Buckle, in his “History of Civilization in England,” lays it down that no man can write history without a knowledge of the physical sciences. Now it is equally true that no one can discuss human nature scientifically without an acquaintance with zoology. It is Darwin and the naturalists who have opened up this new field of inquiry; and Comparative Zoological Nature has now become as needful a study to the playwright and novelist as Comparative Anatomy is to the physiologist. For my own part, whenever I would know whether a certain proposition be true of man, I first inquire if it holds good as to the lower animals,—to speak as a man; and in the course of my desultory investigations on this line I have stumbled upon sundry valuable truths.
Among the convictions which I have reached in this way is the one which led me to say just now that our pretty little Alice, perched upon the gunwale of the Argo, bethought her of making poor Charley crazy with love, by simply looking very, very beautiful; and did so look accordingly, then and there. Of the mere fact there can be no doubt, since I have Charley’s word for that. [Fact. C. F.] [Goose! A. F.] [Who? J. B. W.] But a scientific explanation of the phenomenon can be given only by a student of Comparative Zoological Nature.
The way in which I hit upon the truth in question was as follows. A vexatious incident in my own private history had occurred just at the time when I had set myself the task of weaving this Monograph, and I was ruefully ruminating upon woman and her ways, and bringing up in my mind, and contrasting with her (in my Comparative Zoological fashion) all manner of birds and fishes and what not, when all of a sudden there popped into my head eels, and how marvellously slippery they were.
But, thought I, if you can but get your finger and thumb into their gills, you’ve got ’em; and if eels—
But straightway I lost heart; for I remembered, from my Darwin, that of gills—or branchiæ, as he will persist in calling them—no traces have for ages been discovered in the genus homo,—at least in the adult stage. Far from it; for the Egyptian mummies, even in their day, for example, got on perfectly without them.
The case was hopeless, therefore; but still I went on ruminating about women and eels and eels and women, in the most aimless and unprofitable fashion, till, wandering off from the eel of commerce and the pie, I chanced to think of the electric variety of that fish. Here faint streaks of dawn began to make themselves felt; and so, making a rapid excursion through the animal kingdom, and recalling the numberless appliances for offence, defence, and attraction to be observed therein, I returned flushed with victory. I had made a discovery. It is this. Just as the eel in question (the Gymnotus electricus) has a reservoir of electricity, to be used when needed, so woman, I find, carries about her person more or less bottled beauty, which she has the singular power of raying forth at will.
More or less; in too many cases, less; but evolution, through selection, may ultimately mend that.
How, or by what mechanism they contrive to do this, is more than I can tell. We know, it is true, that the Anolis principalis (the so-called chameleon of the Gulf States) can change at will from dingy brown to a lovely pea-green, by reversing certain minute scales along its back; but to jump from this fact to the conclusion that the woman you saw at breakfast old and yellow, but youthful and rosy at the ball, indued all this glory by simply reversing her scales, is, in the present state of our knowledge, premature. Besides, we have just seen that the gills of the prehistoric sister have long since disappeared; so that the woman of the period may, upon investigation, turn out not to have any scales, minute or other, to reverse; so unsafe are analogies in matters of science.
But the fact remains (no other hypothesis covering all the observed phenomena) that women carry about their persons bottled beauty.
As to the thing itself, female beauty, I do not pretend to know any more about it than other people. That it is in its nature a poison has been notorious for thousands of years, attacking the male brain with incredible virulence. This pathological condition of that organ has been spoken of for ages as Love, as everybody knows. But what everybody does not know, is that woman possesses the power of concentrating this toxic exhalation upon a doomed male,—dazzling him with what I may provisionally term beauty’s bull’s-eye lamp. Love is not blind. Just the reverse. The lovelorn see what is invisible to others, that is all; the focussed rays of the most magical of all magic lanterns.