Inmates of my House and Garden

“Else they are all – the meanest things that are,
As free to live, and to enjoy that life,
As God was free to form them at the first
Who in His sovereign wisdom made them all.
Ye therefore who love mercy, teach your sons
To love it too.”

    Cowper.
“A man who is kind to the animals belonging to him will be thoughtful of the feelings and wishes of his family. A woman who, with patience and tenderness, cares for the domestic creatures around her home, can but be loving to her little ones; for she must observe how strong is the mother-love in the humblest thing that lives.”

Mrs. F. A. F. Wood-White.

SO much preventable cruelty in this world arises from ignorance that it seems the duty of every one to try and pass on to others any useful knowledge they may happen to have acquired, and thus increase the general sum of happiness in the hearts and lives of those who live around them. This general axiom is, I think, especially true with reference to information about animals and birds: we can prevent a great deal of cruelty being unintentionally shown towards the useful creatures that serve us in so many ways by using our influence wisely in the village schools and in the houses of the children’s parents.

If some one in each country village would but gather the children together as often as possible, and talk to them pleasantly and kindly about the right treatment of horses, asses, dogs, cats, birds, &c., the little lads who will grow up to be grooms, ostlers, and carters, would be likely to remember the teaching they receive, and carry it out in humane treatment of the animals under their charge. I dare not repeat what I know of the cruelties practised by young boys upon birds and their nestlings in the breeding season, but will at any rate try and show some of the motives that lead young people to persecute birds and destroy their eggs. I would classify these motives thus: first, wanton mischief; secondly, ignorance; and thirdly, collecting mania. The two first mostly influence the poor, and the last the richer classes. I will endeavour to suggest remedies for each.

Mischievous country lads may in some measure be restrained by bills freely posted about in their village stating clearly the penalties for taking nests and eggs, with a list of protected birds. The notices should be couched in simple words, that children can understand, and not after the style of a notice board, which was placed to protect a spring of pure water for village use, and which ran thus: “Persons are requested to refrain from polluting or contaminating this water.” I am afraid the rustic Tommy would not be much enlightened by these formidable words. Much more to the point is the warning to be met with in one Surrey village, “Children, let Well alone.”

Any proved case of pure mischief or cruelty shown towards any living creature should be made a serious offence, rebuked openly in the village school, and spoken about to the parents by the clergy and others. In this way public opinion may by degrees be created, and any child so offending may learn that he or she is in disfavour for such acts.

It may be that only a few children out of a whole school have the disposition which delights in cruelty, but all are more or less ignorant and thoughtless, and need to be carefully and patiently taught the duty of kindness to all living creatures.

What constantly happens is this. A boy sees something unusual flitting about in a tree; he wonders what it is, and, wishing to find out, he naturally flings a stone at the object; when the coveted thing lies gasping at his feet he looks at it a moment, and flings it aside. He knows nothing about the harm he has done – has no idea that he has killed a bird that perhaps very rarely visits our shores, and that may not be seen again for years. Why, then, if we wish such rare visitants to increase, do we not systematically teach our boys and girls to watch and study the ways of wild creatures, and feel some rational interest in them, so that in consequence they may be drawn to do what they can to aid in their preservation? The children need to be instructed about the life-history of one bird after another; information should be given about its mode of life, its usefulness in destroying insects, its nesting habits, the tender love between the mated birds, and their care of their young – defending them even at the risk of their own lives if needful. Surely the impressible hearts of children might be led to pity and protect our feathered songsters if once they were made thoroughly acquainted with facts such as these.

Leaflets on natural history and kindness to animals and birds can be had very cheaply from the R.S.P.C.A., the Society for the Protection of Birds, and the Dickybird Society, and these should be scattered broadcast throughout our land, where they cannot fail to do beneficent work. If coloured lithographs of our common birds were hung up in village schools, and simple explanatory lessons were given upon them, it would surely be more useful to our country children than that they should be taught to know the exact difference between the Indian and African elephant! And yet one often sees large prints of foreign animals in schools, and but seldom anything so simple as pictures of the animals and birds the children meet with in everyday life.

Again, small prizes might be offered for the best papers written upon our English birds, describing their habits and uses, and all the facts about them which the children are able to comprehend.

I was delighted to receive from a dear unknown child a capital drawing of a brambling which I could recognise at once, so truthful was the pose and colouring, and, though the young artist was only eleven, his drawing and letter revealed a born naturalist. Now this kind of effort might be largely promoted amongst young people with excellent effect. We should make a rule I have myself observed all my life most carefully, “Never to have a bird killed wantonly, even for drawing or study purposes.” There are admirable pictures to be obtained of all our English birds, and, with an occasional find of a dead bird, and the glimpses we may obtain of them in life, these will furnish enough to guide young artists in their first attempts. Suppose the children of a village school awakened to this kind of competition, and a “tea” given to those who have sent in papers, I can see the way to a delightful evening when the papers should be read, comments kindly offered, mistakes corrected, information given, and some fresh subjects set for the next time. The whole village would be full of chat about this gathering, and each child would naturally bring much of the knowledge gained into his own home, and thus the parents would indirectly become enlightened upon natural history subjects, on which they are usually deplorably ignorant.

These humble suggestions are offered as being the best means I can at present bring forward in order to attain the end we have in view, and in a measure they apply equally to young people in a higher position in life, who would, I believe, welcome little informal meetings for the reading of the papers they may have written, and the attainment from their elders of further information on the life-histories of animals and birds. I earnestly hope that still better plans may be evoked from others as a result of bringing this subject prominently forward.

I must draw attention to an excellent idea borrowed from Miss Carrington’s book on “The Extermination of Birds,” and it is that our young people who desire to possess collections of birds’ eggs should be encouraged to model them in wax and colour them precisely according to nature. Even the one egg used as a model need only be borrowed from a nest and returned when the model is cast and coloured; or one may be lent for the purpose from the collection of a friend. The young artist would be able to enjoy the thought that his specimens were of a permanent nature, and that there had been no rifling of the nests of valuable birds, without whose incessant labours we should have endless insect plagues. For the modus operandi of this last idea I would refer my readers to Miss Carrington’s little book.[2 - “Extermination of Birds,” by Edith Carrington. Wm. Reeves.]

In trying to discourage the collecting mania I know I am treading upon delicate ground, and I must define my meaning clearly, else I may convey wrong ideas and provoke needless discussion of vexed questions. I do not think very young children should be allowed to kill any living creature in order to make a collection – it must tend to make them hard-hearted; far better is it to lead them to watch and admire every bird and insect they come across. As they are taught to know the ways and habits of living things, and year by year they grow up with kindly feelings towards them, I think they will hardly be amongst those who would destroy perhaps fifty lovely butterflies in order to complete a circle of colour in some case of insects. That is the kind of collecting I wholly condemn as both useless and cruel. So much study can be carried on without taking life, that it seems undesirable to adopt in early life any line of investigation which involves the death of the objects being studied – at any rate until the student is old enough to avoid any possible cruelty in the matter. It appears to me that if we bring up young people with a reverent love for all, even the lowliest of God’s handiwork, that feeling will tend to restrain them from exercising the instinct of destruction which we may often trace in children’s early years.

There must be a certain amount of slaying for necessary food, and animals and birds prey upon each other by the very laws of their existence. Specimens, too, are required for museums, else how could students learn to know the various orders of animal and bird creation; but outside all these unavoidable uses, the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent life that is carried on year by year, fills me with distress, and I, for one, shall never cease to protest against it with voice and pen. I can but hope that by the multiplication of our Selborne branches and kindred societies we may in time see some diminution of this selfish warfare against all creatures in fur and feathers.

STUDYING NATURE

“If thou art worn and hard beset
With sorrows, that thou wouldst forget,
If thou wouldst read a lesson, that will keep
Thy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep,
Go to the woods and hills! – no tears
Dim the sweet look that Nature wears.”

    Longfellow.
I HAPPEN to live in the country, in the midst of lovely scenery, abounding in all the elements of beauty, such as wide-spreading heaths, sheets of water, distant views, and grand old trees and woods.

There are many varieties of birds and insects to be seen, plenty of wild flowers, mosses, and lichens in the lanes, and in my own grounds all kinds of cultivated flowers.

Numbers of young people come to stay with me in the course of the year, and naturally, when I am taking walks with them, and we are admiring trees and flowers, or a sweet-voiced bird begins to sing, questions arise about the names of various plants and songsters. I confess I am often surprised to discover the very limited knowledge of elementary natural history or botany that is possessed by young girls who in other branches of study are intelligent and well-informed. It grieves me to think that the instructive book of Nature is thus disregarded, and its lessons left unlearned, by thousands who would be much happier, and have many more resources to fill up leisure moments, if they knew more about the everyday things which surround them in the country.

Even if it is the lot of many young people to live in towns, still, when they pay visits to their friends at the seaside, or in the country, there are ample opportunities for natural history studies, and by means of books these studies can be carried on when they return home.

I will try and describe one of the subjects which my young visitors always discover to be full of interest, namely, the study of trees.

Such a book as “The Forest Trees of Britain”[3 - By the Rev. C. A. Johns. S.P.C.K.] will supply the names of all our ordinary trees; and, when taking a ramble in a country lane or garden, if a perfect leaf of each species of tree is gathered, well pressed, and dried between sheets of blotting paper under a heavy weight, there will be found pleasant occupation for some wet day spent indoors in arranging these specimen leaves in a large blank book.

Space should be left to write the English and Latin name of each tree, whence it was imported, and some of its chief uses. If, later on, the autumn-tinted leaf of each species can be obtained, and a coloured drawing made of its catkin flower, then in time a really charming and valuable book will be formed, which a girl will feel pleasure in showing to her young friends, and thus others will be led to fill up their leisure time with instructive pursuits of this kind.

Drying and arranging the leaves is only the first step towards a more intimate knowledge of this subject. The exquisite beauty of autumn-tinted leaves attracts the attention of the most unobservant. One longs to preserve them, and for years I used to try various methods of pressing and drying them with but very partial success. Now, however, I have devised a plan by which their fleeting colours are so exactly imitated that my friends constantly mistake the painted leaf for the real one. As it may afford pleasurable occupation for some of my readers, I will briefly describe the process.

The materials required are but few: a common slate, some fine drawing paper, a cyclostyle[4 - This kind of roller and the ink can be obtained at any stores.] roller, and a bottle of the ink which is sold with it. A small quantity of the ink should be placed on the slate, and the roller passed to and fro until it is slightly and evenly inked. The leaf should then be placed on a flat, hard surface, and the roller passed firmly over it so as to leave a little ink on the under side of the leaf to mark the veins. The leaf should then be reversed, with the ink side downwards, on a piece of drawing paper, and the roller firmly passed over it once or twice. The result will be an exquisite faint imprint of the exact shape of the leaf with all its veins. After a few minutes it will be ready to be tinted in water colours, so as to exactly resemble the various hues in the real leaf. The colours should be very moist, and rather floated into each other, as in this way one can most readily attain the delicate gradations of tone. When finished the leaf should be neatly cut out with fine scissors, carefully following the outline of the notches, which vary so much in different trees, and give character to each species. When such painted leaves are gummed into a blank book the effect will be found to be wonderfully real. The album should be large enough to allow of four or five leaves, each representing a different stage in the coloration – yellow, pink, crimson, and all other tints which belong to each special tree. A page should of course be reserved for each set of specimens, and the English and Latin name, the date, and any other particulars written at the bottom of the page will add to the scientific value of the collection.

The various galls which are found on each species of tree will alone furnish a wide field for study. The ink with which I am now writing is the product of an oak-gall which is imported in large quantities from Asia Minor; many kinds are of great value in dyeing; and the life-history of the numerous gall-flies is most curious and interesting.

Careful drawings of the buds of trees as they open in spring will reveal the delicate plaiting of the tiny leafage within. We can then discern how some leaves are folded lengthways or in half, others curled up spirally or fluted; we shall see how the embryo leaves are protected by more than a dozen scales, often lined with silky down, and then, as in the case of the horse-chestnut, still further guarded from the winter’s cold by an outer coating of resin.

Again, the fruits and seeds of trees would prove an interesting subject. I wonder how many young people know the difference between the English sycamore, which is a true maple, and the sycomore of Palestine, which is a fig-tree; and yet they are totally unlike each other – the first producing a dry seed vessel, and the other an eatable fruit; the sycamore usually having a stem twenty or thirty feet high before it branches, and the sycomore dividing near the ground, so that Zaccheus found no difficulty in climbing its ample stems.

There are some birds which frequent special trees, and are named after them, such as the hawfinch, the whinchat, which is found on its favourite furze-bushes (called whins in Scotland), the pine and fir grosbeak, and the nuthatch. The student should know something of these birds and their habits, as being linked with the trees they frequent.

There are innumerable insects also found upon the leaves and stems of trees. It has been calculated that about two thousand different species of caterpillars and larvæ of various kinds prey upon the oak alone.

We thus see vistas which open out before the young student, any one of which, when followed up with thoughtful perseverance, will add immensely to the pleasure of walks abroad and quiet hours at home.

As this chapter aims to be a suggestive one, I would mention the possibility of making a dried collection of the trees of Scripture. This may seem at first sight very difficult of attainment, but we often hear of friends going abroad (even if we cannot go ourselves), and a request to gather and dry a spray of olive or carob-tree will hardly be refused, and thus in time, by the help of others, our collection will be formed, and will become of much value to us in teaching our Bible classes, as well as from the associations the book will have with the kind travellers who remembered us when far away.

I greatly treasure my own specimens of oleander gathered on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, the carob-leaves from Bethlehem, sycomore fig from Jericho, pomegranate from Jerusalem, and olive-sprays from the Garden of Gethsemane. Pleasant hours have been spent in reading about each tree, and the passages in Scripture where they are mentioned are invested with a deeper interest from one’s knowledge of many facts connected with each which otherwise would have passed unnoticed.

For instance, the fruit of the carob or locust-tree may have been the food of John the Baptist; it is known to this day by the name of “St. John’s Bread,” and the sweet, nutritious pods are still eaten by the poorer inhabitants of Palestine. It is also more than probable that “the husks that the swine did eat,” mentioned in the parable of the Prodigal Son, were the long curved pods produced by this tree[5 - To this day great quantities of these husks are imported into England for the purpose of feeding cattle.]; and it is also well known that the equal-sized, hard-shelled seeds of the carob were the original “carat” weights of the jeweller.

Thus we see how many interesting facts cluster around the name of a single Scripture tree. If a spray or leaf of any of the kinds mentioned is placed in the centre of a page, with some neatly written texts referring to interesting facts about its history and uses, we shall then have always at hand a delightful book, which will prove useful for many purposes. It will afford plenty of subjects for conversation when we wish to make Sunday afternoon a bright and happy time for some young people, kept indoors, it may be, by wet weather. Many a sick person’s weary hours might be cheered by such a book being lent, and in endless ways it will well repay the trouble of putting it together.

A collection of seedling trees, carefully dried between sheets of blotting paper in a press or under a weight, then fastened into a blank book with strips of gummed paper, with the English and Latin names to each, and a note of the age of the seedling, will form a pleasant memento of our forest rambles, and probably may lead on to further study of the same kind.

Lemon and orange pips will grow readily in damp moss under a glass, and can be transplanted into pots of earth, so that seedling plants are attainable even by those who live in towns. I was much surprised to find that tamarind seeds taken out of the jam would grow very quickly in cocoanut fibre if kept moist and placed near a hall stove. The secret appears to be that although the tamarinds are packed in barrels, and hot sugar is poured over them, yet owing to the thickness of the seed-coat the life principle is not destroyed.

To make our collection complete there should be seedlings of the other great division of plants, namely, those with only one seed-leaf, such as palms, cannas, bulbs, grasses, &c. A few date-stones kept in moist earth, and placed where they will have a slight degree of regular heat, will supply one of these specimens, and Canna seed, Indian corn, and other plants of the kind, grown in the same way, will supply other examples.

Whatever branch of nature-study we select, or whatever collections we may decide to make, the invariable result is that our interest in that special thing becomes immensely deepened; we begin to notice points that never struck us before, our power of observing becomes quickened, we really begin to think we must have been almost blind hitherto not to have been aware of the new and curious things we are daily finding out, we learn that the natural world around us is a storehouse ready to yield endless treasure to those who are willing to seek it, and thus I have often noticed that when once young people can be induced to begin a collection of some sort it is the first step to their becoming true nature-students.

Mothers often long for some simple occupation for the little busy fingers, that get into mischief if unemployed, and what can be more innocent than collecting and pressing wild flowers and leaves, and, when dried, arranging them in a book, so that mother can write the name to each specimen and talk about them, telling the uses to which some plants are applied? In this way children grow up to be ardent botanists, and may learn a great deal about the science without any of its dry details being presented to them in the shape of long unpronounceable terms, until they are old enough to see for themselves the necessity for them.

I have tried to indicate a few of the ways in which young people may study Nature, but the avenues into her domain are endless; let us at least endeavour to traverse such of them as may be within our reach whilst we are young, and so make our lives all the brighter and happier for knowing something of the wonders of this marvellous world in which it has pleased God to place us.

INSECT OBSERVATION