From North Pole to Equator: Studies of Wild Life and Scenes in Many Lands
9781465672742
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The foundations of zoology were laid by Aristotle some three hundred years before Christ, but they remained unbuilt on for nearly eighteen centuries. Here and there some enthusiast strove unaided, but only a fragmentary superstructure was reared. In fact, men were pre-occupied with tasks of civilization more serious than the prosecution of zoology, though that is not trivial. Gradually, however, great social movements, such as the Crusades and the collapse of Feudalism; great intellectual and emotional movements, such as those of the Renaissance; great inventions, such as that of printing, gave new life to Europe, and zoology shared in the re-awakening. Yet the natural history of the Middle Ages was in great part mystical; fancy and superstition ran riot along paths where science afterwards established order, and, for all practical purposes, the history of zoology, apart from the efforts of a few pioneers, may be said to date from the sixteenth century. Now, one indubitable factor in the scientific renaissance of the sixteenth century was the enthusiasm of the early travellers, and this stimulus, periodically recurrent, has never failed to have a similar effect—of giving new life to science. But while science, and zoology as a branch of it, has been evolving during the last three centuries, the traveller, too, has shared in the evolution. It is this which we wish to trace. I. The Romantic Type. Many of the old travellers, from Herodotus onwards, were observant and enthusiastic; most were credulous and garrulous. In days when the critical spirit was young, and verification hardly possible, there could not but be a strong temptation to tell extraordinary “travellers’ tales”. And they did. Nor need we scoff at them loudly, for the type dies hard; every year such tales are told. Oderico de Pordenone and other mediæval travellers who give some substance to the mythical Sir John de Maundeville were travellers of this genial type. Oderico describes an interesting connecting link between the animal and vegetable kingdom, a literal “zoophyte”, the “vegetable lamb”, which seems to have been a woolly Scythian fern, with its counterpart in the large fungus which colonials sometimes speak of as the “vegetable sheep”. As for the pretended Sir John, he had in his power of swallowing marvels a gape hardly less than that of the great snakes which he describes. But even now do we not see his snakes in at least the picture-books on which innocent youth is nurtured? The basilisk (one of the most harmless of lizards) “sleyeth men beholding it”; the “cocodrilles also sley men”—they do indeed—“and eate them weeping, and they have no tongue”. “The griffin of Bactria hath a body greater than eight lyons and stall worthier than a hundred egles, for certainly he will beare to his nest flying, a horse and a man upon his back.” He was not readily daunted, Sir John, for when they told him of the lamb-tree which bears lambs in its pods, his British pluck did not desert him, and he gave answer that he “held it for no marvayle, for in his country are trees which bear fruit which become birds flying, and they are good to eate, and that that falleth on the water, liveth, and that that falleth on earth, dyeth; and they marvailed much thereat”. The tale of the barnacle-tree was a trump card in those days!
