More Science From an Easy Chair Part 12

A bird which was believed sixty years ago both by the natives and white men to have become extinct, the Takahe, or Notornis, was known by its bones and from the traditions of the natives. Much to the delight of naturalists, four live specimens of it were obtained at intervals in the last century, the last as late as 1898. The beautiful dark plumage and thick and short beak, which is bright red, as are the legs, are well known from the two specimens preserved in the Natural History Museum. The Notornis is a heavy, flightless "rail." Rails are remarkable for their size and variety in New Zealand, where there are twenty species, some of them very sluggish in flight, or like Notornis, flightless (the wood hens). Amongst the flightless birds of New Zealand is a duck, as helpless as the heaviest farmyard product, and yet a wild bird, and then there are the penguins, which swim with their wings, but never fly, and belong entirely to the southern hemisphere. Many species are found on the sh.o.r.es of New Zealand. Other noteworthy birds of New Zealand are the twelve kinds of cormorants, the wry-bill plover, the only bird in the world with its beak turned to one side, the practically flightless Kakapo, or ground parrot (Stringops), the Huia, a bird like a crow in appearance, whose male has a short straight beak, whilst the female has a long one, greatly curved; the detested Kea, the parrot which kills the sheep, introduced by the colonists, by digging out with its beak from their backs the fat round the kidneys; also very peculiar owls and wrens, and the fine singing bell-birds.

The peculiarity of the indigenous animals of New Zealand is seen not only in the absence of mammals and the abundance of remarkable birds, many of them flightless, but also in the fact that there are no snakes in this vast area--no crocodiles, no tortoises--only fourteen small kinds of lizard (seven Geckoes and seven Skinks), and only one species of frog (and that only ever seen by a very few persons)! There were fish in the rivers when settlers arrived there, but none very remarkable. Insects and flies of every kind, scorpions, spiders, centipedes, land-snails and earth-worms were all flouris.h.i.+ng in the forests of New Zealand a thousand years ago, serving in large measure as the food of birds, fish and lizards. The great island continent of Australia, 1,500 miles away, is peculiar enough in its living products, quite unlike the rest of the world in its egg-laying duck-mole and spiny ant-eater, and in its abundant and varied population of pounched mammals or marsupials, emphasized by the absence (except for two or three peculiar little mice and the late-arrived black-fellow and bush-dog) of the regular type called "placental" mammals which inhabit the rest of the world. The rest of the world except New Zealand! Strange as Australia is, New Zealand is yet stranger. Long as the isolation of Australia has endured, and archaic and primitive in essential characters as is its living freight of animals and plants navigated (as it were) in safety and isolation to our present days, yet New Zealand has a still more primitive, a more ancient cargo. When we divide the land surfaces of the earth according to their history as indicated by the nature of their living fauna and flora and their geological structure, and the fossilised remains of their past inhabitants, it becomes necessary to separate the whole land surface into two primary sections: (_a_) New Zealand, and (_b_) the rest of the world, "Theriogoea," or the land of beasts (mammals). Then we divide Theriogoea into (1) the land of Marsupials (Australia) and (2) the land of Placentals (the rest of the world).

This last great area is divisible according to the same principles into the great northern belt of land, the Holarctic region and the (three not equally distinct) great southward-reaching land surfaces--the Neo-tropical (South America), the Ethiopian (Africa, south of the Sahara), and the Oriental (India and Malay).

The bird-ruled quietude of New Zealand was disturbed 500 years ago by the arrival of the Polynesian Islanders, the Maoris, in their canoes.

They brought with them three kinds of vegetables which they cultivated, a dog and a kind of rat. The dogs soon died out, but the rat has remained, and is considered to have done little or no harm. It was not one of the destructive proliferous rats of the northern hemisphere. The Maoris hunted the big birds--the Moas and others--for their flesh, and ate their eggs, and it is probable that they caused or accelerated the extinction of the Moa and two or three other birds.

In the north island they nearly exterminated the white heron, the plumes being valued by them. On the whole, very little damage was done to the natural products of the islands by the Maoris. "It was with the advent of the Europeans," says Mr. John Drummond, F.L.S., in his interesting and well-ill.u.s.trated book on 'The Animals of New Zealand,'

"that destruction began in earnest. It seemed as if they had been commanded to destroy the ancient inhabitants." They killed right and left, and, in addition, burnt up the primaeval forests and bushes till a great part of the flora was consumed. It was never a very varied or strong one, consisting only of some 1,400 species, which are now in large proportion vanis.h.i.+ng, whilst 600 species of plants, most of them introduced accidentally rather than intentionally by the European settlers, have taken their place.

Here I may state the great principle which, in regard to plants as well as animals, determines the survival of intruders from one region to another. It appears that setting aside any very special and peculiar adaptations to quite exceptional conditions in a given area, the living things, whether plants or animals, which are brought to or naturally arrive at such an area, survive and supplant the indigenous plants and animals of that area, if they themselves are kinds (species) produced or formed in a larger or more variegated area; that is to say, formed under severer conditions of compet.i.tion and of struggle with a larger variety of compet.i.tors, enemies and adverse circ.u.mstances in general. Thus, the plants of remote oceanic islands are destroyed, and their place and their food are taken by the more hardy "capable" plants of Continental origin. And, in accordance with the same principle, as Darwin especially maintained, the plants of the northern hemisphere, produced as they are in a wide stretching belt of land--Europe, temperate Asia, and North America--always push their way down the great southern stretches of land (by cool mountain roadways), and when they have arrived in the temperate regions of the southern hemisphere, they have at various geological epochs starved out, taken the place of, or literally "supplanted" the native southern flora, which in every case has been formed on a narrow, restricted and peninsula-like area. The same greater "potency" of the animals of the Holartic region has in the past established them as intruders into South America, Ethiopia and India, and has led to the inevitable survival of the animal of the large area when brought into contact with the animal of the small and restricted area. Applying these principles to New Zealand, we see that no country, no area of land, could have a worse chance for the survival of its animal and vegetable children than that mysterious land, isolated for many millions of years in the ocean, the home of the Tuatara, solitary survivor of an immensely remote geologic age, the undisturbed kingdom of huge birds, so easy-going that they have ceased to fly, and have even lost their wings!

The first European animals to settle there were the pigs benevolently introduced into New Zealand by Captain Cook. They multiplied apace, served for food and sport both to the natives and the early settlers, and destroyed the ancient Tria.s.sic reptile, the Tuatara, which only survives now on rocky islands near the coast. In less than a hundred years the settlers had introduced sheep and cattle, and looked upon the abounding pigs as a scourge. In 1862, pig-hunters were employed to destroy them--three hunters would kill 20,000 pigs in a year. Dogs, cats and the European rats came in early with the settlers, and destroyed the flightless birds, driving them for shelter to the mountains. As the settlers increased they shot down millions of birds of all kinds, and burnt up gra.s.s, shrub, and bush. At last, a few years ago, the Government established three islands as "sanctuaries,"

where many of the more interesting birds survive, and are increasing.

Besides cattle and sheep (which have flourished exceedingly) the colonists introduced rabbits, pheasants and the honey-bee, and later on quails, hares, deer, and trout. Clover depends on bees for its fertilisation and seeding. White clover, taken over there for pasture, did not seed in New Zealand until the honey-bee was imported in 1842, and later, as they could not seed red-clover without it, the colonists had to introduce the humble-bee, and the red-clover now also seeds freely and the imported farm-beasts have their accustomed food.

Besides the animals already named, the colonists have introduced ferrets and weasels, to reduce the destructive excess of the imported rabbits; and they, whilst failing to subdue the rabbits, have themselves become a serious nuisance. Of small birds there were introduced the house-sparrow, which is too prolific, and is hated by the farmers; the greenfinch, a pest; the bullfinch, a failure. The introduced skylark and the blackbird (alas! poor colonists) are not the joy of New Zealanders--the farmers hate them. The European settlers had the audacity to introduce also the most beautiful and beloved of all birds, our own perfect "Robin Redbreast," and they add want of manners to their violent and uncalled-for hospitality by speaking ill of this sweetest and brightest of living things. After this, I am rather glad to report that the esteemed table-delicacies, pheasants and partridges, don't get on well in New Zealand; nor do turtle-doves. The thrush is spreading and meets with the approval of the hypercritical New Zealander. The hedge-sparrow, the chaffinch and the goldfinch have flourished abundantly, but the linnet has failed. A very interesting and important problem for New Zealand naturalists to solve is that as to why one bird succeeds in their remote land and another does not. The British trout have grown to an enormous size and are destroying all other fresh-water life. Imported red-deer flourish, and are shot with great satisfaction by the colonists. The American elk has been introduced in the South Island, and the mountain goats--the ibex and the thar--are to be acclimatized in the mountains, so that unnatural sport may flourish in this ancient land of quiet and of wondrous birds, turned topsy-turvy by enlightened man.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE EFFACEMENT OF NATURE BY MAN

Very few people have any idea of the extent to which man since his upgrowth in the late Tertiary period of the geologists--perhaps a million years ago--has actively modified the face of Nature, the vast herds of animals he has destroyed, the forests he has burnt up, the deserts he has produced, and the rivers he has polluted. It is, no doubt, true that changes proceeded, and are proceeding, in the form of the earth's face and in its climate without man having anything to say in the matter. Changes in climate and in the connections of islands and continents across great seas and oceans have gone on, and are going on, and in consequence endless kinds of animals and plants have been, some extinguished, some forced to migrate to new areas, many slowly modified in shape, size, and character, and abundantly produced. But over and above these slow irresistible changes there has been a vast destruction and defacement of the living world by the uncalculating reckless procedure of both savage and civilised man which is little short of appalling, and is all the more ghastly in that the results have been very rapidly brought about, that no compensatory production of new life, except that of man himself and his distorted "breeds" of domesticated animals, has accompanied the destruction of formerly flouris.h.i.+ng creatures, and that, so far as we can see, if man continues to act in the reckless way which has characterised his behaviour hitherto, he will multiply to such an enormous extent that only a few kinds of animals and plants which serve him for food and fuel will be left on the face of the globe. It is not improbable that even these will eventually disappear, and man will be indeed monarch of all he surveys. He will have converted the gracious earth, once teeming with innumerable, incomparably beautiful varieties of life, into a desert--or, at best, a vast agricultural domain abandoned to the production of food-stuffs for the hungry millions which, like maggots consuming a carcase, or the irrepressible swarms of the locust, incessantly devour and multiply.

Another glacial period or an overwhelming catastrophe of cosmic origin may fortunately, at some distant epoch, check the blind process of destruction of natural things and the insane pullulation of humanity.

But there are, it seems probable, many centuries of what would seem to the men of to-day deplorable ugliness and cramping pressure in store for posterity unless an unforeseen awakening of the human race to the inevitable results of its present recklessness should occur. Whatever may be the ultimate fate of the earth under man's operations, we should endeavour at this moment to delay, as far as possible, the hateful consummation looming ahead of us.

It is interesting to note a few instances of man's destructive action.

Even in prehistoric times it is probable that man, by hunting the mammoth--the great hairy elephant--a.s.sisted in its extinction, if he did not actually bring it about. At a remote prehistoric period the horses of various kinds which abounded in North and South America rapidly and suddenly became extinct. It has been suggested, with some show of probability, that a previously unknown epidemic disease due to a parasitic organism--such as those which we now see ravaging the herds of South Africa--found its way to the American continent. And it is quite possible that this was brought from the other hemisphere by the first men who crossed the Pacific and populated North America.

To come to matters of certainty and not of speculation, we know that man by clearing the land, as well as by actively hunting and killing it, made an end of the great wild ox of Europe, the aurochs or urus of Caesar, the last of which was killed near Warsaw in 1627. He similarly destroyed the bison, first in Europe and then (in our own days) in North America. A few hundred, carefully guarded, are all that remain in the two continents. He has very nearly made an end of the elk in Europe, and will soon do so completely in America. The wolf and the beaver were destroyed in these British Islands about 400 years ago.

They are rapidly disappearing from France, and will soon be exterminated in Scandinavia and Russia and in Canada. At a remote prehistoric period the bear was exterminated by man in Britain and the lion driven from the whole of Europe, except Macedonia, where it still flourished in the days of the ancient Greeks. It was common in Asia Minor a few centuries ago. The giraffe and the elephant have departed from South Africa before the encroachments of civilised man. The day is not distant when they will cease to exist in the wild state in any part of Africa, and with them are vanis.h.i.+ng many splendid antelopes.

Even our "nearest and dearest" relatives in the animal world, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the ourang, are doomed. Now that man has learnt to defy malaria and other fevers the tropical forest will be occupied by the greedy civilised horde of humanity, and there will be no room for the most interesting and wonderful of all animals, the man-like apes, unless (as we may hope in their case, at any rate) such living monuments of human history are made sacred and treated with greater care than are our ancient monuments in stone. Smaller creatures, birds like the dodo and the great auk and a whole troop of others less familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the human blight. Even some beautiful insects--the great copper b.u.t.terfly and the swallow-tail b.u.t.terfly--have been exterminated in England by human "progress" in the shape of the drainage of the Fen country.

But the most repulsive of the destructive results of human expansion is the poisoning of rivers, and the consequent extinction in them of fish and of well-nigh every living thing, save mould and putrefactive bacteria. In the Thames it will soon be a hundred years since man, by his filthy proceedings, banished the glorious salmon, and murdered the innocents of the eel-fare. Even at its foulest time, however, the Thames mud was blood-red (really "blood-red," since the colour was due to the same blood-crystals which colour our own blood) with the swarms of a delicate little worm like the earth-worm, which has an exceptional power of living in foul water, and nouris.h.i.+ng itself upon putrid mud. In old days I have stood on Hungerford Suspension Bridge and seen the mud-banks as a great red band of colour, stretching for a mile along the picture when the tide was low. In smaller streams, especially in the mining and manufacturing districts of England, progressive money-making man has converted the most beautiful things of nature--trout streams--into absolutely dead corrosive chemical sewers. The sight of one of these death-stricken black filth-gutters makes one shudder as the picture rises, in one's mind, of a world in which all the rivers and the waters of the sea-sh.o.r.e will be thus dedicated to acrid sterility, and the meadows and hill-sides will be drenched with nauseating chemical manures. Such a state of things is possibly in store for future generations of men! It is not "science"

that will be to blame for these horrors, but should they come about they will be due to the reckless greed and the mere insect-like increase of humanity.

In the destruction of trees and all kinds of plants man has deliberately done more mischief than in the extermination of animals.

By inadvertence he has completely abolished the strange and remarkable trees and shrubs of islands--such as St. Helena--where the herbivorous animals introduced by him have made short work of the wonderful native plants isolated for ages, and have completely exterminated them, so that they are "extinct." We have just had the opportunity of studying one of the few oceanic islands--"Christmas Island" (forty square miles in area)--untouched by man until thirty years ago. It lies 200 miles south of Java. Its native inhabitants, plants and animals were carefully examined, and specimens secured twenty years ago. There were then no human inhabitants, and the island was rarely visited. It was, however, about twelve years ago handed over by its proprietors to some thousand Chinamen to dig and s.h.i.+p the 15,000,000 tons of valuable "phosphate" (at a profit of a guinea a ton), which forms a large part of its surface. And now from time to time we shall have reports of this result of contact with man, and through him with all the plagues and curses of the great world. Already a remarkable shrew-mouse and two native species of rat, peculiar to the island, have disappeared.

Dr. Andrews ("Proceedings of the Zoological Society," February 2nd, 1909), who has twice explored the island, gives evidence that this is caused by a parasitic disease (due to a trypanosome like those which cause sleeping-sickness and various horse and cattle diseases) introduced by the common black rats from the s.h.i.+ps which now frequent the island. The further progress of destruction will be carefully and minutely observed and recorded--but not arrested!

It is, however, in cutting down and burning forests of large trees that man has done the most harm to himself and the other living occupants of many regions of the earth's surface. We can trace these evil results from more recent examples back into the remote past. The water supply of the town of Plymouth was a.s.sured by Drake, who brought water in a channel from Dartmoor. But the cutting down of the trees has now rendered the great wet sponge of the Dartmoor region, from which the water was drawn all the year, no longer a sponge. It no longer "holds" the water of the rainfall, but in consequence of the removal of the forest and the digging of ditches the water quickly runs off the moor, and subsequently the whole countryside suffers from drought. This sort of thing has occurred wherever man has been sufficiently civilised and enterprising to commit the folly of destroying forests. Forests have an immense effect on climate, causing humidity of both the air and the soil, and give rise to moderate and persistent instead of torrential streams. Spain has been irretrievably injured by the cutting down of her forests in the course of a few hundred years. The same thing is going on, to a disastrous extent, in parts of the United States. Whole provinces of the Thibetan borders of China have been converted into uninhabitable, sandy desert, where centuries ago were fertile and well-watered pastures supporting rich cities, in consequence of the reckless destruction of forest. In fact, whether it is due to man's improvident action or to natural climatic change, it appears that the formation of "desert" is due in the first place to the destruction of forest, the consequent formation of a barren, sandy area, and the subsequent spreading of what we may call the "disease" or "desert ulcer," by the blowing of the fatally exposed sand and the gradual extension, owing to the action of the sand itself, of the area of destroyed vegetation. Sand-deserts are not, as used to be supposed, sea-bottoms from which the water has retreated, but areas of destruction of vegetation--often (though not always) both in Central Asia and in North Africa (Egypt, etc.), started by the deliberate destruction of forest by man, who has either by artificial drainage starved the forest, or by the simple use of the axe and fire cleared it away.

The great art of irrigation was studied and used with splendid success by the ancient nations of the near East. They converted deserts into gardens, and their work was an act of compensation and rest.i.tution to be set off against the destructive operations of more barbarous men.

But they, too, long ago were themselves destroyed by conquering hordes of more ignorant but more war-like men, and their irrigation works and the whole art of irrigation perished with them. One of the absolutely necessary works to be carried out by civilised man, when he has ceased to build engines of war and destruction, is the irrigation of the great waterless territories of the globe. A little home-work of the kind has been carried on in Italy regularly year by year since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, and our Indian Government is slowly copying the Italian example. In Egypt we have built the great dam of a.s.souan, whilst in Mesopotamia it is proposed to re-establish the irrigation system by which it once was made rich and fertile. But, as has lately been maintained by Mr. Rose Smith in his book, "The Growth of Nations," the vast possibilities of irrigation have not yet been realised by the business men of the modern world. Millions of acres in the warmer regions of the earth now unproductive can be made to yield food to mankind and rich pecuniary profits to the capitalists who shall introduce modern engineering methods and a scientific system of irrigation into those areas.

The whole problem of the increase of the more civilised races and the necessary accompanying increase of food-production depends for its solution on the speedy introduction of irrigation methods into what are now the great unproductive deserts of the world.

CHAPTER XXV

THE EXTINCTION OF THE BISON AND OF WHALES

The almost complete and very sudden disappearance of the bison in North America thirty years ago does not seem to have been due simply to the slaughter of tens of thousands of these creatures by men who made a commerce of so-called "buffalo-rugs." These "hunters" miscalled the unhappy bison, which is not a buffalo, nor at all like that creature, just as they gave the name "elk" to the great red deer (the wapiti), although there was a real elk, the so-called "moose," staring them in the face. The sudden extinction of the bison resulted partly from the slaughter and partly from the breaking up of the herds and the interference with their free migration by the trans-continental railway. An interesting discovery made only this year, in regard to the closely allied European bison, suggests that disease may also have played a part in the destruction of the North American bison. A few hundred individuals of the European bison are all that remain at this day. Some are carefully preserved by the Emperor of Russia in a tract of suitable country in Lithuania and another herd exists in the Caucasus. Some of the Lithuanian bison have lately been dying in an unaccountable way, and on investigating a dead individual a Russian observer has discovered a "trypanosome" parasite in the blood. The trypanosomes are microscopic corkscrew-like creatures, of which many kinds have become known within the last ten or fifteen years. They are "single cells"--that is to say, "protoplasmic" animalcules of the simplest structure--provided with a vibrating crest and tail by means of which they swim with incessant screw-like movement through the blood. They rarely exceed one thousandth of an inch in length exclusive of the tail. The poisons which they produce by their life in the blood are the cause of the sleeping-sickness of man (in tropical Africa), of the horse and cattle disease carried by the tsetze fly, and of many similar deadly diseases--a separate "species" being discovered in each disease. A peculiar species is found in the blood of the common frog, and another in that of the sewer-rat. The last discovery of a "trypanosome" is that of one in the blood of the African elephant, announced to the Royal Society by Sir David Bruce.

It is a matter of great interest that a trypanosome has been found in a death-stricken herd of European bison. It suggests that one of the causes of the disappearance of the bison, both in Europe and America, may be the infection of their blood by trypanosomes, and that possibly, whilst a freely migrating and vigorous herd would not be extensively infected, a dwindled and confined herd may be more liable to infection, and that thus the final destruction of an already decadent animal may be brought about. It would now be a matter of extreme interest to ascertain whether the few dwindled herds of bison in North America are infected by trypanosomes, and no doubt we shall soon receive reports on the subject.

A most interesting branch of this subject of the unthinking extermination of great animals by man is that of the extermination of whales. Man is worrying them out of existence. Some are already beyond saving. It would be interesting to know whether there are trypanosomes or other blood-parasites in whales. I suppose that no one has an ill-feeling towards whales. Most of us have never seen a whale, either alive or in the flesh--only a skeleton. I have seen a live whale or two off the coast of Norway; and I once, in conjunction with my friend Moseley, when we were students at Oxford, cut up one, 18 ft. long, which had been exhibited for three weeks during the summer in a tent on the sh.o.r.es of the Bristol Channel, where we purchased it. The skeleton of that whale is now in the museum at Oxford, but happily the smell of it exists only in my memory. The late Mr. Gould, who produced such beautifully ill.u.s.trated books on birds, told me that he once fell into the heart of a full-sized whale, which he was cutting up. He narrowly escaped drowning in the blood. The whale was not very fresh, and Mr. Gould was unapproachable for a week.

An immense number of whales are killed every year for their oil, and their highly nutritious flesh is wasted. There was an attempt some years ago to make meat extract from it. Some which was brought to me reminded me of the whale on the sh.o.r.es of the Bristol Channel. I do not know if the extract has proved palatable to other people. The Norwegians are specially expert in killing whales. They have been allowed to set up "factories" on the west coast of Ireland and in the Shetlands, where they kill whales with harpoons fired from guns, cut them up, and boil down the fat.

Whales are warm-blooded creatures which suckle their young, and have been developed in past geological times from land animals--the primitive carnivora--which were also the ancestors of dogs, bears, seals and cats. Whales have lost the hind limbs altogether and developed the forelegs into fingerless flippers, whilst the tail is provided with "flukes" like the fins of a fish's tail in shape, but horizontal instead of vertical. The whole form is fish-like, the skin smooth and hairless. It is a remarkable conclusion arrived at by the investigators of the remains of extinct animals that a little four-legged creature the size of a spaniel, and intermediate in character between a hedgehog and a dog, was the common ancestor from which have been derived such widely different creatures as the whale and the bat, the elephant and the man. We can at the present day trace with some certainty the gradual modifications of form by which in the course of many millions of years the change from the primitive, dog-like hedgehog to each of those four living "types" has proceeded.

The whales of to-day are divided into the toothed whales and the whalebone whales. The great cachalot or sperm whale is captured, chiefly in the Southern Ocean, and killed in large numbers for the sake of the "spermaceti," or "sperm oil," which forms the great ma.s.s of its head, but he is so fierce and active that he is not easily captured, and is not in immediate danger of extinction. The smaller toothed whales, the killers, dolphins, and porpoises (though one of them--the bottle-nosed whale--is being killed out), are not as yet seriously threatened by commercial man. But the whalebone whales are in a parlous state. The Right whales, as they are called, are the chief of these. They are huge creatures, 60 ft. in length, with an enormous head: it is as much as one third of the total length in the Greenland whale. Besides the Greenland species there are four other "right whales," which may be considered as four varieties of one species. The head is not quite so large in them. The Biscay whale is one of them, and was hunted until it was exterminated in the Bay of Biscay, when the whalers, extending their operations further and further north, came upon the Greenland whale, which proved to be even more valuable than the Biscay species. The huge mouth in these two whales has hanging from its sides within the lips a series of long bars or planks of wonderfully strong, elastic, h.o.r.n.y substance--the "baleen" or "whalebone"--each plank being as much as eight or in rare cases twelve feet long. Following close on one another and having hairy edges, they act as strainers so as to separate the floating food of the whale from the water which rushes through its mouth as it swims. The whalebone is of great value commercially, as is also the fat or oil. A hundred years ago whalebone fetched only 25 a ton, now the same quant.i.ty fetches more than 1,500. The Rorquals, or "Finners," have smaller heads and mouths; their whalebone is so short as to be valueless, but they grow to even greater size than the Right whales and are found on our own coasts and all over the world. The Humpback whale is one of these "Finners," distinguished by its excessively long flippers and huge bulk.

The Biscay whale was the first of these great creatures to be hunted.

The Basques began its capture as early as the ninth century. It was exterminated by them in the Bay of Biscay, and only saved from complete extinction elsewhere by the discovery of the more valuable Arctic or Greenland whale. The capture of the Greenland whale began in 1612; and in 200 years the unceasing pursuit of this species had driven it to the remote places of the Arctic Ocean. It is now so rare that it is not worth while to send a s.h.i.+p out for the purpose of hunting it, and it will probably never recover its numbers. An idea of its value and former abundance may be formed from the fact that between 1669 and 1778 it yielded to 1,400 Dutch vessels about 57,000 individuals, of which the baleen and oil produced a money value of four million pounds sterling. Of late years a single large Greenland whale would bring 900 for its whalebone and 300 for its oil. These two great Right whales having been practically exterminated, the merciless hunt has now been turned on to the wilder and less valuable Finback whales or Finners. In these days of steam and electric light the Arctic night is robbed of its terrors, and the whale chase goes on very fast. The shot harpoon was invented in 1870 by Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, and is the most deadly and extraordinary weapon ever devised by man for the pursuit of helpless animals. It is this invention (a commercial, not a scientific, discovery!) which has, in conjunction with swift steams.h.i.+ps, rendered the destruction of whales a matter of ease and deadly certainty. It is this which is being used on the Irish as on the Scandinavian coast, resulting in the pollution of the air and water by the carcases of the slaughtered beasts from which the oil has been extracted. This revolting butchery, without foresight or intelligence, is carried on solely for the satisfaction of human greed, and apparently will be stopped only by the extinction of the yet remaining whales. In forty years in the middle of last century the whale fishery of the United States yielded 300,000 whales to 20,000 voyages, and a value of sixty-million pounds sterling in baleen and oil. It is calculated that in the thousand years during which man has hunted the great whales not less than a million individuals have been captured. Man's skill and capacity have now become such that he will soon have cleared the ocean of these wonderful creatures, since, like the bison, the whales cannot persist when harried and interfered with beyond a certain limited degree.

It appears that the curious musk ox, which now lives on the fringe of the Arctic circle, and in the glacial period existed in the Thames Valley, is doomed. There (as in similar instances in other lands), the comparatively harmless savage race of men (in this case the Eskimo), whose weapons did not enable them seriously to threaten the existence of the animals around them, have now obtained efficient firearms. The musk ox is consequently now between two lines of fire--that of the white hunter on the south, and of the Eskimo on the north.

From regions far remote from the Arctic complaints come of an even more reckless destruction of helpless animals. Perhaps our legislators may feel some personal concern in this case, since it is neither more nor less than the approaching extinction of the turtle, the true green turtle of City fame, to eat which at the invitation of City dignitaries is one of the few duties of a legislator. Both the green turtles and the tortoise-sh.e.l.l turtles are being destroyed indiscriminately on the coast of Florida and in many West Indian Islands by brutal, careless, "white" beach-combers and idlers. By proper care of the eggs and young the turtles could easily be increased enormously in number, and a regulated capture of them be made to yield a legitimate profit. But neither the United States Government nor our own take any steps to restrain promiscuous slaughter of the turtles which come to the sh.o.r.e in order to lay their eggs. Soon the City Fathers will have to do without the "green fat"

and their wives without tortoise-sh.e.l.l combs. It will serve them right. Such dest.i.tution in these--and, be it noted, in many other matters--will deservedly fall upon those who ignorantly, wilfully, and contentedly neglect to take steps to understand and to control the withering blight created by modern man wherever he sets his foot.

CHAPTER XXVI

MORE ABOUT WHALES

The possibility of protecting whales from wanton slaughter by man is, no doubt, a matter open to discussion. Protection has, however, been accorded to one particular whale in an exceptional instance. Pa.s.senger steamers along the coast of New Zealand used to call at a station in a narrow inlet of the coast, called Pelorus Sound. A black whale, said to be of the kind known as Risso's Grampus, of about 14 ft. in length, was apparently a settled inhabitant of this channel, and used to follow the steamers and accompany them through the sound. He became famous and popular, and was known as "Pelorus Jack." He was always looked for and recognised by the sailors and pa.s.sengers. Certain savagely destructive persons on one of these steamers--to the horror and disgust of the New Zealand world--made an attempt to shoot "Pelorus Jack." It is stated, and believed by sailors, that ill-luck consequently fell on that steamer. On its next voyage it was avoided by the whale, who had never failed to welcome friendly and non-aggressive steams.h.i.+ps, and on a third voyage the steamer was wrecked. The feeling about "Pelorus Jack" was so strong that his Excellency the Governor of New Zealand, Lord Plunket, signed, on September 26th, 1904, an Order in Council, protecting "Pelorus Jack"

by name for five years, and any person interfering with him was made liable to a fine of 100.

It appears that under the New Zealand Sea Fisheries Act of 1894 the Governor in Council is empowered to make regulations protecting any fish. Although zoologically not belonging to the cla.s.s of fishes, whales are, technically and for all legal and commercial purposes "fishes," since they are "fished" and are the booty of "fisheries." I believe that no Governor, Council, or Secretary of State has power in the British Islands similar to that conferred on the Governor of New Zealand by a modern State which desires good and effective government.

Such power is needed in all parts of the British Empire.

The whales, as compared with their dog-like ancestors, are modified to a more extreme degree and in more special ways than is the case in any other group of which we can trace the history over a similar period of development. This is connected with the complete change of conditions of life to which these mammals ("warm-blooded, air-breathing quadrupeds which suckle their young") have become adapted in pa.s.sing from a terrestrial to a marine existence. Other mammalian ancestors have independently taken to a marine life and given rise to strange-looking adaptations, namely, the seals and also the Manatee and Dugong known as the Sirenians (so-called because they give rise to sailors' stories of mermaids and sirens), but these are far less changed, less modified than the whales. The whales have acquired a completely fish-like form. They frequently have a large back fin, and have lost the hind legs altogether. The horizontally spread flukes of the whale's tail have nothing to do with the hind legs, whereas the common seal's hind legs are tied together so as to form a sort of tail. In the bigger whales, sunk deep in the muscle and blubber, we find on each side well forward in the body (not near the tail) a pair of isolated, unattached bony pieces, which are the hip-bone and thigh-bone--all that remains of the hind limbs. The neck is so short that in many whales the seven neck-bones, or "vertebrae," are all fused into one solid piece not longer than a single ordinary vertebra, and showing six grooves marking off the seven vertebrae which have united into one.

The head is more strangely altered than any other part of the whale.

The jaws are greatly elongated--so as to give a beak-like form in all--but this region is specially long and narrow in the "beaked whales" known to zoologists by the name Ziphius, in which it consists of a solid piece of ivory-like bone, which we find in a fossil state in the bone-bed of the Suffolk Crag. Farther back the bones of the face are suddenly widened in all whales and porpoises, and in many these bones grow up into enormous crests and ridges. The nostrils, instead of being placed, as in other animals, at the free end of the snout or beak, lie far back, so as to form the "blow-hole," which is near the middle of the head.