Dieted on seeds and grain, Picking, popping, Among the barley newly sown. On the summer berries browsing, You that in a humbler station, The gnats and flies your enemies; You that in a squadron driving With a hurry scurry, Hurry to the meeting, and attend to the debate." The travellers are, besides the poets, the chief early source of exact observations in natural history. These observations are, of course, oftentimes found in connection with stories to which we are bound by every possible motive to refuse our credencesuch stories, for instance, as those about the phoenix, or the wonderful pismires that filled the camel's panniers with gold. The whole subject of the apocryphal and mythological animals of the ancients is one of great interest. It would be interesting to inquire how far the stories in question are, like other marvellous stories, founded on fact; how far it is possible that animals like those told of may in fact have existed; or, again, how far the fossil remains of the real monsters of the old world may have suggested to the vivid imaginations of men the monsters that we now call fabulous. But into this we are not going to enter. Of the early travellers, of course none is so noteworthy as old Herodotus; and in passing one may observe how the mar vellous natural history of the land of the Nile seems to have struck both the Greek and the Hebrew intellects, as the books of Job and Herodotus will testify. His description of the crocodile is so interesting, and on the whole so faithful, that we shall not hesitate to put it before our readers, availing ourselves of Mr. Rawlinson's translation (lib. ii. cap. 68-70). "The following are the peculiarities of the Crocodile : during the four winter months they eat nothing; they are four-footed, and live indifferently on land or in the water. The female lays and hatches her eggs ashore, passing the greater portion of the day on dry land, but at night retiring to the river, the water of which is warmer than the night-air and the dew. Of all known animals this is the one which from the smallest size grows to be the greatest; for the egg of the crocodile is but little bigger than that of the goose, and the young crocodile is in proportion to the egg; yet, when it is full-grown, the animal measures frequently seventeen cubits, and even more. It has the eyes of a pig, teeth large and tusk-like, of a size proportioned to its frame. Unlike any other animal, it is without a tongue; it cannot move its under-jaw, and in this respect too it is singular, being the only animal in the world which moves the upper jaw, but not the under. It has strong claws, and a scaly skin, impenetrable upon the back. In the water it is blind, but on land it is very keen of sight. As it lives chiefly in the river, it has the inside of its mouth constantly covered with leeches: hence it happens that, while all the other birds and beasts avoid it, with the trochilus it lives at peace, since it owes much to that bird; for the crocodile, when he leaves the water and comes out upon the land, is in the habit of lying with his mouth wide open, facing the western breeze; at such times the trochilus goes into his mouth, and devours the leeches. This benefits the crocodile, who is pleased, and takes care not to hurt the trochilus. The crocodile is esteemed sacred by some of the Egyptians, by others he is treated as an enemy. The modes of catching the crocodile are many and various. I shall ouly describe the one which seems to me most worthy of mention. They bait a hook with a chine of pork, and let the meat be carried out into the middle of the stream, while the hunter upon the bank holds a living pig, which he belabours. The crocodile hears its cries, and, making for the sound, encounters the pork, which he instantly swallows down. The men on the shore haul, and when they have got him to land, the first thing the hunter does is to plaster his eyes with mud. This once accomplished, the animal is despatched with ease, otherwise he gives great trouble." In this account there are observations which strike one by their truthfulness and exactitude, as, for instance, the comparison between the size of the egg and the full-grown animal. And others of Herodotus's statements which are not perfectly accurate are yet better far than silence, for they are respectable 66 guesses at truth." The question whether the crocodile has or has not a tongue seems to have been greatly ventilated amongst the ancients; and the sculptors and antiquaries of Rome, as M. Humboldt assures us, amused themselves in giving or denying a tongue to their crocodiles, according as the one or the other of these opinions prevailed. The true explanation, no doubt, is that which M. Humboldt has stated in his very interesting discussion of the point, namely, that the tongue of the crocodile is throughout its length attached to the lower jaw, so that it is entirely deprived of all freedom of motion, and, in fact, does not figure as a tongue at all.* Again, though the upper jaw does not in reality move on the lower, the statement of Herodotus is fully excused by the fact, that "the lower jaw is protruded backward beyond the skull, which occasions the upper one to appear movable." And even the story about the trochilus has found an apologist in M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire. But what, far more than aught besides in Herodotus, impresses us with a sense of his real scientific insight is the account which he has given us of the geological formation of Egypt. Having described the formation of land by the deposit of earth, and illustrated this by the process going forward with the Achelous and other rivers, he thus proceeds: "In Arabia, not far from Egypt, there is a long and narrow gulf, running inland from the sea, called the Erythræan, of which I will here set down the dimensions. Starting from its innermost recess, and using a row-boat, you take forty days to reach the open main, while you may cross the gulf at its widest part in the space of half a day. In this sea there is an ebb and flow of the tide every day. My opinion is, that Egypt was formerly very much such a gulf as this: one gulf penetrated from the sea that washes Egypt on the north, and extended itself towards Ethiopia; another entered from the southern ocean, and stretched towards Syria; the two gulfs ran into the land so as very nearly to meet each other, and left between them only a very narrow tract of country. Now if the Nile should choose to divert his waters from their present bed into this Arabian gulf, what is there to hinder it from being filled up by the stream within, at the utmost, twenty thousand years? For my part, I think it would be filled in half the time. How, then, should not a gulf, even of much greater size, have been filled up in the ages that passed before I was born, by a river that is at once so large and so given to working changes? Thus I give credit to those from whom I received this account of Egypt, and am myself, moreover, strongly of the same opinion, since I remarked that the country projects into the sea further than the neighbouring shores; and I observed that there were shells upon the "Sur l'os hyoide et le larynx des oiseaux, des singes, et du crocodile," in his Receuil d'Observations de Zoologie et d'Anatomie comparée, Paris, 1811. † Cuvier, Animal Kingdom. hills, and that salt exuded from the soil to such an extent as even to injure the Pyramids and I noticed also that there is but a single hill in all Egypt where sand is found, namely, the hill above Memphis ; and further, I found the country to bear no resemblance either to its border-land, Arabia, or to Libya-nay, nor even to Syria, which forms the sea-board of Arabia; but whereas the soil of Libya is, we know, sandy and of a reddish hue, and that of Arabia and Syria inclines to stone and clay, Egypt has a soil that is black and crumbly, as being alluvial and formed of the deposits brought down by the river from Ethiopia. One fact which I learnt from the priests is to me a strong evidence of the origin of the country. They said, that when Moeris was king, the Nile overflowed all Egypt below Memphis as soon as it rose so little as eight cubits. Now Moeris had not been dead 900 years at the time I heard this of the priests; yet, at the present day, unless the river rise sixteen, or at the very least fifteen, cubits, it does not overflow the lands. It seems to me, therefore, that if the land goes on rising and growing at this rate, the Egyptians who dwell below Lake Moris, in the Delta as it is called, will one day, by the stoppage of the inundations, suffer permanently the fate which they told me they expected would some time or other befall the Greeks."* Now here we have not only a conclusion to a large extent accurate and just, but we find Herodotus making observations and using a method of reasoning singularly in advance of much of the speculations of far later geologists; and what, above all, is most noteworthy, is the entire grasp we find him to have of the explication of geological facts by the means of existing causes operating through vast periods of time; a principle that has only been established within comparatively late years, by the labours, beyond all others, of Sir Charles Lyell. Take it altogether, and it is impossible to deny that this passage of Herodotus is a most observable contribution to geological science. It was hardly to be supposed that such a mind as that of Socrates should have devoted any part of its strength to the study of nature, and not have left a marked impress upon it. True it is, that in the passage in the Phædot where Socrates Lib. ii. cap. 11-13: Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii. pp. 14-17. + Phædo, p. 96, edit. Steph. Is it possibly to some early speculations of Socrates in natural history that Aristophanes alludes in the absurd passage about the flea (Clouds, 143 et seq., ed. Dind.), or was he talking unmitigated nonsense? narrates his vehement love as a young man for the study of nature, he tells us of little else as its result than a certain bewilderment of mind, which ultimately made him turn his thoughts from natural to moral science. But in the Memorabilia of Xenophon we have a conversation which, even in the most superficial survey of the natural history of the ancients, it is impossible to pass over. Socrates is engaged in conversation with Aristodemus, who was notorious for his irreligious freethinking habits; and after getting from him the admission that there were men whom he admired for their wisdom, the master goes on: "Whether do those who make figures devoid of sense and motion, or those who make living beings endowed with sense and activity, seem to you the more deserving of our wonder? A. By Jupiter, those who make living beings are much the more so, unless it be that these things arise by some chance, and not by design. S. Of the two classes of things, those as to which we are in the dark for the sake of what they exist, and those which are manifestly for some purpose,—which do you judge to be works of chance and which of design? A. It seems that those which exist for some purpose are the works of design. S. Does it seem to you, then, that he who in the beginning made men gave to them on purpose the various organs of sensation-eyes to see things visible, ears to hear things audible? A. What would have been the good to us of smells if our nostrils had not been given to us? What sensation should we have had of things sweet or pungent, or all the pleasures of the palate, unless the tongue had been inserted as the judge of these things? S. And besides this, don't you think that there is a great likeness to a work of providence in this, that since the sight is delicate, it has eyelids for doors, which, when there is any need of using the sight, are drawn back, but are closed together in sleep; and that not even a breath of air should harm it, the eyelashes are planted in to form a network, and that the parts above the eyes have the eyebrows as a cornice, so that not even a drop of sweat from the forehead can harm it ;-or this, that the hearing can take in all sounds, and yet never be filled; —or this, that in all animals the front teeth are able to cut, but the hinder teeth are able to receive from the former, and triturate what they thus receive;—or that the mouth, through which creatures take in all that they desire, is placed near the eyes and the nose: . . . . all these things that are thus providently brought,-are you at a loss whether they are the works of chance or design? A. No, by Jupiter, but if one looks at it in this way, these things do certainly seem like the work of some wise and creature-loving arti Disciple. Most accurately: He dipt the insect's feet in melted wax, Mitchell. |