Because They Do Not
Do As We Should Do Under Similar Circumstances Is No Proof That They Do
Not Possess The Power To Hear And See.
Experiments, for instance, have
been made with bees to find out if they have any sense of hearing, by
shouting close to a bee, drawing discordant notes on the violin, striking
pieces of metal together, and so on, to all of which the bee remained
indifferent.
What else could she do? Neither of these sounds hurt if she
heard them, nor seemed to threaten danger; they simply conveyed no
impression at all to her mind. Observe your favourite pussy curled up in
the arm-chair at such time as she knows the dishes have been cleared
away, and there is no more chance of wheedling a titbit from you. You may
play the piano, or the violin, or knock with a hammer, or shout your
loudest, she will take no notice, no more than if she actually had no
ears at all. Are you, therefore, to conclude she does not hear you? As
well conclude that people do not hear the thunder because they do not
shout in answer to it. Such noises simply do not concern her, and she
takes no notice. Now, though her eyes be closed, let a strange dog run
in, and at the light pad pad of his feet, scarcely audible on the carpet,
she is up in a moment, blazing with wrath. That is a sound that interests
her. So, too, perhaps, it may be with ants and bees, who may hear and
see, and yet take no apparent notice because the circumstances are not
interesting, and the experiment is to them unintelligible. Fishes in
particular have been often, I think, erroneously judged in this way, and
have been considered deaf, and to have little intelligence, while in
truth the fact is we have not discovered a way of communicating with them
any more than they have found a way of talking with us. Fishes, I know,
are keener of sight than I am when they are interested, and I believe
they can hear equally well, and are not by any means without mind. These
ants that acted so foolishly to appearance may have been influenced by
some former experience of which we know nothing; there may be something
in the past history of the ant which may lead them to profoundly suspect
interference with their path as indicative of extreme danger. Once,
perhaps, many ant-generations ago, there was some creature which acted
thus in order to destroy them. This, of course, is merely an illustration
put forward to suggest the idea that there may be a reason in the brain
of the ant of which we know nothing. I do not know that I myself am any
more rational, for looking back along the path of life I can see now how
I turned and twisted and went to the right and the left in the most
crooked manner, putting myself to endless trouble, when by taking one
single step straight forward in the right direction, if I had only known,
I might have arrived at once at the goal. Can any of us look beyond the
little ridge of one day and see what will happen the day after? Some
hours afterwards, towards evening, I found the ants were beginning to get
over their difficulty. On one side an ant would go forward in a
half-circle, on the other another ant would advance sideways, and meeting
together they would touch their antennae, and then the first would travel
back with the second, and so the line was reestablished. It was very much
as if two batsmen at opposite wickets should run forward each halfway,
and after shaking hands and conversing, one of them should lead the other
safely over.
WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS.
I.
If you will look at a grain of wheat you will see that it seems folded
up: it has crossed its arms and rolled itself up in a cloak, a fold of
which forms a groove, and so gone to sleep. If you look at it some time,
as people in the old enchanted days used to look into a mirror, or the
magic ink, until they saw living figures therein, you can almost trace a
miniature human being in the oval of the grain. It is narrow at the top,
where the head would be, and broad across the shoulders, and narrow again
down towards the feet; a tiny man or woman has wrapped itself round about
with a garment and settled to slumber. Up in the far north, where the
dead ice reigns, our arctic explorers used to roll themselves in a
sleeping-bag like this, to keep the warmth in their bodies against the
chilliness of the night. Down in the south, where the heated sands of
Egypt never cool, there in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped
and lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, in the hope, it
may be, that spices and balm might retain within the sarcophagus some
small fragment of human organism through endless ages, till at last the
gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the mummy is folded in
its cloth. And I do not know really whether I might not say that these
little grains of English corn do not hold within them the actual flesh
and blood of man. Transubstantiation is a fact there.
Sometimes the grains are dry and shrivelled and hard as shot, sometimes
they are large and full and have a juiciness about them, sometimes they
are a little bit red, others are golden, many white. The sack stands open
in the market - you can thrust your arm in it a foot deep, or take up a
handful and let it run back like a liquid stream, or hold it in your palm
and balance it, feeling the weight.
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