Part 2

To the naturalist, the most marked feature of the great tropical forest south of the Equator, is the inequality in the balance of Nature between vegetable and animal life. From the forests of Brazil to the forests of the Congo, through the wooded heights of northern Madagascar, to the tangled jungles of the Asiatic Archipelago and the impenetrable woods of New Guinea, the boundless profusion of vegetable growth is unmatched by any similar abundance in animal forms. A few brilliant birds of strange shape and matchless plumage, such as the toucans of Guinea and the Amazon, or the birds of paradise in the Moluccas or the Papuan Archipelago, haunt the loftiest trees, and from time to time fall victims to the blow-pipe or arrow of the natives, who scarcely dare to penetrate that foodless region, even for such rich spoils, until incantation and sacrifice have propitiated the offended spirits of the woods; but except the sloth and the giant ant-eater, there is hardly to be found in the tropical regions of the New World a quadruped which can excite the curiosity of the naturalist, or form food even for the wildest of mankind. In the corresponding tracts of Africa and the Asiatic Archipelago, the rare four-footed animals that live in the solitary forests are, for the most part, creatures of the night. Unlike the lively squirrels and marten-cats of temperate regions, they do not leave their hiding-places till the tropical darkness has fallen on the forest, when they seek their food, not on the surface of the ground, but, imitating the birds, ascend to the upper surface of the ocean of trees, and at the first approach of dawn seek refuge from the hateful day in the dark recesses of some aged and hollow trunk. There is nothing like the loris or the lemur in the fauna of temperate Europe. We may rather compare them to a race of arboreal moles, the condition of whose life is darkness and invisibility. But, unlike the moles, the smaller members of these rarely seen tribes are among the most beautiful and interesting creatures of the tropics, though the extreme difficulty of capturing creatures whose whole life is spent on the loftiest forest trees, is further increased by the reluctance of the natives to enter the deserted and pathless forests. The beautiful lemurs, most of which are found in Madagascar, are further believed by the Malagasi to embody the spirits of their ancestors; and the weird and plaintive cries with which they fill the groves at night, uttered by creatures whose bodies, as they cling to the branches, are invisible, and whose delicate movements are noiseless, may well have left a doubt on the minds of the first discoverers of the island as to whether these were not in truth the cries and wailings of true _lemures_, the unquiet ghosts of the departed.

Several of the larger lemurs are to be found at the Zoo, and though these suffer so much if unduly exposed to the light that before long they lose their sight, they may occasionally be seen in their cages. Others, the rarest and most delicate members of the race, are so entirely creatures of darkness that their exposure to daylight seems to benumb all their faculties. They appear drugged and stupefied, and, though capable of movement, seem indisposed either to attempt escape when handled, or to move in any other direction than that of shelter from the odious day. Even food is refused before nightfall, and, unlike the epicure’s ortolans, which awake and feed in a darkened room whenever the rays of a lamp suggest the sunrise, the lemur only consumes its meal of fruit and insects when nightfall has aroused its drowsy wits. These midnight habits clearly unfit it for public exhibition at the Zoo, and the last and rarest of the tribe which have arrived in London occupy a private room adjacent to the monkey palace, in common with other lemurs and loris, and a few of the most delicate marmosets and tropical monkeys which have escaped the rigours of an English winter. One large cage, which, in spite of the label “Coquerel’s Lemur” placed upon it, seemed at the time of our last visit to contain nothing but a pile of hay, is the dwelling-place of these latest guests. After displacing layer after layer of the hay, the two sleeping beauties were discovered lying in a ball, each with its long furry tail wrapped round the other, in the deepest and most unconscious repose. When at last the two were separated, and the least reluctant was taken in the hand, the extreme beauty of the little “ghost” was at once apparent. In colour it is a rich cinnamon, fading to lavender beneath. The texture of the fur is like nothing but that of the finest and best-finished seal-skin jacket, only far deeper and closer, so that the hand sinks into it as into a bed of moss. The head is large and most intelligent, the face being set with a pair of very large, round, hazel eyes, in which the lines of the orbit seem not to radiate from the centre, but to be arranged in circles, like the layers of growth in the section of a tree. The long tail is at the base almost as wide as the body, tapering to a point, and covered with deep fur. But the greatest beauty of form which this lemur owns is the shape of its hands and feet. These exquisite little members are so far an exact reproduction of the human hand, that not only the hands, but also the feet, own a fully-developed thumb. But each finger, as well as the thumb, expands into a tiny disc, as in certain tree-frogs, so that the little hands may cling to the tree with the tightness of an air-pump. It is plain, as the half-sleeping lemur climbs over the arms and shoulders of its visitor, that it takes him for a tree. The arms are stretched wide apart, the thumbs and fingers are spread, and grasp each fold of the coat with the anxious care of one who thinks that a slip will cause a fall of a hundred feet, and the soft body and tail half envelop the limb down which they are descending, fitting to the surface like some warm enveloping boa. As soon as it reaches the hay-pile in its cage the lemur instantly burrows, its long tail vanishing like a snake, and in a minute it is once more asleep, and unconscious of the world.

A near relation of the lemurs is a beautiful little creature, whose uncouth native name has not been replaced, called the “moholi.” It only differs from the lemurs in the shape of the ears, which in the moholi are either pricked up, like those of a bat, or folded down on its head at will. It has the same wonderful brown eyes, so large and round that they seem to occupy the greater part of the head; the moholi is, in fact, “all eyes.” As it stretches its slender arms out wide against the keeper’s chest, and turns its head to look at the visitors, it has the most winning expression of any quadruped we have ever seen. The coat, of a pinkish-grey above, turns into light saffron below, and the texture is less deep than the lemur’s fur. In touch it resembles floss-silk, thickly piled. The “Slow Loris,” from Malacca, is a tailless lemur. In exchange it has received a fretful temper, which seems a permanent trait in this species. When wakened it growls, bites, and fights, until once more allowed to sleep in peace. This loris hardly falls short of the beauty of the lemurs. The fur is cream-coloured, with a cinnamon stripe running from the head down the back. Of the three species which we have described, the first seems to combine some of the characteristics of the monkey and the mole, the second of the squirrel and the bat, the last those of the monkey and the weasel tribe. The “Slender Loris” is a still greater puzzle. It has all the characteristic “points” of the lemurs, without the tail. In size it resembles a squirrel; but its movements are so strange and deliberate, and so unlike those of any other quadruped, that it seems impossible to guess either at its habits or its purpose in creation. Each hand or foot is slowly raised from the branch on which it rests, brought forward, and set down again; the fingers then close on the wood until its grasp is secure, when the other limbs begin to move, like those of a mechanical toy. As we looked, its “affinities” with other types presently suggested themselves. It is a _furry-coated chameleon_. The round, protruding eyes, the slow mechanical movements, and the insect-feeding habits, are identical, except that the loris hunts by night and the chameleon by day. The loris even possesses an auxiliary tongue, which aids it in catching moths, just as the development of the same member marks the insect-catching lizard. From dawn till dusk all the lemurs are the very bond-slaves of sleep, hypnotized in the literal sense, drugged and steeped in slumber. Had the old poets known them, had the Phœnician sailors brought them back when they visited the land of Ophir, they would have been the consecrated companions of Somnus. Ovid’s famous picture of the Cave of Sleep, and the noiseless hall where

“A couch of down, raised high on ebony, Self-coloured, sombre, draped with sable pall, Stands in the midst, whereon that god doth lie, While all his limbs relaxed in slumber fall,”

wants but one touch to complete the drowsy theme—a sleeping lemur curled up on Somnus’ dusky pillow.

THE BUTTERFLY FARM AT THE ZOO

A COLLECTION of tropical butterflies and moths reared in the Zoological Gardens was exhibited in the rooms of the Royal Society at their annual _soirée_ in 1893. The fact that such perfect and beautiful examples of the frail and fantastic forms which by night fill the place taken by the humming-birds by day, in the steaming tropical forest, have lived in the precincts of a London park, is sufficient justification, if any be required, for their presence among such practical and progressive surroundings. Readers of _Kenelm Chillingly_, one of the latest and most extravagant of Bulwer Lytton’s romances, may remember that one of the airy fancies of his youthful and impossible heroine, is to keep pet butterflies in cages, and to shed floods of tears over their untimely death. They manage things better in the butterfly farm at the Zoo, where the brilliant insects, after their brief day is over, pass by a kind of metempsychosis from the catalogue of living to that of dead specimens, and figure anew in the list of “additions to the collections of the Society.”

It would be difficult to picture a more elegant or more interesting sight than the hatching of the butterfly-broods in the Insect House during the first days of summer heat. The glass cases, filled with damp moss and earth, and adorned with portions of tree-trunks or plants suited to the habits of the moths, are peopled by these exquisite and delicate creatures, as one after another separates itself from the chrysalis-case in which it has been sleeping all the winter, and, fluttering upwards with weak and uncertain movements, exposes its beauties to the light. The wings of the largest kind, such as the great orange-brown “Atlas” moth, are as wide as those of a missel-thrush; and the great size of this and other species increases the strange likeness to bird-forms which is so marked, even in the smaller English hawk-moths. The giant moths of the tropics, unlike the rest of the insect world, have faces and features not devoid of expression. Some resemble birds; others cats. Some are covered with long, soft plumage, like the feathers of the marabout, or the plumes of swans. Others are wrapped in a silky mantle like an Angora kitten, or clothed in ermine and sables. The depth and softness of these downy mantles make the impulse to stroke them suggest itself at once; yet when the head-keeper lifts them from the branch on which they rest, as a falconer lifts his hawk, the feeling that they are neither moths nor animals, but long-winged birds, is equally irresistible. Form and texture suggest endless analogies with the higher animals; but the scheme of colour is peculiar to the tribe of which these are the most beautiful examples. In the Cecropian silk-moths, for example, some five or six of which, at the time this paper was written, were preening their feathery wings on the lichen-covered bark of an ancient oak-trunk. The body seems thickly wrapped in feathers, and, like the wings, is of an exquisite mottled grey, the colour of the natural wool of the Cashmere goat. But the legs, antennæ, and parts of the wings are boldly painted a rich red madder-brown. The Indian moon-moth is perhaps the most delicate in colouring of all. The wings are of the palest green, and as wide as those of a swallow, the tint of the aqua-marine. The uniform faint colour is only broken by a few crescent spots of a darker tint. But the whole of the front edge of the wing is “bound” in velvet, of the colour of dark-red wine. The body is wrapped in thick and downy feathers of the purest white, from which the soft legs and feet emerge, stained to match the claret edging of the wing. Across the head, and lying back against the dark shoulders, are the fern-shaped antennæ of pale-green. Thus, this lovely creature possesses but three hues,—pale-green, claret-colour, and white; but these are so graded and distributed, and so modified by the contrasted beauty of the texture of the semi-transparent wing, the thick and downy body, and the delicate flesh-like legs, that the creature seems rather the realization of some painter’s dream than one among hundreds of silk-producing insects. We once heard the generic difference between angels and fairies stated with all the certainty which was due to the youth of the speaker:—“Angels have birds’ wings, and fairies have butterflies’ wings, of course!” was the indignant answer to the difficulty raised. Imps, too, have bats’ wings. But the wings of the moth have not yet been appropriated to the human embodiment of the unseen denizens of the air. There is a softness and reserve of colouring, and an uncertainty of outline in the moth’s wing, which mark it at once as something distinct from the sharply cut, and brilliantly coloured forms of their butterfly relations.

Perhaps the most brightly coloured moths which are raised in the house are the _Eacles regalis_, which are covered with a net-work of orange, rivalling in colour the inner flesh of a melon, on a ground of greenish-grey; and the _Eacles imperialis_, in which an exquisite shade of “old rose” invades and is lost in a rich cream-coloured ground.

Not the least beautiful among the giant moths is the splendid creature from the cocoons of which the wild silks of India are wound. This is a far larger and finer moth than that which produces the Chinese tussur-silk. Its wings are “old gold” in colour, with two large transparent eyes on each, fringed with rose-colour. These, according to Hindoo superstition, are the finger-marks of the god Vishnu, and the Tussur moth is, therefore, sacred to that deity. But it is among the wild demon-worshipping Santhals that the Indian silk-moth has its native home. In the boundless upland forests, the trees on which it feeds are covered with thousands of the cocoons, which are gathered by these wild tribes, and sold to the silk-winders of the plains. Numbers of these fine cocoons line the cases at the Zoo, each with living pupa inside. The cocoons are beautiful objects in themselves, nearly the size of a walnut in the rind, and hanging by stalks firmly twisted to the supporting twigs, like rows of melons. Their colour varies through all shades of silvery or purplish-grey, streaked all over, like the eggs of the yellow-hammer, with fine irregular dark-purple lines. The silk threads of which they are woven are flat, like tape, not round, like the ordinary floss-silk of Europe; and it is to this flat and irregular form of the thread that the beauty of woven tussur-silk is mainly due. It may be doubted whether the cultivation of the Tussur moth will spread to the West, like that of the common “silkworm.” But the time is not far distant when this, and probably others of the fifty-nine species of silk-producing larvæ which were exhibited in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, will become an additional source of wealth in the wide forest-regions of our Indian Empire.

The area of the jungle forest in the Santhal country, in which grow the trees whose leaves form the best food of these silkworms, is vast beyond any probable use which the most enterprising silk-grower conceives. “As far as the eye could reach from any rising ground,” writes Mr. Thomas Wardle, in his _History of the Growth of the Tussur Silk Industry_, “and for hundreds of square miles, there lay a forest in which it seemed that any quantity of the tussur of the future might be cultivated, and I think it is worthy of the attention of the Government of India to encourage in every way a greatly increased production, and not to be behind China in this respect, remembering that when I showed how tussur-silk could be used, the demand which sprang up was chiefly met by the greater quickness of the Chinese.”

Not only the moths, but even the caterpillars, or larvæ of the various silk-moths, are as beautiful as any fabric which is woven from the glossy fibres of their cocoons. Let no one despise “worms and creeping things” after once seeing these exquisitely formed and coloured creatures. The larvæ of most may be seen in late July in the Insect House, feeding on green leaves in the cases. The finest are those of the Cecropian silk-moth; they are of a blue-green, with a soft bloom like that on some succulent plant. The whole body is clothed with alternate lines of turquoise and amber studs, specked with black, polished and shining like jewels. Those that have spun their cocoons are wrapped in jackets of light-brown silk, into which strips of green leaves of the plum-tree are twisted for protection. The Ailanthus silk-moth has a pale-grey larva, with little ornaments in rows, shaped like the flowers of the stone-crop, and dotted with black. The moth itself is strangely beautiful, fawn-coloured, with bold wavy lines of black, grey, and pink. The Promethean silk-moth has a larva of pale Cambridge blue, with yellow and crimson studs. Not even the sea anemones in their native waters are more beautiful than these fugitive forms assumed by the undeveloped silk-moths of the East.

In their scheme of colour, the butterflies are to the moths what the fabrics of Europe are to the webs of Cashmere or the carpets of Daghestan. A score of the lovely swallow-tailed butterfly may often be seen fluttering in their cage. The bottom of their glass mansion is covered with short pieces of osier-stick, each one of which is pierced up the centre with a tunnel, at the end of which lies the pupa of that strange instance of protective mimicry, the hornet clear-wing. Another case is full of the scarce pale variety of the swallow-tail, and a third of the American swallow-tail, the female of which is black, spangled with what seems a shining dust of sapphires. But perhaps the most beautiful of all the butterfly broods is the swarm of _Papilio Cresphontes_. At the time of hatching, the case is full of these lovely butterflies, black above, with beaded spots of pale yellow; yellow below, with beaded lines of black. When last seen by the writer, some were flying from side to side of the cage; some had alighted, or were in the act of alighting, and others on the moss at the bottom were sipping the juices of ripe grapes.

Among the butterfly cages is a glass case which, since its inmates first found their way to the Zoo, has never failed to excite the utmost interest and curiosity. On the floor of the box, partly sheltered by a few green plants, are ten or a dozen gold buttons, with a red-gold centre, on a lighter gold setting, edged by a round, semi-transparent rim. If watched attentively, the buttons presently move about on invisible legs, and perhaps one suddenly splits, puts out a pair of wings, and flies. These astonishing beetles, which are at present unnamed, are from Ceylon. Above, they exactly resemble an embossed gold sleeve-button, with a rim of yellow talc. Laid on their backs, the under-side of a golden beetle appears, surrounded with the same semi-transparent rim. Trap-door spiders also flourish in the Insect House, and have made several caves, with most ingenious doors, in a large piece of rotten wood with rugged lichen-covered bark. The doors are quite irregular in shape, made to fit the surface of the hole in which the spider lives, and are of all sizes, from that of a walnut-shell to a pea. The door exactly fits the orifice, however irregular its shape, and is so cleverly covered with pieces of wood and lichen woven into the fabric, that it exactly resembles the surrounding bark; and even a prying tit might omit to probe it with its bill.

The one hideous and repulsive creature in this good company is the great tarantula spider. It is like a long-legged, hairy crab, quite seven inches from claw to claw, with enormous brown poison fangs like a beak. Two of these spiders, discovered in a tent at Assouan, occupied by officers of the Heavy Camel Corps, put the whole of the inmates to flight in their pyjamas, and the only wonder is that they ever ventured to return before daylight. There is something strangely repulsive in this low type of life, which nevertheless makes a prey of such beautiful and highly-developed animals as humming-birds, and even the small and fragile quadrupeds of the tropical forest.

PATTERNS ON LIVING ANIMALS.

EARLY in the spring of 1893, the Marquis of Hamilton brought with him from Trinidad a number of little fish, less in size than a half-grown minnow, which were presented to the Zoological Society, and were to be seen at Easter swimming in a glass bowl, among a thin growth of water weeds, in the warm chamber in which the tropical moths and butterflies are hatched.

Being small and elegant, they have a long and ugly scientific name, the _Girardinus Guppyi_. In the absence of a label, the writer mistook them for the gudgeon, which form the food of the more rapacious fishes, and was about to suggest that they would be interesting material for an experiment with the electric eels, when a ray of sunlight flashing through the bowl revealed the astonishing fact that these tiny fishes possessed beauties of ornament not exceeded in kind by any of the most exquisite birds of the tropics.