Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/536

518 Much evidence forces on the primitive man the notion that things can change their forms as well as their substances. Did we not thoughtlessly assume that truths which culture has made obvious to us are naturally obvious, we should see that an unlimited belief in metamorphosis is one which the savage cannot avoid. From early childhood we hear remarks implying that certain transformations which living things undergo are matters of course, while other transformations are impossible. This distinction we suppose to have been manifest at the outset. But, at the outset, the observed metamorphoses suggest that any metamorphosis may occur.

Consider the immense contrast in form as in substance between the seed and the plant. Look at this nut with hard brown shell and white kernel, and ask what basis there is for the expectation that from it will presently come a soft shoot and green leaves. When young we are told that the one grows into the other; and, the blank form of explanation being thus filled up, we cease to wonder and inquire. Yet, it needs but to consider what thought would have arisen had there been no one to give this mere verbal solution, to see that the thought would have been—transformation. Apart from hypothesis, the bare fact is that a thing having one size, shape, and color, becomes a thing having an utterly different size, shape, and color.

Similarly with the eggs of birds. But a few days since this nest contained four or five rounded, smooth, speckled bodies; and now in place of them are as many chicks gaping for food. We are brought up to the idea that the eggs have been hatched; and with this semblance of interpretation we are content. This extreme change in visible and tangible characters being recognized as one constantly occurring in the order of Nature, is therefore regarded as not remarkable. But to a mind occupied by no generalized experiences of its own or of others, there would seem nothing more strange in the production of chicks from nuts than in the production of chicks from eggs: a metamorphosis of the kind we think impossible would stand on the same footing as one which familiarity has made us think natural. Indeed, on remembering that there still survives, or till lately survived, the popular belief that barnacle-geese arise from barnacles—on learning that, even in the early transactions of the Royal Society, there is a paper describing a barnacle as showing faint traces of the young bird it is about to produce—it will be seen that only by advanced science has there been discriminated the natural organic transformations, from transformations which to ignorance seem just as likely.

The insect-world yields instances of metamorphoses even more misleading. To a branch which shades the opening of his wigwam, the savage saw, a few days ago, a caterpillar hanging with its head downward. Now in the same place hangs a differently formed and colored thing—a chrysalis. In a week or two after there comes out a butterfly: leaving a thin, empty case. These insect-metamorphoses,