Ernest Ingersoll

“ All day it lies curled up asleep in an underground nest (where in winter it hibernates) , and wanders about at night hunting for insects, worms, snails, slugs and the like, and savagely attacking and killing every viper it comes across—a valuable little animal, preserved by every intelligent gardener. Next to it are the lively little "tupaias," or tree shrews of the East, and the queer, long-nosed, kangaroo-shaped jumping shrews of the deserts. A rarer oddity is the river shrew of West Africa, looking and acting like a miniature muskrat. ”

“ American snails are solitary, and will be found lurking in the moss beside mountain brooklets—a favorite spot for the glassy vitrinas—hiding in the crevices of rocky banks and old walls, crawling at the edge of swampy pools, creeping in and out of the crannies of bark on aged trees, or clinging to the underside of succulent leaves. Some forms, very beautiful in their ornamentation when magnified, are so minute that they might be encircled by the letter o in this type, yet you will soon come to perceive them amid the grains of mud adhering to the undersurface of a soaked chip or rotten log. ”

“ It lives in, rather than on, muddy beaches, sometimes in crowds of thousands, its shell deeply buried, and its long siphons reaching up to suck in water and food when the tide covers the flat. When the tide is out, a tiny hole in the sand and a spurt of water show the clammer where to dig, and his spade quickly unearths the clam. ”

“ The prey is dragged down and drowned. In the crocodilian throat the passage for air from the nostrils reaches much farther back above the mouth than in other animals, and the entrance of the windpipe may be closed by pressing together the base of the tongue and the soft palate, enabling the alligator to drown its prey without drowning itself. In two particulars our alligator is singular—its fear of man and its voice. When surprised basking on shore, as it likes to do, it will rush with awkward haste for the water; and there will get away or out of sight whenever a man appears. ”

“ The casual reader, with no particular interest in natural history, seeks in such a book little more than stories of animal life thought of mainly as "big game," with an appetite for the adventurous and wonderful. But beasts and birds and snakes, although they number in the aggregate thousands of kinds, are but few compared with the almost innumerable hosts of the lower orders of animal life that dwell in the wildernesses of the world, or throng in the seas, or hover about us in the air; yet they are a part of the zoölogy of the globe, and a most important part. ”

“ No results of investigation in natural history have been more amazing than those that show the marvelous richness of the sea in plant and animal life—not merely at its warm margin, but far out in the centre of what the ancients used to call "the desert of waters"; not only at its surface, but in its profoundest depths, and under the polar ice as well as amid the tropics. ”

“ The most remarkable of these processes of reproduction is that which is represented by the jellyfishes so abundant in all seas, and so beautiful either when seen floating along just at the surface of the summer sea, or when at night they glow with phosphorescence like silvery, greenish rockets in the dark waves. Sometimes they occur in enormous "schools"—as we say of fish—all of one kind, filling the water thickly as far as one can see, and now and then in late summer are cast on the beach in long windrows. ”

“ The big claws are not used for burrowing an underground home, but for digging up the nests of ants and termites which it licks up with its long, sticky tongue. When one realizes the enormous colonies of ants in the tropics it is not amazing that so large an animal should subsist exclusively on these minute creatures. The claws are formidable weapons of defense also, the animal throwing itself on its back and defying the foe, or rising on its hind legs and giving a tearing, bearlike hug that even a man might well fear. ”

“ Minerals never do so. A correlative of life and growth is death, but minerals never die. In the course of its career every animal or plant, in proportion to its need or the degree of complexity of its organs, develops within itself characteristic compounds, such as albumin, gluten, [Pg 14] starch, cellulose, fat and other chemical results, not a trace of any of which is to be found in rocks or soil, or in the water or in the air. No distinction in nature is so absolute as that between the inorganic and the organic realms, the nonliving and living things, so far as our senses can perceive them. ”

“ The search for food, the foremost occupation and anxiety of these small wood-folk, would be increasingly stimulated as the ripening season of the seeds and nuts on which they depend advanced, and the impulse to incessant industry, so necessary in the poorer parts of the year, would now be overworked, and each animal, in his haste to be up and doing, would constantly bring home more food than would be consumed, so that it would pile up in the accustomed "dining room." ”

“ A fourth factor conditioning deep-sea life is that of light. The sunlight penetrates to a much greater distance than was formerly believed; and experiments with photographic plates show that the blue rays may sink as far as 800 fathoms, but the red rays go much less down. Below that glimmer is absolute darkness, illuminated only by the phosphorescent glow of the lanterns carried by the animals moving about in that Stygian and icy abode—which would seem to us the most dreadful fate to which any creature on the globe is born. ”

“ As the onset of winter fills the forests with snow, cold gales moan through the trees, and the long, dark nights enshroud an almost dead world, this peaceable disposition changes into a hungry ferocity and a force of craft and caution born of the direst need, which at last make the animal formidable to man himself. ”

“ They can swallow whole nothing larger than a salmon, but can bite larger prey into manageable pieces, and have more than once seized and crushed a boat in their jaws. The cachalot attacks the giant squid whenever it meets one and the marks of the squid's winding arms and cruel suckers are often seen on the hides of whales as scars of some struggle between these Titans of the deep. ”

“ Yet in the South, where these northern thrushes are rarely heard at their best, the palm is given to the mocking bird, which, like the northern brown thrasher, rivals all in turn by simulating their notes in a liquid melody that, especially when heard in the calm of a moonlit summer evening, seems of surpassing beauty. ”

“ The whole beautiful thing is really very strong and elastic, as it must be to push as hard against the air as a bird's wing has to do. The vanes vary much in shape, and in the degree to which the branchlets are disconnected into a fluffy looseness. Ostrich plumes, and those of the birds of paradise, owe their beauty to the fact that each branch in the vane is loose, and bears little disconnected branches of its own; and in many feathers no vane at all grows, so that they resemble hairs, when fine, and bristles when coarse, as is seen about the mouth of the whippoorwill and some flycatchers. ”

“ A very curious one is the matamata of Guiana and northern Brazil, the biggest of its tribe, becoming more than three feet long. It gets its living by stratagem rather than by activity. The back of its shell is so roughened by coarse bosses that it looks like the bark on an old log, and ragged flaps of skin project from head and neck. These are kept in constant motion, and attract the attention of passing fishes and other creatures, whose curiosity often takes them too near the treacherous jaws of the concealed monster. ”

“ Slowly it became evident that the only proper way to classify animals was by putting together those of like structure, and this could be accomplished only by intense comparative study of the interior anatomy of their bodies. Even here, however, progress was limited until the great light from the idea of organic evolution fell on biological science, by which it was perceived that the true criterion by which the proper place of any animal could be determined was its line of descent—a matter wherein the student of fossils could render, and has rendered, vast assistance. ”

“ Who has not been amused at the labors of the big black beetles that one meets in summer on dusty paths rolling balls of fibrous material. These "dung beetles" are the American cousin of the scarab of the ancient Egyptians, which typified to them many mystical ideas connected with life, present and eternal. With its shovellike head and broad forelegs the beetle gathers and compacts the material it wants, and begins to roll it, sometimes with the help, more often against the struggles, of another beetle toward a prepared nest-hole. ”

“ In fact, the pearl fishery is carried on now far less in hope of a profitable collection of gems than for the profit in the shells, which have a nacreous interior of remarkable beauty—the mother-of-pearl—and the great advantage of offering this in almost flat surfaces, sometimes eight or nine inches broad, making it useful in the arts as well as in the more practical line of buttons, knife handles, etc. Sometimes the whole surface of a fine shell has been carved, cameowise, with cunning art and an exquisite effect. ”

“ Passing the brilliant rollers of the Old World, and the motmots and little gemlike todies of the New, we come to the extensive tribe of kingfishers, of which our blue and white example is a very modest specimen—but the only one we have, while 150 other species are counted in the rest of the world, most of them in the Austro-Malayan region and in Africa. They vary immensely in size, colors, food and habits. A large section are not "fishers" at all, but dwell in wooded places, and subsist on insects caught on the wing, and on reptiles, mice, etc., like birds of prey. ”

“ We are now ready to turn to the land carnivores, which, by the larger opportunity, better food, and varied conditions the land affords, have advanced far beyond their marine cousins. In these more favorable circumstances, and by their struggle for a living against the powers of defense or escape of their intended prey, and the competition of one another, they have become widely diversified in organization and habits, and in some of their representatives have developed the highest intellectual and physical ability in the animal kingdom. ”

“ Which is the best singer of them all will never be settled, for the citizen of each country likes best that to which he is most used; but to Americans nothing can be better than the evening carol of the wood thrush, the serene hymnlike music of the hermit, or the sweet and wavering call of the veery. ”

“ Others rattle, while flying, their hind wings against the tegmina. These sounds are primarily amorous serenades, and Nature's serenades without attentive ears would be even more curious than the ears for which the grasshoppers perform. ”

“ The duckbill is a small, softly furred, web-footed creature, as aquatic in its habits as a beaver, which finds its food in the worms and other things that live in and on the mud of its chosen stream, and digs a burrow in the bank for its home, where it stays most of the daylight hours, and where its young are born. Its special peculiarity is that instead of the muzzle and mouth of an ordinary mammal, it is furnished with a bill like that of a duck, and each jaw is armed with horny plates to do the work of teeth ”

“ These are spiders of moderate size, characterized by a big head marked off from the thorax by converging grooves. Their natural home is in the grass, where their flat, closely woven sheets of silk, almost invisible by reason of their transparency, but brought into plain view when coated with dew or dust, are spread everywhere. They also are fond of getting into cellars and old buildings, and constructing webs across corners, bracketwise. Somewhere the web sinks like a narrow funnel into a short tube in which the owner hides, watching hungrily until a fly alights on his silken platform. ”

“ Eating everything from nuts, berries, and insects, to fish, ground squirrels, and big game, their dentition comprises not only powerful canines, but molars capable of smashing bones. Bears are too slow and clumsy, however, to do much as big game hunters, save, perhaps, the polar giant in seizing seals, and it is therefore necessity rather than choice that reduces these really formidable beasts to the petty business of nibbling berry bushes, digging up bulbs or the nests of wasps and gophers, and tearing rotten logs to pieces in hope of finding ants and beetle grubs. ”

“ Surrounding the open mouth of the cup is a circle of long, jointed, much-branched tentacles that sweep the water, capture passing prey, and bring it into the mouth of the crinoid within the circling base of the arms. ”