The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted to the purposes of this spider as if it had been made for her special use. But, as in all such cases, the soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it. It is radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast—the soil for canons and the rectangular watercourses, and for the trap-door spider. It is a tough, fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does not crumble or disintegrate; the cohesion of particles is such that sun-dried brick are easily made from it.

This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Jamaica. It belongs to the family of Mygalidae. It resembles in appearance the tarantula of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many of the same habits; but its habitation is a much more ingenious and artistic piece of workmanship than that of its European relative. The tarantula has no door to her burrow, but instead she builds about the entrance a kind of breastwork an inch high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from this fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks a deeper shaft than does our spider, but excavates it in the same way with similar tools, her fangs, and lines it with silk from her own body.

Our spider is an artist, evidently the master builder and architect of her kind. Considering her soft and pussy-like appearance—no visible drills for such rough work—one wonders how she excavates a burrow six inches or more deep in this hard adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and how she removes the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has been surprised at her work; her tools are her two fangs, the same weapons with which she seizes and dispatches her prey, and the rake or the chelicerae. To use these delicate instruments in such coarse work, says Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would to dig a pit with a surgeon's scalpel." And she carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet at a time, and drops it here and there at some distance from her nest. Her dooryard is never littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a hole the size of half an English walnut, and to remove the earth.

One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests and left them turned over, a few inches away. The next morning I found that the occupants of the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each started the construction of a new door, and had it about half finished. It seemed as if the soil on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put out a semicircular bit of its surface toward the opposite side of the orifice, each new door copying exactly the color of the ground that surrounded it, one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a light brick-red. I read somewhere of an experimenter who found a nest on a mossy bit of ground protectively colored in this way. He removed the lid and made the soil bare about. The spider made a new lid and covered it with moss like the old one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it had in the first case. This is typical of the working of the insect mind. It seems to know everything, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term "know."

On the second morning, one of the doors had attained its normal size, but not yet its normal thickness and strength. It was much more artfully concealed than the old one had been. The builder had so completely covered it with small dry twigs about the size of an ordinary pin, and had so woven these into it, standing a few of them on end, that my eye was baffled. I knew to an inch where to look for the door, and yet it seemed to have vanished. By feeling the ground over with a small stick I found a yielding place which proved to be the new unfinished door. Day after day the door grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked at it on the under side, adding new layers of silk. There is always a layer of the soil worked into the door to give it weight and strength.

Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without food. The young, according to Fabre, go seven months without eating. They do not grow, but they are very active; they expend energy without any apparent means of keeping up the supply. How do they do it? They absorb it directly from the sun, Fabre thinks, which means that here is an animal between which and the organic world the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which can take at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of life. If this is true, and it seems to be so, it is most extraordinary.

In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I have been considering, it is interesting to remember that one difference between the insect world and the world of animal life to which we belong, which Maeterlinck has forgotten to point out, is this:

In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female plays a secondary part. In the insect world the reverse is true. Here the female is supreme and often eats up the male after she has been fertilized by him. Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood the secondary. It is the female mosquito that torments the world. It is the female spider that spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft, and power go with the female. The female spider eats up the male after he has served her purpose; her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours the male in the same way. Among our wild bees it is the queen alone that survives the winter and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on the window-pane are females. With the honey bees the males are big and loud, but are without any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed by the female as is the male spider. The queen bee does not eat her mate, but she disembowels him. The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In the vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey that the female is the larger and bolder; the care of the young devolves largely upon her. Yes, there is another exception: Among the fishes, the females are, as a rule, larger than the males; the immense number of eggs which they carry brings this about.

There are always exceptions to this dominance of the female in the insect world. We cannot corner Nature and keep her cornered. She would not be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the male that dominates; the female is a little soft, wingless worm on the ground, always in the larval state.

In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant. Behold the showy catkins of the chestnuts, the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the willows, and other trees. The stamens of most flowers are numerous and conspicuous. Our Indian corn carries its panicle of pollen high above the silken tresses which mother the future ear.

One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by a spider with her brood of young ones. I took up a large block of earth weighing ten pounds or more, and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I kept it in the house under observation for a week, hoping that at some hour of day or night the spider would come out. But she made no sign. My ingenious friend arranged the same mechanical contrivance over the door which he had used successfully before. But the latch was never lifted. Madam Spider sulked or bemoaned her fate at the bottom of her den. At the end of a week I broke open the nest and found her alone. She had evidently devoured all her little ones.

I kept two nests with a spider in each in the house for a week, and in neither case did the occupant ever leave its nest.

Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests of their own when they are about half-grown. As to where they stay, or how they live up to that time, I have no clue. The young we found in several nests were very small, not more than an eighth of an inch long. Of the size and appearance of the male spider, and where he keeps himself, I could get no clue.

One morning I went with my guide down to the spider territory, and saw him try to entice or force a spider out of her den. The morning previous he had beguiled several of them to come up to the opening by thrusting a straw down the burrow and teasing them with it till in self-defense they seized it with their fangs and hung on to it till he drew them to the surface. But this morning the trick would not work. Not one spider would keep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at the end in the shape of a hook, he finally lifted one out upon the ground. How bright and clean and untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of the thorax were as black as jet and shone as if they had just been polished. No lady in her parlor could have been freer from any touch of soil or earth-stain than was she. On the ground, in the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost. We turned her around and tried to induce her to enter the nest again; but over and over she ran across the open door without heeding it. In the novel situation in which she suddenly found herself, all her wits deserted her, and not till I took her between my thumb and finger and thrust her abdomen into the hole, did she come to herself. The touch of that silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and she backed quickly into it and disappeared.

Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider has I do not know. I never saw a nest that had been broken into or in any way disturbed, except those which we had disturbed in our observations.

IV. THE DESERT NOTE

I often wonder what mood of Nature this world of cacti which we run against in the great Southwest expresses. Certainly something savage and merciless. To stab and stab again suits her humor. How well she tempers her daggers and bayonets! How hard and smooth and sharp they are! How they contrast with the thick, succulent stalks and leaves which bear them! It is a desert mood; heat and drought appear to be the exciting causes. The scarcity of water seems to stimulate Nature to store up water in vegetable tissues, just as it stimulates men to build great dams and reservoirs. These giant cacti are reservoirs of water. But why spines and prickles and cruel bayonets? They certainly cannot be for protection or defense; the grass and other vegetation upon which the grazing animals feed are not armed with spines.

If the cacti were created that grazing animals in the desert might have something to feed upon, as our fathers' way of looking at things might lead us to believe, why was that benevolent plan frustrated by the armor of needles and spines?

Nature reaches her hungry and thirsty creatures this broad, mittened hand like a cruel joke. It smites like a serpent and stings like a scorpion. The strange, many-colored, fascinating desert! Beware! Agonies are one of her garments.

All we can say about it is that Nature has her prickly side which drought and heat aggravate. In the North our thistles and thorns and spines are a milder expression of this mood. The spines on the blackberry-bush tend against its propagation for the same reason. Among our wild gooseberries, there are smooth and prickly varieties, and one succeeds about as well as the other. Apple-and pear-trees in rough or barren places that have a severe struggle for life, often develop sharp, thorny branches. It is a struggle of some kind which begets something like ill-temper in vegetation—heat and drought in the desert, and browsing animals and poor soil in the temperate zones. The devil's club in Alaska is one mass of spines; why, I know not. It must just be original sin. Our raspberries have prickles on their stalks, but the large, purple-flowering variety is smooth-stemmed.

Mr. John C. Van Dyke in his work on the desert expresses the belief that thorns and spines are given to the desert plants for protection; and that if no animal were there that would eat them, they would not have these defenses. But I believe if there had never been a browsing animal in the desert the cacti would have had their thorns just the same.

Nature certainly arms her animal forms against one another. We know the quills of the porcupine are for defense, and that the skunk carries a weapon that its enemies dread, but I do not believe that any plant form is armed against any creature whose proper food it might become. Cacti carry formidable weapons in the shape of spines and thorns, but the desert conditions where they are found, heat and aridity, are no doubt their primary cause. The conditions are fierce and the living forms are fierce.

We cannot be dogmatic about Nature. From our point of view she often seems partial and inconsistent. But I would just as soon think that Nature made the adobe soil in the arid regions that the human dwellers there might have material at hand with which to construct a shelter, as that she gives spines and daggers to any of the vegetable forms to secure their safety. One may confute Mr. Van Dyke out of his own mouth. He says:

Remove the danger which threatened the extinction of a family, and immediately Nature removes the defensive armor. On the desert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn like a point of steel. Follow it from the desert to the high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing.

But are they not just as much exposed to browsing animals in the high table-lands as in the desert, if not more so?

Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous about the species than about the individual. She is no more solicitous about the one than the other. The same conditions apply to all. But the species are numerous; a dozen units may be devoured while a thousand remain. A general will sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will sacrifice one man to save ten, but Nature's ways are entirely different. Both contending armies are hers, and she is equally solicitous about both. She wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the desert animals to survive, and she favors both equally. All she asks of them is that they breed and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according to Van Dyke, Nature has taken such pains to protect her desert plants, he yet confesses that, although it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla—fruit, stem, and trunk—though it bristle with spines that will draw blood from the human hand at the slightest touch."

This question of spines and thorns in vegetation is a baffling one because Nature's ways are so unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly in his theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded upon the idea that Nature selects as man selects. You cannot put Nature into a formula.

Behold how every branch and twig of our red thorn bristles with cruel daggers! But if they are designed to keep away bird or beast from eating its fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own ends! If no creature ate its little red apples and thus scattered its seeds, the fruit would rot on the ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red thorns would not increase. And increase alone is Nature's end.

It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the animal kingdom is full of design. Every part and organ of our bodies has its purpose which serves the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any character of bird or beast, fish or insect, that does not show purpose, but in the plant world Nature seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not work on so economical a plan. What purpose do the spines on the prickly ash serve? or on the thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering raspberry has no prickles, and thrives as well as any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry do not save them from browsing cattle, nor their fruit from the birds. In fact, as I have said, the service of the birds is needed to sow their seeds. The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so encased in a spiny armor; but what purpose the armor serves is a mystery. We know that hard conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns on seedling pear-trees and plum-trees, but we cannot know why.

The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant, or American aloe (Agave americana), are thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them. They are no more edible than cordwood or hemp ropes. This fact alone settles the defense question about spines.

V. SEA-DOGS

There is a bit of live natural history out here in the sea in front of me that is new and interesting. A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have their rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the breakers, and keep together there week after week. To the naked eye they seem like a group of children sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed by the waves that sweep over them. Their heads and shoulders seem to show above the water, and they appear to be having a happy time.

Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall of green-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea, until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs or hounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when it has a half-muffled, smothered sound.

They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, and there seems something incongruous in their being at home there in the cold briny deep—badgers or marmots that burrow in the waves, wolves or coyotes that hunt their prey in the sea.

Their progenitors were once land animals, but Darwinism does not tell us what they were. The whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents. The origin of any new species is shrouded in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and the short span of human life, or of the whole human history, gives us no adequate vantage-ground from which to solve the problem.

I can easily believe that these hair seals are close akin to the dog. They have five digits; they bolt their food like dogs; their sense of smell is said to be very acute, though how it could serve them in the sea does not appear. The young are born upon the land and enter the water very reluctantly.

This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence of the dog and attaches itself to its master as does the dog. Its sense of direction and locality is very acute. This group of seals in front of me, day after day, and week after week, returns to the same spot in the ever-changing waters, without the variation of a single yard, so far as I can see. The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst, and it seems as if some sixth sense must guide them to it. Locality is as unreal in the sea as in the sky, but these few square yards of shifting waters seem as real to these seals as if they were a granite ledge. They keep massed there on the water at that particular point, with their flippers protruding above the surface, as if they were as free from danger as so many picnickers. Yet something attracts them to this particular place. I know of no other spot along the coast for a hundred miles or more where the seals congregate as they do here. What is the secret of it? Evidently it is a question of security from their enemies. At this point the waves break much farther out than usual, which indicates a hidden reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallow water. This would prevent their enemies, sharks and killer whales, from stealing up beneath them and pulling them down. I do not hear their barking in the early part of the night, but long before morning their half-muffled baying begins. Old fishermen tell me that they retire for the night to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards or more out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp also afford them some protection from their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them on account of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunity offers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning, I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on the unstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at short intervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my youth.



X

A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES

I. NATURE'S WIRELESS

The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems to give us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What one knows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as if they drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something like community of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual process, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but an impulse.

So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board in the hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. The members act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens to the queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to know it at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated. The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and cooeperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part without scheme or direction.

This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these little creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or to commit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat in Norway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straight toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. When the coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course. Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annual migration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In the flocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vast armies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in our youth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. They came in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed in the same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders were as intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all our flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or of blackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the air with astonishing precision.

In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct is strong, I have seen a flock of white ibises waltzing about the sky, going through various intricate movements, with the precision of dancers in a ballroom quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance whatever. Let a body of men try it under the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and the tumbling over one another! At one moment the birds would wheel so as to bring their backs in shadow, and then would flash out the white of their breasts and under parts. It was like the opening and shutting of a giant hand, or the alternate rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock. When a hawk pursues a bird, the birds tack and turn as if linked together. When one robin dashes off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their movements exactly coincide! The hawk-hunted bird often escapes by reaching the cover of a tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer, as a rabbit or a squirrel will dodge a dog. Schools of fish act with the same machine-like unity.

In the South, I have seen a large area of water, acres in extent, uniformly agitated by a school of mullets apparently feeding upon some infusoria on the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given signal, the fish would dive and the rippling cease. It showed a unity of action as of ten thousand spindles controlled by electricity.

How quickly the emotion of fear is communicated among the wild animals! How wild and alarmed the deer become after the opening of the first day of the shooting season. Those who have not seen or heard a hunter seem to feel the impending danger.

The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the monarch) illustrate the same law. In the fall they are all seized with this impulse to go South and thousands of them march in one body. At night they roost in the trees. I have seen photographs of them in which they appeared like a new kind of colored foliage covering the trees. In the return flight in the spring, the same massing again occurs. Recently the Imperial Valley in California was invaded by a vast army of worms moving from east to west. In countries that have been cursed with a plague of grasshoppers witnesses of the spectacle describe them as moving in the same way. They stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles, their crushed bodies making the rails and highways as slippery as grease would have made them. Ten million or ten billion behaving as one.

This community of mind stands the lower orders in great stead. It makes up to them in a measure for the want of reason and judgment. In what we call telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves. Telepathy is probably a survival from our earlier animal state.

II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE

Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more intelligent than honey bees:

If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will persist till they die of exhaustion or hunger in their endeavors to discover an issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side.

The flies are more intelligent than the bees because their problems of life are much more complicated; they are fraught with many more dangers; their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have very few natural enemies. There are no bee-catchers in the sense that there are scores of flycatchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the worker bees. The kingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionally snaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies; the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while, besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them. Try to catch a big blow-fly upon the window-pane and see how difficult the trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. Or try to "swat" the ordinary house-fly with your hand. See how he squares himself and plants himself as your threatening hand approaches! He is ready for a trial of speed. He seems to know that your hand is slower than he is, and he is right in most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows no fear; and to crush it is as easy as to crush a beetle.

The wit and cunning of all animals are developed by their struggle for existence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Our skunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to take thought about their own safety; Nature has done that for them.

To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity for folly so great in itself argues intelligence," which amounts to saying that the more fool you are, the more you know.

Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says,

She makes of labor an eternal lust.

Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (or better) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows and directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee.

The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend the swarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not.

It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognize one another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees from the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box, when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged in carrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to bees from other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey they have found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.

Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented upon during an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the news of her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!

Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration, and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. The secret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon this solution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not. He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem the explanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of the power of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings"; of their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says that the "extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that they are able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurring outside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hive superfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorer of the dawn,—the early bee,—like the early bird that catches the worm, returns to the hive with the news that "the lime-trees are blooming to-day on the banks of the canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay with white clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open"; "the mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with pollen." Whereupon the bees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probably call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalities proceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of the sturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousand juniors go and refresh the white clover." "They make daily calculations as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine liquid."

When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius of the hive issuing its commands," or recognizes the existence among the bees of spiritual communications that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he is true to his own conception.

The division of labor among hive bees is of course spontaneous, like all their other economies—not a matter of thought, but of instinct.

Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee make the mistake of humanizing the bee, thus making them communicate with one another as we communicate. Bees have a language, they say; they tell one another this and that; if one finds honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters, and so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is nothing analogous to verbal communication among the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the Spirit of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and cooeperate with one another as the cells of the body communicate and cooeperate in building up the various organs. The spirit of the body cooerdinates all the different organs and tissues, making a unit of the body.

If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a snail, penetrates into the hive, and dies there, the bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it lies, so that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign object in the body, such as a bullet in the lungs, or in the muscles, becomes encysted in an analogous manner, and is thus rendered harmless.

Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of its crushed body will infuriate the other bees. But crush a bee in the fields or by the bee-hunter's box which is swarming with bees, and the units from the same hive heed it not.

Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment for one another as animals have. If one of their number is wounded or disabled, they ruthlessly expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong to another world of beings that is absolutely oblivious of the world of which we form a part. They murder or expel the drones, after they have done their work of fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Their apparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are not personal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or the cult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers, working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter the kingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. These little people have no red blood, no organs of sense, as we have; they breathe and hear through their legs, their antennae.

The drones do not know the queen as such in the hive. Their instincts lead them to search for her in the air during her nuptial flight, and they know her only there. The drones have thirteen thousand eyes, while the workers have only six thousand. This double measure of the power of vision is evidently to make sure that the males discover the queen in her course through the air.

The guards that take their stand at the gate, the bees that become fans at the entrance to ventilate the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring the bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the bees that go forth to find a home for the new swarm, the sweepers and cleaners of the hive, the workers that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and crevices—all act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of the Hive.

After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as the facts will bear us out in doing, it remains to be said that he is the philosopher of the insect world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has said, Maeterlinck is the Plato of that realm. How wisely he speaks of the insect world in his latest volume, "Mountain Paths":

The insect does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise and amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There is something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its course and died demented in space.

Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as welcome as any of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp, they attract the attention of one they know who recognizes their signal by thought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when the stranger has departed." (The italics are mine.) He says the same hornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on their arrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them with the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been in camp some time."

Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? What would Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent when we remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of them lives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves the nest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her.

III. ODD OR EVEN

One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have you observed that in the inorganic world things go by even numbers, and in the organic world by odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of a bushy and swampy meadow below our camp and brought him a four-petaled flower of galium, and a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In another locality I might have brought him dwarf cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel, or the evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestive of mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with the freedom and irregularity of growing things.

One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things. Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and some eight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but the number six rules them. In the world of living things we cannot be so sure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate and incommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedly odd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that are in lobes usually have three or five lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square, and the cells of the honey bee are six-sided. We have five fingers and five toes, though only four limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged insects. In the inorganic world things attain a stable equilibrium, but in the living world the equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereotyped, hence the danger of dogmatizing about living things. Growing Nature will not be driven into a corner.

Well may Emerson ask—

Why Nature loves the number five, And why the star form she repeats?

The number five rules in all the largest floral families, as in the crowfoot family, the rose family (which embraces all our fruit trees), the geranium family, the flax family, the campanula family, the convolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then there is a large number of flowers the parts of which go in threes, one of the best known of which is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the only form I recall based on the number five.

IV. WHY AND HOW

One may always expect in living nature variations and modifications. It is useless to ask why. Nature is silent when interrogated in this way. Ask her how, and you get some results. If we ask, for instance, why the sting of the honey bee is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp and bumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth like a needle, so that they can sting and sting again, and live to sting another day, while the honey bee stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one species of fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has a powerful electric battery; or why the porcupine has an armor of quills while his brother rodent the woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on—we make no addition to our knowledge.

But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and defenseless an animal as the rabbit manages to survive and multiply, we extend our knowledge of natural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of its wakefulness—by never closing its eyes—and by its speed; also by making its home where it can command all approaches, and so flee in any direction. Or if we ask how our ruffed grouse survives and prospers in a climate where its cousin the quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of certain trees, while the quail is a ground-feeder and is often cut off by a deep fall of snow.

If we ask why the chipmunk hibernates, we get no answer; but if we ask how he does it, we find out that he stores up food in his den, hence must take a lunch between his naps. The woodchuck hibernates, also, but he stores up fuel in the shape of fat in his own body. The porcupine is above ground and active all winter. He survives by gnawing the bark of certain trees, probably the hemlock. We have two species of native mice that look much alike, the white-footed mouse and the jumping, or kangaroo, mouse. The white-foot is active the season through, over and under the snow; the jumper hibernates all winter, and apparently accomplishes the feat by the power he has of barely keeping the spark of life burning. His fires are banked, so to speak; his temperature is very low, and he breathes only at long intervals.

If, then, we ask with Emerson, "why Nature loves the number five," and "why the star form she repeats," we shall be put to it for an answer. We can only say that with living things odd numbers are more likely to prevail, and with non-living, even numbers.

Some seeds have wings and some have not. To ask why, is a blind question, but if we ask how the wingless seeds get sown, we may add to our knowledge.

In our own practical lives, in which experimentation plays such a part, we are often compelled to ask why this result and not that, why this thing behaves this way and that thing that way. We are looking for reasons or causes. The farmer asks why his planting in this field was a failure, while it was a success in the next field, and so on. An analysis of his soil or of his fertilizer and culture will give him the answer.

V. AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM

That Darwin was a great natural philosopher and a good and wise man admits of no question, but to us, at this distance, it seems strange enough that he should have thought that he had hit upon the key to the origin of species in the slow and insensible changes which he fancied species underwent during the course of the geologic ages, and should thus have used the phrase as the title of his book. Had he called his work the "Variability of Species," or the "Modification of Species," it would not have been such a misnomer. Sudden mutations give us new varieties, but not new species. In fact, of the origin of species we know absolutely nothing, no more than we do about the origin of life itself.

Of the development of species we know some of the factors that play a part, as the influence of environment, the struggle for existence, and the competitions of life. But do we not have to assume an inherent tendency to development, an original impulse as the key to evolution? Accidental conditions and circumstances modify, but do not originate species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding or hastening a species, and in its extinction, but not in its origin. The record of the rocks reveals to us the relation of species, and their succession in geologic time, but gives no hint of their origin.

Agassiz believed that every species of animal and plant was the result of a direct and separate act of the Creator. But the naturalist sees the creative energy immanent in matter. Does not one have to believe in something like this to account for the world as we see it? And to account for us also?—a universal mind or intelligence

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to the Infinite Mystery in terms of our own wills and acts. When we think of a Creator and the thing created as two, we are in trouble at once. They are one, as fire and light are one, as soul and body are one. Darwin said he could not look upon the world as the result of chance, and yet his theory of the origin of species ushers us into a chance world. But when he said, speaking of the infinite variety of living forms about us, that they "have all been produced by laws acting around us," he spoke as a great philosopher. These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blind grouping of irrational forces.

VI. A LIVE WORLD

It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive." But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a disordered mind.

Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yielding to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet from the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed the throbbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times. They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians call them, are occurring constantly.

Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, which translates this earth's movements into sound—its tremors and agitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twenty feet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpet from any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed what is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions, occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds." "The noises sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on one occasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensible earthquake.

Our apparently impassive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreams we know little of.

From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impression which again deepens my feeling of something half human about our lucky planet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself. Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is more advanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europe at the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life of Australia is much like that of Europe in the Jurassic period, while both Asia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions, which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.

VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR

That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly made a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when they were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of the jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of the strong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of their political and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of the divinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the fact that the organic world had reached its present stage of development through the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to these ideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency to development, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and that power comes only to him who exerts power—half truths, all of them.

The Germans as a people have never been born again into the light of our higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous. Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind, in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind. The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle in their ethical code. Had not they the same right to expansion and to the usurpation of the territory and to the treasures of their neighbors that every weed in the fields and even the vermin of the soil and the air have? If they had the sanction of natural law, that was enough; they were quite oblivious to the fact that with man's moral nature had come in a new biological law which Darwin was not called upon to reckon with, but which has tremendous authority and survival value—the law of right, justice, mercy, honor, love.

We do not look for the Golden Rule among swine and cattle, or among wolves and sharks; we look for it among men; we look for honor, for heroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of these things are involved in the Darwinian hypothesis. There is no such thing as right or wrong in the orders below man. These are purely human distinctions. It is not wrong for the wolf to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the grass, but an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the farthest star. Germany's assault upon the peace and prosperity of the world was a crime against the very heavens.

Darwin occupied himself only with the natural evolution of organic forms, and not with the evolution of human communities. He treated man as an animal, and fitted him into the zooelogical scheme. He removed him from the realm of the miraculous into the plane of the natural. For all purposes of biological discussion, man is an animal, but that is not saying he is only an animal, and still under the law of animal evolution. The European man is supposed to have passed the stage of savagery, in which the only rule of right is the rule of might. To have made Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is to have debased a sound natural philosophy to a selfish and ignoble end.

Germany lifted the law to the human realm and staked her all upon it, and failed. The moral sense of the world—the sense of justice, of fair play—was against her, and inevitably she went down. Her leaders were morally blind. When the rest of the world talked of moral standards, the German leaders said, "We think you are fools." But these standards brought England into the war—the sacredness of treaties. They brought the United States in. We saw a common enemy in Germany, an enemy of mankind. We sent millions of men to France for an ideal—for justice and fair play. To see our standards of right and justice ignored and trampled upon in this way was intolerable. The thought of the world being swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said to myself from the first, "The Allies have got to win; there is no alternative." And what astonishes me is that certain prominent Englishmen, such as Lord Morley, and others, did not see it. Would they have sat still and watched Germany destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel and make ready to destroy England? The very framework of our moral civilization would have been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his natural selection theory was to lead.

VIII. THE ROBIN

Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest measure, or best stands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility, adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorous feeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. From cherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is the only thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looks upon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the most diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in the fork of a trunk or on a horizontal branch, then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your porch, then on some coign of vantage about your house or barn, or under the shed, or under a bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground above a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and build there on a projecting stone. He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said he never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days.

He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if a dry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in September. He is a hustler in every sense of the word—a typical American in his enterprise and versatility. His voice is the first I hear in the morning, and the last at night. Little wonder that there are twenty robins to one bluebird, or wood thrush, or catbird. The song sparrow is probably our next most successful bird, but she is far behind the robin. We could never have a plague of song sparrows or bluebirds, but since the robins are now protected in the South as well as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a plague of robins. Since they may no longer have robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is near at hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies in New York or New England. Yet who does not cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a plebeian bird, but he adds a touch to life in the country that one would not like to miss.

The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper; he is doomed always to be a runner. Go slow he cannot; his engine is always "in high"—it starts "in high" and stops "in high."

IX. THE WEASEL

In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the red squirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The red squirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weasel would be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leave him behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both. Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men at work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them. Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it released on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-by stone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. The bloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for many yards and then had pulled it down.

Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would not have followed him, and thus make his escape—who knows? One of my neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form, that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its methods are a kind of Schrecklichkeit in the animal world. It is the incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.

X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE

We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the assumption that her methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want wool from the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If we want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quantity of milk, irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we want butter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grains and vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our object with as little waste and delay as possible.

Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in her fruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner she subordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Her one end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will be no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prize fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market.

Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that are necessary for the survival of the species—strength, speed, sharpness of eye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value.

Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but the crow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and can thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of prey wants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothing that requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasons that are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed and cunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent and unafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist's hammer. Has it no enemies in that country?

Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we assume that Nature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principle of power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. He wants some particular good—a race-horse, a draft-horse—better quality or greater quantity of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with her progeny. Only power to win in the competition of life counts with her. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. The stakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. She pits one species of plant or animal against another—heads I win, tails you lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doubles their chances; they are kept in check because certain localities are unfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species of mint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage, but poor cattle pasturage. Quack grass will run out other grass because it travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed.

XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE

We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, or by the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanical or mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping the earth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, piling up and pulling down—aggregating and accumulating, and separating and disintegrating.

It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Canon and in the Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and other aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and structure of the material determine the form. It is as if these striking forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces to liberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved were not laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like the leaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of the earth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic and suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out of them in the Grand Canon! It looks as though titanic architects and sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sand and a vast multitude of little drops of water, active through geologic ages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the material it took out of this chasm! But it could not—poetry at one end of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains—material for a new series of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Canons may be carved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, while the builders of the mountains are only ordinary workmen.



XI

RUMINATIONS

I. MAN A PART OF NATURE

This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think of as entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going its own way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the nature external to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we call nature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises its crest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a little way in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the very limited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too are things and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of.

It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves as distinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of the world in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animals are a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilization is the separating of one thing from another and classifying and organizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we are absolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to be savages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. We improve Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our own purposes. All the forces we use—wind, water, gravity, electricity—are still those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises to the top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twenty miles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighter projectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls the hammer because he greatly outweighs it.

II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH

Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every human being is composed." May we say it is like a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type is unchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death of the body the component elements—water, lime, iron, phosphorus, magnesia, and so on—remain the same, but their organization is changed. Is that all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the printed page, the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to exist independent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and then not permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matter in the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page it is a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of the brain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our minds of our neighbor or friend—his character, his personality—exists after he is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?

We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, or even of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in the same terms; our component parts are all the same; but character, personality, mentality—do not these escape your analysis? and are they not also real?

III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE

Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, so that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting Nature, he is really interpreting himself—reading his own heart and mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the perfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logical order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him his susceptibility to beauty.

It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor, and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn, the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it. We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.

The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul through the medium of the marble—the picture is not in the painter's color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in the heavens is accidental—the chair, the dipper, the harp, the huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.

All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an unfailing sequence of events we frame laws—the law of gravity, of chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity—and refer to them as if they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.

The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered—the spirit which the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no avail—and how absurd to expect them to be—but who shall say that the prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to reach one's hands for the moon.

IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES

The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are, in every age, few compared with the great number that go to the libraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation to the primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to the fountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like those forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hence cannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in the air; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it at first-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the vegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is in direct and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal life possible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through its chlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant, or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance.

The secondary men go to books and creeds and institutions for their religion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go to Nature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earth inspires them.

V. THE COSMIC HARMONY

The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which man produces or aims to produce in his work—the order and harmony that will give him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomic order and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements and circular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution are the two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for the spherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebbles round. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs one law prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends; and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparently celestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and make their rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space, which undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, as they undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new star suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from a star of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowly grows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomic accident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough, would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could it even have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to the world of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures are the exception—else there would be no living world. Organic evolution reaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its devious course. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though its course double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travels ten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters a living tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say that disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the orderly development of life.

The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worlds tend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, she diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough for her creatures, she lessens the number of mouths to be fed. A surplus of food, on the other hand, tends to multiply the mouths.

Man often introduces an element of disorder into Nature. His work in deforesting the land brings on floods and the opposite conditions of drought. He destroys the natural checks and compensations.

VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS

The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean are not merely the result of a local agitation of the waters. The pulse of the earth is in them. The pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmic than terrestrial. The earth wears her seas like a loose garment which the sun and moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to side. Only the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the heavenly influences. The great inland bodies of water are unresponsive to them—they are too small for the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not equally true that only great souls are moved by the great fundamental questions of life? What a puzzle the tides must have been to early man! What proof they afford of the cosmic forces that play upon us at all times and hold us in their net! Without the proof they afford, we should not know how we are tied to the solar system. The lazy, reluctant waters—how they follow the sun and moon, "with fluid step," as Whitman says, "round the world"! The land feels the pull also and would follow if it could. But the mobile clouds go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign. The pull of the sun and the moon is upon you and me also, but we are all unconscious of it. We are bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.

VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE

It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin and Evolution of Life," makes no account of the micro-organisms or unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. I saw in the Grand Canon of the Colorado where they were laid down horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms. Some of our polishing powders are made from these rocks. Formed of pure silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of many exquisite forms, Foraminiferae. The Pyramids are said to be built of rocks formed by these organisms. "No single group of the animal kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, "has contributed, or is at present contributing, so largely as has the Foraminiferae to the formation of the earth's crust." In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seem Professor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on the continents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the fresh waters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the "bordering primordial seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the mark. There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial living organisms. All conceivable changes of environment have passed over them, but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouring another form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologists usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latter begins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world with myriads of animal forms.

VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE

Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends." She is like ourselves, she is ourselves written large—written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of that of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less so of her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinal parts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Many trees yield fruit only every other year.

I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most. Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grasses in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts—butternuts, hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them the wage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries she offers the delectable pulp: "Do this chore for me, and you will find the service its own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and woods hold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fiery arum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries, and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with strychnine.

We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few, extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Western farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he sees his own account in it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are stingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut.



XII

NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD

As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts in Nature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again, which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in the rise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the more familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, I detect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expect to cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest in the whole performance.

I. SUNRISE

The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is the rising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of his coming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through the forest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comes very gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually become conscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowly increases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten minutes that fades into a light bluish tinge—the gold turns to silver. After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is to appear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; a minute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizon line. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites me blind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on its axis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day. The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil" to describe this moment?—"Day boils at last." Gilder, I think, speaks of it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, I watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. It is the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning. Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing the heavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usually enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down. His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.

II. NATURE'S METHODS

Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms; her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models. There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term. She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.

The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that of the animal species.

The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and, while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.

We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things. The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels; they teach us what to shun.