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Zaproburno Yollanica Directory 02
Page 09
It is interesting to note, too, that anticipations of higher types, so to speak, often occur among lower races. An animal here and there among the simpler forms hits upon some device essentially similar to that of some higher group with which it is really quite unrelated. For example, those who have read my account of the common earwig (given in the sixth chapter of "Flashlights on Nature") will recollect how that lowly insect sits on her eggs much as a hen does, and brings up her brood of callow grubs as if they were chickens. In much the same way, anticipations of the mammalian type occur pretty frequently among lower animals. Our commonest English lizard, for example, which frequents moors and sandhills, does not lay or deposit its eggs at all, but hatches them out in its own body, and so apparently brings them forth alive: while among snakes, the same habit occurs in the adder or viper. The very name _viper_, indeed, is a corruption of _vivipara_, the snake which produces living young. Still more closely do some birds resemble mammals in the habit of secreting a sort of milk for the sustenance of their nestlings. Most people think the phrase "pigeon's milk" is much like the phrase "the horse-marines," a burlesque name for an absurd and impossible monstrosity. But it is nothing of the sort: it answers to a real fact in the economy of certain doves, which eat grain or seeds, grind and digest it in their own gizzards into a fine soft pulp or porridge, and then feed their young with it from their crops and beaks. This is thus a sort of bird-like imitation of milk. Only the cow or the goat takes grass or leaves, chews, swallows, and digests them, and manufactures from them in her own body that much more nutritive substance, milk, with which all mammals feed their infant offspring.
The Surinam toad, represented in No. 8, is also the possessor of one of the strangest nurseries known to science. It lives in the dense tropical forests of Guiana and Brazil, and is a true water-haunter. But at the breeding season the female undergoes a curious change of integument. The skin on her back grows pulpy, soft, and jelly-like. She lays her eggs in the water: but as soon as she has laid them, her lord and master plasters them on to her impressionable back with his feet, so as to secure them from all assaults of enemies. Every egg is pressed separately into a bed of the soft skin, which soon closes over it automatically, thus burying each in a little cell or niche, where it undergoes its further development. The tadpoles pass through their larval stage within the cell, and then hop out, in the four-legged condition. As soon as they have gone off to shift for themselves, the mother toad finds herself with a ragged and honeycombed skin, which must be very uncomfortable. So she rubs the remnant of it off against stones or the bark of trees, and re-develops a similar back afresh at the next breeding season.
A few examples drawn from these essays will prove what I mean. On the very first page, in the first line of the second paragraph we have the word "often" coming after the word "experience," instead of before it. He had written "experience," he desired to qualify it, and he did not go back to do what should always be done in plain English, and what indeed distinguishes plain English from almost every other language--to put the qualification before the thing qualified; a peculiarly English mark in this, that it presupposes one's having thought the whole thing out before writing it down.
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