Trace (animal)

“ For example, there is no doubt that both birds and mammals are descended from some fish-like animal that lived in the water and breathed by gills borne on slits in the gullet, and every bird and mammal passes through a stage in which these gill-slits are present, though their function is lost, and they soon close up and disappear. ”

“ Now in domesticated animals there is great variation in colouring, but not in the majority of wild species. What the causes are that operate in the painting of the skin of an animal no one can say, any more than one can say how particular spots are arranged on the petal of a flower or the wing of a butterfly. ”

“ Accordingly, zoologists have so arranged the animal kingdom that warm-blooded animals, including man, the birds, and the quadrupeds, are classified together; while the cold-blooded animals, such as the fish, tortoise, frog, and all that have no vertebral column, are classed by themselves. ”

“ We know, that in these forests, perhaps near enough to see us, though their forms are hidden by their likeness to their leafy surroundings and the dappled sunlight, are animals as various as elephants, tigers, leopards, foxes, squirrels, and bats; birds as various as hawks, parrots, and finches; and insects from butterflies, bees, and wasps to crickets, beetles, and ants. The forest, we know, in addition to all the wealth of tree and plant life, is teeming with animal and insect life, though of this we are able to see very little, so carefully do animals conceal themselves. ”

“ By constantly traversing the same ground, in going and returning from their burrows, they gradually tread down a path among the grass and herbage, by which their presence may readily be discovered by an experienced eye. When under water, their fur is covered with multitudes of tiny air-bubbles that shine like silver and have a beautiful effect when seen against the dark surface of the body. ”

“ The hardest part of my walk now began, as I had left the easy slopes of the shales behind. Here amongst the rocks, as would be expected, animal life in the way of birds, reptiles, and insects became more abundant, and I began to keep a sharp look-out, especially for the smaller Reptilia ”

“ The lay of the land having been thoroughly studied, and the presence, movements, haunts, and habits of the animal determined, traps are set at frequent intervals in those localities most likely to produce satisfactory results, and duly baited with "medicine." ”

“ Traquair emphasized the necessary position of Palæontology in the domain of Biology, and pertinently remarked:—"As I have asked on a previous occasion, 'Does an animal cease to be an animal because it is preserved in stone instead of spirits? ”

“ The rock is a white sandstone, which wears little from exposure to the weather, and upon its smooth surface are delineated the outlines of at least fifty [?] species of animals, birds, reptiles, and fish, embracing in the number panthers, deer, buffalo, otters, beavers, wildcats, foxes, wolves, raccoons, opossums, bears, elk, crows, eagles, turkeys, eels, various sorts of fish, large and small, snakes, etc. In the midst of this silent menagerie of specimens of the animal kingdom is the full length outline of a female form, beautiful and perfect [125] in every respect. ”

“ Such animals—little more than masses of living animal jelly—now abound in the waters, and protect themselves by secreting calcareous skeletons, often complex and beautiful, and penetrated by pores, through which the soft animal within can send forth minute thread-like extensions of its body, which serve instead of limbs. ”

“ The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns,—a sort of fucus or lichen in bone,—to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this! ”

“ Very young animals are banded, but have spots over the shoulders and thighs; these run into stripes as the animal grows older; then the stripes expand, and, at last meeting, the mature animal is a uniform dark brown. Enough has now, I trust, been said upon this point to show that from spots have been developed the other markings with which we are familiar in the animal kingdom. ”

“ A number of the old-school naturalists believed that when an animal's colouring assumed the snowy-white coat of its arctic surroundings, this was due to the natural tendency on the part of its hair and fur to assume the colourings and tints of their habitat. ”

“ They will note the slightest indication of the passage of the animal they are after—the faintest footprint, a stone overturned and showing the moisture on its under surface, a broken twig, a bitten leaf, the bark rubbed—and they will be able to judge from the exact appearance of these signs how long it is since the animal made them. They will, too, detect sounds which we civilised men would certainly never hear, and from a note of alarm in these sounds, or from excitement among birds, infer the presence of a dangerous animal. ”

“ To give an imaginary example, from changes in progress on an island, let the organization{234} of a canine animal become slightly plastic, which animal preyed chiefly on rabbits, but sometimes on hares ”

“ There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. ”

“ But as a matter of fact, the great majority of these mammals, when they seek to escape observation, crouch on the ground, and in that posture the light belly escapes observation, and the animal's color pattern loses very much of, and sometimes all of, the 'full obliterative shading of surface colors' of which Mr. ”

“ In dim ways he recognized in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his own eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking upon man—out of eyes that had circled in the darkness around countless winter campfires, that had peered from safe distances and from the hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged animal that was lord over living things. ”

“ What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; ”

“ They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit. ”

“ Nevertheless the student of development finds, not only that the chick commences its existence as an egg, primarily identical, in all essential respects, with that of the Dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes division—that the primitive groove arises, and that the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by precisely similar methods, into a young chick, which, at one stage of its existence, is so like the nascent Dog, that ordinary inspection would hardly distinguish the two.
The history of the development of any other vertebrate animal, Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the same story. ”

“ He is a tree or a stone, at best an animal, as long as he does not know it. But, when the first spark of this knowledge glimmers in him he becomes a man. You will not consider all the two-legged creatures who walk out there in the street as human beings, simply because they walk erect and carry their young [Pg 136] nine months in the womb? Look how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants or bees. ”

“ Accordingly, we find that no structure exhibits such strange variations as the skin. Besides the regular modifications which we see in the scales or horny plates of fishes, the smooth coats or solid shells of reptiles, the feathers of birds, and the hair of mammals, numerous other minor peculiarities occur in almost every species. Such are the horns of cows and goats, the spike of the rhinoceros, the beaks, nails, claws, hoofs, and talons of beasts or birds, and the tail-plumes, ruffs, lappets, crests, and ornamental adjuncts of all the more aesthetic animals. ”

“ Nevertheless, how many hearts with warm red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining! A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours: beavers are building and mending dams and huts for winter, and storing them with food; ”

“ But it is no longer possible to restrain curiosity from attempting to pry into the relations which connect the present state of the animal and vegetable worlds, as well as of the various races of mankind, with the state of the fauna and flora which immediately preceded. ”

“ In treating of this question, I shall begin with the doctrine of progression, a concise statement of which, so far as it relates to the animal kingdom, was thus given twelve years ago by Professor Sedgwick, in the preface to his Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge.
'There are traces,' he says, 'among the old deposits of the earth of an organic progression among the successive forms of life. They are to be seen in the absence of mammalia in the older, and their very rare appearance in the newer secondary groups; in the diffusion of warm-blooded quadrupeds ”

“ It is probable that the species with a rostrum use it to procure small prey hidden between stones or buried in the mud, and that the fleshy mental appendage with which many are provided is a tactile organ compensating the imperfection of the vision in the search for food. ”

“ For my aim has been to present a picture instinct with the spirit of the wild, of the upland, moor, and cliff of the Land’s End at a time when the prey and the beast of prey roamed the night fearless of snare and gin—and man rarely intruded by day—under conditions, rapidly fading into oblivion, which seem worthy of record before they disappear for ever. ”

“ yet, they can show that any existing species—animal or vegetable—when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have taken place. ”

“ There the dogs would soon devour him,
Birds of prey would feast upon him;
Have not hidden him in Swamp-land,
Have not buried him in heather;
There the worms would live upon him,
Insects feed upon his body. ”

“ Or if a man and his Dogs are chasing you, you must climb into the first hiding-place you can. We Raccoons are too fat and slow to run away from them, and the rings on our tails and the black patches on our broad faces might show from the ground. If the hole is a small one, make it cover your head and your tail anyway, and as much of your brown body fur as you can. ”

“ Moreover, if the spotted or striped young represent the ancestral coloration, and if, as seems probable, the spots and stripes have, on the whole, some slight concealing value, it is evident that in the life history of most of these large mammals, both among those that prey and those that are preyed on, concealing coloration has not been a survival factor ”

“ The colours of many animals seem adapted to their purposes of concealing themselves either to avoid danger, or to spring upon their prey. Thus the snake and wild cat, and leopard, are so coloured as to resemble dark leaves and their lighter interstices; birds resemble the colour of the brown ground, or the green hedges, which they frequent; and moths and butterflies are coloured like the flowers which they rob of their honey. ”

“ The Author has not contented himself, as others have done, with single profile views, but in very many instances has grouped his figures, so as to represent the originals at their natural avocations, and has placed them on branches of trees, decorated with foliage, blossoms and fruits, or amidst plants of numerous species. Some are seen pursuing their prey through the air, searching for food amongst the leaves and herbage, sitting on their nests, or feeding their young; whilst others, of a different nature, swim, wade, or glide in or over their allotted element. ”

“ In mammalia, we notice the frequency of rounded spots on forest or tree haunting animals of large size, as the forest deer and the forest cats; while those that frequent reedy or grassy places are striped vertically, as the marsh antelopes and the tiger. ”

“ We must not, however, push the foregoing argument too far, on account of the probable origin of some of our domestic animals from several wild stocks: the blood, for instance, of a tropical and arctic wolf or wild dog may perhaps be mingled in our domestic breeds. ”

“ In all recent articles which I have read by well-known naturalists on these subjects, it appears to be assumed that both carnivorous and herbivorous animals trust entirely to their sense of sight, the former to find their prey, and the latter to detect and avoid the approach of their enemies. Yet nothing is more certain than that all carnivorous animals hunt almost entirely by scent, until they have closely approached their quarry, and usually by night, when all the animals on which they prey must look very much alike as far as colour is concerned. ”

“ If we take highly decorated species, that is, animals marked by alternate light and dark bands, or spots, such as the Zebra, some Deer, or the carnivora, we find first that the region of the spinal column is marked by a dark stripe ”