Part 17

Some learned men devote their entire lives to making out just this sort of correspondence between the various bones and muscles and other parts of one animal, and those of others and of man. A most fascinating game it is, too; and a game that everyone can play a little, and keep on playing as long as he lives and keeps learning more and more about animals.

L

How The Elephant Got His Trunk

According to the Just So Stories, in the high and far off times, before any elephant ever had any trunk, there was a certain Elephant’s Child who was afflicted with an insatiable curiosity. And after this Elephant’s Child had been spanked for this same insatiable curiosity by his tall aunt, the Ostrich, and by his tall uncle, the Giraffe, and by his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and by his hairy uncle, the Baboon, grievously and frequently, without stopping, for a long time, he started out for the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, to see what the Crocodile has for dinner And the Crocodile caught the Elephant’s Child by the nose, which was just a common nose and not a trunk at all, and pulled and pulled and pulled, being minded to have Elephant’s Child for the beginning of his dinner. And the Elephant’s Child spread out his little four legs, and he pulled and pulled and pulled, until between them, they stretched out the Elephant’s Child’s nose into the first elephant’s trunk that ever was. So all other elephants have had such trunks ever since.

This is Mr. Kipling’s story of how the elephant got his trunk. This and several more like it of the Just So Stories, you must all read for yourselves, for altogether they are about as good stories as have been written by anybody this long time. Besides, something not so very different from this adventure of the Elephant’s Child did really happen. Only it didn’t happen in quite the same way; and instead of there being one Elephant’s Child, there were many, many, many, one after another for hundreds of years, each with a nose a little more stretched out and a little more trunk-like than those which came before it.

So what really happened is something like this: The elephant that you feed peanuts to at the circus, now-a-days, is a strange sort of beast, with his long trunk, his hairless body, his tall legs like the stems of trees, and no front part to his jaws, so that he has only his back teeth. The parents of the elephants that you see were elephants like himself. So were his grand-parents; and their grand-parents in their turn. But if you could go back a very long time, back to the days when the first men appeared in Europe, you would find that the elephants of those days were somewhat more like other four-footed animals. For one thing, they had fur like other animals, while instead of having only four grinding teeth in use at once, they had nearly a full set as most other beasts have. These are the great mastodons and mammoths, whose bones are still dug out of the soil in the United States, in Europe, and in various other parts of the world, and whose bodies have been found frozen in the ice in Siberia, so well preserved that the dogs ate the flesh after they were dug out. There are none of these left alive now, but we still have the pictures of them which men long ago scratched on pieces of bone or sketched on the walls of the caves in which they lived before they knew enough to build houses.

Still older elephant-like creatures, whose bones we still find in the ground, had front teeth, and very long muzzles, longer even than the sharpest nosed dog, as long, let us say, as the bill of a duck, a snipe, or any long-nosed bird. These, of course, had no trunks, but snouts almost as long, with upper and lower jaw, and lips. Then gradually, generation after generation, these long-snouted creatures lost the front part of their jaws and their front teeth and their under lips. They kept two upper front teeth, which grew very large and became tusks. They kept also their long upper lip, without any bones to hold it in place, so that it hung down and became a trunk.

So the elephant’s nose isn’t his nose only, but his nose and his upper lip and part of the roof of his mouth. Next time you go to the circus, you watch the elephant when he lifts his trunk so that you can see the under side, and notice the rough cross markings that other beasts have on the roofs of their mouths, and that you yourselves can see in the mirror or feel on the roof of your own mouth with your tongue. Then, when the elephant opens his mouth to take a peanut, see whether his mouth doesn’t look as if his under lip and the whole front of his jaws had been taken off just as I say it has. But the proof of what I say, is there have been found near Cairo, Egypt, the bones of the original elephant who didn’t have a trunk, but did have a very long snout; and of other elephants besides, the great-great-great-grandchildren of these, and the great-great-great-grandfathers of the mammoths and mastodons, who had begun to lose their long muzzles, and to turn their upper lips into trunks.

It’s the same way with any other animal that is different from the rest; his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather many times removed wasn’t nearly so different from other animals as he is. Take for instance, the horse. He is a good deal different from other beasts, with his great size and speed, and his strange single-fingered hand, and his strange single-toed foot, and himself standing up on the nails of his middle fingers and toes.

But out in Wyoming and thereabouts they dig out of the ground the bones of old horses that had their middle finger nails and their middle toe nails, which are their hoofs, considerably smaller than our horses have them; while at the same time, the little splint bones, which are the remnants of the fingers and toes next the middle, are much larger than they are now-a-days. Still deeper in the ground, are the bones of still older horses, which had three hoofs on each foot, but the middle one was largest and the two at the side did not touch the ground, just as they don’t in the deer. These horses were only as large as the smallest ponies.

Lower in the ground, still, come the bones of yet older and smaller horses, with three hoofs on each foot, all about the same size; but the hoof has become more like a regular toe with a nail, about like a pig’s, which are about half way between hoofs and toes. Buried even deeper in the earth are the bones of horses no bigger than large dogs, that look like horses, and yet look something like dogs also, and something like sheep; which have four toes on their front feet, that are real toes, only just beginning to turn into hoofs. Last of all, there are the oldest horses of all, no larger than cats, with four toes on their front feet, and the splint bone belonging to the thumb, with claws like a dog’s that are not hoofs at all, horses that had a tail like a dog’s, and looked almost as much like a dog as like a horse, only it had grinding teeth and ate herbs.

So gradually, one little change at a time, this creature that was almost as much dog as horse, lost one toe after another, increased in size, got up on his toes, and became a modern trotter. At the same time, another animal that looked much like one of these little dog-horses, only he was on the whole a little more like a dog, kept on getting more and more dog-like, with smaller claws and sharper teeth and slenderer nose, till he became something that was neither dog nor wolf nor fox, but a general mixture of all three, with some cat and some hyena thrown in.

They find out in Wyoming, also, the bones of another creature that has been called “the father of cats”—_Patriofelis_ as they say it in Latin. But the father of cats is also a great deal like a seal, and something like an otter—at least he used to take readily to the water, as our modern cats certainly do not.

In short, if any of us had lived in North America at a time not so very long before the first human beings actually did live somewhere on the earth, we should be surely put to it to tell one sort of beast from another. The horses looked like dogs, and the dogs looked like cats, and the cats looked like seals, and there were pigs that looked like wolves, and camels that suggested sheep, to say nothing of cows that you couldn’t tell from deer. Each beast used to be a general mixture of all beasts, and only since there have been men in the world have the beasts changed into all the various sorts which we know.

The snakes used to have legs. In fact, a snake is not much more than a lizard that has left off his legs for the sake of crawling into smaller holes. But the snakes and lizards are much older than the beasts; so that there were plenty of both in the world long before there were horses and cows and dogs and cats and all the rest of the beasts with fur—and still longer, naturally, before there were any elephants or men.

The early birds, too, were a good deal like lizards. They had teeth like a crocodile, and long tails with feathers stuck in the sides, and tho they had wings like a proper bird, they had also claws on their wings, which were really three-fingered hands with feathers growing on them. But even our modern birds still keep the old lizard scales on their legs, tho they have long ago changed them to feathers on their bodies.

It is exactly the same with our own ancestors as with the ancestors of any beast or bird or reptile. The bones of early men are still found in the caves of Europe, mixed with the bones of the animals which they ate, and buried in the earth and stone that have fallen from the roof. These men were true and proper human beings, who walked on their hind legs and, I suppose, talked. But they were not quite such men as we are, for their skulls were a little flatter on top, the bony ridges over their eyes were a little heavier and their teeth a little larger.

These ancient men, like nearly all Indians before White Men came, and for that matter, like our own prehistoric ancestors in Europe, had no metal tools, and used only stone for hammers, axes, and arrowheads. So there are found, all over Europe, vast numbers of stone tools and weapons, cruder as they are older, until the very earliest are only common pebbles that have been banged by use.

No skeletons are known of these early men, but only skulls, commonly a good deal broken. So we do not know very much about these people. But for the most part the hollow in the brain-case is just a trifle larger over the left ear, as if even they had a speech center, were right-handed, and could talk.

On the other hand, some very ancient apes had skulls and teeth more like ours than any modern gorilla or chimpanzee ever has. So it seems to be a general rule that, just as young animals and plants tend to be more like one another than they will be when they grow up, so very ancient creatures tend to be less unlike each other than their present-day descendants are.

LI

Something Nobody Understands

Now, my reader, we have come to the last chapter of this book, which is going to be the hardest chapter of all, and I think, the most important. For though it is going to be about something that nobody quite understands, and something that the more one thinks about, the more he doesn’t understand it, nevertheless it is something that you will have to think about many times in your lives hereafter, and you might as well make a beginning. Besides, though you won’t understand all that I am going to say—largely I am afraid, because I don’t understand it myself—still I trust that you will remember some of it; and by and by when you are sorely puzzled over these matters, perhaps it will help you out.

If you will think back over what I have already told you in this book about animals and plants, and recall also what you have yourselves seen, and what you have learned about your own bodies and the way they work, I think you will agree with me, that of all the strange and wonderful things in this most strange and wonderful world, a living thing is the strangest and the most wonderful.

Think, for example, how a little egg, no bigger, it may be, than the head of a pin, with no help from outside, except perhaps a little fresh air and a little warmth, just goes ahead and makes itself over into a grown animal. Consider, too, how well it does the job—every scale and feather and tooth and bone and gland and muscle and claw and nail and blood vessel and nerve and hair, all just in the right place, and just of the right size. When one builds a house, the owner consults the architect, and the architect advises with the contractor, and the contractor puts some of the work on the sub-contractor, and the contractor and the sub-contractors direct the workmen; and among them, in a year or so, they manage to get the house together. But in the world of living things, one little fleck of living protoplasm goes ahead all by itself, and builds a whole living animal, sometimes in a few days. Yet there are more different parts to be made and fitted together in one of your little fingers, than in any common dwelling house, even tho you count the laths behind the plastering and the shingles on the roof—yes, and the nails that hold them on. As for your brains, they are, each one of them, for complexity, like all the parts of all the houses in a fair-sized city, with all the furniture, and all the tableware, and all the pots and pans in all the kitchens thrown in for good measure. If you think that a watch or a battleship is a complicated affair, think what goes on in the brain of a tiny ant.

Think, too, how resourceful an egg is. It tries its best to grow into a proper animal; but if somebody interferes, to prevent that, then the egg goes pluckily ahead and makes the best it can of a bad matter. If it gets jarred apart so that it cannot make one animal, why then it makes two, or four, or eight. When it can make neither one animal nor two proper and separate twins, it doesn’t give up, but makes some sort of double monster, that at least manages to keep alive. For my own part, I feel a sincere respect for eggs. I wish more of us had their pertinacity.

After the egg has made itself into a grown animal, consider how well fitted out that animal is. It has, usually, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, sense of touch, of heat and cold, of taste, and the rest. It has born in it the instincts to find its proper food, to find or build its shelter, to take care of its young, to escape its enemies, and in general to like the things which it is best for it to do. Yet if it doesn’t happen to have these sense organs and instincts and the rest, still it always has something nearly as good, and manages somehow to get its living in the world.

Yet I sometimes think that the most extraordinary thing about living things, both animals and plants, is the enormous number of different kinds of them. There are some twenty different sorts of cats, of various sizes from lions down; and twice as many different sorts of dogs, wolves, foxes and other dog-like creatures. There are thirty-two different kinds of willow trees in North America, thirty-six different kinds of pine trees, Sixty-three different oaks. As for insects, about three hundred thousand different sorts have already been given names; and there are at least ten times as many more that are still nameless. Do you know how many different races of men there are that you can tell apart by their looks?—Chinamen, Negroes, White men, Tartars, Eskimo, Indians, Malays, Arabs, and I don’t know how many more, all alike in being human, and yet all different.

Why there should be such a lot of different animals and plants and men is something that nobody fully understands. We do know, however, and know very certainly, that there haven’t always been all these various sorts in the world. If we could go back a sufficient number of thousand years, we should come to a time when, instead of twenty sorts of cat, there were only ten. Back of that, was a still more ancient time when there were only five. A long time before even that early day, there was only _Patriofelis_, “the father of cats,” and even he, as you know, was also a good deal like a seal.

So too there must once have been a “father of dogs” whose descendants have changed, some into proper dogs, and some into wolves, and some into foxes, and some into jackals, coyotes, dingos, fennecs, and the rest of the forty-odd sorts of wild dogs—to say nothing of all the various tame dogs, collies and terriers and mastiffs and bull dogs and setters, that you can count up for yourselves.

Once too, there was only one kind of man. He probably lived somewhere in southern Asia, and spread out from there, till he possessed the whole earth. Some of him went south-east into the Pacific Islands, and changed into Malays and Australians. Some of him went south-west into Africa and became Negroes. Some became Persians, Egyptians, Hindus, and Arabs. Those that kept on further and entered Europe turned various shades of white and became us. For very few white men are really white—only certain Swedes and Norwegians and Danes. The rest of us, who call ourselves white, are merely not quite so black as our very-many-times-great-grandfathers and our somewhat distant cousins, the Negroes.

Most of these early men, however, started north-east; and because they couldn’t very well cross the great mountains and deserts in central Asia, they ran round the eastern end, and then came back on the other side. On their way, they turned to Chinamen and Japanese. Those that got way up to the north under the Arctic circle became Eskimos. Some of them crossed over by way of Siberia and Alaska (for these countries have not always been as cold as they are now) and turned into American Indians.

Then, after these people had got north of the great Asian mountains, others of them turned west, and came clear across into Europe. In fact, they came near to overrunning Europe during the last days of the Roman Empire so that the famous Charlemagne had to fight them in the eighth century, as you will learn when you study history in school, or still better when you read stories of knights and paladins of the early Middle Ages. So part of us white men came to Europe, and then to America, directly from southern Asia. And part of us came round by way of China and Tartary and Russia; tho now we are all mixt up together so that no one can tell which from t’other. Yet even now, whenever you get up in the gallery and look down on the people’s heads, you can see that some white men have long, egg-shaped heads and narrow faces, and some have round bullet-shaped heads and broad faces. The long sort of head came straight up from India, by way of Asia Minor; and the round sort came round the end of the mountains and across central Asia. That’s the reason why, tho we are all white men, we can’t wear one another’s hats.

That’s about the way it is with all kinds of animals and plants. Each one starts somewhere, and spreads out in all directions as far as it can, gradually changing as it goes, until from being one sort of pine or oak, there come to be dozens, and instead of one kind of cat or dog there are a score. On the whole, too, the latest kinds of animals and plants are better than the earlier ones and there are a great many more of them. This is what we call Evolution—but why it all happens or what it is all for, Is just precisely “one of those things that no fellah can find out.”

Still one can’t help thinking that if we men can make as many things as we do out of iron—knives and saws and locomotives and bridges and sky-scrapers and battle-ships and all sorts of wonderful machinery, and make them better and better all the while, some wiser being than ourselves might make other and still more wonderful machines out of the life-jelly which we call protoplasm, and keep making them better and better and more and more kinds of them as the ages have gone on.

INDEX

Air, importance of clean, 276. Ambidexters, 121-122. Amoeba, 40; feeding of, 245. Ants, 194-209. Anti-toxin, 280. Bacteria, 31, 38, 71, 141; and disease, 266 and following, 274 and following.

Bean, 20-23, 146. Bee, 70, 71. Birds, instincts of 96-98; lizard-like, 351. Blind spot, 186-188. Blood, 32, 43-44; growth of, 50-51; and air, 242 and following; waste matter in, 253 and following; poisons in, 263 and following; living creatures in, 268 and following; as defence, 279 and following; messages by way of, 294 and following; salt in, 329 and following; sea water as, 330 and following. Bones, of chick, 5; of fish, 16; growth of, 49-50, 300. Brain, of chick, 4, 5; of fish, 16; and speech, 114-118; centers in, 123-135; accidents to, 127-133; complexity of human, 357. Breath, why we get out of, 257 and following. Breakfast table, experiments in recalling, 228-229, 234.

Camel, 106. Cat, 12; hunting instinct in, 86-87; and mouse, 94-95; and food in bottle, 102; double paws of, 320; teeth of, 321; sharp claws of, 328; feet of, 341; ancestors of, 350. Caterpillars, and moths, how find their way, 158-163; change to butterflies, 297 and following. Cells, 31-41, 238; of eggs, 25-27; of human beings, 27-29; of plants, 35-37; of bone, 45. Chick, hatching of, 1-2; growth in eggs, 3-6; instincts of, 91-93; gill slits of, 332 and following. Children, 24; growth of, 56-58, 61-64; best plays for, 58-60; grip of very young, 75-76, 84; swallowing of, 77; instincts of, 78-85, 93-94; compared with animals, 112-114. Cold, and heat, sense of, 169-170; experiments with, 191-192; how we catch, 286. Colors, how we see, 177, 183-185, 197-198. Coon, and box, 102-104. Corn, 66-68. Cork, 43. Cow, 12, 113, 246; and stuffed calf, 105-106, 112; limbs of, 340, 341. Crab, breaking joints of, 309 and following; eye of, 310, 319.

Date palm, 68. Dog, 12, 61-62, 246; hunting instincts in, 86-88, 95; story of, 100,-101; advantage of speech to, 110,-111; sight and smell in, 220-222; teeth of, 321 and following; claws of, 328; feet of, 341; ancestors of, 349 and following. Dolls, why girls play with, 78-79.