Chapter I: Part 1

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THOSE OTHER ANIMALS.

BY

G. A. HENTY.

WITH PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR

[++ Illustration: The Pig]

AND TWENTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRISON WEIR.

LONDON:

HENRY AND CO., BOUVERIE STREET, E.C.

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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ The symbols “++” placed in an illustration caption indicate that
the caption was created by the transcriber.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed in underscores (_italics_).
○ Additional Transcriber Notes are located at the end of this book.

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TO THE READER.

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MAN, being essentially a creature of habit, has come to look upon what he is pleased to consider as the inferior creation from one point of view only, and that in most cases the narrow and selfish one of his own interests; thus his views are frequently lamentably prejudiced and erroneous. The natural result has been that, while we condone the failings of those creatures we make useful to us, we ignore the virtues of other and much more estimable ones. Thus, we admire the Bee because we benefit by his labours, while we have not a good word to say for the Wasp, who is, in point alike of industry and intelligence, the Bee’s superior.

An attempt has been here made to view some of the animal creation from a broader point of view, and to endeavour to do justice to those whose good points have been hitherto persistently ignored, and to take down others from the pedestal upon which they have been placed, as it would seem, unfairly and unreasonably. If some of the conclusions at which we have arrived are not in accordance with those propounded by men of science, we can only say that we are sorry for the men of science.

It has only to be added that some of these essays were first presented to the world in the columns of the _Evening Standard_.

G. A. H.

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CONTENTS.

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PAGE

THE ELEPHANT 1

THE CROCODILE 7

THE CAMEL 13

THE DONKEY 19

THE DRAGON 25

THE TORTOISE AND TURTLE 30

THE SHARK 36

THE SNAKE 41

FROGS 47

DADDY LONG-LEGS 54

THE APHIS 59

GEESE 65

SLUGS 72

THE PIG 78

CATERPILLARS 84

THE DOMESTIC FOWL 90

THE SPARROW 96

FLIES 101

THE PARROT 107

THE COCKROACH 113

MICE 118

CATS 124

THE LADYBIRD 130

THE DOG 136

SHEEP 143

THE BEE AND THE WASP 150

THE BEAR 156

THE SPIDER 162

THE GNAT 167

THE ANT 173

THE BEAVER 179

THE SQUIRREL 184

THE FLEA 189

THE MOSQUITO 195

THE COW 200

THE OCTOPUS AND CUTTLE 206
FISH

THE BACILLUS 212

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THOSE OTHER ANIMALS.

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THE ELEPHANT.

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IT must be admitted that it is hard upon the citizens of the United States that the elephant is not found in the Western Continent. The Americans have an especial fondness for big things. They are proud that they possess the biggest Continent, the largest rivers, the longest railways, the loftiest trees, the most monster hotels, and the tallest stories of any people in the world. It is, then, extremely hard upon them that they have not also the biggest quadrupeds. Two good-sized quadrupeds, indeed, they had—the bison and the moose—but they are fast disappearing. As they were not the very biggest, the citizens of the States had no interest in preserving them. Had the elephant been there, he would, doubtless, have been religiously protected as a subject of national glorification. The elephant is not thought so much of in the countries where he resides. In India he has been utilised, but in Africa is prized only for his flesh and his tusks. He is considered to be a highly intelligent animal, and in books for children is generally spoken of as the sagacious elephant; but in proportion to his size he is rather a poor creature in the way of intelligence, and the brain of the ant, tiny as it is, contains more real thinking power than the skull of the elephant.

It can hardly be doubted that he owes much of the respect in which he is held by man to the peculiar formation of his proboscis. A large nose is generally considered as a sign of ability in man, but even the largest human nose is, since the change of fashion abolished its usefulness as a snuff-box, incapable of any other function than that of an organ of smell, and as a convenient support for a pair of spectacles. It is practically fixed and immovable, at least for all purposes save that of expressing the emotions of scorn and disdain. Man has, then, never recovered from the astonishment and admiration experienced by the first discoverer of the elephant at finding a beast capable of using his nose as a hand—of conveying his food to his mouth with it, and of utilising it in all the various work of life. This peculiarity has been more than sufficient to counterbalance the many obvious defects in the appearance of the elephant—his little pig-like eyes, his great flat ears, his short and stumpy tail, and the general hairless condition of his leathern skin. Then, too, mankind, even in the present day of advanced education, are worshippers of brute strength, as is evidenced by the attraction of the feats performed by strong men; and the elephant possesses enormous strength. This, however, is positive rather than relative, for he is a poor creature indeed in comparison with the flea, or even with the beetle, both of which can move weights enormously exceeding their own. Even the donkey could, bulk for bulk, give the elephant points.

The elephant is but a chicken-hearted beast. In spite of his size and strength he is easily scared, and a hare starting up at his feet has been frequently known to have excited in him an uncontrollable panic. Now and then one can be trained to await quietly the charge of an angry tiger; but this is rather because of the confidence that the animal feels in the shooting of the men he carries than in his own powers, and after having been once mauled he can seldom be induced to repeat the experiment. Naturally, the elephant is timid in the extreme; the slightest noise startles him, and, except in the case of a solitary bull rendered morose by being driven from the herd by younger rivals, he will seldom unless wounded face man. He is, like most animals, capable of being taught something; but when it is considered that he lives a hundred years, while the dog lives but ten or twelve, he would be stupid indeed if he did not in all that time come to some understanding as to what was required of him; but even at his best, a well-trained dog is a vastly more intelligent animal. This, indeed, might only be expected, for the elephant’s brain is smaller in proportion to its bulk than is that of almost any other creature, being little larger than that of man; and while the brain in man is of about one-twenty-fifth of the size of the body, that of the elephant is but one-five-hundredth part. We should, therefore, pity rather than blame the creature for the smallness of his capacity. It may be said that Baron Cuvier, who made the habits of the elephant a subject of attentive study, came to the conclusion that at the best he was no more intelligent than a dog.

[++ Illustration: Elephant]

The elephant should have been admired by Dr. Johnson on the ground that he is a good hater. Although his brain is not capable of holding many ideas, his memory of an injury is particularly retentive, and if he has to wait for years, he will get even at last with any one who has played him a trick. In old times the elephant was trained to war. Gunpowder had not been invented, and the elephant was therefore practically invulnerable; but even then his utility was problematical, and if pricked by an arrow or javelin, he was as likely as not to turn tail, and to spread confusion and death in the ranks of the troops that marched behind him. His courage, in fact, is beyond all comparison less than that of the horse, who seems to enjoy the clamour of battle, and will carry his rider unflinchingly through the heaviest fire. As a beast of burden the elephant has his uses, and in countries impassable to wheeled vehicles he is very valuable, especially in the carriage of pieces of artillery that could not be transported by any other available means. Upon a level road, however, he possesses no advantage whatever over smaller animals, which will not only drag larger weights in proportion to the food they consume, but will do so at much greater speed.

The elephant, in fact, appears to have been built up with a single eye to his own advantages, and altogether without reference to the use he might be to man. He is admirably fitted for sustaining the struggle for existence. The mechanism of his feet is such as to sustain to a nicety his enormous weight. His thick skin enables him to push his way through the thickest and thorniest jungles with impunity, and his flat ears closely set to his head also facilitate his passage. The great strength and pliability of his prehensile trunk, with its finger-like termination, enables him either to break off the massive limb of a tree or to pick up the smallest tuft of herbage. By its power of suction he can pour volumes of water down his throat, or cool himself by spurting it over his coat of mail. In his natural state, before man appeared upon the scene, he had few enemies, and it was therefore unnecessary to cultivate the attribute of courage. His bulk imposed upon smaller though fiercer creatures, and his thickness of skin protected him from their assaults. As for intelligence, he needed but a small degree of it,—his food lay everywhere within his reach, and he had no occasion for either craft or speed in obtaining it. He was a huge perambulating machine for the conversion of vegetable matter into flesh, and as such he performed his functions admirably, and had no occasion to look further. In his progress, in fact, from the germ up to the elephant he steadily devoted himself to purely selfish ends. Courage was unnecessary, because he intended to be so large and so armour-clad that none would assault him, while, as he had no relish for flesh, he had no need for courage to assault or for speed to pursue others. It was useless to be intelligent, since for him there was no occasion either to hide or to seek. He had but to stretch out his trunk to procure abundant sustenance, and more brain than was needed for this would be but lumber. His digestive organs, on the other hand, were to be upon the largest scale, so as to permit him to enjoy the pleasure of constant and prodigious feeding. These points must have been steadily kept in view during the whole upward progress of the creature, and it is but due to it to say that they were crowned by perfect success. The elephant was a world to himself—not a very lovable, or intelligent, or courageous one, but sufficient in all respects for his own wants and desires; and it would be hard to blame him because he has not devoted himself to the cultivation of qualities that, although admirable in our eyes, would have been wholly useless to him in the career that he had marked out for himself.

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THE CROCODILE.

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THE crocodile and its very near relative, the alligator, possess a double interest to man. In the first place, they are the relics of a bygone age. Their cousins, the ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus, and the other great Saurians, have happily long since vanished from the world, but the crocodile is still with us, and doubtless retains traditions of the days when he and his relatives ranged undisputed masters of a swampy universe, undisturbed even by anticipations of changes and cataclysms that should render the world an unsuitable place of habitation for, at any rate, the larger species among them. The second reason for man’s interest in the crocodile is the crocodile’s marked partiality for man. The crocodile and the alligator differ very slightly from each other; the principal difference being that the alligator has a broader head, and that the hind feet of the crocodile are much more completely webbed than are those of the alligator.

The general observer, however, would see no greater differences between members of the various species of alligators and crocodiles than between different human beings; but the scientific man delights in subtleties, and there is nothing that affords him a deeper satisfaction than in discovering slight peculiarities and differences that enable him to divide and subdivide, to invent fresh hard names, and so to deter as far as possible the general mob from the study of the subject. As, roughly speaking, the crocodile inhabits chiefly the Old World, while the alligator has almost a monopoly of the New, the former was naturally first known to man, and was an object at once of fear and admiration. Its mouth was so much larger than that of man, and its armour so much more perfect than anything that man could contrive, that it is easy to understand the admiration it excited. Our first written record of it is in Job; and it is there, under the name of Leviathan, spoken of as the bravest and most formidable of all creatures, as “a king over all the children of pride.” The Egyptians, who were given to worship animals, and perhaps saw more of the crocodile than they liked, did their best to win its goodwill, and elevated it to the rank of a deity. Their tame crocodiles were well cared for; and although perhaps these did not derive any very lively satisfaction from being adorned with rings of gold and precious stones, they doubtless appreciated the abundant food with which they were supplied, and the feasts of cake, roast meat, and mulled wine occasionally bestowed upon them. The Indian variety have had an equally good time of it, and their reputation in that part of the world has lasted longer than in Egypt, and indeed still continues, large numbers being kept in tanks belonging to some of the temples, still regarded as sacred, and fed abundantly.

The alligator of Northern and Southern America, although it has always been held in great respect by the natives, has scarcely risen to the lofty position occupied by its Eastern cousins. It has, nevertheless, held its own, being too formidable and well defended to be interfered with with impunity. Although killed and eaten occasionally, it was as a rule left severely alone, its flesh having a musty flavour, that needs a strong stomach and long familiarity to appreciate. Of late, however, evil times have fallen upon the alligator. A use has been found for it. So long as the dead crocodile was considered as worthless, save for the somewhat disagreeable food it furnished, so long the alligator was safe; but it was otherwise as soon as it was discovered that a portion of it was a marketable commodity. Some close investigator remarked that under its coat of mail it wore a leathern doublet exactly corresponding to it, and found that this doublet was capable of being turned into an excellent peculiarly-marked leather. From that day the fate of the alligator was sealed. It will doubtless be a long time before it is exterminated, even in the United States; but, like the bison, it has to go. Already on the rivers where the population is comparatively thick it has become rare, and even in the swamps where it formerly was undisputed master the search is hot for it. Theoretically this will be a matter for regret; practically its loss will not be sensibly felt.

It may be owned that the alligator has been to some extent maligned, and that the number of human beings destroyed by it was by no means so great as its exceeding numbers in some of the sluggish rivers of the Southern States or of South America would warrant one in expecting. Nevertheless, it was certainly a very formidable foe, and a swimmer attacked by it had but small chance of escape. Unlike the shark, the crocodile kills its prey by drowning; the shark can take off a limb with a single bite, the alligator has no such power. Its teeth are sharp and pointed, but placed at irregular distances apart, and though these can wound and lacerate sorely they have no cutting power whatever, and when it has captured and drowned a prey too large to be swallowed at a mouthful, hides it up in a deep hole or under the river bank until it decomposes sufficiently for the reptile to be able to tear it in pieces. It is said that any one seized by an alligator or crocodile can, if he possess a sufficient amount of presence of mind, compel the creature to let go by thrusting his thumbs into its one vulnerable point—its eyes. The experiment, however, is one that cannot be recommended. It would doubtless be interesting, but, like Alpine climbing, the satisfaction of success would scarcely compensate for the risk incurred.

In no creature have the defensive powers been carried to the same perfection as in the case of the crocodile: its coat of armour is absolutely invulnerable to the weapons that it was intended to withstand; and even now that man has armed himself with rifles, he is unable to penetrate its defence unless the creature is struck in the eye or in the thick skin of its leg-joints, which are comparatively exposed. The coat of mail, doubtless, possesses certain disadvantages, as did the armour worn by the knights of the Middle Ages; while this was proof against missiles of all kinds, against sword and dagger, the knight, if unhorsed and hurled to the ground, was unable to rise without assistance, and lay a helpless victim to the dagger of the meanest camp-follower. So it is with the crocodile; it can turn its head but at a slight angle with its body, and can turn itself only by means of a long _détour_; hence an active man or an animal of any kind can easily escape it, unless suddenly seized or knocked over by the sweep of its tail.

The crocodile possesses many amiable qualities. It is an excellent mother. It does not indeed sit upon its eggs like a hen, but this is simply because it knows that the heat of the sand in which it buries them is amply sufficient to hatch them. The earlier crocodiles, which doubtless followed the example of birds, would speedily discover that what was good for the goose was not good for the crocodile, and that while but a small supply of heat passed through their armour, its weight was disastrous to the wellbeing of the eggs. The crocodile, however, carefully guards the buried eggs, and as soon as they are hatched watches over the young with anxious and continued care; she escorts them to the water, and once there protects them to the utmost of her power from all assailants, among whom, it must be admitted with regret, the male crocodile figures prominently. This care on the part of the mother continues during many months of the young crocodile’s life. In spite of this, only a small proportion of them arrive at maturity, for in their early days great numbers fall victims to vultures and other birds during their rambles on shore. Like all saurians, the crocodile is partial to warmth, and as it is capable of prolonged fastings it is able to spend a considerable portion of its life basking or asleep on the sands in the sun.

The crocodile’s eye is provided with three distinct lids. It is evident that this advantage admits of an extraordinary variety of what may be called eye-action, and it is probable that these animals are able to converse with each other by means of the varied action of the lids. Man is able to convey a great deal of expression by the action of a single eyelid, and it is reasonable to suppose that the alligator would not have been provided with a triple eyelid had it not been able to utilise these coverings in a very marked manner. It is strange and somewhat unfortunate that this peculiarity should not have been made the subject of much further investigation and research by scientific men than has hitherto been bestowed upon it. It is evident indeed that we have still much to learn concerning the crocodile; and in view of its early disappearance, it is to be hoped that the matter will speedily be taken in hand by some trained investigator.

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THE CAMEL.

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DURING the countless ages that must have elapsed in its upward progress from the original germ, by the various processes of the survival of the fittest, selection, and adaptability to circumstances, it is clear that the camel kept its eyes strictly to business. The object of the germ and its descendants was to build up an animal that should be capable of enjoying existence in the desert. To this they turned all their attention, with, it may be admitted, marvellous success; but it must be added that, while so doing, they unaccountably neglected the beautiful, and turned out a creature which in point of awkwardness and uncouthness stands completely apart from the rest of the brute creation. The camel’s wide, spongy feet save it from sinking in the sand, its long neck enables it either to allay irritation by gnawing itself down its spine to the root of its tail, or to grab a rider by the foot, while its hind legs are specially adapted by their length to allow it to scratch itself behind the ear. It may be admitted that in these respects few animals have its advantages. As a provision against sand storms it has the unique faculty of being able entirely to close its nostrils; while by complicated internal arrangements it is able to carry its water supply about with it for some days. Probably the camel did not foresee that, while thus little by little perfecting itself for a life in the desert, it was constructing an animal that would be exceedingly useful to man, and was preparing for itself and its descendants a lifelong servitude; but so it has been. The camel was one of the very first animals that man turned to his use. Jacob possessed camels, and Joseph was carried away into Egypt by a caravan of Ishmaelites with laden camels. Job possessed three thousand camels at the beginning of his misfortunes, and was promised six thousand at the end. The camel has, in fact, from the first been made a servant by man; it is only in Central Asia that it is known to exist in a wild state, and it is far more probable that these wild camels are the descendants of some escaped from captivity, than that they should all along have retained their freedom.

The camel is capable of great and prolonged endurance if not overloaded or overdriven; but it is a mistake to suppose that there are no limits to its powers in this way. The authorities of the Nile Expedition fell into this error, with the result that in three weeks after its start from Korti, the four thousand camels collected and brought up at so great an expense were all practically _hors-de-combat_, more than half being dead and the rest reduced to the last stage of misery and weakness. The camel on this occasion showed its usual obstinacy, and insisted on dying as a protest against being obliged to travel night and day with utterly insufficient quantities of food and water. A similar result followed the confidence of the authorities of the Abyssinian Expedition in the power of the camel to exist without water when dumped down by thousands on the bare sands of Annesley Bay. The failure of the camel upon these occasions must not, however, be imputed to it as blame. In its progress from the germ it had anticipated only the conditions under which it would naturally find itself, and had made no allowance for the stupidity of man.

It is not surprising that the camel, finding itself from the first reduced to slavery and converted into a beast of burden, should have developed a bad temper. No epithet was ever more ridiculously misapplied than that of patience in connection with the camel. It is, in fact, only possible to account for its use upon the ground that when first applied the word bore its strict Latin signification, and that it was the “suffering” and not the “long-suffering” signification of the word that renders it applicable. The life of the camel is spent in one long protest against its lot. It grumbles and growls alike when it is laden and unladen, when it is ordered to rise or to kneel; to stop or to go on; it roars threateningly at any animal that approaches it, and is ready at all times to take a piece out of any one who may place himself incautiously within reach of its teeth, and even when lying down will shoot out its hind leg with wonderful activity and viciousness to a distance of some two or three yards at a passer-by. The camel has literally no pleasures; its life is one unbroken round of toil, and it would seem almost that it has cultivated ill-temper until it has become a form of enjoyment. Even the camel’s walk is evidently the result of deep calculation, for it is of all kinds of gait the most unpleasant for its rider. The camel has its regular pace,—it will walk two miles and three-quarters an hour, neither faster nor slower,—and however urgent the need of haste may be to its owner, neither blows nor execrations will induce the camel to quicken its pace except for a few hundred yards, at the end of which it will settle down into its regulation stride, with doubtless much inward chuckling at its rider’s exasperation. It would not be fair to blame the camel for this; its disposition has been embittered, and it is not unreasonable that it should find an alleviation in the only way open to it. Indeed, man has much reason to be grateful that the obstinacy of the camel does not take the form of refusing from the first to live, rejecting sustenance, and persisting in giving the whole thing up as soon as its eyes are open to the lot awaiting it.

[++ Illustration: Camel]

There are breeds of camels that differ materially from the ordinary specimen in point of speed. The Heirie or Maherry, and the Sabaye, are very swift, and will keep up a trot of eight or nine miles an hour for many hours together, and have been known to perform a journey of thirty-five days’ caravan travelling in five days, doing six hundred and thirty miles; while Purchas says that camels will carry messages from Timbuktu to places nine hundred miles distant in less than eight days. These fast camels have but one hump; but this is also the case with some of the beasts of burden. The object of these humps is not very clear, but it is supposed that as the stomachs are a reservoir of water, so the humps are natural portmanteaus in which the animals convey a reserve of sustenance to draw upon in case of need. It is, at any rate, certain that the fatty substance composing the humps considerably diminishes and dwindles when the animal is overworked.

The camel has courage as well as endurance: it goes on at its regular pace like a clock that is wound up, until it stops suddenly and falls; when it once does so, nothing can induce it to endeavour to use its feet again as long as man is present, although after the departure of the caravan it has been known to get up to browse on the bushes, and to find its way back to the wells from which it started in the morning. It is very insensible to pain. Count Gleichen, in his account of the Camel Corps in the Nile Expedition, gives many instances of this; notably the case of one camel which, having had its lower jaw shot off by a ball from an Arab matchlock, yet continued its journey to the end of the day in apparent unconsciousness that anything unusual had taken place. The one form of enjoyment of the camel is that dear also to the donkey and horse—namely, a roll in the sand. This appears to afford it great comfort and consolation, and after an indulgence in it, it is ready, when again loaded, to start with renewed vigour. The Heirie, being better treated and cared for than the ordinary camel, is naturally a very much better tempered beast than his humble congener, and is even capable of exhibiting an affection for his master. This is in itself a proof that the moroseness of disposition so general in the race is due to the treatment they receive from man, and not from any inherent incapacity to see things on their bright side; and the thoughtful should pity rather than blame camels for using their only available means of exhibiting their disgust and discontentment with their hard and joyless lot.

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THE DONKEY.

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WHILE the dog has risen vastly in the scale since Scriptural times as the friend and companion of man, the donkey has as distinctly descended. There is no reason for believing that this is the fault of the donkey, but lies rather in the want of appreciation on the part of man. The donkey is, indeed, to no small extent the victim of appearances, and it can hardly be doubted that the length of his ears has told terribly against him. This is not because there is anything inherently objectionable in a donkey’s ears. They match admirably with his general appearance, and their constant movement evinces the animal’s intelligent interest in what is going on around it. Unfortunately for the donkey, however, men are accustomed to see in all other creatures’ ears bearing a smaller proportion to the general bulk than they do in the case of a donkey, and, therefore, rashly and foolishly, jump at the conclusion that the donkey’s ears are excessive. This being once established, it naturally follows that man should attribute various bad qualities to the donkey, simply because his ears are large; but he is specially credited with stupidity and obstinacy. We do not hesitate to say that the stupidity is very much greater on the part of man, who fails to recognise the characteristics of one of the most worthy of animals, than on that of the donkey himself; for it may be doubted whether any individual of the animal creation possesses so many virtues as he does. He is strong, hardy, patient, laborious, and, in his wild state, fleet and brave. He can live on the most meagre provender; he can stand all climates. He is a willing servant, and does not despise humble work. He is affectionate whenever he gets a chance of being so, and is one of the most intelligent of animals. The horse is more showy, but in proportion to the amount of food he consumes, and to his weight and size, he is less strong than the donkey; he is undoubtedly less intelligent, and, in spite of his size, he is no fleeter. The wild ass can leave the horse behind him; can climb precipices inaccessible to his rival, can go fearlessly along mountain paths where the horse would not dare to tread, and is in no way inferior in courage. Well groomed and cared for, his coat is almost as sleek and glossy; while he is free from the various vices that so often mar the usefulness of the horse.

When living under similar conditions, the horse recognises at once the superior sagacity of the ass. On the great ranches of the Western States of America donkeys are frequently turned out with droves of horses, and in such cases the donkey is always accepted as the leader, and the horses gather round him, or follow his footsteps with implicit confidence. The wild stallion on the plains is a very formidable animal, and is more than a match for man himself when unprovided with firearms; but the ass has no fear of it, and the testimony of the plains’ men is unanimous that in a combat between them the jack is likely to come out the victor. In such cases the donkey is well aware that he is no match for the stallion with his heels, but fights with his teeth, and the combat resembles that between a well-trained dog and a bull. The jackass will rush at his opponent, and, skilfully dodging the blows from its fore legs, will leap at its throat, and, having once caught hold, his grip cannot be shaken off. In vain will the stallion strike at him, in vain lift him in the air and hurl him down again, for the jack, with his legs well apart, will always come down on his feet. In vain will the horse throw itself down and roll with its opponent. The jack will hold on until the horse succumbs to his grip, or the flesh he has seized comes away in his hold.

[++ Illustration: Donkey]

Seeing his utility to man, his willingness to give all his strength for so slight a return, his patience under hardship, starvation, and cold, it is wonderful that the ass is not more highly appreciated, and that he does not occupy a far higher place than he does in our regard. In one respect only has the ass a weak side. If, as the philosopher says, silence is golden in the case of man, it is still more so in the case of the ass. The donkey prides himself, not upon his many and sterling virtues, but upon what others consider to be his greatest failing. Unfortunately, like many human beings, he entertains an altogether mistaken idea as to his vocal powers, which he never loses an opportunity of exhibiting. Other animals use the voice for the purpose of expressing their emotions. The dog’s bark expresses joy, watchfulness, or menace; his growl, anger; his whine, impatience or discontent. The horse is naturally silent, but his neigh is indicative sometimes of welcome, sometimes of impatience. Love is the burden of the bird’s song. Maternal solicitude, or a desire for food, that of the baa of the sheep. The donkey’s song appears to express nothing but his desire to favour all within hearing with a specimen of the beauty and power of his voice, and of his amazing vocalisation. Thus he lifts it up at all times, and in all places, whenever the idea seizes him, and the utmost intelligence of man has hitherto failed to grasp the meaning of the strange, varied, and prolonged cachinnations. The boldest animal trembles when it hears them. Man puts his hands to his ears, and flies. It is not a challenge, it is not a call; it is indicative neither of hunger, nor of anger, nor of satisfaction. It seems simply a vocal effort, and as such is unique, but, unfortunately for the donkey, it is unappreciated. The connection between a donkey’s voice and his tail is obscure, but undoubted. It is impossible for him to do justice to himself unless his tail be elevated, and advantage has been taken of this peculiarity by man, who is apt at turning the weaknesses of others to his own benefit. It has been found that by attaching a weight to a donkey’s tail—a brick is sufficient—neither the tail nor the voice can be elevated. In this respect it must be owned that the donkey is easier to deal with than a woman; for while the former can be effectually reduced to silence, no means have hitherto been discovered for suppressing ladies with a mistaken estimate of their vocal abilities.

Happily of late there has been some slight reaction in favour of the donkey, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has done something towards impressing upon the minds of the class of men who chiefly utilise the services of the ass that the animal is not altogether insensible to pain, that he needs a certain amount of sustenance, and that there is a limit to his draught powers. Why a mistaken idea upon these points should have so long prevailed is by no means clear. That it _has_ prevailed is evident from the fact that a certain class of men brutally misuse donkeys, as they misuse no other creatures save their wives. Men do not take an absolute pleasure in beating dogs; but no one can doubt that the brute who lays a heavy stick across an unoffending donkey does feel a malicious joy in the pain he gives. Matters are better than they were; the schoolmaster is abroad, and so are the policeman and the officer of the Society, and between them some slight alleviation of the lot of the ass is in progress. But even now the spectacle of five or six hulking louts seated behind a staggering little donkey, and urging him on his way with oaths and blows, may be witnessed any Sunday or Bank Holiday afternoon, upon every road leading through the suburbs into the country, to the disgrace alike of our civilisation and humanity. In Egypt and in the East the donkey still holds something of his former position in public esteem, and even a portly merchant, or a grave functionary, has no idea that he is in any way demeaning himself when, perched upon the top of an enormous saddle, placed on the back of a donkey, he proceeds about his business. Had the capacities of the ass been equally recognised in the West, the cycle would never have obtained such a height of popularity as it has done. A well-made cycle will cost almost as many pounds as a donkey will cost shillings. Its expenses of repair will equal in cost the keep of the donkey, and, except as a means of promoting perspiration and keeping down flesh, no human being would compare the easy and gentle amble of the donkey with the labour required for a cycle as an instrument of progression. It is a pity that among the many good works that have been effected by the influence of Royalty that of raising the donkey in public esteem has hitherto had no place. The appearance of the Princess of Wales in the Park, in a light equipage drawn by two handsome donkeys, would in a short time produce a moral revolution, and the good little beasts would soon resume their proper place in popular favour.

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THE DRAGON.

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LIKE the dodo, the moa, and the great auk, the dragon is admittedly an extinct animal, but that is no reason why his characteristics should not be considered in these pages. The question that has long agitated scientific men is, first, as to the extent to which the personal peculiarities of the dragon have been exaggerated by popular tradition, and in the second place as to the period at which he became extinct. There have been those who have even asserted that his existence was purely apocryphal, but with men so mentally constituted argument is useless. The traditions of almost all nations point to the fact that not only did the dragon exist as a race, but that individual dragons continued to exist down to comparatively modern times. We may set aside at once the dragon of Wantley. Cæsar makes no allusion to dragons existing in Great Britain; Wantley did not exist before Cæsar’s time; therefore there can have been no dragon at Wantley. But it is not possible so summarily to dispose of all legends, and it is remarkable that the dragon should figure with almost precisely the same characteristics in the folk lore of both Western and Oriental peoples. Our most valuable national coin bears its portrait, and it is the national emblem both of China and Japan. St. George, as we know, was a warlike saint of Cappadocia; although his feats and adventures are somewhat doubtful and misty as to locality, it may be assumed that the dragon who succumbed to his prowess was a native of Asia.

The dragon is, in fact, an exceedingly interesting problem, and the balance of probability appears to be wholly in favour of his existence. We know that great winged saurians inhabited the earth in prehistoric times, and such a creature would be likely to survive cataclysms which overwhelmed the greater portion of his contemporaries. Water would not seriously inconvenience him. His habits would on the whole be retiring, and until man multiplied and became thick over the world, there would be but small inclination to interfere with him. The saurians attain to extreme longevity, and if only a few specimens escaped at the time of the flood, their descendants of a very few generations would have existed in comparatively modern times. The Chinese legends point to the preservation of the dragon in this manner. They say that at a time which closely approximates to that generally assigned to Noah’s deluge, great floods extended almost to the boundaries of China, and that it was at that time that the dragons first made their appearance and became a serious scourge in some of the frontier provinces. Doubtless the European traditions connected with the dragons were brought by the tribes which wave after wave poured in from Central Asia, and it must be assumed that there, if anywhere, the survivors from the flood for some time flourished.

It is certainly difficult to assume that the descriptions of these creatures by so many peoples and such diverse sources would be all but identical, had they been purely the work of imagination and not drawn from a living model. All accounts unite in describing the dragon as a creature clothed with scales, possessing a flexible neck like that of the plesiosaurus, a large head, with jaws well furnished with pointed teeth like the crocodile’s, a flexible tail like the lizard’s, and wings like a pterodactyl’s. The flying apparatus of these extinct creatures, indeed, closely resembled that of a bat, being a membrane from the vastly extended finger of the fore leg to that of the hind leg. This does not agree with the popular idea of the dragon, but the ancients were not close observers, and it was quite enough for them to know that their gigantic enemy was furnished with wings, without inquiring closely into their arrangement. It does not appear that the dragon was able to fly, but it would rather seem that when he ran to attack an enemy he aided himself by flapping his wings, as a swan often travels along the surface of the water before it fairly takes to flight. Some of the dragons are depicted as altogether devoid of wings, the Imperial Japanese dragon showing no signs of such appendages. Thus both the Chinese and Japanese legends go far to prove that several species of saurians survived for some time the general disappearance of their prehistoric congeners. The legendary dragons differ but slightly from some of the prehistoric reptiles, and as the Orientals were entirely in ignorance of the former existence or appearance of these creatures, it is difficult in the extreme to believe that they could have coined from their own imagination a creature so closely resembling them.

In one respect only we must admit an error, and a serious one. Most of the legendary dragons possessed stings at the tip of their tail. We give up the stings, but at the same time would urge that this error cannot be considered as destructive of the truth of the legend. In the present day it is popularly believed by the vulgar that the larva known as the Devil’s Coach Horse—a creature which when alarmed carries its tail in a threatening manner over its head—is, like the scorpion, armed with a sting. In some countries, too, it is believed that dragon-flies are similarly armed. If, then, such errors can exist in an age of general enlightenment, it may well be that in older times the dragon, a creature certainly rare as well as very terrible, was by the popular fancy endowed with means of defence even more formidable than those he possessed. The breath of the creature is in all legends relating to it described as fœtid and poisonous. And as undoubtedly snakes exhale a fœtid odour, there is nothing improbable in the assertion that the dragons also did so.

No details whatever have come down to us as to the domestic habits of the dragon. We only know that he desolated whole provinces, and that the only method of preserving the community from his attacks was the appeasement of his appetite by the offering of victims. These victims are generally represented as being young females, but it is not probable that the dragon himself was particular on this score. Women would be chosen for the tribute, partly because it was supposed that their tender flesh would be more gratefully received than that of tougher victims; but much more because women were in those days considered of smaller account than men, and could be pounced upon and handed over to the monster with much less fuss and trouble than would have been the case had fighting men been chosen. Women’s rights in those days were much less perfectly understood than at present; and the question of the equality of the sexes had not so much as occurred even to the most speculative philosophers. The origin of the story of the female tribute evidently is, that the dragon was too formidable a creature to be assailed, and that it was deemed sound policy to keep him in a state of lethargy in the cave in which he dwelt by supplying him with an occasional victim, rather than that he should sally out and make his own selection. The whole story would seem to show that the dragon was, like most saurians, content to pass a tranquil existence unless when disturbed; that, like the rest of the race, he was capable of prolonged fasts; and that, huge as was his bulk, a meal once a month or so sufficed for his needs. The dragon was said to roar, and this again is another confirmation of the truth of the legend, for the crocodile when enraged can bellow like a bull, and this would naturally be the sound that a great saurian would utter. Upon the whole, it is evident that the balance of probability inclines heavily towards the reality of the existence of the dragon up to comparatively modern times; and we may still cling to the belief that the national legend of the victory of St. George over the dragon is not wholly apocryphal, but possesses a large substratum of truth.

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THE TORTOISE AND TURTLE.

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THE tortoise has in all ages been an object of wonder to man. Its form, its slowness of movement, its wonderful coat of armour, its power of prolonged fasting, the absence of any apparent pleasure in its existence, have all seemed to set it apart among living creatures. The Orientals, who are profound thinkers, arrived at the conclusion that the world must be held up on the back of a tortoise, no other creature appearing capable of sustaining the burden. But even their powers of speculation shrank from endeavouring to cope with the inevitable problem: what in that case held up the tortoise? There was nothing in the habits or customs of the tortoise, as met with on the surface of the earth, that could authorise the supposition that it could, in any state, not only support itself in the air, but hold up the not inconsiderable burden of the earth; indeed, the problem was evidently so insoluble an one that we meet with no trace in any of the writings of the early pundits that they ever attempted fairly to grapple with it.

It would certainly seem that nature has been more unkind to the tortoise than to any other creature. It has given it nothing whatever to compensate for the dulness of its existence or its slow and laborious method of progression. Almost all other creatures are, in their youth at any rate, gay and frolicsome, delighting in their powers of speed and activity. No one has ever observed the tortoise at play; it can neither run nor frisk, climb a tree, nor throw a somersault. It plods gravely on from its birth to its death, like a creature in a living tomb, carrying a burden that seems almost too great for its strength—eating a little, sleeping a great deal,—thinking, it must be presumed, for even a tortoise must do something, deeply and uninterruptedly. As it sees so little of the world around it, we must suppose that its meditations are self-directed, and that it is continually occupied with attempts to solve the problem of the why and the wherefore of its own existence. As it has a hundred years to think this out, there is no reason to doubt that were the tortoise capable of conveying its thoughts and conclusions to man the results would be of the highest value, and that it would be found that the speculations of our deepest thinkers are shallow indeed by the side of profound meditations of the tortoise. It has, too, the advantage of long traditions, and the accumulation of the wisdom of ages; for the tortoise is, perhaps, the oldest existing creature on earth. Its congeners, who ranged with it the surface of the earth countless ages before the present race of animals existed, have all passed away, but the tortoise remains almost identical with his far-off ancestors.

The number of varieties of the land and water tortoise, the latter known as the turtle, are very great, and are of high interest to scientific men; the points of structural difference between them, especially in the skull, being very much more numerous and important than those existing between any species of animals, birds, reptiles, or fish. Their habits differ as widely as their structure. Of the land tortoises, some prefer a vegetable diet, some insects, worms, and molluscs, while some of the larger turtles will feed upon fishes and small aquatic birds. Both land and water tortoises are capable of fasting for upwards of a year. Their tenacity of life is extraordinary, for their hearts will continue to beat, and they are still able to move their limbs with considerable force, for ten or twelve days after their heads have been cut off. The tortoise is sensitive as to weather; it does not like too great heat, and lies in the shade when the sun is strong. It equally objects to cold, and buries itself under loose rubbish, or scrapes itself a hole in the ground on the approach of winter, taking many weeks about the operation.

It might be thought that, clad in its waterproof coat, it would regard rain with indifference; but this is far from being the case, for if a shower is at hand it will hurry away to shelter. It can only be supposed that this extreme sensitiveness to all atmospheric changes has been bestowed upon the tortoise to afford it matter for interest and excitement. Not only does it sleep throughout the whole of the winter months, but in summer it retires to rest early in the afternoon, and remains asleep till late in the morning. In the Galapagos Islands the tortoises rival in size those of the prehistoric period, weighing three or four hundred pounds. The speed of these animals is relatively fast, for they can travel as much as six yards a minute. The water turtle attains even a greater size, individuals having been taken weighing from sixteen to seventeen hundred pounds.