Part 5

M. St. Hilaire describes the pairings, or as he calls it, "the loves of the Moles." As soon as the Mole has finished the galleries he brings his mate along with him, and shuts her up in the bridal gallery, taking care to prevent the entrance of his rivals: in case of a fight they enlarge the part of the gallery where they are met; and the victory is decided in favour of him who first wounds his adversary before the ear. The female, during the fight, is shut up in the bridal gallery, so as to be unable to escape; for which purpose, however, she uses all her resources in digging, and attempts to get away by the side passages. Should she succeed the conqueror hastens to rejoin his faithless mate, and to bring her back into his galleries. This manoeuvre is repeated as often as other males enter the lists. At length the conqueror is recognised, and his mate becomes more docile. The pair work together and finish the galleries; after which the female digs alone for food. As soon as the galleries are formed, the male conducts his mate to a certain point, and from this time the female no longer digs in the solid earth, but towards the surface, advancing by merely separating the roots of the grass.

The Mole is a great friend to the farmer; but there are places in which he is a public enemy. He is not a vegetable feeder, and he never roots up the growing corn in spring-time, except when he is after grubs, snails, and wire-worms. It has been calculated that two Moles destroy 20,000 white worms in a year. He is very destructive to under drains; and where the land is low we are in danger of a deluge from his piercing holes in the drain-banks. Thus it would be madness not to extirpate Moles in those places where the waters, in drains or rivers, are above the level of the lands around, especially when the banks are made of sand or earth of loose texture.

The persecution of Moles in cultivated countries amounts almost to a war of extermination. The numbers annually slaughtered are enormous. A mole-catcher, who had followed the craft for thirty-five years, destroyed from forty to fifty thousand Moles. But all Mole exterminators must yield to Le Court, who, in no large district, took, in five months, six thousand of them. Moles are good swimmers, and their bite is very sharp; their attacks are ferocious, and they keep their hold like a bull-dog.

The Shrew Mole of North America resembles the European Mole in its habits. Dr. Goodman describes it as most active early in the morning, at mid-day, and in the evening; and they are well known in the country to have the custom of coming daily to the surface _exactly at noon_. We read of a captive Shrew Mole which ate meat, cooked or raw, drank freely, and was lively and playful, following the hand of his feeder by the scent, burrowing for a short distance in the loose earth, and after making a small circle, returning for more food. In eating he employed his flexible snout to thrust the food into his mouth, doubling it so as to force it directly backwards, as described in Dr. Richardson's "North American Zoology."

James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, remarks, in his usual impressive manner:--"The most unnatural persecution that ever was raised in a country is that against the Mole--that innocent and blessed little pioneer, who enriches our pastures annually with the first top-dressing, dug with great pains and labour from the fattest of the soil beneath. The advantages of this top-dressing are so apparent that it is really amazing how our countrymen should have persisted, for nearly half a century, in the most manly and valiant endeavours to exterminate the Moles! If a hundred men and horses were employed on a pasture farm of from fifteen hundred to two thousand acres, in raising and driving manure for a top-dressing of that farm, they would not do it so effectually, so neatly, or so equally as the natural number of Moles. In June, July, and August, the Mole-hills are all spread by the crows and lambs--the former for food, and the latter in the evenings of warm days after a drought has set in. The late Duke of Buccleuch was the first who introduced Mole-catching into Scotland."

THE GREAT ANT-BEAR.

A fine living specimen of this comparatively rare animal was first exhibited in the Zoological Society's gardens, in the Regent's-park, 1853. It is stated to be the first specimen brought alive to England, and accordingly excited considerable attention. It was one of a pair, captured near the Rio Negro, in the southern province of Brazil, and shipped for England by some German travellers. The male died on the voyage; the female arrived in London in 1853, and was exhibited in Broad-street, St. Giles's, until purchased by the Zoological Society for the sum of 200_l._ The advantage of this live specimen to naturalists has been very great. Hitherto the examples engraved by Buffon and Shaw were both derived from stuffed specimens, and had the inevitable defects and shortcomings of such. Sir John Talbot Dillon, in his "Travels through Spain," published in 1780, states that a specimen of the Ant-Bear, from Buenos Ayres, was alive at Madrid in 1776: it is now stuffed and preserved in the Royal Cabinet of Natural History at Madrid. The persons who brought it from Buenos Ayres say it differs from the Ant-eater, which only feeds on emmets and other insects, whereas this would eat flesh, when cut in small pieces, to the amount of four or five pounds. From the snout to the extremity of the tail this animal is two yards in length, and his height is about two feet; the head very narrow, the nose long and slender. The tongue is so singular that it looks like a worm, and extends above sixteen inches. The body is covered with long hair of a dark brown, with white stripes on the shoulders; and when he sleeps, he covers his body with his tail. This account, it will be seen hereafter, corresponds very accurately with that of the animal purchased by the Zoological Society.

Mr. Wallace, who travelled on the Amazon and Rio Negro, about the year 1853, relates:--"The living specimen of this singular animal is a great rarity, even in its native country. In fact, there is not a city in Brazil where it would not be considered almost as much a curiosity as it is here. In the extensive forests of the Amazon the great Ant-eater is, perhaps, as abundant as in any part of South America; yet, during a residence there of more than four years, I never had an opportunity of seeing one. Once only I was nearly in at the death, finding a bunch of hairs from the tail of a specimen which had been killed (and eaten) a month previous to my arrival, at a village near the Capiquiare. In its native forests the creature feeds almost entirely on white ants, tearing open their nests with its powerful claws, and thrusting in its long and slender tongue, which, being probably mistaken for a worm, is immediately seized by scores of the inhabitants, who thus become an easy prey. The Indians, who also eat white ants, catch them in a somewhat similar manner, by pushing into the nest a grass-stalk, which the insects seize and hold on to most tenaciously. It may easily be conceived that such an animal must range over a considerable extent of country to obtain a plentiful supply of such food, which circumstance, as well as its extreme shyness and timidity, causes it to be but rarely met with, and still more rarely obtained alive."

We have seen that the Ant-Bear lives exclusively upon ants, to procure which he tears open the hills, and when the ants flock out to defend their dwellings, draws over them his long, flexible tongue, covered with glutinous saliva, to which the ants consequently adhere; and he is said to repeat this operation twice in a second. "It seems almost incredible," says Azara, "that so robust and powerful an animal can procure sufficient sustenance from ants alone; but this circumstance has nothing strange in it, for those who are acquainted with the tropical parts of America, and have seen the enormous multitude of these insects, which swarm in all parts of the country to that degree that their hills often almost touch one another for miles together." The same author informs us that domestic Ant-Bears were occasionally kept by different persons in Paraguay, and that they had even been sent alive to Spain, being fed upon bread-and-milk mixed with morsels of flesh minced very small. Like all animals which live upon insects, the Ant-eaters are capable of sustaining a total deprivation of nourishment for an almost incredible time.

The Great Ant-Bear's favourite resorts are low, swampy savannahs, along the banks of rivers and stagnant ponds; also frequenting humid forests, but never climbing trees, as falsely reported by Buffon. His pace is slow and heavy, though, when hard pressed, he increases his rate, yet his greatest velocity never half equals the ordinary running of a man. When pressed too hard, or urged to extremity, he turns obstinate, sits upon his hind-quarters like a bear, and defends himself with his powerful claws. Like that animal, his usual and only mode of assault is by seizing his adversary with his fore-paws, wrapping his arms round him, and endeavouring, by this means, to squeeze him to death. His great strength and powerful muscles would easily enable him to accomplish his purpose in this respect, even against the largest animals of his native forests, were it but guided by ordinary intelligence, or accompanied with a common degree of activity; but in these qualities there are few animals indeed who do not greatly surpass the Ant-Bear; so that the different stories handed down by writers on natural history from one to another, and copied, without question, into the histories and descriptions of this animal, may be regarded as pure fictions. "It is supposed," says Don Felix d'Azara, "that the jaguar himself dares not attack the Ant-Bear, and that, if pressed by hunger, or under some other strong excitement, he does so, the Ant-Bear embraces and hugs him so tightly as very soon to deprive him of life, not even relaxing his hold for hours after life has been extinguished in his assailant. Such is the manner in which the Ant-eater defends himself; but it is not to be believed that his utmost efforts could prevail against the jaguar, who, by a single bite, or blow of his paw, could kill the Ant-eater before he was prepared for resistance, so slow are his motions, even in an extreme case; and, being unable to leap or turn with ordinary rapidity, he is forced to act solely upon the defensive. The flesh of the Ant-eater is esteemed a delicacy by the Indians; and, though black, and of a strong musky flavour, is sometimes even met with at the tables of Europeans."

The habits of the Great Ant-Bear in captivity have been described scientifically yet popularly, from the Zoological Society's specimen, by Professor Owen, who writes:--"When we were introduced to this, the latest novelty at the noble vivarium in the Regent's-park, we found the animal busy sucking and licking up--for his feeding is a combination of the two actions--the contents of a basin of squashed eggs. The singularly long and slender head, which looks more like a slightly bent proboscis, or some such appendage to a head, was buried in the basin, and the end of the lithe or flexible tongue, like a rat's tail, or a writhing black worm, was ever and anon seen coiling up the sides of the basin, as it was rapidly protruded and withdrawn. The yellow yolk was dripping with the abundant ropy saliva secreted during the feeding process from the exceedingly small terminal mouth; for the jaws are not slit open, as in the ordinary construction of the mouths of quadrupeds, and the head, viewed sideways, seems devoid of mouth; but this important aperture--by some deemed the essential character of an animal--is a small orifice or slit at the end of the tubular muzzle, just being enough, apparently, to let the vermiform tongue slip easily in and out. The tongue, the keeper told us, was sometimes protruded as far as fourteen inches from the mouth."

By the Qjuarani Indians the beast is known by a name which is, in Spanish, "little mouth." The Portuguese and Spanish peons call it by a name equivalent to "Ant-Bear." In the Zoological Catalogue the animal is denominated _Myrmocophaga jubata_, or the "Maned Ant-eater." This appellation would very well suit the animal if, as most spectators commonly imagine at first sight, its head was where its tail is, for the tail is that part of the animal on which the hair is most developed, after the fashion of a mane; whilst the actual head appears much more like a tail, of a slender, almost naked, stiff, rounded kind. The body is wholly covered by long, coarse hair, resembling hay, rapidly lengthening from the neck backwards to six or eight inches, and extending on the tail from ten to eighteen inches. The colour is greyish brown, with an oblique black band, bordered with white, on each shoulder. The animal measures about four feet from the snout to the root of the tail; and the tail, three feet long, resembles a large screen of coarse hair. When the animal lies down, it bends its head between its fore legs, slides these forward, and crosses them in front of the occiput, sinks its haunches by bending its hind legs and bringing them close to the fore feet; then, leaning against the wall of its den, on one side, it lays the broad tail over the other exposed side of the body, by the side bend of that part, like the movement of a door or screen. Nothing is now visible of the animal but the long coarse hair of its _natural and portable blanket_. When it is enjoying its siesta, you cannot form any conception of its very peculiar shape and proportions; an oblong heap of a coarse, dry, _greyish thatch_ is all that is visible. When, however, the keeper enters the den with any new dainty, as cockroaches, crickets, maggots, or meal-worms, to tempt the huge insect-devourer, the quick-hearing animal unveils its form by a sweeping movement of the thatch outwards, the tail that supports it rotating, as if joined by a kind of door-hinge to the body; the head is drawn out from between the fore limbs; the limbs are extended, and the entire figure of this most grotesque of quadrupeds stalks forth. The limbs are short; the fore limbs grow rather thicker to their stumpy ends, which look as if the feet had been amputated. The four toes, with their claws, are bent inwards, and are of very unequal length. This is the most singular part of the animal: it is also the most formidable member, and, indeed, bears the sole weapon of defence the beast possesses. The innermost toe, answering to the thumb on the fore limb of the neighbouring chimpanzee, is the shortest. A fifth toe seems to be buried in the outside callosity, on which the animal rests its stumpy feet while walking. At the back part of the sole, or palm, of the fore foot, is a second large callosity, which receives the point of the great claw in its usual state of inward inflection. Against this callosity the animal presses the claw when it seizes any object therewith; and Azara, as we have seen, avers that nothing can make the Ant-Bear relax its grasp of an object so seized.

With respect to the jaguar being sometimes found dead in the grasp of the Great Ant-eater, Professor Owen observes that its muscular force resembles that of the cold-blooded reptiles in the force and endurance of the contractile action; and, like the reptiles, the Sloths and Ant-Bears can endure long fasts.

Woe to the unlucky or heedless aggressor whose arm or leg may be seized by the Ant-Bear. The strength of the grasp sometimes breaks the bone. The Ant-Bear never voluntarily lets go, and the limb so grasped can be with difficulty extricated, even after the animal has been killed. To put the beast, however, _hors de combat_, no other weapon is needed than a stout stick. "With this," says Azara. "I have killed many by dealing them blows on the head, and with the same security as if I had struck the trunk of a tree. With a mouth so small, and formed as already described, the Ant-Bear cannot bite; and, if it could, it would be useless, for it has no teeth."

"Like a lawyer," says Professor Owen, "the tongue is the chief organ by which this animal obtains its livelihood in its natural habitat. The warmer latitudes of South America, to which part of the world the Ant-Bear is peculiar, abound in forests and luxuriant vegetation; the insects of the ant and termite tribes that subsist on wood, recent or decaying, equally abound. With one link in the chain of organic independencies is interlocked another; and as the surplus vegetation sustains the surplus insect population, so a peculiar form of mammalian life finds the requisite conditions of existence in the task of restraining the undue multiplication of the wood-consuming insects."

The number of male Ant-eaters is supposed to be considerably smaller than that of the females, which circumstance favours the inference that the extinction of the species, like those of the _edentata_ in general, is determined upon.[6]

Large as the Ant-Bear is in comparison with the animals on which it naturally feeds, there appear to have been still larger Ant-Bears in the old times of South America. Fossil remains of nearly allied quadrupeds have been detected in both the fresh-water deposits and bone-caves of the post-pliocene period in Buenos Ayres and Brazil.

In examining the fossil remains has been found evidence that the nervous matter destined to put in action the muscular part of the tongue was equal to half of that nervous matter which influences the whole muscular system of a man. No other known living animal offers any approximation to the peculiar proportions of the lingual nerves of the fossil animal in question except the Great Ant-eater; but the size of the animal indicated by the fossil was three times that of our Ant-eater. For this strange monster, thus partially restored from the ruins of a former world, Professor Owen proposes the name of _Glossotherium_, which signifies tongue-beast.

Evidence of such a creature has been given by Dr. Lund, the Danish naturalist, resident in Brazil: among the fossil remains here (limestone caves of the province Minas) he discovered traces of the Great Ant-eater, which, however, are too imperfect to enable us to determine more accurately its relation to existing species. The fragments indicate an animal the size of an ox! Were the insect prey of these antediluvian Ant-eaters correspondingly gigantic?

Two circumstances very remarkable were observed in the Zoological Society's Great Ant-eater: the hinge-like manner in which the animal worked its tail when it had laid itself down, throwing it over the whole of its body and enveloping itself completely; and the peculiar vibratory motion of the long vermiform tongue when protruded from the mouth in search of food. The tongue is not shot forth and retracted, like that of the chameleon, but protruded gradually, _vibrating_ all the time, and in the same condition withdrawn into the mouth.

Another species of Ant-eater is the _Tamandua_, much inferior in size to the Great Ant-Bear, being scarcely so large as a good sized cat, whilst the other exceeds the largest greyhound in length. The Tamandua inhabits the thick primæval forests of tropical America, and is never found on the ground, but exclusively in trees, where it lives upon termites, honey, and, according to Azara, even bees, which in those countries form their hives among the loftiest branches of the forest; and having no sting, they are more readily despoiled of their honey than their congeners of our own climate. When about to sleep it hides its muzzle in the fur of its breast, falls on its belly, letting its fore-feet hang down on each side, and wrapping the whole tightly round with its tail. The female, as in the Great Ant-eater, has but two pectoral mammæ, and produces but a single cub at a birth, which she carries about with her on her shoulders for the first three or four months. _Tamandua_ is the Portuguese name; the French and English call it _fourmiller_ and Little Ant-Bear.

The latter are the names of a still smaller species, which does not exceed the size of the European squirrel. Its native country is Guayana and Brazil. It is called in Surinam _kissing-hand_, as the inhabitants pretend it will never eat, at least when caught, but that it only licks its paws in the same manner as the bear; that all trials to make it eat have proved in vain, and that it soon dies in confinement. Von Sack, in a voyage to Surinam, had two of these Ant-eaters which would not eat eggs, honey, meat, or ants; but when a wasps'-nest was brought they pulled out the nymphæ and ate them eagerly, sitting in the posture of a squirrel. Von Sack showed this phenomenon to many of the inhabitants of Surinam, who all assured him that it was the first time they had ever known that species of animal to take any nourishment.

Von Sack describes his Ant-eaters as often sleeping all the day long curled together, and fastened by their prehensile tails to one of the perches of the cage. When touched they raised themselves on their hind-legs, and struck with their fore-paws at the object which disturbed them, like the hammer of a clock striking a bell, with both paws at the same time, and with a great deal of force. They never attempted to run away, but were always ready for defence when attacked.

The discovery of the true nature of the food of this species is particularly desirable, and may enable us to have the animal brought alive to this country, a thing which we believe has not been attempted; and which, if attempted, has certainly never succeeded. To procure or carry ants during a long sea-voyage is impracticable, but the larvæ of wasps can be obtained in any quantity, and will keep for months; so that the most serious difficulty to the introduction of the little Ant-eater being thus removed, it would only require to be protected from the effects of a colder climate, which may be as easily done in its case as in that of other South America mammalia.

The Porcupine Ant-eater of New Holland, now very uncommon in New South Wales, is regarded, of its size, the strongest quadruped in existence. It burrows readily. Its mode of eating is very curious, the tongue being used sometimes in the manner of that of the chameleon, and at other times in that in which a mower uses his scythe, the tongue being curved laterally, and the food, as it were, swept into the mouth.

The original Great Ant-Bear, received at the Gardens of the Zoological Society on the 29th of September, 1853, died on the 6th of July, 1854. There are now two of these animals living in the Gardens, one of which is a remarkably fine specimen.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] Proceedings of the Zoological Society.

CURIOSITIES OF BATS.

These harmless and interesting little animals have not only furnished objects of superstitious dread to the ignorant, but have proved to the poet and the painter a fertile source of images of gloom and terror. The strange combination of character of beast and bird, which they were believed to possess, is supposed to have given to Virgil the idea of the Harpies.

Aristotle says but little about the Bat; and Pliny is considered to have placed it among the Birds, none of which, he observes, with the exception of the Bat, have teeth. Again, he notices it as the only winged animal that suckles its young, and remarks on its embracing its two little ones, and flying about with them. In this arrangement he was followed by the older of the more modern naturalists. Belon, doubtingly, places it at the end of the Night-birds; and the Bat, _Attaleph_ (bird of darkness), was one of the unclean animals of the Hebrews; and in Deuteronomy xxv. 18, it is placed among the forbidden birds.