Читать книгу Natural Wonders - Edwin Tenney Brewster - Страница 12

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Ten years from now, you who are reading these sentences will be grown up. Once you were little pink and white babies, all soft and sweet and clean. And because you were soft and unresisting, you grew at a tremendous rate. At first you probably doubled your weight in six months. Then it took three years; then six or eight. By the time you are twelve, you probably will be half as heavy as you ever will be. In all the rest of your lives, you will do no more growing than you did in the first 180 days of them.

You will grow, too, as you have grown, by fits and starts. Sometimes you will shoot up like sunflower stalks. Sometimes, again, you will stop growing large, and begin growing hard. You will not seem to be getting bigger; but you will be getting stronger. Then, when you start growing again, you will perhaps find that you really can’t do so much as you could when you were a year younger, nor do it so well.

So you will keep on, sometimes growing large and sometimes growing hard, but almost never both at once, until you come to the full stature of men and women, and your soft baby flesh that couldn’t lift its head from the pillow has changed to tough muscle and hard bone. That is, of course, supposing that you have taken care of yourselves. If you haven’t—why then it may be different.

This growing up is so common an affair, so many of us do it, puppies and calves and kittens and little rabbits and baby birds, that we usually forget how wonderful a matter it is. Wonderful indeed it is; yet hardly less strange is it that after we have grown a while, then we stop. Yet our hair, as we know, doesn’t stop, nor the skin, nor the nails. Sometimes parts of the body which have hardly grown at all in youth, start up and grow in middle life. But the parts of the body which count, the parts which if they did grow would make us larger, these somehow know enough to stop.

It is not so with some other living creatures. A tree does not stop growing so long as it lives; nor does a fish. The big oak or the big trout may have grown faster than the little one; most likely it has simply been growing longer. We call any creature adult when it is large enough to have children of its own. But the oak bears acorns and the trout lays eggs, and then keeps on growing till it is ten, twenty, fifty times bigger than it was when it first had little ones. It is as if the cat, when her kittens were growing up, kept on growing along with them; and next year when there were more kittens kept on growing nearly as fast as they; and kept on year after year as long as it lived until it got to be as large as an elephant. And still its kittens would be just kittens, no larger than before.

Many animals manage their growing this way. The star-fish egg, you remember, is for size like a minute grain of dust, and the baby star when he first hatches out is hardly bigger. After that, he eats all he can get and grows as fast as he can, like any other kind of baby.

But suppose the little star-fish, as large say as a pin head, doesn’t find enough to eat. Does he then starve? Not a bit. He simply doesn’t grow. The eggs hatch out in the late spring within a few weeks of one another, and the little stars which do not happen upon a good boarding place, go practically without food all summer long. They remain perfectly healthy; but they scarcely grow at all, so that at the end of the summer they are still the pin heads that they were six months before.

On the other hand, when a star-fish happens to be born where he can find plenty of barnacles or small clams or mussels, he doesn’t do much but eat, and grows to match. It may happen, then, that of two stars, hatched on the same day, the one which has been well fed will be no less than five thousand times larger than the other which has gone hungry. Now a grown man is only about fifteen times as large as a new-born babe. But this is as if two babies, each six months old, should be, one no heavier than at birth, while the other weighed twenty-five tons and was as large as a whale.

So you can’t judge by appearances. The star-fish that you pick up at the shore may be a very young animal which has been well fed, or a very old one which has gone on short rations, while a young star, still growing, may be twenty times larger than his own great-grandfather.