LIZARDS AND CROCODILES AT THE ZOO.
It is hardly matter for surprise that the colubrine snakes, with their gorgeous colouring and wonderful form, or the poisonous cobras, rattlesnakes, and puff-adders which inhabit the closed cases in the Reptile House at the Zoo, excite more interest and comment among visitors than the four-footed reptiles, ranging from the alligators of South America to the tiny “gecko” lizards of Southern Europe, which have their abode under the same roof. Yet there is something peculiarly interesting in these modern survivors of the ancient saurians which swarmed in the hot and steaming waters of a prehistoric world, and seem, like the elephants and rhinoceroses, to carry the imagination back to the circumstances and surroundings of a previous though still more ancient era. It may, perhaps, be taken as evidence of the unfitness of such survivals for modern times, that the only inhabitants of the Reptile House which seem to invite unqualified dislike and disgust are the crocodiles and alligators which swarm in the large oval tank in the centre. It seems at first somewhat strange that creatures, many of which are of a strength and ferocity almost equal to that of the largest carnivora, can be kept in safety within the slight barrier formed by the incurved railing which surrounds the pool; but the natural strength of the alligator is only equalled by its sluggishness, and the hideous beasts are content to doze and feed all day in the warm and steaming water. The art of crocodile culture is now fairly understood, and when the baby “basilisk” is transferred from the cool depths of the watering-pot in which he spends his infancy, in the nurseries behind the snakes’ quarters, to the tropical temperature of the tank, it thrives apace. The monster alligator, which now measures some ten feet in length, came from the Mississippi when about twelve months old, nine years ago. Hideous, huge, and hide-bound in armour of horn, it swings round like an enormous eft, and as it lies just beneath the surface of the water, shows, more clearly than any book can picture, the curious adaptation to surroundings of the carnivorous water-lizard. The eyes on their raised orbits are set like dormer-windows in the head. The nostrils are two tiny slits in a raised boss at the end of the nose; apparently the sluggish beast is a quick breather, for the respirations are at the rate of twenty-eight per minute, or nearly double those of a man at rest. Another alligator has been in the collection for twenty-two years, but does not yet equal the size of the later comer, owing, it is said, to the early days spent in the cold and cramped quarters provided before the building of the new house. It is, however, a formidable creature; and as it sprawls on its stomach across the big tree-stump in the centre, with its ugly webbed claws dangling on either side, its mouth partly open, and its tail drooping in the water, its appearance is sufficiently repulsive to deter the most well-meaning visitor from offering the charitable bun. Crocodiles from the Nile, India, and Ceylon share the waters with the alligators. The crocodile evidently bears the same analogy to the alligator as the frog to the toad. It is lighter in colour and in build, and a more active, as well as a more malicious creature. Neither is it so entirely hideous, though the lower jaw shows projecting tusks like those of a wild boar. The creature’s eyes, celebrated in connection with the “crocodile tears,” with which legend declared that it attracted its sympathizing victims to the bank of the stream, are highly “decorative,” if not beautiful. The head, narrow and flat, resembles the head of a snake; the nose is sharp, and the fixed and motionless eyes are of the palest dusty gold, set in a short horny pillar of a deeper golden brown. The crocodile’s coat of armour is less complete than that of the alligator; and its quick, vivacious movements make it far more troublesome to the keepers when the tank has to be refilled and cleansed, than the big alligators, which will allow themselves to be used as stepping-stones as the water ebbs away. The crocodiles and their kin exhaust the list of noxious lizards at the Zoo, with one curious exception. The heloderin, a fat and torpid lizard from Arizona, is supposed to be the sole existing member of its tribe which possesses not only the poison-glands which exist in most of the toads, but also the true poison-teeth, with a channel for the emission of the venom. The lizard is about 1½ ft. long, with a fat, fleshy body, a round tail ending in a blunt point, and a flat head with squared sides, resembling a small padlock. The whole body is covered with a curious coat of scales, like black and pink beads, arranged in an arabesque pattern. In its daily life it is a dull and stupid creature, feeding mainly on eggs, which it breaks and laps with its tongue. Its first and only victim was a guinea-pig, which was put into its cage with a view to testing the reports as to its poisonous nature, which were by no means universally credited. The lizard bit the guinea-pig in the leg, and the animal died in a minute and a half—almost as soon as after the bite of a cobra.
Alligator. From a photograph by Gambier Bolton.
Eggs are favourite food with many lizards and snakes; but the “monitor,” a very large and handsome lizard approaching the size of the half-grown crocodile, is perhaps the most remarkable egg-swallower of the tribe. It bolts the eggs unbroken, and the oval morsel may be watched in its slow descent down the long neck until it disappears in the lower regions. Many of the smaller lizards in the house are almost unmatched for quaintness of form and beauty of colouring, among the inhabitants of the Zoo. It sometimes happens that the chameleons die in winter before the summer stock has arrived to take their place, as most of those brought from the Cape die when the vessels enter the cold atmosphere of the English Channel. But the “horned lizards” of California are hardly less amusing in form and habits than the true chameleons. Shaped like a miniature sole, their backs bristling with pinkish spikes like the thorns of a briar-rose, they bury themselves in the sand at the bottom of their cage until the head only projects, presenting an exact resemblance to one of the thorny “burrs” which lie scattered on the Californian desert. If possible, the lizard remains still until the spiders and other insects walk unsuspecting into its mouth; but at the Zoo, where insects are scarce, the horned lizards have to some extent abandoned concealment, and rush upon their prey with a suddenness and ferocity most amusing in such tiny creatures. The writer watched a violent contest between a horned lizard and a “gecko” for the possession of a mealworm, which was wriggling on the sand. The “gecko,” one of the swift and agile little lizards which are so common in Southern Europe, was darting down from a branch above just as the horned lizard made its spring, and each seized the mealworm at opposite ends. In the tug-of-war which followed, the ground-lizard proved an easy winner; and the “gecko” retired defeated, to finish pulling off its old skin, which hung loosely round its shoulders like a jacket. The cast skin, which was of an exquisite, semi-transparent grey colour, like that of a moonstone, was pulled off by the lizard in long strips, by the aid of its teeth and feet. The toads perform this operation in a far neater manner, pulling their cast skins over their heads with their hands, as a football-player strips off his jersey.
Perhaps the tamest, if not the most beautiful among the smaller reptiles, are the odd little palm-lizards which have recently arrived at the Zoo. They are vegetable feeders, and their appetite for cabbage-leaves is so keen, and the diet supplied so liberal, that after a hearty meal they resemble a well-stuffed oval pincushion with a small lizard’s head, feet, and tail attached to the padding. Yet, even in this condition, they are ready to eat if fresh food be offered to them, sitting contentedly in the visitor’s hand, and “swelling visibly” as they munch their cabbage, like the lady who excited the alarm of Mr. Weller, senior, at the Temperance tea. A near neighbour of the palm-lizards is the existing type of the impostor frog, who tried to inflate himself to the size of the bullock, according to the fable. Æsop’s frog, no doubt, lived in the swamps of Lake Copais; but the strange creature, which naturalists have named the “adorned ceratophorus,” but which is nothing but an enormous fat round caricature of a frog, with a mouth wide enough to swallow a young chicken, lives in South America. His daily habit is to bury himself in the loose earth where small animals, such as rats, mice, other frogs, and the young of ground-birds, ducks or chickens are likely to wander. Half covered with dry earth, the frog resembles a patch of greenish wet moss on wet mud. The chicken or rat which approaches this is immediately seized by an enormous mouth, which opens and shuts with a snap like the back of a watch. Like other selfish and greedy people, this frog is extremely short-tempered and resentful when its own comfort is interfered with: and when poked, and otherwise teased, swells its body out to nearly double its original size, and slowly hops with gasps and growls after its tormentor in a paroxysm of rage and excitement.
FROM THE ANIMALS’ POINT OF VIEW.[[13]]
[13]. The immunity of the keepers at the Zoo from serious injury or attack by the animals in their charge is à priori evidence that the animals’ point of view is not necessarily hostile.
One of the most curious and unconsciously paradoxical claims ever advanced for man in his relation to animals is that by which M. Georges Leroy, philosopher, encyclopædist, and lieutenant des chasses of the Park of Versailles, the vindicator of Buffon and Montesquieu against the criticisms of Voltaire, explains in his Lettres sur les Animaux the intellectual debt which the carnivorous animals owe to human persecution. He pictures with wonderful cleverness the development of their powers of forethought, memory, and reasoning which the interference of man, the enemy and “rival,” forces upon them, and the consequent intellectual advance which distinguishes the loup jeune et ignorant from the loup adulte et instruit. The philosophic lieutenant des chasses had before long ample opportunities for comparing the “affinities” which he had discovered between civilized man and “instructed” wolves, in the experiences of the French Revolution; but without following his fortunes in those troublous times for game-preservers, we may perhaps return to the question of the natural relation of animals to man, which, as pictured by Rousseau to prove his à priori notions of a state of nature, so justly incurred the criticism of the practical observer and practised writer, M. Georges Leroy.
That man is, generally speaking, from the animals’ point of view, an object of fear, hostility, or rapine, is to-day most unfortunately true. But whether this is their natural relation, and not one induced, and capable perhaps of change, is by no means certain. Savage man, who has generally been first in contact with animals, is usually a hunter, and therefore an object of dislike to the other hunting animals, and of dread to the hunted. But civilized man, with his supply of bread and beef, is not necessarily a hunter; and it is just conceivable that he might be content to leave the animals in a newly-discovered country unmolested, and condescend, when not better employed, to watch their attitude towards himself. The impossible island in The Swiss Family Robinson, in which half the animals of two hemispheres were collected, would be an ideal place for such an experiment. But, unfortunately, uninhabited islands seldom contain more than a few species, and those generally birds, or sea-beasts; and in newly-discovered game regions, savage man has generally been before us with his arrows, spears, and pitfalls. Some instances of the first contact of animals with man have, however, been preserved in the accounts of the early voyages collected by Hakluyt and others, though the hungry navigators were generally more intent on victualling their ships with the unsuspecting beasts and birds, or on noting those which would be useful commodities for “trafficke,” than in cultivating friendly relations with the animal inhabitants of the newly-discovered islands. Thus, we read that near Newfoundland there were “islands of birds, of a sandy-red, but with the multitudes of birds upon them they look white. The birds sit there as thick as stones lie in a paved street. The greatest of the islands is about a mile in compass. The second is a little less. The third is a very little one, like a small rock. At the second of these islands there lay on the shore in the sunshine about thirty or forty sea-oxen or morses, which, when our boat came near them, presently made into the sea, and swam after the boat.” Curiosity, not fear or hostility, was, then, the emotion roused in the sea-oxen by the first sight of man. The birds, whales, and walruses in the Wargate Sea and near Jan Mayen’s Land, were no less tame, and the sea-lions in the Southern Pacific, the birds that Barents first discovered in Novaya Zembla, and even the antelopes which the early explorers encountered in the least-inhabited parts of Central South Africa, seem all to have regarded the newly-discovered creature, man, with interest and without fear. Sir Samuel Baker, in his Wild Beasts and their Ways, remarks on the “curious and inexplicable fact that certain animals and birds exhibit a peculiar shyness of human beings, although they are only exposed to the same conditions as others which are more bold.” He instances the wildness of the curlew and the golden plover, and contrasts it with the tameness of swallows and wagtails. The reason does not seem far to seek. The first are constantly sought for food, the latter are left undisturbed. Perhaps the best instance of such a contrast is that of the hawfinch and the crossbill, birds of closely allied form and appearance. The hawfinch, which is probably the shyest of English small birds, seems to have acquired a deep mistrust of man. But the crossbills, on the rare occasions when they descend from the uninhabited forests of the North into our Scotch or English woods, are absolutely without fear or mistrust of human beings, whom they see very probably for the first time. When animals do show fear on first acquaintance, it is probably due, not to any spontaneous dread of man as man, but because they mistake him for something else. “Nearly all animals,” says Sir Samuel Baker, “have some natural enemy which keeps them on the alert, and makes them suspicious of all strange objects and sounds that might denote the approach of danger:” and it is to this that he attributes the timidity of many kinds of game in districts where they “have never been attacked by firearms.” A most curious instance of this mistaken identity occurred lately when Kerguelen Island was visited by H.M.S. Volage and a party of naturalists and astronomers, to observe the transit of Venus. There were large colonies of penguins nesting on the island, which, though the place is so little frequented by man, used at first to run away up the slopes inland when the sailors appeared. They apparently took the men for seals, and thus took what appeared the natural way of escaping from their marine enemies. They soon found out their mistake, for it is said that “when they became accustomed to being chased by men”—an experience for which the sailors seem to have given them every opportunity—“the penguins acquired the habit of taking to the water at the first alarm.” In another colony, the nesting females would settle down peacefully on their eggs if the visitors stood still. “The whole of this community of penguins (they numbered about two thousand) were subsequently boiled down into ‘hare-soup’ for the officers and men of H.M.S. Volage,” writes the Rev. A. E. Eaton, “and very nice they found it.” We may compare with this destruction of the penguins, the letter of Hakluyt on the voyage to Newfoundland by Antony Parkhurst, describing with high approval the business facilities for the fishing trade offered by the tameness of the great auks,—called “penguins” in the passage:—“There are seagulls, musses, ducks, and many other kind of birdes store too long to write about, especially at one island named ‘Penguin,’ where we may drive them on a planke into our ship as many as shall lade her. These birds are also called penguins, and cannot flie; there is more meat in one of them than in a goose. The Frenchmen that fish neere the Grand Bank doe bring small store of flesh with them, but do victuall themselves alwayes with these birdes.”
The point of view from which the lion or tiger looks on man, is perhaps not so far removed from that of the non-carnivorous creatures as might be supposed. Man is certainly not the natural food of any animal—except of sharks and alligators, if he is so rash as to go out of his native element into theirs—and if the item “man” were subtracted from the bill-of-fare of all the carnivora, they would never want a meal. The notion of the natural attitude of a lion to a young lady,—
“When as that tender virgin he did spye,
Upon her he did run full greedily,
To have at once devoured her tender corse,”
is still popular, but hardly correct. More probably the lion would get out of the way politely,—if we may judge by the pacific behaviour of those in our last-explored lion-haunt, Mashonaland. M. Georges Leroy’s contention for the natural affinity, or semi-sympathy, which should exist between man and the intelligent hunting animals, is no doubt partly reasonable. Leigh Hunt, when recording his impressions of a visit to the Zoological Gardens, was unpleasantly struck by the incongruity of the notion of being eaten by a wild beast,—“the hideous, impracticable fellow-creature, looking one in the face, struggling with us, mingling his breath with ours, tearing away scalp or shoulder-blade.” But the “fellow-creature” is not nearly so impracticable as he is supposed to be. More human beings are probably killed by tigers than by any other wild beast, except by starving wolves. Yet this is what Sir Samuel Baker has to say on the subject—“There is a great difference in the habits of tigers. Some exist upon the game in the jungles; others prey especially upon the flocks belonging to the villagers. A few are designated ‘man-eaters.’ These are sometimes naturally ferocious, and having attacked a human being, may have devoured the body, and thus acquired a taste for human flesh; or they may have been wounded on more than one occasion, and have learnt to regard man as a natural enemy. But more frequently the ‘man-eater’ is a very old tiger, or more probably tigress, that, having hunted in the neighbourhood of villages and carried off some unfortunate woman, has discovered that it is far easier to kill a native than to hunt jungle game.” As a rule, the tiger is only anxious to avoid men; and it is noticed that in high grass tigers are more dangerous than in forests, because in the former they cannot be seen, neither can they see, until the stranger is close upon them. An ancient instance of the opposite behaviour is that recorded of the new colonists of Samaria, whom the lions attacked, “and slew some of them.” A curious inversion of this experience occurred when the islands in the Brahmaputra, which were swarming with tigers, were first cultivated. The natives, mainly by the aid of traps set with a bow and arrow, killed off the tigers so fast that the skins were sold by auction at from eight annas to one rupee apiece. In this case, the tigers were the first aggressors by carrying off cattle. But it seems evident that there exists no à priori reason, founded in natural antipathy, why man and animals, if we could reconstruct a “state of nature” in which we could put civilized, not savage man, should not dwell together in profound peace, or at least in such peace as obtains between accidental neighbours. The only ground for quarrel that seems inevitable is the everlasting one between the shepherd and the wolf; and that, after all, is a question, not of prejudice, but of property.