The winners in life's race

by Arabella B. Buckley

None of these forms were of the same species as those now living, and many of them, as we see, had characters which we now find in two or three different animals; showing that they had not yet specialised the various weapons of attack and defence, and the difference of limbs and teeth which now distinguish their descendants. So that, for example, though there were fierce animals of prey, none had yet the formidable teeth of the tiger nor the muscular strength of the lion, neither had the vegetarians the fleetness of the horse, the horns of the deer, nor the large brain of the elephant.

This had all to come with time, and from that day to this their descendants have been spreading over the earth. Some, large and powerful, have conquered by strength; some, by superior intelligence, have learned to herd together and protect each other in the battle of life; some have gone back to the water and imitated the fish in their ocean home; and others, smaller and feebler, have lived on by means of their insignificance, their rapid multiplication, and their power of hiding, and feeding on prey too minute to attract their more powerful neighbours.

Among all these there are hundreds of different forms, branching out here and there, crossing each other’s path and often jostling on the way; while during the long period between our first knowledge of them and now, they have been driven or have travelled from one country to another, from the northern to the southern hemisphere, or from the Old to the New World, till in many cases it is impossible to say what routes they have taken.

How, then, shall we get a glimpse of the nature of these large groups? Shall we take the moles and hedgehogs as the lowest, and the monkeys as the highest, and then travel in a straight line through the forms between? Scarcely, I think, for it is very doubtful whether the lemur and the dormouse may not be able to boast of ancestors as ancient as the moles, while the elephant and the dog are surely as intelligent and far nobler animals than the monkey. No! we must make up our minds at once that the different branches have grown side by side to much the same height, so that our genealogical tree, if it were possible to make one, would, like a real tree, be a mass of entangled twigs, some of which would, indeed, be less aspiring than others, yet on the whole we could scarcely say that one reached nearer to the sky than another. What perfection they have each obtained in their own line is quite another question, and one which we are able to trace out.

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Thus, for example, the gnawing animals or Rodents, and the insect-eaters or Insectivores, are undoubtedly the lowest types next to the sloths and armadilloes, the insect-eaters especially having very primitive skeletons and small brains. Yet we shall find that we pass very naturally from them to the intelligent monkeys, while, on the other hand, the vegetable-feeders and flesh-eaters go off upon quite a different line of their own.

Let us, then, begin with these two lowly groups, the Rodents and Insectivores, and see how they have conquered their humble place in the world. One thing is clear, that they do not hold it by strength or audacity, for taken as a whole they are small and weak animals; the giants among rodents, the Capybaras of South America, where all lower kinds of animals thrive, are only as large as good-sized pigs, and the smallest, the “Pocket-mice” of North America, are not bigger than large locusts; while the insect-eaters have nothing larger than the “Tenrecs” or soft-bristled hedgehogs of Madagascar, about the size of a tailless cat; and the rest of the group vary from two to eight inches all over the world. Moreover, they are as a rule timid, and though some of them fight fiercely among themselves, yet they scamper away and hide at the least alarm, and generally choose the twilight or the dark night for their feeding time.

Stroll out some fine summer’s evening, when the sun has set and the moon has not yet risen, and as you wander in the fields and woods with eye and ear open, you will scarcely have gone far before you will be aware that there is plenty of stir going on. Some active little field-mouse will cross your path in her eager search for grain and seeds to lay up for her winter store, or you may startle a hare in the long grass and watch her run across the field, or see her sit upright on her haunches surveying the quiet night-world. Or, if you pass over a common, the number of little white tips glancing in the twilight from under the furze bushes will tell you that the rabbits have not yet disappeared into their burrows; while as you enter the wood the sharp little eyes of the squirrel will peep down upon you from the beech trees, as she watches over her little ones in their comfortable nest in the branches.

All these are Rodents, and you may know them by their four long chisel-like front teeth (see B, [Fig. 55]), which have a large gap on each side, between them and the grinding teeth behind. These chisel teeth have not bony roots like the teeth of most animals, but rest in a deep socket, and continue growing during the whole of the animal’s life; and they have a hard coat of enamel in front, so that as the tooth wears away behind, this enamel stands out and forms a sharp cutting edge, and there is perhaps no tool more efficient for gnawing a root, a nutshell, or the solid wood of a tree, than the tooth of a beaver or rat.

Fig. 55.