HOMES WITHOUT HANDS.*
IT has been well said that the principles upon which a natural classification of things might be founded are practically indefinite. The whole of the animal creation, for instance, might be classified according to the number of feet, and the words quadruped, cen- tipede, and others, only express partial classifications on that principle. Or animals might be classed according to the number of their teeth, or more fancifully still, according to the ratio of the length of their tails to the length of their bodies, or the ratio of the weight of their bodies to the weight of their legs, if they have any. The ratio of the weight of the nervous system to the weight of the whole body would furnish a veal, important classification in natural history. Of course for scientific purposes classification ought not to be arbitrary or superficial, but ought to be selected according to the end in view. There are classifications of hidden but essential analogies, and classifications of external, and often unessential, but useful, characteristics. In a general way, however, it may be said that every classification whatever, however trivial, is useful, inasmuch as it necessarily tends to enlarge the field of clear vision, and may at any moment disclose some hidden analogy hitherto unseen. Mr. Wood's classification of the habitations of animals according to their principle of construction cannot be • Homes without Hands. By the BM J. G. Wood. With Now DMA! by W. F. FRO and E. Smith. London : Longman' said to be exactly scientific. But on the other band neither can it be accused of being trivial or arbitrary, for it opens up so wide and connected a perspective into the psychology of the animal creation, that it possesses quite a peculiar interest and fascination. The fact that rats and mice live in holes, and birds make nests, taken in an isolated sort of way, leaves little impression upon the imagin- ation of the master builder man, drunk with his own glories, who looks with pity and contempt upon dwellings and contrivances, which, if not in grandeur, at all events in delicacy of adaptation and ingenuity of workmanship, rival his own.
Niebuhr said somewhere or other that genius is seen in the magni- tude of the results compared with the slenderness of the materials obtainable. According to this definition many animals exhibit far more than instinct,—they show genius in the construction of their homes. But it is only when we study them on some such connected plan as that furnished by Mr. Wood, that we gradually become irre- sistibly impressed by sheer cumulative force, rather than direct proof, with the absurdity of the popular talk about blind instinct, and cannot help seeing the large amount of downright solid in- tellect which birds and beasts bring to bear on the construction of their homes. It may be said indeed, that if animals had in- tellect they would not build stereotyped homes. The answer to this is that in fact these homes are, mutatis mutandis, not more " stereotyped " than the homes of man, but on the contrary are adapted in a vast variety of ways to the difficulties to be overcome, and the general habits and wants of the creature concerned. The sociable weaver birds build a nest which can shelter five or six men, and is aptly compared by Mr. Wood to a Borneo village of Dyak houses, each house being in fact a village. They choose a tree of which the wood is very hard and tough, and having collected a large quantity of Booechmannie grass, the grass most suitable to their purpose, they first weave a roof, and under that place a quantity of nests, in regular order, " as much alike as the houses in a modern street," yet perfectly distinguishable to their respective owners. Layer after layer is added until the nest is often mis- taken by travellers for a small house. In one unfinished edifice " Le Vaillant counted, besides the deserted nests of previous seasons (the birds never occupy the same nest twice) no less than 320 nests, each of which was occupied by a pair of birds engaged in bringing up a brood of young, four or five in number." Sometimes the nest outgrows the strength of the tree and crashes down, and some- times the houses of man topple in, in spite of all his mathematics.
No doubt the sociable weaver birds show a sense of co-operation and regularity of development which is not common in either birds or animals, but if we take into account the fact that many tribes of men have hardly reached beyond the separate burrow or the clumsy separate abode, and if the size of our most magnificent monuments were reduced to the ordinary scale upon which bees, and other insects and many birds, usually work, our productions would not figure so very advantageously by comparison, taking all things into account. Surely exquisite adaptability, combined with the utmost natural elegance, is the highest end to which build- ing art can aspire. The neat of the loveliest of the humming birds, for instance, the fiery topaz, is a triumph of natural elegance and adaptation. It is an inverted and obliquely-bent cone, with the cup expanding upwards like a flower, and the apex bending to follow the oblique course of the branch, which it neatly embraces, and at first sight appears as though it were made of delicate buff leather or German tinder. On closer inspection, however, it is found to be a natural fungus, which the topaz selects and con- trives to mould into a shape which an artist in jewellery would be proud if he could copy. A curious case of adaptation is described by the author in the case of the dormouse. The dormouse, it seems, is one of the branch-building mammalia, and builds a very elaborate nest of woven grass and leaves, rather oval, and six inches long by three. This nest has in fact what is to all intents and purposes a curtain or door. For some of the blades of grass are arranged to hang over the entrance, and when the dormouse wishes to go indoors it pulls them aside with its tiny paw, just as we draw a curtain back.
The chapter on ants is prodigious. Time after time, from our youth upwards, we read of the extraordinary doings of these creatures, and time after time the mind throws off the impression as it throws off a nightmare. These creatures, the termites, for instance, have been known to build — what shall we call them 2—nests, houses, pyramids, fully twenty feet high, and a hundred feet in circumference. In order to understand what this means, it is necessary to reflect that twenty feet in proportion to the height of the ant represents more than six times the height of St. Paul's. A termite pyramid twenty feet high, represents to the termite a building about three thousand feet high in relation to ourselves. The very thought of man rearing a building three thousand feet high is enough to make a delicate woman faint. Again, that these insects should always work under galleries, and run a gallery along in no time, say to get at a pot of jam, is one of those facts which we can hardly adequately realize. It seems as if some species of ants outstripped Plato's visions of an ideal community,—the soldiers fight, and only fight, and so devoted are they to their calling, that they measure no con- sequences, know no fear, retreat before no attack, but fling them- selves on an enemy ten thousand times their own size as furiously as on an equal adversary. The ants seem, too, from another point of view, to be an ideal democracy, which would almost satisfy Mr. Bright. Every ant has its place, and fulfils its function, all move on together, none seems to set himself up over the other, all are pervaded by a furious and devouring energy, and to have as it were a fiery furnace of republican and democratic industry in their bowels. And yet it seems scarcely a beau ideal of existence. The present reviewer can conceive no better hell for Mr. Bright, if he wished to send him there, than to turn him into a " foraging" republican, or a " termite" democrat. We entreat Mr. Bright, as a personal favour, to read with care Mr. Wood's chapters on termite democracy.
Of course we have only touched Mr. Wood's materials. It would not be fair to omit all notice of the volume itself, which is a beautiful piece of creamy and comforting typography. Sir Joshua Reynolds somewhere quotes a maxim on painting by " Gandy of Exeter," to the effect that " a picture ought to have a richness in its texture, as if the colours had been composed of cream and cheese, and the reverse of a hard and dusky manner." How a man with the hard and dusky name of Gandy could invent such a maxim so foreign to his name, is a problem which we leave to Mr. Wood's leisure and research. Perhaps with Mr. Darwin's aid he may hit on the solution. But be that as it may, our great publishers apply Gaudy's maxim to their books even more anxiously than our painters to their pictures, and of the volume before us it might be said with exact truth, that Mr. Longman has laboured successfully to give " a richness to its texture, as if the colour of the paper had been composed of cream and cheese, and the reverse of a hard and dusky appearance." Those who feel keenly, as we do, the blight- ing effect upon the critic's soul of a blue, lean, hungry, raw, frost-bitten paper, with an angry, patchy, type, will sympa- thize with our full sense of the blessings of a paper, and type, and general appearance, which melt on the reader's eye as a pear in the mouth of an epicure. We can almost see the publisher smiling with gentle surprise and not unmingled feelings on find- ing his secret overtaken. Some pleasures he may think should be wholly unconscious, and not vulgarly analyzed in the glare of day- light. Well, perhaps we may be doing good to the dusky pub- lishers, at the expense of the more fastidious tastes of the creamy publishers, for the public good. The " new designs," by Messrs. Key 1 and Smith, deserve mention for their softness and beauty, perfect clearness, and, so far as we have been able to verify them, general accuracy, and they are totally free from the vulgarity of the illustrations in which the middle-class child is supposed by the vulgar fifth-rate draughtsman to delight. How "parents and guardians " can permit the young taste to be prematurely poisoned by the florid and garish illustrations now so common, passes our comprehension, except upon one supposition too cruel to make. Upon the whole, Mr. Wood has gradually risen by his perseverance to a legitimate and probably lasting success. His work on Homes without Hands has even a philosophical interest, apart from the mere compilation (for of course Mr. Wood lays no claim beyond intelligent compilation and observation), owing to the useful classification on a very large scale of animals, according to that in which Englishmen most sympathize with other animals, namely, their homes. No better present could be made to a boy fond of natural history. The style is clear. Mr. Wood has evidently laboured to overcome his innocent propensity to be funny, and has taken a hint from the simplicity and sincerity of the animals he describes. Now and then perhaps a faint trace of the former temptation peeps out, and we think his dis- quisitions on reason and instinct much thinner than the paper Mr. Longman supplies ; but on the whole the author is sobered by a sense of the general dignity of his magnum opus. Original naturalists will perhaps shrug their shoulders over Mr. Wood, and say that he is a mere compiler. Well, compilation is a very useful thing, and a few errors in the more scientific details are. cheaply atoned for by the immense impulse given to the general enlightenment. Last, not least, there is an excellent index to the present volume.
Previous page
