CHAPTER VII.

THE STONE PICKER.

When the excellent Doctor Livingstone visited the poor Africans who have so much difficulty in defending themselves against the Lion and the slave merchant, the women, seeing him armed with all the protecting arts of Europe, invoked him as their friend and providence in these touching words--"Give us sleep!"

And such is the prayer which all beings in their own language address to Nature. All desire, and all dream of, security. We cannot doubt of that when we note the ingenious endeavors which are made to obtain it. Those efforts have given birth to the arts. Man has not invented one, which animals had not previously invented, under that strong and abiding instinct, the desire of safety.

They suffer, they fear, they desire to live. We must not assume that creatures little advanced, and as it were embryonic, have, therefore, but little sensibility. The very contrary is certain. In every embryon, that which first appears, is the nervous system, that is to say, the organ and capacity of feeling and of suffering. Pain is the spur by which the creature is urged to foresight and expedients. Pleasure serves the like purpose, and it is already observable even in those which seem the most cold. It has been observed that the snail, after the painful researches of his love, is singularly happy on meeting again the loved object. Both of them with a touching grace wave their swan-like necks, and bestow upon each other the most lively caresses. Who is it that tells us this? The rigid, the very exact Blainville.

But alas! how largely and how widely is pain distributed! Who has not noted with pity the painful efforts of the shell-less mollusc, as he grovels along on his unguarded belly? Painful but faithful image of a foetus untimely torn from the mother by some cruel chance, and cast upon the ground naked and defenceless. The poor mollusc thickens and indurates his skin as well as he can, softens the asperities of his road, and renders it slippery. But at every contact with the ragged or pointed stones, his writhings and contractions only too plainly show how great is his sensibility to pain.

Notwithstanding all this, she loves, does that great Soul of Harmony which is the unity of the world; she loves all beings, and by alternations of pleasure and of pain, instructs them and compels them to ascend. But to ascend, to pass into a superior grade, they must first exhaust all that the lower one can furnish of trials more or less painful, of instinctive art, and of stimulants to invention. They must even have exaggerated their species, perceived its excesses, and, by contrast, be inspired with the craving and the need of an opposite one. Progress is thus made by a kind of oscillation between contrary qualities, which by turns are separated from life, and incarnated with it.

Let us translate these divine things into human language, familiar, indeed, and little worthy of the grandeur of such things, but which will make them understood:

Nature, having long delighted to make, unmake, and remake the Medusæ, thus infinitely varying the theme of infant liberty, smote her forehead one morning, and said--"I have a new and a delicious idea. I forgot to secure the life of the poor creature. It can continue only by the infinity of number, the very excess of its fecundity. I must now have a creature at once better guarded and more prudent. It shall if need be, be timid, even to excess, but above all, it is my will that it shall survive."

These timid creatures, when they appeared, were of a prudence carried to its extremest limits. They shut themselves in, shunning even the light of day. To save themselves from the rude contact of sharp and ragged stones, they employed the universal means, a glutinous mucus from which they secreted an enveloping tube, which elongated in proportion to the length of their journey. A poor expedient, that, which kept these miners, the Tarets out of the light and out of the free air, and which compelled an enormous expenditure of their substance. Every step cost them enormously; a creature thus ruining itself that it may live, can only vegetate--poor, and incapable of progress.

The next resource was not much better, temporarily to bury themselves, going below the sands at low water, and rising to the flood-tide; the resource of the Solen. A varying life that, fugitive twice a day, and consequently full of anxiety.

Among very inferior creatures a thing as yet obscure, which was in time to change the world, began to appear. The simple sea stars had in their fine rays a certain support, a sort of jointed carpentry, and on the outside some thorns, suckers, which could be thrust forward or withdrawn at will. An animal very humble, but timid and serious, seems to have profited by this coarse specimen. It said, I imagine, to Nature:

"I am quite without ambition. I do not ask for the brilliant gifts of the molluscs; I covet neither pearl nor mother of pearl, much less the brilliant colors, the gorgeous array which would discover and betray me; least of all do I envy your silly medusæ, with the fatal charm of their waving and fiery hair, which serves only to drown them, or give them a helpless prey to fish below or birds above. Oh, mother Nature, I ask but one thing, _to be_, to exist, to have life; to be one, self concentrated, and without compromising external appendages; to be strongly and solidly built, self centred, and of rounded figure, as that is the figure that is least easily taken hold of. I have but little desire to travel; sometimes to roll from high to low water will suffice me. Fastened to my rock, I will solve the problem which your future favorite, man, will vainly brood over, the problem of safety; _the strict exclusion of enemies, and the free admission of friends_, especially water, air, and light. I know that to achieve this, I must work hard and work long. Covered with movable thorns, I shall be avoided, I shall live a strictly retired life; and my name shall be oursin, little Bear, or sea hedge-hog."

How superior is that prudent animal to the Polypes, in their own stone, which they make from their own secretion, without hard labor, indeed, but also without affording them any safety; how superior, even to his superiors themselves, I mean to so many _molluscs_, who have more various senses, but are destitute of the unity of his vertebral provision, of his persevering labor, and of the skillful tools with which that very labor has provided him.

The great marvel, however, of this poor rolling ball, which we might mistake for a thorny chestnut, is that he is at once _one and multiple_, _fixed and movable_, and consists of two thousand four hundred pieces, which separate at his will and pleasure.

Let us see his history of creation.

It was in a narrow creek of the Sea of Brittany, where there was no soft bed of polypes and of Algæ, such as the sea hedge-hogs of the Indian Sea enjoy, in addition to their exemption from labor. Our Breton, on the contrary, was in presence of great peril and difficulty; like Ulysses, in the Odyssey, who, cast ashore, and anon washed seaward again, endeavored to fasten himself to the rock, with his torn and bleeding fingers. Every ebb and flow of the tide was to our little Ulysses, as bad as a mighty tempest; but his iron will and potent desire made him cling so closely and lovingly to the rock, that he became fastened to it as though the air had been expelled from between them by the cupping glass. At the same time his strong thorns scratched and scratched, and endeavored to get a hold, and one of them subdivided and formed a triple and real anchor of safety in aid of the cupping glass, if this latter should fail to act quite perfectly on a by no means smooth surface.

After he had thus doubly secured himself to his rock, he gradually comprehended that he would be a great gainer if he could form a concavity in it, gradually dig himself out a hole, and thus form himself a snug nest, for the day of sickness or of age. For, in fact, one is not always young and strong. And how pleasant it would be, if, some day, the veteran oursin could relax somewhat of the effort necessitated by this constant holding on, this anchorage by day and night.

So he worked and worked, to make a hollow; it was for dear life that he was working, and you may be sure that he never relaxed. Formed of detached pieces, he worked with five claws, which, always pushing together, united and formed an admirable pick. His pick of five teeth, of the finest enamel, is attached to a frame work, delicate, but very strong, and consisting of forty pieces, which work in a sort of sheath, playing in and out, in the most perfect and regular manner, with an elasticity preventing too violent shocks, and self-repairing, in case of any accident.

Rarely, in the softer stone, which he holds in contempt, but almost always in the solid rock, in the hardest granite, it is that this heroically laborious sculptor goes to work. The harder the rock, the firmer he feels himself secured. And, then, in fact, what does it matter about the length of the task? Time is of no consequence to him, centuries are before him; supposing that his tools and his life should end to-morrow, another would take his place and continue his work. During their life, they hold but little communication, these hermits; but in death a brotherhood exists, even for them, and the young survivor, who shall find the work half done, will bless the memory of the good workman who has preceded him.

Do not fancy that he strikes, and strikes continually. He has an art, a labor-saving art of his own. When he has well attacked the layers of the rock, and well cleaned it, he tears away the asperities as with little pincers. A work of great patience, and one which requires long intervals, too, in order that the water may aid in doing the work upon the denuded parts. He then proceeds to the second layer, then to the next, and so on till the long, long labor is at length completed.

In this uniform life, however, there are occasional crises, even as in the life of the poor human laborer. The sea retires from certain shores; in the summer, this or that rock becomes quite insupportably hot; and our oursin must have two houses, one for summer, and one for winter. A great event, that, of moving from place to place, for a creature without feet and covered all over with points. M. Cailland had an opportunity of observing the conduct of the creature under those circumstances. The weak and movable scoops which play backward and forward, are by no means insensible though he protects them somewhat by covering them with a little soft gelatine. At length he steadies himself on his thorns, as on so many crutches, rolls his Diogenes' tub, and attains his port as he best may. Arrived there, he shuts himself up again, and in the little nest which he almost always finds partly made, he concentrates himself in the enjoyment of his solitary and thrice blessed security. Let a thousand enemies prowl without, let the storm-lashed wave moan or rage, all that is for his pleasure. Let the very rock tremble at the dash of the breakers; he well knows that he has nothing to fear, that it is only his kind nurse that is making all that noise; he is safe in his cradle, and with a glad good night, he sleeps.