LESSON XLIX.
ODD TOES.
“A thousand horse, and none to ride!With flowing tail, and flying mane,Wide nostrils never stretched by pain,Mouths bloodless of the bit or rein,And feet that iron never shod!”
“A thousand horse, and none to ride!With flowing tail, and flying mane,Wide nostrils never stretched by pain,Mouths bloodless of the bit or rein,And feet that iron never shod!”
“A thousand horse, and none to ride!With flowing tail, and flying mane,Wide nostrils never stretched by pain,Mouths bloodless of the bit or rein,And feet that iron never shod!”
“A thousand horse, and none to ride!
With flowing tail, and flying mane,
Wide nostrils never stretched by pain,
Mouths bloodless of the bit or rein,
And feet that iron never shod!”
—Byron.
One great order of mammals, is called the ungulata, or hoofed-order. The ungulates are animals well fitted for terrestrial life; they are vegetable-eaters, though now and then one of them, as the hog, may display some appetite for animal food, and sheep and cows will eat fish, especially if salted. No order is more familiar to us, as it contains all our best-known domestic animals, and those wild animals most popular in all menageries or zoologicalgardens, as the elephant, camel, and giraffe; and finally all those animals most ardently pursued by hunters, as the deer, antelope, and chamois. The order ungulata embraces two animals so widely different from the others, that they have been classified as sub-orders by themselves; one of these species is that of perhaps the largest land animal, the elephant; the other is nearly the smallest of all the ungulates, the hyrax, or cony. The hyrax is the cony mentioned in the Bible, and a verse of Scripture very well describes it: “The conies are a feeble folk, they have their dwellings in the rocks.” For a long time these little animals were a puzzle to zoologists, and finally ProfessorHuxley set them off in a sub-order all to themselves. Why were they so difficult to arrange? Let us see.
THE THICK SKINS.
THE THICK SKINS.
In the first place there are very few of them, and they are all found in Africa, near the Cape of Good Hope, except one species living in Syria. They are small creatures, rabbit-like, about eighteen inches long, covered with thick fur interspersed with bristles. First, they were classed with the rodents, because of their rabbit-like appearance. But their teeth turned out to be like those of a rhinoceros, and their skeletons like those of the hippopotamus family, and therefore they were placed among the ungulata. Soon there were other claims made upon them; their ribs and backbones were like those of that famous insect-eater, the sloth. These queer little beasts seemed to belong everywhere, and to fit nowhere, and they were set up by themselves.
The conies are gregarious animals; they live in colonies. They have no means of offence or defence, and so they make their homes in holes in the rocks, and stealing out from their stony citadels, they eat grass, fruit, seeds, and roots. As they go forth to forage they leave a sentinel perched on a high rock, to watch for danger and give the alarm. In Africa the lions are their greatest enemies, and as soon as the warning of an approaching lion is given, the conies dash off swift as the wind, to hide in small crevices, where their foe cannot follow them.
The other peculiar animal among the ungulates, which demanded a sub-order all for itself, is the elephant. Of this creature there are but two species now living, the Indianand the African elephants. They are classed by themselves on account of the proboscis or trunk, which no other animal possesses, and which a little boy described as a “big be-front tail, so that the elephant could walk backwards or forwards all the same.” But this is a most unhappy description of an elephant.
The African elephant is the larger species, being sometimes eleven feet high. Its ears are much larger than those of the Asiatic species, are differently set, and there are also differences in the structure of the head and teeth. The tusks of the elephant are two large curved, bony appendages, projecting from the mouth on either side of the trunk. What are they? Why,teethto be sure! Teeth? Yes; they are the two incisors such as I told you the beavers have, but the odd thing about these teeth is, that, beginning to grow in the second year of the elephant’s life, they keep on growing as long as he lives. Of course they are soon too long to be kept within the shelter of the mouth, and so they project and grow and grow, until sometimes they become so enormous as to weigh from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds each. But these are exceptions; from thirty to eighty pounds is a more usual weight. Sometimes the tusks turn upward; sometimes they grow almost straight, or with a downward inclination.
Besides these huge incisors the elephant has six molars or grinding teeth on each side of each jaw. As these molars are its only teeth useful in eating, we see at once that the food of an elephant must be grass, hay, grain, and fruit. The tusks of the elephant are almost entirely the purest ofivory, and as they are our main source of this valuable material, thousands of elephants are slaughtered to secure the tusks. As the elephant has the fewest young of any known animal, the race of elephants cannot keep up with the rapid destruction produced by the ivory hunters, and there is great danger that it will become extinct.
In Africa elephants are not tamed and trained, but in India for many hundred years they have been kept as beasts of burden, as war animals, and as ornaments to the state of kings.
The most notable characteristic of the elephant is its proboscis. What is that? As the tusks are two overgrown teeth, so the proboscis is an overgrown nose and upper lip. The nose and upper lip of the elephant are prolonged into a tube, often six feet long, tapering almost to a point. At the extreme end of this organ the nostrils are situated, and elephants often swim entirely under water, by simply carrying the end of the proboscis above the surface. The proboscis is composed chiefly of muscles, four thousand of them we are told, together with many nerves. Thus it is exceedingly strong, flexible, and very sensitive, and an injury to it gives the animal intense pain.
The proboscis of the elephant is used by its owner with all the ease and skill of a human hand. Through it, it can draw up water and pour it over its back, or squirt it wherever it chooses; it can use sand in the same way, and by an arrangement of valves near the air-passages, the water and sand while thus drawn up are kept out of the nostrils and air-tubes. The tip of the trunk is prolonged into afinger and a thick knob which serves for a thumb. With these the elephant can pick up even so small an object as a cherry or a pin. With this hand-like extremity of the trunk, the animal conveys food to its mouth.
To the elephant its proboscis is indispensable and invaluable; clumsy in its motions, with a very short neck, which does not permit the head to bend to the ground, and thick, pillar-like legs, difficult to bend, what would it do without this long, flexible appendage? With it the elephant collects food and drink, tears off fruit and leaves from the trees, and taking a branch for a fan, drives off the teasing insects which settle on its vast body. A horse switches off insects with its tail, but the tail of the elephant is small, slim, and bare, very like that of the pig.
With the proboscis the elephant strikes down its enemies, pumps water for its bath, lifts a burden to or from its back, defends its young, and shrieks and roars, as if braying through a trumpet when hurt or angry. From this trumpeting noise, the French have called the proboscis a “tromp,” or trumpet, which we have corrupted into that senseless name for a proboscis, a trunk.
In a fight with a lion or tiger, the elephant keeps its proboscis held aloft, out of harm’s way, waving it like a banner, and sounding an alarm, and uses its tusks for a weapon, wherewith to gore or toss its foe. It also tramples on its enemies, and crushes them with its enormous weight. With its tusks the elephant also uproots trees when it wishes to secure dainty leaf-food, too high up to pull down with its proboscis.
The skin of the elephant is bare, exceedingly thick, much wrinkled, and of a dark lead color, nearly black. The head is large, the eyes are small; the mouth is set under the thick upper part of the trunk, and is guarded by the tusks. The legs are enormously large and clumsy, and so are the feet, which have live toes enclosed in a cushion of thick skin up to the nails.
Elephants live from seventy-five to one hundred and thirty years. The baby elephant is woolly about the head and shoulders. It sucks its mother’s milk not through the proboscis, but with its mouth. The mother is very fond of her big baby, and is valiant in its defence. Elephants are enormous feeders, consuming half a bushel of grain and two hundred pounds of green herbage a day.
The sagacity of the elephant has been the theme of many stories, which have also celebrated its affection, gratitude, its sensibility to kindness, its revengeful memory of affronts, and its treacherous disposition, given to sudden bursts of rage. White elephants, of which so much is said, are not a separate species, but albinos.
We have now seen the greatest of the ungulates. With him in a menagerie we often find the tapir, remarkable for its long nose, and as being one of the oldest species of living mammals, therefore of an ancient dignity of family to which the king-crab, hatteria, opossum, and beaver may make their best bows.
The hippopotamus is a hoofed animal, next in size to the elephant. It is a hideous and dirty-looking animal, but one that in a menagerie or garden moves our compassion,for it is by its nature an amphibious creature, born to live in the rivers, and to spend the most of its time diving or swimming, or standing neck deep in water; and nothing can be more wretched than its appearance as it chews dry hay, and panting waits for a keeper to throw a few pailfuls of water over its fevered skin.
The hippopotamus is a tusk-wearer like the elephant, and while the ivory of its tusks is not quite so good as that furnished by the elephant, it is yet in great demand. The hide is also used in the manufacture of boots, trunks, and many instruments.
The rhinoceros is another big specimen of the ungulates, with a bare, smooth hide. It is an aquatic animal, wearing a single horn on the front of its snout. In its native home, this horn serves to root up river-plants, on which it feeds; it is also the weapon of war. Given in its natural haunts to spending hours in rolling in the mud or wading in water, the rhinoceros suffers severely in confinement. Usually of a mild, quiet temper, it seems sometimes filled with homesickness and despair, and with loud moans dashes its head against the walls of its prison as if wishing to end its miseries by breaking its skull.
No hoofed animal is better known, whether dead or alive, than the pig. The pig is the direct descendant of the wild boar, and owes the various changes in its appearance and conformation to ages of domestication. The wild boar is an animal with long legs, long bristles, lean body, a long snout, and a pair of big tusks formed by the elongation of two canine teeth on each side of the mouth. The twocanine teeth on the lower jaw are much larger and stronger than those on the upper. The boar has fiery little eyes, a fierce and active disposition, and great courage.
It has been said of the common pig, that it is an animal “manufactured by man, and he makes it take such shapes as suit his wants best.” By careful feeding and breeding the tusks are lost, the bristles decrease, the head and legs diminish, the body and haunches greatly develop. Fed and sheltered, the pig is mild and lazy. Turned loose in the woods, for several generations, the snout and legs lengthen, the body grows thinner, and many of the characteristics of the boar return. Various famous breeds of pigs take their name from localities where they are reared, as the Berkshire, Suffolk, Norman, Pyrenean, and Perigord varieties.
The horse is the most noble of all the thick-skins, and indeed of all brutes. Its immediate relatives are the ass, quagga, and zebra. The curious stages and changes in the development of the horse have already been given.[91]Docile and quick to learn, the horse has been trained and used by men from the earliest antiquity. Only one of this species remains superior to domestication, the wild ass of the Himalaya regions. The zebra also is restless and intractable, and is not often reduced to a domestic state. Why of all the horse kind should the gentle, tractable, humble, strong, patient, easily-fed donkey have been chosen as the constant recipient of scorn; abuse, and hard fare? Scant food and plentiful kicks and curses are the portion of one of the most useful and gentle of brutes. Much morehardy than his cousin, the horse, demanding only a little water and the coarsest fare, the poor donkey gets many blows and few thanks for tireless service. Hats off to the donkey, who always does the best he can.
FOOTNOTES:[91]Lesson5.
[91]Lesson5.
[91]Lesson5.