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VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE

It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin and Evolution of Life," makes no account of the micro-organisms or unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. I saw in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado where they were laid down horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms. Some of our polishing powders are made from these rocks. Formed of pure silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of many exquisite forms, Foraminiferæ. The Pyramids are said to be built of rocks formed by these organisms. "No single group of the animal kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, "has contributed, or is at present contributing, so largely as has the Foraminiferæ to the formation of the earth's crust." In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seem Professor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on the continents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the fresh waters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the "bordering primordial seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the mark. There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial living organisms. All conceivable changes of environment have passed over them, but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouring another form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologists usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latter begins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world with myriads of animal forms.

VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE

Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends." She is like ourselves, she is ourselves written large – written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of that of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less so of her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinal parts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Many trees yield fruit only every other year.

I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most. Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grasses in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts – butternuts, hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them the wage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries she offers the delectable pulp: "Do this chore for me, and you will find the service its own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and woods hold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fiery arum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries, and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with strychnine.

We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few, extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Western farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he sees his own account in it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are stingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut.

XII
NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD

As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts in Nature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again, which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in the rise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the more familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, I detect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expect to cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest in the whole performance.

I. SUNRISE

The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is the rising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of his coming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through the forest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comes very gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually become conscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowly increases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten minutes that fades into a light bluish tinge – the gold turns to silver. After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is to appear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; a minute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizon line. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites me blind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on its axis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day. The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil" to describe this moment? – "Day boils at last." Gilder, I think, speaks of it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, I watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. It is the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning. Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing the heavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usually enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down. His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.

II. NATURE'S METHODS

Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms; her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models. There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term. She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.

The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that of the animal species.

The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and, while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.

We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things. The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels; they teach us what to shun.

How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, for instance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer and elk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. They are dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop their horns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with our common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram does not shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent.

Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the nose and two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths.

What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given to the shovel-footed mole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no special tool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to use his soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feet have loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves it back with his nose.

Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sows its seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in addition it sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and just beyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seven inches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on its conquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above.

A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner, demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenly distributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers in one locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that my answer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is natural law." I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on his letter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.

There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things to scatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command – to increase and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which is limited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs. Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the robin – in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers – may and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.

The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time is mainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going on all about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the winds do not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be "fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frail as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weak many advantages.

There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another – the fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and sharp-eared with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with the blunt of scent – which we call natural competition; but the slow, the stupid, the dull-eyed, dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need to be otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed and sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungent secretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and the antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies have speed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchful because the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates the gray squirrel, which is above him in size and strength, and the chipmunk below him, but he does not exterminate either. The chipmunk burrows in the ground where the red cannot follow him, and he lays up a store of nuts and seeds which the red does not. The weasel easily dominates the rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and traps and weasels.

The sifting of species is done largely by environment, the wet, the cold, the heat – the fittest, or those best adapted to their environment, survive. For some obscure reason they have a fuller measure of life than those who fall by the way.

III. HEADS AND TAILS

I have heard a story of a young artist who, after painting a picture of a horse facing a storm, was not satisfied with it, and, feeling that something was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly the great artist said to him, "Turn the horse around."

The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse turns his tail. Why this difference? Because each adopts the plan best suited to its needs and its anatomy. How much better suited is the broad, square head of the cow, with its heavy coating of hair and its ridge of bone that supports its horns, to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous and sensitive head of the horse! What a contrast between their noses and their mode of grazing! The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse bites it off and loves to bite the turf with it. The lip of the horse is mobile and sensitive. Then the bovine animals fight with their heads, and the equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and high kicker, the cow a feeble one in comparison. The horse will kick with both hind feet, the cow with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick" in her kind. The tail of the cow is of less protection to her than is that of the horse to him. Her great need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in the rear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then her bony stern, with its ridges and depressions and thin flanks, is less fit in any encounter with storm or with beast than is her head. On the other hand, the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with their huge masses of muscles, his smooth flanks, and his tail – an apron of long, straight, strong hair – are well designed to resist storm and cold. What animal is it in Job whose neck is clothed with thunder? With the horse, it is the hips that are so clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips.

IV. AN UNSAVORY SUBJECT

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I suppose the breath of the obscene fungus by any other name would smell as rank. The defensive weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would probably not be less offensive if we called him by that name alone, instead of the common one by which he is universally known.

While in southern California last winter I heard of one that took up his abode in the basement of a house that stood on the side of a hill in the edge of the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where all sorts of odds and ends had accumulated. On some shelves was a box of miscellaneous articles, such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, old toothbrushes, bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire, chips of wood, and the dried foot and leg of a hen. One morning, on opening the door of the basement, the mistress of the house was surprised to see the whole collection of trash laid out in a line across the floor. The articles were placed with some degree of regularity covering a space about fifteen inches wide and ten feet in length. There were sixty-one articles in the row.

Having such an unsavory creature in the basement of one's house is rather ticklish business; not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yet fraught with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away the exhibit and left the door open, hoping their uninvited guest would take his departure. But he did not. A few nights later he began another collection, finding a lot of new material – among other things a box with old atomizer bulbs, four of which bulbs he arranged here and there, in the row – a motley array.

What is his object? I confess I do not know. No one has seen him do it, as he works at night, but there is little doubt that it is his work.³ The Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger than a gray squirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan.

I wish some one would tell me why this night prowler so often seems to spray the midnight air with his essence which leaves no trace by day. He never taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our Eastern species is as free from odor as a squirrel or a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one by day or night in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground that lasts for months. While at a friend's house in the Catskills last August a wood pussy came up behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap. We saw him from the window in the early evening, and we smelled him. For some reason he betrayed his presence. Late that night I was awakened by a wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose smart, yet in the morning no odor could be detected anywhere about the place. Of course the smell is much more pronounced in the damp night air than by day, yet this does not seem an adequate explanation. Does he signal at night to his fellows by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I have never heard him make a vocal sound. When caught in a trap, or besieged by dogs in a stone wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping his feet. He is the one American who does not hurry through life. I have no proof that he ever moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he ever experiences the feeling of fear, so common to nearly all our smaller animals. His track upon the snow is that of a creature at peace with all the world.

V. CHANCE IN ANIMAL LIFE

Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of some animals than of others. The frog and the toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawn thousands, but most birds lay only five or six eggs.

A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a miser with the other. She lets loose an army of worms upon the forests, and then sends an ichneumon-fly to check them. She wastes no perfume or color upon the flowers which depend upon the wind to scatter their pollen. Cross-fertilization is dear to her, and she invents many ingenious ways to bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will rob the bones of the fowl of their lime to perfect the shell of the egg. She wastes no wit or cunning on the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has already endowed each of them with a perfect means of defense.

Two things Nature is not chary of – fear and pain. She heaps the measure here because fear puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves them from many real dangers. What dangers have lurked for man and for most wild things in the dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! a fluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic. Pain, too, safeguards us; it shields us against real dangers. The pains of childbirth are probably no check upon offspring, because the ecstasy of procreation, especially on the part of the male, overcomes all other considerations.

VI. MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS

Mosquitoes for the North and mainly fleas and ticks for the South – this seems to be Nature's decree, at least in this country. The mosquitoes of the Far North pounce upon one suddenly and ferociously, while our Jersey mosquitoes hesitate and parley and make exasperating feints and passes. On the tundra of Alaska, if I stopped for a moment a swarm of these insects rose out of the grass as if they had been waiting for me all the years (as they had) and were so hungry that they could not stand upon the order of their proceeding, but came headlong.

In Jamaica the dogs were persecuted almost to death by the fleas. They were the most sorry, forlorn, and emaciated dogs I ever saw. Life was evidently a burden to them. I remember that Lewis and Clark, in their journey across the continent, were greatly pestered by fleas. I have found that our woodchucks, when they "hole up" in the fall, are full of fleas.

VII. THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

I have just been reading, for the third time, Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast," my sojourn near San Diego for a few months, where so many of the scenes and events he describes took place, having given me a renewed interest in the book.

It is very evident that the climate of southern California has greatly changed since Dana was here in the trading ships Pilgrim and Alert, in 1832 and 1833. The change has been from wet to dry. At that time his ship collected, and others engaged in the same trade collected, hundreds of thousands of hides and great quantities of tallow, all from cattle grown by the missions between San Diego and Santa Barbara. This fact implies good pasturage. The cattle grazed on the hills and plains that are now, during a large part of the year, as dry as a bone. At present cattle left to their own devices on this coast would soon starve to death.

Dana describes violent storms of wind and rain, mainly from the southeast, which the ship, anchored a few miles off the coast, or cruising up and down, experienced at all times of year – one or more storms each week, often lasting for days. One December he describes it as raining every hour for the whole month. The dread of the southeasters was ever present with the sailors. One of these, lasting three days, which came out of a cloudless sky, blew the sails to tatters. Nowadays a southeast storm of half a day is, according to my experience, an uncommon occurrence. To-day scarcely a drop of rain falls here from April till November, yet Dana describes many heavy rains in August. At present, in some of the interior valleys, where they grow alfalfa by means of irrigation, I see herds of well-kept dairy cows. In the season of rains the grass springs up and for a time cattle do well, but during the long dry season there is no pasturage save dry pasturage.

Although winter is supposed to be the rainy season here, I have been here during three seasons and have so far seen only light rains. To-day (December 16th) the earth is like powder as deep down as you care to dig. Yesterday I saw a man dragging in grain, and a great cloud of dust streamed out behind him. Ten or more years ago there was a very heavy rainfall in this locality that inundated large sections of the country and destroyed much property, the dry San Diego River getting out of bounds and carrying away bridges and floating houses on its banks. But it has been as dry as a highway ever since. It is clear that when the big rains do come they are more sporadic and uncertain than formerly.

VIII. ALL-SEEING NATURE

Sitting by a flat rock one summer morning, on my home acres in the Catskills, I noticed that the wild strawberry-vines sent out their runners over the rock, the surface of which is on a level with the turf, just as over the ground. Of course they could not take root, but they went through all the motions of taking root; the little clusters of leaves developed at intervals, the rootlets showed their points or stood at "attention," and the runners pushed out two or three feet over the barren surface and then seemed to hesitate like a traveler in the desert whose strength begins to fail. The first knot, or, one might say, the first encampment, was about one foot from the last one upon the turf, the next one about eight inches farther in; then the distance dropped to six inches, then to four. I think the runner finally gave it up and stopped reaching out. Each group of leaves apparently draws its main sustenance from the one next behind it, and when this one fails to reach the soil it loses heart and can give little succor to the next in front. The result is that the stools become smaller and smaller, and the distances between them less and less, down the whole line.

Nature's methods are seen in the little as well as in the big, and these little purple runners of the vine pushing out in all directions show the all-round-the-circle efforts of Nature as clearly as do the revolving orbs in sidereal space. Her living impulses go out in all directions. She scatters her seeds upon the barren as well as upon fertile spots. She sends rains and dews upon the sea as well as upon the land. She knows not our parsimony nor our prudence. We say she is blind, but without eyes she is all-seeing; only her creatures who live to particular ends, and are limited to particular spheres, have need of eyes. Nature has all time and all space and all ends. Delays and failure she knows not. If the runners of her strawberries do not reach their goal, the trouble corrects itself; they finally stop searching for it in that direction, and the impulse of the plant goes out stronger and fuller on other sides.

If the rains were especially designed to replenish our springs and supply our growing crops, the clouds might reasonably be expected to limit their benefactions, as do our sprinkling carts; but the rains are older than are we and our crops, and it is we who must adjust ourselves to them, not they to us.

The All-Seeing, then, has no need of our specialized vision. Does the blood need eyes to find its way to the heart and lungs? Does the wind need eyes to find the fertile spots upon which to drop its winged seeds? It drops them upon all spots, and each kind in due time finds its proper habitat, the highly specialized, such as those of the marsh plants, hitting their marks as surely as do others.

Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps are numbered and must go in a particular direction, but the goal of all-seeing Nature is everywhere, and she arrives before she starts. She has no plan and no method, and she is not governed.

These conceptions express too little, not too much. Nature's movements are circular; her definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. The rains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no more an end than is the rising vapor. Each is a part of the great circuit of beneficent and malevolent forces upon which our life (and all life) depends, upon which the making of the soil of the earth and the shaping of the landscape depend; all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and perfume of the world, all the glory of cloud and sky, all the hazards of flood and storm, all the terror of torrents and inundations, are in this circuit of the waters from the sea to the sky, and back again through the rivers to the sea. In our geologic time there is, in this circuit of the waters, more that favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say, we should not be here. The enormous destruction of human life, of all life, which has taken place and will continue to take place, in this beneficent circuit, is only an incident in the history of the globe; the physical forces are neither for nor against it; they are neutral; life to be here at all has to run these risks; has to run the gantlet of these forces, and to get many a lash and gash in the running. Against the suffering and death incident thereto there is no insurance save in the wit of man himself. All this wit has been developed and sharpened by much waste and suffering. We learn to deal with difficulties through the discipline of the difficulties themselves. If man were finally to learn to control the rains and the floods, it would be through the experience which they themselves bring him. The demons that destroy him are on his side when he strikes with the strength which they give him. Gravity, which so often crushes and overthrows him, is yet the source of all his might. The fire that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same fire that warms him and drives his engines across the continent.

There is no god that pities us or weeps over our sufferings, save the god in our own breasts. We have life on heroic terms. Nature does not baby us nor withhold from us the bitter cup. We take our chances with all other forms of life. Our special good fortune is that we are capable of a higher development, capable of profiting to a greater extent by experience, than are the lower forms of life. And here is the mystery that has no solution: we came out of the burning nebulæ just as our horse and dog, but why we are men and they are still horse and dog we owe to some Power, or, shall I say, to the chance working of a multitude of powers, that are beyond our ken. That some Being willed it, designed it, no; yet it was in some way provided for in the constitution of the world.