Part 7 (1/2)

[5] ep? de t??t??? ???a???a? t?? pe?? a?t?? f???s?f?a? e?? s??a pa?de?a? e?e??e??? etest?se?. {epi de toutois Pythagoras ten peri auten philosophian eis schema paideias eleutherou metestesen.} _Procli Comment. Euclidis lib. I, Prolegom. II_ (p. 65, ed.

Friedlein).

The Mediterranean fisherman, like the Chinese fisherman or the j.a.panese, has still, and always has had, a wide knowledge of all that pertains to and accompanies his craft. Our Scottish fishermen have a limited vocabulary, which scarce extends beyond the names of the few common fishes with which the market is supplied. But at Ma.r.s.eilles or Genoa or in the Levant they have names for many hundreds of species, of fish and sh.e.l.l-fish and cuttle-fish and worms and corallines, and all manner of swimming and creeping things; they know a vast deal about the habits of their lives, far more, sometimes, than do we 'scientific men'; they are naturalists by tradition and by trade. Neither, by the way, must we forget the ancient medical and anatomical learning of the great Aesculapian guild, nor the still more recondite knowledge possessed by various priesthoods (again like their brethren of to-day in China and j.a.pan) of the several creatures, sacred fish, pigeons, guinea-fowl, snakes, cuttlefish, and what not, which time out of mind they had reared, tended, and venerated.

Of what new facts Aristotle actually discovered it is impossible to be sure. Could it ever be proved that he discovered many, or could it even be shown that of his own hand he discovered nothing at all, it would affect but little our estimate of his greatness and our admiration of his learning. He was the first of Greek philosophers and gentlemen to see that all these things were good to know and worthy to be told. This was his great discovery.

I have sought elsewhere to show that Aristotle spent two years, the happiest years perhaps of all his life--a long honeymoon--by the sea-side in the island of Mytilene, after he had married the little Princess, and before he began the hard work of his life: before he taught Alexander in Macedon, and long before he spoke _urbi et orbi_ in the Lyceum. Here it was that he learned the great bulk of his natural history, in which, wide and general as it is, the things of the sea have from first to last a notable predominance.

I have tried to ill.u.s.trate elsewhere (as many another writer has done) something of the variety and the depth of Aristotle's knowledge of animals--choosing an example here and there, but only drawing a little water from an inexhaustible well.

A famous case is that of the 'molluscs', where either Aristotle's knowledge was exceptionally minute, or where it has come down to us with unusual completeness.

These are the cuttle fish, which have now surrendered their Aristotelian name of 'molluscs' to that greater group which is seen to include them, together with the sh.e.l.l-fish or 'ostracoderma' of Aristotle. These cuttle-fishes are creatures that we seldom see, but in the Mediterranean they are an article of food and many kinds are known to the fishermen.

All or wellnigh all of these many kinds were known to Aristotle. He described their form and their anatomy, their habits, their development, all with such faithful accuracy that what we can add to-day seems of secondary importance. He begins with a methodical description of the general form, tells us of the body and fins, of the eight arms with their rows of suckers, of the abnormal position of the head. He points out the two long arms of Sepia and of the calamaries, and their absence in the octopus; and he tells us, what was only confirmed of late, that with these two long arms the creature clings to the rock and sways about like a s.h.i.+p at anchor. He describes the great eyes, the two big teeth forming the beak; and he dissects the whole structure of the gut, with its long gullet, its round crop, its stomach and the little coiled coecal diverticulum: dissecting not only one but several species, and noting differences that were not observed again till Cuvier re-dissected them. He describes the funnel and its relation to the mantle-sac, and the ink-bag, which he shows to be largest in Sepia of all others. And here, by the way, he seems to make one of those apparent errors that, as it happens, turn out to be justified: for he tells us that in Octopus, unlike the rest, the funnel is on the upper side; the fact being that when the creature lies p.r.o.ne upon the ground, with all its arms outspread, the funnel-tube (instead of being flattened out beneath the creature's prostrate body) is long enough to protrude upwards between arms and head, and to appear on one side or other thereof, in a position apparently the reverse of its natural one. He describes the character of the cuttle-bone in Sepia, and of the h.o.r.n.y pen which takes its place in the various calamaries, and notes the lack of any similar structure in Octopus. He dissects in both s.e.xes the reproductive organs, noting without exception all their essential and complicated parts; and he had figured these in his lost volume of anatomical diagrams. He describes the various kinds of eggs, and, with still more surprising knowledge, shows us the little embryo cuttle-fish, with its great yolk-sac attached, in apparent contrast to the chick's, to the little creature's developing head.

But there is one other remarkable feature that he knew ages before it was rediscovered, almost in our own time. In certain male cuttle-fishes, in the breeding season, one of the arms develops in a curious fas.h.i.+on into a long coiled whip-lash, and in the act of breeding may then be transferred to the mantle-cavity of the female. Cuvier himself knew nothing of the nature or the function of this separated arm, and indeed, if I am not mistaken, it was he who mistook it for a parasitic worm. But Aristotle tells us of its use and its temporary development, and of its structure in detail, and his description tallies closely with the accounts of the most recent writers.

A scarcely less minute account follows of the 'Malacostraca' or crustaceans, the lobsters and the crabs, the shrimps and the prawns, and others of their kind, a chapter to which Cuvier devoted a celebrated essay. There be many kinds of crabs--the common kind, the big 'granny'

crabs, the little hors.e.m.e.n-crabs, that scamper over the sand and which are for the most part empty, that is to say, whose respiratory cavities are exceptionally large; and there are the freshwater crabs. There are the little shrimps and the big hump-backed fellows, or prawns; there are the 'crangons' or squillae; and the big lobsters and the crawfish or 'langoustes', their spiny cousins. We read about their beady eyes, which turn every way; about their big rough antennae and the smaller, smoother pair between; the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with its projecting rostrum, the jointed abdomen with the tail-fins at the end, and the little flaps below on which the female drops her sp.a.w.n. In more or less detail these things are severally described, and the many limbs severally enumerated, in one kind after another. The descriptions of the lobster and the langouste are particularly minute, and the comparison or contrast between the two is drawn with elaborate precision. In the former, besides other differences between male and female, the female is said to have the 'first foot' (or leg) bifurcate, while in the male it is undivided. It seems a trifling matter, but it is true; it is so small a point that I searched long before at last I found mention made of it in a German monograph. The puzzling thing is that it is (as we should say) the last and not the first leg which is so distinguished; but after all, it is only a convention of our own to count the limbs from before backwards. To inspect a lobster's limbs, we lay it on its back (as Aristotle did), and see the legs overlapping, each hinder one above the one before; the hindmost is the first we see, and the one we must first lift up to inspect the others.

Aristotle's account of fishes is a prodigious history of habits, food, migrations, modes of capture, times and ways of sp.a.w.ning, and anatomical details; but it is not here that we can elucidate or even ill.u.s.trate this astonis.h.i.+ng Ichthyology. It is not always easy to understand--but the obstacle lies often, I take it, in our own ignorance. The identification of species is not always plain, for here as elsewhere Aristotle did not reckon with a time or place where the familiar words of Greek should be unknown or their homely significance forgotten. Among the great host of fish-names there are several referring, somehow or other, to the Grey Mullet, which puzzle both naturalist and lexicographer. A young officer told me the other day how he had watched an Arab fisherman emptying out his creel of Grey Mullet on some Syrian beach, and the Arab gave four if not five names to as many different kinds, betwixt which my friend could see no difference whatsoever. Had my friend been an ichthyologist he would doubtless have noticed that one had eyelids and the others none; that one had little brushes on its lips, another a small but wide-open slit under the jaw, another a yellow spot on its gill-covers, and so on. The Mullets are a difficult group, but Aristotle, like the Arab fisherman, evidently recognized their fine distinctions and employed the appropriate names. Again, Aristotle speaks of a certain nest-building fish, the 'phycis', and regarding this Cuvier fell into error (where once upon a time I followed him). In Cuvier's time there was but one nest-building fish known such as to suit, apparently, the pa.s.sage, namely the little black goby; but after Cuvier's day the nest-building habits of the 'wra.s.ses' became known to naturalists, as they had doubtless been known ages before to the fishermen--and to Aristotle.

Like almost every other little point on which we happen to touch, we might make this one the starting-point (here comes in the delight and fascination of the interpreter's task!) for other stories.

Speusippus, Plato's successor in the Academy, was both philosopher and naturalist, and we may take it, if we please, that his leaning towards biology, and the biological trend which at this time became more and more marked in Athenian philosophy, were not unconnected with the great impulse which Aristotle had given. However this may be, Speusippus wrote a book pe?? ????? {peri h.o.m.oion} 'Concerning Resemblances'; and this, of which we only possess a few fragmentary sentences, must have been a very curious and an interesting book. He mentions, among other similar cases, that our little fish _phycis_ has a close outward semblance to the sea-perch; and this is enough to clinch the proof that Aristotle's nest-building fish was not a goby but a wra.s.se. The whole purport of Speusippus's book seems to have been to discuss how, or why, with all Nature's apparently infinite variety, certain animals have a singularly close resemblance to certain others, though they be quite distinct in kind. It is a problem which perplexes us still, when we are astonished and even deluded by the likeness between a wasp and a hover-fly, a merlin and a cuckoo. In certain extreme cases we call it 'mimicry', and invoke hypotheses to account for this 'mimetic' resemblance; and those of us who reject these hypotheses must fain take refuge in others, as far-reaching in their way. This at least we know, that Speusippus seized upon a real problem of biology, of lasting interest and even of fundamental importance.

To come back to Aristotle and his fishes, let us glance at one little point more. The reproduction of the eel is an ancient puzzle, which has found its full solution only in our own day. While the salmon, for instance, comes up the river to breed and goes down again to the sea, the eel goes down to the ocean to sp.a.w.n, and the old eels come back no more but perish in the great waters. The eel's egg develops into a little flattened, transparent fish, altogether different in outward appearance from an eel, which turns afterwards into a young eel or 'elver'; and Professor Gra.s.si, who had a big share in elucidating the whole matter, tells us the curious fact that he found the Sicilian fishermen well acquainted with the little transparent larva (the _Leptocephalus_ of modern naturalists), that they knew well what it was, and that they had a name for it--_Casentula_. Now Aristotle, in a pa.s.sage which I think has been much misunderstood (and which we must admit to be in part erroneous), tells us that the eel develops from what he calls ??? e?te?a {ges entera}, a word which we translate, literally, the 'guts of the earth', and which commentators interpret as 'earthworms'! But in Sicilian Doric, ??? e?te?a {ges entera} would at once become ?a? e?te?a {gas entera}; and between 'Gasentera' and the modern Sicilian 'Casentula' there is scarce a hairbreadth's difference.

So we may be permitted to suppose that here again Aristotle was singularly and accurately informed; and that he knew by sight and name the little larva of the eel, whose discovery and identification is one of the modest triumphs of recent investigation.

Aristotle's many pages on fishes are delightful reading. The anatomist may read of such recondite matters as the _placenta vitellina_ of the smooth dog-fish, whereby the viviparous embryo is nourished within the womb, after a fas.h.i.+on a.n.a.logous to that of mammalian embryology--a phenomenon brought to light anew by Johannes Muller, and which excited him to enthusiastic admiration of Aristotle's minute and faithful anatomy. Again we may read of the periodic migration of the tunnies, of the great net or 'madrague' in which they are captured, and of the watchmen, the ?????s??p?? {thynnoskopoi}, the 'hooers' of our ancient Cornish fishery, who give warning from tower or headland of the approaching shoal. The student may learn what manner of fish it was (the great Eagle-ray) with whose barbed fin-spine--most primitive of spear-heads--Ulysses was slain; and again, he may learn not a little about that ?a??? {narke}, or torpedo, to which Meno compared his master Socrates, in a somewhat ambiguous compliment.

In rambling fas.h.i.+on Aristotle has a deal to tell us about insects, and he has left us a sort of treatise on the whole natural history of the bee. He knew the several inmates of the hive, though like others of his day (save, perhaps, only Xenophon), and like Shakespeare too, he took the queen-bee for a king. He describes the building of the comb, the laying of the eggs, the provision of the larvae with food. He discusses the various qualities of honey and the flowers from which these are drawn. He is learned in the diseases and the enemies of bees. He tells us many curious things about the economy of the hive and the arts of the bee-keeper, some of which things have a very modern and familiar look about them: for instance, the use of a net or screen to keep out the drones, a net so nicely contrived that these st.u.r.dy fellows are just kept out, while the leaner, slenderer workers are just let in. But it would be a long, long story to tell of Aristotle's knowledge of the bee, and to compare it with what is, haply, the still deeper skill and learning of that master of bee-craft, Virgil.

Then, having perfect freedom to go whithersoever we chose and to follow the bees across the boundless fields of ancient literature, we might read of the wild bees and of their honey out of a rock, and of the hive-bees too, in Homer; follow them to their first legendary home in Crete, where the infant Jupiter was fed on honey--as a baby's lips are touched with it even unto this day; trace their a.s.sociation with Proserpine and her mother, or their subtler connexion with Ephesian Diana; find in the poets, from Hesiod to the later Anthology, a hundred sweet references--to the bee-tree in the oak-wood, to the flowery hill Hymettus. Perhaps, at last, we might even happen on the place where Origen seems so strangely to foreshadow Shakespeare--speaking of the king of the bees with his retinue of courtiers (his officers of sorts), the relays of workmen (the poor mechanic porters crowding in), the punishment of the idle (where some, like magistrates, correct at home), the wars, the vanquished, and the plunder (which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent-royal of their Emperor).

Go back to Aristotle, and we may listen to him again while he talks of many other kindred insects: of the humble-bee and its kind, of the mason-bee with its hard round nest of clay, of the robber-bees, and of the various wasps and hornets; or (still more curiously and unexpectedly) of the hunter-wasp or 'ichneumon', and how it kills the spider, carries it home to its nest, and lays its eggs in its poor body, that the little wasp-grubs may afterwards be fed. Or again of the great wasps which he calls Anthrenae, and how they chase the big flies, and cut off their heads, and fly away with the rest of the carca.s.s--all agreeing to the very letter with what Henri Fabre tells us of a certain large wasp of Southern Europe, and how it captures the big 'taons' or horse-flies: 'Pour donner le coup de grace a leurs Taons mal sacrifies, et se debattants encore entre les pattes du ravisseur, j'ai vu des Bembex machonner la tete et le thorax des victimes.' Verily, there is nothing new under the sun.

With the metamorphoses of various insects Aristotle was well acquainted.

He knew how the house-fly pa.s.ses its early stages in a dung-hill, and how the grubs of the big horse-flies and Tabanids live in decayed wood; how certain little flies or gnats are engendered (as he calls it) in the slime of vinegar. He relates with great care and accuracy the life-history of the common gnat, from its aquatic larva, the little red 'blood-worm' of our pools; he describes them wriggling about like tiny bits of red weed, in the water of some half-empty well; and he explains, finally, the change by which they become stiff and motionless and hard, until a husk breaks away and the little gnat is seen sitting upon it; and by and by the sun's heat or a puff of wind starts it off, and away it flies.

Some of these stories are indeed remarkable, for the events related are more or less hidden and obscure; and so, with all this knowledge at hand, it is not a little strange that Aristotle has very little indeed to tell us about the far more obvious phenomena of the life-history of the b.u.t.terfly, and of the several kinds of b.u.t.terflies and moths. He does tell us briefly that the b.u.t.terfly comes from a caterpillar, which lives on cabbage-leaves and feeds voraciously, then turns into a chrysalis and eats no more, nor has it a mouth to eat withal; it is hard and, as it were, dead, but yet it moves and wriggles when you touch it, and after a while the husk bursts and out comes the b.u.t.terfly. The account is good enough, so far as it goes, but nevertheless Aristotle shows no affection for the b.u.t.terfly, does not linger and dally over it, tells no stories about it. This is all of a piece with the rest of Greek literature, and poetry in particular, where allusions to the b.u.t.terfly are scanty and rare. I think the Greeks found something ominous or uncanny, something not to be lightly spoken of, in that all but disembodied spirit which we call a b.u.t.terfly, and they called by the name of ???? {psyche}, the Soul. They had a curious name (?e??da????

{nekydallos}) for the pupa. It sounds like a 'little corpse' (?e???

{nekys}); and like a little corpse within its shroud or coffin the pupa sleeps in its coc.o.o.n. A late poet describes the b.u.t.terfly 'coming back from the grave to the light of day'; and certain of the Fathers of the Church, St. Basil in particular, point the moral accordingly, and draw a doubtless time-honoured allegory of the Resurrection and the Life from the grub which is not dead but sleepeth, and the b.u.t.terfly which (as it were) is raised in glory.

Of one large moth, Aristotle gives us an account which has been a puzzle to many. This begins as a great grub or caterpillar, with (as it were) horns; and, growing by easy stages, it spins at length a coc.o.o.n. There is a cla.s.s of women who unwind and reel off the coc.o.o.ns, and afterwards weave a fabric with the thread; and a certain woman of Cos is credited with the invention of this fabric. This is, at first sight, a plain and straightforward description of the silkworm; but we know that it was not till long afterwards, nearly a thousand years after, in Justinian's reign, that the silkworm and the mulberry-tree which is its food were brought out of the East into Byzantine Greece. We learn something of this Coan silkworm from Pliny, who tells us that it lived on the ash and oak and cypress tree; and from Clement of Alexandria and other of the Fathers we glean a little more--for instance, that the larva was covered with thick-set hairs, and that the coc.o.o.n was of a loose material something like a spider's web. All this agrees in every particular with a certain large moth (_Lasiocampa otus_), which spins a rough coc.o.o.n not unlike that of our Emperor moth, and lives in south-eastern Europe, feeding on the cypress and the oak. Many other silkworms besides the true or common one are still employed, worms which yield the Tussore silks of India and other kindred silks in j.a.pan; and so likewise was this rough silky fabric spun and woven in h.e.l.las, until in course of time it was surpa.s.sed and superseded by the finer produce of the 'Seric worm', and the older industry died out and was utterly forgotten.

Ere we leave the subject of insects let us linger a moment over one which the Greeks loved, and loved most of all. When as schoolboys we first began to read our Thucydides, we met in the very beginning with the story of how rich Athenians wore Golden Gra.s.shoppers (as the schoolmaster calls them) in their hair. These golden ornaments were, of course, no common gra.s.shoppers, but the little Cicadas, whose sharp chirrup seemed delightful music to the Greeks. It is unpleasant to our ears, as Browning found it; but in a mult.i.tude of Greek poets, in Alcaeus and Anacreon and all through the whole Anthology, we hear its praise. We have it, for instance, in the _Birds_: