Magic Locker Sectory 09
Page 03

THE joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears. They cannot utter the one; nor they will not utter the other. Children sweeten labors; but they make misfortunes more bitter. They increase the cares of life; but they mitigate the remembrance of death. The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to men. And surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men; which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed. So the care of posterity is most in them, that have no posterity. They that are the first raisers of their houses, are most indulgent towards their children; beholding them as the continuance, not only of their kind, but of their work; and so both children and creatures.

Higher up in the scale of life we get many instances which show various stages in the same progressive development towards greater care for the safety and education of the young. Among the larger lizards, for example, a distinct advance may be traced between the comparatively uncivilized American alligator and his near ally, the much more cultivated African crocodile. On the banks of the Mississippi, the alligator lays a hundred eggs or thereabouts, which she deposits in a nest near the water's edge, and then covers them up with leaves and other decaying vegetable matter. The fermentation of these leaves produces heat and so does for the alligator's eggs what sitting does for those of hens and other birds: the mother deputes her maternal functions, so to speak, to a festering heap of decomposing plant-refuse. Nevertheless, she loiters about all the time, like Miriam round the ark which contained Moses, to see what happens; and when the eggs hatch out, she leads her little ones down to the river, and there makes alligators of them. This is a simple and relatively low stage in the nursery arrangements of the big lizards.

Among the various wild animals which inhabit the earth, it is difficult to decide which are really friendly and which are really hostile to man's interests. The actual fact appears to be that there is neither hostility nor friendship. If farmers and gardeners kill off too many birds, nature revenges herself by sending a plague of insects which the small birds, if alive, would have eaten. Gamekeepers ruthlessly shoot hawks and kites, or snare stoats and polecats, with the result that their game grows up too thick for its feeding ground, sickly specimens are allowed to linger on, and a destructive murrain follows. The rook, no doubt, is fond of eggs; but nevertheless he does the farmer good service when he devours the grubs which are turned up by the plow; and as the salmon disease, which of late has proved so destructive, is attributed by the best authorities to overcrowding, that glossy-coated fisherman, the otter, is really a benefactor to the followers of Izaak Walton's gentle craft.

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