described as half brine, half rancid oil. Indeed, the salt has been so
far precipitated already that there is now five times as much chloride
of magnesium left in the water as there is common salt. By the way, it
is a lucky thing for us that these various soluble minerals are of such
constitution as to be thrown down separately at different stages of
concentration in the evaporating liquid; for, if it were otherwise, they
would all get deposited together, and we should find on all old salt
lake beds only a mixed layer of gypsum, salt, and other chlorides and
sulphates, absolutely useless for any practical human purpose. In that
case, we should be entirely dependent upon marine salt pans and
artificial processes for our entire salt supply. As it is, we find the
materials deposited one above another in regular layers; first, the
gypsum at the bottom; then the rock-salt; and last of all, on top, the
more soluble mineral constituents.

The Great Salt Lake of Utah, sacred to the memory of Brigham Young,
gives us an example of a modern saline sheet of very different origin,
since it is in fact not a branch of the sea at all, but a mere shrunken
remnant of a very large fresh-water lake system, like that of the
still-existing St. Lawrence chain. Once upon a time, American geologists
say, a huge sheet of water, for which they have even invented a
definite name, Lake Bonneville, occupied a far larger valley among the
outliers of the Rocky Mountains, measuring 300 miles in one direction by
180 miles in the other. Beside this primitive Superior lay a second
great sheet--an early Huron--(Lake Lahontan, the geologists call it)
almost as big, and equally of fresh water. By-and-by--the precise dates
are necessarily indefinite--some change in the rainfall, unregistered by
any contemporary 'New York Herald,' made the waters of these big lakes
shrink and evaporate. Lake Lahontan shrank away like Alice in
Wonderland, till there was absolutely nothing left of it; Lake
Bonneville shrank till it attained the diminished size of the existing
Great Salt Lake. Terrace after terrace, running in long parallel lines
on the sides of the Wahsatch Mountains around, mark the various levels
at which it rested for awhile on its gradual downward course. It is
still falling indeed; and the plain around is being gradually uncovered,
forming the white salt-encrusted shore with which all visitors to the
Mormon city are so familiar.

But why should the water have become briny? Why should the evaporation
of an old Superior produce at last a Great Salt Lake? Well, there is a
small quantity of salt in solution even in the freshest of lakes and
ponds, brought down to them by the streams or rivers; and, as the water
of the hypothetical Lake Bonneville slowly evaporated, the salt and
other mineral constituents remained behind. Thus the solution grew
constantly more and more concentrated, till at the present day it is
extremely saline. Professor Geikie (to whose works the present paper is
much indebted) found that he floated on the water in spite of himself;
and the under sides of the steps at the bathing-places are all encrusted
with short stalactites of salt, produced from the drip of the bathers as
they leave the water. The mineral constituents, however, differ
considerably in their proportions from those found in true salt lakes of
marine origin; and the point at which the salt is thrown down is still
far from having been reached. Great Salt Lake must simmer in the sun for
many centuries yet before the point arrives at which (as cooks say) it
begins to settle.

That is the way in which deposits of salt are being now produced on the
world's surface, in preparation for that man of the future who, as we
learn from a duly constituted authority, is to be hairless, toothless,
web-footed, and far too respectable ever to be funny. Man of the present
derives his existing salt-supply chiefly from beds of rock-salt
similarly laid down against his expected appearance some hundred
thousand æons or so ago. (An æon is a very convenient geological unit
indeed to reckon by; as nobody has any idea how long it is, they can't
carp at you for a matter of an æon or two one way or the other.)
Rock-salt is found in most parts of the world, in beds of very various
ages. The great Salt Range of the Punjaub is probably the earliest in
date of all salt deposits; it was laid down at the bottom of some very
ancient Asiatic Mediterranean, whose last shrunken remnant covered the
upper basin of the Indus and its tributaries during the Silurian age.
Europe had then hardly begun to be; and England was probably still
covered from end to end by the primæval ocean. From this very primitive
salt deposit the greater part of India and Central Asia is still
supplied; and the Indian Government makes a pretty penny out of the dues
in the shape of the justly detested salt-tax--a tax especially odious
because it wrings the fraction of a farthing even from those unhappy
agricultural labourers who have never tasted ghee with their rice.

The thickness of the beds in each salt deposit of course depends
entirely upon the area of the original sea or salt-lake, and the length
of time during which the evaporation went on. Sometimes we may get a
mere film of salt; sometimes a solid bed six hundred feet thick.
Perfectly pure rock-salt is colourless and transparent; but one doesn't
often find it pure. Alas for a degenerate world! even in its original
site, Nature herself has taken the trouble to adulterate it beforehand.
(If she hadn't done so, one may be perfectly sure that commercial
enterprise would have proved equal to the occasion in the long run.) But
the adulteration hasn't spoilt the beauty of the salt; on the contrary,
it serves, like rouge, to give a fine fresh colour where none existed.
When iron is the chief colouring matter, rock-salt assumes a beautiful
clear red tint; in other cases it is emerald green or pale blue. As a
rule, salt is prepared from it for table by a regular process; but it
has become a fad of late with a few people to put crystals of native
rock-salt on their tables; and they decidedly look very pretty, and have
a certain distinctive flavour of their own that is not unpleasant.

Our English salt supply is chiefly derived from the Cheshire and
Worcestershire salt-regions, which are of triassic age. Many of the
places at which the salt is mined have names ending in _wich_, such as
Northwich, Middlewich, Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich.
This termination _wich_ is itself curiously significant, as Canon Isaac
Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea.
The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans
on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and
Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still
known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the
inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the familiar
name, a wich; and the places where the salt was manufactured came to be
known as wych-houses. Droitwich, for example, was originally such a
wich, where the droits or dues on salt were paid at the time when
William the Conqueror's commissioners drew up their great survey for
Domesday Book. But the good, easy-going mediæval people who gave these
quaint names to the inland wiches had probably no idea that they were
really and truly dried-up bays, and that the salt they mined from their
pits was genuine ancient bay-salt, the deposit of an old inland sea,
evaporated by slow degrees a countless number of ages since, exactly as
the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake are getting evaporated in our own
time.

Such, nevertheless, is actually the case. A good-sized Caspian used to
spread across the centre of England and north of Ireland in triassic
times, bounded here and there, as well as Dr. Hull can make out, by the
Welsh Mountains, the Cheviots, and the Donegal Hills, and with the Peak
of Derbyshire and the Isle of Man standing out as separate islands from
its blue expanse. (We will beg the question that the English seas were
then blue. They are certainly marked so in a very fine cerulean tint on
Dr. Hull's map of Triassic Britain.) Slowly, like most other inland
seas, this early British Caspian began to lose weight and to shrivel
away to ever smaller dimensions. In Devonshire, where it appears to have
first dried up, we get no salt, but only red marl, with here and there a
cubical cast, filling a hole once occupied by rock-salt, though the
percolation of the rain has long since melted out that very soluble
substance, and replaced it by a mere mould in the characteristic square
shape of salt crystals. But Worcestershire and Cheshire were the seat of
the inland sea when it had contracted to the dimensions of a mere salt
lake, and begun to throw down its dissolved saline materials. One of the
Cheshire beds is sometimes a hundred feet thick of almost pure and
crystalline rock-salt. The absence of fossils shows that animals must
have had as bad a time of it there as in the Dead Sea of our modern
Palestine. The Droitwich brine-pits have been known for many centuries,
since they were worked (and taxed) even before the Norman Conquest, as
were many other similar wells elsewhere. But the actual mining of
rock-salt as such in England dates back only as far as the reign of King
Charles II. of blessed memory, or more definitely to the very year in
which the 'Pilgrim's Progress' was conceived and written by John Bunyan.
During that particular summer, an enterprising person at Nantwich had
sunk a shaft for coal, which he failed to find; but on his way down he
came unexpectedly across the bed of rock-salt, then for the first time
discovered as a native mineral. Since that fortunate accident the beds
have been so energetically worked and the springs so energetically
pumped that some of the towns built on top of them have got undermined,
and now threaten from year to year, in the most literal sense, to cave
in. In fact, one or two subsidences of considerable extent have already
taken place, due in part no doubt to the dissolving action of rain
water, but in part also to the mode of working. The mines are approached
by a shaft; and, when you get down to the level of the old sea bottom,
you find yourself in a sort of artificial gallery, whose roof, with all
the world on top of it, is supported every here and there by massive
pillars about fifteen feet thick. Considering that the salt lies often a
hundred and fifty yards deep, and that these pillars have to bear the
weight of all that depth of solid rock, it is not surprising that
subsidences should sometimes occur in abandoned shafts, where the water
is allowed to collect, and slowly dissolve away the supporting columns.

Salt is a necessary article of food for animals, but in a far less
degree than is commonly supposed. Each of us eats on an average about
ten times as much salt as we actually require. In this respect popular
notions are as inexact as in the very similar case of the supply of
phosphorus. Because phosphorus is needful for brain action, people jump
forthwith to the absurd conclusion that fish and other foods rich in
phosphates ought to be specially good for students preparing for
examination, great thinkers, and literary men. Mark Twain indeed once
advised a poetical aspirant, who sent him a few verses for his critical
opinion, that fish was very feeding for the brains; he would recommend a
couple of young whales to begin upon. As a matter of fact, there is more
phosphorus in our daily bread than would have sufficed Shakespeare to
write 'Hamlet,' or Newton to discover the law of gravitation. It isn't
phosphorus that most of us need, but brains to burn it in. A man might
as well light a fire in a carriage, because coal makes an engine go, as
hope to mend the pace of his dull pate by eating fish for the sake of
the phosphates.

The question still remains, How did the salt originally get there? After
all, when we say that it was produced, as rock-salt, by evaporation of
the water in inland seas, we leave unanswered the main problem, How did
the brine in solution get into the sea at all in the first place? Well,
one might almost as well ask, How did anything come to be upon the earth
at any time, in any way? How did the sea itself get there? How did this
planet swim into existence at all? In the Indian mythology the world is
supported upon the back of an elephant, who is supported upon the back
of a tortoise; but what the tortoise in the last resort is supported
upon the Indian philosophers prudently say not. If we once begin thus
pushing back our inquiries into the genesis of the cosmos, we shall find
our search retreating step after step _ad infinitum_. The negro
preacher, describing the creation of Adam, and drawing slightly upon
his imagination, observed that when our prime forefather first came to
consciousness he found himself 'sot up agin a fence.' One of his hearers
ventured sceptically to ejaculate, 'Den whar dat fence come from,
ministah?' The outraged divine scratched his grey wool reflectively for
a moment, and replied, after a pause, with stern solemnity, 'Tree more
ob dem questions will undermine de whole system ob teology.'

However, we are not permitted humbly to imitate the prudent reticence of
the Indian philosophers. In these days of evolution hypotheses, and
nebular theories, and kinetic energy, and all the rest of it, the
question why the sea is salt rises up irrepressible and imperatively
demands to get itself answered. There was a sapient inquirer, recently
deceased, who had a short way out of this difficulty. He held that the
sea was only salt because of all the salt rivers that run into it.
Considering that the salt rivers are themselves salted by passing
through salt regions, or being fed by saline springs, all of which
derive their saltness from deposits laid down long ago by evaporation
from earlier seas or lake basins, this explanation savours somewhat of
circularity. It amounts in effect to saying that the sea is salt because
of the large amount of saline matter which it holds in solution. Cheese
is also a caseous preparation of milk; the duties of an archdeacon are
to perform archidiaconal functions; and opium puts one to sleep because
it possesses a soporific virtue.

Apart from such purely verbal explanations of the saltness of the sea,
however, one can only give some such account of the way it came to be
'the briny' as the following:--

This world was once a haze of fluid light, as the poets and the men of
science agree in informing us. As soon as it began to cool down a
little, the heavier materials naturally sank towards the centre, while
the lighter, now represented by the ocean and the atmosphere, floated in
a gaseous condition on the outside. But the great envelope of vapour
thus produced did not consist merely of the constituents of air and
water; many other gases and vapours mingled with them, as they still do
to a far less extent in our existing atmosphere. By-and-by, as the
cooling and condensing process continued, the water settled down from
the condition of steam into one of a liquid at a dull red heat. As it
condensed, it carried down with it a great many other substances, held
in solution, whose component elements had previously existed in the
primitive gaseous atmosphere. Thus the early ocean which covered the
whole earth was in all probability not only very salt, but also quite
thick with other mineral matters close up to the point of saturation. It
was full of lime, and raw flint, and sulphates, and many other
miscellaneous bodies. Moreover, it was not only just as salt as at the
present day, but even a great deal salter. For from that time to this
evaporation has constantly been going on in certain shallow isolated
areas, laying down great beds of gypsum and then of salt, which still
remain in the solid condition, while the water has, of course, been
correspondingly purified. The same thing has likewise happened in a
slightly different way with the lime and flint, which have been
separated from the water chiefly by living animals, and afterwards
deposited on the bottom of the ocean in immense layers as limestone,
chalk, sandstone, and clay.

Thus it turns out that in the end all our sources of salt-supply are
alike ultimately derived from the briny ocean. Whether we dig it out as
solid rock-salt from the open quarries of the Punjaub, or pump it up
from brine-wells sunk into the triassic rocks of Cheshire, or evaporate
it direct in the salt-pans of England and the shallow _salines_ of the
Mediterranean shore, it is still at bottom essentially sea-salt.
However distant the connection may seem, our salt is always in the last
resort obtained from the material held in solution in some ancient or
modern sea. Even the saline springs of Canada and the Northern States of
America, where the wapiti love to congregate, and the noble hunter lurks
in the thicket to murder them unperceived, derive their saltness, as an
able Canadian geologist has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still
retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates
form the earliest known life-bearing rocks. To the Homeric Greek, as to
Mr. Dick Swiveller, the ocean was always the briny: to modern science,
on the other hand (which neither of those worthies would probably have
appreciated at its own valuation), the briny is always the oceanic. The
fossil food which we find to-day on all our dinner-tables dates back its
origin primarily to the first seas that ever covered the surface of our
planet, and secondarily to the great rock deposits of the dried-up
triassic inland sea. And yet even our men of science habitually describe
that ancient mineral as common salt.

OGBURY BARROWS

We went to Ogbury Barrows on an archæological expedition. And as the
very name of archæology, owing to a serious misconception incidental to
human nature, is enough to deter most people from taking any further
interest in our proceedings when once we got there, I may as well begin
by explaining, for the benefit of those who have never been to one, the
method and manner of an archæological outing.

The first thing you have to do is to catch your secretary. The genuine
secretary is born, not made; and therefore you have got to catch him,
not to appoint him. Appointing a secretary is pure vanity and vexation
of spirit; you must find the right man made ready to your hand; and when
you have found him you will soon see that he slips into the onerous
duties of the secretariat as if to the manner born, by pure instinct.
The perfect secretary is an urbane old gentleman of mature years and
portly bearing, a dignified representative of British archæology, with
plenty of money and plenty of leisure, possessing a heaven-born genius
for organisation, and utterly unhampered by any foolish views of his own
about archæological research or any other kindred subject. The secretary
who archæologises is lost. His business is not to discourse of early
English windows or of palæolithic hatchets, of buried villas or of
Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile-work or of dolichocephalic skulls,
but to provide abundant brakes, drags, and carriages, to take care that
the owners of castles and baronial residences throw them open (with
lunch provided) to the ardent student of British antiquities, to see
that all the old ladies have somebody to talk to, and all the young ones
somebody to flirt with, and generally to superintend the morals,
happiness, and personal comfort of some fifty assorted scientific
enthusiasts. The secretary who diverges from these his proper and
elevated functions into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the
antiquity of man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility of
woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest (when he should
by rights be concentrating the whole force of his massive intellect upon
the arduous task of arranging for dinner), proves himself at once
unworthy of his high position, and should forthwith be deposed from the
secretariat by public acclamation.

Having once entrapped your perfect secretary, you set him busily to work
beforehand to make all the arrangements for your expected excursion, the
archæologists generally cordially recognising the important principle
that he pays all the expenses he incurs out of his own pocket, and
drives splendid bargains on their account with hotel-keepers, coachmen,
railway companies, and others to feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at
fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition. You also
understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the
neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open
their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the
owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little
preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your
archæologists and set out upon your intended tour.

An archæologist, it should be further premised, has no necessary
personal connection with archæology in any way. He (or she) is a human
being, of assorted origin, age, and sex, known as an archæologist then
and there on no other ground than the possession of a ticket (price
half-a-guinea) for that particular archæological meeting. Who would not
be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting terms? Most
archæologists within my own private experience, indeed, are ladies of
various ages, many of them elderly, but many more young and pretty,
whose views about the styles of English architecture or the exact
distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the vaguest and
most shadowy possible description. You all drive in brakes together to
the various points of interest in the surrounding country. When you
arrive at a point of interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his
head reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there is
fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are burning to learn all
about it, you put your hand up to your ear, and assume an attitude of
profound attention. If you are not burning with the desire for
information, you stroll off casually about the grounds and gardens with
the prettiest and pleasantest among the archæological sisters, whose
acquaintance you have made on the way thither. Sometimes it rains, and
then you obtain an admirable chance of offering your neighbour the
protection afforded by your brand-new silk umbrella. By-and-by the dull
paper gets finished, and somebody who lives in an adjoining house
volunteers to provide you with luncheon. Then you adjourn to the parish
church, where an old gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and
tedious account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not to be
found upon the walls of that poky little building. Nobody listens to
him; but everybody carries away a vague impression that some one or
other, temp. Henry the Second, married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of
Sir Ralph de Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and
twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble family with a
correspondingly varied pedigree. Finally, you take tea and ices upon
somebody's lawn, by special invitation, and drive home, not without much
laughter, in the cool of the evening to an excellent table d'hôte dinner
at the marvellously cheap hotel, presided over by the ever-smiling and
urbane secretary. That is what we mean nowadays by being a member of an
archæological association.

It was on just such a pleasant excursion that we all went to Ogbury
Barrows. I was overflowing, myself, with bottled-up information on the
subject of those two prehistoric tumuli; for Ogbury Barrows have been
the hobby of my lifetime; but I didn't read a paper upon their origin
and meaning, first, because the secretary very happily forgot to ask me,
and secondly, because I was much better employed in psychological
research into the habits and manners of an extremely pretty
pink-and-white archæologist who stood beside me. Instead, therefore, of
boring her and my other companions with all my accumulated store of
information about Ogbury Barrows, I locked it up securely in my own
bosom, with the fell design of finally venting it all at once in one
vast flood upon the present article.

Ogbury Barrows, I would have said (had it not been for the praiseworthy
negligence of our esteemed secretary), stand upon the very verge of a
great chalk-down, overlooking a broad and fertile belt of valley, whose
slopes are terraced in the quaintest fashion with long parallel lines of
obviously human and industrial origin. The terracing must have been done
a very long time ago indeed, for it is a device for collecting enough
soil on a chalky hillside to grow corn in. Now, nobody ever tried to
grow corn on open chalk-downs in any civilised period of history until
the present century, because the downs are so much more naturally
adapted for sheep-walks that the attempt to turn them into waving
cornfields would never occur to anybody on earth except a barbarian or
an advanced agriculturist. But when Ogbury Downs were originally
terraced, I don't doubt that the primitive system of universal tribal
warfare still existed everywhere in Britain. This system is aptly summed
up in the familiar modern Black Country formula, 'Yon's a stranger.
'Eave 'arf a brick at him.' Each tribe was then perpetually at war with
every other tribe on either side of it: a simple plan which rendered
foreign tariffs quite unnecessary, and most effectually protected home
industries. The consequence was, each district had to produce for its
own tribe all the necessaries of life, however ill-adapted by nature for
their due production: because traffic and barter did not yet exist, and
the only form ever assumed by import trade was that of raiding on your
neighbours' territories, and bringing back with you whatever you could
lay hands on. So the people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to
grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and,
in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil
and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt
as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in place by artificial
barriers.

On the top of the down, overlooking this curious vale of prehistoric
terraces, rise the twin heights of Ogbury Barrows, familiar landmarks to
all the country side around for many miles. One of them is a tall,
circular mound or tumulus surrounded by a deep and well-marked trench:
the other, which stands a little on one side, is long and narrow, shaped
exactly like a modern grave, but of comparatively gigantic and colossal
proportions. Even the little children of Ogbury village have noticed
its close resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in
their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when they play upon its
summit that a great giant in golden armour lies buried in a stone vault
underneath. But if only they knew the real truth, they would say instead
that that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of a short,
squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature to the Lapps and
Finns, and about as much unlike a giant as human nature could easily
manage. It maybe regarded as a general truth of history that the
greatest men don't by any means always get the biggest monument.

The archæologists in becoming prints who went with us to the top of
Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised (with demonstrative parasol) that
'these mounds must have been made a very long time ago, indeed.' So in
fact they were: but though they stand now so close together, and look so
much like sisters and contemporaries, one is ages older than the other,
and was already green and grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the
fresh earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its side,
above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic warrior. Let us begin
by considering the oldest first, and then pass on to its younger sister.

Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument indeed. Not, to be sure,
one quarter so ancient as the days of the extremely old master who
carved the mammoth on the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the
Dordogne, and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in an earlier
portion of this volume: compared with that very antique personage, our
long barrow on Ogbury hill-top may in fact be looked upon as almost
modern. Still, when one isn't talking in geological language, ten or
twenty thousand years may be fairly considered a very long time as time
goes: and I have little doubt that from ten to twenty thousand years
have passed since the short, squat chieftain aforesaid was first
committed to his final resting-place in Ogbury Long Barrow. Two years
since, we local archæologists--_not_ in becoming prints this
time--opened the barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we
expected, the 'stone vault' of the popular tradition, proving
conclusively that some faint memory of the original interment had clung
for all those long years around the grassy pile of that ancient tumulus.
Its centre, in fact, was occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big
Sarsen stones from the surrounding hillsides; and in the midst of the
house of death thus rudely constructed lay the mouldering skeleton of
its original possessor--an old prehistoric Mongoloid chieftain. When I
stood for the first moment within that primæval palace of the dead,
never before entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I
must own, something like a burglar, something like a body-snatcher,
something like a resurrection man, but most of all like a happy
archæologist.

The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in fact, a buried
cromlech, covered all over (until we opened it) by the earth of the
barrow. Almost every cromlech, wherever found, was once, I believe, the
central chamber of just such a long barrow: but in some instances wind
and rain have beaten down and washed away the surrounding earth (and
then we call it a 'Druidical monument'), while in others the mound still
encloses its original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric
tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves are quite
modern and commonplace personages compared with the short, squat
chieftains of the long barrows. For all the indications we found in the
long barrow at Ogbury (as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us
at once to the strange conclusion that our new acquaintance, the
skeleton, had once been a living cannibal king of the newer stone-age in
Britain.

The only weapons or implements we could discover in the barrow were two
neatly chipped flint arrowheads, and a very delicate ground greenstone
hatchet, or tomahawk. These were the weapons of the dead chief, laid
beside him in the stone chamber where we found his skeleton, for his
future use in his underground existence. A piece or two of rude
hand-made pottery, no doubt containing food and drink for the ghost, had
also been placed close to his side: but they had mouldered away with
time and damp, till it was quite impossible to recover more than a few
broken and shapeless fragments. There was no trace of metal in any way:
whereas if the tribesmen of our friend the skeleton had known at all the
art of smelting, we may be sure some bronze axe or spearhead would have
taken the place of the flint arrows and the greenstone tomahawk: for
savages always bury a man's best property together with his corpse,
while civilised men take care to preserve it with pious care in their
own possession, and to fight over it strenuously in the court of
probate.

The chief's own skeleton lay, or rather squatted, in the most
undignified attitude, in the central chamber. His people when they put
him there evidently considered that he was to sit at his ease, as he had
been accustomed to do in his lifetime, in the ordinary savage squatting
position, with his knees tucked up till they reached his chin, and his
body resting entirely on the heels and haunches. The skeleton was
entire: but just outside and above the stone vault we came upon a number
of other bones, which told another and very different story. Some of
them were the bones of the old prehistoric short-horned ox: others
belonged to wild boars, red deer, and sundry similar animals, for the
most part skulls and feet only, the relics of the savage funeral feast.
It was clear that as soon as the builders of the barrow had erected the
stone chamber of their dead chieftain, and placed within it his honoured
remains, they had held a great banquet on the spot, and, after killing
oxen and chasing red deer, had eaten all the eatable portions, and
thrown the skulls, horns, and hoofs on top of the tomb, as offerings to
the spirit of their departed master. But among these relics of the
funeral baked meats there were some that specially attracted our
attention--a number of broken human skulls, mingled indiscriminately
with the horns of deer and the bones of oxen. It was impossible to look
at them for a single moment, and not to recognise that we had here the
veritable remains of a cannibal feast, a hundred centuries ago, on
Ogbury hill-top.

Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with a sword or
bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt implement, presumably either
a club or a stone tomahawk. The skull of the great chief inside was
entire and his skeleton unmutilated: but we could see at a glance that
the remains we found huddled together on the top were those of slaves or
prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead chieftain's tomb, and eaten
with the other products of the chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an
inner chamber behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger
relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skeletons squatted
there in the same curious attitude as their lord's, as if in attendance
upon him in a neighbouring ante-chamber. They were the skeletons of
women--so our professional bone-scanner immediately told us--and each of
their skulls had been carefully cleft right down the middle by a single
blow from a sharp stone hatchet. But they were not the victims intended
for the _pièce de résistance_ at the funeral banquet. They were clearly
the two wives of the deceased chieftain, killed on his tomb by his son
and successor, in order to accompany their lord and master in his new
life underground as they had hitherto done in his rude wooden palace on
the surface of the middle earth.

We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old cannibal savage king
(after abstracting for our local museum the arrowheads and tomahawk, as
well as the skull of the very ancient Briton himself), and when our
archæological society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two
years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown again as green
as ever, and not a sign remained of the sacrilegious act in which one of
the party then assembled there had been a prime actor. Looking down from
the summit of the long barrow on that bright summer morning, over the
gay group of picnicking archæologists, it was a curious contrast to
reinstate in fancy the scene at that first installation of the Ogbury
monument. In my mind's eye I saw once more the howling band of naked,
yellow-faced and yellow-limbed savages surge up the terraced slopes of
Ogbury Down; I saw them bear aloft, with beating of breasts and loud
gesticulations, the bent corpse of their dead chieftain; I saw the
terrified and fainting wives haled along by thongs of raw oxhide, and
the weeping prisoners driven passively like sheep to the slaughter; I
saw the fearful orgy of massacre and rapine around the open tumulus, the
wild priest shattering with his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his
victims, the fire of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the
heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered stone
chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals around the mangled
remains of men and oxen, and finally the long task of heaping up above
the stone hut of the dead king the earthen mound that was never again to
be opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we modern
Britons invaded with our prying, sacrilegious mattock the sacred privacy
of that cannibal ghost. All this passed like a vision before my mind's
eye; but I didn't mention anything of it at that particular moment to my
fellow-archæologists, because I saw they were all much more interested
in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about an exalted personage and a
distinguished actress with which the model secretary was just then duly
entertaining them.

Five thousand years or so slowly wore away, from the date of the
erection of the long barrow, and a new race had come to occupy the soil
of England, and had driven away or reduced to slavery the short, squat,
yellow-skinned cannibals of the earlier epoch. They were a pastoral and
agricultural people, these new comers, acquainted with the use and abuse
of bronze, and far more civilised in every way than their darker
predecessors. No trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce
onslaught the Celtic invaders--for the bronze-age folk were presumably
Celts--swept through the little Ogbury valley, and brained the men of
the older race, while they made slaves of the younger women and
serviceable children. Nothing now stands to tell us anything of the long
years of Celtic domination, except the round barrow on the bare down,
just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far earlier and more
primitive neighbour.

We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time as the other, and
found in it, as we expected, no bones or skeleton of any sort, broken or
otherwise, but simply a large cinerary urn. The urn was formed of coarse
hand-made earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth, but not
by any means so old or porous as the fragments we had discovered in the
long barrow. A pretty pattern ran round its edge--a pattern in the
simplest and most primitive style of ornamentation; for it consisted
merely of the print of the potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the
moist clay before baking. Beside the urn lay a second specimen of early
pottery, one of those curious perforated jars which antiquaries call by
the very question-begging name of incense-cups; and within it we
discovered the most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful
wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no
consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated
both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to
the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full
consent) on the land of his fathers.

Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of burying their dead? Why
did they anticipate the latest fashionable mode of disposal of corpses,
and go in for cremation with such thorough conviction? They couldn't
have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary considerations
which so profoundly agitated the mind of 'Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation
was still in a very rudimentary state in the year five thousand B.C.;
and the ingenious Celt, who is still given to 'waking' his neighbours,
when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference to the chances
of infection, must have had some other and more powerful reason for
adopting the comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference
to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due to a further
development of religious ideas on the part of the Celtic tribesmen above
that of the primitive stone-age cannibals.

When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the firm belief in
another life, which life was regarded as the exact counterpart of this
present one. The unsophisticated savage, holding that in that equal sky
his faithful dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the dog
in question killed and buried with him, in order that it might follow
him to the happy hunting-grounds. Clearly, you can't hunt without your
arrows and your tomahawk; so the flint weapons and the trusty bow
accompanied their owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the
deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and drink have
long since decayed within the damp tumulus: but the harder stone and
earthenware articles have survived till now, to tell the story of that
crude and simple early faith. Very crude and illogical indeed it was,
however, for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man was
thought of as persisting to live a sort of underground life within the
barrow. A stone hut was constructed for its use; real weapons and
implements were left by its side; and slaves and wives were ruthlessly
massacred, as still in Ashantee, in order that their bodies might
accompany the corpse of the buried master in his subterranean dwelling.
In all this we have clear evidence of a very inconsistent, savage,
materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality of the soul, but in
the continued underground life of the dead body.

With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon these subjects
began to grow more definite and more consistent. Instead of the corpse,
we get the ghost; instead of the material underground world, we get the
idealised and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world of
shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits. With the growth of
the idea in this ghostly nether world, there arises naturally the habit
of burning the dead in order fully to free the liberated spirit from the
earthly chains that clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable
fact that wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly
accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course; while wherever
(among savage or barbaric races) burial is practised, there a more
materialistic creed of bodily survival necessarily accompanies it. To
carry out this theory to its full extent, not only must the body itself
be burnt, but also all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in
ghostly clothing; and the question has often been asked of modern
spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, 'Where do the ghosts get their
coats and dresses?' The true believer in cremation and the shadowy world
has no difficulty at all in answering that crucial inquiry; he would say
at once, 'They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with the
body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as veraciously retailed for
us by that dear old grandmotherly scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of
Melissa refuses to communicate with her late husband, by medium or
otherwise, on the ground that she found herself naked and shivering with
cold, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and
therefore were of no use to her in the world of shades. So Periander, to
put a stop to this sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all
the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a great
trench, and received an immediate answer from the gratified shade, who
was thenceforth enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of
Hades among the best-dressed ghosts of that populous quarter.

The belief which thus survived among the civilised Greeks of the age of
the Despots is shared still by Fijis and Karens, and was derived by all
in common from early ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury
round barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt, to liberate
their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as now, in Fiji, knives and
axes have their spiritual counterparts, which can only be released when
the material shape is destroyed or purified by the action of fire.
Everything, in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own;
and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free from all
clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in the rite of suttee,
the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon her husband's pyre, in order
that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts
whither he was bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge
over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so remote as to
merge together mentally to the casual eyes of modern observers, but yet
in reality marking in their very shape and disposition an immense, long,
and slow advance of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in
form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut that surrounds and
encloses it, so does the round barrow answer in form to the urn
containing the calcined ashes of the cremated barbarian. And is it not a
suggestive fact that when we turn to the little graveyard by the church
below we find the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, as
opposed to the pagan belief in the immortality of the soul, once more
bringing us back to the small oblong mound which is after all but the
dwarfed and humbler modern representative of the long barrow? So deep is
the connection between that familiar shape and the practice of
inhumation that the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere to have come into
use again throughout all Europe, after whole centuries of continued
cremation, as the natural concomitant and necessary mark of Christian
burial.

This is what I would have said, if I had been asked, at Ogbury Barrows.
But I wasn't asked; so I devoted myself instead to psychological
research, and said nothing.

FISH OUT OF WATER

Strolling one day in what is euphemistically termed, in equatorial
latitudes, 'the cool of the evening,' along a tangled tropical American
field-path, through a low region of lagoons and watercourses, my
attention happened to be momentarily attracted from the monotonous
pursuit of the nimble mosquito by a small animal scuttling along
irregularly before me, as if in a great hurry to get out of my way
before I could turn him into an excellent specimen. At first sight I
took the little hopper, in the grey dusk, for one of the common, small
green lizards, and wasn't much disposed to pay it any distinguished
share either of personal or scientific attention. But as I walked on a
little further through the dense underbrush, more and more of these
shuffling and scurrying little creatures kept crossing the path,
hastily, all in one direction, and all, as it were, in a formed body or
marching phalanx. Looking closer, to my great surprise, I found they
were actually fish out of water, going on a walking tour, for change of
air, to a new residence--genuine fish, a couple of inches long each, not
eel-shaped or serpentine in outline, but closely resembling a red mullet
in miniature, though much more beautifully and delicately coloured, and
with fins and tails of the most orthodox spiny and prickly description.
They were travelling across country in a bee-line, thousands of them
together, not at all like the helpless fish out of water of popular
imagination, but as unconcernedly and naturally as if they had been
accustomed to the overland route for their whole lifetimes, and were
walking now on the king's highway without let or hindrance.

I took one up in my hand and examined it more carefully; though the
catching it wasn't by any means so easy as it sounds on paper, for these
perambulatory fish are thoroughly inured to the dangers and difficulties
of dry land, and can get out of your way when you try to capture them
with a rapidity and dexterity which are truly surprising. The little
creatures are very pretty, well-formed catfish, with bright, intelligent
eyes, and a body armed all over, like the armadillo's, with a continuous
coat of hard and horny mail. This coat is not formed of scales, as in
most fish, but of toughened skin, as in crocodiles and alligators,
arranged in two overlapping rows of imbricated shields, exactly like the
round tiles so common on the roofs of Italian cottages. The fish walks,
or rather shambles along ungracefully, by the shuffling movement of a
pair of stiff spines placed close behind his head, aided by the steering
action of his tail, and a constant snake-like wriggling motion of his
entire body. Leg spines of somewhat the same sort are found in the
common English gurnard, and in this age of Aquariums and Fisheries
Exhibitions, most adult persons above the age of twenty-one years must
have observed the gurnards themselves crawling along suspiciously by
their aid at the bottom of a tank at the Crystal Palace or the
polyonymous South Kensington building. But while the European gurnard
only uses his substitutes for legs on the bed of the ocean, my itinerant
tropical acquaintance (his name, I regret to say, is Callichthys) uses
them boldly for terrestrial locomotion across the dry lowlands of his
native country. And while the gurnard has no less than six of these
pro-legs, the American land fish has only a single pair with which to
accomplish his arduous journeys. If this be considered as a point of
inferiority in the armour-plated American species, we must remember that
while beetles and grasshoppers have as many as six legs apiece, man, the
head and crown of things, is content to scramble through life
ungracefully with no more than two.

There are a great many tropical American pond-fish which share these
adventurous gipsy habits of the pretty little Callichthys. Though they
belong to two distinct groups, otherwise unconnected, the circumstances
of the country they inhabit have induced in both families this queer
fashion of waddling out courageously on dry land, and going on voyages
of exploration in search of fresh ponds and shallows new, somewhere in
the neighbourhood of their late residence. One kind in particular, the
Brazilian Doras, takes land journeys of such surprising length, that he
often spends several nights on the way, and the Indians who meet the
wandering bands during their migrations fill several baskets full of the
prey thus dropped upon them, as it were, from the kindly clouds.

Both Doras and Callichthys, too, are well provided with means of defence
against the enemies they may chance to meet during their terrestrial
excursions; for in both kinds there are the same bony shields along the
sides, securing the little travellers, as far as possible, from attack
on the part of hungry piscivorous animals. Doras further utilises its
powers of living out of water by going ashore to fetch dry leaves, with
which it builds itself a regular nest, like a bird's, at the beginning
of the rainy season. In this nest the affectionate parents carefully
cover up their eggs, the hope of the race, and watch over them with the
utmost attention. Many other fish build nests in the water, of
materials naturally found at the bottom; but Doras, I believe, is the
only one that builds them on the beach, of materials sought for on the
dry land.

Such amphibious habits on the part of certain tropical fish are easy
enough to explain by the fashionable clue of 'adaptation to
environment.' Ponds are always very likely to dry up, and so the animals
that frequent ponds are usually capable of bearing a very long
deprivation of water. Indeed, our evolutionists generally hold that land
animals have in every case sprung from pond animals which have gradually
adapted themselves to do without water altogether. Life, according to
this theory, began in the ocean, spread up the estuaries into the
greater rivers, thence extended to the brooks and lakes, and finally
migrated to the ponds, puddles, swamps and marshes, whence it took at
last, by tentative degrees, to the solid shore, the plains, and the
mountains. Certainly the tenacity of life shown by pond animals is very
remarkable. Our own English carp bury themselves deeply in the mud in
winter, and there remain in a dormant condition many months entirely
without food. During this long hibernating period, they can be preserved
alive for a considerable time out of water, especially if their gills
are, from time to time, slightly moistened. They may then be sent to any
address by parcels post, packed in wet moss, without serious damage to
their constitution; though, according to Dr. Günther, these dissipated
products of civilisation prefer to have a piece of bread steeped in
brandy put into their mouths to sustain them beforehand. In Holland,
where the carp are not so sophisticated, they are often kept the whole
winter through, hung up in a net to keep them from freezing. At first
they require to be slightly wetted from time to time, just to
acclimatise them gradually to so dry an existence; but after a while
they adapt themselves cheerfully to their altered circumstances, and
feed on an occasional frugal meal of bread and milk with Christian
resignation.

Of all land-frequenting fish, however, by far the most famous is the
so-called climbing perch of India, which not only walks bodily out of
the water, but even climbs trees by means of special spines, near the
head and tail, so arranged as to stick into the bark and enable it to
wriggle its way up awkwardly, something after the same fashion as the
'looping' of caterpillars. The tree-climber is a small scaly fish,
seldom more than seven inches long; but it has developed a special
breathing apparatus to enable it to keep up the stock of oxygen on its
terrestrial excursions, which may be regarded as to some extent the
exact converse of the means employed by divers to supply themselves with
air under water. Just above the gills, which form of course its natural
hereditary breathing apparatus, the climbing perch has invented a new
and wholly original water chamber, containing within it a frilled bony
organ, which enables it to extract oxygen from the stored-up water
during the course of its aërial peregrinations. While on shore it picks
up small insects, worms, and grubs; but it also has vegetarian tastes of
its own, and does not despise fruits and berries. The Indian jugglers
tame the climbing perches and carry them about with them as part of
their stock in trade; their ability to live for a long time out of water
makes them useful confederates in many small tricks which seem very
wonderful to people accustomed to believe that fish die almost at once
when taken out of their native element.

The Indian snakehead is a closely allied species, common in the shallow
ponds and fresh-water tanks of India, where holy Brahmans bathe and
drink and die and are buried, and most of which dry up entirely during
the dry season. The snakehead, therefore, has similarly accommodated
himself to this annual peculiarity in his local habitation by acquiring
a special chamber for retaining water to moisten his gills throughout
his long deprivation of that prime necessary. He lives composedly in
semi-fluid mud, or lies torpid in the hard baked clay at the bottom of
the dry tank from which all the water has utterly evaporated in the
drought of summer. As long as the mud remains soft enough to allow the
fish to rise slowly through it, they come to the surface every now and
then to take in a good hearty gulp of air, exactly as gold fish do in
England when confined with thoughtless or ignorant cruelty in a glass
globe too small to provide sufficient oxygen for their respiration. But
when the mud hardens entirely they hibernate or rather æstivate, in a
dormant condition, until the bursting of the monsoon fills the ponds
once more with the welcome water. Even in the perfectly dry state,
however, they probably manage to get a little air every now and again
through the numerous chinks and fissures in the sun-baked mud. Our Aryan
brother then goes a-fishing playfully with a spade and bucket, and digs
the snakehead in this mean fashion out of his comfortable lair, with an
ultimate view to the manufacture of pillau. In Burmah, indeed, while the
mud is still soft, the ingenious Burmese catch the helpless creatures by
a still meaner and more unsportsmanlike device. They spread a large
cloth over the slimy ooze where the snakeheads lie buried, and so cut
off entirely for the moment their supply of oxygen. The poor fish,
half-asphyxiated by this unkind treatment, come up gasping to the
surface under the cloth in search of fresh air, and are then easily
caught with the hand and tossed into baskets by the degenerate
Buddhists.

Old Anglo-Indians even say that some of these mud haunting Oriental
fish will survive for many years in a state of suspended animation, and
that when ponds or jhíls which are known to have been dry for several
successive seasons are suddenly filled by heavy rains, they are found to
be swarming at once with full-grown snakeheads released in a moment from
what I may venture to call their living tomb in the hardened bottom.
Whether such statements are absolutely true or not the present deponent
would be loth to decide dogmatically; but, if we were implicitly to
swallow everything that the old Anglo-Indian in his simplicity assures
us he has seen--well, the clergy would have no further cause any longer
to deplore the growing scepticism and unbelief of these latter
unfaithful ages.

This habit of lying in the mud and there becoming torpid may be looked
upon as a natural alternative to the habit of migrating across country,
when your pond dries up, in search of larger and more permanent sheets
of water. Some fish solve the problem how to get through the dry season
in one of these two alternative fashions and some in the other. In flat
countries where small ponds and tanks alone exist, the burying plan is
almost universal; in plains traversed by large rivers or containing
considerable scattered lakes, the migratory system finds greater favour
with the piscine population.

One tropical species which adopts the tactics of hiding itself in the
hard clay, the African mud-fish, is specially interesting to us human
beings on two accounts--first, because, unlike almost all other kinds of
fish, it possesses lungs as well as gills; and, secondly, because it
forms an intermediate link between the true fish and the frogs or
amphibians, and therefore stands in all probability in the direct line
of human descent, being the living representative of one among our own
remote and early ancestors. Scientific interest and filial piety ought
alike to secure our attention for the African mud-fish. It lives its
amphibious life among the rice-fields on the Nile, the Zambesi, and the
Gambia, and is so greatly given to a terrestrial existence that its
swim-bladder has become porous and cellular, so as to be modified into a
pair of true and serviceable lungs. In fact, the lungs themselves in all
the higher animals are merely the swim-bladders of fish, slightly
altered so as to perform a new but closely allied office. The mud-fish
is common enough in all the larger English aquariums, owing to a
convenient habit in which it indulges, and which permits it to be
readily conveyed to all parts of the globe on the same principle as the
vans for furniture. When the dry season comes on and the rice-fields are
reduced to banks of baking mud, the mud-fish retire to the bottom of
their pools, where they form for themselves a sort of cocoon of hardened
clay, lined with mucus, and with a hole at each end to admit the air;
and in this snug retreat they remain torpid till the return of wet
weather. As the fish usually reach a length of three or four feet, the
cocoons are of course by no means easy to transport entire. Nevertheless
the natives manage to dig them up whole, fish and all; and if the
capsules are not broken, the unconscious inmates can be sent across by
steamer to Europe with perfect safety. Their astonishment when they
finally wake up after their long slumber, and find themselves inspecting
the British public, as introduced to them by Mr. Farini, through a sheet
of plate-glass, must be profound and interesting.

In England itself, on the other hand, we have at least one kind of fish
which exemplifies the opposite or migratory solution of the dry pond
problem, and that is our familiar friend the common eel. The ways of
eels are indeed mysterious, for nobody has ever yet succeeded in
discovering where, when, or how they manage to spawn; nobody has ever
yet seen an eel's egg, or caught a female eel in the spawning condition,
or even observed a really adult male or female specimen of perfect
development. All the eels ever found in fresh water are immature and
undeveloped creatures. But eels do certainly spawn somewhere or other in
the deep sea, and every year, in the course of the summer, flocks of
young ones, known as elvers, ascend the rivers in enormous quantities,
like a vast army under numberless leaders. At each tributary or
affluent, be it river, brook, stream, or ditch, a proportionate
detachment of the main body is given off to explore the various
branches, while the central force wriggles its way up the chief channel,
regardless of obstacles, with undiminished vigour. When the young elvers
come to a weir, a wall, a floodgate, or a lasher, they simply squirm
their way up the perpendicular barrier with indescribable wrigglings, as
if they were wholly unacquainted, physically as well as mentally, with
Newton's magnificent discovery of gravitation. Nothing stops them; they
go wherever water is to be found; and though millions perish hopelessly
in the attempt, millions more survive in the end to attain their goal in
the upper reaches. They even seem to scent ponds or lakes mysteriously,
at a distance, and will strike boldly straight across country, to sheets
of water wholly cut off from communication with the river which forms
their chief highway.

The full-grown eels are also given to journeying across country in a
more sober, sedate, and dignified manner, as becomes fish which have
fully arrived at years, or rather months, of discretion. When the ponds
in which they live dry up in summer, they make in a bee-line for the
nearest sheet of fresh water, whose direction and distance they appear
to know intuitively, through some strange instinctive geographical
faculty. On their way across country, they do not despise the succulent
rat, whom they swallow whole when caught with great gusto. To keep their
gills wet during these excursions, eels have the power of distending the
skin on each side of the neck, just below the head, so as to form a big
pouch or swelling. This pouch they fill with water, to carry a good
supply along with them, until they reach the ponds for which they are
making. It is the pouch alone that enables eels to live so long out of
water under all circumstances, and so incidentally exposes them to the
disagreeable experience of getting skinned alive, which it is to be
feared still forms the fate of most of those that fall into the clutches
of the human species.

A far more singular walking fish than any of these is the odd creature
that rejoices (unfortunately) in the very classical surname of
Periophthalmus, which is, being interpreted, Stare-about. (If he had a
recognised English name of his own, I would gladly give it; but as he
hasn't, and as it is clearly necessary to call him something, I fear we
must stick to the somewhat alarming scientific nomenclature.)
Periophthalmus, then, is an odd fish of the tropical Pacific shores,
with a pair of very distinct forelegs (theoretically described as
modified pectoral fins), and with two goggle eyes, which he can protrude
at pleasure right outside the sockets, so as to look in whatever
direction he chooses, without even taking the trouble to turn his head
to left or right, backward or forward. At ebb tide this singular
peripatetic goby literally walks straight out of the water, and
promenades the bare beach erect on two legs, in search of small crabs
and other stray marine animals left behind by the receding waters. If
you try to catch him, he hops away briskly much like a frog, and stares
back at you grimly over his left shoulder, with his squinting optics.
So completely adapted is he for this amphibious long-shore existence,
that his big eyes, unlike those of most other fish, are formed for
seeing in the air as well as in the water. Nothing can be more ludicrous
than to watch him suddenly thrusting these very movable orbs right out
of their sockets like a pair of telescopes, and twisting them round in
all directions so as to see in front, behind, on top, and below, in one
delightful circular sweep.

There is also a certain curious tropical American carp which, though it
hardly deserves to be considered in the strictest sense as a fish out of
water, yet manages to fall nearly half-way under that peculiar category,
for it always swims with its head partly above the surface and partly
below. But the funniest thing in this queer arrangement is the fact that
one half of each eye is out in the air and the other half is beneath in
the water. Accordingly, the eye is divided horizontally by a dark strip
into two distinct and unlike portions, the upper one of which has a
pupil adapted to vision in the air alone, while the lower is adapted to
seeing in the water only. The fish, in fact, always swims with its eye
half out of the water, and it can see as well on dry land as in its
native ocean. Its name is Anableps, but in all probability it does not
wish the fact to be generally known.

The flying fish are fish out of water in a somewhat different and more
transitory sense. Their aërial excursions are brief and rapid; they can
only fly a very little way, and have soon to take once more for safety
to their own more natural and permanent element. More than forty kinds
of the family are known, in appearance very much like English herrings,
but with the front fins expanded and modified into veritable wings. It
is fashionable nowadays among naturalists to assert that the flying fish
don't fly; that they merely jump horizontally out of the water with a
powerful impulse, and fall again as soon as the force of the first
impetus is entirely spent. When men endeavour to persuade you to such
folly, believe them not. For my own part, I have _seen_ the flying fish
fly--deliberately fly, and flutter, and rise again, and change the
direction of their flight in mid-air, exactly after the fashion of a big
dragonfly. If the other people who have watched them haven't succeeded
in seeing them fly, that is their own fault, or at least their own
misfortune; perhaps their eyes weren't quick enough to catch the rapid,
though to me perfectly recognisable, hovering and fluttering of the
gauze-like wings; but I have seen them myself, and I maintain that on
such a question one piece of positive evidence is a great deal better
than a hundred negative. The testimony of all the witnesses who didn't
see the murder committed is as nothing compared with the single
testimony of the one man who really did see it. And in this case I have
met with many other quick observers who fully agreed with me, against
the weight of scientific opinion, that they have seen the flying fish
really fly with their own eyes, and no mistake about it. The German
professors, indeed, all think otherwise; but then the German professors
all wear green spectacles, which are the outward and visible sign of
'blinded eyesight poring over miserable books.' The unsophisticated
vision of the noble British seaman is unanimously with me on the matter
of the reality of the fishes' flight.

Another group of very interesting fish out of water are the flying
gurnards, common enough in the Mediterranean and the tropical Atlantic.
They are much heavier and bigger creatures than the true flying fish of
the herring type, being often a foot and a half long, and their wings
are much larger in proportion, though not, I think, really so powerful
as those of their pretty little silvery rivals. All the flying fish fly
only of necessity, not from choice. They leave the water when pursued
by their enemies, or when frightened by the rapid approach of a big
steamer. So swiftly do they fly, however, that they can far outstrip a
ship going at the rate of ten knots an hour; and I have often watched
one keep ahead of a great Pacific liner under full steam for many
minutes together in quick successive flights of three or four hundred
feet each. Oddly enough, they can fly further against the wind than
before it--a fact acknowledged even by the spectacled Germans
themselves, and very hard indeed to reconcile with the orthodox belief
that they are not flying at all, but only jumping. I don't know whether
the flying gurnards are good eating or not; but the silvery flying fish
are caught for market (sad desecration of the poetry of nature!) in the
Windward Islands, and when nicely fried in egg and bread-crumb are
really quite as good for practical purposes as smelts or whiting or any
other prosaic European substitute.

On the whole, it will be clear, I think, to the impartial reader from
this rapid survey that the helplessness and awkwardness of a fish out of
water has been much exaggerated by the thoughtless generalisation of
unscientific humanity. Granting, for argument's sake, that most fish
prefer the water, as a matter of abstract predilection, to the dry land,
it must be admitted _per contra_ that many fish cut a much better figure
on terra firma than most of their critics themselves would cut in
mid-ocean. There are fish that wriggle across country intrepidly with
the dexterity and agility of the most accomplished snakes; there are
fish that walk about on open sand-banks, semi-erect on two legs, as
easily as lizards; there are fish that hop and skip on tail and fins in
a manner that the celebrated jumping frog himself might have observed
with envy; and there are fish that fly through the air of heaven with a
grace and swiftness that would put to shame innumerable species among
their feathered competitors. Nay, there are even fish, like some kinds
of eels and the African mud-fish, that scarcely live in the water at
all, but merely frequent wet and marshy places, where they lie snugly in
the soft ooze and damp earth that line the bottom. If I have only
succeeded, therefore, in relieving the mind of one sensitive and
retiring fish from the absurd obloquy cast upon its appearance when it
ventures away for awhile from its proper element, then, in the pathetic
and prophetic words borrowed from a thousand uncut prefaces, this work
will not, I trust, have been written in vain.

THE FIRST POTTER

Collective humanity owes a great debt of gratitude to the first potter.
Before his days the art of boiling, though in one sense very simple and
primitive indeed, was in another sense very complex, cumbersome, and
lengthy. The unsophisticated savage, having duly speared and killed his
antelope, proceeded to light a roaring fire, with flint or drill, by the
side of some convenient lake or river in his tropical jungle. Then he
dug a big hole in the soft mud close to the water's edge, and let the
water (rather muddy) percolate into it, or sometimes even he plastered
over its bottom with puddled clay. After that, he heated some smooth
round stones red hot in the fire close by, and drawing them out gingerly
between two pieces of stick, dropped them one by one, spluttering and
fizzing, into his improvised basin or kettle. This, of course, made the
water in the hole boil; and the unsophisticated savage thereupon thrust
into it his joint of antelope, repeating the process over and over again
until the sodden meat was completely seethed to taste on the outside. If
one application was not sufficient, he gnawed off the cooked meat from
the surface with his stout teeth, innocent as yet of the dentist's art,
and plunged the underdone core back again, till it exactly suited his
not over-delicate or dainty fancy.

To be sure, the primitive savage, unversed as he was in pastes and
glazes, in moulds and ornaments, did not pass his life entirely devoid
of cups and platters. Coconut shell and calabash rind, horn of ox and
skull of enemy, bamboo-joint and capacious rhomb-shell, all alike, no
doubt, supplied him with congenial implements for drink or storage. Like
Eve in the Miltonic Paradise, there lacked him not fit vessels pure;
picking some luscious tropical fruit, the savoury pulp he chewed, and in
the rind still as he thirsted scooped the brimming stream. This was
satisfactory as far as it went, of course, but it was not pottery. He
couldn't boil his joint for dinner in coco-nut or skull; he had to do it
with stone pot-boilers, in a rude kettle of puddled clay.

But at last one day, that inspired barbarian, the first potter, hit by
accident upon his grand discovery. He had carried some water in a big
calabash--the hard shell of a tropical fruit whose pulpy centre can be
easily scooped out--and a happy thought suddenly struck him: why not put
the calabash to boil upon the fire with a little clay smeared outside
it? The savage is conservative, but he loves to save trouble. He tried
the experiment, and it succeeded admirably. The water boiled, and the
calabash was not burnt or broken. Our nameless philosopher took the
primitive vessel off the fire with a forked branch and looked at it
critically with the delighted eyes of a first inventor. A wonderful
change had suddenly come over it. He had blundered accidentally upon the
art of pottery. For what is this that has happened to the clay? It went
in soft, brown, and muddy; it has come out hard, red, and stone-like.
The first potter ruminated and wondered. He didn't fully realise, no
doubt, what he had actually done; but he knew he had invented a means by
which you could put a calabash upon a fire and keep it there without
burning or bursting. That, after all, was at least something.

All this, you say (which, in effect, is Dr. Tylor's view), is purely
hypothetical. In one sense, yes; but not in another. We know that most
savage races still use natural vessels, made of coco-nuts, gourds, or
calabashes, for everyday purposes of carrying water; and we also know
that all the simplest and earliest pottery is moulded on the shape of
just such natural jars and bottles. The fact and the theory based on it
are no novelties. Early in the sixteenth century, indeed, the Sieur
Gonneville, skipper of Honfleur, sailing round the Cape of Good Hope,
made his way right across the Southern Ocean to some vague point of
South America where he found the people still just in the intermediate
stage between the use of natural vessels and the invention of pottery.
For these amiable savages (name and habitat unknown) had wooden pots
'plastered with a kind of clay a good finger thick, which prevents the
fire from burning them.' Here we catch industrial evolution in the very
act, and the potter's art in its first infancy, fossilised and
crystallised, as it were, in an embryo condition, and fixed for us
immovably by the unprogressive conservatism of a savage tribe. It was
this curious early observation of evolving keramic art that made
Goguet--an anthropologist born out of due season--first hit upon that
luminous theory of the origin of pottery now all but universally
accepted.

Plenty of evidence to the same effect is now forthcoming for the modern
inquirer. Among the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, Squier
and Davis found the kilns in which the primitive pottery had been baked;
and among their relics were partially burnt pots retaining in part the
rinds of the gourds or calabashes on which they had been actually
modelled. Along the Gulf of Mexico gourds were also used to give shape
to the pot; and all over the world, even to this day, the gourd form is
a very common one for pottery of all sorts, thus pointing back, dimly
and curiously, to the original mode in which fictile ware generally
came to be invented. In Fiji and in many parts of Africa vessels
modelled upon natural forms are still universal. Of course all such pots
as these are purely hand-made; the invention of the potter's wheel, now
so indissolubly associated in all our minds with the production of
earthenware, belongs to an infinitely later and almost modern period.

And that consideration naturally suggests the fundamental question, When
did the first potter live? The world (as Sir Henry Taylor has oracularly
told us) knows nothing of its greatest men; and the very name of the
father of all potters has been utterly forgotten in the lapse of ages.
Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, one may reasonably doubt
whether there was ever actually any one single man on whom one could
definitely lay one's finger, and say with confidence, Here we have the
first potter. Pottery, no doubt, like most other things, grew by
imperceptible degrees from wholly vague and rudimentary beginnings. Just
as there were steam-engines before Watt, and locomotives before
Stephenson, so there were pots before the first potter. Many men must
have discovered separately, by half-unconscious trials, that a coat of
mud rudely plastered over the bottom of a calabash prevented it from
catching fire and spilling its contents; other men slowly learned to
plaster the mud higher and ever higher up the sides; and yet others
gradually introduced and patented new improvements for wholly encasing
the entire cup in an inch thickness of carefully kneaded clay. Bit by
bit the invention grew, like all great inventions, without any inventor.
Thus the question of the date of the first potter practically resolves
itself into the simpler question of the date of the earliest known
pottery.

Did palæolithic man, that antique naked crouching savage who hunted the
mammoth, the reindeer, and the cave-bear among the frozen fields of
interglacial Gaul and Britain--did palæolithic man himself, in his rude
rock-shelters, possess a knowledge of the art of pottery? That is a
question which has been much debated amongst archæologists, and which
cannot even now be considered as finally settled before the tribunal of
science. He must have drunk out of something or other, but whether he
drank out of earthenware cups is still uncertain. It is pretty clear
that the earliest drinking vessels used in Europe were neither bowls of
earthenware nor shells of fruits, for the cold climate of interglacial
times did not permit the growth in northern latitudes of such large
natural vessels as gourds, calabashes, bamboos, or coco-nuts. In all
probability the horns of the aurochs and the wild cattle, and the
capacious skull of the fellow-man whose bones he had just picked at his
ease for his cannibal supper, formed the aboriginal goblets and basins
of the old black European savage. A curious verbal relic of the use of
horns as drinking-cups survives indeed down to almost modern times in
the Greek word _keramic_, still commonly applied to the art of pottery,
and derived, of course, from _keras_, a horn; while as to skulls, not
only were they frequently used as drinking-cups by our Scandinavian
ancestors, but there still exists a very singular intermediate American
vessel in which the clay has actually been moulded on a human skull as
model, just as other vessels have been moulded on calabashes or other
suitable vegetable shapes.

Still, the balance of evidence certainly seems to show that a little
very rude and almost shapeless hand-made pottery has really been
discovered amongst the buried caves where palæolithic men made for ages
their chief dwelling-places. Fragments of earthenware occurred in the
Hohefels cave near Ulm, in company with the bones of reindeer,
cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had doubtless been duly boiled,
a hundred thousand years ago, by the intelligent producer of those
identical sun-dried fleshpots; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his
possession portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel,
from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of the hand that
moulded the clay are still clearly distinguishable on the baked
earthenware. That is the great merit of pottery, viewed as an historical
document; it retains its shape and peculiarities unaltered through
countless centuries, for the future edification of unborn antiquaries.
_Litera scripta manet_, and so does baked pottery. The hand itself that
formed that rude bowl has long since mouldered away, flesh and bone
alike, into the soil around it; but the print of its fingers, indelibly
fixed by fire into the hardened clay, remains for us still to tell the
story of that early triumph of nascent keramics.

The relics of palæolithic pottery are, however, so very fragmentary, and
the circumstances under which they have been discovered so extremely
doubtful, that many cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now
have nothing to say to the suspected impostors. Among the remains of the
newer Stone Age, on the other hand, comparatively abundant keramic
specimens have been unearthed, without doubt or cavil, from the long
barrows--the burial-places of the early Mongoloid race, now represented
by the Finns and Lapps, which occupied the whole of Western Europe
before the advent of the Aryan vanguard. One of the best bits is a
curious wide-mouthed, semi-globular bowl from Norton Bavant, in
Wiltshire, whose singular shape suggests almost immediately the idea
that it must at least have been based, if not actually modelled, upon a
human skull. Its rim is rough and quite irregular, and there is no trace
of ornamentation of any sort; a fact quite in accordance with all the
other facts we know about the men of the newer Stone Age, who were far
less artistic and æsthetic in every way than their ruder predecessors of
the interglacial epoch.

Ornamentation, when it does begin to appear, arises at first in a
strictly practical and unintentional manner. Later examples elsewhere
show us by analogy how it first came into existence. The Indians of the
Ohio seem to have modelled their pottery in bags or nettings made of
coarse thread or twisted bark. Those of the Mississippi moulded them in
baskets of willow or splints. When the moist clay thus shaped and marked
by the indentations of the mould was baked in the kiln, it of course
retained the pretty dappling it received from the interlaced and woven
thrums, which were burnt off in the process of firing. Thus a rude sort
of natural diaper ornament was set up, to which the eye soon became
accustomed, and which it learned to regard as necessary for beauty.
Hence, wherever newer and more improved methods of modelling came into
use, there would arise an instinctive tendency on the part of the early
potter to imitate the familiar marking by artificial means. Dr. Klemm
long ago pointed out that the oldest German fictile vases have an
ornamentation in which plaiting is imitated by incised lines. 'What was
no longer wanted as a necessity,' he says, 'was kept up as an ornament
alone.'

Another very simple form of ornamentation, reappearing everywhere all
the world over on primitive bowls and vases, is the rope pattern, a line
or string-course over the whole surface or near the mouth of the vessel.
Many of the indented patterns on early British pottery have been
produced, as Sir Daniel Wilson has pointed out, by the close impress of
twisted cord on the wet clay. Sometimes these cords seem to have been
originally left on the clay in the process of baking, and used as a
mould; at other times they may have been employed afterwards as
handles, as is still done in the case of some South African pots: and,
when the rope handle wore off, the pattern made by its indentation on
the plastic material before sun-baking would still remain as pure
ornament. Probably the very common idea of string-course ornamentation
just below the mouth or top of vases and bowls has its origin in this
early and almost universal practice.

When other conscious and intentional ornamentation began to supersede
these rude natural and undesigned patterns, they were at first mere
rough attempts on the part of the early potter to imitate, with the
simple means at his disposal, the characteristic marks of the ropes or
wickerwork by which the older vessels were necessarily surrounded. He
had gradually learned, as Mr. Tylor well puts it, that clay alone or
with some mixture of sand is capable of being used without any
extraneous support for the manufacture of drinking and cooking vessels.
He therefore began to model rudely thin globular bowls with his own
hands, dispensing with the aid of thongs or basketwork. But he still
naturally continued to imitate the original shapes--the gourd, the
calabash, the plaited net, the round basket; and his eye required the
familiar decoration which naturally resulted from the use of some one or
other among these primitive methods. So he tried his hand at deliberate
ornament in his own simple untutored fashion.

It was quite literally his hand, indeed, that he tried at first; for the
earliest decoration upon paleolithic pottery is made by pressing the
fingers into the clay so as to produce a couple of deep parallel
furrows, which is the sole attempt at ornament on M. Joly's Nabrigas
specimen; while the urns and drinking-cups taken from our English long
barrows are adorned with really pretty and effective patterns, produced
by pressing the tip of the finger and the nail into the plastic
material. It is wonderful what capital and varied results you can get
with no more recondite graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes
turned front downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes used to
egg up the moist clay into small jagged and relieved designs. Most of
these patterns are more or less plaitlike in arrangement, evidently
suggested to the mind of the potter by the primitive marks of the old
basketwork. But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into
his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers, and the flint
knife itself, with which he incised more regular patterns, straight or
zigzag lines, rows of dots, squares and triangles, concentric circles,
and even the mystic cross and swastika, the sacred symbols of yet unborn
and undreamt-of religions. As yet, there was no direct imitation of
plant or animal forms; once only, on a single specimen from a Swiss lake
dwelling, are the stem and veins of a leaf dimly figured on the
handiwork of the European prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form,
as pattern merely, had begun to exist; imitative work as such was yet
unknown, or almost unknown, to the eastern hemisphere.

In America, it was quite otherwise. The forgotten people who built the
mounds of Ohio and the great tumuli of the Mississippi valley decorated
their pottery not only with animal figures, such as snakes, fish, frogs,
and turtles, but also with human heads and faces, many of them evidently
modelled from the life, and some of them quite unmistakably genuine
portraits. On one such vase, found in Arkansas, and figured by the
Marquis de Nadaillac in his excellent work on Prehistoric America, the
ornamentation consists (in true Red Indian taste) of skeleton hands,
interspersed with crossbones; and the delicacy and anatomical
correctness of the detail inevitably suggest the idea that the unknown
artist must have worked with the actual hand of his slaughtered enemy
lying for a model on the table before him. Much of the early American
pottery is also coloured as well as figured, and that with considerable
real taste; the pigments were applied, however, after the baking, and so
possess little stability or permanence of character. But pots and vases
of these advanced styles have got so far ahead of the first potter that
we have really little or no business with them in this paper.

Prehistoric European pottery has never a spout, but it often indulges in
some simple form of ear or handle. The very ancient British bowl from
Bavant Long Barrow--produced by that old squat Finnlike race which
preceded the 'Ancient Britons' of our old-fashioned school-books--has
two ear-shaped handles projecting just below the rim, exactly as in the
modern form of vessel known as a crock, and still familiarly used for
household purposes. This long survival of a common domestic shape from
the most remote prehistoric antiquity to our own time is very
significant and very interesting. Many of the old British pots have also
a hole or two holes pierced through them, near the top, evidently for
the purpose of putting in a string or rope by way of a handle. With the
round barrows, which belong to the Bronze Age, and contain the remains
of a later and more civilised Celtic population, we get far more
advanced forms of pottery. Burial here is preceded by cremation, and the
ashes are enclosed in urns, many of which are very beautiful in form and
exquisitely decorated. Cremation, as Professor Rolleston used feelingly
to plead, is bad for the comparative anatomist and ethnographer, but it
is passing well for the collector of pottery. Where burning exists as a
common practice, there urns are frequent, and pottery an art in great
request. Drinking-cups and perforated incense burners accompany the
dead in the round barrows; but the use of the potter's wheel is still
unknown, and all the urns and vases belonging to this age are still
hand-moulded.

It is a curious reflection, however, that in spite of all the later
improvements in the fictile art--in spite of wheels and moulds, pastes
and glazes, stamps and pigments, and all the rest of it--the most
primitive methods of the first potter are still in use in many
countries, side by side with the most finished products of modern
European skill and industry. I have in my own possession some West
Indian calabashes, cut and decorated under my own eye by a Jamaican
negro for his personal use, and bought from him by me for the smallest
coin there current--calabashes carved round the edge through the rind
with a rude string-course, exactly like the common rope pattern of
prehistoric pottery. I have seen the same Jamaican negroes kneading
their hand-made porous earthenware beside a tropical stream, moulding it
on fruits or shaping it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and
drying it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily-formed kiln
of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric types, locally
known by the quaint West African name of 'yabbas.' Many of these yabbas,
if buried in the ground and exposed to damp and frost, till they almost
lost the effects of the baking, would be quite indistinguishable, even
by the skilled archæologist, from the actual handicraft of the
palæolithic potter. The West Indian negroes brought these simple arts
with them from their African home, where they have been handed down in
unbroken continuity from the very earliest age of fictile industry. New
and better methods have slowly grown up everywhere around them, but
these simplest, earliest, and easiest plans have survived none the less
for the most ordinary domestic uses, and will survive for ages yet, as
long as there remain any out-of-the-way places, remote from the main
streams of civilised commerce. Thus, while hundreds of thousands of
years, in all probability, separate us now from the ancient days of the
first potter, it is yet possible for us to see the first potter's own
methods and principles exemplified under our very eyes by people who
derive them in unbroken succession from the direct teaching of that
long-forgotten prehistoric savage.

THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS

Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet,
is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him,
it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his
grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of
those that precede him. Nevertheless, there _is_ a recipe for the
production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet
adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I
believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown
regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly
anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their
adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly
demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a
natural product, not a _lusus naturæ_. You get them only under sundry
relatively definite and settled conditions; and though it isn't
(unfortunately) quite true that the conditions will always infallibly
bring forth the genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be
brought forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet from a family of
stockbrokers who have intermarried with the daughters of an eminent
alderman, or make a philosopher out of a country grocer's eldest son
whose amiable mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and
sugar.

In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for action, I am going
to start even by getting rid once for all (so far as we are here
concerned) of that famous but misleading old distinction between genius
and talent. It is really a distinction without a difference. I suppose
there is probably no subject under heaven on which so much high-flown
stuff and nonsense has been talked and written as upon this well-known
and much-debated hair-splitting discrimination. It is just like that
other great distinction between fancy and imagination, about which poets
and essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the present
century, until at last one fine day the world at large woke up suddenly
to the unpleasant consciousness that it had been wasting its time over a
non-existent difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all
absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert that talent and
genius are exactly one and the same thing; but I do assert that genius
is simply talent raised to a slightly higher power; it differs from it
not in kind but merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no
drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two. You might
just as well try to classify all mankind into tall men and short men,
and then endeavour to prove that a real distinction existed in nature
between your two artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in
height and in ability by infinitesimal gradations: some men are very
short, others rather short, others medium-sized, others tall, and yet
others again of portentous stature like Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So,
too, some men are idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid,
some are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever, and some
geniuses. But genius is only the culminating point of ordinary
cleverness, and if you were to try and draw up a list of all the real
geniuses in the last hundred years, no two people could ever be found
to agree among themselves as to which should be included and which
excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard Kingsley and
Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I have heard them both
absolutely denied every sort of literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a
poor creature, and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty windbag.

The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast gulf which
separates genius from mere talent has been published and set abroad by
those fortunate persons who fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under
the former highly satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short,
real or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify itself
at the expense of poor, commonplace, inferior talent. There is a
certain type of great man in particular which is never tired of dilating
upon the noble supremacy of its own greatness over the spurious
imitation. It offers incense obliquely to itself in offering it
generically to the class genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There
are great men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor Hugo,
the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose perpetually as great
men; they cry aloud to the poor silly public so far beneath them, 'I am
a genius! Admire me! Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on
an aërial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and battling
multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not unfortunately geniuses,
are surely entitled to enter occasionally our humble protest. Our
contention is that the genius only differs from the man of ability as
the man of ability differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent
man from the worthy person of sound common sense. The sliding scale of
brains has infinite gradations; and the gradations merge insensibly into
one another. There is no gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here
as elsewhere, throughout the whole range of her manifold productions,
our common mother _saltum non facit_.

The question before the house, then, narrows itself down finally to
this; what are the conditions under which exceptional ability or high
talent is likely to arise?

Now, I suppose everybody is ready to admit that two complete born fools
are not at all likely to become the proud father and happy mother of a
Shakespeare or a Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow
that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable chance arise
among the South African Bushmen, who cannot understand the arduous
arithmetical proposition that two and two make four. No amount of
education or careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the
most profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who cannot even
comprehend an English drawing of a dog or horse, into a respectable
president of the Royal Academy. It is equally unlikely (as it seems to
me) that a Mendelssohn or a Beethoven could be raised in the bosom of a
family all of whose members on either side were incapable (like a
distinguished modern English poet) of discriminating any one note in an
octave from any other. Such leaps as these would be little short of pure
miracles. They would be equivalent to the sudden creation, without
antecedent cause, of a whole vast system of nerves and nerve-centres in
the prodigious brain of some infant phenomenon.

On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk
about hereditary genius--I don't mean, of course, the talk of our
Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy
sciolists who can't understand them--is itself fully as absurd in its
own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no
explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary.
You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor
Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a
poet before him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start
with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing; it begins by
positing the existence of one original genius, absolutely unaccounted
for, and then proceeds blandly to point out that the other geniuses
derive their characteristics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all
the sons of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports the
earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but who, pray, supports
the tortoise? If the first chicken came out of an egg, what was the
origin of the hen that laid it?

Besides, the allegation as it stands is not even a true one. Genius, as
we actually know it, is by no means hereditary. The great man is not
necessarily the son of a great man or the father of a great man: often
enough, he stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of
baser metal on either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare woolstapler, of
Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, was no doubt an eminently respectable
person in his own trade, and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor
of his native town once upon a time: but, so far as is known, none of
his literary remains are at all equal to _Macbeth_ or _Othello_. Parson
Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, may have preached
a great many very excellent and convincing discourses, but there is no
evidence of any sort that he ever attempted to write the _Principia_.
_Per contra_ the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though
of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed conspicuously in
ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences and Mercies amongst whom
their lot was cast; while the Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not
seem to bud out spontaneously into great commanders in the second
generation. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the
Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the Caracci, or the
Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, where the genius, once
developed, has persisted for two or three, or even four lives: but these
instances really cast no light at all upon our central problem, which is
just this--How does the genius come in the first place to be developed
at all from parents in whom individually no particular genius is
ultimately to be seen?

Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages in the
earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we shall get really
next to no personal peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of any sort amongst
them. Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good
scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of labour,
and the other troublesome technicalities of our modern political
economy, are as unknown among such folk as the modern nuisance of
dressing for dinner. Each man performs all the functions of a citizen on
his own account, because there is nobody else to perform them for
him--the medium of exchange known as hard cash has not, so far as he is
concerned, yet been invented; and he performs them well, such as they
are, because he inherits from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and
muscle in these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among
his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a bird, or were
hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint arrowheads, died out of
starvation, leaving no representatives. The beneficent institution of
the poor law does not exist among savages, in order to enable the
helpless and incompetent to bring up families in their own image. There,
survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately benevolent
and useful end in its own directly cruel and relentless way, cutting
off ruthlessly the stupid or the weak, and allowing only the strong and
the cunning to become the parents of future generations.

Hence every young savage, being descended on both sides from ancestors
who in their own way perfectly fulfilled the ideal of complete
savagery--were good hunters, good fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen
of bow or boomerang--inherits from these his successful predecessors all
those qualities of eye and hand and brain and nervous system which go to
make up the abstractly Admirable Crichton of a savage. The qualities in
question are ensured in him by two separate means. In the first place,
survival of the fittest takes care that he and all his ancestors shall
have duly possessed them to some extent to start with; in the second
place, constant practice from boyhood upward increases and develops the
original faculty. Thus savages, as a rule, display absolutely
astonishing ability and cleverness in the few lines which they have made
their own. Their cunning in hunting, their patience in fishing, their
skill in trapping, their infinite dodges for deceiving and cajoling the
animals or enemies that they need to outwit, have moved the wonder and
admiration of innumerable travellers. The savage, in fact, is not
stupid: in his own way his cleverness is extraordinary. But the way is a
very narrow and restricted one, and all savages of the same race walk in
it exactly alike. Cunning they have, skill they have, instinct they
have, to a most marvellous degree; but of spontaneity, originality,
initiative, variability, not a single spark. Know one savage of a tribe
and you know them all. Their cleverness is not the cleverness of the
individual man: it is the inherited and garnered intelligence or
instinct of the entire race.

How, then, do originality, diversity, individuality, genius, begin to
come in? In this way, as it seems to me, looking at the matter both _à
priori_ and by the light of actual experience.

Suppose a country inhabited in its interior by a savage race of hunters
and fighters, and on its seaboard by an equally savage race of pirates
and fishermen, like the Dyaks of Borneo. Each of these races, if left to
itself, will develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage
cleverness. Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will adapt itself
to its particular environment. The people of the interior will acquire
and inherit a wonderful facility in spearing monkeys and knocking down
parrots; while the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers
of canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one another's
villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates. These original
differences of position and function will necessarily entail a thousand
minor differences of intelligence and skill in a thousand different
ways. For example, the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make
themselves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate their
handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the æsthetic taste thus aroused
will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the façades of their wooden
huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed
at measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these
naïve expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in
the savage breast, but the æsthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate
them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous
precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.

Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain
distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties
to any great extent will arise among them. But, as soon as you permit
intermarriage to take place, the inherited and developed qualities of
the one race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely
intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed
qualities of the other. The children may take after either parent in any
combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted an apparently
capricious element of individuality: a power on the part of the
half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible
in the two original homogeneous societies. In one word, you have made
possible the future existence of diversity in character.

If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage communities to our
own very complex and heterogeneous world, what do we find? An endless
variety of soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers,
candlestick makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a
certain rough number of classes, each with its own developed and
inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world is made up, like the world
of ancient Egypt and of modern India, of an immense variety of separate
castes--not, indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those
extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly hereditary in
character, and given on the average to a tolerably close system of
intermarriage within the caste.

For example, there is the agricultural labourer caste--the Hodge
Chawbacon of urban humour, who in his military avatar also reappears as
Tommy Atkins, a little transfigured, but at bottom identical--the
alternative aspect of a single undivided central reality. Hodge for the
most part lives and dies in his ancestral village: marries Mary, the
daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and begets assorted Hodges
and Marys in vast quantities, all of the same pattern, to replenish the
earth in the next generation. There you have a very well-marked
hereditary caste, little given to intermixture with others, and from
whose members, however recruited by fresh blood, the object of our
quest, the Divine Genius, is very unlikely to find his point of origin.
Then there is the town artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from
the ranks of the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active,
enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many generations
standing in various forms of handicraft. This is a far higher and more
promising type of humanity, from the judicious intermixture of whose
best elements we are apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our
Telfords, and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we
find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only rarely blossoms
out, under favourable circumstances on both sides, into a stray Cobbett
or an almost miraculous miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of
more varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense variety of
brain elements are called into play by their diverse functions in
diverse lines; and when we take them in conjunction with the upper
mercantile grades, which are chiefly composed of their ablest and most
successful members, we get considerable chances of those happy blendings
of individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to make up
talent, and, in their final outcome, genius. Last of all, in the
professional and upper classes there is a freedom and play of faculty
everywhere going on, which in the chances of intermarriage between
lawyer-folk and doctor-folk, scientific people and artistic people,
county families and bishops or law lords, and so forth _ad infinitum_,
offers by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional
development of that rare product of the highest humanity, the genuine
genius.

But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermixture of
variously acquired hereditary characteristics that makes the best and
truest geniuses. Left to itself, each separate line of caste ancestry
would tend to produce a certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of
handicraft in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably
anything worth calling real genius. For example, a family of artists,
starting with some sort of manual dexterity in imitating natural forms
and colours with paint and pencil, and strictly intermarrying always
with other families possessing exactly the same inherited endowments,
would probably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its
drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its grouping; more and
more technically perfect in its perspective and light-and-shade, and so
forth, by pure dint of accumulated hereditary experience from generation
to generation. It would pass from the Egyptian to the Chinese style of
art by slow degrees and with infinite gradations. But suppose, instead
of thus rigorously confining itself to its own caste, this family of
handicraft artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or
seafaring, or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the consequence?
Why, such an infiltration of other hereditary characteristics, otherwise
acquired, as might make the young painters of future generations more
wide minded, more diversified, more individualistic, more vivid and
lifelike. Some divine spark of poetical imagination, some tenderness of
sentiment, some play of fancy, unknown perhaps, to the hard, dry,
matter-of-fact limners of the ancestral school, might thus be introduced
into the original line of hereditary artists. In this way one can easily
see how even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might improve the
breed of a family of painters. For while each caste, left to itself, is
liable to harden down into a mere technical excellence after its own
kind, a wooden facility for drawing faces, or casting up columns of
figures, or hacking down enemies, or building steam-engines, a healthy
cross with other castes is liable to bring in all kinds of new and
valuable qualities, each of which, though acquired perhaps in a totally,
different line of life, is apt to bear a new application in the new
complex whereof it now forms a part.

In our very varied modern societies, every man and every woman, in the
upper and middle ranks of life at least, has an individuality and an
idiosyncrasy so compounded of endless varying stocks and races. Here is
one whose father was an Irishman and his mother a Scotchwoman; here is
another whose paternal line were country parsons, while his maternal
ancestors were city merchants or distinguished soldiers. Take almost
anybody's 'sixteen quarters'--his great-great grandfathers and
great-great grandmothers, of whom he has sixteen all told--and what do
you often find? A peer, a cobbler, a barrister, a common sailor, a Welsh
doctor, a Dutch merchant, a Huguenot pastor, a cornet of horse, an Irish
heiress, a farmer's daughter, a housemaid, an actress, a Devonshire
beauty, a rich young lady of sugar-broking extraction, a Lady Carolina,
a London lodging-house keeper. This is not by any means an exaggerated
case; it would be easy, indeed, from one's own knowledge of family
histories to supply a great many real examples far more startling than
this partially imaginary one. With such a variety of racial and
professional antecedents behind us, what infinite possibilities are
opened before us of children with ability, folly, stupidity, genius?

Infinite numbers of intermixtures everywhere exist in civilised
societies. Most of them are passable; many of them are execrable; a few
of them are admirable; and here and there, one of them consists of that
happy blending of individual characteristics which we all immediately
recognise as genius--at least after somebody else has told us so.

The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to be somewhat after
this fashion. Take a number of good, strong, powerful stocks, mentally
or physically, endowed with something more than the average amount of
energy and application. Let them be as varied as possible in
characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include among them a
considerable small-change of races, dispositions, professions, and
temperaments. Mix, by marriage, to the proper consistency; educate the
offspring, especially by circumstances and environment, as broadly,
freely, and diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with
other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies; and
watch the result to find your genius in the fourth or fifth generation.
If the experiment has been properly performed, and all the conditions
have been decently favourable, you will get among the resultant five
hundred persons a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair
proportion of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and
(in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your cards very
carefully) perhaps among them all a single genius. But most probably the
genius will have died young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through
some tiny defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying
this experiment unaided every day all around us, and, though she makes a
great many misses, occasionally she makes a stray hit and then we get a
Shakespeare or a Grimaldi.

'But you haven't proved all this: you have only suggested it.' Does one
prove a thesis of deep-reaching importance in a ten-page essay? And if
one proved it in a big book, with classified examples and detailed
genealogies of all the geniuses, would anybody on earth except Mr.
Francis Galton ever take the trouble to read it?

DESERT SANDS

If deserts _have_ a fault (which their present biographer is far from
admitting), that fault may doubtless be found in the fact that their
scenery as a rule tends to be just a trifle monotonous. Though fine in
themselves, they lack variety. To be sure, very few of the deserts of
real life possess that absolute flatness, sandiness and sameness, which
characterises the familiar desert of the poet and of the annual
exhibitions--a desert all level yellow expanse, most bilious in its
colouring, and relieved by but four allowable academy properties, a
palm-tree, a camel, a sphinx, and a pyramid. For foreground, throw in a
sheikh in appropriate drapery; for background, a sky-line and a
bleaching skeleton; stir and mix, and your picture is finished. Most
practical deserts one comes across in travelling, however, are a great
deal less simple and theatrical than that; rock preponderates over sand
in their composition, and inequalities of surface are often the rule
rather than the exception. There is reason to believe, indeed, that the
artistic conception of the common or Burlington House desert has been
unduly influenced for evil by the accessibility and the poetic adjuncts
of the Egyptian sand-waste, which, being situated in a great alluvial
river valley is really flat, and, being the most familiar, has therefore
distorted to its own shape the mental picture of all its kind elsewhere.
But most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy; they
present a considerable diversity and variety of surface, and their rocks
are often unpleasantly obtrusive to the tender feet of the pedestrian
traveller.

A desert, in fact, is only a place where the weather is always and
uniformly fine. The sand is there merely as what the logicians call, in
their cheerful way, 'a separable accident'; the essential of a desert,
as such, is the absence of vegetation, due to drought. The barometer in
those happy, too happy, regions, always stands at Set Fair. At least, it
would, if barometers commonly grew in the desert, where, however, in the
present condition of science, they are rarely found. It is this dryness
of the air, and this alone, that makes a desert; all the rest, like the
camels, the sphinx, the skeleton, and the pyramid, is only thrown in to
complete the picture.

Now the first question that occurs to the inquiring mind--which is but a
graceful periphrasis for the present writer--when it comes to examine in
detail the peculiarities of deserts is just this: Why are there places
on the earth's surface on which rain never falls? What makes it so
uncommonly dry in Sahara when it's so unpleasantly wet and so
unnecessarily foggy in this realm of England? And the obvious answer is,
of course, that deserts exist only in those parts of the world where the
run of mountain ranges, prevalent winds, and ocean currents conspire to
render the average rainfall as small as possible. But, strangely enough,
there is a large irregular belt of the great eastern continent where
these peculiar conditions occur in an almost unbroken line for thousands
of miles together, from the west coast of Africa to the borders of
China: and it is in this belt that all the best known deserts of the
world are actually situated. In one place it is the Atlas and the Kong
mountains (now don't pretend, as David Copperfield's aunt would have
said, you don't know the Kong mountains); at another place it is the
Arabian coast range, Lebanon, and the Beluchi hills; at a third, it is
the Himalayas and the Chinese heights that intercept and precipitate all
the moisture from the clouds. But, from whatever variety of local causes
it may arise, the fact still remains the same, that all the great
deserts run in this long, almost unbroken series, beginning with the
greater and the smaller Sahara, continuing in the Libyan and Egyptian
desert, spreading on through the larger part of Arabia, reappearing to
the north as the Syrian desert, and to the east as the desert of
Rajputana (the Great Indian Desert of the Anglo-Indian mind), while
further east again the long line terminates in the desert of Gobi on the
Chinese frontier.

In other parts of the world, deserts are less frequent. The peculiar
combination of circumstances which goes to produce them does not
elsewhere occur over any vast area, on so large a scale. Still, there is
one region in western America where the necessary conditions are found
to perfection. The high snow-clad peaks of the Rocky Mountains on the
one side check and condense all the moisture that comes from the
Atlantic; the Sierra Nevada and the Wahsatch range on the other, running
parallel with them to the west, check and condense all the moisture that
comes from the Pacific coast. In between these two great lines lies the
dry and almost rainless district known to the ambitious western mind as
the Great American Desert, enclosing in its midst that slowly
evaporating inland sea, the Great Salt Lake, a last relic of some
extinct chain of mighty waters once comparable to Superior, Erie, and
Ontario. In Mexico, again, where the twin ranges draw closer together,
desert conditions once more supervene. But it is in central Australia
that the causes which lead to the desert state are, perhaps on the
whole, best exemplified. There, ranges of high mountains extend almost
all round the coasts, and so completely intercept the rainfall which
ought to fertilise the great central plain that the rivers are almost
all short and local, and one thirsty waste spreads for miles and miles
together over the whole unexplored interior of the continent.

But why are deserts rocky and sandy? Why aren't they covered, like the
rest of the world, with earth, soil, mould, or dust? One can see plainly
enough why there should be little or no vegetation where no rain falls,
but one can't see quite so easily why there should be only sand and rock
instead of arid clay-field.

Well, the answer is that without vegetation there is no such thing as
soil on earth anywhere. The top layer of the land in all ordinary and
well-behaved countries is composed entirely of vegetable mould, the
decaying remains of innumerable generations of weeds and grasses. Earth
to earth is the rule of nature. Soil, in fact, consists entirely of dead
leaves. And where there are no leaves to die and decay, there can be no
mould or soil to speak of. Darwin showed, indeed, in his last great
book, that we owe the whole earthy covering of our hills and plains
almost entirely to the perennial exertions of that friend of the
farmers, the harmless, necessary earthworm. Year after year the silent
worker is busy every night pulling down leaves through his tunnelled
burrow into his underground nest, and there converting them by means of
his castings into the black mould which produces, in the end, for lordly
man, all his cultivable fields and pasture-lands and meadows. Where
there are no leaves and no earth-worms, therefore, there can be no soil;
and under those circumstances we get what we familiarly know as a
desert.

The normal course of events where new land rises above the sea is
something like this, as oceanic isles have sufficiently demonstrated.
The rock when it first emerges from the water rises bare and rugged like
a sea-cliff; no living thing, animal or vegetable, is harboured anywhere
on its naked surface. In time, however, as rain falls upon its jutting
peaks and barren pinnacles, disintegration sets in, or, to speak plainer
English, the rock crumbles; and soon streams wash down tiny deposits of
sand and mud thus produced into the valleys and hollows of the upheaved
area. At the same time lichens begin to spring in yellow patches upon
the bare face of the rock, and feathery ferns, whose spores have been
wafted by the wind, or carried by the waves, or borne on the feet of
unconscious birds, sprout here and there from the clefts and crannies.
These, as they die and decay, in turn form a thin layer of vegetable
mould, the first beginning of a local soil, in which the trusty
earthworm (imported in the egg on driftwood or floating weeds)
straightway sets to work to burrow, and which he rapidly increases by
his constant labour. On the soil thus deposited, flowering plants and
trees can soon root themselves, as fast as seeds, nuts or fruits are
wafted to the island by various accidents from surrounding countries.
The new land thrown up by the great eruption of Krakatoa has in this way
already clothed itself from head to foot with a luxuriant sheet of
ferns, mosses, and other vegetation.

First soil, then plant and animal life, are thus in the last resort
wholly dependent for their existence on the amount of rainfall. But in
deserts, where rain seldom or never falls (except by accident) the first
term in this series is altogether wanting. There can be no rivers,
brooks or streams to wash down beds of alluvial deposit from the
mountains to the valleys. Denudation (the term, though rather awful, is
not an improper one) must therefore take a different turn. Practically
speaking, there is no water action; the work is all done by sun and
wind. Under these circumstances, the rocks crumble away very slowly by
mere exposure into small fragments, which the wind knocks off and blows
about the surface, forming sand or dust of them in all convenient
hollows. The frequent currents, produced by the heated air that lies
upon the basking layer of sand, continually keep the surface agitated,
and so blow about the sand and grind one piece against the other till it
becomes ever finer and finer. Thus for the most part the hollows or
valleys of deserts are filled by plains of bare sand, while their higher
portions consist rather of barren, rocky mountains or table-land.

The effect upon whatever animal or vegetable life can manage here and
there to survive under such circumstances is very peculiar. Deserts are
the most exacting of all known environments, and they compel their
inhabitants with profound imperiousness to knuckle under to their
prejudices and preconceptions in ten thousand particulars.

To begin with, all the smaller denizens of the desert--whether
butterflies, beetles, birds, or lizards--must be quite uniformly
isabelline or sand-coloured. This universal determination of the
desert-haunting creatures to fall in with the fashion and to harmonise
with their surroundings adds considerably to the painfully monotonous
effect of desert scenery. A green plant, a blue butterfly, a red and
yellow bird, a black or bronze-coloured beetle or lizard would improve
the artistic aspect of the desert not a little. But no; the animals will
hear nothing of such gaudy hues; with Quaker uniformity they will clothe
themselves in dove-colour; they will all wear a sandy pepper-and-salt
with as great unanimity as the ladies of the Court (on receipt of
orders) wear Court mourning for the late lamented King of the Tongataboo
Islands.

In reality, this universal sombre tint of desert animals is a beautiful
example of the imperious working of our modern _Deus ex machinâ_,
natural selection. The more uniform in hue is the environment of any
particular region, the more uniform in hue must be all its inhabitants.
In the arctic snows, for example, we find this principle pushed to its
furthest logical conclusion. There, everything is and must be
white--hares, foxes, and ptarmigans alike; and the reason is
obvious--there can be no exception. Any brown or black or reddish animal
who ventured north would at once render himself unpleasantly conspicuous
in the midst of the uniform arctic whiteness. If he were a brown hare,
for example, the foxes and bears and birds of prey of the district would
spot him at once on the white fields, and pounce down upon him forthwith
on his first appearance. That hare would leave no similar descendants to
continue the race of brown hares in arctic regions after him. Or,
suppose, on the other hand, it were a brown fox who invaded the domain
of eternal snow. All the hares and ptarmigans of his new district would
behold him coming from afar and keep well out of his way, while he, poor
creature, would never be able to spot them at all among the white
snow-fields. He would starve for want of prey, at the very time when the
white fox, his neighbour, was stealing unperceived with stealthy tread
upon the hares and ptarmigans. In this way, from generation to