milk-giving animals we must inquire of our own day, to learn something
as to the causes of their success in life. And first let us notice two
important changes which give them an advantage over other backboned
creatures. We have seen that, as we have gradually risen in the scale
of Life, parents have taken more and more care of their eggs and their
young ones. Among the boneless animals which we studied in _Life and
her Children_, it was not (with very few exceptions) till we reached
the clever, industrious, intelligent insects, that we found them taking
any thought for the weak and helpless infants. There we did find it,
for insects in their own peculiar line stand very high among animals;
when, however, we turned back again to begin with the first feeble
representatives of the backboned family, we found the fish casting
their eggs to the bottom of the sea, or on the pebbly gravel of a
flowing stream, and, as a rule, taking no more thought of them. The
tiny stickleback with his nest, and the lumpsucker watching over his
young ones, were quite exceptions among the finny tribe. So it was
again with the frogs, so with the reptiles (the turtles, lizards, and
snakes), whose eggs, even when carefully buried by the mother, are
often devoured by thousands before the little ones have a chance of
creeping out of the shell. But when we come to the birds, there, as
with the insects, we find parental care beginning--the nest, the home,
the feeding, the education in flying, in singing, in seeking food, the
warm-hearted love which will risk death sooner than forsake the little
ones.
Yet still these same little ones have many perils to run even before
they break through the shell. In spite of their parents’ care, more
eggs probably are eaten by snakes or weasels, field-rats, and other
creatures, than remain to be hatched; while, even if they escape being
devoured, the eggs must not be allowed to grow cold; and should the
parents be too long away or be scared off the nest by some enemy, or
should a damp cold season spoil the warm dry home, the young bird is
killed in the egg before it has ever seen the light.
It is not difficult to see, therefore, that if the mother could carry
the egg about with her till the little bird was born, as we found our
little common lizard doing (see p. 105), it would be much safer than
when left in the nest exposed to so many dangers.
Now something of this kind takes place with all that great group of
animals we are going to study. The cat and the cow, as we all know, do
not lay eggs as birds do; but the mother carries the young within her
body while they are going through all the changes which the chicken
goes through in the egg. Thus they go wherever she goes, the food which
she takes feeds them, and they lie hidden, safe from danger, till they
are born, perfectly formed, into the world. Nor is this all; for when
at last her little ones see the light, the mother has nourishment ready
for them; part of the food which she herself eats is turned into milk,
and secreted by special glands, so that the newly-born calf or kitten
is suckled at its mother’s breast till it has strength to feed itself.
These two advantages, then,--namely, that the young have no dangerous
egg-stage, but are sheltered by their mother till they are perfect,
and that their mother has milk to give them for food,--at once divide
the _Mammalia_ or milk-giving group of animals from the rest of the
backboned family.
But how will this help us to learn where that great group begins? Is it
possible that such creatures as these can have anything in common with
reptiles and birds? To answer these questions we must travel to a part
of the world which has long been separated from the great continents
of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and where the low and feeble
milk-giving animals had a chance of still keeping a place in the world.
Take a map and look at Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania, and you
will see that they are separated by a number of scattered islands from
the great continents, which are not only large in themselves, but are
all nearly joined together, with only narrow straits dividing them.
Moreover, Australasia stands even more alone than appears at first
sight; for Mr. Wallace has pointed out that a very deep sea separates
New Guinea and Australia on the one hand from Borneo and China on the
other; so that the land might rise several thousand feet, and yet the
Australasian islands would not be joined to the great continents.
Now, if the milk-givers once had feeble beginnings, and gradually
branched out, as the ages went on, into all the many forms now living,
it is clear that on the great battlefield of Europe, Asia, Africa,
and America, the first poor weak forms would gradually be destroyed
by the stronger ones that overran these great continents. They would
be crushed out, as so many of the reptiles and newts and fishes had
been before them; and only their bones, if any remained, would tell
us that they had once lived. But if some of them could find a refuge
in a domain of their own, where after a time they had a good open sea
between them and their stronger neighbours, they might have a chance of
living on and keeping up the old traditions.
And this is just what we have reason to believe has been their history;
for it is exactly in Australasia that we find that curious group of
pouched animals, the kangaroos and other _Marsupials_,[108] as they
are called, which are different from all the other milk-giving animals
in the world, except the opossums of America, whom we shall speak of
by-and-by.
And together with these marsupials we also find the simplest
milk-giving animals now living. Come with me in imagination to a quiet
creek in one of the rivers of East Australia. It is a bright summer
day, and the lovely acacias are hanging out their golden blossoms in
striking contrast to the tall graceful gum-trees and dark swamp oaks
in the plain beyond. Come quietly, and do not brush the reeds growing
thickly on the bank; for the least noise will startle the creature
we are in search of, and he will dive far out of sight. There he is,
gently paddling along among the water plants. His dark furry body,
about a foot and a half long, with a short broad tail at the end, makes
him look at first like a small beaver. But why, then, has he a flat
duck’s bill on the tip of his nose, with a soft fold or flap of flesh
round it, with which he seems to feel as he goes? Again, he has four
paws, with which he is paddling along; but though these paws have true
claws to them, they have also a thick web under the toes, stretching,
in the front feet (C Fig. 50), far beyond the claws, yet loose from
them, so that while it serves for swimming it can be pushed back when
the animal is digging in the ground. His hind feet have a much shorter
web, and a sharp spur behind, like that of a game cock.
And now, as this animal turns his head from side to side you can see
his sharp little eyes, but not his ears, for they are small holes which
he can close quite tightly as he works along in the water, pushing his
bill into the mud of the bank, just as a duck does, and drawing it back
with the same peculiar jerky snap; for he too has ridges in his beak
like the duck family, through which he sifts his food; while, at the
same time, he has in his mouth eight horny mouth-plates, peculiar to
himself.
What, then, is this four-footed animal with a beaver’s fur and tail,
and teeth in his mouth, and yet with a duck’s bill and webbed feet?
He is the lowest and simplest milk-giving animal we know of in the
world--the duck-billed Platypus or Ornithorhynchus, called by the
settlers the Water-mole.
[Illustration: Fig. 49.
The Duck-billed Platypus[109] swimming and rolled up, with its
underground nest laid open behind; on the right hand bank is an
Echidna.[110]
]
If we could search along the bank we should find, somewhere below the
water’s edge, a hole, and again, a few feet back on the land, another
among the grass and reeds; and both of these lead into a long passage,
which ends in a snug underground nest--a dark hole lined with dry grass
and weeds--where in the summer time (about December) we should find the
mother platypus, with two or four tiny naked young ones, not two inches
long, cuddled under her. How these little ones begin life we do not
know. The natives talk about finding soft eggs like those of reptiles;
but it seems more likely that these eggs break just as they are laid,
like those of our common lizard (see p. 105), and the naked little ones
come out alive into the nest.
[Illustration: Fig. 50.
A, Head of Ornithorhynchus, showing serrated bill; B, Hind foot
with claw _a_, found on the males only; C, Webbed fore foot.]
And how are they fed? Their mother has no teat, like the cow, to put
into their mouth, for she is a very primitive creature; only in one
spot amid her fur are a number of little holes, and from these she can
force out milk for them to drink as they press against her with their
soft flat bills. So here, in a dark underground nest, away from the
world, because she cannot, like the higher animals, carry her little
ones till they are perfect, the duck-billed platypus, which may well be
called “paradoxical” (see Fig. 49), enables us to picture to ourselves
how, in ages long gone by, mothers first began to feed their little
ones with their own milk.
And now, perhaps, you will be struck by this animal’s likeness to a
bird, especially when you hear that the little baby water-moles have
a soft horny knob on their nose, just where young birds have a hard
knob for breaking through the shell; and you will ask if milk-giving
animals came from birds. Not at all; young tortoises, too, have such a
knob, and so have crocodiles; and, moreover, these duck-billed moles
have many parts of their skeleton, especially the shoulder bone and
the separate bones of the skull, very like our living reptiles, and
still more like some which lived in ages long gone by.[111] And yet at
the same time they differ essentially both from reptiles and birds in
many points besides those we have been able to mention, and in one in
particular, which we can understand now we have studied these groups,
namely, that the platypus, like all milk-giving animals, _is without
that curious quadrate bone_ (_q_, Figs. 23 and 33) _which we find in
all reptiles and birds_.
Now, notice the frog, which is an amphibian and therefore lower than
the reptiles, has not got this quadrate bone, though his companions the
newts have; and he seems to tell us that among those old amphibians
which roamed in the coal-forests of ages past, there must have
been some which,--while they had that great mass of cartilage which
imperfect, unborn, milk-giving animals have even now, out of part of
which this bone is formed,--yet never went so far as to have the bone
itself. If this is so, then here at last, in the distant past--so
remote that we cannot even guess how long ago it may have been--we have
a point from which the earliest ancestors of the milk-giving animals
may have gone off in one direction, and those of reptiles and birds in
another. And this would explain how it is that they have so many points
in common, while yet the mammalia are without that special bone and
other characters which are found both in reptiles and birds.[112]
Be this as it may, here is our lowest mammalian form, and he has a
relation, the Echidna, very like him in many respects, but who has made
a decided step forward; for on the sandy shores and in the rocky gorges
of Australia, creatures about a foot long, covered with prickly spines
like hedgehogs, and called by the settlers “Porcupine Ant-eaters” (see
Fig. 49), shuffle along in the twilight, thrusting out their long thin
tongues from the small mouth at the end of their beak-like snout, and
feeding on ants and ants’ eggs. These do not belong, however, to the
real ant-eater family, but are near relations to the platypus; and they
are well protected by their spines in the battle of life, for when
attacked they either roll themselves up into a ball like a hedgehog,
or burrow down into the sand so fast that they seem to sink into it,
leaving only the points of their prickles sticking out to pierce the
feet of their enemy. Now these creatures have a little fold of skin
under their body, which forms two little pouches over the milk-giving
holes, and the little echidna when _very_ tiny is put into this pouch,
and keeps its head there while its body grows larger and sticks out
beyond. In this way the Echidna can carry her child about with her, and
she only turns it out to shift for itself when its prickles are hard
and sharp.
* * * * *
You see, then, that though we began with the simplest known milk-giving
animal, we are, in the Echidna, already fairly on our way to the
curious pouched creatures of Australia, the “Marsupials,” which,
instead of a small fold, have indeed a large pouch of skin, into which
they put their little ones when they are less than two inches long, and
so imperfect that their legs are mere knobs, and they can do nothing
more than hang on to the nipple with their round sucking mouths as if
they had grown to it.
There the little ones hang day and night, and their mother from time
to time pumps milk into their mouth, while they breathe by a peculiar
arrangement of the windpipe, which reaches up to the back of their
nose. Then, as they grow, the pouch stretches, and by-and-by they begin
first to peep out, and then to jump out and in, and feed on grass as
well as their mother’s milk. For a long time they take refuge in the
pouch whenever there is any danger or they are tired, and Professor
Owen has suggested that this curious pouch arrangement may be of great
use in a country where water is often so far to seek that the little
ones could not travel to it unless the mother could carry them.
[Illustration: Fig. 51.
Australian Marsupials.
Kangaroos; a flying Phalanger; and the Kaola or native Bear, with a
young one on its back.]
Now this race of pouched animals we find spreading all over a land
where they had none of the higher four-footed animals to dispute
the ground with them, for there are no ordinary land mammalia in
Australia, except bats, which could fly thither; mice and rats, which
could be carried on floating wood, and a fierce native dog, the Dingo,
which was probably brought by the earliest native settlers long after
the marsupials had spread and multiplied. And what is more, though
we find the bones of marsupials of all sizes buried in the rocks of
Australia, some of them as large as elephants,[113] showing that these
creatures too had their time of greatness, we do not find those of
ordinary mammalia.[114] It would seem, then, that for long ages the
pouched animals had the field to themselves, and they made good use of
it, filling all the different situations which in other parts of the
world are filled by ordinary four-footed creatures.
On the plains, mountains, and red stony ridges are the long-legged
Kangaroos every child knows so well in the Zoological Gardens. There
they browse upon the grass and leaves as our cattle do in Europe, and
some of them, such as the great gray Kangaroo,[115] grow to be as much
as five feet high, and can make a good fight even against the fierce
dingo dog, hugging him in their arms and ripping him up with the strong
nail of the long middle toe of their hind foot, which answers in them
to the hoofs of our cattle and deer. And yet they are peaceable enough
unless attacked, as they lurk among the tall ferns and grass, and will
far rather leap away than turn and attack an enemy. Others are much
smaller, such as the Kangaroo Rats, which feed on roots and grasses,
one of them, the Tufted-Tailed Kangaroo-Rat,[116] biting off tufts of
grass and carrying them in his tail to make a soft nest to sleep in;
while the Tree Kangaroos[117] of New Guinea live in the trees, feeding
on the leaves and jumping from bough to bough.
All these, from their long hind legs and jumping movements, we should
recognise at once; but the plump furry Wombat (see Fig. 52) looks more
like an ordinary four-footed animal, as it wanders by night burrowing
and gnawing the roots of plants. So too do the tree-climbing animals,
the Kaola or tailless bear (Fig. 51), which often carries its young one
on its back, and the beautiful Phalangers or “Australian Opossums,”
which live in hollow trees and come out on moonlight nights to feed
upon the leaves, hanging from the boughs by their long prehensile
tails. Yet all these animals have a pouch for their young, and while
the long-tailed furry Phalangers play the part of the fruit-eating
monkeys in a land where monkeys have probably never been, another group
of them, the “Flying Phalangers” (Fig. 51), with a membrane stretching
between their front and hind legs, represent the flying squirrels, and
live at the very top of the gum trees, feeding on leaves and flowers,
and taking flying leaps with their limbs outspread.
These are all vegetable-feeders; and they leave plenty of room for the
little insect-feeders, the Myrmecobius, with its long bushy tail, and
the Bandicoots or rabbit-rats, which feed partly on bulbs and roots,
and more often on insects, grubs, and even small mice and vermin.
But where are the animal-eaters? Surely here, as in other parts of the
world, some of the group have taken to feeding on their neighbours?
There are very few carnivorous animals in Australia, and these are
small, though fierce, and feed chiefly on rats and mice; yet the bones
of huge marsupials, with long pointed teeth, found in the rocks, tell
us that dangerous animals were once there before they were driven out,
probably by the Dingo and savage man. And when we get to Tasmania,
where no Dingos are found, there the flesh-eating marsupials still
live, as fierce as any wolves and wild cats of Europe, and still they
are pouch-bearers. Slim and elegant as the fierce and furry Tiger-wolf
(Fig. 52) looks as he courses over the Tasmanian plains in search of
prey, yet the mother carries her young in a pouch like the gentler
wombat or the powerful kangaroo; and so does the mother of the Native
Devil or Tiger-cat (Fig. 52), which is so fierce that even the natives
are afraid of it when it turns at bay, and it will attack and devour
large sheep, though it is only the size of a terrier dog.
We see, then, that the marsupials in a world of their own, cut off by
the sea from the struggling world beyond, play all parts in life; and
squirrels, monkeys, insect-eaters, gnawing animals, hoofed animals, and
beasts of prey, all have their parallel among the pouch-bearers. But
just because they are so isolated it becomes a curious question why,
when we travel right across the wide Atlantic or Pacific to America, we
find another set of pouched animals slightly different but belonging
to the same group. How comes it that the clever little opossums of
Guiana, Brazil, and Virginia (see Fig. 53, p. 200), which grasp the
trees with the free nailless great toe of their hind feet and hang by
their long tails, should be marsupials, carrying their little ones in
pouches, when all their relations are thousands of miles away over the
sea?
[Illustration: Fig. 52.
Tasmanian Marsupials.
The two to the left of the picture are Wombats;[118] the front
right hand figure the Tasmanian Devil;[119] and the background
figure the Tasmanian Wolf.[120]
]
Stop a moment, and let us go back to those times when the marsupials
were living with the great flying reptiles in Europe and North America.
These forms (see p. 183) were like the little myrmecobius now living
in Australia, and at some period, we do not know exactly when, their
descendants must have found their way to that part of the world, where
they have since branched out into so many curious forms, gnawing,
leaping, running, and flying, and filling the place of ordinary
quadrupeds. But they must also have lived on in the Northern Hemisphere
and branched out into other forms; for much later, when tigers and
other ferocious beasts had begun to prowl about in the forests of
Europe and America, opossums were leaping in the trees, as we know by
finding their bones in Suffolk, under Paris, and in North America.
And so we see that when these opossums found their way down south to
Brazil and Guiana, the simile that we used a little while ago (p. 131)
probably became literally true, and the Australian and South American
pouched animals are related to each other, not because they come one
from the other, but because they both come from the same very ancient
stock which once lived in Europe.
This would explain how these active, furry, little beings of all sizes,
from that of a good-sized cat to a rat, come to be sporting among the
leaves of the grand forests of Brazil or on the edges of the Virginian
swamps, sleeping during the day in the hollow trees, and prowling by
night over the plantations, and among the rice-fields feeding on fruit
and seeds, worms and insects, and even on young birds and rats. On the
ground they walk heavily, with flat feet, but in the trees they swing
from bough to bough (see Fig. 53), the little ones curling their tails
round that of their mother and clinging to her back as she goes. Some
of these opossums have even lost the pouch, and put their little ones
at once on to the thick fur of their back as soon as they come out of
their snug nests in the tree-hollows. They seem to have a happy time
of it, these merry tree-climbers, and know well how to swing out of
danger, or to feign death if they cannot escape, so that “cute as a
’possum” is a common American proverb. One kind, living in the swamps
of Guiana, feeds almost entirely on crabs, while another, called the
Yapock, has webbed feet and dives under water, feeding on fish and
other water-animals.
But here another question presents itself. How is it that these curious
pouched animals have lived on in America as well as in Australia when
they have been killed off in Europe and Asia? The answer to this is
not far to seek if we remember that geology teaches us that there
have been many changes of land and sea in past times, for the neck
of land which joins South America to North America is very low and
narrow, and a change of level of scarcely more than 2000 feet would
break it up into islands; and as we know that such changes have taken
place in past geological times, there is no doubt that once this neck
was partially under the sea, and South America, like Australia, was a
huge continental island, where the lower animals might struggle on and
become settled, before the higher ones poured in to interfere with them.
* * * * *
Indeed, if the opossums did not teach us this history, we might learn
it from another singularly old-fashioned race of animals; for in the
same Brazilian forests in which our little opossums are sporting,
the dreamy Sloth, with his long arms, short legs with the knees bent
outwards, and long thick hair drooping over his eyes, is hanging back
downwards from the boughs; while the strange Ant-bear is tearing open
the ant-hills with his strong bent claws in the damp earth below, and
licking up the insects with his long sticky tongue; and the Armadillo,
whose back is covered with bony shields like the crocodile, issues out
of his burrow at night to dig for worms or roots or buried animals. We
may look all the world over and we shall not find another group so
strange and old-fashioned as this one, nor even any creatures of their
kind, except the ant-eaters of the Cape and the scaly Manises of Africa
and India, which also live, as you will notice, upon continents which
jut out into the water, and not on the great northern mass of land.
[Illustration: Fig. 53.
South American pouched animal, the Opossum;[121] and imperfect-toothed
animals--Sloth,[122] Ant-bear,[123] and Armadillo.[124]]
In many ways these curious animals (_Edentata_) of South America and
Africa are more singular, though not of so ancient a race, as the
“pouch-bearers.” Many of them, the American ant-bears and the African
Pangolins, are quite toothless, and those which like the sloth have
teeth, have very imperfect ones more like the teeth of reptiles than
those of marsupials; again, their feet have the toes much joined
together, and the sloths have only three toes on the hind feet and
sometimes two only on the front, and the joints of their neck are
irregular in number. Thus we see in them that variability of structure
which always points to a low order of animals; and, moreover, the
armadilloes are the only milk-giving animals which are covered with
bony plates like reptiles.
[Illustration: Fig. 54.
African imperfect-toothed animals--Aard-Vark or Cape Ant-eater in the
background, and scaly Manis or Pangolin in the foreground.]
What, then, is the history of these old-fashioned animals? Much the
same as that of the marsupials, so far as we can read it; for at
the same time that opossums were living in Europe, strange animals,
with imperfect rootless teeth, and toes with immense claws, bent
inwards like the claws of the ant-eaters, were wandering over France
and Greece, where we now find their bones. Then, a little later we
find, on the shores of the Pacific in North America, other huge
imperfect-toothed creatures, which lived, died, and were buried in
the mud; and lastly, in South America, still later, we find whole
skeletons of gigantic sloth-like animals the size of elephants,[125]
which had not yet such long arms as the Sloth of to-day, but walked
on four feet upon the ground and browsed upon the trees, while huge
armadillo-like creatures,[126] with solid bony shields covering their
backs, wandered in the vast forests and lived on animal food. Making
use of these facts, then, cannot we picture to ourselves how these
large unwieldy creatures, with their stiff bent claws and their weakly
teeth, which if once broken or lost could not be replaced by a second
set, were no match for the large tigers, bears, and other beasts of
prey which were roaming over Europe and Asia; while those, on the
contrary, which found their way from North to South America, and were
cut off from the crowded world, just as the marsupials were, might live
on and fill the land with large creepers and burrowers. In the old
world the same would probably happen in Africa, where the sea certainly
flowed at one time over the low-lying desert of Sahara; and so the
Cape Ant-eater and the Pangolin, both so different from their American
relations, would keep their place in the world.
This would explain how they gained a firm footing; but the next
question is how they kept it, when jaguars and pumas began to roam over
America, and lions and panthers over Africa? Now, if we inquire into
the history of the Aard-Vark or great Cape ant-eater, which is in many
ways much more like the American armadilloes,--for he has like them
teeth in the back of his mouth, and walks flat-footed, though he has a
thick skin and bristles instead of armour,--we find that he is a very
timid animal, and lives almost entirely underground, only venturing out
at night to scratch open the ant-hills with his strong claws, so that
he may thrust his long sticky tongue into the ant-galleries to draw
it back covered with food. Even then he never ventures far from his
hole, so we can easily conjecture that it is by concealment that he has
escaped destruction.
Still more would the Pangolins flourish, for though they are toothless
and walk very clumsily, because their front feet are bent under so that
they tread on the upper part, yet they have two means of protection.
First, like the ant-eater, they live chiefly underground and come out
at night; and secondly, their back is covered with sharp-edged scales,
which grow from the skin as hairs do, and can be raised into a complete
_cheval-de-frise_ as they roll themselves up, or tuck their tail and
head between their legs when they are attacked. Thus protected, the
scaly ant-eaters not only flourish in Africa, but have even kept their
ground in India, China, and Ceylon.
In America, on the other hand, we find that the armadilloes have gone
strangely back to the bony armour of the reptiles or the ancient
Labyrinthodonts, and have shields on their backs and heads formed of
skin-plates exactly like those of the crocodile, so that the only
delicate part of their body is the under side, which is kept close to
the ground. When we see how well they are protected, and also remember
that they are extremely quick burrowers and can get out of the way of
dangerous enemies, while they feed on vegetables, insects, and dead
creatures, we see why the plains and forests of South America should
abound in armadilloes of all sizes, from the Great Armadillo, as large
as a moderate-sized pig, to the little Pichiciago, not larger than a
rat.
It would be more difficult to understand how the great hairy
Ant-bear[127] (p. 200), with his twisted feet, united toes, and
toothless tube-like snout, has managed to live on in the dense forests
of South America, if we did not know that he is immensely strong, and
his sharp claws and the deadly hug of his muscular arms are avoided
even by large animals, while the small American Ant-eaters[128] live
chiefly in the trees, feeding on bees, termites, and honey. A strange
fellow is the great ant-bear as he wanders at night slowly and heavily
along the river-banks, his long bushy tail sweeping behind him and his
head bent low; or, if it be a mother, she may be carrying her little
one clinging to her back, or pause to hold it in her long arms as it
sucks. Be this as it may, by-and-by the ant-bear reaches a group of
nests of termites (wrongly called white ants), looming six feet high in
the dark night; at once the sharp claws are at work tearing the hill to
pieces, though they are so strongly built that men have to open them
with a crowbar, and as the alarmed termites rush out, the long sticky
tongue wanders among them and they are drawn into the ant-bear’s mouth
by thousands. Yet the ant-bear has his enemies, for it may be that in
his night-walk he may come across the fierce jaguar in search of prey.
Now, D’Azara, the great traveller, doubted the stories of the natives
when they said that the ant-bear could kill the jaguar, but Mr.
Cumberland, who has lived much in South America and has himself killed
the ant-bear, assures me that the animal is quite a match for such
a wild beast. The muscles of his shoulder and arms are tremendous,
the claws so hard and strong and sharp that when once stuck in they
never lose their hold, and the ant-bear when attacked stands up and
gives a death-hug so dreadful that the natives never dare to come to
close quarters with him. Moreover, he is very difficult to kill. Mr.
Cumberland, by the help of his dog and man, caught and disabled one of
these creatures so as to tie his legs together and keep him stunned,
but his skull was so hard that repeated blows with heavy quartz rock
on his nose, the most vulnerable point, only succeeded in stunning him,
and his skin was so tough that an ordinary small dagger-knife made no
impression whatever. With all their efforts they could not put the
poor animal to death till the following morning, when they could get
a strong and sharp knife to butcher him. Such a creature as this need
scarcely fear a jaguar or any beast of moderate size.
Such, however, is not the case with the dull-looking hairy forms which
move among the tall cecropia trees above the ant-bear’s head; for the
sloths, though busy enough in the trees, would fare but badly if they
were condemned to live upon the ground. The sloth is surely one of the
most curious examples of how an animal may live and flourish by taking
to a strange way of life. We have seen (p. 202) how his ancestors, the
Megatheriums, walked upon the ground, while he himself was formerly
pitied by all travellers because his arms are so long in comparison
with his legs that if he wants to walk he has to drag himself along
upon his elbows, and while the ankles of his hind feet are so twisted
that he can only rest on the side of the foot. But then they forgot
that he seldom or never descends to the ground, for the buds and leaves
of the trees are his food, and they are so juicy that he does not need
to come down to drink, and when he is in his natural place in the trees
he is no longer helpless.
There, safe from prowling animals on the ground below, he hangs like
a hammock from the bough. The long fingers of his hand (in some
sloths two, in others three, in number) and the three toes of his
twisted hind feet, all armed with long claws, seize the branch like
grappling irons; while his long flexible neck, which in one kind of
sloth has more joints than in other mammalia, enables him to look over
his shoulder and take a wide survey around. In the daytime he sleeps
with his back in the fork of a branch and his head bent forward on
his chest, but as the sun goes down he rouses to life and feeds by
stretching out those long arms to tear the leaves and twigs, which he
stuffs into his mouth and chews with his few back teeth. He has no need
to hurry or disturb himself, for his long thick hair protects him from
insects; and from the very fact of his being fitted for a tree-life he
is safe from other animals except snakes, and even they do not find him
out easily, so like is his dull matted hair to the colour of the bark
and moss. Even the young ones run very few risks, for they are not born
till they are perfect, and then the baby sloth clings to its mother’s
hair, and goes with her wherever she travels, sucking till it is old
enough to hang on to a bough and feed itself. So they live a completely
tree-life, and sleepy as they seem, yet they can move quickly enough
when they wish; and they often take advantage of a time when the wind
is blowing so that the branches from tree to tree sway against each
other, and by seizing the boughs as they touch, pass along and find new
feeding-grounds.
We see, then, that while the duck-billed water-mole and the echidna
have found a comparatively peaceful home in Australia, where the
pouched animals have reigned as monarchs, and still hold their own
in spite of the animals brought in by man; and while the opossums,
by taking to a tree-life, revel in the forests of America: so the
imperfect-toothed animals, an old and antiquated race of Life’s
children, still remain in a few scattered forms by reason of their
power to adapt themselves to peculiar conditions of life. What they
may have been in olden times we can scarcely guess; but one thing is
certain, namely, that before such strangely different forms as the
sloth, the ant-eater, the manis, and the armadillo could each have
settled down and taken on their special protective armour and habits,
many others must have tried, flourished awhile, and died out. When we
look at the bones of the gigantic Ground-sloths or Megatheriums of
olden times, which walked on four feet and are supposed to have lived
by tearing the trees up by the roots and feeding on the branches, or
when we examine the huge shield of the monster Glyptodon, and find
that it had no movable bands between the plates such as enable the
armadillo to burrow with ease, or in some kinds to roll up in a ball,
we see that it is not always size and strength that win in the battle
of life; but that the sloth of to-day has probably lived on because,
in taking refuge in the trees, it has secured great advantages by
those peculiarly long arms and twisted feet for which men used to pity
it; while the ant-eaters and armadilloes in their underground homes,
and the pangolins rolled up into prickly balls, show that passive
resistance and retiring habits, especially if fortified by a thick
skin, are sometimes quite as useful in the struggle for existence as
fierce passions and aggressive weapons.
[Illustration: THE PIONEERS OF THE ARMY OF MAMMALS]
CHAPTER IX.
FROM THE LOWER AND SMALLER MILK-GIVERS WHICH FIND SAFETY IN
CONCEALMENT, TO THE INTELLIGENT APES AND MONKEYS.
Having now taken leave of the curious pouch-bearers and the strange
primitive sloths and armadilloes, we find ourselves left to deal with
an immense multitude of modern mammalia, which have spread in endless
variety over the earth, and which may be divided into five great
groups--the _Insectivora_ or insect-eaters; the _Rodents_ or gnawers;
the climbing and fruit-eating Lemurs and Monkeys; the _Herbivora_ or
large vegetable-feeding animals; and the _Carnivora_ or flesh-eaters.
All these groups are very distinct now, and we naturally turn back
to ancient times to ask how they first started each upon their own
road. But when we do this, we meet with a history so strange that it
makes us long to open the great book of Nature still further, and by
ransacking the crust of the earth in all countries to try and find the
explanation, which will no doubt come some day to patient explorers.
The history is this. We saw in the last chapter that in those far
distant ages, when even reptiles were only beginning to spread and
multiply by land and sea, and when, although birds probably existed,
still they did not as yet leave any traces behind, small milk-giving
and insect-eating animals, the _Microlestes_ and _Dromatherium_ (see p.
183), were already living upon the earth, and left their teeth and jaws
in the ground.
Now, as ages passed on and the reptiles increased in strength, these
little milk-giving animals evidently flourished, for though we have not
yet discovered any of their bones in the rocks of the Chalk Period, yet
as we find them both before and after that time, they must have lived
on in some part of the world, the rich vegetation and abundant insect
life affording them plenty of food. Meanwhile the huge reptiles, of
kinds now long extinct, reigned over land and sea and air, and were in
the height of their glory,--when suddenly there comes a blank and their
history ends. When we look again, “a change has come o’er the spirit
of the dream,” and in the next period we find their bones no more.
From that time we meet only with the four groups of lizards, snakes,
tortoises, and crocodiles, which still survive; and the place of the
swimming, flying, and walking reptiles is taken by four-footed and
milk-giving animals.
Some of these were still marsupials like those that had gone before;
others were of strange forms, distantly related to them; others were
curious ancestral forms of our hyænas and bears, dogs and civets,
horses and tapirs,[129] in which the characters which distinguish these
groups were not so distinct as they are now, while others again were
old forms of moles, hedgehogs, squirrels, bats, and lemurs. In what
part of the world, then, had all these been growing up, that we come
upon them so suddenly? Before the seas of the chalk only the small
marsupials; after them, when the areas of land began to increase in
extent, a whole army of milk-givers, so different from each other and
so well adapted for their lives, that we even find among them such
peculiar forms as whales, with their arms converted into paddles, and
bats with their arms acting as wings.
What an idea this gives us of the immense period of time that must have
elapsed while the chalk was forming, the reptiles becoming extinct, and
the mammalia taking their place!
We have had a hint of this before, when we learned in _Life and her
Children_ how infinitely minute the shells are of which chalk is made,
and what enormous thicknesses remain of the chalk-beds. And now we find
these facts strengthened by the great changes which then took place in
the animal world, for even if (as is likely) older forms of these large
milk-givers existed in earlier times, and we have not yet found them,
yet there are such great differences between whales, bats, dogs, and
lemurs, that our imagination stands appalled at the time required to
account for them.
Again, where are the traces of all the forms which must have existed
between the little marsupials and this great army of four-footed
beasts? At present no one can answer. Forty years ago we knew nothing
even of those early marsupials, and people said there were no
milk-giving animals until after the time when the chalk was formed. Now
a few jaws have told us that milk-givers had been already in the world
for ages; and it may be that before forty years more have passed, some
child now reading these lines, and following in the footsteps of such
patient explorers as Beckles and Gaudry, or the American naturalists
Leidy, Cope, Marsh and others, who have such a grand field before them,
may discover bones which will unravel the history of that crowd of
mammalia which now seems to start up like Cadmus’ army from the ground.
But for the present we can only begin with them as we find them
immediately after the Chalk Period, and a strange motley group they
appear. There, roaming among the palms, evergreens, screw-pines and
tree-ferns, which flourished in Europe and North America in those
warmer times, were beasts larger than oxen, with teeth partly like
the tapir, partly like the bear, and feet like the elephant,[130]
which may have been both animal and vegetable feeders. With them were
true vegetarians, which could be called neither rhinoceroses, horses,
nor tapirs, but had some likeness to each.[131] Others, half-pigs
half-antelopes, were thick-skinned, but graceful and two-toed,[132]
while a little fellow no bigger than a fox,[133] with five toes on his
front feet and three behind, the ancestor of our horses, grazed in
the open plains. There too, moles, hedgehogs, and dormice had already
begun to make their underground homes, and squirrels and lemurs sprang
about the trees of the forest, where bats roamed at night in search of
insects. Nor was this life without its dangers, for beasts of prey,
half-bears half-hyænas,[134] were there to feed upon their neighbours,
and with them a creature half-dog half-civet,[135] with several
other carnivorous animals with feeble brains and partly marsupial
characters,[136] and lastly a large flat-footed dog-bear,[137]
something between a dog, a cat, and a bear, with a very small brain but
plenty of teeth, represented the most primitive flesh-eating animal
known to us.
None of these forms were of the same species as those now living, and
many of them, as we see, had characters which we now find in two or
three different animals; showing that they had not yet specialised the
various weapons of attack and defence, and the difference of limbs and
teeth which now distinguish their descendants. So that, for example,
though there were fierce animals of prey, none had yet the formidable
teeth of the tiger nor the muscular strength of the lion, neither had
the vegetarians the fleetness of the horse, the horns of the deer, nor
the large brain of the elephant.
This had all to come with time, and from that day to this their
descendants have been spreading over the earth. Some, large and
powerful, have conquered by strength; some, by superior intelligence,
have learned to herd together and protect each other in the battle of
life; some have gone back to the water and imitated the fish in their
ocean home; and others, smaller and feebler, have lived on by means of
their insignificance, their rapid multiplication, and their power of
hiding, and feeding on prey too minute to attract their more powerful
neighbours.
Among all these there are hundreds of different forms, branching out
here and there, crossing each other’s path and often jostling on the
way; while during the long period between our first knowledge of them
and now, they have been driven or have travelled from one country to
another, from the northern to the southern hemisphere, or from the
Old to the New World, till in many cases it is impossible to say what
routes they have taken.
How, then, shall we get a glimpse of the nature of these large groups?
Shall we take the moles and hedgehogs as the lowest, and the monkeys
as the highest, and then travel in a straight line through the forms
between? Scarcely, I think, for it is very doubtful whether the lemur
and the dormouse may not be able to boast of ancestors as ancient as
the moles, while the elephant and the dog are surely as intelligent
and far nobler animals than the monkey. No! we must make up our minds
at once that the different branches have grown side by side to much
the same height, so that our genealogical tree, if it were possible to
make one, would, like a real tree, be a mass of entangled twigs, some
of which would, indeed, be less aspiring than others, yet on the whole
we could scarcely say that one reached nearer to the sky than another.
What perfection they have each obtained in their own line is quite
another question, and one which we are able to trace out.
* * * * *
Thus, for example, the gnawing animals or _Rodents_, and the
insect-eaters or _Insectivores_, are undoubtedly the lowest types next
to the sloths and armadilloes, the insect-eaters especially having very
primitive skeletons and small brains. Yet we shall find that we pass
very naturally from them to the intelligent monkeys, while, on the
other hand, the vegetable-feeders and flesh-eaters go off upon quite a
different line of their own.
Let us, then, begin with these two lowly groups, the _Rodents_ and
_Insectivores_, and see how they have conquered their humble place in
the world. One thing is clear, that they do not hold it by strength or
audacity, for taken as a whole they are small and weak animals; the
giants among rodents, the Capybaras of South America, where all lower
kinds of animals thrive, are only as large as good-sized pigs, and
the smallest, the “Pocket-mice” of North America, are not bigger than
large locusts; while the insect-eaters have nothing larger than the
“Tenrecs” or soft-bristled hedgehogs of Madagascar, about the size of a
tailless cat; and the rest of the group vary from two to eight inches
all over the world. Moreover, they are as a rule timid, and though some
of them fight fiercely among themselves, yet they scamper away and hide
at the least alarm, and generally choose the twilight or the dark night
for their feeding time.
Stroll out some fine summer’s evening, when the sun has set and the
moon has not yet risen, and as you wander in the fields and woods with
eye and ear open, you will scarcely have gone far before you will
be aware that there is plenty of stir going on. Some active little
field-mouse will cross your path in her eager search for grain and
seeds to lay up for her winter store, or you may startle a hare in the
long grass and watch her run across the field, or see her sit upright
on her haunches surveying the quiet night-world. Or, if you pass over a
common, the number of little white tips glancing in the twilight from
under the furze bushes will tell you that the rabbits have not yet
disappeared into their burrows; while as you enter the wood the sharp
little eyes of the squirrel will peep down upon you from the beech
trees, as she watches over her little ones in their comfortable nest in
the branches.
All these are _Rodents_, and you may know them by their four long
chisel-like front teeth (see B, Fig. 55), which have a large gap on
each side, between them and the grinding teeth behind. These chisel
teeth have not bony roots like the teeth of most animals, but rest in
a deep socket, and continue growing during the whole of the animal’s
life; and they have a hard coat of enamel in front, so that as the
tooth wears away behind, this enamel stands out and forms a sharp
cutting edge, and there is perhaps no tool more efficient for gnawing
a root, a nutshell, or the solid wood of a tree, than the tooth of a
beaver or rat.
[Illustration: Fig. 55.
A, Skull of an insect-eating animal (_Insectivore_), showing the
numerous pointed teeth. B, Skull of a gnawing animal (_Rodent_)
showing the large chisel teeth in front, and the gap between these
and the hind teeth.
]
But these animals have another and quite a different set of companions,
as you will learn if you are lucky enough, by looking carefully along
the hedge, to startle a little shrew in its quest for worms, or to
catch a hedgehog shuffling along at a sharp trot after his nightly
meal of beetles, slugs, and snails; nay, you may even, if it be early
summer, come across a mole, or find two fighting fiercely together for
possession of the only thing they come to the upper world to fetch--a
wife.
These creatures have not the long front chisels of the hare or the
shrew; on the contrary, their mouth is small, and crowded with a number
of fine pointed teeth (see A, Fig. 55), of which even the back ones
have sharp cusps or points, well fitted for crushing insects. For these
are _Insectivora_ or insect-eaters; and while the rodents are gnawing
at roots and leaves and nuts, these devourers of small fry mingle with
them very amicably; while both groups only ask that the night-owl
may not see them in their evening wanderings, nor the weasel and his
bloodthirsty tribe attack them in their homes.
For, ever since they began the race of life, long long ago, these two
very different orders of animals have been trying to feed without risk,
and to keep out of the way of flesh-eating birds and larger creatures.
And so it has come to pass that, though the rodents are mostly
plant-eaters, while their associates are insect-eaters, yet, as both
are trying to conceal themselves, and get their food by stealth, they
have acquired curiously similar external forms, weapons, and habits of
life, with the one exception of their teeth and the manner of eating
their food.
Even in our English meadows a casual observer might easily mistake
the little _insect-eating_ shrew, with its soft velvety coat and bare
paws (Fig. 56), for a near relation of the _gnawing_ Harvest-mouse
nibbling the grass tips just above its head (Fig. 57); though a nearer
inspection of the shrew’s long snout, small ears, and sharp teeth,
would show the difference. And as to their way of life, the Field-shrew
and the larger Field-mouse live like two brothers of the same race.
They both make burrows in the banks, though the field-mouse digs the
deeper hole, and they both line their home with dry grass to bring up
their little ones. And when the winter comes they both retreat into
their homes; the shrew to sleep away the dark days, and the mouse to
wake from time to time to feed upon his store. Only their food is quite
different, and when they come out in the twilight of the summer’s
evening, the mouse is on the look out for acorns, nuts, grains, and
roots, which it gnaws off with its sharp chisels, while the shrew is
chasing worms and insects, or cracking tiny snails with its pointed
teeth.
Then if you lie and watch quietly by the bank of a river, there you
may see the Water-rat or Vole (not the land-rat which sometimes hunts
for prey in the water) diving under with a splash to gnaw the roots
of the duckweed or the stems of the green flags, and coming up to sit
on the bank, and hold them in his paws as he eats them; while not far
off a pretty little Water-shrew, this time too small and different to
be mistaken for his companion, is swimming along with his hind feet,
the air bubbles covering his velvety back with silvery lustre as he
chases water-shrimps, or feeds on fish-spawn or young frogs. Both these
animals live in streams and rivers, and bring up their young in holes
in the bank, where they can jump into the water if the weasel attacks
them, or the common snake pokes his head too near their home.
These are perhaps the chief examples we shall find in England of
insect-eaters and gnawers living near together and following the same
kind of life; but if we look over the world it is most curious how many
parallels we can draw between them, showing how the same dangers have
led to the same defences.
[Illustration: Fig. 56.
A group of Insect-eaters.
Common Shrew, Hedgehog, Mole, Bat.]
Look among the _insect-eaters_ at our Hedgehog (Fig. 56), so weak
and shuffling in his movements that he would have been cleared out of
the world long ago but for the sharp elastic spines which grow upon
his back in the place of hair. There he goes trotting along under the
hedges in the twilight, cracking the horny skins of beetles, or sucking
eggs, or devouring worms, slugs and mice when he can get them, without
a thought of fear. For he can roll himself up in an instant if danger
be near, and his sharp spines will keep off even dogs and foxes, unless
they can catch him unawares, and bite him underneath in his soft
throat. Nay, he can actually master a poisonous snake, and use it for
food, not suffering even from the adder’s fangs when they pierce his
tender nose.
[Illustration: Fig. 57.
A group of Rodents.
Harvest-mouse, Porcupine, Mole-rat.]
It is curious to see how quickly he can roll himself up by drawing
together the strong band of muscle which passes along the sides of his
body from head to tail, sending out bands of muscle to feet, head,
and legs. When he contracts this band his limbs are all drawn in, and
the spiny back forms a kind of prickly bag all round them, even his
tender snout being safely hidden. Nor are his spines merely sharp--they
are as elastic as the hair of which they are modifications; and the
hedgehog can drop safely from a height when he is in his ball-shape,
falling on the spines, which bend and straighten again as though made
of whalebone. So he lives under hedges and in ditches till the winter
comes, when he settles down in a nest of moss and leaves in a hedgebank
or a hollow tree, and sleeps the cold weather away. And when the spring
comes he takes a wife, who brings up her little ones in the nest of
moss and leaves under the hedgerow, watching over them as long as their
spines are soft.
And now where shall we look among the _rodents_ for a creature to match
the hedgehog among insect-eaters? Surely to the “fretful Porcupines,”
which feed on all kinds of vegetable food in Southern Europe, Africa,
Asia, and America, protecting themselves by the formidable array of
spines which they can raise at will. Even the European porcupine,
which is about two feet long and the weakest of his tribe, is better
protected than is generally believed. It is true that his long black
and white ringed spines only cover the hinder part of his body, but
the hair of his head and neck hides a number of short spines which can
give very sharp pricks; and though he is a timid night-loving animal,
hiding by day in burrows and holes of the rocks, yet when attacked he
jerks himself up against his enemy, so that the long spines wound very
severely. And when we come to the Tree-porcupines, which hang by their
tails from the palm trees in Mexico and Brazil, we find that their
short stout spines are a very efficient defence both against birds
of prey and the deadly coils of the boa constrictor and other large
snakes; while the Western porcupine and the almost tailless Canada
porcupine, which climb trees and strip off their bark and buds, have
a clothing of such dangerous weapons that pumas and wolves have been
known to die of inflammation from the wounds.
The porcupine among the rodents, then, like the hedgehog among
insect-eaters, has adopted prickles as a defence. But there are many
soft-haired creatures living upon the ground in both families which
have no protection but concealment, and we find them both gaining it by
burrowing into the ground. Among the _insect-eaters_ the Mole is the
most successful digger, and as he works his tortuous way through the
ground in search of worms and grubs, it is scarcely possible to imagine
a miner more usefully equipped for his work. His skeleton, it is true,
is, on the whole, more primitive and roughly finished than that of
higher animals, his ear is almost closed, and his eye though bright
is deeply hidden; but the parts specially necessary to him are most
wonderfully fitted for the work they have to do.
His broad shovel-like front paws (see Fig. 56), with their five strong
claws, set each in a long groove at the tip of the last finger-joint,
are powerful tools for shovelling away the earth, as he turns them
outwards and pushes with them as if he were swimming; and they are
carried on strong, short, and broad front legs, fixed to collar-bones
and a shoulder blade of unusual strength, while the breastbone is so
formed as to throw the legs forward and bring them on a level with his
nose when he is burrowing. This nose, too, has its part to play, for
it is long and slender, with a small bone at the tip, which helps him
in pushing his way forwards while his hind feet are planted flat and
firm on the ground behind, while it also serves to pick out the grubs,
worms, and beetles from their narrow holes.
Here, then, we have the very best of miners, who has secured food and
safety far from the busy world above, and spends his time hunting for
grubs and earth-worms in the dark earth below. He is a most voracious
animal, and makes the ground above him heave and swell as he toils
through it eager for prey, pushing up every now and then with his nose
the loose earth he has excavated, thus marking the line of his route by
molehills.
But when he builds his home and fortress where he takes his long
winter’s sleep, and hides from weasels and pole-cats, he takes care to
throw no loose rubbish above; on the contrary, he presses the earth
together so as to make the walls of his chamber firm and hard, and
carries out from it a number of passages, by any of which he can reach
his home in safety when he is pursued too closely.
Thus by his cleverness in burrowing, and the useful tools which he
carries upon his body, the mole has managed to find safe feeding-ground
and shelter, when no doubt many of his relations living above ground
have been killed off. Even underground he has his enemies, for the
Weasel, the Stoat, and the Badger find him good eating, while if he
meets one of his own brothers in a narrow passage they will fight till
one is killed and eaten; yet though fierce he is also tender-hearted,
for mole-catchers say that when a mother-mole is caught in a trap the
father may sometimes be found dead by her side.
And now if we turn to the _rodents_ for rivals to the mole, we are
almost confounded by the multitude of creatures which have found safety
in burrowing. Not only have we the rabbit-warrens, by which the sandy
soil of our commons is riddled in every direction with holes, leading
to burrows where the mother lies snugly hidden with her five or six
naked little ones in a bed of her own fur; but we have the extensive
burrows of the little, long-legged, leaping, gnawing Jerboas of Africa,
which are so like the Jumping Shrews among insect-eaters. Then again
there are the underground cities of the South American Viscachas
and Chinchillas, and the extensive subterranean settlements of the
Lemmings,--those curious rodents, which from time to time start off in
vast swarms across Norway, over mountain and valley, through flood and
fen, over rivers and plains, preyed upon by eagles and hawks, foxes and
weasels, on their way, but never stopping or swerving in their course
till they reach the sea, into which they plunge and drown themselves.
Again, every inhabitant of Switzerland knows the Marmot and the burrows
he forms, scratching up the earth with his hind feet and patting it
together with his front paws and his broad nose; while every American
child has heard of the hillocks thrown up by the “Prairie Dogs,”[138]
which undermine whole plains in the far west with their underground
cities, where the burrowing owl shares their home with them, and the
rattlesnake steals their young.
[Illustration: Fig. 58.
The Pyrenean Desman,[141] an insect-eating water animal.]
But all these come out upon the land and use their burrows chiefly
for homes and nurseries. We can match the mole better than this among
_rodents_, for in Eastern Europe, India, and Africa, there are blind
creatures called Mole-rats[139] (see Fig. 57), with broad flat heads,
small eyes hidden in their fur, short tails, and feet with sharp
claws, which live almost entirely underground, burrowing subterranean
galleries in the sandy plains in search of roots, as the mole does
for worms; while the Pouched Rats[140] of North America also live in
burrows, throwing up hills just like mole-hills, and gnawing roots and
buried seeds, which they carry in their large cheek-pouches, to store
up in their underground chamber for winter food.
Nevertheless, the rodents can scarcely compete with the mole as
burrowers, and it is not till we come to the water-animals that
_they_ begin to have the best of it. True, the insect-eaters have the
Water-shrew and the curious West African Shrew,[143] with its broad
tail; while the Desman[144] of Russia and the Pyrenees (see Fig. 58),
with his dense furry coat, his broad tail, and his webbed feet, is
quite a match for the gnawing Musk-rat or Musquash of North America,
for they both live in fortresses on the river-banks, to which hidden
passages are well contrived to elude pursuit; and while the desman,
with his curious movable snout, pokes about in the Russian or Pyrenean
streams after leeches, water-snails and insects, the musquash in
America gnaws off the roots and stems of water-plants.
[Illustration: Fig. 59.
The Beaver,[142] a gnawing water-animal.]
But the insect-eaters have no water-animal to match the Beaver in
sagacity, judgment, or engineering. For here we have a creature not
much larger than a good-sized cat, cutting down trees, dragging logs
six feet long to the water’s edge, and building with them the most
elaborate log-houses and water-dams. With hind feet webbed up to the
claws, and his broad tail as a rudder, the beaver has so much swimming
power that his fore legs are free to carry and place the wood, while
his broad orange-coloured teeth, as sharp as chisels, which grow as
fast as he wears them away, are his cutting instruments. With them
he gnaws a deep notch in the trunk of a larch or pine or willow, as
deep as he dares without fear of its falling, and then going round
to the other side, begins work there till the trunk is severed and
falls heavily on the side of the deep notch, and therefore away from
himself. Then, after stripping off the bark and gnawing the trunk into
pieces about six feet long, he uses his fore-paws and his teeth to
drag them into position to build his dam. The lighter branches he uses
to make his oven-shaped lodge, laying them down in basket-work shape,
plastering them with mud, grass, and moss, and lining the chambers with
wood-fibre, and dry grass; and the logs he piles up to form dams, lest
at any time the stream should flow away and leave the entrances to his
home dry. These dams are very skilfully and cunningly formed. He always
makes the deep notch in the trunk on the side near the water, so that
the tree in falling comes as near as possible to the stream; then he
does not always clear away all the branches, but he and his companions
place the logs with these lying _down_ the stream, so that they act as
supports to resist the current and prevent the dam being washed away.
Thus they make a broad foundation, sometimes as much as six feet wide,
and upon this they pile logs and stones and mud till they have made a
barrier often ten feet high and more than a hundred feet long.
In this way they clear the woods just round their stream, as if a whole
gang of wood-cutters had been there at work; and as the dams check back
the water and form broad meres, there are soon swamps on all sides,
where peat moss grows and “beaver-meadows” are formed.
Here the beavers live in companies, each in his own chamber with his
wife and family, though underground passages often lead from one to the
other, and when water-plants and soft bark are scarce, they will often
travel some way inland to feed on fruits and grain. But if among the
community any are lazy or will not take partners, they are driven out,
to find a refuge in holes of the river-banks, where they sulk alone.
In Western Europe, indeed, where they have been so much persecuted,
most of the beavers live alone in holes, though communities are still
left in parts of Germany, Scandinavia, and Siberia. But in North
America they still carry on their true communal life, and those who
visit their wonderful settlements will not be surprised to learn that
they possess the largest brain for their size of any of the gnawing
animals.
Indeed, they would have no rival among rodents if it were not for the
clever sagacious rats, and these have probably sharpened their wits by
living so long in contact with man, for they are burrowers chiefly in
human dwellings, granaries, stables, mines, ships, and every available
dwelling-place where they can rob and plunder, and outwit even man
himself by working their way into his stores, and acting together in
carrying away his goods.
So the insect-eaters and rodents hold their own both by land and
water, penetrating, in the forms of bats and mice even to Australia,
though the rodents are most widely spread, for except two very rare
animals[145] in the West Indian Islands, there are no Insectivora
except bats in South America. The bats, however, remind us that both
these groups have also found homes above the ground and in the trees.
There the _rodents_ have the lovely little Squirrels, which, with their
brown red backs, white waistcoats, and graceful bushy tails, scamper
up the trees of our English woods. It is very tempting to dwell upon
the squirrel, with his little wife, to whom he remains faithful all his
life, his beautiful round nest, in which his young are so carefully
reared, and his pretty ways as he sits upright gnawing beechnuts or
acorns, holding them in his tiny hands. He has made good use of his
opportunities, being almost as widely spread as the rat, for there
are squirrels of some kind all over the world, wherever there are
forests, except in Australia. Several of them in the East and North
America have folds of skin at the side of the body, which, when tightly
stretched, by extending the four limbs, enable them to take flying
leaps from tree to tree (see Fig. 60). Even without flying, however,
the squirrel is so nimble that he manages well to escape his enemies,
except some of the birds of prey and the fierce tree-marten and wild
cat; and as in cold countries he sleeps soundly in snug holes of a
tree till the leaves grow again to give him shelter, he is not often
detected even by these.
[Illustration: Fig. 60.
On the tree, the Taguan[146] or flying squirrel, a rodent; Flying
below, the Colugo,[147] an insectivorous animal.]
Nevertheless, in tree-life and in the air it is the turn of the
_insect-eaters_ to claim the advantage. It is true that the
insect-eating Bangsrings,[148] which scamper up the trees in Sumatra
and South-East Asia, and were long mistaken for squirrels, are a small
family and not of much importance; but what shall we say to the Bats,
the only true flying milk-givers? Or what, again, to that curious
animal the Colugo or Flying Lemur of the Malay Islands, which belongs
to the insect-eaters, and yet has some points like marsupials, some
like fruit-bats, and some like the true lemurs? This strange creature,
which seems like the remnant of some branch-line from very ancient
times, climbs the tree like a squirrel by means of its claws, and
then spreading out its limbs displays a broad membrane (see Fig. 60)
stretching not only along its sides but across its tail, and from the
front of the arms to the neck as in bats, and so sails down from one
tree to another. The mother, which Mr. Wallace examined, nurses the
little one on her breast just as the lemurs do, while large folds of
her skin protects the small, bald, naked little creature, something
after the manner of an imperfect pouch. Lastly, while they sometimes
feed on insects, the chief diet of these colugos is fruit, like the
lemurs, to which group they were once supposed to belong.
* * * * *
But of all modified insect-eaters the most extraordinary are the Bats,
which are so different from all the others that they have been placed
in a distinct order[149] of their own. Imagine a little creature about
three inches long, with a body something like a shrew, large ears,
a protruding snout, and plenty of sharp teeth (see Figs. 61 and 62).
Let it have a breast bone projecting more than in most milk-givers,
and covered with a large mass of muscle as in birds, fitted to move
the wings, but having nipples to suckle its young. Let it have large
shoulder-blades and collar-bones, a strong upper arm, a very long
lower arm (_fa_, Fig. 61), and four immensely long fingers to its hand
(_ha_), and a short clawed thumb (_t_). Let its hind legs be short and
weak, with a long spur behind the heel (_h_) of its five-toed feet,
and finally let the skin of its body grow on over the arms and long
fingers, filling in the space between the elbows and the neck in front,
and stretching away behind, over the legs down to the ankle, and on
behind the legs, so as to enclose the tail. This skin growing from the
back above, and the under part of the body below, will enclose the
bones of the arms, hands, and legs, like a kite with calico stretched
on both sides (see Fig. 56, p. 220), and when the long fingers are
outspread and the legs opened, no limbs will be seen, but only a small
body and head, with an immense expanse of skinny wing, from which the
short clawed thumbs and the four toes of the feet stick out before and
behind.
[Illustration: Fig. 61.
Skeleton of a Bat.
(Lettered to compare with bird’s skeleton, p. 126).
_fa_, fore arm; _w_, wrist; _t_, thumb; _ha_, hand; _h_, heel; _f_,
foot.]
Now this creature is no longer like the flying squirrels or the colugo,
which can only take floating leaps; for though like them it has only
a membrane stretching out from its body, yet this has become a long
flexible wing, formed on a widely outstretched arm and abnormally
long hand, and moved by powerful muscles like the wings of birds or
insects. It is essentially fitted for flitting through the air in
search of prey, while it makes but little use of the running power
which it possesses in common with all other insect-eaters. If you see
a bat moving along the ground, you will acknowledge at once that it is
a true quadruped, yet, by its awkward gait as it shuffles along on its
clawed thumb and toes, you will judge that it is not an earth-loving
animal. Watch it at night on the wing and it is quite another creature;
then it will flit about in and out of cracks and crevices, under the
eaves, round the haystacks, or among the trees, and never once strike
its wings against anything, though it has been proved that it does not
trust chiefly to its bead-like eyes to guide it.
Bats have been blinded, their ears stopped with wool, and their noses
with sponge dipped in camphor; and yet, without sight, hearing, or
smell, they steered quite successfully between outstretched threads
or tree-branches, or found their way into a hole in the roof. In
truth, as they have become fitted to navigate the air, they seem also
to have become sensitive to its currents. Their wings are abundantly
supplied with nerves and blood-vessels, and have little rough points
all over the surface; their ears have generally a second ear-lobe or
leaf within the outer one, and those which have not this have leaves of
skin or membrane round their nose. With all these they seem to feel the
slightest difference in the air, so as to detect at once whether they
are in the open, or whether any resisting object is near them.
[Illustration: Fig. 62.
A Bat walking.]
Now it is clear that a creature of this kind, able to chase insects
in the air, even in the darkest night, can secure much food that the
running insect-eaters can never reach. When the little common English
bat, the Pipistrelle, awakes from his day’s sleep, which he has been
taking, head downwards, hanging by his feet in some old tree or under
the roof of a barn, he finds the gnats and flies abroad, and begins his
chase in the twilight--up and down, from side to side he flits, and his
wide-open mouth takes in insects at every turn. And by-and-by, as the
dark nights come on, the Long-eared Bats begin gradually to stir from
their clusters in the barns and old buildings, and, unfolding their
wings so as to display their ears as long as their bodies, commit sad
havoc among the night-moths. All night long their shrill squeak may
be heard, but before day dawns they are away again, and may be found
hanging in dense masses by their hind legs to the timbers of some old
church belfry, or in caves, or even under the roofs of houses, where
they find an entrance by some hole, and go in by hundreds to hang from
the rafters.
Many accounts are given in American writers of the thousands of bats
collected in the caverns which abound in the Western States, while in
the Egyptian catacombs they hang in myriads. For of all things a bat
dreads the light when beasts of prey are abroad, and next to that he
fears any position near the ground where weasels, wild cats, or other
flesh-eating animals may seize him in his sleep. Nay, the smaller
bats live in constant fear of the larger ones, for they feed upon one
another with evident relish.
Yet in spite of dangers the bat family, aided by its power of flight,
has spread all over the world, from the Arctic Circle to the Equator,
east, west, north, and south. In cold countries they hang by their feet
in the winter, or sometimes by their clawed thumbs, and sleep in dark
recesses, scarcely breathing till the warm weather and the insects
return; but in warm countries they are active all the year, sleeping by
day and feeding by night.
In England and North America they are content chiefly with insect food,
but in South America the Vampires, among the leaf-nosed bats, fasten
on to large animals and suck their blood. Mr. Darwin had his servant’s
horse bitten and disabled for two days by a vampire in Chili; while Mr.
Wallace, when on the Amazon River, was himself twice bitten, once upon
the great toe, and once on the tip of his nose while asleep! A bat is a
grotesque-looking animal at best; but some of these leaf-nosed bats are
simply hideous, with their wide-open mouth, sharp teeth, and the skinny
leaves sticking up round their nose.
How different are the gentle-looking fruit-eating bats of the Tropics,
which seem to belong to quite a different branch of the family. Their
fox-like and intelligent faces are a pleasure to look at, reminding one
of the lemurs, and harmonising beautifully with their quiet peaceful
life among the fig-trees, guavas, mango-trees, and plantains of the
East. There they hang in dense masses from the tall silk-cotton trees
till night comes on, and then take wing as soon as the sun is set, and
hooking themselves by one thumb to the fruit-trees, hold the fruit in
the other as they feed.
[Illustration: Fig. 63.
Fruit-bats[150] hanging from the ledges of a cave in the Mauritius.]
Thus we have a wide range of habits in bats, from the insect-eaters to
the blood-sucking vampires on one hand, and the gentle fruit-bats on
the other.
But one virtue the most bloodthirsty and the most gentle have in
common, and that is maternal love. As soon as the little ones are born
they cling to their mother’s breast, and she often folds over them
the skin which covers her tail, so as to form a kind of pouch, so that
wherever she flies they go with her, and are carefully tended and
suckled by her till they can take up the chase for themselves.
And now we have followed out the Rodents and Insectivora in their
various lines. Both lowly groups, of simple structure and with
comparatively feeble brains, they have chiefly escaped destruction
from higher forms by means of their nocturnal and burrowing habits or
arboreal lives, and the marvellous rapidity with which they breed,
combined with their power of sleeping without food during the winter
in all cold countries. Nevertheless, though they are often strangely
alike in outward form, they differ in many remarkable respects. The
insect-eaters now existing are chiefly a few straggling forms of a once
widely-spread group; while the rodents, on the contrary, are still
a very numerous and varied family, spread all over the earth, and
boasting of such intelligent forms as the squirrel, the beaver, and the
rat. But here their advantages appear to end, while the insectivora
point onwards not only to the bats, the only flying milk-givers, but
also through the colugo to the lemurs, and thus onwards to the monkeys.
It may be, and indeed probably is true, that the colugo started off
from some very early type, more nearly related to the pouch-bearers
than the present insect-eaters are; while the monkeys, again, branched
off long ago on another line quite separate from the modern lemurs.
But if the tiny shrew wished, like many little people, to boast
of distinguished connections, he might with justice suggest that
somewhere among his primitive ancestors one would probably be found
whose descendants had risen far higher in the world than himself.
* * * * *
It may perhaps seem strange to many readers that instead of leaving
the apes and monkeys to the last, as standing at the head of the
animal kingdom, we should bring them in now, directly after such lowly
creatures as hedgehogs and mice, bats and beavers. It must, however,
be repeatedly borne in mind that we are not following a direct line
upwards, but a family tree, which branches in all directions; and
though the gap between monkeys and insectivora may be great, yet they
have many more points in common than the monkeys have with any of
the vegetable-feeders or carnivorous animals, and probably we should
find these links even more marked if it were not that we know so very
little of the early history of Monkeys. The reason of this probably is
that they live and die in woods, where any remains of their bodies not
eaten by other animals decay and crumble to dust, so that we have only
here and there a few skeletons to tell any tale of their ancestors.
And so it comes to pass that when we first meet with the great army of
milk-givers (see p. 209), lemurs, and soon after true monkeys, existed,
with thumbs on their hands and grasping great toes on their feet.
In those times, when the climate of Europe and North America was warm
and genial, they spread far and wide with the other animals over
Germany, England, and the United States, where forests of palms,
fig-trees, and evergreens afforded them a congenial home. But as soon
as these began to fail and the climate of the northern countries became
cold and cheerless, we find the monkey-kingdom growing narrower and
narrower, till in our own day, while the flesh-feeders range from the
Arctic Circle to the Equator, and the vegetarians have their reindeers
travelling over ice and snow on the one hand, and their hippopotamuses
and giraffes wandering under the burning sun of Africa on the other,
the tender monkeys, which shiver in cold and damp and are constant
victims to consumption, have shrunk back into the Tropics, where there
is abundance of fruit and vegetation for their food. It is true a
few kinds still linger in Japan, and one[151] on the sunny Rock of
Gibraltar, while one or two wander up the mountains of Tibet into the
regions of frost and snow; but, on the whole, monkeys are essentially
inhabitants of warm countries, where the trees are perpetually covered
with leaves and fruit, as in the luxuriant forests of South Asia and
Tropical Africa in the Old World, and Tropical America in the New.
Though they have but a narrow kingdom, however, there can be no doubt
that they make the most of it, and have managed to develop shrewdness
and a sense of fun and frolic which would be quite unaccountable if it
were not for one peculiarity which they possess. This peculiarity is
the grasping power of their hands and feet, which has caused them to
become such active nimble creatures, swinging, leaping, and running
quickly along the boughs of the tangled forests in which they live.
Yet the monkeys do not stand alone in this grasping power, for we have
seen that the opossums have hind-thumbs among the pouch-bearers, while
among the rodents the little dormouse has a nailless grasping toe-thumb
on his hind feet. So that here already we have some clue to possible
descendants of poor relations of the monkeys down in the lower forms
of life; and when we remember that the colugo (see p. 232) is related
on the one hand to marsupials and insect-eaters, while on the other it
leans towards the lemurs, and through them to the monkeys, we begin
to suspect that somewhere low down in all these groups we might find
ourselves among a family party from which all the different branches
have sprung; just as we found the birds, reptiles, and milk-givers
starting in past ages among the amphibia.
It must, however, be very long ago since the monkeys scrambled to the
top of this family tree, for even the Lemurs,--which are not true
monkeys, but a lower type with an irregular number of teeth like the
insect-eaters, hairy hands and fox-like faces, without any change of
expression,--have well-developed thumbs and toe-thumbs, with nails on
hands and feet, and they have besides that free movement of the arm
and wrist which gives at once an advantage to the _Quadrumana_[152] or
four-handed animals.
These lemurs are a gentle and loving race of creatures, which run on
all fours like cats, and have none of the mischievous half-reasoning
pranks of monkeys. They must have crept down long long ago from the
great battlefield of Europe and Asia, and taken refuge in the forests
of South Africa and India, and especially in the Island of Madagascar,
where they were sheltered from the attacks of larger and fiercer
animals. They are splendid climbers, with very sensitive tips to
their fingers, which are often of different lengths, and many of them
have eyes with pupils which expand and contract like those of a cat,
enabling them to see well by day and night, while a quick sense of
hearing warns them of any danger near.
In India, indeed, their relations the “Lories” are most of them
slow-moving night-loving animals, while in South Africa the “Galagos”
sleep all day in a nest of leaves, and are only active at night, crying
to each other as they leap from bough to bough, seizing the beetles and
moths in their little hands. It was probably from such night-wanderers
as these that the general name of “lemurs” or “ghost-like” animals
was given to the group, for the _true_ lemurs, which live in
Madagascar,--their special home, where they have few enemies,--may be
seen by day running along the branches, snatching the fruit, sucking
birds’ eggs, and even feeding on the young birds themselves, for they
have plenty of crushing teeth, as well as incisors for clipping the
leaves. Sometimes they sit in companies, huddled together, wrapping
their soft furry tails round each other’s necks, for they are chilly
creatures, and even in that warm country their thick tails, which are
quite useless for clinging, seem to be a comfort to them. More often
they are running and jumping, especially in the evening time, the
mothers carrying their naked little ones nestled in the fur of their
stomach, or, when they are older, on their backs; and whether slow or
quick, day-lovers or night-hunters, these happy thoughtless little
beings flourish in the quiet island home they have found, cut off from
the struggling world beyond.
[Illustration: Fig. 64.
The Aye-Aye and a Lemur in the forests of Madagascar.]
And among them at night, when the soft clear moonlight shines down
on the thick forests in the interior of the island, comes a small
ghost-like animal, the “Aye-Aye,” with wide-staring eyes, furry body,
and long bony jointed fingers. He utters a plaintive cry as he creeps
from bough to bough, stripping the bark off the trees with his strong
chisel-like teeth to find some worm-eaten hole into which he thrusts
his skinny fourth finger to pick out a grub, and then moistens his meal
by drawing the same long finger rapidly through some watery crevice,
and then through his lips for drink. This strange creature too is a
kind of lemur, so far as he can be classed at all, with his gnawing
teeth, his hind feet like a monkey’s, his large spoon-shaped ears,
and his uneven fingered hands, with strong curved claws. At any rate
he belongs to no other group, but tells us once more the old story of
creatures in isolated countries putting on strange shapes suited to
extreme habits of life.
Now between these gentle, but low-brained and dreamy lemurs, and the
active, intelligent, mischievous monkeys, there is a great gap. The
creatures most like them are the little Marmosets of South America,
which run like squirrels among the forest trees of Brazil, feeding
on bananas, spiders, and grasshoppers, and making their nests in the
topmost boughs. But these marmosets are true monkeys, with expressive
faces, and the peculiar wide-spread nostrils which we find in all the
monkeys of the New World. For it is to South America, that land of the
less advanced forms of life, that we must look for the lower kind of
quadrumana, with side-opening nostrils,[153] thumbs which move in a
line with the fingers of the hand, and not nearly so much across the
palm as in the higher apes, and thirty-six teeth in their mouth instead
of thirty-two,[154] as in man and in the Old World monkeys.
None of these American monkeys ever become so man-like as the Apes of
Africa and Asia, but in many ways they bring monkey-life in the trees
to greater perfection, in the dense forests of Brazil and Paraguay,
and even as far north as Guatemala. The lumbering heavy Gorilla of
Africa, though higher in the scale, is a cumbersome fellow compared
to the nimble little thumbless Spider monkeys of the Amazons, which
hang by their bare tipped tails to the branches and to each other,
chattering away like a troop of children as they gather the bananas and
other fruits, or catch insects and young birds, or fly screaming with
fear from the stealthy puma or the fierce eagle. With the trees for
their kingdom, their tail for a fifth hand, and the warm sun to cheer
and invigorate them, these spider-monkeys and their quieter friends
the Capucine monkeys (often seen on London organs), and the Woolly
monkeys (Fig. 65), lead a pleasant life enough, till misfortune or old
age overtakes them. Their friends the Howler monkeys, which also have
grasping tails, seek the deep recesses of the forest and creep quietly
from tree to tree until night comes, when hundreds of them at once will
make the woods re-echo with their deep howling cry, which they produce
by a special voice-organ in their throat; and with them come out the
little Owl monkeys, which sleep by day in the hollows of the trees.
These, with the various kinds of Saki monkeys, which cannot cling by
their tails, but have fairly good brains and quick intelligence, make
up the monkey population of America.
[Illustration: Fig. 65.
A Woolly Monkey and child (Lagothryx Humboldtii), showing grasping
tail. (Proc. Zool. Soc.)]
Here, then, we have a whole group of quickwitted tree-monkeys, which,
from their structure, we know must have started long ago on a line of
their own, wandering down into South America, where they had but few
enemies except the boas and pumas and birds of prey, till man came to
kill and eat them. And if we wonder how they have gained their quick
mischievous intelligence in those quiet pathless forests, we must
remember that though a grasping hand and foot seem at first sight of
very little importance, yet by means of them the monkey moves rapidly
from place to place, swinging, leaping, running, and climbing along the
boughs, which are its paths from tree to tree. And since rapid change
of any kind makes the eye quick of sight, the ear acute, and the brain
active and alive to take in new impressions, it is no wonder that the
monkey mind has become alert and ready during the ages that these
animals have been chasing and cheating and outwitting each other, or
tenderly rearing their young ones among the dangers of the forest.
And now if we turn back to the Old World, it is not so much the smaller
active tree-monkeys that interest us, for they live much the same life
as their American cousins, although they differ from them in never
having grasping tails, in having thirty-two teeth like man, in the
openings of their nostrils which turn downwards[155] like our own, and
in having either cheek-pouches to stow away their food, or stomachs
with three compartments like animals that chew the cud, so that they
can keep a store within. But in spite of these differences they appear
outwardly much the same as the American monkeys; they leap and jump
among the trees, and it is not till we come to the Baboons and the
tailless man-like apes, that we find ourselves studying quite another
kind of life.
Imagine an undulating country of corn-fields and rough vegetation in
Abyssinia, or southwards towards the Cape, with long ranges of rocky
hills rising up behind, and precipices leading to the narrow defiles
of the mountains, and then picture to yourself, descending from those
mountains, a troop of two hundred or more large hairy monkeys, with
short tails growing from between bare seat-pads, dog-like faces and
something of a dog’s shape, as they gallop clumsily along with all four
feet flat upon the ground. These are the African Baboons, and they form
a goodly company, the chiefs marching first, grand old elders with
stout hairy manes to protect them when fighting. These come cautiously,
peering over the precipices, and climbing up rocks and stones to survey
the country round before allowing the troop to advance; and behind
them follow the young males, and the mothers with their children on
their backs, shambling down till they reach the fertile grounds, where
sentinels are set to watch for danger, while the multitude feed,
filling their cheek-pouches and even storing the corn under their
armpits. Then when all are satisfied, if no alarm has been given they
wander slowly back, resting by the way to chew their food or drink at
some mountain stream, but never leaving the company till they are safe
back under the rocky ledges of the steep hillside, where they make
their home.[156]
For these baboons, unlike other monkeys, live in hilly rocky places,
and not in forests, and therefore they are in much more danger from
wild beasts, especially the leopard, so that they rarely venture abroad
except in company, and lead an extremely gregarious life. Yet though
they run on all fours, and look less human than most monkeys, even the
lowest baboon, the Mandrill (easily known by the coloured swellings on
its cheeks and hind quarters), which has many points in its skeleton
like four-footed animals, has true thumbs on its hands and toe-thumbs
on its feet, and uses them to lift up stones to search for scorpions
and other insects; while the mother baboons dandle their little ones,
or give them a box on the ear when troublesome, in true human fashion.
Moreover, they have developed great intelligence in their social life,
and the youngsters are soon taught to keep silence when danger is near,
to follow their leader, and to obey the sign of command; while, in
their turn, the leaders will defend the weak and feeble of the troop,
as in the well-known case of the brave old baboon who came down alone
in the face of the dogs to fetch away a little one only six months old,
which had been left behind crying for help.
Still, notwithstanding their cleverness and courage, these baboons,
with their long hind legs and dog-like faces, running on all fours,
travelling in troops, and feeding in the corn-fields and meadows,
remind us more of four-footed animals than any other of the monkey
tribe, and we must turn again to dense forests and tangled jungles to
find those large and tailless apes which have risen highest in monkey
life.
If we go back in imagination to those days when the wild beasts of the
forests, the strong elephants and rhinoceroses, the fierce tigers,
lions, and leopards, had not yet been persecuted by man, but roamed
in great numbers over the whole tropical and temperate world, we can
easily imagine that a set of animals which could climb along the
tops of the lofty trees in impenetrable forests would have a great
advantage, even though elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffaloes were
crashing through the underwood below, and the fierce leopard was on the
watch for them when they ventured to descend. With their tree-loving
life, the monkeys would have every chance of escape, climbing along
the topmost boughs with wonderful rapidity, to find refuge in gloomy
recesses where they might bring up their young in safety. And as they
grew in strength and intelligence, gradually retiring to the thickly
wooded part of Southern Asia and tropical Africa, they might even
succeed in driving out their opponents, as the Gorilla is said to have
driven the elephant from the Gaboon country, because he interfered with
the trees which he makes his special home.
So we must go to such tangled virgin forests as those of Sumatra,
Borneo, and Malacca, to find the long-armed tailless Gibbons,[157]
which once wandered over Europe, but now roam no further than Southern
Asia, where they swing themselves along from branch to branch by means
of their lengthy arms, which are so out of proportion to their legs
that when they stand upright they can touch the ground with their
knuckles. These gibbons are gentle creatures, with not too much brain,
but wonderfully elegant and agile, which is more than can be said for
the intelligent Orangutan[158] or Mias which wanders in the same
forest. He has shorter arms, only reaching to the ankle, and he climbs
half upright from tree-top to tree-top, grasping the boughs and swaying
slowly onwards, or holds on by his toe-thumbs while he stretches up to
the more slender branches to gather the fruit and young buds.
A strange object he looks, a great red, hairy, man-like creature,
between four and five feet high, thrusting his huge black face from out
of the dense foliage as he devours the Durian and Mangosteen fruits,
seated comfortably in a fork of the tree, and then if disturbed he is
off far more quickly than you would suppose possible for such a heavy
creature, running, climbing, and creeping half upright till he is lost
in the forest. He rarely comes down, except to shamble across some open
space from one wood to another, or to drink in the river, where the
natives say the crocodile attacks him, but he beats him and carries
off the victory; while in the trees his only enemy is the python,
which tries to encircle him in its coils. Nor does he often wander in
company, for Mr. Wallace tells us that he never saw a father and mother
orangutan together, though either of them may be seen with the young
ones. He seems to lead, on the whole, a solitary life, and when the sun
goes down retires into a nest of leaves low down in one of the trees,
and sleeps till it is broad daylight and the dew is dried off the
leaves.
But, though the orangutan is both strong and cunning, he is not nearly
so human as the intelligent and docile Chimpanzee, which shares with
the fierce Gorilla the dense forests of palms, amomas, and gigantic
tropical trees of Africa, where the grass and brush grow fifteen feet
or more high, and the native man scarcely dares to venture for fear of
the man-like apes. In these endless African forests there is quite a
population of these wild creatures; bald-headed apes which build bowers
in the trees; the Soko, a kind of gorilla, which loves to steal the
native children, and always defends himself by biting off the fingers
or paws of his enemy; the true chimpanzee, so human in its affection
and its fun when it is caught and tamed; and the fierce gorilla,
between five and six feet high, which rules as master in Western Africa
near the equator.
Though each of these tailless apes has its own advantages, yet
the gorilla is, on the whole, most advanced and nearest to man in
structure. But his legs are still too short and thick, and his arms
long, reaching to his knee; and the large projections on the back of
his neck bones prevent him throwing his head well back, so that he
stoops like a hunchback, while his feet are twisted so that he treads
on the outside and not on the sole. His eye-teeth are huge, his eyes
deeply sunken, his jaws heavy and strong, but his brain is not one-half
the size of that of the lowest races of men, and though it has foldings
very like those of the human brain, these are larger and less complex.
When he walks it is not upright but on all fours, resting the knuckles
of his hand on the ground; but when he is in his natural home--the
trees--then his long strong arms and broad naked palmed hands grasp
the boughs with immense power, and pull his heavy body upwards as
he climbs hand over hand, his twisted toe-thumbed feet clutching the
branches below far better than a straight foot could do.
[Illustration: Fig. 66.
The Gorilla at home.]
And so he lives with his wife and family in the thick solitary parts of
the West African forests, feeding only on fruits and leaves, so that
his stomach becomes large and heavy with the amount of food necessary
to nourish him. He is more sociable than the orangutan, for several
will travel together, but he asks for no shelter beyond the trees and
the nest of leaves, which is his home and the cradle of his young
ones, nor does he seem to attack other animals except in self-defence,
and then his gigantic strength and his formidable teeth are his chief
weapons, and woe betide the creature that comes within his grasp.
It is strange to picture to ourselves these huge apes, living in the
depths of lonely forests and looking like human savages to those who
can catch a glimpse of them, so that the ancient Carthaginians landing
on the shores took them for “wild men” and “hairy women.” We know very
little of their daily life, for they are seldom seen except by those
who hunt them, and who have but little chance of watching their habits.
But all that we do know teaches us that in their rough way they have
developed into strangely man-like though savage creatures, while at the
same time they are so brutal and so limited in their intelligence that
we cannot but look upon them as degenerate animals, equal neither in
beauty, strength, discernment, nor in any of the nobler qualities, to
the faithful dog, the courageous lion, or the half-reasoning elephant.
[Illustration: TROPICAL EUROPE OF LONG AGO]
CHAPTER X.
THE LARGE MILK-GIVERS WHICH HAVE CONQUERED THE WORLD BY STRENGTH AND
INTELLIGENCE.
If we now glance back in imagination over the almost endless variety
of creatures which we have met with since we started with the fish,
we must acknowledge that even if there were no other kinds than those
we have already mentioned, the world would be very full of different
living beings, and that to succeed in the struggle for life in the
midst of such a multitude, new forms must be endowed with great
strength or armed with specially effective weapons.
Such animals, however, we know were already in the field, for we saw
at the beginning of the last chapter that, together with the small
rodents, insect-eaters, and lemurs, there were two groups of much
larger animals, first the _Herbivora_ or grass-feeders, including the
hoofed animals (_Ungulata_) and the elephants; and secondly, their
great enemies the _Carnivora_ or flesh-feeders.
Now these two groups, on account of their size, strength, and agility,
have spread very widely over the earth, especially the grass-feeders,
for there is no part of the world which has not some vegetable-feeding
animal in it, if only a few green shoots grow there. It is true the
Rodents take some part of this green food, but then they are small
and insignificant compared to the large Rhinoceroses, Elephants,
Hippopotamuses, Oxen, Antelopes, Goats, Pigs and Sheep, which roam
over wide spaces, and are even less restricted than the flesh-eating
animals, for they live in the open air or the thick jungle, never in
caves and holes, and their young ones are born wherever they may happen
to be, and in a few hours run by their mother’s side, so that young and
old wander together wherever food and shelter is to be found.
And so we shall see that these vegetable-feeders have filled every spot
where they could possibly find a footing. In the regions of snow and
ice the reindeer in Europe, and the elk and musk-sheep in America,
rake the snow to uncover their scanty food, while the burning deserts
of North Africa and East Asia have bred their camels and wild asses,
and those of South Africa their quaggas. On the prairies of America
the bison, and on the plains of Asia the wild cattle, feed in herds of
thousands, while the zebra courses over the African hills. If we look
to the tops of mountains, to dangerous crags where the merest tufts
of grass are to be found, there we meet with the goats and sheep in
India and Asia, the chamois and ibex in Europe, the big-horn sheep in
the Rocky Mountains of America; or if we turn to the dense forests and
tropical jungles, there we find the giraffes in Africa, the elephants,
rhinoceroses, buffaloes, antelopes, and wild boars in Africa and India,
some feeding on the branches of the trees, some grazing on the grasses
and lower brushwood, and some digging up roots and underground food.
Only the rivers remain, and here too, in Africa, the hippopotamus has
taken possession, feeding on the water plants and wallowing on the
muddy banks.
In this way every available spot is used by one herbivorous animal or
another, and if we could only trace out their pedigree we should be
surprised to find how wonderfully each one has become fitted for the
special work it has to do. But three things they all require and have,
though they may arrive at them in different ways. The _first_ of these
is a long face and freely moving under jaw, with large useful grinding
teeth to work up and chew the vegetable food; the _second_, a capacious
stomach to hold and digest green meat enough to nourish such bulky
bodies; and the _third_, good defensive weapons to protect themselves
against each other, and against wild beasts. Weapons of attack they do
not need, except for fighting among themselves; for being grass-feeders
they do not attack other creatures, and this is one of the great
differences between them and the flesh-feeding or _carnivorous_ animals.
We need not look far to see these three chief characters of the
vegetable-feeders in active work. Look at any horse as he grazes in the
meadow, and see how his under jaw works from side to side as soon as he
has a good mouthful. A peep into his mouth will show that he is using
broad flat back teeth to grind the grass to pulp (see Fig. 67), and he
will go on eating all day without overfilling the large stomach which
lies within his barrel-shaped body. And as to his defences, if he is
vicious, he will soon show that his front teeth are good weapons, while
his hoofs will deal an ugly blow.
Then turn to the cow, quietly chewing the cud by his side; you will
find that she has no upper front teeth, but only a hardened gum, upon
which her under teeth bite as she crops the grass; but she too has
broad flat teeth behind, while within she has a stomach with four
compartments, and when she has filled one of these full of half-chewed
grass, she lies down, and with a slight hiccough returns a ball of
food to her mouth to be leisurely ground down. It is not difficult
to see that to animals, such as wild cattle, antelopes, goats, and
sheep, which often have to go far to seek their food, an arrangement
of this kind, by which they may store provender in a larder for quiet
enjoyment by-and-by, must be a great advantage. But the cow cannot
defend herself with her teeth since she has no upper ones in front; in
their stead she has strong horns which are quite as dangerous, so that
an angry bull is an enemy not pleasant to meet.
Lastly, there is another fierce vegetable-feeding animal almost as
dangerous as a bull, though we no longer come across him in England;
for the Wild Boar, as he still flourishes in the forests of Germany,
can inflict very ugly wounds with his lower eye-teeth which grow out
and project over his upper lip, forming large tusks.
So we see that while the vegetable-feeding animals have three
characters in common, namely, large flat grinders, a capacious stomach,
and defensive weapons, their defences, on the other hand, may be of
three different kinds, and they may depend upon horns, hoofs, or teeth
for protection.
Now in the beginning, when we first meet with the milk-givers, these
defences were not so complete in any of the vegetable-feeders as they
are now. Of the elephants alone it may perhaps be said that they
had large and formidable ancestors.[159] As to the rest, the huge
hippopotamus and sharp-tusked boar were only represented by small
animals;[160] and even later, when the hogs branched off in a line of
their own, they had at first only ordinary teeth, which did not grow
out as tusks.
So, too, the fierce horned rhinoceros had as an ancestor a hornless
tapir-like creature,[161] and the graceful hoofed horse a little
creature no larger than a fox, with five separate toes on his
feet.[162] Lastly, all the horned animals which chew the cud,--oxen,
buffaloes, antelopes, and deer,--were nowhere to be seen, and in their
place were only some small elegant creatures without horns.[163]
It is only at a later period when the flesh-feeding animals grew strong
and dangerous, and the vegetable-feeders had to struggle for their
lives, that we begin to find the remains of hogs and hippopotamuses
with tusks, rhinoceroses with nose-bones, and fleet horses which could
take to their heels, or bite and kick their enemy to death; of stags
with antlers, ever increasing in size; and of bulls and buffaloes,
goats and antelopes, with true horns. For not only by this time
were they persecuted by the flesh-feeders, but they themselves were
becoming very numerous, and it was the strongest only that could secure
feeding-grounds or carry off wives.
* * * * *
It is very curious to see the different ways in which the three chief
lines of vegetable-feeders secured these advantages to themselves.
First, there were the hogs and hippopotamuses. The hogs did not grow
to any enormous size, but their thick skins were a great protection to
them, and their eye-teeth became their defence, growing out from the
lower, and sometimes from both jaws into huge tusks; while their broad,
round, flexible snouts served them to turn up the ground, and so get at
roots and underground fruits such as other grass-feeding animals could
not find; though at the same time they did not despise snakes or toads,
and have become omnivorous animals. And so they have spread nearly all
over the world; in Europe and Asia as wild hogs, and their wives the
sows; one peculiar form, the Babirusa, being found only in Celebes;
in Africa as large Wart-hogs, some as big as donkeys, with two pair
of strong tusks curling out of the mouth; while in South America the
family is represented by the small Peccaries, which travel about in
herds, and have no tusks to show; but which, nevertheless, are bold and
fearless, for they have _within_ their lips short lancet-shaped tusks,
which inflict fearful wounds. Only in North America, north of Texas, no
_wild_ creature of the hog family now lives, though in ancient times
there were plenty of them.
[Illustration: Fig. 67.
The Babirusa; the double-tusked hog of Celebes.]
Meanwhile the warmth-loving hippopotamuses, the hog’s nearest
relations, with huge grinding teeth behind, sharp front teeth, and
tusks within their lips, took to a water-life in the Old World.[164]
When we look at their immensely powerful bodies, and their short stout
legs with four strong hoof-covered toes, and learn how rapidly they can
gallop on land, and how furiously they charge an enemy in the water,
snapping their great jaws which will kill a large animal at one crunch,
we do not wonder that they can hold their own, especially as they
always live in herds. Yet large and powerful as they are, they have not
spread far over the earth, for though in past ages the hippopotamus
swam in the river Thames, and grazed and left his bones in the ground
upon which London streets now stand, yet after a time they crept down
to warm Africa, where they may now be seen lazily basking on the
surface of the Nile or of the river Zambesi by day, and making tracks
by night into the swamps and jungle to feed on the coarse rank grass.
They are well fitted for their life, for their thick naked skin, with
pores which give out a fatty oil, keeps them from chill in the water;
their eyes are set well back on their heads, so that as they float
deep they can still look around, and the slits of their nose, and the
openings of their ears, can both be closed and made water-tight when
they dive, while their slow breathing enables them to remain a long
while under water.
The second line was that of the rhinoceroses, tapirs, and horses, or
the uneven-toed animals which have one or three toes on the hind feet.
They took to very different means of defence. The Tapirs,[165] large,
heavy, and with enormously tough hides, seem to depend chiefly upon
their great strength for defence. Starting in warm times in the Old
World, they have wandered in their day nearly all over the globe, dying
out in later times, till now one kind is left solitary in Sumatra and
Malacca, and the remainder have found their way down to South America,
where they tear the branches from the trees with their short movable
snouts, and feed peaceably at night unless attacked, when they make a
furious rush at their enemy and conquer by sheer force.
The rhinoceros, the tapir’s nearest relation, is even better defended;
his skin is so thick and hard that in the Indian rhinoceros it actually
forms a kind of jointed armour; his skull is wonderfully strong, and
his nose is supported by thick bones, on the top of which are one or
two solid horns, which are formed by a modification of the hairs of the
skin growing matted together.[165]
And now notice, just as we saw that the horned cow has no front upper
teeth, so too the rhinoceros, though his horn is of quite a different
kind, has in some cases lost his front teeth, which he does not need,
since he rushes with his horn at his enemy instead of biting. Like the
hippopotamus, the rhinoceros once wandered all over Europe and Asia,
and when the great cold came on, the woolly species which roamed far
north was often caught in the frost and snow of Northern Asia, where
his fleshy body has been found preserved in the ice. Now he too has
taken refuge in the warm parts of Asia and Africa, where he either
grazes on the plains or plucks the leaves from the trees in the jungle
with the fleshy flap of his upper lip.
[Illustration: Fig. 68.
Skeleton of a Wild Ass.
_i_, incisor teeth; _g_, grinding-teeth, with the gap between the
two sets as in all large grass-feeders; _k_, knee; _h_, heel; _f_,
foot; _t_, middle toe of three joints carrying the hoof; _s_,
splint, or remains of one of the two lost toes; _e_, elbow; _w_,
wrist; _h_, hand-bone; 1, 2, 3, joints of the middle toe.
]
But of all the animals of this three-toed group the Horse has the most
interesting history, because we can read it most perfectly. The only
certainly original wild animals of the horse tribe now living are the
Zebras, Quaggas, and Asses of Asia and Africa; yet strange to say,
it was in America that this tribe began, for there we find that tiny
pony[166] not bigger than a fox, with four horn-covered toes to his
front feet (and traces of a fifth) and three toes on his hind ones.
Then, as ages went on, we meet with forms, still in America, first with
four toes on the front foot, and then with only three toes on all the
feet, and a splint in place of the fourth on the front ones. In the
next period they have travelled into Europe, and there, as well as in
America, we find larger animals with only three toes of about equal
size. One more step, and we find the middle toe large and long, and
covered with a strong hoof, while the two small ones are lifted off
the ground. Lastly, in the next forms the two side toes became mere
splints; and soon after, in America and in Europe, well-built animals
with true horse’s hoofs abounded, the one large hoof covering the
strong and broad middle toe. For what we call a horse’s knee is really
his wrist, and just below it we can still find under the skin, those
two small splints (_sw_) running down the bone of the hand, while the
long middle finger or toe, with its three joints (1, 2, 3), forms what
we call the foot. It is by these small splints the horse still reveals
to us that he belongs to the three-toed animals.[167]
Now while these changes in the toes were going on, the space between
the front teeth and eye-teeth gradually increased, till we arrive at
the large gap now seen in the horse and ass (see Fig. 67). The chief
bone of the fore arm (radius) increased in size, and the other bone
(ulna) became joined to it, and the same in the hind leg. The brain
increased in size mainly in the front part, and the body grew much
larger, improving in form and build, till the long, slender, flexible
legs became the perfection of running and galloping limbs such as we
find in the zebra of to-day, poised upon a strong jointed toe, with
its last joint broadened into a firm pad, and covered with a thick
nail--the hoof. We have only to compare the well-proportioned leg of
a horse with the thick, strong, clumsy leg of an elephant, to see, on
the one hand, what a shapely and beautiful limb it has become; while,
on the other hand, if we put it by the side of a giraffe’s leg, we must
acknowledge at once that it is a far stronger and more serviceable
limb than if it had gone to the other extreme. There can be no doubt
that when the horse arrived at this point of the strong single hoof and
well-shaped body, he had a wide range over the world, both Old and New;
but curiously enough, while in Asia and Africa the tribe branched out
into many forms, such as asses, quaggas and zebras, in America it died
out, so that till we found the fossil-forms,[168] it was thought that
no horses had ever been there till they were brought by the Spaniards.
Meanwhile, in the Old World, they must have led as free and joyous a
life as those horses do now which have run wild in Tartary and America,
galloping, frolicking, feeding, and neighing to each other with
delight, as they roamed over the wide plains in troops of thousands,
for solitary wanderers they would soon have fallen a prey to wolves or
jaguars; and if the mothers wished to protect their foals they had to
learn to follow one leader and act together in time of danger.
“A thousand horse, the wild, the free,
Like waves that follow o’er the sea,
Headed by one black mighty steed
Who seemed the patriarch of his breed,”
they grew accustomed, as generations passed on, to unite against their
common foes, placing the mares and their foals in the centre when
attacked, while the fathers met the enemy with hoofs and teeth. And
so they became intelligent and tractable even in their wild state,
to those of their own kind, and laid the foundation of those noble
qualities of which man now reaps the benefit.
But the horses were not the only group which combined in this way
for protection. The third great line of hoofed animals, those which
have “cloven” feet of two toes, and which “chew the cud,” have learnt
many a lesson of vigilance, fidelity, and affection, by their social
habits. Everyone has read of the herds of antelopes or deer, where
the sentinels stand faithfully watching while their companions feed,
and stamp or whistle when danger is near; while in the herds of wild
cattle, not only will the mothers keep a watchful look-out for danger,
but the bulls will join to protect the young ones at the risk of their
own lives. Mr. Allen relates how, in America, a young bison, which had
strayed from the troop and was followed by wolves, was surrounded by a
number of old bulls, who, facing about, warily conducted him across the
plain till he was safely among the dense mass of buffaloes, which the
wolves dared not attack.
Now these “ruminant” animals, with complicated stomachs and the power
of feeding at long intervals, have spread far and wide over the earth
under many different forms, and while some are still very numerous,
others are now rare, or almost destroyed.
Take, for example, the Camel, the true “child of the desert.” There
are no wild camels left now, so long has man conquered and tamed this
useful beast of burden. But in past ages vast numbers of camel-like
forms lived in North America, which found their way on the one hand
to the south, where the Llamas, Alpacas, and Guanacos now feed on the
mountains of Peru and Chili, while on the other they travelled over
Northern Asia to the deserts of Africa and Arabia, and there became
those curious desert-animals which the Arabs used and still use as
their beasts of burden. A strange old fellow is the camel, with his
two-toed hairy feet, with only nail-hoofs upon them, and his hard pads
on his thighs and legs, on which he rests when he lies or kneels. His
curious fleshy hump, which is single in the true camel or dromedary
and double in the Bactrian camel, serves him as a special provision
of fat, and it dwindles when he is short of food, recovering its size
and firmness when he is full-fed again; and he is the only cud-chewing
animal which has kept his front teeth and defends himself with them,
having no horns.
[Illustration: Fig. 69.
The true Camel (Camelus Dromedarius).]
Still more strange in some ways are the giraffes,[169] of which we
know very little, except that large forms like them once wandered
in Europe.[170] For they, with only the same number of bones as
other animals, have these so lengthened out that, as they wander in
the tropical forests, their slender legs raise them above all other
animals, and their long neck, which nevertheless has only seven joints
like all the milk-givers, enables them to reach the high trees, so as
to strip off the leaves with their ribbon-like tongues.
But we should want much space to discuss such curious forms as these,
and we need not go further than the ordinary deer of our parks to read
a strange history of how life has gradually armed her children. The
giraffe with his long neck to feed, and his wide straggling legs to fly
swiftly from danger, has only short hairy covered knobs on his forehead
for horns. But the stag, who is obliged to fight, especially when he
wishes to secure his wives, has antlers so branched and so heavy that
it is a wonder that his neck can carry them.
Now it is in the autumn that the stags fight and struggle together to
secure the leadership of the does, and it is then that their antlers
are finest and strongest, and they remain so during the whole winter.
But when the early spring comes, the bone of the antlers dries up near
the head, where there is a little ridge round it, and soon they fall
off, a skin forms over the place, and new ones begin to grow. Then as
the little knobs push forward and increase, how lovely they are, for
the skin covered with soft hair is all over them, carrying the network
of blood-vessels which secrete the bone within. So fast do they grow
that antlers weighing seventy-two pounds will be complete in ten weeks,
and when they are finished, the “velvet,” as this soft skin is called,
dries up, and they rip it off against a tree, leaving the bare bone.
[Illustration: Fig. 70.
The Red-deer with branching antlers.[171]--(_After Ridinger_).]
Thus equipped, the stag is a match for the world, and he knows it;
his bearing is proud and haughty, and instead of flying from danger
he will turn round and fight fiercely when attacked. And now comes
the curious part of his history. In the different stags of the world
we see all kinds of antlers, from one single spike like a stiletto in
some American stags, to the superb antlers of the Red-deer, some of
which have as many as sixty-six spikes. But when the red-deer begins
to grow his antlers, he does not get this splendid tree in the first
year, he has only a single spike; this falls off, and the next year he
grows them with a second branch; the third year both branches become
doubled and another appears, and so each year as he grows them afresh
they are more and more complicated, till at last the whole branched
tree grows up in a few months. Now in thus increasing his spikes year
by year, he is in his own person most curiously retracing the steps of
his ancestors in ages past; for, as we have seen, the first deerlike
animals had no horns, then as the ages passed on we find that they
had single spikes; later on, their descendants grew antlers of two
branches, and later still more complicated ones, so that the race put
on little by little those magnificent antlers which now the red-deer
and others carry, and meanwhile the various species spread all over the
world, except into Australia and Africa, south of the desert.
Still, even the stags have times in the year, before their antlers
are grown, when they are comparatively defenceless. There remains yet
another branch of the “ruminant” family, even better provided with
weapons. These are the antelopes, wild cattle, and buffaloes, for with
them the horns never fall off. The reason of this is that they grow in
quite a different manner from the stags’ antlers. Instead of the bone
being laid down by the skin, it grows out as a core from the forehead,
and the skin over it hardens into horn as it grows, so that the tip of
a bull’s horns is the oldest part.
[Illustration: Fig. 71.
A Buffalo cow defending her calf.--(Livingstone.)]
Here then we can have no branching as in the stag, but on the other
hand a firm and terrible weapon increasing from year to year; and even
the king of the beasts, the lion, when he attacks a large buffalo, is
often seriously wounded for his pains. We should not wonder then if
these animals had conquered the world wherever man had not destroyed
them; but strange to say, they have kept chiefly to the old world, for
none have travelled to South America, and only the Bisons have overrun
North America with their vast herds. All the rest, buffaloes, wild
cattle, antelopes, gazelles, goats and sheep, have made their home in
Europe, Asia, and Africa, and a fine time they must have had of it
when all Europe was one field of undulating plains and dense forests,
and the ancestors of our cattle crashed through the tangled bushes,
drank by the silent rivers, or grazed on the wild rough herbage. Then,
where town and villages now stand, there must have been scenes such as
travellers still relate of Central Africa, where amid dense jungle,
magnificent forests, and flat marshy grounds,
“... the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will,
In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.”
There the huge buffaloes come down in troops out of the forest to
drink, while the great hippopotamuses leave their watery bed to feed
on the rough grass of the swamps. Not far off, a herd of zebras comes
galloping by to drink lower down in the river, startling the large
antelopes feeding quietly in the soft green pasture above, for they
know that this is the hour when the lions are abroad and will fall
upon any straggler with tooth and nail, while the distant howling of
the hyænas shows that they would not be far behind in seizing upon any
weak or wounded animal. But little does the heavy rhinoceros care for
all this as he too tramps slowly along on his way to drink, for with
his size and defences he runs but little risk of attack. Thus all the
country is alive with large milk-givers, and we realise that when they
ruled all over the world, as they still do in Africa, they too must
have had their time of triumph and greatness like the great fish or the
monster reptiles.
But hush! as we watch this scene a heavy thud, thud, strikes upon our
ear, like the tramping of heavy troops upon soft ground. It is the
“lords of the forest,” the large Elephants, which, after feeding all
day in the shady jungle, are coming down to drink and bathe. What,
then, is the history of these huge antiquated animals that they have
not come into our story as yet? The reason is this: as they stand
alone now with their huge flapping ears, their column-like legs and
feet, and their long grasping trunk, so they have stood apart from
the hoofed animals almost as long as we have any knowledge of them.
So far as we can judge by their skeleton, especially the shoulder
blade, they come nearer to the gnawers, or rodents, than to any of the
large vegetable-feeders. Their legs are awkward and their gait clumsy,
for the thigh bones are enormously long and thick, and the toes are
enclosed in a thick pad with only the nails to mark them; but above all
it is the head and mouth which make so strange a figure. Look at the
huge forehead, showing a skull of immense size. This skull would be
far too heavy to carry if it were not full of hollows, making a large
framework to bear the tusks of smooth white ivory, which grow out from
the upper jaw to a length of more than six feet on each side,[172] and
weigh sometimes from eighty to one hundred pounds. Surely a wonderful
size for teeth, and we shall not wonder that they are the only front
teeth that the elephant has, and that they go on growing all his life
from a permanent pulp, like the gnawing teeth of the rodents. But if
he opens his mouth you will see that, besides these, he has at the
back huge flat grinders, one, or never more than two, at a time on each
side; but those are monsters, with hard enamelled ridges for grinding
his food. During his lifetime of about a hundred years the elephant
grows six of these teeth on each side, twenty-four in all, the new ones
growing up at the back and pushing forward as the old ones wear away.
[Illustration: Fig. 72.
The Indian Elephant.]
And, last of all, look at his wonderful trunk; see how it grows out
straight from his face, his cheeks merging into it so that he is all
nose; and then consider that this trunk, a double-barrelled tube,
ending in a fleshy finger opposite to a thick cushion which acts as a
thumb, is the elephant’s arm and hand, with which he feels and grasps
and tests everything that comes in his way. With it he can pick up a
crumb or root up a strong tree, gather a leaf or tear off a branch,
draw up a gallon of water to squirt over his body when heated with the
sun, or suck up the few drops in a puddle when water is scarce; with
it he caresses those he loves, as gently as a mother strokes her child
with her hand, or uses it to dash his enemy upon the ground, before he
pierces him with his tusks or tramples him under foot.
And yet this formidable and delicate weapon is nothing more than a
long fleshy nose and upper lip, provided with millions of interlaced
muscles, which draw it in every direction, guided by the delicate
nerves. If we did not see it, could we have believed that any creature
could have gained so much experience, and learned to do so many
wonderful things as elephants do, merely by possessing a movable nose?
Yet so it is, for if the elephant stands far above all other
vegetable-feeding animals in intelligence and even reasoning power,
we can only attribute it to two causes--the long life he leads, and
the delicate implement he carries for testing things around him. The
strongest of all animals, he has reigned supreme for ages, even the
lion or the tiger often meeting a terrible death from his trunk,
his tusks, or his heavy feet, if they venture to attack him; while
everywhere, during his hundred years of life, he has handled and tested
and tried every object he has come near with his fleshy trunk, till now
when we examine his brain we find that though small for so large an
animal it is folded and refolded into those curious convolutions which
are always found in highly intelligent animals.
For many long ages this education must have been going on; for already,
when the monkeys and opossums were playing about the trees in England,
an ancient elephant called the Mastodon, having four tusks, was roaming
over Europe, Asia, and America; while soon after, the hairy Mammoth,
kept warm by his shaggy coat, wandered right up into the snows of
Siberia and the extreme of North America, and often met his death
in the ice, and true elephants ruled the world in Europe and India,
continuing down to our day. All these had the same delicate trunk, and
gained experience as they wandered over the wide world, till some have
become extinct and others have shrunk back into the dense forests of
Africa and India, where they often give proofs of a power of reasoning
which surprises us, and make them seem like old patriarchs of a bygone
time, looking thoughtfully upon a world which has grown new and strange.
* * * * *
And here we must take leave of the Herbivora, and turn our attention to
that large army of flesh-feeders which we find throughout all past ages
harassing and destroying the vegetable-feeders on all sides, killing
their young, falling upon the stragglers, the weak and the aged, and
keeping down their numbers by constant persecution. For, since the
whole world is teeming with life, and countless new beings are coming
into existence day after day, there is no creature on the earth which
has not some other creature to prey upon it. Thus, for example, the
whole host of small animals, rats and rabbits, moles, shrews, and small
birds of all kinds, have their special pursuers in long wiry-bodied
civets and ichneumons, weasels, pole-cats, ferrets, pine-martens, and
paradoxures, which can work their way into a hole, give chase through
the long grass, or climb the trees and feed on birds’ eggs or young
birds. There is a vast multitude of these smaller flesh-eating animals,
with teeth so sharp that a weasel will kill its prey in a second by
piercing the skull by its bite; and they make sad havoc all over the
world among young and weak creatures, while a great many of them,
such as the weasel tribe, the pole-cat, and the skunk, are themselves
protected from larger animals of prey by their disagreeable smell.
[Illustration: Fig. 73.
The Weasel[173]--a small, long, narrow-bodied carnivorous animal.]
Then the birds again have their numbers greatly thinned by the wild
cats, tiger-cats, and racoons; while the fox, the badger, and the
glutton, do their share in devouring partridges and all ground birds,
hares, rabbits, and even lambs and other young creatures.
[Illustration: Fig. 74.