Concerning Animals and Other Matters Part 3

There has been another attempt to misuse and pervert this part of the face which I scarcely dare to touch upon, for it is so utterly fantastic and mystical that I fear the charge of heresy if I give words to my thoughts. It occurs among bats, a tribe of obscure creatures about which common knowledge amounts to this, that they fly about after sunset, are uncanny, and fond of getting entangled in the hair of ladies, and should be killed. But there are certain families of bats, named horseshoe bats, leaf-nosed bats and vampires about which common knowledge is _nil_, and the knowledge possessed by naturalists very little, so I will tell what I know of them. They are larger than common bats, their wings are broad, soft and silent, like those of the owl, they sleep in caves, tombs and ruins, they do not flutter in the open air, but swiftly traverse gloomy avenues and shady glades, their prey is not gnats and midges, but the "droning beetle," the death's head moth, the c.o.c.kchafer, croaking frogs, sleeping birds and _human blood_. The books will tell you that these bats are distinguished by "complicated nasal appendages consisting of foliaceous skin processes around the nostrils," which is quite true and utterly futile. It may do for a dried skin or a specimen in spirits of wine. I have had the foul fiend in a cage and looked him in the face.

His whole countenance, from lips to brow and from cheek to cheek, is covered and hidden by a hideous design of

Spells and signs, Symbolic letters, circles, lines,

sculptured in living, quivering skin. It is a sight to make the flesh creep. The books suggest that these foliaceous appendages are the organs of some special sense akin to touch. Futile again! There are things in Nature still which prompt the naturalist who has not atrophied his inner eye and starved his imagination to cry out:

Science ...

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

Supposing there should be in the unseen universe an evil spirit, an imp of malice and mischief, not Milton's Satan, but the Deil of Burns:

Whyles ranging, like a roaring lion, For prey, a' holes an' corners tryin; Whyles on the strong-winged tempest flyin, Tirlin the kirks; Whyles in the human bosom pryin,

and supposing him to crave possession of a body through which he might get into touch with this material world and express himself in outward forms and motions; then oh! how fitly were this bat explained.

But let us go back to firm ground. If you compare a dog's profile with that of a horse you will note at once that the nostrils are in advance of the lips, and have a kind of portal to themselves. This is a distinct advance. The sense of smell has come to the front and pushed aside the lower sense of touch. You will observe, too, that with the growth of the brain the brain-pan has elevated itself above the level of the nose.

Through the cat to the monkeys the process proceeds, the forehead advancing, the jaws retreating, and the nostrils leaving the lips, until they finally settle in a detached villa midway between the eyes and the mouth. This is the nose. I do not know the use of it. I cannot fathom the meaning of it. It is a solemn mystery. See the face of an orang-outang. It is a _countenance_, a signboard with three distinct lines of writing on it, the eyes, the nose and the mouth. You may not think much of this particular nose. Neither do I. I think it is situated rather too near the eyes and too far from the mouth. It is a little too small also, and wants style. But you must not judge a first attempt too critically. I have seen human noses of a pattern not unlike this, but they are not considered aristocratic: perhaps they indicate a reversion to the ancestral type.

[Ill.u.s.tration: I HAVE SEEN HUMAN NOSES OF A PATTERN NOT UNLIKE THIS, BUT THEY ARE NOT CONSIDERED ARISTOCRATIC.]

But the noses even of monkeys are not all like this. In fact, there is a good deal of variety, and two in particular have struck me as quite remarkable. One is that of the long-nosed monkey (_Semnopithecus nasalis_). I think it must have suggested Sterne's stranger on a mule, who had travelled to the promontory of noses and threw all Stra.s.sburg into a ferment. I have often contemplated this nose in mute wonderment, and longed to see that monkey in life, if so be I might arrive at some understanding of it; for the taxidermist cannot rise above his own level, and the man who would mount _S. nasalis_ would need to be a Henry Irving. Then there is the sub-nosed monkey, labelled _rhinopithecus_, of which there is an expressive specimen at the South Kensington Museum.

Who can consider that nose seriously and continue to believe in a recipe made up of struggle for existence, adaptation to environment, and natural selection _quantum suf_.? If I could dine with that monkey, ask it to drink a gla.s.s of wine with me, offer it a pinch of snuff and so on, I might come in time to feel, if not to comprehend, the import of its nose.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LONG-NOSED MONKEY.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHO CAN CONSIDER THAT NOSE SERIOUSLY?]

But one step further is required for the evolution of what we may call the human nose, and that is a solid foundation, a ridge of bone connecting it with the brow and separating the eyes from each other. I believe that the completeness of this is a fair index of the comparative advancement of different races of men. In the Greek ideal of a perfect face the profile forms a straight line from the top of the forehead to the tip of the nose. This is the type of face which painters have delighted to give to the Virgin Mary; and, when looking at their Madonnas, one cannot help wondering whether they forgot that Mary was a Jewess. According to the Hebrew ideal, a perfect nose was like "the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus" (Song of Solomon, vii.

4); but not even the ruins of that tower remain to help us to-day. The Romans, no doubt, accepted the ideal of the Greeks aesthetically, but their destiny had given them a very different nose, and they ruled the world.

Here is the nose of Julius Caesar as a coin has preserved it for us. I think that the outline is too straight for a typical Roman, but the deep dip under the brow and the downward point are characteristic. Now compare the nose of another race which rules an empire greater than that of the Caesars. Here is John Bull as _Punch_ usually represents him. It belongs to the same genus as that of the Roman. The reason why this should be the nose of command is not easy to give with scientific precision, for we are dealing with the play of very subtle influences, so the man without imagination will no doubt scoff. But I will take shelter under Darwin. Dealing with the expression of pride he says, "A proud man exhibits his sense of superiority by holding his head and body erect. He is haughty _(haut),_ or high, and makes himself appear as large as possible." Again, "The arrogant man looks down on others"; and yet again, "In some photographs of patients affected by a monomania of pride, sent me by Dr. Crichton-Browne, the head and body were held erect and the mouth firmly closed. This latter action, expressive of decision, follows, I presume, from the proud man feeling perfect self-confidence in himself."

Darwin says nothing about the nose, but I believe that, by physiological sympathy, it cannot but take part in the habitual downward look upon inferior beings. Darwin goes on to say that, "The whole expression of pride stands in direct ant.i.thesis to that of humility"; from which it follows, if my philosophy is sound, that the nose of Uriah Heep was turned upwards.

Of course, many emotions may share in the moulding of a nose, and the whole subject is too intricate and vast to be treated briefly. I have only given a few examples to ill.u.s.trate my argument, and my conclusion is that the key to the peculiar significance and personal quality of the nose is to be found in its _immobility_. The eyes and lips are incessantly in motion, we can twitch and wrinkle the cheeks and forehead, and muscles to move the ears are there, though most men have lost control of them. But the nose stands out like some bold promontory on a level coast, or like the Sphinx in the Egyptian desert, with an ancient history, no doubt, and a mystery perhaps, but without response to any appeal. And for this very reason it is an index, not to that which is transient in the man, but to that which is permanent. He may knit his brows to seem thoughtful and profound, or compress his lips to persuade his friends and himself that he has a strong will, but he can play no trick with his nose. There it stands, an incorruptible witness, testifying to what he is, and not only to what he is, but to the rock whence he was hewn and to the pit whence he was digged. For his nose is a bequest from his ancestors, an entailed estate which he cannot alienate.

V

EARS

Men and women have ears, and so have jugs and pitchers. In the latter case they are useful: jugs and pitchers are lifted by them. And what is useful is fit, and fitness is the first condition of beauty. But human ears are put to no use, except sometimes when naughty little boys are lifted by them in the way of discipline; and I can see no beauty in them. It is only because they are so common that we do not notice how ridiculous they are. In the days of Charles I. men sometimes had their ears cut off for holding wrong opinions, which would have made them famous and popular in these enlightened days, but at that time it made all right-thinking people despise them, so the fas.h.i.+on of going without ears did not spread among us. If it had, then how differently we should all think of the matter now! If we were all accustomed to neat, round heads at drawing-rooms, levees and b.a.l.l.s, how repulsive it Would be to see a well-dressed man with two ridiculous, wrinkled appendages sticking out from the sides of his face!

In saying this I am not drawing on my fancy, but on my memory. I can recollect the time when no gentleman, still less any lady, would have owned a terrier with its ears on. And why go back so far? The same sentiment is prevalent in good society with respect to men's beards in this year of grace and smooth faces. Yet, if one chance to be looking at a Rembrandt instead of at society, what an infinitely handsomer adjunct to a n.o.ble face is a fine beard than a pair of ears!

When woman first looked at her face in a polished saucepan, she was at once struck with the comicality of those things, and bethought herself what to do with them. She decided to use them for pegs to hang ornaments on. The improvement excited the admiration of her husband and the envy of her rivals to such a degree that all other women of taste in her tribe did the same, and from that day to this, in almost every country in the world, it has been accounted a shame for any respectable woman to show her face in public in the hideousness of naked ears. This discovery of its capabilities gave a new value to the ear, and a large, roomy one became an a.s.set in the marriage market. I have seen a pretty little damsel of Sind with fourteen jingling silver things hanging at regular intervals from the outside edge of each ear. If Nature had been n.i.g.g.ardly, the lobe at least could be enlarged by boring it and thrusting in a small wooden peg, then a larger one, and so on until it could hold an ivory wheel as large as a quoit, and hung down to the shoulders.

But Nature surely did not intend the ear for this purpose. Then what did she intend? A popular error is that the ears are given to hear with, but the ears cannot hear. The hearing is done by a box of a.s.sorted instruments (_malleus, incus, stapes_, etc.) hidden in a burrow which has its entrance inside of the ear. If you argue that the ears are intended to catch sounds and direct them down to the hearing instrument, then explain their absurd shape. They are useless. A man who wants to hear distinctly puts his hand to his ear. And why do they not turn to meet the sounds that come from different quarters? They are absolutely immovable, and therefore also expressionless. A savage expresses his mind with all the rest of his face; he smiles and grins and pouts and frowns, but his ears stand like gravestones with the inscriptions effaced. How different is the case when you turn from man to the "irrational" animals! The eyes of a fawn are l.u.s.trous and beautiful, but they would be as meaningless as polished stones without the eloquent ears that stand behind them and tell her thoughts. Curiosity, suspicion, alarm, anger, submission, friendliness, every emotion that flits across her quick, sensitive mind speaks through them. They are in touch with her soul, and half the music of her life is played on them. And if you abstract yourself from individuals and look at that thing, the ear, in the wide field of life, what a great, living reality it is!--a spiritual unity under infinite diversity of material form and fas.h.i.+on. It is like the telegraph wire overhead, the commonest and plainest of material things, but charged with the silent and invisible currents of the life of the world.

"Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore."

[Ill.u.s.tration: OR PERHAPS WHEN IT WANTS TO LISTEN IT RAISES A FLIPPER TO ITS EAR.]

Birds have no ears, nor have crocodiles, nor frogs, nor snakes. Ears seem to be for beasts only. And not for all beasts. Seals are divided by naturalists into two great families--those with ears, and those without.

The common seal belongs to the latter cla.s.s, and the sea-lion to the former. A common seal lives in the sea, and when it does wriggle up on the beach of an iceberg there is nothing to hear, I suppose, or perhaps when it wants to listen it raises a flipper to its ear. I never saw one doing so, but we do not see everything that happens in the world. The sea-lion, with its stouter limbs, can lift its forepart, raise its head and look about it, and even flop about the ice-fields at a respectable rate. And there is no doubt that one of these is as much above an earless seal as fifty years of Europe are better than a cycle of Cathay.

When performing seals are exhibited at a circus sitting on chairs, catching b.a.l.l.s on the points of their noses and playing diabolo with them, or balancing billiard cues on their snouts, and doing other miraculous things, they are always sea-lions, not common seals. Of course, I do not mean to insinuate that sea-lions invented the ear and stuck it on: that would be unscientific; but I mean that their general intelligence and interest in affairs created that demand for more distinct hearing which led to the development of an ear trumpet. This view is wholly scientific, though pedants may quarrel with my way of putting it.

The sea-lion's ears are very minute, mere apologies one might think; but don't be hasty. The finny prey of the sea-lion makes no sound as it skims through the water; and perhaps the padded foot of that stealthy garrotter, the Polar bear, makes as little on the smooth ice; for catching the one and not being caught by the other the sea-lion must trust to the keenness of its great goggle eyes. But it is a social beast, and it wants to catch the bellowing of its fellows far across the foggy waste of ice-floes; and that little leather scoop standing behind the ear-hole seems to be just the instrument required to catch and send down those sounds which would otherwise glance off the glossy fur and never find entrance to the tiny orifice at all. If it were any larger than is absolutely necessary it would be a serious impediment to a professional diver and swimmer like the sea-lion. This is the reason why otters have very small ears, and why whales and porpoises have none at all.

But when a beast lives on land the conditions are all altered, and then the ear blossoms out into an infinite variety of forms and sizes, from each of which the true naturalist may divine the manner of life of its wearer as surely as the palmist tells your past, present and future from the lines on your hand. First, he will divide all beasts into those that pursue and those that flee, oppressors and oppressed. The former point their ears forwards, but the latter backwards. There may be a good deal of free play in both cases, but I am thinking of the habitual position.

When a cat is making its felonious way along the garden wall, wrapped in thoughts of blackbirds and thrushes, its ears look straight forwards, and this is the way in which a cat's portrait is always taken, because it is characteristic, It cannot turn them round to catch sounds from behind, and would scorn to do so; when accosted from behind, it turns its head and looks danger in the face. It can fold them down backwards when the danger is a terrier and the decks are cleared for action, but that is another story. Contrast Brer Rabbit as he comes "lopin' up de big road," His ears are turning every way scouting for danger, not always in unison, but independently; but when he is at rest they are set to alarm from the flank and rear.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "TEAR OUT THE HOUSE LIKE THE DOGS WUZ ATTER HIM."]

But when he "tear out the house like the dogs wuz atter him," then they point straight back. He was made to be eaten, and he knows it. So it is with the whole tribe of deer, and even with the horse, pampered and cared for and unacquainted with danger; his ears are a weatherc.o.c.k registering the drift of all his petty hopes and fears. I see the left ear go forward and prepare for a desperate shy at that wheelbarrow. He knows a wheelbarrow familiarly--there is one in his stall all day--but I am taking him a road he does not want to go, and so the hypocrite is going to pretend that barrow is of a dangerous sort. I prepare to apply a counter-irritant: he sees it with the corner of his eye, and both ears turn back like a tuning-fork.

The size and quality of the ear serve to show how far the owner depends on it. You will never begin to understand Nature until you see clearly that every life is dominated by two supreme anxieties which push aside all other concerns--viz., to eat, and not to be eaten. The one is uppermost in those that pursue, and the other in those that flee. Now if the pursuer fails he loses a dinner, but if the fugitive fails he loses his life, from which it follows that the very best sort of ears will be found among those beasts that do not ravage but run.

But there is another matter to be taken into account. The ears are not the whole of the beast's outfit. It has eyes, and it has a nose. Which of the three it most relies on depends upon the manner of its life. A bird lives in trees or the air, looking down at the prowling cat or up at the hawk hovering in the clear sky; so it does not keep ears, and its nose is of no account. But what four-footed thing can see like a bird?

The squirrel also lives in the trees, and its ears are frivolously decorated with tufts of hair. You will not find many beasts that can afford to prost.i.tute their ears to ornamental purposes. The only other beast that I can think of at this moment which has tufted ears is the lynx. Now the lynx is a tree cat, and there is proverbial wisdom in the saying "Eyes like a lynx."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GREAT CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF DISTINGUISHED EARS.]

But go to the timid beasts that spend their lives on the ground among gra.s.s and brushwood and woods and coppices, where murderous foes are prowling unseen, and you will see ears indeed--expansive, tremulous, turning lightly on well-oiled pivots, and catching, like large sea-sh.e.l.ls, the mingled murmur of rustling leaves and snapping twigs and chirping insects and falling seeds, and the slight, occasional, abrupt, fateful sound which is none of these. It is impossible, no doubt, for us ever to think ourselves into the life which these beasts live--moving, thinking and sleeping in a circ.u.mambient atmosphere of never-ceasing sound; sitting, as it were, at the receiving station of a system of wireless telegraphy, and catching cross-currents of floating intelligence from all quarters, mostly undiscernible by us if we listened for it, but which they, by long practice, instantly locate and interpret without conscious effort.

The zoologist cla.s.sifies them under many heads. The field mouse and rabbits are rodentia, the deer ungulata, the kangaroos marsupialia. In my museum they are all one family, and their labels are their ears. In these days of international conferences, parliaments of religion, pan-everything-in-turn councils, might we not arrange for a great catholic congress of distinguished ears? What a glow of new life it would shed upon our straitened, traditional ways of thinking about the social problems of our humble fellow-creatures! I would exclude the eared owls, whose ears are a mere sport of fas.h.i.+on, like the hideous imitations of birds' wings which ladies stick on their hats.

But just when this peep into the rare show of Nature is lifting my soul into sublimity, I am brought down to the base earth again by an exception. This is the plague of all high science. You design a stately theory, collect from many quarters a wealth of facts to establish it with, and have arranged them with c.u.mulative and irresistible force, when some disgusting, uninvited case thrusts itself in on your notice and refuses to fit into your argument at all. In this instance it is "my lord the elephant." That he has no need to concern himself about any bloodthirsty beast that may be lurking in the jungle is not more obvious than that his ears are the biggest in the world. Now there are two ways of getting rid of an obstruction of this kind. One is to betake yourself to your thinking chair and pipe and to rake up the possibilities of the Pleiocene and Meiocene ages, and prove that when the immense ear of the elephant was evolved there must have been some carnivorous monster, some sabre-toothed tiger or cave bear, which preyed on elephants.

The other way is to get acquainted with the elephant, cultivate an intimacy with him, and find out what his ears are to him. I prefer the second way. I would patiently watch him as he stands drowsily under an umbrageous banian tree on a sultry day before the monsoon has burst and refreshed earth and air. So might I note that his ears are incessantly moving, but not turning this way and that to catch sounds--just flapping, flapping, as if to cool his great temples. So have I seen the gigantic fruit bats, called flying foxes in India, hanging in hundreds in the upper branches of a tall peepul tree at noon, feeling too hot to sleep, and all fanning themselves in unison with one wing--a comic spectacle. And at each flap of the elephant's ears I would observe that a cloud of flies (for the elephant is not too great to be pestered by the despicable hordes of beggars for blood) were dislodged from their feeding grounds about his head and neck, and, trying to settle about his rear parts, were driven back again by the swinging of his tail. Then I should say that ear is just a fan. How significant it is that among the emblems of royalty in the East the three chiefest are an umbrella-bearer, two men who stand behind and swing great punkahs modelled on the elephant's ear, and two others carrying yak's tails wherewith to scare the flies from the royal person! The elephant is a rajah!

There is another mysterious ear which is a stumbling-block to the simple theory-monger. It is in fas.h.i.+on among a tribe of bats to which belongs the so-called vampire of India. This monster is fond of coming into your bedroom at midnight through the open windows, but not to suck your blood, for it has little in common with the true vampire of South America. It brings its dinner with it and hangs from the ceiling, "feeding like horses when you hear them feed." You hear its jaws working--crunch, crunch, crunch, but feel too drowsy to get up and expel it.

When you get up in the morning there on your clean dressing table, just below the place where it hung, are the b.l.o.o.d.y remains of a sparrow, or the crumbs of a tree-frog. The servants will tell you that the sparrow was killed and eaten by a rat, but if you rise softly next night when you hear the sound of feeding, and shut the windows, you will find a goblin hanging from the ceiling in the morning, hideous beyond the power of words to tell. Its ears, thin, membranous and longer than its head, tremble incessantly. Inside of them is another pair, much smaller than the first, and tuned to their octave, I should guess, while two membranous smelling trumpets of similar pattern rise over the nose. What is the meaning of these repulsive instruments, and how does that strange beast catch sparrows? When it comes out after dark and quarters the garden, pa.s.sing swiftly under and through the branches of trees, they are sound asleep hidden among the leaves, motionless and silent. But their flesh may be scented, and their gentle breathing heard if you have instruments sufficiently delicate. Then the ample wings may suddenly enfold the sleeping body, and the savage jaws grip the startled head before there is time even to scream. Without a doubt this is the secret of the vampire bat's ears.

But to find food and flee death are not the only interests in life even to the meanest creature. There are social pleasures, family affections and fellows.h.i.+p, sympathy and co-operation in the struggles of life. And there is love.

Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque, Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres, In furias ignemque ruunt: amor omnibus idem.

The chirping of the cricket, the song of the lark, the call of the sentinel crane, the watchword with which the migratory geese keep their squadrons together, the howling of jackals, the lowing of cows, the hum of the hive, the chatter of the drawing-room, and a hundred other voices in forest and field and town remind us that the voice and the ear are the pair of wheels on which society runs.

And this thought points the way out of another contradictious puzzle, that which confronts my argument from the ears of an a.s.s. It roams treeless deserts where no foe can approach unseen. Thistles make no sound. Why should it be adorned with ears which in their amplitude are scarcely surpa.s.sed by those of the rabbit and the hare. There is no answer unless their function is to hear the bray of a fellow-a.s.s.... One may object that that majestic sound is surely of force to impress itself without any aid from an external ear; but that is a vain argument built on the costermonger's moke--dreary exile from its fatherland. Remember that its ancestors wandered on the steppes of Central Asia or the borders of the Sahara. In those boundless solitudes, with nothing that eye can see or that common ear can hear to remind her that she is not the sole inhabitant of the universe, the wild a.s.s "snuffeth up the wind in her desire," and lifting her windsails to the hot blast, hears, borne across miles of white sand and s.h.i.+mmering mirage, the joyful reverberations of that music which tells of old comrades and boon companions scouring the plain and kicking up their exultant heels.

Monkeys taking to trees were like the birds, they scarcely needed ears.

And so by the high road of evolution you arrive at man and the enigma of his ear. It is a shrunken and shrivelled remnant, a moss-grown ruin, a derelict s.h.i.+p. It is to a pattern ear what the old shoe which you find in a country lane, shed from the foot of some "unemployed," is to one of Waukenphast's "five-miles-an-hour-easy" boots. We ought to temper our contempt for what it is with respect for what it was. All the parts of it are there and recognisable, even to the muscles that should move it, but we have lost control of them. I believe anyone could regain that by persevering exercise of his will power for a time--that is, if he has any. I have a friend who, if you treat him with disrespect, shrivels you up with a sarcastic wag of his right ear.