The Project Gutenberg eBook of Man and Nature, by George P. Marsh.

[58] This remark is much less applicable to fruit trees than to garden vegetables and the cerealia. The wild orange of Florida, though once considered indigenous, is now generally thought by botanists to be descended from the European orange introduced by the early colonists. The fig and the olive are found growing wild in every country where those trees are cultivated. The wild fig differs from the domesticated in its habits, its season of fructification, and its insect population, but is, I believe, not specifically distinguishable from the garden fig, though I do not know that it is reclaimable by cultivation. The wild olive, which is so abundant in the Tuscan Maremma, produces good fruit without further care, when thinned out and freed from the shade of other trees, and is particularly suited for grafting. See Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle Maremme, pp. 63-73. See Appendix, No. 12.

Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, pp. 35-38, gives, upon the authority of Link and other botanical writers, a list of the native habitats of most cereals and of many fruits, or at least of localities where these plants are said to be now found wild; but the data do not appear to rest, in general, upon very trustworthy evidence. Theoretically, there can be little doubt that all our cultivated plants are modified forms of spontaneous vegetation, but the connection is not historically shown, nor are we able to say that the originals of some domesticated vegetables may not be now extinct and unrepresented in the existing wild flora. See, on this subject, Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, i, pp. 208, 209. The following are interesting incidents: "A negro slave of the great Cortez was the first who sowed wheat in New Spain. He found three grains of it among the rice which had been brought from Spain as food for the soldiers. In the Franciscan monastery at Quito, I saw the earthen pot which contained the first wheat sown there by Friar Jodoco Rixi, of Ghent. It was preserved as a relic."

The Adams of modern botany and zoology have been put to hard shifts in finding names for the multiplied organisms which the Creator has brought before them, "to see what they would call them;" and naturalists and philosophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the laws of philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientific ideas. It is much to be wished that some bold neologist would devise English technical equivalents for the German verwildert, run-wild, and veredelt, improved by cultivation.

[59] Could the bones and other relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed by disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries be collected into large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered together those of extinct animals, they would soon form aggregations which might almost be called mountains. There were in the United States, in 1860, as we shall see hereafter, nearly one hundred and two millions of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine. There are great numbers of all the same animals in the British American Provinces, and in Mexico, and there are large herds of wild horses on the plains, and of tamed among the independent Indian tribes of North America. It would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that all those cattle may amount to two thirds as many as those of the United States, and thus we have in North America a total of 170,000,000 domestic quadrupeds belonging to species introduced by European colonization, besides dogs, cats, and other four-footed household pets and pests, also of foreign origin.

If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly destructible parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form a cubical mass measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet to the side, or a pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as the average life of these animals does not exceed six or seven years, the accumulations of their bones, horns, hoofs, and other durable remains would amount to at least fifteen times as great a volume in a single century. It is true that the actual mass of solid matter, left by the decay of dead domestic quadrupeds and permanently added to the crust of the earth, is not so great as this calculation makes it. The greatest proportion of the soft parts of domestic animals, and even of the bones, is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable; there is, nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute life immensely changes the form and character of the superficial strata, if it does not sensibly augment the quantity of the matter composing them.

The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the face of the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during the long, long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a pile as one generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the barbarous days of old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large pyramids of human skulls. The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of Europe has sometimes been raised several feet by the deposit of the dead during a few generations. In the East, Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a couple of feet beneath the surface. The grave is respected as long as the tombstone remains, but the sepultures of the ignoble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has removed, are opened again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the ground in Oriental cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, if not wholly composed of them; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of the Petit Champ des Morts at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the observer that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fellow man.

[60] It is asserted that the bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many instances, appear to have been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other stone weapons. These accounts have often been discredited, because it has been assumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it highly probable, if not certain, that this conclusion has been too hastily adopted. Lyell observes: "These stories * * must in future be more carefully inquired into, for we can scarcely doubt that the mastodon in North America lived down to a period when the mammoth coexisted with man in Europe."—Antiquity of Man, p. 354.

On page 143 of the volume just quoted, the same very distinguished writer remarks that man "no doubt played his part in hastening the era of the extinction" of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed, to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be ascribed to human action alone.

On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct organism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just idea.

[61] Evelyn thought the depasturing of grass by cattle serviceable to its growth. "The biting of cattle," he remarks, "gives a gentle loosening to the roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and sweet, and their very breath and treading as well as soil, and the comfort of their warm bodies, is wholesome and marvellously cherishing."—Terra, or Philosophical Discourse of Earth, p. 36.

In a note upon this passage, Hunter observes: "Nice farmers consider the lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a sufficient tilth for the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does certainly enrich the roots of grass; a circumstance worthy of the attention of the philosophical farmer."—Terra, same page.

The "philosophical farmer" of the present day will not adopt these opinions without some qualification.

[62] The rat and the mouse, though not voluntarily transported, are passengers by every ship that sails from Europe to a foreign port, and several species of these quadrupeds have, consequently, much extended their range and increased their numbers in modern times. From a story of Heliogabalus related by Lampridius, Hist. Aug. Scriptores, ed. Casaubon, 1690, p. 110, it would seem that mice at least were not very common in ancient Rome. Among the capricious freaks of that emperor, it is said that he undertook to investigate the statistics of the arachnoid population of the capital, and that 10,000 pounds of spiders (or spiders' webs—for aranea is equivocal) were readily collected; but when he got up a mouse show, he thought ten thousand mice a very fair number. I believe as many might almost be found in a single palace in modern Rome. Rats are not less numerous in all great cities, and in Paris, where their skins are used for gloves, and their flesh, it is whispered, in some very complex and equivocal dishes, they are caught by legions. I have read of a manufacturer who contracted to buy of the rat catchers, at a high price, all the rat skins they could furnish before a certain date, and failed, within a week, for want of capital, when the stock of peltry had run up to 600,000.

[63] Bigelow, Les États Unis en 1863, pp. 379, 380. In the same paragraph this volume states the number of animals slaughtered in the United States by butchers, in 1859, at 212,871,653. This is an error of the press. Number is confounded with value. A reference to the tables of the census shows that the animals slaughtered that year were estimated at 212,871,653 dollars; the number of head is not given. The wild horses and horned cattle of the prairies and the horses of the Indians are not included in the returns.

[64] Of this total number, 2,240,000, or nearly nine per cent., are reported as working oxen. This would strike European, and especially English agriculturists, as a large proportion; but it is explained by the difference between a new country and an old, in the conditions which determine the employment of animal labor. Oxen are very generally used in the United States and Canada for hauling timber and firewood through and from the forests; for ploughing in ground still full of rocks, stumps, and roots; for breaking up the new soil of the prairies with its strong matting of native grasses, and for the transportation of heavy loads over the rough roads of the interior. In all these cases, the frequent obstructions to the passage of the timber, the plough, and the sled or cart, are a source of constant danger to the animals, the vehicles, and the harness, and the slow and steady step of the ox is attended with much less risk than the swift and sudden movements of the impatient horse. It is surprising to see the sagacity with which the dull and clumsy ox—hampered as he is by the rigid yoke, the most absurd implement of draught ever contrived by man—picks his way, when once trained to forest work, among rocks and roots, and even climbs over fallen trees, not only moving safely, but drawing timber over ground wholly impracticable for the light and agile horse.

Cows, so constantly employed for draught in Italy, are never yoked or otherwise used for labor in America, except in the Slave States.

[65] "About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, and for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of buffalo upon it. Their number was variously estimated by the members of the party; by some as high as half a million. I do not think it any exaggeration to set it down at 200,000."—Stevens's Narrative and Final Report. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific, vol. xii, book i, 1860.

The next day, the party fell in with a "buffalo trail," where at least 100,000 were thought to have crossed a slough.

[66] The most zealous and successful New England hunter of whom I have any personal knowledge, and who continued to indulge his favorite passion much beyond the age which generally terminates exploits in woodcraft, lamented on his deathbed that he had not lived long enough to carry up the record of his slaughtered deer to the number of one thousand, which he had fixed as the limit of his ambition. He was able to handle the rifle, for sixty years, at a period when the game was still nearly as abundant as ever, but had killed only nine hundred and sixty of these quadrupeds, of all species. The exploits of this Nimrod have been far exceeded by prairie hunters, but I doubt whether, in the originally wooded territory of the Union, any single marksman has brought down a larger number.

[67] Erdkunde, viii. Asien, 1ste Abtheilung, pp. 660, 758.

[68] See chapter iii, post; also Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, i, p. 71. From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or auerochs, found among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient Switzerland, and from other circumstances, it is inferred that this animal had been domesticated by that people; and it is stated, I know not upon what authority, in Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia, that it had been tamed by the Veneti also. See Lyell, Antiquity of Man, pp. 24, 25, and the last-named work, p. 489. This is a fact of much interest, because it is, I believe, the only known instance of the extinction of a domestic quadruped, and the extreme improbability of such an event gives some countenance to the theory of the identity of the domestic ox with, and its descent from, the urus.

[69] In maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the countries named in the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid too much weight on the frequent occurrence of representations of this animal in sculptures apparently of a historical character. It will not do to argue, twenty centuries hence, that the lion and the unicorn were common in Great Britain in Queen Victoria's time, because they are often seen "fighting for the crown" in the carvings and paintings of that period.

[70]

Dar nach sloger schiere, einen wisent bat elch.
Starcher bore biere. but einen grimmen schelch.
XVI Auentiure.

The testimony of the Nibelungen-Lied is not conclusive evidence that these quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of that poem. It proves too much; for, a few lines above those just quoted, Sigfrid is said to have killed a lion, an animal which the most patriotic Teuton will hardly claim as a denizen of mediæval Germany.

[71] The wild turkey takes readily to the water, and is able to cross rivers of very considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an idea of the former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable gentleman who was among the early white settlers of the West, told me that he once counted, in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio River, within a distance of four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they landed singly, or at most in pairs, after swimming over from the Kentucky side.

[72] The wood pigeon has been observed to increase in numbers in Europe also, when pains have been taken to exterminate the hawk. The pigeons, which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole days in passing a given point, were no doubt injurious to the grain, but probably less so than is generally supposed; for they did not confine themselves exclusively to the harvests for their nourishment.

[73] Pigeons were shot near Albany, in New York, a few years ago, with green rice in their crops, which it was thought must have been growing, a very few hours before, at the distance of seven or eight hundred miles.

[74] Professor Treadwell, of Massachusetts, found that a half-grown American robin in confinement ate in one day sixty-eight earthworms, weighing together nearly once and a half as much as the bird himself, and another had previously starved upon a daily allowance of eight or ten worms, or about twenty per cent. of his own weight. The largest of these numbers appeared, so far as could be judged by watching parent birds of the same species, as they brought food to their young, to be much greater than that supplied to them when fed in the nest; for the old birds did not return with worms or insects oftener than once in ten minutes on an average. If we suppose the parents to hunt for food twelve hours in a day, and a nest to contain four young, we should have seventy-two worms, or eighteen each, as the daily supply of the brood. It is probable enough that some of the food collected by the parents may be more nutritious than the earthworms, and consequently that a smaller quantity sufficed for the young in the nest than when reared under artificial conditions.

The supply required by growing birds is not the measure of their wants after they have arrived at maturity, and it is not by any means certain that great muscular exertion always increases the demand for nourishment, either in the lower animals or in man. The members of the English Alpine Club are not distinguished for appetites which would make them unwelcome guests to Swiss landlords, and I think every man who has had the personal charge of field or railway hands, must have observed that laborers who spare their strength the least are not the most valiant trencher champions. During the period when imprisonment for debt was permitted in New England, persons confined in country jails had no specific allowance, and they were commonly fed without stint. I have often inquired concerning their diet, and been assured by the jailers that their prisoners, who were not provided with work or other means of exercise, consumed a considerably larger supply of food than common out-door laborers.

[75] I hope Michelet has good authority for this statement, but I am unable to confirm it.

[76] Apropos of the sparrow—a single pair of which, according to Michelet, p. 315, carries to the nest four thousand and three hundred caterpillars or coleoptera in a week—I take from the Record, an English religious newspaper, of December 15, 1862, the following article communicated to a country paper by a person who signs himself "A real friend to the farmer:"

"Crawley Sparrow Club.—The annual dinner took place at the George Inn on Wednesday last. The first prize was awarded to Mr. I. Redford, Worth, having destroyed within the last year 1,467. Mr. Heayman took the second with 1,448 destroyed. Mr. Stone, third, with 982 affixed. Total destroyed, 11,944. Old birds, 8,663; young ditto, 722; eggs, 2,556."

This trio of valiant fowlers, and their less fortunate—or rather less unfortunate, but not therefore less guilty—associates, have rescued by their prowess, it may be, a score of pecks of grain from being devoured by the voracious sparrow, but every one of the twelve thousand hatched and unhatched birds, thus sacrificed to puerile vanity and ignorant prejudice, would have saved his bushel of wheat by preying upon insects that destroy the grain. Mr. Redford, Mr. Heayman, and Mr. Stone ought to contribute the value of the bread they have wasted to the fund for the benefit of the Lancashire weavers; and it is to be hoped that the next Byron will satirize the sparrowcide as severely as the first did the prince of anglers, Walton, in the well known lines:

"The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it."

[77] Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane, p. 143. The country about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers who watch from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down in to the nets by throwing stones over them. See Appendix, No. 14.

Tschudi has collected in his little work, Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der Vögel, many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, and the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the burrows of the mole are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square miles under water.—Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, 1re sémestre, p. 150. See also Vogt, Nützliche u. schädliche Thiere.

[78] Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits. The extension of particular branches of agriculture introduces new birds; but unless in the case of such changes in physical conditions, particular species seem indissolubly attached to particular localities. The migrating tribes follow almost undeviatingly the same precise line of flight in their annual journeys, and establish themselves in the same breeding places from year to year. The stork is a strong-winged bird and roves far for food, but very rarely establishes new colonies. He is common in Holland, but unknown in England. Not above five or six pairs of storks commonly breed in the suburbs of Constantinople along the European shore of the narrow Bosphorus, while—much to the satisfaction of the Moslems, who are justly proud of the marked partiality of so orthodox a bird—dozens of chimneys of the true believers on the Asiatic side are crowned with his nests. See App. No. 15.

[79] It is not the unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed to destruction by severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and strong-winged tribes are killed by hail. Severe winters are usually followed by a sensible diminution in the numbers of the non-migrating birds, and a cold storm in summer often proves fatal to the more delicate species. On the 10th of June, 184-, five or six inches of snow fell in Northern Vermont. The next morning I found a humming bird killed by the cold, and hanging by its claws just below a loose clapboard on the wall of a small wooden building where it had sought shelter.

[80] Lyell, Antiquity of Man, p. 409, observes: "Of birds it is estimated that the number of those which die every year equals the aggregate number by which the species to which they respectively belong is, on the average, permanently represented."

A remarkable instance of the influence of new circumstances upon birds was observed upon the establishment of a lighthouse on Cape Cod some years since. The morning after the lamps were lighted for the first time, more than a hundred dead birds of several different species, chiefly water fowl, were found at the foot of the tower. They had been killed in the course of the night by flying against the thick glass or grating of the lantern. See Appendix, No. 16.

Migrating birds, whether for greater security from eagles, hawks, and other enemies, or for some unknown reason, perform a great part of their annual journeys by night; and it is observed in the Alps that they follow the high roads in their passage across the mountains. This is partly because the food in search of which they must sometimes descend is principally found near the roads. It is, however, not altogether for the sake of consorting with man, or of profiting by his labors, that their line of flight conforms to the paths he has traced, but rather because the great roads are carried through the natural depressions in the chain, and hence the birds can cross the summit by these routes without rising to a height where at the seasons of migration the cold would be excessive.

The instinct which guides migratory birds in their course is not in all cases infallible, and it seems to be confounded by changes in the condition of the surface. I am familiar with a village in New England, at the junction of two valleys, each drained by a mill stream, where the flocks of wild geese which formerly passed, every spring and autumn, were very frequently lost, as it was popularly phrased, and I have often heard their screams in the night as they flew wildly about in perplexity as to the proper course. Perhaps the village lights embarrassed them, or perhaps the constant changes in the face of the country, from the clearings then going on, introduced into the landscape features not according with the ideal map handed down in the anserine family, and thus deranged its traditional geography.

[81] The cappercailzie, or tjäder, as he is called in Sweden, is a bird of singular habits, and seems to want some of the protective instincts which secure most other wild birds from destruction. The younger Læstadius frequently notices the tjäder, in his very remarkable account of the Swedish Laplanders—a work wholly unsurpassed as a genial picture of semi-barbarian life, and not inferior in minuteness of detail to Schlatter's description of the manners of the Nogai Tartars, or even to Lane's admirable and exhaustive work on the Modern Egyptians. The tjäder, though not a bird of passage, is migratory, or rather wandering in domicile, and appears to undertake very purposeless and absurd journeys. "When he flits," says Læstadius, "he follows a straight course, and sometimes pursues it quite out of the country. It is said that, in foggy weather, he sometimes flies out to sea, and, when tired, falls into the water and is drowned. It is accordingly observed that, when he flies westwardly, toward the mountains, he soon comes back again; but when he takes an eastwardly course, he returns no more, and for a long time is very scarce in Lapland. From this it would seem that he turns back from the bald mountains, when he discovers that he has strayed from his proper home, the wood; but when he finds himself over the Baltic, where he cannot alight to rest and collect himself, he flies on until he is exhausted and falls into the sea."—Petrus Læstadius, Journal af första året, etc., p. 325.

[82] Die Herzogthümer Schleswig und Holstein, i, p. 203.

[83] Gulls hover about ships in port, and often far out at sea, diligently watching for the waste of the caboose. "While the four great fleets, English, French, Turkish, and Egyptian, were lying in the Bosphorus, in the summer and autumn of 1853, a young lady of my family called my attention to the fact that the gulls were far more numerous about the ships of one of the fleets than about the others. This was verified by repeated observation, and the difference was owing no doubt to the greater abundance of the refuse from the cookrooms of the naval squadron most frequented by the birds. Persons acquainted with the economy of the navies of the states in question, will be able to conjecture which fleet was most favored with these delicate attentions.

[84] Birds do not often voluntarily take passage on board ships bound for foreign countries, but I can testify to one such case. A stork, which had nested near one of the palaces on the Bosphorus, had, by some accident, injured a wing, and was unable to join his follows when they commenced their winter migration to the banks of the Nile. Before he was able to fly again, he was caught, and the flag of the nation to which the palace belonged was tied to his leg, so that he was easily identified at a considerable distance. As his wing grow stronger, he made several unsatisfactory experiments at flight, and at last, by a vigorous effort, succeeded in reaching a passing ship bound southward, and perched himself on a topsail yard. I happened to witness this movement, and observed him quietly maintaining his position as long as I could discern him with a spyglass. I suppose he finished the voyage, for he certainly did not return to the palace.

[85] The enthusiasm of naturalists is not always proportioned to the magnitude or importance of the organisms they concern themselves with. It is not recorded that Adams, who found the colossal antediluvian pachyderm in a thick-ribbed mountain of Siberian ice, ran wild over his trouvaille; but Schmidl, in describing the natural history of the caves of the Karst, speaks of an eminent entomologist as "der glückliche Entdecker," the happy discoverer of a new coleopteron, in one of those dim caverns. How various are the sources of happiness! Think of a learned German professor, the bare enumeration of whose Rath-ships and scientific Mitglied-ships fills a page, made famous in the annals of science, immortal, happy, by the discovery of a beetle! Had that imperial ennuyé, who offered a premium for the invention of a new pleasure, but read Schmidl's Höhlen des Karstes, what splendid rewards would he not have heaped upon Kirby and Spence!

[86] I believe there is no foundation for the supposition that earthworms attack the tuber of the potato. Some of them, especially one or two species employed by anglers as bait, if natives of the woods, are at least rare in shaded grounds, but multiply very rapidly after the soil is brought under cultivation. Forty or fifty years ago they were so scarce in the newer parts of New England, that the rustic fishermen of every village kept secret the few places where they were to be found in their neighborhood, as a professional mystery, but at present one can hardly turn over a shovelful of rich moist soil anywhere, without unearthing several of them. A very intelligent lady, born in the woods of Northern New England, told me that, in her childhood, these worms were almost unknown in that region, though anxiously sought for by the anglers, but that they increased as the country was cleared, and at last became so numerous in some places, that the water of springs, and even of shallow wells, which had formerly been excellent, was rendered undrinkable by the quantity of dead worms that fell into them. The increase of the robin and other small birds which follow the settler when he has prepared a suitable home for them, at last checked the excessive multiplication of the worms, and abated the nuisance.

[87] I have already remarked that the remains of extant animals are rarely, if ever, gathered in sufficient quantities to possess any geographical importance by their mere mass; but the decayed exuviæ of even the smaller and humbler forms of life are sometimes abundant enough to exercise a perceptible influence on soil and atmosphere. "The plain of Cumana," says Humboldt, "presents a remarkable phenomenon, after heavy rains. The moistened earth, when heated by the rays of the sun, diffuses the musky odor common in the torrid zone to animals of very different classes, to the jaguar, the small species of tiger cat, the cabiaï, the gallinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, and the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations, the vehicles of this aroma, appear to be disengaged in proportion as the soil, which contains the remains of an innumerable multitude of reptiles, worms, and insects, begins to be impregnated with water. Wherever we stir the earth, we are struck with the mass of organic substances which in turn are developed and become transformed or decomposed. Nature in these climes seems more active, more prolific, and so to speak, more prodigal of life."

[88] It is remarkable that Palissy, to whose great merits as an acute observer I am happy to have frequent occasion to bear testimony, had noticed that vegetation was necessary to maintain the purity of water in artificial reservoirs, though he mistook the rationale of its influence, which he ascribed to the elemental "salt" supposed by him to play an important part in all the operations of nature. In his treatise upon Waters and Fountains, p. 174, of the reprint of 1844, he says: "And in special, thou shalt note one point, the which is understood of few: that is to say, that the leaves of the trees which fall upon the parterre, and the herbs growing beneath, and singularly the fruits, if any there be upon the trees, being decayed, the waters of the parterre shall draw unto them the salt of the said fruits, leaves, and herbs, the which shall greatly better the water of thy fountains, and hinder the putrefaction thereof."

[89] Between the years 1851 and 1853, both inclusive, the United States exported 2,665,857 pounds of beeswax, besides a considerable quantity employed in the manufacture of candles for exportation. This is an average of more than 330,000 pounds per year. The census of 1850 gave the total production of wax and honey for that year at 14,853,128 pounds. In 1860, it amounted to 26,370,813 pounds, the increase being partly due to the introduction of improved races of bees from Italy and Switzerland.—BIGELOW, Les États Unis en 1863, p. 376.

[90] A few years ago, a laborer, employed at a North American port in discharging a cargo of hides from the opposite extremity of the continent, was fatally poisoned by the bite or the sting of an unknown insect, which ran out from a hide he was handling.

[91] In many insects, some of the stages of life regularly continue for several years, and they may, under peculiar circumstances, be almost indefinitely prolonged. Dr. Dwight mentions the following remarkable case of this sort, which may be new to many readers: "While I was here [at Williamstown, Mass.], Dr. Fitch showed me an insect, about an inch in length, of a brown color tinged with orange, with two antennæ, not unlike a rosebug. This insect came out of a tea table, made of the boards of an apple tree." Dr. Dwight examined the table, and found the "cavity whence the insect had emerged into the light," to be "about two inches in length, nearly horizontal, and inclining upward very little, except at the mouth. Between the hole, and the outside of the leaf of the table, there were forty grains of the wood." It was supposed that the sawyer and the cabinet maker must have removed at least thirteen grains more, and the table had been in the possession of its proprietor for twenty years.

[92] It does not appear to be quite settled whether the termites of France are indigenous or imported. See Quatrefages, Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste, ii, pp. 400, 542, 543.

[93] I have seen the larva of the dragon fly in an aquarium, bite off the head of a young fish as long as itself.

[94] Insects and fish—which prey upon and feed each other—are the only forms of animal life that are numerous in the native woods, and their range is, of course, limited by the extent of the waters. The great abundance of the trout, and of other more or less allied genera in the lakes of Lapland, seems to be due to the supply of food provided for them by the swarms of insects which in the larva state inhabit the waters, or, in other stages of their life, are accidentally swept into them. All travellers in the north of Europe speak of the gnat and the mosquito as very serious drawbacks upon the enjoyments of the summer tourist, who visits the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to see the midnight sun, and the brothers Læstadius regard them as one of the great plagues of sub-Arctic life. "The persecutions of these insects," says Lars Levi Læstadius [Culex pipiens, Culex reptans, and Culex pulicaris], "leave not a moment's peace, by day or night, to any living creature. Not only man, but cattle, and even birds and wild beasts, suffer intolerably from their bite." He adds in a note, "I will not affirm that they have ever devoured a living man, but many young cattle, such as lambs and calves, have been worried out of their lives by them. All the people of Lapland declare that young birds are killed by them, and this is not improbable, for birds are scarce after seasons when the midge, the gnat, and the mosquito are numerous."—Om Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, p. 50.

Petrus Læstadius makes similar statements in his Journal för första året, p. 285.

[95] It is very questionable whether there is any foundation for the popular belief in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake, and careful experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the supposed enmity is wholly imaginary. Observing that the starlings, stornelli, which bred in an old tower in Piedmont, carried something from their nests and dropped it upon the ground, about as often as they brought food to their young, I watched their proceedings, and found every day lying near the tower numbers of dead or dying slowworms, and, in a few cases, small lizards, which had, in every instance, lost about two inches of the tail. This part I believe the starlings gave to their nestlings, and threw away the remainder.

[96] Russell denies the existence of poisonous snakes in Northern Syria, and states that the last instance of death known to have occurred from the bite of a serpent near Aleppo took place a hundred years before his time. In Palestine, the climate, the thinness of population, the multitude of insects and of lizards, all circumstances, in fact, seem very favorable to the multiplication of serpents, but the venomous species, at least, are extremely rare, if at all known, in that country. I have, however, been assured by persons very familiar with Mount Lebanon, that cases of poisoning from the bite of snakes had occurred within a few years, near Hasbeiyeh, and at other places on the southern declivities of Lebanon and Hermon. In Egypt, on the other hand, the cobra, the asp, and the cerastes are as numerous as ever, and are much dreaded by all the natives, except the professional snake charmers. See Appendix, No. 18.

[97] I use whale not in a technical sense, but as a generic term for all the large inhabitants of the sea popularly grouped under that name.

[98] From the narrative of Ohther, introduced by King Alfred into his translation of Orosius, it is clear that the Northmen pursued the whale fishery in the ninth century, and it appears, both from the poem called The Whale, in the Codex Exoniensis, and from the dialogue with the fisherman in the Colloquies of Aelfric, that the Anglo-Saxons followed this dangerous chase at a period not much later. I am not aware of any evidence to show that any of the Latin nations engaged in this fishery until a century or two afterward, though it may not be easy to disprove their earlier participation in it. In mediæval literature, Latin and Romance, very frequent mention is made of a species of vessel called in Latin, baleneria, balenerium, balenerius, balaneria, etc.; in Catalan, balener; in French, balenier; all of which words occur in many other forms. The most obvious etymology of these words would suggest the meaning, whaler, baleinier; but some have supposed that the name was descriptive of the great size of the ships, and others have referred it to a different root. From the fourteenth century, the word occurs oftener, perhaps, in old Catalan, than in any other language; but Capmany does not notice the whale fishery as one of the maritime pursuits of the very enterprising Catalan people, nor do I find any of the products of the whale mentioned in the old Catalan tariffs. The whalebone of the mediæval writers, which is described as very white, is doubtless the ivory of the walrus or of the narwhale.