Part 4

"He is great and good and beautiful, like my patron saint, Ivan," he thought. Something stirred in the gloom of the hut, and quickly Ivanka turned to where his mother sat with the sleeping Minka in her lap. His lip began to quiver.

The peasant found his tongue. "Give him time, Noble Prince," he faltered, huskily, and he too looked towards the crouching figure by the stove. "It is a great thing the High Noble offers, but the boy is very young."

"Take your time," replied the Prince. "In the spring I shall return. Then, since you are sensible people, he will be ready to go."

With these words the great man stooped and kissed Ivanka, pressing a roll of notes into his hand. From the door Ivanka watched the Prince depart. He gazed after the fine sledge with its prancing horses as they sped, swift as the wind, towards the wonderful, mysterious city of the Great Czar. When it had disappeared and the merry jingle of the silver bells no longer reached his ear it was to him as though a bright noontide sun had suddenly dropped from the heavens. And there and then a feeling of longing after greater things crept into his valiant little heart.

"You shall decide for yourself, my son," said the peasant. And the mother hid her grief because she wished Ivanka to be a great man.

Thus it was that when the spring came to stir the sap in the trees and release the ice-bound brooks, at the return of the Prince, Ivanka was ready to go.

_In Nature's Workshop._

II.--FALSE PRETENCES.

By Grant Allen.

Human life and especially human warfare are rich in deceptions, wiles, and stratagems. We dig pitfalls for wild beasts, carefully concealed by grass and branches; we take in the unsuspecting fish with artificial flies, or catch them with worms which conceal a hook treacherously barbed for their surer destruction. The savage paints his face and sticks feathers in his hair so that he may look more terrifying to his expected enemy; civilized men mask their batteries, and sometimes even paint muzzles of imaginary guns in the spaces between the gaping mouths of the real ones. _Chevaux de frise_ block the way to points liable to attack; real troops lie in ambush and dart out unexpectedly in the rear of the assailants. Trade in like manner is full of shams--a fact which I need hardly impress by means of special examples. But Nature we are usually accustomed to consider as innocent and truthful. Alas, too trustfully: for Nature too is a gay deceiver. There is hardly a device invented by man which she has not anticipated: hardly a trick or ruse in his stock of wiles which she did not find out for herself long before he showed her.

I propose in this paper to examine a few cases of such natural deceptions--not indeed the most striking or typical, but such as occur among fairly well-known English plants and animals. And I shall begin with our familiar and unsavoury old friend, the Devil's Coach-horse.

In order fully to understand his mode of procedure, however, I must first call your attention to another animal which really _is_ what the Devil's Coach-horse mendaciously pretends to be: and that is the common scorpion. His mode of fighting is well known to most of us. In illustration No. 1 Mr. Enock has given us a delineation of a frantic death-struggle between such a scorpion and a large and powerful southern spider. The venomous creature with the stinging tail is on the left; the spider is on the right. As far as mere size goes, the antagonists are fairly well matched: but the scorpion is the best armed, both with offensive and defensive armour. His lobster-like or crab-like claws enable him to hold his enemy's limbs in his grip as in a vice: then, at the critical moment, he bends over his tail, in the extremity of which his sting is situated, and plunges it with force through the comparatively slight skin of the spider's body or thorax, injecting at the same moment a pungent drop of his deadly poison. This characteristic action of the scorpion in curving its tail over its body and raising its sting in a menacing attitude is well known to birds and other enemies of the species: often the mere threat of a thrust is a sufficient deterrent: the dangerous beast just elevates its poisonous appendage or assumes an angry mien, and the inquisitive intruder is frightened away immediately. It is the same with ourselves. The bare sight of that uplifted sting suffices to repel us. Even a child who saw a scorpion once arch its back and prepare to strike with its reversed tail would instinctively understand that there was danger ahead, and would withdraw its hand before the venomous creature had time to pounce upon it.

Owing to these unamiable personal traits of the scorpion race, it is not popular among other animals. But to be feared is to be respected; and scorpions for the most part are left severely alone, under the stones where they love to lurk, by the various denizens of the districts they inhabit. Now, it is a fact in nature as in human life that to be successful is to have many imitators. Thus a number of harmless flies dress up like wasps in black and yellow bands, and so escape the too pressing attentions of insect-eating birds and other enemies. They have no stings, to be sure, but they look so like the wasps, and flaunt about so fearlessly in their borrowed uniform, that they are universally taken for the insects they mimic; even the cautious entomologist himself stares at them twice and makes quite sure of his specimen before he ventures to lay hands on any such doubtful masquerader. I hope in a future article to give some further account (with illustrations) of these facts of _mimicry_, as it is called: for the present we will stick close to our text, the Devil's Coach-horse. For this familiar English beetle is an imitator of the scorpion, and obtains immunity from the attack of enemies to a great extent by pretending to powers which are not his in reality.

In No. 2 we have a portrait of the Coach-horse in his hours of ease, seen from above, engaged in doing nothing in particular. He does not _look_ like a flying insect, but he is. He has a long pair of wings tucked away in folds under his horny wing-cases, and he can use them with great effect, for he is one of our swiftest and strongest fliers--the long-distance champion, I almost fancy, among the beetles of England, unless indeed the tiger-beetle be pitted against him. But when crawling on the ground, and attacked or menaced, he does not take to flight or show the white feather: being a pugnacious and spirited little beast, he bridles up at once, and endeavours incontinently to terrify his assailant. In No. 2 you see him from above when he is merely engaged in crawling along the ground, looking as mild as milk, and as gentle as any sucking dove: you would hardly suppose he could show fight or raise his hand--I mean his antennæ--to injure anyone. But in No. 3 he is represented in his favourite act of attacking a caterpillar: for he is really a very voracious and courageous carnivore. In the autumn, when Devil's Coach-horses are usually most abundant, you can easily catch them by putting a piece of meat or a dead frog under an empty flower-pot, and then tilting the edge up with a stone, so that the beetles can crawl in and get at the food thus temptingly laid out for them.

If you disturb the Coach-horse, however, while he is engaged in eating his quiet meal, or even when he is walking at leisure along a country road, he puts himself at once into his "terrifying" attitude, and imitates the scorpion. No. 4 exhibits him in this military character, cocking up his tail and pretending he can sting--which is only his brag: he just does it to frighten you. But the attitude is so exactly like that of the scorpion, that it almost always produces an immediate effect: hardly anybody likes to molest a Devil's Coach-horse. If you put down your hand to touch him, and he rears in response, ten to one you will withdraw it in alarm at sight of him. In England these beetles often enough find their way into larders or cellars, seeking whom or what they may devour; and when the servants light upon them, they almost invariably decline to touch them: there is a general opinion about that the ugly and threatening black beasts are uncanny and poisonous, or else why should they turn up their tails at you in such an insulting fashion?

"But," you may object, "there are no scorpions in England: how then can the Devil's Coach-horse be benefited by imitating an animal which he has never seen, and of whose very existence he has not been able to read in pretty picture books?" Your objection has some force--though not so much as you imagine. It is quite true that there are no scorpions in England; but then, there are Devil's Coach-horses in many other countries, and the habit of tail-cocking need not necessarily have been acquired in these islands of Britain. That is not all, however: it suffices the beetle if the tactics it adopts happen to frighten and repel its enemies, no matter why. Now, in the first place, many of our migratory birds go in winter to Southern Europe and Africa--especially the insect-eaters, which can find no food in frozen weather. The hard-billed seed-eaters and fruit-eaters remain with us, but the soft-billed kinds retire to warmer climates, where food is plentiful. Of course, however, it is just these insect-eating birds that the Devil's Coach-horse has most to fear from. The birds must be quite familiar with the habits and manners of scorpions in their southern homes; and they are not likely to inquire closely whether the dangerous beast they know on the Mediterranean has, or has not been scheduled in Britain. We all of us dislike and distrust any insect that resembles a bee or wasp, and that buzzes or hums in a hostile manner: we give all such creatures a wide berth, wherever found, on the bare off-chance that they may turn out to be venomous--be hornets or so forth. Just in the same way, a bird, when it sees an unknown black beastie cock up its tail and assume a threatening attitude, is not likely to inquire too curiously whether or not it is really a scorpion: the bare suspicion of a sting is quite enough to warn it off from interfering with any doubtful customer. Moreover, in the second place, even those birds or men who have never seen a scorpion at all are yet sure to be alarmed when an insect sticks up its forked tail menacingly, and shows fight, instead of skulking or flying away. As a general rule, if any animal makes signs of resistance, we take it for granted he has adequate arms or weapons to resist with: and so this mere dumb-show of being a sort of scorpion proves quite sufficient to protect the Devil's Coach-horse from the majority of his enemies.

I ought to add that while our beetle thus frightens larger enemies, he is actively and offensively objectionable to small ones. The main use of his tail, indeed, is for folding away his wings, much as the earwig folds hers by aid of her pincers. But the Devil's Coach-horse makes it serve a double purpose. For he has a couple of yellow scent-glands in his tail, which secrete an unpleasant and acrid aromatic substance. These scent-glands are protruded in No. 4: you can just see them at the tip of the tail; and if the annoyance to which the beetle is subjected seems to call for their intervention, a drop of the volatile body they distil is set free, and is at once discharged in the face of the enemy. Such a manoeuvre is in essence like that of the skunk: it is defence by means of a nasty odour, and it occurs not only in the Coach-horse's case, but also among a number of beetles and other insects.

The odd little creatures known as Bombardier Beetles are still quainter in their habits: they carry the last-mentioned mode of defence to an even greater pitch of perfection. For, like miniature artillery-men, they actually fire off a regular volley of explosive gas in the faces of their pursuers. The gas is secreted as a liquid; but it is very volatile, and it vaporizes at once on contact with the air, so as to form a small, white cloud of pungent smoke, resembling in its effects nitric acid. Our native English species of Bombardier roams about in large flocks or regiments: and when one member of a clan is disturbed, all the other beetles of the company let off their artillery at once, so that the scattered volley has something the appearance of platoon firing. The chief enemy of the Bombardiers is a much larger and very handsome carnivorous beetle known as Calosoma. When this insect tiger hunts down a single Bombardier, and has almost caught him, the fugitive waits till his pursuer is quite close, and then salutes him with a discharge of fire-arms: the pungent gas gets into the Calosoma's eyes and mouth and distracts him for a moment; and the Bombardier escapes in the midst of the confusion thus caused, under cover of the cloud he himself has exploded. That is the most highly evolved mode of defence of which I know among the British insects.

There are few creatures, again, which one would so little suspect of any attempt to bully and bluff others as the soft-bodied caterpillars. They are as a rule so plump and squashy and defenceless: a mere peck from a bird's beak is enough to kill them, for when once their tight, thin skin is broken, were it but with a pin-prick, all the flabby contents burst out at once in the messiest fashion. Yet even caterpillars, strange to say, have their tricks of terrifying. They pretend to be dangerous characters. I will set out with some of the simplest and least developed cases, and then pass on to a more complex and wily class of deceivers.

To begin with, I must premise that two sets of caterpillars have two different ways of evading the unpleasant notice of birds and other insect-eaters. One way is that adopted by the common "woolly-bear," a great hairy caterpillar, frequent in gardens, and covered from head to tail with long needles or bristles. These prickly points make the creature into a sort of insect hedgehog; birds refuse to touch him, because the serried spikes, which to us are mere hairs, seem to them perfect spines or thorns, sticking into their tongues and throats, or clogging their gizzards. Protected caterpillars like the woolly-bears live quite openly, exposed on the leaves and branches of their food-plant; they are not afraid of being seen: nay, they rather court observation than shun it, because they know nobody will attack them. The porcupine has no need to run away like the rabbit. Similar tactics are also adopted by many nasty-tasting caterpillars, in whose bodies natural selection has developed bitter or unpleasant juices. These caterpillars are rejected by birds and lizards--the great enemies of the race--and therefore they find it worth while to clothe themselves in gaudy and conspicuous red or yellow bands, so as to advertise all comers of their inedible qualities. Whenever you see such brilliantly-attired grubs (like those of the Magpie Moth, so common on gooseberry-bushes--a striking creature tricked out in belts of black and orange), you may be sure of two things: first, they live openly and undisguisedly on the leaves of their food-plant, without any attempt at mean concealment; and second, they are nasty to the taste, and therefore rejected as food by insect-eating animals. Now and then a young and inexperienced bird may eat one, to be sure; but it never tries twice, and the solitary martyr is sacrificed for the good of the race. Their bright colours and gaudy bands are just advertisements, as it were, of their inedible qualities. For, of course, nasty taste would do a caterpillar no good if the bird had always to sample it before rejecting it; the broken skin alone would be enough to kill it. Hence almost all uneatable caterpillars have acquired bright colours by natural selection--that is to say, by the less bright being continuously devoured or killed; and birds on their side have learned to know (after one trial, or, perhaps, even before it by inherited instinct) that red or yellow bands and belts in caterpillars are the outward and visible sign of uneatableness.

The second group or set of caterpillars is edible and tasty: it, therefore, governs itself accordingly, and has recourse to the exactly opposite tactics. Caterpillars of this class are smooth and naked: they never have the brilliant "warning colours" of the nasty-tasted kinds: and they show a marked absence of the beautiful metallic sheen, the strange melting iridescent hues and spots which add beauty to the charms of so many among the uneatable species. Such fat and smooth-skinned edible caterpillars are, of course, very tempting juicy morsels to birds and other insect-eating animals. Their motions, like those of all grubs, are slow; and if they lived exposed on their food-plants, after the fashion of the protected hairy and bitter kinds, they would all he eaten up before they had time to turn into moths or butterflies. Here, therefore, natural selection has produced the contrary result from that which it produces among protected kinds. Caterpillars of this edible type which showed themselves too openly and imprudently have got picked off by birds, like sentries and pickets who make themselves too conspicuous to the enemy's sharpshooters. Only the most prudent, modest, and retiring grubs have survived to become moths or butterflies, and so be the parents of future generations, to whom they hand on their own peculiarities. In this way the edible caterpillars have acquired at last a fixed hereditary instinct of lurking under leaves, or in dark spots, and never showing themselves openly. The larvæ of the butterfly group as a whole thus fall into two great classes (as far as regards habits alone, I mean): the _protected_, which are either hairy or nasty, and which flaunt themselves openly; and the _unprotected_, which lurk and skulk, endeavouring to escape notice as sedulously as their rivals the protected endeavour to attract it.

Nor is that all. It would clearly be useless for a bright red or yellow caterpillar to hide under a green leaf, and then suppose by that simple device he was going to escape observation. Birds are always looking out for insects under leaves. The consequence is that skulking or lurking caterpillars are soon found out by sharp-eyed and hungry enemies, unless they closely resemble the foliage or stems upon which they lie. From generation to generation, accordingly, the less imitative insects get eaten, and the more imitative spared: so that nowadays, most unarmed caterpillars are green like the leaves or grey like the stems, and are even provided with markings of light and shade upon their skins which mimic the distribution of light and shade among the ribs and veins of the surrounding foliage. Such deceptive leaf-like caterpillars are always very difficult to find: so that careless observers as a rule know only those of the other type, the great hairy "woolly-bears" and the brilliant red and yellow-banded bitter kinds; they never observe the unobtrusive green and brown sorts, which harmonize so admirably with their native tree in colour and markings.

Many greenish caterpillars, however, when discovered and disturbed, fall back on their second line of defence: they endeavour to frighten their enemies by devices closely similar to those of the Devil's Coach-horse. The caterpillar of the Broad-bordered Bee-hawk, for example, forms a good instance of a very simple stage in the development of such brazen-faced "terrifying" tactics. This warlike grub is shown in No. 5, trying on its simple little attempt to make itself alarming. Though by no means an uncanny-looking or appalling insect, it will rear itself up on its haunches (so to speak) when attacked, raising the fore part of its body erect with a sudden jerk, and holding its head high, as if it meant to bite or sting, so as to give itself as formidable an aspect as possible. The mild ruse succeeds, too; for birds will eye the harmless creature askance when it attempts this evolution, putting their heads on one side, and ruffling their crests in evident terror. The attitude is all a simple piece of bluff, to be sure, but _it pays_; indeed, bluff in warfare is often more than half the battle. If you put on a bold face in a row, and seem able to take care of yourself, people are apt to think you have a knife up your sleeve, and therefore to refrain from unnecessarily annoying you.

The cunning caterpillar which finally develops into the Privet Hawk-moth has a slightly more evolved mode of purely theatrical frightening. You see him in No. 6, a full-fed specimen, just ready to turn at once into a chrysalis. This grub feeds usually on the vivid leaves of the privet; he is therefore protectively coloured a bright green, like that of the foliage about him. "But why those great purple stripes on his sides?" you will ask. "Surely they must make him an easy mark for birds?" Not at all: please notice that they run obliquely. There is method in that obliquity. When the caterpillar is smaller, he lurks unseen on the under-side of the leaves, and this pattern of oblique purplish lines exactly imitates the general effect of the shadows cast by the ribs--so much so, that if you look for him on a privet-tree in spring, I doubt whether you will find him till I point him out to you. Even when he waxes fat and full fed, the purple stripes still aid him more or less by breaking up the large green surface into smaller areas, as Professor Poulton has well noticed. He harmonizes better so with the broken masses of the leaves about him. Then again, when the time arrives for him to turn into a chrysalis, he descends to the ground, which, under a thickly-leaved privet bush, is most often brown. So, just as he is coming of age and reaching the proper moment for migration, his back all at once begins to turn brown, in order that he may be less observed as he walks about on the stem; while by the time he is quite ready to take to the earth he has grown brown all over, thus matching the soil in which he has next to bury himself. You could hardly have a better example of the sort of colour-change which often accompanies altered habits of living.

In the illustration, however, you see this really harmless and undefended grub in the act of trying to pretend he is poisonous. He is now mature, and the stripes on his sides stand out conspicuously as he walks on the stem. A sparrow threatens him. He retorts by showing fight--fallaciously and deceptively, for he has nothing to fight with. He lifts his head with an aggressive air, and throws himself about from side to side, as if he knew he could bite, and meant to do it. He also lashes his tail in pretended anger--"I would have you to know, Sir Bird, I am not to be trifled with!" The empty demonstration usually succeeds: the sparrow gets alarmed and believes he means it. This policy is, in essence, that commonly known as "spirited": it consists in trying to frighten your enemy instead of fighting him.