On their own part, how benevolent are the estranged allies far away! how ready to resume "the league of heart to heart" with some soul a little primal! Any one, indeed, may tame a wild thing by no deeper necromancy than a succession of suppers and of kind words. Animals are disinterested also, and ready to serve without rewards. Ravens are gentle marketers for Elijah; the lions purr about the prophet Daniel; the shyest fish swim into Thoreau's hand; S. Francis, in the tenderest of folk-tales, goes out to the hills, and reasons with the wicked wolf who sacks the Umbrian villages. He offers him free and ample maintenance, promises him immunity from the hunters, and brings him down among the women and children, to pledge himself to better behavior on his apologetic paw. S. Francis was not a very great fool: he was only Adam sane again, and interharmonized with the physical universe. The majority of infants still show pleasure at the sight of a beetle, or a toad. Of course, their grasp kills it; but that is not voluntary, as the pleasure is. The fatuous parents, however, are certain to change all that: toads, be it known, produce warts, and beetles sting. A lizard on a tree-trunk, a mink in the creek, a delicate gray squirrel on the stone wall, (charming persons exclusively minding their own business,) are at all times providentially provided for our sweet little boys to kill. Strange that, whereas, by Tigris and Euphrates, we creatures had our communications with creatures in one kindly language, we should now roam over the face of the earth, everywhere accosting our demonstrable superiors with a gun! Mr. Bryan, candidate for the Presidency of the United States, went into the forest, the other day, for rest and recreation, and had a stroke of luck: he shot something. It was a beautiful doe. We learn from the newspapers that she had "stood looking at him, without any fear." Here is your typical high treason in these nice matters. Who will say but that the doe was about to give some sign? Ça donne furieusement à penser. Blind bullies, sodden usurpers that we are! It is our dense policy to rebuff the touching advances of our old allies and kindred. Not Rhœcus only instinctively bruises the ambassador bee, and stifles the immortal message.
If the Oriental religions have any mission to discharge in our behalf, let them teach us speedily, through any gracious superstition whatsoever, their grave respect for animal life. When we are thoroughly converted, we shall not only cease to vivisect, but manumit our slaves of the exhibition-hall and the Zoo: we shall hear no longer from the lion-house the fell foreboding sound, as of Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Zenobia, all together, imploring the gods for vengeance upon Rome. The captives have borne their fate, yet not quite dispassionately. They lose, behind bars, day by day, something of themselves hard to part with; and they know it: but they are no atheists. Outside is the hateful city, but the sun also, bringing strange fancies to them as it crosses the threshold. So much lies back of them, in that cell of humiliation, where they were not born! What if there should be freedom again for them, beyond death? Some thought as profound surges this morning in a vast antiphonal cry among the tanks and cages, and shakes, in passing, the soul of man.
"O socii, neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum,
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem."
1896.
[ON TEACHING ONE’S GRANDMOTHER
HOW TO SUCK EGGS]
IN the days of the Schoolmen, when no vexed question went without its fair showing, it seems incredible that the important thesis hereto affixed as a title went a-begging among those hair-splitting philosophers. Since Aristotle himself overlooked it, Duns Scotus and the noted Paracelsus, Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast de Hohenheim himself, were content to repeat his sin of omission. Even Sir Thomas Browne, "the horizon of whose understanding was much larger than the hemisphere of this world," neither unearthed the origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any way to uphold or depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of an Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in reverence, and where their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.
It is reserved therefore, for some modern inquirer to establish, whether the strange accomplishment in mind was at any time, in any nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among venerable females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, pythonesses, sibyls, and such secretive and oracular folk; whether the initiatory lessons were theoretical merely; and at what age the grandams (for the condition of hypermaternity was at least imperative) were allowed to begin operations.