Love's Meinie Part 3

[11] Incidentally suggestive sentences occur in the history of Selborne, but its author never comes to the point, in this case.

Taking Michelet's estimate--eighty French leagues, roughly two hundred and fifty miles, an hour--we have a thousand miles in four hours. That is to say, leaving Devonshire after an early breakfast, he could be in Africa to lunch.

49. He could, I say, if his flight were constant; but though there is much inconsistency in the accounts, the sum of testimony seems definite that the swallow is among the most fatiguable of birds. "When the weather is hazy," (I quote Yarrell) "they will alight on fishing-boats a league or two from land, so tired that when any one tries to catch them, they can scarcely fly from one end of the boat to the other."

I have no time to read to you the interesting evidence on this point given by Yarrell, but only that of the brother of White of Selborne, at Gibraltar. "My brother has always found," he himself writes, "that some of his birds, and particularly the swallow kind, are very sparing of their pains in crossing the Mediterranean; for when arrived at Gibraltar, they do not 'set forth their airy caravan, high over seas,'

but scout and hurry along in little detached parties of six or seven in a company; and sweeping low, just over the surface of the land and water, direct their course to the opposite continent at the narrowest pa.s.sage they can find."

50. You will observe, however, that it remains an open question whether this fear of sea may not be, in the swallow, like ours of the desert.

The commissariat department is a serious one for birds that eat a thousand flies a day when just out of the egg; and it is possible that the weariness of swallows at sea may depend much more on fasting than flying. Captain (or Admiral?) Sir Charles Wager says that "one spring-time, as he came into soundings in the English Channel, a great flock of swallows came and settled on all his rigging; every rope was covered; they hung on one another like a swarm of bees; even the decks were filled with them. They seemed almost famished and spent, and were only feathers and bone; but, being recruited with a night's rest, took their flight in the morning."

51. Now I detain you on this point somewhat, because it is intimately connected with a more important one. I told you we should learn from the swallow what a wing was. Few other birds approach him in the beauty of it, or apparent power. And yet, after all this care taken about it, he gets tired; and instead of flying, as we should do in his place, all over the world, and tasting the flavor of the midges in every marsh which the infinitude of human folly has left to breed gnats instead of growing corn,--he is of all birds, characteristically, except when he absolutely can't help it, the stayer at home; and contentedly lodges himself and his family in an old chimney, when he might be flying all over the world.

At least you would think, if he built in an English chimney this year, he would build in a French one next. But no. Michelet prettily says of him, "He is the bird of return." If you will only treat him kindly, year after year, he comes back to the same niche, and to the same hearth, for his nest.

To the same niche; and builds himself an opaque walled house within that. Think of this a little, as if you heard of it for the first time.

52. Suppose you had never seen a swallow; but that its general habit of life had been described to you, and you had been asked, how you thought such a bird would build its nest. A creature, observe, whose life is to be pa.s.sed in the air; whose beak and throat are shaped with the fineness of a net for the catching of gnats; and whose feet, in the most perfect of the species, are so feeble that it is called the Footless Swallow, and cannot stand a moment on the ground with comfort. Of all land birds, the one that has least to do with the earth; of all, the least disposed, and the least able, to stop to pick anything up. What will it build with? Gossamer, we should say,--thistledown,--anything it can catch floating, like flies.

But it builds with stiff clay.

53. And observe its chosen place for building also. You would think, by its play in the air, that not only of all birds, but of all creatures, it most delighted in s.p.a.ce and freedom. You would fancy its notion of the place for a nest would be the openest field it could find; that anything like confinement would be an agony to it; that it would almost expire of horror at the sight of a black hole.

And its favorite home is down a chimney.

54. Not for your hearth's sake, nor for your company's. Do not think it. The bird will love you if you treat it kindly; is as frank and friendly as bird can be; but it does not, more than others, seek your society. It comes to your house because in no wild wood, nor rough rock, can it find a cavity close enough to please it. It comes for the blessedness of imprisonment, and the solemnity of an unbroken and constant shadow, in the tower, or under the eaves.

Do you suppose that this is part of its necessary economy, and that a swallow could not catch flies unless it lived in a hole?

Not so. This instinct is part of its brotherhood with another race of creatures. It is given to complete a mesh in the reticulation of the orders of life.

55. I have already given you several reasons for my wish that you should retain, in cla.s.sifying birds, the now rejected order of Picae. I am going to read you a pa.s.sage from Humboldt, which shows you what difficulties one may get into for want of it.

You will find in the second volume of his personal narrative, an account of the cave of Caripe in New Andalusia, which is inhabited by entirely nocturnal birds, having the gaping mouths of the goat-sucker and the swallow, and yet feeding on fruit.

Unless, which Mr. Humboldt does not tell us, they sit under the trees outside, in the night time, and hold their mouths open, for the berries to drop into, there is not the smallest occasion for their having wide mouths, like swallows. Still less is there any need, since they are fruit eaters, for their living in a cavern 1,500 feet out of daylight.

They have only, in consequence, the trouble of carrying in the seeds to feed their young, and the floor of the cave is thus covered, by the seeds they let fall, with a growth of unfortunate pale plants, which have never seen day. Nay, they are not even content with the darkness of their cave; but build their nests in the funnels with which the roof of the grotto is pierced like a sieve; live actually in the chimney, not of a house, but of an Egyptian sepulcher! The color of this bird, of so remarkable taste in lodging, Humboldt tells us, is "of dark bluish-gray, mixed with streaks and specks of black. Large white spots, which have the form of a heart, and which are bordered with black, mark the head, the wings, and the tail. The spread of the wings, which are composed of seventeen or eighteen quill feathers, is three feet and a half. Suppressing, with Mr. Cuvier, the order of Picae, we must refer this extraordinary bird to the _Sparrows_."

56. We can only suppose that it must be, to our popular sparrows, what the swallow of the cinnamon country is to our subordinate swallow. Do you recollect the cinnamon swallows of Herodotus, who build their mud-nests in the faces of the cliffs where Dionusos was brought up, and where n.o.body can get near them; and how the cinnamon merchants fetch them joints of meat, which the unadvised birds, flying up to their nests with, instead of cinnamon,--nest and all come down together,--the original of Sindbad's valley-of-diamond story?

57. Well, Humboldt is reduced, by necessities of recent cla.s.sification, to call a bird three feet and a half across the wings, a sparrow. I have no right to laugh at him, for I am just going, myself, to call the cheerfulest and brightest of birds of the air, an owl. All these architectural and sepulchral habits, these Egyptian manners of the sand-martin, digging caves in the sand, and border-trooper's habits of the chimney swallow, living in round towers instead of open air, belonging to them as connected with the tribe of the falcons through the owls! and not only so, but with the mammalia through the bats! A swallow is an emanc.i.p.ated owl, and a glorified bat; but it never forgets its fellowship with night.

58. Its _ancient_ fellowship, I had nearly written; so natural is it to think of these similarly-minded creatures, when the feelings that both show are evidently useless to one of them, as if the inferior had changed into the higher. The doctrine of development seems at first to explain all so pleasantly, that the scream of consent with which it has been accepted by men of science, and the shriller vociferation of the public's gregarious applause, scarcely permit you the power of antagonistic reflection. I must justify to-day, in graver tone than usual, the terms in which I have hitherto spoken,--it may have been thought with less than the due respect to my audience,--of the popular theory.

59. Supposing that the octohedrons of galena, of gold, and of oxide of iron, were endowed with powers of reproduction, and perished at appointed dates of dissolution or solution, you would without any doubt have heard it by this time a.s.serted that the octohedric form, which was common to all, indicated their descent from a common progenitor; and it would have been ingeniously explained to you how the angular offspring of this eight-sided ancestor had developed themselves, by force of circ.u.mstances, into their distinct metallic perfections; how the galena had become gray and brittle under prolonged subterranean heat, and the gold yellow and ductile, as it was rolled among the pebbles of amber-colored streams.

60. By the denial to these structures of any individually reproductive energy, you are forced to accept the inexplicable (and why expect it to be otherwise than inexplicable?) fact, of the formation of a series of bodies having very similar aspects, qualities, and chemical relations to other substances, which yet have no connection whatever with each other, and are governed, in their relation with their native rocks, by entirely arbitrary laws. It has been the pride of modern chemistry to extricate herself from the vanity of the alchemist, and to admit, with resignation, the independent, though apparently fraternal, natures, of silver, of lead, of platinum,--aluminium,--pota.s.sium. Hence, a rational philosophy would deduce the probability that when the arborescence of dead crystallization rose into the radiation of the living tree, and sentient plume, the splendor of nature in her more exalted power would not be restricted to a less variety of design; and the beautiful caprice in which she gave to the silver its frost and to the opal its fire, would not be subdued under the slow influences of accident and time, when she wreathed the swan with snow, and bathed the dove in iridescence. That the infinitely more exalted powers of life must exercise more intimate influence over matter than the reckless forces of cohesion;--and that the loves and hatreds of the now conscious creatures would modify their forms into parallel beauty and degradation, we might have antic.i.p.ated by reason, and we ought long since to have known by observation. But this law of its spirit over the substance of the creature involves, necessarily, the indistinctness of its type, and the existence of inferior and of higher conditions, which whole eras of heroism and affection--whole eras of misery and misconduct,--confirm into glory, or confuse into shame. Collecting the causes of changed form, in lower creatures, by distress, or by adaptation,--by the disturbance or intensifying of the parental strength, and the native fortune--the wonder is, not that species should sometimes be confused, but that the greater number of them remain so splendidly, so manifestly, so eternally distinct; and that the vile industries and vicious curiosities of modern science, while they have robbed the fields of England of a thousand living creatures, have not created in them one.

61. But even in the paltry knowledge we have obtained, what unanimity have we?--what security? Suppose any man of ordinary sense, knowing the value of time, and the relative importance of subjects of thought, and that the whole scientific world was agog concerning the origin of species, desired to know first of all--what was meant by a species.

He would naturally look for the definition of species first among the higher animals, and expect it to be best defined in those which were best known. And being referred for satisfaction to the 226th page of the first volume of Mr. Darwin's "Descent of Man," he would find this pa.s.sage:--

"Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity among capable judges, whether he should be cla.s.sed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Aga.s.siz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawford), or as sixty-three according to Burke."

And in the meantime, while your men of science are thus vacillating, in the definition of the species of the only animal they have the opportunity of studying inside and out, between one and sixty-three; and disputing about the origin, in past ages, of what they cannot define in the present ones; and deciphering the filthy heraldries which record the relation of humanity to the ascidian and the crocodile, you have ceased utterly to distinguish between the two species of man, evermore separate by infinite separation: of whom the one, capable of loyalty and of love, can at least conceive spiritual natures which have no taint from their own, and leave behind them, diffused among thousands on earth, the happiness they never hoped, for themselves, in the skies; and the other, capable only of avarice, hatred, and shame, who in their lives are the companions of the swine, and leave in death nothing but food for the worm and the vulture.

62. Now I have first traced for you the relations of the creature we are examining to those beneath it and above, to the bat and to the falcon. But you will find that it has still others to entirely another world. As you watch it glance and skim over the surface of the waters, has it never struck you what relation it bears to the creatures that glance and glide _under_ their surface? Fly-catchers, some of them, also,--fly-catchers in the same manner, with wide mouth; while in motion the bird almost exactly combines the dart of the trout with the dash of the dolphin, to the rounded forehead and projecting muzzle of which its own bullet head and bill exactly correspond. In its plunge, if you watch it bathing, you may see it dip its breast just as much under the water as a porpoise shows its back above. You can only rightly describe the bird by the resemblances, and images of what it seems to have changed from,--then adding the fantastic and beautiful contrast of the unimaginable change. It is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves the morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender domestication of a trout.

63. And yet be a.s.sured, as it cannot have been all these creatures, so it has never, in truth, been any of them. The transformations believed in by the mythologists are at least spiritually true; you cannot too carefully trace or too accurately consider them. But the transformations believed in by the anatomist are as yet proved true in no single instance, and in no substance, spiritual or material; and I cannot too often, or too earnestly, urge you not to waste your time in guessing what animals may once have been, while you remain in nearly total ignorance of what they are.

64. Do you even know distinctly from each other,--(for that is the real naturalist's business; instead of confounding them with each other),--do you know distinctly the five great species of this familiar bird?--the swallow, the house-martin, the sand-martin, the swift, and the Alpine swift?--or can you so much as answer the first question which would suggest itself to any careful observer of the form of its most familiar species,--yet which I do not find proposed, far less answered, in any scientific book,--namely, why a swallow has a swallow-tail?

It is true that the tail feathers in many birds appear to be entirely,--even c.u.mbrously, decorative; as in the peac.o.c.k, and birds of paradise. But I am confident that it is not so in the swallow, and that the forked tail, so defined in form and strong in plume, has indeed important functions in guiding the flight; yet notice how surrounded one is on all sides with pitfalls for the theorists. The forked tail reminds you at once of a fish's; and yet, the action of the two creatures is wholly contrary. A fish lashes himself forward with his tail, and steers with his fins; a swallow lashes himself forward with his fins, and steers with his tail; partly, not necessarily, because in the most dashing of the swallows, the swift, the fork of the tail is the least developed. And I never watch the bird for a moment without finding myself in some fresh puzzle out of which there is no clue in the scientific books. I want to know, for instance, how the bird turns.

What does it do with one wing, what with the other? Fancy the pace that has to be stopped; the force of bridle-hand put out in an instant.

Fancy how the wings must bend with the strain; what need there must be for the perfect aid and work of every feather in them. There is a problem for you, students of mechanics,--How does a swallow turn?

You shall see, at all events, to begin with, to-day, how it gets along.

65. I say you shall see; but indeed you have often seen, and felt,--at least with your hands, if not with your shoulders,--when you chanced to be holding the sheet of a sail.

I have said that I never got into sc.r.a.pes by blaming people wrongly; but I often do by praising them wrongly. I never praised, without qualification, but one scientific book in my life (that I remember)--this of Dr. Pettigrew's on the Wing;[12] and now I must qualify my praise considerably, discovering, when I examined the book farther, that the good doctor had described the motion of a bird as resembling that of a kite, without ever inquiring what, in a bird, represented that somewhat important part of a kite, the string. You will, however, find the book full of important observations, and ill.u.s.trated by valuable drawings. But the point in question you must settle for yourselves, and you easily may. Some of you perhaps, knew, in your time, better than the doctor, how a kite stopped; but I do not doubt that a great many of you also know, now, what is much more to the purpose, how a ship gets along. I will take the simplest, the most natural, the most beautiful of sails,--the lateen sail of the Mediterranean.

[12] "On the Physiology of Wings." Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Vol. xxvi., Part ii. I cannot sufficiently express either my wonder or regret at the petulance in which men of science are continually tempted into immature publicity, by their rivalship with each other. Page after page of this book, which, slowly digested and taken counsel upon, might have been a n.o.ble contribution to natural history, is occupied with dispute utterly useless to the reader, on the question of the priority of the author, by some months, to a French savant, in the statement of a principle which neither has yet proved; while page after page is rendered worse than useless to the reader by the author's pa.s.sionate endeavor to contradict the ideas of unquestionably previous investigators. The problem of flight was, to all serious purpose, solved by Borelli in 1680, and the following pa.s.sage is very notable as an example of the way in which the endeavor to obscure the light of former ages too fatally dims and distorts that by which modern men of science walk, themselves. "Borelli, and all who have written since his time, are unanimous in affirming that the horizontal transference of the body of the bird is due to the perpendicular vibration of the wings, and to the yielding of the posterior or flexible margins of the wings in an upward direction, as the wings descend. I" (Dr. Pettigrew) "am, however, disposed to attribute it to the fact (1st), that _the wings_, both when elevated and depressed, _leap forwards_ in curves, those curves uniting to form a continuous waved track; (2d), _to the tendency which the body of the bird has to swing forwards_, in a more or less horizontal direction, _when once set in motion_; (3d), to the construction of the wings; they are elastic helices or screws, which twist and untwist while they vibrate, _and tend to bear upwards and onwards any weight suspended from them_; (4th), _to the action of the air on the under surfaces_ of the wings; (5th), _to the ever-varying power with which the wings are urged_, this being greatest at the beginning of the down-stroke, and least at the end of the up one; (6th), _to the contraction of the voluntary muscles_ and elastic ligaments, and to the effect produced by the various inclined surfaces formed by the wings during their oscillations; (7th), _to the weight of the bird_--weight itself, when acting upon wings, becoming a propelling power, and so contributing to horizontal motion."

I will collect these seven reasons for the forward motion, in the gist of them, which I have marked by italics, that the reader may better judge of their collective value. The bird is carried forward, according to Dr. Pettigrew--

1. Because its wings leap forward.

2. Because its body has a tendency to swing forward.

3. Because its wings are screws so constructed as to screw upwards and onwards any body suspended from them.

4. Because the air reacts on the under surfaces of the wings.

5. Because the wings are urged with ever-varying power.

6. Because the voluntary muscles contract.

7. Because the bird is heavy.

What must be the general conditions of modern science, when it is possible for a man of great experimental knowledge and practical ingenuity, to publish nonsense such as this, becoming, to all intents and purposes, insane, in the pa.s.sion of his endeavor to overthrow the statements of his rival? Had he merely taken patience to consult any elementary scholar in dynamics, he would have been enabled to understand his own machines, and develop, with credit to himself, what had been rightly judged or noticed by others.

66. I draw it rudely in outline, as it would be set for a side-wind on the boat you probably know best,--the boat of burden on the Lake of Geneva (Fig. 3), not confusing the drawing by adding the mast, which, you know, rakes a little, carrying the yard across it (_a_). Then, with your permission, I will load my boat thus, with a few casks of Vevay vintage--and, to keep them cool, we will put an awning over them, so (_b_). Next, as we are cla.s.sical scholars, instead of this rustic stern of the boat, meant only to run easily on a flat sh.o.r.e, we will give it an Attic [Greek: embolon] (_c_). (We have no business, indeed, yet, to put an [Greek: embolon] on a boat of burden, but I hope some day to see all our ships of war loaded with bread and wine, instead of artillery.) Then I shade the entire form (_c_); and, lastly, reflect it in the water (_d_)--and you have seen something like that before, besides a boat, haven't you?

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 3.]

There is the gist of the whole business for you, put in very small s.p.a.ce; with these only differences: in a boat, the air strikes the sail; in a bird, the sail strikes the air: in a boat, the force is lateral, and in a bird downwards; and it has its sail on both sides. I shall leave you to follow out the mechanical problem for yourselves, as far as the mere resolution of force is concerned. My business, as a painter, is only with the exquisite organic weapon that deals with it.