Читать книгу Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. - Various - Страница 8

We have been struck with the following anecdote of the great Cuvier, which is recorded in the "Courrier de l'Europe" for February, 1850, and trust the following translation will prove as interesting to our readers as it has been to us. It forms an amusing chapter in natural history, and forcibly illustrates that close observation which so frequently characterizes eminent men.

Poverty in youth has a purifying tendency, like the "live coal" of old which the angel passed over the lips of Isaiah. It inures the soul to struggling, and the mind to persevering labor and self-confidence: it keeps the imagination away from the temptations of luxury, and the still more fatal one of idleness, that parent of vice. It, moreover, becomes one of the most fruitful sources of happiness to the man whom God permits to come out of the crowd and take his place at the head of science and art. It is with ineffable delight that he looks behind, and says, in thinking of his cold and comfortless garret, "I came out of that place, single and unknown." George Cuvier, that pupil of poverty, loved to relate one of his first observations of natural history, which he had made while tutor to the children of Count d'Henry.

Cuvier and his scholars inhabited an old mansion in the county of Caux à Fiquanville; the teacher's room overlooked the garden, and every morning, at break of day, he opened the window to inhale the refreshing air, before commencing his arduous duties to his indifferently trained pupils. One morning he observed, not without pleasure, that two swallows had begun to build their nest in the very corner of his little chamber window. The birds labored with the ardor of two young lovers who are in haste to start in housekeeping. The male bird brought the moistened clay in his beak, which the female kneaded, and with the addition of some chips of straw and hay, she built her little lodging with wonderful skill. As soon as the outside was finished, the betrothed gathered feathers, hair, and soft dry leaves for the inside, and then departed to hide themselves in a neighboring wood, there to enjoy the sweets of repose after their labor, and amid the thick foliage of the trees the mysterious joys of the honeymoon. However that may be, they did not think of returning to take possession of their nest till the end of twelve or fifteen days.

Alas! changes had taken place during their absence. While the swallows were laboring with such assiduity in building a house, Cuvier had observed two sparrows, that perched at a short distance, watching the industry of the two birds, not without interchanging between themselves some cries that appeared to Cuvier rather ironical. When the swallows departed for their country excursion, the sparrows took no pains to conceal their odious schemes; they impudently took possession of the nest, which was empty and without an owner to defend it, and established themselves there as though they had been its veritable builders. Cuvier observed that the cunning sparrows were never both out of the nest at the same time. One of the usurpers always remained as sentinel, with his head placed at the opening, which served for a door, and with his large beak interdicted the entrance of any other bird, except his companion, or rather, to call things by their right names, his brother robber. The swallows returned in due time to their nest, the male full of joy, which showed itself in the brightness of his eye, and in the nervous kind of motion in his flight; the female rather languid, and heavy with the approach of laying. You can imagine their surprise at finding the nest, on which they had bestowed so much care, occupied. The male, moved with indignation and anger, rushed upon the nest to chase away the usurpers, but he found himself face to face with the formidable beak of the sparrow who, at that moment, guarded the stolen property. What could the slim beak of the swallow do against the redoubtable pincers of the sparrow, armed with a double and sharpened point? Very soon, the poor proprietor, dispossessed and beaten back, retreated with his head covered with blood, and his neck nearly stripped of its feathers. He returned with flashing eye, and trembling with rage, to the side of his wife, with whom he appeared for some minutes to hold counsel, after which they flew away into the air, and quickly disappeared. The female sparrow came back soon after; the male recounted all that had passed – the arrival, the attack, and flight of the swallows – not without accompanying the recital with what seemed to Cuvier to be roars of laughter. Be this as it may, the housekeeper did not rest satisfied with making only a hullah-balloo, for the female went forth again, and collected in haste a much larger quantity of provisions than usual. As soon as she returned, after having completed the supplies for a siege, two pointed beaks, instead of one, defended the entrance to the nest. Cries, however, began to fill the air, and an assemblage of swallows gathered together on a neighboring roof. Cuvier recognized distinctly the dispossessed couple, who related to each newcomer the impudent robbery of the sparrow. The male, with blood-stained head and bared neck, distinguished himself by the earnestness of his protestations and appeals of vengeance. In a little while two hundred swallows had arrived at the scene of conflict. While the little army was forming and deliberating, all at once a cry of distress came from an adjacent window. A young swallow, doubtless inexperienced, instead of taking part in the counsels of his brethren, was chasing some flies which were buzzing about a bunch of neglected or castaway flowers before the window. The pupils of Cuvier had stretched a net there to catch sparrows; one of the claws of the swallow was caught by the perfidious net. At the cry which this hair-brained swallow made, a score of his brethren flew to the rescue: but all their efforts were in vain; the desperate struggles which the prisoner made to free himself from the fatal trap only drew the ends tighter, and confined his foot more firmly. Suddenly a detachment took wing, and, retiring about a hundred paces, returned rapidly, and, one by one, gave a peck at the snare, which each time, owing to the determined manner of the attack, received a sharp twitch. Not one of the swallows missed its aim, so that, after half an hour of this persevering and ingenious labor, the chafed string broke, and the captive; rescued from the snare, went joyously to mingle with his companions. Throughout this scene, which took place twenty feet from Cuvier, and at almost as many from the usurped nest, the observer kept perfectly still, and the sparrows made not the slightest movement with their two large beaks, which, formidable and threatening, kept its narrow entrance. The council of swallows, while a certain number of them were succoring their companion, had continued to deliberate gravely. As soon as all were united, the liberated prisoner included, they took flight, and Cuvier felt convinced they had given up the field, or rather the nest, to the robbers, who had so fraudulently possessed themselves of it. Judge of his surprise when, in the course of a few seconds, he beheld a cloud of two or three hundred swallows arrive, with the rapidity of thought throw themselves before the nest, discharge at it some mud which they had brought in their bills, and retire to give place to another battalion, which repeated the same manœuvre. They fired at two or three inches from the nest, thus preventing the sparrows from giving them any blows with their beaks. Besides, the mud, shot with such perfidious precision, had so blinded the sparrows, after the first discharge, that they very soon knew not in what manner to defend themselves. Still the mud continued to thicken more and more on the nest, whose original shape was soon obliterated: the opening would have almost entirely disappeared, had not the sparrows, by their desperate efforts at defense, broken away some portions of it. But the implacable swallows, by a strategic movement, as rapidly as it was cleverly executed, rushed upon the nest, beat down with their beaks and claws the clay over the opening already half stopped up, and finished the attack by hermetically closing it. Then there arose a thousand cries of vengeance and victory. Nevertheless, the swallows ceased not the work of destruction. They continued to carry up moistened clay till they had built a second nest over the very opening of the besieged one. It was raised by a hundred beaks at once, and, an hour after the execution of the sparrows, the nest was occupied by the dispossessed swallows. The drama was complete and terrible; the vengeance inexorable and fatal. The unfortunate sparrows not only expiated their theft in the nest they had taken possession of, whence they could not escape, and where suffocation and hunger were gradually killing them, but they heard the songs of love from the two swallows, who thus so cruelly made them wipe out the crime of their theft. During the fight the female remained alone, languishing and motionless, on an angle of the roof. It was with difficulty, and with a heavy flight, that she left this spot to take up her abode in her new house; and, doubtless, while the agony of the sparrows was being filled up, she laid her eggs, for she did not stir out for two days; the male, during that time, taking upon himself to search for insects and hunt for flies. He brought them alive in his beak, and gave them to his companion. Entirely devoted to the duties of incubation and maternity, she was only seen now and then to put out her head to breathe the pure air. Fifteen days after, the male flew away at day-break. He appeared more gay and joyful than usual; during the whole day he ceased not to bring to the nest a countless number of insects, and Cuvier, by standing on tiptoe at his window, could distinctly see six little yellow and hungry beaks, crying out, and swallowing with avidity all the food brought by their father. The female did not leave her family till the morrow; confinement and fatigue had made her very thin. Her plumage had lost its lustre; but in seeing her contemplate her little ones, you might conceive the maternal joy which filled her, and by what ineffable compensations she felt herself indemnified for all her privations and sufferings. After a short time the little creatures had advanced in figure; their large yellow bills were transformed into little black and charming ones; their naked bodies, covered here and there with ugly tufts, were now clothed with elegant feathers, on which the light played in brilliant flashes. They began to fly about the nest, and even to accompany their mother when she hunted for flies in the neighborhood.

Cuvier could not refrain from feelings of admiration, and was somewhat affected when he saw the mother, with indefatigable patience and grace, show her children how they should set about catching flies, which darted about in the air – to suck in an incautious one, or carry away a spider which had imprudently made his net between the branches of two trees. Often she would hold out to them at a distance in her beak a booty which excited their appetite; then she would go away by degrees, and gradually draw them unconsciously off to a shorter or a longer distance from the nest. The swallow taught her children to fly high when the air was calm, for then the insects kept in a more elevated part of the air; or to skim along the ground at the approach of a storm, as then the same insects would direct their course toward the earth, where they might find shelter under the stones at the fall of the first drop of rain. Then the little ones, more experienced, began, under the guidance of their father, to undertake longer flights. The mother, standing at the entrance of the nest, seemed to give her instructions before they departed: she awaited their return with anxiety, and when that was delayed, took a flight high, very high in the air, and there flew to and fro till she saw them. Then, full of a mother's joy, she would utter cries of emotion, scud before them, bring them back to the nest, happy and palpitating, and seemed to demand an account of the causes of their delay.

The autumn arrived. Some groups of swallows collected together on the very roof of the mansion of Fiquanville. After grave deliberation, and a vote being taken (whether by ballot or otherwise, Cuvier does not mention), the young ones of the nest, along with the other young swallows of the same age, were all placed in the middle of the troop; and one morning a living cloud rose above the chateau, and flew away swiftly due east.

The following spring two swallows, worn down by fatigue, came to take possession of the nest. Cuvier recognized them immediately; they were the very same – those whose manners and habits he had studied the preceding year. They proceeded to restore the nest, cracked and injured in some places by the frost: they garnished anew the inside with fresh feathers and choice moss, then, as last year, made an excursion of some days. On the very morrow after their return, while they were darting to and fro close to Cuvier's window, to whose presence they had become accustomed, and which did not in the least incommode them, a screech-owl, that seemed to fall from above, pounced upon the male, seized him in his talons, and was already bearing him away, when Cuvier took down his gun, which was within reach, primed and cocked it, and fired at the owl; the fellow, mortally wounded, fell head over heels into the garden, and Cuvier hastened to deliver the swallow from the claws of the dead owl, who still held him with his formidable nails. The poor swallow had received some deep wounds; the nails of the owl had penetrated deeply into his side, and one of the drops of shot had broken his leg. Cuvier dressed the wounds as well as he could, and, by the aid of a ladder, replaced the invalid in his nest, while the female flew sadly around it, uttering cries of despair. For three or four days she never left the nest but to go in search of food, which she offered the male. Cuvier saw his sickly head come out with difficulty, and try in vain to take the food offered by his companion; every day he appeared to get weaker. At length, one morning, Cuvier was awakened by the cries of the female, who with her wings beat against the panes of his window. He ran to the nest – alas! it contained only a dead body. From that fatal moment the female never left her nest. Overwhelmed with grief, she, five days after, died of despair, on the dead body of her companion.

Some months after this, the Abbé Tessier, whom the revolutionary persecution had compelled to flee to Normandy, where he disguised himself under the dress of a military physician of the hospital of Fécamp, fell in with the obscure tutor, who recounted to him the history of the swallows. The abbé engaged him to deliver a course of lectures on natural history to the pupils of that hospital, of which he was the head, and wrote to Jussieu and Geoffrey Saint Hilaire, to inform them of the individual he had become acquainted with. Cuvier entered into a correspondence with these two learned men, and a short time after he was elected to the chair of comparative anatomy at Paris His subsequent career is well known.

[From Hunting Adventures in South Africa.]