The Egyptian Ichneumon,[174] a long-bodied carnivore, sucking

crocodile’s eggs.]

Lastly the fish, too, have their pursuers, for the mink and the otter,

though true land animals, seek their food in the water, the sea-otter

giving us a hint as to how such flesh-eating animals as seals, which

are the great fish-devourers, took to a watery life. But though these

smaller flesh-eaters are spread in great numbers over the world, the

civets and ichneumons only in the Eastern Hemisphere, the racoons only

in America, and the weasels and their relations everywhere, yet the war

they carry on is but little seen compared with the ravages of their

more imposing relations the wolves, the bears, and the lions, tigers,

and their kin. For these animals seek their prey among the buffaloes,

antelopes, horses, sheep, and hogs, and where they go they leave the

track of blood behind them, and appear indeed as ruthless destroyers.

And yet it would not be fair to speak of these larger flesh-feeding

animals as if they had worked nothing but evil to their more peaceful

neighbours; for how would Life educate her children if she put no

difficulties in their way to be conquered, no sufferings to be endured?

We saw that in the beginning the vegetable-feeders were neither so

strong, so intelligent, nor so swift of foot as they are now, while

the flesh-feeders were not nearly so well armed for destruction as the

tigers and lions of to-day.

It was in the long long struggle for life that the animals with the

largest and strongest horns got the upper hand, that the swiftest

horses or antelopes survived and left young ones, that the best

climbers baffled their hungry pursuers, while the most intelligent

and cautious feeders learned to herd together and watch for danger;

while we must remember that it is more often the sickly, worn-out, and

diseased animals that fall a prey to the devourers, and their life is

ended far less painfully than if they dragged themselves into some

hole to die. And so, too, on the other hand, with the flesh-feeders

themselves. It was no wanton cruelty that taught them to hunt for

prey, to creep stealthily along and leap upon their victims, and to

take advantage of the weak and feeble. It was pressing hunger and the

necessity of providing their young ones with food; and they, too, have

often suffered in the struggle; so that it was only the strongest,

healthiest, and best armed, that won the victory and were able to bring

up their children.

[Illustration: Fig. 75.

The Wolf,[175] showing the dog-like form, and long mouth full of teeth.]

Moreover, it is quite a mistake to suppose that the greater part of

the life of a lion or a wolf is spent in killing and destroying, any

more than ours is because we eat beef and mutton. The Lion, at any

rate, never attacks an animal unless he is hungry, and even the wolf,

generally considered so cruel and bloodthirsty and pitiless, spends

the greater part of the year in some quiet place in the mountains with

wife and cubs, only hunting for their daily food (though sometimes he

is guilty of killing more than he needs), and playing, gambolling, and

resting the remainder of the time.

It is when winter comes, and the young ones are stronger and food is

scarce, that he grows wild with hunger, and starts off, with a number

of others, to scour the forests, so that the animals fly in terror as

they hear the howling from afar; and even the traveller, driving his

sledge across the snow, urges his frightened horses to their utmost

speed, since, with a pack of hungry wolves, even if he has firearms,

his life is at stake.

The Wolf, with his relations, the foxes and jackals,[176] is the form

of flesh-eating animals which has become least altered from the general

type of milk-givers. He has the slim form peculiar to flesh-eaters, but

the claws of his feet cannot be drawn in like those of tigers, nor has

he those powerful hindquarters which enable them to bound and leap,

or the strong paw and fore leg with which they give the death-blow to

their prey. Moreover, his face is long like a sheep’s, and his jaws are

full of teeth, some of which are blunter than the tiger’s teeth, and

more fitted for grinding, for wolves and dogs are omnivorous. But then,

on the other hand, he is not so much of a vegetarian as the bears,

nor has he their clumsy gait and cumbersome body, for he walks upon

his toes and not his flat foot; lastly, his front teeth are large and

sharp, and his fangs strong, for they are his chief weapons, and he

uses them with wonderful effect. He is essentially a running animal,

and chases his prey, rarely leaping on it but tearing it down with

his teeth. Strong as he is, he seldom attacks an animal larger than

himself, except when he has companions to help him, and then, indeed,

he makes little account of a horse or a buffalo, for combination and

co-operation are the great strength of the wolf tribe. Even their

cowardly cousins the Jackals hunt in packs when they attack living

animals, feeding at other times on offal and the remains of the lion’s

feast. Yet such is the power of numbers that there is no part of the

world, except a few islands, where some member of the wolf family is

not to be found. In Northern Europe, Asia, and North America, the

common wolves and the prairie wolves hunt in large packs, and in South

America the Red Wolf takes their place. In Africa and India the jackals

wander with their dismal howl; and even in Australia the wild Dingo

dog, probably brought there long ago by savage man, is the terror of

all peaceful creatures.

Nor must we forget the cunning clever Fox, with his keen face and

bushy tail; for he, curiously enough, is the only one of the wolf

family which always hunts alone. The reason of this probably is that

he contents himself with small prey--birds, rabbits, and game; while

his burrowing habits, his cunning, and his night-hunting, enable him to

escape destruction. He is one of the most subtle and knowing of animals

except, perhaps, the jackal; and the fact that the pupil of his eye

expands and contracts like a cat’s, especially fits him for night-work.

So, although he has only himself to depend upon, his race has spread

from the Arctic regions, where the Blue Fox wanders over the frozen

sea to eat dead seals, down to Africa where the tiny Fennecs feed upon

dates, and South America where the Gray Foxes follow the jaguar, as the

jackals in Africa do the lion.

And now, does it not seem strange that from a family so fierce and

bloodthirsty as the wolf family, our own true, faithful, large-hearted

dog should have sprung? But do not let us be too hasty. Remember that

this hunting and killing is not for pleasure but for daily bread, and

that the wolf and jackal at home are good, tender, and loving parents;

and, moreover, that they have both of them been tamed, and shown great

affection to man.

Surely we wrong the animals when we call bad men “brutes,” for men love

and forget, but a dog will die on his master’s grave, and a tame wolf,

whose mistress went away, pined and grieved till she returned, when,

on hearing her footstep, he bounded to meet her, and springing up upon

her, fell back dead,--his faithful heart had burst with the shock of

joy.

And then, also, we must remember that the family of the wolf is the

only one among the carnivora in which the animals hunt in packs, so

as to learn sociable habits and to obey the will of others. And here,

perhaps, we have the reason why, though we have tamed the cat and

brought her to our homes, she still remains half-defiant, and can never

be taught to work for man; while the dog, on the contrary, has become

our obedient servant, and will tend our sheep, guard our homes, and

defend our lives.

[Illustration: Fig. 76.

The Tiger.

Showing slim body, muscular thighs, strong front legs and paws, and

short face with large teeth, all with sharp edges, especially one

(_the carnassial_), near the back in both jaws.]

Loving, and affectionate indeed, as she is, yet the cat will probably

never entirely lose the free untamable spirit of her tribe, for if we

search the whole world over we shall not find a creature better fitted

for a hunter of prey than the wild cat, the lion, or the tiger. Gentle

and loving at home with the wife and little ones, patting with soft

paws in which the claws are hidden, and doing no harm to any one till

food is needed, yet when they are once out on the chase we see that

every part of their structure is of use in approaching and overcoming

their victims.

Look at the Tiger as he moves along, crouching to spring upon his prey.

Here we have no round barrel-shaped body, with a tight-fitting skin, as

in the horse and ox, but a slim slender-waisted animal, which is lithe

and nimble, because feeding on nourishing flesh he can do with a small

stomach and short digesting tube. So, too, his loose hanging skin,

forming a flap under his body, saves him from wounds in his adventurous

life, for, when seized by teeth or claw, this skin wrinkles up, so that

even if a good grip be taken the tender flesh underneath may escape.

This flesh itself is firm and solid, being made of powerful muscles,

while the cords or tendons of the body are so thick and strong that he

can kill an ox with a blow of his paw; and under this flesh again are

bones polished like ivory, far more compact and firm than those of most

animals, and bound together by strong ligaments, the rounded joints

moving smoothly upon each other and causing those graceful movements

which enable him to creep stealthily and spring upon his prey. Lastly,

the tips of his toes, upon which he walks, are clothed underneath with

a soft pad which breaks his fall when he leaps, and makes his footfall

silent as he creeps through the jungle; while, nevertheless, he has

sharp claws hidden within to strike when needful.

These movable claws are indeed peculiar to the cat or feline tribe

(though the civets and ichneumons can draw theirs in half), and they

are caused by the second joint of the toe being grooved, while the

end joint, curved and covered with a horny claw, is drawn back by

a strong elastic band (_l_) till it lies in this groove so that the

outgrowing skin of the toe covers it. There it remains so long as it is

not wanted; but when the animal bends its paw to strike, another band

or tendon (_t_) _under_ the toe is tightened and the claws are thrown

forward, burying themselves in the flesh of the victim.

[Illustration: Fig. 77.

Claws of the Cat or Tiger.

A, claw held back by the strong ligament _l_; B, claw pulled

forward by the tendon _t_ being drawn back, so that _l_ is

stretched out.

]

So in shape, in limbs, and in claws, the tiger, the lion, and their

relations, are the perfection of hunting animals; and when we examine

the well-formed head set upon the strong neck, so that it can turn

widely from side to side, ever on the watch, we see that here too

everything is fitted for the work. Not only are his ears so quick of

hearing that the smallest rustle in the grass startles him at once,

while his large round eyes have a special reflecting mirror at the

back to catch the faint rays of evening light when he prowls abroad,

but the whisker-like tufts on his face are so provided with nerves at

their base that when he raises them they are the most delicate feelers

to guide him in the dark. Then, instead of the long narrow face, flat

teeth, and sideways-moving under jaw of the horse or ox, we find that

he has a large broad brain-case with a well-formed brain within, and a

short face with rough bony ridges upon it, to support powerful muscles

which move the lower jaw _up and down_, so as to mince the food, and

even crush solid bones.

Such a small mouth cannot hold many teeth, and the front ones, though

sharp and pointed, are small, for the tiger does not fight with his

teeth like the wolf, but strikes with his heavy paw. But the eye-teeth

are immensely large, strong, and dagger-like, to hold the prey and tear

the flesh apart, and all the double teeth behind, especially the last

bottom tooth and the one to match it above, have very sharp cutting

edges, so that, when the two jaws work against each other they divide

the flesh like a pair of shears. Lastly, his tongue is not soft and

fleshy, so as to serve for tasting, but very rough, and covered with

horny pimples which serve to rasp the flesh from the bones of his prey.

Thus, in all the animals of the cat tribe, such as the lion, the tiger,

the jaguar, and their relations, every part of the body has become

fitted to help them in the work of destruction; and even their near

relation the Hyæna, though he cannot keep his claws sharp by drawing

them in, nor leap so well because his hind legs are short, makes up

for this by his immensely strong jaw and conical teeth with which he

attacks his prey, instead of using his paw, and which serve him to

split open even the strongest thigh bone of a horse or ox, or to gnaw

the ends to extract the marrow.

With all these advantages, we shall not wonder that the feline family

and their near relations were the rulers of the forests and plains

and mountains till man came to conquer them, or that lions and large

cats, something like those living now, together with the fierce

sabre-toothed tiger (Machairodus), roamed over Europe, Asia, and North

and South America, where the crowds of vegetable-feeders offered them

plenty of food. They were even numerous in England, where the lion

chased the elk and the wild cattle, before he was driven back to

Africa, Persia, and Bengal. No doubt in those days he scraped out his

den in the valley of the Thames, as he still does in some quiet spot in

the African plains where he hunts alone, except when his little ones

are born, and then for some time he lives with his lioness, helping

her to provide for them, and taking out the cubs as soon as they are a

year old to teach them to hunt, to leap upon their prey, and to strike

it with their paw, educating them like a true father in getting their

living. And when they are three years old, the young lions will go off

and meet together, two or three in a party, till in the spring each one

seeks a wife for himself, having many a fierce battle with other lions

before he can win her, and finding then the use of his thick mane in

protecting his neck from the teeth of his rivals.

So the “king of the beasts” lives

“On the mountains bred,

Glorious in strength;”

for though by no means so large as people generally imagine, compared

to the buffaloes, or horses, or large antelopes which he attacks, yet

his immense strength generally secures him the victory over all but the

rhinoceros and the elephant, and he feeds in a royal manner, sharing

his hunting grounds only with the leopard, and leaving the remains of

his feast for the hyænas and jackals following in his track.

Then just where his reign ends in Bengal, that of the tiger begins,

that splendid and ferocious cat, larger even than the lion, which

spares no animal, and will fight till death even with those stronger

than himself. When we see our own house-cat playing with a mouse,

striking at it, letting it escape, and at last giving it the final

grip, we are watching in miniature the cruel game which is played

in the dense jungles of Asia by the tiger with the antelopes, young

buffaloes, and other terrified animals. Yet when we see the mother cat

caressing her little ones, this too is true to tiger life, for though

the father does not watch and care for his children as the lion does,

the tigress loves them with the utmost devotion, and attacks all who

come near them, dying sooner than forsake her cubs.

So in Africa and Asia the lion and the leopard reign, while the tiger

is confined to Asia, ranging up to the snowy regions in the Caucasus

Mountains and Mantchuria, where he is covered with a warm coat of hair.

Yet all these animals have but a small kingdom now compared to olden

times; and man has so cleared the ground in other parts of the world

that we must travel away to South America to find the other large

felines, the fierce Jaguar and Puma. There the jaguar, second only in

strength to the tiger, carries all before him, making havoc among the

peccaries and the herds of wild horses, and even fishing in the rivers

for turtles and fish; scooping the turtles out of their shell with his

sharp claws, and conquering every animal except the great ant-bear

in whose embrace he has been found dead after he had also killed his

enemy. The puma, meanwhile, contents himself usually with smaller

prey,--sheep and rheas, opossums and monkeys, for he can climb like a

cat, and passes much of his life in the trees. Thus, though the cat

family wander over the whole earth, the larger kinds live chiefly in

the warm parts of the world where life is luxuriant and man has not yet

driven them out.

But these are not all the wild flesh-feeders. There remains a third

group--a lazy, easy-going, lumbering group, which, though they spread

from the equator to the poles, have taken chiefly to temperate and

colder regions for their home, to mixed food for their nourishment, and

have gone off on a line as far from the wolves on the one side as the

lions have on the other.

This group is the Bears, and it is a very curious one in many ways.

For, in the first place, though they are large and strong animals, they

have very much given up eating flesh-food, and have taken to berries

and acorns, fruits, vegetables, and honey. To get this last they even

climb the trees to dig out the comb with their paw, trusting to their

thick shaggy hair to protect them from the stings, which, however, they

sometimes receive rather heavily on the nose.

[Illustration: Fig. 78.

Polar Bear[177] and Walrus.[178]

Showing how the Bear walks with the heel flat on the ground, and the

Walrus also.]

A glance at a bear’s mouth will tell at once that he is partly a

vegetarian, for his hind teeth are smoothed down, and as he eats he

can move his lower jaw slightly from side to side, so as to chew

vegetable food. Even the Polar Bear, which eats little else but fish

and seals, has these same grinding teeth, and he can be fed for a long

time upon bread; while it is found that he keeps in better health when

in zoological gardens if he has some grass occasionally. Still it is

only the Sun Bears and Sloth Bears in India and Malacca which never

eat flesh, for the Bruin of our northern countries often varies his

food with deer or sheep, and grows more ferocious and flesh-feeding as

he grows in years. It would almost seem as if his very laziness and

awkward gait may have led him to take to vegetarianism as a convenient

change, when animal food was not handy. For though a bear can trot

along at a good pace, yet his heavy lumbering body and long foot

with the whole heel touching the ground[179] (see Fig. 78), make him

decidedly not well fitted for a hunting animal.

How different he looks from the slim wolf running on the tips of his

toes, and the graceful tiger bending his long hind legs for a leap! Yet

he is a formidable animal too, for his muscles are tremendously strong,

and his firmly-planted foot enables him to rise upon his hind legs and

give that deadly embrace which drives the breath out of the body of his

victim.

The wolf attacks with his teeth, the lion strikes with his paw, but the

bear hugs his enemy to death; and here his long stiff claws serve him

well, for though he cannot draw them in to keep them sharp, yet they

are rough and jagged, and inflict dreadful wounds. The great Grizzly

Bear of America, which is sometimes nine feet long, and strong enough

to drag along the carcase of a bison, sticks his front claws into his

prey while he tears the flesh with the hind feet; he is the only one,

except the polar bear, which lives principally upon animal food.

In fact, the bears take much the same place in the animal world that

heavy phlegmatic men do among ourselves; easy-going, but dangerous

if roused, they seem to have succeeded in life more by accommodating

themselves to things as they have found them, than by conquering and

taking by force like the wolves and tigers. Thus a bear roams leisurely

through the thick forest, for few animals care to meddle with him and

he feeds wherever food comes easy, especially in the autumn when fruits

abound and he can grow fat; and then he lies down to sleep in a cave or

hollow tree, or in a nest of moss and leaves, till spring comes round

again. Why should he trouble himself to struggle with difficulties?

Unless, indeed, food is scarce, and then he sometimes has an uneasy

winter, or attacks animals he would otherwise leave alone.

But if once he is roused, or if a she-bear is afraid that her cubs

may be attacked, then you see that under the lazy good-nature there

is plenty of pluck and ferocity. He would rather be let alone, for he

looks upon life as a thing to enjoy and take leisurely, but if you

will have a struggle then he will see who is master. And this kind of

philosophy, somewhat easy for strong powerful creatures, has stood

Bruin in good stead, for he has spread over all countries where there

are thick forests, except Africa and Australia; and with his great

strength and shaggy coat must have been very safe from attack till man

came to annoy and worry him.

Even the polar bear, living amidst perpetual snow and ice on the shores

of Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, and Greenland, has not, on the whole, a

bad life of it, for he is master of the situation, and conquers and

devours even the tusked walrus. The polar bear is a most interesting

animal, because he shows us the bear tribe becoming adapted to a

watery life. His body is much longer and more flexible than that of

most bears, giving him the power to twist and turn in the water, as

he swims with strong broad feet; and his long neck, narrow head, and

small ears, are all fitted for a watery fishing life, while he fights

entirely with his teeth and does not hug his prey. Again, the soles of

his feet, instead of being bare, are covered with long stout hairs,

giving him foothold upon the slippery ice, over which he travels very

quickly, climbing up from time to time on the icy hummocks to see where

seals are to be found, or to scent a dead whale from afar. He is an

inveterate seal-hunter, chasing them in the water or out of it with

equal ease and great cunning, though they are quick too, and often

escape him just when he thinks he has caught them. It is when they are

asleep with their noses upon the ice or the land, that he has his best

chance, for then he will swim warily behind them, coming up close,

till, even if they wake, they have no choice but to be killed where

they are, or to leap out on the solid ice where he will soon overtake

them.

The polar bear, unlike his brown cousins, fishes and hunts all the

winter through, and it is only the mothers which take refuge in caves

hollowed out of the snow, where their little ones are born in early

spring, and nestle down by her side in their icy home. And when the

cubs can run, both father and mother care for them with true devotion,

defending them against all attacks, and pushing them before them when

pursued, even going so far as to take them in their teeth and swim away

with them when they cannot otherwise save them.

So we see that the polar bear has become more than half a water-animal,

and gives us the first hint that some milk-givers may take to a

thoroughly sea life. Neither among the wolves nor the felines do

we find any animals taking entirely to the water; but in the weasel

family, which comes near to the bears, we have the otters, and among

the bears themselves their polar cousin, which reminds us that there is

another great division of flesh-feeders which we must study in the next

chapter--the walruses, seals, and sea-bears, the porpoises, dolphins,

and whales, which with finned paddles have struck out quite a new line

of life, and imitated the fish so well that they are often wrongly

classed among them.

[Illustration: EUROPE IN THE AGE OF ICE]

CHAPTER XI.

HOW THE BACKBONED ANIMALS HAVE RETURNED TO THE WATER, AND LARGE

MILK-GIVERS IMITATE THE FISH.

“On revient toujours à ses premiers amours,” says the French song.

But who would have thought that, after rising step by step above the

fish, and tracing the history of the backboned animals through their

development in the air and over the land, till we brought them to a

stage of intelligence second only to man, we should have to follow them

back again to the water and find the highly gifted milk-givers taking

on the form and appearance of fishes? Nevertheless it is so, for seals

and whales are as truly flesh-eating milk-givers as bears and wolves;

nor are they much behind them in intelligence, for we all know how

teachable and affectionate seals and sea-lions are, while what little

is known of the life of whales shows that they are devoted mothers, and

their well convoluted though small brains are a proof that they are by

no means wanting in intelligence.

Yet the whales and dolphins, at any rate, have not only adopted a sea

life, but have limbs so like a fish’s fins that we can scarcely call

them by any other name, and they are so completely water animals that

they cannot even return to the land.

Now we should be quite puzzled to account for such curious forms as

these warm-blooded animals, half transformed into fish, if it were not

that we know of several land animals belonging to different groups

which have gone part of the way towards a fish life. Thus among the

reptiles we have the oceanic turtles and the sea snakes; among birds

the penguins, whose wings have almost become fins. Then among the

milk-givers we have the web-footed Duck-billed Platypus, the Yapock

or web-footed opossum of South America, the Desman and the Beaver,

the Polar Bear, and last but not least the Otters, web-footed animals

nearly allied to the weasels, which seek their food entirely in the

water.

The common Otter of Europe and America though he moves quickly and

actively on land, has webbed toes with only short claws standing out

beyond the swimming foot, and he spends the greater part of his life

in the river, making his home in a hollow of the bank beneath the

overhanging roots of trees. There he may still be seen in many of our

English rivers, his soft brown fur shining as he swims along, diving

under water for a fish, which he brings out on to the bank to eat,

holding it in his fore paws.

But there is an otter which has deserted the old land life much more

completely than this, for the great Sea-Otters of the North Pacific,

about four or five feet long (see Fig. 79), never care even to come on

shore, but, when they have dived for their prey, turn on their backs

and float while they eat it, holding the sea-urchins, crabs, or fish,

in their front paws. They even nurse their young ones in the same

fashion, dandling them in their arms as they lie face upwards on the

sea; and they rear them entirely on the thick beds of kelp off the

coasts of the North Pacific Ocean, never bringing them on land.

These sea-otters may be seen in hundreds off the coasts of Alaska and

California, basking on the wet rocks, playing, leaping, and plunging in

the water, till some alarm makes each mother seize her little one in

her teeth and dive under in an instant.

They are twice the size of the River Otter, and in many points more

like seals, for though their front paws are short and cat-like, their

hind feet are flat flippers, with a long outer toe; their face too is

broad and short, and their teeth are neither cutting like the weasels

nor flattened like the bears, but covered with rounded knobs, well

fitted for crushing crab-shells and the bones of the fish on which they

feed.

[Illustration: Fig. 79.

Sea-Otter.[180]--(_From Wolf._)

Showing the front paws, and the hind webbed feet.]

We see, then, that it is quite possible for land-animals to have near

relations specially adapted for a sea life. But the otter is still

distinctly a four-footed creature, with free arms and legs, and we can

trace his connection with the weasel tribe. It is quite different with

the three groups of real fin-footed animals--the Seals and Walruses,

the Manatees, and the Whales. Though we can trace their likeness bone

by bone to the land animals, yet they have become so different as to

show that they must have branched off long long ago; so long indeed

that we cannot even guess at the relations of the whales, while

the seals have only a distant resemblance to the bear family, and

the sea-cows or manatees to the ancestors of the hoofed animals and

elephants. Nor shall we wonder to find the whales so much the most

fitted for the sea, when we learn that they were already living in the

water when we first meet with the great army of milk-givers (see p.

211) just after the Chalk Period, so that they have probably had a much

longer spell of watery life than the seals and sea-cows, whose remains

we only find later.

Yet even the seals are so much altered from anything we see on land,

that few people would believe at first sight that they have the same

skeleton as a bear. We need not leave the British shores to study these

pretty creatures, for they still come to the coasts of Wales, Cornwall,

and Ireland; while in the Hebrides they may be seen lying fast asleep

on the rocks at low tide out at sea, one, placed higher than the rest,

keeping awake as sentinel to give warning at the least approach of

danger.

But if we begin our study with the common seal we shall be much

puzzled, for he is very unlike a land animal. His round neckless

body tapering away to the tail, where the hind flippers stretch out

behind like fish’s fins, reminds us far more of a tunny fish than of a

four-footed milk-giver; while the front flippers, coming out so finlike

from his side, give us very little idea of legs (see Fig. 81). No! in

order to compare these fin-footed[181] creatures with land animals

we shall do far better to travel up to the Aleutian Islands at the

entrance of Behring’s Straits, and visit the Fur Seals and Sea Lions,

from which we get our seal-skins, and the Walruses which sometimes lie

there sleeping on the rocks, though their real home is farther north

within the Arctic Circle, round the coasts of Nova Zembla, Spitzbergen,

and Greenland.

[Illustration: Fig. 80.

Skeleton of a Sea Lion.

Showing how the whole foot rests on the ground, as in the Bear Family.

_th_, thigh; _l_, leg; _h_, heel; _f_, foot; _a_, upper-arm; _fa_,

fore arm; _ha_, hand.

]

These creatures, although they have “flippers,” and are truly

fin-footed, are much more like land animals than the smaller seals, for

they plant their whole foot on the ground as a bear does, and walk,

or, more properly, “flop along” on all fours. A mere glance at the

skeleton of the sea lion, which is one of these higher kind of seals

with a slight outer ear,[182] shows that it is a four-footed animal,

with five toes to each foot, the great toes and the thumbs being the

largest. We can see distinctly the short thighs and the long shanks,

which give the hind flippers their lanky appearance, and we see, too,

the broad stumpy arms, which give such strength to the front flippers

in swimming. For the eared seals and walruses use their fore flippers

very much in the water, while the true seals swim almost entirely

with the hind flippers, and use the front ones chiefly for guiding

themselves.

And now if we turn to the living fur seal we find that the reasons are

twofold which make us forget that his limbs are legs. In the first

place, the skin of his body comes down very low over his arms (see Fig.

81), while the hand is encased in skin, with only mere traces of nails

upon it Then as regards his hind legs, not only are the feet made into

flippers, in which the toes are joined by a loose flexible skin, so

that they can move them freely when swimming, but the legs themselves

are strapped back by a skin passing right across his tail, so that his

thighs are kept flat against his side, and only the lower part of the

legs has power to move. We lose sight, then, of the limbs, and see very

little more than the feet, which are disguised by being turned into

flippers.

Now if we once think what is the object of a seal’s life, this curious

change in its body is at once explained. For seals are the hunters of

the sea; fish-food is to them what flesh-food is to lions, wolves, and

bears, only that they have a much wider field to hunt in, for they have

the whole ocean for their feeding ground, and no one to dispute it

with them but the sea-otter in places near the land, and the porpoises

and other fish-feeding whales out at sea. In consequence of this we

find seals of some kind in almost all parts of the world, except the

Indian Ocean, though they evidently prefer the cooler regions. Even the

large sea lions live in the North Pacific, as far up as the Aleutian

Isles, and in the South Pacific down to the Falkland Islands and

Kerguelen’s Land, and play about the shores of the Cape, New Zealand,

and Australia.

[Illustration: Fig. 81.

A Fur Seal,[183] one of the Sea Lions; and a common Seal.[184]

Showing how the Sea Lion walks on the flat hind feet, while the

seal’s flippers lie back in a line with the body; note also the

absence of an external ear in the seal.

]

They have evidently been very successful in exchanging flesh-feeding

for fish-feeding, and if we consider for a moment what changes a

four-footed land animal would wish to make in its body in order to

swim and dive in the water, we shall see that these changes have taken

place in the seals.

First, a flexible body is required to wind and twist rapidly in the

water, and this the seal arrives at by having the cushions of gristle

between its joints very large and thick, while even its ribs are joined

to its back by gristly rods, making its whole body very lissom. Next,

a small head, offering little resistance to the water is an advantage,

and this we find in all seals, while the short neck and extremely

sloping narrow shoulders well encased in fat, make the body slope away

gently with no jutting angles, but a round smooth surface from head to

tail where it narrows like the tail of a fish. The next step is to do

away with long angular arms and legs, which would impede it in diving

and swimming, and here the seal meets the difficulty, not by losing

its leg and arm bones, but by having them so shortened and encased in

the skin that only the useful broad flippers are free, while the hind

legs are set upon a very narrow hip joint (see Fig. 80), so that they

bend backwards and work close to the body. Lastly, such a warm-blooded

animal would want clothing to prevent it from being chilled in icy cold

water, and here we find two protections. First, under the skin is a

layer of oily fat, which, while it reminds us of the fat accumulated

by bears before they settle down to their winter’s sleep, has become

in the seals a dense oily mass, acting like a thick blanket in keeping

up the warmth of the body; and secondly, the seal, like its distant

relations the bears, has a dense furry covering, and over this a number

of coarse long hairs, which give it that shining oily look we notice

in all seals. No doubt every one has wondered, when watching seals

in zoological gardens, where the fur can be which makes our sealskin

muffs and jackets. The fact is, that this under fur is quite out of

sight in the living seal, being covered by the coarse hairs; but if we

could turn these aside, even in common seals, we should see the soft

undergrowth beneath, and in the fur seals it is much thicker. Now the

roots of these coarse hairs are deeper in the flesh than the roots of

the soft undergrowth, and when the uppermost layer of the skin on which

the fur grows is sliced off, the coarse hairs are cut away from their

deep roots below, and can then be pulled out, leaving only the fur

behind.

The seals then, while they are in all main points constructed like

land animals, have gained many advantages, not by having new parts,

but by the old ones becoming so modified as to make them admirably

fitted for a watery life; and when we add that they have large eyes

well adapted for seeing under water, keen ears with little or no outer

ear, which would be useless, but a very acute hearing apparatus within,

and nostrils which will close firmly and keep the air in and the water

out when they dive, we must acknowledge that they make good use of all

parts of their body. Indeed, their breathing apparatus is the most

curious of all, for they can remain under water sometimes for twenty

minutes, and meanwhile the circulation of their blood is probably

controlled by large reservoirs in the veins, which prevent it going

back to the heart and lungs till it can be purified by fresh breath.

Now, if all these changes from a land to a water-frequenting

animal have been made gradually, we shall expect to find some forms

less altered than others, and so it is. The Walrus, which is not a

seal, but a creature with a thick hide having no fur and only a few

scattered hairs upon it, and long tusks in his mouth, is much more

of a land-animal than the seals. He passes a great part of his life

sauntering along on the low shores of the Arctic seas, digging up

mussels, cockles, and clams with his long canine teeth or tusks; and

in accordance with this we find that his hind legs are much freer than

even those of the sea-lions, for the skin binding them to his body is

broader and his hips are stronger, so that, as he throws his front

flippers forwards, he can also throw out his feet and walk on all fours

in a strange straddling manner. He is remarkably fierce and strong,

and Captain Scoresby caught one once in the act of killing and eating

a large narwhal, so that they are evidently not afraid of attacking

even large animals. The walrus is even said to stand at bay on shore

and fight his great destroyer the polar bear, throwing up his head so

as to strike forcibly with his sharp tusks, but in this battle he is

generally defeated. His tusks alone would suggest that he lives a good

deal on land exposed to dangers, for his more aquatic relations the

seals are without tusks, and though their teeth are sharp enough, and

they fight among themselves, yet their way of escaping the great tyrant

of the ice-fields is to slip into the water.

Beyond his tusks, and the fact that by sleeping many weeks on the ice

in autumn he reminds us of the bears, the walrus’s life is not very

interesting. They live in large shoals in the Arctic sea, climbing the

rocks and ice with the help of their tusks, which they drive into the

crevices and so haul themselves up. During the colder times just before

our own, they came down into much lower latitudes than now, and we find

their bones as far south as England in Europe and Virginia in America,

and even in our day one has been seen off the west coast of Skye; but

we know very little of their daily life or how they bring up their

young ones.

Of Fur Seals and Sea Lions, however, we know a good deal, and a

singular history it is. They spend the greater part of the year in

huge shoals in the sea, rising and falling, gambolling and diving in

the water, feeding on the fish, and probably migrating from colder to

warmer seas in the winter from either pole. But the interesting time of

their life is in the spring, when the northern eared seals have often

been watched as they come to the shores of the Aleutian Isles to bring

up their families.

For then begins the fight which seals shall get the most wives. Early

in May the fathers begin to arrive--strong old seals, which have gone

through the battle many years before and know the rules. They are huge

fellows six or seven feet long, with enormous eye-teeth and cutting

teeth next to them, which together grip like a vice. They come up at

first singly and then in greater numbers, swimming powerfully and

laying hold of the rocks with their flippers so as to haul themselves

up on land, taking the best positions they can find on the edge of the

water to watch for the arrival of the mothers. Yet still more and more

fathers arrive as time goes on, and these are obliged to go farther

inland, for all the shore stations are soon occupied, and each sea

lion defends his own plot of ground with tooth and flipper.

[Illustration: Fig. 82.

Sea Lions gathered on one of the Pribylov Islands, watching for wives.]

Thus, in about a month’s time, from the shore right inland, the whole

island is covered with male seals. And now the mothers arrive, coming

to the islands that their little ones may be born. They are very much

smaller, not much more than four feet long, lighter in colour than the

fathers, gentle and inoffensive; and as they swim up to the island each

father seal tries, by coaxing, pulling, and tugging, to persuade a mate

to come on to his rock. If he succeeds he has then to keep her, for the

sea lions behind, which cannot reach the sea, are on the watch to steal

her.

Now he might make quite sure of his prize if he would be content with

one, but he wants several; and the next young mother swimming up calls

off his attention, and while he is courting her his neighbour behind

tries to carry his first wife away, lifting her by the back of the neck

as a cat does a kitten. Then often a terrible battle begins, and the

poor mothers are pulled hither and thither till one male seal secures

her, and then the whole thing begins again. This constant fighting

and lovemaking go on for several days till all the sea lions have

wives--those on the shore many, those behind perhaps very few. Then all

settle down quietly, the little sea lions are born, bleating like young

lambs, and family life begins. But the peace does not last long, for no

sooner are mothers able to leave their little ones than the old contest

begins again, and happy the father who can keep his wives together

through a whole season!

And now comes the most remarkable point. As a rule, seals are immense

eaters, and they become very fat. But from the time that the fathers

land upon the rocks till they go back to the water after about two

months, they have never been known to leave their position to take

food, so busy are they defending their wives. And when the two months

are over, during which the little ones have been trying their strength

in the waves and learning to swim, the fathers, which have grown

thin and meagre, having used up all their fat, swim away and do not

come back. The mothers, however, with the children, and those young

bachelors, which have not yet taken wives, remain on the islands

sporting and enjoying themselves till autumn, when they, too, start

off for the open sea till spring comes round again.

Such is the history of the eared seals. And now that we have studied

their form, and seen that their skeleton is like that of other animals,

though their arms and legs are disguised as flippers, we shall

understand our own home seals better; for the chief difference between

them and the higher seals is merely that their front legs are much

shorter, and that their hind legs are turned back so as to lie in a

line with the body (see Fig. 81), while they are closely bound to the

tail down right as far as the heel, so that they cannot throw their

hind flippers forward nor use them in walking. Thus they have become

still more completely aquatic animals, using their hind legs entirely

in swimming, when they serve as great oars, working something like the

screw of a steamer. The consequence is that they are terribly awkward

on land, though they get along very fast by jerking their body forward,

or sometimes by dragging themselves by their front flippers.

This, however, matters very little to them, for their home is the sea.

True, they may often be seen lying asleep on sandbanks or on rocks

jutting out of the water, but they rarely venture far up the land,

always remaining where they can slip back into their true home at the

least alarm. So they live in the seas almost all over the world. They

may be known from the higher seals chiefly by their want of outer

ears, their backward-turned legs, and their feet with both the great

and little toes larger than the inner ones; but their life is much

the same. Some live near our own shores, especially in Scotland; some

are peculiar to Australia and New Zealand; others crowd the icy seas

of Greenland, sleeping in large herds on the ice-fields, where the

polar bear makes them his prey; while others again live on the pack ice

round the South Pole, the huge Elephant seal, with its long tapir-like

nose, basking on the shores of Kerguelen’s Land and the islands of the

southern seas--a monster twelve feet or more long, with his smaller

wives beside him.

* * * * *

Thus the seals are bold ocean lovers, feeding entirely on animal food,

and finding plenty of it in the wide sea as they roam. But there is

another family of warm-blooded animals, pure vegetable-feeders, which

also must have found their way in distant ages into the water; for they

too are milk-givers, and though they have lost their hind legs, have

still the front legs with all their proper bones, with the hands turned

into flippers.

These animals are the curious sea-cows or Manatees, which wander under

water along the east coast of Africa and west coast of South America,

feeding in the bays and often up the rivers, on the seaweeds and

water-plants of all kinds; while another kind with tusks, called the

Dugong, feeds all along the shores of the Indian Ocean and Australia.

It is strange that while every child knows something about seals, very

few people have heard of these gentle grazing manatees and dugongs,

the only large vegetable-feeders of the sea. Yet they are curious,

interesting animals, and seem to be the forms which have given rise to

the popular stories of mermaids,[185] for they suckle their young ones

at the breast, clasping them with their flippers, and when they raise

their heads in the water have something the appearance of an uncouth

mother nursing her child.

[Illustration: Fig. 83.

The Manatee or Sea Cow grazing.]

But very uncouth indeed! for they are long barrel-shaped creatures,

with a thick skin like the elephant’s, with short stiff hairs upon it.

Their head is small, with no outer ears, and very insignificant eyes

surrounded with wrinkles; their lips are thick, heavy, and covered

with short bristles, and above them two narrow nostrils open and close

according as they are above or under water. Their front flippers, which

are all they have, are long and broad, with faintly-marked flat nails

upon them, and behind these their body tapers away gradually into a

thin, wide, shovel-shaped tail, not set edgewise as in a fish, but

_across_ the body, so as to lie like a broad leaf in the water.

Who would think that a creature like this had anything in common with

land animals? Yet so it is, for not only do we know that his ancestors

had traces of hind legs, but his front limbs are quite as true arms

and hands as those of any of the seals. Moreover, he has large broad

grinding back teeth like the elephant, and in front he has small

cutting teeth as a baby, though these are covered up by the gum as he

grows older. In the Australian dugong, however, these teeth continue to

grow and form good-sized tusks in the fathers.

What, then, is this curious animal? Simply a vegetable-feeder which

has become fitted for a watery life--a gentle, peaceable animal, which

keeps near the shore and grasps the seaweed with the sides of its

upper lip, and then nips it off by a set of horny plates, which grow

down from the roof of its mouth, and answer to the rough wrinkles

on a cow’s palate. They may often be seen together, father, mother,

and child, wandering up the river Congo in Africa, or the Amazons in

South America, feeding entirely under water, and only raising their

heads from time to time with a snort to take in fresh air. In olden

times they probably thronged all the coasts on the sea-margin, for

a hundred and fifty years ago there was another group of them, the

Rhytinas, right up in the cold seas of Behring’s Straits, where the

vast submarine forests of seaweed afforded them plenty of food. But the

sailors found them such good eating, and the fatty blubber on their

bodies was so valuable, that they were all killed twenty-five years

after Behring first discovered them, and unless some care is taken, the

more southern sea-cows may some day be exterminated in the same way.

* * * * *

And now that we have firmly grasped the fact that the seals and

manatees, however altered in shape, belong to the four-footed and

milk-giving group, perhaps we shall be prepared to understand how it is

that the whales[186] are not fish, though this popular delusion is one

of the most difficult to overcome. “Do you really mean then,” exclaim

nearly all people who are not naturalists, “that a whale is not a huge

fish?” Certainly I do! A whale is no more a fish than crocodiles,

penguins, or seals, are fish although they too live chiefly in the

water.

A whale is a warm-blooded, air-breathing, milk-giving animal. Its fins

are hands with finger-bones, having a large number of joints (see Fig.

84); its tail is a piece of cartilage or gristle, and not a fish’s fin

with bones and rays; it has teeth in its gums even if it never cuts

them; and it gives suck to its little one just as much as a cow does to

her calf (see Fig. 85). Nay! the whalebone whales have even the traces

of hind legs entirely buried under the skin (see Fig. 84), and in the

Greenland whale the hip-joint and knee-joint can be distinguished with

some of their muscles, though the bones are quite hidden and useless.

[Illustration: Fig. 84.

Skeleton of a Whalebone Whale (Mysticete), and Section of the Mouth

with Whalebone.

_b_, blowhole; _a_, upper arm; _fa_, fore arm; _h_, hand; _p_, _th_,

_l_, small remains of pelvis or hip-bone, thigh, and leg; _r_, roof

of the palate; _w_, _w_, plates of whalebone; _f_, whalebone fringe.

]

We see then that the whale undoubtedly belongs to the same type as the

four-footed land animals, although it branched off into the water so

long ago that it may have come from some _very_ early milk-giver. But

why then has it become so like a fish? For the same reason that the

penguin’s wings have become so fin-like, and the seal’s arms and legs

have become flippers, namely, that during the long time in which the

whales have taken to a watery life, those which could swim best and

float best in the water have been the most successful in the struggle

for existence; and as a fish’s shape is by far the best for this

purpose the warm-blooded milk-giver has gradually imitated it, though

belonging to quite a different order of animals.

[Illustration: Fig. 85.

The Humpback Whale[187] suckling her young (_after Scammon_).]

We saw this imitation already beginning in the seals, with their bodies

sloping off towards the tail and their legs fastened back in a line

with the body; but they have not gone so far in this direction as the

whales have, since they still have hind legs and furry bodies. The sea

cows, on their line, have gone a little farther, for they have lost

their hind legs, and their skin is smooth, with very few hairs upon it.

But it remained for the whales to take up the best fish-form, the old

spindle-shape, thinning before and behind, with the strong fleshy tail

ending in two tail lobes, which act like a screw in driving the body

along.

Any good drawing of a whale shows at once how admirably these animals

are fitted for gliding through the water (see Fig. 85). True, many of

them have enormous heads, but these always have long face-bones ending

in a rounded point, and even the huge head of the sperm whale (see Fig.

87), eighteen feet long, six feet high, and six feet wide, is rounded

off above, and gradually thins away below, like the cutwater of a ship.

The eyes are very tiny and so little exposed, that it is difficult to

find them; there are no outer ears, though the bones within are large

and probably very useful for hearing in water; the bones of the neck

are seven, as is the rule among milk-givers, but they are so flattened

and firmly soldered together, and so covered with blubber, that there

is not even a hollow between the head and the body; while to crown

all, the skin is perfectly smooth so as to offer no resistance to the

water. Here, however, would be a disadvantage in the loss of the furry

covering, since most of the whales travel into cold seas, were it not

compensated by the great mass of oily fat or blubber which fills the

cells in the under part of the skin, and keeps the whole body warm;

and thus the whale, by a covering of fat often as much as a foot and a

half thick, solves the problem of a warm-blooded animal, with a smooth

gliding body, living in icy water without having its blood chilled.

In every essential for swimming, then, whales are as well provided as

any fish, while their immensely strong backbone, and the long cords

or tendons running from the mass of muscle on the body to the tail,

give them such tremendous power that a large whale makes nothing of

tossing a whole boat’s crew into the air and breaking the boat in

two. But, though they are so far true water-animals, yet they cannot

live entirely below as fish can, for they have no apparatus for

water-breathing. The outside of their body takes on the appearance of

a fish, but inside they have the true lungs, the four-chambered heart,

and all the complicated machinery of a warm-blooded animal. Therefore,

though a whale may dive deep and remain below to seek its food, yet

before an hour has passed even the largest of them must come floating

up to the top again, to blow out the bad air through the nostrils at

the top of the head, and fill the capacious lungs with a fresh supply.

It is then that, partly because of the water which has run into the

blowhole, and partly because the rush of breath throws up spray from

the sea, we see those magnificent spouts of water which tell that a

whale is below. The older naturalists thought that these spouts were

caused by the water which the whale had taken into its mouth; but this

is not so, and Scoresby, the great Arctic traveller, states distinctly

that if the blowhole of the whale is out of the water only moist vapour

rises with the breath, while when it makes a large spout this comes

from its blowing under water and so throwing up a jet.

If, however, the whale is a simple air-breather and yet swims under

water with its mouth open, how comes it that this water does not run

down the windpipe and choke the lungs? This is prevented by a most

ingenious contrivance. At the top of our own windpipe there is a

small elastic lid which shuts when we swallow, and prevents water and

food from running down to the lungs. Now, in the whale the gristle

answering to this lid runs up as a long tube past the roof of the

mouth into the lower portion of the nose, and is kept there tightly,

being surrounded by the muscles of the soft palate. The upper portion

of the nose cavity then opens on the forehead by means of one or two

“blowholes,” as the outside nose holes are called; so that when the

blowholes are closed the whale can swim with its mouth open and feed

under water, and yet not a drop will enter its lungs.

A large sperm whale will often remain twelve minutes or more at the

top of the water, taking in air at the single blowhole in the front of

its head, and purifying its blood, and then with a roll and a tumble

it will plunge down again, and remain for an hour below, trusting to a

large network of blood-vessels lying between the lungs and the ribs to

supply purified blood to its body and retain the impure blood till it

comes up again to breathe.

But the smaller whales and porpoises, which play about our coasts,

have to come up much more often, and even when they are not tumbling

and jumping, as they love to do, you may see them rising at regular

intervals as they swim along, their black backs appearing like little

hillocks in the water, as they “blow” strongly from their single

nose-slit, take a quick breath in, and sink again to rise a few paces

farther on and repeat the process.

Thus provided both with swimming and breathing apparatus, these purely

air-breathing animals wander over the wide ocean and live the lives

of fish, making such good use of food which cannot be reached by land

animals, or those which must keep near the shore, that we shall not be

surprised to find that the whale family is a very large one.

But it is curious that the fierce animals of prey among them should be,

not the huge whales but the smaller Dolphins, Porpoises, and Grampuses;

and this shows how different water-feeding is to land-feeding, since,

because the water is full of myriads of small and soft creatures,

the sperm whale feeding on jelly-fish, and the large whalebone whale

feeding on soft cuttle-fish and the minutest beings in the sea, are

those which attain the largest size.

Most people have at one time or another seen a shoal of porpoises

either out at sea or travelling up the mouth of some large river, where

“Upon the swelling waves the dolphins show

Their bending backs, then swiftly darting go,

And in a thousand wreaths their bodies throw;”

and though they are small creatures, only about five feet long, they

are very good examples of the whale shape, with their tapering bodies,

broad tails, and the back fin, which is found in some whales and not in

others. Sometimes they swim quietly, only rising to breathe, and then

they work the tail gently from side to side; at others they gambol and

frolic, and jump right out of the water, beating the tail up and down,

and bending like a salmon when he leaps; and whether they come quietly

or wildly, you may generally know they are near by the frightened

mackerel and herrings, which spring out of the water to avoid them.

For the porpoises have a row of sharp teeth in each jaw, more than a

hundred in all, and they bite, kill, and swallow in one gulp, without

waiting to divide their food, so that they make sad havoc among the

fish.

[Illustration: Fig. 86.

The Porpoise.[188]]

They are here to-day and gone to-morrow. A few kinds wander up into

fresh water, such as the Ganges and the Amazons, but by far the greater

number range all over our northern seas, together with their near

relations the dolphins, and the bottle-nosed whales, and the strange

narwhal, with its two solitary eye teeth, one only of which grows out

as a long tusk. All these roam freely through the vast ocean home,

coming into the still bays to bring up their young ones, which they

nurse and suckle tenderly, afterwards moving off again in shoals to the

open sea. There they will follow the ships, and sport and play, and

probably we shall never know exactly where their wanderings extend,

though it seems that they prefer the northern hemisphere.

Among all the dolphin family the most voracious and bloodthirsty is

the Grampus or Orca,[189] which is commonly called the “Killer Whale,”

because it alone feeds on warm-blooded animals, seizing the seals with

its strong, sharp, conical teeth, devouring even its own relations

the porpoises, and attacking and tearing to pieces the larger whales.

No lion or tiger could be more ruthless in its attacks than this

large-toothed whale, which is sometimes as much as twenty-five feet

long and has broad flippers. In vain even the mother walruses try to

save their young ones by carrying them on their backs; the cunning Orca

swims below her, and coming up with a jerk shakes the young one from

its place of safety and swallows it in a moment. Nor do they merely

fight single-handed, for many voyagers have seen them attack large

whales in a pack like wolves, and in 1858 Mr. Scammon saw three killer

whales fall upon a huge Californian Gray Whale and her young one,

though even the baby whale was three times their size. They bit, they

tore, and wounded them both till they sank, and the conquerors appeared

with huge pieces of flesh in their mouths, as they devoured their prey.

How much they can eat is shown by one orca having been killed which had

the remains of thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals in its stomach!

How strange now to turn from this ravenous hunter to the huge Sperm

Whale, eighty feet long, with a head one-third the size of its whole

body and more than a ton of spermacetic oil in its forehead, and to

think that this monster swims quietly along in the sea, drops its long

thin lower jaw, and with wide-open mouth simply gulps in jelly-fish,

small fish, and other fry, thus without any exertion or fuss slaying

its millions of small and soft creatures quietly, as the orca does the

higher creatures with so much battle and strife!

For the sperm whale (Fig. 87) must need a great deal of food to feed

its huge body. Though it has forty-two teeth in the lower jaw it never

cuts those in the upper one, and seems to depend more on sweeping its

prey into its mouth than on attacking it. And this perhaps partly

explains the use of that curious case of spermaceti which lies in its

huge forehead over the tough fat of its upper jaw. For this oil gives

out a powerful scent, which, when the whale is feeding below in the

deep water, most probably attracts fish and other small animals, as

they are also certainly attracted nearer the surface by the shining

white lining of its mouth. This light mass is also, however, useful in

giving the head a tendency to rise, so that when the whale wishes to

swim quickly it has only to rise to the top, so that the bulk of its

head will stand out of the water, the lower and narrow part cutting the

waves. In this position he can go at the rate of twelve to twenty miles

an hour.

But if the sperm whale is curious, as it carries its oil-laden head

through all seas from pole to pole, chiefly in warmer latitudes, how

much more so are the whalebone whales, which are monarchs of the

colder and arctic seas, where they feed on the swarms of mollusca,

crustaceans, and jelly animals which live there. For these large

whales, though they have teeth in their gums, never cut them, but in

their place they have large sheets of whalebone hanging down from the

upper jaw (see Fig. 84), smooth on the outside, fringed with short

hairs on the inside, and crowded together so thickly, only about a

quarter of an inch apart, that as many as three hundred sheets hang

down on each side of the mouth of the great Greenland whale.

[Illustration: Fig. 87.

The Sperm Whale.]

It is easy to see the use of these whalebones when we remember that

this huge whale feeds entirely by filling its enormous mouth with

water, and then closing it and raising its thick tongue at the back

so as to drive the water out at the sides, straining it through the

fine fringes, which fill up all the spaces between the plates and keep

back every little shell-fish and soft animal. But it is less easy to

guess where these whalebone plates come from, till we look back at the

manatee, and remember those horny ridges which it uses for biting, and

which are exaggerations of the rough fleshy ridges at the top of a

cow’s mouth.

Then we have a clue, for each blade of whalebone grows from a horny

white gum, being fed by a fleshy substance below much in the same way

as our nails are, so that these blades are, as it were, a series of

hardened ridges, which grow out from the soft palate, till they become

frayed at the edges, and form that dense fringe which is the whale’s

strainer, upon which he depends entirely for his food.

Explain it as we will, however, it is a most wonderful apparatus.

Imagine a huge upper jaw forming an arch more than nine feet high, so

that if the whalebone were cleared away a man could walk about inside,

upon the thick tongue which lies in the lower jaw fastened down almost

to the tip so that it cannot be put out of the mouth. And then remember

that this enormous mouth has to be filled with food sufficient to

nourish a body fifty or more feet long. Who would ever guess that this

food is made up of creatures so small that countless millions must

go to a mouthful? Yet the whole difficulty is solved simply by these

triangular fringed plates or mouth-ridges (see section Fig. 84, p.

318), covered with horny matter and frayed into minute threads like the

horny barbs of a feather.

Nor are we yet at the end of the wonderful adaptation, for while the

jaw is only from nine to twelve feet high, the long outside edge of

the plates is often eighteen feet long, and for this reason, that if

they were only as long as the jaw is deep, then when the whale went

fishing with his mouth open the animals would escape below the fringe,

while as they now are, he may gape as wide as he will, the long curtain

will still guard the passage of the mouth and entangle the prey in its

meshes. But what, then, is to become of this great length of whalebone

when the animal shuts his mouth? Here comes in the use of the beautiful

elasticity of the plates, for the great Arctic whaler, Captain Gray,

has shown that as the mouth shuts the lower ends of the longer plates

bend back towards the throat and fall into the hollow formed by the

short blades behind them, so that the whole lies compactly fitted in,

ready to spring open again, and fill the gap whenever the jaws are

distended.

With this magnificent fishing-net the whalebone whales go a-fishing

in all the salt waters of the world. They are not all of enormous

size,--many of them are not more than twenty feet long,--nor have they

all such a perfect mouthful of whalebone as the great Polar Whale; but

when the whalebone is shorter, as in the Rorqual, and other whales with

back fins, the stiff walls of the lower lip close in the sides of the

mouth and prevent the escape of the prey; and many of these whales have

a curious arrangement of skin folds under the lower jaw, which stretch

out and enable them to take in enormous mouthfuls of water, so as to

secure more food.

New Zealand, California, Japan, the Cape, the Bay of Biscay, and in

fact almost every shore or sea from pole to pole, has some whale

called by its name; for these gaping fishers are everywhere, and it

is not always easy to say whether the same whale is not called by

different names in various parts of the world. In the shallow bays and

lagoons they may be found with their newly-born young ones very early

in the year; while far out at sea ships meet with them travelling in

shoals, or “schools,” northwards, as the summer sets in and the Arctic

Sea is swarming with life. In fact the Californian gray whales go right

up into the ice, poking their noses up through the holes to breathe,

and then they travel far away south again into the tropics to bring up

their young ones.

And whether large or small, toothed whales or whalebone whales, active

as the dolphin and the huge fin-whales or rorquals, which dash through

the water although some are nearly a hundred feet long, or lazy and

harmless as the Greenland whale is unless attacked, in one thing

all the whale family betray their high place in the animal kingdom.

Nowhere, either on land or in the water, can mothers be found more

tender, more devoted, or more willing to sacrifice their lives for

their children than whale-mothers. Scoresby tells us that the whalers,

as means of catching the grown-up whales, will sometimes strike a

young one with harpoon and line, sure that the mother will come to its

rescue. Then she may be seen coming to the top with it encouraging it

to swim away, and she will even take it under her fin, and, in spite of

the harpoons of the whalers, will never leave it till life is extinct.

Nay, she has been known to carry it off triumphantly, for the lash of

her tail is furiously strong when she is maddened by the danger of her

child, so that a boat’s crew scarcely dare approach her.

And now there remains the question what enemies besides man these

strong-swimming milk-givers can have in their ocean home? We have seen

that the orca or killer whale will turn cannibal and devour those of

its own kind, and the swordfish is said to attack whales with its

formidable spear; but these are not their greatest enemies. With many

of the whales it is tiny creatures like those on which they feed which

hasten their death, for small parasitic crustaceans cover their head

and fins, and feed upon their fat, so that whales which have been

infested with these animals are often found to be “dry,” or to have

lost nearly all their oil. And thus we see the tables turned, and while

the whale feeds upon minute creatures, it is in its turn destroyed by

them.

Nevertheless, as a rule, they probably live long lives, till their

teeth are worn, or their whalebone frayed and broken, and their blubber

wasted away; and then, it may be after eighty or one hundred years of

life, they die a natural death. Therefore they probably share with the

elephant the longest term of life of any of the warm-blooded animals;

and though their existence cannot certainly be said to be an exciting

one, yet, when undisturbed by man, it is at least peaceful, sociable,

and full of family love.

It may perhaps seem strange that we should have taken these

ocean-dwellers last in our glimpses of animal life; but in the first

place, how was it possible to show how they are truly related to the

land mammalia until we understood the structure of these last? And

in the second place, we have as our object to see how the backboned

family have won for themselves places in the world, and surely there

are none which have done this more successfully or in a more strange

and unexpected way than the whales, which, while retaining all the

qualities of warm-blooded animals, have won themselves a home in

the ocean by imitating the form and habits of fish, and so adapting

themselves to find food in the great oceans, where their land relations

were powerless to avail themselves of it.

[Illustration: WHEN THE COLD HAS PASSED AWAY]

CHAPTER XII.

A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF BACKBONED LIFE.

We have now sketched out, though very roughly, the history of the

various branches of the great backboned family, and we have found that,

as happens in all families, they have each had their successes and

their downfalls, their times of triumph, and their more sober days,

when the remaining descendants have been content to linger on in the

byways of life, and take just so much of this world’s good as might

fall to their share.

We have seen also that, as in all families of long standing, many

branches have become extinct altogether; the great enamel-plated

fish, the large armour-covered newts, the flying, swimming, and huge

erect-walking reptiles, the toothed and long-tailed birds, the gigantic

marsupials, the enormous ground-loving sloths, and many others, have

lived out their day and disappeared; their place being filled either by

smaller descendants of other branches of the group, or by new forms in

the great armies of fish, birds, and milk-givers which now have chiefly

possession of the earth.

Still, on the whole, the history has been one of a gradual rise from

lower to higher forms of life; and if we put aside for a moment all

details, and, forgetting the enormous lapse of time required, allow the

shifting scene to pass like a panorama before us, we shall have a grand

view indeed of the progress of the great backboned family.

First, passing by that long series of geological formations in

which no remains of life have been found, or only those of boneless

or invertebrate animals, we find ourselves in a sea abounding in

stone-lilies and huge crustaceans,[190] having among them the small

forms of the earliest fish known to us, those having gristly skeletons.

Then as the scene passes on, and forests clothe the land, we behold the

descendants of these small fish becoming large and important, wearing

heavy enamelled plates or sharp defensive spines; some of them with

enormous jaws, two or three feet in length, wandering in the swamps and

muddy water, and using their air-bladder as a lung. But these did not

turn their air-breathing discovery to account; they remained in the

water, and their descendants are fish down to the present day.

It is in the next scene, when already the age of the huge extinct

fishes is beginning to pass away, and tree ferns and coal forest plants

are flourishing luxuriantly, that we find the first land animals,[191]

which have been growing up side by side with the fish, and gradually

learning to undergo a change, marvellous indeed, yet similar to one

which goes on under our eyes each year in every country pond. For now,

mingling with the fish, we behold an altogether new type of creatures

which, beginning life as water-breathers, learn to come out upon the

land and live as air-breathers in the swamps of the coal forests.

A marvellous change this is, as we can judge by watching our common

tadpole, and seeing how during its youth its whole breathing organs are

remade on a totally different principle, its heart is remodelled from

an organ of two chambers into one of three, the whole course of its

blood is altered, some channels being destroyed and others multiplied

and enlarged, a sucking mouth is converted into a gaping bony jaw,

and legs with all their bones and joints are produced where none were

before, while the fish’s tail, its office abandoned, is gradually

absorbed and lost.

The only reason why this completely new creation, taking place in one

and the same animal, does not fill us with wonder is, that it goes on

in the water where generally we do not see it, and because the most

wonderful changes are worked out _inside_ the tadpole, and are only

understood by physiologists. But in truth the real alteration in bodily

structure is much greater than if a seal could be changed into a monkey.

Now this complete development which the tadpole goes through in one

summer is, after all, but a rapid repetition, as it were, of that slow

and gradual development which must have taken place in past ages, when

water-breathing animals first became adapted to air-breathing. Any one,

therefore, who will take the spawn of a frog from a pond, and watch

it through all its stages, may rehearse for himself that marvellous

chapter in the history of the growth and development of higher life.

And he will gain much by this study, for all nature teaches us

that this is the mode in which the Great Power works. Not “in the

whirlwind,” or by sudden and violent new creations, but by the

“still small voice” of gentle and gradual change, ordering so the

laws of being that each part shall model and remodel itself as

occasion requires. Could we but see the whole, we should surely

bend in reverence and awe before a scheme so grand, so immutable,

so irresistible in its action, and yet so still, so silent, and so

imperceptible, because everywhere and always at work. Even now to those

who study nature, broken and partial as their knowledge must be, it is

incomprehensible how men can seek and long for marvels of spasmodic

power, when there lies before them the greatest proof of a mighty

wisdom in an all-embracing and never-wavering scheme, the scope of

which is indeed beyond our intelligence, but the partial working of

which is daily shown before our very eyes.

But to return to our shifting scene where the dense forests of

the Coal Period next come before us. There, while numerous fish,

small and great, fill the waters, huge Newts have begun their reign

(_Labyrinthodonts_), wandering in the marshy swamps or swimming in the

pools, while smaller forms run about among the trees, or, snake-like in

form, wriggle among the ferns and mosses; and one and all of these lead

the double-breathing or amphibian life.

In the next scene the coal forests are passing away, though still

the strange forms of the trees and the gigantic ferns tell us we

have not left them quite behind; and now upon the land are true

air-breathers,[192] no longer beginning life in the water, but born

alive, as the young ones of the black salamander are now (see p. 81).

The Reptiles have begun their reign, and they show that, though still

cold-blooded animals, they have entered upon a successful line of life,

for they increase in size and number till the world is filled with them.

Meanwhile other remarkable forms now appear leading off to two new

branches of backboned life. On the one hand, little insect-eating

warm-blooded marsupials scamper through the woods, having started

we scarcely yet know when or where, except that we learn from their

structure that they probably branched off from the amphibians in quite

a different line from the reptiles, and certainly gained a footing upon

the earth in very early times. On the other hand, birds come upon the

scene having teeth in their mouths,[193] long-jointed tails,[194] and

many other reptilian characters. We have indeed far more clue to the

relationship of the birds than we have of the marsupials, for while we

have these reptile-like birds, we have also the bird-like reptiles such

as the little Compsognathus, which hopped on two feet, had a long neck,

bird-like head and many other bird-like characters, though no wings or

feathers.

The birds, however, even though reptile-like in their beginning, must

soon have branched out on a completely new line. They for the first

time among this group of animals,[195] have the perfect four-chambered

heart with its quick circulation and warm blood; while not only do they

use their fore limbs for flying (for this some reptiles did before

them), but they use them in quite a new fashion, putting forth a

clothing of feathers of wondrous beauty and construction, and with true

wings taking possession of the air, where from this time their history

is one of continued success.

And now we have before us all the great groups of the backboned

family--fish, amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammalia; but in what

strange proportions! As the scenery of the Chalk Period with its

fan-palms and pines comes before us, we find that the gristly fish,

except the sharks and a few solitary types, are fast dying out, while

the bony fish[196] are but just beginning their career. The large

amphibians are all gone long ago; they have run their race, enjoyed

their life and finished their course, leaving only the small newts

and salamanders, and later on the frogs and toads, to keep up the

traditions of the race. The land-birds are still in their earliest

stage; they have probably scarcely lost their lizard-like tail, and

have not yet perfected their horny beak, but are only feeling their way

as conquerors of the air. And as for the milk-givers, though we have

met with them in small early forms, yet now for a time we lose sight of

them again altogether.

It is the reptiles--the cold-blooded monster reptiles--which seem at

this time to be carrying all before them. We find them everywhere--in

the water, with paddles for swimming; in the air, with membranes for

flying; on the land hopping or running on their hind feet. From small

creatures not bigger than two feet high, to huge monsters thirty

feet in height, feeding on the tops of trees which our giraffes and

elephants could not reach, they fill the land; while flesh-eating

reptiles, quite their match in size and strength, prey upon them

as lions and tigers do upon the grass-feeders now.[197] This is

no fancy picture, for in our museums, and especially in Professor

Marsh’s wonderful collection in Yale Museum in America, you may see

the skeletons of these large reptiles, and build them up again in

imagination as they stood in those ancient days when they looked down

upon the primitive birds and tiny marsupials, little dreaming that

their own race, then so powerful, would dwindle away, while these were

to take possession in their stead.

And now in our series of changing scenes comes all at once that strange

blank which we hope one day to fill up; and when we look again the

large reptiles are gone, the birds are spreading far and wide, and we

come upon those early and primitive forms of insect-eaters, gnawers,

monkeys, grass-feeders, and large flesh-eaters, whose descendants,

together with those of the earlier marsupials, are henceforward to

spread over the earth. We need scarcely carry our pictures much

farther. We have seen how, in these early times, the flesh-feeders

and grass-feeders were far less perfectly fitted for their lives than

they are now;[198] how the horse has only gradually acquired his

elegant form; the stag his branching antlers; and the cat tribe their

scissor-like teeth, powerful jaws, and muscular limbs; while the same

history of gradual improvement applies to nearly all the many forms of

milk-givers.

But there is another kind of change which we must not forget, which

has been going on all through this long history, namely, alterations

in the level and shape of the continents and islands, as coasts have

been worn away in some places and raised up or added to in others, so

that different countries have been separated from or joined to each

other. Thus Australia, now standing alone, with its curious animal

life, must at some very distant time have been joined to the mainland

of Asia, from which it received its low forms of milk-givers, and since

then, having become separated from the great battlefield of the Eastern

Continent, has been keeping for us, as it were in a natural isolated

zoological garden, the strange primitive Platypus and Echidna, and

Marsupials of all kinds and habits.

So too, Africa, no doubt for a long time cut off by a wide sea which

prevented the larger and fiercer animals from entering it, harboured

the large wingless ostriches, the gentle lemurs, the chattering

monkeys, the scaly manis, and a whole host of insect-eaters; while

South America, also standing alone, gave the sloths and armadilloes,

the ant-bears, opossums, monkeys, rheas, and a number of other forms,

the chance of establishing themselves firmly before stronger enemies

came to molest them. These are only a few striking examples which help

us to see how, if we could only trace them out, there are reasons to

be found why each animal or group of animals now lives where we find

it, and has escaped destruction in one part of the world when it has

altogether disappeared in others.

* * * * *

So, wandering hither and thither, the backboned family, and especially

the milk-givers, took possession of plains and mountain ranges, of

forests and valleys, of deserts and fertile regions. But still another

question remains--How has it come to pass that large animals which

once ranged all over Europe and Northern Asia,--mastodons, tusked

tapirs, rhinoceroses, elephants, sabre-toothed tigers, cave-lions, and

hippopotamuses in Europe,[199] gigantic sloths and llamas in North

America, and even many huge forms in South America, have either been

entirely destroyed or are represented now only by scattered groups

here and there in southern lands? What put an end to the “reign of the

milk-givers,” and why have they too diminished on the earth as the

large fish, the large newts, and the large lizards did before them?

To answer this question we must take up our history just before the

scene at the head of our last chapter,[200] which the reader may have

observed does not refer, as the others have done, to the animals in

the chapter itself. Nevertheless it has its true place in the series,

for it tells of a time when the great army of milk-givers had its

difficulties and failures as well as all the other groups, only these

came upon them not from other animals but from the influence of snow

and ice.

For we know that gradually from the time of tropical Europe, when all

the larger animals flourished in our country, a change was creeping

very slowly and during long ages over the whole northern hemisphere.

The climate grew colder and colder, the tropical plants and animals

were driven back or died away, glaciers grew larger and snow deeper

and more lasting, till large sheets of ice covered Norway and Sweden,

the northern parts of Russia, Germany, England, Holland, and Belgium,

and in America the whole of the country as far south as New York.

Then was what geologists call the “Glacial Period;” and whether the

whole country was buried in ice, or large separate glaciers and thick

coverings of snow filled the land, in either case the animals, large

and small, must have had a bad time of it.

True, there were probably warmer intervals in this intense cold, when

the more southern animals came and went, for we find bones of the

hippopotamus, hyæna, and others buried between glacial beds in the

south of England. But there is no doubt that at this time numbers

of land animals must have perished, for in England alone, out of

fifty-three known species which lived in warmer times, only twelve

survived the great cold, while others were driven southwards never to

return, and the descendants of others came back as new forms, only

distantly related to those which had once covered the land.

Moreover, when the cold passed away and the country began again

to be covered with oak and pine forests where animals might feed

and flourish, we find that a new enemy had made his appearance.

Man--active, thinking, tool-making man--had begun to take possession

of the caves and holes of the rocks, making weapons out of large

flints bound into handles of wood, and lighting fires by rubbing wood

together, so as to protect himself from wild beasts and inclement

weather.

In America and in England alike, as well as in Northern Africa, Asia

Minor, and India, we know that man was living at this time among

animals, many of them of species which have since become extinct, and

with his rude weapons of jagged flint was conquering for himself a

place in the world.

He must have had a hard struggle, for we find these flint implements

now lying among the bones of hyænas, sabre-toothed tigers, cave-lions,

cave-bears, rhinoceroses, elephants, and hippopotamuses, showing that

it was in a land full of wild beasts that he had to make good his

ground.

“By the swamp in the forest

The oak-branches groan,

As the savage primeval,

With russet hair thrown

O’er his huge naked limbs, swings his hatchet of stone.

“And now, hark! as he drives with

A last mighty swing,

The stone blade of the axe through

The oak’s central ring,

From his blanched lips what screams of wild agony spring!

There’s a rush through the fern-fronds,

A yell of affright,

And the Savage and Sabre-tooth

Close in fierce fight,

As the red sunset smoulders and blackens to night.”[201]

Many and fierce these conflicts must have been, for the wild beasts

were still strong and numerous, and man had not yet the skill and

weapons which he has since acquired. But rough and savage though he may

have been, he had powers which made him superior to all around him. For

already he knew how to make and use weapons to defend himself, and how

to cover himself at least with skins as protection from cold and damp.

Moreover, he had a brain which could devise and invent, a memory which

enabled him to accumulate experience, and a strong power of sympathy

which made him a highly social being, combining with others in the

struggle for life.

And so from that early time till now, man, the last and greatest winner

in life’s race, has been taking possession of the earth. With more and

more powerful weapons he has fought against the wild beasts in their

native haunts; and by clearing away the large forests, cutting up the

broad prairies and pastures, and cultivating the land, he has turned

them out of their old feeding grounds, till now we must go to the

centre of Africa, the wild parts of Asia, or the boundless forests of

South America, to visit in their homes the large wild animals of the

great army of milk-givers.

* * * * *

Since, therefore, these forms are growing rarer every century, and

some of them, such as the Dodo, Epyornis, and Moa among birds, and the

northern sea-cow or Rhytina among milk-givers, have already disappeared

since the times of history, we must endeavour, before others are gone

for ever, to study their structure and their habits. For we are fast

learning that it is only by catching at these links in nature’s chain

that we can hope to unravel the history of life upon the earth.

At one time naturalists never even thought that there was anything to

unravel, for they looked upon the animal kingdom as upon a building put

together brick by brick, each in its place from the beginning. To them,

therefore, the fact that a fish’s fin, a bird’s wing, a horse’s leg, a

man’s arm and hand, and the flipper of a whale, were all somewhat akin,

had no other meaning than that they seemed to have been formed upon the

same plan; and when it became certain that different kinds of animals

had appeared from time to time upon the earth, the naturalists of fifty

years ago could have no grander conception than that new creatures were

separately made (they scarcely asked themselves how) and put into the

world as they were wanted.

But a higher and better explanation was soon to be found, for there was

growing up among us the greatest naturalist and thinker of our day,

that patient lover and searcher after truth, Charles Darwin, whose

genius and earnest labours opened our eyes gradually to a conception

so deep, so true, and so grand, that side by side with it the idea of

making an animal from time to time, as a sculptor makes a model of

clay, seems too weak and paltry ever to have been attributed to an

Almighty Power.

By means of the facts collected by our great countryman and the careful

conclusions which he drew from them, we have learned to see that there

has been a gradual unfolding of life upon the globe, just as a plant

unfolds first the seed-leaves, then the stem, then the leaves, then

the bud, the flower, and the fruit; so that though each part has its

own beauties and its own appointed work, we cannot say that any stands

alone, or could exist without the whole. Surely then Natural History

acquires quite a new charm for us when we see that our task is to study

among living forms, and among the remains of those that are gone,

what has been the education and the development of all the different

branches, so as to lead to the greatest amount of widespreading life

upon the globe, each having its own duty to perform. With the great

thought before us that every bone, every hair, every small peculiarity,

every tint of colour, has its meaning, and has, or has had, its use in

the life of each animal or those that have gone before it, a lifelong

study even can never weary us in thus tracing out the working of

Nature’s laws, which are but the expression to us of the mind of the

great Creator.

When we once realise that whether in attacking or avoiding an enemy

it is in most cases a great advantage to all animals to be hidden

from view, and that each creature has arrived at this advantage

by slow inheritance, so that their colours often exactly answer

the purpose, how wonderful becomes the gray tint of the slug, the

imitation of bark in the wings of the buff-tip moth, the green and

brown hues of the eatable caterpillars, the white coat of the polar

bear, and the changing colour of the arctic fox, the ermine, and the

ptarmigan, as winter comes on! And when, on the other hand, we find

badly-tasting creatures such as ladybirds and some butterflies, or

stinging animals like bees and wasps, having bright colours, because

it is an actual advantage to them to be known and avoided, we see that

in studying colour alone we might spend a lifetime learning how the

winners in life’s race are those best fitted for the circumstances

under which they live, so that in ever-changing variety the most

beautifully-adapted forms flourish and multiply.

Then if we turn to the skeleton and the less conspicuous framework of

the body, the flippers of the whale, the manatee, or the seal, doing

the work of a fish’s fin and yet having the bones of a hand and arm,

reveal a whole history to us when we have once learned the secret that

in the attempt to increase and multiply no device is left untried by

any group of animals, and so every possible advantage is turned to

account.

Next, the wonderful instincts taught by long experience give us a

whole field of study. We see how frogs and reptiles, and even higher

animals such as marmots, squirrels, shrews and bears, escape the cold

and scarcity of food in winter by burying themselves in mud, or in

holes of trees or caves of the earth till spring returns; and while we

find alligators burying themselves in cold weather in America, we find

crocodiles, on the contrary, taking their sleep in the hot dry weather

in Egypt because then is their time of scarcity.

Then we learn that the birds avoid this difficulty of change of climate

in quite another manner. They with their power of flight have learned

to migrate, sometimes for short distances, sometimes for more than a

thousand miles, so that they bring up their young ones in the cool

north in summer, when caterpillars and soft young insects are at hand

for their prey, and lead them in the winter to the sunny south where

food and shelter in green trees are always to be found. So long indeed

has this instinct of migration been at work, that often we are quite

baffled in trying to understand why they take this or that particular

route for their flight, because probably, when the first stragglers

chose it, even the areas of land and water were not divided as now, so

that we must study the whole history of the changing geography of the

earth to understand the yearly route of the swallow or the stork.

And last but not least, when we look upon the whole animal creation as

the result of the long working out of nature’s laws as laid down from

the first by the Great Power of the Universe, what new pleasure we find

in every sign of intelligence, affection, and devotion in the lower

creatures! For these show that the difficulties and dangers of animal

life have not only led to wonderfully-formed bodies, but also to higher

and more sensitive natures; and that intelligence and love are often

as useful weapons in fighting the battle of life as brute force and

ferocity.

Even among the fish, which, as a rule, drop their eggs and leave them

to their fate, we have exceptions in the nest-building sticklebacks

and the snake-headed fish of Asia, which watch over and defend their

fry till they are strong, in the pipe-fish where the fathers carry the

young in a pouch, and in sharks which travel in pairs; while a pike has

been known to watch for days at the spot where his mate was caught and

taken away, and mackerel and herrings live in shoals and probably call

to each other across the sea.

Among the other cold-blooded animals--the frogs, newts, and

reptiles--it is true we find less show of feeling, but we must remember

that these are only poor remaining fragments of large groups which have

disappeared from the earth. Even among the amphibia however a tame toad

will become attached to one person; while among reptiles, lizards are

full of intelligence and affection, and snakes are well-known for their

fondness for their owners. The case of the snake which died by its

master’s side when he fell down insensible,[202] if it can be relied

upon, would show that even cold-blooded animals have tender hearts.

Yet these are all instances of affection of lower animals to man. We

must turn to the birds, that group which has gone on increasing in

strength and numbers down to our day, to find that tender devotion

which watches over the helpless nursling, defends the young at the

risk of life, nay, like the peewit with the dragging wing, will even

run in the face of death to lure the cruel destroyer away from the

hidden nest. Natural history teems with examples of birds faithful to

each other and pining even till death for the loss of a mate; while

many birds, such as rooks, starlings, wild geese, swans, and cranes,

not only live in companies and exact obedience from their members, but

even set sentinels to watch, the duties of the office being faithfully

fulfilled.

Then again it is to the higher animals, those nearer to ourselves, that

we must look for the truest affection, and the strongest proofs of that

obedience and sympathy which lead them to unite and so become strong in

the face of danger. Among the beasts of prey it is true that, except

the wolves and jackals, none herd together; but family love is strong

and true. No tiger is so dangerous as is the mother tigress if any one

approaches her young ones, or the lioness whose cubs are attacked,

and in our own homes we all know the tenderness and devotion of a cat

to her kittens. Nevertheless, these animals have very little social

feeling; theirs are the narrower virtues of courage and fidelity to

home, and to the duty of providing food for wife and children. It is

among the gentler vegetable-feeders,--the antelopes and gazelles, the

buffaloes, horses, elephants, and monkeys,--that we find the instinct

of herding together for protection, and with this the consciousness of

the duty of obedience and fidelity to the herd and to one another.

It is easy to see how this was necessary to protect these feebler

animals from the attacks of their ferocious neighbours, and also what

an advantage they had when they had once learned to set sentinels who

understood the duty of watching while others fed, as in the case of the

chamois and seals, of obeying the signal of a leader like the young

baboons on the march, or of putting the mothers and children in the

centre for protection, as horses and buffaloes do.

And there is a real significance in this gradual education in duty to

others which we must not overlook, for it shows that one of the laws

of life which is as strong, if not stronger, than the law of force and

selfishness, _is that of mutual help and dependence_. Many good people

have shrunk from the idea that we owe the beautiful diversity of animal

life on our earth to the struggle for existence, or to the necessity

that the best fitted should live, and the feeblest and least protected

must die. They have felt that this makes life a cruelty, and the world

a battlefield. This is true to a certain extent, for who will deny that

in every life there is pain and suffering and struggle? But with this

there is also love and gentleness, devotion and sacrifice for others,

tender motherly and fatherly affection, true friendship, and a pleasure

which consists in making others happy.

This we might have thought was a gift only to ourselves--an exception

only found in the human race; now we see that it has been gradually

developing throughout the whole animal world, and that the love of

fathers and mothers for their young is one of the first and greatest

weapons in fighting life’s battle. So we learn that after all, the

struggle is not entirely one of cruelty or ferocity, but that the

higher the animal life becomes, the more important is family love and

the sense of affection for others, so that at last a fierce beast

of prey with strength and sharp tools at his command, is foiled in

attacking a weak young calf, because the elders of the herd gather

round him, and the destroyer is kept at bay.

Surely then we have here a proof that, after all, the highest and most

successful education which Life has given her children to fit them for

winning the race is that “unity is strength;” while the law of love

and duty beginning with parent and child and the ties of home life,

and developing into the mutual affection of social animals, has been

throughout a golden thread, strengthened by constant use in contending

with the fiercer and more lawless instincts.

So it becomes evident that the beautiful virtue of self-devotion, one

of the highest man can practise, has its roots in the very existence

of life upon the earth. It may appear dimly at first,--it may take a

hard mechanical form in such lowly creatures as insects, where we saw

the bees and ants sacrificing all tender feelings to the good of the

community. But in the backboned family it exists from the very first

as the tender love of mother for child, of the father for his mate and

her young ones, and so upwards to the defence of the tender ones of the

herd by the strong and well-armed elders, till it has found its highest

development in man himself.

Thus we arrive at the greatest and most important lesson that the

study of nature affords us. It is interesting, most interesting, to

trace the gradual evolution of numberless different forms, and see

how each has become fitted for the life it has to live. It gives us

courage to struggle on under difficulties when we see how patiently

the lower animals meet the dangers and anxieties of their lives, and

conquer or die in the struggle for existence. But far beyond all these

is the great moral lesson taught at every step in the history of the

development of the animal world, that amidst toil and suffering,

struggle and death, the supreme law of life is the law of SELF-DEVOTION

AND LOVE.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Almost every animal mentioned in this book is to be found alive in

the London Zoological Gardens, or stuffed in the British Museum.

[2] The Figures in the text, which, with exception of about twenty,

have all been drawn expressly for this book, are the work of the

above-mentioned artists, together with Mr. Coombe and Miss Suft.

[3] _Life and her Children_, p. 135.

[4] Amphioxus lanceolatus (_amphi_ both, _oxus_ sharp).

[5] For this drawing, and also those of Figures 1 and 4, I am indebted

to Professor A. C. Haddon; the larval form A is the young of Clavelina,

found at Torquay.

[6] Petromyzon (_petra_, stone; _myzo_, to suck).

[7] Myxine.

[8] Cyclostomata (_cyclos_, circle; _stoma_, mouth).

[9] Called _conodonts_, and found in Lower Silurian rocks earlier than

any bones of true fish.

[10] Carcharias glaucus.

[11] Homocercal.

[12] Heterocercal.

[13] Acipenser sturio.

[14] Isinglass is made from the covering of this air-bladder.

[15] Lepidosteus.

[16] Polypterus.

[17] Amia.

[18] Lepidosiren.

[19] Protopterus.

[20] Ceratodus.

[21] These fish, coiled round, may be seen in the British Museum.

[22] Ichthyodorulites.

[23] Dipterus.

[24] Dinichthys.

[25] See Frontispiece. 1, Chauliodus; 2, 9, 10, 11, Harpodon or Bombay

Duck; 3, Plagiodus; 4, Chiasmodus, with a Scopelus in its stomach; 6,

Beryx; 8, Scopelus.

[26] In drawing up this sketch of the deep sea I am almost entirely

indebted to Dr. Günther’s masterly sketch of the deep-sea fish in his

excellent work.

[27] Echeneis remora.

[28] Naucrates.

[29] In this description I am not alluding simply to the

mackerel _family_ Scombridæ, but to that much larger group

_Cotto-Scombriformes_, to which so many ocean fish belong, and even the

sword-fish is allied.

[30] Thynnus pelamys.

[31] Thynnus thynnus.

[32] Coryphæna.

[33] Lampris luna.

[34] Exocœtus.

[35] Coryphæna.

[36] Dactylopterus.

[37] Hippocampus.

[38] Xiphias.

[39] At least 10,000 for each mother.

[40] Mullus.

[41] Trigla.

[42] Gobidæ.

[43] Cyclopterus.

[44] Trachinidæ.

[45] Lophius piscatorius.

[46] Lophius.

[47] Uranoscopus.

[48] Solea vulgaris.

[49] Hippocampus.

[50] Gasterosteus.

[51] Cottus.

[52] Siluridæ.

[53] More properly eel-fares (_fare_, Saxon, to travel; ex.,

way-_faring_ man).

[54] Anabas.

[55] Not “waddling;” it is the toad, not the frog, that waddles.

[56] Lissotriton punctatus.

[57] _Amphi_, all around; _bios_, life.

[58] Proteus anguineus.

[59] Salamandra atra.

[60] See Picture-heading, p. 70.

[61] Labyrinthodonts (_Laburinthos_, spiral; _odontas_, teeth).

[62] Rhacophorus Rheinhardii.

[63] Alytes obstetricus.

[64] Pipa Americana.

[65] Protorosaurus or Thuringian lizard.

[66] Ichthyosaurus.

[67] Plesiosaurus.

[68] Mosasaurus and Clidastes.

[69] Pterodactyls.

[70] Iguanodon in Europe, Hadrosaurus in America.

[71] Megalosaurus in Europe, Dryptosaurus in America.

[72] Testudo Græca.

[73] Testudo talenlata.

[74] The parts of the joints which flatten out in the tortoise are seen

at _sp_ in the lizard and snake, pp. 103, 111.

[75] Testudinea.

[76] Terrapins.

[77] Emyx and Trionys.

[78] Chelydra serpentina.

[79] Chelonia midas.

[80] Chelonia imbricata.

[81] Zootoca vivipara.

[82] Ophisaurus ventralis.

[83] Anguis fragilis.

[84] Natrix torquata.

[85] Naja.

[86] Crotalus.

[87] Naja tripudians.

[88] _Ichthyopsida_--_ichthys_, fish; _opsis_, appearance.

[89] _Sauropsida_--_sauros_, lizard; _opsis_, appearance.

[90] Archœopteryx, see picture-heading, Chapter VII.

[91] See picture-heading of this chapter.

[92] _Ichthyornis_, fish-bird.

[93] _Hesperornis._

[94] Some chamæleons and geckos also have air-tubes passing from the

lungs into the body, and the crocodile’s skull is full of air-cells;

but the two phenomena are not connected as in birds, and other parts of

the skeleton or of the skin-covering, being heavy, have a counteracting

effect.

[95] This third eyelid is a fold on the inner side of the eye; some

reptiles and amphibians have it, and so have the marsupials and many of

the higher animals.

[96] Struthio camelus.

[97] Dinornidæ, of which Dinornis, a still more ancient form, must have

been ten feet high.

[98] This beautiful effect may be seen from below when the guillemots

are fed in any of the public aquariums.

[99] Talegallus.

[100] Megapodidæ or large-footed birds.

[101] Partridges, quails, and some others are exceptions, and pair.

[102] Columba migratoria.

[103] Gecinus viridis.

[104] Alcedo ispida.

[105] The Indian and Chinese edible-nest Swiftlets (Collocalia), make

their nests entirely of this saliva, and they are eaten by the natives.

[106] Troglodytes parvulus.

[107] Orthotomus sutorius.

[108] _Marsupium_, a pouch.

[109] Ornithorhynchus paradoxus.

[110] Echidna hystrix.

[111] Professor Owen has described a reptile from the Trias of Africa,

and Professor Cope another from the Permian of Texas, both having

characters closely resembling the Platypus.

[112] This argument, which can only be stated very roughly here, must

not be supposed to rest merely on the quadrate bone, though this is the

easiest point to illustrate popularly. I am deeply indebted to Mr. W.

Kitchen Parker for a whole flood of light thrown on these early forms,

and only regret that I have neither skill nor space to do justice to

his graphic illustration of a subject of which he is pre-eminently

master.

[113] Diprotodont.

[114] The only exceptions to this are a tooth and a piece of a tusk of

one of the ancient elephants, lately found in Australia, showing that

a few straggling forms of mammalia probably reached that country in

Tertiary times.

[115] Macropus giganteus.

[116] Hypsiprymnus penicillatus.

[117] Dendrolagus.

[118] Phascolomys.

[119] Dasyurus.

[120] Thylacinus.

[121] Didelphis.

[122] Cholœpus.

[123] Mymecophaga.

[124] Dasypus.

[125] Megatherium.

[126] Glyptodon.

[127] Myrmecophaga jubata.

[128] Tamandua.

[129] For a few of these forms see the picture-heading, p. 209.

[130] Coryphodon.

[131] Paleotherium and Anoplotherium.

[132] Xiphodon.

[133] Eohippus.

[134] Hyænarctos.

[135] Cynodon.

[136] Hyænodon and others.

[137] Arctocyon.

[138] Cynomys.

[139] Spalacidæ.

[140] Geomyidæ.

[141] Myogale Pyrenaica.

[142] Castor fiber.

[143] Potamogale.

[144] Myogale.

[145] Soledon and one of the Shrews.

[146] Pteromys Petaurista.

[147] Galeopithecus volans.

[148] Tupaia.

[149] Chiroptera.

[150] Pteropus vulgaris.

[151] The Magot, Macacusinuus.

[152] Naturalists now class monkeys under the order “Primates” (or

highest forms), together with man, and they have given up the term

Quadrumana, or four-handed, because, although the feet grasp like

hands, they are _true feet_. Nevertheless, this term is very useful;

and, if properly understood, expresses the grasping power of the four

feet characteristic of the group.

[153] Platyrrhine monkeys, from _Platus_ broad, _rhines_ nostrils.

[154] Except the marmosets, which have a peculiar dentition of their

own.

[155] Catarrhine monkeys; _kata_ downward, _rhines_ nostrils.

[156] See Parkyns’ _Life in Abyssinia_.

[157] Hylobates, or walker in the woods.

[158] Malay: _Orang_ man, _utan_ forest.

[159] The Dinocerata of the Middle Eocene of America. These gigantic

extinct animals, with tusks and horns, but very small brains, are

believed by Professor Marsh to have connected the two groups the

elephants and the hoofed animals among the early milk-givers.

[160] Anoplotherium; for this form and others, see p. 256.

[161] Paleotherium.

[162] Eohippus.

[163] Xiphodon.

[164] See picture heading.

[165] See picture heading.

[166] See p. 213, and picture heading, p. 209.

[167] The genealogy of the horse is so important, that it may be well

to give a table of the seven principal stages, though transitions are

known even between these.

Period. In Front Hind No. of In

America. Toes. Toes. Teeth. Europe.

{Recent -- } 1 1 Equus.}

7. { and } --------- --------- 40 }

{Upper Pliocene Equus} 2 splints 2 splints Equus.}

1 1

6. Upper Pliocene Pliohippus --------- --------- 42 --

2 splints 2 splints

1 large 1 large

5. Lower Pliocene Protohippus ------- ------- 44 Hipparion.

2 small 2 small

4. Upper Miocene Miohippus 3 3 44 Anchitherium.

3

3. Lower Miocene Mesohippus -------- 3 44 --

1 splint

2. Upper Eocene Orohippus 4 3 44 --

4

1. Lower Eocene Eohippus -------- 3 44 --

1 splint

[168] See table, above.

[169] Cameleopardalis.

[170] See heading of chapter.

[171] Compare this with the Deer with the one-spiked antler in the

picture heading.

[172] In the African elephant; in the Indian they are smaller, and the

female has none.

[173] Mustelus.

[174] Herpestes.

[175] Canis lupus.

[176] These are united in one family, the _Canidæ_ or Dog family; but

this name is unfortunate, as there are no original wild dogs, only

those which have run wild from man. Dogs are now almost certainly shown

to be descended from wolves and jackals.

[177] Thalassarctos (ursus) maritimus.

[178] Trichechus rosmarus.

[179] Plantigrade.

[180] Enhydra marina.

[181] Pinnipedia.

[182] Otariidæ (_ous_, _otos_, an ear), eared Seals.

[183] Callorhinus (Otaria) ursinus.

[184] Phoca vitulina.

[185] Hence their name _Sirenia_, a curious name for voiceless animals.

[186] Cetacea--_cete_, a whale.

[187] Megaptera.

[188] Phocæna communis.

[189] Orca gladiator.

[190] Picture heading, Chap. II.

[191] Picture heading, Chap. IV.

[192] Picture heading, Chap. VIII.

[193] Picture heading, Chap. VI.

[194] _Ibid._ Chap. VII.