And in their turn must lie as low.
The Beautiful in Nature and Art.—In looking at our nature, we discover among its admirable endowments the sense or perception of beauty. We see the germ of this in every human being; and there is no power which admits greater cultivation: and why should it not be cherished in all? It deserves remark, that the provision for this principle of the creation which we can turn into food and clothes, or gratification for the body; but the whole creation may be used to minister to the sense of beauty. Beauty is an all-pervading presence; it unfolds the numberless flowers of the spring; it waves in the branches of the trees and the green blades of grass; it haunts the depth of the earth and sea, and gleams out in the hues of the shell and the precious stone; and not only these minute objects, but the ocean, the mountains, the clouds, the heavens, the stars, the rising and setting sun, all overflow with beauty. The universe is its temple, and those men who are alive to it cannot lift their eyes without feeling themselves encompassed with it on every side. Now, this beauty is so precious, the enjoyments it gives are so refined and so akin to worship, that it is painful to think of the multitude of men as living in the midst of it, and living almost as blind to it, as if, instead of this fair earth and glorious sky, they were tenants of a dungeon. An infinite joy is lost to the world by the want of culture of this spiritual endowment. Suppose that I were to visit a cottage, and to see its walls lined with the choicest picture of Raphael, and every spare nook filled with statues of the most exquisite workmanship, and that I were to learn that neither man, woman, nor child, ever cast an eye at these miracles of art, how should I regret their privation; how should I want to open their eyes; and to help them to comprehend and feel the loveliness and grandeur which in vain courted their notice? But every husbandman is living in sight of the works of a diviner artist; and how much would his existence be elevated, could he see the glory which shines forth in their forms, hues, proportions, and moral expression! I have spoken only of the beauty of nature; but how much of this mysterious charm is found in the elegant arts, and especially in literature? The best books have most beauty. The greatest truths are wronged if not linked with beauty, and they win their way most surely and deeply into the soul when arrayed in this their natural and fit attire. Now no man receives the true culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and I know of no condition in life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries, this is the cheapest and most at hand; and it seems to be most important to those conditions where coarse labour tends to give a grossness to the mind. From the diffusion of the sense of beauty in ancient Greece, and of the taste for music in modern Germany, we learn that the people at large may partake of refined gratifications which have hitherto been thought to be necessarily restricted to a few.—Channing.
A COMMON FROG!
“Come along; don’t stay poking in that ditch; it’s nothing but a common frog,” said a lively-looking fellow to his companion; who replied, “True, it is only a common frog, but give me a few minutes, and I will endeavour to show you that it better deserves attention than many a creature called rare and curious. The fact is, that the history of what we call common animals, and see every day, is often very imperfectly known, though possessing much to astonish and instruct us. Come, sit you down on this bank for a few minutes, instead of pursuing your idle walk, and I will endeavour to excite your curiosity and powers of observation. If I do so by means of so humble an instrument as a common frog, I do better service than if I were to fix your attention by accounts of the mightiest monsters of fossil or existing Herpetology, as the part of natural history which treats of reptiles is called. See! I have caught him, and a fine stout fellow he is, for I perceive from his swelling chops he is a male. Let us now consider his place in the creation: it is in the tailless section of the fourth order of reptiles called Batrachians, and distinguished from the other three orders by the absence of scales on the skin, and by the young undergoing the most extensive changes of form, organic structure, and habits of life. You know, I presume, that frogs are hatched from eggs, or as they are called in mass, spawn, which is laid early in the year in shallow pools, and resembles boiled sago. The peasantry believe that as it is laid in more or less deep water, so will the coming season be dry or wet. This, however, like many other instances of supposed prescience in animals, does not stand the test of observation, for spawn is frequently laid where, when the weather proves fine, the water is dried up. Nevertheless, its position does in some degree indicate the state of the atmosphere, as, under the low pressure of air which precedes and attends rain, the spawn, owing to bubbles of air entangled in it, floats more buoyantly, and is fitted for shallower water than it could swim in under other circumstances. But to our subject. The product of this spawn is in every thing unlike the perfect frog we now behold. He commenced life with some twelve hundred in family, a tiny, fish-formed creature, with curious external gills, which in a short time became covered with skin; and he then breathed by taking in water at the mouth, passing it over the gills, and out at orifices on each side, just as we see in ordinary fishes. The circulation of his blood was also similar to that of those animals. His head and body were then confounded in one globular mass, to which was appended a long, flattened, and powerful tail; his mouth was small, his jaws suited to his food, which was vegetable, and his intestines were four times longer in proportion than they are now. After some time of this fish-like life, two limbs began to bud near to the junction of his body and tail—then another pair under the skin near his gills. His tail absorbed in proportion as his limbs developed, until, casting away the last of his many tadpole skins, and with it his jaws and gills, he emerged from the water a ‘gaping, wide-mouthed, waddling frog,’ to seek on land his prey, in future to consist exclusively of worms, insects, and other small living beings; still retaining his power of swimming and diving, but accomplishing it by powerful exertions of his hinder legs, which serve him on land to effect his prodigious jumps, of which we may form an estimate by knowing that a man exerting as great a power in proportion could jump upwards of one hundred yards. He cannot, however, breathe under water; and though his skin, which possesses enormous absorbing powers, may contribute a portion of the necessary stimulus to his blood, yet he must breathe as we do by getting air into his lungs, and therefore, except when he is torpid from cold, he cannot continue any great length of time under water. Observe now his mode of breathing—see with what regularity his nostrils open and shut, while the skin under his throat falls and rises in the same order, for as he is without ribs or diaphragm, his mode of inspiration is not effected as ours is; but he takes air into his closely shut mouth through his nostrils, which he then closes, and by a muscular exertion presses the air into his lungs. Were you to keep his mouth open, he would be infallibly smothered. His tongue is one of his most striking peculiarities, for instead of being rooted, as in other animals, at the throat, it is fastened to his under lip, and its point is directed to his stomach. Nevertheless, this strange arrangement is well suited to his purposes, and his tongue as an organ of prehension is very effective. It is flat, soft, and long, and is covered with a very viscid fluid. When he wishes to use it, he lowers his under jaw suddenly, and ejects and retracts his tongue with the rapidity of a flash of light, snatching away a luckless worm or beetle attached, by the secretion before alluded to, to its tip. The insertion of the tongue in front of the lower jaw serves not only to aid mechanically in its ejection and retraction, just as we manage the lash of a whip, but it saves material in its construction, for it would require much greater volume of muscle to accomplish the same end posited as tongues usually are; and it has also the advantage of bringing the food into the proper place for being swallowed, without further exertion than that of its retraction.
Look now at the splendour of the golden iris of his eyes, and his triple eyelids; see, notwithstanding the meagre developement of his head, as a phrenologist would say, his great look of vivacity; though his brain is small, his nerves are particularly large, and his muscles are accordingly possessed of more than ordinary excitability, which property has subjected his race to very many cruel experiments, at the hands of physiologists, galvanists, &c. A favourite experiment was, by the galvanic action of a silver coin and a small plate of zinc, on the leg of a dead frog, to make it jump with more than the force of life. Should you be inclined to study his anatomy, you will find ample stores in the ponderous folios of old writers, who have so laboriously wrought out his story as to leave little to be accomplished by us. The frog, now abundantly dispersed over Ireland, was introduced into this country not much more than a century since by Doctor Gwythers of Trinity College; and in thus naturalizing this pretty creature, cold and clammy though it be, he did a service, for it contributes materially to check the increase of slugs and worms. I have often vindicated the frog from charges brought against him by gardeners. I have been shown a strawberry, and desired to look at the mischief he has done. I have pointed out, that the edge where he was accused of biting out a piece was not only dry, but smaller than the interior of the cavity, and it therefore could not be formed by a bite. I have then shown other strawberries with similar wounds, in which small black slugs were feeding; and I have cut up the supposed strawberry-devouring frog slain by the gardener, and shown in his stomach, with several earthworms, a number of little black slugs of the species alluded to, but not one bit of fruit: thus proving, I hope, that the cultivator of strawberries ought for his own sake to be the protector of frogs.
The frog is a good instance of the confusion that constantly arises from applying the same words to designate different animals in different countries. The common frog of the continent is the green frog (Rana esculenta), while our common frog is their red frog (Rana temporaria). The former is of much more aquatic habits than the latter, and is not known in Ireland. I once made an attempt to introduce it here, and when in Paris directed a basket of 100 frogs to be made up for me, giving special instructions that no common frogs were to be amongst them, which order I found on returning was obeyed as understood in that country, and not a single green frog was in my lot, though I intended to have none other. As articles of food there seems to be little difference, but the preference is given to the green frog. The vulgar opinion that Frenchmen eat frogs for want of better food is quite erroneous; the contrary is the fact; for a fricassee of these animals is an expensive dish in France, and is considered a delicacy. Its chief merit appears to me to be its freedom from strong flavour of any kind; a delicate stomach may indulge in it without fear of a feeling of repletion. In this country the foolish prejudices which forbid the use of many attainable articles of wholesome food, applies with force to frogs. Our starving peasants loath what princes of other nations would banquet on, and leave to badgers, hedgehogs, buzzards, herons, pike and trout, sole possession of a very nutritive and pleasant article of food. When devoured by the heron, it is in part converted into a source of wonder to the unenlightened; for the curious masses of whitish jelly found on the banks of rivers and other moist places, and said by the country people to be fallen stars, are, so far as I have been able to observe, masses of immature frog spawn in a semi-digested state; and they seemed to me to have been rejected by herons, just as we see hawks and owls reject balls of hair, feathers, or other indigestible portions of their prey.
While on the subject of eating frogs, one of many of my adventures with the animal comes upon me with something like a feeling of compunction. When I was at school, it happened on a great occasion that a party of the ‘big boys’ were allowed to sit up much beyond the ordinary time of retiring. Finding it cold, it was proposed to adjourn to the kitchen, poke up the fire, and make warm before going to bed. Proceeding accordingly, we were startled by the repetition of some heavy sounds on the floor, and on getting up a blaze we discovered a frog of gigantic proportions jumping across the room. He was seized, and a council being held upon him, it was resolved that he should be killed, roasted, and eaten; and this awful sentence was at once put into execution—the curious for curiosity, the braggarts for bravado, and the cowards, lest they be thought so, partaking of the repast. We discovered next day that the unfortunate devoured had been for three years a settled denizen of the kitchen, where he dealt nightly havoc on the hordes of crickets and cockroaches it contained. I have had for three years a frog in confinement where his food is not very abundant, and he has grown proportionally slowly, being still of a very diminutive size. Linnæus and others distinguished ours as the mute frog, believing it did not possess a voice. They were mistaken: you hear our captive, when I press his back, give utterance to his woes; but if you desire to attend his concert, get up some bright night in spring, seek out his spawning place about the witching hour, and you will then hear sounds, of strange power, which seem to make the earth on which you stand to tremble. On investigation you will find it to proceed from an assembled congregation of frogs, each pronouncing the word Croak, but dwelling, as a musician would say, with a thrill on the letter r. When speaking of the tadpole, I forgot to allude to the fact, that recent experimenters find that by placing them in covered jars, the developement of the frog is arrested. The tadpole will continue to grow until it reaches a size as great as that of an adult frog. This has been attributed by the discoverer to a withdrawal of the agency of light; but it strikes me he has, in his anxiety to prop a theory, lost sight of the true reason, which appears to be, that while he excluded the young animal from light, he also put it in such a situation as to compel it to breathe alone by its gills, and afford it no opportunity for the developement of its lungs, and so it retained of necessity its fish-like functions. As you are probably more of a sportsman than a naturalist, you have observed in rail shooting, your pointer, after a show of setting, roll on the ground: if you had examined, the chances are you would have found a dead frog of no very pleasing perfume. Why the dog so rolled, I cannot say, unless it be, that he like other puppies wished to smear his hair with nasty animal odours. I have now I think worked out your patience; and though I could dwell much longer on the subject, and eke out much from ancient lore, I will end by a less pompous quotation of part of a well-known song—
‘A frog he would a-wooing go,
Whether his mother would let him or no.’
And the catastrophe,