Diversions of a NaturalistLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
Diversions of a Naturalist
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history
at all when in natural conditions, has been converted into a songster
by bringing it up in company with piping bullfinches.
Other animals which cannot sing like the birds yet use their voices in
courtship. The frogs and toads are no mean performers in this way,
whilst cats, deer, and other large animals are "singers," of a kind,
when stirred by mate-hunger. The monkeys chatter and make various
vocal sounds, but the gibbons and man-like apes produce excessively
loud and penetrating cries. These cries, though sometimes of fine note
and repeated rhythmically (as in the gibbons and chimpanzees), have
not the character of song. The beginnings of song in mankind are lost
in the mist of ages. The Australian black-fellows chant and dance
with rhythmic precision and a certain kind of melancholy cadence, but
they never attempt to fascinate the other sex by the use of the voice
(nor, so far as is known, in any other way), and, indeed, there is a
vast interval between their vocal performances and the love-songs of
modern civilized races. Man has not inherited singing from his animal
ancestry, but has re-invented it for himself. His real knowledge
and command of "music" is actually a novelty which has sprung into
existence within the last few hundred years.
There is no doubt that animals of the same species are attracted to
one another by smell, and that distinct species have distinct smells.
Further, there is no doubt that in many cases the special smell of
either sex attracts the other. But modern man has so nearly lost
the sense of smell--why it is difficult to say, excepting that it
is because it was not of life-saving value to him--that it is very
difficult for us to estimate properly the significance of perfumes and
odours. We know that the dog has what to us seems a marvellous power
of tracking and recognizing by smell, and that other animals appear
to be similarly endowed, though most usually we cannot perceive the
smell at all which they recognize and follow. It appears that nearly
all the hairy quadrupeds have distinctive odours, which they and their
companions can readily recognize, secreted by certain glands in the
skin placed here and there on the body, often on the legs and toes.
Some of these odours, like musk and civet, we can perceive, though most
have no effect on us. It seems to be an evidence of the absence of any
need for man to produce "perfumes" by the action of his own structure
that he has a feeble sense of smell and has so little perception of
any perfumes or odours peculiar to himself that he has when civilized
always made use of odorous substances (perfumes and scents) extracted
from other animals and from plants for the purpose, before the days of
cleanliness, of masking the unpleasant odours of putrescence pervading
his body and clothing. Later, when dirt became less common, he made
use of perfumes for the purpose of giving an agreeable whiff to the
olfactory organs of his associates.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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