Parents and their Young.—Milk, and the various Ways of obtaining and using it.—The Kafir Tribes and Clotted Milk.—The Tonga Islanders.—The Tartars.—Ants and Aphides.—Honey-dew.—Milch Cows in Insect-land.—Fish-tanks and Aquaria.—Bill of the Pelican.—Eggs and Chickens.—The Hen-coop.—Nest of Termite.—Workers and Queen.—Egg-hatching.—The Hen and her Young.—Artificial Egg-hatching Machine.—The Snake and her Eggs.—The Gad-fly and Bot-fly.—Preservation of Provisions.—Hanging Meat.—Eggs of the Lace-wing Fly.—Spider-eggs.—The Butcher’s Hook and the Claws of the Sloth.—Bats and Insects.
THIS subject is necessarily a very large one, and I shall, in consequence, be obliged to compress it, though it might well make a separate work by itself. For Food represents the very existence of Man, considered as one of the animal world; and Comfort represents the progress of civilisation, by which man leaves day by day his savage and solitary nature behind him, and becomes social, moral, and elevated.
Putting aside the instinct which forces the parent to feed the young without external assistance, we come to those cases where the parent has to seek food which the offspring could not have found for itself, and often to prepare it for the use of the offspring.
In the greater part of the world, the milk of various animals is the staple of food, not only for children, but adults; and the “milk diet,” as it is called, is strongly urged by many physicians of the present day.
The Kafir tribes, for example, a wonderfully powerful race of men, live almost wholly on sour milk, mixed with maize flour, never eating such valuable animals as kine except on great occasions. Yet the natives of the Tonga Islands think that nothing can be more disgusting than for a human being to drink the milk of a cow.
How the operation of milking is conducted we need not say, whether it be performed on the cow as with most nations, or the ass in case of need with ourselves, or the mare as with the Tartars, or the goat and sheep in various parts of the world. The milk of the sheep, by the way, is singularly rich and nourishing.
Suffice it to say that the animals which are to be milked are kept for that purpose, and that the touch of the human hand, rightly applied, induces the animal to part with its milky stores.
In Nature there is an exact parallel.
It has long been known that some species of Ants are in the habit of acting in exactly the same manner as ourselves, in not only extracting a nutritious liquid from other insects, but watching and tending those which furnish their daily food just as a good dairyman watches and tends his cows.
