It is when Parliament is not sitting that the papers are most
interesting to read. I have found an item of news to-day which
would never have been given publicity in the busy times, and it
has moved me strangely. Here it is, backed by the authority of
Dr. Chalmers Mitchell:--
"The caterpillar of the puss-moth, not satisfied with Nature's
provisions for its safety, makes faces at young birds, and is
said to alarm them considreably."
I like that "is said to." Probably the young bird would deny
indignantly that he was alarmed, and would explain that he was
only going away because he suddenly remembered that he had an
engagement on the croquet lawn, or that he had forgotten his
umbrella. But whether he alarms them or not, the fact remains
that the caterpillar of the puss-moth does make faces at young
birds; and we may be pretty sure that, even if he began the
practice in self-defence, the habit is one that has grown on him.
Indeed, I can see him actually looking out for a thrush's nest,
and then climbing up to it, popping his head over the edge
suddenly and making a face. Probably, too, the mother birds
frighten their young ones by telling them that, if they aren't
good, the puss-moth caterpillar will be after them; while the
poor caterpillar himself, never having known a mother's care, has
had no one to tell him that if he goes on making such awful faces
he will be struck like that one day.
These delvings into natural history bring back my youth very
vividly. I never kept a puss-moth, but I had a goat-moth which
ate its way out of a match-box, and as far as I remember took all
the matches with it. There were caterpillars, though, of a
gentler nature who stayed with me, and of these some were
obliging enough to turn into chrysalises. Not all by any means. A
caterpillar is too modest to care about changing in public. To
conduct his metamorphosis in some quiet corner--where he is not
poked every morning to see if he is getting stiffer --is what
your caterpillar really wants. Mine had no private life to
mention. They were as much before the world as royalty or an
actress. And even those who brought off the first event safely
never emerged into the butterfly world. Something would always
happen to them. "Have you seen my chrysalis?" we used to ask each
other. "I left him in the bathroom yesterday."
But what I kept most successfully were minerals. One is or is not
a successful mineralogist according as one is or is not allowed a
geological hammer. I had a geological hammer. To scour the cliffs
armed with a geological hammer and a bag for specimens is to be a
king among boys. The only specimen I can remember taking with my
hammer was a small piece of shin. That was enough, however, to
end my career as a successful mineralogist. As an unsuccessful
one I persevered for some months, and eventually had a collection
of eighteen units. They were put out on the bed every evening in
order of size, and ranged from a large lump of Iceland spar down
to a small dead periwinkle. In those days I could have told you
what granite was made of. In those days I had over my bed a map
of the geological strata of the district--in different colours
like a chocolate macaroon. And in those days I knew my way to the
Geological Museum.
As a botanist I never really shone, but two of us joined an open-
air course and used to be taken expeditions into Kew Gardens and
such places, where our lecturer explained to his pupils--all
grown-up save ourselves--the less recondite mysteries. There was
one golden Saturday when we missed the rendezvous at Pinner and
had a picnic by ourselves instead; and, after that, many other
golden Saturdays when some unaccountable accident separated us
from the party. I remember particularly a day in Highgate Woods--
a good place for losing a botanical lecturer in; if you had been
there, you would have seen two little boys very content, lying
one each side of a large stone slab, racing caterpillars against
each other.
But there was one episode in my career as a natural scientist--a
career whose least details are brought back by the magic word,
caterpillar-- over which I still go hot with the sense of
failure. This was an attempt to stuff a toad. I don't know to
this day if toads can be stuffed, but when our toad died he had
to be commemorated in some way, and, failing a marble statue, it
seemed good to stuff him. It was when we had got the skin off him
that we began to realize our difficulties. I don't know if you
have had the skin of a fair-sized toad in your hand; if so, you
will understand that our first feeling was one of surprise that a
whole toad could ever have got into it. There seemed to be no
shape about the thing at all. You could have carried it--no doubt
we did, I have forgotten--in the back of a watch. But it had lost
all likeness to a toad, and it was obvious that stuffing meant
nothing to it.
Of course, little boys ought not to skin toads and carry
geological hammers and deceive learned professors of botany; I
know it is wrong. And of course caterpillars of the puss-moth
variety oughtn't to make faces at timid young thrushes. But it is
just these things which make such pleasant memories afterwards--
when professors and toads are departed, when the hammers lie
rusty in the coal cellar, and when the young thrushes are grown
up to be quite big birds.