The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Place of Animals in Human Thought, by Contessa Evelyn Lilian Hazeldine Carrington Martinengo-Cesaresco

THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN
HUMAN THOUGHT

The Emperor Akbar personally directing the tying up of a wild Elephant.
Tempera painting by Abu’l Fazl. (1597-98.)
Photographed for this work from the original in the India Museum.

THE PLACE OF ANIMALS

IN HUMAN THOUGHT

BY

THE COUNTESS EVELYN

MARTINENGO CESARESCO

“On ne connait rien que par bribes.”—M. Berthelot

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

153-157 FIFTH AVENUE

1909

“C’est l’éternel secret qui veut être gardé.”

(All rights reserved.)

PREFACE

AT the Congress held at Oxford in September, 1908, those who heard Count Goblet d’Alviella’s address on the “Method and Scope of the History of Religions” must have felt the thrill which announces the stirring of new ideas, when, in a memorable passage, the speaker asked “whether the psychology of animals has not equally some relation to the science of religions?” At any rate, these words came to me as a confirmation of the belief that the study which has engaged my attention for several years, is rapidly advancing towards recognition as a branch of the inquiry into what man is himself. The following chapters on the different answers given to this question when extended from man to animals, were intended, from the first, to form a whole, not complete, indeed, but perhaps fairly comprehensive. I offer them now to the public with my warmest acknowledgments to the scholars whose published works and, in some cases, private hints have made my task possible. I also wish to thank the Editor of the Contemporary Review for his kindness in allowing me to reprint the part of this book which appeared first in that periodical.

Some chapters refer rather to practice than to psychology, and others to myths and fancies rather than to conscious speculation, but all these subjects are so closely connected that it would be difficult to divide their treatment by a hard-and-fast line.

With regard to the illustrations, I am glad to bear grateful testimony to the facilities afforded me by the Directors of the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Hague Gallery, the National Museum at Copenhagen, the Egypt Exploration Fund, and by the Secretary of State for India. H.E. Monsieur Camille Barrère, French Ambassador at Rome, has allowed me to include a photograph of his remarkably fine specimen of a bronze cat; and I have obtained the sanction of Monsieur Marcel Dieulafoy for the reproduction of one of Madame Dieulafoy’s photographs which appeared in his magnificent work on “L’Art Antique de la Perse.” Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Limited, and Messrs. Chapman and Hall, Limited, have permitted photographs to be taken of two plates in books published by them. Finally, Dr. C. Waldstein and Mr. E. B. Havell have been most kind in helping me to give the correct description of some of the plates.

Salò, Lago di Garda.

February 15, 1909.

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

ILLUSTRATIONS

LT COL. MAISEY DEL. W. BRIGGS, LITH.
DEER WORSHIPPING THE WHEEL OF THE LAW.
Tope of Sanchi.

The Place of Animals in Human Thought

I
SOUL-WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS

IN one of these enigmatic sayings which launch the mind on boundless seas, Cardinal Newman remarked that we know less of animals than of angels. A large part of the human race explains the mystery by what is called transmigration, metempsychosis, Samsara, Seelenwanderung; the last a word so compact and picturesque that it is a pity not to imitate it in English. The intelligibility of ideas depends much on whether words touch the spring of the picture-making wheel of the brain; “Soul-wandering” does this.

Ancient as the theory is, we ought to remember what is commonly forgotten—that somewhere in the distance we catch sight of a time when it was unknown, at least in the sense of a procession of the soul from death to life through animal forms. Traces of it are to be found in the Sutras and it is thoroughly developed in the Upanishads, but if the Sutras belong to the thirteenth century and the Upanishads to about the year 700 before Christ, a long road still remains to the Vedas with their fabulous antiquity.

In the Vedas it is stated that the soul may wander, even during sleep, and that it will surely have a further existence after death, but there is nothing to show that in this further existence it will take the form of an animal. Man will be substantially man, able to feel the same pleasures as his prototype on earth; but if he goes to a good place, exempt from the same pains. What, then, was the Vedic opinion of animals? On the whole, it is safe to assume that the authors of the Vedic chants believed that animals, like men, entered a soul-world in which they preserved their identity. The idea of funeral sacrifices, as exemplified in these earliest records, was that of sending some one before. The horse and the goat that were immolated at a Vedic funeral were intended to go and announce the coming of the man’s soul. Wherever victims were sacrificed at funerals, they were originally meant to do something in the after-life; hence they must have had souls. The origin of the Suttee was the wish that the wife should accompany her husband, and among primitive peoples animals were sacrificed because the dead man might have need of them. Not very long ago an old Irish woman, on being remonstrated with for having killed her dead husband’s horse, replied with the words, “Do you think I would let my man go on foot in the next world?” On visiting that wonderfully emotion-awakening relic, the Viking ship at Christiania, I was interested to see the bones of the Chief’s horses and dogs as well as his own. Did the Norsemen, passionately devoted to the sea as they were, suppose, that not only the animals, but also the vessel in which they buried their leader, would have a ghostly second existence? I have no doubt that they did. Apart from what hints may be gleaned from the Vedas, there is an inherent probability against the early Aryans, any more than the modern Hindu, believing that the soul of man or beast comes suddenly to a full stop. To destroy spirit seems to the Asiatic mind as impossible as to destroy matter seems to the biologist.

Leaving the Vedas and coming down to the Sutras and Upanishads, we discover the transmigration of souls at first suggested and then clearly defined. Whence came it? Was it the belief of those less civilised nations whom the Aryans conquered, and did they, in accepting it from them, give it a moral complexion by investing it with the highly ethical significance of an upward or downward progress occasioned by the merits or demerits of the soul in a previous state of being?

A large portion of mankind finds it as difficult to conceive a sudden beginning as a sudden end of spirit. We forget difficulties which we are not in the habit of facing; those who have tried to face this one have generally stumbled over it. Even Dante with his subtle psychophysiological reasoning hardly persuades. The ramifications of a life before stretched far: “Whosoever believes in the fabled prior existence of souls, let him be anathema,” thundered the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 543. Which shows that many Christians shared Origen’s views on this subject.

From the moment that soul-wandering became, in India, a well-established doctrine, some three thousand years ago, the conception of the status of animals was perfectly clear. “Wise people,” says the Bhagavad Gita, “see the same soul (Atman) in the Brahman, in worms and insects, in the outcasts, in the dog and the elephant, in beasts, cows, gadflies, and gnats.” Here we have the doctrine succinctly expounded, and in spite of subtleties introduced by later philosophers (such as that of the outstanding self) the exposition holds good to this day as a statement of the faith of India. It also described the doctrine of Pythagoras, which ancient traditions asserted that he brought from Egypt, where no such doctrine ever existed. Pythagoras is still commonly supposed to have borrowed from Egypt; but it is strange that a single person should continue to hold an opinion against which so much evidence has been produced; especially as it is surely very easy to explain the tradition by interpreting Egypt to have stood for “the East” in common parlance, exactly as in Europe a tribe of low caste Indians came to be called gypsies or Egyptians. Pythagoras believed that he had been one of the Trojan heroes, whose shield he knew at a glance in the Temple of Juno where it was hung up. After him, Empedocles thought that he had passed through many forms, amongst others those of a bird and a fish. Pythagoras and his fire-spent disciple belong to times which seem almost near if judged by Indian computations: yet they are nebulous figures; they seem to us, and perhaps they seemed to men who lived soon after them, more like mysterious, half Divine bearers of a word than men of flesh and blood. But Plato, who is real to us and who has influenced so profoundly modern thought, Plato took their theory and displayed it to the Western world as the most logical explanation of the mystery of being.

The theory of transmigration did not commend itself to Roman thinkers, though it was admirably stated by a Roman poet:—

“Omnia mutantur: nihil interit. Errat, et illinc

Huc venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus

Spiritus, eque feris, humana in corpora transit,

Inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo.

Utque novis facilis signatur cera figuris,

Nec manet ut fuerat, nec formas servat easdem,

Sed tamen ipsa eadem est: animam sic semper eandem

Esse.”

This description is as accurate as it is elegant; but it remains a question whether Ovid had anything deeper than a folk-lorist’s interest in transmigration joined to a certain sympathy which it often inspires in those who are fond of animals. The enthusiastic folk-lorist finds himself believing in all sorts of things at odd times. Lucian’s admirers at Rome doubtless enjoyed his ridiculous story of a Pythagorean cock which had been a man, a woman, a prince, a subject, a fish, a horse and a frog, and which summed up its varied experience in the judgment that man was the most wretched and deplorable of all creatures, all others patiently grazing within the enclosures of Nature while man alone breaks out and strays beyond those safe limits. This story was retold with great gusto by Erasmus. The Romans were a people with inclusive prejudices, and they were not likely to welcome a narrowing of the gulf between themselves and the beasts of the field. Cicero’s dictum that, while man looks before and after, analysing the past and forecasting the future, animals have only the perception of the present, does not go to the excess of those later theorists who, like Descartes, reduced animals to automata, but it goes farther than scientific writers on the subject would now allow to be justified.

It is worth while asking, what was it that so powerfully attracted Plato in the theory of transmigration? I think that Plato, who made a science of the moral training of the mind, was attracted by soul-wandering as a scheme of soul-evolution. Instead of looking at it as a matter of fact which presupposed an ethical root (which is the Indian view), he looked upon it as an ethical root which presupposed a matter of fact. He was influenced a little, no doubt, by the desire to get rid of Hades, “an unpleasant place,” as he says, “and not true,” for which he felt a peculiar antipathy, but he was influenced far more by seeing in soul-wandering a rational theory of the ascent of the soul, a Darwinism of the spirit. “We are plants,” he said, “not of earth but of heaven,” but it takes the plants of heaven a long time to grow.

We ought to admire the Indian mind, which first seized the idea of time in relation to development and soared out of the cage of history (veritable or imaginary) into liberal æons to account for one perfect soul, one plant that had accomplished its heavenly destiny. But though the Indian seer argues with Plato that virtue has its own reward (not so much an outward reward of improved environment as an inward reward of approximation to perfection), he disagrees with the Greek philosopher with regard to the practical result of all this as it affects any of us personally. Plato found the theory of transmigration entirely consoling; the Indian finds it entirely the reverse. Can the reason be that Plato took the theory as a beautiful symbol while the Indian takes it as a dire reality?

The Hindu is as much convinced that the soul is re-born in different animals as we are that children are born of women. He is convinced of it, but he is not consoled by it. Let us reflect a little: does not one life give us time to get somewhat tired of it; how should we feel after fifteen hundred lives? The wandering Jew has never been thought an object of envy, but the wandering soul has a wearier lot; it knows the sorrows of all creation.

“How many births are past I cannot tell,

How many yet may be no man may say,

But this alone I know and know full well,

That pain and grief embitter all the way.”[^[1]]

[1]. “Folk-Songs of Southern India,” by Charles E. Gover, a fascinating but little-known work.

Rather than this—death. How far deeper the gloom revealed by these lines from the folk-songs of an obscure Dravidian tribe living in the Nilgiri Hills, than any which cultured Western pessimism can show! Compared with them, the despairing cry of Baudelaire seems almost a hymn of joy:—

“’Tis death that cheers and gives us strength to live,

’Tis life’s chief aim, sole hope that can abide,

Our wine, elixir, glad restorative

Whence we gain heart to walk till eventide.

Through snow, through frost, through tempests it can give

Light that pervades th’ horizon dark and wide;

The inn which makes secure when we arrive

Our food and sleep, all labour laid aside.

It is an Angel whose magnetic hand

Gives quiet sleep and dreams of extasy,

And strews a bed for naked folk and poor.

’Tis the god’s prize, the mystic granary,

The poor man’s purse and his old native land,

And of the unknown skies the opening door.”

Folk-songs are more valuable aids than the higher literature of nations in an inquiry as to what they really believe. The religion of the Dravidian mountaineers is purely Aryan (though their race is not); their songs may be taken, therefore, as Aryan documents. They are particularly characteristic of the dual belief as to a future state which is, to this day, widely diffused. How firmly these people believe in transmigration the quatrain quoted above bears witness; yet they also believe that souls are liable to immediate judgment. This contradiction is explained by the theory that a long interval may elapse between death and re-incarnation and that during this interval the soul meets with a reward or punishment. To say the truth, the explanation sounds a rather lame one. Is it not more likely that the idea of immediate judgment, wherever it appears, is a relic of Vedic belief which has to be reconciled, as best it can, with the later idea of transmigration? The Dravidian songs are remarkable for their strong inculcation of regard for animals. In their impressive funeral dirge which is a public confession of the dead man’s sins, it is owned that he killed a snake, a lizard and a harmless frog. And that not mere lifetaking was the point condemned, is clearly proved by the further admission that the delinquent put the young ox to the plough before it was strong enough to work. In a Dravidian vision of Heaven and Hell certain of the Blest are perceived milking their happy kine, and it is explained that these are they who, when they saw the lost kine of neighbour or stranger in the hills, drove them home nor left them to perish from tiger or wolf. Surely in this, as in the Jewish command which it so closely resembles, we may read mercy to beast as well as to man.

It is sometimes said that there is as much cruelty to animals in India as anywhere. Some of this cruelty (as it seems to us) is caused directly by reluctance to take life; of the other sort, caused by callousness, it can be only said that the human brute grows under every sky. One great fact is admitted: children are not cruel in India: Victor Hugo could not have written his terrible poem about the tormented toad in India. I think it a mistake to attribute the Indian sentiment towards animals wholly to transmigration; nevertheless, it may be granted that such a belief fosters such a sentiment. Indeed, if it were allowable to look upon the religion of the many as the morality of the one, it would seem natural to suppose that the theory of transmigration was invented by some creature-loving sage on purpose to give men a fellow-feeling for their humbler relations. Even so, many a bit of innocent folk-fable has served as “protective colouration” to beast or bird: the legend of the robin who covered up the Babes in the Wood; the legend of the swallow who did some little service to the crucified Saviour, and how many other such tender fancies. Who invented them, and why?

If Plato had wished simply to find a happy substitute for Hades, he might have found it—had he looked far enough—in the Vedic kingdom of the sun, radiant and eternal, where sorrow is not, where the crooked are made straight, ruled over by Yama the first man to die and the first to live again, death’s bright angel, lord of the holy departed—how far from Pluto and the “Tartarean grey.” It would not have provided a solution to the mystery of being, but it might have made many converts, for after a happy heaven all antiquity thirsted.

THE BUDDHISTIC TIGER.
British Museum.
(From a painting on silk by Ko-Tō.)

It is not sure if the scheme of existence mapped out in soul-wandering is really more consoling for beast than for man. It is a poor compliment to some dogs to say that they have been some men. Then again, it is recognised as easier for a dog to be good than for a man to be good, but after a dog has passed his little life in well-doing he dies with the prospect that his spirit, which by his merits becomes again a man, will be sent down, by that man’s transgressions, to the society of jackals. According to the doctrine of soul-wandering, animals are, in brief, the Purgatory of men. Just as prayers for the dead (which means, prayers for the remission to them of a merited period of probation) represent an important branch of Catholic observances, so prayers for the remission of a part of the time which souls would otherwise spend in animal forms constitute the most vital and essential feature in Brahmanical worship.

Of course, this is also true of Buddhism, to which many people think that the theory of soul-wandering belongs exclusively, unmindful that the older faith has it as well. The following hymn, used in Thibet, shows how accurately the name of Purgatory applies to the animal incarnations of the soul:—

“If we [human beings] have amassed any merit

In the three states,

We rejoice in this good fortune when we consider

The unfortunate lot of the poor [lower] animals,

Piteously engulphed in the ocean of misery;

On their behalf, we now turn the Wheel of Religion.”

There are grounds for thinking that the purgatorial view of animals was part of the religious beliefs of the highly civilised native races of South America. The Christianised Indians are very gentle in their ways towards animals, while among the savage tribes in Central Peru (which are probably degraded off-shoots from the people of the Incas) the belief still survives that good men become monkeys or jaguars, and bad men parrots or reptiles. For the rest, soul-wandering has an enduring fascination for the human mind.

In January, 1907, Leandro Improta, a young man well furnished with worldly goods, shot himself in a café at Naples. His pocket was found to contain a letter in which he said that the act was prompted by a desire to study metempsychosis; much had been written on the subject, but it pleased him better to discover than to talk: “so I determined to die and see whether I shall be re-born in the form of some animal. It would be delightful to return to this world as a lion or a rat.” It might not prove delightful after all!

II
THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS

“THE heralds brought a sacred hecatomb to the gods through the city and the long-haired Grecians were assembled under the shady grove of far-darting Apollo, but when they had tasted the upper flesh and had drawn it out, having divided the shares, they made a delightful feast.” In this description the poet of the Odyssey not only calls up a wonderfully vivid picture of an ancient fête-day, but also shows the habit of mind of the Homeric Greeks in regard to animal food. They were voracious eaters—although the frequent reference to feasts ought not to make us suppose that meat was their constant diet; rather the reverse, for then it would not have been so highly rated. But when they had the chance, they certainly did eat with unfastidious copiousness and unashamed enjoyment. It is not pleasant to read about, for it sets one thinking of things by no means far away or old; for instance, of the disappearance of half-cooked beef at some Continental tables d’hôte. We find that Homer is painfully near us. But in Homeric times the ghost of a scruple had to be laid before the feast could be enjoyed. Animal food was still closely connected with the idea of sacrifice. Sacrifice lends distinction to subject as well as object; it was some atonement to the animal to dedicate him to the gods. He was covered with garlands and attended by long-robed priests; his doom was his triumph. The devoted heifer or firstling of the flock was glorified beyond all its kind. Some late sceptic of the Anthology asked what possible difference it could make to the sheep whether it were devoured by a wolf or sacrificed to Herakles so that he might protect the sheepfold from wolves? But scepticism is a poor thing. From immolation to apotheosis there is but a step; how many human victims willingly bowed their heads to the knife!

The sacrificial aspect of the slaughter of domestic animals took a strong hold of the popular imagination. It is still suggested by the procession of garlanded beasts which traverses the Italian village on the approach of Easter: the only time of year when the Italian peasant touches meat. In the tawdry travesty of the Bœuf gras, though the origin is the same, every shred of the old significance is lost, but among simple folk south of the Alps, unformed thoughts which know not whence they come still contribute a sort of religious glamour to that last pageant. Far back, indeed, stretches the procession of the victims, human and animal—for wherever there was animal sacrifice, at some remote epoch, “the goat without horns” was also offered up.

The Homeric Greeks had no butchers; they did the slaying of beasts themselves or their priests did it for them. Agamemnon kills the boar sacrificed to Zeus with his own hands, which are first uplifted in prayer. The commonest meat was the flesh of swine, as may be seen by the pig of Æsop which replied, on being asked by the sheep why he cried out when caught, “They take you for your wool or milk, but me for my life.” In Homer, however, there is much talk of fatted sheep, kids and oxen, and there is even mention of killing a cow. The Athenians had qualms about slaughtering the ox, the animal essential to agriculture—though they did it—but the Homeric Greek was not troubled by such thoughts. He was not over nice about anything; he was his own cook, and he did not lose his appetite while he roasted his bit of meat on the spit. A Greek repast of that age would have shocked the abstemious Indian as much as the Hindu reformer, Keshub Chunder Sen, confessed to have been shocked by the huge joints on English sideboards.

Putting aside his meat-eating proclivities, for which we cannot throw stones at him, the Greek of the Iliad and of the Odyssey is the friend of his beast. He does not regard it as his long-lost brother, but he sees in it a devoted servant; sometimes more than human in love if less than human in wit. His point of view, though detached, was appreciative. Practically it was the point of view of the twentieth century. Homer belongs to the Western world, and in a great measure to the modern Western world. He had no racial fellow-feeling with animals; yet he could feel for the sparrow that flutters round its murdered young ones and for the vulture that rends the air with cries when the countryman takes its fledglings from the nest. He could shed one immortal tear over the faithful hound that recognises his master and dies. “There lay the dog Argus, full of vermin.” If it had not been a living creature, what sight could have more repelled human eyes? But with dog as with man, the miserable body is as naught beside—what in the man we call the soul. “He fawned with his tail and laid down both his ears, but he could no more come nearer his master.” All the sense of disgust is gone and there is something moist, perhaps, in our eyes too, though it is not the ichor of immortality.

Giving names to animals is the first instinctive confession that they are not things. What sensible man ever called his table Carlo or his inkpot Trilby? Homer gives his horses the usual names of horses in his day; this is shown by the fact that he calls more than one horse by the same name. Hector’s steeds were Xanthus, Æthon and noble Lampus; often would Andromache mix wine for them even before she attended to the wants of her husband, or offer them the sweet barley with her own white hands. Æthe is the name of Agamemnon’s graceful and fleet-footed mare. Xanthus and Balius, offspring of Podarges, are the horses which Achilles received from his father. He bids them bring their charioteer back in safety to the body of the Greeks—and then follows the impressive incident of the warning given to him of his impending fate. The horse Xanthus bends low his head: his long mane, which is collected in a ring, droops till it touches the ground. Hera gives him power of speech and he tells how, though the steeds of Achilles will do their part right well, not all their swiftness, not all their faithful service can save their master from the doom that even now is drawing near. “The furies restrain the voice”: the laws which govern the natural order of things must not be violated. “O Xanthus,” cries Achilles, “O Xanthus, why dost thou predict my death?... Well do I know myself that it is my fate to perish here, far away from my dear father and mother!” It is the passionate cry of the Greek, the lover of life as none has loved it, the lover of the sweet air gladdened by the sun.

Many a soldier may have spoken to his horse, half in jest, as Achilles spoke to Xanthus and Balius: “bring me safely out of the fray.” The supernatural and terrible reply comes with the shock of the unforeseen, like a clap of thunder on a calm day. This incident is a departure from the usual Homeric conventionality, for it takes us into the domain of real magic. The belief that animals know things that we know not, and see things that we see not, is scattered over all the earth. Are there not still good people who feel an “eerie” sensation when a cat stares fixedly into vacancy in the twilight? “Eerie” sensations count for much in early beliefs, but what counts for more is the observation of actual facts which are not and, perhaps, cannot be explained. The uneasiness of animals before an earthquake, or the refusal of some animals to go to sea on ships which afterwards come to grief—to refer to only two instances of a class of phenomena the existence of which cannot be gainsaid—would be sufficient to convince any savage or any primitive man that animals have foreknowledge. If they know the future on one point, why should they not know it on others? The primitive man generally starts from something which he deems certain; he deals in “certainties” far more than in hypotheses, and when he has seized a “certainty” in his own fashion he draws logical deductions from it. Savages and children have a ruthless logic of their own.

The prophetic power of animals has important bearings on the subject of divination. In cases of animal portents the later theory may have been that the animal was the passive instrument or medium of a superior power; but it is not likely that this was the earliest theory. The goddess did not use Xanthus as a mouthpiece: she simply gave him the faculty of speech so that he could say what he already knew. The second sight of animals was believed to be communicable to man through their flesh, and especially through their blood. Porphyry says plainly that diviners fed on the hearts of crows, vultures, and moles (the heart being the fountain of the blood), because in this manner they partook of the souls of these animals, and received the influence of the gods who accompanied these souls. The blood conveyed the qualities of the spirit. In my opinion the Hebrew ordinance against partaking of the blood was connected with this idea; the soul was not to be meddled with. I do not know if attention has been paid to the remarkable juxtaposition of the blood prohibition with enchantment in Leviticus xix. 26. The Institutes of Manu clearly indicate that the blood was not to be swallowed because, by doing so, could be procured an illicit mixing up of personality: the most awful of sins, more awful because so much more mysterious than our mediæval “pact,” or selling the soul to the devil. A knowledge of magic is essential to the true comprehension of all sacred writings.

That animals formerly talked with human voices was the genuine belief of most early races, but there are few traces of it in Greek literature. A hint of a real folk-belief is to be found, perhaps, in the remark of Clytemnestra, who says of Cassandra, when she will not descend from the car that has brought her, a prisoner, to Agamemnon’s palace:—

“I wot—unless like swallows she doth use

Some strange barbarian tongue from over sea,

My words must bring persuasion to her soul.”

But such hints are not frequent. The stories of “talking beasts” which enjoyed an immense popularity in Greece were founded on as conscious “make-believe” as the Beast tales of the Middle Ages. From the “Battle of the Frogs and Mice” to Æsop’s fables, and from these to the comedies of Aristophanes, the animals are meant to hold up human follies to ridicule or human virtues to admiration. The object was to instruct while amusing when it was not to amuse without instructing. Æsop hardly asks the most guileless to believe that his stories are of the “all true” category—which is why children rarely quite take them to their hearts. At the same time, he shows a close study of the idiosyncrasies of animals, so close that there is little to alter in his characterisation. Out of the mass of stories in the collection attributed to him, one or two only seem to carry us back to a more ingenuous age. The following beautiful little tale of the “Lion’s Kingdom” is vaguely reminiscent of the world-tradition of a “Peace in Nature.”

“The beasts of the field and forest had a lion as their king. He was neither wrathful, cruel, nor tyrannical, but just and gentle as a king could be. He made during his reign a proclamation for a general assembly of all the birds and beasts, and drew up conditions for an universal league in which the Wolf and the Lamb, the Panther and the Kid, the Tiger and the Stag, the Dog and the Hare, should live together in perfect peace and amity. The Hare said, ‘Oh, how I have longed to see this day, in which the weak shall take their place with impunity by the side of the strong.’”

The temper of a people towards animals can be judged from its sports. It has been well said, Who could imagine Pericles presiding over a “Roman holiday”? Wanton cruelty to animals seemed to the Greeks an outrage to the gods. The Athenians inflicted a fine on a vivisector of the name of Xenocrates (he called himself a “philosopher”) who had skinned a goat alive. In Greece, from Homeric times downwards, the most favourite sport was the chariot-race which, at first, possessed the importance of a religious event, and always had a dignity above that of a mere pastime. The horses received their full share of honour and glory; for many centuries the graves of Cimon’s mares, with which he had thrice conquered at the Olympian games, were pointed out to the stranger, near his own tomb.

In the ancient Greek as in the modern world, while the majority held the views about animals which I have briefly sketched, a small minority held views of quite a different kind. It may be that no outward agency is required to cause the periodical appearance of men who are driven from the common road by the nostalgia of a state in which the human creature had not learnt to shed blood. The earliest tradition agrees with the latest science in testifying that man did not always eat flesh. It seems as if sometimes, in every part of the earth, an irresistible impulse takes hold of him to resume his primal harmlessness. It is natural, however, that students should have sought some more definite explanation for the introduction of the Orphic sect into Greece, where it can be traced to about the time generally given to Buddha—the sixth century B.C. Some have conjectured that dark-skinned, white-robed missionaries from India penetrated into Europe as we know that they penetrated into China, bringing with them the gospel of the unity of all sentient things. Others agree with what seems to have been thought by Herodotus: that wandering pilgrims brought home treasured secrets from the temple of Ammon or some other of those Egyptian shrines with which the Greeks constantly kept up certain rapports. It may be, now, that these two theories will be abandoned in favour of a third which would refer the origin of the Orphists to Ægean times and suppose them to be the last followers of an earlier faith. When they do come into history, it is as poor and ignorant people—like the Doukhobors of to-day—whose obscurity might well account for their having remained long unobserved. But this is no reason for concluding that their beginnings were obscure.

What is best understood about them is that they abstained rigorously from flesh except during the rare performance of some rite of purification, in which they tasted the blood of a bull which was supposed to procure mystic union with the divine. As happened with the performers of other cruel or horrid rites, the transcendent significance they ascribed to the act paralysed their power of recognising its revolting nature. A diseased spiritualism which ignores matter altogether is the real key to such phenomena. It is too soon to say whether any link can be established between the Orphic practices and the so-called “bull-fights” of which traces have been found in Crete. Despised and tabooed though they were in historical Greece, the Orphists are still held to have exercised some sure though undefined influence on the development of the greatest spiritual fact of Hellenic civilisation, the Eleusinian Mysteries.

(Photo: Sommer)
ORPHEUS.
(Fresco at Pompeii.)

The popular description of Orpheus as founder of the Orphists must be taken for what it is worth. The sect may have either evolved or borrowed the legend. Christianity itself appropriated the myth of Orpheus, pictorially, at least, in those rude tracings in the Roman catacombs showing the Good Shepherd in that character, which inspired Carlyle to write one of the most impassioned passages in English prose. The sweet lute-player who held entranced lion and lamb till the one forgot his wrath and the other his fear, was the natural symbol of the prototype of a humane religion.

Out of the nebulous patches of Greek enthusiasts who cherished tender feelings towards animals, emerges the intellectual sun of the Samian sage. It is difficult not to connect Pythagoras in some way with the Orphists, nor would such a connexion make it the less probable that he journeyed to the sacred East in search of fuller knowledge. Little, indeed, do we know about this moulder of minds. He passed across the world’s stage dark “with excess of light”—an influence rather than a personality. Yet he was as far as possible from being only a dreamer of dreams; he was the Newton, the Galileo, perhaps the Edison and Marconi of his epoch. And it was this double character of moral teacher and man of science which caused the extraordinary reverence with which he was regarded. Science and religion were not divorced then; the Prophet could present no credentials so valid as an understanding of the laws which govern the universe. Mathematics and astronomy were revelations of divine truth. It was the scientific insight of Pythagoras, the wonderful range and depth of which is borne out more and more by modern discoveries, that lent supreme importance to whatever theories he was known to have held. The doctrine of transmigration had not been treated seriously while it was only preached by the Orphists, but after it was adopted by Pythagoras it commanded a wide attention, though it never won a large acceptance. One expounder it had, who was too remarkable an original thinker to be called a mere disciple—the greatly-gifted Empedocles, who denounced the eaters of flesh as no better than cannibals, which was going further than Pythagoras himself had ever gone.

Even in antiquity, there were some who suspected that at the bottom of the Pythagorean propaganda was the wish to make men more humane. Without taking that view, it may be granted that a strong love of animals prepares the mind to think of them as not so very different from men. A thing that tends in the same direction is the unfavourable comparison of some men with some beasts: the sort of sentiment which made Madame de Staël say that the more she knew of men the more she liked dogs. Did not Darwin declare that he would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from various still extant races of mankind? Darwinism is really the theory of Pythagoras with the supernatural element left out. The homogeneity of living things is one of the very old beliefs from which we strayed and to which we are returning.

Among the Greeks, sensitive and meditative minds which did not place faith in the Pythagorean system of life were attracted, nevertheless, by its speculative possibilities which they bent to their own purposes. Thus Socrates borrowed from Pythagoras when he suggested that imperfect and earth-bound spirits might be re-incorporated in animals whose conventionally ascribed characteristics corresponded with their own moral natures. Unjust, tyrannical, and violent men would become wolves, hawks, and kites, while good commonplace people—virtuous Philistines—would take better forms, such as ants, bees, and wasps, all of which live harmoniously in communities. It is pleasant to find that Socrates did justice to that intelligent insect, the undeservedly aspersed wasp. Men who are good in all respects save the highest, may re-assume human forms. Socrates does not explain why it is that humanity progresses so slowly if it is always being recruited from such good material? He passes on from these righteous men to the super-excellent man to whom alone he allots translation into a divine and wholly immaterial sphere; he it is who departs from this world completely pure of earthly dross; who cannot be moved by ill-fortune, poverty, disgrace; who has “overcome the world” in the Pauline sense, who has died while living, in the Indian sense. Though Socrates does not say so, it is this super-excellent man who really convinces him of the immortality of the soul according to the meaning which we attach to these words.

That the more tender and poetic aspects of Pythagorean speculations had deeply impressed Socrates can be seen by the fact that they recurred to his mind in the most solemn hour of his life. From these he drew the lovely parable with which he gently reproved the friends who were come to take leave of him for their surprise at finding him no wise depressed. He asks if he appears to them inferior in divination to the swans, who, when they perceive that they must die, though given to song before, then sing the most of all, delighted at the prospect of their departure to the deity whose ministers they are. Mankind has said falsely of the swans that they sing through dread of death and from grief. Those who say this do not reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or afflicted with any other pain, not even the nightingale or swallow or hoopoe, which are said to sing a dirge-like strain, “but neither do they appear to me to sing for grief nor do the swans, but as pertaining to Apollo they are skilled in the divining art, and having a foreknowledge of the bliss in Hades, they express their joy in song on that day rather than at any previous time. But I believe myself to be a fellow-servant of the swans and consecrated to the same divinity, and that I am no less gifted by my master in the art of divination, nor am I departing with less good grace than they.”

Socrates would not have been “the wisest of men” if he had dogmatised about the unknowable; to insist, he says, that things were just as he described them, would not become an intelligent being; he only claimed an approximate approach to the truth. In appearance Plato went nearer to dogmatic acceptance of the theory of the transmigration of souls, but probably it was in appearance only. Like his master, he thought it reasonable to suppose that the human soul ascended if it had done well, and descended if it had done ill, and of this ascent and descent he took as symbol its attirement in higher or lower corporeal forms till, freed from the corruptible, it joined the incorruptible.

The Greeks were the first people to have an insatiable thirst for exact knowledge; they showed themselves true precursors of the modern world by their researches into scientific zoology, which were carried on with zeal long before Aristotle took the subject in hand. We cannot judge of these early researches because they are nearly all lost; but Aristotle’s “History of Animals,” even after the revival of learning, was still consulted as a text-book, and perhaps nothing that he wrote contributed more to win for him the fame of

“... maestro di color che sanno.”

The story goes that this work was written by desire of Alexander the Great or, as some say, Philip of Macedon, and that the writer was given a sum which sounds fabulous in order that he might obtain the best available information. What interest most the modern reader are the “sayings by the way” on the moral qualities or the intelligence of animals. “Man and the mule,” says Aristotle, “are always tame”—a classification not very complimentary to man. The ox is gentle, the wild boar is violent, crafty the serpent, noble and generous the lion. Except in the senses of touch and taste, man is far surpassed by the other animals—a remark that was endorsed by St. Thomas Aquinas, who inferred from the limitation of man’s senses that he would have made bad use of them if they had been more acute. Aristotle laid down the axiom that man alone can reason, though other animals can remember and learn, but he never pursued this theory as far as it was pushed by Descartes, much less by Malebranche. He believed that the soul of infants differed in no respect from that of animals. All animals present traces of their moral disposition, though these distinctions are more marked in man. Animals understand signs and sounds, and can be taught. The females are less ready to help the males in distress than the males are to help the females. Bears carry off their cubs with them if they are pursued. The dolphin is remarkable for the love of its young ones; two dolphins were seen supporting a small dead dolphin on their backs, that was about to sink, as if in pity for it, to keep it from being devoured by wild creatures. In herds of horses, if a mare dies, other mares will bring up the foal, and mares without foals have been known to entice foals to follow them and to show much affection to them, though they die for want of their natural sustenance.

Aristotle says that music attracts some animals; for instance, deer can be captured by singing and playing on the pipe. Animals sometimes show fore-thought, as the ichneumon, which does not attack the asp till it has called others to help it—which reminds one of the dog whose master took him to Exeter, where he was badly treated by the yard-dog of the inn; on this, he escaped and went to London, whence he returned with a powerful dog-friend who gave the yard-dog a lesson which he must have long remembered. Hedgehogs are said by Aristotle and other ancient authors to change the entrance of their burrows according as the wind blows from north or south; a man in Byzantium got no small fame as a weather prophet by observing this habit. He thinks that small animals are generally cleverer than larger ones. A tame woodpecker placed an almond in a crevice of wood so as to be able to break it, which it succeeded in doing with three blows. Aristotle does not mention the similar ingenuity of the thrush which I have noticed myself; it brings snails to a good flat stone on which it breaks the shell by knocking it up and down. He admired the skill of the swallow in making her nest. Although he knew of the migrations of birds, and declared that cranes go in winter to the sources of the Nile, “where there is a race of pigmies—no fable, but a fact,” he was not free from the erroneous idea (which is to be found in modern folk-lore) that some birds hybernate in caves, out of which they emerge, almost featherless, in the spring. Of the nightingale, he says that it sings ceaselessly for fifteen days and nights when the mountains are thick with leaves.

The spider’s art and graceful movements receive due praise, as do the cleanly habits of bees, which are said to sting people who use unguents because they dislike bad smells. “Bright and shiny bees” Aristotle asserts to be idle, “like women.”

Of all animals his favourites are the lion and the elephant. The lion is gentle when he is not hungry and he is not jealous or suspicious. He is fond of playing with animals that are brought up with him, and he gets to have a real affection for them. If a blow aimed at a lion fails, he only shakes and frightens his attacker, and then leaves him without hurting him. He never shows fear or turns his back on a foe. But old lions that are unable to hunt sometimes enter villages and attack mankind. This is the first observation of the “man-eating” lion or tiger, and the reason given for his perverse conduct is still believed to be the right one.

Aristotle assigned the palm of wisdom to the elephant, a creature abounding in intellect, tame, gentle, teachable, and one which can even learn how to “worship the king”—which is what many of us saw the elephants do at the Delhi Durbar.

STELE WITH CAT AND BIRD.
Athens Museum.

In a later age, Apollonius of Tyana confirmed from personal observation all Aristotle’s praise; he watched with admiration the crossing of the Indus by a herd of thirty elephants which were being pursued by huntsmen; the light and small ones went first, then the mothers, who held up their cubs with tusk and trunk, and lastly the old and large elephants. Pliny gave a similar account of the way in which elephants cross rivers, and it is, I believe, still noticed as a fact that the old ones send the young ones before them. The officer whose duty it was to superintend the embarcation of Indian elephants for Abyssinia during the campaign of Sir Robert Napier told me how a very fine old elephant, who perfectly understood the business in hand, drove all the others on board, but after performing this useful service, when it came to be his turn, he refused resolutely to move an inch, and had to be left behind. The sympathy with animals for which Apollonius was remarkable made him feel for these great beasts brought into subjection; he declares that at night they mourn over their lost liberty with peculiar piteous sounds unlike those which they make usually; if a man approaches, however, they cease their wailing out of respect for him. He speaks of their attachment to their keeper, how they eat bread from his hand like a dog and caress him with their trunks. He saw an elephant at Taxila which was said to have fought against Alexander the Great three hundred and fifty years before. Alexander named it Ajax, and it bore golden bracelets on its trunk with the words: “Ajax. To the Sun from Alexander son of Jove.” The people decked it with garlands and anointed it with precious salves. Several classical writers bore witness to the pleasure which elephants took in music; they could be made to dance to the pipe. It was also said that they could write. Their crowning merit—that of helping away wounded comrades, which is vouched for by no less an authority than Mr. F. C. Selous—does not seem to have been observed in ancient times.

In Greek mythology the familiar animals of the gods occupy a place half-way between legend and natural history. Viewed by one school as totems, as the earlier god of which the later is only an appendix, to more conservative students they may appear to be, in the main, the outgrowth of the same fondness for coupling man and beast and fitting man with a beast-companion suited to his character, which gave St. Mark his lion and St. John his eagle. The panther of Bacchus is the most attractive of the divine menagerie, because Bacchus, in this connexion, is generally shown as a child and the friendships of beasts and children are always pleasing.

The affection of Bacchus for panthers has been attributed to the fact that he wore a panther-skin, but there seems no motive for deciding that the one tradition was earlier than the other; the rationale of a myth is often evolved long after the myth itself. Perhaps, after all, the stories of gods and animals often originated in the simple belief that gods, like men, had a weakness for pets!

In the Pompeian collections at Naples there are several designs of Bacchus and his panther; one of them shows the panther and the ass of Silenus lying down together; in another, a very fine mosaic, the winged genius of Bacchus careers along astride of his favourite beast; in a third, a chubby little boy, with no signs of godhead about him, clambers on to the back of a patient panther, which has the long-suffering look of animals that are accustomed to be teased by children. It may be noticed that children and animals, both somewhat neglected in the older art, attained the highest popularity with the artists of the age of Pompeii. Children were represented in all sorts of attitudes, and all known animals, from the cat to the octopus and the elephant to the grasshopper, were drawn not only with general correctness but with a keen insight into their humours and temperaments.

It is said that a panther was once caught in Pamphylia which had a gold chain round its neck with the inscription in Armenian letters: “Arsaces the king to the Nysæan god.” Oriental nations called Bacchus after Nysa, his supposed birthplace. It was concluded that the king of Armenia had given its freedom to this splendid specimen to do honour to the god. The panther became very tame and was fondled by every one, but when the spring came it ran away, chain and all, to seek a mate in the mountains and never more came back.

III
ANIMALS AT ROME

ROME, the eternal, begins with a Beast-story. However much deeper in the past the spade may dig than the reputed date of the humanitarian She-wolf, her descendant will not be expelled from the grotto on the Capitol, nor will it cease to be the belief of children (the only trustworthy authorities when legends are concerned) that the grandeur that was Rome would have never existed but for the opportune intervention of a friendly beast!

The fame of the She-wolf shows how eagerly mankind seizes on some touch of nature, fact or fable, that seems to make all creatures kin. Rome was as proud of her She-wolf as she was of ruling the world. It was the “luck” of Rome; even now, something of the old sentiment exists, for I remember that during King Edward’s visit old-fashioned Romans were angry because this emblem was not to be seen in the decorations.

(Photo: Bruckmann.)
CAPITOLINE SHE-WOLF.

The story did not make such large demands on credulity as sceptics pretend. The wolf is not so much the natural enemy of man as the cat is of the mouse: yet cats have been known to bring up families of mice or rats which they treated with affection. In recent times a Russian bear was stated to have carried away to the woods a little girl whom it fed with nuts and fruits. The evidence seemed good, though the story did sound a little as if it were suggested by Victor Hugo’s “Épopée du Lion.” But in India there are stories of the same sort—stories actually of She-wolves—which appear to be impossible to set aside. In a paper read before the Bombay Natural History Society, the well-known Parsi scholar, Jivanji Jamsedji Modi, described how he had seen one such “wolf-boy” at the Secundra Orphanage: the boy had remained with wolves up to six years old when he was discovered and captured, not without vigorous opposition from his vulpine protectors.

The historical record of Rome as regards animals is not a bright one. The cruelty of the arena does not stain the first Roman annals; the earliest certified instance of wild-beast baiting belongs to 186 B.C., and after the practice was introduced it did not reach at once the monstrous proportions of later times. Still, one does not imagine that the Roman of republican times was very tender-hearted towards animals. Cato related, as if he took a pride in it, that when he was Consul he left his war-horse in Spain to spare the public the cost of its conveyance to Rome. “Whether such things as these,” says Plutarch, who tells the story, “are instances of greatness or littleness of soul, let the reader judge for himself!” When the infatuation for the shows in the arena was at its height, the Romans felt an enormous interest in animals: indeed, there were moments when they thought of nothing else. It was an interest which went along with indifference to their sufferings; it may be said to have been worse than no interest at all, but it existed and to ignore it, as most writers have done, is to make the explicable inexplicable. If the only attraction of these shows had been their cruelty we should have to conclude that the Romans were all afflicted with a rare though not unknown form of insanity. Much the same was true of the gladiatorial shows. Up to a certain point, what led people to them was what leads people to a football match or an assault-at-arms. Beyond that point—well, beyond it there entered the element that makes the tiger in man, but for the most part it was inconscient.

LION BEING LED FROM THE ARENA BY A SLAVE.
(Nennig Mosaic.)

When we see Pola or Verona or Nîmes; when we tread the crowded streets to the Roman Colosseum or traverse the deserted high-road to Spanish Italica; most of all, when we watch coming nearer and nearer across the wilderness between Kairouan and El Djem the magnificent pile that stands outlined against the African sky—we all say the same thing: “What a wonderful race the Romans were!” It is an exclamation that forces itself to the lips of the most ignorant as to those of the scholar or historical student. At such moments, it may be true, that the less we think of the games of the arena the better; the remembrance of them forms a disturbing element in the majesty of the scene. But they cannot be put out of mind entirely, and if we do think of them, it is desirable that we should think of them correctly. It so happens that it is possible to reconstruct them into a lifelike picture. There exists one, though, as far as I know, only one, faithful, vivid, and complete contemporary representation of the Roman Games. This is the superb mosaic pavement which was discovered in the middle of the last century by a peasant striking on the hard surface with his spade, at the village of Nennig, not far from the Imperial city of Treves. The observer of this mosaic perceives at once that the games were of the nature of a “variety” entertainment. There was the music which picturesque-looking performers played on a large horn and on a sort of organ. (The horn closely resembles the pre-historic horns which are preserved in the National Museum at Copenhagen, where they were blown with inspiring effect before the members of the Congress of Orientalists in 1908.) There was the bloodless contest between a short and tall athlete, armed differently with stick and whip. In the central division, because the most important, is shown the mortal earnest of the gladiatorial fight, strictly controlled by the Games-master. In the sexagion above this is a hardly less deadly struggle between a man and a bear: the bear has got the man under him but is being whipped off so that the “turn” may not end too quickly, and, perhaps, also to give the more expensive victim another chance. To the right hand, a gladiator who has run his lance through the neck of a panther, holds up his hand to boast the victory and claim applause: the dying panther tries vainly to free itself from the weapon. To the left is a fight between a leopard and an unfortunate wild ass, which has already received a terrible wound in its side and is now having its head drawn down between the fore-paws of the leopard. I hear that in beast-fights organised by Indian princes, these unequal combatants are still pitted against each other. Lastly, the Nennig Mosaic depicts a fat lion that has also conquered a wild ass, of which the head alone seems to remain: it has been inferred, though I think rashly, that the lion has eaten up all the rest; at any rate he now seems at peace with the world and is being led back to his cage by a slave.

Everything is quiet, orderly, and a model of good management. The custodian of the little museum told me that the (surprisingly few) visitors to Nennig were in the habit of remarking of this representation of the Roman Games that it made them understand for the first time how the cultivated Romans could endure such sights. Unhappily, conventional propriety joined to the sanction of authority will make the majority of mankind endure anything that causes no danger or inconvenience to themselves.

Except with a few, at whom their generation looks askance, the sense of cruelty more than any other moral sense is governed by habit, by convention. It is even subject to latitude and longitude; in Spain I was surprised to find that almost all the English and American women whom I met had been to, at least, one bull-fight. Insensibility spreads like a pestilence; new or revived forms of cruelty should be stopped at once or no one can say how far they will reach or how difficult it will be to abolish them. One might have supposed that the sublime self-sacrifice of the monk who threw himself between two combatants—which brought the tardy end of gladiatorial exhibitions in Christian Rome—would have saved the world for ever from that particular barbarity; but in the fourteenth century we actually find gladiatorial shows come to life again and in full favour at Naples! This little-known fact is attested in Petrarch’s letters. Writing to Cardinal Colonna on December 1, 1343, the truly civilised poet denounces with burning indignation an “infernal spectacle” of which he had been the involuntary witness. His gay friends (there has been always a singular identity between fashion and barbarism) seem to have entrapped him into going to a place called Carbonaria, where he found the queen, the boy-king, and a large audience assembled in a sort of amphitheatre. Petrarch imagined that there was to be some splendid entertainment, but he had hardly got inside when a tall, handsome young man fell dead just below where he was standing, while the audience raised a shout of applause. He escaped from the place as fast as he could, horror-struck by the brutality of spectacle and spectators, and spurring his horse, he turned his back on the “accursed spot” with the determination to leave Naples as soon as possible. How can we wonder, he asks, that there are murders in the streets at night when in broad daylight, in the presence of the king, wretched parents see their sons stabbed and killed, and when it is considered dishonourable to be unwilling to present one’s throat to the knife just as if it were a struggle for fatherland or for the joys of Heaven?

Very curious was the action of the Vatican in this matter; Pope John XXII. excommunicated every one who took part in the games as actor or spectator, but since nobody obeyed the prohibition, it was rescinded by his successor, Benedict XII., to prevent the scandal of a perpetual disregard of a Papal ordinance. So they went on cutting each other’s throats with the tacit permission of the Church until King Charles of the Peace succeeded in abolishing the “sport.”

The action of the Church in respect to bull-fights has been much the same; local opinion is generally recognised as too strong for opposition. The French bishops, however, did their best to prevent their introduction into the South of France, but they failed completely.

I have strayed rather far from the Roman shows, but the savagery of Christians in the fourteenth century (and after) should make us wonder less at Roman callousness. All our admiration is due to the few finer spirits who were repelled by the slaughter of man or beast to make a Roman’s holiday. Cicero said that he could never see what there was pleasurable in the spectacle of a noble beast struck to the heart by its merciless hunter or pitted against one of our weaker species! For a single expression of censure such as this which has come down to us, there must have been many of which we have no record. Of out-spoken censure there was doubtless little because violent condemnation of the arena would have savoured of treason to the State which patronised and supported the games just as Queen Elizabeth’s ministers supported bull-baiting.

Rome must have been one vast zoological garden, and viewing the strange animals was the first duty of the tourist. Pausanias was deeply impressed by the “Ethiopian bulls which they call rhinoceroses” and also by Indian camels in colour like leopards. He saw an all-white deer, and very much surprised he was to see it, but, to his subsequent regret, he forgot to ask where it came from. He was reminded of this white deer when he saw white blackbirds on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. I remember a white blackbird which stayed in the garden of my old English home for more than two years: a wretched “sportsman” lay in wait for it when it wandered into a neighbouring field and shot it.

The feasibility of the transport of the hosts of animals destined to the arena will always remain a mystery. At the inauguration of the Colosseum, five thousand wild beasts and six thousand tame ones were butchered, nor was this the highest figure on a single occasion. Probably a great portion of the animals was sent by the Governors of distant provinces who wished to stand well with the home authorities. But large numbers were also brought over by speculators who sold them to the highest or the most influential bidder. One reason why Cassius murdered Julius Cæsar was that Cæsar had secured some lions which Cassius wished to present to the public. Every one who aimed at political power or even simply at being thought one of the “smart set” (the odious word suits the case) spent king’s ransoms on the public games. For vulgar ostentation the wealthy Roman world eclipsed the exploits of the modern millionaire. If any one deem this impossible, let him read, in the Satyricon of Petronius, the account of the fêtes to be given by a leader of fashion of the name of Titus. Not merely gladiators, but a great number of freedmen would take part in them: it would be no wretched mock combat but a real carnage! Titus was so rich that he could afford such liberality. Contempt is poured upon the head of a certain Nobarnus who offered a spectacle of gladiators hired at a low price and so old and decrepit that a breath threw them over. They all ended by wounding themselves to stop the contest. You might as well have witnessed a mere cock-fight!

I should think that not more than one animal in three survived the voyage. This would vastly increase the total number. The survivors often arrived in such a pitiable state that they could not be presented in the arena, or that they had to be presented immediately to prevent them from dying too soon. Symmachus, last of the great nobles of Rome, who, blinded by tradition, thought to revive the glories of his beloved city by reviving its shame, graphically describes the anxieties of the preparations for one of these colossal shows on which he is said to have spent what would be about £80,000 of our money. He began a year in advance: horses, bears, lions, Scotch dogs, crocodiles, chariot-drivers, hunters, actors, and the best gladiators were recruited from all parts. But when the time drew near, nothing were ready. Only a few of the animals had come, and these were half dead of hunger and fatigue. The bears had not arrived and there was no news of the lions. At the eleventh hour the crocodiles reached Rome, but they refused to eat and had to be killed all at once in order that they might not die of hunger. It was even worse with the gladiators, who were intended to provide, as in all these beast shows, the crowning entertainment. Twenty-nine of the Saxon captives whom Symmachus had chosen on account of the well-known valour of their race, strangled one another in prison rather than fight to the death for the amusement of their conquerors. And Symmachus, with all his real elevation of mind, was moved to nothing but disgust by their sublime choice! Rome in her greatest days had gloried in these shows: how could a man be a patriot who set his face against customs which followed the Roman eagles round the world? How many times since then has patriotism been held to require the extinction of moral sense!

Sometimes the humanity of beasts put to shame the inhumanity of man. There was a lion, commemorated by Statius, which had “unlearnt murder and homicide,” and submitted of its own accord to a master “who ought to have been under its feet.” This lion went in and out of its cage and gently laid down unhurt the prey which it caught: it even allowed people to put their hands into its mouth. It was killed by a fugitive slave. The Senate and people of Rome were in despair, and Imperial Cæsar, who witnessed impassible the death of thousands of animals sent hither to perish from Africa, from Scythia, from the banks of the Rhine, had tears in his eyes for a single lion! In later Roman times a tame lion was a favourite pet: their masters led them about wherever they went, whether much to the gratification of the friends on whom they called is not stated.

Another instance of a gentle beast was that of a tiger into whose cage a live doe had been placed for him to eat. But the tiger was not feeling well and, with the wisdom of sick animals, he was observing a diet. So two or three days elapsed, during which the tiger made great friends with the doe and when he recovered his health and began to feel very hungry, instead of devouring his fellow-lodger he beat with his paws against the bars of the cage in sign that he wanted food. These stories were, no doubt, true, and there may have been truth also in the well-known story of the lion which refused to attack a man who had once succoured him. Animals have good memories.

One pleasanter feature of the circus was the exhibition of performing beasts. Though the exhibitors of such animals are now sometimes charged with cruelty, it cannot be denied that the public who goes to look at them is composed of just the people who are most fond of animals. All children delight in them because, to their minds, they seem a confirmation of the strong instinctive though oftenest unexpressed belief, which lurks in every child’s soul, that between man and animals there is much less difference than is the correct, “grown-up” opinion; this is a part of the secret lore of childhood which has its origins in the childhood of the world. The amiable taste for these exhibitions—in appearance, at least, so harmless—strikes one as incongruous in the same persons who revelled in slaughter. Such a taste existed, however, and when St. James said that there was not a single beast, bird or reptile which had not been tamed, he may have been thinking of the itinerant showmen’s “learned” beasts which perambulated the Roman empire.

Horses and oxen were among the animals commonly taught to do tricks. I find no mention of monkeys as performing in the arena, though Apuleius says that in the spring fêtes of Isis, the forerunners of the Roman carnival, he saw a monkey with a straw hat and a Phrygian tunic—we can hardly keep ourselves from asking: what had it done with the grind-organ? But in spite of this startlingly modern apparition, monkeys do not seem to have been popular in Rome; I imagine even, that there was some fixed prejudice against them. The cleverest of all the animal performers were, of course, the dogs, and one showman had the ingenious idea of making a dog act a part in a comedy. The effects of a drug were tried on him, the plot turning on the suspicion that the drug was poisonous, while, in fact, it was only a narcotic. The dog took the piece of bread dipped in the liquid, swallowed it, and began to reel and stagger till he finally fell flat on the ground. He gave himself a last stretch and then seemed to expire, making no sign of life when his apparently dead body was dragged about the stage. At the right moment, he began to move very slightly as if waking out of a deep sleep; then he raised his head, looked round, jumped up and ran joyously to the proper person. The piece was played at the theatre of Marcellus in the reign of old Vespasian, and Cæsar himself was delighted. I wonder that no manager of our days has turned the incident to account; I never yet saw an audience serious enough not to become young again at the sight of four-footed comedians. Even the high art-loving public at the Prince Regent’s theatre at Munich cannot resist a murmur of discreet merriment when the pack of beautiful stag-hounds led upon the stage in the hunting scene in “Tannhäuser” gravely wag their tails in time with the music!

The pet lions were only one example of the aberrations of pet-lovers in ancient Rome. Maltese lap-dogs became a scourge: Lucian tells the lamentable tale of a needy philosopher whom a fashionable lady cajoles into acting as personal attendant to her incomparable Mirrhina. The Maltese dog was an old fad; Theophrastus, in the portrait of an insufferable élégant, mentions that, when his pet dog dies, he inscribes “pure Maltese” on its tombstone.

Many were the birds that fell victims to the desire to keep them in richly ornamented cages in which they died of hunger, says Epictetus, sooner than be slaves. The canary which takes more kindly to captivity was unknown till it was brought to Italy in the sixteenth century. Parrots there were, but Roman parrots were not long-lived: they shared the common doom: “To each his sufferings, all are pets.” The parrots of Corinna and of Melior which ought to have lived to a hundred or, at any rate, to have had the chance of dying of grief at the loss of their possessors (as a parrot did that I once knew), enjoyed fame and fortune for as brief a span as Lesbia’s sparrow. Melior’s parrot not only had brilliant green feathers but also many accomplishments which are described by its master’s friend, the poet Statius. On one occasion, it sat up half the night at a banquet, hopping from one guest to another and talking in a way that excited great admiration; it even shared the good fare and on the morrow it died—which was less than surprising. I came across an old-fashioned criticism of this poem in which Statius is scolded for showing so much genuine feeling about ... a parrot! The critic was right in one thing—the genuine feeling is there; those who have known what a companion a bird may be, will appreciate the little touch: “You never felt alone, dear Melior, with its open cage beside you!” Now the cage is empty; it is “la cage sans oiseaux” which Victor Hugo prayed to be spared from seeing. Some translator turned this into “a nest without birds,” because he thought that a cage without birds sounded unpoetical, but Victor Hugo took care of truth and left poetry to take of itself. And whatever may be the ethics of keeping cage birds, true it is that few things are more dismal than the sight of the little mute, tenantless dwelling which was yesterday alive with fluttering love.

We owe to Roman poets a good deal of information about dogs, and especially the knowledge that the British hound was esteemed superior to all others, even to the famous breed of Epirus. This is certified by Gratius Faliscus, a contemporary of Ovid. He described these animals as remarkably ugly, but incomparable for pluck. British bull-dogs were used in the Colosseum, and in the third century Nemesianus praised the British greyhound. Most of the valuable dogs were brought from abroad; it is to be inferred that the race degenerated in the climate of Rome, as it does now. Concha, whose epitaph was written by Petronius, was born in Gaul. While Martial’s too elaborate epitaph on “The Trusty Lydia” is often quoted and translated, the more sympathetic poem of Petronius has been overlooked. He tells the perfections of Concha in a simple, affectionate manner; like Lydia, she was a mighty huntress and chased the wild boar fearlessly through the dense forest. Never did chain hamper her liberty and never a blow fell on her shapely, snow-white form. She reposed softly, stretched on the breast of her master or mistress, and at night a well-made bed refreshed her tired limbs. If she lacked speech, she could make herself understood better than any of her kind—yet no one had reason to fear her bark. A hapless mother, she died when her little ones saw the light, and now a narrow marble slab covers the earth where she rests.

Cicero’s tribute to canine worth is well known: “Dogs watch for us faithfully; they love and worship their masters, they hate strangers, their powers of tracking by scent is extraordinary; great is their keenness in the chase: what can all this mean but that they were made for man’s advantage?” It was as natural to the Roman mind to regard man as the lord of creation as to regard the Roman as the lord of man. For the rest, his normal conception of animals differed little from that of Aristotle. Cicero says that the chief distinction between man and animals, is that animals look only to the present, paying little attention to the past and future, while man looks before and after, weighs causes and effects, draws analogies and views the whole path of life, preparing things needful for passing along it. Expressed in the key of antique optimism instead of in the key of modern pessimism, the judgment is the same as that of Burns in his lines to the field-mouse:

“Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me!

The present only touches thee:

But, och! I backward cast my e’e

On prospects drear!

And forward, tho’ I canna see,

I guess and fear.”

And of Leopardi in the song of the Syrian shepherd to his flock:—

“O flock that liest at rest, O blessed thou

That knowest not thy fate, however hard,

How utterly I envy thee!”

Cicero’s more virile mind would have spurned this craving to renounce the distinguishing human privilege for the bliss of ignorance.

Wherever we fix the limits of animal intelligence, there is no question of man’s obligation to treat sentient creatures with humanity. This was recognised by Marcus Aurelius when he wrote the golden precept: “As to animals which have no reason ... do thou, since thou hast reason, and they have none, make use of them with a generous and liberal spirit.” Here we have the broadest application of the narrowest assumption. From the time, at least, that Rome was full of Greek teachers, there were always some partisans of a different theory altogether. What Seneca calls “the illustrious but unpopular school of Pythagoras” had a little following which made up by its sincere enthusiasm for the fewness of its members. Seneca’s own master Sotio was of this school, and his teaching made a deep impression on the most illustrious of his pupils, who sums up its chief points with his usual lucidity: Pythagoras gave men a horror of crime and of parricide by telling them that they might unawares kill or devour their own fathers; all sentient beings are bound together in a universal kinship and an endless transmutation causes them to pass from one form to another; no soul perishes or ceases its activity save in the moment when it changes its envelope. Sotio took for granted that the youths who attended his classes came to him with minds unprepared to receive these doctrines, and he aimed more at making them accept the consequences of the theory than the theory itself. What if they believed none of it? What if they did not believe that souls passed through different bodies and that the thing we call death is a transmigration? That in the animal which crops the grass or which peoples the sea, a soul resides which once was human? That, like the heavenly bodies, every soul traverses its appointed circle? That nothing in this world perishes, but only changes scene and place? Let them remember, nevertheless, that great men have believed all this: “Suspend your judgment, and in the meantime, respect whatever has life.” If the doctrine be true, then to abstain from animal flesh is to spare oneself the committal of crimes; if it be false, such abstinence is commendable frugality; “all you lose is the food of lions and vultures.”

Sotio himself was a thorough Pythagorean, but there was another philosopher of the name of Sestius who was an ardent advocate of abstinence from animal food without believing in the transmigration of souls. He founded a sort of brotherhood, the members of which took the pledge to abide by this rule. He argued that since plenty of other wholesome food existed, what need was there for man to shed blood? Cruelty must become habitual when people devour flesh to indulge the palate: “let us reduce the elements of sensuality.” Health would be also the gainer by the adoption of a simpler and less various diet. Sotio used these arguments of one whom he might have called an unbeliever, to reinforce his own.

Seneca does not say if many of his schoolfellows were as much impressed as he was by this teaching. For a year he abstained from flesh, and when he got accustomed to it, he even found the new diet easy and agreeable. His mind seemed to grow more active. That he was allowed to eat what he liked without encountering interference or ridicule shows the considerable freedom in which the youth of Rome was brought up: this made them men. But at the beginning of the reign of Tiberius there went forth an edict against foreign cults, and abstinence from flesh was held to show a leaning towards religious novelties. For this reason the elder Seneca advised his son to give up vegetarianism. Seneca honestly confesses that he went back to better fare without much urging; yet he always remained frugal, and he seems never to have felt quite sure that his youthful experiment did not agree best with the counsels of perfection.

IV
PLUTARCH THE HUMANE

PLUTARCH was the Happy Philosopher—and there were not many that were happy. A life of travel, a life of teaching, an honoured old age as the priest of Apollo in his native village in Bœotia: what kinder fate than this? He was happy in the very obscurity which seems to have surrounded his life at Rome, for it saved him from spite and envy. He was happy, if we may trust the traditional effigies, even in that thing which likewise is a good gift of the gods, a gracious outward presence exactly corresponding with the soul within. A painter who wished to draw a type of illimitable compassionateness would choose the face attributed to Plutarch. Finally, this gentle sage is happy still after eighteen hundred years in doing more than any other writer of antiquity to build up character by diffusing the radiance of noble deeds. Nevertheless, were he to come back to life he would have one disappointment, and that would be to find how few people read his essays on kindness to animals: they would stand a better chance of being read if they were printed alone, but to arrive at them you must dive in the formidable depths of the Moralia: a very storehouse of interesting things, but hardly attractive to the general in a hurried age. Some of its treasures have been revealed by Dr. Oakesmith in his admirable monograph on “The Religion of Plutarch.” The mine of nobly humane sentiment remains, however, almost unexplored.

The essays devoted to animals are three in number, with the titles: “Whether terrestrial or aquatic animals are the more intelligent?” “That animals have the use of Reason”; “On the habit of eating flesh.” The two first are in the form of dialogues, and the third is a familiar discourse, a conférence, such as those which now form a popular feature of the Roman season. Through these studies there runs a vein of transparent sincerity: we feel that they were composed not to show the author’s cleverness or to startle by paradoxes, but with the real wish to make the young men for whom they were intended a little more humane. Plutarch did not take up the claims of animals because good “copy” could be made out of them. As his wish is to persuade, he does not ask for the impossible. It is the voice of the highly civilised Greek addressing the young barbarians of Rome: for to the Greek’s inmost mind the Roman must have always remained somewhat of a barbarian. There is great restraint: though Plutarch must have loathed the games of the arena, he speaks of them with guarded deprecation. He makes one of his characters say that the chase (which he did not himself like) was useful in keeping people from worse things, “such as the combats of gladiators.” He is genuinely anxious by all means to persuade some, and for this reason he refrains from scaring away his hearers or readers by extreme demands. Though he has a strong personal repugnance to flesh-eating, he does not insist on every one sharing it. Anyhow, he says, Be as humane as you can; cause as little suffering as is possible; no doubt it is not easy, all at once, to eradicate a habit which has taken hold of our sensual nature, but, at least, let us deprive it of its worst features. Let us eat flesh if we must, but for hunger, not for self-indulgence; let us kill animals but still be compassionate—not heaping up outrages and tortures “as, alas, is done every day.” He mentions how swans were blinded and then fattened with unnatural foods, which is only a little worse than things that are done now. What is certain is, that extreme and habitual luxury in food has spelt decadence from the banquets of Babylon downwards.

Plutarch goes on to ask whether it is impossible to amuse ourselves without all these excesses? Shall we expire on the spot, are the resources of men totally exhausted, if the table be not supplied with pâtés de foies gras? Is life not worth living without slaughter to make a feast, slaughter to find a pastime; cannot we exist without asking of certain animals that they show courage, and fight in spite of themselves, or that they massacre other animals which have not the natural energy to defend themselves? Must we for our sport tear the mother from the little ones which she suckles or hatches? Plutarch implores us not to imitate the children of whom Bion speaks, who amused themselves by throwing stones at the frogs, but the frogs were not at all amused—they simply died. “When we take our recreation, those who help in the fun ought to share in it and be amused as well.” Thus does the kind Greek philosopher exhort us

“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”

Did Wordsworth know that his thought had been expressed so long before? It matters little; the counsels of mercy never grow old.

With good sense and in that spirit of compromise which is really the basis of morality, Plutarch argued that cruelty to animals does not lie in the use but in the abuse of them; it is not cruel to kill them if they are incompatible with our own existence; it is not cruel to tame and train to our service those made by nature gentle and loving towards man which become the companions of our toil according to their natural aptitude. “Horse and ass are given to us,” as Prometheus says, “to be submissive servants and fellow-workers; dogs to be guardians and watchers, goats and sheep to give us milk and wool.” (Cow’s milk seems to have been rarely drunk, as is still the case in the Mediterranean islands and in Greece.)

“The Stoics,” says Plutarch, “made sensibility towards animals a preparation to humanity and compassion because the gradually formed habit of the lesser affections is capable of leading men very far.” In the “Lives” he insists on the same point: “Kindness and beneficence should be extended to creatures of every species, and these still flow from the breast of a well-natured man as streams that issue from the living fountain. A good man will take care of his horses and dogs not only when they are young, but when old and past service.... We certainly ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or household goods, which, when worn out with use, we throw away, and were it only to learn benevolence to human kind, we should be merciful to other creatures. For my own part I would not sell even an old ox.”

Here I may say that Plutarch should have thanked Fate which made him a philosopher and not a farmer. For how, alas, can the farmer escape from becoming the accomplice of that which the Italian poet apostrophizes in the words—

“Natura, illaudabil maraviglia,

Che per uccider partorisci e nutri!”

How can well-cared-for old age be the lot of more than a very few of the animals that serve us so faithfully? The exception must console us for the rule. The beautiful story of one such exception is told by both Plutarch and Pliny the Elder. When Pericles was building the Parthenon a great number of mules were employed in drawing the stones up the hill of the Acropolis. Some of them became too old for the work, and these were set at liberty to pasture at large. But one old mule gravely walked every day to the stone-yard and accompanied, or rather led, the procession of mule-carts to and fro. The Athenians were delighted with its devotion to duty, and decided that it should be supported at the expense of the State for the rest of its days. According to Pliny, the mule of the Parthenon lived till it had attained its eightieth year, a record that seems startling even having regard to the proverbial longevity of pensioners. Plutarch does not mention it, perhaps, because he had some doubts about its accuracy. In other respects the story may be accepted as literally true; and does it not do us good to think of it, as we look at the most glorious work of man’s hands bathed in the golden afterglow? Does it not do us good to think that at the zenith of her greatness Athens

“... Mother of arts

And eloquence, native to famous wits”

stooped—nay, rose—to generous appreciation of the willing service of an old mule?

In dealing with animal psychology Plutarch makes a strong point of the inherent improbability that, while feeling and imagination are the common share of all animated beings, reason should be apportioned only to a single species. “How can you say such things? Is not every one convinced that no being can feel without also possessing understanding, that there is not a single animal which has not a sort of thought and reason just as he comes into the world with senses and instinct?” Nature, which is said to make all things from one cause and to one end, has not given sensibility to animals simply in order that they should be capable of sensations. Since some things are good for them, and others bad, they would not exist for a single instant if they did not know how to seek the good and shun the bad. The animal learns by his senses what things are good and what are bad for him, but when, in consequence of these indications, of his senses, it is a question of taking and seeking what is useful and of avoiding and flying from what is harmful, these same animals would have no means of action if Nature had not made them up to a certain point capable of reason, of judgment, of memory, and of attention. Because, if you completely deprived them of the spirit of conjecture, memory, foresight, preparation, hope, fear, desire, grief, they would cease to derive the slightest utility from the eyes or ears which they possess. Plutarch might have added that a mindless animal would resemble not a child or a savage, but an idiot. He does point out that they would be better off with no senses at all than with the power of feeling and no power of acting upon it. But, he adds, could sensation exist without intelligence? He quotes a line from I do not know what poet:—

“The spirit only hears and sees—all else

Is deaf and blind.”

If we look with our eyes at a page of writing without seizing the meaning of a word of it, because our thoughts are preoccupied, is it not the same as if we had never seen it? But even were we to admit that the senses suffice to their office, would that explain the phenomena of memory and foresight? Would the animal fear things, not present, which harm him, or desire things, not present, which are to his advantage? Would he prepare his retreat or shelter or devise snares by which to catch other animals? Only one theory can be applied to mind in man and mind in animals.

It will be seen from this summary that Plutarch traversed the whole field of speculation on animal intelligence which has not really extended its boundaries since the time when he wrote, though it is possible that we are now on the verge, if not of new discoveries, at least of the admission of a new point of view. The study of the dual element in man, the endeavour to establish a line of demarcation between the conscious and subliminal self, may lead to the inquiry, how far the conscious self corresponds with what was meant, when speaking of animals, by “reason,” and the subliminal self with what was meant by “instinct”? But the use of a new terminology would not alter the conclusion: call it reason, consciousness, spirit; some of it the “paragon of animals” shares with his poor relations. The case is put in a homely way but not without force by the heroine of a forgotten novel by Lamartine: the speaker is an old servant who is in despair at losing her goldfinch: “Ah! On dit que les bêtes n’ont pas l’âme,” she says. “Je ne veux pas offenser le bon Dieu, mais si mon pauvre oiseau n’avait pas d’âme, avec quoi done n’aurait-il tant aimée? Avec les plumes ou avec les pattes, peut-être?”

Plutarch reviews—to reject—the “Automata” argument, which had already some supporters. Certain naturalists, he says, try to prove that animals feel neither pleasure nor anger nor yet fear; that the nightingale does not meditate his song, that the bee has no memory, that the swallow makes no preparations, that the lion never grows angry, nor is the stag subject to fear. Everything, according to these theorists, is merely delusive appearance. They might as well assert that animals cannot see or hear; that they only appear to see or hear; that they have no voice, only the semblance of a voice; in short, that they are not alive but only seem to live.

The moral aspects of any problem are those which to a moralist seem the most important, and Plutarch did not seek to deny the force of the objection: If virtue be the true aim of reason, how can Nature have bestowed reason on creatures which cannot direct it to its true object? But he denied the postulate that animals have no ethical potentialities. If the love of men for their children is granted to be the corner-stone of all human society, shall we say that there is no merit in the affection of animals for their offspring? He sums up the matter by remarking that the limitation of a faculty does not show that it does not exist. To pretend that every being not endowed at birth with perfect reason is, by its nature, incapable of reason of any kind, would be to ignore the fact that although reason is a natural gift the degree in which it is possessed by any individual depends on his training and on his teachers. Perfect reason is possessed by none because none has perfect rectitude and moral excellence.

Animals exhibit examples of sociability, courage, resource, and again, of cowardice and viciousness. Why do we not say of one tree that it is less teachable than another, as we say that a sheep is less teachable than a dog? It is, of course, because plants cannot think, and where the faculty of thought is wholly wanting, there cannot be more or less quickness or slowness, more or less of good qualities or of bad.

Yet it must be allowed that man’s intelligence is amazingly superior to that of animals. But what does that prove? Do not some animals leave man far behind in the keenness of their sight and the sharpness of their hearing? Shall we say, therefore, that man is blind or deaf? We have some strength in our hands and in our bodies although we are not elephants or camels. In the same way, we should be careful not to infer that animals lack all reasoning faculties from the fact that their intelligence is duller and more defective than man’s. “Boatfuls” of true stories can be cited to show the docility and special aptitudes of the different children of creation. And a very amusing occupation it is, says Plutarch, for young people to collect such stories. In the course of his work, he sets them a good example, for he brings together a real “boatful” of anecdotes of clever beasts, but at this point he contents himself with observing that madness in dogs and other animals would be alone sufficient to show that they had some mind: otherwise, how could they go out of it?

The stoics who taught the strictest humanity to animals rejected, nevertheless, the supposition that animals had reason, for how, they asked, can such a theory be reconciled with the idea of eternal justice? Would it not make abstinence from their flesh imperative and entail consequences which would make our life impracticable? If we were to give up using animals for our own purposes, we should be reduced ourselves almost to the condition of brutes. “What works would be left for us to do by land or sea, what industries to cultivate, what embellishments of our way of living, if we regarded animals as reasonable beings and our fellow-creatures, and hence adopted the rule (which, clearly, would be only proper) to do them no harm and to study their convenience.”

Many a sensitive modern soul has pondered over this crux without finding a satisfactory solution. Plutarch says that Empedocles and Heraclites admitted the injustice, and laid it to the door of Nature which permits or ordains a state of war and necessity, in which nothing is accomplished without the weaker going to the wall. For himself, he would propose to those “who, instead of disputing, gently follow and learn” the better way out of the difficulty—which was introduced by the Sages of Antiquity, then long lost, and found again by Pythagoras. This better way is to use animals as our helpers but to refrain from taking life.

Plutarch here evades a stumbling-block which he does not remove. The dialogue, as it has come down to us, breaks off suddenly after one final objection: how can beings have reason which have no notion of God? Some scholars imagine that Plutarch hurried the dialogue to a close because this query completely baffled him; others (and they are the majority) attribute the abrupt finish to the loss of the concluding part. Would Plutarch have contented himself with citing the analogy of young children who, although not without the elements of reason, know very little of theology, or would not he rather have contended with Celsus, that animals do possess religious knowledge? If he took the last course, it may well be that the disappearance of the end of the dialogue was not accidental. At Ravenna there is a terrible mosaic, alive with wrath and energy, which shows a Christ we know not (for He looks like a grand Inquisitor) thrusting into the flames heretical books. As I looked at it, I thought how many valuable classical works, vaguely suspected on the score of faith or morals, must have shared the fate of “unorthodox” polemics in the merry bonfires which this mosaic holds up for imitation!

The argument “that it sounds unnatural to ascribe reason to creatures ignorant of God,” suggests familiarity with a passage in Epictetus (Plutarch’s contemporary), where he says that man alone was made to have the understanding which recognises God—a recognition which he elsewhere explains by the hypothesis that every man has in him a small portion of the divine. Having this intuitive sense, man is bound, without ceasing, to praise his Creator, and, since others are blind and neglect to do it, Epictetus will do it on behalf of all: “for what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God? If I was a nightingale, I should do the part of a nightingale; if I were a swan, I would do like a swan; but now I am a rational creature, and I ought to praise God: this is my work; I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am allowed to keep it, and I exhort you to join in this song.”

The words are among the sweetest and most solemn that ever issued from human lips; yet those who care to pursue the subject farther may submit that there was some one before Epictetus, who called upon the beasts, the fishes and the fowls to join him in blessing the name of the Lord, and there was some one after him who commanded the birds of the air to sing the praises of their Maker and Preserver! It is strange that, despite the hard-and-fast line which the moulders of the Catholic Faith were at pains to trace between man and beast, if we would find the most emphatic assertion of their common privilege of praising God, we must leave the Pagan world and take up the Bible and the “Fioretti” of St. Francis!

(Photo: Sommer.)
BACCHUS RIDING ON A PANTHER.
Naples Museum.
(Mosaic found at Pompeii.)

Of the anecdotes with which Plutarch enlivens his pages, he says himself that he puts on one side fable and mythology, and limits his choice to the “all true” category, and if he appears to be at times a little credulous, one may well believe that he is always candid. Just as in his “Lives” he tried to ennoble his readers by making noble deeds interesting, so in his writings on animals, he tried to make people humane by making his dumb clients interesting. He did not start with thinking the task an easy one, for he was convinced that man is more cruel than the most savage of wild beasts. But he aims at pouring, if not a full draught of mercy, at least some drops, into the heart that never felt a pang, the mind that never gave a thought. Many of his stories are taken straight from the common street life of the Rome of his day, as that of the elephant which passed every day along a certain street where the schoolboys teased it by pricking its trunk with their writing stylets (men may come and go, but the small boy is a fixed quantity!). At last, the elephant, losing patience, picked up one of his tormentors and hoisted him in the air; a cry of horror rose from the spectators, no one doubted that in another moment the child would be dashed to the ground. But the elephant set the offender down very gently and walked away, thinking, no doubt, that a good fright had been a sufficient punishment. The Syrian elephant, of whom Plutarch tells how he made his master understand that in his absence he had been cheated of half his rations, was not cleverer than some of his kind on service in India, who would not begin to eat till all three cakes which formed their rations were set before each of them—a fact that was told me by the officer whose duty it was to preside at their dinner. Plutarch speaks of counting oxen that knew when the number of turns was finished which constituted their daily task at a saw-mill: they refused to perform one more turn than the appointed figure. As an instance of the discrimination of animals, he tells how Alexander’s horse, Bucephalus, when unsaddled, would allow the grooms to mount him, but when he had on all his rich caparisons, no one on earth could get on his back except his royal master. There is no doubt that animals take notice of dress. I have been told that when crinolines were worn, all the dogs barked at any woman not provided with one. Plutarch was among the earliest to observe that animals discover sooner than man when ice will not bear, which he thinks that they find out by noticing if there is any sound of running water. He says truly that to draw such an inference presupposes not only sharp ears, but a real power of weighing cause and effect. Plutarch mentions foxes as particularly clever in this respect, but dogs possess the same gift. The French Ambassador at Rome—who, like all persons of superior intelligence, is very fond of animals—told me the following story. One winter day, when he was French Minister at Munich, he went alone with his gun and his dog to the banks of the Isar. Having shot a snipe, he ordered the dog to go on to the ice to fetch it, but, to his surprise, the animal, which had never disobeyed him, refused. Annoyed at its obstinacy, he went himself on to the ice, which immediately gave way, and had he not been a good swimmer he might not be now at the Palazzo Farnese.

The two creatures that have been most praised for their wisdom are the elephant and the ant, but of the ant’s admirers from Solomon to Lord Avebury, not one was ever so enthusiastic as Plutarch. Horace, indeed, had discoursed of her foresight: “She carries in her mouth whatever she is able, and piles up her heap, by no means ignorant or careless of the future; then, when Aquarius saddens the inverted year, never does she creep abroad, wisely making use of the stores which were provided beforehand.” But such a tribute sounds cold beside Plutarch’s praise of her as the tiny mirror in which the greatest marvels of Nature are reflected, a drop of the purest water, containing every Virtue, and, above all, what Homer calls “the sweetness of loving qualities.” Ants, he declares, show the utmost solicitude for their comrades, alive and dead. They exhibit their ingenuity by biting off the ends of grains to prevent them from sprouting and so spoiling the provender. He speaks, though not from his own observation, of the beautiful interior arrangements of ant-hills which had been examined by naturalists who divided the mount into sections, “A thing I cannot approve of!” Tender-hearted philosopher, who had a scruple about upsetting an ant-hill! Of other insects, he most admires the skill of spiders and bees. It is said that the bees of Crete, when rounding a certain promontory, carried tiny stones as ballast to avoid being blown away by the wind. I have seen more than once a tiny stone hanging from the spider-threads which crossed and re-crossed an avenue—it seemed to me that these were designed to steady the suspension bridge.

Plutarch insists that animals teach themselves even things outside the order of their natural habits, a fact which will be confirmed by all who have observed them closely. Just as no two animals have the same disposition, so does each one, though in greatly varying degree, display some little arts or accomplishments peculiar to itself. Plutarch mentions a trained elephant that was seen practising its steps when it thought that no one was looking. But he allots the palm of self-culture to an incomparable magpie that belonged to a barber whose shop faced the temple called the Agora of the Greeks. The bird could imitate to perfection any sort of sound, cry or tune; it was renowned in the whole quarter. Now it happened one morning that the funeral of a wealthy citizen went past, accompanied by a very fine band of trumpeters which performed an elaborate piece of music. After that day, to every one’s surprise, the magpie grew mute! Had it become deaf or dumb or both! Endless were the surmises, and what was not the general amazement when, at last, it broke its long silence by bursting forth with a flood of brilliant notes the exact reproduction of the difficult trills and cadences executed by the funeral band! Evidently it had been practising it in its head all that while, and only produced it when it had got it quite perfect. Several Romans and several Greeks witnessed the facts and could vouch for the truth of the narrative.

The swallow’s nest and the nightingale’s song make Plutarch pause and wonder; he believes, with Aristotle, that the old nightingales teach the young ones, remarking that nightingales reared in captivity never sing so well as those that have profited by the parental lessons. He gives a word to the dove of Deucalion which returned a first time to the ark because the deluge continued, but disappeared when it was set free again, the waters having subsided. Plutarch confesses, however, that this is “mythical,” and though he admits that birds deserved the name by which Euripides calls them of “Messengers of the gods,” he is inclined to attribute their warnings to the direct intervention of an over-ruling deity of whom they are the inconscient agents.

It is a pleasure to find that Plutarch had a high appreciation of the hedgehog—the charming “urchin” which represents to many an English child an epitome of wild nature, friendly yet untamed, familiar yet mysterious. He does not say that it milks cows—a calumny which is an article of faith with the British ploughman—but he relates that when the grapes are ripe, the mother urchin goes under the vines and shakes the plants till some of the grapes fall off; then, rolling herself over them, she attaches a number of grapes to her spines and so marches back to the hole where she keeps her nurslings. “One day,” says Plutarch, “when we were all together, we had the chance of seeing this with our own eyes—it looked as if a bunch of grapes was shuffling along the ground, so thickly covered was the animal with its booty.”

Dogs that threw themselves on their masters’ pyre, dogs that caused the arrest of assassins or thieves, dogs that remained with and protected the bodies of their dead masters, clever dogs, devoted dogs, magnanimous dogs—these will be all found in Plutarch’s gallery. How high-minded, he says, it is in the dog when, as Homer advises, you lay down your stick, even an angry dog ceases to attack you. He praises the affectionate regard which many have shown in giving decent burial to the dogs they cherished, and recalls how Xantippus of old, whose dog swam by his galley to Salamis when the Athenians were forced to abandon their city, buried the faithful creature on a promontory which “to this day” is known as the Dog’s Grave. Very desolate was the case of the other animals that ran up and down distraught when their masters embarked, like the poor cats and dogs which helped the English soldiers in the block-houses to while away the weary hours, and which, by superior orders, were left to their fate, though their comrades in khaki were anxious enough to carry them away. As a proof of the affection of the Greeks for their dogs Plutarch might have spoken of the not uncommon representation of them on the Stelæ in the family group which brings together all the dearest ties between life and death.

One animal is missing from Plutarch’s portrait gallery—the cat, to which he only concedes the ungracious allusion “that man had not the excuse of hunger for eating flesh, like the weasel or cat.” Can we make good the omission from other sources?

There is a general notion that cats “were almost unknown to Greek and Roman antiquity”—these are the words of so well-informed a writer as M. S. Reinach. Yet instances exist of paintings of cats on Greek vases of the fifth century, and I was interested to see in the Museum at Athens a well-carved cat on a stele. Aristotle, who, like Plutarch, mentions cats in connexion with weasels (both, he says, catch birds), reckons the time they live at six years, less than half the life of an average modern cat; this may indicate that though known, they were not then acclimatised in Europe. Æsop has four fables of cats: 1. A cat dressed as a physician offers his services to an aviary of birds; they are declined. 2. A cat seeks an excuse for eating a cock; he fails to find the excuse, but eats the cock all the same. 3. A cat pretends to be dead so that mice may come near her. 4. A cat falls in love with a handsome young man and induces Venus to change her into a lovely maiden. But on a mouse coming into the room, she scampers after it. Venus, being displeased, changes her back into a cat. This belongs to a large circle of folk-tales, and probably all these fables came from the East.

Herodotus tells as a “very marvellous thing” that cats are apt to rush back into a burning house, and that the Egyptians try to save them, even at the risk of their lives, but rarely succeed: hence great lamentation. Also, that if a cat die in a house all the dwellers in it shave their eyebrows; “the cats, when they are dead, they carry for burial to the city of Bubastis.” The Egyptian name for light (and for cat) is Mau, and the inference is irresistible, that the Egyptians supposed the cat to be constantly apostrophizing the sacred light of which she was the symbol. Nothing shows the strength of tradition better than the existence of an endowment at Cairo for the feeding and housing of homeless cats.

If the cat in Europe had been a rarity so great as most people think, it would have been more highly prized. It seems nearer the truth to say that it was not admired. Its incomplete domestication which attracts us, did not attract the ancient world. Tame only so far as it suits their own purposes, cats patronize man, looking down upon him from a higher plane, which, if only the house-top, they make a golden bar.

“Chat mystérieux,

Chat séraphique, chat étrange ...

Peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?”

Greeks and Romans preferred a plain animal to this half-elf, half-god.

The Greek comic writer, Anaxandrides, said to the Egyptians: “You weep if you see a cat ailing, but I like to kill and skin it.” The fear lest cats should be profanely treated in Europe led the Egyptians to do all they could to prevent their exportation; they even sent missions to the Mediterranean to ransom the cats borne into slavery and carry them back to Egypt. But these missions could not have reached the cats that had been taken inland, and as the animal increases rapidly, it may have been fairly common from early times. There is no doubt, however, that the number went up with a bound when Egypt became Christian, and every monk who came to Europe brought shoals of cats, the date corresponding with that of the first invasion of the rat in the trail of the Huns.

BRONZE STATUE OF AN EGYPTIAN CAT.
(Collection of H.E. Monsieur Camille Barrère, French Ambassador at Rome.)

Antiquity regarded the cat, before all things, as a little beast of prey. Nearly every reference to it gives it this character. In the stele at Athens the cat is supposed to be looking at a bird-cage to which the man is pointing; the man holds a bird in his left hand, presumably the pet of the child who stands by him. It seems as if the cat meditated if it had not performed some fell deed. Seneca observed that young chickens feel an instinctive fear of the cat but not of the dog. The fine mosaic at Pompeii shows a tabby kitten in the act of catching a quail.

Only one ancient poet, by a slight magician-like touch, calls up a different vision: Theorcitus makes the voluble Praxinœ say to her maid: “Eunœ, pick up your work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like.” There—at last—is the cat we know! But after all, it is an Egyptian cat: a cat sure of her privileges, a cat who relies on her goddess prototype, and has but a modicum of respect for the chattering little Syracusan woman in whose house she condescends to reside. Such were not cats of ancient Greece and Rome, who, from being un-appreciated, fell back to the morals of the simple ravager.

V
MAN AND HIS BROTHER

TRADITIONAL beliefs are like the coco de mer which was found floating, here and there, on the sea, or washed up on the shore, and which gave birth to the strangest conjectures; it was supposed to tell of undiscovered continents or to have dropped from heaven itself. Then, one day, some one saw this peculiar cocoanut quietly growing on a tall palm-tree in an obscure islet of the Indian Ocean. All we gather of primitive traditions is the fruit. Yet the fruit did not grow in the air, it grew on branches and the branches grew on a trunk and the trunk had a root. To get to the root of even the slightest of our own prejudices—let alone those of the savage—we should have to travel back far into times when history was not.

Lucretius placed at the beginning of the ages of mankind a berry-eating race, innocent of blood. The second age belonged to the hunter who killed animals, at first, and possibly for a long time, for their skins, before he used their flesh as food. In the third age animals were domesticated; first the sheep, because that was gentle and easily tamed (which one may see by the moufflons at Monte Carlo), then, by degrees, the others.

This classification was worthy of the most far-seeing mind of antiquity. Had not human originally meant humane we should not have been here to tell the tale. The greater traditions of a bloodless age are enshrined in sacred books; minor traditions of it abound in the folk-lore of the world. Man was home-sick of innocence; his conscience, which has gone on getting more blunted, not more sensitive, revolted at the “daily murder.” So mankind called upon heaven to provide an excuse for slaughter.

The Kirghis of Mongolia say that in the beginning only four men and four animals were made: the camel, the ox, the sheep, and the horse, and all were told to live on grass. The animals grazed, but the men pulled up the grass by the roots and stored it. The animals complained to God that the men were pulling up all the grass, and that soon there would be none left. God said: “If I forbid men to eat grass, will you allow them to eat you?” Fearing starvation, the animals consented.

From the first chapter of Genesis to the last of the “Origin of Species” there is one long testimony to our vegetarian ancestor, but beyond the fact that he existed, what do we know about him? We may well believe that he lived in a good climate and on a plenteous earth. Adam and Eve or their representatives could not have subsisted in Greenland. I think that the killing of wild animals, and especially the eating of them, began when man found himself confronted by extremes of cold and length of winter nights. The skins of animals gave him the only possibility of keeping warm or even of living at all, if he was to brave the outer air, while their flesh may have been often the only food he could find. He was obliged to eat them to keep alive, as Arctic explorers have been obliged to eat their sledge-dogs. Not preference, but hard necessity, made him carnivorous.

These speculations are confirmed by the doings of the earliest man of whom we have any sure knowledge; not the proto-man who must have developed, as I have said, under very different climatic conditions. Perhaps he sat under the palm-trees growing on the banks of the Thames, but though the palm-trees have left us their fruit, man, if he was there, left nothing to speak of his harmless sojourn. By tens of thousands of years the earliest man with whom we can claim acquaintance is the reindeer hunter of Quartenary times. He hunted and fed upon the reindeer, but he had not tamed them. He wore reindeer skins, but he could not profit by reindeer milk; no children were brought up by hand, possibly to the advantage of the children. It is likely, by the by, that the period of human lactation was very long. The horse also was killed for food at a time infinitely removed from the date of his first service to man.

REINDEER BROWSING.
Older Stone Age.

HORSE DRAWING DISC OF THE SUN.
Older Bronze Age.

The reindeer hunter was a most intelligent observer of animals. He was an artist and a very good one. The best of his scratchings on reindeer horn and bone of horses and reindeer in different attitudes are admirable for freedom, life, and that intuition of character which makes the true animal painter. For a time which makes one dizzy to look down upon, no such draughtsman appeared as the pre-historic cave dweller. The men of the age of Polished Stone and of the early ages of metals produced nothing similar in the way of design. They understood beauty of form and ornament or, rather, perhaps, they still shared in that Nature’s own unerring touch; it took millenniums of civilisation for man to make one ugly pot or pan. But these men had not the gift or even the idea of sitting down to copy a grazing or running animal.

We need not go far, however, to find a man who, living under nearly the same conditions as the reindeer hunter of Southern France, has developed the same artistic aptitude. I shall always recall with pleasure my visit to a Laplander’s hut; it was in the broad daylight of Arctic midnight—no one slept in the hut, except an extraordinarily small baby in a canoe-shaped cradle. The floor was spread with handsome furs, and its aspect was neither untidy nor comfortless. I reflected that this was how the cave dweller arranged his safe retreat. Much more strongly was he brought to my mind by the domestic objects of every sort made of reindeer horn and adorned with drawings. As I write I have one of them before me, a large horn knife, the sheath of which ends with the branching points. It is beautifully decorated with graffiti, showing the good and graceful creature without whom the Laplander cannot live. The school of art is distinctly Troglodite.

A theory has been started that the man of the Quartenary age drew his horses and his reindeer solely as a magical decoy from the idea that the pictures “called” the game as whistling (i.e., imitating the sound of the wind) “calls” the wind. I do not know that the Lapps, though practised in magic, have any such purpose in view. It is said that it would be absurd to attribute a motive of mere artistic pleasure to the Troglodite. Why? Some races have as natural a tendency to artistic effort as the bower-bird has to decorate its nest. Conditions of climate may have given the hunter periods of enforced idleness, and art, in its earliest form, was, perhaps, always an escape from ennui, a mode of passing the time. That the early hunter dealt in magic is likely enough; he is supposed, though not on altogether conclusive grounds, to have been a fetich-worshipper, and fetich-worship is akin to some kinds of magic. But it does not follow that all his art had this connexion. How animals appeared to his eyes we know; what he thought about them he has not told us. The Eskimo, the modern pre-historic man who is believed to be a better-preserved type than even the Lapp, may be asked to speak for him.

The Eskimo can say that he had a friendly feeling towards all living things, notwithstanding that he fed on flesh, and that wild beasts sometimes fed on him. Not that he had ever talked of wild beasts, for he had no tame ones. He had not a vocabulary of rude terms about animals. He was inclined to credit every species with many potential merits. The Eskimo is afraid—very much afraid—of bears. Yet he is the first to admit that the bear is capable of acting like the finest of fine gentlemen. A woman was in a fright at seeing a bear and so gave him a partridge; that bear never forgot the trifling service, but brought her newly killed seals ever after. Another bear saved the life of three men who wished to reward him. He politely declined their offer, but if, in winter time, they should see a bald-headed bear, will they induce their companions to spare him? After so saying, he plunged into the sea. Next winter a bear was sighted and they were going to hunt him, when these men, remembering what had happened, begged the hunters to wait till they had had a look at him. Sure enough it was “their own bear”! They told the others to prepare a feast for him, and when he had refreshed himself, he lay down to sleep and the children played around him. Presently he awoke and ate a little more, after which he went down to the sea, leapt in, and was never seen again.

Even such lovely imaginings, we may believe, without an excessive stretch of fancy, gilded the mental horizon of the Troglodite. He had long left behind the stage of primal innocence, but no supernatural chasm gaped between him and his little brothers.

The reindeer hunters were submerged by what is more inexorable than man—Nature. The reindeer vanished, and with him the hunter, doomed by the changed conditions of climate. He vanished as the Lapp is vanishing; the poignantly tragic scene which was chronicled by two lines in the newspapers during the early summer of 1906—the suicide of a whole clan of Lapps whose reindeer were dead and who had nothing to do but to follow them—may have happened in what we call fair Provence. Thousands of men paid with their lives for its becoming a rose garden.

The successors of the reindeer hunters, Turanian like them, but far more progressive, were the lake dwellers, the dolmen-builders, with their weaving and spinning, their sowing and reaping, their pottery and their baskets, their polished flints and their domestic animals. Man’s greatest achievement, the domestication of animals, had been reached in the unrecorded ages that divide the rough and the polished stone. Man, “excellent in art,” had mastered the beast whose lair is in the wilds; “he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck; he tames the tireless mountain bull.” The great mind of Sophocles saw and saw truly that these were the mighty works of man; the works which made man, man. We know that when the Neolithic meat-eater of what is now Denmark threw away the bones after he had done his meal, these bones were gnawed by house-dogs. A simple thing, but it tells a wondrous tale. Did these dogs come with their masters from Asia, or had they been tamed in their Northern home? The answer depends on whether the dog is descended from jackal or wolf. In either case it is unlikely that the most tremendous task of domestication was the first.

Not everywhere has man domesticated animals, though we may be sure that he took them everywhere with him after he had domesticated them. If man walked on dry land across the Atlantic as some enthusiastic students of sub-oceanic geography now believe that he did, he led no sheep, no horses, no dogs. In America, when it was discovered, there was only one domestic animal, and in Australia there was none. Of native animals, the American buffalo could have been easily tamed. It may be said that in Australia there was no suitable animal, but the dog’s ancestor could not have seemed a suitable animal for a household protector; a jackal is not a promising pupil, still less a wolf, unless there was some more gentle kind of wolf than any which now survives. Might not a good deal have been made out of the kangaroo? Possibly the whole task of domestication was the work of one patient, intelligent and widely-spread race, kindred of the Japanese, who in making forest trees into dwarfs show the sort of qualities that would be needed to make a wild animal not only unafraid (that is nothing), but also a willing servant.

The Neolithic man’s eschatology of animals and of himself was identical. He contemplated for both a future life which reproduced this one. “The belief in the deathlessness of souls,” said Canon Isaac Taylor, “was the great contribution of the Turanian race to the religious thought of the world.” This appears to claim almost too much. Would any race have had the courage to start upon its way had it conceived death as real?

“It is a modest creed and yet

Pleasant if one considers it,

To own that death itself must be

Like all the rest, a mockery.”

It is a creed which springs from the very instinct of life. Two pelicans returning to their nest found their two young ones dead from sunstroke. The careful observer who was watching them has recorded that they did not seem to recognise the inert, fluffy heap as what was their fledglings; they hunted for them for a long while, moving the twigs of the nest, and at last threw one of the dead birds out of it. So the primitive man in presence of the dead knows that this is not he and he begins to ask: where is he?

But if every race in turn has asked that question, it was asked with more insistence by some peoples than by others, and above all, it was answered by some with more assurance. The Neolithic Turanians had nothing misty in their vision of another world. It was full of movement and variety: the chase, the battle, the feast, sleep and awakening, night and day—these were there as well as here. Animals were essential to the picture, and it never struck the Neolithic man that there was any more difficulty about their living again than about his living again. If he philosophised at all, it was probably after the fashion of the Eskimo who holds the soul to be the “owner” of the body: the body, the flesh, dies and may be devoured, but he who kills the body does not kill its “owner.”

Vast numbers of bones have been found near the dolmens in Southern France. The steed of the dead man galloped with him into the Beyond. The faithful dog trotted by the little child, comrade and guardian. In the exquisite Hebrew idyll Tobias has his dog as well as the angel to accompany him on his adventurous earthly journey. The little Neolithic boy had only the dog and his journey was longer; but to some grieving fathers would it not be a rare comfort to imagine their lost darlings guarded by loving four-footed friends along the Path of Souls?

The Celtic conquerors of the dolmen-builders took most of their religious ideas. When successful aid in mundane matters was what was chiefly sought in religion, a little thing might determine conversion en masse. If the divinities of one set of people seemed on some occasion powerless, it was natural to try the divinities of somebody else. When success crowned the experiment, the new worship was formally adopted. This is exactly what happened in the historic case of Clovis and “Clothilde’s God,” and it doubtless happened frequently before the dawn of history. Druidism is believed to have arisen in this way in a grafting of the new on the old. The Celts had the same views about the next world as the dolmen-builders. They are thought to have taken them from the conquered with the rest of their religious system, but to me it seems unlikely that they had not already similar views when they arrived from Asia. In the early Vedas goats and horses were sacrificed to go before and announce the coming of the dead; Vedic animals kept their forms, the renewed body was perfect and incorruptible, but it was the real body. A celebrated racehorse was deified after death. Such beliefs have a strong affinity to the theory that animals (or slaves) killed at the man’s funeral will be useful to him in the after-life. However derived, our European ancestors embraced that theory to the full.

Only a few years ago a second Viking ship was found at Oseberg, in Norway, in which were the remains of ten horses, four dogs, a young ox, and the head of an old ox. Three more horses were found outside. The dogs had on their own collars with long chains. There were also sledges with elaborately carved animals’ heads. It was a queen’s grave; her distaff and spinning-wheel told of simple womanly tasks amidst so much sepulchral splendour. In those late times the law by which religious forms grow more sumptuous as the faith behind them grows less, may have come into operation. Lavish but meaningless tributes may have taken the place of a provision full of meaning for real wants.

So the sacrifices to the gods may have been once intended to stock the pastures of heaven. It cannot be doubted that the victim was never killed in the mind of the original sacrificer, it was merely transferred to another sphere. The worser barbarity comes in when the true significance of the act is lost and when it is repeated from habit.

After animals were domesticated they were not killed at all for a long time—still less were they eaten. Of this there can be no shadow of doubt. The first domestic animals were far too valuable possessions for any one to think of killing them. As soon would a showman kill a performing bull which had cost him a great deal of trouble to train. Besides this, and more than this, the natural man, who is much better than he is painted, has a natural horror of slaying the creature that eats out of his hand and gives him milk and wool and willing service.

There are pastoral tribes now in South Africa which live on the milk, cheese and butter of their sheep, but only kill them as the last necessity. In East Africa the cow is never killed, and if one falls ill, it is put into a sort of infirmary and carefully tended. We all know the divinity which hedges round the Hindu cow. The same compunction once saved the labouring ox. When I was at Athens for the Archæological Congress of 1905, Dr. R. C. Bosanquet, at that time head of the British school, told me that he had observed among the peasants in Crete the most intense reluctance to kill the ox of labour. In several places in Ancient Greece all sorts of devices were resorted to in order that the sacrificial knife might seem to kill the young bull accidentally, and the knife—the guilty thing—was afterwards thrown into the sea. This last custom is important; it marks the moment when the slaughter of domestic animals, even for sacrificial purposes, still caused a scruple. The case stands thus: at first they were not killed at all; then, for a long time, they were killed only for sacrifice. Then they were killed for food, but far and wide relics of the original scruple may be detected as in the common invocation of divine permission which every Moslem butcher utters before killing an animal.

Animal and human sacrifices are one phenomenon of early manners, not two. The people who sacrificed domestic animals to accompany their dead generally, if not always, also sacrificed slaves for the same purpose, and the sacrifice of fair maidens at the funerals of heroes was to give them these as companions in another world.

I am not aware that Gift Sacrifice ever led to cannibalism nor, in its primitive forms, did it lead to eating the flesh of the animal victim which was buried or burnt with the body of the person whom it was intended to honour. This is what was done by the dolmen-builders. The earlier reindeer hunters had no domestic animals to sacrifice, and it is unlikely that they sacrificed men. At all events, they were not cannibals.

On the other hand, cannibalism is closely connected with Pact Sacrifice, which there is a tendency now to regard as antecedent to Gift Sacrifice, especially among those scholars who think that the whole human race has passed through a stage of Totemism. Psychologically the Totemist’s sacrifice of a reserved animal to which all the sanctity of human life is ascribed, resembles the sacrifice by some African tribes of a human victim—as in both cases not only is a pact of brotherhood sealed, but also those who partake of the flesh are supposed to acquire the physical, moral, or supersensual qualities attributed to the victim. Indeed, it would be possible to argue that the Totem was a substitute for a human victim, and a whole new theory of Totemism might be evolved from that postulate, but it is wiser to observe such affinities without trying to derive one thing from another which commonly proves a snare and a delusion. It is sufficient to note that among fundamental human ideas is the belief that man grows like what he feeds upon.

The sacrifice of the Totem, though found scattered wherever Totemism prevails, is not an invariable or even a usual accompaniment of it. When it does occur, the Totem is not supposed to die, any more than the victim was supposed to die in the primitive Gift Sacrifice. It changes houses or goes to live with “our lost others,” or returns to eternal life in the “lake of the dead.” The death of the soul is the last thing that is thought of. The majority of Totemists do not kill their Totems under any circumstances, and when the Totem is a wild beast they believe that it shows a like respect for the members of its phratry. If one dies they deplore its loss; in some parts of East Africa where the Totem is a hyena not even the chief is mourned for with equal ceremony.

Totemism is the adoption of an animal (or plant) as the visible badge of an invisible bond. The word Totem is an American Indian word for “badge,” and the word Taboo a Polynesian term meaning an interdiction. The Totemist generally says that he is descended from his Totem: hence the men and the beasts of each Totem clan are brothers. But the beast is something more than a brother, he is the perpetual reincarnation of the race-spirit. Numerical problems never trouble the natural human mind; all the cats of Bubastis were equally sacred, and all the crows of Australia are equally sacred to the clans who have a crow for Totem. To the mass of country folks every cow is the cow, every mouse is the mouse; the English villager is practically as much convinced of this as the American Indian or the Australian native is convinced that every Totem is the Totem.

Men and women of the same Totem are taboo: they cannot intermarry. But I need not speak of Totemism here as a social institution. My business with it is limited to its place in the history of ideas about animals.

In Totemism we find represented not one idea, but an aggregation of most of the fundamental ideas of mankind. This is why the attempt to trace it to one particular root has failed to dispose of the question of its origin in a final and satisfactory manner. For a time there seemed to be a general disposition to accept what is called the “Nickname theory” by which Totemism was attributed to the custom of giving animal nicknames. We have a peasant called Nedrott (in the Brescian dialect “duck”); I myself never heard his real name—his wife is “la Nedrott” and his children are “i Nedrotti.” It is alleged that his father or grandfather had flat feet. But I never heard of a confusion between the Nedrotti and their nicknamesakes. It may be said that this would be sure to happen were they less civilised. How can we be sure that it would be sure to happen? An eminent scholar who objects to the nickname theory on the ground that it assigns too much importance to “verbal misunderstanding,” proposes as an alternative the “impregnation theory.” A woman, on becoming aware of approaching motherhood, mentally connects the future offspring with an animal or plant which happens to catch her eye at that moment. This is conceivable, given the peculiar notions of some savages on generation, but if all Totemism sprang from such a cause, is it not strange that in Australia there are only two Totems, the eagle-hawk and crow?

As a mere outward fact, the Totem is what its name implies, a badge or sign; just as the wolf was the badge of Rome, or as the lion is taken to represent the British Empire. The convenience of adopting a common badge or sign may have appeared to men almost as soon as they settled into separate clans or communities. Besides public Totems there exist private and secret Totems, and this suggests that the earliest communities may have consisted of a sort of freemasonry, a league of mutual help of the nature of a secret society. Around the outward and so to speak heraldic fact of Totemism are gathered the impressions and beliefs which make it a rule of life, a morality and a religion.