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All these are Rodents, and you may know them by their four long
chisel-like front teeth (see B, Fig. 55), which have a large gap on each
side, between them and the grinding teeth behind. These chisel teeth
have not bony roots like the teeth of most animals, but rest in a deep
socket, and continue growing during the whole of the animal’s life; and
they have a hard coat of enamel in front, so that as the tooth wears
away behind, this enamel stands out and forms a sharp cutting edge,
and there is perhaps no tool more efficient for gnawing a root, a
nutshell, or the solid wood of a tree, than the tooth of a beaver or rat.
Fig. 55.
Fig. 56.
A group of Insect-eaters.
Common Shrew, Hedgehog, Mole, Bat.
Look among the insect-eaters at our Hedgehog (Fig. 56), so weak
and shuffling in his movements that he would have been cleared out of
the world long ago but for the sharp elastic spines which grow upon his
back in the place of hair. There he goes trotting along under the
hedges in the twilight, cracking the horny skins of beetles, or sucking
eggs, or devouring worms, slugs and mice when he can get them,
without a thought of fear. For he can roll himself up in an instant if
danger be near, and his sharp spines will keep off even dogs and
foxes, unless they can catch him unawares, and bite him underneath
in his soft throat. Nay, he can actually master a poisonous snake, and
use it for food, not suffering even from the adder’s fangs when they
pierce his tender nose.
Fig. 57.
A group of Rodents.
Harvest-mouse, Porcupine, Mole-rat.
It is curious to see how quickly he can roll himself up by drawing
together the strong band of muscle which passes along the sides of his
body from head to tail, sending out bands of muscle to feet, head, and
legs. When he contracts this band his limbs are all drawn in, and the
spiny back forms a kind of prickly bag all round them, even his tender
snout being safely hidden. Nor are his spines merely sharp—they are
as elastic as the hair of which they are modifications; and the
hedgehog can drop safely from a height when he is in his ball-shape,
falling on the spines, which bend and straighten again as though made
of whalebone. So he lives under hedges and in ditches till the winter
comes, when he settles down in a nest of moss and leaves in a
hedgebank or a hollow tree, and sleeps the cold weather away. And
when the spring comes he takes a wife, who brings up her little ones in
the nest of moss and leaves under the hedgerow, watching over them
as long as their spines are soft.
And now where shall we look among the rodents for a creature to
match the hedgehog among insect-eaters? Surely to the “fretful
Porcupines,” which feed on all kinds of vegetable food in Southern
Europe, Africa, Asia, and America, protecting themselves by the
formidable array of spines which they can raise at will. Even the
European porcupine, which is about two feet long and the weakest of
his tribe, is better protected than is generally believed. It is true that his
long black and white ringed spines only cover the hinder part of his
body, but the hair of his head and neck hides a number of short spines
which can give very sharp pricks; and though he is a timid night-loving
animal, hiding by day in burrows and holes of the rocks, yet when
attacked he jerks himself up against his enemy, so that the long spines
wound very severely. And when we come to the Tree-porcupines,
which hang by their tails from the palm trees in Mexico and Brazil, we
find that their short stout spines are a very efficient defence both
against birds of prey and the deadly coils of the boa constrictor and
other large snakes; while the Western porcupine and the almost
tailless Canada porcupine, which climb trees and strip off their bark
and buds, have a clothing of such dangerous weapons that pumas and
wolves have been known to die of inflammation from the wounds.
The porcupine among the rodents, then, like the hedgehog among
insect-eaters, has adopted prickles as a defence. But there are many
soft-haired creatures living upon the ground in both families which
have no protection but concealment, and we find them both gaining it
by burrowing into the ground. Among the insect-eaters the Mole is the
most successful digger, and as he works his tortuous way through the
ground in search of worms and grubs, it is scarcely possible to imagine
a miner more usefully equipped for his work. His skeleton, it is true, is,
on the whole, more primitive and roughly finished than that of higher
animals, his ear is almost closed, and his eye though bright is deeply
hidden; but the parts specially necessary to him are most wonderfully
fitted for the work they have to do.
His broad shovel-like front paws (see Fig. 56), with their five strong
claws, set each in a long groove at the tip of the last finger-joint, are
powerful tools for shovelling away the earth, as he turns them
outwards and pushes with them as if he were swimming; and they are
carried on strong, short, and broad front legs, fixed to collar-bones and
a shoulder blade of unusual strength, while the breastbone is so
formed as to throw the legs forward and bring them on a level with his
nose when he is burrowing. This nose, too, has its part to play, for it is
long and slender, with a small bone at the tip, which helps him in
pushing his way forwards while his hind feet are planted flat and firm
on the ground behind, while it also serves to pick out the grubs,
worms, and beetles from their narrow holes.
Here, then, we have the very best of miners, who has secured food
and safety far from the busy world above, and spends his time hunting
for grubs and earth-worms in the dark earth below. He is a most
voracious animal, and makes the ground above him heave and swell
as he toils through it eager for prey, pushing up every now and then
with his nose the loose earth he has excavated, thus marking the line
of his route by molehills.
But when he builds his home and fortress where he takes his long
winter’s sleep, and hides from weasels and pole-cats, he takes care to
throw no loose rubbish above; on the contrary, he presses the earth
together so as to make the walls of his chamber firm and hard, and
carries out from it a number of passages, by any of which he can reach
his home in safety when he is pursued too closely.
Thus by his cleverness in burrowing, and the useful tools which he
carries upon his body, the mole has managed to find safe feeding-
ground and shelter, when no doubt many of his relations living above
ground have been killed off. Even underground he has his enemies, for
the Weasel, the Stoat, and the Badger find him good eating, while if he
meets one of his own brothers in a narrow passage they will fight till
one is killed and eaten; yet though fierce he is also tender-hearted, for
mole-catchers say that when a mother-mole is caught in a trap the
father may sometimes be found dead by her side.
And now if we turn to the rodents for rivals to the mole, we are
almost confounded by the multitude of creatures which have found
safety in burrowing. Not only have we the rabbit-warrens, by which the
sandy soil of our commons is riddled in every direction with holes,
leading to burrows where the mother lies snugly hidden with her five or
six naked little ones in a bed of her own fur; but we have the extensive
burrows of the little, long-legged, leaping, gnawing Jerboas of Africa,
which are so like the Jumping Shrews among insect-eaters. Then
again there are the underground cities of the South American
Viscachas and Chinchillas, and the extensive subterranean
settlements of the Lemmings,—those curious rodents, which from time
to time start off in vast swarms across Norway, over mountain and
valley, through flood and fen, over rivers and plains, preyed upon by
eagles and hawks, foxes and weasels, on their way, but never
stopping or swerving in their course till they reach the sea, into which
they plunge and drown themselves. Again, every inhabitant of
Switzerland knows the Marmot and the burrows he forms, scratching
up the earth with his hind feet and patting it together with his front
paws and his broad nose; while every American child has heard of the
138
hillocks thrown up by the “Prairie Dogs,” which undermine whole
plains in the far west with their underground cities, where the
burrowing owl shares their home with them, and the rattlesnake steals
their young.
Fig. 58.
But all these come out upon the land and use their burrows chiefly
for homes and nurseries. We can match the mole better than this
among rodents, for in Eastern Europe, India, and Africa, there are blind
139
creatures called Mole-rats (see Fig. 57), with broad flat heads,
small eyes hidden in their fur, short tails, and feet with sharp claws,
which live almost entirely underground, burrowing subterranean
galleries in the sandy plains in search of roots, as the mole does for
140
worms; while the Pouched Rats of North America also live in
burrows, throwing up hills just like mole-hills, and gnawing roots and
buried seeds, which they carry in their large cheek-pouches, to store
up in their underground chamber for winter food.
Nevertheless, the rodents can scarcely compete with the mole as
burrowers, and it is not till we come to the water-animals that they
begin to have the best of it. True, the insect-eaters have the Water-
143
shrew and the curious West African Shrew, with its broad tail; while
144
the Desman of Russia and the Pyrenees (see Fig. 58), with his
dense furry coat, his broad tail, and his webbed feet, is quite a match
for the gnawing Musk-rat or Musquash of North America, for they both
live in fortresses on the river-banks, to which hidden passages are well
contrived to elude pursuit; and while the desman, with his curious
movable snout, pokes about in the Russian or Pyrenean streams after
leeches, water-snails and insects, the musquash in America gnaws off
the roots and stems of water-plants.
Fig. 59.
* * * * *
But of all modified insect-eaters the most extraordinary are the
Bats, which are so different from all the others that they have been
149
placed in a distinct order of their own. Imagine a little creature about
three inches long, with a body something like a shrew, large ears, a
protruding snout, and plenty of sharp teeth (see Figs. 61 and 62). Let it
have a breast bone projecting more than in most milk-givers, and
covered with a large mass of muscle as in birds, fitted to move the
wings, but having nipples to suckle its young. Let it have large
shoulder-blades and collar-bones, a strong upper arm, a very long
lower arm (fa, Fig. 61), and four immensely long fingers to its hand
(ha), and a short clawed thumb (t). Let its hind legs be short and weak,
with a long spur behind the heel (h) of its five-toed feet, and finally let
the skin of its body grow on over the arms and long fingers, filling in
the space between the elbows and the neck in front, and stretching
away behind, over the legs down to the ankle, and on behind the legs,
so as to enclose the tail. This skin growing from the back above, and
the under part of the body below, will enclose the bones of the arms,
hands, and legs, like a kite with calico stretched on both sides (see
Fig. 56, p. 220), and when the long fingers are outspread and the legs
opened, no limbs will be seen, but only a small body and head, with an
immense expanse of skinny wing, from which the short clawed thumbs
and the four toes of the feet stick out before and behind.
Fig. 61.
Skeleton of a Bat.
(Lettered to compare with bird’s skeleton, p. 126).
fa, fore arm; w, wrist; t, thumb; ha, hand; h, heel; f, foot.
Now this creature is no longer like the flying squirrels or the colugo,
which can only take floating leaps; for though like them it has only a
membrane stretching out from its body, yet this has become a long
flexible wing, formed on a widely outstretched arm and abnormally
long hand, and moved by powerful muscles like the wings of birds or
insects. It is essentially fitted for flitting through the air in search of
prey, while it makes but little use of the running power which it
possesses in common with all other insect-eaters. If you see a bat
moving along the ground, you will acknowledge at once that it is a true
quadruped, yet, by its awkward gait as it shuffles along on its clawed
thumb and toes, you will judge that it is not an earth-loving animal.
Watch it at night on the wing and it is quite another creature; then it will
flit about in and out of cracks and crevices, under the eaves, round the
haystacks, or among the trees, and never once strike its wings against
anything, though it has been proved that it does not trust chiefly to its
bead-like eyes to guide it.
Bats have been blinded, their ears stopped with wool, and their
noses with sponge dipped in camphor; and yet, without sight, hearing,
or smell, they steered quite successfully between outstretched threads
or tree-branches, or found their way into a hole in the roof. In truth, as
they have become fitted to navigate the air, they seem also to have
become sensitive to its currents. Their wings are abundantly supplied
with nerves and blood-vessels, and have little rough points all over the
surface; their ears have generally a second ear-lobe or leaf within the
outer one, and those which have not this have leaves of skin or
membrane round their nose. With all these they seem to feel the
slightest difference in the air, so as to detect at once whether they are
in the open, or whether any resisting object is near them.
Fig. 62.
A Bat walking.
Fig. 63.
* * * * *
It may perhaps seem strange to many readers that instead of
leaving the apes and monkeys to the last, as standing at the head of
the animal kingdom, we should bring them in now, directly after such
lowly creatures as hedgehogs and mice, bats and beavers. It must,
however, be repeatedly borne in mind that we are not following a direct
line upwards, but a family tree, which branches in all directions; and
though the gap between monkeys and insectivora may be great, yet
they have many more points in common than the monkeys have with
any of the vegetable-feeders or carnivorous animals, and probably we
should find these links even more marked if it were not that we know
so very little of the early history of Monkeys. The reason of this
probably is that they live and die in woods, where any remains of their
bodies not eaten by other animals decay and crumble to dust, so that
we have only here and there a few skeletons to tell any tale of their
ancestors. And so it comes to pass that when we first meet with the
great army of milk-givers (see p. 209), lemurs, and soon after true
monkeys, existed, with thumbs on their hands and grasping great toes
on their feet.
In those times, when the climate of Europe and North America was
warm and genial, they spread far and wide with the other animals over
Germany, England, and the United States, where forests of palms, fig-
trees, and evergreens afforded them a congenial home. But as soon
as these began to fail and the climate of the northern countries
became cold and cheerless, we find the monkey-kingdom growing
narrower and narrower, till in our own day, while the flesh-feeders
range from the Arctic Circle to the Equator, and the vegetarians have
their reindeers travelling over ice and snow on the one hand, and their
hippopotamuses and giraffes wandering under the burning sun of
Africa on the other, the tender monkeys, which shiver in cold and damp
and are constant victims to consumption, have shrunk back into the
Tropics, where there is abundance of fruit and vegetation for their food.
151
It is true a few kinds still linger in Japan, and one on the sunny
Rock of Gibraltar, while one or two wander up the mountains of Tibet
into the regions of frost and snow; but, on the whole, monkeys are
essentially inhabitants of warm countries, where the trees are
perpetually covered with leaves and fruit, as in the luxuriant forests of
South Asia and Tropical Africa in the Old World, and Tropical America
in the New.
Though they have but a narrow kingdom, however, there can be no
doubt that they make the most of it, and have managed to develop
shrewdness and a sense of fun and frolic which would be quite
unaccountable if it were not for one peculiarity which they possess.
This peculiarity is the grasping power of their hands and feet, which
has caused them to become such active nimble creatures, swinging,
leaping, and running quickly along the boughs of the tangled forests in
which they live.
Yet the monkeys do not stand alone in this grasping power, for we
have seen that the opossums have hind-thumbs among the pouch-
bearers, while among the rodents the little dormouse has a nailless
grasping toe-thumb on his hind feet. So that here already we have
some clue to possible descendants of poor relations of the monkeys
down in the lower forms of life; and when we remember that the colugo
(see p. 232) is related on the one hand to marsupials and insect-
eaters, while on the other it leans towards the lemurs, and through
them to the monkeys, we begin to suspect that somewhere low down
in all these groups we might find ourselves among a family party from
which all the different branches have sprung; just as we found the
birds, reptiles, and milk-givers starting in past ages among the
amphibia.
It must, however, be very long ago since the monkeys scrambled
to the top of this family tree, for even the Lemurs,—which are not true
monkeys, but a lower type with an irregular number of teeth like the
insect-eaters, hairy hands and fox-like faces, without any change of
expression,—have well-developed thumbs and toe-thumbs, with nails
on hands and feet, and they have besides that free movement of the
arm and wrist which gives at once an advantage to the
152
Quadrumana or four-handed animals.
These lemurs are a gentle and loving race of creatures, which run
on all fours like cats, and have none of the mischievous half-reasoning
pranks of monkeys. They must have crept down long long ago from
the great battlefield of Europe and Asia, and taken refuge in the forests
of South Africa and India, and especially in the Island of Madagascar,
where they were sheltered from the attacks of larger and fiercer
animals. They are splendid climbers, with very sensitive tips to their
fingers, which are often of different lengths, and many of them have
eyes with pupils which expand and contract like those of a cat,