With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade, not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast gives a shiver and drops, as [[362]]though struck by lightning: procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.
I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.
This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres.
Let us watch this spectacle a second time, under more exciting conditions: I mean, in the saladeiros of South America, those immense establishments for killing and treating meat, where they slaughter as many as twelve hundred [[363]]Oxen a day. I will quote the account of an eye-witness:[4]
‘The cattle arrive in large herds and the matance begins on the day after the arrival. A whole herd is confined in an enclosed space, or margueira. From time to time men on horseback drive fifty or sixty beasts into a narrower and stronger enclosure, with a sloping floor of brick, boards or concrete, which is always very slippery. A special operator, standing on an outer platform which runs along the wall of the smaller margueira, lassoes one of the crowd of animals by the head or, more often, by the horns. The middle portion of the long, stout lasso is coiled round a windlass; and a draught-horse, or sometimes a pair of oxen, drags the lassoed beast along and makes it slide, in spite of its struggles, right against the windlass, where it is brought up with a thud and remains without power of movement.
‘Another assistant, the desnucador, also standing on the platform, has then but to stick a knife, at the back of the head, between the occipital bone and the axis; and the paralysed animal topples on to a trolley in which it is carted off. It is at once thrown on an inclined plane where [[364]]other special labourers bleed it and skin it. But, as the injury to the cervical marrow varies a good deal in position and extent, it often happens that the unfortunate beasts still retain the motions of the heart and of the respiratory organs; and, in such cases, they suffer a reaction under the knife; they utter faint sounds of pain and move their limbs, while already half-flayed and disembowelled. Nothing could be more painful than the sight of all those animals skinned alive, cut up and transformed by those men, covered with blood, who run about in all directions.’
The murderous methods of the saladeiro are an exact repetition of what I had seen in the slaughter-house. In both these lethal work-shops they pierce the vertebral marrow at the base of the skull. The Ammophila operates in a similar fashion, with this difference, that her surgery is much more complex, much more difficult, because of the peculiar organization of her victim. The honours are on her side again when we consider the delicacy of the result obtained. Her caterpillar is not a corpse, like the Ox whose spinal cord is cut; it is alive, but incapable of movement. The insect here is man’s superior in all respects.
Now how did the butcher of our parts and [[365]]the desnucador of the pampas light upon the idea of plunging a knife into the seat of the marrow, in order to produce the sudden death of a colossus which would never suffer its throat to be cut without first offering a dangerous resistance? Outside those in the trade and men of science, nobody knows or suspects the lightning result of that particular wound; we are almost all in the same state of ignorance on this subject in which I myself was when my childish curiosity drew me into the killing-shed. The desnucador and the butcher have learnt their craft from the teachings of tradition and example: they have had masters; and these were brought up in the school of other masters, harking back by a chain of linked traditions to him who, served, no doubt, by some hazard of the chase, first realized the tremendous effects of a wound in the nape of the neck. Who shall tell us that a pointed flint-stone, driven by accident into the spinal marrow of the Reindeer or the Mammoth, did not rouse the attention of the desnucador’s forerunner? A casual incident furnished the original idea; observation confirmed it; reflection matured it; tradition preserved it; example disseminated it. After that, the same transmission-current. For generation might follow generation in vain: deprived of masters, the [[366]]desnucador’s descendants would return to the primitive state of ignorance. Heredity does not hand down the art of killing by severing the spinal marrow: no man is born a cattle-slayer by the desnucador’s method.
Now here is the Ammophila, a slayer of caterpillars by a far more cunning method. Where are the professors of the art of stinging? There are not any. When the Wasp rends her cocoon and issues from underground, her predecessors have long ceased to live; she herself will perish without seeing her successors. Once the larder is stocked and the egg laid, all connection with the offspring ends; this year’s perfect insect dies while next year’s insect, still in the larval stage, slumbers below ground in its silken cot. Absolutely nothing, therefore, is transmitted by practical illustration. The Ammophila is born a finished desnucador even as we are born feeders at our mother’s breast. The nurseling uses its suction-pump, the Ammophila her dart, without ever being taught; and both are past masters of the difficult art from the first attempt. There we have instinct, the unconscious impulse that forms an essential part of the conditions of life and is handed down by heredity in the same way as the rhythmic action of the heart and lungs.
Let us try, if possible, to trace the Ammophila’s [[367]]instinct to its source. We suffer to-day, more than we ever did, from a mania for explaining what might well be incapable of explanation. There are some—and their number seems to increase daily—who settle the stupendous question with magnificent audacity. Give them half-a-dozen cells, a bit of protoplasm and a diagram for demonstration; and they will account to you for everything. The organic world, the intellectual and moral world, everything derives from the original cell, evolving by means of its own energies. It’s as simple as A B C. Instinct, roused by a chance action that has proved favourable to the animal, is an acquired habit. And men argue on this basis, invoking natural selection, heredity, the struggle for life. I see plenty of big words, but I should prefer a few small facts. These little facts I have been collecting and catechizing for nearly forty years; and their replies are not exactly in favour of current theories.
You tell me that instinct is an acquired habit, that a casual circumstance, propitious to the animal’s offspring, was the first to prompt it. Let us look into the thing more closely. If I understand aright, we must suppose some Ammophila, in a very remote past, to have accidentally injured her caterpillar’s nervous centres; to have found herself the gainer by [[368]]this operation, both as regards herself, in being released from a struggle not unattended with danger, and as regards her larva, thus supplied with fresh, living and yet harmless victuals; and consequently to have endowed her offspring, by heredity, with a natural tendency to repeat the advantageous device. The maternal legacy did not benefit all the descendants equally: some were poor hands at the newborn art of the stiletto; others were adepts. Then came the struggle for existence, the hateful væ victis! The weak went under, the strong flourished; and, as age succeeded age, selection by vital competition changed the fleeting impression of the start into a deep-rooted, ineffaceable impression, exemplified in the masterly instinct which we admire in the Wasp to-day.