Part 15

“On September 26 they were first seen to eat fish, and follow the mother into the water. They did not dive like the mother, but went in like a dog, with their head above water, and it was not till the middle of October that they were observed to plunge into the water like the old ones. When the water was let out of the pond for the purpose of cleaning it they were shut up, but got out, and into the pond when it was half full of water. The young ones were not able to get out without help, and for some minutes the mother appeared very anxious, and made several attempts to reach them from the side of the pond where she was standing, but without success, as they were not within reach.

“She then plunged into the water to them, and began to play with one of them for a short time, and put her head close to its ears, as if to make it understand what she meant; the next moment she made a spring out of the pond, with the _young one holding on to the fur_ at the root of the tail _by its teeth_; this she did several times during a quarter of an hour, as the young ones kept going into the water as fast as she got them out. Sometimes the young held on by the fur of her sides, sometimes by that at the tail. As soon as there was sufficient water for her to reach them from the side of the pond, she took hold of them near the ears with her mouth, and drew them out, and led them round the pond close to the fence, and kept chattering to them, as if telling them not to go into the pond again.”

A litter of young raccoons were born in the spring of 1894. Unfortunately they all died, just as it was hoped that they had passed the most dangerous time of infancy. On the other hand, the little Caucasian bear cubs, which arrived at Easter, throve amazingly, and in three months grew to the size of a retriever dog, though they had not abandoned the youthful habit of sucking the paws and “humming,” to signify that they wanted to be fed. But the great and notable birth of the year, almost contemporaneous with that of the infant prince, and worthy to be noted as a _prodigium_, if the keeping of Sibylline books were part of the English Constitution, was the arrival of a young “gnu.” It was even uglier than its mother, whose compound features of a horse’s body, a bull’s horns, and a goat’s beard combine to make her one of the strangest beasts existing. The infant was exactly like its mamma, minus the horns, but plus a high nose, and a curly beard, which makes it in profile rather like a portrait of Sennacherib or Shalmanezar. Another most beautiful calf of the wild cattle, a cross between the Chartley bull and the white cow from the Bangor herd, is as pretty and pleasing as the gnu calf is ugly. But in each case the mother is vastly proud of its infant, and they are probably the best judges of what their offspring should be.

ANIMAL COLOURING.

THE conclusions of naturalists as to the laws which govern the colouring of animals must, it seems, be modified. There is no reason, however, to fear any loss of interest in one of the prettiest and most attractive sides of natural history. The collection and comparison of the wonderful analogies in colour between animals and their environment, and between one animal and another, will still be guided by the leading principles which Bates and Wallace detected; and the delight and surprise with which the non-scientific world welcomed these discoveries need neither be regretted nor diminished. But without wishing to grudge one iota of the praise awarded to explanations, the dexterity and aptness of which would alone entitle them to admiration, it is still possible to doubt whether some of the minor hypotheses framed to account for facts which seemed to stand outside the explanation of colour mimicry by the general law of the survival of the fittest, are not almost too ingenious. The fascination of the subject is so great that it seems to develop an over-keenness of scientific insight. The facts of resemblance themselves are so wonderful, and the contrast between the colours of the sexes in birds so startling, that the temptation to make a great principle like that of natural selection fit the exact requirements of each case, and to explain the complexity of Nature in a sentence, is almost irresistible. It is quite possible that the principle of natural selection, which gives a perfect explanation of the wonderful phenomena of “protective mimicry,” may also be the master-key to the remaining problems of animal hues. The chief difficulties which remain, after accounting for protective coloration, are, first, the extraordinary differences between the tints and plumage of male and female in many birds; and, secondly, the conspicuous colours of certain creatures by which the attention of their enemies must necessarily be attracted. The first of these obvious difficulties has been explained by what is called “sexual selection,” which is an auxiliary to the general law of natural selection. The female pheasants, or birds of paradise, or pigeons, as the case may be, by an enduring good taste in choosing for their mates those with the brightest plumage and finest wattles and spurs, have played their part in the general scheme of evolution so well, that their progeny have in time developed all the beauties which they now possess. That theory is obviously quite consistent with the general law. It accounts logically in part, if not entirely, for the perilous beauties of the stronger sex. But there are creatures in gorgeous attire for which “sexual selection” could give no justification—caterpillars, for instance, which run additional risks by their conspicuous hues. “That,” said the naturalist, “is in order to advertise their inedible qualities!” “They require,” writes Mr. Wallace, “some signal, or danger flag, which shall serve as a warning to would-be enemies not to attack them, and they have usually obtained this in the form of conspicuous or brilliant coloration, very distinct from the protective tints of the defenceless animals allied to them.” There is one obvious objection to this explanation. It is really too clever. It fits the case so perfectly that, in the absence of further experiment and observation, one is reluctantly obliged to pause before yielding entirely to such a brilliant surmise, and to welcome the note of warning which Mr. Beddard, the Prosector of the Zoological Society, utters in his admirable work on “Animal Coloration.”[9] It is evident, from the space given to the two points of “Sexual Selection” and “Warning Colours” in this work, which aims only at furnishing a general notion of the facts and theories relating to animal coloration, that room exists for doubt as to the value to be attached to either theory. The contribution which Mr. Beddard makes towards solving the difficulty is threefold. He presents as alternatives to the theories of sexual selection and warning coloration, the ingenious speculations of Mr. Stoltzmann and Dr. Eisig, neither of which have yet found their way into works of a popular character; and he gives an account of numerous and careful experiments made at the Zoo, with insects of brilliant colouring and reputed evil flavour, as food for birds and reptiles. No care or pains was omitted to get at the truth of these supposed instances of warning colouring. No augurs, with the purest motives to guide their interpretation of the omens, ever watched the feeding of the sacred chickens in the Capitol with a more ardent desire to mark the real appetite of the prophetic fowls, than did Mr. Beddard and his predecessors, in observing the practical results of “warning coloration” when making trial of the birds at the Zoo. But the list of experiments does not give any clear line of refusal or acceptance between the “protectively coloured” insects and their more sober relations, and Mr. Beddard’s conclusion is that “the experiments which have been made might be taken to prove anything.” That is, so far, disappointing. But it is probable that with time and patience a body of evidence will be accumulated which will throw more light on the vexed question of the palatability of these gaudy insects or reptiles. Meantime, the discoveries of Dr. Eisig, to which Mr. Beddard introduces us, throw light on the question from a different point of view. If his surmises are confirmed, the fact will be additional evidence in favour of that minute and laborious specialization which so often goes without reward. His researches were devoted to the history of a small group of sea-worms. One of these he found living parasitically upon a marine sponge in the Bay of Naples. The sponge was of a yellow colour, caused by the presence of small particles of colouring-matter. The worm was of the same colour, with bright orange spots, and the _pigment_ which coloured the sponge was found to be the same which coloured the worm, having been simply transferred from the tissues of the sponge to the skin of the worm, after going through part of the alimentary canal. Dr. Eisig is of opinion that the “pigment” so transferred from the alimentary canal to the skin is itself the cause of the creature being distasteful, which suggests the conclusion that the brilliant colour—that is, the secretion of a quantity of colouring-matter—has itself caused the inedibility of species, rather than that the inedibility has made necessary the production of bright colour as an advertisement. “This explanation,” Mr. Beddard remarks, “is not entirely contrary to the views of Wallace, Poulton, and others; for we may still suppose that the bright colours are actually ‘warning’ colours, although they have not been evolved for this purpose.” But the weakness, as well as the attraction, of the unmodified theory really lies in the supposition of the creation in the creature of colour, for the express purpose of advertisement. The modest conjecture of Dr. Eisig transfers the explanation to safer ground.

Footnote 9:

_Animal Coloration_, by F. E. Beddard, M.A., Prosector to the Zoological Society of London. Swan, Sonnenschein, and Co., London. Macmillan and Co., New York.

The mode by which, in the simple organisms which he observed, the colour was transferred from the food to the feeder, also suggests the existence of some simple and natural relation between the tints in the skin, or hair, and external conditions of food and temperature, to account for the strange changes of colour to suit outside conditions in animals exposed to the rigours of a northern winter. The mountain hare of Ireland does not always change its colour to white in winter, though in the colder climate of Scotland and Norway the change is the rule. So the Arctic fox seems always to be “bleached” in the extreme north, though often retaining its darker dress throughout the year when further south. Yet exactly the same effects are found in connection with want of food as with want of warmth. The rats in a large iron ship which was recently wrecked off the coast of Northumberland,[10] and remained stranded for many weeks without connection with the shore, turned quite white—a change due apparently to starvation.

Footnote 10:

Near Blyth. When some shipwrights visited the vessel to remove rigging and fittings, the starving rats swarmed round them, and ate the food which they had brought for their dinners.

In strong contrast with the modifications of the part played by evolution in animal colouring, suggested by Dr. Eisig, is the alternative which Mr. Stoltzmann proposes to the theory of sexual selection. It is not a change which will flatter the masculine imagination. Contrasted with the view which accounted for the predominance of male strength, and in some cases of masculine beauty, over the weaker sex by a long course of discerning feminine selection, it has an unconscious irony. Going quite outside the merits of the male sex _per se_, Mr. Stoltzmann weighs its worth in view of the survival of a species. So considered, an excess of males is an evil, which the law of natural selection is under obligations to remedy.[11] The tendency of Nature is to produce a superabundance of males, observations on the origin of sex having shown that the percentage of male birds among birds is greater than that of females. Further inquiries into the influence of nutrition on sex go to show that badly-nourished eggs produce males, while well-nourished eggs produce females; and scarcity of food is a more common condition than its abundance. The fine feathers which “make fine birds” have therefore been given to the males with a view to exposing them to the attacks of their enemies, and so reducing their numbers, always—be it observed—in accordance with the law of the survival of the fittest, but by a curiously different line of argument from that which lent its weight to the theory of sexual selection. Probably neither the one nor the other should stand alone; nor is this result to be feared. Bigotry seems almost unknown to the spirit of the natural history research of to-day; the only danger of the open mind of its followers is in the constructive ingenuity of theory which it seems to foster.

Footnote 11:

The bad result of an excess of males is perhaps best ascertained in the case of grouse moors. See Mr. A. Stuart Wortley’s remarks upon this in _The Grouse_ (Fur and Feathers Series, Longmans, Green & Co.).

WILD-CATS AT THE ZOO.

THE reservation of one-tenth of the area of Scotland for deer-forests has probably arrested the extermination of three, if not of four, of the largest and rarest of our birds and beasts of prey for at least a century. The great increase in the numbers of the golden eagle, and the migration of the ospreys from the lakes to the forests, are among the results of the protection so afforded. It was reasonable to expect that the wild-cat would also benefit by the policy, now generally in favour with owners of forests, of encouraging animals of prey to keep down the grouse and hares. The arrival at the Zoological Gardens of two genuine Scotch wild-cats, trapped during last year on the same estate in Inverness-shire, is evidence that even there the rarest and wildest of all British quadrupeds are recovering from the persecution of half a century of grouse and black-cock preserving. Both were caught in steel traps, and each had lost part of a fore-foot; but with the wonderful vitality of all cats, they so far recovered from their injuries that, on being confronted with each other, they at once joined battle, like the Border rider at Chevy Chase, who—

“When his legs were smitten off, Did fight upon his stumps.”

These bold and courageous beasts, fresh from the remnants of the Caledonian Forest, have not diminished either in size or courage since the wild-cat was described by John Bossewell in 1597:—“He is slye and wittie, and seeth so sharply that he overcometh the darkness of night by the shyninge light of his eyen. In shape of body he is like unto a leopard”—[this is not the case, however]—“and hathe a great mouth. He doth delight that he enjoyeth his liberty; and in his youth he is swift, plyante, and merye. He maketh a rueful noise and a gasteful when he profereth to fight with another.” The growling of the wild-cats is “gasteful” indeed, not only when they proffer to fight with another, but whenever a friendly visitor proffers to look at them. That owned by Lord Lilford, which has been in the Zoological Gardens for some time, when exhibited at the cat show at the Westminster Aquarium, performed the singular and creditable feat in wild-cat annals of growling without ceasing for two whole days, varied only by explosions of hisses and spitting. This cat is somewhat lighter, and has fewer dark markings than the Scotch wild-cats; the ground hue of the fur is pepper-colour, its eyes pale-green, its nose very small—not a usual feature in wild-cats—and covered with fur, its face round and bushy, and its expression infinitely surly. The only stripes distinctly marked are two on either side of the head.

Though the list of so-called wild-cats includes nearly twenty species, there is only one, besides the animal we have described, which seems to compete with it as the possible undescended great original of the “bundle of concepts” which civilized man has in his mind when, with reference to all the varieties of the domestic animal, he uses the abstract term “cat.” This is the “chaus,” or jungle-cat, which bears somewhat the same geographical and tribal relation to a Scotch or Russian wild-cat as a Pathan tribesman to a Highlander. The Scotch wild-cat is found with very little variation throughout Northern and Central Europe, across the steppes of Northern Asia, as far as the southern limits of the Nepaul Hills. At a height of some 8000 ft. his place is taken by another cat, equally bold, and far less retiring and solitary, the “chaus,” which is common not only in India, but at the roots of the Caucasus, and throughout Northern Africa and Upper Egypt. A splendid specimen of this Oriental cousin of our wild-cats occupies a cage in the same house at the Zoo, under the somewhat misleading name of the “Egyptian cat.” Nothing could well be more different from the paintings of the sleek tabbies of ancient Egypt, the sacred animals of the goddess Bast, petted by priests, and taught to catch wild-fowl for their masters in the reedy banks of the Nile, than this rough, round, broad-headed, bushy-whiskered, “upstanding” savage, who has held his own till the present day in the swamps of Asia and Africa, and in the immediate neighbourhood of every Indian country village or tank, just as the European wild-cat did in England till the days of the Tudors. The late General Douglas Hamilton, in his journals of sport in Southern India, tells a story of the courage of this Indian wild-cat, which matches exactly the experience of Charles St. John in Sutherlandshire. St. John’s terriers had brought a wild-cat to bay under a rock, and when he approached, the animal sprang straight at his face, and was only stopped by a blow from a stick which he had cut before coming up to aid the dogs. General Hamilton says of the chaus—“One of these animals came into our cantonment evidently on the prowl for fowls, or anything it could pick up; so we collected all the dogs we could, and had a hunt. We came to a long check, the dogs being quite at fault. After looking for some time, I spied the cat squatting in a hedge, and called for the dogs. When they came I knelt down and began clapping my hands and cheering them on; the cat suddenly made a clean spring at my face; I had just time to catch it as one would a cricket-ball, and giving its ribs a strong squeeze, I threw it to the dogs, not, however, before it had made its teeth meet in my arm, just above my wrist. For some weeks I had to carry my arm in a sling, and I shall carry the marks of the bite to my grave.” The chaus is a far finer animal even than the European wild-cat. It is larger and more powerful, though its proportions and movements are almost the same. In colour it is a fine tawny-grey, with long bushy hair, a ruff round its face, yellow cheeks shading into white, a long, very broad nose, long ears slightly tufted, yellow eyes, and bars on its tail. There are also two dark bars on the inside of the arm, above the elbow; when laying its ears back, spitting and uttering growls like distant thunder, it is the “very moral” of a big, ill-tempered domestic tom-cat, which poaches all day, fights all night, and sleeps by choice in the coal-cellar. Apart from their general resemblance to the tame cat, both the chaus and the Scotch cat in their moments of repose exactly resemble the domestic species. They never “pace” their cages—a habit which distinguishes all leopards and tigers, and all the tiger-cats _when young_. They sleep all day, if possible, either curled up on their backs with their noses upwards, like a tame cat in a sunny window; or with their backs drawn up and their fore-paws tucked neatly under their chests. When feeding, they do not lie down like the leopards, but crouch over their food, with their jaws almost upon the ground, and their backs somewhat arched, like a tame cat with a mouse. Anatomists state that the European wild-cat differs from the tame animal in the dimensions of that part of its interior which is in such request for violin-strings. If this objection is fatal to the claim of the former to be the ancestor of our cats, we should be inclined to find its direct ancestor in the chaus—a view which need not conflict with the conclusions of M. Champfleury, who considers that the Egyptian cat was acclimatized in Egypt at the same time as the horse, in 1668 B.C.

All the other wild “cats” are either tiger-cats, leopard-cats, or puma-cats, names in which the last half of the compound should, we think, be read rather as a “diminutive” than as an index to race. In them the habits and appearance of the larger rather than the smaller animal appear to the writer to bear the greater proportion in the affinities of the whole. From first impressions, the Bengal tiger-cat, for example, appears to be a variety of the domestic cat with the coat and colouring of a leopard, or rather of a cheetah. Its attitudes, or rather those of the full-grown specimen in the Society’s collection, are those of a tired house-cat. It sleeps in the same positions, and like the true cats never “paces” for exercise. But a young one of the same species, shown this year at the Westminster Aquarium, untamed, preserved all the lion-like features strongly developed, just as the young of lions and pumas preserve the spots which disappear at maturity. The movements of this little creature and its general proportions were almost exactly those of a quarter-grown lion. It had the square head, the flat massive jaws, and the same restless, eager, pacing movements from side to side of its cage, and feet always ready to claw or strike. The colouring and texture of the skin in the full-grown animal are wholly unlike any variety of domestic cat known to the “fancy.” Its colour is tawny, its coat short and close, its eyes yellow with a black centre. The face of the adult is narrow like that of a female house-cat; but the six parallel lines, two on either side, and two in the centre of the head, break into spots upon the back. Its tail, which is long and thick, is spotted, not ringed, and it has spotted, leopard-like legs.

The collection of these beautiful smaller _felidæ_ in the Zoological Gardens is less complete than that of any other tribe exhibited. Even the “clouded tiger,” the most perfect in colouring of all the spotted kinds, has disappeared from the collection, though some years ago there were two fine specimens in the Cat House. The “clouded tiger” is marked with almost rectangular ornaments of clouded black on a ground of rich buff. It is the largest of all the “tiger-cats,” and has a very long, thick, silky tail, ringed with black. This animal has a special claim to be an inmate of the Zoo, for it was first discovered and brought to this country by Sir Stamford Raffles, the moving spirit in the establishment of the Zoological Society. They were no less good than beautiful, and the following description of their behaviour from the pen of Sir Stamford Raffles himself should be contrasted with the ancient and inbred malignity of the true wild “cat.”