From North Pole to Equator: Studies of Wild Life and Scenes in Many Lands

by Alfred Edmund Brehm

Specialism in travelling has, of course, gone much further. Thus to cite only three examples, we have Semper’s zoological work on the Philippines, the researches of the Sarasins in Ceylon, and the first results of Semon’s recent visit to Australasia, all of them passing far beyond records of zoological exploration into monographs on the structure and development of characteristic members of the fauna of these countries. And it is no exaggeration to say that private enterprise, Royal Society subsidies, British Association grants, and the like have sent scores of naturalists from Britain half round the world in order to solve special problems, as to the larva of a worm, for instance, or as to the bird-fauna of some little island.

V. The Biological Type. In some ways the most important scientific journey ever made was Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle. It was the Columbus-voyage of zoology. There is a great deal to be said for the Wanderjahre of the old students, for to have time to think is one of the conditions of intellectual progress. Not that the Beagle voyage was one of idleness, but it gave Darwin, at the age of twenty-two, a wealth of impressions and some measure of enforced leisure wherein to gloat intellectually over what he saw. He has said, indeed, that various sets of facts observed on his voyage, such as the aspect of the Galapagos Islands, started him on paths of pondering which eventually led to his theory of the origin of species.

We take Darwin as the type of the biological, or, we may almost say, evolutionist travellers; but he must share this position with his magnanimous colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose journeyings were more prolonged and not less fruitful. Before Darwin the naturalist-travellers had been, for the most part, describers, systematists, and analysts, and it goes without saying that such work is indispensable, and must continue; but in the light of the conception of evolution all things had become new; the present world of life was henceforth seen as a stage in a process, as a passing act in a drama, not merely as a phantasmagoria to be admired and pictured, but as a growth to be understood.

It is within this group of biological travellers, which includes such men as Bates and Belt, that we must also place Brehm. For although he perhaps had not the firmness of grasp or the fineness of touch necessary for the successful handling of the more intricate biological problems, especially those which centre around the factors of evolution, he had unusual power as an observer of the habits of animals. His contributions, which must be judged, of course, from his great Tierleben,[A] as well as from his popular lectures, were rather to the old natural history than to biology in the stricter sense. His works show that he was as much interested in men as in beasts, that he was specially an ornithologist, that he was beneath the naturalist a sportsman; but so scores of other travellers have been. His particular excellence is his power of observing and picturing animal life as it is lived in nature, without taking account of which biology is a mockery and any theory of evolution a one-sided dogma.

[A] This well-known treasure-house of Natural History appeared originally in 1863-69 in six big volumes, which have since increased to ten. Even the first edition took a foremost place among similar works on the Natural History of Animals. With a wealth of personal observation on the habits of animals in their native haunts, it combined the further charm of very beautiful pictorial illustration.

Let us now bring together briefly the outstanding facts of this historical outline.

In early days men followed their wandering herds or pursued their prey from region to region, or were driven by force of competition or of hunger to new lands. Many of the most eventful journeys have been among those which had to be taken.

I. Gradually, intellectual curiosity rather than practical need became the prompter, and men travelled with all manner of mixed aims seeking what was new. When they returned they told travellers’ tales, mostly in as good faith as their hunting ancestors had done in the caves of a winter night, or as the modern traveller does after dinner still. We pass insensibly from Herodotus to Marco Polo, from “Sir John Maundeville” to Mr. X. Y. Z., whose book was published last spring. This is the type romantic.

II. But when science shared in the renaissance there ensued the extraordinary industry of the encyclopædist school, with which many naturalist-travellers were associated. Some of these were great men—perhaps Gesner was greatest of all—but all had the defects of their qualities. They gathered into stackyards both wheat and tares, and seldom found time to thrash. The type survives afield in the mere collector, and its degenerate sedentary representatives are called compilers.

III. Just as Buffon represents the climax of the encyclopædists, and is yet something more, for he thrashed his wheat, so Humboldt, while as ambitious as any encyclopædist traveller, transcended them all by vitalizing the wealth of impressions which he gathered. He was the general naturalist-traveller, who took all nature for his province, and does not seem to have been embarrassed. Of successful representatives of this type there are few, since Darwin perhaps none.