FROG AND TOAD CONCERTS.
It would be hard to believe the stories of the vocal powers of Frogs and Toads were they not related by trustworthy travellers, who tell of animal concerts,
"Wild as the marsh, and tuneful as the harp."
Mr. Priest, the traveller in America, who was himself a musician, records:—"Prepared as I was to hear something extraordinary from these animals, I confess the first Frog Concert I heard in America was so much beyond anything I could conceive of the power of these musicians, that I was truly astonished. This performance was al fresco, and took place on the eighteenth of April, in a large swamp, where there were at least 10,000 performers; and I really believe not two exactly in the same pitch, if the octave can possibly admit of so many divisions, or shades of semitones."
Professor and Mrs. Louis Agassiz, in their recent "Journey in Brazil," record:—"We must not leave Parà without alluding to our evening concerts from the adjoining woods and swamps. When I first heard this strange confusion of sounds, I thought it came from a crowd of men shouting loudly, though at a little distance. To my surprise. I found that the rioters were the frogs and toads in the neighbourhood. I hardly know how to describe this Babel of woodland noises; and, if I could do it justice, I am afraid my account would hardly be believed. At moments it seems like the barking of dogs, then like the calling of many voices on different keys; but all loud, rapid, excited, full of emphasis and variety. I think these frogs, like ours, must be silent at certain seasons of the year, for on our first visit to Parà we were not struck by this singular music, with which the woods now resound at nightfall."
SONG OF THE CICADA.
THE Greeks have been scoffed at for rendering in deathless verse the song of so insignificant an insect as the Cicada; and hence it has been asserted that their love for such slender music must have been either exaggerated or simulated. It is pleasant, however, to hear an independent observer in the other hemisphere confirm their testimony. Mr. Lord tells us that in British Colombia there is one sound or song which is clearer, shriller, and more singularly tuneful than any other. It never appears to cease, and it comes from everywhere—from the tops of the trees, from the trembling leaves of the cotton-wood, from the stunted under-brush, from the flowers, the grass, the rocks and boulders—nay, the very stream itself seems vocal with hidden minstrels, all chanting the same refrain.
An especial feature of the Cicada's song is, that it increases in intensity when the sun is hottest; and one of the later Latin poets mentions the time when its music is at its highest, as an alternative expression for noon. Mr. Tennyson, inadvertently, speaks in "Ænone" of the Grasshopper being silent in the grass, and of the Cicada sleeping when the noonday quiet holds the hill. Keats sings more truly:—
"When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead:
That is the Grasshopper's."
Then the Greek poets show us how intimately the song of the Cicada is associated with the hottest hours of the day. Aristophanes describes it as mad for the love of the sun; and Theocritus, as scorched by the sun. When all things are parched with the heat (says Alcæus), then from among the leaves issues the song of the sweet Cicada. His shrill melody is heard in the full glow of noontide, and the vertical rays of a torrid sun fire him to sing. Over and over again Mr. Lord met with allusions to the same peculiarity.
Cicadæ are regularly sold for food in the markets of South America. They are not eaten now, like they were at Athens, as a whet to the appetite; but they are dried in the sun, powdered, and made into a cake.
STORIES ABOUT THE BARNACLE GOOSE.
"As barnacles turn Poland geese
In th' islands of the Orcades."
—Hudibras.
ONE of the earliest references to this popular error is in the "Natural Magic" of Baptista Porta, who says:—"Late writers report that not only in Scotland, but also in the river of Thames by London, there is a kind of shell-fish in a two-leaved shell, that hath a foot full of plaits and wrinkles.... They commonly stick to the keel of some old ship. Some say they come of worms, some of the boughs of trees which fall into the sea; if any of them be cast upon shore, they die; but they which are swallowed still into the sea, live and get out of their shells, and grow to be ducks, or such-like birds."
Professor Max Müller, in a learned lecture, enters fully into the origin of the different stories about the Barnacle Goose. He quotes from the "Philosophical Transactions" of 1678 a full account by Sir Robert Moray, who declared that he had seen within the barnacle shell, as through a concave or diminishing glass, the bill, eyes, head, neck, breast, wings, tail, feet, and feathers of the Barnacle Goose. The next witness was John Gerarde, Master in Chirurgerie, who, in 1597, declared that he had seen the actual metamorphosis of the muscle into the bird, describing how—
"The shell gapeth open, and the first thing that appeareth is the fore said lace or string; next come the leg of the birde hanging out, and as it groweth greater, it openeth the shell by degrees, till at length it is all come forth, and hangeth only by the bill, and falleth into the sea, when it gathereth feathers and groweth to a foule, bigger than a mallart; for the truth hereof, if any doubt, may it please them to repair unto me, and I shall satisfie them by the testimonies of good witnesses."
As far back as the thirteenth century, the same story is traced in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis. This great divine does not deny the truth of the miraculous origin of the Barnacle Geese, but he warns the Irish priests against dining off them during Lent on the plea that they were not flesh, but fish. For, he writes, "If a man during Lent were to dine off a leg of Adam, who was not born of flesh either, we should not consider him innocent of having eaten what is flesh." This modern myth, which, in spite of the protests of such men as Albertus Magnus, Æneas Sylvius, and others, maintained its ground for many centuries, and was defended, as late as 1629, in a book by Count Maier, "De volucri arborea," with arguments, physical, metaphysical, and theological, owed its origin to a play of words. The muscle shells are called Bernaculæ from the Latin perna, the mediæval Latin berna; the birds are called Hibernicæ or Hiberniculæ, abbreviated to Berniculæ. As their names seem one, the creatures are supposed to be one, and everything conspires to confirm the first mistake, and to invest what was originally a good Irish story—a mere canard—with all the dignity of scientific, and all the solemnity of theological truth. The myth continued to live until the age of Newton. Specimens of Lepadidæ, prepared by Professor Rolleston of Oxford, show how the outward appearance of the Anatifera could have supported the popular superstition which derived the Bernicla, the goose, from the Bernicula, the shell.
Drayton (1613), in his "Poly-olbion," iii., in connexion with the river Lee, speaks of
"Th' anatomised fish and fowls from planchers sprung;"
to which a note is appended in Southey's edition, p. 609, that such fowls were "Barnacles, a bird breeding upon old ships." A bunch of the shells attached to the ship, or to a piece of floating timber, at a distance appears like flowers in bloom; the foot of the animal has a similitude to the stalk of a plant growing from the ship's sides, the shell resembles a calyx, and the flower consists of the tentacula, or fingers, of the shell-fish. The ancient error was to mistake the foot for the neck of a goose, the shell for its head, and the tentacula for feathers. As to the body, non est inventus.
Sir Kenelm Digby was soundly laughed at for relating to a party at the castle of the Governor of Calais, that "the Barnacle, a bird in Jersey, was first a shell-fish to appearance, and, from that striking upon old wood, became in time a bird." In 1807, there was exhibited in Spring-gardens, London, a "Wonderful natural curiosity, called the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or Tree bearing Geese," taken up at sea on January 12th, and more than twenty men could raise out of the water. [26]
Sir J. Emerson Tennent asks whether the ready acceptance and general credence given to so obvious a fable may not have been derived from giving too literal a construction to the text of the passage in the first chapter of Genesis:—
"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and the fowl that may fly in the open firmament of heaven."
The Barnacle Goose is a well-known bird, and is eaten on fast-days in France, by virtue of this old belief in its marine origin. The belief in the barnacle origin of the bird still prevails on the west coast of Ireland, and in the Western Highlands of Scotland.
The finding of the Barnacle is thus described by Mr. Sidebotham, to the Microscopical and Natural History Section of the Literary and Philosophical Society:—"In September, I was at Lytham with my family. The day was very stormy, and the previous night there had been a strong south-west wind, and evidences of a very stormy sea outside the banks. Two of my children came running to tell me of a very strange creature that had been washed up on the shore. They had seen it from the pier, and pointed it out to a sailor, thinking it was a large dog with long hair. On reaching the shore I found a fine mass of Barnacles, Pentalasinus anatifera, attached to some staves of a cask, the whole being between four and five feet long. Several sailors had secured the prize, and were getting it on a truck to carry it away. The appearance was most remarkable, the hundreds of long tubes with their curious shells looking like what one would fancy the fabled Gorgon's head with its snaky locks. The curiosity was carried to a yard where it was to be exhibited, and the bellman went round to announce it under the name of the sea-lioness, or the great sea-serpent. Another mass of Barnacles was washed up at Lytham, and also one at Blackpool, the same day or the day following. This mass of Barnacles was evidently just such a one as that seen by Gerard at the Pile of Foulders. It is rare to have such a specimen on our coasts. The sailors at Lytham had never seen anything like it, although some of them were old men who had spent all their lives on the coast."