Читать книгу Consider Her Ways - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 8

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I must now reach back in time and resume the narrative at the point where we entered the Œcodoma city.

Not far from the northern end of this barrier across the Narrows and just west of it, stood a city built by man. Although the detailed zoological and ecological study of man was not directly comprised in our instructions, I thought it inadvisable to neglect this opportunity. Man, forming part of that large division of the animal kingdom called the Mammalia, had been studied previously by a number of expeditions, but with inconclusive results. It was known that, by virtue of a number of peculiarities, he occupied a somewhat unique position within that group. It was suspected, on the ground of things reported by trustworthy observers, that his position among mammals might somewhat resemble the position of ants among insects. It had even been suggested that his development, in the past and in certain branches of his kind, had almost reached the same level as ours today; in that case he would represent that most interesting type of a retrograded or degenerate race; and I must confess I was inclined to embrace this view. One daring speculator had even hinted that perhaps man possessed, or at least had possessed, that same imperial gift of reason which is universally held to be the distinguishing mark of ants.

Before I summarize what was previously known of man, I will briefly state what led me to the conclusion that man is a degenerate type. In this I shall, of course, anticipate the results of later investigations. In the first place, it is an axiom among biologists of the first rank that every individual of no matter what species, in its development from the embryonic state to the imaginal, adult, or final state, summarizes the development of the race. If, then, it can be shown that the adult stage, in some essential point, shows a retrogression from the development reached in an immature phase, the only conclusion possible to be drawn is that the adult represents a degenerate type. Now my students will have to take my scent for it that man's instincts approach plastic intelligence in the young; the adult shows no trace of it. For proof of this I must refer to scent-tree number 349. In the second place, I cannot imagine a state of affairs in which, the animal in question having reached the stage where a social life (as distinct from a herd life) becomes possible, as man has, the male is the dominant sex; and it is with man. This is against all reason. Every male is capable of fertilizing many females unless it dies in copula (male man does not); yes, the seminal fluid discharged in a single copulation suffices (at least with us) to fertilize thousands of ovules; even where the male is not restricted to a single copulation (as it is with us), it is the rule that, after having fulfilled its proper function, it serves for such menial offices only as defence or the labour of procuring food, etc. I cannot think of any other animal which has developed to the social stage--distinctly an achievement of the female--and which nevertheless supports its males in a dominant position. I therefore conclude that, in the past, man, too, has lived under matriarchy as we do today. If this conclusion needs further support, that support is furnished by the fact that young human males play at being females, acting as though they had brought forth callows and carrying images of such about in their forelimbs. From this stage, which must necessarily summarize a lost development of the race, they gradually degenerate, even individually, into a pure, arrogant, and ignorant masculinity. This argument seems, to me, to be conclusive.

Now for the summary of our previous knowledge of man.

Even in our own country these destructive animals are to be found sporadically. As is well known, they kill, without provocation or discrimination, all living things, sometimes at sight, sometimes after having enslaved them for a time. The native vegetation on which the rest of creation depends for shelter and food they destroy by fire or otherwise.

On an average they are 70 ants long, 36 ants wide, and 20 ants thick, measuring their length from the top of their heads to the fork of their extraordinarily long hind limbs. Of these limbs, they have four though, as a rule, they use only two for locomotion: a fact characteristic of the contempt in which they hold nature's gifts. The head resembles a hard sphere of bone overlaid with a thin layer of pinkish flesh which, in turn, is covered with a more or less dark-coloured filmy and pliable skin. It is provided with two round, simple eyes excellent for distant, but singularly ill-adapted for minute and accurate vision. Two prodigious skinny excrescences served originally as covers for their ear-passages; but they have long since, through disuse, become worthless for this purpose. A large, fleshy protuberance in the centre of the face is presumed to harbour the vestiges of a sense of smell, also largely lost by neglect. The mouth, below, consists of a transverse slit armed with bony plates for mastication and measuring from six to eight ants. The most striking proof of a lack of natural intelligence, or of its loss, is to be found in the fact that, by millennia-long neglect, man has forfeited the most important means of communication, orientation, and fixation of records, namely, the contact-odour sense. This sense, which we, by intelligent use and careful breeding, have developed to such a remarkable acuteness and applied to such sublime purpose, has, with man, become rudimentary.

Their bodies are not, as ours, protected by a defensive, chitinous ectoskeleton but with soft integuments of varying composition. I shall later speak of them again. These integuments have, by certain zoologists, been used to support the theory that man as a species has never yet become fixed; they are of such extraordinary variety. The latest observations, however, had led to the daring theory that man moults at will. Of this, too, we shall treat later on.

To a certain extent man is social in his habits, not only with regard to his own kind, but also with regard to certain mammals and birds which, phylogenetically, stand quite remote from him; as, f.i., dogs, cats, parrots, chickens, and others. It is significant that all his more intimate associates are chosen from the lowest of the great subdivisions of the animal world, the vertebrates.

Such, apart from a few details which the curious can read up on any standard scent-tree of zoology, was what was definitely known of man.

Every now and then, however, the assertion is met with, in some more speculative monoscent, that certain acts of man, observed and recorded by careful investigators, argue for at least the traces of a reasoning power. Such-and-such a thing, it has been said, cannot be explained by a mere animal urge or "instinct"; it has to be attributed to more or less conscious deliberation and logical inference; it seemed to prove the existence of a "plastic intelligence" directing a "plastic behaviour". But, if many learned ants have advocated this view, an equal number have scoffed at it. Reason seemed to be such an incomparably precious gift that it was hard to imagine other creatures to be endowed with it, creatures remote from our own race which was by nature destined to rule the world.

Perhaps this is the place for a brief digression. Everybody knows that in most systems of philosophy evolved in the past it is tacitly assumed that reason is one and indivisible, as though, to use a bold metaphor, it had sprung fully armed from the brain of some super-ant. It is now pretty well acknowledged by most biologists that this theory or assumption is untenable. Even with us, reason is the result of a long and slow assimilation of experience, and it is still in the making. Wherever, therefore, in what follows, the word is used without qualification, it is to be understood as referring simply to the present phase of development among Attas.

Here, then, were a number of problems on which I thought it worth our while to throw as much light as we could. Our present adventure, however, which must excuse this digression, will be set down without further comment. The facts speak for themselves.