Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/390

364 judgment to which it is not entitled. He says that in order that the mud nest may not advance too rapidly and so fall of its own weight, the bird only works at it in the morning, and plays and feeds the rest of the day, thus giving the mud a chance to harden. Had not the genial parson observed that this is the practice of all birds during nest-building, that they work in the early morning hours and feed and amuse themselves the rest of the day? In the case of the mud-builders, this interim of course gives the mud a chance to harden, but are we justified in crediting them with this forethought?

Such skill and intelligence as a bird seems to display in the building of its nest, and yet at times such stupidity! I have known a phœbe-bird to start four nests at once, and work more or less upon all of them. She had deserted the ancestral sites under the shelving rocks and come to a new porch, upon the plate of which she started her four nests. She blundered because her race had had little or no experience with porches. There were four or more places upon the plate just alike, and whichever one of these she chanced to strike with her loaded beak she regarded as the right one. Her instinct served her up to a certain point, but it did not enable her to discriminate between those rafters. Where a little original intelligence should have come into play she was deficient. Her progenitors had built under rocks where there was little chance for mistakes of this sort, and they had learned through ages of experience to blend the nest with its surroundings, by the use of moss the better to conceal it. My phœbe brought her moss to the new timbers of the porch, where it had precisely the opposite effect to what it had under the gray mossy rocks.

An intelligent man once told me that crabs could reason, and this was his proof: In hunting for crabs in shallow water he found one that had just cast its shell, but the crab put up just as brave a fight as ever, though, of course, was powerless to inflict any pain; as soon as the creature found that its bluff game did not work it offered no further resistance. Now I should as soon say a wasp reasoned because a stingless drone, or male, when you capture him, will make all the motions with its body, curving and thrusting, that its sting-equipped fellows would do. This action is from an inherited instinct and is purely automatic. The wasp is not putting up a bluff game; it is really trying to sting you, but has not the weapon. The shell-less crab quickly reacts at your approach, as is its nature to do, and then quickly ceases its defence because in its enfeebled condition the impulse of defence is feeble also. Its surrender was on physiological, not upon rational grounds.

Thus do we without thinking impute the higher faculties to even the lowest forms of animal life. So much in our own lives is purely automatic—the quick reaction to appropriate stimuli, as when we ward off a blow or dodge a missile, or make ourselves agreeable to the opposite sex; and so much is inherited or unconsciously imitative.

Because man, then, is half animal, shall we say that the animal is half man? This seems to be the logic of some people. The animal man, while retaining much of his animality, has evolved from it higher faculties and attributes, while our four-footed kindred have not thus progressed.

The biological tree of life suggests one of those native apple-trees we often see in the pasture, to which I have already referred, with a thorny, scrubby, conical-shaped base, from the apex of which rises a stalk that unfolds and blooms in the free air and sunshine above. Of course this is only a comparison and not a real analogy. Any part of the cropped and thwarted base of the apple-tree would send up the tree if it had the chance, but no biologist now believes that any class of the lower animals could give rise to man, had it time and a free field to do so. Man is undoubtedly of animal origin, but his rise occurred when the principle of variation was much more active, when the forms and forces of nature were much more youthful and plastic, when the seething and fermenting of the vital fluids were at a high pitch in the far past, and it was high tide with the creative impulse. The world is aging, and, no doubt, the power of initiative of nature is becoming less and less. I think it safe to say that the worm no longer aspires to be man.