BIRDS, BEASTS AND TREES.
LONG gone are the days when uncles at the Christmas book- shop announced that they "only "wanted a book for children. Those were the people whose own youth was nourished on "Cautionary Tales." With what glee, on solemn festivals of one's own childhood, awed by the authoritative voices of great-great-uncles, did one open the little book with its antique woodcuts, thinking, "And they believed all this ! " After this came the period of self-conscious simplicity, of "talking-down." Nowadays the names on Gift Books are among the most distinguished of their time, and there is a predominance of the best of all books for boys and girls— Nature books.
To write a good book of this kind is one of the hardest tasks in the literary world, for to a great store of knowledge must be added a crystal honesty and the power to steep fact in imagination without changing it or twisting it. Also, while such books may be made anthropomorphic to a certain degree, great care must be taken not to humanize the animals too much. It is, perhaps, better not to make them talk, but only to express their imagined thoughts. But if their talk is pure bird-talk and beast-talk it may be all right. The great thing to remember is that Nature is utterly different from, utterly careless of, man, and that there lies its primal fascination.
In reviewing a dozen books dealing with Nature from different angles and in different degrees of intensity it is interesting to trace through them all a connecting idea—the question which seems so slight in itself, but which yet delves to the heart of creation" Does the animal world, the enor- mous, bemused, half submerged world of the 'not-man,' does it think as we think, reason as we reason ? "
This question binds together the tersely expressed discovery of science and the simple tale a mother tells her children. Religions have been founded on the diverse answers to the conundrum ; thunders have been launched from the thrones of science. But still the creatures of field and forest maintain their reserve ; go upon their daily ploys, shy and debonair ; weave nests, distil sweets, build Cities, dam up tides—and disclose nothing of the inner secret of their accomplishment. The scientist and the child both ask with the same wonder, "In what furnace was thy brain ? "
But while Fabre practically denies reason to animals, the trend of younger thinkers is to allow that they have it, and W. T. Homaday, in The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals (Seribners, 7s. 6d. net), says, quite deliberately, that animals have the same reasoning powers as men. He even goes so far as to assert that they deduce new sets of ideas from old ones ; "think before and after " ; model action upon the results of constructive reasoning, and have souls. (This last, of course; means just what the particular religious tenets of the reader allow it to mean. For, to begin with, have we souls ourselves ? What and where are they ? If the lion and the bee have them, have the jelly fish and the flea also ? And to what new domain in the Cosmos will all these souls go after death ?) But, apart from this, Mr. Hornaday has built up a sincere and logical argument founded on long and sympathetic study of wild animals. He takes the chief human attributes—courage, obedience, unselfishness—and, having proved animals to possess them, he goes on to show that when these emotions are met by such things as hunger, fear, or imminent death, deliber- ate reasoning results. He gives instances to show that where the mind of an animal has not been able to fall back upon custom nor the law of the herd, but has had to " think or die," it has thought, and thought to good purpose. The Kearton books are also full of such instances. So is one's own obser- vation. But they are also full of opposite instances. The bee, blundering at a partly open window, is not reasoning. It is blindly struggling. It goes foolishly up and down without deducing the fact that the strip of air means liberty. Yet the same bee, confronted by the colossal problem of inventing a new comb-shape (as cited by Tickner Edwards in his Lore of the Honey Bee), not only tries to do it, but does it, actually creating a new comb-form. And, the more one watches any creature, the more it seems as if the animal world had access at certain times and not at others to a wisdom deeper than our reason. Perhaps somewhere here lies the germ of the answer to the riddle. The animal world has developed along lines of instinct and intuition which we, in the dim past, discarded for reason, and which we are only just beginning to re-learn. Its failures are not ours, nor its triumphs. On the surface the results of reason and intuition may look the same, but their intense, their almost awful fascination is that they are not. We have been thinking hexagons while the bee has been dreaming them. In short, the animal world seems to have access to the mystery behind life, seems to have a " corner " in the subconscious where man only gropes. May it not be that the animal shows apparent stupidity at one moment and reason- ing powers at the next just because under sufficient stress its instinct touches the spring of the subconscious (which includes individual memory, race memory, deductions drawn from them, and something else as yet unnamed) and in a flash it knows its way. So the poet works, in darkness lit by divine flashes ; and the poet works by intuition, not reason. May not the animal world be to ours what the poet is to the man of science—a fool maybe, but a fool who is liable at any moment to become a prophet ?
Mr. Homaday's book is the pondered judgment of a practical man on a question of extreme mystery. It is both brilliant and careful, and it is an event in the literature of natural history. If one may make a criticism, it is a pity he did not gather together the threads of his thesis in a final chapter.
Richard Kearton's book, Al Home with Wild Nature (Cassell, 7s. 6d. net), has the perfection of all his work. He has patience, humour, love and the integrity of the true lover of earth. He never makes a 'statement without proving it, not once, but many times. Years of comradeship with the peoples of meadow and Mountain have enabled him to think the thoughts of the very fledglings a-row upon a brier, and of the tender-crafty mothers in fur and feather. No follower of the Grail could have had a more sincere, indomitable heart than this great observer of small creatures. He follows the flicker of vanishing wings with the ardour of a lover, and no rebuff discourages him. The result is a fairyland of actuality. Few men have taken such intimate pictures of birds as the
Keartons. They excel in their photographs of nestlings and mother-birds, and from the expression of the sitters one gathers that the birds are as much at home with them as they are with the birds. Particularly charming is the dipper fronting page 99, which has the essence of" dipperishness "- the neat, well-tailored air which it never loses even after submersion under rushing water. Some accident of printing has made the blackbird, fronting page 147, look like a thrush ; and even Mr. Kearton cannot be allowed to misquote Blake (p. 58) and to call his verse doggerel ! But that is one's only criticism of a marvellous book.
The illustrations to W. P. Pycraft's Birds in Flight (Gay and Hancock, 15s. net), though they have not the exactitude of the camera, have the delight of colour which so appeals to the mystic and the savage in us all—particularly in children. Mr. Roland Green is to be congratulated on the beauty of these pictures in which he has triumphed over a great difficulty—that of showing the markings on flying birds. In actuality the flying bird is just a blur. It is a pity that in the plates the various birds were not kept to scale, for the wagtail comes out as large as the buzzard. Also, are not the young chaffinches too fully fledged for their size ? And is not the bill of the drumming snipe too long ? (It is about a quarter of the bird's length in reality.) Most lovely of the pictures is that of the woodcock carrying young. Whether they do really carry them thus, or on the back like a bat, the artist has expressed in this picture the essence of motherly tenderness and baby trust. Apart from such small criticisms one has nothing but unbounded gratitude for such a book, which ought, like Mr. Kearton's, to be on everybody's shelves. The chapters on modes of flight and how to tell birds on the wing are most fascinating— especially to those who know the difficulties of such obser- vation. Whether he describes the dainty love-flight of the grasshopper-warbler or the majestic wing-display of the sun bittern the author is equally happy. This is a book of unique charm, and any schoolroom to which Christmas brings it will become hysterical with delight.
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