Mace

“ For the god grasps in his right hand a heavy mace, which he lets fall upon a net in front of him containing captive foes, whose bodies may be seen between its broad meshes struggling and writhing within it. On the relief the cords of the net are symmetrically arranged, and it apparently rises as a solid structure to the level of the god's waist. It thus has the appearance of a cage with cross-bars and supports of wood or metal. ”

“ When the mace, a bright-red membraneous substance, is removed from the nut it is pressed flat between blocks of wood and left to dry until it has acquired the right color. The preparation of mace for the market requires experience rather than technical knowledge. If packed too green it is liable to mold, and is subject to attacks from insects, which render it valueless in commerce. ”

“ As may be inferred from its colossal size the mace was never intended for actual use in battle, but was sculptured by Mesilim's orders with the special object of being dedicated in the temple of the god. It is decorated with rudely-carved figures of lions, which run around it and form a single composition in relief. The lions are six in number, and are represented as pursuing and attacking [Pg 100] one another. Each has seized the hind-leg and the back of the one which precedes it; they thus form an endless chain around the object, and are a most effective form of decoration. ”

“ The physician Douban rose up, and after a profound reverence, said to the king, he judged it meet that his majesty should take horse, and go to the place where he used to play at mall. The king did so, and when he arrived there, the physician came to him with the mace, and said, "Exercise yourself with this mace, and strike the ball until you find your hands and body perspire. When the medicine I have put up in the handle of the mace is heated with your hand, it will penetrate your whole body ”

“ At the same time were we to review the birds in detail, as we have done the mammals, you would see that there are almost more modifications to be observed in this one single instrument than in our thirty-two teeth. All birds have a beak, but each has his own, organized expressly with reference to the kind of food needed by its owner. The eagle's beak, which mangles living prey, is pointed, bent, and hard as steel; the bill of the duck, which laps up water from ponds and puddles, in order to get worms and half-decomposed refuse out of it, is soft, and flattened like a shovel. ”

“ But, so far from really being a bird, this curious little creature has the same internal organization as ours, and indeed comes so near us, though without looking as if it did, that a scientific man, and a very distinguished one too, placed the bat in the first family of the animal kingdom, with the monkey, and, you will hardly believe it, with man. ”

“ The groups have, therefore, been subdivided into five classes, which we will study in succession, only naming each now: viz. mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and batrachians. Do not alarm yourself at this last name: it is a Greek word, meaning simply frogs.
The mammals are our immediate neighbors. Mammalia are the animals which produce milk. They bring forth their young alive, and give suck to them as soon as they are born. ”

“ It is found that the bat, like man and the monkey, suckles its young at the breast; and it was this very character which Linnæus, the leader of artificial classification, thought of selecting as the distinguishing mark of his first family in the animal kingdom. It is true that in honor of the human race he had given that first family a much more sonorous name than our usual one of man—viz. ”

“ It also has its canines, but very small ones; they disappear, so to speak, in a large vacancy between the incisors and the molars, where man inserts the bit, by means of which the animal has been subdued. Small as these are, however, these canines indicate that the horse might eat flesh, canine teeth being the distinctive attribute of the carnivorous mammals. I have read somewhere, but I do not remember where, that an unusual development of strength could be produced in the horse by feeding it on flesh ”

“ All the fire of the atmosphere has passed into his frame. Now go to the Zoological Gardens, and see him there: he crawls languidly under the coverings that shelter him; if by chance he bites any one, it is with an idle tooth that no longer knows how to kill ”

“ Its fire is not slackened because you have put it into a cage, and its muscles, lashed furiously on by the double-oxygenized blood, drive it hap-hazard into a thousand movements, in which it expends, as best it can, a superabundance of power, which no longer finds natural employment. Little children, who are the real singing-birds of our homes, and whose blood also drives much more energetically along than ours—little children I say—often fare no better than caged birds in those larger cages we call schools ”

“ And here we have the tribe of bears, wolves, foxes, weasels, dogs, cats, tigers, lions, of all the fighting animals, i.e., those which steep their muzzles in blood, and live by devouring others. These have a similar apparatus for nutrition to our own; especially the bear, who, with the monkey, is the animal most nearly resembling man, seeing that he has feet like ours, with scarcely any tail, while the monkey has our hands, without specifying any other points of resemblance. Like ourselves, too, the bear is omnivorous; that is to say, it eats everything, vegetables and fruit as well as meat ”

“ This invasion of the palate by teeth, which began in the lizard and the serpent, assumes alarming proportions here. It is not merely the roof of the palate which is spiked with teeth: above, below, at the sides, everywhere to the very limits of the oesophagus, the little fangs triumphantly stick out their slender points. It is impossible, therefore, to state their number. Nature has scattered them broadcast without counting, just as she has done with the hairs of the beard round the human mouth; and the comparison is not so impertinent as you may think. ”

“ The lion, whose voracious jaw opens like the door of an oven, so that the tamers of wild beasts have no scruple in thrusting in their whole heads, a mouthful a good deal larger than an apple; the lion, who has no doctors, would often be liable to this accident—an irremediable one in his case—if nature had not made a special provision for him. ”

“ From all this results a fine red blood, such as we have not met with since we left the reptiles, and which is manufactured in all parts of the body at once.
Each of these rings, then, the worm's only organs, is a little eating machine to and for itself, and at the same time a little movement machine also; in fact, a complete animal. Each one could, if necessary, nourish itself and live apart; and this is what he really does. Learn hence, to despise nothing in nature. ”

“ It is her daily food which is daily becoming a cat inside her—her saucers of milk now, and very soon her mice, all serve to the same end.
The large ox, too, of whom you are so much afraid, because you cannot as yet be persuaded what a good-natured beast he really is, and how unlikely to do any harm to children who do none to him—that large ox began life as a small calf, and it is the grass which he has been eating for some time past which has transformed him into the huge mass of flesh you now see, and which by-and-by will be eaten by man, to become man's flesh in the same manner. ”

“ Flesh and blood, on which he lives entirely, is concentrated albumen, prepared beforehand in the bodies of his victims; so that no great preparation is needed here to convert it into lion's blood. A professor of chemistry, who has a good assistant, does not need a very large laboratory. This is the case with the lion; and nature, which makes nothing in vain, has here economised space. Tame the monarch of the forest into a domestic animal, and change his food, and I will wager anything you please that, in the course of a few generations, his digestive tube will lengthen itself. ”

“ His mode of flight is rather lumbering, it is true; he is, in comparison with the large flies, what the ox is to the deer; but when you contrast the weight of his thick body with the delicacy and narrow dimensions of the two membranes which sustain him in the air, you may well ask yourself how those little morsels of wings, thin as gold-beater's skin, can carry such a mass along. In fact, they only accomplish this feat of strength by dint of an excess of activity almost startling to think of. When you run as fast as you can, how many times, think you, do you move your legs in one second? ”

“ This tongue, perfectly unique in its character, stretches out in its murderous exertions to nearly three times the length of the animal's long head. What a distance there seems between such a tongue as this and your own little doorkeeper! But no wonder: we have now reached the confines of the kingdom of Mammalia, and the face of nature is beginning to change.
The Armadillo, for instance, which comes next to the ant-eater, looks far more like the tortoise or lizard than its noble mammalian brethren. ”

“ There are six incisors in each jaw; these are long and rather projecting teeth, by examining which, the age of the horse can be detected from certain marks which appear in them from year to year. The molars are flat, square, furrowed with bars of enamel, marking out more or less distinct crescents; perfectly constructed, in short, for chewing hay and oats. Nevertheless, I should never be surprised to see the enamel crescents become sharp-cutting in our rich professor's stable; so skillful is the unseen Architect who created animals, in altering the house when the tenant changes his habits. ”

“ In this way only half the blood that comes from the veins passes on to be regenerated by contact with the air, and all the hinder part of the body receives nothing but the mixed blood common to reptiles, while the head and fore members enjoy the privilege of the superior orders. ”

“ She picks up and swallows over and over again, without appearing to experience any other pleasure than that of satisfying her appetite. Birds of prey, it is true, have rather more convenient tongues, capable, moreover, of tasting up to a certain point; and the parrot, who is a complete epicure, and chews his food philosophically, has a charming-little black one, thick, fleshy, and susceptible—a true porter, in fact-who enables Polly thoroughly to enjoy her breakfast. But certain birds who live on insects surpass even the hen in the dryness and hardness of their tongues. ”

“ Vertebrated animals are all furnished with a head, containing a brain, which gives its orders to the whole body; they have all an internal skeleton, that is to say, a system of bones linked together, forming a solid base by which all the organs are supported. I was going to add that they have all four limbs; but here the serpent glides in to call me to order, and to hiss at our childish craving for fine-drawn divisions, in perfect order, where there is an exactly proper place for everything. However, each has, without exception, a heart, with its network of blood-vessels ”

“ The animal has no canines, sometimes no incisors even; sometimes it has as many as thirty-six teeth, according to the species, as naturalists aver; and this is all I have to say about this great lump of flesh, so misshapen outside, yet so regularly formed within. He it is who especially deserves the title pachydermata, his skin being so hard and thick that bullets glance off its surface. ”

“ A wonderful fact, and one of which I have no explanation to offer you, because among the many mysteries which are silently going on within us is this, that the education of the new-born blood begins entirely of itself in the vessels which are carrying it along. During their very journey, the confused elements are setting themselves in order and forming into groups. In short the chyle, when it comes out of the chyliferous vessels, is already much more like blood than when it entered them, and yet one cannot account for the change. ”

“ Finally, even with an additional heart in thetail, the circulation among fishes is quite on a par with their respiration. They have a melancholy steward, whose legs are very heavy, and his pockets very light, and their life comes down a peg lower in consequence. It is always the same life nevertheless—you must never lose sight of that fact: it gets low in consequence of the imperfection of the machine, but without changing its nature, any more than the light in our different sorts of lighting apparatus. ”

“ Less freedom, in exchange for more power, is a bargain which any one would gladly accept who plays the part of a lion!
I have here a remark to make. We have now passed in review three orders besides our own, and have only had to point out a change in the fastenings of the jaws and in the teeth; and you will find that the same sort of modifications take place in the whole class of mammals. This is in fact the essentially movable and variable point in their apparatus for nutrition. The jaw and its weapons vary their character from one species to another, according to the nature of their food ”

“ They project with a descending curve from the upper jaw, and would give the animal the very false appearance of a small wild boar, but for the great delicacy of its legs, which are more slender than even those of our roebuck, to whom, with the exception of the horns, it bears a close resemblance, as its name implies. ”

“ I have not been sorry to make you acquainted as we went along, with this little trait in the history of classification; but beyond it there is really nothing particular to say about the apparatus for the nourishment of the deposed bat-princes, which is a plain proof how nearly it must be like our own. By-the-by, there is one trifling remark to be made with regard to her teeth. The bats we have in our country (France) , for there are many varieties of species in the world, live on insects, which they catch in their flight by night. ”

“ The dog, for instance, that loving and intelligent companion, who almost reads your thoughts in your eyes, and is as affectionate and obedient to his master as it were to be wished all children were to their parents—this dog is, as you must own, very superior, in all ways, to the frog, with its large goggle eyes and clammy body, hiding itself in the water as soon as you come near it. But again, the frog, which can come and go as it likes, is decidedly superior to the oyster, which has neither head nor limbs, and lives all alone, glued into a shell, in a sort of perpetual imprisonment. ”