Phil Robinson

“ To him, for instance, the squirrel is “the thing that sits in the shadow of its tail,” and in Akkadian nomenclature there is no lion, but only “the great-voiced one.” We have only to see how the Red Indians individualize their fauna, to understand the nature of Adam’s names.
But to be able to name the creatures, furred and feathered, with such picturesque appropriateness argues a knowledge of their habits founded upon personal observation, and the legend therefore that tells us how the Angels failed to execute the orders of the Creator is not at all an absurd one. ”

“ Thus, so much the more should we feel tenderly towards the smaller lives about us, the things that the Creator has placed amongst us to enjoy the same earth as ourselves, but whom we compel to serve us so long as they can, and to die out when our end is served. ”

“ The door gives way, and the next instant the beast has seized his keeper. A number of people, powerless of course to give assistance, are looking on ; but fortunately there is also present some professional lion-tamer, belonging to the establishment, and this man, with great courage, rushes straight into the cage and confronts the lion. Discipline and a loaded stick triumph over instinct. The lion releases its prey and the unfortunate keeper is at once dragged out. ”

“ Yet there are those who dispute the weird majesty of the hidden potentate, for the whales, to north and south, enjoy a limited sovereignty, while all along the belt of the tropics the pirate sharks scourge the sea-folk as they will. ”

“ There they stood, the ten miserable birds, with splitting headaches and parched tongues, contrite and dejected, asking to have their feathers back again. The situation was painful to both parties. The forlorn geese saw in each other’s persons the humiliating reflection of their own condition, while the dame, guiltily conscious of that bag full of feathers, remembered how the one lapse of Noah, — in that “aged surprisal of six hundred years, and unexpected inebriation from the unknown effects of wine,” — has been excused by religion and the unanimous voice of posterity. ”

“ The lion, again, they say, is king in Africa, yet the gorilla Zulus it over the forests within the lion’s territory; the ostrich on the plain despises all his mandates, and in the earldom of the rivers the crocodile cares nothing for his favor or his wrath. The lion, indeed, claims to be king of the beasts ”

“ Thus in the beginning of days all power was in the hands of the Titans, the mammoths and the mastodons of antiquity; but in time a more vigorous race of beasts was gradually developed, and the Saturn and Tellus, Ops and Typhon, of the primeval earth were one by one unseated and dispossessed of power by the younger creatures, — the eagles of Jupiter and the tigers of Bacchus, the serpents of Athene and the wolves of Mars. ”

“ They have all to pay in vexed boundaries the penalty of extended dominion. Thus, though the tiger may be supreme in the jungles of the Himalayan Terai, he finds upon his wild Naga frontier the irreconcilable rhinoceros, and in the fierce Guzerati country there is the maneless lion. ”

“ Except in Holy Writ there is nothing so beautiful or so manful as the teaching of Buddha, the evangelist of universal tenderness; and approaching nature we ought to remember that it is the very Temple of temples, and that we may not minister there unless we have on the ephod of pity. ”

“ I HAVE it not in my nature to look at the animal world merely as a congregation of beasts. Nor can I bring myself to believe that everything, whether in fur, feathers, or scales, was created for my own special benefit as a human being. Man was not created till the sixth day, and is therefore the junior among the animals. ”

“ No one will deny the aristocracy of the flamingo, the bustard, or the swan, or dispute the nobility of the ibis on the Nile, or of the birds of Paradise in their leafy Edens of the Eastern Seas. For pretenders to high place we have the peacock and the vulture ”

“ The mischief, however, was done; for the geese, who had got drunk with brandied cherries, and been plucked by mistake in consequence, had good reason for withholding from human beings for ever afterwards that pleasing trustfulness which characterizes the domestic fowl. They would never again approach their food without suspicion, nor look upon a gathering of the neighbors except as a dark conspiracy against their feathers. ”

“ The bees, hitherto as pure-minded and upright insects as one could have wished to meet in a summer’s day, developed at once an unnatural aversion to labor, and a not less unnatural tendency to larceny. ”

“ Perplexed by the spectacle, the dame called in her neighbors, and after careful investigation it was decided in counsel that the birds had died of poison. Under these circumstances their carcasses were worth nothing for food, but, as the neighbors said, their feathers were not poisoned, and so, the next day being market day, they set to work, then and there, and plucked the ten geese bare. Not a feather did they leave on the gander, not a tuft of down on the old grey goose ”