The evening that the gentle animal appears leading in her train a file of tiny infant skunks, you will feel well repaid for the trouble you have taken. Baby skunks, like their elders, soon learn to know their friends, and are far from being at hair-trigger poise, as is generally supposed.

THE LESSON OF THE WAVE

The sea and the sky and the sh.o.r.e were at perfect peace on the day when the young gull first launched into the air, and flew outward over the green, smooth ocean. Day after day his parents had brought him fish and squid, until his baby plumage fell from him and his beautiful wing-feathers shot forth,--clean-webbed and elastic. His strong feet had carried him for days over the expanse of sand dunes and pebbles, and now and then he had paddled into deep pools and bathed in the cold salt water.

Most creatures of the earth are limited to one or the other of these two elements, but now the gull was proving his mastery over a third. The land, the sea, were left below, and up into the air drifted the beautiful bird, every motion confident with the instinct of ages.

The usefulness of his mother's immaculate breast now becomes apparent. A school of small fish basking near the surface rise and fall with the gentle undulating swell, seeing dimly overhead the blue sky, flecked with hosts of fleecy white clouds. A nearer, swifter cloud approaches, hesitates, splashes into their midst,--and the parent gull has caught her first fish of the day. Instinctively the young bird dives; in his joy of very life he cries aloud,--the gull-cry which his ancestors of long ago have handed down to him. At night he seeks the sh.o.r.e and tucks his bill into his plumage; and all because of something within him, compelling him to do these things.

But far from being an automaton, his bright eye and full-rounded head presage higher things. Occasionally his mind breaks through the mist of instinct and reaches upward to higher activity.

As with the other wild kindred of the ocean, food was the chief object of the day's search. Fish were delicious, but were not always to be had; crabs were a treat indeed, when caught unawares, but for mile after mile along the coast were hosts of mussels and clams,--sweet and lucious, but incased in an armour of sh.e.l.l, through which there was no penetrating.

However swift a dash was made upon one of these,--always the clam closed a little quicker, sending a derisive shower of drops over the head of the gull.

Once, after a week of rough weather, the storm G.o.ds brought their battling to a climax. Great green walls of foaming water crashed upon the rocks, rending huge boulders and sucking them down into the black depths. Over and through the spray dashed the gull, answering the wind's howl--shriek for shriek, poising over the fearful battlefield of sea and sh.o.r.e.

A wave mightier than all hung and curved, and a myriad sh.e.l.l-fish were torn from their sheltered nooks and hurled high, in air, to fall broken and helpless among the boulders. The quick eye of the gull saw it all, and at that instant of intensest chaos of the elements, the brain of the bird found itself.

Shortly afterward came night and sleep, but the new-found flash of knowledge was not lost.

The next day the bird walked at low tide into the stronghold of the sh.e.l.l-fish, roughly tore one from the silky strands of its moorings, and carrying it far upward let it fall at random among the rocks. The toothsome morsel was s.n.a.t.c.hed from its crushed sh.e.l.l and a triumphant scream told of success,--a scream which, could it have been interpreted, should have made a myriad, myriad mussels shrink within their sh.e.l.ls!

From gull to gull, and from flock to flock, the new habit spread, imitation taking instant advantage of this new source of food. When to-day we walk along the sh.o.r.e and see flocks of gulls playing ducks and drakes with the unfortunate sh.e.l.l-fish, give them not too much credit, but think of some bird which in the long ago first learned the lesson, whether by chance or, as I have suggested, by observing the victims of the waves.

No scientific facts are these, but merely a logical reasoning deduced from the habits and traits of the birds as we know them to-day; a theory to hold in mind while we watch for its confirmation in the beginning of other new and a.n.a.logous habits.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great G.o.d! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth.

WE GO A-SPONGING

When a good compound microscope becomes as common an object in our homes as is a clock or a piano, we may be certain that the succeeding generation will grow up with a much broader view of life and a far greater realisation of the beauties of the natural world. To most of us a glance through a microscope is almost as unusual a sight as the panorama from a balloon. While many of the implements of a scientist arouse enthusiasm only in himself, in the case of the revelations of this instrument, the average person, whatever his profession, cannot fail to be interested.

Many volumes have been written on the microscopic life of ponds and fields, and in a short essay only a hint of the delights of this fascinating study can be given.

Any primer of Natural History will tell us that our bath sponges are the fibrous skeletons of aquatic animals which inhabit tropical seas, but few people know that in the nearest pond there are real sponges, growing sometimes as large as one's head and which are not very dissimilar to those taken from among the corals of the Bahamas. We may bring home a twig covered with a thick growth of this sponge; and by dropping a few grains of carmine into the water, the currents which the little sponge animals set up are plainly visible. In winter these all die, and leave within their meshes numbers of tiny winter buds, which survive the cold weather and in the spring begin to found new colonies. If we examine the sponges in the late fall we may find innumerable of these statoblasts, as they are called.

Scattered among them will sometimes be crowds of little wheels, surrounded with double-ended hooks. These have no motion and we shall probably pa.s.s them by as minute burrs or seeds of some water plant. But they, too, are winter buds of a strange group of tiny animals. These are known as Polyzoans or Bryozoans; and though to the eye a large colony of them appears only as a ma.s.s of thick jelly, yet when placed in water and left quiet, a wonderful transformation comes over the bit of gelatine....

"Perhaps while you gaze at the reddish jelly a pink little projection appears within the field of your lens, and slowly lengthens and broadens, retreating and reappearing, it may be, many times, but finally, after much hesitation, it suddenly seems to burst into bloom. A narrow body, so deeply red that it is often almost crimson, lifts above the jelly a crescentic disc ornamented with two rows of long tentacles that seem as fine as hairs, and they glisten and sparkle like lines of crystal as they wave and float and twist the delicate threads beneath your wondering gaze.

Then, while you scarcely breathe, for fear the lovely vision will fade, another and another spreads its disc and waves its silvery tentacles, until the whole surface of that ugly jelly ma.s.s blooms like a garden in Paradise--blooms not with motionless perianths, but with living animals, the most exquisite that G.o.d has allowed to develop in our sweet waters."

At the slightest jar every animal-flower vanishes instantly.

A wonderful history is behind these little creatures and very different from that of most members of the animal kingdom. While crabs, b.u.t.terflies, and birds have evolved through many and varied ancestral forms, the tiny Bryozoans, or, being interpreted, moss-animals, seem throughout all past ages to have found a niche for themselves where strenuous and active compet.i.tion is absent. Year after year, century upon century, age upon age, they have lived and died, almost unchanged down to the present day.

When you look at the tiny animal, troubling the water and drawing its inconceivably small bits of food toward it upon the current made by its tentacles, think of the earth changes which it has survived.

To the best of our knowledge the Age of Man is but a paltry fifty thousand years. Behind this the Age of Mammals may have numbered three millions; then back of these came the Age of Reptiles with more than seven millions of years, during all of which time the tentacles of unnumbered generations of Bryozoans waved in the sea. Back, back farther still we add another seven million years, or thereabouts, of the Age of the Amphibians, when the coal plants grew, and the Age of the Fishes. And finally, beyond all exact human calculation, but estimated at some five million, we reach the Age of Invertebrates in the Silurian, and in the lowest of these rocks we find beautifully preserved fossils of Bryozoans, to all appearances as perfect in detail of structure as these which we have before us to-day in this twentieth century of man's brief reckoning.

These tiny bits of jelly are transfigured as well by the grandeur of their unchanged lineage as by the appearance of the little animals from within.

What heraldry can commemorate the beginning of their race over twenty millions of years in the past!

The student of mythology will feel at home when identifying some of the commonest objects of the pond. And most are well named, too, as for instance the Hydra, a small tube-shaped creature with a row of active tentacles at one end. Death seems far from this organism, which is closely related to the sea-anemones and corals, for though a very brief drying will serve to kill it, yet it can be sliced and cut as finely as possible and each bit, true to its name, will at once proceed to grow a new head and tentacles complete, becoming a perfect animal.

Then we shall often come across a queer creature with two oar-like feelers near the head and a double tail tipped with long hairs, while in the centre of the head is a large, shining eye,--Cyclops he is rightly called.

Although so small that we can make out little of his structure without the aid of the lens, yet Cyclops is far from being related to the other still smaller beings which swim about him, many of which consist of but one cell and are popularly known as animalculae, more correctly as Protozoans.

Cyclops has a jointed body and in many other ways shows his relationship to crabs and lobsters, even though they are many times larger and live in salt water.

Another member of this group is Daphnia, although the appropriateness of this name yet remains to be discovered; Daphnia being a chunky-bodied little being, with a double-branched pair of oar-like appendages, with which he darts swiftly through the water. Although covered with a hard crust like a crab, this is so transparent that we can see right through his body. The dark ma.s.s of food in the stomach and the beating heart are perfectly distinct. Often, near the upper part of the body, several large eggs are seen in a sort of pouch, where they are kept until hatched.

So if the sea is far away and time hangs heavy, invite your friends to go sponging and crabbing in the nearest pond, and you may be certain of quieting their fears as to your sanity as well as drawing exclamations of delight from them when they see these beautiful creatures for the first time.

DECEMBER

NEW THOUGHTS ABOUT NESTS

Our sense of smell is not so keen as that of a dog, who can detect the tiny quail while they are still invisible; nor have we the piercing sight of the eagle who spies the grouse crouching hundreds of feet beneath his circling flight; but when we walk through the bare December woods there is unfolded at last to our eyes evidence of the late presence of our summer's feathered friends--air castles and tree castles of varied patterns and delicate workmanship.

Did it ever occur to you to think what the first nest was like--what home the first reptile-like scale flutterers chose? Far back before Jura.s.sic times, millions of years ago, before the coming of bony fishes, when the only mammals were tiny nameless creatures, hardly larger than mice; when the great Altantosaurus dinosaurs browsed on the quaint herbage, and Pterodactyls--those ravenous bat-winged dragons of the air--hovered above the surface of the earth,--in this epoch we can imagine a pair of long-tailed, half-winged creatures which skimmed from tree to tree, perhaps giving an occasional flop--the beginning of the marvellous flight motions. Is it not likely that the Teleosaurs who watched hungrily from the swamps saw them disappear at last in a hollowed cavity beneath a rotten knothole? Here, perhaps, the soft-sh.e.l.led, lizard-like eggs were laid, and when they gave forth the ugly creaturelings did not Father Creature flop to the topmost branch and utter a gurgling cough, a most unpleasant grating sound, but grand in its significance, as the opening chord in the symphony of the ages to follow?--until now the mockingbird and the nightingale hold us spellbound by the wonder of their minstrelsy.

Turning from our imaginary picture of the ancient days, we find that some of the birds of the present time have found a primitive way of nesting still the best. If we push over this rotten stump we shall find that the cavity near the top, where the wood is still sound, has been used the past summer by the downy woodp.e.c.k.e.r--a front door like an auger hole, ceiling of rough-hewn wood, a bed of chips!

The chickadee goes a step further, and shows his cleverness in sometimes choosing a cavity already made, and instead of rough, bare chips, the six or eight chickadee youngsters are happy on a hair mattress of a closely woven felt-like substance.

Perhaps we should consider the kingfisher the most barbarous of all the birds which form a shelter for their home. With bill for pick and shovel, she bores straight into a sheer clay bank, and at the end of a six-foot tunnel her young are reared, their nest a ma.s.s of fish bones--the residue of their dinners. Then there are the aerial masons and brickmakers--the eave swallows, who carry earth up into the air, bit by bit, and attach it to the eaves, forming it into a globular, long-necked flask. The barn swallows mix the clay with straw and feathers and so form very firm structures on the rafters above the haymows.

But what of the many nests of gra.s.ses and twigs which we find in the woods? How closely they were concealed while the leaves were on the trees, and how firm and strong they were while in use, the strongest wind and rain of summer only rocking them to and fro! But now we must waste no time or they will disappear. In a month or more almost all will have dissolved into fragments and fallen to earth--their mission accomplished.

Some look as if disintegration had already begun, but if we had discovered them earlier in the year, we should have seen that they were never less fragile or loosely constructed than we find them now. Such is a cuckoo's nest, such a mourning dove's or a heron's; merely a flat platform of a few interlaced twigs, through which the eggs are visible from below. Why, we ask, are some birds so careless or so unskilful? The European cuckoo, like our cowbird, is a parasite, laying her eggs in the nests of other birds; so, perhaps, neglect of household duties is in the blood. But this style of architecture seems to answer all the requirements of doves and herons, and, although with one sweep of the hand we can demolish one of these flimsy platforms, yet such a nest seems somehow to resist wind and rain just as long as the bird needs it.

Did you ever try to make a nest yourself? If not, sometime take apart a discarded nest--even the simplest in structure--and try to put it together again. Use no string or cord, but fasten it to a crotch, put some marbles in it and visit it after the first storm. After you have picked up all the marbles from the ground you will appreciate more highly the skill which a bird shows in the construction of its home. Whether a bird excavates its nest in earth or wood, or weaves or plasters it, the work is all done by means of two straight pieces of horn--the bill.

There is, however, one useful substance which aids the bird--the saliva which is formed in the mucous glands of the mouth. Of course the first and natural function of this fluid is to soften the food before it pa.s.ses into the crop; but in those birds which make their nests by weaving together pieces of twig, it must be of great a.s.sistance in softening the wood and thus enabling the bird readily to bend the twigs into any required position. Thus the catbird and rose-breasted grosbeak weave.