• AN OBJECT FOR A WALK.
SIIRELY it is rather a sad affair when a man going forth for a country ramble says, complainingly, that he wants "an object for his walk." Such a complaint seems to argue a very remarkable poverty of interest. It is as if Charles Darwin, starting for that voyage in the 'Beagle' which was scarcely, if at all, less epoch-making than the earlier voyage of Christopher Columbus in the Santa Maria,' had complained that be wanted "an object for the voyage." He went with no very definite object in his eye, but just to "look around," as an American would say ; and he looked with some purpose,-.-.he came back with "The Origin of Species" in his head. If he had started with an object clearly defined, there would have been a great deal less of interest in his excursion, for the foreknowledge would have practically excluded the possibility of new discovery, which is always so attractive. We can hardly imagine Darwin going out for a country ramble and saying that he wanted an object in the walk. When a man has Iris interests and his intelligence so keenly set, objects —in the country, at all events : they are not so readily found in towns—cannot be far to seek. No doubt it is quite true, more's the pity, that we cannot all be Darwins ; but all of us can train ourselves to take some share of his interest in the so-called "common objects" of a country walk. The faculty which men like Darwin seem to have possessed in such perfection was the faculty for asking themselves questions about everything that they aw,—asking the " why " of everything. They wanted to know why it was that the young beech leaf was rolled up in a long narrow case and a young oak leaf or ash leaf in a dumpy round case. Lord. Avebury, who has very much of this great faculty of Darwin, answers that it is because the edges of the beech leaf are not serrated and cut in like the leaves of the others, so that it is mechanically impossible for them to be folded up into a ball without tearing, as the others can be. This in itself may not seem an important addition to the sum of human knowledge; but it is out of the multitude of little bits of information such as this that the whole edifice of knowledge has to be built, beginning from as small, simple things as the first living forms out of which all present life, so various and wonderful, has evolved. In union with the faculty of setting themselves problems about the "why" of all the common things they saw about them, the men who have done the big work had a wonderful capacity for taking pains in observation,— unwearied patience. And although Darwin probably thought out his system in the intervals of leisure which a 'board-ship life gives in abundance, and fortified it by the instances which he found in the teeming Brazils, it is likely that he might have given us just the same results, from patient observation and long thought, if the 'Beagle' had never taken him as passenger. It is not necessary to go far afield to see signs and wonders : they are always ready at our very feet. What is necessary is to have eyes to see them.
Just for the moment, rambling in the woodlands, you will find them very empty of visible forms of life. Generally speaking, insects are either dead or hibernating : there is none of the hum of their wings which fills the air in summer, nor sign of their movement flying or creeping. The wood- land is singularly empty of bird-life, too. Beaters and shooters have been through the woods again and again, reducing the game to its minimum, and at the same time scaring away many kinds which are allowed to go without the compliment of a shot. Most of the acorns have been eaten, so that the swarms of woodirigeons which used to frequent the oak trees have departed elsewhere, probably to , their native homes on the Continent. Now and again you may • find' a big English wood-pigeon out of a fir in which he has been taking a siesta. But it is only an occasional bird; the multitude has gone. High up in the trees you may here and there bear a very tiny, thin voice cheeping, of a golden-crested , wren in, incessant movement, hunting sedulously for insect food which is hard to find. Once in the day, or twice if you are fortunate, you may meet with strangely assorted companies of small birds, tits, tree-creepers, gold-crests, perhaps a nut- hatch or two ; and these will all be moving on together, hunting each tree for insects in the line of their travel, which generally appears to be towards the West ; but very possibly this is only a charms appearance, and the next company seen may be going quite differently. More often than these composite gatherings one sees a party, moat probably a last year's family, of long-tailed tits only, all travelling on in a like way. Solitarily hunting up in the high trees is a little bird very busy. Most frequently it is too high for identification, but generally it is one of the cole-tit species. When the days become warm and springlike, you will be able to tell it easily enough by its note, perpetually repeated.
One wonders how all these birds, which depend almost entirely on insects for their food, keep themselves alive through the winter, when the insects which we are able to see-are so few and far between. All of them are tiny birds, and would not be large eaters. Nor, for all that we have spoken of there being several species, are they many at this time of year. For the most part the woodland is deserted. It has altogether an empty look, for there is no foliage on euch of the trees as are not evergreen, and the bracken has been laid by the snow, so that there seems to be no cover for bird or beast either above or below. The pine mounds, or what remain of them, of the big horse-ants which are so active in the woods all the summer, piling up their great edifices of pine-needles and twigs, are in strong evidence now that all the undergrowth is bare or laid low. The snow has knocked about the hills of the ants, so that they are not half the height they were, and all the symmetry of their conical shape has been destroyed; but, for all that, they are very much more visible from a distance now that the undergrowth is down, and also because their dark mass strikes almost the only note of contrast, except for the tree-stems, with the universal russet of the flattened bracken. If such destruction had been wrought on their mountains in the summer, when the ants were at work, they would have repaired the damage with a
• feverish energy which would very soon have restored the architecture; but now the ants are not inhabiting the mountainous part of their country at aU, or taking any present interest in it, or, indeed, in anything else, for they are down far below, in their tunnelled galleries under the surface of the ground, and even there are in the deep trance of hibernation. When the warmth comes it will revive their activities, and they will set to work again at once on the mountains.
Beside the breakdown and flattening down of the heaps, due to snow and other untoward influences, you are likely to notice that the mounds are honeycombed or dug out in holes here and there, rather as if the rabbits had been scratching in them. They have, however, no attraction for the rabbits, and if you are lucky you may catch in the very act the culprit who is guilty of making these breaches in a neighbour's wall, or at least obtain a good clear sight of him, in the shape of a bird with gleaming gold and green back and a scarlet top to his head,—a green wood- pecker. This latter capital detail you are not so likely to be able to see, as he flies from you to perch himself up against a vertical tree-trunk, and immediately to ran round it so as to place the shelter of the stem between you and him. He will put his head round the shoulder of the trunk to have a look at you again after he has run some twenty feet or so higher up the tree, and will keep you under careful observation until you have passed quite out of dangerous distance. You may be very sure that he will see a good deal more of you than you will of him, once you have flushed him from his dinner. And this dinner from which you have flushed him he has been seeking in one of these ant-heaps, and it is he that has made the holes which look like rabbits' serapes in the sides of the pine-needle hills. Hem and there you will see where he has thrust in his long sharp beak, with a longer and more penetrating tongue at the end of that, into the far end of the excavated hole, like a borer put in at the end of the dug-out portion of a well Whether it is actually for ants, or for other insects which may have taken shelter in the warmth of these heaps, that he has been searching, it would be hard to say, and perhaps impossible to find out without apost- mertera examination of him, which one would be loth to resort to. Probably it is insects other than the ants, which are most likely too deep—in the literal, not the metaphorical sense— for him. And though, having seen all this, we may come home without having discovered a new "Origin of Species," we have at least found much that is of interest, though we have not had "an object for a walk."
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