LOWER LIFE IN THE TROPICS.
IN the old times, before Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace, when we used to know nothing about evolution or selection, or the meaning of their colours to animals and plants themselves, apart from their privilege of pleasing the human eye, we read stories of the Equatorial lands with rather a provoked sense of the beauty that was wasted there. )Ye called it " wasted " in our thoughts, because to so very few it should ever be given to look up into the
golden and scarlet network-roofing of the primeval tropical forest, and around on an endless expanse of flower-bearing stems, with Charles Kingsley's "At last !" in the long-drawn breath of their intense satisfaction. Now the fairy-tales of science are popular reading. Mr. Wallace tells us how the plants recommend themselves by their tempting colours to the birds which are to scatter their seeds in distant places, instructs us in the domestic habits of butterflies, and the humours of orchids ; describes the humming-birds, in phrases that have the swiftness of flight in them ; and shows us the life that is in the equatorial forests,—so various, so vivid, and so purposeful, that we se it in our fancy without any vague discontent, and with a grander notion of its beauty, gained from the fuller revelation of its wonder.
With Mr. Wallace for our guide, for instance, we may go ashore in fancy, from an imaginary Sunbeam,' during an unfettered voyage in which,—
" We know the merry world is round,
And we might sail for evermore,"
and find ourselves in the hill forests of Borneo, all draped with the most beautiful of orchids, the unique Valuta Lotvii, whose flower-stems, sent out from small clusters of leaves, bang down eight feet in length, covered with large, symmetrical, crimson stars. Throughout the mountains of the equatorial zone we should find everywhere the wonderful flowers of which the crimson starred streamer—festival decorations of the forest—is king, growing on the stems, the forks, or the branches of trees, abounding on fallen trunks, spreading over rocks, hanging down the face of preci- pices, or modestly mixing with humble grasses. And we should see the profuse, low-growing, orange star flowers on the stem of the Polyalthea, which cannot fail to attract the attention of the wandering butterflies and bees, out of whose sight they would be, if they grew in the usual way, on the tops of these small trees, overshadowed by the dense canopy above them. We should not, indeed, find the belief that in abundance and variety of floral colour the tropics are pre-eminent, which in old times we held, justified by the facts. "Twelve years of observation among the vegeta- tion of the Eastern and Western tropics has convinced me," says Mr. Wallace, "that in proportion to the whole number of species of plants, those having gaily-coloured flowers are actually more abundant in the temperate zones. The Alpine meadows and rock- slopes, the open plains of the Cape of Good Hope or of Australia, and the flower-prairies of North America, offer an amount and variety of floral colour which can certainly not be sur- passed, even if it can be equalled, between the tropics." But not only the vastness of the primeval forest, within the equatorial zone, would overwhelm us, but the force of develop- ment and vigour of growth, and amazing variety of forms and species which everywhere meet and grow side by aide. If the traveller, having overcome his first sense of lost bewilderment amid profusion, notices a particular species, and wishes to find more like it, he may often turn his eyes in vain in every direction ; trees of varied forms, dimensions, and colours are around him, but rarely is any one of them repeated in that equable zone, where there is no struggle against climate, and no one type of vegetation monopolises territory to the exclusion of the rest. We should probably look in vain, amid the vast luxuriance of palm and bamboo, with all their incalculable aid to human needs in the lands they grow in, for the larger forms of animal life, for the mammals and the reptiles are widely scattered, and shy of man ; and in the Brazilian forests, and those of the Malay Archipelago especially, birds do not sing, but make pensive and mysterious sounds. Monkeys, indeed, are pre-eminently tropical and con- stantly on view, except in Australia, Madagascar, and New Guinea ; and whether they are chattering in Asia, or roaring like lions or bulls in America, they are the liveliest and the noisiest creatures within the equatorial zone. Bats, too, are specialities of the tropics, and South America boasts a group, the " vampyre," which Mr. Wallace considers "sure to attract attention." It seems likely, especially if an individual of the group gets a chance of exercising his mysterious manoeuvres on the observant
traveller. The exact manner of the vampyre's attack is not
known ; the sufferer never feels the wound, being fanned into a deeper slumber by the motion of the wings, and "rendered insensible to the gentle abrasion of the skin, either by teeth or tongue." The tropical bats are of immense variety One of the strangest of the living pictures presented there must be a migration of the great fruit-bats, or flying foxes. We know the shrinking, blinking creatures, something like small umbrellas with broken wires, and inextricably mixed up with fox-head handles, of which we get peeps under a flap in a cage at the Zoological Gardens ; but they are small specimens, and convey to us no notion of the huge, swooping things, often five feet in width across the expanded wings, which pass by in immense flocks, taking hours to do it in, and devastate the fruit plantations of the natives, who will not even eat them in revenge. They seem indeed to enjoy complete impunity, like the beautiful glow- worm, who is supposed to shine because he is not edible, and hangs out his luminous speck of warning to the insectivorous birds. We might, perchance, see such monster snakes as that one, twenty-six feet long, which Mr. St. John measured in Borneo, and we should probably be told, while sleeping in a native house, that there is a large snake in the roof, on a rat-hunting expedition, and that one need not be disturbed in case one should hear it. The slender whip-snake will glide among the bushes, and may be touched before he is seen ; and the green viper, deadly and watch- ful, will lie coiled motionless upon foliage of his own hue, un- suspected, within a few inches of one's face, if one is a collector, which it is much safer not to be. Then there are the lizards,—no less than 1,300 different kinds, and almost all to be found in the tropics, thriving on the rich vegetation and the duly propor- tioned sunshine and moisture, and coloured to harmonise with their habits and surroundings. "When I see the first lizard holding on by his feet to the side of a white wall, I feel that I am getting into the sunshine," once said a lover of the sun to the present writer ; and Mr. Wallace dwells on the charm of these creatures to corners from the cold. They run along walls and palings, sun themselves on logs of wood, creep up to the eaves of cottages, scamper out of one's way in every garden, road, or sandy path, walk up smooth walls with the greatest ease, or crawl up trees, "keeping at the further side of the trunk, and watching the passer-by with the caution of a squirrel." The house lizards are grey, the rock lizards are stone-colour ; the forest lizards are mottled with green, like lichen-grown bark ; the ground lizards are of beautiful green colours, like the tree-frogs. Not the least interesting of the forest pictures must be the latter curious reptiles, sitting quietly during the day, so as to be almost invisible, owing to their colour, and their moist, shining skins, so closely resembling vegetable surfaces ; and the other varieties, beautifully spotted, like large beetles, or striped with bright, staring colours. In their case, nature's wonderful law comes in to protect them ; they may flaunt their red bodies and blue legs,—they are uneatable.
Among the living pictures that the tropics have to show, surely none can be more beautiful than the butterflies. Who has ever looked even at dead specimens from Malacca and from Rio de Janeiro, all stiff and dull, pinned on cardboard with their prim companions, without wondering at their beauty, without a vision- ary glimpse of the sun-pierced forest-paths, and the fruit-bearing lands in which the splendid creatures disport themselves in life? America is richer in butterflies than the Eastern hemisphere, but everywhere those of the tropics surpass those of the temperate zone in numbers and quality. "The first sight of the great blue Morphos," says Mr. Wallace, "flapping slowly along in the forest-roads near Para, of the large, white-and-black, semi .transparent Ideas, floating airily about in the woods near Malacca, and of the golden-green Ornithopteras, sailing on bird-like wing over the flowering shrubs which adorn the beach of the Ke and Am u islands, can never be forgotten by any one with a feeling of admiration for the new and beautiful in nature." The habits of the tropical butterflies are as various as their colours and forms are exquisite, and a true lover of them need never be deprived of objects of contemplation, for though the majority are "diurnal "—that is, of the early-to-bed-and- early-to-rise persuasion—some Eastern morphiclie and an entire American family (Brassolidie) are " crepuscular," like the "Buffalo gals " of our youth. The description of some of them, as early in the morning they expand their wings to the sun, and dart so swiftly that the eye cannot follow them, reminds one of Shelley's "embodied joy, whose !ace has just begun." A considerable number frequent river-
sides and the margins of pools, assembling together in flocks of hundreds of individuals ; but these are all males,— the females remain in the forest, where in the afternoons (pre- sumably after their no-business hours) their partners join them. Among these exquisite creatures there are also uneatable species, who, when the crowd of floating and fluttering beauties disappear, to conceal themselves amid foliage or on sticks which harmonise with their hues, hang in their unconcealed gaudiness at the end of slender twigs or on exposed leaves.
We should be disappointed at first with the tropical birds, but
creaturesat er many days ylis in the forest e we should tthheiebkeaetztifthuel parrots, the pigeons, the perching birds, in all the wonderful variety of those orders, especially in that portion of the Malay Archipelago that is east of Borneo, and in the Pacific Islands, where monkeys—arboreal animals given to the eating of eggs—are not. Only in America should we find the humming-bird, that living marvel of colour, exclusively tropical, though it has migrant species which visit Lake Winnipeg and the Columbia River making journeys of full 3,000 miles each spring and autumn ; darting into fuchsia-flowers in the midst of a snow-storm at Terra del Fuego, and whirring about Pichincha at 14,000 feet above the sea. It was of a minute humming-bird, found only in the extinct crater of Chiriqua, in Veragua, that Mr. Gould said, "It seems to have caught the last spark from the volcano before it was extinguished," so flaming is the crimson of its tiny gorget. These flitting gems, these beautiful bauble-birds are extraordi- narily brave and combative ; we have complete tournament-pic- tures of them from Mr. Wallace and Mr. Gosse, and of their numbers Mr. Belt says that in the part of Nicaragua where he was living they equalled in number all the rest of the birds together, if they did not greatly exceed them. How much one would like to see the nest, "no larger inside than the half of a walnut-shell, of a cup-shape, beautifully decorated with pieces of lichen, and lined with the finest and most silky fibres ;" how gently, lest one should tarnish the two little white eggs by breathing on them, one would steal away from it. What pictures are conjured up by the Mexican and Peruvian names of these wonderful crea- tures, which mean "rays of the sun" and "tresses of the day- star."
The scientific aspect of these living pictures has an extraordinary charm, as Mr. Wallace sets it forth. "The functional and biolo- gical classification of the colours of living organisms" sounds very imposing, but one finds the protective, warning, sexual, typical, and attractive colours all severally explained, so simply and con- vincingly that one rather thinks the lucidity must be somehow imputable to one's-self,—and then the theory adds a tenfold in- terest to the scenes which have been summoned up before one's fancy. One feels deeply grateful to the profoundly scientific naturalist who teaches one so much, but does not forbid one to feel,—who classifies wonders indeed, but acknowledges them thus :—" When, for the first time, the traveller wanders in these primeval forests, he can scarcely fail to experience sensations of awe, akin to those excited by the trackless ocean or the Alpine snowfields. There are a vastness, a solemnity, a gloom, a sense of solitude and of human insignificance, which for a time over- whelm him, and it is only when the novelty of these feelings has passed away that he is able to turn his attention to the separate constituents that combine to produce those emotions, and examine the varied and beautiful forms of life which, in inex- haustible profusion, are spread around him."
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