OUR GARDEN FRIENDS AND FOES.*
Tins is a book which every gentleman who loves his garden should place in the hands of his gardener. The amount of useful and curious information which it contains in a very moderate compass and in the most intelligible form upon most of the birds and insects that can injure or befriend a garden is really re- markable. And we fancy that there are very few persons, indeed, beyond those who are professed naturalists, who will not find in it an immense amount of information absolutely new to them about creatures with which they have been familiar from their childhood. We wish, indeed, that Mr. Wood, though a clergyman, would have the good taste to dispense with the little odds and ends unto Christian edification which seem like so many twigs plucked from "Dick's Christian Philosophy," and transplanted to droop and die among Our Garden Friends and Foes. Why, in a purely didactic and most useful and excellent work, he should think it necessary at the end of every twenty pages to make Providence utterly ridiculous by his unseasonable applications we cannot understand on the part of a man other- wise apparently so intelligent and acute. Surely none but an enfant terrible would bring in " the benevolence and care of his Maker" after a long dissertation upon some hypothetical and unknown sense which is supposed to enable the snail to know when our plums are ripe, not to mention a most highly interest- ing description of the excruciating apparatus (some two thousand barbed teeth) of the testacella's tongue, by means of which that "rather elegant little slug" is enabled to harrow up the earth- worm after tracking it with diabolical ingenuity through the earth, with its own tail protected from being taken in the rear by a shell, which acts as a Roman test ado. Why Providence, in its infinite mercy, should take -pleasure in arming the slug against the worm, and at the same time against our peaches, Mr. Wood does not explain, and, therefore, it would be wiser in him to describe only what be sees, and use such moral difficulties rather as a test of faith. Cocks will fight, and cockfighting is no great obstacle in the way of faith,—but we should certainly never think 111 illustrating Providence by that rather ignoble phenomenon.
Our Mimics Friends and Foes. By the Bev. J. G. Wood. London: Bondage.
But these stray bits apart, Mr. Wood's new book is pro- foundly interesting and practical, and, we cannot help thinking, eminently calculated to encourage the growing tendency towards a more systematic and connected observation of the habits of all the living creatures around us. The time was, when men could sneer freely at "botany and beetles," and when habits of scientific observation were thought to indicate littleness of mind and triviality of temper. This superficial view has been more or less knocked on the head by a truer view of the connection between the sciences, to which the fable of the stomach and the members is now felt to apply with a newer and higher meaning. If any one doubts what may come of studying the habits of the commonest insect, and discovering even one new fact concerning it, let him read Our Garden Friends and Foes. Nor can it be doubted, that even apart from utilitarian tendencies, the study of animal life from a connected and scientific point of view opens up to the mind revelations of new worlds, not less instructive, not less astounding, than those connected with the astronomical heavens. The mathematician learns to consider nothing great or small, but only by comparison. The laws which regulate an atom are not other than the laws which regulate the universe. We can crush a worm, but the laws which regulate its being are as much beyond our power as the laws which regulate the stars. As it is, the study of animal life is still in its infancy, and all the accumulated pressure of modern science has only elicited occasional scraps of knowledge, and furnished us with passing gleams of insight, which only serve to illumine for a moment the thick darkness in which we are as to due animal ethics. In this view such books as those of Mr. Wood are exceedingly useful and suggestive, quite apart from their direct use in actual practice. And when we speak of our knowledge of animal life, we mean strictly the life itself of the animals. For of their organic structure we know, in a vast number of cases, almost as much as we do of man himself. We can physic horses and dogs with much benefit and discretion. But their feelings in relation to one another are almost unknown to us. And yet we know just enough to perceive that in many cases the feelings and thoughts of animals towards one another may be almost as subtle and intricate as our own, the extremities of civilization, of course, being left out of view. In truth, though the structural and physiological laws of the animal kingdom are of the highest scientific value, they throw no more light at present upon the ethical relations of the living animals, than would a human skeleton probably teach an inhabitant of the 'moon concerning the psychology of man, unless, indeed, the Lunites are far in advance of the Terrestrians in comparative science. Nor would the comparison of the human skeleton with the skeleton of the gorilla, without further means of knowledge, explain to him the social and political relations, if we may borrow such a phrase, in which we stand to the gorillas. What infinite hypothases might not be raised ? Would the animal to which the larger skeleton belonged stand to the smaller simply in the relation of the larger to the less ? Would it be like that .of the Suffolk punch to the Shetland pony ? The latter, we know, is one of amity ; the former one of hatred and ferocity on one side, and of incalculable superiority on the other. Then, also, there is the point of view according to which the whole of animated nature appears in the light of an organized hierarchy of mutual destruction in certain prescribed orbits, almost as fixed as that of the stars, and accompanied with equally fixed trains of feeling on both sides. The hawk feeds on the sparrow, the sparrow feeds on the grub, just as we feed upon partridges, oysters (the French oat frogs and snails), and other living creatures, but with a wider range. We are, in fact, the carnivorous genus of the globe par excellence. But a large part of the animals upon which we feed have grown up in feelings of friendship towards us, while there seem to be, as far as we know, few instances, if any, of the prey of other animals feeling any friendship for their devourers. The sparrow can feel no friendship for the hawk. Pigeons have a hereditary dread of the hawk resembling superstition. It is curious to consider what the feelings of the hawk may be towards the sparrow, or pigeon—whether, for instance, he looks upon the sparrow with the sublime superiority and the cold absence of cruelty with which a butcher surveys a sheep. Or, are his feelings those of a chamois-bunter in pursuit of his nimble prey ? Or, again, is cruelty per se one of the emotions superadded to appetite and pursuit ? That which makes the subject even more interesting is the wonderful irregularity of this hierarchy of destruction. The hawk eats the sparrow, and the cat eats the mouse, but the crow lives on terms of entente cordiale with the starling, and the cow with the goat. Then, again, while there are certain cases of a direct hierarchy, so to speak, as from the lesser birds to some of the greater, from some of the lesser to some of the greater quadrupeds, and from the lesser to larger insects, as from the fly to the dragon-fly, there are, on the other hand, cross purposes and crooked byways, as when birds feed upon insects and also upon quadrupeds, rep- tiles and quadrupeds upon birds, and the lesser upon the greater. while among men, the only direct hierarchy of destruction goes by the name of cannibalism. There are pirates among animals, as there are pirates among men, and parasites among
plants—creatures that plunder erratically, and kill, as it were, abnormally. Then there are, as it were, recognized sovereigns, with well defined fields of butchery. Nor can it fail to strike any attentive observer that the same moral position brings about very similar characteristics in all grades and degrees of the different fauna. It is impossible not to perceive that the dragon-fly soars and pounces upon ordinary flies much as a kite pounces upon a pigeon, or attacks a butterfly much as a falcon strikes a heron, and generally bears itself with much of the royal arrogance of a supreme and devouring monarch. Those who like these trains of thought will find plenty of materials in Mr. Wood's book, which is equally suitable for tike gardener and the gentleman, the child and the adult.
It would be impossible within our limits to do justice to the immense amount of matter contained in Mr. Wood's little octavo, almost every paragraph of which contains some point of prac- tical or speculative interest. The account of the death's head moth, for instance, is curious in many ways. It is thought to be so rare, that the discovery of one sometimes gives rise to a paragraph in the local newspapers. It is celebrated for the close representation of a skull and part of the shoulder-bones upon the
upper part of its thorax. The mere picture of the moth is a little alarming. No wonder it should have become an object of dread among ignorant people. In addition to this, its eyes shine at night like two globes of fire, and when handled it gives a little squeak. Nor, if the popular account be true, is the superstition connected with this terrible moth confined to ignorant mankind. It is said to enter beehives, take up its residence there, and feed upon the honey. The bees are thought to be paralyzed, as it were, by the sharp, squeaking sound uttered by the moth. Mr. Wood does not accept, but neither does he reject the legend, which, if true, would show that the bees, no less than man, are capable of superstitious terror. A single bee would probably assassinate the fat and awful beauty with a single poke. The best way of obtaining a perfect specimen, kIr. Wood says, is to hunt for the caterpillar at night in a potato field with a bull's- eye lantern. Though destructive to the potato, the ravages of the death's head caterpillars in the potato field are not very serious, But it seems to have a predilection for the jessamine, which often proves fatal to the fashionable shrub.
" ' The jessamine,' Mr. Wood says, will sometimes suffer in a sin- gular manner, the leaves being stripped of their verdure and no creature to be found on whom the blame may be laid. Snails and slugs usually have the credit of this damage, but the death's head caterpillar may mostly be considered the destroyer. It may be detected in the night time by means of a lantern, and caught in the very act of eating the leaves ; and in the day time may be captured by digging in the ground near the roots of the injured plants.'
So again, the caterpillar of the beautiful insect called the high- brown fritillary feeds on the heartsease and the sweet violet. As a rule, however, the butterfly species are the gardener's friends, destroying nettles and other noxious weeds. We could ramble through the book with pleasure, space and fairness to the author permitting, and we can confidently recommend it as eminently useful and suggestive.
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