THE STONE PICKER.
When the excellent Doctor Livingstone visited the poor Africans who have so much difficulty in defending themselves against the Lion and the slave merchant, the women, seeing him armed with all the protecting arts of Europe, invoked him as their friend and providence in these touching words—"Give us sleep!"
And such is the prayer which all beings in their own language address to Nature. All desire, and all dream of, security. We cannot doubt of that when we note the ingenious endeavors which are made to obtain it. Those efforts have given birth to the arts. Man has not invented one, which animals had not previously invented, under that strong and abiding instinct, the desire of safety.
They suffer, they fear, they desire to live. We must not assume that creatures little advanced, and as it were embryonic, have, therefore, but little sensibility. The very contrary is certain. In every embryon, that which first appears, is the nervous system, that is to say, the organ and capacity of feeling and of suffering. Pain is the spur by which the creature is urged to foresight and expedients. Pleasure serves the like purpose, and it is already observable even in those which seem the most cold. It has been observed that the snail, after the painful researches of his love, is singularly happy on meeting again the loved object. Both of them with a touching grace wave their swan-like necks, and bestow upon each other the most lively caresses. Who is it that tells us this? The rigid, the very exact Blainville.
But alas! how largely and how widely is pain distributed! Who has not noted with pity the painful efforts of the shell-less mollusc, as he grovels along on his unguarded belly? Painful but faithful image of a fœtus untimely torn from the mother by some cruel chance, and cast upon the ground naked and defenceless. The poor mollusc thickens and indurates his skin as well as he can, softens the asperities of his road, and renders it slippery. But at every contact with the ragged or pointed stones, his writhings and contractions only too plainly show how great is his sensibility to pain.
Notwithstanding all this, she loves, does that great Soul of Harmony which is the unity of the world; she loves all beings, and by alternations of pleasure and of pain, instructs them and compels them to ascend. But to ascend, to pass into a superior grade, they must first exhaust all that the lower one can furnish of trials more or less painful, of instinctive art, and of stimulants to invention. They must even have exaggerated their species, perceived its excesses, and, by contrast, be inspired with the craving and the need of an opposite one. Progress is thus made by a kind of oscillation between contrary qualities, which by turns are separated from life, and incarnated with it.
Let us translate these divine things into human language, familiar, indeed, and little worthy of the grandeur of such things, but which will make them understood:
Nature, having long delighted to make, unmake, and remake the Medusæ, thus infinitely varying the theme of infant liberty, smote her forehead one morning, and said—"I have a new and a delicious idea. I forgot to secure the life of the poor creature. It can continue only by the infinity of number, the very excess of its fecundity. I must now have a creature at once better guarded and more prudent. It shall if need be, be timid, even to excess, but above all, it is my will that it shall survive."