October 6 — The Little Dumb Brother
I have been reading in one of the magazines a record of travel in the Rocky Mountains of the Arctic regions. It is illustrated with pictures of some ten polar bear skins—two of them evidently mere babies of bears—a dead ram, a dead caribou—the former killed, the author explains, to furnish the first food he had in forty-four hours. He concludes his article with this naive charge: “Wolves, when pressed by hunger, do not hesitate to fall upon one of their own number and sacrifice it to their beastly cravings. They are utterly lacking in conscience, and the young or weak of every class of land animals suffer from their wanton lack of mercy.”
Such wicked wolves! And how about those baby bears?
It is the same point of view as that of the Spanish bull fighters. “They are not Christians—they have no souls—why consider them?”
As I have said before, very probably the decent, well-behaved, kindly Roman citizen of Nero’s day, returning with his family from a pleasant afternoon at the gladiatorial shows, gathered his children about the household altar, offered pious libation to the gods, and went peacefully to bed with a clean and untroubled conscience. It was all simply a question of the point of view. A Roman citizen was certainly not going to be disturbed by a sense of wrong-doing in watching the pangs of such creatures as Christians or barbarians.
The theory that human beings were each and every one in a spiritual sense, brothers, came later to trouble this fine old crusted indifference, and now after nearly two thousand years the idea has so completely infiltrated human consciousness, that the death agonies of men can no longer anywhere serve as diversion to the gentle and the good. But behind that sweeping assumption that we of all organic nature alone possess that element of immortality, binding us together with spiritual ties, and laying upon all the mutual obligations of justice and mercy, we have been nourishing a towering and brutal egotism, that moves blindly and stupidly about amid unreckonable multitudes of sentient fellow creatures; unaware of their lives, their passions, or their languages. Contracted inside the shell of this foolish prepossession we miss half the interest and wonder of the world we inhabit, and—thinking of ourselves all the while as an honest and merciful fellow—we play an unimaginable devil to our unhappy neighbours.
And yet I think even we at our worst would recoil could there be set before us in plain language the immitigable horrors of man’s place in nature written from the point of view of even the most philosophic and amiable of the beasts. It makes the skin upon one’s flesh crisp to reflect how black would be that long chronicle of poisonings, burnings, slayings, devourings. Those unmentionable tortures upon the vivisector’s table; those maimings and clippings of well-loved pets to gratify a cheerful but perverted fancy; the treachery, ingratitude, and fantastic despotism practised every day, and always—throughout the whole indictment set forth by the accusing animals,—would be seen a dark, everflowing stream of innocent blood, spilled purely for man’s idle recreation. The fanged Nero of the jungle, the very Heliogabalus of the cobras would seem spotless saints contrasted with this horrid record of the deeds of what are commonly called kindly and upright men. The beasts had never need to invent a devil myth. The model was always to their hand.
Cardinal Newman once remarked, with a sense of surprise, that “we know less of the animals than we do of the angels,” and when one remembers the disproportionate attention given the two subjects this is hardly cause for wonder. One of the favourite texts of the never-ending debates of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages was the question whether sixty thousand angels would have room to stand on the point of a needle; and upon this and cognate subjects
... “Doctor and Saint—they heard great argument
About it, and About: and ever more
Came out by that same door wherein they went.”
But of any study of what we call—in our topping human fashion—“the lower orders of creation” the history of the schools contains not a single record.
Even since science has begun to divert the world’s mind from the study of the macrocosm, to the contemplation of the microcosm this same ingrained contempt and misunderstanding of the animals has led to the most amazing ideas. Descartes, whose study of the reflex actions of the muscles curiously anticipated some of the subtlest discoveries made recently in Chicago by Professor Loeb, propounded the theory, in his “Réponses,” that animals were mere automata—which ate without pleasure, cried without pain, desired nothing, knew nothing, and only simulated intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician. He says: “Among the movements that take place in us there are many which do not depend upon the mind at all, such as the beating of the heart, the digestion of food, nutrition, and respiration, walking, singing, and other similar actions when they are performed without the mind thinking of them. And when one, who falls from a height throws his hands forward to save his head, it is in virtue of no ratiocination that he performs this action. It does not depend upon his mind, but takes place merely because his senses being affected by present danger some change arises in his brain which affects the nerves in such a manner as is required to produce the motion, in the same manner as in a machine, and without the mind being able to hinder it. Now since we observe this in ourselves, why should we be so astonished if the light reflected from the body of a wolf into the eye of a sheep has the same force to excite it into the motion of flight?”
Why on the other hand should we refuse to think that the light reflected from the body of a lion into the eye of Descartes himself should have the power of exciting him into the motion of flight, without his mind being concerned in the matter at all—except that Descartes himself would assure us with his own lips that this was not so.
Our ignorance of the dialects of animals, our inability to understand the medium by which they convey their thoughts, makes it possible for men of even Descartes’ abilities to generate such childish hypotheses. Even Huxley says blandly of animals that “Since they have no language they can have no trains of thought,” though he admits that most of them possess that part of the brain which we have every reason to suppose to be the organ of consciousness in man.
It is one of the most regrettable results of this human egotism, which has dug so deep and permanent a gulf between ourselves and our fellow creatures, that we have made no concerted or intelligent effort to find a means of communication with our fellow beings. That such an effort would produce results worth the labour it would entail we have reason to infer from the surprising success that has followed our struggles to elucidate the meaning of the fragments of language sculptured on the broken stones that have been left by races extinct for thousands of years. We know how great are the barriers the varying tongues raise between living peoples: how much effort must be given to acquire a language foreign to us, even when surrounded by the sound of it in our daily life, and assisted by teachers, yet supreme human ingenuity has, from these fragments of broken stones, reconstructed dead tongues and forgotten histories of civilizations that for millenniums have been but dust blown through voiceless deserts. Yet in all the great lapse of ages during which man has been living in close intimacy with his domesticated animals not the slightest attempt has been made to cross the width of silence lying between him and his faithful companions.
The student who makes the acquaintance of animals only in the trap or upon the vivisection table may well assert that the beast has
“No language but a cry,”
but those who approach their fellow beings with a mind divested of this self-righteous cant are well aware that the animals have means of communication as accurate as our own, and fully sufficient for all the needs of their existence.
To an ant the man standing beside him is as a creature three thousand feet high, would be to us. Now let us imagine this colossal person stooping to examine the tiny beings hurrying to and fro in a channel between a row of structures built of fragments that would appear to him no bigger than grains of sand. He would, of course, be unaware that this channel was called Broadway, or the Strand, or the Avenue de l’Opera.
“Do these tiny atoms think, reason, or speak?” he would ask himself. His ear, of course, would be unable to catch any vibrations of their infinitesimal tones, but he would notice here and there two of them pausing to touch their forepaws, remaining opposite one another for some moments moving their minute lips, and that thereupon one or the other would abandon his travel along this channel and move off in another direction, apparently led thereto by the communication of a command or suggestion from his companion. If this giant should chance to be an intelligent giant he would certainly infer that these men had a language.
Now let us step out upon the grass any day in June and in our turn use an intelligent eye. Here lies a dead grasshopper. A foraging ant comes wandering by. He surveys it carefully and estimates the horse power requisite to move it, and then hurries away in the direction of home. Meeting another ant he stops, touches antennae for a few moments, and passes on. The second ant makes straight for the grasshopper and finds it without trouble. Nothing can be plainer than that the first ant told the second one where to go. “A glorious windfall!” he probably said, “There’s a dead Leviathan about two miles from here. Keep straight on till you come to a three-cornered rock, then turn to the left and you will come upon three grains of sand and a straw. Climb the straw, and you can’t miss it. It’s big enough to be seen a mile away.” The second ant, when it finds the grasshopper, does not go home. It sits down and waits till the first one returns with a great gang of labourers, and then every one seizes hold of a leg or wing and the stupendous mass is slowly removed to the nest. Would any person with ordinary common-sense suppose these to be automata?
Had Huxley pondered the Scriptures and gone to the ant to consider her ways he would have certainly been cured of his haughty illusions, for not only has each species of ant a language in which he can communicate with other ants of the same species, but each nest or clan has, clearly, its own brogue; for an ant knows instantly whether another belongs to its own nest or not. The ants of one nest murder those of another. It is a point of honour with them.
We have seen that Huxley admits reluctantly that most animals have those portions of brain development that we believe to be the seat of consciousness, but here is an insect with organs and functions as heterogeneous from our own as can well be imagined, and yet there is no mode of life that men have tried which one or another of the races of ants is not pursuing to-day. Beside the agriculturists and herdsmen, some keep slaves to do everything for them, some live by hunting and plunder, while others quarter themselves upon us and live by confounding meum and tuum. Any ardent pomologist may study the herdsmen tribes by simply turning over the leaves of his young apple tree in the spring. Upon the broad succulent meadows of the under side of his foliage he will discover fat flocks of aphis cows, tended by brawny ant cow-herds, who keep a special eye upon the big brown bulls around which the cows and calves gather to feed. The herdsmen conduct them from leaf to leaf as they exhaust the sap, and at night by the long twig paths and barky roads they carry the milk of the sweet honey dew with which they are swollen. If the horticulturist be hard of heart and smear away a whole herd with a sweep of his thumb, the horrified herdsmen will rush frantically home, bursting into the nest to report to some hyksos king of the termites, that the Philistines have fallen upon his charge and that “I, only I, have escaped to tell the tale!”
The most interesting of the agricultural races of ants is that one commonly known in the West Indies as the parasol ant, from its fashion of carrying bits of flower petals over its shoulder at the angle commonly used with a sunshade. This ant erects an enormous structure, as large in proportion to its size as is the City of London to any one of its inhabitants. The dwellers in these cities are divided into classes: farmers, road-makers, explorers, nurses, soldiers, street sweepers, policemen, and, of course, the Queen. The great town is kept perfectly clean and sanitary by the scavengers, who remove all refuse every day. In case of death the bodies are removed some distance and buried. The soldiers guard the entrances to the city, and in case of attack by one of the Attila hordes of the barbarian hunter ants, they fight with a fury and courage so great that only after the entire army is destroyed is the city ever given up to pillage.
The explorers belonging to the nest scour the surrounding country in search of the material needed by the farmers, and following their indications, the road-makers clear paths a quarter of an inch in width and frequently a mile in length, through the immense tangles of the tropical forests,—roads as straight and useful as those of the Romans. Along these the farmers pass, often at the end of it to climb a tree fifty feet high in search of the bits of flower petals, with which they pass so continuously to the nest that the human observer will sometimes see what appears to be a thin trickle of pink or yellow through the jungle grass as far as the eye can reach. These flower petals are packed in the city’s cellars, moistened, and sown with the spores of a minute fungus upon which the ants live.
Most curious of all is that these ants also keep pets—several varieties of tiny insects which they feed and protect, and which apparently serve no purpose save to give pleasure by their playful gambols. In every well established city of the parasol ants there resides a small green snake in a chamber built about him by the ants themselves, who feed and guard him, and when by any accident the little reptile is removed they abandon all their affairs until another is found to replace him. Unless this snake serves them as a fetish or deity there is no means of accounting for their desire for his presence, for as far as can be discovered he fills no purpose of utility. Mark Twain declares that the ants “vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves and dispute about religion,” and for all we know this little snake may be the centre of a complex system of theology.
Consider too Maeterlinck’s “Life of the Bee,” that remarkable study of a civilization so unlike our own. It is common to dismiss the bee’s geometrical abilities with the futile word instinct, but honest students of the work of these astonishing insects have shown that, given a new situation to deal with, they first hold active counsel together concerning it, and then adapt their means to new conditions with all the skill and flexibility that suggest powers of trained reasoning. Here is a race that works for an ideal. The general good of the hive inspires in them as inflexible a severity, as ardent an abandonment of the desires of the individual as did the Roman patriotism of the elder Brutus, or of the young Scaevola. No more remarkable story is to be found in literature than Maeterlinck’s description of the nuptial flight of the Queen Bee. Choosing a warm and perfect day in the very prime of the season’s glow, distilling as she goes some intoxicating aroma—impalpable to our grosser senses—a perfume of love that drives every drone of the hives in passionate ardour to that deadly encounter, to which only he may obtain who can follow her arrowy course into the blue, where, out of sight of our feeble eyes, that one lethal embrace occurs after which the lover comes hurtling from the skies, dead and eviscerated. To provide this lover, whose potent tenderness shall ensure a myriad generation—this lover with greater wing flight than any of his fellows—with countless facetted eyes, with greater body and stronger limbs, this creature of such passion as to sacrifice his life for one moment of joy—the unflagging life work of not less than five of the sexless workers must be given, and hundreds of drones are raised each year that among them one may prove strong enough to attain to that dizzy aerial love.
Beside the stern, homogeneous, self-sacrificing civilization of the bees that of even the Japanese shows but clumsy, disordered and inadequate.
Many of the doings of these small brothers of ours seem incomprehensible and unreasonable to us, but imagine that three thousand foot giant looking down upon the mites in France and Germany in 1870 without an inkling as to the Spanish succession; upon the recent incredible scufflings and passagings back and forth over the veldts of South Africa without being instructed as to the term of residence required to obtain the franchise. To his ignorant eye how purposeless, how amazingly futile the whole affair would have seemed. And it is thus we move, stupid and contemptuous, amid great races and events, heavily indifferent to their meaning, to their significance to ourselves. We walk surrounded by powers whose forces we ignore, who work out their ends independent of us, yet against whom we are sometimes forced to battle mightily for existence. To the unreflecting man in the street the cinch bug seems a matter of small interest. No one interviews the coddling moth to inquire his intentions. War correspondents pass by the locust and ignore the cotton worm; the fly weevil and the ox bot seem to such an one but a feeble folk, yet every year in the United States alone these small races cost us more than three hundred and fifty millions of dollars, destroy one tenth of our agricultural wealth, and are more expensive to us than was the yearly cost of the Boer war to England.
We are the victims of pigmy captains of pernicious industries, beside whose gigantic operations such magnates as Carnegie or Mr. Morgan look—in the language of the streets—like thirty cents.
Darwin discovered that human and plant life would perish from the face of the earth were it not for the labours of that humble annelid, commonly known as the angle worm, through whose body the entire superficial soil of the globe passes periodically, and by whose digestive processes it is made amenable for agriculture. The termites subserve the angle worm’s efforts by turning over and aerating the soil to an extent very nearly incredible to those who have given no attention to their industry. Our very existence is made possible by the myriad beings for whom our bodies serve as homes and battlefields, and whose dimensions are so minute as to be invisible save under the most powerful microscopes. Ferocious struggles take place within our own tissues between the germs of disease and the white corpuscles of the blood, those brave and sleepless warriors who patrol our veins, and who die by thousands with unreflecting courage in combats with malignant bacteria. When their ranks are thinned, their columns crushed, we succumb helplessly to our invisible foes.
How many of the great and good have fallen victims to those Brinvilliers of the swamps—the anopheles mosquitoes? And a greater number of the young flower of the armies of America and England were slaughtered by the enteric germs carried by flies than fell victims to Boer or Spanish bullets.
How little have we regarded the fly, and yet the facts about this little brother stagger the imagination! It is said to be certain that he came to this country in the Mayflower; but compare his conquests and fertility with that of the Pilgrims. Linnæus said that three flies and the generations that could spring from them could eat a dead horse more rapidly than could a lion, but later knowledge shows that, barring mortality, the number of flies resulting from one female in a summer would be something like seven hundred sextillions, and would in mere bulk outweigh every man, woman, and child on earth. Happily the fly has enemies.
In speaking of these smaller races an idea of their relations to us can only be conveyed by figures; with the larger forms of life the individual may be studied as a type of the race.
We, secure in a conviction of a unique value through the immortality we claim, broadly stigmatize our living fellows as of “the lower orders of life.” They are different, it is true, but in what respect lower? Their development is as commensurate with their needs as is ours. The shibboleth of the Socialists—“To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities,” has plainly been the rule with nature. Whatever we boast of achieving has been accomplished as well or better by these lower orders when their necessities have demanded it. Even the Japanese create inferior paper to that made by the wasps, who number among the species the most skilled of carpenters and masons. Who can spin or weave as can the arachnæ and their cognate families? The beautiful manufactures of the mollusks—even of the diatoms, invisible save with the microscope—leave us beggared of admiration and envy.
If it be a question of physical qualities let us compare the eye of the eagle, or of a fly, with our own—pit our dull sense of smell with the subtle olfactories of a dog or a wolf—or let one of us test our sense of hearing against that of a mouse or a robin. The albatross loafs in indolent circles about the swiftest of our turbine ships; the porpoise can pass from point to point in his dense element with greater speed than that of our swiftest express engine. The wild goose can do his eighty miles an hour for ten hours without rest. Scare up little Molly Cottontail from your path, and as she flies through the autumn grasses like a light leaf blown before the wind, her delicate and harmonious play of muscular powers leaves our most skilled athletes but clumsy cripples by comparison.
In sight, smell, hearing, speed, strength, grace, and endurance we are immeasurably the inferiors of our dumb brothers. And turning from the material to the spiritual and the ideal, we find that in industry, courage, patriotism, loyalty, fidelity, friendship, chivalry, maternal love, and racial solidity the lower orders have nothing to learn from us. Indeed some races we find advanced in moral progress in certain directions far beyond our most hopeful endeavours.
The needs and laws of their being have developed their morals in differing degree, and the virtues of individuals vary as greatly as among ourselves. Of the characters and ideals of wild creatures we can snatch but brief and tantalizing glimpses; from the larger domestic animals our daily life is too removed to make intimacy possible, but dogs and cats, the free birds, and our caged pets—if considered with a seeing eye—open a door through which we can learn much, though our indolence and stupidity still shut us off from the free community of speech.
Carlyle says: “No nobler feeling than that of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is at this hour, and at all hours the unifying influence in man’s life. Religion, I find, stands upon it... what, therefore, is loyalty proper, the life breath of all society, but an effluence of hero worship; submissive admiration for the truly great! Society is founded upon hero worship.”
Lockhart in his Life of Scot tells of a little pig who conceived a passion of admiration and affection for Scott which much embarrassed the great story teller. This susceptible little porker would lurk about, waiting for Scott’s appearance, squealing with joy when he came, and trotting patiently all day at his heels through miles of wandering, proud and contented at merely being allowed to attend on Scott. What was this but Carlyle’s hero worship. It is not by the way recorded that any pig ever made a hero of Carlyle. I once had the pleasure of knowing a goose who abandoned his kind for just such a human friendship, and the same love of the admirable is mutual among the animals themselves. A small green paroquet, who lived in the freedom of a bird fancier’s room with a canary, was possessed of a passionate admiration for his more gifted companion. His every waking moment was spent in the most touching efforts to imitate the thrilling songs and graceful airiness of his more gifted friend, in no way discouraged by the contumely with which the yellow tenor treated his lumberingly pathetic failures. But there is no more confirmed hero worshipper than your dog. Stevenson says of a dog whom he knew and loved: “It was no sinecure to be Coolin’s idol. He was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.” And, he adds, “for every station the dog has an ideal to which the master—under pain of derogation—will do wisely to conform. How often has not a cold glance informed me that my dog was disappointed, and how much more gladly would he not have taken a beating than to be thus wounded in the seat of piety.”
“Because of all animals the dog is our nearest intimate we know more of his ideals and of his moral traits than of those of the other races. We know that he is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy.”
To quote Stevenson again: “To the dog of gentlemanly feeling theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The canine like the human gentleman, demands in his misdemeanours Montaigne’s ‘je ne sais quoi de genereux!’ He is never more than half ashamed of having barked or bitten, and for those faults into which he has been led by a desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains, even under physical correction, a share of pride. But to be caught lying, if he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece.” “Among dull observers the dog has been credited with modesty. It is amazing how the use of language blunts the faculties of man. That because vain glory finds no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious is amazing. If a small spoiled dog were to be endowed with speech he would prate interminably and still about himself. In a year’s time he would have gone far to weary out our love. Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs—thrilling from top to toe with excruciating vanity—scouting the streets for cause of offence—here was your talking dog.”
While an egregious, incurable snob the dog is yet the very flower of chivalry. The beggar maid of his kind is sure of as distinguished a consideration from him as is the queen of his race. Indeed he carries his gallantry to so exquisite a point of quixotism that even a female wolf is safe from his teeth. Gratitude is the keynote of his character; to its claims he will subdue even his innate snobbishness, and his devotion to the mysterious laws of his canine etiquette amount to slavishness. “In the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for ten minutes in the street some swaggering canine cavalier is to receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; and in every act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog.”
Of all persons now living I personally should most prefer to be enabled to converse freely with that high-bred, subtle-natured lady who follows me in my walks, who shares my meals and lies beside my fire. She has learned with ease to understand my speech, but I, in my gross sluggishness, have neglected to acquire her tongue, and yet how different a place this dull world would appear could I learn all she might tell me. What sights, sounds, and odours, what significances escaping my dull senses, might become open to me! A thousand times I have been aware of her pitying impatience of my slow-wittedness in matters so obvious to her keener intelligence. A whole world lies outside of my apprehension with which she is familiar, and all my life I shall suffer unappeased curiosity as to how she becomes aware of approaching changes in the weather; why a certain part of the wood is taboo. What is it that warns her of a death in my family? Why does a certain good and gentle woman fill her with loathing distrust, and what was the peculiar refinement of insult she received in her puppyhood from the family butcher, which has made it possible for her daily for six years to detect the sound of the butcher’s wheels among many others while he is still not in sight, and daily produces in her a rage of resentment that no punishment, no offer of tidbits, has ever been able to allay?
All these things I shall never know. She shares my life, but I, regretfully, protestingly, must stand almost wholly outside of hers.
When we at last seriously take up the great task of articulate communication with the animals, a new world will swim into our ken beside which the discovery of America will seem but an unimportant event. Half of the unexplained puzzles of science will be solved with ease, and whole departments of knowledge as yet undreamed of will be opened to our astonished understandings.
Perhaps by our little dumb brothers we are still compassionately reckoned as the deaf and blind giant.