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Boulder Place Directory 15
Page 06
I ARRIVED in Manaos in the evening of November 15th. I was very ill indeed, my right foot so swollen that I could hardly stand on it, and so painful that I could not put on a shoe or even a slipper, so that I had to hop about with only a sock over it. The doctor on board had told me that I was suffering from beri-beri, and although I tried not to believe him I was gradually forced to the conclusion that he was right. In fact, atrophy set in by degrees--one of the characteristics of beri-beri being that after a time you feel no pain at all. You can dig a pin into the affected part, or pluck off all the hairs without feeling the slightest pain. I was in a bad way, although I never laid up for an entire day. From the moment I arrived I "got busy," to use an American expression, in order to go to the rescue of Filippe the negro and another man I had left in charge of my valuable baggage near the mouth of the Canuma River, a tributary of the Madeira. It was necessary for me to borrow or charter a steam launch for one or two days, so that I could save men and baggage. I applied to the Governor of the Amazonas, who had received telegraphic instructions from the Central Government to give me every possible assistance. When I called upon him he said he was not the "black servant" of the President of the Republic; that he was practically an independent ruler, and would obey nobody's orders or instructions, especially from the Central Government.
To those whose acquaintance with fish is mainly culinary, it may seem odd to hear that the father stickleback alone takes part in the care of the nursery. But this is the rule among the whole class of fish; wherever the young are tended, it is almost always the father, not the mother, who undertakes the duty of incubation. Only two instances occur where the female fish assumes maternal functions towards her young; about these I shall have more to say a little later on. We must remember that reptiles, birds, and mammals are in all probability descended from fish as ancestors, and it is therefore clear that the habit of handing over the care of the young to the female alone belongs to the higher grades of vertebrates--in other words, is of later origin. We need not be astonished, therefore, to find that in many cases among birds and other advanced vertebrates a partial reversion to the earlier habit not infrequently takes place. With doves, for example, the cock and hen birds sit equally on the eggs, taking turns about at the nest; and as for the ostriches, the male bird there does most of the incubation, for he accepts the whole of the night duty, and also assists at intervals during the daytime. There are numerous other cases where the father bird shares the tasks of the nursery at least equally with the mother. I will glance first, however, at one of the rare exceptions among fish where the main duty does not devolve on the devoted father.
I must, however, return to Frost's "Lives of Eminent Christians." I will leave none of the ambiguity about my words in which Moore and Wordsworth seem to have delighted. I am very sorry the book is gone, and know not where to turn for its successor. Till I have found a substitute I can write no more, and I do not know how to find even a tolerable one. I should try a volume of Migne's "Complete Course of Patrology," but I do not like books in more than one volume, for the volumes vary in thickness, and one never can remember which one took; the four volumes, however, of Bede in Giles's "Anglican Fathers" are not open to this objection, and I have reserved them for favourable consideration. Mather's "Magnalia" might do, but the binding does not please me; Cureton's "Corpus Ignatianum" might also do if it were not too thin. I do not like taking Norton's "Genuineness of the Gospels," as it is just possible some one may be wanting to know whether the Gospels are genuine or not, and be unable to find out because I have got Mr. Norton's book. Baxter's "Church History of England," Lingard's "Anglo-Saxon Church," and Cardwell's "Documentary Annals," though none of them as good as Frost, are works of considerable merit; but on the whole I think Arvine's "Cyclopedia of Moral and Religious Anecdote" is perhaps the one book in the room which comes within measurable distance of Frost. I should probably try this book first, but it has a fatal objection in its too seductive title. "I am not curious," as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts, "but I like to know," and I might be tempted to pervert the book from its natural uses and open it, so as to find out what kind of a thing a moral and religious anecdote is. I know, of course, that there are a great many anecdotes in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling them either moral or religious, though some of them certainly seem as if they might fairly find a place in Mr. Arvine's work. There are some things, however, which it is better not to know, and take it all round I do not think I should be wise in putting myself in the way of temptation, and adopting Arvine as the successor to my beloved and lamented Frost.
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