ANIMAL ARTISANS

AND OTHER STUDIES OF BIRDS AND BEASTS

CHARLES JOHN CORNISH.
(From a Portrait taken while at Oxford.)

Frontispiece

ANIMAL ARTISANS

AND OTHER STUDIES OF BIRDS
AND BEASTS

BY

C. J. CORNISH, M.A., F.Z.S.
With a Prefatory Memoir by his Widow

TWO PORTRAITS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS, AND
TWELVE DRAWINGS BY PATTEN WILSON

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO,

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

1907

All rights reserved

PREFACE

THE greater number of the papers included in this
book have already appeared, like most of the Author's
work, in the pages of the Spectator and of Country Life,
and my sincerest thanks are due to the proprietors and
editors of those papers for the help and encourage-
ment which they have given me, and for permission to
reprint the essays in their present form.

Some of the chapters my husband had himself re-
written and extended with a view to republication ;
the rest I have chosen from his numerous papers on
similar subjects which are available, as having most in
common with those he had already selected.

I fear that the title " Animal Artisans " is not
applicable, in the current sense of the word artisan,
to all the subjects dealt with ; but if the word is inter-
preted in its original and wider sense, as meaning one
" skilled in any art, mystery, or trade," it does, I think,
apply to the greater number of animals whose habits
or activities are here described.

In some chapters purely topical allusions, which have
become out of date, have been altered or removed ;

253305

vi PREFACE

in others, additional matter has been added from my
husband's own notes and elsewhere ; more especially
when fresh evidence in support of any point he put
forward has presented itself since an article was
written. In other respects I have made as few
alterations as possible, and I trust that this course
will commend itself to those who have encouraged
me to put together these papers and others from
my husband's pen which I hope to publish in book
form erelong.

The many letters full of sympathy and regret,
which reached me from known and unknown friends
all over the world at the time of his death, suggested
that some account of his life and work might be
welcome to those of his readers who never knew him
personally, and to others who admired his often un-
signed writings without being aware of the identity
of their author. And it seemed appropriate that such
an account should be embodied in the preface to this
book.

But it would be impossible for one bound to him
as I am to write dispassionately of one so dear
and so lately lost, or to attempt anything like an
appreciation of his work which could claim to be
in any degree authoritative or final. I have therefore
only attempted myself to record the bare facts of his
life, leaving the task of appraising the value of his
work to others.

PREFACE vii

May I in conclusion be allowed to add that the
letters already referred to, and the generous tributes
to my husband's work and memory which appeared
in so many of the daily and weekly papers at the
time of his death, gave the greatest possible consola-
tion to all who loved him. In the following pages
I have borrowed freely from both these sources, and
here tender my heartfelt thanks to those writers to
whom I am thereby so deeply indebted.

EDITH CORNISH.

EYOT VILLA,
CHISWICK MALL, October 1906.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR .... xiii

I. MINOR MASONS i

II. CARPENTER BIRDS 8

III. THE FAUNA OF THE RAILROAD . . . 16

IV. ON THE MARCH 25

V. ROAD-MAKING ANIMALS ..... 33

VI. LANDSCAPE GARDENERS 41

VII. ANIMAL DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER . . 50

VIII. IN THE TIME OF FLOODS .... 58

IX. THE MIGRATIONS OF INSECTS .... 65

X. ANIMALS AND POISON 72

XI. WILD SWANS 79

XII. TAME CYGNETS 86

XIII. THIRSTY BIRDS 94

XIV. How ANIMALS LEARNT TO CLIMB . . .100
XV. CROSSBILLS AT WORK . 107

XVI. THE SENSE OF DIRECTION . . . .114

XVII. THE "SIXTH SENSE" 119

XVIII. THE MIND OF A GARDENING ANT . . .123

XIX. THE POWER OF FASCINATION . . . .136

XX. THE COURAGE OF THE SMALLER ANIMALS . 144

x CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

XXI. BENEVOLENCE IN MAN AND BEAST . .151

XXII. ODD FRIENDSHIPS 158

XXIII. DECOY ANIMALS 165

XXIV. BULLS AND BULL-FIGHTS . . . .171
XXV. MOLES AND MOLE-SKINS . . . .179

XXVI. CANARY CULTURE 186

XXVII. HUMOURS OF THE "FANCY" . . ' . . 192

XXVIII. THE FEAR OF MAN 199

XXIX. POLYGLOT ANIMALS 207

XXX. PUPPIES AND FOX-CUBS 221

XXXI. DOGS ON THE HIGHWAY 230

XXXII. THE SIMPLE LIFE 238

XXXIII. THE PREHISTORIC FARMYARD . . . .245

XXXIV. ANIMALS AND THEIR CLOTHES . . .251
XXXV. COMIC ANIMALS IN ART AND NATURE . .259

XXXVI. NEW NATIONAL EMBLEMS 268

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR, TAKEN WHILE AT
OXFORD

A LATER PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR, WITH
HIS DAUGHTER

"IN THE COLD GREY DAWN, THE HUNGRY
COYOTES WAIT TO SEE WHAT MAY BE
THROWN FROM THE WINDOWS OF THE
CARS FOR DESERVING PRAIRIE DWELLERS "

BUTTERFLIES FOLLOWING A SHIP AT SEA

"THEY FLY IN ORDERED RANKS, AND EACH
STROKE OF THE WINGS MAKES A CLEAR
AND MUSICAL SOUND "

"THE CYGNET WOULD CLIMB ON TO THE
BACK OF A SETTER WHICH WAS ITS
COMPANION"

"UNABLE TO TURN BACK AND AFRAID TO
JUMP ON TO THE LEADS"

CROSSBILLS AT WORK

"THE DUCKLINGS TOOK A BEE LINE STRAIGHT
FOR THEIR DESTINATION"

Frontispiece

To face p. xxiv

18
66

82

92

104

1 08

116

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

RABBIT ATTACKING A STOAT .... ,, 146

A FRIEND IN NEED ,,156

"HE BECAME VERY FRIENDLY WITH A HORSE,
AND USED TO SlT BETWEEN HIS EARS
FOR HOURS AT A TlME " .... „ 160

"THEY WILL BE A DAILY AND HOURLY EX-
CITEMENT IN ANY QUIET FAMILY" . . „ 226

TO KEEP THEIR PETTICOATS DRY THEY ARE

CARRIED OVER BY THE KENNEL-BOY . „ 256

MEMOIR

CHARLES JOHN CORNISH
Born September 28, 1858. Died January 30, 1906

" It is not growing like a tree

In bulk doth make man better be :
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere :

In just proportions we just beauties see ;
And in short measures life may perfect be."

—BEN JONSON.

CHARLES JOHN CORNISH was born on September 28,
1858, at Salcombe House, Salcombe Regis, Devon,
the home of his grandfather, then Deputy-Lieutenant
of the county. He was sprung from a family long
connected with Devonshire and Cornwall, and his
literary tastes and love of natural history were
hereditary.

Several of his forebears attained distinction as
scholars, or held exhibitions and scholarships at
Oxford on the Rous and Wadham foundations by
their " right of founder's kin " ; while his great-
grandfather, Mr. James Cornish of Totnes and Black-
hall, wrote a book on the culture and preservation
of salmon and other fish in the Devonshire rivers,

ziii

xiv MEMOIR

in which many of Frank Buckland's suggestions were
forestalled by half a century.

Charles Cornish was the eldest son of the Rev. C.
J. Cornish (now of Thurlestone, Fleet), sometime
scholar of Eton and of Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, afterwards Vicar of Debenham in Suffolk,
and then Rector of Childrey, Berks, to which living
he was presented by his college in 1882. To his
father's influence Charles Cornish ascribed his love
of sport and of the classics, a debt which he acknow-
ledged in the dedication of the " Nights with an
Old Gunner." In his personal appearance, vivacity,
and eager activity of mind and body, he strongly
resembled his mother. From her, too, he inherited
his taste for languages and powers of expression,
while the whole of his childhood and early manhood
were deeply influenced by her personal charm, fine
character, and great intellectual gifts, which have
become an abiding tradition in the Suffolk village
which was the home of her sons' earlier years.

The boundless energy, quick fancy, and intense
interest and curiosity in everything around him, which
are apparent in his writings, characterised him from
his earliest years. When a tiny child in petticoats,
he not only knew the habits and nesting-places of
nearly all the living inhabitants of the garden and
fields in which he and his brothers played, but his
vivid imagination, eager for adventure, peopled their
little world with a more remarkable fauna of his
own creation.

Occasionally this led to misunderstanding or worse ;

MEMOIR xv

as when he complimented a relative on the number
of lions in his garden, and was reprimanded for
" telling lies," or on another occasion when the
brothers went to spear " Merrymaids " * in a moat,
and in the ardour of pursuit the younger boy over-
balanced himself and was very nearly drowned.

When very little older he was introduced to more
prosaic forms of sport, and he always loved to
remember his earliest " first of September." That
took place at his grandfather's home in Devonshire,
when he was still such a little boy, that he and his
brother James both rode up the steep red hillsides
together on one pony, and later on in the day when
walking with the guns they were each given a hare
to carry, to stop them from talking so much ; and
a very effectual remedy they found it !

As he grew older his ready resourcefulness and
powers of organisation quickly made him a leader
in the enterprises of his boyish companions. Many
are the tales which they can tell of the games of
football which he organised, his rambles over the
country in his ardour for birds' eggs, his search for
fossils in the watercourses, and his general knowledge
of animal and plant life. It must be admitted that
his ingenuity in devising new forms of activity hitherto
undreamt of, was a source of some disquietude to the
mothers of more conventionally-minded but equally
energetic sons. For certain brilliant ideas of his were
carried out with a characteristic thoroughness and dis-
regard of anything but the matter in hand, which was

1 Suffolk word meaning Mermaids.

b

xvi MEMOIR

rather disastrous in its after effects. Such was the
" Siege of Jotapata," as re-enacted strictly according to
Josephus, in and around an empty stable at the back
of the Vicarage. The methods of constructing and
working siege implements had been carefully studied
by the three brothers, and their battering-ram (weighted
with lead stripped from the stable roof) proved so
effective that a breach a couple of feet square was
very soon made in a particularly solid wall. In the
meantime, the beleaguered citizens running short of
" clods," the orthodox missile of Suffolk boyhood,
and disdaining stones as unsportsmanlike, supplied
themselves with ammunition from the winter's supply
of potatoes which were stored in the loft above the
stable. After that sieges were voted too expensive
a form of amusement, but further scenes from Jewish
history were enacted in the " Caves of Engedi," which
were mined in the gravel banks of the river Deben.

At fourteen, up till which age he had been educated
at home by his father and mother, Charles Cornish
went to Charterhouse, just after the school had been
moved from London to its new home at Godalming.
The fauna of the Surrey hills is, needless to say,
totally different from that of high Suffolk, but, to
use words applied to him in later life, " almost by
instinct he would come to a right conclusion as to
the birds that would be found in a district to which
he had previously been a stranger, and it was seldom
that he looked for them without success. He was
an expert in finding nests, and it was scarcely possible
to show him one concerning which he had not some

MEMOIR xvii

interesting fact or feature to describe." So it came
about that at Charterhouse natural history specimens
which he collected became the nucleus of what is
now the school museum, and he very soon earned a
reputation for natural history lore which was some-
times rather hard to live up to. In his second term
he was sent for by a sixth-form boy, and on entering
his study was greeted as follows : " Hullo ! you're a
naturalist, aren't you ? Very well then, you may as
well be useful. Just get along out at once and stop
the row these beastly nightingales are making, then
perhaps I shall be able to get on with my work."

The thickets on the slope below the school buildings
held at that time plenty of rabbits as well as nightin-
gales, and these coverts afforded opportunities, too
good to be neglected, for more or less surreptitious
ferreting ; the chief drawback to which was that the
ferrets would never learn to recognise the school bell
as a signal to come to the surface, and so were rather
apt to get lost. Pistol shooting was another unrecog-
nised joy sometimes indulged in with quite as much
zest as the legitimate practice of the school rifle corps,
of which he was one of the earliest members. He
won a place in the first team which Charterhouse
sent to Wimbledon to compete for the Ashburton
Shield ; a team which also included the future General
Baden-Powell.

As soon as school hours are over at Charterhouse,
the real business of the spring and autumn terms is
Association football, and at this Charles Cornish very
soon became an expert. Though small and some-

xviii MEMOIR

what slightly built, his fleetness of foot, and the
general alertness of eye and movement which later
on made him such a first-rate game shot, also made
him one of the best public school " forwards " of
his year ; and though he afterwards lost his speed,
he kept his love of the game, and continued to play
occasionally at Charterhouse and elsewhere till an age
when most men have long discarded so arduous a
game.

As to his more serious studies at Charterhouse,
he always maintained that he was lazy there, and
did not learn as much as he ought to have done, but
his ideas of laziness were so different from those
of most other people that this statement cannot be
accepted without a good deal of reserve. At the
end of his second term he won the classical prize
given for the whole of the lower school, and always
took a very good place in the school, besides winning
the lasting affection of many of his masters and
schoolfellows. One of the latter who did not meet
him for some years, wrote to me recently : " He was
one of my old school and college friends of whom
I always think with great affection. I have the
happiest recollection of him, and there never was a
time when I did not admire the spirit and enthusiasm
which marked all that he did, and which ensured
success in whatever he undertook." Charles Cornish's
own recollections of Charterhouse were among the
happiest of his life ; and it was one of his greatest
pleasures to revisit the school from time to time,
and to stay with his former house-master, the Rev.

MEMOIR xix

H. J. Evans, for whom and for all his family he
had the warmest regard.

It had been his wish either to go into the army
or to continue his education at Oxford ; but when he
left Charterhouse circumstances made either course
almost impossible for the time being. Though it
was necessary for him to find some employment at
once on leaving school, he did not give up the idea
of going to Oxford later on, but set to work with
characteristic energy and courage to earn the means
to take him there. A private tutorship seemed to
him to offer the best opening for this purpose, and
he shortly afterwards obtained such a post in York-
shire. He was then not eighteen, and his pupil, an
only son, was some eight or nine years younger than
himself, but before long they became so much attached
to one another that their relations were more like
those of an elder and younger brother than of a tutor
and pupil, and the strong affection which sprung up
between them lasted all his life. His relations, too,
with his pupil's parents were of the happiest description,
and he always felt how much he himself owed to the
scholarly tastes and kindly guidance that he met
with in that household. He made many friends in
Yorkshire, and constantly revisited them in later years.
" I have never forgotten," writes one of the friends
of his youth, " the delightful days we had together at

L , getting up at three and four to go after wild

duck. I thoroughly enjoyed those walks and talks
with him, and he taught me to use my eyes."

His delight in the strange beauty of the Doncaster

xx MEMOIR

carrs, over which he often shot while on these York-
shire visits, and his appreciation of the canny sense
and dry humour of the Yorkshire people, are shown
in "Wild England" and the "Nights with an Old
Gunner." These, too, give some hint of his knowledge
of the West Riding dialect, one of the many local
" tongues " for which he possessed an extraordinary
aptitude. He could faultlessly render or interpret
the local intonations of Norfolk, Suffolk, Berkshire,
Yorkshire, Devonshire, and Cumberland ; and his
unusual abilities in this direction may partly have
accounted for his power of quickly gaining the con-
fidence and liking of all sorts and conditions of men ;
whereby he acquired many odds and ends of local
knowledge which would never have reached a man
of less flexible and sympathetic temperament.

He remained with his first pupil for four and a half
years, when the latter went to Eton and he himself
to Oxford. There he took a scholarship at Hert-
ford College, and subsequently his tutor recom-
mended him for an exhibition that was in the gift
of the Principal. With this help, together with his
savings and the remuneration for extra teaching under-
taken during the vacations and in his " grace terms,"
he was able to complete his University course entirely
at his own expense. He had, of course, gone up a few
years later than most of his contemporaries, and the
work which he undertook during the vacations left
him little time for extra reading, but he neverthe-
less took a good second in Greats. He also had
charge of the college library, and won his Blue at

MEMOIR xxi

Association football, playing in the 'Varsity match of
1883. The portrait which forms the frontispiece to
this book (an extremely good likeness) was enlarged
from one in a group photographed immediately before
the match for the Inter-collegiate cup won by Hert-
ford in 1885.

His life at Oxford was a very happy one. He had
successfully accomplished the first task which he had
set himself to carry out, and this in itself was a source
of considerable satisfaction to him. Although most
of his old school friends had left Oxford before he
went up, he found many other congenial companions.
Readers of his articles in Country Life on old houses,
mills, bridges, and old architecture generally, will
readily understand how keenly he enjoyed the archi-
tectural beauty and historic associations of the Uni-
versity and its buildings, while the treasures of the
Bodleian and the peaceful loveliness of the river
scenery appealed with equal force to his keenly
appreciative nature.

In the meantime his father had left Suffolk and
become Rector of Childrey, a village on the slope of
the Berkshire downs, and Charles Cornish soon came
to know and love the rolling down country and the
wide vale beneath as well as the poplar-studded
meadows of his Suffolk home. The Berkshire downs
were at that time still a great corn-growing country,
where the down partridges flourished ; and the shoot-
ing of the Childrey glebe, some six hundred acres
in extent, was always reserved by the Rector for his
sons and their friends. The fields were wide and

xxii MEMOIR

unfenced, and birds flew far and fast, but no first of
September was considered a good one unless the three
brothers shot at least twenty brace ; and as this was
always over dogs, it meant any amount of walking, and
straight shooting besides. But in the words of a friend
who shared another shooting with him on these same
downs in recent years, he "cared little for a large
bag, but any little device by which we could steal a
march on the game or counteract its wiles, brought
out all his powers of observation and resource, and his
keenness inspired keeper and beaters and even the dogs
to their best efforts ; and when we stayed over the
week-end . . . the Sunday walk over the downs and
among the villages so rich in historic interest and
picturesque beauty, was made memorable by his wide
knowledge of the country and his overflowing curiosity
about everything and everybody that fell in our way."
From his boyhood upwards he was always a good,
and often a brilliant shot, but " from the time he used
a catapult till he ascended through a single-barrelled
muzzle-loader to a breech-loader, he was always a
naturalist as well as a sportsman." His extraordinary
memory enabled him to recall every incident of a
day's shooting, and not only details as to the bag,
but particulars of every unusual or interesting episode
which occurred were carefully set down by himself or
his brothers in a series of note-books on sport and
natural history which extended over twenty years.
When he began to write regularly these notes were
invaluable to him, but " it was comparatively late in
his career before he thought of putting his ideas

MEMOIR xxiii

into print. The knowledge of field and wood lore
that won him distinction had indeed been garnered
during his earliest years, . . . but he had studied wild
life and natural history, not because he wanted to
make copy out of it, but for the reason that he had
been born with a temperament which was spontaneously
interested in all that appertained to the open air and
to outdoor sport."

His first essay on a natural history subject was
not written until after he had left Oxford and settled
in London as an assistant Classical Master at St. Paul's
School ; a position which he held until the time of his
death twenty years later.

His gift of sympathy for the young, his general
alertness, and his powers of organisation and expression
" made him a most successful and efficient schoolmaster
. . . and he inspired his pupils with something of his
own energy and love of work." And when the hand of
Death was heavy upon him, and much that he had hoped
to do still undone, it comforted him to think that he
had succeeded in this. When he felt that his own
day was over, his thoughts turned to the boys he
had taught — those still at school, and others boys no
longer and out in the world — for some of them had
been very dear to him. It seemed to him then that
he had failed in many things; "but," he said, "I
have taught them to work, or at least to be ashamed
of being lazy."

Fond as he was of boys, both in an out of school
hours, he was a very strict disciplinarian, as any who
were inclined to be troublesome soon found to their

xxiv MEMOIR

cost ; and though he seldom punished a boy, few
masters at St. Paul's were more feared than he by
any really indolent or mutinous spirits which came
in contact with him.

In every case he tried to develop his pupil's
special interests, and so to bring out the best side of
every boy. It was part of his special work to set the
papers for the junior scholarship examination, and he
invariably arranged that in the " general knowledge "
papers there should be something to suit all tastes,
and that every boy should have a chance to show his
knowledge of some special subject. He did all he
could, too, to teach his form to think and to express
themselves intelligently, for he held that in every walk
of life it is an immense advantage to a man to be able
to make a clear and concise report ; while those who
showed any literary ability he delighted to encourage
with sympathy and advice. He was for many years
one of the editing committee of the school magazine,
the Pauline, and, as was noted in the obituary notice
of him in that paper, " every number testified to his
energy and vigilance. . . . But," the same paper
continues, " undoubtedly the most striking monu-
ment to Mr. Cornish's energy at St. Paul's is the
Field Club. Initiated by him in 1896, and drawing
its vitality mainly from the abundant springs of his
enthusiasm, the club has known a continually in-
creasing prosperity, and now holds a place among the
most flourishing of the school societies." Its head-
quarters in his class-room at St. Paul's, with its" cases
of stuffed birds and beasts, of shells and plants, re-

CHARLES JOHN CORNISH AND HIS DAUGHTER.
(From a Photograph by Miss Blanche Thorny croft}.

MEMOIR xxv

sembled a small museum. Many of the specimens
have been presented (through the president's agency)
by the authorities of the Natural History Museum at
South Kensington ; others have been collected and set
up by members of the club, and in many cases their
work could scarcely be improved upon either in scien-
tific arrangement or artistic execution. From the be-
ginning the club numbered among its members several
Paulines of exceptional ability, and though as collectors
they were naturally at a disadvantage from the fact
that they lived in London, when the first Nature
Study exhibition was held at the Botanical Gardens in
1902, the St. Paul's School Field Club exhibits were
among those selected for the highest honours.

The weekly meetings of the Field Club were a real
pleasure to its president, and he was always ready
himself to learn from those of its members who were
specialists in any particular subject. I remember the
delight with which he afterwards recounted how, when
an error in some other natural history writer's facts
had been commented on, a small boy remarked de-
murely, with a twinkle in his eye, " But of course, sir,
he hadn't the advantage of a form of well-informed
boys to consult."

It was one of his distractions during his long illness
to make plans for the future well-being of the Field
Club, and one of the last letters he dictated was to
inquire about some fishing near London which he
hoped to be able to take for the use of its members.
This very genuine interest in their amusements as
well as in their work naturally made him a favourite

xxvi MEMOIR

with his form, and " among his colleagues," says the
Pauline , " he was justly popular. He was remark-
able for the loyalty of his friendship, and when he
undertook to do anything he never failed to carry
it through to the best of his ability. Perhaps his
chief characteristic was an energy and alertness which
gave an impression of one who was armed at all
points, ready to say and do what the moment might
require. Though his life has ended prematurely, he
leaves behind him a record of sincere and honourable
work which is an example to all, and which many a
veteran might envy."

How deeply his loss was felt by many of his col-
leagues the following extracts show. One with whom
he had been closely associated during the whole of his
work at St. Paul's, writes : " I knew him better than
most of his colleagues, and I am quite unable to ex-
press to you my own feelings. I always told him
he worked too hard ; " and another : " I shall never
forget the many acts of kindness and consideration I
received from him ; " and yet another : " Of all my col-
leagues at and there has not been one whom

I loved so unreservedly or who showed me the same
affection ... I loved him as I have loved few men."

But good as his record as a schoolmaster was, it was
by his work outside St. Paul's that he was known to
the world at large. Soon after he came to London
he began to write occasional articles for the St. James s
Gazette, then edited by Mr. Greenwood, the Globe,
Field, Yorkshire Post, and other papers, and in 1890
he became a regular contributor to the Spectator.

MEMOIR xxvii

Although his articles in that paper were unsigned,
many of its readers soon learned to recognise his
delightful discourses on animals and outdoor life,
but few were aware that some of the articles on
naval and military matters (particularly on the im-
portance of rifle-shooting), and others on such varied
topics as "Steeplejacks," "Modern Burglary," "Li
Hung Chang's Furs," "Children at the Guildhall,"
" Race as a Factor in County Elections," and " The
Moral Value of Ancestors " were also from his pen.

After the birth of his little daughter in 1894, his
studies of childhood appeared more frequently, and
though comparatively few in number they are, in the
opinion of the editor of the Spectator, among the
very best he ever wrote.1 His first book, a mono-
graph on the New Forest, was published in 1894.
This was quickly followed by " Life at the Zoo,"
which at once " produced an impression that here was
a new writer on open-air subjects who was looking at
his world independently with his own eyes, and repro-
ducing impressions which were peculiar to himself."
With the publication of "Wild England," the "Old
Gunner," and the/ other books which followed, recog-
nition of this grew deeper ; and he was soon offered
far more literary work than his various duties would
allow him to undertake.

When Country Life embarked on its prosperous
career, Charles Cornish at once became a regular con-
tributor, and later on its shooting editor. In spite
of the funds of past experience which his well-stored

1 I hope at some future date to republish these in book form. — ED.

xxviii MEMOIR

memory enabled him to draw upon, it would have
been impossible for him to keep up to date with
the outdoor subjects on which he wrote without the
opportunities of absence from London, which his
school vacations afforded him, and his readers already
know to a great extent how these vacations were
spent. In the New Forest, he studied the glades
around Rufus' Stone, and strove to unravel the
mystery of the Red King's death, or drifted with the
flood-tide up the Beaulieu river, watching the swans
nesting among the pink-flowered thrift on its banks,
and the many-hued medusae floating up with the salt
tide from the sea. In the Norfolk marshes with the
old gunner Barrett, he lay in wait for the flighting
geese ; or underneath the tall cliffs of " the Wight,"
he watched the culver peregrines winging out to the
horizon, or the black lines of cormorants coming home
to roost. In Berkshire he noted the rise and fall of
the dewponds on the downs, and counted the dragon-
flies by the old canal, or watched the great chub
cruising below the bridge at Clifton Hampden, and
the woodpeckers raiding ants' nests in the old camp
on Sinodun Hill.

Together with a brother or a friend he usually took
a modest shooting in Berkshire or Suffolk, and latterly
he spent some time each year in fishing in the north
of England, under the shadow of the Pennine Range.
This was a new pleasure to him, and largely in a
new country ; but in the words of the friend to
whom he was indebted for this fresh interest, " His
extraordinary keenness and youthfulness endeared him

MEMOIR xxix

to every one up in Cumberland. . . . Coming up
into a new country, he seemed to get to know the
farmers and keepers and people about in a wonder-
ful way. They always asked after him whenever
I was there, and looked upon him with the greatest
respect and kindliness."

Although for nearly three months of his year he
was free from school work, he could scarcely ever be
persuaded to take a real holiday. He usually wrote
for several hours daily throughout the year, although
the ardour with which he carried out all he under-
took made an occasional complete rest an even more
urgent necessity to him than to less active natures.

In his later years he not only wrote his weekly
article for the Spectator, and edited the shooting de-
partment of Country Life, but often wrote one or
more articles for the latter paper, in addition to a
leader and other matter for the County Gentleman,
and a good deal of miscellaneous writing and editing
besides.

The nature of the subjects on which he wrote often
entailed a great deal of preliminary correspondence,
and besides writing the articles he usually had to
think of half-a-dozen suitable subjects every week ;
but no matter how pressed he might be, he would
never fail to do what he had promised, and if any
of the staff of either paper were ill, he was always
ready to step into the breach and do extra work if
required. In the words of one of his fellow-writers,
" He was the most loyal of colleagues, who never
made any difficulties, and always gave us of his best.

xxx MEMOIR

. . . His loss to the paper is irreparable. . . . He
was by far the best writer on Wild Life in any British
paper, and for many years gave pleasure and delight of
the purest kind to thousands of readers who never
saw him, but were none the less his debtors, and will
never forget his lessons."

But all this ceaseless activity, often involving long
journeys on the top of his regular school work,
undoubtedly overtaxed his strength, especially after
an unfortunate shooting accident had sowed the
seeds of a disease which in the end proved fatal.
Though very dangerously ill for some days after
this accident — a fall, in which he sustained severe
internal injuries — he recovered quickly and, it was
hoped at the time, completely. But a few years
later symptoms of kidney disease came on, and for
nearly a year he suffered from constant attacks of such
intense pain that it was feared an operation would be
unavoidable. With care and less drastic treatment,
however, these attacks gradually subsided, and though
he was warned that overwork, worry, or a too sedentary
life would be exceedingly likely to bring on a recur-
rence, for a time all seemed to go well. Then as
years went on and his literary reputation and work
increased, the time he allowed himself for exercise
and recreation grew less and less. The game of
rackets or tennis which he had been in the habit of
playing during his midday breaks was given up, so
were the walks that he formerly took when his after-
noon's work was over ; and he frequently worked
so late in the evening that he was unable to sleep

MEMOIR xxxi

when he wished to do so. Slowly but surely this
began to tell on his health, and though the outside
world knew little of this, those nearest to him saw
only too plainly that all was not well with him.
Always of a highly-strung nervous temperament, he
became over-anxious about his work, both at St.
Paul's and elsewhere. Those who only knew him
as a journalist and author could scarcely credit that
he was still working at St. Paul's besides, and the
knowledge that he was doing more than to some
people seemed possible, kept him in a constant state
of anxiety lest one or another of his employers
might think that he was giving undue attention to
the business of the others.

Although the thoroughness of his work at St. Paul's
was constantly proved by the success of his pupils in
public examinations (nearly 90 per cent, actually
passed the London Matriculation examination in the
subjects in which he prepared them), and though
constantly assured by equally satisfactory tests of
the excellence of his literary work, his mind was
never at rest, and this in itself greatly increased
the strain upon him. Above all things it dis-
tressed him if it were suggested that he was over-
worked : not for any fear of the injury it might
do to himself, but lest it should be considered
possible that his work itself might suffer. His own
writings, as well as the testimony of all who knew
him, are abundant evidence of his unusually keen
powers of appreciation of all that was good in life ;
but he was equally sensitive to adverse influences,

c

xxxii MEMOIR

and his capacity for suffering was always as intense
as his powers of enjoyment. This very rarely
appeared in his writings, for he always preferred
to write of the happier side of things, and for the
time being could completely identify himself with
his subject. But as his health declined, his powers
of enjoyment waned, while even the lesser worries of
life fretted him, until they became at times an almost
intolerable burden.

The Christmas of 1904 was spent at Sidmouth,
which he had not visited for several years. He
thoroughly enjoyed meeting old friends again, talked
of buying some of the land which his cousin Bishop
Kestell-Cornish was offering for sale, and returned to
London rather better in health. But immediately
afterwards he had a slight attack of influenza, and
from that he never recovered.

He never would leave his post at St. Paul's for
a single day if it could possibly be avoided, and on
this occasion (as on many others) he returned to
work when quite unfit to go out. From that time
his health became much worse, but he would not
acknowledge himself to be really ill, though the fact
was painfully apparent to those about him ; he worked
on the same as ever, steadily maintaining that if he
could do his work properly there could not be
much the matter with him, and that a good rest
later on would set him right again. The following
autumn the asthma from which he had been suffering
so increased that he was obliged to seek medical aid.
His condition was then found to be most alarming,

MEMOIR xxxiii

for the asthma was in reality a symptom of advanced
kidney disease, and it was decided that if his life was
to be prolonged he must stop all work and spend the
winter in Egypt or Algeria ; but it was too late.

On the 2 8th October there appeared in the Spectator
" a discourse on the shape and colour of leaves, and no
paper richer in suggestion or poetic charm ever came
from his pen," but it was his last. A few days
later his strength suddenly collapsed, and though he
recovered to a certain extent after this, it was the
beginning of the end. For a time his great vitality
still gave hopes of a partial recovery, but the nervous
energy which kept him alive also prevented him from
resting as completely as he should have done. As
soon as he was a little stronger, he insisted on writing
a little ; when this exertion was too much for him he
would dictate to a shorthand writer ; and though he
never wrote another article for the Spectator, several
short papers were written for Country Life in this way.

Early in December he was sufficiently well to be
moved to Worthing, and at first he seemed better
for the change, as his cough and difficulty in breathing
almost disappeared. But an attack of acute peri-
carditis on January 22nd made recovery out of the
question, and he grew gradually weaker, until in the
early morning of January 3Oth he fell asleep so
peacefully that those around him scarcely knew when
he had passed away.

" It is possible that if he could have been persuaded
in time to limit his work to one or other of the

xxxiv MEMOIR

directions in which his many-sided interests led him,
his life might have been spared for many years longer.
But, on the one hand, his enjoyment of life and all
that it offered to his active mind and wide sympathies
was so keen that it seemed impossible for him to draw
in ; on the other, his natural modesty led him to
fear that if he were not at once ready to take up every
piece of work as it came he might drop behind and be
overlooked in the struggle for existence. It was hard
to convince him that such fears were groundless, and
that there would always be a demand for work so
sincere and so stimulating as his." It had always
been rather a weakness of his to pride himself on
never doing anything slowly. Alas ! he could not
even live slowly, and so his life was over all too
soon.

And yet even those who love him best cannot
but feel that for himself it is happier so, for had
he survived what proved to be his last illness, his
must have been but a feeble and flickering life.
Bravely as he had lived and worked in spite of ever-
increasing weakness until the end, an invalid's exist-
ence would have been almost intolerable to him,
and those who love and mourn him most cannot
be otherwise than thankful that his eager spirit is
spared the burden of inactive years.

EDITH CORNISH.

ANIMAL ARTISANS

CHAPTER I

MINOR MASONS

IF ever the Fraternity of the Ancient Order of Free-
masons chooses to add a crest to the many bearings
which it emblazons among its insignia, the claims of
a very remarkable little bird to that honour are worthy
of consideration. It is the black wheatear, which
crosses the Straits of Gibraltar in the spring to nest
among the rocks and stones of the south Spanish
provinces. In form it is like the well-known English
wheatear, but not in colour ; for though it has the
same alert appearance, and the broad white band
across the lower part of the back which makes the
latter so conspicuous, the rest of the plumage, instead
of being light grey and buff, looks as if it had been
dipped in the inkpot.

The Spaniards near Malaga call this bird the pedrero,
or " stonemason," from its peculiar taste in nest-
building. The common wheatear usually builds in a
rabbit-hole. Several of them have nested lately in the
open warren in Richmond Park. The black wheatear
sometimes builds in a deep crevice in a cliff; but
more often it chooses a low excavation, or horizontal

A

2 ANIMAL ARTISANS

cleft, or low cave, and there sets to work with
tremendous energy to make a stone foundation for
its house and a stone wall around or in front of it.
Technically speaking, the pedrero is not so much a
mason as what is called in Yorkshire a " dry dyker " —
that is, he uses no mortar in his job, though some
other birds can mix mortar to dry to any degree of
hardness. In the Boer war the dry dykers of a
certain East Yorkshire regiment used to be asked to
volunteer to build " sangars," those being practically
the same as the dry stone walls of the North. If
Aristophanes had been acquainted with the black
wheatear's accomplishment, he would no doubt have
assigned to it the business of building the walls round
the City of the Birds when about to establish their
league between the realms of the gods and the habita-
tions of men.

Having chosen the place for its home — which, due
regard being had to proportionate size, in comparison
to human ideas, would represent to the bird a low-
browed cavern much like that in which the remains
of the great sloth were found in Patagonia — it first
collects a number of stones, and places them together
as a foundation for the future nest. Next, and this
is much more strange, it builds a sangar, or dry stone
wall, all along the front of the space which the nest
is to occupy later. This is not a mere flimsy wall,
but often a solid barrier, in which the stones are piled
in such a way as to make it almost or quite as thick
as it is long. The barrier of stones in front of
one nest found by Colonel Howard Irby, and described

MINOR MASONS 3

in his book on the "Ornithology of the Straits of
Gibraltar," was 9 in. long, 9 in. thick, and i\ in.
high. In this barrier there were no less than 282
stones. In the foundation of the nest were 76 more,
making 358 in all, of which the total weight was
4^ lb., the largest stone weighing 2 oz. It is difficult
to imagine how the little wheatear, intermediate in
size between a thrush and a robin, managed to carry
a stone of this weight. But perhaps it found this
particular pebble in situ. Having thus made the
foundation and wall of stone, it builds inside the
latter a comfortable nest, the upholstering of which
is in no way deficient in finish. The reason for this
hereditary taste for " overbuilding its position " may
perhaps be explained by a wish to improve the site
rather than the nest. Some other birds try to make
up for deficiencies in the position of the nest some-
what in the same way. The nuthatch, if the hole
leading to the place where it means to nest in a wall
or hollow tree is too large, will plaster the opening
up with a special cement, which becomes too hard
to be cut with a knife. In one case seen by the
writer the cement patch was as large as the hand,
though the hole left was no larger than a crown piece.
The nuthatch's ideal is a hollow dead branch, into
which it can bore just such a round hole. In this
case it made an artificial covering to part of the cavity,
and so reconstructed what was wanting.

Sometimes a house-martin, another mason bird,

instead of making a simple hole at the top of the

si nest for an entrance, builds a kind of covered way

4 ANIMAL ARTISANS

to it along the side of the wall. This suggests that
in former ages the ideal place for a martin's nest was
not under the eaves, but at the end of a hole, and
that the tunnel attached to the wall is a kind of
reminiscence of this. In the same way, probably the
black wheatear's ideal location is a very narrow crack
in a rock-face. Failing this, the barrier is built up
in front in order to improve the environment, for it
has no necessary result in improving the nest itself.
The pebble foundations belong to a different order of
ideas. Foundations of masonry of one kind or another
are quite common, even among English birds. The
ringed plover, which practically makes no nest, always
lays a foundation of broken shells or little stones,
on which the four eggs are placed. It commonly
scatters a few broken shells round it too, even if the
nest is made upon the grass or on sand. The black-
bird and the magpie, as well as the carrion-crow,
sometimes build foundations of mud, which hardens
into a kind of mortar, for their nests, the blackbird
also working this mud into a cup, which is subsequently
lined. The material is usually taken from the nearest
ditch. The thrush, on the other hand, makes a very
careful " compost " of cow-dung and rotten wood,
smooths this into a perfect bowl, and lays its eggs
directly on this extremely clean, hard, and light
lining. The only drawback to this and to the mud
nests is that the rain soon softens them, though the
thrush's compost lasts the longer. Both birds seem
to understand the art of mixing their building material
into a uniform substance. The swallows and house-

MINOR MASONS 5

martins, on the other hand, build by sticking together
pellets of prepared road-mud. Most of the material
is obtained from the drying puddles on the high-
roads. Clearly, if not mixed with anything else, the
tendency of these pellets would be to crumble
when dry. But the swallow tribe are supplied with
a mucous secretion which enables them to gum the
particles together. The swallows' nests from which
the Chinese bird's-nest soup is made are constructed
of this mucous matter only ; while an Indian swift,
which builds little boat-shaped nests against the trunks
of lofty trees, practically makes them of dried saliva.

The best mason among the birds of the New
World is a potter as well. It is the oven-bird of
the pampas. It is called the casara, or house-builder,
by the Spaniards. The nest is made of mud and bits
of straw, practically the same as the material used for
most buildings in Mexico. The walls are very thick,
and there is a partition wall inside, reaching so high as
to form an antechamber. Except the beaver (which is
such an accomplished designer that he must be con-
sidered an engineer rather than a mere mason) and
certain rats which build walls of stones and of thorns
to keep out snakes, there are few masons among mam-
mals. But the methods of the swallows and martins
are closely imitated by the greater number of minor
masons, from perfect insects such as the mason wasps
and bees down to the sea-worms that build themselves
tubes of feand. The general principle is to make pellets,
and then to harden and join them by some secretion,
though sometimes this home-made mortar is only

6 ANIMAL ARTISANS

used to stick existing material ^together. Some of the
most charming little workers to watch are the mason
bees and mason wasps. Much has been written about
them. But they are by no means very common insects,
and not conspicuous. Consequently, their work is not
so often seen as might be expected. They are solitary
little creatures, and have none of the fussy aggressive-
ness of the social bees and wasps, often seeming rather
to enjoy the company of an onlooker, and sometimes
being quite willing to be fed. Some of the mason
wasps combine the parts of mason and miner. One
makes burrows in hard sandbanks, but like the old
Suffolk squires who dug a moat round their future
house, and formed the bricks to build it with out of
the earth they removed, this wasp moulds the sand
which it digs out into bricks, stuck together with
gum, and piles these in a kind of tower round the
shaft, like the towers which cap old mine-shafts in
the North and Midlands. Then, when the shaft is
finished, it takes down the tower, and uses the bricks
to line the bottom of the hole with, so that no enemy
may break into the safe in which its eggs are laid.
Another mason wasp chooses bricks to burrow in, re-
moving the particles in the form of brick-dust, which
it excavates with its steel-like jaws. Not satisfied with
a brick chamber, it flies away, fetches puddled clay,
lines the chamber, lays the eggs, and then stops up
the entrance with the same mortar. This, be it noticed,
is not " pellet " masonry. A mason bee builds its nest
of mud and minute pebbles. Sometimes what looks
like a large mud-splash thrown by a child at a wall, or

MINOR MASONS 7

squirted up by the wheels of a passing cart, may be
seen. The one suspicious fact about it is that it is the
only mud- splash there. If opened with a knife, neat
cells made of pellets and shaped like jars will be found
holding the eggs or larvae of the bee. Sometimes one
or two neat little jars of masonry are found merely
stuck on to a wall.

Mason birds have a great affection for an old nesting-
place. It seems as if the same feeling were shared by
mason insects. Some years ago a mason wasp made a
cell inside the keyhole of a bureau in a bedroom ; when
the bedroom door was shut, it used to come in through
the keyhole in the door. Next year this bureau keyhole
was again tenanted by a mason wasp ! One small British
fresh-water fish builds stone breakwaters to protect its
eggs from being washed away by the current, much in
the same way that the pedrero bird makes a sangar.
This is the lamprey, a very curious creature, formerly
very common in the Thames, whence they migrated
to the brackish waters of the estuary at certain seasons.
Charles St. John watched a pair of these little fish for
some time at work in a running ditch, painfully col-
lecting stones and pushing them up into little heaps.
The stones were apparently pushed ; but it is more
probable that they were carried in the sucker-like
mouth of the lamprey.

CHAPTER II

CARPENTER BIRDS

WOODPECKERS are so bright in plumage, so alike
in their habits, and so thoroughly masters of their
own peculiar way of making a living, in which they
do not interfere with man, bird, or beast, that
wherever they are numerous they attract, and deserve,
a greater share of interest than falls to many other
classes of bird.

The Romans apparently looked on the woodpecker
as the first inventor of spirit-rapping, and identified
it with a remarkably old-fashioned god who had the
gift of rustic prophecy. When they wanted to pay
the god a compliment they set up a pillar with a
woodpecker on the top. Later they set up his
statue with the bird carved sitting on his head. The
Spaniards, both in the Old and New World, called
the woodpecker the carpintero, to which his feats in
drilling holes in wood fully entitle him, even more
than does the sound of his hammer tapping on the
trees.

Yet M. de Buffon in one of his flights of fancy
chose to identify the position of the carpinteros in the
community of the air with that of the French peasants
on the great estates. He described them as con-

CARPENTER BIRDS 9

demned to spend their lives crawling on the trunks of
trees, toiling for the meanest fare, unable to join in
the gaieties of other creatures, and without even a
change of diet, or a palate sensitive enough to
appreciate the delicacies of life. All this commisera-
tion was quite unnecessary. The woodpeckers have
what is generally known as " a good time." Nor is
it the case that they only live on the grubs which they
bore out of rotten wood or extract from the crevices
of the bark.

Looking at the fine contrasts of black, white,
crimson, or green on their plumage, it might be
guessed that our woodpeckers have some affinities
with birds of less northern range. The fact is that
not only are there a great number of species in
Northern and Tropical America, but that they are
also numerous in North Africa, India, and as far south
as the Celebes, where the " Wallace line " cuts them
off from the Australian region. In both Central and
Southern America, and in most tropical countries
except Australia, they have for first cousins those
curious, ungainly birds, with oversized heads and
beaks, called barbets. These are mainly fruit-eaters,
though some feed on insects, which they take on the
wing, as some of the insect-feeding kingfishers also
do. The barbets bore a hole in a tree to lay their
eggs in, and these are white like the woodpeckers'.
So far are the latter, even those of England, from
being confined entirely to a life of hard labour and
incessant tree-climbing, that they all show a liking for
fruit-eating, with which they are not always credited.

io ANIMAL ARTISANS

They also feed freely upon insects on the ground,
especially upon ants and their eggs, for which they
tear the ant-hills to pieces with their beaks, using these
as spades or pickaxes quite as readily as they adapt
them on the trunks of trees to the work of the auger
and awl.

When seen running up the side of a tree, the great
spotted woodpecker is perhaps the most striking of all
our wood-haunting birds. The black-and-white of
its plumage is set off by the brilliant crimson crest.
Though credited with being a fairly common bird, it
is less often seen than any of the larger species haunt-
ing our woods. There seems to be no reason why it
should not be as common as the green woodpecker,
which has very much increased since it gained the
general protection now granted to it. But in the
course of a life spent largely in observing birds the
present writer has only seen the great spotted wood-
pecker on five occasions. On two of these the
nest was found, and one was in Richmond Park.
The most carefully excavated nest, or rather hole,
was made in a rotten willow-tree, some twelve feet
from the ground. Instead of carrying away the
chips, the bird had left them all to lie below the
tree, where their fresh appearance at once attracted
attention. Precisely the same negligence marked the
beginning of a nesting-hole close by. The fond-
ness of these birds for fruit leads them to raid the
orchards of small, black, and very sweet cherries,
called in Devonshire " mazzards." In the same
county, on the sea-coast, some distance from any

CARPENTER BIRDS n

woods, a family of lesser spotted woodpeckers invaded
a garden, and could scarcely be driven away from the
red currants and raspberries.

While in this country the greater spotted wood-
pecker is rarer than he is believed to be, the pretty
little lesser spotted species is extremely common. It
is so small, and frequents such high trees, that it is
not easily seen. But in spring its note, which is
made probably by striking the wood, and sounds like
a stick drawn sharply along a wooden paling, may
often be heard in cities. The bird is quite common
in Oxford, and was a regular inhabitant of Kensington
Gardens. It is still abundant in Richmond Park, and
may be heard in Kew Gardens. The common green
woodpecker has been among the birds which have
benefited most by the protection of the law, and
the sentiment of which the amnesty so proclaimed
was only an expression. Formerly it was steadily
killed down, partly for the sake of its skin, which
when stuffed was a welcome addition to the glass
cases containing a jay, a sparrow-hawk, and a bullfinch
which decorate cottage parlours, and partly from the
persistent tradition that it was an enemy to trees.
The belief that the birds bored large holes in sound
oaks and elms, and so " bled " them, was widely
spread. Consequently the woodman always asked
his friend the keeper to shoot the woodpecker. As a
matter of fact, in England the woodpecker always
chooses a partially decayed tree as a nesting-place ;
sound wood is too hard for it to work in. But it is
reported that in America the earliest erected telegraph

12 ANIMAL ARTISANS

poles were often damaged by woodpeckers which it
was supposed mistook the humming of the wires for
the voices of insects concealed in the poles. The
green woodpecker, like those other tree-climbers,
the nuthatch, the wryneck, and the creeper, is gener-
ally so absorbed in the business of holding on and
hammering or prospecting that he is easily watched
from a short distance. He does not show the gaiety
and abandon of the nuthatch, nor is he so intensely
energetic as the latter. A nuthatch smashing a nut
seems as if he worked like the hammer of a self-
cocking gun. But the woodpecker travels fast up the
trunk, and scales off bits of bark with a sideways
blow wherever he sees a likely lair for grubs. Having
finished one tree, he flies off, and alights on another
about half-way up the trunk. He can move down-
wards, but does this by dropping backwards, instead
of turning round and running head downwards like
a nuthatch. When at work on the ground, the
woodpecker's method of feeding can be seen. On the
summit of Sinodun Hill, above Dorchester, is a clump
of trees much affected by woodpeckers; while the
steep turf banks of the ancient Celtic ramparts of the
prehistoric fortress which surround it, as well as the
sides of the ditch, are full of ant-hills. As the scene
lies far away from men and their work, the wood-
peckers have the place all to themselves. Some years
ago, on a sunny day in August, a whole brood, all
fully fledged, with the old birds, were enjoying them-
selves in digging up the ant-hills. The writer first
mistook them for a brood of partridges, both from

CARPENTER BIRDS 13

their size and their position on the ground. They
were easily stalked, and showed very little fear. Two
or three birds would attack one ant-heap, digging
away with their beaks, though their short claws were
useless. They then retired a few inches, and leaning
back with their heads held at some distance from the
ground, shot out their long tongues like fishing-lines,
and " whipped " the ants up at lightning speed. The
beak was in no case used to pick up a single ant, but
only as a mattock ; the tongue did the rest.

Every one who has done any bird-nesting knows of
certain groves where there are "woodpecker trees."
Sometimes these trees are inhabited by both the small
and large species, as the size of the holes shows.
Their favourite prospecting ground is a tree which
has received an injury that exposes a long length of
wood without bark upon it, generally a Scotch fir.
This exposed part is sometimes hollow, and always
verging towards decay, which begins at the top. The
woodpeckers find a place where the wood is in about
the right condition, and bore a hole into it. If the
interior is not yet hollow, they make a chamber and
lay their eggs. They never plaster up the orifice, as
a nuthatch sometimes does, but leave a clean round
hole. Next year the woodpecker wants a clean nest,
so it begins a foot or so lower down. If the wood is
harder than it feels inclined to work upon, it goes to
another tree. But in a year or two it comes back
and tries the old one. In some of the woodpecker
trees in the tall firs of Holly Water Clump in
Woolmer Forest there are, or were, stems pierced

i4 ANIMAL ARTISANS

like a flute, with a series of holes begun or completed ;
for the bird will often dig in a few inches, and then
abandon the work.

The wrynecks belong to a class of carpenter birds
which have no spines in their tails, and instead of the
strong and bright coloration of the woodpeckers and
barbets, have feathers which imitate the colour of
the bark more closely than do those of any other
British bird, except perhaps the mimicry of dead
sticks and leaves in the plumage of the nightjar.
The resemblance is as close as that between the bark-
haunting moths and their favourite resting-place, so
much so that wrynecks are practically invisible except
while on the ground, when, like the woodpeckers,
they feed on ants, and in the same way. Their
choice of a nest is often in a pollard willow, dead, or
partly dead, and of which portions are in a condition
like that of touchwood. Into this they burrow,
though their bills are far weaker than those of the
woodpecker proper, and can only deal with soft
material.

In California there is a woodpecker nearly two feet
long ; but the most remarkable species of the United
States is the ivory-billed woodpecker, found in con-
siderable numbers in the forests of the Lower Missis-
sippi. Piles of bark, some of the pieces eight inches
square, may be found under the decayed trees on
which it is, or has been, busy at work. "We used
to see enormous pine-trees," says Wilson, " with
cartloads of bark lying around their roots, and chips
of the trunk itself in such quantities as to suggest

CARPENTER BIRDS 15

the idea that half-a-dozen axe-men had been at work
the whole morning." The great black woodpecker
of the Scandinavian and North European forests,
which has occasionally strayed to England, bores holes
in sound wood for its nest, as well as in decayed
trees, but is said to choose the softer kinds for the
work.

N

CHAPTER III
THE FAUNA OF THE RAILROAD

THE railway fauna, other than the horses used to
shunt the trucks, is an amusing growth of recent
years. Numbers of animals which at first resented
or feared the trains have now become railway volun-
teers or hangers-on in some form or another. Most
of them, like the visitors to Mr. Dooley's bar, come
there for refreshment and change. But some have
taken to the iron road as a regular means of getting
a living, or of adding to their resources. There is
hardly a country in the world in which some wild
creatures are not regular waiters on the trains, or
haunters of the line itself or of the stations. The
earliest impressions excited by the railway on animal
minds are not always favourable. The buffalo used
occasionally to charge the cars of the trans-continental
lines in America, and a male wild Indian elephant
fought with, and was vanquished by, a contractor's
engine. When the first of all Indian lines was opened
from Burwan to Calcutta, a holy Brahmini bull con-
ceived that the engine was in some sense an outrage
and gave it battle, with disastrous results. Some fear
was felt as to the effect which this untoward incident
might have on the people, whose sacred animal had

THE FAUNA OF THE RAILROAD 17

been killed by the new invention. Fortunately, the
popular interpretation of the omen was in favour of
the engine. They made offerings to it, and decorated
it with flowers, as being the stronger divinity.

But after these early misunderstandings the animals
make the best of the railway, and in time find it one
of their best friends. Sometimes they actually take
toll of the railway. An amusing case of this sort was
recorded by Mr. Walter Scott, at one time manager of
the Mauritius Government Railways. " Trains of sugar-
canes, loaded in open-sided trucks, were worked over
a section of the line from the plantations to the usine
centrak some miles distant, and the three first miles of
the single-line railway passed through a forest with
trees quite close to the rails, up a very steep gradient,
and round sharp curves. When the first down passenger
train from Port Louis had passed the crossing station,
the loaded cane train was despatched towards the
summit. In the meantime, some monkeys in the
forest had timed the passage of the descending pas-
senger train, and had fixed sentinels who signalled
to their expectant comrades on trees the approach of
the cane train. As the train went crawling up the
incline a troop of monkeys sprang upon each waggon,
ten forming the train, and threw off quite a goodly
number of canes, which were gathered up as the train
slowly passed onwards. These depredations became
so serious that the planter appointed a watchman to
patrol this ' length ' ; but the malgaches have a super-
stitious dread of killing a monkey, which they term
di monde meme in Creole. The looting of these trains

B

1 8 ANIMAL ARTISANS

by these marauders was, however, ultimately stopped
by other means."

When Dr. Vaughan Cornish was on the Canadian
prairies studying the forms of snow and snow-waves,
which formed the subject of a paper read recently
before the Geographical Society, he observed that the
railroad had entirely altered the habits of the wolves
in winter. Formerly, in the days of the old waggon
teams and " prairie schooners," the wolves used to
follow the camps across to the great West, just as
they followed the buffalo herds, stealing all the stock
they could, and picking up the leavings of the camp
fires, and even eating the saddles and harness of the
mules. Now they come down to the Canadian Pacific
or the Grand Trunk line, and watch for the trains.
A trans-continental train is like a ship. Eating and
drinking must go on at regular hours. The passengers
consume three solid meals a day ; the black cooks and
waiters have theirs also ; and plenty of spare food,
bones, bread, and trimmings, is thrown overboard. In
the grey cold dawn the hungry coyotes, their tails
tucked between their shaking legs, may be seen stand-
ing in the snow, with their short ears pricked up like
an anxious terrier's, waiting to see what the morning's
" clear-up " of the cars will cause to be thrown out of
the windows for deserving prairie dwellers. Sometimes
a great grey wolf, the very personification of cold and
famine, is viewed sitting by a sage bush, in the drift
of snow powder lifted before the icy morning wind,
his long sharp nose uplifted in line with his spine, the
cutting blast ruffling up the fur on his back, waiting

w
g

£ a

*2 —

B H

B O

THE FAUNA OF THE RAILROAD 19

for the sun to rise and warm him, and for the train to
pass and leave him a beef-bone to take the edge of
hunger off. Something of the same kind happens
along the Siberian Railway, where the steppe jackals
and foxes are always more numerous round the stations
and along the sleeping sidings than elsewhere, and in
India the jackals regularly visit the line on the way
home from their nightly prowl.

On our southern railroads leading to Folkestone and
Calais a very considerable amount of food is also con-
sumed, with its due percentage of waste. Very few
people fail to provide themselves with solid refresh-
ment when about to cross the Channel, which provisions
they consume, or throw away, from a pious feeling that
they had better make the best of the good things of
this world before venturing on the horrors of the
" middle passage." The section of the line at which
the psychological moment usually suggests itself that
it would be well to eat luncheon or tea happens to be
near some covers where pheasants are preserved. The
birds have found this out, and regularly hunt that
part of the line for sandwiches, biscuits, and bits of
bread-and-butter, so much so that they are occasion-
ally killed by the engine. In the same way, country
people coming up to London nearly always bring
large provisions of food to consume on the journey.
What is not eaten is left in the carriages, and swept
out at the termini. Thus it happens that nearly
every great London station provides unlimited free
meals for railway rats. If any one has the misfortune
to have to await the arrival of a midnight or early

20 ANIMAL ARTISANS

morning train in town he will hear these rats scamper-
ing about over the metals -and cheerfully squeaking.
At Victoria and some other London termini a staff
of station cats maintains itself mainly by catching the
rats which live under the platforms and feed on the
fragments left in the cars by bond-fide travellers. But
these very irrepressible rodents seem to flourish in
considerable numbers in spite of them. Not long
since, when we were returning to town from a week-
end shoot accompanied by a good deal of ground
game and a retrieving setter, the dog was much
admired by a Cockney porter, who " supposed it had
caught all them hares and rabbits." We explained
that this would have been scarcely correct, but that
the dog had been a great assistance in killing and
collecting the game according to more orthodox
methods. " Well," said our friend, " I only wish I'd
got one like him to help me kill the rats in that tunnel.
I can tell you, sir, there's such a lot of them, and
such big ones, that I am downright afraid to go there
at night ! " On the Great Western line in the Vale
of the White Horse, and probably in many other
places, foxes, carrion-crows, and rooks habitually come
to the line for food. The foxes regularly hunt down
the embankment, just under the telegraph wires,
looking for the bodies of birds which have been killed
against the wires the previous day or during the night.
It is not hard work for a fox to hunt along three or
four miles, and he is very unlucky if in that distance
he does not discover two or three dead birds, larks,
turtle-doves, partridges, water-hens, and fieldfares being

THE FAUNA OF THE RAILROAD 21

those most often found at different seasons. Half-
wild swans which frequent the reclaimed Brading
Haven in the Isle of Wight are frequently killed or
injured by flying against the telegraph wires along the
railway line which crosses the marsh. The speed and
force with which these birds fly is shown by the very
severe injuries so received ; some are killed outright,
and others have cut a wing off as if it had been done
with a knife. So many birds were lost in this way
that the wires have now been hung at intervals with
small pieces of metal to make them more easily visible,
and this appears to be successful. But swans are
singularly stupid birds, and they occasionally get
killed by the trains on the same piece of railway line.
It is only a single line, but not long since a couple
of cock swans chose to fight a duel between the
metals, and declined to move when a train came in
sight. The engineer blew his whistle and did all he
could to frighten them, but as it is against the rules
for a passenger train to stop under such circumstances,
he was obliged to go on over the swans, and one of
them was killed. The other, nothing daunted, re-
mained on the line to triumph over his fallen rival,
and when the train returned half-an-hour later he
too was run over and slain. And in death these
valiant warriors were honoured and united, and, like
the cat in the nursery rhyme, "went to London to see
the Queen" — for their beautiful skins were made
into a swan's-down wrap which was worn at the first
Court of the season. The crows along the Great
Western Railway come to catch the young frogs and

22 ANIMAL ARTISANS

toads for which the line is a regular trap. They are
hatched out in thousands in some pond or ditch, and
when about an inch long try to migrate to the canal
or ponds on the other side of the line. There they
are stopped by the metals. If they can crawl over
the first line, they generally fail to manage the next,
and are there gobbled up by the carrion-crows by
dozens. The rooks are far more civilised, and con-
sequently bolder, than the crows. At the little country
stations they fly down after each train has passed and
hunt not only the line but the platform. The writer
saw a pair quietly searching for fragments of bread
and biscuit among the milk-cans on the platform of
a small station not two minutes after a train had left.
Railway cuttings are favourite haunts for very many
British birds and many of our smaller animals, just
as the slopes of embankments and cuttings are favourite
ground for certain flowers. The railway cutting is
as attractive a home as an old quarry when once the
creatures have learnt not to mind the trains, offering
much the same warm slope to the sun, shelter from
winds, and for the burrowing or hole-using creatures
a convenient " face " to work at. Sand-martins more
particularly haunt the cuttings, both to nest in and to
feed on the flies and gnats which gather there. Pipits,
larks, robins, whinchats, and other ground-building
birds nest on the embankments, and use the telegraph
wires as outlooks and resting-places.

Rabbits, too, are especially fond of burrowing in
the cuttings, and pheasants like to sun themselves anc
hunt for ants' nests there. We have seen a cov(

THE FAUNA OF THE RAILROAD 23

of partridges dusting between the sleepers, and they
appeared far less alarmed by an approaching train
than they would have been if a man or a dog had
come along the line. Indeed, they did not get up
till the engine was upon them, when it seemed
impossible that all could escape unhurt. But a search
on the line after the train had passed showed only one
or two feathers dropped by the birds when dusting.

Some birds have a perverted liking for actually
nesting in old railway-trucks, or occasionally in those
in use. Water-wagtails are the commonest experi-
menters in this department of animal railway life.
They have been known to follow the truck when
moved to another station ; but whether they would
ever try to sit on the eggs unless the truck were
returned to the place from which it was moved is
doubtful. Barnes railway bridge on the Thames is
a very favourite nesting site with house-martins,
which build in great numbers among the iron supports
beneath it. Why the eggs are not " addled " by the
constant vibration of the trains passing only a few
feet above them is an unsolved mystery ; but as the
birds have built there for many years, it is evident
that they consider the position a good one. On the
Uganda Railway it might be expected that the great
herds of wild game of all kinds found along some
parts of the line would have moved off at once to
a distance from the track. When hunted they do
so. But it was observed that the trains themselves
caused them very little concern. Some species used
the track as a path. Others fed without moving

*4 ANIMAL ARTISANS

within sight of the engines as they passed by. In
one case a photograph was taken of a herd or string
of wildebeest, or brindled gnus, moving parallel with
the line on open veldt. This herd, moving in single
file ahead with irregular intervals between the animals,
did not change its direction as the cars ran parallel
with it, and was computed to have been nearly four
miles in length.

CHAPTER IV

ON THE MARCH

SIR JOHN OGLANDER, writing of the manners and
customs of the Isle of Wight in the days of Charles I.,
quaintly remarks that persons out of " owre island "
who undertook a journey to London always made their
wills first, " as reckoning noe trooble like to travel."
Many people still take the same view as was then held
by the islanders. But the trouble of a separate jour-
ney is nothing as compared with the march of organised
bodies who have to provide their own commissariat
and transport. That is where Western nations usu-
ally break down, though in the East the business is
better understood. Xerxes could never have marched
and fed his million men through Thrace to Greece if
half of them had not belonged to the " caravanning "
races. Animals on the march often manage these
things better than men do. Generally speaking, they
go worst if driven, better if ridden, when man becomes
a part of the animal, and best when left to themselves.
Compare, for instance, sheep driven along a road with
the same animals changing pastures voluntarily on
the hill, or horses in a drove with others ridden in a
march of cavalry, or a troop of colts galloping in
the breeder's paddock. The marches of the larger

26 ANIMAL ARTISANS

quadrupeds have many features in common. Long
journeys in great numbers are, or were, undertaken by
the spring-buck, the American bison, the musk-ox,
and in smaller bodies by wild horses, and the antelopes
of the steppes. All these, with the exception of the
musk-ox in some of the mountains of Alaska, make
their journeys over plains, the spring-bucks over the
veldt, the bison on the prairie, the musk-oxen on the
"barren lands," the horses on the pampas, the ante-
lopes on an absolutely flat steppe. They are therefore
free to choose their own order, and like the migrating
hosts of Tartars, the majority of them usually move
on a wide front. In this order they avoid the constant
strain on the rear ranks of closing up in a hurry, which
is one of the standing difficulties of calvary marching
along roads. The German cavalry under Von Radowitz
tried the experiment of marching for a whole day
in extended line. Owing to the difficulty caused by
obstacles, the experiment was abandoned, though the
French cavalry in their manoeuvres still practise this,
to them, most difficult form of advance. For animals
it has another advantage. When halting to feed they
can browse straight forward in line, on grass untrodden
by animals in front.

The march of the spring-bucks shows far the largest
bodies of large mammals to be seen in movement at
the present date. This, however, is not an orderly
progress. The herds are under no control, and move
on in a dense body, the centre packed close and the
flanks in loose order. Neither is facility for feeding
secured. The Dutch hunters say that the animals in

ON THE MARCH 27

the rear of the herd are thin, those in front having
eaten all the grass, and that at the change of the
monsoon, when the spring-buck columns turn north
again, these become the leaders, and take their turn to
fatten. Two species of bird habitually march great
distances, and in numerous bodies, but there is a
difference in the method and intelligence shown in
their travels. The guinea-fowls travel in troops often
numbering over a hundred ; but, like true Africans,
they always walk in single file, making their way
through the scrub or forest down to the drinking-
place in the same primitive order as that in which the
African caravan crosses the continent. The single-file
order has only one advantage. It saves the trouble of
widening paths — wherefore the whole Central African
region is connected by paths nowhere more than
eighteen inches wide. But the results are worse for
the African than for the birds, for the slightest
obstacle causes a halt and a break in the line, and the
rear must constantly be hurried up after stoppages.
To the guinea-fowls, almost the most active of ground
birds, this habit of closing up has become a kind of
conscience, as any one may see who watches the eager,
craning anxiety of a tame brood to keep in touch even
when running across open ground. The guinea-fowls'
march is thoroughly African — non-progressive and
uninstructive. Contrast with this the orderly pro-
gress of the wisest bird of Europe, the goose, when
travelling in companies. There are times when
wild geese, some of the strongest fliers among the
large birds, travel great distances on foot, some-

28 ANIMAL ARTISANS

times to accompany their young, sometimes because
they are moulting. Mr. Seebohm witnessed the pass-
ing of a goose-column when exploring the tundra.
They came on in column, the old birds leading,
and after crossing the Arctic moorland, descended
to the river, and took the water in the same order.
Large, heavy birds like geese could not possibly
march for long distances unless their method and
order of march were carefully thought out. That
the average intelligence of these birds is very high is
generally acknowledged; but it is nowhere so well
shown as when they are travelling on foot. In the
first place, there is no hurry — every one goes his own
pace, but that pace is deliberate. They walk in
column, but the ranks are often ten geese wide. No
goose touches or jostles his neighbour, and all the
heads are carried high, so as to get the maximum of
air. At regular intervals on the march the column
halt and feed, spreading out in lines for this purpose,
but falling in at a proper signal from the leaders.
The writer has often watched these proceedings when
a large flock of geese has been crossing Port Meadow,
the wide green flat above Oxford. But their marching
powers have been well known in "the trade" for
centuries, and are still made use of abroad. At
Antwerp a flock of three thousand geese has been
seen to walk along the quay, gently urged by some
Flemish gooseherds. They were halted opposite to
an English steamer bound for Harwich, and then
crossed three abreast on a plank with low canvas sides
on to the steamer. They then walked along the

ON THE MARCH 29

deck, descended a steep sloping plank, and marched
along the lower deck into an enclosure, where they
remained during the crossing. At Harwich they
were driven up the plank to the upper deck, off the
ship and into pens, where it is to be feared most of
them were killed for market. This is only a survival
of the old system by which the Norfolk geese were
driven up to London in thousands without losing
condition. It paid better before the days of railways
to let the geese transport themselves. The largest
drove mentioned was one of nine thousand which
went from Suffolk, through Chelmsford, and on >to
London. As " a cart," not carts, was provided to
pick up the lame ones, the number who fell out must
have been surprisingly small. It may be doubted
whether nine thousand creatures of any other species
could have made the journey of a hundred miles
with so little trouble. They took their journey
easily, marching ten miles a day. The ordinary day's
march of the German army is thirteen miles — only
three miles better than the geese. But these are the
champion pedestrians of all birds. When Lord
Oxford bet the Marquess of Queensberry that a drove
of Suffolk geese would beat an equal number of
turkeys in a walk to London, the geese won by forty-
eight hours.

Possibly the marching powers of geese are a legacy
from ancestors which could not fly at all, and were
entirely dependent on their legs as a means of pro-
gression over land or water. For, judging by the very
late development of the wings in goslings as well as

30 ANIMAL ARTISANS

in ducklings and cygnets, their forbears must have
been almost as wingless as the apteryx is to-day. It
is common knowledge that when fattening ducklings
for market, the birds should be killed while still in
the down, and when the exhausting process of feather-
making has scarcely begun. But it is probable that
it is the development of the wing bones quite as
much as of the feathers that for the time affects the
condition of the birds. In the case of some cygnets
which the writer had under close observation for
several months, the wings were quite rudimentary till
the birds were nearly three months old, and about
half-grown. When they did begin to develop, the
wing bones grew at an almost incredible rate ; in one
case each wing grew over five inches in length in
seven days. The wing feathers grew little until the
bones were almost fully grown ; then they too grew
very rapidly, and by the time this bird was five
months old they measured eight feet from the tip of
one wing to the tip of the other. Beautiful as is the
modern swan in either air or water, its slow rolling
gait on land is certainly not that of a champion
pedestrian like its cousin the goose ; yet if the life-
history of the individual is an epitome of the history
of the race, its ancestors must once have been num-
bered among the birds which could march.

Mr. John Guille Millais, in his book on the African
veldt, tells how he once overtook an army of ants
on the march.

" It was about as like a regiment on the march as
anything could possibly be," he writes. " As nearly

ON THE MARCH 31

as I could estimate the number, there were about
two or three thousand big ants, and all were formed
into 'fours,' though in military phrase the 'fours'
did not keep their * dressing.' The outside members
of each ' four ' never moved from their position, but
the insiders constantly kept changing places across
the column. They moved along like a huge black
snake, and were led by a single ant, who examined
the ground like a scout, while the column implicitly
followed his movements, and apparently his direc-
tions." Four times Mr. Millais picked up and threw
away the leader, and thrice another came forward to
take its place, when the army, which had halted,
resumed its march.

Commissariat, the curse of armies on the march,
presents few difficulties even to vast moving bodies
of animals when wild. Almost the only creatures
which are noticed to suffer from hunger in these
journeys are the migrating lemmings and, as men-
tioned above, the rear columns of the spring-bucks.
This is because the travelling animals are all vege-
table feeders, and move as a rule in the direction of
an increased food-supply — the musk-oxen travelling
south in winter, and north when the Arctic summer
uncovers the tundra, and the animals of the veldt
or prairie advancing or retiring over their feeding-
grounds when plenty follows rain or scarcity follows
snow. Where this natural commissariat is not avail-
able, Nature has to overcome the difficulty by very
specialised means. Many birds feed up for days
before the effort of the over-sea migration flight, and

32 ANIMAL ARTISANS

carry their food concentrated, in the form of fat.
The submarine " march" of fish is probably the only
movement of great bodies of animals which is abso-
lutely without trouble to the movers. With their
bodies poised in water, with no effort except that of
leisurely, almost effortless, propulsion, with the in-
visible and everlasting food-supply of entomostraca
suffusing the medium in which they move, with no
waste of force in wave-making, and almost no surface-
friction of their smooth bodies on the surrounding
water, their ''march" is a triumphal procession, so
far as triumph can be claimed by an almost complete
victory over all the difficulties of travel.

CHAPTER V
ROAD-MAKING ANIMALS

TRESPASS by animals, and disputes as to rights of way,
are among the commonest subjects of discussion in
papers devoted to country life and amenities, for few
animals recognise the authority of the Ordnance Sur-
vey, or acknowledge any boundary which is not marked
by a strong fence. But in spite of the aspersions of
the " Bad Child's Book of Beasts," the Welsh mountain
sheep appear to be especially gifted members of the
ovine race, and as such have actually obtained legal
recognition of their capacity to distinguish boundaries
and assert rights of way. On certain farms the flocks
know the boundaries of their mountain pastures, and
presumably transmit this knowledge to their lambs.
They also maintain their rights against intruders, and
if they meet trespassing sheep on the paths which
generations of flocks have worn on the mountain
side, they do battle with the interlopers, and if pos-
sible knock them down the hill. This sense of
locality augments the value of flocks bred on these
hills, and the enhanced value was settled at Dolgelly
Assizes as half-a-crown per sheep.

We should expect this assertion of rights of way by
sheep, though their knowledge of boundaries is more

33

34 ANIMAL ARTISANS

difficult to account for. Sheep have for unknown
ages been the great path-makers on mountains and
downs, and have left their mark on the faces of the
everlasting hills. The sheep-walks are only made in-
tentionally in so far that the flocks, having once settled
which is the shortest, easiest, and best route across
these roadless hills, never seem to abandon what their
reason has decided to be the best. Out on the hills
these animals are almost in their primitive condition
before domestication, and not the least interesting
feature of their conduct in this relapse to the wild life
is, that in spite of the highly artificial conditions in
which they live to-day, they retain the primitive in-
stincts of their race. That this " peremptory and
path-keeping" impulse is part of their early instinct
is clear from an account of the habits of the musk-ox
recently written by the Times correspondent in Canada.
The musk-ox, the ovibos, is as much akin to the sheep
as to the bovid*, and in habits more like what we
imagine the undescended great original of our sheep
was than are the wild sheep of to-day. It naturally
assembles in great flocks, and is migratory, just as all
the domesticated flocks of Spain are, and those of
Thrace and the Caspian steppe. These flocks of musk-
oxen always return from the barren lands in the Far
North by the same road, and cross rivers by the same
fords. Nothing but too persistent slaughter at these
points by the Indians who beset them induces them
to desert their ancient highways. Pictures and anec-
dotes of the migrations of these animals, and of the
bison in former days, represent them as moving on

ROAD-MAKING ANIMALS 35

a broad front across the prairie or tundra. The
examples of most moving multitudes suggest that this
was their formation when moving slowly forward,
feeding as they went, but their roads prove that at
other times they moved on a narrow front or in file,
just as domestic cattle do to-day. A herd of cows
going home to be milked naturally walks in a long,
straggling line, one behind the other, and when going
to drink at a pond they keep more or less to the same
formation. Where the Eamont River flows into the
Eden, the banks at the waters' meeting are flanked
on the Cumberland side by a very large, flat meadow,
hundreds of acres in extent. This is never mown,
but is grazed year after year by herds of young store
cattle. The bank is steep and overhanging for the
greater part, so that large animals can only go down
to drink at one or two spots, and narrow tracks, just
like big hare-paths, run from different parts of the
meadow and converge at these watering places. These
tracks are of exactly the same width throughout,
some eight or nine inches, which gives just room
for one hoof to pass the other, but is too narrow
for a man to use with comfort. They could not be
mistaken for human footpaths, as they are far more
sharply defined ; and there are no secondary side-paths,
as in tracks made by the white races of mankind,
which, unlike cattle, have a strong preference for
walking at least two abreast. On the North American
prairie, though the bison is extinct, the bison roads
still remain as evidence, after the destruction of a
species, of some part of its habits. These "trails"

36 ANIMAL ARTISANS

are paths worn on the prairie, nearly all running due
north and south (the line of the old migration of the
herds), like gigantic rabbit-tracks. They are hard,
the grass on them is green and short, and, if followed,
they generally lead near water, to which a diverging
track runs from the highway.

It is pleasant to reconstruct in fancy the life on
this great animal highway, before the Indian invented
the arrow to destroy and torment the moving tribes
of beasts. Doubtless, in their unresponsive way, the
creatures felt the usual emotions of travellers on a
known and pleasant road, looked forward to their
halts for food or d6tours for water and bathing, and
recognised or longed for pastures and retreats which
they had visited yearly as their manes grew shaggier
and their frames more ponderous and robust.

With the sheep-tracks and the buffalo and musk-ox
trails may be compared the main roads used by very
many graminivorous animals, from those which the
hippopotamus cuts through the gigantic reeds fringing
African rivers to the hare and rabbit highways on our
downs. The main roads of the hares over hills are
almost as permanent as the sheep-tracks, and must
not be confused with their paths to temporary feeding-
places or the shelter of crops. In the same way the
regular step terraces on the sides of chalk downs,
though often made by sheep, are not roads, but
feeding-places. As a sheep walks on a steep slope
it always grazes on the ground on the side above it.
Its neck would not reach that on the lower side.
Consequently sheep work backwards and forwards on

ROAD-MAKING ANIMALS 37

such slopes, like a reaping-machine, taking about a
" neck's length " in width each time. This measure-
ment will be found to correspond pretty accurately
with the steps on sheep-downs.

Field-voles make their roads by sinking cuttings ;
moles make underground highways, which are quite
distinct from the tunnels formed in hunting for
food ; trapdoor-spiders make gates, and other spiders
form suspension-bridges ; but no animal has yet
thought of forming an embankment, on which to run
a road over wet places, or of building elevated roads,
though arboreal creatures are very ingenious in mak-
ing use of the interlacing limbs of trees for travelling
on, and have regular highways from tree to tree.

Even in so simple a matter as road-making there
is room for diversity in the motives of the con-
structors. It will be remembered that among the
items of expenditure debited to the account of the
firm of brigands directed by the Ifyi des Montagnes
was that of mending the road to Thebes. It had so
fallen out of repair that travellers declined to use it,
and " business " in this part of his dominions had
fallen off. Though not rivalling the powers of fore-
sight possessed by Hadgi Stavros, some animals do
put their roads to uses more complex than mere ease
of travel. The most sinister purpose for which a
seeming roadway is constructed is devised by certain
spiders. The species in question frequents sunny
heaths, commons, and furze brakes, and selects by
preference some portion of ground which has been
trenched by a field-vole or mole. Frequently these

38 ANIMAL ARTISANS

animals make a half-burrow or open excavation —
the former by biting the lower stems and roots of
the rough grasses away, and the latter by tunnelling
with their backs level with the surface. These open
trenches, as the vegetation wears away from above,
are occupied by big spiders, which cover the bottom
with curving sheets of web woven close like silk. At
the end, perhaps four or five inches from the beginning
of the trap, they form a continuous, funnel-shaped
arch of web, in which they lie hidden. Grains of
earth and seeds of grasses fall on to the open trap,
which looks like a nice even little road, leading to a
hole. Insects of many kinds see this smooth, groove-
like path, and attempting to run along it, are en-
tangled, and then pounced upon by the spider. Even
a mouse is embarrassed if it is frightened into one
of these trammel-roads hung with " toils " of web.

Great numbers of industrial insects make paths for
use on expeditions which involve the transport of all
kinds of loads. But it would be difficult to name
a single instance in which they consciously improve
the road to facilitate traffic. The roofed paths of
many African ants are not rationally designed for
this purpose. The roof is mainly intended to keep
off the sun, and to enable the creatures to work in
the darkness or twilight, which seems a necessary
condition for their activities. It has also a secondary
and important use in protecting them from the attacks
of birds. But ants in general are bad engineers in the
road-making department. They do not clear away
obstacles, but climb over or round them, and though

ROAD-MAKING ANIMALS 39

able and willing to combine, do not seem to realise
that co-operative road-clearing would help the com-
munity in general. The late Professor Drummond
noted the same idiosyncrasy among the natives of
Central Africa. Thin, narrow little footpaths cover
the whole central continent, like rabbit-tracks, but
even a moderate-sized stone or a bush is left in situ.
No one clears away the obstacle, and the path goes
round it.

In contrasting the intelligence of other animals
with the activities of insects, those creatures, mainly
rodents, which form winter stores of food, and trans-
port this from some distance to the hoard, naturally
suggest a parallel. As a rule, the objects which they
transport are light and small in size, such as beans,
kernels, nuts, and grain. These need no roads for
transport, and the paths of the ground squirrels,
hamsters, and mice which carry them are mere tracks.
Two rodents do make and improve roads for trans-
port. Rats, when established in buildings, will steal
and drag home objects as large as a dumpling, or a
big turnip, or potatoes. To drag these to their
retreats they will at once, and rapidly, enlarge narrow
points in their passages, or gnaw away obstacles. But
this is only rough road improvement, and extemporised
on special occasions.

Beavers, the only warm-blooded animals which
habitually do heavy transport by land, provide for
all contingencies by cutting " rolling ways," biting
off all stumps and obstacles, and do their log-rolling
along these towards the water. There is very little

40 ANIMAL ARTISANS

doubt that, were it at all necessary to their comfort,
other animals would have hit on the same expedients.
Beavers have three kinds of roads — their ordinary
tracks near the water, their canals, and the log-rolling
roads. This is quite in accordance with the very
high degree of their social development as compared
with other animals. Variety of roads is a mark of
progress among the beasts as among men. Even
in Europe there are many degrees of this exhibition
of civilisation, and oddly enough the Dutch, a semi-
aquatic race, are the representatives of the beavers
among mankind. On the route from the Hague
to Scheveningen, for instance, there lie parallel to
each other a carriage road, a canal, a bicycle track,
a light railway, side-paths regularly constructed, and
in places little tracks or " Katz-passen " made by
trespassers.

CHAPTER VI
LANDSCAPE GARDENERS

THAT changes in successive generations of animals
are largely due to the influence of their environment,
is a generally acknowledged fact; but it is equally
true that animals are often directly responsible for
changes in their own surroundings ; and the alterations
so produced sometimes remain in evidence long after
the species to which they are due has disappeared.

The bison of the North American plains has ceased
to exist, but the pathways of the once innumerable
herds remain. In " The Deserts and Forests of North
America," Mr. Paul Fountain writes : —

" The plains are deeply scored with tracks, even to
this day, worn during countless generations by the
bisons, which seem always to have followed the same
routes in their migrations and wanderings. These
tracks are likely to endure, for the bison, with
wonderful sagacity, chose the easiest and safest paths,
avoiding barren bogs and crevices, so that travellers
invariably follow them. So deeply are these tracks
worn that, even if they were not kept fresh by the
frequent passage of horsemen and waggons, many
years would elapse before they were obliterated ; in-
deed, they may possibly be traceable for ever." But

42 ANIMAL ARTISANS

the most marked and widely spread change in North
American landscape directly due to animal agency,
remaining permanent after the authors of it have
been almost entirely destroyed, is to be seen in the
" beaver meadows." These are found scattered over
the whole of the continent north of New York and
east of the Rocky Mountains, and are referred to in
ordinary business terms, as when, for example, such
land is put up for sale. The beaver meadows were
made in two ways. Some were formed above the
gradually silted-up "dams," which the beavers made
wider every year, but could not build up vertically
beyond a certain point. The other beaver meadows
were originally flat forest by the side of the streams
on which the beavers lived. They cut down every
tree on these flats to build their dams or to feed on
the bark, and often cut canals across the ground.
They also cleared away all small timber and bushes
between the stumps, that they might roll the " logs "
to the water. Then deer came and regularly fed on
these clearings, keeping the grass fine, and thus the
beaver meadow was formed.

Another change due to the agency of animals is
seen in the water-pools of the Kalahari Desert. These
in most cases owe their shape in great measure to the
use made of them by the larger animals, once so
numerous in that region. During the rains, the game
scattered over the whole country. But in the dry
season, when the only water available was found in
these pools, the elephants, rhinoceroses, and other
large game, by constantly wallowing in them and

LANDSCAPE GARDENERS 43

using them as baths, made the sides steep and circu-
lar, and thus gave a uniform character to the pools.
They also carried off a quantity of the mud on their
bodies, and so helped to keep the " pans " deep and
prevented them from silting up. Access to the
pools was generally between two large rocks, the
path being worn into a deep roadway by the animals
that came to drink.

Here in England the continuous or permanent
marks left on the landscape by the larger animals are
very noticeable. The peat-beds on the Kennet near
Newbury were very possibly formed by the dams
made by beavers, as the remains of those industrious
predecessors of Sir Benjamin Baker have been found
in them ; and though this country shows nothing
quite so curious as the paths of the dwarf cattle of the
Indian hills, paths which, seen on the slopes from a
distance, seem to cover them with a kind of scale
pattern, nearly all our steep downs and pastures,
other than those on mountains and fells, are worn
into little shelves by the sheep. For unknown
ages these creatures have pastured on the slopes,
and on the steeper ones have worn these paths,
on which they stand while grazing the turf sloping
just above them. They make tracks on the moun-
tains and fells too. But there the land is so broken
by rocks and boggy patches that the effect is far less
striking than on the chalk downs or the marly sides
of Devonshire hills. In all our parks and meadows
the browsing of cattle has produced a curious uni-
formity, by causing what is known as the " cattle

44 ANIMAL ARTISANS

line " in trees. In any park where there are a number
of trees of less than sixty years' growth, especially
limes, elms, and ashes, it will be noticed that the
height of the lower branches above the ground is
uniform. They are as neatly cut away below as if by
a woodman with shears. This is the work of the
cattle, which regularly browse the shoots and twigs as
high as their heads will reach.

It will be noticed that where bushes or boughs
hang over the pavement in London, especially in
a new street, these are all cut back to a uniform
height, which is the level that clears the tall
hat. It is quite possible that in provincial towns,
where tall hats are not in daily wear, the line
descends an inch or two lower.

Where horses, which have a much higher reach
than cattle, are kept in parks, the browsing limit
is much higher, and more irregular than in cattle-
fed parks. A minor effect on park landscape due
to the animals contained in them is seen in the
nature of the fences. Where red deer are kept
the fencing is at least eight feet high; that for
fallow deer is reduced to six feet, or six and a half
feet ; while where cattle only are kept an ordinary
hedge is usually sufficient. Our domestic cattle are
also responsible for the thirty thousand miles of
quickset hedges and railings along the sides of our
railways, on to which they would otherwise stray and
cause accidents.

In wild England the most striking contribution
made directly by the larger animals to scenery is the

LANDSCAPE GARDENERS 45

formation of the exquisite "lawns" of the New
Forest. There the cattle are the landscape gardeners,
who, somewhat to the detriment of timber, but to the
great advantage of the beauty of the forest, have kept
the glades and grass-grown greens from being filled
up with bushes, shrubs, and briars. The bite of the
hungry cattle has century after century cropped the
natural increase of young seedlings level with the
earth, while their tread has made the grass compact
and close. They have also kept it short and sweet
up to the very bases of the columned beeches, whose
grey stems rise from the velvet sward set round with
violets, primroses, and a thousand tiny leaves and
blossoms which never could have flourished but for
the light and air which the forest cattle unconsciously
secure to them. The open glades and lawns seen at
their best in the New Forest are common to all forest
land where cattle have long been allowed to pasture.
In the clay forests, such as Epping, these lawns are
scarce, because the indigenous shrub and undergrowth
is thorn, almost the only bush which cattle find too
prickly to chew. Pasturing grass-lands with certain
kinds of stock induces a different growth of minor
vegetation. In the Vale of the White Horse, for
example, there are large tracts of meadow-land in
which horses should never be turned out. Where
they are nettles always grow. The experiment of
keeping horses entirely away from these meadows has
been tried for many years on a certain large estate,
with the result that there is now scarcely a nettle-bed
in some five hundred acres of this grass-land. The

46 ANIMAL ARTISANS

ordinary management of sheep on down-land prescribes
that they shall be fed on the thin chalk-turf, and
folded at night on the arable land. The experiment
was tried of folding them on the down, in the hope
that this would cause richer pasture to appear there.
Instead, a rank growth of the most undesirable, sharp-
edged, tussocky " rubbish " grasses sprang up, and on
one or two spots known to the writer has remained,
spoiling that portion of the downs for twenty years.

Among the unpaid gardeners who keep certain parts
of our landscape trim must be reckoned the humble
rabbit. "Rabbit turf" on the juniper-studded slopes
of the Surrey hills, or the verges of the Devonshire
cliffs, is almost the finest sward existing. The con-
stant nibbling of the rabbits, which work steadily
outwards from their burrows, cropping the grass again
and again closer than does a mowing-machine, dwarfs
not only the grass, but all other plants and herbs.
They also nibble the furze-bushes and bunches of
heather into cushions and blunt cones, and give to the
ground which they frequent the appearance of being
covered with artificially rounded and trimmed shrubs
and bushes, an effect which the large number of ant-
hills, so characteristic of the sides of downs, aids in
producing. On some parts of the coast, especially in
the sandhills which protect low lands from the sea,
rabbits occasionally threaten to produce very much
more serious changes in the landscape than this. They
burrow into the sandhills and weaken them until they
are no longer the firm barrier that they were. Over
the whole of the coast of Holland the Board which

LANDSCAPE GARDENERS 47

has control of the dykes and dams has plenary powers
to enter upon any estate in the " dunes " fringing the
sea, and then and there to kill, slay, and exterminate
the rabbits without asking permission, if, in the judg-
ment of its officers, they are weakening the sandhills.

As the cattle on the New Forest and the rabbits on
the downs have dwarfed and sweetened the herbage,
so the vast herds of wild game on the African veldt
would in past ages have turned that fertile region into
a grassy lawn were it not for the unfortunate cessa-
tion of almost all rain in the three summer months.
During this time the surface becomes so arid that
the tread of beasts, instead of compacting it, helps to
disintegrate it and to destroy surface grass, and thus
the veldt never becomes " turf."

Happily this is not the case with the clay steppe of
the pampas, which Darwin saw and described seventy
years ago. He saw the curious phenomenon of a land
capable of supporting animal life in quantities almost
without parallel elsewhere, a land where the natural
grasses were hindered in their growth neither by shrub
nor tree, and in parts only broken by brilliant flowers,
geraniums, scarlet verbena, wood-sorrel, and cenotherae,
stretching like an Atlantic Ocean of green from the
sea to the foot-hills of the Cordilleras on the opposite
side of the continent. Nature seemed to have left
out every product which could take up room which
would otherwise be occupied by grasses. There were
no useless rocks, and almost no stones ; no trees, to
kill herbage by their shade ; few marshes or arid belts
of sand or salt ; no mountains. The steppe offered

48 ANIMAL ARTISANS

spontaneously that monotony of feature which agri-
culture produces elsewhere after generations of labour.
It was like some vast natural reclamation, made ready
for the flocks and herds of a continent. Yet to con-
sume this half-million square miles of food, instead of
legions of bison and wapiti-deer, as on the Northern
prairies, there were not enough native animals to crop
the grasses. South America has no wild oxen, or wild
sheep, or goats, or antelopes ; and on the pampas
and the Southern plains there was only one large
native ruminant animal, the pampas stag, with the
puma and jaguar, which have probably been attracted
south by the increase of imported animals which serve
them as food.

Darwin's belief was that this scarcity of animal life
on these plains was also very recent, and that the
splitting up of the continents of North and South
America zoologically was effected by the rising of the
high Mexican plateau, beyond which few Northern
species wandered south. But since Darwin's day man
has filled in the blank left by Nature with a fauna
brought there across the ocean. These animals have
multiplied faster than ever did the bison herds, and
have changed, or are changing, the surface of the
steppe.

Formerly the grey and misty levels of these plains
showed in winter but little life except the scattered
herds of wild horses, and the viscachas sitting by their
burrows. Now on these chosen pastures the hordes
of cattle blacken the plains.

That modification of the herbage which Darwin

LANDSCAPE GARDENERS 49

noted as produced by cattle in the more populous
and anciently settled territories has spread over
millions of acres. On these the tall, rough grass, so
high that cattle could not be seen in it unless the
gauchos stood on their horses as look-out posts to
gain a view, has given way to turf, close, compact,
and of treble the nutritive powers of the unimproved
grasses. The millions of sheep which it now sup-
ports, herded by dogs which have become almost part
of the flocks, outnumber the ancient " treks " of the
spring-buck of South Africa ; and instead of the vast
and oppressive silence of the plains, the lowing of herds
and the bleating of flocks fill the air with sound.

CHAPTER VII*
ANIMAL DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER

CONTINUOUS wet and darkness sensibly reduces the
vitality of well-housed human beings and disposes
them to sickness. How then do the animals, which
have no protection from the weather, or a foot of dry
soil on which to lie or stand, endure week after week
of damp and cold ? The answer must be that they
endure it how they can, but that of all conditions of
weather, rain and damp are those most injurious to
them.

From the sheep in the sodden folds to the deer
on the Highland hills, all suffer. Even the common
remark that a wet day is " fine weather for young
ducks" 'is wrong, for in the very wettest summers
of the last ten years nearly all the young ducks
died. One heavy shower is often sufficient to kill
young water-birds that are exposed to it. Their
breasts are covered with a dense coating of springy
down, which holds the air like patent " cellular "
underclothing, so that the ducklings float on a
kind of lifebuoy and waterproof combined ; but
their backs are not so well covered, and a very little
wetting from above is fatal to them. A charming
picture, sketched by Mr. John G. Millais at the side

ANIMAL DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER 51

of a Highland loch, shows how carefully wild-duck
mothers guard their broods against the rain. A
sharp shower has whitened the waters of the lake,
and all the little bee-like ducklings have been hurried
to the shore, and crowd round the old ducks, which
stand with wings outstretched shielding the babies
from the pelting drops.

Frost and snow, if only there be food, seldom injure
any creatures but the small birds. Sheep will grow fat
in a frost, even though the snow is lying unthawed
on their thick, oil-soaked, non-conducting fleeces.

Drought and dry heat always mean healthy seasons
for all wild animals in this country, where food and
water never really fail. Cows, ponies, and deer put on
more flesh from a pound's weight of dried-up grass
than from two of water-logged pasture, and horses
which can take a roll in a dust-bath after a day in
the sun are in better condition than after careful
grooming following a day's driving in mud and rain.

Considering the dislike of animals for rain and
its injurious effect on their health, it is curious
that more have not learned to build houses of some
kind. Besides the squirrels and the dormice, the
orang-outang is almost the only mammal which
makes a shelter from the weather, and that a poor
one.1 It is only their magnificent condition of health,
due to their being all teetotalers and having to work
for their living in the open air, that enables most
land animals and birds to stand continuous wet.

1 The holes of burrowing animals are used more as a refuge from living
foes than as shelters from the weather, and such burrows are commonly full
of water and uninhabitable in wet seasons.

52 ANIMAL ARTISANS

Possibly the tropical winter rains of the central zones
are less injurious to life than the cold rains and low
temperature of temperate countries. In the Indian
plains spring is dusty and barren. The sun brings
heat, but only a life in death, for there is no water
in the ground. The monsoon, when the Indian sky
is filled with welcome clouds, brings freshness and life.
The opening of the rains is the real beginning of spring.
The plants grow so fast that you can almost see them,
forced by the hot, almost fermenting earth. There is
a prodigious birth of insects, followed by the destroy-
ing hosts of the carnivorous insects which feed upon
them. "Eha," the Indian field-naturalist, considers
that the first few days of the rains are the Indian
counterpart of our opening spring days, so far as
anything in England can find a parallel there. " Even
the roadside rivulets are full of little fishes, come
from I know not where, to grow fat on the worms
and mole crickets borne helplessly along by the flood ;
and the fireflies light their lamps and hold their
silent concerts, the occupants of each tree flashing in
unison and making sheet lightning in the woods."

The rain cannot put out the fireflies' lamps ; but
after a few days of this intermittent downpour it is evi-
dent that the animals are feeling the effects of cold and
damp, even in India. All creatures, from men to the
white ants, begin in some way to show that it incon-
veniences them. " The fear of getting wet is universal.
The gentleman runs because the rain will spoil his
clothes. The coolie runs because he has none. When
you realise that at this time all kinds of birds and

ANIMAL DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER 53

beasts, down to the flimsy butterflies and moths, live
and sleep in the open air, you cannot help wondering
how they manage when the station rain-gauge is regis-
tering ten inches in twenty-four hours." The smaller
butterflies and moths of Europe can usually find shel-
tering places in rainy weather, but the broad-winged
insects of the tropics are sadly damaged and reduced in
numbers. The Indian birds, many of which lay their
eggs during the first and heaviest month of the rains,
also suffer considerably ; and the monkeys, " huddled
together with the water spouting from their long tails,"
while the deluge is running so fast down branches and
trunks that the water may be seen throbbing as it
slips down the bark in a thick glaze, must be miserable
indeed.

Evidence of the danger to young animal life at this
time is seen in the season at which the young of the
Indian deer are born. In every country the females of
all wild animals have adjusted the time at which they
produce their young to the seasons. In all cases the
mammals, more especially the larger grass-eating kinds,
drop their fawns, calves, and kids at the time when
natural food is beginning to increase, and when the
bad weather is over. In temperate Europe these two
periods are the same. Winter is over and food steadily
increasing in early summer, and that is the time at
which the doe and hind produce their young. If the
rains, which certainly cause an enormous increase of
vegetable food in India, were also favourable to health,
we should expect the Axis hinds, for example, the
typical jungle-deer of the peninsula, to drop their

54 ANIMAL ARTISANS

fawns in April or May. But they do not. The fawns
are not produced till after the rainy season, in October.
There is no stronger proof than this that the rains,
even of the tropics, are hurtful to animal life.

When wild creatures are partly domesticated or
naturalised, the females begin either to disregard this
seasonal law, or, if living at large, to change the
period of producing young to suit the new seasons and
climate.

But though the first and imperious instinct of pre-
serving the young dictates these physical adaptations, in
the ordinary matters of life they often do not learn
to accommodate themselves to new conditions. The
Sambur stags which the late Lord Powerscourt turned
out in his glens and woods on the Wicklow Mountains
persisted in lying in the thickest cover all day, trying
to shelter from the Indian sun, though the trees were
dripping with Irish rains and mist. Yet domesticated
sheep will always go to the top of a hill to sleep at
nights in the dry. In Dovedale the flocks climb in
the evening literally to the summit of Thorp Cloud,
and mark the skyline like a string of black beads against
the setting sun.

The writer has no experience of the wild life of
the parts of Lancashire round Manchester, one of the
wettest areas of England, where, as Yorkshire men
say, there is no spring and no summer, but " all back-
end " — i.e. autumn. But if rain is the main climatic
enemy of animals in these latitudes, we should expect
to find Ireland, the wettest of the three countries, and
the west coast of Scotland less populous in species

ANIMAL DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER 55

and numbers of birds and beasts than the east coast
of Scotland or Norfolk. And that is the case. The
place of Ireland in the Atlantic and its severance from
what was Continental England may account for the
absence of some species. But climate must be held
mainly accountable for the failure of introduced
animals, such as the brown hare and perhaps the
black grouse, to multiply; for the poor crop of
partridges, and for the scarcity of birds like the red
grouse, for which the heathery mountains would seem
well suited. Speaking generally, Irish woods and
mountains are curiously bare of indigenous life,
though the migratory woodcock, and in the bogs the
migratory wildfowl, find it a congenial winter resort.
In the same way the mainland of the wet Scotch west
coast has a smaller bird population than the east.

In this country wet springs and summers seem to
affect most forms of animal life. In such seasons there
are very few butterflies or moths. All young ground
birds suffer, especially game. Rabbits and hares die
of fluke and dysentery ; calves, sheep, and lambs of
various ailments. Myriads of wild birds' eggs are
addled, or the youg birds die in the nests. Even
rats decrease. Fish do not thrive, because there are
few insects, and kingfishers decrease on the Thames,
because the wet soaks into the holes in which they
breed. Strangely enough, the only animals which
increase in numbers during a very wet season are the
most homeless of all the beasts — the hares. It is true
that a certain number die from diseases engendered
by damp and darkness, but on the higher ground at

56 ANIMAL ARTISANS

any rate their numbers are more than made up by the
unusual number of leverets which in such seasons
grow to maturity. Hares are always numerous on
the downland round Lambourne and Catmore in
Berkshire, but at the end of the wet season of
1902 they had increased enormously. In ordinary
years many young hares are destroyed by plough
and harrow in tilling the soil, but the weather had
been so bad all through 1902 that field operations
for clearing the land, and especially steam ploughing,
were practically at a standstill for months ; and the
leverets were no longer sacrificed to Ceres.

There is reason to conjecture that a wet summer
round our coasts actually reduces the number of fish
in the sea, and marine life generally. This may
seem a paradox, but it is borne out partly by the
increase of marine life after dry years, partly by the
recent discoveries as to the hatching and life of the
spawn and young of sea creatures. The season of the
year 1900, for instance, saw the most teeming marine
life known for years round our shores. " But the
early summer of 1900 was exceptionally wet and
cold ? " Yes, so it was, and it destroyed the young
partridges, rabbits, and wild pheasants. But the sea
creatures are not made in one summer like the
partridges. The herrings, of which the record catch
was made, the bass which were caught in thousands
off Dover, the innumerable cuttlefish off the coasts
of France and Cornwall, the solid shoals of mackerel
taken off the Irish shores, perhaps were adult fish
hatched and bred in unusual numbers in the three

ANIMAL DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER 57

previous hot summers, when no cold rains were chilling the
surface of the sea and keeping down its temperature.
For it is on the surface of the sea that the untold
millions of the eggs of most of the food-fish float,
and it is there, too, that the minute creatures swim
and breed, and lay their invisible eggs on which the
fry of the sea-fish feed. Thus rain and cold may be
as fatal to the life of the ocean as they are to life
on the dry land. They chill the surface water, on
which float the embryos both of fish and the food
which ought to support them. Wet weather spoils
even the harvest of the sea.

CHAPTER VIII

IN THE TIME OF FLOODS

IN England it is, as a rule, only the wild animals
whose happiness and even lives are really dependent
on the weather, but during torrential rains and summer
floods the injury and destruction caused among
domestic birds and beasts is often very considerable.
For instance, during the second week of June 1903
some ten thousand homing pigeons were let loose on
the south coast to fly home to various places mainly
in London and the Midlands. They flew right into
the heaviest continuous rainstorm of the last forty
years. Two days later it was reported that nearly
all these birds were lost, having failed to find their
way home. At the same time the swallows, martins,
and most of all the swifts, were gradually starving,
as well as suffering from the cold and wet, through-
out the days of downpour. The continuous heavy
rain washed all the insects out of the air. After
the first twenty-four hours there was no food left for
the swallow tribe at all. The swifts, as a last resort,
came down to the houses, flying round the eaves to
see if a few gnats remained under the shelter of their
projections. Their extraordinary powers of flight

enabled them to keep up their ceaseless ranging of

58

IN THE TIME OF FLOODS 59

the air in spite of the continuous downpour, which
would have wetted the feathers of almost any other
land-birds after such long exposure. In their hunger
they flew, seeking food, long after dusk — until it
was almost dark. But long before the rain ceased
numbers of them gave up the struggle, and crept
into houses, or were found clinging to walls, or lying
dead at the foot of buildings to which they had clung
when exhausted.

The destruction among late-hatched broods of wild-
ducks was great. The loss among the young phea-
sants, mainly from the rains, but also from drowning
in the case of the wild birds, was most deplorable.
Four thousand young birds are said to have been
found dead upon one estate.

Though swans, ducks, coots, and moorhens, which
build close to the water-level, and even the little
warblers whose nests are hung in the reeds a few feet
above it, do not themselves perish in sudden floods,
their eggs are destroyed by thousands. In the
summer of 1902, when numbers of these birds were
nesting on the banks of the little river Yar, which
flows through the reclaimed marshes of Brading
Haven, violent rains on the downs which form the
" backbone" of the Isle of Wight filled the little
river as suddenly as if it had been a mountain beck
instead of a slow south-country stream. Even the
swans, whose evident anxiety to raise their nests
usually gives warning of a coming flood, were taken
by surprise ; and when in the early morning their
keeper hurried down to the bank to help them, he

60 ANIMAL ARTISANS

found the nests washed away, and ducks', teals', and
swans' eggs floating all over the river.

When the rivers begin to flood in earnest, the scene
of the deluge, if the district is an English one, is
usually the flat meadows or marshes, and the animal
victims are of all kinds and sizes, from field-mice to
sheep and oxen, according to the depth of the waters
and the nature of the ground.

Cattle are more often drowned in the marsh
floods caused by exceptionally high tides flowing up
estuaries, and so breaking embankments, than by
ordinary river floods. They seem singularly help-
less and frightened in such circumstances. It is
almost impossible to drive them through the rising
waters, even though it is quite safe for a mounted
man to follow them. They huddle together on any
piece of dry ground left, and are almost as loath to
quit it as horses are to leave a burning stable. They
lose any sense they have, even if they are induced to
move. We have seen a whole herd of young bullocks,
which were being driven off some dangerously flooded
marshes when the tide was rising fast, walk not
through the gateway, where there was a bridge over
the dyke, though the water covered it, but straight
into the deep drain above it, where several were
drowned. It did not seem to occur to them to feel
the depth with their feet, or to try whether there was
firm ground or seven feet of water in front of them.

Marsh floods annually claim a great number of
victims among sheep. In some of the Norfolk " meal
marshes," which in summer are famous grazing ground

IN THE TIME OF FLOODS 61

for the flocks, the numerous creeks are crossed by
wooden sheep-bridges. In a marsh tide the sheep,
if overtaken by the water, crowd on to these bridges,
which are slightly higher than the adjacent levels of
orach and crab-grass, and wait for the waters to go
down. While the sheep take refuge on the bridges,
the rabbits, which spread from the sandhills on to
the banks in the higher parts of the marsh, climb
into the bushes of that curious plant, the suaeda, to
escape the water. The suddenness and depth of some
recent floods may be gathered from the fact that
in the valley of the little river Stort, between Essex
and Hertfordshire, a hundred and fifty sheep were
drowned on an ordinary Home Counties farm.

On flat ground nearly all the smaller mammals,
except moles, but including foxes, climb into bushes
and trees to escape the water. During a flood of
the Trent near Clifton in Nottinghamshire, the hares
were seen sitting up in the hedges, where they re-
mained, and though screaming with fear, allowed
themselves to be picked up from a boat. In the
hedges there were also seen sitting rabbits, rats, field-
voles, shrews, and occasionally a hedgehog. All the
moles were drowned ; but the weasels and stoats,
which are excellent swimmers, made for trees, in
which they were quite at home.

In the Thames Valley the thousands of pollard
willows are the welcome and easily reached refuge of
all kinds of flooded-out animals, including a con-
siderable amount of insect life. The rats, in these
hard times, eat the snails, beetles, and other refugees

62 ANIMAL ARTISANS

which crawl up the trunks into the hollow crowns.
The present writer once saw a flooded-out rat sitting
on the top of a notice-board, the futility of which
in flood-time has often been subject for jokes, but
never more so than on that particular occasion, when
lengths of deep and muddy water between hedges
appeared labelled with the legend " Private Road,"
and the most conspicuous objects showing above the
watery wastes on either side were the boards which
proclaimed them to be valuable building sites.

The immolation of almost the entire insect
population, and of a very large number of the
mollusca and annelids, naturally follows the covering
of large areas of land with standing water. Among
the chief reasons why meadows which are annually
flooded for weeks are so unprofitable may be reckoned
the killing off of the whole living stock of earth-
worms. Doubtless their eggs remain in the ground
and renew the race ; but in such meadows earth-
worms are always few, which prevents the aeration
and movement of the soil.

The after effects of floods, which are often so
injurious to human health that it is believed that
some of the greatest epidemics of the Middle Ages
originated in the flooding of the Yangtse Valley,
sometimes caused similar outbreaks among animals.

Early in the last century the head-waters of the
great river Apure, a tributary of the Orinoco, burst
down in flood from the forest regions where the
waters generally lay in soak among the marshes, and
let loose the vegetable detritus which had been accu-

IN THE TIME OF FLOODS 63

mulating there for ages. This flood-borne vegetable
matter, carried down the stream through what were
usually some of the healthiest plains of South America
from the great primeval forest of San Carmilo, brought
with it a plague which attacked all the higher
forms of animal life from reptiles to man. It was
the modern equivalent of that corruption of the Nile
water which preceded the plagues of Egypt. Don
Ramon Paez states that " the first symptoms of the
epidemic appeared among the crocodiles, whose hideous
carcases might then be seen floating down the stream
in such prodigious numbers that both the waters and
the air of that fine region were tainted with the
effluvium." The symptoms of a crocodile epidemic
are then described, probably for the first time. " It
was observed that they were first seized by a violent
fit of coughing, followed by a vomit, which obliged
them to quit their watery homes, and finally to find
a grave among the thickets on the river-banks. The
disease next attacked the fish and other inhabitants
of the water with equal violence, until it was feared
that the streams would be depopulated. The fearful
mortality among them can be estimated from the
fact that for more than a month the rippling waters
of that noble river, the Apure, were constantly wash-
ing down masses of putrefaction, its surface being
almost hidden from view for many weeks. The next
victims were the pachydermata of the swamps. It
was a piteous sight to see the capybaras and the
grizzly wild swine dragging their paralysed hind-
quarters after them : hence the name of ' derren-

64 ANIMAL ARTISANS

gadera ' applied to this disease. Not even monkeys,
in their aerial retreats, escaped the contagion. Their
melancholy cries resounded through the woods."

This flood-engendered pestilence then attacked the
horses of the llanos, and lastly the people, who for
some time abandoned horse-breeding. On the other
hand, great catastrophes in animal life, attributed
to floods by those who discover the remains of the
victims in later periods, may often have been due to
a different, or even exactly contrary, cause.

Thus Charles Darwin noted that in the great
drought which afflicted South America from 1827 till
1830, when the deer used to come into the court-
yards to drink at the wells, and one proprietor lost
every head of a herd of twenty thousand cattle,
the latter animals in herds of thousands rushed into
the Parana, and then, being exhausted by hunger,
were unable to climb up the muddy banks, and so
were drowned. A very rainy season followed this
drought, and caused great floods. " Hence it is
almost certain that some thousands of the skeletons
were buried by the deposits next year. What would
be the opinion of a geologist, viewing such a collec-
tion of bones, of all kinds of animals, and of all
ages, thus embedded in one earthy mass? Would
he not attribute it to a flood having swept over the
land, rather than to the common order of things ? "

CHAPTER IX

THE MIGRATIONS OF INSECTS

NOT long ago a story was current which sounded like
the realisation of a collector's dream. A ship was
crossing the Atlantic from the United States, and was
followed by a number of butterflies of a large species
called the "black-veined brown." The butterflies
kept up with the ship, probably alighting on it at
night, and when the steamer drew near the Scilly
Islands were still following it. Shortly afterwards
thirteen of these American butterflies were said to
have been caught in Cornwall, it was alleged by friends
of an entomologist on board, who contrived to let
them know by the earliest possible means that such
distinguished strangers might be expected.

Whether the story is based on fact the writer knows
not. But there is good reason to think that butter-
flies do occasionally cross the sea, whether by choice
or compulsion, and that they are not the only insects
that do so. Others also travel great distances by
land, or migrate to pastures new on ships, in trains,
and among the feathers of birds. The unusual num-
bers of the Camberwell beauty butterfly seen a few
years ago on the South Coast were believed to have
been blown across, or to have flown across with a fair

« E

66 ANIMAL ARTISANS

i.k-

wind, from France, whence also passengers on the
Calais-Dover boats saw not long ago swarms of
common white butterflies crossing the Channel. This
is not in the least surprising. The large vanessas,
such as the red admiral or Camberwell beauty, fly
swiftly and strongly. One came out to a Scotch
boat going up Channel, and accompanied it all the
way to the Clyde. When Darwin was off the mouth
of the Plata, and also off the Patagonian shore, the
ship was often surrounded by insects. "One evening,"
he writes, " when we were ten miles from the Bay of
St. Bias, vast numbers of butterflies, in bands or flocks
of countless myriads, extended as far as the eye could
range. More species than one were present, but
the main number were very similar to the common
English Colias edusa. Even by the aid of a telescope it
was not possible to see a space free from butterflies.
Some seamen cried out ' it was snowing butterflies.' "

There seems to be an occasional migration of insects
into this country across the North Sea. Very few
people who have lived on the coast of Norfolk or
Suffolk doubt it. From time to time ladybirds and
other insects are found washed up by the waves, or
floating near the shore, in numbers " like dust for
multitude." It is possible that they were blown off-
shore first, and then washed up again by a change of
wind. But it does not seem probable that they would
be in such compact masses if dispersed and strug-
gling against an adverse gale at some distance from
land. On the other hand, it is well known that birds
sometimes fall into the sea from exhaustion when

\

A

"-*.

THE MIGRATIONS OF INSECTS 67

crossing towards land, and the case of these ladybirds
seems much the same. Sometimes the drowned in-
vaders consist of black flocks of the tiny turnip beetles,
which lie on the waves like soot. Fishermen who
spend much of their time off the mouth of the Wash
and the north Norfolk coast have told the writer
that butterflies constantly visit their boats, flying In
from the sea ; and from time to time blue butterflies
are seen lying at short intervals, from yard to yard,
along miles of the sea-fringe of sand on the Lincoln
coast.

The painted lady butterflies appear to assemble for
migration as swallows do. Great columns of them
many yards wide have been seen flying in a given
direction.

A locust alighted on the deck of the Beagle
at a distance of three hundred and seventy miles
from land. If an insect only four inches long
can make such a flight, no limits can be set to the
possible migrations of locusts. They cross seas and
even mountains. Some years ago they appeared near
Darjeeling. Whence they came is not precisely
known. But it is believed that they crossed the
Himalayas from Thibet. The invasions of locusts
are best remembered when for some reason unknown
they decide to leave the regions over which their
flight is generally taken, and to make a vast aerial
trek into others. Such invasions naturally attract
great attention. The records remain, emphasised by
the actual losses inflicted, and not infrequently by
more serious misfortunes.

68 ANIMAL ARTISANS

It will be remembered that the plague of locusts
recorded in the Book of Exodus was almost im-
mediately followed by the death of the first-born, and
in the Middle Ages a locust invasion of the North or
West was regarded as one of the regular precursors
of great pestilences.

In 1528 there appeared in the Mark of Branden-
burg, during the prevalence of a south-east wind
and a great drought, swarms of locusts, "as if
this prognostic too of great epidemics was not to
be wanting," says Hecker. This "prognostic" had
been observed before the Black Death in the four-
teenth century, the beginning of the " morbific
conditions" in the Far East having been innumerable
locust swarms, which destroyed the crops in Hunan,
and caused the famine which pestilence followed.

Locusts appeared in Franconia in incredible swarms
in 1337, and the celebrated "stinking mists" which
spread over Italy at the time of the Plague in 1348 were
made worse by the odour of putrefying locusts," which
had spread from the East to the West." The locusts
were regarded as having been summoned by celestial
wrath to complete the destruction of mankind which
earthquake, famine, and pestilence had begun. In
1542 swarms of locusts migrated from the interior
of Asia, and travelled across Europe as far north as
the Elbe, and as far south as Spain. The Turks were
then invading Hungary, and by a natural coincidence
brought the plague with them.

Induced migration of insects offers some curious
points in political natural history. At the beginning

THE MIGRATIONS OF INSECTS 69

of the last century the possibility of introducing the
cochineal insect was much discussed in India. Red
dye was expensive and scarce ; but red was a colour
highly prized, and for which there was a great demand.
Clearly, if the cochineal could be introduced there
would be a sale to a vast local population. The
cultivation of the cactus on which it fed, and of the
insects themselves, which are planted out in little
communities on each young cactus-plant, seemed
exactly suited for the laborious Hindoos. To add
to the wealth of the many nations and languages of
the peninsula by the induced migration of one hardy
plant and a little red blight seemed almost a natural
miracle, yet a possible one. Yet for some reason,
though the economic arguments were all sound, the
cochineal insect refused to migrate with a cheerful mind.

It flourished when taken from its native Mexico to
the Canary Islands, that Western foster-mother of
other tropical products, and to some degree in Java
and Algiers. But the parts of India to which it was
taken did not suit it.

On the other hand, an equally insignificant insect
has crossed the Atlantic, and not only the Atlantic
but the New World itself, and been settled on the
Pacific coast by the aid and desire of the Cali-
fornian fruit-growers. The story of its journey
and establishment is like an echo of some anecdote
by Herodotus of Greek rites rationalised by refer-
ence to some Egyptian " mystery." The ancients
had an immemorial custom of hanging up branches
of a wild fig, which they called the goat fig (just

70 ANIMAL ARTISANS

as we speak of the "dog" rose), on the edible
fig-trees at certain seasons, in the belief that the wild
fig fertilised the other. In this they were perfectly
right, but it was not done in the way in which they
thought. Though the wild fig has male and female
flowers, the former do not directly fertilise those of
the edible fig. That is done by an insect hatched in
the female blossom of the wild tree. These blossoms
turn into galls, the galls in turn liberate a fly, the fly
visits and is covered with the pollen of the wild fig,
and then flies into the female flower of the other and
fertilises it. In order that the edible figs introduced
into California from Asia Minor might be properly
fertilised, these insects were introduced, it having been
found that without them the trees did not give a
proper yield.

A curious instance of insect migration in which the
creature seems to have travelled in order either to
" better itself" or because it is naturally of an adven-
turous turn, was given some years ago in a pamphlet
written by a Russian diplomatist, who in the intervals
of political work applied himself to the task of un-
ravelling the ancient and widespread belief that bees
are born from the bodies of dead oxen. It is a belief
of remote antiquity, which appears in many languages.
The author identified the insect which gave rise to it
as a fly called Erystalis tenax, which, in addition to
being very like a bee, has the power of feeding on
and breeding in a very great number of substances,
nice or nasty. Incidentally he quoted evidence as to
the curious migrations of the fly, which has in recent

THE MIGRATIONS OF INSECTS 71

years accompanied ships into most quarters of the
globe, and become a colonist, like the brown rat
or the cockroach. The large Oriental cockroach
is now firmly established in this country. In return
for this doubtful blessing we have sent to New
Zealand the humble-bee to fertilise the antipodean
clover, and are, it is said, about to export ladybirds
to eat the blight on the vines of Australia.

CHAPTER X
ANIMALS AND POISON

IN the account of Colonel Mahon's successful expe-
dition against the latest Mahdi, in 1903, it was noted
that on the march back to the Nile a number of the
horses died from eating " poisoned grass," on which
they browsed at the halting-places. A similar instance
of the failure of instinct to detect danger lurking in
vegetable growth, as regards which it might naturally
be concluded that the animals' senses would, after
long experience in the life of a species, have inherited
caution, occurred quite recently in Somaliland. A
train of Indian camels were brought over for use in
the army transport, many of them being exceptionally
good and strong animals. There were also many
native Somali camels at the base. The Indian and
Somali beasts were both allowed to browse freely on
the wild shrubs round their quarters. The camels
which had been born of native stock took no harm.
But the Indian camels ate shrubs which were so
poisonous that many of them died. It is not stated
that they over ate themselves, which rather stupid
creatures like camels will often do when they get
the chance, but that they were actually poisoned by
the toxic qualities of the food which they selected.

ANIMALS AND POISON 73

It is an interesting question whether the native Somali
camels really avoided the dangerous plants, or whether
they had become " immune " by eating them for gene-
rations, as cats and their kittens which have eaten snake
poison are believed to become protected from the effects
of a snake bite. But the probability is all in favour of
the theory that they purposely avoid and reject what
they instinctively know to be poisonous. If the food
is pleasant and plentiful, there is no reason to believe
that animals ever cease eating until they think they
have had enough, and by that time it would probably
be too late for them to make use of experience on a
later occasion.

Whatever be the reason for the fact, "warning"
notices of various kinds are frequently affixed by
Nature to poisonous plants, almost as legibly as the
label which the law insists that chemists shall place
upon poisonous drugs. Many of the poisonous fungi
have an odious smell, so much so that no mammal or
bird ever thinks of touching them. On the other
hand, the scent of the mushroom is distinctly appetis-
ing and pleasant. Henbane, an exceptionally poisonous
and quite beautiful wild plant, has a most unpleasant
scent which is instantly detected by cattle when the
plant is green. They most carefully avoid touching
it when growing. But it seems to lose its warning
odour when dried in hay. Instances have been quoted
in which it has been injurious to cattle when consumed
in this form. The common "fool's parsley," which
has poisonous seeds, is not, we believe, eaten by any
bird; neither do cattle touch it when growing in

74 ANIMAL ARTISANS

meadows. But they sometimes seem to have no
such suspicion about the water hemlock, which is so
peculiarly deadly to both cows and horses. Mr. Rider
Haggard in his " Farmer's Year " describes the sudden
death of a colt, just turned out with its mother in
the early spring into the wet meadows by the river
Waveney, from some such plant eaten in the grass.

One of our most poisonous native plants is the
ordinary foxglove, from which " digitalis " is made.
Every part of it is toxic in a high degree — flowers,
stem, leaves, and roots. It has no unpleasant odour
of any kind, but for some reason cattle never touch
it. The lower leaves are among the earliest to appear
on the banks or on commons, though the tall spike
appears much later. But however scanty the herbage,
these leaves are left uneaten, although in appearance
they very closely resemble prickly comfrey, which is
grown as a forage plant in some parts of the country.

In the hemlocks, several of which are poisonous
to man or beast, the dangerous ingredient varies.
In the spotted hemlock it is " conine," which is
present in great quantities in the seeds, though
there is very little in the leaves and stem. The
Greek poison was probably prepared from these seeds,
as is the medical extract made at the present time.
On the other hand, in the water hemlock, which
is not very common in England, though found abun-
dantly by Scotch rivers and on wet grounds in the
North, the poisonous principle is contained in an
essential oil. Spotted hemlock kills or injures human
beings by causing paralysis, which progresses through

ANIMALS AND POISON 75

the nervous centres till it attacks the lungs. In the
water hemlock the poison acts in a different way.
Like another and more deadly vegetable poison,
strychnine, it causes tetanic spasms. The difference
in the nature of the poison contained in plants so
closely alike as these two hemlocks may perhaps
account for the failure of cattle to know the danger
to which they are exposed in eating them. It may
well be that one variety, though injurious to man,
may not affect cattle. Consequently they might
naturally eat without any misgiving the other variety
which is deadly to them.

The sense by which animals detect the presence of
a poison is mainly that of smell. They seem to have
very little sense of taste upon the palate. But carni-
vorous animals have a kind of " half-way " sense be-
tween taste and stomach-ache which very soon tells
them when they have taken poison or anything likely
to disagree with them, and Nature has kindly arranged
that they can get rid of it by the throat with very
great ease. An extraordinary instance of this was
recently quoted in the Country Gentleman. A Scotch
keeper had a retriever which he had taught to fetch
any object that he had left behind him. One day
on the moors in the spring he found that he had
left his knife at a place where he had been sitting
no great way down the hill, and sent the dog to
fetch it. The dog galloped back to the place,
and finding the knife, concluded that that was
what he was to fetch, and picked it up. So much
at least seems certain from the sequel, for when the

76 ANIMAL ARTISANS

dog arrived he had not got the knife, and also looked
somewhat shamefaced. The keeper tried to send him
back again, but he would not go. He went back
himself, taking the dog with him. No knife was
there ; and it was certain that had it been dropped the
dog would have picked it up. It then flashed across
his mind that the dog, in running up the hill with
the knife in his mouth, had swallowed it. Unfor-
tunately, as it apparently was not uncomfortable,
the retriever showed no signs of wishing to do other
than digest it, which, as it was a valuable dog, the
keeper was most unwilling to risk. So he took a
handful of salt, clapped it into the dog's mouth, and
held it tight for a minute — and after one or two
coughs the knife made its appearance. The dog was, of
course, trying to get rid of the salt, not of the knife.

Wolves, tigers, leopards, and most other carnivora
are difficult to poison, from the similar power which
they have of rapidly getting rid of a drug. Lions, on
the other hand, are very frequently poisoned. It is
said that a good many lion-skins, especially those sent
from Somaliland before the regrettable misunderstand-
ings between whites and blacks had begun in that
region famous for large game, were obtained by the
unsportsmanlike method of poisoning carcases and
leaving them for the lions to devour. Cattle, which
have no less than four stomachs, are hopelessly poisoned
if once they have swallowed a fatal dose, whether in a
toxic plant or otherwise. But this curious arrange-
ment of their interiors enables them to take very
large doses of certain poisons without any ill effects,

ANIMALS AND POISON 77

as a drug becomes so much diluted before it reaches
the last or true digestive stomach. Half an ounce of
black shag tobacco is often given to cattle as a vermi-
fuge, and though in such a case the animal's tempera-
ture falls slightly, and its pulse is rather slow for a
few hours, it feeds as usual and appears to feel no
inconvenience.

In common with human beings, animals seem to
be affected by poison in certain forms when in a par-
ticular condition of health. At other times they can
eat the same plant or shrub with impunity. In certain
states of health a man can eat pork, lobsters, cockles,
scallops, and other somewhat risky foods without bad
effects. At other times the same edibles would pro-
duce on him the effect of slight ptomaine poisoning.
Two persons may eat of the same food at the same
time, and while one is perfectly well afterwards, the
other may become- violently ill. The curious cases of
yew poisoning among cattle or horses seem to be some-
what analogous. They will sometimes browse on shoots
of yew and take no harm whatever. At other times
they are obviously made very ill, or die, from eating
the leaves. They have even been found dead with the
yew fresh and undigested in their stomachs. Where
poisonous plants are present in any great numbers in
herbage, it seems quite impossible to prevent cattle
from eating them. The " poison veldt " of parts of the
Transvaal has a particularly bad reputation caused by
plants — one of which is said to be a species of tulip —
which come into leaf in the spring.

In addition to the poisons mentioned above, the

78 ANIMAL ARTISANS

deaths or illness of English cattle have been traced to
eating the leaves of laurel, common crowfoot, and
various other plants of the ranunculus family, wild
parsnips, and acorns, which are very astringent ; and
also, it is believed, to their eating woody nightshade.
The old custom of keeping a goat with cattle was
based on the idea that the strong smell of the goat
acted as a natural disinfectant, and so prevented certain
obscure diseases to which they are subject ; but there is
reason to believe that the goat is beneficial because it
eats by choice and with impunity plants which are
very injurious to cows.

CHAPTER XI
WILD SWANS

THE flight of birds still gives true auguries both of
storm and sunshine. They alone can almost outstrip
the wind ; and if they cannot outfly the onward march
of frost, they can soon place hundreds of miles
between themselves and any region suddenly invaded
by intolerable cold. One of the surest indications
that the Ice King has enlarged the borders of his
dominions, and brought the seas and shores lying
southward of the Arctic night temporarily under his
sway, is the arrival on our coasts of the swans, the
birds which Norse legend and fancy identified with
the snow-clouds and the realms of everlasting ice.
The author of the Religio Medici says in his
notes on the birds of Norfolk : " In hard winters
elks, a kind of wild swan, are seen in no small
numbers. ... If the winter be mild, they come no
further southward than Scotland ; if very hard, they
go lower, and seek more Southern places, which is
the cause that sometimes we see them not before
Christmas or the hardest time in winter." Mr.
Stevenson, the author of the " Birds of Norfolk," the
classic of local ornithology, says that this account
written by the learned Norwich physician in the days

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8o ANIMAL ARTISANS

of Queen Elizabeth agrees most accurately with
modern experience of the visits of the wild swan,
since, with one exception, he had no trustworthy
record of their being killed in the county before
December, and then only when there was an early
beginning of frost and snow. All the very severe
winters are noted as " great swan years " in Norfolk,
and the birds then often stay till as late as March.
By that time they are scattered in small flocks round
the coast and salt-marshes. But in the first week
in March they gather into " herds " and fly straight
northwards, passing right across the county in a
straight line for that part of the Arctic Circle in
which they intend to nest.

There is something particularly interesting and
suggestive both in the appearance and the life of
these grave and stately strangers from the hyperborean
lands. They are the largest of all the Northern
birds, and infinitely the most striking in form and
hue. They are among the very few birds of pure
white plumage in summer and winter alike. They
are absolutely harmless, though possessed of great
strength and power of flight ; and they depend for
their existence on the fact that they make their nest
and rear their young in lands where no man dwells,
or where those relentless enemies of animal life, the
savage and the semi-savage, are so rarely found
that these great, helpless, ground-nesting birds are in
a measure free from their molestation.

It is said that the hooper swans once nested in the
Orkneys. But at the present time these, the commonest

WILD SWANS 8 1

our wild swan visitors, breed in the farthest North,
Iceland, in Lapland, and on the enormous fringe
tundra which runs along the rim of the Old World
from the White Sea eastwards. When the late Mr.
Seebohm and Mr. Harvie-Brown were waiting together
on the Petchora River to see and mark the arrival
of the birds from the South to nest in the Arctic
tundras, almost the first birds to come were the wild
swans. These would not be the birds from Norfolk,
but possibly those which had spent the winter on the
Caspian Sea. In the spring each pair flies some
thousand miles north, probably to nest on or near
the spot where its ancestors reared their cygnets
centuries ago. In the valley of the Yenisei, where
Mr. Seebohm saw them when he accompanied Captain
Wiggins on one of his bold adventures through the
Kara Sea, the hoopers appeared on 5th May. On
the Petchora they arrived in pairs on nth May, flying
high overhead, and soon settled down in the willow
scrub which covered the islands, and there built their
great nests of sedge and reared their young.

Besides the hooper, we are visited in hard winters
by a smaller wild species, which the old naturalist
Pallas identified a century ago. It is known as
Bewick's swan, and though smaller than the hooper,
comes from even more distant lands. Like certain
other species, this bird vanishes from all human
i knowledge in the spring, as if it had become trans-
formed into the snow-clouds with which Northern
» fancy identified its race. It is now known to nest
: on lands so profoundly remote that the previous

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82 ANIMAL ARTISANS

uncertainty as to its origin is easily accounted for. It
breeds in the tundras west of the White Sea, lands
absolutely unvisited by ordinary travellers, and in-
habited only by scattered Samoyeds, whose interest
in natural history is confined to trapping the birds
upon their nests and stealing their eggs, or to organis-
ing swan drives when the unfortunate birds have shed
their flight feathers and are helpless. The numbers
of men and of swans and wild geese in these distant
Arctic lands vary inversely. Swans and geese, unlike
nearly all other birds, shed most of their flight
feathers at the same time, and remain unable to fly
till the fresh quills have grown. At such times the
"native," if unfortunately he happens to be in the
neighbourhood, takes the opportunity to kill the birds.

The Bewick's swans, though reared at such a vast
distance in the farthest North and East, come in
numbers to the shores of Ireland, where the numerous
estuaries and bays offer them a safe and congenial
winter home. It is among the curiosities of natural
history that while these two birds fly north to nest in
such high latitudes, the wild mute swans, the originals
of our domesticated birds, nest at least a thousand
miles farther south, and never visit our shores. They
do not breed west of the Rhine, or farther north than
Denmark and the south of Sweden.

The flight of these, which are probably the largest
of all swans, is a most beautiful sight ; but owing
to the foolish and cruel custom of pinioning all
swans on the Thames, it is not so often enjoyed
as it mighty be. There are now so many swans on

WILD SWANS 83

the lower reaches of the river that in severe winters
they are half starved ; but as they cannot fly, it is
impossible for the poor birds to move away in search
of food, and they often get pinched and hurt by the
moving ice. Apart from the cruelty to the birds of
depriving them of their power of flight, the loss to
the river scenery can only be realised by those who
have lived near a colony of half-wild swans and seen
them constantly in flight. The birds fly in ordered
ranks, if in any number, and each stroke of the wings
makes a clear and musical sound. The stretch of
the pinions is often as much as eight and a half feet
across, and though its flight is not apparently fast, the
progress of the bird is very rapid. This may be seen
almost any day on some of the south coast estuaries,
and a flight of swans out over the bay is a sight not
to be forgotten. Their great size and snowy plumage
keep them in sight longer than any other birds could
possibly be visible to the eye. Their flight looks like
the beginning of a journey into infinity, and Tenny-
son's description of a rock-built palace that —

" Lent broad view to distant lands,
Far as the wild swan wings, to where the sky
Dips down to sea and sands,"

is admirably appropriate.

Whence the legend of the swan song came is not
very certain. It was one of the tales of the ancients ;
but, unlike most other fables concerning birds and
beasts, was very early questioned. Even Pliny, in his
great reservoir of nonsense about animals, doubted it ;

84 ANIMAL ARTISANS

and so did Athenaeus and others. Sir Thomas Browne
noted it among his "vulgar errors." But the call of
the hooper swan as it flies is very striking, and when
uttered by night may well have given rise to the
story.

The mute swan, now seen either tame or half wild
all over England, is believed to have been first brought
from Cyprus by Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Conse-
quently, as the visits of the wild Arctic swans were
mainly confined to the coast, there was little material
in England for the growth of idealisation such as the
beauty, dignity, and whiteness of the birds suggest. The
early swan legends are all of Northern origin. Norse
story made them the sacred birds of the goddess
Freyr, and identified them with the form and colour
of her chariot in the clouds. The whiteness and
purity of the bird's colour naturally gave rise to the
myth of the swan maidens, too good for any one in
this world, and able at will to transform their shape
and take wing to the virginal snows. Lohengrin's
mysterious arrival and departure in the boat drawn
by a swan may naturally be traced to the riddle of
the silent and sudden coming and going of the
migrating swans, " coming no man knoweth whence,
and going no man knoweth whither." In the legend
of Helias all the other six brothers and sisters were
changed into swans — in other words, were given the
power of safety and flight at will — while the known
confidence of the birds in man (in the South, where
they were early half domesticated) typified their
willingness to return to human shape.

WILD SWANS 85

It is perhaps not generally known that Edward I.
of England took the swan for his badge or totem.
When his son the Prince of Wales was knighted, and
then conferred the Order on three hundred of his
companions of noble birth, two swans are said to have
been brought into the hall "gorgeously caparisoned,
and with their beaks gilded, a most pleasing sight to
all beholders," and upon these swans the King swore
before all his Court to avenge the death of Comyn,
whom Robert Bruce had stabbed in the church where
he had appointed a meeting to settle their claims to
the Scotch throne.

CHAPTER XII

TAME CYGNETS

WHEN swans were more highly thought of as pro-
perty than they are now, a swan-owner brought an
action against another swan-owner to assert his rights
to halve the cygnets of a brood. He proved by the
swan-marks that though one parent belonged to the
rival claimant, the other belonged to him, and sug-
gested a division. The case was taken before Lord
Chief Justice Coke, who based his decision on the high
moral and domestic character of swans, evidence of
which was adduced to his complete satisfaction. " The
swan," he said, " is the husband of one wife, and re-
mains so until death. Consequently, the children are
of undeniable parentage." As the two parents be-
longed in this case to different owners, he decided,
with a wisdom that Solomon could not have excelled,
that the offspring of swans sprung from these mixed
marriages should be divided, the odd cygnet, if there
was one, going to the owner of the hen swan.

The reputation for conjugal constancy so set up,
and with some justice, for the swans does not, it is to
be feared, extend to them in their relation as parents,
which leaves very much to be desired. They show,
in fact, an odd mixture of instinctive sense and in-

TAME CYGNETS 87

credible stupidity about their nesting and nursery
arrangements. When one sees a hen swan reaching
out her neck as she sits on her eggs, and steadily
building up her nest, while heavy rain threatens and
there is a chance of a flood, it suggests sense and
foresight. Yet the same swan will never think of
picking up her cygnets and replacing them in the
nest if they fall out into the wet grass, and lie there
dying of cold, while she stolidly tries to hatch off an
addled egg. And an old cock swan will often kill
every one of his children in the autumn if they are
left on the same isolated piece of water with him.

The curious limitation of swan character and brains
does not so seriously affect their offspring when the
nest is built on the flat banks of a shallow lake or on
a tideless stream. There the cygnets can almost take
care of themselves ; but if they get into any sort of
dilemma, the old birds seem to have no idea of helping
them out of it.

The two swans which make Chiswick Eyot their
headquarters, and are the pair which nest lower
down the Thames, i.e. nearer to the City of London,
than any other, have exceptional difficulties to con-
tend with. The tide falls some fifteen feet, and at low
water, if they have a brood, and insist on taking
the little birds up on to the eyot, they have to scramble
up a very high and steep bank, with weltering pools
of mud below. For several years these birds built a
nest and sat with a patience that deserved success, and
yet the eggs were always stolen or addled. Then
four cygnets were hatched, but only survived a day, for

88 ANIMAL ARTISANS

they got out of the nest while the hen swan calmly sat
on, and, though replaced twice by kind friends who
got very wet and muddy in doing so, they fell out
again before night, and as neither swan thought of
picking them up, they were all dead next morning.
Next year the swans refused to use a good high nest
made for them, which would have raised their eggs
out of reach of the spring-tides, and kept to one of
their own. The result was that the bird was twice
floated off her nest and all the eggs but one spoiled.
Strange to say, this egg hatched, and for a whole day
it was just possible to hear the little piping voice of
the cygnet, which the bird kept under her. Next day
she left the nest at high water and took the little bird
for a swim. When a cygnet is tired its instinct is to
climb on to the old swan's back, but the stupid swan
did not give it a " leg up " (swans do this by putting
out their broad webbed foot, on to which the cygnets
first scramble), but kept giving the cygnet her " wash."
She soon returned to the island, and as the tide was
still high, the infant managed to scramble up after her
and into the nest.

Next day the swan brought the cygnet down to the
river at half ebb, and kept it there until the channel
below was dry, and the steep bank, about twenty
times as high as the cygnet, had to be climbed. The
little creature scrambled up part of the way, and then
rolled down and fell on its back in the mud. Now,
little swans are built like a flat-iron or a Dutch barge,
and when once on their backs can no more get up than
can a fat sheep, a fact which we discovered soon after we

TAME CYGNETS 89

began to rear this one. It was quite helpless when on
its back even when two months old, and could only lie
and kick. The old swans looked on to see how long
it would go on kicking, but otherwise took no interest
in the proceedings, even when the cygnet was rescued,
nearly suffocated, from the mud. All they did after
it was restored to them was to take it up the slope and
let it roll down again. So the baby was once more
rescued, and after this had happened three times it was
taken indoors, washed clean, dried, and put to bed with
a hot-water bottle. When it awoke it was quite dry
and warm, with a coat like grey plush, and a good
appetite. Unfortunately, though it called out loudly
for food, it would not eat a morsel of anything which
was given to it. One might as well have offered a
baby an omelette or a mutton-chop as try to induce
the cygnet to feed except in its own particular way.

What this way is, is rather interesting. If an old hen
swan with her newly hatched brood is watched, it will
be noticed that she pulls up water-weeds from below
the surface and strews them on the water, making a
kind of call to the cygnets. It has been said that the
swan is " feeding its young on water-weeds." She is
doing nothing of the kind. She is giving them these
weeds in order that they may suck off them the slime,
and eggs of the entomostraca and other invisible
creatures in the water. Also, there is often a number
of the eggs of fish on these weeds, with the larvae of
snails and other molluscs and insects. All this, a kind
of natural river soup or " frame food," forms the pap
on which an infant swan is brought up, and it won't

90 ANIMAL ARTISANS

be happy till it gets it. In addition, it will only get
it in its own peculiar way, which is by "bibbling,"
to use the words of the Norfolk gunners. It takes
the weed in its beak and sucks and works it between
its mandibles, just as ducks "bibble" in the muddy
margin of a ditch.

To improvise the eggs of entomostraca and put
them on water-weeds is simply an impossibility, and
though we gave our cygnet the tips of rose-bushes
covered with green blight, which it at once washed
and " bibbled " and sucked so long as any blight was
left, this was a poor and scanty substitute. So it
had to be fed, i.e. crammed, with a weak mixture of
Gilbertson and Page's duck-meal, specially made for
young wild-ducks, and muddy Thames water. As it
threw away every scrap which it could, and as far as
it could, this was a messy and troublesome process.
The lady who fed it had to wear an apron up to her
chin. Also, as the little swan was intensely distressed
if it got any meal on its fluff, and made desperate
efforts to clean itself, instead of even trying to
swallow the food, it had to have a bib too, to keep
it clean and not too miserable. As it would take
very little food at a time, and woke up complain-
ing bitterly at all times of the night, the first three
days were rather critical, both for the cygnet and its
mistress, who began to show signs of exhaustion about
the same time as the little swan began to show equal
evidence that it had "turned the corner" and was
going to live to be an ornament to its country. As
it sat out on the lawn with all the gravity of a swan

TAME CYGNETS 91

of twenty summers, we noticed that it put down
its beak to taste the drops which had fallen after a
shower. Hitherto it had resolutely refused to drink
water, or to swallow anything, without compulsion.
But when we saw it drink we promptly got a saucer,
mixed a pinch of duck-meal with plenty of water,
put it down before the cygnet, and dipped its beak
in. It squeaked resentfully, but seemed to like it.
Presently it sat down before the saucer and bibbled
away as if it had known how to do it all its life.
From that hour there was no more trouble with it
so far as food was concerned, or indeed in any other
respect. It would take its saucer of duck-meal,
mixed very weak, always sitting down to eat it ; after
which it would get up, shake its ridiculous little
wings, and either walk off to its basket or sit down
by the person who had fed it.

As probably very few people have had a cygnet
under close observation, not only by day but by
night, until it grew into a swan, perhaps the follow-
ing notes of its habits may be new. When hatched
it weighed about 6 oz. It did not begin to grow
for a week, and then gained about 4 oz. per week.
Until it weighed 6 Ib. its wing-bones were quite
rudimentary, like those of a penguin. The cygnet's
plumage j consisted entirely of soft grey down, and
the first signs of feathers appeared round its eyes.
It carefully oiled and brushed itself several times a
day, using not only its beak but the back of its head
as a brush, and rubbing every part of its body over
with this, especially the flanks. If it were too wet

92 ANIMAL ARTISANS

to get dry quickly, it was pleased to be dried with
a towel. It liked to swim in the bath, but shrieked
if it could not see over the top. This leads up to
a very interesting instinct in the young swan. The
great danger of its life is being unable to get out of
the water when tired. This was the danger which
had nearly killed it when we saved it. A deeply
seated instinct prompts the little creature to climb up
any obstacle. It climbs on to its mother's back, and
climbs up the banks of rivers or ponds. To aid it to
do this it has quite sharp claws. But it is never happy
till it has clambered to the top of anything on which
it happens to be. If taken on a lady's lap it would
generally try to climb up higher, and would be quite
contented when it got on to her shoulder. In the
same way it was quite ready to climb on to the
back of the setter which was its companion for a
time.

Its last meal was supper, at n P.M., which it always
ate by lamplight on a balcony. It was then quite ready
to go to sleep in a basket of hay, with the lid shut
down, in which it would talk itself to sleep. For one
of the most curious points in this little swan's be-
haviour was that, unlike the grown-ups, which are
known by the scientific name of " mute swan," it was
very seldom quiet. It had all sorts and kinds of notes,
from a most contented little pipe up to a doleful and
complaining shriek, as, for instance, when it first saw a
cat. The happier it was the more syllables it used,
until when very contented and half asleep it almost
twittered like a swallow. It did this when half awake,

TAME CYGNETS 93

too, or if a candle was lighted at night when it was
sleeping.

It was quite obvious that its parents would kill
it by leading it up the steep bank which it could
not climb if it were given back to them. But when it
was shown to them safe and sound on the bank they
seemed so anxious to have it back that another larger
cygnet was fetched up from Brading Harbour in the
Isle of Wight, and after being kept with the little one
for a day to rest after its journey, was handed over to
the old swans. At first they made a great fuss over it,
adopted it, and swam about in a family way ; but
within half-an-hour afterwards the cock swan attacked
it and tried to drown it, running it down as a big
ship might a little one. So that bird also had to be
rescued, and for a day or two was kept with the baby
swan, which was about one-fifth of its size. It was
ridiculous to see the way in which the civilised infant
patronised it, showed it how to eat duck-meal out of
a soup-plate, and pecked it when it was not wanted.
Then the bigger cygnet was sent back to its father and
mother and four brothers and sisters in the Isle of
Wight, and for a week all went well. But a few days
later the father swan, tired perhaps of its stories of
London life, attacked the unfortunate cygnet ; which,
after living alone for some days up a ditch, was again
rescued and taken back to live as the humble follower
and admirer of its friend the foundling cygnet, in the
most happy circumstances, with a garden and pool all
to themselves.

CHAPTER XIII

THIRSTY BIRDS

AT the end of a recent summer drought, after weeks
of burning sunshine and dusty haze, the atmosphere
underwent such a change, prophetic of rain, that the
windows of Windsor Castle could be counted from the
Great Western line near Slough. Then the thirsty
birds also began to show signs that rain was at hand.
They twittered and sang while the clouds gathered,
and when after a night of continuous downpour the
tempest ceased, they crowded to the pools and puddles,
or to the lakelets left in the depressions of lead roofs,
and there drank and bathed and splashed the water
over their heads and backs as if they never could have
enough of it. It is a sad " come-down " for a respect-
able family blackbird which has lived in the same
garden for years to have to wash in the overflow of
the garden hose, as he had been doing lately, while
in places where no such appliances are found the
birds had been suffering from a water famine of a very
serious kind.

Possibly because their powers of flight enable even
desert species to drink at least once daily, most birds
do not seem to have acquired the power of going with-
out water which several mammals possess. They gener-

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THIRSTY BIRDS 95

ally drink at least three times a day in summer — in
the morning about nine o'clock, again between half-
past twelve and one, and again before they go to roost.

It might be thought that the birds of heaths and
commons, such as whinchats, stonechats, wheatears, and
the meadow pipit, which is often found on very waterless
ground, do not drink often. But if the watering places
near such heaths are watched, it will be seen that these
birds fly considerable distances to visit them. Between
the sea-marshes of Orford, on the Suffolk coast, and
the fine old park of Campsea Ash, some miles inland,
lies the wild and desolate tract of Tunstall Heath, over
which the road passes. In a hollow close by the road
is a pool, which only dries up entirely in very hot
weather. To this pond there fly from the different
parts of this dry and heathery tract birds of all kinds,
especially the heath birds proper, as well as such species
as yellow-hammers, linnets, chaffinches, and the small
warblers. Each bird comes alone, flies down to the
water, drinks repeatedly, and then wings its way back
to its own particular haunt. When the pool dries up
they still fly there for a few days to see if any water is
left, and finding none, hang round the spot for some
time, apparently at a loss where to go next.

In a long drought, and almost equally in a pro-
tracted frost, English birds suffer much from thirst.
They may be seen sitting with their beaks wide open at
such times, exhibiting every sign of discomfort, and pos-
sibly of suffering. Rooks and jackdaws are among the
thirstiest, if we may judge from their behaviour. Jack-
daws arc ready to drink at almost any hour of the day,

96 ANIMAL ARTISANS

and being clever and inquisitive birds, are highly in-
genious at finding out where water is kept. Unfortu-
nately, they are not equally thoughtful as to the means
of reaching it, and both tame jackdaws and wild ones
are constantly "found drowned" in sheep-tanks and
garden water-carriers into which they have fallen in
endeavouring to drink.

On the downs, whither most of the rooks from the
lower ground move at the close of summer, they may
be seen, together with the starlings, sitting in long
lines in the evening, waiting to drink up what the
sheep leave in the troughs. The scene at such times
is often quite amusing. The shepherds are at the
draw-well, three hundred feet deep, winding up the
buckets. The sheep crowd densely round them in
a solid mass, often jumping over each other's backs,
or on to the packed flock, in the hope of wedging
into a place. The starlings, eager to drink too, fly
on to the sheep's backs and heads, and peer over into
the troughs, while the rooks, equally thirsty but less
bold, wait their turn for the " leavings " till the flock
is driven off to be folded for the night.

For the ground birds, especially the young ones
unable to fly, or only capable of moving by means of
their wings for short distances, long droughts are a
very serious matter. On many parts of the downs
most of the ponds dry up, and all that the little par-
tridges find to drink are the drops of dew in the
morning. The result is a great mortality, which also
occurs on waterless parts of moors among the young
grouse. On many partridge manors tin troughs or

THIRSTY BIRDS 97

earthenware pans are set down in accessible places
beside the fields, and the keeper drives a water-cart
round to fill them daily. If one of these temporary
drinking-places is watched, it will be found that the
various broods in the neighbourhood visit it punctually
every day at 12.30, each bird taking several sips at the
water before it runs off again into the corn.

On the Lockinge Estate, both on the hills and also
in the large meadows in the vale, a regular system of
water-supply was constructed by the late Lord Wantage
for the use of the cattle on these extensive pastures.
There were large reservoirs, supplied partly by wind-
mill pumps on the hills, and from these the water was
carried to circular stone tanks, like a well-head ten feet
across, which were so supplied as to be usually almost
brimful. Both these and the reservoirs were ideal drink-
ing-places for the birds. The wood-pigeons flew from
all parts of the downs to drink at the sloping sides of
the reservoirs (which were carefully railed and netted
round at some distance from the water, to prevent
sheep or hares and rabbits from getting in and being
drowned) ; while smaller birds, and also partridges,
used the tanks when full. One of these was regarded
by a covey of very tame partridges as their especial
property. They used to dust and sun themselves on
one side of the tank, and go round to the other to
lie in the shade at midday. When thirsty the whole
covey would fly up on to the rim of the tank, and,
bending down, would alternately sip the water, and
then raise their heads to " say grace," in a very pretty
and amusing way.

9 8 ANIMAL ARTISANS

As with human beings, so with birds it is easy to
reach the water-side, but not always so easy to obtain a
position from which to drink. Men, cattle, and even
birds, except the swallows, which often drink on the
wing (unless they are only seizing gnats' eggs, which
the way that they dip their beaks again and again at
the same place seems rather to negative), need proper
" watering-places." Even on a river like the Thames
you will only find regular birds' drinking-places at
considerable intervals, and the same is often the case
on small streams if the banks are at all steep, and by the
drains of fresh-water marshes. The bird needs a plat-
form almost level with the water from which to bend
down its head and drink. It also very much dislikes
drinking in any place where there is a steep bank
behind it. Thus on the Thames cautious birds, such
as rooks, pigeons, and peewits, will not drink at the
foot of the ordinary steep bank three or four feet high,
but nearly always select a cattle watering-place with a
smooth adit. Otherwise they are liable to surprise by
persons coming suddenly up behind them.

In the tropical forest it is believed that the birds
living on the tops of the gigantic trees find part of their
drinking water in the cups of the large pitcher-shaped
flowers and fungi which grow on them, in which even
small molluscs and other water creatures are found.

It is a great mistake, and a cause of much uninten-
tional cruelty, to think that parrots never drink. They
do, and require clean water, and plenty of it.

Even such desert-loving birds as the sand-grouse fly
daily to the drinking-pools. Mr. J. A. Bryden gives a

THIRSTY BIRDS 99

charming description of the coming of the flocks of
these swift and swallow-like birds to the " pans " in
the dried-up veldt of South Africa, whither they fly
in thousands to drink.

Water-birds drink quite as eagerly as others. When
an eminent Yorkshire politician and Temperance leader
was delivering a more than usually eloquent speech,
one of the audience remarked admiringly: " Eh ! he's
'ad a sup o' warter to-day, has Ed'ard ! " Whatever
its stimulating effects in this instance, there seems no
doubt that ducks of all kinds regard a " sup o' warter "
as an indispensable preliminary to any enterprise what-
ever. They drink and turn up their eyes in ecstasy
when they enter the water, and again before leaving it ;
before eating, and after eating; before beginning a
water tournament, and after it. Medical men say that
sipping water gently stimulates the brain. Apparently
the ducks think so too.

CHAPTER XIV

HOW ANIMALS LEARNT TO CLIMB

AMONG the forest tribes of India there is one " parish "
which elects its chief on principles not mentioned in
the most exhaustive treatise on village communities.
It is set deep in the forest, and in the centre of the
clearing stands one enormous tree, with a branchless
trunk running up straight for some 150 feet. This
giant tree supplies what may be called the communal
fund of the tribe, for among its branches the wild bees
have built their combs for generations, and as the tree
and the village grow older together, and the claimants
on the fund increase, so do the number and weight
of the combs from the labour of the procreant bees.
The only human work needed to gather the harvest
of wax — the honey they value little — is that required
to climb the towering tree, and when once there, to
smoke the bees and shake down the wax. Con-
sequently, the election of the headman is deter-
mined in the first instance by his skill as a climber ;
and though after election he usually succeeds in in-
vesting his office with religious or magical sanction,
and endeavours to bequeath it to his son, there is
no reason why the post should not be put up to free
competition, and awarded, at least in its qualifying

HOW ANIMALS LEARNT TO CLIMB 101

stages, to the man who " did " the tree in the best
time on record.

Climbing runs in families, for steeple-jacks are often
the sons of fathers who were in the business ; but it is
somewhat odd that man, though he learns to swim so
well that armed only with a knife he can encounter a
shark in its native element, and, judged by the extent
of his mining operations in comparison with his own
size, is a good worker underground, has never become
a good climber, or shown the slightest tendency to
become arboreal, as he has become aquatic and
subterranean.

South Sea babies that cannot walk will roll into
the sea and swim ; collier boys at fourteen will take
pick and lamp and descend into the mine almost
as naturally as young moles ; but we believe that,
in spite of the danger from wild beasts in forest
regions, and the fact that in such places there is ten
times more life on the level of the tree-tops than on
the ground, there is no single instance of a tribe which,
properly speaking, has become arboreal and learnt
to climb like monkeys. Though not a few make huts
in trees, they approach these by ladders ; and unless
in their huts, which they use as a refuge and sleeping-
place, they spend their time on the ground.

Even in forests where the upper levels of the trees
are so closely laced together that a comparatively slight
adaptation would enable the Indians to progress from
tree to tree, and where nearly the whole of the fruit,
and the greater part of the birds and animals used for
food are found only in this " upper story," man is not,

102 ANIMAL ARTISANS

and always refuses to become, a " climbing animal."
Natural repugnance to this form of enterprise seems
characteristic of savage men, and even of animals
which run no risks whatever.

African natives who have only lived in one-storied
huts show the greatest dislike to going up stairs, and
have been known to creep up on hands and knees,
while large dogs when required to ascend stairs for the
first time often refuse to do so except under strong
persuasion and with evident reluctance. A half-bred
greyhound, now immortalised in a well-known statue
of Artemis, would refuse absolutely to descend the
stairs when she had once gone up, and had to be
carried down.

In the case of the dog, this dislike to the very
modified form of climbing needed for ascending a
staircase can be accounted for on physical grounds.
A very slight fall, even a jump from a cart, will snap
a dog's foreleg below the shoulder, and it seems aware
of the danger. A fox has not the slightest disinclina-
tion to run these risks ; it climbs easily and leaps
down lightly, and though not equipped like a cat for
" swarming " a trunk, one was seen by Mr. Tom
Smith, when Master of the Craven hounds, sitting
at a height of 17 feet in a straight-stemmed beech-
tree with only small horizontal branches to aid the
climb.

That this art was acquired by animals with far
greater difficulty and effort than that of swimming, is
evident by the limited number in the same class which
have managed to become expert climbers. All the

HOW ANIMALS LEARNT TO CLIMB 103

rodents, including even the guinea-pig, are good
swimmers. The number which can climb is far more
limited, and the line seems drawn not by lack of
physical equipment, but by lack of experience, or
possibly of the desire to do so. There is, for instance,
a regular series, from the tree squirrels through the
ground squirrels to the prairie-dogs and marmots,
of very closely allied rodents. The squirrels are at
the head of the second rank of climbers, though the
lack of "swinging power" in their arms puts them
below the monkeys. The ground squirrels can
climb trees well enough, though they are terrestrial.
But the prairie-dogs and marmots, though the former
are almost as well equipped for climbing as a rat, have
never properly learnt the art, and though not afraid
to try, the former come to most lamentable grief in
their experiments. Probably the prairie-dogs, which
live mainly on level and treeless plains, never have
occasion in their lives either to jump or to climb.
When loose in a house they try to do both. Being
well equipped with claws, and very active, they manage
the climbing well enough. But as they have never
learnt either to jump or to judge distance, or that
smooth upright surfaces offer no hold on alighting,
they generally miss their object, and fall violently to
the ground. This would not matter, were it not that,
as they have large and heavy heads, they usually fall on
these, and either stun themselves or break their teeth.
This instance of climbing in the experimental stage
would be more interesting did we know how the
Australian rabbits first learnt to climb, and whether

io4 ANIMAL ARTISANS

they incurred similar failures and accidents. There
is no doubt that the great difficulty of the second
stage of their acquirement of the art was to learn how
to climb down again. Some climbing animals have
even now not learnt to come down properly, though
adepts at going up. The bear always descends a
vertical trunk " stern foremost," just as a man does ;
so do some of the opossums, the racoon (generally),
and the domestic cat, though a leopard will run down
a vertical trunk with no more hesitation than a nut-
hatch would show. A frightened cat will run up
into a position from which it cannot descend at all,
either among the small branches of a tree or on
buildings.

In the same way a cocker spaniel belonging to the
writer once followed him unnoticed up a ladder
leading on to the roof of a high building. The end
of the ladder stuck up for some feet above the level
of the roof, and when poor Jessie reached the top
she remained there, almost paralysed with fear,
unable to turn back, and afraid to jump between
the rungs on to the leads. Her terrified yelps soon
drew attention to her position, but of course she had
to be carried down the ladder that she had so readily
ascended.

Lateral movement among trees is for all animals a
far more difficult feat than vertical ascent or descent.
Unless the boughs of one tree touch those of another,
the creature must learn to jump, with the certainty
of a fall if it misses, either on alighting or in " taking
off." The "take off" is, we believe, the main diffi-

"UNABLE TO TURN BACK AND AFRAID TO JUMP ON TO THE LEADS.'

HOW ANIMALS LEARNT TO CLIMB 105

culty. Except in the case of the tree-kangaroo, a
considerable modification of the hind-foot into some-
thing like the palm of a hand, or an equipment of
sharp claws, to act like the nails in an Alpine climber's
boots and prevent slipping, is usual in the creatures
which excel in lateral climbing. The cat and the
bear, the lynx, stoat, ferret, and rat are all as yet
imperfect in this branch of their business. The
marten, on the other hand, excels even the squirrel
in this acrobatic feat, for the squirrel naturally seeks
to escape the marten or sable in this way, yet these
small carnivora make" the squirrel their principal food.

Tigers probably refuse to climb because their weight
is so great as to make any fall dangerous to a limb.
The bears, of which the grizzly climbs little, would
run the same danger had not they acquired a special
facility for rolling up first their limbs, and then their
bodies, into something like the initial curve of a
collapsing hedgehog, which preserves the bones from
injury. A bear will voluntarily roll over almost pre-
cipitous rocks and pick itself up at the bottom no
worse for its fall.

No animal with hoofs can climb a tree, though a
goat very nearly succeeds in this, and the writer has
seen a pig climb out of a sty over a paling of
boards six feet high, with interstices between each of
the boards, and three cross-pieces of wood. The pig
scrambled up just as a dog might, and when the fore-
feet were over the top of the fence, gave itself a hoist
and a wriggle and rolled over, dropping on its feet.

The climbing birds seem past masters of their busi-

106 ANIMAL ARTISANS

ness, with the exception of some of the parrots. These
are clearly not yet fully accustomed to the work ; for
every grey parrot climbs with the aid of its beak ; and
so dependent is it on this, that, even when crawling on
the ground, a parrot will pull itself along from one
projection or piece of furniture to another by laying
hold with its bill.

CHAPTER XV
CROSSBILLS AT WORK

THOUGH comparatively few persons in this country
have ever seen a wild crossbill, no mediaeval legend is
better known than that which dates its metamorphosis
from the scene on Calvary, and claims that its crossed
bill and blood-red breast were gained on the day
when the bird tried to wrench the nails from the feet
of the crucified Redeemer. Buffon termed the beak
of the crossbill a deformity of Nature, but Yarrell
watched the birds at work in captivity, and described
the means by which the crossed and loosely jointed beak
is used to extract the seeds from the close-set and
unyielding segments of the cones of the Northern
pine.

Few birds found in these islands are more interest-
ing, or more suggestive of other types and climates,
than the crossbills. Though they belong by rights
to the Northern forest, they are ever ready to establish
and maintain themselves wherever their favourite, and
almost sole food in winter — the pine seeds — can be
found. They have a colony in the high Pyrenees,
and others in the Alps. They inhabit the great pine
forests which run from Central Europe across Siberia,
and haunt the pine mountains of Japan and the uplands

107

io8 ANIMAL ARTISANS

of Formosa. In Great Britain their main home is in
the woods of Sutherlandshire, while others have dwelt
for centuries in the remains of the great Caledonian
forest near Rothiemurchus.

But at all times the crossbills are the very gipsies
of the bird world, ready at any moment to wander
into the most distant lands, where their strange forms
and unfamiliar plumage are at once the object of
comment and chronicle. Matthew Paris recorded an
invasion of birds with red plumage and beaks like
forceps, beaks which they used to cut apples in two
and eat the pips; and in the early autumn of 1822,
1825, and 1826 they appeared in flocks, like red and
green parrots, in Denmark, Holland, and France. In
one of these gipsy movements made recently the cross-
bills seem to have come to the South of England,
and there to have discovered certain places in which
they propose to stop. One of these is the Royal
Forest of Parkhurst in the Isle of Wight, a wood
largely planted with Scotch firs. The other is the
great pine-wood of Bournemouth.

Their presence among the Bournemouth woods was
recorded some ten years ago in the Spectator ; and there
is little doubt that though their quiet movements, the
height of the pines, and the peculiar adaptation of
their plumage, brilliant as it is, to the reds and greens
of pine shoots and leaves, have caused them to escape
the notice of the residents there, their numbers have
continued to increase. From the Bournemouth cliffs
to the Isle of Wight and Parkhurst Forest is a natural
autumn excursion for the birds, and in the latter they

CROSSBILLS AT WORK.

CROSSBILLS AT WORK 109

now enjoy the benefit of complete protection by a
special Order made by the Secretary of State. Thence
small flocks now roam into different parts of the
island in early autumn. With one of these com-
panies of crossbills the writer was recently able to
spend a whole summer day, in surroundings which
made it possible to watch their "life and conversa-
tion " very closely.

The flock of crossbills numbered twenty-three, and
were at once distinguished from other birds by their
flight, their notes, and by the brilliant red plumage of
the old cock birds. Even in the matter of colour the
crossbills are much more like parrots than any other
European bird, and their movements and way of feeding
suggest the same idea. Closer observation shows dif-
ferences ; but, on the whole, the resemblance is so strong
as to make a day with the crossbills suggest scenes
very different from those in which they were found.

Three small groups of young pine-trees, from 12
feet to 20 feet high, were the attraction which drew
them to the spot. When disturbed in one group they
flew to the next, except at 10 A.M. and 2 P.M., when
the whole company flew off like a flock of snow-
buntings and rested in some oaks near. When feeding
they were so tame as to continue at work within a
few feet of those who watched them, and the trees
seemed full of the birds. They worked silently, the
only sounds being the fluttering of their wings as they
fell through the branches still holding a cone which
had broken as they were examining it, the dry rustle
of falling cones, and a husking sound, exactly like

no ANIMAL ARTISANS

that made by parrots feeding on bird-seed. When
tired of work they would run out on to the outer
tufts of the pine branches and sun themselves quietly
for a few minutes before resuming operations.

Their striking and characteristic plumage was then
clearly seen. The general character of the colouring
of these Northern substitutes for parrots is that the
male birds are a more or less brilliant rosy red. The
shades vary through all grades from rose colour to
rusty brown or orange-brown, but an old cock cross-
bill ought to carry rose colour in many parts of his
plumage, especially on those parts of the back above
the tail and under the long feathers of the wing.
Many of these Isle of Wight crossbills wore this
garment in most resplendent fashion, the brightest
and most brilliant tint showing constantly when they
fluttered their wings and showed the parts beneath,
as they tried to balance themselves on the tips of
the pine shoots. Others sitting sunning themselves
looked like big red fruit on the trees.

The females and young birds were all green, like
a greenfinch, but with a very marked difference. The
plumage is not compact like that of other finches, but
soft, and with no edges or shapes of feathers showing
anywhere. The dull mossy green of the head, and
especially of the breast, was marked with blurred stripes
like those on the long-eared owl — also a pine-haunting
bird, and closely resembling the colour and markings
of some of the odd New Zealand parrots which live
among mosses and ferns. This striped loose plumage
harmonises so exactly with the tint of the pine-needles

CROSSBILLS AT WORK in

that the birds are almost invisible when at work, while
even the red and orange-brown of the cocks is much
less visible than might be supposed, for this matches
the bright red-brown of the young pine-shoots and
the bark of the branches.

In the low trees among which the crossbills spent
their day it was possible to see at close quarters their
method of dealing with the fir-cones and extracting
the seed.

Many of the cones had fallen and were lying on
the ground. These the birds carefully searched
for. Half-a-dozen, both red and green birds,
would descend on to the bed of pine-needles and
inspect the cones. We do not remember to have
read any account of crossbills working on the
ground. They are less parrot-like than when in the
branches, for they hop instead of creeping like a
parrot. But if a cone is searched where it lies, the
bird throws one foot over it just as a parrot does,
rests its breast across it, and thrusts its mandibles
very deliberately into the interstices, just like a parrot
feeding. Often the bird picks up a cone in its beak
and flies into a low branch of a pine to extract the
seeds there. When feeding on the tree itself, the
bird holds the cone firmly in one foot, trying not
to detach it from the bough, and searches every side,
sometimes hanging head downwards, sometimes tail
downwards, and if the cone becomes detached, keep-
ing its grasp, and fluttering down through the pine-
tufts till it can catch hold of one with its disengaged
foot.

ii2 ANIMAL ARTISANS

This constant fluttering and falling would break
stiflrer and closer feathers than those of the crossbill.
As it is, the looser ones give way, while the stiff tail
and wing feathers do become ragged and broken.

While the flock were at work the ' grove was quite
silent, except for the constant fluttering, and the
falling of the cones which they had detached by
accident or finished searching. So close were the
birds that they could be seen "husking" the seeds
when extracted, and it was noticed that their beaks
showed various degrees of length and crossing of
the mandible. In more than one the tips did not
project beyond the depth of the other mandible, and
it was only when the bird looked " full face " at its
visitors that the crossing was visible. About one-
sixteenth of an inch was the average overlap.

The difficulty of extracting the seed by any other
means than those provided by the peculiar bill of
these birds must be very great. So tough and rigid
are the louvres of the cone that, unless they gape from
ripeness, the seed cannot be extracted without the
greatest difficulty even with a strong knife. Beyond
the fortification of these rigid louvres of wood, the
seed itself lies in a special little socket, in the very
core of the cone. According to Yarrell, the bird first
opens its beak until the points do not cross, this being
possible because the mandibles have some lateral play.
It then pushes this in like a wedge, wrenches the
mandibles crosswise again, and so prising open the
crack, extracts the seed.

The seed itself lies at the base of a little wing, like

CROSSBILLS AT WORK 113

that of a small dragon-fly, and the birds manage to ex-
tract this without breaking it, or the light husk which
envelops the kernel. They could be seen " husking"
this, and pushing the " wing " and the husk out of their
mouths with their tongues, just as a parrot does. The
kernel, when extracted, is no larger than a mustard seed,
and tastes like a morsel of Brazil-nut flavoured with
turpentine. The crossbills evidently consider it very
delicious, and would not taste buckwheat seeds, which
were inserted into cones as an experiment. The apples
which they are usually accused of destroying were
perhaps not ripe enough to attract them, for neither
these nor the peaches which were hanging in numbers
on the walls close by could tempt them from the
resinous dainty of the pine-trees.

H

CHAPTER XVI

THE SENSE OF DIRECTION

WHEN the pageant of the year is almost over, and
autumn decks the leaves in their brightest colours to
say farewell, we watch the twittering swallows gather
in companies on our roofs, ere they pass in the night
and are no more seen. And year after year, when
the cold and darkness of winter are past and the
hum of insects is heard again in the air, the warmth-
loving birds come once more back to nest under
the very eaves which gave them welcome before.

But though years of patient inquiry have taught
where they go when they leave us, and even the routes
they travel by are known, we know not what power
impels them unerringly forward, straight to the far-
distant point they have chosen as their winter home.

So far as we can see, they must possess a sense of
direction, shared by all migratory birds, and in a lesser
degree by some other animals and certain races of
men. The possession of such a sense would account
equally well for the long flights of homing pigeons,
and to many people seems the only possible explana-
tion of their performances. But one of the highest
practical authorities on the subject has always em-
phasised the rational side of the homing pigeons'
flight, and maintaining that they require training over

THE SENSE OF DIRECTION 115

the whole of the distance they are to fly, draws a
broad distinction between the homing of individual
birds and the instinct which directs migration,
common to every individual of a species. It is doubt-
ful if this distinction can be maintained, for not
only are there well-authenticated cases in which un-
trained pigeons have "homed" long distances, but
the very methods of pigeon-training go far to show
that the birds possess a sense of direction.

If homers were only trained over short stages, say,
eight to ten miles at a time, they might actually
learn the whole of their route by sight ; but they
are occasionally flown from Brighton to London at
the first toss without any intermediate stages, so that
if they are not guided by any sense of direction, they
must be conceded powers of sight which would be at
least as wonderful. Under perfect atmospheric con-
ditions it would, no doubt, be possible from a height
of only a few hundred feet above Brighton to see
on the horizon a dark mass which would represent
London ; but how, failing a sense of direction, could
a bird which had never seen the great city from
such an aspect before possibly know what that mass
represented, much less recognise in it any particular
London landmarks ? Moreover, if the best authenti-
cated examples of the homing instinct in various birds
and animals are graded and classified, we believe that
the results will show, on a graduated scale, the con-
nection between the least remarkable instances which
can be explained by reference to experience or reasoning
power, and the most remarkable, such as the migration
of birds by night across wide intervals of sea, in

n6 ANIMAL ARTISANS

which the sense of sight is in abeyance, and some
other guiding power independent of visible landmarks
must be assumed to exist.

A rather striking, but not inexplicable, group of
cases comprises most instances of foxes, dogs, and
other quadrupeds which, after removal to considerable
distances, have found their way back to their original
homes. The Duke of Beaufort's vixen, which returned
from Badminton across the Severn to its old quarters
in the Forest of Dean, is typical of this class of
" returning animals/' though this case is far less extra-
ordinary than that of a fox which returned from Sussex
to its original home on Lord Hothfield's estate in
Northumberland. Both the fox and the dog are
exceptionally intelligent animals ; and given a strong
original faculty for finding their way across country,
the roaming propensity of foxes at certain seasons
and the reasoning powers of the dog must be held
to account for much of their success in returning
home from exile. Probably the following instance
of homing by young wild-ducks should come into
the same group, as the distance traversed was com-
paratively short, and the little birds may have been
able to ask their way.

The ducklings, numbering about three hundred, were
hatched in incubators, reared under hens, and kept in a
rearing field with young pheasants, away from any pond,
until about five weeks old. They were then packed in
hampers, placed in a cart, and driven along a rather
circuitous route to a large pond in a park about half
a mile away. Between the park and the rearing field
there are large kitchen-gardens intersected by several

Y~7\J

?'>

v

W*'

THE SENSE OF DIRECTION 117

walls, and beyond those a farm homestead, a small
wood, two or three fields, and a high-road with
banks and hedges on each side of it. By the evening
most of the ducklings were back in the rearing field,
too exhausted to quack, and others on their way ; but
none of them returned along the road they had gone
by, and as far as obstacles would allow, they took a
bee-line straight for their destination.

In the second class of instances experience plays a
large part ; but an original faculty prior to experience
is conceded by the most competent observers. In
this group are comprised all the feats of the domesti-
cated homing pigeons, of whose original and surviving
faculty of return, unaided by experience, the follow-
ing two examples, given by Mr. James Huie of
Glasgow, in a paper on the Antwerp carrier-pigeon
which appeared in the Journal of Horticulture, may be
quoted. Some Antwerp homing pigeons, brought
from the Continent, were kept by Mr. Huie in
Glasgow. After three years some young birds were
sent from Glasgow, vid Manchester, to Ledbury in
Herefordshire. At Ledbury these pigeons were kept
confined until they were sitting on a second brood
of eggs. Then they were liberated, and were found
back at their home in Glasgow two days later. They
had never been trained, and their experience of the
journey was limited to what they could ascertain
from inside their hamper. In the Fanciers' Chronicle
of August 20, 1880, a still more striking instance
of a long return-flight of an untrained pigeon was
recorded by Mr. J. P. Taylor of Moss Croft,
Gateshead-on-Tyne. He bought some homing

n8 ANIMAL ARTISANS

pigeons of a Mr. Mills in Brussels in February
1879. On 8th August 1880 one of these birds
was set at liberty, and on the morning of nth
August it was back in its loft in Brussels, a distance
of four hundred miles. This pigeon was a hen bird
three years old.

While training seems to be nearly always necessary,
and the above cases are rather exceptional, they still
indicate the direction in which the origin of the
homing power is to be sought. It is instinct modified
by domestication. It occasionally survives in full force
even in so long domesticated a species as the pigeon ;
but as a rule it is only the capacity for training which
is transmitted. Incidentally it should be noticed
that this acquired, or regained, faculty is transmitted ;
for whereas sixty years ago twenty-five miles was
considered a creditable flight, the birds are now easily
trained up to one hundred miles in their first season.

A third class of examples comprises the instances of
the homing faculty in man. The instances have for a
general feature the fact that this faculty is most deve-
loped in the least " reasoning " races, and seems, if not
purely instinctive, to proceed from intuition to action,
without any intervening process of reason or debate.

One instance shows clearly how common reason-
ing kills the faculty. We quote Mr. Stillman's
account of his early experiences in the forest of the
Adirondacks, where by much solitary adventure he
had gained the homing faculty without reference to
landmarks.

" I had set out with my skiff to explore the
course of a stream which meandered through a forest

THE SENSE OF DIRECTION 119

absolutely unexplored. I abandoned the boat and
the stream to ascertain if a short cut and ' carry '
might not lead to an unencumbered continuation of
navigation, and suddenly came on a stream (the same,
of course), running, as it seemed, in a contrary direc-
tion. In less time than I could tell it I lost all
sense of direction, and though the sun was still
several hours high, I could not convince myself that
it was not shining out of the north, and that to get
back to my boat I must go in the direction contrary
to that in which I had left it. ... The agitation
which supervened in an instant was little short of
insanity." The ordinary course in such an emergency
would be to torture the brain with recollection and
inferences, and recover the track by an appeal to
reason. The traveller, having in his previous wander-
ings in the forest acquired the c< sense of direction,"
did exactly the opposite. " I sat down, covered my
eyes, and had still sufficient command of my nerves
to wait for will to regain the power over reason ; and
when I opened my eyes I had my compass again
correctly."

The sun was shining, so that by abandoning the
minor promptings of reason the traveller might still
have regained his course by referring to the sun as
guide. But the point is that he regained the sense
of direction without it. This instance would be
peculiarly interesting in any case, because the homing
instinct is seldom developed in a civilised man, and
more rarely still in one who is educated and able to
record his experiences.

In uncivilised man it is far commoner, and the

120 ANIMAL ARTISANS

following instance of its manifestation in an Australian
aboriginal occurred a few years ago in Yorkshire. A
gentleman who was interested in ethnology, and had
been for some time resident in Australia, when return-
ing to England with his family brought also an
aboriginal girl as a domestic servant. They stayed

at a house at B in the East Riding, and after

a few weeks moved on to another house at C ,

some fourteen miles away as the crow flies. The
journey was made in a closed carriage, and the road
was circuitous. A few days later the girl disappeared,

and news arrived that she had come back to B .

She had not returned by the road, and did not explain
how she found her way, merely stating that she
wanted to return there and had come ; but such an
unusual-looking woman had naturally attracted some
attention on the way, and inquiries elsewhere proved
that she had come straight across country from one
house to the other. There are no large natural
obstacles between the two houses, but the country
is rather flat and intersected by large ditches, too deep
to ford and too wide for most horses to jump. The
girl could not cross these except at certain points,
but apparently did not lose her way in spite of these
diversions.

A correspondent familiar with the Central American
forests states that the Indians there rely on experience
to find their path. Mr. Selous, on the other hand,
declares that "there is one faculty which the Bush-
men possess in a remarkable degree, which enables
them to find their way, by day or night, through
level, pathless forests, where there are no landmarks

THE SENSE OF DIRECTION 121

whatever, to any point they wish to reach where
they have ever been before." This is the homing
instinct exactly as we see it developed in animals,
and it seems entirely to coincide with the kind of
mental projection of the attention to a definite known
point, which the " sense of direction " supposes.
There is nothing in the observed phenomena of the
successful homing of wild man in the forest to
contradict the assumption that, when once he has
mentally fixed the point at which he desires to arrive,
he keeps it before him in his mental vision, and
u goes for it " without conscious reference to particular
landmarks, tokens, or signs. It is open to him to
use all these, as the traveller uses the stars when
crossing the desert by night ; but we believe that in
many cases the " homing " man projects himself by a
mental effort, which abstracts his attention from land-
marks, yet carries him surely to the goal. Into this
abstraction particulars and inferences only introduce
confusion, as in the position described by Mr. Still-
man. The homing of Australian birds over one
thousand miles of intervening ocean to the islands of
New Zealand, does not seem very far removed in kind
from that of the Bushmen, or of Mr. Stillman in his
acquired disuse of reasoning, or from the isolated cases
of the return of untrained pigeons from a distance.
No one acquainted with the recent records of migra-
tion claims to have discovered a solution of the faculty
of return to a given spot across the open seas. What
guides the old birds is the problem at present offered
for solution. The case of the young, who are said

122 ANIMAL ARTISANS

to travel back to their parents' home before these
start on their journey, we must set aside at present,
until it can be proved that the route and time of their
migration arc separate and distinct.

But given that the bird, flying from Australia to
New Zealand, knows, like the Bushman, the place
to which it desires to go, the graduated instances of
the exercise of the faculty which accomplishes this
desire hint the direction in which the answer must
be sought. If a civilised Englishman, planted on the
sea-sands, can, when blindfolded, walk for some
fifty yards almost straight in the direction of a point
on which he has previously fixed his gaze, we must
assume that he has the sense of direction in its
rudimentary form. The ability to do this depends,
first, on the actual or mental selection of a point
to aim at ; secondly, on a sensibility to any deviation
from the straight line towards this point. This
sensibility is subjective and not objective, and is only
liable to distraction and disturbance by landmarks.
It should work best in a vacuum. The migrating
bird, as it launches itself from the land into the upper
air, enjoys a high degree of freedom from those
suggestions and hints to the reason supplied by
material objects. In its flight by night the isolation
from physical reminders between the starting-point
and the goal is almost complete ; and it should be
noted that the main source of error to the birds
is precisely the occurrence of these material signs,
such as the lighthouse on Heligoland, and other
beacons set in the sea.

CHAPTER XVII

THE "SIXTH SENSE"

THE recent disaster at San Francisco was so over-
whelming, and the destruction which followed it so
complete, that all side issues have for the time been
forgotten, and as yet no one seems to have troubled
to inquire whether either men or animals in the
doomed city experienced premonitory symptoms of
unrest and apprehension similar to those remem-
bered in the case of other great disturbances of earth
or air.

But judging by the history of recent but less
serious natural catastrophes, such warnings could
scarcely have been absent. The day before the land-
slip at Amalfi, a lady who had been staying in the
hotel refused to remain there for another night be-
cause she felt certain that the earth was moving ; and
a number of cases are on record in which horses, dogs,
a monkey, and even ducks, showed signs of panic for
a day, two days, or even longer, before the great
earthquake on the Riviera in 1897. A lady at Nice
remarked the bad condition of the horse she usually
drove, and told her coachman to take it home and to
bring another in a brougham from the livery-stables

for her. The hired horse seemed as timid and as

193

1 24 ANIMAL ARTISANS

weak as her own. The driver then said that all the
animals were " off their feed." A monkey and other
pets at a villa near Villefranche, on Shrove-Tuesday,
the day before the shock which destroyed much life
and property, refused to enter the house where they
were generally anxious to come. They were all
spiritless, dull, and scared. A small lapdog which
usually sat on the arm of its master's chair at meals
refused to occupy its usual seat.

But perhaps the most striking evidence that the
animals were in a state of fear was that the cows in the
dairies supplying the coast resorts seemed terrified, and
the quantity and quality of the milk suffered. As the
farmers and peasants of that district are noted for their
skill and knowledge in dairying, small facts of this
kind affecting the yield of milk and butter would
almost certainly be noticed and remembered.

The Daily News correspondent was probably quite
right in attributing to the lady who refused to stay
longer in the hotel at Amalfi a share in the same
prescience exhibited by the animals. The high degree
of sensibility, more common in woman than in man,
would account for this. This sensitiveness to earth-
tremors is necessarily uncommon among persons not
living in the earthquake zones. They might feel a
sense of insecurity and of impending danger, but be
unable, owing to previous inexperience, to assign a
definite reason for their malaise. But after the first
shocks of earthquake in that particular disturbance in
the Riviera, those who had experienced it instantly
became intensely sensitive to the approach of the sub-

THE "SIXTH SENSE" 125

sequent shocks, of which there were many. In other
words, the same " prescience " was acquired in an
incredibly short time, and became a source of great
nervous depression and anxiety.

If human beings, with their many interests and pre-
occupations, become acutely sensitive to these earth-
tremors, it is more than probable that animals, with
their few and simple objects of thought to distract
their minds from the physical world, and especially
domestic animals, which are free from the two anxieties
which do occupy the minds of wild animals — namely,
the fear of enemies and the search for food — should be
instantaneously aware of these coming disturbances.
Moreover, earthquake has a peculiarly terrifying effect
on animals. They fear the actual movement of the
earth, and the terror which some dogs exhibit in
thunderstorms is attributable in all probability not to
the sound, but to the vibration which this sets up.

In very heavy thunderstorms in the Alps the Swiss
cattle, which wander at will on the upper pastures,
come galloping down the rocky paths to their milking
ground, the example being usually set by la mtre^
the mistress cow of the herd. The goats and sheep
often follow them, and it is noted that they do this as
a rule only when there is very severe thunder — not in
ordinary rainstorms.

During the disastrous series of earthquakes which
took place at Agram each shock was preceded first
by a general crowing of the cocks, and next by
the howls of dogs and of cats, the latter animals
for once losing their wonted superiority to every-

126 ANIMAL ARTISANS

day events and making a doleful tumult. This
outcry of fear in the animal world before earthquakes
has obviously been part of the ordinary tradition of
Italy for twenty centuries : —

" Sub pedibus mugire solum et juga coepta moveri
Silvarum, yisaeque canes ululare per umbram
Adventante dea."

In the Himalayas the hillmen believe that the animals
are endowed with prescience of earthquakes that they
may warn mankind. There is some curious evidence
that even in this country animals are aware of earth-
quake shocks when these are not detected by our
unexpectant and blunter senses. Not long ago it was
reported that there was a shock of earthquake one
night at Newmarket. The report met with very little
credence ; but evidence of a curious kind came from
some of the racing stables. It was asserted by the
"boys" and some of the men there employed that
the horses were extremely and unaccountably uneasy,
that they kicked and neighed in an unusual way, and
that some were obviously frightened and upset next
morning.

We do not know whether the chalk range which
runs from Reading, down the Chilterns, and across
the East Midlands towards Newmarket, is reputed
to be more subject than other parts of England to
earth-tremors ; but there is some reason to think that
this is the case, the evidence being partly based on
the movements of water and partly derived from
the behaviour of animals. At Shirburn Castle, near

THE "SIXTH SENSE" 127

Watlington, under the Chilterns, the shock of the
earthquake at Lisbon was distinctly felt, and the
waters of the deep moat which surrounds the house
were seen to rise on one side and sink on another.

What the effect of this earthquake shock may have
been upon domestic animals kept near the castle is
not recorded. But on the same chalk range, which
overhangs Shirburn and extends along the Thames as
far as Caversham, one of the most extraordinary and
universal panics ever known among domestic animals
in this country occurred quite recently, a panic which
can only be explained on the supposition that they
felt the premonition of an earthquake, or one of those
subterranean sounds which sometimes precede earth-
quakes.

These hills are a series of sheep farms, the flocks
being part of the regular local system of agriculture.
One morning the greater number of the flocks, which
had been left safe in their folds, were found to have
broken out. In some cases they were scattered or
had wandered to a distance, but little loss resulted.
It is not uncommon for sheep to stampede at night.
They will do so if an escaped stag comes to look
at the flock, or if strange dogs approach the fold.
But when the shepherds met at the next big sheep
fair and compared notes, it was found that the range
of country over which this panic had occurred was far
too extensive for any such explanation to be possible.
Nor could it have been mere coincidence. The local
papers contented themselves with chronicling the fact,
without suggesting a reason. That no earthquake

128 ANIMAL ARTISANS

shock was felt does not make it impossible that the
sheep felt or heard some of the common premonitions
of earthquake. The roaring sound which sometimes
precedes a shock has been heard by human ears at a
distance of nearly one hundred and sixty miles from
the disturbed area. It is known also that these sounds
were once heard for a month in Mexico, with no sub-
sequent shock at all.

It is well known that many sounds, such as the
squeaking of bats and the rustle of the grasshopper,
are not audible to the ears of some persons, though
easily heard by others. Nothing is more probable
than that the whisperings of earth and air, to which
we are deaf, are heard by the keener animal ears.
The supposition that they have a "sixth sense," a
hypothesis which arouses a degree of irritation diffi-
cult to account for in some minds, need not be
raised in this case any more than in the instances
in which animals are obviously conscious of coming
storms. If many human beings are uneasy at such
times, and declare that they " feel " a thunderstorm
coming, there need be no doubt whatever that many
animals are far longer, earlier, and more acutely alive
to the heat and electric tension before a coming
cyclone.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MIND OF A GARDENING ANT

A COLONY of gardening ants was recently established
for some time in the insect house at the Zoo. They
came from Trinidad, originally in two colonies, but the
queen of one died. The two communities were then per-
suaded to join, and fed up their queen to the dimensions
of a house spider. The rest of the society consisted of
small yellow working ants, and big policemen ants
with large heads. The latter keep the others to their
work, and act as foremen. If a ray of sunshine comes
in on a cold day, and a dozen workers stop and " loaf"
in the warmth, the foremen soon run up and send
them about their business, if necessary carrying them
some part of the way in their mouths.

The work in which these creatures were mainly
occupied was cutting out circular discs of rose-leaf,
about the size of the top of a pencil, and carrying
them across a long bridge to the nest, to make their
garden. As they carry these upright, or sloping over
their heads, they have been called " parasol ants."
But as they do this when there is no sun at all, it
is clear that it is convenience, not shelter from sun,
which suggests the position. Arrived at the nest, they
go through the whole of the astonishing agricultural

129

130 ANIMAL ARTISANS

operations which Mr. Belt described in the " Naturalist
in Nicaragua," and of which Herr Alfred Mollen
collected a number of similar examples among other
South American ants. They pulp the rose-leaves,
roll them into balls, and heap them in masses in the
nest. On these " mushroom-beds " grows a fungus or
mould, and on this the ants live. The mushroom-
bed, and the process of preparation and growth, could
be seen through the glass top of the box in which the
ants at the Zoological Gardens were kept. Mr. Belt,
after clearly describing the object of these labours, in
the book already referred to, reserves his opinion as to
the intelligence which directs them. " Many of these
actions," he writes, "such as those of two relays of
workmen to carry out the ant-food, can scarcely be
blind instinct ; " and he gives instances of the mis-
takes made by the ants and of their correction. But
he prefers to state the facts rather than to hazard a
theory to account for them.

The interesting question suggested by the activities
of the gardener ant is whether it consciously uses its
intelligence, or, if not, how far " instinct " and reason
are working side by side. In endeavouring to solve
it, we are confronted at the outset with this difficulty,
that the insect mind works on lines remote from our
own experience, and exhibits its methods by indica-
tions very hard for us to interpret. The aloofness
of the insect mind from apprehension by vertebrates'
brains perplexes all inquirers. We can range ourselves
side by side with the constructive bird, or the engineer-
ing beaver. There is sympathy between us and them

THE MIND OF A GARDENING ANT 131

both in intelligence and feelings. But the mute and
expressionless being which animates the metallic shell
of some social insect lives out of relation to our lines
of thought. Man and dog may take common action
on the same grounds : but we cannot see practical
problems eye to eye with an ant.

Our sympathy and common share in the emotions
of birds and beasts has very largely helped us to infer
their intellectual processes. The border line where
love, fear, wants, and desires originate action is common
to us with them ; and we know that many animals also
share with us the aesthetic sense.

In endeavouring to understand the process of thought
in insects, we have to subtract the whole of this common
ground, and to approach the subject almost — not quite
— as if it were working in a different medium. What
we do know of their senses seems in some instances to
keep us at this impossible distance. Physical inquiry
accentuates these differences.

We know, for instance, that the compound eyes of
many insects must present objects to them in a dif-
ferent form from that in which we see them. Some
ants have no eyes at all, yet go about their daily
business quite as well as if they saw. Sir John
Lubbock's experiments show that they can smell ; but,
on the other hand, they cannot hear — or, rather, do
not hear the sounds which we hear. They appear also
to be mute ; but it is quite likely that they utter
sounds which we cannot hear. Thus the human world
of sounds is non-existent for the ant, and very pro-
bably the ant brain is busy with sounds which are

132 ANIMAL ARTISANS

non-existent for us. At the same time they have a
different quality of sight, which, if transferred to us,
would make us unable to find the Nelson Column in
Trafalgar Square.

The result of the gap between the mind of the
man who observes and the mind of the insect whose
activities he watches has always tended to produce
one of two contradictory forms of interpretation.

The first was to assume that, because social bees
or ants were engaged in exactly the same activities
as human communities, their minds were practically
the same as our own ; that, in fact, there was some-
thing equivalent to human intelligence of a very high
order, with necessarily corresponding moral qualities,
in the bee ; and that for the purposes of this life there
was, in fact, a tiny " soul " in each working member
of the hive. That soul, if the conclusions of the
early naturalists are examined, was clearly a human
intelligence metamorphosed. This assumption would
explain quite logically the astonishing and incredible
perfection of the material side of the life of social
insects. It also accounted for the apparently moral
ideas of subordination, self-sacrifice, and devotion to
duty which their life exhibits. The difficulty in its
acceptance was the limitation of this intelligence to a
narrow class of actions, outside which this astonishingly
brilliant intellect ceased to work at all; and the absence
of any evidence beyond that set of acts to show the
processes of thought.

This absence of evidence of any thought origi-
nating and directing the work of social insects led

THE MIND OF A GARDENING ANT 133

also to an exactly opposite conclusion. The actions
performed demanded so much mental power, and
the evidence of mental action was so slight, and
our powers of apprehending functions so aloof from
our sensations so limited, that the whole of their
complicated life and actions was set down as purely
automatic. Every action ascribable to reason, from
the making of the hexagonal cell of the honey-bee — in
which the utmost carrying capacity is obtained with
the least expenditure of material — to the making of
" mushroom-beds " by the parasol ants, is thus ascribed
to blind obedience to inherited instinct, or knowledge
" prior to experience."

In the light of this conclusion, the ants which make
such admirable dwellings and storehouses that they
arrest the germination of seeds, or, when needed,
permit them to sprout and undergo the exact chemical
change needed to turn them into ants' food, and arrest
this again at the proper stage ; and whose cities are
peopled with dependants living on the " crumbs which
fall from their table " — there are three hundred species
of such ant parasites in Germany alone — are to-day as
brainless as the newly hatched cuckoo, which when
still blind and naked, at once addresses itself to the
task of ejecting its fellow-nestlings.

Both the one and the other of these extreme views
are, we think, due mainly to the initial difficulty of
apprehending the mental processes of insects in the
absence of the signs and tokens by which we under-
stand the working of the brain of vertebrates. It
is as if we were trying to receive a message in aerial

134 ANIMAL ARTISANS

telegraphy on a sensitive plate wrongly set. That we
can see no evidence of conscious organisation, or of the
transmission of ideas, does not prove that work under-
taken jointly is not concerted. In the case of bees
and ants there is evidence of communication by con-
tact and touch ; but many of the more important acts
of the community are done without visible communi-
cation. There is not the slightest reason to conclude
from this that they do not communicate. Two wrens
are building a nest in a bank. They settle, without
conversation of any kind, that they will make the
whole of the outside of dead leaves, to match other
masses of dead leaves which have been drifted into
corners of the bank. The same pair of wrens next
year make their nest in a haystack, and decide to
make the whole exterior of hay, to match the sur-
roundings. It is an intellectual process, understood
by both, carried into action jointly, and without visible
communication.

Two years ago some bees swarmed near Holkham
Park. The whole swarm took flight, and traversed
the park at a considerable height, followed by their
owner, who kept them well in sight. They flew
on, above the tree- tops, until they came over a
certain oak, when the whole flight dropped like a
flock of starlings, and entered a small hole leading
into a hollow in this tree. They went " in a bee-line "
for the tree from the hive in the garden whence they
came. No one could possibly credit that there was
not some bee to take them there, who had been there
before, or that the swarm did not know what they

THE MIND OF A GARDENING ANT 135

were doing. This was one of the very rare instances
in which our senses suggest what was probably in the
minds of the insects. But what of the thousand
instances in which this is at present hidden from us ?

Another source of error, which supports the theory
that insects are machines " wound up to go of them-
selves," is the fictitious appearance of mechanism, and
the likeness to automata which well-organised industrial
work usually presents, whether carried on by men or
insects. When the object is purely material — and this
is the case in a bee-hive as much as in an engineering
shop or a pin factory — the more perfect the organisa-
tion the more automatic it appears to be. A dozen
men at similar machines going through the same
movements, or thirty girls rolling cigarettes, if seen
through a diminishing-glass reducing them to the size
of white ants, would look very mechanical creatures
indeed. An enlarged ant, with a pair of unimproved
eyes, looking down on thousands of acres of Indian
paddy-fields, with brown-skinned creatures creeping
about all day mending little banks, and going at
night into little huts on bigger banks, might easily
conceive them to be mere unintelligent insects, work-
ing successfully, on some inherited but now perfectly
unintelligent system, to prolong their existence, in-
crease, and multiply.

CHAPTER XIX

THE POWER OF FASCINATION

THE evident facility with which certain animals can
capture and kill others which are stronger, fleeter, and
to all appearance generally better equipped than them-
selves, has led to a belief that the latter fall victims to
a mysterious form of fascination. Serpents in parti-
cular, which have ever been objects of suspicion, are
popularly supposed to exercise some baleful influence
on their prey ; but actual instances of such fascination
have seldom been recorded by competent observers.
Recently, however, a correspondent in Natal witnessed
what seemed to be an instance of complete paralysis
by a snake, which he described as follows : —

"Our attention was first attracted by something
moving on the branch of a tree, about ten feet above
the ground. We then saw it was a Cape cobra, of the
deadly kind, standing erect with only the lowest coils
of its tail round the branch, with its hood expanded,
and swaying from side to side. On going nearer we
saw, what we had not noticed before, a pigeon, sitting
on the branch, about a yard from the snake. It was
perfectly motionless, not crouched on the bough, but
standing up, and made not the slightest attempt to

fly away. We shot the snake, but neither the fall

136

THE POWER OF FASCINATION 137

of the creature nor the report seemed to ' unfreeze '
the pigeon at first. Then it did not fly, but slowly
walked along the bough into the centre of the tree,
where I suppose it remained until it had recovered
from the shock to its nerves."

The above is authentic, and a very uncommon in-
stance of what is generally understood by the popular
belief in the power of serpents to exercise this influence
on their prey. But it is possible, even in this case,
that the bird had been already slightly bitten by the
cobra, and that the paralysis may have been physical
and not nervous. This idea did not occur to the
witness of the scene, and he did not wait to see
whether the pigeon ultimately recovered. Its partial
recovery when the snake was shot he did see.

If, as is probable, there are occasional instances of
suspension of faculties caused by the sudden appear-
ance of so deadly a foe as the snake, they can be
accounted for, step by step, by a natural process of
emotion and results. But before endeavouring to trace
the degrees of such suspension of the natural impulses
of flight and escape, it is well to state that cases even
of apparent fascination are uncommon, and confined
to a very few of the creatures on which snakes feed.
The frogs, ducks, and mice on which various serpents
at the Zoo are fed are said usually to show no fear at
all, and a duck will walk over the python's coils and
quack before the creature moves its head to seize it.
Rabbits, which are paralysed with fear, and in a sense
" fascinated " by the stoat, seem insensible to the danger
from the serpent. That, however, may well be because

138 ANIMAL ARTISANS

English rabbits have had no experience of large ser-
pents. In India there is at least one rat which goes
in such fear of its life from them that it blocks up
its hole with stones when " at home," as it is thought,
to keep them out.

The creatures which are said to be the usual objects
of fascination by snakes are birds and monkeys. In
this selection common belief has probability on its side,
because both small birds and monkeys are intensely
emotional, quick, and sensitive creatures. Moreover,
they have for all time been the prey of tree- climbing
snakes. Mr. Kipling's " Hunting of Kaa " puts the
idea into dramatic form. There may be evidence that
the python goes " hunting," though if he does not, but
remains, as " Eha," the Anglo-Indian field-naturalist,
says, quiet, and waiting till he can seize a passing
jackal or monkey, it does not spoil the story. It is,
however, on record that a monkey has been known
to drop down in a dead faint when suddenly shown a
serpent ; and more than one description represents a
brood of fledged young birds fluttering and apparently
powerless to fly before a snake, with the parent bird
dashing so close past its jaws that it is caught.

This can only be accounted for on the same
grounds as the impulse which makes persons inclined
to throw themselves over precipices. It arises from
the momentary breakdown of resolution in the face
of an overwhelming danger, or from the rebound of
overstretched precaution, which starts back to the
furthest limits of abhorrence and then rushes into
the jaws of peril. But the temporary paralysis of

THE POWER OF FASCINATION 139

faculties is an instance of moral failure in what, up
till then, has been a series of reasoned acts.

All weaker creatures pay intense attention to the ap-
pearance of a natural enemy. Their first impulse is to
watch it most intently. Deer, hares, and birds all do
this. Concurrently with this watching impulse is that
of standing absolutely still. In some cases this develops
into crouching, or "sitting" motionless, so that the
creature may, while never taking its eye off its enemy,
be at the same time invisible. Paralysis of faculties
often so far accompanies this attitude that the creature,
in its intense apprehension of one danger, becomes
oblivious of another. A mountain hare, for instance,
watching an eagle, has allowed itself to be picked up
by the hand.

The extra "voltage" of fear engendered by the
horror of the serpent would be sufficient, when exer-
cised on the nerves of highly sensitive creatures like
the smaller birds, so to strain the first series of reason-
able acts of watching, immobility, and crouching, that
the final logical act, that of flight when discovered, is
impossible, the will-power having broken down. The
converse of this feeling in the hunted may sometimes
be seen in the hunter. Very well-bred pointers have
so elaborated the point, which was originally the pause
to determine exactly where the bird or hare was sitting,
that they often cannot be induced to " break " it and
move on to flush the game.

It is not difficult to guess why some dangerous
animals induce this paralysing fear in their prey, while
others do not. It varies largely in proportion to

1 40 ANIMAL ARTISANS

the deadly nature of the creature, and its weapons
or mode of pursuit. The cat is a more formidable
animal than the stoat. But a rabbit or hare shows
no more than ordinary fear of the cat. The stoat,
on the contrary, often " fascinates," or rather para-
lyses, the mental faculties of the rabbit, or even of
the courageous rat. It does not always happen, but
instances are so common that we need not quote them.
A rabbit hunted by a stoat will sit down and squeak
till the stoat leisurely kills it ; and a rat will often
make no fight at all against the same enemy, though
it would defend itself against a ferret, which is larger
than the stoat. It is the remorseless bloodthirst and
courage of the stoat which has won this ascendency.

There is a common jungle legend that leopards and
tigers can fascinate peacocks. Colonel Tytler had an
experience which showed that the natives believe in the
story. When stalking a peacock he was rather sur-
prised to see how near it allowed him to approach.
The bird paid no attention to him, but was gazing
intently, as if fascinated, at a little patch of jungle just
in front. Looking in the same direction, he saw a
leopard stealing on its belly towards the bird, which
continued to remain still in the same position. He
was greatly surprised, for he had never even heard of
leopards in that neighbourhood ; but his astonishment
was greater when, on his raising his gun, one barrel of
which was loaded with ball, and covering the animal,
the leopard threw up its paws, and shrieked in a voice
hoarse with terror : "Nehin, sahib, nehin ; mut chulao"
(No, sir, no ; don't fire). He said that for a moment he

THE POWER OF FASCINATION 141

thought he must be going mad, and all the Indian tales
of enchanted princes and fairies, werewolves, and the
like flashed through his recollection. The next moment
he saw a man very cleverly disguised in a leopard's
skin, with a well-stuffed head, and a bow and arrow
in one paw, standing before him. The man so dressed
was a professional fowler, who said that in that disguise
he could always approach near enough to shoot the
birds with a bow and arrow, and sometimes to catch
them in his hand.

As a cat, when left in a room with a caged bird,
can always kill it if it gives way to temptation, it is
commonly believed that the cat " fascinates " the bird.
" How else," asks the sorrowing owner, " could it
have hurt the bird, when the cage was so large that
its occupant could easily have remained safe in the
middle ? " The fact is that the cat does exactly the
contrary. It frightens the bird into violent move-
ments, and makes it dash from side to side of the
cage. Its persecutor strikes with lightning speed at
the bird as it dashes against the bars, first on one
side and then on the other, until it is wounded and
weakened and can be clutched and dragged out. If
a bird is killed or injured by a cat when in its cage,
quantities of feathers will be found lying about, the
result of this clutching and buffeting, whereas when a
cat kills a bird in the open it is scarcely " feathered "
at all. If the cage is small, the cat climbs on to the
top, lies on its belly, and hanging a foreleg down on
either side, pursues the same tactics.

Some instances of seeming fascination are simply

1 42 ANIMAL ARTISANS

due to a curious indifference to danger. Others are
real fascination, not caused by fear, but by an irre-
sistible attraction or curiosity which renders the animal
subjected to it indifferent to fear.

The behaviour of fish in the presence of pike and
crocodiles, creatures most obviously dangerous and
most repulsive in appearance, looks like fascination,
but is really due to their limited intelligence. Many
readers must often have watched the boldness or
insensibility of shoals of fish when a big pike is
lying close by. The monster, weighing perhaps six
or eight pounds, lies perfectly motionless, except for
the gentle vibration of its fins, in a clear pond
while roach or carp are being fed. The whole shoal,
of many score in number, swim past the pike, and
struggle for bread within a yard of its jaws, until
one slightly injured, or engaged in swallowing an un-
usually large piece of bread, passes close by. Then
the pike makes a rush like a rocket, all the fish start
off explosively, leaving one victim in the jaws of the
monster, and in two minutes all the survivors will be
feeding again.

The crocodile's methods are almost identical. But
unlike the pike, which is very conspicuous from the
side, which is the point of view it presents to the
fish, and which any one may see in a good aquarium,
the alligator is exactly the colour of the dark mud of
tropical rivers, a tint which is imitated by many other
water creatures, down to certain tropical water-snails.
It seems fully aware of its semi-invisibility, and takes
advantage of it in its methods of attack.

THE POWER OF FASCINATION 143

Instances of the real fascination exercised by unusual
objects on animals of all kinds, from deer to birds,
fish, and insects, are extremely common. Carrying
lamps for night shooting is about to be prohibited
in some States of the Union, so destructive is it to
the deer, which will approach the light though they
have been constantly shot for the greater part of
a century by this device. " Lark glitters " seem
as irresistible as ever to the migrating flocks pass-
ing across France from the North in winter. The
Northern larks, which have never seen anything more
glittering than a Scandinavian waterfall, hover en-
chanted over the revolving spindle set with brilliant
looking-glass, while the Continental sportsman pours
in shot as fast as he can load at the arrested flocks.

CHAPTER XX

THE COURAGE OF THE SMALLER ANIMALS

AMONG animals courage seems to bear no relation to
size. Many of the smaller creatures exhibit courage
in an astonishing degree, and though in a few animals
such as the lemming — which, though no bigger than
a field-vole, will attack and bite the boots of any
one who interferes with it — or the Tasmanian " devil "
this may be due to low brain-power, a great propor-
tion of the smaller creatures are endowed with a
large share of brains and courage combined. The
weasel tribe, all of which are small animals, are almost
the most courageous of any. Unfortunately they
are also the most bloodthirsty, and the greater
number of their victims are harmless and defenceless
creatures. But there are abundant instances on record
in which they have attacked, without the slightest
hesitation, either man or any large animal whom they
considered to be at all likely to do them an injury.
The story of Thomas Edwards's encounter with a
polecat in a cave near the coast was written as evidence
of the courage of the naturalist. We have always
regarded it, from the polecat's point of view, as an
instance of astonishing courage in so small a creature.
In North America one of the largest of the weasel

144

COURAGE OF SMALLER ANIMALS 145

family is the " fisher," a very large, long-furred pole-
cat, living mainly by the water-side, and, like many
others of the tribe, very partial to fish. It weighs
about 1 6 lb., and its long, richly coloured fur is
exported in great quantities to different parts of
Europe, though until recently it was not often used
in this country. A trapped fisher will attack any one
who comes within reach of the trap chain, and when
free will beat off any dog of twice its size. But
perhaps the most striking example of the courage of
the smaller species yet recorded is that shown by a
small variety of jungle cat known as the fishing cat,
which, though no relation of the Canadian "fisher,"
is quite as courageous. One of these, which was
kept in a menagerie, broke through into the next
cage, and there attacked and killed a leopard, which
was three times its own size.

The Indian mongoose possesses all the courage of
the polecats, together with amiability and a "regu-
lated " mind. It turns its pluck and prowess to good
ends, and we imagine it to stand at the head of the
list of the smaller animals if quality as well as quantity
is demanded as a mark of intrepidity. There is little
doubt that the mongoose realises the deadly nature
of the cobra's bite. Its intense excitement is strong
evidence of this. But a mongoose has been known
to fight just as bravely against other foes. One was
seen to attack and drive off a large greyhound which
it fancied was hostile to it.

As most of the other small animals know how
hopeless is a contest against the strength and per-

K

146 ANIMAL ARTISANS

tinacity of the weasel tribe, instances of resistance on
their part must be classed as courage of a high order.
The following example of a rabbit attacking a stoat
rests on the first-hand observation of a trustworthy
field-naturalist. He was sitting on a log in Gunton
Park in Norfolk, near some nettles, when he heard
a curious grunting noise in the nettle-bed. Presently
a stoat ran out, and almost immediately a rabbit
rushed from the nettle-bed and knocked the stoat
over. The rabbit then ran back a little, and re-
peated the odd noise which had been heard before.
The stoat picked itself up and ran, not at the
rabbit, but towards the nettles. The rabbit rushed
at it again, and upset it before it could enter the
nettle-bed. It did this four times in all before the
stoat was able to get past. When it did so it almost
immediately caught and killed a very young rabbit,
which the doe had evidently been trying to protect.

The courage of many birds is very remarkable, if
allowance is made for their small size and slight
means of offence or defence. As a rule size makes
no difference whatever in their personal prowess.
Many of the smallest are the most intrepid. In the
defence of their eggs the blue-tits are the most
determined of any English birds. A blue-tit will
sit on its nest, though there is plenty of time and
opportunity to esca'pe, and wait until its visitor's hand
reaches it, when it will at once bite the intruding
fingers with the greatest vigour and courage. As
most blue-tits' nests are made at the bottom of holes
and hollows, there is sometimes no chance for the bird

V ft*.

RABBIT ATTACKING A STOAT.

COURAGE OF SMALLER ANIMALS 147

to leave the eggs. But in the majority of cases there
is ample room in the hollow for the little bird to
shift to one side, or leave altogether by another
entrance. But it scarcely ever chooses to do this.
It is not difficult to realise the terrors which the tiny
little tit so boldly faces. She sees an enormous arm,
some ten times larger round than her own body,
coming slowly towards her with outstretched fingers,
exactly as the story-books represent the hand of the
giant stretched out to catch Tom Thumb. She abides
its awful approach without shrinking, and attacks it
with all the courage of the Giant-killer himself. The
great tit, cole-tit, and marsh-tit are nearly, though
not quite, as courageous.

We remember no other British bird which equals
them, except perhaps the puffin. But as the puffin
has no means of escape when her hole is discovered,
she naturally fights and bites " for all she is worth "
before allowing herself to be pulled out, or leaving
her eggs. Jackdaws, on the other hand, which, like
the tits, build in holes, but are large and strong birds,
do not attempt to defend their eggs against man ; and
though owls sometimes offer a sleepy, semi-somnolent
resistance, they make little more than a formal protest
against ejectment.

That any bird should have the courage to do so
is sufficiently remarkable ; but the courage of the
diminutive species is the more astonishing because
most small birds have highly nervous temperaments.
Their courage is not the result of low brain-power.
They thoroughly realise what danger is, and suffer

148 ANIMAL ARTISANS

acutely from nervous apprehension. Cases in which
birds have died of fright are well authenticated. The
writer has seen an instance of it in the case of a
greenfinch seized by a sparrow-hawk. The finch,
though not injured by the hawk, which had merely
picked it up in its claw, died of fright a few minutes
after the hawk was shot. A canary has also been
known to die from the same cause when a cat climbed
on to its cage.

Next to the snake, the cat is the worst heredi-
tary enemy of the race of birds, and the fear of
cats is an inherited instinct with all wild birds. Yet
in Argentina there is one species, no larger than a
blackbird, which will attack and drive oft a cat in
the open, if near its nest. This is the oven-bird,
which is about the same size as a blackbird, and
makes a nest of clay, which is soon baked by the sun
into a vessel as hard as pottery. One who resided
for some years near Buenos Ayres informed the
writer that he has seen an oven-bird with a nest of
newly fledged young attack a cat, fly straight at its
face, peck and buffet it, and after returning twice to
the attack, rout the cat and chase it into the bushes.
The cat was " upset " by the attack, not being used
to this kind of thing, and tried to avoid the bird.

Such animals as are by temperament suited for
domestication are not, as a rule, marked by special
traits of courage. The dog is an exception, for most
breeds, whether large or small, are very courageous.
One of the pluckiest animals we ever knew was a
Yorkshire terrier weighing only a few pounds. He

COURAGE OF SMALLER ANIMALS 149

was an indefatigable ratter, and on one occasion went
to ground and refused to come out for so long
that we began to be seriously alarmed for his safety.
When he did appear he was quite unrecognisable, tem-
porarily blind, and scarcely able to walk ; for the
sticky soil in which he had been working had matted
and caked on his long hair till he looked like a lump
of yellow clay.

It is true that he was only doing battle with
rats, but these must be sufficiently alarming oppo-
nents for a dog of a petted lapdog breed, and in
his own way he was almost as plucky as the bigger
terriers used to drive the badger to the end of his
hole and keep him there while the trenches are made
to dig the animal out. Far underground, faced by
a very much larger and better armed foe, in darkness,
heat, and during the last part of the digging in scenes
of half-subterranean battle, amid dust and commo-
tion, the terrier meets the charges of the badger,
and " holds him up " by barking and demonstration,
even if the latter has bitten him badly. Nineteen
couple of the Cleveland pack once attacked a badger
in the open without doing him any harm whatever
before they were whipped off, though many of them
were badly bitten. What, then, must be the courage
of the diminutive terrier who descends into the ground
and faces the badger in the galleries and mines of his
own digging ?

As a rule we naturally avoid any attempt at domes-
ticating the fighting breeds, and turn our attention
to the milder-tempered species : but it is amusing

150 ANIMAL ARTISANS

to note how in these creatures the loss of the fear
of man by contact and kindness induces courage.
Even the tame dove and domestic pigeon will fight
hard against the hand which tries to remove their eggs,
pecking vigorously, though when wild the correspond-
ing species take instant flight from the nest. Cases in
which domestic poultry have attacked persons whom
they considered to be intruders are often noted. But
it is less generally known that the game-fowl show
a marked degree of courage when in contact with
hostile species. The hens are as bold as the cocks ;
and it is stated that on some of the Scotch islands the
only poultry which are kept successfully are game-
fowl, as these alone will fight the grey crows, and so
protect their eggs and young.

CHAPTER XXI

BENEVOLENCE IN MAN AND BEAST

WITHIN the limits of animal character good qualities
so predominate over bad that the world has become
almost exacting in its expectations of excellence in
their imperfect intelligences. Traits of courage, good
temper, fidelity, intense family affection, and a great
capacity for friendship, which in cases deserves the
name of love, for man, have raised an expectation of
other qualities which we should expect to correspond
with them.

It is commonly regretted, for instance, that in their
society instances of benevolence and practical sympathy
with other animals are so rare, a regret based on the
assumption that there ought to be a sentiment between
one animal and another equivalent to " philanthropy "
among mankind.

This feeling scarcely takes into account the complex
nature of benevolence, or the lateness of its develop-
ment in- man, or the limits to the possibilities of its
development in animal minds. It does not follow that
the very general absence of benevolence towards other
animals, related or non-related, discredits the animal
disposition as it would that of some human com-
munity where the sentiment of philanthropy was

152 ANIMAL ARTISANS

unknown. A very slight acquaintance with the his-
tory of mankind shows that benevolence is not one
of the primitive virtues at all. It appears very late
in the history of human progress. Even there its
survival and maintenance is always threatened by any
rude disturbance of the delicate machinery of daily
well-being. It survives and is brought into prominence
after temporary calamities. A sudden catastrophe,
like the West Indian hurricane, for example, stimulates
the sentiment. But in long and enduring suffering,
the incidence of which is general, it is matter of
common knowledge that the impulse of good-will
tends to disappear. This tendency is among the first
and more deplorable symptoms caused by any violent
collapse of the organised well-being of society.

The instances in which this demoralisation has been
kept at bay, and which national pride dwells upon
most fondly, are in nearly every case evidence that the
sentiment is strongest where it exists both by inherit-
ance and training. The unselfish devotion to others
shown by the beleaguered garrisons in the Mutiny,
was strengthened and supported by the fact that the
greater number of adult non-combatants were English
ladies, and that among the men the proportion of
those belonging to a class whose standard of moral
obligation is a high one was unusually large.

This is not the place to analyse the motives which
prompt and maintain such magnificent devotion. But
it is certain that few or none of the inducements are
other than complex and slowly acquired notions of
honour, duty, self-respect, religion, or patriotism, which

BENEVOLENCE IN MAN AND BEAST 153

are utterly beyond the limits of the animal mind in
Nature, except perhaps that of duty, which is only
learnt in relation to man by at most one or two
animals.

Without multiplying instances of the acquired
character of the benevolent impulse in man, it is
worth remembering that even civilised races relapse
with astonishing pertinacity to the non-benevolent
state ; and that in cultured Athens the horrible
human sacrifices with which the story of ancient
Greece is replete survived as a national institution, and
that every year a man and a woman were whipped
through the streets and then burnt alive to satisfy
some such impulse as prompts similar acts among the
Congo negroes. At the present moment, the absence
of benevolence in any form among the non-developed
races of to-day needs no better illustration than the
fact, recorded by Captain Hinde, that on the Upper
Congo no negro lives beyond forty ; that being the
age at which their fellow-men directly or indirectly
cause their death.

If analogy demands the exercise of benevolence by
one animal towards another, it is not quite clear in
what sphere this sentiment is to find its realisation.
It is clear that we cannot expect it from all animals
to all other animals, for the carnivorous creatures
naturally act "after their kind." Probably those
who would at any rate desire to see this trait would
expect to see either a general tendency to mutual
aid and comfort among the non-carnivorous warm-
blooded creatures, or at least a desire to perform such

154 ANIMAL ARTISANS

good offices among those of the same species. We
speak now of animals in a state of Nature, not domes-
ticated. The former is probably an idea quite beyond
the range of the ordinary animal mind. It is possible
that those of one species feel sorrow when those of
another are in trouble or pain. But there is no
evidence whatever that wild animals ever do this.
There is a kind of chance association on the same
feeding-ground, or sometimes under stress of flood
or fire. But we can recall no single instance, for
example, of a wild animal of one species attempting
to defend an animal of another, even when they are
quite competent to do so. It is doubtful if a case has
been recorded of buffaloes charging to protect a
wounded antelope, though they will do so to save a
wounded member of their own herd ; or of elephants,
or baboons, or other creatures which live in society,
attempting to protect the wounded young of any
other species but their own.

Among the creatures which seem to assume the
role of sentries for the protection of other animals,
there is one, the rhinoceros bird, whose behaviour
almost justifies the belief that it feels some duty to
the antelope or buffalo on whose insect enemies it
is feeding ; so extraordinary, and apparently organised,
is the watch which it maintains. But this is a very
restless, active bird, and it is quite possible that its
familiarity with the species on whose backs it finds
food makes it identify itself to some extent with
them. It probably imagines the buffalo to be almost
a part of itself. In any case, the instances of in-

BENEVOLENCE IN MAN AND BEAST 155

difference are so overwhelming that we may set aside
the assumption that there is a common sympathy
among non-related animals, even when not carnivorous.
It is not a defect of character, but of comprehension.

The relations between those of the same species
are closer, though exhibitions of helpfulness are
by no means general, and instances of positive ill-
treatment are common. In spite of this, they are
probably exceptional. The monkeys who drown
the objectionably sick by shoving them off trees
into the river are certainly rather worse than the
Greeks who " marooned" Philoctetes for the same
reason. But with this should be contrasted Brehm's
story of the rescue of the young baboon from his dogs
by a patriarch of the troop, and the encouragement
given by an older stag to a young one which feared
to jump a fence. Lord Lovat gives an admirable
description of the latter scene in the volume of the
Badminton Library on " Deer-stalking." The old
stag reached over towards the young one at last, and
" actually kissed him " ; but the youngster would not
jump.

Animals are so "helpless" themselves when any-
thing goes amiss, especially in cases of accident,
that they can hardly be expected to do much for
others. But the impulse is often there in the related
kinds, though it is not extended to the non-related.
Otters run round a trapped otter all night. Cats and
foxes visit the bodies of their dead, and so do stoats
and weasels. It is a rule with trappers to leave these
near a trap ; so we may conclude that these animals

156 ANIMAL ARTISANS

probably visit their fellows when trapped. The writer
once saw an odd instance of this ineffectual concern —
probably not very deep, for the actors were sparrows.
A brick trap had been set in a yard, and a sparrow
caught. All the sparrows in the neighbourhood had
learnt it, and were sitting in crowds on hedges,
cucumber frames, sheds, and buildings, discussing the
situation, or staring moodily at the trap where the
captive was imprisoned, but quite invisible. Next
day a robin was caught, but the sparrows showed no
concern whatever.

This tendency among the wild races finds definite
expression among the domesticated animals, though
instances are not very common. We have seen a
small pig, stuck in a paling through which it had
tried to squeeze, assisted by an elder one inside.
Attracted by its cries, it took the small pig's head in
its mouth and tried to pull it through, in doing which
it almost pulled the sufferer's head off. In another
case a cat deliberately fetched its owner to assist
another cat which was lying helpless in a fit. More-
over, domesticated animals are to some extent " pro-
gressive," and have realised the notion of common
good among other creatures than their own stock.
There is a good deal of service and benevolence among
very different domesticated animals, especially in the
form of protection, sharing of food, and forbearance.
Specialised instances in which dogs or cats have taken
food to others could doubtless be authenticated,
though the writer has not witnessed a case. But
there is the strongest of all evidence that they have a

t U

BENEVOLENCE IN MAN AND BEAST 157

tendency to perform these and other services to other
animals, because the domesticated creatures volun-
tarily offer these services of benevolence to man. How
can any one doubt that animals (in domestication)
are willing to feed each other, when there are cats all
over England and Scotland which delight in bringing
food as presents to their owners ! We need not go
back to the historic cat which caught a pigeon every
day and brought it to its master when a prisoner in
the Tower.

It is the natural impulse, usually of male cats, to
do this. The writer has seen it constantly ; and if
references are needed we need only turn to St. John,
who mentions a Highland shepherd whose cat brought
him something edible nearly every day in the year.

Not the least interesting fact in the growth of the
sense of benevolence in animals is that when it is
engendered (usually in a rudimentary form, but the
same in kind as the virtue which we understand by
the word), it is at once diverted naturally from other
animals and directed by preference to the service of
man. Thus the other creatures benefit only in the
smallest degree. Proud of its new idea of being
serviceable and beneficent, the animal devotes itself
not to other animals, but to its master, who uncon-
sciously absorbs all the benefits which the new " virtue "
in the beast prompts it to bestow.

CHAPTER XXII
ODD FRIENDSHIPS

ODD friendships between animals of different kinds
are often seen, but an adventure recorded in Nature
by Mr. L. C. Hurst is rather out of the common.
It often happens that among all the domestic animals
of a farm the donkey is the cleverest, and takes the
lead when anything interesting is going on. One of
these sharp-witted donkeys, kept in Derbyshire, had
learnt how to open gates, a not uncommon accomplish-
ment of his tribe. Being shut up in a field with two
ponies, he soon wanted a change of scene and com-
pany, and so opened the gate of his own meadow and
walked out with the ponies. He appears to have
wished to find another set of companions, for he
opened three other gates in order to reach another
field where a mare, a foal, and a yearling, all old
friends of his, were placed. They no doubt were
very pleased to see him, and the whole party went
out for a walk. They were then joined by a mastiff,
and they went on their way together exactly as
animals are supposed to do in story-books — dog,
donkey, ponies, mare, yearling, and foal — " until they
met a man," to adopt the style consecrated to ad-
ventures of this kind. Unfortunately the man knew

158

ODD FRIENDSHIPS 159

the horses and foal. There are men in the country
who will even recognise particular pigs when straying,
and the eye for identifying horses seems part of the
inheritance of most rustics. He unkindly interfered
with the walking tour, and rounded up the equine
members of it. The donkey, deprived of his friends,
then returned home ; but the mastiff accompanied
him in an entirely detached manner so far as its
original owners went, so great was this donkey's power
of making friends, and also of keeping them.

As a rule, domestic animals which are much with
people prefer their company to that of other animals
of any kind. They think them more interesting and
distinguished. An " owl " pigeon, named " Pip,"
because, like the hero of "Great Expectations," he
had been brought up by hand, always preferred human
society to that of his own kind. He lived in the
house whenever he could, though there were plenty
of pigeons outside ; and though he occasionally found
a mate and set up housekeeping for a time, his
domestic arrangements were seldom a success, because
he never allowed them to interfere with what he
conceived to be his social duties. So long as he was
only surrounded by other pigeons he would go
on with the nest-building or incubating in a quite
exemplary fashion, but immediately a human acquaint-
ance appeared he always stopped work and flew down
for a little conversation.

The same bird became very friendly with a horse,
and used to sit on his back or between his ears for
hours at a time. This was the more curious, because

160 ANIMAL ARTISANS

in a general way it is only animals which are rather
disregarded by those about the house that are par-
ticularly likely to strike up curious friendships with
what would apparently be very unsuitable companions.
There was recently at Clifton Hampden, on the
Thames, a dog which lived at the Bridge House, but
was not in the least interested either in people or in
boating. Instead of barking and being important
when parties arrived at the boating-raft, or helping
to take the tolls at the bridge, or generally taking
the active and fussy interest in the business of his
master which most dogs show, he preferred to associate
entirely with a horse and a donkey kept in a meadow
next to the bridge.

The three friends used to spend all day out in the
field, the dog lying quietly curled up asleep in the
grass if it were fine, or watching the others graze.
If it rained he would go and lie against the back
of a shed, where he could see the horse, and to
which the latter sometimes also came for ^shelter.
He only appeared at the house when the horse was
fetched to be harnessed, when he would trot with
the cart, and as soon as the horse returned and was
unharnessed, would return with it to the field. In
time this dog became so extremely " horsey " in his
tastes that he took to eating oats when his friend
was fed. It was the custom to put the horse's
feed of oats in a tin pan and set this on the floating
landing-stage or raft used by boating parties, in order
to get the old horse to stand in the water for the
benefit of his legs ; while at the same time the donkey,

HE BECAME VERY FRIENDLY WITH A HORSE, AND USED TO SIT
BETWEEN HIS EARS FOR HOURS AT A TIME."

ODD FRIENDSHIPS 161

which hated water, could not steal the oats. The
dog always went down to the raft, and sat on it close
to the tin pan while the horse was eating. He would
then pick up the spilled-out grains, and carefully
crack and swallow them. Both picking up and
cracking an oat-corn are rather difficult feats for a
dog's mouth and teeth to manage. But he was very
expert at this, and used to sit and eat oats till the
horse had finished. The latter died rather suddenly
a short time ago, and the dog only survived his friend
for a few months, so this scene by the bridge, which
used to take place regularly every summer evening,
has ceased.

The thoroughness and routine with which this dog-
and-horse friendship continued could probably be
paralleled in many other cases. There seems to be a
natural liking between these two very different species,
just as there is a natural antipathy between dogs and
cattle. The latter is sometimes explained by an in-
herited recollection of the destruction of their calves
by the dog's relation, the wolf. But as wolves are at
least as destructive to foals where horses run loose,
the explanation does not seem adequate.

The dog's natural attitude towards the sheep is
strictly that of a hungry man towards a leg of mutton.
He only becomes its guide, philosopher, and friend by
training. Yet between shepherd dogs of the best class
—such as those on the Northern fells — and their sheep,
there exists a much closer link than between the ordi-
nary sheep-driving dogs of the South and their flocks.
These fell sheep are very bright, alert creatures, with

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1 62 ANIMAL ARTISANS

all their wits about them, and scarcely need more than
a hint from the dog as to where they should go. In
Penrith on market-days in autumn there is a great in-
vasion of sheep, often lambs of the year, which, being
bred on the fells, are sold for keeping on the lower
ground in winter. Of the three parties to the visit —
sheep, dogs, and shepherds — the first are usually quite
composed, the dogs almost as much at their ease, and
the only members who lose their heads completely
are the shepherds, who shriek and scream at their
dogs and flocks as if demented. At a cross-road, or
if there is much traffic, a sheep sometimes becomes
separated from the rest, while the shepherd is franti-
cally waving his arms and stick. The writer has
seen one quietly run up beside the dog and push
against it, as if to inquire what it had best do. The
dog, looking up with his tongue out, evidently con-
cluded that his master did not know either ; but
after waiting still a minute, he trotted off with the
sheep alongside of him to the flock.

Perhaps the most incongruous pair of animal friends
at present in England belong to the late Lord Lil-
ford's collection of cranes and wildfowl, still main-
tained at Lilford Hall, near Oundle. A large crane was
selected as the object of an intense and jealous affec-
tion by a goose. The goose, which was of a curious
Australian species, with a very short bill and speckled
body, practically annexed the crane altogether. When
the writer last saw it, it was feeding close by the
tall crane, and never went more than a few yards
from it, or allowed it to be out of its sight for a

ODD FRIENDSHIPS 163

minute. If any other crane came near, or any visitor,
the goose rushed at it and made as if it would bite.
The cranes it did bite, seizing their legs. A mate
was found for the crane, and for six months it was
kept elsewhere, unseen by the goose. The fresh bird
died, and the goose, to whose enclosure the crane
returned, at once renewed the friendship. It was
quite a personal liking, for there was an unrivalled
selection of other cranes to choose from.

When a cat and dog become chums, one or the other
is generally a young one. Their chief object in asso-
ciating seems to be play or boisterous romps, in which
the cat submits to very rough treatment as the dog
grows more excited, and always seems to enjoy the
sport the rougher it is. We have seen a small cat
almost swallowed by a full-grown young bloodhound,
picked up and flung into the air, and swung almost
from one side of the room to the other, still renewing
the mimic fight, until, when quite exhausted, she
would slip under a bureau to get breath. It seemed
as if her bones must get broken, yet she was not
damaged.

An Australian opossum and a setter became most
excellent comrades, the opossum lying asleep by the
setter on the hearthrug by day, and playing with him
in the evening. The dog even submitted, though he
did not like it, to the opossum washing his face, which
it did by licking it all over while it solicitously held
the dog's muzzle in its sharp-clawed little paws. The
first advances in this case came from the opossum ; but
the setter was not a normally minded dog, being rather

164 ANIMAL ARTISANS

given to seek friends among the cats, with which he
would play at any hour.

Mr. Hagenbeck in his Hamburg Menagerie, partly
for the pleasure of the German sight-seer, and partly
to make the animals more cheerful by society, has for
many years made " happy families" of the largest
carnivora in single cages. The greater part do not
do much more than tolerate each other, but the social
cement of the whole party is given by the dogs, large
but young boarhounds, which are full of play and good
humour, and seem to keep the others in spirits by
their example.

Probably, as dogs are the most companionable crea-
tures to man, they also possess the gift of attract-
ing the liking of other animals. One of the most
extraordinary instances of this recently noted was
described and illustrated in Country Life. A fox cub
was brought up among a number of dogs at a house
in Wales, with a park and rough cover close to the
garden, the latter being a favourite place for the
wild foxes to lie by day. The dogs were often taken
to draw this cover and rout out the fox. The cub,
when full-grown, used to accompany them ; and when
the fox was started would rush after it in company
with the dogs, which were giving tongue and enjoying
all the excitement of a brief fox-hunt.

CHAPTER XXIII
DECOY ANIMALS

AMONG the surviving industries of dogs is one dating
from an age when the observation of animal idiosyn-
crasies was sharpened by the keenest sense of their
value as aids to man. The decoy-man's dog is the
creature which holds this unique position. There
are not more than thirty decoys remaining in England,
and in these we may assume that there are not more
than the same number of trained decoy-men's dogs.
Consequently, of the animals brought up to this once
flourishing business, this country does not possess more
than enough to supply the ordinary demand for pets
in the families of a suburban street.

The work which the dog has to do has often been
described in books of sport. He appears from
behind the screens at the mouth of the little canal
or " pipe " leading from the main pool on which
the ducks alight, and runs up along the side of
the pipe, jumping in and out from behind the
screens. The ducks swim after him, " attracted
by curiosity," as the authorities on wild-fowling
say ; and the dog, well trained by his master, leads
the dance up the pipe until the birds are driven

under the netting. A custom still prevailing at one

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1 66 ANIMAL ARTISANS

of the two last of the Yorkshire duck-decoys suggests
a more probable explanation of this use of the dog,
and of the odd attraction which its appearance has for
the ducks. This particular decoy has preserved appar-
ently a very primitive tradition of decoy-dog training.
Before being sent out to show itself to the ducks and
to pop in and out from between the screens, the dog
is dressed up like a fox. It is fitted with a fox's skin
and a fox's brush, and then, arrayed as the arch-
enemy of all ducks since the Creation, it appears at the
mouth of the pipe, and the ducks follow it as gaily as
the rats did the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It is usual,
by tradition, to use red or liver-coloured dogs for this
work. But the use and practice of the Yorkshire
decoy shows its origin. It is well known that birds
of many kinds which can fly will always " mob " a
fox, and plovers will often " mob " a red dog by
mistake. But for ducks the fox's presence has a
perfect fascination. They cannot help watching it
when in sight, and when it is moving away, as the
supposed fox does, up the pipe, they swim after it
to see where it is going and to take care that it does
not steal a march on them.1

The decoy-ducks which lie out on the lake itself
are only tamed wild-ducks, which the others join from
the gregarious instinct so strong in birds. The ad-
vantage taken of instinct in this case is far less ingenious

1 There is little doubt that dogs could be employed to decoy cattle in much
the same way as ducks. If a strange dog is taken into a pasture where a herd
of unhandled steers or heifers are running, they invariably " mob " it, and will
follow wherever it goes.

DECOY ANIMALS 167

than the original observation which suggested the use
of the pseudo-fox as decoy. The knowledge that
birds instinctively join other birds of the same kind
led to the use of the whole race of " call birds " em-
ployed by bird-catchers and fowlers. Their aid is
invoked successfully even by amateurs in the every-
day business of pigeon- keeping. If a stray pigeon
visits a house it generally perches on some part of
the roof, whence it takes a survey of the garden,
dogs, cats, and other pigeons there. If a little corn
is scattered on a window-sill where the latter are used
to be fed, and one of the home birds is thrown up on
to the roof, it is certain to fly down again to the food,
and with it comes the visitor, who cannot endure to
be left alone.

If a hawk or falcon is lost, or refuses to come
down from a tree, the loosing of another hawk will
often bring it again to the lure. Hawks and crows,
as well as many small birds, seem to entertain a
curious spite against any of their tribe which seem to
be in difficulties. If one is taken and pegged down on
its back with its feet upwards, another bird of the
same species is almost certain to descend upon it and
attack it. This is possibly because it imagines that
the other bird is offering battle, for if a crow, hawk,
or owl is fighting on the ground it generally throws
itself on its back, so as to present its most easily
defended side to the foe. Readers of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling's story of the Hindoo colony of the living
dead, will recall the means taken by the prisoners
to catch crows for food, and the same method is

1 68 ANIMAL ARTISANS

practised in England to-day by people whol wish to
catch kestrels. The bird fastened to the ground
instantly grips the other with its claws, partly to
defend itself, and partly, perhaps, to obtain a pur-
chase by which it may raise itself from the ground
to which it adheres in some way quite incomprehen-
sible to its experience. Parrots are taken in this way
in Australia, and there is very little doubt that if a
tame eagle were used as a decoy and "pegged out"
without hurting it, on its back on the eagle-haunted
hills of Spain, others would be caught in the same
way. A couple of these birds which found their way
to the Zoo were actually taken when locked in this
curious embrace after a fight upon the ground.

The progress from the use of these unconscious
instruments, to the training of animals to become
intelligent assistants in decoying others into the power
of man, makes an advance of very many steps up the
intellectual ladder of animal intelligence. Yet it is
not invariably the creatures credited with higher brain-
power than others which are so used. On the cattle
ranches of the great West, one of the great difficulties
of the cowboys is to induce the animals to enter a
train quietly. They can be rounded up and driven to
the siding by the ordinary manoeuvres of the profession,
but to induce a mob of obstinate bullocks and cows to
entrain themselves quietly is so difficult that it is not
yet understood even in Ireland ; and the question has
caused a good deal of correspondence in the papers
devoted to the great live-stock industry of the island.
In Texas they manage this by the use of a trained

DECOY ANIMALS 169

decoy. Bullocks are there called "bogeys" for some
unexplained reason, and the decoy bogey is as necessary
at a station as a stationmaster. It leads each lot of
cattle into the small loading pen next the truck which
is to be filled, and having taken them in, backs out,
stern foremost, at the word of command, when down
goes the slip rail and the " lot " are driven on board.

It may be, that the most intelligent and astonishing
of all animal collaborators with man in the work of
reducing their kind to be his servants, are now as rare
as the decoy-men's dogs in England. So little has been
heard of the old system lately that it is quite possible
that it is no longer in use in India, and that keddah
work has entirely taken its place. We allude to the
method of capturing single wild male elephants by
means of trained female decoys. The wild elephants
were not necessarily savage or outcasts, but were
usually pursued when away from the herd. The
decoys carried coils of rope attached to their necks.
Their owners rode them till near the scene of action,
and they were used whether by day or night. Night
was preferred, for the wild elephant was less suspicious,
and was easily found by the noise he made when feed-
ing, and by the sound of his striking the grass which
he pulled up against his forelegs to get rid of the earth
which clung to it. If discovered by day, the tame
animals slipped their riders at some distance, and then
fed up to the wild one until they could approach and
caress him. Then they " kept him in tow " while the
noosers slipped up and got the rope fastened to the
decoy's neck round the leg of the wild elephant, the

170 ANIMAL ARTISANS

decoy actually assisting in the operation. Something
of the kind is done with the half-wild elephants of
the King of Siam, when these are driven up for their
annual inspection at Ayuthia.

It may be asked, what is the inducement of animals
in captivity to take a conscious share in reducing
others of their species to the same condition ? To us
it suggests an act of treachery, or at least of servile
submission. The answer is, first, that as long as
animals in captivity are given employment they do
not as a rule think themselves unhappy, or dislike
their position. On the contrary, they are proud of
their association with man, and prefer his company
almost invariably to that of their own kind. Even
domestic pigeons, when made pets of, will remain
with their owners in preference to going with their
kind. The more intelligent animals become eager to
serve, and proud of their power to be useful. Like
the negro in " Peter Simple" who hands a stick to
the sailor, remarking that it will do to " keep off de
oder dam nigger," they are pleased to bring others
of their race into line with themselves, and take a
pride and interest in working to that end. There
are many dogs which, if they knew how, would become
regular slave-drivers to other animals, and none of
them have the slightest compunction in using all
their faculties to bring them into the power of the
superior being whom they serve.

CHAPTER XXIV
BULLS AND BULL-FIGHTS

THE popular interest which King Alphonso's court-
ship and marriage aroused in all things Spanish was
from the beginning widespread and sincere, and since
the fateful wedding-day, which so nearly ended in
cruellest tragedy, the popularity of the young king
and his bride is such that the British people would
fain look upon his country and all its institutions
with a favouring eye. But in spite of this the
Spanish bull-fight still meets with unqualified dis-
approval, and when it was announced that the young
queen was to attend a State performance on the
Sunday after the marriage, it was feared that she
might find the ordeal of blood in the Plaza de Toros
almost as terrible as the ordeal of fire in the Calle
Mayor.

But there is some reason to suppose that, in de-
ference to the feelings of the English princess, the
more objectionable features of the Spanish bull-fight
were somewhat mitigated on that occasion, for it is
significant that photographs of the performance show
bulls which are not of the true fighting race. A
stuffed specimen of that breed may be seen at the
Natural History Museum at South Kensington. It

172 ANIMAL ARTISANS

is a small black animal, as active and determined-
looking as our little Jerseys, which indeed it closely
resembles. But the bulls shown in the pictures of the
recent State bull-fights are wide-horned, light-coloured,
and clumsily built, far bigger and heavier than the
black breed, but, judging by the analogy of our own
light and heavy varieties of cattle, as inferior in
fighting power as a Cochin-China fowl is to a game-
cock. The unfortunate horses, whose sufferings are
such a revolting feature of the bull-fight, would have
a much better chance of evading the charge of a
comparatively heavy slow animal, and in the absence
of the true fighting bulls far fewer horses would be
mutilated and sacrificed.

Of late years it seems to have been rather forgotten
that bull-fighting is not even now an institution
peculiar to Spain. It is not very long since bull-
baiting, a peculiarly cruel and cowardly form of
pastime, in which the bull was almost powerless to
defend himself, was one of our own national amuse-
ments ; and the ring where bulls were tied up to be
worried by dogs on public holidays is still to be seen
at Brading, and probably at other towns besides.
Such encounters were the more to be condemned
because dogs and not men were the bulls' opponents,
and it could not be urged in their favour that human
prowess or agility were in any way developed by them.
Yet all the Latin races seem agreed to see in the bull,
the one animal whose courage and strength make it a
worthy antagonist for a man just sufficiently armed
to supplement quickness and skill to the extent

BULLS AND BULL-FIGHTS 173

necessary to protect him from the piercing horns ; and
though the Spaniards have in modern times invested
the encounter in that country with circumstances of
revolting cruelty, the form of duel between man and
bull as practised elsewhere is by no means the odious
and unequal combat which the name now suggests.

In the " Maremma " of Italy it was a natural growth
from the main occupation of that strange district.
Throughout the line of flat pestilential plains and
swamps which stretches along the western coast of the
Peninsula, through the Pontine Marshes, down to the
extremity of Calabria, huge herds of semi-wild cattle
and wild buffaloes are tended by mounted vaccari
and buffalari, armed with long lances to protect them-
selves from the bulls, which are there at least as
savage and dangerous as those kept in the " reserves "
of the Spanish nobles to supply the bull-rings of
Murcia, Carthagena, or Madrid. In the days of the
temporal power of the popes it was the privilege of
the boldest of the vaccari, after driving their cattle
into the towns for sale, to give an exhibition of their
skill in facing or checking the furious bulls, and the
proceeds of this performance formed part of their
remuneration.

In Rome the Anfiteatro Correa, built partly from
the materials of the Mausoleum of Augustus in
the Campus Martius, was the scene of the giostra,
as these combats were called. The bulls were kept
in the vaults which had once held the ashes of
the Caesars, and in the centre of the arena was the
pyramid that was once crowned by the statue of

174 ANIMAL ARTISANS

Augustus. The Italian bull-fight was a fine exhibition
of courage on the part of the giostratori, with none of
the cruelty of the Spanish arena. The men, dressed
in white, with red sashes, and armed only with short
sticks tipped with flags, faced the bull the moment
it was released from the den ; the only place of refuge
available being a stout post placed in the centre of
the ring, round which a bull might be dodged for
a short time until another performer distracted its
attention. If the animal persevered in following a
single man, he escaped by means of iron rings let
into the barrier wall. When the bull was tired of
pursuit the den was thrown open, and it was allowed
to re-enter. The courage of men who, armed only
with a stick, braved these Pontine and Campagnan
bulls, fresh from their free life and as active as wild
animals, seems greater than that called for in any form
of athletic competition known to the Teutonic races.
The speed and quickness of these animals is such
that a well-mounted man has often difficulty in
escaping their charge in their native plains. Sir
Walter Scott's fine lines on the rush of the wild
white bull of Cadzow Chase : —

" Mightiest of all the beasts of chase

That roam in woody Caledon,
Crashing the forest in his race,

The mountain bull comes thundering on.

Fierce, on the hunter's quivered band

He rolls his eyes of swarthy glow,
Spurns, with black hoof and horn, the sand,

And tosses high his mane of snow," —

BULLS AND BULL-FIGHTS 175

describe the onset of an animal inferior in size, though
not in courage, to the smooth-skinned, long-horned,
high-crested giants of the Southern plains.

In Portugal bull-fighting is almost as much a
national institution as in Spain, but with a mitigation
of its brutality. The bull's horns are supposed to be
padded, and the animal is not killed after the exhibi-
tion, but allowed to " live to fight another day."
Still, the injuries done to horses are often fatal, in spite
of the precautions taken to render the horns of the
bull less dangerous, and the sufferings of the horses
are the most cruel part of the performance, when this
is held in the great bull-rings of the large towns.

But the entertainment is by no means confined to
the principal cities. It is there that the popular heroes
of the ring perform, and the skill of the banderillo
and the matador is seen in perfection. But every
little country town converts its plaza into a bull-
ring at least once a year, and there the exhibition of
native pluck and strength, whether of bulls or men,
is seen in an even more picturesque form than among
the vaccari of the Maremma. "First catch your
bull" is the necessary preliminary to these rustic
encounters ; and the forests have to be scoured in
order to secure suitable animals. Every one who has
a horse to ride, or even a mule, delights to join in
these expeditions. Armed with strong, blunt goads,
they divide into two parties and scour the woods
until the herds with which the old bulls are keeping
company are discovered. In the great forest of the
Alemtejo the bulls live a life so free and wild that for

176 ANIMAL ARTISANS

years they are often undisputed masters of large areas
in which they seldom see a human being. To separate
these creatures from the herd, and drive them for
miles surrounded by horsemen armed only with iron-
shod poles, is a feat of skill and danger far greater
than any which the South American Spaniard under-
takes when armed with the bolas or the lasso. Each
bull is successively enticed into pursuit of some rider,
and then diverted into following a second, until it
loses the herd. The whole of those thus separated
are then united, and driven in a tumult of pursuit,
retreat, dust, and occasional disaster into an enclosure
in the town. Next day they are driven into the
square, which has been fitted up as a bull-ring, and
the fight begins. There is no apparatus or ordered
succession of attacks, but the picadors face the bulls
on foot, without the aid of the central goal, which in
the old Italian giostra gave some shelter to the men,
and they are armed with darts instead of sticks as a
means of defence. When men and animals are tired
out the performance ends, and the bulls, subdued by
their two days' combat, are kept for use in agriculture.
According to Spanish tradition, the bull-fight in its
full development, as seen in Madrid, Carthagena,
Murcia, or any of the great provincial capitals, was
borrowed from the Moors ; with the exception that
the Moors of Granada did not kill their bulls, and
were too anxious to display their horsemanship to
allow their steeds to be injured. There is clearly no
likelihood of an institution so dear to the whole
nation being abolished ; but it is much to be hoped

BULLS AND BULL-FIGHTS 177

that the humaner and more sportsmanlike customs
of the Moorish bull-fight may be re-established. As
a display of horsemanship, for which it was originally
intended, the Spanish version of the bull-fight is a
sorry spectacle. The horses are broken-down crea-
tures, destined to be gored by the bull, and so poor
in condition that they have not a chance of escape.

Yet, properly used, the horse can always hold its
own against the greater strength of the bull. " The
strength of the horse as compared to that of the
bullock is quite astonishing," writes Charles Darwin
in his description of the Pampas. " A man on horse-
back, having thrown his lasso round the horns of a
beast, can drag it anywhere he chooses. The animal,
ploughing up the ground with outstretched legs in
vain efforts to resist the force, generally dashes at full
speed to one side ; but the horse, immediately turning
to receive the shock, stands so firmly that the bullock
is almost always thrown down, and it is surprising
that their necks are not broken." The struggle is,
however, not one of fair strength ; the horse's girth
being matched against the bullock's neck. Yet even
the miserable horses of the bull-ring, with their backs
against the barrier, will often sustain the bull's charge,
which is turned by the united weight of horse and
rider bearing on the blunt spear.

The Pope has forbidden priests to attend the bull-
fights, but the order has been interpreted as an in-
junction against appearing in clerical costume. Before
going the -padre doffs his cassock and his shovel-hat.
It would be difficult totally to forbid the attendance

M

178 ANIMAL ARTISANS

of clerics at a national pastime which occupies the
thoughts of the ordinary public for months before
and months after it has taken place. In Madrid the
Plaza de Toros holds 12,000 people, and seats cost
from two shillings to two pounds. A Spanish work-
man will live on bread and grapes or water-melon for
weeks to save enough money for a front seat, and if
the fatal sword be planted in the deadly spot he will
fling his money, his tobacco, and his knife into the
ring at the feet of the successful champion. All
Seville went into mourning recently for the death of
a famous toreador, and his funeral was a semi-public
ceremony. A great nobleman who will keep the
breed of black bulls pure enough and savage enough
to satisfy the audience gains more popular applause
than the owner of a Derby winner in England ; and
in a recent disastrous railway accident public opinion
was strongly aroused against the railway company,
not on account of the loss of human life, but because
the bulls which were on their way to the approaching
bull-fight were thrown upon the line, and besides
injuring one or two passengers, which did not matter,
were in some cases injured themselves, which was felt
to be a public calamity.

CHAPTER XXV
MOLES AND MOLE-SKINS

THE increasing taste for furs in ladies' dress has
brought mole-skin into fashion once more ; and for
a time it was so popular, and garments made of it
were so expensive, that the skins of rabbits, squirrels,
musk-rats, and any other animals whose fur could
be treated and made to resemble the moles' were
more than doubled in value. Except the practically
extinct marten, the mole has the finest fur of any
English animal ; but the " little gentleman in black
velvet," who was toasted by the Jacobites because
William of Orange broke his collar-bone in a fall
caused by a mole-hill at Hampton Court, had been
almost forgotten by town dwellers until the recent
change of fashion brought him so much into request.
Hundreds of thousands of mole-skins must have been
used in the first few years of this century, yet the
little miners of our meadows do not seem to have
decreased to any appreciable extent.

Mole's fur is not only beautifully fine and soft,
but it is set on perpendicularly like moss without any
inclination backwards. Its softness and the absence
of friction thus aid the moles to pass through their
burrows either backwards or forwards. The regula-

179

i8o ANIMAL ARTISANS

tion price for mole-skins has for years been twopence
each. It is the dressing and sewing which cost
money, and as English furriers have taken a hint
from the Chinese work sent over by Li Hung Chang,
and cut the skins to a diamond shape, the make-up
is of skins covering about seven square inches.

The injury caused by moles to farmers does not
amount to much, except on meadow-land if they are
too numerous. Grass grows in hard-pressed soil, weeds
in loose soil. As many moles will soon loosen all
the surface-soil on an acre, weeds grow there and
grass decreases. The good which moles do by drain-
ing land is due not to their surface operations, but
to their deep burrows. These tunnels are the most
permanent of animal highways in this country. They
have a complete system of what may be called " trunk
lines," which probably are connected up over a whole
parish where there is enough meadow-land to make
it worth while for the moles to work it. They keep
mainly to old pastures, because it is there that the
worms are most numerous, worming in ground con-
stantly disturbed by ploughing or digging being a
slow business, quickly abandoned by all but young
and inexperienced moles. But where there is a line
of sound meadows the moles stick to it as persistently
as the Johannesburgers do to the line of the main
reef, and work it both near the surface and in the
deep levels with incessant industry. From the main
drives they make temporary worm-hunting burrows,
which merely represent their excursions in search of
food. These are marked by the mole-hills. The

MOLES AND MOLE-SKINS 181

high-roads, being ancient excavations, are not marked
by mounds, unless some obstruction has been caused.

If the lines of these highways are examined and
traced, it will be found that they are carried round or
under very considerable obstacles. In one case lately
noticed the tunnel entered a garden from the hedge, and
passed under a very ancient grass path, which is known
to have been made and in existence for a hundred
and fifty years. The site of the mole-run is marked
by a depression some two or more inches deep,
running across the path, the turf having gradually
sunk there owing to successive clearances of earth by
the moles from this their main tunnel to the magnifi-
cent worming grounds in the paddock and orchard
beyond. This trunk-line skirts a paddock, mainly
in the fence, and is then carried round an orchard.
It plunges under a carriage drive, where there are
at least two and a half feet of solid macadam and
broken bricks, with hard-rolled gravel on the top,
and emerges on the other side, where it runs round
the edge of a lawn. This lawn ends in a semi-
circular sunk fence of brick, and the moles have run
their tunnel round, just under the edge of the bricks.
They seem quite aware that they must not meddle
with the lawn, and never throw up a hill there, but
go on to another meadow beyond.

It is in these main burrows that the mole-catcher
sets his traps. Though the animals have such ill-
developed eyes that when a mole is skinned the eye
will often " come off" with the skin, so small is the
organ and so weakly set in the head, they are very

1 82 ANIMAL ARTISANS

sensitive to light. In replacing the sod which covers
the mole-trap the greatest care has to be taken to fill
in any possible chinks where light might penetrate
into the earth.

Either moles are very thirsty creatures, or else
they find a specially good store of worms by the
margin of water, for their tunnels generally have an
adit to the water-level of a wet ditch or of a pond.
In the very dry summer of 1899 they could be seen
hunting round the edges of the water, the earth
moving just above their backs. A half-grown mole
captured while thus engaged was let loose in a room.
He tried desperately to dig a hole in the carpet,
but could not. He then scrambled to the side of
the room, turned round, and dug under the edge of
the carpet. Under this he disappeared, and his
course could be traced as he burrowed, much to his
satisfaction, between the floor and the thick Turkey
fabric above him, which needed to be taken up before
he could be caught. This determination and energy
are characteristic of moles. They are dauntless little
creatures, and almost the hardest workers in the
world. They are said to take five or six hours'
sleep in the middle of the day, but the rest of the
twenty-four hours they seem to spend in burrowing,
eating, and drinking. The desperate struggles of a
mole to escape must be felt to be appreciated. If
held in the hand behind its fore-legs, it will assuredly
struggle out unless it is grasped so hard as to injure
its ribs. Once on the ground, it instantly uses its
nose as a kind of divining-rod to find a workable

MOLES AND MOLE-SKINS 183

spot of ground, thrusting it rapidly this way and that
and trying the surface ; and then, working its paws
like paddles, starts its shaft at once and soon sinks
out of sight.

Most accounts of the excavation of the feeding
alleys from which the mole-hills are thrown up seem
to assume that the method is obvious. " The earth
is excavated and thrown up into hillocks." If moles
worked like nearly all other burrowing creatures, this
would mean that the animal entered the ground from
above and threw out the earth behind it, as a rabbit
does, with its hind-feet. But the mole when throw-
ing up its hillock never comes above ground at
all; neither does it throw out the earth behind it.
At the same time, it cannot push a cylinder of earth
in front of it, as the pith is pushed by a stick out
of a length of elder. What can be seen of its
methods when first sinking its burrow shows that it
digs, loosens the earth, and then pushes its way
through. But mere compression of loosened earth
does not give space enough for the animal to pass,
except when it is working only just below the surface,
when it lifts the earth into a half-cylindrical arch
above it. The progress of the mole below ground
seems, for it cannot be watched, to be achieved as
follows. It scratches away and loosens the earth in
front of it probably to rather more than its own length,
passing it backwards into the permanent highway
tunnel. This gives it a certain length of run in
which to work freely, and by constantly passing the
earth backwards it can make a tunnel of any length

184 ANIMAL ARTISANS

it pleases. But should it wish to turn back, it would
be obliged to burrow again through this mass of
loosened soil. It therefore at intervals makes a shaft
upwards to the open air, and turning round, pushes
the loosened earth before it out of the shaft. As all
the earth lying farthest from the shaft has to be
pushed up through the lengthened funnel of the
mole-hill, this must be arduous work. But the
enormous strength and resolution of the mole make
light of this difficulty.

In winter and hard weather they mainly work in
banks and in woods and copses. In spring, to use the
phrase of the mole-catchers, they " begin to run,"
issuing into the fields on every side. Each mole is
believed to have a rather elaborate house, which is its
headquarters in winter, where it makes a bed, as de-
scribed by M. Le Court, who was both a scientific
naturalist and also the inventor of the modern iron
mole-trap. It is said that there is a great predomi-
nance of males among moles. But it seems more
probable that it is the males which are generally
caught. All mole-catchers know that the females are
much more difficult to trap, whereas the bulldog
courage of the male moles hurries them into danger.

An English mole-catcher named Jackson, quoted
by Professor Bell, stated that moles dig wells for
water, sinking perpendicular shafts in which water
always stands. They are also said to store worms,
so bitten as to make them unable to crawl ; but this
seems uncertain. Their appetite is so voracious that a
very short fast kills them. Male moles have been

MOLES AND MOLE-SKINS 185

found lying dead by the side of trapped females, the
assumption being that grief and fasting have hastened
their end.

Moles were distinguished by two very ancient
names, by both of which they are locally known —
" want " and " mouldewarp." The former is the
Wessex name. " Paid for wanting Ardington Meade,
2 shillings," appears in an entry of a vicar of
Lockinge made nearly two centuries ago. " Moulde-
warp " is the Yorkshire name, meaning the piler up
of mould. The " warplands " of the coast recall the
old verb.

CHAPTER XXVI
CANARY CULTURE

CANARIES are probably the smallest of any animals
habitually bred and exhibited for profit. They are
also the latest in date of any domesticated creature—
perhaps the only one the date of whose domestication
is recorded. Yet they are so popular that at the great
shows in the autumn the number exhibited often exceeds
a thousand ; though the extraordinary and permanent
differences of colour and form acquired by these little
birds since they became the household pets of Europe
may be seen, perhaps, better in a small collection than
in one where the specimens of each kind are numbered
by scores.

The chance by which a little greenish finch, from
an insignificant group of islands on the West African
trade-route, has been adopted as the pet cage-bird
of every European nation, is one of the accidents of
domestication. Neither the plumage nor the song of
the canary in its wild state are such as to mark it out
specially for selection as a pet ; though, as compared
with the tropical birds met farther south along the
West African coast, its linnet-like song is an echo
of the bird-voices of the gardens of Europe. The
Portuguese and Spanish sailors, in their first ad-

186

CANARY CULTURE 187

venturous voyages, were keenly on the watch to dis-
cover in the new countries some familiar bird or
flower, and Columbus's journals are dotted with
entries of the song of " river sparrows " and " finches,"
"like those we hear in Spain." Italian voyagers are
credited with being the first to bring the canary-birds
to Europe. They are said to have been brought over
early in the sixteenth century as part of the cargo of a
vessel bound for Leghorn. The ship was wrecked,
and many of the birds were released and flew to the
nearest land, which happened to be the island of
Elba. There they found a climate so like that of
their native land that they nested, and would have
become naturalised. But the greater number were
recaptured, and sold in the coast towns of Western
Italy. There the tame canary was first established ;
and it is said that its portrait may be found intro-
duced into more than one of the works of old Italian
painters, depicted in the sober colours in which it first
made its appearance in the peninsula. The peculiar
beauty of the plumage was the soft merging of the
green on the back into a beautiful warm grey beneath,
a tint which may still be found in the " mules," and
which seems to reappear in the " cinnamon" and
" lizard " canaries.

The splendid bright yellow of the modern birds
was gained by carefully mating all those in which the
yellow colour showed most conspicuously. But there
are equally beautiful varieties which are neither green
nor yellow, and yet have been established for nearly
two centuries. To a naturalist the permanence of the

1 88 ANIMAL ARTISANS

variations should be almost as interesting as the per-
manence of type. The " lizard " canaries, for example,
are spangled all over the breast, back, and shoulders
with elegant spots of silver or golden tints. The
" cinnamons " are of a most beautiful mixed tint of
orange and mealy grey. Norwich canaries without
crests are a brilliant yellow. Others are yellow or
buff, with crests as regular as a crop of hair cut round
the rim of a barber's basin.

Most of the best known breeds of the present time
existed as early as the end of the seventeenth century ;
for Mr. G. Barnesby, in his work on the canary,
mentions a book published in 1709 in which twenty-
eight varieties are mentioned, comprising nearly all
those known at the present day.

When perfection of form has been attained, perfection
of colour becomes the object of the canary exhibitor.
Some of the little birds appear in orange plumage,
which exceeds in depth and richness the colours of
the orioles or tropical tanagers. "Buff" is the name
by which this tint is known to " the fancy," who, like
most specialists, attach a different set of meanings to
words in common use when applied to the mysteries
of their craft. The means by which this beautiful
tint is conveyed to the plumage of a pale, almost
primrose-yellow, bird like the " Norwich plain " canary
is so mechanical that if it were not for the part
played by Nature in transferring pigment from food
to feathers, it would deserve classing with the manu-
facture of green carnations and blue roses by steeping
the stems in dyed liquids.

CANARY CULTURE 189

When about nine or ten weeks old, the young
bird moults its first feathers completely, and ac-
quires the plumage of adult canaryhood. At this
period the owner devotes all the cosmetic experi-
ence acquired in a thousand generations of canary-
colouring to artificially darkening and enriching the
tint of, the new feathers. Probably there is no other
creature in the world, not excluding the beauties of
the East, which goes so thoroughly into training to
gain a complexion ; for the moult lasts for a couple
of months, and during the whole time the cosmetic
process is never neglected. It consists entirely in feed-
ing the bird on food containing yellow colouring
matter, mainly from natural vegetable dyes. The first
step is to induce it to eat the flowers of marigolds.
Canaries, like most other finches, are fond of pulling
to pieces and eating the petals of flowers, and there is
seldom much difficulty in teaching them to eat the
brilliant blossoms. No morsel of green leaves is
allowed in the cage, but fresh marigolds are given as
long as they will touch them, the ardent " fancier "
being recommended to grow the flowers in relays in
his garden. Saffron-cake and saffron-water form the
solid and liquid accompaniments of the marigold
flowers, to which cayenne-pepper is sometimes added.
This gives an almost scarlet shade to some of the
feathers, but sometimes injures the health of the bird.
But saffron seems perfectly harmless, and the canary
eats and drinks the yellow-dyed food as gaily as the
sparrows steal the saffron fibres from the crocuses
themselves in the early spring. Various patent colour-

190 ANIMAL ARTISANS

ings are also used, and are exhibited in front of the
birds which have thrived on them like Mellin's food
and Nestle's milk at a show of prize babies. Cochineal
water is perhaps the deepest in tint of any food given,
but this does not impart the characteristic red which
it produces as a dye.

As the shades of orange and yellow suffer from
dust and dirt, canaries are most carefully bathed before
exhibition. A shaving-brush, warm water, and soft
soap are the usual means employed ; and a practical
hand will wash canaries by the dozen, at the rate of
seven or eight minutes each, transferring each bird
after its final douche and rubbing with a soft cloth
into the drying-cage, which stands before the fire.
Precision and " boldness of attack " are the qualities
for a successful washer ; canaries, like babies, being
apt to catch cold and become miserable if the process
be unduly prolonged.

Singing canaries are treated on different principles.
Their qualities are more suited for private appreciation
than for exhibition, or contests like those held by
the London bird-fanciers between cock chaffinches, in
which the bird wins which repeats its song the greatest
number of times. Yet it is by its song, rather than
its plumage, that the domesticated canary can rightly
claim to be almost the best, as it is the most popular,
of cage-birds. The Norwich and Yorkshire breeds
are said to be the best songsters among the English
varieties, if well taught. But neither of these are equal
to the German birds, which, perhaps from living
among a naturally musical race, have a correctness of

CANARY CULTURE 1 9 1

ear and a memory of sound unrivalled by any other
species of canary, or indeed by any bird at all. It
is said that some German canaries have known and
habitually reproduced the complete song of twenty-
two other species of bird, including the nightingale,
the skylark, the goldfinch, the woodlark, and the
linnet. These German birds seldom live long in this
country, but are bought at high prices to put among
young canaries, to whom they act as tutors, singing,
like Orpheus, till they die. Sometimes in the ecstasy
of song these birds actually cause their own deaths —
bursting a blood-vessel by the extraordinary effort to
compass some loud or unusual note.

It would be interesting to know whether the English
canary is so completely domesticated as to have lost
the power of returning to the wild life, and of rearing
its young in sufficient numbers to make the experi-
ment of reversion to the original form possible. Those
that escape from cages do not seem happy in their
freedom, even if the scene of their wanderings be
English country gardens in summer-time. Probably
the winter would be too severe for them to survive in
this country. But the result of releasing a few dozen
cheap yellow canaries in their own islands would be
worth observing -by those European residents who
now make the islands not only a winter resort but a
permanent home.

CHAPTER XXVII
HUMOURS OF THE "FANCY"

THE honorary secretary of the National Mouse Club
was recently presented with j£8 in subscriptions as a
mark of appreciation of his work for this club. The
journal which gives this item of news is not an
" extreme " fancier's organ, but a very humane one.
Even the remedies for some ailments of pugs are
advertised with the attractive heading of "No Starv-
ing." It also records some interesting details of how
the mouse classes are doing at shows.

It appears that in the Midlands a district Fur and
Feather Society's annual show was remarkable for the
quality of these classes. " A very pretty Dutch mouse
won, and its owner took a V.H.C. [very highly com-
mended] with a lovely white one." Another well-
known exhibitor "sent a very fat fawn one, but his
fur was not in very good condition." A sable mouse,
with the best of ears, was third ; and a lovely black-
and-tan, catalogued at ^20, was second. The writer
does not know the points of a mouse, though £10 is
a price calculated to make beginners envious. But
this pitch of excellence is not obtained without intense
thought and expenditure of energy, as plainly appears
from the regrets expressed that one well-known

192

HUMOURS OF THE "FANCY' 193

exhibitor, "who never failed to take leading honours
wherever she showed," has given it up because she
has married.

It would be wrong to laugh at the National Mouse
Club, because it leads to higher things. It is difficult
to draw the line at which the fancier ends and the
stock-breeder begins. In the preliminary remarks
printed and circulated before a sale of one of the
premier herds of pedigree cattle in this county, the
auctioneer noted that the owner " had been marked out
early for distinction. A natural taste from boyhood
for live-stock, first with canaries, later with rabbits,
and then with Langshan poultry, with all of which
champion prizes and challenge cups were won, led him
to extend his taste," with results of the happiest kind,
and the creation of a transatlantic reputation. The
parallel of Dandie Dinmont's terriers occurs, they
being entered first to " stots and rottens, then to
tods and brocks."

The chief difference between the " fancy" and the
stock-breeders is the vivacity and vigour with which
the devotees of the former differ on the subjects
most dear to them. Their surplus energy is immense,
and their loyalty to their leaders unstinted. The
tributes paid, in works devoted to their special
animals, to the organisers or founders of the fancy
are of the floridly generous but perfectly sincere
order. The personal sacrifices, unremitting single-
minded zeal, unswerving devotion, and singular recti-
tude of these pioneers and pilots are dwelt upon
in pages of heartfelt laudation. Their portraits

N

194 ANIMAL ARTISANS

embellish the text ; and there can be no doubt, from
the expression of their countenances, that they are the
kind of leaders who never swerve from the stern path
of duty. What that duty is, and the trials which
beset them by the way, every fancier knows too well.

Fancies are like other cults. For a time they
are pursued with a single mind. Then divisions
arise, because different and conflicting ideals grow up
insensibly, not from any suggestion of the fanciers,
but from the nature of things. Some one has a rabbit
or a pigeon or a guinea-pig showing marked features
differing from the true type, yet so excellent in
themselves that he cannot set the animal aside. In
time he begins to prize these very differences, and
then he gathers his friends, who perhaps have
animals like it, and starts a schism.

Now, in the heavy lines of genuine stock-breeding,
such as shorthorns, or Southdowns, or Shire horses, or
Tamworth pigs, every one is so absolutely convinced
that he is right and every one else wrong that he
treats suggestions of change with contempt. In the
"fancy" matters are different, or, rather, when the
parties differ the dissidence is very marked, and
embodied not only in correspondence, but in the
permanent pages of the organs devoted to the fancy.
On the Turf there are scandals ; in agriculture,
questions. In the fancy there are " rows." These
rows are generally epoch-making, as they lead to the
creation of two lines of some breed instead of one ;
so perhaps on the whole they are beneficial. Every
one hurls himself into the fray and does his level

HUMOURS OF THE "FANCY'1 195

best, and no one who observes these dissensions with
a proper sense of what they may lead to fails to
remember them. There was the great Black-and-
Tan Row, which may serve as a specimen. It was
some years ago, probably ten, so feeling has cooled.
Some one had the great good fortune to find a
"sport" among various kinds of rabbits turned out
to run wild, which was like a wild rabbit, but was
coloured black-and-tan. This was promptly domesti-
cated, and a new and desirable breed, just like wild
rabbits, only black-and-tan, was founded.

All their points were maintained, even "the wild
expression of the eye." But people could not let
them alone, and began to exhibit black-and-tans
with lop-ears and so forth, degrading them to mere
hutch-rabbits. The grand old original black-and-tans
were threatened with extinction or degradation, and
it was feared that all the wild character would be
lost. These are the moments which prove the true
leaders of the fancy. Then comes the trial of
character and constancy, which wins the devotion
of loyal followers. In this case the leaders, if the
writer's recollection serves, went opposite ways, and
there were for a time two black-and-tan clubs, the
members of which were not on speaking terms.

Then there was the great Grit Row, and another,
too bitter and too dreadful to name, in connection
with a certain breed of chickens. The great Grit
Row originated spontaneously. Some one had very
superior chickens, which won endless prizes, which
he accounted for by the fact that he gave them

196 ANIMAL ARTISANS

" grit," which he pounded up himself. The grit
idea " caught on," as they say. Very many people
thought grit was the thing. They almost fed their
chickens on grit. They had it in sizes, and put
saucers of small grit about as large as gunpowder
before callow chickens, and of large grit as big as
maize for grown-up cocks and hens. All the fowls
acquired a taste for grit, even if they had it not
already. Then an opposition arose who hardly let
their chickens look at grit. One leader and breeder
of prize-winners wrote to say that his lived on bare
boards, where there was no possibility of picking up
grit, and so forth, and insinuated the darkest motives
as against the advocates of the grit, who sold no
end of it at a very handsome rate, considering the
abundance of the article in nature. It was about
twice as dear as the best oilcake.

Of the terrible division which recently arose in
poultry circles brief mention only can be made. A
fancier discovered a new breed of chickens of the
useful kind. Now, it is well known that any one
who discovers a new chicken expects by its means to
benefit mankind and solve the cottage problem and
the rural emigration question. Conceive, then, the
feelings of a fancier who sees a chicken which might
and ought to do this being turned into a "show"
variety, and the judges lending themselves to this
course. Making a chicken or pigeon into a " show "
bird means that if it has long legs you make them
longer, while if it has short legs you make them
almost disappear, or some such treatment, without

HUMOURS OF THE "FANCY' 197

caring in the least whether it will be useful or able
to lay eggs or good to eat. Where, then, is the
solution of the cottage problem and the benefit to
humanity ? Gone for ever. There were many and
bitter protests, and the result was a third kind of
chicken of a highly useful character.

But the fanciers do excellent work in providing
amusement, and even profit, for numbers of people
who would otherwise have no scope for surplus
energy. They create a demand for other people to
supply. When prize Belgian hares are sold for
^60, and even larger sums, and guinea-pigs for ^20,
to go to America and the Colonies, while breeding
prize pigeons and canaries has become a national
industry, it is difficult to foresee the future limits of
the fancy. We imagine that fish or iguanas may
eventually find a place beside the birds and rabbits,
the cavies and the mice. To suggest new objects
for clubs and associations to raise to the dignity
of a " class " in shows, and later to have shows all
to themselves, is one of the dreams of good
fanciers. Generally the animals taken up are in
some way neglected breeds, or poor relations of
others which have either reached perfection or have
been so spoiled by " over showing " that they are no
longer admired, and show their unfitness for survival
by failing to survive at all. Most people who are
not in the fancy think that carrier pigeons are
pigeons which can carry messages. But carrier pigeons
had wattles, and these were so developed by the
show breeders that at last they needed to have their

198 ANIMAL ARTISANS

eyes opened for them every morning, because the
wattles shut them up. Then the pigeons which had
not been patronised, and could fly with messages, were
called " homers," and not carriers. These were then
bred for shows, and became perfectly useless ; so now
they are called " show " homers, and those which
can fly are "flying" homers, about as distinctive a
title, one would say, as walking postmen. Other
"very high-class fancy" are bred with such short
beaks that they cannot feed their own young ones and
always need nurse pigeons to bring them up.

Thus there is no fear that the fancy will ever be
quite stationary, as it kills off its own proteges. Even
the dogs, or some of the breeds, may come to a bad
end at their hands. An American man of science
was recently on a visit to England for the purpose
of studying teeth, because he has long heard it
imputed against his countrymen and countrywomen
that they lose theirs abnormally soon. Almost the
first discovery he made was that the modern British
prize bulldog has such ridiculous front teeth that he
cannot bite properly, and if he did the teeth would
be squeezed out.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE FEAR OF MAN

IN a previous volume, " Animals of To-day," some
account was given of the evidence collected by ancient
and modern naturalists, from Don Felix d'Azara to
Mr. Hudson, that the puma, the second largest of the
big cats of South America, neither feared man nor
regarded human beings as its prey, but on the contrary
sought their society, and even protected man from the
attacks of the jaguar. Trustworthy facts which lend
additional confirmation to this interesting question
must necessarily be slowly acquired ; but the following
anecdote, which comes at first hand from one long
resident in British Guiana, supports the belief that the
puma seeks the society of man instead of attacking or
fearing him. When making an expedition up one of
the large rivers in a steam-launch, our friend gave a
passage to an elderly Cornish miner who was anxious
to reach the goldfields. Not wishing to intrude upon
his hosts, he did not sleep on board the launch, but
always slung his hammock between two trees on shore.
As climbing into a high-slung hammock is not easy,
he usually fastened it rather low, and his weight pro-
bably brought it to within three feet of the ground at
the bottom of the curve. One morning, being asked

199

200 ANIMAL ARTISANS

how he had slept, he complained that "the frogs had
made such a noise underneath his hammock that they
had kept him awake." Some Indians of the crew who
were folding up the hammock laughed a good deal
when they heard this, and being asked the reason, said,
still laughing, " Oh, ' tiger ' sleep with old man last
night." They had found under the hammock the
marks of where a puma had lain. The noise which
had kept the occupier of the hammock awake was
probably the purring of the puma, pleased at occupy-
ing the " next berth " below a man. As these Guiana
Indians have, in addition to the unerring eye of the
forest-dweller, a special liking and capacity for taming
animals, it can hardly be doubted that their conclu-
sion was correct. Such an absence of fear, and liking
for human society, could only be paralleled by the
behaviour of some domestic cats. Yet in the case of
the puma it can only be a survival of a primitive
disposition, which has already been lost in a great
measure by the same species in North America.

Are we, then, to suppose that the absence of that fear
of man so general among even the large carnivora was
the rule in the primitive world ? If it was, we shall
have to account for the survival of man in the presence
of creatures which did not fear him, and possessed a
far more effective physical equipment for attack than
man possessed for defence ; for we cannot suppose
that the benevolent neutrality which can safely be
attributed to the puma was exhibited by the other
carnivora. The evidence that fear is not the natural
attitude of animals towards man is mainly of two

THE FEAR OF MAN 201

kinds — the notes of explorers who have pushed into
the few regions of earth where animals were numerous
but man had not trodden, and the results of the very
latest experiments of to-day in districts where the
killing of animals has been absolutely prohibited. In
other words, we must compare the behaviour of the
creatures in the Arctic seas in the days of Willoughby
and Barents, or in the voyage of Weddell to the
Antarctic, with the latest reports from Yellowstone
Park. The results show a striking agreement in the
demeanour of the beasts when first confronted with
the new creature, man. Few of them exhibited fear,
so far as the records show. When Barents's crew were
on their first voyage a polar bear, who probably had
never seen men before, took one of the crew who
was lying down by the back of the neck, and after
dragging him some way, bit the top of his head off.
Even now the polar bear is the least shy of his race,
though so constantly hunted.

The general tendency of wild animals kept in large
reserves and never molested points to the same con-
clusion, though for obvious reasons none of the most
dangerous carnivora can be maintained in such places.
The fear of man is lost, by creatures wild and free but
unmolested, so quickly as to be matter of surprise
to those most conversant with animals in captivity.
Reports published in the United States newspapers
dwell repeatedly on the loss of the fear of man by all
animals in Yellowstone Park, where the deer (both
wapiti and black-tailed deer) come to the houses to be
fed, and even eat the flowers from the window-boxes.

202 ANIMAL ARTISANS

Brown bears hang round the hotels, and come daily
to eat the refuse carted into the woods close by, and
many of the smaller rodents are absolutely fearless.

In menageries and zoological gardens the fear of
man is lost mainly by constant and daily contact, with
no power to escape, and by the remembrance that
it is man who provides their food. But here the
conditions are abnormal, and it would be useless to
draw conclusions from the behaviour towards man of
animals in captivity, and apply them to the solution
of the earlier problem of the innate or acquired
character of their fear of human beings. It is, how-
ever, matter of general knowledge that where man
is weak and beasts strong and numerous, as in the
country watered by the Zambesi and Shire" rivers, the
boldness of the animals leads to serious disasters. In
the present day the only frequent reports of attacks of
lions and leopards on men for food, and not in self-
defence or fright, come from these districts, though
the story is as old as the rebuilding of Samaria.

African lions are, beyond question, the boldest of
all predatory animals, and those of Mashonaland and
Uganda are perhaps the boldest of all. During the
night, their natural hunting-time, they attack draught
animals, or even men, within a few yards of the
camp-fires, and are a constant and serious danger to
travellers in districts remote from the main tracks
of traders. From the Zambesi, through Mashonaland,
and south to the Limpopo, a chorus of complaints
rises in the pages of recent travellers, whose cattle or
followers have suffered from their attacks. Mr. Selous

THE FEAR OF MAN 203

has recorded the pursuit of the post from Salisbury
by a lion and the loss of the mail-bags, which the
animal tore from the back of the pack-horse.

Mr. Millais, who crossed the Nuanetsi River with
a team of eight donkeys to draw his waggon — the
oxen being left behind on account of the proximity
of the " fly " country — lost three in one night by a
lion attack, carried out with the utmost contempt for
human beings, whether white or black. He was
awakened by the lion's roar, and almost immediately
saw one of the tethered donkeys knocked over. It
was not five yards from the fire, but in the darkness
and dazzle of the fire he could not see the attacker.
" We knew instinctively that a lion had killed the
donkey, and was standing over him not five yards
from where we were, but it was hopeless to fire unless
we saw something, or at least could make certain of
his whereabouts." This odd scene continued for
some moments ; the actors being four or five black
men, two white men, a pony, seven live donkeys and
a dead one, and the lion standing over the latter, with
a fire partly lighting up the figures, until a couple
more donkeys broke loose. They rushed into a
mealie-field, and there the party heard the lion chasing
first one donkey and then another, as excited and as
little afraid as a dog chasing rabbits in a field of
barley. " At every bound the lion emitted a subdued
* boo-uff ' as his forelegs struck the ground, but the
two did not go far. There was presently a loud
scuffle, a crack, and the sound of a heavy body falling ;
then all was still." The lion chased the third donkey

204 ANIMAL ARTISANS

round the camp, killed and ate it, and was next day
shot by an ingenious trap, made by tying a rifle to
posts, and fastening a string to the trigger, which the
lion struck when revisiting its "kill." The un-
sportsmanlike method of compassing its death is
excused by Captain Millais on the obvious ground
of necessity. This lion was ten feet long from the
tip of the nose to the tip of the tail, was in perfect
health, and immensely formidable. But besides the
" waggon and kraal business," which occupied it at
the time of its last attack, it had taken to killing
native women when game and native goats were scarce
and travelling teams had not yet come up-country.
Six women had been killed by it from one village.

If, as seems probable, the animal fear of man was
acquired and is not natural to their minds, it is not
very clear how the early tribes of men, when the
larger carnivorous animals were far more numerous
than now, escaped destruction and survived long
enough to impress on the animal world the sense of
fear by which man now dominates it. Regarded
merely as a conflict between one class of animal and
another, the result should not have been doubt-
ful. Man ought to have disappeared from the face
of the earth, or, in any case, to have retreated to
remote strongholds in regions not frequented by
the beasts. That he did not do so, but turned
the tables on the better equipped offensive crea-
tures, is fair presumptive evidence that original man
never was on a level with the animals in intelli-
gence, but was equipped with the predominant

THE FEAR OF MAN 205

brain-power which has put him ahead in the race
ever since.

Primitive man, literally speaking, " lived by his
wits," for he could have owed his survival to
little else. He was not, for example, nearly so
well equipped as the monkeys for physical defence
or flight, though their survival is not altogether
easy to explain on purely physical grounds. Their
power of using their arms and hands as a means
of swinging rapidly from branch to branch gives
them an advantage over all the tree-climbing cats.
Their habit of throwing missiles is also very dis-
concerting to other animals ; though this art is only
practised by certain monkeys, and may even have been
acquired in imitation of man. But their rapid and
intelligent combination for defence, menace, and look-
out duty has contributed quite as much to their
survival as their speed and activity. In tropical
America even the monkeys are hard put to it to
escape the attacks of such active and formidable foes
as the harpy eagle and the ocelot. But it cannot be
proved that even the most debased or physically
weakest of mankind has ever been the " natural prey "
of that " natural enemy " which, according to Sir
Samuel Baker, is the nightmare of nearly every species
of non-carnivorous animal.

The causes which make exceptions to this rule are
temporary and narrowly local. Even the Greenlander
and the Esquimau are the masters of the polar bear, and
probably always have been, though little better armed
than primitive man ; and the pigmies of the Central

206 ANIMAL ARTISANS

African forests are mighty hunters. It may even be
that the neighbourhood of fierce animals aided the
early development of man; for the least developed
races are largely found in such places as Tierra del
Fuego, where, in the absence of savage beasts, savage
man had no inducement to arm and equip himself.

But man has had an even more potent ally than
his own ingenuity which from remote antiquity has
invested him in the mind of the animal world with
something of the supernatural. He, and he alone, is
ever accompanied by the one element which the animal
mind cannot create, cannot understand, lives in con-
stant awe of, and dreads by night, when its courage
is greatest and that of man least steady. Fire — that
pillar of cloud and flame which precedes not the aggre-
gate human host, but the smallest fragment of the
invading army, the constant and dreaded 'harbinger
of human presence, springing up, as the beasts must
think, automatically from the earth wherever man rests
his body, guarding him in sleeping and waking, and
always associated with his abode — this, above all his
attributes, has for ages terrified and subdued the beasts.

Since the first appearance of man in any given region
of the earth he has been teaching the beast to fear him;
and it is not until to-day, when he is absolutely their
master, and has in many instances totally destroyed
them, that he thinks of restoring on a tiny scale, and
on a few spots on the earth's surface, the " state of
Nature ; " and allowing those creatures which he dares
to experiment with, once more to lay aside that
acquired terror which makes them flee his presence.

CHAPTER XXIX
POLYGLOT ANIMALS

A RECENT discussion on the use of Welsh in working
sheep-dogs is abundant proof that the revival of the
Celtic tongues, recently advocated, will meet with no
resistance from the canine population of Wales. They
have many of them been brought up to understand
Welsh from whatever corresponds to the cradle in a
canine nursery. On the confines of the Highlands the
dogs often understand both Gaelic and English. But
these polyglot collies are not very common, and the
greater part of the orders given to them, except such
ordinary phrases as " Go home ! " " Lie down ! " or
" Come here ! " are usually conveyed in the tongue of
the Gael.

Ever since the dog became the servant of man he
has also had to be a linguist. If the annals of dogs
and men were searched, it would be found that the
former had in their day been proficient in the under-
standing of tongues dead for centuries, as they will be
in the future of the languages of nations yet unborn.
"Argo" doubtless obeyed the orders given by Pene-
lope in the most ladylike Ionic of the day ; the dog
of Alcibiades was no less proficient when addressed in
" up-to-date " Attic by the club porter in Athens ; and

208 ANIMAL ARTISANS

we may be very certain that all the dogs on the
canvases of Cuyp and Teniers were equally familiar
with the dog language of double Dutch.

" Don't say that before l Snap/ ' Snap ' don't know
he's only a dog. He thinks he's folks ! " was an
American appreciation of the quickness with which
dogs understand and resent anything rude said about
themselves. The degree to which they comprehend
doubtless differs, and is probably in most cases limited
to the perception that their name is associated with
laughter or a censorious tone of voice when mentioned
to others. Also the range of conversation, and of
activities to which it refers, is so large in the average
gentleman's house that a dog often gives up the effort
at understanding more than actually concerns its daily
comfort. It becomes bored by the demands on its
attention — the more so as it has as a rule nothing to
do to keep it busy. But any one who has spent any
time, let us say, in fishing quarters in a Northern
farmer's house, cannot fail to notice how simple and
few are the items which make up the routine of the
day, and how completely the dog — there is always a
dog, and that a collie — understands all that is going
on, and probably most of what is said. These farmers
are a very silent people as a rule, speaking seldom, and
then only about practical matters. When happy and
comfortable their practice is to sit quiet, not to talk.
So the dog takes very special notice when a remark is
made, knowing that it is usually connected with the
doing of something by other people or by itself. It is
quite used to being told to "mind the baby" or to

POLYGLOT ANIMALS 209

" stay ben the house " while the wife goes out, and it
knows exactly and to the minute what every person
and every animal about the little farm will be doing at
any given time. It is thus that it also learns to under-
stand talk which refers to these objects of interest.
St. John, in his "Wild Sports of the Highlands,"
says : " The dog that lives with his master constantly,
sleeping before his fire instead of in the kennel, and
seeing and hearing all that passes, learns, if at all
quick-witted, to understand not only the meaning of
what he sees going on, but also frequently, in the
most wonderful manner, of what is being talked of."

The most curious example of a (probably) polyglot
dog's understanding of conversation was shown him by
a shepherd. Like the dogs of modern Greece, which
keep watch along the little banks that enclose their
masters' barley fields, the sheep-dogs " watch their
masters' small crop of oats with great fidelity and
keenness, keeping off all intruders in the shape of
cattle, sheep, and horses. A shepherd once, to prove
the value of his dog, which was lying before the fire
in the house where we were talking, said to me in the
middle of a sentence concerning something else, l I'm
thinking, sir, the cow is in the potatoes.' The dog,
which appeared to be asleep, immediately jumped up,
and leaping through the open window, scrambled up
the turf roof of the house, where he could see the
potato field. He then, not seeing the cow, ran and
looked into the byre, where she was, and finding that
all was right, came back to the house." The shepherd
said the same thing again, when the dog once more

o

210 ANIMAL ARTISANS

made its patrol. But on the doubt being uttered a
third time, it got up, looked at its master, and when
he laughed, growled and curled up again by the fire.

The writer had an old setter which lived in the
country, but always knew when his master was coming
back from town. He slept in the stable, and probably
heard the order given for the dogcart to be sent to
the station to meet his master ; for there was no
other preparation for his coming that the dog could
have been aware of, yet " Plato " was always to be
found waiting at the front door when he arrived.

It is greatly to the credit of canine intelligence that
dogs soon learn to understand not only orders given
in any pure language, but also those given in debased
or mixed languages. Is this, perhaps, the origin of the
phrase " dog Latin " ? The dog-teams used when the
Klondike was first discovered were worked in a kind
of " pidgin French," a mixture of old Canadian-
French, English, and Indian. The order to start
was " Macharn ! " which all the trained dogs under-
stood. This the English miners turned into " March
on ! " Its origin, and the form in which the first
sledge-dogs had heard it, was " Marche, chien ! "
Probably most English hounds were addressed in a
bastard Norman-French long after the language was
entirely dropped in speaking to persons. It is just
possible that the familiar " War hare ! " and " Eloo in ! "
are the remains of the ancient foreign hunting terms.

Where collies are being " worked " on the hills of
the North by their masters, the latter as a rule address
them in a series of shrieks, not shouts, which are abso-

POLYGLOT ANIMALS 211

lutely unintelligible to any human listener whatever,
so that the interchange of orders and the understanding
of them are much more in the nature of signals than
of language. But that is a matter of use and wont.
Probably these dogs begin by learning to obey orders
given in the natural voice, round the cottage or home-
stead. They inherit the capacity for understanding
what they are wanted to do in an unusual degree, as
well as the natural inclination to act as the servants of
man in a particular way. They have a positive eager-
ness to learn and to be employed. " We ask for
employment and they give us work ! " says a disgusted
British working-man in an amusing musical comedy
recently performed. The Northern collie eagerly
desires employment of any kind — even work.

But there are districts where work is scarce for collies,
because the " labour market " is overstocked. In parts
of Cumberland, for instance, away from the mountains
and fells where the dogs are busy every day looking
after sheep, there are large areas where the farms are
small, and there are no " sheep gates " or big mountain
pastures at all. But the tradition of owning sheep
survives, and even if there are no sheep it is infra dig.
not to have a sheep-dog. The traditional form of
property was cattle or sheep, and the presence of a
dog is a token that there is property to look after, to
fetch to the fold or the milking-shed, or to drive to
market. The result is that to every mile of road
there are about ten yellow collies, most of which
belong to the ranks of the unemployed for the greater
part of the day. To fill in part of their time they sit

212 ANIMAL ARTISANS

on the stone walls contemplating the passers-by, and
hoping against hope that a stray animal may come past
which they can aid in rounding up. But their ingenuity
in finding "jobs" about the house is great. Besides
fetching the two or three cows, perhaps from the
adjacent meadow, about which they make a maximum
of fuss and barking, they fetch the chickens to be fed,
bring the ducks up from the river, see the horses back
from plough, and often go to the school, perhaps a
couple of miles off, and fetch the children home.

Dogs kept much in the owners' company do not
necessarily learn to understand the meaning of words.
That depends on the alertness and interest of both
the animal and its owner. But they can be made to
understand much if treated in a way which appeals
to them. For example, an eager little dog, brought
into the house on the understanding that it is going
^out for a walk, and quite disconsolate at seeing its
mistress going upstairs as though she were giving up
the idea of a walk, will run gaily upstairs if the
latter says, " I am going to put my hat on," em-
phasising the remark by pointing to her head. Nearly
all dogs know what " going to church " means—
namely, that they must not come. It is the opposite
and contrary of " going for a walk."

Mr. Bartlett the elder, the first Superintendent of
the " Zoo," held that however attentive to his duties
a keeper might be, he was never successful if he did
not talk to his animals ; and there can be little doubt
that even if they fail to understand most of the
conversation, the mere fact of being talked to creates

POLYGLOT ANIMALS 213

a certain degree of sympathy between themselves and
their keepers. If comparatively few words convey any
meaning to most animals, the tones of the human
voice are almost certainly as intelligible to them as
many animal sounds are to us. The purring of a
cat could scarcely be mistaken for an expression of
anything but pleasure by a person quite unacquainted
with the species or its voice, and the anxious notes
of many birds when calling their young are so ex-
pressive that a sympathetic listener can easily interpret
their meaning. Last summer a friend of the writer's
picked up a newly hatched water-hen which had
somehow been separated from the rest of its family
and wandered a considerable distance from the lake-
side where it had been hatched. The rescuer was
anxious to return it to its mother without delay,
but no trace of the nest or old bird could then be
discovered. So the chick, which was weak with cold
and hunger, was carried up to the house and fed with
raw egg, which it sucked off the tip of a paint-brush
with evident satisfaction. A couple of hours later,
when it was taken down to the lake again, a bird
was heard calling in the rushes. The sound was
unfamiliar, and quite unlike the ordinary call of a
moorhen ; there were also several other species of
water-fowl nesting on the lake to which it might
have been attributed. But the note was so unmis-
takably that of a distressed mother-bird calling its
young that the identity of the caller was at once
suspected. It was carefully " stalked," and proved,
as we had supposed, to be the mother moorhen ; so

2i4 ANIMAL ARTISANS

the tiny chick was launched on to the lake, and in
a few minutes had rejoined its family.

It is difficult to guess how far animals of different
species understand one another's voices ; probably
they only learn to interpret the language of their
natural enemies or natural prey, for few animals con-
cern themselves with anything that does not affect
them personally. But dogs, which express themselves
more by gesture than by sound, apparently learn to
understand something of the language of whatever
race of men they are associated with, and can learn to
converse to some extent with horses, cattle, sheep,
cats, and some birds. This is certainly not because
there is any common language between them. For
Professor Garner, who devoted several years to the
study of monkey language, found that even among
different species of these there was no common code,
or monkey " Esperanto " ; and a very careful study of
the creatures which he kept in captivity in their native
country proved that such sounds as the different species
utter are very limited in number, and do not express
more ideas than other and better known animals
convey to each other by the voice. The chim-
panzee, for instance, has distinct sounds for the
ideas of food, recognition, fear, affection, warning,
and discomfort, and two gestures of negation — a
movement of the arm away from the body and
towards the person addressed, and that of turning
its back and moving the arm backwards. Other
apes have a more limited vocabulary, and though their
intelligence is of a very high order, their means of

POLYGLOT ANIMALS 215

communication, except perhaps by gesture, are not
greater than those of many other quadrupeds, notably
the cat, and less than those of certain birds.

Touch, especially in the case of insects, and the
highly developed power of scent, appealing to the
senses by channels unknown to man, and interpreted
by a process of thought with which we are only
partly acquainted, convey ideas by other means than
speech, and supplement the want of language. The
silence of most quadrupeds is accounted for by the
limited number of wants encountered in their daily
life, and the constant recurrence of these wants in
the same order. Many of their ideas need no ex-
pressing. They simply act on them at once or after
a little reflection, and their companions follow suit.

Brain-power has no necessary result in efforts at
oral communication. The elephant exerts all its
persuasion on another elephant by touches with the
trunk, without uttering a sound, while the howling
monkeys, not the most intelligent of their race, are
the most vociferous. Tigers and cats express them-
selves by the voice far more distinctly than the
chimpanzee. A particularly tame tiger cub at the
London Zoological Gardens purred to show pleasure,
mewed in recognition of its keeper, uttered another
and different sound at the sight of food, and pos-
sessed a vocabulary of modulated howls and groans
quite as expressive as the " calls " of a cat ; while
the fox, one of the cleverest of our wild animals, is
almost mute, though the fox which twice travelled
back from Sussex to its home in Northumberland

216 ANIMAL ARTISANS

must, unless we suppose the existence of another
sense, have had some means of asking the way from
other foxes which it met on its journey.

Birds are in general as talkative as quadrupeds are
silent. They are not only vocal, enjoying the sound
of their own voices, and often listening with delight
to the song of their mates, but they talk in the
proper sense of the word. They prefer to use their
voices as a means of communicating their wishes or
ideas. They are able to modulate their voices better
than most quadrupeds, though this rule has many
exceptions. But this does not explain their prefer-
ence for " talking" in place of signalling or the use
of touch. It is a racial instinct, quite as character-
istic of the order aves as the possession of feathers
or the power of flight.

Two features in the " talking " of birds will occur
to every one. There is no universal bird-language, or
even a language common to two species, though certain
sounds of warning, when uttered by one species, are
understood by another. Secondly, the talking faculty
is very capriciously distributed, even among birds which
are otherwise physically and mentally very much alike.
The crows, which easily learn to imitate human speech,
have very few notes or calls of their own. The jay has
only one, a harsh screech, modified when it is pleased
into a croak ; and a chuckle, varied by a squeak, is
the whole natural vocabulary of the magpie. Yet the
piping- crow and the nutcracker-crow are songsters of
a rather high order, and the former has an infinite
variety of " words " and calls.

POLYGLOT ANIMALS 217

The absence of any universal bird-speech is seen
most clearly by any one who observes their habits in
places where such a common language would natur-
ally be expected. On the shores of some estuaries,
or of the North Norfolk coast, it is possible to see
from a thousand to perhaps three thousand birds,
closely united in race, and living all day in sight of
one another, associating in flocks, with common
feeding -grounds and common dangers — a " com-
munity V of plovers, knots, ring - dotterels, stints,
curlews, sandpipers, and other kindred species. Their
interchange of ideas by means of the voice is very
limited, and a common code might easily be learnt.
They require a call-note of inquiry — " Where are
you ? " — another for answer, sometimes the same
note — " Here I am " — an alarm-note, and a note
uttered when flying or rising from the ground, which
may be interpreted as a sound of mutual encour-
agement or pleasure. Not a trace of a common
code appears. Each kind has its own call, its own
answer, and its own flighting note. Their many and
various musical whistles make one of the charms of
the winter shore ; but they show the curious section-
alism of bird-language. The ease with which they
might adopt a common tongue is evident from the
fact that many coast-men learn some, and a few of
great natural ability as fowlers learn #//, of these calls.
As in Heligoland, where the islanders " whistle down "
passing birds from the sky, so on the Norfolk coast
there are men who can " call down " a single golden
plover, a stint, or even a curlew. One of the most

2i 8 ANIMAL ARTISANS

extraordinary instances ever known, both of the man's
skill and of the bird's intense and unsuspecting reliance
on language, occurred not long ago on the Norfolk
coast, where a noted " caller " brought a golden plover
down from a great height in the sky, and kept it
running about within a few yards of a party lunching
in the sand-hills. In this fowler's opinion, the peewit,
which has the largest range of notes of all shore-
birds, and therefore is presumably the cleverest at
distinguishing the meaning and differences of the
peewit language, is also the most difficult to " call."
Most, if not all, of the songs of birds are meant
as music, to appeal to the emotions, and not as a
means of communication. Their " talk " is sepa-
rate from their song; though the English robin,
perhaps the only wild bird which habitually " con-
verses " with mankind, seems to combine the two to
some extent. None of the game-birds or of the galli-
naceous birds, wild or tame, have a song ; but the
greater number communicate with each other vocally.
Among fowls the sound meaning " Here is some--
thing nice to eat " is used by both sexes ; and these
are the only birds which have a distinct and uni-
versally recognised call with this meaning. Charles
Kingsley, only half in earnest, ascribes a similar call
to the hen-grouse ; but pheasants have only one note
when calling their young, which is used indifferently
on all occasions. Partridges " cluck " to call their
chicks as a hen does, but lack the "food" word.
Chickens also have a distinct and peculiar call which
means " a hawk." Hawks are now so scarce near

POLYGLOT ANIMALS 219

hen-roosts that they might well have forgotten its
use and meaning, but they have not. The owner of
a model farm, who had noticed the use of this call
when a boy in a county where these visits from
hawks were not uncommon, and who was a good
mimic of bird sounds, tried the effect of uttering it
when some fifty or sixty fowls were feeding in a
meadow connected with their hen-house by a tunnel
running under a fence. At the first call they all
looked up, and at the second, though they saw no
hawk, they ran to the tunnel and crowded through
it into the hen-house. Most of the combined move-
ments of the grey partridge, when no enemy is near,
are agreed on by means of conversation. They " call "
to each other when disposed to take a flight, and have
a separate note to indicate that they have taken wing,
a word well understood by any of the covey which
have not joined the rest, and by other coveys near.
When the brood is settling down to sleep the old
birds " cluck " to gather the brood, even when they
are full-grown.

In the sustained flight of birds in flocks the use of
the voice is discarded, and " flight evolutions " are
made by signal. This is analogous to the use of
signals to govern the movements of ships in fleets.
It is not only more convenient, but more effective
than a vocal order. The signal is given by the leading
bird, and by the nature of the case is limited to
change of direction. Many of the instantaneous
changes in the flight of birds in flocks are probably due
to the effect of changes in the direction of the wind,

220 ANIMAL ARTISANS

to which each member of the flock spontaneously
adjusts its flight. But the need for communication
by signal is clearly recognised in the case of some
species. Wild geese, for example, when merely flying
to and from their feeding-ground, or " changing pas-
tures," fly almost in line abreast. But when migrating,
or taking long flights inland, they fall into the wedge
formation, with a leader to give the signals. Their
vocabulary of satisfaction, " society," and pleasure is
apparently very wide ; the fowlers always speak of
geese as "talking" on the sands at night.

The tame swan, on the other hand, is so silent that
its specific name is the "mute swan." Though it hisses
at a dog or any other enemy, its communications with
its mate by day are wholly those of sight ; but those who
are familiar with swan-haunted rivers note that at night
the mute swan is no longer mute. It has at least two
calls, one apparently to ascertain the position of the
other bird, and the other a note uttered when it is
flying. It has a third note only used to call its young,
which are themselves quite as conversational as goslings.
A tame cygnet kept by the writer from the time
it was two days old " talked " incessantly. When
hungry or frightened its note was a single sharp
" cheep," very much like the sound a young chicken
makes in similar circumstances, but far louder. When
more contented the note was double and lower in
tone, and when the cygnet was thoroughly happy its
voice was a continuous twitter very like the song of
a swallow.

CHAPTER XXX
PUPPIES AND FOX-CUBS

POPULAR phrase has done a great injustice in making
the words "puppy" and "cub" synonyms for social
shortcomings. Properly understood puppies are among
the most attractive of all young animals ; and fox-cubs,
and even wolf-cubs, are not very far behind them in
engaging qualities when in their nursery days.

Mr. Tom Smith, who was at various times master
of the Hambledon, Craven, and Pytchley hounds, and
knew more about foxes than any man of his day, dated
the birth of the fox, whose life-story he made a sporting
classic, from March 25, and stated his belief that within
a month from that date every litter in England was born.
The corresponding generation of foxhound puppies, who
are being brought up to hunt the cubs later on, appear
as a rule rather earlier. Consequently the families of
the hunters and the hunted are in the nursery at about
the same time ; and as no vixen has more than one
family in a year, she is free to devote herself entirely
to her cubs till they are five or six months old, and
would probably do so for several months longer if the
family were not dispersed by cub-hunting. Vixens
are as good mothers as cats, and equally clever, both
in providing food and in moving their young from

222 ANIMAL ARTISANS

danger. Early cubs run the most risk, for there is a
danger of their being killed by late hunting packs.
At such times the vixen has been seen slipping off
from a furze cover carrying a cub in her mouth, and
if the earth is disturbed she moves them at once.
Judging by the trouble taken by a vixen to put them
in a place of safety, she is the most anxious mother
known in the animal world. A vixen has been known
to carry away a whole litter to a distance of three
miles in one night when the cubs were about ten
days old and beginning to be able to see. At this
early age their chief danger is the " fox-taker," a char-
acter less familiar to the general reader than other types
of rural malefactors. These men train their terriers
to slip into the earth and drag out the cubs un-
hurt, which are then sold to London dealers. The
dealers keep the cubs, feed them well, and sell
them to people who wish to restock some foxless
part of their country. Apart from the obviously bad
taste of encouraging the stealing of some one else's
foxes, this plan has another disadvantage ; for foxes
so purchased are almost always mangy, owing to the
cramped and often dirty quarters they have occupied
when in captivity, and wherever released they find out
and make use of the neighbouring earths, so that every
native fox which enters them for some time afterwards
catches the disease. The worst plague of mange ever
known among English foxes, which spread among
foxes from Windsor to the mouth of the Severn, was
propagated in the first instance by cubs bought to
be turned down. It is possible that foxes are now

PUPPIES AND FOX-CUBS 223

more susceptible to this horrible complaint than they
were fifty years ago. They are more generally
hunted and disturbed, and their increasing daily
fear compels them to drag much of their food —
rabbits, rats, and poultry — into the earth to eat it,
and what should only be a sleeping chamber and
place of refuge becomes a receptacle for much dis-
gusting refuse. This is only in winter. In the
spring they quickly learn that hunting is over, and
leave the tainted earths.

Wolf-cubs are dropped at the end of April or early
in May, and it is curious to note the progressive scale
of fecundity. The fox seldom has more than five in
a litter ; a wolf, according to Tschudi, has been known
to have nine ; and a greyhound bitch will sometimes
produce twelve puppies. The likeness between wolf-
cubs and Chow-dog puppies at the age of two months
is remarkable ; though the young wolves have better
feet and straighter legs, it would be difficult to tell
them apart. Fox-cubs are playful little creatures,
but even when taken very early seldom acquire the
"jollity" which characterises puppies, or even wolf-
cubs, which, though they are rather quarrelsome
with each other, play and romp in captivity just as
boisterously as the offspring of a collie or a retriever.
In several of the large Continental zoological gardens
a litter of wolf-cubs is produced every year, and is one
of the sights of the season. The cubs are nearly black,
with sharp noses, pricked-up ears, and long tails, which
they often carry high as a foxhound does, a habit
they have in common with very young puppies of

224 ANIMAL ARTISANS

several breeds of dog which carry the tail low when a
little older.

Puppies offer the best, and almost the only, study
of family life open to us among animals. There are
as many characters and individualities in a litter of
average setter puppies as in a family as large as that
described in the " Daisy Chain," and there is this ad-
vantage, that they are "all twins" and start level, and
do not take a lifetime to develop in.

Not only to those " in the fancy," but to any sympa-
thetic person, and especially to children, even to those
no longer in the nursery, the excellent differences of
puppies, their gifts and tendencies, growth and develop-
ment, are clear, attractive, and intensely exciting. There
are those who pretend to be able to prophesy about them
before their eyes are open. Such persons will take the
snub-nosed, sleek, round-bellied, whimpering little
atoms and lay them in pairs to sprawl on a bench,
and after picking them up one by one with the finger
and thumb by the backs of their fat little necks, so
that they squeal worse than ever and put their tongues
out, will deliver themselves on the prospects of this
one being a grand dog, and that a sagacious and most
promising-looking female. All the time the person
who ought to know most about them, their anxious
mother, remains in a state of mingled anxiety and
pride — pride that the gentlemen should take so much
notice of them, and anxiety for fear they may be
dropped. Two infallible rules for detecting early
promise are believed in by those to whom the canine
nursery mysteries are familiar, and who are making an

PUPPIES AND FOX-CUBS 225

early choice, either because they are promised a puppy
or because some must reluctantly be sacrificed, and
they want to know which. Put all the puppies in a
row on the ground, a foot from their mother, and do
not choose those which manage to wriggle to her last,
is one rule. " Stonehenge," dealing seriously with the
selection of the survivors of greyhound litters, if the
sad necessity arises, recommends the following, which
for pure medievalism cannot, we think, be beaten :
" Let the puppies remain with their dam for a week.
Then hold each up by the tail ; the best ones will bring
their legs well over their head, and you can see which
possesses length and the promise of good ribs."

Except when asleep puppies of this age squeal all
day long. When they begin to get their eyes open they
also begin to crawl, for, like babies, they crawl before
they can walk. At this time the litters are extremely
interesting from one point of view, for whatever they
are going to turn out afterwards — long dogs, short
dogs, rough dogs, smooth dogs — they are all almost
exactly alike in face, which is why " puppies " are
spoken of as all one and the same, and not by the
names of their breeds. Their noses are ridiculously
short and broad, often Roman-nosed, which is more
quaint than can be described, and their foreheads and
brows wrinkled as with the cares of unnumbered years.
When their weak little bleary eyes, which are generally
rather watery, begin to open, the lines are increased by
" crows' feet," and these, with the strong marks down
each side of their noses as if their heads had been
originally fastened on with wire like champagne corks,

p

226 ANIMAL ARTISANS

make them some of the most odd little caricatures
existing. When they begin to walk their bodies are
generally round and fat, their feet big, and their tails
thick at the body and tapering to a point.

Take a litter of six setter puppies at this stage,
start them all fair on their legs, standing up, and see
what they will do. It will be noticed that they walk
with their noses close to the ground, like hippopotami,
but with their tails up or stuck out straight, and that
when they think they are going to fall they put their
noses on the ground to help to balance them. At this
time, too, they leave off squealing and try to bark,
which they are inordinately proud of, and soon learn to
do in a very fierce and forbidding manner. Being too
weak to stand the shock of barking, a single bark is
as much as they can usually manage at a time ; and if
they do this when walking it upsets their balance and
they fall over. Sagacious puppies soon learn this, and
sit down to bark, getting up again to walk, and then
sitting down for another bark.

When once the puppies are able to make excursions
on their own account, they will, if allowed the full
liberty which they deserve, become a daily and hourly
excitement in any quiet family. In the country house
in which the litter have the run of the garden, or can
even gain access to the back premises, life is a series
of constant excursions and alarms, though it must be
owned that the promising children make up for their
mischief by an ample margin in beauty, character, and
the unconscious humour with which they invest most
of their proceedings. When very small and only

PUPPIES AND FOX-CUBS 227

able to toddle about, they generally keep near their
mamma, who, if the weather is fine, will bring them
on to a lawn or grass-edging near a shrubbery, and
often — as dogs are sociable by nature and sporting
dogs have privileges — in sight of the windows.
Greyhounds, being usually kept away from houses on
account of their habit of howling at night, more
often take the litter to the farmyard, or to the back
court and curtilage.

Small puppies early develop the dog instinct for
burying food. Any old bones they can pick up they
bury, and if they can find a hole ready made, will
descend into it, scratch out their own ridiculous little
cache, and half-cover the bone in it, using their noses
as shovels. Then they perhaps discover that they
cannot climb out of the principal crater, and howl
as dismally as if some one had beaten them. Like
most small children, they never try to exhibit the
slightest fortitude, but howl and shriek at any
mishap — if they are frightened, if the cat scratches
them, if a fly stings their nose, or if they think
another dog is going to hurt them.

When they can trot, and even gallop a little, they
begin collecting. This, again, is extremely suggestive
to naturalists, who see in it the survival of the instinct
which made the original young wolf or primitive wild
ancestor begin to pick up a living, and carry what
it caught, or what its mother gave it, to its den.
Puppies retain any amount of these interesting sur-
vivals, but keep the acquisitive and not the selective
instinct. For some weeks they regard collecting as

228 ANIMAL ARTISANS

the one object in life, with this curious condition, that
as a rule they think nothing worth taking and keeping
unless they can obtain it in the house. They sit on
the watch at all the doors, or keep an eye from a
distance on unguarded entrances, and then trickle in
like water when a sluice is partly open. When beaten
they admit that it hurts ; but they do it again as soon
as the door is left ajar. Single puppies, puppies in
pairs, puppies in strings, may be seen emerging with a
kind of glum satisfaction after one of these raids, one
with a boot, another with a hat, another with a duster,
another dragging a door-mat and tumbling over it.
They usually try to tear these things up as small
as possible, with a hazy idea of burying them after.
But the tearing up is the main object, and the one
generally carried out. They seem to regard it as
a form of work for which they ought to take
credit.

Greyhound puppies have the reputation of being
the most mischievous of the mischievous brotherhood
of puppies. They inherit this to some extent, for a
large percentage of greyhounds when grown up are
inveterate thieves and chicken-killers, not from any
particular vice, but because " it is their nature to,"
and they have not the moral sense which other dogs
possess. The writer recently remarked when stopping
in a country inn that one of the greyhounds which
were allowed the run of the house had stolen the
butter from the breakfast-table. " Ah," was the reply,
" I reckon he a' most live on that." It is considered
specially good for young greyhounds, like foxhound

PUPPIES AND FOX-CUBS 229

puppies, to be " boarded out " or " walked " when
there is danger of overcrowding at home. But, as a
high authority puts it, " the list of their delinquencies,
including murdered cats, fowls, ducks, torn clothes,
and homesteads laid waste and devastated," may be
made up for by a win at Alt car, in compensation for
the puppies' misdeeds.

CHAPTER XXXI
DOGS ON THE HIGHWAY

IT must be one of the undeserved trials of animal
life that instead of being left to make the best of
things as Nature made them, they are always having
to learn how not to be killed or frightened to death
by some new contrivance of the inventing creature,
man. When bicycles first became common in the
London streets it was said that dogs must rapidly
decrease in numbers, partly because they could not
keep up with their owners when riding bicycles, or
if they did so were often overtaxed, and partly because
the dogs were slow in learning to avoid the machines
and so frequently caused accidents. In such cases
Stephenson's prophecy as to the fate of the cow on
the line is reversed. It is the rider and his machine,
and not the dog, who usually suffer.

The dog, with every good intention, did not for
some time seem able to realise the speed of the new in-
vention, and other animals had just the same difficulty.
A cyclist recently saw a hare trotting along the road
towards him. The hare had no idea of the pace the
" bike " was travelling, and only saved a collision by
a twisting spring just as the wheel was on him, and
barely cleared the pedal. In Holkham Park, where

230

DOGS ON THE HIGHWAY 231

hares are so numerous that as many as forty have
been counted feeding at once, it was at one time quite
dangerous to ride a bicycle at night-time ; for the hares,
attracted by the lamp, would hop into the road right
in the cyclist's path, apparently unconscious of danger.
Now the hares have become more cautious, and very
few dogs get into collision with bicycles in these days.
But they have not yet learnt to appreciate the power
and speed of the motor-car. The dog on the race-
course is a byword ; still, it must have been a most
adventurous or extraordinarily stupid animal which
chose to watch the motor-racing at Blackpool from
the middle of the asphalt track. But one really did
so, and lost its life in consequence.

The first new and dangerous contrivances to which
dogs had to grow used were carts and carriages —
Scotid, " machines " — for the old waggons and sledges
were too slow to make much difference to their safety.
In countries where dogs draw carts themselves they
may understand the danger of being run over naturally.
Here they always have to learn, first, that danger exists,
and next how to avoid it, and are often far less quick
to do so than are very small children. It is not
till they have learnt to take care of themselves on
ordinary country roads that they may be considered
" grown-up." An old exciseman of our acquaintance
always declared that next to the illicit makers of
malt, the " taxable " puppies gave him most trouble.
They were not liable to be paid for until six months
old, and as there was no register of canine births,
many of them never seemed to reach this age. Finally

a 3* ANIMAL ARTISANS

he settled that all dogs which were allowed to u run
in the road " were to be considered six months old,
that being the minimum time in which a careful
owner would think a puppy could learn to avoid
being run over. But some dogs never learn caution,
or how to " keep their heads " when even carts are
passing. These nearly always end by being run over.
This is especially the case with spaniels, which seem
least apt at learning, and apparently feel a kind of
impulse to drift across the road just under the wheels
of a passing carriage.

On the other hand, there are certain breeds of dog
which have the same delight in attending on a cart as
certain men feel in assisting in working any piece of
machinery. It is always pleasant to be able to say
a good word for a discredited race of animals, and in
this connection too great praise cannot be given to
the now discarded " carriage-dog." These spotted,
pointer-like dogs were generally considered as a use-
less breed, kept merely for show, as part of the old-
fashioned parade once considered appropriate to a
grand equipage. The real purpose in keeping these
dogs was originally to keep off footpads and wig-
stealers, and later to serve as companions to the
horses, both in the stable and during the early days
of training to harness. The young horse, otherwise
constantly on the look-out for objects to shy at,
transferred his whole attention to his stable com-
panion the carriage-dog, which, trotting beside him
or just in front, acted as the best possible guide
and example of steadiness. Always attached to the

DOGS ON THE HIGHWAY 233

horses, the carriage-dog delighted most in attending
on a " pair," and used spontaneously to take and
keep his place exactly between the two hind wheels,
or preferably under the hook of the pole. A
London coachman, who for years had charge of a
large and beautiful stable of superb carriage-horses,
told the writer that a carriage-dog owned by his
master invariably ran beneath the pole-chains the
moment the carriage started, and would make the
circuit of the park several times without moving
more than a few inches from his place, the three
animals — two horses and the dog — moving like a
machine. Curiously enough, the dog chose his par-
ticular horse to live and sleep with in the stable ;
when travelling and in inn stables it mounted guard
over this horse's box, and would allow no strange
ostler or groom to approach it.

Greyhounds also learn to run with traps. It was
the custom for sporting farmers in East Anglia to
drive to market with a pair of these dogs, either
running with their heads just beneath the tail-board
or one on either side of the cart. Their pace was
a trot, step for step with the horse.

The use of carts and carriages for locomotion is
much more readily learnt by dogs than the art of
keeping safe among traffic. Sporting dogs soon
learn to like being driven to the shooting ground.
When accustomed to this they will jump up the
moment the tail-board is lowered, and curl up
under the seat, and show great discontent if not
offered a place. But nearly all are singularly dull

234 ANIMAL ARTISANS

at devising any means for safe descent when the
drive is over. They usually make a violent spring
to the ground, often when the cart has scarcely
stopped, and fractured forelegs are a frequent result.
Trains present far less difficulty to them. Though
occasionally afraid of the rush and noise, they soon
learn to delight in travelling by rail — if allowed to
accompany their masters. They rush in the moment
the door is opened, and some dogs, notably those
which are accustomed to comfortable drawing-rooms
and soft carpets, will always select a first-class carriage
in preference to a wooden-seated " third." A setter
which had done a good deal of railway travelling was
considerably alarmed when she first saw an electric
train, but once on board she took far less time to
find the compartment she wanted than most people
would have done. After one disapproving glance at
the upholstery of the first car she entered, she ran
straight through it into the next and at once curled
herself up in a red velvet fauteuil.

But though they have learnt to reckon with the
speed of a carriage, and become so fond of railway
travelling that " railway dogs " who travel by choice
and alone are quite common — there is a " Ryde to
Portsmouth" dog too, which travels by boat, and
begs pennies for buns — no dog, and we believe no
domesticated animal, has ever learnt to judge the
speed of a train. When once on the line they
seem, in this country, quite unconscious of danger.
If the train is moving at the rate of from five to
twelve miles an hour, they get out of the way ; but

DOGS ON THE HIGHWAY 235

a pack of hounds on a railway line, even if they are
not in full cry, are always cut to pieces by the first
fast train which overtakes them. The first thing
which the driver does when he sees them is to shut
off steam. This makes the engine noiseless, but the
whole train rushes on, plainly visible, but with
absolutely no terror for hounds, who seem to look
on the swift, silent thing as perfectly harmless. If
it were a corn waggon or a puffing traction-engine
they would get out of the way. When the short
line of railway was made across the neck of the
Dobrudscha in Turkey, from Kustendji to the
Danube, the Turks were almost as stupid. They
seemed unable to realise that the train would not
stop, and would drive their sheep along the line,
while one man endeavoured to stop a runaway truck
by putting his foot on the rail.

Birds, perhaps from their own power of speed,
more probably from their quicker brains and powers
of observation, do thoroughly realise the speed of
trains. Instances in which they have been killed by
a passing engine are very rare, though partridges and
grouse rising suddenly in front of a train often fly
against the telegraph wires. That this is acquired
knowledge, though probably transmitted now from
generation to generation, and that birds were possibly
killed by trains or incommoded by them in the early
days of the railway, seems evident from the following
facts. The invention of the " torpedo-boat destroyer "
raised the maximum speed obtained at sea at a jump
from twenty-five to thirty-one knots. The speed of

236 ANIMAL ARTISANS

a destroyer running her trials on the Maplin Sand
was about double that of the ocean-steamers and
cargo-boats which commonly pass out of the Thames
mouth, to which sea-birds were thoroughly accus-
tomed. One of the Thornycroft destroyers was
running her trial at top speed, when it disturbed a
large flock of wild-ducks. These, according to their
invariable habit, rose at some distance ahead, and flew
in a direction across the vessel's bows. They rose at
what was their accustomed distance when put up by a
steamer, but had wholly misjudged the speed of the
destroyer. Instead of crossing one hundred yards
ahead, the whole flock came right upon the vessel,
and broke up in dismay over the smoking funnels of
the craft. Had she been carrying masts and spars the
ducks would have collided with the rigging.

Telegraph wires, with the exception of those by the
railway lines, are only a permanent danger to night-
flying birds and to game, which, flying fast and being
often frightened by shots, are constantly killed by
them. But as a rule the birds native to the spot
learn to avoid them. The swans on Brading Harbour
appear unable to avoid the wires, even in the daytime,
unless special means are taken to make them readily
visible. But swans are unusually stupid birds, and the
angle at which their heads are held in flight, together
with the knobs at the base of their bills, may prevent
them from seeing what is immediately in front of
them. The City pigeons are seldom killed by the
mazes of telegraph wire above the roofs, but a
strange bird, such as a carrier pigeon let loose in

DOGS ON THE HIGHWAY 237

the streets, is often cut to pieces. Even a single
wire, newly put up, is very destructive, until the birds
have learnt caution. One recently erected near Cam-
bridge led to the discovery of a permanent " short cut "
used by migrant birds from Cambridgeshire to the
Thames mouth, their bodies being discovered beneath
the wire, though, as they fly by night, their passage
had escaped observation.

The nervous fear of new inventions, which makes
animals afraid where fear is unnecessary, is much
sooner unlearnt than the proper degree of caution is
learnt. Horses, for instance, are practically indifferent
to the sight of a railway train, and cattle which had
travelled by rail, as Charles Dickens early noticed in the
fields north of London, very soon learnt to disregard
the steam-engine.

Motor-cars of any description are, of course, more
alarming to them, for they meet them at much closer
quarters, and a carriage which apparently goes along
of its own accord naturally strikes them as uncanny.
But they are rapidly growing used to even these, and
whereas a few years ago motoring was a very question-
able pleasure to any lover of horses, on account of the
terror which a car produced in half the equine popu-
lation, most of them are now perfectly indifferent, and
it is possible to motor hundreds of miles without
alarming a single horse.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE SIMPLE LIFE

A WARM, rainless summer has a good effect on the
health of almost all animals, whether wild or part of
the live-stock of the farm ; and in spite of a frequent
scarcity of grass, cattle and sheep thrive far better at
such times than in a dripping season when the herbage
grows green and rank all the summer through. This
is due partly to the absence of wet and damp, which
domesticated animals have often not the same means
of avoiding as they would enjoy in natural freedom,
and still more to the fact that sunshine and drought
are destructive to those low parasitical forms of life
which wet seasons always engender.

As a rule cattle are far healthier in the fresh air
than under cover. It was noted in the South African
war that the constant life in the open air led by our
soldiers did more than anything else to promote
health. Sleeping every night on the veldt, often in
the rain, constantly in frosts which whitened every
blanket in the morning, and with absolutely no com-
forts, they actually improved in health and physique
when the food supply was at all adequate. On the
other hand, like the animals, they suffered incredibly
from water-borne disease when the supply was tainted.

But the " open-air treatment " incidental to the con-

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THE SIMPLE LIFE 239

ditions of the fighting was a steady source of strength
and vitality.

The question of the degree to which domesticated
animals, or those kept in captivity, benefit by fresh
air in a climate like ours, has been raised in a practical
form lately by owners of pedigree cattle and by the
managers of Zoological Gardens. In the London
" Zoo " the new and very costly house for the anthro-
poid apes has been built more on the " hot-house"
system than with the idea of trying how far access
to the open air would benefit the inmates. As most
of these come from the tropical forests of West
Africa or the Straits Settlements, perhaps the decision
was correct. Yet we seem to have read of very cold
and comfortless weather both in the Congo forests
and in those of Java and Sumatra. If the apes can
endure such a temperature at home, it does not seem
unlikely that they would benefit by enjoying the fresh
air of an English summer.1 At the Dublin "Zoo"
a most remarkable success was obtained by subjecting a
pair of very weakly lions to the open-air cure. They
were allowed to remain in the open all the year, with
only a shed to retire to, and no artificial heat. The re-
sult was that they grew thick, warm coats, and improved
so much in health and condition that instead of being
the worst, they became the best lions in the collection.

The great interest taken by breeders of high-class

1 If they were thus accustomed to change of temperature, they
might be taken for change of air in winter to Broadstairs or Margate.
It would be interesting to see whether the effect would be as beneficial
to the baby apes as it is to human babies of a tuberculous tendency.

24o ANIMAL ARTISANS

cattle in their animals has led to some useful dis-
coveries as to the difference in constitution between
those kept in the open and those living under cover.
When the tuberculin test was applied to milking-cows
kept shut up in town dairies, such as was once the
universal rule in London before the milk supply came
in by train, nearly ninety per cent, of the cows which
had been entirely in the sheds for from one to two
years showed " reaction " — i.e. symptoms that they were
affected with the disease. Of those kept under cover,
but sent out for part of the day for exercise, a much
smaller percentage were affected, but the figures were
still high. Of cattle kept entirely in the open, either
none or only two per cent, "reacted" when tested.

One of the oldest and best herds of Jersey cattle
in England — cattle which from the fineness of their
frame and skin are supposed to be " delicate" (i.e.
to suffer from the weather) — lives almost entirely
in the open, and what shelter it enjoys is of a kind
which might almost be supposed to be rather less
useful than none. The animals are tied up at night
in an open shed, with no front wall, and the snow or
rain drifts in among them. The roof is so narrow
that the drip only just clears their bodies, and being
tied up, they can do little to change their position.
Doubtless those of the present generation represent
the survival of the fittest. But the death-rate is
unusually low. Air and light are the great enemies
of tuberculosis, which seems to typify the idea of the
actual destruction of bodily tissue more than almost
any other. The same also holds good in the case of

THE SIMPLE LIFE 241

some of the more violent infectious diseases, such
as plague, cholera, and perhaps diphtheria. The
creatures which mainly succumb to plague, and carry
its germs, are precisely those whose lucifugous and
filthy habits withdraw them most from fresh air and
sunshine — namely, rats. It is also well known that
where foxes are much hunted, and therefore carry
their food into the earths, and lie there by day,
parasitic disease, especially mange, is often rife among
them. Experiments have recently been made in
fattening sheep under cover, the object being not to
promote health, but to obtain a rapid deposit of flesh.
But it was found that at first the deprivation of
exercise, air, and natural light upset their system so
much that there was a doubt for some weeks whether
the experiment would pay, even from the limited
point of view from which it was begun.

One of the first scientific protests against dark and
damp stables was made by the late Sir William Flower,
who, in closing his popular lectures on the horse, drew
attention to the fact that the natural conditions for
equine health were hard soil, open air, a bright sun,
dry food, and constant exercise. By far the greater
number of so-called common colds and chills in
horses are caused by placing them in close stables
after having been turned out in the open, not by
turning them out in the open from warm stables.
The only wonder is that under domestication our
horses have not suffered more from the unnatural
conditions in which many of them are kept. Probably
the long hours of daily work prevent them from

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242 ANIMAL ARTISANS

feeling the bad effects of the ill-built, ill-ventilated,
and ill-lighted stables which the working horses of
London often inhabit.

Cold has no ill effect on most animals if it merely
takes the form of low temperature. Their bodily
heat is considerably greater than ours. They have
also exceptional means for adapting themselves to
cold. The rapidity of the growth of protective and
non-conducting hair is astonishing. A Bactrian camel,
which is almost or quite bare of fur in the summer,
grows a coat in the winter on which snow would lie
without melting, just as it sometimes does on a
sheep's back. Even carriage-horses if turned out to
grass soon develop a fairly thick jacket of hair ; and
the Arctic fox and Rocky Mountain goat gain a felt
which must be absolutely frost-proof. When the
latter animal sheds its winter coat it might be thought
that about one and a half feet of Witney blankets
were slowly disintegrating and becoming resolved into
the original wool, were it not that that of the goat is
far finer and warmer. The white cotton-like wool shed
by the male goat would stuff several pillows. The
growth of hair on the Scotch cattle which are left out
all the year on the wet and wild mountains and pastures
of the West Highlands is also remarkable, though it
is not so proof against wet and cold as the "buffalo
robe " or the winter fur of the European bison.

It would seem, also, that the neglect by a vast
majority of animals to make any form of house or
nest in which to sleep is evidence that the open air
suits them best throughout the whole twenty-four

THE SIMPLE LIFE 243

hours. As a rule, it is for the young that a
house or nest is made, and that only by certain species.
Life in the open is what the adults instinctively seek.

What drives almost all animals to seek cover, even
at the expense of less wholesome air, is wet, especially
torrential cold rains such as sometimes usher in an
early winter in this country. It will be found
that the wet temperate regions are always among the
least productive of animal life. In the gloomy and
dripping forests of Tierra del Fuego, where a mean
temperature as high as that of Dublin is accompanied
by constant wet and little variation caused by sun-
shine, Darwin found almost no mammals at all.
There were no deer south of the Straits of Magellan,
and in the forest region proper only one bat, three
kinds of mice, a mole, and one fox, the other species
being confined to the drier parts of the country.

There seems reason to believe that, to avoid the
destructive autumn rains of Europe, several of the
creatures which in drier regions live mainly in the
open became " cave-dwellers " during the time pre-
ceding their extermination by man. Most of the
ancient lion legends of Europe represent the lion as
living in a cave, the Numean lion among the number.
The tale of Androclus and the lion, though said to
be of African origin, also represents the lion as re-
sorting to a cave. In ancient Britain in the prehistoric
period there seems to have been a regular cave-
dwelling fauna, including bears, lions, tigers, and
hyenas. We may possibly conclude that the climate
was even wetter than it is now, and that a cave

244 ANIMAL ARTISANS

was the only moderately weather-tight shelter in
which a lion or bear could live without contracting
rheumatism.

There are, unfortunately, certain disadvantages and
dangers which domestic animals incur if kept in the
open after a plague of rain and waters. The pas-
tures are full of what the Cumberland farmer calls
" 'demicals " — i.e. parasites of all kinds, liver-fluke,
strongylus, and other deadly and little-known plagues,
the eggs of which are eaten in the grass, drunk in
the water, and may even stick to the animals' coats
when they lie down and be swallowed after they have
licked their jackets over by way of toilet. With
their vitality lowered by the bad quality of the food
they graze upon, they are more likely to fall victims
to these insidious enemies. Low-lying ground, or
meadows which are flooded, are particularly dangerous
to all stock at this time. Nor is it easy to take pre-
cautions, because the symptoms of illness do not
appear until months after the animals have absorbed
the origin of the mischief. But it will be seen that
these and similar dangers arise not from the air, but
from the earth. It should be remembered when
leaving animals in the open that on ordinary pasture-
land they have little or no natural shelter available
against storms or sudden cold, such as they would
have been able to find if in a wild state, and that
sheds or shelters of some kind should be open for
them to seek refuge in during exceptional weather.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE PREHISTORIC FARMYARD

THE collection at the Zoo of all the equine animals
now found on the globe, gives ample scope for
conjecture as to how the horse as we know it was
developed from this material. Perhaps it was not
developed from them at all, but from a more
horse-like animal than any of them, which has
disappeared from wild life, even as the original
wild ox has disappeared from the forests of the
West. But a survey of all domestic forms only
strengthens the impression that the original tribes
first drew them from the wild species with which
they were in contact. It is still done by the Lapps
and the jungle tribes of Assam, and the process as it
goes on to-day affords scope for conjectures as to
what the ''prehistoric farm" must have looked like.

Probably the farmyard of one of these early com-
munities did not contain many varieties of stock ;
neither would the judges of an agricultural show have
had many " classes " to deal with. It is the very
natural tendency of early efforts at domestication in
any form to be limited to the reclamation of a single
species. This in itself is difficult enough. The
ambition to possess a variety of domestic animals

245

246 ANIMAL ARTISANS

must be a much later idea. It is generally suggested
from outside by travel, or the immigration of other
owners with a different class of beast. The Kaffirs
only took to owning horses very gradually. They
were content with their cows, even as beasts of
burden ; and to this day, the Lapp makes no effort
to add to his primeval herd of reindeer either the
ponies, or the cattle, which his Norse neighbours have
maintained, in regions as hyperborean, ever since they
migrated to the far North.

The reindeer herds of the Lapps, the Samoyeds, and
the East Siberian tribes continue to flourish without
the slightest attempt to improve or alter the wild
breed. The peculiar conditions and climate make
variation or modification unlikely. Hence, though
the use of the reindeer may be as old as the use of
the horse, it has left the type unaltered — an instance
of primitive reclamation " preserved in ice" within the
Arctic Circle.

The next examples are similar in kind. In Assam
the wild ox or gayal is regularly " taken up " from the
jungle and domesticated. The wild cows are decoyed
by balls of salt, and treated with this luxury till
they mingle with those which have been previously
domesticated, and are gradually incorporated in the
herds which are driven out into the jungle to feed,
and brought home to be milked. In the case of the
Indian buffalo and the Burmese elephant the tame and
wild species are also seen living in the same forests,
and recent travel has discovered the. wild snow-camel
on the cold deserts over which the tame camels have

THE PREHISTORIC FARMYARD 247

for ages transported the goods of the Far East to
the markets of the West. Except the buffalo and
gayal, none of these animals could be expected to be
much modified by human interference. The reindeer
and elephant are specialised by Nature for parti-
cular conditions, and as it is precisely for use in
those conditions that they are maintained, no one
would attempt to introduce differences. No one
would try to make a better elephant or a more
useful reindeer, because improvement for their par-
ticular life is scarcely conceivable. The snow-camel
has been slightly altered ; for, as he is wanted to
carry heavy burdens, he has been made vastly larger
and stronger than when wild, though the connection
with the original stock is plain.

Other creatures are not so specialised, and were
altered — probably in no great time. But first it was
necessary to " catch your hare." It is not difficult,
and is certainly interesting, to picture the early and
ambitious would-be pastoralist considering which of
the animals in his native wood, or on the mountains
near it, would pay best to catch, and how he was
to tame them. He certainly went through some such
process in his mind. In Europe, for instance, there
were at least two large wild bovine animals, one a
bison, the aurochs, the other a real wild bull — not
a bison. Whoever the first cattle-tamers were, they
certainly decided to catch the latter, and had nothing
to do with the bison, for they tamed the one and left
the other severely alone.

It must have needed some courage to capture

248 ANIMAL ARTISANS

even the young of the dreaded urus in the Hercynian
or Calydonian forests ; nor is it easy to conjecture how
these ancient herdsmen were able to keep in their pos-
session herds of animals naturally fierce, and of which
the male descendants are to this day the most dangerous
and uncertain of any domesticated animals. The diffi-
culty of retaining the reclaimed stock must have been
greatly increased because, in the absence of enclosure,
which is not universal even in civilised Europe, all
grazing animals have to be led out to feed daily, when
they have every chance of resuming the wild state.
But it is difficult to suppose that our cattle, or those
of the East, were first obtained in any other way.

There exists in the Malay States a small wild ox,
the anoa, which is perhaps the survival of one of the
wild species from which the smaller Eastern breeds are
descended. But it is no evidence that a domestic
species is not descended from a wild ancestor if this
ancestor is not now existing. We should have known
nothing of the wild bull of Europe were it not for the
records of books and bones, and should not have had
these if the breed, instead of existing down to historic
times, had perished some four thousand years earlier,
as they may well have done from the plains of India.

Pigs were probably a European " reclamation." In
the tropical East no one wanted them, for they were
neither wholesome as flesh nor givers of milk. But in
every case, in Europe and Asia, there is practically only
one wild pig, except the babirussa, which may have
been the origin of some of the Chinese breeds. In any
case, the enterprising domesticator of pigs in any form

THE PREHISTORIC FARMYARD 249

must be honoured before the disciple of Confucius
who is credited with having discovered, merely by
accident, their merits when roasted. We can quite
understand how the resolve arose. What could be
more natural to the tribesman, or the village, who
already possessed a small and increasing herd of dairy
animals reclaimed from the forest, than to follow this
up by catching, either in nets or pitfalls, a family of
young wild swine and adding them to their farm
stock ? Their prolific character must have been well
known, and as Mahomet promised a blessing and
angels' visits to the home which possessed three goats,
so the neighbours must have looked with envy on the
recurrent families of wild piglings in the wicker-fenced
enclosures of the more adventurous. It is possible,
even at this distant date, to trace under the artificially
rounded form of the Tamworth breed the long, sus-
picious nose, the rufous bristles, and the thoughtful
eye of its original wild ancestor.

If the East troubled not with the pig, it probably gave
to the world its flocks of sheep and goats. Asia is the
true home of the domesticated goat. It is there that it
flourishes and is held in honour. There, too, lives the
animal which by general consent is the original of the
common domestic breed, the wild Paseng-goat, or ibex,
call it which you please, of Asia Minor and Persia.
There would not be the slightest difficulty in domesti-
cating the young of several species of mountain sheep
to-day, if this were desired. Difficult as the lambs are to
catch, they are taken when very young on the mountains,
and the only difference in their behaviour is that though

250 ANIMAL ARTISANS

all become as tame as the proverbial "pet lamb," some
species — notably the Barbary wild sheep and the Indian
burrhel — become more markedly friendly than others.
All, wild goats and wild sheep alike, have short, smooth
coats, though the Barbary sheep grows a woolly mane ;
but there is under wool in the fur of all the sheep, which
care in domestication would increase. The tame species
have lost their speed and agility on the English fields,
but not on the Alpine pastures, where some of the
breeds are not unlike the surviving wild species, the
moufflons of Sardinia. Even in England there still
remains one rare local variety, the Wiltshire sheep,
which is so active, long-legged, and free from woolli-
ness that it might easily be mistaken for a wild species ;
and in all probability it closely resembles the original
ancestor of our British breeds.

It is tempting and easy to imagine "lost" animals
from which our tame ones have sprung. But it seems
highly probable that the majority of our domestic
animals may be traced to ancestors almost identical
with wild species still existing ; and they themselves
might still have been indistinguishable from those wild
ancestors if their intermediate progenitors had not been
caught and tamed by man.

CHAPTER XXXIV

ANIMALS AND THEIR CLOTHES

A DISTRIBUTION of horses' hats, presented to the
poorer owners and drivers of horses, recently took
place in Vincent Yard, near Vincent Square, West-
minster. The hats, of the most approved pattern,
were given by the society known as Our Dumb Friends'
League ; and the applicants, cabmen, car-drivers, and
vanmen, numbered over three hundred. Having re-
ceived the sun-bonnets for their horses, they con-
tributed very liberally to the box placed for donations,
one carman giving two shillings, probably more than
he would have paid for a summer hat for himself.
They were very well informed as to the different
" makes " of sun-bonnets for horses, and expressed
their approval of that adopted by the society, which
was of the highly practical kind, standing well away
from the head so as to allow a current of air to pass
through, and not interfering with the natural move-
ments of a horse's ears. The men soak this hat in
water, which makes it a still better protection in semi-
tropical weather.

Before long all our horses, excellent creatures as
they are, will no doubt be provided with hats in hot
weather. It is also probable that many who now go

251

252 ANIMAL ARTISANS

without coats in cold weather will expect to share the
privileges of their carriage and racehorse friends, and
have smart suits for the winter. Horse clothing is
now almost confined to the higher ranks of equine
life ; for as long as a horse's coat is thick and rough it
is a good " non-conductor," and the natural covering
of a sheltie, or a Celtic pony, or a Prejvalski wild
horse gives ample protection against any amount of
cold and wet. But such a coat would be very in-
convenient to a more sophisticated horse ; it is far too
thick and hot for fast work, and too difficult to dry
and clean, so art and nature have been combined to
get rid of this thick natural overcoat, and well-bred
horses are provided with coats suitable for all occasions
like their masters.

Though they are provided with most attractive and
well-cut suits, they occasionally tear them up at first
as a useless encumbrance, but learn to appreciate
them later. To teach this "anti-cloth biters" are
sold, just as children are made to wear gloves to pre-
vent them from biting their nails. Some horses are
even measured for their suits, though the majority
have to content themselves with " reach-me-downs "
made to sizes. They have the distinction also of
having their " things " marked — with the monogram
of their owners.

There is no knowing what this extension of the
movement to hats may lead to. That simplicity
which Carlyle thought he had discovered in the world
which does not wear clothes may possibly be impaired.
Animals may learn in time, like Teufelsdrockh, the

ANIMALS AND THEIR CLOTHES 253

enormous importance and significance of clothes. It
is remarked that among the naked Kavirondi of British
East Africa (now put into trousers) immense hats,
made of clay, bamboo, and feathers, were in vogue
when no other garment was even thought of. Horses
may soon not like to go into the Park in unbecoming
hats. They may learn by some form of instinct that
even at this moment paragraphs are appearing in
the papers complaining of the want of variety and
the plainness of their headgear. Hitherto one of the
pleasures of the Park in the season has been to see the
undoubted self-satisfaction of the horses in their best
harness and ribbons. Shamefaced horses, unable to
hold up their heads when they passed and repassed
other pairs which they knew despised their hats, and
would mention it afterwards, would detract much from
the feeling of the thing.

When the sage of Chelsea in " Sartor Resartus "
drew his comparison between the horse wrapped only
in his own skin and the rider invested in many portions
of the skins of other creatures, he was, strictly speaking,
not quite accurate. For horses, or at any rate modern
rich men's horses, are the most carefully clothed of
any animals. Complete Jaeger suits are now advertised
for their use. Like gentlemen who wish to get into
training, they are often muffled up in them and ridden
so wrapped up to get off weight. Nor is it likely that
horse clothing will ever be in less request than it is
now ; for though they no longer wear armour, and
only funeral horses appear in velvet and feathers,
patent shoes and shoe pads, bits, action developers,

254 ANIMAL ARTISANS

various kind of stockings, mane trainers, and tail
protectors, all form part of a well-provided horse's
wardrobe.

When Oliver Cromwell inquired affectionately after
the " little brat " with which Dorothy Cromwell had
presented her husband, he was, according to current
belief in the North, alluding unconsciously to a form
of animal garment. The lambs are fitted, before going
on to the hills, with waterproof coats, called " brats."
These lambs, or young sheep, are also called " brats " ;
whence the name for babies.

Everybody knows that in Holland the cows wear
rain-proof jackets all the winter, which are only taken
off late in spring ; but these are very cheap compared
to horse clothing, which costs about £3 a set. Horses
also have night rugs and extra rugs, about 365. the
two, and summer suits also, costing about two guineas.
Coats for show cattle are quite the fashion in England,
especially when they are sent to a distance. A really
smart Jersey cow would not like to be seen at a show
without her luggage — a chest containing not only her
sleeping jacket, but her brushes and combs, cosmetics,
and horn protectors. She puts on, or has put on, a
smarter jacket in the daytime if she has to stand in
a draughty place. If she is not sleeping out it does
not so much matter. There are many ladies who
would almost go without a jacket themselves rather
than see their best animals go to a show without
proper clothes.

The following interesting sight was lately seen in
Kensington Gore. First came a costermonger, his

ANIMALS AND THEIR CLOTHES 255

horse duly " hatted," and the hat trimmed with
ribbons. Next came a lady in a victoria wearing a
hat. Her horse also had a hat, and both hats had
pink flowers in them.

The assumption of garments is carried to such a
pitch of elaboration by some animals that they actually
wear, or are made to wear, disguises, "and the same with
intent to deceive." There is a duck-decoy dog known
to the writer which has begun, in the first instance, by
growing as like a fox as it is possible for a dog to be.
This in itself is vastly attractive to the ducks, which
seem to have an irresistible impulse to swim after a
fox and see what he is up to. But after a few days
they get used to the dog, and do not feel any more
curiosity. Thereupon his master supplies him with
a disguise, tying over his shoulders and back a jacket
made out of a dirty-white sheepskin rug. The dog
dances about with delight as soon as this is put on,
as he knows that it means a fresh start in life for
a day or so. The ducks soon get tired even of that ;
whereupon the dog's master takes down another dress
from a peg in his reed-shed, a black rough woollen
jacket, and tries its effect. The dog apparently
knows exactly what it all means. There is another
decoy dog in Yorkshire which is fitted up with a
complete fox-skin over its back, with a brush to
make the disguise more complete.

Some controversy arose lately with the local autho-
rities near Epping Forest as to whether a pig could
legally be kept in a dwelling-house. The owner of
the pig kept it as a pet, and pleaded that it was an

256 ANIMAL ARTISANS

educated pig, and quite a house pig in manners. The
local authorities held strong views about the subject,
were not convinced, and made an order for its expul-
sion, or for the closing of the house. It was then
pleaded that the pig wore a jacket, slept in a bed, and
when in bed had a night-gown. This settled the matter,
and it was reported recently that it was exhibited duly
clothed and in bed to a number of interested visitors.

It is commonly believed that monkeys which are
made to dress up and wear clothes do not like it.
This is a mistake. They would tear their " things "
up directly if they did not like them. Sometimes they
begin by doing so, but they soon learn that they keep
them warm, though their wretched frivolity prevents
their taking any real pride in that or anything else.
But a large ape, such as a chimpanzee, will exhibit
the utmost solicitude about the arrangement of any
simple garment, such as a cloak or blanket. It will
spread its blanket, take it up at the corners, and
lay it over its shoulders as carefully as an old lady
arranges her shawl. It would be an interesting ex-
periment to see whether the apes have any preference
for a red blanket over a blue or brown one.

" Prince," a very intelligent penguin kept at the
"Zoo," was presented either annually or once every
six months with a scarlet-and-gold jacket. He used
to come hopping up with joy to have this put on,
perhaps because he liked the coat, or perhaps because
he associated its appearance with a walk in the garden
outside, which was his privilege when wearing it.

Of the follies of the Parisian ladies in overdressing

TO KEEP THEIR PETTICOATS DRY, THEY ARE CARRIED OVER
BY THE KENNEL-BOY."

ANIMALS AND THEIR CLOTHES 257

lapdogs we do not propose to speak. There is no
reason to think that the wretched little creatures like
the frippery or understand its smartness. Except
" Oriel Bill," who was a very abnormal old bulldog,
and seemed rather to enjoy being put into the little
striped " sweater " some one gave him, dogs, generally
speaking, hate clothes. A dignified old setter, made
to shove his fore feet and legs through the arms of a
boy's jacket, and to have it buttoned round his neck,
may not growl, but his face is the picture of misery.
He thinks he looks a fool and is being made game of,
and when released withdraws in sulks. Greyhounds,
which are exceptions to dog-character in several ways,
and are very chilly creatures, have by long experience
learnt to wear clothes, and appear rather to like
them. They generally look particularly spruce and
bright in them. Their clothes are less expensive
than might be expected, as they have ordinary clothes
and waterproofs. " Slip cloths " cost about 153. each ;
waterproofs, I2s. 6d. When coursing in the marshes
of the East Coast, the necessity for their wearing
clothes causes a good many comical scenes. The
marshes are divided by broad drains or ditches full
of water. Over these very narrow planks are laid,
which are often slippery. The greyhounds, being in
couples, are unable to walk over them together, and
even when uncoupled are very apt to slip in and " wet
their frocks," which would never do, as the wind
blows icy cold over the flats. Accordingly they are
picked up, sometimes singly, sometimes one under
each arm, by the attendants ; and anything funnier

258 ANIMAL ARTISANS

than the sight of a tall, lanky kennel-boy sidling
cautiously over one of these planks with a long,
meek-looking greyhound under each arm, and its
tail and petticoats hanging down below the carrier's
knees, can scarcely be imagined.

CHAPTER XXXV

COMIC ANIMALS IN ART AND NATURE

CARICATURE of animals seems to grow in favour
among the readers of comic papers, and popular
natural history has extended the limits of what was
always a favourite subject. Mr. E. T. Reed has for
some time been able to amuse the subscribers to Punch
by a series of humorous drawings, in which the main
figures are caricatures of extinct monsters, as restored
by Figuier and others — caricatures of palaeontology,
which would have been too remote from common
knowledge to amuse had they been drawn twenty
years ago. As it is, Mr. Reed makes his monsters
much more alive, scaly, knobby, and squirmy, than
the best illustrators of scientific books. But they are
for the most part studies in grotesque. The creatures
hardly admit of caricature. The humour lies mostly
in the setting of the piece, in the contrast between
the absorption of the prehistoric men in their sports
and games, and the practical interest which the pre-
historic monsters as cool spectators take in their little
game, which is to secure and eat such of the players
as they may select. The fact that few, if any, of the
monsters represented were co-existent with primeval

man does not in the least detract from the joke.

259

260 ANIMAL ARTISANS

The origin of the art of animal caricature, if, like
Mr. Herbert Spencer, we go back to origins, seems
to have been double. Gods were drawn as men with
animals' heads, to give them the dignified attributes
of the eagle, the bull, or the lion, or men were drawn
with the faces of less reputable beasts for the opposite
reasons. Caricature seized on both methods for its
own purposes, and in its earlier treatment did not
differ greatly from that which drew the " trusty
servant " beloved of Wykehamists with a pig's face,
because he was not " nice " in his eating, long ears
to overhear, and a locked tongue for prudence' sake.

But modern art has added a third phase — the
simple drawing of animals as they are, or with small
accessories of costume, drawn with such nice observa-
tion of the humour of animal form and expression
that it is perhaps the most effective of any. Some
of the very best examples of this, the highest form of
animal caricature, are the drawings of Sir F. C. Gould,
Mr. Shepherd, and the admirable illustrations to the
" Peter Rabbit " books.

But these are all of comparatively recent date.
For very many years Sir John Tenniel was the best
and almost the only exponent of this branch of his
art. In his cartoons the British lion appeared more
often than any other beast, but it is very rarely re-
presented as a comic animal. The bear and the fox
lend -themselves better than any other creature to
this veteran caricaturist's feeling for animal humour.
The latter is the hero of two out of a series of three
cartoons on the relations of England and Germany in

COMIC ANIMALS 261

the scramble for Africa. In the first the lion, not
caricatured, is being coaxed by the German on one
hand, and stirred up by Mr. Stanley on the other.
In the two last the fox, disguised in a shovel-hat,
umbrella, and " pantoffeln," is the hero. In one he
addresses the lion with a budget of anti-slavery
papers : " You, that so nople are — so strong — let us
in this so holy crusade together join ! " He is a real
fox, infinitely sly. But the foxiness is surpassed in
the last cartoon, where the animal, having laid down
his pipe and umbrella, has pulled down a placard of
" Down with Slavery ! " and is unrolling " Up with
Slavery ! " looking over his shoulder the while with
a quiet furtiveness more animal than human, which,
unaided by the setting, makes this single figure a
masterpiece of expression.

Another political cartoon " made in Germany "
naturally represented a different view of the same
question. It sold largely in Holland shortly after
the Jameson raid, gave huge delight to sober-minded
grown-up Hollanders, and even more to the " Young
Dutch party " man when he diverted his serious boy-
hood by a stroll among the shops of Amsterdam. It
represented John Bull as a " land hamster," the greedy
field-rat of Germany, who has already stuffed Vene-
zuela and Egypt into his cheek-pouches, and has sent
his pet dog, Dr. Jameson, into the Transvaal, though
a notice at the gate gives warning that trespass is
" streng verboden." The dog is just being let out of
a trap, labelled " Johannesburg — made in Germany,"
and the hamster, got up as John Bull in a red coat

262 ANIMAL ARTISANS

and tall hat, is running away with his pet fastened
to a chain, pelted by the Boers, while the other
nations rejoice, and a boy in uniform is seen running
across the veldt with a packet labelled "telegram."
The whole composition is most comic, except the
central figure of John Bull as the hamster. The
reason is that the hamster, though his greediness,
his sulkiness, and general character as miser and
misanthrope make him a fitting object for the
caricaturist's art, is not one of the obviously comic
creatures, being nothing more than a fat, rat-like
animal, with a short tail and a blunt nose.

The list of comic animals is not very long, and the
comic elements in each are by no means the same in
kind or evenly distributed. Those animals which
have some particular feature greatly exaggerated do
not necessarily raise a smile, any more than a vulgar
caricature which depends for its comic element on the
enlargement of a nose or a stomach is necessarily amus-
ing. There are several creatures which seem to have
been made for this " low-comedy line," but they are
far less funny than others that, like the prairie-dogs,
are quite pretty so far as form and features go. The
obviously comic creatures, with no reserve of intention
to back up first impressions, are the "long-nosed
monkey" and those other quadrumana whose legs,
tails, beards, or mouths are exaggerated caricatures
of human members ; yet the monkeys are not by any
means the most humorous of animals to look upon.
In a list of the animals which are always mirth-
provoking the sources of the amusement caused are

COMIC ANIMALS 263

curiously different. Young puppies when just learning
to walk are invariably comic. Their noses are square
and blunt, their youthful faces wrinkled and lined,
their eyes weak and bleared, and their voices cracked
and squeaky. This gives the appearance of age in
very young creatures, and as they are round, fat, and
have large feet, they are not at all unlike little hippo-
potami— an instance of animal caricaturing animal.

Frogs and toads have their special vein of comicality,
due to their staring eyes, consequential, stupid mouths,
fat stomachs, and sticking-out elbows. There has
been a consensus of human opinion about the frog's
appearance from jEsop and the authors of "The
Battle of the Frogs and Mice " to Mr. Ruskin in his
remarks on Bewick's little picture of the frog, under-
neath which the old engraver had written, " Set them
up with a King indeed ! "

Pigs, especially happy pigs, when not too fat but
only "well liking," and free to wander in a big
yard and forage for themselves, are among the
most comic of all animals. Almost all the neces-
sary elements are present — fat bodies and fat cheeks,
twinkling eyes, tightly curling tails, short turned-up
noses, voices capable of expressing in a grunt
intense greedy self-satisfaction or curiosity, and all
forms of squeaks and squeals for surprise, fear, and
panic. The writer recently watched a family of
young pigs, about eighteen inches long, just turned
out to spend the morning in a meadow ; and returned
convinced that there was not a moment at which their
appearance and behaviour was not too comical for

264 ANIMAL ARTISANS

description. Each flower and weed was tasted by the
little pigs with the air of a connoisseur trying a new
dish, and when they found a horse lying asleep taking
its Sunday rest, the whole litter stood in a semicircle
round its head as if grouped to sing in a pantomime.

Pigs are so funny, and every one so thoroughly
recognises the fact now, that it seems rather odd that
the discovery should be so recent. There is plenty
of allusion to the pig as a filthy, ugly creature in the
East, and many old English anecdotes of their cunning
and knowing ways about weather and food, but except
the pig-selling scene in "The Acharnians," which is
sadly wanting in humour, there is hardly any early
recognition of the comicality of pigs. The reason
is that it is only the modern 'improved pig that is
comical. His alone are the round stern, the curly
tail, the short nose, the dumpling cheeks, and the
fine high spirits. The wretched greyhound-pig of the
East, or of the unimproved breeds of Europe, has
not an atom of humour in him. Even a young wild
boar is a glum little fellow, only growing lively as
he grows hungry. We owe the comic pig to the
encouragement of the Smithfield show and the Royal
Agricultural Society, and these and other similar
institutions have profited in a quite unexpected direc-
tion by the comical appearance of the animal they
have helped to produce ; for the whole demeanour
of the modern pig is so mirth-provoking that the
pig department at a show is always crowded, and
every human face seen there is wreathed in smiles.
A full " entry " of pigs is almost essential for a good

COMIC ANIMALS 265

"gate," and a swine-fever order is more dreaded by
show secretaries than an inopportune race meeting or
a wet day.

But there is room for difference as to the humor-
ous side of animal life in creatures which are not
domesticated and have never changed. The owl is
a case in point. The Greeks looked upon him as
a grave and wise bird, and assigned him to Athene.
We think his appearance comic, and in common talk
the owl represents a bewildered, rather dense person
who cannot see the obvious. Though the Greek
revered the owl, Hindoo feeling is exactly the same
as ours. To call a stupid servant "Ooloo" ("You
owl ! ") would convey exactly the same meaning in
India as it would here. A physical explanation is
just possible. We and the Hindoos think of the
night-owl, a bird bewildered by light. Athene's owls,
which are now sold in large numbers in London as
pets, are little, wideawake ground-owls, able to see
by day as well as by night.

Most people who have watched penguins hopping
on the ground will own that when moving they
are irresistibly funny. Their little wings, like fat
hands without arms, round white waistcoats, short
necks, and short legs with little, flat, black feet,
make them like a bird edition of Mr. Pickwick.
Their only movement is a series of hops, with the
head bent nervously forward as if they were afraid
of falling — which they are — and their little wings
stuck out on each side to balance them. Of course,
the penguin has not the least notion that it is

266 ANIMAL ARTISANS

funny or amusing, and is as uncomfortable as a
Chinese lady trying to walk across a rice-field.
Puffins rank high among the comic birds. Their
" make-up," which is that of a City waiter, is enhanced
by the big red and yellow bill, which is set on like a
Guy Fawkes mask. Young puffins, which have not
developed this adjunct to " facial expression," are far
less ludicrous to look upon, and have none of the
exaggerated inspector-like air of their seniors.

The Japanese artists, who have a fine sense of the
ludicrous in Nature, but usually read in some portion
of human wit into their studies of animal life, show
a proper appreciation of the comicality of the crab.
They cast bronze crabs in all attitudes, the most
effective being the enraged crab sticking up his
pinching claws in a position of defence. If their
mechanical skill also allowed of a clockwork move-
ment by which the crab could be depicted retreating
sideways, with his claws raised and snapping, these
works of art would be perfect illustrations of the
comic side of submarine life.

The element of comicality is distributed among
animals of the same species in a curiously arbitrary
fashion. All the bears, for instance, are comic except
the polar bear, which is only amusing when taking
its bath. No grown-up dogs, on the other hand, are
comical except the Dutch pug, which, being fat,
goggle-eyed, asthmatic, and consequential, caricatures
the pig, and suggests a human being of similar
tendencies. But comicality depends quite as much
on action or on demeanour as on shape. The giraffe's

COMIC ANIMALS 267

long neck never suggests a smile, yet from the
anatomical point of view its owner should be among
the most grotesque of beasts. On the other hand,
there is nothing ludicrous in the appearance of prairie-
dogs, yet they are intensely comic, mainly because of
their exaggerated earnestness of demeanour. Their
every action, whether keeping watch as sentry or
collecting straw for their beds, might be labelled
" Most important," and the contrast between matter
and manner enhances the joke. No cat is ever
comical ; from the lion to the kitten they are dignified
when at rest, and pretty or amusing, but not comic,
when at play. Neither is the elephant ; that is partly
because it is not a fat animal, for its skin hangs quite
loosely on it, and drops into folds at the joints of the
limbs, and partly because it walks with great freedom,
deliberation, and dignity. But little elephants, which
are fat and have tight skins like a young hippopo-
tamus, are ludicrous enough, and it is in the likeness
of their rounded contours that Hindoo artists re-
present the jolly elephant-headed god Ganesha, the
subject of endless clever comic treatment, a domestic
joke in earthenware, and the Indian equivalent of
Mr. Punch.

CHAPTER XXXVI

NEW NATIONAL EMBLEMS

THE old states of the world have long been repre-
sented by animals, either as the national crest or
as a kind of accepted totem. The British lion, the
Austrian and Prussian eagles, the Napoleonic eagles
and bees, the Gallic cock, the Chinese dragon — all
these are or have been part of the official insignia of
nations. New nations and states have been springing
up all over the world, and these, especially when of
British origin, have nearly all selected an animal of
some kind as the national emblem, and have made
it the official crest or totem of their state. These
totems are sometimes engraved on the bonds of the
new communities, and in at least sixty cases are also
printed on their stamps. Their selection is not
arbitrary, but in general has reference to the origins
or peculiarities of the new country. In many cases
the bird or beast or fish is a link with the past story
of the community of a very interesting kind. Their
adoption, and as it were consecration, show a senti-
mental phase of the human mind at a time when
young communities are successfully emerging from
the ordeal of their early struggles. They are not
as significant as the manna and rod in the Ark, or

NEW NATIONAL EMBLEMS 269

the unleavened bread, true national emblems of par-
ticular events. But they signify something very
much more than the old heraldic emblems of fortitude,
strength, or pride, like the lion or the eagle or the
dragon. Some are legitimate descendants of the
Roman she-wolf emblem — the bronze memorial of a
belief that young Rome would have perished had not
the rudest forces in Nature aided its infant days.
The animal which was the staple product of the
colony or state in early days, such as the Canadian
beaver, is a favourite choice, as the golden ram is
still the totem of Leeds. Others record the existence
of creatures first discovered when the colony was
founded, or which especially struck the imagination
of the settlers, just as the Phocaean colonists of
Marseilles took the seal which followed their ships
for the emblem on their coins. In almost every case
the new " national animal " recalls a reference to
historical events or natural products of a distinctive
character, and it seems worth while to refer to them
and their story while the causes of their adoption are
recent.

Our oldest colony, Newfoundland, has a stamp
on which is a hair seal, in memory of the sealing
business which with the cod-fishing was the staple
of the old North-Western trade. Not to be un-
grateful to the other and more lasting source of the
national wealth, the two-cent stamp has for chief
bearing a codfish proper, swimming. A third issue
of Newfoundland stamps shows not the trade animal,
but the one which national sentiment thinks most

270 ANIMAL ARTISANS

highly of, the large Newfoundland dog. A whole
library of history might be attached to the first two
emblems ; from Hakluyt to the papers of the Fishery
Award, in which the United States paid us £1, 500,000
for infringement of our rights on these North Atlantic
waters.

Some of the United States stamps are almost
illustrations of national history. A large four-cent
scarlet stamp shows a buffalo on a prairie with a Red
Man in pursuit, and another teams of horses ready
to start the self-binding reaping-machines first made
for prairie use ! Canada very early took the beaver
for its crest, a natural and proper compliment to the
animal which first invited colonists to venture there
in any numbers, though whether the practical return
made was of the kind the beaver would have pre-
ferred is another matter. Historically viewed, the
beaver is to the insignia of Canada what the tunny-
fish was on the coins of Cyzicus, a kind of advertise-
ment of a former staple industry. The maple-leaf is
the Canadian tribute to sentiment, while the beaver
records " business."

Australia and New Zealand combine zoology with
history on some of their stamps. New Zealand
and the different governments now federalised in
Australia each select a typical animal, but New
South Wales adds a short historical reference. The
latter colony backs up the English symbolism by
which Mr. Punch and others typify the Australian
Commonwealth as a kangaroo. In the issue of
stamps of 1870 a kangaroo stands upright, and

NEW NATIONAL EMBLEMS 271

over it is the significant legend, " One Hundred
Years." In other words, the stamp was issued
just a century after Captain Cook, on his first
voyage, discovered Botany Bay and first saw the
kangaroo. Western Australia takes for its emblem
the black swan. This bird is almost as typical of
the continent as is the emu. Some were brought
to Holland before the discoveries of Captain Cook ;
but the black swans — once among the commonest of
Australian birds, and certainly the most remarkable
to European preconceptions of what was possible or
impossible in Nature — used to be among the first
living things seen off the coast of the continent,
until the greedy sealers took to hunting the swans
for the sake of their down, and killed them by
tens of thousands on the sand-bars off the principal
harbours.

Japan engraves the osprey on her stamps, and some-
times scenes from bird life, recalling the vignettes of
Bewick on a space the size of a sixpence. Among
the specimens before the writer are a stamp for fifteen
sen printed in mauve, and another labelled " Wuku "
Local Post. Both are engraved by native artists.
The first shows a long-tailed tit searching for food
in a pine branch, and the second a flight of wild-
fowl alighting on the water.

But such subjects are too fine and curious for ordi-
nary Western fancy, which likes something more solid,
and occasionally is directly commercial. Thus New-
foundland in an issue of 1897, being probably either
anxious to attract visitors or proud of its forests, shows

272 ANIMAL ARTISANS

a dead cariboo deer and a leather-shirted hunter by its
side, and labels this " Cariboo-hunting — Newfoundland
Sport." New Zealand in her stamp designs is ornitho-
logically inclined, possibly because more than one of
her public men have been great naturalists and have
written monumental works on their country's birds.
The apteryx is the most interesting survival of the
strange wingless fauna of the islands, and is duly com-
memorated on the postal issues. So is another bird,
apparently a species of mynah, one which is probably
well known to New Zealanders.

But by far the most interesting bird-emblem of
a modern state is that of the Republic of Guatemala.
It has been adopted as the national crest for so
long that (partly through the taste for stamp-
collecting) the existence of one of the rarest and
most beautiful of the bird -creation has been made
far more widely known than it otherwise would have
been. There is a race of birds called trogons, most
of which have very fine feathers and remarkable
colouring. They are found in India and the Malays,
but are most numerous in Central and Southern
America. It was from their plumage that the
Mexicans made their famous mosaics of feather-work ;
and from the tail-feathers they made the lustrous green
helmets of their kings and nobles. The most gorgeous
of all these was the long-tailed or resplendent trogon,
which was kept as a sacred or royal bird in the palace
of Montezuma, or in one of the two houses which
formed the royal menagerie. " One of these houses
held birds of prey only ; the other birds of gorgeous

NEW NATIONAL EMBLEMS 273

plumage. Three hundred men, according to Cortes,
were employed to take care of these birds, besides
physicians who prescribed for them. Of the three
hundred attendants, some procured the food ; others
distributed it; others took care of the eggs at the
time of incubation; whilst others at the proper time
picked off portions of the plumage (or picked up the
shed plumes), for the King was not only delighted by
the sight of so many beautiful birds, but was very
careful of their plumes for use in the arts for which
they were needed." Adequate description of the bird
is almost impossible. It has a rounded plume on the
head, cascades of feathers falling from the back over
the shoulders, other plumes falling over the tail a yard
long, and a most elegant contour. The colour of the
whole of the upper surface and plumes is a most
resplendent golden green, that of the breast and
under parts crimson scarlet. Such is the national
emblem of Guatemala.

Our Indian and Far Eastern states are not at all
behind the rest of Great Britain in their desire to
commemorate famous natural commodities of one
kind or another, but the picturesque and the terrible
play a part in these devices. Pahang takes for its
representative beast a tiger, either roaming or slinking
through the jungle. North Borneo shows the native
rusa deer, an inhabitant of its impenetrable jungles of
swamp grass. The Seychelles " sport " their famous
tortoise under the usual cocoa-nut palm, and the
Federated Malay States a tiger bounding from the
jungle. The Rajah of Travancore emblazons a device

s

274 ANIMAL ARTISANS

which is variously interpreted as a sacred shell and a
coiled cobra.

Time will show how many of these emblems will
become permanently associated with the countries
which use them on their stamps and securities. But
it cannot be questioned that many of the totems are
well chosen, and show considerable grace of congruity.
It is public feeling which really gives currency to
any of these fancies. If the greater number prove
acceptable, there will be a very large addition to the
zoological side of the political cartoons of the future.

THE END

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