Windows of Love

applied to the persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personagecannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody hasrightly remarked, is the first step on the road to civilisation.

No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must gomuch further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years withwhich Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us forpre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably earlierfire-split flints which the Abbe Bourgeois–undaunted mortal!–venturedto discover among the Miocene strata of the _calcaire de Beauce_. Thoseflints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked andstill more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered asgenuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial,one distinguished archaeologist will not admit they can be in any wayhuman; he will have it that they were really the handiwork of the greatEuropean anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothingmore than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does it matter whetheryou call the animal that fashioned these exceedingly rough andfire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? Thefact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it.When you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed tomanufacture himself a convenient implement, you may be sure that man,noble man, with all his glorious and admirable faculties–cannibal orotherwise–is lurking somewhere very close just round the corner. Themore we examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does theconviction force itself upon us that he was very far indeed from beingprimitive–that we must push back the early history of our race not for250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years intothe dim past of Tertiary ages.

But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race bya very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he isseparated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank space,the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the GlacialEpoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as therelatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows stillcap the summits of our southern chalk downs. When the great ice sheetdrove away palaeolithic man–the man of the caves and the unwrought flintaxes–from Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a nakedsavage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, but armedonly with roughly chipped stone implements, and wholly ignorant oftaming animals or of the very rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothingof the use of metals–_aurum irrepertum spernere fortior_–and he hadnot even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone tomahawks to afinished edge. He couldn’t make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery,and, if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing anintoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too greatanthropological truth, justly remarks, ‘man, being reasonable, _must_get drunk’), he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from thecapacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of human

being who alone inhabited France and England during the laterpre-Glacial period.

A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play-bills put it),and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile,loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yetimperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired theimportant arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-madepottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared awayhe followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another man,physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow accumulationsof nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! howhard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then comes the ageof what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive antiquity–the ageof the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lakedwellings. The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow,the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun to sow smallancestral wheat and undeveloped barley; they had learnt to weave flaxand wear decent clothing: in a word, they had passed from the savagehunting condition to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists.That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose we mustconclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn’t to be measured by merecalculations of ten or twenty centuries, but of ten or twenty thousandyears. The perspective of the past is opening up rapidly before us; whatlooked quite close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewherein the dim distance. Like our paleolithic artists, we fail to get thereindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if wesaw the whole scene properly foreshortened.

On the table where I write there lie two paper-weights, preserving fromthe fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which thisessay is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet,produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows,and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age ofthe very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), andit was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther ofprehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which nowserves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder, simpler, andmore ineffective than any weapon or implement at present in use amongthe lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow bythe banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken foresttwo hundred thousand years ago and more; with it he has faced the angrycave bear and the original and only genuine British lion (for everybodyknows that the existing mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than abastard modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I havevery little doubt in my own mind that with it some aesthetic ancestor hasbrained and cut up for his use his next-door neighbour in the nearestcavern, and then carved upon his well-picked bones an interesting sketchof the entire performance. The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact,habitually drew their society pictures upon the personal remains of the

mammoth or the man whom they wished to caricature in deathlessbone-cuts. The other paper-weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk,belonging to the period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the GlacialEpoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels ofcivilisation with great accuracy. It is the military weapon of a trainedbarbaric warrior as opposed to the universal implement and utensil of arude, solitary, savage hunter. Yet how curious it is that even in themidst of this ’so-called nineteenth century,’ which perpetuallyproclaims itself an age of progress, men should still prefer to believethemselves inferior to their original ancestors, instead of beingsuperior to them! The idea that man has risen is considered base,degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen isconsidered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. Formyself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucusthat we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men than ever wereour fathers.

BRITISH AND FOREIGN

Strictly speaking, there is nothing really and truly British; everybodyand everything is a naturalised alien. Viewed as Britons, we all of us,human and animal, differ from one another simply in the length of timewe and our ancestors have continuously inhabited this favoured and foggyisle of Britain. Look, for example, at the men and women of us. Some ofus, no doubt, are more or less remotely of Norman blood, and came over,like that noble family the Slys, with Richard Conqueror. Others of us,perhaps, are in the main Scandinavian, and date back a couple ofgenerations earlier, to the bare-legged followers of Canute and Guthrum.Yet others, once more, are true Saxon Englishmen, descendants ofHengest, if there ever was a Hengest, or of Horsa, if a genuine Horsaever actually existed. None of these, it is quite clear, have any justright or title to be considered in the last resort as true-born Britons;they are all of them just as much foreigners at bottom as theSpitalfields Huguenots or the Pembrokeshire Flemings, the Italianorgan-boy and the Hindoo prince disguised as a crossing-sweeper. Butsurely the Welshman and the Highland Scot at least are undeniableBritishers, sprung from the soil and to the manner born! Not a bit ofit; inexorable modern science, diving back remorselessly into theremoter past, traces the Cymry across the face of Germany, and fixes inshadowy hypothetical numbers the exact date, to a few centuries, of thefirst prehistoric Gaelic invasion. Even the still earlier brownEuskarians and yellow Mongolians, who held the land before the advent ofthe ancient Britons, were themselves immigrants; the very Autochthonesin person turn out, on close inspection, to be vagabonds and wanderersand foreign colonists. In short, man as a whole is not an indigenousanimal at all in the British Isles. Be he who he may, when we push his

pedigree back to its prime original, we find him always arriving in theend by the Dover steamer or the Harwich packet. Five years, in fact, arequite sufficient to give him a legal title to letters of naturalisation,unless indeed he be a German grand-duke, in which case he can alwaysbecome an Englishman off-hand by Act of Parliament.

It is just the same with all the other animals and plants that nowinhabit these isles of Britain. If there be anything at all with a claimto be considered really indigenous, it is the Scotch ptarmigan and theAlpine hare, the northern holygrass and the mountain flowers of theHighland summits. All the rest are sojourners and wayfarers, broughtacross as casuals, like the gipsies and the Oriental plane, at varioustimes to the United Kingdom, some of them recently, some of them longago, but not one of them (it seems), except the oyster, a true native.The common brown rat, for instance, as everybody knows, came over, not,it is true, with William the Conqueror, but with the Hanoverian dynastyand King George I. of blessed memory. The familiar cockroach, or ‘blackbeetle,’ of our lower regions, is an Oriental importation of the lastcentury. The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard inthe land, especially in some big London hotels. The Colorado beetle ishourly expected by Cunard steamer. The Canadian roadside erigeron iswell established already in the remoter suburbs; the phylloxera battenson our hothouse vines; the American river-weed stops the navigation onour principal canals. The Ganges and the Mississippi have long sinceflooded the tawny Thames, as Juvenal’s cynical friend declared theSyrian Orontes had flooded the Tiber. And what has thus been going onslowly within the memory of the last few generations has been going onconstantly from time immemorial, and peopling Britain in all its partswith its now existing fauna and flora.

But if all the plants and animals in our islands are thus ultimatelyimported, the question naturally arises, What was there in Great Britainand Ireland before any of their present inhabitants came to inheritthem? The answer is, succinctly, Nothing. Or if this be a little tooextreme, then let us imitate the modesty of Mr. Gilbert’s hero andmodify the statement into Hardly anything. In England, as in NorthernEurope generally, modern history begins, not with the reign of QueenElizabeth, but with the passing away of the Glacial Epoch. During thatgreat age of universal ice our Britain, from end to end, was covered atvarious times by sea and by glaciers; it resembled on the whole thecheerful aspect of Spitzbergen or Nova Zembla at the present day. A fewreindeer wandered now and then over its frozen shores; a scantyvegetation of the correlative reindeer-moss grew with difficulty underthe sheets and drifts of endless snow; a stray walrus or an occasionalseal basked in the chilly sunshine on the ice-bound coast. But duringthe greatest extension of the North-European ice-sheet it is probablethat life in London was completely extinct; the metropolitan area didnot even vegetate. Snow and snow and snow and snow was then the shortsum-total of British scenery. Murray’s Guides were rendered quiteunnecessary, and penny ices were a drug in the market. England was given

up to one unchanging universal winter.

Slowly, however, times altered, as they are much given to doing; and anew era dawned upon Britain. The thermometer rose rapidly, or at leastit would have risen, with effusion, if it had yet been invented. Theland emerged from the sea, and southern plants and animals began toinvade the area that was afterwards to be England, across the broad beltwhich then connected us with the Continental system. But in those dayscommunications were slow and land transit difficult. You had to foot it.The European fauna and flora moved but gradually and tentativelynorth-westward, and before any large part of it could settle in Englandour island was finally cut off from the mainland by the long and gradualwearing away of the cliffs at Dover and Calais. That accounts for thecomparative poverty of animal and vegetable life in England, and stillmore for its extreme paucity and meagreness in Ireland and theHighlands. It has been erroneously asserted, for example, that St.Patrick expelled snakes and lizards, frogs and toads, from the soil ofErin. This detail, as the French newspapers politely phrase it, isinexact. St. Patrick did not expel the reptiles, because there werenever any reptiles in Ireland (except dynamiters) for him to expel. Thecreatures never got so far on their long and toilsome north-westwardmarch before St. George’s Channel intervened to prevent their passageacross to Dublin. It is really, therefore, to St. George, rather than toSt. Patrick, that the absence of toads and snakes from the soil ofIreland is ultimately due. The doubtful Cappadocian prelate is wellknown to have been always death on dragons and serpents.

As long ago as the sixteenth century, indeed, Verstegan the antiquaryclearly saw that the existence of badgers and foxes in England impliedthe former presence of a belt of land joining the British Islands to theContinent of Europe; for, as he acutely observed, nobody (beforefox-hunting, at least) would ever have taken the trouble to bring themover. Still more does the presence in our islands of the red deer, andformerly of the wild white cattle, the wolf, the bear, and the wildboar, to say nothing of the beaver, the otter, the squirrel, and theweasel, prove that England was once conterminous with France or Belgium.At the very best of times, however, before Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochielhad killed positively the last ‘last wolf’ in Britain (several other’last wolves’ having previously been despatched by various earlierintrepid exterminators), our English fauna was far from a rich one,especially as regards the larger quadrupeds. In bats, birds, and insectswe have always done better, because to such creatures a belt of sea isnot by any means an insuperable barrier; whereas in reptiles andamphibians, on the contrary, we have always been weak, seeing that mostreptiles are bad swimmers, and very few can rival the late lamentedCaptain Webb in his feat of crossing the Channel, as Leander and LordByron did the Hellespont.

Only one good-sized animal, so far as known, is now peculiar to theBritish Isles, and that is our familiar friend the red grouse of the

A PIGEON, oppressed by excessive thirst, saw a goblet of water painted on a signboard. Not supposing it to be only a picture, she flew towards it with a loud whir and unwittingly dashed against the signboard, jarring herself terribly. Having broken her wings by the blow, she fell to the ground, and was caught by one of the bystanders.

Zeal should not outrun discretion.

Scotch moors. I doubt, however, whether even he is really indigenous inthe strictest sense of the word: that is to say, whether he was evolvedin and for these islands exclusively, as the moa and the apteryx wereevolved for New Zealand, and the extinct dodo for Mauritius alone. It isfar more probable that the red grouse is the original variety of thewillow grouse of Scandinavia, which has retained throughout the year itsold plumage, while its more northern cousins among the fiords and fjeldshave taken, under stress of weather, to donning a complete white dressin winter, and a grey or speckled tourist suit for the summer season.

Even since the insulation of Britain a great many new plants andanimals have been added to our population, both by human design and inseveral other casual fashions. The fallow deer is said to have beenintroduced by the Romans, and domesticated ever since in the successiveparks of Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman. The edible snail, stillscattered thinly over our southern downs, and abundant at Box Hill and afew other spots in Surrey or Sussex, was brought over, they tell us, bythe same luxurious Italian epicures, and is even now confined,imaginative naturalists declare, to the immediate neighbourhood of Romanstations. The mediaeval monks, in like manner, introduced the carp fortheir Friday dinners. One of our commonest river mussels at the presentday did not exist in England at all a century ago, but was ferriedhither from the Volga, clinging to the bottoms of vessels from the BlackSea, and has now spread itself through all our brooks and streams to thevery heart and centre of England. Thus, from day to day, as in societyat large, new introductions constantly take place, and old friends dieout for ever. The brown rat replaces the old English black rat; strangeweeds kill off the weeds of ancient days; fresh flies and grubs andbeetles crop up, and disturb the primitive entomological balance. Thebustard is gone from Salisbury Plain; the fenland butterflies havedisappeared with the drainage of the fens. In their place the red-leggedpartridge invades Norfolk; the American black bass is making himselfquite at home, with Yankee assurance, in our sluggish rivers; and thespoonbill is nesting of its own accord among the warmer corners of theSussex downs.

In the plant world, substitution often takes place far more rapidly. Idoubt whether the stinging nettle, which renders picnicking a nuisancein England, is truly indigenous; certainly the two worst kinds, thesmaller nettle and the Roman nettle, are quite recent denizens, neverstraying, even at the present day, far from the precincts of farmyardsand villages. The shepherd’s-purse and many other common garden weeds ofcultivation are of Eastern origin, and came to us at first with theseed-corn and the peas from the Mediterranean region. Corn-cockles andcorn-flowers are equally foreign and equally artificial; even thescarlet poppy, seldom found except in wheat-fields or around wasteplaces in villages, has probably followed the course of tillage fromsome remote and ancient Eastern origin. There is a pretty blue veronicawhich was unknown in England some thirty years since, but which thenbegan to spread in gardens, and is now one of the commonest and most

A NUMBER of Flies were attracted to a jar of honey which had been overturned in a housekeeper’s room, and placing their feet in it, ate greedily. Their feet, however, became so smeared with the honey that they could not use their wings, nor release themselves, and were suffocated. Just as they were expiring, they exclaimed, “O foolish creatures that we are, for the sake of a little pleasure we have destroyed ourselves.”

Pleasure bought with pains, hurts.

A FISHERMAN skilled in music took his flute and his nets to the seashore. Standing on a projecting rock, he played several tunes in the hope that the fish, attracted by his melody, would of their own accord dance into his net, which he had placed below. At last, having long waited in vain, he laid aside his flute, and casting his net into the sea, made an excellent haul of fish.

When he saw them leaping about in the net upon the rock he said: “O you most perverse creatures, when I piped you would not dance, but now that I have ceased you do so merrily.”

troublesome weeds throughout the whole country. Other familiar wildplants have first been brought over as garden flowers. There is thewall-flower, for instance, now escaped from cultivation in every part ofBritain, and mantling with its yellow bunches both old churches andhouses and also the crannies of the limestone cliffs around half theshores of England. The common stock has similarly overrun the sea-frontof the Isle of Wight; the monkey-plant, originally a Chilian flower, hasrun wild in many boggy spots in England and Wales; and a North Americanbalsam, seldom cultivated even in cottage gardens, has managed toestablish itself in profuse abundance along the banks of the Wey aboutGuildford and Godalming. One little garden linaria, at first employed asan ornament for hanging-baskets, has become so common on old walls andbanks as to be now considered a mere weed, and exterminated accordinglyby fashionable gardeners. Such are the unaccountable reverses offortune, that one age will pay fifty guineas a bulb for a plant whichthe next age grubs up unanimously as a vulgar intruder. White ofSelborne noticed with delight in his own kitchen that rare insect, theOriental cockroach, lately imported; and Mr. Brewer observed with joyin his garden at Reigate the blue Buxbaum speedwell, which is now theacknowledged and hated pest of the Surrey agriculturist.

The history of some of these waifs and strays which go to make up thewider population of Britain is indeed sufficiently remarkable. Like allislands, England has a fragmentary fauna and flora, whose members haveoften drifted towards it in the most wonderful and varied manner.Sometimes they bear witness to ancient land connections, as in the caseof the spotted Portuguese slug which Professor Allman found calmlydisporting itself on the basking cliffs in the Killarney district. Informer days, when Spain and Ireland joined hands in the middle of theBay of Biscay, the ancestors of this placid Lusitanian mollusk must haveranged (good word to apply to slugs) from the groves of Cintra to theCove of Cork. But, as time rolled on, the cruel crawling sea rolled onalso, and cut away all the western world from the foot of the Asturiasto Macgillicuddy’s Reeks. So the spotted slug continued to survive intwo distinct and divided bodies, a large one in South-western Europe,and a small isolated colony, all alone by itself, around the Kerrymountains and the Lakes of Killarney. At other times pure accidentaccounts for the presence of a particular species in the mainlands ofBritain. For example, the Bermuda grass-lily, a common American plant,is known in a wild state nowhere in Europe save at a place calledWoodford, in county Galway. Nobody ever planted it there; it has simplysprung up from some single seed, carried over, perhaps, on the feet of abird, or cast ashore by the Gulf Stream on the hospitable coast ofWestern Ireland. Yet there it has flourished and thriven ever since, anaturalised British subject of undoubted origin, without ever spreadingto north or south above a few miles from its adopted habitat.

There are several of these unconscious American importations in variousparts of Britain, some of them, no doubt, brought over with seed-corn oramong the straw of packing-cases, but others unconnected in any way with