Animal Life in Field and Garden

by Jean-Henri Fabre

“To discuss ugliness and beauty with you, my children,” replied Uncle Paul, “is not an undertaking that I should care to enter upon. To follow me in such a discussion you would need a maturity of mind that does not go with your years. Even if you [[32]]were grown up, it might still be impossible for us to come to an agreement, inasmuch as it is not with the bodily eyes that ugliness and beauty should be judged, but with the eyes of reason ripened by reflection and study and free from the trammels of first impressions, which are generally erroneous. Also, how few possess that intellectual clearness of vision that remains untroubled by prematurely conceived opinions and can thus contemplate things in all the clarity of truth! Trusting the testimony of our eyes and yielding to daily habit, we call beautiful the creatures whose general structure shows a certain conformity with that of the animals most familiar to us and unthinkingly accepted as standards for all future judgments. We call ugly those that differ from these accepted models, and if very unlike we call them hideous. Enlightened reason refuses to be hemmed in by the narrow circle of first impressions; it rises above petty prejudices and says to itself: Nothing is ugly that God has made; everything is beautiful, everything is perfect in itself, as everything is the work of the Creator.

“An animal’s form should not be judged by its greater or less resemblance to the forms that are already familiar to us and serve us as standards of comparison, but rather by its fitness for the kind of life for which it was created. Where the structure is in perfect harmony with the functions to be performed, there too is beauty. From this higher point of view ugliness no longer exists; or, rather, it exists all too abundantly, but only in the moral world. Intemperance, [[33]]laziness, stupid pride—all forms of vice, in short—constitute ugliness and hideousness. To tell the truth, I know of none besides.

“But I must return to the bat, if not in the hope of making you find it beautiful, at least with the certainty of interesting you in its remarkable structure. I will wager, too, that not one of you knows what a bat is.”

“It is a kind of bird,” declared Emile.

“It is an old rat that has grown a pair of wings,” Jules ventured to assert.

“You are both talking nonsense,” returned their uncle. “That is the way with us all: we speak at random of animals and persons, giving to one our esteem, to another our scorn, without knowing what they are, what they do, what they are good for. You don’t know the first thing about the bat, and yet you overwhelm the poor animal with abuse.

“The bat has nothing in common with birds; it has neither beak nor feathers; nor is it a rat that has acquired wings in its old age. It is really a peculiar creature that is born, lives, and dies with wings, without in any way belonging to the bird family. Its body has the size, the fur, and somewhat the shape of a mouse; but its wings are bare.

“The most highly organized animals have as a distinctive mark teats or udders, which furnish milk, the first food of their young. These animals do not feed their young family from the beak, as birds do; they do not abandon their offspring to all the hazards of good or ill fortune, careless of their [[34]]future, as do the stupid races of reptiles and fish. The females rear their young with maternal care, feeding them from time to time with milk from their udders. All the various species that suckle their young, all that are provided with udders, are classed together by men of learning and called mammals, from the Latin mamma, a breast or teat. I will add that in the great majority of instances these animals have the body covered with fur or hair, and not with feathers or scales. Feathers belong to birds, scales to reptiles and fishes. As examples of mammals you will immediately think of our domestic animals, the dog, the cat, the cow, the sheep, the goat, the horse, and others.”

“I have often noticed,” said Emile, “how carefully the cat raises her family. While the kittens press her teats with their little pink paws to make the milk flow faster, the old cat washes them with her tongue and shows her happiness by her soft purring.”

“Well, then,” resumed Uncle Paul, “the bat is a mammal just as much as is the cat, and like that of the cat its body is protected from the cold by fur, and the female has teats for nursing her little ones. The number of teats varies widely in the different kinds of animals, being greater in the species that have many young at a birth, and less in the others; which is as it should be, in order that the nurslings may all be suckled at the same time. The bat has only two, situated on the breast and not under the stomach. The female bears only a single young one [[35]]at a time. Emile rightly admires the love of the cat for her kittens; yet the bat is a still tenderer mother. When in the evening she goes out in search of food, instead of leaving her nursling in some hole in the wall after suckling it, she carries it with her, clinging to her breast; and it is while weighted with this load that she chases the nimble moths on the wing. Doubtless the pursuit of prey is thus rendered less fruitful and more difficult; but no matter, the loving mother prefers not to abandon her feeble charge, and allows it to continue peacefully sucking during the evolutions of the hunt. With the deepening darkness the bat regains its retreat, suspends itself from the roof by a toe-nail, and holds its nursling by wrapping it in her wings.”