A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
If the scale of precedence in the mental development of our fellow-creatures can be determined by any single test, that test is the instinctive love of Independence. Many of the lower animals may surprise us by constructive achievements that rival the products of human science, but their instinct of freedom is quite imperfectly developed. The caterpillar [[96]]of the silk-moth will spin its satin winter-gown in a box full of mulberry leaves as skilfully as in the freedom of the tropical forests. In the hive of their captor a swarm of wild bees will continue to build hexagons and store up honey as diligently as in the rocks or hollow trees of the wilderness. Captive river-fish will eat and pair a day after their transfer to a fishpond. Birds, on the other hand, mourn their lost liberty for weeks. During the first half-month of its captivity, a caged hawk rarely accepts any food; sea-birds and eagles starve with a persistence as if they were thus trying to end an affliction from which they see no other way of escape. Wild cows can be domesticated in a month; wild elephants hardly in a year. Several species of the larger carnivora can be trained only if caught in their cub-hood, as in after years they become almost wholly untamable. The lower varieties of quadrumana, the Brazilian capuchin monkeys and East Indian macaques, seem almost to invite capture by the frequency of their visits to the neighborhood of human dwellings, while the apes proper are, without any exception, the shyest creatures of the virgin woods. The gorilla is so rarely seen in the vicinity of human settlements that its very existence was long considered doubtful. Sir Stamford Raffles asserts that at the distant sound of an ax the orang of Sumatra at once abandons its favorite haunts in the coast jungles. On the west coast of Borneo a large orang was once surprised by the crew of an English trading-vessel, but fought with a desperation that obliged its would-be captors to riddle it with rifle-balls, though they knew that a [[97]]living specimen of that size would be worth its weight in silver.
That same resolution in defense of their liberties has always distinguished the nobler from the baser tribes of the human race. The natives of the Gambia Valley have no hesitation in selling their relatives to the Portuguese slave-traders, while the liberation of a single countryman (whom the enemy had determined to hold as a hostage) impelled the Circassian highlanders to risk their lives in a series of desperate assaults upon the ramparts of a Russian frontier post. The hope of covering the retreat of their fleeing wives and children inspired the heroes of Thermopylæ to make a stand against six-thousandfold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-despots found no difficulty in foisting their yoke upon the former vassals of the Roman empire, but when they attempted to cross the border of the Saxon Landmark, the kidnappers were slain like rabid wolves; and when the neighboring ruffian-counts, and at last Charlemagne in person, marched to the support of the clerical slave-hunters, they met with a resistance the record of which will forever remain the proudest page in the chronicle of the Germanic races. Cornfields were burnt, villages were leveled with the ground; for hundreds of miles the means of human subsistence were utterly destroyed; but the council of the Saxon chieftains refused to submit, and when the homes of their forefathers were devastated, they carried their children to the inaccessible wilds of the Harz highlands, where they grimly welcomed the aid of the winter snows, and defied frost [[98]]and starvation, rather than crawl to cross (zu Kreuze kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the cowardice of their crucifix-kissing neighbors. And when the Frankish autocrat had shackled their land with a chain of forts, they thrice rebelled with persistent disregard of consequences; nay, after the loss of the last murderous battle, the prisoners of war refused to accept the ultimatum of the conqueror, and rather than crawl to cross four thousand of their captive noblemen mounted the scaffold of the executioner on the market-square of Quedlinburg. The bodies of the heroes were thrown to the birds of the wilderness; but their deathless spirits revived in the philippics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Lützen and Oudenaarde, and will yet ride the storm destined to hurl the last cross from the temples of the Germanic nations.