SKETCHES OF ANIMAL LIFE AND HABITS4 PHILOLOGISTS have busied themselves

much of late over the legends and folk-lore of primitive times, and are fast reducing the chaos of Wonderland to order. The fairy-tales which fed

• The Laws of Fesole; a Familiar Treatise on the Elementary Principles and Practice of Drawing and Painting. By John Ruskin, LL.D. Part I. G. Allen, SunnysIde, Orpington, Kent.

Sketches Of Aninv.1 Life and Habits. By Andrew Wilson, Ph.D. London and Edinburgh: W. and It. Chambers.

our tender minds with food suitable for babes are made beneath their magic touch to give up dark meanings. Giants and dwarfs, enchanters and enchanted, melt away into sun-myths, rain-myths, myths of the revolving seasons, and prove to be, after all, but lessons in disguise. The mind of youth is quick to imbibe the spirit of the age into which it is born, and before long we may expect to have philosophers in short frocks or knickerbockers explaining to benighted elders that the falling of the Welsh giant into the pit dug for him by Jack really means the setting of the sun in the west, that the climbing by him of the beanstalk up the wondrous ladder to that upper land between earth and heaven signifies the rising of mists and exhalations to feed the cloud strata ; that the transformation of the white cat is a parable illustrating the good results of judicious kindness in the educa- tion of girls ; and that the tale of the gay ascent "in union sweet" of Jack and Gill up the world-renowned hill, and their sad and separate downfall, hints briefly and darkly at the mysteries of life and of death.

When that time comes, when "fairy tales no longer fill the minds of children with wonder and a pleasing fear, it is to Nature that we must turn for consolation, and it is satisfactory to reflect that no fairy or magician can outdo her in wonderful transforma- tions, in subtle disguises, or in unlooked-for and odd combinations. The love of the marvellous, so natural to the heart of childhood, can never go unfed while the great mother provides it with such strange and beautiful stories.

The little volume before up opens up some of the sources from which the fairy tales of the future (not of science, but of nature) may be drawn. We see in it glimpses of what we may call the fantastic side of nature, the side in which she seems to revel in quaintness, incongruities, sudden freaks and changes, and a be- wildering richness of resource. The microscope has revealed worlds of life to which no end can be seen, and of speculation that reaches beyond the subtlest intellect. The child may seek for amusement where the man of science stands as.a scholar,—in the great workshop of nature.

In old days, the barnacle (imaginary parent of the so-called geese) was a favourite of romance. The transformation (pro- gressive and upward), so livelily described by Gerard, in his Herbal, of the " spuma or froth that in time breedeth shells, in shape like those of a mussel, but sharper-pointed, wherein is con- tained a thing in form like the lace of silk, finely woven which in time cometh to the shape and form of a bird ; when it is perfectly formed, the shell gapeth open, and the first thing that appeareth is the aforesaid lace or string ; next come the legs of the bird, hanging out, and as it groweth greater, it openeth the shell by degrees, till at length it is all come forth, and hangeth only by the bill ; in short space after it cometh to full maturitie and falleth into the sea, where it gather- eth, feathers and groweth to a fowle," is, alas ! proved by later knowledge to be a transformation retrogressive and downward, but in its nature scarcely less incredible. The barnacle begins life an active and comparatively highly developed creature, it ends it as a shell affixed to a log of rotten wood. The larva swims forth from its tiny egg, furnished with tail and feet, with a breast- plate and a cyclopian eye. He leads a merry, roving life for a time, but soon the spell begins to work ; his eyes drop out, his breastplate grows into a shell, his legs becoree feelers, and attach themselves to some chance drift-wood, to which the eyeless barnacle is for ever fixed. One of the strangest facts in this case is that during this process of loss the one eye, for a short time, is replaced by two, and the creature enjoys a brief season of intenser light before he is plunged into perpetual darkness,

thus illustrating, as Dr. Wilson truly says, the fact of "retrogression or physical backsliding."

Of a more cheerful cast is the story of the crab. It is pleasant to contemplate the infant crab, spectacles (huge and goggled) covering the front of his head, a peak, as of an elongated night- cap, on the top, a little brush-tail thrust out behind, and clusters of legs peeping like whiskers from under his chin, as he turns head-over-heels, acrobat fashion, on his first journey in life. On his back, when grown to maturity, he often carries a bag,—not for his own profit, however. The bag or sacciilina is deeply fixed by root-like feelers into his shell, and on being opened is found to contain eggs. If we trace the history of one of these eggs, we shall find that it grows into a being resembling the young barnacle, and like the latter form, the young sacculina swims merrily through the sea :—

" Soon the shell of the back becomes folded, and developes two pieces, like the larva of the barnacle ; and as in the latter, six pair of additional legs appear. The young sacculina and the young barnacle might, in fact, be regarded as identical, and even at this stage no difference is perceptible between them. The feelers next become greatly developed, and grow into the form of branched, root-like organs. The shell and other organs drop off, and the formerly active and free-swimming being becomes.thns transformed into the inert, bag-like sacculina, the eggs of which will each repeat the curious cycle of development through which their progenitor itself has passed."

That extremely slippery customer of old, Proteus, the sea-god, Las his representative in the amceba of our age :—

" Making its way slowly along amidst the fragments of weed which impede its course, we descry a peculiar shapeless and colourless being, which, as it moves, seems literally to flow from one shape to another. Movement, in this case, really means a constant alteration of the soft,

clear, jelly-like body When it moves it pushes out a process of its body in the direction in which it means to travel, and the rest of the body flows, as it were, into this extended portion More than once I have watched an amceba stumble, as it were, across a frag- ment of pond-weed which lay in its path. The soft body was next extended both above and below the obstruction, apparently in hope of surmounting the difficulty, but without success. The animalcule was, however, equal to the occasion, for the portion of the body above the obstacle parted company with that below, and each half moved triumphantly away from the spot, having converted a defeat into a veritable crown of success, so that two individuals were thus produced by the temporary difficulty-of one."

This accidental and summary divorce of what were before cer- tainly the closest imaginable relations is rivalled by certain bell- shaped animalcules, whose "heads may be seen to increase enormously ; by-and-by, a division, a 'little rift,' is visible in the enlarged head ; this increases, till one of the halves breaks away, and wanders off to seek its fortune and to form other ties- As is customary with younger sons thus turned adrift in fairy- land, new and unsuspected capabilities reveal themselves in the despised youth, all things necessary for its sustenance and growth developing themselves by degrees, as the animalcule-bud floats in the water of the pool that forms its universe."

Under the title of "Some Curious Animal Companionships," Dr. Wilson tells us a new version of the tale of Sinbad and his Old Man of the Sea,—a new and far more pleasing version, for friend- ship appears, strange as it may seem, to be at the bottom of the singular companionship of the hermit-crab and the cloak anemone. On the shell of the hermit-crab may often be seen—" almost certainly be found," are our author's words—this pretty little anemone :-

"And not only does the hermit-crab appear tacitly and simply to tolerate his living burden, with which, like Sinbad the Sailor and the Old Man of the Sea, he persistently crawls about, but he also appears to exhibit a certain care and affection for the anemone. He has been noticed to feed the anemone with his pincer-like claws, and when, as is the custom of these animals, the crab casts away his shell to Beek another and larger abode, he has been seen carefully detaching the helpless anemone from the old habitation, and assisting it to gain a firm basis and support on the now shell. Another species of hermit simi- larly makes a companion of another kind of anemone, the latter sub- sisting on the food-particles furnished by his host. These details may pardonably suggest to us the idea that there may be, after all, much that is identical in the motives of even such lower forms as hermit- crabs with the actions which we are accustomed, perhaps too exclu- sively, to regard as peculiar to ourselves."

In a chapter on animal transplanting, some extremely interesting instances are given of the power of circumstances in accelerating or retarding the processes of development, or even in producing permanent results on the "life and structure of living beings." Dr. Wilson's aim being, as he declares in his preface, to give "the general reader, especially the young, some popular and yet trust- worthy ideas regarding some of the most interesting groups of the animal world," he does not enter into any vexed question of science, but leaving his opinions on one side, deals simply with facts. The whole tone of this little book speaks, however, of the devout and humane, no less than of the true scientific spirit that animates it, and makes it as agreeable to read as it is profitable to mark and inwardly digest.