I
WHEREVER Nature has commissioned one creature to prey upon another, she
has preserved the balance by forewarning that other creature of what she
has done. Nature says to the cat, "Catch the mouse," and she equips her
for that purpose; but on the selfsame day she says to the mouse, "Be
wary,--the cat is watching for you." Nature takes care that none of her
creatures have smooth sailing, the whole voyage at least. Why has she
not made the mosquito noiseless and its bite itchless? Simply because
in that case the odds would be too greatly in its favor. She has taken
especial pains to enable the owl to fly softly and silently, because the
creatures it preys upon are small and wary, and never venture far from
their holes. She has not shown the same caution in the case of the crow,
because the crow feeds on dead flesh, or on grubs and beetles, or fruit
and grain, that do not need to be approached stealthily. The big fish
love to cat up the little fish, and the little fish know it, and, on the
very day they are hatched, seek shallow water, and put little sandbars
between themselves and their too loving parents.
How easily a bird's tail, or that of any fowl, or in fact any part of
the plumage, comes out when the hold of its would-be capturer is upon
this alone; and how hard it yields in the dead bird! No doubt there is
relaxation in the former case. Nature says to the pursuer, "Hold on,"
and to the pursued, "Let your tail go." What is the tortuous, zigzag
course of those slow-flying moths for but to make it difficult for the
birds to snap them up? The skunk is a slow, witless creature, and the
fox and lynx love its meat; yet it carries a bloodless weapon that
neither likes to face.
I recently heard of an ingenious method a certain other simple and
slow-going creature has of baffling its enemy. A friend of mine was
walking in the fields when he saw a commotion in the grass a few
yards off. Approaching the spot, he found a snake--the common garter
snake--trying to swallow a lizard. And how do you suppose the lizard was
defeating the benevolent designs of the snake? By simply taking hold
of its own tail and making itself into a hoop. The snake went round and
round, and could find neither beginning nor end. Who was the old giant
that found himself wrestling with Time? This little snake had a tougher
customer the other day in the bit of eternity it was trying to swallow.
The snake itself has not the same wit, because I lately saw a black
snake in the woods trying to swallow the garter snake, and he had made
some headway, though the little snake was fighting every inch of the
ground, hooking his tail about sticks and bushes, and pulling back with
all his might, apparently not liking the look of things down there
at all. I thought it well to let him have a good taste of his own
doctrines, when I put my foot down against further proceedings.
This arming of one creature against another is often cited as an
evidence of the wisdom of Nature, but it is rather an evidence of her
impartiality. She does not care a fig more for one creature than for
another, and is equally on the side of both, or perhaps it would be
better to say she does not care a fig for either. Every creature must
take its chances, and man is no exception. We can ride if we know
how and are going her way, or we can be run over if we fall or make a
mistake. Nature does not care whether the hunter slay the beast or the
beast the hunter; she will make good compost of them both, and her ends
are prospered whichever succeeds.
"If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again."
What is the end of Nature? Where is the end of a sphere? The sphere
balances at any and every point. So everything in Nature is at the top,
and yet no _one_ thing is at the top.
She works with reference to no measure of time, no limit of space, and
with an abundance of material, not expressed by exhaustless. Did you
think Niagara a great exhibition of power? What is that, then, that
withdraws noiseless and invisible in the ground about, and of which
Niagara is but the lifting of the finger?
Nature is thoroughly selfish, and looks only to her own ends. One
thing she is bent upon, and that is keeping up the supply, multiplying
endlessly and scattering as she multiplies. Did Nature have in view our
delectation when she made the apple, the peach, the plum, the cherry?
Undoubtedly; but only as a means to her own private ends. What a bribe
or a wage is the pulp of these delicacies to all creatures to come and
sow their seed! And Nature has taken care to make the seed indigestible,
so that, though the fruit be eaten, the germ is not, but only planted.
God made the crab, but man made the pippin; but the pippin cannot
propagate itself, and exists only by violence and usurpation. Bacon
says, "It is easier to deceive Nature than to force her," but it seems
to me the nurserymen really force her. They cut off the head of a savage
and clap on the head of a fine gentleman, and the crab becomes a Swaar
or a Baldwin. Or is it a kind of deception practiced upon Nature, which
succeeds only by being carefully concealed? If we could play the same
tricks upon her in the human species, how the great geniuses could be
preserved and propagated, and the world stocked with them! But what a
frightful condition of things that would be! No new men, but a tiresome
and endless repetition of the old ones,--a world perpetually stocked
with Newtons and Shakespeares!
We say Nature knows best, and has adapted this or that to our wants or
to our constitution,--sound to the ear, light and color to the eye; but
she has not done any such thing, but has adapted man to these things.
The physical cosmos is the mould, and man is the molten metal that is
poured into it. The light fashioned the eye, the laws of sound made
the ear; in fact, man is the outcome of Nature and not the reverse.
Creatures that live forever in the dark have no eyes; and would not any
one of our senses perish and be shed, as it were, in a world where it
could not be used?