—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
When one glances at the map the members of the stupendous island wilderness1 of the Pacific seem to crowd upon each other; but no, there is no crowding, even in the center of a group; and between groups there are lonely wide deserts of sea. Not everything is known about the islands, their peoples and their languages. A startling reminder2 of this is furnished by the fact that in Fiji, twenty years ago, were living two strange and solitary3 beings who came from an unknown country and spoke4 an unknown language. “They were picked up by a passing vessel5 many hundreds of miles from any known land, floating in the same tiny canoe in which they had been blown out to sea. When found they were but skin and bone. No one could understand what they said, and they have never named their country; or, if they have, the name does not correspond with that of any island on any chart. They are now fat and sleek6, and as happy as the day is long. In the ship’s log there is an entry of the latitude7 and longitude8 in which they were found, and this is probably all the clue they will ever have to their lost homes.”—[Forbes’s “Two Years in Fiji.”]
What a strange and romantic episode it is; and how one is tortured with curiosity to know whence those mysterious creatures came, those Men Without a Country, errant waifs who cannot name their lost home, wandering Children of Nowhere.
Indeed, the Island Wilderness is the very home of romance and dreams and mystery. The loneliness, the solemnity, the beauty, and the deep repose9 of this wilderness have a charm which is all their own for the bruised10 spirit of men who have fought and failed in the struggle for life in the great world; and for men who have been hunted out of the great world for crime; and for other men who love an easy and indolent existence; and for others who love a roving free life, and stir and change and adventure; and for yet others who love an easy and comfortable career of trading and money-getting, mixed with plenty of loose matrimony by purchase, divorce without trial or expense, and limitless spreeing thrown in to make life ideally perfect.
We sailed again, refreshed.
The most cultivated person in the ship was a young Englishman whose home was in New Zealand. He was a naturalist12. His learning in his specialty13 was deep and thorough, his interest in his subject amounted to a passion, he had an easy gift of speech; and so, when he talked about animals it was a pleasure to listen to him. And profitable, too, though he was sometimes difficult to understand because now and then he used scientific technicalities which were above the reach of some of us. They were pretty sure to be above my reach, but as he was quite willing to explain them I always made it a point to get him to do it. I had a fair knowledge of his subject—layman’s knowledge—to begin with, but it was his teachings which crystalized it into scientific form and clarity—in a word, gave it value.
His special interest was the fauna14 of Australasia, and his knowledge of the matter was as exhaustive as it was accurate. I already knew a good deal about the rabbits in Australasia and their marvelous fecundity15, but in my talks with him I found that my estimate of the great hindrance16 and obstruction17 inflicted18 by the rabbit pest upon traffic and travel was far short of the facts. He told me that the first pair of rabbits imported into Australasia bred so wonderfully that within six months rabbits were so thick in the land that people had to dig trenches19 through them to get from town to town.
He told me a great deal about worms, and the kangaroo, and other coleoptera, and said he knew the history and ways of all such pachydermata. He said the kangaroo had pockets, and carried its young in them when it couldn’t get apples. And he said that the emu was as big as an ostrich20, and looked like one, and had an amorphous21 appetite and would eat bricks. Also, that the dingo was not a dingo at all, but just a wild dog; and that the only difference between a dingo and a dodo was that neither of them barked; otherwise they were just the same. He said that the only game-bird in Australia was the wombat22, and the only song-bird the larrikin, and that both were protected by government. The most beautiful of the native birds was the bird of Paradise. Next came the two kinds of lyres; not spelt the same. He said the one kind was dying out, the other thickening up. He explained that the “Sundowner” was not a bird it was a man; sundowner was merely the Australian equivalent of our word, tramp. He is a loafer, a hard drinker, and a sponge. He tramps across the country in the sheep-shearing season, pretending to look for work; but he always times himself to arrive at a sheep-run just at sundown, when the day’s labor23 ends; all he wants is whisky and supper and bed and breakfast; he gets them and then disappears. The naturalist spoke of the bell bird, the creature that at short intervals24 all day rings out its mellow25 and exquisite26 peal27 from the deeps of the forest. It is the favorite and best friend of the weary and thirsty sundowner; for he knows that wherever the bell bird is, there is water; and he goes somewhere else. The naturalist said that the oddest bird in Australasia was the, Laughing Jackass, and the biggest the now extinct Great Moa.
The Moa stood thirteen feet high, and could step over an ordinary man’s head or kick his hat off; and his head, too, for that matter. He said it was wingless, but a swift runner. The natives used to ride it. It could make forty miles an hour, and keep it up for four hundred miles and come out reasonably fresh. It was still in existence when the railway was introduced into New Zealand; still in existence, and carrying the mails. The railroad began with the same schedule it has now: two expresses a week-time, twenty miles an hour. The company exterminated28 the moa to get the mails.
Speaking of the indigenous29 coneys and bactrian camels, the naturalist said that the coniferous and bacteriological output of Australasia was remarkable30 for its many and curious departures from the accepted laws governing these species of tubercles, but that in his opinion Nature’s fondness for dabbling31 in the erratic32 was most notably33 exhibited in that curious combination of bird, fish, amphibian34, burrower35, crawler, quadruped, and Christian36 called the Ornithorhynchus—grotesquest of animals, king of the animalculae of the world for versatility37 of character and make-up. Said he:
“You can call it anything you want to, and be right. It is a fish, for it lives in the river half the time; it is a land animal, for it resides on the land half the time; it is an amphibian, since it likes both and does not know which it prefers; it is a hybernian, for when times are dull and nothing much going on it buries itself under the mud at the bottom of a puddle38 and hybernates there a couple of weeks at a time; it is a kind of duck, for it has a duck-bill and four webbed paddles; it is a fish and quadruped together, for in the water it swims with the paddles and on shore it paws itself across country with them; it is a kind of seal, for it has a seal’s fur; it is carnivorous, herbivorous, insectivorous, and vermifuginous, for it eats fish and grass and butterflies, and in the season digs worms out of the mud and devours39 them; it is clearly a bird, for it lays eggs, and hatches them; it is clearly a mammal, for it nurses its young; and it is manifestly a kind of Christian, for it keeps the Sabbath when there is anybody around, and when there isn’t, doesn’t. It has all the tastes there are except refined ones, it has all the habits there are except good ones.
“It is a survival—a survival of the fittest. Mr. Darwin invented the theory that goes by that name, but the Ornithorhynchus was the first to put it to actual experiment and prove that it could be done. Hence it should have as much of the credit as Mr. Darwin. It was never in the Ark; you will find no mention of it there; it nobly stayed out and worked the theory. Of all creatures in the world it was the only one properly equipped for the test. The Ark was thirteen months afloat, and all the globe submerged; no land visible above the flood, no vegetation, no food for a mammal to eat, nor water for a mammal to drink; for all mammal food was destroyed, and when the pure floods from heaven and the salt oceans of the earth mingled41 their waters and rose above the mountain tops, the result was a drink which no bird or beast of ordinary construction could use and live. But this combination was nuts for the Ornithorhynchus, if I may use a term like that without offense42. Its river home had always been salted by the flood-tides of the sea. On the face of the Noachian deluge43 innumerable forest trees were floating. Upon these the Ornithorhynchus voyaged in peace; voyaged from clime to clime, from hemisphere to hemisphere, in contentment and comfort, in virile44 interest in the constant change of scene, in humble45 thankfulness for its privileges, in ever-increasing enthusiasm in the development of the great theory upon whose validity it had staked its life, its fortunes, and its sacred honor, if I may use such expressions without impropriety in connection with an episode of this nature.
“It lived the tranquil46 and luxurious47 life of a creature of independent means. Of things actually necessary to its existence and its happiness not a detail was wanting. When it wished to walk, it scrambled48 along the tree-trunk; it mused49 in the shade of the leaves by day, it slept in their shelter by night; when it wanted the refreshment50 of a swim, it had it; it ate leaves when it wanted a vegetable diet, it dug under the bark for worms and grubs; when it wanted fish it caught them, when it wanted eggs it laid them. If the grubs gave out in one tree it swam to another; and as for fish, the very opulence51 of the supply was an embarrassment52. And finally, when it was thirsty it smacked53 its chops in gratitude54 over a blend that would have slain55 a crocodile.
“When at last, after thirteen months of travel and research in all the Zones it went aground on a mountain-summit, it strode ashore56, saying in its heart, ‘Let them that come after me invent theories and dream dreams about the Survival of the Fittest if they like, but I am the first that has done it!
“This wonderful creature dates back like the kangaroo and many other Australian hydrocephalous invertebrates57, to an age long anterior58 to the advent11 of man upon the earth; they date back, indeed, to a time when a causeway hundreds of miles wide, and thousands of miles long, joined Australia to Africa, and the animals of the two countries were alike, and all belonged to that remote geological epoch59 known to science as the Old Red Grindstone Post-Pleosaurian. Later the causeway sank under the sea; subterranean60 convulsions lifted the African continent a thousand feet higher than it was before, but Australia kept her old level. In Africa’s new climate the animals necessarily began to develop and shade off into new forms and families and species, but the animals of Australia as necessarily remained stationary61, and have so remained until this day. In the course of some millions of years the African Ornithorhynchus developed and developed and developed, and sluffed off detail after detail of its make-up until at last the creature became wholly disintegrated62 and scattered63. Whenever you see a bird or a beast or a seal or an otter64 in Africa you know that he is merely a sorry surviving fragment of that sublime65 original of whom I have been speaking—that creature which was everything in general and nothing in particular—the opulently endowed ‘e pluribus unum’ of the animal world.
“Such is the history of the most hoary66, the most ancient, the most venerable creature that exists in the earth today—Ornithorhynchus Platypus67 Extraordinariensis—whom God preserve!”
When he was strongly moved he could rise and soar like that with ease. And not only in the prose form, but in the poetical68 as well. He had written many pieces of poetry in his time, and these manuscripts he lent around among the passengers, and was willing to let them be copied. It seemed to me that the least technical one in the series, and the one which reached the loftiest note, perhaps, was his—
INVOCATION.
O Ornithorhynchus dear!
And greet with a cordial claw
The stranger that longs to hear
“From thy own own lips the tale
Of thy origin all unknown:
Thy misplaced bone where flesh should be
And flesh where should be bone;
And beaver-trowel tail,
And snout of beast equip’d with teeth
Where gills ought to prevail.
“Come, Kangaroo, the good and true
Foreshortened as to legs,
“And tells us why you linger here,
When all your friends as fossils sleep,
Immortalized in lime!”
Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist75; but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one. The above verses are indeed beautiful, and, in a way, touching76; but there is a haunting something about them which unavoidably suggests the Sweet Singer of Michigan. It can hardly be doubted that the author had read the works of that poet and been impressed by them. It is not apparent that he has borrowed from them any word or yet any phrase, but the style and swing and mastery and melody of the Sweet Singer all are there. Compare this Invocation with “Frank Dutton”—particularly stanzas77 first and seventeenth—and I think the reader will feel convinced that he who wrote the one had read the other:
I.
“Frank Dutton was as fine a lad
As ever you wish to see,
And he was drowned in Pine Island Lake
On earth no more will he be,
His age was near fifteen years,
And he was a motherless boy,
He was living with his grandmother
When he was drowned, poor boy."
XVII.
“He was drowned on Tuesday afternoon,
On Sunday he was found,
And the tidings of that drowned boy
Was heard for miles around.
His form was laid by his mother’s side,
Beneath the cold, cold ground,
His friends for him will drop a tear
The Sentimental79 Song Book.
By Mrs. Julia Moore, p. 36.
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1
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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reminder
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| n.提醒物，纪念品；暗示，提示 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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sleek
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| adj.光滑的，井然有序的；v.使光滑，梳拢 | |
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latitude
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| n.纬度，行动或言论的自由(范围)，(pl.)地区 | |
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longitude
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| n.经线，经度 | |
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repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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bruised
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| [医]青肿的，瘀紫的 | |
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advent
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| n.(重要事件等的)到来，来临 | |
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naturalist
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| n.博物学家(尤指直接观察动植物者) | |
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specialty
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| n.(speciality)特性，特质；专业，专长 | |
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fauna
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| n.(一个地区或时代的)所有动物，动物区系 | |
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fecundity
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| n.生产力；丰富 | |
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hindrance
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| n.妨碍，障碍 | |
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obstruction
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| n.阻塞，堵塞；障碍物 | |
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inflicted
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| 把…强加给，使承受，遭受( inflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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trenches
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| 深沟，地沟( trench的名词复数 )； 战壕 | |
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ostrich
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| n.鸵鸟 | |
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amorphous
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| adj.无定形的 | |
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wombat
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| n.袋熊 | |
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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mellow
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| adj.柔和的；熟透的；v.变柔和；(使)成熟 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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peal
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| n.钟声；v.鸣响 | |
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exterminated
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| v.消灭，根绝( exterminate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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indigenous
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| adj.土产的，土生土长的，本地的 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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dabbling
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| v.涉猎( dabble的现在分词 )；涉足；浅尝；少量投资 | |
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erratic
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| adj.古怪的，反复无常的，不稳定的 | |
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notably
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| adv.值得注意地，显著地，尤其地，特别地 | |
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amphibian
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| n.两栖动物；水陆两用飞机和车辆 | |
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burrower
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| 借钱人； 借用人，剽窃者 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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versatility
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| n.多才多艺，多样性，多功能 | |
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puddle
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| n.(雨)水坑，泥潭 | |
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devours
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| 吞没( devour的第三人称单数 )； 耗尽； 津津有味地看； 狼吞虎咽地吃光 | |
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fin
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| n.鳍；(飞机的)安定翼 | |
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41
mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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offense
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| n.犯规，违法行为；冒犯，得罪 | |
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43
deluge
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| n./vt.洪水，暴雨，使泛滥 | |
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virile
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| adj.男性的；有男性生殖力的；有男子气概的；强有力的 | |
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45
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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46
tranquil
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| adj. 安静的, 宁静的, 稳定的, 不变的 | |
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luxurious
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| adj.精美而昂贵的；豪华的 | |
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48
scrambled
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| v.快速爬行( scramble的过去式和过去分词 )；攀登；争夺；（军事飞机）紧急起飞 | |
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49
mused
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| v.沉思，冥想( muse的过去式和过去分词 )；沉思自语说（某事） | |
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50
refreshment
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| n.恢复，精神爽快，提神之事物；（复数）refreshments:点心，茶点 | |
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51
opulence
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| n.财富，富裕 | |
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52
embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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53
smacked
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| 拍，打，掴( smack的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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gratitude
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| adj.感激，感谢 | |
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55
slain
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| 杀死，宰杀，杀戮( slay的过去分词 )； (slay的过去分词) | |
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56
ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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57
invertebrates
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| n.无脊椎动物( invertebrate的名词复数 ) | |
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58
anterior
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| adj.较早的；在前的 | |
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epoch
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| n.(新)时代；历元 | |
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subterranean
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| adj.地下的，地表下的 | |
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stationary
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| adj.固定的，静止不动的 | |
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62
disintegrated
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| v.（使）破裂[分裂，粉碎]，（使）崩溃( disintegrate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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64
otter
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| n.水獭 | |
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65
sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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hoary
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| adj.古老的；鬓发斑白的 | |
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platypus
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| n.鸭嘴兽 | |
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68
poetical
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| adj.似诗人的；诗一般的；韵文的；富有诗意的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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70
oozy
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| adj.软泥的 | |
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fishy
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| adj. 值得怀疑的 | |
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tapered
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| adj. 锥形的，尖削的，楔形的，渐缩的，斜的 动词taper的过去式和过去分词 | |
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73
marsupial
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| adj.有袋的，袋状的 | |
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relic
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| n.神圣的遗物，遗迹，纪念物 | |
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plagiarist
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| n.剽窃者，文抄公 | |
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76
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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77
stanzas
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| 节，段( stanza的名词复数 ) | |
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78
mound
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| n.土墩，堤，小山；v.筑堤，用土堆防卫 | |
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79
sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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