Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/269

Rh. Savage man, who has generally been first in contact with animals, is usually a hunter, and therefore an object of dislike to the other hunting animals, and of dread to the hunted. But civilized man, with his supply of bread and beef, is not necessarily a hunter; and it is just conceivable that he might be content to leave the animals in a newly discovered country unmolested, and condescend, when not better employed, to watch their attitude toward himself. The impossible island in The Swiss Family Robinson, in which half the animals of two hemispheres were collected, would be an ideal place for such an experiment. But, unfortunately, uninhabited islands seldom contain more than a few species, and those generally birds, or sea-beasts; and in newly discovered game regions, savage man has generally been before us with his arrows, spears, and pitfalls. Some instances of the first contact of animals with man have, however, been preserved in the accounts of the early voyages collected by Hakluyt and others, though the hungry navigators were generally more intent on victualing their ships with the unsuspecting beasts and birds, or on noting those which would be useful commodities for "trafficke," than in cultivating friendly relations with the animal inhabitants of the newly discovered islands. Thus, we read that near Newfoundland there are "islands of birds, of a sandy-red, but with the multitudes of birds upon them they look white. The birds sit there as thick as stones lie in a paved street. The greatest of the islands is about a mile in compass. The second is a little less. The third is a very little one, like a small rock. At the second of these islands there lay on the shore in the sunshine about thirty or forty sea-oxen or morses, which, when our boat came near them, presently made into the sea, and swam after the boat." Curiosity, not fear or hostility, was, then, the emotion roused in the sea-oxen by the first sight of man. The birds, whales, and walruses in the Wargate Sea and near Jan Mayen's Land were no less tame, and the sea-lions in the Southern Pacific, the birds that Barents first disturbed in Novaya Zembla, and even the antelopes which the early explorers encountered in the leastinhabited parts of central South Africa, seem all to have regarded the newly discovered creature, man, with interest and without fear. Sir Samuel Baker, in his Wild Beasts and their Ways, remarks on the "curious and inexplicable fact that certain animals and birds exhibit a peculiar shyness of human beings, although they are only exposed to the same conditions as others which are more bold." He instances the wildness of the curlew and the golden plover, and contrasts it with the tameness of swallows and wagtails. The reason does not seem far to seek. The first are constantly sought for food, the latter are left undisturbed. Perhaps the best instance of such a contrast is that of the hawfinch