MARGINAL COMMENTS
By LAWRENCE ATH ILL
RAMBLING through my Buffon, I came the other day upon the Sloth, an animal widely condemned as dull. Realising, as I read, the gross injustice of this verdict, I was at a loss to find its explanation until a line of a familiar hymn supplied the clue. "Shake off dull sloth ! " The subconscious mind, the shrine of prejudice, loves to confuse the concrete with the abstract and bridges with a stride the gap between the mammal and the habit to which the hymn undoubtedly refers. The epithet has stuck, and sloths are damned eternally by the unthinking as tedious and obtuse.
Let us then see the beast as Buffon paints it. The sloth quite undeniably is slow. It hardly ever runs. The late Lord Oxford and Asquith, according to his son, openly admitted the same impeachment, yet retained a reputation for acuteness even when most inert. Then the sloth, so Buffon tells us, has four stomachs, which not only provide an adequate excuse for lack of pace but should convince us, who know the needs and vagaries of only one, that life for it can never lack absorbing interest.
It is, however, the habit of the sloth which even more emphatically than its structural excess refutes the charge of dullness. Placed at the foot of a tree, it sets to work indus- triously to clamber to the summit, demolishing all obstacles and devouring on the way such green and tender things as it encounters, sometimes thereby killing the tree itself. Once at the top, it clings there in a posture which often strikes the onlooker, less highly placed, as topsy-turvy, but with extreme tenacity. There it remains until the tree can bear its weight no longer, or another and more profitable one attracts its eye. Then it " shakes , off."
Can this be called the conduct of a dullard ? Is it not rather a shining example to aspiring youth ? The tree-tops in our jungle are crowned by splendid figures which have assiduously aped the sloth, though few of them have made acknowledgement. A whole menagerie of heraldic beasts, couchant, rampant and regardant, deck their escutcheons, but never a Sloth sca.ndent. The gateposts of their country seats sport lions, wolves, stags, bears and even cats, but offer no asylum to the sloth. They dub the poor beast dull, and yet what crashing bores some of them are themselves !
But when it comes to crashing, few can hold a candle to the sloth. When sloths shake off, they do it handsomely and fall to earth as nearly like a plummet as the intervening boughs permit. Doctor Spooner has told us that falling cats pop on their drawers. Sloths, less fortunate, land on their pants. That use does not stale the infinite variety of their sensations is witnessed by the plaintive and staccato cry which they emit on these occasions and to which they owe their onomatopoeic name of "al." Can lives so catastrophically punctuated be monotonous ? Surely not.
Here human sloths are luckier. They often flit from pinnacle to pinnacle without the painful expedient of bouncing. All of us must be glad to think that this will be true of that exalted sloth shortly to be translated to Another Place. For he has been an honourable sloth, tenacious, yet reverencing green and tender things and living nobly on classic leaves and draughts of honey-dew. Long may he deck the tree-tops. But Nemesis awaits the sloths who cling too long or gobble too much greenery. Sooner or later their trees will crash beneath them. Then they will cry " ai " in vain. Even the consolation prize won by their three-toed prototype will be denied to them. For the three-toed sloth years ago was crowned the King of Crossword Clues, and since it has so long resisted the competition of the Eft and Ounce, we may be sure that it will not yield its throne to any human copyist. Which goes to prove that sloths are not so slow as even Buffon seems to think them ; and certainly not dull.
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