminster Aquarium, untamed, preserved
all the lion-like features strongly developed, just as the young of
lions and pumas preserve the spots which disappear at maturity. The
movements of this little creature and its general proportions were
almost exactly those of a quarter-grown lion. It had the square head,
the flat massive jaws, and the same restless, eager, pacing movements
from side to side of its cage, and feet always ready to claw or strike.
The colouring and texture of the skin in the full-grown animal are
wholly unlike any variety of domestic cat known to the “fancy.” Its
colour is tawny, its coat short and close, its eyes yellow with a black
centre. The face of the adult is narrow like that of a female house-cat;
but the six parallel lines, two on either side, and two in the centre of
the head, break into spots upon the back. Its tail, which is long and
thick, is spotted, not ringed, and it has spotted, leopard-like legs.
The collection of these beautiful smaller _felidæ_ in the Zoological
Gardens is less complete than that of any other tribe exhibited. Even
the “clouded tiger,” the most perfect in colouring of all the spotted
kinds, has disappeared from the collection, though some years ago there
were two fine specimens in the Cat House. The “clouded tiger” is marked
with almost rectangular ornaments of clouded black on a ground of rich
buff. It is the largest of all the “tiger-cats,” and has a very long,
thick, silky tail, ringed with black. This animal has a special claim to
be an inmate of the Zoo, for it was first discovered and brought to this
country by Sir Stamford Raffles, the moving spirit in the establishment
of the Zoological Society. They were no less good than beautiful, and
the following description of their behaviour from the pen of Sir
Stamford Raffles himself should be contrasted with the ancient and
inbred malignity of the true wild “cat.”