Part 16

An allusion will suffice. Antiquity in this special branch has bequeathed us the admirable patrimony which has supported the human race: the domestication of the dog, the horse, and the ass; of the camel, the elephant, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and poultry.

What progress has been made in the last two thousand years? What new acquisition?

Two only, and these unquestionably trivial: the importation of the turkey and the China pheasant.

No direct effort of man has accomplished so much for the welfare of the globe as the humble toil of the modest auxiliaries of human life.

To descend to that which we so foolishly despise, to the poultry-yard, when one sees the millions of eggs which the ovens of Egypt hatch, or with which our Normandy loads the ships and fleets that every year traverse the Channel, one learns to appreciate how the small agencies of domestic economy produce the greatest results.

If France did not possess the horse, and some person introduced it, such a conquest would be of greater benefit to her than the conquest of the Rhine, of Belgium, of Savoy; the horse alone would be worth three kingdoms.

But here now is an animal which represents in itself the horse, the ass, the cow, the goat; which combines all their useful qualities, and which yields moreover an incomparable wool; a hardy, robust animal, enduring cold with wonderful vigour. You understand, of course, that I refer to the lama, which M. Isidore Geoffrey Saint Hilaire exerts himself, with so laudable a perseverance, to naturalize in France. Everything seems leagued in his despite: the fine flock at Versailles has perished through malice; that of the Jardin des Plantes will perish through the confined area and dampness of the locality.

The conquest of the lama is ten times more important than the conquest of the Crimea.

* * * * *

But again, this species of transplantation needs a generosity of means, a combination of precautions, let us say a tenderness of education, which are rarely found united.

One word here--one small fact--whose bearing is not small.

A great writer, who was not a man of science, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, had remarked that we should never succeed in transplanting the animal unless we imported along with him the plant to which he was especially partial. This observation fell to the ground, like so many other theories which excite the philosophical smile, and which men of science name _poetry_.

But it has not been made in vain, for an enlightened amateur had formed here, in Paris, a collection of living birds. However constant his attentions, a very rare she-parrot which he had obtained remained obstinately barren. He ascertained in what kind of plant she made her nest, and commissioned a person to procure it for him. It could not be got alive; he received it leafless and branchless; a simple dead trunk. It mattered not; the bird, in this hollow trunk discovered her accustomed place, and did not fail to make therein her nest. She laid eggs, she hatched them, and now her owner has a colony of young ones.

* * * * *

To re-create all the conditions of abode, food, vegetable environment, the harmonies of every kind which shall deceive the exile into a forgetfulness of his country, is not only a scientific question, but a task of ingenious invention.

To determine the limit of slavery, of freedom, of alliance and collaboration with ourselves, proper for each individual creature, is one of the gravest subjects which can occupy us.

A new art is this; nor shall you succeed in it without a moral gravity, a refinement, a delicacy of appreciation which as yet are scarcely understood, and shall only exist perhaps when Woman undertakes those scientific studies from which she has hitherto been excluded.

This art supposes a tenderness unlimited in justice and wisdom.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

The chief illustration of a book is incontestably the formula in which it is summed up. Here it is, then, in few words:--

This book has considered the bird _in himself_, and but little in relation to man.

The bird, born in a much lower condition than man (oviparous, like the serpent), possesses three advantages over him, which are his special mission:--

I. _The wing_, _flight_, an unique power, which is the dream of man. Every other creature is slow. Compared with the falcon or swallow, the Arab horse is a snail.

II. Flight itself does not appertain solely to the wing, but to an incomparable power of _respiration and vision_. The bird is peculiarly the son of air and light.

III. An essentially electrical being, the bird sees, knows, and foresees earth and sky, the weather, the seasons. Whether through an intimate relation with the globe, whether through a prodigious memory of localities and routes, he is always facing eastward, and always knows his path.

He swoops; he penetrates; he attains what man shall never attain. This is evident, particularly in his marvellous war against the reptile and the insect.

Add the marvellous work of continual purification of everything dangerous and unclean, which some species accomplish. If this war and this work ceased but for one day, man would disappear from the earth.

This daily victory of the beloved son of light over death, over a murderous and tenebrous life, is the fitting theme of his _song_, of that hymn of joy with which the bird salutes each Dawn.

But, besides song, the bird has many other languages. Like man, he prattles, recites, converses. He and man are the only beings which have really a language. Man and the bird are the voice of the world.

The bird, with its gift of augury, is ever drawing near to man, who is ever inflicting injury upon him. He undoubtedly divines, and has a presentiment of, what he will one day become when he emerges from the barbarism in which he is now unhappily plunged.

He recognizes in him the creature unique, sanctified, and blessed, who ought to be the arbiter of all, who should accomplish the destiny of this globe by one supreme act of good--the union of all life and the reconciliation of all beings.

This pacific union must after a time be effected by a great art of education and initiation, which man begins to comprehend.

Page 64. _Training for flight_ (see also p. 84).--Is it wrong for man, in his reveries, to beguile himself into a belief that he will one day be more than man, to attribute to himself wings? Dream or presentiment, it matters not.

It is certain that a power of flight such as the bird possesses is truly a _sixth sense_. It would be absurd to see in it only an auxiliary of touch. (See, among other works, Huber, _Vol des oiseaux de proie_, 1784).

The wing is so rapid and so infallible only because it is aided by a visual faculty which has not its equal in all creation.

The bird, we must confess, lives wholly in the air, in the light. If there be a sublime life, a life of fire, it is this.

Who surveys and descries all earth? Who measures it with his glance and his wing? Who knows all its paths? And not in any beaten route, but at the same time in every direction: for where is not the bird's track?

His relations with heat, electricity, and magnetism, all the imponderable forces, are scarcely known to us; we see them, however, in his singular meteorological prescience.

If we had seriously studied the matter, we should have had the balloon for some thousands of years; but even with the balloon, and the balloon capable of being _steered_, we should still be enormously behind the bird. To imitate its mechanism, and exactly reproduce its details, is not to possess the agreement, the _ensemble_, the unity of action, which moves the whole with so much facility and with such terrible swiftness.

Let us renounce, for this life at least, these higher gifts, and confine ourselves to examine the two machines--our own and the bird's--in those points where they differ least.

The human machine is superior in what is its smallest peculiarity, its susceptibility of adaptation to the most diverse purposes, and, above all, in its omnipuissance of the hand.

On the other hand, he has far less unity and centralization. Our inferior limbs, our thighs, and legs, which are very long, perform eccentric movements far from the central point of action. Circulation is very slow; a thing perceptible in those last moments, when the body is dead at the feet before the heart has ceased to throb.

The bird, almost spherical in form, is certainly the apex, divine and sublime, of living centralization. We can neither see nor imagine a higher degree of unity. From his excess of concentration he derives his great personal force, but it implies his extreme individuality, his isolation, his social weakness.

The profound, the marvellous solidarity, which is found in the higher genera of insects, as in the bees and ants, is not discovered among birds. Flocks of them are common, but true republics are rare.

Family ties are very strong in their influence, such as maternity and love. Brotherhood, the sympathy of species, the mutual assistance rendered even by different kinds, are not unknown. Nevertheless, fraternity is strong among them in the inferior line. The whole heart of the bird is in his love, in his nest.

There lies his isolation, his feebleness, his dependence; there also the temptation to seek for himself a defender.

The most exalted of living beings is not the less one of those which the most eagerly demand protection.

Page 67. _On the life of the bird in the egg._--I draw these details from the accurate M. Duvernoy. Ovology in our days has become a science. Yet I know but a few treatises specially devoted to the bird's egg. The oldest is that of an Abbé Manesse, written in the last century, very verbose, and not very instructive (the MS. is preserved in the Museum Library). The same library possesses the German work of Wirfing and Gunther on nests and eggs; and another, also German, whose illustrations appear of a superior character, although still defective. I have seen a part of a new collection of engravings, much more carefully executed.

Page 74. _Gelatinous and nourishing seas._--Humboldt, in one of his early works ("Scenes in the Tropics"), was the first, I think, to authenticate this fact. He attributes it to the prodigious quantity of medusæ, and other analogous creatures, in a decomposed state in these waters. If, however, such a cadaverous dissolution really prevailed there, would it not render the waters fatal to the fish, instead of nourishing them? Perhaps this phenomenon should be attributed rather to nascent life than to life extinct, to that first living fermentation in which the lowest microscopic organizations develop themselves.

It is especially in the Polar Seas, whose aspect is so wild and desolate, that this characteristic is observed. Life there abounds in such excess that the colour of the waters is completely changed by it. They are of an intense olive-green, thick with living matter and nutriment.

Page 91. _Our Museum._--In speaking of its collections, I may not forget its valuable library, which now includes that of Cuvier, and has been enriched by donations from all the physicists of Europe. I have had occasion to acknowledge very warmly the courtesy of the conservator, M. Desnoyers, and of M. le Docteur Lemercier, who has obligingly supplied me with a number of pamphlets and curious memoirs from his private collection.

Page 94. _Buffon._--I think that now-a-days too readily forget that this great _generalizer_ has not the less received and recorded a number of very accurate observations furnished him by men of special vocations, officers of the royal hunt, gamekeepers, marines, and persons of every profession.

Page 96. _The Penguin._--The brother of the auk, but less degraded; he carries his wings like a veritable bird, though they are only membranes floating on an evoided breast. The more rarified air of our northern pole, where he lives, has already expanded his lungs, and the breast-bone begins to project. The legs, less closely confined to the body, better maintain its equilibrium, and the port and attitude gain in confidence. There is here a notable difference between the analogous products of the two hemispheres.

Page 103. _The Petrel, the mariner's terror._--The legend of the petrel gliding upon the waves, around the ship which he appears to lead to perdition, is of Dutch origin. This is just as it ought to be. The Dutch, who voyage _en famille_, and carry with them their wives, their children, even their domestic animals, have been more susceptible to evil auguries than other navigators. The hardiest of all, perhaps--true amphibians--they have not the less been anxious and imaginative, hazarding not only their lives, but their affections, and exposing to the fantastic chances of the sea the beloved home, a world of tenderness. That small lumbering bark, which is in truth a floating house, will nevertheless go, ever rolling across the seas of the North, the great Arctic Ocean, and the furious Baltic, accomplishing without pause the most dangerous voyages, as from Amsterdam to Cronstadt. We laugh at these ugly vessels and their antiquated build, but he who observes how plenteously they combine the two purposes of store-room for the cargo and accommodation for the family, can never see them in the ports of Holland without a lively interest, or without lavishing on them his good wishes.

Page 113. _Epiornis._--The remains of this gigantic bird and its enormous egg may be seen in the Museum. It is computed that its size was fivefold that of the ostrich. How much we must regret that our rich collection of fossils, or the major part, lies buried in the drawers of the Museum for want of room. For thirty or forty thousand francs a wooden gallery might be constructed, in which the whole could find opportunities of display.

Meanwhile, we argue as if these vast studies, now in their very infancy, had already been exhausted. Who knows but that man has only seen the threshold of the prodigious world of the dead? He has scarcely scratched the surface of the globe. The deeper explorations to which he is constrained by the thousand novel needs of art and industry (as that, for example, of piercing the Alps for a new railway) will open to science unexpected prospects. Palæontology as yet is built upon the narrow foundation of a _minimum_ number of facts. If we remember that the dead--owing to the thousands of years the globe has already lived--are enormously more numerous than the living, we cannot but consider this method of reasoning upon a few specimens very audacious. It is a hundred, nay, a thousand to one, that so many millions of dead, once disinterred, will convict us of having erred, at least, through _incomplete enumeration_.

Page 113. _Man had perished a hundred times._--Here we trace one of the early causes of the limited confederacy originally existing between man and the animal--a compact forgotten by our ungrateful pride, and without which, nevertheless, the existence of man had been impossible.

When the colossal birds whose remains we are constantly exhuming had prepared for him the globe, had subjugated the crawling, climbing life which at first predominated--when man came upon the earth to confront what remained of the reptiles, to confront those new but not less formidable inhabitants of our planet, the tiger and the lion--he found on his side the bird, the dog, and the elephant.

At Alexandria may be seen the last few individuals of those giant dogs which could strangle a lion. It was not through terror that these formidable animals allied themselves with man, but through natural sympathy, and their peculiar antipathy to the feline race, the giant cat (the tiger or lion).

Without the alliance of the dog against beasts of prey, and that of the bird against serpents and crocodiles (which the bird kills in the very egg), man had assuredly been lost.

The useful friendship of the horse originated in the same cause. You may trace it in the indescribable and convulsive horror which every young horse experiences at the mere odour of the lion. He attaches, he surrenders himself to man.

Had he not possessed the horse, the ox, and the camel--had he been compelled to bear on his back and shoulders the heavy burdens of which they relieve him--man would have remained the miserable slave of his feeble organization. Borne down by the habitual disproportion of weight and strength, either he would have abandoned labour, have lived upon chance victims, without art or progress; or, rather, he would have lived earth's everlasting porter--crooked, dragging, and drawing, with sunken head, never gazing on the sky, never thinking, never raising himself to the heights of invention.

Page 132. _On the power of insects._--It is not only in the Tropical world that they are formidable; at the commencement of the last century half Holland perished because the piles which strengthen its dykes simultaneously gave way, invisibly undermined by a worm named the _taret_.

This redoubtable nibbler, which is often a foot in length, never betrays itself; it only works within. One morning the beam breaks, the framework yields, the ship engulfed founders in the waves.

How shall we reach, how discover it? A bird knows it--the lapwing, the guardian of Holland. And it is thus a notable imprudence to destroy, as has been done, his eggs. (Quatrefages, _Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste_.)

France, for more than a century, has suffered from the importation of a monster not less terrible--the _termite_, which devours dry wood just as the taret consumes wet wood. The single female of each swarm has the horrible fecundity of laying daily eighty thousand eggs. La Rochelle begins to fear the fate of that American city which is suspended in the air, the termites having devoured all its foundations, and excavated immense catacombs beneath.

In Guiana the dwellings of the termites are enormous hillocks, fifteen feet in height, which men only venture to attack from a distance, and by means of gunpowder. You may judge, therefore, the importance of the ant-eater, which dares to enter this gulf, and seek out the horrible female whence issues so accursed a torrent. (Smeathmann, _Mémoire sur les Termites_.)

Does climate save us? The termites prosper in France. Here, too, the cockchafer flourishes; and even on the northern slopes of the Alps, under the very breath of the glaciers, it devours vegetation. In the presence of such an enemy every insectivorous bird should be respected; at least, the canton of Vaud has recently placed the swallow under the protection of the law. (See the work of Tschudi.)

Page 134. _You frequently detect there a strong odour of musk._--The plain of Cumana, says Humboldt, presents, after heavy rains, an extraordinary phenomenon. The earth, moistened and reheated by the sun's rays, gives forth that odour of musk which, under the torrid zone, is common to animals of very different classes--to the jaguar, the small species of the tiger-cat, the cabiai, the galinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations which are the vehicles of this aroma appear only to disengage themselves in proportion as the soil enclosing the _débris_ of an innumerable quantity of reptiles, worms, and insects, becomes impregnated with water. Everywhere that one stirs up the soil, one is struck by the mass of organic substances which alternately develop, transform, or decompose. Nature in these climates appears more active, more prolific, one might say more lavish of life.

Pages 136, 137. _Humming-birds and colibris._--The eminent naturalists (Lesson, Azara, Stedmann, &c.) who have supplied so many excellent descriptions of these birds, are not, unfortunately, as rich in details of their manners, their food, their character.

As to the terrible unhealthiness of the places where they live (and live with so intense a life), the narratives of the old travellers--of Labat and others--are folly confirmed by the moderns. Messieurs Durville and Lesson, in their voyage to New Guiana, scarcely dared to cross the threshold of its profound virgin forests, with their strange and terrible beauty.

The most fantastic aspect of these forests--their prodigious fairylike enchantment of nocturnal illumination by myriads of fire-flies--is attested and very forcibly described, as far as relates to the countries adjoining Panama, by a French traveller, M. Caqueray, who has recently visited them. (See his Journal in the new _Revue Française_, 10th June 1855.)

Page 153. _The valuable museum of anatomical collections_--that of Doctor Auzoux.--I cannot too warmly thank, on this occasion, our esteemed and skilful professor, who condescends to instruct us ignorant people, men of letters, men of the world, and women. He willed that anatomy should descend to all, should become popular; and it is done. His admirable imitations, his lucid demonstrations, gradually work out that great revolution whose full extent can already be perceived. Shall I dare to tell men of science my inmost thought? They themselves will have an advantage in possessing always at hand these objects of study under so convenient a form and in enlarged proportions, which greatly diminish the fatigue of attention. A thousand objects, which seem to us different because different in size, recover their analogies, and reappear in their true relative forms, through the simple process of enlargement.

America, I may add, appears more keenly sensible of these advantages than we are. An American speculator had desired M. Auzoux to supply him yearly with two thousand copies of his figure of man, being certain of disposing of them in all the small towns, and even in the villages. Every American village, says M. Auzoux, endeavours to obtain a museum, an observatory, &c.

Page 157. _The suppression of pain._--To prevent death is undoubtedly impossible; but we may prolong life. We may eventually render rarer, less cruel, and almost _suppress pain_.

That the hardened old world laughs at this expression is so much the better. We have seen this spectacle in the days when our Europe, barbarized by war, centred all medical art in surgery, and only knew how to cure by the knife by a horrible prodigality of suffering, young America discovered the miracle of that profound dream in which all pain is annihilated.[28]

Page 157. _The useful equilibrium of life and death._--Numerous species of birds no longer make a halt in France. One with difficulty descries them flying at inaccessible elevations, deploying their wings in haste, accelerating their passage, saying,--"Pass on, pass on quickly! Let us avoid the land of death, the land of destruction!"

Provence, and many other departments in the south, are barren deserts, peopled by every living tribe, and therefore vegetable nature is sadly impoverished. You do not interrupt with impunity the natural harmonies. The bird levies a tax on the plant, but he is its protector.