Part 7

The experiences of this Russian soldier when he had penetrated into the regions behind the plateau of Tibet to the mysterious lake of Koko-Nor, lying 10,000 ft. above the sea, are more in the spirit and setting of the journals of Columbus than any tale of travel of modern times. The lake, blue as a sapphire, lay in a setting of dull salt sand, with an encircling rim of snowy mountains. Outside and beyond the mountains lay on one side the forbidden land of China; on another, Tibet, with its frozen and stereo-typed government of a priestly caste; and on the west, the broken tribes of Eastern Turkestan. As he passed towards the great Desert of Gobi, which divides the dwindling population on one side of the mountains from the decaying civilization on the other, he found himself almost alone among the primitive animals and birds of the centre of the Old World; and as the old Greeks imagined, and as Darwin found in Patagonia, and voyagers at either Pole, that at the ends of the world Nature was simplified, with fewer and more primitive forms, so, in the “centre of the world,” Prejvalski found that in these remote and solitary regions he was face to face with some of the early and original types of those animals which man enslaved and turned to his own uses, at such a distance of time that the original types were believed to have perished for ever. The hope of discovering the “undescended dark original” of some of our domesticated animals, especially of those ancient servants of Eastern mankind, the camel and the horse, seems to have been ever present to the mind of Prejvalski, and to have affected his imagination as the vision of the shining walls of El Dorado did the old adventurers, or the hope of finding the mother-rock of the gold, the gold-seekers of our day. From the sapphire lake of Koko-Nor he pushed towards the North-West across the plain of Tsaidam, a strange, unfinished region, once the bed of a huge lake, a waste of sand, salt-impregnated clay, and marshes, through clouds of mosquitoes and gadflies, towards another lake, called Lob-Nor, lying in an extension of the great Desert of Gobi. He had marked how, as he journeyed across Asia westward, all the elements of Nature grew more simple and severe, and that as the more complex landscape resolved itself into waterless mountains, salt lakes, and rude vegetation, so the types of animal life grew constantly more primitive. He had left behind him the semi-wild horses of the Don and Southern Russia, and seen the still wilder ponies of the Mongols, “under the average height, with thick necks, large heads, thick legs, and long, shaggy coats.” The camels of the Koko-Nor were smaller and rougher than those further West, and he rejoiced to think that he must now be approaching the original home of the wild camel, and even of the wild horse. “Such a journey,” he wrote, “must finally set at rest the question of the existence of wild camels and wild horses; the people have repeatedly told me of both, and described them fully.” The wild camels were said to live in North-West Tsaidam, and to have smaller humps and more pointed muzzles than the tame camels, and grey hair. They were hunted for food, and were exceedingly fleet, wary, and suspicious of man. These stories of the Mongols were found to be correct. Several skins of the wild camel were brought to the traveller, and he was at last rewarded by a sight of one of them, though the distance was too great to enable him to shoot it or compare it with the tame animals. Later, however, some have been taken alive, and the existence of the wild camel in the Desert of Gobi may be taken as established.[3]

Footnote 3:

The skins and skeletons of the wild camel are now on view at the Natural History Museum.

The Mongol accounts of the wild horses, though equally positive, were less satisfactory. They were certain that there did exist wild horses in the same districts as the wild camels; and they were also certain that these were distinct from the horselike kiang, the wild ass of Eastern Turkestan and Mongolia. The kiangs do, in fact, resemble a Mongol horse in many points. They have the same heavy head, square shoulder, chestnut colour, and short ears; but they differ in having their lower parts almost white, and a true ass’s tail. They neigh, but also bray, and, when going at full speed, have the characteristic appearance of an ass with “great ugly head stretched out straight before, and scanty tail straight behind,” as Prejvalski says. They are, in fact, probably only a variety of the wild ass of Persia and Western Turkestan. But the Mongol accounts of the wild horse were quite inconsistent with the description of the kiangs. “The wild horses,” they said, “were numerous near Lob-Nor, but were so shy that when frightened they continued their flight for days. They were of a uniform bay [? dun] colour, with black tails, and manes sweeping the ground; and were never hunted because they were too difficult of approach.” Prejvalski obtained the skin of one of these wild horses; but the evidence so obtained did not bear out the account given by the Mongols, who seem to have fallen into the usual error of imagining that in the “wild horse” they would find the species in a condition of original and primitive perfection. Of course nothing could be more contrary to probabilities. “Wild” animals, compared with domesticated descendants of the same species, occupy much the same position as “wild” plants do to their descendants in the garden; and the absence of fine legs and a flowing mane in the _Equus Prejvalskii_ made the place assigned to it as the ancestor of the modern horse all the more probable. Now the news comes that the wild horse of Prejvalski has been seen, hunted, and captured by two Russian travellers, the brothers Grum-Grizimailo, and that four specimens have been brought to the Zoological Gardens of St. Petersburg from their Central Asian home. These creatures are said to correspond in all respects with the skin obtained by Prejvalski, and to represent the ancestors of all our modern horses. From a picture of the animal which appeared in the _Graphic_, there seems some reason to doubt whether they may not, after all, be only a variety of the kiang, or wild ass of Turkestan. They have the ass’s hog-mane, and a tail in which the long hairs, though not confined to the tip, do not begin to grow until some inches from the root. Neither has the animal any forelock. On the other hand, the ears are short, not long, as in all the ass tribe, and the square shoulder is not more characteristic of the asses than of all neglected breeds of horses. Moreover, it is a commonplace in natural history, that the primitive characteristics are shown in the young; and the thin tail, short neck, and head set on so as to make an angle with the throat instead of a curve, are as characteristic of a young colt as of the _Equus Prejvalskii_. But, apart from all external differences between the ass and the horse, lies the inexplicable fact that the latter adapts itself to changed conditions in almost all climates, while the former does not. Under human care and selection, the horse varies so rapidly, that we meet with all extremes, from the dray-horse to the Shetland, and all colours from black to white. But the ass in the last five thousand years has varied little. It will not thrive except in hot climates, and centuries of careful breeding have not caused it to change colour further than from grey to white,[4] and have done little to make it a pleasant animal to ride, or big enough for heavy draught. These facts give a starting-point from which we may judge whether or not the _Equus Prejvalskii_ is of the true stock. Let those recently brought to Russia be made the nucleus of a herd, and the variations of successive generations be noted. Then if they are true horses, they will vary first in colour, then in shape, and human selection ought to be able to guide the varieties towards different types. If, on the other hand, they be asses, they will refuse to vary, and remain true to the type of the steppes of Dsungaria.

Footnote 4:

There are black donkeys, but most appear to be instances of “melanism” rather than of colour gradation.

Even in our own New Forest, this difference between the horse and the ass is curiously persistent. In the Southern Forest there are many hundreds of semi-wild donkeys, as well as ponies, which are left to Nature from year to year. The ponies are of every colour known in the annals of horse-breeding, but the shaggy little donkeys are all of a uniform dark stone-colour, which never varies. Looking at the beautiful wild asses from the Desert of Cutch, Southern Africa, and Central Asia, which are exhibited at the Zoo, one is tempted to wonder how it comes that the race in this country has been allowed to degenerate, instead of being retained as a strong and useful auxiliary to our unrivalled breed of horses.

ÆSTHETICS AT THE ZOO.

THE ANIMAL SENSE OF BEAUTY.

THAT sense of beauty to which the gorgeous plumage of the male birds in many species is an obvious and direct appeal, is by no means limited to the knowledge so naïvely shown by resplendent husbands and adoring wives, that fine feathers make fine birds. So common and varied is the pleasure derived from this sense, that in many kinds it extends to the conscious search for and appliance of beautiful objects in the decoration of nests, of pleasure-houses, and the enrichment of collections. This taste for ornament is by no means limited to birds kept in captivity, in which they often learn tricks and habits foreign to their nature, from _ennui_ and idleness. In the freedom of English woods or Papuan jungles, they show the keenest pleasure in the strange or beautiful shapes and colours of flowers, of feathers, of fruits, of gay shells and insects, of woven fabrics, of metal, glass, and gems; and similar tastes shown in captivity are often but the survival and maimed reproduction of their natural love for surrounding themselves with what pleases the eye. It appears in species where it might be least expected, and is developed to a point at which it becomes an artistic passion identical in motive and the means taken to gratify it, with the same taste and its expression by civilized man. It is not without reason that the Papuan, who lives naked under a tree, calls the gardener-bird “the master,” which can build not only a nest, but a lovely pleasure-house besides, and adorns this with a hundred beautiful objects to satisfy æsthetic wants which the savage is not yet developed enough to feel or understand.

The gardener-bird has not yet become established at the Zoo, but the bower-birds build their gallery every spring, and decorate it with such “articles of vertu” as visitors are kind enough to place at their disposal. The bower-birds live in the compartments of the western Aviary nearest to and on the left of the main entrance. Apart from the claims to sympathy which their æsthetic tastes suggest, the birds themselves are singularly handsome, courageous, and active, and thoroughly enjoy the excitement and change of scene which is so distasteful to many creatures confined in a public menagerie. They are strongly-built, compact-looking birds, almost as large as a rook, but in general shape something between a thrush and the Indian mynah. The male in his adult plumage is a splendid purple, while the hen-bird is green and olive, almost as brilliant as the colours of the ground parakeets. They hop from perch to perch with wonderful agility, and whether on the ground or in the branches, are seldom still, but always active, inquisitive, and alert.

In the first warm days of early spring they begin to collect materials for the bower. The twigs of a birch-broom are usually given them for the raw material, and these are soon arranged with astonishing skill into two short incurved hedges, the tops being pulled over to make the bower as nearly like a tunnel as the material admits. If they had a larger allowance of brooms no doubt the tunnel would be made longer. As it is, it is only a section of a gallery. When this is complete nothing makes the birds so happy as presents of bright-coloured objects to arrange round the sides of the playground. Unfortunately for the birds, the mice, which have no æsthetic perceptions, but are of a practical turn of mind, steal everything soft which is put in the bower, to make nests for their own young. All pieces of coloured paper, rags, and tinsel are carried off in the night, or even in the day, so that the birds can only rely for permanent ornament on things not only bright but hard. But their taste for colour may easily be tested by giving them shreds of paper of different hues. If it be merely a question of colour, not of texture, they usually prefer red, picking out the red strips first and trying the effect in different parts of the gallery. That their power of selection is highly developed may be judged from the following example. The writer was looking at the birds early in January, when they showed signs of a wish to build, and happened to have in his pocket some specimens of silk, which had been sent in order to make a selection of a pattern for neckties. The utmost variation from black allowed by the severe taste of London costume being some slight pattern of white, or grey spots, the difference in the “colouring” of these little bits of silk was so slight, as to be hardly appreciable by any but the highly specialized sense of adornment in the masculine mind, consisting as it did of more or less frequent repetitions of little groups of spots or other insignificant pattern. Eight or nine of these were thrown on the floor of the aviary, and the cock-bird at once flew out from the recess at the back, and proceeded to pick them up and scrutinize them one by one. Finally, after much consideration, it took to the bower, which was just begun, the piece of silk on which the pattern was closest and most obvious. Their liking for what is bright and shining in texture is even stronger than that for colour. Some ingenious friend, finding that the mice robbed the birds of their papers and silks, presented them with a number of small glass phials filled with coloured shreds, or with tin and brass filings. These were a source of great delight, and when the supply was further increased by a dozen pretty glass _solitaire_ balls, they spent a week in arranging and re-arranging their treasures.

It is obvious that the bower-birds are highly intelligent creatures, but these tastes appear in birds which are quite low in the scale of mental development, even among the hawks, which are among the least keen-witted of the birds. The kite, for instance, has a great liking for pretty things, or what it considers such. In two of the rare instances in which the kite’s nest has been recently found in this country, the cock-bird had carried home a long, trailing spray of woodbine in flower, and left it by the side of its mate. When kites were common in England, their habit of carrying off to their nests any strange objects which took their fancy was well known. “The white sheet bleaching on the hedge” has as great attractions for them as it had for Autolycus. Shakespeare makes the pedlar refer to this habit. “My traffic is sheets,” he says; “when the kite builds, look to lesser linen.” But the bird, though as much a “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” as Autolycus himself, is only a fine-art and _bric-à-brac_ collector in its way, and is perhaps not more unscrupulous in annexing the specimens that take its fancy. In a kite’s nest found not long ago in this country, the “collection” was enriched by pieces of newspaper and leaves of “Bradshaw’s Railway Guide!”—and on the few estates in England where these birds are still protected, the keepers are said to be quite aware of their mania for collecting linen when laid out to dry, and carrying off socks and bright cotton handkerchiefs to the nest.

The sense of beauty naturally appears, in the rudest and most elementary form, in such uncouth robbers as the kites. In the far cleverer crows, ravens, magpies, and jays, it is a marked and hereditary passion. From the Jackdaw of Rheims to the old raven at the Tower of London, who amassed a unique and valuable collection at the bottom of one of the venerable cannon inside the Barbican, there can hardly have existed a tame member of the tribe which has not at times asserted its own right to a share in the enjoyment of what we remember to have seen described in the pompous advertisement of a modern art furnisher, as “those products of the minor arts which contribute to the dignity and refinement of domestic life.” They have a wide and catholic sense of feeling for what may contribute to their happiness in this way, and do not always distinguish between what is beautiful and what is merely curious. At the same time, they do often distinguish and keep apart what they collect or steal for _food_, and their art collections, which are hidden separately, and far more carefully concealed. The writer has seen this in the case of tame jays and jackdaws, and has known it practised by a raven and a magpie. The latter always hid the crusts, and especially the small squares of toast made ready for soup, which he stole or had given him in the kitchen, between the layers of household linen in the drying-room of a large house in Northumberland. But his “collections” were buried in the straw in a disused outhouse. The loss of several small cups and saucers out of a bright-coloured set belonging to the children led to the discovery of this hoard, as the bird was seen to enter the shed, and was there found pulling away the straw which covered the china.

So far, we have traced the development of this sense of beauty from the kites, which merely pick up and carry to their nests what they consider to be pretty and interesting, to the crow tribe, which have a separate hiding-place for keeping and enjoying their treasures. The conscious search for and application of ornament to the decoration of the fabric of the nest, even at the risk of its danger and discovery through the gratification of their feeling for beauty, is a further and most remarkable evidence of the pleasure which they derive from that sense; for one of the strongest impulses of the nesting bird is to subordinate the colour and texture of the outside of the nest to the tint of its natural surroundings, and none but a strong and tempting bias to the indulgence of a contrary instinct could compete with their natural solicitude for the safety of their young. Yet two undoubted instances of the addition of ornament by English birds to the _outside_ of a nest have come under the writer’s notice, where its use clearly entailed some danger from the enemy. The first was the nest of a chiff-chaff, found in a plantation near Rosamond’s Bower, on the Isis, near Godstow. It was a domed nest of the usual kind, made of dry, colourless grass, with an entrance in the side. But on the _outside_, and round the entrance to the chamber, were stuck several of the brilliant blue feathers of the kingfisher. The position of these bright patches of colour on the outside of the nest is strong evidence that beauty, not utility, was the object of their insertion. The other case was the nest of a goldfinch, which was built on a high branch of a sycamore, near the window of a house at Sidmouth in Devonshire. When the fabric of the nest was completed, the birds, or rather one bird, for the other was constantly employed in building, brought long pieces of the blue forget-me-not from the next garden, and so adjusted the sprays that the flowers hung all round the top of the nest. The sacrifice of safety to beauty did not cause any risk from below, as the nest was at a considerable height from the ground. Unfortunately it attracted the notice of a jackdaw passing overhead, and the black robber plundered the nest of the eggs on which the bird had been sitting for some days. It may be noticed that in both these cases, in each of which there was a large choice of flowers or feathers—for the feathers which lined the chiff-chaff’s nest were brought from a farmyard near—the irresistible colour was light-blue. This decorative instinct finds its final and complete expression in the bower-birds, and the still more interesting gardener-bird of New Guinea, both of which construct an “art gallery” for the reception of their treasures, and the better enjoyment of their sense of the beautiful. These bowers are in no sense nests, but “palaces of art” for the days of their honeymoon, and are quite apart from the later cares of the nest or nursery. The best of all are the galleries of the gardener-birds, which Count Rosenberg recently found in New Guinea.

“It was a piece of workmanship more lovely than the ingenuity of any animal has been known to construct,” writes the discoverer. “It was a temple in miniature, in the midst of a meadow studded with flowers.” The bird, which is not much larger than a thrush, chooses a level place round some shrub which has a straight stem about the thickness of a walking-stick. To this central pilaster it fastens the stems of a kind of orchid, and draws them outwards to the ground, like the cords of a bell-tent; but the leaves are left on the stems, and remain fresh for some time. The upper part is then fitted together, and the leaves and moss make a beautiful umbrella-shaped roof. In front of the central building, the birds clear a space about a yard in diameter, which they cover with moss, after removing all stones and weeds. On this moss carpet they arrange flowers and brilliant fruits in great variety, and of the brightest colours to be found. Showy fungi and elegantly coloured insects are distributed about the garden, and inside the tent, and when these lose their freshness, they are thrown away and replaced by others. The tent itself is about thirty-nine inches in diameter and eighteen inches high. The Papuans never disturb these bowers. They call the builder the “Master Bird,” or “Tukan Robin,” the “Gardener,” and say that it is wiser than mankind—and judged by the Papuan standard, this estimate is a true one. In the gallery of one of the bower-birds half a peck of decorations was found. Among these were a large white shell, four hundred shells of a bright-coloured snail, flints and agates, red seed-pods and seeds, and the bleached and shining bones of animals. If for shells we read mother-of-pearl; for snail-shells, nautilus cups; for flints and agates, agates and malachite; for seeds, beads; and for bones, ivory, where does the taste for beauty in the bird differ from our own?

ÆSTHETICS AT THE ZOO.

SCENTS AND SOUNDS.