ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.
ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.
ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.
The chief illustration of a book is incontestably the formula in which it is summed up. Here it is, then, in few words:—
This book has considered the birdin himself, and but little in relation to man.
The bird, born in a much lower condition than man (oviparous, like the serpent), possesses three advantages over him, which are his special mission:—
I.The wing,flight, an unique power, which is the dream of man. Every other creature is slow. Compared with the falcon or swallow, the Arab horse is a snail.
II. Flight itself does not appertain solely to the wing, but to an incomparable power ofrespiration and vision. The bird is peculiarly the son of air and light.
III. An essentially electrical being, the bird sees, knows, and foresees earth and sky, the weather, the seasons. Whether through an intimate relation with the globe, whether through a prodigious memory of localities and routes, he is always facing eastward, and always knows his path.
He swoops; he penetrates; he attains what man shall never attain. This is evident, particularly in his marvellous war against the reptile and the insect.
Add the marvellous work of continual purification of everything dangerous and unclean, which some species accomplish. If this war and this work ceased but for one day, man would disappear from the earth.
This daily victory of the beloved son of light over death, over a murderous and tenebrous life, is the fitting theme of hissong, of that hymn of joy with which the bird salutes each Dawn.
But, besides song, the bird has many other languages. Like man, he prattles, recites, converses. He and man are the only beings which have really a language. Man and the bird are the voice of the world.
The bird, with its gift of augury, is ever drawing near to man, who is ever inflicting injury upon him. He undoubtedly divines, and has a presentiment of, what he will one day become when he emerges from the barbarism in which he is now unhappily plunged.
He recognizes in him the creature unique, sanctified, and blessed, who ought to be the arbiter of all, who should accomplish the destiny of this globe by one supreme act of good—the union of all life and the reconciliation of all beings.
This pacific union must after a time be effected by a great art of education and initiation, which man begins to comprehend.
Page64.Training for flight(see also p.84).—Is it wrong for man, in his reveries, to beguile himself into a belief that he will one day be more than man, to attribute to himself wings? Dream or presentiment, it matters not.
It is certain that a power of flight such as the bird possesses is truly asixth sense. It would be absurd to see in it only an auxiliaryof touch. (See, among other works, Huber,Vol des oiseaux de proie, 1784).
The wing is so rapid and so infallible only because it is aided by a visual faculty which has not its equal in all creation.
The bird, we must confess, lives wholly in the air, in the light. If there be a sublime life, a life of fire, it is this.
Who surveys and descries all earth? Who measures it with his glance and his wing? Who knows all its paths? And not in any beaten route, but at the same time in every direction: for where is not the bird's track?
His relations with heat, electricity, and magnetism, all the imponderable forces, are scarcely known to us; we see them, however, in his singular meteorological prescience.
If we had seriously studied the matter, we should have had the balloon for some thousands of years; but even with the balloon, and the balloon capable of beingsteered, we should still be enormously behind the bird. To imitate its mechanism, and exactly reproduce its details, is not to possess the agreement, theensemble, the unity of action, which moves the whole with so much facility and with such terrible swiftness.
Let us renounce, for this life at least, these higher gifts, and confine ourselves to examine the two machines—our own and the bird's—in those points where they differ least.
The human machine is superior in what is its smallest peculiarity, its susceptibility of adaptation to the most diverse purposes, and, above all, in its omnipuissance of the hand.
On the other hand, he has far less unity and centralization. Our inferior limbs, our thighs, and legs, which are very long, perform eccentric movements far from the central point of action. Circulation is very slow; a thing perceptible in those last moments, when the body is dead at the feet before the heart has ceased to throb.
The bird, almost spherical in form, is certainly the apex, divine and sublime, of living centralization. We can neither see nor imagine a higher degree of unity. From his excess of concentration he deriveshis great personal force, but it implies his extreme individuality, his isolation, his social weakness.
The profound, the marvellous solidarity, which is found in the higher genera of insects, as in the bees and ants, is not discovered among birds. Flocks of them are common, but true republics are rare.
Family ties are very strong in their influence, such as maternity and love. Brotherhood, the sympathy of species, the mutual assistance rendered even by different kinds, are not unknown. Nevertheless, fraternity is strong among them in the inferior line. The whole heart of the bird is in his love, in his nest.
There lies his isolation, his feebleness, his dependence; there also the temptation to seek for himself a defender.
The most exalted of living beings is not the less one of those which the most eagerly demand protection.
Page67.On the life of the bird in the egg.—I draw these details from the accurate M. Duvernoy. Ovology in our days has become a science. Yet I know but a few treatises specially devoted to the bird's egg. The oldest is that of an Abbé Manesse, written in the last century, very verbose, and not very instructive (the MS. is preserved in the Museum Library). The same library possesses the German work of Wirfing and Gunther on nests and eggs; and another, also German,whose illustrations appear of a superior character, although still defective. I have seen a part of a new collection of engravings, much more carefully executed.
Page74.Gelatinous and nourishing seas.—Humboldt, in one of his early works ("Scenes in the Tropics"), was the first, I think, to authenticate this fact. He attributes it to the prodigious quantity of medusæ, and other analogous creatures, in a decomposed state in these waters. If, however, such a cadaverous dissolution really prevailed there, would it not render the waters fatal to the fish, instead of nourishing them? Perhaps this phenomenon should be attributed rather to nascent life than to life extinct, to that first living fermentation in which the lowest microscopic organizations develop themselves.
It is especially in the Polar Seas, whose aspect is so wild and desolate, that this characteristic is observed. Life there abounds in such excess that the colour of the waters is completely changed by it. They are of an intense olive-green, thick with living matter and nutriment.
Page91.Our Museum.—In speaking of its collections, I may not forget its valuable library, which now includes that of Cuvier, and has been enriched by donations from all the physicists of Europe. I have had occasion to acknowledge very warmly the courtesy of the conservator, M. Desnoyers, and of M. le Docteur Lemercier, who hasobligingly supplied me with a number of pamphlets and curious memoirs from his private collection.
Page94.Buffon.—I think that now-a-days too readily forget that this greatgeneralizerhas not the less received and recorded a number of very accurate observations furnished him by men of special vocations, officers of the royal hunt, gamekeepers, marines, and persons of every profession.
Page96.The Penguin.—The brother of the auk, but less degraded; he carries his wings like a veritable bird, though they are only membranes floating on an evoided breast. The more rarified air of our northern pole, where he lives, has already expanded his lungs, and the breast-bone begins to project. The legs, less closely confined to the body, better maintain its equilibrium, and the port and attitude gain in confidence. There is here a notable difference between the analogous products of the two hemispheres.
Page103.The Petrel, the mariner's terror.—The legend of the petrel gliding upon the waves, around the ship which he appears to lead to perdition, is of Dutch origin. This is just as it ought to be. The Dutch, who voyageen famille, and carry with them their wives, their children, even their domestic animals, have been more susceptible to evil auguries than other navigators. The hardiest of all, perhaps—true amphibians—they have not the less been anxious and imaginative, hazarding not only their lives, but their affections,and exposing to the fantastic chances of the sea the beloved home, a world of tenderness. That small lumbering bark, which is in truth a floating house, will nevertheless go, ever rolling across the seas of the North, the great Arctic Ocean, and the furious Baltic, accomplishing without pause the most dangerous voyages, as from Amsterdam to Cronstadt. We laugh at these ugly vessels and their antiquated build, but he who observes how plenteously they combine the two purposes of store-room for the cargo and accommodation for the family, can never see them in the ports of Holland without a lively interest, or without lavishing on them his good wishes.
Page113.Epiornis.—The remains of this gigantic bird and its enormous egg may be seen in the Museum. It is computed that its size was fivefold that of the ostrich. How much we must regret that our rich collection of fossils, or the major part, lies buried in the drawers of the Museum for want of room. For thirty or forty thousand francs a wooden gallery might be constructed, in which the whole could find opportunities of display.
Meanwhile, we argue as if these vast studies, now in their very infancy, had already been exhausted. Who knows but that man has only seen the threshold of the prodigious world of the dead? He has scarcely scratched the surface of the globe. The deeper explorations to which he is constrained by the thousand novel needs of art and industry (as that, for example, of piercing the Alps for a new railway) will open to science unexpected prospects. Palæontology as yet is built upon the narrow foundation of aminimumnumber of facts. If we remember that the dead—owing to the thousands of years the globe has already lived—are enormously more numerous than the living, we cannot but consider this method of reasoningupon a few specimens very audacious. It is a hundred, nay, a thousand to one, that so many millions of dead, once disinterred, will convict us of having erred, at least, throughincomplete enumeration.
Page113.Man had perished a hundred times.—Here we trace one of the early causes of the limited confederacy originally existing between man and the animal—a compact forgotten by our ungrateful pride, and without which, nevertheless, the existence of man had been impossible.
When the colossal birds whose remains we are constantly exhuming had prepared for him the globe, had subjugated the crawling, climbing life which at first predominated—when man came upon the earth to confront what remained of the reptiles, to confront those new but not less formidable inhabitants of our planet, the tiger and the lion—he found on his side the bird, the dog, and the elephant.
At Alexandria may be seen the last few individuals of those giant dogs which could strangle a lion. It was not through terror that these formidable animals allied themselves with man, but through natural sympathy, and their peculiar antipathy to the feline race, the giant cat (the tiger or lion).
Without the alliance of the dog against beasts of prey, and that of the bird against serpents and crocodiles (which the bird kills in the very egg), man had assuredly been lost.
The useful friendship of the horse originated in the same cause. You may trace it in the indescribable and convulsive horror which every young horse experiences at the mere odour of the lion. He attaches, he surrenders himself to man.
Had he not possessed the horse, the ox, and the camel—had he been compelled to bear on his back and shoulders the heavy burdensof which they relieve him—man would have remained the miserable slave of his feeble organization. Borne down by the habitual disproportion of weight and strength, either he would have abandoned labour, have lived upon chance victims, without art or progress; or, rather, he would have lived earth's everlasting porter—crooked, dragging, and drawing, with sunken head, never gazing on the sky, never thinking, never raising himself to the heights of invention.
Page132.On the power of insects.—It is not only in the Tropical world that they are formidable; at the commencement of the last century half Holland perished because the piles which strengthen its dykes simultaneously gave way, invisibly undermined by a worm named thetaret.
This redoubtable nibbler, which is often a foot in length, never betrays itself; it only works within. One morning the beam breaks, the framework yields, the ship engulfed founders in the waves.
How shall we reach, how discover it? A bird knows it—the lapwing, the guardian of Holland. And it is thus a notable imprudence to destroy, as has been done, his eggs. (Quatrefages,Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste.)
France, for more than a century, has suffered from the importation of a monster not less terrible—thetermite, which devours dry wood just as the taret consumes wet wood. The single female of each swarm has the horrible fecundity of laying daily eighty thousand eggs. La Rochelle begins to fear the fate of that American city which is suspended in the air, the termites having devoured all its foundations, and excavated immense catacombs beneath.
In Guiana the dwellings of the termites are enormous hillocks, fifteen feet in height, which men only venture to attack from a distance, and by means of gunpowder. You may judge, therefore, the importance of the ant-eater, which dares to enter this gulf, and seek out the horrible female whence issues so accursed a torrent. (Smeathmann,Mémoire sur les Termites.)
Does climate save us? The termites prosper in France. Here, too, the cockchafer flourishes; and even on the northern slopes of the Alps, under the very breath of the glaciers, it devours vegetation. In the presence of such an enemy every insectivorous bird should be respected; at least, the canton of Vaud has recently placed the swallow under the protection of the law. (See the work of Tschudi.)
Page134.You frequently detect there a strong odour of musk.—The plain of Cumana, says Humboldt, presents, after heavy rains, an extraordinary phenomenon. The earth, moistened and reheated by the sun's rays, gives forth that odour of musk which, under the torrid zone, is common to animals of very different classes—to the jaguar, the small species of the tiger-cat, the cabiai, the galinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations which are the vehicles of this aroma appear only to disengage themselves in proportion as the soil enclosing thedébrisof an innumerable quantity of reptiles, worms, and insects, becomes impregnated with water. Everywhere that one stirs up the soil, one is struck by the mass of organic substances which alternately develop, transform, or decompose. Nature in these climates appears more active, more prolific, one might say more lavish of life.
Pages136,137.Humming-birds and colibris.—The eminent naturalists (Lesson, Azara, Stedmann, &c.) who have supplied so many excellent descriptions of these birds, are not, unfortunately, as rich in details of their manners, their food, their character.
As to the terrible unhealthiness of the places where they live (and live with so intense a life), the narratives of the old travellers—of Labat and others—are folly confirmed by the moderns. Messieurs Durville and Lesson, in their voyage to New Guiana, scarcely dared to cross the threshold of its profound virgin forests, with their strange and terrible beauty.
The most fantastic aspect of these forests—their prodigious fairylike enchantment of nocturnal illumination by myriads of fire-flies—is attested and very forcibly described, as far as relates to the countries adjoining Panama, by a French traveller, M. Caqueray, who has recently visited them. (See his Journal in the newRevue Française, 10th June 1855.)
Page153.The valuable museum of anatomical collections—that of Doctor Auzoux.—I cannot too warmly thank, on this occasion, our esteemed and skilful professor, who condescends to instruct us ignorant people, men of letters, men of the world, and women. He willed that anatomy should descend to all, should become popular; and it is done. His admirable imitations, his lucid demonstrations,gradually work out that great revolution whose full extent can already be perceived. Shall I dare to tell men of science my inmost thought? They themselves will have an advantage in possessing always at hand these objects of study under so convenient a form and in enlarged proportions, which greatly diminish the fatigue of attention. A thousand objects, which seem to us different because different in size, recover their analogies, and reappear in their true relative forms, through the simple process of enlargement.
America, I may add, appears more keenly sensible of these advantages than we are. An American speculator had desired M. Auzoux to supply him yearly with two thousand copies of his figure of man, being certain of disposing of them in all the small towns, and even in the villages. Every American village, says M. Auzoux, endeavours to obtain a museum, an observatory, &c.
Page157.The suppression of pain.—To prevent death is undoubtedly impossible; but we may prolong life. We may eventually render rarer, less cruel, and almostsuppress pain.
That the hardened old world laughs at this expression is so much the better. We have seen this spectacle in the days when our Europe, barbarized by war, centred all medical art in surgery, and only knew how to cure by the knife by a horrible prodigality of suffering, young America discovered the miracle of that profound dream in which all pain is annihilated.[28]
Page157.The useful equilibrium of life and death.—Numerous species of birds no longer make a halt in France. One with difficulty descries them flying at inaccessible elevations, deploying their wings in haste, accelerating their passage, saying,—"Pass on, pass on quickly! Let us avoid the land of death, the land of destruction!"
Provence, and many other departments in the south, are barren deserts, peopled by every living tribe, and therefore vegetable nature is sadly impoverished. You do not interrupt with impunity the natural harmonies. The bird levies a tax on the plant, but he is its protector.
It is a matter of notoriety that the bustard has almost disappeared from Champagne and Provence. The heron has passed away; the stork is rare. As we gradually encroach upon the soil, these species, partial to dusty wastes and morasses, depart to seek a livelihood elsewhere. Our progress in one sense is our poverty. In England the same fact has been observed. (See the excellent articles on Sport and Natural History, translated from Messrs. St. John, Knox, Gosse, and others, in theRevue Britannique.) The heath-cock retires before the step of the cultivator; the quail passes into Ireland. The ranks of the herons grow daily thinner before theutilitarian improvementsof the nineteenth century. But to these causes we must add the barbarism of man, which so heedlessly destroys a throng of innocent species. Nowhere, says M. Pavie, a French traveller, is game more timid than in our fields.
Woe to the ungrateful people! And by this phrase I mean the sporting crowd who, unmindful of the numerous benefits we owe to animals, have exterminated innocent life. A terrible sentence of the Creator weighs upon the tribes of sportsmen,—they can create nothing.They originate no art, no industry. They have added nothing to the hereditary patrimony of the human species. What has their heroism profited the Indians of North America? Having organized nothing, having accomplished nothing permanent, these races, despite their singular energy, have disappeared from the earth before inferior men, the last emigrants of Europe.
Do not believe the axiom that huntsmen gradually develop into agriculturists. It is not so—they kill or die; such is their whole destiny. We see it clearly through experience. He who has killed, will kill; he who has created, will create.
In the want of emotion which every man suffers from his birth, the child who satisfies it habitually by murder, by a miniature ferocious drama of surprise and treason, of the torture of the weak, will find no great enjoyment in the gentle and tranquil emotions arising from the progressive success of toil and study, from the limited industry which does everything itself. To create, to destroy—these are the two raptures of infancy: to create is a long, slow process; to destroy is quick and easy. The least act of creation implies those best gifts of the Creator and of kindly Nature: gentleness and patience.
It is a shocking and hideous thing to see a child partial to "sport;" to see woman enjoying and admiring murder, and encouraging her child. That delicate and sensitive woman would not give him a knife, but she gives him a gun: kill at a distance—be it so! for we do not see the suffering. And this mother will think it admirable that her son, kept confined to his room, shall drive offennuiby plucking the wings from flies, by torturing a bird or a little dog.
Far-seeing mother! She will know when too late the evil of having formed a hard heart. Aged and weak, rejected of the world, she will experience in her turn her son's brutality.
But rifle practice? They will object to you. Must not the child grow skilful in killing, that, from murder to murder, he may at last arrive at the surpassing feat of killing the flying swallow? The only country in Europe where everybody knows how to handle a musket isthat where the bird is least exposed to slaughter. The land of William Tell knew how to place before her children a juster and more exalted object when they liberated their country.
France is not cruel. Why, then, this love of murder, this extermination of the animal world?
It is theimpatient people, theyoung people, thechildish people, in a rude and restless childhood. If they cannot be doing in creating, they will be doing by destroying.
But what they most fatally injure is—themselves! A violent education, stormily impassioned in love or severity, crushes in the child, withers, chokes up the first moral flower of natural sensitiveness, all that was purest of the maternal milk, the germ of universal love which rarely blooms again.
Among too many children we are saddened by their almost incredible sterility. A few recover from it in the long circle of life, when they have become experienced and enlightened men. But the first freshness of the heart? It shall return no more.[29]
How is it that this nation, otherwise born under such felicitous circumstances, is, with rare and local exceptions, accursed with so singular an incapacity for harmony? It has its own peculiar songs, its charming little melodies of vivacity and mirth. But it needs a prolonged effort, a special education, to attain to harmony.
Page158.Flattening of the brain.—The weight of the brain, compared with that of the body, is, in the
(Estimate of Haller and Leuret.)
Page158.The noble falcon.—Thenoblebirds (the falcon, gerfalcon, saker) are those whichholdtheir prey by thetalon, and kill it with the bill: their bill, for this purpose, is toothed. Theignoblebirds (the eagle, the kite, &c.) are for the most part swift of flight (voiliers): these employ their talons to rend and choke their victims. Therameursrise with difficulty, which enables thevoiliersto escape them the more easily. The tactics of the former are to feign, in the first place, to rise to a great height; and then, by suffering themselves to drop, they disconcert the manœuvres of thevoiliers. (Huber,Vol des Oiseaux de Proie, 1784, 4to. He was the first of that clever lineage, Huber of the birds, Huber of the bees, Huber of the ants.)
Page177.Its happiness in the morning, when terrors vanish!—"Before" (says Tschudi) "the vermeil tints of the early dew have announced the approach of the sun, oftentimes before even the lightest gleam has heralded dawn in the east, while the stars still sparkle inthe sombre azure of heaven, a low murmur resounds on the summit of a venerable pine, and is speedily followed by a more or less distinct prattling; then the notes arise, and an interminable series of keen sounds strike the air on every side like a clang of swords continually hurtled one against another. It is the coupling time of the wood-cock. With his eye a-flame, he dances and springs on the branch, while below him, in the copse, his hens repose tranquilly, and reverently contemplate the mad antics of their lord and master. He is not long left alone to animate the forest. The mavis rises in his turn, shaking the dew from his glittering feathers. Behold him whetting his bill upon the branch, and leaping from bough to bough, up to the very crest of the maple tree where he has slept, astonished to find nearly all life still slumbering in the forest, though the dawn has taken the place of night. Twice, thrice, he hurls hisfanfareat the echoes of the mountain and the valley, which a dense mist still envelopes.
"Thin columns of white smoke escape from the roof of the cottages; the dogs bark around the farm-yards; and the bells ring suspended to the neck of the cow. The birds now quit their thickets, flutter their wings, and dart into the air to salute the sun, which once more comes to bless them with his bounteous light. More than one poor little sparrow rejoices that he has escaped the perils of the darkness. Perched on a little twig, he had trusted to enjoy his slumber without alarm, his head buried beneath his wing, when, by the ray of a star, he discerned the noiseless screech-owl gliding through the trees, intent upon some misdeed. The pole-cat stole from the valley-depth, the ermine descended from the rock, the pine-marten quitted his nest, the fox prowled among the bushes. All these enemies the poor little one watched during this terrible night. On his tree, on the earth, in the air—destruction menaced him on every side. How long, how long were the hours when, not daring to move, his only protection was the young leaves which screened him! And now, how great the pleasure to ply his unfettered wing, to live in safety, protected, defended by the light!
"The chaffinch raises with all his energy his clear and sonorous note; the robin sings from the summit of the larch, the goldfinch amid the alder-groves, the blackbird and the bullfinch beneath the leafy arbours. The tomtit, the wren, and the troglodyte mingle their voices. The stockdove coos, and the woodpecker smites his tree. But far above these joyous utterances re-echo the melodious strains of the woodlark and the inimitable song of the thrush."
Page185.Migrations.—For the famished Arab, the lank inhabitant of the desert, the arrival of the migrating birds, weary and heavy at this season, and, therefore, easy to catch, is a blessing from God, a celestial manna. The Bible tells us of the raptures of the Israelites, when, during their wanderings in Arabia Petræa, fasting and enfeebled, they suddenly saw descending upon them the winged food: not the locusts of abstemious Elias, not the bread with which the raven nourished his bowels, but the quail heavy with fat, delicious and yet substantial, which voluntarily fell into their hands. They ate to repletion; and no longer regretted the rich flesh-pots of Pharaoh.
I willingly excuse the gluttony of the famished. But what shall I say of our people, in the richest countries of Europe, who, after harvest and vintage-time, with barns and cellars brimming full, pursue with no less fury these poor travellers? Thin or fat, they are equally good: they would eat even the swallows; they devour the song-birds, "those which have only a voice." Their wild frenzy dooms the nightingale to the spit, plucks and kills the household guest, the poor robin, which yesterday fed from their hands.
The migration season is a season of slaughter. The law which impels southward the tribes of birds is, for millions, a law of death.Many depart, few return; at each stage of their route they must pay a tribute of blood. The eagle waits on his crag, man watches in the valley. He who escapes the tyrant of the air, falls a victim to the tyrant of the earth. "A fortunate opportunity!" exclaims the child or the sportsman, the ferocious child with whom murder is a jest. "God has willed it so!" mutters the pious glutton; "let us be resigned!" These are the judgments of man upon the carnival of massacre. As yet we know nothing more, for history has not written the opinions of the massacred.
Migrations are exchanges for every country (except the poles, at the epoch of winter). The particular condition of climate or food, which decides the departure of one species of birds, is precisely that which determines the arrival of another species. When the swallow quits us at the autumn rains, we note the arrival of the army of plovers and peewits in quest of the lobworms driven from their lurking-places by the floods. In October, and as the cold increases, the greenfinches, the yellow-hammers, the wrens, replace the song-birds which have deserted us. The snipes and partridges descend from their mountains at the moment when the quail and the thrush emigrate towards the south. It is then, too, that the legions of the aquatic species quit the extreme north for those temperate climes where the seas, the lakes, and the pools, do not freeze. The wild geese, the swans, the divers, the ducks, the teal, cleave the air in battle array, and swoop down upon the lakes of Scotland and Hungary, and our marshes of the south. The delicate stork flies southward, when his cousin, the crane, sets out from the north, where his supplies begin to fail him. Passing over our lands, he pays us tribute by delivering us from thelast reptiles and batrachians which a warm autumnal breeze has restored to life.
Page188.My muse is the light.—And yet the nightingale loses it when he returns to us from Asia. But all true artists require that it should be softly ordered, blended with rays and shadows. Rembrandt in his paintings has exhausted the effects, at once warm and soft, of the science of chiaro-oscuro. The nightingale begins his song when the gloom of evening mingles with the last beams of the sun; and hence it is that we tremble at his voice. Our soul in the misty and uncertain hours of the gloaming regains possession of the inner light.
Page215.Do not say, "Winter is on my side."—While M. de Custine was travelling in Russia, he tells us that, at the fair of Nijni-Novgorod, he was frightened by the multitude ofblatteswhich thronged his chamber, with an infectious smell, and which could not be got rid of. Dr. Tschudi, a careful traveller, who has explored Switzerland in its smallest details, assures us that at the breath of the south wind, which melts the snow in twelve hours, innumerable hosts of cockchafers ravage the country. They are not a less terrible scourge than the locusts to the south.
During our Italian tour, my wife and I made an observation which will not have escaped the notice of naturalists; namely, that the cockchafer does not die in autumn. From the inhabited portions of our palazzo, almost entirely shut up in winter, we saw clouds of these insects emerge in the spring, which had slept peacefully in expectation of its warmth. Moreover, in that country, even ephemeral insects do not perish. Gigantic gnats wage war against us every night, demanding our blood with sharp and strident voice.
If, by the side of these proofs of the multiplication of insects, evenin temperate or cold countries, we put the fact that the swallow is not satisfied with less than one thousand fliesper diem; that a couple of sparrows carry home to their young four thousand three hundred caterpillars or beetles weekly; a tomtit three hundred daily; we see at once the evil and the remedy. We quote these figures from M. Quatrefages (Souvenirs), and from a letter written by Mr. Walter Trevelyan to the editor of "The Birds of Great Britain," translated in theRevue Britannique, July 7, 1850.
I offer the reader a very incomplete summary of the services rendered to us by the birds of our climate.
Many are the assiduous guardians of our herds. The herongarde-bœuf, making use of his bill as a lancet, cuts the flesh of the ox to extract from it a parasitical worm which sucks the blood and life of the animal. The wagtails and the starlings render very similar services to our cattle. The swallows destroy myriads of winged insects which never rest, and which we see dancing in the sun's rays; gnats, midges, flies. The goat-suckers and the martinets, twilight hunters, effect the disappearance of the cockchafers, the gnats, the moths, and a swarm of nibbling insects (rongeurs), which work only by night. The magpie hunts after the insects which, concealed beneath the bark of the tree, live upon its sap. The humming-bird, the fly-catcher, thesoui-mangas, in tropical countries, purify the chalice of the flower. The bee-eater, in all lands, carries on a fierce hostility against the wasps which ruin our fruit. The goldfinch, partial to uncultivated soil and the seeds of the thistle, prevents the latter from spreading over the ground. Our garden birds, the chaffinches, blackcaps, blackbirds, tits, strip our fruit-bushes and great trees of the grubs, caterpillars, and beetles, whose ravages would be incalculable. A large number of these insects remain during winter in the egg or the larva, waiting for spring to burst into life; but in this state they are diligently hunted up by the mavis, the wren, the troglodyte. The former turn over the leaves which strew the earth; the latter climb to the loftiest branches, or clear out the trunk. In wet meadows, you may see the crows and storks boring the groundto seize on the white worm (ver blanc) which, for three years before metamorphosing into a cockchafer, gnaws at the roots of our grasses.
Here we pause, not to weary our reader, and yet the list of useful birds is scarcely glanced at.
Page228.The woodpecker, as an augur.—Are the methods of observation adopted by meteorology serious and efficacious? Some men of science doubt it. It might, perhaps, be worth while examining if we could not deduce any part of the meteorology of the ancients from their divination by birds. The principal passages are pointed out in Pauly's Encyclopædia (Stuttgard), articleDivinatio.
"The woodpecker is a favoured bird in the steppes of Poland and Russia. In these sparsely wooded plains he constantly directs his course towards the trees; by following him, you discover a hidden ravine, a little later some springs, and finally descend towards the river. Under the bird's guidance you may thus explore and reconnoitre the country." (Mickiewicz,Les Slaves, vol. i., p. 200.)
Page235.Song.—Do not separate what God has joined together. If you place a bird in a cage beside you, his song quickly fatigues you with its sonorous timbre and its monotony. But in the grand concert of Nature, that bird would supply his note, and complete the harmony. This powerful voice would subdue itself to the modulations of the air; soft and tender it would glide, borne upon the breeze.
And then, in the deep woody depths, the singer incessantly moves from place to place, now drawing near, and now receding; hence arise those distant effects which induce a delightful reverie, and that delicate cadence which thrills the heart.
Under our roof his song would be ever the same; but on the pinions of the wind the music is divine, it penetrates and ravishes the soul.