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+{"text":" \nThe author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.\n\nCopyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com\/piracy.\nTO SIMON HALLY\n\nwho first let me develop Doctor Fingal O'Reilly and with a gentle editorial hand guided the eccentric GP from early beginnings to the maturity that finally became the Irish Country Doctor novels\nCONTENTS\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright Notice\n\nDedication\n\nAuthor's Note\n\nIntroducing O'Reilly\n\nThe Lazarus Manoeuvre\n\nGalvin's Ducks\n\nKinky\n\nTroubles at the Table\n\nAnatomy Lesson\n\nSunny Disposition\n\nWell Said, Sir\n\nA Pregnant Silence\n\nWorking as Equals\n\nMurphy's Law\n\nThe Law of Holes\n\nMen of the Cloth (1)\n\nMen of the Cloth (2)\n\nO'Reilly Finds His Way\n\nPowers of Observation\n\nStress of the Moment\n\nO'Reilly's Surprise\n\nShock Therapy\n\nHappy as a Pig in...\n\nBarometer Falling\n\nThe Flying Doctor\n\nForty Shades of Green\n\nA G(h)astly Mistake\n\nBlessed Are the Meek\n\nA Matter of Tact\n\nThe Cat's Meow\n\nO'Reilly at the Helm\n\nO'Reilly Strikes Back\n\nA Word to the Wise\n\nDog Days of Winter\n\nIn a Pig's Ear\n\nArthur and the General\n\nSomething Happened\n\nHell on Wheels\n\nWhat's in a Name?\n\nFill 'er Up\n\nA Curious Affair\n\nCuriouser and Curiouser\n\nA Matter of Time\n\nThe Last Laugh\n\nEasy Come, Easy Go\n\nLateral Thinking\n\nFlight of Fancy\n\nFuel for Thought\n\nTimes Are a-Changing\n\nThe Sting\n\nPipes of Wrath\n\nSam Slither\n\nA Matchless Experience\n\nA Humble Apology\n\nThe Patient Who Broke the Rules\n\nGoing to the Dogs\n\nA Meeting of the Minds\n\nIt's in the Can\n\nA Very Pheasant Evening...\n\n'Tis the Season to Be Jolly\n\nJust a Wee Deoch an' Dorris\n\nWhat's in a Name?\n\nWhat's in a Name? (Part 2)\n\nWhiskey in a Jar\n\nO'Reilly Puts His Foot in It\n\nO'Reilly's Cat\n\nO'Reilly's Dog\n\nO'Reilly's Rival\n\nThe Smoking Gun\n\nRing Around the Rosies\n\nJingle Bells\n\nHome Is the Sailor\n\nAfterword\n\nGlossary\n\nBy Patrick Taylor\n\nAbout the Author\n\nCopyright\nAUTHOR'S NOTE\n\nI have written all my life, or at least since an essay of mine phrased in the style of Sir Francis Bacon was published in my school magazine when I was sixteen. It seems so long ago now that I wonder if the task came easily to me because the old seventeenth-century statesman, jurist, scientist, and author and I were practically contemporaries.\n\nWhenever I give readings from my later works, all novels, someone invariably asks a two-part question, the first part of which is, \"Where did Doctors O'Reilly and Laverty come from?\" It'll take me a page or two to answer that.\n\nThe whole process was a lengthy evolution of a writer and his characters. Much of it seemed to come by chance, a strange admixture of who you know and luck. The short stories included between these covers are the proof of that and I hope you enjoy them.\n\nThe second part of the question will have to await the fuller explanation of part one, but I promise I'll tell you what the query was and answer it before the end of this introduction.\n\nDuring most of my medical research career any literary efforts were confined to the production of scientific papers and, in collaboration with colleagues, half a dozen textbooks. Dull, I can assure you. Very, very dull.\n\nThat changed in 1989. My longtime friend and medical school classmate Doctor Tom Baskett had been appointed editor in chief of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada (JSOGC). To lighten its otherwise dry content he invited me to contribute a regular page of tongue-in-cheek observations about the world of then modern medicine. \"En Passant\" began appearing monthly and lasted for nearly ten years.\n\nTo my surprise the associate editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) noticed the early efforts and commissioned a six-weekly column, \"Medicine Chest,\" for his publication. An idea had begun to germinate and I asked permission to devote five hundred words in each episode to the doings of a fictional Ulster GP, Doctor Reilly\u2014please note Reilly, not yet O'Reilly\u2014and the suggestion was accepted. Unfortunately the electronic records of these stories are lost, but I had fun with the character.\n\nSimon Hally, who over the years has become my friend, was then editor of Punch Digest for Canadian Doctors, which subsequently became Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour. He'd read the Reilly stories in the CMAJ and wondered if I'd consider doing a regular piece for him, to be called \"Taylor's Twist.\" He also mentioned a dollar sum that would keep me in paper, ink, and the high technology of the time, floppy discs. I agreed, but asked that rather than doing short, one-paragraph observations I could devote each column to a single, I hoped humorous, anecdote. The first of these stories appeared in 1991, and until 1995 chronicled the vagaries of the life of a medical undergraduate in Belfast in the '50s and '60s, and yes, they were autobiographical, if exaggerated and a bit twisted.\n\nBut old Doctor Reilly, whose antics had ceased with the discontinuation of \"Medicine Chest\" somewhere in 1991, kept muttering to me that he felt he should be resurrected. After four years of undergraduate stories I was running out of steam, and with Simon's permission switched to the recounting of the misadventures of a newly qualified medical graduate who innocently accepts a position of assistant to an irascible, blasphemous, hard-drinking, rural Ulster GP who by now had adopted the name Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. I think you probably know him. Those columns ran until 2001. Like the undergraduate stories they were based on my own and my friends' experiences in Ulster general practice. Some come from good stories heard in pubs.\n\nForgive me if I now digress into some technical aspects of writing fiction, but I needs must if I am going to explain why in these columns I cast myself, Patrick Taylor, as the straight man and narrator in this Hippocratic Laurel and Hardy double act.\n\nThe best modern stories are written in \"point of view.\" The author must slip into the background and let the reader experience the action through the eyes of the \"point of view character.\" This means that, for example, a subsidiary character in a scene cannot comment as an aside on what the main character is thinking or doing. Such asides, while properly called \"authorial intrusion\" in literary fiction, can be the guts of good comedy. And there is a way to use them so they are not intrusive.\n\nIf the point of view character is the narrator, they can make as many asides as they like, and this is even easier if the story-telling character is the first-person \"I,\" as in, \"I saw O'Reilly lift Donal Donnelly by gripping the little man's shoulder in one vast paw and as God is my witness I swear I heard the victim's bones creak. O'Reilly never seemed to know his own strength.\"\n\nTo tell the Stitches stories my own character became the narrator, the butt of many of the jokes, and I had a useful technique to work with. I am frequently asked, \"In the novels are you Doctor Barry Laverty?\" O'Reilly's fictional junior. For structural reasons I did indeed use myself in these columns, but I do not translate into Barry in the Irish Country series.\n\nSo those were the first stumbling steps. I'm afraid they don't quite answer the question of how did the Country Series evolve. That is also the story of my journey to become a novelist.\n\nShortly after graduation from medical school in my twenties I tried my hand as a short-story writer. W. Somerset Maugham had been my teenage hero. The Belfast Troubles had broken out and I tried to set human drama against that background. I am the proud possessor of rejection slips from several magazines of the period, including one from The New Yorker.\n\nBy the mid-'90s I had been appointed editor of the JSOGC. The various humour columns were doing well, and as a sideline I was also selling sailing humour. (I think it's genetic. When an Ulsterman goes to sea, strange things can happen. We, after all, built the RMS Titanic.) In a fit of chutzpah I dug out some of the short stories I'd written back in the '60s and a few more I'd started to experiment with, and sought an opinion from the publisher of the JSOGC and his wife, Adrian and Olga Stein, two people whose interest in the written word is vast. They in turn persuaded Anna Porter, then of Key Porter Books, to take a look, and to my delight she agreed that with editorial help from Carolyn Bateman, who is now my friend and highly valued editor to this day, a short story collection, Only Wounded: Ulster Stories, should be produced. It will be re-released by Forge in 2015.\n\nAnother remarkable man, Jack Whyte, author of the Dream of Eagles series and more novels, suggested I try writing a novel. Emboldened by having had my short stories accepted, I took his advice. Thank you, Jack. To cut a long story short, after numerous rejections a psycho-thriller, Pray for Us Sinners, was published in 2000 in Canada. Flushed with pride I suggested to my house editor, Adrienne Weiss, \"Why don't we take all my Doctor O'Reilly columns, clap on covers, and make a buck or two?\"\n\nShe said, \"If your name was Garrison Keillor I'd say, 'Let's call it Lake Wobegon Days and go for it, but...'\"\n\nHer implication that no one had heard of Patrick Taylor was not lost. She was, however, kind enough to suggest that she liked the character of Doctor O'Reilly. \"Perhaps with the confidence gained from one published novel under my belt I might consider...?\"\n\nThe Apprenticeship of Doctor Laverty, the first novel about O'Reilly, appeared in Canada in 2004 and, thanks to the efforts of Jack Whyte, as well as Natalia Aponte, then acquiring editor for Forge Books, it was republished in the United States in 2007 as An Irish Country Doctor. It was the beginning of the Irish Country series.\n\nAnd so with the support of you, the readers, the continuing story of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly has continued to grow.\n\nI started this introduction by quoting the first part of a two-part question: \"Where did Doctors O'Reilly and Laverty come from?\" and I promised after a long-winded answer to tell you what the second part was. \"You've told us that they came from your humour columns,\" I can hear you say. \"So, when are we going to get to see those old columns?\" And that of course is the second part of the question.\n\nThe answer is that while I have released a few on my Web page as blogs, now through the generosity of Tom Doherty and Forge Books you can have the lot, warts and all, between these covers. The cover illustration was conceived and brought to life by Irene Gallo and beautifully painted by Gregory Manchess. They have been responsible for all the Irish Country dust-jacket art.\n\nIn addition, last March we published a short O'Reilly story, \"Home Is the Sailor,\" in e-format only. You can see how in part it was derived from a column entitled \"The Lazarus Manoeuvre\" first created in late 1995. I now know that many readers who did not have access to the e-reader technology were disappointed. For them, that story, written much later than the columns, is appended in hard copy in this work.\n\nI have had a lot of fun revisiting these long-ago-written friends. I sincerely hope you enjoy them. If you compare them with the Irish Country novels you will see how characters changed and grew, and simple story lines were twisted and embellished.\n\nAnd perhaps having had a glimpse into the origins you will see how a writer and his characters can grow from small beginnings.\n\nWith my best wishes,\n\nPATRICK TAYLOR  \nSalt Spring Island,  \nBritish Columbia,  \nCanada\nOCTOBER 1995\n\nIntroducing O'Reilly\n\nIn which we make the acquaintance of a rather remarkable GP\n\n\"Taylor's Twist\" first appeared in Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour in September 1991, as a chronicle of the experiences of a medical student in Belfast in the '50s and '60s. By 1995 I'd written about the life of a medical undergraduate for almost as long as I was one. The editor, Simon Hally, was a generous man and allowed me to switch my attention, and I trust yours, to events of postgraduate life in the North of Ireland in the late '60s. To anyone with the intestinal fortitude actually to want more undergraduate stories, I can only apologize. To the rest, who have followed me thus far, let us boldly go where no sentient entity has gone before\u2014and I don't mean the Canadian House of Commons or the Congress of the United States. Come back with me to Ulster and meet my old tutor, Doctor O'Reilly, ex-navy boxing champion, classical scholar, unregenerate poacher, hard drinker, cryptophilanthropist, foul-mouthed widower, and country GP.\n\nHe was a big man, about six foot fourteen in his socks and weighing twenty stone or, if you prefer, 280 pounds. His complexion might be charitably called florid, the delicate roseate hue of his cheeks having all the softness of an overheated blast furnace. His nose, once perhaps a thing of beauty and a joy forever, had acquired a distinct personality of its own. The tip was squashed and sat at a rakish forty-five degrees to port of the bridge. Boxing, or as it was once known, the manly art of self-defence, carried its own costs. The tip of O'Reilly's nose had one other important characteristic: when he became enraged it turned white.\n\nI stumbled, all unsuspecting, into his clutches after I'd finished my houseman's (intern's) year and was eking out a meagre existence demonstrating anatomy. Weekend and evening locums for GPs helped me make ends if not exactly meet, then at least come within calling distance of each other. I simply answered a newspaper advertisement.\n\nIn the years that I knew O'Reilly, years that encompassed a series of horribly underpaid registrar's (resident's) jobs, he never ceased to astound me. Sometimes my surprise was a result of his absolutely cavalier treatment of a malingerer; on other occasions his encyclopaedic knowledge of his patients astounded me. He had an uncanny sense of clinical smell, and I would still bet O'Reilly's diagnostic acumen against a battery of CT scans, MRI pictures, and the entire arsenal of the biochemistry laboratory.\n\nHe detested bureaucracy with the vitriolic hatred of Torquemada for unrepentant heretics, was kind to widows and small children, and ate public health officers for breakfast. He was stubborn to the point of mulishness when his mind was made up, had a tongue that when aroused would have made Adolf Hitler on a bad day at a Nuremberg rally sound like a cooing dove, yet he'd sit for hours in the dark of the night with a dying patient and still be ready for work as soon as morning surgery, the term for office over there, opened.\n\nI learned more about the art of medicine from that man, and some of the humour of it too, than from a faculty of professors. I wish I could have him with me today when I'm faced with some of the array of meaningful, interactive, holistic, client-centred healthcare providers who want to invade my turf as a physician. You know the kind: the ones who believe that medicine is too important to be left to the doctors (a brilliantly original paraphrasing of old Georges Clemenceau's crack about war and generals, although others would attribute it to Talleyrand) and who, bless their trusting little souls, are convinced that if enough wellness clinics are opened, nasty old diseases will vanish and we'll all live forever.\n\nTo be fair to O'Reilly, in some matters he was well ahead of his time. I thought of him the other day while watching a demonstration in which a healthcare provider held her hands over the sufferer and by concentrating, focused vital healing energies. I saw O'Reilly using a similar approach thirty years ago.\n\nHe'd asked me to join him for morning surgery, which he conducted in the converted front room of his home, sitting in a swivel chair in front of a great rolltop desk. Beside him was a hard-backed chair for the sufferer. One of O'Reilly's ploys was to have sawn off the last inch of the front legs of this seat so the customer would keep sliding forward, be uncomfortable, and thus not be tempted to stay too long.\n\nI occupied the other piece of furniture in the room, a battered examination couch, swinging my legs and wishing that the incessant flow of coughs, colds, and sniffles would dry up, both figuratively and literally.\n\nThe last patient came in. I'd seen her before, twice actually, with vague but time-consuming symptoms. She took one look at me and sniffed. \"The young lad's not helping me, Doctor.\"\n\nO'Reilly rose, and waited until she was seated. He sat and took one of her hands in his, peered over a set of half-moon spectacles, which he affected when he wanted to look particularly wise, and asked, \"What seems to be the trouble, Maggie?\"\n\nShe fired one aggrieved glance in my direction and said in a voice that would have softened Pharaoh's heart if, like Moses, she'd been discussing the holiday plans of the Children of Israel with Ramses, \"It's the headaches, Doctor.\"\n\n\"Um,\" said O'Reilly, leaning forward, left elbow on his knee, chin cupped in his hand, index finger crushing past the side of his bent schnozzle. \"Where are they?\"\n\nShe sighed deeply. \"About two inches above my crown.\"\n\nO'Reilly didn't bat an eyelid. \"Tut-tut.\" He positively oozed solicitousness. \"Tut. Tut!\" He released her hand, swivelled in his chair, grabbed a bottle of some new vitamins that a drug rep had left as a sample, swung back, and handed them to her. He stood, signalling that the consultation was nearly over. She stood. He took her arm, piloting her to the door. \"Now, Maggie,\" he said. \"You must take two of these for the ache over your head...\" he looked at me, one upper eyelid drooping in a slow wink \"... ten minutes before the pain starts.\"\n\nShe thanked him profusely and left.\n\nI saw her a week later. She lost no time telling me what a useless physician I was and how Doctor O'Reilly had effected another miracle cure. I'm sure he would have been a great practitioner of therapeutic touch.\n\nNow you've met Doctor O'Reilly. Next time I'll tell you how he started in practice.\nNOVEMBER\/DECEMBER 1995\n\nThe Lazarus Manoeuvre\n\nHow the young Doctor O'Reilly earned the respect of his community\n\nWe were sitting in the upstairs lounge of Doctor O'Reilly's house at the end of the day. Himself was tucking contentedly into his second large whiskey. \"So,\" he demanded, \"how do you like it?\"\n\nBeing a little uncertain whether he was asking about the spectacular view through the bay window to Belfast Lough, the small sherry I was sipping, or the general status of the universe, I countered with an erudite, \"What?\"\n\nHe fished in the external auditory canal of one thickened, pugilist's ear with the tip of his right little finger and echoed my sentiments: \"What?\"\n\nI thought this conversation could become mildly repetitive and decided to broaden the horizons. \"How do I like what, Doctor O'Reilly?\"\n\nHe extracted his digit and examined the end with all the concentration and knitting of brows of a gorilla evaluating a choice morsel. \"Practice here, you idiot. How do you like it?\"\n\nMy lights went on. \"Fine,\" I said, as convincingly as possible. \"Just fine.\"\n\nMy reply seemed to satisfy him. He grinned, grunted, hauled his twenty stone erect, wandered over to the sideboard, and returned carrying the sherry decanter. He topped up my glass. \"A bird can't fly on one wing,\" he remarked.\n\nI refrained from observing that if he kept putting away the whiskey at his usual rate he'd soon be giving a pretty fair imitation of a mono-winged albatross in a high gale, accepted my fresh drink, and waited.\n\nHe returned the decanter, ambled to the window, and took in the scenery with one all-encompassing wave of his arm. \"I'd not want to live anywhere else,\" he said. \"Mind you, it was touch and go at the start.\"\n\nHe was losing me again. \"What was, Doctor O'Reilly?\"\n\n\"Fingal, my boy. Fingal. For Oscar.\" He gave me one of his most avuncular smiles.\n\nI couldn't for the life of me see him having been named for a small, gilded statuette given annually to movie stars. \"Oscar, er, Fingal?\" I asked.\n\nHe shook his head. \"No. Not Oscar Fingal. Wilde.\"\n\nHe did this to me. Every time I thought I was following him he'd change tack, leaving me in a state of confusion bordering on that usually felt by people recovering from an overdose of chloroform. \"Oscar Fingal Wilde, Fingal?\"\n\nI should have stuck with \"Doctor O'Reilly.\" I could tell by the way the tip of his bent nose was beginning to whiten that he was becoming exasperated. He shook his head. \"Oscar... Fingal... O'Flahertie... Wills... Wilde.\"\n\nI stifled the urge to remark that if you put an air to it you could sing it.\n\nHe must have seen my look of bewilderment. The ischaemia left his nose. \"I was named for him. For Oscar Wilde.\"\n\nThe scales fell from my eyes. \"I see.\"\n\n\"Good. Now where was I?\"\n\n\"You said, 'It was touch and go at the start.'\"\n\n\"Oh yes. Getting the practice going. Touch and go.\" He sat again in the big comfortable armchair, picked up his glass of whiskey, and looked at me over the brim. \"Did I ever tell you how I got started?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, settling back in my own chair, preparing myself for another of his reminiscences, for another meander down the byways of O'Reilly's life.\n\n\"I came here in the early '40s. Took over from Doctor Finnegan.\"\n\nI hoped fervently that we weren't about to embark on the genealogy of James Joyce, and was relieved to hear O'Reilly continue, \"He was a funny old bird.\"\n\nNever, I thought, but kept the thought to myself.\n\nO'Reilly was warming up now. \"Just before he left, Finnegan warned me about a local condition of cold groin abscesses. He didn't understand them.\" O'Reilly took a mouthful of Irish, savoured it, and swallowed. \"He explained to me that when he lanced them he either got wind or shit, but the patient invariably died.\" O'Reilly chuckled.\n\nI was horrified. My mentor's predecessor had been incising inguinal hernias.\n\n\"That's why it was touch and go,\" said O'Reilly. \"My first patient had the biggest hernia I've ever seen. When I refused to lance it, like good old Doctor Finnegan, the patient spread the word that I didn't know my business.\" He sat back and crossed one leg over the other. \"Did you ever hear of Lazarus?\"\n\n\"Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Lazarus?\" I asked.\n\n\"Don't be impertinent.\" He grabbed my by-now-empty glass and headed back to the sideboard. The delivery of a fresh libation, and one for himself, signalled that he hadn't been offended. \"No, the biblical fellow that Jesus raised from the dead.\" He sat.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"That's how I got my start.\"\n\nWas it the sherry or was I really losing my mind? Whatever his skills, I doubted that Doctor O'Reilly had actually effected a resurrection. \"Go on,\" I asked for it.\n\n\"I was in church one Sunday, hoping that if the citizens saw that I was a good Christian they might look upon me more favourably.\"\n\nThe thought of a pious O'Reilly seemed a trifle incongruous.\n\n\"There I was when a farmer in the front pew let out a yell like a banshee, grabbed his chest, and keeled over.\" To add drama to his words O'Reilly stood, arms wide. \"I took out of my pew like a whippet. Examined him. Mutton. Dead as mutton.\"\n\nI knew that CPR hadn't been invented in the '40s. \"What did you do?\"\n\nO'Reilly lowered his arms and winked. \"I got my bag, told everyone to stand back, and gave the poor corpse an injection of whatever came handy. I listened to his heart. 'He's back,' says I. You should have heard the gasp from the congregation.\"\n\nHe sat down. \"I listened again. 'God,' says I, 'he's going again,' and gave the poor bugger another shot.\" O'Reilly sipped his drink. \"I brought him back three times before I finally confessed defeat.\"\n\nInnocence is a remarkable thing. \"Did you really get his heart started?\"\n\nO'Reilly guffawed. \"Not at all, but the poor benighted audience didn't know that. Do you know I actually heard one woman say to her neighbour, 'The Lord only brought Lazarus back once and the new doctor did it three times.'\" He headed for the sideboard again. \"I told you it was touch and go at the start, but the customers started rolling in after that\u2014will you have another?\"\nJANUARY 1996\n\nGalvin's Ducks\n\nHow Doctor O'Reilly mended a broken heart\n\n\"That man Galvin's a bloody idiot!\" Thus spake Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. He was standing in his favourite corner of the bar of the Black Swan Inn, or, as it was known to the locals, the Mucky Duck. O'Reilly's normally florid cheeks glowed crimson and the tip of his bent nose paled. Somehow rage seemed to divert the blood flow from his hooter to his face. I thought it politic to remain silent. I'd seen the redoubtable Doctor O'Reilly like this before.\n\nHe hadn't seemed to be his usual self when we'd repaired to the hostelry after evening surgery, and now, after his fourth pint, whatever had been bothering him was beginning to surface. \"Raving bloody idiot,\" he muttered, taking a generous swallow of his drink and slamming the empty glass on the counter.\n\nAfter six months as his weekend locum and part-time assistant, I'd learned my place in O'Reilly's universe. I nodded to Brendan the barman, who rapidly replaced O'Reilly's empty glass with another full of the velvet liquid product of Mister Arthur Guinness and Sons, St. James's Gate, Dublin.\n\n\"Ta,\" said O'Reilly, the straight glass almost hidden by his big hand. \"I could kill Seamus Galvin.\" He rummaged in the pocket of his rumpled jacket, produced a briar, stoked it with the enthusiasm of Be\u00eblzebub preparing the coals for an unrepentant sinner, and fired up the tobacco, making a smokescreen that would have hidden the entire British North Sea fleet from the attentions of the Panzerschiff Bismarck.\n\nI sipped my shandy and waited, trying to remember if I'd seen the patient in question.\n\n\"Do you know what that benighted apology for a man has done?\"\n\nFrom the tone of O'Reilly's voice, I assumed it must have been some petty misdemeanour\u2014like mass murder perhaps. \"No,\" I said, helpfully.\n\nO'Reilly sighed. \"He has Mary's heart broken.\"\n\nNow I remembered. Seamus Galvin and his wife Mary lived in a cottage at the end of one of the lanes just outside the small Ulster town where O'Reilly practised. Galvin was a carpenter by trade and a would-be entrepreneur. I'd seen him once or twice, usually because he'd managed to hit his thumb with one of his hammers. I said the man was a carpenter; I didn't say he was a good carpenter.\n\n\"Broken,\" said O'Reilly mournfully, \"utterly smashed.\"\n\nThis intelligence came as no great surprise. Mary Galvin was the sheet anchor of the marriage, bringing in extra money by selling her baking, eggs from her hens, and the produce of her vegetable garden. Galvin himself was a complete waster.\n\nO'Reilly prodded my chest with the end of his pipe. \"I should have known a few weeks ago when I saw him and he was telling me about his latest get-rich scheme.\" The big man grunted derisively. \"That one couldn't make money in the Royal Mint.\"\n\nI could only agree, remembering Galvin's previous failed endeavours. His \"Happy Nappy Diaper Service\" had folded. No one in a small town could afford the luxury of having someone else wash their babies' diapers. Only the most sublime optimist could have thought that a landscaping company would have much custom in a predominantly agricultural community. Galvin had soon been banished from his \"Garden of Eden\" lawn care business\u2014presumably because his encounters with the fruit of the tree of knowledge had been limited. I wondered what fresh catastrophe had befallen him.\n\nO'Reilly beat carelessly at an ember that had fallen from the bowl of his pipe onto the lapel of his tweed jacket. \"Mary's the one with sense. She was in to see me a couple of weeks ago. She's pregnant.\" He inspected the charred cloth. \"I've known her since she was a wee girl. I've never seen her so happy.\" His craggy features softened for a moment. \"She told me her secret. She'd been saving her money and had enough for Seamus and herself to emigrate to California.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said.\n\n\"Aye,\" said O'Reilly, \"she has a brother out there. He was going to find Seamus a job with a construction company.\"\n\nI'd read somewhere that California was prone to earthquakes and for a moment thought that this unfortunate geological propensity had been transmitted to Ulster before I realized that the pub's attempt to shimmy like my sister Kate was due to O'Reilly banging his fist on the bar top.\n\n\"That bloody idiot and his bright ideas.\" O'Reilly's nose tip was ashen. \"He's gone into toy making. He thinks he can sell rocking ducks\u2014rocking ducks.\" He shook his head ponderously. \"Mary was in tonight. The wee lass was in tears. He'd taken the money she'd saved and went and bought the lumber to make his damn ducks. That man Galvin's a bloody idiot.\"\n\nO'Reilly finished his pint, set the glass on the counter, shrugged, and said just one more word, \"Home.\"\n\n* * *\n\nAbout a month later, I met Mary Galvin in the High Street. She stopped me and I could see she was bubbling with excitement.\n\n\"How are you, Mary?\"\n\n\"Doctor, you'll never believe it!\" She had wonderfully green eyes and they were sparkling. \"A big company in Belfast has bought all of Seamus's rocking ducks, lock, stock, and barrel.\" She patted her expanding waistline. \"The three of us are off to California next week.\"\n\nI wished her well, genuinely pleased for her good fortune. It wasn't until I'd returned to O'Reilly's house that I began to wonder. He was out making a house call. For the last week he'd taken to parking his car on the street. No. No, he wouldn't have...? When I opened the garage door, a bizarre creature toppled out from a heap of its fellows. The entire space was filled to the rafters with garishly painted ducks\u2014rocking ducks. It only took a moment to stow the one that had made a bid for freedom and close the door. When I introduced Doctor O'Reilly, I described him as, among other things, a cryptophilanthropist. Now you know why.\nFEBRUARY 1996\n\nKinky\n\nEvery practice should have a triage specialist like her\n\nDoctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly wasn't the only character in the practice. Mrs. Kincaid, widow, native of County Kerry, known to one and all as \"Kinky,\" functioned as his housekeeper-cum-receptionist-cum-nurse. She was a big woman, middle-aged, with big hands and blue eyes that could twinkle like the dew on the grass in the morning sun when she was in an expansive mood\u2014or flash like lightning when she was enraged. She treated Doctor O'Reilly with due deference when he behaved himself and sub-Arctic frigidity when he didn't. She was the only person I knew who could bring him to heel. In her native county she would have been known as \"a powerful woman.\"\n\nWhen she was acting in her nursing role, Kinky's speciality was triage. Cerberus at the gates to Hades might have done a fair to middling job keeping the unworthy in the underworld, but when it came to protecting her doctors' time from the malingerers of the town, Kinky made the fabled dog look like an edentulous pussycat. Not only did she get rid of them, she did so with diplomatic skills that would have been the envy of the American ambassador to the Court of St. James.\n\nI began to appreciate her talents one January evening. It had been a tough week. We were in the middle of a 'flu epidemic and O'Reilly, who'd been without much sleep for about four days, had prevailed upon me to come and help him out. By the week's end both of us were knackered. We were sitting in the surgery, me on the examination couch, O'Reilly slumped in the swivel chair. The last patient had left and as far as I knew no emergency calls had come in. O'Reilly's usually ruddy complexion was pallid and his eyes red-rimmed, the whole face looking like two tomatoes in a snowbank. I didn't like to think about my own appearance. He massaged his right shoulder with his left hand. \"God,\" he said, \"I hope that's the last of it for tonight.\" As he spoke the front doorbell rang. \"Bugger!\" said O'Reilly.\n\nI started to rise but he shook his head. \"Leave it. Kinky will see who it is.\"\n\nThe door to the surgery was ajar. I could hear the conversation quite clearly, Kinky's soft Kerry brogue contrasting sharply with harsher female tones. I thought I recognized the second speaker, and when I heard Kinky refer to her as \"Maggie,\" I realized that the caller was the woman who'd come to see O'Reilly complaining of headaches that were located about two inches above the crown of her head. She was in and out of the surgery on a weekly basis. The prospect of having to see her was not pleasant. I needn't have worried.\n\n\"The back, is it, Maggie?\" Kinky's inquiry was dulcet.\n\n\"Something chronic,\" came the reply.\n\n\"Oh dear. And how long has it been bothering you?\"\n\n\"For weeks.\"\n\n\"Weeks, is it?\" The concern never wavered. \"Well, we'll have to get you seen as soon as we can.\"\n\nI shuddered, for it was my turn to see the next patient, but O'Reilly simply smiled, shook his head, and held one index finger in front of his lips.\n\n\"Pity you'll have to wait. The young doctor's out on an emergency. He shouldn't be more than two or three hours. You will wait, won't you?\"\n\nI heard the sibilant indrawing of breath and could picture Maggie's frustration. I heard her harrumph. \"It's the proper doctor that I want to see, not that young lad.\"\n\nSo much for the undying respect of the citizens for their medical advisors. I glanced at O'Reilly and was rewarded with a smug grin.\n\n\"Ah,\" said Kinky. \"Ah, well now, that's the difficulty of it. Doctor O'Reilly's giving a pint of his own blood this very minute, the darling man.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Kincaid\"\u2014Maggie didn't sound as if she was going to be taken in\u2014\"that has to be the fifth pint of blood you've told me about him giving this month.\"\n\nI waited to see how Kinky would wriggle out of that one. I needn't have worried, as I heard her say with completely convincing sincerity, \"And is that not what you'd expect from Doctor O'Reilly, him the biggest-hearted man in the town. Goodnight, Maggie.\" I heard the door close. As I told you, O'Reilly wasn't the only character in the practice.\nMARCH 1996\n\nTroubles at the Table\n\nO'Reilly expounds on the Great Wall of Ulster\n\nDoctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly was rarely lost for an opinion, and not only on matters medical. Now it's just possible that you've noticed during the last twenty-five years that there has been a touch of internecine unpleasantness going on in the North of Ireland. Although at this time of writing peace seems to have broken out over there, when I was working for O'Reilly there were nights when I began to wonder when they were going to issue the civil war with a number, like WW1 or WW2. Many great minds had done their collective best to try to come up with a solution. Alas, in vain.\n\nAfter another huge bomb had remodelled another chunk of Belfast, I foolishly asked O'Reilly, over supper one evening, what he thought could be done about the Troubles.\n\nHe paused from disarticulating the roast fowl, stared at me over his half-moon spectacles, and waved vaguely in my general direction with a slice of breast that was impaled on the carving fork. \"Which troubles?\"\n\nI toyed with my napkin, feeling a great urge to have bitten my tongue out\u2014before I'd asked the question. It had been a busy day and Mrs. Kincaid's roast chicken would have gone a long way to easing the hunger pangs. By the way O'Reilly had asked his question in reply, I could tell that he was ready to expound at some length, and I had a horrible suspicion that he might forget that he was meant to be carving.\n\n\"Come on, man.\" He laid the fork and its toothsome burden back on the plate. \"Which troubles?\"\n\nI sighed. Dinner, it seemed, was going to be late. \"The Troubles. The civil war.\"\n\nHe picked up the fork and expertly dislodged the slice of meat with the carving knife\u2014dislodged it onto his own, already heaped plate. \"Oh. Those troubles.\"\n\nNo, Fingal. The outbreak of foot and mouth disease on Paddy Murnaghan's farm, the civil war in Biafra, or the fact that you seem to have forgotten that locums, like gun dogs, need to be fed at least once a day. I kept my thoughts to myself. Captain Bligh and his few loyal crew members had rowed a longboat about two thousand miles to East Timor existing on one ship's biscuit. Perhaps if I let O'Reilly expound for a while he might eventually see fit to toss me the odd crumb of nourishment.\n\nA spoon disappeared into the nether end of the bird and reappeared full of steaming sage-and-onion stuffing.\n\n\"Those troubles.\" O'Reilly hesitated, trying to find room on his plate between the slices of breast and the roast potatoes before deciding to dump the stuffing at random on top of the pile. He replaced the spoon in the bird with the finesse of a proctologist. \"Those troubles. I reckon there's a pretty simple solution. Pass the gravy.\"\n\nI did so. \"Fingal...\" I tried, hoping at least to encourage him to start serving me as he held forth. Try interrupting the incoming tide in the Bay of Fundy.\n\n\"Simple. Now. You tell me: What are the three most pressing problems in Northern Ireland?\" He ingested a forkful and masticated happily while waiting for my reply.\n\nHow about pellagra, scurvy, and beri-beri in underpaid, underfed junior doctors?\n\n\"Come om, come om...\" His words were a little garbled. He swallowed. \"Right, I'll tell you. Unemployment, falling tourism, and the brave lads who like to make things go bang.\"\n\nI was drowning in my own saliva, watching him tuck in. He pointed at me with his fork. \"The solution is a Great Wall of Ulster.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"Great Wall of Ulster.\" He pulled the half-carved chicken toward himself, stood, expertly dissected the remaining drumstick, and laid three roast potatoes between the severed limb and the rest of the carcass. \"Now look. The thigh there's Ulster and the tatties are my wall.\"\n\nBrilliantly pictorial, I had to admit, but I really would have forgone this lesson in political science if a bit of his improvised Ulster or the rest of Ireland, if that was what the breast was meant to represent, could somehow have been transported to my still-empty plate.\n\n\"Now. Tourism. The tourists would come for miles to see the Great Wall.\" He used the carving knife to line the tubers up more straightly. \"The unemployed would have had to build it in the first place, of course.\"\n\nMy unemployed stomach let go with a gurgle like the boiling mud pits of New Zealand.\n\n\"You're excused,\" said O'Reilly. \"Finally\"\u2014he squashed one of the potatoes with the spoon he'd used to help himself to stuffing\u2014\"the brave banging lads could blow it up to their hearts' content and\"\u2014he paused and replaced the mashed spud with a fresh one\u2014\"the unemployed could be kept occupied rebuilding.\" He sat beaming at me. \"Told you it was simple.\"\n\nI hastened to agree, hoping that now he'd finished I might finally get something to eat.\n\nThe door opened and Mrs. Kincaid stuck her head into the dining room. \"Can you come at once, Doctor Taylor? There's been an accident.\"\nAPRIL 1996\n\nAnatomy Lesson\n\nThe things you learn on a Dublin pub crawl\n\nDoctor O'Reilly was a keen sportsman. I think I've remarked previously that he was an ex\u2013boxing champion. He'd also played a fair bit of rugby football in his youth. I found out about his interest in rugby one weekend in January. Ireland was to play Scotland at Lansdowne Road in Dublin. To my great pleasure, O'Reilly invited me to accompany him to the match. He would provide the transportation and tickets, and would pay for my hotel room on the night before the match.\n\nThe drive to Dublin was uneventful and we checked into the Gresham Hotel. I'd barely begun to unpack my bag when there was a knocking at my door. I opened it. There stood O'Reilly, grinning from ear to ear. \"Do you fancy a jar?\"\n\nIt is, I'm told, possible, just possible, for an entertainer to decline the Royal Command to appear at the London Palladium. It was not possible, not remotely possible, for anyone to turn down O'Reilly's invitation for a drink.\n\n\"Right,\" I said, with all the enthusiasm that must be evinced by the prisoner on death row when the chaplain sticks his head round the cell door. I'll say one thing for convicted American murderers: the electric chair is reputed to be very fast. Their suffering is over quickly. I'd been with Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly in full cry on his home turf and had lived, barely, to regret it. What he might be like when he was truly off the leash didn't bear thinking about. Oh well. My life insurance was paid up. \"I'd love one. Where to?\"\n\nHe winked, a great conspiratorial wink. \"Usually the rugby crowd goes to Davy Byrnes, but I thought we might take a wee wander to The Stag's Head at the back of Grafton Street.\"\n\n\"Do you know how to get there?\" I asked, knowing that when O'Reilly was ready for his tot, depriving him of it for long could produce the same effects as poking an alligator in the eye with a blunt stick.\n\n\"Of course. Didn't I go to medical school here, at Trinity College?\"\n\nThat was something I hadn't known. Those of us who were graduates of Queen's University Belfast referred disdainfully to Trinity as \"that veterinary college in Dublin.\" It was unfair to a fine school, but there was a rivalry between Queen's and the other place. The picture of the enraged alligator popped into my mind and I decided not to mention my lack of respect for his old alma mater. \"Silly of me,\" I said. \"Lead on, Fingal.\"\n\nAnd away we went, just like the caissons, over hill, over dale.\n\nNow Dublin isn't that big a city, it just seemed big after about two hours of walking. O'Reilly was becoming just a tad irritable if the pallor of his nose tip was anything to go by.\n\n\"Jasus,\" he remarked, as we found ourselves at the end of yet another publess cul-de-sac, \"I'd have sworn it was down here.\"\n\nI coughed. \"Should we maybe ask directions?\"\n\nI imagine Captain Oates would have received the same kind of look from Robert Scott that O'Reilly hurled at me if the gallant gentleman had asked the same question on the way back from the South Pole. Frosty\u2014very frosty.\n\n\"Not at all,\" O'Reilly countered, making an about-turn on the march and heading back toward the main thoroughfare. \"I know this place like the back of my hand.\" I took little comfort from that statement. He had both hands in his trouser pockets.\n\nDusk was falling as we trudged along Grafton Street for the umpteenth time. O'Reilly was never one to admit defeat gracefully, but his internal drought, which by then was probably on a par with the drier reaches of the Sahara, finally got the better of him.\n\nA grubby youth was washing a shop-front window or, to be more accurate, redistributing the streaks of city grime. O'Reilly tapped him on the shoulder. The youth turned. \"My good man,\" O'Reilly asked in the tones that he reserved for lesser mortals, \"do you know where The Stag's Head is?\"\n\nThe Dubliner wasn't one bit overawed, neither by O'Reilly's size nor his overweening manner. He gave O'Reilly a pitying look and said with an absolutely straight face, \"Do I know where The Stag's Head is? Of course I do\u2014it's about six feet from its arse.\"\n\nI thought O'Reilly was going to explode, but instead he collapsed in peals of helpless laughter.\n\nWe did eventually find the pub in question. The irony was that just kitty-corner from it was another pub, The Vincent Van Gogh, which, believe it or not, is known to the locals as The Stag's Arse. The Dublin lad hadn't even been trying to be funny.\nMAY 1996\n\nSunny Disposition\n\nThe O'Reilly method of social and preventive medicine\n\nDoctor O'Reilly was fond of extolling the virtues of general practice. He reckoned that a good GP should be the master of what he called \"all branches of the medical arts.\" Once I thought I'd caught him out, but as usual he managed to get the better of me. It all came about because Sunny disappeared. O'Reilly was very fond of Sunny and by chance couldn't stand Councillor Bishop.\n\nIf you're feeling confused, don't worry, any association with O'Reilly will do that to you. If you can bear with me, I'll try to explain.\n\nSunny lived in his car\u2014not because he was penurious, far from it; he'd inherited a sizable sum when his father died\u2014and not because he was stupid; he held a Ph.D. He lived in his car because there was no roof on his house.\n\nThere was no roof on his house because twenty years before, the roof had needed new slates. Sunny had engaged Mister Bishop, town councillor, building contractor, and property developer, to do the job. For reasons that are lost in the mists of Ulster history, just at the time that the old roof had been removed, Sunny and Bishop had fallen out. Sunny refused to pay and Bishop refused to finish the job. Sunny moved into his car and decided to retire from the rat race.\n\nO'Reilly had introduced me to Sunny shortly after I'd started to work there. One of us would drop by to check on him about every couple of weeks or so. I don't think I've ever known a more contented sixty-year-old man.\n\nHis car was parked at the front of what had been the garden. One patch of ground remained uncluttered and there Sunny grew his vegetables, which he sold to the locals. The rest of the place looked like a junkyard that had come into close proximity with a tornado on stimulants. Other old cars, perambulators, washing machines, scrap metal, phonograms, two tractors, and an old caravan were piled hither and yon, vaguely covered by tattered tarpaulins, weeds growing merrily in the interstices.\n\nHis treasured possessions did little for local property values but his neighbours tolerated his eccentricity, bought his vegetables, and passed the time of day with him. O'Reilly had mentioned that the caravan had been a gift from Sunny's neighbours, but he'd only lived in it for a week before returning to his car and turning the caravan over to his four dogs, who were his best friends and constant companions.\n\nI was surprised one afternoon when I made a routine call to find that neither Sunny nor his dogs were anywhere to be seen. The woman who lived next door told me that Mister Bishop had taken Sunny away two days earlier and that someone from the animal protection society had come for the dogs yesterday. I thought it seemed strange and raised the matter with O'Reilly during the course of our evening meal.\n\nThe progress of a large slice of steak to O'Reilly's mouth halted precipitously. He lunged at me with the meat-covered fork. \"What?\"\n\nI wondered if the old adage \"don't shoot the messenger\" could be adapted to \"don't skewer him on a dinner fork,\" and repeated the intelligence.\n\n\"Bloody Bishop!\" O'Reilly slammed the meat into his mouth and worried at it like a jackal with a particularly tasty piece of dead zebra. He swallowed, larynx going up and down like an out-of-control U-boat. \"Bloody Bishop!\" he said again as O'Reilly hunched forward, elbows on the table, shoulders high. \"I bet he's found a way to have Sunny put in the home.\" My mentor sat back, pinioned the remains of his steak, and slashed at it with the fervour of a member of the Light Brigade venting his spleen on a Russian gunner. \"He's trying to get his hands on Sunny's land.\" He scowled at his plate and pushed it away. \"Right. You nip round to the home and see if Sunny's there.\" O'Reilly stood. \"I think I'll go and have a chat with Mister Bishop.\"\n\nBy the look in O'Reilly's eyes and the pallor of the tip of his nose, I knew Mister Bishop was shortly going to wish he was spending a relaxing time with a Gestapo interrogator who was suffering from strangulated haemorrhoids.\n\nSure enough, Sunny was in the home. He was a lost, terrified old man. He told me that the nurses scared him, the other inmates were rude, and he couldn't stop worrying about his dogs. He begged me to take him home and cried when I had to explain to him that I'd discovered he was under a restraining order, for his own good, and that until it was lifted, I was powerless to intervene. I stood beside his bed, looking at a man who'd been reduced in two days from an independent, albeit slightly unusual, individual, to a pathetic institutionalized wretch. I could see that he'd lost weight and indeed looked very ill.\n\nI still had his \"Och, please get me out, Doctor\" in my ears as I climbed the stairs to O'Reilly's sitting room. Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly was parked in one of the armchairs, pipe belching like a Pittsburgh steelworks chimney. He didn't bother to turn to see who'd come in. \"Well?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"Sunny's in the home. You were right.\"\n\nHis big head nodded ponderously, acknowledging his rightness, but he said nothing.\n\nI carried on. \"If we can't get him out of there, I think he's going to die.\"\n\nO'Reilly half turned and waved toward the other chair. \"Sit yourself down, my boy. God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.\"\n\nI started to argue but he interrupted. \"Sunny should be on his way home now.\"\n\n\"But...\"\n\n\"No buts. I explained things to Mister Bishop.\"\n\nThe only word I can find to describe the smile on O'Reilly's battered face is demoniacal. \"You remember the lass we had to ship off to England a couple of months ago\u2014piffy?\"\n\n\"Piffy? Right. PFI, pregnant from Ireland.\" I knew that the Ulster community had about as much tolerance for young women with child, but out of holy wedlock, as a mongoose for a cobra. These unfortunates had to be shipped out. \"What about her?\"\n\nHe blew a smoke ring at the ceiling and stabbed his pipe stem through the hole. \"Mister Bishop's maid. I just explained to him that if the order wasn't lifted, I might just have to have a word with Mrs. Bishop\u2014tell her the real reason that the lassie had to visit her sick sister in Liverpool. That cooled him.\" O'Reilly stood and started heading for the sideboard, remarking over his shoulder, \"The last I saw of Bishop, he was on his way to the Town Hall, aye, and to the animal shelter.\" He poured himself a stiff whiskey. \"They don't teach you young fellows medicine like that.\"\n\nRelieved as I was that Sunny's troubles would soon be over, I thought I might just have a bit of a dig at the self-satisfied Doctor O'Reilly, he who reckoned that good GPs should be masters of all the branches of the healing arts.\n\n\"And what branch of the healing arts would you say you were practising?\" I asked, guilelessly.\n\nO'Reilly stopped in mid-pour, put one finger alongside his bent nose, and said, as if to a not-too-bright child, \"Social and preventive medicine, son. Social and preventive.\"\nJUNE 1996\n\nWell Said, Sir\n\nThe silencing of Doctor O'Reilly\n\n\"How are the mighty fallen?\" David, a biblical king, said something along these lines. I'm sure his sage utterances would have been worth the listen if he'd been in the Mucky Duck the night O'Reilly met his match.\n\nWhen I introduced you to Doctor Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills O'Reilly, I mentioned some of his attributes. As I recollect, I described him as an ex-navy boxing champion, classical scholar, unregenerate poacher, bagpiper, cryptophilanthropist, foul-mouthed widower, and country GP. I may have neglected to note that in addition, he regarded himself as a bit of a wit, and disliked intensely being bested in any verbal joust. The fact that all of his local potential opponents knew very well that Doctor O. could be a great man for prescribing, and on occasion administering, the soap-suds enema as a panacea for just about any minor complaint, if the complaint was brought by someone in whom the font of medical knowledge wasn't well pleased, may in part have taken the edge off the local competition.\n\nOn the particular evening I'm about to describe, Doctor O'Reilly was in full cry. No wonder he was in good voice. He'd just won the local pibroch competition.\n\nThe pibroch is said, by those who understand these matters, to be a thing of complex beauty. It's the classical music of the great highland bagpipe. Only the most experienced and skillful piper will even attempt the pibroch in public. (Which, as far as I'm concerned, is a great relief. To me, the thing is interminable, tuneless, repetitive, embellished with incomprehensible grace notes, and an assault to the civilized ear.) The tune, if it can be so called, is played on the chanter and immediately brings to mind the noise that would accompany the simultaneous gutting and emasculating of a particularly bad-tempered tomcat. Over the melody, on and on, thunder the drones, those pipes that stick up from the back of the bag like the remaining three tentacles of some long-fossilized prehistoric squid.\n\nNeedless to say, playing pibrochs takes a great deal of breath. I forget exactly how much water is lost per expiration, but judging by the post-pibroch intake of uisque beatha by the average exponent of the arcane art, the amount of dehydration suffered must be extensive.\n\nTo return to the public bar of the Black Swan. O'Reilly sat at a table in the middle of a circle of admiring fellow pipers, replacing his lack of bodily fluids like one of those desert flowers that only sees rain once every ten years. I was in my customary corner sipping a small sherry and trying to mind my own business. I'm told that some people in Florida try to ignore hurricanes.\n\nO'Reilly was at his pontifical best. His basso voice thundered on. He'd launched into a monologue several minutes previously on the relative merits of plastic versus bamboo reeds for the chanter. The assembled multitude listened in respectful silence, although judging by the glazed expressions on some of the faces their interest had waned. O'Reilly warmed to his subject, brooking no interruption, rolling like a juggernaut over anyone who might try to get a word in edgewise. He was talking on the intake of breath. I watched as a member of the group signalled for a fresh round of drinks. The barman delivered the glasses shortly afterward. O'Reilly was now up to verbal escape velocity, emphasizing his words with staccato jabs of his right index finger on the beer-ring-stained tabletop.\n\nHe stopped dead\u2014in mid-sentence. A ghastly pallor appeared at the tip of his bent nose. Something had annoyed the great man. I craned forward to see. Catastrophe. Somehow the barman had neglected to deliver a drink for Doctor O.\n\nThe silence, now that he'd shut up, was palpable. He fixed the cowering bartender with an agate stare and demanded, pointing at the appropriate orifice, \"And haven't I got a mouth too?\"\n\nThat was when it happened. A voice, from which of the assembled pipers I never discovered, was heard to say clearly, distinctly, and with heartfelt sincerity, \"And how could we miss it? All night it's been going up and down between your ears like a bloody skipping rope.\"\n\nI do believe David Rex went on to say, after his remarks about the precipitous plummeting of the powerful, \"Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.\"\n\nPhilistines are rare in the North of Ireland. There were no women in the public bar, and it would be a breach of professional confidentiality to tell you who among the party were preputially challenged.\n\nBut the rejoicing\u2014if not in the streets, at least in the Mucky Duck\u2014was vast. And for once, O'Reilly was at a complete loss for words.\nJULY\/AUGUST 1996\n\nA Pregnant Silence\n\nAnother lesson by Doctor O'Reilly, practical psychologist\n\nSome therapeutic interventions simply do not appear in the textbooks.\n\nRegular readers will remember Maggie, she of the incessant complaints, the headache two inches above her head, the chronic backache. In her early fifties, she was what the ministers of the time when reading the banns would have referred to as a \"spinster of this parish,\" except that for Maggie the banns had never been called. She remained what the locals charitably described as \"one of nature's unclaimed treasures.\"\n\nHer trials and tribulations, and the way O'Reilly handled them, let him teach me a lesson in practical psychology, a lesson that I'll be happy to pass on to anyone who has the fortitude to stick with this story to the bitter end.\n\n(As an aside, \"the bitter end\" is the part of a ship's anchor cable that's attached to the vessel. This column isn't called \"Taylor's Twist,\" another nautical term, for nothing.)\n\n\"Pat, that one's driving me bloody well daft,\" said Doctor O'Reilly. We were walking along the main street. O'Reilly stopped and pointed with his blackthorn walking stick through the window of the local grocery store. Naturally, when he stopped, so did I.\n\n\"The grocer?\" I asked, knowing full well that the source of O'Reilly's impending descent into raving lunacy was entirely the fault of the other figure visible through the pane.\n\n\"No. Maggie. Maggie MacCorkle.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" I wondered what was coming\u2014Maggie had been visiting Doctor O'Reilly on a weekly basis for the last three months, and absolutely refused to see me.\n\n\"She's convinced she's pregnant.\" As he spoke, O'Reilly tapped his temple with one thick index finger. \"Nutty. Nutty as a fruitcake.\" He sighed.\n\nI confess her presenting symptoms caught me off guard. Wishing to demonstrate my encyclopaedic grasp of the physiology of the reproductive process, I immediately wondered aloud, \"Would she not have needed a bit of masculine help?\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head ponderously. \"She says that it's another immaculate conception, and the responsibility is more than she can bear.\"\n\nI was beginning to see what he meant about Maggie's resemblance to a filbert-filled Christmas confection. The troubled look on his face rapidly disabused me of any notion of making remarks about wise men and stars in the East.\n\n\"She's a sorry old duck.\" O'Reilly leant on his stick with one hand, jamming the knuckles of the other under his nose. \"I'm damned if I can figure out how to persuade her she's just going through the change of life.\"\n\n\"Have you thought about getting her to see a psychiatrist?\" I inquired helpfully. O'Reilly shook his head. \"Sure you know by now what these country folk are like about things like that.\"\n\nI did indeed. The last patient to whom I'd made such a suggestion had bristled like an aggrieved porcupine and stormed out of the surgery. I could imagine Maggie's reaction.\n\n\"Anyway,\" said O'Reilly, \"she's no danger to anyone or herself.\" He produced a large handkerchief from his jacket pocket, buried his battered nose, and made a noise like the RMS Queen Elizabeth undocking.\n\n\"If she tells one of our headshrinking colleagues that she's the mother-to-be of the Second Coming, she'd be in the booby hatch as quick as a ferret down a rat hole.\" He stuffed his 'kerchief back into his pocket. \"She'd really lose her marbles in there. No. It's just a matter of getting her to see that she's not up the builder's.\"\n\nUnable to make any useful suggestions, I began to ruminate about the quaint euphemisms of the day for pregnancy: up the spout, in the family way, up the builder's, bun in the oven, poulticed.\n\nIt was clear from the way Fingal kept furrowing his brow that he was also at a loss for a solution and, knowing him as I'd come to, I could tell that he was worried. Fate intervened.\n\nAs we stood there silently, Maggie bustled out of the grocer's shop. She was carrying a brown paper bag, presumably her purchases. Her face split into a wide grin when she noticed Doctor O'Reilly and she began to hurry toward him. I could see that she'd failed to notice a young lad wheeling a bicycle.\n\nThe resultant collision wasn't quite of the magnitude of the meteor that smacked into planet Earth and, it's rumoured, put paid to the dinosaurs, but the fallout was dramatic.\n\nThe lad picked himself and his cycle up and rode off muttering some less-than-complimentary epithets about old bats who should watch where they were going. Maggie sat on the pavement, hair askew, legs wide under her voluminous skirt, surrounded by the wreckage of the contents of her parcel. A shattered ketchup bottle lay at the edge of a spreading scarlet puddle of its contents. Right in the middle of the crimson tide, the yolks and whites of two broken eggs peered malevolently upward.\n\nI saw a look flit across O'Reilly's face, a look the like of which must have been there when Archimedes spilled his bathwater. Fingal didn't exactly yell \"Eureka,\" but he'd clearly thought of something. He stepped over to where Maggie sat, knelt, put one solicitous hand on her shoulder, whipped out his hanky, dried her eyes, peered closely at the crimson clots and their ocular ova, and pronounced in sad, sombre, sonorous sentences, \"There, there, Maggie. There, there. No need to grieve.\" He looked up at me and winked. \"It couldn't have lived\u2014its eyes were too close together.\"\n\nThe relief on Maggie's face could only have been matched by the joy of the old boy scout Baden-Powell when the British Army arrived at the outerworks of Mafeking.\n\nSome therapeutic interventions simply do not appear in the textbooks.\nSEPTEMBER 1996\n\nWorking as Equals\n\nO'Reilly fails to mellow with time\n\nFrom time to time after I'd emigrated to Canada, I would return to my roots in Ulster. When I did so, I'd always make a point of visiting my old friend Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly to see if he'd mellowed with time. The last time I dropped in to see him, in the early '80s, he was still in harness.\n\nWhen I called at the house, Mrs. Kincaid answered the door. She told me that for the last week Doctor O'Reilly had been dealing with a particularly rough 'flu epidemic. He'd been summoned the night before to see a little girl who was desperately ill with pneumonia. He'd simply loaded the parents and the child into his own car, driven the forty-odd miles to the Royal Victoria Hospital, and then, because the parents had no phone, brought them back to his own home so they could receive regular progress reports. He was like that. He was very tired, she said, but she was sure he'd be glad to see me.\n\nShe knocked on the door. \"Come in.\" I'd have recognized those gravelly tones anywhere. She opened the door. O'Reilly sat at his old rolltop desk. The heavy boxer's shoulders were more bent, his complexion more florid. He was writing a prescription for a young woman. \"Just a minute.\" He didn't look up. \"Remember, Annie. One at breakfast time and one at noon.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Doctor O'Reilly.\" The young woman left.\n\n\"Good God.\" He saw me standing there. \"You still alive?\"\n\nI could tell by the grin he was pleased to see me. He didn't get up. He arched his back. \"I'm buggered. Tell you what: you have a pew\"\u2014he motioned toward the examining table\u2014\"and I'll finish the surgery.\"\n\n\"Right, Fingal.\" I went to the couch, remembering vividly that this was exactly how we'd started.\n\n\"We'll have lunch at the Black Swan when I've finished stamping out disease,\" he said, as Mrs. Kincaid ushered in the next supplicant.\n\nI sat there quietly as he saw patient after patient, 'flu case after 'flu case. In the middle of the chaos, a well-dressed man in his early forties entered the room and took a seat.\n\n\"Good morning,\" said O'Reilly. \"What seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm fine,\" said the man, looking disdainfully at the shabby furnishings. \"Perfectly fit.\"\n\nO'Reilly's bushy brows moved closer to each other, like two hairy caterpillars heading for a choice leaf. \"I'm just a bit busy...\"\n\n\"My business will only take a moment. I'm new in this town.\"\n\nThe caterpillars reared their forequarters questioningly. O'Reilly said nothing.\n\n\"Yes.\" The man crossed one immaculately creased trouser leg over the other. \"I'm interviewing healthcare providers.\"\n\nO'Reilly leant forward in his own chair, head cocked to one side. \"You're looking for a what?\" His question sounded so ingenuous he could have been addressing an American tourist who'd inquired where he might find a leprechaun.\n\nThe man shook his head and smiled a pitying smile, the kind he obviously kept for yokels like O'Reilly. \"A healthcare provider. One who will be sensitive to my needs as a consumer.\" He looked down his nose at O'Reilly's rumpled tweed sports jacket. \"One with whom I can work as an equal, defining and discussing my options, so that I can identify the optimal approach to a given problem.\"\n\nO'Reilly sat back. The black brows settled. I saw the tip of his nose begin to whiten, an ominous sign, but his rugged face wrinkled in a vast grin. \"I doubt if I'm the man for the job.\" He shook his head sadly.\n\nThe man sat stiffly. \"And why's that?\"\n\nO'Reilly ran his beefy hands along the lapels of his jacket, like a learned judge about to deliver his opinion, fixed the stranger with a stare that would have been the envy of any passing basilisk, and said, in dulcet tones, \"For one thing, I'm only a country doctor, not one of those healthcare what-do-you-ma-callums you were telling me about.\" An edge had crept into his voice. Any one of O'Reilly's regular patients would have found urgent business elsewhere. \"And I don't think we could work as equals.\"\n\nThe stranger shifted in his chair. \"And why not?\"\n\n\"Because,\" said O'Reilly, rising to his feet, \"you'd be a very old man. You'd need six years of medical school, two years' postgraduate work, and forty-two years in practice.\"\n\nThe man rose, sniffed haughtily and said, \"I don't like your attitude.\"\n\nO'Reilly's smile was beatific. \"I was wrong. We are equals. I don't like yours either.\" He held the door open and waited for the man to leave.\n\nDoctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, I'm glad to say, definitely had not mellowed with time.\nOCTOBER 1996\n\nMurphy's Law\n\nDoctor O'Reilly has the last laugh\n\nI have characterized Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly as an ex-navy boxing champion, classical scholar, unregenerate poacher, hard drinker, cryptophilanthropist, foul-mouthed bachelor, and country GP. This, I believe, is called a thumbnail sketch. There was nothing thumbnail-sized about O'Reilly, however; not his physical dimensions, not his personality, and certainly not his ability to hold a grudge. He could, on occasion, be the perfectly balanced Irishman\u2014a man with a chip on both shoulders.\n\nSomeone described revenge as a \"dish best eaten cold.\" For the life of me I cannot remember if it was that well-known Scots-Italian, Mac E. Avelli, or some other dead white male. No matter. O'Reilly had certainly heard of the concept but as usual had improved on it to suit his own requirements. In O'Reilly's world, revenge wasn't best eaten cold. It should be consumed deep-frozen, preferably at about absolute zero. Job, it's rumoured, was possessed of a modicum of patience, but when it came to waiting for just the right moment to deflate a swollen ego or right a perceived wrong, O'Reilly made Job look like a hyperactive child who'd been fed a sugar-enhanced diet and stimulated with an electric cattle prod.\n\nI first became aware of this attribute when O'Reilly arrived home after making a house call. The barometer of his temper, his bent nose, was pallid from tip to bridge, and his eyes flashed sparks. He helped himself to a rigid whiskey (stiff would have been an understatement) hurled himself into an armchair, and snarled, \"I'll kill the bloody man!\"\n\nI tried to hide behind a copy of the British Medical Journal. King Kong tried the same thing on top of the Empire State Building. At least O'Reilly didn't shoot at me.\n\n\"That *#@##** Doctor Murphy! He's a menace.\" O'Reilly inhaled his drink. \"Put down that comic and listen.\"\n\nHardly respectful of the organ of organized medicine in the U.K., but I felt, given O'Reilly's *#@##*** mood\u2014and please remember that I did describe him as \"foul-mouthed\"\u2014it might be better to say nothing. Besides, I dearly wanted to know what Murphy had done to raise my colleague's ire, temperature, and, judging by the colour of O'Reilly's naturally florid cheeks, blood pressure.\n\n\"Bah,\" said O'Reilly.\n\n\"Humbug?\" I inquired.\n\n\"Exactly,\" he agreed, devouring yet more of the potent potable product of Paddy pot-still Distillery.\n\nA modicum of colour was returning to O'Reilly's schnozzle, so either the ethyl alcohol was having its recognized vasodilatory effect\u2014probable\u2014or O'Reilly was beginning to calm down\u2014unlikely.\n\n\"That Murphy. I'll get the &#@**. Do you know what he's just done?\" Definitely vasodilatation. \"Do you remember Maggie MacCorkle?\"\n\nThis was an easier question than its predecessor relating to Doctor Murphy's doings. The answer to the first question required second sight; for the latter, simple recall was all that was needed.\n\n\"Oh, yes, Fingal. The woman with the headaches two inches above her head. The one who thought she was pregnant with the second coming?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said. \"The silly old biddy decided to consult that well-known veterinarian, Doctor Murphy.\"\n\nOops. I had a fair idea of what was coming next. Doctor Murphy and Doctor O'Reilly existed at opposite ends of the spectrum, not only of visible light but of electromagnetic waves not yet discovered by physical science. As O'Reilly was rough and ready, Murphy was devious. O'Reilly's clothes tended to fit him where they touched and Murphy always dressed immaculately. O'Reilly would walk on hot coals for his patients; Murphy might venture onto ashes, but only in very stout, highly polished boots. And O'Reilly had a soft spot for Maggie MacCorkle.\n\n\"Poor old duck,\" he said, \"Murphy told her she needed to see a psychiatrist.\" He snorted like a warthog with severe sinusitis. \"It took me two hours to calm her down.\" I knew he didn't begrudge the two hours but did resent the trauma caused to a simple, if somewhat eccentric, woman.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" I said, and waited.\n\n\"Do you know what else he said to her?\"\n\nThe second sight thing again. I shook my head. \"He said, 'Doctor O'Reilly should know better than to play God.'\"\n\nI maintained a diplomatic silence.\n\n\"Play God! Me? That bloody man doesn't play at being God. Murphy works at it. Pour me another.\"\n\nI did as I was told, handed the glass to O'Reilly, and tried to change the subject. \"What did you think of the Irish rugby team's showing last Saturday?\"\n\nHis reply was unprintable. I began to suspect that it was entirely my fault that they'd been beaten by Scotland by a substantial margin, but at least I was able to get him off the subject of Doctor Murphy.\n\n* * *\n\nI forgot about the whole thing until about three months later. There was a meeting of the local medical society. Doctor Murphy was there, immaculate in a three-piece suit. As usual, he took a pontifical stance on most issues and on one occasion, in public, in front of our peers, admonished Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly about the dangers of doctors in general and O'Reilly in particular of playing God.\n\nI'm told that the Manhattan Project scientists hid before they made a little bang at the Alamogordo test site. I looked round for the nearest bunker, but to my surprise O'Reilly said nothing. Absolutely nothing. A nuclear blast would have been preferable. Just imagine the feelings of Doctor Oppenheimer if the switch had been thrown, nothing had happened, and it had been remarked that somebody really ought to nip outside and see what was the matter. Now what?\n\nI found out just as we were about to leave.\n\nDoctor Murphy had slipped into his overcoat but seemed to be having some difficulty adjusting his shiny bowler hat.\n\n\"Bit of trouble with the hat, Murphy?\" O'Reilly inquired solicitously. \"Not surprising, really.\"\n\nThe rest of the company waited expectantly, all knowing full well the lack of brotherly love between the two men.\n\n\"And why not?\" asked Murphy.\n\n\"Ah,\" said O'Reilly. \"It's the playing God thing. A fellah's head must hurt when he's spent most of his life wearing a crown of thorns.\"\n\nThe biblical allusion wasn't lost on those assembled. Poor old Doctor Murphy from that day was known locally as \"Thorny Murphy,\" to his great discomfort and O'Reilly's great joy.\n\nAnd Doctor Murphy never again accused Doctor O' Reilly of playing God.\nNOVEMBER 1996\n\nThe Law of Holes\n\nO'Reilly's near-death experience\n\nI was surprised one day when, after evening \"surgery,\" I retired to the upstairs sitting room to find my senior colleague, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, sitting in his usual armchair sipping what appeared to be a gin and tonic rather than his usually preferred whiskey. He ignored my entrance and my polite inquiry about whether he'd like me to refurbish his drink.\n\nDo remember that such suggestions were usually greeted with the enthusiasm toward an impending monsoon of those peculiar toads that live in states of total dehydration in certain deserts, only coming to full animation when the rains appear.\n\n\"Sure?\" I said, helping myself to a very small sherry.\n\n\"No,\" he replied lugubriously, pulling out his old briar and stoking the infernal device until the smoke clouds gave a fair impression of the aftereffects of the combined weight of the attentions of the RAF and the USAAF on the hapless town of Dresden.\n\n\"No\/yes or no\/no?\" I said brightly.\n\n\"What are you on about, Taylor?\"\n\nAs far as I could tell through the industrial haze, his nose wasn't pallid, yet his use of my surname was an indicator of his general state of displeasure. Foolishly, I ploughed on.\n\n\"Er, no you're not sure you don't want another, which is a way of saying yes you do, because if you had been sure that you wanted no more to drink your answer should have been yes and...\"\n\n\"Sit down,\" he said, \"and shut up.\"\n\nWhich actually seemed like a very sensible thing to do. I sat and said, self-effacingly, \"Right. First law of holes: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.\"\n\nThe thought struck me as, if not original, at least comical.\n\n\"How,\" he said, peering over his half-moon spectacles, \"did you know?\"\n\n\"How did I know about what?\"\n\n\"The hole, you idiot.\"\n\n\"I read it somewhere,\" I confessed.\n\nHe grunted. \"Couldn't have. It only happened last night.\"\n\nI was becoming confused. Truth to tell, my being in a fuddled state around O'Reilly was closer to the norm than his drinking gin and tonic. I felt a sense of relief, the kind of feeling that comes with knowing that God is indeed in His Heaven and all is right with the world.\n\n\"And,\" he said, \"no one knows about it except Seamus Galvin and me.\"\n\nMy confusion was now as dense as the tobacco fog that surrounded us.\n\nO'Reilly sighed heavily. \"Would you like to hear my side?\"\n\nIt almost seemed a shame to be enlightened. \"Please.\"\n\nHe gestured with the glass in his hand. \"I'll have to give it up.\"\n\nEnlightenment was going to be some time coming. I'd thought we were discussing holes. \"Digging holes?\"\n\n\"No.\" He shuddered like a wounded water buffalo. \"The drink.\"\n\nOops. I thought for a moment that I was having an auditory hallucination. Fingal O'Reilly? Give up the drink?\n\n\"All because of the hole, you see.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" I said. They'd taught us in psychiatry to humour certain types of raving lunatics. I saw not at all but had no intention of enraging O'Reilly.\n\nHe pointed at his glass. \"Just tonic water,\" he said in tones that would have done a professional mourner great credit. \"Bloody Galvin,\" he added, and lapsed into silence.\n\nTonic water. Holes. Galvin. I had some difficulty seeing any logical connection. Then I remembered. Seamus Galvin and his wife Mary were the ones who were going to emigrate because O'Reilly had restored their family fortunes by clandestinely purchasing a garage full of rocking ducks.\n\nThe Galvins were leaving tomorrow, and last night there had been a send-off at the Mucky Duck. I'd missed it because of a long confinement in an outlying cottage, but O'Reilly had attended. Something Fingal had said earlier came back to me: \"It only happened last night.\" Now, Galvin's party was last night and something concerning a hole had happened, something sufficiently catastrophic as to make O'Reilly decide to take the pledge. I was beginning to feel I merely needed a magnifying glass and a deerstalker to be able to change my name to Sherlock. I might even ask Fingal if I could borrow his pipe. Only one question. What was the \"something\"?\n\nO'Reilly's rumbling interrupted my attempt to reason things out. \"Should never have let Galvin leave by himself.\"\n\nSo it was at the party.\n\n\"I should never have taken a shortcut through the churchyard, but it was pouring, you see.\" He peered over his spectacles.\n\n\"Quite,\" I said solicitously.\n\nO'Reilly took a deep swallow of his tonic water and regarded the glass with a look of total disgust before fixing me with a stony glare and saying, \"No harm telling you, seeing you already know.\"\n\nI merely nodded.\n\n\"I fell into a freshly dug grave.\"\n\nThe\u2014or more accurately, my\u2014mind boggled.\n\n\"I couldn't get out. It was raining, you see,\" he said by way of an explanation. His nose tip was now becoming pallid.\n\nI seem to remember that when stout Horatio made it across the foaming Tiber, his enemies \"could scarce forbear to cheer.\" Being attached to my teeth I felt that despite the mental image of O'Reilly scrabbling like a demented hamster against the slick sides of a muddy six-foot hole, I definitely should forbear to laugh. \"Oh dear.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said aggrievedly. \"Bloody Galvin. How was I to know he'd fallen into the same grave? It was black as half a yard up a chimney down there. And cold. What was I to do?\"\n\n\"Stop digging? First law of holes,\" I said.\n\n\"Don't be so bloody silly. I huddled against a corner and like an eejit said aloud to myself, 'Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, you're not going to get out of here tonight.' Galvin, who must have been lurking in another corner, tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'By God you won't.' But...\" O'Reilly shrugged. \"By God, I did.\"\n\n\"Must have given you an awful shock,\" I remarked, wandering over to the sideboard and pouring a stiff Paddy.\n\n\"It did. Oh, indeed it did. Got the strength of ten men.\"\n\nI handed him the glass. \"I believe shock can be treated with spirits.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" he asked, swallowing a large measure, \"and none of your no\/yes, no\/no rubbish.\"\nDECEMBER 1996\n\nMen of the Cloth (1)\n\nHow the minister learned about sex\n\nIn today's egalitarian society it may be hard to believe that once upon a time some members of a community were held in greater respect than the rest of the common herd. In rural Ulster the possession of a higher education was thought to confer exalted status. The pecking order among the upper echelons wasn't always clear, but it was fair to say that the local teachers, physicians, and men of the cloth were somewhere at the top of the heap.\n\nIn his own eyes at least, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly stood at the apex. Mind you, the challengers for top spot were a motley crew.\n\nMister Featherstonehaugh, the teacher, besides having a name that could strangle a pig, was as tall and skinny as a yard of pump water and suffered from what was known charitably as a \"terrible strong weakness.\" (Which is to say that any pupil foolish enough to come within two feet of Mister F. was at some danger of suffering skin burns from the whiskey fumes of the permanently pissed pedagogue's pulmonary products.)\n\nFather Fitzmurphy was a quiet man who'd taken his vows of humility so seriously that his presence was scarcely noticed. Compared to Father Fitz., Uriah Heep would have looked like a blatant self-promoter.\n\nOn the other side of the sectarian divide, the Presbyterian church was represented by a senior and a junior minister. The senior minister, Reverend Manton Basket, was middle-aged and very tall across, an allusion to the fact that he was in no danger of being suspected of suffering from any form of anorexia. The junior, Mister Angus McWheezle, was of Scottish descent. Actually he hadn't so much descended as plummeted\u2014the kind of man who would have given Charles Darwin some very difficult times wondering if he hadn't got things quite right and perhaps the apes were in fact offspring of the clan McWheezle.\n\nO'Reilly, while nominally of the Protestant persuasion, could not have been described as devout. Well, he could, but it would have been like attributing feelings of piety and love for all mankind to that well-known philanthropist, A. Hitler. Business, however, was business, and O'Reilly did attend morning services on Sundays, if only to try to persuade his potential customers that he was a worthy physician.\n\nYou may well wonder why I'm telling you all this. Bear with me. O'Reilly's relationships with both of the Presbyterian ministers are worth the relating.\n\n\"Good to see you, Doctors.\" Reverend Manton Basket beamed at O'Reilly and me over his chins as he stood outside the church door greeting the departing members of his flock. He had a paternal arm draped over the shoulder of his eldest son, a spherical boy of about twelve. The rest of the tribe, all five of them, were lined up in a row, tallest on the right, shortest on the left, like a set of those chubby Russian dolls.\n\nO'Reilly nodded as he passed the Baskets. \"Powerful sermon, your reverence,\" he said, but he kept hurrying on. I was well aware that he found old Basket dry and, as you know, Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly's preferences tended more to the wet\u2014the wet that even now was waiting for him in the upstairs sitting room over the surgery.\n\n\"You should have heard his sermons when he came here first,\" O'Reilly said to me. \"I'll tell you all about them when we get home.\"\n\nI had to lengthen my stride to keep up with O'Reilly, who moved from a walk to a canter to practically a full-blown gallop as he neared the source of his sustenance. He relaxed once he was ensconced in his favourite armchair, briar belching, fist clutching a glass of what he'd referred to as his communion wine.\n\n\"Where was I?\"\n\nI settled into the chair opposite and prepared for another of O'Reilly's reminiscences.\n\n\"When?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not 'when,' where.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Not 'what,' not 'when'... where.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, feeling the inexorable tug of yet another of those moments with O'Reilly when the circuitousness of the conversation began to feel like the Maelstrom. I knew how old Captain Nemo must have felt as the Nautilus sank lower and lower. \"I meant what did you mean when you asked, 'Where?'\"\n\n\"Silly question.\" He exhaled in his best Puff the Magic Dragon fashion. \"I should have asked, 'Who?'\"\n\n\"When?\" It just slipped out.\n\n\"Don't you start.\"\n\n\"What?\" Oops.\n\nFortunately he was in one of his expansive moods. He laughed and handed me his empty glass. \"Who do you think Manton was?\"\n\n\"Why?\" The sight of the tip of O'Reilly's nose beginning to pale pulled me up short. I refilled his glass and waited.\n\n\"Manton was a minor prophet.\" He accepted the tumbler. \"That's who his reverence is named after.\"\n\nI admit I was pleased to be so informed. It was a name I'd never heard before.\n\n\"Came from a very strict family. That's why you should have heard his sermons when he first came here.\"\n\n\"Fire and brimstone?\"\n\n\"And how.\" O'Reilly chuckled. \"You could have felt the spits of him five pews back.\" O'Reilly sipped his drink. \"He's a decent man, Manton Basket. Unworldly, of course.\"\n\nI was about to ask what that meant when O'Reilly continued. \"When he first came here he put an awful amount of effort into denouncing the sins of the flesh.\"\n\n\"Including gluttony?\" I inquired, thinking of Dumbo, Jumbo, and the Reverend Manton Basket.\n\n\"No. Just the sexual kind.\" O'Reilly made a sucking noise through his pipe. The gurgling was like the sound of the runoff through a partially clogged bath drain. \"Pity was, he hadn't a clue what he was talking about.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nO'Reilly rose and stretched and ambled to the big bay window. \"Aye. He'd been here about two years when he came to see me professionally. Seemed he and the wife couldn't get pregnant.\" O'Reilly turned away from the view of Belfast Lough. \"Bit tricky asking a man of the cloth about his procreative efforts. Even worse, his sermon the week before had been about the sin of Onan.\"\n\n\"Onan?\"\n\n\"Yeah. The bloke who spilled his seed on the ground and got clobbered by a thunderbolt for his pains.\"\n\nThe \"bit tricky\" became clearer.\n\n\"Fingal, how did you persuade Reverend Basket to provide a sperm sample? Bottle in one hand, lightning conductor in the other?\"\n\n\"Didn't have to.\" O'Reilly looked smug. \"That's the advantage of a bit of local knowledge. I just asked him to describe exactly what he and his wife did.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"Every night for two years they'd knelt together by the bed and prayed for offspring.\"\n\n\"That was all?\"\n\n\"Aye. I had to put his stumbling feet on the paths of righteousness, so to speak.\"\n\n\"Good Lord. How did he take that?\"\n\nO'Reilly chuckled. \"Frostily. Very frostily at first.\"\n\nI had a quick mental picture of the six little Baskets.\n\n\"Ice must have thawed a bit when he got home.\"\n\n\"And he was a big enough man to thank me. He is a decent man.\" A cloud passed over O'Reilly's sunny countenance. \"Not like that weasel McWheezle.\"\n\n\"The assistant minister?\"\n\nBefore O'Reilly could reply, Mrs. Kincaid stuck her head round the door. \"Dinner's ready, Doctors.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" said O'Reilly, \"grub. I'll tell you about McWheezle over dinner.\"\n\nTo be continued.\nJANUARY 1997\n\nMen of the Cloth (2)\n\nO'Reilly exacts a heavy price\n\n\"Aye,\" said Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, helping himself to a liberal dollop of horseradish dressing, \"old Basket's a decent enough chap for a Presbyterian minister.\" Fingal was continuing the conversation that had begun upstairs, a conversation that had been interrupted by Mrs. Kincaid's summons to Sunday dinner. I watched in awe as he spread the white concoction over a slice of roast beef prior to transferring the morsel to his mouth.\n\nThe horse in Mrs. Kincaid's horseradish was not a Shetland pony. It tended more to the Clydesdale: big, muscular, and very, very strong. Strong enough to have stripped paint. I'd been foolish enough to try it once before. I think it took about three weeks for the mucous membrane inside my mouth to regenerate. I watched O'Reilly's happy mastication, expecting steam to appear from his ears. For all the apparent effect, he might as well have been eating ice cream.\n\n\"Here,\" he said, spreading some of the incendiary condiment on my beef, \"spice yours up a bit, young fellow.\"\n\nI smiled weakly and settled for a piece of Yorkshire pudding.\n\n\"Aye,\" said O'Reilly, \"Basket's not a bit like his assistant. That McWheezle. That man has a smile like last year's rhubarb. Mrs. Kincaid reckons that anyone who reared him would drown nothing.\"\n\nI thought it fair to surmise that Doctor O. didn't exactly hold the Reverend Angus McWheezle in high regard.\n\n\"Pass the gravy.\"\n\nI complied, nibbling on a roast potato and avoiding the fifty-megaton meat.\n\n\"Not one of your favourite people, Fingal?\"\n\n\"Him? He's a sanctimonious, mean-spirited, mealy-mouthed, narrow-minded, hypocritical, Bible-thumping little toad. That man has as much Christian charity in him as Vlad the Impaler.\" O'Reilly harrumphed and attacked another slice of beef. \"Bah.\"\n\n\"So you don't like him very much?\" Sometimes my powers of observation astounded even me.\n\n\"How could anyone like a man like that? Do you know what he used to do?\"\n\nI hoped the question was rhetorical. I think I've remarked previously that O'Reilly seemed to think I was blessed with some kind of extrasensory perceptive powers. I simply munched on another piece of Yorkshire pudding and shook my head, both to signify that indeed I didn't know what the Reverend Angus McWheezle had done to draw O'Reilly's ire and to distract him while I tried to hide the horseradish-beef time bomb under a small pile of broccoli.\n\n\"Do you know\"\u2014I continued to shake my head\u2014\"that if there were an Olympic event for smugness and self-satisfaction, the man could represent Ireland?\" O'Reilly helped himself to another roast potato. \"But I fixed the bugger.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Aye. You remember I told you how Mister Basket used to preach against the sins of the flesh?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Well, McWheezle went one better. He used to hound unmarried women who'd fallen pregnant. Humiliate them from his pulpit. Name them. That little @#$&*! didn't think that their being pregnant out of wedlock was hurt enough.\"\n\nO'Reilly's florid cheeks positively glowed\u2014and it wasn't the horseradish. It was his genuine concern for the feelings of his patients, most of whom would have had to leave the village, such was their disgrace.\n\n\"I see what you mean.\"\n\n\"Right. I asked him to stop, but he refused.\" O'Reilly paused from his gustatory endeavours, laid his knife and fork aside for a moment, folded his arms on the tabletop, leant forward, and said, \"But I stopped him anyway.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nO'Reilly chuckled, in much the same way that I imagine Be\u00eblzebub must chortle when a fresh sinner arrives on the griddle. I couldn't prevent a small, involuntary shudder.\n\n\"Ah,\" he said, \"pride cometh... McWheezle showed up in the surgery one day.\n\n\"'It's a very private matter,' says he.\n\n\"'Oh?' says I.\n\n\"'Yes,' says he. 'I seem to have caught a cold on my gentiles.'\n\n\"Threw me for a moment, that. 'Your gentiles?' says I.\n\n\"He waved a limp hand toward his trouser front.\n\n\"'Aha,' says I. 'A cold on your genitals.'\n\n\"'Yes.'\n\n\"'Let's have a look.'\"\n\nO'Reilly's chuckle moved from the Be\u00eblzebubbian to the Satanic.\n\nI knew what was coming next. I knew the story had done the rounds of every medical school in the world, and yet Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly was the most honest man I've ever met. If he said what I thought he was going to say had actually happened, I'd believe him.\n\n\"Mister McWheezle unzips. He has the biggest syphillitic chancre on his 'gentiles' that I've ever seen.\n\n\"'It's a bad cold right enough,' says I, handing him a hanky. 'See if you can blow it.'\"\n\nO'Reilly picked up his knife and fork. \"Good thing we had penicillin. Poor old McW. was so terrified that I wrung a promise out of him there and then to leave the wee pregnant girls alone.\" Fingal O'Reilly started to eat. \"Tuck in,\" he ordered.\n\nI was still chuckling at his tale when I suddenly realized that I'd just filled my mouth with enough of Mrs. Kincaid's horseradish sauce to start the second great fire of London.\n\nO'Reilly must have noticed the tears pouring from my eyes. It's hard to miss something with the flow rate of the Horseshoe Falls.\n\n\"Ah, come on now, Pat,\" he said solicitously. \"It's a funny story\u2014but it's not that funny.\"\nFEBRUARY 1997\n\nO'Reilly Finds His Way\n\n\"Doctor Gangrene\" is no match for the rural GP\n\n\"You'd think I'd know my way about up here,\" said Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, looking puzzled as he stood in the middle of the long echoing corridor of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.\n\nI'd bumped into him on my way to the X-ray department from the ward where I was working. If you remember, I was employed as a registrar at the Royal, my day job so to speak, my other source of revenue and a smattering of post-graduate training, when I wasn't functioning as O'Reilly's part-time locum.\n\nI had a moment of smugness. I did know my way about. Not surprising really; I worked in the place. But O'Reilly hadn't specifically asked for directions. He'd simply made a slightly self-deprecatory statement: \"You'd think I'd know my way about up here.\"\n\nThe smug feeling passed. The burning question was, what was I going to do? Offering unsolicited advice to Doctor O. could provoke a minor seismic event. Neglecting to give the necessary directions, and perhaps allowing him to make an idiot of himself, could result in a major tectonic shift with all the resultant unpleasant fallout\u2014usually on me.\n\nIt's a fundamental law of politics and diplomacy that when one is faced with two equally unpalatable options\u2014prevaricate.\n\n\"How long has it been since you worked here?\" I asked.\n\n\"Years.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they've moved the ward you're looking for?\"\n\nHe scratched his head. \"Do you think so? I just popped in to see one of my customers who was admitted here last night.\"\n\n\"It's possible.\"\n\n\"Rubbish. Nothing possible about it.\"\n\n\"But, Fingal, the administrators do it, you know.\"\n\n\"Admit my patients?\"\n\n\"No. Move wards.\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\"\n\nI felt relieved. He and I had nearly set off on another of our tortuous verbal peregrinations and to be honest I was a bit pushed for time. I was supposed to be assisting the senior gynaecologist Sir Gervaise Grant, a man who was obsessional about time. Lord help any assistant who was late in the operating room.\n\nSir Gervaise was renowned for the speed with which he could perform vaginal hysterectomies. \"Watch me like a hawk,\" he would instruct his assistant, the knife flashing, scissors snipping, ligatures going on like trusses in a turkey-plucking factory.\n\nO'Reilly was saying something but I'm afraid I wasn't paying attention. Coming down the hall, white coat flying, minions scurrying in pursuit, was Sir Gervaise himself. I had to get away from O'Reilly.\n\n\"Good God,\" he boomed, in a voice that echoed from the tiled walls, \"there's 'Green Fingers' Grant.\"\n\nThe \"Green Fingers\" soubriquet referred to the fact that Sir Gervaise's wound infection rate was triple that of anyone else. But while he might be called \"Green Fingers\" behind his back, it was a braver man than I who would call him that to his granite-jawed, bristling, silver-mustachioed face. And judging by the scowl on Sir G.'s countenance\u2014the sort that Medusa reserved for those passing Argonauts she really wanted to fix\u2014he'd overheard O'Reilly's remark.\n\nI closed my eyes and adopted the hunch-shouldered crouch favoured by bomb-disposal experts when something unexpectedly goes \"tick.\"\n\n\"To whom are you alluding, O'Reilly?\" Sir Gervaise's treacly voice held all the warmth of a Winnipeg winter.\n\n\"Yourself.\"\n\nI opened one eye.\n\nO'Reilly stood his ground, legs apart, chin tucked in. I could see his meaty fists starting to clench and remembered that the man had been a Royal Navy boxing champion. If a bell rang anywhere in those hallowed halls of healing, Doctor O. was going to come out swinging. One wallop would have rearranged Sir Gervaise's immaculately coiffed hair, his nose, and his teeth as far back as his molars.\n\nThe two men stood scowling at each other like a pair of Rottweilers who've met suddenly and unexpectedly over a raw steak.\n\nDiscretion is the better part of valour. I knew that I should have found some excuse to slink away, but some idiotic impulse led me to step between the two and say, \"Excuse me, Sir Gervaise, but I think we're going to be late.\"\n\nThe great man looked at me with all the condescension of Louis XIV for a grovelling peasant. \"Indeed, Taylor. I don't believe I sought your opinion. Indeed when I do want it, I'll tell you what it is.\"\n\nOh, Lord. I wished I had the tortoise's ability to tuck its head into its carapace.\n\n\"Still. We can't be late. Can't be late. Don't have time to waste on underqualified country quacks.\" He strode off, courtiers following in his wake, with me bringing up the rear.\n\nTo my surprise, the eruption I'd been expecting from Doctor O'Reilly failed to materialize. All I heard him say to our departing backs was, \"And good day to you too, Sir Gangrene.\"\n\nAs we sped down the corridor it began to dawn on me why O'Reilly didn't think highly of Sir Gervaise. I remembered the case quite vividly. The man with the Mach 1 scalpel had whipped her uterus out in something under fifteen minutes. Surgical time, that was. The victim took three months to recover from her postoperative abscess. And she'd been one of O'Reilly's patients.\n\nSir Gervaise seemed to have regained his icy equilibrium as we stood side by side scrubbing for the impending surgery. I wondered if he had any idea what he might have wrought. Recall how Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly lay in wait for Doctor \"Thorny\" Murphy. I could still hear the words \"underqualified country quack\" and picture the malevolence under O'Reilly's grin as he bade Sir Gervaise \"good day.\"\n\nWhen I was a boy I used to delight in a firecracker called a Thunderbomb. The instructions on the side read, \"Light blue touchpaper and retire immediately.\" Whether he knew it or not, Sir G. had lit O'Reilly's touchpaper. There was a phone message waiting for me when I left the theatre. Would Doctor Taylor please report to the Pathology Department and see Professor Callaghan?\n\nI imagine an altar boy would feel much as I did had he been summoned unexpectedly by the Pope. Awe, fear, and trembling. Professor Callaghan was the dean of the faculty and, in the eyes of us junior doctors, outranked the Pope. There was even some suspicion that he outranked God.\n\nI ran to his office and knocked on the door.\n\n\"Enter.\"\n\nOh, Lord. I opened the door and to my surprise saw his exalted magnificence sitting at his desk, head bowed over a piece of paper, which also seemed to be fascinating none other than Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly.\n\n\"That should do it, Fingal.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Snotty.\"\n\nSnotty! Snotty? O'Reilly's familiarity was on a par with that of the young American naval officer who, at some embassy function, asked Queen Elizabeth II, Fid. Def., Ind. Imp., \"How's your mum?\"\n\n\"Ah, Taylor.\" O'Reilly took the piece of paper from Professor Callaghan. \"You know my old classmate, Professor Callaghan?\"\n\nI nodded. Yes, and I was on first-name terms with President Nixon and the British prime minister too.\n\n\"He and I played rugby together. He's just done me a little favour.\" O'Reilly rose. \"We won't detain you any longer, Snotty.\"\n\n\"My pleasure, Fingal.\"\n\nI felt a bit like the Emperor's new clothes: not there, as far as Professor Callaghan was concerned.\n\n\"Now,\" said O'Reilly, \"let's get a cup of tea.\"\n\nHe headed for the cafeteria with the unerring accuracy of a Nike missile, and this was the man who'd started today by remarking, \"You'd think I'd know my way about up here.\"\n\nHe refused to show me the paper until we were seated, teacups on the plastic tabletop. \"Here,\" he said, \"take a look at this.\"\n\nI could see immediately that it was a copy of a pathology report form. Three pages of detailed description of a uterus that had been removed by\u2014I flipped back to the first page\u2014Sir Gervaise Grant. The sting was in the tail. Just one line, which read, \"The specimen of ureter submitted showed no abnormalities.\"\n\nDear God. The complication most feared by gynaecological surgeons. Damage to the tube that carried urine from the kidney to the bladder. \"Is it true?\" I asked in a whisper.\n\nO'Reilly guffawed then said, \"Not at all, but it should give old 'Green Fingers' pause for thought, possibly a cardiac arrest when he reads it, before he realises that the patient is fine and the report must be wrong,\" said O'Reilly. He sipped his tea. \"Decent chap, Snotty Callaghan, to fudge the report. He can't stand Sir Gangrene either.\"\n\nHe smiled beatifically. \"And you thought I didn't know my way round up here.\"\nMARCH 1997\n\nPowers of Observation\n\nO'Reilly accepts a bet\n\n\"Powers of observation,\" O'Reilly mumbled through a mouthful of breakfast kipper.\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\n\"Why? You didn't do anything. Did you?\" He pulled a thicker than usual piece of fishbone from between his teeth and smiled at me. \"Good kippers.\"\n\n\"Yes. That was my observation.\"\n\nYou would have thought that after working for Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly as a part-time locum for almost two years, I would have learned not to play the one-upmanship game with the redoubtable man. I had about as much chance of beating him as Tiny Tim had of wresting the world heavyweight championship from a Mister Muhammad Ali.\n\n\"What was?\"\n\n\"What was what?\"\n\n\"Your observation.\"\n\n\"That the kippers were rather good.\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, after some thought. \"That was my observation.\"\n\n\"Well yes, I suppose so. But that's why I said, 'Pardon?'\"\n\n\"Because I had observed that the kippers were good?\"\n\n\"Er, not exactly.\"\n\n\"They're bad?\"\n\n\"Not the kippers.\"\n\n\"Sometimes, Taylor,\" he shook his great head ponderously, \"sometimes I wonder about you.\"\n\nHe was not alone. Sometimes I had a similar feeling of confusion, usually at a time like this when our conversation seemed to be taking one of those wandering paths that inevitably led to my utter loss of the thread. Still, something lost, something gained: I usually ended up with a pounding headache.\n\n\"Fingal, you said, 'Powers of observation.'\"\n\n\"Of the quality of the kippers?\"\n\n\"No. Not the kippers. I asked, 'Pardon?' because I wondered what you meant by the remark.\"\n\n\"Haven't the faintest idea. Pass the marmalade.\" He rose from the table and wandered off, happily munching a slice of toast. \"Don't be late for the surgery. It's antenatal clinic today.\" He stopped in the doorway. \"I'll teach you about my powers of observation. Mark of a good physician, you know.\"\n\n\"Now,\" said O'Reilly, some time later, leaning forward from his swivel chair, \"I'm going to teach you something you didn't learn at medical school.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" His craggy face split into a great, conspiratorial grin. \"I bet you didn't know that you can tell what underwear a pregnant woman is wearing just by observing her urine sample.\"\n\nSure, and you could pick the winner at Goodwood racetrack by consulting the entrails of chickens. I smiled a skeptical little smile. \"A pound says you can't.\"\n\n\"You're on.\" He stretched out his hand and we shook. \"Seems a shame to take your money.\"\n\nWe'll see, Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. We'll see.\n\nThe door opened and Mrs. Kincaid ushered in our first patient, dressed in her Dior creation with a split down the back. So he wasn't going to be able to fool me by making an intelligent guess by looking at each woman's outer garments.\n\n\"Mrs. Robertson,\" said Kinky, handing O'Reilly the chart and a small glass bottle containing the patient's urine sample.\n\n\"Good morning, Mrs. Robertson.\"\n\nO'Reilly rose from his chair and took the sample. \"Doctor Taylor here will just take you behind the screens and examine you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Doctor O'Reilly.\"\n\nI ushered the patient behind the screens, rapidly took her blood pressure, and then examined her abdomen. She was wearing black silk underpants. \"Everything looks fine,\" I said in my best professional manner. She left.\n\n\"Black silk,\" said O'Reilly.\n\nDammit. He must have caught a glimpse through the split in the back of the gown. I hoped that was the explanation. I could feel my hard-earned pound slipping away.\n\n\"Jeannie Neely,\" said Mrs. Kincaid.\n\n\"Sample,\" said O'Reilly. \"Morning, Jeannie.\"\n\n\"Morning, Doctor.\"\n\nHe nodded toward the screens. I escorted the woman to the examining couch, taking great care to place myself between her retreating back and Fingal. I stole a surreptitious glance in his direction. He couldn't have cared less. He was bending over the sink, urine-testing stick in one hand, the specimen in the other, and a look on his face of sublime confidence.\n\n\"Red flannel drawers,\" he said when she left. He was right again. I swallowed. This was getting serious. That pound was meant to be taking me and my girlfriend to the cinema on Saturday night.\n\n\"Annie O'Rourke,\" said Mrs. Kincaid, ushering in a woman who either was carrying quintuplets or had single-handedly by her eating habits almost caused the second great potato famine. She had, I think, a singleton, vertex, and probably had inherited some genes from old Ahab's mate, the great white whale. More importantly, her complete lack of underwear was going to be O'Reilly's downfall.\n\n\"Off you go, Annie.\"\n\nShe left.\n\n\"None,\" said O'Reilly with the absolute confidence of a master.\n\nI saw eighteen women that morning. He was wrong just once. I could only hope that the light of my life would be happy to settle for a long walk on Saturday.\n\nO'Reilly leaned back in his chair and stretched out his hand. \"I believe you owe me a pound.\"\n\nI grudgingly handed it over.\n\n\"Ta.\" He stuffed the note into his trouser pocket.\n\nI gritted my teeth. \"Fingal, how did you do it?\"\n\n\"Powers of observation, my boy.\" His expression wasn't that of the cat who'd got the cream. His face had the felicity of the feline that had feasted on the fermented foaming of an entire dairy.\n\nI was actually thinking of another \"F\" word, but delicacy forbids its use.\n\nHe must have noted my chagrin. \"Come over here, lad.\" He rose and ambled to the sink. There in neat array stood the containers in which the patients had brought their samples. In those days, the niceties of little plastic bottles hadn't yet been introduced. He picked up the first receptacle. \"Here. Mrs. Robertson\u2014Chanel No. 5\u2014black satin; Jeannie Neely\u2014jam jar\u2014red flannel; Annie O'Rourke\u2014Guinness bottle\u2014none.\"\n\nThe old devil.\n\nHe swept the assorted glassware into a wastepaper basket. \"First thing I said this morning, 'powers of observation,' and not of the quality of the kippers.\"\n\nBlast him and blast his powers of observation. My promise to take a certain nurse to see Lawrence of Arabia had gone down the pipe as the urine bottles had been chucked into the rubbish.\n\n\"By the way,\" said O'Reilly, pulling something from his pocket, \"here's the two quid I owe you for staying late the other week.\" He chuckled. \"I was looking at your face, Pat. Amazing what I observed.\"\nAPRIL 1997\n\nStress of the Moment\n\nThe tale of Mister Brown and Miss Gill\n\nI think I've mentioned that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, among his other attributes, was kind to widows and small children. He had a knack of talking to youngsters as if they were adults, taking their concerns with grave sincerity.\n\nPlease remember this was the man who'd crushed Doctor \"Thorny\" Murphy with a single sentence, had given Sir Gervaise Grant enough nightmares to make Edgar Allan Poe look like a beautiful dreamer, yet around the chisslers of the small town he was, in his own quotation of the Bard, \"Naught but a cooing dove.\"\n\nA long afternoon surgery had just finished, and I was perched on the examining table. Mrs. Kincaid knocked on the door.\n\n\"Come in,\" said O'Reilly, eyebrows rising as he looked up from his seat at the rolltop desk. \"Jasus, not more of the sick and suffering?\"\n\nMrs. Kincaid appeared, followed by a little lad of about six who peered out from behind her skirts. He held firmly to the hand of a girl who must have been a couple of years his senior.\n\n\"Mister Brown and Miss Gill would like to have a wee word, Doctor.\" Kinky looked solemn.\n\nO'Reilly's great eyebrows slid back from their attempt to meet his hairline. \"Come right in.\"\n\nKinky ushered the pair forward to stand in front of O'Reilly. I was immediately put in mind of the carollers who visited Rat and Mole in The Wind in the Willows. The boy's short pants almost reached his skinned knees and while one sock was firmly held in place, the other was wrinkled round his ankle. He stood with his toes turned in. He clung to the hand of his companion.\n\nThe girl, clean in a patched grey dress, kept her cornflower blue eyes demurely fixed on the threadbare rug.\n\n\"Well,\" said O'Reilly, \"what can I do for you?\"\n\nI sat quietly watching.\n\nThe little girl looked up at him and said, quite clearly, \"Mister Brown and I are going to get married.\"\n\nO'Reilly didn't bat an eyelid.\n\n\"Married, is it?\" He pushed his half-moon glasses up the bridge of his bent nose, sat back, and steepled his fingers. \"There's a thing now.\"\n\nThe little boy scuffed his toes along the carpet, sniffed, and dragged the back of one forearm across his nostrils.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"Mister Brown proposed to me yesterday.\"\n\n\"Did he now?\"\n\n\"I did,\" said Mister Brown.\n\nI couldn't recollect how my textbook of the diseases of children suggested how one dealt with a paediatric premarital counselling visit, but was quite willing to learn. Besides, I wanted to see how O'Reilly managed to extricate himself from this one. I would probably have laughed and sent them packing.\n\nNot O'Reilly.\n\n\"Well,\" he said, \"'Marriage is an honourable estate, not one to be entered upon lightly.'\"\n\nI flinched. I couldn't believe he was going to get to the bits about the comforts of the flesh.\n\nMister Brown nodded very seriously. He seemed to be uncomfortable and stood pressing his knees together.\n\n\"Good,\" said O'Reilly, \"that's clear then.\"\n\nMister Brown tugged at the front of his pants.\n\nO'Reilly stood. \"I tell you what. I think we should continue these discussions over a cup of tea. Would you like that, Miss Gill?\"\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"Doctor Taylor, would you be kind enough to ask Mrs. Kincaid to put the kettle on and set a tray for four?\"\n\nI thought I might as well go along. I might also have the opportunity to ask Kinky who the children belonged to. I left the room, hearing Fingal say, \"And have you found a nice place to live?\"\n\nHe was standing at the front door when I returned, his big shoulders shaking with suppressed mirth. I could see past him to where the betrothed were scurrying down the front path, Mister Brown still clinging to Miss Gill's hand.\n\nHe called after them. \"Are you sure you won't stay for tea?\"\n\nBut Miss Gill called back over her shoulder. \"We can't, Doctor O'Reilly\u2014Mister Brown's just wet himself.\"\nMAY 1997\n\nO'Reilly's Surprise\n\nThe flowers that bloomed in the spring\n\n\"Begod, I'm famished,\" announced Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, helping himself to a canap\u00e9. The morsel vanished with the rapidity of a small insect trapped on a chameleon's tongue. \"There's not enough on these things to keep a flea from starvation. Come back here, you.\"\n\nThe red-jacketed waiter to whom these words were addressed did a quick one-eighty like one of those figure skaters winding up for a death spiral. Donal Donnelly, mostly unemployed, occasional waiter at catered functions, proffered the tray of nibblers to O'Reilly with the subservience of a minion offering John the Baptist's head to Salome on a silver platter.\n\nNow I wouldn't want you to think that Donal was scared of Doctor O'Reilly. Just because Donnelly was a patient of long standing and once upon a time Doctor O. had reduced Donal's dislocated shoulder\u2014without the benefit of anaesthesia\u2014was no reason for the youth to be scared of my mentor. Absolutely, totally, and utterly petrified is probably a better description.\n\n\"Good lad,\" said O'Reilly, grabbing a shrimp and a chippolata on a cocktail stick. \"Run along.\"\n\nDonal scuttled away.\n\n\"So?\" O'Reilly asked, picking a tooth with the chippolata stick. \"What do you think of this hooley?\"\n\n\"Very nice,\" I replied, slightly overawed by my surroundings. I should tell you that in the late '60s, the concept of elitism hadn't been invented yet by the perpetually dissatisfied\u2014those whose only claim to any degree of status is the volume with which they can whinge about perceived wrongs and who reckon because they always came last in the egg-and-spoon race that there's a conspiracy afoot to keep them in their places. The ones who have a personality with a specific gravity that would match that of lead, who feel they should have floated to the top by dint of no other effort than the fact of their existence.\n\nLord Fitzgurgle, twentieth Earl Hurtletoot, hereditary master of the lands surrounding our small village, had no doubts about who was elite and who wasn't. The medical profession, represented by Doctor Fingal O'Reilly, Doctor Murphy (he of the crown of thorns), and myself, were. Just. We'd been invited to the annual \"show the peasants a bit of condescension\" evening at his lordship's stately home.\n\n\"Very nice,\" I said once again.\n\n\"Stop repeating yourself,\" O'Reilly grunted, swallowing a dollop of Black Bush whiskey. \"His lordship keeps a good drop.\" He smacked his lips with the appreciatory enthusiasm of a satisfied orangutan. \"Where the hell's young Donnelly?\"\n\n\"I think he went back to the kitchen.\"\n\n\"Keep an eye out for him.\" O'Reilly adopted the tone he usually reserved for when he was imparting one of his pearls of wisdom. \"I've been to these dos before. Takes forever to get the grub on the table. Take my advice.\" He waved an admonitory finger. \"Stock up now.\"\n\n\"Right, Fingal.\" I cast an eye about for our waiter and hoped he would shortly hove into view. A hungry O'Reilly could become a tad irritable. Like a viper with its tail caught in a vice-grip.\n\n\"Don't go away,\" said O'Reilly. \"I see our esteemed colleague Doctor Murphy over there. I'll just nip over and inquire after his health.\" Fingal had that look in his eye. I deemed it safer to stay where I was.\n\nI stood looking around me. The room was a fine example of the kind of decayed gentility to be found in the houses of the remnants of the nobility in Ireland. Lord Fitzgurgle's ancestors scowled down from the walls. Ranks of oil paintings of peers of the realm. The First Earl looked like a brigand. He'd probably been ennobled for nicking a few sheep for his liege lord or stamping on a few Irish peasants. There was no sitting on your duff in the sixteenth century if you fancied a bit of swift promotion.\n\nBetween the pictures hung assorted trophies. Wicked-looking knobkerries, assegais, a horribly serrated spear, one or two moth-eaten zebra-skin shields. Hunting trophies abounded. Fox heads, stags' heads, and a mounted cape buffalo stared down.\n\n\"That fellow must have come through the wall at a hell of a tilt.\" I turned to see the returned O'Reilly squinting up at the buffalo. \"Faster than that bloody Donnelly.\"\n\nI saw O'Reilly's eyes light up. I followed the direction of his gaze. It was fixed on a large ceramic bowl that sat on a heavily carved sideboard.\n\n\"Peanuts,\" he muttered and set off at a trot.\n\n\"Evening, Doctor.\" His lordship stood at my side. Stiff military bearing, bushy white moustache, and a bulbous nose the colour of raw beef. The quinine in tonic water is prophylactic against malaria. And it had been effective\u2014in all the seventy-six years he'd lived in Ulster he had not contracted malignant quartan. Not once. The brandy with which the duke had for years fortified his tonic accounted for the nose.\n\n\"My lord.\"\n\nIt's difficult to express in writing what my expression actually meant. At first glance you may think it was a greeting appropriate to my host's station. I can only hope he took it that way. In fact it was an exclamation of serious concern.\n\nOut of the corner of my eye I could see O'Reilly. His eyeballs bulged, his face was redder than his lordship's nose. Much redder. And the tip of O'Reilly's nose, the marker of his anger level, was white as driven snow. His cheeks bulged and he was tugging at his collar. This display of facial gymnastics had clearly upset the very attractive woman to whom he'd been talking. She was hastening away, occasionally casting a backward glance at Fingal.\n\n\"Good. Good,\" said Lord Fitzgurgle. \"Enjoy yourself, my boy.\"\n\n\"Thank you, my lord. Excuse me.\" I thought I was witnessing my first case of apoplexy, but as I neared O'Reilly his complexion cleared slightly. He managed an enormous swallow.\n\n\"You all right, Fingal?\"\n\nHe made a gurgling noise for all the world like water running out of a bath and pointed at the bowl of peanuts. Now, it's said that when Horatio swam the swollen Tiber, Lars Porsena of Clusium could scarce forbear to cheer. I had a similar bad attack of the scarce forbearances. In my case, it was laughter I had to suppress.\n\nDoctor O'Reilly, momentarily distracted by the charms of his companion, had seized and stuffed his mouth with an enormous handful, not of peanuts, but of the dried flower petals that had lurked in a potpourri.\n\nHe didn't complain of being hungry for the rest of the evening.\nJUNE 1997\n\nShock Therapy\n\nThe astonishingly rapid cure of Agatha Arbuckle\n\nI may have alluded to the fact that my old tutor, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, could, on occasion, be a little unorthodox. I believe the early Catholic Church regarded Martin Luther in roughly the same light. I do, however, suspect there was a difference between the two men. There's not a shred of published evidence to suggest that the hero of the Reformation had much of a sense of humour. Certainly in any of the woodcuts, lithographs, and other sundry reproductions of the old cleric he looks to have been remarkably po-faced.\n\nO'Reilly could be accused of many things (and frequently was, after the Mucky Duck had closed for the night), but lacking a well-developed sense of the ho-ho-hos was never one of them.\n\nIt has been said that laughter is the best medicine. It could be back then. I'm not so sure today. A well-meaning one-liner may be greeted with a polite titter. It can also lead to a frolicsome chat with the disciplinary committee of your provincial college or a visit from those merry minions of mirth, the harassment police.\n\nDoctor O'Reilly suffered from no such constraints.\n\nJust before Friday-morning surgery was to start, he peered through a crack in the door to the waiting room.\n\n\"Would you look at that lot?\" he said. \"The weary, wilting, woesome, walking wounded wanting our wisdom before the weekend. The scabrous sick searchers after solace for their scorched souls. Jasus.\" He stepped back from the door. \"See for yourself.\"\n\nI chanced a glance.\n\nThe waiting room was full. Four local farmers; three housewives; Donal Donnelly, who I'd last seen waiting at Lord Fitzgurgle's soiree; and Maggie, looking suspiciously as if the pain above her head had returned, sat on benches arranged round the walls of the room. Two small boys ran around the remaining open space, arms outstretched, banking and weaving and making machine-gun noises.\n\nA single wooden chair occupied one corner. Whoever took that seat would be first into the sanctum sanctorum when O'Reilly opened the surgery. This morning's winner was a woman with a smile like last week's rhubarb. Her lips were set at a permanent twenty to four. Her upper body, thin as a rake handle, twitched up and down at about two-second intervals. A series of faint \"hics\" could be heard over the racket of the simulated dogfight.\n\n\"Ha,\" said O'Reilly as he let the door close. \"You'd need the diagnostic skills of a Galen to sort out that lot. Piles, sniffles, backaches, a couple of ruptures. Donnelly'll be looking for another doctor's letter so he can draw his sick pay, and God only knows what Maggie has for us today. And to top it off there's Agatha Arbuckle with her chest going up and down like a hoor on hinges.\"\n\nHe got that glint in his eye and a coercive tone to his voice. \"I don't suppose you'd like to take the surgery today?\"\n\nHe was right. If for no other reason than I had no wish to tend to Maggie or Agatha Arbuckle, I know the oath of a certain classic quack from the isle of Cos has some kind of codicil about ministering unto the sick. Old Hippocrates didn't practise in Ulster. Nor did he have to sort out Maggie or Aggie on a regular basis. \"Sorry, Fingal. Lots of house calls.\" I began to sidle toward the front door.\n\nO'Reilly heaved an enormous sigh, the kind of noise a beached right whale makes just before expiring. \"All right. But I could do without Agatha today.\"\n\n\"Sorry about that,\" I lied. I could do without her too. Agatha Arbuckle, fifty, spinster of this parish, secretary-treasurer of the Presbyterian Women's Union, was not one of my favourite people. Nor one of O'Reilly's. Somewhere in the woman's soul lurked a pool of acid. Not your regular sulphuric or nitric. Oh, no. Agatha's psyche was fuelled by aqua regia, an acid so powerful that one drop can dissolve the armour of a main battle tank.\n\n\"I'll have to be getting on,\" I said. \"Just going to nip upstairs and get my bag.\"\n\nI'd been wrong about the whale. It wasn't one. From O'Reilly's expiratory rumblings it sounded as if a whole school of cetaceans had taken up permanent residence in the hall. As I headed up I heard him say, \"Come in, Agatha. What seems to be the trouble?\" Just as I came back into the hall, doctor's black bag clutched in one hand, the door to the surgery opened and Agatha rushed past me to the front door. The look of shock on her face would have suited the mayor of Hiroshima just after the big bang. What had Fingal said to her? From somewhere I remembered that hiccups could be a sign of terminal ureamia.\n\nO'Reilly sat in his swivel chair at the rolltop desk. He looked enormously self-satisfied. \"Thought you were off doing house calls.\"\n\n\"I'm just going, but I saw Aggie a minute ago. Is she all right?\"\n\n\"Right as rain.\"\n\n\"But...\"\n\n\"No 'buts' about it. I fixed her.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nCertain cats, I believe from the county of Cheshire, are reputed to grin. O'Reilly's vast smirk would have shamed them into expressionlessness. \"Told her she was pregnant.\"\n\n\"You what?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Told her she's up the builder's.\"\n\nAggie? Impossible. \"She couldn't be.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said, rising to his feet and pausing for dramatic effect, \"but it cured her hiccups.\"\nJULY\/AUGUST 1997\n\nHappy as a Pig in...\n\nDiagnosing porcine pregnancy\n\n\"What do you know about pigs?\" O'Reilly inquired.\n\nI paused, a small sherry halfway to my lips. \"Pigs?\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" said O'Reilly, wiping Guinness froth from his upper lip. \"Pigs.\"\n\nI glanced round the snug of the Mucky Duck, but the landlord was nowhere in sight. Erroneously, as it turned out, I'd assumed that O'Reilly was about to make some disparaging remark about mine host, Arthur Turloch Osbaldiston, purveyor of strong drink, intoxicating liquors, and fine tobaccos. A man of substantial proportions, a complexion of a pinkness to match the hue of a hog, and a squashed nose of similar configuration.\n\n\"Pigs?\"\n\n\"Yes. Pigs, man,\" said O'Reilly, his nose tip paling.\n\nWhat the hell was he on about? Male chauvinists, lumps of cast iron, the Saracen armoured personnel carriers of the British Army, or cloven-hoofed mammals? All could legitimately be called pigs. Certainly the APCs were by the citizens of Belfast. \"Pigs, Fingal?\"\n\nO'Reilly's brows knitted. Actually they moved up and down so rapidly it might have been said \"O'Reilly's brows crocheted,\" but it wasn't. Not by me anyway.\n\n\"They say,\" he remarked, idly using an index finger to draw a smile in the white head of his stout, \"that perseveration is an early sign of mental disease. Why do you keep mumbling 'pigs'?\"\n\n\"You asked the question.\"\n\n\"What question?\"\n\n\"Pigs. You asked, 'What do you know about pigs?'\"\n\n\"Did I?\"\n\n\"You did.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nThat seemed to put an end to a rather aimless conversation. I wasn't disappointed, but of course I was wrong. O'Reilly heaved himself vertically, carried his empty glass to the counter, leaned over, and yelled, \"Nurse!\" He wasn't ill. This was his standard summons for anyone with the power to pour him a drink. Arthur Turloch Osbaldiston hove weightily into view, glass in one hand, dishrag in the other. \"Yes, Doctor O'Reilly?\"\n\n\"Two more.\"\n\n\"Right, sir.\" Osbaldiston busied himself seeing to Doctor O'Reilly's next pint. As he ran the black brew into the glass he asked, anxiously, \"Well?\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head. \"Doctor Taylor doesn't know anything about pigs.\"\n\nArthur Turloch was so upset he allowed some of the beer to spill. \"Ah, dear,\" he said, handing O'Reilly his pint and a small sherry for me. \"I'll just have to carry on with your advice then, Doctor O'Reilly.\"\n\n\"You will,\" said O'Reilly, neglecting to pay, as he headed back toward our table. He sat, set my second drink beside the unfinished first, and took a deep pull of his own.\n\n\"Pigs,\" he said, mournfully.\n\nI flinched. This, more or less, was where I'd come in. I thought it wiser to agree.\n\n\"Yes, indeed,\" I said. \"Pigs.\"\n\n\"Bloody animals. Pity you don't know more about them.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed.\"\n\nHe rummaged round in his jacket pocket, hauled out his briar, stoked the bowl, and lit up. At least it gave me time to see if I could offer any solace on the subject that was troubling him. I could not.\n\n\"Fat and very rotund,\" he said.\n\nI nodded. Did he mean Osbaldiston or the subject of the moment?\n\n\"Bloody difficult to tell if they're pregnant.\"\n\nPigs. Definitely not Arthur Turloch.\n\n\"And Arthur there needs to know.\"\n\n\"If he's pregnant?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not him. His sow.\"\n\nLight began to dawn. Our landlord ran a smallholding on the side. He'd bought a sow last year. She would have been ready for breeding this year, and every visit to the boar cost money.\n\n\"Yes,\" said O'Reilly, \"and he asked me how he could tell if the boar had scored a winner.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"I know.\"\n\n\"What do you know?\"\n\n\"About pigs? Nothing.\"\n\nO'Reilly growled, stabbed the stem of his briar in my general direction and said, \"How did you know I'd given him advice?\"\n\n\"Because he said, a moment ago, that he'd just have to go on taking it.\"\n\n\"Damn silly advice too.\" The man had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. \"Do you know how the farmers round here breed pigs?\" he asked.\n\nIt seemed not the most opportune time to remind him that we'd established beyond reasonable doubt that the sum of my knowledge on that subject was zero. I merely shook my head.\n\n\"The usual procedure is to load the sow in a wheelbarrow and trundle her off to the boar.\"\n\n\"Seems sensible.\"\n\n\"Not,\" said O'Reilly, \"if you have to keep repeating the exercise. Gets expensive.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"And you know Arthur would wrestle a bear for a farthing.\"\n\nI nodded, thinking to myself that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly could probably give Osbaldiston a few pointers in the sport of ursine mat-grappling\u2014certainly if there was any prospect of a pecuniary payoff.\n\nO'Reilly sighed. \"The best I could think of was an old farmer's tale that I'd heard years ago.\"\n\nI listened.\n\n\"Seems there was a local belief that recently pregnant sows, if given a choice between mud and grass, would always roll in the mud, so after you'd bred her you waited to see if she'd go to the mud.\"\n\n\"Well,\" I said, \"that makes sense.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. The raised progesterone levels of pregnancy would put the animal's temperature up. Naturally she'd prefer the mud. Help her cool off.\"\n\nO'Reilly looked at me suspiciously. \"You're not pulling my leg?\"\n\n\"Me, Fingal? Never.\"\n\nHe brightened up. \"Perhaps I did give him good advice after all. I just hope the wee sow gets into the mud soon.\" O'Reilly chuckled. \"It's a sight every evening to see Arthur toiling up the hill, pushing the barrow with the pig in it.\"\n\nBefore I could reply I became aware that Arthur Turloch had reappeared. He didn't look happy.\n\n\"Ah,\" said O'Reilly, grandiloquently. \"You'll be glad to hear that young Doctor Taylor has applied his understanding of basic science to our problem. He concurs with my opinion.\" O'Reilly held up his now-empty glass and looked hopeful. \"I'll bet your sow will be rolling in the mud already.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Arthur, lugubriously. \"She's not. She's sitting in my wheelbarrow with a smile on her face.\"\nSEPTEMBER 1997\n\nBarometer Falling\n\nFlying would be more accurate\n\nThere's an anaeroid barometer hanging in the hall of the house of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. Barometers, as you know, measure atmospheric pressure. This one no longer does. It's battered, the glass is broken, and the needle is stuck permanently indicating \"fair.\" Let me tell you why.\n\n\"I think...\" said Doctor O'Reilly, and paused.\n\n\"Therefore I am?\" I suggested.\n\nHe scowled at me as a gouty retired colonel might regard a scruffy teenager who'd just run a skateboard over the ex-military man's bandaged foot.\n\n\"Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am,\" I mumbled rapidly, citing my source for good measure. \"Descartes.\"\n\n\"Idiot,\" said O'Reilly. \"Dostoyevsky.\"\n\nI was relieved that Doctor Fingal O'Reilly hadn't dipped further into his encyclopaedic catalogue of the classics. I shuddered to think what he might have called me if he'd taken his riposte from the works of D. H. Lawrence.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I said.\n\nO'Reilly harrumphed then said, \"Should bloody well think so.\"\n\nI wondered why O'Reilly's mood, which had been so high earlier in the morning, was now giving a good impression of a pint of milk left out in the sun too long. Sour. Very sour. Morning surgery was over and he'd announced with a broad grin that this afternoon he would take a half-day holiday.\n\nThis, I should tell you, was somewhat out of character. O'Reilly, and indeed most of his generation, took it as a matter of course that single-handed country GPs were on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year. What was even more curious, he'd made the statement immediately after consulting a heavy mahogany-and-brass barometer that hung in the hall. \"Wonderful,\" he'd remarked. \"Barometer's rising and it's already at 'fair.'\"\n\nPestered as I'd been for most of the pre-noon by a passing parade of perambulatory paediatric problems produced for my perusal by their painfully prolix progenitors, I'd forgotten that my senior colleague had some thoughts of recreation after lunch. And in some way the barometer's cheerful prognostication had, in the fore part of the day, lifted O'Reilly's spirits. Now he stood and scowled at the thing. \"I think...\" he began again.\n\nDiscretion is always the better part of valour. I stood like the middle one of the three monkeys, speaking no evil, and wondering what weighty pronouncement was going to fall from O'Reilly's lips.\n\n\"I think...\" he peered at the needle on the face of the anaeroid, \"that sometimes the marvels of modern science could have been somewhat improved.\"\n\nA glance through the window served to confirm his observations. The heavens hadn't so much opened as gaped. I confidently expected to behold a bearded gentleman wearing a burnoose, muttering about cubits and spans, the tardy delivery of gopher wood, and the difficulty of housing diverse animal species two by two.\n\n\"It's raining,\" I said.\n\nThe look he gave me over the pallid tip of his nose would have induced Medusa's serpentine hairs to shed their scaly skins simultaneously. \"You should give up medicine,\" he said. \"You missed your calling. You'd have made a great meteorologist.\"\n\nSome might call that remark brilliant repartee, others biting sarcasm, given the force of the deluge outside. I chose to remember that he who fights and runs away lives to be sworn at another day.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I said.\n\n\"I was going golfing,\" O'Reilly said mournfully. He pointed an accusatory finger at the barometer. \"I trusted that bloody thing this morning and phoned an old friend, Charlie Elphinstone. He's coming down from Belfast.\" O'Reilly tapped the instrument's glass with the gentility of a caress from King Kong and scowled at the needle. The pointer, presumably terrified, swung farther into the \"fair.\"\n\nO'Reilly's nose moved from ashen to ivory. His neck veins bulged. \"Fair? Fair?\" He ripped the insultingly inaccurate instrument from the wall and with the powerful grace of a caber tosser hurled it straight through the glass of the window and out into the downpour. \"See for your stupid self!\" O'Reilly yelled, as he set the Irish and all comers' open record for anaeroid barometer throwing. \"Bah,\" he added, but the colour was returning to his proboscis. I could only surmise that his outburst had served the same purpose as one of those vents in the side of an active volcano and that O'Reilly's internal pressure was beginning to subside.\n\nI ventured a query: \"So what will you do?\"\n\n\"Do?\"\n\n\"With your friend from Belfast?\"\n\nIt might have been pouring outside, but the sun came up in O'Reilly's personal heaven. \"Charlie? Play golf, of course.\"\n\n\"Play golf? In this?\"\n\n\"No, you idiot. In the nineteenth hole.\" He turned to leave. \"Be a good lad,\" he said. \"Nip out and collect the barometer.\"\nOCTOBER 1997\n\nThe Flying Doctor\n\nO'Reilly takes the wheel\n\n\"Did you ever see the likes of that chase?\" Doctor O'Reilly asked, fist curled round his second John Jameson's, elbow nestled in its accustomed groove in the bar of the Mucky Duck.\n\n\"Impressive,\" I remarked, cuddling a small sherry and trying to make it last.\n\n\"That Steve McQueen must be a powerful driver.\" He was clearly in awe. I should tell you that he and I had just returned from the local cinema's screening of the film Bullitt. The one with the classic car chase through the hills of San Francisco. It dawned on me, vaguely, that the good Doctor O. might be tempted to emulate McQueen's driving. The prospect of the carnage that would be wrought among the local livestock and itinerant rustic cyclists hardly bore contemplation. Even with his present style of procession in his long-bonnetted Rover he was a force to be reckoned with.\n\nWhen they teach you about side effects at medical school, no mention is ever made of the fact that emergency house calls lead to an increase in the incidence of minor sprains and abrasions.\n\nIf he truly believed that life or limb of one of his patients was at risk, O'Reilly would hurl his motorcar through the streets and byways of our district with all the enthusiasm of Toad of Toad Hall. In fairness, Doctor O. was able to refrain from yelling \"poop poop\" at the top of his voice. If Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly had been driving a panzer for Heinz Guderian in May 1940, the Battle of France would have been finished in two weeks flat.\n\nThe natives, many of whom went about their lawful (and in the case of Turlough Tweezlethumbs the local poacher, unlawful) pursuits mounted on fixed-wheel bicycles, had evolved their own method of dealing with O'Reilly in one of his Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade moments. The fixed-wheel bicycle has no brakes. You stop it by standing on the pedals. It is a slow method of arrest. Too slow for O'Reilly avoidance. I can only assume it was some kind of Darwinian genetics at work. To a man, and the three lady cyclists of the townland, standard operating procedure was to recognize O'Reilly's chariot, flinch, tuck in the head, and deliberately fall off into the ditch. Thus the abrasions and sprains.\n\n\"I hope you'll not be trying to drive like Bullitt,\" I remarked.\n\nDoctor O. was in an expansive mood. He chuckled, swallowed his whiskey, and clapped an avuncular hand on my shoulder. (The bruise faded in four days.) \"Don't worry your head about that, Pat.\"\n\nHis grin bothered me. So did his next words: \"The hills aren't steep enough round here.\"\n\nI forgot about the film and our conversation until about three weeks later. O'Reilly had gone off for the afternoon to visit his brother, Lars Porsena Fabius Cunctator O'Reilly, in the small town of Portaferry, which lies at the mouth of Strangford Lough. It's connected to the village of Strangford on the other shore by a car ferry. By the way, the short road ending at the ferry loading ramp lies at the foot of a steep hill.\n\nI was enjoying the last scraps of one of Mrs. Kincaid's steak-and-kidney puddings and wondering casually where Doctor O. might be. It was most unlike him to be late for supper. His head appeared round the door and his expression could only be described as sheepish.\n\n\"Um,\" he said in a small, very un-O'Reilly voice. \"Um, Pat, could I borrow your car?\"\n\n\"Why?\" I inquired with approximately the same degree of trust as would be evinced by a lamb that has been invited over by a starving lion.\n\n\"It's embarrassing.\"\n\nIt might have been emotionally upsetting for O'Reilly, but more so for me was the thought of what he might do to my poor secondhand Volkswagen\u2014or, to be more precise, the Bank of Ireland's Volkswagen. (They let me drive it while exacting their pound of flesh, two pounds of sinew, and one molar a month.) For once, facing the prospect of financial ruin if he wrecked the thing, I straightened my shoulders, emulated Pharaoh, and hardened my heart. \"Why?\" I demanded.\n\nHe flinched, took a deep breath, and said, \"If you were late and had to get back here from Portaferry, which way would you come?\"\n\n\"Take the ferry to Strangford.\"\n\n\"Right. Cuts a good ten miles off the journey.\"\n\nI couldn't quite grasp what this had to do with borrowing my car, and said so.\n\n\"What would you do if you were at the top of the Portaferry hill and the ferry was just going to leave?\"\n\n\"Wait,\" I said.\n\n\"I didn't.\" O'Reilly's eyes flashed. \"I went down the hill like Ben Hur in the Circus Maximus. There was only about ten feet between the ferry and the dock and the ferry was half-empty. There was as much space on the car deck as on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. It would be like landing on a carrier with her forward speed making the runway seem even longer.\"\n\n\"You didn't!\" I asked, immediately regretting my superfluous use of words.\n\n\"I did,\" he said. His eyes adopted that glazed look of satisfaction only seen in the orbs of committed opium smokers after a full and satisfying pipeful. \"And it was wonderful. My Rover flew like Bullitt's Mustang.\"\n\n\"So why do you want to borrow my car?\"\n\n\"Because,\" he said, \"the bloody ferry was coming in.\"\nNOVEMBER 1997\n\nForty Shades of Green\n\nAnother O'Reilly driving adventure\n\nYou may remember Doctor O'Reilly's attempts to emulate Wilbur and Orville Wright. As memory serves, and no, I was not a spectator on that memorable day at Kitty Hawk, the \"Wright Flyer\" successfully conquered gravity and landed in one piece. O'Reilly had managed, albeit briefly, the first part of the daring aviator's feat. He'd defied gravity in a Rover car. His landing on the deck of the Portaferry ferry had been less of a three-point job than a full-blown kamikaze attack on the unfortunate vessel. I'm told the Hesperus after being wrecked was in better shape than the ferry after O'Reilly.\n\nI'd stuck to my guns and refused to lend him my Volkswagen, and until his own motor was returned from the body shop, a repair that made the raising of Lazarus seem like prescribing two aspirins for a cold, he'd been forced to make his way round on a bicycle. This had worked wonders for his figure and his wind, but had reduced his tolerance of delays to somewhere on the southern side of absolute zero. Which was unfortunate for Donal Donnelly.\n\nDonal, you will recall, was last seen handing out canap\u00e9s at Lord Fitzgurgle's annual \"be nice to the peasants\" evening. He was a gangly youth, as lacking in self-confidence as Uriah Heep, as unprepossessing as a sack of cold porridge, and to say he was as thick as two short planks was to do disservice to the local woodworking industry. Donal's density made a couple of short planks look like a piece of microfilm. And he was terrified of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly.\n\nI should tell you that our town had a traffic light. (I know that stories are meant to have an internal logic and a sequential flow. You should recognize by now, however, that \"logic\" and \"O'Reilly\" are not two words with the happy congruence of, say, \"love\" and \"marriage\" or \"peaches\" and \"cream.\" Try \"oil\" and \"water\" or \"Hatfield\" and \"McCoy.\" Please accept that the town had a traffic light.)\n\nO'Reilly had asked me to accompany him by train to Belfast to collect his refurbished automobile. The old Rover, which must have been rebuilt from scratch, gleamed. The engine purred. O'Reilly beamed. O'Reilly purred. When the prodigal son returned, his father killed the fatted calf. When O'Reilly took possession of his motorcar, it was a good thing he did so in Belfast, not the countryside. In a more bucolic setting, herds of fatted cows, and probably several chubby sheep, would have been slaughtered, so great was Doctor O.'s rejoicing.\n\n\"Come on, Pat,\" he said, \"let's get her home.\"\n\n\"You'll drive carefully?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" I believe a piecrust promise is one that is made to be broken. O'Reilly's pie that day was made of the transparent caramel used for special effects in the cinema. The ones where bad cowboys are hurled through windows to the accompaniment of shattering glass.\n\nI understand that once Mach 1 is exceeded, the pilot can no longer hear the engine of the plane. Either the mechanics had fixed the Rover's motor to the specifications of Rolls-Royce or we were a tad above the speed limit for most of the journey. There were moments, usually in heavier traffic, when I could perceive a high-pitched keening noise. It took me a while before I recognized that I was making it.\n\n\"Got to get home for the match,\" O'Reilly said.\n\nI'd forgotten that Ireland was playing England in a rugby game. Actually, I didn't care. I just wanted to get home in one piece.\n\nNow I made a point of mentioning our town's traffic light and Donal Donnelly. On rare occasions planets line up in conjunction and astrologers foretell the coming of the apocalypse. Donal was driving his father's tractor and was stopped at the light. O'Reilly's home was visible not a hundred yards away, kickoff was in two minutes, and the Rover was stopped behind the tractor as we waited for the light to change.\n\nGreen went the light. O'Reilly, presumably wishing to encourage young Donal, blew his horn.\n\nDonal may have been suffering from grand mal, the battery of the tractor may have shorted and hurled a shock through his scrawny body, or it may just have been abject terror brought on by peering astern to discover that the horn blower was Doctor O. Whatever the cause, he began to tremble uncontrollably and stalled the engine of the tractor.\n\nRed went the light.\n\n\"#@$~#!\" went O'Reilly.\n\nGreen went the light.\n\n\"Nurgley-nurgley-nurgley,\" went the tractor's engine, but failed to start.\n\nRed went the light.\n\nWhite went the tip of O'Reilly's nose.\n\nGreen went the light.\n\n\"Nurgley-nurgley-phtang!\" went the tractor's engine as the exhaust billowed clouds of fumes as dense as the rock dust fallout from the explosion of Krakatoa.\n\nLight red, O'Reilly's nose ivory, smoke black, Donal's face puce. Colourful. Very colourful. O'Reilly swore once more, opened the door of the Rover, and dismounted. I followed. Just as the light turned green for the fourth time, I distinctly heard him say to Donal Donnelly, \"Was there a particular shade of green you were waiting for?\"\n\nI did not hear Donal's reply.\nDECEMBER 1997\n\nA G(h)astly Mistake\n\nO'Reilly christens his propane barbecue\n\nI believe I may have mentioned that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly was an ex-naval man. He hadn't been personally responsible for sinking the Bismark or winning the Battle of the Atlantic single-handed, but he claimed to have seen more cases of crab lice than Pharaoh after one of the plagues of Egypt.\n\nHe'd maintained his contact with the sea as the owner of a twenty-six-foot sloop. Apart from washing, this was as close as he was prepared to let H20 come to his body. I once had the temerity to ask for a glass of water and was soundly chastised with the admonishment that if I knew what the stuff did to the outsides of boats, I'd never let it past my lips.\n\nFrom time to time he'd invite me to act as his crew. Perhaps \"invite\" would be rendered better as \"shanghai.\" Dana's Two Years Before the Mast described a pleasure cruise compared to a nautical outing with O'Reilly. His style of skippering, taken straight from Captain Bligh's manual of how to win friends and influence people, left a certain amount to be desired.\n\n\"I need a hand on the boat today,\" he said.\n\nI flinched and sought around for an excuse to run. I imagine French aristocrats had the same impulse when invited to try Doctor Guillotine's new invention\u2014and with about as much success.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said.\n\nMy spirits rose when we reached the dock. He didn't intend to put to sea. Instead he wanted my help to install a propane barbecue on the taffrail.\n\n\"Propane?\" I inquired.\n\n\"Marvellous stuff,\" he said, unpacking the grill from a cardboard box. \"Clean-burning, safe as houses, and these new barbecues are idiot-proof. I've had propane in the galley for years.\"\n\nThe propane that fuels a boat's stove is isolated from belowdecks by a series of solenoids, cut-off valves, and taps. NASA's rockets have similar arrangements. Both systems are designed to prevent the payload, which may be a multimillion-dollar satellite or a small sailboat, from leaving the confines of Earth's gravitational pull prematurely.\n\nClever things, these safety devices. Teams of highly skilled engineers, bomb-disposal experts, and, for all I know, pardoned arsonists have toiled long to ensure the safety of seagoing propane, and O'Reilly was right: the system was idiot-proof. There was no guarantee it was O'Reilly-proof.\n\nIt was a warm day and it took us several hours of fiddling, screwing, unscrewing, rescrewing, bolting, unbolting, rebolting, massaging skinned knuckles, and misplacing screwdrivers and wrenches before the barbecue was fixed in place. I'd thought my vocabulary was fairly complete in the scatological department. O'Reilly would have been an instant nominee for a Nobel if the inventor of dynamite had seen fit to award a prize for blasphemy.\n\n\"That's it,\" he said, sweat streaming down his face with the volume and velocity of the Horseshoe Falls. \"Fixed the @~&**# thing.\"\n\n\"Mmm.\"\n\n\"Now, let's give it a try.\"\n\nHe lifted a locker lid and extracted a squat metal bottle of liquefied gas.\n\n\"Gimme that hose.\"\n\nI handed him a black rubber pipe and watched as he fitted screw couplings to the grill and the bottle. \"Perfect,\" he announced. \"Hang on.\"\n\nHe disappeared below for a moment, only to reappear in the hatchway clutching two bottles of beer. \"Time to christen it.\" He handed me one bottle.\n\n\"I think I'll just go up on the foredeck,\" I said, sidling away as he produced a box of matches. I believe that the men who dispose of unexploded bombs are supposed to keep a distance of four hundred metres between themselves and the device. O'Reilly's twenty-six-foot boat fell a little short, but I had no intention of standing right beside the infernal machine when O'Reilly struck the match.\n\nHe joined me for'ard a minute later. \"It's going like a bomb,\" he said, grinning from ear to ear.\n\nI thought he might have used a different simile.\n\n\"What the hell's that?\" O'Reilly inquired.\n\nFrom aft came a roaring like Mount Vesuvius on one of its more active afternoons. A jet of flame tore across the cockpit and scared the daylights out of a passing gull. It looked as though a leftover storm-trooper from WWII was firing a flammenwerfer (flame thrower for those of you too young to remember).\n\n\"Jasus,\" said O'Reilly.\n\n\"Abandon ship?\" I asked, having no wish to emulate the boy standing on the burning deck.\n\n\"Holy thundering Jasus,\" O'Reilly said, heading aft.\n\nCall me boastful if you wish. Feeble-minded is probably a better description. I actually followed him, feeling horribly like one of the \"Noble Six Hundred.\" Into the jaws of death and all that.\n\nAs soon as we reached the boat's cockpit, the source of the conflagration became apparent. When O'Reilly had hooked up the hose he'd managed to let it lie against the barbecue. The flames from the grill had melted the rubber and ignited the escaping propane, which even then howled and flared like something only Red Adair should be asked to tackle.\n\nI watched in awe as O'Reilly bent and turned off the valve on the propane tank. The roaring subsided. The flames died. The only sounds that broke the stillness were the chattering of my teeth and the rattling of my knees.\n\nAnd I stifled my desire to remind O'Reilly of his earlier remarks that propane was as safe as houses and that gas barbecues were idiot-proof.\nJANUARY 1998\n\nBlessed Are the Meek\n\nThe O'Reillys, alas, are not among them\n\n\"It's not fair, Uncle Fingal.\" Thus spake a tear-stained William Butler Yeats O'Reilly, Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly's nephew. Willy, aged ten, was the son of O'Reilly's brother, Lars Porsena Fabius Cunctator O'Reilly, the one who lived in Portaferry. That's the place, you'll remember, where Doctor O. tried to emulate Steve McQueen and nearly sank the ferry when he hurled his motorcar at the incoming vessel.\n\nOn this occasion, O'Reilly had been invited to his brother's for the pre-Christmas festivities and had dragged me along.\n\n\"Cheer up, Willy. It's not as bad as that,\" said O'Reilly at his avuncular best.\n\n\"It is.\" Willy sniffed and O'Reilly handed him a handkerchief.\n\n\"Blow,\" said O'Reilly.\n\nWilly honked. He was an unprepossessing child, snub-nosed, freckled, and with a shock of ginger hair that stood up from his crown like the crest of an indignant cockatoo. His damp eyes were full of the unspoiled innocence of childhood. I didn't know then that beneath this apparent gentility lurked the O'Reilly propensity for bearing a grudge and that Willy, like his uncle, wasn't one to let a wrong go unpunished. I didn't know that then\u2014but I was going to find out.\n\n\"It's not fair,\" he repeated. \"I've been Joseph twice. I know all the lines.\"\n\n\"And you were a grand Joseph,\" O'Reilly said, retrieving his hanky. \"You'll be a great innkeeper.\"\n\n\"Don't wanna be an innkeeper. Wanna be Joseph.\"\n\nI stood there, both legs the same length, in a state of utter confusion. This was my usual condition when in the company of Doctor O.\n\nHe must have noticed my dazed look. \"Willy was Joseph for the last two years,\" he said.\n\nI'd already grasped that piece of intelligence. \"I see.\"\n\n\"No, you don't.\"\n\n\"Don't what?\"\n\n\"See.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"Then why did you say you did?\"\n\n\"I wanna be Joseph,\" quoth Willy.\n\n\"Doctor Taylor doesn't see,\" said O'Reilly.\n\n\"Don't care,\" said Willy. \"It's not fair.\"\n\nI was beginning to feel a vague pounding at the temples. \"Would somebody please explain,\" I asked.\n\n\"Willy wants to be Joseph,\" O'Reilly said. \"See?\"\n\n\"I see.\" The pounding intensified. I had an overwhelming urge to go and lie down.\n\n\"No, you bloody well don't,\" said O'Reilly.\n\n\"Wanna be Joseph.\"\n\n\"Willy's to be the innkeeper this year,\" O'Reilly explained.\n\n\"I...\" I strangled the word \"see\" in mid-utterance and waited.\n\n\"In the school Christmas pageant,\" O'Reilly said.\n\nThe pieces were beginning to come together. \"You mean Willy played Joseph in the pageant for the last two years?\"\n\n\"Now you see,\" said O'Reilly, and indeed I did.\n\n\"And Johnny Fagan gets to be Joseph this year and I've to be the innkeeper.\" Willy had added the last piece to the puzzle. \"He's a little s*#*! I'll get him.\"\n\nThere was a fire in Willy's eyes that made me look closely at his nose tip to see if like his uncle's in moments of great passion it too paled. It did.\n\n* * *\n\nPicture now the parish hall. Serried rows of parents, teachers, older and younger brothers and sisters, half a dozen nuns, itinerant rubberneckers with no attachment to the school but who have nowhere else to go until the pubs open, the O'Reilly clan, and myself. The stage is divided by a wall so the audience can see the courtyard on one side and the interior of the inn, stable, and manger on the other. The innkeeper, known to his friends and family as William Butler Yeats O'Reilly, waits in the inn with sundry shepherds, wise men, angels, cherubim, and seraphim.\n\nEnter stage left Mary, dressed in one of her mother's cut-down dresses. Mary is astride a small, moth-eaten donkey. Joseph, a.k.a. Johnny Fagan, wearing a nightshirt, head wrapped in a tea towel held in place with a piece of rope, leads the donkey. The gum arabic holding his flowing beard has given way and the beard straggles down his chest.\n\nMary. \"Is this the inn, Joseph?\"\n\nJoseph. \"It is. I'll knock and see if the innkeeper's in.\"\n\nJoseph knocks.\n\nThe innkeeper opens the door. (Perhaps I'm the only one in the audience who notices the pallor of his nose.)\n\nInnkeeper. \"Is that you, Mary and Joseph?\"\n\nJoseph. \"It is, innkeeper.\" He gives a sneering inflection to the word \"innkeeper.\"\n\nJoseph. \"All right. Come on in, Mary.\"\n\nMary dismounts and enters.\n\nInnkeeper, glowering at Joseph. \"And you, Joseph\"\u2014the innkeeper pushes Joseph in the chest\u2014\"Joseph, you can just feck off.\"\n\nI swear two nuns fainted.\nFEBRUARY 1998\n\nA Matter of Tact\n\nOr lack of it\n\n\"Tactless,\" Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly remarked. \"Utterly bloody tactless.\"\n\nThis observation was not so much a question of the pot calling the kettle black as referring to it as stygian. O'Reilly could be described as possessing many attributes, indeed he has been, but, and feel free to correct me if you think I err, tact was not among his own most sterling qualities. In most social and professional encounters, O'Reilly was as tactful as a regimental sergeant major discussing the inadvisability of a new recruit's recent unfortunate dropping of his rifle in the middle of a ceremonial parade.\n\nI was puzzled. I'd said nothing. I couldn't have. I'd just entered his surgery as his last patient of the morning left. Nevertheless I automatically assumed a defensive crouch and wondered what sin of social ineptness I was about to be accused of committing.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I said. I believe in criminal circles this is known as \"copping a plea.\"\n\n\"Why?\" asked O'Reilly.\n\n\"Why what?\"\n\n\"Why are you sorry?\"\n\n\"For being tactless.\"\n\n\"You weren't.\"\n\n\"Sorry?\" I asked.\n\n\"No, you idiot, tactless.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Stop apologizing.\" Just a hint of paleness brightened the tip of his nose.\n\nI decided it was time to beat a retreat. \"I'm sor... so glad I wasn't.\"\n\n\"Yes, you were.\"\n\n\"Tactless?\"\n\n\"No. Apologizing.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Do not say 'Sorry' again. Sometimes I wonder about you, Taylor,\" said O'Reilly, staring into the distance and clearly letting his mind wander. \"I really wonder.\"\n\nHe was not alone. Sometimes, in fact frequently since I had fallen into his clutches, I wondered about myself.\n\nI thought it was probably time to give a slight course correction to the conversation\u2014the kind lunar astronauts make to ensure a safe return to Earth rather than a trip to the Oort Cloud.\n\n\"You were saying something about 'tactless,'\" I remarked.\n\nHis gaze focused and he turned to face me. \"Sorry?\" he asked.\n\nI think in cardiovascular circles this is known as a reversal of shunt. I ignored the temptation to tell him there was no need to apologize, and gave the lateral thrusters a little more liquid oxygen: \"You said someone was 'bloody tactless.'\"\n\n\"I did, didn't I?\"\n\n\"Yes, Fingal.\"\n\n\"Sean Millington O'Casey,\" he said.\n\nI knew that Doctor O. had been named for Oscar Wilde, had a nephew yclept William Butler Yeats O'Reilly, but who the blue blazes had been given a combination of Synge and O'Casey?\n\n\"Man's totally lacking in social graces,\" said O'Reilly. \"O'Casey's the bloke that left as you came in.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said.\n\n\"Just had a hell of a row with his wife. He wanted some marital counselling.\" O'Reilly rummaged in his pocket and produced his briar. \"More like martial counselling the way the pair of them go at it.\"\n\nI remembered Mrs. O'Casey. I'd seen her last week for an antenatal visit.\n\n\"They must talk to each other occasionally,\" I observed. \"His wife's pregnant with their fourth.\"\n\n\"Um,\" said O'Reilly, lighting up. \"And that's another miracle. He's a travelling salesman. Away from home a lot.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he writes passionate letters.\"\n\n\"He does more than that. He makes stupid remarks on the telephone. Tactless remarks.\" O'Reilly paused to tamp the tobacco more firmly into his portable blast furnace. \"'What'll I say, Doctor?' says he to me.\n\n\"'What did you say?' says I.\n\n\"'Well,' says he, 'I was in England last week. Staying in a hotel. The phone rings and I picks it up. A woman's voice says, \"You bastard.\" I knew it was the wife.'\n\n\"I told him to go on.\" O'Reilly exhaled. I confidently expected to see Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson appear from the pea-soup fog that poured from O'Reilly's pipe.\n\n\"'I said nothing,' says O'Casey.\" O'Reilly exhaled again. The miasma was thick enough to conceal a hansom cab.\n\n\"Tactful of him,\" I remarked, \"to say nothing.\"\n\n\"He should have kept his mouth shut,\" said O'Reilly. \"Apparently the next thing his wife said was, 'You've gone on the road and you've left me pregnant,' and the daft eejit, quick as a flash, replies, 'And who is this I'm speaking to?'\"\n\n\"Definitely not tactful,\" I observed.\n\n\"So,\" asked O'Reilly, \"if you were advising O'Casey, what would you tell him to say to his wife?\"\n\nIt slipped out before I could help myself. \"Sorry?\"\nMARCH 1998\n\nThe Cat's Meow\n\nOne way of dealing with feline friends\n\nI sucked my lacerated finger. In the fullness of time you'll find out what had caused the trauma. Suffice it to say for the moment, finger notwithstanding, on the day in question O'Reilly and I had finished our house calls, tending to the bedridden, the bewildered, and those too bloody bolshie to come to the surgery.\n\n\"Maggie's next,\" he said. \"I need her advice about the new kitten.\"\n\nI felt the throbbing in my wounded digit and thought unkindly of cats and with some affection of Maggie, spinster of this parish, one of nature's unclaimed treasures, the old duck with, as we say in the mind-healing trade, a bolt loose. Maggie was definitely one stook short of a stack, but she was a gentle soul and O'Reilly had a soft spot for her.\n\n\"I'm sure she'll know what to do.\" He fired up his briar inside the car, the clouds of smoke giving me a fair impression of the last minutes of the poor benighted in one of the humanitarian American states that still favour the gas chamber. I opened the window and as the sulphurous fumes escaped, hauled in a lungful of clean air. I swear rows of barley withered.\n\n\"Haven't seen her for a few weeks,\" he remarked cheerfully, accelerating and paying no attention to a cycling peasant taking refuge in the ditch.\n\nI should tell you that about once a month, if we'd had an easy afternoon making house calls, Doctor O. would drop by to see how Maggie was getting on. The vitamin pills that he'd told her to swallow ten minutes before the start of the headaches two inches above the top of her head had cured that particular problem.\n\nShe rarely needed medical attention. It was simply a mark of the man. He actually cared about his patients, although to have suggested such a thing to his face would have produced a rumble like Vesuvius on an off day and a pallid hue to his nose tip that would have made Greenland's icy mountains look like ebony.\n\nWe arrived at her cottage and left the car. O'Reilly knocked on the door. Maggie answered, smiled, and asked us in.\n\n\"How are you, Maggie?\" he inquired.\n\n\"Grand, Doctor.\"\n\n\"And how's Montgomery?\"\n\nI knew from previous visits that he was referring to Maggie's ginger tomcat. She'd named the animal \"General Montgomery\" in deference to Sir Bernard Law of the same name, victor of El Alamein, the man who Churchill described as being \"In defeat\u2014indefatigable; in victory\u2014insufferable.\"\n\nThe pussy in question appeared from behind a sofa. He rubbed against O'Reilly's leg. Doctor O. bent and tickled the animal's head.\n\n\"He's pleased to see you, Doctor O'Reilly.\"\n\nMaggie's Montgomery looked as though he'd also taken part in the desert triumph of British arms and had been as badly used by the Afrika Korps as a Sherman tank after a debate with one of the Wehrmacht's anti-tank 88s. His left ear was a fragment of cartilage and his right eye scarred and shut. Some contenders who'd had encounters with Joe Louis had similar miens.\n\n\"He's looking well, Maggie,\" O'Reilly said.\n\nI confess I've never been able to find any particular enthusiasm for moggies, particularly\u2014my finger ached\u2014at that moment, but O'Reilly doted on them and his rambling old house was a regular Doctor Barnardo's for waifs and strays of the feline persuasion.\n\n\"I wanted to ask you about that,\" O'Reilly said.\n\n\"What, Doctor?\"\n\n\"I've a new kitten.\"\n\nIndeed he had. A cross between a Siamese and a rabid tiger. If anything moved in the house, like an unsuspecting finger, the kitten would pounce. The damn animal had nailed me this morning and cost me so much blood I suspected I was suffering from anaemia.\n\n\"It claws the furniture,\" Doctor O'Reilly said.\n\nI felt somewhat resentful to be considered part of the furniture. (This was before the days when heads of committees were called \"chairs.\") I also had a clear image of O'Reilly's sofa leaking kapok stuffing stained with my gore.\n\n\"Ah sure that's no problem, Doctor.\" Maggie smiled. \"Montgomery had the same habit. Hang on.\" She trotted off and returned carrying a strange device. \"Get him one of these scratching posts.\"\n\nIt was a cylinder of wood, five inches in diameter, two feet tall, swathed in a strip of old carpet and mounted on a square plywood base.\n\nO'Reilly stared at the device. \"That thing worked for Montgomery?\"\n\nI looked around. General Montgomery cowered under the table, one paw over his tattered ear. He made a whining noise that clearly belied his warlike appellation. His good eye was fixed on the post.\n\n\"Indeed it did, Doctor. The first time he clawed my chair I got this post, didn't I, Montgomery?\"\n\nMontgomery's whining went up two octaves.\n\n\"And you put it by the chair and the wee pussy clawed it instead of the chair?\" O'Reilly was clearly impressed by the simplicity of the solution.\n\nMaggie chortled. \"Not at all, Doctor.\" She looked at the cat and waved the post in his direction. \"I belted him on the head with it.\"\n\nMontgomery fled. And my finger felt much better.\nAPRIL 1998\n\nO'Reilly at the Helm\n\nThings that go bump in the daytime\n\n\"Like the back of my hand,\" O'Reilly remarked as he sat comfortably on the weather side of his sloop, tiller held loosely. \"Been sailing these seas for years.\"\n\nI was tempted to remark that Captain John Smith had made many crossings of the Atlantic before he had a close encounter of the lethal kind with a large lump of solidified water. His tiny navigational oversight did little for the hull of the RMS Titanic or for the reputation of the Belfast shipbuilders who'd constructed the ocean-going leviathan. I comforted myself with the thoughts that O'Reilly's vessel was a tad smaller than the great liner and that icebergs were passing rare in Strangford Lough. Nevertheless I did offer him the chart.\n\n\"Don't be daft,\" he said. \"I don't need that thing.\"\n\nI stowed the results of years of painstaking depth sounding by the survey crews of Her Majesty's cartographers and let myself be lulled by the day.\n\nI confess that as usual I'd agreed with reluctance to crew for the twentieth century's answer to that old Irish seaman, Saint Brendan the Navigator. If you remember, Saint B. had nipped out for a day's boating in a craft constructed of tarred cowhides, taken a wrong turn at St. Kilda, and but for fortuitously running into Newfoundland might have beaten Marco Polo to China by nipping round the back way.\n\nIt did seem that my reluctance had been ill-founded. It was a perfect afternoon. The sun shone from an azure sky. A ten-knot breeze filled O'Reilly's sails and pushed the boat along at a steady five knots. The multitude of islands that dotted the lough were like green jewels in a porcelain sea. God was in his heaven, all was right with the world, O'Reilly was at the helm and, as he'd recently remarked, he knew these seas like the back of his hand. I hoped.\n\n\"Warm,\" he said, inclining his head toward the companionway.\n\nA wink is as good as a nod to a visually challenged equine.\n\n\"Beer?\" I asked.\n\n\"Um,\" he said.\n\n\"Aye aye, Skipper.\" Nautical, I thought, very nautical. I rose and surveyed the lough. Open water for miles. Not a hazard to navigation in sight\u2014except\u2014I noticed a tower close on the lee bow. It was just visible round the corner of the headsail. I'd seen pictures of the seventh wonder of the ancient world, Ptolemy's lighthouse at Alexandria. The local construction in question seemed to be of roughly similar dimensions. It stood out in splendid isolation miles from any other indication of shallows. \"Fingal, there seems to be a marker ahead.\"\n\n\"'Course there bloody well is. It's the light on Danger Reef.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" I'd forgotten that he knew these waters like the dorsal surface of his paw.\n\n\"It's warm!\" he growled.\n\nI knew that when O'Reilly had his mind set on liquid refreshment, those who kept him from his heart's desire ashore could become the recipients of a tongue-lashing. Afloat, keelhauling would probably be the order of the day. The lighthouse seemed to be drawing nearer. It cast a long dark shadow over the surface. Still, he knew these waters... but you already know that.\n\nI slipped below, opened the icebox, and was deafened by a crash like the opening salvo at the away game on the Somme in 1916. I was still travelling at five knots. Apparently the boat wasn't.\n\nAfter I'd disentangled myself from the forward berth and looked with some amazement at the bruise that was rapidly growing on my left shin, I noticed that our gentle heel to starboard had become alarmingly acute. For reasons that I cannot quite explain, a line or two from a poem I'd had to learn at school came into my head:\n\nThe vessel strikes with a shivering shock.\n\nOh, heavens, 'tis the Inchcape rock.\n\nI struggled up the companionway. O'Reilly must have learned the same ode, which, as I recollect, continued:\n\nSir Ralph the Rover tore his hair\n\nAnd cursed himself in his despair.\n\nDoctor O. was giving a pretty fair Sir Ralph impersonation: \"#**@**#ing Danger Reef.\"\n\nWe were hard aground, and O'Reilly's pride, like my shin, was badly bruised. I thought it might be impolitic to inquire whether some local magnetic anomaly had jinxed his retro-manual aid to navigation, and instead sought for words of comfort. Off our bow the lighthouse towered.\n\n\"I see,\" I ventured. \"The lighthouse blocked your view of the shoals.\"\n\nConcern for younger and more sensitive readers prohibits me from printing his reply.\nMAY 1998\n\nO'Reilly Strikes Back\n\nIt was worth the wait\n\nI was back home in the North of Ireland a few summers ago, and I paid a visit to my old mentor, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. I rang the brass front-door bell of his home-cum-surgery. You'll remember that the very first time I'd depressed that particular bell push the door had flown open and a giant of a man had hurled a small supplicant into a rosebush and roared, \"Next time you want me to look at your ankle, wash your bloody feet.\"\n\nThis time I reflexively stepped back. I had no wish to be thumped by a human projectile. You may think I was overreacting. Lightning, it's said, never strikes twice. I wasn't worried about lightning. Those of you who study proverbs, saws, adages, and assorted folk wisdom won't have encountered the gem \"O'Reilly never strikes twice.\" That's because he does. Bear with me and I'll explain.\n\nThe door opened.\n\n\"Good God,\" he said. \"You?\"\n\n\"Me,\" I replied. I wasn't going to claim to be the benevolent deity.\n\n\"Good God.\"\n\n\"I'm not exactly.\"\n\n\"You're not exactly what?\"\n\n\"God.\"\n\n\"Taylor, I was well aware of what you were not when you worked with me.\" He looked me up and down with a gaze as piercing as an oversensitive metal detector in a Canadian airport. \"I see no reason to alter that opinion.\"\n\nNor had O'Reilly changed. Tweed sports jacket that fitted his massive frame only where it touched, pipe ashes on his badly knotted tie, florid cheeks, and, heavens be praised, not a trace of pallor in the tip of his boxer's bent proboscis.\n\n\"Don't stand there with both legs the same length,\" he rumbled. \"Come in.\" He grasped my hand and exerted the kind of pressure that will ultimately cause the San Andreas Fault to let go. I felt a personal tectonic shift of metacarpals and comforted myself with the thought that now my right hand was two inches wide and more than a foot long there could be no doubt that my future as a gynaecologist was assured.\n\n\"How are you, Fingal?\"\n\nHe grunted and made his way into the dining room.\n\nI followed.\n\n\"What time is it?\" he asked.\n\n\"Eleven.\"\n\n\"Not in Moscow.\"\n\n\"Moscow?\"\n\n\"Moscow.\"\n\nPerhaps I'd misjudged him. Perhaps he had changed. Perhaps he was starting to dote.\n\n\"Why Moscow, Fingal?\"\n\n\"Because, you idiot, I never take a drop until the sun's over the yardarm.\"\n\n\"I didn't know Moscow had yardarms.\"\n\nBy the look in his eyes, if chez O'Reilly had been so equipped I'd have been dangling from it. \"It hasn't but it's after noon there. No reason why we shouldn't have a tot here. Sherry?\" He handed me a cut-glass version of a fire bucket. \"Better,\" he said, demolishing half his own whiskey in one swallow and lowering his frame onto a chair. \"Have a pew.\"\n\nI obeyed.\n\n\"Now,\" he said. \"Tell me what you've been up to.\"\n\nI was happy to ramble on about my life in what I thought of as Canada and he kept dismissing as \"the colonies.\" We must have chatted for twenty minutes before I was able to inquire about his doings. For the first time in all the years I'd known O'Reilly I saw a genuine sadness in his eyes.\n\nHe sighed. \"I'm retired. Have been for two years.\"\n\nTo think of medicine without O'Reilly was difficult. The thought of O'Reilly without his practising medicine verged on the incomprehensible.\n\n\"Good God,\" I said.\n\n\"Not exactly.\"\n\n\"Not exactly what?\"\n\n\"God,\" he said, and chuckled.\n\nHe'd not lost his sense of humour. I found myself laughing with him.\n\n\"So what are you up to?\"\n\nHe leaned back in his chair, cocked his head on one side, and said, \"I'm a student.\"\n\n\"Good God!\"\n\n\"Don't start.\"\n\n\"Sorry. It just slipped out. What are you studying?\" I'd forgotten that he was a self-taught classical scholar.\n\nThere was a pride in his voice when he said, \"I'm finishing my second year. Doing a BA in classical literature.\"\n\nI was impressed. \"I don't suppose there are many retired doctors in your faculty?\"\n\nO'Reilly guffawed. \"You're wrong. Remember Sir Gervaise Grant?\"\n\nI had to delve back, but it came to me. Sir Gervaise had, years ago, called O'Reilly \"an underqualified country quack.\" With the connivance of the dean, an old rugby-playing friend, O'Reilly had spoiled the senior gynaecologist's week by arranging for him to receive a pathology report in which appeared the line, \"The specimen of ureter submitted showed no sign of abnormality.\"\n\n\"I do indeed. I had a half-notion you weren't too fond of Sir Gervaise.\"\n\n\"Stuck-up bugger. I got him with the path report.\" O'Reilly gazed happily into the middle distance. \"He's retired and reading classics too. In his first year.\"\n\n\"Good... gracious.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" said O'Reilly, sipping at his Jameson's. \"I hadn't forgotten what he called me but I don't have to worry about that now.\"\n\n\"Because you're both retired?\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head and said with deep sincerity, \"You remember what a class-conscious snob he was?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"I've put him in his box.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"He came up to me all sweetness and light on the first day of term this year. 'Splendid to see you, O'Reilly,' says he. I gave him a cold look. 'Go away,' says I. 'Second-year students never\u2014never\u2014never speak to mere freshmen.'\"\n\nLightning may only strike twice. In top form O'Reilly could strike and go on striking with all the venom of a rattlesnake with grand mal.\n\n\"Good God,\" I said.\n\n\"No,\" said O'Reilly, \"but I outrank Sir Gervaise.\"\nJUNE 1998\n\nA Word to the Wise\n\nO'Reilly waits for a bus\n\nYou may remember that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly's method of practising medicine was a trifle unorthodox. But I'm indulging in understatement. Doctor O'Reilly's approach to life, the world, and the entire cosmos was unorthodox\u2014and there was nothing trifling about him. He didn't suffer fools gladly and detested being bested in any verbal joust. He rarely was.\n\nWhen affronted by a lesser mortal, and that definition as far as he was concerned encompassed the rest of the human race, he could use his words with the force of one of King Arthur's boiler-plate-encased knights. I'm sure you've seen them on the cinema screen, happily delivering caresses with a spiked cannonball on a chain to the helmeted dome of an opponent.\n\nOne of O'Reilly's ripostes was less of a rapier thrust than the spoken equivalent of being hit with a mace and trampled by a war-horse simultaneously. The fundamental difference between Good King A.'s round-table mob and O'Reilly was that the former lived by a chivalrous code of honour while O'Reilly belonged to the head-butt, knee-him-in-the-groin, pull-his-lungs-out-through-his-nose school of combat.\n\nHe had to. The citizens of Northern Ireland, and particularly the denizens of Belfast, are no mean contestants when it comes to a bit of the old jocular thrust and parry. The \"Good Book\" says, \"The gentle word turneth away the blow.\" Judging by the number of victims of grievous bodily harm I used to encounter in the ER on Saturday nights after chucking-out time from the pubs, either the Belfast men hadn't appreciated the scriptures or were a bit short in the \"gentle word\" department.\n\nI ask that you try to recall this information while I illustrate how O'Reilly could with one carefully chosen sentence demolish a self-styled humorist who tried to raise a giggle at O'Reilly's expense.\n\nFor reasons that are lost to me I found myself in the Belfast city centre in the company of O'Reilly. We seemed to have walked for miles. He was slightly in the lead and for that I was grateful. I'm small and dislike being jostled by passersby. O'Reilly's progress, in a beeline, parted the throng with all the efficiency of Moses at the Red Sea. Of course both the well-known old Israelite and O'Reilly were highly motivated. Moses had Pharaoh's seventh cavalry hot on his heels. O'Reilly wanted a drink.\n\n\"Get a move on, Taylor.\"\n\nI hurried to keep up.\n\n\"Not far now.\" O'Reilly stopped at a bus stop. A queue of would-be passengers stood waiting to be granted admission to the red omnibus parked at the curb. \"We'll take the bus back to where I left the car.\"\n\nI had mixed feelings. Relief that we wouldn't have to walk back mixed with some minor concerns\u2014the kind of vague worries experienced by the mayor of Hiroshima when he heard the Enola Gay was on its way\u2014about being driven home by a somewhat befuddled O'Reilly.\n\n\"Now?\" I said, hope springing eternal that he might forgo his libation.\n\n\"No, you idiot. After we've had a tot.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said, bowing to the inevitable. \"When does the bus go?\"\n\n\"No idea. I'll ask.\" With that he strode to the head of the queue. Line jumping was frowned upon in Belfast. O'Reilly ignored the insubordinate chorus of muttering that arose from the line jumpees, who began to form a scrum around the jumper.\n\n\"My good man,\" he roared at the blue-uniformed bus conductor, \"how long is the next bus?\"\n\nO'Reilly's syntax left a certain amount to be desired. I knew he wished to inquire, \"How long will it be until the departure of the next public-transport vehicle?\"\n\nSo, clearly, did the bus conductor, but he'd been given an opportunity that none of his ilk could ignore: an unpopular line jumper, a potentially appreciative crowd, and an ambiguous question. He grasped the metal pole that ran from the floor to the ceiling of the bus's rear platform, swung slightly outward, grinned, looked out over the waiting mob, and said, scorn dripping from his lips like oil from a cracked crankcase, \"Fifty-two feet. Same as this one.\"\n\nI believe the expression used by sports commentators when a goal has been scored is \"The crowd roared.\" It did.\n\nO'Reilly's nose paled. He let the laughter subside, fixed the conductor with a glare the intensity of one of those laser lances that safe-crackers use to cut through tungsten-carbide-toughened steel, and said, \"Thank you.\"\n\nI was amazed. I'd expected bile laced with sulphuric acid.\n\nHe half-turned away, hesitated, turned back, and said in a deceptively level voice that could be heard all the way to the back of the waiting passengers, \"And will that one have a monkey in a blue uniform swinging round the pole too?\"\nJULY\/AUGUST 1998\n\nDog Days of Winter\n\nThe case of the leg-loving Labrador\n\nNormally I like dogs, but I'm prepared to make exceptions. Let me explain\u2014but first let me give you the background. Did I tell you that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly was a keen shot? I found it difficult to approve of his pastime. After all, what had a duck ever done to him? Besides, I often found myself taking call at peculiar hours on my days off\u2014either pre- and post-dawn or before and after dusk\u2014so he could slip away to fire feverishly at his feathered friends.\n\nDucks, it seems, are creatures of habit and fly inland to feed at night and back out to sea during the day. They reverse the process in the gloaming. At these times wildfowlers park themselves on the shoreline, like the heavy flak of occupied Europe during the last global unpleasantness, and blaze away at the unsuspecting avians with all the enthusiasm of a regiment of Luftwaffe anti-aircraft gunners at a squadron of Lancaster bombers. The only difference is that the ducks can't shoot back.\n\nI'm giving you this information because his hobby was the reason O'Reilly had another member of his household. One I've neglected to tell you about before. Arthur Guinness wasn't the patriarch of the famous family of Dublin brewers but a large black Labrador dog, O'Reilly's constant companion on his murky missions of mayhem against mild-mannered mallard.\n\nArthur had all the attributes of his breed: gentleness, playfulness, boundless enthusiasm, and, I suspected, a willingness to be trained, if O'Reilly had had the slightest notion of how to teach an animal. He didn't. One word from Fingal and Arthur did exactly as he pleased.\n\nOne thing that pleased him enormously was my trousered leg. No matter where we were, as soon as I hove into view Arthur would greet me with a joyful \"Arf,\" rear up, and clasp me to him. Front paws round my thigh, grinning as only Labradors can, he would bash away at my shin like one of those automatic rivet guns. It was a miracle that I didn't give birth to a litter of Labrador puppies with corduroy coats.\n\nI did say I could make exceptions to my generally pleasant feelings toward the genus Canis.\n\nAnother of Arthur's little pleasures was his pint. It seemed that some years previously he'd accompanied O'Reilly into the Mucky Duck, his usual stop for a glass of revivification after huddling on the chilled foreshore. On that particular post-hunting foray, someone had spilled a glass of bitter on the floor and Arthur had lapped it up with the speed of a commercial vacuum cleaner. From that moment the dog had been hooked.\n\nI apologize for taking so long filling in the background, but bear with me. It's all germane.\n\nI was sitting in the surgery at nine o'clock on a December evening. I wasn't in the best of moods but was in my best suit. I was dressed up because I'd planned to take a certain young nurse out to dinner. I was cast down because O'Reilly had pleaded with me to look after the shop.\n\nIt seemed that the wind and tide conditions were so ideal that he might have the best evening's shooting of his life. To deprive him of the opportunity would have been more cruel than Pharaoh's refusal to let the Israelites set off on a package tour of the Sinai Desert. He promised he'd be back by eight. I hadn't had the heart to refuse his entreaties and I could still see my nurse if he kept his word.\n\nBy nine, having just sewn up a lacerated finger when I might have been gazing over a glass of Beaujolais into a pair of marvellously brown eyes, I hoped that his bloody shotgun had exploded.\n\nIt hadn't.\n\nThe door opened. O'Reilly stuck his head round.\n\n\"I'm back.\"\n\nI grunted.\n\n\"Sorry I'm a bit late.\"\n\n\"Very late.\"\n\n\"Come on, Pat, I had a flat tire.\"\n\nI let a silence hang, the kind that psychology research workers achieve in sensory-deprivation chambers.\n\nHe had the good grace to look sheepish. \"Look. I really am sorry. I came straight home. I didn't even stop for a drop in the Duck.\"\n\nPerhaps it wasn't his fault and his sacrifice of his usual post-wildfowling tot was a measure of his contrition.\n\n\"All right, Fingal.\" I managed a weak smile.\n\n\"Good lad.\" He beamed. \"I'll make it up to you. Come on, I'll buy you a jar.\"\n\nWhy not? I had no other plans for the evening now.\n\n\"Fine.\" I rose and followed O'Reilly into the hall.\n\n\"Arf.\" A muddy Arthur Guinness, who must have accompanied his master, greeted me with enthusiasm.\n\nI watched him eying my brand-new trouser legs and prepared to fend off his amatory advances.\n\n\"Hang on to Arthur, Fingal.\"\n\n\"What? Right.\" O'Reilly grabbed the dog by the collar and the three of us set off for the Duck.\n\nOsbaldiston was behind the bar and what's known in Ireland as \"the usual suspects\" were in their accustomed places.\n\n\"Evening, Doctors,\" mine host remarked. \"The usual?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" said O'Reilly and planked himself down at a vacant table. I followed suit and Arthur Guinness tucked himself in by O'Reilly's feet. At least he seemed to have lost interest in my pants.\n\nOsbaldiston waddled over, put a whiskey in front of O'Reilly, a small sherry before me, and set a bowl of best bitter on the floor. Arthur Guinness gave a fair impression of the tattered cartoon character leaving the desert and arriving at the oasis. He was the only living creature that could sink a pint faster than Fingal or who had a similar capacity.\n\nBy my count Arthur had consumed half a gallon before we left. He was only a bit shaky on his pins but his perpetual grin was even more lopsided. I was heartily relieved that his inebriation had definitely dampened his amorous ardour. My new pants were safe.\n\nAt least they were until we stopped and waited to cross the road. Arthur must have mistaken my leg for a lamppost. I could have killed him.\nSEPTEMBER 1998\n\nIn a Pig's Ear\n\nWhat a boar\n\n\"What,\" inquired Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, \"do you know about pigs?\"\n\nI stopped in my tracks. D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. We'd had this conversation before, six months previously, when the question had reared its ugly head about the fecundity of the publican Arthur Osbaldiston's sow.\n\n\"Absolutely nothing. Don't you remember?\"\n\n\"Pity.\"\n\n\"I agree. It is a pity you don't remember.\"\n\nHe grimaced. \"No, idiot. It's a pity you don't know anything about pigs.\"\n\n\"Why is it a pity, for God's sake?\" I was feeling a tad exasperated.\n\n\"Because,\" he said, pointing vaguely across the field we were crossing, \"there's one coming.\"\n\nI glanced over my shoulder. He was right.\n\nI should tell you that we were making a house call. One of his patients, Dermot Kennedy by name, lived on a small farm on the outskirts of the village. The lane was so rutted that O'Reilly had simply abandoned the car, opened a five-barred gate, and announced, \"We'll take a shortcut through the fields.\" And so we did.\n\nThe grass was knee-deep, dew-bespangled, and absolutely perfect for ensuring that my remaining pair of trousers was sodden. (My other pair was at the dry cleaner's after O'Reilly's alcoholic Labrador, Arthur Guinness, had mistaken me for a lamppost.) The joys, I thought, of rural practice.\n\nAnd it seemed that those joys were to be multiplied.\n\n\"It's coming this way,\" O'Reilly muttered, lengthening his stride.\n\nI chanced another look. I wasn't even sure that the brute in question was a pig. It seemed to me to be about the size of a well-nourished hippopotamus, moved with the same rolling gait, and was indeed heading in our direction. It was a healthy pink colour, except for a pair of very red and rather malevolent-looking eyes, and hippopotami were exceeding rare in the fields of Ulster.\n\n\"It is a pig,\" I said, more to myself.\n\n\"Brilliant. I didn't realize you were an experienced zoologist.\" O'Reilly's walk changed to a canter and I modified my steps to match his, wondering what all the unseemly hurry was about.\n\n\"I read somewhere that domesticated boars can turn ugly,\" he said. He seemed rather short of breath.\n\nI chanced another glance behind, forgetting that such errors have been known to cost Olympic sprinters the gold medal. Our porcine pursuer had no distance to go to live up to O'Reilly's description if my mentor had been alluding to physical appearance. It also had narrowed the gap between two perspiring physicians and itself.\n\n\"Ugly?\" I asked.\n\n\"Right.\" Puff. \"Bloody big teeth.\" O'Reilly's canter moved through the gears to a fully developed gallop.\n\nHe was right about boars' teeth and, more to the point, O'Reilly was opening a respectable distance between me and his rapidly departing back. It dawned on me that if the boar astern had any intentions of using its \"bloody big teeth\" on the intruders in its territory it would settle for the closest to hand\u2014and that was me.\n\nI've heard that a small man, in the heat of adrenaline-driven action, can single-handedly lift an overturned motorcar. As I passed O'Reilly I was covering the turf at a rate that would have beaten Roger Bannister to the four-minute mile. The boar's hoofbeats drew nearer. My only consolation was that O'Reilly was a big man and it would take the animal some time to devour him. I imagine early Christians felt much the same about plumper members of their groups when the lions entered the Circus Maximus.\n\nI was even luckier than a skinny Christian. I had a way out. I was drawing nearer to the far side of the field. I went over the gate like a steeplechaser at the Grand National and nearly collided with a man who stood in the farmyard. I just had time to notice that the onlooker wore a flat tweed cap on his head and a bemused grin, confused by a ferocious squint on his face.\n\nThe quiet of the afternoon was broken only by my heavy breathing and a crashing, rending noise as O'Reilly burst through the blackthorn hedge like a Sherman tank in the Bocage country of Normandy.\n\nI watched as he took several deep breaths, examined the rents in his jacket, and made an heroic effort to regain his dignity. He stumped over to the cloth-capped stranger. Despite his recent exertions, O'Reilly's nose tip was ivory. \"Dermot Kennedy,\" O'Reilly bellowed, \"what the hell is so funny?\"\n\nMister Kennedy was unable to answer. He was doubled over and laughing like a drain.\n\n\"Jasus, Kennedy.\" I thought O'Reilly was going to burst. \"Jasus, Kennedy, you've a man-eating boar in that field. We've just escaped by the skin of our teeth. How in the name of the wee man can you laugh?\"\n\nMister Kennedy straightened up, gathered himself, and said, \"She's not a boar. That's Gertrude, the kids' pet sow. She just wanted her snout scratched.\"\n\nI made a quick preemptive strike. \"I told you, Fingal. I don't know anything about pigs.\"\nOCTOBER 1998\n\nArthur and the General\n\n\"I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree\"\n\n\"Quick, Pat,\" said O'Reilly. \"Take Arthur Guinness inside the house.\"\n\n\"Why?\" I asked, looking at O'Reilly's black Labrador, who was making a peculiar ululation and staring intently upward into the boughs of the big sycamore tree that grew at the bottom of O'Reilly's back garden.\n\n\"Don't ask, just do it like a good lad. Maggie's coming.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said, reaching for Arthur's collar and wondering why O'Reilly wouldn't want Maggie MacCorkle, she of the supracranial headaches, to see his dog. \"Right.\" I'd been impressed as a child when shown a picture of a statue of the Greek mythological figure Laco\u00f6n wrestling with two enormous snakes. I achieved a deeper understanding of the old boy's difficulties when I tried to persuade Arthur Guinness to go where he did not wish. Little boys may be made of \"snaps and snails and puppy dogs' tails,\" but adolescent Labradors are constructed from high-tensile steel springs. I pulled in the general direction of the back door to O'Reilly's house. Arthur dug in his heels, cranked up the volume of his yodelling, and stared straight up.\n\nMy gaze followed his and I wondered what up the tree had captured the dog's undivided attention. There was something just visible in a fork of a high branch. The something was orange-coloured and bore a striking resemblance to\u2014Maggie's ginger tomcat, General Montgomery.\n\nAll was revealed unto me. With the exception of O'Reilly's furniture-clawing kitten, all cats were anathema to Arthur G. It was almost certainly his fault that General Montgomery was up the tree, and that would explain why O'Reilly wanted the dog out of sight when Maggie arrived.\n\nThe least I could do was accommodate my mentor. Besides, I wanted to see what would happen when Maggie discovered the whereabouts of her perpendicularly placed pussycat.\n\n\"Come on, Guinness.\" By dint of superhuman effort I managed to haul the black dog along the path and shove him inside the house. He wasn't happy to be incarcerated and expressed his dissatisfaction by hurling himself against the closed door.\n\nI ignored the dog and headed back. My return to the scene of the action coincided with Maggie's arrival. Now that Guinness was offstage, a semblance of quiet had returned, punctuated only by an intermittent yowling from above.\n\n\"Evening, Maggie,\" I heard O'Reilly say.\n\n\"Evening, Doctor,\" Maggie replied, craning her neck and staring upward. \"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Is that you, General? Is that where you are? I've been looking for you. How did you ever get up there?\"\n\nI saw O'Reilly blush and was convinced that my original supposition that the General had been chased up the tree by Arthur Guinness was correct. Fortunately the cat didn't speak English and couldn't give O'Reilly away.\n\n\"Will you not come down now?\" Maggie said and made \"push-wushing\" noises. O'Reilly said nothing and the General gave a fair impression of an air-raid siren. He budged not an inch. In both his colour and his lack of locomotion he could have passed for an Ulster Orangeman whose motto is \"Not an Inch.\"\n\n\"What'll we do, Doctor?\" Maggie implored.\n\nI saw what was coming next and launched a preemptive strike. \"It's a pity about my acrophobia, Maggie,\" I said gravely, adding both for her benefit and for O'Reilly's, \"I've a terrible fear of high places.\"\n\nI could see by the pallor creeping into O'Reilly's nose tip that I'd been right again. He had been going to suggest that I climb the tree. It was his dog that had put the cat there. As far as I was concerned, natural justice demanded that O'Reilly get it down.\n\nGeneral Montgomery yowled. Maggie sniffed. I waited.\n\n\"All right now, Maggie.\" O'Reilly shrugged off his jacket and handed it to me. \"Don't you fret.\" He hauled himself onto the lowest bough. His upward progress reminded me of a nature film I'd once seen of a three-toed sloth as it made its hesitant, ponderous way through the jungle. All O'Reilly needed was a bit more hair.\n\nHis nose drew level with the General's perch. I heard the cat spit and O'Reilly's expletive as claws raked his schnozzle. Perhaps my moving well away from the base of the tree reflected a degree of cowardice but I had no desire to be underneath if O'Reilly lost his hold.\n\nI was impressed by his skilful descent, the General tucked like a rugby ball under one arm. He reached the ground, offered the cat to Maggie, shot me a look of utter disdain, and rubbed the back of his hand over his bloody nose. \"Here you are, Maggie. Now don't let General Montgomery go up any more trees.\"\n\n\"I won't, Doctor.\"\n\nI'm sure Maggie meant it. It was a pity that at that moment Mrs. Kincaid opened the back door to yell, \"There's a phone call for you, Doctor Taylor.\"\n\nMy last picture as I went inside to take the call was of a happy Arthur Guinness at the tree's foot and the tweed-covered backside of O'Reilly as he ascended on his second mission of mercy.\nNOVEMBER 1998\n\nSomething Happened\n\nArthur Guinness has a run-in with the law\n\nI'd been away from the practice for a week and had returned just in time to help O'Reilly with a busy morning's surgery. I didn't have the opportunity to ask him to bring me up to date on the doings in the village of Ballybucklebo. I hoped he'd fill me in over lunch, but after the last patient of the morning departed, O'Reilly wanted to make a house call, on foot, to a nearby cottage. I decided to accompany him.\n\nIt was a glorious June mid-morning, a grand day for a walk, and after the bustle of Belfast I was enjoying the relative tranquillity of Ballybucklebo's only street. As we walked I surmised that it was unlikely that gold had been found in Jimmy Ferguson's manure heap or that Maggie MacCorkle had won the Miss Ireland beauty pageant during my absence. Nothing much ever happened in the place. I knew that.\n\nAs usual, I was wrong.\n\n\"Jasus,\" said O'Reilly, staring straight ahead.\n\nMy gaze followed his and I saw approaching us the portly figure of Police Constable Michael McGillicuddy, Royal Ulster Constabulary, sole uniformed upholder of Lex Britannicus in the village and the surrounding townlands.\n\nI knew that O'Reilly's opinion of PC McGillicuddy, RUC, was rather to the south of contempt. As I remembered, there was something about one of Lord Fitzgurgle's pheasants that had found its way into the backseat of O'Reilly's car\u2014all unknown to his lordship or his gamekeeper\u2014and a debate between the chubby arm of the law and the local representative of Hygeiea and Panacea surrounding the ownership of that deceased member of the family Phaisanus versicolour.\n\nMy musing was interrupted by O'Reilly muttering, \"Bloody dog.\"\n\nI assumed he was referring to Arthur Guinness, but before I had time to inquire, O'Reilly stopped walking and I was forced to follow suit. Our progress was blocked by PC M. McG., RUC.\n\n\"Morning, Doctors.\"\n\n\"Morning, Officer,\" I replied. It has always struck me as sensible to keep on the good sides of policemen, parking wardens, gamekeepers, water bailiffs, and such. I didn't expect O'Reilly to do more than grunt, given his known opinion of the constable in particular and the rest of the human race in general. As you well know, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly treated few people with respect, let alone deference.\n\nI imagine Catherine the Great, or \"Big Katy\" as she would have been called in Northern Ireland, had a similar approach to the citizens of Mother Russia. \"Rodina,\" I believe, is the correct term in Russian for the place\u2014but you probably didn't want to know that. Anyway, Big Katy would condescend to peasant and archduke alike. They in turn would grovel to her.\n\nShe had a bit of an edge over O'Reilly. Although almost every citizen of Ballybucklebo and its environs did metaphorically tug their forelocks to their physician, he didn't have the right to order them shot if they did not. And I know that in his heart he believed he should have that prerogative.\n\nIt was with those thoughts running through my mind that I watched in amazement as he smiled, inclined his head, touched the peak of his cap with the fingers of his right hand, wished Constable McGillicuddy a very good morning, and inquired about his health.\n\n\"I'm grand, Doctor,\" replied the constable. \"Grand altogether.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said O'Reilly. \"Very good. Well. Must be off. Duty calls.\" He sidled past McGillicuddy and I followed. What on earth could have happened to reduce O'Reilly to such a pacific state?\n\n\"Bloody dog,\" he grunted as he strode along.\n\n\"Arthur?\"\n\n\"Arthur.\"\n\n\"More cats in trees?\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head. \"Worse.\" He stopped dead. I halted. Fingal turned to face me. \"I had a burglar.\"\n\n\"My God.\" Something had happened in my absence.\n\n\"Indeed. Some misbegotten nitwit broke into my place. Arthur's meant to be a watchdog.\" O'Reilly snorted. \"Bloody animal must have nearly beaten the intruder to death with his tail. Flaming dog didn't even bark, never mind tear the man's throat out.\"\n\nI had no difficulty believing that. Arthur Guinness, apart from an unrequited passion for my trouser leg, was the gentlest dog in Ireland.\n\n\"What was taken?\" I asked.\n\nO'Reilly shrugged. \"Couple of bottles of whiskey. Not much, but I thought I should at least make our local Sherlock Holmes earn his wages, so I telephoned him.\"\n\nAha, I thought, and McGillicuddy had apprehended the villain and recovered O'Reilly's whiskey. That would explain his recent civility.\n\n\"Bloody dog,\" he said.\n\n\"Why?\" I asked. \"Arthur's a retriever, not a Rottweiler. You can hardly blame him for not going for the burglar.\"\n\n\"Burglar? Burglar?\" O'Reilly shook his head. \"I would forgive him that, but just now you saw me being nice to McGillicuddy.\"\n\n\"Because he got your whiskey back.\"\n\n\"I wish,\" said O'Reilly. \"I have to be nice to the constable because, after neglecting to deal with my burglar, do you know what was the first thing Arthur-bloody-Guinness did when McGillicuddy arrived?\"\n\nI shook my head and saw O'Reilly's brows knit and his nose tip pale. \"Arthur-bloody-Guinness bit McGillicuddy.\"\n\nI had difficulty stifling a laugh, which, if the look on O'Reilly's face was anything to go by, would have been as appropriate as a snigger at a funeral.\n\nTo my surprise O'Reilly himself was starting to smile. \"Still,\" he said, turning to stare at the constable's retreating back, \"old Arthur G. does have impeccable taste.\"\nDECEMBER 1998\n\nHell on Wheels\n\nDonal Donnelly and his venerable velocipede\n\nI was walking along the street on my way to make a house call. O'Reilly was taking morning surgery. My forward progress was blocked by Donal Donnelly, who clearly wanted my opinion. \"It's a beauty, isn't it, Doctor Taylor, sir?\" he asked.\n\nYou'll recall Donal, a gangly youth who occasionally worked as an itinerant barman at Lord Fitzgurgle's soirees. You can't place him? Not surprising, really. Donal had once been described by Kinky\u2014O'Reilly's housekeeper\u2014as \"an unpredisposing sort of a kind of a man.\" He was. Utterly unpredisposing. There's no reason why you should remember him.\n\nCast your mind back to the time Donal stalled his father's tractor at the village's only traffic light. That was when O'Reilly, stuck behind as the light kept changing colours, left his car, walked up to the tractor, and asked a terrified Donal if he was waiting for a particular shade of green.\n\nGot him now? Right. Twenty-three, four foot ten, ninety-one pounds, ginger hair, a squint, buck teeth that were the envy of the local hares, and a tendency to acneiform eruptions.\n\nYou're probably wondering why I'm spending so long getting you up to speed on the physical characteristics of Donal Donnelly. You may even have forgotten his opening remarks: \"It's a beauty, isn't it, Doctor Taylor, sir?\"\n\nThe \"it\" in question was a Raleigh bicycle. Donal stood beside it holding on to the handlebars, beaming at the elderly velocipede with all the pride of a new mother looking into her pram.\n\n\"Indeed, Donal.\" The white lie was invented for these situations. \"Beauty\" and Donal's 'cycle could only occupy the same sentence when ice skates are sold in Hades, but Donal was a gentle soul and if he wanted me to admire his new possession I saw no reason not to.\n\nI gazed at the machine. Once it had been black. There were flakes of enamel scattered over the uniform patina of rust that covered the frame. It was the woman's model. Men's bikes had a crossbar that ran horizontally from the front wheel-forks to the saddle post. On the woman's model, the bars dipped from the fork to the bit where the pedals are attached. The arrangement was a hangover from the time women wore voluminous skirts. Real men\u2014the non-quiche-eating types\u2014wouldn't have been caught dead on a woman's bike.\n\n\"It only cost me thirty bob,\" Donal said.\n\n\"You stole it.\" I couldn't bring myself to tell Donal that he might have made a reasonable bargain if the previous owner had paid him thirty shillings to take the thing away.\n\n\"Just you wait until I've fixed her up a bit, Doctor.\" He pushed the lever that should have activated the handlebar-mounted bell. There was no \"ting,\" just a rusty grinding noise. \"Just you wait.\"\n\n\"I'll do that,\" I said, glancing at my watch, \"but I'd best be getting on now, Donal.\"\n\nHe touched the peak of his cloth cap and we parted. I confess I thought little of Donal Donnelly and his bike for several months.\n\n* * *\n\nThe next time I saw the bike it was propped against the side of O'Reilly's house. I didn't recognize it at first as Donal's. He had indeed \"fixed it up a bit.\" The rust had been sandpapered away and the frame painted a screaming primrose yellow. A chrome-plated bell was fixed to the right handlebar. The mudguards' lime green shone in the morning sunlight. Every spoke had been tinted scarlet. This, it must be remembered, was before LSD and the psychedelic movement. I was so engrossed I didn't notice Donal and O'Reilly approaching.\n\n\"Morning, Doctor Taylor.\" I turned and saw Donal grinning from ear to ear. \"Told you I'd fix her up.\" He laid one hand on the saddle. \"And Doctor O'Reilly says I can keep her.\" The relief in his voice was palpable. \"That's right, isn't it, sir?\"\n\n\"Indeed it is, Donal.\" I could see O'Reilly was struggling to keep a straight face.\n\n\"That's good,\" I mumbled, wondering what that last remark meant. I watched Donal cycle away with all the dignity of the maharajah of Ponderistan in his state barouche, then turned to O'Reilly, who was now laughing openly.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" he said, \"poor Donal.\" A frown crossed O'Reilly's craggy visage. \"That bloody man the Reverend McWheezle should have known better.\"\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\n\"Donal's getting married.\"\n\n\"Never. Who to?\"\n\n\"Maggie MacCorkle's niece, Martha, and the pair of them went to McWheezle for a bit of a rehearsal.\"\n\nI was having some difficulty understanding what this had to do with Donal keeping his bicycle.\n\nO'Reilly explained. \"They got to the bit, 'With all my worldly goods I thee endow.' Donal asks what 'endow' means. McWheezle tells him Martha gets all Donal's possessions.\"\n\n\"He didn't.\"\n\n\"He did, and poor old Donal's been stewing for a week about whether to give up Martha or his bike.\"\n\n\"And that's why you told him he could keep the bike.\"\n\n\"It is,\" said O'Reilly.\n\n\"But how could you outrank McWheezle on a theological question?\"\n\n\"Easy,\" he said, pulling out his briar. \"I told Donal that endowments were made after a man dies. Martha gets the bike in Donal's will.\"\n\nI had to laugh. \"You're a crafty old devil, Fingal. The Wily O'Reilly.\"\n\n\"I am,\" he said, \"and you can buy me a pint.\"\nJANUARY 1999\n\nWhat's in a Name?\n\nO'Reilly checks in\n\nSome ethnic expressions suffer in the translation and yet if left untranslated are well understood. Take the Yiddish \"chutzpa.\" There's no English equivalent nor does there need to be. I know I need not expound further, at least to those of you who know my old mentor, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, when I tell you that he had \"a good conceit of himself.\" And you know he didn't \"suffer fools gladly.\"\n\nThis combination could lead to misunderstandings, pallor of the O'Reilly schnozzle, and as much heat generated as in one of those bizarre chemistry experiments we were forced to conduct as first-year medical students.\n\nI was present when O'Reilly's unwillingness to condescend to lesser mortals led to such an inevitable outcome. To add spice, it was one of those rare situations when O'Reilly was bested in a verbal joust. The reagents in the reaction were Fingal Flahertie and a desk clerk at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin. The catalyst was a suitcase.\n\nIt had been a present to O'Reilly from Lord Fitzgurgle. Fingal was inordinately proud of the buffed pigskin and his name, Doctor F. F. O'Reilly, inscribed on a small brass plaque.\n\nHow the clerk and O'Reilly came into contact requires a few words of explanation. The occasion was one of those annual exercises of legalized thuggery. I refer of course to the sport of rugby football. According to tradition, the game was invented at the English school Rugby, when during a soccer game one young lad picked up the ball and ran with it. I favour an earlier explanation that the modern game is a watered-down version of a contest invented by the Visigoths, who used a human head for a ball.\n\nO'Reilly had been a keen player in his youth. (I believe that if gladiatorial contests had been legal in his salad days he would have taken an active role. He was, as you'll recall, a former boxing champion of Her Majesty's Royal Navy.) He always went to Dublin to cheer on the Irish rugby team. And this was the second time he'd asked me to come as his guest.\n\n\"It'll be a grand trip,\" he announced. \"And we'll stay at the Gresham again.\"\n\n\"Terrific.\" I almost meant it. The internationally recognized luxury of the Gresham Hotel would almost make up for being driven to Dublin by O'Reilly. I won't bore you with an account of the journey. I will take you directly to the Gresham.\n\nO'Reilly strode up the front steps with the force of the Bolshevik Army at the St. Petersburg Winter Palace. He brushed aside the efforts of the uniformed doorman to carry the pigskin portmanteau. \"Jasus, Gallagher. You know I always carry my own luggage.\"\n\nThe doorman tugged at his forelock. \"Sorry, Doctor, sir. I didn't recognize you for a minute.\"\n\n\"You what? Haven't I been coming here for twenty years now?\"\n\n\"Sorry, sir.\"\n\nO'Reilly grunted. \"Come on, Taylor. I want to get us registered and go for a jar.\" He shouldered his way through the crowd in the lobby. \"This won't take long. All the staff know me here.\"\n\nI refrained from remarking that that had not been initially obvious from the way the doorman had behaved, and followed in O'Reilly's footsteps.\n\nHe halted at the registration desk, set his case on the plushly carpeted floor, and leant forward, arms folded on the counter.\n\nThe desk clerk was filing papers in pigeonholes behind the counter. As was the custom in those days, he wore a full morning suit, tail coat and pinstripes.\n\nI heard a low rumbling coming from O'Reilly and knew how much he disliked being ignored.\n\n\"Oi,\" he said.\n\nEither he was not overheard or the clerk chose to overlook the less than polite remark.\n\n\"OI!\"\n\nThe clerk half-turned, looked over a pair of spectacles at O'Reilly, and returned to his filing.\n\nO'Reilly's nose tip paled. I knew he was going to go ballistic. (As an aside, if you believe you've found an anachronism because the expression \"going ballistic\" belongs to the '90s, not the '60s, let me remind you that the original ballista, a Roman artillery piece, predated even O'Reilly by the odd millennium.) He lifted a hand and smashed it down on a bell that adorned the counter. Quasimodo would have been proud of the clangour.\n\n\"OI, YOU!\"\n\nThe clerk turned. \"Is sir addressing me?\"\n\n\"Sir bloody well is. I want to register.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" The clerk pulled a ledger along the countertop.\n\n\"What name, sir?\"\n\n\"Jasus, not you too,\" said O'Reilly. \"How many years have I been coming here?\"\n\n\"I haven't the faintest idea, sir. I started working here two weeks ago.\" The clerk sniffed. \"Now. What name, sir?\"\n\n\"Use your eyes, you thick bastard.\" O'Reilly pointed at his suitcase. \"My name's on the case.\"\n\n\"Certainly, sir.\" The clerk scrutinized the luggage. \"I see,\" he said. \"Silly of me.\"\n\n\"I should think so,\" said O'Reilly, calming a little, at least until the clerk remarked in unctuous tones, \"And how long will Mister Genuine Pigskin be staying with us?\"\nFEBRUARY 1999\n\nFill 'er Up\n\nDonal Donnelly makes a fuel of O'Reilly\n\nWhen I told you about Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly and the desk clerk at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin, I remarked that I wouldn't weary you with an account of our drive there from Belfast. There was no promise, overt or implied, not to tell you about our drive back.\n\nMotorcars were to O'Reilly as explosive-laden bombers were to kamikaze pilots. The only difference between the \"Divine Wind\" fliers in their Mitsubishis and O'Reilly in his long-nosed Rover car was that he confidently expected to return from each mission. In our small village and the environs all the locals were well aware of his propensities and were as adept at taking avoiding action as U.S. warships in Leyte Gulf. Well, most U.S. warships.\n\nLike some of the smaller aircraft carriers in the Philippines, Donal Donnelly was an exception. In his last vehicular encounter with Fingal Flahertie\u2014when Donal's tractor had stalled at a red light\u2014the unfortunate youth had been the subject of a tongue-lashing of ferocious intensity.\n\nThis fact is germane to the rest of the story. I hadn't realized at the time that Donal could harbour a grudge and, like the mills of God, he ground slowly, but he ground exceeding small. I probably would never have known if O'Reilly hadn't told me the story on the drive back from Dublin.\n\nWe left the Gresham on Sunday morning. Ireland had beaten England the day before and we'd celebrated with some of Fingal's old classmates from Trinity College. I had a very sore head, O'Reilly looked as if he might bleed to death from his eyeballs, and I had a distinct impression I'd be better to go home by train.\n\nCertain mystic sects believe the gods are especially protective of small children and idiots. The same deities must also have held a watching brief for O'Reilly when he was behind the wheel\u2014and I leave it to you to decide under which category. If, as O'Reilly's passenger, I qualified for attention from the deities, it was definitely because I was an idiot. There was a perfectly good train service from Dublin to the North of Ireland.\n\n\"Hop in,\" he said, climbing into the driver's seat. \"Great day.\"\n\nAs I boarded I couldn't help but agree. It was one of those crisp February mornings\u2014sun bright, sky eggshell-blue, clouds puffy and white\u2014that God makes in Ireland to ensure that never more than half the population can bring themselves to emigrate.\n\n\"Right,\" said O'Reilly, grinding the Rover into gear and pulling away from the curb in a series of jerks that would have made a musclebound kangaroo proud, \"won't take us long to get home.\"\n\n\"Good.\" I crossed my fingers and hunched down in my seat.\n\nWe managed to leave the city of Dublin more or less intact. I didn't count the dray horse that was last seen disappearing along O'Connell Street at Mach 0.5 or the two dustbins that were bowled over. I was heartily relieved when the Rover hurtled along the country roads, if for no other reason than there were fewer impediments to forward progress.\n\n\"We'll be across the border in no time,\" said O'Reilly, swerving to avoid a chicken.\n\nI glanced at the dashboard instruments. The speedometer read seventy miles per hour and\u2014oops\u2014the petrol gauge read empty.\n\n\"Er, Fingal. I think we're going to run out of petrol.\" I hoped he'd take my word for it and not feel constrained to take his eyes off the road.\n\nHe glanced down at the gauge. The car wobbled across the white line and back to O'Reilly's side, missing a gypsy caravan by the width of a coat of paint.\n\n\"You're right,\" he said. \"We'll stop at the next petrol pump.\"\n\nI was surprised. O'Reilly always mistrusted instruments that didn't show him what he wanted to see. And petrol was at that time considerably cheaper in the North of our divided country.\n\n\"You believe the gauge?\" I asked.\n\nHe laughed like a drain. \"I do now,\" he said, \"ever since that Donal Donnelly gave me my come-uppance.\"\n\n\"What\u2014?\" I was momentarily interrupted as the car crested a small rise and for several seconds was airborne. The crash of our yielding to Earth's gravitational field muffled O'Reilly's chuckles, then he said, \"A while back there I was very interested in the petrol consumption of this motorcar.\"\n\n\"I remember.\" I did indeed. He'd been extremely boring on the subject and then inexplicably had lost interest.\n\n\"Do you recall the week I thought I was going to get a hundred miles to the gallon?\"\n\n\"Watch the sheep, Fingal.\"\n\nI swear he drove the only vehicle that could go from seventy to zero in less than a microsecond. The halted Rover oscillated on its springs while two black-faced ewes ambled across the road. The gears ground and the Rover continued on its way.\n\n\"Can you imagine I really thought this car would do a hundred miles on one gallon of petrol?\" O'Reilly snorted. \"Boy, was I the right eejit.\"\n\nI was relieved that we were travelling rather more sedately. I was also surprised that Fingal would admit to having been wrong\u2014and smile about it.\n\n\"I'd spent all week telling the lads at the Mucky Duck I'd got her up to forty, then fifty. They started taking bets when I'd hit seventy.\"\n\nIn those days, thirty miles to the gallon was pretty impressive. \"So you're telling me the instruments were wrong?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not at all. They were spot on. I might have believed I'd made the hundred if I hadn't caught him.\"\n\nAre you a bit lost? Don't worry. I was often confused and confounded by O'Reilly.\n\n\"Him?\" I inquired as O'Reilly pulled the car off the road beside a single petrol pump.\n\n\"Him,\" he said. \"Donal Donnelly.\"\n\n\"Right,\" I agreed, happy that the car had stopped. I watched a red-faced gentleman, presumably the owner of the pump, amble toward our car.\n\n\"Aye,\" said O'Reilly, rolling down the window. \"Donal had heard about the whole business. Every night he'd been slipping into my garage, and do you know what he'd done?\"\n\nI shook my head.\n\nO'Reilly nodded at the pump's proprietor. \"Fill her up, please.\" He turned back to me. \"Just like Donal. Just to make a goat of me, Donal Donnelly had been topping up my petrol tank.\"\nMARCH 1999\n\nA Curious Affair\n\nThings that go \"yeeow\" in the night\n\n\"Riven\" is a word that has slipped from common usage, but I can't think of a better one to describe the effects of the shriek that tore through the fabric of the early morning hours chez O'Reilly. Believe me, the night was riven\u2014positively riven\u2014by a caterwauling like the death throes of a banshee.\n\nI sat up in bed. I didn't have goose bumps; I had ostrich wens. My erector pilae were in spasm. I silently begged the Deity to ensure that whatever was making the noise would find the slumbering O'Reilly in his bedroom on the floor below before it came after me. I hauled the blankets up round my chin and listened.\n\n\"Thumpity-thump\" came from below, drowning the chattering of my teeth. That would be O'Reilly's feet hitting the floor.\n\n\"Stop making that **#**#@!* noise!\"\n\nThree miles offshore the lighthouse keepers must have heard O'Reilly's dulcet tones.\n\nThe creature ignored his blandishments and went up and down the scale like an air-raid siren with operatic pretensions.\n\nJudging by the clumping on the stairs, O'Reilly was heading down.\n\n\"Shut up!\" O'Reilly's command made the glasses on my nightstand rattle. The eldritch howling ceased as if the sound waves had been sliced with a razor. The front door opened and was slammed. I heard O'Reilly climbing the stairs muttering, \"Bloody cat.\"\n\nWhen O'Reilly appeared for breakfast, my initial thought was to avoid any mention of the mysterious events of the earlier part of the morning. I'd slept badly and was not in the mood for conversation.\n\n\"Did you hear all that row?\" he asked, helping himself to a pair of Mrs. Kincaid's poached kippers from a steamer on the sideboard.\n\nI could imagine the mayor of Hiroshima asking a passing citizen, \"Did you notice that bang?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" I said, waiting for O'Reilly to be seated at the table. \"Most curious.\" I hoped my uninterested tone would stifle any further discussion. \"Some tea?\"\n\nHe ignored my offer to pour. \"Curiosity, my boy. Curiosity. You've said it.\" His speech was muffled by a mouthful of kipper.\n\n\"Actually, I said, 'Most curious,' but it's probably the same thing.\"\n\n\"It's not,\" he said. \"'Most curious' describes your appreciation of the events. 'Curiosity' is the property that was responsible for the row.\"\n\n\"Curiouser and curiouser,\" I remarked.\n\n\"Do not,\" he said, \"try to confuse matters by quoting Lewis Carroll. The issue is one of curiosity.\"\n\n\"Killed the cat, I believe.\" I hoped that might put an end to the discussion. I was unprepared for the effects of that remark.\n\nHe guffawed\u2014loudly\u2014almost choked on a kipper bone, and slapped himself on the chest. \"Absolutely right. It damn nearly did.\"\n\nI remembered his \"bloody cat\" remark.\n\n\"This morning?\" I inquired.\n\n\"Umm,\" he said, holding out his teacup. \"Pour.\"\n\nI did as I was told. \"Lady Macbeth couldn't contain hers.\" He shovelledsugar into his cup.\n\nYou may remember an episode with a kitten that had savaged my finger. She'd grown into a massive moggie and rejoiced in the name of Lady Macbeth. It sounded as though something untoward had happened to my feline nemesis. \"Go on,\" I said.\n\n\"Piqued your curiosity, have I?\"\n\nI let the remark pass, although the frustrating thing was that he had.\n\n\"Thought so.\" O'Reilly reached for the milk jug. \"Well, the old curiosity piqued Lady Macbeth last night. Mrs. Kincaid must have set a couple of mouse traps.\"\n\nMouse traps. Little wooden devices with bait and a spring-loaded bar. Mouse took the bait, dislodged a lock, and released the bar, which snapped over with enough force to break the mouse's neck.\n\n\"Lady MacB must have decided to investigate.\" He poured milk into his tea. \"Stupid animal had one stuck on the end of her nose.\"\n\nDespite my dislike of the beast I couldn't help feeling a certain sympathy for her plight.\n\n\"No real harm done, in spite of the row she was making,\" said O'Reilly. \"More a matter of hurt pride.\" He lifted a forkful of kipper. \"She can have the leftover kippers for her breakfast. That'll cheer her up.\" He masticated slowly and swallowed. \"It might teach her a lesson. Like the one I taught Donal Donnelly.\"\n\n\"Donal?\"\n\n\"Um. He was most curious.\"\n\nI confess so was I, until O'Reilly glanced at his watch and said, \"Come on. Eat up. We're going to be late for morning surgery. I'll tell you that story at lunchtime.\"\n\nTo be continued.\nAPRIL 1999\n\nCuriouser and Curiouser\n\nThings that go \"aargh\" in the day\n\n\"I'll tell you that story at lunchtime.\" That had been O'Reilly's parting remark as we finished our breakfasts and headed off to our morning tasks. He'd gone to visit Lord Fitzgurgle to make comforting noises about his lordship's gout\u2014and probably spend the rest of the morning sampling the baronial sherry.\n\nI'd not had much time to wonder about the story that was meant to be forthcoming at lunchtime. The question of Donal Donnelly's curiosity had been pushed aside by the demands of a busy morning.\n\nI ushered Maggie MacCorkle, my last patient, into the surgery. She'd come in for a fresh supply of the vitamin pills that, if taken ten minutes before the onset, prevented the recurrence of headaches two inches above the crown of her head.\n\nI reached into the cubbyhole of the rolltop desk where O'Reilly kept his free samples and produced the magic placebo.\n\n\"Ah, thanks, Doctor,\" said Maggie, stuffing the bottle into her handbag.\n\nI hoped she was going to leave, as it was now half an hour past lunchtime, but she was anxious to tell me about the doings of her cat, General Montgomery.\n\nI listened\u2014I hope patiently. Perhaps it was my empty stomach's quite believable impression of those boiling mud pits in New Zealand that prompted her to remark, \"Ah sure but I've taken up enough of your time, Doctor sir.\"\n\n\"That's all right, Maggie.\" I held the door, waiting for her to leave. \"Glad to hear the General's still bright as a bee.\"\n\nShe sniffed. \"He is that\u2014and it's more than I can say for that buck-eejit Donal.\"\n\nDonal Donnelly, you'll remember\u2014he of the psychedelic bicycle\u2014was married to Maggie's niece, Martha. \"You'll not need me to be telling you about that one,\" she said. \"Away on, Doctor dear, and get your lunch.\"\n\n\"Right, Maggie.\"\n\nAs I watched her go, I began to wonder about a strange series of coincidences. Maggie's chat about her cat had led her admittedly sometimes off-centre thoughts to Donal Donnelly. Last night O'Reilly's cat, Lady Macbeth, had suffered a misfortune. It had led his usually convoluted intellectual processes to Donal Donnelly.\n\nSomewhere in the back of my invariably muddled mind I started to hear the theme music of an American TV program that was starting to gain some notoriety even in Ireland. A little subconscious voice said, \"Welcome to the Twilight Zone\"\u2014although in Ballybucklebo it would more likely be the \"Early Evening Environs.\"\n\nComforting myself with the thought that whatever supernatural events had befallen Donal were more likely to have been the result of too long a stay in the Mucky Duck rather than a close encounter of the third kind, I left the surgery, crossed the hall, and went into the dining room.\n\n\"Busy?\" O'Reilly muttered through a mouthful of chicken pot pie. I could see the congealed remnants of what half an hour ago would have been another of Mrs. Kincaid's culinary gems.\n\nI nodded, helped myself to a glutinous plateful, and sat at the big table. \"I've just been having a chat with Maggie.\"\n\nHe hiccupped. So he had been at the sherry.\n\n\"She mentioned Donal. You said you were going to tell me a story about him.\"\n\n\"Did I?\"\n\n\"You did. About curiosity.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" he said, and hiccupped. \"Poor old Donal.\"\n\nI chewed my chilled chicken.\n\n\"Do you know what a polecat is?\" he asked, and before I could answer, continued, \"It's a member of the ferret family\u2014but bigger. More teeth, more claws.\"\n\nI knew as much about overgrown weasels as I did about pigs. Nothing. I'd conveniently forgotten that years ago, when I introduced you to O'Reilly, I may have remarked that among his many attributes he was an unregenerate poacher\u2014and in Ireland ferrets were as much tools of that particular trade as scalpels are to surgeons.\n\n\"That's nice,\" I said.\n\n\"Donal didn't think so.\"\n\nI swallowed. \"Fingal, it's been a long morning. I've a list of home visits as long as your arm to do after my late and thus nearly inedible lunch. If you want me to say I'm curious, consider it said, but please get to the point.\"\n\n\"What point?\" He footered about lighting his briar. I swear O'Reilly did it simply to irritate.\n\nI pushed my half-finished plate away. \"This morning you said that Donal was curious, you taught him a lesson, and that you would explain at lunch.\"\n\n\"I am explaining.\"\n\n\"Then what does my state of knowledge about stickcats have to do with Donal?\"\n\n\"Polecats, son. Polecats. They bite.\"\n\n\"Fingal.\"\n\nHe hiccupped, exhaled smoke, and chuckled. \"All right. Donal used to do odd jobs for me, but apart from his congenital dimness he had a fatal flaw.\"\n\n\"Let me guess. Curiosity?\"\n\n\"Right. He couldn't keep his nose out of things that didn't concern him.\" O'Reilly's brow wrinkled. \"I didn't really mind him rummaging about in the drinks cabinet, but I drew the line when I caught him reading patients' charts.\"\n\nMy immediate thought was that under those circumstances Doctor O. would have been less likely to draw a line than dig an enormous trench. \"What did you do?\"\n\n\"I spoke to Fergal McGillicutty and borrowed something from him.\"\n\nMcGillicutty was a farm labourer who, for a price and no questions asked, was always able to produce a brace of pheasants or a fat hare for Mrs. Kincaid.\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"I put it in a box in the back garden just before Donal came over to cut the grass. I told him that under no circumstances was he to open the box.\"\n\n\"He opened the box, didn't he, Fingal?\"\n\n\"Curiosity killed the cat.\" O'Reilly could barely contain himself. \"But Donal survived. He only needed six stitches.\"\n\n\"Good God. What was in the box?\"\n\n\"I told you,\" said O'Reilly. \"Polecats bite.\"\n\nMy involuntary laughter was cut short when he looked pointedly at his watch and said, \"Isn't it about time you were off to see your customers?\"\n\n\"Right,\" I said, rising.\n\n\"Don't you want to know what I'm going to be up to this afternoon?\"\n\nI knew very well he'd go to sleep off this morning's load of sherry, but I said, and I meant it, \"I'm not curious, Fingal. Not in the least.\"\nMAY 1999\n\nA Matter of Time\n\nO'Reilly bends the law\n\nThere's a difference between broken and bent. If you don't believe me, I'll explain. As with anything vaguely related to Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, you may find the explanation convoluted.\n\nWhen I worked for Doctor O'Reilly, Ireland had returned to daylight saving time, but during the second great numbered unpleasantness we'd had a peculiar system of \"double summer time\" when the clocks were advanced not one but two hours.\n\nThis, it was widely believed, had been introduced to foil the Luftwaffe's night bombing raids. How, the denizens of Ballybucklebo reasoned, could the German air force indulge itself in a touch of nocturnal bombing when there was no longer such a thing as night, and the sun, literally, shone at midnight? (It was this kind of reasoning that allowed the Irish to plan a manned mission to the sun. They'd avoid the heat by going after dark.) The Germans short-circuited the defensive ploy by resorting to what was, according to the new clock settings, very early morning bombing raids. This upset that sense of fairness so dear to the hearts of the average Ulsterman; the Germans were regarded as no longer playing by the rules.\n\nDoctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly would never have failed to play by the rules. Never. He was, or at least as far as Her Majesty's Royal Navy had been concerned, he had been, an officer and a gentleman. I can categorically assure you I never saw him break a single rule during all the time I spent with him.\n\nBending was another matter. It's said the first pretzel was designed by O'Reilly when he mistook a straight biscuit for a statute of which he disapproved.\n\nYou may be wondering what the vagaries of springing forward, falling back, and O'Reilly's disdain for the laws of mere mortals have in common. To help you see the connection let me add the catalyst\u2014alcohol. Still confused? Bear with me.\n\nYou do know that O'Reilly enjoyed a shot, both in the \"of whiskey\" sense and at the occasional unsuspecting duck. It might help if I explained that the months for molesting migratory mallard ran from September to February. You also are aware, because I've been at some pains to tell you, that when the omens were propitious on any given autumn or winter Saturday, Doctor O. would stick me with being on call, summon Arthur Guinness, and vanish in the pre-dawn blackness to bang and blaze barrel after barrel at the bewildered birds.\n\nOn the third Saturday of October in the year of our Lord I don't remember exactly, O'Reilly and the faithful hound had been somewhere on the foreshore of Strangford Lough since well before dawn. I'd been ministering to the medical emergencies: one cut finger, one marble up a nostril, and one hangover\u2014Donal Donnelly's\u2014that could have been mistaken for the symptoms of a brain tumour in anyone who actually possessed such an organ. I'd eaten a splendid late supper\u2014slices of one of Mrs. Kincaid's roast hams\u2014and for once feeling like a bit of company had wandered over to the Mucky Duck.\n\nBy this stage of my apprenticeship with Doctor O. I was well known to the locals and they to me. The snug was full of the usual suspects\u2014Arthur Osbaldiston behind the bar, Fergal McGillicutty, Donal Donnelly \"having a hair of the dog,\" as the English call it, or, as the Irish say, \"taking the cure\"\u2014in front. The local constable leant against the bar, straight glass of stout clutched in one hand.\n\n\"Evening, Doc. Sherry?\" Arthur asked.\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nHe poured, handed it to me, and glanced over to where a large clock hung high up on the opposite wall. It was eight minutes to ten. \"Himself's late the night.\"\n\n\"The ducks,\" I remarked, sipping from my glass.\n\n\"Oh aye,\" said Arthur, polishing a glass with a grubby dishcloth, \"Doctor O'Reilly's a terrible man for the ducks.\" He glanced back at the clock and his head made an almost indiscernible twitch toward the rotund arm of the law. \"The doctor'd better get himself in soon if he wants a wee hot whiskey to keep away the dew. I've to close in five minutes.\" He smiled obsequiously at the constable. \"Isn't that right, officer?\"\n\n\"It is, Mister Osbaldiston. The licensing laws are very strict. Very strict.\" He held out his now-empty glass. \"I've just the time for the one more.\"\n\n\"Time, gentlemen,\" called Arthur as he started to build the policeman's pint.\n\nAt precisely 9:55 the door flew open and O'Reilly, pursued by Arthur Guinness, entered. His cheeks were a slate grey, his nose a screaming red. He blew on his hands, rubbed the palms vigorously together, and blew on them again.\n\n\"Jasus, it's cold as a witch's tit out there,\" he remarked to the bar in general, and, \"Hot Irish. Double,\" to Arthur Osbaldiston in particular.\n\nThe constable turned and glared first at O'Reilly then at Arthur Guinness. I suspected the episode when Arthur had mistaken the man for a burglar and had bitten him still rankled.\n\n\"Last shout's been called. It's nearly ten o'clock, Doctor.\"\n\nO'Reilly looked at the clock, then back to the officer. I may have been the only one in the place to notice the change in the colour of O'Reilly's nose tip, but he hid his anger well.\n\n\"True, officer, true,\" he said, \"and I know you're just doing your job.\"\n\nThe constable hurried to finish his pint within the five minutes drinking-up time permitted by the law. \"True, sir.\"\n\n\"But,\" said O'Reilly, \"if I could prove you're wrong about the time could I buy you a pint and have a wee warmer myself?\"\n\nEvery eye was on the peeler. The silence was such that the dropping of a single pin might have resulted in a bang of sufficient magnitude to rupture eardrums.\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"Walking stick, Arthur,\" said O'Reilly in his best quarterdeck voice.\n\nThe stick was produced.\n\nO'Reilly stepped over to the clock, pushed open the glass front with the stick's rubber-tipped ferrule, and with great concentration used the thing to turn the minute hand back. It was now, local Mucky Duck time, 8:58.\n\n\"But,\" spluttered the constable, \"you can't just do that.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" said O'Reilly, \"I can't, but Her Majesty's government can.\" He glared round the room. \"Today is the third Saturday of October, and what happens tonight?\"\n\nTo give him credit, Donal Donnelly saw it first. \"Jasus, Doctor. The clocks go back.\"\n\n\"They do,\" said O'Reilly.\n\nThe constable began, \"But not until two...\"\n\n\"Drinks have been poured, officer. One for you and, Arthur, a hot double John Jameson for me.\"\n\nThe constable laughed. \"All right, Doctor. I'll allow that you're not breaking the law\u2014only bending it.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said O'Reilly, lifting his steaming glass. \"Cheers.\"\nJUNE 1999\n\nThe Last Laugh\n\nMrs. Bishop's will\n\n\"We'd better be off,\" said O'Reilly.\n\nThe temptation to suggest that he'd been going off for quite some time was firmly resisted. It was after all a solemn occasion, and in deference to the solemnity O'Reilly, as was the local expression, had cleaned up well. He wore black shoes that gleamed like the Koh-i-Noor diamond and pinstriped trousers with creases that would have cut tungsten-strengthened steel. His rusty black jacket covered an immaculately starched white shirt. His tie, as befitted the occasion, was black\u2014except where a stubborn egg stain marred its ebony sheen. The entire ensemble was topped\u2014literally\u2014by a top hat made of velvety beaver pelt.\n\nFunerals were taken seriously in Ballybucklebo.\n\n\"Sad day,\" said O'Reilly. \"The place will miss Mrs. Bishop.\"\n\n\"True,\" I said, shifting uncomfortably in my best dark suit. The waistband of my seldom-worn trousers had shrunk since I'd encountered Mrs. Kincaid's cooking. \"Mrs. Bishop was a decent woman. We will miss her.\"\n\n\"Not as much as Councillor Bishop.\" O'Reilly let one eyelid droop in a slow-motion wink that would have done justice to a voyeur at a strip club. \"I was the witness to her will. I'd to deal with one of her bequests yesterday. And I'd to tell her husband.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" When O'Reilly grinned the way he grinned then, I knew there was more to tell.\n\n\"I'll tell you after the service,\" he said. \"Come on or we'll be late.\" He was unusually quiet as he piloted the long-nosed Rover out to the main Belfast road. Mrs. Bishop was to be cremated and the crematorium was in the big city. I contented myself watching the hedgerows rush by and the occasional cyclist take to the ditch. I tried to puzzle out what he could mean by, \"Not as much as Councillor Bishop.\"\n\nYou may remember he was a man who would wrestle a bear for a farthing. Several years ago he'd arranged for a harmless old eccentric, Sunny, to be put in a home so that Bishop could acquire Sunny's land. O'Reilly had resorted to some absolutely ethical blackmail then. He'd suggested to the good Councillor, with all the subtlety of the blow of a battering ram on a castle gate, that unless Sunny was returned to his land and his dogs forthwith, Mrs. Bishop might have to find out about why their maid had left so abruptly for England. In those days being single and pregnant was not regarded enthusiastically in rural Ireland.\n\nNeither was divorce.\n\nI recalled that by means other than O'Reilly, Mrs. Bishop had found out about her husband's little peccadillo. (It's an awful example of authorial intrusion but I can't resist the temptation to remark that no, Viagra would not have helped the man.) Matters in the Bishop household had attained the state of diplomatic relations that existed between England and Denmark when Admiral Nelson won the battle of Copenhagen\u2014armed neutrality. This must have had some effect on the late Mrs. B.'s will\u2014but what? Given that the pair of them shared a house only to avoid the shame of divorce proceedings I would have thought that Bishop might have felt a certain relief when his wife joined the choir invisible. Why would he miss her?\n\n\"Come on, Fingal,\" I paused as he screeched past a cow that had somehow wandered onto the road, \"what was the bequest?\"\n\n\"Later, my boy.\" He grunted, shifted down, and accelerated over one of those little hills in the roads of Ireland which, if taken at the right speed, have the same effect on the motorcar as did the launching ramps of V1 flying bombs in the second numbered unpleasantness. Touchdown came with a ferocious crash.\n\nMy teeth were still chattering when he parked the Rover in the lot at the crematorium.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was, as funerals go, a pleasant one. A couple of hymns, prayers for the departed. The Reverend McWheezle gave the eulogy\u2014and for once kept his words short and to the point.\n\nO'Reilly, as befitted his station, and I, as O'Reilly's minion, had been given pews at the front of the chapel. It was from this vantage point that I was able to observe Mister Bishop's reactions to the proceedings. The portly gentleman seemed to have his emotions reasonably well under control. Occasionally a tear\u2014which even then I regarded as the essence of hypocrisy\u2014leaked from one pallid eye when he glanced at the bier where his late wife's coffin lay.\n\nThe organ began to play \"Nearer my God to Thee,\" and by whatever mechanical miracles make these things happen, the coffin sank slowly from view. The gears of the device were almost soundless, the organ music subdued, but the air was rent with the keening coming from Councillor Bishop. The man was as grief-stricken as Orpheus when he discovered that Eurydice had fallen off the perch. I stole a glance at O'Reilly. His features were composed, his hands folded primly before him, and his eyes held that sparkle that I only saw when God was definitely in his Heaven and all was very right with O'Reilly's world.\n\n\"Fingal,\" I whispered, \"tell me.\"\n\nHe bent his head and said, sotto voce, \"She had the money in the family. Inherited it from her people.\" O'Reilly nodded toward the hapless Bishop. \"Her last bequest\u2014and I had the pleasure of telling him last night\u2014was that all her\u2014hang on\u2014\"\n\nBishop's wailing had reached epic proportions. I looked at one of the glass chandeliers to satisfy myself it had not shattered. I had a last glimpse as the coffin vanished and the lid of the bier slid back into place.\n\nI heard O'Reilly try to stifle a snigger \"\u2014that all her money was to be put into ten-pound notes and used to line her coffin.\"\n\nI wondered how I was going to explain my unseemly guffaws to the rest of the mourners. My struggling to compose myself wasn't helped by O'Reilly's next suggestion: \"Maybe Bishop could put the ashes in an egg timer\u2014after all, time is money.\"\n\nAuthor's note: A friend who read this manuscript before it was submitted has pointed out that the money-in-the-coffin ploy was used in a Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack movie, Ocean's Eleven. Unfortunately Ol' Blue Eyes himself has shuffled off this mortal coil\u2014otherwise he'd be hearing from me on the subject of plagiarism.\nJULY 1999\n\nEasy Come, Easy Go\n\nO'Reilly triumphs again\n\n\"Would you fancy a day at Loughbrickland?\"\n\nO'Reilly wandered into the surgery just as Maggie left. I barely heard his question, thinking as I was about Maggie MacCorkle's sore back that had failed to respond to everything I'd tried. I'd even used his vitamin-pill trick, telling her to take the placebo exactly seventeen minutes before the pain started. O'Reilly had cured the aches above her head that way. Why were my ministrations not working?\n\n\"Have you gone deaf?\" he asked.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You have\u2014either deaf or stupid. I just offered you one of the best days out you'll ever have.\" He fired up his briar. \"Of course if you don't want to go to the races maybe Lord Fitzgurgle would enjoy the trip.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Fingal. I was thinking about Maggie.\"\n\n\"Oh? Headaches or backaches?\"\n\n\"Back.\"\n\n\"What have you tried?\"\n\nI sighed. \"Everything.\"\n\nHe laughed, a deep throaty rumbling noise, the sort of sound you might hear when one tectonic plate shifts over its neighbour. \"No, you haven't.\"\n\nI sniffed. \"I bloody well have.\" My professional pride had been stung by my failure.\n\nI should have seen the glint in his eye, heeded the warning signals. It's said that a leaden hue to the sky, humid air that's almost drinkable, and an oily calm on a breathless sea is a sure harbinger of a tropical hurricane. That glint in O'Reilly's baby-blues was as accurate a predictor of squalls. I ignored it when he said, \"Bet you I can fix her.\"\n\n\"Don't be daft. I've done everything.\"\n\nHis eyebrows knitted and he said, slowly and deliberately, \"I believe I remarked, 'Bet you.' Would you like to chance five pounds?\"\n\nThat stopped me. Five pounds was a lot of money. I hesitated.\n\n\"What's that business about 'money' and 'mouth'?\" he asked.\n\n\"All right, Fingal. You're on.\"\n\nHe grinned like an open drainpipe as he shook my hand. \"We'll see her together the day after tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Why not tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Because,\" he said, shaking his head, \"tomorrow you and me are going to Loughbrickland.\"\n\nAnd, on the morrow, go we did. Loughbrickland is the site of one of those peculiarly Irish events, point-to-point horse racing. The English aristocracy may turn out in their ducal splendour in the paddock at Royal Ascot or Epsom Downs. Tame affairs. The horses there are true thoroughbreds that run round a level track. An Irish point-to-point is a cross between Ben Hur's endeavours in the Circus Maximus, without the chariots, of course, and a ride on the \"Sky Demon\" roller coaster. The horses and jockeys thunder round a course that's interrupted at intervals by hedges, gates, ditches, and sometimes combinations of hedges and ditches. At least they try to. Most horses finish but a goodly number of riders part company with their mounts before journey's end. The spectators aren't usually drawn from the ranks of those whose names appear in Burke's Peerage, but the craic, as they say in Ireland, is powerful.\n\nTis there you'll see the fiddlers and the pipers all competing,\n\nThe nimble footed dancers and they trippin' on the daisies,\n\nAnd others crying cigars and lights and bills for all the races,\n\nWith the colours of the jockeys and the price and horses' ages.\n\nThat stanza from a song called \"The Galway Races\" puts the point-to-point in a nutshell\u2014particularly the bit about the horses' prices. At one end of the track the bookmakers, who in Ireland rejoice in the title of \"Turf Accountant,\" set up their stands, cry the odds, and happily take the punters' money.\n\nWe'd parked the old Rover in an adjacent field.\n\n\"Come on,\" said O'Reilly, as eager to get down to the track as any one of the horses awaiting the start of the first race.\n\nI trotted along in his wake, trying not to step in too many cow-claps or twist an ankle in one of the ruts in the ground. I was breathing heavily as he shouldered his way through the crowd of farmers and townsfolk, stopping at last in front of a stand that bore the slogan \"Honest Bobby Greer.\"\n\n\"Is it yourself, Doctor dear?\" enquired a florid-faced gentleman standing on a raised platform beneath the sign. This, I assumed, was Trustworthy Robert. He wore a yellow-checked waistcoat beneath a Donegal tweed jacket, moleskin trousers, and a bowler hat tipped forward over his brow. He clearly knew O'Reilly of old and, judging by the huge smile on Greer's face, had lightened O'Reilly's wallet more than once in the past.\n\n\"Good day, Bobby,\" said O'Reilly. He handed over a ten-shilling note. \"Finnegan's Fancy both ways in the first.\" I watched as he accepted a ticket.\n\n\"Are you not having a flutter, Pat?\" he inquired. I shook my head. I'd let him put his ten bob on a horse in the hopes that it would finish in the first three. I'd be quite happy to follow its progress vicariously. Besides, there was the small matter of tomorrow's wager.\n\n\"Come on then,\" he called over his shoulder as he forced his way to the fence near the finish line. I followed.\n\n\"They're off!\" cried the starter. The faint pounding of hooves grew louder. The ground trembled. The punters yelled encouragement. The mass of equine bodies hurtled past. No wonder, I thought, caught up by the moment, no wonder Liza Doolittle encouraged the horse she'd backed to \"Move your bleeding arse.\"\n\n\"Bugger,\" said O'Reilly, tearing up his ticket. \"Come on.\"\n\nOff we went back to Honest Bobby. Ten shillings changed hands. Next race. Steaming horses, crouching jockeys, turf clods flying from hooves.\n\n\"Bugger,\" said O'Reilly, tearing up his ticket.\n\nHe said that word seven times all told.\n\nThe eighth and final race would start in ten minutes. Off we went back to a now happily grinning Bobby Greer.\n\n\"So what's your fancy, Doctor dear?\"\n\n\"I've got you now,\" said O'Reilly. I saw a five-pound note. \"That on Butcher's Boy to win.\" He took the ticket.\n\nI hadn't placed a bet all day but the name of a filly took my eye: Strangford Sally. The current love of my life was a young woman from Strangford and, yes, you've guessed her name. The odds were twenty to one, but I thought there might be an omen so I risked five shillings.\n\nAs we walked back to our places at the finish, O'Reilly said, \"I've got Greer on this one. Donal Donnelly's father owns Butcher's Boy. He's never been out before. I've seen him jump.\" He rubbed his hands. \"That horse loves hedges like Orpheus loved Eurydice. Just goes at the nearest one as if his legs were springs.\"\n\n\"They're off!\" I waited, fingers crossed, peering up the track, wondering what the commotion was near the start. A horse with its jockey clinging on to its neck had left the track and was charging up a hill like Lord Cardigan's mount at Balaclava. I was so intrigued I nearly missed the finish and that would have been a shame.\n\nI was feeling rather smug the next morning as I sat in the surgery beside a chastened O'Reilly. Strangford Sally had come in at twenty to one, which made me five pounds better off. Butcher's Boy had lived up to expectations and had, like winged Pegasus, soared over the nearest hedge. Unfortunately, it had been the one marking the boundary of the track. As O'Reilly had remarked yesterday, \"At the rate the bloody thing was going up that hill it's probably in County Antrim by now.\" Only one tiny matter remained to be resolved.\n\n\"Come in, Maggie,\" said O'Reilly as she hobbled in. \"It's the back again?\"\n\n\"Yes, Doctor.\"\n\n\"Let's have a look.\"\n\nI watched as O'Reilly palpated her sides. He didn't even ask her to take off her dress. He bent and whispered something to her. She nodded and moved behind the screens. I heard the rustling of material. Maggie reappeared, smiling to beat the band. Her limp had gone.\n\n\"Thank you, Doctor O'Reilly,\" she said. \"Oh, that's better.\"\n\n\"Go on with you now, Maggie,\" he said.\n\nShe left. He turned to me. \"I believe you owe me a fiver.\"\n\nI fished in my pocket for yesterday's winnings. \"What did you do?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Her corset stays were too tight. I told her to loosen them.\"\n\nI handed him the bank note. Easy come, easy go.\n(no column in august 1999)  \nSEPTEMBER 1999\n\nLateral Thinking\n\nOr should that be vertical?\n\n\"I wonder what it is about my family?\" muttered Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, sipping his whiskey as he sat comfortably ensconced in the armchair in the upstairs sitting room of his home.\n\nI had a pretty fair idea of some of the peculiarities of the clan O'Reilly, but as my sage old father had often remarked, \"Some questions are better not answered.\" I sat in my armchair, peered through the big bay window, and feigned interest in a fishing boat drifting on the rippled waters of Belfast Lough.\n\n\"Sometimes they can be a bit odd,\" he said.\n\nAs two left feet, I thought, but left the thought unsaid.\n\n\"Do you remember Lars Porsena?\" he asked.\n\n\"'... of Clusium,'\" I countered, \"'by the nine gods he swore, that the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more.' Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.\"\n\nO'Reilly grunted. \"So you're not altogether unread. At least you recognize the source.\" He shook his head. \"No. I was thinking of my brother. The one in Portaferry.\"\n\nI had one of those flashbacks that are only supposed to come to patients with recovery of suppressed memories. I pictured Lars Porsena O'Reilly's youngest son devastating the school Christmas pageant by venting his wrath, very publicly, on the boy who'd replaced O'Reilly Minor in the part of Joseph.\n\n\"That Lars Porsena,\" I said.\n\n\"Himself,\" said O'Reilly. \"It's his oldest lad, Liam.\"\n\n\"Who can be a bit odd,\" I prompted.\n\n\"As two left feet,\" said O'Reilly.\n\nI started. Could O'Reilly have read my mind just a few seconds ago?\n\n\"Do you know what he's just done?\" O'Reilly asked.\n\n\"No,\" I replied, taking some comfort that if O'Reilly could have delved into my thoughts he wouldn't have needed to ask the question.\n\n\"Daft bugger,\" he continued, then, noticing my hurt look, added, \"Not you, Pat. Liam.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said.\n\n\"He's just passed his final examination for his B.Sc. up at Queen's University.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't have thought that qualified him for what you just called him.\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head. \"He should have had a first-class honours but he managed to upset one of his professors.\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Oh, aye,\" said Fingal. \"Daft B.\" He busied himself lighting his pipe. \"I got the story from Frothelbottom.\"\n\n\"Frothelbottom?\"\n\n\"Professor John Stout\u2014known to his old school friends as Frothelbottom. Froth for short.\"\n\nI waited.\n\n\"Seems Froth had Liam in an oral. Asked him a question about barometers and a block of flats.\"\n\nI remembered the same question from my own undergraduate days. \"If you had a barometer, how could you tell the height of a tall building?\"\n\n\"Do you know what Liam said? 'Go to the top, let down the barometer on a piece of string, and measure the length of the string.'\"\n\nI confess I'd considered a different approach, but Liam's solution would have worked.\n\n\"Froth told Liam he could do it that way, but could he suggest another. 'Sure,' says Liam. 'Go to the top, chuck the barometer off, and time its descent. Then use the acceleration formula to calculate the distance fallen.'\n\n\"'Um,' says Froth, 'but is there another way?'\n\n\"'Yes. Measure the barometer and walk up the stairwell. Turn the barometer end over end and multiply the length by the number of revolutions.'\"\n\nAt this point I was quite intrigued. Fingal's nephew must have been possessed of a keen mind to come up with these original approaches. \"Seems that he should have got his pass mark by this point,\" I observed.\n\n\"I agree,\" said O'Reilly, \"but as Froth admitted to me, by this time he wasn't getting the answer he wanted, and was beginning to take a dislike to young Liam.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Oh dear. 'Try again,' says Froth. 'Measure the barometer, stand it vertically on the ground, and at noon measure the lengths of the shadows cast by the barometer and the building. Now you'd have a ratio and could calculate the height from that.'\"\n\nFor the life of me I could see nothing wrong with that answer.\n\nO'Reilly sighed, blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke, and muttered, \"I wish old Froth had packed it up after that, but he told me that by then he was determined to wring the real correct answer out of young Liam. 'Mister O'Reilly,' says Froth, 'there's only one more way and if you tell it to me I'll give you a pass with honours.'\"\n\n\"Seems to me that was a pretty fair offer.\"\n\n\"It was,\" said O'Reilly, \"but Froth hadn't allowed for the O'Reilly oddness.\"\n\nNeither had I when I joined his practice, but you already know that.\n\nFingal shrugged. \"I thought I understood a bit of physics, and I tell you, Pat, by that time I could only think of one more way to skin that particular cat. When old Froth started the last of the story he had me rightly flummoxed.\"\n\nI waited.\n\n\"'Only one way?' says Liam. 'Rubbish.'\" O'Reilly sighed. \"Students don't say 'rubbish' to senior professors.\"\n\n\"Liam did.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said O'Reilly, \"and do you know what? He was right. He finally allowed that if he measured the difference in barometric pressure between the ground and the roof he'd be able to calculate the height of the building.\"\n\nThat was the very answer I'd given some years before. But apparently Liam had known another way. \"He should have called it a day right then,\" I said.\n\n\"I know. I know. But he didn't. 'Right,' says Froth, and as he admitted to me, he was just about ready to forgive the young fellow his impertinence when Liam says, 'Do you not want to know the other way?' 'I do,' says Froth. You'll never guess what Liam said.\"\n\nHe was right.\n\n\"Says Liam, 'I'd go to the caretaker's flat, knock on the door, and when he opened it, I'd say, 'Mister, if you tell me the height of the building, I'll give you this bloody barometer.'\"\n\nI couldn't stop laughing.\n\n\"It's all very well for you to cackle like a broody hen, Pat Taylor. You don't have to wonder what it is about your family.\"\nOCTOBER 1999\n\nFlight of Fancy\n\nThe dog who loved planes\n\nWhen I introduced you to Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, I numbered among his attributes his propensity for kindness to small children and animals. There is of course an adage that \"the exception proves the rule,\" and loyal readers will remember that even O'Reilly's faunophilia didn't extend to Sus scrofa, the domesticated pig. Perhaps it was to compensate for his mistrust of all things porcine\u2014unless roasted, glazed, or served in thick rashers by Mrs. Kincaid\u2014that he was especially attached to members of the tribe Canis familiaris, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a \"domesticated carnivore.\" Arthur Guinness, O'Reilly's Labrador retriever, was assuredly carnivorous. His domesticity was another matter. One word from O'Reilly and the brute did exactly as he pleased. The merest sight of my corduroy trousers either drove him into a state of sexual arousal previously recorded only at some of Nero's classier Roman orgies or reminded him that his bladder was full. In my opinion he was as domesticated as a rabid Tasmanian devil.\n\nBut O'Reilly doted on Arthur G., and showed his adoration in some of the most peculiar ways. (Please do not misinterpret that last remark. Remember, Honi soit qui mal 'y pense.) On reflection, perhaps a few words of explanation are warranted. Bear with me and I'll give you an example.\n\nIt was a perfect late-summer evening. O'Reilly and I had retired to his spacious back garden to ruminate on the state of the universe in general and the vagaries of medical practice in Ballybucklebo in particular. The air was soft, rose-perfumed, and drowsy with humming bees. O'Reilly sat on a wooden chair clutching his John Jameson, sucking contentedly on his briar. I squatted on the grass at his feet. We must have looked like the setup for an early Edwardian photograph. All I needed was an Eton jacket and a tasselled cap. Even Arthur Guinness, lolling under O'Reilly's chair, seemed hypnotized by the tranquillity.\n\nI thought, occasionally God really is in his heaven and all is right with the world. I became aware of a distant droning, but before I could turn to try to identify the source of the increasingly loud noise, Arthur Guinness crawled out from under O'Reilly's chair, sat erect, and stared at the sky.\n\nI knew that Labradors owed their retrieving ability to remarkably accurate vision so I followed his line of sight and saw on the horizon a small monoplane coming our way. Probably going to the Belfast airport, which at that time rejoiced in the name of Nutt's Corner. Honestly.\n\nAs the aircraft approached, Arthur began to ululate. I'd never heard him make the noise before. It fell somewhere between the falsetto keening of professional mourners at an Irish wake and the harsh wailing attributed to the banshee. And its volume increased until, as the plane passed overhead, I glanced hurriedly at the kitchen windows to assure myself that Arthur's yodelling hadn't cracked them.\n\nI had only enough time to note the panes' integrity when I caught a blur of movement. Guinness's wailing had changed to a bark that would have been the envy of a California sea lion, and I swear he was already approaching Mach 1 as he raced the length of the garden, staring upward and roaring his battle cry. Only the distant hedge stopped his career, and his ranting didn't cease until the aircraft was out of view.\n\nO'Reilly was on his feet. \"Come in here, sir.\"\n\nArthur looked over his shoulder, his view interrupted by his still-raised hackles.\n\n\"Come here, I say.\"\n\nPresumably misinterpreting this command for one to \"sit,\" Arthur planted his glossy behind, wagged his tail, but kept his back to O'Reilly.\n\n\"Daft bloody dog,\" O'Reilly rumbled in my general direction.\n\nDaft? Arthur's recent display had been, at least to my mind, closer to raving lunacy than mere daftness. If the Baskerville canine had ever needed a stand-in, I could have pointed it in the right direction.\n\n\"What on earth,\" I asked, \"was that all about?\"\n\n\"Ducks,\" said O'Reilly, shaking his head. \"He thinks they're ducks.\"\n\nI thought O'Reilly was finally beginning to assume some of the less balanced attributes of his gun dog but said, with a gently interrogative inflection, \"Ducks?\"\n\n\"He keeps mistaking aeroplanes for ducks. You saw how happy he was chasing that one.\"\n\n\"That was happiness?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. Just look at him.\"\n\nArthur must have meandered back. O'Reilly bent and patted the dog's head. \"Who's a good lad?\" he inquired.\n\nArthur's tail moved so rapidly it seemed to stand still. The fact that it was in action was given away by the frenetic shimmy of his backside. His face wore a grin and his pink tongue dripped. In the fullness of time, disdaining even a sideways glance at my trouser leg, Arthur subsided under O'Reilly's chair. Even I was convinced that the pursuit of the aircraft had in some inexplicable way brought great joy to the dimmer recesses of Arthur's brain.\n\nIt was then that I first glimpsed O'Reilly's peculiar ways of demonstrating his adoration.\n\n\"Um,\" he said, a beginning I'd learned always prefaced his asking for a favour, \"um, Pat, I don't suppose you'd consider working this Saturday? I'd pay you a bit extra.\"\n\n\"Why, Fingal?\"\n\nHe hesitated. \"It's special or I wouldn't ask.\"\n\n\"What's special, Fingal?\"\n\n\"It's Arthur's birthday. I want to give him a treat.\"\n\nI had to laugh. \"I suppose you're going to take him to the airport so he can really get close to some of those big 'ducks.'\"\n\nO'Reilly's jaw dropped. \"How in the hell did you know that? And keep your voice down.\" He glanced at the black dog under the chair. \"It's meant to be a surprise.\"\n\nI agreed to work on O'Reilly's behalf. How could I be so unfeeling as to keep the pair of them from a trip they so clearly warranted? To Nutt's Corner.\nNOVEMBER 1999\n\nFuel for Thought\n\nO'Reilly and the Texan\n\n\"Curious people, Americans,\" observed O'Reilly as he helped himself to a plateful of Mrs. Kincaid's devilled kidneys.\n\nIt was suppertime chez O'Reilly and the pair of us was ensconced at the big mahogany dining table. I'd finished the afternoon surgery and Fingal, now masticating with the fervour of a cud-chewing yak, had come back from what I assumed must have been a successful confinement of Mrs. McGillicutty's fourth. Certainly if the grin on his craggy face was anything to go by, something had pleased him enormously. Of course, what Americans had to do with the labour of a farmer's wife was anyone's guess.\n\nForgetting the old adage about the impetuous entry of idiots into environs where the winged denizens of the celestial sphere would not venture, I decided to find out.\n\n\"Curious, Fingal?\"\n\n\"Curious.\" He mumbled, mouth full, fist-held fork on its way to deposit another load.\n\n\"Do you mean they, like the ancient Greeks, are possessed of inquiring minds, or was that a comment about certain ethnic peculiarities?\"\n\nHe stopped in mid-chew. \"What the hell are you on about, Taylor?\"\n\nIt was not an unreasonable question. I flinched. \"Sorry, Fingal. Just\u2014I was wondering aloud about what kind of curiousness the Americans had.\"\n\nHe grunted. \"Odd bunch, the Yanks.\" And lapsed into a digestive silence.\n\nI thought it better to follow suit, and let my mind wander on the subject under discussion. Americans. They'd started coming to our corner of Ireland in the late '50s. They came by the coach-load\u2014friendly, large people who dressed in baseball caps, tartan sports jackets, and Bermuda shorts and spoke loudly about \"finding our roots in li'l ol' Ireland.\"\n\nThe natives regarded their transatlantic cousins with gentle amusement and, ever with an eye to the main chance, grasping avarice. Prices in the Mucky Duck soared. Bed-and-breakfasts blossomed. Donal Donnelly had shown remarkable enterprise. He'd fashioned a leprechaun costume, complete with buckled brogues, knee britches, waistcoat, and stovepipe hat, equipped himself with a shillelagh, and parked himself on a stool outside the Duck. A hand-lettered sign beside him announced, \"Will say 'Begorrah' for $1.\" He'd done very well.\n\nMy mental meanderings were interrupted.\n\n\"Well, do you want to know why I think Americans are curious?\"\n\nI glanced across the table. No sign of nasal pallor. The grin was back. \"Oh, indeed.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"What do you know about petrol tanks?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\" I was about to add that I didn't see the connection between petrol\u2014what Americans would call gasoline\u2014and Americans themselves, when O'Reilly charged on.\n\n\"There's a funny arrangement in my Rover car.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Aye. The outflow pipe is an inch above the bottom of the tank.\"\n\nHis line of reasoning was like Maggie MacCorkle's headaches\u2014at least two inches above my head.\n\n\"It's to stop dirt in the bottom of the tank getting into the carburettor and clogging it,\" he explained.\n\n\"That's nice.\"\n\nHis brows knitted. \"It can be a bloody nuisance when you're low on petrol and the engine stops.\"\n\n\"I can see that.\"\n\n\"But there's a way round it.\"\n\n\"Go on.\" I tried to sound enraptured.\n\n\"I had to use it this afternoon.\"\n\nI could only hope that O'Reilly, like Roald Amundsen, who, as you'll remember, announced that he was setting off for the North Pole but arrived at the South to the disgust of one Robert Falcon Scott, would eventually come back onto his true course.\n\n\"Bloody car conked out on the way to the McGillicuttys, and you know how fast her labours are.\"\n\nIndeed I did. I'd confined her last year. The term \"precipitate\" when applied to Jean McGillicutty's second stage was about as descriptive as calling the then-recent puncturing of the sound barrier as \"a wee bit fast, like.\"\n\nO'Reilly mopped up his gravy with a slice of bread. \"Do you know what I did?\"\n\nI shook my head.\n\n\"I'd no time to walk to the garage. I had to get the car to go, so I got out and peed in the petrol tank.\"\n\n\"You what?\"\n\n\"Peed in the tank. The petrol floats on the pee, is able to get into the feed pipe, and the engine'll run for a while longer\u2014\"\n\nI sat in awe of his ingenuity.\n\n\"\u2014trouble was, I'd been in such a rush I hadn't noticed the American tour bus parked at the side of the road\u2014\"\n\nAha. Perhaps Amundsen was going to head north.\n\n\"\u2014one of the Yanks had been watching me. 'Watcha doin', buddy?' says he.\" O'Reilly gave a very creditable imitation of John Wayne. \"'Refuelling, pilgrim,' I told him. 'Is that a fact,' says he. 'Ah never heard of using that fer fuel\u2014and ah'm from Texas and that's oil country.' 'I've heard that,' says I, 'but this is Ireland\u2014and this is Guinness country. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm in a bit of a rush.' 'Mighty fine,' says he, 'do you think it would work with Budweiser?'\"\n\nI had no doubt that O'Reilly had assured the innocent that such indeed would be the case. My mental image of some poor bewildered Texan shaking his head over a stalled Lincoln Continental was too much. I had what was known locally as \"a fit of the giggles.\"\n\nO'Reilly's guffaws drowned my strangled squeaks.\n\n\"Told you,\" he gasped, \"they're a curious people. And, by the way, I made it to the McGillicuttys in time.\"\nDECEMBER 1999\n\nTimes Are a-Changing\n\nOr are they?\n\nThe smell in O'Reilly's surgery would have gagged a maggot. He stood at the sink, test tube grasped in one hand, oblivious to the acrid fumes spewing forth with all the fervour of a genie who has been in his bottle for centuries too long.\n\nMaggie MacCorkle sat expectantly, awaiting the pronouncement from her oracle.\n\n\"No sugar in that, Maggie.\" O'Reilly looked pontifically over his half-moon spectacles. \"Run along, now. And leave the door open.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Doctor.\" Maggie rose, gave me her usual look of disdain, and left. Her departure allowed a modicum of fresh air to penetrate the fug.\n\n\"God's strewth, Fingal, what were you about?\" My eyes watered and my words were muffled by a series of involuntary constrictions of my throat.\n\n\"Fehling's test, my boy.\" He waved the noisome vessel under my nose.\n\nFor readers who didn't attend a medical school that boasted either Hippocrates or Galen as members of its faculty, Fehling's test involved boiling one test tube of the mystical Fehling's solution and another of the patient's urine. The two were mixed. If nothing exploded, the appearance of a blue tinge indicated the presence of glycosuria. Maggie may not have had glucose in her specimen, but something had managed to slip through her glomeruli\u2014probably, I thought, burnt Wellington boots.\n\nIt was always tricky\u2014as in trying to remove a piece of well-decayed cow from a starving alligator\u2014to suggest to O'Reilly that he might not be entirely up to date. It was going to be even more so because I did remember the hypochondriac who'd insisted on calling O'Reilly in the middle of the night. Doctor O. had instructed the victim to pass urine every hour on the hour until morning and use dipsticks on every specimen. So he couldn't have been entirely unfamiliar with the things.\n\nIn the spirit of scientific inquiry, and with a precautionary glance to assure myself that the door was still open, I began.\n\n\"Er,\" I asked, \"er, Fingal, would it not have been easier to use a dipstick?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he said benignly, dumping the fuming mixture down the drain, \"but remember, there's art to medicine as well as science.\" He chuckled. \"Maggie would never have believed the results of a wee bit of cardboard but she's absolutely convinced by my pyrotechnics.\"\n\nLord help us, I thought, if he ever decides she needs leeching, but although I kept the sentiments to myself, my cynical look must have betrayed me.\n\n\"You don't believe me?\" he asked.\n\nI have difficulty with the concepts that the Earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, and Darwin and armies of palaeontologists are wrong. \"Well...\"\n\n\"There's nobody\u2014I mean nobody,\" he shook his head, \"absolutely nobody as resistant to change as Ulsterfolk.\"\n\nThere was some truth to that. Half of us were still fighting a battle that officially ended in 1690\u2014with no need for a couple of periods of overtime, never mind three centuries of rematches. There was, however, an increasing subset of the inhabitants of the northeastern corner of the Emerald Isle who had moved with the times. Instead of pikes and muskets, they used Semtex. \"Yes, but...\" I tried, but he rolled over me.\n\n\"I'll prove it. Do you remember Sunny?\"\n\n\"Sunny? The chap who lives in his car?\"\n\n\"The very one.\"\n\nOf course I remembered Sunny and his run-in with Councillor Bishop, he whose wife had had herself cremated, with the family wealth in ten-pound notes in the coffin.\n\n\"I should remember him. Don't I call to see him and his dogs every week or so?\"\n\n\"Still living in his car?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I was having some difficulty following Fingal's line of reasoning\u2014but that was something that would never change. As is a corkscrew to a ruler, so was O'Reilly's convoluted logic to linear cogitation. I suspected he was probably the originator of divergent thinking.\n\n\"But,\" I said, \"I don't see what that has to do with the inflexibility of the average Ulsterman.\"\n\n\"Huh. Do you know what Sunny's chief delight was\u2014other than his dogs?\"\n\nI had to admit I did not.\n\n\"His car had a wireless. He'd listen to it for hours.\"\n\n\"And I suppose you're going to tell me that when the BBC added new stations he refused to listen to them because he's an Ulsterman and Ulsterfolk are resistant to change.\"\n\n\"Not at all. He took to them like a duck to water.\"\n\n\"So he did change.\"\n\n\"Up to a point,\" said O'Reilly. His face softened. I knew he had a warm spot for his eccentric patient. \"But the car was 1940s vintage and eventually the radio stopped working.\"\n\nI'm sure that on occasions in darkest Africa Stanley must have despaired of ever finding Doctor Livingstone.\n\n\"I don't see...\"\n\n\"'Course you don't.\" A smile played round O'Reilly's lips. \"But somebody bought Sunny a television set and ran an electrical cable from his deserted house to the car.\"\n\nArchimedes is reputed to have leapt from his bathtub yelling, \"Eureka.\" I had an urge to mutter the same Hellenic expletive\u2014not because I had the faintest idea what this piece of intelligence had to do with O'Reilly's thesis about stubbornness, but because I was certain who the \"somebody\" had been.\n\nTo accuse O'Reilly of anything resembling kindness would have upset the big man. Like the Good Lord, Fingal liked to \"move in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.\" Lest my expression give me away for a second time, I tried to steer O'Reilly back to his original argument.\n\n\"So,\" I said, \"Sunny did change. He switched from listening to the radio to watching television.\" Adopting my best Perry Mason manner, I remarked, \"I rest my case.\"\n\n\"Almost,\" said O'Reilly. \"You're almost right.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" The argument seemed pretty solid to me.\n\n\"He used the set. No doubt about that\u2014but do you know what he said to me after he'd had the thing for a month?\"\n\nI shook my head.\n\nO'Reilly's big frame quivered. \"Sunny said\u2014Sunny said, 'Do you know, Doctor dear, but thon TV's the powerful thing. All you have to do is watch it with your eyes shut and it's near as good as my old wireless.'\"\n\nI had to laugh.\n\n\"Change an Ulsterman?\" said O'Reilly. \"You'd have a better chance getting Niagara Falls to run uphill.\"\n\nNow, after thirty years, I can look back and laugh at myself, and O'Reilly was wrong. Some Ulsterman do change. If they didn't, I'd be writing this with a quill pen instead of my trusty Underwood typewriter.\nJANUARY 2000\n\nThe Sting\n\nO'Reilly bags a wasps' nest\n\n\"Holy thundering mother of Jasus,\" O'Reilly roared, springing from his deck chair, dousing me with the contents of his glass, and clapping a hand to the back of his neck with enough force to have decapitated a lesser mortal.\n\nI leapt to my feet, simultaneously dabbing at the large John Jameson stain on my pants and wondering what could have provoked the big man's outburst.\n\n\"Little bugger,\" O'Reilly growled.\n\nI thought he was addressing me\u2014he was prone to using such terms of endearment\u2014but he wasn't looking at me. Instead he glowered at an insectoidal remnant clutched between his finger and thumb. It was a very wide, very flat, very dead wasp. One of the kamikaze breed. Only an insect with no desire to continue its existence would have had the temerity to sting Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO.\n\nHe discarded the corpse and rubbed the back of his neck. I could see the red weal. \"Blue bag,\" he grunted as he galloped from the garden and into the house.\n\nWhen he reappeared\u2014fresh whiskey in one hand\u2014a deep blue splodge covered his nuchal lump. I hadn't the faintest idea what resided within the famous blue bag, but I did know that its application to insect stings was soothing. Certainly it seemed to have calmed O'Reilly.\n\n\"Wouldn't be summer without the odd wasp,\" he said mildly.\n\nI nodded. The beasts were pests in late August and\u2014I watched one as it clung to the edge of my sherry glass\u2014there seemed to be more of them on that particular evening. Lots more. Two had joined the original sherry seeker and five were having a go at O'Reilly's whiskey.\n\nI've neglected to tell you that we'd set our deck chairs under the shade of the sycamore tree at the bottom of O'Reilly's garden. It was a magnificent specimen, tall, leafy, ancient, and from among its branches squadrons of the brutes buzzed in close formation. They made beelines, or perhaps that should be wasp-lines, for our drinks.\n\nI dislike physical pain and it seemed to me that the odds against my being stung were going down dramatically. There were so many yellow-and-black bodies on the wing that I began to wonder if Pharaoh and Moses had taken up residence in Ballybucklebo and that the old patriarch had given up on locusts and moved on to wasps as a method of softening Ramses' ossified cardiac organ.\n\n\"I think we should go in, Fingal.\"\n\nHe ignored me and stared up into the leafy canopy overhead.\n\n\"C'mere, Pat.\" He pointed upward.\n\nI moved beside him and followed the line of his outstretched finger.\n\n\"What do you make of that?\"\n\nHigh in the tree, suspended from a branch, was a grey thing, narrow at the bottom, wide at the top, and about the size of the ill-fated Hindenburg dirigible.\n\n\"It's the biggest wasps' nest I've ever seen, Fingal.\" One settled on my ear. \"I really do think we should be going in,\" I remarked, sidling toward the house, leaving my drink on a garden table, hoping the wasps would be distracted long enough for me to make my getaway unscathed.\n\nHe grabbed my arm.\n\n\"It's got to go,\" he said. \"Got to.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" I said, and instantly regretted my words. Someone was going to have to make the nest go, and from the look on O'Reilly's face I realized that he thought he'd found his volunteer. I imagine Lord Wellington's eyes took on the same steely glare when he selected the poor devils to be first to storm the breach in the walls of a French-held fort. The term for those wretches was \"the forlorn hope.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Fingal, but remember when Maggie MacCorkle's cat got stuck up this tree?\"\n\n\"Right,\" he said, \"right. I'd forgotten you had acrophobia.\" And a highly developed sense of self-preservation, I thought.\n\n\"Donal,\" he said. \"Donal Donnelly's the man for the job.\"\n\n* * *\n\nWriters of tales of darkest Africa often mentioned the jungle telegraph, as in \"... the heat, the heat, and the native drums.\" Plains Indians reputedly communicated using smoke signals. How messages were transmitted in Ballybucklebo, where few of the natives possessed telephones, was a mystery to me, but communicate they did. I called this phenomenon the bog telegraph. It had worked with its usual celerity.\n\nHalf an hour after O'Reilly's pronouncement, Donal Donnelly showed up at the house, wheeling his psychedelic bicycle and wearing his simple smile.\n\n\"Hear you've a wee job for me, Doctor, sir,\" he said, knuckling his forehead\u2014a very thin strip between his eyebrows and hairline\u2014and bending to remove his bicycle clips, strange metallic devices worn around the ankles to prevent the 'cycle's chain from devouring the wearer's trousers.\n\n\"Indeed I do,\" said an avuncular O'Reilly, draping a fond arm round Donal's narrow shoulders and regarding the victim with the expression I've always imagined Lewis Carroll's walrus used when talking to a group of oysters. \"Just a wee one. Come on in,\" he said, \"and I'll show you.\"\n\nDonal trotted in O'Reilly's wake and I brought up the rear. Once in the back garden, O'Reilly started to explain the nature of the \"wee job.\"\n\n\"Here's your ladder, Donal.\" O'Reilly bent, picked up a wooden extending ladder, and loaded it onto Donal's shoulder.\n\n\"Painting, is it, Doctor?\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head.\n\n\"Here's your sack.\" Fingal handed Donal a large potato sack.\n\nDonal frowned as he accepted the thing.\n\n\"There's the tree.\"\n\nDonal's face lightened. \"Another wee pussycat up your tree, Doctor, sir?\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\"\n\nThe frown came back.\n\n\"It's a wasps' nest, Donal.\"\n\nDonal froze. I believe his eyeballs swole in their sockets. \"Jasus, Mary, and Joseph and all the little saints,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Nothing to it, Donal. Nip up the ladder, whip the sack round the nest, snap off its stalk, and hold the mouth of the sack tight shut.\"\n\nDonal's head nodded like one of those big-beaked, globular-bodied, feather-tailed toy birds which if clipped to the rim of a water glass would oscillate back and forth for hours.\n\n\"There's a good lad,\" said O'Reilly, pushing Donal in the direction of the elm. \"By the time you bring the nest down in the sack, I'll have a bonfire lit. We can cremate the whole bloody lot of them.\" This last was said with a leer that would have looked well on the face of a Roman emperor giving the thumbs down to an army of defeated gladiators.\n\nI retreated inside the kitchen doorway. Donal went to the tree. My last glimpse was of his legs disappearing up through the leaves. O'Reilly bent to his work making a heap of dried leaves and twigs, his ample behind pointing straight at the old elm.\n\nI heard Donal yelling from his leafy aerie, \"I've got them, Doctor, sir. It's going to be all right.\"\n\nAnd it would have been\u2014if the bottom hadn't fallen out of the mouldy old sack and the nest's infuriated occupants hadn't been released when the nest hit the ground.\nFEBRUARY 2000\n\nPipes of Wrath\n\nThe man who silenced O'Reilly\n\nVery few people ever told that medical gentleman, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, what to do, but it could be done. I saw it happen. By the way, please remember that a gentleman may be defined as \"a man who can play the bagpipes\u2014but doesn't.\" By this account Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly was certainly no gentleman. His weekly practices with the local pipe band were one thing. They took place in an old barn sufficiently far from Ballybucklebo that the natives were scarcely if ever disturbed. I could even find it in my heart to forgive his solitary warbling on his miniature chanter.\n\nChanter? For those unfamiliar with the great highland bagpipe and wondering what on Earth I'm on about, let me explain the arcane workings of the things. The bits that stick up over the player's shoulder are the drones. There are no prizes for guessing why. The tube that connects the apparently apoplectic puffer's mouth to the tartan-covered bag is the blowstick. The chanter is the perforated pipe up and down which the musician's fingers ripple as though the digits' owner had forgotten to take his anticonvulsants for at least a week. It's from the chanter that the tune is wrung.\n\nPipers with consciences can exercise their chanter fingering on a miniature version. The full-sized job roars like the booming of some long-dead dinosaur. A regimental pipe band can re-create the noises of the entire Jurassic period. Massed bands, like those at the Annual Edinburgh Tattoo, for example, can emulate the racket of the Mesozoic Era. The miniature version produces a gentler note\u2014somewhere between an oboe and a ruptured duck\u2014and is barely audible at a range of a spear's throw, the average distance used by Sassenachs to decide whether to flee from the noise or try to show their disapproval in a more pointed way. No, I had little cause for complaint when O'Reilly confined himself to the mini version.\n\nLife only became auditorily awful when himself would fire up the whole set and march up and down the back garden playing something called a pibroch. According to O'Reilly, the pibroch was the classical music of the pipes. I didn't seem to recognize the names of Beethoven or Brahms among the composers of these works but I'm sure it was due to an oversight. Mozart's rarely if ever played K1007\u00bd was probably a concerto for pibroch and orchestra.\n\nPicture if you will, O'Reilly, bag under left arm, drones on left shoulder, face florid, nose flashing from scarlet to white (the latter when he missed a note, although how anyone but him could tell was beyond me), pacing up and down the back garden, pipes roaring, birds fleeing from the trees in panic, and the faithful Arthur Guinness marching at his master's side, gazing with the eyes of a besotted fool at the Labrador's version of God and lending his not inconsiderable howling in counterpoint.\n\nThe natives of Ballybucklebo tolerated these outbursts, less because of any great affection for their medical advisor, but rather from a deep-seated local belief that so awful was the wailing that the indigenous banshees fled in terror. And as everyone knew, no one could die in Ballybucklebo without a preliminary hullabaloo from the banshee.\n\nOn the night in question I was cowering in the upstairs sitting room, praying that the row would stop, beseeching the Almighty with all the fervour of one of Custer's cavalrymen asking that the Indians go away. Somewhere in my pounded ears I became aware of an insistent ringing. I knew that tinnitus could be provoked by too many decibels. For a happy moment I hoped it might be the harbinger of a merciful deafness, then I realized it was the front doorbell\u2014and it was Mrs. Kincaid's night off.\n\nWhen I answered the door, a small, bekilted man stood there. He looked like a Scottish garden gnome that had climbed down from its concrete plinth. His face was as weathered as if he'd spent his entire life\u2014which must have been at least seventy winters\u2014in the open air.\n\n\"Good evening,\" I remarked, expecting to be addressed in the almost incomprehensible burr of the Glaswegian.\n\n\"Aye. Chust so.\" His speech was soft, melodious. I was conversing with a highlander or a man from the Western Isles.\n\n\"It will be the Doctor himself that I am hearing?\"\n\nNo, I thought, it's the wrath of God. But I nodded.\n\n\"Chust so. And could I be speaking with himself?\"\n\n\"Actually I'm on call tonight, Mister... er...\"\n\n\"MacKay of the Island MacKays.\" He offered his hand as a laird would to a peasant.\n\nI shook it gravely. \"Come into the surgery. Please.\" I ushered him in. Even with the heavy door closed behind us the awful ululation thundered on.\n\n\"What can I do for you, Mister MacKay?\"\n\n\"Well...\" His face contorted into a rictus of such anguish that I thought the little man was having a heart attack.\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\nHis features softened. \"Fine. Ah'm grand. It's himself.\" He inclined his bald pate in the direction of the piping. \"The Doctor cannae get the grace notes right.\"\n\n\"And is that why you wanted to see him?\" I asked.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Right,\" I said. \"I'll go and get him.\" At last, I thought, someone who can tell O'Reilly to shut up. Then a thought struck me. \"Mister McKay, if he's making mistakes, does that mean he'll have to practise harder?\"\n\n\"Chust so.\"\n\n\"Could you do me a favour? Could you suggest he uses the practice chanter?\"\n\nA very knowing look spread across the old Scotsman's face. \"Aye, son. Chust so.\"\n\nMy heart soared as I sped to the back garden. It took about five minutes to attract O'Reilly's attention. He lowered the bag and the moaning ceased slowly. The noise would have been described locally as \"the tune the old cow died to.\"\n\n\"What do you want?\" he roared.\n\nDo not try to take a raw steak from a pit bull. Do not interrupt O'Reilly's pibroch.\n\n\"There's a Mister MacKay to see you, Fingal.\"\n\nO'Reilly flinched. \"Lord,\" he muttered.\n\n\"He says something about your not getting your grace notes right.\"\n\nO'Reilly looked as if he had been struck by lightning. His voice fell to a whisper\u2014the first bit of peace and quiet I'd had for what seemed like hours. \"Did he?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Jasus. Do you know who he is?\"\n\nI shook my head.\n\n\"Angus MacKay was the Lord of the Isles piper before he moved here to Ballybucklebo.\" By the look on Fingal's face the position must have been on a par with the Archangel Gabriel's in a more elevated sphere. \"He taught me to play.\"\n\n\"And,\" I said, \"he says you need a lot more practice. On the little chanter.\"\n\nO'Reilly hung his head.\n\nAnd for a while, I thought, blessing the name of Angus MacKay, there will be peace in the valley.\nMARCH 2000\n\nSam Slither\n\nWhat noise annoys an oyster?\n\nDoctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly was a man of definite likes\u2014you know about his terrible strong weakness for the product of John Jameson's distillery\u2014and his share of well-formulated dislikes.\n\nWhen it came to certain members of the species Homo sapiens\u2014Councillor Bishop immediately springs to mind\u2014O'Reilly regarded them with the distaste of a South Seas cannibal for banana fritters. Nor did he confine his animus to specified individuals. Certain subspecies\u2014district health officials, a well-defined breed of Presbyterian minister (the Angus McWheezles of this world) and lawyers, for example\u2014he would condemn to perdition en bloc. Not that he ever let his general disgust stand in the way if the opportunity to attack a particular member of one of the subsets presented itself.\n\nTake the case of Samuel P. Shaughnessy, LLB, known to the citizens of Ballybucklebo as \"Sam Slither.\" The \"slither\" part was an allusion to the man's slippery courtroom carryings-on.\n\nThe legal eagle in question had visited us because he was troubled by a persistent cough. Shaughnessy was a little man, birdlike. He had beady eyes and a hooked nose that wouldn't have been out of place on the face of a peregrine falcon. He strutted into the surgery, breast thrust out like a pouter pigeon\u2014and a particularly haughty pouter at that.\n\nFrom his opening, \"Well, O'Reilly?\"\u2014not, you will note, \"Doctor O'Reilly\"\u2014he treated my senior colleague as a duke would treat a scullion. He simply ignored me. He left without as much as a thank you.\n\nO'Reilly had dealt with the man in an entirely professional manner\u2014and about as much warmth as the blizzard that finally saw off Scott of the Antarctic.\n\n\"Jasus,\" said O'Reilly as soon as Slither, S., had left the surgery, \"I can't abide that man. He'd better not go swimming.\"\n\n\"Because it would be bad for his cough?\" I asked naively.\n\nO'Reilly snorted. \"Not at all. If he ever went in the water, the whole of the coast guard would be out to clean up the oil slick.\"\n\nI knew of Shaughnessy's reputation. \"You're right, Fingal,\" I said, but contained my desire to laugh. O'Reilly's nose tip was pure alabaster.\n\n\"I don't like Mister Shaughnessy,\" growled O'Reilly. \"Not one bit.\"\n\nIt seemed superfluous to remark that I could have guessed that. I assumed that Mister S. was in O'Reilly's bad books as a side effect of the little lawyer's profession. As usual when it came to guessing why Doctor O. behaved the way he did, I wasn't entirely right.\n\nO'Reilly rummaged in his pocket and produced and lit up his briar. \"Come to think of it, keeping him away from the water's another good reason that he should never be let loose on the deck of a yacht.\"\n\nAha, I thought, there's more to this than immediately collides with the contents of the eye-socket.\n\nYou'll remember that O'Reilly was a keen sailor. So was Shaughnessy. Indeed he was commodore of the local yacht club, and to add insult to injury, his boat and O'Reilly's were tied at four wins each in the biweekly race series.\n\n\"It's your day off on Saturday,\" O'Reilly remarked, catching me quite off guard. \"What are you up to?\"\n\nWith my unerring ability to fabricate a plausible excuse on the spur of the moment, I answered, \"Um...\"\n\n\"Good,\" said O'Reilly. \"It's the last race in the series and I...\"\n\n\"Need a crew?\"\n\n\"Exactly, my boy.\" He beamed and exhaled a cloud of tobacco smoke that would have cleared the first two lines of enemy trenches in World War I. \"I'm sure we can get a locum down from Belfast. You'll have a wonderful sail.\"\n\nI wondered if Mister Christian had offered similar comforting words as he cast Captain Bligh adrift on the start of his two-thousand-mile journey in an open longboat.\n\n* * *\n\nI won't weary you with the details of the great yacht race. I'll merely remark that O'Reilly's boat and Shaughnessy's crossed the start line bow to bow and immediately engaged in what I'm told is referred to as a tacking duel. The shining hours passed with tacks, gybes, luffing ups, and sundry other arcane manoeuvres, all accompanied by roars of command to the crew\u2014me\u2014and abusive bellows of \"Starboard!\" and \"Water!\" hurled from vessel to vessel. I believe if O'Reilly's boat had been armed he'd have given Shaughnessy a broadside and ordered me to \"board him in the smoke.\"\n\nThe ferocity of the competition would have made an America's Cup race look like the endeavours of two model boats on a duck pond. O'Reilly's boat crossed the finishing line a mere two feet ahead of the competition.\n\nI was soaked, frozen, and felt as though single-handedly I'd hauled a grand piano to the summit of Mount Everest. Pulling on ropes on a yacht isn't called grinding for nothing. But I confess there was a sense of satisfaction. Not only had O'Reilly beaten Shaughnessy, he had, as far as I understood these things, won the series.\n\nI glanced at Shaughnessy's boat and noticed a red flag flying from the piece of string that ran from the blunt end to the top of the mast. Assuming this signal to be some kind of gracious concession of defeat, I happily drew the matter to O'Reilly's attention.\n\nHe erupted. \"Bloody lawyers! Bloody Sam Slither. Trust him to hoist a protest flag.\"\n\n\"Protest?\"\n\n\"Protest. He's saying that somewhere we broke one of the rules.\" Given the ferocity of the recent competition, I couldn't help remarking, \"The Marquess of Queensberry Rules?\"\n\n\"No, you nitwit. Racing rules. We'll have to meet with the race committee. He'll present his case\u2014bloody lawyer\u2014and we'll have to try to defend ourself. That little weasel knows the laws of sailing better than a Talmudic scholar knows the Torah.\" The sound of O'Reilly grinding his teeth was so intense that I thought we'd run aground\u2014again.\n\n* * *\n\nThe atmosphere at the post-race buffet was frosty. The committee had met. Shaughnessy had presented his case, and to the obvious disappointment of the committee members and the huge chagrin of O'Reilly, they'd had to find, purely on some abstruse point of maritime law, in Slippery Sam's favour. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to describe O'Reilly as crushed, but he was distinctly subdued.\n\nI believe revenge has been described as \"a dish best eaten cold.\" If the originator of the remark had been at the buffet he might have changed the remark to \"a dish not eaten at all,\" but then its author Joseph Marie Eug\u00e8ne Sue couldn't have known O'Reilly.\n\nHe stood at the table, pint in one hand, plate in the other. He was accepting the condolences of his many cronies.\n\nShaughnessy pushed his way through the little throng. He carried a plate of raw oysters.\n\nI listened as he addressed O'Reilly.\n\n\"To make up for my victory,\" I saw the man's chest puff out farther than usual, \"let me buy you a drink.\"\n\nO'Reilly did not speak.\n\nNor did any other member of the yacht club. A dropping pin would have sounded like the eruption of Krakatoa, so deep was the silence.\n\n\"Well, at least have an oyster. Quite delicious.\"\n\nI saw O'Reilly's grin start and steeled myself.\n\n\"Shaughnessy,\" Fingal said in gentle tones, \"you're a quare dab hand at the law.\" Sam Slither's pullover nearly burst.\n\n\"But my trade's medicine, and you know... so I'll pass on the oysters.\" His pause wasn't merely pregnant. It was carrying triplets. He inclined his head to the plate of slithery bivalves and said in gentle but very widely audible tones, \"I always advise my patients never\u2014never\u2014to eat anything as slimy as a lawyer.\"\nAPRIL 2000\n\nA Matchless Experience\n\nPity the stranger visiting Ballybucklebo\n\nOccasionally, outsiders wandered into Ballybucklebo. Some of them, when confronted with the likes of Maggie MacCorkle, Donal Donnelly, the Reverend Angus McWheezle, and indeed the redoubtable Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly himself, must have wondered if they'd stumbled into a dress rehearsal for one of the more bizarre efforts of Le Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Grand-Guignol.\n\nI'm sure that collectively the denizens of our little village could have kept teams of geneticists happily employed for years. Behavioural psychologists could have filled countless journal pages with arcane articles with titles like, \"The Immediate Onset of Incomprehensible Gibbering Among Strangers on First Being Introduced to Maggie MacCorkle\" or \"The Impact of Entering the Mucky Duck on the Cognitive Processes of Otherwise Well-Balanced Persons.\"\n\nUsually, the poor benighted who stumbled into our little backwater had arrived there by mistake. Most had taken a wrong turning on the Belfast-to-Donaghadee Road. Even the mere act of seeking directions to return a wayward traveller on their merry way could lead to nervous exhaustion. Such clearly stated navigational tips as, \"Go down the road 'til you come to a red barn, sir. Now don't turn right there,\" or, \"When you've not turned at the red barn, go on three more fields. There'll be a black-and-white cow there unless Willy John has her in the red barn for milking. Go two fields past and follow your nose.\"\n\nI once heard Donal Donnelly at his most helpful reduce a bewildered-looking city gent to a state bordering on hysteria. The party in question halted his Rolls-Royce, wound down the window, and said to the passing Donal, \"My good man, how would I get from here to Donaghadee?\"\n\nDonal, as you'll remember, was a bit slow. Indeed snails had been known to cover vast distances while Donal puzzled out the answer to a question.\n\n\"Come on, man. I haven't got all day.\"\n\n\"It's Donaghadee you want, sir?\"\n\n\"I just told you that.\"\n\n\"Donaghadee? Aye, indeed. Donaghadee.\"\n\n\"Yes. Donaghadee.\" There was a great deal of drumming of fingers on the steering wheel.\n\n\"That's a hard one, sir. That's a very hard one. You know\"\u2014here Donal paused and a beautiful smile plastered itself across his normally bland face\u2014\"if I was you I wouldn't have tried to get to Donaghadee from here in the first place.\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou can understand why few non-natives, apart from impecunious assistants to established general practitioners, would decide to let their caravans rest in that rural loony bin. And yet once in a navy blue moon someone would appear from the great world outside, sample the village, and decide to stay. They usually didn't last long unless they were able to adapt to the aboriginal ways and, more importantly, gain acceptance into the Ballybucklebo social circle. In Ireland such recent arrivals are known as \"blow-ins.\"\n\nIt might have been his acknowledged virtuosity on the great highland bagpipe\u2014after all, the man had been piper to the Lord of the Isles\u2014that led to the initial acceptance of Angus MacKay.\n\nThe fact that he'd had the temerity to point out to O'Reilly his inability to master certain grace notes as he throttled a thing called a pibroch from his tartan-clad octopus would have raised MacKay's stock further with the locals. His complete bringing into the fold was assured on the night when MacKay simultaneously reaffirmed his Scotsness and succeeded in discomfiting a visiting Sassenach.\n\nAngus worked as a shepherd. He lived in a cottage about ten miles from the village and it had become his wont to walk into Ballybucklebo on a Saturday, stop at the Mucky Duck for a wee dram, purchase one bottle of single malt, and hike back to his cottage.\n\nO'Reilly had hauled me into the Duck. The place was relatively quiet. Only one or two of the usual suspects held up the far end of the bar. A stranger leaned dispiritedly, alone as a heron on a mudflat, toying with a half-pint. The poor man had probably popped in to ask directions.\n\nO'Reilly and I were sitting at a table when Angus came in. As usual he wore a tam-o'-shanter and was bekilted and besporranned.\n\n\"Good evening, Doctors,\" said Angus.\n\n\"Evening, Angus.\"\n\nHe propped his cromach, the long crook beloved by Scottish shepherds, in a corner and walked over to the bar. He was so short his nose barely reached the countertop.\n\n\"Evening, Angus.\" Arthur Osbaldiston, our red-faced, spherical host, beamed over the bar. \"The usual?\"\n\n\"Chust so, and a packet of Woodbines.\"\n\n\"Twenty?\"\n\nAngus rummaged in his sporran, produced a handful of coins, consulted them with the concentration of a Viking warlock examining his runes, shook his head, and said, \"No. Ten will be chust fine.\"\n\nSpendthrift and Angus MacKay did not have quite the happy relationship of say, peaches and cream.\n\nArthur delivered the cheap cigarettes and a glass of whisky.\n\n\"There you are, Angus.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Arthur,\" he said, lifting his tam-o'-shanter with the courtesy of a Spanish grandee. He pulled out and lit one cigarette, leaving the packet on the counter, said, \"Slainte,\" and sipped his drink.\n\nPerhaps it was his accent, so different from those of the locals, that persuaded the stranger to sidle along the bar and try to strike up a conversation.\n\n\"Hello, old chap,\" the man said by way of introduction. Immediately I recognized the plummy, marbles-in-the-mouth tones of an English ex\u2013public schoolboy. No wonder, I thought, that he'd been ignored by the others in the place.\n\nAngus inclined his head, but said nothing.\n\n\"Couldn't help noticing you're having a smoke.\"\n\nAngus nodded, but kept his counsel.\n\nThe Englishman's voice was louder than those usually heard in the Duck and I could see that the others in the place were now paying avid attention to the little drama unfolding at the other end of the bar.\n\n\"Um... don't suppose you could spare a match?\"\n\nAha, I thought, the ask-for-a-match gambit as a way of striking up a conversation. I wondered how successful the Englishman would be.\n\nSilently Angus opened his sporran, fumbled in its depths, produced one single match, and gravely offered it to his newfound acquaintance, who accepted the match and said, \"One is terribly grateful. Live round here, do you?\"\n\nAngus's nod was barely perceptible.\n\n\"Nice place, what?\"\n\nI began to rise as the man spoke. His hands were moving rapidly over his body, patting himself here and there. I thought I was witnessing my first case of Saint Vitus's dance.\n\n\"Do you know\"\u2014the man's hands stilled and he nodded his head toward the packet of Woodbines on the bar counter\u2014\"terribly stupid of me. I seem to have come out without my cigarettes.\"\n\nEvery eye in the place was focused with the pinpoint accuracy of radar sets on the pair at the bar.\n\nThe stranger finally succeeded in getting Angus to say something. He probably wished he hadn't.\n\nThe little Scotsman's usually soft speech was softer yet, but not a word was lost on his audience.\n\nHe held out one hand and said, \"In that case, sir, you'll no' be needing my match.\"\nMAY 2000\n\nA Humble Apology\n\nO'Reilly comes to the rescue once again\n\nI'd last seen Angus MacKay, shepherd and piper extraordinaire, in the company of the Reverend McWheezle. The man of the cloth had tried to suggest that the splendour of Angus's garden was largely attributable to the work of the Almighty. Angus, and I must say I'd thought he'd been pretty diplomatic, had simply asked the Lord's local representative if he could recall what the garden had looked like when the Celestial Being had been left in sole charge of the then-weed-infested plot.\n\nThe Reverend McWheezle took to being bested verbally with all the enthusiasm of a man having a fingernail yanked out, and from that day had gone out of his way to belittle Angus MacKay. The schism between them had developed into a chasm that would have made the Grand Canyon look like an irrigation ditch.\n\nMister McWheezle took every opportunity, usually thinly veiled as prim pastoral piety, to take a verbal swipe at Angus. The old Scot bore this vituperation with apparent sangfroid, although unknown to all of us in Ballybucklebo, the sang that ran in the little Scot's veins was coursing at about absolute zero.\n\nI confess that from time to time I wondered when Angus would stop turning the other cheek and turn the other set of knuckles\u2014as in a right cross or jab and uppercut. But no matter how hard the reverend pushed, Angus would mutter a civil, \"Chust so,\" and walk away. He kept his counsel until the day McWheezle moved from Angus-baiting to a direct frontal assault upon Angus's nation\u2014an attack as forceful as the one that delivered Badajoz into the hands of the Iron Duke.\n\n\"Ah,\" said McWheezle, in front of a small crowd of his congregation outside the kirk at the end of morning service, \"been praying, MacKay?\"\n\n\"Chust so, your reverence.\" Angus tipped his caubeen most civilly.\n\n\"Just like the Scots,\" said McWheezle, vinegar oozing through the honey of his words. \"Pray on their knees on a Sunday\u2014and their neighbours for the rest of the week.\"\n\nAngus stopped dead. His kilt shuddered like an electrocuted jellyfish. He turned, faced the reverend gentleman, and said in low but measured tones, \"Mister McWheezle, sir?\"\n\n\"Yes, Angus?\"\n\n\"It would be a cause of great pleasure to me, sir\u2014with all due deference to your station\u2014it would be a cause of great pleasure to me, sir, if you would kindly bugger off.\"\n\nThe words were clear, deliberate, and greeted with the kind of stunned silence that would have marked a royal wedding if the answer to the question, \"Do you take this prince...\" had been \"Sod this for a game of soldiers.\" Every mouth gaped. Lips pursed. The members of the audience looked like a school of expiring codfish.\n\n\"Aye,\" said Angus\u2014in fencing circles his original remark had been a parry; now came the riposte\u2014\"and as soon and as fast as possible.\" He spun on his heel and strode off, cromac clattering on the pavement.\n\nFrom the look on the Reverend McWheezle's face he'd been taken off guard as much as a certain King Edward at a spot called Bannockburn. It was a good thing the old church was built of granite, so great was the huffing and puffing of the practically paralyzed Presbyterian.\n\nThe only sound that could be heard over the reverend's respiratory rasping was a gargantuan grumbling\u2014the kind of noise an antiquated steam boiler with a stuck safety valve might make if the internal pressure was reaching a critical point. I turned and realized it was O'Reilly trying to control himself.\n\n* * *\n\nWe didn't see Angus for several weeks, then he resurfaced as the very last patient of a busy morning's surgery. O'Reilly ushered him in. O'Reilly seated himself at the rolltop desk and, as usual, I parked myself on the examining couch.\n\n\"Have a seat, Angus.\" O'Reilly gestured toward a chair.\n\nThe little Scot shook his head. He stood silently, holding his caubeen in both hands.\n\nI waited. O'Reilly waited. Angus said nothing. The silence stretched like a piece of knicker elastic caught in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.\n\n\"Well,\" said O'Reilly, at last, \"what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\"It is that man,\" said Angus. \"Himself. The dominie.\"\n\nDomino? I thought. Whatever was he on about?\n\n\"Mister McWheezle?\" asked O'Reilly.\n\n\"Chust so. It was a terrible thing.\"\n\n\"What he said to you?\" O'Reilly probed.\n\n\"No,\" said Angus with a mighty shake of his head. \"What I said to him.\"\n\n\"Come on, Angus. He was asking for it.\"\n\nAngus drew himself up\u2014well to half-mast; remember he was less than five feet tall. \"It was not a thing to be forgiven. A shentleman\"\u2014I realized he meant gentleman\u2014\"from the Isles should never lose his temper.\" The little Scot was clearly distressed.\n\n\"Um,\" said O'Reilly, \"um, I don't suppose you'd consider apologizing?\"\n\nFrom the look on the little man's face I guessed that he would rather have eaten his haggis raw.\n\n\"This is upsetting you, Angus, isn't it?\" said O'Reilly.\n\n\"Chust so, Doctor. It is what you might call a dilemma.\"\n\nRight, I thought. Come on, O'Reilly, let's see you solve this one.\n\nO'Reilly bent his head over to Angus, whispered something I couldn't hear, and straightened up. The thunderclouds fled from Angus's wrinkled face. The sun gleamed on the hills and valleys of his cheeks. His deep blue eyes twinkled.\n\n\"Chust so. Sunday then, Doctor... Thank you, sir.\" He turned and left.\n\n\"What...?\" I began.\n\n\"The power of authority,\" said O'Reilly, and that was all he would say.\n\nAfter service that Sunday, a larger congregation than usual gathered on the church steps. O'Reilly and I kept our places at the front of the crowd as Angus MacKay approached the Reverend McWheezle.\n\n\"It is a word I would like, your reverence.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said McWheezle with the inflated dignity of a Doge of Venice and all the warmth of an Atlantic northeaster.\n\n\"Well,\" said Angus mildly, \"well, you'll no' have forgotten that I telled ye tae bugger off?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said McWheezle.\n\n\"Aye, and soon.\"\n\nMcWheezle sniffed.\n\n\"Well,\" said Angus slowly, \"after giving the matter consideration, and after consultation with Doctor O'Reilly, I have come to the conclusion that...\"\n\nThe reverend's chest puffed up like the Hindenburg before her final flight. \"You must apologize?\" he sneered.\n\n\"Oh no,\" said Angus, \"no, it's chust that Doctor O'Reilly says you need nae bother\u2014but if you must, you'll no' be needing tae rush.\"\nJUNE 2000\n\nThe Patient Who Broke the Rules\n\nAnd why O'Reilly didn't mind\n\nDevotees of Ray Bradbury, and indeed many students of physics, know that paper bursts into flame at a temperature of 451\u00b0F. Devotees of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly know that his flashpoint was considerably lower. If he'd been a volcano, teams of vulcanologists would have set up permanent encampments in his garden, ever ready to be on hand for his next inevitable eruption. Living in his house, as I did, was akin to dwelling on the lower slopes of Mount Vesuvius.\n\nEver since the first report of the dangers of secondhand smoke\u2014written, I believe, by one of the Plinys, describing the minor upset that engulfed Pompeii\u2014Neapolitans have developed a kind of early warning system. They rely on the behaviour of animals, their own ability to sense earth tremors, and any release of smoke from the summit of their local planetary safety vent.\n\nEver since I'd witnessed the ejection of Donal Donnelly by my mentor, I'd developed my own early warning system. I relied on the rapid disappearance of Arthur Guinness, O'Reilly's cerebrally challenged Labrador, my own ability to see the great man tremble, and any suggestion of pallor in the tip of his nose.\n\nNeapolitans are always prepared to beat hasty retreats at the slightest sign of instability. Removing myself from the great man's presence wasn't always possible but at least I'd evolved a pretty acute idea of when to keep my mouth shut and look the other way.\n\nI also kept a mental checklist of people and circumstances likely to provoke one of his outbursts. Councillor Bishop, the Reverend McWheezle, and Doctor \"Thorny\" Murphy, unkindness to widows or eccentrics who lived in old cars, hypocrisy, and shoddy medical practice... but if we take the list of characters I've just mentioned, I repeat myself.\n\nMalingerers with sore backs weren't high on O'Reilly's list of preferred patients. Slow historians\u2014you know the type, the ones who in response to the question \"Does anyone in your family suffer from anything similar?\" will start with the utterly unrelated complaint of a distant ancestor whose name was recorded in the Domesday Book, and ramble glacially through the generations\u2014slow historians would get shrift of such shortness from O'Reilly that it couldn't have been measured with a micrometer. At least that had been my experience until the day I sat in on a consultation with a local fisherman.\n\nDeclan O'Tomelty was a large man. He sat in the chair, boots firmly planted on the floor, knees apart, gnarled hands resting on his thighs. He wore moleskin trousers held up at the knee by those leather thongs that the Scots call knicky-tams.\n\nO'Reilly sat before his rolltop desk, half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, elbow on knee, chin resting on the back of his hand. He looked like a rustic version of Rodin's Thinker.\n\nI kept a close eye on O'Reilly's schnozzle. By all the usual indicators, it should have borne an even closer resemblance to old Auguste R.'s lump of bronze on a marble pedestal\u2014glanced at my watch\u2014at least ten minutes ago. The history of O'Tomelty's sore back seemed to be going on forever, but O'Reilly simply sat, immobile, only occasionally making a sympathetic grunt.\n\nO'Tomelty's epic expostulation eventually ended.\n\nO'Reilly rose and gestured to me to get down from my perch on the examining table. He asked O'Tomelty to undress and lie on the table, and once the man had painfully climbed up, O'Reilly examined his patient's back with a thoroughness and gentleness that surprised me.\n\n\"Right,\" he said, \"hop down, Declan. I've just to make a phone call.\"\n\nO'Reilly lifted the receiver and dialed. \"Hello? Royal Victoria? Orthopaedics, please.\" His fingers drummed on the desktop. \"Professor Muldoon, please.\" Just a hint of nasal pallor. \"I don't give a tinker's damn who he's busy with. This is Doctor Fingal O'Reilly. What? I should bloody well think so.\"\n\nI wondered if the recipient's receiver was melting.\n\n\"Hello? Monkey Nuts?\"\n\nGood Lord, I thought. Professor Michael Muldoon had been the terror of all of us when we were students, and O'Reilly has the temerity to call the old fire-eater \"Monkey Nuts\"?\n\n\"No, sorry, I can't make it for golf on Saturday. No, I need a favour. Patient of mine. You'll see him at five? Splendid.\" O'Reilly put down the phone and spoke quietly to the now fully dressed O'Tomelty. \"Have a pew in the waiting room, Declan. Doctor Taylor here won't mind finishing the surgery. I'll run you up to Belfast.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Doctor, sir,\" O'Tomelty said as he left.\n\nMy mouth hung open. The man had broken at least two of O'Reilly's rules\u2014thou shalt not have a sore back nor give a rambling history\u2014as effectively as a murderer and an adulterer would have bent a couple of the Ten Interesting Suggestions that Moses brought down from the Mount, numbers five and ten by the Augustinian method of reckoning if memory serves, and yet O'Reilly had listened patiently and...\n\n\"I know what you're thinking, Taylor,\" he said, \"so stop it.\"\n\n\"I promise,\" I replied. The Neapolitans, when in doubt, run.\n\n\"You don't know Declan O'Tomelty the way I do.\" O'Reilly's hazel eyes had a faraway look. \"Don't suppose you know much naval history either.\"\n\nI was about to remark that I wasn't entirely ignorant of the fate of the Spanish Armada when I remembered that O'Reilly had had a distinguished career in His Majesty's floating forces in the last great nastiness. He continued, \"I hadn't been in practice here for long when Declan showed up, quite late at night. His back was sore. I wasn't too pleased.\"\n\nNor was King Charles I when Olly Cromwell decided that the royal locks needed a bit of a trim\u2014permanently.\n\n\"Maybe,\" said O'Reilly pensively, \"maybe I was a bit easier in those days. I listened to the man.\"\n\nYou what? I thought.\n\n\"Just showed me the value of a well-taken history. 'All right,' says I, 'how did you hurt your back?' 'Wasn't me that hurt it, Doc,' says he, 'it was them Germans.' 'Pardon,' says I. 'Well,' says he, 'I was in the navy.' I suppose because he and I had something in common I paid a bit more attention. 'Go on,' says I. 'I was minding my own business, strapped to my antiaircraft gun. Then there was a bloody great bang and me and the gun is heading up\u2014right up. God knows what happened to the gun, but I headed down, and I'll tell you, Doc, that water was bloody cold, so it was.' 'Right,' says I, and I'll tell you, Pat, I was tired and not too pleased with his story. I only asked him one more question.\"\n\n\"'Are you going to get out of here?'\" I suggested.\n\nO'Reilly shook his head. \"No. I asked him, 'What ship were you on?' 'I don't suppose, Doc,' says he, 'that you ever heard of the Hood?'\"\n\n\"The Hood?\" I said, \"but there were only three survivors.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said O'Reilly. \"Declan really is one of them.\"\n\nO'Reilly strode to the door. \"His back has given him gip ever since. I think he's earned a ride to the hospital.\"\n\nAuthor's note: I usually make up these stories but this is a retelling of an actual episode of my own early years in practice, although the name Declan O'Tomelty and his occupation are fictitious. I had no reason to doubt O'Reilly.\n(no column in july 2000)  \nAUGUST 2000\n\nGoing to the Dogs\n\nO'Reilly places a bet\n\n\"Good Lord,\" said O'Reilly, \"I wonder if he'll paint it the same colours as his bicycle.\"\n\nWe were strolling along the main, indeed the only, street of the humming metropolis of Ballybucklebo. Approaching us was Donal Donnelly, who was being tailed by something vaguely canine. After closer inspection, as our respective paths converged, I noticed that the beast was attached to Donal by a piece of frayed rope.\n\nDonal, you will remember, wasn't overly bright\u2014in the way that Mount Everest isn't overly short\u2014and definitely belonged to the Charles Atlas School of Bodybuilding, Class of '61\u2014Failures. Anyone who'd ever seen Donal stripped for action was immediately reminded of some poor shipwrecked wretch who'd survived for several months on the boilings of his leather shoes and the smell of a greasy rag. Donal's visage would have been a geometrician's dream, pointed as it was both vertically and fore and aft.\n\nI tell you this because the greyhound, for such it was, bore a striking resemblance to its master. There was nothing of the creature but a muzzle like a weasel's, ribs that only needed little paper chef's hats to pass muster as a rack of lamb, and a tail that the animal carried between its legs.\n\nThe last attribute was Donal's normal demeanour when addressing Doctor O'Reilly, but on that particular morning Donal was distinctly cocky. \"She's a beauty, isn't she, Doctor O'Reilly?\" Donal wasn't bursting with pride\u2014he was exploding.\n\n\"Mmm,\" said O'Reilly noncommittally as he bent to examine the dog.\n\n\"You should see her run,\" said Donal. \"Greased lightning wouldn't get a look in.\"\n\nI thought back to my classes in nutrition and some arcane formula concerning rate of caloric expenditure and weight loss. Looking at Donal's greyhound, it seemed to me that the mere effort of standing was probably generating a calorific deficit. Running might make the animal disappear completely.\n\n\"What do you call her?\" O'Reilly inquired, diplomatically.\n\n\"Bluebird,\" said Donal, smugly.\n\n\"Bluebird. Would that be after Sir Malcolm Campbell's speedboat?\" asked O'Reilly.\n\n\"Aye, Doctor. Boys-a-dear, you should see that thing go.\"\n\n\"Donal,\" said O'Reilly, \"That Bluebird runs on water.\"\n\nDonal held one finger alongside his nose. His left upper eyelid drooped like a sagging theatre curtain\u2014the nearest Donal could manage to a wink\u2014and he inclined his head to the dog. \"So does she, Doctor.\"\n\nFor the life of me I couldn't understand why O'Reilly guffawed, slapped Donal on the shoulder, and said, \"You'll tell me when she runs dry, won't you, Donal?\"\n\n\"Indeed, Doctor. Indeed I will.\" Donal took his leave, pursued by the faithful Bluebird.\n\n\"Smart lad, that Donal,\" said O'Reilly. \"That dog will bear watching.\"\n\nO'Reilly's attribution of smartness to a man whose thickness was an affront to all short planks so dumbfounded me that I neglected to ask why Bluebird would bear scrutiny. I didn't find out for several months\u2014and, as usual, I found out to my cost. I found out when O'Reilly and I went to the dogs\u2014literally.\n\nI may have neglected to mention that in the rural Ulster communities, working dogs were the order of the day\u2014haughty police Alsatians, super-intelligent border collies, gentle guide dogs, and, oh yes, the dimwitted, boozing, look-there's-Taylor's-trouser-leg-let's-have-a-go-at-it, so-called gun dog, Arthur Guinness.\n\nBluebird was nominally a worker. Her task was to charge round an oval track in pursuit of a mechanical hare, beat all the other dogs, and by so doing enrich those who'd seen fit to wager on the outcome.\n\nI'd learned from O'Reilly that those who chanced a flutter on Donal's dog were forming a line on the left for admittance to the local poorhouse. It was locally supposed that the only chance the animal would ever have of coming in first was to be almost overtaken by the dogs entered in the next race after the one she'd come last in.\n\nThe seasons followed their preordained paths in Ballybucklebo. O'Reilly swore at Councillor Bishop, practised his bagpipe grace notes (almost to the satisfaction of Angus MacKay), increased the share values of both the Guinness brewery and John Jameson's distillery, and allowed the practice of medicine to interfere with his busy schedule as little as possible. He had, after all, acquired the services of a junior assistant\u2014me\u2014and, as he was fond of remarking, \"There's no sense buying a dog and barking yourself.\" Perhaps his allusion to dogs was what eventually made me inquire about the celerity of a certain Bluebird, the dog that ran on water.\n\n\"Tell you what,\" he said, \"let's find out. We'll go and watch her run on Saturday.\"\n\nAnd so we did.\n\n* * *\n\nOn the appointed day, O'Reilly took me to the stadium. You may remember the Loughbrickland horse racing. The greyhound races bore a striking resemblance to their equestrian counterpart. A low fence surrounded the track. Between the fence and the spectators, the \"turf accountants\" had their stands. Florid-faced men in loud tweeds stood on their daises calling the odds and turning the purses of the punters to penury. Bluebird, it seemed, was to appear in the third race.\n\nDonal materialized like a genie from a bottle. As he passed O'Reilly, his eyelid managed its slow descent and all he murmured was, \"Very dry today, Doctor.\"\n\nO'Reilly brightened considerably.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said, pushing his way through the crowd with all the gentility of a Tiger tank. He clattered to a halt before \"Honest\" Joe Johnston's stand and examined the odds chalked on a board above the platform.\n\n\"Bluebird's at one hundred to one,\" he remarked. \"Take my advice, Pat, put a couple of quid on her.\" He muttered this as he proffered five pounds to Honest Joe.\n\n\"Bluebird on the nose,\" O'Reilly said.\n\nHonest Joe hesitated. Perhaps, I thought, even a bookie has a sense of decency. Taking O'Reilly's money seemed about as ethical as selling London Bridge to an unsuspecting antipodean.\n\n\"Bluebird,\" said O'Reilly. \"To win.\"\n\nThe bookie shrugged, took the note, and gave O'Reilly a ticket.\n\n\"Well?\" O'Reilly said, looking straight at me.\n\nI shook my head. Given Bluebird's dismal record, I'd decided it would have been less painful simply to tear up one of my hard-earned pounds.\n\n\"You'll be sorry,\" O'Reilly growled.\n\nI won't weary you with the details of the race. I'll simply remark that Bluebird, the slowest dog in all Ballybucklebo, obeying Einstein's laws of relativity, actually lengthened by a good two inches, so close did she come to the speed of light. If I'd taken O'Reilly's advice I'd have been a hundred pounds better off.\n\nHe chuckled all the way home and made me wait until we were safely ensconced in his upstairs sitting room before he deigned to explain the day's proceedings.\n\n\"You see, Pat,\" he said, \"Bluebird really did run on water.\"\n\nI was mystified.\n\n\"Look, the dog fancy aren't above helping their animals along.\"\n\n\"I don't...\"\n\n\"They give the poor things stimulants.\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Oh, aye. That's why all winners have a dope test.\"\n\n\"But if Donal gave Bluebird something, that'll show up\u2014and you'll have to give back the money.\"\n\nThe aspidistra that adorned the corner of the room grew a good two inches before he stopped laughing.\n\n\"They'll not find a thing,\" he said when he'd finally collected himself. \"Donal's been stopping the dog.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Water,\" said O'Reilly. \"Good old H2O. Donal's been keeping the animal dry for a day before every race and then he's given her a bucket of water just before the start. Slows the dog down\u2014and no one ever tests the losers. Dog finishes last time after time, up go the odds, and then...\"\n\n\"Lord,\" I said, \"that's what Donal meant by 'It's a dry day.' He didn't give her the water today.\"\n\n\"Bingo,\" said O'Reilly. \"They can test the wee bitch 'til hell freezes over.\"\n\n\"Dry day,\" I muttered, thinking of the hundred quid I hadn't collected.\n\n\"Never mind,\" said O'Reilly smugly, heading for the decanter on the sideboard, \"we can always have our own wee wet.\"\nSEPTEMBER 2000\n\nA Meeting of the Minds\n\nThe first lesson of general practice\n\n\"Old men forget.\" For the life of me I can't remember the originator of that quotation, but I can recall my first meeting with Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly\u2014classical scholar, bagpiper, poacher, hard drinker, and foul-mouthed country GP\u2014as if it were yesterday.\n\nParenthetically, I also do know that loss of short-term memory and clarity of long-term recall characterize dementia, but with regards to dumuntia\u2014I reckon if I can still spell it I ain't got it.\n\nNor had Doctor Fingal Flahertie O. When I met him, and in subsequent years when I returned to Ulster to visit him, his cortical processes would have made the workings of a Pentium chip look like the slow grinding of an unwound grandfather clock. He coupled his mental acuity with an unshakable belief that actions spoke louder than words\u2014which was often just as well. While his actions could be precipitate, his words, when he was riled, could be as cutting as the obsidian knives so beloved by the ancient Aztecs for slicing the hearts out of living victims. Add to that his propensity for salting his vituperations with a lexicon of blasphemy that would have made a sailor blush, and you can understand why Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly was as much a force to be reckoned with as a supercharged bulldozer.\n\nAnd yet his patients loved him, and I suppose in time, so did I\u2014although when I first met him, love at first sight seemed about as likely as the survival of a woodlouse under the front cylinder of a steamroller.\n\nI'd just graduated from the Queen's University of Belfast. The ink on my diploma where the dean, one Hippocrates of Kos, had made his mark, had barely had time to dry. I was young, idealistic, determined to carry healing to darkest Ulster, wet behind the ears, sanctimonious\u2014in short an inexperienced, opinionated pain in the arse. I had more rough edges than a piece of Precambrian rock. O'Reilly was responsible for smoothing the more jagged bits to something that more closely resembled a piece of emery paper. I will forever be in his debt\u2014but had I followed my instincts when we first met, I would have fled from his village of Ballybucklebo with the single-mindedness of the Israelites on their package trip out of Egypt.\n\nI'd driven down from Belfast, parked my elderly Volkswagen, and walked along a gravel path flanked by rosebushes to the front door of an imposing three-storey granite block house. I stood on the front doorstep, brand-new black bag clutched in one hand, and read the brass plate affixed to the door frame: \"Doctor F. F. O'Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO, Physician and Surgeon.\"\n\nTwo bell pushes resided in their recesses in the plate. One was labelled \"Day Bell,\" the other, \"Night Bell.\" Above the plate, the mouthpiece of a speaking tube glistened dully in the summer sunlight. As I later learned, O'Reilly had been in practice since before the telephone had reached Ballybucklebo. Patients needing to consult the great man were expected to whisper their complaints along the tube as Pyramus and Thisbe spoke to each other through the crack in the wall in A Midsummer Night's Dream.\n\nI was wondering whether to apply my own mouth to the orifice when the front door opened, much as I imagine the jaws of hell gape for an unregenerate sinner. I took a step backward.\n\nA large man, a man who stood about six foot thirteen and had the shoulders of Atlas, stood on the front steps. His face was as wrinkled as dried-out chamois leather, his cheeks florid, and his nose tip an alabaster white. His right hand grasped the coat collar and his left the seat of a pair of moleskin trousers on a much smaller man. I noticed that the grabee's left foot was bare and not altogether clean. The victim wriggled and whimpered, \"Ah, Jesus, no, Doctor...\"\n\nWhatever the rest of his sentiments might have been, they were cut off by a high-pitched keening as he was hurled bodily into one of the rosebushes.\n\nThe ogre bent, picked up a shoe and a sock, and hurled the footwear after the now-crash-landed chap. I'll never forget Doctor O'Reilly's words, delivered in a voice that would have made old Stentor sound like a sufferer from laryngitis.\n\n\"Next time, Donal Donnelly, next time you want me to look at a sore ankle... wash your bloody feet!\"\n\nHe spun on me. \"Who are you and what the hell do you want?\"\n\nImmediate transportation to a place of sanctuary seemed like a good idea, but I was so numbed, all I could think of was to hold my black bag in front of me. I suppose I thought it might have offered some protection. The captain of H.M.S. Hood probably felt the same way about his ship's armour plating\u2014before the Bismark let go.\n\n\"I said,\" he roared, \"what the hell do you want?\" As he spoke he advanced toward me.\n\n\"Doctor O'Reilly?\"\n\n\"No. John\u2014bloody\u2014Wayne.\"\n\nI wondered why I didn't simply mutter, \"My mistake,\" and make tracks. Instead I swallowed, took my black bag and my courage in both hands, and said, \"I'm Taylor. Your locum.\"\n\nHe guffawed. \"Then why didn't you say so?\"\n\nBecause I'd been feeling like a rabbit confronted by a boa constrictor. Because it wasn't the cat that had got my tongue, it was a pride of rabid lions. Because...\n\n\"Never mind,\" he said, \"come on in.\"\n\nHis handshake would have done justice to a gravel crusher. Before turning to go into the house, he pointed an admonitory finger at the heap of human wreckage that was still struggling to disentangle itself from a mass of floribunda. \"Go on home now, Donal, do what I said.\" Doctor O'Reilly consulted his watch. \"Surgery hours are over but if you're back within an hour I'll wait for you and Doctor\u2014what did you say your name was?\"\n\n\"Taylor.\"\n\n\"Doctor Taylor and I will have a look at your hind leg.\" He didn't wait for a reply, but turned and went in. I followed, closing the door behind me. He stood in a spacious hall, beaming from ear to ear, the tip of his nose now the colour of the rest of his face. \"Let that be your first lesson, Taylor. If you want to succeed in practice, never\u2014never, never, never\u2014let the customers get the upper hand.\"\nOCTOBER 2000\n\nIt's in the Can\n\nO'Reilly takes the bait\n\nMy loyal reader stopped me in the corridor of the hospital yesterday and remarked that he still enjoyed his monthly dose of O'Reilly. He asked how I'd developed the ability to conjure up such farfetched pieces of fiction. I could have explained to him too, poor chap, if he hadn't been running late for his appointment with his psychiatrist.\n\nMy answer would have been that many lower species\u2014and no, I don't mean Donal Donnelly\u2014have developed remarkable survival strategies. Certain sea slugs, when threatened, eviscerate themselves. In my case, rather than performing repeated seppuku\u2014the Samurai warrior's do-it-yourself total colectomy\u2014I'd learned to be pretty quick off the mark with plausible excuses when in the company of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly.\n\nThe need to do so was never more pressing than when Admiral Lord Horatio O'Reilly tried to inveigle me into accompanying him for a day's outing on the briny deep. You'll remember that he was the proud owner of a twenty-six-foot sloop. I believe he'd bought the wretched vessel after she'd failed the admittedly low entrance standards to qualify her as a coffin ship during the great Irish potato challenge of the 1840s.\n\nOnce O'Reilly had taken the helm, he seemed to think he was a direct descendant of Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and James Cook. In fact, his navigational skills were such that if Noah had signed O'Reilly on as navigator, given the reproductive rates among animals, the old patriarch would have been skipper of a pretty crowded Ark and might be looking for Mount Ararat to this very day.\n\nSince the day when Fingal had piled his craft up on a reef\u2014a reef that was clearly marked by a lighthouse\u2014it had been my avowed intent never again to set foot on his decks. I often amazed myself with my rapid creativity when there was the slightest hint of an oceangoing jaunt. O'Reilly more often amazed me with his uncanny ability to beat me to the punch.\n\n\"What,\" he asked, one sunny August Saturday, \"do you know about crabs?\"\n\nMy mind was elsewhere\u2014probably on a permanent leave of absence. \"Not much,\" I said. \"They walk sideways, have dirty great claws, and live on the bottom of the sea.\" The mention of the crustaceans' natural habitat should have set my alarm bells ringing, but you already know that I wasn't concentrating properly.\n\n\"Very tasty,\" he observed with a faraway look on his face. \"Fancy some for tea?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Come on, then,\" he said, heading for the door.\n\nI followed, neglecting to pay attention to the fact that he was wearing a Guernsey sweater and a pair of corduroy trousers\u2014his favoured seagoing rig.\n\nIt was a short walk to the shops. He surprised me by turning into the grocery store instead of the fishmonger's.\n\n\"Cat food,\" he announced, paying for a can. \"Nothing like it.\"\n\n\"For supper for us\u2014or for the cat?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"No. For the crabs.\"\n\nSomewhere deep in the recesses of my mind a tiny red light glowed weakly.\n\n\"Cat food for crabs?\"\n\n\"Bait, my boy. They love it.\"\n\nMy cortical red light flashed on and off like the Eddystone Lighthouse. Sirens howled. \"Er, Fingal, did I mention I had plans to...\"\n\n\"Nonsense, my boy. We'll have a wonderful time.\"\n\nMy heart plummeted like a U-boat in a crash dive.\n\n\"Not on your boat, Fingal?\" My hopes were about as valid as those of an early Christian martyr who has tried to persuade himself that the lions in the Coliseum were of a peculiarly vegetarian breed.\n\nHe draped an avuncular arm round my shoulder and, with the gentility of a hydraulic ram, propelled me toward the door. \"Where else, my boy? Where else?\"\n\nTo have suggested that the innermost circle of Dante's Inferno held a certain appeal would have been churlish. Besides, his hand gripped my arm the way Godzilla caressed one of his foes.\n\n* * *\n\nFor once, the seagoing day turned out to be more pleasant than I'd anticipated. I suffered only a minor concussion when the boom and my head came into immediate juxtaposition during a manouevre he referred to as a gibe. When we dropped anchor in the lee of a small island, I was comforted by the thought that the ground tackle's ability to hold us in position was no doubt augmented by the extra weight it was carrying from the pounds of flesh the chain had ripped from my hands.\n\n\"Marvellous,\" said O'Reilly. \"Absolutely marvellous. Now. Crabs.\"\n\nHe opened a locker and hauled out a Heath-Robinson device of netting and metal struts.\n\n\"Cat food,\" he demanded.\n\nI handed him the tin. He wrestled it into the infernal machine, lifted the thing, and tossed it over the side.\n\n\"Er, Fingal...\"\n\n\"Not now, boy. I'm busy.\" He was. He was paying out fathoms of rope that I assumed were attached to the crab pot.\n\nI waited until he'd made the rope fast to the taffrail.\n\n\"Er, Fingal...\"\n\n\"Not now, boy. Beer,\" he ordered.\n\nI'd noticed something about the tinned cat food that was surely going to spoil his afternoon, but in the confusion of falling down the companionway, dropping the lid of the ice chest on my fingers, and hitting my head on the hatch cover as I returned to the deck, whatever it was must have slipped my mind\u2014or perhaps I decided to let it slip. I handed him his beer and sat beside him.\n\n\"If you listen carefully,\" he said, \"you'll hear the scrabbling of crustacean claws as the little darlins fight to get at the bait. They do love it, you know.\"\n\nI remembered what had bothered me, but said nothing.\n\n\"Mrs. Kincaid will do them a treat. Boiled. Melted butter.\" O'Reilly was salivating so heavily at the thought of his upcoming feast that if he hadn't been consuming beer at his usual rate he would probably have suffered dehydration.\n\nFor one hour he extolled the virtues of boiled crab. I would have been bored by the monologue had I not been given periodic respite by being sent below for more beer.\n\n\"Right,\" he finally announced, \"let's get at 'em.\" He rose and began hauling in the rope. The bay must have been on the edge of the Marianas Trench. I watched as coils of manila filled the cockpit. O'Reilly's fluid deprivation was mightily increased by the rivulets of sweat pouring from his brow.\n\nFinally the crab pot broke the surface.\n\n\"Gotcha,\" he roared in triumph, hauling it into the boat.\n\nThe device was as empty as Donal Donnelly's mind. Not a single crab, not even a shrimp. The cat food can sparkled in the sunlight.\n\n\"Can't understand it,\" said O'Reilly. \"Cat food usually works a treat.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it does, Fingal,\" I observed as gently as I could, \"but I think you're meant to open the can.\"\n\n\"What?\" he roared, reaching into the trap and pulling out the can, pristine in all its unpunctured glory. \"Well, I'll be damned.\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" I said, probably less than tactfully, \"I'm sure Mrs. Kincaid can work wonders with cat food.\"\nNOVEMBER 2000\n\nA Very Pheasant Evening...\n\n... and another pain in the arse for his lordship\n\n\"Thank you, Fingal,\" said the only denizen of Ballybucklebo\u2014other than myself\u2014to be accorded the privilege of addressing Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO, without using the great healer's title.\n\nThe patient buttoned up his tweed trousers.\n\n\"My pleasure, John,\" O'Reilly said, dropping a rubber glove into a disposal bin.\n\nO'Reilly had just finished examining the fat, feudal fundament of John Fitzgurgle, DSO, MC, and bar, Viscount Ballybucklebo. Under the circumstances, Doctor O. was in the position to call the great man just about anything he chose.\n\n\"Haemorrhoids, I'm afraid. Sorry, John,\" O'Reilly said, his half-hidden smile giving the lie to his spoken regrets. \"Here.\" O'Reilly sat at his desk and scribbled out a prescription. \"Twice a day. Should clear them up in about a week.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" said his lordship, \"today's Tuesday. Had rather hoped they'd be gone by Saturday. I'm having a shoot. Won't possibly be able to walk the coverts.\"\n\n\"Lots of birds this year, John?\" asked O'Reilly with the innocence of a choirboy inquiring after the health of a beloved choirmaster.\n\n\"Rather,\" said his lordship. \"Mostly in the Leprechauns' Wood.\"\n\nI saw O'Reilly smile. Mata Hari must have had the same look on her face after she'd extracted some juicy tidbit from a member of the French high command.\n\n\"Lots of time in the season left for you to get a shot or two, John,\" O'Reilly said helpfully as he showed his lordship to the door.\n\n\"Isn't that interesting, Pat?\" O'Reilly asked, after the pathetically piles-pained peer had perambulated through the portal.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" I said, trying frantically to guess which night O'Reilly had in mind for using his recently acquired intelligence. I knew I had to have an ironclad excuse for being somewhere else\u2014anywhere else.\n\nPerhaps the reason for my panic-stricken preemptive planning requires a word of elaboration. For those unfamiliar with sporting life in Ulster or with one of Doctor F. F. O'Reilly's eccentricities, let me offer an explanatory note.\n\nThe landed gentry stocked their estates with large numbers of Phaisanus versicolour\u2014the ring-necked pheasant. The birds were raised from chicks, and during their formative months were given the kind of loving care usually reserved for tiny premature infants. The pampered pheasants were fed, kept warm, and thoroughly coddled. Coddled, that was, until the start of the shooting season. Then the bewildered birds were rousted from their avian Eden. Flapping fearfully in full flight, they were set upon by hordes of happy hunters who blazed away with all the enthusiasm of Montgomery's artillery during the warm-up to the away match at El Alamein.\n\nBeing a pheasant was no bed of roses. Lord Fitzgurgle's guests, poltroons who paid for the privilege of joining in the awful avicide, weren't the only ones the birds should have feared. Several of Ballybucklebo's citizens, in the spirit of Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and the rest of the French revolutionaries, saw no reason not to indulge in a bit of egalitarian free enterprise.\n\nLesser mortals had practised poaching for years. This activity was mightily frowned upon by the upper crust. In days of yore they spent considerable resources to ensure that vast tracts of Australia were populated by platoons of penurious peasants who'd purloined or pilfered privately purchased pheasants.\n\nAnd I hope you'll remember that when I first introduced you to my mentor, I described him as, among other things, an unregenerate poacher. Well, he might fancy a night in the woods. I did not.\n\nAs usual, my wishes and my fate were on widely divergent courses.\n\n\"Whiskey,\" said O'Reilly. \"Whiskey and oatmeal.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed.\" I wondered what on Earth he was talking about, and quite lost track of my search for a self-preserving alibi.\n\n\"Come on,\" said O'Reilly, leaving the surgery and heading for the kitchen. I followed.\n\nHe opened a cupboard and removed a bottle of a well-known Scotch brand's Red Label, not one of his favoured Irish whiskeys.\n\n\"Cooking whisky's good enough,\" he remarked, producing a bag of oatmeal.\n\nA bucket came next, the oatmeal was dumped into the bucket, and the spirits poured in. O'Reilly left just enough in the bottom of the bottle to allow him to take a healthy swallow as he stirred the soggy mess. \"No need to let it all go to waste,\" he remarked, and burped.\n\nI was lost. Oatmeal was used to make porridge. If Mrs. Kincaid decided to boil some up from the contents of the bucket, my performance at morning surgery would certainly not be up to scratch. \"What...?\"\n\n\"You'll see, my boy. You'll see.\" And so I did\u2014but not until Friday night.\n\nWe were sitting in the upstairs room. The curtains were open and I was admiring the effects of the full moon on the waters of Belfast Lough. In the distance, the Hills of Antrim stood dark against a darker sky. A single coal boat ploughed a dark furrow through a sea like burnished silver. From somewhere inland, the liquid call of a barn owl was the only sound to disturb the velvet silence. The evening was idyllic, peaceful...\n\n\"Right,\" said O'Reilly, \"go and put on some dark clothes.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Get a move on. I'll get the oatmeal and I'll meet you at the car.\"\n\nThe oatmeal. I'd forgotten about it and was curious to know its purpose. Utterly forgetting the catastrophic consequences of curiosity to the cat\u2014who became a cadaver with a certain degree of celerity\u2014I went and changed.\n\nIt was a short drive through the darkened countryside. I wondered why O'Reilly switched off the engine and let the car glide silently for the last part of our journey\u2014until I realized that we'd stopped by a large copse. A copse that I instantly recognized as Leprechauns' Wood.\n\n\"Oh no, Fingal...\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" he said. \"Out, and keep very quiet.\"\n\nTogether we wriggled through a barbed-wire fence and went on our way. O'Reilly carried the bucket of whisky-soaked oatmeal. I merely bore a two-inch laceration of my left hand. He made his way through the dimly lit undergrowth as silently as Daniel Boone might have approached a hostile Indian encampment. I trailed behind, making only the occasional acquaintance with briars' thorns.\n\nWhen we arrived in a small clearing, he stopped, held an extended finger to his lips, and began to peer intently up into the trees. My gaze followed his. There, silhouetted against the night sky, I saw the rotund shapes of roosting birds.\n\nO'Reilly grinned at me and silently scattered the oatmeal on the forest floor. He rejoined me and guided me back into the undergrowth. He lay down. I lay down. Among a stand of broad-leafed plants. Pity they were nettles.\n\nO'Reilly cupped his hands to his mouth and produced a most peculiar sound. I clapped my stung hands to my mouth and tried not to whimper.\n\nSomething stirred in the branches. One after another the sleeping birds sat bolt upright. One after another they fluttered to the ground. They bent and pecked at the oatmeal with the enthusiasm of a set of small pile-drivers. Sated at last, they fluttered back up to their perches, tucked their heads under their wings and, like a row of dominoes, one after another they lost their grips and tumbled to the ground.\n\nThey were a party of profoundly pissed pheasants, beautifically blotto birds, drunk as a lord\u2014to whom, lest we forget, they actually belonged.\n\nO'Reilly rose, walked into the clearing, grabbed two birds, and rapidly dispatched them. At least, I thought, they died happy. I wondered if the birds he left behind would awaken with horrible hangovers.\n\nIt struck me quite forcibly as we made our way back to the car that for Lord Fitzgurgle, haemorrhoids were not the only pains in the arse.\nDECEMBER 2000\n\n'Tis the Season to Be Jolly\n\nO'Reilly and the turkey\n\nSir Stamford Raffles was an empire builder. He gave his name to a magnificent hotel in Singapore where, if the works of W. Somerset Maugham are to be believed, the tuans and memsa'bs would sit at tiffin sipping their chota pegs\u2014and a good thing too. There's quinine in tonic water, without which gin and tonic would be merely gin, the despised tot of the \"other ranks\" of His Majesty's armed nitwits. Without the quinine, G&T would have absolutely no antimalarial powers whatsoever. It would be like Christmas without the presents.\n\nAnd what, you may be wondering, does this have to do with the Machiavellian machinations of one Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO? Those who have come to know and love the old reprobate would immediately assume there might be some connection with alcoholic consumption. A logical, almost Holmesian piece of deductive reasoning, but of course putting logic and O'Reilly in the same sentence is about as sensible as mixing water and sodium and chucking in a dose of gasoline for good measure. No, the link is rather more obscure. I'll explain.\n\nPlease picture his surgery. It was mid-December. As I entered, his last patient of the day\u2014Finnula Finucane, widowed mother of three\u2014pushed past me. I could see the swelling beneath her usually lively green eyes and the silver tracks on her cheeks that spoke sadly of recent tears. \"Finnula...\" I began, but she hustled by without speaking. O'Reilly sat in his swivel chair staring over his half-moons at her departing back. I don't think he even knew I was there. \"Bugger it,\" he muttered to himself, then, looking up, scowled at me.\n\n\"What's wrong with her?\" I asked, knowing full well that for all his bluster O'Reilly could care deeply for his patients.\n\n\"Bloody Santa Claus.\"\n\n\"What?\" For the life of me I failed to see how old Saint Nick could be the cause of Finnula's grief.\n\nHe ignored me, hunched forward, clearly lost in his thoughts, then straightened, pointed one finger at me, and said, \"We'll just have to fix it. It'll be Christmas in a week.\"\n\n\"Yes. Right,\" I said, utterly at sea, but it seemed simpler to agree.\n\nHe rose, strode to the door, and roared, \"Mrs. Kincaid!\"\n\nI heard her coming along the corridor.\n\n\"Yes, Doctor O'Reilly?\"\n\n\"Kinky, have you bought our turkey yet?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Well, buy two.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nI was trying to make sense of all of this. Finnula in tears. O'Reilly's strange outbursts: \"Bloody Santa Claus,\" \"It'll be Christmas in a week,\" \"Buy two turkeys.\" Good Lord, was O'Reilly going to cast himself as the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge, somehow hoping that Finnula or one of her youngsters would greet his gift of a turkey with a \"God bless us each and every one\"? I couldn't quite see Finnula's youngest\u2014a carrot-haired six-year-old whose mischief was legend in Ballybucklebo\u2014as a latter-day Tiny Tim.\n\nO'Reilly grunted, then scratched his bent nose and continued, \"Do you have any of those tickets you used for the parish dance left?\"\n\n\"Yes, Doctor.\"\n\n\"Get them, please.\"\n\nShe left.\n\n\"Fingal, I...\"\n\n\"Not now, Taylor. I need to think.\"\n\nMrs. Kincaid reappeared and handed O'Reilly a roll of paper tickets.\n\n\"Thanks, Kinky.\" O'Reilly ripped one free.\n\n\"I want you, Taylor, to buy a raffle ticket.\"\n\n\"What for?\" I think he detected the hint of suspicion in my voice. My tones were ones I imagined were used by flies following an invitation to visit a spider's domicile.\n\n\"What for? A pound.\"\n\n\"No, Fingal. I mean...\"\n\n\"You might win a turkey.\"\n\n\"No, Fingal. I mean what's the draw in aid of?\"\n\nHis face split into a grin of heroic proportions. \"Santa Claus,\" he muttered conspiratorially. \"Now give.\" He held out his hand.\n\nI surrendered a note with all the enthusiasm of a Chicago South Side speakeasy owner who has just assured a large gentleman in a trench coat and a bulge under one armpit that nothing would be more gratifying than to buy beer from Mister Alphonsus Capone's brewery\u2014and, yes, an assurance that nothing nasty would go \"bang\" on the premises would be appreciated.\n\n\"Here.\" He gave me my ticket. \"It's for a good cause.\"\n\nThe departure of some of my hard-earned cash drove away any charitable thoughts I might have been harbouring about O'Reilly giving a turkey to Finnula Finucane. I had a horrible suspicion that I'd just contributed to the F. F. O'Reilly Christmas festivities fund. As P. G. Wodehouse remarked, I was suffering from a distinct lack of gruntle.\n\n\"Come on,\" he bellowed, heading for the door, \"the Mucky Duck's open.\"\n\nI swallowed. Could he actually have the temerity to take my money and immediately go and spend it?\n\nI followed in his wake like a very small dinghy being dragged along by a very large motorboat.\n\nThe Duck was packed. O'Reilly accosted the usual suspects. All, including Arthur Osbaldiston, Donal Donnelly, and even the notoriously tight-fisted Angus MacKay, were given a ticket and relieved of their pounds with a skill and apparent ease of a London pickpocket divesting his prey of their wallets and fob-watches. The rapine and pillage was over before it had sunk in to the befuddled mob that they'd been fleeced. I noticed that Angus MacKay looked as though he might be going to object. O'Reilly must have read the signs.\n\n\"Home,\" he roared before any of the recently shorn could object.\n\nAnd he hadn't even stopped for a drink.\n\n* * *\n\nWhen we were once more ensconced in his surgery, O'Reilly pulled out a wad of notes and counted them with a well-licked thumb.\n\n\"Sixty-four quid,\" he remarked, \"less one for the cost of the prize.\" He shoved a note into his trousers pocket. \"Leaves sixty-three. That should do it.\" His smile was like a morning sunrise.\n\n\"Fingal...?\"\n\n\"Yes, my boy.\"\n\n\"What exactly was that all about?\"\n\nHe stuffed the notes into an envelope.\n\n\"Finnula,\" he said, \"and bloody Santa Claus. Didn't I explain?\"\n\nIt was my turn to grunt.\n\nIt must have been the imminence of the \"season to be jolly.\" His next words were ones I'd never\u2014not in a month of Sundays\u2014expected to hear pass O'Reilly's lips: \"Sorry about that, but it would have been a catastrophe of the first magnitude. We had to do something.\"\n\nI tried to ignore the \"we.\" My contribution had been a grudgingly given pound. And I was no closer to getting an explanation.\n\n\"Fingal...\"\n\n\"You see, Pat,\" his voice softened, \"Finnula has been having a hard time making a go of it since her husband died. But she wanted her kids to enjoy Christmas. Do you know, she saved her egg money every week to buy them little treats.\"\n\n\"Was she robbed?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Worse. Remember when you were a kid you'd write a letter to Santa, tell him what you wanted, and send it up the chimney?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Her wee ones did\u2014but the things they asked for were away beyond her budget. She did her best to explain to them that Santa was a bit hard up this year.\"\n\n\"Sensible.\"\n\n\"You'd have thought so, but she hadn't counted on the wee redheaded one. She told me today that she'd gone out and when she'd come home she'd just been in time to see the lad send the last of her hard-saved pounds up the chimney because, 'Santa could use a bit of help.' She hadn't the heart to chastise him.\"\n\n\"So that's what the money's for.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" he said. \"We just have to work out how to get her to accept it. She's a very proud woman.\"\n\n\"You'll think of something, Fingal,\" I said, and I meant it.\n\n\"I will,\" he fixed me with a steely glare, \"and you'll keep your mouth shut about it\u2014or I'll kill you.\"\n\nAnd what has all this to do with one of the Founders of Empire? I believe the selling of tickets to a group of unwilling punters in the hope that one will win a prize\u2014and somehow the turkey found its way to the table of Angus MacKay\u2014is called a raffle.\n\nAnd with that, nothing remains but for me to wish my reader\u2014I can't believe that there's actually more than one\u2014a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.\nJANUARY 2001\n\nJust a Wee Deoch an' Dorris\n\nWith apologies to Sir Harry Lauder\n\nO'Reilly paused, shook the water from his tweed coat, and shouldered his way to the bar of the Mucky Duck. His words would have been audible from the quarterdeck to the main-top-gallant mast of HMS Victory in a Force 10 gale, and indeed, given the state of the weather that night, with the rain pelting off the roof like bursts of Maxim gunfire and the wind rattling the pub's shutters, there was some justification for his raising his voice. Of course he had another, more pressing reason to make himself heard. \"I believe your estate can sue the landlord if you die of thirst in a public house,\" he roared.\n\nPatience, you'll recall, was not in his catalogue of virtues, particularly when the thirst was on him.\n\nI watched as other patrons sidled away along the bar, studiously avoided his gaze, found fascinating areas of exploration under their fingernails, and otherwise tried, like a child who pulls a blanket over his head in the belief that he's now invisible to the outside world, to avoid attracting the attention of Ballybucklebo's resident ogre. O'Reilly in need of a drink was like a bear with a sore head\u2014a sore head that had been brought on by repeated applications of a heavy blunt instrument to the top of the ursine skull.\n\nOnly Angus MacKay, piper, shepherd, Highland gentleman, a man held in enormous esteem by the locals for once daring to point out to O'Reilly that his bagpipe playing needed as much work to clean up his grace notes as the Earth did following Noah's boat trip\u2014only Angus held his ground. I noticed he had no drink in front of him but stood quietly at the bar, apparently waiting for something to arrive.\n\nArthur Osbaldiston trundled along behind the counter, bowing as much as his three hundred pounds allowed and sweating like a jaunting-car pony after a trip to the summit of Ballybucklebo Hills with Osbaldiston in the trap. He shoved something out of sight under the bar counter and asked, \"Large whiskey and a small sherry, Doctor, sir?\"\n\n\"Jasus, Arthur,\" O'Reilly rumbled, \"if you ever get out of the pub business you can always get a job in the circus as a mind reader.\"\n\n\"Or as Art the Human Whale,\" called a voice I didn't recognize, from somewhere in a darker corner of the establishment.\n\nO'Reilly spun like a principal dancer in mid-pirouette, pointed an admonitory finger and, keeping his quarterdeck voice at full decibels, announced, \"That was uncalled-for, Paddy Finnegan. Arthur can't help his weight. It's in his genes, and for those who don't know what genes are, they're little small thingies in the cells.\"\n\nA respectful muttering filled the room. In one sentence O'Reilly had established his sympathy for Arthur Osbaldiston's obesity and his own intellectual preeminence in the Ballybucklebo pecking order.\n\nAnd I'd recognized an edge creep into his voice\u2014the one that appeared when he was about to cut someone down to size with the finality of a chain saw.\n\n\"Cells,\" he pronounced. \"Cells, Paddy\u2014but then you'd know all about that, wouldn't you now?\"\n\nLaughter swept the company as a breaker roars over a shingle beach. Every man there knew that Paddy Finnegan had just returned from six months as a guest of Her Majesty Elizabeth II Regina, Dei Gratia, Fid. Def. A small matter of four salmon from Lord Fitzgurgle's river, as I now recalled.\n\n\"Here you are, Doctors,\" said Osbaldiston, setting the drinks on the counter. \"Five shillings, please.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said O'Reilly, ignoring mundane things like money and the look of supplication on the landlord's face. \"Better,\" he said, taking a hefty pull, \"much better.\"\n\nI slipped Arthur the necessary coins, sipped my sherry, and waited.\n\nO'Reilly, placated now by the success of his repart\u00e9e and the taste of his John Jameson's, turned his attention to his immediate neighbour.\n\n\"How are you, Angus?\" he asked.\n\nThe little Scot pondered his reply with all the gravity of a High Court judge prior to donning the black cap and handing down the death penalty. Finally he vouchsafed, \"I am well.\"\n\n\"Grand,\" said O'Reilly. \"Good to see you in town.\"\n\nAngus nodded.\n\nI remembered. Today was Friday. It was Angus's day to walk the ten miles from his cottage to visit Ballybucklebo. I'd only once made the mistake of offering him a lift. Angus MacKay would be beholden to no one.\n\n\"You walk in every Friday, don't you, Angus?\" I asked.\n\n\"Chust so.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said O'Reilly, waving his now-empty glass in the general direction of Osbaldiston, who'd been hovering at our end of the bar like a waiting peregrine falcon and who now stooped on the glass at roughly the same speed as the world's fastest bird. Parenthetically, for those who think I should have written \"swooped\" instead of \"stooped,\" the action of a diving peregrine is a \"stoop.\" But to continue.\n\n\"Bit of a walk on a day like today,\" O'Reilly mused. \"Ten miles there and ten miles back. Be careful not to catch your death of cold.\"\n\n\"I will, sir. I have my medicine.\"\n\n\"Medicine?\" asked O'Reilly, looking at me questioningly.\n\nI shook my head to answer his unasked question.\n\n\"So, who has been prescribing for you, Angus?\"\n\nThe Scot's eyes twinkled. \"Doctor Osbaldiston here.\"\n\n\"Who?\" asked O'Reilly incredulously.\n\n\"Himself there,\" said Angus, nodding to the landlord who'd set O'Reilly's refilled glass on the counter.\n\n\"Arthur? Doctor Arthur?\" O'Reilly was clearly baffled.\n\n\"Could I trouble you for my parcel?\" Angus asked Arthur, who reached beneath the countertop and produced a brown bag.\n\n\"Thank you, Mister Osbaldiston.\" Angus accepted the bag and handed over two pound notes. \"My medicine,\" he remarked, opening the neck of the bag and showing the contents to O'Reilly.\n\nO'Reilly laughed. \"Whisky. Is that your medicine, Angus?\"\n\nThe Scot became very serious. \"Chust so, Doctor, chust so. But if you examine the label, sir, this is real whisky\u2014from the highlands.\"\n\n\"So you don't think much of Irish?\" O'Reilly inquired, lowering the contents of his glass by a good half.\n\n\"It will do very well for the cooking with,\" Angus allowed, \"but should only be drunk by a chentleman in moments of great stress.\"\n\nI thought O'Reilly might take offence, but he clapped the little Scot on the shoulder. \"Would you have an Irish with me, Angus?\" he asked, signalling to Arthur to refill his glass.\n\n\"Thank you, no, sir,\" said Angus, \"but it's a handsome offer.\" He took his change from Arthur, who'd also given O'Reilly his third double whiskey. \"I must be getting along now, for it's a fair tramp.\"\n\n\"Hold on,\" said O'Reilly. \"Do you walk twenty miles every Friday to buy one bottle of whisky, Angus?\"\n\nAngus nodded. \"Chust so.\"\n\n\"But,\" said O'Reilly, knocking back most of his third double, \"why not buy half a dozen bottles and save yourself the long weekly walk?\"\n\n\"Because,\" said Angus solemnly, eyeing O'Reilly's nearly empty glass, \"as you no doubt will have observed, Doctor O'Reilly, when the whisky is close at hand, it's like butter in summer.\"\n\n\"Why?\" I asked.\n\n\"Because when it's close by\"\u2014Angus nodded at O'Reilly's glass\u2014\"it does nae keep very well.\"\nFEBRUARY 2001\n\nWhat's in a Name?\n\nYe banks and braes of bonnie Ballybucklebo\n\nBallybucklebo, home of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly and an assorted cast of characters whose intellects on their communal best days would make the inmates of the old Bedlam Asylum look like a collection of dons from a Cambridge college. Ballybucklebo, site of my introduction to the art and craft of medicine\u2014if not the science. Ballybucklebo, a name to conjure with and a name that has led my loyal reader to inquire, just what the hell does it mean?\n\nIn truth, Irish place names can be a mite confusing to the foreigner. There's a plethora of Kil-something-or-others, Drum-whatchamacallums, and Bally-this-that-and-the-other-things. A smattering of knowledge of the origins of the prefixes can cast a little light on the matter. And as those of you who have accompanied me through the darker reaches of Ballybucklebo well know, illumination of anything pertaining to that particularly peculiar place can only be to our mutual advantage.\n\nT. S. Eliot, who may very well have had Ballybucklebo in mind when he wrote The Waste Land, was quite particular in his instructions for The Naming of Cats. I, in my turn, will now dilate further on the naming of Irish locales.\n\n\"Kil\" simply means \"the church of,\" so Kiltoom is the church of the burial mound. \"Drum\" is \"ridge,\" \"bo\" is \"cow.\" Drumbo: cow ridge. \"Bally\" is the \"townland\"\u2014an old feudal method of establishing the boundaries of the countryside surrounding a particular geographical feature. \"Bally\" was also used as a polite euphemism for \"bloody,\" leading to a popular verbal play on real place names: \"If you hadn't been so Ballymena with your Ballymoney, you'd have a Ballycastle for your Ballyholme.\" But I digress.\n\nWhat about Ballybucklebo? All right. Bally, \"townland,\" buckle (or in Irish, buachaill), \"boy,\" bo\u2014those with retentive memories will already have learned that \"bo\" means \"cow.\" Ballybucklebo: the townland of the boy's cow. Quite simple, really.\n\nWell, actually it's not, and I'm sure that comes as no surprise. In fact, the village had grown up on the banks of the River Bucklebo, where legend had it a great calamity had befallen an invading English army, a calamity precipitated by a wandering cow that had magically distracted the Sassenach troops at a crucial point during the statutory clashing of halberds, swords, axes, maces, and other macabre methods of mediaeval mayhem. The date of the awful affray is lost in the mists of Celtic twilight, but in Ireland history has a habit of repeating itself, and it was on the banks of that very Bucklebo that I witnessed the downfall of another English invader\u2014not at the hands of the Irish but from the actions of one Angus MacKay, Scot, shepherd, piper extraordinaire, and Highland gentleman.\n\nI'll tell you about it.\n\n* * *\n\nO'Reilly had gone to Belfast, ostensibly to attend a postgraduate course. Knowing him as you do, you'll no doubt have surmised already that while his cerebrum might be mildly stimulated, his tonsils would undoubtedly receive a thorough inundation and his liver a workout of gargantuan proportions. While my mentor was off besporting himself, I'd been left in charge of the practice and, Lord help them, the health of the local citizenry. I stuck my head into the waiting room expecting to summon Angus MacKay. I'd noticed him coming in some time ago and by my reckoning he should have been my last patient of the afternoon.\n\nInstead I was greeted by a stranger who addressed me in the plummy accents of an English public school.\n\n\"You must be the local quack, what?\"\n\n\"I'm Doctor Taylor,\" I replied, noting his three-piece suit, old school tie, watery eyes, and distinct lack of chin.\n\n\"Taylor? Oh. His lordship\u2014I'm Cholmondely, guest of the Fitzgurgles, you know\u2014his lordship said I should consult a Doctor O'Reilly.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I said. \"Doctor O'Reilly has gone to Belfast. He'll be back tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Blast! Can't wait 'til then.\" He grimaced. \"Oh well, I'll just have to make do. Beggars can't be choosers, what?\"\n\n\"I'll do what I can,\" I said as civilly as I could, \"but Mister MacKay\"\u2014I nodded at Angus, who'd been sitting quietly, and clearly observing the exchange\u2014\"has been here for rather a long time. If you'd care to wait, I'll...\"\n\n\"Wait? Don't be ridiculous. This fellow won't mind hanging on, will you, my good man?\"\n\n\"Chust so,\" said Angus quietly, but knowing him as I did I could tell he was remembering Bannockburn, the battle where King Robert of Scotland took the gold, silver, and bronze, and left King Edward of England holding nothing but a few splinters from the wooden spoon. It's generally recommended that blunt sticks not be forcibly inserted into the orbits of rabid dogs, but perhaps the newcomer hadn't learned the parallel between such activities and the act of patronizing a Scot from the Western Isles.\n\n\"Come along, Doctor,\" the newcomer said, then he turned to Angus. \"Won't take a jiffy, old boy.\"\n\nI stole a glance at Angus, who nodded.\n\nSo Cholmondely accompanied me into the surgery, where I dealt with his medical difficulties. I have no doubt that Hippocrates wouldn't have approved of my secret delight when I discovered that the man had a case of inflamed haemorrhoids.\n\n\"Here you are,\" I said, handing him a prescription for an anti-inflammatory cream.\n\nHe did have the courtesy to thank me. He rose. \"One more thing,\" he said. \"Did I by any chance hear you refer to that chappie next door as MacKay?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Small world. He must be the laddie his lordship mentioned. I'm over for the fishing, d'you see?\"\n\nI did see. Lord Fitzgurgle owned the fishing rights to a large stretch of the Bucklebo, and Angus, when not occupied with his sheep, worked as a ghillie, tending to the waters, the salmon therein, and guiding his lordship's guests.\n\n\"Better have a word with him,\" the Englishman said, heading for the waiting room. I followed. The upcoming conversation could be interesting.\n\nTo be continued next month.\nMARCH 2001\n\nWhat's in a Name? (Part 2)\n\nScotland 1, England 0\n\nLast month, Doctor Taylor treated the inflamed haemorrhoids of a visiting Englishman named Cholmondely, who was less than courteous to Angus MacKay in the waiting room. That was before Cholmondely learned that Angus worked as a ghillie, looking after Lord Fitzgurgle's waters and salmon...\n\n\"So, MacKay,\" said Cholmondely. \"Hear you're a very fine ghillie.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Angus's mien was as expressionless as a Highland tarn in a flat calm.\n\n\"Excellent. His lordship says you'll take me on the water tomorrow\u2014at nine.\"\n\n\"Chust so,\" said Angus, \"if that is what the chentleman wants. But the Bucklebo's in spate chust now.\"\n\n\"My good man, I'm here to fish and fish I will. I'll expect you on the bank at nine. Clear?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" said Angus. He hesitated. \"Doctor, sir, is tomorrow your day off?\"\n\n\"Yes, Angus.\"\n\nA twinkle flashed into the steely eyes of the little Scot, an unholy twinkle that would have dimmed the fires of hell.\n\n\"You'd not mind, sir, if Doctor Taylor came with us? He enjoys the riverbank.\"\n\n\"Bring who you like,\" said Cholmondely, \"but remember one thing. I'm a very expert fisherman and I do not like being advised unless I ask for information. Is that clear?\"\n\n\"Och aye, sir,\" said Angus. \"Och aye.\"\n\nAngus and I arrived at the banks of the Bucklebo promptly at 8:55 A.M. There was no sign of Mister Cholmondely.\n\n\"Would you look at that, sir?\" Angus pointed at the river. Judging by the way the brown waters tossed and roiled, somewhere upstream there was a large gopher-wood vessel, inhabited by pairs of animals and skippered by an older, bearded gentleman in long flowing robes\u2014a gentleman who'd decided that despite the return of a dove with an olive branch he'd better wait until the very last of the deluge had dissipated down the course of the Bucklebo.\n\nAngus's mien was utterly devoid of gruntle. \"He'll no take a fish in yon.\"\n\nMy muttered agreement was interrupted by the arrival of Mister Cholmondely, dressed as I could only suppose he imagined an expert fisherman should be. His tweed deerstalker was so festooned with flies that it had the appearance of an exotic tropical parrot having a bad feather day in a high wind. His tweed suit\u2014hacking jacket and plus-four pants\u2014was complemented by a pair of tartan socks that could only have been knitted by someone from the very-post-impressionist school. Over his shoulder was slung a wicker creel and he carried a rod with the dimensions of one of those old-growth Canadian pines. \"Morning,\" he said, hefting his rod. \"Should do well today.\"\n\nI watched Angus. I could tell he was wrestling with his conscience. His duty as a ghillie was to do his utmost to provide the guest with the best day's fishing possible. His instructions were not to proffer advice. His ethics won.\n\n\"Sir, you see the water. Maybe, at the edge, with the wee rod\"\u2014Angus offered a slim fly rod\u2014\"you might take a trout or two.\"\n\nCholmondely bristled. \"When I want your advice, MacKay, I'll ask for it. This\"\u2014he struggled to wave his own rod\u2014\"this is a double-handed Spey rod.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" said Angus, \"I ken that.\"\n\n\"Just you watch.\" At that, Cholmondely, grasping his angle in a two-handed grip, began hurling casts at the swollen waters. He thrashed at the river with the enthusiasm of a Nelsonic bos'n laying on the cat-o'-nine-tails. His face reddened. Rivulets of sweat coursed from under his deerstalker. His back casts fouled in trees, rushes, and just missed an inquisitive cow that had wandered down to observe.\n\nAngus dutifully untangled the line and kept his counsel\u2014for an hour. Then he ventured, \"Perhaps, sir, if you tried this wee fly rod...\"\n\n\"MacKay. I do not... not... need advice from you.\"\n\nThen his rod tip flickered. Had he hooked a fish after all?\n\nCholmondely began to reel in. The rod was definitely under some tension. I looked sympathetically at Angus but was rewarded with a tiny smile and an inclination of the little man's head, which said, more loudly than any words, \"Wait and see.\"\n\nFinally, after much reeling in, a fish broke the surface close to the bank. It was a salmon parr, an immature fish the size of an over-developed minnow. Its ordinarily puny ability to put up a fight had been boosted by the force of the water.\n\nCholmondely cranked on until all the line was in and the tiddler flapped weakly at the rod tip, some fifteen feet above the breathless Cholmondely's head. \"Now, my good man,\" he huffed, \"what shall I do?\"\n\nAngus bent slowly, picked up a fair-sized stone from the bank of the Bucklebo, handed it to Cholmondely, and said in dulcet tones, \"If I was you, sir, I'd shinny up yon great rod and beat the wee thing to death with this.\"\nAPRIL 2001\n\nWhiskey in a Jar\n\nO'Reilly goes fishing\n\n\"And what do you think of that?\" asked O'Reilly. He stood in the doorway of the surgery, beaming from ear to ear. He held a rod in his right hand and struggled with his left to hold aloft a salmon that was probably, as the horsey set would say, \"by Moby Dick out of Leviathan.\" It was a superlative specimen of the spectacular species Salmo salar.\n\n\"That's quite a fish,\" I acknowledged testily. If my words were a little clipped it was because he should have been working that afternoon. It was supposed to have been my half day. Mrs. Kincaid had collared me just as I was about to drive away and had regretfully informed me that himself was nowhere to be found and the waiting room was chockablock. I'd been left with no choice but to cancel my arrangements and see the sufferers, rather to the chagrin of one of the tiny number of members of the opposite sex who would agree to share my company\u2014and she had the most alluring brown eyes. At least, I'd assumed, some medical emergency had delayed him. I hadn't for a moment thought that he'd have gone fishing.\n\n\"Sorry it kept you away from the surgery,\" I said. \"You missed some absolutely fascinating head colds.\"\n\nO'Reilly, like a small boy caught with pockets stuffed with apples in someone else's orchard, hung his head for a brief second and then said, sotto voce, \"Sorry.\"\n\nI started. It was the one word I'd never thought to hear from him. If Be\u00eblzebub himself had appeared in the room, enunciating the Lord's Prayer and gargling with holy water, I couldn't have been more surprised.\n\n\"No, really. I should have been here. Thanks for holding the fort.\"\n\nOld Nick had graduated from gargling with holy water to bathing in the stuff. If the films of the time were to be believed, such activities would have led to a considerable degree of dolour on the part of the Devil's disciple.\n\nO'Reilly's look of childish content belied any suggestion that he was truly remorseful, but as he wiggled the fish and said, \"Just look at this beauty,\" I couldn't find it in me to begrudge him his contentment, particularly when he continued, \"I'll make it up to you, Pat. How about I take the calls this Saturday night?\"\n\n\"Well...\" There was a dance in Belfast I would enjoy if a certain ebony-eyed nurse happened to be free. \"Well...\"\n\n\"All right, and Sunday too.\"\n\nHe who hesitates is lost? Not always. Sometimes he improves his bargaining position. For once I had the upper hand and decided that I might as well use it. \"All right, Fingal.\"\n\n\"Great.\"\n\n\"But there's one more condition.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" His eyes narrowed. When it came to bargaining, O'Reilly's techniques were of such effectiveness that Romany horse traders had been known to ask him to take their animals away\u2014and accept a small fee for doing so.\n\n\"And what's that then?\" he asked, smile now replaced by his patented poker face.\n\nI laughed. \"I'm finished for the day. Go and get rid of the fish and then you can take me to the Mucky Duck, tell me the story of how you caught that salmon, and...\"\n\n\"Right.\" He turned to go. You, dear reader, may have forgotten the night in the Duck when he'd been so involved in a discussion with Angus MacKay that I'd been stuck with the cost of the drinks. I had not.\n\n\"... and, Fingal?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You're paying.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThe Duck was almost deserted. O'Reilly paid Arthur Osbaldiston, turned from the bar, and carried his own large John Jameson's and my small sherry to our table. \"Here,\" he said, handing me my drink and lowering his bulk into a chair. \"Slainte.\" He sipped his whiskey. \"Grand drop,\" he announced, \"and a potion with remarkable powers.\"\n\n\"Fingal,\" I said, \"I'm sure you're right about the Irish whiskey, but I believe you promised to tell me about the fish.\"\n\n\"I'm doing that,\" he said. \"The last time we were in here I had a chat with Angus MacKay.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I said. \"I got stuck with the bill.\"\n\n\"Yes, right, but it's my shout tonight.\"\n\n\"Correct.\" I savoured my sherry.\n\n\"Anyway,\" he continued, \"Angus was very much of the opinion that Scotch whisky was greatly superior to Irish.\"\n\nI thought about this, but the connection between the relative merits of two kinds of ethnic firewater and the catching of a salmon wasn't instantly apparent.\n\n\"I showed him,\" said O'Reilly smugly.\n\n\"Fingal,\" I glanced at my watch, \"I'm sure this is intriguing, but what about...?\"\n\n\"The salmon?\" He emptied his glass and roared, \"Arthur, two more!\" He turned back to me. \"Patience, my boy. Patience.\"\n\nThe drinks appeared and once again O'Reilly paid. \"Now,\" he said, \"where was I?\"\n\n\"Search me.\"\n\nHis brows knitted. \"Right. The whiskey.\"\n\n\"No, Fingal. The fish.\"\n\n\"Same thing,\" he said. \"Listen and I'll tell you\u2014and don't interrupt.\"\n\n\"I'm all ears.\" Wondering where this was going to lead, I sat back and waited.\n\n\"You know I went fishing today? Well, who should be on the bank of the Bucklebo but Angus MacKay.\n\n\"'Morning, Angus,' says I.\n\n\"'Chust so,' says he.\" O'Reilly made a fair hand at imitating the little Scot's lilt. \"And that was the last we spoke for about four hours.\" O'Reilly glanced round the room. I presumed he was ensuring that he wasn't being overheard. Apparently satisfied, he bent forward and said quietly, \"Angus had six fish on and I hadn't had as much as a nibble.\"\n\nI understood his reluctance to be overheard. The man couldn't stand to be bested at anything, and his next words took me as much by surprise as his earlier apology.\n\n\"I finally went and asked Angus's advice. I'd noticed that he had a little jar of some brown liquid. He dipped his worms into it before he cast. 'What's that, Angus?' I asked him.\"\n\nFor a moment, O'Reilly asking for guidance seemed to me as likely as Julius Caesar having a quick word with a legionary recruit about the advisability of crossing the Rubicon. Then I remembered that Angus was Lord Fitzgurgle's ghillie\u2014a man of undoubted piscatorial expertise.\n\n\"'The whisky,' Angus told me. 'The Scotch whisky.'\n\n\"'Could you spare a drop?'\"\n\nSo there was a connection between the drink and the fish. Interesting, I thought.\n\n\"Angus looked solemn and peered at his jar. 'I'd like to, Doctor, sir, but there's chust enough for me\u2014and the worms.' I don't need to tell you that I was a wee bit disappointed.\"\n\nAs was a Mister Adolf Hitler when his generals informed him that regrettably his plans to own a large chunk of the city of Stalingrad would have to be deferred for a week or two.\n\n\"So what did you do?\" I asked.\n\n\"I remembered that I always carry a flask of Irish\u2014for medicinal purposes. I took it out and showed it to Angus. 'Do you think this might work?'\n\n\"'Would that be the Irish, Doctor, sir?' The wee man looked as disdainful as only Angus can. 'I think it would chust upset your worm,' said he.\n\n\"I needn't tell you, Pat, I considered that a bit of a challenge.\"\n\nThe code of chivalry called for the armoured antagonist to throw down a galvanized gauntlet. In my opinion, Angus MacKay had chucked the mailed glove and accompanied it with a breastplate, a pair of greaves, and the helmet for good measure.\n\n\"'We'll just have to see, won't we, Angus?' I told him. I gave a worm a good soaking and cast.\"\n\nO'Reilly's eyes took on a faraway look. \"Have you ever seen a depth charge go off?\"\n\n\"No. They weren't part of our classes,\" I said, reminding myself that O'Reilly had been in Her Majesty's seagoing forces.\n\n\"It's a thing of beauty,\" he said. \"White water everywhere.\" He chuckled. \"The Bucklebo looked just like that. And do you know what?\"\n\n\"No,\" I replied innocently.\n\n\"When all the spray died down, there on the end of my line was the salmon I brought home, twice as big as anything Angus had caught.\"\n\n\"So you reckon you'd made your point about the superiority of Irish whiskey.\"\n\n\"More than that. When Angus dipped his worms in Scotch, the fish took the bait. It wasn't until I'd landed mine\u2014and fighting him is what kept me away from the surgery\u2014it wasn't until he was on the bank that I saw\u2014and so did Angus, for I called him to see\u2014that my worm had grabbed the fish by the throat.\"\nMAY 2001\n\nO'Reilly Puts His Foot in It\n\nOut of the mouths of babes...\n\n\"I'll kill you, Uncle Fingal. I'll kill you bloody well dead, so I will.\" Thus spake an obviously enraged William Butler Yeats O'Reilly, aged eleven.\n\nI could infer his state of mind by observing the pallor of his nose tip.\n\nWhen gales were impending in coastal areas around Ireland, the coast guard hoisted south cones as a warning to mariners. This information was broadcast on the radio. Seamen who were familiar with the signalling convention made all speed for safe havens. When an eruption by a member of the clan O'Reilly was imminent, the O'Reilly schnozzles blanched. Those who could read the signs were usually well advised to take avoiding action.\n\nOn this particular occasion the wrath of the youngest O'Reilly was directed at Fingal, not me. I decided it might be interesting to stay and observe.\n\nIf you're having some difficulty remembering William Butler Yeats O'Reilly\u2014Willy for short\u2014he was the son of Lars Porsena O'Reilly, who was the brother of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. By intensely exercising your genealogical skills you'll be able to ascertain that Willy was Fingal's nephew.\n\nO'Reilly's brother and family dwelt in the town of Portaferry at the mouth of Strangford Lough, and O'Reilly had dragged me along while he paid a familial pre-Christmas visit. When last Doctor O. and I had ventured down there, young Willy had been the cause of a minor upset, much as one Gavrilo Princip had been the source of a certain amount of dissension when his disposal of the Archduke Ferdinand had inexorably led to the first great numbered unpleasantness.\n\nYou may remember that I told you about Willy, then aged ten, in the Portaferry school's Christmas pageant. That was when, because he'd been relegated from the starring role of Joseph to that of innkeeper, he had, on stage, in public, in front of six nuns, invited Mary into the inn but told the upstart playing the part of Joseph, in no uncertain and very audible tones, to \"feck off!\"\n\nWhen the smoke and dust had died down, Willy's father, Lars Porsena, had taken his son aside and had explained gently that the English language was a precious thing, an instrument of great precision, of beauty, of resonance, not a thing to be taken lightly or profaned. His words, or perhaps his actions, had seemed to make a lasting impression on Willy, who'd stood to take his meals for the next three days.\n\nCertainly since that time Willy's use of profanity, at least within the earshot of potentially offendable adults, had ceased. Until today.\n\n\"It's all your bloody fault.\" Willy spat the words. Some species of cobra have the ability to hurl their venom several feet. They would easily have been outranged by O'Reilly's nephew.\n\nI watched O'Reilly. I could tell by the way he shuffled his feet that he was uncomfortable, and I suspected that although I was completely in the dark about why his nephew should be so irate, O'Reilly might well have some inkling of understanding of the nature of his misdemeanour. He made no attempt to defend himself or to chastise Willy for swearing.\n\n\"Would you like to tell me what happened?\" he asked.\n\n\"Can you not guess?\"\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"Aye. Well. Easy for you to say.\" Willy shook his head in the kind of pitying way adults use when they notice a small child or someone of strictly limited intellectual ability\u2014a Donal Donnelly, say\u2014commit some unspeakable act of folly.\n\nThis was what our old professor of psychiatry used to call \"role-reversal\" of the very first magnitude. The boot, as Donal Donnelly was frequently heard to observe, was very firmly on the other shoe.\n\n\"All right, Willy,\" said O' Reilly in his most placating voice, \"tell me what I did.\"\n\n\"Can you not guess?\"\n\n\"Was it the words?\"\n\n\"'Was it the words?'\" Sarcasm dripped from Willy's tongue like gobbets of fat from a tallow candle. \"Was it the bloody words?\"\n\n\"Hah-hm,\" said O'Reilly in a fair imitation of C. S. Forester's fictional sea captain, Horatio Hornblower. \"Hah-hm.\"\n\nI'd stood quietly, trying not to draw attention to myself as I enjoyed his discomfiture, but some imp drove me to inquire, \"What words, Fingal?\"\n\nHe turned and glowered at me.\n\n\"You tell him, Uncle Fingal. Just you tell him,\" said Willy.\n\n\"Well,\" said O'Reilly uneasily, \"Willy here got himself into a little bit of bother at last year's...\"\n\n\"Christmas pageant,\" I said. \"I remember.\"\n\n\"And Dad said he'd marmalize me if he ever caught me swearing again,\" added Willy.\n\n\"He was just right,\" said O'Reilly.\n\nWilly's look of scorn would have stopped a train in its tracks. \"My dad always keeps his promises,\" he said. \"I didn't want that, so I started to use little words.\"\n\n\"Little words?\" I asked.\n\n\"Aye,\" said Willy. \"I'd not say, 'train,' I'd say, 'choo-choo.' I'd call dogs 'bow-wows,' cats 'kitties.'\" He scowled at O'Reilly. \"It's very hard to say, 'Look at what that bloody bow-wow's done now.' And it worked. I never once upset my dad\u2014until he took your advice.\"\n\n\"And what would that have been, Fingal?\" I asked sweetly.\n\n\"Hah-hm,\" said O'Reilly, hanging his head. \"I thought Willy was too old to be using baby talk, so I suggested to Lars Porsena that he should make Willy use proper, adult language.\"\n\n\"And you should have minded your own bloody business,\" said an aggrieved Willy.\n\nO'Reilly sighed. \"All right, Willy,\" he said resignedly, \"perhaps you're right.\"\n\n\"I know I am,\" said Willy. \"Do you know what happened?\"\n\n\"I can guess,\" said Fingal.\n\n\"No, you can't,\" snapped Willy. \"You and your 'adult language.' Dad kept at me for weeks and weeks.\" Willy's pause was pregnant, not with a singleton but with triplets at least. I became impatient. \"Go on,\" I prompted.\n\nWilly looked at me. \"Dad asked me what books I wanted for Christmas.\"\n\nAs was usual in my dealings with the O'Reilly clan, the waters of my hitherto clear understanding of the problem were beginning to become muddied.\n\n\"No,\" said O'Reilly, \"he didn't ask for Lady Chatterley's Lover, if that's what you're thinking.\"\n\n\"I did worse,\" said Willy, \"and it's all your fault, Uncle Fingal. You gave me The House at Pooh Corner last year.\" Willy scowled. \"Dad had been going on so much about me using grown-up language that I got muddled about what book I wanted this year. So I asked for 'something more about Winnie the Shite.'\"\nJUNE 2001\n\nO'Reilly's Cat\n\n\"I must go down to the sea again...\"\n\n\"You're not serious, Fingal?\" I asked the question because his most recent suggestion made about as much sense to me as the thought of climbing into the works of an operating combine harvester.\n\n\"'Course I am. She'll love it. You'll see.\"\n\nThe \"she\" to whom he referred was at that moment imprisoned in a cat-carrying box, from which emanated a series of low, deep, threatening growls that would have made a banshee blanch.\n\nYou may remember that O'Reilly had a cat. Why not? After all, Old MacDonald had a farm. I've told you about the creature\u2014a pure white beast whose ancestors must have come straight from Transylvania if her taste for my blood was anything to go by. I'd earlier given some thought to seeing if a certain Doctor van Helsing was listed in the medical directory.\n\nAfter all, Maggie MacCorkle's advice to belt the beast with a scratching post to discourage her attempts to reduce O'Reilly's furniture to kindling and me to a walking heap of raw meat had been ignored. O'Reilly had dismissed Mrs. Kincaid's pleas and brushed away my protests with an assurance that Lady Macbeth\u2014that's what he'd named her\u2014would grow out of her repeated and totally unpredictable moments when she apparently believed that since there was definitely some sabre-toothed tiger blood in her past, she had a moral obligation to live up to her heritage.\n\nO'Reilly picked up the cat carrier. \"Absolutely love it,\" he said.\n\nJudging by the increased volume of the caterwauling, her ladyship was not of the same mind, but as you well know, dissenting opinions rarely carried much weight with Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. \"Come on,\" he said, \"let's get her down to the boat.\"\n\nThat, you see, was what O'Reilly had decided. Lady Macbeth would love, in his decidedly minority opinion, a trip to sea in his twenty-six-foot sailboat.\n\nOrdinarily, as you know, I'd have used any legitimate excuse short of shooting off one of my toes\u2014a habit referred to during the first great numbered unpleasantness as \"causing self-inflicted injury\"\u2014to avoid another nautical adventure with Ballybucklebo's answer to Captain Ahab. This time, particularly given the dubious outcome for the original old ivory-legged, obsessive-compulsive when he actually caught up with his Moby Dick, nothing would have kept me away. \"Just call me Ishmael,\" I muttered as we headed for the car.\n\n\"What are you on about, Taylor?\" O'Reilly asked, shoving the cat carrier into the backseat. \"Lady Macbeth's a white cat, not a white whale.\"\n\n\"I know. But Ishmael was the only survivor of the Pequod's crew. If it weren't for him the tale would never have been told.\"\n\n\"The only story you'll have to tell will be about how much her ladyship enjoyed herself. Isn't that right, Lady Macbeth?\"\n\nOnly Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, whose self-described ever-open mind had that day clanged shut like a steel trap, could have interpreted the cat's very accurate impression of a hand-cranked air-raid siren with a slipped clutch as an affirmative.\n\n\"I'll leave her below in the saloon,\" O'Reilly announced, squeezing his bulk through the hatch. \"We'll let her on deck once we're well away from the dock.\" He vanished. The cat box vanished. He closed the hatch behind him.\n\nSound carries at sea, even when a vessel is still moored. From my vantage point in the cockpit I had no difficulty hearing, \"Out you come, Lady Macbeth,\" hissing that could have been forced from an over-inflated and recently perforated rubber dinghy, and then a bellowed, \"Yeeeow!\"\n\nIt took some self-control on my part to refrain from passing any remarks about the four red lines on his face that were very evident the moment his head appeared at the hatchway. Still, I thought, with his almost blue cheeks, red stripes, and very white nose tip, his face would have a certain amount of appeal to any passing Ulster Loyalist.\n\n\"It's all a bit strange to her,\" he remarked. \"She'll be all right once we're at sea.\"\n\n\"If you say so, Fingal.\"\n\n\"'Course I do. Now,\" he bent and turned on the engine, \"you let go the dock lines. I'll take the boat out.\"\n\nAnd so it came to pass.\n\nSmall-boat diesel engines tend to be somewhat noisy and their exhaust gases malodorous. It's usually a great relief to hoist the sails and turn the motor off. Then, in the normal course of events, if there's a decent breeze, little can be heard but the gentle singing of the wind in the rigging, the swish and lap of the water. Salty scents fill the nostrils.\n\nThat's in the normal course. O'Reilly had been adamant that Lady Macbeth would love her first seagoing experience, and as was recognized by no less an expert than Billy Shakespeare, \"The course of true love never runs smooth.\"\n\n\"Eldritch\" is the only word I can use to describe Lady M.'s commentary on her situation. She sounded like the entire string section of a symphony orchestra when half have been given the score to one of Shostakovich's tone-poems and the rest upside-down copies of a Sousa march. The song of the wind had no hope of competing. And please remember the hatch was shut.\n\nBorne on the sea breeze came a strange aroma. Pungent, acrid, and very definitely feline, it was something an advertising executive might have described, in a last-ditch attempt to save a failing perfume company, as eau de catpiss.\n\n\"I don't think she's altogether happy, Fingal.\"\n\nI could see that it pained him to have to admit that I might just be right.\n\n\"Be a good lad,\" he said. \"Nip below and see how she's doing.\"\n\nWorms, it is said, can turn. My very acute self-preservatory instincts kicked in. In helminthic terms, I positive whirled on my axis.\n\n\"No,\" I said, surprising myself with the vehemence of my reply. I moved some distance away from him, expecting his response to be on a par with the verbal riposte Captain Bligh must surely have hurled at a certain Mister Fletcher Christian, but to my surprise O'Reilly merely shrugged.\n\n\"Take the helm. I'll go below,\" he said, moving forward and opening the hatch.\n\nSomething white raced past his shoulder, shrieking like every last one of the Furies. I wouldn't have believed the cat's next actions if I hadn't been there in the flesh to bear witness. She went up the mainsail, close to the mast, at something that must have approached the escape velocity the American space scientists of the time were trying to achieve with their Agena rockets, reached the spreaders that stick out from the mast to support the shrouds, and stopped there. She crouched like one of the exotic gargoyles that ancient monks used to adorn the eaves of their more spectacular cathedrals and hurled noisy and vituperative imprecations down onto the heads of the humans below.\n\n\"No,\" I said, forestalling the inevitable suggestion that as O'Reilly was much bigger and stronger than I, then I would be the logical choice to be swayed aloft to try to effect a rescue. \"We'll just have to wait for her to come down.\"\n\n\"I think,\" said an obviously chastened O'Reilly, \"I think we should head back to port.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" I put the helm over. \"And Fingal?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"If she doesn't come down once we've docked, someone's going to have to stay aboard until she decides to budge.\"\n\n\"I know. You wouldn't...?\" He must have seen the look on my face. \"Thought not.\"\n\nHe sat quietly on the short trip home, docked the vessel, and stared up the mast. \"Come on down, sweetie,\" he crooned in his gentlest voice. \"Push-wush. Pushy-wushy.\"\n\nI've never mastered catspeak but I guessed, judging by the arch in the cat's back, the way her tail fluffed like a semi-electrocuted lavatory brush, and the loudness of her hissing, that she was politely declining his blandishments.\n\nShe must have continued to do so for some considerable time, because O'Reilly didn't reappear chez himself until just before my bedtime. I expected him to be somewhat out of sorts, but perhaps the hours of quiet reflection he'd spent on his boat had given him time to mellow.\n\nMind you, I could be wrong. He never went to sea without enough beer aboard to quench the thirsts of the entire supporters' contingent of the Irish rugby football team, and his breath had a certain hoppy quality.\n\n\"Get her down?\" I asked.\n\n\"Eventually. You know, Pat, I think I know what went wrong.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Indeed. It dawned on me while I was waiting for her. Who's ever heard of a sea cat?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Mind you, 'sea dog' is an expression with a long and honourable history.\"\n\n\"Drake, Frobisher, Nelson.\"\n\n\"How do you think Arthur Guinness would enjoy a day at sea?\"\n\nI stared at him, trying to decide if he was being facetious. He wasn't.\n\nAnd if you want to know how the big black Labrador fared on the boat, I'm afraid you'll have to wait for next time.\n(no column in july 2001)  \nAUGUST 2001\n\nO'Reilly's Dog\n\nYet another sailing adventure\n\n\"I must down to the sea again \/ To the lonely sea and the sky \/ And all I ask is a tall ship \/ And a star to steer her by...\" O'Reilly's memory for the words of Johnny Masefield's \"Sea Fever\" was, as with all things literary, phenomenal. His voice was not. He may have thought he was singing. I'd assumed he was in some late stage of mortal anguish, so doleful was the noise.\n\nArthur Guinness, who was standing upright in the backseat of the old Rover car, front paws draped over my shoulders, took a break from salivating down my neck and joined in. His \"Ooowwlll...\" did give a certain harmonic counterpoint to O'Reilly's off-key bellowing. When they got to the bit about \"... for the call of the running tide \/ Is a wild call and a clear call...\" I could in all honesty only agree with the first of the sentiments. Clear, in their combined rendition, it definitely was not.\n\nWhat was clear was that O'Reilly had learned nothing from his disastrous experiences when he'd tried to persuade Lady Macbeth, his demoniacally possessed white cat, to enjoy a short sea voyage. Apparently neither her dousing the saloon's upholstery with liquid high in urea content, nor the rents that had miraculously appeared in the mainsail when she'd gone up the mast like one of Nelson's topmen pursued by a bad-tempered bos'n wielding a knotted rope's end, nor the claw marks that had barely healed on his cheek would convince him that taking animals to sea, unless of course your name happened to be Noah and you were under divine protection, was probably not a very good idea. (Parenthetically, I believe that's the longest sentence I've ever managed to write.)\n\nHe'd promised last week, and he was a man who always kept his word, that he intended to retry the nautical experiment, this time with the unsuspecting Arthur Guinness as the subject.\n\n\"Dogs,\" he remarked, pulling the car into the marina's parking lot, \"are much more stable creatures than cats.\"\n\nAnd certain rural general practitioners, I thought, but naturally kept the idea very much to myself.\n\n\"Out,\" he barked.\n\nArthur and I complied.\n\n\"I think that's where we went wrong with Lady Macbeth last week.\"\n\n\"Not 'we'; you, Fingal. I tried to talk you out of it. Remember?\" With, I thought, about as much success as was obtained by a certain King Canute when he commanded the tide to stop coming in.\n\n\"Slip of the tongue,\" he said. \"You're absolutely right. Come on, Arthur.\" And with that he set off across the tarmac, followed by the unsuspecting hound.\n\n* * *\n\nI'd learned early in my acquaintance with Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly that he was always at his most placatory when he wanted something. I knew he wanted me to accompany him on the boat. He didn't know that he need not have been one bit polite to me. After last week's debacle, I wouldn't have missed this Saturday's outing for the world.\n\nAnd it was one of those glorious summer days that grace Ulster with roughly the frequency of a planetary conjunction, a blue moon, and a total eclipse of the sun\u2014all in one twenty-four-hour period. The sun beamed from an azure sky. Not even the thin, diaphanous wisp of an aircraft's contrail marred the unblemished firmament. Had I not been in the company of O'Reilly and his distinctly ditsy dog, I could easily have been persuaded that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.\n\n\"Are you coming?\" he called, as he led Arthur onto the finger where his sloop was moored.\n\n\"Right.\" I trotted down onto the dock and followed the pair of them.\n\nO'Reilly stopped while Arthur investigated the dock's planking, happily trotting from side to side, sniffing here, cocking his leg there, doing the usual doggy things.\n\n\"I want to give him time to get used to his new surroundings,\" O'Reilly said.\n\nThat seemed reasonable. I was a bit lost myself. It was only in the last week that the new facility had been opened. Boats had always been moored to buoys out in Ballybucklebo Bay, but now, borrowing from the American experience, a proper marina had been constructed. Several long docks stuck out into the bay. At right angles to each were shorter slips. There was room for two boats to be moored, stern in, between each slip.\n\n\"We're out at the very end,\" said O'Reilly. \"It's not far.\" He'd grabbed Arthur Guinness by the collar. \"Get out of there, Arthur.\"\n\nWhen I looked to see the nature of the dog's transgression, I noticed that he was standing rigidly, nose thrust forward, tail sticking out astern, staring fixedly at a Siamese cat that lay languidly on a velvet cushion in the cockpit of a very smart yawl that was tied up closest to the shore.\n\n\"He's just being inquisitive, Charley,\" I heard O'Reilly reassure the skipper of the yawl. \"I'll get him down to my boat.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it, Fingal. Cleopatra here can look after herself.\" Charley stroked the cat's head.\n\nObviously, I thought, he hadn't been present when Arthur Guinness had treed Maggie MacCorkle's cat, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, in O'Reilly's sycamore \u2014twice.\n\nO'Reilly sauntered along, pausing at each moored vessel to exchange pleasantries with other members of the yachting fraternity. It must have been the sunshine that had brought them out in their droves, much as mosquitoes appear in swarms when the sun follows the rain.\n\nMen in shorts, blazers, and Dutch captains' caps, women in short skirts and blue-and-white-striped T-shirts lolled in the cockpit of almost every vessel. I noticed that each member of the nautical set grasped a glass of something, and judging by the sparkling beads of dew on the outsides of the glasses, something cold. If this had been imperial India, it would have been the sahibs and memsa'bs at tiffin.\n\nAll terribly civilized, dontcha know? It was a scene of peacefulness, tranquility, and, unbeknownst to anyone, about to be disrupted by a force with the strength of those mild tropical breezes that used to be identified with women's names\u2014like Hurricane Gladys.\n\nO'Reilly hustled the Labrador onward and it seemed that any interspecies unpleasantness had been avoided. Things may not always be what they seem.\n\nI joined O'Reilly as he encouraged Arthur Guinness to clamber aboard his sloop. The big dog jumped into the cockpit, gave one happy \"Woof,\" turned round three times, curled up, and promptly fell asleep.\n\n\"Told you,\" said O'Reilly. \"To the manner born. Nothing's going to go wrong this time.\"\n\nI was just about to agree when something caught my eye. A small feline figure was moving along the dock. Cleopatra must have taken a short shore leave and was exploring her domain.\n\n\"We'll just give him a few minutes to settle in,\" O'Reilly said. \"Fancy a beer?\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\n\"I'll get them.\" He vanished below.\n\nJust as O'Reilly appeared in the hatch, a brimming beer glass held in either hand, thus of course breaking the first law of seagoing vessels, \"One hand for the ship, one hand for yourself,\" Cleopatra jumped nimbly aboard.\n\nThe Americans of the time had developed a sophisticated early warning system to alert them to the presence of anything slightly antisocial\u2014like several gazillion incoming megatons of nuclear firecrackers. I suspect they pinched some of the technology from our animal friends. Although the cat had landed soundlessly, Arthur was awake in one instant and on his feet in the next. Cleopatra let go the contralto-crossed-with-a-bandsaw howl that the Creator gave only to Siamese cats. On this occasion it was the feline equivalent of the orders, \"Dive! Dive! Dive!\" screamed from the conning tower of a submarine that has unexpectedly found itself directly in the path of an enemy destroyer.\n\nCleopatra didn't dive. She took off at maximum revolutions, nimbly leaping from deck to deck of every one of the moored boats as she frantically fled for sanctuary on her own yawl.\n\nArthur boosted himself from the gunnels with the force of one Dick Fosbury trying for yet another Olympic high-jump record, and, if you remember your physics, \"To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.\"\n\nO'Reilly's sloop pitched horribly, thrashing from port to starboard like a gazelle caught in the coils of a boa constrictor. I was too busy grabbing the nearest fixture to see what had caused, almost simultaneously, a roar from O'Reilly, a massive \"thump\" from belowdecks, and the sounds of smashing glass. All I can tell you was that when I did look inboard, he was no longer in the hatchway.\n\nI would have gone to his aid but was distracted by a chorus of screeches, curses, more glass-breaking noises, and the crashing of a series of tsunamis displaced by the rocking hulls of a fleet of wildly tossing yachts. I realized that I could gauge the extent of Arthur's trans-decks progress by the way each mast in succession began to thrash to and fro and the chorus of imprecations increased in volume. The last to be hit was the yawl.\n\nEventually, I'm told, all good things must come to an end. The churned-up waters returned to their previous calm. In sequence, the masthead gyrations lessened in duration and amplitude. In another sequence, nearest vessel first, farthest boat last, the owners of the battered boats began to form a mob, something akin to the one that I imagine stormed the Bastille, on the dock beside O'Reilly's boat.\n\nThe last to arrive was Charley. His blazer was very damp and his yachting cap seemed to have gone missing. He was a big man, much bigger than O'Reilly. The calluses on his knuckles might have been caused by their obvious ability to trail on the ground.\n\n\"I'd like a word with your skipper,\" he said. \"Now.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said, wondering if maritime law, as well as giving captains the right to perform marriages, also waived the usual civilities surrounding suspension from the nearest yardarm. \"He's below.\"\n\n\"And he'll soon be going aloft,\" Charley growled.\n\nThey were going to hang O'Reilly. I could only hope that there was no such crime as aiding and abetting in the nautical legal lexicon.\n\n\"You don't mean...\" I glanced up and swallowed.\n\n\"I bloody well do,\" said Charley. \"Somebody's going to have to get Cleopatra down from my masthead.\"\nSEPTEMBER 2001\n\nO'Reilly's Rival\n\nDoctor Murphy feels the wrath of his fellow physician\n\nO'Reilly smacked his empty pint glass on the bar top of the Mucky Duck, nodded at mine host Arthur Osbaldiston, and turned to me. \"One day...\" muttered O'Reilly. The tip of his nose was alabaster. His eyes flashed with the kind of light that must have given the Hamburg fire chief pause for serious thought in July 1943. \"One day I'm going to marmalize that monstrous mountebank Murphy.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" I remarked, taking a step backward and wondering what Doctor \"Thorny\" Murphy had done this time to, well, rile O'Reilly.\n\n\"He's a qualified quack, a certified charlatan. He's not fit to be a bloody benighted barber-surgeon.\"\n\nYou may recall that deep in hillbilly country there once was a minor misunderstanding between the Hatfield and McCoy families. Their falling-out was an entente cordiale compared to Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly's feelings for his medical competitor in the village of Ballybucklebo.\n\nIf you remember, it went back to the occasion when Doctor Murphy had publicly accused Doctor O'Reilly of playing God. O'Reilly had not so much bided his time as lurked, setting up an ambush that would have done credit to the skills of a squadron of the SAS hiding in the hills of County Tyrone awaiting the coming of a unit of the PIRA. And when O'Reilly did strike, his verbal assault had been as devastating as the cross fire from half a dozen assault rifles.\n\nDiscretion, I decided, was definitely the better part of valour. No doubt he would explain his present agitation in the fullness of time. I merely nodded sympathetically and waited.\n\n\"Are you pouring that bloody pint or brewing it, Arthur?\" O'Reilly roared down the bar. \"A man's estate can sue the publican if he lets a customer die of thirst, you know.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Doctor, sir.\" Arthur waddled along from the beer pump and set a full pint glass of Guinness before O'Reilly, who grunted, lifted the glass, and sank half of its contents before gracing me with, \"The College shouldn't suspend Murphy's licence\u2014they should hoist the bloody thing to the top of the tallest flagpole and burn it.\" The second half of his pint disappeared. \"Arthur!\"\n\nI had no doubt that all of the unsuspecting gentlemen named Arthur who lived within a ten-mile radius of the Mucky Duck wondered who was shouting at them.\n\n\"Right, Doctor, sir. Coming, Doctor, sir.\"\n\n\"Worms,\" said O'Reilly to me. \"What do you know about worms?\"\n\nI wondered if we were going fishing but kept the question unspoken.\n\n\"Come on, Taylor.\"\n\n\"Well, they're blind helminthes that burrow around in the soil and turn vegetable matter into humus,\" I tried, quite proud of remembering something from my first-year zoology class at medical school.\n\n\"Not those ones, you ninny. Pinworms. Threadworms.\"\n\nI was on safer ground now and happily trotted out, \"Oxyuris vermicularis. Most common parasitic infection of children. Cause pruritis...\"\n\n\"Exactly. Make life bloody miserable for the wee ones. And how would you treat them?\"\n\n\"Piperazine.\"\n\n\"That's how any self-respecting physician would. I just found out we've got an outbreak here in the Ballybucklebo kindergarten, and do you know what Murphy has been prescribing?\"\n\nI shook my head. By the scowl on O'Reilly's face, the answer might be interesting, but I had to contain my curiosity because of the arrival of Arthur and O'Reilly's new pint. He grabbed the glass and muttered, \"Lime water.\"\n\n\"Looks like Guinness to me,\" I ventured.\n\n\"Not this.\" O'Reilly must have been calming down, I thought. His first swallow merely consumed the upper third of his beverage. \"Lime water is Murphy's miracle cure for worms.\"\n\n\"But...\"\n\n\"Not just lime water. He's been telling the mothers to write 'Et verbum carum factum est,' on a piece of paper and make the sign of the cross over the concoction before they make the kiddies drink it.\"\n\n\"'And the word is made flesh,'\" I translated. \"Biblical.\"\n\n\"Aye. It's an old country remedy that goes back to a Franciscan friar. A fellow called Father Gregory Dunne.\"\n\n\"Your erudition amazes me, Fingal.\"\n\n\"Never mind amazing you. We've got to stop that bloody man.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head. \"Dunno. Yet.\" I saw something in the depths of O'Reilly's brown eyes that would have given Edgar Allen Poe nightmares. \"But I'll think of something.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIt took us three weeks to repair the wreckage wrought by Doctor Murphy's ham-fisted practices. I confess that I felt rather smug as we basked in the gratitude of the mothers of the youngsters who, now properly treated, no longer had to suffer constant perianal irritation. The only one in the village who still had an itch that needed to be scratched was one Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. His opportunity to do so came, as before, at a meeting of the county medical society.\n\nAll of the GPs from County Down had assembled in Belfast, nominally to hear a learned address by some imported speaker. The added attraction was of course the splendid dinner and copious amounts of some very excellent claret, courtesy of an international pharmaceutical company.\n\nO'Reilly was in one of his expansive moods. He was a splendid raconteur and, after the lecture and the meal, had surrounded himself with a coterie of his cronies whom he was entertaining with yet another of his stories of naval life. I hovered at the periphery of the crowd. Judging by the gale of laughter that swept through the assembly, they'd fully appreciated his last rendition.\n\nI became aware of a presence at my shoulder, heard a disdainful sniff, and turned to see the tall, angular, black-suited figure of Doctor \"Thorny\" Murphy.\n\n\"I see your senior associate is up to his usual uncouth antics,\" he remarked in condescending tones. I don't know how he did it, but he always struck me as being arrogantly subservient, a cross between Gilbert and Sullivan's Pooh-Bah and Dickens's Uriah Heep.\n\n\"Doctor Murphy.\" O'Reilly's voice boomed across the room. All heads turned to where we stood.\n\n\"Doctor O'Reilly.\" Murphy inclined his head. His tones were the ones he might have used if he'd stepped into a cesspit.\n\n\"How very pleasant to see you.\" O'Reilly's voice oozed charm.\n\nI glanced round, trying to find cover. Before going anywhere near something that might be a bomb, army bomb-disposal officers don a thing called an \"explosive ordnance device suit.\" It's made of Kevlar. Its protective attributes are of such magnitude that compared with it, a mediaeval suit of armour would offer about as much protection as silk thermal underwear. I knew O'Reilly was going to explode and frankly wished to be well out of range.\n\n\"I thought you did a very nice job with the worms,\" O'Reilly said in his most sincere tones. He addressed the throng. \"Doctor Murphy here is our local expert on traditional healing.\"\n\nO'Reilly had once told me that the secret of being a good physician was sincerity. Once you could fake that, everyone would trust you.\n\nDoctor Murphy inclined his head. \"Well, I...\"\n\n\"Now don't be modest,\" O'Reilly said. \"If anyone here needs to know how to make a nettle-leaf decoction or a mustard plaster, Doctor Murphy's the man to ask.\"\n\nI swear a little blush of pleasure tinged the sere wattles of Murphy's scrawny throat.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" O'Reilly continued. \"Doctor Murphy has been in Ballybucklebo for thirty-five years and the local customers are always talking about his wondrous cures.\"\n\nMurphy's pink turned to a deeper hue. \"Well, I...\"\n\n\"I myself heard, only yesterday, about his cure for infertility.\"\n\n\"What was that?\" a voice asked from the back.\n\n\"Gunpowder,\" O'Reilly said conspiratorially.\n\n\"Now, Doctor O'Reilly...\" Doctor Murphy's brow wrinkled into the beginning of a frown.\n\nA juggernaut was a huge wagon under the wheels of which devotees of Krishna hurled themselves and were crushed to death. It was unstoppable. It was but a wheelbarrow compared with O'Reilly, once he got up a head of steam.\n\n\"Gunpowder,\" O'Reilly continued. \"One of Doctor Murphy's first patients, Paddy Finucane, couldn't get his wife pregnant. Our esteemed colleague told the man to substitute one teaspoonful of black powder for the sugar in his cup of tea, the tea to be taken three times daily.\"\n\n\"I did no such...\"\n\n\"Worked like a charm. Do you know that when he died, old Paddy left six children, fourteen grandchildren...\" O'Reilly's timing was impeccable. He paused and swept his gaze over the clearly enraptured audience before adding, \"... and a bloody great hole where the crematorium used to stand.\"\n\nThe famous roar of the crowd of soccer supporters when Manchester United scored a goal would have been a muted whisper if ranked against the gales of laughter that filled the meeting room.\n\nDoctor Murphy flushed scarlet, gobbled like a cock turkey that had just noticed the pre-Christmas axe, spun on his heel, and fled.\n\n\"Keep up the good work, 'Thorny,'\" O'Reilly roared at the departing back. He lowered his voice and turned to me. \"Maybe now he'll think twice before inflicting his rubbish on the poor unsuspecting supplicants,\" he said.\n\nAnd do you know? He was right.\nOCTOBER 2001\n\nThe Smoking Gun\n\nA lesson in the hazards of tobacco\n\n\"Bah! Rubbish! Fiddlesticks! Unadulterated twaddle. Them eejits in London think they can prove anything with their statistics. This here fellah Vessey's utterly, absolutely, categorically wrong.\"\n\nI knew it was O'Reilly who was making these ex cathedra statements. No one could have mistaken the gravelly tones or the vehemence with which the words were uttered. And a good thing too, because any hopes of actually seeing the orator were roughly on a par with Captain Robert Falcon Scott's chances of finding a room at the Savoy Hotel for a quick overnight stay on his way back from the South Pole. Fingal Flahertie's dining room was filled with a fug of pipe-tobacco smoke that would have made the impenetrable clouds after the first black-powder broadsides at the Battle of Trafalgar seem as clear as the pure crystal air of the Mourne Mountains.\n\nI coughed and flapped an ineffective hand in a vain attempt to clear the pea-souper from which I confidently expected Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to emerge at any moment. My efforts were about as useful as those of the cabin boy who thought he could use a teaspoon to bail out the entire Atlantic Ocean from the depths of R.M.S. Titanic's hold.\n\n\"I thought the article in the British Medical Journal seemed convincing.\"\n\n\"You would,\" O'Reilly growled, \"and you probably believe that duodenal ulcers are caused by some as yet unidentified bacterium.\"\n\n\"Don't be daft. They're caused by stress,\" I said, wondering about the gnawing sensation in my epigastrium, \"but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that there might be an association between smoking and ill health. Doctor Vessey's figures looked pretty impressive to me.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" said O'Reilly, \"and if you draw a graph that shows the increase in the rates of purchases of television sets and the rates of heart attacks, they've been roaring upwards at about the same speed. If you want to, you can prove that television is the cause of coronaries.\"\n\nHe laughed at his own razor-sharp repartee. \"Don't believe everything you read in the BMJ.\"\n\n\"Well, I think...\"\n\n\"Jasus, Pat, you'd better watch yourself. If you're that gullible, somebody's going to try to sell you the Queen's Bridge.\"\n\nAccording to the late Jim Croce, \"You don't tug on Superman's cape. \/ You don't spit into the wind.\" According to the still-living P. J. Taylor, you didn't argue with O'Reilly when it was obvious that his mind on a given subject was firmly made up. This simple rule may account for my continued survival. Deciding that discretion was indeed the better part of valour, I conceded defeat. \"You're probably right, Fingal.\"\n\n\"'Course I am,\" he said with the finality of the Spanish geographers who took great pains in explaining to Christopher Columbus that when it came to the configuration of this planet, \"flat\" was the word he was looking for.\n\nClinging to the one remaining shred of my self-respect, I made a last feeble effort. \"Is there anything at all that might convince you?\"\n\n\"That smoking's bad for you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Not a thing, my boy. Not a single thing on God's green Earth.\"\n\nI sighed, not knowing that he was going to be proven wrong.\n\n* * *\n\nThe question of any relationship between smoking and disease was forgotten in the general hurly-burly of rural practice. I probably wouldn't have given the matter much more thought\u2014although I confess I was developing an aversion to being bested by my mentor\u2014if, some months later, fate hadn't intervened.\n\nWe were standing in the hall of his house.\n\n\"Could you do me a favour, Pat?\" O'Reilly's voice oozed charm. My internal alarm bells went off.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked, with as much trust in my tones as the housefly (order Diptera) must have used when invited into the parlour of a certain arachnid.\n\n\"Have you noticed the weather?\"\n\nIf he'd ever given up the practice of medicine, there would have been a stellar career in elected office for Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. The first rule for that merry bunch of pilgrims is never, never give a straight answer to a direct question.\n\n\"What favour?\" He might be trying to divert the conversation. I was going to keep it on course with all the concentration of the master of a square-rigger trying to navigate through the Straits of Magellan down in Cape Horn country.\n\n\"There's a gale. From the south,\" he said.\n\nPerhaps I'd misjudged him. Meteorology might be his avocation. It certainly must have taken an acutely honed weather sense to have noted the shrieking of the wind in the great sycamore tree at the end of his garden, the intermittent crashes as slates were ripped from roofs and hurled to the road, and the rattle of rain on the windowpanes.\n\n\"It's time Arthur Guinness got out to play, you know,\" he continued. \"You'd be doing him a favour too.\"\n\n\"No, Fingal. I am not going to take him for a walk.\"\n\nO'Reilly laughed. \"Mad dogs and Irishmen go out in the midday rain, and you're not daft, is that it?\"\n\n\"Badly paraphrased Noel Coward. And right, I'm not going out in that lot.\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to ask you to. But this is the very best weather for the ducks.\"\n\nI was tempted to remark that if he could see my feathers I'd venture out of doors, but unless such was the case I intended to stay as firmly put as King Arthur's Excalibur in the famous stone.\n\n\"They'll have to come in low to the ground at evening flight tonight.\"\n\nGale. Arthur Guinness\u2014a gun dog. Low-flying ducks. Somewhere at the back of my mind a series of small synapses went off in sequence. A little red light bulb glowed\u2014dimly, I admit, but it definitely lit up. \"And you want me to run the evening surgery so you can take Arthur and go shooting?\"\n\n\"Jasus,\" he said, \"your powers of deduction would make the Great Detective look like a candidate for a school for the hopelessly muddled.\" He lit his briar. \"I'll make it up to you. I'll do next Saturday and Sunday.\"\n\nI examined the proposition. It seemed to be decidedly deficient in attached strings. No obvious catches were apparent. \"You're on,\" I said, comforting myself with the thought that given the inclemency of the climate, only the true sufferers would brave the elements and make the trip to the surgery. I might have an easy evening.\n\n\"Good man.\" His craggy face lit up with the inner glow only seen on the countenances of small children who have been given the much-desired train set for Christmas. \"I'll be off then.\" He galloped upstairs.\n\nI wandered to the kitchen to see if perhaps Mrs. Kincaid had made an afternoon cup of tea. Moments later O'Reilly reappeared, clad for his outing in hip-waders, a waterproof jacket, and a deerstalker hat. He had a game bag slung over one shoulder and a double-barrelled twelve-bore tucked in the crook of one arm.\n\nMrs. Kincaid looked at him and asked, \"Now have you got all that you need, Doctor dear?\"\n\nO'Reilly checked in his game bag. \"Cartridges. Tobacco. Pipe. Matches.\" He looked at the teapot. \"I don't suppose there's enough of that to fill a thermos.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Mrs. Kincaid found a flask, filled it with hot tea, and presented it to an obviously impatient O'Reilly. \"Off you go now.\"\n\nAnd off he went. He was too big a man to skip, but the lightness of his step was akin to the dances of \"The Lordly Ones.\" You know, the little folk that \"dwell in the hills \/ in the hollow hills.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Mrs. Kincaid, chuckling after he'd slammed the door, \"whether himself or that great lummox of a dog has more fun when he goes out after the ducks.\"\n\nNeither Mrs. Kincaid nor I could have had the slightest inkling what form O'Reilly's fun would take on that particular evening.\n\n* * *\n\nEvening surgery was, as I'd predicted, light. I retired to the upstairs sitting room and was well into the new James Bond book when I heard the crash of the back door and a heavy tread on the stairs. O'Reilly entered, stage right, with as much force as the gale that still howled outside and all the drama of the Demon King in a Christmas pantomime. He spoke not one word but headed for the sideboard and helped himself to a large John Jameson.\n\nI simply stared. O'Reilly's usually bushy eyebrows had shrunk as if an American Marine Corps barber had given them the full new-recruit treatment. His hairline had receded like a neap tide and his normally florid cheeks had a roseate hue that only John Turner could have rendered in oils. From him emanated a vague smell of something singed.\n\n\"Lord,\" he said, lowering a very large gulp of Irish, \"you and that fellah Vessey were right.\"\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\n\"About the smoking. Just look at me.\"\n\nI did, and by herniating most of my face muscles managed to refrain from grinning. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"I dropped my matches. Couldn't light my pipe. So I did something a bit silly.\"\n\nThis confession coming from the redoubtable O'Reilly would have been on a par with King Charles I admitting that perhaps he had been a little over-optimistic in his opinion of the Divine Right of Kings.\n\n\"Go on,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, I thought it was a brilliant idea at the time.\"\n\nIt had been, I thought, on a par with General Ulysses S. Grant's notion of digging a ditch to divert the entire flow of the mighty Mississippi at the siege of Vicksburg\u2014and obviously O'Reilly had had about as much success.\n\n\"Aye. I really wanted a smoke so I split a cartridge and put the powder on top of a rock. Then I stuck the stem of the pipe in my mouth and the bowl in the powder.\" He finished his whiskey. \"Did you ever make sparks from a couple of pieces of flint?\"\n\n\"No, Fingal, and I never went looking for a gas leak with a lit match either.\"\n\n\"Jasus. It worked a charm. Went off like the crack of doom.\"\n\n\"Worked wonders for your haircut too,\" I said, peering at his frazzled face. \"Do you think maybe we should slap a dab or two of ointment on you?\"\n\n\"I do,\" he said, \"and I'll tell you something else. Smoking can be dangerous to your health. Bloody dangerous.\"\n\nI'm sure that Doctor Vessey, who was eventually knighted for his work linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer, would have been delighted to have received such a ringing endorsement of his theories from no less a personage than Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO.\nNOVEMBER 2001\n\nRing Around the Rosies\n\nO'Reilly's nephew demonstrates his entrepreneurial prowess\n\nYou may remember O'Reilly's nephew, William Butler Yates O'Reilly, aged eleven. An enterprising boy. Something of an original thinker in the O'Reilly mould. His main claim to fame, at least in Ballybucklebo circles, had been won by his uttering one unscripted sentence at the infamous Christmas pageant.\n\nHe'd been moved from his starring role as Joseph\u2014a part that he'd carried off with dramatic flair in the two previous years\u2014to a supporting spot as the innkeeper, and wasn't one bit happy about his demotion. \"Seething\" is a descriptor often applied to superheated mud pits in remote parts of New Zealand. It would barely have done justice to the pent-up fury inside one small boy.\n\nIt would be unfair to compare Ballybucklebo's thespian retelling of the nativity story with the Oberammergau Passion Play or the Wagnerian Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, but it was nevertheless an annual fixture in our little village's social calendar and well attended. Willy had dropped his bombshell on opening night.\n\nThe effects of his ad lib on the audience had been on a par with the conflagration started by His Majesty's Royal Air Force (Bomber Command), in February 1945 at a spot called Dresden. Willy's father, Lars Porsena O'Reilly, had found himself at the epicentre of the firestorm. Well, you could hardly have expected Willy's immortal lines when admission was sought to the inn by Joseph and Mary\u2014\"You can come in, Mary, but Joseph, you can just feck off!\"\u2014to have been greeted with thunderous applause by an audience of teachers, parents, and a convent's worth of blushing nuns.\n\nWilly had eaten his meals standing up for several days after the event and his pocket money had been stopped for three months. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 would have seemed but a minor readjustment of the markets in the impecunious eyes of William Butler Yates O'Reilly. He was facing fiscal catastrophe. Monetary meltdown. But I did tell you that he was an enterprising boy. Wall Street recovered. So did Willy.\n\nIn the process he caused his uncle, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, and Doctor O'Reilly's junior colleague, myself, a great deal of head scratching\u2014and we weren't alone. We had the village schoolmaster and most of the children from Ballybucklebo's primary school to keep us company. In the case of ourselves and our perplexed parish pedagogue, the capital clawing was metaphorical. In the cases of the little learners, it was literal.\n\nAt first we were caught off guard, but our initial surprise soon turned to complete consternation. O'Reilly began to look like a U-boat skipper who'd surfaced directly under the fifteen-inch guns of one of His Majesty's larger ironclads.\n\nThe first inkling that we might be facing some difficulties came at the end of a busy surgery. The last patient was a small boy\u2014you remember Mister Brown, who once before had come in for prenuptial counselling but had cut the interview short when he'd wet his pants\u2014and his mother. She tugged at his hand and said, \"Take off your cap.\" He removed that peculiar head adornment favoured by the school authorities of the time, a soft, peaked cap embellished with concentric rings in the school colours, which in the case of Ballybucklebo Primary were horribly clashing yellow and orange.\n\nO'Reilly peered at the boy's crown. \"What do you make of that, Doctor Taylor?\" he asked, pointing to a circular bald spot in the middle of the child's head.\n\nI peered at the lesion in question. The hairs had broken off close to the scalp and the stumps had a frosted appearance. \"Tinea capitis?\" I suggested.\n\n\"Brilliant,\" growled O'Reilly. \"I'd guessed that. But which fungus?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Could be anything from Microsporum audouinii to Microsporum canis to one of the Trichophytons.\"\n\nO'Reilly pursed his lips. \"It's ringworm, Mother, but we'll have to send the wee lad up to the skin clinic in Belfast to find out what's the cause.\"\n\nShe looked worried. Mister Brown sniffled and scratched his head.\n\n\"All the way to Belfast, Doctor O'Reilly?\" she said, doubtfully. \"He'll miss a day of school.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said O'Reilly, \"but he may miss more than that.\"\n\nI noticed her frown and her son's grin as O'Reilly continued. \"If it's one of the animal fungi that's the cause, it'll not spread, but if it's the human kind it could infect every kiddie in the class. He'll have to stay home until we know the answer to the test, and if it is the human kind he'll be off school until he's cured.\"\n\nHer mouth rounded into a silent \"O.\" Mister Brown's grin widened.\n\n\"And,\" said O'Reilly, \"burn his cap.\"\n\n\"But it's brand-new.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said O'Reilly, \"the bloody thing gets into the cloth and could be given to another youngster. Now just you wait until I make the arrangements at the Royal Victoria Hospital.\"\n\nThe arrangements were made, the patients dismissed, and O'Reilly fired up his briar. \"If it is Microsporum audouinii, I hope to God we've caught it in time. Once that one gets into a school it can go through the place like wildfire.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIt was, we hadn't, and it did. Within a week, every boy in the school had shown the telltale symptoms and signs. Every boy had been given a prescription for Griseofulvin. Every mother had been given instruction about shaving the affected parts of the scalp. The smoke of the funeral pyres of yellow and orange school caps hung over the village. The streets of Ballybucklebo rang to the sounds of childish laughter, and would continue to do so for at least six more weeks until every child was considered fungus-free. The boys rejoiced in their unexpected holiday. Their mothers wrung their hands and O'Reilly grumbled that unless we could trace the source of the outbreak, the whole epidemic could break out again at any time. He was right and it did. Two days after the last of the lads, who looked like a group of tiny tonsured Trappists, was safely ensconced behind his desk, Mister Brown and his mother were back in the surgery.\n\n\"Bugger,\" said O'Reilly, glowering at the boy's scalp, \"here we go again. We've got to find out where it's starting.\"\n\nI had to agree, but the mystery seemed to be unsolvable\u2014unsolvable, that is, until O'Reilly discovered that he'd run out of Erinmore Flake, his favourite pipe tobacco, a product of Messrs. Gallagher and Sons, who in my opinion added sulphur, Greek fire, and a whiff of the great nineteenth-century fogs of London to their product.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said. \"We'll nip down to the shop.\"\n\nWe strolled along the main street to the little store. The door opened and who should appear but William Butler Yates O'Reilly. His cheeks were bulging. In his left hand he carried a paper bag and in his right a brightly coloured school cap. His eyes widened when he caught sight of his uncle.\n\n\"Morning, Willy,\" said O'Reilly.\n\nWilly's reply was unintelligible. He had difficulty forming the words round an enormous mouthful of peppermint gobstopper.\n\n\"Buying sweeties?\" O'Reilly inquired as he stared at the paper bag.\n\nWilly nodded.\n\n\"Huh,\" said O'Reilly. \"I thought you'd no money.\"\n\nWilly blushed, and tried to hide the cap behind his back.\n\nO'Reilly struck like a cobra. His big hand shot out and grabbed Willy by the ear.\n\n\"Spit out that gobstopper,\" O'Reilly roared.\n\nWilly spat and a great spherical lump of multi-hued hard candy hit the gutter.\n\nI had no idea what was happening, but of course that was often my state of mind when in the company of Fingal Flahertie.\n\n\"Give me that cap.\"\n\nThe item in question was surrendered.\n\n\"How long have you been at it?\" O'Reilly tugged on his nephew's ear.\n\nAt what? I wondered as Willy whimpered.\n\n\"How long?\"\n\n\"Six weeks, Uncle Fingal.\"\n\n\"Jasus.\"\n\n\"You won't tell my dad?\"\n\nO'Reilly paused, pursed his lips, then said, very slowly, \"Not if you tell me how much a rub.\"\n\n\"Sixpence.\"\n\n\"You little...\"\n\n\"Sorry, Uncle Fingal.\"\n\nO'Reilly pointed an admonitory finger. \"No more, do you hear?\" He tweaked Willy's ear to add emphasis to his words.\n\n\"I promise. Honest.\"\n\nO'Reilly released his grip. \"Go on home, but if I catch you at it again...\"\n\nWilly fled.\n\n\"And that's the end of that,\" said O'Reilly, clearly pleased with himself. \"No wonder we couldn't stop the outbreak.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" I was as much at sea as the Ancient Mariner.\n\n\"Ach,\" said O'Reilly, \"in the immortal phrase that the great detective never actually uttered, 'Elementary, my dear Watson.' Nephew Willy has restored his exchequer by selling a rub of his cap\u2014his infected cap\u2014at sixpence a pop. The kids get the ringworm and don't have to go to school and Willy...\" O'Reilly began counting on his fingers, then whistled, \"... by my reckoning he's made nearly two pounds. Crafty little bugger.\"\n\n\"I wonder where he gets that from,\" I muttered, but O'Reilly had already gone into the shop.\n\nWhen we returned to his back garden, I had some difficulty deciding which made the worse stink, O'Reilly's recharged briar or the fumes from the bonfire that consumed Willy's cap. The smoke drifted upward and dissipated, and with it went the great ringworm plague of Ballybucklebo.\n\n\"Do you know,\" said O'Reilly, exuding a certain tangible family pride. \"That nephew of mine's going to go far one day. You just watch.\"\nDECEMBER 2001\n\nJingle Bells\n\nSammy the sweep rises to the occasion\n\nWhile watching a TV quiz show I fell to pondering how popular these things are. In the Yuletide spirit of giving and, as O'Reilly would remark just before he laid into some miscreant, \"It is always more blessed to give than to receive,\" I thought I'd offer my readers a little quiz.\n\nTranslate the following: Airy tipsies, slabbergub, bit of a lig, bletherskite, beelin', boggin', and boke. [Montgomery, M. and F. Montgomery, Barnish County Antrim Dialect Dictionary 1993 \u00a9 Doctor Robert Montgomery. Courtesy Doctor T. F. Baskett.]\n\nGive up? I'm not surprised. You'd not come within a beagle's gowl of the answers unless of course you speak fluent Ulsterese. Please understand, Ulsterese isn't a foreign language but an abstruse form of English embellished with the local expressions used daily in Ballybucklebo and its environs. When rendered at full speed by an upset Ulsterman whose accent would be, in the local parlance, \"thick as champ,\" attempts to comprehend what was being said would have left no less a linguist than Professor Henry Higgins babbling with incomprehension.\n\nOnce, at the height of the Ulster Troubles, I saw an NBC documentary filmed in Belfast. Naturally the ubiquitous man-on-the-street had been interviewed. The folks at the network had thoughtfully provided their viewers with English subtitles. And a good thing too. \"Beagle's gowl. Thick as champ.\" Indeed.\n\nLet me instantly explain that failing to \"come within a beagle's gowl\" is translated as falling short of expectations by the distance from which a howling beagle dog could be heard, and that's a fair stretch of the legs. \"Thick as champ\" refers to the density of a peculiar Irish dish of potatoes, buttermilk, and scallions. It has the gastronomic qualities of a lump of spent plutonium and, when eaten, \"sticks to your ribs like glue.\" Applied in a descriptive fashion to an accent, this phrase suggests a degree of impenetrability that would make the front armour of a main battle tank seem as thin as tissue paper. When used to describe intellectual capacity\u2014say in the case of Donal Donnelly\u2014well, I'm sure you get my drift.\n\nIf you're still wondering about the Airy tipsies list, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until this story is finished before you get the answers, because I really want to explain the expression \"thon one has a heart of corn.\"\n\n\"A what?\" I hear you ask. That's right. \"Thon one has a heart of corn,\" is precisely how O'Reilly described Samuel St. John (pronounced \"sinjin\") Slattery, our local chimney sweep, after the man had left the surgery. He'd been in to see about a nasty cough, an occupational hazard of the sweep's trade. I must say I was glad to see him go. It was Christmas Eve and I was going to a dance in Belfast. I really didn't want to be held up by one of O'Reilly's rambling expositions so I merely nodded.\n\n\"You can't always tell a book by its cover,\" said O'Reilly, washing enough soot from his hands to have replenished the entire York, Notts, and Derby coalfields. \"Just because your man looks like an escapee from a travelling minstrel show...\"\n\n\"Grunts when you ask him a question and has a perpetual scowl on his face that would make the Medusa on a bad hair day seem as mild as a cooing dove...\"\n\n\"I'm telling you,\" said O'Reilly. \"You can hardly blame him for being covered in soot. He'd come here straight from his work.\"\n\nI had a mental flashback to the violent ejection of one Donal Donnelly, who'd dared to show O'Reilly an unwashed foot, but decided that it would be wise to make no comment on that matter. I really did want to get away, but foolishly added, \"Sammy St. John strikes me as a pretty mean-tempered bloke.\"\n\n\"You'd be wrong,\" said O'Reilly, dumping himself in his swivel chair and firing up his pipe.\n\n\"Prove it.\"\n\n\"All right. I will. Park yourself.\"\n\nI glanced at my watch, sighed, and hitched myself up onto the examination table. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"Do you remember Mister Brown and Miss Gill?\"\n\n\"The kids that came to see you because they wanted to get married but had to leave because Mister Brown had wet himself?\"\n\n\"The very ones. Well, I saw Mister Brown on the street today. He was sobbing his wee heart out.\"\n\n\"Fingal, I thought we were discussing Sam Slattery.\"\n\n\"Patience, my boy. All in good time.\"\n\nI fidgeted.\n\n\"'What's up?' I asked him. It took me a few minutes to understand what was the matter. I tell you, Pat, between the howls of him and his wiping his nose on his sleeve, I thought I was going to be there all day. But you couldn't leave a wee lad that upset. Not on Christmas Eve.\"\n\nI had to smile. I told you years ago that O'Reilly was kind to widows and small children.\n\n\"I finally got it out of him. One of the big boys had told him there was no Santa Claus.\"\n\n\"Ach no.\"\n\n\"Ach yes, and there was no comforting him. I know we all have to find it out sooner or later. I don't think it's right to lie to the wee ones when they hear the truth. But on Christmas Eve?\" He shook his big head.\n\n\"So what did you do?\"\n\n\"I took him by the hand and walked him home.\"\n\n\"Let his mother sort it out?\"\n\n\"I suppose that's what I was thinking but, do you know, once in a while things have a habit of working out just fine. Guess who was at the house?\"\n\n\"Donner and Blitzen? Rudolph?\"\n\nInstead of growling at my sarcasm, O'Reilly let go a guffaw that rattled the instruments on the stainless steel instrument trolley. \"The next best thing. Samuel St. John Slattery was there sweeping the Browns' chimney.\" O'Reilly let go a mini-mushroom cloud from his pipe. \"He was just about to climb his ladder when we arrived. 'What's up?' says he to the little lad. He just went on sniffling so I told Sam what the trouble was. I suppose I was hoping maybe Sam could say something to help. 'Is that fact?' was all he said, and he went up the ladder like a monkey up a pole.\"\n\n\"Right enough. The man has a heart of corn. You're not convincing me, Fingal.\"\n\nThis time O'Reilly did glower at me. \"I will,\" he said. \"There was me, both legs the same length, a little boy by the hand, still in floods, no sign of the mother, and Samuel St. John up on the roof. Then it happened.\" His frown vanished and was replaced by a smile so enigmatic that he could have posed for Leonardo da Vinci. \"Sammy came back down, bent over the little lad, and held out a big black hand. The look on old Sam's face was one of complete awe. 'Look what I found up by the chimney,' says he, and opened his hand.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"I watched the wee fellow. I've never seen anything like it. He rubbed his eyes, peered into the callused, sooty hand, and do you know what was there?\"\n\nI shook my head.\n\n\"A tiny golden bell. A sleigh bell. 'I wonder what this came off?' says Sammy. It was like the sunrise, the way the wee lad's face lit up. He looked at Sammy. 'You'd better have it,' says Sam, and gave the boy the bell. He tore off into the house yelling, 'Look, Mummy. Look what Santa's reindeer left on our roof.' Old Sam just coughed.\n\n\"'How the hell...' I started to ask him. He stuck his hand into his trousers pocket and pulled out five or six little bells. 'He's not the first nipper I've seen like that. And you don't have to lie to them. Just let them draw their own conclusions. The poor little bugger is going to find out soon enough. Let him enjoy one more Christmas.'\n\n\"'God, Sammy,' says I, 'you've a heart of corn.'\"\n\nI was so amazed I just sat there on the couch with, to use a graphic piece of Ulsterese, my eyes turned up like a duck in thunder.\n\nOh yes, I promised you a translation of other bits of my native tongue. Here you are. Airy tipsies: high winds. Slabbergub: a man with a foul mouth. Bit of a lig: a fool. Beelin': suppurating. Boggin': filthy. Boke: Throw up. And one more thing, in plain English: a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all.\nHome Is the Sailor\n\nAn Irish Country Doctor Story\n\nAuthor's Note\n\nSince Tom Doherty and Associates first began publishing the Irish Country Doctor series in 2007 for a current total of seven novels with one in press, I have been overwhelmed by the number of kind letters that come to me through my Web site and as comments posted on Facebook. Readers have taken the characters in the books to heart and want to know more about them. A recurrent wish is for the works to appear more frequently. Like the title of the 1982 movie starring Jill Clayburgh, \"I'm dancing as fast as I can\"\u2014for me, read, \"I'm writing,\" and my publisher is doing his best, but it takes a while to write 140,000 words and to turn them into a paper book.\n\nSixteen thousand words do not consume as much time, and although this work has had all the technical attention paid to a paper book in terms of editing, design, and cover design, the Internet allows much more rapid publication.\n\nIn this long short story, for want of a better term, you will learn how the recent widower Doctor Fingal O'Reilly returns to Ballybucklebo after the Second World War. His attempts to reestablish his practice seem doomed until, in her usual understated but effective way, Mrs. Kinky Kincaid comes to the rescue.\n\nAlthough this is not a giveaway\u2014authors all have the same recurrent habits of needing to eat and find shelter\u2014it is well priced and I hope will be regarded as a kind of gift from my publisher and me to help fill the gap before my first work about the Ulster Troubles, Pray for Us Sinners, a story of loss of faith and search for atonement, appears in June and Fingal O'Reilly: Irish Doctor, number eight in the Irish Country Doctor series, is on the shelves in October.\n\nAll the citizens of Ballybucklebo and I thank you for your loyalty, encouragement, and patience.\n\nWith my very best wishes,\n\nPATRICK TAYLOR  \nSalt Spring Island,  \nBritish Columbia,  \nNovember 2012\n1\n\nFirst Impressions Are Things You Don't Get a Second Chance to Make\n\nSurgeon-Commander Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, M.B., B.Ch., B.A.O., R.N.R., D.S.C., gave a third hard shove then kept his thumb firmly on the porcelain push of a bell that was mounted on a brass plate. \"Get a move on,\" he said, and hunched his shoulders. It was nippy out here in the mid-February evening. His ship, HMS Warspite, had been placed in Category C reserve on February 1, 1946, and her remaining crew paid off. As soon as he had completed the formalities of his own demobilisation, O'Reilly had headed for the Liverpool cross-channel ferry to Belfast docks and then the train to Ballybucklebo. From there it had only been a short walk.\n\nAn Austin Ruby of early thirties vintage rattled past the Presbyterian church on the other side of Main Street, part of the Bangor to Belfast road.\n\nHe heard a distant ringing and a woman's soft Cork brogue calling, \"I'm coming, so. Take your hurry in your hand now.\"\n\nHe stepped back and regarded the familiar front of the big, old, three-storey house where he had been an assistant in general practice before the war had called him away on naval service for six long years. A steam engine whistled, coming from where the tracks of the Belfast and County Down Railway ran along the shore of Belfast Lough.\n\nWhen he looked at the house again he saw ground-floor bow windows flanking a green-painted front door\u2014a now-open green door wherein stood a solid woman in her late thirties. Fire flashed in her agate eyes as she squinted into the low sun. She dusted flour off her hands then stood arms akimbo. \"You did make the bell sound like the last trump, bye. There's no need to\u2014\" She stepped back, smiling broadly with dimples coming into her cheeks. \"Praise all the saints. It's yourself, sir.\" She stepped aside. \"Welcome home at last. Come in, come in, come in, Doctor O'Reilly, sir. Come into the dining room and I'll make you a cup of tea and a plate of hot buttered barmbrack, so, before I see to your dinner. I've made roast rack of spring lamb with herb stuffing and caper sauce.\"\n\nO'Reilly's tummy rumbled and his grin was vast. \"By God that sounds like manna from heaven.\" After years of eating the efforts of Royal Navy cooks, often little more than corned beef sandwiches and cocoa when the ship was closed up at action stations, one of Mrs. Kinkaid's homemade meals would be bliss. \"How are you, anyway, Kinky? I'm sorry I'm a bit late.\" On Monday, to let her know he'd be arriving Friday, he'd phoned Mrs. Maureen \"Kinky\" Kincaid, until recently housekeeper to the late Doctor Flanagan, to whom O'Reilly had been an assistant before the war. The estate had provided for her wages to be paid until the house and practice had been sold\u2014to O'Reilly.\n\n\"Och, I'm grand, so, and it's better late than never, and I'm all the better for seeing yourself back here, sir.\" She beamed at him.\n\n\"It's good to be home.\" O'Reilly was very glad that she was now going to assume the same housekeeping role for him. He had, while the ship was still in Portsmouth, through his solicitor brother Lars, completed the purchase of the practice and the house and its contents from Doctor Flanagan's estate. It had taken every penny of O'Reilly's demobilisation gratuity and a sizable loan from the Bank of Ireland. It was, he thought, a blessing that Kinky had agreed to stay. With her knowledge of the locals she'd help him rebuild the practice, the patients of which must now be seeking their medical advice elsewhere. Doctor Flanagan had had no assistant before or after O'Reilly.\n\nAnd neither would he, not for many years anyway. Apart from the need to pay off the loan, O'Reilly was looking forward to running a busy, single-handed practice and seeing a variety of patients and their ailments. He'd not delivered a baby for years and he'd always enjoyed midwifery. He wondered if he'd forgotten all he'd ever learned about diseases of women. Medicine on a battleship with a crew of more than twelve hundred healthy young men had largely been confined to treating accidental injuries\u2014when in port the results of barroom brawls, hangovers, and venereal disease, and when in action, war wounds. He shuddered. He'd rather not think of those.\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"It's been quite some time, Kinky,\" he said.\n\n\"A donkey's age, sir, but you do be back so leave your suitcase and overcoat in the hall.\"\n\nHe took off his navy greatcoat, they'd allowed him to keep it, and hung it on the hall coat stand. He felt lucky to have been demobbed at last. British airmen in Ceylon had gone on strike this month to protest against the slow rate of their release from the armed forces.\n\n\"It's a grand tweed suit the navy did give you,\" she said. \"Makes a change from a uniform. Now go you into the dining room, sir, and I'll only be a shmall-little minute, so.\" She left.\n\nO'Reilly looked to what he automatically thought of as the port side of the house, then reminded himself he was on dry land now. This was the front parlour but had served old Doctor Flanagan as his surgery, what North American doctors would call their office. It didn't seem as if much had changed in there. Perhaps not, but he had. Six years of war service would change any man.\n\nHe went into the dining room. The furniture had come with the purchase of the house.\n\nSame old high-backed chairs, long bog oak table, cut-glass chandelier, sideboard. Even the decanters were still there. He'd get a bottle of John Jameson's Irish whiskey tomorrow. He'd much prefer that to the navy's traditional tipple of Plymouth gin and Angostura bitters\u2014pink gin.\n\nThe front doorbell rang. When he'd been an assistant here, it had been Kinky's job to answer. Business already? He hoped so. He waited, heard voices, one soft, Cork, female, the other male, raised, harsh, Ulster. \"I don't give a tinker's toss if he's only arrived five minutes ago and he's getting his afternoon tea. His tea can wait. I want til see a doctor and I want til see him right now. Right now. It was in the County Down Spectator last week that a new quack was taking over here and I need til see him, so I do. Now. I'm a very busy man.\"\n\nO'Reilly rose. He felt the tip of his boxer's bent nose grow cold, an indication that it was blanching, which was itself a sure sign that his temper was rising. He needed patients but not rude and demanding ones. He peered through the slightly open door.\n\nKinky, jaw set, arms folded across the top of her pinafore, stood four square in the front doorway. \"I've told you, sir, the doctor\u2014\"\n\n\"I want him and I want him now. Now.\"\n\nO'Reilly frowned. How dare this rotund little man in a three-piece blue serge suit and bowler hat speak like that to a woman? O'Reilly took a deep breath. Calm down, he told himself. You're dealing with civilians. You need to build up a practice. You can't treat them like naval ratings. And yet echoing in his head was the admonition of Warspite's senior medical officer, Surgeon-Commander Wilcoxson, R.N., to a young Surgeon-Lieutenant O'Reilly, R.N.R., in 1939. Never, never let the patients get the upper hand. He opened the dining room door. \"Can I help you, Mister...?\"\n\nThe man pushed past Kinky and came into the hall. \"I dunno. Can you? Who the hell are you, anyroad?\" The man squinted at O'Reilly. \"Aren't you the young pup that worked with Flanagan before the war? O'Rourke or O'Rafferty or something like that?\"\n\nStruggling to keep his voice level, O'Reilly said, \"I'm Doctor O'Reilly. Yes.\"\n\n\"Right. I'm Mister Albert Bishop. I'm a very important man round here, so I am.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you are,\" O'Reilly said in his most placatory voice while thinking about large fish, ugly ones at that, in small if not puddle-sized ponds. \"What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"I need to talk to you, and in private.\" He flicked his head dismissively at Kinky, who frowned, sniffed, and turned on her heel.\n\n\"Come into the surgery,\" O'Reilly said, overriding his intense desire to throw the man out. Some philosopher had made a crack about a long journey starting with the first step, and O'Reilly had a practice to build. He led the way. He pushed the door closed behind the man.\n\nA swivel chair stood in front of a flat table that had served Doctor Flanagan as a desk. O'Reilly sat in the swivel, stuck a pair of half-moon spectacles on his nose, and waved at one of two simple, hard wooden chairs. \"Have a seat.\"\n\nMister Bishop plumped himself down.\n\n\"And what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\"I'm not sick nor nothing.\"\n\nAnd you insisted on seeing me and you were rude to Kinky? O'Reilly told himself again to calm down. \"Then what can I do for you?\"\n\n\"You mind in 1939 we all had til get National Identity Cards?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, I've lost mine, and I need one to prove who I am,\" he shook his head, \"as if everyone round here didn't know, so I can complete a big contract with the army at Palace Barracks outside Holywood. The stupid buggers that issue the cards say I've til fill out this here thing.\" He slammed a government form on the table. \"And I need a doctor's signature, so I do. Like on a passport application.\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head and said levelly, but with a touch of steel in his tones, \"And for that you barged in here, were rude to Mrs. Kincaid...\" Never mind not treating a physician with the courtesy custom demanded.\n\n\"I'm in a hurry, so I am.\" Clearly O'Reilly's attempted admonition had had no effect.\n\nFor a moment he ached to be back on Warspite. A naval rating who'd behaved like this man might have been up before the executive officer, before his feet had touched the deck, on a charge of insolence to a superior officer. Might have. O'Reilly prided himself that he'd never had to invoke naval law. A few well-chosen words roared in what O'Reilly thought of as his quarterdeck voice and an icy stare over half-moon spectacles had always quelled the most intransigent rating. But this Bishop was a civilian, and, O'Reilly reminded himself, he needed patients, and lots of them, if he was going to make a success of this practice. He took a deep breath. \"Give it to me.\"\n\n\"Sign there.\" Bishop pointed.\n\nO'Reilly did, recognising that he had lost the \"upper hand.\" One day, Mister Bishop, he thought, either you are going to have to find a new medical advisor or you and I are going to rethink our doctor-patient relationship. \"Here.\" He wondered what the fee was for signing forms. Perhaps Kinky would know. Doctor Flanagan, as far as O'Reilly knew, had handled the practice finances and had paid O'Reilly a salary.\n\n\"Right.\" Bishop rose and headed for the door.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" O'Reilly called at the departing back.\n\nBishop stopped, turned. \"I never said nothing.\"\n\n\"Sorry. I thought I distinctly heard you say, 'Thank you, Doctor.'\"\n\nThere was a small smile on O'Reilly's face as Bishop snorted, let himself out, and slammed the door.\n\nO'Reilly headed back to the dining room to be met by Kinky, who had just delivered a tray of tea and hot buttered barmbrack. The scent of its spices was mouth-watering.\n\n\"There you are, sir,\" she said. \"Eat up however little much is in it.\"\n\n\"Thank you, and Kinky?\" He went to the tray and lifted a warm triangle of 'brack.\n\n\"Yes, sir?\"\n\n\"What do I charge for filling in a form?\" He bit into the wedge. Delicious.\n\n\"Lord bless you, sir, do not worry your head. Next time you see a patient there's a ledger on the table. Fill in the name and what you did. I send out the accounts every month.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nShe must have interpreted his relieved surprise as disbelief because she stiffened and said, \"I have my School Leavers Certificate, so. I am not an unlettered woman.\"\n\nO'Reilly swallowed his mouthful. \"I never thought for one minute you were, Kinky.\"\n\n\"That's all right then.\" She smiled. \"It's my job to leave you free for the doctoring.\"\n\n\"I appreciate that.\" Another mouthful. He'd missed Irish cooking.\n\n\"And will you be starting on Monday?\"\n\n\"I will. I'm going up to Charles Hurst in Belfast tomorrow to buy a car, then I'm going down to Portaferry to see my mother and brother.\"\n\n\"Family does be important, so. Most of mine are still in County Cork near Beal na mBl\u00e1th,\" she said wistfully.\n\n\"And you'll want to see them, I'm sure. I'll be able to give you time off soon, but I'll need you for a week or two first, Kinky. My mother has arranged for bits and pieces she's been storing for me to be brought up here tomorrow. You'll need to let the movers in\u2014I'll tell you where things are to go.\"\n\n\"That will not be any trouble, sir.\"\n\n\"And I'll certainly need you here on Monday on my first day as the principal here.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"And I do hope you'll soon be busy for I remember how much you enjoyed your work when you were last here, so.\"\n\n\"I hope so too\u2014and I do have to pay the bank.\"\n\n\"I'll be here to help, and the patients will come back and bring the fees with them, you'll see.\"\n\n\"I just hope they're more pleasant than that Bishop. I don't remember seeing him when I was here before, but he is a thoroughly unpleasant man.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Mister Bertie Bishop is an influential man here and he is a terrible one for bearing a grudge, so.\"\n\nO'Reilly wondered if his parting shot had been altogether wise, but damn it all he was going to be the local GP and he'd be damned if anybody was going to ride roughshod over Kinky\u2014or him. He'd never tolerated that kind of thing since the day he used his newly discovered wicked right cross to flatten the school persecutor. O'Reilly had spent the last six years fighting one of the biggest bullies the world had ever known, and he'd be damned if he was going to let anyone get away with it here.\n2\n\nHome They Brought Her Warrior\n\nO'Reilly drove his black long-bonnetted Rover 16 with all the flair of the pilot of Warspite's Walrus observation seaplane. The car was a secondhand 1945 model he'd bought on the never-never, as hire-purchase was called. He'd been lucky to get it. New cars could take as long as a year to be delivered and even used models were rare, but those in some occupations, including doctors, were given priority. The motor industry was only now switching back to peacetime production. \"Poop-poop,\" he shouted in what he thought might be a fair imitation of Mister Toad from one of O'Reilly's favourite books, The Wind in the Willows. And he drove like Mister Toad. Heavy on the accelerator and brake.\n\nHe passed elms and sycamores growing in hedgerows. The great gaunt trees were leafless, reaching with bony fingers for a cold blue sky from which an occasional snowflake drifted. Black-faced ewes heavy with winter fleeces huddled in the corners of little fields bordered in drystone walls or blackthorn hedges while the lambs, seemingly oblivious to the cold, ran and bounced, full of the joys of spring. Lord, even if real spring was still some weeks away it was good to be back home in Ulster. There had been times in the last six years when it had seemed to him that, like the crew of the Flying Dutchman, he and his shipmates were doomed eternally to sail their great gallant ship through endless growling seas. But he was home. At last. He roared out,\n\nAnd it's home boys home, home I'd like to be\n\nHome for a while in the old counteree\n\nWhere the oak and the ash and the bonny rowan tree\n\nAre all growin' greener in the old counteree.\n\nAnd in all of Ireland, his own old counteree, here on the shores of Strangford Lough, was the place he loved the best.\n\nOverhead a skein of metallically honking Greylag geese drifted down a gentle wind heading for the islands of the lough that lay to his right. The peace washed round him and if he did hear gunfire, it would only be the report of a wildfowler's shotgun. A far cry from the islands of the Mediterranean Sea where he'd spent tumultuous parts of 1940, '41, and '43, or those of Puget Sound in Washington State where his old ship had gone because a German bomb had blown a great hole in her during the Battle of Crete. After being patched up as best the dockyard could in Alexandria Harbour she had passed through the Suez Canal for her long trip for extensive repairs and modifications in Bremerton Navy Yard and replacement of her worn-out main armament.\n\nO'Reilly had mixed memories, some sad, some grateful, of Bremerton and the kindness of the Americans.\n\nHe sighed. He'd needed kindness, wounded as he'd been, still was, by the death of his wife, Deirdre, in the Belfast Blitz in April 1941. He must try to put it all behind him. Start a new life back here in Ulster. But it hurt. It hurt sore.\n\n\"Damnation.\" He stamped on the brake pedal. A rusty Massey Ferguson tractor was trundling toward him coming the other way. The horse trailer behind took up more than its share of the road and O'Reilly had to pull onto the verge. As soon as he was past he sank his foot and tore off, hardly noticing the lone cyclist who on the Rover's approach hurled himself and his bike into the ditch.\n\nHe turned on the car radio, fiddled with the dial, and found a BBC man's Oxbridge voice saying, \"And finally in sports news; on Thursday in Paris the International Olympics Committee announced that the 1948 Games will be held in London.\" More fiddling before O'Reilly found the classical music he was looking for. He recognised Mozart's Magic Flute and let the cheerful sounds soothe him. He was able to manage a smile by the time he'd turned into the short drive up to Lars's home. O'Reilly'd been singing along with Papageno's \"Der vogelf\u00e4nger bin ich ja\" and accompanying the performer's reed flute with a series of rising \"tiddle-iddle-eyes\u2014\" and falling \"pom-poms.\" He noticed a big Armstrong Siddeley near the house. Lars had warned Fingal of Ma's taste in motorcars. He parked to the final \"pom-pom,\" got out, and crunched across the gravel to the front door where Lars and Ma stood smiling at him.\n\n\"Fingal, welcome home, son,\" Ma said, letting herself be engulfed in his hug. \"Thank God you're safe.\"\n\n\"And sound,\" he said. \"You're looking well.\" And she was, in her short tweed jacket and knee-length skirt.\n\n\"I do my best,\" she said, \"but I'm afraid these wartime austerity fashions leave a certain amount to be desired.\" She laughed. \"I think us ladies complaining about clothes rationing hardly compares with what our troops had to face.\"\n\nHe picked her up and spun her round. \"God, it's good to see you, Ma.\"\n\n\"Put me down, Fingal.\" Her laughter filled the hall.\n\n\"I'm home, Ma. And it'll be a long time before I leave again.\" He set her down.\n\n\"Home is the sailor, home from the sea,\" Lars said.\n\n\"And the hunter home from the hill. 'Requiem.' Robert Louis Stevenson,\" O'Reilly said, and shook Lars's hand. \"And how are you, big brother?\"\n\n\"I'm grand, Finn, and very glad to see you. Come in.\"\n\nHe followed them into the hall. Something giving off a tantalising aroma was cooking somewhere. A large liver and white springer spaniel rushed up to greet him.\n\n\"Sit, Barney,\" Lars said, and the dog obeyed.\n\n\"Old Barney's still going strong,\" Fingal said, noticing grey in the dog's muzzle.\n\n\"Remember when we used to go wildfowling with him? He was a great retriever.\"\n\n\"Still is,\" Lars said.\n\n\"Let me look at you again,\" Ma said. She frowned. \"You've got older, Fingal,\" she said, \"but you're still my handsome young son.\"\n\n\"It's been nearly six years and I think you need specs, Ma,\" he said, \"but thank you.\" He was expecting to be ushered into Lars's spacious sitting room overlooking the narrows where the ripping tides had given the lough its Viking name, Strangfjorthr, the turbulent fjord.\n\nMa said, \"That's a goose you can smell roasting.\" She glanced at her watch. \"It'll be ready in about an hour. I've things to do in the kitchen. I know how long you've been gone, Fingal. There's so much to talk about, but why don't you boys give Barney a walk, go down to the Portaferrry Arms, and have a pint before lunch?\"\n\n\"You sure, Ma?\" Fingal said.\n\n\"Of course I am. I've waited this long, I can wait a bit longer. We can blether away to our hearts' content over lunch and in the afternoon. I've a feeling it might snow more heavily later so go on and enjoy yourselves before it does.\"\n\n\"Let me get my coat,\" Lars said.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Do you know,\" said Fingal, \"I don't think this place's changed one bit.\" He was striding beside his brother up the face of a low, rounded hill. Gorse bushes grew, spiny green and dotted with chrome-yellow flowers. Their almond scent was carried on the salty air. He sniffed. There was a more pungent aroma too. \"You got a badger round here, Lars?\"\n\nLars pointed to a burrow under a bank where brown bracken drooped. \"Old Brock has his set in there. He'll be sleeping now. Leave it, Barney. Don't want him getting into a fight with the beast.\"\n\nThe dog, who had made a beeline for the burrow, now turned aside and began investigating the whins. Two rabbits bolted, ears back, scuts white and bobbing. Barney had been trained to know he was not allowed to chase flushed game. He sat abruptly and watched them go.\n\nOverhead, small jackdaws and larger rooks that had flocked together cawed and flapped their way inland. A constant twittering was coming from a leafless blackthorn hedge and Fingal saw a flock of brightly coloured goldfinches take wing and whirl away across the field.\n\nHe strode alongside his brother across the little fields. When Lars asked a question, Fingal was, like most ex-service men, reticent about the details of his war. He was warmed by Lars's concern for Fingal's loss of Deirdre. Lars himself, bachelor solicitor and unable to volunteer because of flat feet, had lived out his war quietly here, keeping an eye on Ma, who'd been terribly busy raising money for the Spitfire Fund and working for a charity for unmarried mothers. No. Lars hadn't married. His disappointment over a judge's daughter in Dublin seemed to have put him off the fair sex for life, yet he appeared content to Fingal. Something to think about, because Fingal himself had no intention of becoming romantically involved. Certainly not for a while yet.\n\nHe followed Lars and Barney over a stile and onto the shore. A little past the tide's edge a heron, blue-grey, gangly legged, and with a pigtail of feathers hanging down behind, darted its head into the water and pulled it back, a silver fish wriggling in the bird's long beak. Across the narrow waters a vee of small geese with grey bellies, narrow white collars, and black heads flew up the lough.\n\n\"Atlantic brent geese,\" Lars said. \"All the way from Greenland and Spitzbergen to winter here. Probably heading up to the Quoile River.\"\n\n\"You always did know your birds, Lars,\" Fingal said.\n\n\"To shoot them. But you know, Finn, I'm beginning to think they need our protection. I haven't been out more than a couple of times this season. I'm thinking of joining the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.\"\n\n\"Not until after next season, please,\" Fingal said. \"You'd better be ready to go out once or twice with me. Unless you count my ship chucking everything she had from fifteen-inch shells to 0.5-inch machine-gun bullets at the enemy, I've not had a shot,\" he laughed, \"for nearly seven years. I'd enjoy a day or two out with you for old times' sake, and,\" he said more softly, \"it would make a nice change if no one's shooting back.\"\n\n\"I suppose it was pretty grim,\" Lars said.\n\nFingal took a deep breath. \"It had its moments\u2014but it's over, and I'm home, and I'm home to stay.\"\n\n\"I'd certainly say you're glad to be back,\" Lars said, picking up a stick and throwing it for Barney to retrieve.\n\n\"I am that.\" Fingal frowned. \"And happy to be.\"\n\n\"Happy to be back, yes, but I'd say you don't sound completely happy, Finn. What's up?\"\n\nFingal shook his head and waited for Lars to take the stick and throw it again. \"Thank you for handling the conveyance of old Doctor Flanagan's practice, Lars.\"\n\n\"It was my pleasure, Finn.\"\n\n\"I'm excited about the practice...\" He hesitated then said, \"But I'm a bit worried. I haven't started work yet, but I just hope the old boy's patients come back. I'll see on Monday morning if anyone shows up.\"\n\n\"I suppose all folks starting a small business have the same worry. I know I did. We put our shingle up and pray they come.\" He clapped Fingal on the shoulder. \"You'll be fine, Finn. I know you will because you're an excellent doctor, but don't be surprised if it's slow at the beginning.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Fingal warmed inside to his brother's touch and reassurance, but outside the snow Ma had warned them about had started and the air was as cold as a witch's tit. And tucked in a corner of his inner glow was a chilly worry that Lars might be wrong and the practice wouldn't grow. Forget it for today, he told himself. \"It's getting bloody bitter,\" Fingal said. \"Come on, big brother, call Barney in and we'll take Ma's advice and head for the Arms\u2014but I'm buying you a hot half-un. It's too bloody cold for a pint.\"\n3\n\nIs of His Own Opinion Still\n\nO'Reilly looked at his watch. Ten o'clock on Monday morning and still no patients. He sat in the swivel chair in the surgery, rolling the top of his father's old desk up and down. It had been delivered on Saturday afternoon. Kinky, as he'd requested, had supervised the moving men in their placing of his few pieces of furniture and leaving packing cases of books in the upstairs lounge.\n\nO'Reilly had spent Sunday afternoon arranging his volumes on the shelves there, wondering how he'd managed to accumulate so many, but then reading was amongst his foremost pleasures. He'd stood for minutes enjoying the sweeping views past the lopsided steeple of the Presbyterian church with its churchyard full of ancient tombstones and sombre snow-dusted yew trees. Looking farther over the roofs of the village to where gulls wheeled and swooped over the sand dunes, his gaze had taken in the calm, washed-out blue of Belfast Lough and in the dim distance the soft darker blue hills of Antrim rolling down to Carrickfergus and its brooding Norman castle. Only a single coalboat shoved her way steadily to the Central Coal Pier in Bangor Harbour, reminding him of a line in John Masefield's poem \"Cargoes\": \"Dirty British coaster with a salt-streaked smoke stack.\" No yachts yet, but in the summer he knew the sailors would be out in force.\n\nLater he'd asked Kinky to give him a hand hanging a photograph on the landing wall outside the lounge.\n\n\"And that does be your big ship, sir?\" she'd asked when they'd finished.\n\n\"That's her,\" he said. \"HMS Warspite. 'The Grand Old Lady.'\" He adjusted the frame to be sure the picture was hanging straight. \"The photo was taken when she was anchored in Grand Harbour, Valetta, in Malta.\"\n\nKinky leant forward to see better. \"She does look a very powerful vessel, so.\"\n\n\"She was, Kinky, she and her four sister Queen Elizabeth class of battleships.\" He pointed to the eight fifteen-inch rifles, two each in X and Y turrets aft and two each in A and B turrets for'ard. \"You see those big guns above the foredeck?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"The dispensary and sick bay where the medical staff worked were two decks below the most for'ard gun barrels. It was like the clap of doom when they were fired over our heads. Their shells weighed 1,950 pounds each, that's not far off one ton, and she could hurl them for fourteen miles.\"\n\n\"From here to Millisle down the Ards Peninsula, bye,\" Kinky said, and took her duster to the frame. \"I can believe those guns would have made ferocious bangs, so. I've seen newsreel of battleships firing at France on D-Day,\" she looked him in the eye, \"but the war does be over and you can settle down now and enjoy the nice peace and quiet of Ballybucklebo, so.\"\n\nPeace and quiet? True enough, but things were a bit too quiet this morning. It wasn't that he wanted people to be sick, but he needed to work. O'Reilly drummed his fingers on the desktop.\n\nThat old piece held memories for O'Reilly of a much younger Fingal who all his life had wanted to study medicine. Father had been sitting at this desk in his study when Fingal had defied him back in '27, telling him, \"I'm not doing nuclear physics.\" That stubbornness had led him into the merchant marine and the Royal Naval Reserve before he'd finally gone to Trinity College in Dublin to fulfil his dream. And that stint in the reserve had led to his call-up when war had broken out, a war that, as Kinky had remarked, was now over. And the Lord be praised. But now what he needed were patients in his surgery so he could get back to the kind of doctoring he loved.\n\nHe rose and for the umpteenth time walked back to the room that had originally been the scullery, but which Doctor Flanagan had used as his waiting room. Not for the first time O'Reilly scowled at the dismal, shiny, green-painted walls. He'd already decided to paper them with something more cheerful. Roses, he thought, roses would do very well.\n\nThe place was as deserted as a Protestant church on a weekday. He bent and lifted a tattered Reader's Digest from a heap of earlier editions, several Women's Own magazines, and some issues of a kiddies' comic book, The Dandy Comic. He smiled at the drawings of Korky the Cat on their front pages. As he was scanning the index of the Digest, the outside door opened and a young woman came in holding the hand of a little girl clutching a well-worn teddy bear. His first real patients. He didn't count Bertie Bishop. \"Good morning,\" a smiling O'Reilly said. \"I'm Doctor O'Reilly.\"\n\n\"I'm Kathy Dunleavy, Willie Dunleavy's wife.\"\n\n\"Are you related to Charles Dunleavy who owns the Black Swan?\"\n\n\"He was my da-in-law. He's gone three years, God rest him. I married his son Willie five years back. He runs the pub now, so he does.\"\n\n\"Good Lord, the last time I saw your husband he was a bachelor kicking a ball around with his mates and looking for divilment.\" O'Reilly shook his head. \"Anyway, what can I do for you?\"\n\n\"I'm worried about wee Mary here.\"\n\n\"Let's see what we can do about that.\" O'Reilly led Mrs. Dunleavy and the child to the surgery and sat in his chair while she took one of the wooden ones and lifted Mary onto her lap.\n\n\"So, what seems to be the trouble with Mary?\"\n\n\"The poor wee button's off her feed for the last couple of days, says she can't swallow right, and I think she's got a fever.\"\n\n\"Mmmh,\" said O'Reilly, already formulating his possible diagnoses. \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"No convulsions, vomiting, diarrhoea? No pains anywhere? No earache? No sore throat?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\nAt this time of the year he was probably dealing with acute tonsillitis, which could be a recurrent disease. \"Has she ever had anything like this before?\"\n\nMrs. Dunleavy shook her head.\n\nHe went and hunkered down in front of the girl so his eyes were at the same level as hers. \"Hello, Mary.\"\n\nShe pulled the teddy bear closer and looked at him from big blue eyes, which he noticed were dull.\n\n\"Cat got your tongue?\" He smiled and said to the bear, \"And how old is your mistress?\"\n\n\"He can't talk, thilly,\" she said. \"I'm four.\"\n\n\"Are you now?\" said O'Reilly. \"You are a big girl.\"\n\nThat produced a little smile.\n\n\"Can I put my hand on your neck, please?\"\n\nShe glanced at her mother, who nodded. \"Yeth.\"\n\nO'Reilly quickly examined her neck. He noted a few enlarged lymph nodes and her skin was warm. It was always tricky taking wee ones' temperatures so he'd settle for that inexact observation. The findings so far were in keeping with his thoughts. A couple more observations would confirm them. \"Could you open wide and stick out your tongue?\"\n\n\"Yeth.\" She did.\n\nO'Reilly produced a pencil torch and shone it into her mouth. Small children always gagged if you tried to use a tongue depressor and he was confident he'd be able to find what he was looking for without one. \"Say 'aaah.'\"\n\nHe saw at once that the very back of the oral cavity, the fauces, were red and inflamed and that both tonsils were scarlet and swollen. There was no evidence of membrane formation so he could stop worrying about diphtheria or a rare condition called Vincent's angina, also known as trench mouth. \"Thank you, Mary,\" he said. \"You can close your mouth.\"\n\nShe did.\n\nHe patted the teddy on the head and returned to his chair.\n\n\"You've got tonsillitis, Mary,\" he said, but directed his remarks to her mother. \"We'll have you better in three or four days.\"\n\n\"What do we treat it with, Doctor?\" Mrs. Dunleavy asked. \"My granny in Coalisland in County Tyrone uses a stocking filled with hot salt wrapped round the neck.\"\n\n\"Some folks here in County Down use hot potatoes instead of salt,\" O'Reilly said, \"but do you think you could teach Mary to gargle?\"\n\n\"Aye, certainly.\"\n\n\"Good, because I want you to get some aspirin. You'll not need a scrip. Break a tablet in half and crush one half up in warm water and have her gargle and then swallow the gargle. Do that every eight hours. Keep her in bed until I've seen her again and give her lots to drink. That should see her right in no time. If you are worried send for me.\" It was a great comfort to know that if simple measures failed he could always fall back on sulphas. Although penicillin had been available to the armed forces, it was not yet in use in civilian practice. The few doses he'd had on Warspite late in the war, like all the doses that had been stockpiled before D-Day, had all been produced in America from fungus taken from a mouldy canteloupe from Peoria, Illinois. \"I'll pop in and see her in a day or two.\" And again in three weeks because there was always the risk of rheumatic fever or kidney disease developing if the infecting organism was a haemolytic streptococcus, but he'd not mention that.\n\n\"Thank you very much, sir. Say thank you, Mary.\"\n\n\"Fank oo.\"\n\nAs Kinky had instructed, he made a quick note in the ledger so she could send out the bill. Mary rose. \"And Willy says the next time you're in the Duck the first pint's on him, so it is.\"\n\n\"I'll look forward to that.\" He followed them from the surgery and showed them out through the front door. The snow of Saturday had vanished. Whistling a few bars of Vaughn Monroe's latest hit, \"Let It Snow,\" he walked back to the waiting room. His smile widened when he saw a middle-aged man wearing a bowler hat sitting on one of the chairs. \"I'm Doctor O'Reilly,\" he said, \"will you come with me?\"\n\nBy the time they'd reached the surgery, the man, who was now setting his bowler hat on the second patient's chair, had aleady told O'Reilly his name. \"I was given Hubert, but everybody calls me 'Wowser,' so they do. Wowser Ward. I'm connected with the Ward family, a bunch of highheejins. Lived in Bangor Castle. They gave thirty-seven acres to Bangor for a park, Ward Park, and one of their daughters married Lord Clanmorris from the west of Ireland in 1878, so she did. Me? I'm forty-eight, I'm the foreman for Bishop's Builders, and I was a patient of Doctor Flanagan. I never seen you before the war because I thought you was too young, you know.\" He sighed. \"But now? I heard you'd given Mister Bishop lip last Friday, but beggars can't be choosers, so they can't.\"\n\nHow flattering, O'Reilly thought, and grinned. He'd take no offence. A patient was a patient. After a short rummage in the desk drawer, he found the man's old record card. \"And you live on Station Road. Number 12.\"\n\n\"Bingo,\" he said, \"and if you look at my card you'll see what ailed me then and what ails me again, but worser now, you know. That's why I've come. I want it fixed the day. Right now if you can, sir. The bloody thing aches and aches all day unless I'm lying down.\" He unbuckled his belt.\n\nO'Reilly put on his half-moons and read, Tuesday, 11\/Aug\/42. Cold right groin abscess unchanged. Advised bed rest. May need lancing. He whipped off his spectacles, whistled, and felt the hackles of his neck rising. Back in 1939, Doctor Flanagan had been puzzled by a rare local condition he called a cold groin abscess. Two of the cases he'd lanced in his surgery he explained to O'Reilly had either, \"Wind or shite in them and both patients died. It was most puzzling.\"\n\nNot to the then-young O'Reilly. His senior colleague had been incising ruptures\u2014inguinal hernias. No wonder he'd released bowel contents. Often such bulgings of the peritoneum through a weakness in the lower abdominal wall did contain small bowel. And after Doctor Flanagan's ham-fisted efforts, two of his victims must have succumbed to peritonitis following contamination.\n\n\"So you think you've a groin abscess?\" O'Reilly said.\n\n\"Think? I'm bloody well sure. Doctor Flanagan knew his stuff, so he did.\" Wowser Ward was unbuttoning his fly.\n\nThe old doctor had certainly been convinced of his own infallability and had managed to persuade his patients of the same. Such was often the case with that generation of physicians. O'Reilly's attempt in '39 to suggest to Doctor Flanagan that these were hernias and not abscesses had been met with scorn and anger. And back then, death after surgery was, if not accepted, at least understood by the laity.\n\nNow, with no real local reputation, O'Reilly was going to have to try to contradict the late and omniscient Doctor Flanagan for the sake of the patient. \"All right, Mister Ward. Stand up and lower your pants.\"\n\nThe man did.\n\nEven from where he sat O'Reilly could see a bulging in the fold between the belly and thigh on the right. \"Cough,\" he said.\n\n\"Cough? It's my groin, not my chest's the trouble.\"\n\n\"Please?\"\n\nThe man did, and O'Reilly had no difficulty observing a visible impulse under the skin. A hernia, no doubt, and one that should be repaired surgically. A third-year student could have made the diagnosis without any further examination. Its exact nature would need to be delineated by a surgeon but it was beyond the powers of a GP to fix. O'Reilly coughed and said, \"I think I must tell you, Mister Ward, I believe medicine has moved on since Doctor Flanagan's day.\"\n\n\"How?\" There was acid in the one word.\n\nThis was going to take diplomacy and tact, but if the Ard R\u00ed himself\u2014the High King of all Ireland\u2014appeared and thought he could order O'Reilly to incise an inguinal hernia here in the surgery, his Royal Highness would have another thought coming. \"Mister Ward, I believe that what you have is called a hernia and\u2014\"\n\n\"Why? Hernia? Amn't I a man? If it should be called anything, it should be a hisnia, and it's not nothing like that anyroad. It's a groin abscess and I want it fixed, Doctor.\" He shook his head. \"You call sitting there and getting a fellah to cough an examination? Jasus, a horse trader would look more carefully at a horse, so he would.\"\n\n\"Mister Ward, I really want to get a second opinion from a specialist at the Royal Victoria Hospital.\" Two of O'Reilly's friends from Trinity, Charlie Greer and Donald Cromie, were surgeons there.\n\n\"Aye. Well. You can want. I've no time til be buggering about in Belfast, and them specialists cost a brave wheen of money, so they do. Why will you not do it here for me?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said O'Reilly, realising that he was going to be sending away a dissatisfied customer. Better that than a dead one; although, oddly enough, if he acceded to the patient's request and that gloomy outcome occurred he was more likely to be forgiven by the locals than if he turned the man down. Never mind. The patient's health came first. \"I wish you could under\u2014\"\n\nThe man and the colour in his cheeks both rose. He pulled up his pants and began to close his fly.\n\nO'Reilly flinched.\n\n\"I understand that you're useless til me, Doctor.\"\n\n\"Lancing your hernia might kill you,\" O'Reilly said.\n\n\"Away off and feel your head.\" He buckled his belt, grabbed his bowler, headed for and opened the door. \"Hernia, my aunt Fanny Jane. If you won't fix it, I'll just thole it, so I will, but just you wait till I put out the word you never even examined me properly, never mind put me right.\" Country patients had great faith in the powers of the examination\u2014and of the X-ray. \"I'm paying you nothing, neither. You don't know your arse from your elbow.\" He buckled his belt and slammed the door behind him as he left.\n\nO'Reilly fished out and lit his pipe. He needed a minute to think. He'd been consulted three times and had only sent one customer away satisfied, and although Kathy Dunleavy was a nice young woman she'd hardly be rushing round telling the world how wonderful the newly returned doctor was. What he'd done for her Mary was routine. What would Bishop and Ward be saying and to whom? That neither had paid was not his real concern. The damage they might be doing to his reputation\u2014he blew out a cloud of smoke\u2014hardly bore thinking about.\n\nSetting his pipe in an ashtray he walked back to the waiting room. Empty. No patients. Patience, he told himself and smiled. The words had the same Latin root, patiens, which meant \"waiting\" or \"suffering,\" and both described what he was doing right now. He could only hope that by waiting a bit longer his worry, which in fairness could hardly be called suffering, would be over and his surgeries full. He brightened, remembering Kathy Dunleavy's parting remark. Maybe before supper he'd pop into the Black Swan, or Mucky Duck as the locals called their pub.\n4\n\nAnd Everything in Its Place\n\nThe tips of O'Reilly's ears tingled after his short walk from Number One, past the maypole, and across the Main Street to its junction with Station Road, the corner site of the Black Swan Pub. In the icy, darkening evening, the snow that had stopped falling on Saturday had returned. The flakes were large and damp and barely lay on the pavement.\n\nHe heard the sounds of laughter and chatter even before he pushed through the pub's doors. Once inside he felt as if he'd walked into a wall of warmth coming from a blazing turf fire and a web of tobacco smoke from pipes and cigarettes. As he brushed flakes from and then unbuttoned his coat he waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the dim lighting.\n\nThe single, narrow room had not changed since his last visit almost seven years ago. There was still sawdust on the plank floor, still the low black ceiling beams, and a few tables and occupied chairs in front of a long bar counter. Bottles of spirits on shelves behind the bar kept company with two barrels of the product of Mister Arthur Guinness and Sons, Saint James's Gate, Dublin, lying on their sides. Each had a brass spigot for drawing off the stout hammered into its bung hole near the bottom of the lower rim. A spile to regulate the release of carbon dioxide had been driven into the middle of each barrel at the top of its upper circumference.\n\nO'Reilly's ears were assailed by a loud hum of men's conversation. Women were not permitted in public bars in Ulster, and the Duck boasted neither a snug nor a lounge bar where women could go\u2014if escorted. Dogs, however, were allowed in, and O'Reilly noticed a border collie under one table, a lurcher\u2014a collie greyhound cross much favoured by poachers for its intelligence and speed in pursuit of game\u2014under another. Its owner had bright carrotty hair. Maybe, O'Reilly thought, one day he'd get himself a Labrador\u2014but not until the practice was busier.\n\nThe rising and falling tides of noise stopped as if a sluice gate had been closed, and he was aware of every eye being fixed on him. \"A very good evening to this house,\" he said, but he might as well have been talking to a room full of deaf men for all the response he got. He'd seen Western films where a stranger comes to the town saloon and is ignored. It was often the setup for a fight scene\u2014in Westerns and in the slums of Dublin where ruggy-ups, bare-knuckle fights, were commonplace, but not in a quiet little place like Ballybucklebo.\n\nThere was space at this end of the bar so he moved there, smiled at a big man in an army greatcoat and duncher\u2014probably recently demobbed like O'Reilly\u2014and took his place leaning on the bar top and putting one foot up on a brass rail beneath. He looked more closely at his companion. \"You're Declan Finnegan,\" O'Reilly said. \"I set a broken arm for you in '39. You were going to join the Tank Regiment when I left here for the navy.\"\n\nThe general level of conversation had risen to its previous levels.\n\n\"That's right, Doctor O'Reilly.\" Declan smiled. \"And my arm mended rightly. You done a great job. And I was a tanker. I fought in Sicily and I drove a Cromwell tank in Normandy, so I did, but I was demobbed in late '45 and come home, you know. I heard you were coming back. It's good to have you here, sir, so it is. I wonder,\" he hesitated, \"I wonder if I could ask you a wee doctoring favour, sir?\"\n\nO'Reilly hesitated. He generally refused such requests on social occasions and had no intention of letting his pub become an annex to his surgery. After all, he was on his own time here, but for just this once said, \"Fire away.\" He'd get an opportunity sooner or later to make his position on pub consultations clear.\n\n\"What'll it be, Doctor O'Reilly?\" a voice said from behind the bar counter.\n\nO'Reilly turned to see the barman. Willie Dunleavy had packed on the beef since his soccer-playing days. He'd be about thirty. He wore a flowery waistcoat and his shirt sleeves were held up by satin-covered elastic garters.\n\n\"I mind my da, God rest him, who used to own this place, saying you were fond of your pint when you worked here before the war.\" He held out his hand. \"Welcome back, sir, and thanks for seeing our wee Mary.\"\n\nO'Reilly shook hands. \"Thank you. I was sorry to hear about your father.\"\n\nWillie shrugged. \"Aye,\" he said. \"Thon cancer's not nice, but... och...\" He took a deep breath. \"And will it be a pint, sir?\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\n\"You're on,\" said Willie, went to the two barrels, and started to pour.\n\nO'Reilly turned back to Declan Finnegan. \"You were going to ask a favour, Declan?\"\n\n\"I wonder, maybe someday soon, if I could bring the missus til see you? We think she's pregnant.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course. Send her round about nine tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\nDeclan hesitated. \"I'll come too,\" he said. \"Melanie doesn't speak much English yet. She's learning, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Melanie? She's French?\"\n\nDeclan nodded. \"Aye. I met her in 1944, near Mont Pin\u00e7on. She'd volunteered to help the army doctors. I'd been wounded, only a toty wee scratch, like. I was back on my feet in time to rejoin my squadron and fight at Falaise and go the whole way to the Rhine River, but I never forgot Melanie Devereux, so I didn't. Her and me got married last May, after the war in Europe was over.\"\n\n\"Good for you both. More power to your wheels. And the French won't be a problem. Moi, je parle un tres petit peu.\"\n\n\"Merveilleux,\" Declan said. \"Moi aussi.\"\n\n\"And that's enough of the oul parley-voo from you, Declan Finnegan, so it is,\" Willie said with a grin. \"Here's your pint, Doctor O'Reilly, sir, and like Kathy said, it's on the house. A wee welcome home. I hope you'll take a brave wheen more in here over the years.\"\n\n\"I'm beginning to think I will,\" O'Reilly said, hoping this and his easy conversation with Declan were more small steps to his gradual reacceptance in the village and townland. He lifted his pint, said, \"Sl\u00e1inte,\" and took a hefty pull. \"Mother's milk,\" he said, grinned, and fished out his pipe.\n\nThe Murray's Erinmore Flake tobacco was going well when it was time for his second pint and the one he bought for Declan Finnegan.\n\n\"I mind you was quare nor keen on the rugby football, sir,\" Declan was saying. \"You should have a wee word with my younger brother, Fergus. He plays for the Ballybucklebo Bonnaughts' Junior Fifteen.\"\n\n\"So you've got the club going again?\" Most athletic pursuits had been interrupted by the war.\n\n\"Och aye. The marquis of Ballybucklebo's their patron. He's played for Ireland, you know.\"\n\nO'Reilly felt a draught as someone opened the door, half-turned, and saw Bertie Bishop followed by Wowser Ward, of all people.\n\nO'Reilly ignored them and said to Declan, \"I did know about his Lordship's caps.\" O'Reilly had three of his own for representing his country, but it would be boastful to say so. Joining the club would increase the circle of his acquaintances\u2014and possible patients\u2014and put him back in touch with a game he loved. \"I will join, Declan. How'd I get ahold of your brother?\"\n\n\"He's no phone in his house. He's a jockey. Rides for the marquis. I'll tell him to come and see you, sir.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nO'Reilly glanced over. A table that he'd noticed upon arriving had been occupied by three obviously working-class men in dunchers and with mufflers wrapped round their necks, one man smoking a clay pipe. They now vacated their places in favour of the great Panjandrum and his friend. O'Reilly had a quick mental image of Mister Bertie Bishop saying, \"I'm a very important man round here, so I am.\"\n\n\"'Scuse me.\" A tall, narrow-faced patron pushed past O'Reilly to get to the bar and call an order. \"Pint and a packet of crisps, please, Willie.\"\n\n\"Right, Archie.\"\n\nO'Reilly had to think. Archie. Archie. Got it. \"Hello, Mister Auchinleck,\" he said. The man shared a surname with a famous British general of Ulster stock who'd taken over command of the British Army in the Middle East after Warspite had left for Bremerton.\n\n\"Doctor O'Reilly. It's yourself. I hardly noticed you there. It's a bit dim in here. I heard you was coming back, so I did. Mrs. Kincaid's been putting the word around. If me or the missus or our wee lad get sick we'll come and see you, so we will.\"\n\nGood for you, Kinky, O'Reilly thought. \"The surgery's open every morning at nine o'clock,\" he said. He felt a tugging at his sleeve, turned, and saw Bishop. \"Yes, Mister Bishop.\"\n\n\"I've not time for til come til your surgery. Bend you your head so I can whisper.\"\n\nO'Reilly stooped to the shorter man, who said what he had to say.\n\nNo. Bloody well no. Declan's polite request had been one thing, this demand another entirely. This was a perfect opportunity to establish that unless someone was bleeding to death or having a heart attack, Doctor O'Reilly was off duty inside the Duck. \"Certainly, Mister Bishop,\" he bellowed in his quarterdeck voice, which could be heard above a howling Atlantic gale. He paused. The falling of a pin would have been as noisy as the eruption of Krakatoa, so silent had the Duck become. \"Just slip off your trousers and climb up on the counter so I can examine you.\" The falling of a single downy feather would probably have registered on the Richter scale. Silence hung until a clearly furious, puce-faced Bishop yelled, \"My trousers? Here? Have you taken a fit of the headstaggers? Do you not know it's a feckin' pub!\"\n\n\"Well, Mister Bishop...\" O'Reilly had deliberately lowered his voice so that his audience would have to strain to hear. \"I thought you didn't know. After all, you insisted on consulting me in here for something that can wait until the surgery opens tomorrow. I didn't think you'd mind being examined in here. But if it upsets you, I'll be happy to see you tomorrow. Tomorrow.\"\n\nBishop spluttered. \"By God, O'Reilly, you've a quare brass neck, so you have. Telling a fellah til take off his pants in public.\"\n\n\"I think,\" said O'Reilly, \"the cervical alloy of copper and zinc is all yours.\" He turned back to Archie and Declan as a wave of laughter swept through the room. I've not made a bosom buddy, O'Reilly thought, but there is a limit. And for the moment, and God bless Surgeon Commander Wilcoxson for his sage advice, the upper hand was back where it belonged. Nor would he be pestered in here in the future by other patients.\n\nHe glanced over to where Bishop and Ward had their heads together. Ward looked over at O'Reilly. The man's eyes were narrowed, his teeth clenched. He shook his fist and mouthed, \"You wait, O'Reilly. Just you wait.\"\n\nO'Reilly turned away. He had clearly offended two locals, but surely the laughter at Bishop's discomfiture signified that there was support for the newly returned doctor too?\n\n\"It's my shout, Doctor,\" Declan Finnegan said. \"And well done putting Mister Bishop in his box. I'm sorry I asked you a medical question. I never thought\u2014\"\n\n\"You didn't ask me a question. You asked if you could bring your wife to see me. That's entirely different.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir. Now, would you like that pint, and maybe one for you, Archie?\"\n\nO'Reilly shook his head and buttoned his coat. If Archie said yes, then the \"my shout\" circle would begin where everyone in the party had to buy a round. He smiled. \"Maybe next time, Declan. It's time I was home.\"\n\nDeclan nodded. \"I understand, sir.\" He lowered his voice. \"See that there Bertie Bishop? His head's full of hobbyhorse shite, so it is.\" He spat into the sawdust. \"Pay him no heed and never you worry, sir, me and Melanie'll be in first thing tomorrow.\"\n\nO'Reilly smiled and said, \"I'll expect you.\" And to hell with Bertie Bishop and Wowser Ward. O'Reilly hoped that the Finnegans would be the start of a steadily growing trade. \"Good night to this house,\" he called, and was gratified by a few, although not everybody's by any means, \"Good night, Doctor.\"\n5\n\nHave You No Bowel, No Tenderness?\n\nO'Reilly pushed away his plate, empty save for a squeezed lemon slice. Not long before a pair of famous Craster kippers had lain, blissfully brown and seductively, steamingly scented. Utterly delicious. While drinking his second cup of tea, he finished reading a story in Tuesday's The Northern Whig. It seemed that fifteen alleged Soviet spies had been arrested in Canada. He wondered what they'd be spying on in that far cold country, tutted, put down the paper, rose, and crossed to the surgery.\n\nHe opened his doctor's bag, went to a cupboard, took out an ampoule of aminophylline, and put it into the bag to replace the one he'd used yesterday for a seven-year-old boy who was having a severe asthmatic attack. That home visit and a case of influenza had been the sum of the day's caseload. What had Lars said? \"Don't be surprised if it's slow at the beginning.\" Slow? Glaciers moved more quickly. Still, O'Reilly thought, Declan Finnegan and his French wife were coming today. He headed for the surgery.\n\nDeclan and a petite but obviously swollen-bellied woman with glossy brown hair sat side by side. And across the room, perched like a gargoyle on a cathedral on one of the hard-backed chairs, was Albert Bishop. Before O'Reilly could even say good morning and invite them to come to his surgery, the man announced, \"The Finnegans don't mind if I go first, O'Reilly.\" As Bishop strode past the couple, Declan raised his eyes to heaven and shook his head.\n\nO'Reilly was sure Bishop had bullied his way past the Finnegans, but did not want to make a fuss about it\u2014yet. He followed him along to the surgery, where Bishop had already seated himself. O'Reilly closed the door. \"Good morning, Mister Bishop. I wasn't expecting to see you today.\" To tell the truth I was not expecting to see you ever after last night, O'Reilly thought, as he took the swivel chair. This was something he'd learned from Doctor Corrigan, his senior in general practice in Dublin. That not every patient and their doctor would get along. Sometimes it was better to come to the parting of the ways and have them seek medical advice elsewhere. He recognised that may have been at the back of his mind when he'd deliberately embarrassed Bishop last night.\n\n\"Aye, nor me you, but I've still not gone since I tried to have a wee quiet word with you. I've been seeing a Doctor Robbins in Bangor, but it's far too far to drive just because I'm bound. My missus, Flo, says she til me, she says, 'Go on, give O'Reilly a try.' I says til her that I tried to tell you on Monday night that I needed a strong laxative, but, no, you were too high and mighty to do me a favour, so you were. Sometimes my Flo does talk sense, but. Says she til me, 'O'Reilly worked here before. He never killed nobody then.'\"\n\nNow there was a backhanded compliment.\n\n\"'And it'll take you an hour til drive til Bangor, see Robbins, and drive back. Go on, try O'Reilly.' So here I am. And it's your last chance with me, so it is. I've already heard you wouldn't treat Wowser Ward, so you'd better see me right or else.\"\n\nO'Reilly frowned. \"Or else what, Mister Bishop?\" O'Reilly had been trained to understand that patients were not always as polite as they might be and to be prepared to make allowances, but this pompous little man didn't seem to recognise how close he was to being thrown out\u2014physically. \"Or else what?\"\n\n\"Wowser and me'll put out the word you're no bloody good.\" He leant back, smiled, and folded his arms across his chest.\n\nTo give himself a moment to consider his reply O'Reilly fished out a pair of half-moon spectacles and perched them on his nose. Decision time. Could he afford to tell Bishop to go to hell, behave like that Anglo-Dubliner the Duke of Wellington and his famous, \"Publish and be damned\"? That would alienate this man when the practice was in an embryonic state. And how much harm could he and Wowser Ward do? Probably quite a lot. On the other hand, if O'Reilly simply ignored Bishop's rudeness and threats, he had no doubt that the man would proudly spread the word around that O'Reilly was so weak he couldn't beat the skin off a rice pudding, and he couldn't afford that either. Half a doctor's ability to treat lay in the esteem in which he was held by his patients. O'Reilly recognised that he was on the horns of what one of his naval patients had called a dilly-ma-ma.\n\nBut\u2014but\u2014he had to struggle to conceal a grin. There was a way to appear to acquiesce but give Bishop a not-so-subtle message that Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, once called by an old Dublin friend The Wily O'Reilly, was not a man to be threatened\u2014ever. \"I see,\" he said levelly. \"Then I'll have to make sure you are treated properly, won't I?\"\n\n\"That's more like it,\" Bishop said.\n\nO'Reilly steepled his fingers. He'd learnt long ago that the makers of patent laxatives had taught the great public that their bowels must move once a day. It wasn't true, but such was the power of advertising. \"When was the last time you went?\"\n\n\"Saturday morning, and that's three whole days.\"\n\n\"I see, and has this kind of thing happened before?\"\n\n\"Aye, and Robbins gives me castor oil.\" He screwed up his face. \"Tastes like shite. I thought you being younger\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sure I do have something better for you, but I need to make sure there's no underlying disease. Have you any belly pains?\"\n\n\"Nah.\"\n\n\"No vomiting?\"\n\n\"No, I've not boked. I'm rightly otherwise, so I am. It's just I'm bound.\"\n\nNo pain, no vomiting, so no suggestion of anything obstructing the bowel. \"Anything else bothering you?\" Constipation if a symptom of something serious was invariably accompanied by other symptoms of distress, and Bishop looked the picture of overweight health.\n\n\"Are you deaf? I just told you. Not at all.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said O'Reilly, gritting his teeth and remembering Ward's anger at not having been examined... \"I'd still better take a look.\"\n\nIt was a simple matter to examine Bishop's tubby belly, which O'Reilly did, finding nothing amiss. \"All right,\" he said. \"Get dressed.\" He went to his desk and found a prescription pad. His old teacher Doctor Micks had preached, It may be dangerous to give a purgative but never to withold one. Not in this case. Bishop appeared to have nothing physically wrong with him. There was nothing to worry about, O'Reilly was quite sure. He removed a fountain pen from an inside pocket, scribbled, and handed the prescription to Bishop. \"Take that to the chemist. It'll do the trick.\"\n\nBishop took the scrip, scowled, and said, \"Thank you. It had better work.\"\n\n\"It will,\" said O'Reilly. \"I promise. Now,\" said O'Reilly, rising. \"I'm sure you're a very busy man and in a rush.\" Not half the hurry you're going to be in after you've taken your medicine, he thought, hiding a grin.\n\n\"Aye. I am.\"\n\nHe took Bishop by the elbow, helped him stand, and began propelling him to the door.\n\n\"Take a teaspoonful of that as soon as you get home\u2014and don't go out.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said O'Reilly, letting Bishop out of the surgery. Only when the door was shut did he allow himself to chuckle. His prescription of Tinct. Crotonis Oleum, tincture of croton oil, was for the strongest purgative available. During the war, the U.S. Navy had added it to the alcohol fuel used in their torpedoes. The violent laxative effects were meant to discourage sailors from draining and drinking the fuel. It was also believed that a number of U-boat patrols from French ports had been abandoned because the French fishermen who supplied the German fleet had packed sardines in croton rather than olive oil. The effects on a U-boat's crew in a vessel with only two heads hardly bore imagining.\n\nThe self-important Mister Bishop was not going to enjoy himself today. He'd be spending a fair bit of it all alone in a small room. But he'd be hard-pressed to complain. He'd explicitly asked for a \"strong\" laxative and had demanded effective treatment. And he probably would have sufficient insight to recognise that messing about with Doctor O'Reilly was a less than smart thing to do.\n\nHe opened the ledger, noted, B. Bishop. Consultation, then headed for the waiting room where another patient, a young woman, had joined the Finnegans.\n\n\"Your turn, Mister and Mrs. Finnegan.\" He smiled at the newcomer. \"I'll not be long.\"\n\nOnce in the surgery and with Declan sitting on one chair, his wife on the other, Declan said, \"Good morning, Doctor O'Reilly. This here's Melanie, so it is.\"\n\nO'Reilly made a little bow. \"Enchant\u00e9, Madame Finnegan.\"\n\nShe smiled, but her torrent of heavily Norman-accented French overwhelmed O'Reilly. \"Je m'excuse,\" he said, \"mais moi, je parle Fran\u00e7ais comme une vache Espagnole. If faut que vous parleriez tres lentement, madame, s'il vous pla\u00eet.\"\n\nShe laughed and said, \"D'accord, monsieur. Je comprend.\"\n\n\"No harm til you, Doctor, but you done very good. And you do not speak French 'like a Spanish cow,'\" said Declan, chuckling at the way native French speakers referred to those who hadn't mastered the language. \"Not one bit. What you just done was set her at her ease that she can talk to you even if she does have to speak more slowly\u2014and I'll help too.\" He turned to his wife, rapidly translated, and was rewarded with a beaming smile that lit up her ebony eyes.\n\n\"I'm sorry you got bumped,\" O'Reilly said.\n\n\"See that there Bishop?\" Declan said. \"He thinks he's no goat's toe, but he puts his trousers on one leg at a time just like ordinary people.\" He lowered his voice. \"If you ask me, he's full of shite.\"\n\nNot for much longer, O'Reilly thought, but said, \"I am sorry you had to wait, and please explain that to Melanie and help me to ask her some questions.\"\n\nWith some of his own French and with Declan translating where needed, O'Reilly soon finished his history-taking and, after Melanie had climbed upon the couch, her physical examination. He'd noted that he was going to be looking after a twenty-three-year-old with no history of serious illness, who was today at about the twenty-sixth week of her first pregnancy and thus was due to deliver in late May. When he'd worked at the Rotunda in Dublin in the late 1930s, the master had begun to institute routine antenatal care aimed at trying to prevent stillbirth and foetal abnormality and screen women for high blood pressure. O'Reilly intended\u2014when more started showing up\u2014to follow that protocol with his patients. At least since 1936, with the advent of Red Prontosil, the first antibiotic, and since the war much better blood transfusion services, the risks of the two great killers of pregnant women, infection and haemorrhage, were being brought under better control.\n\nIn his very best French, O'Reilly, with Declan helping, explained that everything seemed to be fine, that he'd like to see her in a month, and to get hold of him if she was worried about anything.\n\n\"Merci, monsieur le mede\u00e7in. Je suis tr\u00e8s content.\" And those deep eyes smiled at him again.\n\nO'Reilly cleared his throat, then said, \"There is one thing.\" Full obstetrical care was expensive and O'Reilly felt he had an obligation to warn Declan.\n\n\"Aye?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I'll have to charge you eight guineas,\" he rushed on, \"but that includes antenatal visits, delivery, and postpartum care.\" O'Reilly looked at his desktop. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"What the hell for?\" Declan said. \"For God's sakes, Doctor dear, the workman's worth his hire. I don't work for free. How much on account?\"\n\n\"Four guineas, but we'll be sending out the bills at the end of the month.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" O'Reilly said, and made an entry in the ledger. Not only did it allow him to keep his accounts straight, it would enable him when the time came to apportion to HM Inspector of Taxes his statutory thirty percent. And with the imminent introduction of Pay as You Earn, PAYE, this would, in O'Reilly's case, have to be paid monthly.\n\n\"We'll be running along, sir,\" Declan said, then, \"Viens, Melanie, and she'll see you in a month, sir. And your Mrs. Kincaid told the ladies at the Woman's Union last night that you took special training in midwifery in Dublin too.\" He winked. \"Never mind that ould git Bishop. I'll give you five til one Melanie isn't the only pregnant woman you'll be seeing soon, sir. You'll be sucking diesel before you know it, so you will.\"\n\nO'Reilly accompanied the couple to the front door and let them out, turned, and went back toward the the waiting room. \"Sucking diesel?\" That was a new one, but by the inflexion in Declan's voice O'Reilly reckoned it was akin to being on the pig's back or in clover. It was comforting for Declan to say so.\n\nHe headed back to the waiting room where another patient awaited. Perhaps things were looking up.\n6\n\nThere Are More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio\n\nO'Reilly finished his roast pheasant and pushed his plate away. Somehow, despite Kinky's magic way with game birds, he had not relished his dinner. On Tuesday he'd hoped that things were looking up, but they were not. To be sure Tuesday had yielded two more patients after the Finnegans, but from Wednesday until today, Friday, he'd seen only another three, four if he counted a home visit yesterday to Mary Dunleavy. She and her family lived over the Duck, and after he'd reassured himself and her mother that Mary was well mended, he'd not been hard to persuade to have another pint with mine host. Willie had been more reserved than usual and had obviously had to steel himself before he'd been able to ask in a low voice, \"Seeing lots of patients, Doc?\"\n\nO'Reilly had shaken his head. Willie's next words were indelibly imprinted.\n\n\"Aye, well no harm til you, sir, but thon Mister Ward was in here a couple of nights ago. He was telling everybody that you'd refused til treat him right, and that you'd near killed Mister Bishop. I telt him to shut his yap or I'd bar him.\"\n\nO'Reilly had thanked Willie. And finished his pint.\n\nIt looked as if the damage had been done, and although O'Reilly's main reason for wanting the practice to expand was because he really enjoyed his work, there was no escaping the fact that the bank would be expecting his first loan repayment soon.\n\nThere was talk that the government was going to introduce a National Health Service by which all citizens would be insured and GPs would be paid monthly by a government agency so there would be no need for money to come between doctors and their patients. It couldn't be implemented fast enough for O'Reilly. He disliked the need to send bills, particularly to poorer patients, and was sure many of them avoided visiting a doctor because they simply could not afford to. Some found other ways round the difficulty.\n\nHe managed a smile. And once the practice did grow\u2014if it did grow\u2014he'd not object to gifts in lieu of cash. The chicken in return for a linament for a sore back, the brace of mallard instead of the surgery visit fee for a patient with acute conjunctivitis, and the lobster for strapping a sprained wrist he'd been given when he'd worked here before had been most acceptable.\n\nOn Wednesday, the father of a young, carotty-haired buck-toothed lad, Donal Donnelly, had offered O'Reilly a brace of pheasants to pay for his treatment of the boy's middle ear infection. The birds had almost certainly been \"borrowed\" from the marquis's estate, but taking a leaf from another sailor's book, O'Reilly had turned a blind eye. Slices of one of them with roast potatoes, seasonal brussels sprouts, and carrots had been his dinner that night.\n\nThe barter system appealed to O'Reilly and wasn't taxable, and as far as he was concerned what the eye didn't see the heart didn't grieve over. But until his debt was fully discharged, he did need hard currency too, and that would only come when he had full surgeries.\n\nKinky had used her best endeavours to bolster his reputation. The kind words of Declan Finnegan had been comforting, but his French-speaking wife was hardly in a position to shout O'Reilly's praises from the rooftops, at least in words comprehensible to the average villager. And he couldn't advertise. The General Medical Council, the disciplinary body of his profession, regarded that as unethical and could take away his licence if he tried to.\n\nBertie Bishop and Wowser Ward must have succeeded in blackening O'Reilly's name, of that he had no doubt, none whatsoever. Did he regret having given Bishop a laxative that if compared to usually prescribed ones was the atomic bomb of purgatives? Not one bloody bit. It might have been foolhardy, but O'Reilly had consciously decided to accept the risk. Bullies were bullies and had to be checked.\n\nHe rose, went to the sideboard, and poured himself a John Jameson. Sipping the Irish whiskey, he headed for the door, intending to go upstairs to the lounge and finish reading The Captain from Castille, one of last year's bestsellers.\n\nThe door opened and Kinky came in carrying a tray of polished silver. \"Doctor O'Reilly,\" she said, \"you do have a face on you like a Lurgan spade, as I've heard the locals say\u2014although it would mean nothing in County Cork, so.\"\n\nHe shrugged and exhaled.\n\n\"Would you take it ill, sir, if your housekeeper was to ask you if everything is all right?\"\n\nHe hesitated. O'Reilly was not one to cry on other people's shoulders, but tonight... \"I'd not take it that way at all, Kinky,\" he said, and in truth he'd welcome a friendly person to tell his troubles to. His closest friends, Doctors Charlie Greer and Donald Cromie, both surgeons, were up in Belfast. His best naval friend from Warspite days, Tom Laverty, was a career naval officer and was God knew where, still on active service. \"Will you sit down?\"\n\nShe frowned. It wasn't commonplace for servants to sit down with their employers.\n\n\"Kinky,\" he said, \"if I'm going to talk to you like a friend I'm going to treat you like one.\"\n\nShe blushed and said, \"That does be greatly appreciated, so.\" She sat and put the tray on the table.\n\n\"Another thing,\" he said as he sat, \"I got used to calling you Kinky when I was first here because that's what Doctor Flanagan called you. Would you prefer to be Maureen, or Mrs. Kincaid?\"\n\n\"Lord bless you, sir, Kinky's just grand. My late husband, Paudeen Kincaid, God rest him, gave it to me as a nickname because of how I used irons back then to curl my hair. It has a nice familiar sound, so. Kinky it is\u2014but I appreciate your asking. It does be the act of a real gentleman. Now,\" she smoothed her apron, \"can I offer a guess why you are upset?\"\n\n\"Go right ahead.\"\n\n\"I knew from when you were here before the war that it wasn't the money you worked for. You were simply happy at your work.\"\n\n\"I've wanted to be a doctor since I was thirteen.\" O'Reilly shrugged. \"Doctor Flanagan paid me well enough, I had my room here, and...\" He grinned at her. \"I had the best cook in all of Ireland feeding me.\"\n\n\"Go 'way out of that, sir,\" but her grin was one of enormous pleasure, \"and be serious now. You are worried because not enough people are coming to see you, isn't that so?\"\n\nHe pursed his lips and nodded. \"True.\"\n\n\"And there are one or two who I'll not name who are blackguarding you round the village.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Huh,\" she said, \"there's precious little goes on here I don't know. Haven't I been here nearly twenty years and isn't everyone under that age one of Doctor Flanagan's babies except for the ones delivered by yourself when first you were here?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"And don't I know their mammies and daddies and grannies and grandpas?\"\n\nO'Reilly realised what an important source of information Kinky would be. \"I don't suppose there is much goes on without you knowing.\"\n\n\"There is not. Now, would it help if I told you not to worry?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It would be a kindness, but how would you know? Have you heard something?\"\n\n\"More seen.\" She leant forward and said very quietly, \"Now, sir, it does be said in the village that I am a wise woman.\"\n\n\"And are you?\" O'Reilly felt the hairs on his forearms bristle.\n\n\"From time to time I do find myself in a thin place.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"The old Celts believed that for some people in some places or times the gap between this earth and the other world becomes very thin and things can pass between. That is called a thin place. It can give some people, like my ma, it can give them the gift.\"\n\n\"Are you telling me you're fey, Kinky?\"\n\nShe stared at a spot near infinity off to the left of the cut-glass chandelier, and her face became expressionless, her voice far away. \"I was there last night, so.\"\n\nThe hackles rose on the back of his neck.\n\n\"I saw you in church. I saw people amazed. I felt\u2014\" She closed and reopened her eyes. \"I knew all was well.\"\n\nO'Reilly shivered as if a goose had walked on his grave. What was she trying to tell him?\n\n\"So, sir,\" she said in her usual voice, \"it would give me great pleasure if you'd come to morning service with me on Sunday. It would not hurt for the villagers to see that you are a Christian gentleman.\"\n\n* * *\n\nWith the cross of Jesus going on before.\n\nO'Reilly bellowed out the last line of \"Onward Christian Soldiers,\" a cheerful hymn with which the congregation had filled the barrel-vaulted nave of First Ballybucklebo Presbyterian Church. Sunlight streamed through stained-glass windows. He inhaled the mustiness of two hundred years and the overpowering perfume of Old Spice aftershave coming from a man in the pew behind. Cissie Sloan, whom O'Reilly had seen for acne in 1938, finished with triumphal chords on the harmonium. She and her cousin Aggie Arbuthnot were two of Kinky's friends.\n\nThe service was progressing and so far none of the amazement Kinky had predicted had occurred.\n\nAs O'Reilly sat, his foot nudged the doctor's bag he had set on the floor when he had taken this pew. It had been a habit of both Doctor Corrigan and Doctor Flanagan to go nowhere without their bag. One never knew when an emergency might occur. He patted the left pocket of his jacket to make sure his stethoscope was there too.\n\nHe paid attention to the service. Today Mister Wilson, the septuagenarian minister, was being assisted by a young cleric, a Mister Robinson who, Kinky had told O'Reilly, had recently received the call to be taking over the parish when the older man retired in August. This morning Mister Robinson was to preach the sermon.\n\nHe ascended into a carved pulpit and began, \"The text for today is from the Gospel According to Saint Mark, 12:31. 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'\" He smiled down at Kinky. O'Reilly, who was sitting next to her, wondered if she'd persuaded Mister Robinson to use that text.\n\nHe half-listened and gazed ahead. When they'd arrived this morning, he had simply followed Kinky to her usual place three rows from the front, a place where, Kinky had solemnly assured him on their way to church, that when in good fettle preaching fire and brimstone, Mister Robinson's spits could be felt.\n\nBertie Bishop must not mind the salivary showers. His place was in the very front pew immediately facing the pulpit. He was accompanied by a dumpy woman wearing a pink cloche hat, presumably Mrs. Bishop. There didn't seem to be any little Bishops.\n\nO'Reilly unobtrusively half-turned and stole another look over the congregation. Here and there were people he recognised, either from his previous time in the village or because he'd noticed them in the Duck, or, and he reckoned he could count them on one hand, because they'd recently been patients. There was Alfie Corry in a pew halfway down the nave adjacent to the aisle. The strapping unmarried farmer of, O'Reilly had to calculate\u2014the man had been sixty-four in 1939 when he'd first consulted O'Reilly, so Mister Corry'd be seventy-one now. When O'Reilly and Kinky had arrived this morning to walk to their pew, Alfie'd greeted O'Reilly with a hushed \"Nice til see you back, Doc.\"\n\nAt least somebody thought so.\n\nAnd there was no mistaking Mister and young Donal Donnelly's carrotty hair. Archie Auchinleck sat farther down the nave beside an auburn-haired woman and a little boy of about Donal Donnelly's age.\n\nO'Reilly'd not been surprised that the Finnegans weren't here. Finnegan was a Catholic name and the odds of finding a Protestant bride in rural Normandy would be pretty long indeed.\n\nO'Reilly decided he'd better pay attention to the sermon.\n\n\"And where else better to love our neighbours than a little place like our own dear Ballybucklebo?\"\n\nWhere else indeed, thought O'Reilly. Yet it is such a little place. Perhaps I should have found a practice in Belfast?\n\n\"Sweet Jesus, what's happened?\" A woman's startled voice behind O'Reilly had stopped the sermon.\n\nAnother voice, \"It's Alfie Corry. He's taken a wee turn. I'll run til get the doctor.\"\n\nThat was enough for O'Reilly. He leapt to his feet. \"Excuse me, excuse me,\" he said, and forced his way along the pew and down the aisle. Fainted? The man had had a series of anginal attacks when he'd been here in 1939. O'Reilly shook his head.\n\nAs he pushed forward a man's voice said, \"The doctor's already here, you eejit. Bide where you're at.\"\n\nThe crowd parted to let O'Reilly get at Alfie Corry, who must have pitched sideways out of the pew to land on his back in the aisle. His face was dusky, his eyes open, but glazed, with their pupils dilated, and he was not breathing. Almost certainly the man had just had a fatal coronary thrombosis.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" O'Reilly said to a heavyset woman who wore a hat with pheasant tail feathers and who was taking the victim's pulse.\n\n\"I'm a first-aider,\" she said. \"He's no pulse, you know. Could you try Holger-Neilsen artificial respiration, sir?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" O'Reilly said, \"that's only for people who are nearly drowned. Now if you'd just\u2014?\"\n\nShe needed no further bidding to move aside.\n\nHe unbuttoned the man's shirt and saw a farmer's chest, chalky white save for a tanned vee at the throat and upper chest. It was not moving. If he was right and the man had had a heart attack, there were no means of resuscitating such a patient nor any wonder drug to inject. Despite the accelerated progress of medicine brought about by the war, doctors were still helpless when it came to lethal heart attacks, and O'Reilly stifled a curse of frustration.\n\nNews of what had happened seemed to be spreading throughout the congregation by a series of loud whispers punctuated by, \"Och, dears,\" and a, \"Dear love, Alfie. Sound man. Sound man, so he is.\"\n\nO'Reilly fished out his stethoscope, put the earpieces in, and clapped the bell over the left chest.\n\n\"Everybody wheest now,\" the first-aid lady said. \"The doctor's trying til listen in, so he is.\"\n\nMeanwhile, O'Reilly had felt in the angle of the jaw for the pulse of the carotid artery. There were no audible heart sounds and no pulse. O'Reilly fished out his pencil torch and shone it into each of the victim's eyes. Neither pupil contracted nor, he bent his head to Alfie's mouth, was there any evidence of breathing. Poor Alfie Corry, looking like a stunned mullet, was dead. Dead as mutton. And there was no treatment. None at all.\n\nO'Reilly blew out a long breath against pursed lips. It wasn't as if he was a stranger to death\u2014by disease, natural causes, and accident in peacetime, of the young, but mostly of the old. And death by fire, scalding, drowning, hypothermia, bullets, and explosives in wartime. Senseless, bloody senseless, and the victims so pathetically young. And while O'Reilly had tried to steel himself, had become inured by familiarity, there was always regret when a fellow human died in his hands, a sense of failure.\n\nHe started to rise and heard a familiar voice saying, \"I think poor oul Alfie's gone, so I do.\" Bertie Bishop, not to O'Reilly's surprise, had forced his way to the front of the rubbernecking crowd. His wife stood just behind him. Bertie was a man who had to be at the centre of everything. He'd not have been satisfied at a wake if he wasn't the corpse. \"But then, you'd not expect O'Reilly to have saved him, would youse?\"\n\nNo one else in the congregation spoke. O'Reilly stiffened, and for a moment wondered, was the lack of response in his favour or against him? He took a deep breath, and like the navy he'd served in when attacked, prepared to defend himself with every weapon he possessed. But then an idea pushed into his mind. \"Kinky, bring my bag,\" he roared. \"Your man's gone.\" And nothing, nothing O'Reilly could do could bring him back. And yet... He heard shuffling of feet as a passage was cleared for her.\n\n\"Here, sir.\" Kinky gave him the leather bag.\n\n\"Requiescat in pace,\" O'Reilly muttered, \"and please forgive me for what I'm going to do.\" He hoped his conscience would forgive him too, but the late Alfie might just perform a vital service for the living Fingal O'Reilly. He ripped open the bag, found a hypodermic syringe, filled it from a bottle of whatever was nearest to hand\u2014the label said \"sterile water\"\u2014plunged the needle into Alfie's left breast over the heart, and injected one third of the contents of the syringe.\n\nThe stethoscope was still in O'Reilly's ears so he put the bell over Alfie's chest. O'Reilly put an entirely forced look of awe on his face. \"Praise be. He's got a heartbeat.\" No one could gainsay that.\n\nO'Reilly looked up at a sea of faces, many with hands over their mouths, all of the people with wide, staring eyes. He smiled, put the stethoscope back on the chest. \"Och, no,\" he said, letting his feigned anguish show. \"No. He's going again.\" Another third of the syringe was injected like the first and the bell reapplied. O'Reilly took a long count before he whispered, loudly enough for the nearest of his audience to hear, \"It's beating again.\"\n\nEven with the earpieces in place he heard a voice yell, \"Somebody send for an ambulance.\" That was no bad thing. Unless Alfie had recently been under a doctor's care it was a statutory requirement that a postmortem examination had to be performed to establish the cause of death, so the departed would have to go to the hospital mortuary anyway.\n\nO'Reilly listened again, and knowing the effect his next utterance would have in here loudly said, \"Damnation,\" and injected the remaining sterile water. There was no need for any further explanation and by the loud \"tch, tching\" and \"tut-tutting,\" he could hear, even though his word was disapproved of, the message had got through.\n\nHe waited and this time made a display of taking the wrist pulse and letting a tired smile play on his face. Once more, judging by the communal indrawing of breath, the message of another success had been clearly received.\n\nO'Reilly waited for what he considered to be a reasonable time, never letting go of Alfie's wrist before frowning mightily, clapping the stethoscope back on the corpse's chest, deepening his frown, and shining his torch into the nonresponding eyes. O'Reilly shook his head ponderously, stood slowly still shaking his head, before taking a very deep breath and saying, \"I'm sorry. I did my best. I couldn't save him.\"\n\nNow what?\n\n\"Och, dear,\" and \"God rest him,\" and \"At least he went easy\" rose above the murmuring.\n\n\"May I speak, your reverence?\"\n\nO'Reilly recognised Kinky's voice.\n\n\"Certainly, Mrs. Kincaid.\" Mister Robinson was now standing behind Bertie Bishop.\n\nShe climbed up on a pew and was facing the crowd. \"You said some powerful things, Reverend Robinson, about loving your neighbour. I think there's nobody here\u2014\" She glanced at Bertie Bishop. \"\u2014who would disagree.\"\n\nThere was a murmuring of agreement.\n\n\"But I know some malicious things have been said about Doctor O'Reilly here. You heard one now about not expecting Doctor O'Reilly to have done any good, so.\" She fixed Bertie Bishop with a stare O'Reilly thought would have done justice to Balor the one-eyed Fomorian, whose gaze could turn men to stone.\n\nO'Reilly saw Bishop's wife give him a ferocious dig in the ribs.\n\nKinky continued, \"And you all know the saying about giving a dog a bad name. Now I mean no irreverence, your reverences, but we all know the story of how our Lord raised Lazarus from the dead.\"\n\nThere was a loud muttering of agreement.\n\n\"And didn't Doctor O'Reilly, who could have gone anywhere in the world such a good doctor is he, so.\"\n\nO'Reilly did something he didn't do often. He blushed.\n\n\"Didn't he choose to come back to us here?\"\n\nMore muttering.\n\n\"And while Lazarus was brought back once, didn't Doctor O'Reilly bring back poor old Alfie Corry three times?\"\n\nO'Reilly heard a number of \"Ayes,\" and \"Right enoughs.\"\n\n\"Not once, not once, but three times\u2014three times? I think we do be very lucky and I think it's about time when any of you need a doctor that you remember what you saw here this morning.\" Kinky smiled at O'Reilly. \"I'll say no more, so,\" she said, and clambered down.\n\n\"Thank you, Kinky,\" he mouthed and was going to say it aloud when a woman's harsh voice rang out, \"See you, Bertie Bishop? See you, you great glipe?\"\n\nO'Reilly recognised Mrs. Bishop by her hat.\n\n\"See you and your 'That doctor what's come back is only a quack?' You were trying for til drive him away, so you were. You and that Wowser Ward. Pair of bollixes, so youse are.\"\n\nBertie Bishop glared at his wife. \"Hould your wheest, woman.\" The man was blushing.\n\nO'Reilly saw a number of the congregation look at Bishop and shake their heads before turning to smile at O'Reilly.\n\nBishop, dragging his wife by the hand, headed for the narthex and the way out.\n\nO'Reilly took off his jacket and respectfully covered the dear departed's face. \"Perhaps,\" he said, \"some of you men could give me a hand to carry Mister Corry to the vestry to wait for the ambulance. Will that be all right, Reverend Robinson?\"\n\n\"Please. I'll come too. Say a few words. Reverend Wilson, will you please get everyone else back in their pews. Perhaps a hymn? 'Amazing Grace'?\"\n\nThere was no lack of volunteers to carry Alfie. His corpse was laid on a bench and covered with a minister's robe that was hanging in the vestry so O'Reilly could recover his jacket.\n\nEveryone there bowed their heads as the minister prayed for the soul of the departed.\n\nAll joined in the \"Amen.\"\n\nFrom the church proper came\n\nTwas grace that caused my heart to fear.\n\nAnd grace my fears relieved...\n\nAnd after a moment's silence in the vestry Mister Robinson said, \"Thank you for acting so quickly, Doctor.\"\n\nO'Reilly, knowing full well it had all been a charade for his own benefit, hung his head and muttered, \"It's my job.\"\n\n\"Nevertheless...\" The minister let the sentence hang and then said with a smile, \"And I think under the circumstances,\" he glanced up, \"He will forgive your little indiscretion, and bless your continuing work here among us.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" O'Reilly said, could have kissed the minister, and inside was grateful he'd only said \"damnation.\" He'd had a full naval repertoire to choose from.\n\n\"We'd best be getting back,\" Mister Robinson said.\n\n\"Aye, but,\" one of the men said, \"that was quare nor quick thinking, Doc. Me and the rest of the lads here,\" he glanced round at the other three ruddy-cheeked men, all probably farmers, \"hope you'll stay on like. Isn't that right?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" said one, and held out a callused hand, which O'Reilly shook. \"Thank you,\" he said, and in his heart also said, \"I'm sorry, Alfie Corry, but thank you. And bless you, Maureen Kinky Kincaid. Bless you. Bless you.\" Things looked like they were going to be all right after all, and he remembered Lars's recent quotation, \"Home is the sailor, home from the sea.\" For Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, recently Surgeon Commander, R.N.R., D.S.C., and now simply Doctor O'Reilly, this town and these people who would become his patients were his home\u2014and always would be.\nAFTERWORD\n\nby Mrs. Maureen Kincaid,\n\nLately Housekeeper to Doctor Thom\u00e1s Flanagan\n\nNow in That Capacity to Doctor F. F. O'Reilly\n\nWe're back from all that excitement at the church now. I thought Mister Wilson did a fine job of getting everyone calmed down after poor Alfie Corry passed. The Reverend Robinson even finished the service. I was pleased to see how many of the congreation said kindly things to Doctor O'Reilly after. I think he need not worry anymore about his future here, so I told him as much.\n\nSays he, \"Kinky, I think you are right about the future, I thank you, and I'm in your debt.\" Then he surprised me when he went on, \"And I want to be further in. I don't want a part of the past to suffer either. I meant it when I said you were the best cook in Ireland...\" the ould soft-soaper, \"but I'd hate to think of your recipes getting lost to posterity.\"\n\n\"So what would you like me to do?\"\n\n\"Could you please start writing them down?\"\n\n\"I will,\" says I, and here I am, pen in fist, getting the recipe for the first dinner I made for him when he came back after serving on that big ship where he had only men cooking for him, the poor soul. I hope you'll enjoy my roast rack of lamb too, so.\n\nROAST RACK OF LAMB WITH HERB STUFFING AND CAPER SAUCE\n\n2 racks of trimmed lamb\n\nSalt and pepper to season\n\n1 teaspoon chopped rosemary\n\n2 teaspoons of mild-tasting mustard (Dijon)\n\n1 teaspoon of fresh herbs (mint, parsley, and thyme)\n\n1 tablespoon breadcrumbs\n\nPreheat the oven to 200\u00b0 C\/400\u00b0 F\/gas mark 6.\n\nHeat a large roasting pan in the oven. Season the lamb and rub over with a little butter and some chopped rosemary. Place in the pan and cook for about 18\u201320 minutes or longer if you like it less rare.\n\nRemove from the oven and coat the outside with a mixture of the mustard, crumbs, and herbs. Crisp under a hot grill for 2 to 3 minutes, making sure not to let it burn.\n\nStuffing\n\n75 g\/2\u00bd oz.\/1\/3 cup butter\n\n2 shallots, chopped small\n\n75 g mixed herbs (mint, parsley, and thyme)\n\n50 g\/2 oz.\/\u00bc cup chopped dried apricots\n\n100 g\/3\u00bd oz.\/\u00bd cup breadcrumbs\n\nMelt the butter in a pan over a gentle heat. Add the shallots, herbs, and chopped apricots. Cook gently for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently so as not to let it burn. Then add the crumbs and keep warm till needed.\n\nCaper Sauce\n\n50 g\/2 oz. butter\n\n1 tablespoon flour\n\n\u00bd cup lamb stock\n\n50 ml\/\u00bc cup cream\n\nJuice of half a lemon\n\n3 tablespoons capers\n\n1 tablespoon chopped parsley\n\nSalt and pepper\n\nPlace the butter in a saucepan and cook gently until it browns slightly and smells slightly nutty. Remove from the heat and work in the flour. Cook for a minute and whisk in the lamb stock, cream, and lemon juice with the seasoning. Simmer gently for about 5 minutes and add the chopped parsley and capers.\n\nHimself thinks this is a grand feast altogether, so, and likes me to serve it with buttery mashed potatoes, brussel sprouts, and mashed and mixed carrots and parsnips.\nGLOSSARY\n\nIn all the Irish Country books I have provided a glossary to help the reader who is unfamiliar with the vagaries of the Queen's English as she may be spoken by the majority of people in Ulster. It is a regional dialect akin to English as spoken in Yorkshire or on Tyneside, American English used in Texas or the Bronx, or Canadian English in Newfoundland or the Ottawa Valley. It is not Gaeilge, the Irish language. It is not Ulster Scots, which is claimed to be a distinct language in its own right. I confess I am not a speaker.\n\nToday in Ulster (but not in 1946 where this book is set) official signs are written in English, Irish, and Ulster Scots. The washroom sign would read Toilets, Leithris, and Cludgies respectively.\n\nI hope what follows here will enhance your enjoyment of the work and unravel some of the mysteries of Ulsterspeak, although, I am afraid, it will not improve your command of Ulster Scots.\n\nanyroad: Anyway.\n\naway off and...: Go away, or you are being stupid. Often succeeded by feel your head or chase yourself.\n\nbar: Refuse admission, as from a public house.\n\nbarge: Force your way through a crowd. Verbally chastise.\n\nbarmbrack: Speckled bread. (See Kinky's recipe, Irish Country Doctor p. 340)\n\nbide (where you're at): Stay (where you are).\n\nboke: Vomit.\n\nbollix: Testicles (impolite). May be used as an expression of vehement disagreement or to describe a person of whom you disapprove.\n\nbonnaught: Irish mercenary of the fourteenth century.\n\nbonnet: Hood (when applied to a car).\n\nboth legs the same length: Standing about uselessly.\n\nbowler hat: Derby hat.\n\nbrass neck: Chutzpah. Impertinence.\n\nbrave: Large or good.\n\nbrave wheen: Large number of.\n\nbut: Ulster folks have a habit of putting \"but\" not at the beginning of a sentence but at the end.\n\ncapped\/cap: A cap was awarded to athletes selected for important teams. Equivalent to a \"letter\" at a University.\n\ncracker: Excellent.\n\ncrisps: Potato chips. In 1946 there was only one flavour and the salt came in a little bag of blue greaseproof paper.\n\ncurrency: In 1946, well prior to decimilisation, sterling was the currency of the United Kingdom, of which Northern Ireland was a part. The unit was the pound, which contained twenty shillings, each made of twelve pennies, thus there were 240 pennies in a pound. Coins and notes of combined or lesser or greater denominations were in circulation often referred to by slang or archaic terms: halfpenny (two to the penny), threepenny piece (thruppeny bit), sixpenny piece (tanner), two-shillings piece (florin), two-shillings-and-sixpence piece (half a crown), ten-shilling note (ten-bob note), guinea coin worth one pound and one shilling, five-pound note (fiver). In 1946 one pound bought nearly three U.S. dollars.\n\ndemob: Demobilise. Be honourably discharged from the armed forces. Ulster was an anomaly in the Second World War. Unlike the rest of the United Kingdom there was no conscription there. Ulster members of the peacetime reserve forces like the Territorial Army, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and Royal Naval Reserve were called up to fight, but all other Ulstermen, and indeed Irishmen, like RAF fighter pilot Paddy Finucane, were volunteers.\n\ndesperate: Immense, or terrible.\n\ndivil: Devil.\n\ndivilment: Mischief.\n\ndonkey's age: A very long time.\n\ndote\/doting: Something (person or animal) adorable\/being crazy about or simply being crazy (in one's dotage).\n\nduncher: Cloth cap, usually tweed.\n\neejit: Idiot.\n\nface like a Lurgan spade: The turf-cutting spade particular to the town of Lurgan and surounds was longer than most, so, having a very long face.\n\nfeck, and variations: Corruption of \"fuck.\" Its scatalogical shock value is now so debased that it is no more offensive than \"like\" larded into teenagers' chat. Now available at reputable bookstores is the Feckin' Book of Irish... a series of ten books by Murphy and O'Dea.\n\nfeel your head: See away off.\n\nferocious: Extremely bad or very upsetting.\n\nfey: Having the gift of second sight.\n\ngit: Corruption of \"got,\" a short form of \"begotten.\" Often expressed as \"hoor's (whore's) git\" or bastard.\n\ngive lip: Be cheeky or insulting to.\n\nglipe (great): stupid (or very stupid) person.\n\ngo 'way (out of that): I don't believe you, or I know you are trying to fool me.\n\nhead (nautical): Lavatory.\n\nheadstaggers: A disease of sheep where a parasite invades the brain causing the animal to stagger and fall.\n\nhighheejin: Upper-class person.\n\nHMS: His\/Her Majesty's Ship.\n\nhobbyhorse shite: Literally sawdust. Rubbish.\n\nhot half un: Measure of spirits, usually whiskey, to which is added sugar, lemon juice, cloves, and boiling water.\n\nhould your wheest: Keep quiet.\n\nkipper: A butterflied and gutted herring, pickled or salted and cold smoked, usually over oak chips.\n\nknows his onions: Is very knowledgeable about.\n\nmore power to your wheel: Words of encouragement.\n\nno goat's toe: Has a very high and usually misplaced opinion of onesself.\n\nno harm to you: An expression used prior to delivering bad news or disagreeing with the person being addressed.\n\nno mission: Hopeless.\n\non your bike: Forceful \"go away.\"\n\nput in his box: Taken down a peg or two.\n\nquare: Queer. Used to mean very strange, or exceptional.\n\nR.N.\/R.N.R.: These letters following a name indicate either Royal Navy for someone who has joined in a career capacity or Royal Navy Reserve for merchant seamen who volunteered for extra training with the Royal Navy during peacetime and who, in times of emergency, were liable for call-up to active service.\n\nscrip: Prescription.\n\nsee: See you, him, me. Drawing emphasis to the person \"seen.\" It does not actually mean that they are in sight.\n\nshit: Verb.\n\nshite: Noun.\n\nshout: In a bar, the person named's turn to buy.\n\nshut your yap: Shut up.\n\nso (so it is): Much used at the ends of sentences for emphasis in County Cork. (The same in Ulster.)\n\nsoft-soaper: Flatterer.\n\nsound (man): Reliable or very good (man).\n\nstunned mullet: To look stupid, surprised, or absolutely out of touch. A mullet is an ugly saltwater fish.\n\nsucking diesel: Hitting paydirt. Probably in reference to siphoning tractor fuel.\n\ntelt: Told.\n\nthole: Put up with. Suffer in silence.\n\nthon (der): That person or thing (over there).\n\nthran: Bloody-minded.\n\ntinker's toss\/damn\/curse: Tinkers were itinerant menders with tins of pots and pans. Their attributes were not highly prized.\n\nto beat Ban(n)agher: Far exceed realistic expectations or to one's great surprise.\n\ntoty: Very small.\n\nturn: Faint.\n\nwarm: Have lots of money.\n\nwee: Small, but in Ulster can be used to modify almost anything without reference to size. A barmaid, an old friend, greeted me by saying, \"Come in, Pat. Have a wee seat and I'll get you a wee menu, and would you like a wee drink while you're waiting?\"\n\nwee man: The devil.\n\nwell mended: Recovered from a recent illness.\n\nwheen: An indeterminate number.\n\nwheest: Shut up or be quiet.\n\nwind: Bowel gas.\n\nyou know: Verbal punctuation often used when the person being addressed could not possibly be in possession of the information.\n\nyour man (I'm): Someone either whose name is not known, \"Your man over there? Who is he?\" or someone known to all, \"Your man, Van Morrison.\"\n\nyou're on: I will do what you ask or I accept the wager.\n\nyouse: You plural.\nBY PATRICK TAYLOR\n\nOnly Wounded\n\nPray for Us Sinners\n\nNow and in the Hour of Our Death\n\nAn Irish Country Doctor\n\nAn Irish Country Village\n\nAn Irish Country Christmas\n\nAn Irish Country Girl\n\nAn Irish Country Courtship\n\nA Dublin Student Doctor\n\nAn Irish Country Wedding\n\nFingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor\n\nThe Wily O'Reilly\n\n\"Home Is the Sailor\" (e-original)\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nPatrick Taylor, M.D., was born and raised in Bangor, County Down, in Northern Ireland. Dr. Taylor is a distinguished medical researcher, offshore sailor, model-boat builder, and father of two grown children. He now lives on Saltspring Island, British Columbia.\nThis is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in the short stories and columns in this collection are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.\n\nTHE WILY O'REILLY: IRISH COUNTRY STORIES\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 by Ballybucklebo Stories Corp.\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nThese columns first appeared in Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour, which was published between 1993 and 2003 by Stitches Publishing Inc. of Newmarket, Ontario.\n\n\"Home Is the Sailor\" was originally published as an e-book by Forge in 2013.\n\nCover art by Greg Manchess\n\nA Forge Book\n\nPublished by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC\n\n175 Fifth Avenue\n\nNew York, NY 10010\n\nwww.tor-forge.com\n\nForge\u00ae is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.\n\nThe Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.\n\nISBN 978-0-7653-3838-9 (hardcover)\n\nISBN 978-1-4668-3887-1 (e-book)\n\ne-ISBN 9781466838871\n\nFirst Edition: February 2014\n\ntor-forge.com\/author\/patricktaylor \u2022 Also available in audiobook\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nPublished by The History Press\n\nCharleston, SC 29403\n\nwww.historypress.net\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 by Keven McQueen\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nFirst published 2014\n\ne-book edition 2014\n\nISBN 978.1.62584.861.1\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nMcQueen, Keven.\n\nMurder and mayhem in Indiana \/ Keven McQueen.\n\npages cm\n\nIncludes bibliographical references.\n\nprint edition ISBN 978-1-62619-368-0 (paperback)\n\n1. Murder--Indiana--Case studies 2. Crime--Indiana--Case studies. I. Title.\n\nHV6533.I6M367 2014\n\n364.152'30977209041--dc23\n\n2013047421\n\n_Notice_ : The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.\n_To Amy and Quentin_.\nContents\n\nAcknowledgements\n\n1. The Mystery of Dr. Knabe\n\n2. Picnic of Death\n\n3. The Farmhand and the Acrobat\n\n4. Mr. Wade and Mrs. Brown Hatch a Stupid Plot\n\n5. A Hoosier Makes a Spectacle of Himself in Cincinnati\n\n6. Hazel Triumphant!\n\n7. Pursued by a Monster\n\n8. Justice, Possibly\n\n9. The Honeymooners\n\n10. With a Smile on Her Face\n\n11. The Stage's Loss Was St. Louis's Gain\n\n12. Otto Embellishes\n\n13. William Wants to Get Married\n\n14. A Higher Venue\n\n15. Hypothetical Questions in Abundance\n\n16. Thomas Hoal, Boy Bandit\n\n17. Three Ways to Escape Punishment\n\nBibliography\n\nAbout the Author\nAcknowledgements\n\nGeneta Chumley; Thomas Clark; Drema Colangelo; Greg Dumais and everyone at The History Press; Gaile Sheppard Dempsey; Eastern Kentucky University Department of English and Theatre; Eastern Kentucky University Interlibrary Loan Department (Stefanie Brooks; Heather Frith; Pat New; Shelby Wills); Amy and Quentin Hawkins; Darrell and Swecia McQueen; Darren, Alison and Elizabeth McQueen; Kyle and Bonnie McQueen; Michael, Lori and Blaine McQueen and Evan Holbrook; Lee Mitchum; Jerica Nanik; Mia Temple. Also: the Provider.\n\nThis book was edited by Lee Mitchum.\n1\n\nThe Mystery of Dr. Knabe\n\nThe slaying of Helen Knabe in Indianapolis contains the elements that make true crime stories fascinating: the puzzling, pointless and grisly homicide of a prominent individual; a bungled investigation; legitimate clues and red herrings; a cast of bizarre characters; absurd theories; and, most of all, a genuine sense of mystery.\n\nThe tragedy of Knabe's premature demise is all the more striking because she must have been a truly remarkable person. She succeeded despite obstacles that would have made many people surrender out of sheer despair. Born a German peasant around 1876, as a young girl she denied herself the necessities of life, including food, in order to save enough money to travel to the United States. Once there, she was handicapped in that she could not speak a word of English. She went to work for an Indianapolis physician as a \"house girl of all work\"\u2014that is, she was a maid, a cook, a manual laborer and an all-purpose drudge. But she was intelligent and had a keen interest in medicine and science. Through perseverance and hard work, she learned English, saved her money and entered the Medical College of Indiana, an institution that readers of my book _Forgotten Tales of Indiana_ will recognize as one of the patrons of professional ghoul Rufus Cantrell's peculiar services.\n\nKnabe proved such a brilliant student that she became an instructor in bacteriology and pathology even before she graduated in 1904. For a year after graduation, she was in charge of the school's laboratory. She rose to the position of assistant pathologist in the state board of health's lab and became Indiana's first official state bacteriologist. In 1906, she was named assistant in physical diagnosis at the Medical College of Indiana. On November 1, 1908, she resigned and started her own private practice. In January 1909, she was elected a member of the faculty at the Indiana Veterinary College, where she served as chair of parasitology and hematology. By the time of her death at age thirty-five, she had a roster of upper-class patients in Indianapolis.\n\nDr. Helen Knabe. _From the_ Indianapolis Sun, _October 26, 1911_.\n\nFemale doctors were relatively rare in Knabe's time; according to the book _The Sum of Feminine Achievement_ , in 1910, there were precisely 13,687 in the United States. On the night of October 23, 1911, their number decreased by one. At 8:00 a.m. on October 24, Dr. Knabe's assistant, Katherine McPherson, unlocked the door to the physician's ground-floor rooms at the Delaware, a swanky apartment house where Knabe lived and kept her office. The doctor did not answer McPherson's calls, so McPherson commenced a room-to-room search. McPherson found her employer's body on a blood-soaked bed in the sleeping quarters. Then, she did something that has caused many an open-and-shut murder case to go unsolved forever: rather than call the police right away, the rattled woman called some of the doctor's friends and relatives, many of whom showed up to see the remains for themselves. Despite their good intentions, they contaminated the crime scene. More than an hour after discovering the body, McPherson finally notified the authorities.\n\nWhen detectives arrived, they noticed that the doctor's nightdress was in disarray. Her throat was cut so deeply from ear to ear that she had nearly been decapitated. The furniture in the rest of the apartment was in order, so whatever had happened to Dr. Knabe occurred in her bedroom with great swiftness. But one item was known to be missing: a surgical instrument called a microtome, loaned to Knabe by Dr. C.E. Ferguson. The theory quickly gained ground that it was the murder weapon.\n\nIn some respects, Dr. Knabe's death is reminiscent of the baffling 1929 murder of Isidor Fink in New York City's Harlem. As in the Fink case, all of the apartment's doors were locked from the inside. The windows were closed and locked in all rooms but the doctor's bedroom. There, the windows were up but the screens were intact. The sills were coated with thick dust from street traffic, proving that no one had entered or exited through the windows. The only access into the apartment seemed to be via a dumbwaiter that was too small to hold a man. The front door was secured with a spring mechanism that would automatically lock the door when it was closed; therefore, it was entirely possible for a keyless intruder to lock the door behind him while leaving. The mystery was how Knabe's assailant got into the apartment in the first place.\n\nCoroner C.O. Durham and detectives questioned janitor Jefferson Haynes, who also happened to be an elder at Shiloh Baptist Church; Haynes's daughter, Eva; and a housekeeper named Fannie Winston, all of whom lived in basement rooms under Knabe's apartment. Haynes claimed he had heard the sound of someone falling in the night, followed by a scream and a groan. He assumed the noises were being made by one of the doctor's patients and went back to sleep. He told the story to detectives several times but contradicted himself as to exactly when he heard the sounds. The coroner opined that it was impossible for Dr. Knabe to have groaned, so deep was the cut in her throat. Neither Haynes's daughter nor Mrs. Winston had heard any noises in the night. The police were suspicious of Haynes and detained him.\n\nBy the day after the body was discovered, the police were divided into two camps. Coroner Durham embraced what we might call the Obvious Theory: he felt that Knabe had been murdered, as evidenced by a defensive wound on her left forearm and her throat wound, which was so deep the blade had grazed the spinal cord. By contrast, Captain William Holtz, chief of detectives, adhered to the Barely Plausible Theory: he thought that Dr. Knabe had committed suicide. As a doctor, he argued, she would have known how to do maximum damage to her own throat with a knife slash. As a trained gymnast, she could have put up a fight against an assailant, yet the furniture was undisturbed. There was no discernible motive for murder; she had been neither robbed nor raped. On the other hand, she had gone into considerable debt after opening her private practice and had worried about her financial predicament. Even her furniture and medical instruments were not her own, but the property of her cousin Augusta Knabe.\n\nThe doctor's friends countered that she had often railed against suicide as a cowardly act and pointed out the most glaring flaw in the suicide theory: no knife had been found on the premises. How could Dr. Knabe have given herself such a ghastly injury, capable of causing near-instantaneous death, and managed to dispose of the weapon? Detective Holtz responded that since some of the doctor's friends had come by the apartment before the police arrived, perhaps one of them, wishing to spare the doctor the stigma of suicide, had taken the knife. Katherine McPherson and Augusta Knabe denied taking anything from the crime scene.\n\nThe police spent the best part of a day searching the entire apartment building, going through Knabe's correspondence and questioning all occupants of the flat as well as grilling delivery boys and janitors of neighboring buildings. On October 26, the first real clue turned up: a barkeeper named Joseph Carr told the police that he had been walking home around 1:00 a.m. on the night of the murder, a route that led him past the Delaware apartments. As he approached the building, he heard two screams, the second more muffled than the first; then, a man exited the building's back alley and ran up the sidewalk toward Carr. When the stranger realized he had been seen, he whipped a handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his face with it. The man dashed into the night, heading south on Delaware Avenue. (Carr's insistence that he heard two screams supported the story told by Jefferson Haynes, so hopefully Haynes was detained by the police no longer.)\n\nCarr had had only a fleeting glimpse of the mysterious man but thought he was about forty years old and well dressed in a dark suit and a stiff hat. At first, police thought Carr's story improbable, but when they reenacted the scene according to his description, they found that it was possible for a man to leave Knabe's apartment and reach the back alley in the allotted time if he fled immediately after slashing the doctor's throat. Detectives\u2014at least the ones who did not think it a suicide\u2014believed the mysterious man might have been a physician or a patient who attacked Dr. Knabe as she slept. That theory had problems. Had the man hidden in the apartment until she went to sleep? If so, how did he get inside, since it was clear no one had entered through the windows? It was more reasonable to believe that Dr. Knabe, for whatever reason, had allowed the man inside. The authorities were quick not to cast aspersions on the late doctor's character. Detective Holtz told the press that \"Dr. Knabe's reputation was unblemished, and she lectured to young women and men on the necessity of social purity as well as on physical culture and hygiene.\"\n\nBartender Carr's statement jogged the memory of two citizens, who stepped forward with corroborating stories of their own. A man claimed that about eight o'clock on the evening of the murder, he was stopped by a man on the street who asked for directions to the Delaware apartments. He was dressed exactly like the man Carr described. A woman who lived along the route on which the man allegedly escaped said that she heard someone running past her house around the time the suspect fled from Carr. Judging from the sound of the footsteps, the person was running from the vicinity of the Delaware apartments.\n\nSketch of Dr. Knabe's apartment. _From the_ Indianapolis Sun, _October 24, 1911_.\n\nAs Dr. Knabe's body was carted to Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis was invaded by detectives from other cities, working independently from the police. They allegedly were hired by doctors who feared the killer was one of their own or a deranged patient of the slain physician. After running down \"twenty or thirty clues,\" according to the press, the stumped local detectives returned to the barely tenable suicide theory. They grilled the victim's cousin Augusta for three hours on October 29, the tenor of their questions leaning toward the notion that Helen had cut her own throat and some busybody had removed the knife from the scene. Many of her answers were incoherent, and she was so nervous that investigators had to give her frequent breaks and medicinal stimulants. She did no better when testifying before the coroner a couple days later. Nevertheless, detectives were convinced after her performance that Miss Knabe knew more than she was telling.\n\nAn acquaintance of Helen Knabe's, Dr. W.T. Dodds, was adamant that she had committed suicide. His reasons for believing so were not compelling. \"Dr. Knabe was an arrogant, headstrong and merciless woman, whose ambition to succeed in the world was so great that to achieve it she did not hesitate to sacrifice anyone,\" he said. \"During her connection with the State Board of Health, Dr. Knabe made herself so disliked that she was asked to resign...She was a bright and intelligent woman, but she failed in her wish to sweep things before her.\" However, Dr. Dodds's negative character assessment cut two ways (pardon the pun): had Knabe been so arrogant, merciless and disliked, those might be reasons for someone to murder her. Dr. Dodds scoffed at the idea that Knabe, as a physician, might be expected to have opted to end her life with drugs or some other painless method: \"That kind of death would not appeal to her. She wanted something violent, in keeping with the struggle she had made for success in her profession.\" In other words, Dodds thought she chose a painful and gruesome means of suicide over a painless one because she liked its symbolic value. When asked to explain the defensive wound in Knabe's forearm, Dr. Dodds claimed, \"It would seem natural for Dr. Knabe deliberately to cut into her arm to test the weapon or to ascertain what pressure was necessary.\" Well, it seemed natural to Dr. Dodds, anyway.\n\nThe suicide theory was farfetched, but it was deductive brilliance equal to a Hercule Poirot compared to other pet theories that made the rounds. Coroner Durham found among Dr. Knabe's correspondence a letter in which she expressed an interest in Buddhism. Durham refused to explain why he found this significant, but it seems he thought a vicious Buddhist had come after the doctor for reasons undisclosed. The hypothesis was abruptly dropped and never mentioned again. Another somewhat less-than-brilliant supposition came from a female physician, Dr. Carrie Gregory of Elwood, Indiana, who believed Knabe's death was neither suicide nor murder, but the ultimate result of the Hippocratic oath's injunction to \"apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required\" being taken to foolhardy lengths. Dr. Gregory stated that a certain female patient had been suffering from \"an ailment that was drying up the blood\" and that Dr. Knabe was convinced a transfusion of blood from a healthy person would save her. Knabe attempted to prove her point by donating two quarts of her own blood but died during the attempt. The other physicians present during the procedure took the sensible precaution of nearly decapitating the dead Dr. Knabe to make it look as though she had been murdered and then placed her body on her bed. Dr. Gregory claimed that the patient had been saved by Dr. Knabe's heroic sacrifice and was recovering in an Indianapolis hospital. Despite an investigation, the patient never turned up. Newspaper readers were entertained with this sort of folderol for a couple months.\n\nCoroner Durham announced his official verdict a few days after Christmas: Dr. Knabe was murdered. The coroner's statement was all the progress that was made in the case for several months. The police ran out of clues, and the case went cold. Some detectives continued to retain a fondness for the suicide theory despite the improbability of the victim's nearly severing her own head with a knife or razor.\n\nBut the Indianapolis chapter of the Council of Women did not give up. Its president, Dr. Amelia Keller, had been a friend of Dr. Knabe's, and she made it a personal mission to find the killer. The council hired a private detective named Harry Webster to keep working the case. It seemed for a time that the Council of Women had wasted its time and money by hiring Webster because he uncovered no clues to speak of. Nobody held out much hope, but suddenly, the mystery was catapulted back into the headlines with a voluntary confession.\n\nAbout two weeks before the _Titanic_ went down, police in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, arrested a drunken young navy sailor named Seth Nichols. The influence of the grape made Nichols very talkative, and he told the authorities that a well-dressed man he knew only as \"Knight\" had paid him $1,500 to desert the USS _Dixie_ and murder Dr. Knabe. He maintained that he had been in Indianapolis visiting his sister, Mrs. Grace Blakeman, when he met the iniquitous Knight at the Washington Street skating rink. (The reader is invited to relish the improbability of such murderous fellows hanging out in a skating rink.) Nichols claimed to be tormented by guilt and in constant terror of being caught by the police, and he seemed almost relieved to be arrested. He dropped a hint that he would not even mind receiving a death sentence.\n\nThe authorities were delighted to have an arrest and a confession, but Nichols's story immediately fell asunder at nearly every joint. He provided police with details about the murder but told them nothing that could not have been gleaned from reading the daily papers. Other details could be neither proved nor disproved, such as Nichols's contention that he and Knight had slipped into Dr. Knabe's apartment together on the night of the slaying. Nichols contradicted himself: initially, he claimed he left Indianapolis the day after the murder, but later, he said he waited three days. Unsavory details of his background surfaced: he had married Mary McHale, a seventeen-year-old mill girl of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on November 6, 1911, a week after the murder. They were married only three months, Mary having decided to end her life in her sister's Boston home with a dose of mercury on March 11, 1912. That was bad enough, but the Boston police charged Nichols with robbing the house where his bride of three months had died.\n\nSeth Nichols, who confessed to the murder of Dr. Helen Knabe. _From the_ New Orleans Picayune, _April 8, 1912. Courtesy of the_ New Orleans Times-Picayune.\n\nNichols had said that he was visiting Grace Blakeman when he murdered Knabe, but Mrs. Blakeman told the press that Nichols had not been in Indianapolis at the time he claimed. His aunt, Mrs. Glenn Gilbert of Lafayette, Indiana, said that Nichols had suffered a head injury as a child, and afterward, he had never been mentally right. He had a marked tendency to lie and exaggerate. Nichols had said that his dastardly employer Mr. Knight lived in Wonderland Park on North Washington Street, a lie easily run to earth. The final blow came from the commander of the USS _Dixie_ , whose records proved Nichols had been aboard the day of Knabe's murder. He was not even a deserter, but rather had been dishonorably discharged \"for conduct prejudicial to the service\" on December 20, 1911. Not wishing to surrender his moment of shabby glory, Nichols feebly claimed that he and Knight had bribed the ship's records keeper into counting him present while he went on unauthorized shore leave.\n\nThe grand jury met again in April 1912 but, like the former grand jury, failed to vote a true bill of murder. When Nichols's claims were shattered, the investigation into the murder of Dr. Knabe ground to a halt. Nothing more was heard of the case until Christmastime 1912, when, once again, the suicide theory came to the fore. This time a grand jury met and debated the issue. The jury decided once and for all on a verdict of murder after hearing a critical piece of evidence that somehow had been overlooked repeatedly: a large bloody handprint, not Dr. Knabe's, was on the doctor's pillow. The clue revived interest in the case. The Council of Women, led by the indefatigable Dr. Amelia Keller, continued to agitate, and Detective Webster kept searching. Dr. Keller offered a $2,500 reward for information leading to the conviction of Dr. Knabe's murderer.\n\nIn December 1912, Detective Webster presented his findings to the grand jury and, at long last, came two arrests and two indictments. Dr. William B. Craig, president of the Indiana Veterinary College, where Dr. Knabe had been a faculty member, had been Knabe's unacknowledged suitor; he had given her rides in his auto, and they had often been seen together. On this\u2014and one hopes, stronger\u2014evidence, the police brought him into custody, along with an undertaker named Alonzo Ragsdale. Craig was charged with murder, Ragsdale with helping to conceal evidence after the fact.\n\nDr. Craig appeared in criminal court on the last day of the year and was set free on a $15,000 bond. Ragsdale paid his bond on New Year's Day. The indictment against Ragsdale came as a surprise, but for quite some time, Dr. Craig had been a \"person of interest in the case,\" as cops say when being diplomatic; he had been questioned for several hours when the grand jury had met back in April.\n\nThere was plenty of evidence concerning the formerly close relationship between Drs. Craig and Knabe. They had met in 1908 while she was the bacteriologist for the state of Indiana. In 1909, Dr. Craig placed her on the faculty at his veterinary college, but at some point, the romance became stormy. Dr. Knabe had been \"a persistent visitor\" at Dr. Craig's home for the two weeks preceding her murder. One night, the housekeeper overheard an argument between the doctors concerning their proposed marriage. Dr. Knabe had said, \"You can continue to practice and I can continue to practice,\" which sounds as if Dr. Craig expected her to give up her career if they got married. Knabe had visited the Craig residence on the night of her death, but only to return a book she had borrowed. Dr. Craig was not at home at the time. None of this was very serious evidence, but a witness named Harry Haskett claimed to have seen Dr. Craig stepping out of the Delaware apartments a little after 11:00 p.m. on the night of the murder. He had been able to pick the doctor's photo out of a group of portraits. Of course, this does not jibe with the previously described 1:00 a.m. encounter between Joseph Carr and the man with the handkerchief on his face, raising the possibility that the murderer invaded the apartment after Craig visited Knabe.\n\nRagsdale, the undertaker, had been the administrator of Dr. Knabe's estate and owned a silk kimono that had belonged to the doctor. An analysis showed that it had been stained with human blood and washed in \"a strong chemical solution.\" His accusers thought he had removed the garment from the house at the insistence of the alleged murderer, Dr. Craig, leaving unanswered the question of why Craig didn't just do it himself. Ragsdale explained that he owned many of Dr. Knabe's effects that were considered to be of little or no value, including the kimono. It is hard to believe that if Ragsdale had helped Dr. Craig commit a perfect murder, he would be foolish enough to keep such an incriminating piece of evidence. Dr. Knabe's body had been clad in a nightdress rather than the kimono, and Augusta Knabe and Katherine McPherson swore that the kimono had not been in the room with the body. Perhaps the killer thought it convenient to wipe his bloody hands on the kimono and then discarded it in another room while escaping.\n\nThe prosecution probably realized the shakiness of its case, for though the trial of Craig and Ragsdale was supposed to begin on June 23, the state asked that it be postponed until October. Craig's trial did not actually get underway until November 28, when the dramatis personae convened in Shelbyville. (It was decided to try Ragsdale later.)\n\nThe case against Craig was made up of suspicious circumstances that may be easily summarized. His association with Dr. Knabe had been souring in the weeks before her death. Judging from arguments heard by witnesses, he had wanted to break off the relationship. The prosecution contended that Dr. Craig had been seeing another woman who lived in Avon, Indiana. The other evidence included the word of the aforementioned Harry Haskett, who claimed he had seen Dr. Craig leaving Knabe's apartment building on the night of the murder. Dr. Eva Templeton told Detective Webster that Dr. Craig had returned home late that night and had changed his clothes; but Dr. Templeton heard this from the Craigs' housekeeper, so the information was secondhand. Nevertheless, Detective Webster was certain he had collared the right man. The Council of Women agreed and employed \"several of the best criminal lawyers in the state\" to assist in Dr. Craig's prosecution. The state's lawyers promised not to seek the death penalty.\n\nOn December 3 came one of the pivotal moments of the trial. Harry Haskett had seemed very confident that he had witnessed Dr. Craig in the act of fleeing Dr. Knabe's apartment, but once on the stand, he faltered and refused to positively identify Dr. Craig. Worse, three witnesses testified that they heard a scream issuing from the apartment after midnight. To believe Haskett had seen a homicidal Dr. Craig leaving the Delaware at 11:00 p.m. was to believe that Dr. Knabe had waited over an hour after her throat had been cut to start screaming.\n\nNotably lacking in accounts about the trial are mentions of the bloody handprint found on Dr. Knabe's pillow. Had the print matched either Craig or Ragsdale, it alone would have made the prosecution's case. At least Seth Nichols was not invited to testify.\n\nThe defense was so certain of acquittal that it made a motion to dismiss the case the moment the prosecution closed. Craig's attorney, Henry Spaan, claimed that the state had failed to build a case against the doctor. The judge agreed, and on December 9, he instructed the jury to dismiss the case. On the same day, an Indianapolis prosecutor had the indictment against Alonzo Ragsdale nolle prossed (a noble Latin phrase that means, legally, \"forget about it\").\n\nAnd that was the end of the Knabe case, probably forever. No one else was ever arrested or tried; no more evidence surfaced; no one made a deathbed confession. The story dropped from the papers and consequently from the mind of the public. Even the Council of Women finally gave up. We are left only with unanswered questions and the faint memory of a woman who, in a better world, would be remembered for her determination and accomplishments rather than for her unsolved murder.\n2\n\nPicnic of Death\n\nIn the early days of the Great Depression, the prosperous Simmons family lived in Simmons Corners near Greenfield. Every year, they met for a combination reunion and picnic. They chose to have their 1931 meeting at Memorial Park in Lebanon, sixty-five miles away, on June 21, the first day of summer. No doubt it seemed impossible to them, as it would to most, that anything evil could come from such a wholesome, harmless event.\n\nYet owing to the fallen nature of man, evil cannot be excluded from any event, not even a picnic. A guest noticed that a chicken sandwich included an extra ingredient: capsules full of mysterious white powder. He immediately left the park and took the item to a local doctor to see what was in it. The physician, who didn't seriously test the powder, guessed that it _might_ be quinine, an antimalarial painkiller. But even if the substance had been relatively harmless quinine, why were capsules of it in the sandwich?\n\nThe attendee hurried back to the picnic, but in his absence, five persons had done a foolhardy thing: they ate the sandwiches anyway, capsules and all. In short order, the five were miserably ill and rushed to a local hospital. Three survived: Lester Carr, Horace Jackson and a wealthy farmer named John W. Simmons. Mr. Simmons's daughter Alice Jean, age ten, died fifteen minutes after she arrived at the hospital, and another daughter, fourteen-year-old Virginia, passed away in the evening. The only other casualties of the picnic were blackbirds that expired after eating crumbs from the sandwiches.\n\nOn the day the girls died, Lebanon's coroner, G.A. Owsley, determined that there were only two opportunities for the poison\u2014later found to be strychnine\u2014to be placed in the sandwiches. \"Once was when they were made,\" he told reporters, \"and the other time was when the family stopped and left the automobile for more than an hour outside the home of Isaac Pollard, a distant relative here [in Lebanon].\"\n\nMr. and Mrs. Simmons. _From the_ Lebanon (IN) Reporter, _June 25, 1931. Courtesy of the_ Lebanon Reporter.\n\nNaturally, suspicion fell on Carrie Barrett Simmons, mother of the two deceased girls and maker of the offending sandwiches, who protested that she had no idea how the capsules got into them. Investigators found that strychnine had been sprinkled on the sweet pickled beets, which Mrs. Simmons also had prepared.\n\nCarrie Simmons was at home in Simmons Corners on June 29, grieving over her lost daughters and being consoled by friends, when police entered and arrested her. She went without protest.\n\nOn July 3, Mrs. Simmons was indicted on the charge of murdering her daughters. There were obvious logical problems with this theory that would present challenges to a prosecutor. Of the eighteen sandwiches she made for the picnic, twelve were poisoned. If she had plotted to kill her daughters in such a bizarre fashion, how could she be sure that they would take one of the contaminated sandwiches? How could she prevent someone she _didn't_ intend to murder from eating one? In fact, three persons other than her daughters did consume the food and nearly died. The lack of subtlety in the killer's chosen method was na\u00efve, almost darkly comical; could any sensible person actually believe that capsules in a sandwich would not be noticed? (Indeed, as already noted, one picnicker did see the capsules in his sandwich.) Perhaps the would-be killer surmised that any resulting deaths would be blamed on food poisoning caused by hot summer weather\u2014but it would not take a mental colossus to realize that there would be plenty of leftover evidence in uneaten sandwiches and in the bodies of the victims.\n\nVirginia and Alice Simmons. _From the_ Lebanon (IN) Reporter, _June 25, 1931. Courtesy of the_ Lebanon Reporter.\n\nDespite these nagging questions, Mrs. Simmons was the most likely suspect and went on trial in Lebanon on two charges of first-degree murder on September 27, after spending three months in jail. Perhaps that stretch in a cheerless cell made her long for fashionable clothes, because she entered the courtroom wearing the height of feminine fashion circa autumn 1931. Her husband had bought her black oxford shoes and an Empress Eugenie hat. Her family and most of her Hancock County neighbors expressed steadfast confidence in her innocence, but the situation was serious: she could go to the electric chair.\n\nIt appeared from the beginning that the state did not have much, if any, evidence against Carrie Simmons other than that she prepared the chicken sandwiches. Prosecutors were also hampered by their inability to produce even the ghost of a motive, financial or otherwise, as to why Mrs. Simmons might desire to send her girls to an early grave.\n\nOn October 1, the state called John Simmons to testify as a reluctant witness against his own wife. Two hours of questioning produced little information that benefited the prosecution, which attempted to show that Mrs. Simmons had tried to poison her daughters two weeks _before_ the picnic.\n\nNot much of interest happened at the trial until October 12, when Indianapolis druggist Charles Friedman testified that Mrs. Simmons had purchased sixty grains of strychnine at his store on June 18\u2014which, if true, suggested that Mrs. Simmons must have had tremendous faith in her murderous abilities if she bought so much poison only three days before committing very public murder and still thought she could fool the authorities. Friedman said the transaction stood out in his mind because it had been the first sale of that particular poison he had made in years. This seemed plenty incriminating, but on October 14, Louise Robinson of Bargersville testified that _she_ was the person who had bought the strychnine from the druggist. In fact, said Robinson, when she had confronted Friedman he recognized her as the actual purchaser and urged her to testify in favor of Mrs. Simmons. Robinson's testimony was considered so decisive that after she left the stand, a weeping Mrs. Simmons shook her hand, saying, \"You have saved my life.\"\n\nThe trial seemed to have more than its share of testimony from less-than-reliable druggists. Another was Harry Short of New Palestine, who claimed under oath that Horace Jackson, Mrs. Simmons's brother-in-law, had bought sixty grains of strychnine at _his_ pharmacy a few days before the picnic. The reader will recall that Jackson was one of the three men who barely survived eating the deadly sandwiches, so if Short's testimony were true, it had to mean that Jackson _poisoned himself as well as the Simmons sisters_. Under cross-examination, the formerly positive Harry Short admitted he was \"not positive\" Jackson was his customer after all.\n\nOn October 15, the jurors heard from Mrs. Claude White of Charlottesville, a housewife who was so interested in the case that she conducted an experiment that was neither scientific nor rigorous but interesting nevertheless. Using the Simmons family kitchen as a lab, she made twelve chicken sandwiches and put strychnine capsules in six of them. Then at the Pollard house in Lebanon, where the Simmonses had stopped for over an hour on June 21 on the way to the reunion, she put capsules in the other six. After waiting slightly over an hour, she drove to Memorial Park and examined the food. In the six sandwiches that were poisoned in the kitchen, the strychnine capsules had nearly dissolved; but in the six poisoned at the Pollard house, the capsules were almost intact. And since the sandwiches that killed the girls contained visibly whole capsules, this suggested that whoever tampered with the food did so at the Pollard residence.\n\nMr. and Mrs. Simmons arriving at the courthouse. _From the_ Lebanon (IN) Reporter, _September 30, 1931. Courtesy of the_ Lebanon Reporter.\n\nCarrie Simmons's sixteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, testified on October 22 that she personally witnessed her mother making the chicken sandwiches and saw her add no untoward ingredients.\n\nNear the end of the trial, the defense provided evidence that the police had questioned Mrs. Simmons with loud, abusive language late on the night when they arrested her and for several days following. They contended that this was the verbal equivalent of third-degree interrogation.\n\nThe Simmons family in the courtroom; Mrs. Simmons is seated at the table. _From the_ Lebanon (IN) Reporter, _November 6, 1931. Courtesy of the_ Lebanon Reporter.\n\nThe trial's highlight came on October 27, when Carrie Simmons took the stand. She said nothing that incriminated herself. The case was given to the jury on November 3; forty-eight hours and nine ballots later, the hopelessly deadlocked members voted eight to four for acquittal.\n\nThe hung jury was dismissed, and Carrie Simmons was taken back to jail. Usually in such a case, there is a second trial later. But at some point, attorneys representing the state must have realized that they did not have a winnable case. In May 1933, all charges against the farm mother were officially and finally dropped.\n\nThe poisoning of the Simmons girls, dubbed by the press as \"the state's most baffling murder case,\" will probably remain forever a mystery. What makes the case so puzzling is the very narrow window of opportunity to commit the crime. If Mrs. Simmons were innocent and did not add strychnine to the sandwiches\u2014and it appears that she didn't\u2014there were only a few other (rather improbable) ways the poison could get there. Did some unknown person have a grudge against the John Simmons family? If so, this person must have seen the family car at their relative Isaac Pollard's house in Lebanon\u2014not back home in Hancock County, as the capsules had not had sufficient time to dissolve; he must have contaminated the sandwiches and pickled beets on the spot, using a supply of strychnine capsules that he just happened to have with him, if we assume that most people don't walk around with a handy supply of deadly poison; and he did this while hoping no one witnessed him meddling with the food.\n3\n\nThe Farmhand and the Acrobat\n\nFirst let's meet the murder victim. She was Alice Martin, fifty-two years old, unmarried and famously grouchy with the hired help. She lived in a miserable shack incongruously located on gorgeous property: a sprawling 150-acre farm atop a bluff four miles from Derby, overlooking a spectacular view of the Ohio River. It was near the spot where Abraham Lincoln had once operated a Kentucky-to-Indiana ferryboat before he realized he was meant for greater things.\n\nMartin was a woman with a mysterious past. She had been a professional acrobat and aerialist for years under the exotic name Alice de Garno (de Garmo in some accounts). Her specialty was swinging on the trapeze, and she worked on the vaudeville circuit and for the Barnum and Bailey Circus; she traveled with the show in the United States, Europe, Canada and South America. A March 18, 1911 article in the _New York Clipper_ \u2014a newspaper that specialized in entertainment-related news\u2014suggests that part of her appeal was that she undressed for success: \"Alice de Garno, of aerial disrobing fame, was the added attraction and was well applauded. This lady does some good stunts on the trapeze, her disrobing part being one of the many.\"\n\nAround 1924, Alice retired from circus life. In 1929, upon the death of her father, William F. Martin, she moved into the family's bluff-top farm for the few remaining years of her life. Perhaps as a reaction to having spent years soaring above lascivious crowds, she now craved seclusion. She lived by herself in her ramshackle house, far from the nearest road and accessible only by a half-mile-long footpath that ran up the bluff. If she had any relatives, she didn't tell neighbors about them.\n\nMartin spent years amazing people on the trapeze, but once she settled down on the farm, she astounded the locals in an entirely different way. She wore men's clothing, and although petite and weighing only ninety pounds, her acrobatic musculature permitted her to do heavy farm work. Her mouth was a veritable profanity mill and the source of shame to many a man who _thought_ he knew how to curse; hers was the sort of salty language that only long years of experience in show business can confer. This rhetorical ability was not appreciated by her hired help, who had to bear the brunt of it when Martin upbraided them for perceived sloth or ineptitude.\n\nAlthough Martin had earned $400 per week at a time when the average American's salary was $750 per year, she lived in Dickensian squalor. The front rooms of her miserable house were choked with debris, broken furniture, bags of powdered cement and barbed wire. One room was used as a chicken roost. An upstairs room held a brand-new comfortable bed that had never been slept in\u2014it had the original wrapping and an unused mattress. She slumbered instead on an iron cot. Some considered Martin eccentric, but she explained that she intended to remodel her house someday and saw no need to fix the place up in the meantime. In any case, the neighbors all agreed that the former circus queen was a good farmer.\n\nDuring the last week of January 1934, Frank Sandage Jr., son of a tenant farmer, twice went to Alice Martin's home to deliver groceries and mail. She was nowhere to be seen either time. Her farmhand Ernest Wright, age thirty-two, told the boy that she had taken a trip to Plainfield, New Jersey. The police thought this explanation reeked of fish. They contacted officials in Plainfield who informed them that wherever Martin was, she was not there.\n\nSuspicions about Wright increased when he also disappeared after police commenced searching Martin's beloved farm. On February 3, the former aerialist's body was found in a shallow grave\u2014covered, perhaps symbolically, with manure\u2014near the barn. She had a fractured skull and a slit throat and had been dead a week. She was dressed in her usual masculine attire, an enchanting ensemble consisting of boots and two pairs of overalls, a shirt, a vest and a jacket. She shared her homemade grave with two blood-soaked gunnysacks. An inspection of her hovel turned up only sixteen dollars and a notable dearth of feminine clothing.\n\nSheriff Anton Voges noticed bloodstains on a block of wood behind the house. Someone had unsuccessfully tried to burn other bloodstains on the ground. Investigators found evidence that the murderer had intended to burn the house down, presumably with Martin's body inside, but then gave up and buried her. A freshly chopped hole in the floor, with a hatchet nearby, suggested that the killer thought Martin had hidden money in the house and searched for it.\n\nIt was no secret around Derby and nearby Tell City that Wright got along with his employer about as amicably as a tarantula and a pregnant wasp in a nature documentary; she was on his case constantly for neglecting chores. This animosity, plus the timing of Wright's disappearance, made him the prime suspect.\n\nA three-state manhunt for Wright ended \"not with a bang but a whimper,\" as T.S. Eliot would have said had he written true crime stories instead of squandering his talent on poetry. The suspect sheepishly surrendered at Cannelton on February 5. Since Sheriff Voges happened not to be at the jail at the time, his cute young daughter Julietta took custody of Wright and locked him up. In addition, a couple hundred people came to the jail when word got out that Wright had been arrested\u2014not to lynch, but merely to gawk. Unwilling to take chances, Sheriff Voges had his prisoner transported to Evansville.\n\nThe authorities were deeply interested in knowing, among other things, how it came to pass that Wright had Alice Martin's feed and livestock in his possession when he surrendered. This is the story he told them with a straight face. Had it been set to music, it could have made a comic opera:\n\nThe farmhand did not kill Alice Martin, he claimed, but he witnessed the murder. Two weeks before Martin's death, a stranger moved into the cottage\u2014Wright couldn't seem to remember his name despite having shared quarters with him for a fortnight, but he thought the man's name was Jack. This Jack fellow, or whatever his name was, must have been Alice's lover because he helped with the chores and she called him \"honey\" and \"sweetheart.\" On the night of January 25, Alice and Jack had a Homeric quarrel that ended with her braining and slashing, after which, Jack forced Ernest at gunpoint to bury his boss and spread manure on her grave. The dastard swore he would return soon and claim Alice's valuable farm as his own, since he had tricked her into signing a phony marriage certificate. Then, Jack fled for Louisville, leaving Ernest Wright behind as a living witness to the murder. Realizing that he looked suspicious, Wright himself abandoned the farm\u2014which of course didn't seem suspicious at all. But, drat the luck, while on the lam he met _another_ crazy man with a gun who forced Wright to accompany him to Tobinsport, where they stole a boat and rowed over to Kentucky. And whom should Wright and his abductor meet there? The mysterious Jack! The villains blindfolded Wright, put him in a car and released him at Cloverport, Kentucky. The fugitive hotfooted it back to Indiana; in Evansville, he found a wallet containing twenty-four fifty-dollar bills, with which he bought the feed and livestock on Alice Martin's farm. After this big adventure, Wright saw the error of flight and turned himself in at Cannelton.\n\nThe Evansville police believed Wright's yarn about as much as you do, and they interrogated him in such fashion as would give a modern civil libertarian a coronary. They denied him sleep and food and subjected him to constant questioning. They also told him that his fingerprints were on the club used to bash in Alice Martin's head. It was a lie, but Wright fell for it and confessed. This time around he told what _really_ happened: Martin had remonstrated to him in her sweet and ladylike way after he lost some tools and broke a wagon. For this, she deducted $2.75 from his wages. She snapped, \"I'll see you in hell before I will pay you!\" In a drunken rage, Wright decided that she must die for her temerity and unfairness.\n\nWright went on trial in March. Judge Oscar Minor, while deploring the Evansville police's strong-arm methods of gaining the confession, ruled that it could be admitted as evidence since the prisoner's constitutional rights had not been violated.\n\nThe jury brought in its verdict on March 23: Wright was guilty of first-degree murder. On March 29, he was sentenced to life in prison. Wright faced the court's judgment with more equanimity than he had shown Alice Martin, former queen of the air, when she insulted him for his incompetence.\n4\n\nMr. Wade and Mrs. Brown Hatch a Stupid Plot\n\nMary Brown and Joe Wade were in love. They were also married\u2014but not to each other, and that's where the trouble began. Was there any way the star-crossed lovers could be together? They thought and thought about the problem and decided there was a way: Joe would divorce his wife and then help Mary murder her husband, and nobody would put two and two together. Perhaps they should have thought a little harder.\n\nMary's husband was nearly twenty years older than she. He was John G.F. Brown, an evil carpenter (and how many evil carpenters could there have been throughout history?). They had married on August 25, 1867, when she was twenty and he was thirty-nine. They lived on a farm one mile south of Irvington, then a rural area on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Over the next thirteen years, they had three children and plenty of near misses with the law. To hear the neighbors tell it, Mr. and Mrs. Brown were united in both matrimony and murder. Persons to whom the Browns were indebted had a habit of disappearing. Mr. Hunter, a young German who lived in Seymour, had worked for Brown in 1875. A year later, he was last seen in the company of Mr. Brown, who owed Hunter back wages. Soon afterward, neighbors noticed Brown filling in a large hole in his garden, but nobody at the time made the connection between the disappearance and the digging. Ben Fletcher, half brother of Mary Brown, later reported seeing Hunter's jewelry in the Brown residence.\n\nNext on the list of the vanished was a nameless old man who started boarding with the Browns after the German's disappearance. His host borrowed $50. The old man was never seen again, but neighbors did observe Mr. Brown filling in another hole in his garden. Soon after this suspicious incident, Brown borrowed $300 from a physician; he was tardy in repaying it, so the doctor made a nonmedical house call. This was unwise. Later, when a farmhand reported seeing a mound resembling a grave in some nearby woods, Brown covered the spot with heavy rails. He had planted acorns there, he explained, and he placed the rails there to prevent hogs from rooting them up. It seems that the rails would also prevent the acorns from sprouting, but nobody asked questions.\n\nIn 1878, Dr. Levi Ritter found an unconscious man with a crushed skull lying on the road in proximity to the Brown farmhouse. Ritter took the man to the City Hospital in Indianapolis, but the injured man died two days later without naming his attacker. In addition to these mysterious occurrences, neighbors pondered the whereabouts of a boy adopted by the Browns. He, too, had disappeared one day and was never seen again.\n\nPerhaps gossipers exaggerated or even invented the couple's many dubious achievements, but one fact is clear: the Browns' neighbors feared them. By fair means or foul, Brown eventually was prosperous enough to own several pieces of property in Indianapolis. Whether or not the Browns were killers, they certainly kept bad company. Their house was used as headquarters by a gang of thieves. At last, the Browns were arrested, not for murder, but for possessing stolen goods. Both husband and wife and a number of accomplices were convicted. Mrs. Brown appears to have served little if any time, but Mr. Brown was sentenced to a year in Northern Prison on January 9, 1879.\n\nWhile Brown was in prison, his wife became enamored of Joe Wade, a local saloonkeeper whom she had met on July 2, 1879. Almost as soon as she met Wade, she asked him to move in with her on the grounds that she had been robbed recently and was afraid to stay alone. He found the suggestion agreeable and, within two months, had moved in permanently, having sold his \"notoriously bad\" Virginia Avenue saloon and divorced his wife. The happy man took on all the connubial duties of Mrs. Brown's absent husband, including tending to the livestock, chopping firewood and digging potatoes. I suppose Mrs. Brown specified which areas to avoid in the garden. She declared later under oath that she paid him for all this hard labor only with free clothing.\n\nAfter the passing of several months, one problem affected the lovers' paradise: Mr. Brown was due to be released from prison soon and would be coming home. Wade suggested that they flee the state, but Mrs. Brown said she could not bear to leave her children. Wade gallantly offered to \"steal them\" from Mr. Brown. The situation was at an impasse when Joseph Brown left jail and returned to Irvington on New Year's Eve 1879. Little did Brown realize that his wife and Joe Wade were plotting his removal.\n\nJoseph Wade. _From the_ National Police Gazette, _March 6, 1880_.\n\nUpon Mr. Brown's return, Wade did not flee the house but instead remained as a boarder. The husband took his set of carpenter's tools and got to work making repairs around the farm. Wade became jealous and threatened Mrs. Brown, saying he would kill her and her husband\u2014or so said Mrs. Brown, who later stated in court that she warned her husband of the threats.\n\nOn the evening of February 6, 1880, the entire family and Wade ate at the dinner table. After the meal, the two eldest children left to visit a neighbor named Smith. Wade asked Mr. Brown if he could borrow his buggy on the pretext that a Dr. Long in Irvington wanted to buy his (Wade's) horse. Brown cheerfully agreed, though he asked Wade why it was necessary to take a buggy when he could ride horseback.\n\nWhen on trial later, Mrs. Brown claimed she took no part in what happened next. As she cleaned the dishes, she said, her husband stood at the table whittling an axe handle. Glancing out the window, she saw the horse hitched to the gate, so she knew Wade had not left on his alleged errand. She took the remaining child, a baby, as she went to perform some chore outside. She heard a loud thumping noise coming from inside the house at the front door. Walking around the house, she saw her paramour standing between the house and the gate and her husband lying next to the buggy, his head covered with a blanket and his body on a red robe. The inference was that Wade had coaxed Brown to the front door, bludgeoned him with some object and then used the robe to drag his body out to the buggy.\n\nWhen Mrs. Brown approached, Wade said curtly, \"Take that child back in the house.\" She did so and then came back. She distinctly heard her husband groaning. As she told it, Mrs. Brown asked, \"Joe, what have you done?\" Like a villain in a stage melodrama, he embraced her and said, \"This is what love will do, darling. I love every hair on your head better than my life!\" She claimed that she wanted to take Mr. Brown into the house, but Wade retorted, \"No, this work must be finished now.\" Wade placed the fatally injured Brown in the buggy, said he was going to dump the body somewhere up the road and ordered Mrs. Brown to clean up any visible bloodstains. When he returned an hour later, they hurried to the house of their neighbor Smith in order to establish an alibi. Wade knew well that he would be suspect number one when Mr. Brown's corpse was discovered, but he thought the Smiths' testimony would keep him out of prison.\n\nMrs. Brown claimed that the next morning, she and Wade went to visit Smith again, the baby and a fiddle in tow. Wade promised he would make a good father for her children and cautioned her to act nonchalant before the Smiths. He also instructed her to tell the Smiths that her husband had gone to Indianapolis to buy a stove. That night she saw Wade burn a mallet, which he acknowledged was the murder weapon. The two then had some interesting experiences removing bloodstains from an area near the front gate, from the front doorstep and from the carpet. A couple days after the murder, Mrs. Brown went to Indianapolis, pretending to be searching for her lamented husband whom she feared had been robbed and murdered, for he had unaccountably disappeared with a large amount of money.\n\nMr. Brown's body was found not in Indianapolis, of course, but by a railroad crossing on Belt Road back home. Brown's head was crushed, and his buggy was nearby, still attached to his patient horse. Wade made disastrous yet darkly comical mistakes when arranging the crime scene. The buggy and the robes within were blood-spattered, yet the horse and outside of the buggy were unharmed; this would have been possible only if Brown had stepped out of his buggy, got hit by a train, climbed back inside the buggy, bled all over it, then climbed out again and expired beside the track.\n\nAlso, Wade had turned Brown's pockets inside out in order to suggest he had been the victim of a robbery, and then apparently changed his mind and decided to make it look as though Brown had been hit by a train. But he forgot to restore Brown's pockets to their original condition. Since trains seldom run over people and then rob them, authorities were suspicious. Conceivably, the train had run over Brown and some greedy passerby had plundered the corpse, but murder was the more likely possibility given local rumors about the closeness between Joe Wade and Mrs. Brown. The grieving widow was called to testify before the coroner; she told the story as Wade had coached her. But then she voluntarily testified a second time and confessed the truth. Her lover had started extorting her for money, and she realized their relationship might not work out. To put it kindly, not everyone was convinced Mrs. Brown was as guiltless as she maintained. It was largely suspected that she wanted to marry Joe Wade and inherit her late husband's money and property.\n\nJoe Wade was arrested and sent to the Marion County jail. As if to prove that life imitates cartoons, Mrs. Brown slipped her lover some saws and a file to help make his escape. Wade was caught with the contraband and betrayed Mrs. Brown's confidence by admitting that she had given him the tools. In short order, the self-made widow was also jailed. She testified at Wade's murder trial on April 22, 1880. She spoke in such a low tone that the jurymen could barely hear her, and they sat only three feet from the witness stand. Perhaps incomprehensibility was part of her strategy.\n\nThe usual labyrinth of contradictory testimony ensued at the trial: a number of neighbors testified that her reputation for truth and veracity was very poor, but cross-examination suggested that many of the negative comments were based on hearsay. On the other hand, Wade had a reputation for being peaceable but had been known to be violent when manhandling rowdies in his saloon. Several incriminating letters allegedly written by Wade to Mrs. Brown were proved to be forgeries at the trial. Despite this evidence in his favor, the _Louisville Courier-Journal_ 's Indianapolis correspondent wrote: \"[I]t is the universal opinion that while Wade is not as guilty as Mrs. Brown, yet he will hang. And if Wade receives the death sentence, Mrs. Brown will also, and the two miserable wretches will swing from the same scaffold.\"\n\nMary Brown. _From the_ National Police Gazette, _March 6, 1880_.\n\nThe journalist rightly stated that things were looking dark for Wade. His attorneys claimed that he was an accessory after the fact\u2014that is, they claimed Mrs. Brown planned and committed the murder of her husband, and Wade was guilty only of concealing evidence afterward. Few believed it, and Wade's only hope for a life sentence lay in a rumor that one member of the jury was opposed to capital punishment. His hope was dashed when the jury rendered its verdict on April 30: the sole juror who held out for life imprisonment was persuaded to vote for the death penalty. Wade remarked that the verdict was about what he expected; he still insisted that Mrs. Brown had murdered her husband and that he had only tried to shield her. He philosophically observed that in any case, he was a marked man, since no jury would believe that Mrs. Brown had committed the crime all by herself.\n\nMrs. Brown expressed delight with Wade's death sentence; truly, the bloom was off the romance. She claimed that Wade got what was coming to him since he \"parted her from her children and murdered her husband.\" These sentiments were the direct opposite of those expressed in love letters she had written to him just after the murder. (Mrs. Brown claimed she could not have written the letters, as she was illiterate, but during her trial, the state brought out several witnesses proving the contrary.)\n\nMrs. Brown went to trial in early July 1880. She had testified against Wade at his trial, and now he testified against her. As he told it, she had become infuriated when, on the night of Mr. Brown's murder, he told her their affair was over and he intended to move to Michigan. Later that night, he said, he saw Mrs. Brown fatally strike her husband on the head with a mallet as he stood at the kitchen table, whittling an axe handle. Horrified, Wade bolted from the house, but Mrs. Brown managed to catch up with him at the front gate while simultaneously dragging her husband's corpse. Improbable, yes, but the story got even better. Wade testified that despite having just witnessed a grotesque murder, he was still intent on riding to Irvington to sell his horse. He prepared to take Mr. Brown's buggy since his late host had given his permission, and besides, he was dead now anyway and would not care. Mrs. Brown, she of the Amazonian strength, cried: \"Joe Wade, if you leave me you'll rue the day. You're a man, and I'm a woman; you've been staying here, and nobody will suspect me of doing this.\" Seeing the wisdom in her words, Wade forgot about his errand and helped his sweetheart wrap robes around the corpse and load it into the buggy. They drove away, Mrs. Brown at the reins; she had cleverly put on some of Wade's clothes so that if they were spotted, eyewitnesses would think she was a man. The pair dropped the body at the train tracks, and on returning home, they cleaned up the murder site and swore each other to secrecy. Then, they visited their neighbors, the Smiths, in order to establish an alibi. It was Mrs. Brown who burned the evil mallet, Wade insisted. After testifying, Wade said to a reporter from the _Indianapolis News_ : \"The only thing I have to regret is that I ever allowed that woman to get the hold on me she did. I tell you she is terrible.\"\n\nThus the jury at Mrs. Brown's trial heard a story almost diametrically opposed to one she had told at Wade's trial. The conclusion could be drawn, and was, that the two were equally guilty and trying to shift the blame on each other. The trial closed on July 10; the jury retired after hearing strong arguments from the prosecution and defense and after receiving careful instructions from the judge \"defining the distinction between the several grades of homicide and the punishment prescribed.\"\n\nTwo days later, the jury announced its decision: Mrs. Brown was guilty and should hang, contrary to the widespread belief that the jury would never recommend that a woman be executed. Mrs. Brown, who had expected a life sentence at worst, was \"paralyzed with horror.\" Ten minutes after the verdict was read, she said to a reporter: \"My poor children! They will be disgraced forever.\" (\"Why didn't she remember them when she killed their father?\" demanded Wade.) Then she begged the reporter to ask Joe Wade \"to tell the truth and not let me die.\" The journalist obligingly went to Wade's cell, but the prisoner displayed no concern for anyone but himself: \"[I]f she had only been sent to the penitentiary, I would have gotten a new trial. But the jury couldn't do anything else. They couldn't hang me and let her live.\" After expressing a fanciful wish that the ghost of the late Mr. Brown could have attended the trial and told what had really happened to shorten his days, Wade added: \"Mrs. Brown can hang, as she deserves to. I believe in justice, though I have not been treated with justice.\"\n\nAs Joe Wade waited in prison for his execution date, he committed another crime by inflicting a couple awful poems on the public via the newspapers. The first, published by the _Indianapolis Herald_ , laid the blame for the murder on the shoulders of his ex-girlfriend. Three verses will more than suffice:\n\n_and when She committed_\n\n_It was few words I could say_\n\n_She said if you leave me now my dear_\n\n_you will always rue the day_.\n\n_I never murdered John_ [sic] _Brown_\n\n_or any man in my life_\n\n_I did not want his money_\n\n_Neither did I want his wife_\n\n_She is a murderess that I know_\n\n_as she told me this before_\n\n_She never Stuck in front she Said_\n\n_but the first lick killed him dead_.\n\nMrs. Brown's three children were adopted by her brother-in-law, who forbade them to visit her prison cell. The Brown property was purchased by a Mr. White, who reported that he received up to forty visitors per day, including some from such foreign places as Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Michigan. They all thirsted to see the place where the famous Brown-Wade murder had occurred.\n\nIn September, Mary Brown and Joe Wade entered the courtroom once again, this time to receive their final sentencing: they were to be hanged from the same scaffold on October 27. \"Awful,\" said the _Courier-Journal_ in a headline, \"But No More So Than Was the Horrible Murder of Old Man Brown.\" Both prisoners protested their innocence before being led back to jail. Mrs. Brown even swooned several times, as women in the nineteenth century were fully expected to do in stressful times.\n\nBrown and Wade still had two chances to avoid the noose: the Indiana Supreme Court could decide to have them retried, and the governor might show executive clemency. As of October 23, neither seemed to be forthcoming, and Sheriff Pressly of Indianapolis purchased new ropes and had the gallows overhauled in preparation for the big day. The _Indianapolis People_ remarked, \"We can hardly bring our minds to believe that Mrs. Brown will ever be hung [ _sic_ ], and yet cannot see how Wade can well be hung [ _sic_ ] unless Mrs. Brown is also. The public will hardly consent that one shall be taken and the other left, and yet the hanging of a woman is repugnant to everyone.\"\n\nThe set date for the hangings came and went\u2014but there were no hangings. It was reported on October 28 that Joe Wade had converted to Catholicism. Governor James D. Williams died on November 20, and his last official act had been to sign a respite for Wade. The Supreme Court of Indiana granted Mary Brown a new trial, to begin in December. It took three and a half days to select a jury, a length of time \"entirely unparalleled in the annals of jurisprudence in Marion County.\" On December 29, Joe Wade again testified against Mrs. Brown. On January 10, 1881, she was sentenced to life in prison. Several years later, she broke out of jail but voluntarily returned the same day. I have been unable to determine whether she fully served her life sentence.\n\nWhile Mrs. Brown endured her second trial, a movement started to spare Wade's life. He was granted a hearing in the Supreme Court of Indiana in February 1881, pled guilty and had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The verdict appears to have been unpopular; the _Indianapolis News_ remarked, \"The Supreme Court, instead of using its powers to enforce the plain purpose of the law, has systematically used them to divert it.\"\n\nFor the next fourteen years, Wade languished in jail. In March 1895, Governor Claude Matthews granted a pardon due to the prisoner's poor health. The formerly robust bartender stepped out of the prison, coughing and wheezing, in the valley of the shadow of death and undoubtedly \"ruing the day,\" to use Mrs. Brown's phrase, that she first stepped into his saloon looking for a roommate.\n5\n\nA Hoosier Makes a Spectacle of Himself in Cincinnati\n\nCharles D. Evans, age fifty, did not get along with his wife, Ellen, age forty-two\u2014no, not at all. That's what neighbors in Indianapolis said when their opinions on the matter became a topic of interest to the authorities. But that was in 1933, and the Evans' domestic warfare had started long before then.\n\nMr. Evans, a real estate salesman and contractor, lived with his wife at 1321 Congress Avenue. He was industrious and owned fourteen pieces of property; she operated a hand laundry in their basement. However, the Great Depression harmed his business interests and properties' values, and he took control of his wife's earnings. This did nothing to increase marital harmony. Neighbors often heard them arguing. Mrs. Evans believed her husband unfaithful and hired a detective to watch him. Apparently, her suspicions were confirmed, because she filed for divorce in February 1933, after thirty-two years of squabbling.\n\nThe couple separated, but by mid-March, they were living in their Congress Avenue residence again. The housemaid, Dorothy Hill, said they had a vociferous argument on March 16. When Hill came to work the next morning, Mrs. Evans wasn't there. Mr. Evans said his wife had left the house in a fit of pique in the middle of the night and had not yet returned.\n\nOn March 19, Mr. and Mrs. Evans were traveling through Cincinnati, Ohio, a city famous for its early founding by hog butchers. Mr. Evans had been born in the city and perhaps had decided to pay a social call on his mother, Alice Hervey, or his brother Ben Evans, both of whom lived in the suburb of Norwood\u2014the former on Forest Avenue and the latter on Melrose Avenue. He was destined not to visit either. Mrs. Evans was making the trip in uncharacteristic silence. Mr. Evans undoubtedly was fuming; he carried a letter from an attorney advising him to pay his wife fifty dollars in monthly alimony.\n\nEvans drove south on Hamilton Avenue and slowed down as he approached floodwaters crossing the road. A sharp-eyed motorcycle police officer, Elmer Joyce, noticed that his sedan bore an expired license plate reading \"Indiana 1932.\"Joyce ordered Evans to pull over at the east end of the Ludlow Avenue viaduct.\n\n\"What about those tags?\" asked Officer Joyce.\n\n\"Oh, I have until April 1 to get new ones.\"\n\n\"In whose name is the car registered?\"\n\n\"My wife's.\"\n\nYet Mrs. Evans was nowhere to be seen.\n\nThe policeman noticed that Evans seemed excessively nervous; also, that a tarpaulin was covering something in the back seat. This suggested he was guilty of something more than a mundane violation. \"A possible bootlegger!\" thought Officer Joyce, who detained Evans while two other policemen, Joseph Cole and Major \"Tip\" O'Neil, arrived on the scene.\n\n\"What have you got in the back of your machine?\" asked Joyce.\n\n\"Household goods.\"\n\nThe policemen removed the tarp, revealing a wash boiler, cooking utensils, kitchen pots and baskets. Joyce lifted the lid off one of the pots, expecting to find liquor. Instead it contained something cold, pink and fleshy.\n\n\"What is this?\" he asked.\n\n\"A ham,\" said Evans. \"I killed a hog.\"\n\n\"Where is your wife?\" asked Joyce as a terrible possibility entered his mind\u2014for he had noticed also that Evans's face was scratched.\n\n\"In Indianapolis,\" said Evans. Next thing the officers knew, he had removed a straight razor from his pocket and was cutting away at his own wrist and throat. Blood cascaded down his shirt and coat.\n\nEvans was no lightweight at 235 pounds, plus he had a weapon. The police shot at his arm to stop his suicide attempt and missed. They tried manual force, but he was so powerfully built that he held off the three would-be rescuers with one arm while slashing his throat repeatedly with the other. Meanwhile, a deeply interested crowd gathered. They had come to see the flood but saw instead a death struggle between an armed giant of a man and the policemen.\n\nUnable to stop Evans and afraid to get too close to him, the police moved to Plan B: they pleaded with him to kindly cease butchering himself in public. By this point, Evans had lost so much blood that the battle reached an impasse. He confessed that he had killed his wife, cut her into fourteen pieces, packed them in cooking pots, loaded them in the auto and motored from Indianapolis to Cincinnati. \"She tried to shoot me,\" he hoarsely explained.\n\nHe took $152 from his wallet and tried to hand it to the police, saying, \"Give this to my mother.\" The officers told him that they refused to come any closer as long as he held the razor. He snarled, put the bills back in his pocket, sank the razor into his jugular vein and expired on the spot.\n\nThe body of Evans, and the fourteen parts comprising his wife, were delivered to the Cincinnati morgue. The upper section of her torso, one arm and one leg were in a copper-lined wash boiler lined with newspapers. The bushel baskets, also lined with paper, held Mrs. Evans's head, her lower torso and her other arm and leg. Two galvanized buckets contained her stomach. The officials at the coroner's department determined that she had been dead several hours and must have been murdered, dismembered, disemboweled and packaged at her home. Indianapolis detectives confirmed the theory when they checked the Evans's house and found flecks of dried blood on the white bathroom walls and cloth rags in the furnace that had failed to burn because they were saturated with blood. Also, a tarpaulin Evans was known to have used to cover a floor-sanding machine was missing. He must _really_ have not wanted to shell out that fifty bucks a month for alimony.\n\nThe professional dissectors of the human body at the Cincinnati coroner's office expressed amazement at what an expert job Evans had done:\n\n_Each_ [section was] _cut carefully at a point of articulation so that no bones had to be sawed or hacked through. The torso had been cut in two just below the ribs. The spine was severed also in a careful manner. Coroner M. Scott Kearns, Dr. J.M. Patterson, coroner's pathologist, and Dr. Edward Dulle...who examined the parts, declared they had never seen a more careful and complete job of dismembering at points of articulation. The legs, arms and neck had been cut through at the joints where a knife would do the work_.\n\nWhere Evans picked up such precise anatomical knowledge remains a mystery. So do his planned ultimate destination on the motor trip and how he intended to dispose of his wife's remains. The fact that he packed her in kitchen pots and baskets and brought utensils with him opens the imagination to some unpleasant, though colorful, possibilities.\n\nThe _Cincinnati Enquirer_ paid the Hoosier salesman a dubious compliment by calling the spectacle he made of himself \"a suicide which for gruesomeness surpasses anything in local annals since the slaying of Pearl Bryan in 1896.\" But that's another story for another book.\n6\n\nHazel Triumphant!\n\nFrank McNally of Hammond was a factory worker, age fifty-four. He was pleased when he married Hazel Hall, an attractive woman only twenty-six years old who looked even younger. Frank married Hazel for a reason other than her youth and attractiveness: more than anything else, he wanted to be a father. His fondest desire was fulfilled\u2014twice over, in fact\u2014when Hazel gave birth to twins, a son and a daughter, in December 1921.\n\nHazel was proud of the babies, too, and did all the expected things: she nursed them, rocked them, bathed them and took them for rides in a baby carriage. Like any happy father, Frank carried his twins around and doted over them. He never fed, bathed or changed them, but that was not unusual in 1921, when such activities were by and large considered \"women's work.\" Anyway, Hazel insisted on doing these chores and refused help from anyone else.\n\nFrank was slow to get suspicious, but after a while, he had to admit Hazel was behaving strangely. She was secretive when ladies came by to see the children and wanted to make a fuss over them. When company came, she invariably said the infants were asleep and could not be bothered. She kept the babies in the dark all the time, a circumstance that provoked much whispering among the neighbors.\n\nOne neighbor, Mrs. Agnes Sphirmer, became so doubtful that she spoke to Frank McNally in private. He agreed that he would let her sneak into the house and inspect the children next time Mrs. McNally was absent.\n\nWhen the opportunity arose, Mrs. Sphirmer entered the twins' room and saw two small forms lying in bed. The cover was pulled back enough that she could see the face of one: stiff, unblinking and expressionless. A wave of horror racked Mrs. Sphirmer's foundation. Were the babies dead? But closer inspection revealed the truth: they were not dead\u2014they were china dolls with straw-stuffed bodies!\n\nFrank's reaction when he found that the children of which he was so proud were actually toys can only be imagined. He remembered that a month after they were born, Hazel had taken them on a mysterious trip to Chicago. There was only one conclusion he could reach: she had murdered her own children and fiendishly replaced them with dolls, unaware that her husband was a match for her cleverness\u2014or more so\u2014and eventually would figure out her ruse.\n\nSo now it was October 1922, and Frank's pretty young wife was sitting in the Hammond courthouse on charges of having murdered her twins\u2014charges brought by the grieving husband himself. During the trial, Hazel did not seem worried by the gravity of the charges against her; in fact, many observers thought she seemed to be having a pretty darned good time.\n\nOne witness, nurse Mary Griffith, testified that she had visited the McNallys two days after the twins were born. She noted that even then, Hazel would not allow anyone to touch them. Mrs. Griffith had not actually handled the babies, and she could not testify that they were human. She explained, \"Mrs. McNally would not let me tend to the babies. I frequently saw her nurse them\u2014at least she appeared to nurse them.\"\n\nWhen Chief of Police Bunde testified, the truth came out. He stated that after Mr. McNally pressed murder charges against his wife, he had questioned Hazel, who told him that she never had actually given birth. She had faked pregnancy, faked childbirth, faked breast feeding, faked bathing the \"babies,\" faked everything\u2014all to hoax her miraculously gullible (to put it politely) husband.\n\nWhy did she do it? An operation she had had before she married Frank rendered her infertile, but she hated to disappoint her husband, who wanted children so badly. So she bought two dolls, pretended to give birth and fooled him good\u2014for several months. The unanswered question: How long did Hazel think she would be able to get away with her scam?\n\nIf Frank McNally felt somewhat akin to an ass, he was not the only one. Mrs. Griffith, the nurse, was loath to admit she had been fooled. She was sure she had seen a spot of blood on one baby's cheek. When Griffith was asked under oath if she held any grudges against Mrs. McNally, this exchange entered the record:\n\n\"Well, it makes me mad to have her say she had dolls when I know she had twins.\"\n\n\"Makes you mad?\"\n\n\"Well, to sit up there nine days with dolls makes me feel foolish.\"\n\n\"You mean it hurt your reputation as a nurse to say you nursed dolls?\"\n\n\"Dolls don't bleed.\"\n\nDr. Cyrenus Campbell, who had attended Mrs. McNally during her fictitious pregnancy, was allowed not to testify when the defense objected that such testimony \"would be violating professional secrets.\" The physician was likely quite relieved that he was excused from having to answer questions about how his patient had pulled the wool over his eyes most egregiously.\n\nIn the end, Judge Henry Cleveland ruled that no one proved there ever had been any real babies, let alone that Hazel had murdered them. She was acquitted on October 20, to thunderous applause of 150 female spectators and probably not a few ribald jests from the menfolk aimed at her clueless husband, who noticeably fidgeted after the verdict was pronounced, standing on one foot and then the other.\n\nAs spectators filed out of the courtroom, Frank McNally insisted that his wife actually had given birth to twins the previous December. Meanwhile, Hazel walked into the nearest department store and walked out triumphantly with her purchase: two enormous life-size dolls.\n7\n\nPursued by a Monster\n\nIt is difficult to imagine a more alarming scene than that which confronted farmer William Starbuck when he returned to his house, located a half mile from Greensboro, on the night of July 9, 1904. He realized with mounting horror that his wife, Mollie, was nowhere to be seen\u2014but she could be heard screaming in the forest. And where was their four-month-old baby, Beulah?\n\nStarbuck ran in the direction of the noise and found his wife and child in an abandoned well one-eighth of a mile from their home. Mrs. Starbuck was hysterical and battered; the baby was dead.\n\nThe stricken man called in a doctor who could do but little. Mollie remained delirious and never regained enough lucidity to answer questions about her attacker. She shouted, \"What are you doing here?\" and \"What are you going to do?\" She did not recognize her husband and referred to being chased by a monster. At times, she raved so violently that she had to be restrained.\n\nShe died on July 11. At the inquest, the coroner noted bruising on her throat and the baby's as though they were choked. The baby had drowned while her mother died of \"acute congestion of the lungs\" caused by exposure to the cold well water and excessive screaming.\n\nAs mother and child were buried in the same grave, detectives got to work. They were baffled by the crime's senselessness: Mrs. Starbuck had been neither robbed nor sexually assaulted, and the murder of the infant was as pointless as any murder could be. In fact, they were not even certain the Starbucks _had_ been murdered. Mollie was bruised and scratched, to be sure, but none of the injuries seemed sufficient enough to cause death. Could she have received her injuries by falling into the well? The house was not in disarray, nor were there any signs of disturbance outside, indicating that no struggle had taken place. A man who had passed by the house twenty minutes before Mr. Starbuck came home said all seemed calm and quiet. Bloodhounds were brought in and sniffed out nothing unusual.\n\nMrs. Starbuck. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _July 24, 1904. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nThese circumstances convinced some that Mrs. Starbuck, a new mother, had fallen victim to what we now call postpartum depression. Her physician, Dr. R.A. Smith, believed that after slaving over a hot stove all day and tending to the baby, Mollie Starbuck went insane and jumped into the well with her child\u2014not with the intention of killing her, but to protect her from the monster Mollie thought was pursuing them. The doctor's hypothesis sounded convincing to the coroner, who ruled that the Starbucks' deaths were the tragic result of the mother's \"puerperal insanity.\"\n\nThe theory, ingenious as it was, required one to believe that Mrs. Starbuck had throttled her baby (depressingly possible) and herself (not so easy), and by the end of July, few people could be found who believed it. Mr. Starbuck had ideas of his own. Some instinct told him that a twenty-one-year-old acquaintance named Haley Gipe was to blame, and he told the police so.\n\nThey summarily arrested Gipe and took him to the jail at New Castle. There he sang like a canary and, according to one account, narrowly avoided being the guest of honor at a lynching. He confessed that he was part of a three-man plot that went awry. The men heard that Mr. Starbuck sold some hogs and had hidden several hundred dollars. Their idea was to perform a home invasion and _scare_ Mollie into handing over the money\u2014but they did not intend to harm anyone. Gipe insisted that he had not actually broken into the house but had merely agreed to keep the plan secret. Another conspirator, he said, was sixty-five-year-old William Lockridge. Gipe refused to name the third party.\n\nBy the end of August, three more men were arrested: Lewis Wales, Frank Wales and Joe George Lanham. The charges against them and Lockridge were eventually dropped. That left only one person to go to trial: Haley Gipe, who had only too obviously done his best to shift the blame onto anyone but himself. He was indicted by the grand jury in October; a _Courier-Journal_ account includes the curious statement, \"As yet he is ignorant of the serious charge that has been placed against him,\" which suggests that the papers knew more about the trouble Gipe was in than Gipe himself did. He found out the hard way on November 1, when he was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder.\n\nOnly a month later, on December 1, a jury convicted Gipe on the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter rather than the original charge. It appears the members believed Gipe's story that he meant only to _scare_ Mrs. Starbuck, not _kill_ her. A popular speculation, which the jury may have heard, was that Gipe had so frightened Mrs. Starbuck by breaking into her house that she went insane and jumped down the well with her daughter, undoubtedly leaving him feeling foolish. His indeterminate sentence was two to twenty-one years in the State Reformatory at Jeffersonville. Under the circumstances, he got off lucky.\n\nHowever, this was not good enough for Gipe. At the reformatory, he maintained his innocence and refused to work. After a round of punishment, Gipe straightened up and became a \"good convict,\" an outcome that will not surprise anyone familiar with the concept of \"discipline\" as practiced in prisons of that era. Nevertheless, Gipe swore he'd take his case to the Supreme Court of Indiana to get a new trial. He was so obnoxious about it that a newspaper called him \"one of the most advertised men who ever wore stripes at the Indiana Reformatory.\" As a result of his efforts, some came to believe\u2014as they always will\u2014that an innocent man had been railroaded; in particular, many in Henry County believed he was the pawn of an unscrupulous detective from Ohio. His case was reopened in March 1905.\n\nGipe's retrial took place the following November. He might as well have not bothered. On December 18, the jury returned a second verdict of manslaughter and back he went to jail, where he had many years to reflect on the fact that he was the type of man who, at worst, would toss a young mother and baby down a well or, at best, would frighten them into taking the plunge.\n8\n\nJustice, Possibly\n\nFred and Caroline Buente were wealthy farmers who lived with their family six miles west of Evansville. They may have thought, as many people do, that raising their nine-year-old daughter, Lizzie, away from the big city would keep her from finding evil influences. But on Wednesday, May 12, 1897, evil influences found Lizzie.\n\nOn that date, Lizzie was looking after cattle in an oat field. Someone crept out of the forest, raped the girl and left her for dead. The _Evansville Courier_ described her injuries in no uncertain detail:\n\n[H] _er head was split open and her brains were scattered over the leaves and grass. Her clothes were torn from her lower limbs and the abdomen badly mutilated...The back of the head was mashed almost to a pulp and the brains were oozing out. Her eyes and mouth were filled with mud...The child's lower limbs were horribly bruised and mutilated, the abdomen having been mutilated with a knife before the rapist accomplished his awful work_.\n\nThe weapon was never determined, but examiners thought it was a hoe.\n\nLizzie was found unconscious an hour later and died in the afternoon without regaining consciousness. With her died not only her own hopes and dreams but also those of her parents and friends and all the good her descendants might have done on earth.\n\nThe outraged community got to work immediately. Neighborhood farmers organized posses, including one consisting of three hundred men; if we read between the lines of contemporary news reports, they brought along more rope than one would think necessary, despite a _Courier_ editorial urging that no one resort to vigilantism. The county commissioners held a meeting and offered a reward for the killer's capture. Judge Mattison ordered Sheriff Charles Covert to import R.T. Carter's famous bloodhounds from Seymour.\n\nThe bloodhounds followed a scent to Mount Vernon but lost the trail there. Several \"suspicious Negroes\" were arrested and jailed at that town. When the dogs were allowed to sniff the prisoners, they were interested in the scent of one particular man, Elbert Standard of Princeton, Kentucky. Blood spots allegedly were detected on his clothing; the story was later proved false. He was hustled off to the jail at Evansville for safekeeping. Standard protested that he had done nothing worse than sleep in one of the Buente stables. Police noted that his shoeprints did not match those left at the crime scene.\n\nOn May 14, Standard seemed cleared when word came that the right man\u2014a black man named John Spaulding\u2014had been caught at Morganfield, Kentucky. Nevertheless, mobs expressed a heartfelt desire to get their hands on Standard, and when Sheriff Covert took a special train to Morganfield, he took Standard with him. This was much to the disappointment of about three thousand people who surrounded the county jail and broke down the gate, so great was their wish to have a word with Elbert Standard.\n\nRumor held that a mob intended to travel from Mount Vernon to Kentucky to deal with Spaulding before Indiana authorities could pick him up, but the Morganfield jail was strongly guarded and any would-be lynchers were discouraged. A \"mob\" of six men did materialize, but their actions were limited to walking from the train depot to the jail, seeing the armed guards and then returning sheepishly to the depot.\n\nNo explanation was forthcoming in the papers as to the fate of Elbert Standard.\n\nBy this point, most onlookers were convinced of Spaulding's innocence. A prominent Morganfield attorney, Honorable H.D. Allen, interviewed the prisoner and vowed to defend him. On May 20, the examining trial was held to determine whether Spalding should be extradited to Evansville. Twenty-five witnesses came from Indiana, including Lizzie Buente's parents. A half dozen of them swore they saw Spaulding walking to Mount Vernon from the direction of the murder site. But there was no proof of guilt, and the Kentucky court discharged Spaulding for insufficient evidence.\n\nThe authorities in Evansville were displeased with this verdict and vowed to rearrest Spaulding. They wired back to Indiana requesting a warrant charging him with murder. But it appears nothing more was done.\n\n\"It may be,\" said the _Courier_ as far back as May 14, two days after the crime, \"that the murderer may never have justice meted out to him, but it will be no fault of the authorities and the law abiding people of Vanderburgh County.\" Chief of Detectives Brennecke was convinced the child's attacker hopped a freight train after committing the crime and was possibly hundreds of miles away.\n\nActing on the assumption that Lizzie's killer must be black, the authorities and Lizzie's neighbors may have let the real murderer escape. The _Courier_ noted on May 16:\n\n_There is no proof to justify the statement that Lizzie Buente was killed by a Negro, as the majority of people believe. Many of the neighbors of Mr. Buente believe that the stylishly dressed white man who was seen in the vicinity about 10 o'clock Wednesday morning committed the murder. What makes this theory seem reasonable is the fact that this man has not been seen since nor_ [have] _his whereabouts been ascertained_.\n\nFred Buente mentioned a creepy occurrence that took place on May 16, four days after his daughter's murder. He and his brother-in-law, Mr. Schnerr, were standing on the railroad tracks near the Buente farm when they saw a stranger approaching. Buente and Schnerr hid in the shade and watched the figure, who carried something under his arm. When the man arrived near the murder site, he stopped, hung his head and repeatedly said, \"No, no, I must not do it.\" After this display, the man continued walking to Evansville. For some reason, Mr. Buente did not follow him, a decision he later regretted. Had the killer returned to the scene of the crime?\n\nThe murder of Lizzie Buente was forever unsolved and justice was not done.\n\nOr was it?\n\nOn September 18, 1897, Gus Walters, presumably white and described as \"a young man of good family,\" was found guilty in Evansville of the attempted rape of a six-year-old girl named Frances Weinert on July 6. On September 28, he was sentenced to the Indiana Reformatory for a term of two to fourteen years. The city's correspondent remarked, perhaps na\u00efvely and perhaps not, in the pages of the _Louisville Courier-Journal_ :\n\n_It is a queer coincidence that only a few months ago, when this community was startled with the story of the assault and murder of Lizzie Buente, a little country girl, Gus Walters led a posse in a bloodhound chase for the villain who committed the crime. Only a few weeks later he was arrested for attempting a similar crime_.\n\nIt is possible the Evansville authorities put away a budding young serial killer without knowing it. We know now, as the people of 1897 did not, that a common characteristic of such murderers is their innate need to participate in the hunt for themselves\u2014just as perhaps Walters did after Lizzie Buente was killed.\n9\n\nThe Honeymooners\n\nJames and Lillie May Mastison, an attractive young couple, were married on July 9, 1901\u2014possibly under the encouragement of a shotgun, because only six months later, in January 1902, Lillie gave birth. Soon afterward, the newlyweds moved into the home of Lillie's father, William H. Proctor, at 1418 South Street, New Albany.\n\nAt 9:30 on the evening of Saturday, August 23, 1902, the noticeably unhappy couple got off a streetcar and was walking to Mr. Proctor's house. A nearby patrolman, Jacob Fess, heard seven shots ring out. Investigating, he found Mrs. Mastison crumpled on the ground, shot four times, including once through the heart, dead at only nineteen years old. Mr. Mastison was absent but returned a few minutes later; he said he had run to a telephone to call for help.\n\nThe lighting was poor in that section of the city, but three witnesses\u2014a nurse named Mary Keene, Dr. Ritter and R.B. Frazee\u2014were close enough to hear a woman cry, \"For God's sake, don't kill me! I have a little baby to care for.\" A man answered, \"I'll finish you now.\"\n\nThe pool of suspects was small\u2014in fact, there was only one: Lillie's husband, James, a twenty-three-year-old painter. He told the police that an unknown man had shot at the couple, hitting him in the wrist and killing his wife. What's more, he had the superficial flesh wound to prove it. Patrolmen Jacob Fess and John Rhinehart did not believe Mastison and arrested him at the murder scene.\n\nThe more authorities investigated, the worse Mastison looked. Inquiries established that he and his wife had been \"on the outs\" with each other for a while and had undertaken a violent argument on the Thursday night before her death.\n\nLillie Mastison. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _August 27, 1902. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nOn the day of the shooting, the Mastisons were supposed to meet downtown. Instead, Lillie went to the business district to make a payment on furniture. James, not finding her at their meeting place, went home in a rage and got a pistol. In other words, he was armed and angry on the night of her death. He went back downtown to look for her, and by coincidence, they boarded the same streetcar. Henry Platt, the motorman, said the pair had been pointedly chilly toward each other all the way home\u2014their mutual hostility was witnessed by every passenger. The bickering couple got off, and less than a minute later, seven shots were fired in the darkness.\n\nCoroner Starr noted that Mrs. Mastison's shirtwaist bore powder burns, so whoever shot her must have been standing close by.\n\nBut how to account for that fact that no gun was found on the suspect, even though police were at Mrs. Mastison's side soon after the shooting? The weeds were high in the area, and it was possible Mastison had thrown it in the underbrush with a plan of retrieving and disposing of it later. He had not counted on help arriving so quickly, the New Albany police theorized, and had to think fast. Confirmation came the day after the crime when a patrolman found a recently fired pistol in a vacant lot near Mr. Proctor's house. The lot was located along the route Mastison had taken to get to the telephone from which he made his emergency call. The pistol fired .32-caliber bullets\u2014the kind that killed Mrs. Mastison\u2014so it appeared that Mr. Mastison's phantom gunman had flung the weapon down rather than sensibly taking it with him.\n\nOf course, there was no phantom gunman. When Mr. Proctor saw the gun, he said it belonged to none other than his son-in-law, James Mastison; it was immediately identifiable by its white handle and a mark filed on the barrel. Mastison could do little more than look glumly at his feet and protest that he had no _earthly_ idea how some villain managed to get hold of his gun.\n\nJames Mastison. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _August 27, 1902. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nDespite all the circumstantial evidence, Mastison refused to admit his guilt.\n\nOn August 26, the coroner's jury convened. One witness, William Overton, said that he, Albert Drury and Everett O'Connor had been standing a block away from the murder site on the night in question when they, too, heard those seven shots. Shortly thereafter, a man Overton identified as James Mastison came walking up the opposite side of the street. When they asked what the commotion was about, Mastison replied, \"Someone has shot a dog.\" The \"dog\" had emitted humanlike screams, which the three men heard along with the gunfire.\n\nLucretia Proctor, Lillie's mother, said that Mastison had dropped by the house for a few minutes about an hour before the murder was committed. He appeared to be in a jealous rage, and told his mother-in-law, \"She has run off and I expect she has gone over to the river to a dance, and if I catch her on the dancing floor she will come off.\" In fact, said Mrs. Proctor, he had a vicious jealous streak and forbade his wife to so much as look at any other man. On several occasions, Mrs. Proctor had heard him threaten to take Lillie's life.\n\nThe most important witness was Hugh Thomas, who lived at 1307 South Street, mere feet from the murder site. He heard the shots, looked outside and saw a man firing at a woman on the ground. According to Thomas, she said, \"Oh my, you have killed me.\" Her attacker replied, \"Damn you, I have fixed you.\" (The dialogue as Thomas remembered it doesn't sound quite right to modern ears\u2014it has a stilted, stagelike quality to it\u2014but hey, it was 1902.)\n\nThe coroner ordered Mastison\u2014the one and only logical suspect in New Albany, or on the face of the earth for that matter\u2014be tried for murdering his wife. In the face of all this, he still asserted his innocence.\n\nThe X marks the place where James Mastison's revolver was found. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _August 27, 1902. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nThe grand jury indicted Mastison on October 16. His attorneys asked for a change of venue to Jeffersonville\u2014or was it, as some thought, merely a ploy to gain more time? The request was granted, and the trial was scheduled to begin on November 23; however, it was delayed until December 8 because one of the defense witnesses, Mary Mastison, the prisoner's mother, was ill.\n\nThe accused man's court-appointed attorneys were Charles Schindler, Joseph McKee and Harry Montgomery. At first, they claimed their client was an epileptic\u2014they said he had an \"epileptic eye,\" whatever that meant\u2014but soon dropped this unpromising line of defense. Then, they attempted, none too subtly, to blame the victim. According to a November 30 _Louisville Courier-Journal_ report:\n\n_After his marriage...he became insanely jealous of her. She was good-looking, sprightly and popular, and frequently, it was stated, associated with persons of not the best reputation. Stories of her indiscretions were brought to Mastison, who was greatly in love with her, and these stories aggravated his mental condition_.\n\nAbout the best anyone could say for Mastison was that the killing had been so foolishly executed that it must have been done in the heat of the moment, as no sensible human could premeditate a murder _that_ stupidly. For example, to list just a couple circumstances, the murder occurred only moments after a number witnesses saw him and his wife, obviously angry with each other, getting off a streetcar together, and he killed her next to a residence where, for all he knew, any occupant who happened to be home could see him at work. But arguing for a reduced penalty due to lack of premeditation wasn't good enough for the defense attorneys\u2014they had to dust off the oldest, lamest excuse in the history of jurisprudence and pray for the best: they claimed their client, James Mastison, had been insane on the night he shot his wife down like a dog.\n\nPleading not guilty by reason of insanity was a strategic mistake: all this time, Mastison had steadfastly been denying that he killed his wife. But pleading insanity was a tacit admission that he _had_ pulled the trigger after all.\n\nThe more Mastison pondered his predicament, the more nervous he became. If the creaky insanity tactic did not impress the jury, he would certainly swing from the gallows like a Foucault pendulum. So on December 9, the second day of the trial, he decided the smartest course of action was to come clean. He confessed and entered a plea of guilty. He claimed his deed had been manslaughter rather than a coolly planned murder, which may well have been true considering his extreme incompetence. To a reporter, Mastison said:\n\n_Yes, I killed her. But I was not responsible. I was crazy\u2014crazy on account of her treatment and her way of living. I tried to do the best I could by her, but she did not appreciate my kindness, and deceived me not only once, but every time she got a chance. Had she been true to me the trouble would never have happened. I loved her as long as I thought she was doing right, but when I found out she was betraying the vows she had taken, I began to hate her, and I became insane. There has been insanity in our family, and no wonder I could not stand what she did_.\n\nHe went on to confirm the details that everyone had long before figured out. After slaying Lillie, he had tossed the gun in the high weeds but had been unable to reclaim it as planned because he had been immediately clapped into a jail cell. He added that he didn't think he would be in prison all _that_ long.\n\nThe X marks the place where Lillie Mastison's body was found. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _August 27, 1902. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nHe was sentenced to life at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City without further delay. If anything, he seemed only too eager to start his prison sentence. He said being alone in his Jeffersonville cell was no fun, and he wanted to go where he could have some company. He also said that he was glad he murdered his wife and should have exterminated her long before he did. One wonders if he had such coldblooded sentiments about his child. The reader will recall that Lillie Mastison's last words were, \"For God's sake, don't kill me! I have a little baby to care for.\" At the time of her murder, her baby was almost eight months old. The child sickened and died five weeks after its mother's death.\n\nMastison was taken to his new, permanent residence on December 14, during appropriately depressing weather. The prisoner and his escort, Jeffersonville sheriff Herman Rave, arrived in the midst of a raging sleet storm that had knocked out Michigan City's electricity. The two slipped on the city streets like fugitives from a Mack Sennett movie until they got to the prison door.\n\nJames Mastison put the state and its taxpayers through much unnecessary trouble and expense; he admitted his obvious guilt only when it would have been preposterous to deny it any further, and even then only to spare himself the indignity of a hanging; and he wasted everyone's time and insulted everyone's intelligence by pretending to be insane. By contrast, and for a refreshing change of pace, let's examine the actions of another Indiana wife-killer whose crime took place in Kokomo on October 7, 1909, only a few years after the Mastison murder.\n\nOn that date, William Robison shot his wife, Jennie, in a dry goods store after she said she wanted a divorce. When he was arrested a few minutes later he said, \"I guess I am crazy.\"\n\nUnlike many killers who feign insanity, Robison actually had a believable claim to inherited craziness. His father, David Robison, had attained unenviable fame in 1875 when he slashed the throats of his two daughters, attempted to murder his wife and took a shot at his son, William. (In fact, the grown-up William had a bullet scar in his cheek, a permanent reminder of the day his old man lost it.) The elder Robison capped his energetic performance by taking a fatal fall off a train while trying to escape.\n\nWilliam Robison inherited not only his father's penchant for murder but also his stubborn streak. Instead of making the legal system jump through hoops as James Mastison had done, Robison immediately pled guilty and refused to use the insanity defense. When told he was entitled to a lawyer, he said he didn't want one. Within twenty-four hours of his crime, he was given a life sentence at Michigan City\u2014the same place Mastison was sent. One wonders if they spent their life sentences comparing notes on how to abuse\u2014or not abuse\u2014the judicial process.\n10\n\nWith a Smile on Her Face\n\nThe first national headline about the crime was datelined December 1, 1930: \"Shock of Attack Is Fatal to Girl.\" In those more demure times, one had to read between the lines to understand that the vague headline meant a young woman had died of injuries sustained during a rape. She was Arlene Draves, age eighteen, who had just graduated from Emerson High School in Gary. Five men were arrested who were barely older than she: Leon Stanford, age twenty-one; Paul Barton, age twenty-one; David Thompson, age unknown; Henry Shirk, age twenty-four; and Virgil Kirkland, age twenty.\n\nSuch a crime would be scandalous to any community, but two of the alleged attackers, Stanford and Kirkland, had been idolized as former football stars at Gary High School. Kirkland had been the team's halfback in 1929 when they won the state championship. According to one account, he was expelled from school\u2014reason not given. He had since gone to work at a steel mill and was the steady boyfriend of the girl he was arrested for raping and killing. Kirkland and Draves were not officially engaged, but it was said that they planned to get married. One of Kirkland's high school friends, Mrs. Ethel Madera, claimed that the couple had gone so far as to drive to Valparaiso for a marriage license, but Arlene appears to have gotten cold feet and called it off.\n\nThe already sufficiently sordid story got worse as details leaked out. The five accused men and Draves had been participants at a \"gin party\"\u2014illegal in itself, since these were Prohibition days. It was held at the home of Thompson, a married man, on the night of November 29.\n\nKirkland told the police in a written confession that Draves got drunk and passed out, so he carried her to the porch to revive her. While there, he raped her. Later that night, the five men loaded Draves into Paul Barton's car and went out for hamburgers. When Kirkland went inside to order the food, the four other men gang-raped Draves\u2014apparently with his encouragement. Kirkland came back to the car and sat with her while his companions went in to eat. She died in the car in the early morning hours of November 30, as attested by a loiterer at the restaurant who heard Kirkland shout to his party pals, \"My God, feel her pulse! I think she's dead!\" The panicking drunks rushed her to Dr. R.O. Wharton, who declared that she had passed away. Kirkland and company fled the scene as fast as they could, while the doctor urged them to come back and take some responsibility.\n\nThe four other prisoners also confessed. The coroner's jury held that Arlene Draves had died of cerebral hemorrhage and shock and recommended that all five be charged with first-degree murder. It was decided that they would be tried separately, with Kirkland's trial to be held first.\n\nIt seemed cut and dried, at least until Virgil Kirkland's trial began in Valparaiso on February 23, 1931, with the prosecution and defense seeking twelve jury members that could pass muster with both sides. Delicate (and indelicate) questions would have to be answered. Were the defendants' confessions legitimate? Was only one of them guilty? Were all of them? None? If any of them killed her, was it intentional or accidental\u2014murder or manslaughter? How had Arlene Draves actually died? Was any sexual activity that took place at the gin party consensual or forced? To get to the truth, many details of the last hours of Draves's short life would be revealed under oath\u2014details that ranged from the tawdry to the downright gruesome. People who enjoyed sensational trials would batten to their heart's content, at least insofar as the nation's newspapers would allow them to. Some details were deemed unprintable and remain mysteries to this day. Portions of the more shocking testimony that did make it past the censors came from acquaintances of Kirkland's, who swore that he said he would \"knock [the] hell out of Arlene\" if she refused to give in to his sexual demands. He also said he would \"spoil Arlene\" so no other man would want her.\n\nThe trial got under way on February 26. So many spectators attended that Judge Grant Crumpacker had to move the trial to a larger courtroom for fear the floor would collapse. A number of detectives and doctors gave testimony detrimental to Kirkland. Lieutenant Paul Thixton told of his initial confession: \"Kirkland denied attacking the girl. [Deputy Coroner Chester] Owens then told Kirkland about the blood and bruises on Arlene's body. Kirkland sobbed on my shoulder and then confessed. He admitted that he and four other men had attacked Arlene during the night.\"\n\nThe police got signed confessions from Kirkland and the other men as well, but the defense objected to Kirkland's statement being entered as evidence on the grounds that it had been \"obtained with the aid of police blackjacks and under police duress.\" They appear to have provided no proof of this serious charge.\n\nAfter a delay, Judge Crumpacker ruled that the statement, in which Kirkland admitted molesting his girlfriend three times, was admissible\u2014but only if references to rapes committed by the other four men were stricken, presumably because such inflammatory statements might jeopardize their chances of getting fair trials later.\n\nThe next day's testimony featured a detail that no novelist would dare include in fiction. The witness was Victoria Leonard, the waitress on duty when Arlene Draves's alleged attackers hauled her to a late-night hamburger stand. Leonard testified that Kirkland and two of the other accused men had bloody hands when they paid for their food.\n\nRichard Sturtridge, former DePauw University athlete, admitted he had supplied the party with alcohol. The defense's theory was that Arlene Draves bled to death when she got intoxicated and fell down, striking her head, and Sturtridge supported their contention. He saw Kirkland and Draves sitting on the porch, and then, \"I went inside and heard a loud crash. I rushed out to find Babe (Arlene) fainted on the floor [of the porch]. Virgil told me she had fallen off a chair, drunk. I helped him pick her up. She was making a sort of sobbing sound.\"\n\nOn the other hand, Dr. James Burcham, coroner's physician, stated that the \"falling off a chair\" theory was nonsense, as it did not explain the extent and location of Draves's injuries. During the previous day's testimony, he said she had died of two hemorrhages, \"one of them of the brain.\" (The papers prudently did not mention the site of the other one.) He now elaborated that her death was caused by \"a cerebral hemorrhage plus shock of repeated attacks.\"\n\nOn March 3, Dr. L.N. Harger of Indianapolis, who had examined Arlene's vital organs, surprised everyone by stating that he found evidence that the liquor had been poisoned\u2014but not poisoned enough to kill her. This did not necessarily mean someone had tried to commit murder by spiking her drink; during Prohibition, bootleg alcohol was liable to be filled with dangerous additives and unwholesome ingredients, and the imbiber of such hooch took his life into his own hands. Later evidence indicated that the party liquor included wood alcohol.\n\nTestimony about Arlene Draves's fatal injuries was so contradictory that the defense requested her body be disinterred and reexamined. The judge ruled in their favor. Caroline Draves, sister of the victim, stood up and asked, \"Can you do that without permission from the family?\" When Judge Crumpacker answered yes, she fainted.\n\nA team of defense physicians, attorneys and reporters took a trip to the small Lutheran cemetery in the town of Reynolds on March 4 to unearth Arlene's gray plush coffin and bring the poor girl once more into the sunlight. Naturally, the graveyard was choked with spectators whose fondest hope was to see something suitably horrifying. The coffin was driven to a small-frame building where the examination was to take place. Gawkers hopped into their cars and followed the lead vehicle to the building in a morbid parade. And it appears, from a March 5 _Courier-Journal_ article, that they were not forbidden from entering:\n\n_They crowded into the tiny room, the coffin was lifted to a table and Coroner W.L. Henry lifted the lid. Arlene's brother and sister stood quietly at the foot of the coffin. Charles Draves, her elderly father, sobbed just outside the room. The spectators started as they beheld the body of the girl, three months dead. The cheeks were rouged, the eyes closed and the mouth smiling_.\n\nShe was probably the only person in the room who was smiling. The assembled spectators had a good look; then, and only then, did the authorities shoo everyone away except four physicians\u2014two for the state, two for the defense. Tissue samples were collected for shipment to expert medical examiners in Chicago, the coffin was resealed, and Arlene once again laid to rest beside the grave of her mother. Charles Draves muttered, \"Why couldn't they have left my child in peace?\"\n\nWhen asked about the exhumation, the defense admitted that matters looked very ominous for Virgil Kirkland and had his former sweetheart dug up out of desperation to find evidence that would exonerate him. Meanwhile, the prosecution made no secret of the fact that it wanted to dust off the electric chair with the seat of Kirkland's pants.\n\nThe experts in Chicago hastily examined Arlene's viscera, and the trial continued on March 5. The result was another stalemate: two defense physicians, Dr. Joseph Springer and Dr. H.O. Seipel, testified that they found no evidence of rape and opined that she had died of a blow to the head. Springer's opinion was convincing; he was Chicago's former coroner's physician and had performed twenty-five thousand postmortems in the course of his career. By contrast, the prosecution brought in Dr. George Bicknell, also of Chicago, who declared that bruises and discreetly unspecified \"other injuries\" were present on Draves's body at both autopsies.\n\nA sensation developed on March 5 when the defense said Virgil Kirkland would take the stand the next day to discuss his relationship with Arlene Draves and describe what transpired at the notorious gin party. This he did, tearfully telling the court how he met and fell in love with Arlene. She had visited him in the hospital when he was recuperating from a football injury. That's where they had their first kiss. Yes, they had had sexual relations, but it was consensual. They were engaged, he said, and they would have married soon had the great tragedy not occurred at the gin party. Concerning that party, he said:\n\n_We drank straight alcohol and wine. Babe and I went to a davenport and embraced each other. We talked of love. Then we went out on the porch to a settee_. [At this point, the attorneys for both sides quarreled like fishwives, after which Kirkland was allowed to continue.] _Arlene was dazed-like. I didn't slap her. I told her I loved her. She said she felt dizzy. And then she fell to the floor. I was dazed. We picked her up_.\n\nHe did not strike his unconscious girlfriend, he said; he merely shook her because she was in a stupor. Instead of calling a doctor, Kirkland and his equally intoxicated friends went out for a bite to eat and took the injured girl with them. As for Arlene's having been raped\u2014either by himself or others\u2014he seemed to know nothing about it.\n\nThe state wrapped up its case on March 9. John Underwood argued that Kirkland was a \"wolfish\" cad determined to \"despoil\" his girlfriend one way or another. Some witnesses, including Richard Sturtridge, had noted that Arlene said she wanted to leave the party and go home; Underwood saw this as evidence that she knew what Kirkland's real motives were. On the other hand, defense attorney John Crumpacker argued that the state had proved neither murder nor rape. (Mr. Crumpacker, incidentally, was the son of the presiding judge. If anyone thought this was peculiar, and possibly a conflict of interest, it does not appear in the record.)\n\nSome of the final testimony came from Dr. Erik Bukhofzer, assistant pathologist at the University of Illinois, who stated that he found tears in a tissue specimen from the dead girl. This was at odds with the defense pathologist, who said he saw no torn tissue. The jury could be forgiven if it was badly confused by the mindboggling, contradictory evidence from the dueling experts\u2014and also by the fact that it was given twenty-two possible verdicts from which to choose.\n\nArlene Draves. _Courtesy of Thomas Clark_.\n\nDespite the confusion, it did not take the jurors long to reach a verdict. On March 10, after deliberating a little less than four hours, they found Kirkland guilty of murder. The evidence showed, they felt, that Kirkland had struck his girlfriend with his fist when she resisted his advances, causing injuries that led to her death later that evening. They were not certain that he had caused other fatal injuries by sexually assaulting her and did not take that into consideration when deciding the verdict. The sentence was life in prison at Michigan City. \"We're satisfied,\" said Kirkland's attorney Barrett O'Hara, which suggests that the defense team expected its client to go to the electric chair. The next day, Mr. O'Hara preposterously opined that _society_ was really to blame for Arlene Draves's death\u2014specifically, Prohibition: \"He wasn't the guilty one, remember. Society with its Prohibition, which brought about such gin parties, is really responsible for that murder.\"\n\nOn March 11, the day after the jury made its decision, the defense attorneys claimed that a mysterious woman had emerged with sensational new evidence that would totally clear Kirkland. The unnamed woman attended the gin party, they said, and had witnessed a girl who was jealous of Arlene Draves strike her over the head with a milk bottle. They did not say where this witness had been when the defense so badly needed her during the trial, nor why she had waited until the proceedings were over to come forward, but they implied that she would be of critical importance in winning Kirkland a reversal of his life sentence. This marvelous surprise witness must not have panned out, because we hear nothing more of her.\n\nNevertheless, Judge Crumpacker granted Virgil Kirkland a second trial in April 1931, scarcely more than a month after his first trial ended, on the grounds that \"the evidence was insufficient to uphold the verdict.\" Crumpacker found fault with the jury's belief that Draves's murder had been premeditated; if that were so, asked the judge, why had Kirkland rushed her off to a doctor? (The judge's logic appears to be faulty in this regard. Kirkland and his pals sought medical help for Arlene only after they stopped off for a leisurely hamburger feast and finally noticed that she wasn't breathing. Also, when Dr. Wharton informed them the girl was dead, the men fled only to be caught later.)\n\nKirkland's second trial began on May 12 after the court had considerable trouble finding twelve jurors. The possibility that Kirkland had killed his girlfriend by punching her would not be considered this time around. According to the _Courier-Journal_ , prosecutor Underwood amended \"the indictments against him to include only two counts charging that Miss Draves was killed as the result of a criminal attack or attempted criminal attack.\" This meant that only two possible fates were now open for Kirkland: either he would be set free or he would go to the electric chair. He could not return to his life sentence.\n\nThe testimony was mostly a repeat of the first trial, but there were some new witnesses: George Regal and Edwin Minner, both Gary policemen, who testified that they witnessed Kirkland's confession after his arrest. Two Gary youths, John Churchill and Fred Phillips, testified that a few days before the gin party, they heard Kirkland say that he would beat up Draves if she didn't \"accede to his demands.\" Nicholas Christoff, owner of the hamburger joint where Kirkland and his classy friends had stopped the night Draves died, said he overheard Kirkland remarking to them, \"I fixed her that time\u2014now's your chance.\" This was understood to be an invitation to his friends to molest the unconscious girl in the car.\n\nTwo of Kirkland's friends at the gin party, Henry Shirk and Paul Barton, testified on May 18 even though they were awaiting their own trials; they spoke voluntarily and had not been promised clemency. The other two partiers, Dave Thompson and Leon Stanford, refused to speak on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves. Kirkland \"seemed to cringe\" when his pals took the stand, according to a reporter. As well he might have: much of what Shirk and Barton said was considered unprintable by the newspapers, but it is clear they admitted participating in a gang rape. The _Courier-Journal_ reported:\n\n_Haltingly when their testimony touched upon the gruesome and the revolting, but without reservation, they admitted their own indiscretions at the party and accused Kirkland of leading the attacks which State physicians say caused the girl's death in an automobile shortly before dawn last November 30..._ [Barton said,] _\"She seemed to be unconscious. Kirkland invited us to be intimate with her.\"_\n\nShirk's testimony corroborated Barton's. It looked like Kirkland was bound for death row instead of freedom, and his attorneys promptly tried to find a way to gain a third option\u2014that of sending him back to jail, for life if necessary and for less if possible. Judge Crumpacker seemed unwilling to give the death penalty to a man barely out of his teenage years, and on May 19, he said that he would grant a third choice for the jury. He would instruct them to reach one of three possible verdicts: guilty of murder by rape, guilty of rape or not guilty. If the jury chose the first option, Kirkland would die; if they chose the second, he would return to prison after all\u2014and instead of his previous life sentence, he would serve between five and twenty-one years.\n\nThe jurors again were treated to the spectacle of respected doctors with excellent reputations and years of professional experience flatly contradicting each other. Dr. George Bicknell testified that Arlene Draves was killed by a blow to the head; Dr. E.S. Jones disagreed, and both physicians were _prosecution_ witnesses. Dr. Harry Kahn for the defense thought Arlene Draves had died solely due to a cerebral hemorrhage, not due to injuries caused by rape. Doctors Dittner, Dobbins and Seipel agreed with him. But defense witness Dr. E.H. Powell rocked the boat when he complained about the nature of the questions Kirkland's attorneys asked:\n\n_That hypothetical question_ [asked by the defense about the hemorrhage] _was phrased so it could be answered in only one way, and that's the reason I answered it that way. As a matter of fact, I believe that the criminal attack, exposure, and extrabural hemorrhage all contributed to the girl's death_.\n\nKirkland himself took the stand again on May 21. \"I couldn't have killed Babe,\" he said. \"Why, we were engaged to be married. I loved her.\" He and Arlene had been sitting on the porch at Dave Thompson's house: \"Then she got dizzy. I slapped her to sober her up.\" (Previously he said he merely shook her.) \"She fell off a chair and hit her head on the floor.\" He admitted he and his cronies had abandoned the dead girl at Dr. Wharton's house but did not say why.\n\nThe case went to the jury on May 26. The jurors were given seven possible verdicts rather than the three choices Judge Crumpacker had said he would give when instructing them. They left the courtroom with the prosecutors' demand that they give Kirkland the death penalty ringing in their ears.\n\nIn a trial loaded with bizarre moments, one of the strangest came when the jury returned its verdict on the night of the twenty-sixth, after two hours' deliberation: Kirkland was guilty of assault and battery with intent to commit rape. The sentence that went with this offense was one to ten years in prison. This meant that, conceivably, he could serve only one year for good behavior. When the jurors discovered this after the fact, they protested that they did not realize the punishment would be so light. They thought the sentence would be death\u2014they had fully intended to send Kirkland to the electric chair.\n\nThe situation was unprecedented. Judge Crumpacker confessed, \"I am frankly puzzled. I do not know what to do.\" But after the sentence was passed, it was too late for a do-over. Virgil Kirkland, who was marked for the chair, escaped it only because of the jury's mistake.\n\nThe remainder of the squalid tale can be told in a few words.\n\nProsecutors threatened to demand that the proceedings be declared a mistrial but never did so. The jurors released a statement on June 7 to the effect that they had been confused because they were told at the beginning of the trial that the only two options for Kirkland were death or freedom but later the judge opened a third possibility. It was to no avail; assistant prosecutor Robert Estil told the press that Kirkland had officially been sentenced and the jury's statement had \"no legal value.\"\n\nOn May 27, Kirkland was sent to the reformatory at Pendleton to serve his comparatively soft one- to ten-year sentence. Judge Crumpacker told the prisoner as he left, \"You have been fortunate.\" A prosecutor remarked, \"Now when you get out, behave yourself.\"\n\nThe defense's victory was marred somewhat when Sheriff Birney Maxwell arrested one of Kirkland's attorneys, Ronald Oldham, on a charge of passing a bad check in Ohio. Oldham settled his bad debt, only to face a charge in early June of practicing law in Illinois without a license, which would cost him a $500 fine.\n\nAnother defense witness, one of the plethora of doctors called to the stand, was found drunk in the street after the verdict was rendered.\n\nOn June 9, Judge Crumpacker put an end to the case when he refused to alter the jury's verdict. The _Courier-Journal_ related: \"The Judge challenged the State to prove that Kirkland should have been given a longer sentence under a jury's verdict of 'guilty of assault and battery with intent to commit criminal assault.' The prosecution offered no evidence.\"\n\nThe other four men who were arrested along with Virgil Kirkland never went to trial even though two of them admitted _under oath_ to being rapists. They were released from jail and slunk back to their everyday lives.\n\nVirgil Kirkland sought a parole in June 1933 and was turned down. He tried again in August 1937 and got lucky. He was set free, having served six years and three months of a sentence that the jury thought far too lenient even if he had served every minute of it.\n\nArlene Draves rests yet in Reynolds with a smile on her face.\n11\n\nThe Stage's Loss Was St. Louis's Gain\n\nOn March 1, 1914, Ada Owsley, formerly from Madison, Indiana, shot her husband, Benjamin, three times in their home at 1219 Warren Street, St. Louis. When the police arrived, they found Mr. Owsley dead on the floor and his wife in an attitude of prayer. She had contusions over the left eye and on her left cheek and leg, and there were signs of a recent struggle in the room. The self-made widow's tone was nothing short of boastful:\n\n_I have been able to shoot squirrels out of a tree with a revolver. My husband and I quarreled, and he insulted me grossly. He then started into another room, saying he was going after a revolver. I took a revolver out of a bureau drawer, and when he returned, I began shooting. He kept coming, and I fired until he dropped. I was surprised, as I am a crack shot and thought several of the shots must have hit him_.\n\nHer story did not jibe with Mr. Owsley's condition. Although she said she shot as he approached her threateningly, the only bullet wound the dead man had was in his _back_ , so he must have been walking away from her when she shot him. Also, she said at first that she fired \"several\" shots but later would claim she fired only twice. Later still, she would include the additional detail that he had brandished a poker, though she said nothing about the weapon in the earliest reports.\n\nOfficers took Mrs. Owsley away\u2014not to jail, as one might expect, but to a hospital\u2014so she could recuperate from the nervous condition that a woman develops after ventilating her husband. At some point, the demure flower must have realized that her piratical braggadocio would not win an acquittal if her case came to trial. While in the observation ward, she made a show of hysterically crying out for her beloved Benjamin and asking the doctors about his condition, as if she were unaware that she had just put a hole in his hide.\n\nParadoxically, while on one hand she claimed that she thought Mr. Owsley still walked among the living, on the other hand, she wrote a confession in which she admitted killing him. She added that the shooting was in self-defense and the culmination of months of physical abuse. He had attempted to \"force indignities upon her\" and, in 1912, had vowed to kill her with a razor and a hatchet. At the hospital, she said, \"I wouldn't have harmed a hair on his head, although he did abuse me. I loved him. I know I killed him, for the Lord stands before me and tells me. I must be a murderess, but I don't care if I am strung up. I will tell the truth.\"\n\nIt seems she was only feigning indifference as to whether she was \"strung up.\" At the coroner's inquest on March 3, she shifted from the arrogance she had displayed after the shooting to a grossly overplayed fearfulness, as though she believed her husband was alive and expected him to give her a thrashing right there in the coroner's office.\n\n\"Have mercy on me!\" she screamed as a patrolman led her into the room. \"Have mercy on me! Where is he? Don't let him beat me anymore!\"\n\nThen, she sobbed bitterly\u2014and ostentatiously\u2014in the arms of her son by a previous marriage, Edward Ricketts.\n\nThe newspapers tell us that \"[s]he became so frantic that the officers were directed to return her to the hospital as quickly as possible.\" Thus, she was spared from telling her story on the stand and facing cross-examination. Edward Ricketts filled in the gap by testifying that his stepfather \"was abusive to his mother, would not speak to her for long periods, often threatened to kill her, and nagged her about other women.\" That last phrase meant that the cad loved to tell her how attractive other women found him.\n\nHowever, her stepson, Robert Owsley, testified that he had heard her boast about her prowess with a pistol and that she said she had shot a woman in Madison in 1905. This interesting revelation appears to have never been further investigated.\n\nThe coroner's jury, possibly impressed by Mrs. Owsley's histrionics, found that she had killed her husband in self-defense. The _St. Louis Post-Dispatch_ noted that five of the city's women in the last three years had murdered their spouses, and all five had been acquitted. (One of them, Alma James, claimed she was asleep when she shot her dear Leon; another, Emily Roberts, could provide as a motive only that her William had boasted ceaselessly of his infidelities. The reader may be forgiven for supposing that while women could not vote in 1914, this infringement of their civil rights was somewhat palliated by the ease with which so many of them got away with murder.)\n\nMrs. Owsley was set free and spent another month in the hospital recovering from what was called \"hysteria,\" one of those vague old medical terms that can mean nearly anything.\n\nDespite the coroner's jury's ringing endorsement, Ada Owsley was not out of the woods yet, legally speaking; her stepson, Robert, agitated to have her tried, and the grand jury decreed that she be indicted on a charge of second-degree murder after all.\n\nOne of the state's witnesses in the second trial was Benjamin Owsley's former wife, Rosa, who said she would have some unflattering stories to tell about poor, put-upon Ada\u2014not the least of which was that she was a home-wrecker who had seduced her Benjamin.\n\nAda Owsley's trial began on May 6. She entered the courtroom dramatically: she was dressed in black, heavily veiled and leaning on her natural son's, Edward Ricketts, arm. Her performance in this venue outstripped the comparatively restrained presentation she gave before the coroner's jury. Had she actually been an actress onstage, no doubt she would have employed the then popular\u2014and famously unsubtle\u2014Delsarte method, replete with gestures and gymnastics. During cross-examination, she shrieked and cried, \"Bennie, I didn't want to shoot you! Oh Lord, have mercy on my soul!\" The women in the courtroom wept.\n\nShe said she was a battered wife. Bennie choked her so often that she had to wear a handkerchief around her neck to hide the bruises. On one occasion, the brute ordered her to remove the handkerchief: \"I made those marks!\" she claimed he had said. \"They are signs that I love you!\"\n\nThis is what she said happened just before she shot him. The reader may believe as much of it as he likes:\n\n_He kicked me on the shins as I sat in the Morris chair in the front room after dinner, until I got down on my knees_ [just like a Delsarte actress] _and begged him to stop. He tore off my glasses, saying, \"I don't want to go to the penitentiary for hitting you with your glasses on.\"_ [Yet he apparently didn't mind if she walked around in public with bruises on her throat, visible evidence he had choked her; and did he think he would not go to jail as long as her glasses were off when he struck her?] _He jerked me onto the bed. I tried to get away, but he threw me back again. He knocked me down three times. \"Where's that gun?\" he demanded. I told him it was in a trunk in the front room. As he went into the room to search for it I heard him lock the front door. Then I drew the revolver from the washstand drawer beside the bed. He returned from his search and looking at my face, which was streaming with blood, said: \"I've spoiled your face, kid, now I'll take the poker to you.\" As he reached down for the poker I fired. I don't know how often I fired. All I remember is hearing him shout and seeing him coming toward me with hands stretched out like this and his face looked all purple. Then he fell. I fired because I knew he would kill me_.\n\nAfter this theatrical recitation, she swooned. She revived just in time to shout, \"God have mercy on me!\" as she was carried out of the room by two deputy sheriffs.\n\nA patrolman named Rohlfing testified that Mrs. Owsley had admitted that she shot her husband in the back while he was running away, a flat contradiction of both her initial confession and the story she told under oath. While at the hospital, Mrs. Owsley displayed bruises and cuts she supposedly got before the shooting, but the city's autopsy physician testified that her husband's corpse had a bruised nose and a scratched finger, which infers that the couple had a brawl in which Mrs. Owsley gave as well as she got. Evidence regarding the couple's quarrels was not permitted, and former wife Rosa Owsley's intended testimony about Ada's bad reputation was dismissed as remote.\n\nBut none of that mattered; it was an era when all-male juries were reluctant to find any woman guilty of murder unless she confessed to a crime of unusual magnitude, such as poisoning a couple generations' worth of her family or burying a carload of murdered hobos in her cellar. Had there been some skeptical, nonsympathetic women on the jury, Mrs. Owsley might have found her path more difficult.\n\nAfter deliberating for forty-four hours, the jury could not reach an agreement and was dismissed. The more rational among them pointed out that Mrs. Owsley's pathetic, mouse-like trembling in court did not square with the cool boasts about her excellent marksmanship just after she killed her husband.\n\nEven had she been convicted of third-degree manslaughter, as some jurors wanted, she probably would have received the minimum penalty of three months in jail and a $100 fine. There is no record that Mrs. Owsley was tried a second time for the slaying.\n12\n\nOtto Embellishes\n\nOtto Vest married twenty-three-year-old Lucille Tabor at Seelyville on September 7, 1917. It was her second venture onto the sea of matrimony; her first husband, a man named Bailey, and her two children from that marriage lived at Glen Ayr, a town of microscopic size near Terre Haute. Rumor held that Lucille married Otto without legally severing ties with Mr. Bailey, but we'll let that pass.\n\nThe newlyweds moved to Ninth and Jackson Streets in Columbus to start a life together. Instead, neighbors said they spent a considerable portion of their time quarreling. On October 29, after a few weeks of wedded bliss, Lucille informed Otto that she felt their marriage wasn't working out. She made her point by swallowing fifteen cents' worth of carbolic acid and expiring horribly thirty minutes later. That's the story Otto told the cops\u2014the first story, anyway.\n\nOtto was indignant when the police questioned him about his wife's suicide. He professed not to see anything strange about it. Yes, he admitted, he had purchased the poison. But it wasn't like he deceptively slipped it in her porridge. He openly gave it to her, and she _willingly_ drank it.\n\nWhy on earth would you do that? Why on earth would _she_ do that, asked the cops.\n\nWell, mused Otto, she had often expressed the desire to kill herself. So, being a good husband and not a chauvinist who would prevent a woman from achieving her fondest goals, Otto bought the carbolic acid for her as a sort of present. He watched her quaff deeply of the drink of death\u2014and then he left the house. By the time he returned, she had already become a memory.\n\nAs he touchingly told the police, \"If she was damn fool enough to take it I thought I would just buy it for her.\"\n\nEven at this early stage in the investigation, Vest contradicted himself. He told some that his wife had requested that he buy the acid so she could use it as a disinfectant; to others, he said she wanted to kill herself with it and he obligingly procured it for her; to A.H. Fehring, the druggist who sold it to him, he claimed that he wanted to use it on a horse.\n\nFor some unaccountable reason, the authorities found Otto's story\u2014that is, his _stories_ \u2014farfetched, and they arrested him, but on a charge of manslaughter, not murder. Some official must have believed Vest's claim that he handed his wife carbolic acid knowing that she intended to drink it, making him an accessory, not a murderer.\n\nA third possibility was that Otto Vest was neither guilty of manslaughter nor an innocent dupe; perhaps he had induced his wife to drink the carbolic acid\u2014making him a murderer. We will never know for sure.\n\nThe local paper, the _Evening Republican_ , said in its October 30 edition, \"This morning Vest began to realize the seriousness of the charge against him.\" Evidently, it took several hours for him to figure out that his wife's horrifying demise was no lighthearted frolic and might have distasteful legal ramifications. He asked the police if they would take him to the funeral home so that he might have a final glimpse of his poor Lucille. They obliged, and he spent a while gazing at her face and weeping.\n\nVest was offended by the very idea that he should be arrested and went on a hunger strike as soon as the cell door closed behind him. He asserted that he would soon join his dead wife; presumably, he was eager to quarrel with her again. Cynics thought he might have a less romantic motive for starving himself, i.e., a healthy fear of the electric chair. His strike lasted five days, until his appetite won out over love.\n\nVest was indicted on December 1 for first-degree murder, not the original charge of manslaughter, so someone in the legal system must have changed his mind about the possibility of Vest's innocence. When his trial began on December 19, the parents of his dead bride were among the interested spectators. From the beginning, Otto appeared to have an adversarial relationship with truth; he swore under oath that he was twenty-seven years old but later admitted he was thirty-two.\n\nBy now, Vest had changed his story\u2014and not just in a few trivial details. His new version was a total makeover. No longer did he state that his wife had repeatedly expressed the yen to commit suicide. Perhaps realizing that his first story made him seem unattractively coldblooded, he now claimed that yes, he had given his wife carbolic acid but only because she had used it for medicinal purposes before, so naturally he thought that was what she wanted it for this time, too. How was he to know she intended to down the entire bottle?\n\nThere were, in fact, a few medicinal uses for carbolic acid\u2014it could be used as a home remedy for toothache, for instance. But it was up to the defense to prove that Mrs. Vest had used the drug for such purposes, and it appears they failed to do so. It shouldn't have been difficult because a prescription was needed to purchase something so dangerous, and there would have been records of Mrs. Vest's ailments among doctors and druggists.\n\nThe jury retired on December 20, but despite the unlikeliness of Vest's stories, it was unable to reach a verdict and was dismissed. The majority of jurors were for acquittal.\n\nThe case went to a second jury on February 5, 1918. In less than an hour, Vest was acquitted and free to go tell all the fishy stories he pleased. If he married a second time, his new bride likely poured any beverage he handed her in the cracks of the floorboards when he wasn't looking.\n13\n\nWilliam Wants to Get Married\n\nTwenty-two-year-old William Lee of Boonville had been in love with a luscious lovely named Mina Taylor for some time, and he planned to marry her on August 24, 1911. William spent that night in jail instead of in connubial bliss with his beloved Mina. And all merely because he pulverized the skulls of his father, Richard Lee; his mother, Sarah; and his younger brother, Clarence, and set the house on fire.\n\nWilliam refused to comment on the events of August 24, other than to explain that the house was already on fire when he awoke. He said he got up to rouse his family and sound the alarm\u2014but had taken care to get fully dressed first (because who knows when one might meet ladies, and it would be a deplorable social faux pas to be caught in a nightgown). He theorized that someone else must have murdered his family, lit the fire and run.\n\nThe absurd story might have been believable except for a flaw in William's master plan: firemen extinguished the fire so quickly that a curiosity-seeker took a photograph of William with bystanders and the remains of his family lying under sheets.\n\nInside the house, investigators found a bloodstained axe and hatchet and kerosene-soaked furniture. The bodies' clothing was saturated with coal oil. What _wasn't_ in the house was equally interesting: $100 in cash the Lees had gotten the day before by selling property. Witnesses told the coroner that William received his fair share of the proceeds but had argued with his father that he deserved more because of his impending nuptials. Also, neighbors said Lee's parents objected to his marrying Mina. (The young man was noted for his laziness and for being a drain on his parents' resources, so one would think they'd be happy that he wanted to leave the nest.)\n\nLee family portrait. William Lee is wearing the white shirt and leaning against the wall. The rest of the family is lying under sheets in the foreground. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _August 26, 1911. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nWilliam was taken to the morgue, where the crushed and toasted bodies of his family were dramatically unsheeted before his eyes. He displayed no emotion and merely lit his pipe. Back in her hometown of Newburg, Mina shrieked before reporters: \"I know he is innocent!\"\n\nThe suspect kept his composure until the next day, when he confessed. Yes, he said, he had killed his father, Richard, but only in self-defense\u2014after Richard first killed his wife and other son. Then, said William, he committed arson because he was sure no one would believe the truth: \"I could smell coal oil, and I found oil had already been poured over the bed. Just because matches were handy and I didn't know what else to do I set fire to the bed clothing and gave the alarm of fire.\" In other words, it just seemed like the thing to do.\n\nSheriff Raymond Scales took Lee to Evansville so he would not be lynched. Physicians disproved Lee's tall tale when they examined the bodies and found they had been dead at least three hours before he alerted neighbors to the fire. His bloody, scorched underwear was found hidden in the bedding.\n\nIn the face of such evidence, Mina turned her back on her former sweetheart and wished that he would be punished if proved guilty. She fainted at the Newburg cemetery when the three coffins of the Lees were lowered into an extra-wide grave. She probably also contemplated how close she came to marrying the type of man who would bludgeon and burn his relatives because he was peeved at them.\n\nThe silly stories he told convinced no one, so on August 26, Lee told the truth: he had butchered his folks out of anger because they disapproved of his marriage and refused to give him money to finance it. In addition to that, his father and brother were insured for $700, and William was the beneficiary\u2014that is, if his mother died before he did. Lee was sent to the Jeffersonville Reformatory, where he resided in the cell formerly occupied by Thomas Hoal, the Boy Bandit (see later chapter about his notorious career).\n\nEarlier in the same day, Mina Taylor declared that she would marry William yet if he were innocent. His confession dashed her hopes. She cried, \"Oh Will, why did you do it?\" and collapsed in hysterics. Her father said she would live with relatives in Colorado until she recovered from the heartbreak.\n\nAt the reformatory, Lee made a third confession, which, like the others, failed to make sense in some particulars. He claimed he had been threatened with death by both parents. He was so certain they intended to kill him that he decided he would kill them first. (No explanation as to why he felt compelled to exterminate his brother.) He said he had not intended to burn the bodies\u2014after applying the axe to his family, he lit a match to contemplate his handiwork and dropped it on the bed, hence the conflagration. (No explanation was given as to how the bodies were first saturated with coal oil.) He claimed additionally that he had been abused by Mr. Lee for years, which for all we know was true.\n\nMina said, \"I will try to forget Willie as soon as possible. I hope time will heal the wounds caused by this terrible tragedy.\"\n\nAt the end of November, William was returned to Boonville on the grounds that potential lynch mobs had cooled down. \"Yes, I killed them,\" the unsentimental fellow said of his family. \"I feel justified because I thought they were going to kill me and because of the whippings they gave me when I was a boy.\" He added with ill-found optimism, \"I expect to get two to twenty-one years for this.\"\n\nLee collected the life insurance on the family he murdered\u2014it must have been a _very_ generous company\u2014and used the proceeds to pay his defense attorneys, brothers Caleb and Thomas Lindsey. He faced the Circuit Court on December 5. Surprisingly, despite his three confessions, William pled not guilty on grounds of self-defense. _Not_ surprisingly, given how many other defendants in this book also tried it, his attorneys entered a plea of insanity as a backup plan.\n\nBefore going on trial, William Lee was moved again, this time to Evansville, where the proceedings would be held due to a change of venue. He was placed in what was called \"the unlucky cell\" because everyone who had occupied it had been convicted.\n\nThe trial began on January 24, 1912. As promised, the defense tried to prove Lee was insane, but its evidence for his hereditary \"mental taint\" was feeble. Rather than being content with one crazy parent, it boldly claimed both were unbalanced. The defense's star witness was Josephine Jones, who had lived with the Lee family for a decade. She thought father Richard Lee was insane because he \"was of an eccentric turn of mind, and refused to believe the world was round, and looked upon the Bible as a fable, and always laughed when he read it because it was so much like a novel.\" Mrs. Jones believed Sarah Lee was crazy, too, because she had once \"rejoiced over the death of her brother.\"\n\nAs for William Lee himself, the evidence for his mental illness largely consisted of his boasting to girls that he was wealthier than he actually was and that he cried a lot. Under oath, Lee recanted all of his confessions and now claimed that he had no idea who slaughtered his family. He polished the old, old chestnut of selective memory loss: he couldn't remember killing anyone, and the whole episode \"seemed like a dream\" to him.\n\nWhen at the jail, however, the \"crazy man\" spent time cracking jokes with fellow prisoners. The prosecutor, Ora Davis, revealed that Lee promised to plead guilty in exchange for life imprisonment, indicating that he wasn't nearly as unbalanced as his attorneys wanted him to seem. Davis responded that he would settle for nothing less than the death penalty.\n\nCountering this woeful evidence for Lee's insanity was Dr. C.E. Laughlin, superintendent of the Southern Indiana Hospital for the Insane, who answered a whopper of a four-thousand-word hypothetical question by saying that in his professional opinion, William Lee was sane.\n\nMany observed that during cross-examination, Lee answered \"I don't know\" to any question that would incriminate him, but his memory was jim-dandy when he was grilled on less serious matters.\n\nOn January 31, the jury decided that Lee was perfectly sane and comprehensively guilty\u2014yet it fixed his punishment only as life imprisonment. It was a relatively light punishment, considering the barbarity of his crime. A _Louisville Courier-Journal_ editorial remarked, \"Kentucky has no monopoly of chicken-hearted jurors...If any criminal in Indiana ever deserved the death penalty that criminal was Lee.\"\n\nA week later, William Hester of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, went on trial in Evansville for murdering his girlfriend. According to a news account, \"The State's Attorney...refused to ask the jurors in the Hester case if they believed in capital punishment, contending that it is impossible to hang a man in this Vanderburgh County.\"\n\nMina Taylor. William Lee was willing to kill so he could marry her. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _August 29, 1911. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nMina Taylor, for whose hand William Lee murdered three people, married a neighbor named Curran Keeler on June 24, 1913. William's thoughts on the matter are not recorded, but it musta hurt!\n\nWilliam had been in prison less than a year when, in November 1912, some Evansville citizens decided it would be a fine thing indeed if a man who killed his family for money were to be turned loose, and they started a petition to secure his parole; their tenderhearted\u2014to say nothing of misguided\u2014efforts were rebuffed. But no matter\u2014William Lee's life sentence was destined to be a short one. He died in his cell in September 1914, age about twenty-five. Was it suicide or natural causes? Prison officials did not say. His relatives did not wish to be burdened with the disposal of his body, and at last report, they considered giving it to the Indiana Anatomical Society in Bloomington, perhaps sparing some other poor soul's body from being snatched from its grave by medical students.\n14\n\nA Higher Venue\n\nDallas Bower, twenty-five years old and something of a lunkhead, lived on a farm with his family two miles from New Washington. For reasons now known only to God, he developed a deep dislike for his stepmother, Mrs. Eliza Bower, and he tended to show it through physical violence. He was arrested for assaulting her on September 22, 1911, and taken to nearby Jeffersonville. He paid a seven-dollar fine and went home.\n\nIn 1912, Bower was again arrested for beating her. He was not punished, not even fined.\n\nAt the beginning of November of the same year, he beat her for a third time. Once more, he got no punishment worthy of the name. It could be argued that the following tragedy resulted from stinginess on the part of the Clark County government. As recently as September, the County Council had refused to appropriate money to cover the expense of taking New Washington prisoners to Jeffersonville; Bower was not arrested after his last outburst because no official wanted to spend his own money to send him to the city. So he was turned loose, and everyone simply hoped he would learn to get along with his stepmother.\n\nBower's animosity reached its zenith on November 10. His father, Clinton Bower, and brother Benton went outside to do chores, leaving only Dallas and Eliza in the house.\n\nWhen Benton Bower returned to the kitchen, he found his stepmother lying on the floor, marinating in a pool of blood, \"her brains oozing from three ghastly wounds on her head,\" as a reporter described it. Neither Dallas nor a weapon was to be seen.\n\nDr. S.L. Adair Jr. was called in. He pronounced Mrs. Bower dying and called the authorities in Jeffersonville. Since Eliza was a goner and there was nothing to occupy the doctor's time until the police arrived, he searched for the object that had inflicted her grievous injuries.\n\nDr. Adair looked in the family smokehouse, and there stood Dallas Bower. The doctor was surprised, and for lack of anything better to say under the circumstances, he inquired: \"Would you mind shucking some corn for me?\"\n\n\"I don't want to,\" replied Dallas.\n\nThe doctor closed the door and locked it, imprisoning Bower. Word traveled fast in the small community, and soon, the farm was choked with neighbors. A guard was stationed at the smokehouse, implying that some of these villagers desired to see how Bower looked wearing a hempen necktie.\n\nWhen the police arrested Bower, he offered no resistance and reacted to all questions with a glum, stubborn silence that became his trademark for the remainder of his days. However, he did confess to belaboring his stepmother's head with a hatchet and said he hid it behind a door near the kitchen's firewood box. The bloody implement was found there. The only motive he offered was that he \"didn't get along\" with Mrs. Bower.\n\nDespite Dr. Adair's gloomy prognosis, poor Mrs. Bower wasn't yet ready to give up the ghost, and she raved with such ferocity\u2014though unconscious\u2014that several men had to hold her down. The doctor gave her opiates to relieve her misery; she spoke, though still insensible, in a garbled and unintelligible fashion. She reached journey's end at noon on November 11, and the charge against Dallas Bower of assault and battery with intent to kill was altered to a charge of murder.\n\nFew news reports about the youthful killer fail to mention his perceived lack of intelligence. From the _Louisville Courier-Journal_ of November 12:\n\n_Bower is a pitiful object to look at, and there is every indication he is not bright. People in the vicinity of New Washington assert he has been feeble-minded all his life. The officers who brought him to Jeffersonville Sunday night assert he did not say five words on the whole trip. On one occasion he acted as if excited and threw his hat out of the automobile_.\n\nBower refused to eat for over a week. He also did not seem to comprehend the enormity of what he had done.\n\nA special grand jury indicted him on November 14. \"Bower still remains silent,\" said a reporter, \"and it is only rarely that he can be induced to even answer questions asked him.\"\n\nWas he authentically dimwitted or was he shamming? Perhaps a jury would have been convinced that he knew right from wrong and convicted him. He could have been acquitted, jailed or become one of the first to try out the state's newfangled electric chair. We will never know for certain, because while awaiting trial in February 1913, he became ill with heart trouble and dropsy, the old-fashioned name for edema (excessive accumulation of fluid in the body's tissues and cavities). The jail physician said he \"may never face the court.\"\n\nThe diagnosis was correct. Bower died on March 5. Had he survived, he was scheduled to go on trial March 14. His last words were, \"I am going home.\" Whether this referred to paradise or perdition was left unclarified, as was the reason why he resented his stepmother so much.\n\nSome anonymous poet of the legal profession made this entry in the docket of the Clark Circuit Court: \"Case venued to a higher court.\"\n\nBower's tale was told\u2014but there was a postscript. The hatchet murder preyed on the mind of his brother, Benton, who had discovered his dying stepmother, until he could take it no more. In July 1913, he went mad and was committed to the Southeastern Hospital for the Insane at North Madison.\n15\n\nHypothetical Questions in Abundance\n\nIn July 1915, Edmund A.H. Kayser of Gary asked Chief of Police Heintz for permission to carry a revolver. Heintz\u2014who was about to become the most overworked man in town\u2014refused. The chief may have been surprised by the request, because the applicant seemed unlikely to need a concealed weapon. Kayser, age forty-two, was pastor of St. James's Evangelical Lutheran Church at Tolleston, a suburb of Gary. Not long after the chief's rejection, Kayser sent his wife, Dora, and their three children to live with her relatives in Grand Haven, Michigan.\n\nWas Reverend Kayser anticipating trouble? If so, he certainly found it. On the night of August 25, someone standing outside his window shot him in the chest as he sat in his library. He opened the door and was shot in the jugular vein. As he slowly bled to death, his assailant dragged him forty feet from the house, tied his wrists and ankles with window cords and dumped him in a nearby lot, where he was found dead by a passerby an hour later.\n\nH.B. Snyder, postmaster of Tolleston, told authorities that for the past several months, Kayser had received threatening anonymous letters, warnings to stay away from a married Gary woman. Kayser turned a batch of them over to Snyder and requested that federal authorities locate the sender. The _New York Times_ reported that a woman's shoeprints were in the dirt outside the pastor's window. Had he been shot by a woman, perhaps the woman mentioned in the mysterious letters? She was located and denied having any untoward relations with Kayser.\n\nThe police sneered at suggested romantic entanglements and favored a second hypothesis: there had been strife and controversy in Kayser's church. Allegedly, the pastor received death threats over his highhanded ways. Was the preacher the victim of an angry parishioner? Reverend Conrad Held, pastor of Bethlehem German Evangelical Church, said that several months before, he received a letter complaining about Kayser. The anonymous letter, from Gary, was written in German and was a bitter rant blaming him for \"mismanagement of the church, unfairness, persecution of the [Saxon Verein] society, and improper relations with women of the church.\" Held passed the letter on to Kayser, who had no comment.\n\nA rival theory that never got much traction held that Kayser was slain because of a bad land or business deal. It appears he was in debt and owed many overdue payments.\n\nThen there was a fourth theory, more colorful and topical than the others. Kayser was originally from W\u00fcrttemberg, Germany, and had a Teutonic surname\u2014why, it was virtually _Kaiser_ \u2014and of course, in August 1915, Europe was embroiled in World War I. America would not enter the conflict until April 1917, but anti-German feeling was strong in the United States. Yet the foolhardy reverend made no secret of his rabidly pro-German stance, making heated remarks about Russia, France, England, America's neutral policy and President Wilson. He sent letters taking his fatherland's side to German and English newspapers. When some parishioners wrote a statement pledging neutrality, he tore up the document and tossed the scraps in their faces. Worst of all in American eyes, he publicly approved Germany's sinking of the British ocean liner _Lusitania_.\n\nHad Kayser been silenced for making statements considered treasonous by his adopted country? On the day of his death, he informed members of his congregation that an anonymous telephone caller told him he would be \"lynched.\" With a grin, he said he had received so many death threats he didn't take them seriously anymore. Then, he dropped a clue before his listeners that suggested the cause of his death might have been a woman after all: \"I have four enemies, and they are the only ones I am afraid of. And if I have trouble with them it will be because of my private affairs. I am not afraid of anything happening because of my political policies.\" If only he had named those \"four enemies\"\u2014but he didn't.\n\nReverend Kayser was buried on August 27, and the mystery of his passing seemed no closer to solution than before. He still had his admirers. The Alliance of German Societies of Evansville, Indiana, sent a wreath bearing the inscription, \"To the protagonist of German truth.\" Later, the same people would raise a fund to find Kayser's killers. In less than two years, America would be at war with Germany, and these lovers of Kayser and the Kaiser would be as popular as a guy eating beans on a submarine.\n\nThree suspects were collared with fanfare and then sheepishly released. On August 26, Gary police arrested George Schneider for two reasons: he was a member of the Saxon Verein, the church organization that had been at loggerheads with Kayser, and he had scratches and bruises on his face. \"Schneider answers the description of the man we have been looking for,\" said Police Chief Heintz, who, by then, must have wished he had given Reverend Kayser that blasted concealed weapon permit and thereby saved himself a lot of trouble. Schneider protested he had been in a fight and was able to prove it, so Heintz released him.\n\nThomas Modjesch, an inspector at the Gary Steel Mills, was brought into custody for reasons the police did not reveal to the press. He was soon freed.\n\nLucas Hamptman, a worker at a steel mill, was arrested on suspicion of being the author of the threatening letters to Kayser. Chief Heintz stated that he believed Hamptman innocent, and the laborer was released.\n\nThe leading explanation for Kayser's untimely end was his openly expressed anti-American sentiments. And some believed he was willing to do more to help the German war effort than merely talk. A woman who claimed to have been in the Kayser residence an hour before his death said she overheard a conversation between the reverend and \"a prominent Gary attorney,\" in which they appeared to discuss plans to sabotage the shipment of arms to the European Allies. (The United States was officially a neutral country, but American munitions companies sold explosives to Europe anyway.) They carried on their furtive chat in German, she said.\n\nJoseph Kramer, employee at Gary's Aetna Powder Works\u2014one of the firms that manufactured explosives to be used against Germany\u2014said he was accosted by two men, \"one of whom looked something like Kayser,\" who offered him $1,500 if he would blow up the plant. Kramer was tempted. But patriotism trumped greed, and he refused.\n\nThe sabotage theory gained support in Gary on August 29, when a disaster was narrowly averted. Someone noticed that the rivets on a plate holding together two train track rails had been filed. It could have derailed the locomotive, which carried volatile guncotton to be used in the war effort. In addition, the damaged track was located just fifty feet from the Aetna Powder Works, an alleged target of pro-German spies. The press reported that Chief Heintz was \"unusually reticent\" concerning this development. Authorities wondered if the attempt at sabotage was connected with Reverend Kayser's murder, but nothing could be proved.\n\nAt first, Chief Heintz believed Kayser had been murdered over a woman, not for his politics. However, he came to think that the preacher's rabid pro-German stance was the motive\u2014especially when the chief also started getting death threats in the mail.\n\nHeintz wasn't the only one who thought so. An important announcement came on September 1. Federal and state authorities were convinced that Reverend Kayser's murderers were involved in a \"war plot.\" Since Kayser was virulently pro-German, his assassins must have been anti-German. Said the _New York Times_ , \"[O]ne or more arrests are expected in a few days.\" It was suggested that Kayser had been a closet Hun, and not closeted very well:\n\n_Telegrams and correspondence seized following the murder are said to link the Rev. Mr. Kayser very closely with the German propaganda in this country. Government Secret Service men are investigating rumors that the pastor was plotting to tamper with or destroy mills making war munitions_.\n\nIf true, one wonders why pro-German saboteurs would select a notorious loudmouth such as Kayser to do their dirty work. His lack of subtlety would make him less than ideal for pulling off covert operations.\n\nA couple days later, the feds suggested that the undercover sabotage operation in America was bigger than they thought:\n\n_Gigantic plots in violation of American neutrality, with two organizations of nation-wide extent in every large city, agents for dynamiting powder mills and arms plants, and recruiting officers secretly working in Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and other northern cities have been unearthed by government agents_.\n\nCharles Clyne, United States district attorney, admitted, \"There are unmistakably agents of warring governments at work in America.\" And these revelations were uncovered when authorities investigated the murder of Reverend Kayser. It seems the best thing he could have done for his beloved Germany\u2014not to mention himself and his family\u2014was to keep his big yap shut.\n\nStrangely, after the initial press releases, nothing more was said about this massive conspiracy. The papers did not report on the promised arrests. Possibly the federal government decided that it was smarter to keep the operations of foreign saboteurs in America a state secret.\n\nPerhaps as a result, Reverend Kayser's slaying remains officially unsolved. On February 19, 1918, Michael Schramm of Bridgeport, Connecticut, confessed to the murder. It appears that no one took him seriously.\n16\n\nThomas Hoal, Boy Bandit\n\nIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, young men were enamored of dime novels. These stories were larded with blood-and-thunder violence, daring rescues, preposterous illustrations and the most stilted language imaginable. And they were very, _very_ popular since they were so cheap.\n\nToday, dime novels are valuable collector's items read by few; back when they served as a literary repast to famished adolescents, reformers considered the books vulgar menaces to society and corruptors of youth. Dime novels were blamed for everything from rising crime rates to boys' lack of respect for their elders, and they were roundly denounced, confiscated and banned from coast to coast\u2014which only served, of course, to make them forbidden and even more popular.\n\nEdmund Pearson declared in _Books in Black or Red_ and _Dime Novels_ that the genre was hokey and harmless; also, rather than reveling in a sense of lawlessness, if anything the stories tended to be as rigidly moralistic as Sunday school primers. Recently, Harold Schechter argued persuasively in his study of the history of violence in American entertainment, _Savage Pastimes_ , that dime novels were a convenient scapegoat on which to blame societal pathologies.\n\nBut although reformers made too much of the dime novel's influence on young minds, surely a few readers were seduced into committing violent acts by reading them, just as a modern fool might imitate some maniacal stunt he saw in a movie\u2014something that would not have occurred to him unless the movie put the idea in his mind. It doesn't mean novels or movies are to blame or should be banned, but we should acknowledge that they can put bad ideas into the heads of suggestible souls.\n\nTake the incident of November 11, 1909, for example.\n\nOur story begins in Louisville, Kentucky. A black chauffeur named James R. Tucker, who worked for Mrs. Walter Escott, was cleaning his employer's car in a garage and minding his own business when he was hijacked by a heavily armed seventeen-year-old. The boy ordered Tucker to drive across the river to the Merchants' National Bank on the corner of Pearl and Main Streets in New Albany, Indiana.\n\nArtist's depiction of a rather happy-looking Thomas Hoal in the Jeffersonville Reformatory. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _November 12, 1909. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nThe teenager forced Tucker to enter the bank ahead of him at gunpoint. He made no attempt at subtlety\u2014he toted _five_ revolvers and hundreds of cartridges\u2014or even secrecy; he came to the side door just as though he had business to conduct.\n\nWhen he stood before the tellers' cages, the young man\u2014who would be universally called \"the Boy Bandit\" in headlines\u2014whipped out two guns from his collection and shouted, \"Hands up! Everybody into the vault!\" Whether due to inexperience, incompetence or just plain nervousness, he didn't give them an opportunity to fulfill his commands. He started shooting without provocation, first into the ceiling and then at the employees. He shot cashier Jacob Hangary \"Gary\" Fawcett through the heart and seriously wounded the bank's president, John K. Woodward, in the abdomen. (In one of those bitter ironies that life enjoys throwing at us, Woodward was due to retire in only six weeks.) According to bookkeeper Frank Fougerousse, the bandit didn't even demand money; apparently, he forgot to in the excitement. Then the boy fled the bank without taking a measly penny, dropping one of his revolvers in flight.\n\n\"Quick, get me out of here!\" the boy ordered James Tucker. Displaying the same foolish impatience as before, the would-be bandit shot the chauffeur in the left side and ran out the door with a pack of policemen and a furious crowd at his heels. They chased him to the river, where he swiped a boat and tried to row to Kentucky. Police caught him, with help from fishermen armed with shotguns, after he was stranded on a sandbar. The mob was in a vengeful humor, and the boy might have had no earthly need for an attorney if the police had not applied some cleverness. The arresting officer instructed the Boy Bandit to feign death; the policeman told the crowd that the shooter had taken poison. The ruse fooled them. The teen was hurried to Jeffersonville Reformatory for his own safety.\n\nIn custody, he refused to give his name. He probably marveled at the ease and speed with which he was arrested, since the antiheroes in dime novels never seemed to get caught. However, his silence was in vain. That evening, William J. Hall of 802 South Preston Street in Louisville\u2014an antique dealer, upholsterer and cabinetmaker of excellent reputation\u2014went to the police saying that the bandit's description matched his wayward son, who had not been home for several hours. He added that his son was an incorrigible reader of dime novels, smoker of cigarettes and terrorizer of his own family. He had even beaten his father. Mr. Hall told a reporter, \"Now when I see what he has done, I am surprised that he never killed me.\" He added that his son was so mean and threatening that he was relieved he was being held in the reformatory. When the news got back to the Boy Bandit, he knew the jig was up and revealed that he was Thomas Jefferson Hall.\n\nExcept that wasn't the family's true name. It was actually Hoal. William Hall had changed their surname when he abandoned his wife Nettie in Knoxville, Tennessee, several months before. He was trying to escape from an unhappy marriage and did not want her to find him. (They had since reconciled and were living together in Louisville.) The killer shall be called \"Hoal\" for the remainder of this account.\n\nWhen the Hoals moved to New Albany from Knoxville in June 1909, they lived across from the bank Tom would attempt to rob in the future. Undoubtedly living in proximity to the bank fueled his juvenile daydreams about making easy money. The family moved to Louisville in September.\n\nJ. Hangary Fawcett, murdered cashier. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _November 12, 1909. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nWhen reporters came to interview Tom Hoal in his cell, they found him stubborn and temperamental. He answered nearly every question with the laconic phrase, \"Not saying,\" and refused to explain why he needlessly shot the workers at the bank, but he was big enough to exonerate James Tucker, whom some thought was an accessory to the crime rather than a hostage: \"I'm sorry for what I did, and I know that nobody can help me now. The Negro didn't know what he was doing. I am the only guilty person. I'm not saying why I did it, and I'm not afraid of the consequences.\" He added, \"[Tucker] is square and should be released. He is telling the truth...He couldn't help himself and shouldn't be held responsible.\"\n\n\"Do you read ten-cent novels?\" a reporter asked.\n\n\"I expect that is the cause of my present trouble,\" he replied. \"I now wish I had let them alone.\" Thus, Hoal admitted his addiction to violence-prone, outlaw-romanticizing dime novels. (In a later interview, Hoal said of the books, \"They had a whole lot to do with it. If I had not read the stories I would not be here.\" Some would consider Hoal's admission evidence of dime novels' evil influence. But then, it is easier to blame your bad behavior on your choice of reading material than to admit you are an amoral idiot.)\n\nHoal continued his show of bravado: \"They can't [do] more than hang me, and we all have to die.\"\n\nThe journalist interjected, with commendable sarcasm, \"Yes, one had to die at New Albany this morning.\"\n\n\"He would not if he had done what I asked him,\" replied Hoal, glossing over the fact that he had not given his victims the opportunity to follow his instructions.\n\nThe condition of the three men shot by Hoal was of paramount concern\u2014or two of them, at least. Cashier Fawcett was beyond help, having died instantly of his wound. For days the papers reported every peak and valley in the recovery of chauffeur Tucker and bank president Woodward. A headline the day after the shooting announced that Tucker might not survive the day; in fact, he almost died and was saved only by injections of salt water. On November 13, Dr. D.F. Davis said Tucker would develop peritonitis. He did, and it was nearly fatal.\n\nJohn Tucker, wounded chauffeur. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _November 12, 1909. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nAs for Woodward, on November 13, it was said that he had about a fifty-fifty chance for recovery. The next day, the newspapers reported that he was getting stronger. He had serious liver damage, and the doctors predicted that if Woodward could live through the next day, November 14, he would likely survive. On the other hand, they did not hold high hopes for Tucker's recovery.\n\nMr. William Hoal visited his son at the reformatory the day after the shooting. The heartbroken older gentleman revealed to reporters that when he had briefly worked as a furniture repairman in New Albany, one of his best customers was Gary Fawcett, the man murdered by his son. \"I am sorry Tom was not the one who lost his life,\" he said. \"I could have stood it better.\"\n\nAt Hoal's residence, investigators found an enormous, waterproof dry goods box with a hinged door. Mr. Hoal said that his son had threatened the family with death if they looked inside. It contained a five-gallon can of water, a bag of food, a flashlight and battery, a change of clothes (all black), a small bed, guns, three road maps, a railroad timetable, a bottle of matches, a ball of cord, a set of automobile goggles, a mask and a false beard. The outside label read \"R.J. Smith, Knoxville, Tenn.\" Tom Hoal's absurd plan was to escape detection by hiding in the box and having himself mailed away! He must have had an accomplice waiting in Knoxville; otherwise, who would have claimed the box? But the mysterious \"R.J. Smith\" appears not to have been investigated.\n\nJohn K. Woodward, wounded bank president. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _November 12, 1909. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nHoal's getaway box proved a source of unending fascination to the public and became a celebrity in its own right. It was taken to Louisville City Hall for safekeeping until the New Albany authorities came for it. Within fifteen minutes of the box's arrival, it drew crowds who wanted to see its ingenious design. A merchant wanted to buy it and put it in his shop window, and a street urchin remarked to a pal, \"Say, guy, this here Hoal was the whole cheese. He's got Nick Carter done to a turn.\" (Judging from his allusion to Carter, hero of many a dime novel, the lad shared his newfound hero's taste in literature.) Officers hauled the box to the police station to prevent souvenir hunters from dismantling it and carrying it away\u2014after all, it was a key piece of evidence.\n\nNew Albany police retrieved the box and took it home; somewhere along the way, somebody stole the mask and false beard secreted within. They locked the box in the jailhouse stable, much to the disappointment of anticipating throngs, but put it on display in the yard on December 2. The box's fascination had not waned even by then, and more than one thousand people with nothing better to do turned out to gaze upon it.\n\nThe Boy Bandit took hold of the public imagination in a phenomenon that we might call Hoalmania. As Tom Hoal awaited his hearing, he proved an irresistible subject for professional experts and amateurs who wanted to plumb his psychology or present him as a perfect example of all that was wrong with society and modern youth. The _Evansville Journal_ and the _South Bend Tribune_ ran editorials on the perils of reading dime novels. The _Journal_ pointed out that while the hero and the cause of good always triumphed in the novels, the villains could be perceived as worthy of emulation by diseased minds: \"[T]he bad people make just as deep and lasting an impression.\" There was serious discussion in Indiana about making illegal the sale of \"yellow-back novels\" (that is, dime novels) through the mail. Postmaster General Hitchcock in Washington, D.C., stated that there was no legal way to prevent their sale as long as they contained no obscene material. He said so regretfully, making it clear that there was nothing he would have loved more than to keep such harmful trash out of the hands of little nosepickers.\n\nTom Hoal became the subject of many a Sunday sermon. His school records were scrutinized; for instance, Professor J. Milton Elliott of the Dudley Public School in Lexington, Kentucky, which Hoal had attended as a child, noted that the student did well until 1905, when he made poor grades and a teacher described him as \"disobedient, untrustworthy, and vicious.\" Professor Elliott suggested that was when Hoal's downward spiral commenced. Elliott ended his speech by warning parents of their duty to make sure their children read good material.\n\nHoal's head was also studied. A phrenologist\u2014that is, a brand of quack scientist who claimed he could tell all about a person's character by studying the shape of his head and the bumps thereon\u2014crowed that he had observed Hoal a month before and had boldly predicted that he was certain to rob a bank. Phrenologists were not the only ones to attempt figuring out Hoal's personality and mentality strictly by his looks. Major David Peyton, superintendent of the reformatory where the prisoner was being held, said:\n\n_I have examined his head and mouth, eyes and ears, and I think he is the most perfect specimen of a pervert that I have ever seen. His teeth are all jumbled up and not regularly set. His palate is wrongly formed, and he had the mind of an 8-year-old boy instead of a young man of 17_.\n\nWilliam Hoal, while not wealthy, persuaded attorneys Laurent Douglas and Samuel G. Wilkerson to save his son from the waiting noose. (Indiana had no law against hanging minors.) On November 13, Tom Hoal confided that he intended to plead insanity. He claimed his mental illness was caused by\u2014wait for it\u2014reading too many dime novels. His bravado had worn off, and his captors described him as cringing and nervous. He no longer seemed so blas\u00e9 about dying, but he had not conquered his hair-trigger temper.\n\nOn November 15, both James Tucker and J.K. Woodward were reported to be \"doing better.\" Doctors confidently stated that Woodward, in particular, had \"passed the crisis.\" The following day, the _Courier-Journal_ reported of the bank president, \"The danger of death is diminishing every hour that he lives.\" The paper said on November 19 that Tucker had entered the valley of the shadow several times but was rescued by \"his strong constitution and youth.\" Tucker finally went home on December 2, in the care of his employer, Mrs. Walter Escott, whose boundless concern for him during his convalescence is one of the few bright spots in the saga of Thomas Hoal. In early February, Woodward went to his home at 511 Park Avenue in Louisville, still in feeble condition.\n\nHoal's attorneys, undoubtedly secretly relieved that he would be tried for one murder instead of three, asked for a change of venue from Floyd County to Clark County on the grounds that too many people in New Albany wanted to string their client up. He was arraigned in the Floyd County Circuit Court early in the morning of November 24, Thanksgiving Day\u2014so early, by design, that he could be sneaked in and out of the courtroom as quickly as possible before the public found out, such was his unpopularity. In spite of the bank employees who saw him shoot, the hundreds of persons who joined the police in chasing him and his own confession, Hoal pled not guilty.\n\nThe change of venue was granted\u2014under Indiana law, the judge could not refuse\u2014and Tom Hoal's destiny would be decided by a jury at Corydon, in Harrison County. With him came his marvelous box\u2014in fact, it arrived in Corydon on January 7, 1910, long before its builder did. Hoal wasn't taken from Jeffersonville until February 19. He spent most of the trip as a little man with a scared look in his eye, quaking in his boots from fear that he would be seized and mobbed. He \"trembled as with palsy,\" wrote one reporter. It was far from the cool, macho image Hoal had tried so hard to cultivate.\n\nOnce the prisoner arrived, a problem became evident: the Corydon jail was frail and rickety and would present little challenge to a highly motivated lynch mob. No trouble was expected, but he was strongly guarded just in case and placed in a specially constructed, reinforced cell. He awoke in a funk of fear on his first morning there, having heard the joyful whoops of small urchins playing in the courthouse square and believing that the long-dreaded mob had arrived.\n\nOn February 23, while Hoal awaited his trial, the papers reported that a sixteen-year-old boy in Cincinnati was fatally shot by his brother as they enacted a scene from their favorite western-themed dime novel. And on February 27 came news that J.K. Woodward had almost fully recovered.\n\nThe trial began on May 4 after an epic struggle to acquire twelve unprejudiced jurors. Two witnesses against Hoal were the men he harmed: James Tucker, who related the story of his abduction and shooting, and J.K. Woodward, who described what happened in the bank that morning. Other testimony came from C.H. Fawcett, father of the murdered cashier, and former chief of police William Adams, who had rescued Hoal from the mob after arresting him. The defense had only one possible strategy: an insanity plea, for which it laid the grounds by calling its client \"mentally defective.\" To make sure everyone got the point, Tom developed a deadpan expression that made Buster Keaton look like Jerry Lewis and contemplated the ceiling with a glassy-eyed stare. No one had mentioned Hoal's tendency to slip into a catatonic state _before_ the trial.\n\nMerchants' National Bank, New Albany. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _November 12, 1909. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nWilliam Hoal was so desperate to save his son from the gallows that he bared a dark family secret in court: his first wife, Tom's mother, had been an alcoholic who drank heavily while pregnant. When the family lived in Lexington, Kentucky, she struck her son on the head with a heavy dish because he hid her whiskey, and after that incident, said Mr. Hoal, Tom was never the same. His son had grown up strong, stubborn and prone to temper tantrums and violence. Oh, and also, he read lots of dime novels.\n\nAlso testifying (allegedly) in Hoal's defense was Major Peyton, the reformatory superintendent who had told reporters that he thought the Boy Bandit was abnormal because he _looked_ abnormal. Hoal's attorneys expected Peyton to state under oath that he considered Hoal to be insane. But Peyton surprised them by refusing to say so under oath. Instead, Peyton protested that he could say nothing definite about the prisoner's mental condition. The angry attorneys introduced into evidence a letter Peyton had written to Katie Fox\u2014Hoal's birth mother\u2014in which he opined that his young charge was mentally defective and had been ruined by reading those dime novels.\n\nA deliveryman standing beside Tom Hoal's celebrated box. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _November 13, 1909. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nThe insanity plea clearly wasn't going anywhere, so Hoal's attorney S.G. Wilkerson offered a novel alternative theory for the defense: the Boy Bandit fired a warning shot into the ceiling, to be sure, but he didn't kill Gary Fawcett. The teller was shot by _someone else_ who fired at Hoal through the window, missed him and _accidentally_ shot the cashier. Who was this civic-minded person who shot at Hoal seconds after the bank robber shot into the air? Wilkerson didn't say, nor did his theory excuse the fact that his client also fired at Woodward and Tucker. Reporters noted that Wilkerson's explanation was greeted with broad smiles all around the courtroom. To be fair, Hoal was so manifestly guilty, and his act of violence so senseless, that his attorneys had no choice but to explore the far frontiers of silliness in hope of sparking reasonable doubt.\n\nWhen the prosecution blistered the Boy Bandit and his deeds in its closing arguments, the \"catatonic,\" \"semi-idiotic\" Hoal noticeably squirmed.\n\nThe case went to the jury on May 6. \"At a late hour tonight,\" dramatically wrote the _Courier-Journal_ 's correspondent, \"twelve grim and troubled men were still wrestling with the question of what shall be done with Thomas Jefferson Hoal.\"\n\nOn May 7, the jury returned with bad news and good news for the defense: it found Hoal guilty (that was the bad news), with a recommended life sentence at the Michigan City penitentiary (that was the good news). A poll of the jurors indicated that they spared Hoal the death penalty only because of his extreme youth. Still, life in prison making the acquaintance of tough convicts was not going to be a carefree existence. Ordinarily, an Indiana prisoner under the age of thirty would be sent to a reformatory, but an exception was made for those convicted of murder.\n\nThe _St. Louis Globe-Democrat_ did not like dime novels. Reprinted in the _Louisville Courier-Journal_ , November 16, 1909. _Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nRumor held that a lynch mob was in the offing, so Hoal was sent to Michigan City immediately. Before the prisoner was taken away, he again displayed the surly attitude that had gotten him into so much trouble in the first place when Judge William Ridley asked him if there were any reason the sentence should not be passed. A reporter described Hoal's response: \"Then, standing before the judge, his body slightly inclined forward, he thundered a venomous 'no.' That one word was the only utterance he made in the courtroom and it contained a world of hatred and disappointment.\"\n\nIt was Corydon sheriff Alva Ward's duty to ride with Hoal to prison. A reporter aboard the train noticed the Boy Bandit's presence, and the sheriff said this to the journalist\u2014in a voice loud enough to make certain Hoal heard every word:\n\n_I had intended to say something good about the boy to the warden of the Indiana State Prison, but he has been so ugly since I started with him from Corydon that I must tell the warden that he is an incorrigible and I hope he will never get out. Before we started from Corydon on Saturday night Hoal got into one of his spells and tore up all of the clothing in his cell. He also tried to break the locks on the door. He is certainly the worst prisoner I have ever handled, but I do not believe he is insane. He will have lots of time to reflect in the State prison during the next ninety-nine years_.\n\nAfter the verdict was announced, the _Courier-Journal_ said of Hoal's father: \"[He] announced that he would never stop working on behalf of his son until he should be free.\" Those words were truer than the author knew, because on May 9, the day after Hoal was sent to prison, officials at the Corydon jail found files and five steel saws capable of cutting iron bars in the mattress in his former cell. His father registered surprise and wondered aloud how Tom possibly could have gotten them. The police didn't wonder. On May 19, William and Nettie Hoal were indicted by the Harrison County grand jury for conspiring to help Tom escape. But the pair was nowhere to be found; they had fled to Kentucky, where they vanished as the will-o'-the-wisp at daybreak.\n\nI am sorry to report that the ultimate fate of Hoal's box, like the whereabouts of his parents, is a mystery.\n\nThomas Hoal's mug shots. _From the_ Louisville Courier-Journal, _November 13, 1909. Courtesy of the_ Courier-Journal.\n\nThe case struck a sour note for nearly everyone involved with it. Hoal's father did not pay his son's lawyers\u2014having disappeared\u2014and they understandably wanted compensation. In September 1910, attorneys Douglas and Wilkerson sent a bill for $528 to the Floyd County Council, but the members refused to appropriate the funds on the grounds that the attorneys had been appointed by a nonlocal judge, Judge Ridley at Corydon; also, there had been no petition for a court-appointed attorney for the young pauper Hoal. In December, their petition was officially denied, and Douglas and Wilkerson had no choice but to eat that $528.\n\nThe defense attorneys weren't the only ones who got shafted in the aftermath of the trial. In June 1910, Gary Fawcett's family tried to collect $5,000 worth of insurance from the Travelers' Protective Association for the benefit of the dead cashier's son, Charles. The company argued that Fawcett was not \"a regular traveling man,\" and therefore, his family was not entitled to the money. (Yet they were happy to insure the non-traveling man and thus take his payment in the first place.) Showing the talent for legal hairsplitting that makes insurance companies so beloved everywhere, Travelers' contended furthermore that since Fawcett was a murder victim, his death did not count as an accident. The other side argued that Fawcett's death _was_ accidental, since \"Hoal was shooting at random without a specific intention to kill him.\" Attorneys argued the case as late as March 1911; I don't know how it concluded.\n\nPrison conditions were not much to Tom Hoal's liking, and he tried for a parole in March 1912. He sent a letter to prosecutor Walter Bulleit beseeching his assistance. The letter's elegance and eloquence indicate that while in prison, Hoal elevated his literary tastes. In any case, the attempt was turned down.\n\nHoal tried again in March 1915, this time seeking aid from Bruce Ulsh, editor of the _New Albany Tribune_. Once again, he blamed his taking the wrong turn in life on dime novels. To show that he had improved himself, Hoal said that he attended prison chapel services and a Bible class, learned the printing trade and played in a band. The _Courier-Journal_ remarked acidly in an editorial:\n\n_That Hoal now plays a cornet and belongs to a Bible class will not be deemed by those who recall the crime sufficient ground for parole...If the murderer of Mr. Fawcett is sincerely religious he should be sufficiently awake to the enormity of his crime to realize that a lifetime of repentance in prison could not atone for it_.\n\nSix months later, on September 27, former bank president J.K. Woodward died at last from the effects of the bullet Thomas Hoal had placed in him nearly six years before.\n\nThe aging Boy Bandit got tired of waiting for that parole and decided to take matters into his own hands. On the night of September 22, 1919, he and four other prisoners escaped.\n\nHoal was never seen again, as far as the record shows. Perhaps he climbed into a well-provisioned box and mailed himself to some exotic location. Undoubtedly, he slumbers far from New Albany under a gravestone bearing a chiseled alias.\n17\n\nThree Ways to Escape Punishment\n\nIndianapolis citizens who rose early on Friday morning, February 2, 1934, saw the rare but unwelcome sight of a man's body slumped in a parked car with the motor running. He had been shot in the back of the head but turned out to be no ordinary thug or bootlegger. The victim was none other than Reverend Gaylord V. Saunders, age thirty-six, former pastor of a Methodist Episcopal church in Wabash.\n\nWhat had Reverend Saunders been doing so far from home? Going to school, actually\u2014embalming school. After retiring from the ministry, he craved a change of careers and had moved to Indianapolis to learn the fine art of giving a pleasantly lifelike appearance to the preserved remains of the dearly departed. His wife, Neoma, chose to stay in Wabash.\n\nBenjamin Franklin once remarked, \"Three may keep a secret if two are dead.\" How right he was. Because of the loose lips of the people involved, the murder was solved by Saturday night.\n\nReverend Saunders's roommate at embalming school was nineteen-year-old Theodore Mathers. (One imagines their bull sessions must have been pretty interesting, perhaps covering such topics as the efficiency of the trocar for aiding in preservation of the abdominal organs and friendly arguments over whether Cintio or Veino was the superior brand of embalming fluid.) Mathers, in turn, had a lifelong pal named Masel Roe; both Mathers and Roe were natives of Coalmont who had relocated to Indianapolis.\n\nA badly rattled Roe turned informer and told the police that he was present when Mathers shot the preacher: \"Several times Mathers told me that his roommate, Saunders, was nuts and was going to kill his wife and children at Wabash. Mathers said he would rather kill Saunders than see him kill the children.\"\n\nTheodore Mathers. _From the_ Wabash (IN) Plain Dealer, _February 5, 1934. Courtesy of the_ Wabash Plain Dealer.\n\nOn the night of Thursday, February 1, Roe and Mathers rode with Saunders down to a tavern called the Brown Derby. Said Roe, \"While Saunders was talking with the manager, Mathers told me that he had to 'do it tonight' or kill himself.\"\n\n(In other words, Mathers considered the reverend dangerously insane, but rather than tell the proper authorities, he thought it better to take matters in his own hands and slay Saunders\u2014and took his mission so seriously that he contemplated suicide if he should be thwarted. The reader may be wondering why young Mathers felt so strongly on the topic of removing Reverend Saunders from the world.)\n\nAccording to Roe, the three got back in the car\u2014Saunders driving, Roe in the passenger seat and Mathers in the back seat. \"Before I knew what had happened, Mathers shot Saunders through the head.\" Then Mathers took the wheel. After driving around the outskirts of the city for a while with a bloody corpse, they parked. Mathers moved the body to the driver's seat and took the dead man's watch, diamond ring and three dollars from his wallet to make it look like a robbery gone bad. After staging the crime scene, he and Roe lammed it home on foot, but Mathers reassured his old pal that he would \"keep Roe's name out of it.\"\n\nRoe responded, of course, by ratting out his best buddy at the soonest opportunity. After hearing this strange story, the police wanted to get Mathers's side of it. They found him at the freshly minted widow's home back in Wabash. He had gone there, he said, to help her make funeral arrangements.\n\nThe reader may be wondering, as did the police, why Mathers took such an interest in the widow of his murdered roommate. He broke down and told Indianapolis chief of police Michael Morrissey that three weeks before, Mrs. Saunders had paid him a princely $10.00 to polish off her husband\u2014out of which he paid a friend $8.50 for the gun.\n\nMrs. Saunders and Theodore Mathers were arrested in Wabash and taken to Indianapolis. The police also arrested Masel Roe and Mabel Balke, a nurse who had attended Mrs. Saunders during a bout with tuberculosis, because Mathers said she knew of the murder conspiracy and even had the reverend's watch and ring hidden at her house. (True to his word, these items were found in Balke's basement.)\n\nOnce in custody, the four suspects sang like a barbershop quartet. Mrs. Saunders confessed to plotting the murder; Mathers confessed to committing it; Roe confessed to being present when it happened; Balke confessed that she was aware of the impending crime. They were in a predicament, especially the matronly looking, thirty-five-year-old Mrs. Saunders, who admitted that she had masterminded (if that is the correct word) the badly executed, poorly thought-out crime. How could she possibly save herself from Indiana's electric chair?\n\nMrs. Saunders. _From_ the Wabash (IN) Plain Dealer, _February 5, 1934. Courtesy of the_ Wabash Plain Dealer.\n\nWhen a murderer is caught red-handed and has even confessed, he has three available options to escape punishment, and Mrs. Saunders shamelessly employed all three of them.\n\nThe first option is the \"abuse excuse.\" She claimed the reverend had been so crazy that she (and Mathers) lived in constant fear. Nurse Balke agreed that Saunders's mind had seemed \"affected\" in the weeks before Mrs. Saunders decided to put him out of her misery. On the other hand, the victim's brother, Reverend Eldridge Saunders of Uniondale, indignantly denied that Gaylord had had any mental problems.\n\nThere is a second option favored by those who commit murder but wish not to be punished: blacken the character of the victim, who is no longer around to defend himself. When Neoma Saunders went to trial on December 7, her defense team made full use of this strategy. In fact, to use its term, Gaylord Saunders had been \"a moral pervert.\" Reverend W. Earl Pittenger offered triple-barreled testimony that Saunders had been a heavy drinker for more than a year before his murder; that he (Pittenger) had urged Mrs. Saunders to have her husband committed because he seemed a \"dangerous type\"; and that Mrs. Saunders confided to him that Gaylord had subjected her to \"indecencies.\" A family friend, Ross Curts, said that the allegedly deranged preacher had once threatened to kill Mrs. Saunders with a butcher knife; when Curts objected, Saunders bit him on the finger. Prosecutor John Kelly objected to this sort of \"mud slinging\" and character assassination, but Judge Laymon overruled him.\n\nThe prosecution introduced a statement made by Mrs. Saunders in her written confession: \"I wanted my husband killed because he was losing his mind and I had papers filed to put him in an insane asylum.\" She never did explain why she thought it better for him to be dead than hospitalized. When she took the stand on December 13, she denied that she had plotted his death, flatly contradicting her confession.\n\nShe also denied under oath that she had been having an affair with young Mathers, as many thought\u2014although that would explain his unnaturally protective attitude toward her, his eagerness to kill her husband and the fact that he was at her house in Wabash when arrested. However, Neoma Saunders was a woman of many contradictions; she quickly reversed course and admitted she had twice scratched the cosmic itch with Mathers. Both times, she said, Gaylord had forced her to do it. Once, he even held a knife to her back!\n\nThe crazy man had abused his long-suffering wife in many other ways, she said. He had threatened to kill their two sons; he drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes excessively; forced her to submit to unnamed \"unspeakable indignities\"; made her look at dirty pictures and read \"lewd stories\" aloud to him; struck her and threatened her with weapons; and he smoked marijuana, too. This effort to paint the minister as a crazed dope fiend was far more convincing then than it would be now. At the time, marijuana was a relatively new and little-understood phenomenon in American culture, and as everyone in 1934 knew, a couple puffs of this dreadful Mexican weed would turn a straight-A divinity student into a hysterical maniac bent on murder and mayhem, perhaps even cannibalism if the smoker happened to have the munchies.\n\nIt should be noted that Mrs. Saunders claimed all of her husband's spectacular dissipation improbably occurred in only the last year or two of his life.\n\nReverend Saunders. _From the_ Wabash (IN) Plain Dealer, _February 5, 1934. Courtesy of the_ Wabash Plain Dealer.\n\nIt may have seemed at this point that the defense was overdoing it, but to play it safe it tried a third time-tested possibility for saving its client: the temporary insanity dodge\u2014no, not her husband's insanity, but her own! In other words, if the jury didn't believe Reverend Saunders was crazy, perhaps it could be persuaded that Mrs. Saunders was. The defense's use of this strategy was implied at the beginning of the trial, when prospective jurors were asked whether they believed in _witchcraft_. They also were asked what their attitude would be toward a woman who believed her spouse was possessed by Old Nick himself. The defense claimed that Mrs. Saunders had been driven insane by those undisclosed \"unnatural acts of the slain man.\" (Genuine cases of temporary insanity are rather rare in everyday life\u2014but not in the courtrooms of America.)\n\nAs we have seen, Mrs. Saunders's attorneys worked overtime to make the minister seem like the living embodiment of depravity and cruelty. (But for some reason, this business about demonic possession was not brought up again.) In contrast to the baroque stories presented by the defense, the prosecution simply said that Mrs. Saunders was a \"cold-blooded murderess\" with a couple easily discernible motives: she wanted to continue her fling with Theodore Mathers, and she wanted the $29,200 she would receive from Gaylord's insurance policies if he should be so unfortunate as to die an unnatural death.\n\nThree physicians examined Mrs. Saunders and declared her _presently_ sane, which meant that if the jury acquitted her, she would be set free immediately.\n\nAnd that's precisely what happened. On December 18, after two hours' deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty due to temporary insanity. Mrs. Saunders greeted the verdict with \"hysterical laughter\"\u2014not _too_ hysterical, mind you, as she was supposed to be perfectly sane now. The judge pronounced her free to go.\n\nMasel Roe and Mabel Balke never went to trial; apparently, they got off with a stern warning, perhaps accompanied with the legal equivalent of a dirty look and shamey-shamey fingers.\n\nTheodore Mathers\u2014the self-confessed actual killer of Reverend Gaylord Saunders\u2014went on trial in April 1935. The temporary insanity stunt had worked so darn well for Mrs. Saunders that Mathers's attorneys employed it, too. They argued with straight faces that Mathers had been driven temporarily insane when the reverend forced him to have sex with Mrs. Saunders.\n\nIt was a noble effort, but there was one law the attorneys failed to take into consideration: the law of diminishing returns. (Perhaps they also should have considered Murphy's Law.) On April 20, the jury found Mathers guilty of involuntary manslaughter and gave him a sentence of one to ten years in prison.\nBibliography\n\nTHE MYSTERY OF DR. KNABE\n\nDorland, W.A. Newman. _The Sum of Feminine Achievement_. Boston, MA: Stratford Co., 1917.\n\n_New Orleans Daily Picayune_. \"Knabe Murder Case Postponed to Fall.\" June 24, 1913, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Trial for Murder of Woman Friday.\" November 24, 1913, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Undertaker and Doctor Accused of Knabe Death.\" January 1, 1913, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Woman Physician Did Not Suicide.\" December 24, 1912, 13.\n\n_New York Times_. \"At Bar for Knabe Murder.\" November 28, 1913, 20.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Buddhism a Clue in Dr. Knabe Case.\" November 1, 1911, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Clue to Dr. Knabe's Slayer.\" October 27, 1911, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Deserter Got $1,500 for Killing Woman.\" April 2, 1912, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Dr. Craig Goes Free.\" December 10, 1913, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Fails to Identify Craig.\" December 4, 1913, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Find Woman Doctor Slain in Her Home.\" October 25, 1911, 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Insists He Killed Dr. Helen Knabe.\" April 3, 1912, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Knabe Verdict Is Murder.\" December 30, 1911, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"New Knabe Murder Theory.\" November 14, 1911, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"No Trace of Knife.\" October 26, 1911, 9.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Now Think Dr. Knabe Suicide.\" October 30, 1911, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Seeks Dr. Craig's Acquittal.\" December 5, 1913, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Sleuths on Knabe Case.\" February 11, 1912, I, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Sticks to His Story.\" April 4, 1912, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Sure Dr. Knabe Was Suicide.\" November 2, 1911, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Was Seeking Flats Dr. Knabe Lived In.\" October 28, 1911, 20.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Won't Ask Death Penalty.\" November 30, 1913, II, 14.\n\nPICNIC OF DEATH\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Daughter Testifies in Poison Trial.\" October 23, 1931, 16.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Eleven on Jury to Try Accused Mother.\" October 1, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Food Served at Reunion Kills Sisters.\" June 22, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mother Freed in Poisoning of Girls.\" May 10, 1933, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mother Indicted in Poison Case.\" July 4, 1931, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mother Quizzed in Poison Deaths.\" June 23, 1931, 18.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mother to Be Tried in Poisoning of 2 Girls.\" September 28, 1931, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mrs. Simmons to Go on Stand Today.\" October 28, 1931, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Picnic Poison Case Is Begun.\" September 29, 1931, 9.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Poison Buyer Put on Stand.\" October 15, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Poison Test Told in Court.\" October 16, 1931, 29.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Simmons Case Is Given to Jury.\" November 4, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Simmons Case Jury, Hung, Is Discharged.\" November 6, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Simmons Defense Raps Questioners.\" October 17, 1931, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Simmons Testifies in Poisoning of Girls.\" October 2, 1931, 1.\n\nTHE FARMHAND AND THE ACROBAT\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Alleged Confession of Wright in Woman's Death Held Competent.\" March 23, 1934, 14.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Cannelton Prisoner Rushed to Evansville.\" February 6, 1934, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Ex-Circus Acrobat Slain in Indiana.\" February 4, 1934, I, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana Farm Hand Confesses He Slew Woman Ex-Acrobat.\" February 7, 1934, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Search for Farm Hand in Slaying of Ex-Circus Performer Widens.\" February 5, 1934, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Wright Held Slayer of Ex-Circus Acrobat.\" March 24, 1934, 1+.\n\n_New York Clipper_. \"The Cherry Blossoms.\" March 18, 1911, 12.\n\n_New York Times_. \"Farm Hand Gets Life in Killing.\" March 30, 1934, 7.\n\nMR. WADE AND MRS. BROWN HATCH A STUPID PLOT\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Awful....\" September 4, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"The Gallows.\" October 24, 1880, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Horrible Story of Crime.\" March 3, 1880, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana.\" November 26, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana.\" January 11, 1881, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana.\" February 5, 1881, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana.\" February 22, 1881, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana Affairs.\" April 30, 1880, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana Affairs.\" May 1, 1880, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana Legislature.\" January 8, 1881, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indianapolis.\" October 29, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indianapolis.\" December 24, 1880, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indianapolis.\" December 30, 1880, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Joe Wade's Story.\" July 3, 1880, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mrs. B's Love Story.\" April 28, 1880, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"A Murderer's Poem.\" July 18, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"A Murderer's Verses.\" August 19, 1880, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Paralyzed with Horror.\" July 13, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Pardoned.\" March 22, 1895, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"A Quiet Man.\" April 27, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Waiting for the Gallows.\" September 5, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"What Love Will Do.\" April 23, 1880, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Whoppers.\" July 9, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Will Mary Brown Hang?\" July 11, 1880, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"A Wretched Woman.\" July 8, 1880, 1.\n\n_National Police Gazette_. \"Hoosier Horror.\" February 21, 1880, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mrs. Brown Frees Her Mind.\" February 28, 1880, 3.\n\nA HOOSIER MAKES A SPECTACLE OF HIMSELF IN CINCINNATI\n\n_Cincinnati Enquirer_. \"Butcher Murder Is Bared in Cincinnati.\" March 20, 1933, 1+.\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Man Cuts Wife into 14 Pieces.\" March 20, 1933, 1.\n\nHAZEL TRIUMPHANT!\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"'Mother' of McNally Doll-Twins is Freed...\" October 21, 1922, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Neighbor Testifies...\" October 19, 1922, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Strange Doll Case...\" December 3, 1922, magazine section, 3.\n\nPURSUED BY A MONSTER\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Another Indiana Mystery.\" Editorial. July 17, 1904, II, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Another Trial.\" November 4, 1905, 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Double Murder May Have Attempted.\" July 11, 1904, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Gipe Convicted for the Second Time.\" December 19, 1905, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Gipe Convicted of the Starbuck Murder.\" December 2, 1904, 9.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Haley Gipe Indicted by the Grand Jury.\" November 1, 1904, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Haley Gipe Tells of an Alleged Plot.\" July 26, 1904, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"May Be Innocent.\" March 20, 1905, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mother and Child Buried.\" July 12, 1904, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Three More Arrests in the Starbuck Case.\" August 28, 1904, I, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"The Wave of Crime in Indiana.\" July 24, 1904, II, 8.\n\nJUSTICE, POSSIBLY\n\n_Evansville Courier_. \"At Morganfield.\" May 20, 1897, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Bloodhounds on the Trail!\" May 14, 1897, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"The Buente Murder Case.\" May 18, 1897, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Lizzie Maria Buente: Funeral Yesterday...\" May 15, 1897, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Patience.\" Editorial. May 15, 1897, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Perry Township Farmers Take Up Arms!\" May 13, 1897, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Preliminary Hearing.\" May 16, 1897, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Reach Verdict in Sixteen Minutes.\" September 29, 1897, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Spaulding Released.\" May 21, 1897, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"A Strange Negro...\" May 17, 1897, 1.\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Arrests of Negroes Suspected...\" May 15, 1897, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Blood on His Clothes.\" May 14, 1897, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Convicted of Attempted Outrage.\" September 29, 1897, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"The Jail Under Guard.\" May 16, 1897, I, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"John Spalding Released.\" May 21, 1897, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"No Mob Came.\" May 17, 1897, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Outraged and Murdered.\" May 13, 1897, 3.\n\nTHE HONEYMOONERS\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Bullets Fit the Pistol.\" August 26, 1902, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Charges Mastison with Murder.\" October 17, 1902, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Continued.\" November 25, 1902, 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Defense of James Mastison Is Outlined by Attorneys.\" November 30, 1902, I, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Experienced Difficulties in Taking Mastison to Prison.\" December 15, 1902, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Fear of Gallows Forces Mastison to Confess.\" December 9, 1902, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"For Trial.\" November 17, 1902, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Held Over.\" August 27, 1902, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Insanity Will Be the Plea of James Mastison.\" December 8, 1902, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Insists That an Unknown Man Shot His Wife.\" August 25, 1902, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kills Wife in Dry Goods Store.\" October 8, 1909, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Preliminary Trial Tuesday.\" August 28, 1902, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Restless.\" December 10, 1902, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Shot Down.\" August 24, 1902, III, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"To Be Tried.\" November 24, 1902, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Wife Murderer Gets Life Sentence.\" October 9, 1909, 1.\n\nWITH A SMILE ON HER FACE\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Arlene Draves' Fall Told Jury.\" May 15, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Body of Arlene Draves Exhumed While Curious Throng Watches.\" March 5, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Death Urged for Kirkland.\" May 26, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Defense Hails New Draves Witness.\" March 12, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Doctor Avers Hemorrhage Killed Girl.\" February 27, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Eleven on Kirkland Jury 'Mistaken.'\" June 7, 1931, I, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Five Youths Held in Girl's Death.\" December 2, 1930, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Football Star Sobs Out Story of Love Affair with Dead Girl.\" March 7, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Judge Orders Body of Girl Exhumed.\" March 4, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Judge Threatens to Use Jobless for Jury.\" May 5, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Jury Sought to Try Youth.\" February 24, 1931, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland Accused by Two Friends.\" May 19, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland Given One to Ten Years.\" May 27, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland in Prison, Case Is Finished.\" May 28, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland Is Given Life Sentence.\" March 11, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland May Accuse Four Other Youths.\" April 30, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland May Get Jail Term.\" May 20, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland Tells Jury His Love for Arlene.\" May 23, 1931, I, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland Term in Gin Death Stands.\" June 10, 1931, 20.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland Threat to 'Beat Up' Girl Told.\" May 16, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland Trial Adjourned.\" May 2, 1931, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kirkland Trial Is Ready for Arguments.\" May 24, 1931, I, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Parents Give Kirkland Aid.\" May 21, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Parole Given Youth Convicted in Gin Party Death.\" August 28, 1937, I, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Ronald Oldham Faces New Charge.\" June 3, 1931, I, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Ronald Oldham Fined for Illegal Practice.\" August 5, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Shock of Attack Is Fatal to Girl.\" December 1, 1930, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"State Demands Youth's Life as Kirkland Trial Nears End.\" March 10, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Ten of the Jurors...\" Editorial. June 9, 1931, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Two Doctors Lay Arlene Draves' Death to Blow, No Attacks.\" March 6, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Two New Witnesses in Kirkland Trial.\" May 14, 1931, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Virgil Kirkland Denied Liberty.\" June 20, 1933, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Waitress Says Gary Boys Bought Hamburgers with Bloody Hands.\" February 28, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Young Kirkland Faces Death or Freedom in Second Trial.\" May 13, 1931, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Youth in Gin Slaying Gets Second Trial.\" April 7, 1931, 1+.\n\nTHE STAGE'S LOSS WAS ST. LOUIS'S GAIN\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Boasts of Marksmanship After Slaying Husband.\" March 3, 1914, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Owsley Jury Unable to Reach Agreement.\" May 10, 1914, I, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Self-Defense Verdict in Owsley Murder Case.\" March 4, 1914, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Wife Tried for Death of Former Louisville Man.\" May 7, 1914, 2.\n\n_St. Louis Post-Dispatch_. \"Defense in Owsley Trial Begins; Wife No. 1 Not Called.\" May 6, 1914, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Ex-Wife to Testify Against Successor Who Shot Husband.\" May 5, 1914, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Four Women Freed in Last 3 Years After Slaying Husbands.\" March 3, 1914, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Husband Slain in Self-Defense, Is Inquest Verdict.\" March 3, 1914, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Jury in Owsley Case Discharged After 44 Hours.\" May 9, 1914, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mrs. Ada Owsley Probably Will Be Tried Second Time.\" May 10, 1914, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mrs. Owsley on Trial for Killing Husband.\" May 4, 1914, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Owsley Case with Jury; First Wife's Story Is Barred.\" May 7, 1914, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Owsley Jury Said to Be 8 to 4 for Conviction.\" May 8, 1914, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Wife Who Shot Husband Doesn't Know He's Dead.\" March 2, 1914, 3.\n\nOTTO EMBELLISHES\n\n_(Columbus, IN) Evening Republican_. \"Attempts Suicide.\" October 29, 1917, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Husband Sorry His Wife Died.\" October 30, 1917, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Jury Is Secured for Trial of Murder Case.\" December 19, 1917, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Otto Vest May Not Be Called for Trial Now.\" January 31, 1918, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Vest Jury Unable to Agree on a Verdict.\" December 21, 1917, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Vest Murder Case to Be Settled Very Soon.\" December 20, 1917, 1.\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Acquittal Verdict Returned.\" February 6, 1918, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Bride of Month Poison Victim.\" October 30, 1917, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Faces Trial for Life.\" December 20, 1917, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Otto Vest Indicted on Charge of Wife Murder.\" December 2, 1917, I, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Prisoner Breaks Fast After Hunger Strike.\" November 4, 1917, I, 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Prisoner on Hunger Strike.\" November 1, 1917, 7.\n\nWILLIAM WANTS TO GET MARRIED\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Alleged Parricide Repudiates Confession.\" January 28, 1912, I, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Who Slew Parents Dies.\" September 16, 1914, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"The Case of William Lee.\" Editorial. February 3, 1912, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Change of Venue Granted...\" December 19, 1911, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Confesses to Killing Father.\" August 26, 1911, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Defense Will Attempt to Prove Insanity.\" January 25, 1912, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"In Reformatory.\" August 29, 1911, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Kentuckian on Trial.\" February 7, 1912, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Lee Pleads Not Guilty...\" December 6, 1911, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Lee Pleads Not Guilty...\" January 5, 1912, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Lee's Case Expected to Go to Jury...\" January 29, 1912, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Lee's Punishment Fixed at Life Imprisonment.\" February 1, 1912, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Lee to Be Tried on Triple Murder Charge.\" November 30, 1911, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mental Taint Pleaded as Excuse for Lee's Crime.\" January 27, 1912, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Murderer's Lady Love Marries Another.\" June 25, 1913, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Parole Sought for Man Guilty of Triple Murder.\" November 23, 1912, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Physician Declares William Lee Sane.\" January 30, 1912, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Preparing for Defense.\" September 13, 1911, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Slayer of Trio Gives Details.\" August 28, 1911, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"State Demands Death Penalty...\" January 26, 1912, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Tells Story of Killing Family.\" August 27, 1911, I, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Triple Murder Charge Against William Lee.\" December 18, 1911, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Triple Murder Charge Against Young Son.\" August 25, 1911, 1.\n\nA HIGHER VENUE\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Dies of Wounds.\" November 12, 1912, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Grand Jury Drawn.\" November 13, 1912, 9.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hatchet Used.\" November 11, 1912, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Inquest Is Held.\" November 14, 1912, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"In Serious Condition.\" February 27, 1913, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Mind Wrecked.\" July 13, 1913, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Murder Charge.\" November 15, 1912, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Prisoner Has Dropsy.\" February 28, 1913, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Slayer Is Dead.\" March 6, 1913, 9.\n\nRHETORICAL QUESTIONS IN ABUNDANCE\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Confesses He Murdered Priest...\" February 20, 1918, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Death of Gary Preacher Unsolved by Authorities.\" August 27, 1915, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Evansville Admirers Pay Tribute to Kayser.\" August 29, 1915, II, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Fund for the Detection of Kayser's Slayers.\" September 17, 1915, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Gary Letter Reviled Kayser...\" August 27, 1915, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Murdered Minister Buried; Death Unsolved Mystery.\" August 28, 1915, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Pastor Slain; Threatened in Anonymous Letters.\" August 26, 1915, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Police Chief Receives Threats Against Life.\" August 29, 1915, I, 3.\n\n_Milwaukee Journal_. \"Kayser Figured in Bomb Plot?\" August 28, 1915, 2.\n\n_New London (CT) Day_. \"Church Quarrel Caused Murder.\" August 26, 1915, 1.\n\n_New York Times_. \"Charge Gigantic Plots to Violate Neutrality.\" September 3, 1915, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indiana Pastor Slain After Many Threats.\" August 26, 1915, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"To Wreck Explosives Train.\" August 30, 1915, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Trailing Pastor's Slayers.\" September 1, 1915, 20.\n\nTHOMAS HOAL, BOY BANDIT\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"After Parole.\" March 9, 1912, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Alters Name Because of Domestic Troubles.\" November 13, 1909.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"As a Student.\" November 15, 1909, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Bandit's Victims Recovering.\" November 19, 1909, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Bank President Is Still Alive.\" November 13, 1909, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Bares Sorrow: Father Tells of Wife's Shame to Save Son.\" May 6, 1910, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Both Victims Doing Better.\" November 15, 1909, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Bandit Occupies Cell in Reformatory.\" November 12, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Bandit's Box Is at Central Station.\" November 13, 1909.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Bandit Seeks Pardon.\" March 26, 1915, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Bandit Subject of Lexington School Principal.\" November 20, 1909, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Bandit's Victim Nearing Recovery.\" February 27, 1910, I, 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Bandit to Be Tried in Harrison County...\" December 18, 1909, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Bandit to Plead Insanity.\" November 14, 1909, IV, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Boy Bandit Will Be Tried at This Term of Court.\" April 29, 1910, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Cannot Bar Yellow Backs.\" November 16, 1909, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Change of Venue.\" November 27, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Crowd Clamors for View of Bandit's Box.\" November 14, 1909, IV, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Curious Crowds See Hoal's Box.\" December 3, 1909, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Denies $500 Fee.\" December 16, 1910, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"The Dime Novel.\" November 14, 1909, II, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Dime Novels Versus Paroles.\" Editorial. March 28, 1915, II, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Dramatic Story J.K. Woodward Tells...\" May 5, 1910, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Drops Revolver as He Leaves the Bank.\" November 12, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Extra Strong Cell Holds Boy Bandit...\" February 21, 1910, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"For the Curious: Hoal's Box...\" December 1, 1909, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Goes to Jury.\" May 7, 1910, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal Case Goes Over Until May 3.\" February 24, 1910, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal Case Will Be Called at Corydon...\" February 11, 1910, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal Case Will Be Called in New Albany...\" November 26, 1909, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal Meets His Son in Prison.\" November 13, 1909, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal Not Moved: Will Be Kept in the Indiana Reformatory.\" November 28, 1909, IV, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal's Attorneys Get Nothing.\" September 9, 1910, 10.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal's Box Sent to Corydon.\" January 8, 1910, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal's Lawyers Want to Enter an Appearance...\" November 17, 1909, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal Still in Reformatory.\" November 16, 1909, 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal's Trial Begins Wednesday.\" February 17, 1910, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hoal Trial Delayed at Corydon...\" February 23, 1910, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Hopes to Save Neck by Plea of Insanity.\" November 14, 1909, IV, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Indictments Against Father and Stepmother...\" May 20, 1910, 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Individual Bookkeeper Tells Thrilling Story.\" November 12, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Jury Selected...\" May 4, 1910, 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Last Ride Taken by Erstwhile Boy Bandit...\" May 9, 1910, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Life Sentence Meted Out...\" May 8, 1910, I, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Louisville Boy Bandit...Flees Prison.\" September 25, 1919, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Negro Chauffeur Has Slim Chance to Live.\" November 14, 1909, IV, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Negro Chauffeur May Not Survive the Day.\" November 12, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Negro Chauffeur Tells His Story.\" November 13, 1909.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Negro Chauffeur Wounded by Bandit.\" November 12, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"New Albany Banker Shot in 1909...Dead of Wound.\" September 28, 1915, 8.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Nice Point Raised...\" March 15, 1911, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"On Trial: Suit Against Insurance Company...\" June 16, 1910, 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Phrenologist Sizes Boy Bandit Up Right.\" November 14, 1909, IV, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Physicians Hopeful of Banker's Recovery.\" November 14, 1909, IV, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Planned to Escape in Shipping Case.\" November 12, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Reacting Dime Novel Heroes Boy Kills Brother.\" February 23, 1910, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Reporter Breaks the News to Boy's Father.\" November 12, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"School Record of Youthful Bandit.\" November 14, 1909, IV, 11.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Slip Hoal into Court Secretly.\" November 25, 1909, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Spirited from Jeffersonville.\" February 20, 1910, IV, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Steel Saws Found in Hoal's Corydon Cell.\" May 10, 1910, 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"They Want $500.\" November 24, 1910, 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Tom Hall, Boy Bandit, Kills Bank Cashier...\" November 12, 1909, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Tucker Taken to His Home.\" December 3, 1909, 5.\n\nTHREE WAYS TO ESCAPE PUNISHMENT\n\n_Louisville Courier-Journal_. \"Four Tell Parts in Preacher's Death.\" February 5, 1934, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Jurors Quizzed on Belief in Witchcraft.\" December 8, 1934, 1.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Jury Given Case of Theodore Mathers.\" April 20, 1935, 18.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Slain Minister Termed Insane.\" December 13, 1934, 3.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"State Rests in Trial of Mrs. Saunders.\" December 18, 1934, 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Widow and Boy Admit Killing Indiana Minister.\" February 4, 1934, I, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Widow Free in Spouse's Death.\" December 19, 1934, 1+.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Widow of Indiana Preacher Denies She Plotted His Death.\" December 14, 1934, III, 9.\n\n_Reading (PA) Eagle_. \"Youth Found Guilty of Murdering Pastor.\" April 21, 1935, 17.\nAbout the Author\n\nKeven McQueen was born in Richmond, Kentucky, and teaches composition and literature at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of twelve books, including six for The History Press ( _Kentucky Book of the Dead, Strange Tales of Crime and Murder in Southern Indiana, Louisville Murder & Mayhem: Historic Crimes of Derby City, Forgotten Tales of Indiana, The Great Louisville Tornado of 1890, Forgotten Tales of Kentucky_), on Kentucky, Indiana and the deep South, concerning topics such as history, biography, historical true crime, natural disasters and folklore.\nOTHER BOOKS BY KEVEN MCQUEEN\n\nBiography\/History\n\n_Cassius M. Clay, Freedom's Champion_ (Turner Publishing, 2001)\n\n_Offbeat Kentuckians: Legends to Lunatics_ (McClanahan Publishing, 2001)\n\n_More Offbeat Kentuckians_ (McClanahan Publishing, 2004)\n\n_The Great Louisville Tornado of 1890_ (The History Press, 2010)\n\nFolklore\/History\n\n_The Kentucky Book of the Dead_ (The History Press, 2008)\n\n_Forgotten Tales of Kentucky_ (The History Press, 2008)\n\n_Forgotten Tales of Indiana_ (The History Press, 2009)\n\nHistorical True Crime\n\n_Murder in Old Kentucky: True Crime Stories from the Bluegrass_ (McClanahan Publishing, 2005)\n\n_Cruelly Murdered: The Murder of Mary Magdalene Pitts and Other Kentucky True Crime Stories_ (Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2008)\n\n_Strange Tales of Crime and Murder in Southern Indiana_ (The History Press, 2009)\n\n_The Axman Came from Hell and Other Southern True Crime Stories_ (Pelican Publishing, 2011)\n\n_Louisville Murder and Mayhem: Historic Crimes of the Derby City_ (The History Press, 2012)\n\nFor further particulars and an entertaining history-based story every month, check out KevenMcQueenStories.com. Friend me on Facebook\u2014I get kinda lonesome sometimes.\n_Visit us at_\n\nwww.historypress.net\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n\n\nProduced by Chris Curnow, Julia Neufeld and the Online\nDistributed Proofreading Team at http:\/\/www.pgdp.net (This\nfile was produced from images generously made available\nby The Internet Archive)\n\n\n\n\n\nTranscriber's note:\n\nText enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).\n\nText enclosed in equal signs is in bold (=350=).\n\nText enclosed in plus symbols is Greek transliteration (+diulizo+).\n\nSmall capital text has been replaced with all capitals.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n[Illustration: THE ANIMALS ENTER THE ARK.\n\nFRONTISPIECE--\"STORY OF THE BIBLE ANIMALS.\"]\n\n\n\n\n  STORY\n  OF THE\n  BIBLE ANIMALS\n\n  A Description of the\n  Habits and Uses of every living\n  Creature mentioned in the Scriptures,\n\n  WITH\n\n  EXPLANATION OF PASSAGES IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT IN\n  WHICH REFERENCE IS MADE TO THEM.\n\n  BY\n  J. G. WOOD,\n  AUTHOR OF \"HOMES WITHOUT HANDS,\"\n  \"THE ILLUSTRATED NATURAL HISTORY,\" ETC.\n\n  300 ILLUSTRATIONS.\n\n\n  PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICE OF\n  _CHARLES FOSTER'S PUBLICATIONS_,\n  No. 118 South Seventh Street,\n  PHILADELPHIA, PA.\n\n[Illustration: WAR-HORSES AND ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CHARIOT.\n\nSee page 307.]\n\n\n\n\nCOPYRIGHT, 1888, BY W. A. FOSTER.\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE.\n\n\nOwing to the different conditions of time, language, country, and\nrace under which the various books of the Holy Scriptures were\nwritten, it is impossible that they should be rightly understood at\nthe present day without some study of the customs and manners of\nEastern peoples, as well as of the countries in which they lived.\n\nThe Oriental character of the scriptural writings causes them to\nabound with metaphors and symbols taken from the common life of the\ntime.\n\nThey contain allusions to the trees, flowers, and herbage, the\ncreeping things of the earth, the fishes of the sea, the birds of\nthe air, and the beasts which abode with man or dwelt in the deserts\nand forests.\n\nUnless, therefore, we understand these writings as those understood\nthem for whom they were written, it is evident that we shall\nmisinterpret instead of rightly comprehending them.\n\nThe field which is laid open to us is so large that only one\ndepartment of Natural History--namely, Zoology--can be treated in\nthis work, although it is illustrated by many references to other\nbranches of Natural History, to the physical geography of Palestine,\nEgypt, and Syria, the race-character of the inhabitants, and\nhistorical parallels.\n\nThe importance of understanding the nature, habits, and uses of\nthe animals which are constantly mentioned in the Bible, cannot be\noverrated as a means of elucidating the Scriptures, and without this\nknowledge we shall not only miss the point of innumerable passages\nof the Old and New Testaments, but the words of our Lord Himself\nwill often be totally misinterpreted, or at least lose part of their\nsignificance.\n\nThe object of the present work is therefore, to take in its proper\nsuccession, every creature whose name is given in the Scriptures,\nand to supply so much of its history as will enable the reader to\nunderstand all the passages in which it is mentioned.\n\n[Illustration: SHEPHERD LEADING SHEEP AND GOATS TO THEIR FOLD IN THE\nROCK.\n\nSee page 191.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE AUTHOR.\n\n\nThe Rev. J. G. Wood is a native of London, England. He was educated\nat Oxford University, and has long been known, both in England\nand America, as not only a learned and accurate writer on Natural\nHistory, but a popular one as well, having the happy faculty of\nmaking the results of scientific study and painstaking observation,\ninteresting and instructive to all classes of readers.\n\nHe has published a number of works on the most familiar departments\nof the history of animals, designed to awaken popular interest\nin the study. Their titles are \"Sketches and Anecdotes of Animal\nLife;\" \"Common Objects of the Seashore and Country;\" \"My Feathered\nFriends;\" \"Homes Without Hands\"--being a description of the\nhabitations of animals,--and the \"Illustrated Natural History,\" a\nbook which is widely known both in England and America as a standard\nwork of great value. It has given the author celebrity, and has\ncaused him to be considered an eminent authority on the subject\nwhich it treats.\n\nIt is evident, from these facts, that it would be difficult to find\na man better qualified than Mr. Wood, to write a book describing the\nanimals mentioned in the Bible.\n\nProfoundly impressed with the ignorance which prevails towards so\nimportant a feature of the Scriptural Narrative, he has devoted his\nripe powers and special knowledge to the work of dissipating it, and\nin this volume, not only fully describes the nature and habits of\nall the animals mentioned in the Scriptures, but tells the story of\ntheir relations to mankind.\n\nMr. Wood is a clergyman of the Church of England, and was for a\ntime connected with Christ Church, Oxford. He has devoted himself\nmainly, however, to authorship in the field which he has chosen,\nand in which he has become so well known. In his works he usually\nemploys a popular style of writing, and does not make scientific\nterms prominent. This is especially true of the \"Story of the Bible\nAnimals,\" which from its easy and interesting character is adapted\nto the comprehension of young and old.\n\n[Illustration: animals]\n\nMany of the pictures in this book are taken from the living animals,\nor from photographs and sketches by Eastern travellers.\n\nOthers represent imaginary scenes, or ancient historical events, and\nhave been designed by skilful artists after careful study of the\nsubjects.\n\n\n\n\nLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.\n\n[A complete Index of Subjects will be found at the end of this\nVolume.]\n\n\n  NO.                                                            PAGE\n\n  1. THE ANIMALS ENTER THE ARK                                      2\n\n  2. WAR-HORSES AND ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CHARIOT                        4\n\n  3. SHEPHERD LEADING SHEEP AND GOATS TO THEIR FOLD IN THE ROCK     6\n\n  4. A DESERT-SCENE                                                 8\n\n  5. THE GARDEN OF EDEN                                            19\n\n  6. LION DRINKING AT A POOL                                       21\n\n  7. A LION KILLS THE PROPHET FROM JUDAH                           22\n\n  8. LION AND TIGER                                                23\n\n  9. THE LION REPLIES TO THE THUNDER                               25\n\n  10. LIONESS AND YOUNG                                            27\n\n  11. LION CARRYING HOME SUPPLIES                                  31\n\n  12. AFRICAN LIONS                                                32\n\n  13. THE LION ATTACKS THE HERD                                    34\n\n  14. THE LAIR OF THE LION                                         35\n\n  15. THE LION LISTENS TO THE APPROACH OF THE HUNTER               39\n\n  16. THE LEOPARD                                                  43\n\n  17. LEOPARD ATTACKING A HERD OF DEER                             45\n\n  18. THE LEOPARD LEAPS UPON HIS PREY                              47\n\n  19. WAITING                                                      49\n\n  20. LEOPARD                                                      51\n\n  21. CAT AND KITTENS                                              52\n\n  22. CAT                                                          54\n\n  23. DOGS IN AN EASTERN CITY AT NIGHT                             57\n\n  24. SHIMEI EXULTING OVER KING DAVID                              59\n\n  25. LAZARUS LYING AT THE RICH MAN'S DOOR                         62\n\n  26. THE DEATH OF JEZEBEL                                         63\n\n  27. SYRIAN DOG                                                   64\n\n  28. EASTERN WATER-SELLER                                         68\n\n  29. WOLVES ATTACKING A FLOCK OF SHEEP                            70\n\n  30. WOLVES CHASING DEER                                          72\n\n  31. THE WOLF                                                     73\n\n  32. WOLVES ATTACKING WILD GOATS                                  75\n\n  33. THE JACKAL                                                   76\n\n  34. FOXES OR JACKALS DEVOURING THE CARCASE OF A GOAT             77\n\n  35. A FEAST IN PROSPECT                                          79\n\n  36. A FEAST SECURED                                              81\n\n  37. A TRESPASSER                                                 83\n\n  38. LEOPARD ROBBED OF ITS PREY BY HYAENAS                         87\n\n  39. HYAENAS DEVOURING BONES                                       89\n\n  40. WEASELS                                                      93\n\n  41. THE BITER BIT                                                95\n\n  42. BADGERS                                                      99\n\n  43. SUPPOSED FORM AND ARRANGEMENT OF THE TABERNACLE             101\n\n  44. BEARS DESCENDING THE MOUNTAINS                              105\n\n  45. ON THE WATCH                                                107\n\n  46. SEEKING AN OUTLOOK                                          109\n\n  47. A FAMILY PARTY                                              111\n\n  48. BEAR                                                        112\n\n  49. PORCUPINE                                                   113\n\n  50. THE MOLE-RAT                                                115\n\n  51. THE MOUSE                                                   119\n\n  52. DAGON FALLEN DOWN BEFORE THE ARK                            120\n\n  53. MOUSE AND NEST                                              121\n\n  54. JERBOA OR LEAPING-MOUSE                                     122\n\n  55. THE FIELD-MOUSE                                             123\n\n  56. THE SYRIAN HARE                                             127\n\n  57. A TIMID GROUP                                               129\n\n  58. ALTAR OF BURNT-OFFERING                                     133\n\n  59. THE PRODIGAL SON RETURNS                                    134\n\n  60. ABRAHAM OFFERS FOOD TO THE THREE STRANGERS                  135\n\n  61. OXEN TREADING OUT GRAIN                                     139\n\n  62. EASTERN OX-CART                                             140\n\n  63. THE ARK OF THE COVENANT BEING DRAWN BY COWS                 141\n\n  64. PLOUGHING WITH OXEN                                         143\n\n  65. MUMMY OF A SACRED BULL TAKEN FROM AN EGYPTIAN TOMB          146\n\n  66. ANIMALS BEING SOLD FOR SACRIFICE IN THE PORCH OF THE TEMPLE 147\n\n  67. JEROBOAM SETS UP A GOLDEN CALF AT BETHEL                    148\n\n  68. THE BUFFALO                                                 149\n\n  69. THE BHAINSA, OR DOMESTIC BUFFALO, AND CAMEL DRAWING\n         THE PLOUGH                                               151\n\n  70. WILD BULL OR ORYX                                           155\n\n  71. THE ORYX                                                    157\n\n  72. THE UNICORN                                                 158\n\n  73. THE BISON                                                   160\n\n  74. BISON KILLING WOLF                                          161\n\n  75. THE GAZELLE OR ROE OF SCRIPTURE                             163\n\n  76. GAZELLES                                                    164\n\n  77. THE FALCON USED IN OUR HUNT                                 168\n\n  78. THE ARAB IS DELIGHTED AT THE SUCCESS OF THE HUNT            169\n\n  79. THE GAZELLE                                                 170\n\n  80. THE ADDAX                                                   172\n\n  81. THE BUBALE OR FALLOW DEER OF SCRIPTURE                      175\n\n  82. SHEEP                                                       176\n\n  83. ARABS JOURNEYING TO FRESH PASTURES                          178\n\n  84. VIEW OF THE PYRAMIDS                                        179\n\n  85. JACOB MEETS RACHEL AT THE WELL                              182\n\n  86. EASTERN SHEPHERD WATCHING HIS FLOCK                         183\n\n  87. DAVID GATHERS STONES FROM THE BROOK TO CAST AT\n         GOLIATH                                                  185\n\n  88. AN EASTERN SHEPHERD                                         186\n\n  89. SHEEP FOLLOWING THEIR SHEPHERD                              187\n\n  90. ANCIENT SHEEP-PEN                                           190\n\n  91. THE POOR MAN'S LAMB                                         193\n\n  92. THE RICH MAN'S FEAST                                        193\n\n  93. FLOCKS OF SHEEP BEING TAKEN INTO JERUSALEM                  195\n\n  94. SOUNDING THE TRUMPETS IN THE YEAR OF JUBILEE                202\n\n  95. RAM'S HORN TRUMPET                                          203\n\n  96. A LAMB UPON THE ALTAR OF BURNT OFFERING                     204\n\n  97. THE PLACE OF SACRIFICE                                      206\n\n  98. THE CHAMOIS                                                 211\n\n  99. CHAMOIS DEFENDING ITS YOUNG                                 213\n\n  100. CHASING THE AOUDAD                                         214\n\n  101. THE MOUFLON                                                216\n\n  102. JACOB DECEIVES HIS FATHER AND TAKES ESAU'S BLESSING        218\n\n  103. THE ANGEL APPEARS TO GIDEON                                219\n\n  104. EASTERN WATER-CARRIERS WITH BOTTLES MADE OF GOAT-SKIN      224\n\n  105. GOATS ON THE MARCH                                         228\n\n  106. HERD OF GOATS ATTACKED BY A LION                           231\n\n  107. ARABIAN IBEX, THE WILD GOAT OF SCRIPTURE                   236\n\n  108. THE DEER                                                   238\n\n  109. RED DEER                                                   239\n\n  110. FALLOW DEER OR HIND OF SCRIPTURE                           240\n\n  111. A QUIET SPOT                                               241\n\n  112. RED DEER AND FAWN                                          243\n\n  113. THE LEADER OF THE HERD                                     245\n\n  114. THE WATCHFUL DOE                                           247\n\n  115. A KNEELING CAMEL                                           248\n\n  116. JACOB LEAVES LABAN AND RETURNS TO CANAAN                   249\n\n  117. A CAMP IN THE DESERT                                       250\n\n  118. A GRATEFUL SHADE                                           253\n\n  119. CAMELS LADEN WITH BOUGHS                                   257\n\n  120. MORNING IN THE DESERT: STARTING OF THE CARAVAN             258\n\n  121. THE CAMEL POST                                             261\n\n  122. A RUNAWAY                                                  263\n\n  123. AN ARAB SHEIK MOUNTED UPON HIS CAMEL                       264\n\n  124. AARON'S ROD BEARS ALMONDS                                  266\n\n  125. CAMEL RIDING                                               267\n\n  126. THE DELOUL, OR SWIFT CAMEL                                 268\n\n  127. ANOTHER MODE OF RIDING THE CAMEL                           270\n\n  128. PASSING A CAMEL IN A NARROW STREET OF AN EASTERN CITY      277\n\n  129. MOSES AT THE BURNING BUSH                                  278\n\n  130. AN ARAB ENCAMPMENT                                         279\n\n  131. ON THE MARCH                                               281\n\n  132. HAIR OF THE CAMEL                                          283\n\n  133. CAMEL GOING THROUGH A \"NEEDLE'S EYE\"                       285\n\n  134. A REST IN THE DESERT                                       287\n\n  135. BACTRIAN CAMELS DRAWING CART                               289\n\n  136. TRIAL OF ARAB HORSES                                       292\n\n  137. AN ARAB HORSE OF THE KOCHLANI BREED                        293\n\n  138. THE WAR-HORSE                                              295\n\n  139. ARAB HORSES                                                297\n\n  140. BUYING AN ARAB HORSE                                       299\n\n  141. THE ARAB'S FAVORITE STEEDS                                 301\n\n  142. PHARAOH PURSUES THE ISRAELITES WITH CHARIOTS AND\n        HORSES, AND THE SEA COVERS THEM                           302\n\n  143. ELIJAH IS CARRIED UP                                       304\n\n  144. THE ISRAELITES, LED BY JOSHUA, TAKE JERICHO                308\n\n  145. ANCIENT BATTLEFIELD                                        309\n\n  146. CHARIOT OF STATE                                           311\n\n  147. ANCIENT EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE REPRESENTING A VICTORIOUS\n        KING IN HIS CHARIOT SLAYING HIS ENEMIES                   313\n\n  148. MUMMY OF AN EGYPTIAN KING OVER THREE THOUSAND\n        YEARS OLD                                                 314\n\n  149. ASS AND DRIVER                                             315\n\n  150. ENTERING JERUSALEM                                         317\n\n  151. SYRIAN ASSES                                               319\n\n  152. A STREET IN CAIRO, EGYPT                                   322\n\n  153. BEGGAR IN THE STREETS OF CAIRO                             324\n\n  154. NIGHT-WATCH IN CAIRO                                       325\n\n  155. HUNTING WILD ASSES                                         331\n\n  156. MULES OF THE EAST                                          334\n\n  157. ABSALOM IS CAUGHT IN THE BOUGHS OF AN OAK TREE             335\n\n  158. DANIEL REFUSES TO EAT THE KING'S MEAT                      337\n\n  159. THE PRODIGAL SON                                           340\n\n  160. ELEAZAR REFUSES TO EAT SWINE'S FLESH                       341\n\n  161. A MOTHER AND HER SEVEN SONS TORTURED FOR REFUSING\n        TO EAT SWINE'S FLESH                                      342\n\n  162. THE EVIL SPIRITS ENTER A HERD OR SWINE                     343\n\n  163. WILD BOARS DEVOURING THE CARCASE OF A DEER                 344\n\n  164. WILD BOARS                                                 345\n\n  165. WILD BOARS DESTROYING A VINEYARD                           347\n\n  166. INDIAN ELEPHANT                                            349\n\n  167. KING SOLOMON, SEATED UPON HIS THRONE, RECEIVES THE\n        QUEEN OF SHEBA                                            350\n\n  168. INDIAN ELEPHANTS                                           351\n\n  169. THE WAR-ELEPHANT                                           355\n\n  170. AFRICAN ELEPHANTS                                          359\n\n  171. ELEPHANTS' WATERING-PLACE                                  361\n\n  172. TIGER                                                      363\n\n  173. TIGER IN THE REEDS                                         364\n\n  174. HEAD OF TIGER                                              365\n\n  175. THE HYRAX                                                  367\n\n  176. HIPPOPOTAMUS                                               372\n\n  177. HIPPOPOTAMUS POOL                                          375\n\n  178. THE GREAT JAWS OF THE HIPPOPOTAMUS                         376\n\n  179. HIPPOPOTAMUS EMERGING FROM THE RIVER                       377\n\n  180. HIPPOPOTAMUS EATING GRASS                                  379\n\n  181. A HIPPOPOTAMUS-HUNT IN EGYPT                               381\n\n  182. HIPPOPOTAMUS AND TRAP                                      384\n\n  183. THE BABOON                                                 387\n\n  184. THE RHESUS MONKEY                                          389\n\n  185. FEEDING THE MONKEYS IN INDIA                               390\n\n  186. TROUBLESOME NEIGHBORS                                      391\n\n  187. MONKEYS ENTERING A PLANTATION                              392\n\n  188. SLOTHFUL MONKEYS                                           393\n\n  189. A PRIVILEGED RACE                                          394\n\n  190. THE WANDEROO                                               396\n\n  191. THE ENEMY DISCOVERED                                       397\n\n  192. BONNET MONKEYS                                             399\n\n  193. THE BAT                                                    401\n\n  194. BATS' RESTING-PLACE                                        403\n\n  195. GREAT FOX-HEADED BAT, OR FLYING FOX                        405\n\n  196. CAVE NEAR THE SITE OF ANCIENT JERICHO                      406\n\n  197. NIGHT IN THE TROPICS                                       407\n\n  198. LEOPARDS                                                   408\n\n  199. THE HOME OF THE VULTURE                                    411\n\n  200. The LAeMMERGEIER                                            412\n\n  201. A SUCCESSFUL DEFENCE                                       415\n\n  202. STRUCK FROM A DIZZY HEIGHT                                 417\n\n  203. THE VULTURE'S NEST                                         418\n\n  204. THE EGYPTIAN VULTURE, OR GIER EAGLE                        420\n\n  205. VULTURES                                                   425\n\n  206. THE EAGLE AND THE HARE                                     430\n\n  207. EAGLES                                                     432\n\n  208. EAGLE RETURNING TO THE NEST WITH HER PREY                  435\n\n  209. THE OSPREY SEARCHING FOR FISH                              437\n\n  210. SNATCHED FROM THE DEEP: THE OSPREY RISES WITH HIS\n        PREY                                                      439\n\n  211. THE KITE, OR VULTURE OF SCRIPTURE                          441\n\n  212. THE PEREGRINE FALCON, OR GLEDE                             444\n\n  213. THE LANNER FALCON                                          446\n\n  214. THE HAWK                                                   447\n\n  215. KESTREL HOVERING OVER A FIELD IN SEARCH OF PREY            449\n\n  216. THE WIND-HOVER, OR KESTREL                                 450\n\n  217. THE BARN OWL                                               454\n\n  218. THE LITTLE OWL                                             456\n\n  219. CAUGHT NAPPING                                             457\n\n  220. RAVEN.--BARN OWL.--EAGLE OWL                               459\n\n  221. A FAMILY COUNCIL                                           460\n\n  222. THE NIGHT HAWK ON THE WING                                 462\n\n  223. THE NIGHT HAWK                                             463\n\n  224. THE SWALLOW                                                466\n\n  225. LOST FROM THE FLOCK                                        469\n\n  226. THE SWALLOW AND SWIFT                                      471\n\n  227. VIEW OF THE SEA OF GALILEE                                 472\n\n  228. THE SWALLOW'S FAVORITE HAUNT                               473\n\n  229. SWALLOWS AT HOME                                           475\n\n  230. THE HOOPOE                                                 478\n\n  231. EASTERN HOUSETOPS                                          479\n\n  232. READING THE LAW TO THE PEOPLE AFTER THE RETURN\n          FROM CAPTIVITY                                          482\n\n  233. THE BLUE THRUSH, OR SPARROW OF SCRIPTURE                   483\n\n  234. THE TREE SPARROW                                           485\n\n  235. SPARROWS                                                   486\n\n  236. A FOREST SCENE                                             487\n\n  237. THE GREAT SPOTTED CUCKOO                                   488\n\n  238. NOAH RECEIVES THE DOVE                                     489\n\n  239. JESUS DRIVES OUT OF THE TEMPLE THE MONEYCHANGERS\n          AND THOSE WHO SOLD DOVES                                493\n\n  240. THE ROCK DOVE                                              494\n\n  241. BLUE ROCK PIGEONS                                          495\n\n  242. THE TURTLE DOVE                                            497\n\n  243. THE HEN AND HER BROOD                                      498\n\n  244. THE DOMESTIC FOWL                                          499\n\n  245. POULTRY                                                    500\n\n  246. THE PEACOCK                                                501\n\n  247. PEAFOWL                                                    503\n\n  248. FEATHERS OF THE PEACOCK                                    504\n\n  249. PARTRIDGES                                                 505\n\n  250. THE GREEK PARTRIDGE                                        507\n\n  251. PARTRIDGE AND THEIR YOUNG                                  508\n\n  252. EASTERN QUAIL                                              509\n\n  253. THE QUAIL                                                  510\n\n  254. FLIGHT OF QUAIL                                            515\n\n  255. THE RAVEN                                                  517\n\n  256. ELIJAH FED BY RAVENS                                       518\n\n  257. RAVENS' ROOSTING-PLACE                                     521\n\n  258. RAVENS' NEST                                               522\n\n  259. OSTRICH AND NEST                                           527\n\n  260. ARABS HUNTING THE OSTRICH                                  533\n\n  261. THE BITTERN                                                537\n\n  262. BITTERN AND CORMORANT                                      539\n\n  263. THE HOME OF THE BITTERN                                    541\n\n  264. THE HERON                                                  543\n\n  265. THE HOME OF THE HERON                                      545\n\n  266. THE PAPYRUS PLANT                                          548\n\n  267. THE HOME OF THE CRANE                                      549\n\n  268. THE CRANE                                                  550\n\n  269.  THE STORK                                                 553\n\n  270.  STORKS AND THEIR NESTS                                    555\n\n  271.  A NEST OF THE WHITE STORK                                 559\n\n  272.  IBIS AND GALLINULE                                        561\n\n  273.  THE PELICAN                                               568\n\n  274.  LIZARDS                                                   575\n\n  275.  TORTOISES                                                 577\n\n  276.  THE DHUBB AND THE TORTOISE                                578\n\n  277.  WATER TORTOISE                                            579\n\n  278.  CROCODILE ATTACKING HORSES                                587\n\n  279.  A CROCODILE POOL OF ANCIENT EGYPT                         590\n\n  280.  CROCODILES OF THE UPPER NILE                              591\n\n  281.  ICHNEUMON DEVOURING THE EGGS OF THE CROCODILE             597\n\n  282.  A CROCODILE TRAP                                          599\n\n  283.  A Fight for Life                                          601\n\n  284.  THE CYPRIUS, OR LIZARD                                    602\n\n  285.  THE CHAMELEON                                             605\n\n  286.  GECKO AND CHAMELEON                                       606\n\n  287.  THE GECKO                                                 609\n\n  288.  SERPENTS                                                  611\n\n  289.  BOA CONSTRICTOR AND TIGER                                 613\n\n  290.  COBRA AND CERASTES                                        615\n\n  291.  THE ISRAELITES ARE BITTEN BY SERPENTS IN THE WILDERNESS,\n        AND MOSES LIFTS UP THE SERPENT OF BRASS                   616\n\n  292.  THE SERPENT-CHARMER                                       619\n\n  293.  THE VIPER                                                 621\n\n  294.  TEACHING COBRAS TO DANCE                                  623\n\n  295.  HORNED VIPER                                              625\n\n  296.  THE VIPER, OR EPHEH                                       627\n\n  297.  THE TOXICOA                                               628\n\n  298.  THE FROG                                                  630\n\n  299.  FISHES                                                    633\n\n  300.  A RIVER SCENE                                             635\n\n  301. PETER CATCHES THE FISH                                     636\n\n  302. MURAENA, LONG-HEADED BARBEL, AND SHEAT FISH                 638\n\n  303. SUCKING FISH, TUNNY, AND CORYPHENE                         640\n\n  304. FISHING SCENE ON THE SEA OF GALILEE                        642\n\n  305. MODE OF DRAGGING THE SEINE NET                             645\n\n  306. NILE PERCH, SURMULLET, AND STAR-GAZER                      647\n\n  307. THE PEARL OYSTER                                           653\n\n  308. INSECTS                                                    655\n\n  309. A SWARM OF LOCUSTS                                         659\n\n  310. THE LOCUST                                                 663\n\n  311. THE BEE                                                    665\n\n  312. THE HORNET AND ITS NEST                                    669\n\n  313. ANTS ON THE MARCH                                          671\n\n  314. ANT OF PALESTINE                                           675\n\n  315. THE CRIMSON WORM                                           677\n\n  316. MORDECAI IS LED THROUGH THE CITY UPON THE KING'S\n        HORSE                                                     679\n\n  317. BUTTERFLIES OF PALESTINE                                   682\n\n  318. NOXIOUS FLIES OF PALESTINE                                 685\n\n  319. THE SCORPION                                               690\n\n  320. CORAL                                                      694\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: more animals]\n\n\n\n\nSTORY OF THE BIBLE ANIMALS.\n\n\n\n\nTHE LION.\n\n     Frequent mention of the Lion in the Scriptures--The Lion\n     employed as an emblem in the Bible--Similarity of the African\n     and Asiatic species--The chief characteristics of the Lion--its\n     strength, activity, and mode of seizing its prey--The Lion hunt.\n\n\nOf all the undomesticated animals of Palestine, none is mentioned so\nfrequently as the LION. This may appear the more remarkable, because\nfor many years the Lion has been extinct in Palestine. The leopard,\nthe wolf, the jackal, and the hyaena, still retain their place in\nthe land, although their numbers are comparatively few; but the\nLion has vanished completely out of the land. The reason for this\ndisappearance is twofold, first, the thicker population; and second,\nthe introduction of firearms.\n\nNo animal is less tolerant of human society than the Lion. In\nthe first place, it dreads the very face of man, and as a rule,\nwhenever it sees a man will slink away and hide itself. There are,\nof course, exceptional cases to this rule. Sometimes a Lion becomes\nso old and stiff, his teeth are so worn, and his endurance so\nslight, that he is unable to chase his usual prey, and is obliged\nto seek for other means of subsistence. In an unpopulated district,\nhe would simply be starved to death, but when his lot is cast in\nthe neighbourhood of human beings, he is perforce obliged to become\na \"man-eater.\" Even in that case, a Lion will seldom attack a man,\nunless he should be able to do so unseen, but will hang about the\nvillages, pouncing on the women as they come to the wells for water,\nor upon the little children as they stray from their parents, and\ncontinually shifting his quarters lest he should be assailed during\nhis sleep. The Lion requires a very large tract of country for his\nmaintenance, and the consequence is, that in proportion as the land\nis populated does the number of Lions decrease.\n\nFirearms are the special dread of the Lion. In the first place, the\nLion, like all wild beasts, cannot endure fire, and the flash of the\ngun terrifies him greatly. Then, there is the report, surpassing\neven his roar in resonance; and lastly, there is the unseen bullet,\nwhich seldom kills him at once, but mostly drives him to furious\nanger by the pain of his wound, yet which he does not dread nearly\nso much as the harmless flash and report. There is another cause of\nthe Lion's banishment from the Holy Land. It is well known that to\nattract any wild beast or bird to some definite spot, all that is\nrequired is to provide them with a suitable and undisturbed home,\nand a certainty of food. Consequently, the surest method of driving\nthem away is to deprive them of both these essentials. Then the Lion\nused to live in forests, which formerly stretched over large tracts\nof ground, but which have long since been cut down, thus depriving\nthe Lion of its home, while the thick population and the general use\nof firearms have deprived him of his food. In fact, the Lion has\nbeen driven out of Palestine, just as the wolf has been extirpated\nfrom England.\n\nBut, in the olden times, Lions must have been very plentiful.\nThere is scarcely a book in the Bible, whether of the Old or New\nTestaments, whether historical or prophetical, that does not contain\nsome mention of this terrible animal; sometimes describing the\nactions of individual Lions, but mostly using the word as an\nemblem of strength and force, whether used for a good purpose or\nabused for a bad one.\n\n[Illustration: LION DRINKING AT A POOL.]\n\n[Illustration: A LION KILLS THE PROPHET FROM JUDAH.]\n\nThere are several varieties of Lion, which may be reduced to two,\nnamely, the African and the Asiatic Lion. It is almost certain,\nhowever, that these animals really are one and the same species,\nand that the trifling differences which exist between an African\nand an Asiatic Lion, are not sufficient to justify a naturalist in\nconsidering them to be distinct species. The habits of both are\nidentical, modified, as is sure to be the case, by the difference of\nlocality; but then, such variations in habit are continually seen in\nanimals confessedly of the same species, which happen to be placed\nin different conditions of climate and locality.\n\nThat it was once exceedingly plentiful in Palestine is evident, from\na very cursory knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. It is every where\nmentioned as a well-known animal, equally familiar and dreaded. When\nthe disobedient prophet was killed by the Lion near Bethel, the fact\nseemed not to have caused any surprise in the neighbourhood. When\nthe people came out to rescue the body of the prophet, they wondered\nmuch because the Lion was standing by the fallen man, but had not\ntorn him, and had left the ass unhurt. But that a Lion should have\nkilled a man seems to have been an event which was not sufficiently\nrare to be surprising.\n\nWe will now proceed to those characteristics of the Lion which bear\nespecial reference to the Scriptures.\n\nIn the first place, size for size, the Lion is one of the strongest\nof beasts.\n\n[Illustration: LION AND TIGER.]\n\nMoreover, the strength of the Lion is equally distributed over the\nbody and limbs, giving to the animal an easy grace of movement which\nis rare except with such a structure. A full-grown Lion cannot only\nknock down and kill, but can carry away in its mouth, an ordinary\nox; and one of these terrible animals has been known to pick up a\nheifer in its mouth, and to leap over a wide ditch still carrying\nits burden. Another Lion carried a two-year old heifer, and was\nchased for five hours by mounted farmers, so that it must have\ntraversed a very considerable distance. Yet, in the whole of this\nlong journey, the legs of the heifer had only two or three times\ntouched the ground.\n\nIt kills man, and comparatively small animals, such as deer and\nantelopes, with a blow of its terrible paw; and often needs to\ngive no second blow to cause the death of its victim. The sharp\ntalons are not needed to cause death, for the weight of the blow is\nsufficient for that purpose.\n\nWhen the hunter pursues it with dogs, after the usual fashion,\nthere is often a great slaughter among them, especially among those\nthat are inexperienced in the chase of the Lion. Urged by their\ninstinctive antipathy, the dogs rush forward to the spot where the\nLion awaits them, and old hounds bay at him from a safe distance,\nwhile the young and inexperienced among them are apt to convert the\nsham attack into a real one. Their valour meets with a poor reward,\nfor a few blows from the Lion's terrible paws send his assailants\nflying in all directions, their bodies streaming with blood, and in\nmost cases a fatal damage inflicted, while more than one unfortunate\ndog lies fairly crushed by the weight of a paw laid with apparent\ncarelessness upon its body. There is before me a Lion's skin, a\nspoil of one of these animals shot by the celebrated sportsman,\nGordon Cumming. Although the skin lies flat upon the floor, and the\npaws are nothing but the skin and talons, the weight of each paw is\nvery considerable, and always surprises those who hear it fall on\nthe floor.\n\nThere are several Hebrew words which are used for the Lion, but\nthat which signifies the animal in its adult state is derived from\nan Arabic word signifying strength; and therefore the Lion is\ncalled the Strong-one, just as the Bat is called the Night-flier.\nNo epithet could be better deserved, for the Lion seems to be a\nvery incarnation of strength, and, even when dead, gives as vivid\nan idea of concentrated power as when it was living. And, when the\nskin is stripped from the body, the tremendous muscular development\nnever fails to create a sensation of awe. The muscles of the limbs,\nthemselves so hard as to blunt the keen-edged knives employed by a\ndissecter, are enveloped in their glittering sheaths, playing upon\neach other like well-oiled machinery, and terminating in tendons\nseemingly strong as steel, and nearly as impervious to the knife.\nNot until the skin is removed can any one form a conception of the\nenormously powerful muscles of the neck, which enable the Lion to\nlift the weighty prey which it kills, and to convey it to a place\nof security.\n\n[Illustration: THE LION REPLIES TO THE THUNDER.]\n\nAlthough usually unwilling to attack an armed man, it is one of the\nmost courageous animals in existence when it is driven to fight, and\nif its anger is excited, it cares little for the number of its foes,\nor the weapons with which they are armed. Even the dreaded firearms\nlose their terrors to an angry Lion, while a Lioness, who fears\nfor the safety of her young, is simply the most terrible animal\nin existence. We know how even a hen will fight for her chickens,\nand how she has been known to beat off the fox and the hawk by the\nreckless fury of her attack. It may be easily imagined, therefore,\nthat a Lioness actuated by equal courage, and possessed of the\nterrible weapons given to her by her Creator, would be an animal\nalmost too formidable for the conception of those who have not\nactually witnessed the scene of a Lioness defending her little ones.\n\nThe roar of the Lion is another of the characteristics for which it\nis celebrated. There is no beast that can produce a sound that could\nfor a moment be mistaken for the roar of the Lion. The Lion has a\nhabit of stooping his head towards the ground when he roars, so\nthat the terrible sound rolls along like thunder, and reverberates\nin many an echo in the far distance. Owing to this curious habit,\nthe roar can be heard at a very great distance, but its locality\nis rendered uncertain, and it is often difficult to be quite sure\nwhether the Lion is to the right or the left of the hearer.\n\nThere are few sounds which strike more awe than the Lion's roar.\nEven at the Zoological Gardens, where the hearer knows that he is in\nperfect safety, and where the Lion is enclosed in a small cage faced\nwith strong iron bars, the sound of the terrible roar always has\na curious effect upon the nerves. It is not exactly fear, because\nthe hearer knows that he is safe; but it is somewhat akin to the\nfeeling of mixed awe and admiration with which one listens to the\ncrashing thunder after the lightning has sped its course. If such be\nthe case when the Lion is safely housed in a cage, and is moreover\nso tame that even if he did escape, he would be led back by the\nkeeper without doing any harm, the effect of the roar must indeed be\nterrific when the Lion is at liberty, when he is in his own country,\nand when the shades of evening prevent him from being seen even at a\nshort distance.\n\n[Illustration: LIONESS AND YOUNG.]\n\nIn the dark, there is no animal so invisible as a Lion. Almost\nevery hunter has told a similar story--of the Lion's approach at\nnight, of the terror displayed by dogs and cattle as he drew near,\nand of the utter inability to see him, though he was so close that\nthey could hear his breathing. Sometimes, when he has crept near\nan encampment, or close to a cattle inclosure, he does not proceed\nany farther lest he should venture within the radius illumined by\nthe rays of the fire. So he crouches closely to the ground, and,\nin the semi-darkness, looks so like a large stone, or a little\nhillock, that any one might pass close to it without perceiving its\nreal nature. This gives the opportunity for which the Lion has been\nwatching, and in a moment he strikes down the careless straggler,\nand carries off his prey to the den. Sometimes, when very much\nexcited, he accompanies the charge with a roar, but, as a general\nfact, he secures his prey in silence.\n\nThe roar of the Lion is very peculiar. It is not a mere outburst of\nsound, but a curiously graduated performance. No description of the\nLion's roar is so vivid, so true, and so graphic as that of Gordon\nCumming: \"One of the most striking things connected with the Lion\nis his voice, which is extremely grand and peculiarly striking.\nIt consists at times of a low, deep moaning, repeated five or six\ntimes, ending in faintly audible sighs. At other times he startles\nthe forest with loud, deep-toned, solemn roars, repeated five or six\ntimes in quick succession, each increasing in loudness to the third\nor fourth, when his voice dies away in five or six low, muffled\nsounds, very much resembling distant thunder. As a general rule,\nLions roar during the night, their sighing moans commencing as the\nshades of evening envelop the forest, and continuing at intervals\nthroughout the night. In distant and secluded regions, however, I\nhave constantly heard them roaring loudly as late as nine or ten\no'clock on a bright sunny morning. In hazy and rainy weather they\nare to be heard at every hour in the day, but their roar is subdued.\"\n\nLastly, we come to the dwelling-place of the Lion. This animal\nalways fixes its residence in the depths of some forest, through\nwhich it threads its stealthy way with admirable certainty. No fox\nknows every hedgerow, ditch, drain, and covert better than the\nLion knows the whole country around his den. Each Lion seems to\nhave his peculiar district, in which only himself and his family\nwill be found. These animals seem to parcel out the neighbourhood\namong themselves by a tacit law like that which the dogs of eastern\ncountries have imposed upon themselves, and which forbids them to\ngo out of the district in which they were born. During the night he\ntraverses his dominions; and, as a rule, he retires to his den as\nsoon as the sun is fairly above the horizon. Sometimes he will be\nin wait for prey in the broadest daylight, but his ordinary habits\nare nocturnal, and in the daytime he is usually asleep in his secret\ndwelling-place.\n\nWe will now glance at a few of the passages in which the Lion is\nmentioned in the Holy Scriptures, selecting those which treat of its\nvarious characteristics.\n\nThe terrible strength of the Lion is the subject of repeated\nreference. In the magnificent series of prophecies uttered by\nJacob on his deathbed, the power of the princely tribe of Judah\nis predicted under the metaphor of a Lion--the beginning of its\npower as a Lion's whelp, the fulness of its strength as an adult\nLion, and its matured establishment in power as the old Lion that\ncouches himself and none dares to disturb him. Then Solomon, in the\nProverbs, speaks of the Lion as the \"strongest among beasts, and\nthat turneth not away for any.\"\n\nSolomon also alludes to its courage in the same book, Prov.\nxxviii. 1, in the well-known passage, \"The wicked fleeth when no\nman pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.\" And, in 2\nSam. xxiii. 20, the courage of Benaiah, one of the mighty three of\nDavid's army, is specially honoured, because he fought and killed a\nLion single-handed, and because he conquered \"two lion-like men of\nMoab.\" David, their leader, had also distinguished himself, when a\nmere keeper of cattle, by pursuing and killing a Lion that had come\nto plunder his herd. In the same book of Samuel which has just been\nquoted (xvii. 10), the valiant men are metaphorically described as\nhaving the hearts of Lions.\n\nThe ferocity of this terrible beast of prey is repeatedly mentioned,\nand the Psalms are full of such allusions, the fury and anger of\nenemies being compared to the attacks of the Lion.\n\nMany passages refer to the Lion's roar, and it is remarkable that\nthe Hebrew language contains several words by which the different\nkind of roar is described. One word, for example, represents the\nlow, deep, thunder-like roar of the Lion seeking its prey, and which\nhas already been mentioned. This is the word which is used in Amos\niii. 4, \"Will a lion roar in the forest when he hath no prey?\" and\nin this passage the word which is translated as Lion signifies the\nanimal when full grown and in the prime of life. Another word is\nused to signify the sudden exulting cry of the Lion as it leaps\nupon its victim. A third is used for the angry growl with which a\nLion resents any endeavour to deprive it of its prey, a sound with\nwhich we are all familiar, on a miniature scale, when we hear a cat\ngrowling over a mouse which she has just caught. The fourth term\nsignifies the peculiar roar uttered by the young Lion after it has\nceased to be a cub and before it has attained maturity. This last\nterm is employed in Jer. li. 38, \"They shall _roar_ together like\nlions; they shall _yell_ as lions' whelps,\" in which passage two\ndistinct words are used, one signifying the roar of the Lion when\nsearching after prey, and the other the cry of the young Lions.\n\nThe prophet Amos, who in his capacity of herdsman was familiar\nwith the wild beasts, from which he had to guard his cattle, makes\nfrequent mention of the Lion, and does so with a force and vigour\nthat betoken practical experience. How powerful is this imagery,\n\"The lion hath roared; who will not fear? The Lord God hath spoken;\nwho can but prophesy?\" Here we have the picture of the man himself,\nthe herdsman and prophet, who had trembled many a night, as the\nLions drew nearer and nearer; and who heard the voice of the Lord,\nand his lips poured out prophecy. Nothing can be more complete than\nthe parallel which he has drawn. It breathes the very spirit of\npiety, and may bear comparison even with the prophecies of Isaiah\nfor its simple grandeur.\n\nIt is remarkable how the sacred writers have entered into the spirit\nof the world around them, and how closely they observed the minutest\ndetails even in the lives of the brute beasts. There is a powerful\npassage in the book of Job, iv. 11, \"The old lion perisheth for lack\nof prey,\" in which the writer betrays his thorough knowledge of the\nhabits of the animal, and is aware that the usual mode of a Lion's\ndeath is through hunger, in consequence of his increasing inability\nto catch prey.\n\nThe nocturnal habits of the Lion and its custom of lying in wait\nfor prey are often mentioned in the Scriptures. The former habit is\nspoken of in that familiar and beautiful passage in the Psalms (civ.\n20), \"Thou makest darkness, and it is night; wherein all the beasts\nof the forest do creep forth. The young Lions roar after their\nprey; and seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth, they gather\nthemselves together, and lay them down in their dens.\"\n\n[Illustration: LION CARRYING HOME SUPPLIES.]\n\nAn animal so destructive among the flocks and herds could not be\nallowed to carry out its depredations unchecked, and as we have\nalready seen, the warfare waged against it has been so successful,\nthat the Lions have long ago been fairly extirpated in Palestine.\nThe usual method of capturing or killing the Lion was by pitfalls or\nnets, to both of which there are many references in the Scriptures.\n\nThe mode of hunting the Lion with nets was identical with that which\nis practised in India at the present time. The precise locality of\nthe Lion's dwelling-place having been discovered, a circular wall\nof net is arranged round it, or if only a few nets can be obtained,\nthey are set in a curved form, the concave side being towards the\nLion. They then send dogs into the thicket, hurl stones and sticks\nat the den, shoot arrows into it, fling burning torches at it, and\nso irritate and alarm the animal that it rushes against the net,\nwhich is so made that it falls down and envelopes the animal in its\nfolds. If the nets be few, the drivers go to the opposite side of\nthe den, and induce the Lion to escape in the direction where he\nsees no foes, but where he is sure to run against the treacherous\nnet. Other large and dangerous animals were also captured by the\nsame means.\n\n[Illustration: AFRICAN LIONS.]\n\nAnother and more common, because an easier and a cheaper method was,\nby digging a deep pit, covering the mouth with a slight covering\nof sticks and earth, and driving the animal upon the treacherous\ncovering. It is an easier method than the net, because after the pit\nis once dug, the only trouble lies in throwing the covering over\nits mouth. But, it is not so well adapted for taking beasts alive,\nas they are likely to be damaged, either by the fall into the pit,\nor by the means used in getting them out again. Animals, therefore,\nthat are caught in pits are generally, though not always, killed\nbefore they are taken out. The net, however, envelops the animal so\nperfectly, and renders it so helpless, that it can be easily bound\nand taken away. The hunting net is very expensive, and requires a\nlarge staff of men to work it, so that none but a rich man could use\nit in hunting.\n\nThe passages in which allusion is made to the use of the pitfall in\nhunting are too numerous to be quoted, and it will be sufficient\nto mention one or two passages, such as those wherein the Psalmist\nlaments that his enemies have hidden for him their net in a pit, and\nthat the proud have digged pits for him.\n\nLions that were taken in nets seem to have been kept alive in dens,\neither as mere curiosities, or as instruments of royal vengeance.\nSuch seems to have been the object of the Lions which were kept by\nDarius, into whose den Daniel was thrown, by royal command, and\nwhich afterwards killed his accusers when thrown into the same den.\nIt is plain that the Lions kept by Darius must have been exceedingly\nnumerous, because they killed at once the accusers of Daniel, who\nwere many in number, together with their wives and children, who,\nin accordance with the cruel custom of that age and country, were\npartakers of the same punishment with the real culprits. The whole\nof the first part of Ezek. xix. alludes to the custom of taking\nLions alive and keeping them in durance afterwards.\n\nSometimes the Lion was hunted as a sport, but this amusement\nseems to have been restricted to the great men, on account of its\nexpensive nature. Such hunting scenes are graphically depicted in\nthe famous Nineveh sculptures, which represent the hunters pursuing\ntheir mighty game in chariots, and destroying them with arrows.\nRude, and even conventional as are these sculptures, they have a\nspirit, a force, and a truthfulness, that prove them to have been\ndesigned by artists to whom the scene was a familiar one.\n\n[Illustration: THE LION ATTACKS THE HERD.]\n\nUpon the African Continent the Lion reigns supreme, monarch of the\nfeline race.\n\nWhatever may be said of the distinction between the Asiatic and\nAfrican Lion, there seems to be scarcely sufficient grounds for\nconsidering the very slight differences a sufficient warrant for\nconstituting separate species. From all accounts, it seems that\nthe habits of all Lions are very similar, and that a Lion acts\nlike a Lion whether found in Africa or Asia.\n\n[Illustration: THE LAIR OF THE LION.]\n\nAn old Boer, as the Dutch settlers of Southern Africa are called,\ngave me a most interesting account of an adventure with a Lion.\n\nThe man was a well-known hunter, and lived principally by the sale\nof ivory and skins. He was accustomed each year to make a trip into\nthe game country, and traded with the Kaffirs, or native blacks,\nunder very favorable auspices. His stock in trade consisted of guns\nand ammunition, several spans of fine oxen, some horses, and about a\ndozen dogs.\n\nA Lion which appeared to have been roaming about the country\nhappened to pass near this hunter's camp, and scenting the horses\nand oxen, evidently thought that the location would suit him for\na short period. A dense wood situated about a mile from the camp\nafforded shelter, and this spot the Lion selected as a favorable\nposition for his headquarters.\n\nThe hunter had not to wait for more than a day, before the\nsuspicions which had been aroused by some broad footmarks, which he\nsaw imprinted in the soil, were confirmed into a certainty that a\nlarge Lion was concealed near his residence.\n\nIt now became a question of policy whether the Boer should attack\nthe Lion, or wait for the Lion to attack him. He thought it possible\nthat the savage beast, having been warned off by the dogs, whose\nbarking had been continued and furious during the night on which the\nLion was supposed to have passed, might think discretion the better\npart of valor, and consequently would move farther on, in search of\na less carefully guarded locality upon which to quarter himself. He\ndetermined, therefore, to wait, but to use every precaution against\na night-surprise.\n\nThe Lion, however, was more than a match for the man; for during the\nsecond night a strong ox from his best span was quietly carried off,\nand, although there was some commotion among the dogs and cattle, it\nwas then thought that the alarm had scared the Lion away.\n\nThe morning light, however, showed that the beast had leaped the\nfence which surrounded the camp, and, having killed the ox, had\nevidently endeavored to scramble over it again with the ox in his\npossession. The weight of the Lion and the ox had caused the stakes\nto give way, and the Lion had easily carried off his prey through\nthe aperture.\n\nThe track of the Lion was immediately followed by the Boer, who took\nwith him a <DW64> and half a dozen of his best dogs. The tracks were\neasily seen, and the hunter had no difficulty in deciding that the\nLion was in the wood previously mentioned. But this in itself was no\ngreat advance, for the place was overgrown with a dense thicket of\nthorn-bushes, creepers, and long grass, forming a jungle so thick\nand impenetrable that for a man to enter seemed almost impossible.\n\nIt was therefore agreed that the Boer should station himself on one\nside, while the <DW64> went to the other side of the jungle, the dogs\nmeanwhile being sent into the thicket.\n\nThis arrangement, it was hoped, would enable either the hunter or\nthe <DW64> to obtain a shot; for they concluded that the dogs, which\nwere very courageous animals, would drive the Lion out of the bushes.\n\nThe excited barking of the dogs soon indicated that they had\ndiscovered the Lion, but they appeared to be unable to drive him\nfrom his stronghold; for, although they would scamper away every now\nand then, as though the enraged monster was chasing them, still they\nreturned to bark at the same spot.\n\nBoth of the hunters fired several shots, with the hope that a stray\nbullet might find its way through the underwood to the heart of the\nsavage beast, but a great quantity of ammunition was expended and no\nresult achieved.\n\nAt length, as the dogs had almost ceased to bark, it was considered\nadvisable to call them off. But all the whistling and shouting\nfailed to recall more than two out of the six, and one of these was\nfearfully wounded. The others, it was afterwards found, had been\nkilled by the Lion: a blow from his paw had sufficed to break the\nback or smash the skull of all which had come within his reach.\n\nThus the first attempt on the Lion was a total failure, and the\nhunter returned home lamenting the loss of his dogs, and during the\nnight watched beside his enclosure; but the Lion did not pay him a\nsecond visit.\n\nEarly on the following evening, accompanied by the <DW64>, he started\nafresh for the wood; and, having marked the spot from which the Lion\nhad on the former occasion quitted the dense thorny jungle, the two\nhunters ascended a tree and watched during the whole night in the\nhope of obtaining a shot at the hated marauder. But while they\nwere paying the residence of the Lion a visit _he_ favored the camp\nwith a call, and this time, by way of variety, carried away a very\nvaluable horse, which he conveyed to the wood, being wise enough\nto walk out and to return by a different path from that he had\npreviously used, consequently avoiding the ambush prepared for him.\n\nWhen the hunter returned to his camp, he was furious at this new\nloss, and determined upon a plan which, though dangerous, still\nappeared the most likely to insure the destruction of the ravenous\nmonster.\n\nThis plan was to enter the wood alone, without attendant or dogs,\nand with noiseless, stealthy movements creep near enough to the Lion\nto obtain a shot.\n\nNow, when we consider the difficulty of moving through thick bushes\nwithout making a noise, and remember the watchful habits of every\nmember of the cat tribe, we may be certain that to surprise the Lion\nwas a matter of extreme difficulty, and that the probability was\nthat the hunter would meet with disaster.\n\nAt about ten o'clock on the morning after the horse-slaughter,\nthe hunter started for the wood armed with a double-barrelled\nsmooth-bore gun, and prepared to put forth his utmost skill in\nstalking his dangerous enemy.\n\nNow, it is the nature of the Lion, when gorged, to sleep during the\nday; and if the animal has carried off any prey, it usually conceals\nitself near the remnants of its feast, to watch them until ready for\nanother meal.\n\nThe hunter was aware of this, and laid his plans very judiciously.\nHe approached the wood slowly and silently, found the track of the\nLion, and began tracing it to find the spot where the remains of the\nhorse could be seen.\n\nHe moved forward very slowly and with great caution, being soon\nsurrounded by the thick bushes, the brightness of the plain also\nbeing succeeded by the deep gloom of the wood. Being an experienced\nhand at bush-craft, he was able to walk or crawl without causing\neither a dried stick to crack or a leaf to rustle, and he was aware\nthat his progress was without noise; for the small birds, usually so\nwatchful and alert, flew away only when he approached close to them,\nthus showing that their eyes, and not their ears, had made them\nconscious of the presence of man.\n\nBirds and monkeys are the great obstacles in the bush to the\nsuccess of a surprise, for the birds fly from tree to tree and\nwhistle or twitter, whilst the monkeys chatter and grimace,\nexpressing by all sorts of actions that a strange creature is\napproaching. When, therefore, the bushranger finds that birds and\nmonkeys are unconscious of his presence until they see him, he may\nbe satisfied that he has traversed the bush with tolerable silence,\nand has vanquished such dangerous betrayers of his presence as dried\nsticks and dead leaves.\n\n[Illustration: THE LION LISTENS TO THE APPROACH OF THE HUNTER.]\n\nThe hunter had not proceeded thus more than fifty yards into the\njungle, before he found indications that he was close upon the lair\nof the Lion: a strong leonine scent was noticeable, and part of\nthe carcase of his horse was visible between the bushes. Instead,\ntherefore, of advancing farther, as an incautious or inexperienced\nbushranger would have done, he crouched down behind a bush and\nremained motionless.\n\nAll animals are aware of the advantages of a surprise, and the\ncat tribe especially practise the ambuscading system. The hunter,\ntherefore, determined, if possible, to turn the tables on the Lion,\nand to surprise, rather than to be surprised.\n\nHe concluded that the Lion, even when gorged with horseflesh, would\nnot be so neglectful of his safety as to sleep with more than one\neye closed, and that, although he had crept with great care through\nthe bush, he had probably, from some slight sound, caused the Lion\nto be on the alert; if, therefore, he should approach the carcase of\nthe horse, he might be pounced upon at once.\n\nAfter remaining silent and watchful for several minutes, the hunter\nat length saw that an indistinctly-outlined object was moving behind\nsome large broad-leafed plants at about twenty paces from him.\n\nThis object was the Lion. It was crouched behind some shrubs,\nattentively watching the bushes where the hunter was concealed. Its\nhead only was clearly visible, the body being hidden by the foliage.\n\nIt was evident that the Lion was suspicious of something, but was\nnot certain that anything had approached.\n\nThe hunter, knowing that this was a critical period for him,\nremained perfectly quiet. He did not like to risk a shot at the\nforehead of the Lion, for it would require a very sure aim to insure\na death-wound, and the number of twigs and branches would be almost\ncertain to deflect the bullet.\n\nThe Lion, after a careful inspection, appeared to be satisfied, and\nlaid down behind the shrubs. The hunter then cocked both barrels\nof his heavy gun and turned the muzzle slowly around, so that he\ncovered the spot on which the Lion lay, and shifted his position so\nas to be well placed for a shot.\n\nThe slight noise he made in moving, attracted the attention of the\nLion, who immediately rose to his feet. A broadside shot, which was\nthe most sure, could not be obtained, so the hunter fired at the\nhead of the animal, aiming for a spot between the eyes. The ball\nstruck high, as is usually the case when the distance is short, and\nthe charge of powder heavy, but the Lion fell over on its back,\nrising, however, almost immediately and uttering a terrific roar.\n\nIn regaining its feet it turned its side to the hunter, giving him\nthe opportunity he had so anxiously waited for. Aiming at a spot\nbehind the shoulder, he fired again, and had the satisfaction of\nseeing the savage beast, maddened by the pain of a mortal wound,\ntearing up the ground in its fury within a very few paces of his\nhiding-place.\n\nBy degrees its fierce roars subsided into angry growls, and the\ngrowls into heavy moans, until the terrible voice was hushed and\nsilence reigned throughout the wood.\n\nThe hunter immediately started off home, and brought his <DW64>s and\ndogs to the spot, where they found stretched dead upon the ground a\nLion of the largest size.\n\nBefore sunset that evening its skin was pegged down at the hunter's\ncamp, and all were filled with delight, knowing that they would be\nno more disturbed by the fierce marauder.\n\n\n\n\nTHE LEOPARD.\n\n     The Leopard not often mentioned in the Scriptures--its\n     attributes exactly described--Probability that several animals\n     were classed under the name--How the Leopard takes its\n     prey--Craft of the Leopard--its ravages among the flocks--The\n     empire of man over the beast--The Leopard at Bay--Localities\n     wherein the Leopard lives--The skin of the Leopard--Various\n     passages of Scripture explained.\n\n\nOf the LEOPARD but little is said in the Holy Scriptures.\n\nIn the New Testament this animal is only mentioned once, and\nthen in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense. In the Old\nTestament it is casually mentioned seven times, and only in two\nplaces is the word Leopard used in the strictly literal sense.\nYet, in those brief passages of Holy Writ, the various attributes\nof the animal are delineated with such fidelity, that no one could\ndoubt that the Leopard was familiarly known in Palestine. Its\ncolour, its swiftness, its craft, its ferocity, and the nature of\nits dwelling-place, are all touched upon in a few short sentences\nscattered throughout the Old Testament, and even its peculiar habits\nare alluded to in a manner that proves it to have been well known at\nthe time when the words were written.\n\nIt is my purpose in the following pages to give a brief account of\nthe Leopard of the Scriptures, laying most stress on the qualities\nto which allusion is made, and then to explain the passages in which\nthe name of the animal occurs.\n\nIn the first place, it is probable that under the word Leopard are\ncomprehended three animals, two of which, at least, were thought to\nbe one species until the time of Cuvier. These three animals are the\nLEOPARD proper (_Leopardus varius_), the OUNCE (_Leopardus uncia_),\nand the CHETAH, or HUNTING LEOPARD (_Gueparda jubata_). All these\nthree species belong to the same family of animals; all are spotted\nand similar in colour, all are nearly alike in shape, and all are\ninhabitants of Asia, while two of them, the Leopard and the Chetah,\nare also found in Africa.\n\nIt is scarcely necessary to mention that the Leopard is a beast\nof prey belonging to the cat tribe, that its colour is tawny,\nvariegated with rich black spots, and that it is a fierce and\nvoracious animal, almost equally dreaded by man and beast. It\ninhabits many parts of Africa and Asia, and in those portions of\nthe country which are untenanted by mankind, it derives all its\nsustenance from the herb-eating animals of the same tracts.\n\n[Illustration: THE LEOPARD.]\n\nTo deer and antelopes it is a terrible enemy, and in spite of their\nactive limbs, seldom fails in obtaining its prey. Swift as is the\nLeopard, for a short distance, and wonderful as its spring, it has\nnot the enduring speed of the deer or antelope, animals which are\nspecially formed for running, and which, if a limb is shattered,\ncan run nearly as fast and quite as far on three legs as they\ncan when all four limbs are uninjured. Instinctively knowing its\ninferiority in the race, the Leopard supplies by cunning the want of\nenduring speed.\n\nIt conceals itself in some spot whence it can see far around without\nbeing seen, and thence surveys the country. A tree is the usual\nspot selected for this purpose, and the Leopard, after climbing the\ntrunk by means of its curved talons, settles itself in the fork of\nthe branches, so that its body is hidden by the boughs, and only\nits head is shown between them. With such scrupulous care does it\nconceal itself, that none but a practised hunter can discover it,\nwhile any one who is unaccustomed to the woods cannot see the animal\neven when the tree is pointed out to him.\n\nAs soon as the Leopard sees the deer feeding at a distance, he\nslips down the tree and stealthily glides off in their direction.\nHe has many difficulties to overcome, because the deer are among\nthe most watchful of animals, and if the Leopard were to approach\nto the windward, they would scent him while he was yet a mile away\nfrom them. If he were to show himself but for one moment in the\nopen ground he would be seen, and if he were but to shake a branch\nor snap a dry twig he would be heard. So, he is obliged to approach\nthem against the wind, to keep himself under cover, and yet to\nglide so carefully along that the heavy foliage of the underwood\nshall not be shaken, and the dry sticks and leaves which strew the\nground shall not be broken. He has also to escape the observation of\ncertain birds and beasts which inhabit the woods, and which would\ncertainly set up their alarm-cry as soon as they saw him, and so\ngive warning to the wary deer, which can perfectly understand a cry\nof alarm, from whatever animal it may happen to proceed.\n\nStill, he proceeds steadily on his course, gliding from one covert\nto another, and often expending several hours before he can proceed\nfor a mile. By degrees he contrives to come tolerably close to them,\nand generally manages to conceal himself in some spot towards which\nthe deer are gradually feeding their way. As soon as they are near\nenough, he collects himself for a spring, just as a cat does when\nshe leaps on a bird, and dashes towards the deer in a series of\nmighty bounds. For a moment or two they are startled and paralysed\nwith fear at the sudden appearance of their enemy, and thus give\nhim time to get among them. Singling out some particular animal, he\nleaps upon it, strikes it down with one blow of his paw, and then,\ncouching on the fallen animal, he tears open its throat, and laps\nthe flowing blood.\n\n[Illustration: LEOPARD ATTACKING A HERD OF DEER.]\n\nIn this manner does it obtain its prey when it lives in the desert,\nbut when it happens to be in the neighbourhood of human habitations,\nit acts in a different manner. Whenever man settles himself in any\nplace, his presence is a signal for the beasts of the desert and\nforest to fly. The more timid, such as the deer and antelope, are\nafraid of him, and betake themselves as far away as possible. The\nmore savage inhabitants of the land, such as the lion, leopard, and\nother animals, wage an unequal war against him for a time, but are\ncontinually driven farther and farther away, until at last they\nare completely expelled from the country. The predaceous beasts\nare, however, loth to retire, and do so by very slow degrees. They\ncan no longer support themselves on the deer and antelopes, but\nfind a simple substitute for them in the flocks and herds which\nman introduces, and in the seizing of which there is as much craft\nrequired as in the catching of the fleeter and wilder animals. Sheep\nand goats cannot run away like the antelopes, but they are penned so\ncarefully within inclosures, and guarded so watchfully by herdsmen\nand dogs, that the Leopard is obliged to exert no small amount of\ncunning before it can obtain a meal.\n\nSometimes it creeps quietly to the fold, and escapes the notice of\nthe dogs, seizes upon a sheep, and makes off with it before the\nalarm is given. Sometimes it hides by the wayside, and as the flock\npass by it dashes into the midst of them, snatches up a sheep, and\ndisappears among the underwood on the opposite side of the road.\nSometimes it is crafty enough to deprive the fold of its watchful\nguardian. Dogs which are used to Leopard-hunting never attack the\nanimal, though they are rendered furious by the sound of its voice.\nThey dash at it as if they meant to devour it, but take very good\ncare to keep out of reach of its terrible paws. By continually\nkeeping the animal at bay, they give time for their master to come\nup, and generally contrive to drive it into a tree, where it can be\nshot.\n\nBut instances have been known where the Leopard has taken advantage\nof the dogs, and carried them off in a very cunning manner. It\nhides itself tolerably near the fold, and then begins to growl in a\nlow voice. The dogs think that they hear a Leopard at a distance,\nand dash towards the sound with furious barks and yells. In so\ndoing, they are sure to pass by the hiding-place of the Leopard,\nwhich springs upon them unawares, knocks one of them over, and\nbounds away to its den in the woods. It does not content itself\nwith taking sheep or goats from the fold, but is also a terrible\ndespoiler of the hen-roosts, destroying great numbers in a single\nnight when once it contrives to find its way into the house.\n\n[Illustration: THE LEOPARD LEAPS UPON HIS PREY.]\n\nAs an instance of the cunning which seems innate in the Leopard, I\nmay mention that whenever it takes up its abode near a village, it\ndoes not meddle with the flocks and herds of its neighbours, but\nprefers to go to some other village at a distance for food, thus\nremaining unsuspected almost at the very doors of the houses.\n\nIn general, it does not willingly attack mankind, and at all events\nseems rather to fear the presence of a full-grown man. But, when\nwounded or irritated, all sense of fear is lost in an overpowering\nrush of fury, and it then becomes as terrible a foe as the lion\nhimself. It is not so large nor so strong, but it is more agile\nand quicker in its movements; and when it is seized with one of\nthese paroxysms of anger, the eye can scarcely follow it as it\ndarts here and there, striking with lightning rapidity, and dashing\nat any foe within reach. Its whole shape seems to be transformed,\nand absolutely to swell with anger; its eyes flash with fiery\nlustre, its ears are thrown back on the head, and it continually\nutters alternate snarls and yells of rage. It is hardly possible\nto recognise the graceful, lithe glossy creature, whose walk is\nso noiseless, and whose every movement is so easy, in the furious\npassion-swollen animal that flies at every foe with blind fury, and\npours out sounds so fierce and menacing that few men, however well\narmed, will care to face it.\n\nAs is the case with most of the cat tribe, the Leopard is an\nexcellent climber, and can ascend trees and traverse their boughs\nwithout the least difficulty. It is so fond of trees, that it is\nseldom to be seen except in a well-wooded district. Its favourite\nresidence is a forest where there is plenty of underwood, at least\nsix or seven feet in height, among which trees are sparingly\ninterspersed. When crouched in this cover it is practically\ninvisible, even though its body may be within arm's length of\na passenger. The spotted body harmonizes so perfectly with the\nbroken lights and deep shadows of the foliage that even a practised\nhunter will not enter a covert in search of a Leopard unless he\nis accompanied by dogs. The instinct which teaches the Leopard to\nchoose such localities is truly wonderful, and may be compared with\nthat of the tiger, which cares little for underwood, but haunts the\ngrass jungles, where the long, narrow blades harmonize with the\nstripes which decorate its body.\n\n[Illustration: WAITING.]\n\nThe skin of the Leopard has always been highly valued on account\nof its beauty, and in Africa, at the present day, a robe made of\nits spotted skin is as much an adjunct of royalty as is the ermine\nthe emblem of judicial dignity in England. In more ancient times, a\nleopard skin was the official costume of a priest, the skin being\nsometimes shaped into a garment, and sometimes thrown over the\nshoulders and the paws crossed over the breast.\n\nSuch is a general history of the Leopard. We will now proceed to\nthe various passages in which it is mentioned, beginning with its\noutward aspect.\n\nIn the first place, the Hebrew word Namer signifies \"spotted,\" and\nis given to the animal in allusion to its colours. The reader will\nnow see how forcible is the lament of Jeremiah, \"Can the Ethiopian\nchange his skin, or the Leopard his spots?\" Literally, \"Can the\nEthiopian change his skin, or the spotted one his spots?\"\n\nThe agility and swiftness of the Leopard are alluded to in the\nprediction by the prophet Habakkuk of the vengeance that would\ncome upon Israel through the Chaldeans. In chap. i. 5, we read: \"I\nwill work a work in your days, which ye will not believe though it\nbe told you. For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and\nhasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land, to\npossess the dwelling-places that are not theirs. They are terrible\nand dreadful; their judgment and their dignity shall proceed of\nthemselves. Their horses also are swifter than the Leopards, and are\nmore fierce than the evening wolves.\"\n\nThe craftiness of the Leopard, and the manner in which it lies in\nwait for its prey, are alluded to in more than one passage of Holy\nWrit. Hosea the prophet alludes to the Leopard in a few simple\nwords which display an intimate acquaintance with the habits of this\nformidable animal, and in this part of his prophecies he displays\nthat peculiar local tone which distinguishes his writings. Speaking\nof the Israelites under the metaphor of a flock, or a herd, he\nproceeds to say: \"According to their pasture so were they filled;\nthey were filled, and their heart was exalted; therefore have they\nforgotten me. Therefore I will be unto them as a lion, as a Leopard\nby the way will I observe them.\" The reader will note the peculiar\nforce of this sentence, whereby God signifies that He will destroy\nthem openly, as a lion rushes on its prey, and that he will chastise\nthem unexpectedly, as if it were a Leopard crouching by the wayside,\nand watching for the flock to pass, that it may spring on its prey\nunexpectedly. The same habit of the Leopard is also alluded to by\nJeremiah, who employs precisely the same imagery as is used by\nHabakkuk. See Jer. v. 5, 6, \"These have altogether broken the yoke,\nand burst the bonds. Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay\nthem, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall\nwatch over their cities.\" It is evident from the employment of this\nimage by two prophets, the one being nearly a hundred years before\nthe other, that the crafty, insidious habits of the Leopard were\nwell known in Palestine, and that the metaphor would tell with full\nforce among those to whom it was addressed.\n\n[Illustration: leopard]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: cats]\n\n\n\n\nTHE CAT.\n\n     The Cat never mentioned by name in the canonical Scriptures,\n     and only once in the Apocrypha--The Cat domesticated among the\n     Egyptians, and trained in bird-catching--Neglected capabilities\n     of the Cat--Anecdote of an English Cat that caught fish for her\n     master--Presumed reason why the Scriptures are silent about the\n     Cat--The Cat mentioned by Baruch.\n\n\nIt is a very remarkable circumstance that the word CAT is not once\nmentioned in the whole of the canonical Scriptures, and only once in\nthe Apocrypha.\n\nThe Egyptians, as is well known, kept Cats domesticated in their\nhouses, a fact which is mentioned by Herodotus, in his second book,\nand the 66th and 67th chapters. After describing the various animals\nwhich were kept and fed by this nation, he proceeds to narrate the\nhabits of the Cat, and writes as follows: \"When a fire takes place,\na supernatural impulse seizes the cats. For the Egyptians, standing\nat a distance, take care of the cats and neglect to quench the fire;\nbut the cats make their escape, and leaping over the men, cast\nthemselves into the fire, and when this occurs, great lamentations\nare made among the Egyptians. In whatever house a cat dies of\na natural death, all the family shave their eyebrows. All cats\nthat die are carried to certain sacred houses, where, after being\nembalmed, they are buried in the city of Bubastis.\"\n\nNow, as many of those cat-mummies have been discovered in good\npreservation, the species has been identified with the Egyptian\nCat of the present day, which is scientifically termed _Felis\nmaniculatus_. Not only did the Egyptians keep Cats at their houses,\nbut, as is shown by certain sculptures, took the animals with them\nwhen they went bird-catching, and employed them in securing their\nprey. Some persons have doubted this statement, saying, that in the\nfirst place, the Cat is not possessed of sufficient intelligence\nfor the purpose; and that in the second place, as the hunter is\nrepresented as catching wild fowl, the Cat would not be able to\nassist him, because it would not enter the water. Neither objection\nis valid, nor would have been made by a naturalist.\n\nThere are no grounds whatever for assuming that the Cat has not\nsufficient intelligence to aid its master in hunting. On the\ncontrary, there are many familiar instances where the animal has\nbeen trained, even in this country, to catch birds and other game,\nand bring its prey home. By nature the Cat is an accomplished\nhunter, and, like other animals of the same disposition, can be\ntaught to use its powers for mankind. We all know that the chetah,\na member of the same tribe, is in constant use at the present day,\nand we learn from ancient sculptures that the lion was employed for\nthe same purpose. Passing from land to water, mankind has succeeded\nin teaching the seal and the otter to plunge into the water, catch\ntheir finny prey, and deliver it to their owners. Among predaceous\nbirds, we have trained the eagle, the falcon, and various hawks,\nto assist us in hunting the finned and feathered tribes, while we\nhave succeeded in teaching the cormorant to catch fish for its\nmaster, and not for itself. Why, then, should the Cat be excepted\nfrom a rule so general? The fact is, the Cat has been, although\ndomesticated for so many centuries, a comparatively neglected\nanimal; and it is the fashion to heap upon it the contumacious\nepithets of sullen, treacherous, selfish, spiteful, and intractable,\njust as we take as our emblems of stupidity the ass and the goose,\nwhich are really among the most cunning of the lower animals. We\nhave never tried to teach the Cat the art of hunting for her owners,\nbut that is no reason for asserting that the animal could not be\ntaught.\n\nAs to entering the water, every one who is familiar with the habits\nof the Cat knows perfectly well that the Cat will voluntarily enter\nwater in chase of prey. A Cat does not like to wet her feet, and\nwill not enter the water without a very powerful reason, but when\nthat motive is supplied, she has no hesitation about it. A curious\nand valuable confirmation of this fact appeared some time ago in\n\"The Field\" newspaper, in which was recorded the history of an\nold fisherman, whose Cat invariably went to sea with him, and as\ninvariably used to leap overboard, seize fish in her mouth, and\nbring them to the side of the boat, where her kindly owner could\nlift her out, together with the captured fish.\n\nThe Cat, then, having been the favoured companion of the Egyptians,\namong whom the Israelites lived while they multiplied from a family\ninto a nation, it does seem very remarkable that the sacred writers\nshould not even mention it. There is no prohibition of the animal,\neven indirectly, in the Mosaic law; but it may be the case that the\nIsraelites repudiated the Cat simply because it was so favoured by\ntheir former masters.\n\n[Illustration: cat]\n\n\n\n\nTHE DOG.\n\n     Antipathy displayed by Orientals towards the Dog, and\n     manifested throughout the Scriptures--Contrast between European\n     and Oriental Dogs--Habits of the Dogs of Palestine--The\n     City Dogs and their singular organization--The herdsman's\n     Dog--Various passages of Scripture--Dogs and the crumbs--their\n     numbers--Signor Pierotti's experience of the Dogs--Possibility\n     of their perfect domestication--The peculiar humiliation of\n     Lazarus--Voracity of the Wild Dogs--The fate of Ahab and\n     Jezebel--Anecdote of a volunteer Watch-dog--Innate affection of\n     the Dog towards mankind--Peculiar local Instinct of the Oriental\n     Dog--Albert Smith's account of the Dogs at Constantinople--The\n     Dervish and his Dogs--The Greyhound--Uncertainty of the word.\n\n\nScarcely changed by the lapse of centuries, the Oriental of the\npresent day retains most of the peculiarities which distinguished\nhim throughout the long series of years during which the books\nof sacred Scripture were given to the world. In many of these\ncharacteristics he differs essentially from Europeans of the present\nday, and exhibits a tone of mind which seems to be not merely owing\nto education, but to be innate and inherent in the race.\n\nOne of these remarkable characteristics is the strange loathing\nwith which he regards the Dog. In all other parts of the world, the\nDog is one of the most cherished and valued of animals, but among\nthose people whom we popularly class under the name of Orientals,\nthe Dog is detested and despised. As the sacred books were given\nto the world through the mediumship of Orientals, we find that\nthis feeling towards the Dog is manifested whenever the animal is\nmentioned; and whether we turn to the books of the Law, the splendid\npoetry of the Psalms and the book of Job, the prophetical or the\nhistorical portions of the Old Testament, we find the name of the\nDog repeatedly mentioned; and in every case in connexion with some\nrepulsive idea. If we turn from the Old to the New Testament, we\nfind the same idea manifested, whether in the Gospels, the Epistles,\nor the Revelation.\n\nTo the mind of the true Oriental the very name of the Dog carries\nwith it an idea of something utterly repugnant to his nature,\nand he does not particularly like even the thought of the animal\ncoming across his mind. And this is the more extraordinary, because\nat the commencement and termination of their history the Dog was\nesteemed by their masters. The Egyptians, under whose rule they\ngrew to be a nation, knew the value of the Dog, and showed their\nappreciation in the many works of art which have survived to our\ntime. Then the Romans, under whose iron grasp the last vestiges of\nnationality crumbled away, honoured and respected the Dog, made it\ntheir companion, and introduced its portrait into their houses. But,\ntrue to their early traditions, the Jews of the East have ever held\nthe Dog in the same abhorrence as is manifested by their present\nmasters, the followers of Mahommed.\n\nOwing to the prevalence of this feeling, the Dogs of Oriental\ntowns are so unlike their more fortunate European relatives, that\nthey can hardly be recognised as belonging to the same species.\nIn those lands the traveller finds that there is none of the\nwonderful variety which so distinguishes the Dog of Europe. There\nhe will never see the bluff, sturdy, surly, faithful mastiff, the\nslight gazelle-like greyhound, the sharp, intelligent terrier, the\nsilent, courageous bulldog, the deep-voiced, tawny bloodhound, the\nnoble Newfoundland, the clever, vivacious poodle, or the gentle,\nsilken-haired spaniel.\n\nAs he traverses the streets, he finds that all the dogs are alike,\nand that all are gaunt, hungry, half starved, savage, and cowardly,\nmore like wolves than dogs, and quite as ready as wolves to attack\nwhen they fancy they can do so with safety. They prowl about the\nstreets in great numbers, living, as they best can, on any scraps of\nfood that they may happen to find. They have no particular masters,\nand no particular homes. Charitable persons will sometimes feed\nthem, but will never make companions of them, feeling that the very\ncontact of a dog would be a pollution. They are certainly useful\nanimals, because they act as scavengers, and will eat almost any\nanimal substance that comes in their way.\n\nThe strangest part of their character is the organization which\nprevails among them. By some extraordinary means they divide the\ntown into districts, and not one dog ever ventures out of that\nparticular district to which it is attached. The boundaries,\nalthough invisible, are as effectual as the loftiest walls, and not\neven the daintiest morsel will tempt a dog to pass the mysterious\nline which forms the boundary of his district. Generally, these\nbands of dogs are so savage that any one who is obliged to walk in a\ndistrict where the dogs do not know him is forced to carry a stout\nstick for his protection. Like their European relatives, they have\ngreat dislike towards persons who are dressed after a fashion to\nwhich they are unaccustomed, and therefore are sure to harass any\none who comes from Europe and wears the costume of his own country.\nAs is customary among animals which unite themselves in troops, each\nband is under the command of a single leader, whose position is\nrecognised and his authority acknowledged by all the members.\n\n[Illustration: DOGS IN AN EASTERN CITY AT NIGHT.]\n\nThese peculiarities are to be seen almost exclusively in the\ndogs which run wild about the towns, because there is abundant\nevidence in the Scriptures that the animal was used in a partially\ndomesticated state, certainly for the protection of their herds,\nand possibly for the guardianship of their houses. That the Dog was\nemployed for the first of these purposes is shown in Job xxx. i:\n\"But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose\nfathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my\nflock.\" And that the animal was used for the protection of houses is\nthought by some commentators to be shown by the well-known passage\nin Is. lvi. 10: \"His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they\nare all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving\nto slumber.\" Still, it is very probable that in this passage the\nreference is not made to houses, but to the flocks and herds which\nthese watchmen ought to have guarded.\n\nThe rooted dislike and contempt felt by the Israelites towards\nthe Dog is seen in numerous passages. Even in that sentence from\nJob which has just been quoted, wherein the writer passionately\ndeplores the low condition into which he has fallen, and contrasts\nit with his former high estate, he complains that he is despised by\nthose whose fathers he held even in less esteem than the dogs which\nguarded his herds. There are several references to the Dog in the\nbooks of Samuel, in all of which the name of the animal is mentioned\ncontemptuously. For example, when David accepted the challenge of\nGoliath, and went to meet his gigantic enemy without the ordinary\nprotection of mail, and armed only with a sling and his shepherd's\nstaff Goliath said to him, \"Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with\nstaves?\" (1 Sam. xvii. 43.) And in the same book, chapter xxiv. 14,\nDavid remonstrates with Saul for pursuing so insignificant a person\nas himself, and said, \"After whom is the King of Israel come out?\nafter a dead dog, after a flea.\"\n\n[Illustration: SHIMEI EXULTING OVER KING DAVID.]\n\nThe same metaphor is recorded in the second book of the same writer.\nOnce it was employed by Mephibosheth, the lame son of Jonathan, when\nextolling the generosity of David, then King of Israel in the place\nof his grandfather Saul: \"And he bowed himself, and said, 'What\nis thy servant, that thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog as\nI am?'\" (2 Sam. ix. 8.) In the same book, chapter xvi. 9, Abishai\napplies this contemptuous epithet to Shimei, who was exulting over\nthe troubled monarch with all the insolence of a cowardly nature,\n\"Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king?\" Abner also makes\nuse of a similar expression, \"Am I a dog's head?\" And we may also\nrefer to the familiar passage in 2 Kings viii. 13, Elisha had\nprophesied to Hazael that he would become king on the death of\nBen-hadad, and that he would work terrible mischief in the land.\nHorrified at these predictions, or at all events pretending to be\nso, he replied, \"But what, is thy servant a dog, that he should do\nthis great thing?\"\n\nIf we turn from the Old to the New Testament, we find the same\ncontemptuous feeling displayed towards the Dog. It is mentioned as\nan intolerable aggravation of the sufferings endured by Lazarus the\nbeggar as he lay at the rich man's gate, that the dogs came and\nlicked his sores. In several passages, the word Dog is employed as\na metaphor for scoffers, or unclean persons, or sometimes for those\nwho did not belong to the Church, whether Jewish or Christian. In\nthe Sermon on the Mount our Lord himself uses this image, \"Give not\nthat which is holy unto dogs\" (Matt. vii. 6.) In the same book,\nchapter xv. 26, Jesus employs the same metaphor when speaking to\nthe Canaanitish woman who had come to ask him to heal her daughter:\n\"It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs.\"\nAnd that she understood the meaning of the words is evident from\nher answer, in which faith and humility are so admirably blended.\nBoth St. Paul and St. John employ the word Dog in the same sense.\nIn his epistle to the Philippians, chapter iii. 2, St. Paul writes,\n\"Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers.\" And in the Revelation,\nchapter xxii. 14, these words occur: \"Blessed are they that do his\ncommandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may\nenter in through the gates to the city; for without are dogs, and\nsorcerers, ... and murderers, and idolaters, and whomsoever loveth\nand maketh a lie.\"\n\nThat the dogs of ancient times formed themselves into bands just as\nthey do at present is evident from many passages of Scripture, among\nwhich may be mentioned those sentences from the Psalms, wherein\nDavid is comparing the assaults of his enemies to the attacks of the\ndogs which infested the city. \"Thou hast brought me into the dust\nof death; for dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the wicked\nhave enclosed me.\" This passage will be better appreciated when\nthe reader has perused the following extract from a recent work\nby Signor Pierotti. After giving a general account of the Dogs of\nPalestine and their customs, he proceeds as follows:--\n\n\"In Jerusalem, and in the other towns, the dogs have an organization\nof their own. They are divided into families and districts,\nespecially in the night time, and no one of them ventures to quit\nhis proper quarter; for if he does, he is immediately attacked by\nall the denizens of that into which he intrudes, and is driven\nback, with several bites as a reminder. Therefore, when an European\nis walking through Jerusalem by night, he is always followed by a\nnumber of canine attendants, and greeted at every step with growls\nand howls. These tokens of dislike, however, are not intended for\nhim, but for his followers, who are availing themselves of his\nescort to pass unmolested from one quarter to another.\n\n\"During a very hard winter, I fed many of the dogs who frequented\nthe road which I traversed almost every evening, and afterwards,\neach time that I passed, I received the homage not only of the\nindividuals, but of the whole band to which they belonged, for they\naccompanied me to the limits of their respective jurisdictions and\nwere ready to follow me to my own house, if I did but give them a\nsign of encouragement, coming at my beck from any distance. They\neven recollected the signal two years afterwards, though it was but\nlittle that I had given them.\"\n\nThe account which this experienced writer gives of the animal\npresents a singular mixture of repulsive and pleasing traits,\nthe latter being attributable to the true nature of the Dog, and\nthe former to the utter neglect with which it is treated. He\nremarks that the dogs which run wild in the cities of Palestine\nare ill-favoured, ill-scented, and ill-conditioned beasts, more\nlike jackals or wolves than dogs, and covered with scars, which\nbetoken their quarrelsome nature. Yet, the same animals lose their\nwild, savage disposition, as soon as any human being endeavours\nto establish that relationship which was evidently intended to\nexist between man and the dog. How readily even these despised and\nneglected animals respond to the slightest advance, has been already\nshown by Sig. Pierotti's experience, and there is no doubt that\nthese tawny, short-haired, wolf-like animals, could be trained as\nperfectly as their more favoured brethren of the western world.\n\nAs in the olden times, so at the present day, the dogs lie about\nin the streets, dependent for their livelihood upon the offal that\nis flung into the roads, or upon the chance morsels that may be\nthrown to them. An allusion to this custom is made in the well-known\npassage in Matt. xv. The reader will remember the circumstance\nthat a woman of Canaan, and therefore not an Israelite, came to\nJesus, and begged him to heal her daughter, who was vexed with a\ndevil. Then, to try her faith, He said, \"It is not meet to take the\nchildren's bread, and to cast it to dogs.\" And she said, \"Truth,\nLord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master's\ntable.\" Now, the \"crumbs\" which are here mentioned are the broken\npieces of bread which were used at table, much as bread is sometimes\nused in eating fish. The form of the \"loaves\" being flat, and much\nlike that of the oat-cake of this country, adapted them well to the\npurpose. The same use of broken bread is alluded to in the parable\nof Lazarus, who desired to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the\nrich man's table, _i. e._ to partake of the same food as the dogs\nwhich swarmed round him and licked his sores.\n\n[Illustration: LAZARUS LYING AT THE RICH MAN'S DOOR.]\n\n[Illustration: THE DEATH OF JEZEBEL.]\n\nThe \"crumbs,\" however liberally distributed, would not nearly\nsuffice for the subsistence of the canine armies, and their chief\nsupport consists of the offal, which is rather too plentifully\nflung into the streets. If the body of any animal, not excluding\ntheir own kind, be found lying in the streets, the dogs will\nassemble round it, and tear it to pieces, and they have no scruples\neven in devouring a human body. Of course, owing to the peculiar\nfeeling entertained by the Orientals towards the Dog, no fate can\nbe imagined more repulsive to the feelings of humanity than to be\neaten by dogs; and therein lies the terror of the fate which was\nprophesied of Ahab and Jezebel. Moreover, the blood, even of the\nlower animals, was held in great sanctity, and it was in those days\nhardly possible to invoke a more dreadful fate upon any one than\nthat his blood should be lapped by dogs.\n\nWe lose much of the real force of the Scriptures, if we do not\npossess some notion of the manners and customs of Palestine and the\nneighbouring countries, as well as of the tone of mind prevalent\namong the inhabitants. In our own country, that any one should be\neaten by dogs would be a fate so contrary to usage, that we can\nhardly conceive its possibility, and such a fate would be out of\nthe ordinary course of events. But, if such a fate should happen to\nbefall any one, we should have no stronger feeling of pity than the\nnatural regret that the dead person was not buried with Christian\nrites.\n\nBut, with the inhabitants of Palestine, such an event was by no\nmeans unlikely. It was, and is still, the custom to bury the corpse\nalmost as soon as life has departed, and such would ordinarily have\nbeen the case with the dead body of Jezebel. But, through fear of\nthe merciless Jehu, by whose command she had been flung from the\nwindow of her own palace, no one dared to remove her mangled body.\nThe dogs, therefore, seized upon their prey; and, even before Jehu\nhad risen from the banquet with which he celebrated his deed,\nnothing was left of the body but the skull, the feet, and the hands.\n\n[Illustration: SYRIAN DOG.]\n\nIn Mr. Tristram's work, the author has recognised the true dog\nnature, though concealed behind an uninviting form: \"Our watch-dog,\nBeirut, attached himself instinctively to Wilhelm, though his canine\ninstinct soon taught him to recognise every one of our party of\nfourteen, and to cling to the tents, whether in motion or at rest,\nas his home. Poor Beirut! though the veriest pariah in appearance,\nthy plebeian form encased as noble a dog-heart as ever beat at the\nsound of a stealthy step.\"\n\nThe same author records a very remarkable example of the sagacity of\nthe native Dog, and the fidelity with which it will keep guard over\nthe property of its master. \"The guard-house provided us, unasked,\nwith an invaluable and vigilant sentry, who was never relieved, nor\never quitted the post of duty. The poor Turkish conscript, like\nevery other soldier in the world, is fond of pets, and in front of\nthe grim turret that served for a guard-house was a collection of\nold orange-boxes and crates, thickly peopled with a garrison of\ndogs of low degree, whose attachment to the spot was certainly not\npurchased by the loaves and fishes which fell to their lot.\n\n\"One of the family must indeed have had hard times, for she had a\nfamily of no less than five dependent on her exertions, and on the\nsuperfluities of the sentries' mess. With a sagacity almost more\nthan canine, the poor gaunt creature had scarcely seen our tents\npitched before she came over with all her litter and deposited\nthem in front of our tent. At once she scanned the features of\nevery member of the encampment, and introduced herself to our\nnotice. During the week of our stay, she never quitted her post,\nor attempted any depredation on our kitchen-tent, which might have\nled to her banishment. Night and day she proved a faithful and\nvigilant sentry, permitting no stranger, human or canine, European\nor Oriental, to approach the tents without permission, but keeping\non the most familiar terms with ourselves and our servants.\n\n\"On the morning of our departure, no sooner had she seen our camp\nstruck, than she conveyed her puppies back to their old quarters\nin the orange-box, and no entreaties or bribes could induce her to\naccompany us. On three subsequent visits to Jerusalem, the same\ndog acted in a similar way, though no longer embarrassed by family\ncares, and would on no account permit any strange dog, nor even her\ncompanions at the guard-house, to approach within the tent ropes.\"\n\nAfter perusing this account of the Dog of Palestine, two points\nstrike the reader. The first is the manner in which the Dog, in\nspite of all the social disadvantages under which it labours,\ndisplays one of the chief characteristics of canine nature, namely,\nthe yearning after human society. The animal in question had already\nattached herself to the guard-house, where she could meet with some\nsort of human converse, though the inborn prejudices of the Moslem\nwould prevent the soldiers from inviting her to associate with them,\nas would certainly have been done by European soldiers. She nestled\nundisturbed in the orange-box, and, safe under the protection of the\nguard, brought up her young family in their immediate neighbourhood.\nBut, as soon as Europeans arrived, her instinct told her that they\nwould be closer associates than the Turkish soldiers who were\nquartered in the guard-house, and accordingly she removed herself\nand her family to the shelter of their tents.\n\nHerein she carried out the leading principle of a dog's nature. A\ndog _must_ have a master, or at all events a mistress, and just in\nproportion as he is free from human control, does he become less\ndog-like and more wolf-like. In fact, familiar intercourse with\nmankind is an essential part of a dog's true character, and the\nanimal seems to be so well aware of this fact, that he will always\ncontrive to find a master of some sort, and will endure a life of\ncruel treatment at the hands of a brutal owner rather than have no\nmaster at all.\n\nThe second point in this account is the singular local instinct\nwhich characterises the Dogs of Palestine and other eastern\ncountries, and which is as much inbred in them as the faculty of\nmarking game in the pointer, the combative nature in the bulldog,\nthe exquisite scent in the bloodhound, and the love of water in\nthe Newfoundland dog. In this country, we fancy that the love of\nlocality belongs especially to the cat, and that the Dog cares\nlittle for place, and much for man. But, in this case, we find that\nthe local instinct overpowered the yearning for human society. Fond\nas was this dog of her newly-found friends, and faithful as she was\nin her self-imposed service, she would not follow them away from the\nspot where she had been born, and where she had produced her own\nyoung.\n\nThis curious love for locality has evidently been derived from the\ntraditional custom of successive generations, which has passed from\nthe realm of reason into that of instinct. The reader will remember\nthat Sig. Pierotti mentions an instance where the dogs which he had\nbeen accustomed to feed would follow him as far as the limits of\ntheir particular district, but would go no farther. The late Albert\nSmith, in his \"Month at Constantinople,\" gives a similar example of\nthis characteristic. He first describes the general habits of the\ndogs.\n\nOn the first night of his arrival, he could not sleep, and went\nto the window to look out in the night. \"The noise I heard then I\nshall never forget. To say that if all the sheep-dogs, in going to\nSmithfield on a market-day, had been kept on the constant bark,\nand pitted against the yelping curs upon all the carts in London,\nthey could have given any idea of the canine uproar that now first\nastonished me, would be to make the feeblest of images. The whole\ncity rang with one vast riot. Down below me, at Tophane--over-about\nStamboul--far away at Scutari--the whole sixty thousand dogs that\nare said to overrun Constantinople appeared engaged in the most\nactive extermination of each other, without a moment's cessation.\nThe yelping, howling, barking, growling, and snarling, were all\nmerged into one uniform and continuous even sound, as the noise of\nfrogs becomes when heard at a distance. For hours there was no lull.\nI went to sleep, and woke again, and still, with my windows open,\nI heard the same tumult going on; nor was it until daybreak that\nanything like tranquillity was restored.\n\n\"Going out in the daytime, it is not difficult to find traces of the\nfights of the night about the limbs of all the street dogs. There\nis not one, among their vast number, in the possession of a perfect\nskin. Some have their ears gnawed away or pulled off; others have\ntheir eyes taken out; from the backs and haunches of others perfect\nsteaks of flesh had been torn away; and all bear the scars of\ndesperate combats.\n\n\"Wild and desperate as is their nature, these poor animals are\nsusceptible of kindness. If a scrap of bread is thrown to one of\nthem now and then, he does not forget it; for they have, at times,\na hard matter to live--not the dogs amongst the shops of Galata or\nStamboul, but those whose 'parish' lies in the large burying-grounds\nand desert places without the city; for each keeps, or rather is\nkept, to his district, and if he chanced to venture into a strange\none, the odds against his return would be very large. One battered\nold animal, to whom I used occasionally to toss a scrap of food,\nalways followed me from the hotel to the cross street in Pera,\nwhere the two soldiers stood on guard, but would never come beyond\nthis point. He knew the fate that awaited him had he done so; and\ntherefore, when I left him, he would lie down in the road, and go to\nsleep until I came back.\n\n\"When a horse or camel dies, and is left about the roads near the\ncity, the bones are soon picked very clean by these dogs, and they\nwill carry the skulls or pelves to great distances. I was told that\nthey will eat their dead fellows--a curious fact, I believe, in\ncanine economy. They are always troublesome, not to say dangerous,\nat night; and are especially irritated by Europeans, whom they will\nsingle out amongst a crowd of Levantines.\"\n\nIn the same work there is a short description of a solitary dervish,\nwho had made his home in the hollow of a large plane-tree, in front\nof which he sat, surrounded by a small fence of stakes only a foot\nor so in height. Around him, but not venturing within the fence,\nwere a number of gaunt, half-starved dogs, who prowled about him\nin hopes of having an occasional morsel of food thrown to them.\nSolitary as he was, and scanty as must have been the nourishment\nwhich he could afford to them, the innate trustfulness of the\ndog-nature induced them to attach themselves to human society of\nsome sort, though their master was one, and they were many--he was\npoor, and they were hungry.\n\n[Illustration: EASTERN WATER-SELLER.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE WOLF.\n\n     Identity of the animal indisputable--its numbers, past and\n     present--The Wolf never mentioned directly--its general\n     habits--References in Scripture--its mingled ferocity and\n     cowardice--its association into packs--The Wolf's bite--How it\n     takes its prey--its ravages among the flocks--Allusions to this\n     habit--The shepherd and his nightly enemies--Mr. Tristram and\n     the Wolf--A semi-tamed Wolf at Marsaba.\n\n\nThere is no doubt that the Hebrew word _Zeeb_, which occurs in a\nfew passages of the Old Testament, is rightly translated as WOLF,\nand signifies the same animal as is frequently mentioned in the New\nTestament.\n\nThis fierce and dangerous animal was formerly very plentiful in\nPalestine, but is now much less common, owing to the same causes\nwhich have extirpated the lion from the country. It is a rather\nremarkable fact, that in no passage of Holy Writ is the Wolf\ndirectly mentioned. Its name is used as a symbol of a fierce and\ntreacherous enemy, but neither in the Old nor New Testament does\nany sacred writer mention any act as performed by the Wolf. We have\nalready heard of the lion which attacked Samson and was killed by\nhim, of the lion which slew the disobedient prophet, and of the\nlions which spared Daniel when thrown into their den. We also read\nof the dogs which licked Ahab's blood, and ate the body of Jezebel,\nalso of the bears which tore the mocking children.\n\nBut in no case is the Wolf mentioned, except in a metaphorical\nsense; and this fact is the more remarkable, because the animals\nwere so numerous that they were very likely to have exercised some\ninfluence on a history extending over such a lengthened range of\nyears, and limited to so small a portion of the earth. Yet we never\nhear of the Wolf attacking any of the personages mentioned in\nScripture; and although we are told of the exploit of David, who\npursued a lion and a bear that had taken a lamb out of his fold, we\nare never told of any similar deed in connexion with the Wolf.\n\n[Illustration: WOLVES ATTACKING A FLOCK OF SHEEP.]\n\nThis animal was then what it is now. Seldom seen by day, it lies\nhidden in its covert as long as the light lasts, and steals out in\nsearch of prey in the evening. This custom of the Wolf is mentioned\nin several passages of Holy Scripture, such as that in Jer. v. 5,\n6: \"These have altogether broken the yoke, and burst the bonds.\nWherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of\nthe evenings shall spoil them.\" In this passage the reader will\nsee that the rebellious Israelites are compared to restive draught\ncattle which have broken away from their harness and run loose,\nso that they are deprived of the protection of their owners, and\nexposed to the fury of wild beasts. A similar reference is made in\nHab. i. 8: \"Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are\nmore fierce than the evening wolves.\" The same habit of the Wolf is\nalluded to in Zeph. iii. 3: \"Her princes within her are roaring\nlions; her judges are evening wolves.\"\n\nIndividually, the Wolf is rather a timid animal. It will avoid a man\nrather than meet him. It prefers to steal upon its prey and take\nit unawares, rather than to seize it openly and boldly. It is ever\nsuspicious of treachery, and is always imagining that a trap is laid\nfor it. Even the shallow device of a few yards of rope trailing\nfrom any object, or a strip of cloth fluttering in the breeze, is\nquite sufficient to keep the Wolf at bay for a considerable time.\nThis fact is well known to hunters, who are accustomed to secure the\nbody of a slain deer by simply tying a strip of cloth to its horn.\nIf taken in a trap of any kind, or even if it fancies itself in an\nenclosure from which it can find no egress, it loses all courage,\nand will submit to be killed without offering the least resistance.\nIt will occasionally endeavour to effect its escape by feigning\ndeath, and has more than once been known to succeed in this device.\n\nBut, collectively, the Wolf is one of the most dangerous animals\nthat can be found. Herding together in droves when pressed by\nhunger, the wolves will openly hunt prey, performing this task as\nperfectly as a pack of trained hounds. Full of wiles themselves,\nthey are craftily wise in anticipating the wiles of the animals\nwhich they pursue; and even in full chase, while the body of the\npack is following on the footsteps of the flying animal, one or two\nare detached on the flanks, so as to cut it off if it should attempt\nto escape by doubling on its pursuers.\n\nThere is no animal which a herd of wolves will not attack, and very\nfew which they will not ultimately secure. Strength avails nothing\nagainst the numbers of these savage foes, which give no moment of\nrest, but incessantly assail their antagonist, dashing by instinct\nat those parts of the body which can be least protected, and\nlacerating with their peculiar short, snapping bite. Should several\nof their number be killed or disabled, it makes no difference to\nthe wolves, except that a minute or two are wasted in devouring\ntheir slain or wounded brethren, and they only return to the attack\nthe more excited by the taste of blood. Swiftness of foot avails\nnothing against the tireless perseverance of the wolves, who press\non in their peculiar, long, slinging gallop, and in the end are sure\nto tire out the swifter footed but less enduring animal that flees\nbefore them. The stately buffalo is conquered by the ceaseless\nassaults of the wolves; the bear has been forced to succumb to them,\nand the fleet-footed stag finds his swift limbs powerless to escape\nthe pursuing band, and his branching horns unable to resist their\nfurious onset when once they overtake him.\n\n[Illustration: WOLVES CHASING DEER.]\n\nThat the Wolf is a special enemy to the sheep-fold is shown in\nmany parts of the Scriptures, both in the Old and New Testaments,\nespecially in the latter. In John x. 1-16, Jesus compares himself\nto a good shepherd, who watches over the fold, and, if the wolves\nshould come to take the sheep, would rather give up His life than\nthey should succeed. But the false teachers are compared to bad\nshepherds, hired for money, but having no interest in the sheep, and\nwho therefore will not expose themselves to danger in defence of\ntheir charge.\n\nThis metaphor was far more effective in Palestine, and at that time,\nthan it is in this country and at the present day. In this land,\nthe shepherd has no anxiety about the inroads of wild beasts, but\nin Palestine one of his chief cares was to keep watch at night lest\nthe wolves should attack the fold, and to drive them away himself in\ncase they should do so. Therefore the shepherd's life was one which\ninvolved no small danger as well as anxiety, and the metaphor used\nby our Lord gains additional force from the knowledge of this fact.\n\n[Illustration: THE WOLF.]\n\nA similar metaphor is used when Jesus wished to express in\nforcible terms the dangers to which the chosen seventy would oft\nbe subjected, and the impossibility that they should be able to\novercome the many perils with which they would be surrounded. \"Go\nyour ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves\" (Luke x.\n3).\n\nMr. Tristram several times met wolves while he was engaged in his\ntravels, and mostly saw solitary specimens. One such encounter\ntook place in the wilderness of Judah: \"On my way back, I met a\nfine solitary wolf, who watched me very coolly, at the distance of\nsixty yards, while I drew my charge and dropped a bullet down the\nbarrel. Though I sent the ball into a rock between his legs as he\nstood looking at me in the wady, he was not sufficiently alarmed to\ndo more than move on a little more quickly, ever and anon turning\nto look at me, while gradually increasing his distance. Darkness\ncompelled me to desist from the chase, when he quietly turned and\nfollowed me at a respectful distance. He was a magnificent animal,\nlarger than any European wolf, and of a much lighter colour.\"\n\nThose who are acquainted with the character of the animal will\nappreciate the truthfulness of this description. The cautious\nprowl at a distance, the slow trot away when he fancied he might\nbe attacked, the reverted look, and the final turning back and\nfollowing at a respectful distance, are all characteristic traits of\nthe Wolf, no matter to what species it may belong, nor what country\nit may inhabit.\n\nOn another occasion, while riding in the open plain of Gennesaret,\nthe horse leaped over the bank of a little ditch, barely three feet\nin depth. After the horse had passed, and not until then, a Wolf\nstarted out of the ditch, literally from under the horses hoofs,\nand ran off. The animal had been crouching under the little bank,\nevidently watching for some cows and calves which were grazing at\na short distance, under the charge of a Bedouin boy. The same\nauthor mentions that one of the monks belonging to the monastery at\nMarsaba had contrived to render a Wolf almost tame. Every evening at\nsix o'clock the Wolf came regularly across the ravine, ate a piece\nof bread, and then went back again. With the peculiar jealousy of\nall tamed animals, the Wolf would not suffer any of his companions\nto partake of his good fortune. Several of them would sometimes\naccompany him, but as soon as they came under the wall of the\nmonastery he always drove them away.\n\n[Illustration: WOLVES ATTACKING WILD GOATS.]\n\nThe inhabitants of Palestine say that the Wolves of that country\nhunt singly, or at most in little packs of few in number. Still they\ndread the animal exceedingly on account of the damage it inflicts\nupon their flocks of sheep and goats.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: THE JACKAL.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE FOX OR JACKAL.\n\n     The two animals comprehended under one name--The Jackal--its\n     numbers in ancient and modern Palestine--General habits of the\n     Jackal--Localities where the Jackal is found--Samson, and the\n     three hundred \"foxes\"--Popular objections to the narrative--The\n     required number easily obtained--Signor Pierotti's remarks upon\n     the Jackal--An unpleasant position--How the fields were set on\n     fire--The dread of fire inherent in wild beasts--The truth of\n     the narrative proved--The Fox and Jackal destructive among grapes\n\n\nThere are several passages in the Old Testament in which the word\nFox occurs, and it is almost certain that the Hebrew word _Shual_,\nwhich is rendered in our translation as Fox, is used rather loosely,\nand refers in some places to the Jackal, and in others to the Fox.\nWe will first take those passages in which the former rendering of\nthe word is evidently the right one, and will begin by examining\nthose characteristics of the animal which afford grounds for such an\nassertion.\n\n[Illustration: FOXES OR JACKALS DEVOURING THE CARCASE OF A GOAT.]\n\nEven at the present time, the Jackal is extremely plentiful in\nPalestine; and as the numbers of wild beasts have much decreased\nin modern days, the animals must have been even more numerous than\nthey are at present. It is an essentially nocturnal and gregarious\nanimal. During the whole of the day the Jackals lie concealed in\ntheir holes or hiding-places, which are usually cavities in the\nrocks, in tombs, or among ruins. At nightfall they issue from their\ndens, and form themselves into packs, often consisting of several\nhundred individuals, and prowl about in search of food. Carrion of\nvarious kinds forms their chief subsistence, and they perform in\nthe country much the same task as is fulfilled by the dogs in the\ncities.\n\nIf any animal should be killed, or even severely wounded, the\nJackals are sure to find it out and to devour it before the\ndaybreak. They will scent out the track of the hunter, and feed\nupon the offal of the beasts which he has slain. If the body of\na human being were to be left on the ground, the Jackals would\ncertainly leave but little traces of it; and in the olden times of\nwarfare, they must have held high revelry in the battle-field after\nthe armies had retired. It is to this propensity of the Jackal\nthat David refers--himself a man of war, who had fought on many a\nbattle-field, and must have seen the carcases of the slain mangled\nby these nocturnal prowlers: \"Those that seek my soul, to destroy\nit, shall go into the lower parts of the earth. They shall fall\nby the sword; they shall be a portion for foxes\" (Ps. lxiii. 9,\n10). Being wild beasts, afraid of man, and too cowardly to attack\nhim even when rendered furious by hunger, and powerful by force of\nnumbers, they keep aloof from towns and cities, and live in the\nuninhabited parts of the country. Therefore the prophet Jeremiah, in\nhis Book of Lamentations, makes use of the following forcible image,\nwhen deploring the pitiful state into which Judaea had fallen: \"For\nthis our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim: because\nof the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it\"\n(Lam. v. 17). And Ezekiel makes use of a similar image: \"O Israel,\nthy prophets are like foxes in the desert.\"\n\nBut, by far the most important passage in which the Fox is\nmentioned, is that wherein is recorded the grotesque vengeance of\nSamson upon the Philistines: \"And Samson went and caught three\nhundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and\nput a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he had set\nthe brands on fire, he let them go into the standing com of the\nPhilistines, and burnt up both the shocks and also the standing\ncorn, with the vineyards and olives\" (Judges xv. 4, 5). Now, as this\nis one of the passages of Holy Writ to which great objections have\nbeen taken, it will be as well to examine these objections, and see\nwhether they have any real force. The first of these objections is,\nthat the number of foxes is far too great to have been caught at\none time, and to this objection two answers have been given. The\nfirst answer is, that they need not have been caught at once, but\nby degrees, and kept until wanted. But the general tenor of the\nnarrative is undoubtedly in favour of the supposition that this act\nof Samson was unpremeditated, and that it was carried into operation\nat once, before his anger had cooled. The second answer is, that\nthe requisite number of Foxes might have been miraculously sent to\nSamson for this special purpose. This theory is really so foolish\nand utterly untenable, that I only mention it because it has been\nput forward. It fails on two grounds: the first being that a miracle\nwould hardly have been wrought to enable Samson to revenge himself\nin so cruel and unjustifiable a manner; and the second, that there\nwas not the least necessity for any miracle at all.\n\n[Illustration: A FEAST IN PROSPECT.]\n\nIf we put out of our minds the idea of the English Fox, an animal\ncomparatively scarce in this country, and solitary in its habits,\nand substitute the extremely plentiful and gregarious Jackal,\nwandering in troops by night, and easily decoyed by hunger into a\ntrap, we shall see that double the number might have been taken,\nif needful. Moreover, it is not to be imagined that Samson caught\nthem all with his own hand. He was at the head of his people, and\nhad many subordinates at his command, so that a large number of\nhunters might have been employed simultaneously in the capture. In\ncorroboration of this point, I insert an extremely valuable extract\nfrom Signor Pierotti's work, in which he makes reference to this\nvery portion of the sacred history:--\n\n\"It is still very abundant near Gaza, Askalon, Ashdod, Ekron, and\nRamleh. I have frequently met with it during my wanderings by night,\nand on one occasion had an excellent opportunity of appreciating\ntheir number and their noise.\n\n\"One evening in the month of January, while it was raining a perfect\ndeluge, I was obliged, owing to the dangerous illness of a friend,\nto return from Jerusalem to Jaffa. The depth of snow on the road\nover a great part of the mountain, the clayey mud in the plain, and\nthe darkness of the night, prevented my advancing quickly; so that\nabout half-past three in the morning I arrived on the bank of a\nsmall torrent, about half an hour's journey to the east of Ramleh. I\nwished to cross: my horse at first refused, but, on my spurring it,\nadvanced and at once sank up to the breast, followed of course by\nmy legs, thus teaching me to respect the instinct of an Arab horse\nfor the future.\n\n[Illustration: A FEAST SECURED.]\n\n\"There I stuck, without the possibility of escape, and consoled my\nhorse and myself with some provisions that I had in my saddle-bags,\nshouting and singing at intervals, in the hope of obtaining succour,\nand of preventing accidents, as I knew that the year before a mule\nin the same position had been mistaken for a wild beast, and killed.\nThe darkness was profound, and the wind very high; but, happily,\nit was not cold; for the only things attracted by my calls were\nnumbers of jackals, who remained at a certain distance from me, and\nresponded to my cries, especially when I tried to imitate them, as\nthough they took me for their music-master.\n\n\"About five o'clock, one of the guards of the English consulate at\nJerusalem came from Ramleh and discovered my state. He charitably\nreturned thither, and brought some men, who extricated me and my\nhorse from our unpleasant bath, which, as may be supposed, was not\nbeneficial to our legs.\n\n\"During this most uncomfortable night, I had good opportunity of\nascertaining that, if another Samson had wished to burn again the\ncrops in the country of the Philistines, he would have had no\ndifficulty in finding more than three hundred jackals, and catching\nas many as he wanted in springs, traps, or pitfalls. (See Ps. cxl.\n5.)\"\n\nThe reader will now see that there was not the least difficulty in\nprocuring the requisite number of animals, and that consequently the\nfirst objection to the truth of the story is disposed of.\n\nWe will now proceed to the second objection, which is, that if\nthe animals were tied tail to tail, they would remain on or near\nthe same spot, because they would pull in different directions,\nand that, rather than run about, they would turn round and fight\neach other. Now, in the first place, we are nowhere told that the\ntails of the foxes, or jackals, were placed in contact with each\nother, and it is probable that some little space was left between\nthem. That animals so tied would not run in a straight line is\nevident enough, and this was exactly the effect which Samson\nwished to produce. Had they been at liberty, and the fiery brand\nfastened to their tails, they would have run straight to their\ndens, and produced but little effect. But their captor, with\ncruel ingenuity, had foreseen this contingency, and, by the method\nof securing them which he adopted, forced them to pursue a devious\ncourse, each animal trying to escape from the dreaded firebrand, and\nstruggling in vain endeavours to drag its companion towards its own\nparticular den.\n\n[Illustration: A TRESPASSER.]\n\nAll wild animals have an instinctive dread of fire; and there is\nnone, not even the fierce and courageous lion, that dares enter\nwithin the glare of the bivouac fire. A lion has even been struck\nin the face with a burning brand, and has not ventured to attack\nthe man that wielded so dreadful a weapon. Consequently it may be\nimagined that the unfortunate animals that were used by Samson for\nhis vindictive purpose, must have been filled with terror at the\nburning brands which they dragged after them, and the blaze of\nthe fire which was kindled wherever they went. They would have no\nleisure to fight, and would only think of escaping from the dread\nand unintelligible enemy which pursued them.\n\nWhen a prairie takes fire, all the wild inhabitants flee in terror,\nand never think of attacking each other, so that the bear, the wolf,\nthe cougar, the deer, and the wild swine, may all be seen huddled\ntogether, their natural antagonism quelled in the presence of a\ncommon foe. So it must have been with the miserable animals which\nwere made the unconscious instruments of destruction. That they\nwould stand still when a burning brand was between them, and when\nflames sprang up around them, is absurd. That they would pull in\nexactly opposite directions with precisely balanced force is equally\nimprobable, and it is therefore evident that they would pursue a\ndevious path, the stronger of the two dragging the weaker, but being\njerked out of a straight course and impeded by the resistance which\nit would offer. That they would stand on the same spot and fight has\nbeen shown to be contrary to the custom of animals under similar\ncircumstances.\n\nThus it will be seen that every objection not only falls to the\nground, but carries its own refutation, thus vindicating this\nepisode in sacred history, and showing, that not only were the\ncircumstances possible, but that they were highly probable. Of\ncourse every one of the wretched animals must have been ultimately\nburned to death, after suffering a prolonged torture from the\nfirebrand that was attached to it. Such a consideration would,\nhowever, have had no effect for deterring Samson from employing\nthem. The Orientals are never sparing of pain, even when inflicted\nupon human beings, and in too many cases they seem utterly unable\neven to comprehend the cruelty of which they are guilty. And Samson\nwas by no means a favourable specimen of his countrymen. He was the\nvery incarnation of strength, but was as morally weak as he was\ncorporeally powerful; and to that weakness he owed his fall. Neither\ndoes he seem to possess the least trace of forbearance any more than\nof self-control, but he yields to his own undisciplined nature,\nplaces himself, and through him the whole Israelitish nation, in\njeopardy, and then, with a grim humour, scatters destruction on\nevery side in revenge for the troubles which he has brought upon\nhimself by his own acts.\n\n\n\n\nTHE HYAENA.\n\n     The Hyaena not mentioned by name, but evidently alluded\n     to--Signification of the word Zabua--Translated in the\n     Septuagint as Hyaena--A scene described by the prophet\n     Isaiah--The Hyaena plentiful in Palestine at the present\n     day--its well-known cowardice and fear of man--The uses of\n     the Hyaena and the services which it renders--The particular\n     species of Hyaena--The Hyaena in the burial-grounds--Hunting the\n     Hyaena--Curious superstition respecting the talismanic properties\n     of its skin--Precautions adopted in flaying it--Popular legends\n     of the Hyaena and its magical powers--The cavern home of the\n     Hyaena--The valley of Zeboim.\n\n\nAlthough in our version of the Scriptures the Hyaena is not mentioned\nby that name, there are two passages in the Old Testament which\nevidently refer to that animal, and therefore it is described in\nthese pages. If the reader will refer to the prophet Jeremiah, xii.\n7-9, he will find these words: \"I have forsaken mine house, I have\nleft mine heritage; I have given the dearly beloved of my soul into\nthe hand of her enemies. Mine heritage is unto me as a lion in\nthe forest; it crieth out against me: therefore have I hated it.\nMine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird; the birds round about\nare against her: come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field,\ncome to devour.\" Now, the word _zabua_ signifies something that\nis streaked, and in the Authorized Version it is rendered as a\nspeckled bird. But in the Septuagint it is rendered as Hyaena, and\nthis translation is thought by many critical writers to be the true\none. It is certain that the word _zabua_ is one of the four names by\nwhich the Talmudical writers mention the Hyaena, when treating of its\ncharacter; and it is equally certain that such a rendering makes the\npassage more forcible, and is in perfect accordance with the habits\nof predacious animals.\n\nThe whole scene which the Prophet thus describes was evidently\nfamiliar to him. First, we have the image of a deserted country,\nallowed to be overrun with wild beasts. Then we have the lion,\nwhich has struck down its prey, roaring with exultation, and\ndefying any adversary to take it from him. Then, the lion having\neaten his fill and gone away, we have the Hyaenas, vultures, and\nother carrion-eating creatures, assembling around the carcase, and\nhastening to devour it. This is a scene which has been witnessed\nby many hunters who have pursued their sport in lands where lions,\nhyaenas, and vultures are found; and all these creatures were\ninhabitants of Palestine at the time when Jeremiah wrote.\n\nAt the present day, the Hyaena is still plentiful in Palestine,\nthough in the course of the last few years its numbers have sensibly\ndiminished. The solitary traveller, when passing by night from one\ntown to another, often falls in with the Hyaena, but need suffer no\nfear, as it will not attack a human being, and prefers to slink out\nof his way. But dead, and dying, or wounded animals are the objects\nfor which it searches; and when it finds them, it devours the whole\nof its prey. The lion will strike down an antelope, an ox, or a\ngoat--will tear off its flesh with its long fangs, and lick the\nbones with its rough tongue until they are quite cleaned. The wolves\nand jackals will follow the lion, and eat every soft portion of the\ndead animal, while the vultures will fight with them for the coveted\nmorsels. But the Hyaena is a more accomplished scavenger than lion,\nwolf, jackal, or vulture; for it will eat the very bones themselves,\nits tremendously-powerful jaws and firmly-set teeth enabling it to\ncrush even the leg-bone of an ox, and its unparalleled digestive\npowers enabling it to assimilate the sharp and hard fragments which\nwould kill any creature not constituted like itself.\n\nIn a wild, or even a partially-inhabited country, the Hyaena is,\ntherefore, a most useful animal. It may occasionally kill a crippled\nor weakly ox, and sometimes carry off a sheep; but, even in that\ncase, no very great harm is done, for it does not meddle with any\nanimal that can resist. But these few delinquencies are more than\ncompensated by the great services which it renders as scavenger,\nconsuming those substances which even the lion cannot eat, and thus\nacting as a scavenger in removing objects which would be offensive\nto sight and injurious to health.\n\n[Illustration: LEOPARD ROBBED OF ITS PREY BY HYAENAS.]\n\nThe species which is mentioned in the Scriptures is the Striped\nHyaena (_Hyaena striata_); but the habits of all the species are\nalmost exactly similar. We are told by travellers of certain towns\nin different parts of Africa which would be unendurable but for the\nHyaenas. With the disregard for human life which prevails throughout\nall savage portions of that country, the rulers of these towns order\nexecutions almost daily, the bodies of the victims being allowed\nto lie where they happened to fall. No one chooses to touch them,\nlest they should also be added to the list of victims, and the\ndecomposing bodies would soon cause a pestilence but for the Hyaenas,\nwho assemble at night round the bodies, and by the next morning have\nleft scarcely a trace of the murdered men.\n\nEven in Palestine, and in the present day, the Hyaena will endeavour\nto rifle the grave, and to drag out the interred corpse. The bodies\nof the rich are buried in rocky caves, whose entrances are closed\nwith heavy stones, which the Hyaena cannot move; but those of the\npoor, which are buried in the ground, must be defended by stones\nheaped over them. Even when this precaution is taken, the Hyaena will\nsometimes find out a weak spot, drag out the body, and devour it.\n\nIn consequence of this propensity, the inhabitants have an utter\ndetestation of the animal. They catch it whenever they can, in\npitfalls or snares, using precisely the same means as were employed\ntwo thousand years ago; or they hunt it to its den, and then kill\nit, stripping off the hide, and carrying it about still wet,\nreceiving a small sum of money from those to whom they show it.\nAfterwards the skin is dressed, by rubbing it with lime and salt,\nand steeping it in the waters of the Dead Sea. It is then made into\nsandals and leggings, which are thought to be powerful charms, and\nto defend the wearer from the Hyaena's bite.\n\nThey always observe certain superstitious precautions in flaying the\ndead animal. Believing that the scent of the flesh would corrupt the\nair, they invariably take the carcase to the leeward of the tents\nbefore they strip off the skin. Even in the animal which has been\nkept for years in a cage, and has eaten nothing but fresh meat,\nthe odour is too powerful to be agreeable, as I can testify from\npractical experience when dissecting a Hyaena that had died in the\nZoological Gardens; and it is evident that the scent of an animal\nthat has lived all its life on carrion must be almost unbearable.\nThe skin being removed, the carcase is burnt, because the hunters\nthink that by this process the other Hyaenas are prevented from\nfinding the body of their comrade, and either avenging its death or\ntaking warning by its fate.\n\n[Illustration: HYAENAS DEVOURING BONES.]\n\nSuperstitions seem to be singularly prevalent concerning the Hyaena.\nIn Palestine, there is a prevalent idea that if a Hyaena meets a\nsolitary man at night, it can enchant him in such a manner as to\nmake him follow it through thickets and over rocks, until he is\nquite exhausted, and falls an unresisting prey; but that over two\npersons he has no such influence, and therefore a solitary traveller\nis gravely advised to call for help as soon as he sees a Hyaena,\nbecause the fascination of the beast would be neutralized by the\npresence of a second person. So firmly is this idea rooted in the\nminds of the inhabitants, that they will never travel by night,\nunless they can find at least one companion in their journey.\n\nIn Northern Africa there are many strange superstitions connected\nwith this animal, one of the most curious of which is founded on\nits well-known cowardice. The Arabs fancy that any weapon which\nhas killed a Hyaena, whether it be gun, sword, spear, or dagger, is\nthenceforth unfit to be used in warfare. \"Throw away that sword,\"\nsaid an Arab to a French officer, who had killed a Hyaena, \"it has\nslain the Hyaena, and it will be treacherous to you.\"\n\nAt the present day, its numbers are not nearly so great in Palestine\nas they used to be, and are decreasing annually. The cause of\nthis diminution lies, according to Signor Pierotti, more in the\ndestruction of forests than in the increase of population and the\nuse of fire-arms, though the two latter causes have undoubtedly\nconsiderable influence.\n\nThere is a very interesting account by Mr. Tristram of the haunt of\nthese animals. While exploring the deserted quarries of Es Sumrah,\nbetween Beth-arabah and Bethel, he came upon a wonderful mass of\nhyaenine relics. The quarries in which were lying the half-hewn\nblocks, scored with the marks of wedges, had evidently formed the\nresort of Hyaenas for a long series of years. \"Vast heaps of bones\nof camels, oxen, and sheep had been collected by these animals, in\nsome places to the depth of two or three feet, and on one spot I\ncounted the skulls of seven camels. There were no traces whatever of\nany human remains. We had here a beautiful recent illustration of\nthe mode of foundation of the old bone caverns, so valuable to the\ngeologist. These bones must all have been brought in by the Hyaenas,\nas no camel or sheep could possibly have entered the caverns alive,\nnor could any floods have washed them in. Near the entrance where\nthe water percolates, they were already forming a soft breccia.\"\n\nThe second allusion to the Hyaena is made in 1 Sam. xiii. 18,\n\"Another company turned to the way of the border that looketh to the\nValley of Zeboim towards the wilderness,\" _i.e._ to the Valley of\nHyaenas.\n\nThe colour of the Striped Hyaena varies according to its age. When\nyoung, as is the case with many creatures, birds as well as mammals,\nthe stripes from which it derives its name are much more strongly\nmarked than in the adult specimen. The general hue of the fur is\na pale grey-brown, over which are drawn a number of dark stripes,\nextending along the ribs and across the limbs.\n\nIn the young animal these stripes are nearly twice as dark and twice\nas wide as in the adult, and they likewise appear on the face and\non other parts of the body, whence they afterwards vanish. The fur\nis always rough; and along the spine, and especially over the neck\nand shoulders, it is developed into a kind of mane, which gives a\nvery fierce aspect to the animal. The illustration shows a group of\nHyaenas coming to feed on the relics of a dead animal. The jackals\nand vultures have eaten as much of the flesh as they can manage,\nand the vultures are sitting, gorged, round the stripped bones. The\nHyaenas are now coming up to play their part as scavengers, and have\nalready begun to break up the bones in their crushing-mills of jaws.\n\n\n\n\nTHE WEASEL.\n\n     Difficulty of identifying the Weasel of Scripture--The Weasel of\n     Palestine--Suggested identity with the Ichneumon.\n\n\nThe word Weasel occurs once in the Holy Scriptures, and therefore it\nis necessary that the animal should be mentioned. There is a great\ncontroversy respecting the identification of the animal, inasmuch as\nthere is nothing in the context which gives the slightest indication\nof its appearance or habits.\n\nThe passage in question is that which prohibits the Weasel and the\nmouse as unclean animals (see Lev. xi. 29). Now the word which is\nhere translated Weasel is _Choled_, or _Chol'd_; and, I believe,\nnever occurs again in the whole of the Old Testament. Mr. W.\nHoughton conjectures that the Hebrew word Choled is identical with\nthe Arabic _Chuld_ and the Syriac _Chuldo_, both words signifying a\nmole; and therefore infers that the unclean animal in question is\nnot a Weasel, but a kind of mole.\n\nThe Weasel does exist in Palestine, and seems to be as plentiful\nthere as in our own country. Indeed, the whole tribe of Weasels\nis well represented, and the polecat is seen there as well as the\nWeasel.\n\nThere is hardly any animal which, for its size, is so much dreaded\nby the creatures on which it preys as the common Weasel.\n\nAlthough its small proportions render a single Weasel an\ninsignificant opponent to man or dog, yet it can wage a sharp battle\neven with such powerful foes, and refuses to yield except at the\nlast necessity.\n\nThe proportions of the Weasel are extremely small, a full-grown male\nnot exceeding ten inches in length. The color of its fur is bright\nreddish-brown on the upper parts of the body, and the under-portions\nare pure white. The audacity and courage of this little animal are\nreally remarkable. It seems to hold every being except itself in the\nmost sovereign contempt, and, to all appearances, is as ready to\nmatch itself against a man as against a mouse.\n\nIt is a terrible foe to many of the smaller animals, such as rats\nand mice, and performs a really good service to the farmer in\ndestroying many of these farmyard pests. The Weasel is specially\ndreaded by rats and mice, because there is no hole through which\nthey can pass that will not also admit the passage of their enemy;\nand, as the Weasel is most persevering and determined in pursuit, it\nseldom happens that rats or mice escape when their little foe has\nset itself fairly on their track.\n\n[Illustration: WEASELS.]\n\nNot only does the Weasel pursue its prey through the windings of\nthe burrows, but it will even cross water in the chase. When it\nhas at last reached its victim, it leaps upon the devoted creature\nand endeavours to fix its teeth in the back of the neck, where it\nretains its deadly hold in spite of every struggle on the part of\nthe wounded animal. If the attack be rightly made and the animal a\nsmall one, the Weasel can drive its teeth into the brain and cause\ninstantaneous death.\n\nThe Weasel is very fond of eggs, and young birds of all kinds. It\nis said that an egg that has been broken by a Weasel, can always be\nrecognized, by the peculiar mode which the little creature employs\nfor the purpose.\n\nInstead of breaking the egg to pieces or biting a large hole in the\nshell, the Weasel contents itself with making quite a small aperture\nat one end, through which it abstracts the liquid contents.\n\nA curious example of the courage of the Weasel, is related by a\ngentleman who while crossing a field at dusk, saw an owl pounce upon\nsome object on the ground, and carry it in the air.\n\nIn a short time the bird showed signs of distress, trying to free\nitself from some annoying object by means of its talons, and\nflapping about in a very bewildered manner.\n\nSoon afterwards the owl fell dead to the earth; and when the\nspectator of the aerial combat approached, a weasel ran away from\nthe dead body of the bird, itself being apparently uninjured. On\nexamination of the owl's body, it was found that the Weasel, which\nhad been marked out for the owl's repast, had in its turn become the\nassailant, and had attacked the unprotected parts which lie beneath\nthe wings. A considerable wound had been made in that spot, and the\nlarge blood-vessels torn through.\n\n[Illustration: THE BITER BIT.]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: scene]\n\n\n\n\nTHE BADGER.\n\n     Difficulty in identifying the _Tachash_ of Scripture--References\n     to \"Badgers' skins\"--The Dugong thought to be the\n     Badger--The Bedouin sandals--Nature of the materials for\n     the Tabernacle--Habits of the Badger--The species found in\n     Palestine--Uses of the Badgers' skins--Looseness of zoological\n     terms.\n\n\nUntil very lately, there was much difficulty in ascertaining whether\nthe word _Tachash_ has been rightly translated as Badger. It occurs\nin several parts of the Scriptures, and almost invariably is used\nin relation to a skin or fur of some sort. We will first examine\nthe passages in which the Badger is mentioned, and then proceed to\nidentify the animal.\n\nNearly all the references to the Badger occur in the book of Exodus,\nand form part of the directions for constructing the Tabernacle and\nits contents. The first notice of the word occurs in Exodus xxv. 5,\nwhere the people of Israel are ordered to bring their offerings for\nthe sanctuary, among which offerings are gold, silver, and brass,\nblue, purple, and scarlet, fine linen, goats' hair, rams' skins dyed\nred, badgers' skins, and shittim wood--all these to be used in the\nconstruction of the Tabernacle. Then a little farther on, in chapter\nxxvi. 14, we find one of the special uses to which the badgers'\nskins were to be put, namely, to make the outer covering or roof of\nthe tabernacle. Another use for the badgers' skins was to form an\nouter covering for the ark, table of shewbread, and other furniture\nof the Tabernacle, when the people were on the march.\n\nIn all these cases the badger-skin is used as a covering to defend a\nbuilding or costly furniture, but there is one example where it is\nemployed for a different purpose. This passage occurs in the book\nof Ezekiel, chapter xvi. 10. The prophet is speaking of Jerusalem\nunder the image of a woman, and uses these words, \"I anointed thee\nwith oil; I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee\nwith badger's skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I\ncovered thee with silk. I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put\nbracelets upon thy hands, and a chain upon thy neck, and I put a\njewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears, and a beautiful\ncrown upon thine head.\"\n\nSo we have here the fact, that the same material which was used for\nthe covering of the Tabernacle, and of the sacred furniture, could\nalso be used for the manufacture of shoes. This passage is the more\nvaluable because of an inference which may be drawn from it. The\nreader will see that the badger-skin, whatever it may have been,\nmust have been something of considerable value, and therefore, in\nall probability, something of much rarity.\n\nIn the present instance, it is classed with the most luxurious\nrobes that were known in those days, and it is worthy of special\nmention among the bracelet, earrings, necklace, and coronal with\nwhich the symbolized city was adorned. If the reader will now refer\nto the passage in which the children of Israel were commanded to\nbring their offerings, he will see that in those cases also the\nbadger-skins were ranked with the costliest articles of apparel\nthat could be found, and had evidently been brought from Egypt, the\npeculiar home of all the arts; together with the vast quantity of\ngold and jewels which were used for the same sacred purpose.\n\nNow we find that the badger-skins in question must possess three\nqualities: they must be costly, they must be capable of forming a\ndefence against the weather, and they must be strong enough to be\nemployed in the manufacture of shoes. If we accept the word Tachash\nas signifying a Badger, we shall find that these conditions have\nbeen fulfilled.\n\nBut many commentators have thought that badger-skins could not\nhave been procured in sufficient numbers for the purpose, and have\ntherefore conjectured that some other animal must be signified by\nthe word Tachash.\n\nA species of dugong (_Halicore hemprichii_) is the animal that has\nbeen selected as the Badger of the Scriptures. It is one of the\nmarine mammalia, and always lives near the shore, where it can find\nthe various algae on which it feeds. It is a gregarious animal,\nand, as it frequently ascends rivers for some distance, it may be\ncaptured in sufficient numbers to make both its flesh and skin\nuseful. Moreover, it is of considerable size, fourteen or fifteen\nfeet in length being its usual dimensions, so that a comparatively\nsmall number of the skins would be required for the covering of the\nTabernacle.\n\nThat shoes can be made of it is evident from the fact that at the\npresent day shoes, or rather sandals, are made from its hide, and\nare commonly used by the Bedouins. But the very qualities and\npeculiarities which render it a fit material for the sandal of a\nhalf-naked Bedouin Arab, who has to walk continually over hard, hot,\nsandy, and rough ground, would surely make it unsuitable for the\ndelicate shoes worn by a woman of rank who spends her time in the\nhouse, and the rest of whose clothing is of fine linen and silk,\nembroidered with gold and jewels. In our own country, the hobnailed\nshoes of the ploughman and the slight shoe of a lady are made of\nvery different materials, and it is reasonable to conjecture that\nsuch was the case when the passage in question was written.\n\nThen Dr. Robinson, who admits that the hide of the dugong could\nhardly have been used as the material for a lady's shoe, thinks that\nit would have answered very well for the roof of the Tabernacle,\nbecause it was large, clumsy, and coarse. It seems strange that he\ndid not also perceive that the two latter qualities would completely\ndisqualify such skins for that service. Everything clumsy and\ncoarse was studiously prohibited, and nothing but the very best\nwas considered fit for the Tabernacle of the Lord. By special\nrevelation, Moses was instructed to procure, not merely the ordinary\ntimber of the country for the framework--not only the fabrics which\nwould keep out rain and wind--not simply the metals in common use,\nfrom which to make the lamps and other furniture--not the ordinary\noils for supplying the lamps; but, on the contrary, the finest\nlinen, the most elaborate embroidery, the rarest woods, the purest\ngold, the costliest gems, were demanded, and nothing common or\ninferior was accepted. The commonest material that was permitted\nwas the long, soft fleece of rams' wool; but, even in that case,\nthe wool had to be dyed of the regal scarlet--a dye so rare and so\ncostly that none but the wealthiest rulers could use it. Even the\nvery oil that burned in the lamps must be the purest olive-oil,\nprepared expressly for that purpose.\n\n[Illustration: BADGERS.]\n\nThe very fact, therefore, that any article was plentiful and could\neasily be obtained, would be a proof that such article was not\nused for so sacred a purpose; while it is impossible that anything\ncoarse and clumsy could have been accepted for the construction\nof that Tabernacle within which the Shekinah ever burned over the\nMercy-seat--over which the cloud rested by day, and the fire shone\nby night, visible external proofs of the Divine glory within.\n\nWe therefore dismiss from our minds the possibility of accepting\nany material for it which was not exceptionably valuable, and which\nwould be employed in the uses of ordinary life. The great object of\nthe minutely-elaborate directions which were given through Moses to\nthe Israelites was evidently to keep continually before their eyes\nthe great truth that they owed all to God, and that their costliest\nofferings were but acknowledgments of their dependence.\n\nWe will now presume that the Tachash of the Pentateuch and Ezekiel\nis really the animal which we know by the name of Badger. It exists\nthroughout the whole of the district traversed by the Israelites,\nthough it is not very plentiful, nor is it easily taken. Had such\nbeen the case, its fur would not have been employed in the service\nof the sanctuary.\n\nIt is nocturnal in its habits, and very seldom is seen during the\nhours of daylight, so that it cannot be captured by chase. It is\nnot gregarious, so that it cannot be taken in great numbers, as is\nthe case with certain wild animals which have been thought to be\nthe Tachash of Scripture. It is not a careless animal, so that it\ncannot be captured or killed without the exercise of considerable\ningenuity, and the expenditure of much time and trouble. It is one\nof the burrowing animals, digging for itself a deep subterranean\nhome, and always ready whenever it is alarmed to escape into\nthe dark recesses of its dwelling, from which it can scarcely be\ndislodged. It is not a large animal, so that a considerable number\nof skins would be required in order to make a covering which should\noverlap a structure forty-five feet in length and fifteen in\nbreadth. Were it a solitary animal, there might be a difficulty in\nprocuring a sufficient number of skins. But it is partly gregarious\nin its habits, living together in small families, seven or eight\nbeing sometimes found to inhabit a single dwelling-place. It\nis, therefore, sufficiently rare to make its skin valuable, and\nsufficiently plentiful to furnish the requisite number of skins.\nAll these facts tend to show that the cost of such a covering\nmust have been very great, even though it was the outermost, and,\nconsequently, the least valuable of the four. It has been suggested\nthat these skins were only used to lay over the lines where the\ndifferent sets of coverings overlapped each other, and that, in\nconsequence, they need not have been very numerous.\n\n[Illustration: SUPPOSED FORM AND ARRANGEMENT OF THE TABERNACLE,\nCAMP, ETC.]\n\nBut we find that these same skins, which were evidently those\nwhich formed the external roof, were used, when the Tabernacle was\ntaken down, for the purpose of forming distinct coverings for the\nark of the testimony, the table of shewbread, the seven-branched\ncandlestick, the golden altar, the various vessels used in the\nministrations, and lastly, the altar of sacrifice itself. Thus, when\nwe recollect the dimensions of the ark, the table, the candlestick,\nand the two altars, we shall see that, in order to make separate\ncovers for them, a quantity of material would be used which would be\namply sufficient to cover the whole roof of the Tabernacle, even if\nit had, as was most probably the case, a ridged, and not a flat roof.\n\nWe now come to our next point, namely, the aptitude of the Badger's\nskin to resist weather. Any one who has handled the skin of the\nBadger will acknowledge that a better material could hardly be\nfound. The fur is long, thick, and, though light, is moderately\nstiff, the hairs falling over each other in such a manner as to\nthrow off rain or snow as off a penthouse. And, as to the third\npoint, namely, its possible use as a material for the manufacture\nof shoes, we may call to mind that the skin of the Badger is\nproverbially tough, and that this very quality has caused the animal\nto be subjected to most cruel treatment by a class of sporting men\nwhich is now almost extinct.\n\nThe Septuagint gives little assistance in determining the precise\nnature of the Tachash, and rather seems to consider the word as\nexpressive of the colour with which the fur was dyed than that of\nthe animal from which it was taken. Still, it must be remembered\nthat not only are zoological terms used very loosely in the\nScriptures, but that in Hebrew, as in all other languages, the same\ncombination of letters often expresses two different ideas, so\nthat the word Tachash may equally signify a colour and an animal.\nMoreover, it has been well pointed out that the repeated use of the\nword in the plural number shows that it cannot refer to colour;\nwhile its almost invariable combination with the Hebrew word that\nsignifies a skin implies that it does not refer to colour, but to an\nanimal.\n\nWhat that animal may be, is, as I have already mentioned,\nconjectural. But, as the authorized translation renders the word as\nBadger, and as this reading fulfils the conditions necessary to its\nidentification, and as no other reading does fulfil them, we cannot\nbe very far wrong if we accept that translation as the correct one,\nand assume the Tachash of the Scriptures to be the animal which we\ncall by the name of Badger.\n\n\n\n\nTHE BEAR.\n\n     The Syrian Bear--Identity of the Hebrew and Arabic titles--Its\n     colour variable according to age--Bears once numerous in\n     Palestine, and now only occasionally seen--Reason for their\n     diminution--Present localities of the Bear, and its favourite\n     haunts--Food of the Bear--Its general habits--Its ravages among\n     the flocks--The Bear dangerous to mankind--The Bear robbed of\n     her whelps--Illustrative passages--Its mode of fighting--Various\n     references to the Bear, from the time of Samuel to that of St.\n     John.\n\n\nWhatever doubt may exist as to the precise identity of various\nanimals mentioned in the Scriptures, there is none whatever as to\nthe creature which is frequently alluded to under the name of Bear.\n\nThe Hebrew word is _Dob_, and it is a remarkable fact that the name\nof this animal in the Arabic language is almost identical with the\nHebrew term, namely, _Dubh_. The peculiar species of Bear which\ninhabits Palestine is the Syrian Bear (_Ursus Isabellinus_), and,\nthough it has been variously described by different eye-witnesses,\nthere is no doubt that the same species was seen by them all. As is\nthe case with many animals, the Syrian Bear changes its colour as\nit grows older. When a cub, it is of a darkish brown, which becomes\na light brown as it approaches maturity. But, when it has attained\nits full growth, it becomes cream-, and each succeeding year\nseems to lighten its coat, so that a very old Bear is nearly as\nwhite as its relative of the Arctic regions. Travellers, therefore,\nwho have met the younger specimens, have described them as brown in\nhue, while those who have seen more aged individuals have stated\nthat the colour of the Syrian Bear is white.\n\nOwing to the destruction of forests, the Bear, which is essentially\na lover of the woods, has decreased considerably in number. Yet,\neven at the present time, specimens may be seen by the watchful\ntraveller, mostly about the range of Lebanon, but sometimes at a\nconsiderable distance from that locality. Mr. Tristram, for example,\nsaw it close to the Lake of Gennesaret. \"We never met with so many\nwild animals as on one of those days. First of all, a wild boar got\nout of some scrub close to us, as we were ascending the valley. Then\na deer was started below, ran up the cliff, and wound along the\nledge, passing close to us. Then a large ichneumon almost crossed my\nfeet and ran into a cleft; and, while endeavouring to trace him, I\nwas amazed to see a brown Syrian Bear clumsily but rapidly clamber\ndown the rocks and cross the ravine. He was, however, far too\ncautious to get within hailing distance of any of the riflemen.\"\n\nThe same author mentions that some of the chief strongholds of this\nBear are certain clefts in the face of a precipitous chasm through\nwhich the river Leontes flows. This river runs into the sea a few\nmiles northward of Tyre, and assists in carrying off the melted\nsnows from the Lebanon range of mountains. His description is so\npicturesque, that it must be given in his own words. \"The channel,\nthough a thousand feet deep, was so narrow that the opposite ridge\nwas within gunshot. Looking down the giddy abyss, we could see the\ncliff on our side partially covered with myrtle, bay, and caper\nhanging from the fissures, while the opposite side was perforated\nwith many shallow caves, the inaccessible eyries of vultures,\neagles, and lanner falcons, which were sailing in multitudes around.\nThe lower part had many ledges clad with shrubs, the strongholds\nof the Syrian Bear, though inaccessible even to goats. Far beneath\ndashed the milk-white river, a silver line in a ruby setting of\noleanders, roaring doubtless fiercely, but too distant to be heard\nat the height on which we stood. This _cleft_ of the Leontes was the\nonly true Alpine scenery we had met with in Palestine, and in any\ncountry, and amidst any mountains, it would attract admiration.\"\n\n[Illustration: BEARS DESCENDING THE MOUNTAINS.]\n\nOn those elevated spots the Bear loves to dwell, and throughout the\nsummer-time generally remains in such localities. For the Bear is\none of the omnivorous animals, and is able to feed on vegetable as\nwell as animal substances, preferring the former when they can be\nfound. There is nothing that a Bear likes better than strawberries\nand similar fruits, among which it will revel throughout the whole\nfruit season, daintily picking the ripest berries, and becoming\nwonderfully fat by the constant banquet. Sometimes, when the fruits\nfail, it makes incursions among the cultivated grounds, and is noted\nfor the ravages which it makes among a sort of vetch which is much\ngrown in the Holy Land.\n\nBut during the colder months of the year the Bear changes its diet,\nand becomes carnivorous. Sometimes it contents itself with the\nvarious wild animals which it can secure, but sometimes it descends\nto the lower plains, and seizes upon the goats and sheep in their\npastures. This habit is referred to by David, in his well-known\nspeech to Saul, when the king was trying to dissuade him from\nmatching himself against the gigantic Philistine. \"And Saul said\nto David, Thou art not able to go against this Philistine to fight\nwith him: for thou art but a youth, and he a man of war from his\nyouth.... Thy servant kept his father's sheep, and there came a\nlion and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock: and I went out\nafter him, and smote him, and delivered it out of his hand; and\nwhen he arose against me, I caught him by the beard, and smote him,\nand slew him. Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear: and this\nuncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he hath\ndefied the armies of the living God.\"--1 Sam. xvii. 33-36.\n\n[Illustration: ON THE WATCH.]\n\nThough not generally apt to attack mankind, it will do so if first\nattacked, and then becomes a most dangerous enemy. See, for example,\nthat most graphic passage in the book of the prophet Amos, whose\nbusiness as a herdsman must have made him conversant with the\nhabits, not only of the flocks and herds which he kept, but of the\nwild beasts which might devour them:--\"Woe unto you that desire the\nday of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is\ndarkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a\nbear met him; or went into a house, and leaned his hand on the wall,\nand a serpent bit him.\" (v. 19.)\n\nAnother reference to the dangerous character of the Bear is made in\n2 Kings ii. 23, 24, in which is recorded that two she-bears came out\nof the wood near Bethel, and killed forty-two of the children that\nmocked at Elisha.\n\nAs the Bear is not swift of foot, but rather clumsy in its\nmovements, it cannot hope to take the nimbler animals in open chase.\nIt prefers to lie in wait for them in the bushes, and to strike them\ndown with a sudden blow of its paw, a terrible weapon, which it can\nwield as effectively as the lion uses its claws. An allusion to this\nhabit is made in the Lamentations of Jeremiah (iii. 10), \"He was\nunto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places.\"\n\nHarmless to man as it generally is, there are occasions on which\nit becomes a terrible and relentless foe, not seeking to avoid his\npresence, but even searching for him, and attacking him as soon\nas seen. In the proper season of the year, hunters, or those who\nare travelling through those parts of the country infested by the\nBear, will sometimes find the cubs, generally two in number, their\nmother having left them in the den while she has gone to search for\nfood. Although they would not venture to take the initiative in an\nattack upon either of the parents, they are glad of an opportunity\nwhich enables them to destroy one or two Bears without danger to\nthemselves. The young Bears are easily killed or carried off,\nbecause at a very early age they are as confident as they are weak,\nand do not try to escape when they see the hunters approaching.\n\nThe only danger lies in the possibility that their deed may be\ndiscovered by the mother before they can escape from the locality,\nand, if she should happen to return while the robbers are still in\nthe neighbourhood, a severe conflict is sure to follow. At any time\nan angry Bear is a terrible antagonist, especially if it be wounded\nwith sufficient severity to cause pain, and not severely enough to\n<DW36> its movements. But, when to this easily-roused ferocity is\nadded the fury of maternal feelings, it may be imagined that the\nhunters have good reason to fear its attack.\n\n[Illustration: SEEKING AN OUTLOOK.]\n\nTo all animals that rear their young is given a sublime and almost\nsupernatural courage in defending their offspring, and from the\nlioness, that charges a host of armed men when her cubs are in\ndanger, to the hen, which defies the soaring kite or prowling fox,\nor to the spider, that will give up her life rather than abandon\nher yet unhatched brood, the same self-sacrificing spirit actuates\nthem all. Most terrible therefore is the wrath of a creature which\npossesses, as is the case of the Bear, the strongest maternal\naffections, added to great size, tremendous weapons, and gigantic\nstrength. That the sight of a Bear bereaved of her young was well\nknown to both writers and contemporary readers of the Old Testament,\nis evident from the fact that it is mentioned by several writers,\nand always as a familiar illustration of furious anger. See for\nexample 2 Sam. xvii. 8, when Hushai is dissuading Absalom from\nfollowing the cautious counsel of Ahithophel, \"For thou knowest thy\nfather and his men, that they be mighty men of war, and they be\nchafed in their minds as a bear robbed of her whelps in the field.\"\nSolomon also, in the Proverbs (xvii. 12), uses the same image, \"Let\na bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his\nfolly.\"\n\nWhen the Bear fights, it delivers rapid strokes with its armed paw,\ntearing and rending away everything that it strikes. A blow from a\nbear's paw has been several times known to strip the entire skin,\ntogether with the hair, from a man's head, and, when fighting with\ndogs, to tear its enemies open as if each claw were a chisel.\n\nBears are capable of erecting themselves on their hinder limbs, and\nof supporting themselves in an upright position with the greatest\nease. When attacked in close combat, they have a habit of rearing\nthemselves upon their hinder feet--a position which enables them to\ndeliver with the greatest effect the terrific blows with their fore\npaws, upon which they chiefly rely in defending themselves.\n\nWith fearful ingenuity, the Bear, when engaged with a human foe,\ndirects its attack upon the head of its antagonist, and, as\npreviously stated, has been known to strike off the entire scalp\nwith a single blow.\n\n[Illustration: A FAMILY-PARTY.]\n\nA hunter who had the misfortune to be struck down by a Bear--and\nthe singular good fortune to afterwards escape from it--says, that\nwhen he was lying on the ground at the mercy of the angry beast,\nthe animal, after biting him upon the arms and legs, deliberately\nsettled itself upon his head and began to scarify it in the fiercest\nmanner, leaving wounds eight and nine inches in length.\n\nBears are the more terrible antagonists from their extreme tenacity\nof life, and the fearful energy which they compress into the last\nmoment of existence, when they are suffering from a mortal wound.\nUnless struck in the heart or brain, the mortally-wounded Bear is\nmore to be feared than if it had received no injury whatever, and\ncontrives to wreak more harm in the few minutes that immediately\nprecede its death, than it had achieved while still uninjured.\n\nMany a hunter has received mortal hurts by incautiously approaching\na Bear, which lay apparently dead, but was in reality only stunned.\n\n[Illustration: bear]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: porcupine]\n\n\n\n\nTHE PORCUPINE.\n\n     Presumed identity of the Kippod with the Porcupine--Habits\n     of the Porcupine--the common Porcupine found plentifully in\n     Palestine.\n\n\nAlthough, like the hedgehog, the Porcupine is not mentioned by name\nin the Scriptures, many commentators think that the word Kippod\nsignifies both the hedgehog and Porcupine.\n\nThat the two animals should be thought to be merely two varieties\nof one species is not astonishing, when we remember the character\nof the people among whom the Porcupine lives. Not having the least\nidea of scientific geology, they look only to the most conspicuous\ncharacteristics, and because the Porcupine and hedgehog are both\ncovered with an armature of quills, and the quills are far more\nconspicuous than the teeth, the inhabitants of Palestine naturally\nclass the two animals together. In reality, they belong to two very\ndifferent orders, the hedgehog being classed with the shrew-mice and\nmoles, while the Porcupine is a rodent animal, and is classed with\nthe rats, rabbits, beavers, marmots, and other rodents.\n\nIt is quite as common in Palestine as the hedgehog, a fact which\nincreases the probability that the two animals may have been\nmentioned under a common title. Being a nocturnal animal, it retires\nduring the day-time to some crevice in a rock or burrow in the\nground, and there lies sleeping until the sunset awakens it and\ncalls it to action. And as the hedgehog is also a nocturnal animal,\nthe similarity of habit serves to strengthen the mutual resemblance.\n\nThe Porcupine is peculiarly fitted for living in dry and unwatered\nspots, as, like many other animals, of which our common rabbit is a\nfamiliar example, it can exist without water, obtaining the needful\nmoisture from the succulent roots on which it feeds.\n\nThe sharply pointed quills with which its body is covered are solid,\nand strengthened in a most beautiful manner by internal ribs, that\nrun longitudinally through them, exactly like those of the hollow\niron masts, which are now coming so much into use. As they are,\nin fact, greatly developed hairs, they are continually shed and\nreplaced, and when they are about to fall are so loosely attached\nthat they fall off if pulled slightly, or even if the animal shakes\nitself. Consequently the shed quills that lie about the localities\ninhabited by the Porcupine indicate its whereabouts, and so\nplentiful are these quills in some places, that quite a bundle can\nbe collected in a short time.\n\nThere are many species of Porcupines which inhabit different parts\nof the world, but that which has been mentioned is the common\nPorcupine of Europe, Asia, and Africa.\n\n\n\n\nTHE MOLE.\n\n     The two Hebrew words which are translated as Mole--Obscurity of\n     the former name--A parallel case in our own language--The second\n     name--The Moles and the Bats, why associated together--The\n     real Mole of Scripture, its different names, and its place\n     in zoology--Description of the Mole-rat and its general\n     habits--Curious superstition--Discovery of the species by Mr.\n     Tristram--Scripture and science--How the Mole-rat finds its\n     food--Distinction between the Mole and the present animal.\n\n\nThere are two words which are translated as Mole in our authorized\nversion of the Bible. One of them is so obscure that there seems no\npossibility of deciding the creature that is represented by it. We\ncannot even tell to what class of the animal kingdom it refers,\nbecause in more than one place it is mentioned as one of the unclean\nbirds that might not be eaten (translated as _swan_ in our version),\nwhereas, in another place, it is enumerated among the unclean\ncreeping things.\n\n[Illustration: THE MOLE-RAT.]\n\nWe may conjecture that the same word might be used to designate two\ndistinct animals, though we have no clue to their identification. It\nis rather a strange coincidence, in corroboration of this theory,\nthat our word Mole signifies three distinct objects--firstly, an\nanimal; secondly, a cutaneous growth; and thirdly, a bank of earth.\nNow, supposing English to be a dead language, like the Hebrew, it\nmay well be imagined that a translator of an English book would feel\nextremely perplexed when he saw the word Mole used in such widely\ndifferent senses.\n\nThe best Hebraists can do no more than offer a conjecture founded\non the structure of the word _Tinshemeth_, which is thought by some\nto be the chameleon. Some think that it is the Mole, some the ibis,\nsome the salamander, while others consider it to be the centipede;\nand in neither case have any decisive arguments been adduced.\n\nWe will therefore leave the former of these two names, and proceed\nto the second, _Chephor-peroth_.\n\nThis word occurs in that passage of Isaiah which has already been\nquoted when treating of the bat. \"In that day a man shall cast his\nidols of silver and his idols of gold, which they made each one to\nhimself to worship, to the moles and to the bats; to go into the\nclefts of the rocks and into the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear\nof the Lord and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to\nshake terribly the earth.\"\n\nIt is highly probable that the animal in question is the Mole of\nPalestine, which is not the same as our European species, but is\nmuch larger in size, and belongs to a different order of mammalia.\nThe true Mole is one of the insectivorous and carnivorous animals,\nand is allied to the shrews and the hedgehogs; whereas the Mole of\nPalestine (_Spalax typhlus_) is one of the rodents, and allied to\nthe rabbits, mice, marmots, and jerboas. A better term for it is the\nMole-rat, by which name it is familiar to zoologists. It is also\nknown by the names of Slepez and Nenni.\n\nIn length it is about eight inches, and its colour is a pale slate.\nAs is the case with the true Moles, the eyes are of very minute\ndimensions, and are not visible through the thick soft fur with\nwhich the whole head and body are covered. Neither are there any\nvisible external ears, although the ear is really very large, and\nextremely sensitive to sound. This apparent privation of both\nears and eyes gives to the animal a most singular and featureless\nappearance, its head being hardly recognisable as such but for\nthe mouth, and the enormous projecting teeth, which not only look\nformidable, but really are so. There is a curious superstition in\nthe Ukraine, that if a man will dare to grasp a Mole-rat in his bare\nhand, allow it to bite him, and then squeeze it to death, the hand\nthat did the deed will ever afterwards possess the virtue of healing\ngoitre or scrofula.\n\nThis animal is spread over a very large tract of country, and is\nvery common in Palestine. Mr. Tristram gives an interesting account\nof its discovery. \"We had long tried in vain to capture the Mole\nof Palestine. Its mines and its mounds we had seen everywhere, and\nreproached ourselves with having omitted the mole-trap among the\nitems of our outfit. From the size of the mounds and the shallowness\nof the subterranean passages, we felt satisfied it could not be the\nEuropean species, and our hopes of solving the question were raised\nwhen we found that one of them had taken up its quarters close to\nour camp. After several vain attempts to trap it, an Arab one night\nbrought a live Mole in a jar to the tent. It was no Mole properly so\ncalled, but the Mole-rat, which takes its place throughout Western\nAsia. The man, having observed our anxiety to possess a specimen,\nrefused to part with it for less than a hundred piastres, and\nscornfully rejected the twenty piastres I offered. Ultimately, Dr.\nChaplin purchased it for five piastres after our departure, and I\nkept it alive for some time in a box, feeding it on sliced onions.\"\n\nThe same gentleman afterwards caught many of the Mole-rats, and\nkept them in earthen vessels, as they soon gnawed their way through\nwood. They fed chiefly on bulbs, but also ate sopped bread. Like\nmany other animals, they reposed during the day, and were active\nthroughout the night.\n\nThe author then proceeds to remark on the peculiarly appropriate\ncharacter of the prophecy that the idols should be cast to the\nMoles and the bats. Had the European Mole been the animal to\nwhich reference was made, there would have been comparatively\nlittle significance in the connexion of the two names, because,\nalthough both animals are lovers of darkness, they do not inhabit\nsimilar localities. But the Mole-rat is fond of frequenting\ndeserted ruins and burial-places, so that the Moles and the bats\nare really companions, and as such are associated together in the\nsacred narrative. Here, as in many other instances, we find that\ncloser study of the Scriptures united to more extended knowledge\nare by no means the enemies of religion, as some well-meaning,\nbut narrow-minded persons think. On the contrary, the Scriptures\nwere never so well understood, and their truth and force so well\nrecognised, as at the present day; and science has proved to be,\nnot the destroyer of the Bible, but its interpreter. We shall soon\ncease to hear of \"Science _versus_ the Bible,\" and shall substitute\n\"Science and the Bible _versus_ Ignorance and Prejudice.\"\n\nThe Mole-rat needs not to dig such deep tunnels as the true Moles,\nbecause its food does not lie so deep. The Moles live chiefly upon\nearthworms, and are obliged to procure them in the varying depths\nto which they burrow. But the Mole-rat lives mostly upon roots,\npreferring those of a bulbous nature. Now bulbous roots are, as\na rule, situated near the surface of the ground, and, therefore,\nany animal which feeds upon them must be careful not to burrow too\ndeeply, lest it should pass beneath them. The shallowness of the\nburrows is thus accounted for. Gardens are often damaged by this\nanimal, the root-crops, such as carrots and onions, affording plenty\nof food without needing much exertion.\n\nThe Mole-rat does not keep itself quite so jealously secluded as\ndoes our common Mole, but occasionally will come out of the burrow\nand lie on the ground, enjoying the warm sunshine. Still it is not\neasily to be approached; for though its eyes are almost useless, the\nears are so sharp, and the animal is so wary, that at the sound of a\nfootstep it instantly seeks the protection of its burrow, where it\nmay bid defiance to its foes.\n\nHow it obtains its food is a mystery. There seems to be absolutely\nno method of guiding itself to the precise spot where a bulb may\nbe growing. It is not difficult to conjecture the method by which\nthe Mole discovers its prey. Its sensitive ears may direct it to\nthe spot where a worm is driving its way through the earth, and\nshould it come upon its prey, the very touch of the worm, writhing\nin terror at the approach of its enemy, would be sufficient to act\nas a guide. I have kept several Moles, and always noticed that,\nthough they would pass close to a worm without seeming to detect\nits presence, either by sight or scent, at the slightest touch they\nwould spring round, dart on the worm, and in a moment seize it\nbetween their jaws. But with the Mole-rat the case is different. The\nroot can utter no sound, and can make no movement, nor is it likely\nthat the odour of the bulb should penetrate through the earth to a\nvery great distance.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: mice]\n\n\n\n\nTHE MOUSE.\n\n     The Mice which marred the land--The Field-mouse--Its destructive\n     habits and prolific nature--The Hamster, and its habits--The\n     Jerboa, its activity and destructiveness--Various species of\n     Dormice and Sand-rats.\n\n\nThat the Mouse mentioned in the Old Testament was some species\nof rodent animal is tolerably clear, though it is impossible to\nstate any particular species as being signified by the Hebrew word\n_Akbar_. The probable derivation of this name is from two words\nwhich signify \"destruction of corn,\" and it is therefore evident\nthat allusion is made to some animal which devours the produce of\nthe fields, and which exists in sufficient numbers to make its\nvoracity formidable.\n\nSome commentators on the Old Testament translate the word Akbar\nas jerboa. Now, although the jerboa is common in Syria, it is not\nnearly so plentiful as other rodent animals, and would scarcely\nbe selected as the means by which a terrible disaster is made to\nbefall a whole country. The student of Scripture is well aware\nthat, in those exceptional occurrences which are called miracles, a\nneedless development of the wonder-working power is never employed.\nWe are not to suppose, for example, that the clouds of locusts that\ndevoured the harvests of the Egyptians were created for this express\npurpose, but that their already existing hosts were concentrated\nupon a limited area, instead of being spread over a large surface.\nNor need we fancy that the frogs which rendered their habitations\nunclean, and contaminated their food, were brought into existence\nsimply to inflict a severe punishment on the fastidious and\nsuperstitious Egyptians.\n\nOf course, had such an exercise of creative power been needed, it\nwould have been used, but we can all see that a needless miracle\nis never worked. He who would not suffer even a crumb of the\nmiraculously multiplied bread to be wasted, is not likely to waste\nthat power by which the miracle was wrought.\n\n[Illustration: DAGON FALLEN DOWN BEFORE THE ARK.]\n\nIf we refer to the early history of the Israelitish nation, as\ntold in 1 Sam. iv.-vi., we shall find that the Israelites made an\nunwarrantable use of the ark, by taking it into battle, and that it\nwas captured and carried off into the country of the Philistines.\nThen various signs were sent to warn the captors to send the ark\nback to its rightful possessors. Dagon, their great god, was\nprostrated before it, painful diseases attacked them, so that many\ndied, and scarcely any seem to have escaped, while their harvests\nwere ravaged by numbers of \"mice that marred the land.\"\n\n[Illustration: MOUSE AND NEST.]\n\nThe question is now simple enough. If the ordinary translation is\naccepted, and the word Akbar rendered as Mouse, would the necessary\nconditions be fulfilled, _i.e._ would the creature be destructive,\nand would it exist in very great numbers? Now we shall find that\nboth these conditions are fulfilled by the common Field-mouse.\n\nThis little creature is, in proportion to its size, one of the most\ndestructive animals in the world. Let its numbers be increased from\nany cause whatever, and it will most effectually \"mar the land.\" It\nwill devour every cereal that is sown, and kill almost any sapling\nthat is planted. It does not even wait for the corn to spring up,\nbut will burrow beneath the surface, and dig out the seed before it\nhas had time to sprout. In the early part of the year, it will eat\nthe green blade as soon as it springs out of the ground, and is an\nadept at climbing the stalks of corn, and plundering the ripe ears\nin the autumn.\n\n[Illustration: JERBOA, OR LEAPING MOUSE.]\n\nWhen stacked or laid up in barns, the harvest is by no means safe,\nfor the Mice will penetrate into any ordinary barn, and find their\nway into any carelessly-built stack, from which they can scarcely be\nejected. The rat itself is not so dire a foe to the farmer, as the\nless obtrusive, but equally mischievous Field-mouse. The ferret will\ndrive the rats out of their holes, and if they have taken possession\nof a wheat-stack they can be ejected by depriving them of access to\nwater. But the burrows of the Field-mouse are so small that a ferret\ncannot make its way through them, and the nightly dew that falls on\nthe stack affords an ample supply of water.\n\n[Illustration: THE FIELD-MOUSE.]\n\nWhen the Field-mouse is deprived of the food which it loves best,\nit finds a subsistence among the trees. Whenever mice can discover\na newly-planted sapling, they hold great revel upon it, eating away\nthe tender young bark as high as they can reach, and consequently\ndestroying the tree as effectually as if it were cut down. Even\nwhen the young trees fail them, and no tender bark is to be had,\nthe Field-mice can still exert their destructive powers. They will\nthen betake themselves to the earth, burrow beneath its surface,\nand devour the young rootlets of the forest trees. All botanists\nknow that a healthy tree is continually pushing forward fresh roots\nbelow the ground, in order to gain sufficient nourishment to supply\nthe increasing growth above. If, therefore, these young roots are\ndestroyed, the least harm that can happen to the tree is that its\nfurther growth is arrested; while, in many cases, the tree, which\ncannot repair the injuries it has received, droops gradually, and\nfinally dies. Even in this country, the Field-mouse has proved\nitself a terrible enemy to the agriculturist, and has devastated\nconsiderable tracts of land.\n\nSo much for the destructive powers of the Field-mouse, and the next\npoint to be considered is its abundance.\n\nNearly all the rats and mice are singularly prolific animals,\nproducing a considerable number at a brood, and having several\nbroods in a season. The Field-mouse is by no means an exception to\nthe general rule, but produces as many young in a season as any of\nthe Mice.\n\nNot only is it formidable from its numbers, but from the insidious\nnature of its attacks. Any one can see a rabbit, a hare, or even\na rat; but to see a Field-mouse is not easy, even when the little\ncreatures are present in thousands. A Field-mouse never shows itself\nexcept from necessity, its instinct teaching it to escape the\nobservation of its many furred and feathered enemies. Short-legged\nand soft-furred, it threads its noiseless way among the herbage\nwith such gentle suppleness that scarcely a grass-blade is stirred,\nwhile, if it should be forced to pass over a spot of bare ground,\nthe red-brown hue of its fur prevents it from being detected by an\ninexperienced eye. Generally the Field-mouse is safe from human\nfoes, and has only to dread the piercing eye and swift wings of the\nhawk, or the silent flight and sharp talons of the owl.\n\nAlthough there can be no doubt that the Field-mouse is one of the\nanimals to which the name of Akbar is given, it is probable that\nmany species were grouped under this one name. Small rodents of\nvarious kinds are very plentiful in Palestine, and there are several\nspecies closely allied to the Field-mouse itself.\n\nAmong them is the Hamster (_Cricetus frumentarius_), so widely\nknown for the ravages which it makes among the crops. This terribly\ndestructive animal not only steals the crops for immediate\nsubsistence, but lays up a large stock of provisions for the winter,\nseeming to be actuated by a sort of miserly passion for collecting\nand storing away. There seems to be no bounds to the quantity of\nfood which a Hamster will carry into its subterranean store-house,\nfrom seventy to one hundred pounds' weight being sometimes taken\nout of the burrow of a single animal. The fact of the existence\nof these large stores shows that the animal must need them, and\naccordingly we find that the Hamster is only a partial hibernator,\nas it is awake during a considerable portion of the winter months,\nand is consequently obliged to live on the stores which it has\ncollected.\n\nIt is an exceedingly prolific animal, each pair producing on an\naverage twenty-five young in the course of a year. The families\nare unsociable, and, as soon as they are strong enough to feed\nthemselves, the young Hamsters leave their home, and make separate\nburrows for themselves. Thus we see that the Hamster, as well as the\nField-mouse, fulfils the conditions which are needed in order to\nclass it under the general title of Akbar.\n\nI have already stated that some translators of the Bible use the\nword Jerboa as a rendering of the Hebrew Akbar. As the Jerboa\ncertainly is found in Palestine, there is some foundation for this\nidea, and we may safely conjecture that it also is one of the\nsmaller rodents which are grouped together under the appellation of\nMouse.\n\nThe Common Jerboa (_Dipus AEgyptiacus_) is plentiful in Palestine,\nand several other species inhabit the same country, known at once\nby their long and slender legs, which give them so curious a\nresemblance to the kangaroos of Australia. The Jerboas pass over the\nground with astonishing rapidity. Instead of creeping stealthily\namong the grass-blades, like the short-limbed field-mouse, the\nJerboa flies along with a succession of wonderful leaps, darting\nhere and there with such rapidity that the eye can scarcely follow\nits wayward movements. When quiet and undisturbed, it hops along\ngently enough, but as soon as it takes alarm, it darts off in its\npeculiar manner, which is to the ordinary walk of quadrupeds what\nthe devious course of a frightened snipe is to the steady flight of\nbirds in general.\n\nIt prefers hot and dry situations, its feet being defended by a\nthick coating of stiff hairs, which serve the double purpose of\nprotecting it from the heat, and giving it a firm hold on the\nground. It is rather a destructive animal, its sharp and powerful\nteeth enabling it to bite its way through obstacles which would\neffectually stop an ordinary Mouse. That the Jerboa may be one of\nthe Akbarim is rendered likely by the prohibition in Lev. xi. 29,\nforbidding the Mouse to be eaten. It would be scarcely probable\nthat such a command need have been issued against eating the common\nMouse, whereas the Jerboa, a much larger and palatable animal, is\nalways eaten by the Arabs. The Hamster is at the present day eaten\nin Northern Syria.\n\nBeside these creatures there are the Dormice, several species of\nwhich animal inhabit Palestine at the present day. There are also\nthe Sand-rats, one species of which is larger than our ordinary\nrats. The Sand-rats live more in the deserts than the cultivated\nlands, making their burrows at the foot of hills, and among the\nroots of bushes.\n\n\n\n\nTHE HARE.\n\n     The prohibitions of the Mosaic law--The chewing of the\n     cud, and division of the hoof--Identity of the Hare of\n     Scripture--Rumination described--The Hare a rodent and not\n     a ruminant--Cowper and his Hares--Structure of the rodent\n     tooth--The Mosaic law accommodated to its recipients--The Hares\n     of Palestine and their habits.\n\n\nAmong the many provisions of the Mosaic law are several which refer\nto the diet of the Israelites, and which prohibit certain kinds of\nfood. Special stress is laid upon the flesh of animals, and the list\nof those which may be lawfully eaten is a singularly restricted one,\nall being excluded except those which \"divide the hoof and chew\nthe cud.\" And, lest there should be any mistake about the matter,\nexamples are given both of those animals which may and those which\nmay not be eaten.\n\nThe ox, sheep, goat, and antelopes generally are permitted as\nlawful food, because they fulfil both conditions; whereas there is\na special prohibition of the swine, because it divides the hoof but\ndoes not chew the cud, and of the camel, coney, and hare because\nthey chew the cud, but do not divide the hoof. Our business at\npresent is with the last of these animals.\n\nConsiderable discussion has been raised concerning this animal,\nbecause, as is well known to naturalists, the Hare is not one of\nthe ruminant animals, but belongs to the same order as the rat,\nrabbit, beaver, and other rodents. Neither its teeth nor its stomach\nare constructed for the purpose of enabling it to ruminate, _i.e._\nto return into the mouth the partially-digested food, and then to\nmasticate it afresh; and therefore it has been thought that either\nthere is some mistake in the sacred narrative or that the Hebrew\nword has been mistranslated.\n\n[Illustration: THE SYRIAN HARE.]\n\nTaking the latter point first, as being the simplest of the two, we\nfind that the Hebrew word which is rendered as Hare is Arnebeth, and\nthat it is rendered in the Septuagint as Dasypus, or the Hare,--a\nrendering which the Jewish Bible adopts. That the Arnebeth is really\nthe Hare may also be conjectured from the fact that the Arabic name\nfor that animal is Arneb. In consequence of the rather wide sense\nto which the Greek word Dasypus (_i.e._ hairy-foot) is used, some\ncommentators have suggested that the rabbit may have been included\nin the same title. This, however, is not at all likely, inasmuch as\nthe Hare is very plentiful in Palestine, and the rabbit is believed\nnot to be indigenous to that part of the world. And, even if the two\nanimals had been classed under the same title, the physiological\ndifficulty would not be removed.\n\nBefore proceeding further, it will be as well to give a brief\ndescription of the curious act called rumination, or \"chewing the\ncud.\"\n\nThere are certain animals, such as the oxen, antelopes, deer,\nsheep, goats, camels, &c. which have teeth unfitted for the rapid\nmastication of food, and which therefore are supplied with a\nremarkable apparatus by which the food can be returned into the\nmouth when the animal has leisure, and be re-masticated before it\npasses into the true digestive organs.\n\nFor this purpose they are furnished with four stomachs, which are\narranged in the following order. First comes the paunch or \"rumen\"\n(whence the word \"ruminating\"), into which passes the food in a\nvery rough state, just as it is torn, rather than bitten, from the\nherbage, and which is analogous to the crop in birds. It thence\npasses into the second stomach, or \"honeycomb,\" the walls of which\nare covered with small angular cells. Into those cells the food is\nreceived from the first stomach, and compressed into little balls,\nwhich can be voluntarily returned into the mouth for mastication.\n\nAfter the second mastication has been completed, the food passes at\nonce into the third stomach, and thence into the fourth, which is\nthe true digesting cavity. By a peculiar structure of these organs,\nthe animal is able to convey its food either into the first or third\nstomach, at will, _i.e._ into the first when the grass is eaten, and\ninto the third after rumination. Thus it will be seen that an animal\nwhich chews the cud must have teeth of a certain character, and be\npossessed of the fourfold stomach which has just been described.\n\nTwo points are conceded which seem to be utterly irreconcilable with\neach other. The first is that the Mosaic law distinctly states that\nthe Hare chews the cud; the second is that in point of fact the\nHare is not, and cannot be, a ruminating animal, possessing neither\nthe teeth nor the digestive organs which are indispensable for that\nprocess. Yet, totally opposed as these statements appear to be, they\nare in fact, not so irreconcilable as they seem.\n\n[Illustration: A TIMID GROUP.]\n\nWhy the flesh of certain animals was prohibited, we do not at the\npresent time know. That the flesh of swine should be forbidden food\nis likely enough, considering the effects which the habitual eating\nof swine's flesh is said to produce in hot countries. But it does\nseem very strange that the Israelites should have been forbidden\nto eat the flesh of the camel, the coney (or hyrax), and the Hare,\nand that these animals should have been specified is a proof that\nthe eating or refraining from their flesh was not a mere sanitary\nregulation, but was a matter of importance. The flesh of all these\nthree animals is quite as good and nutritious as that of the oxen,\nor goats, which are eaten in Palestine, and that of the Hare is far\nsuperior to them. Therefore, the people of Israel, who were always\napt to take liberties with the restrictive laws, and were crafty\nenough to evade them on so many occasions, would have been likely\nto pronounce that the flesh of the Hare was lawful meat, because\nthe animal chewed the cud, or appeared to do so, and they would\ndiscreetly have omitted the passage which alluded to the division of\nthe hoof.\n\nTo a non-scientific observer the Hare really does appear to chew\nthe cud. When it is reposing at its ease, it continually moves its\njaws about as if eating something, an action which may readily\nbe mistaken for true rumination. Even Cowper, the poet, who kept\nsome hares for several years, and had them always before his eyes,\nwas deceived by this mumbling movement of the jaws. Speaking of\nhis favourite hare, \"Puss,\" he proceeds as follows: \"Finding him\nexceedingly tractable, I made it my custom to carry him always after\nbreakfast into the garden, where he hid himself generally under the\nleaves of a cucumber vine, sleeping, _or chewing the cud_, till\nevening.\"\n\nThe real object of this continual grinding or mumbling movement is\nsimple enough. The chisel-like incisor teeth of the rodent animals\nneed to be rubbed against each other, in order to preserve their\nedge and shape, and if perchance such friction should be wanting to\na tooth, as, for example, by the breaking of the opposite tooth,\nit becomes greatly elongated, and sometimes grows to such a length\nas to prevent the animal from eating. Instinctively, therefore,\nthe Hare, as well as the rabbit and other rodents, always likes to\nbe nibbling at something, as any one knows who has kept rabbits in\nwooden hutches, the object of this nibbling not being to eat the\nwood, but to keep the teeth in order.\n\nBut we may naturally ask ourselves, why the Mosaic law, an emanation\nfrom heaven, should mention an animal as being a ruminant, when its\nvery structure shows that such an act was utterly impossible? The\nanswer is clear enough. The law was suited to the capacity of those\nfor whom it was intended, and was never meant to be a handbook of\nscience, as well as a code of religious duties and maxims. The Jews,\nlike other Orientals, were indifferent to that branch of knowledge\nwhich we designate by the name of physical science, and it was\nnecessary that the language in which the law was conveyed to them\nshould be accommodated to their capabilities of receiving it.\n\nIt would have been worse than useless to have interrupted the solemn\nrevelation of Divine will with a lesson in comparative anatomy; the\nobject of the passage in question being, not to teach the Jews the\ndistinctive characteristics of a rodent and a ruminant, but to guard\nagainst their mistaking the Hare for one of the ruminants which\nwere permitted as food. That they would in all probability have\nfallen into that mistake is evident from the fact that the Arabs are\nexceedingly fond of the flesh of the Hare, and accept it, as well as\nthe camel, as lawful food, because it chews the cud, the division of\nthe hoof not being considered by them as an essential.\n\nHares are very plentiful in Palestine, and at least two species are\nfound in that country. One of them, which inhabits the more northern\nand hilly portion of Palestine, closely resembles our own species,\nbut has not ears quite so long in proportion, while the head is\nbroader. The second species, which lives in the south, and in the\nvalley of the Jordan, is very small, is of a light dun colour, and\nhas very long ears. In their general habits, these Hares resemble\nthe Hare of England.\n\n\n\n\nCATTLE.\n\n     The cattle of Palestine, and their decadence at the present\n     day--Ox-flesh not used for food in modern times--Oxen of\n     the stall, and oxen of the pasture--The use of the ox in\n     agriculture--The yoke and its structure--The plough and the\n     goad--The latter capable of being used as a weapon--Treading\n     out the corn--The cart and its wheels--The ox used as a\n     beast of burden--Cattle turned loose to graze--The bulls of\n     Bashan--Curiosity of the ox-tribe--A season of drought--Branding\n     the cattle--An Egyptian field scene--Cattle-keeping an\n     honourable post--The ox as used for sacrifice--Ox-worship--The\n     bull Apis, and his history--Persistency of the\n     bull-worship--Jeroboam's sin--Various names of cattle--The\n     Indian buffalo.\n\n\nUnder this head we shall treat of the domesticated oxen of\nScripture, whether mentioned as Bull, Cow, Ox, Calf, Heifer, &c.\n\nTwo distinct species of cattle are found in Palestine, namely, the\nordinary domesticated ox, and the Indian buffalo, which lives in the\nlow-lying and marshy valley of the Jordan. Of this species we shall\ntreat presently.\n\nThe domesticated cattle are very much like our own, but there is not\namong them that diversity of breed for which this country is famous;\nnor is there even any distinction of long and short horned cattle.\nThere are some places where the animals are larger than in others,\nbut this difference is occasioned simply by the better quality and\ngreater quantity of the food.\n\nAs is the case in most parts of the world where civilization\nhas made any progress, Domesticated Cattle were, and still are,\nplentiful in Palestine. Even at the present time the cattle are in\ncommon use, though it is evident, from many passages of Holy Writ,\nthat in the days of Judaea's prosperity cattle were far more numerous\nthan they are now, and were treated in a better fashion.\n\nTo take their most sacred use first, a constant supply of cattle\nwas needed for the sacrifices, and, as it was necessary that every\nanimal which was brought to the altar should be absolutely perfect,\nit is evident that great care was required in order that the breed\nshould not deteriorate, a skill which has long been rendered useless\nby the abandonment of the sacrifices.\n\n[Illustration: ALTAR OF BURNT-OFFERING.]\n\nAnother reason for their better nurture in the times of old is that\nin those days the ox was largely fed and fatted for the table, just\nas is done with ourselves. At the present day, the flesh of the\ncattle is practically unused as food, that of the sheep or goat\nbeing always employed, even when a man gives a feast to his friends.\nBut, in the old times, stalled oxen, _i.e._ oxen kept asunder from\nthose which were used for agricultural purposes, and expressly\nfatted for the table, were in constant use. See for example the\nwell-known passage in the Prov. xv. 17, \"Better is a dinner of herbs\nwhere love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.\" Again,\nthe Prophet Jeremiah makes use of a curious simile, \"Egypt is\nlike a very fair heifer, but destruction cometh; it cometh out of\nthe north. Also her hired men are in the midst of her like fatted\nbullocks [or, bullocks of the stall], for they also are turned\nback, and are fled away together.\" (Jer. xlvi. 20.) And in 1 Kings\niv. 22, 23, when describing the glories of Solomon's household,\nthe sacred writer draws a distinction between the oxen which were\nespecially fattened for the table of the king and the superior\nofficers, and those which were consumed by the lower orders of his\nhousehold: \"And Solomon's provision for one day was thirty measures\nof fine flour, and threescore measures of meal, ten fat oxen, and\ntwenty oxen out of the pastures, and an hundred sheep, beside harts,\nand roebucks, and fallow-deer, and fatted fowl.\"\n\n[Illustration: THE PRODIGAL SON RETURNS, AND THE FATTED CALF IS\nKILLED.]\n\nCalves--mostly, if not always, bull-calves--were largely used\nfor food in Palestine, and in the households of the wealthy were\nfatted for the table. See, for example, the familiar parable of\nthe prodigal son, in which the rejoicing father is mentioned as\npreparing a great feast in honour of his son's return, and ordering\nthe fatted calf to be killed--the calf in question being evidently\none of the animals that were kept in good condition against any\nfestive occasion. And, even in the earliest history of the Bible,\nthe custom of keeping a fatted calf evidently prevailed, as is shown\nby the conduct of Abraham, who, when he was visited by the three\nheavenly guests, \"ran unto the herd, and fetched a calf, tender\nand good,\" and had it killed and dressed at once, after the still\nexisting fashion of the East.\n\n[Illustration: ABRAHAM OFFERS FOOD TO THE THREE STRANGERS.]\n\nBut, even in the times of Israel's greatest prosperity, the chief\nuse of the ox was as an agricultural labourer, thus reversing the\ncustom of this country, where the horse has taken the place of the\nox as a beast of draught, and where cattle are principally fed for\nfood. Ploughing was, and is, always performed by oxen, and allusions\nto this office are scattered plentifully through the Old and New\nTestaments.\n\nWhen understood in this sense, oxen are almost always spoken of in\nconnexion with the word \"yoke,\" and as each yoke comprised two oxen,\nit is evident that the word is used as we employ the term \"brace,\"\nor pair. The yoke, which is the chief part of the harness, is a very\nsimple affair. A tolerably stout beam of wood is cut of a sufficient\nlength to rest upon the necks of the oxen standing side by side,\nand a couple of hollows are scooped out to receive the crest of the\nneck. In order to hold it in its place, two flexible sticks are bent\nunder their necks, and the ends fixed into the beam of the yoke. In\nthe middle of this yoke is fastened the pole of the plough or cart,\nand this is all the harness that is used, not even traces being\nrequired.\n\nIt will be seen that so rude an implement as this would be very\nlikely to gall the necks of the animals, unless the hollows were\ncarefully smoothed, and the heavy beam adapted to the necks of\nthe animals. This galling nature of the yoke, so familiar to the\nIsraelites, is used repeatedly as a metaphor in many passages of\nthe Old and New Testaments. These passages are too numerous to be\nquoted, but I will give one or two of the most conspicuous among\nthem. The earliest mention of the yoke in the Scriptures is a\nmetaphor.\n\nAfter Jacob had deceived his father, in procuring for himself the\nblessing which was intended for his elder brother, Isaac comforts\nEsau by the prophecy that, although he must serve his brother, yet\n\"it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou\nshalt break his yoke from off thy neck.\" Again, in the next passage\nwhere the yoke is mentioned, namely, Lev. xxvi. 13, the word is\nemployed in the metaphorical sense: \"I am the Lord your God, which\nbrought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be\ntheir bondmen, and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made\nyou go upright.\"\n\nThe plough was equally simple, and consisted essentially of a bent\nbranch, one end of which was armed with an iron point by way of a\nshare, while the other formed the pole or beam, and was fastened\nto the middle of the yoke. It was guided by a handle, which was\nusually a smaller branch that grew from the principal one. A nearly\nsimilar instrument is used in Asia Minor to the present day, and\nis a curious relic of the most ancient times of history, for we\nfind on the Egyptian monuments figures of the various agricultural\nprocesses, in which the plough is made after this simple manner.\n\nOf course such an instrument is a very ineffective one, and can but\nscratch, rather than plough the ground, the warmth of the climate\nand fertility of the land rendering needless the deep ploughing of\nour own country, where the object is to turn up the earth to the\ngreatest possible depth. One yoke of oxen was generally sufficient\nto draw a plough, but occasionally a much greater number were\nrequired. We read, for example, of Elisha, who, when he received his\ncall from Elijah, was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen, _i. e._\ntwenty-four. It has been suggested, that the twelve yoke of oxen\nwere not all attached to the same plough, but that there were twelve\nploughs, each with its single yoke of oxen. This was most probably\nthe case.\n\nThe instrument with which the cattle were driven was not a whip, but\na goad. This goad was a long and stout stick, armed with a spike\nat one end, and having a kind of spud at the other, with which the\nearth could be scraped off the share when it became clogged. Such\nan instrument might readily be used as a weapon, and, in the hands\nof a powerful man, might be made even more formidable than a spear.\nAs a weapon, it often was used, as we see from many passages of the\nScriptures. For example, it is said in Judges iii. 31, \"that Shamgar\nthe son of Anath killed six hundred Philistines with an ox-goad.\"\n\nAfterwards, in the beginning of Saul's reign, when the Israelites\nfairly measured themselves against the Philistines, it was found\nthat only Saul and Jonathan were even tolerably armed. Fearful\nof the numbers and spirit of the Israelites, the Philistines had\ndisarmed them, and were so cautious that they did not even allow\nthem to possess forges wherewith to make or sharpen the various\nagricultural instruments which they possessed, lest they should\nsurreptitiously provide themselves with weapons. The only smith's\ntool which they were allowed to retain was a file with which each\nman might trim the edges of the ploughshares, mattocks, axes, and\nsharpen the points of the goad. The only weapons which they could\nmuster were made of their agricultural implements, and among the\nmost formidable of them was the goad.\n\nHow the goad came into use in Palestine may easily be seen. The\nEgyptians, from among whom the people of Israel passed into the\nPromised Land, did not use the goad in ploughing, but the whip,\nwhich, from the representations on the Egyptian monuments, was\nidentical with the koorbash, or \"cow-hide\" whip, which is now in\nuse in the same country. But this terrible whip, which is capable,\nwhen wielded by a skilful hand, of cutting deep grooves through the\ntough hide of the ox, could not be obtained by the Jews, because the\nhippopotamus, of whose hide it was made, did not live in or near\nPalestine. They therefore were forced to use some other instrument\nwherewith to urge on the oxen, and the goad was clearly the simplest\nand most effective implement for this purpose.\n\nAfter the land was ploughed and sown, and the harvest was ripened,\nthe labours of the oxen were again called into requisition, first\nfor threshing out the corn, and next for carrying or drawing the\ngrain to the storehouses.\n\nIn the earlier days, the process of threshing was very simple. A\ncircular piece of ground was levelled, and beaten very hard and\nflat, its diameter being from fifty to a hundred feet. On this\nground the corn was thrown, and a number of oxen were driven here\nand there on it, so that the constant trampling of their feet shook\nthe ripe grain out of the ears. The corn was gathered together in\nthe middle of the floor, and as fast as it was scattered by the feet\nof the oxen, it was thrown back towards the centre.\n\nAfterwards, an improvement was introduced in the form of a rough\nsledge, called \"moreg,\" to which the oxen were harnessed by a\nyoke, and on which the driver stood as he guided his team round\nthe threshing-floor. This instrument is mentioned in Isa. xli. 15:\n\"Behold, I will make thee a new and sharp threshing instrument\nhaving teeth [or mouths]: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat\nthem small, and shalt make the hills as chaff.\" Mention is also\nmade of the same implement in 2 Sam. xxiv. 22, where it is related\nthat Araunah the Jebusite offered to give David the oxen for a\nburnt-sacrifice, and the moregs and other implements as wood with\nwhich they could be burned.\n\nThe work of treading out the corn was a hard and trying one for the\noxen, and it was probably on this account that the kindly edict was\nmade, that the oxen who trod out the corn should not be muzzled.\nAs a rule, the cattle were not fed nearly as carefully as is done\nwith us, and so the labours of the threshing-floor would find a\ncompensation in the temporary abundance of which the animals might\ntake their fill.\n\n[Illustration: OXEN TREADING OUT GRAIN.]\n\nAfter the corn was threshed, or rather trodden out, the oxen had\nto draw it home in carts. These were but slight improvements on\nthe threshing-sledge, and were simply trays or shallow boxes on a\npair of wheels. As the wheels were merely slices cut from the trunk\nof a tree, and were not furnished with iron tires, they were not\nremarkable for roundness, and indeed, after a little time, were worn\ninto rather irregular ovals, so that the task of dragging a cart\nover the rough roads was by no means an easy one. And, as the axle\nwas simply a stout pole fastened to the bottom of the cart, and\nhaving its rounded ends thrust through holes in the middle of the\nwheels, the friction was enormous. As, moreover, oil and grease were\nfar too precious luxuries to be wasted in lubricating the axles, the\ncreaking and groaning of the wheels was a singularly disagreeable\nand ear-piercing sound.\n\n[Illustration: EASTERN OX-CART.]\n\nThe common hackery of India is a good example of the carts\nmentioned in the Scriptures. As with the plough, the cart was\ndrawn by a couple of oxen, connected by the yoke. The two kinds of\ncart, namely, the tray and the box, are clearly indicated in the\nScriptures. The new cart on which the Ark was placed when it was\nsent back by the Philistines (see 1 Sam. vi. 7) was evidently one\nof the former kind, and so was that which was made twenty years\nafterwards, for the purpose of conveying the Ark to Jerusalem.\n\nAlthough the cattle were evidently better tended in the olden times\nthan at present, those animals which were used for agriculture\nseem to have passed rather a rough life, especially in the winter\ntime. It is rather curious that the Jews should have had no idea of\npreserving the grass by making it into hay, as is done in Europe.\nConsequently the chief food of the cattle was the straw and chaff\nwhich remained on the threshing-floor after the grain had been\nseparated.\n\n[Illustration: THE ARK OF THE COVENANT BEING DRAWN BY COWS.]\n\nThis, indeed, was the only use to which the straw could be put,\nfor it was so crushed and broken by the feet of the oxen and the\nthreshing-sledge that it was rendered useless.\n\nThe want of winter forage is the chief reason why cattle are so\nirregularly disposed over Palestine, many parts of that country\nbeing entirely without them, and only those districts containing\nthem in which fresh forage may be found throughout the year.\n\nExcept a few yoke of oxen, which are kept in order to draw carts,\nand act as beasts of burden, the cattle are turned loose for a\nconsiderable portion of the year, and run about in herds from one\npasturage to another. Thus they regain many of the characteristics\nof wild animals, and it is to this habit of theirs that many of the\nScriptural allusions can be traced.\n\nFor example, see Ps. xxii. 12, \"Many bulls have compassed me,\nstrong bulls of Bashan have beset me round. They gaped on me with\ntheir mouths [or, their mouths opened against me] as a ravening and\na roaring lion.\" This passage alludes to the curiosity inherent\nin cattle, which have a habit of following objects which they do\nnot understand or dislike, and surrounding it with looks of grave\nwonderment. Even in their domesticated state this habit prevails.\nWhen I was a boy, I sometimes amused myself with going into a field\nwhere a number of cows and oxen were grazing, and lying down in the\nmiddle of it. The cattle would soon become uneasy, toss their heads\nabout, and gradually draw near on every side, until at last they\nwould be pressed together closely in a circle, with their heads just\nabove the object of their astonishment. Their curious, earnest looks\nhave always been present to my mind when reading the above quoted\npassage.\n\nThe Psalmist does not necessarily mean that the bulls in question\nwere dangerous animals. On the contrary, the bulls of Palestine are\ngentle in comparison with our own animals, which are too often made\nsavage by confinement and the harsh treatment to which they are\nsubjected by rough and ignorant labourers. In Palestine a pair of\nbulls may constantly be seen attached to the same yoke, a thing that\nnever would be seen in this country.\n\nThe custom of turning the herds of cattle loose to find pasture for\nthemselves is alluded to in Joel i. 18, \"How do the beasts groan!\nthe herds of cattle are perplexed because they have no pasture.\"\nWe can easily imagine to ourselves the terrible time to which the\nprophet refers, \"when the rivers of waters are dried up, and the\nfire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness,\" as it is wont to\ndo when a spark falls upon grass dried up and withered, by reason\nof the sun's heat and the lack of water. Over such a country, first\nwithered by drought, and then desolated by fire, would the cattle\nwander, vainly searching on the dusty and blackened surface for the\ntender young blades which always spring up on a burnt pasture as\nsoon as the first rains fall. Moaning and bellowing with thirst\nand disappointment, they would vainly seek for food or water in\nplaces where the seed lies still under the clods where it was sown\n(v. 17), where the vines are dried up, and the fig, the pomegranate\nand the palm (v. 12) are all withered for want of moisture.\n\n[Illustration: PLOUGHING WITH OXEN.]\n\nSuch scenes are still to be witnessed in several parts of the\nworld. Southern Africa is sometimes sadly conspicuous for them, an\nexceptional season of drought keeping back the fresh grass after\nthe old pastures have been burned (the ordinary mode of cultivating\npasture land). Then the vast herds of cattle, whose milk forms the\nstaff of life to the inhabitants, wander to and fro, gathering in\nmasses round any spot where a spring still yields a little water,\nand bellowing and moaning with thirst as they press their way\ntowards the spot where their owners are doling out to each a small\nmeasure of the priceless fluid.\n\nThe cattle are branded with the mark of their owners, so that in\nthese large herds there might be no difficulty in distinguishing\nthem when they were re-captured for the plough and the cart. On one\nof the Egyptian monuments there is a very interesting group, which\nhas furnished the idea for the plate which illustrates this article.\nIt occurs in the tombs of the kings at Thebes, and represents a\nploughing scene. The simple two-handled plough is being dragged by\na pair of cows, who have the yoke fastened across the horns instead\nof lying on the neck, and a sower is following behind, scattering\nthe grain out of a basket into the newly-made furrows. In front of\nthe cows is a young calf, which has run to meet its mother, and is\nleaping for joy before her as she steadily plods along her course.\n\nThe action of both animals is admirably represented; the steady and\nfirm gait of the mother contrasting with the light, gambolling step\nand arched tail of her offspring.\n\nIn the olden times of the Israelitish race, herd-keeping was\nconsidered as an honourable occupation, in which men of the highest\nrank might engage without any derogation to their dignity. We find,\nfor instance, that Saul himself, even after he had been appointed\nking, was acting as herdsman when the people saw the mistake they\nhad made in rejecting him as their monarch, and came to fetch their\ndivinely-appointed leader from his retirement. (See 1 Sam. xi.\n5.) Doeg, too, the faithful companion of Saul, was made the chief\nherdsman of his master's cattle, so that for Saul to confer such an\noffice, and Doeg to accept it, shows that the post was one of much\nhonour. And afterwards, when David was in the zenith of his power,\nhe completed the organization of his kingdom, portioning out not\nonly his army into battalions, and assigning a commanding officer\nto each battalion, but also appointing a ruler to each tribe, and\nsetting officers over his treasury, over the vineyards, over the\nolive-trees, over the storehouses, and over the cattle. And these\noffices were so important that the names of their holders are\ngiven at length in 1 Chron. xxvii. those of the various herdsmen\nbeing thought as worthy of mention as those of the treasurers, the\nmilitary commanders, or the headmen of the tribes.\n\nBefore concluding this necessarily short account of the domesticated\noxen of Palestine, it will be needful to give a few lines to the\nanimal viewed in a religious aspect. Here we have, in bold contrast\nto each other, the divine appointment of certain cattle to be\nslain as sacrifices, and the reprobation of worship paid to those\nvery cattle as living emblems of divinity. This false worship was\nlearned by the Israelites during their long residence in Egypt, and\nso deeply had the customs of the Egyptian religion sunk into their\nhearts, that they were not eradicated after the lapse of centuries.\nIt may easily be imagined that such a superstition, surrounded as\nit was with every external circumstance which could make it more\nimposing, would take a powerful hold of the Jewish mind.\n\nChief among the multitude of idols or symbols was the god Apis,\nrepresented by a bull. Many other animals, specially the cat and the\nibis, were deeply honoured among the ancient Egyptians, as we learn\nfrom their own monuments and from the works of the old historians.\nAll these creatures were symbols as well as idols, symbols to the\neducated and idols to the ignorant.\n\nNone of them was held in such universal honour as the bull Apis. The\nparticular animal which represented the deity, and which was lodged\nwith great state and honour in his temple at Memphis, was thought\nto be divinely selected for the purpose, and to be impressed with\ncertain marks. His colour must be black, except a square spot on the\nforehead, a crescent-shaped white spot on the right side, and the\nfigure of an eagle on his back. Under the tongue must be a knob\nshaped like the sacred scarabaeus, and the hairs of his tail must be\ndouble.\n\n[Illustration: MUMMY OF A SACRED BULL TAKEN FROM AN EGYPTIAN TOMB.]\n\nThis representative animal was only allowed to live for a certain\ntime, and when he had reached this allotted period, he was taken in\nsolemn procession to the Nile, and drowned in its sacred waters. His\nbody was then embalmed, and placed with great state in the tombs at\nMemphis.\n\nAfter his death, whether natural or not, the whole nation went into\nmourning, and exhibited all the conventional signs of sorrow, until\nthe priests found another bull which possessed the distinctive\nmarks. The people then threw off their mourning robes, and appeared\nin their best attire, and the sacred bull was exhibited in state for\nforty days before he was taken to his temple at Memphis. The reader\nwill here remember the analogous case of the Indian cattle, some of\nwhich are held to be little less than incarnations of divinity.\n\nEven at the very beginning of the exodus, when their minds must have\nbeen filled with the many miracles that had been wrought in their\nbehalf, and with the cloud and fire of Sinai actually before their\neyes, Aaron himself made an image of a calf in gold, and set it up\nas a symbol of the Lord. That the idol in question was intended\nas a symbol by Aaron is evident from the words which he used when\nsummoning the people to worship, \"To-morrow is a feast of the Lord\"\n(Gen. xxxii. 5). The people, however, clearly lacked the power of\ndiscriminating between the symbol and that which it represented,\nand worshipped the image just as any other idol might be worshipped.\nAnd, in spite of the terrible and swift punishment that followed,\nand which showed the profanity of the act, the idea of ox-worship\nstill remained among the people.\n\n[Illustration: ANIMALS BEING SOLD FOR SACRIFICE IN THE PORCH OF THE\nTEMPLE.]\n\n[Illustration: JEROBOAM SETS UP A GOLDEN CALF AT BETHEL.]\n\nFive hundred years afterwards we find a familiar example of it in\nthe conduct of Jeroboam, \"who made Israel to sin,\" the peculiar\ncrime being the open resuscitation of ox-worship. \"The king made\ntwo calves of gold and said unto them, It is too much for you to\ngo up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee\nup out of the land of Egypt. And he set the one in Bethel, and the\nother put he in Dan.... And he made an house of high places, and\nmade priests of the lowest of the people, which were not of the\ntribe of Levi. And Jeroboam ordained a feast ... like unto the\nfeast in Judah, and he offered upon the altar. So did he in Bethel,\nsacrificing unto the calves that he had made.\"\n\nHere we have a singular instance of a king of Israel repeating,\nafter a lapse of five hundred years, the very acts which had drawn\ndown on the people so severe a punishment, and which were so\ncontrary to the law that they had incited Moses to fling down and\nbreak the sacred tables on which the commandments had been divinely\ninscribed.\n\n[Illustration: THE BUFFALO.]\n\nAnother species of the ox-tribe now inhabits Palestine though\ncommentators rather doubt whether it is not a comparatively late\nimportation. This is the true BUFFALO (_Bubalus buffelus_, Gray),\nwhich is spread over a very large portion of the earth, and is very\nplentiful in India. In that country there are two distinct breeds\nof the Buffalo, namely, the Arnee, a wild variety, and the Bhainsa,\na tamed variety. The former animal is much larger than the latter,\nbeing sometimes more than ten feet in length from the nose to the\nroot of the tail, and measuring between six and seven feet in height\nat the shoulder. Its horns are of enormous length, the tail is very\nshort, and tufts of hair grow on the forehead and horns. The tamed\nvariety is at least one-third smaller, and, unlike the Arnee, never\nseems to get into high condition. It is an ugly, ungainly kind of\nbeast, and is rendered very unprepossessing to the eye by the bald\npatches which are mostly found upon its hide.\n\nBeing a water-loving animal, the Buffalo always inhabits the\nlow-lying districts, and is fond of wallowing in the oozy marshes\nin which it remains for hours, submerged all but its head, and\ntranquilly chewing the cud while enjoying its mud-bath. While thus\nengaged the animal depresses its horns so that they are scarcely\nvisible, barely allowing more than its eyes, ears, and nostrils\nto remain above the surface, so that the motionless heads are\nscarcely distinguishable from the grass and reed tufts which stud\nthe marshes. Nothing is more startling to an inexperienced traveller\nthan to pass by a silent and tranquil pool where the muddy surface\nis unbroken except by a number of black lumps and rushy tufts, and\nthen to see these tufts suddenly transformed into twenty or thirty\nhuge beasts rising out of the still water as if by magic. Generally,\nthe disturber of their peace had better make the best of his way out\nof their reach, as the Buffalo, whether wild or tame, is of a tetchy\nand irritable nature, and resents being startled out of its state of\ndreamy repose.\n\nIn the Jordan valley the Buffalo is found, and is used for\nagriculture, being of the Bhainsa, or domesticated variety. Being\nmuch larger and stronger than the ordinary cattle, it is useful in\ndrawing the plough, but its temper is too uncertain to render it a\npleasant animal to manage. As is the case with all half-wild cattle,\nits milk is very scanty, but compensates by the richness of the\nquality for the lack of quantity.\n\nIn the picture which appears on a following page, one of these\ndomesticated Buffaloes is represented, harnessed with a camel, to a\nrude form of plough used in the East.\n\n[Illustration: THE BHAINSA, OR DOMESTIC BUFFALO, AND CAMEL, DRAWING\nTHE PLOUGH.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE WILD BULL.\n\n     The To, Wild Bull of the Old Testament--Passages in which it is\n     mentioned--The Wild Bull in the net--Hunting with nets in the\n     East--The Oryx supposed to be the To of Scripture--Description\n     of the Oryx, its locality, appearance, and habits--The points in\n     which the Oryx agrees with the To--The \"snare\" in which the foot\n     is taken, as distinguished from the net.\n\n\nIn two passages of the Old Testament an animal is mentioned,\nrespecting which the translators and commentators have been somewhat\nperplexed, in one passage being translated as the \"Wild Ox,\" and in\nthe other as the \"Wild Bull.\" In the Jewish Bible the same rendering\nis preserved, but the sign of doubt is added to the word in both\ncases, showing that the translation is an uncertain one.\n\nThe first of these passages occurs in Deut. xiv. 5, where it is\nclassed together with the ox, sheep, goats, and other ruminants,\nas one of the beasts which were lawful for food. Now, although we\ncannot identify it by this passage, we can at all events ascertain\ntwo important points--the first, that it was a true ruminant, and\nthe second, that it was not the ox, the sheep, or the goat. It was,\ntherefore, some wild ruminant, and we now have to ask how we are to\nfind out the species.\n\nIf we turn to Isa. li. 20, we shall find a passage which will help\nus considerably. Addressing Jerusalem, the prophet uses these words,\n\"By whom shall I comfort thee? Thy sons have fainted, they lie at\nthe head of all the streets, as a wild bull in a net; they are full\nof the fury of the Lord, the rebuke of thy God.\" We now see that\nthe To or Teo must be an animal which is captured by means of nets,\nand therefore must inhabit spots wherein the toils can be used.\nMoreover, it is evidently a powerful animal, or the force of the\nsimile would be lost. The prophet evidently refers to some large\nand strong beast which has been entangled in the hunter's nets, and\nwhich lies helplessly struggling in them. We are, therefore, almost\nperforce driven to recognise it as some large antelope.\n\nThe expression used by the prophet is so characteristic that it\nneeds a short explanation. In this country, and at the present\nday, the use of the net is almost entirely restricted to fishing\nand bird-catching; but in the East nets are still employed in the\ncapture of very large game.\n\nA brief allusion to the hunting-net is made at page 31, but, as the\npassage in Isaiah li. requires a more detailed account of this mode\nof catching large animals, it will be as well to describe the sport\nas at present practised in the East.\n\nWhen a king or some wealthy man determines to hunt game without\ntaking much trouble himself, he gives orders to his men to prepare\ntheir nets, which vary in size or strength according to the\nparticular animal for which they are intended. If, for example, only\nthe wild boar and similar animals are to be hunted, the nets need\nnot be of very great width; but for agile creatures, such as the\nantelope, they must be exceedingly wide, or the intended prey will\nleap over them. As the net is much used in India for the purpose of\ncatching game, Captain Williamson's description of it will explain\nmany of the passages of Scripture wherein it is mentioned.\n\nThe material of the net is hemp, twisted loosely into a kind of\nrope, and the mode in which it is formed is rather peculiar. The\nmeshes are not knotted together, but only twisted round each other,\nmuch after the fashion of the South American hammocks, so as to\nobtain considerable elasticity, and to prevent a powerful animal\nfrom snapping the cord in its struggles. Some of these nets are\nthirteen feet or more in width, and even such a net as this has been\noverleaped by a herd of antelopes. Their length is variable, but, as\nthey can be joined in any number when set end to end, the length is\nnot so important as the width.\n\nThe mode of setting the nets is singularly ingenious. When a\nsuitable spot has been selected, the first care of the hunters is\nto stretch a rope as tightly as possible along the ground. For this\npurpose stout wooden stakes or truncheons are sunk crosswise in\nthe earth, and between these the rope is carefully strained. The\nfavourite locality of the net is a ravine, through which the animals\ncan be driven so as to run against the net in their efforts to\nescape, and across the ravine a whole row of these stakes is sunk.\nThe net is now brought to the spot, and its lower edge fastened\nstrongly to the ground rope.\n\nThe strength of this mode of fastening is astonishing, and, although\nthe stakes are buried scarcely a foot below the surface, they cannot\nbe torn up by any force which can be applied to them; and, however\nstrong the rope may be, it would be broken before the stakes could\nbe dragged out of the ground.\n\nA smaller rope is now attached to the upper edge of the net, which\nis raised upon a series of slight poles. It is not stretched quite\ntightly, but droops between each pair of poles, so that a net which\nis some thirteen feet in width will only give nine or ten feet of\nclear height when the upper edge is supported on the poles. These\nlatter are not fixed in the ground, but merely held in their places\nby the weight of the net resting upon them.\n\nWhen the nets have been properly set, the beaters make a wide\ncircuit through the country, gradually advancing towards the fatal\nspot, and driving before them all the wild animals that inhabit\nthe neighbourhood. As soon as any large beast, such, for example,\nas an antelope, strikes against the net, the supporting pole\nfalls, and the net collapses upon the unfortunate animal, whose\nstruggles--especially if he be one of the horned animals--only\nentangle him more and more in the toils.\n\nAs soon as the hunters see a portion of the net fall, they run to\nthe spot, kill the helpless creature that lies enveloped in the\nelastic meshes, drag away the body, and set up the net again in\nreadiness for the next comer. Sometimes the line of nets will extend\nfor half a mile or more, and give employment to a large staff of\nhunters, in killing the entangled animals, and raising afresh those\nportions of the net which had fallen.\n\nAccepting the theory that the To is one of the large antelopes that\ninhabit, or used to inhabit, the Holy Land and its neighbourhood, we\nmay safely conjecture that it may signify the beautiful animal known\nas the ORYX (_Oryx leucoryx_), an animal which has a tolerably wide\nrange, and is even now found on the borders of the Holy Land. It is\na large and powerful antelope, and is remarkable for its beautiful\nhorns, which sometimes exceed a yard in length, and sweep in a most\ngraceful curve over the back.\n\nSharp as they are, and evidently formidable weapons, the manner\nin which they are set on the head renders them apparently\nunserviceable for combat. When, however, the Oryx is brought to bay,\nor wishes to fight, it stoops its head until the nose is close to\nthe ground, the points of the horns being thus brought to the front.\nAs the head is swung from side to side, the curved horns sweep\nthrough a considerable space, and are so formidable that even the\nlion is chary of attacking their owner. Indeed, instances are known\nwhere the lion has been transfixed and killed by the horns of the\nOryx. Sometimes the animal is not content with merely standing to\nrepel the attacks of its adversaries, but suddenly charges forward\nwith astonishing rapidity, and strikes upwards with its horns as it\nmakes the leap.\n\n[Illustration: WILD BULL, OR ORYX.]\n\nBut these horns, which can be used with such terrible effect in\nbattle, are worse than useless when the animal is hampered in the\nnet. In vain does the Oryx attempt its usual defence: the curved\nhorns get more and more entangled in the elastic meshes, and become\na source of weakness rather than strength. We see now how singularly\nappropriate is the passage, \"Thy sons lie at the heads of all the\nstreets, as a wild bull (or Oryx) in a net,\" and how completely the\nforce of the metaphor is lost without a knowledge of the precise\nmode of fixing the nets, of driving the animals into them, and of\nthe manner in which they render even the large and powerful animals\nhelpless.\n\nThe height of the Oryx at the shoulder is between three and four\nfeet, and its colour is greyish white, mottled profusely with black\nand brown in bold patches. It is plentiful in Northern Africa, and,\nlike many other antelopes, lives in herds, so that it is peculiarly\nsuited to that mode of hunting which consists in surrounding a\nnumber of animals, and driving them into a trap of some kind,\nwhether a fenced enclosure, a pitfall, or a net.\n\nThere is, by the way, the term \"snare,\" which is specially used\nwith especial reference to catching the foot as distinguished from\nthe net which enveloped the whole body. For example, in Job xviii.\n8, \"He is cast into a net, he walketh on a snare,\" where a bold\ndistinction is drawn between the two and their mode of action. And\nin ver. 10, \"The snare is laid for him in the ground.\" Though I\nwould not state definitely that such is the case, I believe that the\nsnare which is here mentioned is one which is still used in several\nparts of the world.\n\nIt is simply a hoop, to the inner edge of which are fastened a\nnumber of elastic spikes, the points being directed towards the\ncentre. This is merely laid in the path which the animal will\ntake, and is tied by a short cord to a log of wood. As the deer\nor antelope treads on the snare, the foot passes easily through\nthe elastic spikes, but, when the foot is raised, the spikes run\ninto the joint and hold the hoop upon the limb. Terrified by the\ncheck and the sudden pang, the animal tries to run away, but, by\nthe united influence of sharp spikes and the heavy log, it is soon\nforced to halt, and so becomes an easy prey to its pursuers.\n\n[Illustration: THE ORYX.]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: unicorn]\n\n\n\n\nTHE UNICORN.\n\n     The Unicorn apparently known to the Jews--Its evident connection\n     with the Ox tribe--Its presumed identity with the now extinct\n     Urus--Enormous size and dangerous character of the Urus.\n\n\nThere are many animals mentioned in the Scriptures which are\nidentified with difficulty, partly because their names occur only\nonce or twice in the sacred writings, and partly because, when they\nare mentioned, the context affords no clue to their identity by\ngiving any hint as to their appearance or habits. In such cases,\nalthough the translators would have done better if they had simply\ngiven the Hebrew word without endeavouring to identify it with any\nknown animal, they may be excused for committing errors in their\nnomenclature. There is one animal, however, for which no such excuse\ncan be found, and this is the Reem of Scripture, translated as\nUnicorn in the authorized version.\n\nEven in late years the Unicorn has been erroneously supposed to be\nidentical with the Rhinoceros of India. It is, however, now certain\nthat the Unicorn was not the Rhinoceros, and that it can be almost\ncertainly identified with an animal which, at the time when the\npassages in question were written, was plentiful in Palestine,\nalthough, like the Lion, it is now extinct.\n\nOn turning to the Jewish Bible we find that the word Reem is\ntranslated as buffalo, and there is no doubt that this rendering is\nnearly the correct one. At the present day naturalists are nearly\nall agreed that the Unicorn of the Old Testament must have been of\nthe Ox tribe. Probably the Urus, a species now extinct, was the\nanimal alluded to. A smaller animal, the Bonassus or Bison, also\nexisted in Palestine, and even to the present day continues to\nmaintain itself in one or two spots, though it will probably be as\nsoon completely erased from the surface of the earth as its gigantic\ncongener.\n\nThat the Unicorn was one of the two animals is certain, and that it\nwas the larger is nearly as certain. The reason for deciding upon\nthe Urus is, that its horns were of great size and strength, and\ntherefore agree with the description of the Unicorn; whereas those\nof the Bonassus, although powerful, are short, and not conspicuous\nenough to deserve the notice which is taken of them by the sacred\nwriters.\n\nOf the extinct variety we know but little. We do know, however, that\nit was a huge and most formidable beast, as is evident from the\nskulls and other bones which have been discovered. Their character\nalso indicates that the creature was nothing more than a very large\nOx, probably measuring twelve feet in length, and six feet in\nheight. Such a wild animal, armed, as it was, with enormous horns,\nwould prove a most formidable antagonist.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: bison]\n\n\n\n\nTHE BISON.\n\n     The Bison tribe and its distinguishing marks--Its former\n     existence in Palestine--Its general habits--Origin of its\n     name--Its musky odour--Size and speed of the Bison--Its\n     dangerous character when brought to bay--Its defence against the\n     wolf--Its untameable disposition.\n\n\nA few words are now needful respecting the second animal which has\nbeen mentioned in connexion with the Reem; namely, the Bison, or\nBonassus. The Bisons are distinguishable from ordinary cattle by the\nthick and heavy mane which covers the neck and shoulders, and which\nis more conspicuous in the male than in the female. The general\ncoating of the body is also rather different, being thick and woolly\ninstead of lying closely to the skin like that of the other oxen.\nThe Bison certainly inhabited Palestine, as its bones have been\nfound in that country. It has, however, been extinct in the Holy\nLand for many years, and, not being an animal that is capable of\nwithstanding the encroachments of man, it has gradually died out\nfrom the greater part of Europe and Asia, and is now to be found\nonly in a very limited locality, chiefly in a Lithuanian forest,\nwhere it is strictly preserved, and in some parts of the Caucasus.\nThere it still preserves the habits which made its ancient and\ngigantic relative so dangerous an animal. Unlike the buffalo, which\nloves the low-lying and marshy lands, the Bison prefers the high\nwooded localities, where it lives in small troops.\n\n[Illustration: BISON KILLING WOLF.]\n\nIts name of Bison is a modification of the word Bisam, or musk,\nwhich was given to it on account of the strong musky odour of its\nflesh, which is especially powerful about the head and neck. This\nodour is not so unpleasant as might be supposed, and those who\nhave had personal experience of the animal say that it bears some\nresemblance to the perfume of violets. It is developed most strongly\nin the adult bulls, the cows and young male calves only possessing\nit in a slight degree.\n\nIt is a tolerably large animal, being about six feet high at the\nshoulder--a stature nearly equivalent to that of the ordinary\nAsiatic elephant; and, in spite of its great bulk, is a fleet and\nactive animal, as indeed is generally the case with those oxen\nwhich inhabit elevated localities. Still, though it can run with\nconsiderable speed, it is not able to keep up the pace for any great\ndistance, and at the end of a mile or two can be brought to bay.\n\nLike most animals, however large and powerful they may be, it fears\nthe presence of man, and, if it sees or scents a human being, will\ntry to slip quietly away; but when it is baffled in this attempt,\nand forced to fight, it becomes a fierce and dangerous antagonist,\ncharging with wonderful quickness, and using its short and powerful\nhorns with great effect. A wounded Bison, when fairly brought to\nbay, is perhaps as awkward an opponent as can be found, and to kill\nit without the aid of firearms is no easy matter.\n\nAlthough the countries in which it lives are infested with wolves,\nit seems to have no fear of them when in health; and, even when\npressed by their winter's hunger, the wolves do not venture to\nattack even a single Bison, much less a herd of them. Like other\nwild cattle, it likes to dabble in muddy pools, and is fond of\nharbouring in thickets near such localities; and those who have to\ntravel through the forest keep clear of such spots, unless they\ndesire to drive out the animal for the purpose of killing it.\n\nLike the extinct Aurochs, the Bison has never been domesticated,\nand, although the calves have been captured while very young, and\nattempts have been made to train them to harness, their innate\nwildness of disposition has always baffled such efforts.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: gazelle]\n\n\n\n\nTHE GAZELLE, OR ROE OF SCRIPTURE.\n\n     Its swiftness, its beauty, and the quality of its\n     flesh--Different varieties of the Gazelle--How the Gazelle\n     defends itself against wild beasts--Chase of the Gazelle.\n\n\nWe now leave the Ox tribe, and come to the Antelopes, several\nspecies of which are mentioned in the Scriptures. Four kinds of\nantelope are found in or near the Holy Land, and there is little\ndoubt that all of them are mentioned in the sacred volume.\n\nThe first that will be described is the GAZELLE, which is\nacknowledged to be the animal that is represented by the word\n_Tsebi_, or _Tsebiyah_. The Jewish Bible accepts the same\nrendering. This word occurs many times, sometimes as a metaphor,\nand sometimes representing some animal which was lawful food, and\nwhich therefore belonged to the true ruminants. Moreover, its flesh\nwas not only legally capable of being eaten, but was held in such\nestimation that it was provided for the table of Solomon himself,\ntogether with other animals which will be described in their turn.\n\n[Illustration: THE GAZELLE.]\n\nIt is even now considered a great dainty, although it is not at\nall agreeable to European taste, being hard, dry, and without\nflavour. Still, as has been well remarked, tastes differ as well\nas localities, and an article of food which is a costly luxury in\none land is utterly disdained in another, and will hardly be eaten\nexcept by one who is absolutely dying of starvation.\n\nThe Gazelle is very common in Palestine in the present day, and, in\nthe ancient times, must have been even more plentiful. There are\nseveral varieties of it, which were once thought to be distinct\nspecies, but are now acknowledged to be mere varieties, all of\nwhich are referable to the single species _Gazella Dorcas_. There\nis, for example, the Corinna, or Corine Antelope, which is a rather\nboldly-spotted female; the Kevella Antelope, in which the horns are\nslightly flattened; the small variety called the Ariel, or Cora; the\ngrey Kevel, which is a rather large variety; and the Long-horned\nGazelle, which owes its name to a rather large development of the\nhorns.\n\nWhatever variety may inhabit any given spot, they all have the\nsame habits. They are gregarious animals, associating together in\nherds often of considerable size, and deriving from their numbers\nan element of strength which would otherwise be wanting. Against\nmankind, numbers are of no avail; but when the agile though feeble\nGazelle has to defend itself against the predatory animals of\nits own land, it can only defend itself by the concerted action\nof the whole herd. Should, for example, the wolves prowl round\na herd of Gazelles, after their treacherous wont, the Gazelles\ninstantly assume a posture of self-defence. They form themselves\ninto a compact phalanx, all the males coming to the front, and the\nstrongest and boldest taking on themselves the honourable duty of\nfacing the foe. The does and the young are kept within their ranks,\nand so formidable is the array of sharp, menacing horns, that beasts\nas voracious as the wolf, and far more powerful, have been known to\nretire without attempting to charge.\n\nAs a rule, however, the Gazelle does not desire to resist, and\nprefers its legs to its horns as a mode of insuring safety. So fleet\nis the animal, that it seems to fly over the ground as if propelled\nby volition alone, and its light, agile frame is so enduring, that a\nfair chase has hardly any prospect of success. Hunters, therefore,\nprefer a trap of some kind, if they chase the animal merely for\nfood or for the sake of its skin, and contrive to kill considerable\nnumbers at once. Sometimes they dig pitfalls, and drive the Gazelles\ninto them by beating a large tract of country, and gradually\nnarrowing the circle. Sometimes they use nets, such as have already\nbeen described, and sometimes they line the sides of a ravine with\narchers and spearmen, and drive the herd of Gazelles through the\ntreacherous defile.\n\nThese modes of slaughter are, however, condemned by the true hunter,\nwho looks upon those who use them much in the same light as an\nEnglish sportsman looks on a man who shoots foxes. The greyhound\nand the falcon are both employed in the legitimate capture of the\nGazelle, and in some cases both are trained to work together.\nHunting the Gazelle with the greyhound very much resembles coursing\nin our own country, and chasing it with the hawk is exactly like the\nsystem of falconry that was once so popular an English sport, and\nwhich even now shows signs of revival.\n\nIt is, however, when the dog and the bird are trained to work\ntogether that the spectacle becomes really novel and interesting to\nan English spectator.\n\nAs soon as the Gazelles are fairly in view, the hunter unhoods his\nhawk, and holds it up so that it may see the animals. The bird fixes\nits eye on one Gazelle, and by that glance the animal's doom is\nsettled. The falcon darts after the Gazelles, followed by the dog,\nwho keeps his eye on the hawk, and holds himself in readiness to\nattack the animal that his feathered ally may select. Suddenly the\nfalcon, which has been for some few seconds hovering over the herd\nof Gazelles, makes a stoop upon the selected victim, fastening its\ntalons in its forehead, and, as it tries to shake off its strange\nfoe, flaps its wings into the Gazelle's eyes so as to blind it.\nConsequently, the rapid course of the antelope is arrested, so\nthat the dog is able to come up and secure the animal while it is\nstruggling to escape from its feathered enemy. Sometimes, though\nrarely, a young and inexperienced hawk swoops down with such\nreckless force that it misses the forehead of the Gazelle, and\nimpales itself upon the sharp horns, just as in England the falcon\nis apt to be spitted on the bill of the heron.\n\nThe most sportsmanlike mode of hunting the Gazelle is to use the\nfalcon alone; but for this sport a bird must possess exceptional\nstrength, swiftness, and intelligence. A very spirited account of\nsuch a chase is given by Mr. G. W. Chasseaud, in his \"Druses of the\nLebanon:\"--\n\n\"Whilst reposing here, our old friend with the falcon informs us\nthat at a short distance from this spot is a khan called Nebbi\nYouni, from a supposition that the prophet Jonah was here landed by\nthe whale; but the old man is very indignant when we identify the\nplace with a fable, and declare to him that similar sights are to\nbe seen at Gaza and Scanderoon. But his good humour is speedily\nrecovered by reverting to the subject of the exploits and cleverness\nof his falcon. This reminds him that we have not much time to waste\nin idle talk, as the greater heats will drive the gazelles from the\nplains to the mountain retreats, and lose us the opportunity of\nenjoying the most sportsmanlike amusement in Syria. Accordingly,\nbestriding our animals again, we ford the river at that point where\na bridge once stood.\n\n\"We have barely proceeded twenty minutes before the keen eye of the\nfalconer has descried a herd of gazelles quietly grazing in the\ndistance. Immediately he reins in his horse, and enjoining silence,\ninstead of riding at them, as we might have felt inclined to do, he\nskirts along the banks of the river, so as to cut off, if possible,\nthe retreat of these fleet animals where the banks are narrowest,\nthough very deep, but which would be cleared at a single leap by\nthe gazelles. Having successfully accomplished this manoeuvre,\nhe again removes the hood from the hawk, and indicates to us that\nprecaution is no longer necessary. Accordingly, first adding a few\nslugs to the charges in our barrels, we balance our guns in an easy\nposture, and, giving the horses their reins, set off at full gallop,\nand with a loud hurrah, right towards the already startled gazelles.\n\n\"The timid animals, at first paralysed by our appearance, stand and\ngaze for a second terror-stricken at our approach; but their pause\nis only momentary; they perceive in an instant that the retreat to\ntheir favourite haunts has been secured, and so they dash wildly\nforward with all the fleetness of despair, coursing over the plain\nwith no fixed refuge in view, and nothing but their fleetness to aid\nin their delivery. A stern chase is a long chase, and so, doubtless,\non the present occasion it would prove with ourselves, for there is\nmany and many a mile of level country before us, and our horses,\nthough swift of foot, stand no chance in this respect with the\ngazelles.\n\n\"Now, however, the old man has watched for a good opportunity to\ndisplay the prowess and skill of his falcon: he has followed us\nonly at a hand-gallop; but the hawk, long inured to such pastime,\nstretches forth its neck eagerly in the direction of the flying\nprey, and being loosened from its pinions, sweeps up into the air\nlike a shot, and passes overhead with incredible velocity. Five\nminutes more, and the bird has outstripped even the speed of the\nlight-footed gazelle; we see him through the dust and haze that\nour own speed throws around us, hovering but an instant over the\nterrified herd; he has singled out his prey, and, diving with\nunerring aim, fixes his iron talons into the head of the terrified\nanimal.\n\n[Illustration: THE FALCON USED IN OUR HUNT.]\n\n\"This is the signal for the others to break up their orderly\nretreat, and to speed over the plain in every direction. Some,\ndespite the danger that hovers on their track, make straight for\ntheir old and familiar haunts, and passing within twenty yards of\nwhere we ride, afford us an opportunity of displaying our skill as\namateur huntsmen on horseback; nor does it require but little nerve\nand dexterity to fix our aim whilst our horses are tearing over\nthe ground. However, the moment presents itself, the loud report\nof barrel after barrel startles the unaccustomed inmates of that\nunfrequented waste; one gazelle leaps twice its own height into the\nair, and then rolls over, shot through the heart; another bounds on\nyet a dozen paces, but, wounded mortally, staggering, halts, and\nthen falls to the ground.\n\n\"This is no time for us to pull in and see what is the amount of\ndamage done, for the falcon, heedless of all surrounding incidents,\nclings firmly to the head of its terrified victim, flapping its\nstrong wings awhile before the poor brute's terrified eyes, half\nblinding it and rendering its head dizzy; till, after tearing round\nand round with incredible speed, the poor creature stops, panting\nfor breath, and, overcome with excessive terror, drops down fainting\nupon the earth. Now the air resounds with the acclamations and\nhootings of the ruthless victors.\n\n[Illustration: THE ARAB IS DELIGHTED AT THE SUCCESS OF THE HUNT.]\n\n\"The Arab is wild in his transports of delight. More certain of\nthe prowess of his bird than ourselves, he had stopped awhile to\ngather together the fruits of our booty, and now galloped furiously\nup, waving his long gun, and shouting lustily the while the praises\nof his infallible hawk; then getting down, and hoodwinking the bird\nagain, he first of all takes the precaution of fastening together\nthe legs of the fallen gazelle, and then he humanely blows up into\nits nostrils. Gradually the natural brilliancy returns to the dimmed\neyes of the gazelle, then it struggles valiantly, but vainly, to\ndisentangle itself from its fetters.\n\n\"Pitying its efforts, the falconer throws a handkerchief over its\nhead, and, securing this prize, claims it as his own, declaring that\nhe will bear it home to his house in the mountains, where, after a\nfew weeks' kind treatment and care, it will become as domesticated\nand affectionate as a spaniel. Meanwhile, Abou Shein gathers\ntogether the fallen booty, and, tying them securely with cords,\nfastens them behind his own saddle, declaring, with a triumphant\nlaugh, that we shall return that evening to the city of Beyrout with\nsuch game as few sportsmen can boast of having carried thither in\none day.\"\n\nThe gentle nature of the Gazelle is as proverbial as its grace\nand swiftness, and is well expressed in the large, soft, liquid\neye, which has formed from time immemorial the stock comparison of\nOriental poets when describing the eyes of beauty.\n\n[Illustration: THE GAZELLE.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE PYGARG, OR ADDAX.\n\n     The Dishon or Dyshon--Signification of the word\n     Pygarg--Certainty that the Dishon is an antelope, and that it\n     must be one of a few species--Former and present range of the\n     Addax--Description of the Addax.\n\n\nThere is a species of animal mentioned once in the Scriptures under\nthe name of Dishon which the Jewish Bible leaves untranslated, and\nmerely gives as Dyshon, and which is rendered in the Septuagint by\nPugargos, or PYGARG, as one version gives it. Now, the meaning of\nthe word Pygarg is white-crouped, and for that reason the Pygarg\nof the Scriptures is usually held to be one of the white-crouped\nantelopes, of which several species are known. Perhaps it may be one\nof them--it may possibly be neither, and it may probably refer to\nall of them.\n\nBut that an antelope of some kind is meant by the word Dishon is\nevident enough, and it is also evident that the Dishon must have\nbeen one of the antelopes which could be obtained by the Jews. Now\nas the species of antelope which could have furnished food for that\nnation are very few in number, it is clear that, even if we do not\nhit upon the exact species, we may be sure of selecting an animal\nthat was closely allied to it. Moreover, as the nomenclature is\nexceedingly loose, it is probable that more than one species might\nhave been included in the word Dishon.\n\nModern commentators have agreed that there is every probability that\nthe Dishon of the Pentateuch was the antelope known by the name of\nAddax.\n\nThis handsome antelope is a native of Northern Africa. It has a\nvery wide range, and, even at the present day, is found in the\nvicinity of Palestine, so that it evidently was one of the antelopes\nwhich could be killed by Jewish hunters. From its large size, and\nlong twisted horns, it bears a strong resemblance to the Koodoo of\nSouthern Africa. The horns, however, are not so long, nor so boldly\ntwisted, the curve being comparatively slight, and not possessing\nthe bold spiral shape which distinguishes those of the koodoo.\n\n[Illustration: THE ADDAX.]\n\nThe ordinary height of the Addax is three feet seven or eight\ninches, and the horns are almost exactly alike in the two sexes.\nTheir length, from the head to the tips, is rather more than two\nfeet. Its colour is mostly white, but a thick mane of dark black\nhair falls from the throat, a patch of similar hair grows on the\nforehead, and the back and shoulders are greyish brown. There is no\nmane on the back of the neck, as is the case with the koodoo.\n\nThe Addax is a sand-loving animal, as is shown by the wide and\nspreading hoofs, which afford it a firm footing on the yielding\nsoil. In all probability, this is one of the animals which would be\ntaken, like the wild bull, in a net, being surrounded and driven\ninto the toils by a number of hunters. It is not, however, one of\nthe gregarious species, and is not found in those vast herds in\nwhich some of the antelopes love to assemble.\n\n[Illustration: decoration]\n\n\n\n\nTHE FALLOW-DEER, OR BUBALE.\n\n     The word Jachmur evidently represents a species of\n     antelope--Resemblance of the animal to the ox tribe--Its\n     ox-like horns and mode of attack--Its capability of\n     domestication--Former and present range of the Bubale--Its\n     representation on the monuments of ancient Egypt--Delicacy of\n     its flesh--Size and general appearance of the animal.\n\n\nIt has already been mentioned that in the Old Testament there occur\nthe names of three or four animals, which clearly belong to one\nor other of three or four antelopes. Only one of these names now\nremains to be identified. This is the Jachmur, or Yachmur, a word\nwhich has been rendered in the Septuagint as Boubalos, and has been\ntranslated in our Authorized Version as FALLOW DEER.\n\nWe shall presently see that the Fallow Deer is to be identified\nwith another animal, and that the word Jachmur must find another\ninterpretation. If we follow the Septuagint, and call it the BUBALE,\nwe shall identify it with a well-known antelope called by the\nArabs the \"Bekk'r-el-Wash,\" and known to zoologists as the BUBALE\n(_Acronotus bubalis_).\n\nThis fine antelope would scarcely be recognised as such by an\nunskilled observer, as in its general appearance it much more\nresembles the ox tribe than the antelope. Indeed, the Arabic\ntitle, \"Bekk'r-el-Wash,\" or Wild Cow, shows how close must be the\nresemblance to the oxen. The Arabs, and indeed all the Orientals in\nwhose countries it lives, believe it not to be an antelope, but one\nof the oxen, and class it accordingly.\n\nHow much the appearance of the Bubale justifies them in this opinion\nmay be judged by reference to the figure on page 143. The horns are\nthick, short, and heavy, and are first inclined forwards, and then\nrather suddenly bent backwards. This formation of the horns causes\nthe Bubale to use his weapons after the manner of the bull, thereby\nincreasing the resemblance between them. When it attacks, the Bubale\nlowers its head to the ground, and as soon as its antagonist is\nwithin reach, tosses its head violently upwards, or swings it with\na sidelong upward blow. In either case, the sharp curved horns,\nimpelled by the powerful neck of the animal, and assisted by the\nweight of the large head, become most formidable weapons.\n\nIt is said that in some places, where the Bubales have learned to\nendure the presence of man, they will mix with his herds for the\nsake of feeding with them, and by degrees become so accustomed to\nthe companionship of their domesticated friends, that they live with\nthe herd as if they had belonged to it all their lives. This fact\nshows that the animal possesses a gentle disposition, and it is said\nto be as easily tamed as the gazelle itself.\n\nEven at the present day the Bubale has a very wide range, and\nformerly had in all probability a much wider. It is indigenous\nto Barbary, and has continued to spread itself over the greater\npart of Northern Africa, including the borders of the Sahara, the\nedges of the cultivated districts, and up the Nile for no small\ndistance. In former days it was evidently a tolerably common animal\nof chase in Upper Egypt as there are representations of it on the\nmonuments, drawn with the quaint truthfulness which distinguishes\nthe monumental sculpture of that period.\n\n[Illustration: THE BUBALE, OR FALLOW-DEER OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\nIt is probable that in and about Palestine it was equally common, so\nthat there is good reason why it should be specially named as one of\nthe animals that were lawful food. Not only was its flesh permitted\nto be eaten, but it was evidently considered as a great dainty,\ninasmuch as the Jachmur is mentioned in 1 Kings iv. 23 as one of the\nanimals which were brought to the royal table. \"Harts and Roebucks\nand Fallow-Deer\" are the wild animals mentioned in the passage\nalluded to.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: sheep and birds]\n\n\n\n\nTHE SHEEP.\n\n     Importance of Sheep in the Bible--The Sheep the chief wealth\n     of the pastoral tribes--Arab shepherds of the present\n     day--Wanderings of the flocks in search of food--Value of the\n     wells--How the Sheep are watered--The shepherd usually a part\n     owner of the flocks--Structure of the sheepfolds--The rock\n     caverns of Palestine--David's adventure with Saul--Use of the\n     dogs--The broad-tailed Sheep, and its peculiarities.\n\n\nWe now come to a subject which will necessarily occupy us for some\nlittle time.\n\nThere is, perhaps, no animal which occupies a larger space in the\nScriptures than the SHEEP. Whether in religious, civil, or domestic\nlife, we find that the Sheep is bound up with the Jewish nation in\na way that would seem almost incomprehensible, did we not recall\nthe light which the New Testament throws upon the Old, and the many\nallusions to the coming Messiah under the figure of the Lamb that\ntaketh away the sins of the world.\n\nIn treating of the Sheep, it will be perhaps advisable to begin the\naccount by taking the animal simply as one of those creatures which\nhave been domesticated from time immemorial, dwelling slightly on\nthose points on which the sheep-owners of the old days differed from\nthose of our own time.\n\nThe only claim to the land seems, in the old times of the\nScriptures, to have lain in cultivation, or perhaps in the land\nimmediately surrounding a well. But any one appears to have taken a\npiece of ground and cultivated it, or to have dug a well wherever he\nchose, and thereby to have acquired a sort of right to the soil. The\nsame custom prevails at the present day among the cattle-breeding\nraces of Southern Africa. The banks of rivers, on account of their\nsuperior fertility, were considered as the property of the chiefs\nwho lived along their course, but the inland soil was free to all.\n\nHad it not been for this freedom of the land, it would have been\nimpossible for the great men to have nourished the enormous flocks\nand herds of which their wealth consisted; but, on account of\nthe lack of ownership of the soil, a flock could be moved to one\ndistrict after another as fast as it exhausted the herbage, the\nshepherds thus unconsciously imitating the habits of the gregarious\nanimals, which are always on the move from one spot to another.\n\nPasturage being thus free to all, Sheep had a higher comparative\nvalue than is the case with ourselves, who have to pay in some way\nfor their keep. There is a proverb in the Talmud which may be curtly\ntranslated, \"Land sell, sheep buy.\"\n\nThe value of a good pasture-ground for the flocks is so great, that\nits possession is well worth a battle, the shepherds being saved\nfrom a most weary and harassing life, and being moreover fewer in\nnumber than is needed when the pasturage is scanty Sir S. Baker, in\nhis work on Abyssinia, makes some very interesting remarks upon the\nArab herdsmen, who are placed in conditions very similar to those of\nthe Israelitish shepherds.\n\n[Illustration: ARABS JOURNEYING TO FRESH PASTURES.]\n\n\"The Arabs are creatures of necessity; their nomadic life is\ncompulsory, as the existence of their flocks and herds depends\nupon the pasturage. Thus, with the change of seasons they must\nchange their localities according to the presence of fodder for\ntheir cattle.... The Arab cannot halt in one spot longer than the\npasturage will support his flocks. The object of his life being\nfodder, he must wander in search of the ever-changing supply. His\nwants must be few, as the constant change of encampment necessitates\nthe transport of all his household goods; thus he reduces to a\nminimum his domestic furniture and utensils....\n\n\"This striking similarity to the descriptions of the Old Testament\nis exceedingly interesting to a traveller when residing among\nthese curious and original people. With the Bible in one's hand,\nand these unchanged tribes before the eyes, there is a thrilling\nillustration of the sacred record; the past becomes the present, the\nveil of three thousand years is raised, and the living picture is a\nwitness to the exactness of the historical description. At the same\ntime there is a light thrown upon many obscure passages in the Old\nTestament by the experience of the present customs and figures of\nspeech of the Arabs, which are precisely those that were practised\nat the periods described....\n\n[Illustration: VIEW OF THE PYRAMIDS.]\n\n\"Should the present history of the country be written by an Arab\nscribe, the style of the description would be precisely that of\nthe Old Testament. There is a fascination in the unchangeable\nfeatures of the Nile regions. There are the vast pyramids that have\ndefied time, the river upon which Moses was cradled in infancy,\nthe same sandy desert through which he led his people, and the\nwatering-places where their flocks were led to drink. The wild and\nwandering Arabs, who thousands of years ago dug out the wells in the\nwilderness, are represented by their descendants, unchanged, who now\ndraw water from the deep wells of their forefathers, with the skins\nthat have never altered their fashion.\n\n\"The Arabs, gathering with their goats and sheep around the wells\nto-day, recall the recollection of that distant time when 'Jacob\nwent on his journey, and came into the land of the people of the\neast. And he looked, and behold a well in the field, and lo! there\nwere three flocks of sheep lying by it,' &c. The picture of that\nscene would be an illustration of Arab daily life in the Nubian\ndeserts, where the present is a mirror of the past.\"\n\nOwing to the great number of Sheep which they have to tend, and the\npeculiar state of the country, the life of the shepherd in Palestine\nis even now very different from that of an English shepherd, and\nin the days of the early Scriptures the distinction was even more\ndistinctly marked.\n\nSheep had to be tended much more carefully than we generally think.\nIn the first place, a thoughtful shepherd had always one idea before\nhis mind,--namely, the possibility of obtaining sufficient water\nfor his flocks. Even pasturage is less important than water, and,\nhowever tempting a district might be, no shepherd would venture to\ntake his charge there if he were not sure of obtaining water. In a\nclimate such as ours, this ever-pressing anxiety respecting water\ncan scarcely be appreciated, for in hot climates not only is water\nscarce, but it is needed far more than in a temperate and moist\nclimate. Thirst does its work with terrible quickness, and there are\ninstances recorded where men have sat down and died of thirst in\nsight of the river which they had not strength to reach.\n\nIn places therefore through which no stream runs, the wells are the\ngreat centres of pasturage, around which are to be seen vast flocks\nextending far in every direction. These wells are kept carefully\nclosed by their owners, and are only opened for the use of those who\nare entitled to water their flocks at them.\n\nNoontide is the general time for watering the Sheep, and towards\nthat hour all the flocks may be seen converging towards their\nrespective wells, the shepherd at the head of each flock, and the\nSheep following him. See how forcible becomes the imagery of David,\nthe shepherd poet, \"The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He\nmaketh me to lie down in green pastures (or, in pastures of tender\ngrass): He leadeth me beside the still waters\" (Ps. xxiii. 1, 2).\nHere we have two of the principal duties of the good shepherd\nbrought prominently before us,--namely, the guiding of the Sheep to\ngreen pastures and leading them to fresh water. Very many references\nare made in the Scriptures to the pasturage of sheep, both in a\ntechnical and a metaphorical sense; but as our space is limited, and\nthese passages are very numerous, only one or two of each will be\ntaken.\n\nIn the story of Joseph, we find that when his father and brothers\nwere suffering from the famine, they seem to have cared as much\nfor their Sheep and cattle as for themselves, inasmuch as among a\npastoral people the flocks and herds constitute the only wealth.\nSo, when Joseph at last discovered himself, and his family were\nadmitted to the favour of Pharaoh, the first request which they made\nwas for their flocks. \"Pharaoh said unto his brethren, What is your\noccupation? And they said unto Pharaoh, Thy servants are shepherds,\nboth we, and also our fathers.\n\n\"They said moreover unto Pharaoh, For to sojourn in the land are we\ncome; for thy servants have no pasture for their flocks; for the\nfamine is sore in the land of Canaan: now therefore, we pray thee,\nlet thy servants dwell in the land of Goshen.\"\n\nThis one incident, so slightly remarked in the sacred history, gives\na wonderfully clear notion of the sort of life led by Jacob and his\nsons. Forming, according to custom, a small tribe of their own, of\nwhich the father was the chief, they led a pastoral life, taking\ntheir continually increasing herds and flocks from place to place as\nthey could find food for them. For example, at the memorable time\nwhen the story of Joseph begins, he was sent by his father to his\nbrothers, who were feeding the flocks, and he wandered about for\nsome time, not knowing where to find them. It may seem strange that\nhe should be unable to discover such very conspicuous objects as\nlarge flocks of sheep and goats, but the fact is that they had been\ndriven from one pasture-land to another, and had travelled in search\nof food all the way from Shechem to Dothan.\n\nIn 1 Chron. iv. 39, 40, we read of the still pastoral Israelites\nthat \"they went to the entrance of Gedor, even unto the east side\nof the valley, to seek pasture for their flocks. And they found fat\npasture and good, and the land was wide, and quiet, and peaceable.\"\n\nHow it came to be quiet and peaceable is told in the context. It\nwas peaceable simply because the Israelites were attracted by the\ngood pasturage, attacked the original inhabitants, and exterminated\nthem so effectually that none were left to offer resistance to the\nusurpers. And we find from this passage that the value of good\npasture-land where the Sheep could feed continually without being\nforced to wander from one spot to another was so considerable, that\nthe owners of the flocks engaged in war, and exposed their own\nlives, in order to obtain so valuable a possession.\n\n[Illustration: JACOB MEETS RACHEL AT THE WELL.]\n\nWe will now look at one or two of the passages that mention watering\nthe Sheep--a duty so imperative on an Oriental shepherd, and so\nneedless to our own.\n\nIn the first place we find that most graphic narrative which occurs\nin Gen. xxix. to which a passing reference has already been made.\nWhen Jacob was on his way from his parents to the home of Laban\nin Padan-aram, he came upon the very well which belonged to his\nuncle, and there saw three flocks of Sheep lying around the well,\nwaiting until the proper hour arrived. According to custom, a large\nstone was laid over the well, so as to perform the double office of\nkeeping out the sand and dust, and of guarding the precious water\nagainst those who had no right to it. And when he saw his cousin\nRachel arrive with the flock of which she had the management, he,\naccording to the courtesy of the country and the time, rolled away\nthe ponderous barrier, and poured out water into the troughs for the\nSheep which Rachel tended.\n\n[Illustration: EASTERN SHEPHERD WATCHING HIS FLOCK.]\n\nAbout two hundred years afterwards, we find Moses performing a\nsimilar act. When he was obliged to escape into Midian on account\nof his fatal quarrel with a tyrannical Egyptian, he sat down by a\nwell, waiting for the time when the stone might be rolled away, and\nthe water be distributed. Now it happened that this well belonged\nto Jethro, the chief priest of the country, whose wealth consisted\nprincipally of Sheep. He entrusted his flock to the care of his\nseven daughters, who led their Sheep to the well and drew water as\nusual into the troughs. Presuming on their weakness, other shepherds\ncame and tried to drive them away, but were opposed by Moses, who\ndrove them away, and with his own hands watered the flock.\n\nNow in both these examples we find that the men who performed the\ncourteous office of drawing the water and pouring it into the\nsheep-troughs married afterwards the girl to whose charge the flocks\nhad been committed. This brings us to the Oriental custom which has\nbeen preserved to the present day.\n\nThe wells at which the cattle are watered at noon-day are the\nmeeting-places of the tribe, and it is chiefly at the well that\nthe young men and women meet each other. As each successive flock\narrives at the well, the number of the people increases, and while\nthe sheep and goats lie patiently round the water, waiting for the\ntime when the last flock shall arrive, and the stone be rolled off\nthe mouth of the well, the gossip of the tribe is discussed, and the\nyoung people have ample opportunity for the pleasing business of\ncourtship.\n\nAs to the passages in which the wells, rivers, brooks,\nwater-springs, are spoken of in a metaphorical sense, they are too\nnumerous to be quoted.\n\nAnd here I may observe, that in reality the whole of Scripture has\nits symbolical as well as its outward signification; and that,\nuntil we have learned to read the Bible strictly according to the\nspirit, we cannot understand one-thousandth part of the mysteries\nwhich it conceals behind its veil of language; nor can we appreciate\none-thousandth part of the treasures of wisdom which lie hidden in\nits pages.\n\nAnother duty of the shepherd of ancient Palestine was to guard his\nflock from depredators, whether man or beast. Therefore the shepherd\nwas forced to carry arms; to act as a sentry during the night; and,\nin fact, to be a sort of irregular soldier. A fully-armed shepherd\nhad with him his bow, his spear, and his sword, and not even a\nshepherd lad was without his sling and the great quarter-staff which\nis even now universally carried by the tribes along the Nile--a\nstaff as thick as a man's wrist, and six or seven feet in length. He\nwas skilled in the use of all these weapons, especially in that of\nthe sling.\n\n[Illustration: DAVID GATHERS STONES FROM THE BROOK TO CAST AT\nGOLIATH.]\n\nIn these days, the sling is only considered as a mere toy, whereas,\nbefore the introduction of fire-arms, it was one of the most\nformidable weapons that could be wielded by light troops. Round\nand smooth stones weighing three or four ounces were the usual\nprojectiles, and, by dint of constant practice from childhood, the\nslingers could aim with a marvellous precision. Of this fact we have\na notable instance in David, who knew that the sling and the five\nstones in the hand of an active youth unencumbered by armour, and\nwearing merely the shepherd's simple tunic, were more than a match\nfor all the ponderous weapons of the gigantic Philistine.\n\nIt has sometimes been the fashion to attribute the successful aim of\nDavid to a special miracle, whereas those who are acquainted with\nancient weapons know well that no miracle was wrought, because none\nwas needed; a good slinger at that time being as sure of his aim as\na good rifleman of our days.\n\nThe sling was in constant requisition, being used both in directing\nthe Sheep and in repelling enemies: a stone skilfully thrown in\nfront of a straying Sheep being a well-understood signal that the\nanimal had better retrace its steps if it did not want to feel the\nnext stone on its back.\n\n[Illustration: AN EASTERN SHEPHERD.]\n\nPassing his whole life with his flock, the shepherd was identified\nwith his Sheep far more than is the case in this country. He knew\nall his Sheep by sight, he called them all by their names, and they\nall knew him and recognised his voice. He did not drive them, but he\nled them, walking in their front, and they following him. Sometimes\nhe would play with them, pretending to run away while they pursued\nhim, exactly as an infant-school teacher plays with the children.\n\nConsequently, they looked upon him as their protector as well as\ntheir feeder, and were sure to follow wherever he led them.\n\n[Illustration: SHEEP FOLLOWING THEIR SHEPHERD.]\n\nWe must all remember how David, who had passed all his early years\nas a shepherd, speaks of God as the Shepherd of Israel, and the\npeople as Sheep; never mentioning the Sheep as being driven, but\nalways as being led. \"Thou leddest Thy people like a flock, by\nthe hands of Moses and Aaron\" (Ps. lxxvii. 20); \"The Lord is my\nShepherd.... He leadeth me beside the still waters\" (Ps. xxiii. 1,\n2); \"Lead me in a plain path, because of mine enemies\" (Ps. xxvii.\n11); together with many other passages too numerous to be quoted.\n\nOur Lord Himself makes a familiar use of the same image: \"He calleth\nhis own sheep by name, and leadeth them out And when he putteth\nforth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him:\nfor they know his voice.\"\n\nAlthough the shepherds of our own country know their Sheep by sight,\nand say that there is as much difference in the faces of Sheep as of\nmen, they have not, as a rule, attained the art of teaching their\nSheep to recognise their names. This custom, however, is still\nretained, as may be seen from a well-known passage in Hartley's\n\"Researches in Greece and the Levant:\"--\n\n\"Having had my attention directed last night to the words in John\nx. 3, I asked my man if it were usual in Greece to give names to\nthe sheep. He informed me that it was, and that the sheep obeyed\nthe shepherd when he called them by their names. This morning I\nhad an opportunity of verifying the truth of this remark. Passing\nby a flock of sheep, I asked the shepherd the same question which\nI had put to the servant, and he gave me the same answer. I then\nbade him call one of his sheep. He did so, and it instantly left\nits pasturage and its companions, and ran up to the hands of the\nshepherd, with signs of pleasure, and with a prompt obedience which\nI had never before observed in any other animal.\n\n\"It is also true that in this country, 'a stranger will they not\nfollow, but will flee from him.' The shepherd told me that many of\nhis sheep were still wild, that they had not learned their names,\nbut that by teaching them they would all learn them.\"\n\nGenerally, the shepherd was either the proprietor of the flock, or\nhad at all events a share in it, of which latter arrangement we find\na well-known example in the bargain which Jacob made with Laban, all\nthe white Sheep belonging to his father-in-law, and all the dark\nand spotted Sheep being his wages as shepherd. Such a man was far\nmore likely to take care of the Sheep than if he were merely a paid\nlabourer; especially in a country where the life of a shepherd was a\nlife of actual danger, and he might at any time be obliged to fight\nagainst armed robbers, or to oppose the wolf, the lion, or the bear.\nThe combat of the shepherd David with the last-mentioned animals has\nalready been noticed.\n\nIn allusion to the continual risks run by the Oriental shepherd, our\nLord makes use of the following well-known words:--\"The thief cometh\nnot but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that\nthey might have life, and have it more abundantly. I am the Good\nShepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he\nthat is an hireling, ... whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf\ncoming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth\nthem, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth because he is an\nhireling, and careth not for the sheep.\"\n\nOwing to the continual moving of the Sheep, the shepherd had very\nhard work during the lambing time, and was obliged to carry in\nhis arms the young lambs which were too feeble to accompany their\nparents, and to keep close to him those Sheep who were expected\nsoon to become mothers. At that time of year the shepherd might\nconstantly be seen at the head of his flock, carrying one or two\nlambs in his arms, accompanied by their mothers.\n\nIn allusion to this fact Isaiah writes: \"His reward is with Him, and\nHis work before Him. He shall feed His flock like a shepherd; He\nshall gather the lambs with His arms and carry them in His bosom,\nand shall gently lead them that are with young\" (or, \"that give\nsuck,\" according to the marginal reading). Here we have presented\nat once before us the good shepherd who is no hireling, but owns\nthe Sheep; and who therefore has \"his reward with him, and his work\nbefore him;\" who bears the tender lambs in his arms, or lays them in\nthe folds of his mantle, and so carries them in his bosom, and leads\nby his side their yet feeble mothers.\n\nFrequent mention is made of the folds in which the Sheep are penned;\nand as these folds differed--and still differ--materially from those\nof our own land, we shall miss the force of several passages of\nScripture if we do not understand their form, and the materials of\nwhich they were built. Our folds consist merely of hurdles, moveable\nat pleasure, and so low that a man can easily jump over them, and so\nfragile that he can easily pull them down. Moreover, the Sheep are\nfrequently enclosed within the fold while they are at pasture.\n\nIf any one should entertain such an idea of the Oriental fold, he\nwould not see the force of the well-known passage in which our\nLord compares the Church to a sheepfold, and Himself to the door.\n\"He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth\nup some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that\nentereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the\nporter openeth, and the sheep hear his voice.... All that ever came\nbefore me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them.\nI am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and\nshall go in and out, and find pasture.\"\n\n[Illustration: ANCIENT SHEEP PEN.]\n\nHad the fold here mentioned been a simple enclosure of hurdles, such\nan image could not have been used. It is evident that the fold to\nwhich allusion was made, and which was probably in sight at the time\nwhen Jesus was disputing with the Pharisees, was a structure of some\npretensions; that it had walls which a thief could only enter by\nclimbing over them--not by \"breaking through\" them, as in the case\nof a mud-walled private house; and that it had a gate, which was\nguarded by a watchman.\n\nIn fact, the fold was a solid and enduring building, made of stone.\nThus in Numbers xxxii. it is related that the tribes of Reuben and\nGad, who had great quantities of Sheep and other cattle, asked for\nthe eastward side of Jordan as a pasture-ground, promising to go\nand fight for the people, but previously to build fortified cities\nfor their families, and folds for their cattle, the folds being\nevidently, like the cities, buildings of an enduring nature.\n\nIn some places the folds are simply rock caverns, partly natural\nand partly artificial, often enlarged by a stone wall built outside\nit. It was the absence of these rock caverns on the east side of\nJordan that compelled the Reubenites and Gadites to build folds\nfor themselves, whereas on the opposite side places of refuge were\ncomparatively abundant.\n\nSee, for example, the well-known history related in 1 Sam.\nxxiii.-xxiv. David and his miscellaneous band of warriors, some six\nhundred in number, were driven out of the cities by the fear of\nSaul, and were obliged to pass their time in the wilderness, living\nin the \"strong holds\" (xxiii. 14, 19), which we find immediately\nafterwards to be rock caves (ver. 25). These caves were of large\nextent, being able to shelter these six hundred warriors, and,\non one memorable occasion, to conceal them so completely as they\nstood along the sides, that Saul, who had just come out of the open\nair, was not able to discern them in the dim light, and David even\nmanaged to approach him unseen, and cut off a portion of his outer\nrobe.\n\nThat this particular cave was a sheepfold we learn from xxiv. 2-4:\n\"Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and\nwent to seek David and his men upon the rocks of the wild goats.\nAnd he came to the sheepcotes by the way.\" Into these strongholds\nthe Sheep are driven towards nightfall, and, as the flocks converge\ntowards their resting-place, the bleatings of the sheep are almost\ndeafening.\n\nThe shepherds as well as their flocks found shelter in these caves,\nmaking them their resting-places while they were living the strange,\nwild, pastoral life among the hills; and at the present day many\nof the smaller caves and \"holes of the rock\" exhibit the vestiges\nof human habitation in the shape of straw, hay, and other dried\nherbage, which has been used for beds, just as we now find the rude\ncouches of the coast-guard men in the cliff caves of our shores.\n\nThe dogs which are attached to the sheepfolds were, as they are\nnow, the faithful servants of man, although, as has already been\nrelated, they are not made the companions of man as is the case with\nourselves. Lean, gaunt, hungry, and treated with but scant kindness,\nthey are yet faithful guardians against the attack of enemies. They\ndo not, as do our sheepdogs, assist in driving the flocks, because\nthe Sheep are not driven, but led, but they are invaluable as\nnocturnal sentries. Crouching together outside the fold, in little\nknots of six or seven together, they detect the approach of wild\nanimals, and at the first sign of the wolf or the jackal they bark\nout a defiance, and scare away the invaders. It is strange that the\nold superstitious idea of their uncleanness should have held its\nground through so many tens of centuries; but, down to the present\nday, the shepherd of Palestine, though making use of the dog as a\nguardian of his flock, treats the animal with utter contempt, not to\nsay cruelty, beating and kicking the faithful creature on the least\nprovocation, and scarcely giving it sufficient food to keep it alive.\n\nSometimes the Sheep are brought up by hand at home. \"House-lamb,\" as\nwe call it, is even now common, and the practice of house-feeding\npeculiar in the old Scriptural times.\n\nWe have an allusion to this custom in the well-known parable of the\nprophet Nathan: \"The poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb,\nwhich he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with\nhim, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of\nhis own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter\"\n(2 Sam. xii. 3). A further, though less distinct, allusion is made\nto this practice in Isaiah vii. 21: \"It shall come to pass in that\nday, that a man shall nourish a young cow, and two sheep.\"\n\nHow the Sheep thus brought up by hand were fattened may be\nconjectured from the following passage in Mr. D. Urquhart's valuable\nwork on the Lebanon:--\n\n\"In the month of June, they buy from the shepherds, when pasturage\nhas become scarce and sheep are cheap, two or three sheep; these\nthey feed by hand. After they have eaten up the old grass and the\nprovender about the doors, they get vine leaves, and, after the\nsilkworms have begun to spin, mulberry leaves. They purchase them on\ntrial, and the test is appetite. If a sheep does not feed well, they\nreturn it after three days. To increase their appetite they wash\nthem twice a day, morning and evening, a care they never bestow on\ntheir own bodies.\n\n[Illustration: THE POOR MAN'S LAMB.]\n\n[Illustration: THE RICH MAN'S FEAST.]\n\n\"If the sheep's appetite does not come up to their standard, they\nuse a little gentle violence, folding for them forced leaf-balls and\nintroducing them into their mouths. The mulberry has the property of\nmaking them fat and tender. At the end of four months the sheep they\nhad bought at eighty piastres will sell for one hundred and forty,\nor will realize one hundred and fifty.\n\n\"The sheep is killed, skinned, and hung up. The fat is then removed;\nthe flesh is cut from the bones, and hung up in the sun. Meanwhile,\nthe fat has been put in a cauldron on the fire, and as soon as it\nhas come to boil, the meat is laid on. The proportion of the fat\nto the lean is as four to ten, eight 'okes' fat and twenty lean. A\nlittle salt is added, it is simmered for an hour, and then placed in\njars for the use of the family during the year.\n\n\"The large joints are separated and used first, as not fit for\nkeeping long. The fat, with a portion of the lean, chopped fine, is\nwhat serves for cooking the 'bourgoul,' and is called _Dehen_. The\nsheep are of the fat-tailed variety, and the tails are the great\ndelicacy.\"\n\nThis last sentence reminds us that there are two breeds of Sheep\nin Palestine. One much resembles the ordinary English Sheep, while\nthe other is a very different animal. It is much taller on its\nlegs, larger-boned, and long-nosed. Only the rams have horns, and\nthey are not twisted spirally like those of our own Sheep, but\ncome backwards, and then curl round so that the point comes under\nthe ear. The great peculiarity of this Sheep is the tail, which\nis simply prodigious in point of size, and is an enormous mass\nof fat. Indeed, the long-legged and otherwise lean animal seems\nto concentrate all its fat in the tail, which, as has been well\nobserved, appears to abstract both flesh and fat from the rest of\nthe body. So great is this strange development, that the tail alone\nwill sometimes weigh one-fifth as much as the entire animal. A\nsimilar breed of Sheep is found in Southern Africa and other parts\nof the world. In some places, the tail grows to such an enormous\nsize that, in order to keep so valuable a part of the animal from\ninjury, it is fastened to a small board, supported by a couple of\nwheels, so that the Sheep literally wheels its own tail in a cart.\n\nFrequent reference to the fat of the tail is made in the Authorized\nVersion of the Scriptures, though in terms which would not be\nunderstood did we not know that the Sheep which is mentioned in\nthose passages is the long-tailed Sheep of Syria. See, for example,\nthe history narrated in Exod. xxix. 22, where special details\nare given as to the ceremony by which Aaron and his sons were\nconsecrated to the priesthood. \"Thou shalt take of the ram the fat\nand the rump, and the fat that covereth the inwards, and the caul\nabove the liver, and the two kidneys, and the fat that is upon them.\"\n\n[Illustration: FLOCKS OF SHEEP BEING TAKEN INTO JERUSALEM.]\n\nThough this particular breed is not very distinctly mentioned in\nthe Bible, the Talmudical writers have many allusions to it. In\nthe Mischna these broad-tailed Sheep are not allowed to leave\ntheir folds on the Sabbath-day, because by wheeling their little\ntail-waggons behind them they would break the Sabbath. The writers\ndescribe the tail very graphically, comparing its shape to that of\na saddle, and saying that it is fat, without bones, heavy and long,\nand looks as if the whole body were continued beyond the hind-legs,\nand thence hung down in place of a tail.\n\nThe Rabbinical writers treat rather fully of the Sheep, and give\nsome very amusing advice respecting their management. If the ewes\ncannot be fattened in the ordinary manner, that end may be achieved\nby tying up the udder so that the milk cannot flow, and the elements\nwhich would have furnished milk are forced to produce fat. If the\nweather should be chilly at the shearing time, and there is danger\nof taking cold after the wool is removed, the shepherd should dip a\nsponge in oil and tie it on the forehead of the newly-shorn animal.\nOr, if he should not have a sponge by him, a woollen rag will do as\nwell. The same potent remedy is also efficacious if the Sheep should\nbe ill in lambing time.\n\nThat the Sheep is liable to the attack of the gadfly, which deposits\nits eggs in the nostrils of the unfortunate animal, was as well\nknown in the ancient as in modern times. It is scarcely necessary\nto mention that the insect in question is the _AEstrus ovis_.\nInstinctively aware of the presence of this insidious and dreaded\nenemy, which, though so apparently insignificant, is as formidable\na foe as any of the beasts of prey, the Sheep display the greatest\nterror at the sharp, menacing sound produced by the gadfly's wings\nas the insect sweeps through the air towards its destination. They\ncongregate together, placing their heads almost in contact with each\nother, snort and paw the ground in their terror, and use all means\nin their power to prevent the fly from accomplishing its purpose.\n\nWhen a gadfly succeeds in attaining its aim, it rapidly deposits an\negg or two in the nostril, and then leaves them. The tiny eggs are\nsoon hatched by the natural heat of the animal, and the young larvae\ncrawl up the nostril towards the frontal sinus. There they remain\nuntil they are full-grown, when they crawl through the nostrils,\nfall on the ground, burrow therein, and in the earth undergo their\nchanges into the pupal and perfect stages.\n\nIt need hardly be said that an intelligent shepherd would devote\nhimself to the task of killing every gadfly which he could find,\nand, as these insects are fond of basking on sunny rocks or\ntree-trunks, this is no very difficult matter.\n\nThe Rabbinical writers, however, being totally ignorant of practical\nentomology, do not seem to have recognised the insect until it had\nreached its full larval growth. They say that the rams manage to\nshake the grubs out of their nostrils by butting at one another\nin mimic warfare, and that the ewes, which are hornless, and are\ntherefore incapable of relieving themselves by such means, ought\nto be supplied with plants which will make them sneeze, so that\nthey may shake out the grubs by the convulsive jerkings of the head\ncaused by inhaling the irritating substance.\n\nThe same writers also recommend that the rams should be furnished\nwith strong leathern collars.\n\nWhen the flock is on the march, the rams always go in the van,\nand, being instinctively afraid of their ancient enemy the wolf,\nthey continually raise their heads and look about them. This line\nof conduct irritates the wolves, who attack the foremost rams and\nseize them by the throat. If, therefore, a piece of stout leather be\nfastened round the ram's neck, the wolf is baffled, and runs off in\nsullen despair.\n\nGenerally, the oldest ram is distinguished by a bell, and, when\nthe flock moves over the hilly <DW72>s, the Sheep walk in file\nafter the leader, making narrow paths, which are very distinct\nfrom a distance, but are scarcely perceptible when the foot of the\ntraveller is actually upon them. From this habit has arisen an\nancient proverb, \"As the sheep after the sheep, so the daughter\nafter the mother,\" a saying which is another form of our own\nfamiliar proverb, \"What is bred in the bone will not come out of the\nflesh.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe now come to the Sheep considered with reference to its uses.\nFirst and foremost the Sheep was, and still is, one of the chief\nmeans of subsistence, being to the pastoral inhabitants of Palestine\nwhat the oxen are to the pastoral inhabitants of Southern Africa.\n\nTo ordinary persons the flesh of the Sheep was a seldom-tasted\nluxury; great men might eat it habitually, \"faring sumptuously every\nday,\" and we find that, among the glories of Solomon's reign, the\nsacred chronicler has thought it worth while to mention that part of\nthe daily provision for his household included one hundred Sheep. No\nparticular pains seem to have been taken about the cooking of the\nanimal, which seems generally to have been boiled. As, however, in\nsuch a climate the flesh could not be kept for the purpose of making\nit tender, as is the case in this part of the world, it was cooked\nas soon as the animal was killed, the fibres not having time to\nsettle into the rigidity of death.\n\nGenerally, when ordinary people had the opportunity of tasting the\nflesh of the Sheep, it was on the occasion of some rejoicing,--such,\nfor example, as a marriage feast, or the advent of a guest, for\nwhom a lamb or a kid was slain and cooked on the spot, a young male\nlamb being almost invariably chosen as less injurious than the ewe\nto the future prospects of the flock. Roasting over a fire was\nsometimes adopted, as was baking in an oven sunk in the ground, a\nremarkable instance of which we shall see when we come to the Jewish\nsacrifices. Boiling, however, was the principal mode; so much so,\nindeed, that the Hebrew word which signifies boiling is used to\nsignify any kind of cooking, even when the meat was roasted.\n\nThe process of cooking and eating the Sheep was as follows.\n\nThe animal having been killed according to the legal form, the skin\nwas stripped off, and the body separated joint from joint, the right\nshoulder being first removed. This, it will be remembered, was the\npriest's portion; see Lev. vii. 32: \"The right shoulder shall ye\ngive unto the priest for an heave offering of the sacrifices of your\npeace offerings.\" The whole of the flesh was then separated from the\nbones, and chopped small, and even the bones themselves broken up,\nso that the marrow might not be lost.\n\nA reference to this custom is found in Micah iii. 2, 3, \"Who pluck\noff their skin from off them, and their flesh from off their bones;\nwho also eat the flesh of my people ... and they break their bones,\nand chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the\ncaldron.\" The reader will now understand more fully the force of\nthe prophecy, \"He keepeth all His bones: not one of them is broken\"\n(Psa. xxxiv. 20).\n\nThe mixed mass of bones and flesh was then put into the caldron,\nwhich was generally filled with water, but sometimes with milk, as\nis the custom with the Bedouins of the present day, whose manners\nare in many respects identical with those of the early Jews. It has\nbeen thought by some commentators that the injunction not to \"seethe\na kid in his mothers milk\" (Deut. xiv. 21) referred to this custom.\nI believe, however, that the expression \"in his mother's milk\" does\nnot signify that the flesh of the kid might not be boiled in its\nmother's milk, but that a kid might not be taken which was still in\nits mother's milk, _i.e._ unweaned.\n\nSalt and spices were generally added to it; see Ezek. xxiv. 10:\n\"Heap on wood, kindle the fire, consume the flesh, and spice it\nwell.\" The surface was carefully skimmed, and, when the meat was\nthoroughly cooked, it and the broth were served up separately. The\nlatter was used as a sort of sauce, into which unleavened bread was\ndipped. So in Judges vi. 19 we read that when Gideon was visited by\nthe angel, according to the hospitable custom of the land, he \"made\nready a kid, and unleavened cakes of an ephah of flour: the flesh he\nput in a basket, and he put the broth in a pot, and brought it out\nunto him under the oak, and presented it to him.\"\n\nValuable, however, as was the Sheep for this purpose, there has\nalways existed a great reluctance to kill the animal, the very sight\nof the flocks being an intense gratification to a pastoral Oriental.\nThe principal part of the food supplied by the Sheep was, and is\nstill, the milk; which afforded abundant food without thinning the\nnumber of the flock. As all know who have tasted it, the milk of the\nSheep is peculiarly rich, and in the East is valued much more highly\nthan that of cattle. The milk was seldom drunk in a fresh state, as\nis usually the case with ourselves, but was suffered to become sour,\ncurdled, and semi-solid.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe now come to a portion of the Sheep scarcely less important than\nthe flesh and the milk, _i.e._ the fleece, or wool.\n\nIn the ancient times nearly the whole of the clothing was made of\nwool, especially the most valuable part of it, namely the large\nmantle, or \"haick,\" in which the whole person could be folded, and\nwhich was the usual covering during sleep. The wool, therefore,\nwould be an article of great national value; and so we find that\nwhen the king of Moab paid his tribute in kind to the king of\nIsrael, it was carefully specified that the Sheep should not be\nshorn. \"And Mesha king of Moab was a sheep-master, and rendered\nunto the king of Israel an hundred thousand lambs, and an hundred\nthousand rams, with the wool.\"\n\nThe wool of the Sheep of Palestine differed extremely in value; some\nkinds being coarse and rough, while others were fine.\n\nThe wool was dressed in those times much as it is at present, being\ncarded and then spun with the spindle, the distaff being apparently\nunused, and the wool simply drawn out by the hand. The shape of the\nspindle was much like that of the well-known flat spinning-tops that\ncome from Japan--namely, a disc through which passes an axle. A\nsmart twirl given by the fingers to the axle makes the disc revolve\nvery rapidly, and its weight causes the rotation to continue for a\nconsiderable time. Spinning the wool was exclusively the task of the\nwomen, a custom which prevailed in this country up to a very recent\ntime, and which still traditionally survives in the term \"spinster,\"\nand in the metaphorical use of the word \"distaff\" as synonymous with\na woman's proper work.\n\nWhen spun into threads, the wool was woven in the simple loom\nwhich has existed up to our own day, and which is identical in its\ngeneral principles throughout a very large portion of the world. It\nconsisted of a framework of wood, at one end of which was placed the\n\"beam\" to which the warp was attached; and at the other end was the\n\"pin\" on which the cloth was rolled as it was finished.\n\nThe reader may remember that when Delilah was cajoling Samson to\ntell her the secret of his strength, he said, \"If thou weavest the\nseven locks of my head with the web.\" So, as he slept, she interwove\nhis long hair with the fabric which was on her loom, and, to make\nsure, \"fastened it with the pin,\" _i.e._ wove it completely into the\ncloth which was rolled round the pin. So firmly had she done so,\nthat when he awoke he could not disentangle his hair, but left the\nhouse with the whole of the loom, the beam and the pin, and the web\nhanging to his head.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWool was often dyed of various colours; blue, purple, and scarlet\nbeing those which were generally employed. The rams' skins which\nformed part of the covering of the Tabernacle were ordered to be\ndyed scarlet, partly on account of the significance of the colour,\nand partly because none but the best and purest fleeces would be\nchosen for so rare and costly a dye. How the colour was produced we\nshall learn towards the end of the volume.\n\nSheep-shearing was always a time of great rejoicing and revelry,\nwhich seem often to have been carried beyond the bounds of\nsobriety. Thus when Nabal had gathered together his three thousand\nSheep in Carmel, and held a shearing festival, David sent to ask for\nsome provisions for his band, and was refused in accordance with\nthe disposition of the man, who had inflamed his naturally churlish\nnature with wine. \"He held a feast in his house, like the feast of\na king: and Nabal's heart was merry within him, for he was very\ndrunken\" (1 Sam. xxv. 36).\n\nThe same was probably the case when Laban was shearing his Sheep\n(Gen. xxxi. 19). Otherwise it would scarcely have been possible for\nJacob to have gone away unknown to Laban, taking with him his wives\nand children, his servants, his camels, and his flocks, the rapid\nincrease of which had excited the jealousy of his uncle, and which\nwere so numerous that, in fear of his brother Esau, he divided them\ninto two bands, and yet was able to select from them a present to\nhis brother, consisting in all of nearly six hundred sheep, camels,\noxen, goats, and asses.\n\nSometimes the shepherds and others who lived in pastoral districts\nmade themselves coats of the skins of the Sheep, with the wool still\nadhering to it. The custom extends to the present day, and even\nin many parts of Europe the sheep-skin dress of the shepherds is\na familiar sight to the traveller. The skin was sometimes tanned\nand used as leather, but was considered as inferior to that of the\ngoat. Mr. Tristram conjectures that the leathern \"girdle\" worn by\nSt. John the Baptist was probably the untanned sheep-skin coat which\nhas been just mentioned. So it is said of the early Christians, that\n\"they wandered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins, being destitute,\nafflicted, tormented,\" the sheep-skins in question being evidently\nthe rude shepherd's coats.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe horn of the ram had a national value, as from it were made the\nsacred trumpets which played so important a part in the history of\nthe Jewish nation. There is no doubt that the primitive trumpets\nwere originally formed either from the horn of an animal, such as\nthe ox, the large-horned antelopes, the sheep, and the goat, and\nthat in process of time they were made of metal, generally copper or\nsilver.\n\nReferences are frequently made in the Bible to these trumpets, for\nwhich there were different names, probably on account of their\ndifferent forms. These names are, however, very loosely rendered in\nour version, the same word being sometimes translated the \"cornet,\"\nand sometimes the \"trumpet.\"\n\n[Illustration: SOUNDING THE TRUMPETS IN THE YEAR OF JUBILEE.]\n\nThe jubilee year was always ushered in by the blasts of the sacred\ntrumpets. \"Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound\non the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall\nye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land\" (Lev. xxv. 9).\nThen there was the festival known as the Feast of Trumpets. \"In the\nseventh month, on the first day of the month, ye shall have an holy\nconvocation; ye shall do no servile work: it is a day of blowing the\ntrumpets unto you\" (Numb. xxix. 1).\n\nOne of these trumpets is now before me, and is shown in the\naccompanying illustration.\n\nIn length it measures eighteen inches, _i.e._ a cubit, and it is\nformed entirely in one piece. As far as I can judge, it is made from\nthe left horn of the broad-tailed Sheep, which, as has already been\nremarked, is not spiral, but flattish, curved backwards, and forming\nnearly a circle, the point passing under the ear. This structure,\nadded to the large size of the horn, adapts it well for its purpose.\nIn order to bring it to the proper shape, the horn is softened by\nheat, and is then modelled into the very form which was used by the\nJewish priests who blew the trumpet before the ark.\n\n[Illustration: RAM'S HORN TRUMPET.]\n\nAt the present day one such trumpet, at least, is found in every\nJewish community, and is kept by the man who has the privilege of\nblowing it.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe now come to the important subject, the use of the Sheep in\nsacrifice.\n\nNo animal was used so frequently for this purpose as the Sheep, and\nin many passages of the Mosaic law are specified the precise age as\nwell as the sex of the Sheep which was to be sacrificed in certain\ncircumstances. Sometimes the Sheep was sacrificed as an offering\nof thanksgiving, sometimes as an expiation for sin, and sometimes\nas a redemption for some more valuable animal. The young male lamb\nwas the usual sacrifice; and almost the only sacrifice for which a\nSheep might not be offered was that of the two goats on the great\nDay of Atonement.\n\n[Illustration: A LAMB UPON THE ALTAR OF BURNT OFFERING.]\n\nTo mention all the passages in which the Sheep is ordered for\nsacrifice would occupy too much of our space, and we will therefore\nrestrict ourselves to the one central rite of the Jewish nation, the\nsacrifice of the Paschal lamb, the precursor of the Lamb of God, who\ntaketh away the sins of the world.\n\nWithout examining in full the various ceremonies of the Paschal\nsacrifice, we will glance over the salient points which distinguish\nit from any other sacrifice.\n\nThe lamb must be a male, which is selected and examined with the\nminutest care, that it may be free from all blemish, and must be of\nthe first year. It must be killed on the fourteenth of the month\nAbib as the sun is setting, and the blood must be sprinkled with\nhyssop. In the first or Egyptian Passover the blood was sprinkled\non the lintels and doorposts of the houses, but afterwards on the\naltar. It must be roasted with fire, and not boiled, after the usual\ncustom in the East; not a bone must be broken. It must be eaten by\nthe household in haste, as if they were just starting on a journey,\nand if any of it should be left, it must be consumed in the fire,\nand not eaten on the following day.\n\nSuch are the chief points in connexion with the Paschal rite, at\nonce a sacrifice and a feast. The original directions not being\nsufficiently minute to meet all the practical difficulties which\nmight hinder the correct performance of the rite, a vast number\nof directions are given by the Rabbinical writers. In order, for\nexample, to guard against the destruction of any part of the animal\nby careless cooking over a fire, or the possible fracture of a bone\nby a sudden jet of flame, the Paschal lamb was rather baked than\nroasted, being placed in an earthen oven from which the ashes had\nbeen removed. In order to prevent it from being burned or blackened\nagainst the sides of the oven, (in which case it would be cooked\nwith earthenware and not with fire), it was transfixed with a wooden\nstake, made from the pomegranate-tree, and a transverse spit was\nthrust through the shoulders. These spits were made of wood, because\na metal spit would become heated in the oven, and would cause all\nthe flesh which it touched to be roasted with metal, and not with\nfire; and the wood of the pomegranate was chosen, because that wood\nwas supposed not to emit any sap when heated. If a drop of water had\nfallen on the flesh, the law would have been broken, as that part of\nthe flesh would be considered as boiled, and not roasted.\n\nAs to the eating of unleavened bread and bitter herbs with the lamb,\nthe custom does not bear on the present subject. In shape the oven\nseems to have resembled a straw beehive, having an opening at the\nside by which the fuel could be removed and the lamb inserted.\n\nThe ceremony of the Passover has been described by several persons,\nsuch as the late Consul Rogers and the Dean of Westminster, the\nlatter of whom has given, a most striking and vivid account of the\nrite in his \"Lectures on the Jewish Church.\"\n\nThe place which is now employed in the celebration of this rite\nis a level spot about two hundred yards from the summit of the\nmountain, a place which is apparently selected on account of its\ncomparative quiet and seclusion. Dean Stanley thinks that in former\ntimes, when the Samaritans were the masters of the country, they\ncelebrated the sacrifice on the sacred plateau on the very summit of\nthe mountain, so that the rite could be seen for a vast distance on\nevery side. Now, however, the less conspicuous place is preferred.\nBy the kindness of the Palestine Exploration Society, I am enabled\nto present the reader with a view of this sacred spot, taken from\na photograph made an hour or two before the time of sacrifice.\nThe rough, rugged character of the mountain is shown by this\nillustration, though not so well as in several other photographs of\nGerizim, in which the entire surface seems to be loosely covered\nwith stones like those of which the low wall is built. Near the\ncentre of the illustration may be seen a pile of sticks and the tops\nof two caldrons, on each of which a stone is laid to keep the cover\nfrom being blown off by the wind. These sticks nearly fill a trench\nin which the caldrons are sunk, and their use will be presently seen\non reading Dean Stanley's narrative. In the far distance are the\nplains of Samaria, and the long-drawn shadows of the priest and his\nnephew, and probable successor, show that the time of sacrifice is\nrapidly approaching.\n\n[Illustration: THE PLACE OF SACRIFICE.]\n\nOn the previous day the whole of the community had pitched their\ntents on the mountain, and as the time of sunset approached the\nwomen retired to the tents, and all the males, except those who were\nunclean according to the provisions of the Mosaic law, assembled\nnear a long deep trench that had been dug in the ground. The men\nare clothed in long white garments, and the six young men who are\nselected as the actual sacrifices are dressed in white drawers and\nshirts. These youths are trained to the duty, but whether they hold\nany sacred office could not be ascertained.\n\nThen, according to the narrative of Dean Stanley, \"the priest,\nascending a large rough stone in front of the congregation, recited\nin a loud chant or scream, in which the others joined, prayers or\npraises chiefly turning on the glories of Abraham and Isaac. Their\nattitude was that of all Orientals in prayer; standing, occasionally\ndiversified by the stretching out of the hands, and more rarely by\nkneeling or crouching, with their knees wrapped in their clothes and\nbent to the ground, towards the Holy Place on the summit of Gerizim.\nThe priest recited his prayers by heart; the others had mostly books\nin Hebrew and Arabic.\n\n\"Presently, suddenly there appeared amongst the worshippers six\nsheep, driven up by the side of the youths before mentioned. The\nunconscious innocence with which they wandered to and fro amongst\nthe bystanders, and the simplicity in aspect and manner of the young\nmen who tended them, more recalled a pastoral scene in Arcadia, or\none of those inimitable patriarchal _tableaux_ represented in the\nAmmergau Mystery, than a religious ceremonial.\n\n\"The sun, meanwhile, which had hitherto burnished up the\nMediterranean in the distance, now sank very nearly to the farthest\nwestern ridge overhanging the plain of Sharon. The recitation became\nmore vehement. The priest turned about, facing his brethren, and\nthe whole history of the Exodus from the beginning of the plagues\nof Egypt was rapidly, almost furiously, chanted. The sheep, still\ninnocently playful, were driven more closely together.\n\n\"The setting sun now touched the ridge. The youths burst into a\nwild murmur of their own, drew forth their long bright knives, and\nbrandished them aloft. In a moment the sheep were thrown on their\nbacks, and the flashing knives rapidly drawn across their throats.\nThen a few convulsive but silent struggles--'as a sheep ... dumb ...\nthat openeth not his mouth,'--and the six forms lay lifeless on the\nground, the blood streaming from them; the one only Jewish sacrifice\nlingering in the world. In the blood the young men dipped their\nfingers, and a small spot was marked on the foreheads and noses of\nthe children. A few years ago the red stain was placed on all. But\nthis had now dwindled away into the present practice, preserved,\nwe were told, as a relic or emblem of the whole. Then, as if in\ncongratulation at the completion of the ceremony, they all kissed\neach other, in the Oriental fashion, on each side of the head.\n\n\"The next process was that of the fleecing and roasting of the\nslaughtered animals, for which the ancient temple furnished such\nample provisions. Two holes on the mountain side had been dug;\none at some distance, of considerable depth, the other, close to\nthe scene of the sacrifice, comparatively shallow. In this latter\ncavity, after a short prayer, a fire was kindled, out of the mass of\ndry heath, juniper, and briers, such as furnished the materials for\nthe conflagration in Jotham's parable, delivered not far from this\nspot.\n\n\"Over the fire were placed two caldrons full of water. Whilst the\nwater boiled, the congregation again stood around, and (as if for\neconomy of time) continued the recitation of the Book of Exodus,\nand bitter herbs were handed round wrapped in a strip of unleavened\nbread--'with unleavened bread and bitter herbs shall they eat\nit.' Then was chanted another short prayer; after which the six\nyouths again appeared, poured the boiling water over the sheep, and\nplucked off their fleeces. The right forelegs of the sheep, with the\nentrails, were thrown aside and burnt. The liver was carefully put\nback. Long poles were brought, on which the animals were spitted;\nnear the bottom of each pole was a transverse peg or stick, to\nprevent the body from slipping off.\"\n\nThis cross-piece does not, however, penetrate the body, which in\nmost cases scarcely touches it, so that there is little or no\nresemblance to a crucifixion. The writer lays especial stress on\nthis point, because the early Christians saw in the transverse spit\nan emblem of the cross. In the Jewish Passover this emblem would\nhave been more appropriate, as in that ceremony the cross-piece was\npassed through the shoulders, and the forefeet tied to it.\n\nThe Sheep being now prepared, they were carried to the oven, which\non this occasion was a deep, circular pit, in which a fire had been\npreviously kindled. Into this the victims were carefully lowered,\nthe stakes on which they were impaled guarding their bodies from\ntouching the sides of the oven, and the cross-piece at the end\npreventing them from slipping off the stake to the bottom of the pit\namong the ashes. A hurdle was then laid on the mouth of the pit,\nand wet earth was heaped upon it so as to close it completely. The\ngreater part of the community then retired to rest. In about five\nhours, the Paschal moon being high in the heavens, announcement\nwas made that the feast was about to begin. Then, to resume Dean\nStanley's narrative,\n\n\"Suddenly the covering of the hole was torn off, and up rose into\nthe still moonlit sky a vast column of smoke and steam; recalling,\nwith a shock of surprise, that, even by an accidental coincidence,\nReginald Heber should have so well caught this striking feature of\nso remote and unknown a ritual:\n\n  'Smokes on Gerizim's mount Samaria's sacrifice.'\n\n\"Out of the pit were dragged successively the six sheep, on their\nlong spits, black from the oven. The outlines of their heads, their\nears, their legs, were still visible--'his head, with his legs, and\nwith the inward parts thereof.' They were hoisted aloft, and then\nthrown on large square brown mats, previously prepared for their\nreception, on which we were carefully prevented from treading, as\nalso from touching even the extremities of the spit.\n\n\"The bodies thus wrapped in the mats were hurried down to the trench\nwhere the sacrifice had taken place, and laid out upon them in a\nline between two files of the Samaritans. Those who had before been\ndressed in white robes still retained them, with the addition now\nof shoes on their feet and staves in their hands, and ropes round\ntheir waists--'thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your\nshoes on your feet, your staff in your hand.' The recitation of\nprayers or of the Pentateuch recommenced, and continued till it\nsuddenly terminated in their all sitting down on their haunches,\nafter the Arab fashion at meals, and beginning to eat. This, too,\nis a deviation from the practice of only a few years since, when\nthey retained the Mosaic ritual of standing whilst they ate. The\nactual feast was conducted in rapid silence, as of men in hunger, as\nno doubt most of them were, and so as soon to consume every portion\nof the blackened masses, which they tore away piecemeal with their\nfingers--'ye shall eat in haste.' There was a general merriment, as\nof a hearty and welcome meal.\n\n\"In ten minutes all was gone but a few remnants. To the priest and\nto the women, who, all but two (probably his two wives), remained\nin the tents, separate morsels were carried round. The remnants\nwere gathered into the mats, and put on a wooden grate, or hurdle,\nover the hole where the water had been originally boiled; the fire\nwas again lit, and a huge bonfire was kindled. By its blaze, and by\ncandles lighted for the purpose, the ground was searched in every\ndirection, as for the consecrated particles of sacramental elements;\nand these fragments of flesh and bone were thrown upon the burning\nmass--'ye shall let nothing remain until the morning; and that which\nremaineth until the morning ye shall burn with fire;' 'there shall\nnot anything of the flesh which thou sacrificest the first day at\neven remain all night until the morning;' 'thou shalt not carry\nforth aught of the flesh abroad out of the house.' The flames blazed\nup once more, and then gradually sank away.\n\n[Illustration: sheep]\n\n\"Perhaps in another century the fire on Mount Gerizim will be the\nonly relic left of this most interesting and ancient rite.\"\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: chamois]\n\n\n\n\nTHE CHAMOIS.\n\n     The Zemer or Chamois only once mentioned in the\n     Bible--Signification of the word Zemer--Probability that the\n     Zemer is the Aoudad--Its strength and activity--The Mouflon\n     probably classed with the Aoudad under the name of Zemer.\n\n\nAmong the animals which may be used for food is mentioned one which\nin our version is rendered Chamois. See Deut. xiv. 5, a passage\nwhich has several times been quoted.\n\nIt is evident to any one acquainted with zoology that, whatever\nmay be the Hebrew word, \"Chamois\" cannot be the correct rendering,\ninasmuch as this animal does not inhabit Palestine, nor are there\nany proofs that it ever did so. The Chamois frequents the lofty\ninaccessible crags of the highest mountains, finding its food in the\nscanty herbage which grows in such regions, appearing on the brink\nof awful precipices, and leaping from ledge to ledge with ease and\nsafety. We must, therefore, look for some other animal.\n\nThe Chamois is one of the most wary of Antelopes, and possesses the\npower of scenting mankind at what would seem to be an impossible\ndistance.\n\nIts ears are as acute as its nostrils, so that there are few animals\nwhich are so difficult to approach.\n\nOnly those who have been trained to climb the giddy heights of the\nAlpine Mountains, to traverse the most fearful precipices with a\nquiet pulse and steady head, to exist for days amid the terrible\nsolitudes of ice, rock, and snow,--only these, can hope to come\nwithin sight of the Chamois, when the animal is at large upon its\nnative cliffs.\n\nThe Hebrew word, which has been rendered Chamois, is Zamar, or\nZemer, _i. e._ the leaper, and therefore an animal which is\nconspicuous for its agility. Zoologists have now agreed in the\nopinion that the Zamer of Deuteronomy is the handsome wild sheep\nwhich we know under the name of Aoudad (_Ammotragus Tragelaphus_).\nThis splendid sheep is known by various names. It is the Jaela of\nsome authors, and the Bearded Sheep of others. It is also called the\nFichtall, or Lerwea; and the French zoologists describe it under the\nname of _Mouflon a manchettes_, in allusion to the fringe of long\nhair that ornaments the fore limbs.\n\nThe Aoudad is a large and powerful animal, exceedingly active,\nand has the habits of the goat rather than of the sheep, on which\naccount it is reckoned among the goats by the Arabs of the present\nday, and doubtless was similarly classed by the ancient inhabitants\nof Palestine. The height of the adult Aoudad is about three feet,\nand its general colour is pale dun, relieved by the dark masses of\nlong hair that fall from the neck and the tufts of similar hair\nwhich decorate the knees of the male. The female is also bearded and\ntufted, but the hair, which in the male looks like the mane of the\nlion, in the female is but slightly developed.\n\nIt is so powerful and active an animal, that an adult male which\nlived for some time in the Zoological Gardens was much dreaded\nby the keepers, not even the man who fed it liking to enter the\nenclosure if he could help himself. The animal was given to making\nunexpected charges, and would do so with astonishing quickness,\nspringing round and leaping at the object of his hate with\ntremendous force, and with such rapidity that even the experienced\nkeeper, who knew all the ways of the animals under his charge, had\noften some difficulty in slipping behind the door, against which the\nhorns of the Aoudad would clatter as if they would break the door to\npieces. So fond was he of attacking something that he would often\nbutt repeatedly at the wooden side of the shed, hurling himself\nagainst it with eager fury.\n\n[Illustration: CHAMOIS DEFENDING ITS YOUNG.]\n\n[Illustration: CHASING THE AOUDAD.]\n\nThe horns of the Aoudad are about two feet in length, and are of\nconsiderable diameter. They curve boldly and gracefully backwards,\ntheir points diverging considerably from each other, so that when\nthe animal throws its head up, the points of the horns come on\neither side of the back. This divergence of the horns has another\nobject. They cover a considerable space, so that when the animal\nmakes its charge the object of its anger has much more difficulty in\nescaping the blow than if the horns were closer together.\n\nWhether these horns were used as musical instruments is doubtful,\nsimply because we are not absolutely sure that the Zamar and the\nAoudad are identical, however great may be the probability. But\ninasmuch as the horn-trumpets were evidently of various sizes, it\nis certain that the Jewish musicians would never have neglected to\ntake advantage of such magnificent materials as they would obtain\nfrom the horns of this animal. Perhaps the Chaldaic \"keren\" may have\nbeen the horn of the Aoudad, or of the animal which will next be\nmentioned.\n\nThe Aoudad is wonderfully active, and even the young ones bound to\nan astonishing height. I have seen the marks of their hoofs eight\nfeet from the ground.\n\nIn its wild state the Aoudad lives in little flocks or herds,\nand prefers the high and rocky ground, over which it leaps with\na sure-footed agility equal to that of the Chamois itself. These\nflocks are chased by hunters, who try to get it upon the lowest and\nleast broken ground, where it is at a disadvantage, and then run it\ndown with their horses, as seen in the illustration on page 214.\n\nThe Aoudad was formerly plentiful in Egypt, and even now is\nfound along the Atlas mountain-range. It is seen on the Egyptian\nmonuments, and, owing to its evident profusion, we have every reason\nto conjecture that it was one of those animals which were specially\nindicated as chewing the cud and cleaving the hoof.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nPerhaps the MOUFLON (_Caprovis Musimon_) may be the animal which is\nmeant by the Hebrew word Zamar, and it is not unlikely that both\nanimals may have been included in one name.\n\nThis animal, which is nearly allied to the Aoudad, is also very\ngoatlike in general aspect. It is indeed to this resemblance that\nthe name Caprovis, or goat-sheep, has been given to it. The name\nAmmotragus, which, as mentioned above, belongs to the Aoudad, has a\nsimilar signification.\n\nThe horns of the Mouflon belong only to the male animal, and are\nof enormous size, so that if trumpets of deep tone and great power\nwere needed, they could be obtained from the horns of this animal.\nThose of the Aoudad are very large, and would be well adapted for\nthe same purpose, but they would not furnish such instruments as\nthe horns of the Mouflon, which are so large that they seem almost\nunwieldy for an animal of twice the Mouflon's size, and give visible\nproofs of the strength and agility of an animal which can carry them\nso lightly and leap about under their weight so easily as does the\nMouflon.\n\n[Illustration: THE MOUFLON.]\n\nAt the present time the Mouflon is only to be found in Crete,\nSardinia, and Corsica, but formerly it was known to inhabit many\nother parts of the earth, and was almost certainly one of the many\nanimals which then haunted the Lebanon, but which have in later days\nbeen extirpated.\n\n\n\n\nTHE GOAT.\n\n     Value of the Goat--Its use in furnishing food--The male kid the\n     usual animal of slaughter--Excellence of the flesh and deception\n     of Isaac--Milk of the Goat--An Oriental milking scene--The hair\n     of the goat, and the uses to which it is put--The Goat's skin\n     used for leather--The \"bottle\" of Scripture--Mode of making\n     and repairing the bottles--Ruse of the Gibeonites--The \"bottle\n     in the smoke\"--The sacks and the kneading troughs--The Goat as\n     used for sacrifice--General habits of the Goat--Separation of\n     the Goats from the sheep--Performing Goats--Different breeds of\n     Goats in Palestine.\n\n\nWhether considered in reference to food, to clothing, or to\nsacrifice, the GOAT was scarcely a less important animal than the\nsheep. It was especially valuable in such a country as Palestine,\nin which the soil and the climate vary so much according to the\nlocality. Upon the large fertile plains the sheep are bred in vast\nflocks, the rich and succulent grass being exactly to their taste;\nwhile in the hilly and craggy districts the Goats abound, and\ndelight in browsing upon the scanty herbage that grows upon the\nmountain-side.\n\nFor food the Goat was even more extensively used than the sheep.\nThe adult male was, of course, not eaten, being very tough, and\nhaving an odour which would repel any but an actually starving man.\nNeither were the females generally eaten, as they were needed for\nthe future increase of the flocks. The young male kid formed the\nprincipal material of a feast, and as soon as a stranger claimed the\nhospitality of a man in good circumstances, the first thing that was\ndone was to take a young male kid and dress it for him.\n\nFor example, when the angel visited Gideon in the guise of a\nstranger, Gideon \"went in and made ready a kid, and unleavened cakes\nof an ephah of flour,\" and brought them to his guest (Judges vi.\n19). And when Isaac was on his death-bed and asked Esau to take\nhis bow and arrows and hunt for \"venison,\" which was probably the\nflesh of one of the antelopes which have already been mentioned, a\nready substitute was found in the two kids, from whose flesh Rebekah\nmade the dish for which he longed. The imposition might easily\npass without detection, because the flesh of the kid is peculiarly\ntender, and can scarcely be distinguished from lamb, even when\nsimply roasted. Isaac, therefore, with his senses dulled by his\ngreat age, was the less likely to discover the imposture, when the\nflesh of the kids was stewed into \"savoury meat such as he loved.\"\n\n[Illustration: JACOB DECEIVES HIS FATHER AND TAKES ESAU'S BLESSING.]\n\nA curious illustration of the prevalence of kid's flesh as food is\ngiven in the parable of the prodigal son, for whom his father had\nkilled the fatted calf. \"And he answering said to his father, Lo,\nthese many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any\ntime thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I\nmight make merry with my friends\" (Luke xv. 29). The force of the\nreproval cannot be properly understood unless we are acquainted with\nthe customs of the East. The kid was the least valuable animal that\ncould have been given, less valuable than a lamb, and infinitely\ninferior to the fatted calf, which was kept in wealthy households\nfor some feast of more than ordinary magnificence.\n\nThe kid was cooked exactly in the same manner as the sheep, namely,\nby cutting to pieces and stewing in a caldron, the meat and broth\nbeing served separately. See, for example, the case of Gideon, to\nwhom a reference has already been made. When he brought the banquet\nto his guest, \"the flesh he put in a basket, and he put the broth\nin a pot, and brought it out unto him under the oak, and presented\nit. And the angel of God said unto him, Take the flesh and the\nunleavened cakes, and lay them upon this rock, and pour out the\nbroth.\"\n\n[Illustration: THE ANGEL APPEARS TO GIDEON.]\n\nGideon did so, and the angel reached forth the staff that was in his\nhand, and touched the flesh, and there rose up fire out of the rock\nand burnt up the offering.\n\nThe same custom exists at the present day. When an Arab chief\nreceives a guest, a kid is immediately killed and given to the\nwomen to be cooked, and the guest is pressed to stay until it is\nready, in the very words used by Gideon three thousand years ago.\n\"Depart not hence, I pray thee, until I come unto thee, and bring\nforth my present, and set it before thee.\" The refusal of proffered\nhospitality would be, and still is considered to be, either a\nstudied insult, or a proof of bad manners, and no one with any\nclaims to breeding would commit such an action without urgent cause\nand much apology.\n\nLike the sheep, the Goat is extremely valuable as a milk-producer,\nand at the present day the milk of the Goat is used as largely as\nthat of the sheep. \"At Rasheiya, under Mount Hermon,\" writes Mr.\nTristram, \"we saw some hundreds of goats gathering for the night\nin the wide open market-place beneath the castle. It was no easy\nmatter to thread our way among them, as they had no idea of moving\nfor such belated intruders on their rest. All the she-goats of the\nneighbouring hills are driven in every evening, and remain for\ntheir morning's milking, after which they set forth on their day's\nexcursion.\n\n\"Each house possesses several, and all know their owners. The\nevening milking is a picturesque scene. Every street and open space\nis filled with the goats; and women, boys, and girls are everywhere\nmilking with their small pewter pots, while the goats are anxiously\nawaiting their turn, or lying down to chew the cud as soon as it\nis over. As no kids or he-goats are admitted, the scene is very\norderly, and there is none of the deafening bleating which usually\ncharacterises large flocks.\n\n\"These mountain goats are a solemn set, and by the gravity of their\ndemeanour excite a suspicion that they have had no youth, and never\nwere kids. They need no herdsman to bring them home in the evening,\nfor, fully sensible of the danger of remaining unprotected, they\nhurry homewards of their own accord as soon as the sun begins to\ndecline.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nLike the wool of the sheep, the hair of the Goat is used for the\nmanufacture of clothing; and, as is the case with wool, its quality\ndiffers according to the particular breed of the animal, which\nassumes almost as many varieties as the sheep or the dog. The hair\nof some varieties is thick and rough, and can only be made into\ncoarse cloths, while others, of which the mohair Goat and Cashmere\nGoat are familiar examples, furnish a staple of surpassing delicacy\nand fineness. It is most likely that the covering and curtains of\nthe Tabernacle mentioned in Exod. xxvi. 7 were of the latter kind,\nas otherwise they would have been out of character with the fine\nlinen, and blue and scarlet, their golden clasps, and the profuse\nmagnificence which distinguished every part of the sacred building.\nMoreover, the hair of the Goat is classed among the costly offerings\nwhich were made when the Tabernacle was built. \"And they came\nforth, men and women, as many as were willing hearted, and brought\nbracelets, and earrings, and rings, and tablets, all jewels of\ngold: and every man that offered offered an offering of gold unto\nthe Lord. And every man, with whom was found blue, and purple, and\nscarlet, and fine linen, and goats' hair, and red skins of rams, and\nbadgers' skins, brought them\" to be used in the structure of that\nwonderful building, in which nothing might be used except the finest\nand costliest that could be procured.\n\nOne of the principal uses to which the goat-skin was applied was\nthe manufacture of leather, for which purpose it is still used,\nand is considered far better than that of the sheep. Perhaps the\nmost common form in which this leather is used is the well-known\nwater-vessel, or \"bottle\" of the Bible.\n\nThese so-called bottles are made from the entire skin of the animal,\nwhich is prepared in slightly different methods according to the\nlocality in which the manufacture is carried on. In Palestine they\nare soaked for some little time in the tanning mixture, and are\nthen filled with water, after the seams have been pitched. In this\nstate they are kept for some time, and are kept exposed to the sun,\ncovered entirely with the tanning fluid, and filled up with water to\nsupply the loss caused by evaporation and leakage.\n\nThe hair is allowed to remain on the skins, because it acts as a\npreservative against the rough usage to which they are subject at\nthe hard hands of the water-carriers. By degrees the hairy covering\nwears off, first in patches, and then over the entire surface, so\nthat a new bottle can be recognised at a glance, and any one who\nwished to sell an old bottle at the price of a new one would be at\nonce detected.\n\nVessels made in this rude manner are absolutely necessary in the\ncountries wherein they are used. Wooden or metal vessels would be\ntoo heavy, and, besides, the slight though constant evaporation\nthat always takes place through the pores of the leather keeps\ndown the temperature of the water, even under a burning sun, the\nslight loss which is caused by the porousness of the skin being\nmore than counterbalanced by the coolness of the water. It is true\nthat the goat-skin communicates to the liquid a flavour far from\npleasant, but in those countries the quality of the water is of\nlittle consequence, provided that it is plentiful in quantity, and\ntolerably cool.\n\nIn all parts of the world where the skin is used for this purpose\nthe mode of manufacture is practically identical. An account of the\nart of preparing the goat-skin as practised in Abyssinia is given by\nMr. C. Johnston, in his \"Travels in Southern Abyssinia:\"--\n\n\"To be of any value it must be taken off uncut, except around the\nneck, and in those situations necessary to enable the butchers to\ndraw the legs out of the skin; also, of course, where the first\nincision is made to commence the process, and which is a circular\ncut carried around both haunches, not many inches from and having\nthe tail for a centre. The hide is then stripped over the thighs,\nand two smaller incisions being made round the middle joint of the\nhind-legs enable them to be drawn out.\n\n\"A stick is now placed to extend these extremities, and by this, for\nthe convenience of the operators, the whole carcase is suspended\nfrom the branch of a tree, and, by some easy pulls around the body,\nthe skin is gradually withdrawn over the fore-legs, which are\nincised around the knees, to admit of their being taken out; after\nwhich, the head being removed, the whole business concludes by the\nskin being pulled inside out over the decollated neck. One of the\nparties now takes a rough stone and well rubs the inside surface,\nto divest it of a few fibres of the subcutaneous muscle which are\ninserted into the skin, and after this operation it is laid aside\nuntil the next day; the more interesting business of attending to\nthe meat calling for immediate attention.\n\n\"These entire skins are afterwards made into sacks by the apertures\naround the neck and legs being secured by a double fold of the\nskin being sewed upon each other, by means of a slender but very\ntough thong. These small seams are rendered quite air-tight, and\nthe larger orifice around the haunches being gathered together by\nthe hands, the yet raw skin is distended with air; and the orifice\nbeing then tied up, the swollen bag is left in that state for a few\ndays, until slight putrefaction has commenced, when the application\nof the rough stone soon divests its surface of the hair. After\nthis has been effected, a deal of labour, during at least one\nday, is required to soften the distended skin by beating it with\nheavy sticks, or trampling upon it for hours together, the labourer\nsupporting himself by clinging to the bough of a tree overhead, or\nholding on by the wall of the house.\n\n\"In this manner, whilst the skin is drying, it is prevented from\ngetting stiff, and, still further to secure it from this evil\ncondition, it is frequently rubbed with small quantities of butter.\nWhen it is supposed that there is no chance of the skin becoming\nhard and easily broken, the orifice is opened, the air escapes, and\na very soft, flaccid leather bag is produced, but which, for several\ndays after, affords an amusement to the owner, when otherwise\nunemployed, by well rubbing it all over with his hands.\"\n\nThe reader will see that the two processes are practically\nidentical, the chief difference being that in one country the skins\nare distended with water and in the other with air.\n\nAs these bottles are rather apt to be damaged by the thorns,\nbranches, rocks, and similar objects with which they come in\ncontact, and are much too valuable to be thrown away as useless,\ntheir owners have discovered methods of patching and repairing\nthem, which enable them to be used for some time longer. Patches of\nconsiderable size are sometimes inserted, if the rent should be of\nimportance, while the wound caused by a thorn is mended by a simple\nand efficacious expedient. The skin is first emptied, and a round\nflat piece of wood, or even a stone of suitable shape, is put into\nit. The skin is then held with the wounded part downwards, and the\nstone shaken about until it comes exactly upon the hole. It is then\ngrasped, the still wet hide gathered tightly under it, so as to\npucker up the skin, and a ligature is tied firmly round it. Perhaps\nsome of my readers may have practised the same method of mending a\npunctured football.\n\nAllusion to this mode of mending the skin bottles is made in Josh.\nix. 4, 13. The Gibeonites \"did work wilily, and went and made as if\nthey had been ambassadors, and took old sacks upon their asses, and\nwine bottles, old, and rent, and bound up ... and said ... these\nbottles of wine, which we filled, were new; and, behold, they be\nrent.\"\n\nIf these skin bottles be allowed to become dry, as is sometimes the\ncase when they are hung up in the smoky tents, they shrivel up,\nand become rotten and weak, and are no longer enabled to bear the\npressure caused by the fermentation of new wine. So, in Ps. cxix.\n81-83: \"My soul fainteth for Thy salvation: but I hope in Thy word.\n\n[Illustration: EASTERN WATER-CARRIERS WITH BOTTLES MADE OF\nGOAT-SKIN.]\n\n\"Mine eyes fail for Thy word, saying, When wilt Thou comfort me?\n\n\"For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget Thy\nstatutes.\"\n\nHow forcible does not this image become, when we realize the early\nlife of the shepherd poet, his dwelling in tents wherein are no\nwindows nor chimneys, and in which the smoke rolls to and fro until\nit settles in the form of soot upon the leathern bottles and other\nrude articles of furniture that are hung from the poles!\n\nIn the New Testament there is a well-known allusion to the weakness\nof old bottles: \"Neither do men put new wine into old bottles, or\nthe bottles break and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish;\nbut they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.\" It\nwould be impossible to understand the meaning of this passage unless\nwe knew that the \"bottles\" in question were not vessels of glass or\nearthenware, but merely the partly-tanned skins of goats.\n\nAnother allusion to the use of the goat-skin is made in that part of\nthe Book of Joshua which has already been mentioned. If the reader\nwill refer to Josh. ix. 4, he will see that the Gibeonites took with\nthem not only old bottles, but old sacks. Now, these sacks bore no\nresemblance to the hempen bags with which we are so familiar, but\nwere nothing more than the same goat-skins that were employed in\nthe manufacture of bottles, but with the opening at the neck left\nopen. They were, in fact, skin-bottles for holding solids instead of\nliquids. The sacks which Joseph's brethren took with them, and in\nthe mouths of which they found their money, were simply goat-skin\nbags, made as described.\n\nYet another use for the goat-skin. It is almost certain that the\n\"kneading-troughs\" of the ancient Israelites were simply circular\npieces of goat-skin, which could be laid on the ground when wanted,\nand rolled up and carried away when out of use. Thus, the fact\nthat \"the people took their dough before it was leavened, their\nkneading-troughs being bound up in their clothing upon their\nshoulders,\" need cause no surprise.\n\nNothing could be more in accordance with probability. The women were\nall hard at work, preparing the bread for the expected journey, when\nthe terrified Pharaoh \"called for Moses and Aaron by night, and\nsaid, Rise up, and get you forth from among my people, both ye and\nthe children of Israel, and go, serve the Lord, as ye have said....\nAnd the Egyptians were urgent upon the people that they might send\nthem out of the land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men.\"\n\nSo the women, being disturbed at their work, and being driven\nout of the country before they had leavened, much less baked,\ntheir bread, had no alternative but to roll up the dough in the\nleathern \"kneading-troughs,\" tie them up in a bundle with their\nspare clothing, and carry them on their shoulders; whereas, if we\nconnect the kneading-troughs with the large heavy wooden implements\nused in this country, we shall form an entirely erroneous idea of\nthe proceeding. As soon as they came to their first halting-place\nat Succoth, they took the leathern kneading-troughs out of their\nclothes, unrolled them, took the dough which had not even been\nleavened, so unexpectedly had the order for marching arrived, made\nit into flat cakes, and baked them as they best could. The same kind\nof \"kneading-trough\" is still in use in many parts of the world.\n\nStone as well as earthenware jars were also used by the inhabitants\nof ancient Palestine; but they were only employed for the storage of\nwine in houses, whereas the bottles that were used in carrying wine\nfrom one place to another were invariably made of leather. Water\nalso was stored in stone or earthenware jars. See, for example,\nJohn ii. 6: \"And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after\nthe manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three\nfirkins apiece.\" Whereas, when it was carried about, it was poured\ninto bottles made of skin. Such was probably the \"bottle of water\"\nthat Abraham put on Hagar's shoulder, when she was driven away by\nthe jealousy of Sarah, and such was the \"bottle of wine\" that Hannah\nbrought as her offering when she dedicated Samuel to the service of\nGod.\n\nIn sacrifices the Goat was in nearly as much requisition as the\nlamb, and in one--namely, that which was celebrated on the Great Day\nof Atonement--the Goat was specially mentioned as the only animal\nwhich could be sacrificed. The reader will, perhaps, remember that\nfor this peculiar sacrifice two Goats were required, on which two\nlots were cast, one for the Lord, _i.e._ with the word \"Jehovah\"\nupon it, and the other for the scapegoat, _i.e._ inscribed with the\nword \"Azazel.\" The latter term is derived from two Hebrew words,\nthe former being \"Az,\" which is the general name for the Goat, and\nthe second \"azel,\" signifying \"he departed.\" The former, which\nbelonged to Jehovah, was sacrificed, and its blood sprinkled upon\nthe mercy-seat and the altar of incense; and the Goat Azazel was\nled away into the wilderness, bearing upon its head the sins of the\npeople, and there let loose.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThese being the uses of the Goat, it may naturally be imagined that\nthe animal is one of extreme importance, and that it is watched as\ncarefully by its owners as the sheep. Indeed, both sheep and Goats\nbelong to the same master, and are tended by the same shepherd, who\nexercises the same sway over them that he does over the sheep.\n\nThey are, however, erratic animals, and, although they will follow\nthe shepherd wherever he may lead them, they will not mix with the\nsheep. The latter will walk in a compact flock along the valley, the\nshepherd leading the way, and the sheep following him, led in their\nturn by the sound of the bell tied round the neck of the master-ram\nof the flock. The Goats, however, will not submit to walk in so\nquiet a manner, but prefer to climb along the sides of the rocks\nthat skirt the valleys, skipping and jumping as they go, and seeming\nto take delight in getting themselves into dangerous places, where a\nman could not venture to set his foot.\n\nIn the evening, when the shepherds call their flocks to repose,\nthey often make use of the caverns which exist at some height in\nthe precipitous side of the hills, as being safe strongholds, where\nthe jackal and the hyaena will not venture to attack them. When such\nis the case, the shepherds take their station by the mouth of the\ncave, and assist the sheep as they come sedately up the narrow path\nthat leads to the cavern. The Goats, however, need no assistance,\nbut come scrambling along by paths where no foot but a Goat's could\ntread, mostly descending from a considerable height above the cave,\nand, as if in exultation at their superior agility, jumping over the\nbacks of the sheep as they slowly file into the accustomed fold.\n\nFriendly as they are, the Goats and sheep never mingle together.\nThere may be large flocks of them feeding in the same pasturage,\nbut the Goats always take the highest spots on which verdure grows,\nwhile the sheep graze quietly below. Goats are specially fond of the\ntender shoots of trees, which they find in plenty upon the mountain\nside; and, according to Mr. Tristram, by their continual browsing,\nthey have extirpated many species of trees which were once common on\nthe hills of Palestine, and which now can only be found in Lebanon\non the east of the Jordan.\n\n[Illustration: GOATS ON THE MARCH.]\n\nEven when folded together in the same enclosure, the Goats never\nmix with the sheep, but gather together by themselves, and they\ninstinctively take the same order when assembled round the wells at\nmid-day.\n\nThis instinctive separation of the sheep and the goats naturally\nrecalls to our minds the well-known saying of our Lord that \"before\nHim shall be gathered all nations, and He shall separate them one\nfrom another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and\nHe shall set the sheep on His right hand, and the goats on His left.\"\n\nThe image thus used was one that was familiar to all the hearers,\nwho were accustomed daily to see the herds of sheep and Goats under\none shepherd, yet totally distinct from each other. At feeding-time\nthe Goats will be browsing in long lines on the mountain sides,\nwhile the sheep are grazing in the plain or valley; at mid-day, when\nthe flocks are gathered round the wells to await the rolling away\nof the stone that guards the water, the Goats assemble on one side\nand the sheep on the other. And at night, when they are all gathered\ninto one fold by one shepherd, they are still separated from each\nother. The same image is employed by the prophet Ezekiel: \"As for\nyou, O my flock, thus said the Lord God, Behold I judge between\ncattle and cattle, between rams and the he-goats.\"\n\nGenerally, the leading Goat was distinguished by a bell as well as\nthe leading sheep, and in reference to this custom there was an old\nproverb, \"If the shepherd takes the lead, he blinds the bell-goat,\"\nwhile another proverb is based upon the inferior docility of the\nanimal--\"If the shepherd be lame, the Goats will run away.\"\n\nYet the Goat can be tamed very effectively, and can even be\ntaught to perform many tricks. \"We saw just below us, on the\nrudely-constructed 'parade,' a crowd of men and children,\nsurrounding a fantastically-dressed man exhibiting a Goat, which had\nbeen tutored to perform some cunning trick. It stood with its four\nfeet close together on the top of a very long pole, and allowed the\nman to lift it up and carry it round and round within the circle;\nthen the Goat was perched on four sticks, and again carried about. A\nlittle band of music--pipes, drums, and tambourines--called together\nthe people from all parts of the town to witness this performance.\n\n\"The Goat danced and balanced himself obediently and perfectly, in\nvery unnatural-looking positions, as if thoroughly understanding the\nwords and commands of his master. The men who watched the actions of\nthe Goat looked as grave and serious as if they were attending a\nphilosophical or scientific lecture.\" (\"Domestic Life in Palestine,\"\nby Miss Rogers.)\n\nAnother feat is a favourite with the proprietors of trained Goats.\nThe man takes a stool and plants it carefully on the ground, so as\nto be perfectly level, and then orders the Goat to stand upon it.\nA piece of wood about six inches in length, and shaped something\nlike a dice-box, is then placed on the stool, and the Goat manages\nto stand on it, all his sharp, hard hoofs being pressed closely\ntogether on the tiny surface. The man then takes another piece of\nwood and holds it to the Goat's feet. The animal gently removes\nfirst one foot and then another, and, by careful shifting of the\nfeet, enables its master to place the second piece of wood on the\nfirst. Successive additions are made, until at the last the Goat is\nperched on the topmost of some nine or ten pieces of wood balanced\non each other, the whole looking like a stout reed marked off with\njoints.\n\nThe stately steps and bold bearing of the old he-goat is mentioned\nin the Proverbs: \"There be three things which go well, yea, four are\ncomely in going:\n\n\"A lion, which is strongest among beasts, and turneth not away for\nany;\n\n\"A greyhound; an he-goat also; and a king, against whom there is no\nrising up.\" (Prov. xxx. 29-31.) The word which is here rendered as\nhe-goat signifies literally the \"Butter,\" and is given to the animal\non account of the mode in which it uses its formidable horns. The\nword is not common in the Bible, but it is used even at the present\nday among the Arabs.\n\nSeveral herds of goats exist in Palestine, the most valuable of\nwhich is the Mohair Goat, and the most common the Syrian Goat.\nThese, however dissimilar they may be in appearance, are only\nvarieties of the ordinary domestic animal, the former being produced\nartificially by carefully selecting those specimens for breeding\nwhich have the longest and finest hair. It was from the hair of this\nbreed that the costly fabrics used in the Tabernacle were woven, and\nit is probably to this breed that reference is made in Solomon's\nSong, iv. 1, 2: \"Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art\nfair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock\nof goats, that appear from Mount Gilead.\n\n\"Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which\ncame up from the washing.\" In this passage the careful reader\nwill also note another reference to the habits of the Goats and\nsheep, the hair being compared to the dark-haired Goats that wander\non the tops of the hills, while the teeth are compared to sheep\nthat are ranged in regular order below. The Mohair Goat is known\nscientifically as _Capra Angorensis_. The same image is used again\nin chap. vi. 5.\n\n[Illustration: HERD OF GOATS ATTACKED BY A LION.]\n\nThe second breed is that which is commonest throughout the country.\nIt is known by the name of the Syrian Goat, and is remarkable for\nthe enormous length of its ears, which sometimes exceed a foot from\nroot to tip. This variety has been described as a separate species\nunder the name of _Capra Mambrica_, or _C. Syriaca_, but, like the\nMohair Goat, and twenty-three other so-called species, is simply a\nvariety of the common Goat, _Hircus aegragus_.\n\nReference is made to the long ears of the Syrian Goat in Amos iii.\n12: \"Thus saith the Lord: As the shepherd taketh out of the mouth\nof the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear; so shall the children\nof Israel be taken out that dwell in Samaria.\" Such a scene, which\nwas familiar to Amos, the shepherd as well as the prophet, is\nrepresented in the illustration. In the foreground is the goat on\nwhich the lion has sprung, and from which one of the long ears has\nbeen torn away. Its companions are gathering round it in sympathy,\nwhile its kid is trying to discover the cause of its mother's\nuneasiness. In the background is a group of armed shepherds,\nstanding round the lion which they have just killed, while one of\nthem is holding up the torn ear which he has taken out of the lion's\nmouth.\n\n\n\n\nTHE WILD GOAT.\n\n     The Azelim or Wild Goats of Scripture identical with the Beden\n     or Arabian Ibex--Different names of the Beden--Its appearance\n     and general habits--En-gedi, or Goats' Fountain--The Beden\n     formerly very plentiful in Palestine, and now tolerably\n     common--Its agility--Difficulty of catching or killing it--How\n     the young are captured--Flesh of the Beden--Use of the horns at\n     the present day--The Ako of Deuteronomy.\n\n\nIn three passages of the Old Testament occurs a word, \"Azelim,\"\nwhich is variously translated in our Authorized Version.\n\nIt is first seen in 1 Sam. xxiv. 2, in which it is rendered as\n\"Wild Goats.\" \"It was told Saul, saying, Behold, David is in the\nwilderness of En-gedi [_i.e._ the Fountain of the Goat]. Then Saul\ntook three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and went to seek\nDavid and his men upon the rocks of the wild goats (_azelim_).\" The\nsame word occurs in Job xxxix. 1: \"Knowest thou the time when the\nwild goats of the rock bring forth?\" It is also found in Ps. civ.\n18: \"The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats.\" In all these\npassages it is rendered as \"wild goats.\" But, in Prov. v. 19, it is\ntranslated as roe: \"Rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be\nas the loving hind and pleasant roe (_azelah_).\" The Jewish Bible\nfollows the same diverse renderings.\n\nWe now have to discover the animal which was signified by the word\nAzel. According to its etymology, it is the Climber, just as the\nadult he-goat is called the Butter.\n\nThat it was a climbing animal is evident from its name, and that\nit loved to clamber among precipices is equally evident from the\nrepeated connexion of the word rock with the name of the animal. We\nalso see, from the passage in Job, that it is a wild animal whose\nhabits were not known. There is scarcely any doubt that the Azel of\nthe Old Testament is the ARABIAN IBEX or BEDEN (_Capra Nubiana_).\nThis animal is very closely allied to the well-known Ibex of the\nAlps, or Steinbock, but may be distinguished from it by one or two\nslight differences, such as the black beard and the slighter make\nof the horns, which moreover have three angles instead of four, as\nis the case with the Alpine Ibex.\n\nThe Beden is known by several names. It is sometimes called the\nJaela, sometimes the Nubian Wild Goat, and is also known as the Wild\nGoat of Sinai. The general colour of the Beden is grey, becoming\nbrownish in winter, and being whitish grey beneath. The feet are\nspotted with black and white, and the beard of the male is black,\ndiffering from that of the Alpine Ibex, which is brown. The female\nis beardless. The lines along the back and the sides of the tail are\nblack, and there are three streaks on each ear.\n\nThe Beden generally lives in little herds of eight or ten, and\nis even now to be found in Palestine. At the strange, wild,\nweird-looking En-gedi (Ain Jiddy), or Fountain of the Goats, the\nBeden is still to be seen. Mr. Tristram suggests that David and\nhis followers took up their residence at En-gedi for the sake of\nthe Wild Goats that were plentiful upon the spot, and which would\nfurnish food for himself and his hardy band of outlaws. \"In the\nneighbourhood of En-gedi,\" remarks this traveller, \"while encamped\nby the Dead Sea shore, we obtained several fine specimens, and\nvery interesting it was to find the graceful creature by the very\nfountain to which it gave name.\n\n\"When clambering over the heights above En-gedi, I often, by the\nhelp of my glass, saw the Ibex from a distance, and once, when near\nMar-saba, only a few miles from Jerusalem, started one at a distance\nof four hundred yards. At the south end of the Dead Sea they were\ncommon, and I have picked up a horn both near Jericho on the hills\nand also on the hills of Moab on the eastern side. At Jericho,\ntoo, I obtained a young one which I hoped to rear, but which died\nafter I had had it for ten days, owing, I believe, to the milk with\nwhich it was fed being sour. Further north and west we did not\nfind it, though I have reason to believe that a few linger on the\nmountains between Samaria and the Jordan, and perhaps also on some\nof the spurs of Lebanon. We found its teeth in the breccia of bone\noccurring in the Lebanon, proving its former abundance there.\"\n\nAs the Beden was found so plentifully even in these days when\nfire-arms have rendered many wild animals scarce and wary, so that\nthey will not show themselves within range of a bullet, it is\nevident that in the time when David lived at En-gedi and drank of\nthe Goats' Fountain they were far more numerous, and could afford\nnourishment to him and his soldiers. Travellers, moreover, who do\nnot happen to be experienced hunters, will often fail in seeing\nthe Beden, even in places where it is tolerably plentiful. The\ncolour of its coat resembles so nearly that of the rocks, that an\ninexperienced eye would see nothing but bare stones and sticks where\na practised hunter would see numbers of Beden, conspicuous by their\nbeautifully curved horns.\n\nThe agility of the Beden is extraordinary. Loving the highest and\nmost craggy parts of the mountain ridge, it flings itself from\nspot to spot with a recklessness that startles one who has not\nbeen accustomed to the animal, and the wonderful certainty of its\nfoot. It will, for example, dash at the face of a perpendicular\nprecipice that looks as smooth as a brick wall, for the purpose of\nreaching a tiny ledge which is hardly perceptible, and which is\nsome fifteen feet or so above the spot whence the animal sprang.\nIts eye, however, has marked certain little cracks and projections\non the face of the rock, and as the animal makes its leap, it takes\nthese little points of vantage in rapid succession, just touching\nthem as it passes upwards, and by the slight stroke of its foot\nkeeping up the original impulse of its leap. Similarly, the Ibex\ncomes sliding and leaping down precipitous sides of the mountains,\nsometimes halting with all the four feet drawn together, on a little\nprojection scarcely larger than a penny, and sometimes springing\nboldly over a wide crevasse, and alighting with exact precision\nupon a projecting piece of rock that seems scarcely large enough to\nsustain a rat comfortably.\n\nThe young of the Ibex are sometimes captured and tamed. They are,\nhowever, difficult to rear, and give much more trouble than the\nyoung gazelles when taken in a similar manner. The natives can\ngenerally procure the kids at the proper time of year, and sell them\nat a very cheap rate. They seldom, however, can be reared, and even\nthose who live in the country experience the greatest difficulty in\nkeeping the young Beden alive until it attains maturity.\n\nWere it not for the curious habits of the Beden, the young could\nscarcely ever be obtained alive, as they are so agile that they\ncould easily leap away from their slow two-legged pursuers. But\nthe mother Ibex has a habit of leading a very independent life,\nwandering to considerable distances, and leaving her kid snugly\nhidden in some rock-cleft. The hunters watch the mother as she\nstarts off in the morning, clamber up to the spot where the kid is\nconcealed, and secure it without difficulty. The Arabs say that\nthere are always two kids at a birth, but there is considerable\ndiscrepancy of evidence on this point, which, after all, is of very\nlittle importance.\n\n[Illustration: ARABIAN IBEX, OR BEDEN; THE WILD GOAT OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\nThe flesh of the Beden is really excellent. It is far superior to\nthat of the gazelle, which is comparatively dry and hard, and it has\nbeen happily suggested that the Beden was the animal in search of\nwhich Esau was sent to hunt with his quiver and his bow, and which\nfurnished the \"savoury meat\" which Isaac loved. None but a true\nhunter can hope to secure the Beden, and even all the knowledge,\npatience, and energy of the best hunters are tried before they can\nkill their prey. It was therefore no matter of wonder that Isaac\nshould be surprised when he thought that he heard Esau return so\nsoon from the hunting-grounds. \"How is it that thou hast found it so\nquickly, my son?\"\n\nThere are few animals more wary than the Beden, and even the chamois\nof the Alps does not exercise the finest qualities of a hunter more\nthan does the Beden of Palestine. It is gifted with very keen eyes,\nwhich can discern the approach of an enemy long before its grey coat\nand curved horns can be distinguished from the stones and gnarled\nboughs of the mountain side. And, even if the enemy be not within\nrange of the animal's sight, its nostrils are so keen that it can\ndetect a man by scent alone at a considerable distance. Like all\ngregarious animals, the Beden insures the safety of the flock by\nstationing sentries, which are posted on places that command the\nwhole surrounding country, and to deceive the watchful senses of\nthese wary guardians tests all the qualities of the hunter.\n\nThe dawn of day is the time that is generally chosen for approaching\na herd, because the animals are then feeding, and if the hunter can\nmanage to approach them against the wind, he may chance to come\nwithin range. Should however the wind change its direction, he may\nquietly walk home again, for at the first breath of the tainted gale\nthe sentinels utter their shrill whistle of alarm, and the whole\nparty dash off with a speed that renders pursuit useless.\n\nThe horns of the Beden are of very great size, and from their bold\ncurves, with the large rings and ridges which cover their front,\nare remarkably handsome objects. In their own country they are in\ngreat request as handles to knives, and even in England they may be\noccasionally seen serving as handles to carving-knives and forks.\n\nAs to the word Ako, which occurs in Deut. xiv. 5, together with\nother animals, and is rendered as \"Wild Goat,\" there is so much\ndoubt about the correct translation that I can do no more than\nmention that the Jewish Bible follows our authorized edition in\ntranslating Ako as Wild Goat, but adds the doubtful mark to the\nword.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: deer]\n\n\n\n\nTHE DEER.\n\n     The Hart and Hind of Scripture--Species of Deer existing in\n     Palestine--Earliest mention of the Hind--The Hart classed among\n     the clean animals--Passages alluding to its speed--Care of the\n     mother for her young, and her custom of secreting it--Tameable\n     character of the Deer.\n\n\nWe now come to the DEER which are mentioned in Scripture. There are\nnot many passages in which they are mentioned, and one of them is\nrather doubtful, as we shall see when we come to it.\n\nThere is no doubt that the two words HART and HIND (in the Hebrew\n_Ayzal_ and _Ayzalah_) represent Deer of some kind, and the question\nis to find out what kind of Deer is signified by these words. I\nthink that we may safely determine that no particular species is\nmeant, but that under the word Ayzal are comprehended any kinds of\nDeer that inhabit Palestine, and were likely to be known to those\nto whom the earlier Scriptures were addressed. That some kind of\nDeer was plentiful is evident from the references which are made\nto it, and specially by the familiar word Ajala or Ayala, as it is\npronounced, which signifies the Deer-ground or pasture. But the\nattempt to discriminate between one species and another is simply\nimpossible, and the more careful the search the more impracticable\nthe task appears.\n\n[Illustration: RED DEER.]\n\nAs far as can be ascertained, at least two kinds of Deer inhabited\nPalestine in the earlier days of the Jewish history, one belonging\nto the division which is known by its branched horns, and the other\nto that in which the horns are flat or palmated over the tips.\nExamples of both kinds are familiar to us under the titles of the\nRED DEER and the FALLOW DEER, and it is tolerably certain that both\nthese animals were formerly found in Palestine, or that at all\nevents the Deer which did exist there were so closely allied to them\nas to be mere varieties occasioned by the different conditions in\nwhich they were placed.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe will now proceed to the various passages in which the Hart and\nHind are mentioned in the Bible.\n\n[Illustration: FALLOW-DEER, OR HIND OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\nAs might be expected, we come upon it among the number of the beasts\nwhich divided the hoof and chewed the cud, and were specially\nindicated as fit for food; see Deut. xii. 15: \"Notwithstanding thou\nmayest kill and eat flesh in all thy gates, ... the unclean and the\nclean may eat thereof, as of the roebuck, and as of the hart.\"\n\nThere is, however, an earlier mention of the word in Gen. xlix.\n21. It occurs in that splendid series of imagery in which Jacob\nblesses his sons, and prophesies their future, each image serving\never afterwards as the emblem of the tribe: \"Naphtali is a hind let\nloose: he giveth goodly words;\"--or, according to the Jewish Bible,\n\"Naphtali is a hind sent forth: he giveth sayings of pleasantness.\"\nNow, such an image as this would never have been used, had not the\nspectacle of the \"hind let loose\" been perfectly familiar to the\neyes both of the dying patriarch and his hearers, and equally so\nwith the lion, the ass, the vine, the serpent, and other objects\nused emblematically in the same prophetic poem.\n\n[Illustration: A QUIET SPOT.]\n\nThe excellence of the Hart's flesh is shown by its occurrence among\nthe animals used for King Solomon's table: see 1 Kings iv. 23, a\npassage which has been quoted several times, and therefore need only\nbe mentioned.\n\nAllusion is made to the speed and agility of the Deer in several\npassages. See, for example, Isa. xxxv. 6: \"Then shall the lame man\nleap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.\" Again, in 2 Sam.\nxxii. 33, 34: \"God is my strength and power: and He maketh my way\nperfect.\n\n\"He maketh my feet like hinds' feet: and setteth me upon my high\nplaces.\"\n\nNearly four hundred years afterwards we find Habakkuk using\nprecisely the same image, evidently quoting David's Psalm of\nThanksgiving:--\"Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the\nGod of my salvation.\n\n\"The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hinds'\nfeet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.\" (iii. 18,\n19.)\n\nA passage of a similar character may be found in Solomon's Song, ii.\n8, 9: \"The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the\nmountains, skipping upon the hills.\n\n\"My beloved is like a roe or a young hart.\"\n\nThere is one passage in the Psalms which is familiar to us in many\nways, and not the least in that it has been chosen as the text\nfor so many well-known anthems. \"As the hart panteth after the\nwater-brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.\n\n\"My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come\nand appear before God?\" (Ps. xlii. 1, 2.)\n\nBeautiful as this passage is, it cannot be fully understood without\nthe context.\n\n[Illustration: RED DEER AND FAWN.]\n\nDavid wrote this psalm before he had risen to royal power, and while\nhe was fleeing from his enemies from place to place, and seeking\nan uncertain shelter in the rock-caves. In verse 6 he enumerates\nsome of the spots in which he has been forced to reside, far away\nfrom the altar, the priests, and the sacrifice. He has been hunted\nabout from place to place by his enemies as a stag is hunted by\nthe hounds, and his very soul thirsted for the distant Tabernacle,\nin which the Shekinah, the visible presence of God, rested on the\nmercy-seat between the golden cherubim.\n\nWild and unsettled as was the early life of David, this was ever\nthe reigning thought in his mind, and there is scarcely a psalm\nthat he wrote in which we do not find some allusion to the visible\npresence of God among men. No matter what might be the troubles\nthrough which he had to pass, even though he trod the valley of the\nshadow of death, the thought of his God was soothing as water to the\nhunted stag, and in that thought he ever found repose. Through all\nhis many trials and adversities, through his deep remorse for his\nsins, through his wounded paternal affections, through his success\nand prosperity, that one thought is the ruling power. He begins his\ncareer with it when he opposed Goliath: \"Thou comest to me with a\nsword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in\nthe name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel.\" He\ncloses his career with the same thought, and, in the \"last words\"\nthat are recorded, he charged his son to keep the commandments of\nthe Lord, that he might do wisely all that he did.\n\nWe now come to another point in the Deer's character; namely, the\nwatchful care of the mother over her young. She always retires to\nsome secret place when she instinctively knows that the birth is at\nhand, and she hides it from all eyes until it is able to take care\nof itself. By some strange instinct, the little one, almost as soon\nas it is born, is able to comprehend the signals of its mother, and\nthere is an instance, well known to naturalists, where a newly-born\nDeer, hardly an hour old, crouched low to the earth in obedience to\na light tap on its shoulder from its mother's hoof. She, with the\nintense watchfulness of her kind, had seen a possible danger, and so\nwarned her young one to hide itself.\n\n[Illustration: THE LEADER OF THE HERD.]\n\nThere is scarcely any animal so watchful as the female Deer, as\nall hunters know by practical experience. It is comparatively easy\nto deceive the stag who leads the herd, but to evade the eyes and\nears of the hinds is a very different business, and taxes all the\nresources of a practised hunter. If they take such care of the herd\nin general, it may be imagined that their watchfulness would be\nmultiplied tenfold when the object of their anxiety is their own\nyoung.\n\nIt is in allusion to this well-known characteristic that a passage\nin the Book of Job refers: \"Knowest thou the time when the wild\ngoats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds\ndo calve?\" (xxxix. 1.) A similar image is used in Psa. xxix. 9.\nAfter enumerating the wonders that are done by the voice of the\nLord, the thunders and rain torrents, the devastating tempests, the\nforked lightning, and the earthquake \"that shaketh the wilderness\nof Kadesh,\" the Psalmist proceeds: \"The voice of the Lord maketh\nthe hinds to calve, and discovereth the forests,\"--this being as\nmysterious to the writer as the more conspicuous wonders which he\nhad previously mentioned.\n\nSo familiar to the Hebrews was the watchful care which the female\nDeer exercised over her young, that it forms the subject of a\npowerful image in one of Jeremiah's mournful prophecies: \"Yea, the\nhind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because there was no\ngrass.\" (xiv. 5.) To those who understand the habits of the animal,\nthis is a most telling and picturesque image. In the first place,\nthe Hind, a wild animal that could find food where less active\ncreatures would starve, was reduced to such straits that she was\nobliged to remain in the fields at the time when her young was born,\ninstead of retiring to some sheltered spot, according to her custom.\nAnd when it was born, instead of nurturing it carefully, according\nto the natural maternal instinct, she was forced from sheer hunger\nto abandon it in order to find a sufficiency of food for herself.\n\nThat the Deer could be tamed, and its naturally affectionate\ndisposition cultivated, is evident from a passage in the Proverbs\n(v. 18, 19): \"Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife\nof thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe.\"\n\nWe might naturally expect that the Rabbinical writers would have\nmuch to say on the subject of the Hart and Hind. Among much that\nis irrelevant to the object of the present work there are a few\npassages that deserve mention. Alluding to the annual shedding of\nthe Deer's horns, there is a proverb respecting one who ventures\nhis money too freely in trade, that \"he has hung it on the stag's\nhorns,\" meaning thereby that he will never see it again. It is\nremarkable that in Western Africa there is a proverb of a similar\ncharacter, the imprudent merchant being told to look for his money\nin the place where Deer shed their horns.\n\n[Illustration: THE WATCHFUL DOE.]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: A KNEELING CAMEL.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE CAMEL.\n\nCHAPTER I.\n\n     The two species of Camel, and the mode of distinguishing\n     them--Value of the Camel in the East--Thirst-enduring\n     capability--The hump, and its use to the animal--The Camel as\n     a beast of draught and burden--How the Camel is laden--Camels\n     for riding--Difficulty of sitting a Camel--A rough-paced\n     steed--Method of guiding the Camel--The swift dromedary--Young\n     Camels and their appearance--The deserted Camel.\n\n\nBefore treating of the Scriptural references to the Camel, it will\nbe as well to clear the ground by noticing that two distinct species\nof Camel are known to zoologists; namely, the common Camel (_Camelus\ndromedarius_), which has one hump, and the Bactrian Camel (_Camelus\nBactrianus_), which has two of these curious projections. There is a\npopular but erroneous idea that the dromedary and the Camel are two\ndistinct animals, the latter being distinguished by its huge hump,\nwhereas the fact is, that the dromedary is simply a lighter and more\nvaluable breed of the one-humped Camel of Arabia, the two-humped\nBactrian Camel being altogether a different animal, inhabiting\nCentral Asia, Thibet, and China.\n\nThe Camel is still one of the most valued animals that inhabit\nPalestine, and in former times it played a part in Jewish history\nscarcely inferior to that of the ox or sheep. We shall, therefore,\ndevote some space to it.\n\nIn some parts of the land it even exceeded in value the sheep, and\nwas infinitely more useful than the goat. At the very beginning of\nJewish history we read of this animal, and it is mentioned in the\nNew Testament nearly two thousand years after we meet with it in\nthe Book of Genesis. The earliest mention of the Camel occurs in\nGen. xii. 16, where is related the journey of Abram: \"He had sheep,\nand oxen, and he-asses, and men-servants, and maid-servants, and\nshe-asses, and camels.\"\n\n[Illustration: JACOB LEAVES LABAN AND RETURNS TO CANAAN WITH HIS\nCAMELS, SHEEP, AND CATTLE.]\n\nBelonging, as he did, to the nomad race which lives almost wholly on\nthe produce of their herds, Abram needed Camels, not only for their\nmilk, and, for all we know, for their flesh, but for their extreme\nuse as beasts of burden, without which he could never have travelled\nover that wild and pathless land. The whole of Abram's outer life\nwas exactly that of a Bedouin sheikh of the present day, in whom\nwe find reproduced the habits, the tone of thought, and the very\nverbiage of the ancient Scriptures.\n\nMany years afterwards, when the son of his old age was desirous of\nmarrying a wife of his own kindred, we find that he sent his trusted\nservants with ten of his Camels to Mesopotamia, and it was by the\noffering of water to these Camels, that Rebekah was selected as\nIsaac's wife (see Gen. xxiv. 10, 19). In after days, when Jacob was\nabout to leave Laban, these animals are mentioned as an important\npart of his wealth: \"And the man increased exceedingly, and had much\ncattle, and maid-servants, and men-servants, and camels, and asses\"\n(Gen. xxx. 43).\n\nIt is thought worthy of mention in the sacred narrative that Job\nhad three thousand, and afterwards six thousand Camels (Job i. 3,\nand xlii. 12); that the Midianites and Amalekites possessed camels\nwithout number, as the sand by the seaside.\n\n[Illustration: A CAMP IN THE DESERT.]\n\nThey were valuable enough to be sent as presents from one potentate\nto another. For example, when Jacob went to meet Esau, he gave as\nhis present two hundred and twenty sheep, the same number of goats,\nfifty oxen, thirty asses, and sixty camels, i.e. thirty mothers,\neach with her calf. They were important enough to be guarded by\nmen of position. In 1 Chron. xxvii. 30, we find that the charge\nof David's Camels was confided to one of his officers, Obil the\nIshmaelite, who, from his origin, might be supposed to be skilful in\nthe management of these animals. Bochart, however, conjectures that\nthe word Obil ought to be read as Abal, _i.e._ the camel-keeper, and\nthat the passage would therefore read as follows: \"Over the camels\nwas an Ishmaelitish camel-keeper.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe will now proceed to the uses of the Camel, and first take it in\nthe light of food.\n\nBy the Mosaic law, the Camel was a forbidden animal, because it did\nnot divide the hoof, although it chewed the cud. Yet, although the\nJews might not eat its flesh, they probably used the milk for food,\nas they do at the present day. No distinct Scriptural reference is\nmade to the milk of the Camel; but, as the Jews of the present day\nare quite as fastidious as their ancestors in keeping the Mosaic\nlaw, we are justified in concluding that, although they would not\neat the flesh of the animal, they drank its milk. At the present\ntime, the milk is used, like that of the sheep, goat, and cow, both\nin a fresh and curdled state, the latter being generally preferred\nto the former. A kind of cheese is made from it, but is not much to\nthe taste of the European traveller, on account of the quantity of\nsalt which is put in it. Butter is churned in a very simple manner,\nthe fresh milk being poured into a skin bag, and the bag beaten with\na stick until the butter makes its appearance.\n\nThat it was really used in the patriarchal times is evident by the\npassage which has already been mentioned, where Jacob is related to\nhave brought as a present to his brother Esau thirty milch Camels,\ntogether with their young. So decided a stress would certainly not\nhave been laid upon the fact that the animals were milch Camels\nunless the milk were intended for use.\n\nPerhaps the use of the Camel's milk might be justified by saying\nthat the prohibition extended only to eating and not to drinking,\nand that therefore the milk might be used though the flesh was\nprohibited.\n\nThere was another mode in which the Camel might be used by\ntravellers to sustain life.\n\nThe reader is probably aware that, even in the burning climate in\nwhich it dwells, the Camel is able to go for a long time without\ndrinking,--not that it requires less liquid nourishment than other\nanimals, but that it is able, by means of its internal construction,\nto imbibe at one draught a quantity of water which will last for\na considerable time. It is furnished with a series of cells, into\nwhich the water runs as fast as it is drunk, and in which it can be\nkept for some time without losing its life-preserving qualities. As\nmuch as twenty gallons have been imbibed by a Camel at one draught,\nand this amount will serve it for several days, as it has the power\nof consuming by degrees the water which it has drunk in a few\nminutes.\n\nThis curious power of the Camel has often proved to be the salvation\nof its owner. It has often happened that, when travellers have been\npassing over the desert, their supply of water has been exhausted,\npartly by the travellers and partly by the burning heat which causes\nit to evaporate through the pores of the goat-skin bottle in which\nit was carried. Then the next well, where they had intended to\nrefill their skins and refresh themselves, has proved dry, and the\nwhole party seemed doomed to die of thirst.\n\nUnder these circumstances, only one chance of escape is left them.\nThey kill a Camel, and from its stomach they procure water enough\nto sustain life for a little longer, and perhaps to enable them to\nreach a well or fountain in which water still remains. The water\nwhich is thus obtained is unaltered, except by a greenish hue, the\nresult of mixing with the remains of herbage in the cells. It is,\nof course, very disagreeable, but those who are dying from thirst\ncannot afford to be fastidious, and to them the water is a most\ndelicious draught.\n\nIt is rather curious that, if any of the water which is taken out of\na dead Camel can be kept for a few days, both the green hue and the\nunpleasant flavour disappear, and the water becomes fresh, clear,\nand limpid. So wonderfully well do the internal cells preserve the\nwater, that after a Camel has been dead for ten days--and in that\nhot climate ten days after death are equal to a month here--the\nwater within it has been quite pure and drinkable.\n\nMany persons believe in the popular though erroneous idea that the\nCamel does not require as much water as ordinary animals. He will\nsee, however, from the foregoing account that it needs quite as much\nwater as the horse or the ox, but that it possesses the capability\nof taking in at one time as much as either of these animals would\ndrink in several days. So far from being independent of water, there\nis no animal that requires it more, or displays a stronger desire\nfor it. A thirsty Camel possesses the power of scenting water at a\nvery great distance, and, when it does so, its instincts conquer\nits education, and it goes off at full speed towards the spot,\nwholly ignoring its rider or driver. Many a desert spring has been\ndiscovered, and many a life saved, by this wonderful instinct, the\nanimal having scented the distant water when its rider had lost all\nhope, and was resigning himself to that terrible end, the death by\nthirst. The sacred Zemzem fountain at Mecca was discovered by two\nthirsty Camels.\n\n[Illustration: A GRATEFUL SHADE.]\n\nExcept by the Jews, the flesh of the Camel is eaten throughout\nPalestine and the neighbouring countries, and is looked upon as a\ngreat luxury. The Arab, for example, can scarcely have a greater\ntreat than a Camel-feast, and looks forward to it in a state of\nwonderful excitement. He is so impatient, that scarcely is the\nanimal dead before it is skinned, cut up, and the various parts\nprepared for cooking.\n\nTo European palates the flesh of the Camel is rather unpleasant,\nbeing tough, stringy, and without much flavour. The fatty hump is\nuniversally considered as the best part of the animal, and is always\noffered to the chief among the guests, just as the North American\nIndian offers the hump of the bison to the most important man in the\nassembly. The heart and the tongue, however, are always eatable,\nand, however old a Camel may be, these parts can be cooked and eaten\nwithout fear.\n\nThe hump, or \"bunch\" as it is called in the Bible, has no connexion\nwith the spine, and is a supplementary growth, which varies in size,\nnot only in the species, but in the individual. It is analogous to\nthe hump upon the shoulders of the American bison and the Indian\nzebra, and in the best-bred Camels it is the smallest though the\nfinest and most elastic.\n\nThis hump, by the way, affords one of the points by which the value\nof the Camel is decided. When it is well fed and properly cared for,\nthe hump projects boldly, and is firm and elastic to the touch.\nBut if the Camel be ill, or if it be badly fed or overworked, the\nhump becomes soft and flaccid, and in bad cases hangs down on one\nside like a thick flap of skin. Consequently, the dealers in Camels\nalways try to produce their animals in the market with their humps\nwell developed; and, if they find that this important part does not\nlook satisfactory, they use various means to give it the required\nfulness, inflating it with air being the most common. In fact, there\nis as much deception among Camel-dealers in Palestine as with dog or\npigeon fanciers in England.\n\nHere perhaps I may remark that the hump has given rise to some\nstrange but prevalent views respecting the Camel. Many persons\nthink that the dromedary has one hump and the Camel two--in fact,\nthat they are two totally distinct animals. Now the fact is that\nthe Camel of Palestine is of one species only, the dromedary being\na lighter and swifter breed, and differing from the ordinary Camel\njust as a hunter or racer differs from a cart-horse. The two-humped\nCamel is a different species altogether, which will be briefly\ndescribed at the end of the present article.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe Camel is also used as a beast of draught, and, as we find, not\nonly from the Scriptures, but from ancient monuments, was employed\nto draw chariots and drag the plough. Thus in Isa. xxi. 7: \"And\nhe saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses,\nand a chariot of camels.\" It is evident that in this passage some\nchariots were drawn by Camels and some by asses. It is, however,\nremarkable that in Kennard's \"Eastern Experiences\", these two\nvery useful animals are mentioned as being yoked together: \"We\npassed through a fertile country, watching the fellaheen at their\nagricultural labours, and not a little amused at sometimes remarking\na very tall camel and a very small donkey yoked together in double\nharness, dragging a plough through the rich brown soil.\" Camels\ndrawing chariots are still to be seen in the Assyrian sculptures. In\nPalestine--at all events at the present time--the Camel is seldom\nif ever used as a beast of draught, being exclusively employed for\nbearing burdens and carrying riders.\n\nTaking it first as a beast of burden, we find several references in\ndifferent parts of the Scriptures. For example, see 2 Kings viii.\n9: \"So Hazael went to meet him, and took a present with him, even\nof every good thing of Damascus, forty camels' burden.\" Again, in\n1 Chron. xii. 40: \"Moreover they that were nigh them, even unto\nIssachar and Zebulun and Naphtali, brought bread on asses, and on\ncamels, and on mules, and on oxen.\" Another allusion to the same\ncustom is made in Isaiah: \"They will carry their riches upon the\nshoulders of young asses, and their treasures upon the bunches (or\nhumps) of camels.\"\n\nThe Camel can carry a considerable load, though not so much\nas is generally fancied. A sort of a pack-saddle of a very\nsimple description is used, in order to keep the burden upon so\nstrangely-shaped an animal. A narrow bag about eight feet long is\nmade, and rather loosely stuffed with straw or similar material. It\nis then doubled, and the ends firmly sewn together, so as to form\na great ring, which is placed over the hump, and forms a tolerably\nflat surface. A wooden framework is tied on the pack-saddle, and\nis kept in its place by a girth and a crupper. The packages which\nthe Camel is to carry are fastened together by cords, and slung\nover the saddle. They are only connected by those semi-knots called\n\"hitches,\" so that, when the Camel is to be unloaded, all that is\nneeded is to pull the lower end of the rope, and the packages fall\non either side of the animal. So quickly is the operation of loading\nperformed, that a couple of experienced men can load a Camel in very\nlittle more than a minute.\n\nAs is the case with the horse in England, the Camels that are\nused as beasts of burden are of a heavier, slower, and altogether\ninferior breed to those which are employed to carry riders, and\nall their accoutrements are of a ruder and meaner order, devoid\nof the fantastic ornaments with which Oriental riders are fond of\ndecorating their favourite animals.\n\nIn the large illustration are represented four of the ordinary\nCamels of burden, as they appear when laden with boughs for the\nFeast of Tabernacles. The branches are those of the Hebrew pine,\nand, as may be seen, the animals are so heavily laden with them that\ntheir forms are quite hidden under their leafy burdens. The weight\nwhich a Camel will carry varies much, according to the strength\nof the individual, which has given rise to the Oriental proverb,\n\"As the camel, so the load.\" But an animal of ordinary strength is\nsupposed to be able to carry from five to six hundred pounds for a\nshort journey, and half as much for a long one,--a quantity which,\nas the reader will see, is not so very great when the bulk of the\nanimal is taken into consideration. It is remarkable that the Camel\nknows its own powers, and instinctively refuses to move if its\ncorrect load be exceeded. But, when it is properly loaded, it will\ncarry its burden for hours together at exactly the same pace, and\nwithout seeming more fatigued than it was when it started.\n\n[Illustration: CAMELS LADEN WITH BOUGHS.]\n\n[Illustration: MORNING IN THE DESERT: STARTING OF THE CARAVAN.]\n\nThe riding Camels are always of a better breed than those which are\nused for burden, and maybe divided into two classes; namely, those\nwhich are meant for ordinary purposes, and those which are specially\nbred for speed and endurance. There is as much difference between\nthe ordinary riding Camel and the swift Camel as there is between\nthe road hack and the race-horse. We will first begin with the\ndescription of the common riding Camel and its accoutrements.\n\nThe saddle which is intended for a rider is very different from the\npack-saddle on which burdens are carried, and has a long upright\nprojection in front, to which the rider can hold if he wishes it.\n\nThe art of riding the Camel is far more difficult of accomplishment\nthan that of riding the horse, and the preliminary operation of\nmounting is not the least difficult portion of it. Of course,\nto mount a Camel while the animal is standing is impossible, and\naccordingly it is taught to kneel until the rider is seated.\nKneeling is a natural position with the Camel, which is furnished\nwith large callosities or warts on the legs and breast, which act as\ncushions on which it may rest its great weight without abrading the\nskin. These callosities are not formed, as some have imagined, by\nthe constant kneeling to which the Camel is subjected, but are born\nwith it, though of course less developed than they are after they\nhave been hardened by frequent pressure against the hot sand.\n\nWhen the Camel kneels, it first drops on its knees, and then on\nthe joints of the hind legs. Next it drops on its breast, and then\nagain on the bent hind legs. In rising it reverses the process, so\nthat a novice is first pitched forward, then backward, then forward,\nand then backward again, to the very great disarrangement of his\ngarments, and the probable loss of his seat altogether. Then when\nthe animal kneels he is in danger of being thrown over its head by\nthe first movement, and jerked over its tail by the second; but\nafter a time he learns to keep his seat mechanically.\n\nAs to the movement of the animal, it is at first almost as\nunpleasant as can be conceived, and has been described by several\ntravellers, some of whose accounts will be here given. One\nwell-known traveller declares that any person desiring to practise\nCamel-riding can readily do so by taking a music-stool, screwing\nit up as high as possible, putting it into a cart without springs,\nsitting on the top of it cross-legged, and having the cart driven at\nfull speed transversely over a newly-ploughed field.\n\nThere is, however, as great a difference in the gait of Camels as\nof horses, some animals having a quiet, regular, easy movement,\nwhile others are rough and high-stepping, harassing their riders\ngrievously in the saddle. Even the smooth-going Camel is, however,\nvery trying at first, on account of its long swinging strides, which\nare taken with the legs of each side alternately, causing the body\nof the rider to swing backwards and forwards as if he were rowing in\na boat.\n\nThose who suffer from sea-sickness are generally attacked with the\nsame malady when they make their first attempts at Camel-riding,\nwhile even those who are proof against this particular form of\ndiscomfort soon begin to find that their backs are aching, and that\nthe pain becomes steadily worse. Change of attitude is but little\nuse, and the wretched traveller derives but scant comfort from\nthe advice of his guide, who tells him to allow his body to swing\nfreely, and that in a short time he will become used to it. Some\ndays, however, are generally consumed before he succeeds in training\nhis spine to the continual unaccustomed movement, and he finds that,\nwhen he wakes on the morning that succeeds his first essay, his back\nis so stiff that he can scarcely move without screaming with pain,\nand that the prospect of mounting the Camel afresh is anything but a\npleasant one.\n\n\"I tried to sit erect without moving,\" writes Mr. Kennard, when\ndescribing his experience of Camel-riding. \"This proved a relief for\na few minutes, but, finding the effort too great to continue long in\nthis position, I attempted to recline with my head resting upon my\nhand. This last manoeuvre I found would not do, for the motion of\nthe camel's hind legs was so utterly at variance with the motion of\nhis fore-legs that I was jerked upwards, and forwards, and sideways,\nand finally ended in nearly rolling off altogether.\n\n\"Without going into the details of all that I suffered for the\nnext two or three days--how that on several occasions I slid from\nthe camel's back to the ground, in despair of ever accustoming my\nhalf-dislocated joints to the ceaseless jerking and swaying to and\nfro, and how that I often determined to trudge on foot over the\nhot desert sand all the way to Jerusalem rather than endure it\nlonger--I shall merely say that the day did at last arrive when I\ndescended from my camel, after many hours' riding, in as happy and\ncomfortable a state of mind as if I had been lolling in the easiest\nof arm-chairs.\"\n\nA very similar description of the transition from acute and constant\nsuffering to perfect ease is given by Albert Smith, who states that\nmore than once he has dozed on the back of his Camel, in spite of\nthe swaying backwards and forwards to which his body was subjected.\n\n[Illustration: THE CAMEL POST.]\n\nIf such be the discomfort of riding a smooth-going and good-tempered\nCamel, it may be imagined that to ride a hard-going and\ncross-grained animal must be a very severe trial to an inexperienced\nrider. A very amusing account of a ride on such a Camel, and of\na fall from its back, is given by Mr. Hamilton in his \"Sinai, the\nHedjaz, and Soudan:\"--\n\n\"A dromedary I had obtained at Suk Abu Sin for my own riding did not\nanswer my expectations, or rather the saddle was badly put on--not\nan easy thing to do well, by the way--and one of my servants,\nwho saw how out of patience I was at the many times I had had to\ndismount to have it arranged, persuaded me to try the one he was\nriding, the Sheik's present. I had my large saddle transferred to\nhis beast, and, nothing doubting, mounted it.\n\n\"He had not only no nose-string, but was besides a vicious brute,\nrising with a violent jerk before I was well in the saddle, and\nanxious to gain the caravan, which was a little way ahead, he set\noff at his roughest gallop. Carpets, kufieh, tarbush, all went off\nin the jolting; at every step I was thrown a foot into the air, glad\nto come down again, bump, bump, on the saddle, by dint of holding\non to the front pommel with the left hand, while the right was\nengaged with the bridle, which in the violence of the exercise it\nwas impossible to change to its proper hand. I had almost reached\nthe caravan, and had no doubt my hump-backed Pegasus would relax his\nexertions, when a camel-driver, one of the sons of iniquity, seeing\nme come up at full speed, and evidently quite run away with, took it\ninto his head to come to my assistance.\n\n\"I saw what he was at, and called out to him to get out of the way,\nbut instead of this he stuck himself straight before me, stretching\nhimself out like a St. Andrew's cross, with one hand armed with a\nhuge club, and making most diabolical grimaces. Of course the camel\nwas frightened, it was enough to frighten a much more reasonable\nbeing; so, wheeling quickly round, it upset my unstable equilibrium.\nDown I came head foremost to the ground, and when I looked up, my\nforehead streaming with blood, the first thing I saw was my Arab\nwith the camel, which he seemed mightily pleased with himself for\nhaving so cleverly captured, while the servant who had suggested the\nunlucky experiment came ambling along on my easy-paced dromedary,\nand consoled me by saying that he knew it was a runaway beast, which\nthere was no riding without a nose-string.\n\n\"I now began to study the way of keeping one's seat in such an\nemergency. An Arab, when he gallops his dromedary with one of these\nsaddles, holds hard on with the right hand to the back part of\nthe seat, not to the pommel, and grasps the bridle tightly in the\nother. The movement of the camel in galloping throws one violently\nforward, and without holding on, excepting on the naked back, when\nthe rider sits behind the hump, it is impossible to retain one's\nseat. I afterwards thought myself lucky in not having studied this\npoint sooner, as, from the greater resistance I should have offered,\nmy tumble, since it was _fated_ I should have one, would probably\nhave been much more severe. It is true I might also have escaped it,\nbut in the chapter of probabilities I always think a mishap the most\nprobable.\"\n\n[Illustration: A RUNAWAY.]\n\n[Illustration: AN ARAB SHEIK MOUNTED UPON HIS CAMEL.]\n\nIt may be imagined that a fall from a Camel's back is not a trifle,\nand, even if the unskilful rider be fortunate enough to fall on soft\nsand instead of hard rock, he receives a tolerably severe shock,\nand runs no little risk of breaking a limb. For the average height\nof a Camel's back is rather more than six feet, while some animals\nmeasure seven feet from the ground to the top of the hump.\n\nThis height, however, is of material advantage to the traveller. In\nthe first place it lifts him above the waves of heated air that are\ncontinually rolling over the sand on which the burning rays of the\nsun are poured throughout the day; and in the second place it brings\nhim within reach of the slightest breeze that passes above the\nstratum of hot air, and which comes to the traveller like the breath\nof life. Moreover, his elevated position enables him to see for a\nvery great distance, which is an invaluable advantage in a land\nwhere every stranger may be a robber, and is probably a murderer\nbesides.\n\nThe best mode of avoiding a fall is to follow the Arab mode of\nriding,--namely, to pass one leg over the upright pommel, which, as\nhas been mentioned, is a mere wooden peg or stake, and hitching the\nother leg over the dangling foot. Perhaps the safest, though not the\nmost comfortable, mode of sitting is by crossing the legs in front,\nand merely grasping the pommel with the hands.\n\nYet, fatiguing as is the seat on the Camel's back to the beginner,\nit is less so than that on the horse's saddle, inasmuch as in the\nlatter case one position is preserved, while in the former an\ninfinite variety of seat is attainable when the rider has fairly\nmastered the art of riding.\n\nThe Camel is not held by the bit and bridle like the horse, but by\na rope tied like a halter round the muzzle, and having a knot on\nthe left or \"near\" side. This is held in the left hand, and is used\nchiefly for the purpose of stopping the animal. The Camel is guided\npartly by the voice of its rider, and partly by a driving-stick,\nwith which the neck is lightly touched on the opposite side to that\nwhich its rider wishes it to take. A pressure of the heel on the\nshoulder-bone tells it to quicken its pace, and a little tap on the\nhead followed by a touch on the short ears are the signals for full\nspeed.\n\nThere are three different kinds of stick with which the Camel\nis driven; one of them, a mere almond branch with the bark, and\nan oblique head, is the sceptre or emblem of sovereignty of the\nPrince of Mecca. Mr. Hamilton suggests that this stick, called the\n\"_mesh'ab_,\" is the original of the jackal-headed stick with which\nso many of the Egyptian deities are represented; and that Aaron's\nrod that \"brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded\nalmonds,\" was the _mesh'ab_, the almond-branch sceptre, the emblem\nof his almost regal rank and authority.\n\n[Illustration: AARON'S ROD BEARS ALMONDS.]\n\nThe women mostly ride in a different manner from the men. Sometimes\nthey are hardy enough to sit the animal in the same way as their\nhusbands, but as a rule they are carried by the animal rather than\nride it, sitting in great basket-like appendages which are slung on\neither side of the Camel. These constitute the \"furniture\" which\nis mentioned in Gen. xxxi. 34. When Jacob left the house of Laban,\nto lead an independent life, Rachel stole her father's images, or\n\"teraphim,\" and carried them away with her, true to her affectionate\nthough deceptive nature, which impelled her to incur the guilt of\nrobbery for the sake of enriching her husband with the cherished\nteraphim of her father. From the most careful researches we learn\nthat these teraphim were used for divining the future, and that they\nwere made in the human form. That they were of considerable size\nis evident from the fact that, when Saul was hunting after David,\nhis wife Michal contrived to convey him out of the house, and for\na time to conceal her fraud by putting an image (or teraph) into\nthe bed as a representative of her husband. Had not, therefore, the\ncamel-furniture been of considerable dimensions, images of such a\nsize could not be hidden, but they could well be stowed away in the\ngreat panniers, as long as their mistress sat upon them, after the\ncustom of Oriental travellers and declined to rise on the ready plea\nof indisposition.\n\n[Illustration: CAMEL-RIDING.]\n\nThis sort of carriage is still used for the women and children. \"The\nwife and child came by in the string of camels, the former reclining\nin an immense circular box, stuffed and padded, covered with red\ncotton, and dressed with yellow worsted ornaments. This family\nnest was mounted on a large camel. It seemed a most commodious and\nwell-arranged travelling carriage, and very superior as a mode of\ncamel-riding to that which our Sitteen rejoiced in (_i.e._ riding\nupon a saddle). The Arab wife could change her position at pleasure,\nand the child had room to walk about and could not fall out, the\nsides of the box just reaching to its shoulders. Various jugs and\nskins and articles of domestic use hung suspended about it, and\ntrappings of fringe and finery ornamented it.\"\n\nThis last sentence brings us to another point which is several\ntimes mentioned in the Bible; namely, the ornaments with which the\nproprietors of Camels are fond of bedizening their favourite animals.\n\nTheir leathern collars are covered with cowrie shells sewn on them\nin various fantastic patterns. Crescent-shaped ornaments are made of\nshells sewn on red cloth, and hung so abundantly upon the harness of\nthe animal that they jingle at every step which it takes. Sheiks and\nother men of rank often have these ornaments made of silver, so that\nthe cost of the entire trappings is very great.\n\n[Illustration: THE DELOUL, OR SWIFT CAMEL.]\n\nWe now come to the Swift Camel, or Deloul.\n\nThe limbs of the Deloul are long and wiry, having not an ounce of\nsuperfluous fat upon them, the shoulders are very broad, and the\nhump, though firm and hard, is very small.\n\nA thoroughbred Deloul, in good travelling condition, is not at\nall a pleasing animal to an ordinary eye, being a lank, gaunt, and\nungainly-looking creature, the very conformation which insures its\nswiftness and endurance being that which detracts from its beauty.\nAn Arab of the desert, however, thinks a good Deloul one of the\nfinest sights in the world. As the talk of the pastoral tribes is of\nsheep and oxen, so is the talk of the nomads about Camels. It is a\nsubject which is for ever on their lips, and a true Bedouin may be\nseen to contemplate the beauties of one of these favourite animals\nfor hours at a time,--if his own, with the rapture of a possessor,\nor, if another's, with the determination of stealing it when he can\nfind an opportunity.\n\nInstead of plodding along at the rate of three miles an hour, which\nis the average speed of the common Camel, the Deloul can cover,\nif lightly loaded, nine or ten miles an hour, and go on at the\nsame pace for a wonderful time, its long legs swinging, and its\nbody swaying, as if it were but an animated machine. Delouls have\nbeen reported to have journeyed for nearly fifty hours without\na single stop for rest, during which time the animals must have\ntraversed nearly five hundred miles. Such examples must, however,\nbe exceptional, implying, as they do, an amount of endurance on the\npart of the rider equal to that of the animal; and even a journey of\nhalf that distance is scarcely possible to ordinary men on Delouls.\n\nFor the movements of the Deloul are very rough, and the rider is\nobliged to prepare himself for a long journey by belting himself\ntightly with two leathern bands, one just under the arms, and the\nother round the pit of the stomach. Without these precautions, the\nrider would be likely to suffer serious injuries, and, even with\nthem, the exercise is so severe, that an Arab makes it a matter of\nspecial boast that he can ride a Deloul for a whole day.\n\nA courier belonging to the Sherif of Mecca told Mr. Hamilton that he\noften went on the same dromedary from Mecca to Medina in forty-eight\nhours, the distance being two hundred and forty miles. And a\nthoroughbred Deloul will travel for seven or eight weeks with only\nfour or five days of rest.\n\nEven at the present time, these Camels are used for the conveyance\nof special messages, and in the remarkable Bornu kingdom a regular\nservice of these animals is established, two couriers always\ntravelling in company, so that if one rider or Camel should fail\nor be captured by the Arabs, who are always on the alert for so\nvaluable a prey, the other may post on and carry the message to its\ndestination.\n\n[Illustration: ANOTHER MODE OF RIDING THE CAMEL.]\n\nThe swift dromedary, or Deloul, is mentioned several times in the\nOld Testament. One of them occurs in Isa. lx. 6: \"The multitude of\ncamels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah.\" In\nthis passage a distinction is drawn between the ordinary Camel and\nthe swift dromedary, the former being the word \"gamel,\" and the\nlatter the word \"beker,\" which is again used in Jer. ii. 23: \"See\nthy way in the valley, know what thou hast done: thou art a swift\ndromedary.\"\n\nThere is a passage in the Book of Esther which looks as if it\nreferred to the ordinary Camel and the swift dromedary, but there\nis considerable uncertainty about the proper rendering It runs as\nfollows: \"And he wrote in king Ahasuerus' name, and sealed it with\nthe king's ring, and sent letters and posts on horseback, and riders\non mules, camels, and young dromedaries.\"\n\nThe Jewish Bible, however, translates this passage as follows: \"And\nsent letters by the runners on the horses, and riders on the racers,\nmules, and young mares.\" Now, the word _rekesh_, which is translated\nas \"racer,\" is rendered by Buxtorf as \"a swift horse or mule,\" and\nthe word _beni-rammachim_, which is translated as \"young mares,\"\nliterally signifies \"those born of mares.\"\n\nThe Camel-drivers behave towards their animals with the curious\ninconsistency which forms so large a part of the Oriental character.\n\nPrizing them above nearly all earthly things, proud of them, and\nloving them after their own fashion, the drivers will talk to\nthem, cheer them, and sing interminable songs for their benefit.\nTowards the afternoon the singing generally begins, and it goes on\nwithout cessation in a sort of monotonous hum, as Dr. Bonar calls\nit. The same traveller calls attention to a passage in Caussinus'\n\"Polyhistor Symbolicus,\" in which the learned and didactic author\nsymbolizes the maxim that more can be done by kindness than by\nblows. \"The Camel is greatly taken with music and melody. So much\nso, indeed, that if it halts through weariness, the driver does not\nurge it with stripes and blows, but soothes it by his songs.\"\n\nSeveral travellers have mentioned these songs. See, for example,\nMiss Rogers' account of some Bedouins: \"Their songs were already\nsubdued to harmonize with their monotonous swinging pace, and chimed\nsoftly and plaintively with the tinkling of camel-bells, thus--\n\n    \"'Dear unto me as the sight of mine eyes,\n       Art thou, O my Camel!\n     Precious to me as the health of my life,\n       Art thou, O my Camel!\n     Sweet to my ears is the sound\n       Of thy tinkling bells, O my Camel!\n     And sweet to thy listening ears\n       Is the sound of my evening song.'\n\nAnd so on, _ad libitum_.\"\n\nSometimes a female Camel gives birth to a colt on the journey. In\nsuch a case, a brief pause is made, and then the train proceeds\non its journey, the owner of the Camel carrying the young one in\nhis arms until the evening halt. He then gives it to its mother,\nand on the following day it is able to follow her without further\nassistance. The young Camels are almost pretty, their hair being\npaler than that of the adult animal, and their limbs more slender.\n\nAlthough the young Camel is better-looking than its parents, it is\nnot one whit more playful. Unlike almost all other animals, the\nCamel seems to have no idea of play, and even the young Camel of a\nmonth or two old follows its mother with the same steady, regular\npace which she herself maintains.\n\nIn spite of all the kindness with which a driver treats his\nCamels, he can at times be exceedingly cruel to them, persisting\nin over-loading and over-driving them, and then, if a Camel fall\nexhausted, removing its load, and distributing it among the other\nCamels. As soon as this is done, he gives the signal to proceed, and\ngoes on his way, abandoning the wretched animal to its fate--_i.e._\nto thirst and the vultures. He will not even have the humanity to\nkill it, but simply leaves it on the ground, muttering that it is\n\"his fate!\"\n\n\n\n\nTHE CAMEL.\n\nCHAPTER II.\n\n     The Camel and its master--Occasional fury of the animal--A\n     boy killed by a Camel--Another instance of an infuriated\n     Camel--Theory respecting the Arab and his Camel--Apparent\n     stupidity of the Camel--Its hatred of a load, and mode of\n     expressing its disapprobation--Riding a Camel through the\n     streets--A narrow escape--Ceremony of weaning a young Camel--The\n     Camel's favourite food--Structure of the foot and adaptation\n     to locality--Difficulty in provisioning--Camel's hair and\n     skin--Sal-ammoniac and Desert fuel--The Camel and the needle's\n     eye--Straining at a gnat and swallowing a Camel.\n\nWe now come to the general characteristics of the Camel.\n\nThe Camels know their master well, some of them being much more\naffectionate than others. But they are liable to fits of strange\nfury, in which case even their own masters are not safe from them.\nThey are also of a revengeful nature, and have an unpleasant\nfaculty of treasuring up an injury until they can find a time of\nrepaying it. Signor Pierotti gives a curious example of this trait\nof character. As he was going to the Jordan, he found a dead Camel\nlying on the roadside, the head nearly separated from the body. On\ninquiry he found that the animal had a master who ill-treated it,\nand had several times tried to bite him. One evening, after the\nCamels had been unloaded, the drivers lay down to sleep as usual.\n\nThe Camel made its way to its master, and stamped on him as he\nslept. The man uttered one startled cry, but had no time for\nanother. The infuriated Camel followed up its attack by grasping his\nthroat in its powerful jaws, and shaking him to death. The whole\nscene passed so rapidly, that before the other drivers could come to\nthe man's assistance he was hanging dead from the jaws of the Camel,\nwho was shaking him as a dog shakes a rat, and would not release\nits victim until its head had been nearly severed from its body by\nsword-cuts.\n\nA similar anecdote is told by Mr. Palgrave, in his \"Central and\nEastern Arabia:\"--\n\n\"One passion alone he possesses, namely, revenge, of which he gives\nmany a hideous example; while, in carrying it out, he shows an\nunexpected degree of forethoughted malice, united meanwhile with\nall the cold stupidity of his usual character. One instance of this\nI well remember--it occurred hard by a small town in the plain of\nBaalbec, where I was at the time residing.\n\n\"A lad of about fourteen had conducted a large camel, laden\nwith wood, from that very village to another at half an hour's\ndistance or so. As the animal loitered or turned out of the way,\nits conductor struck it repeatedly, and harder than it seems to\nhave thought he had a right to do. But, not finding the occasion\nfavourable for taking immediate quits, it 'bided its time,' nor was\nthat time long in coming.\n\n\"A few days later, the same lad had to re-conduct the beast, but\nunladen, to his own village. When they were about half way on the\nroad, and at some distance from any habitation, the camel suddenly\nstopped, looked deliberately round in every direction to assure\nitself that no one was in sight, and, finding the road clear of\npassers-by, made a step forward, seized the unlucky boy's head in\nits monstrous mouth, and, lifting him up in the air, flung him down\nagain on the earth, with the upper part of his head completely torn\noff, and his brains scattered on the ground. Having thus satisfied\nits revenge, the brute quietly resumed its pace towards the village,\nas though nothing were the matter, till some men, who had observed\nthe whole, though unfortunately at too great a distance to be able\nto afford timely help, came up and killed it.\n\n\"Indeed, so marked is this unamiable propensity, that some\nphilosophers have ascribed the revengeful character of the Arabs\nto the great share which the flesh and milk of the camel have in\ntheir sustenance, and which are supposed to communicate, to those\nwho partake of them over-largely, the moral or immoral qualities of\nthe animal to which they belonged. I do not feel myself capable of\npronouncing an opinion on so intricate a question, but thus much I\ncan say, that the camel and its Bedouin master do afford so many and\nsuch divers points of resemblance, that I do not think our Arab of\nShomer far in the wrong, when I once on a time heard him say, 'God\ncreated the Bedouin for the camel, and the camel for the Bedouin.'\"\n\nThe reader will observe that Mr. Palgrave in this anecdote makes\nreference to the stupidity of the Camel. There is no doubt that the\nCamel is by no means an intellectual animal; but it is very possible\nthat its stupidity may in a great measure be owing to the fact that\nno one has tried to cultivate its intellectual powers. The preceding\nanecdotes show clearly that the Camel must possess a strong memory,\nand be capable of exercising considerable ingenuity.\n\nStill it is not a clever animal. If its master should fall off its\nback, it never dreams of stopping, as a well-trained horse would\ndo, but proceeds at the same plodding pace, leaving his master to\ncatch it if he can. Should it turn out of the way to crop some green\nthorn-bush, it will go on in the same direction, never thinking\nof turning back into the right road unless directed by its rider.\nShould the Camel stray, \"it is a thousand to one that he will never\nfind his way back to his accustomed home or pasture, and the first\nman who picks him up will have no particular shyness to get over;\n... and the losing of his old master and of his former cameline\ncompanions gives him no regret, and occasions no endeavour to find\nthem again.\"\n\nHe has the strongest objection to being laden at all, no matter\nhow light may be the burden, and expresses his disapprobation by\ngrowling and groaning, and attempting to bite. So habitual is this\nconduct that if a kneeling Camel be only approached, and a stone as\nlarge as a walnut laid on its back, it begins to remonstrate in its\nusual manner, groaning as if it were crushed to the earth with its\nload.\n\nThe Camel never makes way for any one, its instinct leading it to\nplod onward in its direct course. What may have been its habits in\na state of nature no one can tell, for such a phenomenon as a wild\nCamel has never been known in the memory of man. There are wild\noxen, wild goats, wild sheep, wild horses, and wild asses, but there\nis no spot on the face of the earth where the Camel is found except\nas the servant of man. Through innate stupidity, according to Mr.\nPalgrave, it goes straight forwards in the direction to which its\nhead happens to be pointed, and is too foolish even to think of\nstopping unless it hears the signal for halt.\n\nAs it passes through the narrow streets of an Oriental city, laden\nwith goods that project on either side, and nearly fill up the\nthoroughfare, it causes singular inconvenience, forcing every one\nwho is in front of it to press himself closely to the wall, and\nto make way for the enormous beast as it plods along. The driver\nor rider generally gives notice by continually calling to the\npedestrians to get out of the way, but a laden Camel rarely passes\nthrough a long street without having knocked down a man or two, or\ndriven before it a few riders on asses who cannot pass between the\nCamel and the wall.\n\nOne source of danger to its rider is to be found in the low archways\nwhich span so many of the streets. They are just high enough to\npermit a laden Camel to pass under them, but are so low that they\nleave no room for a rider. The natives, who are accustomed to this\nstyle of architecture, are always ready for an archway, and, when\nthe rider sees an archway which will not allow him to retain his\nseat, he slips to the ground, and remounts on the other side of the\nobstacle.\n\nMr. Kennard had a very narrow escape with one of these arch ways.\n\"I had passed beneath one or two in perfect safety, without being\nobliged to do more than just bend my head forward, and was in\nthe act of conversing with one of my companions behind, and was\ntherefore in a happy state of ignorance as to what was immediately\nbefore me, when the shouting and running together of the people in\nthe street on either side made me turn my head quickly, but only\njust in time to feel my breath thrown back on my face against the\nkeystone of a gateway, beneath which my camel, with too much way on\nhim to be stopped immediately, had already commenced to pass.\n\n\"With a sort of feeling that it was all over with me, I threw\nmyself back as far as I could, and was carried through in an almost\nbreathless state, my shirt-studs actually scraping along against the\nstonework. On emerging again into the open street, I could hardly\nrealize my escape, for if there had been a single projecting stone\nto stop my progress, the camel would have struggled to get free, and\nmy chest must have been crushed in.\"\n\nIt will be seen from these instances that the charge of stupidity\nis not an undeserved one. Still the animal has enough intellect to\nreceive all the education which it needs for the service of man, and\nwhich it receives at a very early age. The ordinary Camel of burden\nis merely taught to follow its conductor, to obey the various words\nand gestures of command, and to endure a load. The Deloul, however,\nis more carefully trained. It is allowed to follow its mother for\na whole year in perfect liberty. Towards the expiration of that\ntime the young animal is gradually stinted in its supply of milk,\nand forced to browse for its nourishment. On the anniversary of its\nbirth, the young Deloul is turned with its head towards Canopus,\nand its ears solemnly boxed, its master saying at the same time,\n\"Henceforth drinkest thou no drop of milk.\" For this reason the\nnewly-weaned Camel is called Lathim, or the \"ear-boxed.\" It is then\nprevented from sucking by a simple though cruel experiment. A wooden\npeg is sharpened at both ends, and one end thrust into the young\nanimal's nose. When it tries to suck, it pricks its mother with\nthe projecting end, and at the same time forces the other end more\ndeeply into the wound, so that the mother drives away her offspring,\nand the young soon ceases to make the attempt.\n\nThe food of the Camel is very simple, being, in fact, anything that\nit can get. As it proceeds on its journey, it manages to browse as\nit goes along, bending its long neck to the ground, and cropping\nthe scanty herbage without a pause. Camels have been known to\ntravel for twenty successive days, passing over some eight hundred\nmiles of ground, without receiving any food except that which they\ngathered for themselves by the way. The favourite food of the Camel\nis a shrub called the ghada, growing to six feet or so in height,\nand forming a feathery tuft of innumerable little green twigs, very\nslender and flexible. It is so fond of this shrub that a Camel can\nscarcely ever pass a bush without turning aside to crop it; and even\nthough it be beaten severely for its misconduct, it will repeat the\nprocess at the next shrub that comes in sight.\n\n[Illustration: PASSING A CAMEL IN A NARROW STREET OF AN EASTERN\nCITY.]\n\nIt also feeds abundantly on the thorn-bushes which grow so\nplentifully in that part of the world; and though the thorns are an\ninch or two in length, very strong, and as sharp as needles, the\nhard, horny palate of the animal enables it to devour them with\nperfect ease.\n\n[Illustration: MOSES AT THE BURNING BUSH.]\n\nThere are several species of these thorn-shrubs, which are scattered\nprofusely over the ground, and are, in fact, the commonest growth\nof the place. After they die, being under the fierce sun of that\nclimate, they dry up so completely, that if a light be set to them\nthey blaze up in a moment, with a sharp cracking sound and a roar\nof flame, and in a moment or two are nothing but a heap of light\nashes. No wonder was it that when Moses saw the thorn-bush burning\nwithout being consumed he was struck with awe at the miracle. These\nwithered bushes are the common fuel of the desert, giving out a\nfierce but brief heat, and then suddenly sinking into ashes. \"For as\nthe crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool\"\n(Eccl. vii. 6).\n\nThe dried and withered twigs of these bushes are also eaten by the\nCamel, which seems to have a power of extracting nutriment from\nevery sort of vegetable substance. It has been fed on charcoal, and,\nas has been happily remarked, could thrive on the shavings of a\ncarpenter's workshop.\n\n[Illustration: AN ARAB ENCAMPMENT.]\n\nStill, when food is plentiful, it is fed as regularly as can be\nmanaged, and generally after a rather peculiar manner. \"Our guide,\"\nwrites Mr. Hamilton, in the work which has already been mentioned,\n\"is an elderly man, the least uncouth of our camel-drivers. He\nhas three camels in the caravan, and it was amusing to see his\npreparations for their evening's entertainment. The table-cloth, a\ncircular piece of leather, was duly spread on the ground; on this he\npoured the quantity of dourrah destined for their meal, and calling\nhis camels, they came and took each its place at the feast. It is\nquaint to see how each in his turn eats, so gravely and so quietly,\nstretching his long neck into the middle of the heap, then raising\nhis head to masticate each mouthful; all so slowly and with such\ngusto, that we could swear it was a party of epicures sitting in\njudgment on one of Vachette's _chefs d'oeuvre_.\"\n\nThe foregoing passages will show the reader how wonderfully adapted\nis the constitution of the Camel for the country in which it lives,\nand how indispensable it is to the inhabitants. It has been called\n\"the ship of the desert,\" for without the Camel the desert would be\nas impassable as the sea without ships. No water being found for\nseveral days' journey together, the animal is able to carry within\nitself a supply of water which will last it for several days, and,\nas no green thing grows far from the presence of water, the Camel is\nable to feed upon the brief-lived thorn-shrubs which have sprung up\nand died, and which, from their hard and sharp prickles, are safe\nfrom every animal except the hard-mouthed Camel.\n\nBut these advantages would be useless without another--_i. e._ the\nfoot. The mixed stones and sand of the desert would ruin the feet\nof almost any animal, and it is necessary that the Camel should be\nfurnished with a foot that cannot be split by heat like the hoof of\na horse, that is broad enough to prevent the creature from sinking\ninto the sand, and is tough enough to withstand the action of the\nrough and burning soil.\n\nSuch a foot does the Camel possess. It consists of two long toes\nresting upon a hard elastic cushion with a tough and horny sole.\nThis cushion is so soft that the tread of the huge animal is as\nnoiseless as that of a cat, and, owing to the division of the toes,\nit spreads as the weight comes upon it, and thus gives a firm\nfooting on loose ground. The foot of the moose-deer has a similar\nproperty, in order to enable the animal to walk upon the snow.\n\nIn consequence of this structure, the Camel sinks less deeply into\nthe ground than any other animal; but yet it does sink in it, and\ndislikes a deep and loose sand, groaning at every step, and being\nwearied by the exertion of dragging its hard foot out of the\nholes into which they sink. It is popularly thought that hills are\nimpracticable to the Camel; but it is able to climb even rocky\nground from which a horse would recoil. Mr. Marsh, an American\ntraveller, was much surprised by seeing a caravan of fifty camels\npass over a long ascent in Arabia Petraea. The rock was as smooth as\npolished marble, and the angle was on an average fifteen degrees;\nbut the whole caravan passed over it without an accident.\n\n[Illustration: ON THE MARCH.]\n\nThe soil that a Camel most hates is a wet and muddy ground, on\nwhich it is nearly sure to slip. If the reader will look at a Camel\nfrom behind, he will see that the hinder legs are close together\nuntil the ankle-joint, when they separate so widely that the feet\nare set on the ground at a considerable distance from each other.\nOn dry ground this structure increases the stability of the animal\nby increasing its base; but on wet ground the effect is singularly\nunpleasant. The soft, padded feet have no hold, and slip sideways\nat every step, often with such violence as to dislocate a joint and\ncause the death of the animal. When such ground has to be traversed,\nthe driver generally passes a bandage round the hind legs just below\nthe ankle-joint, so as to prevent them from diverging too far.\n\nIt must be remarked, however, that the country in which the animal\nlives is essentially a dry one, and that moist and muddy ground\nis so exceptional that the generality of Camels never see it in\ntheir lives. Camels do not object to mud an inch or two deep,\nprovided that there is firm ground below; and they have been seen\nto walk with confident safety over pavements covered with mud and\nhalf-frozen snow.\n\nThe animals can ford rivers well enough, provided that the bed be\nstony or gravelly; but they are bad swimmers, their round bodies and\nlong necks being scarcely balanced by their legs, so that they are\napt to roll over on their sides, and in such a case they are sure\nto be drowned. When swimming is a necessity, the head is generally\ntied to the stern of a boat, or guided by the driver swimming in\nfront, while another often clings to the tail, so as to depress the\nrump and elevate the head. It is rather curious that the Camels of\nthe Sahara cannot be safely entrusted to the water. They will swim\nthe river readily enough; but they are apt to be seized with illness\nafterwards, and to die in a few hours.\n\nWe now come to some other uses of the Camel.\n\nIts hair is of the greatest importance, as it is used for many\npurposes. In this country, all that we know practically of the\nCamel's hair is that it is employed in making brushes for painters;\nbut in its own land the hair plays a really important part. At the\nproper season it is removed from the animal, usually by being pulled\naway in tufts, but sometimes by being shorn, and it is then spun by\nthe women into strong thread.\n\nFrom this thread are made sundry fabrics where strength is required\nand coarseness is not an objection. The \"black tents\" of the Bedouin\nArabs, similar to those in which Abraham lived, are made of Camel's\nhair, and so are the rugs, carpets, and cordage used by the nomad\ntribes. Even mantles for rainy or cold weather are made of Camel's\nhair, and it was in a dress of this coarse and rough material that\nSt. John the Baptist was clad. The best part of the Camels hair is\nthat which grows in tufts on the back and about the hump, the fibre\nbeing much longer than that which covers the body. There is also a\nlittle very fine under-wool which is carefully gathered, and, when a\nsufficient quantity is procured, it is spun and woven into garments.\nShawls of this material are even now as valuable as those which are\nmade from the Cachmire goat.\n\n[Illustration: HAIR OF THE CAMEL.]\n\nThe skin of the Camel is made into a sort of leather. It is simply\ntanned by being pegged out in the sun and rubbed with salt.\n\nSandals and leggings are made of this leather, and in some places\nwater-bottles are manufactured from it, the leather being thicker\nand less porous than that of the goat, and therefore wasting less of\nthe water by evaporation. The bones are utilized, being made into\nvarious articles of commerce.\n\nSo universally valuable is the Camel that even its dung is important\nto its owners. Owing to the substances on which the animal feeds,\nit consists of little but macerated fragments of aromatic shrubs.\nIt is much used as poultices in case of bruises or rheumatic pains,\nand is even applied with some success to simple fractures. It is\nlargely employed for fuel, and the desert couriers use nothing else,\ntheir Camels being furnished with a net, so that none of this useful\nsubstance shall be lost. For this purpose it is carefully collected,\nmixed with bits of straw, and made into little rolls, which are\ndried in the sun, and can then be laid by for any time until they\nare needed.\n\nMixed with clay and straw, it is most valuable as a kind of mortar\nor cement with which the walls of huts are rendered weather-proof,\nand the same material is used in the better-class houses to make a\nsort of terrace on the flat roof. This must be waterproof in order\nto withstand the wet of the rainy season, and no material answers\nthe purpose so well as that which has been mentioned. So strangely\nhard and firm is this composition, that stoves are made of it. These\nstoves are made like jars, and have the faculty of resisting the\npower of the inclosed fire. Even after it is burned it has its uses,\nthe ashes being employed in the manufacture of sal-ammoniac.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThere are two passages in the New Testament which mention the Camel\nin an allegorical sense. The first of these is the proverbial saying\nof our Lord, \"A rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of\nheaven. Again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through\nthe eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom\nof God\" (Matt. xix. 23, 24).\n\nNow, this well-known but scarcely understood passage requires some\nlittle dissection. If the reader will refer to the context, he will\nsee that this saying was spoken in allusion to the young and wealthy\nman who desired to be one of the disciples, but clung too tightly\nto his wealth to accept the only conditions on which he could be\nreceived. His possessions were a snare to him, as was proved by his\nrefusal to part with them at Christ's command. On his retiring,\nthe expression was used, \"that a rich man shall hardly (or, with\ndifficulty) enter the kingdom of heaven;\" followed by the simile of\nthe Camel and the needle's eye.\n\nNow, if we are to take this passage literally, we can but draw one\nconclusion from it, that a rich man can no more enter heaven than a\ncamel pass through the eye of a needle, i.e. that it is impossible\nfor him to do so. Whereas, in the previous sentence, Christ says not\nthat it is impossible, but difficult (+dyskolos+) for him to do so.\nIt is difficult for a man to use his money for the service of God,\nthe only purpose for which it was given him, and the difficulty\nincreases in proportion to its amount. But wealth in itself is no\nmore a bar to heaven than intellect, health, strength, or any other\ngift, and, if it be rightly used, is one of the most powerful tools\nthat can be used in the service of God. Our Lord did not condemn\nall wealthy men alike. He knew many; but there was only one whom He\nadvised to sell his possessions and give them to the poor as the\ncondition of being admitted among the disciples.\n\n[Illustration: CAMEL GOING THROUGH A \"NEEDLE'S EYE.\"]\n\nWe will now turn to the metaphor of the Camel and the needle's eye.\nOf course it can be taken merely as a very bold metaphor, but it\nmay also be understood in a simpler sense, the sense in which it\nwas probably understood by those who heard it. In Oriental cities,\nthere are in the large gates small and very low apertures called\nmetaphorically \"needle's-eyes,\" just as we talk of certain windows\nas \"bull's-eyes.\" These entrances are too narrow for a Camel to\npass through them in the ordinary manner, especially if loaded.\nWhen a laden Camel has to pass through one of these entrances, it\nkneels down, its load is removed, and then it shuffles through on\nits knees. \"Yesterday,\" writes Lady Duff-Gordon from Cairo, \"I saw a\ncamel go through the eye of a needle, _i.e._ the low-arched door of\nan enclosure. He must kneel, and bow his head to creep through; and\nthus the rich man must humble himself.\"\n\nThere is another passage in which the Camel is used by our Lord in\na metaphorical sense. This is the well-known sentence: \"Ye blind\nguides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel\" (Matt. xxiii.\n24). It is remarkable that an accidental misprint has robbed this\npassage of its true force. The real translation is: \"which strain\n_out_ the gnat, and swallow the camel.\" The Greek word is +diulizo+,\nwhich signifies to filter thoroughly; and the allusion is made to\nthe pharisaical custom of filtering liquids before drinking them,\nlest by chance a gnat or some such insect which was forbidden as\nfood might be accidentally swallowed.\n\n\n\n\nTHE BACTRIAN CAMEL.\n\n     General description of the animal--Its use in mountain\n     roads--Peculiar formation of the foot--Uses of a mixed\n     breed--Its power of enduring cold--Used chiefly as a beast\n     of draught--Unfitness for the plough--The cart and mode of\n     harnessing--The load which it can draw--Camel-skin ropes--A\n     Rabbinical legend.\n\n\nThe second kind of Camel--namely, the Bactrian species--was probably\nunknown to the Jews until a comparatively late portion of their\nhistory. This species was employed by the Assyrians, as we find by\nthe sculptures upon the ruins, and if in no other way the Jews would\nbecome acquainted with them through the nation by whom they were\nconquered, and in whose land they abode for so long.\n\nThe Bactrian Camel is at once to be distinguished from that which\nhas already been described by the two humps and the clumsier and\nsturdier form. Still the skeletons of the Bactrian and Arabian\nspecies are so similar that none but a very skilful anatomist\ncan distinguish between them, and several learned zoologists\nhave expressed an opinion, in which I entirely coincide, that the\nBactrian and Arabian Camels are but simple varieties of one and the\nsame species, not nearly so dissimilar as the greyhound and the\nbulldog.\n\n[Illustration: A REST IN THE DESERT.]\n\nUnlike the one-humped Camel, the Bactrian species is quite at home\nin a cold climate, and walks over ice as easily as its congener does\nover smooth stone. It is an admirable rock-climber, and is said even\nto surpass the mule in the sureness of its tread. This quality is\nprobably occasioned by the peculiar structure of the foot, which has\nan elongated toe projecting beyond the soft pad, and forming a sort\nof claw. In the winter time the riders much prefer them to horses,\nbecause their long legs enable them to walk easily through snow,\nin which a horse could only plunge helplessly, and would in all\nprobability sink and perish.\n\nA mixed breed of the one-humped and the Bactrian animals is thought\nto be the best for hill work in winter time, and General Harlan\nactually took two thousand of these animals in winter time for a\ndistance of three hundred and sixty miles over the snowy tops of the\nIndian Caucasus; and though the campaign lasted for seven months, he\nonly lost one Camel, and that was accidentally killed. Owing to its\nuse among the hills, the Bactrian species is sometimes called the\nMountain Camel.\n\nIt very much dislikes the commencement of spring, because the warm\nmid-day sun slightly melts the surface of the snow, and the frost\nof night converts it into a thin plate of ice. When the Camel walks\nupon this semi-frozen snow, its feet plunge into the soft substratum\nthrough the icy crust, against which its legs are severely cut. The\nbeginning of the winter is liable to the same objection.\n\nThe mixed breed which has just been mentioned must be procured from\na male Bactrian and a female Arabian Camel. If the parentage be\nreversed, the offspring is useless, being weak, ill-tempered, and\ndisobedient.\n\nThe Bactrian Camel is, as has been mentioned, tolerant of cold, and\nis indeed so hardy an animal that it bears the severest winters\nwithout seeming to suffer distress, and has been seen quietly\nfeeding when the thermometer has reached a temperature several\ndegrees below zero. Sometimes, when the cold is more than usually\nsharp, the owners sew a thick cloth round its body, but even in such\nextreme cases the animal is left to find its own food as it best\ncan. And, however severe the weather may be, the Bactrian Camel\nnever sleeps under a roof.\n\nThis Camel is sometimes employed as a beast of burden, but its\ngeneral use is for draught. It is not often used alone for the\nplough, because it has an uncertain and jerking mode of pulling, and\ndoes not possess the steady dragging movement which is obtained by\nthe use of the horse or ox.\n\n[Illustration: BACTRIAN CAMELS DRAWING CART.]\n\nIt is almost invariably harnessed to carts, and always in pairs. The\nmode of yoking the animals is as simple as can well be conceived.\nA pole runs between them from the front of the vehicle, and the\nCamels are attached to it by means of a pole which passes over their\nnecks. Oxen were harnessed in a similar manner. It was probably\none of these cars or chariots that was mentioned by Isaiah in his\nprophecy respecting Assyria:--\"And he saw a chariot with a couple of\nhorsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels\" (Isa. xxi.\n7). The cars themselves are as simple as the mode of harnessing\nthem, being almost exactly like the ox carts which have already been\ndescribed.\n\nThe weight which can be drawn by a pair of these Camels is really\nconsiderable. On a tolerably made road a good pair of Camels are\nexpected to draw from twenty-six to twenty-eight hundred weight,\nand to continue their labours for twenty or thirty successive\ndays, traversing each day an average of thirty miles. It is much\nslower than the Arabian Camel, seldom going at more than two and a\nhalf miles per hour. If, however, the vehicle to which a pair of\nBactrians are harnessed were well made, the wheels truly circular,\nand the axles kept greased so as to diminish the friction, there is\nno doubt that the animals could draw a still greater load to longer\ndistances, and with less trouble to themselves. As it is, the wheels\nare wretchedly fitted, and their ungreased axles keep up a continual\ncreaking that is most painful to an unaccustomed ear, and totally\nunheeded by the drivers.\n\nThe hair of the Bactrian Camel is long, coarse, and strong; and,\nlike that of the Arabian animal, is made into rough cloth. It is\nplucked off by hand in the summer time, when it naturally becomes\nloose in readiness for its annual renewal, and the weight of the\nentire crop of hair ought to be about ten pounds. The skin is not\nmuch valued, and is seldom used for any purpose except for making\nropes, straps, and thongs, and is not thought worth the trouble of\ntanning. The milk, like that of the Arabian animal, is much used for\nfood, but the quantity is very trifling, barely two quarts per diem\nbeing procured from each Camel.\n\nThere is but little that is generally interesting in the Rabbinical\nwriters on the Camel. They have one proverbial saying upon the\nshortness of its ears. When any one makes a request that is likely\nto be refused, they quote the instance of the Camel, who, it seems,\nwas dissatisfied with its appearance, and asked for horns to match\nits long ears. The result of the request was, that it was deprived\nof its ears, and got no horns.\n\n\n\n\nTHE HORSE.\n\n     The Hebrew words which signify the Horse--The Horse introduced\n     into Palestine from Egypt--Similarity of the war-horse of\n     Scripture and the Arab horse of the present day--Characteristics\n     of the Horse--Courage and endurance of the Horse--Hardness of\n     its unshod hoofs--Love of the Arab for his Horse--Difficulty\n     of purchasing the animal--The Horse prohibited to the\n     Israelites--Solomon's disregard of the edict--The war-chariot,\n     its form and use--Probable construction of the iron chariot--The\n     cavalry Horse--Lack of personal interest in the animal.\n\n\nSeveral Hebrew words are used by the various Scriptural writers to\nsignify the Horse, and, like our own terms of horse, mare, pony,\ncharger, &c., are used to express the different qualities of the\nanimal. The chief distinction of the Horse seemed to lie in its\nuse for riding or driving, the larger and heavier animals being\nnaturally required for drawing the weighty springless chariots. The\nchariot horse was represented by the word _Sus_, and the cavalry\nhorse by the word _Parash_, and in several passages both these words\noccur in bold contrast to each other. See, for example, 1 Kings iv.\n26, &c.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nAmong the many passages of Scripture in which the Horse is\nmentioned, there are few which do not treat of it as an adjunct of\nwar, and therefore it is chiefly in that light that we must regard\nit.\n\nThe Horse of the Scriptures was evidently a similar animal to the\nArab Horse of the present day, as we find not only from internal\nevidence, but from the sculptures and paintings which still remain\nto tell us of the vanished glories of Egypt and Assyria. It is\nremarkable, by the way, that the first mention of the Horse in the\nScriptures alludes to it as an Egyptian animal. During the terrible\nfamine which Joseph had foretold, the Egyptians and the inhabitants\nof neighbouring countries were unable to find food for themselves\nor fodder for their cattle, and, accordingly, they sold all their\nbeasts for bread. \"And they brought their cattle unto Joseph, and\nJoseph gave them bread in exchange for horses and the flocks, and\nfor the cattle of herds, and for the asses, and he fed them with\nbread for all their cattle for that year.\"\n\nThis particular breed of Horses is peculiarly fitted for the\npurposes of war, and is much less apt for peaceful duties than the\nheavier and more powerful breeds, which are found in different parts\nof the world. It is remarkable for the flexible agility of its\nmovements, which enable it to adapt itself to every movement of the\nrider, whose intentions it seems to divine by a sort of instinct,\nand who guides it not so much by the bridle as by the pressure of\nthe knees and the voice. Examples of a similar mode of guidance\nmay be seen on the well-known frieze of the Parthenon, where, in\nthe Procession of Horsemen, the riders may be seen directing their\nsteeds by touching the side of the neck with one finger, thus\nshowing their own skill and the well-trained quality of the animals\nwhich they ride.\n\n[Illustration: TRIAL OF ARAB HORSES.]\n\nIts endurance is really wonderful, and a horse of the Kochlani breed\nwill go through an amount of work which is almost incredible. Even\nthe trial by which a Horse is tested is so severe, that any other\nanimal would be either killed on the spot or ruined for life. When a\nyoung mare is tried for the first time, her owner rides her for some\nfifty or sixty miles at full speed, always finishing by swimming\nher through a river. After this trial she is expected to feed\nfreely; and should she refuse her food, she is rejected as an animal\nunworthy of the name of Kochlani.\n\n[Illustration: AN ARAB HORSE OF THE KOCHLANI BREED.]\n\nPartly from native qualities, and partly from constant association\nwith mankind, the Arab Horse is a singularly intelligent animal.\nIn Europe we scarcely give the Horse credit for the sensitive\nintelligence with which it is endowed, and look upon it rather as\na machine for draught and carriage than a companion to man. The\nArab, however, lives with his horse, and finds in it the docility\nand intelligence which we are accustomed to associate with the\ndog rather than the Horse. It will follow him about and come at\nhis call. It will stand for any length of time and await its\nrider without moving. Should he fall from its back, it will stop\nand stand patiently by him until he can remount; and there is a\nwell-authenticated instance of an Arab Horse whose master had been\nwounded in battle, taking him up by his clothes and carrying him\naway to a place of safety.\n\nEven in the very heat and turmoil of the combat, the true Arab Horse\nseems to be in his true element, and fully deserves the splendid\neulogium in the Book of Job (xxxix. 19-25): \"Hast thou given the\nhorse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?\n\n\"Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his\nnostrils is terror.\n\n\"He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on\nto meet the armed men.\n\n\"He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back\nfrom the sword.\n\n\"The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the\nshield.\n\n\"He walketh the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth\nhe that it is the sound of the trumpet.\n\n\"He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle\nafar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.\"\n\nIn another passage an allusion is made to the courage of the Horse,\nand its love for the battle. \"I hearkened and heard, but they spake\nnot aright: no man repented him of his wickedness, saying, What have\nI done? Every one turned to his course, as the horse rusheth into\nthe battle.\" (Jer. viii. 6.) Even in the mimic battle of the djereed\nthe Horse seems to exult in the conflict as much as his rider, and\nwheels or halts almost without the slightest intimation.\n\n[Illustration: THE WAR HORSE.]\n\nThe hoofs of the Arab Horses are never shod, their owners thinking\nthat that act is not likely to improve nature, and even among the\nburning sands and hard rocks the Horse treads with unbroken hoof. In\nsuch a climate, indeed, an iron shoe would be worse than useless,\nas it would only scorch the hoof by day, and in consequence of the\nrapid change of temperature by day or night, the continual expansion\nand contraction of the metal would soon work the nails loose, and\ncause the shoe to fall off.\n\nA tender-footed Horse would be of little value, and so we often\nfind in the Scriptures that the hardness of the hoof is reckoned\namong one of the best qualities of a Horse. See, for example, Isa.\nv. 28: \"Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, their\nhorses' hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a\nwhirlwind.\" Again, in Micah iv. 13: \"Arise and thresh, O daughter\nof Zion: for I will make thine horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs\nbrass: and thou shalt beat in pieces many people.\" Allusion is here\nmade to one mode of threshing, in which a number of Horses were\nturned into the threshing-floor, and driven about at random among\nthe wheat, instead of walking steadily like the oxen.\n\nIn Judges v. 22 there is a curious allusion to the hoofs of the\nHorse. It occurs in the Psalm of Thanksgiving sung by Deborah and\nBarak after the death of Sisera: \"Then were the horse-hoofs broken\nby the means of the prancings, the prancings of their mighty ones.\"\n\nHorses possessed of the qualities of courage, endurance, and\nsureness of foot are naturally invaluable; and even at the present\nday the Arab warrior esteems above all things a Horse of the purest\nbreed, and, whether he buys or sells one, takes care to have its\ngenealogy made out and hung on the animal's neck.\n\nAs to the mare, scarcely any inducement is strong enough to make\nan Arab part with it, even to a countryman, and the sale of the\nanimal is hindered by a number of impediments which in point of\nfact are almost prohibitory. Signor Pierotti, whose long residence\nin Palestine has given him a deep insight into the character of the\npeople, speaks in the most glowing terms of the pure Arab Horse,\nand of its inestimable value to its owner. Of the difficulties with\nwhich the sale of the animal is surrounded, he gives a very amusing\naccount:--\n\n\"After this enumeration of the merits of the horse, I will describe\nthe manner in which a sale is conducted, choosing the case of the\nmare, as that is the more valuable animal. The price varies with the\npurity of blood of the steed, and the fortunes of its owner. When he\nis requested to fix a value, his first reply is, 'It is yours, and\nbelongs to you, I am your servant;' because, perhaps, he does not\nthink that the question is asked with any real design of purchasing;\nwhen the demand is repeated, he either makes no answer or puts the\nquestion by; at the third demand he generally responds rudely with\na sardonic smile, which is not a pleasant thing to see, as it is a\nsign of anger; and then says that he would sooner sell his family\nthan his mare. This remark is not meant as a mere jest; for it is no\nuncommon thing for a Bedawy to give his parents as hostages rather\nthan separate himself from his friend.\n\n[Illustration: ARAB HORSES.]\n\n\"If, however, owing to some misfortune, he determines on selling his\nmare, it is very doubtful whether he or his parents will allow her\nto leave their country without taking the precaution to render her\nunfit for breeding.\n\n\"There are many methods of arranging the sale, all of which I should\nlike to describe particularly; however, I will confine myself to a\ngeneral statement. Before the purchaser enters upon the question of\nthe price to be paid, he must ascertain that the parents, friends,\nand allies of the owners give their consent to the sale, without\nwhich some difficulty or other may arise, or perhaps the mare may be\nstolen from her new master. He must also obtain an unquestionable\nwarranty that she is fit for breeding purposes, and that no other\nhas a prior claim to any part of her body. This last precaution may\nseem rather strange, but it arises from the following custom. It\nsometimes happens that, when a Bedawy is greatly in want of money,\nhe raises it most easily by selling a member of his horse; so that\nvery frequently a horse belongs to a number of owners, one of whom\nhas purchased the right fore-leg, another the left, another the\nhind-leg, or the tail, or an ear, or the like; and the proprietors\nhave each a proportionate interest in the profits of its labour or\nsale.\n\n\"So also the offspring are sold in a similar manner; sometimes only\nthe first-born, sometimes the first three; and then it occasionally\nhappens that two or three members of the foal are, as it were,\nmortgaged. Consequently, any one who is ignorant of this custom may\nfind that, after he has paid the price of the mare to her supposed\nowner, a third person arises who demands to be paid the value of his\npart; and, if the purchaser refuse to comply, he may find himself in\na very unpleasant situation, without any possibility of obtaining\nhelp from the local government. Whoever sells his mare entirely,\nwithout reserving to himself one or two parts, must be on good terms\nwith the confederate chiefs in the neighbourhood, and must have\nobtained their formal sanction, otherwise they would universally\ndespise him, and perhaps lie in wait to kill him, so that his only\nhope of escape would be a disgraceful flight, just as if he had\ncommitted some great crime. It is an easier matter to purchase\na stallion; but even in this case the above formalities must be\nobserved.\n\n[Illustration: BUYING AN ARAB HORSE.]\n\n\"These remarks only apply to buying horses of the purest blood;\nthose of inferior race are obtained without difficulty, and at fair\nprices.\"\n\nFor some reason, perhaps the total severance of the Israelites from\nthe people among whom they had lived so long in captivity, the use\nof the Horse, or, at all events, the breeding of it, was forbidden\nto the Israelites; see Deut. xvi. 16. After prophesying that the\nIsraelites, when they had settled themselves in the Promised Land,\nwould want a king, the inspired writer next ordains that the new\nking must be chosen by Divine command, and must belong to one of\nthe twelve tribes. He then proceeds as follows:--\"But he shall not\nmultiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt,\nto the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the Lord\nhath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way.\"\n\nThe foresight of this prophetical writer was afterwards shown by the\nfact that many kings of Israel did send to Egypt for Horses, Egypt\nbeing the chief source from which these animals were obtained. And,\njudging from the monuments to which reference has been made, the\nHorse of Egypt was precisely the same animal as the Arab Horse of\nthe present day, and was probably obtained from nomad breeders.\n\nIn spite of the prohibitory edict, both David and Solomon used\nHorses in battle, and the latter supplied himself largely from\nEgypt, disregarding as utterly the interdict against plurality of\nHorses as that against plurality of wives, which immediately follows.\n\nDavid seems to have been the first king who established a force\nof chariots, and this he evidently did for the purpose of action\non the flat grounds of Palestine, where infantry were at a great\ndisadvantage when attacked by the dreaded chariots; yet he did not\ncontrovert the law by multiplying to himself Horses, or even by\nimporting them from Egypt; and when he had an opportunity of adding\nto his army an enormous force of chariots, he only employed as many\nas he thought were sufficient for his purpose. After he defeated\nHadadezer, and had taken from him a thousand chariots with their\nHorses together with seven hundred cavalry, he houghed all the\nHorses except those which were needed for one hundred chariots.\n\n[Illustration: THE ARAB'S FAVOURITE STEEDS.]\n\nSolomon, however, was more lax, and systematically broke the ancient\nlaw by multiplying Horses exceedingly, and sending to Egypt for\nthem. We learn from 1 Kings iv. 26 of the enormous establishment\nwhich he kept up both for chariots and cavalry. Besides those which\nwere given to him as tribute, he purchased both chariots and their\nHorses from Egypt and Syria.\n\nChariots were far more valued in battle than horsemen, probably\nbecause their weight made their onset irresistible against infantry,\nwho had no better weapons than bows and spears. The slingers\nthemselves could make little impression on the chariots; and even\nif the driver, or the warrior who fought in the chariot, or his\nattendant, happened to be killed, the weighty machine, with its two\nHorses, still went on its destructive way.\n\n[Illustration: PHARAOH PURSUES THE ISRAELITES WITH CHARIOTS AND\nHORSES, AND THE SEA COVERS THEM.]\n\nOf their use in battle we find very early mention. For example, in\nExod. xiv. 6 it is mentioned that Pharaoh made ready his chariot to\npursue the Israelites; and in a subsequent part of the same chapter\nwe find that six hundred of the Egyptian chariot force accompanied\ntheir master in the pursuit, and that the whole army was delayed\nbecause the loss of the chariot wheels made them drive heavily.\n\nThen in the familiar story of Sisera and Jael the vanquished general\nis mentioned as alighting from his chariot, in which he would be\nconspicuous, and taking flight on foot; and, after his death, his\nmother is represented as awaiting his arrival, and saying to the\nwomen of the household, \"Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why\ntarry the wheels of his chariot?\"\n\nDuring the war of conquest which Joshua led, the chariot plays a\nsomewhat important part. As long as the war was carried on in the\nrugged mountainous parts of the land, no mention of the chariot is\nmade; but when the battles had to be fought on level ground, the\nenemy brought the dreaded chariots to bear upon the Israelites. In\nspite of these adjuncts, Joshua won the battles, and, unlike David,\ndestroyed the whole of the Horses and burned the chariots.\n\nMany years afterwards, a still more dreadful weapon, the iron\nchariot, was used against the Israelites by Jabin. This new\ninstrument of war seems to have cowed the people completely; for\nwe find that by means of his nine hundred chariots of iron Jabin\n\"mightily oppressed the children of Israel\" for twenty years. It has\nbeen well suggested that the possession of the war chariot gave rise\nto the saying of Benhadad's councillors, that the gods of Israel\nwere gods of the hills, and so their army had been defeated; but\nthat if the battle were fought in the plain, where the chariots and\nHorses could act, they would be victorious.\n\nSo dreaded were these weapons, even by those who were familiar\nwith them and were accustomed to use them, that when the Syrians\nhad besieged Samaria, and had nearly reduced it by starvation, the\nfancied sound of a host of chariots and Horses that they heard in\nthe night caused them all to flee and evacuate the camp, leaving\ntheir booty and all their property in the hands of the Israelites.\n\nWhether the Jews ever employed the terrible scythe chariots is not\nquite certain, though it is probable that they may have done so;\nand this conjecture is strengthened by the fact that they were\nemployed against the Jews by Antiochus, who had \"footmen an hundred\nand ten thousand, and horsemen five thousand and three hundred,\nand elephants two and twenty, and three hundred chariots armed with\nhooks\" (2 Macc. xiii. 2). Some commentators think that by the iron\nchariots mentioned above were signified ordinary chariots armed with\niron scythes projecting from the sides.\n\n[Illustration: ELIJAH IS CARRIED UP.]\n\nBy degrees the chariot came to be one of the recognised forces\nin war, and we find it mentioned throughout the books of the\nScriptures, not only in its literal sense, but as a metaphor which\nevery one could understand. In the Psalms, for example, are several\nallusions to the war-chariot.\" He maketh wars to cease unto the end\nof the earth; He breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder;\nHe burneth the chariot in the fire\" (Ps. xlvi. 9). Again: \"At Thy\nrebuke, O God of Jacob, both the chariot and horse are cast into\na dead sleep\" (Ps. lxxvi. 6). And: \"Some trust in chariots, and\nsome in horses: but we will remember the name of the Lord our God\"\n(Ps. xx. 7). Now, the force of these passages cannot be properly\nappreciated unless we realize to ourselves the dread in which the\nwar-chariot was held by the foot-soldiers. Even cavalry were much\nfeared; but the chariots were objects of almost superstitious fear,\nand the rushing sound of their wheels, the noise of the Horses'\nhoofs, and the shaking of the ground as the \"prancing horses and\njumping chariots\" (Nah. iii. 2) thundered along, are repeatedly\nmentioned.\n\nSee, for example, Ezek. xxvi. 10: \"By reason of the abundance of\nhis horses their dust shall cover thee: thy walls shall shake at\nthe noise of the horsemen, and of the wheels, and of the chariots.\"\nAlso, Jer. xlvii. 3: \"At the noise of the stamping of the hoofs\nof his strong horses, at the rushing of his chariots, and at the\nrumbling of his wheels, the fathers shall not look back to their\nchildren for feebleness of hands.\" See also Joel ii. 4, 5: \"The\nappearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen,\nso shall they run.\n\n\"Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they\nleap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble,\nas a strong people set in battle array.\"\n\nIn several passages the chariot and Horse are used in bold imagery\nas expressions of Divine power: \"The chariots of God are twenty\nthousand, even thousands of angels: the Lord is among them, as\nin Sinai, in the holy place\" (Ps. lxviii. 17). A similar image\nis employed in Ps. civ. 3: \"Who maketh the clouds His chariot:\nwho walketh upon the wings of the wind.\" In connexion with these\npassages, we cannot but call to mind that wonderful day when the\nunseen power of the Almighty was made manifest to the servant\nof Elisha, whose eyes were suddenly opened, and he saw that the\nmountain was full of Horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.\n\nThe chariot and horses of fire by which Elijah was taken from earth\nare also familiar to us, and in connexion with the passage which\ndescribes that wonderful event, we may mention one which occurs in\nthe splendid prayer of Habakkuk (iii. 8): \"Was the Lord displeased\nagainst the rivers? was Thine anger against the rivers? was Thy\nwrath against the sea, that Thou didst ride upon Thine horses and\nThy chariots of salvation?\"\n\nBy degrees the chariot came to be used for peaceful purposes, and\nwas employed as our carriages of the present day, in carrying\npersons of wealth. That this was the case in Egypt from very early\ntimes is evident from Gen. xli. 43, in which we are told that after\nPharaoh had taken Joseph out of prison and raised him to be next in\nrank to himself, the king caused him to ride in the second chariot\nwhich he had, and so to be proclaimed ruler over Egypt. Many years\nafterwards we find him travelling in his chariot to the land of\nGoshen, whither he went to meet Jacob and to conduct him to the\npresence of Pharaoh.\n\nAt first the chariot seems to have been too valuable to the\nIsraelites to have been used for any purpose except war, and it is\nnot until a comparatively late time that we find it employed as a\ncarriage, and even then it is only used by the noble and wealthy.\nAbsalom had such chariots, but it is evident that he used them for\npurposes of state, and as appendages of his regal rank. Chariots or\ncarriages were, however, afterwards employed by the Israelites as\nfreely as by the Egyptians, from whom they were originally procured;\nand accordingly we find Rehoboam mounting his chariot and fleeing\nto Jerusalem, Ahab riding in his chariot from Samaria to Jezreel,\nwith Elijah running before him; and in the New Testament we read of\nthe chariot in which sat the chief eunuch of Ethiopia whom Philip\nbaptized (Acts viii. 28).\n\nAs to the precise form and character of these chariots, they are\nmade familiar to us by the sculptures and paintings of Egypt\nand Assyria, from both of which countries the Jews procured the\nvehicles. Differing very slightly in shape, the principle of the\nchariot was the same; and it strikes us with some surprise that\nthe Assyrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews, the three wealthiest\nand most powerful nations of the world, should not have invented a\nbetter carriage. They lavished the costliest materials and the most\nartistic skill in decorating the chariots, but had no idea of making\nthem comfortable for the occupants.\n\nThey were nothing but semicircular boxes on wheels, and of very\nsmall size. They were hung very low, so that the occupants could\nstep in and out without trouble, though they do not seem to have\nhad the sloping floor of the Greek or Roman chariot. They had no\nsprings, but, in order to render the jolting of the carriage less\ndisagreeable, the floor was made of a sort of network of leathern\nropes, very tightly stretched so as to be elastic. The wheels were\nalways two in number, and generally had six spokes.\n\nTo the side of the chariot was attached the case which contained\nthe bow and quiver of arrows, and in the case of a rich man these\nbow-cases were covered with gold and silver, and adorned with\nfigures of lions and other animals. Should the chariot be intended\nfor two persons, two bow-cases were fastened to it, the one crossing\nthe other. The spear had also its tubular case, in which it was kept\nupright, like the whip of a modern carriage.\n\nTwo Horses were generally used with each chariot, though three were\nsometimes employed. They were harnessed very simply, having no\ntraces, and being attached to the central pole by a breast-band, a\nvery slight saddle, and a loose girth. On their heads were generally\nfixed ornaments, such as tufts of feathers, and similar decorations,\nand tassels hung to the harness served to drive away the flies.\nRound the neck of each Horse passed a strap, to the end of which was\nattached a bell. This ornament is mentioned in Zech. xiv. 20: \"In\nthat day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, Holiness unto\nthe Lord\"--i.e. the greeting of peace shall be on the bells of the\nanimals once used in war.\n\nSometimes the owner drove his own chariot, even when going into\nbattle, but the usual plan was to have a driver, who managed the\nHorses while the owner or occupant could fight with both his hands\nat liberty. In case he drove his own Horse, the reins passed round\nhis waist, and the whip was fastened to the wrist by a thong, so\nthat when the charioteer used the bow, his principal weapon, he\ncould do so without danger of losing his whip.\n\nThus much for the use of the chariot in war; we have now the Horse\nas the animal ridden by the cavalry.\n\nAs was the case with the chariot, the war-horse was not employed by\nthe Jews until a comparatively late period of their history. They\nhad been familiarized with cavalry during their long sojourn in\nEgypt, and in the course of their war of conquest had often suffered\ndefeat from the horsemen of the enemy. But we do not find any\nmention of a mounted force as forming part of the Jewish army until\nthe days of David, although after that time the successive kings\npossessed large forces of cavalry.\n\nMany references to mounted soldiers are made by the prophets,\nsometimes allegorically, sometimes metaphorically. See, for example,\nJer. vi. 23: \"They shall lay hold on bow and spear; they are cruel,\nand have no mercy; their voice roareth like the sea; and they ride\nupon horses, set in array as men for war against thee, O daughter\nof Zion.\" The same prophet has a similar passage in chap. l. 42,\ncouched in almost precisely the same words. And in chap. xlvi. 4,\nthere is a further reference to the cavalry, which is specially\nvaluable as mentioning the weapons used by them. The first call of\nthe prophet is to the infantry: \"Order ye the buckler and shield,\nand draw near to battle\" (verse 3); and then follows the command\nto the cavalry, \"Harness the horses; and get up, ye horsemen, and\nstand forth with your helmets; furbish the spears, and put on the\nbrigandines.\" The chief arms of the Jewish soldier were therefore\nthe cuirass, the helmet, and the lance, the weapons which in all\nages, and in all countries, have been found to be peculiarly\nsuitable to the horse-soldier.\n\n[Illustration: THE ISRAELITES, LED BY JOSHUA, TAKE JERICHO.]\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBeing desirous of affording the reader a pictorial representation\nof the war and state chariots, I have selected Egypt as the typical\ncountry of the former, and Assyria of the latter. Both have been\nexecuted with the greatest care in details, every one of which, even\nto the harness of the Horses, the mode of holding the reins, the\nform of the whip, and the offensive and defensive armour, has been\ncopied from the ancient records of Egypt and Nineveh.\n\nWe will first take the war-chariot of Egypt.\n\n[Illustration: ANCIENT BATTLE-FIELD.]\n\nThis form has been selected as the type of the war-chariot because\nthe earliest account of such a force mentions the war-chariots of\nEgypt, and because, after the Israelites had adopted chariots as\nan acknowledged part of their army, the vehicles, as well as the\ntrained Horses, and probably their occupants, were procured from\nEgypt.\n\nThe scene represents a battle between the imperial forces and a\nrevolted province, so that the reader may have the opportunity of\nseeing the various kinds of weapons and armour which were in use in\nEgypt at the time of Joseph. In the foreground is the chariot of\nthe general, driven at headlong speed, the Horses at full gallop,\nand the springless chariot leaping off the ground as the Horses\nbound along. The royal rank of the general in question is shown by\nthe feather fan which denotes his high birth, and which is fixed in\na socket at the back of his chariot, much as a coachman fixes his\nwhip. The rank of the rider is further shown by the feather plumes\non the heads of his Horses.\n\nBy the side of the chariot are seen the quiver and bow-case, the\nformer being covered with decorations, and having the figure of a\nrecumbent lion along its sides. The simple but effective harness\nof the Horses is especially worthy of notice, as showing how the\nancients knew, better than the moderns, that to cover a Horse with a\ncomplicated apparatus of straps and metal only deteriorates from the\npowers of the animal, and that a Horse is more likely to behave well\nif he can see freely on all sides, than if all lateral vision be cut\noff by the use of blinkers.\n\nJust behind the general is the chariot of another officer, one\nof whose Horses has been struck, and is lying struggling on the\nground. The general is hastily giving his orders as he dashes past\nthe fallen animal. On the ground are lying the bodies of some slain\nenemies, and the Horses are snorting and shaking their heads,\nsignificative of their unwillingness to trample on a human being.\nBy the side of the dead man are his shield, bow, and quiver, and\nit is worthy of notice that the form of these weapons, as depicted\nupon the ancient Egyptian monuments, is identical with that which is\nstill found among several half-savage tribes of Africa.\n\nIn the background is seen the fight raging round the standards. One\nchief has been killed, and while the infantry are pressing round\nthe body of the rebel leader and his banner on one side, on the\nother the imperial chariots are thundering along to support the\nattack, and are driving their enemies before them. In the distance\nare seen the clouds of dust whirled into the air by the hoofs and\nwheels, and circling in clouds by the eddies caused by the fierce\nrush of the vehicles, thus illustrating the passage in Jer. iv. 13:\n\"Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots shall be as a\nwhirlwind: his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe unto us! for we\nare spoiled.\" The reader will see, by reference to the illustration,\nhow wonderfully true and forcible is this statement, the writer\nevidently having been an eye-witness of the scene which he so\npowerfully depicts.\n\n[Illustration: CHARIOT OF STATE.]\n\nThe second scene is intentionally chosen as affording a strong\ncontrast to the former. Here, instead of the furious rush, the\ngalloping Horses, the chariots leaping off the ground, the archers\nbending their bows, and all imbued with the fierce ardour of\nbattle, we have a scene of quiet grandeur, the Assyrian king making\na solemn progress in his chariot after a victory, accompanied by\nhis attendants, and surrounded by his troops, in all the placid\nsplendour of Eastern state.\n\nChief object in the illustration stands the great king in his\nchariot, wearing the regal crown, or mitre, and sheltered from\nthe sun by the umbrella, which in ancient Nineveh, as in more\nmodern times, was the emblem of royalty. By his side is his\ncharioteer, evidently a man of high rank, holding the reins in a\nbusiness-like manner; and in front marches the shield-bearer. In\none of the sculptures from which this illustration was composed,\nthe shield-bearer was clearly a man of rank, fat, fussy, full of\nimportance, and evidently a portrait of some well-known individual.\n\nThe Horses are harnessed with remarkable lightness, but they bear\nthe gorgeous trappings which befit the rank of the rider, their\nheads being decorated with the curious successive plumes with which\nthe Assyrian princes distinguished their chariot Horses, and the\nbreast-straps being adorned with tassels, repeated in successive\nrows like the plumes of the head.\n\nThe reader will probably notice the peculiar high action of the\nHorses. This accomplishment seems to have been even more valued\namong the ancients than by ourselves, and some of the sculptures\nshow the Horses with their knees almost touching their noses. Of\ncourse the artist exaggerrated the effect that he wanted to produce;\nbut the very fact of the exaggeration shows the value that was\nset on a high and showy action in a Horse that was attached to a\nchariot of state. The old Assyrian sculptors knew the Horse well,\nand delineated it in a most spirited and graphic style, though they\ntreated it rather conventionally. The variety of attitude is really\nwonderful, considering that all the figures are profile views, as\nindeed seemed to have been a law of the historical sculptures.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBefore closing this account of the Horse, it may be as well to\nremark the singular absence of detail in the Scriptural accounts. Of\nthe other domesticated animals many such details are given, but of\nthe Horse we hear but little, except in connexion with war. There\nare few exceptions to this rule, and even the oft-quoted passage\nin Job, which goes deeper into the character of the Horse than any\nother portion of the Scriptures, only considers the Horse as an\nauxiliary in battle. We miss the personal interest in the animal\nwhich distinguishes the many references to the ox, the sheep, and\nthe goat; and it is remarkable that even in the Book of Proverbs,\nwhich is so rich in references to various animals, very little is\nsaid of the Horse.\n\n[Illustration: ANCIENT EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE REPRESENTING A VICTORIOUS\nKING IN HIS CHARIOT SLAYING HIS ENEMIES.]\n\n[Illustration: MUMMY OF AN EGYPTIAN KING (OVER THREE THOUSAND YEARS\nOLD).]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: ass]\n\n\n\n\nTHE ASS.\n\n     Importance of the Ass in the East--Its general use for the\n     saddle--Riding the Ass not a mark of humility--The triumphal\n     entry--White Asses--Character of the Scriptural Ass--Saddling\n     the Ass--Samson and Balaam.\n\n\nIn the Scriptures we read of two breeds of Ass, namely, the\nDomesticated and the Wild Ass. As the former is the more important\nof the two, we will give it precedence.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIn the East, the Ass has always played a much more important part\nthan among us Westerns, and on that account we find it so frequently\nmentioned in the Bible. In the first place, it is the universal\nsaddle-animal of the East. Among us the Ass has ceased to be\nregularly used for the purposes of the saddle, and is only casually\nemployed by holiday-makers and the like. Some persons certainly\nride it habitually, but they almost invariably belong to the\nlower orders, and are content to ride without a saddle, balancing\nthemselves in some extraordinary manner just over the animal's tail.\nIn the East, however, it is ridden by persons of the highest rank,\nand is decorated with saddle and harness as rich as those of the\nhorse.\n\nSo far from the use of the Ass as a saddle-animal being a mark of\nhumility, it ought to be viewed in precisely the opposite light.\nIn consequence of the very natural habit of reading, according\nto Western ideas, the Scriptures, which are books essentially\nOriental in all their allusions and tone of thought, many persons\nhave entirely perverted the sense of one very familiar passage,\nthe prophecy of Zechariah concerning the future Messiah. \"Rejoice\ngreatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold,\nthy King cometh unto thee: He is just, and having salvation; lowly,\nand riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass\" (Zech.\nix. 9).\n\nNow this passage, as well as the one which describes its fulfilment\nso many years afterwards, has often been seized upon as a proof of\nthe meekness and lowliness of our Saviour, in riding upon so humble\nan animal when He made His entry into Jerusalem. The fact is, that\nthere was no humility in the case, neither was the act so understood\nby the people. He rode upon an Ass as any prince or ruler would have\ndone who was engaged on a peaceful journey, the horse being reserved\nfor war purposes. He rode on the Ass, and not on the horse, because\nHe was the Prince of Peace and not of war, as indeed is shown very\nclearly in the context. For, after writing the words which have just\nbeen quoted, Zechariah proceeds as follows (ver. 10): \"And I will\ncut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and\nthe battle bow shall be cut off: and He shall speak peace unto the\nheathen: and His dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from\nthe river even to the ends of the earth.\"\n\nMeek and lowly was He, as became the new character, hitherto unknown\nto the warlike and restless Jews, a Prince, not of war, as had been\nall other celebrated kings, but of peace. Had He come as the Jews\nexpected--despite so many prophecies--their Messiah to come, as a\ngreat king and conqueror, He might have ridden the war-horse, and\nbeen surrounded with countless legions of armed men. But He came as\nthe herald of peace, and not of war; and, though meek and lowly, yet\na Prince, riding as became a prince, on an Ass colt which had borne\nno inferior burden.\n\nThat the act was not considered as one of lowliness is evident from\nthe manner in which it was received by the people, accepting Him as\nthe Son of David, coming in the name of the Highest, and greeting\nHim with the cry of \"Hosanna!\" (\"Save us now,\") quoted from verses\n25, 26 of Ps. cxviii.: \"Save now, I beseech Thee, O Lord: O Lord, I\nbeseech Thee, send now prosperity.\"\n\n\"Blessed be He that cometh in the name of the Lord.\"\n\n[Illustration: ENTERING JERUSALEM.]\n\nThe palm-branches which they strewed upon the road were not chosen\nby the attendant crowd merely as a means of doing honour to Him\nwhom they acknowledged as the Son of David. They were necessarily\nconnected with the cry of \"Hosanna!\" At the Feast of Tabernacles,\nit was customary for the people to assemble with branches of palms\nand willows in their hands, and for one of the priests to recite the\nGreat Hallel, _i.e._ Ps. cxiii. and cxviii. At certain intervals,\nthe people responded with the cry of \"Hosanna!\" waving at the same\ntime their palm-branches. For the whole of the seven days through\nwhich the feast lasted they repeated their Hosannas, always\naccompanying the shout with the waving of palm-branches, and setting\nthem towards the altar as they went in procession round it.\n\nEvery child who could hold a palm-branch was expected to take part\nin the solemnity, just as did the children on the occasion of the\ntriumphal entry. By degrees, the name of Hosanna was transferred to\nthe palm-branches themselves, as well as to the feast, the last day\nbeing called the Great Hosanna.\n\nThe reader will now see the importance of this carrying of\npalm-branches, accompanied with Hosannas, and that those who used\nthem in honour of Him whom they followed into Jerusalem had no idea\nthat He was acting any lowly part.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nAgain, the woman of Shunem, who rode on an Ass to meet Elisha, a\nmission in which the life of her only child was involved, was a\nwoman of great wealth (2 Kings iv. 8), who was able not only to\nreceive the prophet, but to build a chamber, and furnish it for him.\n\nNot to multiply examples, we see from these passages that the Ass of\nthe East was held in comparatively high estimation, being used for\nthe purposes of the saddle, just as would a high-bred horse among\nourselves.\n\nConsequently, the Ass is really a different animal. In this country\nhe is repressed, and seldom has an opportunity for displaying the\nintellectual powers which he possesses, and which are of a much\nhigher order than is generally imagined. It is rather remarkable,\nthat when we wish to speak slightingly of intellect we liken the\nindividual to an Ass or a goose, not knowing that we have selected\njust the quadruped and the bird which are least worthy of such a\ndistinction.\n\nPutting aside the bird, as being at present out of place, we shall\nfind that the Ass is one of the cleverest of our domesticated\nanimals. We are apt to speak of the horse with a sort of reverence,\nand of the Ass with contemptuous pity, not knowing that, of the two\nanimals, the Ass is by far the superior in point of intellect. It\nhas been well remarked by a keen observer of nature, that if four or\nfive horses are in a field, together with one Ass, and there be an\nassailable point in the fence, the Ass is sure to be the animal that\ndiscovers it, and leads the way through it.\n\nTake even one of our own toil-worn animals, turned out in a common\nto graze, and see the ingenuity which it displays when persecuted\nby the idle boys who generally frequent such places, and who try to\nride every beast that is within their reach. It seems to divine at\nonce the object of the boy as he steals up to it, and he takes a\npleasure in baffling him just as he fancies that he has succeeded in\nhis attempt.\n\n[Illustration: SYRIAN ASSES.]\n\nShould the Ass be kindly treated, there is not an animal that proves\nmore docile, or even affectionate. Stripes and kicks it resents,\nand sets itself distinctly against them; and, being nothing but a\nslave, it follows the slavish principle of doing no work that it can\npossibly avoid.\n\nNow, in the East the Ass takes so much higher rank than our own\nanimal, that its whole demeanour and gait are different from those\ndisplayed by the generality of its brethren. \"Why, the very slave of\nslaves,\" writes Mr. Lowth, in his \"Wanderer in Arabia,\" \"the crushed\nand grief-stricken, is so no more in Egypt: the battered drudge has\nbecome the willing servant. Is that active little fellow, who, with\nrace-horse coat and full flanks, moves under his rider with the\nlight step and the action of a pony--is he the same animal as that\nstarved and head-bowed object of the North, subject for all pity and\ncruelty, and clothed with rags and insult?\n\n\"Look at him now. On he goes, rapid and free, with his small head\nwell up, and as gay as a crimson saddle and a bridle of light chains\nand red leather can make him. It was a gladdening sight to see the\nunfortunate as a new animal in Egypt.\"\n\nHardy animal as is the Ass, it is not well adapted for tolerance\nof cold, and seems to degenerate in size, strength, speed, and\nspirit in proportion as the climate becomes colder. Whether it\nmight equal the horse in its endurance of cold provided that it\nwere as carefully treated, is perhaps a doubtful point; but it is\na well-known fact that the horse does not necessarily degenerate\nby moving towards a colder climate, though the Ass has always been\nfound to do so.\n\nThere is, of course, a variety in the treatment which the Ass\nreceives even in the East. Signor Pierotti, whose work on the\ncustoms and traditions of Palestine has already been mentioned,\nwrites in very glowing terms of the animal. He states that he formed\na very high opinion of the Ass while he was in Egypt, not only from\nits spirited aspect and its speed, but because it was employed even\nby the Viceroy and the great Court officers, who may be said to use\nAsses of more or less intelligence for every occasion. He even goes\nso far as to say that, if all the Asses were taken away from Egypt,\ntravel would be impossible.\n\nThe same traveller gives an admirable summary of the character of\nthe Ass, as it exists in Egypt and Palestine. \"What, then, are the\ncharacteristics of the ass? Much the same as those which adorn it\nin other parts of the East--namely, it is useful for riding and for\ncarrying burdens; it is sensible of kindness, and shows gratitude;\nit is very steady, and is larger, stronger, and more tractable than\nits European congener; its pace is easy and pleasant; and it will\nshrink from no labour, if only its poor daily feed of straw and\nbarley is fairly given.\n\n\"If well and liberally supplied, it is capable of any enterprise,\nand wears an altered and dignified mien, apparently forgetful of its\nextraction, except when undeservedly beaten by its masters, who,\nhowever, are not so much to be blamed, because, having learned to\nlive among sticks, thongs, and rods, they follow the same system of\neducation with their miserable dependants.\n\n\"The wealthy feed him well, deck him with fine harness and silver\ntrappings, and cover him, when his work is done, with rich Persian\ncarpets. The poor do the best they can for him, steal for his\nbenefit, give him a corner at their fireside, and in cold weather\nsleep with him for more warmth. In Palestine, all the rich men,\nwhether monarchs or chiefs of villages, possess a number of asses,\nkeeping them with their flocks, like the patriarchs of old. No one\ncan travel in that country, and observe how the ass is employed for\nall purposes, without being struck with the exactness with which the\nArabs retain the Hebrew customs.\"\n\nThe result of this treatment is, that the Eastern Ass is an enduring\nand tolerably swift animal, vying with the camel itself in its\npowers of long-continued travel, its usual pace being a sort of easy\ncanter. On rough ground, or up an ascent, it is said even to gain on\nthe horse, probably because its little sharp hoofs give it a firm\nfooting where the larger hoof of the horse is liable to slip.\n\nThe familiar term \"saddling the Ass\" requires some little\nexplanation.\n\nThe saddle is not in the least like the article which we know by\nthat name, but is very large and complicated in structure. Over the\nanimal's back is first spread a cloth, made of thick woollen stuff,\nand folded several times. The saddle itself is a very thick pad of\nstraw, covered with carpet, and flat at the top, instead of being\nrounded as is the case with our saddles. The pommel is very high,\nand when the rider is seated on it, he is perched high above the\nback of the animal. Over the saddle is thrown a cloth or carpet,\nalways of bright colours, and varying in costliness of material and\nornament according to the wealth of the possessor. It is mostly\nedged with a fringe and tassels.\n\nThe bridle is decorated, like that of the horse, with bells,\nembroidery, tassels, shells, and other ornaments.\n\nAs we may see from 2 Kings iv. 24, the Ass was generally guided\nby a driver who ran behind it, just as is done with donkeys hired\nto children here. Owing to the unchanging character of the East,\nthere is no doubt that the \"riders on asses\" of the Scriptures rode\nexactly after the mode which is adopted at the present day. What\nthat mode is, we may learn from Mr. Bayard Taylor's amusing and\nvivid description of a ride through the streets of Cairo:--\n\n[Illustration: A STREET IN CAIRO, EGYPT.]\n\n\"To see Cairo thoroughly, one must first accustom himself to the\nways of these long-eared cabs, without the use of which I would\nadvise no one to trust himself in the bazaars. Donkey-riding is\nuniversal, and no one thinks of going beyond the Frank quarters on\nfoot. If he does, he must submit to be followed by not less than\nsix donkeys with their drivers. A friend of mine who was attended\nby such a cavalcade for two hours, was obliged to yield at last,\nand made no second attempt. When we first appeared in the gateway\nof an hotel, equipped for an excursion, the rush of men and animals\nwas so great that we were forced to retreat until our servant and\nthe porter whipped us a path through the yelling and braying mob.\nAfter one or two trials I found an intelligent Arab boy named Kish,\nwho for five piastres a day furnished strong and ambitious donkeys,\nwhich he kept ready at the door from morning till night. The other\ndrivers respected Kish's privilege, and henceforth I had no trouble.\n\n\"The donkeys are so small that my feet nearly touched the ground,\nbut there is no end to their strength and endurance. Their gait,\nwhether in pace or in gallop, is so easy and light that fatigue is\nimpossible. The drivers take great pride in having high-cushioned\nred saddles, and in hanging bits of jingling brass to the bridles.\nThey keep their donkeys close shorn, and frequently beautify them\nby painting them various colours. The first animal I rode had legs\nbarred like a zebra's, and my friend's rejoiced in purple flanks\nand a yellow belly. The drivers ran behind them with a short stick,\npunching them from time to time, or giving them a sharp pinch on the\nrump. Very few of them own their donkeys, and I understood their\npertinacity when I learned that they frequently received a beating\non returning home empty-handed.\n\n\"The passage of the bazaars seems at first quite as hazardous on\ndonkey-back as on foot; but it is the difference between knocking\nsomebody down and being knocked down yourself, and one certainly\nprefers the former alternative. There is no use in attempting to\nguide the donkey, for he won't be guided. The driver shouts behind,\nand you are dashed at full speed into a confusion of other donkeys,\ncamels, horses, carts, water-carriers, and footmen. In vain you cry\nout '_Bess_' (enough), '_Piacco_,' and other desperate adjurations;\nthe driver's only reply is: 'Let the bridle hang loose!' You\ndodge your head under a camel-load of planks; your leg brushes the\nwheel of a dust-cart; you strike a fat Turk plump in the back; you\nmiraculously escape upsetting a fruit-stand; you scatter a company\nof spectral, white-masked women; and at last reach some more quiet\nstreet, with the sensations of a man who has stormed a battery.\n\n[Illustration: BEGGAR IN THE STREETS OF CAIRO.]\n\n\"At first this sort of riding made me very nervous, but presently I\nlet the donkey go his own way, and took a curious interest in seeing\nhow near a chance I ran of striking or being struck. Sometimes there\nseemed no hope of avoiding a violent collision; but, by a series\nof the most remarkable dodges, he generally carried you through in\nsafety. The cries of the driver running behind gave me no little\namusement. 'The hawadji comes! Take care on the right hand! Take\ncare on the left hand! O man, take care! O maiden, take care! O boy,\nget out of the way! The hawadji comes!' Kish had strong lungs, and\nhis donkey would let nothing pass him; and so wherever we went we\ncontributed our full share to the universal noise and confusion.\"\n\n[Illustration: NIGHT-WATCH IN CAIRO.]\n\nThis description explains several allusions which are made in the\nScriptures to treading down the enemies in the streets, and to the\nchariots raging and jostling against each other in the ways.\n\nThe Ass was used in the olden time for carrying burdens, as it is\nat present, and, in all probability, carried them in the same way.\nSacks and bundles are tied firmly to the pack-saddle; but poles,\nplanks, and objects of similar shape are tied in a sloping direction\non the side of the saddle, the longer ends trailing on the ground,\nand the shorter projecting at either side of the animal's head. The\nNorth American Indians carry the poles of their huts, or wigwams, in\nprecisely the same way, tying them on either side of their horses,\nand making them into rude sledges, upon which are fastened the skins\nthat form the walls of their huts. The same system of carriage is\nalso found among the Esquimaux, and the hunters of the extreme\nNorth, who harness their dogs in precisely the same manner. The\nAss, thus laden, becomes a very unpleasant passenger through the\nnarrow and crowded streets of an Oriental city; and many an unwary\ntraveller has found reason to remember the description of Issachar\nas the strong Ass between two burdens.\n\nThe Ass was also used for agriculture, and was employed in the\nplough, as we find from many passages. See for example, \"Blessed\nare ye that sow beside all waters, that send forth thither the feet\nof the ox and the ass\" (Isa. xxxii. 20). Sowing beside the waters\nis a custom that still prevails in all hot countries, the margins\nof rivers being tilled, while outside this cultivated belt there is\nnothing but desert ground.\n\nThe ox and the Ass were used in the first place for irrigation,\nturning the machines by which water was lifted from the river, and\npoured into the trenches which conveyed it to all parts of the\ntilled land. If, as is nearly certain, the rude machinery of the\nEast is at the present day identical with those which were used in\nthe old Scriptural times, they were yoked to the machine in rather\nan ingenious manner. The machine consists of an upright pivot, and\nto it is attached the horizontal pole to which the ox or Ass is\nharnessed. A machine exactly similar in principle may be seen in\nalmost any brick-field in England; but the ingenious part of the\nEastern water-machine is the mode in which the animal is made to\nbelieve that it is being driven by its keeper, whereas the man in\nquestion might be at a distance, or fast asleep.\n\nThe animal is first blindfolded, and then yoked to the end of the\nhorizontal bar. Fixed to the pivot, and rather in front of the bar,\nis one end of a slight and elastic strip of wood. The projecting\nend, being drawn forward and tied to the bridle of the animal, keeps\nup a continual pull, and makes the blinded animal believe that it is\nbeing drawn forward by the hand of a driver. Some ingenious but lazy\nattendants have even invented a sort of self-acting whip, _i.e._ a\nstick which is lifted and allowed to fall on the animal's back by\nthe action of the wheel once every round.\n\nThe field being properly supplied with water, the Ass is used for\nploughing it. It is worthy of mention that at the present day the\nprohibition against yoking an ox and an Ass together is often\ndisregarded. The practice, however, is not a judicious one, as the\nslow and heavy ox does not act well with the lighter and more active\nanimal, and, moreover, is apt to butt at its companion with its\nhorns in order to stimulate it to do more than its fair proportion\nof the work.\n\nThere is a custom now in Palestine which probably existed in the\ndays of the Scriptures, though I have not been able to find any\nreference to it. Whenever an Ass is disobedient and strays from its\nmaster, the man who captures the trespasser on his grounds clips a\npiece out of its ear before he returns it to its owner. Each time\nthat the animal is caught on forbidden grounds it receives a fresh\nclip of the ear. By looking at the ears of an Ass, therefore, any\none can tell whether it has ever been a straggler; and if so, he\nknows the number of times that it has strayed, by merely counting\nthe clip-marks, which always begin at the tip of the ear, and extend\nalong the edges. Any Ass, no matter how handsome it may be, that has\nmany of those clips, is always rejected by experienced travellers,\nas it is sure to be a dull as well as a disobedient beast.\n\nThere are recorded in the Scriptures two remarkable circumstances\nconnected with the Ass, which, however, need but a few words. The\nfirst is the journey of Balaam from Pethor to Moab, in the course\nof which there occurred that singular incident of the Ass speaking\nin human language (see Numb. xxii. 21, 35). The second is the\nwell-known episode in the story of Samson, where he is recorded as\nbreaking the cords with which his enemies had bound him, and killing\na thousand Philistines with the fresh jaw-bone of an Ass.\n\n\n\n\nTHE WILD ASS.\n\n     Various allusions to the Wild Ass--Its swiftness and\n     wildness--The Wild Ass of Asia and Africa--How the Wild Ass is\n     hunted--Excellence of its flesh--Meeting a Wild Ass--Origin of\n     the domestic Ass--The Wild Asses of Quito.\n\n\nThere are several passages of Scripture in which the Wild Ass is\ndistinguished from the domesticated animal, and in all of them there\nis some reference made to its swiftness, its intractable nature,\nand love of freedom. It is an astonishingly swift animal, so that\non the level ground even the best horse has scarcely a chance of\novertaking it. It is exceedingly wary, its sight, hearing, and sense\nof scent being equally keen, so that to approach it by craft is a\nmost difficult task.\n\nLike many other wild animals, it has a custom of ascending hills or\nrising grounds, and thence surveying the country, and even in the\nplains it will generally contrive to discover some earth-mound or\nheap of sand from which it may act as sentinel and give the alarm\nin case of danger. It is a gregarious animal, always assembling in\nherds, varying from two or three to several hundred in number, and\nhas a habit of partial migration in search of green food, traversing\nlarge tracts of country in its passage.\n\nIt has a curiously intractable disposition, and, even when captured\nvery young, can scarcely ever be brought to bear a burden or draw a\nvehicle.\n\nAttempts have been often made to domesticate the young that have\nbeen born in captivity, but with very slight success, the wild\nnature of the animal constantly breaking out, even when it appears\nto have become moderately tractable.\n\nAlthough the Wild Ass does not seem to have lived within the limits\nof the Holy Land, it was common enough in the surrounding country,\nand, from the frequent references made to it in Scriptures, was well\nknown to the ancient Jews.\n\nWe will now look at the various passages in which the Wild Ass is\nmentioned, and begin with the splendid description in Job xxxix. 5-8:\n\n\"Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands\nof the wild ass?\n\n\"Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren lands (or\nsalt places) his dwellings.\n\n\"He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the\ncrying of the driver.\n\n\"The range of the mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after\nevery green thing.\"\n\nHere we have the animal described with the minuteness and truth of\ndetail that can only be found in personal knowledge; its love of\nfreedom, its avoidance of mankind, and its migration in search of\npasture.\n\nAnother allusion to the pasture-seeking habits of the animal is to\nbe found in chapter vi. of the same book, verse 5: \"Doth the wild\nass bray when he hath grass?\" or, according to the version of the\nJewish Bible, \"over tender grass?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nA very vivid account of the appearance of the animal in its wild\nstate is given by Sir R. Kerr Porter, who was allowed by a Wild Ass\nto approach within a moderate distance, the animal evidently seeing\nthat he was not one of the people to whom it was accustomed, and\nbeing curious enough to allow the stranger to approach him.\n\n\"The sun was just rising over the summit of the eastern mountains,\nwhen my greyhound started off in pursuit of an animal which, my\nPersians said, from the glimpse they had of it, was an antelope. I\ninstantly put spurs to my horse, and with my attendants gave chase.\nAfter an unrelaxed gallop of three miles, we came up with the dog,\nwho was then within a short stretch of the creature he pursued; and\nto my surprise, and at first vexation, I saw it to be an ass.\n\n\"Upon reflection, however, judging from its fleetness that it must\nbe a wild one, a creature little known in Europe, but which the\nPersians prize above all other animals as an object of chase, I\ndetermined to approach as near to it as the very swift Arab I was\non could carry me. But the single instant of checking my horse to\nconsider had given our game such a head of us that, notwithstanding\nour speed, we could not recover our ground on him.\n\n\"I, however, happened to be considerably before my companions, when,\nat a certain distance, the animal in its turn made a pause, and\nallowed me to approach within pistol-shot of him. He then darted off\nagain with the quickness of thought, capering, kicking, and sporting\nin his flight, as if he were not blown in the least, and the chase\nwas his pastime. When my followers of the country came up, they\nregretted that I had not shot the creature when he was within my\naim, telling me that his flesh is one of the greatest delicacies in\nPersia.\n\n\"The prodigious swiftness and the peculiar manner in which he\nfled across the plain coincided exactly with the description that\nXenophon gives of the same animal in Arabia. But above all, it\nreminded me of the striking portrait drawn by the author of the Book\nof Job. I was informed by the Mehnander, who had been in the desert\nwhen making a pilgrimage to the shrine of Ali, that the wild ass of\nIrak Arabi differs in nothing from the one I had just seen. He had\nobserved them often for a short time in the possession of the Arabs,\nwho told him the creature was perfectly untameable.\n\n\"A few days after this discussion, we saw another of these animals,\nand, pursuing it determinately, had the good fortune to kill it.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIt has been suggested by many zoologists that the Wild Ass is\nthe progenitor of the domesticated species. The origin of the\ndomesticated animal, however, is so very ancient, that we have no\ndata whereon even a theory can be built. It is true that the Wild\nand the Domesticated Ass are exactly similar in appearance, and that\nan _Asinus hemippus_, or Wild Ass, looks so like an Asiatic _Asinus\nvulgaris_, or Domesticated Ass, that by the eye alone the two are\nhardly distinguishable from each other. But with their appearance\nthe resemblance ends, the domestic animal being quiet, docile, and\nfond of man, while the wild animal is savage, intractable, and has\nan invincible repugnance to human beings.\n\n[Illustration: HUNTING WILD ASSES.]\n\nThis diversity of spirit in similar forms is very curious, and is\nstrongly exemplified by the semi-wild Asses of Quito. They are the\ndescendants of the animals that were imported by the Spaniards, and\nlive in herds, just as do the horses. They combine the habits of\nthe Wild Ass with the disposition of the tame animal. They are as\nswift of foot as the Wild Ass of Syria or Africa, and have the same\nhabit of frequenting lofty situations, leaping about among rocks and\nravines, which seem only fitted for the wild goat, and into which no\nhorse can follow them.\n\nNominally, they are private property, but practically they may be\ntaken by any one who chooses to capture them. The lasso is employed\nfor the purpose, and when the animals are caught they bite, and\nkick, and plunge, and behave exactly like their wild relations of\nthe Old World, giving their captors infinite trouble in avoiding\nthe teeth and hoofs which they wield so skilfully. But, as soon\nas a load has once been bound on the back of one of these furious\ncreatures, the wild spirit dies out of it, the head droops, the\ngait becomes steady, and the animal behaves as if it had led a\ndomesticated life all its days.\n\n\n\n\nTHE MULE.\n\n     Ancient use of the Mule--Various breeds of Mule--Supposed date\n     of its introduction into Palestine--Mule-breeding forbidden to\n     the Jews--The Mule as a saddle-animal--Its use on occasions of\n     state--The king's Mule--Obstinacy of the Mule.\n\n\nThere are several references to the MULE in the Holy Scriptures, but\nit is remarkable that the animal is not mentioned at all until the\ntime of David, and that in the New Testament the name does not occur\nat all.\n\nThe origin of the Mule is unknown, but that the mixed breed between\nthe horse and the ass has been employed in many countries from very\nancient times is a familiar fact. It is a very strange circumstance\nthat the offspring of these two animals should be, for some\npurposes, far superior to either of the parents, a well-bred Mule\nhaving the lightness, surefootedness, and hardy endurance of the\nass, together with the increased size and muscular development of\nthe horse. Thus it is peculiarly adapted either for the saddle or\nfor the conveyance of burdens over a rough or desert country.\n\nThe Mules that are most generally serviceable are bred from the male\nass and the mare, those which have the horse as the father and the\nass as the mother being small, and comparatively valueless. At the\npresent day, Mules are largely employed in Spain and the Spanish\ndependencies, and there are some breeds which are of very great size\nand singular beauty, those of Andalusia being especially celebrated.\nIn the Andes, the Mule has actually superseded the llama as a beast\nof burden.\n\nIts appearance in the sacred narrative is quite sudden. In Gen.\nxxxvi. 24, there is a passage which seems as if it referred to the\nMule: \"This was that Anah that found the mules in the wilderness.\"\nNow the word which is here rendered as Mules is \"Yemim,\" a word\nwhich is not found elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. The best\nHebraists are agreed that, whatever interpretation may be put upon\nthe word, it cannot possibly have the signification that is here\nassigned to it. Some translate the word as \"hot springs,\" while the\neditors of the Jewish Bible prefer to leave it untranslated, thus\nsignifying that they are not satisfied with any rendering.\n\n[Illustration: MULES OF THE EAST.]\n\nThe word which is properly translated as Mule is \"Pered;\" and the\nfirst place where it occurs is 2 Sam. xiii. 29. Absalom had taken\nadvantage of a sheep-shearing feast to kill his brother Amnon in\nrevenge for the insult offered to Tamar: \"And the servants of\nAbsalom did unto Amnon as Absalom had commanded. Then all the\nking's sons arose, and every man gat him up upon his mule, and\nfled.\" It is evident from this passage that the Mule must have been\nin use for a considerable time, as the sacred writer mentions, as a\nmatter of course, that the king's sons had each his own riding mule.\n\n[Illustration: ABSALOM IS CAUGHT IN THE BOUGHS OF AN OAK TREE.]\n\nFarther on, chap. xviii. 9 records the event which led to the death\nof Absalom by the hand of Joab. \"And Absalom met the servants of\nDavid. And Absalom rode upon a mule, and the mule went under the\nthick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak,\nand he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule\nthat was under him went away.\"\n\nWe see by these passages that the Mule was held in such high\nestimation that it was used by the royal princes for the saddle, and\nhad indeed superseded the ass. In another passage we shall find that\nthe Mule was ridden by the king himself when he travelled in state,\nand that to ride upon the king's Mule was considered as equivalent\nto sitting upon the king's throne. See, for example, 1 Kings i. in\nwhich there are several passages illustrative of this curious fact.\nSee first, ver. 33, in which David gives to Zadok the priest, Nathan\nthe prophet, and Benaiah the captain of the hosts, instructions for\nbringing his son Solomon to Gihon, and anointing him king in the\nstead of his father: \"Take with you the servants of your lord, and\ncause Solomon my son to ride upon mine own mule, and bring him down\nto Gihon.\"\n\nThat the Mule was as obstinate and contentious an animal in\nPalestine as it is in Europe is evident from the fact that the\nEastern mules of the present day are quite as troublesome as their\nEuropean brethren. They are very apt to shy at anything, or nothing\nat all; they bite fiercely, and every now and then they indulge\nin a violent kicking fit, flinging out their heels with wonderful\nforce and rapidity, and turning round and round on their fore-feet\nso quickly that it is hardly possible to approach them. There is\nscarcely a traveller in the Holy Land who has not some story to tell\nabout the Mule and its perverse disposition; but, as these anecdotes\nhave but very slight bearing on the subject of the Mule as mentioned\nin the Scriptures, they will not be given in these pages.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: DANIEL REFUSES TO EAT THE KING'S MEAT.]\n\n\n\n\nSWINE.\n\n     The Mosaic prohibition of the pig--Hatred of Swine by Jews and\n     Mahometans--The prodigal son--Supposed connexion between Swine\n     and diseases of the skin--Destruction of the herd of Swine--The\n     wild boar of the woods--The damage which it does to the vines.\n\n\nMany are the animals which are specially mentioned in the Mosaic law\nas unfit for food, beside those that come under the general head of\nbeing unclean because they do not divide the hoof and chew the cud.\nThere is none, however, that excited such abhorrence as the hog, or\nthat was more utterly detested.\n\nIt is utterly impossible for a European, especially one of the\npresent day, to form even an idea of the utter horror and loathing\nwith which the hog was regarded by the ancient Jews. Even at the\npresent day, a zealous Jew or Mahometan looks upon the hog, or\nanything that belongs to the hog, with an abhorrence too deep for\nwords. The older and stricter Jews felt so deeply on this subject,\nthat they would never even mention the name of the hog, but always\nsubstituted for the objectionable word the term \"the abomination.\"\n\nSeveral references are made in the Scriptures to the exceeding\ndisgust felt by the Jews towards the Swine. The portion of the\nMosaic law on which a Jew would ground his antipathy to the flesh of\nSwine is that passage which occurs in Lev. xi. 7: \"And the swine,\nthough he divide the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not\nthe cud; he is unclean to you.\" But the very same paragraph, of\nwhich this passage forms the termination, treats of other unclean\nbeasts, such as the coney (or hyrax) and the hare, neither of which\nanimals are held in such abhorrence as the Swine.\n\nThis enactment could not therefore have produced the singular\nfeeling with which the Swine were regarded by the Jews, and in all\nprobability the antipathy was of far greater antiquity than the time\nof Moses.\n\nHow hateful to the Jewish mind was the hog we may infer from many\npassages, several of which occur in the Book of Isaiah. See, for\nexample, lxv. 3, 4: \"A people that provoketh me to anger continually\nto my face; that sacrificeth in gardens, and burneth incense upon\naltars of brick;\n\n\"Which remain among the graves, and lodge in the monuments, which\neat swine's flesh, and broth of abominable things is in their\nvessels.\" Here we have the people heaping one abomination upon\nanother--the sacrifice to idols in the gardens, the burning of\nincense upon a forbidden altar and with strange fire, the living\namong the tombs, where none but madmen and evil spirits were\nsupposed to reside, and, as the culminating point of iniquity,\neating Swine's flesh, and drinking the broth in which it was boiled.\n\nIn the next chapter, verse 3, we have another reference to the\nSwine. Speaking of the wickedness of the people, and the uselessness\nof their sacrifices, the prophet proceeds to say: \"He that killeth\nan ox is as if he slew a man; he that sacrificeth a lamb, as if he\nhad cut off a dog's neck; he that offereth an oblation, as if he\noffered swine's blood.\" We see here how the prophet proceeds from\none image to another: the murder of a man, the offering of a dog\ninstead of a lamb, and the pouring out of Swine's blood upon the\naltar instead of wine--the last-mentioned crime being evidently held\nas the worst of the three. Another reference to the Swine occurs\nin the same chapter, verse 17: \"They that sanctify themselves, and\npurify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst,\neating swine's flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be\nconsumed together, saith the Lord.\"\n\nNot only did the Jews refuse to eat the flesh of the hog, but they\nheld in utter abomination everything that belonged to it, and\nwould have thought themselves polluted had they been even touched\nwith a hog's bristle. Even at the present day this feeling has not\ndiminished, and both by Jews and Mahometans the hog is held in utter\nabhorrence.\n\nSome recent travellers have made great use of this feeling. Signor\nPierotti, for example, during his long sojourn in Palestine, found\nthe flesh of the hog extremely beneficial to him. \"How often has the\nflesh of this animal supported me, especially during the earlier\npart of my stay in Palestine, before I had learned to like the\nmutton and the goats' flesh! I give the preference to this meat\nbecause it has often saved me time by rendering a fire unnecessary,\nand freed me from importunate, dirty, and unsavoury guests, who used\ntheir hands for spoons, knives, and forks.\n\n\"A little piece of bacon laid conspicuously upon the cloth that\nserved me for a table was always my best friend. Without this\ntalisman I should never have freed myself from unwelcome company,\nat least without breaking all the laws of hospitality by not\ninviting the chiefs of my escort or the guides to share my meal;\na thing neither prudent nor safe in the open country. Therefore,\non the contrary, when thus provided I pressed them with the utmost\nearnestness to eat with me, but of course never succeeded in\npersuading them; and so dined in peace, keeping on good terms with\nthem, although they did call me behind my back a 'dog of a Frank'\nfor eating pork.\n\n\"Besides, I had then no fear of my stores failing, as I always took\ncare to carry a stock large enough to supply the real wants of my\nparty. So a piece of bacon was more service to me than a revolver,\na rifle, or a sword; and I recommend all travellers in Palestine to\ncarry bacon rather than arms.\"\n\nSuch being the feelings of the Jews, we may conceive the abject\ndegradation to which the Prodigal Son of the parable must have\ndescended, when he was compelled to become a swine-herd for a\nliving, and would have been glad even to have eaten the very husks\non which the Swine fed. These husks, by the way, were evidently the\npods of the locust-tree, or carob, of which we shall have more to\nsay in a future page. We have in our language no words to express\nthe depths of ignominy into which this young man must have fallen,\nnor can we conceive any office which in our estimation would be so\ndegrading as would be that of swine-herd to a Jew.\n\n[Illustration: THE PRODIGAL SON.]\n\nHow deeply rooted was the abhorrence of the Swine's flesh we can\nsee from a passage in 2 Maccabees, in which is related a series of\ninsults offered to the religion of the Jews. The temple in Jerusalem\nwas to be called the Temple of Jupiter Olympus, and that on Gerizim\nwas to be dedicated to Jupiter, the defender of strangers. The\naltars were defiled by forbidden things, and the celebration of the\nSabbath, or of any Jewish ceremony, was punishable with death.\n\nSevere as were all these afflictions, there was one which the Jews\nseem, from the stress laid upon it, to have felt more keenly than\nany other. This was the compulsory eating of Swine's flesh, an act\nwhich was so abhorrent to the Jews that in attempting to enforce it,\nAntiochus found that he was foiled by the passive resistance offered\nto him. The Jews had allowed their temples to be dedicated to the\nworship of heathen deities, they had submitted to the deprivation of\ntheir sacred rites, they had even consented to walk in procession on\nthe Feast of Bacchus, carrying ivy like the rest of the worshippers\nin that most licentious festival. It might be thought that any\npeople who submit to such degradation would suffer any similar\nindignity. But even their forbearance had reached its limits, and\nnothing could induce them to eat the flesh of Swine.\n\n[Illustration: ELEAZAR REFUSES TO EAT SWINE'S FLESH.]\n\nSeveral examples of the resistance offered by them are recorded in\nthe book just mentioned. Eleazer, for example, a man ninety years\nold, sternly refused to partake of the abominable food. Some of the\nofficials, in compassion for his great age, advised him to take\nlawful meat with him and to exchange it for the Swine's flesh.\nThis he refused to do, saying that his age was only a reason for\nparticular care on his part, lest the young should be led away by\nhis example. His persecutors then forced the meat into his mouth,\nbut he rejected it, and died under the lash.\n\nAnother example of similar, but far greater heroism, is given by\nthe same chronicler. A mother and her seven sons were urged with\nblows to eat the forbidden food, and refused to do so. Thinking\nthat the mother would not be able to endure the sight of her sons'\nsufferings, the officers took them in succession, and inflicted a\nseries of horrible tortures upon them, beginning by cutting off\ntheir tongues, hands, and feet, and ending by roasting them while\nstill alive. Their mother, far from counselling her sons to yield,\neven though they were bribed by promises of wealth and rank, only\nencouraged them to persevere, and, when the last of her sons was\ndead, passed herself through the same fiery trial.\n\n[Illustration: A MOTHER AND HER SEVEN SONS TORTURED FOR REFUSING TO\nEAT SWINE'S FLESH.]\n\nIt has been conjectured, and with plausibility, that the pig was\nprohibited by Moses on account of the unwholesomeness of its flesh\nin a hot country, and that its almost universal repudiation in such\nlands is a proof of its unfitness for food. In countries where\ndiseases of the skin are so common, and where the dreaded leprosy\nstill maintains its hold, the flesh of the pig is thought, whether\nrightly or wrongly, to increase the tendency to such diseases, and\non that account alone would be avoided.\n\n[Illustration: THE EVIL SPIRITS ENTER A HERD OF SWINE.]\n\nIt has, however, been shown that the flesh of Swine can be\nhabitually consumed in hot countries without producing any evil\nresults; and, moreover, that the prohibition of Moses was not\nconfined to the Swine, but included many other animals whose flesh\nis used without scruple by those very persons who reject that of the\npig.\n\nKnowing the deep hatred of the Jews towards this animal, we may\nnaturally wonder how we come to hear of herds of Swine kept in\nJewish lands.\n\nOf this custom there is a familiar example in the herd of Swine that\nwas drowned in the sea (Matt. viii. 28-34). It is an open question\nwhether those who possessed the Swine were Jews of lax principles,\nwho disregarded the Law for the sake of gain, or whether they\nwere Gentiles, who, of course, were not bound by the Law. The\nformer seems the likelier interpretation, the destruction of the\nSwine being a fitting punishment for their owners. It must be here\nremarked, that our Lord did not, as is often said, destroy the\nSwine, neither did He send the devils into them, so that the death\nof these animals cannot be reckoned as one of the divine miracles.\nEjecting the evil spirits from the maniacs was an exercise of His\ndivine authority; the destruction of the Swine was a manifestation\nof diabolical anger, permitted, but not dictated.\n\nSwine are at the present day much neglected in Palestine, because\nthe Mahometans and Jews may not eat the flesh, and the Christians,\nas a rule, abstain from it, so that they may not hurt the feelings\nof their neighbours. Pigs are, however, reared in the various\nmonasteries, and by the Arabs attached to them.\n\n[Illustration: WILD BOARS DEVOURING THE CARCASE OF A DEER.]\n\nWe now come to the wild animal. There is only one passage in the\nScriptures in which the WILD BOAR is definitely mentioned, and\nanother in which a reference is made to it in a paraphrase.\n\n[Illustration: WILD BOARS.]\n\nThe former of these is the well-known verse of the Psalms: \"Why hast\nthou broken down her hedges, so that all they which pass by the way\ndo pluck her?\n\n\"The boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of\nthe field doth devour it\" (Ps. lxxx. 12, 13). The second passage\nis to be found in Ps. lxviii. 30. In the Authorized Version it is\nthus rendered: \"Rebuke the company of spearmen, the multitude of\nbulls, with the calves of the people.\" If the reader will refer to\nthe marginal translation (which, it must be remarked, is of equal\nauthority with the text), the passage runs thus: \"Rebuke the beasts\nof the reeds,\" &c. Now, this is undoubtedly the correct rendering,\nand is accepted in the Jewish Bible.\n\nHaving quoted these two passages, we will proceed to the description\nand character of the animal.\n\nIn the former times, the Wild Boar was necessarily much more\nplentiful than is the case in these days, owing to the greater\nabundance of woods, many of which have disappeared by degrees, and\nothers been greatly thinned by the encroachments of mankind. Woods\nand reed-beds are always the habitations of the Wild Boar, which\nresides in these fastnesses, and seems always to prefer the reed-bed\nto the wood, probably because it can find plenty of mud, in which it\nwallows after the fashion of its kind. There is no doubt whatever\nthat the \"beast of the reeds\" is simply a poetical phrase for the\nWild Boar.\n\nIf there should be any cultivated ground in the neighbourhood, the\nBoar is sure to sally out and do enormous damage to the crops. It\nis perhaps more dreaded in the vineyards than in any other ground,\nas it not only devours the grapes, but tears down and destroys the\nvines, trampling them under foot, and destroying a hundredfold as\nmuch as it eats.\n\nIf the reader will refer again to Ps. lxxx. he will see that the\nJewish nation is described under the image of a vine: \"Thou hast\nbrought a vine out of Egypt: Thou hast cast out the heathen and\nplanted it,\" &c. No image of a destructive enemy could therefore\nbe more appropriate than that which is used. We have read of the\nlittle foxes that spoil the vines, but the Wild Boar is a much more\ndestructive enemy, breaking its way through the fences, rooting up\nthe ground, tearing down the vines themselves, and treading them\nunder its feet. A single party of these animals will sometimes\ndestroy an entire vineyard in a single night.\n\n[Illustration: WILD BOARS DESTROYING A VINEYARD.]\n\nWe can well imagine the damage that would be done to a vineyard even\nby the domesticated Swine, but the Wild Boar is infinitely more\ndestructive. It is of very great size, often resembling a donkey\nrather than a boar, and is swift and active beyond conception. The\nWild Boar is scarcely recognisable as the very near relation of the\ndomestic species. It runs with such speed, that a high-bred horse\nfinds some difficulty in overtaking it, while an indifferent steed\nwould be left hopelessly behind. Even on level ground the hunter\nhas hard work to overtake it; and if it can get upon broken or\nhilly ground, no horse can catch it. The Wild Boar can leap to a\nconsiderable distance, and can wheel and turn when at full speed,\nwith an agility that makes it a singularly dangerous foe. Indeed,\nthe inhabitants of countries where the Wild Boar flourishes would\nas soon face a lion as one of these animals, the stroke of whose\nrazor-like tusks is made with lightning swiftness, and which is\nsufficient to rip up a horse, and cut a dog nearly asunder.\n\nAlthough the Wild Boar is not as plentiful in Palestine as used to\nbe the case, it is still found in considerable numbers. Whenever the\ninhabitants can contrive to cut off the retreat of marauding parties\namong the crops, they turn out for a general hunt, and kill as many\nas they can manage to slay. After one of these hunts, the bodies are\nmostly exposed for sale, but, as the demand for them is very small,\nthey can be purchased at a very cheap rate. Signor Pierotti bought\none in the plains of Jericho for five shillings. For the few who may\neat the hog, this is a fortunate circumstance, the flesh being very\nexcellent, and as superior to ordinary pork as is a pheasant to a\nbarn-door fowl or venison to mutton.\n\n[Illustration: chase]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: INDIAN ELEPHANT.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE ELEPHANT.\n\n     The Elephant indirectly mentioned in the Authorized\n     Version--The Elephant as an engine of war--Antiochus and\n     his Elephants--Oriental exaggeration--Self-devotion of\n     Eleazar--Attacking the Elephants, and their gradual abandonment\n     in war.\n\n\nExcept indirectly, the Elephant is never mentioned in the Authorized\nVersion of the Canonical Scriptures, although frequent references\nare made to ivory, the product of that animal.\n\nThe earliest mention of ivory in the Scriptures is to be found in 1\nKings x. 18: \"Moreover the king (_i.e._ Solomon) made a great throne\nof ivory, and overlaid it with the best gold.\" This passage forms\na portion of the description given by the sacred historian of the\nglories of Solomon's palace, of which this celebrated throne, with\nthe six steps and the twelve lions on the steps, was the central\nand most magnificent object. It is named together with the three\nhundred golden shields, the golden vessel of the royal palace, and\nthe wonderful arched viaduct crossing the valley of the Tyropoeon,\n\"the ascent by which he went up unto the house of the Lord,\" all of\nwhich glories so overcame the Queen of Sheba that \"there was no more\nspirit in her.\"\n\n[Illustration: KING SOLOMON, SEATED UPON HIS THRONE, RECEIVES THE\nQUEEN OF SHEBA.]\n\nWe see, therefore, that in the time of Solomon ivory was so precious\nan article that it was named among the chief of the wonders to be\nseen in the palace of Solomon, the wealthiest and most magnificent\nmonarch of sacred or profane history.\n\nThat it should not have been previously mentioned is very singular.\nFive hundred years had elapsed since the Israelites escaped from\nthe power of Egypt, and during the whole of that time, though gold\nand silver and precious stones and costly raiment are repeatedly\nmentioned, we do not find a single passage in which any allusion is\nmade to ivory. Had we not known that ivory was largely used among\nthe Egyptians, such an omission would cause no surprise. But the\nresearches of modern travellers have brought to light many articles\nof ivory that were in actual use in Egypt, and we therefore cannot\nbut wonder that a material so valued and so beautiful does not seem\nto have been reckoned among the treasures which were brought by the\nIsraelites from the land of their captivity, and which were so\nabundant that the Tabernacle was entirely formed of them.\n\n[Illustration: INDIAN ELEPHANTS.]\n\nIn the various collections of Europe are many specimens of ivory\nused by the ancient Egyptians, among the chief of which may be\nmentioned an ivory box in the Louvre, having on its lid the name of\nthe dynasty in which it was carved, and the ivory-tipped lynch-pins\nof the splendid war-chariot in Florence, from which the illustration\non page 309 has been drawn.\n\nThe ivory used by the Egyptians was, of course, that of the African\nElephant; and was obtained chiefly from Ethiopia, as we find in\nHerodotus (\"Thalia,\" 114):--\"Where the meridian declines towards the\nsetting sun, the Ethiopian territory reaches, being the extreme part\nof the habitable world. It produces much gold, huge elephants, wild\ntrees of all kinds, ebony, and men of large stature, very handsome\nand long-lived.\"\n\nThe passages in the Bible in which the Elephant itself is named are\nonly to be found in the Apocrypha, and in all of them the Elephant\nis described as an engine of war. If the reader will refer to\nthe First Book of the Maccabees, he will find that the Elephant\nis mentioned at the very commencement of the book. \"Now when the\nkingdom was established before Antiochus, he thought to reign over\nEgypt, that he might have the dominion of two realms.\n\n\"Wherefore he entered into Egypt with a great multitude, with\nchariots, and elephants, and horsemen, and a great navy.\" (i. 16,\n17.)\n\nHere we see that the Elephant was considered as a most potent engine\nof war, and, as we may perceive by the context, the King of Egypt\nwas so alarmed by the invading force, that he ran away, and allowed\nAntiochus to take possession of the country.\n\nAfter this, Antiochus Eupator marched against Jerusalem with a vast\narmy, which is thus described in detail:--\"The number of his army\nwas one hundred thousand footmen, and twenty thousand horsemen, and\ntwo and thirty elephants exercised in battle.\n\n\"And to the end that they might provoke the elephants to fight, they\nshowed them the blood of grapes and mulberries.\n\n\"Moreover, they divided the beasts among the armies, and for every\nelephant they appointed a thousand men, armed with coats of mail,\nand with helmets of brass on their heads; and, besides this for\nevery beast were ordained five hundred horsemen of the best.\n\n\"These were ready at every occasion wheresoever the beast was; and\nwhithersoever the beast went they went also, neither departed they\nfrom him.\n\n\"And upon the beasts were there strong towers of wood, which covered\nevery one of them, and were girt fast unto them with devices; there\nwere also upon every one two and thirty strong men that fought upon\nthem, beside the Indian that ruled him.\n\n\"As for the remnant of the horsemen, they set them on this side and\nthat side at the two fronts of the host, giving them signs what to\ndo, and being harnessed all over amidst the ranks.\" (1 Macc. vi. 30,\n&c.)\n\nIt is evident from this description that, in the opinion of the\nwriter, the Elephants formed the principal arms of the opposing\nforce, these animals being prominently mentioned, and the rest of\nthe army being reckoned as merely subsidiaries of the terrible\nbeasts. The thirty-two Elephants appear to have taken such a hold of\nthe narrator's mind, that he evidently looked upon them in the same\nlight that the ancient Jews regarded chariots of war, or as at the\npresent day savages regard artillery. According to his ideas, the\nthirty-two Elephants constituted the real army, the hundred thousand\ninfantry and twenty thousand cavalry being only in attendance upon\nthese animals.\n\nTaken as a whole, the description of the war Elephant is a good\none, though slightly exaggerated, and is evidently written by an\neye-witness. The mention of the native mahout, or \"Indian that\nguided him,\" is characteristic enough, as is the account of the\nhowdah, or wooden carriage on the back of the animal.\n\nThe number of warriors, however, is evidently exaggerated, though\nnot to such an extent as the account of Julius Caesar's Elephants,\nwhich are said to have carried on their backs sixty soldiers, beside\nthe wooden tower in which they fought. It is evident that, in the\nfirst place, no Elephant could carry a tower large enough to hold so\nmany fighting men, much less one which would afford space for them\nto use their weapons.\n\nA good account of the fighting Elephant is given by Topsel (p.\n157):--\"There were certain officers and guides of the Elephants,\nwho were called _Elephantarchae_, who were the governors of sixteen\nElephants, and they which did institute and teach them martial\ndiscipline were called _Elephantagogi_.\n\n\"The Military Elephant did carry four persons on his bare back, one\nfighting on the right hand, another fighting on the left hand, a\nthird, which stood fighting backwards from the Elephant's head, and\na fourth in the middle of these, holding the rains, and guiding the\nBeast to the discretion of the Souldiers, even as the Pilot in a\nship guideth the stem, wherein was required an equall knowledge and\ndexterity; for when the Indian which ruled them said, Strike here on\nthe right hand, or else on the left, or refrain and stand still, no\nreasonable man could yield readier obedience.\"\n\nThis description is really a very accurate as well as spirited one,\nand conveys a good idea of the fighting Elephant as it appeared when\nbrought into action.\n\nStrangely enough, after giving this temperate and really excellent\naccount of the war Elephant, the writer seems to have been unable to\nresist the fascination of his theme, and proceeds to describe, with\ngreat truth and spirit, the mode of fighting adopted by the animal,\nintermixed with a considerable amount of the exaggeration from which\nthe former part of his account is free.\n\n\"They did fasten iron chains, first of all, upon the Elephant that\nwas to bear ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty men, on either side\ntwo panniers of iron bound underneath their belly, and upon them\nthe like panniers of wood, hollow, wherein they placed their men\nat armes, and covered them over with small boards (for the trunck\nof the Elephant was covered with a mail for defence, and upon that\na broadsword two cubits long); this (as also the wooden Castle, or\npannier aforesaid) were fastened first to the neck and then to the\nrump of the Elephant.\n\n\"Being thus armed, they entered the battle, and they shewed unto the\nBeasts, to make them more fierce, wine, liquor made of Rice, and\nwhite cloth, for at the sight of any of these his courage and rage\nincreaseth above all measure. Then at the sound of the Trumpet, he\nbeginneth with teeth to strike, tear, beat, spoil, take up into the\nair, cast down again, stamp upon men under feet, overthrow with his\ntrunck, and make way for his riders to pierce with Spear, Shield,\nand Sword; so that his horrible voice, his wonderful body, his\nterrible force, his admirable skill, his ready and inestimable\nobedience, and his strange and seldom-seen shape, produced in a main\nbattel no mean accidents and overturns.\"\n\n[Illustration: THE WAR ELEPHANT.]\n\nIn this account there is a curious mixture of truth and\nexaggeration. As we have already seen, the number of soldiers which\nthe animal was supposed to carry is greatly exaggerated, and it is\nrather amusing to note how the \"towers\" in which they fought are\nmodified into \"panniers.\" Then the method by which the animal is\nincited to the combat is partly true, and partly false. Of course\nan Elephant is not angered by seeing a piece of white cloth, or by\nlooking at wine, or a liquor made of rice.\n\nBut that the wine, or the \"liquor made of rice,\" _i.e._ arrack,\nwas administered to the Elephant before it was brought into the\nbattle-field, is likely enough. Elephants are wonderfully fond of\nstrong drink. They can be incited to perform any task within their\npowers by a provision of arrack, and when stimulated by a plentiful\nsupply of their favourite drink they would be in good fighting\ncondition.\n\nNext we find the writer describing the Elephant as being furnished\nwith a coating of mail armour on its proboscis, the end of which was\narmed with a sword a yard in length. Now any one who is acquainted\nwith the Elephant will see at once that such offensive and defensive\narmour would deprive the animal of the full use of the proboscis,\nand would, therefore, only weaken, and not strengthen, its use in\nbattle. Accordingly we find that the writer, when describing with\nperfect accuracy the mode in which the Elephant fights, utterly\nomits all mention of the sword and the mailed proboscis, and\ndescribes the animal, not as striking or thrusting with the sword,\nbut as overthrowing with the trunk, taking up into the air, and\ncasting down again--acts which could only be performed when the\nproboscis was unencumbered by armour. The use of weapons was left to\nthe soldiers that fought upon its back, the principal object of the\nhuge animal being to trample its way through the opposing ranks, and\nto make a way for the soldiers that followed.\n\nIt may be easily imagined that, before soldiers become familiarized\nwith the appearance of the Elephant, they might be pardoned for\nbeing panic-struck at the sight of so strange an animal. Not only\nwas it formidable for its vast size, and for the armed men which it\ncarried, but for the obedience which it rendered to its keeper, and\nthe skill with which it wielded the strange but powerful weapon with\nwhich Nature had armed it.\n\nAt first, the very approach of so terrible a foe struck\nconsternation into the soldiers, who knew of no mode by which\nthey could oppose the gigantic beast, which came on in its swift,\nswinging pace, crushing its way by sheer weight through the ranks,\nand striking right and left with its proboscis. No other method of\nchecking the Elephant, except by self-sacrifice, could be found; and\nin 1 Macc. vi. 43-46, we read how Eleazar, the son of Mattathias,\nnobly devoted himself for his country.\n\n\"Eleazar also, surnamed Savaran, perceiving that one of the beasts,\narmed with royal harness, was higher than all the rest, and\nsupposing that the king was upon him,\n\n\"Put himself in jeopardy, to the end he might deliver his people,\nand get him a perpetual name.\n\n\"Whereupon he ran upon him courageously, through the midst of the\nbattle, slaying on the right hand and on the left, so that they were\ndivided from him on both sides.\n\n\"Which done, he crept under the elephant, and thrust him under, and\nslew him; whereupon the elephant fell down upon him, and he died.\"\n\nI may here mention that the surname of Savaran, or Avaran, as it\nought to be called, signifies one who pierces an animal from behind,\nand was given to him after his death, in honour of his exploit.\n\nAt first, then, Elephants were the most formidable engines of war\nthat could be brought into the battle-field, and the very sight of\nthese huge beasts, towering above even the helmets of the cavalry,\ndisheartened the enemy so much that victory became easy.\n\nAfter a while, however, when time for reflection had been allowed,\nthe more intellectual among the soldiers began to think that, after\nall, the Elephant was not a mere engine, but a living animal, and,\nas such, subject to the infirmities of the lower animals. So they\ninvented scheme after scheme, by which they baffled the attacks of\nthese once dreaded foes, and sometimes even succeeded in driving\nthem back among the ranks of their own soldiery, so maddened with\npain and anger, that they dealt destruction among the soldiers for\nwhom they were fighting, and so broke up their order of battle that\nthe foe easily overcame them.\n\nThe vulnerable nature of the proboscis was soon discovered, and\nsoldiers were armed with very sharp swords, set on long handles,\nwith which they continually attacked the Elephants' trunks. Others\nwere mounted on swift horses, dashed past the Elephant, and hurled\ntheir darts before the animal could strike them. Others, again, were\nplaced in chariots, and armed with very long and sharply-pointed\nspears. Several of these chariots would be driven simultaneously\nagainst an Elephant, and sometimes succeeded in killing the animal.\nSlingers also were told off for the express purpose of clearing the\n\"castles,\" or howdahs, of the soldiers who fought on the Elephants'\nbacks, and their especial object was the native mahout, who sat on\nthe animal's neck.\n\nSometimes they made way for the Elephant as it pressed forward, and\nthen closed round it, so as to make it the central mark, on which\nconverged a hail of javelins, arrows, and stones on every side,\nuntil the huge animal sank beneath its many wounds. By degrees,\ntherefore, the Elephant was found to be so uncertain an engine of\nwar, that its use was gradually discontinued, and finally abandoned\naltogether.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe Elephant which was employed in these wars was the Indian\nspecies, _Elephas Indicus_, which is thought to be more susceptible\nof education than the African Elephant. The latter, however, has\nbeen tamed, and, in the days of Rome's greatest splendour, was\ntaught to perform a series of tricks that seem almost incredible.\nAs, however, the Indian species is that with which we have here to\ndo, I have selected it for the principal illustrations.\n\nIt may be at once distinguished from its African relative by the\ncomparatively small ears, those of the African Elephant reaching\nabove the back of the head, and drooping well below the neck. The\nshape of the head, too, is different. In the Indian species, only\nthe males bear tusks, and even many of them are unarmed. In the\nAfrican species, however, both sexes bear tusks, those of the male\nfurnishing the best ivory, with its peculiar creamy colour and\nbeautiful graining, and those of the female being smaller in size,\nand producing ivory of a much inferior quality.\n\n[Illustration: AFRICAN ELEPHANTS.]\n\nThe Elephant, whether of Asia or Africa, always lives in herds\nvarying greatly in numbers, and invariably found in the deepest\nforests, or in their near vicinity. Both species are fond of\nwater, and never wander far from some stream or fountain, although\nthey can, and do, make tolerably long journeys for the purpose of\nobtaining the needful supply of liquid.\n\nThey have a curious capability of laying up a store of water in\ntheir interior, somewhat after the fashion of the camel, but also\npossess the strange accomplishment of drawing the liquid supply from\ntheir stomachs by means of their trunks, and scattering it in a\nshower over their backs to cool their heated bodies.\n\nWhen drinking, the Elephant inserts the tip of his trunk into the\nstream, fills it with water, and then, turning it into his throat,\ndischarges the contents.\n\nThe strangest portion of the Elephant is the trunk, or proboscis.\nThis wonderful appendage is furnished at its extremity with a\nfinger-like projection, with which the animal can pluck a single\nblade of grass or pick up a small object from the ground.\n\nThe value of the proboscis to the Elephant can be estimated when it\nis considered that without its aid the animal must soon starve to\ndeath. The short, thick neck and projecting tusks would entirely\nprevent it from reaching any of the vegetation upon which it feeds.\n\nWith the trunk, however, the Elephant readily carries its food to\nits mouth, and employs the useful member just as if it were a long\nand flexible arm.\n\nThe Elephant bears a worldwide fame for its capabilities as a\nservant and companion of man, and for the extraordinary development\nof its intellectual faculties. The Indian or Asiatic Elephant is the\nvariety that is considered most docile and easy to train; these are\nalmost invariably taken in a wild state from their native forests.\nThe Indian hunters usually proceed into the woods with trained\nfemale Elephants. These advance quietly, and by their blandishments\nso occupy the attention of any unfortunate male that they meet that\nthe hunters are enabled to tie his legs together and fasten him to\na tree. His treacherous companions now leave him to struggle in\nimpotent rage until he is so subdued by hunger and fatigue that the\nhunters can drive him home between two tame elephants. When once\ncaptured, he is easily trained.\n\nThe following curious instance of intelligence in an Elephant is\ngiven by a traveller in Ceylon:\n\n\"One evening, while riding in the vicinity of Kandy, my horse showed\nsome excitement at a noise which was heard in the thick jungle,\nsounding something like '_Urmph! Urmph!_' uttered in a hoarse and\ndissatisfied tone. A turn in the forest explained the mystery, by\nbringing me face to face with a tame working Elephant unaccompanied\nby any driver or attendant. He was laboring painfully with a heavy\nbeam of timber, which he had balanced across his tusks and was\ncarrying to the village from which I had come.\n\n\"The pathway being narrow, he was compelled to bend his head\nto one side to permit the passage of the long piece of wood, and\nthe exertion and inconvenience combined, led him to utter the\ndissatisfied sounds which had frightened my horse.\n\n[Illustration: ELEPHANTS' WATERING-PLACE.]\n\n\"On seeing us halt, the Elephant raised his head, looked at us for a\nmoment, then dropped the timber, and forced himself backward among\nthe bushes at the side of the road, so as to leave us plenty of room\nto pass.\n\n\"My horse still hesitated; the Elephant observed this, and\nimpatiently crowded himself still deeper in the jungle, repeating\nhis cry of, '_Urmph! Urmph!_' but in a voice evidently meant to\nencourage us to come on. Still the horse trembled; and, anxious to\nobserve the conduct of the two sagacious creatures, I forbore any\ninterference. Again the Elephant wedged himself farther in among the\ntrees and waited for us to pass him. At last the horse timidly did\nso, after which I saw the wise Elephant come out of the wood, take\nup the heavy timber upon his tusks, and resume his route, hoarsely\nsnorting, as before, his discontented remonstrance.\"\n\nAlthough so valuable an animal for certain kinds of work, the\nElephant is hardly so effective an assistant as might be supposed.\nThe working Elephant is always a delicate animal, and requires\nwatchfulness and care; as a beast of burden he is unsatisfactory,\nfor, although in the matter of mere strength there is hardly any\nweight that could be conveniently placed on him which he could not\ncarry, it is difficult to pack it without causing abrasions of the\nElephant's skin, which afterwards ulcerate.\n\nHis skin is easily chafed by harness, especially in wet weather.\nEither during long droughts, or too much moisture, his feet are also\nliable to sores which render him useless for months.\n\nIn India the Elephant is used more for purposes of state display\nor for hunting than for hard labor. It is especially trained for\ntiger-hunting, and, as there is a natural dread of the terrible\ntiger deeply implanted in almost all Elephants, it is no easy matter\nto teach the animal to approach his powerful foe.\n\nA stuffed tiger-skin is employed for this purpose, and is\ncontinually shown to the Elephant until he learns to lose all\ndistrust of the inanimate object, and to strike it, to crush it with\nhis feet, or to pierce it with his tusks.\n\nAfter a while a boy is put inside the tiger-skin, in order to\naccustom the Elephant to the sight of the tiger in motion.\n\n[Illustration: TIGER.]\n\nThe last stage in the proceedings is to procure a dead tiger, and to\nsubstitute it for the stuffed skin. Even with all this training, it\nmost frequently happens that when the Elephant is brought to face\na veritable living tiger the furious bounds, the savage yells, and\ngleaming eyes of the beast are so terrifying that he turns tail and\nmakes a hasty retreat. Hardly one Elephant out of ten will face an\nangry tiger. The Elephant, when used in tiger-hunting, is always\nguided by a native driver, called a mahout, who sits astride of the\nanimal's neck and guides its movements by means of the voice and the\nuse of an iron hook at the end of a short stick.\n\n[Illustration: THE TIGER IN THE REEDS.]\n\nThe hunters who ride upon the Elephant sit in a kind of box called\na howdah, which is strapped firmly upon the animal's back, or else\nmerely rests upon a large flat pad furnished with cross-ropes for\nmaintaining a firm hold. The Elephant generally kneels to enable\nthe riders to mount, and then rises from the ground with a peculiar\nswinging motion that is most discomposing to beginners in the art.\n\nThe chase of the tiger is among the most exciting and favourite\nsports in India. When starting on a hunt, a number of hunters\nusually assemble, mounted on Elephants trained for the purpose, and\ncarrying with them a supply of loaded rifles in their howdahs, or\ncarriages mounted on the Elephants' backs. Thus armed, they proceed\nto the spot where a tiger has been seen. The animal is usually\nfound hidden in the long grass or jungle, which is frequently\neight or more feet in height; and when roused, it endeavours to\ncreep away under the grass. The movement of the leaves betrays him,\nand he is checked by a rifle-ball aimed at him through the jungle.\nFinding that he cannot escape without being seen, he turns round\nand springs at the nearest Elephant, endeavouring to clamber up it\nand attack the party in the howdah. This is the most dangerous part\nof the proceedings, as many Elephants will turn round and run away,\nregardless of the efforts of their drivers to make them face the\ntiger. Should, however, the Elephant stand firm, a well-directed\nball checks the tiger in his spring; and he then endeavours to\nagain escape, but a volley of rifle-balls from the backs of the\nother Elephants, who by this time have come up, lays the savage\nanimal prostrate, and in a very short time his skin decorates the\nsuccessful marksman's howdah.\n\n[Illustration: tiger]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: jungle scene]\n\n\n\n\nTHE CONEY, OR HYRAX.\n\n     The Shaphan of Scripture, and the correct meaning of\n     the word--Identification of the Shaphan with the Syrian\n     Hyrax--Description of the animal--Its feet, teeth, and apparent\n     rumination--Passages in which the Coney is mentioned--Habits of\n     the animal--Its activity and wariness--The South African Hyrax,\n     and its mode of life--Difficulty of procuring it--Similarity in\n     appearance and habits of the Syrian species--Three species of\n     Hyrax known to naturalists.\n\n\nAmong the many animals mentioned in the Bible, there is one which is\nevidently of some importance in the Jewish code, inasmuch as it is\ntwice named in the Mosaic law.\n\nThat it was also familiar to the Jews is evident from other\nreferences which are made to its habits. This animal is the\nShaphan of the Hebrew language, a word which has very wrongly been\ntranslated in the Authorized Version as Coney, _i.e._ Rabbit, the\ncreature in question not being a rabbit, nor even a rodent. No\nrabbit has ever been discovered in Palestine, and naturalists\nhave agreed that the true Coney or Rabbit has never inhabited\nthe Holy Land. There is no doubt that the Shaphan of the Hebrew\nScripture, and the Coney of the Vulgate, was the SYRIAN HYRAX\n(_Hyrax Syriacus_). This little animal is rather larger than an\nordinary rabbit, is not unlike it in appearance, and has many of\nits habits. It is clothed with brown fur, it is very active, it\ninhabits holes and clefts in rocks, and it has in the front of\nits mouth long chisel-shaped teeth, very much like those of the\nrabbit. Consequently, it was classed by naturalists among the\nrodents for many years, under the name of Rock Rabbit. Yet, as I\nhave already mentioned, it is not even a rodent, but belongs to the\npachydermatous group of animals, and occupies an intermediate place\nbetween the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus.\n\n[Illustration: THE HYRAX.]\n\nIf it be examined carefully, the rodent-like teeth will be seen to\nresemble exactly the long curved tusks of the hippopotamus, with\ntheir sharp and chisel-edged tips; the little feet, on a close\ninspection, are seen to be furnished with a set of tiny hoofs just\nlike those of the rhinoceros; and there are many other points in\nits structure which, to the eye of a naturalist, point out its true\nplace in nature.\n\nIn common with the rodents, and other animals which have\nsimilarly-shaped teeth, the Hyrax, when at rest, is continually\nworking its jaws from side to side, a movement which it\ninstinctively performs, in order that the chiselled edges of the\nupper and lower teeth may be preserved sharp by continually rubbing\nagainst each other, and that they may not be suffered to grow too\nlong, and so to deprive the animal of the means whereby it gains\nits food. But for this peculiar movement, which looks very like the\naction of ruminating, the teeth would grow far beyond the mouth,\nas they rapidly deposit dental material in their bases in order to\nsupply the waste caused at their tips by the continual friction of\nthe edges against each other.\n\nIt may seem strange that an animal which is classed with the\nelephant, the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus, all bare-skinned\nanimals, should be clothed with a furry coat. The reader may perhaps\nremember that the Hyrax does not afford a solitary instance of this\nstructure, and that, although the elephants of our day have only a\nfew bristly hairs thinly scattered over the body, those of former\ndays were clad in a thick and treble coat of fur and hair.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThere are four passages of Scripture in which the CONEY is\nmentioned--two in which it is prohibited as food, and two in which\nallusion is made to its manner of life. In order to understand the\nsubject better, we will take them in their order.\n\nThe first mention of the Coney occurs in Leviticus xi. 5, among the\nlist of clean and unclean animals: \"The coney, because he cheweth\nthe cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you.\" The\nsecond is of a like nature, and is to be found in Deut. xiv. 7:\n\"These ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that\ndivide the cloven hoof; as the camel, and the hare, and the coney:\nfor they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are\nunclean unto you.\"\n\nThe remaining passages, which describe the habits of the Coney,\nare as follow. The first alludes to the rock-loving habits of the\nanimal: \"The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats, and the\nrocks for the conies.\" (Ps. civ. 18.) The second makes a similar\nmention of the localities which the animal frequents, and in\naddition speaks of its wariness, including it among the \"four things\nwhich are little upon the earth, but they are exceedingly wise.\" The\nfour are the ants, the locusts, the spiders, and the Conies, which\n\"are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks.\"\n\nWe will take these passages in their order.\n\nIt has already been mentioned that the Hyrax, a true pachyderm,\ndoes not merely chew the cud, but that the peculiar and constant\nmovement of its jaws strongly resembles the act of rumination. The\nJews, ignorant as they were of scientific zoology, would naturally\nset down the Hyrax as a ruminant, and would have been likely to\neat it, as its flesh is very good. It must be remembered that two\nconditions were needful to render an animal fit to be eaten by a\nJew, the one that it must be a ruminant, and the second that it\nshould have a divided hoof. Granting, therefore, the presence of the\nformer qualification, Moses points out the absence of the latter,\nthereby prohibiting the animal as effectually as if he had entered\ninto a question of comparative anatomy, and proved that the Hyrax\nwas incapable of rumination.\n\nWe now come to the habits of the animal.\n\nAs we may gather from the passages of Scripture which have already\nbeen mentioned, the Hyrax inhabits rocky places, and lives in\nthe clefts that are always found in such localities. It is an\nexceedingly active creature, leaping from rock to rock with\nwonderful rapidity, its little sharp hoofs giving it a firm hold\nof the hard and irregular surface of the stony ground. Even in\ncaptivity it retains much of its activity, and flies about its cage\nwith a rapidity that seems more suitable to a squirrel than to an\nanimal allied to the rhinoceros and hippopotamus.\n\nThere are several species--perhaps only varieties--of the Hyrax,\nall of them identical in habits, and almost precisely similar in\nappearance. The best known of these animals is that which inhabits\nSouthern Africa (_Hyrax Capensis_), and which is familiar to the\ncolonists by its name of Klip-das, or Rock-rabbit. In situations\nwhich suit it, the Hyrax is very plentiful, and is much hunted\nby the natives, who esteem its flesh very highly. Small and\ninsignificant as it appears to be, even Europeans think that to kill\nthe Hyrax is a tolerable test of sportsmanship, the wariness of\nthe animal being so great that much hunter's craft is required to\napproach it.\n\nThe following account of the Hyrax has been furnished to me by Major\nA. W. Drayson, R.A.:--\"In the Cape Colony, and over a great portion\nof Southern Africa, this little creature is found. It is never, as\nfar as my experience goes, seen in great numbers, as we find rabbits\nin England, though the caution of the animal is such as to enable\nit to remain safe in districts from which other animals are soon\nexterminated.\n\n\"As its name implies, it is found among rocks, in the crevices and\nholes of which it finds a retreat. When a natural cavity is not\nfound, the klip-das scratches a hole in the ground under the rocks,\nand burrows like a common rabbit. In size it is about equal to a\nhare, though it is much shorter in the legs, and has ears more like\nthose of a rat than a rabbit. Its skin is covered with fur, thick\nand woolly, as though intended for a colder climate than that in\nwhich it is usually found; and, when seen from a distance, it looks\nnearly black.\n\n\"The rock-rabbit is a very watchful creature, and usually feeds on\nthe summit of any piece of rock near its home, always choosing one\nfrom which it can obtain a good view of the surrounding country.\nWhen it sees an enemy approaching, it sits rigidly on the rock and\nwatches him without moving, so that at a little distance it is\nalmost impossible to distinguish it from the rock on which it sits.\nWhen it does move, it darts quickly out of sight, and disappears\ninto its burrow with a sudden leap.\n\n\"In consequence of its activity and cunning, the rock-rabbit is\nseldom killed by white men; and when a hunter does secure one, it is\ngenerally by means of a long shot. The natives usually watch near\nits burrow, or noiselessly stalk it.\n\n\"I once killed one of these animals by a very long shot from a\nrifle, as it was sitting watching us from the top of a large\nboulder, at a distance of a hundred and fifty yards or thereabouts.\nThe Dutch Boers who were with me were delighted at the sight of\nit, as they said it was good eating; and so it proved to be, the\nflesh being somewhat like that of a hare, though in our rough\nfield-cookery we could not do justice to it.\"\n\nThis short narrative excellently illustrates the character of the\nanimal, which is classed among the \"four things which be exceeding\nwise.\" It is so crafty that no trap or snare ever set has induced\na Hyrax to enter it, and so wary that it is with difficulty to be\nkilled even with the aid of fire-arms. \"No animal,\" writes Mr.\nTristram, \"ever gave us so much trouble to secure.... The only\nchance of securing one is to be concealed, particularly about sunset\nor before sunrise, on some overhanging cliff, taking care not to\nlet the shadow be cast below, and then to wait until the little\ncreatures cautiously peep forth from their holes. They are said to\nbe common by those who have not looked for them, but are certainly\nnot abundant in Palestine, and few writers have ever had more than a\nsingle glimpse of one. I had the good fortune to see one feeding in\nthe gorge of the Kedron, and then to watch it as it sat at the mouth\nof its hole, ruminating, metaphorically if not literally, while\nwaiting for sunset.\"\n\nShould the Hyrax manage to catch a glimpse of the enemy, it utters a\nshrill cry or squeal, and darts at once to its hole--an action which\nis followed by all its companions as soon as they hear the warning\ncry. It is a tolerably prolific animal, rearing four or five young\nat a birth, and keeping them in a soft bed of hay and fur, in which\nthey are almost hidden. If surprised in its hole and seized, the\nHyrax will bite very sharply, its long chisel-edged teeth inflicting\nsevere wounds on the hand that attempts to grasp it. But it is of a\ntolerably docile disposition, and in a short time learns to know its\nowner, and to delight in receiving his caresses.\n\nThree species of Hyrax are known to naturalists. One is the\nKlip-das, or Rock-rabbit, of Southern Africa; the second is the\nAshkoko of Abyssinia; and the third is the Syrian Hyrax, or the\nConey of the Bible. The two last species have often been confounded\ntogether, but the Syrian animal may be known by the oblong pale spot\non the middle of its back.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: HIPPOPOTAMUS.]\n\n\n\n\nBEHEMOTH.\n\n     Literal translation of the word Behemoth--Various theories\n     respecting the identity of the animal--The Hippopotamus known\n     to the ancient Hebrews--Geographical range of the animal--\"He\n     eateth grass like the ox\"--Ravages of the Hippopotamus among\n     the crops--Structure of the mouth and teeth--The \"sword or\n     scythe\" of the Hippopotamus--Some strange theories--Haunts\n     of the Hippopotamus--The Egyptian hunter--A valuable\n     painting--Strength of the Hippopotamus--Rising of the\n     Nile--Modern hunters--Wariness of the Hippopotamus--The pitfall\n     and the drop-trap.\n\n\nIn the concluding part of that wonderful poem which is so familiar\nto us as the Book of Job, the Lord is represented as reproving the\nmurmurs of Job, by showing that he could not even understand the\nmysteries of the universe, much less the purposes of the Creator.\nBy presuming to bring a charge of injustice against his Maker, he\nin fact inferred that the accuser was more competent to govern\nthe world than was the Creator, and thus laid himself open to the\nunanswerable irony of the splendid passages contained in chapters\nxl. xli., which show that man cannot even rule the animals, his\nfellow-creatures, much less control the destinies of the human race.\n\nThe passages with which we are at present concerned are to be found\nat the end of the fortieth chapter, and contain a most powerful\ndescription of some animal which is called by the name of Behemoth.\nNow this word only occurs once in the whole of the Scriptures,\n_i.e._ in Job xl. 15: \"Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee,\"\n&c. Some commentators, in consequence of the plural termination\nof the word, which may be literally translated as \"beasts,\" have\nthought that it was a collective term for all the largest beasts of\nthe world, such as the elephant, the hippopotamus, the wild cattle,\nand their like. Others have thought that the elephant was signified\nby the word Behemoth; and some later writers, acquainted with\npalaeontology, have put forward a conjecture that the Behemoth must\nhave been some extinct pachydermatous animal, like the dinotherium,\nin which might be combined many of the qualities of the elephant and\nhippopotamus.\n\nIt is now, however, agreed by all Biblical scholars and naturalists,\nthat the hippopotamus, and no other animal, is the creature which\nwas signified by the word Behemoth, and this interpretation is\nfollowed in the Jewish Bible.\n\nWe will now take the whole of the passage, and afterwards examine it\nby degrees, comparing the Authorized Version with the Jewish Bible,\nand noting at the same time one or two variations in the rendering\nof certain phrases. The passage is given as follows in the Jewish\nBible, and may be compared with our Authorized Version:--\n\n  \"Behold now the river-horse, which I have made with thee: he eateth\n        grass like an ox.\n\n  \"Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his vigour is in the\n        muscles of his body.\n\n  \"He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his thighs are\n        wrapped together.\n\n  \"His bones are pipes of copper; his bones are like bars of iron.\n\n  \"He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can alone\n        reach his sword.\n\n  \"That the mountains should bring forth food for him, and all the\n        beasts of the field play there.\n\n  \"He lieth under wild lotuses, in the covert of the reed, and fens.\n\n  \"Wild lotuses cover him with their shadow; willows of the brook\n        compass him about.\n\n  \"Behold, should a river overflow, he hasteth not: he feels secure\n        should Jordan burst forth up to his mouth.\n\n  \"He taketh it in with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.\"\n\nWe will now take this description in detail, and see how far it\napplies to the now familiar habits of the hippopotamus. A little\nallowance must of course be made for poetical imagery, but we shall\nfind that in all important details the account of the Behemoth\nagrees perfectly with the appearance and habits of the hippopotamus.\n\nIn the first place, it is evident that we may dismiss from our minds\nthe idea that the Behemoth was an extinct pachyderm. The whole tenor\nof the passage shows that it must have been an animal then existing,\nand whose habits were familiar to Job and his friends. Now the date\nof the Book of Job could not have been earlier than about 1500\nB.C., and in consequence, the ideas of a palaeozoic animal must be\ndiscarded.\n\nWe may also dismiss the elephant, inasmuch as it was most unlikely\nthat Job should have known anything about the animal, and it is\ncertain that he could not have attained the familiarity with its\nappearance and habits which is inferred by the context. Moreover,\nit cannot be said of the elephant that \"he eateth grass as an ox.\"\nThe elephant feeds chiefly on the leaves of trees, and when he\ndoes eat grass, he cannot do so \"like an ox,\" but plucks it with\nhis proboscis, and then puts the green tufts into his mouth. So\ncharacteristic a gesture as this would never have passed unnoticed\nin a description so full of detail.\n\nThat the hippopotamus was known to the ancient Hebrews is\ncertain. After their sojourn in Egypt they had necessarily become\nfamiliarized with it; and if, as most commentators believe, the\ndate of the Book of Job be subsequent to the liberation of the\nIsraelites, there is no difficulty in assuming that Job and his\ncompanions were well acquainted with the animal. Even if the book\nbe of an earlier date, it is still possible that the hippopotamus\nmay, in those days, have lived in rivers where it is now as much\nextinct as it is in England. Mr. Tristram remarks on this point: \"No\nhippopotamus is found in Asia, but there is no reason for asserting\nthat it may not have had an eastern range as far as Palestine, and\nwallowed in the Jordan; for its bones are found in the _debris_\nof the rivers of Algeria, flowing into the Mediterranean, when\ntradition is quite silent as to its former existence.\"\n\n[Illustration: THE HIPPOPOTAMUS.]\n\nThere is no doubt that the hippopotamus and the urus were the two\nlargest animals known to the Jews, and it is probably on that\naccount that the former received the name of Behemoth.\n\nAssuming, therefore, that the Behemoth is identical with the\nhippopotamus, we will proceed with the description.\n\n\"He eateth grass like the ox.\" The word which is here rendered\n\"grass\" is translated in Numb. xi. 5 as \"leeks.\" It means, something\nthat is green, and is probably used to signify green herbage of\nany description. Now it is perfectly true of the hippopotamus\nthat it eats grass like an ox, or like cattle, as the passage\nmay be translated. In order to supply its huge massive body with\nnourishment, it consumes vast quantities of food. The mouth is\nenormously broad and shovel-shaped, so as to take in a large\nquantity of food at once; and the gape is so wide, that when the\nanimal opens its jaws to their full extent it seems to split its\nhead into two nearly equal portions. This great mobility of jaw is\nassisted by the peculiar form of the gape, which takes a sudden turn\nupwards, and reaches almost to the eyes.\n\n[Illustration: THE GREAT JAWS OF THE HIPPOPOTAMUS.]\n\nJust as the mouth is formed to contain a vast quantity of food,\nso the jaws and teeth are made to procure it. From the front of\nthe lower jaw the incisor teeth project horizontally, no longer\nperforming the ordinary duties of teeth, but being modified into\ntusks, which are in all probability used as levers for prising up\nthe vegetables on which the animal lives. But the most singular\nportion of the jaw is the mode in which the canine teeth are\nmodified so as to resemble the incisor teeth of rodents, and to\nperform a similar office.\n\n[Illustration: THE HIPPOPOTAMUS.]\n\nThese teeth are very long, curved, and chisel-edged at their tips,\ntheir shape being preserved by continual attrition, just as has been\nmentioned of the hyrax. The material of the teeth is peculiarly\nhard, so much so, indeed, that it is in great request for artificial\nteeth, the \"verniers\" of philosophical instruments, and similar\npurposes. Consequently, with these teeth the hippopotamus can cut\nthrough the stems of thick and strong herbage as with shears, and\nthe strength of its jaws is so great that an angered hippopotamus\nhas been known to bite a man completely in two, and to crush a canoe\nto fragments with a single movement of its enormous jaws.\n\nKeeping this description in our minds, we shall see how true is the\nstatement in verse 19. This passage is not adequately rendered in\nthe Authorized Version: the word which is translated as \"sword\" also\nsignifies a scythe, and evidently having that meaning in the text.\nThe passage is best translated thus: \"His Maker hath furnished him\nwith his scythe.\"\n\nThe havoc which such an animal can make among growing crops may be\neasily imagined. It is fond of leaving the river, and forcing its\nway into cultivated grounds, where it eats vast quantities of green\nfood, and destroys as much as it eats, by the trampling of its heavy\nfeet. Owing to the width of the animal, the feet are placed very far\napart, and the consequence is that the hippopotamus makes a double\npath, the feet of each side trampling down the herbage, and causing\nthe track to look like a double rut, with an elevated ridge between\nthem.\n\nSome little difficulty has been made respecting the passage in\nverse 20, \"Surely the mountains bring him forth food.\" Commentators\nignorant of the habits of the hippopotamus, and not acquainted with\nthe character of the country where it lives, have thought that the\nanimal only lived in the rivers, and merely found its food along\nits banks, or at most upon the marshes at the river-side. The\nhippopotamus, say they, is not a dweller on the mountains, but an\ninhabitant of the river, and therefore this passage cannot rightly\nbe applied to the animal.\n\nNow, in the first place, the word _harim_, which is translated\nas \"mountains\" in the Authorized Version, is rendered as \"hills\"\nby many Hebraists. Moreover, as we know from many passages of\nScripture, the word \"mountain\" is applied to any elevated spot,\nwithout reference to its height. Such places are very common\nalong the banks of the Nile, and are employed for the culture\nof vegetables, which would not grow properly upon the flat and\nmarshy lands around them. These spots are very attractive to the\nhippopotamus, who likes a change of diet, and thus finds food\nupon the mountains. In many parts of Egypt the river runs through\na mountainous country, so that the hills are within a very short\ndistance of the water, and are easily reached by the hippopotamus.\n\n[Illustration: THE HIPPOPOTAMUS EATING GRASS.]\n\nWe will now proceed to the next verse. After mentioning that the\nBehemoth can eat grass like an ox, and finds its food upon the\nhills, the sacred writer proceeds to show that in its moments of\nrepose it is an inhabitant of the rivers and marshy ground: \"He\nlieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.\n\n\"The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the\nbrook compass him about.\"\n\nHere I may remind the reader that the compound Hebrew word which is\nrendered in the Authorized Version as \"shady trees\" is translated\nby some persons as \"wild lotuses\"--a rendering which is followed by\nthe editor of the Jewish Bible. Apparently, however, the Authorized\nVersion gives a more correct meaning of the term. Judging from a\nwell-known Egyptian painting, which represents a hunter in the\nact of harpooning the hippopotamus, the tall papyrus reeds are the\nplants that are signified by this word, which occurs in no other\nplace in the Scriptures.\n\nNothing can be more accurate than this description of the habits\nof the animal. I have now before me a number of sketches by Mr.\nT. Baines, representing various incidents in the life of the\nhippopotamus; and in one or two of them, the little islands that\nstud the river, as well as the banks themselves, are thickly clothed\nwith reeds mixed with papyrus, the whole being exactly similar to\nthose which are represented in the conventional style of Egyptian\nart. These spots are the favourite haunts of the hippopotamus, which\nloves to lie under their shadow, its whole body remaining concealed\nin the water, and only the eyes, ears, and nostrils appearing above\nthe surface.\n\nAs reference will be made to this painting when we come to the\nLeviathan, it will be as well to describe it in detail. In\norder that the reader should fully understand it, I have had it\ntranslated, so to speak, from the conventional outline of Egyptian\nart into perspective, exactly as has been done with the Assyrian and\nEgyptian chariots.\n\nIn the foreground is seen the hunter, standing on a boat that\nclosely resembles the raft-boat which is still in use in several\nparts of Africa. It is made of the very light wood called ambatch,\nby cutting down the requisite number of trees, laying them side by\nside so that their bases form the stern and their points the bow of\nthe extemporized boat. They are then firmly lashed together, the\npointed ends turned upwards, and the simple vessel is complete. It\nis, in fact, nothing more than a raft of triangular shape, but the\nwood is so buoyant that it answers every purpose.\n\nIn his hand the hunter grasps the harpoon which he is about to\nlaunch at the hippopotamus. This is evidently the same weapon which\nis still employed for that purpose. It consists of a long shaft,\ninto the end of which a barbed iron point is loosely inserted. To\nthe iron point is attached one end of a rope, and to the other end,\nwhich is held in the left hand of the harpooner, a float of ambatch\nwood is fastened.\n\nWhen the weapon is thrown, the furious struggles of the wounded\nanimal disengage the shaft of the harpoon, which is regained by the\nhunter; and as it dashes through the water, throwing up spray as it\ngoes, the ambatch float keeps the end of the rope at the surface, so\nthat it can be seen as soon as the animal becomes quieter. Sometimes\nit dives to the bottom, and remains there as long as its breath\ncan hold out; and when it comes up to breathe, it only pushes the\nnostrils out of the water under the shadow of the reeds, so that but\nfor the float it might manage to escape.\n\n[Illustration: A HIPPOPOTAMUS HUNT IN EGYPT.\n\n(This picture is taken from an ancient Egyptian painting.)]\n\nIn the meantime, guided by the float, the hunter follows the course\nof the animal, and, as soon as it comes within reach of his weapon,\ndrives another spear into it, and so proceeds until the animal dies\nfrom loss of blood. The modern hunters never throw a second harpoon\nunless the one already fixed gives way, mainly employing a spear to\ninflict the last wounds. But if we may judge from this painting, the\nEgyptian hunter attached a new rope with every cast of his weapon,\nand, when the hippopotamus became weak from its wounds, gathered up\nthe ropes and came to close quarters.\n\nIn the bow of the boat is the hunter's assistant, armed with a rope\nmade lasso-wise into a noose, which he is throwing over the head\nof the hippopotamus, whose attitude and expression show evidently,\nin spite of the rudeness of the drawing, the impotent anger of the\nweakened animal.\n\nBehind the hippopotamus are the tall and dense reeds and papyrus\nunder the shelter of which the animal loves to lie, and on the\nsurface of the water float the beautiful white flowers of the lotus.\n\nIn the Egyptian painting, the artist, in spite of the\nconventionalities to which he was bound, has depicted the whole\nscene with skill and spirit. The head and open mouth of the\nhippopotamus are remarkably fine, and show that the artist who drew\nthe animal must have seen it when half mad with pain, and half dead\nfrom loss of blood.\n\nThe enormous strength of the hippopotamus is shown in verses 16,\n18, the last of which passages requires a little explanation. Two\ndifferent words are used here to express the bones of the animal.\nThe first is derived from a word signifying strength, and means the\n\"strong bones,\" _i.e._ those of the legs. These are hollow, and are\ntherefore aptly compared to tubes or pipes of copper. The second\nterm is thought by some Hebraists to refer to the rib-bones, which\nare solid, and therefore are not likened to tubes, but to bars of\niron.\n\nThe 23d verse has been translated rather variously. The Authorized\nVersion can be seen by reference to a Bible, and another\ntranslation, that of the Jewish Bible, is given on page 374. A\nthird, and perhaps the best rendering of this passage is given by\nthe Rev. W. Drake, in Smith's \"Dictionary of the Bible:\" \"Lo, the\nriver swelleth proudly against him, yet he is not alarmed; he is\nsecurely confident though a Jordan burst forth against his mouth.\"\n\nIn all probability reference is here made to the annual rising of\nthe Nile, and the inundations which it causes. In some years,\nwhen it rises much above its usual height, the floods become most\ndisastrous. Whole villages are swept away, and scarcely a vestige of\nthe mud-built houses is left; the dead bodies of human beings are\nseen intermixed with those of cattle, and the whole country is one\nscene of desolation. Yet the almost amphibious hippopotamus cares\nnothing for the floods, as long as it can find food, and so, \"though\nthe river swelleth proudly against him,\" he is not alarmed.\n\nFrom the use of the word \"Jordan\" in the same verse, it might be\nthought that the river of Palestine was intended. This, however, is\nnot the case. The word \"Jordan\" is simply used as a poetical term\nfor any river, and is derived from a Hebrew word which signifies\n\"descending quickly.\"\n\nWe now come to the last verse of this noble description: \"He taketh\nit in with his eyes.\" These words have also been variously rendered,\nsome translating them as \"He receiveth it (_i.e._ the river) up to\nhis eyes.\" But the translation which seems to suit the context best\nis, \"Who will take him when in his sight? His nose pierceth through\n(_i.e._ detects) snares.\" Now, this faculty of detecting snares is\none of the chief characteristics of the hippopotamus, when it lives\nnear places inhabited by mankind, who are always doing their best\nto destroy it. In the first place, its body gives them an almost\nunlimited supply of flesh, the fat is very highly valued for many\npurposes, the teeth are sold to the ivory-dealers, and the hide is\ncut up into whips, or khoorbashes.\n\nThere is now before me a khoorbash, purchased from a native Egyptian\nwho was beating a servant with it. The whip is identical with that\nwhich was used by the ancient Egyptians in urging the Israelites to\ntheir tasks, and the scene reminded the traveller so forcibly of the\nold Scriptural times that he rescued the unfortunate servant, and\npurchased the khoorbash, which is now in my collection.\n\nNot content with hunting the hippopotamus, the natives contrive\nvarious traps, either pitfalls or drop-traps. The former are simply\npits dug in the path of the animal, covered with sticks and reeds,\nand having at the bottom a sharp stake on which the victim is\nimpaled, and so effectually prevented from escaping or damaging the\npit by its struggles.\n\nThe drop-trap is a log of wood, weighted with stones, and having at\none end an iron spike, which is sometimes poisoned. The path which\nthe animal takes is watched, a conveniently overhanging branch is\nselected, and from that branch the cruel spear is suspended, by a\ncatch or trigger, exactly over the centre of the path. There is no\ndifficulty in finding the precise centre of the path, owing to the\npeculiar gait of the animal, which has already been described. One\nend of the trigger supports the spear, and to the other is attached\na rope, which is brought across the path in such a way that when\ntouched it relieves the spear, which is driven deeply into the\nanimal's back. If well hung, the spear-blade divides the spine, and\nthe wounded animal falls on the spot, but, even if it should miss a\nvital part, the poison soon does its fatal work.\n\n[Illustration: HIPPOPOTAMUS AND TRAP.]\n\nIn consequence of the continual persecution to which it is\nsubjected, the hippopotamus becomes exceedingly wary, and, huge,\nclumsy, and blundering as it looks, is clever enough to detect\neither pitfall or drop-trap that have not been contrived with\nespecial care. An old and experienced hippopotamus becomes so wary\nthat he will be suspicious even of a bent twig, and, rather than\nventure across it, he will leave the path, force for himself a\nroundabout passage, and return to the path beyond the object that\nalarmed him.\n\nMr. T. Baines, to whose sketches I am indebted for the illustration,\ntold me that the hippopotamus is possessed of much more intellect\nthan might be expected from a creature of so dull, clumsy, and\nunpromising aspect. Apathetic it generally is, and, as long as it is\nleft unmolested, does not care to molest even the human beings that\nintrude upon its repose.\n\nIt likes to lie in the shade of the reeds and rushes, and may be\nseen floating in the water, with only the nostrils, the eyes, and\nthe ears above the surface, these organs being set in a line along\nthe head, evidently for the purpose of allowing the whole body to be\nhidden under water while the three most important senses are capable\nof acting.\n\nA canoe-man who knows the habits of the hippopotamus will fearlessly\ntake his fragile vessel through a herd of the animals, knowing\nthat, if he only avoids contact with them, they will not interfere\nwith him. The only danger is, that a hippopotamus may rise under\nthe canoe, and strike itself against the boat, in which case the\nanimal is rather apt to consider the intruding object as an enemy,\nand to attack it, sometimes crushing the canoe between its teeth,\nand mostly upsetting it, and throwing the crew into the water. In\nsuch a case, the men always dive at once to the bottom of the river,\nand hold on to some weed or rock as long as they can exist without\nbreathing. The reason for this proceeding is, that the hippopotamus\nalways looks for its enemy upon the surface of the water, and, if\nthe men were to swim to shore, they would be caught and killed\nbefore they had swum many strokes. But, as it sees nothing but the\ndamaged canoe, its short-lived anger vanishes, and it sinks again\ninto the river, leaving the men at liberty to regain and repair\ntheir vessel.\n\nThere is one passage in the description of the Behemoth which\nrequires a few words of explanation: \"He moveth his tail like a\ncedar\" (v. 17).\n\nSeveral commentators have imagined that this expression shows that\nthe Behemoth must have been an animal which had a very long and\npowerful tail, and have adduced the passage as a proof that the\ncrocodile was the animal that was signified by the Behemoth. Others,\nagain, have shifted the position of the tail, and, by rendering it\nas the \"proboscis,\" have identified the Behemoth with the elephant.\nThere is, however, no necessity for straining the interpretation,\nthe passage evidently signifying that the member in question is\nstiff and inflexible as the cedar-stem.\n\n[Illustration: lily pad scene]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: BABOON.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE APE.\n\n     The Monkey tribe rarely mentioned in Scripture--Why the Ape\n     was introduced into Palestine--Solomon's ships, and their\n     cargo of Apes, peacocks, ivory, and gold--Various species of\n     Monkey that might have been imported--Habits of the Monkey, and\n     reverence in which it is held by the natives--The Egyptians and\n     their Baboon worship--Idols and memorials--The Wanderoo--its\n     singular aspect--Reasons why it should be introduced into\n     Palestine--General habits of the Wanderoo--Various species of\n     Monkey that may be included in the term \"Kophim.\"\n\n\nAnimals belonging to the monkey tribe are but sparingly mentioned in\nHoly Writ. If, as is possible, the Satyr of Scripture signifies some\nspecies of baboon, there are but three passages either in the Old or\nNew Testament where these animals are mentioned. In 1 Kings x. 22,\nand the parallel passage 2 Chron. ix. 21, the sacred historian makes\na passing allusion to apes as forming part of the valuable cargoes\nwhich were brought by Solomon's fleet to Tharshish, the remaining\narticles being gold, ivory, and peacocks. The remaining passage\noccurs in Is. xiii. 21, where the prophet foretells that on the site\nof Babylon satyrs shall dance.\n\nThe reason for this reticence is simple enough. No monkey was\nindigenous to Palestine when the various writers of the Bible lived,\nand all their knowledge of such animals must have been derived\neither from the description of sailors, or from the sight of the few\nspecimens that were brought as curiosities from foreign lands. Such\nspecimens must have been extremely rare or they would not have been\nmentioned as adjuncts to the wealth of Solomon, the wealthiest, as\nwell as the wisest monarch of his time. To the mass of the people\nthey must have been practically unknown, and therefore hold but a\nvery inferior place in the Scriptures, which were addressed to all\nmankind.\n\nThere is scarcely any familiar animal, bird, reptile or insect,\nwhich is not used in some metaphorical sense in the imagery which\npervades the whole of the Scriptures. For example, the various\ncarnivorous animals, such as the lion, wolf, and bear, are used\nas emblems of destruction in various ways; while the carnivorous\nbirds, such as the eagle and hawk, and the destructive insects, such\nas the locust and the caterpillar, are all similarly employed in\nstrengthening and illustrating the words of Holy Writ.\n\nBut we never find any animal of the monkey tribe mentioned\nmetaphorically, possibly because any monkeys that were imported into\nPalestine must only have been intended as objects of curiosity,\njust as the peacocks which accompanied them were objects of beauty,\nand the gold and ivory objects of value--all being employed in the\ndecoration of the king's palace.\n\nThe question that now comes before us is the species of monkey\nthat is signified by the Hebrew word Kophim. In modern days, we\ndistinguish this tribe of animals into three great sections, namely,\nthe apes, the baboons, and the monkey; and according to this\narrangement the ape, being without tails, must have been either the\nchimpanzee of Africa, the orang-outan of Sumatra, or one of the\nGibbons. But there is no reason to imagine that the word Kophim was\nintended to represent any one of these animals, and it seems evident\nthat the word was applied to any species of monkey, whether it had a\ntail or not.\n\nPerhaps the best method of ascertaining approximately the\nparticular species of monkey, is to notice the land from which the\nanimals came. Accordingly, we find that the ships of Solomon brought\ngold, ivory, apes, and peacocks, and that they evidently brought\ntheir cargoes from the same country. Consequently, the country in\nquestion must produce gold, and must be inhabited by the monkey\ntribe, by the elephant, and by the peacock. If the peacock had not\nbeen thus casually mentioned, we should have been at a loss to\nidentify the particular country to which reference is made; but the\nmention of that bird shows that some part of Asia must be signified.\nIt is most probable that the vessels in question visited both India\nand Ceylon, although, owing to the very imperfect geographical\nknowledge of the period, it is not possible to assert absolutely\nthat this is the case. In India, however, and the large island of\nCeylon, gold, elephants, peacocks, and monkeys exist; and therefore\nwe will endeavour to identify the animals which are mentioned under\nthe general term Apes, or Kophim.\n\n[Illustration: THE RHESUS MONKEY.]\n\nWe are quite safe in suggesting that some of the apes in question\nmust have belonged to the Macaques, and it is most likely that one\nof them was the RHESUS MONKEY.\n\n[Illustration: FEEDING THE MONKEYS IN INDIA.]\n\nThis animal is very plentiful in India, and is one of the many\ncreatures which are held sacred by the natives. Consequently, it\ntakes up its quarters near human habitations, feeling sure that it\nwill not be injured, and knowing that plenty of food is at hand.\nIt is said that in some parts of India the natives always leave\none-tenth of their grain-crops for the monkeys, and thus the animals\ncontent themselves with this offering, and refrain from devastating\nthe fields, as they would otherwise do. This story may be true or\nnot. It is certainly possible that in a long series of years the\nmonkeys of that neighbourhood have come to look upon their tithe as\na matter belonging to the ordinary course of things; but whether\nit be true or not, it illustrates the reverence entertained by the\nHindoos for their monkeys.\n\nIn many places where grain and fruit crops are cultivated, the\nmonkeys get rather more than their share, plundering without\nscruple, and finding no hindrance from the rightful owners, who dare\nnot drive them away, lest they should injure any of these sacred\nbeings. However, being of the opinion that no evil will follow a\nforeigner's action, they are only too glad to avail themselves of\nthe assistance of Europeans, who have no scruples on the subject.\nStill, although they are pleased to see the monkeys driven off, and\ntheir crops saved, they would rather lose all their harvest than\nallow a single monkey to be killed, and in the earlier years of the\nIndian colony, several riots took place between the natives and the\nEnglish, because the latter had killed a monkey through ignorance of\nthe reverence in which it was held.\n\n[Illustration: TROUBLESOME NEIGHBORS.]\n\nAnother monkey which may probably have been brought to Palestine\nfrom India is the HOONUMAN, ENTELLUS, or MAKUR, which is more\nreverenced by the Hindoos than any other species. Its scientific\ntitle is _Presbytes entellus_. In some parts of India it is\nworshipped as a form of divinity, and in all it is reverenced and\nprotected to such an extent that it becomes a positive nuisance to\nEuropeans who are not influenced by the same superstitious ideas as\nthose which are so prevalent in India. Being a very common species,\nit could easily be captured, especially if, as is likely to be the\ncase, it was fearless of man through long immunity from harm. The\nsailors who manned Solomon's navy would not trouble themselves about\nthe sacred character of the monkeys, but would take them without the\nleast scruple wherever they could be found.\n\n[Illustration: MONKEYS ENTERING A PLANTATION.]\n\nThe Hoonuman would also be valued by them on account of its docility\nwhen taken young, and the amusing tricks which it is fond of\ndisplaying in captivity as well as in a state of freedom. Moreover,\nit is rather a pretty creature, the general colour being yellowish,\nand the face black.\n\n[Illustration: SLOTHFUL MONKEYS.]\n\nPerfectly aware of the impunity with which they are permitted to\nact, these monkeys prefer human habitations to the forests which\nform the natural home of their race, and crowd into the villages and\ntemples, the latter being always swarming with the long-tailed host.\nAs is the case with the Rhesus, the Hoonuman monkeys are much too\nfond of helping themselves from the shops and stalls, and if they\ncan find a convenient roof, will sit there and watch for the arrival\nof the most dainty fruits.\n\nHowever, the natives, superstitious as they are, and unwilling to\ninflict personal injury on a monkey, have no scruple in making\narrangements by which a monkey that trespasses on forbidden spots\nwill inflict injury on itself. They may not shoot or wound in any\nway the monkeys which cluster on their roofs, and the animals\nare so perfectly aware of the fact, that they refuse to be driven\naway by shouts and menacing gestures. But, they contrive to make\nthe roofs so uncomfortable by covering them with thorns, that the\nmonkeys are obliged to quit their points of vantage, and to choose\nsome spot where they can sit down without fear of hurting themselves.\n\n[Illustration: A PRIVILEGED RACE.]\n\nThat the Hindoos should pay homage almost divine to a monkey,\ndoes seem equally absurd and contemptible. But, strange as\nthis superstition may be, and the more strange because the\nintellectual powers of the educated Hindoos are peculiarly subtle\nand penetrating, it was shared by a greater, a mightier, and a\nstill more intellectual race, now extinct as a nation. The ancient\nEgyptians worshipped the baboon, and ranked it among the most\npotent of their deities; and it can but strike us with wonder\nwhen we reflect that a people who could erect buildings perfectly\nunique in the history of the world, who held the foremost place in\ncivilization, who perfected arts which we, at a distance of three\nthousand years, have only just learned, should pay divine honours to\nmonkeys, bulls, and snakes. Such, however, was the case; and we find\nthat the modern Hindoo shows as great reverence for the identical\nanimals as did the Egyptian when Pharaoh was king, and Joseph his\nprime minister.\n\nIt is said by some, that neither the Egyptian of the ancient times,\nnor the Hindoo of the present day, actually worshipped these\ncreatures, but that they reverenced them as external signs of some\nattribute of God. Precisely the same remarks have been made as\nto the worship of idols, and it is likely enough that the highly\neducated among the worshippers did look upon a serpent merely as\nan emblem of divine wisdom, a bull as an image of divine strength,\nand a monkey as an external memorial of the promised incarnation of\ndivinity. So with idols, which to the man of educated and enlarged\nmind were nothing but visible symbols employed for the purpose of\ndirecting the mind in worship. But, though this was the case with\nthe educated and intellectual, the ignorant and uncultivated, who\ncompose the great mass of a nation, did undoubtedly believe that\nboth the living animal and the lifeless idol were themselves divine,\nand did worship them accordingly.\n\nThere is one species of monkey, which is extremely likely to have\nbeen brought to Palestine, and used for the adornment of a luxurious\nmonarch's palace. This is the WANDEROO, or NIL-BHUNDER (_Silenus\nveter_). The Wanderoo, or Ouanderoo, as the name is sometimes\nspelled, is a very conspicuous animal, on account of the curious\nmane that covers its neck and head, and the peculiarly formed tail,\nwhich is rather long and tufted, like that of a baboon, and has\ncaused it to be ranked among those animals by several writers, under\nthe name of the Lion-tailed Baboon. That part of the hairy mass\nwhich rolls over the head is nearly black, but as it descends over\nthe shoulders, it assumes a greyer tinge, and in some specimens is\nnearly white. As is the case with many animals, the mane is not\nnoticeable in the young specimens, but increases in size with age,\nonly reaching its full dimensions when the animal has attained adult\nage. Only in the oldest specimens is the full, white, venerable,\nwig-like mane to be seen in perfection.\n\nIn captivity, the general demeanour of this monkey corresponds with\nits grave and dignified aspect. It seems to be more sedate than the\nordinary monkeys, to judge from the specimens which have lived in\nthe Zoological Gardens, and sits peering with its shiny brown eyes\nout of the enormous mane, with as much gravity as if it were really\na judge deciding an important case in law. Not that it will not\ncondescend to the little tricks and playful sallies for which the\nmonkeys are so celebrated; but it soon loses the vivacity of youth,\nand when full-grown, presents as great a contrast to its former\nvivacity, as does a staid full-grown cat sitting by the fire, to the\nrestless, lively, playful kitten of three months old. During its\ngrowth, it can be taught to go through several amusing performances,\nbut it has little of the quick, mercurial manner, which is generally\nfound among the monkey tribe.\n\n[Illustration: THE WANDEROO.]\n\nThe docility of the Wanderoo often vanishes together with its youth.\nThe same animal may be gentle, tractable, and teachable when young,\nand yet, when a few years have passed over its head and whitened its\nmane, may be totally obstinate and dull.\n\n[Illustration: THE ENEMY DISCOVERED.]\n\nThe natives of the country in which the Wanderoo lives, attribute\nto it the wisdom which its venerable aspect seems to imply, much as\nthe ancient Athenians venerated the owl as the bird of wisdom, and\nthe chosen companion of the learned Minerva. In many places, the\nWanderoo is thought to be a sort of king among monkeys, and to enjoy\nthe same supremacy over its maneless kinsfolk, that the king-vulture\nmaintains over the other vultures which are destitute of the\nbrilliant crest that marks its rank.\n\nI am induced to believe that the Wanderoo must have been one of the\nmonkeys which were brought to Solomon, for two reasons.\n\nIn the first place, it is a native both of India and Ceylon, and\ntherefore might have formed an article of merchandise, together with\nthe peacock, gold, and ivory. And if, as is extremely probable, the\nTharshish of the Scripture is identical with Ceylon, it is almost\ncertain that the Wanderoo would have been brought to Solomon, in\norder to increase the glories of his palace. Sir Emerson Tennant\npoints out very forcibly, that in the Tamil language, the words for\napes, ivory, and peacocks, are identical with the Hebrew names for\nthe same objects, and thus gives a very strong reason for supposing\nthat Ceylon was the country from which Solomon's fleet drew its\nsupplies.\n\nAnother reason for conjecturing that the Wanderoo would have been\none of the animals sent to grace the palace of Solomon is this. In\nthe days when that mighty sovereign lived, as indeed has been the\ncase in all partially civilized countries, the kings and rulers have\nfelt a pride in collecting together the rarest objects which they\ncould purchase, giving the preference to those which were in any way\nconspicuous, whether for intrinsic value, for size, for beauty, or\nfor ugliness. Thus, giants, dwarfs, and deformed persons of either\nsex, and even idiots, were seen as regular attendants at royal\ncourts, a custom which extended even into the modern history of\nEngland, the \"Fool\" being an indispensable appendage to the train of\nevery person of rank. Animals from foreign lands were also prized,\nand value was set upon them, not only for their variety, but for any\nexternal characteristic which would make them especially conspicuous.\n\nOrdinary sovereigns would make collections of such objects, simply\nbecause they were rare, and in accordance with the general custom;\nand in importing the \"apes\" and peacocks together with the gold and\nivory, Solomon but followed the usual custom. He, however, on whom\nthe gift of wisdom had been especially bestowed, would have another\nmotive besides ostentation or curiosity. He was learned in the study\nof that science which we now call Natural History. It is, therefore,\nextremely probable, that he would not neglect any opportunities of\nprocuring animals from distant lands, in order that he might study\nthe products of countries which he had not personally visited, and\nit is not likely that so conspicuous an animal as the Wanderoo would\nhave escaped the notice of those who provided the cargo for which so\nwealthy a king could pay, and for which they would demand a price\nproportionate to its variety.\n\n[Illustration: BONNET MONKEYS.]\n\nThere is perhaps no monkey which is so conspicuous among its kin\nas the Wanderoo, and certainly no monkey or ape inhabiting those\nparts of the world to which the fleet of Solomon would have access.\nIts staid, sedate manners, its black body, lion-like tail, and huge\nwhite-edged mane, would distinguish it so boldly from its kinsfolk,\nthat the sailors would use all their efforts to capture an animal\nfor which they would be likely to obtain a high price.\n\nThe peculiar and unique character of Solomon affords good reason\nfor conjecture that, not only were several species of the monkey\ntribe included under the general word Kophim, but that the number\nof species must have been very great. He wrote largely of the\nvarious productions of the earth, and, to judge him by ourselves,\nit is certain that with such magnificent means at his command, he\nwould have ransacked every country that his ships could visit, for\nthe purpose of collecting materials for his works. It is therefore\nalmost certain that under the word Kophim may be included all the\nmost plentiful species of monkey which inhabit the countries to\nwhich his fleet had access, and that in his palace were collected\ntogether specimens of each monkey which has here been mentioned,\nbesides many others of which no special notice need be taken, such\nas the Bonnet Monkeys, and other Macaques.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: THE BAT.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE BAT.\n\n     The Bat mentioned always with abhorrence--Meaning of the Hebrew\n     name--The prohibition against eating Bats--The edible species,\n     their food and mode of life--The noisome character of the Bat,\n     and the nature of its dwelling-place--Its hatred of light--Mr.\n     Tristram's discoveries--Bats found in the quarries from which\n     the stone of the Temple was hewn--Edible Bats in a cave near the\n     centre of Palestine--Another species of long-tailed Bat captured\n     in the rock caves where hermits had been buried--Other species\n     which probably inhabit Palestine.\n\n\nAmong the animals that are forbidden to be eaten by the Israelites\nwe find the BAT prominently mentioned, and in one or two parts of\nScripture the same creature is alluded to with evident abhorrence.\nIn Isaiah ii. 20, for example, it is prophesied that when the day of\nthe Lord comes, the worshippers of idols will try to hide themselves\nfrom the presence of the Lord, and will cast their false gods to the\nbats and the moles, both animals being evidently used as emblems of\ndarkness and ignorance, and associated together for a reason which\nwill be given when treating of the mole. The Hebrew name of the Bat\nis expressive of its nocturnal habits, and literally signifies some\nbeing that flies by night, and it is a notable fact that the Greek\nand Latin names for the bat have also a similar derivation.\n\nIn Lev. xi. 20, the words, \"All fowls that creep, going upon all\nfour, shall be an abomination unto you,\" are evidently intended\nto apply to the bat, which, as is now well known, is not a bird\nwith wings, but a mammal with very long toes, and a well developed\nmembrane between them. Like other mammals, the Bat crawls, or walks,\non all four legs, though the movement is but a clumsy one, and\ngreatly different from the graceful ease with which the creature\nurges its course through the evening air in search of food.\n\nPerhaps the prohibition to eat so unsightly an animal may seem\nalmost needless; but it must be remembered that in several parts\nof the earth, certain species of Bat are used as food. These are\nchiefly the large species, that are called Kalongs, and which\nfeed almost entirely on fruit, thus being to their insectivorous\nrelatives what the fruit-loving bear is among the larger carnivora.\nThese edible Bats have other habits not shared by the generality\nof their kin. Some of the species do not retire to caves and\nhollow trees for shelter during their hours of sleep, but suspend\nthemselves by their hind legs from the topmost branches of the trees\nwhose fruit affords them nourishment. In this position they have a\nmost singular aspect, looking much as if they themselves were large\nbunches of fruit hanging from the boughs. Thus, they are cleanly\nanimals, and are as little repulsive as bats can be expected to be.\n\nBut the ordinary bats, such as are signified by the \"night-fliers\"\nof the Scriptures, are, when in a state of nature, exceedingly\nunpleasant creatures. Almost all animals are infested with parasitic\ninsects, but the Bat absolutely swarms with them, so that it is\nimpossible to handle a Bat recently dead without finding some of\nthem on the hands. Also, the bats are in the habit of resorting\nto caverns, clefts in the rocks, deserted ruins, and similar dark\nplaces, wherein they pass the hours of daylight, and will frequent\nthe same spots for a long series of years. In consequence of this\nhabit, the spots which they select for their resting place become\ninconceivably noisome, and can scarcely be entered by human beings,\nso powerful is the odour with which they are imbued.\n\nSometimes, when travellers have been exploring the chambers of\nruined buildings, or have endeavoured to penetrate into the recesses\nof rocky caves, they have been repelled by the bats which had taken\nup their habitation therein. No sooner does the light of the torch\nor lamp shine upon the walls, than the clusters of bats detach\nthemselves from the spots to which they had been clinging, and fly\nto the light like moths to a candle. No torch can withstand the\nmultitude of wings that come flapping about it, sounding like the\nrushing of a strong wind, while the bats that do not crowd around\nthe light, dash against the explorers, beating their leathery wings\nagainst their faces, and clinging in numbers to their dress. They\nwould even settle on the face unless kept off by the hands, and\nsometimes they force the intruders to beat a retreat. They do not\nintend to attack, for they are quite incapable of doing any real\ndamage; and, in point of fact, they are much more alarmed than those\nwhom they annoy. Nocturnal in their habits, they cannot endure the\nlight, which completely dazzles them, so that they dash about at\nrandom, and fly blindly towards the torches in their endeavours to\nescape.\n\n[Illustration: BATS' RESTING-PLACE.]\n\nIf, then, we keep in mind the habits of the bats, we shall\ncomprehend that their habitations must be inexpressibly revolting\nto human beings, and shall the better understand the force of the\nprophecy that the idols shall be cast to the bats and the moles.\n\nNo particular species of Bat seems to be indicated by the Hebrew\nword Hatalleph, which is evidently used in a comprehensive sense,\nand signifies all and any species of Bat. Until very lately, the\nexact species of Bats which inhabit Palestine were not definitely\nascertained, and could only be conjectured. But, Mr. Tristram, who\ntravelled in the Holy Land for the express purpose of investigating\nits physical history, has set this point at rest, in his invaluable\nwork, \"The Land of Israel,\" to which frequent reference will be made\nin the course of the following pages.\n\nAlmost every cavern which he entered was tenanted by bats, and he\nprocured several species of these repulsive but interesting animals.\nWhile exploring the vast quarries in which the stone for the Temple\nwas worked beneath the earth, so that no sound of tool was heard\nduring the building, numbers of bats were disturbed by the lights,\nand fluttered over the heads of the exploring party.\n\nOn another occasion, he was exploring a cave near the centre of\nPalestine, when he succeeded in procuring some specimens, and\ntherefore in identifying at least one species. \"In climbing the\nrocks soon afterwards, to examine a cave, I heard a singular whining\nchatter within, and on creeping into its recesses, a stone thrown\nup roused from their roosting-places a colony of large bats, the\nsoft waving flap of whose wings I could hear in the darkness. How\nto obtain one I knew not; but on vigorously plying my signal\nwhistle, all the party soon gathered to my help. B. suggested\nsmoking them, so a fire of brushwood was kindled, and soon two or\nthree rushed out. Two fell to our shot, and I was delighted to find\nmyself the possessor of a couple of large fox-headed bats of the\ngenus Pteropus (_Xantharpya aegyptiaca_), and extending twenty and\na half inches from wing to wing. As none of the bats of Palestine\nare yet known, this was a great prize, and another instance of the\nextension westward of the Indian fauna.\" These Bats belong to the\nfruit-eating tribe, and are closely allied to the Flying Foxes of\nJava, Australia, and Southern Africa. Therefore, this would be one\nof the species commonly used for food, and hence the necessity for\nthe prohibition. The present species extends over the greater part\nof Northern Africa and into parts of Asia.\n\n[Illustration: GREAT FOX-HEADED BAT, OR FLYING FOX.]\n\nThe same traveller subsequently discovered several more species of\nbats. On one occasion, he was exploring some caves, near the site of\nthe ancient Jericho. On the eastern face of the cliffs are a number\nof caves, arranged in regular tiers, and originally approached\nby steps cut out of the face of the rock. These staircases are,\nhowever, washed away by time and the rains, and in consequence the\nupper tiers were almost inaccessible. In some of these caves the\nwalls were covered with brilliant, but mutilated frescoes; and in\nothers, hermits had lived and died and been buried. Mr. Tristram and\nhis companions had penetrated to the second tier, and there made a\ncurious discovery.\n\n[Illustration: CAVE NEAR THE SITE OF ANCIENT JERICHO.]\n\n\"In the roof of this was a small hole, athwart which lay a stick.\nAfter many efforts, we got a string across it, and so hauled up\na rope, by which, finding the stick strong enough, we climbed,\nand with a short exercise of the chimney-sweeper's art, we found\nourselves in a third tier of cells, similar to the lower ones, and\ncovered with the undisturbed dust of ages. Behind the chapel was a\ndark cave, with an entrance eighteen inches high. Having lighted\nour lantern, we crept in on our faces, and found the place full of\nhuman bones and skulls; with dust several inches deep. We were in an\nancient burying-place of the Anchorites, or hermits of the country,\nwhose custom it was to retire to such desert and solitary places.\n\n\"Their bones lay in undisturbed order, probably as the corpses had\nbeen stretched after death.\n\n\"After capturing two or three long-tailed bats, of a species new\nto us, which were the only living occupants of the cave, we crept\nout, with a feeling of religious awe, from this strange, sepulchral\ncavern.\"\n\nBesides the species of bats that have been described, it is probable\nthat representatives of several more families of bats inhabit\nPalestine.\n\n[Illustration: bat]\n\n[Illustration: LEOPARDS.]\n\n[Illustration: BIRDS.]\n\n[Illustration: bird and nest]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: ossifrage]\n\n\n\n\nTHE LAeMMERGEIER, OR OSSIFRAGE OF SCRIPTURE.\n\n     Difficulty of identifying the various birds mentioned in\n     Scripture--The vultures of Palestine--The Laemmergeier, or\n     Ossifrage of Scripture--Appearance of the Laemmergeier--Its\n     flight and mode of feeding--Nest of the Laemmergeier.\n\n\nIt has already been mentioned that even the best Biblical scholars\nhave found very great difficulties in identifying several of the\nanimals which are named in Scripture. This difficulty is greatly\nincreased when we come to the BIRDS, and in many instances it is\nabsolutely impossible to identify the Hebrew word with any precise\nspecies. In all probability, however, the nomenclature of the birds\nis a very loose one, several species being classed under the same\ntitle.\n\n[Illustration: THE LAeMMERGEIER.]\n\nKeeping this difficulty in mind, I shall mention all the species\nwhich are likely to have been classed under a single title, giving\na general description of the whole, and a detailed account of the\nparticular species which seems to answer most closely to the Hebrew\nword.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nFollowing the arrangement which has been employed in this work, I\nshall begin with the bird which has been placed by zoologists at\nthe head of its class, namely, the LAeMMERGEIER, the bird which may\nbe safely identified with the Ossifrage of Scripture. The Hebrew\nword is \"Peres,\" a term which only occurs twice when signifying a\nspecies of bird; namely, in Lev. xi. 13, and the parallel passage in\nDeut. xiv. 12. The first of these passages runs as follows: \"These\nye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be\neaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and\nthe ospray.\" The corresponding passage in Deuteronomy has precisely\nthe same signification, though rather differently worded: \"These are\nthey of which ye shall not eat: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and\nthe ospray.\"\n\nThe word _peres_ signifies a breaker; and the Latin term Ossifraga,\nor Bone-breaker, is a very good translation of the word. How it\napplies to the Laemmergeier we shall presently see.\n\nThe Laemmergeier belongs to the vultures, but has much more the\nappearance of an eagle than a vulture, the neck being clothed\nwith feathers, instead of being naked or only covered with down.\nIt may at once be known by the tuft of long, hair-like feathers\nwhich depends from the beak, and which has gained for the bird the\ntitle of Bearded Vulture. The colour of the plumage is a mixture of\ndifferent browns and greys, tawny below and beautifully pencilled\nabove, a line of pure white running along the middle of each\nfeather. When young it is nearly black, and indeed has been treated\nas a separate species under the name of Black Vulture.\n\nIt is one of the largest of the flying birds, its length often\nexceeding four feet, and the expanse of its wings being rather more\nthan ten feet. In consequence of this great spread of wing, it\nlooks when flying like a much larger bird than it really is, and\nits size has often been variously misstated. Its flight, as may be\nimagined from the possession of such wings, is equally grand and\ngraceful, and it sweeps through the air with great force, apparently\nunaccompanied by effort.\n\nThe Laemmergeier extends through a very large range of country, and\nis found throughout many parts of Europe and Asia. It is spread\nover the Holy Land, never congregating in numbers, like ordinary\nvultures, but living in pairs, and scarcely any ravine being\nuninhabited by at least one pair of Laemmergeiers.\n\nThe food of the Laemmergeier is, like that of other vultures, the\nflesh of dead animals, though it does not feed quite in the same\nmanner that they do. When the ordinary vultures have found a carcase\nthey tear it to pieces, and soon remove all the flesh. This having\nbeen done, the Laemmergeier comes to the half-picked bones, eats the\nremaining flesh from them, and finishes by breaking them and eating\nthe marrow. That a bird should be able to break a bone as thick and\nhard as the thigh-bone of a horse or ox seems rather problematical,\nbut the bird achieves the feat in a simple and effectual manner.\n\nSeizing the bone in its claws, it rises to an immense height in the\nair, and then, balancing itself over some piece of rock, it lets the\nbone fall, and sweeps after it with scarce less rapidity than the\nbone falls. Should the bone be broken by the fall, the bird picks\nthe marrow out of the fragments; and should it have escaped fracture\nby reason of falling on a soft piece of ground instead of a hard\nrock, the bird picks it up, and renews the process until it has\nattained its object. It will be seen, therefore, that the name of\nOssifrage, or Bone-breaker, may very properly be given to this bird.\n\nNot only does it extract the marrow from bones in this peculiar\nmanner, but it procures other articles of food by employing\nprecisely the same system. If it sees a tortoise, many of which\nreptiles are found in the countries which it inhabits, it does not\nwaste time and trouble by trying to peck the shell open, but carries\nits prey high in the air, drops it on the ground, and so breaks its\nshell to pieces. Tortoises are often very hard-shelled creatures,\nand the Laemmergeier has been observed to raise one of them and\ndrop it six or seven times before the stubborn armour would yield.\nSnakes, too, are killed in a similar manner, being seized by the\nneck, and then dropped from a height upon rocks or hard ground. The\nreader may perhaps be aware that the Hooded Crow of England breaks\nbones and the shells of bivalve molluscs in a similar manner.\n\nMr. Tristram suggests, with much probability, that the \"eagle\" which\nmistook the bald head of the poet AEschylus for a white stone, and\nkilled him by dropping a tortoise upon it, was in all likelihood\na Laemmergeier, the bird being a denizen of the same country, and\nthe act of tortoise-dropping being its usual mode of killing those\nreptiles.\n\n[Illustration: A SUCCESSFUL DEFENCE.]\n\nWe now see why the Laemmergeier is furnished with such enormous\nwings, and so great a power of flight, these attributes being\nneedful in order to enable it to lift its prey to a sufficient\nheight. The air, as we all know, becomes more and more attenuated in\nexact proportion to the height above the earth; and did not the bird\npossess such great powers of flight, it would not be able to carry a\nheavy tortoise into the thinner strata of air which are found at the\nheight to which it soars.\n\nThe instinct of killing its prey by a fall is employed against other\nanimals besides snakes and tortoises, though exerted in a somewhat\ndifferent manner. The bird, as has already been mentioned, lives\namong mountain ranges, and it may be seen floating about them for\nhours together, watching each inch of ground in search of prey.\nShould it see a goat or other inhabitant of the rocks standing near\na precipice, the Laemmergeier sweeps rapidly upon it, and with a blow\nof its wing knocks the animal off the rock into the valley beneath,\nwhere it lies helplessly maimed, even if not killed by the fall.\n\nEven hares and lambs are killed in this manner, and it is from\nthe havoc which the Laemmergeier makes among the sheep that it has\nobtained the name of Laemmergeier, or Lamb-Vulture. So swift and\nnoiseless is the rush of the bird, that an animal which has once\nbeen marked by its blood-red eye seldom escapes from the swoop; and\neven the Alpine hunters, who spend their lives in pursuit of the\nchamois, have occasionally been put in great jeopardy by the sudden\nattack of a Laemmergeier, the bird having mistaken their crouching\nforms for the chamois, and only turned aside at the last moment.\n\nThe reason for employing so remarkable a mode of attack is to be\nfound in the structure of the feet, which, although belonging to\nso large and powerful a bird, are comparatively feeble, and are\nunable, like those of the eagle, to grasp the living animal in a\ndeadly hold, and to drive the sharp talons into its vitals. They\nare not well adapted for holding prey, the talons not possessing\nthe hook-like form or the sharp points which characterise those of\nthe eagle. The feet, by the way, are feathered down to the toes.\nThe beak, too, is weak when compared with the rest of the body,\nand could not perform its work were not the object which it tears\npreviously shattered by the fall from a height.\n\n[Illustration: STRUCK FROM A DIZZY HEIGHT.]\n\nThe nest of the Laemmergeier is made of sticks and sods, and is of\nenormous dimensions. It is almost always placed upon a lofty cliff,\nand contains about a wagon-load or so of sticks rudely interwoven,\nand supporting a nearly equal amount of sods and moss.\n\nAn allied species lives in Northern Africa, where it is called by a\nname which signifies Father Longbeard, in allusion to the beard-like\ntufts of the bill.\n\n[Illustration: bird feeding young]\n\n\n\n\nTHE EGYPTIAN VULTURE, OR GIER-EAGLE.\n\n     The Racham or Gier-Eagle identified with the Egyptian\n     Vulture--Its appearance on the Egyptian monuments--The shape,\n     size, and colour of the bird--Its value as a scavenger, and its\n     general habits--The Egyptian Vultures and the griffons--Its\n     fondness for the society of man--Nest of the Egyptian Vulture.\n\n\nIn the same list of unclean birds which has already been given,\nwe find the name of a bird which we can identify without much\ndifficulty, although there has been some little controversy about\nit. This is the so-called Gier-Eagle, which is named with the\ncormorant and the pelican as one of the birds which the Jews are\nforbidden to eat. The word which is translated as Gier-Eagle is\nRacham, a name which is almost identical with the Arabic name of the\nEGYPTIAN VULTURE, sometimes called Pharaoh's Chicken, because it is\nso often sculptured on the ancient monuments of Egypt. It is called\nby the Turks by a name which signifies White Father, in allusion to\nthe colour of its plumage.\n\nThis bird is not a very large one, being about equal to a raven in\nsize, though its enormously long wings give it an appearance of much\ngreater size. Its colour is white, with the exception of the quill\nfeathers of the wings, which are dark-brown. The bill and the naked\nface and legs are bright ochreous yellow. It does not attain this\nwhite plumage until its third year, its colour before reaching adult\nage being brown, with a grey neck and dull yellow legs and face.\n\nThe Egyptian Vulture, although not large, is a really handsome\nbird, the bold contrast of pure white and dark brown being very\nconspicuous when it is on the wing. In this plumage it has never\nbeen seen in England, but one or two examples are known of the\nEgyptian Vulture being killed in England while still in its\ndark-brown clothing.\n\nIt inhabits a very wide range of country, being found throughout\nall the warmer parts of the Old World. Although it is tolerably\nplentiful, it is never seen in great numbers, as is the case with\nseveral of the vultures, but is always to be found in pairs, the\nmale and female never separating, and invariably being seen close\ntogether. In fact, in places where it is common it is hardly\npossible to travel more than a mile or two without seeing a pair\nof Egyptian Vultures. Should more than two of these birds be seen\ntogether, the spectator may be sure that they have congregated\nover some food. It has been well suggested that its Hebrew name\nof Racham, or Love, has been given to it in consequence of this\nconstant association of the male and female.\n\n[Illustration: EGYPTIAN VULTURE, OR GIER-EAGLE.]\n\nThe Egyptian Vulture is one of the best of scavengers, not only\ndevouring the carcases of dead animals, but feeding on every kind of\noffal or garbage. Indeed, its teeth and claws are much too feeble\nto enable it to cope with the true vultures in tearing up a large\ncarcase, and in consequence it never really associates with them,\nalthough it may be seen hovering near them, and it never ventures\nto feed in their company, keeping at a respectful distance while\nthey feed, and, when they retire, humbly making a meal on the scraps\nwhich they have left.\n\nMr. Tristram narrates an amusing instance of this trait of\ncharacter. \"On a subsequent occasion, on the north side of Hermon,\nwe observed the griffons teaching a lesson of patience to the\ninferior scavengers. A long row of Egyptian vultures were sitting on\nsome rocks, so intently watching a spot in a corn-field that they\ntook no notice of our approach. Creeping cautiously near, we watched\na score of griffons busily engaged in turning over a dead horse, one\nside of which they had already reduced to a skeleton.\n\n\"Their united efforts had just effected this, when we showed\nourselves, and they quickly retired. The inferior birds, who dreaded\nus much less than them, at once darted to the repast, and, utterly\nregardless of our presence within ten yards of them, began to gorge.\nWe had hardly retired two hundred yards, when the griffons came down\nwith a swoop, and the Egyptian vultures and a pair or two of eagles\nhurriedly resumed their post of observation; while some black kites\nremained, and contrived by their superior agility to filch a few\nmorsels from their lordly superiors.\"\n\nSo useful is this bird as a scavenger, that it is protected in all\nparts of the East by the most stringent laws, so that a naturalist\nwho wishes for specimens has some difficulty in procuring the bird,\nor even its egg. It wanders about the streets of the villages, and\nmay generally be found investigating the heaps of refuse which are\nleft to be cleared away by the animals and birds which constitute\nthe scavengers of the East.\n\nIt not only eats dead animal substances, but kills and devours great\nquantities of rats, mice, lizards, and other pests that swarm in\nhot countries. So tame is it, that it may even be observed, like\nthe gull and the rook of our own country, following the ploughman\nas he turns up the ground, and examining the furrow for the purpose\nof picking up the worms, grubs, and similar creatures that are\ndisturbed by the share.\n\nBeing thus protected and encouraged by man, there is good reason\nwhy it should have learned in course of time to fear him far less\nthan its own kind. Indeed, it is so utterly fearless with regard to\nhuman beings, that it habitually follows the caravans as they pass\nfrom one town to another, for the sake of feeding on the refuse food\nand other offal which is thrown aside on the road.\n\nTwo articles of diet which certainly do not seem to fall within the\nordinary range of vulture's food are said to be consumed by this\nbird. The first is the egg of the ostrich, the shell of which is\ntoo hard to be broken by the feeble beak of the Egyptian Vulture.\nThe bird cannot, like the laemmergeier, carry the egg into the air\nand drop it on the ground, because its feet are not large enough\nto grasp it, and only slip off its round and polished surface.\nTherefore, instead of raising the egg into the air and dropping it\nupon a stone, it carries a stone into the air and drops it upon the\negg. So at least say the natives of the country which it inhabits,\nand there is no reason why we should doubt the truth of the\nstatement.\n\nThe other article of food is a sort of melon, very full of juice.\nThis melon is called \"nara,\" and is devoured by various creatures,\nsuch as lions, leopards, mice, ostriches, &c. and seems to serve\nthem instead of drink.\n\nThe nest of the Egyptian Vulture is made in some rocky ledge, and\nthe bird does not trouble itself about selecting a spot inaccessible\nto man, knowing well that it will not be disturbed. The nest is,\nlike that of other vultures, a large and rude mass of sticks,\nsods, bones, and similar materials, to which are added any bits of\nrag, rope, skin, and other village refuse which it can pick up as\nit traverses the streets. There are two, and occasionally three,\neggs, rather variously mottled with red. In its breeding, as in\nits general life, it is not a gregarious bird, never breeding in\ncolonies, and, indeed, very seldom choosing a spot for its nest near\none which has already been selected by another pair.\n\nThe illustration on page 420 represents part of the nest of the\nEgyptian Vulture, in which the curious mixture of bones and sticks\nis well shown. The parent birds are drawn in two characteristic\nattitudes taken from life, and well exhibit the feeble beak, the\npeculiar and intelligent, almost cunning expression of the head,\nand the ruff of feathers which surrounds the upper part of the\nneck. In the distance another bird is drawn as it appears on the\nwing, in order to show the contrast between the white plumage and\nthe dark quill feathers of the wings, the bird presenting a general\nappearance very similar to that of the common sea-gull.\n\n\n\n\nTHE\n\nGRIFFON VULTURE, OR EAGLE OF SCRIPTURE.\n\n     The Griffon Vulture identified with the Eagle of\n     Scripture--Geographical range of the Griffon--Its mode of\n     flight and sociable habits--The featherless head and neck of\n     the bird--The Vulture used as an image of strength, swiftness,\n     and rapacity--Its powers of sight--How Vultures assemble round\n     a carcase--Nesting-places of the Griffon--Mr. Tristram's\n     description of the Griffon--Rock-caves of the Wady Hamam--Care\n     of the young, and teaching them to fly--Strength of the Griffon.\n\n\nThe Griffon Vulture is found throughout a large portion of the Old\nWorld, inhabiting nearly all the warmer portions of this hemisphere.\nThe colour of the adult bird is a sort of yellowish brown,\ndiversified by the black quill feathers and the ruff of white down\nthat surrounds the neck. The head and neck are without feathers, but\nare sparingly covered with very short down of a similar character to\nthat of the ruff.\n\nIt is really a large bird, being little short of five feet in total\nlength, and the expanse of wing measuring about eight feet.\n\nThe Griffon Vulture is very plentiful in Palestine, and, unlike the\nlesser though equally useful Egyptian Vulture, congregates together\nin great numbers, feeding, flying, and herding in company. Large\nflocks of them may be seen daily, soaring high in the air, and\nsweeping their graceful way in the grand curves which distinguish\nthe flight of the large birds of prey. They are best to be seen in\nthe early morning, being in the habit of quitting their rocky homes\nat daybreak, and indulging in a flight for two or three hours, after\nwhich they mostly return to the rocks, and wait until evening, when\nthey take another short flight before retiring to rest.\n\nAllusion is made in the Scriptures to the gregarious habits of the\nVultures: \"Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be\ngathered together\" (Matt. xxiv. 28). That the Vulture, and not the\neagle, is here signified, is evident from the fact that the eagles\ndo not congregate like the Vultures, never being seen in greater\nnumbers than two or three together, while the Vultures assemble in\nhundreds.\n\nThere is also a curious passage in the Book of Proverbs, chap. xxx.\nver. 17, which alludes to the carnivorous nature of the bird: \"The\neye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother,\nthe ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles\nshall eat it.\"\n\nAllusion is made in several passages to the swiftness of the\nVulture, as well as its voracity. See, for example, a portion of\nDavid's lamentation over the bodies of Saul and Jonathan, who,\naccording to the poet's metaphor, \"were lovely and pleasant in their\nlives, and in their death they were not divided; they were swifter\nthan eagles, they were stronger than lions.\"\n\nThe \"bitter\" people--namely, the Chaldeans--are again mentioned in\na very similar manner by the prophet Jeremiah: \"Our persecutors are\nswifter than the eagles of the heavens; they pursued us upon the\nmountains, they laid wait for us in the wilderness\" (Lam. iv. 19).\n\nThere is something peculiarly appropriate in employing the Vulture\nas an image of strength and swiftness when applied to warriors, the\nbird being an invariable attendant on the battle, and flying to the\nfield of death with marvellous swiftness. All who had ever witnessed\na battle were familiar with the presence of the Vulture--the scene\nof carnage, and the image which is employed, would be one which\ncommended itself at once to those for whom it was intended. And, as\nthe earlier history of the Jewish nation is essentially of a warlike\ncharacter, we cannot wonder that so powerful and familiar an image\nshould have been repeatedly introduced into the sacred writings.\n\nWonderful powers of sight are possessed by this bird. Its eyes\nare able to assume either a telescopic or a microscopic character,\nby means of a complex and marvellous structure, which can alter the\nwhole shape of the organ at the will of the bird.\n\n[Illustration: VULTURES.]\n\nNot only can the eye be thus altered, but it changes\ninstantaneously, so as to accommodate itself to the task which it is\nto perform. A Vulture, for example, sees from a vast height the body\nof a dead animal, and instantly swoops down upon it like an arrow\nfrom a bow. In order to enable the bird to see so distant an object,\nthe eye has been exercising its telescopic powers, and yet, in a\nsecond or two, when the Vulture is close to its prey, the whole form\nof the eye must be changed, or the bird would mistake its distance,\nand dash itself to pieces on the ground.\n\nBy means of its powerful eyes, the Vulture can see to an enormous\ndistance, and with great clearness, but neither so far nor so\nclearly as is popularly supposed. It is true that, as soon as a\ncarcase is discovered, it will be covered with Vultures, who arrive\nfrom every side, looking at first like tiny specks in the air,\nscarcely perceptible even to practised eyes, and all directing their\nflight to the same point. \"Where the carcase is, there will the\nvultures be gathered together.\" But, although they all fly towards\nthe same spot, it does not follow that they have all seen the same\nobject. The fact is, they see and understand each other's movements.\n\nA single Vulture, for example, sees a dead or dying sheep, and\nswoops down upon it. The other Vultures which are flying about\nin search of food, and from which the animal in question may be\nconcealed, know perfectly well that a Vulture soars high in the air\nwhen searching for food, and only darts to the earth when it has\nfound a suitable prey. They immediately follow its example, and\nin their turn are followed by other Vultures, which can see their\nfellows from a distance, and know perfectly well why they are all\nconverging to one spot.\n\nIn this way all the Vultures of a neighbourhood will understand, by\na very intelligible telegraph, that a dead body of some animal has\nbeen found, and, aided by their wonderful powers of flight, will\nassemble over its body in an almost incredibly short space of time.\n\nThe resting-place of the Griffon Vulture is always on some lofty\nspot. The Arabian Vulture will build within easy reach, the eagle\nprefers lofty situations, but nothing but the highest and most\ninaccessible spots will satisfy the Vulture. To reach the nest of\nthis bird is therefore a very difficult task, only to be attempted\nby experienced and intrepid cragsmen; and, in consequence, both the\neggs and young of the Griffon Vulture cannot be obtained except for\na very high price. The birds are fond of building in the rock-caves\nwhich are found in so many parts of Palestine, and in some places\nthey fill these places as thickly as rooks fill a rookery.\n\nIn Mr. Tristram's \"Land of Israel,\" there is a very graphic\ndescription of the Griffon's nests, and of the difficulty\nexperienced in reaching them. \"A narrow gorge, with limestone\ncliffs from five hundred to six hundred feet high, into which the\nsun never penetrates, walls the rapid brook on each side so closely\nthat we often had to ride in the bed of the stream. The cliffs\nare perforated with caves at all heights, wholly inaccessible to\nman, the secure resting-place of hundreds of noble griffons, some\nlaemmergeiers, lanner falcons, and several species of eagle....\nOne day in the ravine well repaid us, though so terrific were the\nprecipices, that it was quite impossible to reach any of the nests\nwith which it swarmed.\n\n\"We were more successful in the Wady Hamam, the south-west end of\nthe plain, the entrance from Hattin and the Buttauf, where we spent\nthree days in exploration. The cliffs, though reaching the height of\nfifteen hundred feet, rise like terraces, with enormous masses of\n_debris_, and the wood is half a mile wide. By the aid of Giacomo,\nwho proved himself an expert rope-climber, we reaped a good harvest\nof griffons' eggs, some of the party being let down by ropes, while\nthose above were guided in working them by signals from others below\nin the valley. It required the aid of a party of a dozen to capture\nthese nests. The idea of scaling the cliff with ropes was quite new\nto some Arabs who were herding cattle above, and who could not,\nexcepting one little girl, be induced to render any assistance. She\nproved herself most sensible and efficient in telegraphing.\n\n\"While capturing the griffons' nests, we were re-enacting a\ncelebrated siege in Jewish history. Close to us, at the head of the\ncliffs which form the limits of the celebrated Plain of Hattin, were\nthe ruins of Irbid, the ancient Arbela, marked principally by the\nremains of a synagogue, of which some marble shafts and fragments of\nentablature, like those of Tell Hum, are still to be seen, and were\nafterwards visited by us.\n\n\"Hosea mentions the place apparently as a strong fortress: 'All thy\nfortresses shall be spoiled, as Shalman spoiled Beth-arbel in the\nday of battle' (Hos. x. 14). Perhaps the prophet here refers to the\nrefuges in the rocks below.\n\n\"The long series of chambers and galleries in the face of the\nprecipice are called by the Arabs, Kulat Ibn Maan, and are very\nfully described by Josephus. These cliffs were the homes of a set\nof bandits, who resided here with their families, and for years set\nthe power of Herod the Great at defiance. At length, when all other\nattempts at scaling the fortress had failed, he let down soldiers at\nthis very spot in boxes, by chains, who attacked the robbers with\nlong hooks, and succeeded in rooting them all out.\n\n\"The rock galleries, though now only tenanted by griffons, are very\ncomplete and perfect, and beautifully built. Long galleries wind\nbackwards and forwards in the cliff side, their walls being built\nwith dressed stone, flush with the precipice, and often opening\ninto spacious chambers. Tier after tier rise one after another\nwith projecting windows, connected by narrow staircases, carried\nsometimes upon arches, and in the upper portions rarely broken away.\nIn many of the upper chambers to which we were let down, the dust of\nages had accumulated, undisturbed by any foot save that of the birds\nof the air; and here we rested during the heat of the day, with the\nplains and lake set as in a frame before us. We obtained a full\nzoological harvest, as in three days we captured fourteen nests of\ngriffons.\"\n\nAlthough these caverns and rocky passages are much more accessible\nthan most of the places whereon the Griffons build, the natives\nnever venture to enter them, being deterred not so much by their\nheight, as by their superstitious fears. The Griffons instinctively\nfound out that man never entered these caverns, and so took\npossession of them.\n\nAs the young Griffons are brought up in these lofty and precipitous\nplaces, it is evident that their first flight must be a dangerous\nexperiment, requiring the aid of the parent birds. At first the\nyoung are rather nervous at the task which lies before them, and\nshrink from trusting themselves to the air. The parents, however,\nencourage them to use their wings, take short flights in order to\nset them an example, and, when they at last venture from the nest,\naccompany and encourage them in their first journey.\n\nIn flight it is one of the most magnificent birds that can be seen,\nand even when perched it often retains a certain look of majesty and\ngrandeur. Sometimes, however, especially when basking in the sun, it\nassumes a series of attitudes which are absolutely grotesque, and\nconvert the noble-looking bird into a positively ludicrous object.\nAt one moment it will sit all hunched up, its head sunk between its\nshoulders, and one wing trailing behind it as if broken. At another\nit will bend its legs and sit down on the ankle-joint, pushing its\nfeet out in front, and supporting itself by the stiff feathers of\nits tail. Often it will touch nearly flat on the ground, partly\nspread its wings, and allow their tips to rest on the earth, and\nsometimes it will support nearly all the weight of its body on the\nwings, which rest, in a half doubled state, on the ground. I have\nbefore me a great number of sketches, taken in a single day, of\nthe attitudes assumed by one of these birds, every one of which is\nstrikingly different from the others, and transforms the whole shape\nof the bird so much that it is scarcely recognisable as the same\nindividual.\n\n[Illustration: tree]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: eagle]\n\n\n\n\nTHE EAGLE.\n\n     Signification of the word _Asniyeh_--The Golden Eagle and its\n     habits--The Imperial Eagle--Its solitary mode of life--The\n     Short-toed Eagle--Its domestic habits and fondness for the\n     society of man--The Osprey, or Fishing Eagle--Its mode of\n     catching fish--Its distribution in Palestine.\n\n\nAs to the Eagle, rightly so called, there is little doubt that it\nis one of the many birds of prey that seem to have been classed\nunder the general title of Asniyeh--the word which in the Authorized\nVersion of the Bible is rendered as Osprey. A similar confusion is\nobservable in the modern Arabic, one word, _ogab_, being applied\nindiscriminately to all the Eagles and the large _falconidae_.\n\nThe chief of the true Eagles, namely, the Golden Eagle (_Aquila\nchrysaetos_), is one of the inhabitants of Palestine, and is seen\nfrequently, though never in great numbers. Indeed, its predacious\nhabits unfit it for associating with its kind. Any animal which\nlives chiefly, if not wholly, by the chase, requires a large\ndistrict in order to enable it to live, and thus twenty or thirty\neagles will be scattered over a district of twice the number of\nmiles. Like the lion among the mammalia, the Eagle leads an almost\nsolitary life, scarcely ever associating with any of its kind except\nits mate and its young.\n\nThe whole of the Falconidae, as the family to which the Eagles belong\nis called, are very destructive birds, gaining their subsistence\nchiefly by the chase, seldom feeding on carrion except when pressed\nby hunger, or when the dead animal has only recently been killed.\n\nHerein they form a complete contrast to the vultures, whose usual\nfood is putrefying carrion, and fresh meat the exception.\n\nDestructive though the Eagles may be, they cannot be called cruel\nbirds, for, although they deprive many birds and beasts of life,\nthey effect their purpose with a single blow, sweeping down upon the\ndoomed creature with such lightning velocity, and striking it so\nfiercely with their death-dealing talons, that almost instantaneous\ndeath usually results.\n\nWhen the Eagle pounces on a bird, the mere shock caused by the\nstroke of the Eagle's body is almost invariably sufficient to cause\ndeath, and the bird, even if a large one--such as the swan, for\nexample--falls dead upon the earth with scarcely a wound.\n\nSmaller birds are carried off in the talons of their pursuers, and\nare killed by the grip of their tremendous claws, the Eagle in no\ncase making use of its beak for killing its prey. If the great\nbird carries off a lamb or a hare, it grasps the body firmly with\nits claws, and then by a sudden exertion of its wonderful strength\ndrives the sharp talons deep into the vitals of its prey, and does\nnot loosen its grasp until the breath of life has fled from its\nvictim.\n\nThe structure by means of which the Eagle is enabled to use its\ntalons with such terrible effect is equally beautiful and simple,\ndeserving special mention.\n\nNow, many observant persons have been struck with the curious\npower possessed by birds which enables them to hold their position\nupon a branch or perch even while sleeping. In many instances the\nslumbering bird retains its hold of the perch by a single foot, the\nother being drawn up and buried in the feathers.\n\nAs this grasp is clearly an involuntary one, it is evidently\nindependent of the mere will of the bird, and is due to some\npeculiar formation.\n\nOn removing the skin from the leg of any bird, and separating the\nmuscles from each other, the structure in question is easily seen.\nThe muscles which move the leg and foot, and the tendons, or leaders\nwhich form the attachment of the muscles to the bones, are so\narranged that whenever the bird bends its leg the foot is forcibly\nclosed, and is opened again when the leg is straightened.\n\nA common chicken, as it walks along, closing its toes as it lifts\nits foot from the ground and spreading them as the leg is unbent,\ncannot do otherwise, as the tendons are shortened and lengthened as\neach step is taken.\n\n[Illustration: EAGLES.]\n\nIt will be seen, therefore, that when a bird falls asleep upon a\nbranch the legs are not only bent, but are pressed downwards by the\nweight of the body; so that the claws hold the perch with a firm and\ninvoluntary grasp which knows no fatigue, and which remains secure\nas long as the pressure from above keeps the limbs bent.\n\nTo return to the Eagle. When, therefore, the bird desires to\ndrive his talons into the body of his prey, he needs only to sink\ndownwards with his whole weight, and the forcible bending of his\nlegs will contract the talons with irresistible force, without the\nnecessity of any muscular exertion.\n\nExertion, indeed, is never needlessly used by the Eagle, for it is\nvery chary of putting forth its great muscular powers, and unless\nroused by the sight of prey, or pressed to fly abroad in search of\nfood, will sit upon a tree or point of rock for hours as motionless\nas a stuffed figure.\n\nThe Golden Eagle is a truly magnificent bird in size and appearance.\nA full-grown female measures about three feet six inches in length,\nand the expanse of her wings is nine feet. The male bird is smaller\nby nearly six inches. The colour of the bird is a rich blackish\nbrown on the greater part of the body, the head and neck being\ncovered with feathers of a golden red, which have earned for the\nbird its customary name.\n\nThe Golden Eagle is observed to frequent certain favourite places,\nand to breed regularly in the same spot, for a long series of years.\nThe nest is always made upon some high place, generally upon a ledge\nof rock, and is most roughly constructed of sticks.\n\nIn hunting for their prey the Eagle and his mate assist each other.\nIt may be also mentioned here that Eagles keep themselves to a\nsingle mate, and live together throughout their lives. Should,\nhowever, one of them die or be killed, the survivor does not long\nremain in a state of loneliness, but vanishes from the spot for a\nlonger or shorter time, and then returns with a new mate.\n\nAs rabbits and hares, which form a frequent meal for the Eagle, are\nusually hidden under bushes and trees during the day, the birds are\nfrequently forced to drive them from their place of concealment;\nthis they have been observed to do in a very clever manner. One of\nthe Eagles conceals itself near the cover, and its companion dashes\namong the bushes, screaming and making such a disturbance that the\nterrified inmates rush out in hopes of escape, and are immediately\npounced upon by the watchful confederate.\n\nThe prey is immediately taken to the nest, and distributed to the\nyoung after being torn to pieces by the parent birds.\n\nFour or five species of Eagle are known to inhabit Palestine. There\nis, for example, the Imperial Eagle (_Aquila mogilnik_), which may\nbe distinguished from the Golden Eagle by a white patch on the\nshoulders, and the long, lancet-shaped feathers of the head and\nneck. These feathers are of a fawn colour, and contrast beautifully\nwith the deep black-brown of the back and wings. It is not very\noften seen, being a bird that loves the forest, and that does not\ncare to leave the shelter of the trees. It is tolerably common in\nPalestine.\n\nThen there are several of the allied species, of which the best\nexample is perhaps the Short-toed Eagle (_Circaetus cinereus_), a\nbird which is extremely plentiful in the Holy Land--so plentiful\nindeed that, as Mr. Tristram remarks, there are probably twice as\nmany of the Short-toed Eagles in Palestine as of all the other\nspecies put together. The genus to which this bird belongs does\nnot take rank with the true Eagles, but is supposed by systematic\nnaturalists to hold an intermediate place between the true Eagles\nand the ospreys.\n\nThe Short-toed Eagle is seldom a carrion-eater, preferring to kill\nits prey for itself. It feeds mostly on serpents and other reptiles,\nand is especially fond of frogs. It is a large and somewhat heavily\nbuilt bird, lightness and swiftness being far less necessary than\nstrength in taking the animals on which it feeds. It is rather\nmore than two feet in length, and is a decidedly handsome bird,\nthe back being dark brown, and the under parts white, covered with\ncrescent-shaped black spots.\n\n[Illustration: eagle]\n\n[Illustration: EAGLE RETURNING TO THE NEST WITH HER PREY.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE OSPREY.\n\n     The Osprey, or Fishing Eagle--Its geographical range--Mode of\n     securing prey--Structure of its feet--Its power of balancing\n     itself in the air.\n\n\nWe now come to the Osprey itself (_Pandion haliaetus_), which was\nundoubtedly one of the birds grouped together under the collective\nterm Asniyeh. This word occurs only in the two passages in Deut.\nxiv. and Lev. xi. which have been several times quoted already, and\nneed not be mentioned again.\n\nThis fine bird is spread over a very large range of country, and is\nfound in the New World as well as the Old. In consequence of its\npeculiar habits, it is often called the Fishing Eagle.\n\nThe Osprey is essentially a fish-eater. It seems very strange that\na predacious bird allied to the eagles, none of which birds can\nswim, much less dive, should obtain its living from the water. That\nthe cormorant and other diving birds should do so is no matter of\nsurprise, inasmuch as they are able to pursue the fish in their own\nelement, and catch them by superior speed. But any bird which cannot\ndive, and which yet lives on fish, is forced to content itself\nwith those fish that come to the surface of the water, a mode of\nobtaining a livelihood which does not appear to have much chance of\nsuccess. Yet the Osprey does on a large scale what the kingfisher\ndoes on a small one, and contrives to find abundant food in the\nwater.\n\nIts method of taking prey is almost exactly like that which is\nemployed by the kingfisher. When it goes out in search of food, it\nsoars into the air, and floats in circles over the water, watching\nevery inch of it as narrowly as a kestrel watches a stubble-field.\nNo sooner does a fish rise toward the surface to take a fly, or to\nleap into the air for sport, than the Osprey darts downwards, grasps\nthe fish in its talons, drags the struggling prey from the water,\nand with a scream of joy and triumph bears it away to shore, where\nit can be devoured at leisure.\n\nThe bird never dives, neither does it seize the fish with its beak\nlike the kingfisher. It plunges but slightly into the water, as\notherwise it would not be able to use its strong wings and carry\noff its prey. In order to enable the bird to seize the hard and\nslippery body of the fish, it is furnished with long, very sharp,\nand boldly-hooked talons, which force themselves into the sides of\nthe fish, and hold it as with grappling irons.\n\n[Illustration: THE OSPREY SEARCHING FOR FISH.]\n\nThe flight of the Osprey is peculiarly easy and elegant, as might\nbe expected from a bird the length of whose body is only twenty-two\ninches, and the expanse of wing nearly five feet and a half.\n\nIt is therefore able to hover over the water for long periods of\ntime, and can balance itself in one spot without seeming to move a\nwing, having the singular facility of doing so even when a tolerably\nstrong breeze is blowing. It has even been observed to maintain its\nplace unmoved when a sharp squall swept over the spot.\n\nHarmless though the Osprey be--except to the fish--it is a most\npersecuted bird, being everywhere annoyed by rooks and crows, and,\nin America, robbed by the more powerful white-headed eagle.\n\nSuch a scene is thus described by Wilson:\n\n     \"Elevated on the high, dead limb of a gigantic tree that\n     commanded a wide view of the neighbouring shore and ocean, the\n     great white-headed eagle calmly surveys the motions of various\n     smaller birds that pursue their busy avocations below.\n\n     \"The snow-white gulls slowly winnowing the air; the trains of\n     ducks streaming over the surface; silent and watchful cranes,\n     intent and wading, and all the winged multitude that subsist by\n     the bounty of this vast liquid magazine of nature.\n\n     \"High over all these, hovers one whose action instantly arrests\n     the eagle's attention. By his wide curvature of wing and sudden\n     suspension in the air he knows him to be the Osprey, settling\n     over some devoted victim of the deep. The eyes of the eagle\n     kindle at the sight, and balancing himself with half-opened\n     wings on the branch, he watches the result.\n\n     \"Down, rapid as an arrow, from heaven descends the Osprey, the\n     roar of its wings reaching the ear as it disappears in the\n     water, making the surges foam around! At this moment the eager\n     looks of the eagle are all ardour, and, levelling his neck for\n     flight, he sees the Osprey once more emerge, struggling with his\n     prey, and mounting in the air with screams of exultation.\n\n     \"These are the signals for the eagle, who, launching into the\n     air, instantly gives chase, and soon gains on the Osprey; each\n     exerts his utmost to mount above the other, displaying in this\n     encounter the most elegant and sublime aerial evolutions.\n\n     [Illustration: SNATCHED FROM THE DEEP: THE OSPREY RISES WITH HIS\n     PREY.]\n\n     \"The unencumbered eagle rapidly advances, and is just on the\n     point of reaching his opponent, when, with a sudden scream,\n     probably of despair and honest execration, the Osprey drops his\n     fish.\n\n     \"The eagle, poising himself for a moment, as if to take a more\n     certain aim, descends like a whirlwind, snatches it in his\n     grasp ere it reaches the water, and bears his ill-gotten booty\n     silently away to the woods.\"\n\nAlthough not very plentiful in Palestine, nor indeed in any other\ncountry, the Osprey is seen throughout the whole of that country\nwhere it can find a sufficiency of water. It prefers the sea-shore\nand the rivers of the coast, and is said to avoid the Sea of Galilee.\n\n\n\n\nTHE KITE, OR VULTURE OF SCRIPTURE.\n\n     The word _Dayah_ and its signification--Dayah a collective term\n     for different species of Kites--The Common or Red Kite plentiful\n     in Palestine--Its piercing sight and habit of soaring--The Black\n     Kite of Palestine and its habits--The Egyptian Kite--The Raah or\n     Glede of Scripture--The Buzzards and their habits--The Peregrine\n     Falcon an inhabitant of Central Palestine, and the Lanner of the\n     eastern parts of the country.\n\n\nIn Lev. xi. 14 and Deut. xiv. 13, we find the Vulture among the list\nof birds which the Jews were not permitted to eat. The word which\nis translated as Vulture is _dayah_, and we find it occurring again\nin Isaiah xxxiv. 15, \"There shall the vultures also be gathered,\nevery one with her mate.\" There is no doubt, however, that this\ntranslation of the word is an incorrect one, and that it ought to be\nrendered as Kite. In Job xxviii. 7, there is a similar word, _ayah_,\nwhich is also translated as Vulture, and which is acknowledged to\nbe not a Vulture, but one of the Kites: \"There is a path which no\nfowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen.\" Both these\nwords are nearly identical with modern Arabic terms which are\nemployed rather loosely to signify several species of Kite. Buxtorf,\nin his Hebrew Lexicon, gives the correct rendering, translating\n_dayah_ as _Milvus_, and the Vulgate in one or two places gives the\nsame translation, though in others it renders the word as Vulture.\n\n[Illustration: THE KITE, OR VULTURE OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\nMr. Tristram, who has given much attention to this subject, is\ninclined to refer the word _ayah_ to the Common Kite (_Milvus\nregalis_), which was once so plentiful in this country, and is now\nnearly extinct; and _dayah_ to the Black Kite (_Milvus atra_). He\nfounds this distinction on the different habits of the two species,\nthe Common or Red Kite being thinly scattered, and being in the\nhabit of soaring into the air at very great heights, and the latter\nbeing very plentiful and gregarious.\n\nWe will first take the Red Kite.\n\nThis bird is scattered all over Palestine, feeding chiefly on the\nsmaller birds, mice, reptiles, and fish. In the capture of fish the\nKite is almost as expert as the osprey, darting from a great height\ninto the water, and bearing off the fish in its claws. The wings of\nthis bird are very long and powerful, and bear it through the air in\na peculiarly graceful flight. It is indeed in consequence of this\nflight that it has been called the Glede, the word being derived\nfrom its gliding movements.\n\nThe sight of this bird is remarkably keen and piercing, and, from\nthe vast elevation to which it soars when in search of food, it is\nable to survey the face of the country beneath, and to detect the\npartridge, quail, chicken, or other creature that will serve it for\nfood. This piercing sight and habit of soaring render the passage in\nJob peculiarly appropriate to this species of Kite, though it does\nnot express the habits of the other. Should the Kite suspect danger\nwhen forced to leave its nest, it escapes by darting rapidly into\nthe air, and soaring at a vast height above the trees among which\nits home is made. From that elevation it can act as a sentinel, and\nwill not come down again until it is assured of safety.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nOf the habits of the BLACK KITE (_Milvus atra_), Mr. Tristram\ngives an admirable description. \"The habits of the bird bear out\nthe allusion in Isa. xxxiv. 15, for it is, excepting during the\nwinter three months, so numerous everywhere in Palestine as to be\nalmost gregarious. It returns about the beginning of March, and\nscatters itself over the whole country, preferring especially the\nneighbourhood of valleys, where it is a welcome and unmolested\nguest. It does not appear to attack the poultry, among whom it may\noften be seen feeding on garbage. It is very sociable, and the\nslaughter of a sheep at one of the tents will soon attract a large\nparty of black kites, which swoop down regardless of man and guns,\nand enjoy a noisy scramble for the refuse, chasing each other in a\nlaughable fashion, and sometimes enabling the wily raven to steal\noff with the coveted morsel during their contentions. It is the\nbutt of all the smaller scavengers, and is evidently most unpopular\nwith the crows and daws, and even rollers, who enjoy the amusement\nof teasing it in their tumbling flight, which is a manoeuvre most\nperplexing to the kite.\"\n\nThe same writer proceeds to mention that the Black Kite unlike the\nred species, is very careless about the position of its nest, and\nnever even attempts to conceal it, sometimes building it in a tree,\nsometimes on a rock-ledge, and sometimes in a bush growing on the\nrocks. It seems indeed desirous of making the nest as conspicuous as\npossible, and hangs it all over with bits of cloth, strips of bark,\nwings of birds, and even the cast skins of serpents.\n\nAnother species (_Milvus AEgyptiacus_) is sometimes called the Black\nKite from the dark hue of its plumage, but ought rather to retain\nthe title of Egyptian Kite. Unlike the black kite, this bird is\na great thief, and makes as much havoc among poultry as the red\nkite. It is also a robber of other birds, and if it should happen\nto see a weaker bird with food, it is sure to attack and rob it.\nLike the black kite, it is fond of the society of man, and haunts\nthe villages in great numbers, for the purpose of eating the offal,\nwhich in Oriental towns is simply flung into the streets to be\ndevoured by the dogs, vultures, kites, and other scavengers, without\nwhom no village would be habitable for a month.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWhether the word _raah_, which is translated as Glede in Deut. xiv.\n13, among the list of birds which may not be eaten, is one of these\nspecies of Kite, or a bird of a different group, is a very doubtful\npoint. This is the only passage in which the word occurs, and we\nhave but small grounds for definitely identifying it with any one\nspecies. The Hebrew Bible retains the word Glede, but affixes a mark\nof doubt to it, and several commentators are of opinion that the\nword is a wrong reading of _dayah_, which occurs in the parallel\npassage in Lev. xi. 14. The reading of the Septuagint follows this\ninterpretation, and renders it as Vulture in both cases. Buxtorf\ntranslates the word _raah_ as Rook, but suggests that _dayah_ is the\ncorrect reading.\n\nAccepting, however, the word _raah_, we shall find that it is\nderived from a root which signifies sight or vision, especially of\nsome particular object, so that a piercing sight would therefore be\nthe chief characteristic of the bird, which, as we know, is one of\nthe attributes of the Kites, together with other birds of prey, so\nthat it evidently must be classed among the group with which we are\nnow concerned. It has been suggested that, granting the _raah_ to\nbe a species distinct from the _dayah_, it is a collective term for\nthe larger falcons and buzzards, several species of which inhabit\nPalestine, and are not distinctly mentioned in the Bible.\n\nSeveral species of buzzard inhabit the Holy Land, and there is\nno particular reason why they should be mentioned except by a\ncollective name. Some of the buzzards are very large birds, and\nthough their wings are short when compared with those of the\nvultures and eagles, the flight of the bird is both powerful and\ngraceful. It is not, however, remarkable for swiftness, and never\nwas employed, like the falcon, in catching other birds, being\nreckoned as one of the useless and cowardly birds of prey. In\nconsonance with this opinion, to compare a man to a buzzard was\nthought a most cutting insult.\n\n[Illustration: THE PEREGRINE FALCON, OR GLEDE OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\nAs a general rule, it does not chase its prey like the eagles or the\nlarge-winged falcons, but perches on a rock or tree, watches for\nsome animal on which it can feed, pounces on it, and returns to its\npost, the whole movements being very like those of the flycatcher.\nThis sluggishness of disposition, and the soft and almost owl-like\nplumage, have been the means of bringing the bird into contempt\namong falconers.\n\nAs to the large falcons, which seem to be included in the term\n_raah_, the chief of them is the Peregrine Falcon (_Falco\nperegrinus_), which is tolerably common in the Holy Land. In his\n\"Land of Israel,\" Mr. Tristram gives several notices of this bird,\nfrom which we may take the following picture from a description of\na scene at Endor. \"Dreary and desolate looked the plain, though of\nexuberant fertility. Here and there might be seen a small flock of\nsheep or herd of cattle, tended by three or four mounted villagers,\narmed with their long firelocks, and pistols and swords, on the\nwatch against any small party of marauding cattle-lifters.\n\n\"Griffon vultures were wheeling in circles far over the rounded top\nof Tabor; and here and there an eagle was soaring beneath them in\nsearch of food, but at a most inconvenient distance from our guns.\nHariers were sweeping more rapidly and closely over the ground,\nwhere lambs appeared to be their only prey; and a noble peregrine\nfalcon, which in Central Palestine does not give place to the more\neastern lanner, was perched on an isolated rock, calmly surveying\nthe scene, and permitting us to approach and scrutinize him at our\nleisure.\"\n\nThe habit of perching on the rock, as mentioned above, is very\ncharacteristic of the Peregrine Falcon, who loves the loftiest and\nmost craggy cliffs, and makes its nest in spots which can only be\nreached by a bold and experienced climber. The nests of this bird\nare never built in close proximity, the Peregrine preferring to have\nits home at least a mile from the nest of any other of its kinsfolk.\nSometimes it makes a nest in lofty trees, taking possession of the\ndeserted home of some other bird; but it loves the cliff better\nthan the tree, and seldom builds in the latter when the former is\nattainable.\n\nIn the passage from the \"Land of Israel\" is mentioned the LANNER\nFALCON (_Falco lanarius_), another of the larger falcons to which\nthe term _raah_ may have been applied.\n\nThis bird is much larger than the Peregrine Falcon, and, indeed, is\nvery little less than the great gerfalcon itself. It is one of the\nbirds that were reckoned among the noble falcons; and the female,\nwhich is much larger and stronger than the male, was employed for\nthe purpose of chasing the kite, whose long and powerful wings could\nnot always save it from such a foe.\n\nAlthough the Lanner has been frequently mentioned among the British\nbirds, and the name is therefore familiar to us, it is not even\na visitor of our island. The mistake has occurred by an error in\nnomenclature, the young female Peregrine Falcon, which is much\nlarger and darker than the male bird, having been erroneously called\nby the name of Lanner.\n\n[Illustration: THE LANNER FALCON.]\n\nIn the illustration, a pair of Lanner Falcons are depicted as\npursuing some of the rock-pigeons which abound in Palestine, the\nattitudes of both birds being taken from life.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: hawk]\n\n\n\n\nTHE HAWK.\n\n     The Netz or Hawk--Number of species probably grouped under\n     that name--Rare occurrence of the word--The Sparrow-Hawk and\n     its general habits--Its place of nesting--The Kestrel, or\n     Wind-hover--Various names by which it is known in England--Its\n     mode of feeding and curious flight--The Hariers--Probable\n     derivation of the name--Species of Harier known to inhabit\n     Palestine--Falconry apparently unknown to the ancient Jews.\n\n\nThere is no doubt that a considerable number of species are grouped\ntogether under the single title Netz, or Hawk, a word which is\nrightly enough translated. That a great number of birds should have\nbeen thus confounded together is not surprising, seeing that even\nin this country and at the present time, the single word Hawk may\nsignify any one of at least twelve different species. The various\nfalcons, the hariers, the kestrel, the sparrow-hawk, and the\nhobbies, are one and all called popularly by the name of Hawk, and\nit is therefore likely that the Hebrew word Netz would signify as\nmany species as the English word Hawk. From them we will select one\nor two of the principal species.\n\nIn the first place, the word is of very rare occurrence. We only\nfind it three times. It first occurs in Lev. xi. 16, in which it is\nnamed, together with the eagle, the ossifrage, and many other birds,\nas among the unclean creatures, to eat which was an abomination. It\nis next found in the parallel passage in Deut. xiv. 15, neither of\nwhich portions of Scripture need be quoted at length.\n\nThat the word _netz_ was used in its collective sense is very\nevident from the addition which is made to it in both cases. The\nHawk, \"after its kind,\" is forbidden, showing therefore that\nseveral kinds or species of Hawk were meant. Indeed, any specific\ndetail would be quite needless, as the collective term was quite a\nsufficient indication, and, having named the vultures, eagles, and\nlarger birds of prey, the simple word _netz_ was considered by the\nsacred writer as expressing the rest of the birds of prey.\n\nWe find the word once more in that part of the Bible to which we\nusually look for any reference to natural history. In Job xxxix. 26,\nwe have the words, \"Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and turn [or\nstretch] her wings toward the south?\" The precise signification of\nthis passage is rather doubtful, but it is generally considered to\nrefer to the migration of several of the Hawk tribe. That the bird\nin question was distinguished for its power of flight is evident\nfrom the fact that the sacred poet has selected that one attribute\nas the most characteristic of the Netz.\n\nTaking first the typical example of the Hawks, we find that the\nSPARROW-HAWK (_Accipiter nisus_) is plentiful in Palestine, finding\nabundant food in the smaller birds of the country. It selects for\nits nest just the spots which are so plentiful in the Holy Land,\n_i.e._ the crannies of rocks, and the tops of tall trees. Sometimes\nit builds in deserted ruins, but its favourite spot seems to be\nthe lofty tree-top, and, in default of that, the rock-crevice. It\nseldom builds a nest of its own, but takes possession of that which\nhas been made by some other bird. Some ornithologists think that\nit looks out for a convenient nest, say of the crow or magpie, and\nthen ejects the rightful owner. I am inclined to think, however,\nthat it mostly takes possession of a nest that is already deserted,\nwithout running the risk of fighting such enemies as a pair of angry\nmagpies. This opinion is strengthened by the fact that the bird\nresorts to the same nest year after year.\n\nIt is a bold and dashing bird, though of no great size, and\nwhen wild and free displays a courage which it seems to lose in\ncaptivity. As is the case with so many of the birds, the female is\nmuch larger than her mate, the former weighing about six ounces, and\nmeasuring about a foot in length, and the latter weighing above nine\nounces, and measuring about fifteen inches in length.\n\n[Illustration: KESTREL HOVERING OVER A FIELD IN SEARCH OF PREY.]\n\nThe most plentiful of the smaller Hawks of Palestine is the COMMON\nKESTREL. This is the same species which is known under the names of\nKestrel, Wind-hover, and Stannel Hawk.\n\nIt derives its name of Wind-hover from its remarkable habit of\nhovering, head to windward, over some spot for many minutes\ntogether. This action is always performed at a moderate distance\nfrom the ground; some naturalists saying that the Hawk in question\nnever hovers at an elevation exceeding forty feet, while others,\nmyself included, have seen the bird hovering at a height of twice as\nmany yards. Generally, however, it prefers a lower distance, and is\nable by employing this manoeuvre to survey a tolerably large space\nbeneath. As its food consists in a very great measure of field-mice,\nthe Kestrel is thus able by means of its telescopic eyesight to see\nif a mouse rises from its hole; and if it should do so, the bird\ndrops on it and secures it in its claws.\n\n[Illustration: THE WIND-HOVER, OR KESTREL.]\n\nUnlike the sparrow-hawk, the Kestrel is undoubtedly gregarious, and\nwill build its nest in close proximity to the habitations of other\nbirds, a number of nests being often found within a few yards of\neach other. Mr. Tristram remarks that he has found its nest in the\nrecesses of the caverns occupied by the griffon vultures, and that\nthe Kestrel also builds close to the eagles, and is the only bird\nwhich is permitted to do so. It also builds in company with the\njackdaw.\n\nSeveral species of Kestrel are known, and of them at least two\ninhabit the Holy Land, the second being a much smaller bird than\nthe Common Kestrel, and feeding almost entirely on insects, which\nit catches with its claws, the common chafers forming its usual\nprey. Great numbers of these birds live together, and as they rather\naffect the society of mankind, they are fond of building their nests\nin convenient crannies in the mosques or churches. Independently of\nits smaller size, it may be distinguished from the Common Kestrel by\nthe whiteness of its claws.\n\nThe illustration is drawn from a sketch taken from life. The bird\nhovered so near a house, and remained so long in one place, that the\nartist fixed a telescope and secured an exact sketch of the bird\nin the peculiar attitude which it is so fond of assuming. After a\nwhile, the Kestrel ascended to a higher elevation, and then resumed\nits hovering, in the attitude which is shown in the upper figure. In\nconsequence of the great abundance of this species in Palestine, and\nthe peculiarly conspicuous mode of balancing itself in the air while\nin search of prey, we may feel sure that the sacred writers had it\nspecially in their minds when they used the collective term Netz.\n\nIt is easily trained, and, although in the old hawking days it was\nconsidered a bird which a noble could not carry, it can be trained\nto chase the smaller birds as successfully as the falcons can be\ntaught to pursue the heron. The name Tinnunculus is supposed by some\nto have been given to the bird in allusion to its peculiar cry,\nwhich is clear, shrill, and consists of a single note several times\nrepeated.\n\nOn page 444 the reader may see a representation of a pair of HARIER\nHAWKS flying below the rock on which the peregrine falcon has\nperched, and engaged in pursuing one of the smaller birds.\n\nThey have been introduced because several species of Harier are\nto be found in Palestine, where they take, among the plains and\nlowlands, the place which is occupied by the other hawks and falcons\namong the rocks.\n\nThe name of Harier appears to be given to these birds on account of\ntheir habit of regularly quartering the ground over which they fly\nwhen in search of prey, just like hounds when searching for hares.\nThis bird is essentially a haunter of flat and marshy lands, where\nit finds frogs, mice, lizards, on which it usually feeds. It does\nnot, however, confine itself to such food, but will chase and kill\nmost of the smaller birds, and occasionally will catch even the\nleveret, the rabbit, the partridge, and the curlew.\n\nWhen it chases winged prey, it seldom seizes the bird in the air,\nbut almost invariably keeps above it, and gradually drives it to\nthe ground. It will be seen, therefore, that its flight is mostly\nlow, as suits the localities in which it lives, and it seldom\nsoars to any great height, except when it amuses itself by rising\nand wheeling in circles together with its mate. This proceeding\ngenerally takes place before nest-building. The usual flight is a\nmixture of that of the kestrel and the falcon, the Harier sometimes\npoising itself over some particular spot, and at others shooting\nforwards through the air with motionless wings.\n\nUnlike the falcons and most of the hawks, the Harier does not as a\nrule perch on rocks, but prefers to sit very upright on the ground,\nperching generally on a mole-hill, stone, or some similar elevation.\nEven its nest is made on the ground, and is composed of reeds,\nsedges, sticks, and similar matter, materials that can be procured\nfrom marshy land. The nest is always elevated a foot or so from the\nground, and has occasionally been found on the top of a mound more\nthan a yard in height. It is, however, conjectured that in such\ncases the mound is made by one nest being built upon the remains of\nanother. The object of the elevated nest is probably to preserve the\neggs in case of a flood.\n\nAt least five species of Hariers are known to exist in the Holy\nLand, two of which are among the British birds, namely, the Marsh\nHarier (_Circus aeruginosus_), sometimes called the Duck Hawk and\nthe Moor Buzzard, and the Hen Harier (_Circus cyaneus_), sometimes\ncalled the White Hawk, Dove Hawk, or Blue Hawk, on account of the\nplumage of the male, which differs greatly according to age; and the\nRing-tailed Hawk, on account of the dark bars which appear on the\ntail of the female. All the Hariers are remarkable for the circlet\nof feathers that surrounds the eyes, and which resembles in a lesser\ndegree the bold feather-circle around the eye of the owl tribe.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBefore taking leave of the Hawks, it is as well to notice the entire\nabsence in the Scriptures of any reference to falconry. Now, seeing\nthat the art of catching birds and animals by means of Hawks is a\nfavourite amusement among Orientals, as has already been mentioned\nwhen treating of the gazelle (page 168), and knowing the unchanging\ncharacter of the East, we cannot but think it remarkable that no\nreference should be made to this sport in the Scriptures.\n\nIt is true that in Palestine itself there would be but little scope\nfor falconry, the rough hilly ground and abundance of cultivated\nsoil rendering such an amusement almost impossible. Besides, the use\nof the falcon implies that of the horse, and, as we have already\nseen, the horse was scarcely ever used except for military purposes.\n\nHad, therefore, the experience of the Israelites been confined\nto Palestine, there would have been good reason for the silence\nof the sacred writers on this subject. But when we remember that\nthe surrounding country is well adapted for falconry, that the\namusement is practised there at the present day, and that the\nIsraelites passed so many years as captives in other countries, we\ncan but wonder that the Hawks should never be mentioned as aids\nto bird-catching. We find that other bird-catching implements are\nfreely mentioned and employed as familiar symbols, such as the gin,\nthe net, the snare, the trap, and so forth; but that there is not\na single passage in which the Hawks are mentioned as employed in\nfalconry.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: BARN OWL.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE OWL.\n\n     The words which have been translated as Owl--Use made of the\n     Little Owl in bird-catching--Habits of the bird--The Barn,\n     Screech, or White Owl a native of Palestine--The Yanshuph, or\n     Egyptian Eagle Owl--Its food and nest.\n\n\nIn various parts of the Old Testament there occur several words\nwhich are translated as OWL in the Authorized Version, and in most\ncases the rendering is acknowledged to be the correct one, while in\none or two instances there is a difference of opinion on the subject.\n\nIn Lev. xi. 16, 17, we find the following birds reckoned among\nthose which are an abomination, and which might not be eaten by the\nIsraelites: \"The owl, and the night-hawk, and the cuckoo, and the\nhawk after his kind;\n\n\"And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl.\"\n\nIt is very likely that the Little Owl here mentioned is identical\nwith the Boomah of the Arabs. It is a bird that is common in Europe,\nwhere it is much valued by bird-catchers, who employ it as a means\nof attracting small birds to their traps. They place it on the top\nof a long pole, and carry it into the fields, where they plant the\npole in the ground. This Owl has a curious habit of swaying its\nbody backwards and forwards, and is sure to attract the notice of\nall the small birds in the neighbourhood. It is well known that the\nsmaller birds have a peculiar hatred to the Owl, and never can pass\nit without mobbing it, assembling in great numbers, and so intent\non their occupation that they seem to be incapable of perceiving\nanything but the object of their hatred. Even rooks, magpies, and\nhawks are taken by this simple device.\n\nWhether or not the Little Owl was used for this object by the\nancient inhabitants of Palestine is rather doubtful; but as they\ncertainly did so employ decoy birds for the purpose of attracting\ngame, it is not unlikely that the Little Owl was found to serve as a\ndecoy. We shall learn more about the system of decoy-birds when we\ncome to the partridge.\n\nThe Little Owl is to be found in almost every locality, caring\nlittle whether it takes up its residence in cultivated grounds, in\nvillages, among deserted ruins, or in places where man has never\nlived. As, however, it is protected by the natives, it prefers\nthe neighbourhood of villages, and may be seen quietly perched in\nsome favourite spot, not taking the trouble to move unless it be\napproached closely. And to detect a perched Owl is not at all an\neasy matter, as the bird has a way of selecting some spot where\nthe colours of its plumage harmonize so well with the surrounding\nobjects that the large eyes are often the first indication of its\npresence. Many a time I have gone to search after Owls, and only\nbeen made aware of them by the sharp angry snap that they make when\nstartled.\n\nThe common and well-known Barn Owl, also inhabits Palestine. Like\nthe Little Owl, it affects the neighbourhood of man, though it may\nbe found in ruins and similar localities. An old ruined building\nis sure to be tenanted by the Barn Owl, whose nightly shrieks very\noften terrify the belated wanderer, and make him fancy that the\nplace is haunted by disturbed spirits. Such being the habits of the\nbird, it is likely that in the East, where popular superstition has\npeopled every well with its jinn and every ruin with its spirit, the\nnocturnal cry of this bird, which is often called the Screech Owl\nfrom its note, should be exceedingly terrifying, and would impress\nitself on the minds of sacred writers as a fit image of solitude,\nterror, and desolation.\n\n[Illustration: THE LITTLE OWL.]\n\nThe Screech Owl is scarcely less plentiful in Palestine than the\nLittle Owl, and, whether or not it be mentioned under a separate\nname, is sure to be one of the birds to which allusion is made in\nthe Scriptures.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nAnother name now rises before us: this is the Yanshuph, translated\nas the Great Owl, a word which occurs not only in the prohibitory\npassages of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but in the Book of Isaiah. In\nthat book, ch. xxxiv. ver. 10, 11, we find the following passage:\n\"From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass\nthrough it for ever and ever.\n\n[Illustration: CAUGHT NAPPING.]\n\n\"But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl\n(_yanshuph_) also and the raven shall dwell in it: and He shall\nstretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of\nemptiness.\" The Jewish Bible follows the same reading.\n\nIt is most probable that the Great Owl or Yanshuph is the EGYPTIAN\nEAGLE OWL (_Bubo ascalaphus_), a bird which is closely allied to the\ngreat Eagle Owl of Europe (_Bubo maximus_), and the Virginian Eared\nOwl (_Bubo Virginianus_) of America. This fine bird measures some\ntwo feet in length, and looks much larger than its real size, owing\nto the thick coating of feathers which it wears in common with all\ntrue Owls, and the ear-like feather tufts on the top of its head,\nwhich it can raise or depress at pleasure. Its plumage is light\ntawny.\n\nThis bird has a special predilection for deserted places and ruins,\nand may at the present time be seen on the very spots of which the\nprophet spoke in his prediction. It is very plentiful in Egypt,\nwhere the vast ruins are the only relics of a creed long passed away\nor modified into other forms of religion, and its presence only\nintensifies rather than diminishes the feeling of loneliness that\noppresses the traveller as he passes among the ruins.\n\nThe European Eagle Owl has all the habits of its Asiatic congener.\nIt dwells in places far from the neighbourhood of man, and during\nthe day is hidden in some deep and dark recess, its enormous eyes\nnot being able to endure the light of day. In the evening it issues\nfrom its retreat, and begins its search after prey, which consists\nof various birds, quadrupeds, reptiles, fish, and even insects when\nit can find nothing better.\n\nOn account of its comparatively large dimensions, it is able to\novercome even the full-grown hare and rabbit, while the lamb and the\nyoung fawn occasionally fall victims to its voracity. It seems never\nto chase any creature on the wing, but floats silently through the\nair, its soft and downy plumage deadening the sound of its progress,\nand suddenly drops on the unsuspecting prey while it is on the\nground.\n\nThe nest of this Owl is made in the crevices of rocks, or in ruins,\nand is a very large one, composed of sticks and twigs, lined with a\ntolerably large heap of dried herbage, the parent Owls returning to\nthe same spot year after year. Should it not be able to find either\na rock or a ruin, it contents itself with a hollow in the ground,\nand there lays its eggs, which are generally two in number, though\noccasionally a third egg is found. The Egyptian Eagle Owl does much\nthe same thing, burrowing in sand-banks, and retreating, if it fears\ndanger, into the hollow where its nest has been made.\n\n[Illustration:\n\n  RAVEN.\n  BARN OWL.\n  EAGLE OWL.\n]\n\n[Illustration: A FAMILY COUNCIL.]\n\nIn the large illustration the two last-mentioned species are given.\nThe Egyptian Eagle Owl is seen with its back towards the spectator,\ngrasping in its talons a dead hare, and with ear-tufts erect is\nlooking towards the Barn Owl, which is contemplating in mingled\nanger and fear the proceedings of the larger bird. Near them is\nperched a raven, in order to carry out more fully the prophetic\nwords, \"the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it.\"\n\n[Illustration: owl]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: night-hawk]\n\n\n\n\nTHE NIGHT-HAWK.\n\n     Different interpretations of the word Tachmas--Probability\n     that it signifies the Nightjar--Various names of the bird--Its\n     remarkable jarring cry, and wheeling flight--Mode of\n     feeding--Boldness of the bird--Deceptive appearance of its size.\n\n\nWe next come to the vexed question of the word Tachmas which is\nrendered in the Authorized Version as NIGHT-HAWK.\n\nThis word only occurs among the list of prohibited birds (see Lev.\nxi. 16, and Deut. xiv. 15), and has caused great controversies among\ncommentators. The balance of probability seems to lie between two\ninterpretations,--namely, that which considers the word _tachmas_\nto signify the Night-hawk, and that which translates it as Owl. For\nboth of these interpretations much is to be said, and it cannot be\ndenied that of the two the latter is perhaps the preferable. If so,\nthe White or Barn Owl is probably the particular species to which\nreference is made.\n\nStill, many commentators think that the Night-hawk or Nightjar is\nthe bird which is signified by the word _tachmas_; and, as we have\nalready treated of the owls, we will accept the rendering of the\nAuthorized Version. Moreover, the Jewish Bible follows the same\ntranslation, and renders _tachmas_ as Night-hawk, but affixes the\nmark of doubt.\n\n[Illustration: THE NIGHT-HAWK.]\n\nIt is not unlikely that the Jews may have reckoned this bird among\nthe owls, just as is the case with the uneducated among ourselves,\nwho popularly speak of the Nightjar as the Fern Owl, Churn Owl, or\nJar Owl, the two last names being given to it on account of its\npeculiar cry. There are few birds, indeed, which have received a\ngreater variety of popular names, for, besides the Goatsucker and\nthe five which have already been mentioned, there are the Wheel-bird\nand Dor-hawk, the former of these names having been given to the\nbird on account of its wheeling round the trees while seeking for\nprey, and the latter on account of the dor-beetles on which it\nlargely feeds.\n\nThis curious variety of names is probably due to the very\nconspicuous character of the Nightjar, its strange, jarring,\nweird-like cry forcing itself on the ear of the least attentive, as\nit breaks the silence of night. It hardly seems like the cry of\na bird, but rather resembles the sound of a pallet falling on the\ncogs of a rapidly-working wheel. It begins in the dusk of evening,\nthe long, jarring note being rolled out almost interminably, until\nthe hearer wonders how the bird can have breath enough for such a\nprolonged sound. The hearer may hold his breath as long as he can,\ntake a full inspiration, hold his breath afresh, and repeat this\nprocess over and over again, and yet the Nightjar continues to trill\nout its rapid notes without a moment's cessation for breath, the\nsound now rising shrill and clear, and now sinking as if the bird\nwere far off, but never ceasing for an instant.\n\nThis remarkable cry has caused the uneducated rustics to look upon\nthe bird with superstitious dread, every one knowing its cry full\nwell, though to many the bird is unknown except by its voice. It is\nprobable that, in the days when Moses wrote the Law, so conspicuous\na bird was well known to the Jews, and we may therefore conjecture\nthat it was one of those birds which he would specially mention by\nname.\n\nThe general habits of the Nightjar are quite as remarkable as its\nnote. It feeds on the wing, chasing and capturing the various moths,\nbeetles, and other insects that fly abroad by night. It may be seen\nwheeling round the branches of some tree, the oak being a special\nfavourite, sometimes circling round it, and sometimes rising high\nin the air, and the next moment skimming along the ground. Suddenly\nit will disappear, and next moment its long trilling cry is heard\nfrom among the branches of the tree round which it has been flying.\nTo see it while singing is almost impossible, for it has a habit of\nsitting longitudinally on the branch, and not across it, like most\nbirds, so that the outline of its body cannot be distinguished from\nthat of the bough of which it is seated. As suddenly as it began,\nthe sound ceases, and simultaneously the bird may be seen wheeling\nagain through the air with its noiseless flight.\n\nBeing a very bold bird, and not much afraid of man, it allows a\ncareful observer to watch its movements clearly. I have often stood\nclose to the tree round which several Nightjars were circling, and\nseen them chase their prey to the ground within a yard or two of\nthe spot on which I was standing. The flight of the Nightjar is\nsingularly graceful. Swift as the swallow itself, it presents a\ncommand of wing that is really wonderful, gliding through the air\nwith consummate ease, wheeling and doubling in pursuit of some\nactive moth, whose white wings glitter against the dark background,\nwhile the sober plumage of its pursuer is scarcely visible, passing\noften within a few feet of the spectator, and yet not a sound or a\nrustle will reach his ears. Sometimes the bird is said to strike\nits wings together over its back, so as to produce a sharp snapping\nsound, intended to express anger at the presence of the intruder. I\nnever, however, heard this sound, though I have watched the bird so\noften.\n\nOwing to the soft plumage with which it is clad, this bird, like\nthe owls, looks larger than really is the case. It is between ten\nand eleven inches in length, with an expanse of wing of twenty\ninches, and yet weighs rather less than three ounces. Its large\nmouth, like that of the swallow tribe, opens as far as the eyes,\nand is furnished with a set of _vibrissae_ or bristles, which remind\nthe observer of the \"whale-bone\" which is set on the jaw of the\nGreenland whale.\n\n[Illustration: trees and bird]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: swallow]\n\n\n\n\nTHE SWALLOW.\n\n     Identification of the smaller birds--Oriental indifference to\n     natural history--Use of collective terms--The Swallow--The Bird\n     of Liberty--Swallows and Swifts--Variety of small birds found in\n     Palestine--The Swallows of Palestine.\n\n\nDifficult as is the identification of the mammalia mentioned in the\nBible, that of the birds is much more intricate.\n\nSome of the larger birds can be identified with tolerable certainty,\nbut when we come to the smaller and less conspicuous species,\nwe are at once lost in uncertainty, and at the best can only\noffer conjectures. The fact is, the Jews of old had no idea of\ndiscriminating between the smaller birds, unless they happened to be\ntolerably conspicuous by plumage or by voice. We need not be much\nsurprised at this. The Orientals of the present day do precisely the\nsame thing, and not only fail to discriminate between the smaller\nbirds, but absolutely have no names for them.\n\nBy them, the shrikes, the swallows, the starlings, the thrushes,\nthe larks, the warblers, and all the smaller birds, are called by\na common title, derived from the twittering sound of their voices,\nonly one or two of them having any distinctive titles. They look\nupon the birds much as persons ignorant of entomology look at a\ncollection of moths. There is not much difficulty in discriminating\nbetween the great hawk-moths, and perhaps in giving a name to one or\ntwo of them which are specially noticeable for any peculiarity of\nform or colour; but when they come to the \"Rustics,\" the \"Carpets,\"\nthe \"Wainscots,\" and similar groups, they are utterly lost; and,\nthough they may be able to see the characteristic marks when the\nmoths are placed side by side, they are incapable of distinguishing\nthem separately, and, to their uneducated eyes, twenty or thirty\nspecies appear absolutely alike.\n\nI believe that there is no country where a knowledge of practical\nnatural history is so widely extended as in England, and yet how few\neducated persons are there who, if taken along a country lane, can\nname the commonest weed or insect, or distinguish between a sparrow,\na linnet, a hedge-sparrow, and a chaffinch. Nay, how many are there\nwho, if challenged even to repeat the names of twelve little birds,\nwould be unable to do so without some consideration, much less to\nknow them if the birds were placed before them.\n\nSuch being the case in a country where the capability of observation\nis more or less cultivated in every educated person, we may well\nexpect that a profound ignorance on the subject should exist in\ncountries where that faculty is absolutely neglected as a matter of\neducation. Moreover, in England, there is a comparatively limited\nlist of birds, whereas in Palestine are found nearly all those which\nare reckoned among British birds, and many other species besides.\nThose which reside in England reside also for the most part in\nPalestine, while the greater part of the migratory birds pass, as we\nmight expect, into the Holy Land and the neighbouring countries.\n\nIf then we put together the two facts of an unobservant people and a\nvastly extended fauna, we shall not wonder that so many collective\nterms are used in the Scriptures, one word often doing duty for\ntwenty or thirty species. The only plan, therefore, which can be\nadopted, is to mention generally the birds which were probably\ngrouped under one name, and to describe briefly one or two of the\nmost prominent.\n\nIt is, however, rather remarkable that the song of birds does not\nappear to be noticed by the sacred writers. We might expect that\nseveral of the prophets, especially Isaiah, the great sacred poet,\nwho drew so many of his images from natural objects, would have\nfound in the song of birds some metaphor expressive of sweetness\nor joy. We might expect that in the Book of Job, in which so many\ncreatures are mentioned, the singing of birds would be brought as\nprominently forward as the neck clothed with thunder of the horse,\nthe tameless freedom of the wild ass, the voracity of the vulture,\nand the swiftness of the ostrich. We might expect the song of birds\nto be mentioned by Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, who introduces into\nhis rugged poem the roar of the old lion and the wail of the cub,\nthe venom of the serpent hidden in the wattled wall of the herdman's\nhut, and the ravages of the palmer-worm among the olives. Above all,\nwe might expect that in the Psalms there would be many allusions\nto the notes of the various birds which have formed such fruitful\nthemes for the poets of later times. There are, however, in the\nwhole of the Scriptures but two passages in which the song of birds\nis mentioned, and even in these only a passing allusion is made.\n\nOne of them occurs in Psalm civ. 12: \"By them (_i.e._ the springs\nof water) shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation,\nwhich sing among the branches.\" This passage is perhaps rendered\nmore closely in the Jewish Bible: \"Over them dwell the fowls of the\nheaven; they let their voices resound (or give their voice) from\nbetween the foliage.\"\n\nThe other occurs in Eccles. xii. 4: \"And the doors shall be shut in\nthe streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall\nrise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music\nshall be brought low.\" The word which is here translated as \"bird,\"\nis that which is rendered in some places as \"sparrow,\" in others\nas \"fowl,\" and in others as \"bird.\" Even in these passages, as the\nreader will have noticed, no marks of appreciation are employed, and\nwe hear nothing of the sweetness, joyousness, or mournfulness of the\nbird's song.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe will now proceed to the words which have been translated as\nSwallow in the Authorized Version.\n\nThese are two in number, namely, _deror_ and _agar_. Hebraists are,\nhowever, agreed that the latter word has been wrongly applied, the\ntranslators having interchanged the signification of two contiguous\nwords.\n\nWe will therefore first take the word _deror_. This word signifies\nliberty, and is well applied to the Swallow, the bird of freedom.\nIt is remarkable, by the way, how some of the old commentators have\ncontrived to perplex themselves about a very simple matter. One of\nthem comments upon the bird as being \"so called, because it has\nthe liberty of building in the houses of mankind.\" Another takes a\nsomewhat similar view of the case, but puts it in a catechetical\nform: \"Why is the swallow called the bird of liberty? Because it\nlives both in the house and in the field.\" It is scarcely necessary\nto point out to the reader that the \"liberty\" to which allusion is\nmade is the liberty of flight, the bird coming and going at its\nappointed times, and not being capable of domestication.\n\n[Illustration: LOST FROM THE FLOCK.]\n\nSeveral kinds of Swallow are known in Palestine, including the true\nSwallows, the martins, and the swifts, and, as we shall presently\nsee, it is likely that one of these groups was distinguished by a\nseparate name. Whether or not the word _deror_ included other birds\nbeside the Swallows is rather doubtful, though not at all unlikely;\nand if so, it is probable that any swift-winged insectivorous bird\nwould be called by the name of Deror, irrespective of its size or\ncolour.\n\nThe bee-eaters, for example, are probably among the number of the\nbirds grouped together under the word _deror_, and we may conjecture\nthat the same is the case with the sunbirds, those bright-plumed\nlittle beings that take in the Old World the place occupied by the\nhumming-birds in the New, and often mistaken for them by travellers\nwho are not acquainted with ornithology. One of these birds, the\n_Nectarinia Oseae_, is described by Mr. Tristram as \"a tiny little\ncreature of gorgeous plumage, rivalling the humming-birds of America\nin the metallic lustre of its feathers--green and purple, with\nbrilliant red and orange plumes under its shoulders.\"\n\nIn order to account for the singular variety of animal life which\nis to be found in Palestine, and especially the exceeding diversity\nof species among the birds, we must remember that Palestine is a\nsort of microcosm in itself, comprising within its narrow boundaries\nthe most opposite conditions of temperature, climate, and soil.\nSome parts are rocky, barren, and mountainous, chilly and cold at\nthe top, and acting as channels through which the winds blow almost\ncontinuously. The cliffs are full of holes, rifts, and caverns, some\nnatural, some artificial, and some of a mixed kind, the original\ncaverns having been enlarged and improved by the hand of man.\n\nAs a contrast to this rough and ragged region, there lie close\nat hand large fertile plains, affording pasturage for unnumbered\ncattle, and of a tolerably equable temperature, so that the animals\nwhich are pastured in it can find food throughout the year. Through\nthe centre of Palestine runs the Jordan, fertilizing its banks with\nperpetual verdure, and ending its course in the sulphurous and\nbituminous waters of the Dead Sea, under whose waves the ruins of\nthe wicked cities are supposed to lie. Westward we have the shore of\nthe Mediterranean with its tideless waves of the salt sea, and on\nthe eastward of the mountain range that runs nearly parallel to the\nsea is the great Lake of Tiberias, so large as to have earned the\nname of the Sea of Galilee.\n\n[Illustration: THE SWALLOW AND SWIFT.]\n\nUnder these favourable conditions, therefore, the number of species\nwhich are found in Palestine is perhaps greater than can be seen\nin any other part of the earth of the same dimensions, and it\nseems probable that for this reason, among many others, Palestine\nwas selected to be the Holy Land. If, for example, the Christian\nChurch had been originated under the tropics, those who lived in a\ncold climate could scarcely have understood the language in which\nthe Scriptures must necessarily have been couched. Had it, on the\ncontrary, taken its rise in the Arctic regions, the inhabitants\nof the tropics and temperate regions could not have comprehended\nthe imagery in which the teachings of Scripture must have been\nconveyed. But the small and geographically insignificant Land of\nPalestine combines in itself many of the characteristics which\nbelong respectively to the cold, the temperate, and the hot regions\nof the world, so that the terms in which the sacred writings are\ncouched are intelligible to a very great proportion of the world's\ninhabitants.\n\n[Illustration: VIEW OF THE SEA OF GALILEE.]\n\nThis being the case, we naturally expect to find that several\nspecies of the Swallow are inhabitants of Palestine, if so migratory\na bird can be said to be an inhabitant of any one country.\n\n[Illustration: THE SWALLOW'S FAVOURITE HAUNT.]\n\nThe chief characteristic of the Swallow, the \"bird of freedom,\"\nis that it cannot endure captivity, but is forced by instinct to\npass from one country to another for the purpose of preserving\nitself in a tolerably equable temperature, moving northwards as the\nspring ripens into summer, and southwards as autumn begins to sink\ninto winter. By some marvellous instinct it traces its way over\nvast distances, passing over hundreds of miles where nothing but\nthe sea is beneath it, and yet at the appointed season returning\nwith unerring certainty to the spot where it was hatched. How it\nis guided no one knows, but the fact is certain, that Swallows,\nremarkable for some peculiarity by which they could be at once\nidentified, have been observed to leave the country on their\nmigration, and to return in the following year to the identical nest\nwhence they started.\n\nIts habit of making its nest among the habitations of mankind is\nmentioned in a well-known passage of the Psalms: \"The sparrow hath\nfound an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may\nlay her young, even Thine altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King and my\nGod\" (Ps. lxxxiv. 3). The Swallow seems in all countries to have\nenjoyed the protection of man, and to have been suffered to build\nin peace under his roof. We find the same idea prevalent in the New\nWorld as well as the Old, and it is rather curious that the presence\nof the bird should so generally be thought to bring luck to a house.\n\nIn some parts of our country, a farmer would not dare to kill a\nSwallow or break down its nest, simply because he thinks that if\nhe did so his cows would fail to give their due supply of milk.\nThe connexion between the milking of a cow in the field and the\ndestruction of a Swallow's nest in the house is not very easy to\nsee, but nevertheless such is the belief. This idea ranks with that\nwhich asserts the robin and the wren to be the male and female of\nthe same species, and to be under some special divine protection.\n\nWhatever may be the origin of this superstition, whether it be\nderived from some forgotten source, or whether it be the natural\nresult of the confiding nature of the bird, the Swallow enjoys at\nthe present day the protection of man, and builds freely in his\nhouses, and even his places of worship. The heathen temples, the\nMahometan mosques, and the Christian churches are alike inhabited by\nthe Swallow, who seems to know her security, and often places her\nnest where a child might reach it.\n\nThe bird does not, however, restrict itself to the habitations of\nman, though it prefers them; and in those places where no houses\nare to be found, and yet where insects are plentiful, it takes\npossession of the clefts of rocks, and therein makes its nest.\nMany instances are known where the Swallow has chosen the most\nextraordinary places for its nest. It has been known to build year\nafter year on the frame of a picture, between the handles of a pair\nof shears hung on the wall, on a lamp-bracket, in a table-drawer, on\na door-knocker, and similar strange localities.\n\nThe swiftness of flight for which this bird is remarkable is noticed\nby the sacred writers. \"As the bird by wandering, as the swallow\nby flying, so the curse causeless shall not come\" (Prov. xxvi. 2).\nThis passage is given rather differently in the Jewish Bible, though\nthe general sense remains the same: \"As the bird is ready to flee,\nas the swallow to fly away; so a causeless execration, it shall not\ncome.\" It is possible, however, that this passage may allude rather\nto the migration than the swiftness of the bird.\n\n[Illustration: SWALLOWS AT HOME.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE HOOPOE, OR LAPWING OF SCRIPTURE.\n\n     The \"Dukiphath\" of Scripture--Various interpretations of the\n     word--The Hoopoe--Its beauty and ill reputation--The unpleasant\n     odour of its nest--Food of the Hoopoe--Its beautiful nest, and\n     remarkable gestures--A curious legend of Solomon and the Hoopoe.\n\n\nIn the two parallel chapters, Lev. xi. and Deut. xiv., there occurs\nthe name of a bird which is translated in the Authorized Version,\nLapwing: \"And the stork, the heron after her kind, the lapwing, and\nthe bat.\"\n\nThe Hebrew word is _dukiphath_, and various interpretations have\nbeen proposed for it, some taking it to be the common domestic fowl,\nothers the cock-of-the-woods, or capercailzie, while others have\npreferred to translate it as Hoopoe. The Jewish Bible retains the\nword lapwing, but adds the mark of doubt. Commentators are, however,\nagreed that of all these interpretations, that which renders the\nword as HOOPOE (_Upupa epops_) is the best.\n\nThere would be no particular object in the prohibition of such a\nbird as the lapwing, or any of its kin, while there would be very\ngood reasons for the same injunction with regard to the Hoopoe.\n\nIn spite of the beauty of the bird, it has always had rather an ill\nreputation, and, whether in Europe or Asia, its presence seems to\nbe regarded by the ignorant with a kind of superstitious aversion.\nThis universal distaste for the Hoopoe is probably occasioned by an\nexceedingly pungent and disagreeable odour which fills the nest of\nthe bird, and which infects for a considerable time the hand which\nis employed to take the eggs.\n\nThe nest is, moreover, well calculated for retaining any unpleasant\nsmell, being generally made in the hollow of a tree, and having\ntherefore but little of that thorough ventilation which is found in\nnearly all nests which are built on boughs and sprays.\n\nThe food of the Hoopoe consists almost entirely of insects They\nhave been said to feed on earth-worms; but this notion seems to be\na mistaken one, as in captivity they will not touch an earth-worm\nso long as they can procure an insect. Beetles of various kinds\nseem to be their favourite food, and when the beetles are tolerably\nlarge--say, for example, as large as the common cockchafer and\ndor-beetle--the bird beats them into a soft mass before it attempts\nto eat them. Smaller beetles are swallowed without any ceremony. The\nvarious boring insects which make their home in decaying wood are\nfavourite articles of diet with the Hoopoe, which digs them out of\nthe soft wood with its long curved beak.\n\nIt has already been mentioned that the nest is usually made in the\nhollow of a tree. In many parts of the country however, hollow trees\ncannot be found, and in that case the Hoopoe resorts to clefts in\nthe rock, or even to holes in old ruins.\n\nThe bird is a peculiarly conspicuous one, not only on account of\nits boldly-barred plumage and its beautiful crest, but by its cry\nand its gestures. It has a way of elevating and depressing its\ncrest, and bobbing its head up and down, in a manner which could\nnot fail to attract the attention even of the most incurious, the\nwhole aspect and expression of the bird varying with the raising and\ndepressing of the crest.\n\nRespecting this crest there is a curious old legend. As is the case\nwith most of the Oriental legends, it introduces the name of King\nSolomon, who, according to Oriental notions, was a mighty wizard\nrather than a wise king, and by means of his seal, on which was\nengraven the mystic symbol of Divinity, held sway over the birds,\nthe beasts, the elements, and even over the Jinns and Afreets,\n_i.e._ the good and evil spirits, which are too ethereal for the\nmaterial world and too gross for the spiritual, and therefore hold\nthe middle place between them.\n\nOn one of his journeys across the desert, Solomon was perishing from\nthe heat of the sun, when the Hoopoes came to his aid, and flew in\na dense mass over his head, thus forming a shelter from the fiery\nsunbeams. Grateful for this assistance, the monarch told the Hoopoes\nto ask for a boon, and it should be granted to them. The birds,\nafter consulting together, agreed to ask that from that time every\nHoopoe should wear a crown of gold like Solomon himself. The request\nwas immediately granted, and each Hoopoe found itself adorned with\na royal crown. At first, while their honours were new, great was\nthe joy of the birds, who paused at every little puddle of water to\ncontemplate themselves, bowing their heads over the watery mirror so\nas to display the crown to the best advantage.\n\nSoon, however, they found cause to repent of their ambition. The\ngolden crown became heavy and wearisome to them, and, besides, the\nwealth bestowed on the birds rendered them the prey of every fowler.\nThe unfortunate Hoopoes were persecuted in all directions for the\nsake of their golden crowns which they could neither take off nor\nconceal.\n\nAt last, the few survivors presented themselves before Solomon, and\nbegged him to rescind his fatal gift, which he did by substituting a\ncrest of feathers for the crown of gold. The Hoopoe, however, never\nforgets its former grandeur, and is always bowing and bending itself\nas it used to do when contemplating its golden crown in the water.\n\n[Illustration: lapwing]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: EASTERN HOUSE-TOP.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE SPARROW.\n\n     The Sparrow upon the house top--Architecture of the East--Little\n     birds exposed for sale in the market--The two Sparrows sold for\n     a farthing--Bird-catching--The net, the snare, and the trap.\n\n\nWe have already discussed the signification of the compound word\n_tzippor-deror_, and will now take the word _tzippor_ alone.\n\nLike many other Hebrew terms, the word is evidently used in a\ncollective sense, signifying any small bird that is not specially\ndesignated. In several portions of Scripture it is translated as\nSparrow, and to that word we will at present restrict ourselves.\n\nOn turning to Ps. cii. 5-7, we find that the word is used as an\nemblem of solitude and misery: \"By reason of the voice of my\ngroaning, my bones cleave to my skin.\n\n\"I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the\ndesert,\n\n\"I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house-top.\"\n\nThe word which is here translated as \"Sparrow\" is _tzippor_, the\nsame which is rendered as \"bird\" in Lev. xiv. 4. The Hebrew Bible\nmore consistently uses the collective term \"bird\" in both instances,\nand renders the passage as, \"I watch, and am as a lonely bird upon a\nroof.\"\n\nNow, any one who knows the habits of the Sparrow is perfectly aware\nthat it is a peculiarly sociable bird. It is quarrelsome enough with\nits fellows, and always ready to fight for a stray grain or morsel\nof food; but it is exceedingly gregarious, assembling together in\nlittle parties, enlivening the air with its merry though unmusical\ntwitterings.\n\nThis cosmopolitan bird is plentiful in the coast towns of Palestine,\nwhere it haunts the habitations of men with the same dauntless\nconfidence which it displays in this country. It is often seen upon\nroofs or house-tops, but is no more apt to sit alone in Palestine\nthan it is here. On the contrary, the Sparrows collect in great\nnumbers on the house-tops, attracted by the abundant supply of food\nwhich it finds there. This requires some little explanation.\n\nThe house-tops of the East, instead of being gabled and tiled as\namong ourselves, to allow the rain to run off, are quite flat,\nand serve as terraces or promenades in the evening, or even for\nsleeping-places; and from the house-tops proclamations were made.\nSee, for example, 1 Sam. ix. 25: \"And when they were come down from\nthe high place into the city, Samuel communed with Saul upon the top\nof the house\"--this being the ordinary place which would be chosen\nfor a conversation. In order to keep out the heat of the mid-day\nsun, tents were sometimes pitched upon these flat house-tops. (See\n2 Sam. xvi. 22.) Reference to the use of the house-tops as places\nfor conversation are made in the New Testament. See, for example,\nMatt. x. 27: \"What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light;\nand what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the house-tops.\"\nAnother passage of a similar nature occurs in Luke xii. 3:\n\"Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in\nthe light, and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall\nbe proclaimed on the house-tops.\"\n\nThese roofs, instead of being built with sloping rafters like those\nto which we are accustomed in this country, are made with great\nbeams of wood laid horizontally, and crossed by planks, poles, and\nbrushwood packed tightly together. As this roof would not keep out\nthe rain, it is covered with a thick layer of clay mixed with straw,\nand beaten down as hard as possible. This covering has constantly\nto be renewed, as, even in the best made roofs, the heavy rains are\nsure to wash away some portion of the clay covering, which has to be\npatched up with a fresh supply of earth. A stone roller is generally\nkept on the roof of each house for the purpose of making a flat and\neven surface.\n\nThe earth which is used for this purpose is brought from the\nuncultivated ground, and is full of various seeds. As soon as the\nrains fall, these seeds spring up, and afford food to the Sparrows\nand other little birds, who assemble in thousands on the house-tops,\nand then peck away just as they do in our own streets and farm-yards.\n\nIt is now evident that the \"sparrow alone and melancholy upon the\nhouse-tops\" cannot be the lively, gregarious Sparrow which assembles\nin such numbers on these favourite feeding-places. We must therefore\nlook for some other bird, and naturalists are now agreed that we may\naccept the BLUE THRUSH (_Petrocossyphus cyaneus_) as the particular\nTzippor, or small bird, which sits alone on the house-tops.\n\nThe colour of this bird is a dark blue, whence it derives its\npopular name. Its habits exactly correspond with the idea of\nsolitude and melancholy. The Blue Thrushes never assemble in flocks,\nand it is very rare to see more than a pair together. It is fond of\nsitting on the tops of houses, uttering its note, which, however\nagreeable to itself, is monotonous and melancholy to a human ear.\n\nIn connexion with the passage already quoted, \"What ye hear in\nthe ear, that preach ye upon the house-tops,\" I will take the\nopportunity of explaining the passage itself, which scarcely seems\nrelevant to the occasion unless we understand its bearings. The\ncontext shows that our Lord was speaking of the new doctrines which\nHe had come to teach, and the duty of spreading them, and alludes\nto a mode of religious teaching which was then in vogue.\n\nThe long captivity of the Jews in Babylon had caused the Hebrew\nlanguage to be disused among the common people, who had learned\nthe Chaldaic language from their captors. After their return to\nPalestine, the custom of publicly reading the Scriptures was found\nto be positively useless, the generality of the people being\nignorant of the Hebrew language.\n\n[Illustration: READING THE LAW TO THE PEOPLE AFTER THE RETURN FROM\nCAPTIVITY.]\n\nAccordingly, the following modification was adopted. The roll of\nthe Scriptures was brought out as usual, and the sacred words read,\nor rather chanted. After each passage was read, a doctor of the law\nwhispered its meaning into the ear of a Targumista or interpreter,\nwho repeated to the people in the Chaldaic language the explanation\nwhich the doctor had whispered in Hebrew. The reader will now see\nhow appropriate is the metaphor, the whispering in the ear and\nsubsequent proclamation being the customary mode of imparting\nreligious instruction.\n\nIf the reader will now turn to Matt. x. 29, he will find that the\nword \"sparrow\" is used in a passage which has become very familiar\nto us. \"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them\nshall not fall on the ground without your Father.\n\n\"But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.\n\n\"Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.\"\nThe same sentences are given by St. Luke (xii. 6), in almost the\nsame words.\n\n[Illustration: THE BLUE THRUSH, OR SPARROW OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\nNow the word which is translated as \"Sparrow\" is _strouthion_, a\ncollective word, signifying a bird of any kind. Without the addition\nof some epithet, it was generally used to signify any kind of small\nbird, though it is occasionally employed to signify even so large\na creature as an eagle, provided that the bird had been mentioned\nbeforehand. Conjoined with the word \"great,\" it signifies the\nostrich; and when used in connexion with a word significative of\nrunning, it is employed as a general term for all cursorial birds.\n\nIn the passages above quoted it is used alone, and evidently\nsignifies any kind of little bird, whether it be a sparrow or not.\nAllusion is made by our Lord to a custom, which has survived to\nthe present day, of exposing for sale in the markets the bodies\nof little birds. They are stripped of their feathers, and spitted\ntogether in rows, and always have a large sale.\n\nVarious birds are sold in this manner, little if any distinction\nbeing made between them, save perhaps in respect of size, the larger\nspecies commanding a higher price than the small birds. In fact,\nthey are arranged exactly after the manner in which the Orientals\nsell their \"kabobs,\" _i.e._ little pieces of meat pierced by wooden\nskewers.\n\nIt is evident that to supply such a market it is necessary that\nthe birds should be of a tolerably gregarious nature, so that a\nconsiderable number can be caught at a time. Nets were employed for\nthis purpose, and we may safely infer that the forms of the nets\nand the methods of using them were identical with those which are\nemployed in the same country at the present day.\n\nThe fowlers supply themselves with a large net supported on two\nsticks, and, taking a lantern with them fastened to the top of a\npole, they sally out at night to the places where the small birds\nsleep.\n\nRaising the net on its sticks, they lift it to the requisite height,\nand hold the lantern exactly opposite to it, so as to place the\nnet between the birds and the lantern. The roosting-places are\nthen beaten with sticks or pelted with stones, so as to awaken the\nsleeping birds. Startled by the sudden noise, they dash from their\nroosts, instinctively make towards the light, and so fall into the\nnet. Bird-catching with nets is several times mentioned in the Old\nTestament, but in the New the net is only alluded to as used for\ntaking fish.\n\nBeside the net, several other modes of bird-catching were used by\nthe ancient Jews, just as is the case at the present day. Boys, for\nexample, who catch birds for their own consumption, and not for the\nmarket, can do so by means of various traps, most of which are made\non the principle of the noose, or snare. Sometimes a great number\nof hair-nooses are set in places to which the birds are decoyed, so\nthat in hopping about many of them are sure to become entangled in\nthe snares. Sometimes the noose is ingeniously suspended in a narrow\npassage which the birds are likely to traverse, and sometimes a\nsimple fall-trap is employed.\n\nWe now pass to another division of the subject. In Ps. lxxxiv. 1-3,\nwe come upon a passage in which the Sparrow is again mentioned: \"How\namiable are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!\n\n\"My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my\nheart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.\n\n\"Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for\nherself, where she may lay her young, even Thine altars, O Lord of\nhosts, my King, and my God.\"\n\n[Illustration: THE TREE-SPARROW, OR SPARROW OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\nIt is evident that we have in this passage a different bird from the\nSparrow that sitteth alone upon the house-tops; and though the same\nword, _tzippor_, is used in both cases, it is clear that whereas\nthe former bird was mentioned as an emblem of sorrow, solitude,\nand sadness, the latter is brought forward as an image of joy and\nhappiness. \"Blessed are they,\" proceeds the Psalmist, \"that dwell\nin Thy house: they will be still praising Thee.... For a day in Thy\ncourts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in\nthe house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.\"\n\nAccording to Mr. Tristram, this is probably one of the species to\nwhich allusion is made by the Psalmist. While inspecting the ruins\nin the neighbourhood of the Temple, he came upon an old wall. \"Near\nthis gate I climbed on to the top of the wall, and walked along for\nsome time, enjoying the fine view at the gorge of the Kedron, with\nits harvest crop of little white tombs. In a chink I discovered a\nsparrow's nest (_Passer cisalpinus_, var.) of a species so closely\nallied to our own that it is difficult to distinguish it, one of the\nvery kind of which the Psalmist sung.... The swallows had departed\nfor the winter, but the sparrow has remained pertinaciously through\nall the sieges and changes of Jerusalem.\"\n\nThe same traveller thinks that the TREE SPARROW (_Passer montanus_)\nmay be the species to which the sacred writer refers, as it is even\nnow very plentiful about the neighbourhood of the Temple. In all\nprobability we may accept both these birds as representatives of the\nSparrow which found a home in the Temple. The swallow is separately\nmentioned, possibly because its migratory habits rendered it a\npeculiarly conspicuous bird; but it is probable that many species of\nbirds might make their nests in a place where they felt themselves\nsecure from disturbance, and that all these birds would be mentioned\nunder the collective and convenient term of Tzipporim.\n\n[Illustration: sparrows]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: old tree]\n\n\n\n\nTHE CUCKOO.\n\n     The Cuckoo only twice mentioned in Scripture--The common\n     species, and the Great Spotted Cuckoo--Depositing the egg.\n\n\nOnly in two instances is the word CUCKOO found in the Authorized\nVersion of the Bible, and as they occur in parallel passages they\nare practically reduced to one. In Lev. xi. 16 we find it mentioned\namong the birds that might not be eaten, and the same prohibition is\nrepeated in Deut. xiv. 15, the Jews being ordered to hold the bird\nin abomination.\n\nIt is rather remarkable that the Arabic name for the bird is exactly\nthe same as ours, the peculiar cry having supplied the name. Its\nhabit of laying its eggs in the nests of other birds is well known,\ntogether with the curious fact, that although so large a bird,\nmeasuring more than a foot in length, its egg is not larger than\nthat of the little birds, such as the hedge-sparrow, robin, or\nredstart.\n\n[Illustration: THE GREAT SPOTTED CUCKOO.]\n\nBesides this species, another Cuckoo inhabits Palestine, and is\nmuch more common. This is the GREAT SPOTTED CUCKOO (_Oxylophus\nglandarius_). The birds belonging to this genus have been separated\nfrom the other Cuckoos because the feathers on the head are formed\ninto a bold crest, in some species, such as Le Vaillant's Cuckoo,\nreminding the observer of the crest of the cockatoo. This fine bird\nmeasures nearly sixteen inches in length, and can be distinguished,\nnot only by the crested head, but by the reddish grey of the throat\nand chest, and the white tips of the wing and tail feathers.\n\nThis species lays its eggs in the nests of comparatively large\nbirds, such as the rooks, crows, and magpies.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: NOAH RECEIVES THE DOVE.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE DOVE.\n\n     Parallel between the lamb and the Dove--The Dove and the olive\n     branch--Abram's sacrifice, and its acceptance--The Dove-sellers\n     of the Temple--The Rock Dove and its multitudes.\n\n\nIn giving the Scriptural history of the Doves and Pigeons, we\nshall find ourselves rather perplexed in compressing the needful\ninformation into a reasonable space. There is no bird which plays\na more important part, both in the Old and the New Testaments, or\nwhich is employed so largely in metaphor and symbol.\n\nThe Doves and Pigeons were to the birds what were the sheep and\nlambs to the animals, and, like them, derived their chief interest\nfrom their use in sacrifice. Both the lamb and the young pigeon\nbeing emblems of innocence, both were used on similar occasions, the\nlatter being in many instances permitted when the former were too\nexpensive for the means of the offerer. As to the rendering of the\nHebrew words which have been translated as Pigeon, Dove, and Turtle\nDove, there has never been any discussion. The Hebrew word _yonah_\nhas always been acknowledged to signify the Dove or Pigeon, and the\nword _tor_ to signify the Turtle Dove. Generally, the two words are\nused in combination, so that _tor-yonah_ signifies the Turtle Dove.\n\nThough the interpretation of the word _yonah_ is universally\naccepted, there is a little difficulty about its derivation, and\nits signification apart from the bird. Some have thought that it is\nderived from a root signifying warmth, in allusion to the warmth of\nits affection, the Dove having from time immemorial been selected as\nthe type of conjugal love. Others, among whom is Buxtorf, derive it\nfrom a word which signifies oppression, because the gentle nature of\nthe Dove, together with its inability to defend itself, cause it to\nbe oppressed, not only by man, but by many rapacious birds.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe first passage in which we hear of the Dove occurs in the earlier\npart of Genesis. Indeed, the Dove and the raven are the first\ntwo creatures that are mentioned by any definite names, the word\n_nachosh_, which is translated as \"serpent\" in Gen. iii. 1, being\na collective word signifying any kind of serpent, whether venomous\nor otherwise, and not used for the purpose of designating any\nparticular species.\n\nTurning to Gen. viii. 8, we come to the first mention of the Dove.\nThe whole passage is too familiar to need quoting, and it is only\nneedful to say that the Dove was sent out of the ark in order that\nNoah might learn whether the floods had subsided, and that, after\nshe had returned once, he sent her out again seven days afterwards,\nand that she returned, bearing an olive-branch (or leaf, in the\nJewish Bible). Seven days afterwards he sent the Dove for the third\ntime, but she had found rest on the earth, and returned no more.\n\nIt is not within the province of this work to treat, except in the\nmost superficial manner, of the metaphorical signification of the\nScriptures. I shall, therefore, allude but very slightly to the\nmetaphorical sense of the passages which record the exit from the\nark and the sacrifice of Noah. Suffice it to say that, putting\nentirely aside all metaphor, the characters of the raven and the\nDove are well contrasted. The one went out, and, though the trees\nwere at that time submerged, it trusted in its strong wings, and\nhovered above the watery expanse until the flood had subsided. The\nDove, on the contrary, fond of the society of man, and having none\nof the wild, predatorial habits which distinguish the raven, twice\nreturned to its place of refuge, before it was finally able to find\na resting-place for its foot.\n\nAfter this, we hear nothing of the Dove until the time of Abraham,\nsome four hundred years afterwards, when the covenant was made\nbetween the Lord and Abram, when \"he believed in the Lord, and it\nwas counted to him for righteousness.\" In order to ratify this\ncovenant he was ordered to offer a sacrifice, which consisted of a\nyoung heifer, a she-goat, a ram, a turtle-dove, and a young dove or\npigeon. The larger animals were severed in two, but the birds were\nnot divided, and between the portions of the sacrifice there passed\na lamp of fire as a symbol of the Divine presence.\n\nIn after days, when the promise that the seed of Abram should be as\nthe stars of heaven for multitude had been amply fulfilled, together\nwith the prophecy that they should be \"strangers in a land that was\nnot theirs,\" and should be in slavery and under oppression for many\nyears, the Dove was specially mentioned in the new law as one of the\ncreatures that were to be sacrificed on certain defined occasions.\n\nEven the particular mode of offering the Dove was strictly defined.\nSee Lev. i. 14-17: \"If the burnt sacrifice for his offering to the\nLord be of fowls, then he shall bring his offering of turtle-doves,\nor of young pigeons.\n\n\"And the priest shall bring it unto the altar, and wring off his\nhead, and burn it on the altar; and the blood thereof shall be wrung\nout at the side of the altar.\n\n\"And he shall pluck away his crop with his feathers, and cast it\nbeside the altar, on the east part, by the place of the ashes.\n\n\"And he shall cleave it with the wings thereof, but shall not divide\nit asunder: and the priest shall burn it upon the altar, upon the\nwood that is upon the fire.\"\n\nHere we have a repetition not only of the sacrifice of Abram, but\nof the mode in which it was offered, care being taken that the body\nof the bird should not be divided. There is a slight, though not\nvery important variation in one or two portions of this passage.\nFor example, the wringing off the head of the bird is, literally,\npinching off, and had to be done with the thumb nail; and the\npassage which is by some translators rendered as the crop and the\nfeathers, is by others translated as the crop and its contents--a\nreading which seems to be more consonant with the usual ceremonial\nof sacrifice than the other.\n\nAs a general rule, the pigeon was only sanctioned as a sacrificial\nanimal in case one of more value could not be afforded; and so much\ncare was taken in this respect, that with the exception of the two\n\"sparrows\" (_tzipporim_) that were enjoined as part of the sacrifice\nby which the cleansed leper was received back among the people (Lev.\nxiv. 4), no bird might be offered in sacrifice unless it belonged to\nthe tribe of pigeons.\n\nIt was in consequence of the poverty of the family that the\nVirgin Mary brought two young pigeons when she came to present\nher new-born Son in the Temple. For those who were able to\nafford it, the required sacrifice was a lamb of the first year\nfor a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or Turtle Dove for a\nsin-offering. But \"if she be not able to bring a lamb, then she\nshall bring two turtles, or two young pigeons, the one for the\nburnt-offering and the other for a sin-offering.\" The extraordinary\nvalue which all Israelites set upon the first-born son is well\nknown, both parents even changing their own names, and being called\nrespectively the father and mother of Elias, or Joseph, as the case\nmay be. If the parents who had thus attained the summit of their\nwishes possessed a lamb, or could have obtained one, they would most\ncertainly have offered it in the fulness of their joy, particularly\nwhen, as in the case of Mary, there was such cause for rejoicing;\nand the fact that they were forced to substitute a second pigeon for\nthe lamb is a proof of their extreme poverty.\n\nWhile the Israelites were comparatively a small and compact nation,\ndwelling around their tabernacle, the worshippers could easily offer\ntheir sacrifices, bringing them from their homes to the altar. But\nin process of time, when the nation had become a large and scattered\none, its members residing at great distances, and only coming to the\nTemple once or twice in the year to offer their sacrifices, they\nwould have found that for even the poor to carry their pigeons with\nthem would have greatly increased the trouble, and in many cases\nhave been almost impossible.\n\nFor the sake of convenience, therefore, a number of dealers\nestablished themselves in the outer courts of the Temple, for the\npurpose of selling Doves to those who came to sacrifice. Sheep and\noxen were also sold for the same purpose, and, as offerings of money\ncould only be made in the Jewish coinage, money-changers established\nthemselves for the purpose of exchanging foreign money brought from\na distance for the legal Jewish shekel. That these people exceeded\ntheir object, and endeavoured to overreach the foreign Jews who were\nignorant of the comparative value of money and goods, is evident\nfrom the fact of their expulsion by our Lord, and the epithets which\nwere applied to them.\n\n[Illustration: JESUS DRIVES OUT OF THE TEMPLE THE MONEY-CHANGERS AND\nTHOSE WHO SOLD DOVES.]\n\nAccording to some old writers, the Dove was considered as having a\nsuperiority over other birds in the instinctive certainty with which\nit finds its way from one place to another. At the present time,\nour familiarity with the variety of pigeon known as the Carrier has\ntaught us that the eye is the real means employed by the pigeon\nfor the direction of its flight. Those who fly pigeons for long\ndistances always take them several times over the same ground,\ncarrying them to an increasing distance at every journey, so that\nthe birds shall be able to note certain objects which serve them as\nlandmarks.\n\nBees and wasps have recourse to a similar plan. When a young wasp\nleaves its nest for the first time, it does not fly away at once,\nbut hovers in front of the entrance for some time, getting farther\nand farther away from the nest until it has learned the aspect of\nsurrounding objects. The pigeon acts in precisely the same manner,\nand so completely does it depend upon eyesight that, if a heavy fog\nshould come on, the best-trained pigeon will lose its way.\n\n[Illustration: THE ROCK DOVE.]\n\nThe old writers, however, made up their minds that the pigeon found\nits way by scent, which sense alone, according to their ideas, could\nguide it across the sea. They were not aware of the power possessed\nby birds of making their eyes telescopic at will, or of the enormous\nincrease of range which the sight obtains by elevation. A pigeon at\nthe elevation of several hundred yards can see to an astonishing\ndistance, and there is no need of imagining one sense to receive\na peculiar development when the ordinary powers of another are\nsufficient to obtain the object.\n\nThat dove-cotes were in use among the earlier Jews is well known. An\nallusion to the custom of keeping pigeons in cotes is seen in Isa.\nlx. 8: \"Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their\nwindows?\" or, as the Jewish Bible translates the passage, \"as the\ndoves to their apertures?\" In this passage the sacred writer utters\na prophecy concerning the coming of the world to the Messiah, the\nGentiles flocking to Him as the clouds of pigeons fly homeward to\ntheir cotes.\n\n[Illustration: BLUE ROCK PIGEONS.]\n\nThe practice of pigeon-keeping has survived to the present day, the\nhouses of wealthy men being furnished with separate pigeon-houses\nfor the protection and shelter of these popular birds.\n\nIn the Holy Land are found all the species of Pigeons with which\nwe are familiar, together with one or two others. First, there is\nthe Rock Pigeon, or Blue Rock Dove, which is acknowledged to be the\norigin of our domestic breeds of Pigeons, with all their infinite\nvariety of colour and plumage. This species, though plentiful in\nPalestine, is not spread over the whole of the land, but lives\nchiefly on the coast and in the higher parts of the country. In\nthese places it multiplies in amazing numbers, its increase being\nalmost wholly unchecked by man, on account of the inaccessible\ncliffs in which it lays its eggs and nurtures its young, its only\nenemies being a few of the birds and beasts of prey, which can\nexercise but a trifling influence on these prolific birds.\n\nMr. Tristram, while visiting the Wady (or Valley) Seimun, which lies\nnear the Lake of Gennesaret, witnessed an amusing example of the\nvast number of these Pigeons.\n\n\"No description can give an adequate idea of the myriads of rock\npigeons. In absolute clouds they dashed to and fro in the ravine,\nwhirling round with a rush and a whirr that could be felt like a\ngust of wind. It was amusing to watch them upset the dignity and the\nequilibrium of the majestic griffon as they swept past him. This\nenormous bird, quietly sailing along, was quite turned on his back\nby the sudden rush of wings and wind.\"\n\nIn Palestine these birds are taken in nets, into which they are\ndecoyed by a very effective though cruel device.\n\nWhen one of these birds is trapped or snared, it is seized by its\ncapturers, who spare its life for the sake of using it as a decoy.\nThey blind it by sewing its eyelids together, and then fasten it to\na perch among trees. The miserable bird utters plaintive cries, and\ncontinually flaps its wings, thus attracting others of its kind, who\nsettle on the surrounding branches and are easily taken, their whole\nattention being occupied by the cries of their distressed companion.\n\nWe now come to the Turtle Doves, several of which inhabit the Holy\nLand; but, as they are similar in habits, we will confine ourselves\nto the common species, with which we are so familiar in this\ncountry. Its migratory habits are noticed in the sacred writings.\nSee the following passage in the Song of Solomon:\n\n\"Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers\nappear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and\nthe voice of the turtle is heard in our land\" (Cant. ii. 11, 12).\nThe prophet Jeremiah also refers to the migration of this bird:\n\"Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the\nturtle, and the crane, and the swallow observe the time of their\ncoming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord\" (viii. 7).\n\nBeside this species, there is the Collared Turtle Dove, one variety\nof which is known as the Barbary Dove. It is a large species,\nmeasuring more than a foot in length. Another species is the Palm\nTurtle, so called from its habit of nesting on palm-trees, when it\nis obliged to build at a distance from the habitations of man. It is\na gregarious bird, several nests being generally found on one tree,\nand even, when it cannot find a palm, it will build among the thorns\nin multitudes. Like the common Dove, it is fond of the society of\nman, and is sure to make its nest among human habitations, secure in\nits knowledge that it will not be disturbed.\n\n[Illustration: THE TURTLE DOVE.]\n\nIt is rather a small bird, being barely ten inches in length, and\nhaving no \"collar\" on the neck, like the two preceding species.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: chickens]\n\n\n\n\nPOULTRY.\n\n     Poultry plentiful in Palestine at the present day--The\n     Domestic Fowl unknown in the early times of Israel--The\n     eating and gathering of eggs--References to Poultry in the\n     New Testament--The egg and the scorpion--The fatted fowl of\n     Solomon--The hen brooding over her eggs--Poultry prohibited\n     within Jerusalem--The cock-crowing.\n\n\nAt the present day, poultry are plentiful both in Palestine and\nSyria, and that they were bred in the time of the Apostles is\nevident from one or two references which are made by our Lord. How\nlong the Domestic Fowl had been known to the Jews is extremely\nuncertain, and we have very little to guide us in our search.\n\nThat it was unknown to the Jews during the earlier period of their\nhistory is evident from the utter silence of the Old Testament on\nthe subject. A bird so conspicuous and so plentiful would certainly\nhave been mentioned in the Law of Moses had it been known to the\nIsraelites; but, in all its minute and detailed provisions, the Law\nis silent on the subject.\n\nNeither the bird itself nor its eggs are mentioned, although there\nare a few references to eggs, without signifying the bird which\nlaid them. The humane provision in Deut. xxii. 6, 7, refers not to\na domesticated, but to a wild bird: \"If a bird's nest chance to be\nbefore thee in any tree, or on the ground, whether they be young\nones, or eggs, and the dams sitting upon the young, or upon the\neggs, thou shalt not take the dam with the young: but thou shalt in\nany wise let the dam go, and take the young to thee; that it may be\nwell with thee, that thou mayest prolong thy days.\"\n\n[Illustration: THE DOMESTIC FOWL.]\n\nThere is but one passage in the Old Testament which has ever been\nconjectured to refer to the Domestic Fowl. It occurs in 1 Kings iv.\n22, 23: \"And Solomon's provision for one day was thirty measures of\nfine flour, and threescore measures of meal,\n\n\"Ten fat oxen, and twenty oxen out of the pastures, and an hundred\nsheep, besides harts, and roebucks, and fallow-deer, and fatted\nfowl.\"\n\nMany persons think that the fatted fowl mentioned in the\nabove-quoted passage were really Domestic Fowl, which Solomon\nhad introduced into Palestine, together with various other birds\nand animals, by means of his fleet. There may be truth in this\nconjecture, but, as there can be no certainty, we will pass from the\nOld Testament to the New.\n\nWe are all familiar with the passages in which the Domestic Fowl\nis mentioned in the New Testament. There is, for example, that\ntouching image employed by our Lord when lamenting over Jerusalem:\n\"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest\nthem that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered\nthy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her\nwings, and ye would not!\" The reference is evidently made to the\nDomesticated Fowl, which in the time of our Lord was largely bred in\nthe Holy Land.\n\nSome writers have taken objection to this statement in consequence\nof a Rabbinical law which prohibited poultry from being kept within\nthe walls of Jerusalem, lest in their search for food they should\nscratch up any impurity which had been buried, and so defile the\nholy city. But it must be remembered that in the time of Christ\nJerusalem belonged practically to the Romans, who held it with a\ngarrison, and who, together with other foreigners, would not trouble\nthemselves about any such prohibition, which would seem to them, as\nit does to us, exceedingly puerile, not to say unjustifiable.\n\nThat the bird was common in the days of our Lord is evident from the\nreference to the \"cock-crowing\" as a measure of time.\n\n[Illustration: chickens]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: peacock]\n\n\n\n\nTHE PEACOCK.\n\n     The foreign curiosities imported by Solomon--The word _Tucciyim_\n     and its various interpretations--Identity of the word with\n     the Cingalese name of the Peacock--Reasons why the Peacock\n     should have been brought to Solomon--Its subsequent neglect and\n     extirpation.\n\n\nAmong the many foreign objects which were imported by Solomon into\nPalestine, we find that the Peacock is specially mentioned. (See a\npassage which has already been mentioned in connexion with ivory and\napes.) The sacred historian, after mentioning the ivory throne, the\ngolden shields and targets, that all the vessels in Solomon's house\nwere of gold, and that silver was so common as to be of no account,\nproceeds to give the reason for this profuse magnificence. \"For the\nking had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in\nthree years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver,\nivory, and apes, and peacocks\" (1 Kings x. 22).\n\nThat this magnificent bird should have been one of those creatures\nthat were imported by Solomon is almost certain. It would be\nimported for the same reason as the apes; namely, for the purpose\nof adding to the glories of Solomon's house, and no bird could have\nbeen selected which would have a more magnificent effect than the\nPeacock. Moreover, although unknown in Palestine, it is extremely\nplentiful in India and Ceylon, inhabiting the jungle by thousands,\nand, by a curious coincidence, being invariably most plentiful in\nthose spots which are most frequented by tigers. In many parts\nof the country, great numbers of Peacocks frequent the temples,\nand live amicably with the sacred monkeys, passing their lives in\nabsolute security, protected by the sanctity of the place.\n\nTheir numbers, therefore, would render them easily accessible to\nSolomon's envoys, who would purchase them at a cheap rate from the\nnative dealers, while their surpassing beauty would render them\nsure of a sale on their arrival in Jerusalem. Indeed, their beauty\nmade so great an impression that they are separately mentioned by\nthe sacred chronicler, the Peacock and the ape being the only two\nanimals that are thought worthy of enumeration.\n\nThe Peacock may safely be termed one of the most beautiful of the\nfeathered tribe, and may even lay a well-founded claim to the\nchief rank among birds, in splendour of plumage and effulgence of\ncolouring.\n\nWe are so familiar with the Peacock that we think little of its\nreal splendour; but if one of these birds was brought to this\ncountry for the first time, it would create a greater sensation than\nmany animals which are now viewed in menageries with the greatest\ncuriosity and interest.\n\nThe train of the male Peacock is the most remarkable feature of this\nbeautiful bird; the feathers composing it are very long, and are\n with green, purple, bronze, gold, and blue in such a manner\nas to form distinct \"eyes.\"\n\nOn the head is a tuft of upright feathers, blackish upon their\nshafts, and rich golden green, shot with blue, on their expanded\ntips. The top of the head, the throat, and neck are the most\nrefulgent blue, changing in different lights to gold and green. The\nwings are darker than the rest of the plumage, the abdomen blackish,\nand the feathers of the thighs are fawn.\n\n[Illustration: THE PEACOCK.]\n\nThe female is much smaller than her mate, and not nearly so\nbeautiful, the train being almost wanting, and the colour\nashy-brown, with the exception of the throat and neck, which are\ngreen.\n\nIt seems that after Solomon's death the breed of Peafowl was not\nkept up, owing in all probability to the troubles which beset the\nthrone after that magnificent monarch died.\n\n[Illustration: feathers]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: partridge]\n\n\n\n\nTHE PARTRIDGE.\n\n     The word _Kore_ and its signification--The Partridge upon\n     the mountains--David's simile--The Desert Partridge and\n     its habits--Hunting the Partridge with sticks--Eggs of the\n     Partridge--Egg-hunting in Palestine--The various species of\n     Partridge.\n\n\nThere is a bird mentioned in the Old Testament, which, although its\nname is only given twice, is a very interesting bird to all students\nof the Scriptures, both passages giving an insight into the manners\nand customs of the scarcely changing East. This is the bird called\nin the Hebrew Kore, a word which has been generally accepted as\nsignifying some kind of Partridge. There is no doubt that, like most\nother Hebrew names of animated beings, the word is a collective one,\nsignifying a considerable number of species.\n\nThe first passage occurs in 1 Sam. xxvi. 20. When David was being\npursued by Saul, and had been forced to escape from the city and\nhide himself in the rocky valleys, he compared himself to the\nPartridge, which frequented exactly the same places: \"The king of\nIsrael is come out to seek a flea, as when one doth hunt a partridge\nupon the mountains.\"\n\nThe appositeness of this simile is perfect. The bird to which David\nalluded was in all probability the Desert Partridge (_Ammoperdix\nHeyii_), a species which especially haunts rocky and desert places,\nand even at the present day is exceedingly plentiful about the Cave\nof Adullam. The males, when they think themselves unobserved, are\nfond of challenging, or calling to each other in a loud ringing\nnote, a peculiarity that has earned for the bird the Hebrew name of\nKore, or \"the caller.\"\n\nIt is a very active bird, not taking to flight if it can escape by\nmeans of its legs, and, when pursued or disturbed, running with\ngreat swiftness to some rocky cleft in which it may hide itself,\ntaking care to interpose, as it runs, stones or other obstacles\nbetween itself and the object of its alarm. Thus, then, it will be\nseen how close was the parallel between this bird and David, who was\nforced, like the Partridge, to seek for refuge in the rocky caves.\n\nBut the parallel becomes even closer when we come to examine the\nfull meaning of the passage. The Partridge is at the present day\nhunted on the mountains exactly as was the case in the time of\nDavid. The usual hunters are boys, who provide themselves with\na supply of stout sticks about eighteen inches in length, and,\narmed with these, they chase the birds, hurling the sticks one\nafter the other along the ground, so as to strike the Partridge as\nit runs. Generally, several hunters chase the same bird, some of\nthem throwing the sticks along the ground, while others hurl them\njust above the bird, so that if it should take to flight, it may\nbe struck as it rises into the air. By pertinaciously chasing an\nindividual bird, the hunters tire it, and contrive to come so close\nthat they are certain to strike it.\n\n[Illustration: THE GREEK PARTRIDGE.]\n\nThe reader will now see how perfect is the image. Driven from\nthe city, David was forced to wander, together with the Desert\nPartridge, upon the hill-sides, and, like that bird, his final\nrefuge is the rock. Then came the hunters and pursued him, driving\nhim from place to place, as the boys hunt the Partridge, until he\nwas weary of his life, and exclaimed in his despair, \"I shall now\nperish one day by the hand of Saul.\"\n\nThe Partridges of Palestine are, like those of our own land,\nexceedingly prolific birds, laying a wonderful number of eggs, more\nthan twenty being sometimes found in a single nest. These eggs are\nused for food, and the consumption of them is very great, so that\nmany a Partridge has been deprived of her expected family: she has\nsat upon eggs, and hatched them not.\n\nJust as hunting the Partridge is an acknowledged sport among the\ninhabitants of the uncultivated parts of Palestine, so is searching\nfor the eggs of the bird a regular business at the proper time of\nyear.\n\n[Illustration: PARTRIDGES AND THEIR YOUNG.]\n\nOf these birds several species inhabit Palestine. There is, for\nexample, the Desert Partridge, which has already been mentioned. It\nis beautifully, though not brilliantly , and may be known by\nthe white spot behind the eye, the purple and chestnut streaks on\nthe sides, and the orange bill and legs. These, however, soon lose\ntheir colour after death.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: EASTERN QUAIL.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE QUAIL.\n\n     Migration of the Quail--Modes of catching the Quail in the\n     East--The Quail-hunters of Northern Africa--Quarrelsome nature\n     of the bird--Quail-fighting in the East--How the Quails were\n     brought to the Israelites.\n\n\nIn one or two parts of the Old Testament is found a word which has\nbeen translated in the Authorized Version of the Bible as QUAIL.\n\nThe word is _selav_, and in every case where it is mentioned it is\nused with reference to the same occurrence; namely, the providing\nof flesh-meat in the wilderness, where the people could find no\nfood. As the passages remarkably bear upon each other, it will be\nadvisable to quote them in the order in which they come.\n\nThe first mention of the Selav occurs in Exod. xvi. Only a few days\nafter the Israelites had passed the Red Sea, they began to complain\nof the desert land into which Moses had led them, and openly said\nthat they wished they had never left the land of their slavery,\nwhere they had plenty to eat. According to His custom, pitying their\nnarrow-minded and short-sighted folly, the natural result of the\nlong servitude to which they had been subject, the Lord promised to\nsend both bread and flesh-meat.\n\n\"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,\n\n\"I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel: speak unto\nthem, saying, At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye\nshall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am the Lord\nyour God.\n\n[Illustration: THE QUAIL.]\n\n\"And it came to pass, that at even the quails came up, and covered\nthe camp\" (ver. 11-13).\n\nThe next passage records a similar circumstance, which occurred\nabout a year afterwards, when the Israelites were tired of eating\nnothing but the manna, and again wished themselves back in Egypt.\n\"And there went forth a wind from the Lord, and brought quails from\nthe sea, and let them fall by the camp as it were a day's journey\non this side, and as it were a day's journey on the other side,\nround about the camp, and as it were two cubits high upon the face\nof the earth.\n\n\"And the people stood up all that day, and all that night, and all\nthe next day, and they gathered the quails: he that gathered least\ngathered ten homers; and they spread them all abroad for themselves\nround about the camp\" (Numb. xi. 31, 32).\n\nThe last passage in which Quails are mentioned occurs in the Psalms.\nIn Ps. cv. are enumerated the various wonders done on behalf of the\nIsraelites, and among them is specially mentioned this gift of the\nQuails and manna. \"The people asked, and He brought quails, and\nsatisfied them with the bread of heaven\" (ver. 40).\n\n\"He had commanded the clouds from above, and opened the doors of\nheaven,\n\n\"And had rained down manna upon them to eat, and had given them of\nthe corn of heaven.\n\n\"Man did eat angels' food: He sent them meat to the full.\n\n\"He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven; and by His power He\nbrought in the south wind.\n\n\"He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as\nthe sand of the sea\" (Ps. lxxviii. 23-27).\n\nIf the ordinary interpretation of _selav_ by \"Quail\" be accepted,\nthe description is exactly correct. The Quails fly in vast flocks,\nand, being weak-winged birds, never fly against the direction of the\nwind. They will wait for days until the wind blows in the required\ndirection, and will then take wing in countless multitudes; so that\nin an hour or two a spot on which not a Quail could be seen is\ncovered with them.\n\nOn account of their short wings, they never rise to any great\nheight, even when crossing the sea, while on land they fly at a very\nlow elevation, merely skimming over the ground, barely a yard or\n\"two cubits high upon the face of the earth.\"\n\nMoreover, the flesh of the Quail is peculiarly excellent, and would\nbe a great temptation to men who had passed so long a time without\neating animal food. Another corroboration of the identity of the\nQuail and the Selav is to be found in the mode in which the flesh is\nprepared at the present day. As soon as the birds have arrived, they\nare captured in vast multitudes, on account of their weariness.\nMany are consumed at once, but great numbers are preserved for\nfuture use by being split and laid out to dry in the sun, precisely\nas the Israelites are said to have spread out the Selavim \"all\nabroad for themselves round about the camp.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nAccepting, therefore, the Selav and Quail to be identical, we may\nproceed to the description of the bird.\n\nIt is small, plump, and round-bodied, with the head set closely on\nthe shoulders. Owing to this peculiarity of form, it has its Arab\nname, which signifies plumpness or fatness. The wings are pressed\nclosely to the body, and the tail is pointed, very short, and\ndirected downwards, so that it almost appears to be absent, and the\nbird seems to be even more plump than really is the case.\n\nSeveral modes of capturing these birds are still practised in the\nEast, and were probably employed, not only on the two occasions\nmentioned in Exodus and Numbers, but on many others of which the\nScriptural narrative takes no notice. One very simple plan is, for\nthe hunters to select a spot on which the birds are assembled,\nand to ride or walk round them in a large circle, or rather in a\nconstantly diminishing spiral. The birds are by this process driven\ncloser and closer together, until at the last they are packed in\nsuch masses that a net can be thrown over them, and a great number\ncaptured in it.\n\nSometimes a party of hunters unite to take the Quails, and employ a\nsimilar manoeuvre, except that, instead of merely walking round\nthe Quails, they approach simultaneously from opposite points,\nand then circle round them until the birds are supposed to be\nsufficiently packed. At a given signal they all converge upon the\nterrified birds, and take them by thousands at a time.\n\nIn Northern Africa these birds are captured in a very similar\nfashion. As soon as notice is given that a flight of Quails has\nsettled, all the men of the village turn out with their great\nburnouses or cloaks. Making choice of some spot as a centre, where\na quantity of brushwood grows or is laid down, the men surround it\non all sides, and move slowly towards it, spreading their cloaks in\ntheir outstretched hands, and flapping them like the wings of huge\nbirds. Indeed, when a man is seen from a little distance performing\nthis act, he looks more like a huge bat than a human being.\n\nAs the men gradually converge upon the brushwood, the Quails\nnaturally run towards it for shelter, and at last they all creep\nunder the treacherous shade. Still holding their outspread cloaks\nin their extended hands, the hunters suddenly run to the brushwood,\nfling their cloaks over it, and so enclose the birds in a trap from\nwhich they cannot escape. Much care is required in this method of\nhunting, lest the birds should take to flight, and so escape. The\ncircle is therefore made of very great size, and the men who compose\nit advance so slowly that the Quails prefer to use their legs rather\nthan their wings, and do not think of flight until their enemies are\nso close upon them that their safest course appears to be to take\nrefuge in the brushwood.\n\nBoys catch the Quails in various traps and springes, the\nmost ingenious of which is a kind of trap, the door of which\nover-balances itself by the weight of the bird.\n\nBy reason of the colour of the Quail, and its inveterate habit\nof keeping close to the ground, it easily escapes observation,\nand even the most practised eye can scarcely distinguish a single\nbird, though there may be hundreds within a very small compass.\nFortunately for the hunters, and unfortunately for itself, it\nbetrays itself by its shrill whistling note, which it frequently\nemits, and which is so peculiar that it will at once direct the\nhunter to his prey.\n\nThis note is at the same time the call of the male to the female\nand a challenge to its own sex. Like all the birds of its group,\nthe Quail is very combative, and generally fights a battle for the\npossession of each of its many mates. It is not gifted with such\nweapons of offence as some of its kinsfolk, but it is none the\nless quarrelsome, and fights in its own way as desperately as the\ngame-cock of our own country.\n\nIndeed, in the East, it is used for exactly the same purpose as\nthe game-cock. Battles between birds and beasts, not to say men,\nare the common amusement with Oriental potentates, and, when they\nare tired of watching the combats of the larger animals, they have\nQuail-fights in their own chambers. The birds are selected for this\npurpose, and are intentionally furnished with stimulating food,\nso as to render them even more quarrelsome than they would be by\nnature. Partridges are employed for the same cruel purpose; and as\nboth these birds are easily obtained, and are very pugnacious, they\nare especially suited for the sport.\n\nTwo passages occur in the Scriptures which exactly explain the mode\nin which the Quails were sent to the Israelites. The first is in\nPs. lxxviii. 26. The Psalmist mentions that the Lord \"caused an\neast wind to blow in the heaven, and by His power He brought in the\nsouth wind.\" Here, on examining the geographical position of the\nIsraelites, we see exactly how the south-east wind would bring the\nQuails.\n\nThe Israelites had just passed the Red Sea, and had begun to\nexperience a foretaste of the privations which they were to expect\nin the desert through which they had to pass. Passing northwards\nin their usual migrations, the birds would come to the coast of\nthe Red Sea, and there would wait until a favourable wind enabled\nthem to cross the water. The south-east wind afforded them just the\nvery assistance which they needed, and they would naturally take\nadvantage of it.\n\nIt is remarkable how closely the Scriptural narrative agrees with\nthe habits of the Quail, the various passages, when compared\ntogether, precisely coinciding with the character of the bird. In\nExod. xvi. 13 it is mentioned that \"at even the quails came up and\ncovered the camp.\" Nocturnal flight is one of the characteristics of\nthe Quail. When possible, they invariably fly by night, and in this\nmanner escape many of the foes which would make great havoc among\ntheir helpless columns if they were to fly by day.\n\nThe identity of the Selav with the common Quail is now seen to be\nestablished. In the first place, we have the name still surviving\nin the Arabic language. Next, the various details of the Scriptural\nnarrative point so conclusively to the bird, that even if we were to\nput aside the etymological corroboration, we could have but little\ndoubt on the subject. There is not a detail which is not correct.\nThe gregarious instinct of the bird, which induces it to congregate\nin vast numbers; its habit of migration; its inability to fly\nagainst the wind, and the necessity for it to await a favourable\nbreeze; its practice of flying by night, and its custom of merely\nskimming over the surface of the ground; the ease with which it is\ncaptured; the mode of preserving by drying in the sun, and the\nproverbial delicacy of its flesh, are characteristics which all\nunite in the Quail.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBefore closing our account of the Quail, it will be as well to\ndevote a short space to the nature of the mode by which the\nIsraelites were twice fed. Commentators who were unacquainted\nwith the natural history of the bird have represented the whole\noccurrence as a miraculous one, and have classed it with the\ndivision of the Red Sea and of the Jordan, with the various plagues\nby which Pharaoh was induced to release the Israelites, and with\nmany other events which we are accustomed to call miracles.\n\n[Illustration: birds]\n\nIn reality, there is scarcely anything of a miraculous character\nabout the event, and none seems to have been claimed for it. The\nQuails were not created at the moment expressly for the purpose of\nsupplying the people with food, nor were they even brought from any\ngreat distance. They were merely assisted in the business on which\nthey were engaged--namely, their migration or customary travel from\nsouth to north, and waiting on the opposite side of the narrow sea\nfor a south-east wind. That such a wind should blow was no miracle.\nThe Quails expected it to blow, and without it they could not have\ncrossed the sea. That it was made to blow earlier than might have\nbeen the case is likely enough, but that is the extent of the\nmiraculous character of the event.\n\n\n\n\nTHE RAVEN.\n\n     The Raven tribe plentiful in Palestine--The Raven and the\n     Dove--Elijah and the Ravens--Desert-loving habits of the\n     Raven--Notions of the old commentators--Ceremonial use of the\n     Raven--Return of the Ravens--Cunning of the bird--Nesting-places\n     of the Raven--The magpie and its character--The starling--Its\n     introduction into Palestine.\n\n\nIt is more than probable that, while the Hebrew word _oreb_\nprimarily signifies the bird which is so familiar to us under the\nname of RAVEN, it was also used by the Jews in a much looser sense,\nand served to designate any of the Corvidae, or Crow tribe, such as\nthe raven itself, the crow, the rook, the jackdaw, and the like. We\nwill first take the word in its restricted sense, and then devote a\nbrief space to its more extended signification.\n\nAs might be expected from the cosmopolitan nature of the Raven, it\nis very plentiful in Palestine, and even at the present time is\napparently as firmly established as it was in the days when the\nvarious Scriptural books were written.\n\nThere are few birds which are more distinctly mentioned in the\nHoly Scriptures than the Raven, though the passages in which its\nname occurs are comparatively few. It is the first bird which is\nmentioned in the Scriptures, its name occurring in Gen. viii. 7:\n\"And it came to pass at the end of forty days that Noah opened the\nwindow of the ark which he had made;\n\n\"And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro until the\nwaters were dried up from off the earth.\"\n\nHere we have, at the very outset, a characteristic account of the\nbird. It left the ark, and flew to and fro, evidently for the\npurpose of seeking food. The dove, which immediately followed\nthe Raven, acted in a different manner. She flew from the ark in\nsearch of food, and, finding none, was forced to return again. The\nRaven, on the contrary, would find plenty of food in the bodies\nof the various animals that had been drowned, and were floating\non the surface of the waters, and, therefore, needed not to enter\nagain into the ark. The context shows that it made the ark a\nresting-place, and that it \"went forth to and fro,\" or, as the\nHebrew Bible renders the passage, \"in going and returning,\" until\nthe waters had subsided. Here, then, is boldly drawn the distinction\nbetween the two birds, the carrion-eater and the feeder on vegetable\nsubstances--a distinction to which allusion has already been made in\nthe history of the dove.\n\n[Illustration: THE RAVEN.]\n\nPassing over the declaration in Lev. xi. 15 and Deut. xiv. 14, that\nevery Raven (_i.e._ the Raven and all its tribe) is unclean, we\ncome to the next historical mention of the bird. This occurs in 1\nKings xvii. When Elijah had excited the anger of Ahab by prophesying\nthree years of drought, he was divinely ordered to take refuge by\nthe brook Cherith, one of the tributaries of the Jordan. \"And it\nshall be, that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded\nthe ravens [_orebim_] to feed thee there.\n\n[Illustration: ELIJAH FED BY THE RAVENS.]\n\n\"So he went and did according unto the word of the Lord: for he went\nand dwelt by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan.\n\n\"And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and\nbread and flesh in the evening, and he drank of the brook.\"\n\nIn this passage we have a history of a purely miraculous character.\nIt is not one that can be explained away. Some have tried to do so\nby saying that the banished prophet found the nests of the Ravens,\nand took from them daily a supply of food for his sustenance. The\nrepetition of the words \"bread and flesh\" shows that the sacred\nwriter had no intention of signifying a mere casual finding of food\nwhich the Ravens brought for their young, but that the prophet was\nfurnished with a constant and regular supply of bread and meat twice\nin the day. It is a statement which, if it be not accepted as the\naccount of a miracle, must be rejected altogether.\n\nThe desert-loving habit of the Raven is noticed in Isa. xxxiv. 11:\n\"The cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and\nthe raven shall dwell in it: and He shall stretch out upon it the\nline of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe will now pass to the notices of the Raven as given by the writers\nand commentators of the Talmud.\n\nBeing an unclean bird, and one of ill omen, it was not permitted\nto perch on the roof of the Temple. According to some writers, it\nwas kept off by means of scarecrows, and according to others, by\nlong and sharp iron spikes set so closely together that there was\nno room for the bird to pass between them. The latter is by far the\nmore probable account, as the Raven is much too cunning a bird to be\ndeceived by a scarecrow for any length of time. It might be alarmed\nat the first sight of a strange object, but in a very short time it\nwould hold all scarecrows in supreme contempt.\n\nIts carrion-eating propensities were well known to the ancient\nwriters, who must have had many opportunities of seeing the Raven\nunite with the vultures in consuming the bodies, not only of dead\nanimals, but of warriors killed in battle. So fond was the Raven of\nthis food that, according to those writers, the very smell of human\nblood attracted the bird; and, if a man accidentally cut himself, or\nif he were bled for some illness, the odour of the blood would bring\nround the spot all the Ravens of the place.\n\nThe punctuality with which the Raven, in common with all its kin,\nreturns to its roosting-place, was also familiar to the Talmudists,\nwho made rather an ingenious use of this habit The ceremonial law of\nthe Jews required the greatest care in observing certain hours, and\nit was especially necessary to know the precise time which marked\nthe separation of one day from another. This was ascertained easily\nenough as long as the day was clear, but in case of a dull, murky\nday, when the course of the sun could not be traced, some other plan\nwas needed.\n\nIn the olden times, no artificial means of measuring time were\nknown, and the devout Jew was consequently fearful lest he might\nunwittingly break the law by doing on one day an act which ought\nto have been done on another. A convenient method for ascertaining\nthe time was, however, employed, and, as soon as the Ravens, rooks,\nand similar birds were seen returning to their homes, the sun was\nsupposed to be setting.\n\nThis habit of returning regularly at the same time is mentioned by\nMr. Tristram in his \"Land of Israel:\"--\n\n\"Of all the birds of Jerusalem, the raven is decidedly the most\ncharacteristic and conspicuous. It is present everywhere to eye and\near, and the odours that float around remind us of its use. On the\nevening of our arrival we were perplexed by a call-note, quite new\nto us, mingling with the old familiar croak, and soon ascertained\nthat there must be a second species of raven along with the common\n_Corvus corax_. This was the African species (_Corvus umbrinus_,\nHed.), the ashy-necked raven, a little smaller than the world-wide\nraven, and here more abundant in individuals.\n\n\"Beside these, the rook (_Corvus agricola_, Trist.), the common\ngrey, or hooded crow (_Corvus cornix_, L.), and the jackdaw (_Corvus\nmonedula_, L.), roost by hundreds in the sanctuary. We used to watch\nthem in long lines passing over our tents every morning at daybreak,\nand returning in the evening, the rooks in solid phalanx leading the\nway, and the ravens in loose order bringing up the rear, generally\nfar out of shot. Before retiring for the night, popular assemblies\nof the most uproarious character were held together in the trees of\nthe Kedron and Mount Olivet, and not until sunset did they withdraw\nin silence, mingled indiscriminately, to their roosting-places on\nthe walls.\n\n\"My companions were very anxious to obtain specimens of these\nJerusalem birds, which could only be approached as they settled for\nthe night; but we were warned by the Consul that shooting them so\nclose to the mosque might be deemed a sacrilege by the Moslems, and\nprovoke an attack by the guardians of the Haram and the boys of the\nneighbourhood. They finally determined, nevertheless, to run the\nrisk; and stationing themselves just before sunset in convenient\nhiding-places near the walls, at a given signal they fired\nsimultaneously, and, hastily gathering up the spoils, had retreated\nout of reach, and were hurrying to the tents before an alarm could\nbe raised. The discharge of ten barrels had obtained fourteen\nspecimens, comprising five species.\n\n[Illustration: RAVENS' ROOSTING-PLACE.]\n\n\"The same manoeuvre was repeated with equal success on another\nevening; but on the third occasion the ravens had learned wisdom by\nexperience, and, sweeping round Siloam, chose another route to their\ndormitory.\"\n\nThose who have tried to come within gunshot of a Raven, can\nappreciate this anecdote, and can understand how the Raven would\never afterwards keep clear of the spot where the flash and smoke\nof fire-arms had twice appeared. In a large garden in which the\nsparrows used to congregate, it was a custom of the owner to lay a\ntrain of corn for the sparrows to eat, and then to rake the whole\nline with a discharge from a gun concealed in an outhouse. A tame\nRaven lived about the premises, and as soon as it saw any one\ncarrying a gun towards the fatal outhouse, it became much alarmed,\nand hurried off to hide itself. As soon as the gun was fired, out\ncame the Raven from its place of concealment, pounced on one of the\ndead sparrows, carried it off, and ate it in its private haunt.\n\n[Illustration: birds in flight]\n\nThe nest to which the Raven returns with such punctuality is placed\nin some spot where it is safe from ordinary intruders. The tops of\nlofty trees are favoured localities for the nest, and so are old\ntowers, the interior of caves, and clefts in lofty precipices.\n\n\n\n\nTHE OSTRICH.\n\n     Hebrew words designating the Ostrich--Description of the bird\n     in the Book of Job--Ancient use of Ostrich plumes--Supposed\n     heedlessness of eggs and young--Mode of depositing the\n     eggs--Hatching them in the sand--Natural enemies of the\n     Ostrich--Anecdote of Ostriches and their young--Alleged\n     stupidity of the Ostrich--Methods of hunting and snaring the\n     bird--The Ostrich in domestication--Speed of the Ostrich--The\n     flesh of the bird prohibited to the Jews--Ostrich eggs and their\n     uses--Food of the Ostrich--Mode of drinking--Cry of the Ostrich,\n     and reference made to it in Micah.\n\n\nThere is rather a peculiarity about the manner in which this bird is\nmentioned in the Authorized Version of the Scriptures, and, unless\nwe go to the original Hebrew, we shall be greatly misled. In that\nversion the Ostrich is mentioned only three times, but in the Hebrew\nit occurs eight times.\n\nThe Hebrew word _bath-haya'nah_, which is translated in the\nAuthorized Version as \"owl,\" ought really to be rendered as\n\"Ostrich.\" Taking this to be the case, we find that there are\nseveral passages in the Scriptures in which the word has been used\nin the wrong sense.\n\nIn those places, instead of rendering the word as \"owl,\" we ought to\nread it as \"Ostrich.\"\n\nThe first mention of this bird occurs in Lev. xi. 16, and the\nparallel passage of Deut. xiv., in which the Ostrich is reckoned\namong the unclean birds, without any notice being given of its\nappearance or habits.\n\nIn the Book of Job, however, we have the Ostrich mentioned with that\npreciseness and fulness of description which is so often the case\nwhen the writer of that wonderful poem treats of living creatures.\n\n\"Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? or wings and\nfeathers unto the ostrich?\n\n\"Who leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in the dust,\n\n\"And forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast\nmay break them.\n\n\"She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not\nhers: her labour is in vain without fear;\n\n\"Because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath He imparted\nto her understanding.\n\n\"What time she lifteth up herself on high, she scorneth the horse\nand his rider.\" (Job xxxix. 13-19.)\n\nThere is rather a peculiarity in the translation of this passage,\nwherein the word which has been translated as \"peacock\" is now\nallowed to be properly rendered as \"Ostrich,\" while the word which\nis translated as \"Ostrich\" ought to have been given as \"feathers.\"\nThe marginal translation gives the last words of ver. 13 in a rather\ndifferent manner, and renders it thus:--\"Gavest thou the goodly\nwings unto the peacocks, or the feathers of the stork and ostrich?\"\nThe Hebrew Bible renders the next verses as follows:--\n\n\"She would yet leave her eggs on the earth, and warm them in dust;\nand forget that the foot may crush them, or that the beast of the\nfield may break them.\n\n\"She is hardened against her young ones, for those not hers; being\ncareless, her labour is in vain.\"\n\nIn the same Book, chap. xxx., is another passage wherein this bird\nis mentioned. \"I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, and I\ncried in the congregation.\n\n\"I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls,\" or Ostriches,\nin the marginal and correct reading. The Jewish Bible also\ntranslates the word as Ostriches, but the word which the Authorized\nVersion renders as \"dragons\" it translates as \"jackals.\" Of this\npoint we shall have something to say on a future page. A somewhat\nsimilar passage occurs in Isa. xliii. 20: \"The beast of the field\nshall honour me, the dragons and the owls\" (Ostriches in marginal\nreading), \"because I give waters in the wilderness, and rivers in\nthe desert, to give drink to My people, My chosen.\" The Jewish Bible\nretains the same reading, except that the word \"dragons\" is given\nwith the mark of doubt.\n\nAccepting, therefore, the rendering of the Hebrew as Ostriches, let\nus see how far the passages of Scripture agree with the appearance\nand habits of the bird.\n\nHere I may observe that, although in the Scriptures frequent\nallusions are made to the habits of animals, we are not to look for\nscientific exactness to the Scriptures. Among much that is strictly\nand completely true, there are occasional errors, to which a most\nneedless attention has been drawn by a certain school of critics,\nwho point to them as invalidating the truth of Scripture in general.\nThe real fact is, that they have no bearing whatever on the truth or\nfalsehood of the Scriptural teachings.\n\nThe Scriptures were written at various times, for instruction in\nspiritual and not in temporal matters, and were never intended for\nscientific treatises on astronomy, mathematics, zoology, or any\nsuch branch of knowledge. The references which are made to the\nlast-mentioned subject are in no case of a scientific nature, but\nare always employed by way of metaphor or simile, as the reader must\nhave seen in the previous pages. No point of doctrine is taught by\nthem, and none depends on them.\n\nThe Spirit which conveyed religious instruction to the people\ncould only use the means that existed, and could no more employ\nthe scientific knowledge of the present time than use as metaphors\nthe dress, arms, and inventions of the present day. The Scriptures\nwere written in Eastern lands for Orientals by Orientals, and were\nconsequently adapted to Oriental ideas; and it would be as absurd to\nlook for scientific zoology in the writings of an ancient Oriental,\nas for descriptions of the printing-press, the steam-engine, the\nphotographic camera, or the electric telegraph.\n\nSo, when we remember that only a few years ago the real history of\nthe Ostrich was unknown to those who had made zoology the study of\ntheir lives, we cannot wonder that it was also unknown to those who\nlived many centuries ago, and who had not the least idea of zoology,\nor any kindred science.\n\nStill, even with these drawbacks, it is wonderful how accurate in\nmany instances were the writers of the Scriptures, and the more\nso when we remember the character of the Oriental mind, with its\nlove of metaphor, its disregard of arithmetical precision, and its\npoetical style of thought.\n\nWe will now take the passage in Job xxxix. In ver. 13 reference is\nmade to the wings and feathers of the Ostrich. If the reader will\nrefer to page 310, he will see that the feathers of the Ostrich were\nformerly used as the emblem of rank. In this case, they are shown\nas fastened to the heads of the horses, and also in the form of a\nplume, fixed to the end of a staff, and appended to a chariot, as\nemblematical of the princely rank of the occupier. In the ancient\nEgyptian monuments these Ostrich plumes are repeatedly shown, and in\nevery case denote very high rank. These plumes were therefore held\nin high estimation at the time in which the Book of Job was written,\nand it is evidently in allusion to this fact that the sacred writer\nhas mentioned so prominently the white plumes of the Ostrich.\n\nPassing the next portion of the description, we find that the\nOstrich is mentioned as a bird that is careless of its eggs, and\nleaves them \"in the earth, and warmeth them in the dust, and\nforgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may\nbreak them.\"\n\nNow it is true that the Ostrich is often known to take the greatest\ncare of its eggs, the male collecting and sitting on them, and\nwatching them with loving assiduity, and by some persons this fact\nhas been brought forward as a proof that the writer of the Book of\nJob was mistaken in his statements. A further acquaintance with the\nhabits of the bird tells us, however, that in those parts of the\nworld which were known to the writer of that book the Ostrich does\nbehave in precisely the manner which is described by the sacred\nwriter.\n\nSeveral females lay their eggs in the same nest, if the title of\nnest can be rightly applied to a mere hollow scooped in the sand,\nand, at least during the daytime, when the sun is shining, they\nsimply cover the eggs with sand, so as to conceal them from ordinary\nenemies, and leave them to be hatched by the warm sunbeams. They\nare buried to the depth of about a foot, so that they receive the\nbenefit of a tolerably equable warmth. So much, then, for the\nassertion that the Ostrich leaves her eggs \"in the earth, and\nwarmeth them in the dust.\"\n\nWe next come to the statement that she forgets that \"the foot may\ncrush them, or that the wild beast may break them.\" It is evident\nfrom the preceding description that eggs which are buried a foot\ndeep in the sand could not be crushed by the foot, even were they of\na fragile character, instead of being defended by a shell as thick,\nand nearly as hard, as an ordinary earthenware plate. Neither would\nthe wild beast be likely to discover much less to break them.\n\n[Illustration: OSTRICH AND NEST.]\n\nA more intimate acquaintance with the history of the Ostrich shows\nthat, even in this particular, the sacred writer was perfectly\ncorrect. Besides the eggs which are intended to be hatched, and\nwhich are hidden beneath the sand to be hatched, a number of\nsupplementary eggs are laid which are not meant to be hatched,\nand are evidently intended as food for the young until they are\nable to forage for themselves. These are left carelessly on the\nsurface of the ground, and may easily be crushed by the hoof of a\nhorse, if not by the foot of man. We meet, however, with another\nstatement,--namely, that they may be broken by the wild beasts. Here\nwe have reference to another fact in the history of the Ostrich.\nThe scattered eggs, to which allusion is made, are often eaten,\nnot only by beasts, but also by birds of prey; the former breaking\nthe shells by knocking them against each other, and the latter by\npicking up large stones in their claws, rising above the eggs, and\ndropping the stones on them. The bird would like to seize the egg,\nrise with it in the air, and drop it on a stone, as mentioned on\npage 414, but the round, smooth surface of the egg defies the grasp\nof talons, and, instead of dropping the egg upon a stone, it is\nobliged to drop a stone upon the egg.\n\nUp to the present point, therefore, the writer of the Book of Job is\nshown to be perfectly correct in his statements. We will now proceed\nto verse 16: \"She is hardened against her young ones, as though they\nwere not hers.\" Now in the Jewish Bible the passage is rendered\nrather differently: \"She is hardened against her young ones, for\nthose not hers;\" and, as we shall presently see, the reading\nperfectly agrees with the character of the Ostrich.\n\nThere has long existed a belief that the Ostrich, contrary to the\ncharacter of all other birds, is careless of her young, neglects\nthem, and is even cruel to them. That this notion was shared by the\nwriter of the Book of Job is evident from the preceding passage.\nIt also prevailed for at least a thousand years after the Book of\nJob was written. See Lam. iv. 3: \"Even the sea monsters draw out\nthe breast, they give suck to their young ones: the daughter of my\npeople is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness.\"\n\nIt is probable that this idea respecting the cruelty of the Ostrich\ntowards its young is derived from the fact that if a flock of\nOstriches be chased, and among them there be some very young birds,\nthe latter are left behind by their parents, and fall a prey to the\nhunters. But, in reality, the Ostrich has no choice in the matter.\nThe wide sandy desert affords no place of concealment in which it\nmight hide its young. Nature has not furnished it with weapons by\nmeans of which it can fight for them; and consequently it is forced\nto use the only means of escape by which it can avoid sacrificing\nits own life, as well as the lives of the young.\n\nIt does not, however, leave the young until it has tried, by all\nmeans in its power, to save them. For example, it sometimes has\nrecourse to the manoeuvre with which we are so familiar in the\ncase of the lapwing, and pretends to be wounded or lamed, in order\nto draw the attention of its pursuers, while its young escape\nin another direction. An instance of this practice is given by\nMr. Andersson in his \"Lake Ngami.\" \"When we had proceeded little\nmore than half the distance, and in a part of the plain entirely\ndestitute of vegetation, we discovered a male and female ostrich,\nwith a brood of young ones, about the size of ordinary barn-yard\nfowls. We forthwith dismounted from out oxen, and gave chase, which\nproved of no ordinary interest.\n\n\"The moment the parent birds became aware of our intention, they set\noff at full speed--the female leading the way, and the cock, though\nat some little distance, bringing up the rear of the family party.\nIt was very touching to observe the anxiety the birds evinced for\nthe safety of their progeny. Finding that we were quickly gaining\nupon them, the male at once slackened his pace and diverged somewhat\nfrom his course; but, seeing that we were not to be diverted from\nour purpose, he again increased his speed, and, with wings drooping\nso as almost to touch the ground, he hovered round us, now in wide\ncircles, and then decreasing the circumference until he came almost\nwithin pistol-shot, when he abruptly threw himself on the ground,\nand struggled desperately to regain his legs, as it appeared, like a\nbird that has been badly wounded.\n\n\"Having previously fired at him, I really thought he was disabled,\nand made quickly towards him. But this was only a ruse on his part,\nfor, on my nearer approach, he slowly rose, and began to run in a\ndifferent direction to that of the female, who by this time was\nconsiderably ahead with her charge.\" Nor is this a solitary instance\nof the care which the Ostrich will take of her young. Thunberg\nmentions that on one occasion, when he happened to ride near a place\nwhere an Ostrich was sitting on the eggs, the bird jumped up and\npursued him, evidently with the object of distracting his attention\nfrom the eggs. When he faced her, she retreated; but as soon as he\nturned his horse, she pursued him afresh.\n\nThe care of the mother for the young is perhaps less needed with\nthe Ostrich than with most birds. The young are able to run with\nsuch speed that ordinary animals are not able to overtake them, and,\nbesides, they are protected by their colour as long as they are\ncomparatively helpless. Their downy plumage harmonizes completely\nwith the sandy and stony ground, even when they run, and when they\ncrouch to the earth, as is their manner when alarmed, even the most\npractised eye can scarcely see them. Mr. Andersson, an experienced\nhunter, states that when the Ostrich chicks were crouching almost\nunder his feet, he had the greatest difficulty in distinguishing\ntheir forms.\n\nOwing to the great number of the eggs that are laid, the young are\noften very numerous, between thirty and forty chicks sometimes\nbelonging to one brood. In the Ostrich chase which has already been\ndescribed, the brood were eighteen in number, and so great was\ntheir speed that, in spite of their youth and diminutive size, Mr.\nAndersson only succeeded in capturing nine of them after an hour's\nsevere chase.\n\nWe find, therefore, that we must acquit the Ostrich of neglecting\nits young, much more of cruelty towards them; and we will now turn\nto the next charge against the bird, that of stupidity.\n\nIn one sense, the bird certainly may be considered stupid. Like\nnearly all wild creatures which live on large plains, it always runs\nagainst the wind, so as to perceive by scent if any enemies are\napproaching. Its nostrils are very sensitive, and can detect a human\nbeing at a very great distance. So fastidious is it in this respect,\nthat no hunter who knows his business ever attempts to approach the\nOstrich except from leeward. If a nest is found, and the discoverer\nwishes the birds to continue laying in it, he approaches on the\nleeward side, and rakes out the eggs with a long stick.\n\nThe little Bushman, who kills so many of these birds with his tiny\nbow and arrow, makes use of this instinct when he goes to shoot the\nOstrich, disguised in a skin of one of the birds. Should an Ostrich\nattack him, as is sometimes the case, he only shifts his position\nto windward, so as to allow the birds to catch the scent of a human\nbeing, when they instantly make off in terror.\n\nWhen, therefore, the Ostriches are alarmed, they always run to\nwindward, instinctively knowing that, if an enemy should approach\nin that direction, their powers of scent will inform them of the\ndanger. Being aware of this habit, the hunters manage so that while\none of them goes round by a long detour to frighten the game, the\nothers are in waiting at a considerable distance to windward, but\nwell on one side, so that no indication of their presence may\nreach the sensitive nostrils of the birds. As soon as the concealed\nhunters see the Ostriches fairly settled down to their course, they\ndash off at right angles to the line which the birds are taking, and\nin this way come near enough to use their weapons. The antelopes\nof the same country have a similar instinct, and are hunted in\nprecisely the same manner.\n\nThus, then, in one sense the Ostrich may be considered as open to\nthe charge of stupidity, inasmuch as it pursues a course which can\nbe anticipated by enemies who would otherwise be unable to overtake\nit. But it must be remembered that instinct cannot be expected to\nprove a match for reason, and that, although its human enemies are\nable to overreach it, no others can do so, the instinct of running\nagainst the wind serving to guard it from any foe which it is likely\nto meet in the desert.\n\nWhen captured alive and tamed, it certainly displays no particular\namount of intellect. The Arabs often keep tame Ostriches about\ntheir tents, the birds being as much accustomed to their quarters\nas the horses. In all probability they did so in ancient times, and\nthe author of the Book of Job was likely to be familiar with tame\nOstriches, as well as with the wild bird.\n\nStupidity is probably attributed to the tame bird in consequence\nof the habit possessed by the Ostrich of picking up and eating\nsubstances which cannot be used as food. For example, it will eat\nknives, bits of bone or metal, and has even been known to swallow\nbullets hot from the mould. On dissecting the digestive organs of an\nOstrich, I have found a large quantity of stones, pieces of brick,\nand scraps of wood. These articles are, however, not intended to\nserve as food, but simply to aid digestion, and the bird eats them\njust as domestic fowls pick up gravel, and smaller birds grains of\nsand. In swallowing them, therefore, the Ostrich does not display\nany stupidity, but merely obeys a natural instinct.\n\nLastly, we come to the speed of the Ostrich: \"What time she lifteth\nup herself on high, she scorneth the horse and his rider.\"\n\nThis statement is literally true. When the Ostrich puts forth its\nfull speed, there is no horse that can catch it in a fair chase. It\nmay be killed by the ruse which has already been described, but an\nadult Ostrich can run away from the swiftest horse. When it runs\nat full speed, it moves its long legs with astonishing rapidity,\ncovering at each stride an average of twenty-four feet, a fact\nfrom which its rate of speed may be deduced. In consequence of\nthis width of stride, and the small impression made in the sand by\nthe two-toed foot, the track of a running Ostrich is very obscure.\nPerhaps no better proof of the swiftness of the bird can be given\nthan the extreme value set upon it by the Arabs. Although they are\nbred to the desert as much as the Ostrich itself, and are mounted on\nhorses whose swiftness and endurance are proverbial, they set a very\nhigh value on the Ostrich, and to have captured one of these birds\nestablishes an Arab's fame as a hunter.\n\nSometimes the Arabs employ the plan of cutting across the course\nof the bird, but at others they pursue it in fair chase, training\ntheir horses and themselves specially for the occasion. They furnish\nthemselves with a supply of water, and then start in pursuit of the\nfirst flock of Ostriches they find. They take care not to alarm the\nbirds, lest they should put out their full speed and run away out\nof sight, but just keep sufficiently near to force the birds to be\ncontinually on the move. They will sometimes continue this chase for\nseveral days, not allowing their game time to eat or rest, until at\nlast it is so tired that it yields itself an easy prey.\n\nIn Southern Africa, snares are used for taking the Ostrich. They\nare in fact ordinary springes, but of strength suitable to the size\nof the bird. The cord is made fast to a sapling, which is bent down\nby main strength, and the other end is then formed into a noose and\nfastened down with a trigger. Sometimes the bird is enticed towards\nthe snare by means of a bait, and sometimes it is driven over it\nby the huntsmen. In either case, as soon as the Ostrich puts its\nfoot within the fatal noose, the trigger is loosed, the sapling is\nreleased, and, with a violent jerk, the Ostrich is caught by the leg\nand suspended in the air.\n\nWhy the flesh of the Ostrich should have been prohibited to the\nJews is rather a mystery. It is much valued by most natives, though\nsome of the Arab tribes still adhere to the Jewish prohibition, and\nthose Europeans who have tried it pronounce it to be excellent when\nthe bird is young and tender, but to be unpleasantly tough when it\nis old. Mr. Andersson says that its flesh resembles that of the\nzebra, and mentions that the fat and blood are in great request,\nbeing mixed together by cutting the throat of the bird, passing a\nligature round the neck just below the incision, and then shaking\nand dragging the bird about for some time. Nearly twenty pounds of\nthis substance are obtained from a single Ostrich.\n\n[Illustration: ARABS HUNTING THE OSTRICH.]\n\nThe ancient Romans valued exceedingly the flesh of this bird. We\nare told that Heliogabalus once had a dish served at his table\ncontaining six hundred Ostrich brains, and that another emperor ate\na whole Ostrich at a meal. As an adult Ostrich weighs some three\nhundred and fifty pounds, we may presume that the bird in question\nwas a young one.\n\nThe eggs are most valuable articles of food, both on account of\ntheir excellent flavour and their enormous size. It is calculated\nthat one Ostrich egg contains as much as twenty-five ordinary hen's\neggs. Cooking the Ostrich egg is easily performed. A hole is made\nin the upper part of the egg, and the lower end is set on the fire.\nA forked stick is then introduced into the egg, and twirled between\nthe hands, so as to beat up the whole of the interior. Europeans\nusually add pepper and salt, and say that this simple mode of\ncooking produces an excellent omelette.\n\nThe ordinary food of the Ostrich consists of the seeds, buds, and\ntops of various plants. It seems strange, however, that in the\ndeserts, where there is so little vegetation, the bird should be\nable to procure sufficient food to maintain its enormous body. Each\nof the specimens which are kept at the Zoological Gardens eats\non an average a pint of barley, the same quantity of oats, four\npounds' weight of cabbage, and half a gallon of chaff, beside the\nbuns, bread, and other articles of food which are given to them by\nvisitors.\n\nAlthough the Ostrich, like many other inhabitants of the desert,\ncan live for a long time without water, yet it is forced to drink,\nand like the camel, which it resembles in so many of its ways,\ndrinks enormously, taking in the water by a succession of gulps.\nWhen the weather has been exceptionally hot, the Ostrich visits the\nwater-springs daily, and is so occupied in quenching its thirst that\nit will allow the hunter to come within a very short distance. It\nappears, indeed, to be almost intoxicated with its draught, and,\neven when it does take the alarm, it only retreats step by step,\ninstead of scudding off with its usually rapid strides.\n\nThe camel-like appearance of the Ostrich has already been mentioned.\nIn the Arabic language the Ostrich is called by a name which\nsignifies camel-bird, and many of the people have an idea that it\nwas originally a cross between a bird and a camel.\n\nThe cry of the Ostrich is a deep bellow, which, according to\ntravellers in Southern Africa, so resembles the roar of the lion\nthat even the practised ears of the natives can scarcely distinguish\nthe roar of the animal from the cry of the bird. The resemblance is\nincreased by the fact that both the lion and Ostrich utter their\ncry by night. It is evidently to this cry that the prophet Micah\nalludes: \"Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and\nnaked: I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as\nthe owls\" (Ostriches in marginal reading). The cry of the variety\nof Ostrich which inhabits Northern Africa is said to bear more\nresemblance to the lowing of an ox than the roar of the lion; but as\nthe bird is smaller than its southern relative, the difference is\nprobably accounted for.\n\nIt has been mentioned that the Ostrich has no weapons wherewith\nto fight for its young; still, though it be destitute of actual\nweapons, such as the spur of the gamecock or the beak and talons of\nthe eagle, it is not entirely defenceless. Its long and powerful\nlegs can be employed as weapons, and it can kick with such force\nthat a man would go down before the blow, and probably, if struck on\nthe leg or arm, have the limb broken. The blow is never delivered\nbackward, as is the kick of the horse, but forward, like that of the\nkangaroo. The natives of the countries where it resides say that it\nis able to kill by its kick the jackal that comes to steal its eggs,\nand that even the hyaena and the leopard are repelled by the gigantic\nbird.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: peaceful scene]\n\n\n\n\nTHE BITTERN.\n\n     The Bittern and its general appearance--The bird of\n     solitude--Difficulty of detecting the Bittern in its\n     haunts--Mudie's description of the Bittern and its home--Nest of\n     the Bittern--Scarcity of the bird at the present day--Food of\n     the Bittern.\n\n\nThe Bittern belongs to the same family as the herons, the cranes,\nand the storks, and has many of the habits common to them all. It\nis, however, essentially a bird of solitude, hating the vicinity\nof man, and living in the most retired spots of marshy ground. As\nit sits among the reeds and rushes, though it is a large bird, it\nis scarcely visible even to a practised eye, its mottled plumage\nharmonizing with surrounding objects in such a way that the feathers\nof the bird can scarcely be distinguished from the sticks, stones,\nand grass tufts among which it sits. The ground colour of the\nplumage is dark buff, upon which are sprinkled mottlings and streaks\nof black, chestnut, grey, and brown. These mottled marks harmonize\nwith the stones and tufts of withered grass, while the longitudinal\ndashes of buff and black on the neck and breast correspond with the\nsticks and reeds.\n\nIn a similar manner the tiger, though so large an animal, can lie in\na very small covert of reeds without being detected, its striped fur\ncorresponding with the reeds themselves and the shadows thrown by\nthem; and the leopard can remain hidden among the boughs of a tree,\nits spotted coat harmonizing with the broken light and shade of the\nfoliage.\n\n[Illustration: THE BITTERN.]\n\nThe following powerful description of the Bittern's home is given\nby Mudie: \"It is a bird of rude nature, where the land knows no\ncharacter save that which the untrained, working of the elements\nimpresses upon it; so that when any locality is in the course of\nbeing won to usefulness, the bittern is the first to depart, and\nwhen any one is abandoned, it is the last to return. 'The bittern\nshall dwell there' is the final curse, and implies that the place is\nto become uninhabited and uninhabitable. It hears not the whistle of\nthe ploughman, nor the sound of the mattock; and the tinkle of the\nsheep-bell, or the lowing of the ox (although the latter bears so\nmuch resemblance to its own hollow and dismal voice, that it has\ngiven foundation to the name), is a signal for it to be gone.\n\n\"Extensive and dingy pools--if moderately upland, so much the\nbetter--which lie in the hollows, catching, like so many traps, the\nlighter and more fertile mould which the rains wash and the winds\nblow from the naked heights around, and converting it into harsh and\ndingy vegetation, and the pasture of those loathsome things which\nwriggle in the ooze, or crawl and swim in the putrid and mantling\nwaters, are the habitation of the bittern.\n\n\"Places which scatter blight and mildew over every herb which\nis more delicate than a sedge, a carex, or a rush, and consume\nevery wooded plant that is taller than the sapless and tasteless\ncranberry or the weeping upland willow; which shed murrain over the\nquadrupeds, chills which eat the flesh off their bones, and which,\nif man ventures there, consume him by putrid fever in the hot and\ndry season, and shake him to pieces with ague when the weather is\ncold and humid.\n\n\"Places from which the heath and the lichen stand aloof, and where\neven the raven, lover of disease, and battener upon all that expires\nmiserably and exhausted, comes rarely and with more than wonted\ncaution, lest that death which he comes to seal and riot upon in\nothers should unawares come upon himself. The raven loves carrion\non the dry and unpoisoning moor, scents it from afar, and hastens\nto it upon his best and boldest wing; but 'the reek o' the rotten\nfen' is loathsome to the sense of even the raven, and it is hunger's\nlast pinch ere he come nigh to the chosen habitation, the only loved\nabode, of the bittern.\"\n\nSecure in its retreat, the Bittern keeps its place even if a\nsportsman should pass by the spot on which it crouches. It will not\nbe tempted to leave its retreat by noise, or even by stone throwing,\nfor it knows instinctively that the quaking bogland which it selects\nas its home is unsafe for the step of man.\n\nThe very cry of the Bittern adds to this atmosphere of desolation.\nBy day the bird is silent, but after the sun has gone down it utters\nits strange wild cry, a sound which exactly suits the localities in\nwhich it loves to make its habitation. During part of the year it\nonly emits a sharp, harsh cry as it rises on the wing, but during\nthe breeding season it utters the cry by which it summons its mate,\none of the strangest love-calls that can be imagined. It is\nsomething between the neighing of a horse, the bellow of a bull, and\na shriek of savage laughter. It is very loud and deep, so that it\nseems to shake the loose and marshy ground. There was formerly an\nidea that, when the Bittern uttered this booming cry, it thrust its\nbill into the soft ground, and so caused it to shake. In reality,\nthe cry is uttered on the wing, the bird wheeling in a spiral\nflight, and modulating its voice in accordance with the curves which\nit describes in the air. This strange sound is only uttered by the\nmale bird.\n\n[Illustration:\n\n  BITTERN.        CORMORANT.\n]\n\nLike most of the long-legged wading birds, the Bittern is able\nto change its shape, and apparently to alter its size, in an\nastonishing manner. When it is walking over the ground, with head\nerect and eye glanced vigilantly at surrounding objects, it looks\na large, bold, vigorous, and active bird. Next minute it will sink\nits head in its shoulders, so that the long beak seems to project\nfrom them, and the neck totally disappears, the feathers enveloping\neach other as perfectly and smoothly as if it never had had a neck.\nIn this attitude it will stand for an hour at a time on one leg,\nwith the other drawn close to its body, looking as dull, inert, and\nsluggish a bird as can well be imagined, and reduced apparently\nto one half of its former size. The Bittern is represented in one\nof its extraordinary attitudes on the plate which illustrates the\ncormorant.\n\nThe nest of the Bittern is placed on the ground, and near the\nwater, though the bird always takes care to build it on an elevated\nspot which will not be flooded if the water should rise by reason\nof a severe rain. There is, however, but little reason for the\nBittern to fear a flood, as at the time of year which is chosen\nfor nest-building the floods are generally out, and the water\nhigher than is likely to be the case for the rest of the year. The\nmaterials of the nest are found in marshes, and consist of leaves,\nreeds, and rushes.\n\nAs if to add to the general effect of its character, it is\nessentially a solitary bird, and in this characteristic entirely\nunlike its relatives the heron and the stork, which are peculiarly\nsociable, and love to gather themselves together in multitudes. But\nthe Bittern is never found except alone, or at the most accompanied\nfor a time by its mate and one or two young ones.\n\nThe localities in which it resides are sufficient evidence of the\nnature of its food. Frogs appear to be its favourite diet, but it\nalso feeds on various fish, insects, molluscs, worms, and similar\ncreatures. Dull and apathetic as it appears to be, it can display\nsufficient energy to capture tolerably large fish. Though the\nBittern is only about two feet in total length, one of these birds\nwas killed, in the stomach of which were found one perfect rudd\neight inches in length and two in depth, together with the remains\nof another fish, of a full-grown frog, and of an aquatic insect.\nIn another instance, a Bittern had contrived to swallow an eel as\nlong as itself; while in many cases the remains of five or six\nfull-grown frogs have been found in the interior of the bird, some\njust swallowed, and others in various stages of digestion.\n\n[Illustration: wetland]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: THE HERON.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE HERON.\n\n     The Heron mentioned as an unclean bird--Nesting of the\n     Heron--The papyrus marshes and their dangers--Description of the\n     papyrus--Vessels of bulrushes.\n\n\nThe name of the Heron is only mentioned twice in the\nScriptures--namely, in the two parallel passages of Lev. xi. 19 and\nDeut. xiv. 18; in both of which places the Heron is ranked among the\nunclean birds that might not be eaten.\n\nIn some of the cases where beasts or birds are prohibited as food,\nthe prohibition seems scarcely needed. To us of the present day\nthis seems to be the case with the Heron, as it is never brought to\ntable. The reason for this disuse of the Heron as food is not that\nit is unfit for the table, but that it has become so scarce by the\nspread of cultivation and housebuilding, that it has been gradually\nabandoned as a practically unattainable article of diet. The flesh\nof the Heron, like that of the bittern, is remarkably excellent,\nand in the former days, when it was comparatively plentiful, and\nfalconry was the ordinary amusement of the rich, the Heron formed a\nvery important dish at every great banquet.\n\n[Illustration: THE HERON.]\n\nThe bird, however, must be eaten when young. A gentleman who liked\nto try experiments for himself in the matter of food, found that,\nif young Herons were properly cooked, they formed a most excellent\ndish, equal, in his opinion, to grouse. Wishing to have his own\njudgment confirmed by that of others, he had several of them trussed\nand dressed like wild geese, and served up at table under that name.\nThe guests approved greatly of the bird, and compared it to hare,\nthe resemblance being further increased by the dark colour of the\nflesh. There was not the slighest fishy flavour about the bird.\nThis, however, is apt to be found in the older birds, but can be\nremoved by burying them in the earth for several days, just as is\ndone with the solan goose and one or two other sea-birds.\n\nThe abundance of birds belonging to the Heron tribe is well shown by\nsome of the paintings and carvings on Egyptian monuments, in which\nvarious species of Herons and other water-birds are depicted as\nliving among the papyrus reeds, exactly the locality in which they\nare most plentiful at the present day.\n\nUnlike the bittern, the Heron is a most sociable bird, and loves not\nonly to live, but even to feed, in company with others of its own\nspecies.\n\nI have watched the Herons feeding in close proximity to each other.\nThe birds were fond of wading stealthily along the edge of the\nlake until they came to a suitable spot, where they would stand\nimmersed in the water up to the thighs, waiting patiently for their\nprey. They stood as still as if they were carved out of wood, the\nripples of the lake reflected on their plumage as the breeze ruffled\nthe surface of the water. Suddenly there would be a quick dive of\nthe beak, either among the reeds or in the water, and each stroke\nsignified that the Heron had caught its prey.\n\nFrogs and small fishes are the usual food of the Heron, though it\noften grapples with larger prey, having been seen to capture an\neel of considerable size in its beak. Under such circumstances\nit leaves the water, with the fish in its mouth, and beats it\nviolently against a stone so as to kill it. Now and then the bird\nis vanquished in the struggle by the fish, several instances being\nknown in which an eel, in its endeavours to escape, has twisted\nitself so tightly round the neck of the bird that both have been\nfound lying dead on the shore.\n\nIn one such case the Heron's beak had struck through the eyes of the\neel, so that the bird could not disengage itself. In another the\nHeron had tried to swallow an eel which was much too large for it,\nand had been nearly choked by its meal. The eel must necessarily\nhave been a very large one, as the Heron has a wonderful capacity\nfor devouring fish. Even when quite young, it can swallow a fish as\nlarge as a herring, and when it is full grown it will eat four or\nfive large herrings at a meal.\n\nNow when we remember that a man of average appetite finds one\nherring to form a very sufficient breakfast, we can easily imagine\nwhat must be the digestive power of a bird which, though very\ninferior to man in point of bulk, can eat four times as much at a\nmeal. Even though the fish be much larger in diameter than the neck\nof the bird, the Heron can swallow it as easily as a small snake\nswallows a large frog. The neck merely seems to expand as if it were\nmade of Indiarubber, the fish slips down, and the bird is ready for\nanother.\n\n[Illustration: THE HOME OF THE HERON.]\n\nGenerally the Herons feed after sunset, but I have frequently\nseen them busily engaged in catching their prey in full daylight,\nwhen the sunbeams were playing in the water so as to produce the\nbeautiful rippling effect on the Heron's plumage which has already\nbeen mentioned.\n\nThe Heron does not restrict itself to fishes or reptiles, but, like\nthe bittern, feeds on almost any kind of aquatic animal which comes\nwithin its reach. When it lives near tidal rivers, it feeds largely\non the shrimps, prawns, green crabs, and various other crustacea;\nand when it lives far inland, it still makes prey of the fresh-water\nshrimps, the water-beetles, and the boat-flies, and similar aquatic\ncreatures. In fact, it acts much after the fashion of the lions,\ntigers, and leopards, which put up with locusts and beetles when\nthey can find no larger prey.\n\nThe long beak of the Heron is not merely an instrument by which it\ncan obtain food, but is also a weapon of considerable power. When\nattacked, it aims a blow at the eye of its opponent, and makes the\nstroke with such rapidity that the foe is generally blinded before\nperceiving the danger. When domesticated, it has been known to keep\npossession of the enclosure in which it lived, and soon to drive\naway dogs by the power of its beak. When it is young, it is quite\nhelpless, its very long legs being unable to support its body,\nwhich is entirely bare of plumage, and has a very unprepossessing\nappearance.\n\nThe flight of the Heron is very powerful, its wings being very large\nin proportion to its slender body. Sometimes the bird takes to\nascending in a spiral line, and then the flight is as beautiful as\nit is strong. When chased by the falcon it mostly ascends in this\nmanner, each of the two birds trying to rise above the other.\n\nThe nest of the Heron is always made on the top of some lofty tree,\nwhenever the bird builds in places where trees can be found; and as\nthe bird is an eminently sociable one, a single nest is very seldom\nfound, the Heron being as fond of society as the rook. In some parts\nof Palestine, however, where trees are very scarce, the Heron is\nobliged to choose some other locality for its nest, and in that case\nprefers the great thickets of papyrus reeds which are found in the\nmarshes, and which are even more inaccessible than the tops of trees.\n\nOne of these marshes is well described by Mr. Tristram in his \"Land\nof Israel.\" \"The whole marsh is marked in the map as impassable; and\nmost truly it is so. I never anywhere have met with a swamp so vast\nand utterly impenetrable.\n\n\"The papyrus extends right across to the east side. A false step off\nits roots will take the intruder over head in suffocating peat-mud.\nWe spent a long time in attempting to effect an entrance, and at\nlast gave it up, satisfied that the marsh birds were not to be had.\nIn fact, the whole is simply a floating bog of several miles square;\na very thin crust of vegetation covers an unknown depth of water;\nand, if the explorer breaks through this, suffocation is imminent.\nSome of the Arabs, who were tilling the plain for cotton, assured us\nthat even a wild boar never got through it. We shot two bitterns,\nbut in endeavouring to retrieve them I slipped from the root on\nwhich I was standing, and was drawn down in a moment, only saving\nmyself from drowning by my gun, which had providentially caught\nacross a papyrus stem.\"\n\nIt may here be mentioned that the bulrush of Scripture is\nundoubtedly the papyrus. The ark or basket of bulrushes, lined with\nslime and pitch, in which Moses was laid, was made of the papyrus,\nwhich at the present day is used for the manufacture of baskets,\nmats, sandals, and for the thatching of houses. Many tribes which\ninhabit the banks of the Nile make simple boats, or rather rafts,\nof the papyrus, which they cut and tie in bundles; and it is worthy\nof notice that the Australian native makes a reed boat in almost\nexactly the same manner.\n\nCompare Is. xviii. 1, 2: \"Woe to the land shadowing with wings,\nwhich is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.\n\n\"That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes.\"\nDid we not know that vessels are actually made of bulrushes at the\npresent day, a custom which has survived from very ancient times,\nwe might find a difficulty in understanding this passage, while the\nmeaning is intelligible enough when it is viewed by the light of\nthe knowledge that the Ethiopian of the present day takes gold, and\nivory, and other merchandise down the Nile in his boat of papyrus\n(or bulrush) reeds tied together.\n\n[Illustration: THE PAPYRUS PLANT.]\n\nThe papyrus runs from ten to fifteen or sixteen feet in height, so\nthat the Herons are at no loss for suitable spots whereon to place\ntheir nests. From the name \"papyrus\" our word paper is derived. The\nstems of the plant, after having been split into thin slices, joined\ntogether, and brought to a smooth surface, formed the paper upon\nwhich the ancient Egyptians wrote.\n\nThe Egrets, which are probably included under the generic title\nof Anaphah, are birds of passage, and at the proper season are\nplentiful in Palestine. These pretty birds much resemble the heron\nin general form, and in general habits both birds are very much\nalike, haunting the marshes and edges of lakes and streams, and\nfeeding upon the frogs and other inhabitants of the water. In\ncountries where rice is cultivated, the Egret may generally be seen\nin the artificial swamps in which that plant is sown. The colour\nof the Egret is pure white, with the exception of the train. This\nconsists of a great number of long slender feathers of a delicate\nstraw colour. Like those which form the train of the peacock, they\nfall over the feathers of the tail, and entirely conceal them.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: jungle scene]\n\n\n\n\nTHE CRANE.\n\n     Various passages in which the Crane is mentioned--Its migratory\n     habits, and loud voice--Geographical range of the Crane--Its\n     favourite roosting-places--Size of the Crane, and measurement of\n     the wings--The Crane once used as food--Plumes of the Crane and\n     their use--Structure of the vocal organs--Nest and eggs of the\n     Crane.\n\n\nIn the description of the dove and the swallow two passages have\nbeen quoted in which the name of the CRANE is mentioned, one\nreferring to its voice, and the other to its migratory instinct. The\nfirst passage occurs in Isa. xxxviii. 14: \"Like a crane or swallow,\nso did I chatter;\" and the other in Jer. viii. 7: \"The turtle and\nthe crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming.\"\n\n[Illustration: THE CRANE.]\n\nIt is rather remarkable that in both these cases the word \"Crane\" is\nused in connexion with the swallow, or rather the swift, and that in\nboth instances the names of the birds should have been interchanged.\nIf we refer to the original of these passages, we shall find that\nthe former of them would run thus, \"Like a _sis_ or an _agur_,\" and\nthe latter thus, \"The turtle and the _sis_ and the _agur_.\" That in\nthese passages the interpretation of the words _sis_ and _agur_ have\nbeen interchanged has already been mentioned, and, as the former\nhas been described under the name of swallow or swift, we shall now\ntreat of the latter under the title of Crane.\n\nThe species here mentioned is the common Crane, a bird which has a\nvery wide range, and which seeks a warm climate on the approach of\nwinter.\n\nThe Crane performs its annual migrations in company, vast flocks of\nmany thousand individuals passing like great clouds at an immense\nheight, whence their trumpet-like cry is audible for a great\ndistance round, and attracts the ear if not the eye to them. Thus we\nhave at a glance both the characteristics to which reference is made\nin the Scriptures, namely, the noisy cry and the habit of migration.\n\nIt is a very gregarious bird, associating with its comrades in\nflocks, just as do the starlings and rooks of our own country,\nand, like these birds, has favourite roosting-places in which it\npasses the night. When evening approaches, the Cranes may be seen in\nlarge flocks passing to their roosting-places, and, on account of\ntheir great size, having a very strange effect. A fair-sized Crane\nwill measure seven feet across the expanded wings, so that even a\nsolitary bird has a very imposing effect when flying, while that of\na large flock of Cranes on the wing is simply magnificent.\n\nThe spots which the Crane selects for its roosting-places are\ngenerally of the same character. Being in some respects a wary bird,\nthough it is curiously indifferent in others, it will not roost\nin any place near bushes, rocks, or other spots which might serve\nto conceal an enemy. The locality most favoured by the Crane is a\nlarge, smooth, sloping bank, far from any spot wherein an enemy\nmay be concealed. The birds keep a careful watch during the night,\nand it is impossible for any foe to approach them without being\ndiscovered. The Crane is noisy on the wing, and, whether it be\nsoaring high over head on its long migratory journeys, or be merely\nflying at dusk to its roosting-place, it continually utters its\nloud, clangorous cry.\n\nThe food of the Crane is much like that of the heron, but in\naddition to the frogs, fish, worms, and insects, it eats vegetable\nsubstances. Sometimes it is apt to get into cultivated grounds,\nand then does much damage to the crops, pecking up the ground with\nits long beak, partly for the sake of the worms, grubs, and other\ncreatures, and partly for the sake of the sprouting seeds.\n\nAlthough by reason of its scarcity the Crane has been abandoned as\nfood, its flesh is really excellent, and in former days was valued\nvery highly.\n\nLike the egret, the Crane is remarkable for the flowing plumes of\nthe back, which fall over the tail feathers, and form a train. These\nfeathers are much used as plumes, both for purposes of dress and as\nbrushes or flappers wherewith to drive off the flies. By reason of\nthis conformation, some systematic zoologists have thought that it\nhas some affinity to the ostrich, the rhoea, and similar birds,\nand that the resemblance is strengthened by the structure of the\ndigestive organs, which are suited to vegetable as well as animal\nsubstances, the stomach being strong and muscular.\n\nThe peculiar voice of the Crane, which it is so fond of using,\nand to which reference is made in the Scriptures, is caused by a\npeculiar structure of the windpipe, which is exceedingly long,\nand, instead of going straight to the lungs, undergoes several\nconvolutions about the breast-bone, and then proceeds to the lungs.\n\nThe Crane makes its nest on low ground, generally among osiers or\nreeds, and it lays only two eggs, pale olive in colour, dashed\nprofusely with black and brown streaks.\n\n[Illustration: water side]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: stork]\n\n\n\n\nTHE STORK.\n\n     Signification of the Hebrew word _Chasidah_--Various passages\n     in which it is mentioned--The Chasidah therefore a large,\n     wide-winged, migratory bird--Its identification with the\n     Stork--The Stork always protected.\n\n\nIn the Old Testament there are several passages wherein is mentioned\nthe word _Chasidah_.\n\nThe Authorized Version invariably renders the word _Chasidah_ as\n\"Stork\" and is undoubtedly right.\n\nIn Buxtorf's Lexicon there is a curious derivation of the word. He\nsays that the word _Chasidah_ is derived from _chesed_, a word that\nsignifies benevolence.\n\nAccording to some writers, the name was given to the Stork because\nit was supposed to be a bird remarkable for its filial piety;\n\"for the storks in their turn support their parents in their old\nage: they allow them to rest their necks on their bodies during\nmigration, and, if the elders are tired, the young ones take them\non their backs.\" According to others, the name is given to the\nStork because it exercises kindness towards its companions in\nbringing them food; but in all cases the derivation of the word is\nacknowledged to be the same.\n\nPartly in consequence of this idea, which is a very old and almost\nuniversal one, and partly on account of the great services rendered\nby the bird in clearing the ground of snakes, insects, and garbage,\nthe Stork has always been protected through the East, as it is to\nthe present day in several parts of Europe. The slaughter of a\nStork, or even the destruction of its eggs, would be punished with a\nheavy fine; and in consequence of the immunity which it enjoys, it\nloves to haunt the habitations of mankind.\n\nIn many of the Continental towns, where sanitary regulations are not\nenforced, the Stork serves the purpose of a scavenger, and may be\nseen walking about the market-place, waiting for the offal of fish,\nfowls, and the like, which are simply thrown on the ground for the\nStorks to eat. In Eastern lands the Stork enjoys similar privileges,\nand we may infer that the bird was perfectly familiar both to the\nwriters of the various Scriptural books in which it was mentioned,\nand to the people for whom these books were intended.\n\nWhen they settle upon a tract of ground, the Storks divide it among\nthemselves in a manner that seems to have a sort of system in it,\nspreading themselves over it with wonderful regularity, each bird\nappearing to take possession of a definite amount of ground. By this\nmode of proceeding, the ground is rapidly cleared of all vermin; the\nStorks examining their allotted space with the keenest scrutiny,\nand devouring every reptile, mouse, worm, grub, or insect that they\ncan find on it. Sometimes they will spread themselves in this\nmanner over a vast extent of country, arriving suddenly, remaining\nfor several months, and departing without giving any sign of their\nintention to move.\n\n[Illustration: STORKS AND THEIR NESTS.]\n\nThe wings of the Stork, which are mentioned in Holy Writ, are very\nconspicuous, and are well calculated to strike an imaginative mind.\nThe general colour of the bird is white, while the quill feathers\nof the wings are black; so that the effect of the spread wings is\nvery striking, an adult bird measuring about seven feet across,\nwhen flying. As the body, large though it may be, is comparatively\nlight when compared with the extent of wing, the flight is both\nlofty and sustained, the bird flying at very great height, and, when\nmigrating, is literally the \"stork in the heavens.\"\n\nNext we come to the migratory habits of the Stork.\n\nLike the swallow, the Stork resorts year after year to the same\nspots; and when it has once fixed on a locality for its nest, that\nplace will be assuredly taken as regularly as the breeding-season\ncomes round. The same pair are sure to return to their well-known\nhome, notwithstanding the vast distances over which they pass, and\nthe many lands in which they sojourn. Should one of the pair die,\nthe other finds a mate in a very short time, and thus the same home\nis kept up by successive generations of Storks, much as among men\none ancestral mansion is inhabited by a series of members of the\nsame family.\n\nSo well is this known, that when a pair of Storks have made their\nnest in a human habitation their return is always expected, and\nwhen they arrive the absentees are welcomed on all sides. In many\ncountries breeding-places are specially provided for the Storks; and\nwhen one of them is occupied for the first time, the owner of the\nhouse looks upon it as a fortunate omen.\n\nThe localities chosen by the Stork for its nest vary according to\nthe surrounding conditions. The foundation which a Stork requires is\na firm platform, the more elevated the better, but the bird seems to\ncare little whether this platform be on rocks, buildings, or trees.\nIf, for example, it builds its nest in craggy places, far from the\nhabitations of man, it selects some flat ledge for the purpose,\npreferring those that are at the extreme tops of the rocks. The\nsummit of a natural pinnacle is a favourite spot with the Stork.\n\nIn many cases the Stork breeds among old ruins, and under such\ncircumstances it is fond of building its nest on the tops of\npillars or towers, the summits of arches, and similar localities.\nWhen it takes up its abode among mankind, it generally selects the\nbreeding-places which have been built for it by those who know its\ntaste, but it frequently chooses the top of a chimney, or some such\nlocality.\n\nSometimes, however, it is obliged to build in spots where it can\nfind neither rocks nor buildings, and in such cases it builds on\ntrees, and, like the heron, is sociable in its nesting, a whole\ncommunity residing in a clump of trees. It is not very particular\nabout the kind of tree, provided that it be tolerably tall, and\nstrong enough to bear the weight of its enormous nest; and the\nreader will at once see that the fir-trees are peculiarly fitted to\nbe the houses for the Stork.\n\nAs may be expected from the localities chosen by the Stork for its\nbreeding-place, its nest is very large and heavy. It is constructed\nwith very little skill, and is scarcely more than a huge quantity of\nsticks, reeds, and similar substances, heaped together, and having\nin the middle a slight depression in which the eggs are laid. These\neggs are usually three, or perhaps four in number, and now and then\na fifth is seen, and are of a very pale buff or cream colour.\n\nAs is the case with the heron, the young of the Stork are quite\nhelpless when hatched, and are most ungainly little beings, with\ntheir long legs doubled under them, unable to sustain their round\nand almost naked bodies, while their large beaks are ever gaping for\nfood. Those of my readers who have had young birds of any kind must\nhave noticed the extremely grotesque appearance which they possess\nwhen they hold up their heads and cry for food, with their bills\nopen to an almost incredible extent. In such birds as the Stork,\nthe heron, and others of the tribe, the grotesque appearance is\nexaggerated in proportion to the length and gape of the bill.\n\nThe Stork is noted for being a peculiarly kind and loving parent\nto its young, in that point fully deserving the derivation of its\nHebrew name, though its love manifests itself towards the young, and\nnot towards the parent.\n\nThe Rev. H. B. Tristram mentions from personal experience an\ninstance of the watchful care exercised by the Stork over its young.\n\"The writer was once in camp near an old ruined tower in the plains\nof Zana, south of the Atlas, where a pair of storks had their nest.\nThe four young might often be seen from a little distance, surveying\nthe prospect from their lonely height, but whenever any of the human\nparty happened to stroll near the tower, one of the old storks,\ninvisible before, would instantly appear, and, lighting on the nest,\nput its feet gently on the necks of all the young, so as to hold\nthem down out of sight till the stranger had passed, snapping its\nbill meanwhile, and assuming a grotesque air of indifference, as if\nunconscious of there being anything under its charge.\"\n\nThe snapping noise which is here mentioned is the only sound\nproduced by the Stork, which is an absolutely silent bird, as far as\nvoice is concerned.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThere is another species of Stork found in Palestine, to which\nthe fir-trees are especially a home. This is the Black Stork\n(_Ciconia nigra_), which in some parts of the country is even more\nplentiful than its white relative, which it resembles in almost\nevery particular, except that it has a dark head and back, the\nfeathers being glossed with purple and green like those of the\nmagpie. This species, which is undoubtedly included in the Hebrew\nword _chasidah_, always makes its nest on trees whenever it can find\nthem, and in some of the more densely wooded parts of Palestine is\nin consequence plentiful, placing its nest in the deepest parts of\nthe forests. When it cannot obtain trees, it will build its nest on\nrocky ledges. It lays two or three eggs of a greenish white colour.\n\nLike the preceding species, the Black Stork is easily domesticated.\nColonel Montague kept one which was very tame, and would follow\nits keeper like a dog. Its tameness enabled its proceedings to be\nclosely watched, and its mode of feeding was thereby investigated.\nIt was fond of examining the rank grass and mud for food, and while\ndoing so always kept its bill a little open, so as to pounce down at\nonce on any insect or reptile that it might disturb.\n\nEels were its favourite food, and it was such an adept at catching\nthem that it was never seen to miss one, no matter how small or\nquick it might be. As soon as it had caught one of these active\nfish, it went to some dry place, and then disabled its prey by\nshaking and beating it against the ground before swallowing it,\nwhereas many birds that feed on fish swallow their prey as soon\nas it is caught. The Stork was never seen to swim as the heron\nsometimes does, but it would wade as long as it could place its feet\non the bed of the stream, and would strain its head and the whole of\nits neck under water in searching for fish.\n\n[Illustration: A NEST OF THE WHITE STORK.]\n\nIt was of a mild and peaceable disposition, and, even if angered,\ndid not attempt to bite or strike with its beak, but only denoted\nits displeasure by blowing the air sharply from its lungs, and\nnodding its head repeatedly. After the manner of Storks, it always\nchose an elevated spot on which to repose, and took its rest\nstanding on one leg, with its head so sunk among the feathers of its\nshoulders that scarcely any part of it was visible, the hinder part\nof the head resting on the back, and the bill lying on the fore-part\nof the neck.\n\nThough the bird is so capable of domestication, it does not of its\nown accord haunt the dwellings of men, like the White Stork, but\navoids the neighbourhood of houses, and lives in the most retired\nplaces it can find.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SWAN.\n\n     Signification of the word _Tinshemeth_--The Gallinule and the\n     Ibis--Appearance and habits of the Hyacinthine Gallinule--A\n     strange use for the bird--The White or Sacred Ibis.\n\n\nIn the two parallel chapters of Lev. xi. 18 and Deut. xiv. 16, the\nHebrew word _tinshemeth_ is found, and evidently signifies some\nkind of bird which was forbidden as food. After stating (Lev. xi.\n13) that \"these are they which ye shall have in abomination among\nthe fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination,\" the\nsacred lawgiver proceeds to enumerate a number of birds, nearly all\nof which have already been described. Among them occurs the name of\n_tinshemeth_, between the great owl and the pelican.\n\nWhat was the precise species of bird which was signified by this\nname it is impossible to say, but there is no doubt that it could\nnot have been the Swan, according to the rendering of the Authorized\nVersion. The Swan is far too rare a bird in Palestine to have been\nspecially mentioned in the law of Moses, and in all probability it\nwas totally unknown to the generality of the Israelites. Even had\nit been known to them, and tolerably common, there seems to be no\nreason why it should have been reckoned among the list of unclean\nbirds.\n\nOn turning to the Hebrew Bible, we find that the word is left\nuntranslated, and simply given in its Hebrew form, thereby\nsignifying that the translators could form no opinion whatever of\nthe proper rendering of the word. The Septuagint translates the\nTinshemeth as the Porphyrio or Ibis, and the Vulgate follows the\nsame rendering. Later naturalists have agreed that the Septuagint\nand Vulgate have the far more probable reading; and, as two birds\nare there mentioned, they will be both described.\n\n[Illustration: IBIS AND GALLINULE (SWAN OF SCRIPTURE).]\n\nThe first is the Porphyrio, by which we may understand the\nHYACINTHINE GALLINULE (_Porphyrio veterum_). All the birds of this\ngroup are remarkable for the enormous length of their toes, by means\nof which they are enabled to walk upon the loose herbage that floats\non the surface of the water as firmly as if they were treading\non land. Their feet are also used, like those of the parrots, in\nconveying food to the mouth. We have in England a very familiar\nexample of the Gallinules in the common water-hen, or moor-hen,\nthe toes of which are of great proportionate length, though not so\nlong as those of the Purple Gallinule, which almost rivals in this\nrespect the jacanas of South America and China. The water-rail, and\ncorncrake or land-rail, are also allied to the Gallinules.\n\nThe Hyacinthine Gallinule derives its name from its colour, which is\na rich and variable blue, taking a turquoise hue on the head, neck,\nthroat, and breast, and deep indigo on the back. The large bill and\nthe legs are red. Like many other birds, however, it varies much in\ncolour according to age.\n\nIt has a very wide geographical range, being found in many parts of\nEurope, Asia, and Africa, and is common in the marshy districts of\nPalestine, where its rich blue plumage and its large size, equalling\nthat of a duck, render it very conspicuous. The large and powerful\nbill of this bird betokens the nature of its food, which consists\nalmost entirely of hard vegetable substances, the seeds of aquatic\nherbage forming a large portion of its diet. When it searches for\nfood on the seashore, it eats the marine vegetation, mixing with\nthis diet other articles of an animal nature, such as molluscs and\nsmall reptiles.\n\nThough apparently a clumsy bird, it moves with wonderful speed,\nrunning not only swiftly but gracefully, its large feet being no\nhindrance to the rapidity of its movements. It is mostly found in\nshallow marshes, where the construction of its feet enables it to\ntraverse both the soft muddy ground and the patches of firm earth\nwith equal ease. Its wings, however, are by no means equal to its\nlegs either in power or activity; and, like most of the rail tribe,\nit never takes to the air unless absolutely obliged to do so.\n\nThe nest of the Hyacinthine Gallinule is made on the sedge-patches\nwhich dot the marshes, much like that of the coot. The nest, too,\nresembles that of the coot, being composed of reeds, sedges, and\nother aquatic plants. The eggs are three or four in number, white in\ncolour, and nearly spherical in form.\n\nAs the Ibis has an equal claim to the title of Tinshemeth we will\ndevote a few lines to a description of the bird. The particular\nspecies which would be signified by the word _tinshemeth_ would\nundoubtedly be the WHITE or SACRED IBIS (_Ibis religiosa_), a bird\nwhich derives its name of Sacred from the reverence with which it\nwas held by the ancient Egyptians, and the frequency with which its\nfigure occurs in the monumental sculptures. It was also thought\nworthy of being embalmed, and many mummies of the Ibis have been\nfound in the old Egyptian burial-places, having been preserved for\nsome three thousand years.\n\nIt is about as large as an ordinary hen, and, as its name imports,\nhas the greater part of its plumage white, the ends of the\nwing-feathers and the coverts being black, with violet reflections.\nThe long neck is black and bare, and has a most curious aspect,\nlooking as if it were made of an old black kid glove, very much\ncrumpled, but still retaining its gloss.\n\nThe reason for the extreme veneration with which the bird was\nregarded by the ancient Egyptians seems rather obscure. It is\nprobable, however, that the partial migration of the bird was\nconnected in their minds with the rise of the Nile, a river as\nsacred to the old Egyptians as the Ganges to the modern Hindoo. As\nsoon as the water begins to rise, the Ibis makes its appearance,\nsometimes alone, and sometimes in small troops. It haunts the banks\nof the river, and marshy places in general, diligently searching for\nfood by the aid of its long bill. It can fly well and strongly, and\nit utters at intervals a rather loud cry, dipping its head at every\nutterance.\n\n\n\n\nTHE CORMORANT.\n\n     The word _Shalak_ and its signification--Habits of the\n     Cormorant--The bird trained to catch fish--Mode of securing\n     its prey--Nests and eggs of the Cormorant--Nesting in\n     fir-trees--Flesh of the bird.\n\n\nAlthough in the Authorized Version of the Scriptures the word\nCormorant occurs three times, there is no doubt that in two of the\npassages the Hebrew word ought to have been rendered as Pelican, as\nwe shall see when we come presently to the description of that bird.\n\nIn the two parallel passages, Lev. xi. 17 and Deut. xiv. 17, a\ncreature called the Shalak is mentioned in the list of prohibited\nmeats. That the Shalak must be a bird is evident from the context,\nand we are therefore only left to discover what sort of bird it may\nbe. On looking at the etymology of the word we find that it is\nderived from a root which signifies hurling or casting down, and we\nmay therefore presume that the bird is one which plunges or sweeps\ndown upon its prey.\n\nWeighing, carefully, the opinions of the various Hebraists and\nnaturalists, we may safely determine that the word _shalak_ has been\nrightly translated in the Authorized Version. The Hebrew Bible gives\nthe same reading, and does not affix the mark of doubt to the word,\nthough there are very few of the long list of animals in Lev. xi.\nand Deut. xiv. which are not either distinguished by the mark of\ndoubt, or, like the Tinshemeth, are left untranslated.\n\nThe Cormorant belongs to the family of the pelicans, the\nrelationship between them being evident to the most unpractised eye;\nand the whole structure of the bird shows its admirable adaptation\nfor the life which it leads.\n\nIts long beak enables it to seize even a large fish, while the\nhook at the end prevents the slippery prey from escaping. The\nlong snake-like neck gives the bird the power of darting its beak\nwith great rapidity, and at the same time allows it to seize\nprey immediately to the right or left of its course. Its strong,\nclosely-feathered wings enable it to fly with tolerable speed,\nwhile at the same time they can be closed so tightly to the body\nthat they do not hinder the progress of the bird through the water;\nwhile the tail serves equally when spread to direct its course\nthrough the air, and when partially or entirely closed to act as a\nrudder in the water. Lastly, its short powerful legs, with their\nbroadly-webbed feet, act as paddles, by which the bird urges itself\nthrough the water with such wonderful speed that it can overtake and\nsecure the fishes even in their own element. Besides these outward\ncharacteristics, we find that the bird is able to make a very\nlong stay under water, the lungs being adapted so as to contain a\nwonderful amount of air.\n\nThe Cormorant has been trained to play the same part in the water\nas the falcon in the air, and has been taught to catch fish, and\nbring them ashore for its master. So adroit are they, that if one\nof them should catch a fish which is too heavy for it, another bird\nwill come to its assistance, and the two together will bring the\nstruggling prey to land. Trained birds of this description have been\nemployed in China from time immemorial.\n\nIn order to prevent it from swallowing the fish which it takes, each\nbird has a ring or ligature passed round its neck.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe Cormorant is a most voracious bird, swallowing a considerable\nweight of fish at a meal, and digesting them so rapidly that it is\nsoon ready for another supply. Although it is essentially a marine\nbird, hunger often takes it inland, especially to places where there\nare lakes or large rivers.\n\nWhile the ducks and teal and widgeons may be stationary on the\npool, the cormorant is seen swimming to and fro, as if in quest of\nsomething. First raising his body nearly perpendicular, down he\nplunges into the deep, and, after staying there a considerable time,\nhe is sure to bring up a fish, which he invariably swallows head\nforemost. Sometimes half an hour elapses before he can manage to\naccommodate a large eel quietly in his stomach.\n\nYou see him straining violently with repeated efforts to gulp it;\nand when you fancy that the slippery mouthful is successfully\ndisposed of, all on a sudden the eel retrogrades upwards from its\ndismal sepulchre, struggling violently to escape. The cormorant\nswallows it again, and up again it comes, and shows its tail a foot\nor more out of its destroyer's mouth. At length, worn out with\nineffectual writhings and slidings, the eel is gulped down into the\ncormorant's stomach for the last time, there to meet its dreaded and\ninevitable fate.\n\nMr. Fortune gives a very interesting account of the feeding of tame\nCormorants in China. The birds preferred eels to all other food,\nand, in spite of the difficulty in swallowing the slippery and\nactive creature, would not touch another fish as long as an eel\nwas left. The bird is so completely at home in the water that it\ndoes not need, like the heron and other aquatic birds, to bring its\nprey ashore in order to swallow it, but can eat fish in the water\nas well as catch them. It always seizes the fish crosswise, and is\ntherefore obliged to turn it before it can swallow the prey with the\nhead downwards. Sometimes it contrives to turn the fish while still\nunder water, but, if it should fail in so doing, it brings its prey\nto the surface, and shifts it about in its bill, making a series of\nlittle snatches at it until the head is in the right direction. When\nit seizes a very large fish, the bird shakes its prey just as a dog\nshakes a rat, and so disables it. It is said to eat its own weight\nof fish in a single day.\n\nSometimes, when it has been very successful or exceptionally hungry,\nit loads itself with food to such an extent that it becomes almost\ninsensible during the process of digestion, and, although naturally\na keen-eyed and wary bird, allows itself to be captured by hand.\n\nThe nest of the Cormorant is always upon a rocky ledge, and generally\non a spot which is inaccessible except by practised climbers\nfurnished with ropes, poles, hooks, and other appurtenances. Mr.\nWaterton mentions that when he descended the Raincliff, a precipice\nsome four hundred feet in height, he saw numbers of the nests and\neggs, but could not get at them except by swinging himself boldly\noff the face of the cliff, so as to be brought by the return swing\ninto the recesses chosen by the birds.\n\nThe nests are mostly placed in close proximity to each other, and\nare made of sticks and seaweeds, and, as is usual with such nests,\nare very inartificially constructed. The eggs are of a greenish\nwhite on the outside, and green on the inside. When found in the\nnest, they are covered with a sort of chalky crust, so that the\ntrue colour is not perceptible until the crust is scraped off. Two\nto four eggs are generally laid in, or rather on, each nest. As may\nbe imagined from the character of the birds' food, the odour of the\nnesting-place is most horrible.\n\nSometimes, when rocks cannot be found, the Cormorant is obliged to\nselect other spots for its nest. It is mentioned in the \"Proceedings\nof the Zoological Society,\" that upon an island in the midst of\na large lake there were a number of Scotch fir-trees, upon the\nbranches of which were about eighty nests of the Cormorant.\n\nThe flesh of the Cormorant is very seldom eaten, as it has a fishy\nflavour which is far from agreeable. To eat an old Cormorant is\nindeed almost impossible, but the young birds may be rendered edible\nby taking them as soon as killed, skinning them, removing the whole\nof the interior, wrapping them in cloths, and burying them for some\ntime in the ground.\n\n\n\n\nTHE PELICAN.\n\n     The Pelican of the wilderness--Attitudes of the bird--Its love\n     of solitude--Mode of feeding the young--Fables regarding the\n     Pelican--Breeding-places of the bird--The object of its wide\n     wings and large pouch--Colour of the Pelican.\n\n\nIt has been mentioned that in two passages of Scripture, the word\nwhich is translated in the Authorized Version as Cormorant, ought\nto have been rendered as PELICAN. These, however, are not the first\npassages in which we meet with the word _kaath_. The name occurs in\nthe two parallel passages of Lev. xi. and Deut. xiv. among the list\nof birds which are proscribed as food. Passing over them, we next\ncome to Ps. cii. 6. In this passage, the sacred writer is lamenting\nhis misery: \"By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave\nto my skin.\n\n\"I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the\ndesert.\"\n\nIn these sentences, we see that the Kaath was a bird of solitude\nthat was to be found in the \"wilderness,\" _i.e._ far from the\nhabitations of man. This is one of the characteristics of the\nPelican, which loves not the neighbourhood of human beings, and is\nfond of resorting to broad, uncultivated lands, where it will not be\ndisturbed.\n\nIn them it makes its nest and hatches its young, and to them it\nretires after feeding, in order to digest in quiet the ample meal\nwhich it has made. Mr. Tristram well suggests that the metaphor of\nthe Psalmist may allude to the habit common to the Pelican and its\nkin, of sitting motionless for hours after it has gorged itself with\nfood, its head sunk on its shoulders, and its bill resting on its\nbreast.\n\nThis is but one of the singular, and often grotesque, attitudes in\nwhich the Pelican is in the habit of indulging.\n\n[Illustration: THE PELICAN.]\n\nThere are before me a number of sketches made of the Pelicans at the\nZoological Gardens, and in no two cases does one attitude in the\nleast resemble another. In one sketch the bird is sitting in the\nattitude which has just been described. In another it is walking, or\nrather staggering, along, with its head on one side, and its beak\nso closed that hardly a vestige of its enormous pouch can be seen.\nAnother sketch shows the same bird as it appeared when angry with\na companion, and scolding its foe in impotent rage; while another\nshows it basking in the sun, with its magnificent wings spread and\nshaking in the warm beams, and its pouch hanging in folds from its\nchin.\n\nOne of the most curious of these sketches shows the bird squatting\non the ground, with its head drawn back as far as possible, and\nsunk so far among the feathers of the back and shoulders that only\na portion of the head itself can be seen, while the long beak is\nhidden, except an inch or two of the end. In this attitude it might\neasily be mistaken at a little distance for an oval white stone.\n\nThe derivation of the Hebrew word _kaath_ is a very curious one. It\nis taken from a verb signifying \"to vomit,\" and this derivation has\nbeen explained in different ways.\n\nThe early writers, who were comparatively ignorant of natural\nhistory, thought that the Pelican lived chiefly on molluscs, and\nthat, after digesting the animals, it rejected their shells, just as\nthe owl and the hawk reject the bones, fur, and feathers of their\nprey.\n\nThey thought that the Pelican was a bird of a hot temperament, and\nthat the molluscs were quickly digested by the heat of the stomach.\n\nAt the present day, however, knowing as we do the habits of the\nPelican, we find that, although the reasons just given are faulty,\nand that the Pelican lives essentially on fish, and not on molluscs,\nthe derivation of the word is really a good one, and that those\nwho gave the bird the name of Kaath, or the vomiter, were well\nacquainted with its habits.\n\nThe bird certainly does eat molluscs, but the principal part of its\ndiet is composed of fish, which it catches dexterously by a sort\nof sidelong snatch of its enormous bill. The skin under the lower\npart of the beak is so modified that it can form, when distended,\nan enormous pouch, capable of holding a great quantity of fish,\nthough, as long as it is not wanted, the pouch is so contracted into\nlongitudinal folds as to be scarcely perceptible. When it has filled\nthe pouch, it usually retires from the water, and flies to a retired\nspot, often many miles inland, where it can sit and digest at its\nease the enormous meal which it has made.\n\nAs it often chooses its breeding-places in similar spots, far from\nthe water, it has to carry the food with which it nourishes its\nyoung for many miles. For this purpose it is furnished, not only\nwith the pouch which has been just mentioned, but with long, wide,\nand very powerful wings, often measuring from twelve to thirteen\nfeet from tip to tip. No one, on looking at a Pelican as it waddles\nabout or sits at rest, would imagine the gigantic dimensions of\nthe wings, which seem, as the bird spreads them, to have almost as\nunlimited a power of expansion as the pouch.\n\nIn these two points the true Pelicans present a strong contrast to\nthe cormorants, though birds closely allied. The cormorant has its\nhome close by the sea, and therefore needs not to carry its food\nfor any distance. Consequently, it needs no pouch, and has none.\nNeither does it require the great expanse of wing which is needful\nfor the Pelican, that has to carry such a weight of fish through\nthe air. Accordingly, the wings, though strong enough to enable the\nbird to carry for a short distance a single fish of somewhat large\nsize, are comparatively short and closely feathered, and the flight\nof the cormorant possesses neither the grace nor the power which\ndistinguishes that of the Pelican.\n\nWhen the Pelican feeds its young, it does so by pressing its beak\nagainst its breast, so as to force out of it the enclosed fish.\nNow the tip of the beak is armed, like that of the cormorant, with\na sharply-curved hook, only, in the case of the Pelican, the hook\nis of a bright scarlet colour, looking, when the bird presses the\nbeak against the white feathers of the breast, like a large drop of\nblood. Hence arose the curious legend respecting the Pelican, which\nrepresented it as feeding its young with its own blood, and tearing\nopen its breast with its hooked bill. We find that this legend is\nexemplified by the oft-recurring symbol of the \"Pelican feeding its\nyoung\" in ecclesiastical art, as an emblem of Divine love.\n\nThis is one of the many instances in which the inventive, poetical,\ninaccurate Oriental mind has seized some peculiarity of form, and\nbased upon it a whole series of fabulous legends. As long as they\nrestricted themselves to the appearance and habits of the animals\nwith which they were familiarly acquainted, the old writers were\ncuriously full, exact, and precise in their details. But as soon as\nthey came to any creature of whose mode of life they were entirely\nor partially ignorant, they allowed their inventive faculties full\nscope, and put forward as zoological facts statements which were\nthe mere creation of their own fancy. We have already seen several\nexamples of this propensity, and shall find more as we proceed with\nthe zoology of the Scriptures.\n\nThe fabulous legends of the Pelican are too numerous to be even\nmentioned, but there is one which deserves notice, because it is\nmade the basis of an old Persian fable.\n\nThe writer of the legend evidently had some partial knowledge of the\nbird. He knew that it had a large pouch which could hold fish and\nwater; that it had large and powerful wings; and that it was in the\nhabit of flying far inland, either for the purpose of digesting its\nfood or nourishing its young. Knowing that the Pelican is in the\nhabit of choosing solitary spots in which it may bring up its young\nin safety, but not knowing the precise mode of its nesting, the\nwriter in question has trusted to his imagination, and put forward\nhis theories as facts.\n\nKnowing that the bird dwells in \"the wilderness,\" he has assumed\nthat the wilderness in question is a sandy, arid desert, far from\nwater, and consequently from vegetation. Such being the case, the\nnurture of the Pelican's young is evidently a difficult question.\nBeing aquatic birds, the young must needs require water for drink\nand bathing, as well as fish for food; and, though a supply of\nboth these necessaries could be brought in the ample pouches of\nthe parents, they would be wasted unless some mode of storing were\nemployed.\n\nAccordingly, the parent birds were said to make their nest in a\nhollow tree, and to line it with clay, or to build it altogether of\nclay, so as to leave a deep basin. This basin the parent birds were\nsaid to use as a sort of store-pond, bringing home supplies of fish\nand water in their pouches, and pouring them into the pond. The wild\nbeasts who lived in the desert were said to be acquainted with these\nnests, and to resort to them daily in order to quench their thirst,\nrepaying their entertainers by protecting their homes.\n\nIn real fact, the Pelican mostly breeds near water, and is fond of\nselecting little rocky islands where it cannot be approached without\ndanger. The nest is made on the ground, and is formed in a most\ninartificial manner of reeds and grass, the general mass of the\nnest being made of the reeds, and the lining being formed of grass.\nThe eggs are white, of nearly the same shape at both ends, and are\nfrom two to five in number. On an average, however, each nest will\ncontain about two eggs.\n\nThe parent birds are very energetic in defence of their eggs or\nyoung, and, according to Le Vaillant, when approached they are \"like\nfurious harpies let loose against us, and their cries rendered us\nalmost deaf. They often flew so near us that they flapped their\nwings in our faces, and, though we fired our pieces repeatedly, we\nwere not able to frighten them.\" When the well-known naturalist\nSonnerat tried to drive a female Pelican from her nest, she appeared\nnot to be frightened, but angry. She would not move from her nest,\nand when he tried to push her off, she struck at him with her long\nbill and uttered cries of rage.\n\nIn order to aid the bird in carrying the heavy weights with which\nit loads itself, the whole skeleton is permeated with air, and is\nexceedingly light. Beside this, the whole cellular system of the\nbird is honeycombed with air-cells, so that the bulk of the bird\ncan be greatly increased, while its weight remains practically\nunaltered, and the Pelican becomes a sort of living balloon.\n\nThe habit of conveying its food inland before eating it is so\ncharacteristic of the Pelican that other birds take advantage of\nit. In some countries there is a large hawk which robs the Pelican,\njust as the bald-headed eagle of America robs the osprey. Knowing\ninstinctively that when a Pelican is flying inland slowly and\nheavily and with a distended pouch it is carrying a supply of food\nto its home, the hawk dashes at it, and frightens it so that the\npoor bird opens its beak, and gives up to the assailant the fish\nwhich it was bearing homewards.\n\nIt is evident that the wings which are needed for supporting such\nweights, and which, as we have seen, exceed twelve feet in length\nfrom tip to tip, would be useless in the water, and would hinder\nrather than aid the bird if it attempted to dive as the close-winged\ncormorant does. Accordingly, we find that the Pelican is not a\ndiver, and, instead of chasing its finny prey under water, after\nthe manner of the cormorant, it contents itself with scooping up\nin its beak the fishes which come to the surface of the water. The\nvery buoyancy of its body would prevent it from diving as does the\ncormorant, and, although it often plunges into the water so fairly\nas to be for a moment submerged, it almost immediately rises, and\npursues its course on the surface of the water, and not beneath it.\nLike the cormorant, the Pelican can perch on trees, though it does\nnot select such spots for its roosting-places, and prefers rocks to\nbranches. In one case, however, when some young Pelicans had been\ncaptured and tied to a stake, their mother used to bring them food\nduring the day, and at night was accustomed to roost in the branches\nof a tree above them.\n\nThough under some circumstances a thoroughly social bird, it is yet\nfond of retiring to the most solitary spots in order to consume at\npeace the prey that it has captured; and, as it sits motionless and\nalone for hours, more like a white stone than a bird, it may well be\naccepted as a type of solitude and desolation.\n\nThe colour of the common Pelican is white, with a very slight\npinky tinge, which is most conspicuous in the breeding season. The\nfeathers of the crest are yellow, and the quill feathers of the\nwings are jetty black, contrasting well with the white plumage of\nthe body. The pouch is yellow, and the upper part of the beak bluish\ngrey, with a red line running across the middle, and a bright red\nhook at the tip. This plumage belongs only to the adult bird, that\nof the young being ashen grey, and four or five years are required\nbefore the bird puts on its full beauty. There is no difference in\nthe appearance of the sexes. The illustration represents a fine old\nmale Crested Pelican. The general colour is a greyish white, with a\nslight yellowish tint on the breast. The pouch is bright orange, and\nthe crest is formed of curling feathers.\n\n[Illustration: scene]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: reptile]\n\n\n\n\nREPTILES.\n\n[Illustration: scene]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: tortoise]\n\n\n\n\nTHE TORTOISE.\n\n     The Tzab of the Scriptures, translated as Tortoise--Flesh\n     and eggs of the Tortoise--Its slow movements--Hibernation\n     dependent on temperature--The Water-Tortoises--Their food and\n     voracity--Their eggs--Their odour terrifying the horses--The\n     Dhubb lizard and its legends--Its food, and localities which it\n     prefers.\n\n\nWe now come to a different class of animated beings. In Levit. xi.\n29, there occurs among the list of unclean beasts a word which is\ntranslated in the Authorized Version as \"tortoise.\" The word is\n_Tzab_, and is rendered in the Hebrew Bible as \"lizard,\" but with\nthe mark of doubt affixed to it. As the correct translation of the\nword is very dubious, we shall examine it in both these senses.\n\nThe common Tortoise is very common in Palestine, and is so plentiful\nthat it would certainly have been used by the Israelites as food,\nhad it not been prohibited by law. At the present day it is cooked\nand eaten by the inhabitants of the country who are not Jews, and\nits eggs are in as great request as those of the fowl.\n\nThese eggs are hard, nearly spherical, thick-shelled, and covered\nwith minute punctures, giving them a roughness like that of a file.\nIn captivity the Tortoise is very careless about the mode in which\nthey are deposited, and I have seen a large yard almost covered\nwith eggs laid by Tortoises and abandoned. The white or albumen of\nthe egg is so stiff and gelatinous that to empty one of them without\nbreaking the shell is a difficult task, and the yolk is very dark,\nand covered with minute spots of black. When fresh the eggs are as\ngood as those of the fowl, and many persons even think them better;\nthe only drawback being that their small size and thick shell cause\nconsiderable trouble in eating them.\n\n[Illustration: THE DHUBB OR LIZARD AND THE TORTOISE].\n\nThe flesh of the Tortoise is eaten, not only by human beings, but by\nbirds, such as the laemmergeier. In order to get at the flesh of the\nTortoise, they carry it high in the air and drop it on the ground so\nas to break the shell to pieces, should the reptile fall on a stone\nor rock. If, as is not often the case in such a rocky land as that\nof Palestine, it should fall on a soft spot, the bird picks it up,\nsoars aloft, and drops it again.\n\nThe Tortoises have no teeth, but yet are able to crop the herbage\nwith perfect ease. In lieu of teeth the edges of the jaws are\nsharp-edged and very hard, so that they cut anything that comes\nbetween them like a pair of shears. Leaves that are pulpy and\ncrisp are bitten through at once, but those that are thin, tough,\nand fibrous are rather torn than bitten, the Tortoise placing its\nfeet upon them, and dragging them to pieces with its jaws. The\ncarnivorous Tortoises have a similar habit, as we shall presently\nsee.\n\n[Illustration: WATER TORTOISE.]\n\nThis is the species from whose deliberate and slow movements the\nfamiliar metaphor of \"slow as a Tortoise\" was derived, and it is\nthis species which is the hero of the popular fable of the \"Hare and\nthe Tortoise.\" Many of the reptiles are very slow in some things and\nastonishingly quick in others. Some of the lizards, for example,\nwill at one time remain motionless for many hours together, or creep\nabout with a slow and snail-like progress, while at others they\ndart from spot to spot with such rapidity that the eye can scarcely\nfollow their movements. This however is not the case with the\nTortoise, which is always slow, and, but for the defensive armour in\nwhich it is encased, would long ago have been extirpated.\n\nDuring the whole of the summer months it may be seen crawling\ndeliberately among the herbage, eating in the same deliberate style\nwhich characterises all its movements, and occasionally resting in\nthe same spot for many hours together, apparently enjoying the warm\nbeams of the sunshine.\n\nAs winter approaches, it slowly scrapes a deep hole in the ground,\nand buries itself until the following spring awakes it once more to\nactive life. The depth of its burrow depends on the severity of the\nwinter, for, as the cold increases, the Tortoise sinks itself more\ndeeply into the earth.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nMention has been made of a species of Tortoise that inhabits the\nwater. This is the CASPIAN EMYS (_Emys caspica_), a small species,\nmeasuring about six inches in length. It belongs to the large family\nof the Terrapins, several of which are so well known in America, and\nhas a long, retractile neck, very sharp jaws, and webbed feet, and a\nwell-developed tail.\n\nThe body is flattish, and the colour is olive, with lines of yellow\nedged with black, and the head is marked with longitudinal streaks\nof bright yellow. After the death of the creature these yellow\nstreaks fade away gradually, and at last become nearly black. The\nskin of the head is thin, but very hard. In general appearance it\nis not unlike the chicken Tortoise of America, a species which is\noften brought to England and kept in captivity, on account of its\nhardy nature and the little trouble which is needed for keeping it\nin health.\n\nI have kept specimens of the Caspian Emys for some time, and found\nthem to be more interesting animals than they at first promised\nto be. They were active, swimming with considerable speed, and\nsnatching quickly at anything which they fancied might be food.\n\nThey were exceedingly voracious, consuming daily a quantity of meat\napparently disproportioned to their size, and eating it in a manner\nthat strongly reminded me of the mole when engaged on a piece of\nmeat or the body of a bird or mouse. The Tortoise would plant its\nfore-paws firmly at each side of the meat, seize a mouthful in its\njaws, and, by retracting its head violently, would tear away the\npiece which it had grasped.\n\nThey are most destructive among fish, and are apt to rise quietly\nunderneath a fish as it basks near the surface of the water,\ngrasp it beneath with its sharp-edged jaws, and tear away the\npiece, leaving the fish to die. It is rather remarkable that the\nLepidosiren, or mud-fish of the Gambia, destroys fish in a precisely\nsimilar manner, though, as its jaws are much sharper than those of\nthe Emys, it does not need the aid of fore-paws in biting out its\nmouthful of flesh.\n\nLike the land Tortoise, it is one of the hibernators, and during the\nwinter months buries itself deeply in the earth, choosing for this\npurpose the soft, muddy bed or bank of the pond in which it lives.\n\nIts eggs are white, and hard-shelled, but are more oval than those\nof the land Tortoise, and both ends are nearly alike. In fact, its\negg might well be mistaken for that of a small pigeon. The shell\nhas a porcelain-like look, and is very liable to crack, so that the\nresemblance is increased.\n\nThere is one drawback to these reptiles when kept as pets. They\ngive out a very unpleasant odour, which is disagreeable to human\nnostrils, but is absolutely terrifying to many animals. The monkey\ntribe have the strongest objection to these aquatic Tortoises. I\nonce held one of them towards a very tame chimpanzee, much to his\ndiscomfiture. He muttered and remonstrated, and retreated as far as\nhe could, pushing out his lips in a funnel-like form, and showing\nhis repugnance to the reptile in a manner that could not be mistaken.\n\nHorses seem to be driven almost frantic with terror, not only by the\nsight, but by the odour of these Tortoises. In Southern Africa there\nare Tortoises closely allied to the Caspian Emys, and having the\nsame power of frightening horses.\n\nI have read an account of an adventure there with one of those\nTortoises, which I will give. This variety is described as being of\nan olive colour. When adult, there is a slight depression on either\nside of the vertebral line.\n\n\"Some very awkward accidents have occurred to parties from the\nterror caused by the fresh-water turtle (_Pelamedusa subrufa_).\nCarts have been smashed to fragments, riders thrown, and the utmost\nconfusion caused by them. It is their smell, and it is certainly\nvery disagreeable.\n\n\"My first acquaintance with the fact was in this wise. I was out\nshooting with two young ladies who had volunteered as markers; and,\nas you know, all our shooting is done from horseback. I had jumped\noff for a shot at some francolins near a knill, or water-hole, and,\nafter picking up my birds, was coming round the knoll to windward\nof the horses. In my path scrambled a turtle. I called out to my\nyoung friends, and told them of my find, on which one of them, in\na hasty voice, said, 'Oh, please, Mr. L., don't touch it; you will\nfrighten the horses!'\n\n\"Of course I laughed at the idea, and picked up the reptile, which\ninstantly emitted its pungent odour--its means of defence. Though\na long way off, the moment the horses caught the scent, away they\nflew, showing terror in every action. The girls, luckily splendid\nriders, tugged in vain at the reins; away they went over the Veldt,\nleaving me in mortal fear that the yawning 'aard-vark' holes\n(_Orycteropus capensis_) would break their necks. My own horse,\nwhich I had hitched to a bush, tore away his bridle, and with the\nends streaming in the wind and the stirrups clashing about him,\nsped off home at full gallop, and was only recovered after a severe\nchase by my gallant young Amazons, who, after a race of some miles,\nsucceeded in checking their affrighted steeds and in securing my\nrunaway. But for some hours after, if I ventured to windward, there\nwere wild-looking eyes and cocked ears--the smell of the reptile\nclung to me.\"\n\nShould any of my readers keep any of those water Tortoises, they\nwill do well to supply them plentifully with food, to give them an\nelevated rocky perch on which they can scramble, and on which they\nwill sit for hours so motionless that at a little distance they can\nscarcely be distinguished from the stone on which they rest. They\nshould also be weighed at regular intervals, as decrease of weight\nis a sure sign that something is wrong, and, as a general rule, is\nan almost certain precursor of death.\n\nThis little reptile is not without its legends. According to the old\nwriters on natural history, it is of exceeding use to vine-growers\nin the season when there is excess of rain or hail. Whenever the\nowner of a vineyard sees a black cloud approaching, all he has to do\nis, to take one of these Tortoises, lay it on its back, and carry it\nround the vineyard. He must then go into the middle of the ground\nand lay the reptile on the earth, still on its back; and the effect\nof this proceeding would be that the cloud would pass aside from a\nplace so well protected.\n\n\"But,\" proceeds the narrator, not wishing to be responsible for\nthe statement, \"such diabolical and foolish observations were not\nso muche to be remembered in this place, were it not for their\nsillinesse, that by knowing them men might learn the weaknesse\nof human wisdom when it erreth from the fountain of all science\nand true knowledge (which is Divinity), and the most approved\nassertions of nature. And so I will say no more in this place of the\nsweet-water tortoise.\"\n\n\n\n\nTHE DHUBB.\n\n\nWe now come to the second animal, which may probably be the Tzab of\nthe Old Testament.\n\nThis creature is one of the lizards, and is a very odd-looking\ncreature. It is certainly not so attractive in appearance that the\nJews might be supposed to desire it as food; but it often happens\nthat, as is the case with the turtle and iguana, from the most\nungainly, in the latter animal even repulsive, forms are produced\nthe most delicate meats.\n\nThe DHUBB, or EGYPTIAN MASTIGURE, as the lizard is indifferently\ncalled, grows to a considerable size, measuring when adult three\nfeet in length. Its colour is green, variegated with brown, and is\nslightly changeable, though not to the extent that distinguishes\nthe chameleon. The chief peculiarity of this lizard consists in its\ntail, which is covered with a series of whorls or circles of long,\nsharply-pointed, hard-edged scales. The very appearance of this tail\nsuggests its use as a weapon of defence, and it is said that even\nthe dreaded cerastes is conquered by it, when the lizard and the\nsnake happen to find themselves occupants of the same hole.\n\nThe ancients had a very amusing notion respecting the use of the\nspiny tail possessed by the Dhubb and its kin. They had an idea\nthat, comparatively small though it was, it fed upon cattle, and\nthat it was able to take them from the herd and drive them to its\nhome. For this purpose, when it had selected an ox, it jumped on\nits back, and by the pricking of its sharp claws drove the animal\nto gallop in hope of ridding himself of his tormentor. In order to\nguide him in the direction of its home, it made use of its tail,\nlashing the ox \"to make him go with his rider to the place of his\nmost fit execution, free from all rescue of his herdsman, or\npastor, or the annoyance of passengers, where, in most cruel and\nsavage manner, he teareth the limbs and parts one from another till\nhe be devoured.\"\n\nThis very absurd account is headed by an illustration, which, though\nbad in drawing and rude in execution, is yet so bold and truthful\nthat there is no doubt that it was sketched from the living animal.\n\nAs it haunts sandy downs, rocky spots, and similar localities, it\nis well adapted for the Holy Land, which is the home of a vast\nnumber of reptiles, especially of those belonging to the lizards. In\nthe summer time they have the full enjoyment of the hot sunbeams,\nin which they delight, and which seem to rouse these cold-blooded\ncreatures to action, while they deprive the higher animals of all\nspirit and energy. In the winter time these very spots afford\nlocalities wherein the lizards can hibernate until the following\nspring, and in such a case they furnish the reptiles with secure\nhiding-places.\n\nAlthough the Dhubb does not destroy and tear to pieces oxen and\nother cattle, it is yet a rather bloodthirsty reptile, and will kill\nand devour birds as large as the domestic fowl. Usually, however,\nits food consists of beetles and other insects, which it takes\ndeliberately.\n\n[Illustration: rocks and water]\n\n\n\n\nTHE LEVIATHAN OR CROCODILE.\n\n     Signification of the word _Leviathan_--Description in the Book\n     of Job--Structure and general habits of the Crocodile--The\n     throat-valve and its use--Position of the nostrils--Worship of\n     the Crocodile--The reptile known in the Holy Land--Two legends\n     respecting its presence there--Mode of taking prey--Cunning\n     of the Crocodile--The baboons and the Crocodile--Speed of\n     the reptile--Eggs and young of the Crocodile, and their\n     enemies--Curious story of the ichneumon and ibis--Modes of\n     capturing the Crocodile--Analysis of Job's description--The\n     Crocodile also signified by the word _Tannin_. Aaron's rod\n     changed into a Tannin--Various passages in which the word\n     occurs--Use of the word by the prophet Jeremiah.\n\n\nThe word _Leviathan_ is used in a rather loose manner in the Old\nTestament, in some places representing a mammalian of the sea, and\nin others signifying a reptile inhabiting the rivers. As in the most\nimportant of these passages the Crocodile is evidently signified, we\nwill accept that rendering, and consider the Crocodile as being the\nLeviathan of Scripture. The Jewish Bible accepts the word Crocodile,\nand does not add the mark of doubt.\n\nThe fullest account of the Leviathan occurs in Job xli., the whole\nof which chapter is given to the description of the terrible\nreptile. As the translation of the Jewish Bible differs in some\npoints from that of the Authorized Version, I shall here give the\nformer, so that the reader may be able to compare them with each\nother.\n\n  \"Canst thou draw out a crocodile with a hook, or his tongue with a\n        cord which thou lettest down?\n\n  \"Canst thou put a reed into his nose, or bore his jaw through with\n        a thorn?\n\n  \"Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words\n        unto thee?\n\n  \"Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him as a servant\n        for ever?\n\n  \"Wilt thou play with him as with a bird, or wilt thou bind him for\n        thy maidens?\n\n  \"Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him\n        among the merchants?\n\n  \"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons, or his head with\n        fish-spears?\n\n  \"Lay thine hand upon him, thou wilt no more remember the battle.\n\n  \"Behold, the hope of him is in vain; shall not one be cast down at\n        the sight of him?\n\n  \"None is so fierce that dare stir him up; who then is able to stand\n        before Me?\n\n  \"Who hath forestalled Me that I should repay him? whatsoever is\n        under the whole heaven is Mine.\n\n  \"I will not be silent of his parts, nor of the matter of his power,\n        nor of his comely proportion.\n\n  \"Who can uncover the face of his garment? who would enter the double\n        row in his jaw?\n\n  \"Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round\n        about.\n\n  \"The strength of his shields are his pride, shut up together as\n        with a close seal.\n\n  \"One is so near to another that no air can come between them.\n\n  \"They are joined one to another, they stick together that they\n        cannot be sundered.\n\n  \"His snortings make light to shine, and his eyes are like the\n        eyelids of the morning dawn.\n\n  \"Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or\n        caldron.\n\n  \"His breath kindleth live coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.\n\n  \"In his neck abideth strength, and before him danceth terror.\n\n  \"The flakes of his flesh are joined together, they are firm in\n        themselves; yea, as hard as nether millstone.\n\n  \"When he raiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid; by reason of\n        breakings they lose themselves.\n\n  \"The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the\n        dart, nor the habergeon.\n\n  \"He esteemeth iron as straw, and copper as rotten wood.\n\n  \"The arrow cannot make him flee: sling-stones are turned with him\n        into stubble.\n\n  \"Clubs are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear.\n\n  [Illustration: CROCODILE ATTACKING HORSES.]\n\n  \"His under parts are like sharp points of potsherd; he speaketh\n        sharp points upon the mire.\n\n  \"He maketh the deep to boil like a pot; he maketh the sea like a pot\n        of ointment.\n\n  \"He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be\n        hoary.\n\n  \"Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.\n\n  \"He beholdeth all high things; he is a king over all the children\n        of pride.\"\n\nThis splendid description points as clearly to the Crocodile as the\ndescription of the Behemoth which immediately precedes it does to\nthe hippopotamus, and it is tolerably evident that the sacred poet\nwho wrote these passages must have been personally acquainted with\nboth the Crocodile and the hippopotamus. In both descriptions there\nare a few exaggerations, or rather, poetical licences. For example,\nthe bones of the hippopotamus are said to be iron and copper, and\nthe Crocodile is said to kindle live coals with his breath. These,\nhowever, are but the natural imagery of an Oriental poet, and,\nconsidering the subject, we may rather wonder that the writer has\nnot introduced even more fanciful metaphors.\n\n\nDESCRIPTION OF THE CROCODILE.\n\nThere are several species of Crocodile in different parts of the\nworld, ten species at least being known to science.\n\nSome inhabit India, some tropical America, some Asia, and some\nAfrica, so that the genus is represented in nearly all the warmer\nparts of the world.\n\nThey are all known by the formation of the teeth, the lower canines\nfitting each into a notch on the side of the upper jaw. The feet are\nwebbed to the tips, and though the reptile mostly propels itself\nthrough the water by means of its tail, it can also paddle itself\ngently along by means of its feet.\n\nThe teeth are all made for snatching and tearing, but not for\nmasticating, the Crocodile swallowing its prey entire when possible;\nand when the animal is too large to be eaten entire, the reptile\ntears it to pieces, and swallows the fragments without attempting to\nmasticate them.\n\nIn order to enable it to open its mouth under water, the back\nof its throat is furnished with a very simple but beautiful\ncontrivance, whereby the water is received on a membranous valve\nand, in proportion to its pressure, closes the orifice of the\nthroat. As the Crocodiles mostly seize their prey in their open jaws\nand hold it under water until drowned, it is evident that without\nsuch a structure as has been described the Crocodile would be as\nlikely to drown itself as its prey. But the throat-valve enables\nit to keep its mouth open while the water is effectually prevented\nfrom running down its throat, and the nostrils, placed at the end of\nthe snout, enable it to breathe at its ease, while the unfortunate\nanimal which it has captured is being drowned beneath the surface of\nthe water.\n\nThis position of the nostrils serves another purpose, and enables\nthe Crocodile to breathe while the whole of its body is under the\nwater, and only an inch or two of the very end of the snout is\nabove the surface. As, moreover, the Crocodile, as is the case with\nmost reptiles, is able to exist for a considerable time without\nbreathing, it only needs to protrude its nostrils for a few moments,\nand can then sink entirely beneath the water. In this way the\nreptile is able to conceal itself in case it should suspect danger;\nand as, in such instances, it dives under the herbage of the river,\nand merely thrusts its nose into the air among the reeds and rushes,\nit is evident that, in spite of its enormous size, it baffles the\nobservation of almost every foe.\n\nAmong reptiles, the mailed Crocodiles may be mentioned as most\nformidable foes to man. Vast in bulk, yet grovelling with the belly\non the earth; clad in bony plates with sharp ridges; green eyes with\na peculiar fiery stare, gleaming out from below projecting orbits;\nlips altogether wanting, displaying the long rows of interlocking\nteeth even when the mouth is closed, so that, even when quiet, the\nmonster seems to be grinning with rage,--it is no wonder that the\nCrocodile should be, in all the countries which it inhabits, viewed\nwith dread.\n\nNor is this terror groundless. The Crocodiles, both of the Nile\nand of the Indian rivers, are well known to make man their victim,\nand scarcely can a more terrible fate be imagined than that of\nfalling into the jaws of this gigantic reptile. Strange as it may\nappear, the Crocodile is one of the many animals to which divine\nhonours were paid by the ancient Egyptians. This we learn from\nseveral sources. Herodotus, for example, in \"Euterpe,\" chapter\n69, writes as follows: \"Those who dwell about Thebes and Lake\nMoeris, consider them to be very sacred; and they each of them\ntrain up a Crocodile, which is taught to be quite tame; and they put\ncrystal and gold ear-rings into their ears, and bracelets on their\nfore-paws; and they give them appointed and sacred food, and treat\nthem as well as possible while alive and when dead, they embalm\nthem, and bury them in sacred vaults.\"\n\n[Illustration: A CROCODILE POOL OF ANCIENT EGYPT.]\n\nThe reasons for this worship are several. At the root of them all\nlies the tendency of man to respect that which he fears rather\nthan that which he loves; and the nearer the man approaches the\nsavage state, the more is this feeling developed. By this tendency\nhis worship is regulated, and it will be found that when man is\nsufficiently advanced to be capable of worship at all, his reverence\nis invariably paid to the object which has the greatest terrors\nfor him. The Crocodile, therefore, being the animal that was most\ndreaded by the ancient Egyptians, was accepted as the natural type\nof divinity.\n\n[Illustration: CROCODILES OF THE UPPER NILE.]\n\nOwing to the accuracy of the description in the Book of Job, which\nis evidently written by one who was personally acquainted with\nthe Crocodile, it is thought by many commentators that the writer\nmust have been acquainted with the Nile, in which river both the\nCrocodile and hippopotamus are found at the present day.\n\nIt is possible, however, that the hippopotamus and the Crocodile\nhave had at one time a much wider range than they at present enjoy.\nEven within the memory of man the hippopotamus has been driven\nfurther and further up the Nile by the encroachments of man. It has\nlong been said that even at the present day the Crocodile exists in\nPalestine in the river which is called \"Nhar Zurka,\" which flows\nfrom Samaria through the plains of Sharon. Several of the older\nwriters have mentioned its existence in this river, and, since this\nwork was commenced, the long-vexed question has been set at rest; a\nCrocodile, eight feet in length, having been captured in the Nhar\nZurka.\n\nNo description of the Crocodile would be complete without allusion\nto the mode in which it seizes its prey. It does not attack it\nopenly, neither, as some have said, does it go on shore for that\npurpose. It watches to see whether any animal comes to drink, and\nthen, sinking beneath the surface of the water, dives rapidly,\nrises unexpectedly beneath the unsuspecting victim, seizes it with\na sudden snap of its huge jaws, and drags it beneath the water.\nShould the intended prey be too far from the water to be reached by\nthe mouth, or so large that it may offer a successful resistance,\nthe Crocodile strikes it a tremendous blow with its tail, and knocks\nit into the water. The dwellers on the Nile bank say that a large\nCrocodile will with a single blow of its tail break all the four\nlegs of an ox or a horse.\n\nThese cunning reptiles even contrive to catch birds as they come for\nwater. On the banks of the Nile the smaller birds drink in a very\npeculiar manner. They settle in numbers on the flexible branches\nthat overhang the stream, and when, by their weight, the branch\nbends downwards, they dip their beaks in the water. The Crocodile\nsees afar off a branch thus loaded, swims as near as possible, and\nthen dives until it can see the birds immediately above it, when it\nrises suddenly, and with a snap of its jaws secures a whole mouthful\nof the unsuspecting birds.\n\nSir S. Baker, in his travels on the Nile, gave much attention to\nthe Crocodile, and has collected a great amount of interesting\ninformation about the reptile, much of which is peculiarly valuable,\ninasmuch as it illustrates the Scriptural notices of the creature.\nHe states that it is a very crafty animal, and that its usual mode\nof attack is by first showing itself, then swimming slowly away to a\nconsiderable distance, so as to make its intended victim think that\ndanger is over, and then returning under water. It is by means of\nthis manoeuvre that it captures the little birds. It first makes\na dash at them, open-mouthed, causing them to take to flight in\nterror. It then sails slowly away as if it were so baffled that it\ndid not intend to renew the attack. When it is at a considerable\ndistance, the birds think that their enemy has departed, and return\nto the branch, which they crowd more than ever, and in a minute\nor two several dozen of them are engulfed in the mouth of the\nCrocodile, which has swiftly dived under them.\n\nOn one occasion, Sir S. Baker was walking near the edge of the\nriver, when he heard a great shrieking of women on the opposite\nbank. It turned out that a number of women had been filling their\n\"gerbas\" (water-skins), when one of them was suddenly attacked by\na large Crocodile. She sprang back, and the reptile, mistaking the\nfilled gerba for a woman, seized it, and gave the owner time to\nescape. It then dashed at the rest of the women, but only succeeded\nin seizing another gerba.\n\nA short time previously a Crocodile, thought by the natives to be\nthe same individual, had seized a woman and carried her off; and\nanother had made an attack on a man in a very curious manner. A\nnumber of men were swimming across the river, supported, after\ntheir custom, on gerbas inflated with air, when one of them felt\nhimself seized by the leg by a Crocodile, which tried to drag him\nunder water. He, however, retained his hold on the skin, and his\ncompanions also grasped his arms and hair with one hand, while\nwith the other they struck with their spears at the Crocodile. At\nlast they succeeded in driving the reptile away, and got their\nunfortunate companion to land, where they found that the whole of\nthe flesh was stripped from the leg from the knee downwards. The\npoor man died shortly afterwards.\n\nAnother traveller relates that three young men who were obliged to\ncross a branch of a river in their route, being unable to procure\na boat, endeavoured to swim their horses to the opposite shore.\nTwo of them had reached the bank in safety, but the third loitered\nso long on the brink as only to have just entered the water at the\nmoment his comrades had reached the opposite side. When he was\nnearly half-way across, they saw a large Crocodile, which was known\nto infest this pass, issuing from under the reeds. They instantly\nwarned their companion of his danger; but it was too late for him\nto turn back. When the Crocodile was so close as to be on the point\nof seizing him, he threw his saddle-bag to it. The ravenous animal\nimmediately caught the whole bundle in its jaws, and disappeared for\na few moments, but soon discovered its mistake, and rose in front\nof the horse, which, then seeing it for the first time, reared and\nthrew its rider. He was an excellent swimmer, and had nearly escaped\nby diving towards the bank; but, on rising for breath, his pursuer\nalso rose, and seized him by the middle. This dreadful scene,\nwhich passed before the eyes of his companions, without the least\npossibility of their rendering any assistance, was terminated by the\nCrocodile, having previously drowned the unfortunate man, appearing\non an opposite sand-bank with the body, and there devouring it.\n\nThe crafty Crocodile tries to catch the baboons by lying in wait for\nthem at their drinking places; but the baboons are generally more\nthan a match for the Crocodile in point of cunning and quickness of\nsight. Sir S. Baker witnessed an amusing example of such an attempt\nand its failure.\n\n\"The large tamarind-trees on the opposite bank are generally full\nof the dog-faced baboons (_Cynocephalus_) at their drinking hour.\nI watched a large Crocodile creep slily out of the water and lie\nin waiting among the rocks at the usual drinking place before they\narrived, but the baboons were too wide awake to be taken in so\neasily.\n\n\"A young fellow was the first to discover the enemy. He had\naccompanied several wise and experienced old hands to the extremity\nof a bough that at a considerable height overhung the river; from\nthis post they had a bird's eye view, and reconnoitred before one of\nthe numerous party descended to drink. The sharp eyes of the young\none at once detected the Crocodile, who matched in colour so well\nwith the rocks that most probably a man would not have noticed it\nuntil too late.\n\n\"At once the young one commenced shaking the bough and screaming\nwith all his might, to attract the attention of the Crocodile and to\ninduce it to move. In this he was immediately joined by the whole\nparty, who yelled in chorus, while the large old males bellowed\ndefiance, and descended to the lowest branches within eight or\nten feet of the Crocodile. It was of no use--the pretender never\nstirred, and I watched it until dark. It remained still in the\nsame place, waiting for some unfortunate baboon whose thirst might\nprovoke his fate, but not one was sufficiently foolish, although\nthe perpendicular bank prevented them from drinking except at that\nparticular spot.\"\n\nIt may be imagined that if the Crocodile were to depend entirely\nfor its food upon the animals that it catches on the bank or in\nthe river, it would run a risk of starving. The fact is, that its\nprincipal food consists of fish, which it can chase in the water.\nThe great speed at which the Crocodile darts through the water is\nnot owing to its webbed feet, but to its powerful tail, which is\nswept from side to side, and thus propels the reptile after the\nmanner of a man \"sculling\" a boat with a single oar in the stern.\nThe whales and the fishes have a similar mode of propulsion.\n\nOn land, the tail is the Crocodile's most formidable weapon. It is\none mass of muscle and sinew, and the force of its lateral stroke\nis terrible, sweeping away every living thing that it may meet.\nFortunately for its antagonists, the Crocodile can turn but very\nslowly, so that, although it can scramble along at a much faster\npace than its appearance indicates, there is no great difficulty\nin escaping, provided that the sweep of its tail be avoided. As\nthe Crocodile of the Nile attains when adult a length of thirty\nfeet, one moiety of which is taken up by the tail, it may easily be\nimagined that the power of this weapon can scarcely be exaggerated.\n\nAs if to add to the terrors of the animal, its head, back, and tail\nare shielded by a series of horny scales, which are set so closely\ntogether that the sharpest spear can seldom find its way through\nthem, and even the rifle ball glances off, if it strikes them\nobliquely. Like many other reptiles, the Crocodile is hatched from\neggs which are laid on shore and vivified by the warmth of the sun.\n\nThese eggs are exceedingly small when compared with the gigantic\nlizard which deposited them, scarcely equalling in dimensions those\nof the goose. There is now before me an egg of the cayman of South\nAmerica, a fresh-water lizard but little smaller than the Crocodile\nof the Nile, and this is barely equal in size to an ordinary hen's\negg. It is longer in proportion to its width, but the contents of\nthe two eggs would be as nearly as possible of the same bulk. On\nthe exterior it is very rough, having a granulated appearance, not\nunlike that of dried sharkskin, and the shell is exceedingly thin\nand brittle. The lining membrane, however, is singularly thick and\ntough, so that the egg is tolerably well defended against fracture.\n\nWhen first hatched, the young Crocodile is scarcely larger than a\ncommon newt, but it attains most formidable dimensions in a very\nshort time. Twenty or thirty eggs are laid in one spot, and, were\nthey not destroyed by sundry enemies, the Crocodiles would destroy\nevery living creature in the rivers. Fortunately, the eggs and young\nhave many enemies, chiefly among which is the well-known ichneumon,\nwhich discovers the place where the eggs are laid and destroys them,\nand eats any young Crocodiles that it can catch before they succeed\nin making their way to the water.\n\nThe old writers were aware of the services rendered by the\nichneumon, but, after their wont, exaggerated them by additions of\ntheir own, saying that the ichneumon enters into the mouth of the\nCrocodile as it lies asleep, and eats its way through the body,\n\"putting the Crocodile to exquisite and intolerable torment, while\nthe Crocodile tumbleth to and fro, sighing and weeping, now in\nthe depth of water, now on the land, never resting till strength\nof nature faileth. For the incessant gnawing of the ichneumon so\nprovoketh her to seek her rest in the unrest of every part, herb,\nelement, throws, throbs, rollings, but all in vain, for the enemy\nwithin her breatheth through her breath, and sporteth herself in\nthe consumption of those vital parts which waste and wear away by\nyielding to unpacificable teeth, one after another, till she that\ncrept in by stealth at the mouth, like a puny thief, comes out at\nthe belly like a conqueror, through a passage opened by her own\nlabour and industry.\"\n\nThe author has in the long passage, a part of which is here quoted,\nmentioned that the ichneumon takes its opportunity of entering the\njaws of the Crocodile as it lies with its mouth open against the\nbeams of the sun. It is very true that the Crocodile does sleep\nwith its mouth open; and, in all probability, the older observers,\nknowing that the ichneumon did really destroy the eggs and young\nof the Crocodile, only added a little amplification, and made up\ntheir minds that it also destroyed the parents. The same writer\nwho has lately been quoted ranks the ibis among the enemies of the\nCrocodile, and says that the bird affects the reptile with such\nterror that, if but an ibis's feather be laid on its back, the\nCrocodile becomes rigid and unable to move. The Arabs of the\npresent time say that the water-tortoises are enemies to the eggs,\nscratching them out of the sand and eating them.\n\n[Illustration: ICHNEUMON DEVOURING THE EGGS OF THE CROCODILE.]\n\nAs this reptile is so dangerous a neighbour to the inhabitants of\nthe river-banks, many means have been adopted for its destruction.\n\nOne such method, where a kind of harpoon is employed, is described\nby a traveller in the East as follows:--\n\n\"The most favourable season for thus hunting the Crocodile is\neither the winter, when the animal usually sleeps on sand-banks,\nluxuriating in the rays of the sun, or the spring, after the pairing\ntime, when the female regularly watches the sand islands where she\nhas buried her eggs.\n\n\"The native hunter finds out the place and conceals himself by\ndigging a hole in the sand near the spot where the animal usually\nlies. On its arrival at the accustomed spot the hunter darts his\nharpoon or spear with all his force, for, in order that its stroke\nmay be successful, the iron should penetrate to a depth of at least\nfour inches, in order that the barb may be fixed firmly in the flesh.\n\n\"The Crocodile, on being wounded, rushes into the water, and the\nhuntsman retreats into a canoe, with which a companion has hastened\nto his assistance.\n\n\"A piece of wood attached to the harpoon by a long cord swims on the\nwater and shows the direction in which the Crocodile is moving. The\nhunters pull on this rope and drag the beast to the surface of the\nwater, where it is again pierced by a second harpoon.\n\n\"When the animal is struck it by no means remains inactive; on the\ncontrary, it lashes instantly with its tail, and endeavours to bite\nthe rope asunder. To prevent this, the rope is made of about thirty\nseparate slender lines, not twisted together, but merely placed in\njuxtaposition, and bound around at intervals of every two feet. The\nthin strands get between the Crocodile's teeth, and it is unable to\nsever them.\n\n\"In spite of the great strength of the reptile, two men can drag a\ntolerably large one out of the water, tie up his mouth, twist his\nlegs over his back, and kill him by driving a sharp steel spike into\nthe spinal cord just at the back of the skull.\n\n\"There are many other modes of capturing the Crocodile, one of which\nis the snare portrayed in the illustration.\n\n[Illustration: A CROCODILE TRAP]\n\n\"Two elastic saplings are bent down and kept in position by stout\ncords, one of which, bears a baited hook, while the other is\nfashioned into a noose. These cords are so arranged as to release\nthe bent saplings as soon as the Crocodile pulls upon the baited\nhook. If all works properly, the animal suddenly finds himself\nsuspended in the air, where he remains helpless and at the mercy of\nthe hunter, who soon arrives and despatches him.\n\n\"The extreme tenacity of life possessed by the Crocodile is well\nexemplified by an incident which occurred in Ceylon. A fine specimen\nhad been caught, and to all appearance killed, its interior parts\nremoved, and the aperture kept open by a stick placed across it.\nA few hours afterwards the captors returned to their victim with\nthe intention of cutting off the head, but were surprised to find\nthe spot vacant. On examining the locality it was evident that the\ncreature had retained sufficient life to crawl back into the water.\nFrom this it may be imagined that it is no easy matter to drive the\nbreath out of a Crocodile. Its life seems to take a separate hold\nof every fibre in the creature's body, and though pierced through\nand through with bullets, crushed by heavy blows, and its body\nconverted into a very pincushion for spears, it writhes and twists\nand struggles with wondrous strength, snapping savagely with its\nhuge jaws, and lashing its muscular tail from side to side with such\nvigour that it requires a bold man to venture within range of that\nterrible weapon.\"\n\nSometimes combats occur between this creature and the tiger, one of\nthe fiercest and most terrible of all quadrupeds. Tigers frequently\ngo down to the rivers to drink, and, upon these occasions, the\nCrocodile, if near, may attempt to seize them. The ferocious beast,\nhowever, seldom falls unrevenged; for the instant he finds himself\nseized, he turns with great agility and fierceness on his enemy, and\nendeavours to strike his claws into the Crocodile's eyes, while the\nlatter drags him into the water, where they continue to struggle\nuntil the tiger be drowned, and his triumphant antagonist feasts\nupon his carcass. Such a combat is depicted in the illustration\nwhich appears on an accompanying page.\n\n[Illustration: A FIGHT FOR LIFE.]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: THE CYPRIUS, OR LIZARD OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE LETAAH OR LIZARD.\n\n     Difficulty of identifying the Letaah--Probability that\n     it is a collective and not a specific term--Various\n     Lizards of Palestine--The Green or Jersey Lizard--The\n     Cyprius, its appearance and habits--The Glass Snake or\n     Scheltopusic--Translation of the word _chomet_--Probability that\n     it signifies the Skink--Medicinal uses of the Lizard--The Seps\n     tribe--The common Cicigna, and the popular belief concerning its\n     habits--The Sphaenops and its shallow tunnel.\n\n\nIn Leviticus xi. 30, the word LIZARD is used as the rendering of the\nHebrew word _letaah_ (pronounced as L'tah-ah). There are one or two\ndifficulties about the word, but, without going into the question\nof etymology, which is beside the object of this work, it will be\nsufficient to state that the best authorities accept the rendering,\nand that in the Jewish Bible the word Lizard is retained, but with\nthe mark of doubt appended to it.\n\nA very common species of Lizard, and therefore likely to be one\nof those which are grouped under the common name of Letaah,\nis the CYPRIUS (_Plestiodon auratum_). This handsome Lizard is\ngolden-yellow in colour, beautifully spotted with orange and\nscarlet, and may be distinguished, even when the colours have fled\nafter death, by the curiously formed ears, which are strongly\ntoothed in front. It is very plentiful in Palestine, and, like\nothers of its kin, avoids cultivated tracts, and is generally found\non rocky and sandy soil which cannot be tilled. It is active, and,\nif alarmed, hides itself quickly in the sand or under stones.\n\nIt belongs to the great family of the Skinks, many of which, like\nthe familiar blind-worm of our own country, are without external\nlegs, and, though true Lizards, progress in a snake-like manner, and\nare generally mistaken for snakes. One of these is the GLASS SNAKE\nor SCHELTOPUSIC (_Pseudopus pallasii_), which has two very tiny hind\nlegs, but which is altogether so snake-like that it is considered\nby the natives to be really a serpent. They may well be excused for\ntheir error, as the only external indications of limbs are a pair of\nslightly-projecting scales at the place where the hind legs would be\nin a fully-developed Lizard.\n\nThough tolerably plentiful, the Scheltopusic is not very often seen,\nas it is timid and wary, and, when it suspects danger, glides away\nsilently into some place of safety. When adult, the colour of this\nLizard is usually chestnut, profusely mottled with black or deep\nbrown, the edge of each scale being of the darker colour. It feeds\nupon insects and small reptiles, and has been known to devour a nest\nfull of young birds.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIn Levit. xi. 30 is a Hebrew word, _chomet_, which is given in the\nAuthorized Version as SNAIL. There is, however, no doubt that the\nword is wrongly translated, and that by it some species of Lizard\nis signified. The Jewish Bible follows the Authorized Version,\nbut affixes the mark of doubt to the word. There is another word,\n_shablul_, which undoubtedly does signify the snail, and will be\nmentioned in its proper place.\n\nIt is most probable that the word _chomet_ includes, among other\nLizards, many of the smaller Skinks which inhabit Palestine.\nAmong them we may take as an example the COMMON SKINK (_Scincus\nofficinalis_), a reptile which derives its specific name from the\nfact that it was formerly used in medicine, together with mummy, and\nthe other disgusting ingredients which formed the greater part of\nthe old Pharmacopoeia.\n\nEven at the present day, it is used for similar purposes in the\nEast, and is in consequence captured for the use of physicians,\nthe body being simply dried in the sun, and then sent to market\nfor sale. It is principally employed for the cure of sunstroke,\nnettle-rash, sand-blindness, or fever, and both patient and\nphysician have the greatest confidence in its powers. It is said by\nsome European physicians that the flesh of the Skink really does\npossess medicinal powers, and that it has fallen into disrepute\nchiefly because those powers have been exaggerated. In former days,\nthe head and feet were thought to possess the greatest efficacy, and\nwere valued accordingly.\n\nLike all its tribe, the Skink loves sandy localities, the soil\nexactly suiting its peculiar habits. Although tolerably active,\nit does not run so fast or so far as many other Lizards, and,\nwhen alarmed, it has a peculiar faculty for sinking itself almost\ninstantaneously under the sand, much after the fashion of the\nshore-crabs of our own country. Indeed, it is even more expeditious\nthan the crab, which occupies some little time in burrowing under\nthe wet and yielding sand, whereas the Skink slips beneath the dry\nand comparatively hard sand with such rapidity that it seems rather\nto be diving into a nearly excavated burrow than to be scooping a\nhollow for itself.\n\nThe sand is therefore a place of safety to the Skink, which does\nnot, like the crab, content itself with merely burying its body just\nbelow the surface, but continues to burrow, sinking itself in a few\nseconds to the depth of nearly a yard.\n\nThe length of the Skink is about eight inches, and its very variable\ncolour is generally yellowish brown, crossed with several dark\nbands. Several specimens, however, are spotted instead of banded\nwith brown, while some are banded with white, and others are spotted\nwith white. In all, however, the under-surface is silver grey.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: THE CHAMELEON.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE CHAMELEON, MONITOR, AND GECKO.\n\n     Demeanour of the Chameleon on the ground--The independent\n     eyes--Its frequent change of colour--The Nilotic Monitor.\n\n\nIn Levit. xi. 30 there occurs a word which has caused great trouble\nto commentators. The word is _koach_.\n\nThere are two lizards to which the term may possibly be\napplied--namely, the Chameleon and the Monitor; and, as the\nAuthorized Version of the Scriptures accepts the former\ninterpretation, we will first describe the Chameleon.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThis reptile is very plentiful in the Holy Land, as well as in\nEgypt, so that the Israelites would be perfectly familiar with\nit, both during their captivity and after their escape. It is but\na small reptile, and the reader may well ask why a name denoting\nstrength should be given to it. I think that we may find the reason\nfor its name in the extraordinary power of its grasp, as it is able,\nby means of its peculiarly-formed feet and prehensile tail, to grasp\nthe branches so tightly that it can scarcely be removed without\ndamage.\n\nI once saw six or seven Chameleons huddled up together, all having\nclasped each other's legs and tails so firmly that they formed a\nbundle that might be rolled along the ground without being broken\nup. In order to show the extraordinary power of the Chameleon's\ngrasp, I have had a figure drawn from a sketch taken by myself from\na specimen which I kept for several months.\n\n[Illustration: GECKO AND CHAMELEON.]\n\nWhen the Chameleon wished to pass from one branch to another, it\nused to hold firmly to the branch by the tail and one hind-foot, and\nstretch out its body nearly horizontally, feeling about with the\nother three feet, as if in search of a convenient resting-place.\nIn this curious attitude it would remain for a considerable time,\napparently suffering no inconvenience, though even the spider-monkey\nwould have been unable to maintain such an attitude for half the\nlength of time.\n\nThe strength of the grasp is really astonishing when contrasted\nwith the size of the reptile, as any one will find who allows the\nChameleon to grasp his finger, or who tries to detach it from the\nbranch to which it is clinging. The feet are most curiously made.\nThey are furnished with five toes, which are arranged like those of\nparrots and other climbing birds, so as to close upon each other\nlike the thumb and finger of a human hand. They are armed with\nlittle yellow claws, slightly curved and very sharp, and when they\ngrasp the skin of the hand they give it an unpleasantly sharp pinch.\n\nThe tail is as prehensile as that of the spider-monkey, to which\nthe Chameleon bears a curious resemblance in some of its attitudes,\nthough nothing can be more different than the volatile, inquisitive,\nrestless disposition of the spider-monkey and the staid, sober\ndemeanour of the Chameleon. The reptile has the power of guiding the\ntail to any object as correctly as if there were an eye at the end\nof the tail. When it has been travelling over the branches of trees,\nI have often seen it direct its tail to a projecting bud, and grasp\nit as firmly as if the bud had been before and not behind it.\n\nSometimes, when it rests on a branch, it allows the tail to\nhang down as a sort of balance, the tip coiling and uncoiling\nunceasingly. But, as soon as the reptile wishes to move, the tail is\ntightened to the branch, and at once coiled round it. There really\nseems to be almost a separate vitality and consciousness on the part\nof the tail, which glides round an object as if it were acting with\nentire independence of its owner.\n\nOn the ground the Chameleon fares but poorly. Its walk is absolutely\nludicrous, and an experienced person might easily fail to identify\na Chameleon when walking with the same animal on a branch. It\ncertainly scrambles along at a tolerable rate, but it is absurdly\nawkward, its legs sprawling widely on either side, and its feet\ngrasping futilely at every step. The tail, which is usually so lithe\nand nimble, is then held stiffly from the body, with a slight curve\nupwards.\n\nThe eyes are strange objects, projecting far from the head, and each\nacting quite independently of the other, so that one eye may often\nbe directed forwards, and the other backwards. The eyeballs are\ncovered with a thick wrinkled skin, except a small aperture at the\ntip, which can be opened and closed like our own eyelids.\n\nThe changing colour of the Chameleon has been long known, though\nthere are many mistaken ideas concerning it.\n\nThe reptile does not necessarily assume the colour of any object on\nwhich it is placed, but sometimes takes a totally different colour.\nThus, if my Chameleon happened to come upon any scarlet substance,\nthe colour immediately became black, covered with innumerable\ncircular spots of light yellow. The change was so instantaneous\nthat, as it crawled on the scarlet cloth, the colour would alter,\nand the fore-part of the body would be covered with yellow spots,\nwhile the hinder parts retained their dull black. Scarlet always\nannoyed the Chameleon, and it tried to escape whenever it found\nitself near any substance of the obnoxious hue.\n\nThe normal colour was undoubtedly black, with a slight tinge of\ngrey. But in a short time the whole creature would become a vivid\nverdigris green, and, while the spectator was watching it, the legs\nwould become banded with rings of bright yellow, and spats and\nstreaks of the same colour would appear on the head and body.\n\nWhen it was excited either by anger or by expectation--as, for\nexample, when it heard a large fly buzzing near it--the colours\nwere singularly beautiful, almost exactly resembling in hue and\narrangement those of the jaguar. Of all the colours, green seemed\ngenerally to predominate, but the creature would pass so rapidly\nfrom one colour to another that it was scarcely possible to follow\nthe various gradations of hue.\n\nSome persons have imagined that the variation of colour depends on\nthe wants and passions of the animal. This is not the case. The\nchange is often caused by mental emotion, but is not dependent on\nit; and I believe that the animal has no control whatever over its\ncolour. The best proof of this assertion may be found in the fact\nthat my own Chameleon changed colour several times after its death;\nand, indeed, as long as I had the dead body before me, changes of\nhue were taking place.\n\nThe food of the Chameleon consists of insects, mostly flies, which\nit catches by means of its tongue, which can be protruded to an\nastonishing distance. The tongue is nearly cylindrical, and is\nfurnished at the tip with a slight cavity, which is filled with\na very glutinous secretion. When the Chameleon sees a fly or\nother insect, it gently protrudes the tongue once or twice, as if\ntaking aim, like a billiard-player with his cue, and then, with a\nmoderately smart stroke, carries off the insect on the glutinous tip\nof the tongue. The force with which the Chameleon strikes is really\nwonderful. My own specimen used to look for flies from my hand, and\nat first I was as much surprised with the force of the blow struck\nby the tongue as I was with the grasping power of the feet.\n\n[Illustration: THE GECKO.\n\nFOOT OF THE GECKO--UNDER SIDE.]\n\nSo much for the Chameleon. We will now take the NILOTIC MONITOR and\nthe LAND MONITOR, the other reptiles which have been conjectured to\nbe the real representatives of the Koach.\n\nThese lizards attain to some size, the former sometimes measuring\nsix feet in length, and the latter but a foot or so less. Of the\ntwo, the Land Monitor, being the more common, both in Palestine and\nEgypt, has perhaps the best claim to be considered as the Koach\nof Scripture. It is sometimes called the Land Crocodile. It is a\ncarnivorous animal, feeding upon other reptiles and the smaller\nmammalia, and is very fond of the eggs of the crocodile, which it\ndestroys in great numbers, and is in consequence much venerated by\nthe inhabitants of the country about the Nile.\n\nThe theory that this reptile may be the Koach of Leviticus is\nstrengthened by the fact that even at the present day it is cooked\nand eaten by the natives, whereas the chameleon is so small and bony\nthat scarcely any one would take the trouble of cooking it.\n\nThe Gecko takes its name from the sound which it utters, resembling\nthe word \"geck-o.\" It is exceedingly plentiful, and inhabits the\ninterior of houses, where it can find the flies and other insects\non which it lives. On account of the structure of the toes, each\nof which is flattened into a disk-like form, and furnished on the\nunder surface with a series of plates like those on the back of\nthe sucking-fish, it can walk up a smooth, perpendicular wall with\nperfect ease, and can even cling to the ceiling like the flies on\nwhich it feeds.\n\nIn the illustration the reader will observe the flat, fan-like\nexpansions at the ends of the toes, by which the Gecko is able to\nadhere to flat surfaces, and to dart with silent rapidity from place\nto place.\n\n[Illustration: serpent]\n\n[Illustration: serpents]\n\n\n\n\nSERPENTS.\n\n     Serpents in general--The fiery Serpents of the\n     wilderness--Explanation of the words \"flying\" and \"fiery\" as\n     applied to Serpents--Haunts of the Serpent--The Cobra, or Asp\n     of Scripture--The Cerastes, or Horned Serpent--Appearance and\n     habits of the reptile--The \"Adder in the path.\"\n\n\nAs we have seen that so much looseness of nomenclature prevailed\namong the Hebrews even with regard to the mammalia, birds, and\nlizards, we can but expect that the names of the Serpents will be\nequally difficult to identify.\n\nNo less than seven names are employed in the Old Testament to\ndenote some species of Serpent; but there are only two which can\nbe identified with any certainty, four others being left to mere\nconjecture, and one being clearly a word which, like our snake or\nserpent, is a word not restricted to any particular species, but\nsignifying Serpents in general. This word is _nachash_ (pronounced\nnah-kahsh). It is unfortunate that the word is so variously\ntranslated in different passages of Scripture, and we cannot do\nbetter than to follow it through the Ola Testament, so as to bring\nall the passages under our glance.\n\nThe first mention of the Nachash occurs in Gen. iii., in the\nwell-known passage where the Serpent is said to be more subtle than\nall the beasts of the field, the wisdom or subtlety of the Serpent\nhaving evidently an allegorical and not a categorical signification.\nWe find the same symbolism employed in the New Testament, the\ndisciples of our Lord being told to be \"wise as serpents, and\nharmless as doves.\"\n\nAllusion is made to the gliding movement of the Serpent tribe in\nProv. xxx. 19. On this part of the subject little need be said,\nexcept that the movements of the Serpent are owing to the mobility\nof the ribs, which are pushed forward in succession and drawn back\nagain, so as to catch against any inequality of the ground. This\npower is increased by the structure of the scales. Those of the\nupper part of the body, which are not used for locomotion, are\nshaped something like the scales of a fish; but those of the lower\npart of the body, which come in contact with the ground, are broad\nbelts, each overlapping the other, and each connected with one pair\nof ribs.\n\nWhen, therefore, the Serpent pushes forward the ribs, the edges of\nthe scaly belts will catch against the slightest projection, and are\nable to give a very powerful impetus to the body. It is scarcely\npossible to drag a snake backwards over rough ground; while on a\nsmooth surface, such as glass, the Serpent would be totally unable\nto proceed. This, however, was not likely to have been studied by\nthe ancient Hebrews, who were among the most unobservant of mankind\nwith regard to details of natural history: it is, therefore, no\nwonder that the gliding of the Serpent should strike the writer of\nthe proverb in question as a mystery which he could not explain.\n\nThe poisonous nature of some of the Serpents is mentioned in several\npassages of Scripture; and it will be seen that the ancient Hebrews,\nlike many modern Europeans, believed that the poison lay in the\nforked tongue. See, for example, Ps. lviii. 4: \"Their poison is\nlike the poison of a serpent\" (_nachash_). Also Prov. xxiii. 32, in\nwhich the sacred writer says of wine that it brings woe, sorrow,\ncontentions, wounds without cause, redness of eyes, and that \"at the\nlast it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.\"\n\n[Illustration: COBRA AND CERASTES, THE ASP AND ADDER OF SCRIPTURE.]\n\nThe idea that the poison of the Serpent lies in the tongue is seen\nin several passages of Scripture. \"They have sharpened their tongues\nlike a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips\" (Ps. cxl. 3).\nAlso in Job xx. 16, the sacred writer says of the hypocrite, that\n\"he shall suck the poison of asps: the viper's tongue shall slay\nhim.\"\n\nAs to the fiery Serpents of the wilderness, it is scarcely needful\nto mention that the epithet of \"fiery\" does not signify that the\nSerpents in question produced real fire from their mouths, but that\nallusion is made to the power and virulence of their poison, and\nto the pain caused by their bite. We ourselves naturally employ a\nsimilar metaphor, and speak of a \"burning pain,\" of a \"fiery trial,\"\nof \"hot anger,\" and the like.\n\n[Illustration: THE ISRAELITES ARE BITTEN BY SERPENTS IN THE\nWILDERNESS, AND MOSES LIFTS UP THE SERPENT OF BRASS.]\n\nThe epithet of \"flying\" which is applied to these Serpents is\nexplained by the earlier commentators as having reference to a\nSerpent which they called the Dart Snake, and which they believed\nto lie in wait for men and to spring at them from a distance. They\nthought that this snake hid itself either in hollows of the ground\nor in trees, and sprang through the air for thirty feet upon any man\nor beast that happened to pass by.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe will now take the various species of Serpents mentioned in the\nBible, as nearly as they can be identified.\n\nOf one species there is no doubt whatever. This is the Cobra di\nCapello, a serpent which is evidently signified by the Hebrew word\n_pethen_.\n\nThis celebrated Serpent has long been famous, not only for the\ndeadly power of its venom, but for the singular performances in\nwhich it takes part. The Cobra inhabits many parts of Asia, and\nin almost every place where it is found, certain daring men take\nupon themselves the profession of serpent-charmers, and handle\nthese fearful reptiles with impunity, cause them to move in time to\ncertain musical sounds, and assert that they bear a life charmed\nagainst the bite of these deadly playmates.\n\nOne of these men will take a Cobra in his bare hands, toss it about\nwith perfect indifference, allow it to twine about his naked breast,\ntie it around his neck, and treat it with as little ceremony as\nif it were an earth-worm. He will then take the same Serpent--or\napparently the same--make it bite a fowl, which soon dies from the\npoison, and will then renew his performance.\n\nSome persons say that the whole affair is but an exhibition of that\njugglery in which the natives of the East Indies are such wondrous\nadepts; that the Serpents with which the man plays are harmless,\nhaving been deprived of their fangs, and that a really venomous\nspecimen is adroitly substituted for the purpose of killing the\nfowl. It is, moreover, said, and truly, that a snake thought to have\nbeen rendered harmless by the deprivation of its fangs, has bitten\none of its masters and killed him, thus proving the imposture.\n\nStill, neither of these explanations will entirely disprove the\nmastery of man over a venomous Serpent.\n\nIn the first instance, it is surely as perilous an action to\nsubstitute a venomous Serpent as to play with it. Where was it\nhidden, why did it not bite the man instead of the fowl, and how did\nthe juggler prevent it from using its teeth while he was conveying\nit away?\n\nAnd, in the second instance, the detection of one impostor is by no\nmeans a proof that all who pretend to the same powers are likewise\nimpostors.\n\nThe following narrative by a traveller in the East seems to prove\nthat the serpent-charmer possessed sufficient power to induce a\ntruly poisonous Serpent to leave its hole, and to perform certain\nantics at his command:\n\n\"A snake-charmer came to my bungalow, requesting me to allow him\nto show his snakes. As I had frequently seen his performance, I\ndeclined to witness a repetition of it, but told him that if he\nwould accompany me to the jungle and catch a Cobra, that I knew\nfrequented the place, I would give him a present of money. He was\nquite willing, and as I was anxious to test the truth of the charm\nhe claimed to possess, I carefully counted his tame snakes, and put\na guard over them until we should return.\n\n\"Before starting I also examined his clothing, and satisfied myself\nthat he had no snake about his person. When we arrived at the spot,\nhe commenced playing upon a small pipe, and, after persevering for\nsome time, out crawled a large Cobra from an ant-hill which I knew\nit occupied.\n\n\"On seeing the man it tried to escape, but he quickly caught it by\nthe tail and kept swinging it round until we reached the bungalow.\nHe then laid it upon the ground and made it raise and lower its head\nto the sound of his pipe.\n\n\"Before long, however, it bit him above the knee. He immediately\nbandaged the leg tightly above the wound, and applied a piece of\nporous stone, called a snake-stone, to extract the poison. He was in\ngreat pain for a few minutes, but afterwards it gradually subsided,\nthe stone falling from the wound just before he was relieved.\n\n\"When he recovered he held up a cloth, at which the snake flew and\nhung by its fangs. While in this position the man passed his hand up\nits back, and having seized it tightly by the throat, he pulled out\nthe fangs and gave them to me. He then squeezed out the poison, from\nthe glands in the Serpent's mouth, upon a leaf. It was a clear, oily\nsubstance, which when rubbed with the hand produced a fine lather.\n\n\"The whole operation was carefully watched by me, and was also\nwitnessed by several other persons.\"\n\nHow the serpent-charmers perform their feats is not very\nintelligible. That they handle the most venomous Serpents with\nperfect impunity is evident enough, and it is also clear that they\nare able to produce certain effects upon the Serpents by means of\nmusical (or unmusical) sounds. But these two items are entirely\ndistinct, and one does not depend upon the other.\n\nIn the first place, the handling of venomous snakes has been\nperformed by ordinary men without the least recourse to any arts\nexcept that of acquaintance with the habits of Serpents. The late\nMr. Waterton, for example, would take up a rattlesnake in his bare\nhand without feeling the least uneasy as to the behaviour of his\nprisoner. He once took twenty-seven rattlesnakes out of a box,\ncarried them into another room, put them into a large glass case,\nand afterwards replaced them in the box. He described to me the\nmanner in which he did it, using my wrist as the representative of\nthe Serpent.\n\n[Illustration: THE SERPENT-CHARMER.]\n\nThe nature of all Serpents is rather peculiar, and is probably\nowing to the mode in which the blood circulates. They are extremely\nunwilling to move, except when urged by the wants of nature, and\nwill lie coiled up for many hours together when not pressed by\nhunger. Consequently, when touched, their feeling is evidently like\nthat of a drowsy man, who only tries to shake off the object which\nmay rouse him, and composes himself afresh to sleep.\n\nA quick and sudden movement would, however, alarm the reptile, which\nwould strike in self-defence, and, sluggish as are its general\nmovements, its stroke is delivered with such lightning rapidity that\nit would be sure to inflict its fatal wound before it was seized.\n\nIf, therefore, Mr. Waterton saw a Serpent which he desired to\ncatch, he would creep very quietly up to it, and with a gentle,\nslow movement place his fingers round its neck just behind the\nhead. If it happened to be coiled up in such a manner that he could\nnot get at its neck, he had only to touch it gently until it moved\nsufficiently for his purpose.\n\nWhen he had once placed his hand on the Serpent, it was in his\npower. He would then grasp it very lightly indeed, and raise it\ngently from the ground, trusting that the reptile would be more\ninclined to be carried quietly than to summon up sufficient energy\nto bite. Even if it had tried to use its fangs, it could not have\ndone so as long as its captor's fingers were round its neck.\n\nAs a rule, a great amount of provocation is needed before a venomous\nSerpent will use its teeth. One of my friends, when a boy, caught a\nviper, mistaking it for a common snake. He tied it round his neck,\ncoiled it on his wrist by way of a bracelet, and so took it home,\nplaying many similar tricks with it as he went. After arrival in the\nhouse, he produced the viper for the amusement of his brothers and\nsisters, and, after repeating his performances, tried to tie the\nsnake in a double knot. This, however, was enough to provoke the\nmost pacific of creatures, and in consequence he received a bite on\nhis finger.\n\nThe poison was not slow to take effect; first, the wound looked\nand felt like a nettle sting, then like a wasp sting, and in the\ncourse of a few minutes the whole finger was swollen. At this\njuncture his father, a medical man, fortunately arrived, and set the\napproved antidotes, ammonia, oil, and lunar caustic, to the wound,\nhaving previously made incisions about the punctured spot, and with\npaternal affection attempted to suck out the poison. In spite of\nthese remedies a serious illness was the result of the bite, from\nwhich the boy did not recover for several weeks.\n\n[Illustration: snake]\n\nThere is no doubt that the snake-charmers trust chiefly to this\nsluggish nature of the reptile, but they certainly go through\nsome ceremonies by which they believe themselves to be rendered\nimpervious to snake-bites. They will coil the cobra round their\nnaked bodies, they will irritate the reptile until it is in a state\nof fury; they will even allow it to bite them, and yet be none the\nworse for the wound. Then, as if to show that the venomous teeth\nhave not been abstracted, as is possibly supposed to be the case,\nthey will make the cobra bite a fowl, which speedily dies from the\neffects of the poison.\n\nEven if the fangs were extracted, the Serpents would lose little\nof their venomous power. These reptiles are furnished with a whole\nseries of fangs in different stages of development, so that when the\none in use is broken or shed in the course of nature, another comes\nforward and fills its place. There is now before me a row of four\nfangs, which I took from the right upper jawbone of a viper which I\nrecently caught.\n\nIn her interesting \"Letters from Egypt,\" Lady Duff-Gordon gives an\namusing account of the manner in which she was formally initiated\ninto the mysteries of snake-charming, and made ever afterwards\nimpervious to the bite of venomous Serpents:--\n\n\"At Kom Omboo, we met with a Rifaee darweesh with his basket of tame\nsnakes. After a little talk, he proposed to initiate me: and so we\nsat down and held hands like people marrying. Omar [her attendant]\nsat behind me, and repeated the words as my 'wakeel.' Then the\nRifaee twisted a cobra round our joined hands, and requested me to\nspit on it; he did the same, and I was pronounced safe and enveloped\nin snakes. My sailors groaned, and Omar shuddered as the snakes put\nout their tongues; the darweesh and I smiled at each other like\nRoman augurs.\"\n\nShe believed that the snakes were toothless; and perhaps on this\noccasion they may have been so. Extracting the teeth of the Serpent\nis an easy business in experienced hands, and is conducted in two\nways. Those snake-charmers who are confident of their own powers\nmerely grasp the reptile by the neck, force open its jaws with a\npiece of stick, and break off the fangs, which are but loosely\nattached to the jaw. Those who are not so sure of themselves\nirritate the snake, and offer it a piece of cloth, generally the\ncorner of their mantle, to bite. The snake darts at it, and, as it\nseizes the garment, the man gives the cloth a sudden jerk, and so\ntears away the fangs.\n\nStill, although some of the performers employ mutilated snakes,\nthere is no doubt that others do not trouble themselves to remove\nthe fangs of the Serpents, but handle with impunity the cobra or the\ncerastes with all its venomous apparatus in good order.\n\nWe now come to the second branch of the subject, namely, the\ninfluence of sound upon the cobra and other Serpents. The charmers\nare always provided with musical instruments, of which a sort of\nflute with a loud shrill sound is the one which is mostly used in\nthe performances. Having ascertained, from slight marks which their\npractised eyes easily discover, that a Serpent is hidden in some\ncrevice, the charmer plays upon his flute, and in a short time the\nsnake is sure to make its appearance.\n\nAs soon as it is fairly out, the man seizes it by the end of the\ntail, and holds it up in the air at arm's length. In this position\nit is helpless, having no leverage, and merely wriggles about in\nfruitless struggles to escape. Having allowed it to exhaust its\nstrength by its efforts, the man lowers it into a basket, where\nit is only too glad to find a refuge, and closes the lid. After a\nwhile, he raises the lid and begins to play the flute.\n\n[Illustration: TEACHING COBRAS TO DANCE.]\n\nThe Serpent tries to glide out of the basket, but, as soon as it\ndoes so, the lid is shut down again, and in a very short time the\nreptile finds that escape is impossible, and, as long as it hears\nthe sound of the flute, only raises its head in the air, supporting\nitself on the lower portion of its tail, and continues to wave its\nhead from side to side as long as it hears the sound of the music.\n\nThe rapidity with which a cobra learns this lesson is extraordinary,\nthe charmers being as willing to show their mastery over\nnewly-caught Serpents as over those which have been long in their\npossession.\n\nThe colour of the Cobra is in most cases a brownish olive. The most\nnoted peculiarity is the expansion of the neck, popularly called\nthe hood. This phenomenon is attributable not only to the skin and\nmuscles, but to the skeleton. About twenty pairs of the ribs of\nthe neck and fore part of the back are flat instead of curved, and\nincrease gradually from the head to the eleventh or twelfth pair,\nfrom which they decrease until they are merged into the ordinary\ncurved ribs of the body. When the snake is excited, it brings these\nribs forward so as to spread the skin, and then displays the oval\nhood to best advantage.\n\nIn the Cobra di Capello the back of the hood is ornamented by two\nlarge eye-like spots, united by a curved black stripe, so formed\nthat the whole mark bears a singular resemblance to a pair of\nspectacles.\n\n\n\n\nTHE CERASTES, OR SHEPHIPHON OF SCRIPTURE.\n\n\nThe word _shephiphon_, which evidently signifies some species of\nsnake, only occurs once in the Scriptures, but fortunately that\nsingle passage contains an allusion to the habits of the serpent\nwhich makes identification nearly certain. The passage in question\noccurs in Gen. xlix. 17, and forms part of the prophecy of Jacob\nrespecting his children: \"Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an\nadder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that his rider\nshall fall backward.\"\n\nPutting aside the deeper meaning of this prophecy, there is here an\nevident allusion to the habits of the CERASTES, or HORNED VIPER, a\nspecies of venomous serpent, which is plentiful in Northern Africa,\nand is found also in Palestine and Syria. It is a very conspicuous\nreptile, and is easily recognised by the two horn-like projections\nover the eyes. The name Cerastes, or horned, has been given to it\non account of these projections.\n\nThis snake has a custom of lying half buried in the sand, awaiting\nthe approach of some animal on which it can feed. Its usual diet\nconsists of the jerboas and other small mammalia, and as they are\nexceedingly active, while the Cerastes is slow and sluggish, its\nonly chance of obtaining food is to lie in wait. It will always take\nadvantage of any small depression, such as the print of a camel's\nfoot, and, as it finds many of these depressions in the line of the\ncaravans, it is literally \"a serpent by the way, an adder in the\npath.\"\n\n[Illustration: HORNED VIPER.]\n\nAccording to the accounts of travellers, the Cerastes is much more\nirritable than the cobra, and is very apt to strike at any object\nwhich may disturb it. Therefore, whenever a horseman passes along\nthe usual route, his steed is very likely to disturb a Cerastes\nlying in the path, and to be liable to the attack of the irritated\nreptile. Horses are instinctively aware of the presence of the\nsnake, and mostly perceive it in time to avoid its stroke. Its\nsmall dimensions, the snake rarely exceeding two feet in length,\nenable it to conceal itself in a very small hollow, and its\nbrownish-white colour, diversified with darker spots, causes it to\nharmonize so thoroughly with the loose sand in which it lies buried,\nthat, even when it is pointed out, an unpractised eye does not\nreadily perceive it.\n\nEven the cobra is scarcely so dreaded as this little snake, whose\nbite is so deadly, and whose habits are such as to cause travellers\nconsiderable risk of being bitten.\n\nThe head of the Viper affords a very good example of the venomous\napparatus of the poisonous serpents, and is well worthy of\ndescription. The poison fangs or teeth lie on the sides of the upper\njaw, folded back, and almost undistinguishable until lifted with a\nneedle. They are singularly fine and delicate, hardly larger than a\nlady's needle, and are covered almost to their tips with a muscular\nenvelope, through which the points just peer.\n\nThe poison bags or glands, and the reservoir in which the venom is\nstored, are found at the back and sides of the head, and give to the\nvenomous serpents that peculiar width of head which is so unfailing\na characteristic.\n\nOn examining carefully the poison fangs, the structure by which the\nvenom is injected into the wound will be easily understood. Under a\nmagnifying glass they will be seen to be hollow, thus affording a\npassage for the poison.\n\nWhen the creature draws back its head and opens its mouth to strike,\nthe deadly fangs spring up with their points ready for action, and\nfully charged with their poisonous distillment.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: viper]\n\n\n\n\nTHE VIPER, OR EPHEH.\n\n     The Sand-Viper, or Toxicoa--Its appearance and habits--Adder's\n     poison--The Cockatrice, or Tsepha--The Yellow Viper--Ancient\n     ideas concerning the Cockatrice--Power of its venom.\n\n\nWe now come to the species of snake which cannot be identified with\nany certainty, and will first take the word _epheh_.\n\nMr. Tristram believes that he has identified the Epheh of the Old\nTestament with the Sand-Viper, or Toxicoa. This reptile, though very\nsmall, and scarcely exceeding a foot in length, is a dangerous one,\nbut its bite is not so deadly as that of the cobra or cerastes. It\nis variable in colour, and has angular white streaks on its body,\nwith a row of whitish spots along the back. The top of the head is\ndark, and variegated with arrow-shaped white marks.\n\nThe Toxicoa is very plentiful in Northern Africa, Palestine, Syria,\nand the neighbouring countries, and, as it is exceedingly active, is\nheld in some dread by the natives.\n\nAnother name of a poisonous snake occurs several times in the Old\nTestament. The word is _tsepha_, or _tsiphoni_, and it is sometimes\ntranslated as Adder, and sometimes as Cockatrice. The word is\nrendered as Adder in Prov. xxiii. 32, where it is said that wine\n\"biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.\" Even in this\ncase, however, the word is rendered as Cockatrice in the marginal\ntranslation.\n\n[Illustration: THE TOXICOA. (Supposed to be the viper of Scripture.)]\n\nIt is found three times in the Book of Isaiah. Ch. xi. 8: \"The\nweaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.\" Also, ch.\nxiv. 29: \"Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him\nthat smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent's (_nachash_) nest\nshall come forth a cockatrice (_tsepha_), and his fruit shall be a\nfiery flying serpent.\" The same word occurs again in ch. lix. 5:\n\"They hatch cockatrice' eggs.\" In the prophet Jeremiah we again find\nthe word: \"For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices among you,\nwhich will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.\"\n\nAround this reptile a wonderful variety of legends have been\naccumulated. The Cockatrice was said to kill by its very look,\n\"because the beams of the Cockatrice's eyes do corrupt the visible\nspirit of a man, which visible spirit corrupted all the other\nspirits coming from the brain and life of the heart, are thereby\ncorrupted, and so the man dyeth.\"\n\nThe subtle poison of the Cockatrice infected everything near it, so\nthat a man who killed a Cockatrice with a spear fell dead himself,\nby reason of the poison darting up the shaft of the spear and\npassing into his hand. Any living thing near which the Cockatrice\npassed was instantly slain by the fiery heat of its venom, which was\nexhaled not only from its mouth, but its sides. For the old writers,\nwhose statements are here summarized, contrived to jumble together a\nnumber of miscellaneous facts in natural history, and so to produce\na most extraordinary series of legends.\n\nI should not have given even this limited space to such puerile\nlegends, but for the fact that such stories as these were fully\nbelieved in the days when the Authorized Version of the Bible was\ntranslated. The translators of the Bible believed most heartily in\nthe mysterious and baleful reptile, and, as they saw that the Tsepha\nof Scripture was an exceptionally venomous serpent, they naturally\nrendered it by the word Cockatrice.\n\n[Illustration: viper]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: frog]\n\n\n\n\nTHE FROG.\n\n     The Frog only mentioned in the Old Testament as connected with\n     the plagues of Egypt--The severity of this plague explained--The\n     Frog detestable to the Egyptians--The Edible Frog and its\n     numbers--Description of the species.\n\n\nPlentiful as is the FROG throughout Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, it\nis very remarkable that in the whole of the canonical books of the\nOld Testament the word is only mentioned thrice, and each case in\nconnexion with the same event.\n\nIn Exod. viii. we find that the second of the plagues which visited\nEgypt came out of the Nile, the sacred river, in the form of\ninnumerable Frogs. The reader will probably remark, on perusing the\nconsecutive account of these plagues, that the two first plagues\nwere connected with that river, and that they were foreshadowed by\nthe transformation of Aaron's rod.\n\nWhen Moses and Aaron appeared before Pharaoh to ask him to let\nthe people go, Pharaoh demanded a miracle from them, as had been\nforetold. Following the divine command, Aaron threw down his rod,\nwhich was changed into a serpent.\n\nNext, as was most appropriate, came a transformation wrought on\nthe river by means of the same rod which had been transformed into\na Serpent, the whole of the fresh-water throughout the land being\nturned into blood, and the fish dying and polluting the venerated\nriver with their putrefying bodies. In Egypt, a partially rainless\ncountry, such a calamity as this was doubly terrible, as it at the\nsame time desecrated the object of their worship, and menaced them\nwith perishing by thirst.\n\nThe next plague had also its origin in the river, but extended far\nbeyond the limits of its banks. The frogs, being unable to return to\nthe contaminated stream wherein they had lived, spread themselves\nin all directions, so as to fulfil the words of the prediction: \"If\nthou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders\nwith frogs:\n\n\"And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up\nand come into thine house, and into thy bed-chamber, and upon thy\nbed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and\ninto thine ovens, and into thy kneading-troughs\" (or dough).\n\nSupposing that such a plague was to come upon us at the present\nday, we should consider it to be a terrible annoyance, yet scarcely\nworthy of the name of plague, and certainly not to be classed with\nthe turning of a river into blood, with the hail and lightning that\ndestroyed the crops and cattle, and with the simultaneous death of\nthe first-born. But the Egyptians suffered most keenly from the\ninfliction. They were a singularly fastidious people, and abhorred\nthe contact of anything that they held to be unclean. We may well\nrealize, therefore, the effect of a visitation of Frogs, which\nrendered their houses unclean by entering them, and themselves\nunclean by leaping upon them; which deprived them of rest by getting\non their beds, and of food by crawling into their ovens and upon the\ndough in the kneading-troughs.\n\nAnd, as if to make the visitation still worse, when the plague was\nremoved, the Frogs died in the places into which they had intruded,\nso that the Egyptians were obliged to clear their houses of the dead\ncarcases, and to pile them up in heaps, to be dried by the sun or\neaten by birds and other scavengers of the East.\n\nAs to the species of Frog which thus invaded the houses of the\nEgyptians, there is no doubt whatever. It can be but the GREEN,\nor EDIBLE FROG (_Rana esculenta_), which is so well known for the\ndelicacy of its flesh. This is believed to be the only aquatic Frog\nof Egypt, and therefore must be the species which came out of the\nriver into the houses.\n\nBoth in Egypt and Palestine it exists in very great numbers,\nswarming in every marshy place, and inhabiting the pools in such\nnumbers that the water can scarcely be seen for the Frogs. Thus the\nmultitudes of the Frogs which invaded the Egyptians was no matter\nof wonder, the only miraculous element being that the reptiles were\nsimultaneously directed to the houses, and their simultaneous death\nwhen the plague was taken away.\n\nFrogs are also mentioned in Rev. xvi. 13: \"And I saw three unclean\nspirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of\nthe mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.\"\nWith the exception of this passage, which is a purely symbolical\none, there is no mention of Frogs in the New Testament. It is\nrather remarkable that the Toad, which might be thought to afford\nan excellent symbol for various forms of evil, is entirely ignored,\nboth in the Old and New Testaments. Probably the Frogs and Toads\nwere all classed together under the same title.\n\n[Illustration: creek]\n\n\n[Illustration: waterfall]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: birds over water]\n\n\n\n\nFISHES.\n\n     Impossibility of distinguishing the different species of\n     Fishes--The fishermen Apostles--Fish used for food--The miracle\n     of the loaves and Fishes--The Fish broiled on the coals--Clean\n     and unclean Fishes--The Sheat-fish, or Silurus--The Eel and the\n     Muraena--The Long-headed Barbel--Fish-ponds and preserves--The\n     Fish-ponds of Heshbon--The Sucking-fish--The Lump-sucker--The\n     Tunny--The Coryphene.\n\n\nWe now come to the FISHES, a class of animals which are repeatedly\nmentioned both in the Old and New Testaments, but only in general\nterms, no one species being described so as to give the slightest\nindication of its identity.\n\nThis is the more remarkable because, although the Jews were, like\nall Orientals, utterly unobservant of those characteristics by which\nthe various species are distinguished from each other, we might\nexpect that St. Peter and other of the fisher Apostles would have\ngiven the names of some of the Fish which they were in the habit of\ncatching, and by the sale of which they gained their living.\n\nIt is true that the Jews, as a nation, would not distinguish between\nthe various species of Fishes, except, perhaps, by comparative\nsize. But professional fishermen would be sure to distinguish one\nspecies from another, if only for the fact that they would sell the\nbest-flavoured Fish at the highest price.\n\nWe might have expected, for example, that the Apostles and disciples\nwho were present when the miraculous draught of Fishes took place\nwould have mentioned the technical names by which they were\naccustomed to distinguish the different degrees of the saleable and\nunsaleable kinds.\n\n[Illustration: PETER CATCHES THE FISH.]\n\nOr we might have expected that on the occasion when St. Peter cast\nhis line and hook into the sea, and drew out a Fish holding the\ntribute-money in his mouth, we might have learned the particular\nspecies of Fish which was thus captured. We ourselves would\nassuredly have done so. It would not have been thought sufficient\nmerely to say that a Fish was caught with money in its mouth, but it\nwould have been considered necessary to mention the particular fish\nas well as the particular coin.\n\nBut it must be remembered that the whole tone of thought differs in\nOrientals and Europeans, and that the exactness required by the one\nhas no place in the mind of the other. The whole of the Scriptural\nnarratives are essentially Oriental in their character, bringing\nout the salient points in strong relief, but entirely regardless of\nminute detail.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe find from many passages both in the Old and New Testaments that\nFish were largely used as food by the Israelites, both when captives\nin Egypt and after their arrival in the Promised Land. Take, for\nexample, Numb. xi. 4, 5: \"And the children of Israel also wept\nagain, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat?\n\n\"We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely.\" Then, in\nthe Old Testament, although we do not find many such categorical\nstatements, there are many passages which allude to professional\nfishermen, showing that there was a demand for the Fish which they\ncaught, sufficient to yield them a maintenance.\n\nIn the New Testament, however, there are several passages in which\nthe Fishes are distinctly mentioned as articles of food. Take, for\nexample, the well-known miracle of multiplying the loaves and the\nFishes, and the scarcely less familiar passage in John xxi. 9: \"As\nsoon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there,\nand fish laid thereon, and bread.\"\n\nWe find in all these examples that bread and Fish were eaten\ntogether. Indeed, Fish was eaten with bread just as we eat cheese\nor butter; and St. John, in his account of the multiplication of\nthe loaves and Fishes, does not use the word \"fish,\" but another\nword which rather signifies sauce, and was generally employed to\ndesignate the little Fish that were salted down and dried in the\nsunbeams for future use.\n\nAs to the various species which were used for different purposes, we\nknow really nothing, the Jews merely dividing their Fish into clean\nand unclean.\n\nSome of the species to which the prohibition would extend are\nevident enough. There are, for example, the Sheat-fishes, which have\nthe body naked, and which are therefore taken out of the list of\npermitted Fishes. The Sheat-fishes inhabit rivers in many parts of\nthe world, and often grow to a very considerable size. They may be\nat once recognised by their peculiar shape, and by the long, fleshy\ntentacles that hang from the mouth. The object of these tentacles\nis rather dubious, but as the fish have been seen to direct them at\nwill to various objects, it is likely that they may answer as organs\nof touch.\n\n[Illustration: 1. MURAENA. 2. LONG-HEADED BARBEL. 3. SHEAT-FISH.]\n\nAs might be conjectured from its general appearance, it is one of\nthe Fishes that love muddy banks, in which it is fond of burrowing\nso deeply that, although the river may swarm with Sheat-fishes, a\npractised eye is required to see them.\n\nAs far as the Sheat-fishes are concerned, there is little need for\nthe prohibition, inasmuch as the flesh is not at all agreeable\nin flavour, and is difficult of digestion, being very fat and\ngelatinous. The swimming-bladder of the Sheat-fish is used in some\ncountries for making a kind of isinglass, similar in character to\nthat of the sturgeon, but of coarser quality.\n\nThe lowermost figure in the above illustration represents a species\nwhich is exceedingly plentiful in the Sea of Galilee.\n\nOn account of the mode in which their body is covered, the whole of\nthe sharks and rays are excluded from the list of permitted Fish,\nas, although they have fins, they have no scales, their place being\ntaken by shields varying greatly in size. The same rule excludes the\nwhole of the lamprey tribe, although the excellence of their flesh\nis well known.\n\nMoreover, the Jews almost universally declare that the Muraena and\nEel tribe are also unclean, because, although it has been proved\nthat these Fishes really possess scales as well as fins, and are\ntherefore legally permissible, the scales are hidden under a slimy\ncovering, and are so minute as to be practically absent.\n\nThe uppermost figure in the illustration represents the celebrated\nMuraena, one of the fishes of the Mediterranean, in which sea it is\ntolerably plentiful. In the days of the old Roman empire, the Muraena\nwas very highly valued for the table. The wealthier citizens built\nponds in which the Muraenae were kept alive until they were wanted.\nThis Fish sometimes reaches four feet in length.\n\nThe rest of the Fishes which are shown in the three illustrations\nbelong to the class of clean Fish, and were permitted as food.\nThe figure of the Fish between the Muraena and Sheat-fish is the\nLong-headed Barbel, so called from its curious form.\n\nThe Barbels are closely allied to the carps, and are easily known\nby the barbs or beards which hang from their lips. Like the\nsheat-fishes, the Barbels are fond of grubbing in the mud, for the\npurpose of getting at the worms, grubs, and larvae of aquatic insects\nthat are always to be found in such places. The Barbels are rather\nlong in proportion to their depth, a peculiarity which, owing to the\nlength of the head, is rather exaggerated in this species.\n\nThe Long-headed Barbel is extremely common in Palestine, and may be\ntaken with the very simplest kind of net. Indeed, in some places,\nthe fish are so numerous that a common sack answers nearly as well\nas a net.\n\nIt has been mentioned that the ancient Romans were in the habit of\nforming ponds in which the Muraenae were kept, and it is evident, from\nseveral passages of Scripture, that the Jews were accustomed to\npreserve fish in a similar manner, though they would not restrict\ntheir tanks or ponds to one species.\n\nThe accompanying illustration represents Fishes of the Mediterranean\nSea, and it is probable that one of them may be identified, though\nthe passage in which it is mentioned is only an inferential one. In\nthe prophecy against Pharaoh, king of Egypt, the prophet Ezekiel\nwrites as follows: \"I will put hooks in thy jaws, and I will cause\nthe fish of thy rivers to stick unto thy scales, and I will bring\nthee up out of the midst of thy rivers, and all the fish of thy\nrivers shall stick unto thy scales\" (xxix. 4).\n\n[Illustration: FISHES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN.\n\n1. SUCKING-FISH. 2. TUNNY. 3. CORYPHENE.]\n\nSome believe that the prophet made allusion to the Sucking-fish,\nwhich has the dorsal fins developed into a most curious apparatus\nof adhesion, by means of which it can fasten itself at will to any\nsmooth object, and hold so tightly to it that it can scarcely be\ntorn away without injury.\n\nThe common Sucking-fish is shown in the upper part of the\nillustration.\n\nThere are, however, other fish which have powers of adhesion which,\nalthough not so remarkable as those of the Sucking-fish, are yet\nvery strong. There is, for example, the well-known Lump-sucker, or\nLump-fish, which has the ventral fins modified into a sucker so\npowerful that, when one of these fishes has been put into a pail of\nwater, it has attached itself so firmly to the bottom of the vessel\nthat when lifted by the tail it raised the pail, together with\nseveral gallons of water.\n\nThe Gobies, again, have their ventral fins united and modified into\na single sucker, by means of which the fish is able to secure itself\nto a stone, rock, or indeed any tolerably smooth surface. These\nfishes are popularly known as Bull-routs.\n\nThe centre of the illustration is occupied by another of the\nMediterranean fishes. This is the well-known Tunny, which furnishes\nfood to the inhabitants of the coasts of this inland sea, and indeed\nconstitutes one of their principal sources of wealth. This fine fish\nis on an average four or five feet in length, and sometimes attains\nthe length of six or seven feet.\n\nThe flesh of the Tunny is excellent, and the fish is so conspicuous,\nthat the silence of the Scriptures concerning its existence shows\nthe utter indifference to specific accuracy that prevailed among the\nvarious writers.\n\nThe other figure represents the Coryphene, popularly, though very\nwrongly, called the Dolphin, and celebrated, under that name, for\nthe beautiful colours which fly over the surface of the body as it\ndies.\n\nThe flesh of the Coryphene is excellent, and in the times of classic\nRome the epicures were accustomed to keep these fish alive, and at\nthe beginning of a feast to lay them before the guests, so that they\nmight, in the first place, witness the magnificent colours of the\ndying fish, and, in the second place, might be assured that when it\nwas cooked it was perfectly fresh. Even during life, the Coryphene\nis a most lovely fish, and those who have witnessed it playing round\na ship, or dashing off in chase of a shoal of flying-fishes, can\nscarcely find words to express their admiration of its beauty.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: fishermen]\n\n\n\n\nFISHES.\n\nCHAPTER II.\n\n     Various modes of capturing Fish--The hook and line--Military\n     use of the hook--Putting a hook in the jaws--The fishing\n     spear--Different kinds of net--The casting-net--Prevalence\n     of this form--Technical words among fishermen--Fishing\n     by night--The draught of Fishes--The real force of the\n     miracle--Selecting the Fish--The Fish-gate and Fish-market--Fish\n     killed by a draught--Fishing in the Dead Sea--Dagon, the\n     fish-god of Philistina, Assyria, and Siam--Various Fishes of\n     Egypt and Palestine.\n\n\nAs to the various methods of capturing Fish, we will first take the\nsimplest plan, that of the hook and line.\n\nSundry references are made to angling, both in the Old and New\nTestaments. See, for example, the well-known passage respecting the\nleviathan, in Job xli. 1, 2: \"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an\nhook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?\n\n\"Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with\na thorn?\"\n\nIt is thought that the last clause of this passage refers, not to\nthe actual capture of the Fish, but to the mode in which they were\nkept in the tanks, each being secured by a ring or hook and line, so\nthat it might be taken when wanted.\n\nOn referring to the New Testament, we find that the fisher Apostles\nused both the hook and the net. See Matt. xvii. 27: \"Go thou to the\nsea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up.\"\nNow this passage explains one or two points.\n\nIn the first place, it is one among others which shows that,\nalthough the Apostles gave up all to follow Christ, they did not\nthrow away their means of livelihood, as some seem to fancy, nor\nexist ever afterwards on the earnings of others. On the contrary,\nthey retained their fisher equipment, whether boats, nets, or hooks;\nand here we find St. Peter, after the way of fishermen, carrying\nabout with him the more portable implements of his craft.\n\nNext, the phrase \"casting\" the hook into the sea is exactly\nexpressive of the mode in which angling is conducted in the sea and\nlarge pieces of water, such as the Lake of Galilee. The fisherman\ndoes not require a rod, but takes his line, which has a weight just\nabove the hook, coils it on his left arm in lasso fashion, baits the\nhook, and then, with a peculiar swing, throws it into the water as\nfar as it will reach. The hook is allowed to sink for a short time,\nand is then drawn towards the shore in a series of jerks, in order\nto attract the Fish, so that, although the fisherman does not employ\na rod, he manages his line very much as does an angler of our own\nday when \"spinning\" for pike or trout.\n\nSometimes the fisherman has a number of lines to manage, and in this\ncase he acts in a slightly different manner. After throwing out the\nloaded hook, as above mentioned, he takes a short stick, notched at\none end, and pointed at the other, thrusts the sharp end into the\nground at the margin of the water, and hitches the line on the notch.\n\nHe then proceeds to do the same with all his lines in succession,\nand when he has flung the last hook into the water, he sits down\non a heap of leaves and grass which he has gathered together, and\nwatches the lines to see if either of them is moved in the peculiar\njerking manner which is characteristic of a \"bite.\" After a while,\nhe hauls them in successively, removes the Fish that may have been\ncaught, and throws the lines into the water afresh.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe now come to the practice of catching Fish by the net, a custom\nto which the various Scriptural writers frequently refer, sometimes\nin course of historical narrative, and sometimes by way of allegory\nor metaphor. The reader will remember that the net was also used on\nland for the purpose of catching wild animals, and that many of the\nallusions to the net which occur in the Old Testament refer to the\nland and not to the water.\n\nThe commonest kind of net, which was used in the olden times as it\nis now, was the casting-net. This kind of net is circular, and is\nloaded all round its edge with weights, and suspended by the middle\nto a cord. When the fisherman throws this net, he gathers it up in\nfolds in his arms, and, with a peculiar swing of the arms, only to\nbe learned by long practice, flings it so that it spreads out and\nfalls in its circular form upon the surface of the water. It rapidly\nsinks to the bottom, the loaded circumference causing it to assume\na cup-like form, enclosing within its meshes all the Fish that\nhappen to be under it as it falls. When it has reached the bottom,\nthe fisherman cautiously hauls in the rope, so that the loaded\nedges gradually approach each other, and by their own weight cling\ntogether and prevent the Fish from escaping as the net is slowly\ndrawn ashore.\n\nThis kind of net is found, with certain modifications, in nearly\nall parts of the world. The Chinese are perhaps supreme in their\nmanagement of it. They have a net of extraordinary size, and cast it\nby flinging it over their backs, the huge circle spreading itself\nout in the most perfect manner as it falls on the water.\n\nAt the present day, when the fishermen use this net they wade into\nthe sea as far as they can, and then cast it. In consequence of this\ncustom, the fishermen are always naked while engaged in their work,\nwearing nothing but a thick cap in order to save themselves from\nsun-stroke. It is probable that on the memorable occasion mentioned\nby St. John, in chap. xxi., all the fishermen were absolutely,\nand not relatively naked, wearing no clothes at all, not even the\nordinary tunic.\n\nThat a great variety of nets was used by the ancient Jews is\nevident from the fact that there are no less than ten words to\nsignify different kinds of net. At the present day we have very\ngreat difficulty in deciding upon the exact interpretation of these\ntechnical terms, especially as in very few cases are we assisted\neither by the context or by the etymology of the words. It is the\nsame in all trades or pursuits, and we can easily understand how our\nown names of drag-net, seine, trawl, and keer-drag would perplex\nany commentator who happened to live some two thousand years after\nEnglish had ceased to be a living language.\n\n[Illustration: MODE OF DRAGGING THE SEINE-NET.]\n\nThe Sagene, or seine-net, was made in lengths, any number of which\ncould be joined together, so as to enclose a large space of water.\nThe upper edge was kept at the surface of the water by floats, and\nthe lower edge sunk by weights.\n\nThis net was always taken to sea in vessels, and when \"shot\" the\nvarious lengths were joined together, and the net extended in a\nline, with a boat at each end. The boats then gradually approached\neach other, so as to bring the net into a semicircle, and finally\nmet, enclosing thereby a vast number of Fishes in their meshen\nwalls. The water was then beaten, so as to frighten the Fishes\nand drive them into the meshes, and the net was then either taken\nashore, or lifted by degrees on board the boats, and the Fish\nremoved from it.\n\nAs in a net of this kind Fishes of all sorts are enclosed, the\ncontents are carefully examined, and those which are unfit for\neating are thrown away. Even at the present day much care is taken\nin the selection, but in the ancient times the fishermen were still\nmore cautious, every Fish having to be separately examined in order\nthat the presence both of fins and scales might be assured before\nthe captors could send it to the market.\n\nIt is to this custom that Christ alludes in the well-known parable\nof the net: \"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net that\nwas cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind;\n\n\"Which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and\ngathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nLastly, we come to the religious, or rather superstitious, part\nplayed by Fish in the ancient times. That the Egyptians employed\nFish as material symbols of Divine attributes we learn from secular\nwriters, such as Herodotus and Strabo.\n\nThe Jews, who seem to have had an irrepressible tendency to\nidolatry, and to have adopted the idols of every people with whom\nthey came in contact, resuscitated the Fish-worship of Egypt as soon\nas they found themselves among the Philistines. We might naturally\nimagine that as the Israelites were bitterly opposed to their\npersistent enemy, who trod them under foot and crushed every attempt\nat rebellion for more than three hundred years, they would repudiate\nthe worship as well as the rule of their conquerors. But, on the\ncontrary, they adopted the worship of Dagon, the Fish-god, who was\nthe principal deity of the Philistines, and erected temples in his\nhonour.\n\nWe find precisely the same worship at the present day in Siam, where\nDagon has exactly the same form as among the Philistines of old.\nThere is now before me a photograph of a great temple at Ayutia, the\nentrance to which is guarded by two huge images of the Fish-god.\nThey are about sixty feet in height, and have both legs and feet\nlike man, but in addition the lower part of the body is modified\ninto the tail of a Fish, which, in common with the whole of the\nbody, is covered with gilded scales.\n\nIn order that the reader may see examples of the typical Fish which\nare to be found in Egypt and Palestine, I have added three more\nspecies, which are represented in the following illustration.\n\n[Illustration: FISHES OF EGYPT AND PALESTINE.\n\n1. NILE PERCH. 2. SURMULLET. 3. STAR-GAZER.]\n\nThe uppermost figure represents the NILE PERCH. This Fish is\nplentiful in the Nile, and in the mouths of many Asiatic rivers. It\nis brown above, silvery white below, and may be distinguished by the\narmed gill-covers, and the three strong spines of the anal fin. The\ntongue is smooth.\n\nImmediately below the Nile Perch is the STAR-GAZER.\n\nThis Fish is found in the Mediterranean, and derives its name from\nthe singular mode in which the eyes are set in the head, so that it\nlooks upwards instead of sideways. It is one of the mud-lovers,\na fact which accounts for the peculiar position of the eyes. It\nis said to feed after the fashion of the fishing-frog--_i.e._ by\nburying itself in the mud and attracting other Fishes by a worm-like\nappendage of its mouth, and pouncing on them before they are aware\nof their danger.\n\nThis is not a pretty Fish, and as it is very spiny, is not pleasant\nto the grasp, but its flesh is very good, and it is much valued by\nthose who can obtain it.\n\nThe last Fish to be noticed is the SURMULLET, a Fish that is equally\nremarkable for the beauty of its colours and the excellence of its\nflesh.\n\n[Illustration: man]\n\n\n\n\nMOLLUSCS.\n\n     The purple of Scripture--The sac containing the purple\n     dye--Curious change of colour--Mode of obtaining the dye--The\n     Tyrian purple--The king of the Ethiopians and the purple\n     robe--The professional purple dyers--Various words expressive of\n     different shades of purple.\n\n\nLeaving the higher forms of animal life, we now pass to the\nInvertebrated Animals which are mentioned in Scripture.\n\nAs may be inferred from the extreme looseness of nomenclature\nwhich prevails among the higher animals, the species which can be\nidentified are comparatively few, and of them but a very few details\nare given in the Scriptures.\n\nTaking them in their zoological order, we will begin with the\nMOLLUSCS.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe are all familiar with the value which was set by the ancients\nupon the peculiar dye which may be called by the name of Imperial\nPurple. In the first place, it was exceedingly costly, not only\nfor its richness of hue, but from the great difficulty with which\na sufficient quantity could be procured for staining a dress.\nPurple was exclusively a royal colour, which might not be worn by a\nsubject. Among the ancient Romans, during the times of the Caesars,\nany one who ventured to appear in a dress of purple would do so at\nthe peril of his life. In the consular days of Rome, the dress of\nthe consuls was white, striped with purple; but the Caesars advanced\nanother step in luxury, and dyed the whole toga of this costly hue.\n\nThe colour of the dye is scarcely what we understand by the term\n\"purple,\" _i.e._ a mixture of blue and red. It has but very little\nblue in it, and has been compared by the ancients to the colour\nof newly-clotted blood. It is obtained from several Shell Fish\nbelonging to the great Whelk family, the chief of which is the\n_Murex brandaris_.\n\nThe shell is shaped something like that of a whelk, but is very\nsmooth and porcelain-like, and is generally white, ornamented with\nseveral  bands. It is, however, one of the most variable of\nshells, differing not only in colour but in form. It always inhabits\nthe belt of the shore between tide-marks, and preys upon other\nMolluscs, such as the mussel and periwinkle, literally licking them\nto pieces with its long riband tongue.\n\nThis tongue is beset with rows of hooked teeth, exactly like the\nshark-tooth weapons of the Samoan and Mangaian Islanders, and with\nit the creature is enabled to bore through the shells of mussels\nand similar Molluscs, and to eat the enclosed animal. It is very\ndestructive to periwinkles, thrusting its tongue through the mouth\nof the shell, piercing easily the operculum by which the entrance is\nclosed, and gradually scooping out the unfortunate inmate.\n\nEven the bivalves, which can shut themselves up between two shells,\nfare no better, the tongue of the Dog-Whelk rasping a hole in the\nhard shell in eight-and-forty hours.\n\nIn order to procure the animal, the shell must be broken with a\nsharp blow of a small hammer, and the receptacle of the colouring\nmatter can then be seen behind the head, and recognised by its\nlighter hue.\n\nWhen it is opened, a creamy sort of matter exudes. It is yellowish,\nand gives no promise of its future richness of hue. There is only\none drop of this matter in each animal, and it is about sufficient\nin quantity to stain a piece of linen the size of a dime.\n\nThe best mode of seeing the full beauty of the purple is to take a\nnumber of the Molluscs, and to stain as large a surface as possible.\nThe piece of linen should then be exposed to the rays of the sun,\nwhen it will go through a most curious series of colours. The yellow\nbegins to turn green, and, after a while, the stained portions of\nthe linen will be entirely green, the yellow having been vanquished\nby the blue. By degrees the blue predominates more and more over the\nyellow, until the linen is no more green, but blue. Then, just as\nthe yellow yielded to the blue, the blue yields to red, and becomes\nfirst violet, then purple, and lastly assumes the blood-red hue of\nroyalty.\n\nThe colour is very permanent, and, instead of fading by time, seems\nrather to brighten.\n\nIn some cases the ancients appear not to have troubled themselves\nwith the complicated operation of taking the animal out of the\nshell, opening the receptacle, and squeezing the contents on the\nfabric to be dyed, but simply crushed the whole of the Mollusc,\nso as to set the colouring matter free, and steeped the cloth\nin the pulp. Tyre was one of the most celebrated spots for this\nmanufacture, the \"Tyrian dye\" being celebrated for its richness.\nHeaps of broken shells remain to the present day as memorials of the\nlong-perished manufacture.\n\nThe value which the ancients set upon this dye is shown by many\npassages in various books. Among others we may refer to Herodotus.\n\nCambyses, it appears, had a design to make war upon three\nnations, the Ammonians, the Carthaginians, and the Ethiopians. He\ndetermined to invade the first by land, and the second by sea;\nbut, being ignorant of the best method of reaching the Ethiopians,\nhe dispatched messengers to them, nominally as ambassadors, but\npractically as spies. He sent to the King of Ethiopia valuable\npresents--namely, a purple mantle, a golden necklace and bracelet,\nan elaborate box of perfumed ointment, and a cask of palm-wine,\nthese evidently being considered a proof of imperial magnificence.\n\nThe Ethiopian king ridiculed the jewels, praised the wine, and\nasked curiously concerning the dye with which the purple mantle\nwas stained. On being told the mode of preparation, he refused\nto believe the visitors, and, referring to the changing hues of\nthe mantle and to the perfume of the ointment, he showed his\nappreciation of their real character by saying that the goods were\ndeceptive, and so were the bearers.\n\nThe Hebrew word _argaman_, which signifies the regal purple, occurs\nseveral times in Scripture, and takes a slightly different form\naccording to the Chaldaic or Hebraic idiom.\n\nFor example, we find it in Exod. xxv. 4: \"This is the offering which\nye shall take of them: gold, and silver, and brass,\n\n\"And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen,\" &c. &c.\n\nIt occurs again in 2 Chron. ii. 7: \"Send me now therefore a man\ncunning to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in iron,\nand in purple, and crimson, and blue.\"\n\n\n\n\nTHE SNAIL.\n\n     The Snail which melteth--Rendering of the Jewish Bible--Theory\n     respecting the track of the Snail--The Hebrew word\n     _Shablul_--Various Snails of Palestine.\n\n\nThere is a very remarkable and not very intelligible passage in Ps.\nlviii. 8: \"As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass\naway.\" The Jewish Bible renders the passage in a way which explains\nthe idea which evidently prevailed at the time when the Psalms were\ncomposed: \"As a snail let him melt as he passeth on.\"\n\nThe ancients had an idea that the slimy track made by a Snail as it\ncrawled along was subtracted from the substance of its body, and\nthat in consequence the farther it crept, the smaller it became,\nuntil at last it wasted entirely away. The commentators on the\nTalmud took this view of the case. The Hebrew word _shablul_, which\nundoubtedly does signify a Snail of some kind, is thus explained:\n\"The Shablul is a creeping thing: when it comes out of its shell,\nsaliva pours from itself, until it becomes liquid, and so dies.\"\n\nOther explanations of this passage have been offered, but there is\nno doubt that the view taken by these commentators is the correct\none, and that the Psalmist, when he wrote the terrible series of\ndenunciations in which the passage in question occurs, had in his\nmind the popular belief regarding the gradual wasting away of the\nSnail as it \"passeth on.\"\n\nIt is needless to say that no particular species of Snail is\nmentioned, and almost as needless to state that in Palestine there\nare many species of Snails, to any or all of which these words are\nequally applicable.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: PEARL OYSTER.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE PEARL.\n\n     The Pearl of Scripture--Wisdom compared to Pearl--Metaphorical\n     uses of the Pearl--The Pearl of great price--Casting Pearls\n     before swine.\n\n\nThere is only one passage in the Old Testament in which can be found\nthe word which is translated as PEARL, and it is certain that the\nword in question may have another interpretation.\n\nThe word in question is _gabish_, and occurs in Job xxviii.\n18. Treating of wisdom, in that magnificent passage beginning,\n\"But where shall Wisdom be found, and where is the place of\nunderstanding?\" the sacred writer uses these words, \"No mention\nshall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is\nabove rubies.\"\n\nIn consequence of the labour and research required for seeking\nwisdom, it was proverbially likened to a Pearl, and in this sense\nwe must understand the warning of our Lord, not to cast Pearls\nbefore swine. The \"pearl of great price\" is another form of the same\nmetaphor.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe substance of Pearls is essentially the same as that which lines\nmany shells, and is known as \"mother of pearl.\"\n\nAlthough a large number of shell-fish secrete \"mother of pearl,\"\nonly a few of them yield true Pearls. The finest are obtained from\nthe so-called Pearl oyster, an illustration of which is given on the\npreceding page.\n\nThe Ancients obtained their Pearls chiefly from India and the\nPersian Gulf, where to this day the industry of Pearl-fishing is\nstill carried on by the natives.\n\nThe oysters containing the Pearls are brought up from the bottom of\nthe sea by divers, who go out in boats to the fishing-grounds, which\nare some distance from the shore.\n\nLeaping naked into the water, carrying a heavy stone to enable him\nto sink quickly to the bottom, the diver descends to where the\noysters lie, and secures as many of them as possible during the\nlimited time that his breath lasts. On an average the divers remain\nunder water from fifty to eighty seconds, though some can endure a\nmuch longer period.\n\nSharks are the special dread of Pearl-divers, and many are carried\noff by this fierce monster of the deep. To arm himself against their\nattack the diver carries a sharp knife, and instances are known of\nhis having attacked and fairly defeated the dread destroyer in its\nown element.\n\nNot only is the diver exposed to the danger of attack from sharks,\nbut his hazardous calling is necessarily exhausting, and, as a rule,\nhe is a short-lived man.\n\nThere are some kinds of fresh-water mussels which contain Pearls of\nan inferior quality; perhaps the most celebrated of these is the\nPearl Mussel of the Chinese, who make a singular use of it. They\nstring a number of globular pellets, and introduce them between\nthe valves of the mussel, so that in course of time the creature\ndeposits a coating of pearly substance upon them, and forms a very\ngood imitation of real Pearls.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: insects]\n\n[Illustration: butterfly]\n\n\n\n\nINSECTS.\n\n\n\n\nTHE LOCUST.\n\n     Insects--The Locust-The two migratory Locusts at rest and on\n     the wing--The Locust swarms--Gordon Cumming's account--Progress\n     of the insect hosts--Vain attempts to check them--Tossed up and\n     down as a Locust--Effect of the winds on the insect--The east\n     and the west winds--Locusts used for food--Ancient and modern\n     travellers--The food of John the Baptist.\n\n\nOf the LOCUSTS there are several species in Palestine, two of which\nare represented in the accompanying plate. Those on the ground are\nthe common Migratory Locusts, while those on the wing, which have\nlong heads, are a species of _Truxalis_.\n\nThe Locust belongs to the great order of Orthoptera, or\nstraight-winged insects. They have, when fully developed, four\nwings, the two front being thick and membraneous, while the\ntwo hinder wings are large, delicate, translucent, and folded\nlongitudinally under the front pair of wings when the insect is at\nrest. In the Locusts these characteristics are admirably shown. The\nappearance of a Locust when at rest and when flying is so different\nthat the creature is at first sight scarcely recognisable as the\nsame creature. When at rest, it is a compact and tolerably stout\ninsect, with a dull though delicately <DW52> body; but when it\ntakes flight it appears to attain twice its previous dimensions.\n\nThe front pair of wings, which alone were seen before they were\nexpanded, became comparatively insignificant, while the hinder\npair, which were before invisible, became the most prominent part\nof the insect, their translucent folds being  with the most\nbrilliant hues, according to the species. The body seems to have\nshrunk as the wings have increased, and to have diminished to half\nits previous size, while the long legs that previously were so\nconspicuous are stretched out like the legs of a flying heron.\n\nAll the Locusts are vegetable-feeders, and do great harm wherever\nthey happen to be plentiful, their powerful jaws severing even the\nthick grass stems as if cut by scissors. But it is only when they\ninvade a country that their real power is felt. They come flying\nwith the wind in such vast multitudes that the sky is darkened as\nif by thunder-clouds; and when they settle, every vestige of green\ndisappears off the face of the earth.\n\nMr. Gordon Cumming once saw a flight of these Locusts. They flew\nabout three hundred feet from the ground, and came on in thick,\nsolid masses, forming one unbroken cloud. On all sides nothing was\nto be seen but Locusts. The air was full of them, and the plain was\ncovered with them, and for more than an hour the insect army flew\npast him. When the Locusts settle, they eat with such voracity that\nthe sound caused by their jaws cutting the leaves and grass can be\nheard at a great distance; and even the young Locusts, which have no\nwings, and are graphically termed by the Dutch colonists of Southern\nAfrica \"voet-gangers,\" or foot-goers, are little inferior in power\nof jaw to the fully-developed insect.\n\nAs long as they have a favourable wind, nothing stops the progress\nof the Locusts. They press forward just like the vast herds of\nantelopes that cover the plains of Africa, or the bisons that once\nblackened the prairies of America, and the progress of even the\nwingless young is as irresistible as that of the adult insects.\nRegiments of soldiers have in vain attempted to stop them. Trenches\nhave been dug across their path, only to be filled up in a few\nminutes with the advancing hosts, over whose bodies the millions of\nsurvivors continued their march. When the trenches were filled with\nwater, the result was the same; and even when fire was substituted\nfor water, the flames were quenched by the masses of Locusts that\nfell into them. When they come to a tree, they climb up it in\nswarms, and devour every particle of foliage, not even sparing the\nbark of the smaller branches. They ascend the walls of houses that\ncome in the line of their march, swarming in at the windows, and\ngnawing in their hunger the very woodwork of the furniture.\n\nWe shall now see how true to nature is the terrible prophecy of\nJoel. \"A day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of\nthick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains: a great\npeople and a strong; there hath not been ever the like, neither\nshall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations.\n\n[Illustration: LOCUSTS.]\n\n\"A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth:\nthe land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a\ndesolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.\n\n\"And the Lord shall utter His voice before His army: for His camp is\nvery great\" (Joel ii. 2-11).\n\nNothing can be more vividly accurate than this splendid description\nof the Locust armies. First we have the darkness caused by them as\nthey fly like black clouds between the sun and the earth. Then comes\nthe contrast between the blooming and fertile aspect of the land\nbefore they settle on it, and its utter desolation when they leave\nit.\n\nThere is one passage in the Scriptures which at first sight seems\nrather obscure, but is clear enough when we understand the character\nof the insect to which it refers: \"I am gone like the shadow when it\ndeclineth: I am tossed up and down as the locust\" (Ps. cix. 23).\n\nAlthough the Locusts have sufficient strength of flight to remain\non the wing for a considerable period, and to pass over great\ndistances, they have little or no command over the direction of\ntheir flight, and always travel with the wind, just as has been\nmentioned regarding the quail. So entirely are they at the mercy\nof the wind, that if a sudden gust arises the Locusts are tossed\nabout in the most helpless manner; and if they should happen to come\nacross one of the circular air-currents that are so frequently found\nin the countries which they inhabit, they are whirled round and\nround without the least power of extricating themselves.\n\nIn the account of the great plague of Locusts, the wind is mentioned\nas the proximate cause both of their arrival and their departure.\nSee, for example, Exod. x. 12, 13:\n\n\"And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand over the land\nof Egypt for the locusts, that they may come up upon the land of\nEgypt, and eat every herb of the land, even all that the hail hath\nleft.\n\n\"And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the\nLord brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that\nnight; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts.\"\n\nAfterwards, when Moses was brought before Pharaoh, and entreated to\nremove the plague which had been brought upon the land, the west\nwind was employed to take the Locusts away, just as the east wind\nhad brought them.\n\n\"He went out from Pharaoh, and entreated the Lord.\n\n\"And the Lord turned a mighty strong west wind, which took away the\nlocusts, and cast them into the Red Sea; there remained not one\nlocust in all the coasts of Egypt\" (Exod. x. 18, 19).\n\nModern travellers have given accounts of these Locust armies, which\nexactly correspond with the sacred narrative. One traveller mentions\nthat, after a severe storm, the Locusts were destroyed in such\nmultitudes, that they were heaped in a sort of wall, varying from\nthree to four feet in height, fifty miles in length, and almost\nunapproachable, on account of the odour of their decomposing bodies.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe now come to the use of Locusts as food.\n\nVery few insects have been recognised as fit for human food, even\namong uncivilized nations, and it is rather singular that the\nIsraelites, whose dietary was so scrupulously limited, should have\nbeen permitted the use of the Locust. These insects are, however,\neaten in all parts of the world which they frequent, and in some\nplaces form an important article of diet, thus compensating in some\nway for the amount of vegetable food which they consume.\n\nWhen their captors have roasted and eaten as many as they can manage\nto devour, they dry the rest over the fires, pulverize them between\ntwo stones, and keep the meal for future use, mixing it with water,\nor, if they can get it, with milk.\n\nWe will now take a few accounts given by travellers of the present\nday, selecting one or two from many. Mr. W. G. Palgrave, in his\n\"Central and Eastern Arabia,\" gives a description of the custom of\neating Locusts. \"On a sloping bank, at a short distance in front, we\ndiscerned certain large black patches, in strong contrast with the\nwhite glisten of the soil around, and at the same time our attention\nwas attracted by a strange whizzing, like that of a flight of\nhornets, close along the ground, while our dromedaries capered and\nstarted as though struck with sudden insanity.\n\n\"The cause of all this was a vast swarm of locusts, here alighted\nin their northerly wanderings from their birthplace in the Dahna;\ntheir camp extended far and wide, and we had already disturbed their\noutposts. These insects are wont to settle on the ground after\nsunset, and there, half-stupified by the night chill, await the\nmorning rays, which warm them once more into life and movement.\n\n\"This time, the dromedaries did the work of the sun, and it would be\nhard to say which of the two were the most frightened, they or the\nlocusts. It was truly laughable to see so huge a beast lose his wits\nfor fear at the flight of a harmless, stingless insect, for, of all\ntimid creatures, none equal this 'ship of the desert' for cowardice.\n\n\"But, if the beasts were frightened, not so their masters. I really\nthought they would have gone mad for joy. Locusts are here an\narticle of food, nay, a dainty, and a good swarm of them is begged\nof Heaven in Arabia....\n\n\"The locust, when boiled or fried, is said to be delicious, and\nboiled and fried accordingly they are to an incredible extent.\nHowever, I never could persuade myself to taste them, whatever\ninvitations the inhabitants of the land, smacking their lips over\nlarge dishes full of entomological 'delicatesses,' would make me to\njoin them. Barakat ventured on one for a trial. He pronounced it\noily and disgusting, nor added a second to the first: it is caviare\nto unaccustomed palates.\n\n\"The swarm now before us was a thorough godsend for our Arabs, on no\naccount to be neglected. Thirst, weariness, all were forgotten, and\ndown the riders leaped from their starting camels. This one spread\nout a cloak, that one a saddle-bag, a third his shirt, over the\nunlucky creatures, destined for the morning meal. Some flew away,\nwhizzing across our feet; others were caught, and tied up in sacks.\"\n\nMr. Mansfield Parkyns, in his \"Life in Abyssinia,\" mentions that the\ntrue Abyssinian will not eat the Locust, but that the <DW64>s and\nArabs do so. He describes the flavour as being something between\nthe burnt end of a quill and a crumb of linseed cake. The flavour,\nhowever, depends much on the mode of cooking, and, as some say, on\nthe nature of the Locusts' food.\n\nSignor Pierotti states, in his \"Customs and Traditions of\nPalestine,\" that Locusts are really excellent food, and that he was\naccustomed to eat them, not from necessity, but from choice, and\ncompares their flavour to that of shrimps.\n\nDr. Livingstone makes a similar comparison. In Palestine, Locusts\nare eaten either roasted or boiled in salt and water, but, when\npreserved for future use, they are dried in the sun, their heads,\nwings, and legs picked off, and their bodies ground into dust. This\ndust has naturally a rather bitter flavour, which is corrected by\nmixing it with camel's milk or honey, the latter being the favourite\nsubstance.\n\nWe may now see that the food of John the Baptist was, like his\ndress, that of a people who lived at a distance from towns, and\nthat there was no more hardship in the one than in the other.\nSome commentators have tried to prove that he fed on the fruit of\nthe locust or carob tree--the same that is used in some countries\nfor feeding cattle; but there is not the least ground for such\nan explanation. The account of his life, indeed, requires no\nexplanation; Locust-dust, mixed with honey, being an ordinary\narticle of food even at the present day.\n\n[Illustration: locust]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: flowers]\n\n\n\n\nTHE BEE.\n\n     The Honey Bee of Palestine--Abundance of Bees in the\n     Holy Land--Habitations of the wild Bee--The honey of\n     Scripture--Domesticated Bees and their hives--Stores of wild\n     honey--The story of Jonathan--The Crusaders and the honey.\n\n\nFortunately, there is no doubt about the rendering of the Hebrew\nword _deborah,_ which has always been acknowledged to be rightly\ntranslated as \"Bee.\"\n\nThe Honey Bee is exceedingly plentiful in Palestine, and in some\nparts of the country multiplying to such an extent that the\nprecipitous ravines in which it takes up its residence are almost\nimpassable by human beings, so jealous are the Bees of their\ndomains. Although the Bee is not exactly the same species as that\nof our own country, being the Banded Bee _(Apis fasciata),_ and not\nthe _Apis mellifica,_ the two insects very much resemble each other\nin shape, colour, and habits. Both of them share the instinctive\ndislike of strangers and jealousy of intrusion, and the Banded Bee\nof Palestine has as great an objection to intrusion as its congener\nin this country.\n\nSeveral allusions are made in the Scriptures to this trait in the\ncharacter of the Bee. See, for example, Deut. i. 44: \"And the\nAmorites, which dwelt in that mountain, came out against you,\nand chased you, as bees do, and destroyed you in Seir, even unto\nHormah.\" All those who have had the misfortune to offend Bees will\nrecognise the truth of this metaphor, the Amorites swarming out of\nthe mountain like wild Bees out of the rocky clefts which serve them\nas hives, and chasing the intruder fairly out of their domains.\n\n[Illustration: THE BEE]\n\nA similar metaphor is employed in the Psalms: \"They compassed me\nabout; yea, they compassed me about; but in the name of the Lord I\nwill destroy them.\n\n\"They compassed me about like bees, they are quick as the fire of\nthorns, but in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.\"\n\nThe custom of swarming is mentioned in one of the earlier books of\nScripture. The reader will remember that, after Samson had killed\nthe lion which met him on the way, he left the carcase alone.\nThe various carnivorous beasts and birds at once discover such a\nbanquet, and in a very short time the body of a dead animal is\nreduced to a hollow skeleton, partially or entirely covered with\nskin, the rays of the sun drying and hardening the skin until it is\nlike horn.\n\nIn exceptionally hot weather, the same result occurs even in this\ncountry. Some years before this account was written there was a\nvery hot and dry summer, and a great mortality took place among the\nsheep. So many indeed died that at last their owners merely flayed\nthem, and left their bodies to perish. One of the dead sheep had\nbeen thrown into a rather thick copse, and had fallen in a spot\nwhere it was sheltered from the wind, and yet exposed to the fierce\nheat of the summer's sun. The consequence was that in a few days\nit was reduced to a mere shell. The heat hardened and dried the\nexternal layer of flesh so that not even the carnivorous beetles\ncould penetrate it, while the whole of the interior dissolved into\na semi-putrescent state, and was rapidly devoured by myriads of\nblue-bottles and other larvae.\n\nIt was so thoroughly dried that scarcely any evil odour clung to\nit, and as soon as I came across it the story of Samson received a\nsimple elucidation. In the hotter Eastern lands, the whole process\nwould have been more rapid and more complete, and the skeleton of\nthe lion, with the hard and horny skin strained over it, would\nafford exactly the habitation of which a wandering swarm of Bees\nwould take advantage. At the present day swarms of wild Bees often\nmake their habitations within the desiccated bodies of dead camels\nthat have perished on the way.\n\nAs to the expression \"hissing\" for the Bee, the reader must bear in\nmind that a sharp, short hiss is the ordinary call in Palestine,\nwhen one person desires to attract the attention of another. A\nsimilar sound, which may perhaps be expressed by the letters _tst_,\nprevails on the Continent at the present day. Signor Pierotti\nremarks that the inhabitants of Palestine are even now accustomed to\nsummon Bees by a sort of hissing sound.\n\nWhether the honey spoken of in the Scriptures was obtained from wild\nor domesticated Bees is not very certain, but, as the manners of the\nEast are much the same now as they were three thousand years ago,\nit is probable that Bees were kept then as they are now. The hives\nare not in the least like ours, but are cylindrical vases of coarse\nearthenware, laid horizontally, much like the bark hives employed in\nmany parts of Southern Africa.\n\nIn some places the hives are actually built into the walls of the\nhouses, the closed end of the cylinder projecting into the interior,\nwhile an entrance is made for the Bees in the other end, so that the\ninsects have no business in the house. When the inhabitants wish to\ntake the honey, they resort to the operation which is technically\ntermed \"driving\" by bee-masters.\n\nThey gently tap the end within the house, and continue the tapping\nuntil the Bees, annoyed by the sound, have left the hive. They then\ntake out the circular door that closes the end of the hive, remove\nas much comb as they want, carefully put back those portions which\ncontain grubs and bee-bread, and replace the door, when the Bees\nsoon return and fill up the gaps in the combs. As to the wasteful,\ncruel, and foolish custom of \"burning\" the Bees, the Orientals never\nthink of practising it.\n\nIn many places the culture of Bees is carried out to a very great\nextent, numbers of the earthenware cylinders being piled on one\nanother, and a quantity of mud thrown over them in order to defend\nthem from the rays of the sun, which would soon melt the wax of the\ncombs.\n\nIn consequence of the geographical characteristics of the Holy Land,\nwhich supplies not only convenient receptacles for the Bees in the\nrocks, but abundance of thyme and similar plants, vast stores of\nbee-comb are to be found in the cliffs, and form no small part of\nthe wealth of the people.\n\nThe abundance of wild honey is shown by the memorable events\nrecorded in 1 Sam. xiv. Saul had prohibited all the people\nfrom eating until the evening. Jonathan, who had not heard the\nprohibition, was faint and weary, and, seeing honey dripping on the\nground from the abundance and weight of the comb, he took it up on\nthe end of his staff, and ate sufficient to restore his strength.\n\nThus, if we refer again to the history of John the Baptist and his\nfood, we shall find that he was in no danger of starving for want\nof nourishment, the Bees breeding abundantly in the desert places\nhe frequented, and affording him a plentiful supply of the very\nmaterial which was needed to correct the deficiencies of the dried\nlocusts which he used instead of bread.\n\nThe expression \"a land flowing with milk and honey\" has become\nproverbial as a metaphor expressive of plenty. Those to whom the\nwords were spoken understood it as something more than a metaphor.\nIn the work to which reference has already been made Signor Pierotti\nwrites as follows:--\"Let us now see how far the land could be said\nto flow with milk and honey during the latter part of its history\nand at the present day.\n\n\"We find that honey was abundant in the time of the Crusades, for\nthe English, who followed Edward I. to Palestine, died in great\nnumbers from the excessive heat, and from eating too much fruit and\nhoney.\n\n\"At the present day, after traversing the country in every\ndirection, I am able to affirm that in the south-east and\nnorth-east, where the ancient customs of the patriarchs are most\nfully preserved, and the effects of civilization have been felt\nleast, milk and honey may still be said to flow, as they form a\nportion of every meal, and may even be more abundant than water,\nwhich fails occasionally in the heat of summer.... I have often\neaten of the comb, which I found very good and of delicious\nfragrance.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe Bee represented in the illustration is the common Bee of\nPalestine, _Apis fasciata_. The lowest figure in the corner, with\na long body and shut wings, is the queen. The central figure\nrepresents the drone, conspicuous by means of his large eyes, that\nalmost join each other at the top of the head, and for his thicker\nand stouter body, while the third figure represents the worker Bee.\nNear them is shown the entrance to one of the natural hives which\nare so plentiful in the Holy Land, and are made in the \"clefts of\nthe rocks.\" A number of Bees are shown issuing from the hole.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: THE HORNET AND ITS NEST.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE HORNET.\n\n     The Tzirah or Hornet of Scripture--Travellers driven\n     away by Hornets--The Hornet used as a metaphor--Oriental\n     symbolism--Sting of the Hornet.\n\n\nStill keeping to the hymenopterous insects, we come to the Hornet.\nThere are three passages in which occurs the word _tzirah_, which\nhas been translated as Hornet. In every case when the word is\nmentioned the insect is employed in a metaphorical sense. See, for\nexample, Exod. xxiii. 27, 28: \"I will send my fear before thee, and\nwill destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come; and I will make\nall thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.\n\n\"And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the\nHivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee.\"\n\nThe Hornet affords a most appropriate image for such a promise\nas was made to the Israelites, and was one which they must\nhave thoroughly comprehended. The Hornets of Palestine and the\nneighbouring countries are far more common than our own Hornets\nhere, and they evidently infested some parts to such an extent that\nthey gave their name to those spots. Thus the word _Zoreah_, which\nis mentioned in Josh. xv. 33, signifies the \"place of Hornets.\"\n\nThey make their nests in various ways; some species placing them\nunderground, and others disposing them as shown in the illustration,\nand merely sheltering them from the elements by a paper cover.\nSuch nests as these would easily be disturbed by the animals which\naccompanied the Israelites on their journeys, even if the people\nwere careful to avoid them. In such a case, the irritated insects\nrush out at the intruders; and so great is the terror of their\nstings, that men and beasts fly promiscuously in every direction,\neach only anxious to escape from the winged foes.\n\nThe recollection of such scenes would necessarily dwell in the\nmemory of those who had taken part in them, and cause the metaphor\nto impress itself strongly upon them.\n\nIt is needless to say that the passages in question might be literal\nstatements of facts, and that the various nations were actually\ndriven out of their countries by Hornets. Let the insects be brought\nupon the land in sufficient numbers, and neither man nor beast\ncould stay in it. It is not likely, however, that such a series of\nmiracles, far exceeding the insect-plagues of Egypt, would have been\nworked without frequent references to them in the subsequent books\nof the Scriptures; and, moreover, the quick, short, and headlong\nflight of the attack of Hornets is a very different thing from\nthe emigration which is mentioned in the Scriptures, and the long\njourneys which such a proceeding involved.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: ANTS ON THE MARCH.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE ANT.\n\n     The Ant of Scripture--Habit of laying up stores of food--The\n     Ants of Palestine, and their habits--The Agricultural or\n     Mound-making Ant--Preparing ground, sowing, tending, reaping,\n     and storing the crop--Different habits of Ants--The winged Ants.\n\n\nOne of the best-known and most frequently quoted passages of\nScripture is found in Proverbs, chap. vi. 6-8: \"Go to the ant, thou\nsluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:\n\n\"Which, having no guide, overseer, or ruler,\n\n\"Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the\nharvest.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIn Palestine Ants abound, and the species are tolerably numerous.\nAmong them are found some species which do convey seeds into their\nsubterranean home; and if their stores should be wetted by the heavy\nrains which sometimes prevail in that country, bring them to the\nouter air, as soon as the weather clears up, and dry them in the\nsun.\n\nThe writer of the Proverbs was therefore perfectly right when he\nalluded to the vegetable stores within the nest, and only spoke\nthe truth when he wrote of the Ant that it was exceeding wise. Any\none who wishes to test the truth of his words can easily do so by\nwatching the first Ants' nest which he finds, the species of the Ant\nnot being of much consequence. The nests of the Wood-Ant are perhaps\nthe best suited for investigation, partly because the insect and its\nhabitation are comparatively large, and, secondly, because so much\nof the work is done above-ground.\n\nThe most wonderful Ant in the world is one which hitherto is only\nknown in some parts of America. Its scientific name is _Atta\nmalefaciens_, and it has been called by various popular names, such\nas the Mound-making Ant and the Agricultural Ant on account of its\nhabits, and the Stinging Ant on account of the pungency of its\nvenom. This characteristic has gained for it the scientific name of\n_malefaciens_, or villanous.\n\nThe habits of this Ant were studied in Texas by Dr. Lincecum for\nthe space of twelve years, and the result of his investigations was\ncommunicated to the Linnaean Society by C. Darwin, Esq. It is so\nextraordinary an account that it must be given the narrator's own\nwords:--\n\n\"The species which I have named 'Agricultural' is a large brownish\nant. It dwells in what may be termed paved cities, and, like a\nthrifty, diligent, provident farmer, makes suitable and timely\narrangements for the changing seasons. It is, in short, endowed\nwith skill, ingenuity, and untiring patience sufficient to enable\nit successfully to contend with the varying exigencies which it may\nhave to encounter in the life-conflict.\n\n\"When it has selected a situation for its habitation, if on ordinary\ndry ground, it bores a hole, around which it raises the surface\nthree and sometimes six inches, forming a low circular mound having\na very gentle inclination from the centre to the outer border, which\non an average is three or four feet from the entrance. But if the\nlocation is chosen on low, flat, wet land liable to inundation,\nthough the ground may be perfectly dry at the time the ant sets to\nwork, it nevertheless elevates the mound, in the form of a pretty\nsharp cone, to the height of fifteen to twenty inches or more, and\nmakes the entrance near the summit. Around the mound in either case\nthe ant clears the ground of all obstructions, levels and smooths\nthe surface to the distance of three or four feet from the gate of\nthe city, giving the space the appearance of a handsome pavement, as\nit really is.\n\n\"Within this paved area not a blade of any green thing is allowed to\ngrow, except a single species of grain-bearing grass. Having planted\nthis crop in a circle around, and two or three feet from, the centre\nof the mound, the insect tends and cultivates it with constant care,\ncutting away all other grasses and weeds that may spring up amongst\nit and all around outside of the farm-circle to the extent of one or\ntwo feet more.\n\n\"The cultivated grass grows luxuriantly, and produces a heavy\ncrop of small, white, flinty seeds, which under the microscope\nvery closely resemble ordinary rice. When ripe, it is carefully\nharvested, and carried by the workers, chaff and all, into the\ngranary cells, where it is divested of the chaff and packed away.\nThe chaff is taken out and thrown beyond the limits of the paved\narea.\n\n\"During protracted wet weather, it sometimes happens that the\nprovision stores become damp, and are liable to sprout and spoil.\nIn this case, on the first fine day the ants bring out the damp and\ndamaged grain, and expose it to the sun till it is dry, when they\ncarry it back and pack away all the sound seeds, leaving those that\nhad sprouted to waste.\n\n\"In a peach-orchard not far from my house is a considerable\nelevation, on which is an extensive bed of rock. In the sand-beds\noverlying portions of this rock are fine cities of the Agricultural\nants, evidently very ancient. My observations on their manners\nand customs have been limited to the last twelve years, during\nwhich time the enclosure surrounding the orchard has prevented the\napproach of cattle to the ant-farms. The cities which are outside\nof the enclosure as well as those protected in it are, at the\nproper season, invariably planted with the ant-rice. The crop may\naccordingly always be seen springing up within the circle about the\n1st of November every year.\n\n\"Of late years, however, since the number of farms and cattle has\ngreatly increased, and the latter are eating off the grass much\ncloser than formerly, thus preventing the ripening of the seeds, I\nnotice that the Agricultural ant is placing its cities along the\nturn-rows in the fields, walks in gardens, inside about the gates,\n&c., where they can cultivate their farms without molestation from\nthe cattle.\n\n\"There can be no doubt of the fact, that the particular species of\ngrain-bearing grass mentioned above is intentionally planted. In\nfarmer-like manner the ground upon which it stands is carefully\ndivested of all other grasses and weeds during the time it is\ngrowing. When it is ripe the grain is taken care of, the dry stubble\ncut away and carried off, the paved area being left unencumbered\nuntil the ensuing autumn, when the same 'ant-rice' reappears within\nthe same circle, and receives the same agricultural attention as was\nbestowed upon the previous crop; and so on year after year, as I\n_know_ to be the case, in all situations where the ants' settlements\nare protected from graminivorous animals.\"\n\nIn a second letter, Dr. Lincecum, in reply to an inquiry from Mr.\nDarwin, whether he supposed that the Ants plant seeds for the\nensuing crop, says, \"I have not the slightest doubt of it. And\nmy conclusions have not been arrived at from hasty or careless\nobservation, nor from seeing the ants do something that looked a\nlittle like it, and then guessing at the results. I have at all\nseasons watched the same ant-cities during the last twelve years,\nand I know that what I stated in my former letter is true. I visited\nthe same cities yesterday, and found the crop of ant-rice growing\nfinely, and exhibiting also the signs of high cultivation, and not\na blade of any other kind of grass or weed was to be seen within\ntwelve inches of the circular row of ant-rice.\"\n\nThe economical habits of this wonderful insect far surpass anything\nthat Solomon has written of the Ant, and it is not too much to say\nthat if any of the Scriptural writers had ventured to speak of an\nAnt that not only laid up stores of grain, but actually prepared\nthe soil for the crop, planted the seed, kept the ground free from\nweeds, and finally reaped the harvest, the statement would have been\nutterly disbelieved, and the credibility not only of that particular\nwriter but of the rest of Scripture severely endangered.\n\nAs may be inferred from the above description, the habits of Ants\nvary greatly according to their species and the climate in which\nthey live. All, however, are wonderful creatures; and whether we\nlook at their varied architecture, their mode of procuring food,\nthe system of slave-catching adopted by some, the \"milking\" of\naphides practised by others, their astonishing mode of communicating\nthought to each other, and their perfect system of discipline, we\nfeel how true were the words of the royal naturalist, that the Ants\nare \"little upon earth, but are exceeding wise.\"\n\n[Illustration: ANT OF PALESTINE.]\n\nThere is one point of their economy in which all known species\nagree. Only those which are destined to become perfectly developed\nmales and females attain the winged state. Before they assume the\ntransitional or pupal condition, each spins around itself a slight\nbut tough silken cocoon, in which it lies secure during the time\nwhich is consumed in developing its full perfection of form.\n\nWhen it is ready to emerge, the labourer Ants aid in freeing it\nfrom the cocoon, and in a short time it is ready to fly. Millions of\nthese winged ants rise into the air, seeking their mates, and, as\nthey are not strong on the wing, and are liable to be tossed about\nby every gust of wind, vast numbers of them perish. Whole armies of\nthem fall into the water and are drowned or devoured by fish, while\nthe insectivorous birds hold great festival on so abundant a supply\nof food. As soon as they are mated they bend their wings forward,\nsnap them off, and pass the rest of their lives on the ground.\n\nIn consequence of the destruction that takes place among the winged\nAnts, the Arabs have a proverb which is applied to those who are\nover-ambitious: \"If God purposes the destruction of an ant, He\npermits wings to grow upon her.\"\n\n\n\n\nTHE CRIMSON WORM.\n\n     The scarlet or crimson of Scripture--The Coccus or Cochineal of\n     Palestine compared with that of Mexico--Difference between the\n     sexes--Mode of preparing the insect.\n\n\nWe now come to another order of insects.\n\nJust as the purple dye was obtained from a shell-fish, the scarcely\nless valuable crimson or scarlet was obtained from an insect. This\nis an insect popularly known as the Crimson Worm. It is closely\nallied to the cochineal insect of Mexico, which gives a more\nbrilliant dye, and has at the present day nearly superseded the\nnative insect. It is, however, still employed as a dye in some parts\nof the country.\n\nLike the cochineal insect of Mexico, the female is very much larger\nthan her mate, and it is only from her that the dye is procured. At\nthe proper season of year the females are gathered off the trees\nand carefully dried, the mode of drying having some effect upon the\nquality of the dye. During the process of drying the insect alters\ngreatly, both in colour and size, shrinking to less than half its\noriginal dimensions, and assuming a greyish brown hue instead of\na deep red. When placed in water it soon gives out its colouring\nmatter, and communicates to the water the rich colour with which\nwe are familiar under the name of carmine, or crimson. This latter\nname, by the way, is only a corruption of the Arabic _kermes_, which\nis the name of the insect.\n\n[Illustration: THE CRIMSON WORM.]\n\nThe reader will remember that this was one of the three sacred\ncolours--scarlet, purple, and blue--used in the vestments of the\npriests and the hangings of the tabernacle, the white not taking\nrank as a colour.\n\n\n\n\nTHE CLOTHES MOTH.\n\n     The Moth of Scripture evidently the Clothes Moth--Moths and\n     garments--Accumulation of clothes in the East--Various uses of\n     the hoarded robes--The Moths, the rust, and the thief.\n\n\nOne of the insects mentioned by name in the Scriptures is the MOTH,\nby which we must always understand some species of Clothes Moth.\nThese are as plentiful and destructive in Palestine as in this\ncountry.\n\nSeveral references are made to the Moth in the Scriptures, and\nnearly all have reference to its destructive habits. The solitary\nexceptions occur in the Book of Job, \"Behold, He put no trust in His\nservants; and His angels He charged with folly: how much less in\nthem that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust,\nwhich are crushed before the moth?\"\n\nIn the New Testament reference is made several times to the Moth.\n\"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust\ndoth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal\" (Matt. vi.\n19).\n\nEven to ourselves these passages are significant enough, but to the\nJews and the inhabitants of Palestine they possessed a force which\nwe can hardly realize in this country. In the East large stores of\nclothing are kept by the wealthy, not only for their own use, but\nas presents to others. At a marriage feast, for example, the host\npresents each of the guests with a wedding garment. Clothes are also\ngiven as marks of favour, and a present of \"changes of raiment,\"\n_i.e._ suits of clothing, is one of the most common gifts. As at the\npresent day, there was anciently no greater mark of favour than for\nthe giver to present the very robe which he was wearing, and when\nthat robe happened to be an official one, the gift included the rank\nwhich it symbolized. Thus Joseph was invested with royal robes, as\nwell as with the royal ring (Gen. xli. 42). Mordecai was clothed in\nthe king's robes: \"Let the royal apparel be brought which the king\nuseth to wear, and the horse the king rideth upon, and the crown\nroyal which is set upon his head.\n\n[Illustration: MORDECAI IS LED THROUGH THE CITY UPON THE KING'S\nHORSE.]\n\n\"And let this apparel and horse be delivered to the hand of one of\nthe king's most noble princes, that they may array the man withal\nwhom the king delighteth to honour, and bring him on horseback\nthrough the street of the city, and proclaim before him, Thus shall\nit be done to the man whom the king delighteth to honour.\" (Esther\nvi. 8, 9.)\n\nThe loose clothing of the East requires no fitting, as is the case\nwith the tight garments of the West; any garment fits any man: so\nthat the powerful and wealthy could lay up great stores of clothing,\nknowing that they would fit any person to whom they were given. An\nallusion to this practice of keeping great stores of clothing is\nmade in Job xxvii. 26: \"Though he heap up silver as the dust, and\nprepare raiment as the clay;\n\n\"He may prepare it, but the just shall put it on, and the innocent\nshall divide the silver.\"\n\nSo large was the supply of clothing in a wealthy man's house, that\nspecial chambers were set apart for it, and a special officer,\ncalled the \"keeper of the garments\" (2 Chron. xxxiv. 22), was\nappointed to take charge of them.\n\nThus, when a man was said to have clothing, the expression was a\nsynonym for wealth and power. See Isa. iii. 6: \"When a man shall\ntake hold of his brother of the house of his father, saying, Thou\nhast clothing, be thou our ruler.\"\n\nThe reader will now see how forcible was the image of the Moth and\nthe garments, that is used so freely in the Scriptures. The Moth\nwould not meddle with garments actually in use, so that a poor man\nwould not be troubled with it. Only those who were rich enough to\nkeep stores of clothing in their houses need fear the Moth.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SILKWORM MOTH.\n\n     Probability that the Hebrews were acquainted with Silk--Present\n     cultivation of the Silkworm--The Silk-farms of the\n     Lebanon--Silkworms and thunder.\n\n\nIn the Authorized Version there are several passages wherein silk\nis mentioned, but it is rather doubtful whether the translation be\ncorrect or not, except in one passage of the Revelation: \"And the\nmerchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man\nbuyeth their merchandise any more:\n\n\"The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of\npearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk.\" (xviii. 11, 12.)\n\nThat the Hebrews were acquainted with silk from very early times is\nnearly certain, but it is probable that until comparatively late\nyears they only knew the manufactured material, and were ignorant\nof the source whence it was derived. As to the date at which silk\nwas introduced into Palestine, nothing certain is known; but it is\nmost likely that Solomon's fleets brought silk from India, together\nwith the other valuables which are mentioned in the history of that\nmonarch.\n\nAt the present day silk is largely cultivated, and the silk-farmers\nof the Lebanon are noted for the abundance of the crop which is\nannually produced. The greatest care is taken in rearing the worms.\nAn excellent account of these farms is given by Mr. G. W. Chasseaud\nin his \"Druses of the Lebanon:\"--\n\n\"Proceeding onward, and protected from the fierce heat of the sun's\nrays by the pleasant shade of mountain pines, we were continually\nencountering horseloads of cocoons, the fruit of the industry of the\nDruse silk-rearer. The whole process, from hatching the silkworms'\neggs till the moment that the worm becomes a cocoon, is one series\nof anxiety and labour to the peasant. The worms are so delicate that\nthe smallest change of temperature exposes them to destruction, and\nthe peasant can never confidently count upon reaping a harvest until\nthe cocoon is fairly set.\"\n\nAfter a long and interesting description of the multiplied and\nceaseless labours of the silk-grower in providing food for the\narmies of caterpillars and sheltering them from the elements, the\nwriter proceeds as follows:--\n\n\"The peasant is unwilling to permit of our remaining and watching\noperations. Traditional superstition has inculcated in him a dread\nof the evil eye. If we stop and admire the wisdom displayed by the\nworm, it will, in his opinion, be productive of evil results; either\nthe cocoon will be badly formed, or the silk will be worthless. So,\nfirst clearing the place of all intruders, he puts a huge padlock on\nthe door, and, locking the _khlook_ (room in which the silkworms are\nkept), deposits the key in his _zinnar,_ or waistband.\n\n\"Next week he will come and take out the cocoons, and, separating\nthem from the briars, choose out a sufficiency for breeding\npurposes, and all the rest are handed over to the women of his\nfamily. These first of all disentangle the cocoon from the rich and\nfibrous web with which it is enveloped, and which constitutes an\narticle of trade by itself. The cocoons are then either reeled off\nby the peasant himself or else sold to some of the silk factories\nof the neighbourhood, where they are immediately reeled off, or are\nsuffocated in an oven, and afterwards, being well aired and dried,\npiled up in the magazines of the factory.\n\n\"Such is a brief account or history of these cocoons, of which we\nwere continually encountering horseload after horseload.\n\n\"As you will perceive, unless suffering from a severe cold in\nthe head, the odour arising from these cocoons is not the most\nagreeable; but this arises partly from the neglect and want of\ncare of the peasants themselves, who, reeling off basketful after\nbasketful of cocoons, suffer the dead insects within to be thrown\nabout and accumulate round the house, where they putrefy and emit\nnoxious vapours.\"\n\n[Illustration: BUTTERFLIES OF PALESTINE.\n\n  SYRIAN GRAYLING.\n  SYRIAN ORANGE-TIP.\n  SYRIAN SWALLOW-TAIL.\n]\n\nAlthough our limits will not permit the cultivation of the\nSilkworm to be described more fully, it may here be added that all\nsilk-growers are full of superstition regarding the welfare of the\ncaterpillars, and imagine that they are so sensitive that they will\ndie of fear. The noise of a thunderclap is, in their estimation,\nfatal to Silkworms; and the breeders were therefore accustomed to\nbeat drums within the hearing of the Silkworms, increasing the\nloudness of the sound, and imitating as nearly as possible the crash\nand roll of thunder, so that the caterpillars might be familiar with\nthe sound if the thunderstorm should happen to break near them.\n\n\n\n\nFLIES.\n\n     Flies of Scripture--Annoyance caused by the House-fly--Flies\n     and ophthalmia--Signor Pierotti's account of the Flies--The\n     sovereign remedy against Flies--Causes of their prevalence.\n\n\nThere are two Hebrew words which are translated as \"fly.\" One is\n_zebub_, and the other is _arob_, the latter being applied to the\nflies which were brought upon Egypt in the great plague. It is\nprobable that some different species is here signified, but there\nis no certainty in the matter. Any species, however, would be a\nsufficient plague if they exceeded the usual number which infest\nEgypt, and which at first make the life of a foreigner a burden to\nhim. They swarm in such myriads, that he eats flies, drinks flies,\nand breathes flies.\n\nNot the least part of the nuisance is, that they cluster in the eyes\nof those who are affected with the prevalent ophthalmia, which is so\nfertile a cause of blindness, and so convey the infection with them.\nA stranger is always struck with the appearance of the children, who\nhave quantities of these pests upon and about their eyes, and yet\nseem perfectly unaffected by a visitation which would wellnigh drive\na European mad.\n\nSignor Pierotti writes feelingly on the subject:--\n\n\"These insects sometimes cause no slight suffering in Palestine, as\nI can vouch from my own experience. However large or however small\nthey may be, a rabid and restless foe, they attack alike, and make\nthemselves insufferable in a thousand ways, in every season and\nplace, in the house and in the field, by day and by night.\n\n\"While I was encamped near the tents of the Bedawin, in the\nneighbourhood of the Jordan, and to the south of Hebron, flies were\nbrought in such numbers by the east wind that all, beasts and men,\nwere in danger of being choked by them, as they crept into our\nears, noses, and mouths, and all over our bodies. My servant and I\nwere the first to fly from the pest, as we were spotted all over\nlike lepers with the eruption caused by their bites: the Bedawin\nthemselves were not slow to follow our example.\n\n\"The flies, therefore, still infest Palestine as they did of old,\nexcept that they are not now so numerous as to compel the chiefs of\nthe villages or tribes (answering to the kings of the Pentateuch and\nJoshua) to evacuate the country before them.\n\n\"The Philistines had a special deity whom they invoked against these\npests, Baalzebub, the God of Flies, whose temple was at Ekron.\nThe reason of this is evident at the present day, for the ancient\ncountry of the Philistines is infested with insect plagues, as I\nexperienced to my cost.\n\n\"As, however, we had no faith in Baalzebub, we were obliged to arm\nourselves with fly-traps and stoical patience. Many travellers bring\nwith them a perfect druggist's shop from Europe as a protection\nagainst these nuisances, and leave behind them this only efficacious\nremedy, patience. This I strongly recommend; it is very portable,\nvery cheap, and equally useful in all climates.\n\n\"It is especially valuable in the case of the insects, as they\nare found everywhere in greater or less numbers; especially in\nthe dwellings, where they are nourished by the carrion that lies\nabout, the heaps of rubbish, the filth of the streets, the leakage\nof cesspools and sewers, the dirt in the houses, the filthy\nclothing worn by the people, and the kind of food they eat. Though\nthe country of Baalzebub is deserted and enslaved, the flies are\nstill abundant and free, self-invited guests at the table, unasked\nassistants in the kitchen, tasting everything, immolating themselves\nin their gastronomic ardour, and forming an undesired seasoning in\nevery dish.\"\n\n\n\n\nGNATS.\n\n     The Gnat of Scripture--Straining out the Gnat and swallowing the\n     camel, a typographical error--Probable identity of the Gnat and\n     the mosquito.\n\n\nIt has already been stated that only one species of fly is mentioned\nby name in the Scriptures. This is the Gnat, the name of which\noccurs in the familiar passage, \"Ye blind guides, which strain at a\ngnat and swallow a camel\" (Matt, xxiii. 24).\n\n[Illustration: NOXIOUS FLIES OF PALESTINE.\n\nMOSQUITO. CAMEL FLY. ]\n\nI may again mention here that the words \"strain at\" ought to have\nbeen printed \"strain out,\" the substitution of one for the other\nbeing only a typographical error. The allusion is made to a custom\nwhich is explained by reference to the preceding article on the\nfly. In order to avoid taking flies and other insects into the mouth\nwhile drinking, a piece of thin linen stuff was placed over the cup,\nso that if any insects, as was usually the case, had got into the\nliquid, they would be \"strained out\" by the linen.\n\nWhether or not any particular species of insect was signified by the\nword \"gnat\" is very doubtful, and in all probability the word is\nonly used to express the contrast between the smallest known insects\nand the largest known beasts. Gnats, especially those species which\nare popularly known by the word \"mosquito,\" are very plentiful in\nmany parts of Palestine, especially those which are near water, and\nare as annoying there as in other lands which they inhabit.\n\n\n\n\nTHE LOUSE.\n\n     Insect parasites--The plague of Lice--Its effect on the\n     magicians or priests--The Hebrew word _Chinnim_--Probability\n     that it may be represented by \"tick\"--Habits of the ticks, their\n     dwellings in dust, and their effects on man and beast.\n\n\nWe close the history of insects mentioned in Scripture with two\nparasites of a singularly disagreeable character.\n\nWith respect to the former of them, we find it mentioned in the\naccount of the great plagues of Egypt. After the two plagues of the\nwaters and the frogs, both of which were imitated by the magicians,\ni.e. the priests, a third was brought upon Egypt, which affected the\nmagicians even more than the people, for a reason which we shall\npresently see:--\n\n\"And the Lord said unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod,\nand smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice, throughout\nall the land of Egypt.\n\n\"And they did so; for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod,\nand smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man and in\nbeast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land\nof Egypt.\n\n\"And the magicians did so with their enchantments to bring forth\nlice, but they could not: so there were lice upon man and upon\nbeast.\"\n\nNow it is hardly possible to conceive a calamity which would have\ntold with greater effect upon the magicians, by whose advice Pharoah\nhad resisted the requests of Moses and Aaron.\n\nLiving in a land where all, from the highest to the lowest, were\ninfested with parasites, the priests were so much in advance of the\nlaity that they were held polluted if they harboured one single\nnoxious insect upon their persons, or in their clothing. The\nclothing, being linen, could be kept clean by frequent washing,\nwhile the possibility of the body being infested by parasites was\nprevented by the custom of shaving the whole of the body, from the\ncrown of the head to the sole of the foot, at least once in every\nthree days.\n\nIt may easily be imagined, therefore, how terrible this visitation\nmust have been to such men. As swine to the Pharisee, as the flesh\nof cattle to the Brahmin, so was the touch of a parasite to the\nEgyptian priest. He was degraded in his own estimation and in\nthat of his fellows. He could perform no sacred offices: so that,\nin fact, all the idolatrous worship of Egypt ceased until this\nparticular plague had been withdrawn.\n\nWe now come to a consideration of the insect which is signified by\nthe Hebrew word _chinnim_. Sir Samuel Baker is of opinion that the\nword ought to have been translated as \"ticks,\" and for the following\nreasons:--\n\nAfter quoting the passage which relates to the stretching of Aaron's\nrod over the dust, and the consequence of that action, he proceeds\nas follows: \"Now the louse that infests the human body and hair has\nno connexion whatever with dust, and, if subjected to a few hours'\nexposure to the dry heat of the burning sand, it would shrivel and\ndie. But a tick is an inhabitant of the dust, a dry horny insect,\nwithout any apparent moisture in its composition. It lives in hot\nsand and dust, where it cannot possibly obtain nourishment until\nsome wretched animal should lie down upon the spot, and become\ncovered with these horrible vermin.\n\n\"I have frequently seen dry desert places so infested with ticks\nthat the ground was perfectly alive with them, and it would have\nbeen impossible to have rested upon the earth. In such spots, the\npassage in Exodus has frequently seemed to me as bearing reference\nto these vermin, which are the greatest enemy to man and beast.\nIt is well known that from the size of a grain of sand, in their\nnatural state, they will distend to the size of a hazel nut after\nhaving preyed for some days on the body of an animal.\"\n\nGranting that this suggestion be the correct one, as it certainly\nis the most consistent both with actual facts and with the words of\nHoly Writ, the plague would lose none of its intensity, but would,\nif anything, be more horrible. Only those who have suffered from\nthem can appreciate the miseries caused by the attack of these\nticks, which cling so tightly that they can scarcely be removed\nwithout being torn in pieces, and without leaving some portion of\ntheir head beneath the skin of their victim. Man and beast suffer\nequally from them, as is implied in the words of Scripture, and,\nunless they are very cautiously removed, painful and obstinate is\nthe result of their bites.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FLEA.\n\nPrevalence of the Flea in the East, and the annoyance caused by\nthem to travellers-Fleas of the Lebanon--The Bey's bedfellows--The\nPasha at the bath--Use of the word in Scripture.\n\n\nThis active little pest absolutely swarms in the East. The\ninhabitants are so used to the Fleas that either the insects do not\ntouch them, or by long custom they become so inured to their attack\nthat the bites are not felt.\n\nBut every traveller in Eastern lands has a tale to tell about the\nFleas, which seem to be accepted as one of the institutions of\nthe country, and to be contemplated with perfect equanimity. Miss\nRogers, for example, in her \"Domestic Life in Palestine,\" mentions\nhow she was obliged to stand upon a box in order to be out of the\nreach of a large company of Fleas that were hopping about on the\nfloor!\n\nMr. Urquhart, experienced Orientalist as he was, found on one\noccasion that the Fleas were too strong for him. He had forgotten\nhis curtain, and was invaded by armies of Fleas, that marched\nsteadily up the bed and took possession of their prey. The people\nwere quite amused at his complaints, and said that their Bey could\nnot sleep without a couple of hundred of them in his bosom. Mr.\nUrquhart suggests that these little creatures act as a wholesome\nirritant to the skin, and says that the last two mouthfuls of every\nmeal are for the benefit of the Fleas.\n\nIn order to show the perfect indifference with which the presence of\nthese little pests is regarded, I quote a passage from Mr. Farley's\n\"Druses of the Lebanon.\" He was in a Turkish bath, and was much\namused at a scene which presented itself.\n\n\"A man, whose skin resembled old discoloured vellum, was occupying\nhimself with the somewhat undignified pursuit of pursuing with great\neagerness something that, from the movement of his hands, seemed\ncontinually to elude him, jumping about and taking refuge in the\ncreases and folds of his shirt, that was spread out over his lap as\nhe sat cross-legged on his bedstead like a tailor on his board. This\noddity was no less a dignitary than a Pasha.\"\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: SCORPION.]\n\n\n\n\nTHE SCORPION.\n\nmud walls--Venom of the Scorpion--Scorpions at sea--The Scorpion\nwhip, and its use--The Scorpion Pass.\n\n\nScorpions are exceedingly common in Palestine, and to a novice\nare a constant source of terror until he learns to be accustomed\nto them. The appearance of the Scorpion is too well known to need\ndescription, every one being aware that it is in reality a kind of\nspider that has the venom claw at the end of its body, and not in\nits jaw. As to the rendering of the word _akrabbim_ as \"Scorpions,\"\nthere has never been any doubt.\n\nThese unpleasant creatures always manage to insinuate themselves in\nsome crevice, and an experienced traveller is cautious where the\nScorpions are plentiful, and will never seat himself in the country\nuntil he has ascertained that no Scorpions are beneath the stones\non or near which he is sitting. Holes in walls are favourite places\nof refuge for the Scorpion, and are very plentiful, the mud walls\nalways tumbling down in parts, and affording homes for Scorpions,\nspiders, snakes, and other visitors.\n\nThe venom of the Scorpion varies much in potency according to the\nspecies and size of the creature, some of the larger Scorpions being\nable to render a man ill for a considerable time, and even to kill\nhim if he should be a sensitive subject. So much feared were the\nScorpions that one of the chief privileges of the Apostles and their\nimmediate followers was their immunity from the stings of Scorpions\nand the bite of venomous serpents.\n\nIt is said, however, that after a person has been stung once by a\nScorpion, he suffers comparatively little the second time, and that\nif he be stung three or four times, the only pain that he suffers\narises from the puncture. Sailors also say that after a week at\nsea the poison of the Scorpion loses its power, and that they care\nnothing for the Scorpions which are sure to come on board inside the\nbundles of firewood.\n\nThose passages which mention the venom of the Scorpion are numerous,\nthough most, if not all, of them occur in the New Testament. See\nRev. ix. 5: \"And to them it was given that they should not kill\nthem, but that they should be tormented five months, and their\ntorment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.\"\nAlso ver. 10 of the same chapter: \"And they had tails like unto\nscorpions: and there were stings in their tails: and their power was\nto hurt men five months.\"\n\nThere is, also, the well-known saying of our Lord, \"If a son shall\nask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?\" (Luke xi. 12.) And in the\npreceding chapter of the same Evangelist Scorpions are classed with\nserpents in their power of injury: \"Behold, I give unto you power\nto tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the\nenemy; and nothing shall by any means hurt you.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThere is another reference to the Scorpion in the Old Testament,\nwhich requires an explanation. It forms part of the rash counsel\ngiven to Rehoboam by his friends: \"My father made your yoke heavy,\nand I will add to your yoke; my father also chastised you with\nwhips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.\"\n\nThe general tenor of this passage is evident enough, namely, that\nhe intended to be far more severe than his father had been. But his\nwords assume a new force when we remember that there was a kind of\nwhip called a Scorpion. This terrible instrument was made for the\nexpress purpose of punishing slaves, so that the mere mention of it\nwas an insult. It consisted of several thongs, each of which was\nloaded with knobs of metal, and tipped with a metal hook, so that it\nresembled the jointed and hooked tail of the Scorpion. This dreadful\ninstrument of torture could kill a man by a few blows, and it was\neven used in combats in the amphitheatre, a gladiator armed with a\nScorpion being matched against one armed with a spear.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SPIDER.\n\nSpiders of Palestine.\n\n\nThere are very many species of Spider in Palestine; some which spin\nwebs, like the common Garden Spider, some which dig subterranean\ncells and make doors in them, like the well-known Trap-door Spider\nof Southern Europe, and some which have no webs, but chase their\nprey upon the ground, like the Wolf and Hunting Spiders.\n\n\n\n\nTHE HORSE LEECH.\n\n     Signification of the word Alukah--Leeches in Palestine--The\n     horse and the Leech.\n\n\nIn Prov. xxx. 15 there is a word which only occurs once in the\nScriptures. This is _alukah,_ which is translated as horse-leech.\n\"The horseleech hath two daughters, crying, Give, give.\"\n\nThe Leeches are very common in Palestine, and infest the rivers to\nsuch an extent that they enter the nostrils of animals who come to\ndrink, and cause great annoyance and even danger. The following\nanecdote, related by Mr. H. Dixon in his \"Holy Land,\" gives us a\ngood idea of the prevalence of the Leeches, and the tenacity with\nwhich they retain their hold:--\n\n\"At Beit-Dejan, on a slight twist in the road, we find the wheel and\nwell, and hear a delicious plash and rustle in the troughs. To slip\nfrom my seat to dip Sabeah's nose into the fluid is the work of a\nsecond; but no sooner has she lapped up a mouthful of water, than\none sees that the refuse falling back from her lips into the tank is\ndabbled and red. Opening her mouth, I find a gorged leech dangling\nfrom her gum. But the reptile being swept off, and the mare's nose\ndipt into the cooling stream, the blood still flows from between her\nteeth, and, forcing them open, I find two other leeches lodged in\nthe roof of her mouth.\n\n\"Poor little beast! how grateful and relieved she seems, how gay,\nhow gentle, when I have torn these suckers from her flesh, and\nsoused the water about her wounds; and how my hunting-whip yearns\nto descend upon the shoulders of that laughing and careless Nubian\nslave!\"\n\nPersons passing through the river are also attacked by them, and, if\nthey have a delicate skin, suffer greatly.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: CORAL.]\n\n\n\n\nSPONGE AND CORAL.\n\n     Use of the Sponge in Scripture--Probability that the ancient\n     Jews were acquainted with it--Sponges of the Mediterranean--The\n     Coral, and its value--Signification of the word _Ramoth_.\n\n\nThere is little to be said on either of these subjects.\n\nSponge is only mentioned with reference to the events of the\nCrucifixion, where it is related that a soldier placed a sponge upon\nhyssop, dipped it in vinegar (_i.e._ the acid wine issued to the\nRoman soldiers), and held it to the Lord's lips. There is little\ndoubt that the ancient Hebrews were fully aware of the value of the\nSponge, which they could obtain from the Mediterranean which skirted\nall their western coasts.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe Coral is mentioned in two passages of Scripture: \"No mention\nshall be made of coral, or of pearls\" (Job xxviii. 18). The second\noccurrence of the word is in Ezek. xxvii. 16: \"They occupied in thy\nfairs with emeralds, purple, and broidered work, and fine linen, and\ncoral, and agate.\"\n\nThis Coral, which is described as being brought from Syria, was\nprobably that of the Red Sea, where the Coral abounds, and where it\nattains the greatest perfection.\n\n[Illustration: roses]\n\nTHE END.\n\n\n\n\nINDEX.\n\n\n  A.      PAGE\n\n  Addax, 171-173\n\n  Adder, 628\n\n  Ant, 671\n    agricultural, 672\n    habits of, 674\n    cocoon, 675\n\n  Aoudad, 212-215\n\n  Ape, 387\n    brought by Solomon, 389\n    worshipped in India, 390-395\n\n  Apis, 145\n\n  Ass, 315\n    domesticated, 315\n    royal, 316\n    treatment of, 319\n    saddle, 321\n    in Cairo, 323\n    uses of, 326\n    wild, 328\n\n\n  B.\n\n  Badger, 96\n    skins for tabernacle, 96-112\n    skins for robes and sandals, 97\n    nocturnal in habits, 100\n\n  Barbel, long-headed, 639\n\n  Bat, 401\n\n  Bear, Syrian, 103\n    omnivorous, 106\n    a dangerous enemy, 108\n    robbed of whelps, 110\n    mode of fighting, 110\n\n  Beden, 233-237\n\n  Bee, 664\n    banded, 664\n    hives, 667\n    honey, 667\n\n  Behemoth, 372\n    food, 376\n    hunted, 380\n\n  Bison, 160\n\n  Bittern, 536\n    haunts waste places, 538\n    cry, 538\n    nest, 540\n\n  Blue thrush, 481\n\n  Boer hunting the lion, 36-41\n\n  Bottles, skin, 221-225\n\n  Bubale, 173-175\n\n  Buffalo, 149\n\n  Bull, 142\n    wild, 152\n    hunted with nets, 153\n\n\n  C.\n\n  Calf, 134\n    fatted, 135\n    worshipped, 146, 148\n\n  Camel, 248\n    Arabian, 248\n    Bactrian, 248, 286-290\n    milk of, 251\n    power of carrying water, 252\n    flesh, 254\n    as beast of burden, 255-258\n    riding, 259-268\n    speed, 269\n    malice of, 273\n    food, 277-280\n    foot, 280\n    hair and skin, 283\n    needle's eye, 284\n\n  Caspian emys, 580\n    hibernates, 581\n    terror to horses, 581\n    legends, 582\n\n  Cattle, 132\n\n  Cerastes, 624\n\n  Chameleon, 602\n    strength of grasp, 607\n    eyes, 607\n    change of color, 608\n\n  Chamois, 211\n\n  Chariots, 300-311\n\n  Chetah, 42\n\n  Cobra di capello, 616\n\n  Cockatrice, 628\n\n  Coney, 366\n    ruminant, 368\n    watchful, 370\n\n  Coral, 695\n\n  Cormorant, 563\n    fishing, 564\n    voracious, 565\n    in China, 565\n    nests, 566\n\n  Coryphene, 641\n\n  Crane, 549\n\n  Crocodile, 585\n    description in Job, 586\n    worshipped by Egyptians, 589\n    seizing its prey, 592\n    eggs, 595\n    hunting, 598\n\n  Cuckoo, 487\n    great spotted, 488\n\n  Cyprius, 602\n\n\n  D.\n\n  Deer, 238\n    hunted, 244\n    watchfulness of, 244-246\n\n  Deloul, 268\n\n  Dhubb, 583\n\n  Dishon, 171\n\n  Dove, 489\n    turtle, 489, 496\n    Noah's, 490\n    in sacrifice, 491\n    carrier, 493\n    blue rock, 495\n    collared turtle, 497\n    palm, 497\n    Barbary, 497\n\n\n  E.\n\n  Eagle, 430\n    golden, 433\n    short-toed, 434\n\n  Egret, 548\n\n  Egyptian mastigure, 583\n\n  Elephant, 349\n    ivory, 349\n    in war, 352\n    in hunting, 362\n\n\n  F.\n\n  Falcon, peregrine, 445\n    lanner, 445\n\n  Fallow deer, 173-175\n\n  Field-mouse, 121-124\n\n  Fishes, 635-648\n    apostolic fishermen, 635\n    as food, 637\n    manner of catching, 643\n    as symbols, 646\n\n  Flea, 688\n\n  Flies, 683\n    god of, 684\n\n  Frogs, 630\n    plague of, 631\n    green, 632\n    edible, 632\n\n  Fox, 76\n    plentiful in Palestine, 77\n    feeds upon the slain, 78\n    Samson's foxes, 78-85\n\n\n  G.\n\n  Gazelle, 163\n    mode of defence, 165\n    manner of capture, 166\n    chase of, 166-170\n\n  Gecko, 605\n\n  Gier-eagle, 419\n\n  Gnats, 685\n\n  Goad, 137\n\n  Goat, 217\n    as food, 217-219\n    milking-scene, 220\n    hair for clothing, 220\n    skin bottles, 221-225\n    kneading-troughs, 225\n    scapegoat, 226\n    intractable, 227\n    separated from sheep, 227-229\n\n\n  H.\n\n  Hamster, 124\n\n  Hare, 126\n    not a ruminant, 127\n    two species in Palestine, 131\n\n  Hart, 255\n\n  Hawk, 447\n    sparrow, 448\n    harrier, 451\n    white, 453\n    dove, 453\n    blue, 453\n    ring-tailed, 453\n    night, 462\n\n  Herdsmen, 144\n    Arab, 177\n\n  Heron, 542\n    as food, 542\n    sociable, 544\n    flight, 546\n    nest, 547\n\n  Hind, 255\n\n  Hippopotamus, 374\n\n  Honey, 667\n\n  Hoopoe, 476\n    legend of, 477\n\n  Hornet, 669\n\n  Horse, 291\n    Arab, 291\n    hoofs, 295\n    sale of Arab, 296-300\n    chariots, 300\n\n  Horse-leech, 693\n\n  House-top, 480\n\n  Hyacinthine gallinule, 560\n\n  Hyaena, 85\n    as scavenger, 86-88\n    haunting graves, 88\n    odour of, 89\n    superstitions concerning, 90\n\n  Hyrax, 366\n\n\n  I.\n\n  Ibex, 233-236\n\n  Ibis, white or sacred, 562\n\n  Ichneumon, 596\n\n  Insects, 657\n\n  Ivory, 349-352\n\n\n  J.\n\n  Jackal, 76\n\n  Jerboa, 125\n\n\n  K.\n\n  Kestrel, 449\n\n  Kite, 440\n    red, 441\n    black, 442\n\n  Kneading-troughs, 225\n\n\n  L.\n\n  Laemmergeier, 411\n    food, 414\n    bone-breaker, 414\n\n  Lapwing, 476\n\n  Leviathan, 585\n\n  Lizard, 602\n\n  Locust, 657\n    swarms, 658\n    plague of, 660\n    as food, 661\n\n  Louse, 686\n\n  Lump-fish, 641\n\n\n  M.\n\n  Mole, 114\n    hard to capture, 116\n    frequents ruins, 117\n    food, 118\n\n  Molluscs, 648\n\n  Monitor, 605\n    Nilotic, 610\n    land, 610\n\n  Monkey, 387\n\n  Mosquito, 686\n\n  Mouflon, 215\n\n  Mouse, 119\n    voracity, 119\n\n  Mule, 333\n    ridden by kings, 335\n    perverse, 336\n\n  Muraena, 639\n\n  Moth, clothes, 678\n    silkworm, 680\n\n\n  N.\n\n  Night-hawk, 462\n\n  Nightjar, 462\n    cry, 464\n\n  Nile-perch, 647\n\n  Nineveh, sculptures of, 34\n\n\n  O.\n\n  Oryx, 154-156\n\n  Osprey, 436\n    fishing, 436\n    flight, 438\n\n  Ossifrage, 411\n\n  Ostrich, 523\n    neglect of young, 526-528\n    nest in sand, 526\n    chase, 529\n    scent, 530\n    speed, 531\n    as food, 532\n    eggs, 534\n    cry, 531\n\n  Ounce, 42\n\n  Owl, 454\n    use in bird-catching, 455\n    little, 455\n    barn, 455\n    screech, 456\n    great, 456\n    Egyptian eagle, 458\n    European eagle, 458\n    Virginian eared, 458\n\n  Ox, 133\n    stalled, 133\n    yoke, 136\n    plough, 136\n    goad, 137\n    threshing, 138\n    cart, 139\n    pasturage, 141\n    worshipped, 148\n\n\n  P.\n\n  Palestine, 470\n\n  Partridge, 505\n    desert, 507\n\n  Passover, 204\n    Samaritan, 205-210\n\n  Peacock, 501\n\n  Pearl, 653\n\n  Pelican, 567\n    pouch, 569\n    feeding young, 570\n    legends, 570\n    flight, 572\n    crested, 573\n\n  Pigeon, 489\n\n  Plough, 136\n\n  Porcupine, 113\n\n  Poultry, 498\n\n  Purple dye, 649\n\n  Pygarg, 171\n\n\n  Q.\n\n  Quail, 509\n    sent to Israelites, 510\n    flight, 511\n    as food, 511\n    mode of capture, 512\n\n\n  R.\n\n  Rams' horns, 201-203\n\n  Raven, 516\n    in ark, 516\n    sent to Elijah, 518\n    notices of, in Talmud, 519\n    ashy-necked, 520\n    in Jerusalem, 520\n\n\n  S.\n\n  Scheltopusic, 603\n\n  Scorpion, 690\n\n  Serpents, 613\n    motion, 614\n    poison, 615\n    sluggish, 620\n    anecdotes of, 620\n\n  Sheat-fishes, 637\n\n  Sheep, 177\n    pasturage, 177\n    watering, 180\n    names, 186\n    folds, 189-191\n    dogs, 191\n    broad-tailed, 194\n    uses of, 197\n    in sacrifice, 203\n\n  Shepherds, 185\n    sling, 185\n    care of flock, 188\n\n  Shephiphon, 624\n\n  Silkworm, 681\n\n  Skink, 603\n\n  Snail, 652\n\n  Snake, glass, 603\n    dart, 616\n    charmer, 617\n\n  Sparrow, 479\n    on house-tops, 480\n    value of, 483\n    caught with nets, 484\n    nests, 485\n    tree, 486\n\n  Spider, 692\n\n  Sponge, 694\n\n  Star-gazer, 647\n\n  Stork, 553\n    sacred, 554\n    migratory, 556\n    care of young, 557\n    black, 558\n\n  Sucking-fish, 640\n\n  Surmullet, 648\n\n  Swallow, 466\n    swift, 470, 474\n\n  Swan, 560\n\n  Swine, 337\n    prohibited to Jews, 337\n    hated, 338\n    wild, 334\n\n\n  T.\n\n  Threshing, 138\n\n  Tortoise, 577\n    as food, 577\n    slow-motioned, 579\n\n  Toxicoa, 627\n\n  Tunny, 641\n\n\n  U.\n\n  Unicorn, 158\n    a real animal, 159\n\n\n  V.\n\n  Viper, horned, 624\n    sand, 627\n\n  Vulture, Egyptian, 419\n    scavengers, 421\n    griffon, 423\n\n\n  W.\n\n  Wanderoo, 395-400\n\n  Weasel, 92\n    fond of eggs, 94\n    story of owl and weasel, 94\n\n  Wild bull, 152\n    goat, 233\n    ass, 328\n    boar, 344\n\n  Wind-hover, 449\n\n  Wolf, 69\n    only mentioned symbolically, 69\n    hunting in packs, 71\n    fierceness of, 71\n    special enemy of sheep, 72\n    tamed by a monk, 75\n\n  Wool, 199\n\n  Worm, crimson, 676\n\n\n  Y.\n\n  Yoke, 136\n\n\n\n\n  =THE\n  HOME EDITION\n  OF THE\n  Story of the Bible=\n\n  =Surpasses in Value and Completeness All Former Editions\n  of this Standard Work.=\n\n     It contains fine  Illustrations.\n\n     It contains a Map of the Bible Lands.\n\n     It contains a Steel Plate Engraving after Rembrandt (engraved\n     expressly for the Frontispiece).\n\n     It is printed on extra heavy paper, and bound in rich and\n     attractive style.\n\n=THE HOME EDITION of the Story of the Bible.=\n\nGives admirers of the book an opportunity to procure it in a\nhandsomer form, either for presentation to friends or for use at\nhome.\n\nThe COVER of this edition bears an appropriate and ornamental\ndesign in gold and color. The INSIDE is no less attractive than\nthe outside. On opening it, the ILLUMINATED PRESENTATION PAGE\nfirst meets the eye. This is followed by the beautiful STEEL PLATE\nENGRAVING OF JACOB'S DREAM, as a Frontispiece. A double page \nMAP comes next, showing countries and places mentioned in the Bible.\nSIX RICHLY  PLATES, with 300 ENGRAVINGS, illustrating the\nprincipal scenes and events narrated in the book, are distributed\nthroughout its pages, from beginning to end.\n\n  =FOR SALE=\n  =by the same Dealer from whom this book is obtained.=\n\n\n=The Story of the Gospel.=\n\n=By CHARLES FOSTER, Author of the \"Story of the Bible.\"=\n\n=360 Pages. 16mo. With 150 Illustrations, and a Frontispiece in\nColors.=\n\n     =The New Testament in simple form for Children. Written in\n     Language easy to understand. Printed in large, plain type, and\n     filled with Pictures.=\n\n=100th THOUSAND NOW SELLING.=\n\nThe Author of the \"STORY OF THE BIBLE,\" after publishing that work,\nfound that a smaller and still simpler book on the New Testament\nalone, was needed.\n\nHe therefore prepared the \"STORY OF THE GOSPEL,\" which contains the\nLife of Christ written in a style easily understood by children, and\nillustrated by a large number of excellent wood engravings.\n\n     =_From Rev. M. A. GOODELL, Northwood, Iowa._=\n\n     I am much pleased with the \"STORY OF THE GOSPEL.\" The\n     illustrations are excellent. The Story is told in beautiful\n     language, and in such a way that very difficult points are made\n     plain even to children. It is also a good commentary on the Word\n     for older persons, and should be in every family.\n\n     I lent my copy of the \"STORY OF THE GOSPEL\" to the teacher of\n     the Primary Department in our public school, who used it instead\n     of the Bible in opening school, and after a few days said she\n     could not do without it.\n\n  =FOR SALE\n  by the same Dealer from whom this book is obtained.=\n\n\n  =FIRST STEPS\n  FOR LITTLE FEET IN GOSPEL PATHS.=\n\n  =328 Pages. 16mo. With  Frontispiece and\n  140 Illustrations.=\n\n  By CHARLES FOSTER, Author of the \"Story of the Bible.\"\n\nThere still remained one class of learners whose wants were not\nsupplied by either the STORY OF THE BIBLE or the STORY OF THE\nGOSPEL. These were the little ones in the Nursery, the Infant\nSchool, and the Kinder-Garten. For their instruction the author\nhas prepared a third book, FIRST STEPS FOR LITTLE FEET IN GOSPEL\nPATHS. This book is arranged on a different plan from either of the\npreceding. Instead of being divided into Chapters, it consists of\nseparate passages or Lessons, most of them quite short, and each one\ncomplete in itself. Each Lesson is followed by Questions so simple\nthat the little hearers, if attentive when the passage is read, may\nreadily answer them.\n\n     =From Robert W. Fenwick, President of the Washington Froeebel\n     Society, Washington, D. C.=\n\n     TO THE PUBLISHER: I am the grateful recipient of a nicely-bound,\n     well-printed and illustrated work entitled \"First Steps.\" Upon\n     an examination of it, I feel that every Kinder-Garten teacher\n     should possess this gem of a book for little children. Its\n     simple presentation of great truths and facts, in words as well\n     as in pictures, should be brought home to the heart of every\n     child by the parent or teacher; and, this done, the coming\n     generation will be wiser and better than the past. I am thankful\n     (as President of the Washington Froeebel Society, having under\n     its care the Bethany Free Kinder-Garten) that this book has\n     reached me.\n\n  =FOR SALE by the same Dealer from whom this book is obtained.=\n\n\n  =NEW LIGHTS=\n  --ON--\n  OLD PATHS.\n\n  By Charles Foster, Author of the \"Story of the Bible,\" Etc.\n\n  =QUARTO, 496 PAGES. 350 ILLUSTRATIONS.=\n\nThe author of the stories contained in this beautiful book has given\nlife and power of speech to many of the inanimate objects which we\nmeet in every-day life.\n\nThe Well in the Yard, the Gate and Gate-Post, the Brook and\nWater-Wheel, with other familiar things, give their impressions, in\nthese charming and original tales, of what takes place around them,\nand speak to one another with audible voice.\n\nIf the reader will listen to what they say, he will learn some\nvaluable lessons, and perhaps receive advice that will help him in\ndays to come.\n\nMany familiar places and oft-trodden paths will be given a new\ninterest by reading some of the stories contained in this book.\n\nObjects that have been familiar for years, and which have never\ncaused a moment's reflection as they were carelessly passed by,\nwill now have a new significance, and whenever seen will connect\nthemselves with the imaginary parts they play in this volume.\n\nIn appearance the book is an unusually handsome one, being\nTASTEFULLY BOUND AND PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED. It contains =350=\nPICTURES which in artistic merit, interest, and faithful portrayal\nof the scenes described in the text, are unsurpassed by any book of\nits class.\n\n  Office of Charles Foster's Publications, 118 S. Seventh St.,\n        Philadelphia, Pa.\n\n\n[Illustration: cover New Lights on Old Paths]\n\n  NEW LIGHTS\n  --ON--\n  OLD PATHS.\n\n  By CHARLES FOSTER, Author of the \"Story of the Bible,\" Etc.\n\n  =QUARTO, 496 PAGES. 350 ILLUSTRATIONS.=\n\n  Office of Charles Foster's Publications, 118 S. Seventh St.,\n        Philadelphia, Pa.\n\n\n  =BIBLE PICTURES\n  --AND--\n  WHAT THEY TEACH US.=\n\n  Containing 312 Illustrations from the Old and New Testaments,\n  WITH BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS\n\n  By CHARLES FOSTER, Author of the \"Story of the Bible.\"\n\n  =Quarto, 232 Pages, 312 Engravings, printed on extra heavy calendered\n        paper, and bound in English cloth, black side stamp, gilt\n        title on back.=\n\nThe Collection of Bible Pictures contained in this book is probably\none of the most complete that has ever been brought together in one\nvolume.\n\nIn preparing the work, the greatest care has been observed to use\nonly such designs as will adequately illustrate the Bible scenes and\nfittingly portray the principal events in Bible history.\n\nIt has been a matter of great difficulty to obtain so large a\nnumber of pictures of the necessary merit, as illustrations of\nBible subjects present peculiar difficulties to the artist. While\npreserving the freedom of style and vigor of treatment necessary\nto give life to his designs and reality to the varied scenes of\nthe Scripture narrative, he must preserve for them a feeling of\nreverence and endow them with a dignity worthy of their sacred\ncharacter.\n\nA large number of the pictures in this book are reproduced from\ndesigns by foreign artists who have been celebrated for their skill\nin this branch of art. Others are by artists in this country. All\nthe pictures have been personally selected by, or else drawn under\nthe direction of, the author, who has spent years of labor and\nthousands of dollars in forming this collection.\n\nMany of the engravings in \"BIBLE PICTURES\" were first obtained and\nused for illustrating the \"Story of the Bible\" and the \"Story of the\nGospel,\" two former books by the same author. Other new engravings\nhave been added, and the whole set, THREE HUNDRED AND TWELVE in\nnumber, are now brought together in this one volume, in which the\nbroad pages (8 x 9-3\/4 inches), fine, heavy paper and careful\nprinting, display their artistic excellence to the best advantage.\n\nThe book forms a complete pictorial history of the main portion of\nthe Bible. Many parts are so fully illustrated that the narrative\ncan be followed and understood by merely looking at the series of\npictures which illustrate them, so that children unable to read may\nobtain a fair idea of the nature and sequence of Bible events, by\nsimply turning over the pages. The book, however, is by no means\nmerely a picture book. A lucid and brief explanation, written by the\nauthor of the \"Story of the Bible,\" accompanies each picture, on the\nsame page, or on the page immediately facing it, so that the picture\nand the explanation appear simultaneously to the eye.\n\n  =FOR SALE by the same Dealer from whom this book is obtained.=\n\n\n[Illustration: cover Bible Pictures]\n\n  =BIBLE PICTURES,=\n  AND\n  WHAT THEY TEACH US.\n\n  A Book containing 312 Illustrations from the Old and New Testaments,\n  with brief descriptions.\n\n  By CHARLES FOSTER, Author of the \"Story of the Bible,\" etc.\n\n  Quarto, 232 Pages, 312 Engravings, printed on extra heavy calendered\n        paper and bound in English cloth, ornamental side and back\n        stamp.\n\n  Charles Foster's Publications, 118 S. Seventh St., Philadelphia, Pa.\n\n\n  =--THE--\n  STORY OF THE BIBLE ANIMALS.=\n\n  =704 Pages. 300 Illustrations.=\n\nThis book contains a description of each animal mentioned in the\nBible, and tells of its appearance, its habits and the use to which\nit was put by mankind.\n\nThe importance of understanding the nature of these animals, as a\nmeans of making clear the Scriptures, will be readily seen when\nit is remembered how frequently they are mentioned in the Bible,\nand how different many of them must be from those which we are\naccustomed to see.\n\nSome passages in the Bible which have formerly possessed little\nor no meaning to the ordinary reader will have a new significance\nafter the \"=Story of the Bible Animals=\" has been read, and the\ndescriptions which it contains of the animals of the East, and the\nhabits of Eastern people, have become familiar.\n\nThe book is not only interesting and instructive from the stories\nwhich it contains on the ever-popular subject of Natural History,\nbut it also presents a vivid description of life in the Bible lands.\n\nIt describes the appearance at the present time of many of the\nplaces mentioned in the Bible, as well as the manners and customs of\nthe people who dwell there.\n\nAdventures of modern travellers in these unfamiliar and\nseldom-trodden paths form an important part of the book and are of\nabsorbing interest, presenting to the reader a graphic picture of\nlife in the Holy Land as it is to-day.\n\nIn the never-changing East this is in many respects a counterpart\nof the times in which the Bible was written. The Arab as he speeds\nacross the desert upon his swift dromedary, or sits at the door of\nhis tent watching his flocks and herds, retains many of the customs\nwhich prevailed in the time of Abraham.\n\nThe wild animals of these countries still roam through the forests\nand are hunted and slain by mankind. The crocodile and hippopotamus\nof the Nile are yet found in that mighty river, and yield their\nlives to the courage and skill of modern hunters as did those of old.\n\nThese scenes are vividly portrayed in the \"=Story of the Bible\nAnimals=\" by travellers who have taken an active part in the\nadventures which they narrate, and who are thus able to adequately\ndescribe incidents that will be new and strange to most readers.\n\nThe book is also a valuable commentary on many portions of the\nBible, for without some knowledge of the matters upon which it\ntreats, the point of many passages of Scripture must either be\nentirely missed or else wrongly interpreted.\n\n  =Office of Charles Foster's Publications, 118 S. Seventh St.,\n        Philadelphia, Pa.=\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nTranscriber's note:\n\nMinor typographical errors have been corrected without note.\nIrregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as\nprinted.\n\nThe illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up\nparagraphs, thus the page number of the illustration might not match\nthe page number in the List of Illustrations.\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of Project Gutenberg's Story of the Bible Animals, by J. G. Wood\n\n*** ","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n# ALSO BY MCKAY JENKINS\n\nContamiNation\n\nPoison Spring (with E. G. Vallianatos)\n\nBloody Falls of the Coppermine\n\nThe Last Ridge\n\nThe White Death\n\nThe Peter Matthiessen Reader (editor)\n\nThe South in Black and White\n\nAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLC\n\n375 Hudson Street\n\nNew York, New York 10014\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2017 by McKay Jenkins\n\nPenguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.\n\nMost Avery books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write SpecialMarkets@penguinrandomhouse.com.\n\nEbook ISBN 9780698409835\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nNames: Jenkins, McKay, 1963\u2014 author.\n\nTitle: Food fight : GMOs and the future of the American diet \/ McKay Jenkins.\n\nDescription: New York : Avery, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references\n\nand index.\n\nIdentifiers: LCCN 2016054194 (print) | LCCN 2016056950 (ebook) | ISBN\n\n9781594634604 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780698409835 (epub)\n\nSubjects: LCSH: Transgenic plants. | Crops\u2014Genetic engineering.\n\nClassification: LCC SB123.57 .J46 2017 (print) | LCC SB123.57 (ebook) | DDC\n\n631.5\/233\u2014dc23\n\nLC record available at https:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/2016054194\n\nWhile the author has made every effort to provide accurate Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.\n\nVersion_2\nFor my teachers, my students, and my family\n\n# CONTENTS\n\nALSO BY MCKAY JENKINS\n\nTITLE PAGE\n\nCOPYRIGHT\n\nDEDICATION\n\nPROLOGUE: Square Tomatoes\n\nPart One\n\nROOTS\n\n1. Are GMOs Safe? Is That the Right Question?\n\n 2. The Long, Paved Road to Industrial Food, and the Disappearance of the American Farmer\n\n 3. Mapping and Engineering and Playing Prometheus\n\nPart Two\n\nSEEDS\n\n 4. The Fruit That Saved an Island\n\n 5. Trouble in Paradise\n\n 6. Fighting for That Which Feeds Us\n\nPart Three\n\nFRUIT\n\n 7. Feeding the World\n\n 8. The Plant That Started Civilization, and the Plant That Could Save It\n\n 9. Can GMOs Be Sustainable?\n\n 10. The Farm Next Door\n\nEPILOGUE: Getting Our Hands Dirty\n\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nNOTES\n\nINDEX\n\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\n# PROLOGUE\n\nSquare Tomatoes\n\nBack in 1994, when I was pulling down four bucks an hour grading papers and teaching college students how to write, a friend told me about a can't-lose investment scheme that was sure to lift me from my economic doldrums.\n\nForget about investing in Amazon.com, he said. Here's what you need to get into: Square tomatoes.\n\nThey're going to be great, he said breathlessly. They've had their genes altered by scientists! They stay ripe longer, and soften more slowly, and because they're square, they can be stacked for shipping, which will bring transportation costs way down. It's like the laboratory has taken nature and made it better!\n\nThe company that makes them will make a fortune, my friend said. And so will we!\n\nThere was much truth to what my friend told me, and a good bit of misinformation as well. The product in question turned out to be the Flavr Savr tomato, a newfangled plant designed by a biotech company called Calgene. The Flavr Savr had indeed been designed not for exquisite taste, or enhanced nutrition, but to plug into an industrial food system already rapidly replacing traditional farming practices. Forget small farmers selling their fruit to their neighbors; this was big business. That year, 4 billion dollars' worth of industrial tomatoes were being picked (and shipped) while still hard and green, then reddened with ethylene gas before hitting the supermarket shelves like crates of billiard balls. The genetically altered Flavr Savr, by contrast, was designed to ripen on the vine, but was still tough enough to resist rotting. This meant it could survive both mechanical harvesting and the thousand-mile truck to market.\n\nIn 1994, after three years of negotiations with government regulators, the Flavr Savr became the first genetically modified food approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be sold in the American supermarkets. Rather than being declared formally \"safe,\" the Flavr Savr was considered the \"substantial equivalent\" of a normal tomato. At the time, few people complained, and suspicious critics of genetic engineering were largely drowned out by cheerleaders in industry and the press. Connie Chung, Jane Pauley, and Katie Couric all reported on the Flavr Savr on national television; on _NBC Nightly News_ , Tom Brokaw said the tomato \"stays riper, longer than the nonengineered variety, and they say it's tastier.\"\n\nTo be honest, as a budding English professor, I could never muster much enthusiasm for a product spelled Flavr Savr. The phonetically engineered name offended my ear even before I considered the tomato's provenance or taste, or the many ethical questions surrounding its creation. I decided to save my money, and keep grading papers.\n\nBut the Flavr Savr, it turned out, was just the beginning of what would become a food revolution. Soon I started hearing stories about another tomato, this one created by a company called DNA Plant Technology, which was being outfitted with genes from an Arctic flounder. These \"fish tomatoes,\" the company hoped, would make plants resistant to frost and cold storage, making them easier to grow in northern climates.\n\nIn 2001, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Toronto unveiled a third tomato, this one capable of growing in salty soils\u2014a good thing, since modern irrigation practices were damaging soil so much that the world was losing 25 million acres of cropland a year.\n\nThe fish tomatoes never made it to market. So far, neither have the salt-tolerant tomatoes. The Flavr Savr tomatoes made it to market briefly, but they were a commercial flop; the agrochemical giant Monsanto bought the company in 1996, and dropped the product. The ingenuity of a human-engineered tomato never quite overcame the consensus that the Flavr Savrs tasted terrible. As for the Flavr Savr being square? Well, that turned out to be untrue. Blocky tomatoes had in fact been cultivated by California plant breeders in the 1950s, to make mechanical harvesting easier and to prevent them from rolling off conveyor belts, but squareness was never part of the Flavr Savr profile. This myth was just the first of what would become a long series of myths that continue to tangle themselves around engineered food like aggressive vines.\n\nNow, more than twenty years later, these moribund tomato experiments seem almost quaint. Today, nearly all of our calories\u2014that is to say, nearly all of our food\u2014are grown from genetically modified plants. Chances are that three-quarters of everything you've put in your mouth today\u2014the eggs, the yogurt, and the cereal; the chicken sandwich, the tortilla chips, the mayonnaise, and the salad dressing; the cheeseburger, the french fries, the soda, the cookies, and the ice cream\u2014were processed (or fed) from plants grown from seeds engineered in a laboratory. Same for the food you feed your baby and the food you feed your dog.\n\nThe reason for this is simple: The American diet is composed almost entirely of processed foods that are made from two plants\u2014corn and soybeans (and canola, if you want your food fried). Their seeds, full of dense calories, can be broken down and reconstituted into an infinite variety of prepackaged foods. The vast majority of the 40,000 food products Americans choose from every day are built from ingredients made from engineered plants. This includes almost anything made with high-fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil, or sugar\u2014which is to say, almost all processed food. They can also be ground up and fed to the animals who provide our boundless appetite for meat and dairy products. Fully 85 percent of the feed given to cattle, hogs, and chickens is grown from genetically modified crops. There's more: About half of the sugar we consume is grown from engineered sugar beets. Genetically modified wheat has not yet hit the commercial market, but some of the biggest seed and chemical companies in the world have been working on it for years and have it ready to go.\n\nStrangely\u2014and despite the fact that we're talking about plants\u2014the one place you mostly _won't_ find engineered food is in the produce aisle. Your carrots, your peaches, your lettuce\u2014they are all grown the old-fashioned way. (This, by the way, is true whether or not the produce is labeled \"organic.\") But travel to the middle of your supermarket\u2014or into most fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, or gas stations\u2014and you will discover GM foods at every turn.\n\nDepending on whom you ask, \"genetically modified organisms,\" or more simply \"GMOs,\" represent either a great stride forward in the history of food production or are part of a destructive and dangerous system that allows global food companies to radically damage our land and water, control the way we eat, and flood our bodies with unhealthy food.\n\nAt the most basic level, genetic engineering is a crop-improvement technique, one of many used by plant growers, to alter the quantity, quality, and usefulness of the plants used to make food. A GMO is a plant grown from a seed genetically engineered to express a specific set of traits. These traits can range from an increased tolerance to floods or drought (a critical need given rising global temperatures) to beneficial nutrients (like rice that produces its own beta-carotene) to an improved resistance to certain viruses or insects. Such experiments\u2014often designed by scientists at universities or nonprofit research centers\u2014hold tremendous potential for improving the lives of people around the world. Childhood blindness in Asia, insect infestations in Africa, famines caused by typhoons in the Indian subcontinent: all are problems being addressed by GMO researchers around the world.\n\nBut it is also true that the giant agrochemical companies that produce the vast majority of the world's GMOs do very little of this work\u2014despite their frequent claims that GMO technology can feed the world. These companies, like their cousins in the pharmaceutical industry, are far more interested in creating billion-dollar products for the American consumer market than they are in developing products\u2014cassava, rice, sorghum\u2014that people in the developing world actually eat. In fact, just one-half of 1 percent of American food exports actually goes to developing countries with dire food needs, a recent study by the Environmental Working Group shows. Fully 86 percent goes to wealthy, highly developed countries in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. Indeed, far from solving problems, GMO-based industrial farming actually _contributes_ both to a wide variety of health problems, like obesity, diabetes, nutritional deficiency, and exposure to pesticides, and ecological problems, like water pollution, soil depletion, and a profound drop in the biodiversity of plants, animals, and insects. There's a reason the monarch butterfly has become a symbol for anti-GMO activists: Monarch food supplies have been erased by chemical sprays applied to hundreds of millions of acres of monoculture GM crops. Nationwide, monarch populations are down by 96 percent. So when companies say GMOs are necessary to \"feed a starving world,\" the slogan can sound empty, cynical, a bait and switch.\n\nIn the United States, and increasingly in the developing world, GMOs are planted not to improve global nutrition but to maximize corporate profits through the production of corn and soybeans, which are then funneled into a global system of processed food and industrial meat. In order to support production, they are engineered to tolerate vast quantities of chemical sprays, which are often made by the same companies that make the seeds themselves. These sprays significantly damage both human health and environmental integrity. And because only large companies can fund most GMO research and development, they patent any seeds they create, which means they can control how and by whom they are used. Since time immemorial, farmers developed, saved, and traded seeds from one year to the next, bartering their way to better, more fruitful crops. No more. Now, GM seed companies force farmers to sign agreements that they will not save or share seeds, and hire investigators to badger (or sue) them when they do. As a result, our food supply is essentially controlled by a very small number of enormous biotech companies, most of which got their start making explosives, plastics, and pesticides.\n\nThis trend has given rise to a symbiotic but imbalanced relationship between these companies and our government. Because of their size and power, companies hold tremendous sway over federal food policy, from the way food and chemicals are (or are not) regulated to what kinds of farms (and food companies) receive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to how much information companies need to disclose about their processes and products. The companies that design and sell GM seeds are some of the biggest in the world, and yet they are oddly invisible. You may have heard the names Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow, but these company names do not appear anywhere on your cereal box. In 2009, the top six agrochemical companies (Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow, plus Syngenta, Bayer, and BASF) earned a combined $27.4 billion in seed sales and $44.4 billion in chemical sales. Collectively, they control two-thirds of the world's agrochemical market. By 2019, the global agrochemical industry is expected to reach a value of $261 billion. And since several of the biggest companies are in the process of merging, their influence will soon be consolidated further.\n\nThe closer you look at the GMO debate, the more you are confronted with questions and paradoxes and passionate believers on all sides. Take, for example, the seemingly innocuous question \"Are GMOs safe?\" A great many scientists say altering a plant's genes in a laboratory is merely one incremental improvement in a long history of plant breeding, that GMOs are among the most studied\u2014and thus the safest\u2014foods ever produced, and that there is absolutely nothing to worry about. A library of scientific reports, and reputable organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, support this claim.\n\nBut such pronouncements are less than entirely satisfying, given that many GM crops are grown (indeed, are designed) to be sprayed with hundreds of millions of pounds of petrochemical insecticides (to kill bugs) and herbicides (to kill weeds). Whether or not genetically altered seeds themselves are benign, the chemicals that accompany them are not. The World Health Organization recently declared glyphosate, an herbicide sprayed on Monsanto's Roundup Ready food crops around the world and long considered a relatively tame herbicide, to be a \"probable human carcinogen.\"\n\nThe agrochemical companies\u2014and the giant food-processing companies they supply with grains\u2014have argued vigorously that GMOs are entirely safe. Yet when market demands change\u2014when consumers express fears about GMOs\u2014some of these same companies boast long and loud when they remove them from their products. In a nod to anxious mothers, the Hershey Company says it will stop using GM sugar beets to make its milk chocolate and Hershey's Kisses. General Mills will stop using GM ingredients in Cheerios and recently announced it will label any of its products that contain GMOs. Del Monte, one of the country's biggest producers of canned fruits and vegetables, says it will cease using GM ingredients in most of its products.\n\nMcDonald's refuses to sell GM potatoes grown by J. R. Simplot, one of its biggest french fry suppliers. Do these moves constitute a stance on GMOs, or only a desire to satisfy a nervous market? Hard to say. The meat McDonald's sells is still raised on GM corn, and the soda it sells is still sweetened with GM corn syrup. Cheerios are made mostly of oats, which are never grown with GMOs, so the only change General Mills really has to make is to replace sweeteners made from GM sugar beets and cornstarch made from GM corn. And the company has made it plain that it will continue using GMOs in its other cereals.\n\nA lot of consumers who pay close attention to the GMO debate are convinced that GMOs are in fact unsafe, and a great many of them shop in stores that take advantage of this anxiety. Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Chipotle\u2014these national chains have all made a fuss about going \"GMO free\" to one degree or another. Are these claims trustworthy, or are they merely marketing schemes?\n\nIn Europe, centuries of intertwined, small, local farms have made GMOs a thing of almost continental contempt. As hard as they have tried, giant food conglomerates have had a tough time persuading the French, and the Italians, and the Spanish, to give over their land\u2014and their diets\u2014to industrial corn and soybeans. Globally, there are currently twenty-six countries with total or partial bans on GMOs, including Australia, China, India, Mexico, and Russia. In early 2015, thousands of Polish farmers drove their tractors into the streets in Warsaw to push for a ban on GMOs and to fight a perceived land grab by big ag-biotech companies like Monsanto. \"The health and welfare of the nation depends on consumers and farmers having access to traditional seeds and good-quality food,\" one farmer said. \"The Polish government does not accept this and is destroying the roots of Polish agriculture by listening to corporations rather than the Polish people.\"\n\nFor a variety of reasons, such heat has not been present in the United States. Drive across the country, as my family and I did last summer, and you will find yourself crossing a continent almost entirely given over to corn and soybeans. Granted, there are boundless waves of wheat growing across the northern Midwest, but the route we took\u2014from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to the Colorado Rockies, then up to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state\u2014was astonishingly dichromatic. For close to 4,500 miles, my wife and I would switch off driving and snoozing, our kids in the backseat listening to audio books. This was hardly scientific, but our experience was absolutely clear: you can fall asleep passing fields of corn in Ohio and wake up passing fields of soy in Indiana, or vice versa, but that's about it. Only once during the whole cross-country trip did we find ourselves surprised by what we saw: a large farm in Virginia that was actually growing potatoes.\n\nDespite all the romantic rhetoric thrown around about farming in America, it's hard to feel sentimental when all the land you see, for thousands and thousands of miles, is being used to grow corn and soy for cheap chicken and cattle feed, or frying oil, or salty snacks, or ethanol for gasoline. These crops\u2014hundreds of millions of acres of them, and virtually all GMO\u2014are grown far from population centers and out of sight of anyone who is not directly involved in growing them. It's almost like we've decided that the best farm is the farm we can't see.\n\n\u2014\n\nI'VE BEEN INTERESTED IN questions about food and health for many years. My last book, _ContamiNation_ , examined similar questions about the toxic chemicals found in everyday consumer products. Big-box stores are full of things\u2014mattresses, air fresheners, paints, cosmetics\u2014made from some 80,000 different petrochemicals, and of these, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a full set of toxicity information for just 7 percent. Despite frightening spikes in everything from cancer rates to autism, endocrine problems and neurological disorders, 99 percent of these chemicals have never been tested for their effects on human health. In researching that book, I was shocked at the misinformation\u2014if not the total lack of information\u2014about the products we use in our everyday lives.\n\nLikewise, given the amount of confusion surrounding our food system, I set out in search of facts. GMOs, and the chemicals used to grow them, have become so ubiquitous, so stitched into the fabric of our daily lives, that they are essentially invisible. To me, this invisibility is itself a problem: How can something as intimate as the food we eat be so utterly misunderstood?\n\nMy journey to find out took me from farms in New York and Maryland and Pennsylvania to plant laboratories in Delaware and Missouri and Kansas to the \"ground zero\" of the global GMO debate on three islands in Hawaii. During the course of my research, I interviewed some of the world's great agricultural visionaries, some of whom take radically different approaches to the question of GMOs. One scientist, whose engineered papaya plants saved an entire industry from collapse, considers GMOs to be above reproach. Another, who is trying to invent a plant that would replace\u2014 _replace!_ \u2014millions of acres of industrial crops across the farm belt considers GMOs to be a tool the food industry has used to push the American landscape to the brink of ruin.\n\nI spoke with brilliant farmers who think GMOs will help move the world closer to sustainability, and others who think GMOs will accelerate our ecological demise. I spoke with geneticists who are developing plants that could save millions of people from starvation, or from going blind, and others who think such plants represent a Trojan horse that will do more to spread the influence of American companies than actually help the poor.\n\nIt can be hard to hold these competing stories in your mind at the same time. Clearly, genetic engineering has the potential to help solve some of the world's pressing food and nutrition problems. The problem is that this technology is mostly being used not to help small farmers or improve nutrition in the developing world but to create profits for companies selling poor-quality food in the United States. It's not _GMOs_ that are a problem, in other words; it's the industrial _food system_ that is the problem. That system is designed by and for the agrochemical industry to sell two enormously profitable products: chemicals, and the seeds that can withstand those chemicals. This system has been built so thoroughly around us that we don't even see it.\n\nThis book offers a look at something that is both very complex and very fundamental. Understanding what we eat, and how we have come to eat this way, requires thinking not just about food but also about history, and science, and politics, and ethics. Beneath these issues are fundamental questions of culture. How do we want to eat? How do we view the land we live on, and the plants and animals with whom we share that land? Do we trust the industries that are feeding us, or the government that is supposed to be protecting us? Do we trust that science can remain independent of corporate money and corporate power, and provide clear, independent answers to questions that directly affect our lives?\n\nTo help answer these questions, I have organized this book into three parts. Part One examines the central questions most people want to know about GMOs. Are they safe? How are they made? Are they well tested, and are the tests trustworthy? How much control does the food industry exert over government regulators? How much control does this industry have over what we are allowed to know about what we eat? More broadly, how do GMOs fit into the evolution of American culture itself, from the very small (like the birth and growth of advanced genetic science) to the very large (like the postwar development of our highways and suburbs)?\n\nPart Two takes us to the front lines of the GMO debate to see how this system plays out\u2014for better and worse\u2014in real communities. On three islands in Hawaii, the battle over GMOs has been exceptionally heated, and for very different reasons. On the Big Island, a world-renowned professor created\u2014without any help from industry\u2014a GMO fruit that helped save the economy of his beloved homeland. On Kauai, the story is utterly different: there, a group of activists, worried about vast and secret chemical spraying used on experimental GMO farms, are fighting tooth and nail against some of the largest chemical companies in the world. And on Maui, a tiny island that nonetheless serves as the very birthplace for much of the world's GM corn, indigenous Hawaiians and local organic farmers are trying to kick the GMO industry off their island completely. For them, GMOs are not just about food, they are about the misuse of sacred land and the oppression of local people.\n\nPart Three offers a look at alternatives to an industrial farming system that has been so destructive\u2014and that has tarnished the reputation of GMO technology itself. I visit scientists developing GM crops they hope will prevent mass starvation in the developing world, especially as climate change threatens to undermine traditional farming practices in Africa and Asia. I spend time with farmers who use GMOs as part of a larger effort to make American agriculture more sustainable. I interview researchers who say nibbling around the edges of industrial farming isn't enough\u2014they want to develop crops that will overthrow the entire system itself. And I speak to organic farmers\u2014in the country, in the suburbs, and in the city\u2014who say that no technology, no matter how exquisitely designed, will ever take the place of local people growing food for their own neighbors. Their model, they say, is the way farming was done for 10,000 years, and that GMOs, while perhaps helpful, will be useful only if they augment traditional farming practices that take seriously the health of people as well as the health of our planet.\n\nThroughout the process of writing this book, I also tried an experiment of my own. I required my college students to wrestle with the GMO debate, and\u2014at the same time\u2014to work on a very small organic farm. Every week, my students explored the complexities of the American food system, and they tossed hay, fed sheep, and harvested tomatoes. They argued about the best way to feed the world, and the best way to feed themselves. Some left the conversation convinced that GMOs should have a firm place in the future of food. Scientists who can figure out a way to make drought-resistant crops that will support billions of people in a warming world deserve nothing less than a Nobel Prize.\n\nOthers were more cynical. Companies touting the benefits of GMOs are engaged in a global sleight of hand: they claim they want to feed the world, then turn around and sell us all chicken nuggets, cheeseburgers, and sixty-four-ounce sodas.\n\nOther students were more philosophical. They left convinced that the primary problem in the American diet is not nutrition or any particular technology, but ignorance. If one way to improve the way we eat is through fancy new technology, maybe another way is to get more people\u2014including English majors\u2014to spend time working on local, small-scale, organic farms. Getting \"more eyes on the acre,\" they said, may be the only way to close the enormous gap that has opened up between most American people and the food they consume every day.\n\nTo my mind, they were all right. I hope the following chapters will explain why.\n\n# Part One\n\n## **1.**\n\n## Are GMOs Safe? Is That the Right Question?\n\n The first thing, and sometimes the only thing, that people want to know about GMOs is simple: Are they safe to eat? It's an obvious question, since we're all consuming them at almost every meal, and a legitimate one, since it's not always clear what GMOs are, how they are made, or where they appear in our diet. In the decades since the creation of the Flavr Savr tomato, we are all eating genetically modified food, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not.\n\nAdd to this the fact that basic information\u2014even in the form of simple labels on food\u2014is very hard to come by. Although you most likely eat GMOs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there is simply no way to know it.\n\nMost people, sitting down for a meal, would rather not wrestle with the way small RNAs affect the chromosomes of the corn that went into the cow that went into the burger they are eating. They would certainly rather not contemplate whether that same corn had something to do with climate change, or the obesity epidemic, or the decline of bee populations, or whether they contribute to water pollution, the pesticide contamination of our bodies, or the destruction of small-town America.\n\nIn a way, asking whether GMOs are \"safe\" is like asking whether Froot Loops are safe, or cheeseburgers, or nail polish: if you narrow the question down enough, the answer is almost certainly, sure, GMOs are \"safe,\" but \"safe\" may not be the same thing as \"good for you.\" Not many people get sick from eating a single bowl of Froot Loops, and not many people get sick from painting their nails once or twice. But how many bowls, or manicures, would it take to make a product \"unsafe\"? A great many molecular biologists argue that altering a plant's genetic structure simply mimics natural evolutionary processes and that GM foods are more fully studied\u2014and at least as safe to eat\u2014as anything has ever been. Many hundreds of studies have supported this: food made from plants that have been genetically engineered do not appear to be any more harmful than food grown traditionally.\n\nThose who create, control, and profit from GMOs\u2014the scientists who develop and use the technology, along with the biotech and food companies that make up our industrial food system\u2014consider the debate over genetic engineering to be fully settled. So do highly reputable scientific organizations. The science of GMOs is clear, they say: the technology has been around for decades and has developed into a highly precise method of producing enough food to feed the earth's 7 billion people.\n\nGenetic engineering is simply an incremental step\u2014a new tool, geneticists and molecular biologists say\u2014in the long progression of agricultural science. Since the dawn of the agricultural era 10,000 years ago, farmers have selected seeds from the season's most successful crops and discarded the seeds from the least. This \"human selection\" is merely a manipulated version of the \"natural selection\" that forms the bedrock of evolution. Tinkering with a plant's genome is no different from evolutionary processes that have gone on since time began. Faster, perhaps, but no different.\n\nThese techniques are no more risky than induced mutation, or \"mutagenesis,\" the long-standing practice of exposing seeds to chemicals or radiation to induce random mutations. Mutations happen all the time in nature, and some produce plants with favorable traits like drought tolerance, or higher yields, or better taste. In the last century, more than 3,200 mutagenic plants\u2014from pears to peanuts, from barley to grapefruit\u2014have been released on the market. These crops are not GMOs, and they are considered so benign they are even allowed on organic farms.\n\nBut the minute you open the aperture a bit, the question of \"safety\" becomes considerably more complicated. While the _process_ of engineering plants may be considered \"safe,\" the _consequences_ that ripple out from it are considerably more troubling. The molecular structure of a single GM plant may not be a cause for alarm, but what if almost all GM crops are grown to produce things like cheeseburgers and salty snacks and soft drinks, which have ramped up the country's obesity epidemic? Is that a GMO problem, or not?\n\nWhat about the chemical pesticides and herbicides\u2014many of them known to cause both health and environmental problems\u2014that are sprayed on hundreds of millions of acres of GM crops? These chemicals existed long before GMOs, of course; indeed, they were developed decades ago by the same companies (Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta) that are now the world's leading sellers of GM seeds. Critics often say that GMOs are less necessary for making food than they are a powerful vehicle for selling pesticides; once a company has sold farmers on the idea of GM seeds, they are far more likely to buy chemical sprays that go along with them. If they were using the company's chemicals already, why not also buy seeds that are resistant?\n\nSo are pesticides a \"GMO problem,\" or are GMOs just exacerbating the problem of industrial farming itself?\n\nMore broadly, what happens when entire global industries\u2014and entire swaths of North America\u2014are constructed to keep cheeseburgers and snacks and soft drinks (and thus the GMOs that make them) flowing into our bellies? What if these industries become so enormously profitable, heavily marketed, and politically powerful that the foods they produce began to seem \"conventional\" (or stranger still, \"traditional\")? If problems\u2014even deep problems\u2014began to crop up, would we even be able to see them?\n\nIn other words, most people involved in the GMO debate\u2014no matter what side they are on or how passionately they argue their position\u2014consider the narrow question of safety to be the wrong question.\n\n\"I've been a lawyer for over thirty years, and this is by far the most polarized issue I've ever dealt with,\" Paul Achitoff told me. Achitoff is an environmental attorney for EarthJustice, which is handling a series of major GMO lawsuits in Hawaii. Achitoff has been in the GMO trenches since the beginning.\n\n\"Inevitably, no matter what the subject matter\u2014pesticides, labeling\u2014people always spend their time talking about how dangerous GMOs are to eat. All people want to know is, 'Is it healthy, is there proof?' People in favor of GMOs say they are safe as mother's milk. Others say they are dangerous. I don't even bring that subject up in court. To me, it's not even relevant. It's not even reasonably disputed that there are environmental and socioeconomic consequences here.\"\n\nIndeed, a great many organic farmers, a wide swath of health, consumer, and environmental organizations, and First Amendment \"right to know\" advocates say the GMO debate is about a lot more than molecular science. GMOs, in this view, are the very symbol of all that is wrong with the American food system. Whether or not the technology involved in genetic engineering is \"safe\" (and not all opponents are willing to concede this point), the crops\u2014along with the pesticides and herbicides used to grow them\u2014represent a profound insult to public health and ecological balance.\n\n\"Nature's been around a long time, so to think we can dance in there and take a gene off the shelf and get a product that your body will accept is really arrogant,\" Gerry Herbert, an organic farmer and anti-GMO activist in Hawaii told me. \"It's like throwing a wrench in a moving engine. You're going to have a problem. We don't even know what's in the soil, and yet we're killing it because we can get a quick profit from it. Do we want corporations to control our food? Their whole mandate is to maximize profit. That's why they're there. Are they worried about your nutrition? Not a bit. They will do everything necessary to rearrange genes to maximize their profits.\"\n\nRegardless of its effect on a plant's molecular structure (or that plant's impact on our bodies, or the ecosystem of which the plant is a part), GMO technology is mostly used to turbocharge the engines of an unsustainable farming system that is dousing our land and water with chemicals, wearing out our soil, making us fat, and lining the pockets of companies that already hold far too much economic and political power.\n\nThere is truth on both sides of this debate. There are also half-truths and naked cynicism. There are scientific studies that say GM foods are entirely safe to eat, and others that say they aren't. Earth Open Source, an organization run by the molecular biologist John Fagan, recently published a book called _GMO Myths and Truth_ s with more than 300 pages of studies arguing that GMOs are unhealthy for our bodies, our environment, and our political and economic systems. \"GMO Answers,\" a website overseen by the biotech industry, is larded with studies heralding the benefits (and safety) of GMOs, as well as essays designed to make you feel better about your own doubts (\"Skeptical About GMOs? We Understand.\").\n\nWhich side are we to believe? Consumers can be forgiven for feeling that questions about safety ought to be simple: Is GM food safe to eat, or not? The trouble is, there are complexities at both the micro and macro levels that make such questions of \"safety\" a lot more complicated than they might first appear. The few journalists who have tried to navigate this jungle have found themselves with few reliable guideposts.\n\n\"The quest for greater certainty on genetic engineering leaves you chasing shadows,\" noted Nathanael Johnson in the magazine _Grist_. \"When you're dealing with gaps in knowledge, rather than hard data, it's hard to tell what's an outlandish hypothetical and what's the legitimate danger. Anything, of course, is possible, but we shouldn't be paralyzed by unknown risks, or we'll end up huddled in our basements wearing tinfoil hats.\"\n\nSo let's take a closer look at this.\n\n\u2014\n\nFARMERS HAVE SPENT countless generations crossbreeding, or hybridizing, closely related plants to create desirable traits in their offspring, like bigger fruit, higher yields, and better taste. Do this over and over for many generations and you end up with the apples and lettuces and carrots we recognize today.\n\nGenetic engineering, in this line of thinking, is nothing more than human selection, sped up. GM plants are of two varieties. They are either \"cisgenic,\" which means they are created by taking a gene from a wild apple tree, for example, and stitching it into the genome of a domesticated apple, to prevent the fruit from scabbing. Or they are \"transgenic,\" meaning they are created by taking a gene from one kind of organism (a bacterium, for example) and inserting it into the genome of another kind of organism (a corn plant, say) to help make the corn resistant to plant-eating insects.\n\nThere are only four kinds of genetically engineered plants currently approved for agricultural use: those (like Roundup Ready soybeans) that tolerate the herbicides farmers use to kill weeds; those (like Bt corn) that are engineered to produce their own insecticide; those (like Plenish soybeans) made with altered nutritional components, like healthier fatty acids; and those (like most papaya grown in Hawaii) that have built-in virus resistance. Many other potential applications are in various stages of development.\n\nWhile nothing is absolutely certain when it comes to the interplay between food and health, it seems fair to say that one claim made by industry and its scientific allies is correct: Every day, hundreds of millions of people, in twenty-eight countries, eat food made from (or eat animals fed from) GM plants. Many scientists are willing to leave it at that. After billions of meals served with GM ingredients, \"no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population,\" the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine say. The American Academy for the Advancement of Science agrees: \"Contrary to popular misconceptions, GM crops are the most extensively tested crops ever added to our food supply.\" The World Health Organization considers GMOs to \"have passed risk assessments in several countries and are not likely, nor have been shown, to present risks for human health.\" The scientific adviser to the European Commission has said, \"There is no more risk in eating GMO food than eating conventionally farmed food.\"\n\nMost GMO studies have been done on animals, which makes sense, since food-producing animals consume as much as 90 percent of the GM crops grown worldwide. In the United States, 95 percent of the 9 billion cows, hogs, chickens, and turkeys raised for food eat GM grains. A recent meta-analysis of studies looking at some 100 billion livestock animals raised between 1983 (before the introduction of GMOs) and 2011 (long afterwards) found no \"unfavorable or perturbed trends\" in animal health or productivity. \"No study has revealed any differences in the nutritional profile of animal products derived from [GMO]-fed animals,\" reported researchers at UC-Davis.\n\nAccording to Blake Meyers, a plant geneticist at the University of Delaware, genetically altered plants have been so thoroughly studied that the question of whether or not they are safe to eat is no longer even an interesting scientific question. \"We can say that these products and genes are as safe as we can know, and thus far, the track record of GM products has shown that they are safe,\" Meyers said. \"The study of GM food products already approved for commercial use isn't a topic of interest to most plant biologists\/scientists because the interesting work on them was done years ago, and they are so exhaustively studied that you'd have to work really hard to find something new.\"\n\nSure, there remain gaps in our knowledge about genetic engineering, Meyers says; the field is still only a couple of decades old, and new discoveries about how plants function are happening all the time. But in terms of safety, genetically modified products \"are very well characterized, so I would say that by the time they're taken to market, they're extraordinarily well tested, and they're both predictable and reliable. GM products are also exhaustively analyzed, much more so than nontransgenic food products, so the possibility of an important gap in our knowledge about the introduced genes is typically extremely small.\"\n\nAnxiety over GMO technology has more to do with the human fear of the unknown than it does with actual risk, said Jim Carrington, a plant pathologist. Carrington's credentials are impressive: he's a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, one of the leading nonprofit plant research centers in the world. \"Do we really have so much knowledge about small RNAs or the impact of adding a single gene or two through a GMO approach\u2014do we know so much that we can eliminate any risk? The answer is clearly no,\" Carrington told me. \"But no approach is risk free. We do not have the ability to be confident that we have eliminated all risks. That is the basic fact of risk assessments: you can do your best to assess impacts based on data, and you can know with a high degree of confidence that risks are relatively low and worth taking in view of the benefits.\n\n\"But anyone who says the aim should be to wait until all the data are in, that's foolish. All the data will never be in.\"\n\nThe question about GMOs, Carrington said, should not be \"Are there risks?\" but \"What does science tell us about what is the reasonable likelihood of a problem coming to bear?\" In the case of GMOs, \"the science has been pretty clear. There are over a thousand journal articles that collectively say that the risks are exceedingly low from the standpoint of comparisons to all alternatives\u2014conventional or organic agriculture. The risk is simply very, very low.\"\n\nBut as confident as Meyers and Carrington are\u2014and they represent the majority of scientists working with GMOs\u2014their opinions are not universal. The trouble with such proclamations, critics say, is that genes don't function as neatly (or as predictably) in the world as they do in the laboratory. Instead, they function in the enormously subtle context of other genes (within the organism itself), other organisms (in the soil and in the creatures that eat them), and other ecosystems (in the world at large). There is a randomness in genetics, an unpredictability that lies at the heart of reproduction, and it is this imprecise nature of genetics that scientific critics of GMOs frequently invoke as reason for caution.\n\nA genome itself is a kind of microscopic ecosystem, and \"we all know what can happen when you, for example, try and introduce a single species into an ecosystem,\" John Vandermeer, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, has written. \"What usually happens is nothing, which of course can lead to complacency. But occasionally the introduction is catastrophic.\"\n\nCane toads in Australia, Nile perch in Africa, kudzu in the American South\u2014there are countless examples of ecological disasters caused by introduced species, Vandermeer writes. \"If genomes are like ecosystems, there is nothing at all that suggests equivalent disruptions could not occur, and the few scientists who remain unaware of this complication need to refresh their graduate education with a course in complex systems.\"\n\nAnd inside our bodies? One of the most frequently raised concerns about GM foods has to do with toxins and allergies. GMOs can introduce proteins into our diet that the human body has never encountered before, and food allergies seem to be rising everywhere. While evidence of a direct link is scarce, the long-term effects of eating clinically undetectable traces of new proteins remain a concern.\n\nAlfredo Huerta, a plant biologist at Miami University in Ohio, pointed me to a short-term (thirty-one-day) study that showed that eating GM corn causes abnormalities in the digestive systems of pigs. A two-year study of pigs fed a mixture of GM corn found they developed severe stomach inflammation (and 25 percent heavier uteruses) than pigs fed non-GM corn. The findings were troubling for a couple of reasons. First, pigs have digestion systems similar to those in humans. Second, the pigs were sickened not by a single GM grain, but by a mixture of different GM grains. Mixed grains, the authors noted, are not tested for toxicity by regulators \"anywhere in the world.\"\n\nAs for humans? In his biology classes, Huerta tells his students that he will give an A to anyone who can show him a long-term clinical trial in humans showing that GMOs are safe.\n\nNo one has ever found one.\n\nWhen industries say that GMOs are safe because billions of people have eaten them and no one has dropped dead, they're being anecdotal, not scientific, Huerta told me. How would we even know if large-scale physical symptoms are caused by GMOs if we don't even know we're eating GMOs? Even leaving aside major issues like cancer or endocrine problems, how many other symptoms\u2014headaches, stomachaches, allergic reactions, changes in the way our immune system functions, microscopic changes in the structure and function of our cells\u2014may be caused by GMOs if we don't know where these ingredients enter our diet, and if we don't conduct proper human clinical trials?\n\n\"We tend to blow off the reason for a migraine, the ill feeling that we had, on something that we will never be able to identify,\" Huerta said. \"How do we know if any of those hidden symptoms are due to having consumed a GMO (such as GM sweet corn, which is designed to be eaten fresh, right off the cob, and full of Bt toxin)? Remember that physical ailments due to smoking usually appear after many years. Things like emphysema, asthma, loss of lung function, secondary metabolic effects, etc. tend to show up after many years of smoking. Do we know if anything like that will happen with GMOs? The answer is no. We don't know the answer to that question.\"\n\nHuerta's skepticism is well founded. Although it is virtually impossible to lay a single illness, let alone an epidemic, at the feet of a single product, that doesn't mean these GMOs are _not_ causing problems. It may just mean that we haven't made the connection yet. These foods are a new thing on the evolutionary scene, and we are eating them in unimaginably vast quantities. While it is true that most scientific research done to date has found little reason to worry, there are other truths (as we will see) that ought to give us pause.\n\n\"The fact is, it is virtually impossible to even conceive of a testing procedure to assess the health effects of genetically engineered foods when introduced to the food chain,\" said Dr. Richard Lacey, a member of the British Royal College of Pathologists. \"The only way to base the claims about the safety of genetically engineered food in science is to establish each one to be safe through standard scientific procedures, not through assumptions that reflect more wishful thinking than hard fact.\"\n\n### Is It the GMOs, or the Chemicals We Spray on GMOs?\n\nOne health concern about which there is considerably less doubt is that GMOs, from the very outset, have been developed alongside synthetic pesticides and herbicides. The companies that sell the most GM seeds\u2014Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta\u2014all started out as chemical companies, and their move into the seed business, whatever else it has done, has vastly expanded their capacity to sell chemical sprays.\n\nEven the most benign of these chemicals are known to cause health and environmental problems, and they are used in enormous quantities. In the United States over the last forty years, the use of glyphosate (sold by Monsanto as Roundup, a product that makes the company $5 billion a year) has grown by a factor of 250, from less than half a million to 113 million kilograms a year. It is so common in England that residues of the compound routinely show up in British bread. A study by David Mortensen, a plant ecologist at Pennsylvania State University, predicts that total herbicide use in the United States will double again before 2025 as a direct result of GM crop use.\n\nGlyphosate has been approved by the EPA and regulatory agencies all over the world, and has earned the lasting loyalty of countless farmers who use it to clear fields of weeds. Scores of studies have shown no link to cancer; a recent report by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment found that glyphosate is not carcinogenic or toxic to fertility in lab animals.\n\nBut this opinion is far from unanimous. The International Agency for Research on Cancer\u2014the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization\u2014recently declared that glyphosate and 2,4-D (another common herbicide) should be classified as, respectively, \"probable\" and \"possible\" human carcinogens. France, the Netherlands, and Sweden have all recently come out against relicensing glyphosate for use in the European Union.\n\nWithin American regulatory agencies, scientists have long been troubled by the influence industry holds over government regulators. There is a well-documented pipeline leading from industry employees to EPA staff, and industry lobbyists have been very effective at limiting federal funding for chemical regulation. Until the summer of 2016, the federal Toxic Substances Control Act, the government's primary tool to regulate chemicals, had not been updated in forty years. In the early 1970s, there were a dozen EPA laboratories dedicated to testing farm chemicals. In 2004, thanks to decades of industry-pressured \"deregulation,\" there were two.\n\nChemical companies routinely hire former senior government officials to help them design corporate strategies and to persuade their former colleagues in government to be lenient in their scrutiny of data. And they are adept at getting their own people into positions of power in government. This was most obvious during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush years, when \"regulatory relief\" led to a dramatic dismantling of the EPA\u2014and such breaches of the public trust by former industry insiders that several were forced to resign for ethics violations and one even went to prison.\n\nPresident George H. W. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas, a former lawyer for Monsanto, to the Supreme Court; Thomas later wrote the majority opinion in a landmark case granting companies the right to patent GMO seeds. In the 1990s, President Clinton got so cozy with Monsanto's CEO Robert Shapiro that he swooned over the company in his 1997 State of the Union address and named Shapiro to the president's Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. There, Shapiro worked closely with Mickey Kantor, Clinton's trade representative before becoming a Monsanto board member himself. In 1998, Clinton personally awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to the Monsanto team that invented Roundup Ready soybeans.\n\nDuring the Obama administration, Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto vice president, was given a senior position in charge of food safety at the FDA. Islam Siddiqui, a Monsanto lobbyist, was named the U.S. Agricultural Trade Representative, put in charge of promoting American farm products overseas. As Obama's U.S. Solicitor General, Elena Kagan wrote a brief requesting the Supreme Court lift a ruling forbidding the planting of Monsanto's genetically engineered Roundup Ready alfalfa. Kagan now sits alongside Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.\n\n\"From the 1940s to the dawn of the twenty-first century, it has seemed as if government has been working for industry rather than overseeing it,\" E. G. Vallianatos, a twenty-five-year veteran of the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, has written. \"Most government and academic scientists working on agricultural practices and pest control have obdurately ignored research into nature's intricate and subtle workings. Instead, they have smoothed the way for the poisonous (and hugely profitable) concoctions of the chemical industry, and they are now doing the same for the rapidly growing field of genetic crop engineering.\"\n\nThere will be more on this later in the book, but suffice it to say that the debate over the safety of farm chemicals, like the debate over the safety of GMOs themselves, remains fractious and tangled up as much in money and politics as in concerns for human health.\n\nFood companies like to say that GMOs have reduced the total load of chemicals sprayed on crops, and in one way this is true. Between 1996 and 2011\u2014the first sixteen years of broad GMO planting\u2014the use of the insect-resistant Bt crops (plants inserted with genes from a naturally occurring bacteria found in the soil) reduced the use of insecticides by 123 million pounds. But during those same years, the use of weed killers like glyphosate and atrazine rose by 527 million pounds.\n\nThe net result? An increase of 7 percent, 404 million pounds. Part of this, at least, is the result of a chemical feedback loop: the more farmers use sprays, the more weeds evolve resistance to sprays, which means farmers need to use more, and stronger, chemicals. The magnitude of the increase in herbicide use on GM crops has \"dwarfed\" the reduction in insecticides used on Bt crops, the agricultural economist Charles Benbrook reports, \"and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.\"\n\nNo matter how you slice it, that's a lot of synthetic chemicals going onto (and into) our food. David Pimentel, a Cornell University scientist who has been studying American agriculture for fifty years, has estimated that pesticides cause some 300,000 poisonings a year in the United States; worldwide, the number is more than 26 million, 3 million of whom required hospitalization. Every year, pesticides kill 220,000 people worldwide and cause chronic illness\u2014everything from respiratory problems in farmworkers to cancer and hormone problems in consumers\u2014in another 750,000.\n\n\"The majority of food purchased in supermarkets have detectable levels of pesticide residue,\" Pimentel writes. In 1982, 80 percent of the milk supply on the Hawaiian island of Oahu had to be destroyed because it had been contaminated with the insecticide heptachlor. But at least heptachlor was on the regulatory radar: of the six hundred pesticides now in use, federal regulators search for the residues of only about forty.\n\nAnd those numbers tabulate just the risks for humans. Pimentel has also found that agrochemicals kill some 70 million birds every year in the United States alone. A quarter-million domestic animals are also poisoned every year by pesticides; farmers lose some $30 million a year to animal illness and death caused by pesticide poisonings\u2014an estimate considered low because it includes only numbers reported by veterinarians. \"When a farm animal poisoning occurs and little can be done for the animal, the farmer seldom calls a veterinarian but, rather, either waits for the animal to recover or destroys it,\" Pimentel writes.\n\nIt is true that pesticides and herbicides are not GMOs, and it is also true that farmers sprayed all kinds of chemicals on their crops long before the development of GMOs. Consider wheat, which is not (currently) genetically engineered. Wheat is often sprayed with glyphosate as a desiccant immediately before it is harvested, in order to force the plants to rapidly release their seeds. This puts a concentrated chemical on the plant right before it's processed into food.\n\nSome scientists wonder whether the rash of gluten intolerance currently afflicting the nation is actually Roundup intolerance. Glyphosate may be \"the most important causal factor\" in celiac disease, one study recently found; another found that glyphosate exposure can cause severe depletion of the nutrient manganese, a deficiency of which is associated with everything from anxiety to autism. \"The monitoring of glyphosate levels in food and in human urine and blood has been inadequate,\" the study's authors reported. \"The common practice of desiccation and\/or ripening with glyphosate right before the harvest ensures that glyphosate residues are present in our food supply.\" It is also plausible that \"the recent sharp increase of kidney failure in agricultural workers is tied to glyphosate exposure.\"\n\nThis, then, is not a question of \"the safety of GMOs\"; it is a question of \"the safety of what we spray on our food,\" a whole lot of which _is_ GM. It's obviously impossible to pin a nation's health woes on a single chemical compound, especially when only a tiny fraction of the country's 80,000 synthetic compounds have ever been formally tested for their health consequences. However, few chemicals have been spread as far and wide as glyphosate in the last twenty years, and glyphosate's ability to disrupt the body's detoxification pathways has been shown to intensify the effect of other toxic chemicals.\n\nThere is no question that the explosion in the use of chemicals like glyphosate has tracked right alongside the explosion in the use of GMOs. It has also corresponded with two other trends: a \"huge increase\" in the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases, and a \"marked decrease\" in life expectancy in the United States, write the authors of a study published in _The Journal of Organ Systems_. Diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases\u2014all have jumped dramatically, to the point that one-quarter of Americans now suffer from multiple chronic diseases. These numbers run parallel to \"an exponential increase in the amount of glyphosate applied to food crops and in the percentage of GE food crops planted.\" The annual cost of treating these illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is north of $750 billion per year. While direct, causal links have not been firmly established, the correlation\u2014especially given the scale of our exposure to pesticides, GMOs, and the processed foods both help create\u2014surely merits more attention than it has thus far received.\n\nBeyond worries about human health, there is the question of how much longer the pesticides currently associated with GMOs will remain viable. Farmers have sprayed so much glyphosate on their GM crops that weeds\u2014the very things they use glyphosate to control\u2014are evolving resistance to the spray. In 2004, a common weed called amaranth was found to have developed resistance to glyphosate in a single county in Georgia; by 2011, it had spread to seventy-six. \"It got to the point where some farmers were losing half their cotton fields to the weed,\" a Georgia farming consultant reported.\n\nGlyphosate-resistant weeds have now been found in eighteen countries, with significant impacts in Brazil, Australia, Argentina, and Paraguay. In the United States, they have emerged on 100 million acres in thirty-six states, meaning farmers must now return to harsher chemicals (like atrazine, a known carcinogen) or to recently approved \"stacked\" herbicides that combine glyphosate with 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the carcinogenic defoliant used during the Vietnam War. Dow AgroSciences, which uses 2,4-D in an herbicide called Enlist Duo, says there are more than 1,500 products with 2,4-D as an active ingredient; over the next few years, the EPA predicts the use of 2,4-D will increase sevenfold.\n\nThe EPA's recent decision to approve \"stacked\" herbicides was deeply flawed, according to Philip Landrigan, a renowned pediatrician and public health scientist, and Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist at Washington State University. The decision was based on studies done thirty years ago, which were not done by independent scientists but by the herbicide manufacturers themselves and were never published. The EPA did not take into account what scientists now know of the dangers such chemicals pose\u2014even at very low doses\u2014to the human endocrine system, especially in children. And they failed to consider the chemicals' impact on the environment, especially its effect on pollinators like the monarch butterfly, whose population is down more than 90 percent.\n\nBy pushing chemicals like glyphosate so hard, and for so long, chemical and seed companies \"have sown the seeds of their own destruction,\" the University of Michigan's John Vandermeer told me. \"We now have twenty-five weeds that are Roundup resistant, so now they're developing 2,4-D\u2013resistant crops. Roundup and 2,4-D are not good things to have around in such huge quantities. Roundup is toxic to amphibians\u2014it's actually toxic to almost everything that people have studied.\n\n\"My worry is that spreading Roundup all over the place has not been a good idea, and now we're about to start spreading 2,4-D around the world. It's not a good idea for the environment, and it's a potential danger for human health. Both chemicals are certainly suspected carcinogens, and Roundup is an endocrine disrupter. These are problems that were well known before there were GMOs. I don't care what technique you use to create Roundup Ready crops. I will always have an objection to the chemicals they encourage. If they had created Roundup Ready crops the old-fashioned way, I still wouldn't like them because of the Roundup.\"\n\nIt would seem that with so much riding on this question of safety\u2014with so much food, so much health, and so much money riding on a clear answer\u2014the federal government would make answering it a priority. The trouble with federal oversight of widely used chemicals like glyphosate is that the agencies responsible for keeping an eye on industry are deeply compromised by the political power of these same industries. The EPA has \"gutted\" both internal and external research programs responsible for safeguarding the public from industrial and agricultural chemicals, Bruce Blumberg, a professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine, told me. The EPA says everything they do is online, but \"damned if you can find it,\" he said.\n\nRelying on the seed and chemical companies to test their own products is folly, Blumberg said. Especially for something as ubiquitous as Roundup, large, long-term, and multigenerational studies ought to be carried out by a federal agency like the National Toxicology Program.\n\n\"This kind of work is the province of government, but they have totally shirked their responsibility,\" Blumberg said. \"We just cannot trust people with financial interest in product sales to do safety tests on these products. Companies will never show all the data unless it is in their interest. Look at history. Look at the tobacco industry. Look at General Motors and the ignition switch debacle at Takata and their exploding air bags. What does history tell us? Nothing good.\"\n\n### The Information Squeeze\n\nIt is the absence\u2014or, if you like, the impossibility\u2014of an absolute proof of safety that has led more than sixty countries all over the world to require foods containing GMOs to be labeled. With certainty so hard to come by, these countries (notably not including the United States) have decided that consumers at least deserve enough information to decide what they want to eat.\n\nEuropeans have bitterly opposed GMOs since the beginning. Their objections cropped up right around the time people in England learned that cows were being fed the brains of other cows. Mad cow disease, which had nothing to do with GMOs, nonetheless made people skittish over both the excesses of industrial agriculture and the paucity of government regulation.\n\nTheatrical demonstrations popped up all over Europe and quickly focused on agricultural technologies of all kinds. Protesters dumped GM soybeans at the doorstep of the British prime minister. Food activists pressured supermarkets to pull GMOs off their shelves. Prince Charles said GM foods took mankind into \"realms that belong to God.\"\n\nIn 1996, the German division of Unilever canceled an order for 650,000 metric tons of soybeans unless they could be guaranteed not to contain GM beans. Four years later, the EU required that food with more than 1 percent GM ingredients carry a label. Such was the European resistance to GMOs that hardly any foods ever actually ended up with a label, because hardly any GM foods were actually available for sale. Around this time, a food analyst for Deutsche Bank in New York declared that \"GMOs are dead.\"\n\nMore recently, nineteen members of the European Union requested that they be able to \"opt out\" of an agreement that allows the planting of GM corn.\n\nIn the United States, poll after poll indicates that a majority of people are confused and frightened by engineered food, and that they share a deep mistrust of the large agribusinesses that make them. They worry about the evolution of superbugs and superweeds, and about the growing dangers of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers needed to keep industrial farms afloat. They worry about the creation of dangerous food allergies, like a GM soybean made with genes from a Brazil nut that became such a suspicious cause of allergies that it never made it to market.\n\n\"The GMO issue is something that continues to be brought up in an unprompted way in our interviews with consumers,\" said Laurie Demeritt, CEO of the food research firm Hartman Group. \"And when we look at things like fat, sodium, and sugar, GMO is showing the strongest growth rate in terms of characteristics that consumers are trying to avoid. . . . Consumers have a vision in their minds of people in lab coats taking syringes and injecting things into a product, a vision of food made in a lab\u2014and that's even worse in their minds than food coming off a factory line.\"\n\nIn a 2013 _New York Times_ poll, three-quarters of Americans surveyed expressed concern about GMOs in their food, with most worried about health risks. More than 90 percent of Americans want GMOs labeled, as they have been required to be in countries such as India, China, Australia, and Brazil.\n\nIn 2011, Gary Hirshberg, chairman and cofounder of Stonyfield, the organic yogurt company, partnered with Just Label It, a national coalition of nearly 450 organizations, to petition the FDA to make GM food labels mandatory. More than a million people have now signed up. In 2014, Vermont became the first state to require labels on foods made with GMOs (though critics complain that the state left a sizable loophole by exempting meat and dairy products, much of which comes from animals fed GM grain).\n\nCompanies have responded aggressively to these moves. They have spent tens of millions of dollars in the United States alone trying to limit the information they must provide about the GM ingredients in their food, or the pesticides they use. They fight citizen groups at the ballot box and pour rivers of money into the pockets of politicians who support them. They place industry insiders at the very top of the federal agencies charged with regulating their own industry. They invest millions of dollars in university laboratories, then urge the scientists they support\u2014who the companies know \"have a big white hat in this debate\"\u2014to explain the benefits of their products in the press and before Congress.\n\nWhen California activists decided to float a petition for food labeling in 2012, they gathered more than a million signatures (and $9 million) in support of Proposition 37. The move was derailed by a massive counter-campaign (and $46 million) from Monsanto, DuPont, Pepsi, and Kraft Foods. In the end, the labeling measure failed 51 percent to 49 percent.\n\nThe story repeated itself in Oregon and Washington state: small-scale activists in favor of labeling followed by multimillion-dollar campaigns financed by the food and agricultural industries. \"Monsanto was writing million-dollar checks at a shot,\" recalled Trudy Bialic, the public-affairs director of a Seattle-based natural-foods co-op chain, who helped draft the initiative. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, the lobby for makers of processed food, donated $11 million. \"Boom, boom, boom, millions overnight,\" she said. \"It was death by a thousand cuts.\"\n\nIf some of this sounds familiar, it should. Companies pushing the \"safety\" of GMOs are following a playbook written by Big Tobacco and Big Oil, which spent decades claiming that science (about cancer, or about climate change) was bunk. Yet now, when consumers demand to know more about GMOs\u2014what they are, how they are made, what their health and environmental consequences might be\u2014industry claims to have science \"on its side.\" Consumers should trust these companies to do the right thing, because the science on GMOs is \"clear.\" According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the gap between what scientists and the public believe about GMOs is now wider than on any other issue. Almost 90 percent of scientists believe eating GMOs is safe. Among the public, that number is 37 percent.\n\nThe food industry has always been heavy-handed in its battles over what information the public should be allowed to know. Twenty-five years ago, many of these same companies fought bitterly to prevent the legally strict \"organic\" label from being applied to foods grown without synthetic chemicals. They had reason to be concerned: since the introduction of organic standards, the organic food industry has been growing at 20 percent a year, which has both cut into traditional profit centers and opened the door to a whole new array of growers, preparers, and sellers of food.\n\nBut the GMO labeling debate has a different feel. Requiring a \"Contains GMOs\" label on foods would function as a kind of \"anti-organic\" label, implying (given the public's anxiety over the issue) that the food was somehow unsafe to eat. To big food companies and farmers who use GMOs, requiring a GMO label would do little more than give the organic food industry another big bite out of the American food budget.\n\nAs consumer anxiety over GMOs has grown, so have the marketing opportunities for food companies that do not use GMOs. Some 80 percent of consumers say they would pay more for foods carrying a \"No GMO\" label, even though they don't necessarily trust food labels (or even fully understand GMOs). Whole Foods has pledged that by 2018 it will replace some foods containing genetically modified ingredients and require labels on others. Signs in Trader Joe's proclaim: \"No GMOs Sold Here.\" Sales of products claiming they contain \"no GMOs\" exceeded $10 billion last year and grew at a faster rate than sales of gluten-free items, according to a recent Nielsen study.\n\n\"There's no doubt that the industry is fighting a rear-guard action on this and trying to put it to rest,\" said Carl Jorgensen, director of global consumer strategy for wellness at Daymon Worldwide, a consumer research and consulting firm. \"But there's an aura of inevitability about it now.\"\n\nTen billion dollars for non-GMO foods is a lot, but it's still a vanishing fraction of the $620 billion Americans spent in grocery stores in 2013. But if a traditional grocery chain like Kroger or Safeway were to begin labeling its private-label products, \"that would be a game changer,\" Jorgensen said. Unlike food manufacturers, grocery stores interact directly with consumers, Jorgenson noted; they can see which foods fly off the shelves and which foods remain.\n\nBut this is tricky magic: if companies start boasting that some of their products (like Cheerios) do not contain GMOs, how will consumers react to their other products (like Lucky Charms and even Honey Nut Cheerios)\u2014sitting right there on the same shelf\u2014that do?\n\nIn the absence of broad labeling laws\u2014there are currently eighty-four bills on GMO labeling in thirty states\u2014companies hoping to take advantage of GMO anxiety have found other solutions. On its website, a testing organization called the Non-GMO Project\u2014logo: monarch butterfly\u2014shows a photo of a little blond girl carrying a sign saying \"I Am Not a Science Experiment.\"\n\n\"The sad truth is many of the foods that are most popular with children contain GMOs,\" the site reports. \"Cereals, snack bars, snack boxes, cookies, processed lunch meats, and crackers all contain large amounts of high-risk food ingredients. In North America, over 80% of our food contains GMOs. If you are not buying foods that are Non-GMO Project Verified, most likely GMOs are present at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.\"\n\nThe Non-GMO Project, which calls itself \"North America's only third-party verification for products produced according to the rigorous best practices for GMO avoidance,\" says it has verified more than 34,000 products. The nonprofit group tests ingredients, and anything passing the European standard of less than 0.9 percent GMO is eligible for the \"Non-GMO Project Verified\" seal of approval. Given the almost unavoidable reality of seed and crop cross-contamination, getting to zero\u2014getting to actually \"GMO free\" is (so far) impossible.\n\nRather than mandatory labels on products, the food industry has long pushed the use of voluntary QR barcodes on products, which (they say) consumers could simply scan with their cell phones. The codes would direct you to the company's website, which would reveal further information about the product. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has said the QR codes would solve the label debate \"in a heartbeat.\"\n\nPro-labeling groups consider this move a joke. Bar codes directing you to the Internet make abstract what ought to be utterly present and clear: Does the package in your hand contain GMO ingredients, or not? If you actually take the time to navigate to a company's website, you might (perhaps) find somewhere (in small print) that yes, Coca-Cola uses GM corn to make its high fructose corn syrup; or yes, children's breakfast cereals are sweetened with crystals made from GM sugar beets; or yes, Crisco oil uses GM soybeans. But who's actually going to go to all that trouble? Add to this the fact that 50 percent of the country's poor and 65 percent of the elderly do not even own smartphones, and you have to wonder: Is the goal of this move broad public awareness of what goes into food, or another way for companies to obscure what they are feeding us?\n\nAs with the regulation of toxic chemicals in products like cosmetics or baby bottles, companies have also worked hard to limit the size of their battlefield: a single piece of legislation in Congress is a lot easier to manipulate than bills passing through dozens of state legislatures. In 2014, in the midst of major GMO labeling battles in places like California and Vermont, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) introduced a federal bill seeking to prohibit states from requiring GMO labels on food. Opponents of the measure dubbed it the \"DARK\" Act, for \"Deny Americans the Right to Know,\" and hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions opposing the bill. \"If the DARK Act becomes law, a veil of secrecy will cloak ingredients, leaving consumers with no way to know what's in their food,\" said Scott Faber, senior vice-president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group. \"Consumers in sixty-four countries, including Saudi Arabia and China, have the right to know if their food contains GMOs. Why shouldn't Americans have the same right?\"\n\nOpponents also considered Pompeo's bill a gift to Big Food, and indeed, the Pompeo campaign's top individual contributor has been Koch Industries Inc., the energy, agricultural chemical and fertilizer conglomerate run by billionaire brothers Charles and David H. Koch, who are known for their extensive support of conservative political causes.\n\nIn the end, Big Food won. In the summer of 2016, President Obama signed the Senate version of Pompeo's bill into law. Although the administration pitched the move as a step forward in the march toward consumer information, the law accomplished most of what Big Food desired: it keeps labeling rules in the hands of a single federal agency, which will decide what percentage of GMOs in a food product will require labeling; it allows for the use of obscure QR codes rather than clear labels on food packages; and most important, it kills far stricter rules written by states like Vermont, Connecticut, and Maine.\n\nThe Obama administration's fraught decision notwithstanding, the labeling debate continues to raise deeper questions about the ways our food is made. Do you really care only that a food was genetically engineered? Or would you also like to know that it was sprayed with an herbicide that is known to be carcinogenic to humans, or with another chemical known to destroy the plants that monarch butterflies need to survive? That it was sprayed with an insecticide known to kill bees? That it was grown in a monoculture field that is destroying biodiversity generally, or is polluting drinking water supplies? How far do you want to go with this?\n\nWhen it comes to food labels, everything comes down to your level of risk tolerance, Jim Carrington, the president of the Danforth Center and a forceful proponent of the safety and benefits of genetic engineering, told me. Table salt is dangerous if used too much, and every year some people die from drinking too much water. Celery, broccoli, potatoes\u2014lots of plants contain natural toxins that help them survive. Does that mean they deserve labels?\n\n\"The question is not whether something has the potential to cause cancer. There is nothing that is _not_ in that category,\" Carrington said. \"A rooster crows every morning and then the sun comes up. Association does not equal causation.\"\n\nCarrington's view is that food production depends on all kinds of processes and ingredients that can be delivered in ways that are better or worse, and GMOs are no different.\n\n\"So let's say we label something that has a GMO ingredient,\" Carrington said, a note of sarcasm creeping into his voice. \"If we require that, you know what I want to require? I want to know every input that went into that product. I'm concerned about water, and soil erosion, and nitrogen leaching into the waterways. That's all big-time environmentalism. Show me a label for everything in that box. Show me how much water the crops required, how much fertilizer ran into the nearest waterway or aquifer. But don't stop there. I want to know how many gallons of fuel were used per pound of produce, what the miles per gallon were for that tractor, whether or not there were any farm animals within two miles because I want to know about _E. coli_.\n\n\"Marking GMO ingredients as 'different' is marking something that in fact has no impact on what's in the box,\" he continued. \"There is no substantive difference that will affect you. What I'm saying is, if you get to label something that has no bearing on your health or safety, I say let's go all the way. Show me every bit of information about how that product was produced so I, as a consumer, can make an informed choice. If you force a label on something that doesn't matter for reasons you say _do_ matter\u2014'I want to protect my children'\u2014then I want to claim every bit of every other thing I'm concerned about. It's not rational, it's arbitrary, and it has negative consequences.\"\n\nIn a way, Carrington's modest proposal\u2014labeling _everything_ that goes into making our food\u2014precisely reflects the sentiments of people who completely disagree with him about GMOs. It may be that our desire for labels is simply shorthand for our collective desire to know more about a food system that\u2014to most of us\u2014has become utterly industrial, technological, and abstract. We are given so little information about the way our food is grown and have so little contact with people or places that actually grow it. Perhaps the entire debate about GMOs may just be evidence of our cumulative ignorance about one of the most intimate things in our lives: the way we eat.\n\nSo how did we lose our way?\n\n## 2.\n\n## The Long, Paved Road to Industrial Food, and the Disappearance of the American Farmer\n\n The road we have traveled to our current state of eating is actually a very long, interconnected highway. After World War II, American national security strategists decided that protecting the homeland required building a network of broad interstates that mirrored the German Autobahn. This monumental road-building project\u2014now close to 47,000 miles long\u2014was initially conceived as a way to efficiently move troops and military machinery, but it has also had dramatic peacetime consequences for the American landscape, and for the American diet.\n\nSuddenly, big, safe interstates\u2014and the millions of miles of ring roads, state roads, and town roads they encouraged\u2014allowed people to live farther and farther from the cities where they worked. People moved out of cities in droves, looking for new places to live. Land prices outside cities skyrocketed, and small farmers occupying that land had a hard time resisting when real estate developers came to call.\n\nSuburban development hit small American farms like a virus. In the 1950s alone, some 10 million people left family farms. Chances are, your grandparents (or even your parents) can tell you stories about all those farms in your area that over the last few decades have been turned into subdivisions and shopping malls. In Maryland, where I live, suburban development has replaced 900,000 acres of farmland (and 500,000 acres of forest) in just the last forty years.\n\nAll these new roads, and the suburbs and industries to which they gave birth, caused a second tectonic shift in American culture: in the way we came to eat. Car-friendly fast-food chains like McDonald's and Carl's Jr. and Burger King started popping up along the new highways like weeds. By the early 1960s, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the largest restaurant chain in the United States.\n\nThese restaurants did not cook, exactly; what they did was heat up highly processed, prepackaged foods that tasted exactly the same, whether you were in Dallas or Des Moines. The ingredients didn't need to be fresh, they needed to be uniform, and storable, and\u2014most important, given skyrocketing demand\u2014they needed to be provided in vast quantities.\n\nFast-food joints didn't need local asparagus from New Jersey or collard greens from Georgia or one-of-a-kind apples grown in small orchards in New York. They needed commodity grains to sweeten their sodas, fry their fries, and feed the animals that could be turned into hamburgers and hot dogs and fried chicken. What these restaurants needed was corn, and wheat, and soybeans. And lots of them.\n\nAs small family farms near population centers went bankrupt or sold their land to developers, and as the American diet started demanding processed meals, food production flowed like beads of mercury to the control of larger and larger industrial farm operations in the Midwest. As food production became centralized, companies that controlled the grains, chemicals, and processing factories became bigger and much more politically powerful. Thanks to intensive lobbying, tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies began flowing to giant agribusinesses that were driving the development of the industrial food system. As early as the 1970s, farmers around the country were being told (in the words of President Nixon's Agriculture Secretary Rusty Butz) to \"get big or get out.\"\n\nMost farmers got out. A little over a hundred years ago, there were 38 million people living in the United States, and 50 percent of them worked on a farm. Today, we have 300 million people. How many work on farms? Two percent.\n\nToday, if you drive across the grain belt\u2014Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas\u2014you will spend many, many hours crossing an ocean of just three crops: corn, wheat, and soybeans. They are being grown by farmers you will likely never meet, processed in factories you will likely never see, into packaged foods containing ingredients that look nothing like the crops from which they were made. You won't see it, but your soda will be sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, which replaced sugar in the 1980s. Your fries will be dunked in boiling soybean oil. And your burgers and nuggets and sliced turkey breast will all be processed from animals fed corn or soybeans, or both.\n\nWhat you most likely won't see, out along on the great American road system, are regional food specialties, or the mom-and-pop diners and restaurants that used to serve them. New England clam chowder, New Orleans gumbo, Maryland crab bisque: all these foods require local ingredients, which (by definition) giant farms in Iowa or Kansas are unable to provide. Replacing them has been the food that these farms can provide: Fast food. Processed food. Soda. Pizza. Chicken nuggets. Cheap hamburgers. A vast culinary sameness, all essentially built out of two or three crops, controlled by a small handful of companies. All available twenty-four hours a day in any restaurant, dining hall, or gas station in the country.\n\nIt wasn't just fast-food restaurants pushing this new food system. Food-processing giants like ADM, ConAgra, and Cargill learned to take monoculture corn and soybeans and turn them into the raw ingredients that could be made into just about anything a supermarket shopper wanted. Companies like General Mills or Coca-Cola could take a few cents' worth of wheat or corn and process it into Cocoa Puffs or a two-liter bottle of soda and sell it for a few dollars. As food scientists became more creative, they learned how to take wheat and corn and soy and turn them (along with the secret \"fragrances\" and \"flavors\" whose provenance only the food scientists seem to know) into limitless quantities of foods sold in suburban supermarkets\u2014as often as not built on top of former farms.\n\nThese new foods were cheap to make, enormously profitable, and consumers seemed to love them. Americans spent $6 billion a year on fast food in 1970. By 2014, they were spending more than $117 billion. Today, Americans drink about 56 gallons of soda a year\u2014about 600 cans per person\u2014and every month, 90 percent of American children visit a McDonald's.\n\nAs industrial farms continued to grow, they gobbled up not just good land but marginal land, changing the face of millions upon millions of acres of forest, grasslands, hillsides, even wetlands. The strange thing was that the plants they grew\u2014corn, soy, wheat\u2014didn't seem to mind this change. The plants could grow, weed-like, even in marginal soil.\n\nSo, for better or worse, could the animals. Industrial feedlots across the Midwest began buying trainloads of corn and soybeans to feed an industry that now slaughters 9 billion animals a year.\n\nAs farms consolidated and grew, and as industrial processors increased their demand for ingredients that could be turned into shelf-stable food, farmers responded by growing what the market demanded\u2014and eliminating what the market did not. Over the course of the twentieth century, the varieties of fruits and vegetables being sold by commercial U.S. seed houses dropped by 97 percent. Varieties of cabbage dropped from 544 to 28; carrots from 287 to 21; cauliflower from 158 to 9; tomatoes from 408 to 79; garden peas from 408 to 25. Of more than 7,000 varieties of apples, more than 6,200 have been lost.\n\n\u2014\n\nTHE DEVELOPMENT of American highways and suburbs caused one of the most dramatic changes in land use in the history of the world. But running parallel to this was an equally momentous shift in agricultural technology, which grew up fast to supply the rapidly changing American diet. In the 1930s, a plant breeder named Henry A. Wallace began boasting of the benefits of crossbred or \"hybrid\" corn, which he had meticulously developed to produce unprecedented yields. Even Wallace knew he was on to something dramatic. \"We hear a great deal these days about atomic energy,\" he said. \"Yet I am convinced that historians will rank the harnessing of hybrid power as equally significant.\"\n\nWallace was right. Corn yields doubled\u2014from around 25 bushels per acre to 50 bushels per acre\u2014in ten years. From 1934 to 1944\u2014even before the postwar boom in agribusiness\u2014hybrid corn seed sales jumped from near zero to more than $70 million, and rapidly replaced the enormous variety of seeds farmers had saved and traded for generations. By 1969, yields were up to 80 bushels an acre, and fully 71 percent of the corn grown in the United States was being grown from just a half-dozen types of hybrid seed. Industrial monoculture had arrived. Wallace's Hi-Bred Corn Company became Pioneer Hi-Bred International, America's largest seed company.\n\nSince the 1960s, corn yields have doubled again, and now stand, in some places, close to 200 bushels per acre\u2014nearly a tenfold increase in a single century. This phenomenal increase in production was dramatically accelerated by the invention, in the early twentieth century, of the Haber-Bosch process, which won its German inventors Nobel Prizes for discovering how to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. The ability to synthesize ammonia\u2014routinely called the most important invention of the twentieth century\u2014made it possible for industry to mass-produce two things that changed the world: explosives during the war and synthetic fertilizers after the war.\n\nBy the late 1940s, the war over, American industries found themselves with an enormous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the primary ingredient used to make TNT and other explosives. Since the synthetic compound also proved to be an excellent source of nitrates for plants, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) started encouraging the use of these chemicals on American farmland.\n\nSuddenly, farmers (and their crops) shifted from a reliance on energy from the sun (in the form of nitrogen-fixing legumes or plant-based manure) to a reliance on energy from fossil fuels. Liberated from the old biological constraints, farms \"could now be managed on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw material\u2014chemical fertilizer\u2014into outputs of corn,\" Michael Pollan writes in _The Omnivore's Dilemma_. \"Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.\"\n\nA similar pattern emerged for the poison gases that industry had developed for the war: they were repurposed as agricultural pesticides and herbicides. Monsanto had begun the twentieth century making things like aspirin. In 1945, the company began making herbicides like 2,4-D, which would become a prime ingredient in Agent Orange, and is now one of the most popular farm sprays in the world. Monsanto also spent decades making PCBs, a compound used in both pesticides and electrical transformers (and long since banned as a dangerous carcinogen). By the 1960s, Monsanto was making a whole host of pesticides, with tough-sounding cowboy names like Lasso, Lariat, and Bullet. But the company's star product was Roundup, the glyphosate that is now the most popular herbicide in the world\u2014and which, in a few short years, would be the star player in the growth of GMOs.\n\nDuPont, Dow, Syngenta, Bayer, BASF\u2014all the world's largest chemical companies made fortunes manufacturing compounds like DDT, atrazine, and scores of other farm chemicals. Today, the six top chemical companies control nearly 75 percent of the world's pesticide market.\n\nThis transition, from wartime chemicals to petroleum-based farm chemicals that now cover hundreds of millions of acres in the United States alone, has proven a double-edged sword for the world's farmers, and for the rest of us. For one thing, it means that most of us, in the words of the Indian food activist Vandana Shiva, are \"still eating the leftovers of World War II.\"\n\nTrue, it cranked up the amount of food farmers could grow, but it also (in the words of Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil) \"detonated the population explosion.\" Farmers could now grow a lot more food, but suddenly\u2014thanks in no small part to all this extra food\u2014there were a lot more people to feed. Since the end of World War II, chemical fertilizer production jumped from 17 million tons per year to more than 200 million tons. Excess fertilizers and pesticides that are not taken up by plants seep into the rivers and bays, where they contaminate drinking water and cause algae blooms (and aquatic dead zones) so large they can be seen from space. They evaporate into the air, where they serve as major contributors to climate change.\n\nAnd it's not just plants that these chemicals fertilize. Since their advent, the human population has nearly tripled. Without these chemicals, Smil writes, billions of people would never have been born. The dousing of our crops with fossil fuels, in other words, meant we could now make unprecedented amounts of food. But now we had to.\n\nFor the large chemical companies, the global demand for more food provided a huge new market opportunity, not only for fertilizers and pesticides but for novel seeds to grow the crops themselves. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the explosion of biotechnology\u2014and especially in the ability of scientists to genetically engineer plants\u2014meant that companies once devoted to chemistry began frantically shifting their emphasis to molecular biology. Chemical giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and Bayer began a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions, racing each other to dominate the world's seed industry. Monsanto's CEO Robert Shapiro moved especially aggressively in the mid-1990s, spending billions of dollars buying up seed companies and instantly making Monsanto the world's biggest ag-biotech company. The company bought Calgene, the maker of the Flavr Savr tomato, mainly because the smaller firm had ideas about GM cotton and canola.\n\nSimilar changes were under way at Dow and DuPont, which started out as makers of explosives like phenol and dynamite and are now two of the biggest GM seed companies in the world. In 1999, DuPont spent $7.7 billion to buy Pioneer Hi-Bred, which controlled 42 percent of the U.S. market for hybrid corn and 16 percent of the country's soybeans. The deal gave DuPont control of the world's biggest proprietary seed bank, as well as a global seed sales force.\n\nThe consolidation of the agrochemical giants has continued. In late 2015, DuPont and Dow Chemical announced a $130 billion merger, and Monsanto made a $45 billion offer to buy Syngenta. The deal fell through, but Syngenta was immediately targeted by China National Chemical Corp., and Monsanto turned its attention to acquiring the crop science divisions of German chemical giants BASF and Bayer. Bayer responded in the spring of 2016 by offering to buy Monsanto for $62 billion. Monsanto rejected the bid as too low, but the companies remain in negotiations.\n\nAs late as the 1990s, the United States had hundreds of different seed companies; now we have a half-dozen. The biotech industry owns at least 85 percent of the country's corn seed, more than half of it owned by Monsanto alone. \"This is an important moment in human history,\" Monsanto's CEO Robert Shapiro said in 1999. \"The application of contemporary biological knowledge to issues like food and nutrition and human health has to occur. It has to occur for the same reason that things have occurred for the past ten millennia. People want to live better, and they will use the tools they have to do it. Biology is the best tool we have.\"\n\nThis, then, was the monumental shift that gave us GMOs. In a few short years, companies that had long known the power of chemistry discovered the power of biology. And the way we eat has never been the same.\n\n\u2014\n\nGENETIC ENGINEERS are correct when they say that the fruits and vegetables we see in the supermarket look nothing like their wild forebears. The tomatoes we eat today\u2014juicy and sweet, not bitter and toxic\u2014are the result of thousands of years of human selection. So is the corn. The first cultivated carrots\u2014typically yellow or purple\u2014were grown in Afghanistan. It was only after traders carried them to Europe and the Mediterranean, where they were crossed with wild varieties, that their offspring gradually turned orange.\n\nIn the nineteenth century, the Austrian monk and scientist Gregor Mendel discovered how a plant passed its traits from parent to offspring. Taking anthers from one variety and dusting them with pollen from another, he crossed some 10,000 plants: round peas with wrinkled peas; peas from yellow pods with peas from green pods; peas from tall and short plants. Every trait a plant's offspring exhibited\u2014height, color, shape\u2014depended on what Mendel called \"factors\" that were either dominant or recessive. So if a round pod was crossed with a wrinkly pod, three out of four times the offspring would be round, meaning that was the dominant trait. The last one could either be round or wrinkly. That's because these factors apparently came in pairs, one from each parent, and were inherited as distinct characteristics.\n\nDNA was known to be a cellular component by the late nineteenth century, but Mendel and other early geneticists did their work without understanding its role in heredity. By the late 1940s, most biologists believed one specific kind of molecule held the key to inheritance, and turned their focus to chromosomes, which were already known to carry genes. As agricultural research began moving from the field into the laboratory, scientists discovered a new way to mirror natural selection: by exposing plants to chemicals or radiation, they could alter the plant's biochemical development. They could force it to mutate. By some estimates, radiation mutagenesis has introduced some 2,500 new varieties of plants into the world, including many that find their way onto our plates, like wheat, grapefruit, even lettuce.\n\nWith the flowering of genetic engineering in the 1970s and 1980s, scientists figured out how to go into an organism\u2014a plant or an animal, a bacteria or a virus\u2014remove one or more genes, and stitch them into the genetic sequence of another organism. This process became known as recombinant DNA technology.\n\nThe first commercially available product of genetic engineering was synthetic insulin. In humans, insulin is normally made by the pancreas and helps regulate blood glucose; produce too little insulin, and you can develop type 1 diabetes. Traditionally, increasing a diabetic's insulin required collecting insulin from the pancreatic glands of pigs or cattle, a problem not only for the animals but also for people who became allergic to the insulin's different chemical structure.\n\nIn 1978, scientists at the company Genentech used genetic coding to create a synthetic insulin known as humulin, which hit the market in 1982. Today, this GM insulin is produced around the clock in giant fermentation vats and is used every day by more than 4 million people. Similar technology has been used to produce vaccines that combat hepatitis B; human growth hormone, which combats dwarfism; and erythropoietin (EPO), which helps the body produce red blood cells (and has been, illegally, used to boost racing performance by riders in the Tour de France).\n\nIn the late 1980s, genetic engineers turned their sights on cheese. Just a few years before the release of the Flavr Savr tomato, the combination of a single gene from a cow was stitched into the genome of a bacterium (or a yeast) to create rennin, a critical enzyme in the production of hard cheeses. Once obtained as a by-product of the veal industry, rennin was traditionally collected from the lining of a cow's fourth stomach. GM rennin is now used in some 90 percent of the cheese made in the United States.\n\nBut compared with what was to come, these early experiments were, well, small potatoes. The real money, agrochemical companies knew, would come through genetically engineering the crops Americans ate most. Not cheese, but corn and soybeans. Control those crops, and you could dominate a fundamental part of the global economy.\n\nMonsanto's most important push was to create seeds the company could sell alongside Roundup, already the bestselling farm chemical in the world. Creating (and patenting) Roundup-resistant seeds would secure the company's global share in seeds _and_ herbicides. The world's farmers wouldn't buy just one. They would buy both.\n\n\"It was like the Manhattan Project, the antithesis of how a scientist usually works,\" said Henry Klee, a member of Monsanto's Roundup research team. \"A scientist does an experiment, evaluates it, makes a conclusion, and goes on to the next variable. With Roundup resistance, we were trying twenty variables at the same time: different mutants, different promoters, multiple plant species. We were trying everything at once.\"\n\nIt took four years, and a bizarre eureka moment, for Roundup Ready seeds to be born. Frustrated in their lab work, company engineers decided to examine a garbage dump 450 miles south of Monsanto's St. Louis headquarters. There, at the company's Luling plant on the banks of the Mississippi, the engineers found plants that had somehow survived in soil and ponds near contamination pools, where the company treated millions of tons of glyphosate every year. The hardiest weeds were collected, their molecular structure examined, their genes replicated and inserted into potential food crops.\n\nWhen Roundup Ready soybeans were finally launched, in 1996, they instantly became an essential part of a $15 billion soybean industry. Roundup Ready soybeans covered 1 million acres in the United States in 1996; 9 million acres in 1997; and 25 million in 1998. Today, 90 percent of the country's 85 million acres of soybeans are glyphosate resistant.\n\nThe first insecticide-producing corn plant was approved in 1996, the same year Monsanto released its Roundup Ready soybean. Today, the overwhelming majority of the GM crops grown in the United States\u2014some 170 million acres of them\u2014are still grown to feed the industrial food system. In Iowa, GM corn is grown to feed the numberless cows and pigs that enter into the fast-food system. In Maryland, GM soybeans are grown to feed the hundreds of millions of chickens on the state's Eastern Shore, which will enter the same system. In Nebraska, GM canola is grown to make the oil to fry the french fries served in the country's galaxy of drive-through restaurants.\n\nWhy are the crops genetically engineered? For the same reason the highways were built: they make everything faster, more uniform, more efficient. In the United States, GM crops are grown mainly for two reasons: to increase yields and\u2014especially\u2014to allow farmers to spray their crops with chemicals that kill insects, diseases, or weeds. By developing crops that can withstand regular pesticide dousing (or, like Bt corn, that can provide their own insecticide), scientists have enabled farmers to eliminate everything but the crops whose numbers they are trying to maximize. Gone are the weeds. Gone are the insects. The whole system works\u2014in the most literal sense\u2014like a well-oiled machine.\n\nFood and chemical companies\u2014and the farmers who grow for them\u2014say that GM crops allow them to deliver a lot of food to a lot of people for very little money, and this is true, as far as it goes. Americans have become very comfortable spending relatively little money for their food. According to the World Bank, Americans spend considerably less per capita on food than anyone else in the world. Food expenses are much higher in the UK (9 percent), France (14 percent), South Africa (20 percent), and Brazil (25 percent). And our food is cheap not just compared with other countries; it's cheap compared with the food we used to eat, before all our small farms moved to the Midwest. In 1963, the year I was born, Americans were spending close to a third of their income on food. Now we spend about 6 percent.\n\n\u2014\n\nSO HERE WE ARE. Genetic engineering did not create any of the structures that hold up our current food system. It merely added a set of tools\u2014very powerful tools\u2014to keep the whole machine running. The fact that these tools arrived on the scene at the very moment that the American food economy was becoming so intensely industrialized has created both enormous profits for the companies and enormous health and environmental problems for the rest of us. Had genetic engineering come about at a different time\u2014were we still a nation of small farmers, for example, and were biotech companies making seeds to help local farmers grow nutritious produce\u2014things might have turned out entirely differently.\n\nBut that's not what happened. When it comes to GMOs, it's impossible to separate science from industry, or industry from politics. It's all tangled up together, and we are eating all of it. The argument that genetic engineering is just another step in a tradition of plant breeding that goes back 10,000 years is absolutely true. But it is also true that biotechnology has developed at a time when its primary use has been to fuel a food system that is far bigger, more complex, and more destructive than anything the world has ever seen.\n\nBecause this system has become so profitable, companies have gone to great lengths to cement their control over it in all three branches of the federal government. Through the White House, they push their own people to the top of federal regulatory agencies. In Congress, they use lobbyists and political muscle to influence policy, and to keep federal farm subsidies flowing. In the courts, beginning in 1980, they have repeatedly convinced judges that they deserve patents (to quote a famous court decision) on \"anything under the sun that is made by man.\" To date, tens of thousands of gene patents have been awarded to biotech companies, and tens of thousands more wait in the wings. This means, in the most fundamental way, that our food supply is owned and controlled by a very small handful of companies.\n\nThis is nowhere more evident than in the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that move through federal regulatory agencies into the hands of companies these same agencies are supposed to regulate. Between 1995 and 2010, large agricultural companies received $262 billion in federal subsidies, a great percentage of it going to companies developing GM food products.\n\nIt is also evident in the way federal agencies view their relationship with the companies they are charged with overseeing. Since the 1980s, regulation of GMOs has been handled through a complex web of three vast federal agencies. A genetic engineer has to get a permit from the USDA to field-test a GM crop. Then\u2014after several years of trials\u2014the engineer must petition for the deregulation of the crop. If the crop has been designed to be pest-resistant, the EPA will regulate it as pesticide and demand more data. Finally, the FDA evaluates the plant to make sure it is safe for consumption by people or animals.\n\nBut in reality, safety testing of GMOs in the United States is left to the companies that make them. This is very much in line with much of American regulatory policy and is dramatically different from the approach taken in Europe, where regulators require that the introduction of GM foods should be delayed until the long-term ecological and health consequences of the plants are better understood. In the United States, industry and government have decided that GMOs are \"substantially equivalent\" to traditional foods, and therefore should not be subjected to new federal oversight.\n\nU.S. policy \"tends to minimize the existence of _any_ risks associated with GM products, and directs the agencies to refrain from hypothesizing about or affirmatively searching for safety or environmental concerns,\" legal scholar Emily Marden writes.\n\n### Federal Government: Watchdog or Cheerleader?\n\nThe shift in federal policy from \"regulating\" GMO foods to \"promoting\" them was subtle, and to most of the country, entirely invisible. Back at the beginning, in 1974, Paul Berg, often called the father of genetic engineering, persuaded other molecular biologists to be cautious in the pioneering work they were doing in their laboratories. \"There is serious concern that some of these artificial recombinant DNA molecules could prove biologically hazardous,\" Berg wrote at the time. To address these questions, Berg and his colleagues at the National Academy of Sciences urged caution in the development of genetic engineering technology until scientists could form standards for biological and environmental safety. Addressing the technology itself, rather than its application to food production, the now famous \"Berg Letter\" acknowledged that such a cautious approach was based on \"potential rather than demonstrated risk,\" and might well mean the \"postponement or possible abandonment\" of some ongoing experiments.\n\n\"Our concern for the possible unfortunate consequences of indiscriminate application of these techniques,\" Berg wrote, \"motivates us to urge all scientists working in this area to join us in agreeing not to initiate experiments until attempts have been made to evaluate the hazards and some resolution of the outstanding questions has been achieved.\"\n\nAfter Berg's letter was published, a group of scientists organized a closed-door conference at Asilomar, California, in February 1975 to formulate research guidelines that would prevent health or ecological trouble from rippling out from this new technology. But the letter also made it very clear that scientists themselves, and not the government, would be in charge of keeping an eye on things. No new legislation was needed, the letter noted. Scientists could \"govern themselves.\"\n\nJames Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA and an attendee at the Asilomar conference, made it clear that scientists were not interested in ethical guidance from outside the profession. Although some \"fringe\" groups might consider genetic engineering a matter for public debate, the molecular biology establishment never intended to ask for guidance. \"We did not want our experiments to be blocked by over-confident lawyers, much less by self-appointed bioethicists with no inherent knowledge of, or interest in, our work,\" Watson wrote. \"Their decisions could only be arbitrary.\"\n\nWatson had nothing but contempt for those who would stand in the way of scientific research; he once referred to critics of genetic engineering as \"kooks, shits, and incompetents.\" The risks from this technology, he wrote, were about the same as \"being licked by a dog.\"\n\nThe National Institutes of Health quickly adopted the Asilomar conclusions and turned them into a national research standard: biotechnology research would be largely self-regulated and should be encouraged, not hampered, by federal oversight.\n\nAt first, most of the research being done in biotechnology had to do with medical research, not food production, and given the lack of public debate on the issue, few health or environmental groups paid much attention to genetically engineered food. But within a few years, the potential applications\u2014and the potential profits\u2014in agriculture became obvious. The question was, what would happen once this technology escaped the laboratory and was scaled up to reach all our dinner tables?\n\n\"In the 1970s, we were all trying to keep the genie in the bottle,\" said Arnold Foudin, the deputy director of biotechnology permits at the USDA. \"Then in the 1980s, there was a switch to wanting to let the genie out. And everybody was wondering, 'Will it be an evil genie?'\"\n\nThe genie was released in the 1980s and 1990s by the Reagan and Bush administrations, which had long made industrial deregulation a national priority. To their eyes, the burgeoning biotech industry was a perfect merging of business and science that\u2014if left alone\u2014would generate colossal corporate profits for American agricultural conglomerates.\n\n\"As genetic engineering became seen as a promising investment prospect, a turn from traditional scientific norms and practices toward a corporate standard took place,\" sociologist Susan Wright observes. \"The dawn of synthetic biology coincided with the emergence of a new ethos, one radically shaped by commerce.\"\n\nIf nothing else, all this grain would supercharge the meat industry: Reagan's first secretary of agriculture was in the hog business; his second was president of the American Meat Institute. George H. W. Bush later appointed the president of the National Cattlemen's Association to a senior USDA position.\n\nThe trick was to come up with federal policy that would allow this new technology, and the products it generated, to enter the marketplace without regulatory hassles\u2014and without worrying the public that the foods they made were somehow different from traditional foods.\n\nCreating these rules required some fancy bureaucratic footwork. Since 1958, Congress (through the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act) had mandated that \"food additives\"\u2014typically chemical ingredients added to processed foods\u2014should undergo extensive premarket safety testing, including long-term animal studies. Commonly used ingredients, like salt and pepper, were considered GRAS (for \"generally regarded as safe\") and were exempted from further testing.\n\nThe billion-dollar question was: Should genetically altered foods be considered a \"new\" food additive\u2014and thus be forced to undergo extensive testing\u2014or \"safe,\" like salt and pepper?\n\nIn the early 1990s, the FDA put together a scientific task force to study this question. A consensus quickly emerged that these new products should be developed cautiously, and should be tested to see just what impact they might have on the health of people and animals who eat them.\n\n\"The unintended effects cannot be written off so easily by just implying that they too occur in traditional breeding,\" wrote microbiologist Dr. Louis Pribyl. \"There is a profound difference between the types of unexpected effects from traditional breeding and genetic engineering.\"\n\nPribyl said applying the GRAS label to GMOs was not scientifically sound. It was, instead, \"industry's pet idea\"\u2014a way to apply a formal stamp of government approval on foods that were, in fact, a completely new thing under the sun.\n\nThe director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine went further, warning that using GMOs in animal feed could introduce unexpected toxins into meat and milk products. The head of the FDA's Biological and Organic Chemistry Section emphasized that just because GMOs had not been proven to be dangerous did not confirm their safety. Saying that GMOs were as safe as traditional foods \"conveys the impression that the public need not know when it is being exposed to new food additives.\"\n\nLikewise, deep inside the labs of government and university laboratories, enthusiasm for genetically engineered food was not nearly as uniform as its promoters in government or industry claimed. \"This technology is being promoted, in the face of concerns by respectable scientists and in the face of data to the contrary, by the very agencies which are supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,\" said Suzanne Wuerthele, a toxicologist at the EPA. \"The bottom line in my view is that we are confronted with the most powerful technology the world has ever known, and it is being rapidly deployed with almost no thought whatsoever to its consequences.\"\n\nBut given the revving engines of industry, it was tough for GMO skeptics in the scientific community to have their voices heard. University scientists applying for grants to look more closely at potential dangers of GMOs were routinely underfunded, squashed, or simply shouted down. Government scientists were stymied by the influence of the food and chemical industries, whose former executives were routinely placed at the top of the very agencies charged with regulating products made by the companies they used to work for.\n\nIt was no secret that the Reagan and Bush administrations had made subsidizing (and deregulating) these companies, and this technology, a national priority. There was no way a regulatory agency could fairly scrutinize an industry it was also funding with so much money, said Philip Regal, a professor at the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences.\n\n\"The more I interacted with biotech developers over the years, the more evident it became that they were not creating a science-based system for assessing and managing risks,\" Regal said. \"And as momentum built and pressures to be on the bandwagon mounted, people in industry and government who were alerted to potential problems were increasingly reluctant to pass the information on to superiors or to deal with it themselves. Virtually no one wanted to appear as a spoiler or an obstruction to the development of biotechnology.\"\n\nFrom biotechnology's earliest days, \"it was clearer than ever that the careers of too many thousands of bright, respected, and well-connected people were at stake\u2014and that too much investment needed to be recovered\u2014for industry or government to turn back,\" Regal said. \"The commercialization of GE foods would be allowed to advance without regard to the demands of science; and the supporting rhetoric would stay stretched well beyond the limits of fact.\"\n\nDespite this backbeat of scientific concern, the administration of George H. W. Bush\u2014with considerable input from policy executives at companies like Monsanto\u2014ruled that GMOs would not be subjected to any more testing than traditional foods. The GRAS policy would be explicitly designed not to test new food science but to assure \"the safe, speedy development of the U.S. biotechnology industry,\" Bush's FDA Commissioner David Kessler wrote.\n\nThe FDA policy made it official: the agency was \"not aware of any information showing that foods derived by these new methods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way, or that, as a class, foods developed by the new techniques present any different or greater safety concern than foods developed by traditional plant breeding.\"\n\nGenetic manipulation was no different from breeding techniques farmers had been using for centuries, Kessler argued. Properly monitored, GM foods posed no special risk and should not require advance federal approval before being sold. \"New products come to our kitchens and tables every day,\" Kessler said. \"I see no reason right now to do anything special because of these foods.\"\n\nBeyond giving a green light to the technology itself, the FDA even left the decision about whether new GM foods were GRAS to the companies themselves.\n\nThe victory of agribusiness over the FDA's own scientists furthered a decades-long tradition, in which government agencies \"have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do,\" a fifteen-year veteran of the FDA told _The New York Times._ \"What Monsanto wished for from Washington, Monsanto\u2014and by extension, the biotechnology industry\u2014got.\"\n\nGenetic engineering now had the full-throated support of the U.S. government. Administration officials and food industry groups of all kinds lined up to tout the benefits of biotechnology and celebrate the wall that had been erected to protect companies from federal oversight. The hands-off approach was framed as a fine example of what Bush administration officials called \"regulatory relief.\"\n\nSuch policy \"will speed up and simplify the process of bringing better agricultural products, developed through biotech, to consumers, food processors, and farmers,\" Vice President Dan Quayle announced. \"We will ensure that biotech products will receive the same oversight as other products, instead of being hampered by unnecessary regulation.\"\n\nQuayle's declaration put the full weight of the federal government behind a policy that had largely been dictated by agribusiness\u2014especially Monsanto, which by this time had become the world's largest developer of GM seeds.\n\n\"What Monsanto wanted (and demanded) from the FDA was a policy that projected the illusion that its foods were being responsibly regulated but that in reality imposed no regulatory requirement at all,\" writes Steven Druker, an environmental attorney and author of the book _Altered Genes, Twisted Truth_. The FDA \"ushered these controversial products onto the market by evading the standards of science, deliberately breaking the law, and seriously misrepresenting the facts\u2014and that the American people were being regularly (and unknowingly) subjected to novel foods that were abnormally risky in the eyes of the agency's own scientists.\"\n\nIn the twenty-five years since the GRAS decision, the FDA has never overturned a company's safety determination and, thus, has never required food-additive testing of any transgenic crop.\n\n### The Perils of Self-Regulation\n\nAllowing industry to regulate itself has led to a great deal of criticism, of course, since it's rarely in industry's best interest to reveal problems with its products, even when they are well known. This is not a new game, as users of countless other products\u2014from Agent Orange to cigarettes to opioid pain relievers\u2014have learned. In those cases, industry scientists knew their products were harmful, but companies continued to promote them and withhold conflicting data for years.\n\nIn 2002, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, the country's premier scientific advisory body, declared that the USDA's regulation of GMOs was \"generally superficial\": it lacked transparency, used too little external scientific and public review, and freely allowed companies to claim that their own science was \"confidential business information.\" The committee itself complained that it was denied access to the very information it needed to conduct its review\u2014and not just by the companies. The amount of information kept secret by the USDA itself \"hampers external review and transparency of the decision-making process.\"\n\nThe EPA has also come under intense criticism for\u2014among other things\u2014the way it has handled the staggering population declines of bees and monarch butterflies, both of which have been linked to chemicals sprayed on hundreds of millions of acres of GM crops. The monarch is now as much a symbol for the anti-GMO movement as the polar bear is for climate change activists.\n\nAnd the FDA? The agency's own policy states that \"it is the responsibility of the producer of a new food to evaluate the safety of the food.\" Denied essential proprietary data by companies they are supposed to oversee, the FDA \"is unable to identify unintentional mistakes, errors in data interpretation or intentional deception, making it impossible to conduct a thorough and critical review,\" a study by William Freese and David Schubert at the Center for Food Safety found.\n\nSuch voluntary self-regulation means \"government approval\" amounts to little more than a rubber stamp, Michael Hansen of the Consumers Union told me. Even though companies test their products, they have a way of doing tests over and over until they get the results they like, Hansen said, and show only favorable results to the agencies overseeing them. Companies are not always forthcoming with the data they do accumulate, and sometimes actively refuse to turn over research even when federal regulators ask for it.\n\nFor four decades, the American legal system has repeatedly upheld the industry's right to control the seeds underpinning our food. Monsanto alone filed 147 seed patent infringement lawsuits in the United States between 1997 and April 2010, settling all but nine out of court. The cases that went to court were all decided in favor of the company.\n\nNorth of the border, where GMOs are considerably less popular, it has been a bit more complicated.\n\n### Patenting Our Food: The Schmeiser Case\n\nWandering around his canola farm in Saskatchewan in the late 1990s, Percy Schmeiser noticed plants growing not just in the fields, but in a nearby drainage ditch. He did what many farmers would have done to get rid of an unwanted infestation: he sprayed the plants with glyphosate.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nThe canola plants, it turned out, had sprouted from genetically modified Roundup Ready seeds that had floated in from nearby farms. Schmeiser's neighbors\u2014and 30,000 other Canadian farmers\u2014had paid Monsanto $15 an acre for the right to use these GM seeds; their harvests constituted more than 40 percent of Canada's canola crop. Monsanto was keen to protect its product: they had farmers sign contracts agreeing not to save or replant the seeds, and they sent out inspectors to make sure the farmers were complying with seed contracts.\n\nSchmeiser had not been part of this deal. For several years, he had planted his own (non-GM) canola fields with seeds he had saved from his own plants. After discovering Roundup-resistant plants in his ditch, he wondered just how much of his farm had been contaminated by Monsanto's seeds. He sprayed three acres with glyphosate; 60 percent survived.\n\nWhen word got out that Schmeiser had acres of Monsanto-patented seeds growing in his fields, someone called the company, using an anonymous-tip line the company had set up for farmers to turn in their neighbors. Monsanto sent private investigators to patrol the roads near Schmeiser's farm. They took crop samples from his fields, and in 1998, Monsanto notified Schmeiser that he was using the company's seeds without a license.\n\nUndaunted, Schmeiser saved seeds he had harvested from plants that had survived spraying, and planted them on about 1,000 acres. Later tests would confirm that nearly 98 percent of these plants were Roundup resistant.\n\nMonsanto sued Schmeiser for patent infringement. \"We've put years, years, and years of research and time into developing this technology,\" said Randy Christenson, Monsanto's regional director in Western Canada. \"So for us to be able to recoup our investment, we have to be able to pay for that.\"\n\nSchmeiser had a different take. \"I've been farming for fifty years, and all of a sudden I have this,\" he said. \"It's very upsetting and nerve-racking to have a multi-giant corporation come after you. I don't have the resources to fight this.\"\n\nIn court, Schmeiser argued that the GM seeds on his field had arrived the same way seeds have always arrived\u2014they were blown in on the wind. \"You can't control it,\" he said. \"You can't put a fence around it and say that's where it stops. It might end up 10 miles, 20 miles away.\" Furthermore, he argued, a company should not be allowed to patent a higher life form, like a canola plant. Plants were part of the natural order of things, not widgets that came off a company's factory floor.\n\nThis was not the first time Canada's courts had to wrestle with whether a company could own a life form. The country's supreme court had previously ruled that Harvard University did not have the right to patent a genetically altered \"OncoMouse\" (a rodent genetically designed to rapidly develop cancer) even though it had taken university scientists seventeen years to develop it. Courts in Europe and the United States had sided with Harvard, but Schmeiser argued that the Canadian ruling\u2014that an advanced life form could not be patented\u2014ought to apply in his case too.\n\nIn 2001, a trial judge rejected Schmeiser's argument and fined him $20,000 for infringing on Monsanto's patent. On appeal\u2014and in a show of just how complex biology and patent law can be\u2014the Supreme Court agreed, but its 5\u20134 decision was split. The court's minority argued that Monsanto had claimed patent protection over the _gene_ and the _genetic process_ , not the life form (that is, the plant itself), and that Schmeiser should not be held liable for using an (unpatentable) plant. The majority, interestingly, agreed: _plants_ could not be patented in Canada. But the five justices also ruled that a plant's genes _could_ be patented: by \"using\" the plant, Schmeiser had in effect \"used\" the patented gene.\n\nThe ruling forced Schmeiser to turn over any Roundup Ready seeds or crops on his property. In a small consolation, the court ruled that Schmeiser did not have to pay Monsanto for the profits he had made from his crop. Monsanto, for its part, made sure the world knew its point of view. \"The truth is Percy Schmeiser is not a hero,\" the company says. \"He's simply a patent infringer who knows how to tell a good story.\"\n\nIn effect, the Canadian court gave Monsanto legal control over something it could not patent\u2014Roundup Ready canola plants\u2014by giving it legal control over something it could control\u2014the plant's genes. In Canada at least, plants themselves are still not patentable, and farmers are allowed some protection if they don't intentionally use patented seeds. Canadian growers also (for the moment, at least) still enjoy a \"farmer's privilege\"\u2014protected by the national Plant Breeders Rights Act\u2014that allows them to save and replant traditionally bred seeds.\n\nThis is in direct contrast to laws in the United States, where the Supreme Court has ruled that plants can be patented _in spite_ of laws protecting a farmer's right to save seeds. This position\u2014promoting the rights of large companies over the rights of small farmers\u2014is very much in keeping with the American government's longstanding and unwavering support of the biotech industry.\n\nIn the end, the early (and ongoing) rush to develop, plant, and profit from GM seeds has simply outpaced and overwhelmed our ability to understand their impact on our lives, John Vandermeer, the agroecologist at the University of Michigan, told me.\n\n\"I would be far less negative about GMOs had the people developing [them] taken the same approach as they did at Asilomar,\" Vandermeer told me. \"They could have said, 'Let's have a moratorium on selling them until we can be sure that they are safe.' But partly because of the profits involved, that was never done. Had we done this, it's my guess that Bt and Roundup transgenic crops never would have been developed and spread throughout the landscape. What we are discovering is that they should probably never have been used.\"\n\nIt's not just that such company-directed testing might miss (or cover up) a dangerous product. Chemical-intensive farming has also led to a tremendous loss of biodiversity\u2014both above and below ground, Vandermeer says. From the massive genetic biodiversity of traditional agroecosystems, we now have millions upon millions of acres planted with the same hybrid corn variety. Soil, a fantastic ecology of interdependent living organisms, has been reduced to a medium \"as devoid of life as possible,\" Vandermeer writes.\n\nThis positive feedback loop\u2014vast acreage planted with single crops, all propped up by rivers of chemical fertilizers, which then cause the monocultures to flourish\u2014has also created a dramatic increase in the potential for collapse. All it takes is for an insect (or a virus) to pick the lock of a plant's defenses, and an entire crop can disappear. A nineteenth-century blight in Ireland ruined a potato crop, and fully a million people starved to death. In the 1950s, the Gros Michel banana\u2014planted on monoculture plantations across Latin America\u2014was virtually wiped out by a fungus. Today, the Cavendish\u2014the Gros Michel's successor and likely the only banana you have ever eaten, whether you've eaten it in Los Angeles, New York, London, or Hong Kong\u2014is grown on vast plantations in Asia, Australia, and Central America. And a fungus, called Tropical Race 4, has picked its lock. Unless breeders (including geneticists) can figure out a way to get banana trees to develop resistance, there will likely come a day very soon when we\u2014outside the tropics, at least\u2014will have no more bananas.\n\nHere at home, this system also means that companies get to decide what products to create. In the United States, GMOs are designed more to make corn for cheese puffs and cheap hamburgers than to develop nutritionally dense food for people either here or in developing countries. Such uses cheapen the promise of food technology by using it to create empty calories and poor nutrition, serving industry profits but not the general welfare of either people or the planet.\n\nWithout broader research conducted outside the food industry itself, the editors of the scientific journal _Nature_ say, the development of genetic engineering \"will continue to be profit-driven, limiting the chance for many of the advances that were promised thirty years ago\u2014such as feeding the planet's burgeoning population sustainably, reducing the environmental footprint of farming and delivering products that amaze and delight.\"\n\nLeaving the power of GM technology to a group of global food conglomerates is plainly problematic for a whole array of reasons. But there are small pockets out there, mostly in university and other nonprofit research labs, where an entirely different approach to genetic engineering is taking place. Because while most GMOs currently bolster the production of cheap, unhealthy, processed food, there are scientists at work developing foods that could actually change the world for the better.\n\n## 3.\n\n## Mapping and Engineering and Playing Prometheus\n\n As you walk into the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, the first thing you see is a giant double helix engraved on a large piece of Plexiglas. Inside, adorning the walls, are vivid, Technicolor photographs that look like images beamed back from the Hubble Space Telescope: streaks and smears of purples, greens, and reds that could be gas clouds swirling through star clusters. They aren't. They are pictures of cellular components like mitochondria, taken with nanoscale bioimaging so impressive that its inventor won a Nobel Prize\u2014and so sensitive that an entire wing of the building had to be built on a special slab to prevent vibrations from ruining photographic precision.\n\nDeep inside the building, Blake Meyers leads me through a room given over to racks of whirring computers. There are wires and carcasses of old machines everywhere, and a power generator the size of three refrigerators, whose excess heat is balanced by an air-conditioning unit mounted on the building's roof.\n\nThese computers are \"energy hogs,\" Meyers said; if the power goes out, the backup batteries can support them for only about fifteen minutes. The day I visited, Meyers said one of his servers had been crunching data for one project for six weeks straight.\n\nMeyers is a prominent plant geneticist, with degrees from the University of Chicago and UC-Davis, who also did postdoc work for the agrochemical giant DuPont. He is a vegetarian and deeply conscious of environmental problems. Engineering new kinds of plants, he says, could fix problems on a global scale.\n\nTake nitrogen fixation, Meyers said. Modern agriculture uses huge amounts of natural gas to make and add nitrogen fertilizer to fields growing corn, because corn plants suck so many nutrients from the soil. But if you could engineer corn to pull nitrogen straight out of the atmosphere, think of how much synthetic nitrogen you could stop making and applying.\n\n\"This is science fiction right now, but if we could produce corn that fixes nitrogen, we could eliminate hundreds of millions of units of natural gas, plus eliminate massive environmental sources of nitrogen that currently are emitted or run off,\" he said. \"You would have done a really beneficial thing. You would be one huge step closer to growing corn under organic conditions.\"\n\nMeyers lists other promising projects: creating a calorie-dense rice that also fixes its own nitrogen _and_ resists insects _and_ resists drought. \"Think of what you could do,\" he said. \"You could create a supercrop. But you're not going to get there through natural selection and traditional breeding. This would be like super-speeding evolution.\"\n\nMeyers is also entirely skeptical about the ability of small-scale farming to feed the world.\n\n\"We're looking at a future with 9 billion people, and it may be as many as 12 billion\u2014how are we going to feed them, plus generate sustainable fuels and bioproducts?\" Meyers asked me. \"Through small-scale farming? There's not an ice cube's chance in hell that we can do that. We need substantial bumps in agricultural productivity if we're going to provide the resources that people are expecting. Addressing that need is going to take every tool in our toolbox. That's why we think GM technology has to play a role in this.\"\n\nInside his laboratory, Meyers drew me near a machine and asked a lab assistant to punch up a screen. There appeared before me an image of a grid, three squares by three, labeled \"Tile 13.\" Again, if I hadn't known better, I might have assumed I was looking at a photograph of distant galaxies: blurring patches comprising thousands of tiny spots of black, white, and gray.\n\nWhat we were looking at was in fact a constellation of \"small RNAs\" from soybean leaves. It is in this laboratory that Meyers\u2014like scientists all over the world\u2014is either (depending on your point of view) extending a long tradition of plant breeding or taking a Promethean leap once left to the gods.\n\n### The Genetic Equivalent of War and Peace\n\nUnderstanding genetics is frequently compared to learning a language. Just as letters and words are arranged in certain patterns to transmit information on the page (the metaphor goes), so are microscopic elements inside cells arranged in predictable ways. Once these elements have been assigned letters, their combinations (or sequences) can be read just like words, sentences, or entire volumes. And just as the twenty-six letters in the English language can lead to more than a million words (and a virtually infinite number of unique sentences, paragraphs, and books), so do the four letters at the foundation of genetics lead to an unimaginably diverse number of organisms.\n\nThe \"letters\" of genetics, called nucleotides, are A (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine), and G (guanine). Inside the nucleus of all living cells, these nucleotides form chains that microbiologists can read: AATTCCGG, for example. Given their chemical makeup, each individual nucleotide is attracted to a very particular mate: A (which has two rings of nitrogen) will bond only with T (a single ring); the two-ring G will pair only with the single-ring C. This makes the pairing of letter chains very predictable: our chain of AATTCCGG, for example, will bond (and form a genetic \"word\") with a complementary, mirrored chain of TTAAGGCC.\n\nComplete sequences (the \"chapters\") of these genetic words are called chromosomes, which can be made up of thousands of different genes (and therefore millions of individual nucleotides). Chromosomes are so densely packed that, linked together and stretched out, the DNA molecules in just one of your cells would be taller than you are. Lined up end to end, all the DNA in all your cells would stretch\u2014in a very thin line\u2014some 6 billion miles.\n\nAll together, an organism's chromosomal chapters make up its entire book-length genome. It took about 3.1 million letters, 588,000 words, and 365 chapters to make _War and Peace_. It takes 3.2 billion nucleotide base pairs, 19,000 genes, and 23 pairs of chromosomes to make a human genome. More relevant for Blake Meyers is the soybean genome, which has more than 1.1 billion base pairs, 46,000 genes, and 20 chromosomes. Or the maize genome, which has 2.3 billion base pairs and 32,000 genes.\n\nCounting genes is one thing. Understanding how they work has been another thing entirely. Scientists once summed up the way genes control cell function with a simple formula known as the Central Dogma: DNA codes for RNA and RNA codes for protein. DNA contains a cell's blueprint; RNA transmits the blueprint to create proteins; proteins carry out a cell's functional tasks, which in turn determine the structure and behavior of the organism itself.\n\nAs our understanding of genetics has sped up, however, new molecular worlds have opened up. When scientists sequenced the human genome a decade ago, it was somewhat like looking at a blueprint in a foreign language\u2014everything was marked in its proper location, but no one could tell what it all meant. Less than 2 percent of our genome seemed to code for proteins that actually do anything, so the vast majority of our DNA has been like biology's dark matter, acting in ways that remain mysterious and only partially understood. For years, long stretches of noncoding genes were simply tossed off as \"junk DNA.\"\n\nThat view has changed. A five-year project called ENCODE\u2014for \"Encyclopedia of DNA Elements\"\u2014found that as much as 80 percent of the human genome is biologically \"functional,\" meaning that even if certain genes don't directly code proteins, they can still influence how nearby genes are expressed, and in which types of cells. These noncoding regions of DNA can have major bearing on diseases and genetic mutations. Because the genes of an organism are interconnected, a single disturbance in gene organization (or function) can affect multiple gene systems. This has potentially serious implications for cellular function and the overall health of the organism. Consider that altering a single letter of the genetic code of a single gene can be a significant step leading to cancer\u2014a disease that involves alterations in the function of multiple genes, proteins, and cellular systems.\n\nSo if every cell in an organism has the same DNA\u2014if the cells in your eyes contain the genes for your toes, and vice versa\u2014why is it that cells are so different from one another, and do one thing, and not another? In other words, why do cells allow you to see out of your eyes and not out of your toes? In the plant world, why is a leaf cell not the same as a root cell or a flower cell? Understanding this requires going back to the idea of genetics as both a code (an \"alphabet\") and a language (a mode of \"expression\").\n\nThe answer lies in the way genes are expressed. Since every cell in an organism contains exactly the same genes, it is in this \"expression\"\u2014as genes are either \"turned on\" or \"turned off\"\u2014that cells become distinct. It's gene expression that causes them to become either a root cell or a leaf cell, and collectively create plants\u2014and whole other organisms\u2014that are distinct. Changing a single letter can make a huge difference. Just as the difference between the words \"tasty\" and \"nasty\" is a single letter, so (in humans) a slight shift in nucleotide sequences could cause changes in amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, that can cause sickle-cell anemia, or Parkinson's, or Alzheimer's.\n\nThe code itself, the sequence of A's, C's, G's, and T's, is inscribed in DNA. But for this code, known as an organism's genotype, to orchestrate an organism's structure and behavior, known as its phenotype, the code must first be \"transcribed\" (inside the nucleus) from DNA to RNA and then \"translated\" (outside the nucleus) into a protein. And that requires an understanding not just of DNA, but of RNA as well.\n\nTo continue the book metaphor, think of an organism's DNA as a very expensive, rare edition; it is the original version of an organism's genetic story. If it is changed or damaged (if it \"mutates\"), the organism may no longer be the same.\n\nRNA is like a photocopy, a \"transcription,\" of paragraphs out of this rare book: it is not the original version, but it contains all the genetic information contained by a short section of the DNA. Unlike DNA, RNA has the capacity to travel: it can move outside the cell's nucleus, into a cell's cytoplasm, or it can travel between cells. Some recent studies have even shown RNA moving between organisms. Once in the cytoplasm, the RNA can be \"translated,\" converting the genetic code into a language made of different letters, the twenty amino acids that make up proteins. These proteins interact with and can make or modify other proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates\u2014an organism's plumbers, carpenters, and electricians\u2014that carry out the work of a cell.\n\nHere's how it works: Just as it does when a cell begins to replicate itself, a sequence of DNA that is being transcribed first unwinds inside the nucleus. But in this case, rather than replicate into an identical double helix of DNA, one strand of the DNA falls to the side, and the other serves as a template for a new strand of RNA. This \"transcript\" resembles DNA in almost every respect, except that the RNA contains the nucleotide U (for uracil) instead of T. So a DNA strand of AGCT would be transcribed into an RNA strand of UCGA.\n\nOnce the transcript of the RNA from the gene is complete (its start and expression activity determined by the \"promoter\" at the beginning and its length determined by the \"terminator\" sequences at the end of the original strand of DNA), the single strand of RNA separates from the single strand of DNA, which then twists up again with its original mate. The strand of RNA (known as messenger RNA, or mRNA, for the protein \"message\" that it encodes) then migrates outside the nucleus, where it binds to a ribosome and the ribosome begins (with the help of transfer RNA, or tRNA) to \"translate\" the information the mRNA contains from the DNA into the language of amino acids.\n\nBut it gets more complex still; it turns out that the Central Dogma\u2014DNA makes RNA, RNA makes proteins\u2014may have been a bit too dogmatic after all. There are RNAs that influence gene expression that are themselves influenced by small or micro RNAs. Some scientists estimate that, in the human genome, a third of all genes may be regulated by micro RNAs\u2014amazing given that no one even knew about them twenty years ago. And the growing field of epigenetics has shown that gene expression can be determined not just by genetic information alone, but also by stored chemical influences from _outside_ a cell, or even outside the organism. (Some research suggests that even mental health and stress affect an organism's genetics and its offspring via epigenetic mechanisms, though there is still much to learn about this.)\n\nUnderstanding the science of the genome and genetics is vital to the GMO debate. Genetic engineering is fundamentally different from conventional plant breeding. With conventional breeding, you take pollen from one plant and put it on the stigma of another, and hope for a beneficial outcome. It's a comparatively uncontrolled process, and in some cases, depending on the complexity of the trait you're studying, you don't know if you are going to find what you're looking for.\n\nTypically, when you have a breeding program, you're trying to improve the bearing height of a tree, or the taste or texture of the fruit, but there are a million other things going on at the same time. There's never really _proof_ that something will work, there's only _history_ \u2014these combinations have worked this way in the past. But within this process there remains a degree of mystery. Flower color and disease resistance can be predicted pretty accurately, because they're controlled by just one or a few genes. But yield and adaptation to environment\u2014these are much more complex because they involve multiple controlling genes and are influenced by environmental conditions. This work requires many more plants and growing them in numerous locations.\n\nExploring these complexities, especially at the level of small RNAs, is what interests Blake Meyers. Working with colleagues from Stanford and UCLA on a sizable grant from the National Science Foundation, Meyers recently helped sequence the small RNAs in the genes of corn anthers, the male reproductive organs in corn plants. He and his colleagues are also creating an \"atlas\" of the small RNAs in different plant organs, tissues, and cells; they have worked out a spatiotemporal map of these molecules in the anthers to help them understand how, where, and when they develop and function in maize reproduction.\n\n\"The work is slow, tedious, and expensive at this point, so we only design the experiments that we think will tell us something really useful,\" Meyers said. \"You never know where the breakthroughs will come for practical purposes. Who knows when we'll find a key regulator that will fix drought resistance or assist with fertility or hybrid seed production? The odds of one lab finding it are low, but multiply that by the hundreds of labs doing this type of work, and I'm optimistic that the field will come up with some important solutions. The rate of discovery is good and picking up speed.\"\n\nWorking backward, then, the science of gene sequencing is the effort of pulling apart the genetic book to examine how its individual chapters and sentences and words are constructed and arranged. How does their order affect the behavior of the organism as a whole?\n\nThis is the mysterious world that Blake Meyers has spent his career trying to penetrate.\n\n\"Remember, there are millions, billions, or even trillions of DNA\/RNA\/protein\/gene-expression processes under way that led to every bite of food that you eat, from every plant or animal that has been consumed in the history of the world,\" Meyers told me. \"I would say all but a relative handful of those have never been studied, perhaps never even characterized, and perhaps vary from one bite of food to another.\"\n\nMeyers and his lab assistants begin sequencing genes by taking a leaf from a soybean plant, for example; freezing it in liquid nitrogen; then grinding it up to break up the leaf's cells. Then, using a series of chemical processes that shatter cell walls, the team extracts the plant's DNA or RNA, and loads them\u2014in chains of fifty to two hundred nucleotides\u2014into a three-inch \"flow cell,\" a kind of glass slide with eight hair-thin capillaries running through it. The slides are then snapped into an Illumina HiSeq gene sequencer.\n\nDepending on whether the team is working on fragments of DNA or short strands of RNA, Meyers's team then needs to code their samples by pumping tiny chains of nucleotides through the flow cells, where they are \"amplified\" in a series of chain reactions that replicate the sequence millions of times.\n\nFluorescently charged nucleotides are hit with laser light and photographed at four different wavelengths, showing up on a computer screen as innumerable pinhead-sized \"spots\" of DNA\u2014the spots that, to my eye, looked like clusters of stars. The microscopic scale of these spots is hard to comprehend. The images are actually measured in microns\u2014that is, each spot is a thousand times smaller than a millimeter\u2014yet each one contains up to 5,000 copies of the same short fragment of genes. And in any series of images, there might be 200 million spots, each one containing a different version of the original piece of DNA or RNA. On each slide, the instruments used by Meyers (and his computers) can detect 1.2 billion sequences of DNA fragments.\n\nThe process requires ten terabytes of computer space for each two-week run of the instrument, about what it would take to store the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress.\n\n\"Sequencing a genome is like putting together _War and Peace_ ,\" Meyers said. \"It's long, and content rich, but these machines can only get you words or paragraphs at a time. The machine generating shorter reads of DNA can find you all the times the word 'the' appears, so then it's up to you to find all the places where 'the' appears in the book. But some machines can now give you sentences or entire paragraphs, so you can make much quicker sense of the whole.\n\n\"This is like making millions of copies of _War and Peace_. The computer can overlap the fragmented text and look for places where Paragraph 1001 ends and Paragraph 1002 begins, and repeat that process millions of times, analyzing millions of short stretches of words, and incrementally assembling sentences, paragraphs, and whole chapters. Eventually this can help you figure out the sequence of the entire text.\"\n\nMeyers's team needs so many copies because, statistically, there is always the chance they might find a glitch\u2014a missing paragraph (or ten paragraphs). The longer the strings of text, the easier it is to get recognizable, repeated, and accurate strings.\n\n\"As biologists, we're designing experiments to take advantage of these sequences to look into solving practical problems, like drought resistance,\" Meyers said. \"What genes are expressed when plants are distressed? We can compare stressed plants to non-stressed plants. These transcripts are like short-term memory. If the plant were a computer, we'd want to know: Under these conditions, what software has it been running? It's like asking an iPhone, 'What apps have you been using to solve the problems you faced today?' If we looked at your iPhone and saw you'd been using the Lonely Planet app for New Delhi, or looking at the Urban Spoon app, from that information, from that software, we could tell what you were up to. It's the same with plants, looking at their patterns of gene activity.\"\n\n### Tinkering with the Genetic Machine\n\nIf understanding a genome is like learning a language, Meyers told me, then using genetics to work on plants is like using a repair manual to fix a faulty wire in a car.\n\n\"A cell is like a big machine,\" Meyers said. \"Genes are the blueprints, and proteins are like the different parts of a car. So let's say you have a warning light in your car, and that light means you have a loose wire. You touch the wire and it shocks you. It's not healthy to have that loose wire. In the old days, you would go in there and add a plastic cap. The anti-GMO argument is that this is not the same car; it's been modified by this protective cap. Even though the phenotype itself is better\u2014it's preventing you from getting shocked.\n\n\"There are new methods that are more like this analogy: 'Let's go in there with a tool, and remove that wire altogether, or unscrew that bolt. Now you've got the car, but removed the offending wire, and you've taken the tool with you. Is that modified car something that you are unhappy with? It's better than having that protective cap.\"\n\nIn the early days of genetic engineering, scientists used .22 caliber rounds\u2014a \"gene gun\"\u2014to literally blast gene sequences into a plant's cells. Scientists would coat tiny particles of gold with thousands (or millions) of copies of a specific gene sequence they knew would confer a phenotype of interest (for example, making a plant resistant to an herbicide like glyphosate). They would then shoot the gold particles into a group of plant cells. The chances that the gene sequence would actually integrate into the genome in a way that was functional were less than a million to one, but do it enough times (or with enough copies of the gene) and you'll eventually find one cell that lives and has an integrated and functional copy of the gene.\n\nThe group of cells would then be treated with glyphosate (aka Roundup), and all of them would die except for a select few. Once a surviving cell was found to have absorbed the foreign gene sequence, it would be allowed to recover and encouraged to proliferate. These cells, now structurally Roundup resistant, could be regenerated by a process of tissue culture into an entire plant.\n\nMeyers doesn't use the gene gun in his lab. Like most of his peers, he uses a bacterium (known as _Agrobacterium tumefaciens_ ) to do the work instead. With a natural ability to insert their own DNA into plant cells, this soil bacterium can be outfitted with gene sequences scientists want to see integrated into a plant's own genome. Plants are dipped in a solution full of the bacteria, then covered up. The bacterium, a plant pathogen, is effective at infecting the plant and will find its way into the plant stem cells, transferring the foreign DNA into the plant genome just as it evolved to do, and creating a stable transgenic plant.\n\nIn his laboratory's \"green vaults\"\u2014growth chambers that resemble walk-in food coolers\u2014Meyers showed me plants maintained with high humidity and variable light and temperature. Inside were hundreds of examples of two plant species that have become the workhorses for plant geneticists: tobacco and Arabidopsis, the latter a member of the brassica family that includes things like broccoli.\n\nThese plants are like lab mice for plants\u2014they flower, they reproduce, they respond to stressors. And the research Meyers is doing is similar to the basic research biomedical researchers do with mice: both are trying to unlock the mysteries of the ways organisms function.\n\nThe Arabidopsis genome is a fraction\u2014perhaps 5 percent\u2014the size of the corn genome. It is small enough to grow several plants to maturity in a single coffee cup, which makes it much easier (and cheaper) to work with than corn, which is happiest in a field, well separated from its neighbors. And since \"core responses\" are similar across all sorts of plants, scientists can play around with an Arabidopsis plant and its genome and extrapolate conclusions that will likely hold true for corn or soybeans.\n\n\"Let's say you take two varieties of Arabidopsis,\" Meyers said. \"One grows well in moist climate like Germany. One grows in dry climate like Utah. You can make a cross between them, then use the progeny and traits segregating in those progeny to map onto the chromosomes the loci controlling responses to these climates. You can then identify the locations in the genome that contribute genes important in the line for Utah for drought resistance that may be missing in the line from Germany.\n\n\"Say that you've found gene X that confers the ability to survive in drought conditions. As a geneticist, to test that function and demonstrate causality, you may want to break gene X, to see what happens when the plant normally happy in Utah loses the gene you think contributes to fitness under dry conditions. Or you can misregulate gene X, or modify key parts of the protein that gene X produces. With the resulting data, we can make insights into how gene X functions and confers the phenotype that had attributed to it through a standard genetic approach. For all this, your work is greatly facilitated by having a plant into which you can easily introduce the gene. With Arabidopsis, you have a generation time of eight weeks, lots of molecular tools and preexisting data, and great toolkit for molecular biology. It's really easy to work with, particularly relative to most crops.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nTHE WORLD INSIDE a plant laboratory is so ordered, so controlled, that scientists can be forgiven for their frustration at the screaming debate that has developed over the work they do. \"Forty years ago when I was in school, we'd see farms using chemicals to prevent diseases, where the soil was sterile because of the methyl bromide used as a fungicide and biocide for strawberries,\" Jim Carrington of the Danforth Center in St. Louis told me. \"We would visit strawberry fields in California and say, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was a different way to do this, to use a plant's own genetics to fight off diseases more effectively, so we wouldn't have to douse them with fungicides\u2014some of which do have adverse human health effects? And wouldn't it be great if we had plants that help build the soil, rather than forcing us to lose carbon and other organic matter?' We'd imagine we could improve plant genetics, and now some of that has come to fruition. We have low- (or no) till farming, doing all those things that fall under desired practices to promote sustainability. As a scientist who envisioned many of those things\u2014to see all those aims co-opted by groups that are antagonistic to science\u2014is really frustrating.\"\n\nScientists are trained to discuss data, not to make political arguments, Blake Meyers said. \"We aren't trained in arguments about whether you prefer organic or nonorganic food,\" Meyers said. \"If you tell me this gene is bad for you, we can have that discussion. Show me the data, I might say. But those aren't the arguments that we are often having. It's like a discussion about evolution versus intelligent design. There is no science supporting intelligent design, so to a scientist this debate will be fruitless, as it's irrational. There's no common ground between the rational scientist and the passionate believer. With GMOs, you get the same sort of situation.\n\n\"On the public side, arguments against GMOs are often not grounded in science,\" he said. \"They may be based on 'the way things should be,' or 'the way things used to be,' or based on someone's individual opinion. This can be very frustrating for scientists. Those are arguments that don't fit the data. Show me an argument based on data, and we can have a reasonable or at least scientific discussion.\"\n\nThe frustration felt by Carrington and Meyers\u2014that arguments mounted by anti-GMO skeptics are not based on data or are even \"antagonistic to science\"\u2014is a common refrain that, to the ears of skeptics, sounds ideological in its own right. Scientists have a way of claiming that their field\u2014or the scientific method itself\u2014is somehow beyond reproach. But no matter the natural laws they seek to discover, scientists are people too\u2014and are thus hamstrung by their own preconceptions, desires, and intellectual parameters. John Fagan is a molecular biologist whose professional change of heart on GMOs has made him a leading figure in the scientific debate. In 1994, Fagan became so concerned about the direction of genetic engineering he returned more than $613,000 in grant money to the National Institutes of Health. He quit an academic job to found the Global ID Group, which developed tools for testing genetically modified food, and now directs Earth Open Source, a leading anti-GMO clearinghouse whose publication _GMO Myths and Truths_ has become a bible for GMO critics.\n\n\"There are bona fide scientists who are doing genetic engineering of crops in one way or another and they really sincerely believe that there is not a problem,\" Fagan said. \"You can get all the way through your PhD without ever having a course in the philosophy of science, or a course that discusses the social or environmental impact of technology. The training is very focused on technical aspects of doing molecular biology in one area or another, and as a result you end up with scientists who are really experts in their own area but oftentimes do not understand the relationship between their work and the world out there. Many of them have the attitude that it would be compromising for them to think about or be involved in a debate about larger issues. They feel that they need to be _scientific_ about what they do, and impartial, and true to numbers they get in a lab. There is some merit in that, but on the other side, to have only that perspective on whether a technology is commercialized on a large scale in the world is a very risky thing.\"\n\nThe safety of genetic engineering is not nearly as settled as the majority view claims it is, Fagan maintains.\n\n\"The evolution of the debate on GMOs has really evolved over the last twenty years,\" Fagan said. \"Early on we were saying, 'Based on what we know about how genes function, and what we know about the process, we feel this is a very sloppy and imprecise process that could lead to unexpected problems.' Today, there is lots of evidence that says GMOs do _not_ function the way we predicted, and there are a lot of unintended side effects that have come up.\"\n\nThe prevailing idea, the Central Dogma\u2014that inserting a single gene into the DNA of another organism will cause a single, predictable change in a single protein, followed by a single change at the cellular level of the organism, a single change at the tissue and organ levels, and a single change at the level of the plant as a whole\u2014fails to recognize the complexity and interconnectedness of the many components of living organisms, according to Fagan.\n\nIt is now thought that most genes encode not just one protein but two, three, four, or more, and that the regulatory sequences associated with one gene can influence the expression of neighboring genes. When a new gene is inserted into the DNA of an organism, that gene is likely to influence the expression not just of one gene, but several. Likewise when the newly inserted gene is expressed as a protein, that protein will not have just a single effect, but several. It will influence multiple cellular processes and, subsequently, multiple processes in tissues, organs, and the entire plant. In other words, instead of a single, predictable effect, the insertion of a single gene can result in multiple effects, which can themselves affect many other processes, from the cellular level on up. The more effects, the more unpredictability.\n\n\"There are spatial and temporal aspects of this,\" Richard Manshardt, a plant virologist who helped develop the GM papaya in Hawaii, told me. \"The idea that a gene occupies a particular location, and makes a particular protein, and that protein has a single function, is long outdated. Genes are complicated, and they can interact with different parts of the genome in different ways and at different times. It's a much more dynamic system, and this is even before RNA. This is just in the coding sequence of DNA. If there are two functional units, one might interact with a different gene on a different part of the chromosome. For sure, science is always finding out how ignorant we are.\"\n\nAnd consider that there are over 20,000 genes in the human genome, but in excess of 200,000 proteins\u2014yet only a small fraction of DNA actually codes for proteins. What is the rest of DNA doing? We don't really know. What was once considered \"junk DNA\" is only now beginning to be understood\u2014which is further reason for caution when spreading engineered genes across the globe, Fagan said.\n\n\"My belief is that nature is parsimonious in what it does,\" he said. \"It doesn't waste anything. There are those hubristic opinions that say, 'If we don't understand it, it doesn't exist, or it's superfluous.' But that's the kind of thinking that allows people to be comfortable with the idea of going in and manipulating new genes in very sloppy ways and being so confident in putting them on millions of acres, and for decades. That kind of logic is really risky.\"\n\nArguments about GMO technology are one thing, in other words. The real anxiety arrives when the technology is applied systematically, across wide swaths of the continent and the globe\u2014almost all of it in the service of industrial food. A big part of the problem is that a great deal of university science is funded by industry, or by a federal government in full-throated support of industry, Larry Bohlen told me. Bohlen is a veteran environmental activist who made international headlines fifteen years ago when he discovered that a GM corn (known as StarLink and approved only for animal feed) had made it into the human food supply.\n\nConsider the funding that flows from the USDA into research on GMOs. \"When I looked at it in 2002, it was $193 million for GMO research, of which $3 million was to look at potential environmental problems\u2014or about 1.5 percent\u2014and zero for health effects,\" Bohlen said. \"That would be $2 billion over the last ten years. If I want to survive in academia, of course I'm going to go after the piece of the pie that is 98.5 percent of the budget. There's no real blame in that\u2014you can just look at it objectively and see that most of the money is going to the promotion of GMOs, so that's where the scientists are going. And somebody is setting that budget.\"\n\nBlake Meyers is matter-of-fact when it comes to the funding of his\u2014and all\u2014scientific research. His work is supported by the NSF and the USDA, but he has also gotten money from the big industrial players: DuPont, Dow, Syngenta, BASF. The building that houses his lab was constructed in the mid-1990s, with funds from the University of Delaware, the state of Delaware, and DuPont, whose world headquarters are just up the road in Wilmington. The institute was designed as a hub for research and teaching in the life sciences, but also to support the development of start-up biotech companies.\n\n\"Thirty years ago the university got 40 percent of its budget from the state,\" Meyers said. \"Now it gets 12 percent. The funding rate for federal grants has declined significantly as well. As these sources of funding have declined, there's been a push to diversify the sources of funding for research. So as scientists, you have to find a way to support your lab and support your graduate students. I'm a basic research scientist. Industry comes to me, and they don't give me money for science because they think I'm a great guy. They say, 'We don't know how to measure small RNAs, and we need some help.' My academic group has expertise that can help them to accomplish their goals, and academics can also learn from projects with our industry colleagues.\"\n\nThis dynamic\u2014the drying up of publicly funded research, and its replacement by research paid for by industry\u2014naturally results in an agricultural system dictated by industry, critics say. But the larger issue has to do with the way this thinking\u2014manipulating genetics to serve industrial purposes\u2014has changed the way scientists see the world. Cells are not really like machines, as Meyers suggests, and tinkering with genes is not really like tinkering with a car engine, Craig Holdrege, a scientist and philosopher who runs the Nature Institute in New York, told me. Like organisms out in the world, genes operate in dynamic systems, and both context and timing are far more complex than most scientists allow.\n\n\"In a way we're treating organisms as if they were made up of independent parts, and you can put things in or exchange them, and come up with a result that you (as a human being) like,\" Holdrege said. \"You think you have that degree of control, and you can manipulate that organism to do what you want it to do. But if you read in the literature of genetics and epigenetics, it's completely clear that context matters, that timing matters, and you cannot say that there is a very particular 'this' that always causes a particular 'that.' That's what we've all been indoctrinated to think. Even though the literature is screaming that at us, the habit of thought about causal mechanisms is very deeply entrenched and not easy to overcome, or to move beyond, or to see its limitations. We need to take more seriously the fluidity, the plasticity, and the interconnectedness of all structures and processes.\"\n\nHow you feel about GMOs, whether you are a consumer or a biologist, may have less to do with your grasp of complex science or tangled agricultural history and more to do with how you view your place in the world. Yale University's Dan Kahan recently asked more than 1,500 Americans to rate the threat of climate change on a scale of 0 to 10, then correlated their responses with their scientific literacy. He found that higher literacy was associated with stronger views at _both_ ends of the spectrum. Science literacy, in other words, promoted polarization, not consensus. People use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.\n\nSimilar passions have polarized the country on GMOs, in part because so many of the issues are the same as they are with climate change: big corporations, big government, big fears.\n\nAmericans fall into two basic camps, Kahan says. Those who think of themselves as \"egalitarian\" or \"communitarian\" are generally suspicious of industry, which they would like overseen by regulators. In contrast, people who see themselves as \"hierarchical\" or \"individualistic\" respect leaders of industry and dislike government interference, which they presume would lead to taxes or regulations. Take a barber in a rural town in South Carolina, Kahan writes. If his customers were skeptical about climate change, would it be smart for the barber to urge them to petition Congress to limit industrial emissions? If he did, Kahan writes, he would find himself \"out of a job.\"\n\nWhen we argue about GMOs, or climate change, in other words, we are also arguing about who we are and what our crowd believes. \"It's fascinating, almost mesmerizing, how personally involved we get in these things,\" Richard Manshardt, the Hawaiian papaya researcher, told me. \"We don't want to be manipulated. We want to control our destiny, and sometimes that means doing absolutely stupid and irrational things. People think, 'GMOs are bad because the group I'm with doesn't like them,' and it ends up being all about my standing within my group. Your own logic, your own sense of what's right, gets challenged, and most of us are not comfortable with changing that. We are not open to new kinds of challenges.\"\n\nOf course, this works both ways. It's not just members of the \"unscientific public\" who fear being seen as outliers in their own social group. It is scientists too. Indeed, in its intensity\u2014as well as the size of the stakes\u2014the scientific debate over GMOs has become almost theological, Brian Snyder, the head of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, told me. \"We're not just talking about data, we're talking about which worldview to fit data _into_ ,\" Snyder said. \"It's not just this side and that side. People use the same science and reach different conclusions. At the very least, scientists are making subjective decisions about what to study, and often their results will follow from this subjectivity.\n\n\"It's fascinating to me that so much of the technology is being developed in order to address problems caused by the previous technology,\" Snyder said. \"So when you boil that down you realize there's sort of an undying faith that answers are always going to come out of the laboratory, that we're just one discovery away from solving it all.\"\n\nHeisenberg's uncertainty principle suggests that a scientist's worldview has a great deal to say about what he will get from his data, Snyder said. \"We really are right down to pointing out world issues, paradigm issues. We have no effective way of carrying on a conversation about conflicting worldviews. We used to chop the heads off people who said the earth revolves around the sun.\"\n\n### The S\u00e9ralini Affair\n\nIf ever there was a moment when scientists were ready to chop off some heads, it came after a journal article claimed to prove that GMOs\u2014and the common herbicide glyphosate\u2014caused cancer and premature death in rats. The study, by Gilles-\u00c9ric S\u00e9ralini of the University of Caen in Normandy, France, monitored two hundred rats for two years. The rats were divided into ten groups, each with ten males and ten females. Some groups were fed different amounts of a strain of Monsanto corn (called NK603) that had been engineered to resist glyphosate. Some corn had been sprayed with glyphosate, some had not. Other groups were fed glyphosate in their drinking water. There was also a control group, which was fed non-engineered corn and plain water.\n\nS\u00e9ralini found that female rats that ate both the engineered corn and the glyphosate tended to develop mammary tumors and compromised sex hormones\u2014and tended to die earlier\u2014than the rats in the control group. Male rats showed four times as many large, palpable tumors and \"very significant\" kidney deficiencies.\n\nThe study, which passed the traditional peer-review process, was published in 2012 in the journal _Food and Chemical Toxicology_ , one of the leading publications in the field.\n\nIt went off, in the words of France's environment minister, like \"a bomb.\"\n\nJean-Marc Ayrault, France's prime minister, said that if its results were confirmed, then his government would press for a continental ban on NK603 corn. Russia suspended imports of the crop. Kenya banned _all_ GM crops. The article appeared two months before a referendum in California that would require the labeling of all GM foods.\n\nIn other words, a single article threatened to tip the global conversation about GMOs, and not in the food industry's favor.\n\nAlmost instantly, the journal was deluged with letters savaging its conclusions. Critics complained that the experiment used too few animals; that the rats used in the experiment were prone to cancer anyway; that the experimental protocol used could not distinguish tumors caused by GM food from those that would have occurred anyway. It was \"clear from even a superficial reading that this paper was not fit for publication,\" a professor at the University of Cambridge wrote. \"The study appeared to sweep aside all known benchmarks of scientific good practice and, more importantly, to ignore the minimal standards of scientific and ethical conduct in particular concerning the humane treatment of experimental animals,\" a group of prominent scientists concluded.\n\nCiting such \"major flaws,\" industry officials and pro-GMO scientists alike called for the article to be retracted. In an extraordinary and highly unusual move, the journal's editor complied.\n\n\"Unequivocally,\" the editor wrote, there was \"no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data.\" Nonetheless, there was \"legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals in each study group and the particular strain selected.\"\n\nA more in-depth look at the raw data \"revealed that no definitive conclusions can be reached with this small sample size regarding the role of either NK603 or glyphosate in regards to overall mortality or tumor incidence,\" the editor wrote. \"Ultimately, the results presented (while not incorrect) are inconclusive, and therefore do not reach the threshold of publication for _Food and Chemical Toxicology_.\"\n\nThe decision to retract caused a second firestorm that was at least as powerful as the first. More than a hundred scientists signed a petition calling the decision \"arbitrary\" and \"groundless.\" Retracting a published, thoroughly peer-reviewed paper \"is without precedent in the history of scientific publishing, and raises grave concerns over the integrity and impartiality of science.\"\n\nAmong other things, critics noted, was the fact that S\u00e9ralini had used the same strain of rats Monsanto had used eight years earlier in its own study, which persuaded European regulators to approve the use of GM corn in the first place. That study\u2014done over ninety days, compared with S\u00e9ralini's two years\u2014had been published in the same journal that was now retracting the new study.\n\n\"The retraction is erasing from the public record results that are potentially of very great importance for public health,\" the petition said. \"It is censorship of scientific research, knowledge, and understanding, an abuse of science striking at the very heart of science and democracy, and science for the public good.\"\n\nThe decision was based \"not on the grounds of fraud, malpractice or data misrepresentation, but simply (as far as I can see) because Monsanto and its legion of followers did not like the results of the research and have given you a hard time,\" wrote the British environmental scientist Brian John.\n\n\"The campaign of synthetic outrage orchestrated by the GM industry against the paper and against S\u00e9ralini personally was something that the scientific community should be thoroughly ashamed of, since it was characterised not just by a lack of respect for the research team and its findings, but by personal vilification the like of which I have not seen for a long time,\" John wrote. \"'Inconclusiveness' is not a ground for retraction\u2014every scientific paper published is inconclusive in the sense that it might show probability and might point the way for future research. That is exactly what the S\u00e9ralini paper does, in a perfectly responsible way. If you press ahead with this, you will also confirm what many people have been increasingly concerned about\u2014corporate control not only of the biotechnology industry but also of the means of publication. That is both scientifically reprehensible and sinister.\"\n\nNot long after the retraction, the journal further infuriated critics by installing Richard Goodman, a former Monsanto scientist, as its new associate editor for biotechnology. Goodman's \"fast-tracked appointment directly onto the upper editorial board raises urgent questions,\" an article in _Independent Science News_ reported. \"Does Monsanto now effectively decide which papers on biotechnology are published in _FCT_? And is this part of an attempt by Monsanto and the life science industry to seize control of science?\"\n\nBrian John offered a sharp answer for this as well. \"Only a fool would assume that there is no connection between his arrival and this decision to retract the S\u00e9ralini paper,\" John wrote. \"And from where I stand this is yet more evidence of the increasing corporate control exerted by the GM industry in the area of biotechnology publications. You clearly do not now have true independence in editorial matters, and the manner in which you have buckled under pressure from this orchestrated anti-S\u00e9ralini campaign is both despicable and deeply depressing.\"\n\nIn an open letter in _Independent Science News_ , a group of scientists wrote that the S\u00e9ralini affair risked undermining the credibility of science itself:\n\nWhen those with a vested interest attempt to sow unreasonable doubt around inconvenient results, or when governments exploit political opportunities by picking and choosing from scientific evidence, they jeopardize public confidence in scientific methods and institutions, and also put their own citizenry at risk. Safety testing, science-based regulation, and the scientific process itself, depend crucially on widespread trust in a body of scientists devoted to the public interest and professional integrity. If instead, the starting point of a scientific product assessment is an approval process rigged in favour of the applicant, backed up by systematic suppression of independent scientists working in the public interest, then there can never be an honest, rational or scientific debate.\n\nThe issues raised by the S\u00e9ralini study have not gone away. In a move that may one day generate as much noise as the S\u00e9ralini affair itself, the Russian National Association for Genetic Safety, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization based in Moscow, said in 2014 it was raising $25 million to redo S\u00e9ralini's experiments. In a theatrical press release (announcing the _launch_ of the study rather than its results), the designers of the so-called Factor study said the GMO controversy was so hot they would not even disclose where the research would take place.\n\nThe Factor study will use 6,000 rats, rather than the 200 used by S\u00e9ralini; last four years instead of two; and examine the health consequences of both GM food and glyphosate as they manifest through multiple generations. It will adhere to or exceed guidelines set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international research body that works with governments on economic and environmental policy, said Bruce Blumberg, a professor of developmental and cell biology at UC-Irvine, who will serve on the study's scientific oversight board.\n\n\"The study will employ large groups of animals tested throughout their full lifespan, so unless you are Monsanto, the results will not be easily disputable,\" Blumberg told me. \"The work will be very thorough and very transparent. For sure, companies don't do that. They never let their data out.\"\n\nSuch independent science is critical to the GMO debate, Blumberg said, since most of what we know about the safety of glyphosate\u2014the herbicide most commonly sprayed on GM crops\u2014is based on studies Monsanto did back in the 1970s and 1980s.\n\n\"We remain reliant for what we know\u2014about a chemical sprayed on hundreds of millions of acres of food crops\u2014on studies performed by the company that produces and sells it,\" Blumberg said. \"The bottom line is that we know almost nothing about the long-term health effects of this compound and we use it in colossal amounts. If you talk to Monsanto, they will say, 'If you use our seeds, you will use less Roundup,' but the twentyfold increase in the use of glyphosate-based herbicides since 1996 disputes this assertion.\"\n\nBlumberg's own work has focused not on genetic engineering but on the effect on human health caused by hormone-disrupting chemicals. He looks at the ways synthetic chemicals contribute to things like cancer and obesity. \"Obesogens,\" such as those found in certain synthetic plastics and fungicides, for example, can cause a body to make more fat cells, to put more fat _into_ cells, or to change a body's overall metabolism. Any of these disruptions can cause a rat\u2014or a human\u2014to put on weight, regardless of their diet. Significantly, these chemicals can cause such changes not just in exposed individuals, but in their offspring down at least three generations.\n\nLooking over one of Blumberg's research grant proposals ten years ago, a reviewer at the National Institutes of Health wrote, \"How dare you waste our time with such a ridiculous idea\u2014everyone knows obesity is caused by eating too much and exercising too little.\" Now, thanks in part to Blumberg's work, we have come to know much more about the way synthetic chemicals affect our body's subtle hormonal balance\u2014and how easy it is for them to throw this balance out of whack. National trends\u2014from obesity to early-onset puberty in girls or low sperm counts in boys\u2014have been traced to the chemicals used in an enormous variety of everyday consumer products.\n\nBlumberg, in other words, may not have a horse in the GMO race, but he's seen similar contests before.\n\n\"My job is to make sure the study is designed as well as it can be,\" he said. \"The goal is to see if we can test the safety of one of the world's most widely used chemicals. As a human being who inhabits this planet, I'm very interested in seeing this done well. I want to see the results.\"\n\n# Part Two\n\n## 4.\n\n## The Fruit That Saved an Island\n\n The vast majority of GMOs are hidden in highly processed ingredients in the supermarket's meat and junk food sections, but there is one modest little GM fruit you can find in the produce aisle. The Rainbow papaya, grown on the Big Island in Hawaii, is a singular retort to the blanket condemnation of genetic engineering. The fruit is nutritious. It nurtures local farmers. And it was created not by a company, but by a professor.\n\nDennis Gonsalves unlocks the metal gate blocking the entrance to the 80-acre plantation, then returns to the driver's seat of his beat-up white Ford pickup. We pass field after field of scrawny trees, their feet, here on the Big Island, growing in volcanic rock, their crowns bursting with fruit.\n\nMoments later, we pull up to a large, open-air enclosure lined with plastic crates, filled with freshly picked, genetically modified papaya. Gonsalves has had a long love affair with this fruit. He should\u2014he designed it himself.\n\nAt seventy, Gonsalves is physically robust, ebullient, and remarkably charismatic. In the world of genetic engineering, he has long been considered something of a superstar: a university scientist who saved an industry, and who did it without buckets of government or corporate money. Gonsalves, many people say, is the very model of the way science should be done: with the public good, not corporate profits, at heart.\n\nAs he parks his pickup, Gonsalves calls out to the plantation's owner. \"Hey, Alberto!\" Gonsalves shouts as we leave the truck.\n\nAlberto Belmes climbs down from a forklift and comes over to shake hands. Belmes came to Hawaii from the Philippines in 1981 and started planting papaya a year later. Within ten years, his fortunes, and the fortunes of the trees he was planting, were in danger of complete collapse. A pathogen known as ringspot virus was burning through the trees on the Big Island, and neither farmer nor spray gun had any way to stop it. Ringspot had destroyed the papaya crop on Oahu in the 1950s, prompting the entire industry to move to Puna, on the Big Island, where the virus, up until then, had not yet manifested.\n\nBy the early 1990s, ringspot was moving across the Big Island like a wildfire. State agriculture workers did their best to destroy infected trees, but nothing could stop the burn.\n\nLike Belmes, 80 percent of the island's papaya farmers were first-generation immigrants from the Philippines, and few of them spoke English. They were poor, they had few political connections, and they were dependent on their plantation work to feed their families. The ringspot virus was not just killing trees, it was threatening to ruin a fragile human population as well.\n\nAt first, Belmes tried to outsmart the pathogen by planting his trees close to the ocean, where salt air and wind kept many of the aphids spreading the virus at bay. Early on, as other farmers' crops crashed, Belmes's trees were still producing fruit, and he was able to charge a premium: he sold papaya for a dollar a pound, three times what the fruit would command twenty years later.\n\nFlush with cash, and keeping his fingers crossed, Belmes took a risk. He planted another seventy acres and began moving his crop back inland. Maybe the virus had moved on. Maybe he'd get lucky again.\n\nHis plan failed. His newly planted trees were devastated. That year Belmes didn't harvest a single fruit. He lost everything.\n\n\"People forget how bad it was,\" Dennis Gonsalves told me, casting his eyes across the volcanic landscape. \"It was like a war zone here. All the trees were dead.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nTHE PAPAYA is a remarkable plant: a giant herb, really, not a tree. From the moment a seed is planted, it takes just six months for the plant to grow several feet tall and begin flowering, and just six more months to begin producing fruit. After three years, a papaya tree can be eighteen feet tall, producing scores of fruit at a time.\n\nDennis Gonsalves is a remarkable man. He was raised on a Big Island sugar plantation, where his father worked mowing grass. Times were tough: he remembers his family and the rest of the workers eating a lot of Spam. \"The bosses were white people and the workers were locals,\" he said. \"I grew up with that mentality.\"\n\nGonsalves left the island to get his PhD in plant pathology at UC-Davis, then taught at the University of Florida for six years. Bored of spending all his time studying citrus, he moved to Cornell, in New York, where he would spend the next twenty-five years working alongside some of the smartest plant pathologists in the business. As a plant virologist who knew how bad ringspot had been on Oahu, Gonsalves started experimenting on papaya in 1978. He traveled all over the world trying to figure out how to protect the crop from viral pests. This was before genetic engineering was developed, so Gonsalves and his research team tried to protect plants by \"immunizing\" them to protect against serious infection.\n\nInitially, Gonsalves tried a kind of vaccination called cross-protection: he and his team mutated a mild strain of the ringspot virus and used it to inoculate millions of trees. Plants do not have active immune systems, and thus can't produce antibodies to protect themselves against diseases. Plant biologists had long known, though, that when they are exposed to a weak virus, plants can develop some resistance.\n\nCross-protection had drawbacks, however. There was always the chance that the mild virus injected into the trees might mutate into a far more damaging form. Or the virus protecting the papaya could jump species and cause serious infections in another important agricultural crop.\n\nBy 1983, it was clear that cross-protection was working, \"but not that well,\" Gonsalves told me. So, mid-career, the veteran scientist started teaching himself some new tricks.\n\nThe mid-1980s was an exciting time in the field of molecular biology, and Gonsalves didn't have to look far for an example of a promising experiment. Washington University's Roger Beachy had recently managed to take a strand of DNA from the tobacco mosaic virus\u2014a common pest that damages a plant's leaves and can stunt its growth\u2014and insert it into the tobacco plant itself. The strand of virus DNA they used triggered the creation of \"coat proteins,\" which\u2014in the virus\u2014served as a kind of shield against outside infection. When Beachy inserted this viral DNA into the tobacco's DNA, it did the same thing: it protected the tobacco plant from infection\u2014in this case from the very virus that had contributed its DNA to the plant. Though the process remained somewhat mysterious, one thing was clear: the transformed plants were resistant to infection from the tobacco mosaic virus.\n\nFollowing Beachy's lead, Gonsalves and a colleague, Richard Manshardt, wanted to see if they could pull off the same trick using ringspot virus and Hawaiian papaya. They knew how ringspot worked: it hijacked the papaya cell's protein-making machinery. They started experimenting with gene sequences that might cause RNA interference; they wanted to get their papaya to produce a small stretch of genetic code that could, in turn, spur a biochemical process that would seek out and \"silence\" infecting strands of viral RNA. Once attacked, they hoped, the viral RNA would be rendered \"mute.\"\n\nMeanwhile, a Gonsalves colleague at Cornell, John Sanford, was developing the \"gene gun,\" with which he learned to shoot DNA-coated tungsten balls into plant cells. It was an imprecise method, to say the least; only a tiny fraction of the target cells would absorb and incorporate the new DNA. But some DNA did make it into the target cells, and the possibilities for genetic manipulations suddenly opened up.\n\nThe mystery of cell biology\u2014combined with the prospect of real crops facing real disaster\u2014made Dennis Gonsalves's genetic work both intellectually exciting and economically urgent. Given the pending collapse of the papaya industry, there just wasn't time to plod through years of traditional breeding experiments.\n\nFor the papaya plantations on the Big Island, these experiments could not have come at a more critical time. In 1992, a dean at the University of Hawaii at Manoa called Gonsalves to break the news that the ringspot virus\u2014once absent from the Big Island\u2014had popped up in Hilo, just twenty miles north of Puna, where virtually all of Hawaii's commercial papaya crop was being grown. Gonsalves had discovered his professional calling. \"It is rather rare that a potential solution is coincidental with a potential disaster,\" Gonsalves wrote at the time, with considerable scientific understatement.\n\n\"I was new at Cornell, but 95 percent of Hawaii's papaya industry was here on the Big Island,\" he told me later. \"I started to realize that good science could change things at home.\"\n\nAt first, Gonsalves's research did not attract much attention\u2014or money. His initial grant application was rejected by both the USDA and the NSF; small grants came thanks to the reach of Hawaii's U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, who knew the state's economy would take a significant hit if the papaya industry collapsed again. In what has become something of a legend among the world's plant geneticists, there was no corporate money involved.\n\n\"The first grant we got was for $20,000,\" Gonsalves said. \"This was a poor man's biotech project. We were just scientists doing research.\"\n\nNot all of the hurdles were scientific. Gonsalves also had to seek approval from the entire range of the federal bureaucracy: the USDA, the EPA, and the FDA. The research team conducted numerous toxicity tests and protein studies, some of which would never have been required of plants grown in a traditional breeding program. In this, as in its status as one of the earliest GMO experiments, Gonsalves's papaya became a harbinger of future battles.\n\n\"When the Rainbow papaya was first engineered, its developers had to test several kilos of dried papaya leaves to see if the alkaloid content was any different from traditionally bred fruit. It wasn't,\" Richard Manshardt told me. \"That sort of thing would never be looked at in a conventional breeding project.\n\n\"The big difference between traditional breeding and GMO, people think that what we eat now is 'natural' and has been around for centuries. Their experience is okay, and therefore the government isn't under any pressure to impose further testing. But with GMOs, it's a new process. The government requires researchers to do the testing, and the public sees the whole system as suspicious and untrustworthy. Why? Because it's new, there's potential for a Wall Street distortion of reality, where money is more important than the product. So it's a trust issue, I think. From a research standpoint, the regulatory process is important because we don't know everything, and we _know_ we don't know everything.\"\n\nYet by the fall of 1997, with a speed that surprised everyone in the field, Dennis Gonsalves had the approval he needed. GM papayas were officially deemed safe for human consumption, and for the environment, by the American government.\n\nRoger Beachy's technology, which Gonsalves was building on, had already been licensed to Monsanto, and Hawaiian papaya growers were deeply skeptical of the biotech giant, figuring the company would charge millions of dollars for them to use company property. But given Roger Beachy's influence\u2014and his strong desire to see his technology work in the field\u2014Monsanto issued the licenses for almost nothing.\n\nOn May 1, 1998, after the patent licenses came through, the Rainbow papaya seeds were ready for distribution, and Gonsalves handed them out to island farmers for free.\n\nAlberto Belmes was one of the first five farmers to try them. He planted seven acres. \"We didn't know if it would survive, or if people would like it,\" Belmes told me.\n\nGonsalves smiled. \"We scientists\u2014we were confident,\" he said.\n\nOne year later, Dennis Gonsalves's seeds had turned into Alberto Belmes's trees, and they were bearing fruit. Enormous quantities of fruit. Conventionally grown trees, stunted with yellowed, infected leaves, average just 5,000 pounds per acre per year. The GM Rainbow papaya trees provided 125,000 pounds. From a low of 26 million pounds in 1998, the papaya crop grew to 40 million pounds just three years later. Rainbow papaya seeds are currently controlled by a nonprofit industry group called the Papaya Administrative Committee; seeds are distributed to local farmers at cost.\n\nIn 2002, Gonsalves and his research team were awarded the Humboldt Prize for the most significant contribution to U.S. agriculture in the previous five years. Gonsalves is \"a tireless innovator,\" said Pamela Ronald, a plant geneticist at UC-Davis who has done groundbreaking research into genetically engineered rice. \"Not only did he return to his home to help the farmers in his area, he moved beyond basic science to getting his invention out in the field. His work is widely viewed as brilliant.\"\n\nGonsalves's work \"is a model for what should have happened [everywhere],\" said Roger Beachy, whose work on the tobacco mosaic virus helped inspire Gonsalves's own work. \"He just plain stuck to it because the farming industry needed it.\"\n\nAt seventy, Gonsalves remains undaunted. He is currently trying to open the gates to GM papaya in China, one of the world's biggest markets. He has submitted the scientific paperwork and notified the embassies. Chinese scientists have visited Hawaii's plantations; they've done health data tests and rat-feeding experiments. Gonsalves has received permission to send seeds.\n\n\"The Chinese have 40 million people in Beijing and Shanghai alone,\" he said, \"and they _love_ Hawaiian papaya. That's what hard work does.\"\n\nYet ask Gonsalves what makes him most proud, and he will point to working farmers like Alberto Belmes, the papaya farmer who migrated from the Philippines to Hawaii. Were it not for Gonsalves's discoveries in the laboratory and the field, Belmes and many others like him would not have survived these last thirty-five years. Today, Belmes has twelve employees and close to 100 acres of highly productive papaya trees. He has one son who graduated from New York University (and now works in a bank) and another son in college in Hawaii.\n\nThese days, Belmes spends a lot of time touring foreign scientists around his farm, showing them the benefits of genetic engineering. Recently, a group from Japan arrived and\u2014convinced that Belmes must be suffering because of all the anti-GMO rhetoric floating around the world\u2014asked if he had had any second thoughts about his trees.\n\nWhat about organic? they asked. Hadn't the global interest in organic farming made GMOs a risky investment?\n\n\"I said, 'Ever since the Rainbow came out, it has been very good,'\" Belmes told me, chuckling. \"We couldn't even supply the market. They thought I wouldn't be happy. They thought GMOs were dangerous!\"\n\nBelmes's plantation is now one of the biggest on the Big Island. The day Gonsalves and I visited, a half-dozen pickers\u2014equipped with long bamboo poles and canvas bags\u2014were knocking ripe fruit out of trees.\n\n\"Isn't this incredible?\" Gonsalves told me, waving his hand across a landscape of thickly planted, highly productive papaya trees.\n\n\"I used to come here and cry.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nFOR DENNIS GONSALVES, all the noise over GMOs\u2014the politics, and the corporate money, and the anti-technology activism\u2014has proven a long and bitter irony. After retiring from Cornell, Gonsalves was lured back to Hawaii to work in the USDA's Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center, where he spent ten years continuing to do science in support of local growers.\n\n\"I decided to come back and do the highest levels of science, but also to work for local issues, with respect for all the local culture,\" he told me. \"This really transformed the center into a place that could relate to people. We saw that we could really help the farmers. If you do good science and help people, things will fall into place.\"\n\nBut his return home, where local activists were beginning to launch a campaign to ban genetically engineered crops, also reminded Gonsalves of his own decades of squabbling over GMOs. Back in 1986, when he was still doing research on cross-protection, a crisis emerged in the papaya crop in Thailand. Cross-protection had been moderately successful, but as the years passed, the country's papaya crop faced collapse. Desperate, an undersecretary of agriculture approached Gonsalves, pleading with him to experiment with a GM plant.\n\nGonsalves asked for a scientist and $15,000 for supplies. By 1997, his team took tissue samples and plants to Thailand. They navigated all the bureaucratic quarantine procedures. They conducted \"beautiful\" field trials and rabbit studies, and were ready to plant. Their scientific work was solid. What they didn't count on was the intensity of global food politics. Corporate GMOs had earned such a toxic reputation that even Gonsalves's nonprofit plant research stirred up a storm.\n\nActivists from Greenpeace, dressed in gas masks and white hazard suits and carrying signs that read \"Stop GMOs!\" destroyed the Thai field trials. Greenpeace was making a larger point: papaya wasn't the only GM plant scientists were experimenting with in Thailand. Monsanto was also in the country, trying to get permission to plant GM corn and cotton. As evidence of GMO contamination of traditional crops began to emerge, the Thai government began taking a harder line on experimental crops. The government eventually placed a moratorium on biotech crops, and Gonsalves's plants \"never saw the light of day.\"\n\n\"Who suffered from that? The farmers,\" Gonsalves told me. \"Greenpeace said, 'This isn't about papaya. It's about opening the door to big companies. What happens if that gate gets opened?'\"\n\nIronically for Gonsalves, this argument soon began bubbling up in Hawaii. Despite Gonsalves's status as an international agricultural star, and despite his GM papaya having become one of the most famous fruits on earth, the GMO debate is far from settled even on Gonsalves's home island. Anti-GMO activists point out that the Rainbow papaya has been shut out of a number of global markets because of local resistance to GMOs. In Jamaica, an experimental crop was shelved because consumers in Britain\u2014the primary market for Jamaican fruit\u2014would not touch it. Japan initially refused to allow GM papaya into its lucrative market, a decision that forced some Big Island growers into bankruptcy. In 2011, after Hawaii spent thirteen years (and $13 million of taxpayer money) lobbying to get the GM papaya into Japan, that country's Ministry of Agriculture finally agreed to let GM papaya in\u2014but only if they are labeled \"GMO.\"\n\nThere have also been problems closer to home. By 2004, contamination\u2014by GM papaya trees of non-GM trees\u2014was found to be ubiquitous on the island, forcing even non-GMO farmers to test their trees and fruit before they were allowed to ship their fruit to Japan. Organic farmers lost markets, seed lines, certifications, and chopped down their trees in order to keep their organic integrity, writes Melanie Bondera, an organic farmer in Kona and a cofounder of several anti-GMO groups in Hawaii.\n\nIn 2002, the year Gonsalves won the Humboldt Award, some anti-GMO activists approached him and\u2014somewhat incredibly\u2014asked him to reevaluate his life's work.\n\n\"They said, 'Come out against GMO papaya and you'll be considered a savior,'\" Gonsalves told me. \"But when they said it was unsafe, I said, 'Show me the data.' You say it's bad for the environment, I say, 'Show me the data.'\"\n\nGonsalves has little patience for the GMO debate, especially when he hears people tell him that his beloved papaya should be grown organically. With 100 inches of rain a year, papaya plantations need no irrigation. But so much rain means an endless challenge from fungi\u2014and the need for regular spraying with fungicide.\n\n\"Organic? Bah!\" he said. \"People live in a make-believe world. Organic is what, 2 percent of the food supply? I don't eat organic. Can you grow organic with this rain? We have a fungus problem. All our organic produce comes from California, and it's going to be that way for a long, long time.\"\n\nWhen it comes to the anti-GMO movement, Gonsalves told me, talk is cheap. \"Farmers are not stupid. They will take the best way they can to make money,\" he said. \"You want us to do things organically and sustainably? Show us how to do it. Don't talk about it. Do it. I'll clap my hands. Wonderful! But _do_ it. Don't just talk about it. _Do_ it.\"\n\nGonsalves now serves on a science advisory board for the Gates Foundation, which is coordinating a great deal of research funding for projects in the developing world. He also continues to consult with global food conglomerates. It's true, the big seed companies have terrible PR, he said; Monsanto continues to pay for its past sins of arrogance, like forcing GM corn on people in Europe.\n\n\"Companies always come to me and say, 'What can we do about our bad PR?' I say, 'Do something that will help the people.' Everything about the big companies, this technology\u2014it's not designed to help small farmers. It's designed to help big companies. If Monsanto had come out with a resistant tomato first, instead of corn, things would have been different. But the company knew there were only millions there, not billions. There was no way they were going to do the tomato.\"\n\nTo be fair, he says, Monsanto has put $80 million into a cassava project in Africa, but does not get enough credit for it. This is the same company, he reminded me, that owned a number of patents on the papaya, but \"gave them all to us.\"\n\nIt's important for people to realize how important GMO technology can be for small-scale farmers whose livelihoods face collapse without them, Gonsalves said. Monsanto will never get into niche markets like papaya; there's just not enough money in it. It's up to publicly funded, university researchers to work on crops that help small farmers and poor consumers. Many researchers have become too comfortable doing work\u2014often funded by the big companies\u2014on crops that flow into the industrial food system. This sentiment has been echoed by the National Academy of Sciences, which cited the lack of biotech work on specialty crops as one of farming's most pressing problems.\n\nThere are signs that Gonsalves's message is getting through. Last year, federal regulators approved a GM plum, developed by USDA scientists, that resists a deadly European pox. Blight-blocking peanuts are under way. In Florida and Texas, scientists are working to develop what is almost certain to become a flash point for consumers: oranges, which are under siege from a bacterial infection known as huanglongbing, or citrus greening. Building on the work Gonsalves did with papaya, and Roger Beachy did with tobacco, scientists are now scrambling to develop GM oranges to block the disease. Public scrutiny, not to say outrage, is sure to follow.\n\nAnd if China starts buying his papaya, the greatest beneficiaries, Gonsalves knows, will be his beloved plantation workers. \"People come to Hawaii to see paradise. They have no idea,\" he told me. \"You know how much people here get paid? Ten dollars an hour. You know how expensive food is?\n\n\"If you don't like the companies, say, 'Break them up like they did with the oil companies!' But don't say, 'It's not safe.' Once the Supreme Court said you could patent everything under the sun, that became the law. If you don't follow the law, how are you going to operate a democracy? You want things to be different? Take them to court!\n\n\"I'm for the underdog, the poor people,\" Gonsalves continued. \"All I know is that farmers here were suffering. The human side of biotech is missing. This is not an industrial crop. It is family farming. All we were ever doing was trying to help farmers. That's all we wanted to do.\"\n\n## 5.\n\n## Trouble in Paradise\n\n The island of Kauai is so beautiful it can make you twitch. The great green slabs thrusting up from the central mountains look like they could be hiding another Machu Picchu; the island's lush, rolling piedmont drops into beaches so famous for their waves that locals have been known to remove uninvited surfers with their fists.\n\nKauai is also a place where you can see a guy dressed up as the Grim Reaper\u2014black cape, flaming red death mask\u2014standing by a major intersection with a sign that says \"Monsanto Sucks!\" It is an island where anger at giant chemical companies is so intense that a man who is both a professional surfer and a professional mixed martial arts fighter recently ran for mayor on an anti-GMO platform and got 40 percent of the vote.\n\nTiny Kauai, perched at the far western edge of the United States, has become ground zero for the global debate over genetically modified food and the spraying of their attendant chemicals on cropland. It is a place where, for years, multinational agrochemical companies have developed the GM seeds that circulate around the globe, but kept their experiments\u2014especially their use of pesticides\u2014secret from the people who live just down the road. And it is a place where a ragtag group of activists have fought these companies to a draw. Like other communities around the world that have fought the agrochemical conglomerates, the people of Kauai feel they are bearing a chemical onslaught their bodies and their beloved island ought not to have to bear. They argue that their land is being used for the good of company profits, that GMOs are really just a vehicle for chemical companies to sell the world more pesticides, and that their fight is a microcosm of the global GMO battle itself. Indeed, when it comes to the global food system, with all its perils and promises, the rest of the world is watching Kauai. Because just as GMOs and their attendant pesticides can spread around the world, so can resistance.\n\nWhen I arrived in Kauai, the guy at the rental car agency asked me why I had come to visit. \"I'm writing a book about GMOs,\" I told him.\n\n\"Huh,\" he said. \"Good idea. Lots of pesticides being sprayed over on the island's west side. A guy I work with just lost his dad over there. It's strange how many people are telling stories like that. I'm glad I work inside.\"\n\nWhen I pulled into my hotel, the woman at the check-in desk also asked me why I had come. I told her.\n\n\"My husband works for a fertilizer company, and he says all this stuff about GMO companies is nonsense,\" she said. \"Closing these companies down would be taking food right out of people's mouths. I just try to keep quiet.\n\n\"Be careful who you talk to\u2014you might end up starting a fight.\"\n\nA few hours later, I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of a beat-up Toyota pickup truck being driven by Jeri DiPietro. We had bumped along an endless series of potholes down a long dusty road, finally pulling up next to an abandoned sugar mill, its exterior walls overgrown with trees and weeds. A pair of rusted-out truck chassis sat rotting in front. Behind them, a squat conical building had been emblazed with a line of graffiti: \"It all started here.\"\n\nBehind us, across the dirt road from the abandoned mill, a series of squat plastic silos filled with a yellowish liquid sat baking in the sun.\n\nDiPietro had come to this place\u2014an experimental farm operated by the agribusiness giant DuPont Pioneer, to see if she could figure out what the company was spraying on its fields. She carried with her a series of maps showing the locations of company fields, amended with thick lines of Magic Marker that showed acreage and field boundaries (Pioneer 4,500; BASF 900; Syngenta 3,000; Dow 3,500 + 500), as well as their proximity to local rivers and towns and the pesticides being used there.\n\n\"There is a field in Kamakani on the west side\u2014all we have is Google Earth to see where the fields are,\" DiPietro told me. Chemical companies have fields \"within 450 feet of a preschool, and one of the chemicals they use is paraquat, which has been banned in thirty-six countries. Right on the label, it says that paraquat is fatal if inhaled.\"\n\nDiPietro has been involved in the anti-GMO fight on Kauai since 2002, long before most people on the mainland had ever heard the term. Because the companies running these experimental fields are not forthcoming about their locations, or what crops they are growing, or what they are spraying on them, DiPietro had to create the maps herself. She assembled them from her explorations driving the island's dusty red back roads and looking for the tiny spray sheets the companies post alongside their fields. She has seen plenty of signs noting the chemicals being used: atrazine, lorsban, \"other.\" (As toxic as atrazine and lorsban are, she says, it's the chemicals marked \"other\" that bother her the most.)\n\n\"It's supposed to be against federal law to spray lorsban in winds over ten miles per hour and to spray any restricted-use pesticides in windy conditions,\" DiPietro said. Here on Kauai, \"it's always blowing like this.\"\n\nBecause the fields themselves are shielded from public view, the spray sheets are plainly not intended for the public either. They are posted to advise company workers to stay off the fields for twenty-four to forty-eight hours after a spray. This is serious business: the EPA recently announced it is considering banning chlorpyrifos, another commonly used chemical on Kauai that has sickened dozens of farmworkers in recent years, including at least ten Syngenta workers who were hospitalized in Kauai in January 2016. The workers had walked onto a cornfield twenty hours after it had been sprayed\u2014just four hours earlier than recommended.\n\nDiPietro had driven me by the Grand Hyatt Kauai and the Poipu Bay Golf Course, within easy drifting distance of the experimental farm. Did the golfers know what was being sprayed across the street? Would they care if they did? How about the surfers? The retirees drinking pi\u00f1a coladas or doing yoga on the beach? It is this lack of available information\u2014about chemicals that are well-known health hazards being sprayed in close proximity to places where people live, work, and play\u2014that has driven DiPietro and a host of others on Kauai to take their fight straight to the companies themselves.\n\nA notably gentle woman, DiPietro shielded her dark hair and dark eyes beneath a baseball cap that read \"Kauai Has the Right to Know.\" She had been to this experimental farm many times before and was not, apparently, a welcome presence. As we sat in her cab chatting, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw a white four-by-four coming up fast behind her. She sat tight. \"Looks like we've got a visitor,\" she said.\n\nA white pickup pulled up next to DiPietro, and a bull-necked man with fury on his face glared out from beneath a ball cap.\n\n\"Get the hell out of here and don't come back,\" he seethed. \"And no more pictures!\" The man was enraged, his voice was full of threat, and DiPietro did not try to argue. But she did not seem intimidated so much as resigned. She'd been through this ritual before. She pulled off down the road.\n\n\u2014\n\nLAND USE ON KAUAI has a long and complex history, one that is tied up with centuries-old sugar plantations and an enormous cultural and economic gap between wealthy landowners and native and immigrant laborers. In 1920, several hundred Filipino workers staged a strike against the sugar plantations, protesting wages that amounted to less than a dollar for twelve hours of work. As they gathered, policemen climbed a nearby bluff and fired on the crowd. In what came to be known as the Hanapepe Massacre, sixteen Filipino workers were killed as they fled into a stand of banana trees. The workers were later blamed for the violence: 130 were arrested; 56 were found guilty of rioting and were imprisoned.\n\nA few decades later, chemical companies began testing defoliants for use in the Vietnam War. \"We've been a place for Monsanto to experiment for fifty years,\" a woman named Fern Rosenstiel told me. \"They tested Agent Orange on this island right near where I was born.\"\n\nKing Sugar, as the industry was known, dominated the island's economy for 150 years, placing great wealth in a very few hands but also creating a plantation culture that many say remains in place today. Descendants of the sugar workers from Japan, Portugal, Polynesia, and the Philippines remain in sizable numbers throughout the state. Crippled by foreign competition, Kauai's sugar industry began to collapse in the 1980s and 1990s, and many companies picked up and left. Big Agribusiness has more than stepped into its ample footprint. The companies still hire descendants of the people who worked on the plantations\u2014Chinese, Japanese, native Hawaiians\u2014and these people are happy to have the work. But they also hire a lot of temporary workers from places like Malaysia.\n\n\"Their ancestors were brought here to divert rivers for the benefit of the white people who ran the pineapple plantations and the sugarcane plantations,\" Rosenstiel said. \"Forty million gallons of water still goes out of the Waimea River through diversion, straight out into ocean, because they've never restored the diversions.\"\n\nSome 14,000 acres of Kauai's land are leased to the global agrochemical conglomerates DuPont Pioneer, Dow, Syngenta, and BASF. The corporations chose Kauai because its tropical climate enables them to work their fields year-round. Company workers can plant experimental fields three seasons a year, which can cut in half the time it takes to develop a new genetically altered seed.\n\nThe \"experiments\" taking place on these fields consist of planting genetically engineered seeds\u2014primarily corn\u2014and then dousing the fields with a variety of pesticides to see which plants survive. The chemicals will kill all the weeds and some of the corn plants themselves. Between 2007 and 2012, DuPont Pioneer sprayed fields on Kauai with ninety different chemical formulations with sixty-three active ingredients, and sprayed as many as sixteen times a day, two out of every three days during the year. Statewide, Hawaii leads the nation in the number of experimental fields, with more than 1,100. Studies show that companies use seventeen times more of the highly toxic \"restricted use\" pesticides on experimental plots than do farmers on traditional fields.\n\nThe use of these chemicals has become necessary, at least in part, because softer, \"general use\" pesticides like glyphosate have begun to lose their effectiveness. Chemical companies must now engineer new seeds that will resist other, more intense chemical compounds. Dow, for example, has used its Kauai fields to develop new corn and soybean seeds that are resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D\u2014once an active ingredient in Agent Orange that's been linked to reproductive problems and cancer.\n\nIf a corn plant can survive the chemical sprays\u2014and if the sprays successfully kill every other plant on the field\u2014the resistant seeds will be moved along the development pipeline; one day, this corn's progeny might end up spread across the vast cornfields of Iowa, and Nebraska, and Illinois. More than likely, the harvest from these plants will end up sweetening soft drinks or feeding the millions of cattle and pigs that supply the country's bottomless appetite for inexpensive meat.\n\nBecause GM crops have been legally declared to be the \"substantial equivalent\" of conventionally farmed crops, the island's farms are not required to file Environmental Impact Studies. And because of a variety of legal loopholes, including the shroud wrapped around \"proprietary information,\" companies are not required to tell the public much of anything about what they are spraying, or where, or when.\n\nSince they lease their land from the island's handful of large private landowners (Steve Case, the founder of AOL, owns 38,000 acres of former plantation land known as Grove Farms), the companies are largely shielded from public view. Because the companies get their spraying permits from the federal government, and not from the state or the county or the local planning boards, they do not feel obliged to answer to local complaints. And because their work is regulated by the federal government, the companies say that local laws do not apply to them. They stick to this logic even when their research takes place on thousands of acres of state land.\n\nFor the people who live on Kauai, however, the fight over GMOs and pesticides is just another chapter in a long struggle over the use and misuse of their land. They say the companies have refused to divulge what chemicals they use on their fields. They say that when people complain to the companies, they get no answers. When people complain to their elected officials, and the elected officials complain to the companies, they also get no answers. By fighting even basic disclosure laws, the companies are shutting down any possibility of understanding what consequences their chemical sprays might be having on the health of the local community. Activists, doctors, local politicians\u2014they all want information, and they aren't getting any.\n\n\"For me, this is about the impact on our community, not on whether Doritos have GMOs or not,\" Gary Hooser told me. For years, Hooser, a county councilman (and thus one of the island's highest-ranking public officials), has tried to extract information from the chemical companies. He has had very little success. \"I have issues with corporations controlling the food supply, but that's also not what this is about. This is about industry causing harm. I asked them politely, and in writing, for a list of the pesticides they used, and they said no, they were not going to give it to me. They were very polite.\"\n\nIf chemical companies on Kauai are outwardly uncooperative, their behind-the-scenes influence on the regulatory agencies charged with overseeing their work is virtually complete. Pushing states (and the federal government) to cut regulatory staff has long been a primary industry objective. Here's what this looks like in Hawaii: because of budget cuts, the state Department of Agriculture has only one employee assigned to review pesticide inspection reports. Although the department is responsible for overseeing the federal Clean Water Act, it has no statewide program for testing pesticide use in soil, air, or water. The single position on Kauai meant to monitor toxins in agricultural dust has been vacant for a year. Meanwhile, the state's health department has no programs to test for pesticide contamination in the soil, air, or water.\n\nKauai's sole pesticide inspector says she hasn't gotten around to reviewing most reports in several years\u2014in part because so many concerned people have been asking her for spray records. \"I've had so many requests that I haven't had a chance to work on any of my cases for so many years,\" she said.\n\nAs for federal oversight, the nearest EPA office is 2,000 miles away in San Francisco.\n\nAll of this means that when Gary Hooser asks companies for records about what they are spraying, he finds himself circling in an endless bureaucratic whirlpool. When he asked the state to provide a spreadsheet listing the sales of restricted-use pesticides used by Dow, DuPont Pioneer, Monsanto, BASF, and Syngenta on the island from 2002 to 2004, his request was denied. The disclosure records \"are believed to contain confidential business information (CBI) or trade secrets,\" the state's pesticides program manager wrote Hooser. The decision made it impossible for Hooser or anyone else to determine \"what chemicals are being used, by whom, at what geographical locations,\" Hooser said.\n\nState law requires that companies seeking federal permits to test GMOs or experimental-use pesticides must file a copy of the request with the state. But when Hooser asked the state health department for copies of these requests, he was sent a grand total of eight.\n\n\"I said, 'There must be a problem\u2014there must be more,'\" Hooser told me. A couple of months ago, he asked again. This time, the health department said they had \"a roomful of these things.\" We haven't even opened the boxes, the state people told Hooser, \"but you're welcome to come by and look.\"\n\nAlthough the state has an entire storeroom full of boxes, \"literally nobody at the state looks at these documents,\" Hooser said. \"Nobody. And most are highly redacted.\"\n\nCompanies point to reams of paper to show how regulated they are, but Hooser found that no one was checking up on them. \"The state inspects them maybe five times a year, and they spray 220 days out of the year, and an average of eight to sixteen times a day. It's a tragedy. They look me in the eye and say they are inspected on a regular basis, and 43 percent of the state inspection logs are redacted.\"\n\nA Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) log shows that in 2011 and 2012, the state made 175 inspections on Kauai, but more than a third of these reports had been redacted, the names of companies, employees, and alleged violations crossed out. The log has this note attached: \"On two separate occasions, Kaua'i County Councilmember Hooser has requested in writing from the HDOA 'the nature of the violations and investigations without the accompanying company identification.' This information has not been provided.\"\n\nWhen Hooser finally got his hands on a list of restricted-use pesticide sales from the state Department of Agriculture, \"the core data shocked the hell out of me,\" he said. \"Restricted use\" means the chemicals (in this case including alachlor, atrazine, chlorpyrifos, methomyl, metolachlor, permethrin, and paraquat) are more dangerous\u2014and thus more tightly regulated by the EPA\u2014than general-use pesticides like glyphosate or 2,4-D.\n\n\"Ninety-eight percent of the restricted-use pesticides were being used by just four companies. They were using atrazine by the ton. Paraquat. Eighteen tons a year of twenty-two different kinds of restricted-use pesticides on this island only.\" All these chemicals didn't just disappear, Hooser knew. Some were taken up into plants, but some trickled into the island's soil, the water, the air itself.\n\nState records show that between 2010 and 2012, the agrochemical companies purchased 13 tons (plus nearly 16,000 gallons) of restricted-use pesticides on the island. Pest control companies used an additional 74,000 pounds, mostly to kill termites and ants.\n\nOther records show that between 2013 and 2015, companies sprayed 18 tons of restricted-use pesticides. During this period, companies also used some seventy-five different general-use pesticides, but because of lax enforcement codes, no information was available for how much was used.\n\nSix of the seven restricted-use pesticides are suspected of being endocrine disruptors, which means they may cause sexual development defects in humans and animals, according to the EPA. Four of the seven are also suspected carcinogens. And between them, the seven have been linked to, among other things, neurological and brain problems and damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, adrenal glands, central nervous system, muscles, spleen, and liver. And these are only the most toxic of the lot. As we have seen, even general-use pesticides like glyphosate and 2,4-D have recently been declared \"probable\" and \"possible\" human carcinogens in their own right.\n\nA study published in March 2014 in the British journal _The Lancet_ found that chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxin that is restricted in California and many countries, is one of a dozen commonly used chemicals that \"injure the developing brain\" of children.\n\nRecent hair sample testing of children living near the Kauai test fields indicated exposure to thirty-nine different pesticides, including eight restricted-use pesticides. \"It's unconscionable that pesticides are being found in the hair and bodies of our children,\" said Malia Chun, the mother of one of the girls tested. \"State and federal officials have a responsibility to ban chlorpyrifos and make sure our children are protected in our homes and schools from these hazardous chemicals.\"\n\nBut it wasn't just chlorpyrifos. Children were exposed to \"a cocktail of pesticides, and the consequences of exposure to such mixtures over a lifetime are not known, nor is the issue of exposure to such mixtures currently evaluated by our regulatory agencies,\" said Emily Marquez, an endocrinologist and staff scientist at the Pesticide Action Network.\n\nAlso in the cocktail: permethrin, a suspected carcinogen thought to compromise kidney, liver, reproductive, and neurological function. When combined in the body with chlorpyrifos, permethrin has been shown to be \"even more acutely toxic,\" according to E. G. Vallianatos, a twenty-five-year veteran of the EPA and author of _Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA._\n\nAnother ingredient in the cocktail: atrazine, the second most widely used herbicide (behind glyphosate) in the United States. A known carcinogen, atrazine is sprayed on half of all corn crops and 90 percent of sugar sold in the United States\u2014which is why it is commonly used on experimental fields in Kauai. \"A little bit of poison to an adult is a lot of poison to a developing baby,\" Dr. Tyrone Hayes, an endocrinologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told an audience on Kauai recently. The poisoning of a young child can cause health problems that can last a lifetime, Hayes said; his own research has found that frogs exposed to barely detectable levels of atrazine developed both male and female genitalia.\n\nOn Kauai, frustration with chemical company behavior grew most acute in the town of Waimea, on the island's west side. In 2000, residents of the town filed a formal complaint claiming that pesticide-laden dust was blowing into their homes from experimental fields operated by DuPont Pioneer. They got nowhere.\n\nSix years later, sixty students in a Waimea school went to their health office complaining that a \"chemical smell\" was making them nauseous and dizzy. Some students fainted. Others were seen covering their noses with their T-shirts. Nearly three dozen were sent home. A local reporter noted that several of the children \"had their heads in their hands and tears in their eyes.\"\n\nThe school is situated just a few dozen yards from experimental fields leased by Syngenta. Firefighters, police, a hazmat team, and officials from the state health and agriculture departments descended on the school to examine students and take samples from the nearby fields.\n\nAt first, company and state officials blamed the outbreak on a malodorous plant called _Cleome gynandra_ , also known as wild spider flower or (more accurately) stinkweed. \"It does stink and as a company we certainly hope the children are feeling better,\" a Syngenta official said.\n\nThough it is eaten (boiled) in some parts of the world, stinkweed has been known to cause headaches and even nausea in some people who are particularly sensitive to it. But Gary Hooser, who was a state senator at the time, was not convinced. He started making phone calls. He wanted the company, or the state, to tell parents what chemicals were being applied to the crops near their children's school. Neither state officials nor Syngenta would tell the senator anything, and repeated attempts by local reporters \"to compel authorities to release the information were unsuccessful.\"\n\nCompany claims about stinkweed contamination struck some scientists and doctors as disingenuous. Given that the company fields were so close to the schools and to local homes, a few things were beyond dispute. There was no questioning the presence of restricted-use pesticides, or that dust from these pesticides routinely migrates into residential properties, or that the chemicals have a well-documented connection to childhood neurological problems, including autism, ADHD, and fetal brain defects, wrote J. Milton Clark, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Public Health and a former senior health and science adviser to the EPA, who examined the evidence for an island task force on pesticides.\n\nThere was no evidence to support the stinkweed theory, Clark wrote. \"Symptoms of dizziness, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and respiratory discomfort are consistent with exposure to airborne pesticides,\" he wrote. The children's symptoms \"were far more likely related to pesticide exposures than from exposure to stinkweed.\" If the companies continued spraying, Clark recommended that local health centers near agricultural fields be given kits \"to quickly test for organophosphate poisoning.\"\n\nIt took nearly six years for state health officials to formally weigh in on the incident. When researchers from the University of Hawaii sampled the air around the Waimea Canyon Middle School, they indeed found evidence of stinkweed. But they also found five pesticides, including chlorpyrifos, metolachlor, bifenthrin, benzene hexachlorides (BHCs), and even DDT, which has been banned in the United States for four decades. Although the chemicals were found in amounts below EPA health standards, the presence of agricultural chemicals was clear evidence of \"pesticide drift,\" according to Hawaii's Department of Agriculture. How many years these chemicals\u2014and perhaps dozens of others\u2014had been drifting into Waimea homes and schools was not addressed.\n\nTo Gary Hooser, Waimea's pesticide drift was just part of the problem. The larger issue was the way companies seemed to consider themselves beyond the reach of public oversight. \"The failure to release the information about what is sprayed out there only increases the public's mistrust that something harmful is being sprayed,\" Hooser said at the time. \"They know what was sprayed out there and they should tell the public.\"\n\nWhat the island needed\u2014and what the medical community began demanding\u2014was information about the chemicals being sprayed in their communities. Frustrated by the lack of quantitative data about pesticide use, a group of west-side physicians wrote that they had \"many qualitative examples that point to a higher than normal incidence of many ailments and disease processes occurring in our patient populations.\" They'd seen birth defects involving malformations of the heart that were occurring at ten times the national rate. Miscarriages, gout, cancer, hormonal imbalances\u2014all were occurring at unusually high levels, the doctors wrote, noting that Hawaii had not had surveillance for birth defects since 2005. They called for epidemiology studies by the CDC and Hawaii's Department of Health to better understand the causes.\n\n\"We all share a deep concern for the health of our patients and the concern of what may be happening to our community by being exposed to this unique cocktail of experimental and restricted-use pesticides on an almost daily basis,\" the Kauai doctors wrote. \"We need to understand what chemical toxins are being sprayed, how often they are being sprayed, and how close our patients live to the specific areas being tested with these pesticides. It is unconscionable to allow open-air testing of new combinations and untested chemicals in any location that cannot guarantee the separation of the testing and any unwilling or unknown exposure potential to the public.\"\n\nThe doctors' worries reflected conclusions in a major study by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which contended that a growing body of evidence points to associations between pesticide spray exposure in young children and a range of diseases, from childhood cancers to autism. On Kauai this was especially worrisome for the children of people who work in the fields, said Dr. Lee Evslin, a pediatrician on the island. The AAP \"never had a mandate about pesticides before, but they have now placed it in our laps,\" Evslin said. \"This body carries a lot of weight, and they are basically saying to the pediatricians of the world, 'pay attention to this. These are dangerous substances.'\"\n\nMargie Maupin, a nurse practitioner on the island's west side, said the presence of so many pesticides\u2014and so little information\u2014had left her unable to do her job properly. \"Thousands of reputable studies have already been done that show pesticides are known hazardous toxins,\" she said. \"The probability that these pesticides will hurt a lot of people on the west side, I believe, is high. Some health care providers are already seeing signs of serious illness and disability now, and we are at a loss for how best to protect our patients from this onslaught of known, dangerous exposure.\"\n\n### Taking the Companies to Court\n\nWhen I visited Waimea, I met a man named Klayton Kubo, who has been raging about clouds of dust for fifteen years. When we first sat down at a picnic table in the town center, Kubo refused to talk to me. Too many people around, he said, looking over his shoulder. The companies know who I am.\n\nInstead, we drove to the top of a nearby ridge, parked, and walked along a dry path overlooking the town. To our left, in the near distance, we could see fields operated by both DuPont Pioneer and Dow. Tractors were working the fields, with red dust rising behind them. Perhaps six miles away, the largest of the plumes rose hundreds of feet into the air.\n\n\"If you think this is bad, you should come back during a trade winds day,\" Kubo said. \"It's fucking insane!\n\n\"Two hundred yards outside my living room window, I can see their facility. The wind comes this way, we get it. The wind goes the other way, we get it. And right in the middle is a school and a town.\"\n\nKubo pointed at the plume in the distance. \"What you see right there? That's what's in my kitchen,\" he said. \"I scrape the stuff off my glass-top stove. That's why I've been grumbling the longest.\"\n\nAs we walked down the hill, an official-looking white pickup truck drove by. \"Ha! Syngenta!\" Kubo shouted. \"Don't fuck with my truck!\"\n\nIn 2011, more than a hundred of Klayton Kubo's neighbors filed a lawsuit against DuPont Pioneer claiming that dust from the company's fields was damaging their property. Despite more than a decade of complaints and a formal citizen petition seeking relief from pesticide-laden dust, the lawsuit claimed, Pioneer's GMO operations continually generated \"excessive fugitive dust\" and used dangerous pesticides \"without taking preventative steps to control airborne pollutants as promised by Pioneer and as required by state and county law.\"\n\n\"The community is covered,\" the plaintiffs' lawyer Gerard Jervis said. Residents are \"living in lockdown, unable to open their doors or windows.\" The suit pointedly did not make any health claims, though Jervis said local residents complained frequently of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.\n\nA company spokesperson defended Pioneer's practices. \"We operate our facilities on the islands with the highest standard of safety and environmental responsibility and we plan to vigorously defend our case.\"\n\nAt the beginning of the trial, when residents alluded to health problems they attributed to the dust, the judge in the case reminded his attorneys that the case was about property damage only. The case was not about the effects the chemicals might be having on their health.\n\nJervis reminded the court that the EPA requires that applicators must not allow spray to drift from fields into private property, parks and recreation areas, woodlands, or pastures. He also noted that the state's air quality study did not even try to look for more than thirty pesticides that have been used at the GMO test fields since 2007, including two of the most heavily used and dangerous: methomyl, an insecticide, and paraquat, a weedkiller that (like atrazine) has been linked to Parkinson's disease and (also like atrazine) is made by Syngenta. Paraquat has been banned both in Switzerland, Syngenta's home, and across Europe.\n\nAs the Waimea lawsuit proceeded through its paces, worries about pesticides on Kauai continued to grow. A local Kauai diver discovered a massive die-off of up to 50,000 sea urchins. A biologist for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources speculated that the chemicals sprayed on GM seeds might have been a cause, because when it rains, the loosened red topsoil on treated land flows into streams and rivers that eventually flow out into the ocean and onto coral reefs.\n\n\"Kaua'i produces more GMO seeds than anyplace,\" Don Heacock, the biologist, said. \"Now, there are a whole bunch of people in the genetic engineering camp that say GMO crops need less pesticides, but the new wave of crops is more toxic than ever before. The Bt corn is meant to kill. It has an insecticide protein in the corn. In the Midwest, they found that the residue from GMO corn is related to aquatic insect deaths, which are food for baby fish.\"\n\nThat same winter, the internationally renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva traveled from New Delhi to Kauai to speak to anti-GMO activists. \"I think your island is truth-speaking to the world that GMOs are an extension of pesticides, not a substitute or alternative to it,\" she said. \"[Hawaii] has become like a nerve center for the expansion of destruction. GMOs are not a safe alternative to poisons, they are pushed by a poison industry to both increase the sale of the poisons and simultaneously monopolize the seed.\"\n\nEvoking the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, when a chemical leak from a Union Carbide plant (now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) killed and injured tens of thousands of people, Shiva said that chemical manufacturers had long since transformed themselves into the biotech industry. \"War and agriculture came together when the chemicals that were produced for warfare lost their market\u2014and the industry organized itself to sell those chemicals as agrochemicals,\" Shiva said.\n\nEnergized, activists on Kauai decided to take their animus against the companies to the streets. In December 2012, Fern Rosenstiel, who grew up near Agent Orange test fields, organized a small protest by the Kauai airport. She was joined by Dustin Barca, a professional surfer who, at the age of twenty-six, had become a successful professional fighter in mixed martial arts. Surfing and fighting had made Barca famous on Kauai and around the state, and he decided to leverage his fame to galvanize people against the chemical companies.\n\nBarca had an idea. That same month, during the Pipeline Masters surfing competition on Oahu, he made headlines just by standing on the beach.\n\n\"There were 30,000 people on the beach, millions more [watching] on TV,\" Barca told me. \"Me and this little kid carried around a bright red and yellow banner that said 'Monsanto's GMO Food Poisons Families.' That was my first, initial move to get the word out, on the north shore of Oahu, the most famous surf spot in world.\"\n\nWhen I met Barca, he, like Klayton Kubo, refused to talk in public. He didn't know who might be watching. But even more than Kubo, Barca is used to fighting. He has the wiry frame of a welterweight. He is missing teeth. His ears have been so damaged they have turned inside out. Ever since he'd entered the political fray, he's had people videotaping him, he said. At a recent anti-GMO rally, he confronted a man taping him with a video camera. \"I told him, 'Whoever sent you is going to have to do better than that,'\" Barca said.\n\n\"Are these companies good for people or nature? How can we tell if they don't give us the information?\" Barca said. \"We know what they're doing. They've admitted they're spraying 2,4-D near our communities, and the trade winds blow every single day. We've gone so far into a place where everything is done behind closed doors. It was the same thing that Dole and others did to overthrow the queen. History repeats itself. You just have to know the blueprint to catch it.\"\n\nEmboldened by the anti-GMO energy he felt at the surfing tournament, Barca decided to see just how much energy he could leverage across the state. He and Rosenstiel set about organizing marches on all five islands where companies were testing GMOs and pesticides.\n\nOn Oahu, close to 3,000 people turned out for a rally in the pouring rain. \"I thought, 'Holy shit, that's a lot of people who feel like I feel,'\" Barca said. \"That set up the momentum.\n\n\"We went to a different island every Saturday. First was Honolulu. There's a town there that is the Waimea of Oahu, surrounded by Monsanto experimental fields. We went to a high school over there. You literally walk fifty feet behind their fields. All the kids are running around, these are experimental fields. There are giant aerial sprayers. They can spray 250 times a year, dozens of times a day.\"\n\nAs word spread, the anti-GMO crowds continued to turn out in droves: 300 came out on Molokai, one of the smallest of the islands; 1,500 on the Big Island; 2,000 on Maui.\n\nMeanwhile on Kauai, with anti-GMO energy reaching a peak, Gary Hooser found himself in a bind. If he encouraged activists to stand out in front of expensive tourist hotels, holding up signs saying that Kauai is \"Ground Zero for Experimental GMOs,\" his community stood to lose tourism dollars. He decided instead to introduce a bill that would force companies to do what they so far had refused to do: disclose what they were spraying, on what crops, and in what fields, \"to see if we have anything to be afraid of.\" The bill also sought to create no-spray buffer zones around schools, homes, and hospitals. His bill carried criminal sanctions for companies that refused to comply; Hooser hoped this would at the very least encourage whistleblowers.\n\n\"People were concerned with pesticides and GMOs, so what was I supposed to do?\" Hooser told me. \"I met with the companies, asked them to give me their data, asked them to help me separate the wheat from the chaff, and the companies wouldn't tell me anything. They wouldn't respond to my questions. They lied to me. They were telling me they 'only use what other farmers use.' No other farmers use this stuff, and not in anything like the toxicity or the volume. The more they lied, the more I dug into it, and the more angry I got.\"\n\nIndustry executives claimed the bill's disclosure rules were unnecessary, unfair, and pseudoscientific. Alicia Maluafiti, the executive director of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, a biotech trade group, called Kauai's move \"a pretty pissy bill.\"\n\n\"It's not about community health, it's not about pesticide use, it's about getting rid of these companies,\" she said. She called the pesticide disclosure bill \"fearmongering by Mr. Hooser and the extremists on Kauai.\"\n\nCompanies dismissed complaints by repeating that both GMOs and pesticides were highly regulated by the government. Genetically engineered products \"have been out there for seventeen years now,\" said Mark Phillipson, Syngenta's head of corporate affairs in Hawaii. \"There have been 3 trillion meals served that have had genetic-engineered components in them, and not one reported incident, acutely or long term, associated with GM causing an allergen or toxicity issue.\"\n\nDuring the hearings on the bill, hundreds of people from both sides showed up to voice their opinions, many of them wearing colored shirts to show which side they were on.\n\n\"We made shirts with red and yellow, representing the strong in Hawaiian tradition. They wore blue,\" Dustin Barca told me. \"It was almost like the Bloods and the Crips.\"\n\nCompanies urged their employees to show up en masse to counterbalance the protesters. \"The companies bussed workers in here so we couldn't even get in to testify,\" Rosenstiel said.\n\nIndeed, the battle caused a lot of collateral damage in the Kauai community. \"We had a number of doctors come forward\u2014a clear majority of pediatricians signed a letter supporting the bill\u2014but even they paid a political price,\" Hooser told me. \"These doctors get hammered. They didn't say they 'know illnesses are caused by this spraying,' they just said they were concerned. But the pushback by the companies, their bloggers, the media stuff, it's been intense.\"\n\nDuring one hearing, a councilman asked an official from the state Department of Agriculture if there was any evidence of pesticide drift. Complaints do come in, the official said, and the state goes to houses, swipes the windows, and sends the samples out for testing. When the investigation is complete, the neighborhood is notified. The whole process\u2014if it actually gets completed\u2014can take two years.\n\nWhat if it's a pregnant woman or a child who's being exposed? Gary Hooser wanted to know. What good is a two-year lag in the testing to them?\n\nAs the vote neared, Rosenstiel and Barca helped organize another march. Some 4,000 people marched to the Kauai County Building to support the bill. Some wore gas masks. Others wore death masks. Many wore red T-shirts with yellow letters saying \"Pass the Bill.\"\n\nFinally, after a hearing on the bill that went on for nineteen hours straight, the Kauai County Council passed Hooser's bill, 6\u20131. The mayor vetoed the bill, but the council overrode his veto. It was official: Kauai's anti-GMO activists had pushed their elected officials to pass a bill requiring some of the world's most powerful companies to disclose what pesticides they were spraying and where. In a very real sense, the vote was a watershed.\n\nYet within weeks, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta, BASF, and Agrigenetics Inc. (a company affiliated with Dow AgroSciences) sued the county in federal court. Their argument: Company farming practices adhere to state and federal laws. Local laws have no jurisdiction over them.\n\nIn August 2014, federal judge Barry Kurren agreed with the companies that the state pesticide law preempted any county law regulating pesticides.\n\nAn attorney representing two of the companies said she was very pleased. \"This is what we told the county when they were discussing it initially,\" she said. \"I think they wasted time, effort, and money trying to fight for a law they had no right to pass in the first place.\"\n\nGary Hooser saw the ruling differently. \"We passed the bill with a democratic process, with thousands of citizens involved,\" he told me. \"We got the votes like we were supposed to. We overrode the mayor's veto. And they sued us for the right to spray poisons next to schools.\" The anti-GMO forces on Kauai have appealed the judge's decision; it is now awaiting a hearing in federal court.\n\nBefore the dust from the political fight could settle, Dustin Barca, the surfer and professional MMA fighter who had done so much to organize the anti-GMO rallies, decided to make one last public push: he ran to unseat the mayor who had vetoed Hooser's bill. During the campaign, he ran\u2014literally, ran\u2014around the island; three marathons, back-to-back. Although he didn't win, he did pull 40 percent of the vote.\n\n\"This was totally untypical of me,\" Barca told me. \"I just had a voice in my heart and my head that said, 'You have to do something about this right now.' I threw my whole selfish life away and went into selfless life. I'm not doing this to get rich or famous. I could be making millions fighting in the UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship]. I'm here for my kids. No other reason.\"\n\nAbout this time, the state Department of Agriculture and Kauai County agreed to set up a fact-finding effort to look into pesticide use. They recruited nine volunteers with backgrounds in agriculture, environmental health, and toxicology. Kauai County split the $100,000 cost of the study with the state Department of Agriculture.\n\n\"The big question, the meta-question if you will, is: Are people being harmed from pesticides being sprayed by GMO companies?\" said Peter Adler, a veteran mediator who will oversee the project. \"We hope to really present some pretty rigorous inventories of what we know, what we don't know, and what we need to know still and find out. People are talking at their conclusion levels and we want to get down to: What's the data? What's the evidence?\"\n\nFor local residents, there were other \"meta-questions,\" like whether they should have a say in how their land is used, and how they can protect their own neighborhoods. They have had some victories: in May 2015, a federal court jury awarded $500,000 to fifteen Waimea residents who claimed the red dust from DuPont Pioneer fields caused \"loss of use and enjoyment of property.\" The verdict said that DuPont Pioneer failed to follow generally accepted agricultural and management practices from 2009 to 2011; the jurors found the \"seriousness of the harm to each plaintiff outweighs the public benefit of Pioneer's farming operation.\"\n\nTen days after the verdict, DuPont Pioneer shut down its 3,000-acre experimental field operation in Kekaha. It plans to consolidate it with operations on Oahu.\n\nAt the end of April 2015, Gary Hooser flew to Switzerland to speak at a Syngenta shareholders meeting in Basel. He wanted to ask the company to stop using chemicals in his district that are already illegal in the company's own country\u2014indeed, across the company's own continent.\n\nThe company did not welcome him. On his blog, Hooser recently wrote:\n\nSyngenta did not want me there and was working on many levels to prevent me from speaking, but legally there was nothing they could do to stop me . . .\n\nI asked them to withdraw from their lawsuit against the County of Kauai, to honor and follow our laws, and to give our community the same respect and protections afforded to the people in their home country of Switzerland. I pointed out that their company uses highly toxic Restricted Use Pesticides (RUPs) in our community, including atrazine, paraquat and four others that they are forbidden by law from using in their own country.\n\nWe are not going away and we will not tap out. So long as these companies continue to disrespect and disregard the wishes of our community, we will continue the battle to make them comply.\n\nFern Rosenstiel, who had organized so many of the marches on Kauai and the other islands, accompanied Hooser on his trip to Switzerland.\n\n\"For me, this island is the trunk of the tree,\" Rosenstiel told me. \"If we can get these companies off this island, if we can cut this tree down, it will cause a positive worldwide reaction. I'll be here until the day I die, or until these guys are gone.\"\n\n## 6.\n\n## Fighting for That Which Feeds Us\n\n Around the time Kauai voters were rattling the biotech world by approving a pesticide disclosure law, a group of indigenous Hawaiians and back-to-the-land farmers on two other Hawaiian islands\u2014Maui and the Big Island\u2014were going a dramatic step further: they were pushing to ban GMOs altogether.\n\nTo the big agrochemical companies, this was a far more dangerous game. Being forced to tell people what they were spraying on experimental farms was one thing. Being voted off an island\u2014by what amounted to a pair of tiny county ordinances\u2014was something else entirely.\n\nThe Big Island, basically, had one GM crop\u2014Dennis Gonsalves's papaya\u2014and wanted to lock the door tight before any of the big companies moved in. Maui was a different story. To companies like Monsanto, Maui was not just a warm place to test out new crops; it was the very center of global GM seed production. The majority of the corn seed Monsanto sells to farmers in its biggest markets\u2014Argentina, Brazil, and the United States\u2014originates on Maui. If the island's voters got their way, Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences (the other biotech giant operating there) would have their GMO operations shaken at their foundation.\n\nBeyond this, of course, was the ongoing global perception game. It was one thing for companies to lose fights in Europe\u2014GMOs had never been welcome there\u2014but losing another major public relations battle in the United States was something else altogether. Banning GMOs on a couple of little islands could ignite larger movements in bigger places that were already primed for the fight. Vermont. Oregon. California. And then? South America? India?\n\nFor the companies, already shaken by the Kauai vote, the battles on Maui and the Big Island were about global markets and their ambition to sell seeds and chemicals to the world. They would spend millions of dollars to prevent the anti-GMO ball from rolling any further. There was no way they were going to let a small group of activists derail their global business plans.\n\nBut for the people on the islands themselves, the battles were far more intimate. To them, the fight against GMOs resembled similar fights not in the United States but in the developing world, where indigenous people and political activists had struggled against global conglomerates for years. They were fighting to protect land they considered sacred. They were fighting to break a long history of colonial oppression. They were fighting for the right to feed themselves.\n\n### The Battle on the Big Island\n\nEven as Dennis Gonsalves traveled the world trying to persuade farmers to adopt his beloved papaya, his neighbors back home on the Big Island were working just as hard trying to ban GMOs altogether. In a way, the anti-GMO activists took the same line as Dennis Gonsalves: they wanted to protect farmers. It's just that the farmers they wanted to protect were of an entirely different sort.\n\nNancy Redfeather is not particularly interested in whether GM papayas continue to sell in China or anywhere else. She wants her island to grow food for itself. All this technology, all these companies, all this talk of a globalized food economy\u2014it all just gets in the way of growing nutritious food for people who live down the road.\n\nThe day I met her, on a stunning 70-degree day, Nancy poured me a glass of tangelo juice her husband, Gerry Herbert, had made from one of the thirty-six varieties of fruit trees the couple grow on their one-acre organic farm. Nancy offered me a cup of coffee, ground from beans they roasted from the twelve varieties of coffee they grow at home. She offered me a plate of fruit\u2014apple bananas, yellow dragon fruit, navel oranges, blush pink grapefruit, star fruit, Tahitian pamplemousse, avocado\u2014all just picked from their farm. Had I stuck around for dinner, we might have eaten a meal made from kabocha pumpkin with cloves, turmeric, ginger, and garlic. Plus wild chickens or wild pigs. (In six months, Gerry caught thirty-nine feral pigs in a trap. Their meat is exquisite, he says; given their proximity to his crops, the pigs eat better than most people.)\n\nNancy and Gerry run a small organic farm near Kona. Nancy moved to Hawaii from California in the mid-1970s, when the back-to-the-land movement sent many mainlanders looking for places to set up sustainable livelihoods. They built their timber-frame home themselves. They have a kitchen inside the house, and another one outside the house. Three-quarters of the food they eat they grow themselves.\n\nAfter lunch, Gerry gave me a tour of his gardens. Here is a sample of what he grows in a single acre: There were trees called jaboticaba (Tupi for \"fat of the flesh of the turtle\") that had strange black berries growing straight from the bark. The berries resemble hefty Concord grapes and yield beautiful pink juice. Gerry freezes this juice, then uses it to make banana bread.\n\nThere were four varieties of black beans, lychee trees, a Rajapuri banana tree that produces 500 pounds of fruit a year. There was an eighty-seven-year-old mango tree that still drops 250 pounds of fruit a year (\"We eat as much as we can and feed the rest to the chickens,\" Gerry said). Black-capped raspberries. Star fruit. Pigeon peas. Dragon fruit growing along a stone wall; coffee bushes that produce 1,500 pounds of beans a year; 120 pounds of macadamia nuts. Five different kinds of avocados, including 180 pounds from a single tree. The Yama avocado, Gerry says, makes Hass avocados \"seem like something you'd only feed to the pigs.\"\n\n\"I've lived all over the States and all over the world, and this is the best growing climate I've ever lived in,\" Gerry said.\n\nGerry got his agricultural degree from UC-Davis, near where the Flavr Savr tomato was first developed, and then spent thirty years farming twenty-two acres in Mendocino. When I asked Gerry if he had ever tried a Flavr Savr, he smiled.\n\n\"I tasted the Flavr Savr. It tasted like rubber,\" he said. \"I thought, 'Wow, you guys are never going to sell this,' and sure enough, it fell on its face.\n\n\"If corporations develop a plant, they develop it for their own reasons. They don't develop it for nutrition. They could care less about nutrition. That's not the people you want growing your food.\"\n\nEspecially given Hawaii's utopian weather and soil, Nancy and Gerry think that using the state's precious land to grow GMOs\u2014including Dennis Gonsalves's papaya\u2014is a travesty, and symptomatic of a farm system focused entirely on making money for exporters. Hawaiian farmers could provide close to 40 percent of the state's fruits, but rather than sell them locally, companies ship them to the mainland. \"We keep one percent,\" Nancy said. \"You can't even find it in stores. By the time it gets somewhere else, it loses its taste and its nutrition\u2014just like the food we import.\"\n\nShe pointed to my plate, brimming over with fresh-picked organic produce.\n\n\"Nothing on that plate can you find in stores,\" she said.\n\nNancy and Gerry's farm is typical of how most farming is done on the Big Island: 80 percent of the farms are under five acres. Their farm creates virtually no waste; the couple generates 1,500 pounds a year and puts all of it back into their soil. \"You can think of this place as a mini experimental station for home producers,\" Nancy told me. \"It's intended to be that. We don't just grow what we know we can grow. We try all kinds of things. We have a lot of failures and a lot of successes. We're also trying to be sustainable, trying to grow with only inputs from right here on the farm.\"\n\nExcept for GM papaya, the only biotech crop grown on the Big Island is a few hundred acres of corn, grown to feed cattle. None of the big companies have tried to push their experimental corn and soy operations. Yet.\n\n\"We are a land of small farms,\" Nancy said. \"The biotech industry didn't come here. We don't have big, flat land they want to grow crops on. It's not as good for them.\"\n\nImagine if the state reorganized its priorities and started buying food from its own farmers, Nancy said. Imagine if it started providing local schoolchildren with fresh produce from right here on the islands, rather than processed food from the mainland? Hawaii spends $470 million a year on obesity care and hardly anything on prevention\u2014and it is imported, processed food that is making people fat. And consider this: virtually all of Hawaii's food imports come through the ports of Los Angeles and San Francisco. If those boats stopped coming here\u2014if there was an earthquake or a terror attack\u2014\"Hawaii would have one week before people started to starve.\"\n\n\"When you put chemicals into the ground, it wipes out all the critters\u2014the fungus, the bacteria\u2014that produce fertility,\" Gerry said. \"We had a hundred years of sugar, and now the soil is just loaded with toxins: lead, arsenic, DDE, Agent Orange. It's just loaded. Now all your nitrogen producers are dead, and you have to buy synthetic fertilizer. It's like an addiction, and after a few years, the land is burned out. The soil is dead. It's a red powder. Even weeds won't grow there.\"\n\nBack in 2000, as the local GMO debate began to heat up, Nancy did some research and discovered there were 4,000 experimental field trials going on all over the state. What the companies were growing, and what they were spraying, was a complete mystery. \"No matter who you asked, no one knew what this was,\" Nancy told me. \"The Big Five companies were all here. So we\u2014five mothers of young children\u2014started looking into it, and decided the community needed to know what was happening here.\"\n\nNancy turned to politics and found an ally in Margaret Wille, a Hawaii County Council member. Wille is as adamant about protecting farmers as Dennis Gonsalves and Nancy Redfeather, but when it comes to GMOs, she falls squarely into Redfeather's camp.\n\nEspecially given volcanic debates about GMOs brewing on Kauai and Maui, Wille considered herself a bulwark against industrial agriculture on her own island. \"We look around and see what's going on in other counties,\" she said. \"On Maui, a major section of agricultural land has been taken by these GMO corporations. Now we have dust storms because most GM corn is done with herbicide-resistant chemicals, which kills the soil, makes it sterile, and makes it unstable, so you get dust storms.\n\n\"My district is a breadbasket district. A lot of it is organic, and there is a whole culture of protecting the land, of planting indigenous crops and heirloom seeds. I've heard GMO people say, 'We're going to be everywhere so you won't have any choice.' It's like having an invasive species or a virus: you can't protect against it. As a culture\u2014we have a big native Hawaiian population\u2014we're going in the opposite direction.\"\n\nIn a move that made international headlines, Wille introduced a bill in 2013 that would ban GMOs from being planted on the Big Island. Papaya plantations (and corn silage farms) would be grandfathered in, so there was no risk that Dennis Gonsalves's brainchild was in any danger. But no other land would be available to industrial, experimental farms. Wille wrote her bill \"to prevent the transfer and uncontrolled spread of genetically engineered organisms on to private property, public lands and waterways.\" But the larger question was clear: voters on Hawaii should have a say in how their land is used and by whom.\n\nAfter a great deal of rancorous debate in the county council, the bill was approved.\n\nBig agricultural companies\u2014worried that the decision would serve as another domino in the global anti-GMO movement\u2014immediately sued to prevent the county from enforcing the law. Lawyers representing major industries\u2014the Hawaii Floriculture and Nursery Association, the Hawaii Papaya Industry Association, the Big Island Banana Growers Association, and the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the world's largest biotech trade association\u2014claimed the bill lacked scientific evidence. In the two decades since Dennis Gonsalves began his work, genetically modified farming had become a \"critical and generally accepted part of agriculture,\" their complaint said.\n\nIndustry also claimed that Wille's law was invalid, since local ordinances don't trump state or federal law, and in November 2014, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Kurren, once again, agreed: county law could not override state and federal law. The law banning GMOs was overturned: the county is appealing in federal court.\n\nIndustry representatives were elated. \"This is something to be thankful for,\" one of the plaintiffs' attorneys said. \"This is really important to some of the farmers. It has a big impact on their lives and their livelihoods.\"\n\nNancy Redfeather scoffed at such statements.\n\n\"The Big Ag industry says, 'We're a $270 million industry,'\" she said. \"We say, 'What are your products? What do you sell here?' The answer is: 'Nothing.'\n\n\"We want to be like Vancouver Island: lots of local organic farms,\" Redfeather said. \"That's what I want: to create jobs, healthy food, more dollars floating through our own economy. That's what a lot of people were thinking when we passed this bill. It was really arrogant of Judge Kurren to say, 'It's not the responsibility of the county to regulate what they want.' That 'the health of the land is none of your business, it's the business of the state.' When you look at the state budget for the Department of Ag, the appropriation for local agriculture is so small you can't even see it on a bar graph. The state is not capable of protecting us from anything.\"\n\nBut industry didn't stop there. Given their success in court, companies turned their attention to unseating Margaret Wille, their nemesis on the county council.\n\n\"The super PACs all lined up against me,\" Wille told me. \"They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat me. They sent out fliers with a papaya on it, saying, 'A vote for Margaret is a vote against the community.' They flooded mailboxes with massive mailings, they did phone calls, they went door-to-door leaving all kinds of negative stuff. They brought people in from Honolulu. It was really the first time that big money came in to defeat a local councilperson.\"\n\nAfter a \"tsunami of outrage and objection,\" Wille survived the onslaught. \"We are tired of having these lobbyists control things,\" Wille told me. \"The fact I can win against tremendous odds and money and manpower is very hopeful. This isn't over yet.\"\n\n### The War on Maui\n\nIndeed it wasn't. If anything, the skirmish on the Big Island was just a preview for the real fight, which was already under way across the water on Maui. This time, the global seed companies were not going to wait around for a vote to turn against them. They couldn't afford to: their experimental fields on Maui were the very heart of their global GM seed business. A loss on the Big Island, where there were no experimental farms, was largely symbolic. A loss on Maui would be catastrophic. On Maui, the companies would have to use their muscle\u2014more than $8 million worth\u2014to convince island voters that GMOs were good for them.\n\nBefore agreeing to meet with me, Alika Atay had to consult the moon. He checked his calendar. I'd be arriving on Maui in late March, during a new moon phase. He'd be planting, he said, but could meet me late in the afternoon.\n\nOn my way to meet Alika, I stopped in a local Safeway supermarket to see what kind of fruit was for sale on an island that can produce virtually anything. What I found was the same fruit you would find in a Giant in Baltimore or a Kroger in Dallas or a Piggly Wiggly in Atlanta: Bananas from Costa Rica. Apples from New Zealand. Oranges from Florida.\n\nAs far as I could tell, it was pretty much impossible to buy fruit grown down the street.\n\nFor Alika, as for Nancy Redfeather, this is precisely the problem. In their eyes, the fight against GMOs is part of the much larger fight to loosen the stranglehold that large food companies have on their beloved local food economy. Despite unparalleled weather and growing conditions, the share of produce the state grows for itself has fallen by half since 1990; it now imports two-thirds of its fresh fruits and vegetables. In 2009, for the first time, Hawaii had more land planted for experimental seed crops than for growing fruits and vegetables.\n\nHawaii's agricultural experts have estimated that replacing just 10 percent of the island's food imports with locally grown produce would create 2,300 jobs and $313 million in the local economy and generate nearly $200 million more in sales and tax revenues.\n\n\"The state Department of Education serves 50,000 meals a day, and 90 percent of the food comes from imports,\" Alika said. \"I went over there once and asked to see their order sheet. The first two items on the list were five million pounds of apples and five million pounds of oranges.\n\n\"I said, 'You guys are part of the fucking problem! You say you want to be sustainable, and then you order ten million pounds of apples and oranges from the mainland? Why not order ten million pounds of tangerines and guava and papaya and star fruit that we grow right here?'\"\n\nThe day we met, Alika, as he is known, was dressed in jeans and a green \"MauiThing\" T-shirt adorned with a pitchfork. A camouflage baseball cap barely contained the white curly mane that cascaded down his leathered face and neck. As we talked, Alika's cell phone continued to ring; fellow farmers were checking in about two issues on which Alika has become a charismatic leader: farming and politics.\n\nAlika is the president of the Hawaiian Indigenous Natural Farming Association and a leader in the anti-GMO group called the SHAKA Movement, named for the local hand gesture (a fist with thumb and pinkie extended) used to express cultural solidarity. He is both a grower (he plants, among other things, cucumbers, tomatoes, several varieties of sweet potatoes, and apple bananas) and an educator. He spends a great deal of time teaching sustainable practices to young farmers. He wants them to learn about \"canoe plants,\" the crops that Hawaii's original settlers brought over in tiny boats as they crisscrossed the islands of the Pacific.\n\n\"Our ancestors were pretty cool,\" Alika says. \"Generations ago, they selected particular plants, and for 1,700 years they survived and thrived. They fed millions. And their farming was 100 percent organic. _Nothing_ was imported.\n\n\"Now, we're being asked to grow European seeds, and our soil doesn't have the same geologic composition as it does in the Northeast or in Europe. The cattle and pigs raised here eat our crops, then get 'finished' on the mainland, where they shit out our minerals on someone else's land.\"\n\nAlika sees the struggle against industrial agriculture as far more than just trying to rid his island of GMOs, or pesticides, or global conglomerates: it's about preserving _aina_ , the Hawaiian term for \"that which feeds us.\" _Aina_ represents a sacred bond between people and a place that, once broken, threatens to destroy both humans and the world around them. In their fight against GMOs, Alika and the SHAKA movement considered themselves, as their ancestors did, to be \" _aina_ warriors.\"\n\nForty or fifty years ago, the pineapple plantations sprayed DDT and it leached through the soil, reached local aquifers, and contaminated drinking water. Forty years later, they went back and tested it, and the same wells were _still_ contaminated with DDT. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, heptachlor was being sprayed on the pineapples. The plants got cut up and fed to cattle as \"green chop.\" Then the milk was bottled and served to local kids.\n\n\"For us, this is intergenerational oppression,\" Alika said. \"It's the mentality of the plantation, but instead of plantation bosses, now it's biotech corn bosses. How can you convince people to free themselves from the bonds of oppression?\n\n\"There are two types of power: organized money and organized people,\" he said. \"With organized money, you see the long arm of corruption. They can pervade all levels of government. People make all kinds of decisions because of power and money. When you hear them say, 'We're here to feed the world,' they forgot one word: 'Well.'\"\n\n\u2014\n\nIT IS NOT JUST NATIVE HAWAIIANS who revere the Maui landscape and are willing to fight to preserve it. As on the Big Island, Maui has also been a magnet for back-to-the-land white farmers from the mainland who share the native resistance to corporate agriculture.\n\nGerry Ross and his wife, Janet Simpson, moved to Maui in the 1990s to take over her parents' farm in the middle of the island. Janet left a career as a coffee roaster outside Calgary; Gerry quit his job as a PhD geologist who worked in the Arctic for the Geological Survey of Canada. Today, Gerry is a trim man with a pair of studs in his left ear and two rattails dangling from beneath a dirty white baseball cap; his organic farm produces potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuces, kale, broccoli, beets, carrots\u2014\"anything you could possibly want to eat except strawberries or asparagus.\"\n\nIt was not always thus. When Gerry and Janet first took over the farm twenty years ago, the local agricultural extension agent told them the first thing they needed to do was fumigate the soil with fungicides and atrazine.\n\n\"My father-in-law passed away fourteen months after we got here, from cancer,\" Gerry Ross said. \"The guy at the ER asked what he did for a living. I said, 'Farmer.' He said, 'Yep. We see it all the time.' I'd be willing to bet that most of the soil being used for GMOs is like what we inherited here.\n\n\"These companies, it's pesticides they want to sell, not food,\" Ross said. \"Theirs is not a farm system designed to feed the world, it's a system designed to sell chemicals.\"\n\nRoss takes his science very seriously. A member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, he applies to soil science the same research instincts he once used as a professor of geology. He pays intimate attention to soil bacteria, and erosion control, and the symbiotic relationship between nitrogen-fixing microbes and the nodules on the roots of plants like sun hemp. Once he figured out that increasing the organic matter beneath his crops by just 1 percent saved 19,000 gallons of water per acre, he started collecting and composting 25 tons of local food waste every year.\n\n\"We're sequestering CO2 like you wouldn't believe,\" Ross said. \"If you're an earth scientist, you understand that with systems, things work together. Plants and microbial rhizomes, that's a 400-million-year-old relationship. Why would we trash that? Why not use 400 million years of evolution instead of fifty years of pesticides?\n\n\"This is why I have such a big problem with GMOs\u2014it's not taking the time to understand natural systems,\" Ross said. \"There's no freaking way a Bt gene should be in corn. There's a certain element of human arrogance. We used to be told 'one gene, one trait.' Now we have epigenetics telling us that echoes can be felt four generations down the line.\"\n\nLike Alika, Ross does a lot more than farm. For years, he taught sustainable agriculture at a nearby learning center for children whose lives, one way or another, had gotten off track. Six times a year, he brought them to his farm to learn science and farming: he taught them about the structure of seeds, how seeds make plants, how plants make food. Mainly, though, he taught them \"to learn that they're not stupid.\"\n\nTo generations of young people, Ross became known as Farmer Gerry. Years later, when the GMO debate started to get hot, these allegiances would prove critical. Young people would come out to vote, many of them for the first time in their lives.\n\n### Who Cares for the Land\u2014the Companies or the People?\n\nFor indigenous farmers like Alika Atay and organic farmers like Gerry Ross, the GMO issue brought old legal debates over land sovereignty to the surface. Hawaii is one of the few states in the country with environmental stewardship written right into the state constitution's \"public trust\" doctrine. When Hawaii held a state constitutional convention in 1978\u20131979, the land stewardship language remained.\n\nFor the benefit of present and future generations, the State and its political subdivisions shall conserve and protect Hawaii's natural beauty and all natural resources, including land, water, air, minerals, energy sources, and shall promote the development and utilization of these resources in a manner consistent with their conservation and in furtherance of the self-sufficiency of the State. All public natural resources are held in trust by the State for the benefit of the people.\n\nAlika considered Maui's anti-GMO movement to be directly connected to this tradition. \"For land and water to be protected as a public trust, for animals and birds and fish to have rights, and most importantly for kids and elders to have health\u2014if you were raised here, you're bound to those core values,\" he said.\n\nAutumn Ness was not born or raised on Maui, but she knew a threat when she saw one. Ness had spent twelve years living in Japan, where, in 2011, she worked for tsunami relief efforts and set up testing facilities after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. When she became pregnant, she sought a home away from the radiation and chose Maui.\n\nIt was a safe bet, she thought, until she came across photographs of handwritten company pesticide spray logs. _July 10, 2014, 10 a.m.: Permethrin. July 15, 2014, 10 a.m.: Lorsban. July 15, 2014, 10 a.m.: Penncap. August 5, 11:30 a.m.: Malathion._\n\n\"When I saw the spray logs, my heart sank,\" Ness said. \"That's when I said, 'Okay, I'm all in.' Those logs came from the _least_ secure fields. Other fields are triple barb-wired, like you're crossing the border between Israel and Palestine. What they were doing on fields you can walk to makes you wonder what they're doing behind all that barbed wire.\"\n\nNess turned to every authority she could think of to find out more about the chemicals being sprayed on the experimental plots and\u2014as people had on Kauai\u2014always came up empty. \"Overshadowing all the issues is the fact that the corporations have hijacked every level of our government,\" she said. \"That's a way bigger issue to me than the spray thing.\n\n\"The cards are institutionally stacked against us, and it's done in a really dishonest way,\" Ness said. \"Everywhere we turned\u2014looking for spray records, or birth defect records, or records of companies spraying near schools\u2014we would get told by every level of people\u2014the workers, the city council, the Department of Health, the Department of Ag\u2014they would all say, 'I understand your problem, but there's nothing I can do for you.' I have to wonder: Who the hell is running the show here? Everyone is giving the companies the keys. Even the judges\u2014we hear, 'I can't do anything for you.' I mean, come on! You're a judge!\"\n\nTogether with Alika's SHAKA Movement, Ness became a central figure in a campaign to get a measure on the county ballot that would put a moratorium on all GM farming until the companies performed full health and environmental safety tests. The original draft included page upon page enumerating the reasons GMOs and their associated pesticides were unwelcome on Maui. The experimental plots were not farms but \"an outdoor laboratory\" that promoted intensive pesticide spraying on Maui and encouraged \"527 million pounds of additional herbicides on the nation's farmland.\" The overuse of pesticides damaged soil, wildlife, and drinking water, all of which have \"cultural and spiritual significance\" to the island's indigenous community. GM crops constituted an \"invasive species\" that threatened the island's delicate balance of native plants and animals, and the pesticides used to grow them posed health risks to both consumers and farmworkers.\n\nThe petition also urged voters to consider the \"Precautionary Principle\" that the U.S. Supreme Court articulated in 1986: federal law mandated that states could not \"sit idly by and wait until potentially irreversible environmental damage has occurred or until the scientific community agrees on what [environmental risks] are or are not dangerous before it acts to avoid such consequences.\"\n\nAutumn Ness got busy knocking on doors. As part of her signature-gathering campaign, she carried along the pesticide spray logs, both as she talked to voters and when she was interviewed in the press. She published them on Facebook and in the newspaper. She circulated satellite images of the island, with experimental fields outlined in red and dramatic yellow and blue arrows indicating the direction in which chemicals would drift into towns through the air or in creeks and rivers. The images, intentionally or not, resemble military target maps, with the arrows passing directly over elementary schools and wildlife refuges.\n\n\"These guys were spraying many times a day,\" she said. \"It's not farming, it's chemical testing. As soon as the companies found out those photos were a central part of our campaign, they went back and ripped down the board where they had posted the spray records.\"\n\nNess needed to work quickly. In order to place the measure before the county council (which could either vote on the referendum directly or pass the measure on to voters instead), organizers needed to gather 8,000 signatures within six months.\n\nBy the end of May, with Alika organizing farmers and people in the indigenous community, and Ness knocking on doors, they had collected more than 11,000 signatures in just six weeks.\n\nThe ball was now in the county council's court. During a series of \"excruciating\" hearings on the measure, people from both sides of the debate showed up to pressure the council. Monsanto organized a rally in front of the Maui County Building. Workers showed up wearing neon yellow hats and T-shirts and carrying signs emblazoned with \"Save Ag Jobs\" and \"Save Farmers.\" \"I think the initiative will threaten not only agriculture, but a lot of great jobs for the people of Maui,\" a worker named Lowella Oasay told a local reporter.\n\nA Monsanto employee named Carol Reimann appeared on a video delivering \"over a thousand pages of weighted studies and documents and research papers that attest to the health and safety of our products and farming practices in Maui County.\" A man wearing a neon yellow shirt with a Monsanto emblem on the breast said, \"I love the research, I love what I do, I love working in agriculture. I've been doing it for seventeen years. It's still what drives me. I know what we do here has an impact around the word, you know, and that's important to me. That's why I do it.\"\n\nAnother Monsanto employee, Dan Clegg, said the documents were evidence of the company's \"transparency.\" \"I don't want to speculate, but I would say there is a group of people that have signed that petition that are thoroughly confused,\" Clegg said. \"They don't have all the information. Now is their opportunity to step back, think about where they want local agriculture to go, get all the information before they make a decision. This is one-stop shopping, okay, for a global round of information.\"\n\nAutumn Ness was impressed\u2014and embittered\u2014by the company's tactics. \"Workers were bussed in from Monsanto and Dow\u2014and they all said, 'If this passes, I'll lose my job,'\" Ness said. \"They all had their testimony written on Monsanto letterhead. For many of them, English was their second language, yet they all used the same colloquialisms. It was obvious that the same person had written their speeches.\"\n\nIn the end, the council declined to vote on the bill outright. The GMO ban became the first voter initiative in Maui's history to make it onto a ballot.\n\nFor the industries confronting the ban, things suddenly got serious. Stopping the GMO ban was no longer a matter of twisting a few arms on the county council; now the companies' global business model would be up to the whims of the people of Maui themselves. The companies \"didn't have any idea we would get as far as we did,\" Ness said. \"They ignored us for a while. There wasn't a peep. Then right about when it became clear we were going to get on the ballot\u2014it's really hard in the state of Hawaii to do that\u2014the companies were like, 'Oh, shit! Now we have something to deal with!'\"\n\n### The Counter Campaign\n\nThe companies reacted swiftly. Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences were determined not to let Maui become another Kauai. Monsanto vowed to mount \"an aggressive campaign against this initiative,\" company spokesperson Dawn Bicoy said. Banning GMOs would \"devastate our county's fragile agricultural economy.\" The initiative, Monsanto claimed, was based on \"false claims that are not supported at all by the overwhelming body of scientific evidence.\" GM crops are \"critical to making food available and affordable to the world while also protecting crops threatened by disease, like Hawaii's own papaya.\"\n\nRather than try to convince Maui voters of the safety of GMOs, the companies tried to change the debate; instead of talking about pesticides or land rights or local produce, they would talk about jobs. The bill was not a ban on \"GMOs,\" it became a ban on \"farming.\" Monsanto and Dow said they employed more than six hundred workers on the island and said the GMO ban would put local farmers out of work. But they also returned to the old playbook: GMOs were necessary to feed the world. \"With almost 18 million farmers worldwide growing genetically engineered crops\u201490% of whom are small farmers in developing countries\u2014the SHAKA Initiative would stop Maui farmers from taking advantage of modern technology to help address some of the most pressing problems facing agriculture today,\" the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, an industry group, said.\n\nA letter, composed on letterhead from the Citizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban, went out to all registered voters. A petition was circulated asking voters if they supported a ban on farming. Ads began appearing on television and the radio, never mentioning GMOs\u2014or that the funding had been provided by Monsanto or Dow.\n\nThe companies also flexed their muscles on the wording of the ballot initiative itself. Ness and the rest of the ban's supporters assumed the bill's ambitious language (with its references to the \"spiritual significance\" of the island's water and land) would be what voters would see on the ballot. This proved to be naive. By the time the ballot measure emerged from the county clerk's office, its language was so muddled that even supporters could barely understand what they were being asked to vote for.\n\nVOTER INITIATIVE: GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ORGANISMS\n\nShould the proposed initiative prohibiting the cultivation or reproduction of genetically engineered organisms within the County of Maui, which may be amended or repealed as to a specific person or entity when required [for] environmental and public health impact studies, public hearings, a two thirds vote and a determination by the County Council that such operation or practice meets certain standards, and which establishes civil and criminal penalties, be adopted for Maui County?\n\n\"When I read it, even I didn't know if _I_ was going to vote for it,\" Autumn Ness said. \"There was no mention of the moratorium. They changed 'GMO' to 'GE.' They did everything they could to make people _not_ understand the question on the ballot. They said if we didn't like the wording, we could sue, but then we would have had to wait until the next election. So we said we would just take it. In the end, we realized we were working against our own government. We just decided we would go out and educate people.\"\n\nTo Gerry Ross, the influence the big companies had on local politics became clear during a meeting of the Maui County Farm Bureau. Ross had served on the farm board for fifteen years, and relationships between small organic farmers like him and the \"corporate guys\" had usually gone pretty well. But one evening, about eight months before the GMO vote, the corporate guys started talking about how the anti-GMO people are all \"anti-science.\" Even the mayor parroted this line, saying that people had been \"genetically modifying food for 10,000 years.\"\n\nThis did not sit well with Ross.\n\n\"I said, 'Wait a minute, Mr. Mayor,'\" Ross told me. \"'We've been _selecting_ seeds for 10,000 years. We've only been genetically _crossing_ for forty years. What would you do if you learned in 1959 that a chemical like atrazine actually turned out to be much more dangerous, and at lower levels, than you first supposed? You really need to study how safe this stuff is.'\n\n\"That's the kind of stuff a small-town mayor doesn't understand.\"\n\nRoss agreed to add his voice to television and radio spots supporting the GMO moratorium. He went back into character as \"Farmer Gerry,\" hoping to reach his former students\u2014now grown up and ready to vote\u2014to get their friends and families to show up at the polls.\n\nAutumn Ness helped organize some four hundred volunteers and set out again to talk to her fellow islanders. There was a lot of ground to cover, especially since it was clear the companies were about to drop a lot of money on the campaign. Going door-to-door, it became clear to Ness that \"nobody knew what a GMO was,\" she said.\n\n\"Right out of the gate the companies turned this into a farming ban,\" Ness said. \"We were out in the community talking to people, and they thought there were two things on the ballot: GMOs and a farming ban. People told me they were going to vote yes on the GMO ban and no on the farming ban\u2014and there was no farming ban.\n\n\"People at the door would be a strong no, then we'd have to talk to them at the door and tell them the info they had was wrong\u2014even if the ad was on TV. We could flip a no to a yes at the door in five or ten minutes. All they needed to know was the truth.\"\n\nNess figures she alone spoke to 3,000 people. She and her team handed out fliers, reminding voters that the moratorium was intended to stop just GM experimentation, not traditional farming. GM farms represented only 1 percent of Maui's 852 farms (and just 6 percent of the island's 54,500 acres of cropland), and almost all the locally grown food people actually ate had nothing to do with GMOs. Local produce farms\u2014farms that produced food that local people actually ate\u2014would not be affected.\n\n### Controlling the Airwaves\n\nIn September 2014, the companies' multimillion-dollar media wave crashed over the island. Legally, Monsanto and Dow could buy only four radio commercials per hour, so that is what they did: four per hour, every hour, per station, Ness said.\n\n\"The TV and radio commercials started, and they were just relentless,\" Ness said. \"There was no limit to airtime on TV, so they bought up every available space on TV. So even if we did raise money for ads, there wasn't any space available. By the time we got some money together, we could only buy spots at eleven p.m.\"\n\nIndustry advertisements\u2014typically attributed to the Citizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban\u2014flashed photographs of farmers working in cornfields. Voice-overs from the head of the local farm bureau emphasized that farming helps \"contribute to the economy, provide jobs, pay taxes, and maintain the land in an environmentally friendly way.\" The companies simply \"bring in supplies\" that help local farmers \"reduce their cost of production.\"\n\nThe ads \"never once mentioned the safety of GMOs, they never talked about toxic chemicals. What they did talk about was a farming ban, and what agriculture means to Maui,\" Ness said. \"The companies got older people, who remembered the plantation days, and told them if the moratorium went into effect, their families would lose their jobs. These Dow and Monsanto reps don't go on TV. They got local people to go on TV and tell their sob stories. It was crazy\u2014really, really intense how emotional it got. They really pulled the heartstrings. They put a Filipino girl on TV saying, in tears, 'I don't know how we're going to pay our rent and our kids doctors' bills.' It even got to me.\"\n\nWeeks later, when campaign finance reports came in, the financial power of the companies became clear. The industry group Citizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban received $5.1 million from a \"citizen\" named Monsanto; $1.7 million from Dow AgroSciences; and $1 million from the pro-industry Council for Biotechnology Information.\n\nThe campaign finance reports themselves were absurdly opaque. The companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct mail and millions of dollars on media advertising. But they also spent thousands of dollars on \"media training\" and a \"Maui County Farm Fair\" and \"committee meeting prep\" and \"sign waving.\" During a parade at the Maui County Farm Fair, Monsanto employees showed up in large numbers, waving signs; several told Alika the company had paid them $200 to march behind a tractor.\n\nAll told, companies and their lobbying arm spent more than $8 million on a county ballot measure. \"For all the money they spent, they could have done the safety studies and the soil testing and the water testing, and been back in business for way less than that,\" Ness said.\n\nTo Alika, the tactic of using workers to push a political agenda was doubly distasteful.\n\n\"The companies always dangle the carrot of money,\" Alika told me. \"For me, when you step away and look at it, the real issue is this: There are those who live here, and those who just sleep here. A large majority\u2014maybe 80 percent\u2014of the workers on these farms are immigrant Filipinos or Micronesians; they're international migrants. Yeah, they have families, but they're here on work visas. So when I ask them, 'Where are you from? Where is your home?' the Filipino guys say, 'I send all my money home'\u2014meaning back to the Philippines. But then they get paid by the companies to show up at rallies. They had two hundred of them show up at a rally at the county fair, and the guys told me they were paid to be there. They show up at county council hearings, same way.\n\n\"The same thing is true for these big, burly tractor operators from Nebraska. They just sleep here. They come and go. They come here when it's snowing back home, go back when it's warm. Even the scientists\u2014they come from places like France, so they just sleep here too. All these people saying that GMOs are so good\u2014this isn't their home. For us, this is our home. I ask the Filipinos: 'If they sprayed five times a day in your county, what would you do? Why is it okay to poison us?' I don't blame the workers, I blame the economic system that has them working here in the first place.\"\n\nLorrin Pang, a Maui physician and a consultant to the World Health Organization, maintained throughout the campaign that he was \"very concerned\" with the experimental GM crops, especially because of the chemicals they required. \"You may know the effects of each chemical individually, but each new combination could have stunning effects,\" he wrote. \"The minute you combine then, all hell can break loose. We've only recently learned that, on Kauai for example, they are regularly spraying seventy to eighty different chemicals to kill everything in the soil, the microbes, the viruses, the fungi. That represents ten to the twenty-third possible combinations, a trillion trillion, more than all the drops of water in the ocean. And they certainly haven't cleared any of this with the people who have to live with the risk of being exposed to whatever is being tested. This is all quite unethical.\"\n\nWith election day approaching, celebrity anti-GMO activists started showing up to support the effort. Here was Tyrone Hayes, the Berkeley biology professor and former Syngenta scientist who made international headlines for showing that Syngenta's pesticide atrazine causes hormone disruptions. There was Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, speaking about how difficult it was to be GMO-free in the ice cream industry \"because most of the feed given to cows comes from GMO crops.\"\n\nAlika and the SHAKA Movement held a daylong Hawaiian music festival called Aloha da Vote. A party called Shake It for SHAKA advertised \"tribal ethno global beats to move feets & stir us into ecstatic bliss dance heaven.\"\n\n### The Vote\n\nAlika Atay didn't care whether they danced, walked, or drove to the polls, he just wanted to get them there and get them to vote. The early returns did not seem promising. Local television and radio stations continued to bombard Maui residents with ads paid for by Monsanto and Dow, and the tactic seemed to be working: as Alika drove around, he noticed the polling places were empty. With just four hours left before the polls closed, exit interviews indicated that the industry side was winning 60\u201340.\n\nAlika and his team began feverishly working Facebook and Twitter. They called everyone they knew. If you haven't voted yet, get out and vote. If you have voted, fill your car with friends who haven't, and get them to the polls.\n\n\"We had people working all the precincts,\" Alika said. \"We said, 'Let's make our signs the last things people see before they vote.'\"\n\nAutumn Ness said she was never in any doubt. She knew how many doors she had knocked on. Sure enough, when the final vote was tallied, supporters of the moratorium\u2014a shoestring, grassroots organization battling $8 million spent by two of the biggest companies in the world\u2014had won, with just over 51 percent of the votes. The vote to ban all GM farming on the island was decided by just a thousand votes.\n\n\"That night, when people read the results and the reality sank in that we had won, there were a couple thousand people gathered, hugging each other,\" Alika told me. \"I saw a lot of young people, a lot of Hawaiians, coming up to me and saying this was the first time they had ever voted. There were people who had given up on the system\u2014the elders\u2014they chose this time to say, 'Maybe this will be worth it.'\"\n\nThe celebrations were short-lived. SHAKA and the rest of the moratorium's supporters knew the companies would take their victory to federal court, just as they had on Kauai and on the Big Island. So as soon as the votes were counted, they filed a lawsuit\u2014unusual for the side that won an election\u2014seeking to force the county to enforce the ban.\n\nThe next day, Monsanto and Dow Chemical filed their own lawsuit. Just as they did after the Kauai and Big Island votes, the companies claimed the Maui initiative had no authority to preempt state and federal laws that already regulated GMOs. \"This local referendum interferes with and conflicts with long-established state and federal laws that support both the safety and lawful cultivation of GMO plants,\" said John Purcell, a Monsanto executive.\n\nBarry Kurren, the federal judge who struck down both Kauai's bid to restrict GM farming and the Big Island's own GMO restriction, issued an injunction, pushing for more arguments to be heard; the county agreed to wait several months to start enforcement.\n\nKurren reassigned the case to Chief Judge Susan Mollway, and on June 30, 2015, Mollway ruled that the county law was indeed preempted by state and federal law, and that the county had overstepped its authority by banning GMOs. Notably absent from her ruling was any opinion about the safety of GMOs.\n\nNo portion of this ruling says anything about whether GE organisms are good or bad or about whether the court thinks the substance of the ordinance would be beneficial to the county.\n\nAlika Atay, the SHAKA Movement, Lorrin Pang, and a handful of others have appealed the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Their goal: Get the county to enforce the will of its own citizens.\n\nTo Alika, the victory\u2014however compromised\u2014represented a profound moment in the history of his indigenous people. No longer would native Hawaiians feel intimidated by colonial economic forces, no matter how well-heeled.\n\n\"For me, that was the bigger message,\" Alika said. \"It gave these young people a taste of victory. They knew how much hard work and sacrifice came along with that victory. So now, when future challenges come up, they'll know what to do. We were _aina_ warriors.\"\n\n# Part Three\n\n## 7.\n\n## Feeding the World\n\n Dennis Gonsalves saved an industry by redesigning the genes of a single papaya plant. Nigel Taylor is doing similar work, but he's working to protect food for an entire continent.\n\nWhen I visited Taylor, I discovered him deep inside a large greenhouse outside St. Louis. He was looking wistfully over a small forest of foot-tall cassava seedlings, pawing through a canopy of five-lobed leaves. One by one, Taylor pulled up plants, looking closely at the color of the roots. He was hoping to see orange, but\u2014all too often\u2014he saw white instead.\n\nTaylor moves methodically, but there is an unmistakable urgency to his work. A soft-spoken man with a gray beard and ponytail and a rich Scottish accent, Taylor is a senior research scientist at St. Louis's Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, one of the world's leading (and most well-funded) nonprofit plant research institutions. Taylor is experimenting with genetically engineered cassava, an improved version of an essential crop grown by millions of small farmers in Africa. Cassava is dense with calories, it can tolerate heat and drought, and it can be grown in depleted, marginal soil. But like white rice, cassava is also an imperfect source of nutrition: it fills bellies, but does not fully nourish bodies. Inserting genes that would make cassava more nutritious\u2014coding plants to produce and store vitamin A, vitamin E, or iron\u2014might solve significant health and nutritional problems for the 250 million people who depend on the crop.\n\nTaylor yanks up another cassava. The root of this one is the color of a Creamsicle, and Taylor smiles faintly. The gold-orange hue of the root means the plant is generating beta-carotene, the same compound that gives carrots and sweet potatoes their color. Beta-carotene is essential to the body's generation of vitamin A, a crucial nutritional staple whose absence causes blindness and death in hundreds of thousands of children in the developing world. Vitamin A is found in animal products like eggs, liver, and dairy products, but in countries that don't eat much of these things\u2014especially parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America\u2014reliable sources of vitamin A can be hard to come by. With the right genetic tinkering, Taylor's \"golden cassava\" could help solve vitamin A deficiency for the many cultures that experience it.\n\nBut first he has to get all of the components of the genome just right, and it's not just nutrition he has to address to make the crop more productive.\n\nThere are also the flies.\n\nIn recent years, cassava crops have been attacked by growing swarms of whiteflies, which serve as vectors for a pair of viral diseases called mosaic and brown streak. These pathogen-carrying insects have long been a plague, but warming temperatures, possibly caused by climate change, have helped their numbers explode. Traditionally, the only answer has been to spray plants with pesticides, an only marginally effective solution that carries its own dangers for both farmers and the people they feed.\n\n\"Spraying to control whiteflies is not effective, because\u2014like spraying for mosquitoes to get rid of malaria\u2014you have to kill every one,\" Taylor said. \"These flies are incredibly efficient; you can find a couple thousand flies on a single plant. When we were doing our first field trials, they were flying up and we were breathing them in, wheezing them in. It was really unpleasant.\"\n\nIn the 1990s, scientists working across sub-Saharan Africa focused on breeding cassava to develop plants resistant to the mosaic virus. They were very successful, Taylor said.\n\nBut then the brown streak disease came along.\n\nBrown streak had been around in coastal Kenya and Mozambique for a long time, but it started spreading like crazy in the early to middle 2000s. Cassava varieties that had been developed to resist the mosaic virus were helpless before brown streak, which morphed from being an isolated disease to an epidemic throughout coastal East Africa.\n\n\"People have been looking for sources of resistance to the brown streak disease, but so far, it has proved difficult,\" Taylor said. \"When a plant gets infected, it can recognize the pathogen, and this stimulates its defense mechanism. But when it's a battle between the plant and the pathogen, brown streak always triumphs.\"\n\nCassava is \"vegetatively propagated,\" meaning farmers take stem cuttings from one season's crop to establish the next. Therefore, if one year's plants are infected with the disease, it is carried over to the next planting cycle. \"Even with no new infections, your yields are being affected,\" Taylor said. \"Diseases are always there. Insect vectors are always there.\"\n\nWhere traditional breeding is facing challenges, Taylor is counting on genetic engineering to succeed. Like Dennis Gonsalves, a scientist Taylor very much admires, Taylor is hoping to take an existing cultivar and introduce new gene sequences that\u2014if he can get the sequences right\u2014will make cassava resistant to brown streak. In this, his work is very much like that done on Hawaiian papaya. The difference is that on Hawaii, the price of failure is the collapse of a local industry. In Africa, the collapse of cassava would dramatically affect the lives of millions of people.\n\nPaul Anderson, one of Taylor's senior colleagues, has something of a cold-eyed view of the interaction between humans, food, and agricultural technology. Anderson is the director of the Danforth Center's Institute for International Crop Improvement and oversees the center's work on cassava, sweet potato, sorghum, and cowpeas. He has long studied the rise and fall of crops and human civilizations, and when it comes to the human dependence on farming, he has little patience for sentimentality.\n\n\"Human populations rise and fall based on the promise of food produced in those geographies,\" he said. \"There are lots of instances of crops going by the wayside due to various problems, and others arising. This is why some societies succeeded and some did not. One of the key factors was the ability to grow crops, and those that created multiple crops succeeded. Those that didn't were doomed to be hunters and gatherers.\n\n\"Historically, starvation typically arises with too much dependence on one type of crop,\" he said. \"The potato blight in Ireland\u2014that sort of scenario has played itself out in a lot of different places and in different times. Sometimes diseases could be addressed with cultural practices, with farmers noting that some things you did decreased the possibility of disease. You could manage to get by. But that sort of thing takes time. You gotta be really lucky, or get somebody already doing that cultural practice. One always tries to grow a crop where it hasn't been grown before, to find how it is limited by temperature or water availability or what have you, so any plant breeder is going to be working on expanding the value of that acre by growing in many places and having it yield well.\"\n\nTake sorghum and corn. Sorghum tolerates drought quite well in places like the Sahel, the semi-arid band of Africa south of the Sahara desert. Corn (also known as maize) does not. But maize has advantages that sorghum does not: it tastes better, and its nutrients are more readily available. With maize porridge, your body absorbs 80 to 90 percent of the grain's protein, Anderson said. With sorghum, it's only 65 percent.\n\n\"Over the last ten years, more and more people are growing maize, but it is not a stress-tolerant crop,\" Anderson said. \"But farmers really like it, so if they get good growing conditions for two, three, four years in a row, they increase the maize on their farm. But then there will be a drought, and the maize crop will fail.\n\n\"So that happens, and farmers are used to that,\" Anderson said. \"But if it happens two years in a row, the farmers are lost. He leaves the farm and moves into the city. This has happened most recently in Kenya, after a significant drought caused big population movements. The choice of the wrong crop caused a lot of farmers to fail.\"\n\nSo genetic engineers have a couple of options, Anderson said. They can work on drought-tolerant maize, which plant breeders have been pushing for as long as recorded history, or they can develop a sorghum that is more palatable and has improved nutrition, Anderson said.\n\n\"Genetic engineering isn't an end in itself, it's just a crop-improvement practice that extends your ability to make improvements,\" Anderson said. \"So depending on what time in history one was in, one had tools one could use. Genetic engineering very recently added a new tool\u2014a significant tool, but it's no different than other tools, like the fertilization of plants, or the hybridization of corn.\"\n\nThe United Nations estimates that the world will be inhabited by another 2 billion people by 2050, half of them born in sub-Saharan Africa, and 30 percent in South and Southeast Asia. All of these places are projected to experience acute and worsening drought, which may well make the breakdown of food systems one of the most dangerous effects of climate change.\n\nWith such catastrophic changes on the horizon, the need for advanced technology like GMOs has never been so acute, Anderson said. \"Making plants more stress-tolerant\u2014these are difficult issues to address,\" he said. \"It boils down to this: Is there sufficient genetic variation in the crops of interest? If not, then one has to create variation in the crop so it can be manipulated. Drought tolerance, cold tolerance\u2014these have been targets for plant breeders for thousands of years. Genetic engineering is going to be required to make these big changes.\"\n\nTo Anderson, using GM technology to improve crops in the developing world is a solution that ripples far beyond the growing of food.\n\n\"In most limiting situations, you're talking about the ability to provide nutrients and calories to get you through the year,\" Anderson said. \"You don't have to go very far to see that if you double this, or even increase it by 50 percent, you can sell your crops or share them. You can get the leverage that allows you to move out of poverty. It's poverty that's the biggest problem in these situations.\n\n\"Food availability is more dramatic, but it's ongoing poverty that won't allow a person to achieve their potential. Field labor is almost entirely women and children. Fix this, and a farmer's kids might get to go to school or have a book when they go to school.\"\n\n### Paying for Orphans\n\nWith so much at stake, and with genetic engineering offering so much promise, why haven't multinational corporations put more muscle into this work?\n\nThe answer is money. Or, rather, profit.\n\nThe Danforth Center looks like a hybrid between a university and a corporation, and in a way it is: the center's campus is massive, gleaming, and growing, with 200,000 square feet of gorgeous, state-of-the-art laboratory buildings set off by a sky-lit atrium and a lengthy, fountained reflecting pool. This will soon be joined by $45 million of additional research space and another hundred additional researchers\u2014including the University of Delaware's Blake Meyers.\n\nThe Danforth Center's work is also situated somewhere between university research and corporate agriculture: they do basic science, but they also get their plants out into the field. Their work is not just theoretical, in other words; it is meant to help make practical changes in some of the neediest parts of the world. Most academic scientists are more concerned with publishing research papers than implementing full-scale field tests, Nigel Taylor said, and in any case don't have the money or the staff to deal with things like international bureaucracy, which can kill imaginative projects before they ever get off the ground.\n\nOn the other hand, global food companies, with their deep pockets and their eyes on huge profits, have almost exclusively focused their attention on commodity crops\u2014corn, soy, canola\u2014that make them billions of dollars a year in the enormous North American food market. Building laboratories for genetic engineering is expensive, the companies say, and they need a return on their investment to make the whole thing worthwhile. \"Orphan crops\"\u2014so named because of their neglect by big industry\u2014are left to university researchers and nonprofit centers like Danforth. Cassava, papaya, millet\u2014these crops may be critical staples for millions of the world's poor, but they will never generate the kind of profits demanded by multinational corporations.\n\nInstead, companies donate money to nonprofit researchers doing this sort of work: the Danforth Center's cassava project alone has received some $20 million in grants from Monsanto, as well as from the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The nonprofits get research money, and\u2014in the bargain\u2014the multinationals can say they are doing their part for the needy.\n\nIn other words, the Danforth Center sits at the very joint of the GMO debate: its scientists are working to help the world's most vulnerable people, but they also provide excellent public relations for companies like Monsanto to boast that GMOs are \"feeding the world\" and not just \"feeding the fast-food industry.\" The relationship between the two institutions is distinct and blurry at the same time. The Danforth Center was built literally across the street from Monsanto's world headquarters in St. Louis, and both Monsanto's president and its former chief scientist sit on the Danforth Center's board of directors. Scientists move back and forth between industry and the center. Paul Anderson, for example, spent ten years as the research director of food and feed research at Pioneer Hi-Bred, the same DuPont company caught in the fierce GMO debate on Kauai and Maui. Before that, he served as a senior manager in Pioneer's efforts to move the company's grain into Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America.\n\nA cynic might claim that the $20 million Monsanto throws to the Danforth Center is barely a (tax-deductible) rounding error compared with the company's nearly $16 billion in annual sales. More cynical would be the view that developing drought-resistant GM corn for Africa is really just a way for seed companies to gain more influence\u2014and market share\u2014on other continents. The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been American companies, the U.S. Agency for International Development has said. Close to 80 percent of the agency's contracts and grants go directly to American firms. \"Foreign assistance programs have helped create major markets for agricultural goods, created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans.\"\n\nThe Gates Foundation, which spent close to $500 million on African agricultural development from 2009 to 2011 alone (and which also supports the Danforth Center), has become \"a stalking horse for corporate proponents promoting industrial agriculture paradigms, which view African hunger simply as a business opportunity,\" writes Phil Bereano, a professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Washington. Bereano calls this \"agroindustrial philanthrocapitalism\"; GM crops, he says, \"threaten conventional and organic production as well as the autonomy of African producers and nations.\"\n\nMarion Nestle, a prominent food scientist at New York University, has long been suspicious of industry's humanitarian claims. If giant seed and chemical companies really want to help \"feed the world,\" they should dedicate substantially more resources to helping local farmers in Asia, Africa, and South America develop crops that might only be of _local_ value\u2014even if they don't promote industrial agriculture, and even if they have no potential for corporate profit. How much should companies dedicate to humanitarian food development? Nestle's modest proposal: 10 percent of annual corporate income, a kind of tithing to help those in need.\n\n\"If companies are going to claim that their work will solve world food problems, they need to put substantial resources into working with scientists in developing countries to help farmers produce more food under local conditions,\" Nestle writes in her book _Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism_. \"I continue to believe that to be perceived as credible, the industry must _be_ credible.\"\n\nIndeed, given the destruction that industrial agriculture has done to the American landscape, why should we expect anything different once its technologies are exported to the developing world? \"In the United States, we've seen the number of farms drop by two-thirds and average farm size more than double since World War II,\" wrote veteran food activists Peter Rosset, Frances Moore Lapp\u00e9, and Joseph Collins. \"The gutting of rural communities, the creation of inner-city slums, and the exacerbation of unemployment all followed in the wake of this vast migration from the land. Think what the equivalent rural exodus means in the Third World, where the number of jobless people is already double or triple our own.\"\n\nThis kind of criticism drives scientists like Paul Anderson crazy. Critics of GMOs, especially those in food-secure places like the United States and Europe, have no idea what's at stake for the lives of the poor, he says. Anderson takes an especially dim view of what he calls \"anti-technology groups that are funded by Europeans.\"\n\n\"Do they have the right to do that? Do they have the right to decide who is going to eat what?\" Anderson said.\n\nNigel Taylor agrees. His work on virus-resistant cassava is unlikely ever to serve any corporate interest, and like Dennis Gonsalves, Taylor's primary interest is in serving small African farmers.\n\n\"It's important that African farmers have a strong say in this because it's their livelihood, and they should have the right to access any technology that can improve their standard of living,\" Taylor said. Creating a virus-resistant cassava plant \"would be highly desirable because of the seriousness of brown streak to people's economic security in East Africa.\"\n\nGiven all the noise involved in the GMO debate, Taylor would plainly prefer to leave politics aside and simply work with his cassava plants. He leads me into his tissue culture laboratory to show me minute cassava embryos\u2014clusters of totipotent cells that will be genetically altered before being grown into fully developed plants. Once altered, the cassava cells, under the watchful eyes of Taylor's team, can be cultured and turned into a thousand or more plants. Of these, only a small number will carry the genetic material needed to protect the cassava plant from brown streak. Much work is required to identify and select the most efficacious. The introduced virus defense works by enabling a plant to recognize a viral infection before it occurs, which it does by generating small RNAs and proteins known as argonauts (named for the Greek explorers) that act to \"silence\" the infecting virus.\n\n\"What we can do by triggering this defense mechanism early\u2014it's not an immunization, but it is similar in the manner that it's pre-arming the plant's defense mechanism,\" Taylor said. \"As the virus replicates, it makes double-stranded RNA. The plant can recognize that, and its inherent RNA-silencing mechanisms grab it and chop it up, preventing establishment of the disease. However, in the non-modified plant the virus wins the battle, as the plant cannot fire up these defense mechanisms fast enough to stop the virus replicating and moving to establish infection. By modifying the plant to recognize the virus, and activating the RNA defense mechanisms before the virus arrives, the plant will always stay ahead of the virus and will be resistant. And since the plant makes its own RNA continuously, the plant will always be resistant. So we're not making a new defense mechanism, we're just turning on the plant's inherent resistance systems early and keeping them on.\"\n\nLet's say his lab creates 600 cassava plants. Two-thirds of them would likely need to be thrown out for not expressing virus resistance. Once plants have been selected in St. Louis, they are field tested in Puerto Rico, which, like Hawaii, is a popular growing environment for experimental crops. Then maybe twenty plants get to the field in Africa. These get whittled down to one or two that go through all the stages of testing within the regulatory system. Only one plant line would be submitted for formal approval. If this makes it all the way through regulatory testing and approval, countless crops of this improved cassava line could eventually be grown from this one parent plant.\n\nIn Kenya and Uganda, Taylor and his team work with African scientists and government officials. They have conducted socioeconomic studies to assess if farmers would be receptive to what they are offering.\n\n\"If you frame it up for small farmers for on-farm consumption and local trading, almost everyone says yes,\" Taylor said. \"This is such an important disease, a major threat, and there are very few ways of addressing it. If we can show this works, the farmers have indicated that they would be ready to adopt it.\"\n\nThe question for the people at the Danforth Center is whether their cassava will turn out to be a hit, like Dennis Gonsalves's papaya, or a misfire, like golden rice.\n\n### Golden Rice: The Grain That Will Save Millions of Children\u2014or Won't\n\nIn the summer of 2000, _Time_ trumpeted a cover story about a GM grain that it said could \"save a million kids a year.\" The magazine featured a cover photo of Dr. Ingo Potrykus, a gene scientist who had spent ten years trying to alleviate the suffering of millions of children in the developing world who have deficient levels of vitamin A. Lack of this single nutrient causes blindness in up to half a million children each year and weakens the immune system to the point that some 2 million people die each year of diseases they would otherwise survive.\n\nHow to get more vitamin A into the Asian diet? Potrykus had developed what seemed like a brilliant solution: by inserting genes from daffodils into a rice genome, he had derived a plant fortified with beta-carotene, the same pigment Nigel Taylor is hoping to introduce into cassava. Asia alone produces 417 million tons of rice a year; the trouble is, even if children in many poor countries can get their hands on rice, they frequently do not have access to vitamin-rich fruits or vegetables.\n\nPotrykus visualized peasant farmers \"wading into paddies to set out the tender seedlings and winnowing the grain at harvest time in handwoven baskets,\" _Time_ reported. He pictured \"small children consuming the golden gruel their mothers would make, knowing that it would sharpen their eyesight and strengthen their resistance to infectious diseases. And he saw his rice as the first modest start of a new agricultural revolution, in which ancient food crops would acquire all manner of useful properties: bananas that wouldn't rot on the way to market; corn that could supply its own fertilizer; wheat that could thrive in drought-ridden soil.\"\n\nEven more than Dennis Gonsalves and his GM papaya, golden rice made Potrykus and his research team international celebrities, not least because, like Gonsalves, they had done their work for a nonprofit institution\u2014the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in the Philippines. The project got $100,000 in seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation, and another $2.5 million from the Swiss government and the European Union. But because nearly six dozen genes they were interested in had already been patented by some thirty-two companies, the research team also had to tiptoe through a legal swamp. DuPont, Monsanto, and Zeneca owned a piece of the rice genome, as did Stanford and Columbia universities and the universities of Maryland and California. Patents to the daffodil genes were held by Amoco, DuPont, Zeneca, and Imperial Chemical Industries. The patent for the bacterium was held by Japan's Kirin Brewery.\n\nIn the end, Potrykus and his team struck a deal with AstraZeneca (now Syngenta) that gave the researchers the rights to the seeds they would give to farmers in developing countries earning less than $10,000 a year. The company retained the right to market the rice in places like Japan and the United States. To its supporters, this seemed an ideal partnership between public scientists and private industry, especially after other corporations holding patents also waived their own rights.\n\nThe journal _Science_ announced the successful experiment by distributing magazines to 1,700 journalists around the world. In an accompanying note, editors claimed that \"this application of plant genetic engineering to ameliorate human misery without regard to short-term profit will restore this technology to political acceptability.\"\n\nIndeed, whatever golden rice's prospects for the world's poor, the announcement was a spectacular gift for the biotech industry. After being battered by nearly two decades of growing public resistance to GMOs, biotech companies jumped at the chance to boast that genetic engineering would now feed the world.\n\nThe backlash came swiftly.\n\n\"A rip-off of the public trust,\" grumbled the Rural Advancement Foundation International, an advocacy group based in Winnipeg, Canada. \"Asian farmers get (unproved) genetically modified rice, and AstraZeneca gets the 'gold.'\"\n\nGreenpeace, which had taken a strong stand against GMOs from the beginning, mocked golden rice as an intentional ploy to reverse public anxiety about the technology. \"People are talking about the potential benefits of the second generation of genetically modified crops when almost no questions raised by the first have been answered,\" the group announced. \"You don't have to be paranoid to think the tactics are deliberate.\"\n\nIn an article in _The New York Times Magazine_ titled \"The Great Yellow Hype,\" journalist Michael Pollan suggested that golden rice was being exploited by the biotech industry \"to win an argument rather than solve a public-health problem.\" Malnourished children would have to eat fifteen pounds of cooked rice a day to satisfy their nutritional needs, Pollan wrote, and even if they could eat that much, their fat- and protein-deficient diets would prevent their bodies from taking up the beta-carotene.\n\n\"The unspoken challenge here is that if we don't get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind,\" Pollan wrote. \"Granted, it would be immoral for finicky Americans to thwart a technology that could rescue malnourished children. But wouldn't it also be immoral for an industry to use those children's suffering in order to rescue itself? The first case is hypothetical at best. The second is right there on our television screens, for everyone to see.\"\n\nAnd Vandana Shiva, who would become an international celebrity for vehemently opposing golden rice, called the grain a Trojan horse for the biotech industry. In books like _The Violence of the Green Revolution_ , Shiva had lambasted the planting of Western varieties of wheat and the attendant herbicides, which pushed traditional, vitamin-rich greens like bathua to extinction. Now, she wrote, \"the 'selling' of vitamin A as a miracle cure for blindness is based on the (corporate) blindness to the alternatives.\"\n\nAnd so it has gone. Even in countries where vitamin A deficiency has been most acute\u2014where, one would think, support for such a product would be uniformly enthusiastic\u2014golden rice has been met with acute skepticism and even violence. The government of India is still considering banning all GM field trials for ten years. In Kenya, the government has banned the import of GM food (though not GMO research).\n\nIn August 2013, hundreds of protesters smashed through fences surrounding a field in the Philippines so they could uproot a plant that had been hailed as the potential savior of millions of Asia's malnourished poor. \"We do not want our people, especially our children, to be used in these experiments,\" a farmer and leader of the protest told the Philippine newspaper _Remate_.\n\nTo this day, golden rice\u2014once seen as a savior of the global poor\u2014has not been approved by a single country. What happened?\n\n### The Green Revolution\n\nThe International Rice Research Institute, where Potrykus did his work, had been launching successful breeding projects for decades, and until it started working with GMOs, it had largely met with global gratitude. In the early 1960s, a plant pathologist named Peter Jennings created a fast-growing, high-yielding strain known as India Rice 8 that became so popular that (legend has it) some Indian families even named their children \"IR8.\"\n\nSuch research mirrored work generated by other scientists at the center of what came to be known as the Green Revolution, which used both new plant-breeding techniques and the heavy use of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to dramatically increase the amount of food that farmers could grow. Between 1950 and 1983, crop yields of cereal grains doubled, tripled, even quadrupled. Since grains provide about 80 percent of the calories people consume worldwide, such advances dramatically improved the diets of billions of people: between the 1970s and 1980s, the total amount of food available per person in the world increased 11 percent, while the number of hungry people fell 16 percent (from 942 million to 786 million).\n\nWhen Norman Borlaug, a researcher at Texas A&M University, won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing high-yielding wheat and rice, his citation said that \"more than any person of this age, he helped provide bread for a hungry world.\"\n\nBorlaug has never been shy regarding his feelings about how best to feed the poor and hungry. The organic movement is \"ridiculous,\" Borlaug has said. \"For those who want to go the organic route, God bless them. Let them spend more money for their food. But looking at the world at large, this is an impossibility. . . . Most of the people who are opposing biotechnology, they've never known hunger. These people say that the little farmer should permanently accept that he's going to stay on that three-acre farm with a hoe and a machete. That's fine in Utopia, but don't give the world the false idea that they can produce the food that's needed for 6 billion people.\"\n\nBorlaug's thoughts notwithstanding, the Green Revolution, which laid the global foundation for the spread of GM crops, also left a swath of troubling consequences. The synthetic fertilizers that spurred such high crop yields also created more weeds and insects, which led to a huge increase in the use of herbicides and insecticides. In India, chemically treated land jumped from 15 million acres in 1960 to more than 200 million by the 1980s, contributing to a dramatic global increase in human exposure to toxic chemicals. These poisons also killed natural predators, and soils worldwide edged closer to becoming chemically saturated and lifeless.\n\nM. S. Swaminathan, a renowned Indian geneticist and a leader of India's Green Revolution, later recalled that he had foreseen these complications as early as 1968. \"Exploitive agriculture offers great possibilities if carried out in a scientific way, but poses great dangers if carried out with only an immediate profit motive,\" he said. \"Without first building up a proper scientific and training base to sustain it, [it] may only lead us, in the long run, into an era of agricultural disaster.\"\n\nBy 1999, Swaminathan noted that \"the significance of my 1968 analysis has been widely realized.\"\n\nPlant geneticists like the Danforth Center's Paul Anderson believe GMOs may provide an answer to many of these global food problems. But the debate over spreading GMOs across the developing world has additional complexities, notably that the technology, and the industries pushing it, are largely based in Europe and the United States. The shadow of colonialism has not been lost on local political leaders or on anti-GMO scientists.\n\nIndeed, for every plant scientist who sees GMOs as a powerful tool to feed the world, there is a scientist, or an activist, worried that genetic technology will simply speed up the processes of industrial agriculture that are already in place. Despite the boasts of chemical and biotech companies, there is little evidence that GM crops reduce global chemical use; rather, pushing GMOs at home and in the developing world \"has contributed to the increased use of herbicides to control weeds and the resulting increase in environmental pollution,\" Cornell's David Pimentel writes.\n\nActivists, for their part, have gone to great lengths to make GM crops a symbol of colonial exploitation. In 1999, the Earth Liberation Front torched a genetics research building at Michigan State University where researchers were working on crops for the developing world. The fire caused $900,000 in damage. A spokesman for the group said the research was \"not going to end world hunger, it's going to make more profits for Monsanto.\"\n\nCatherine Ives, the scientist in charge of the lab, was heartbroken. \"I would wonder how much time has been spent by people in this organization in developing countries,\" she told PBS. \"I see women hiking for miles to bring firewood in because they've cut down everything around them and have no productive soils. I see children who are malnourished. They do not have sustainable agricultural practices in place in many parts of the world. That is what we are trying to help them develop.\"\n\n### Feeding the Poor, or Expanding Markets?\n\nCritics say the future of GMOs will play out in the developing world, and not necessarily with the benefit of local people in mind. With upward of 90 percent of American corn and soy crops already planted with GM seeds, the only place for industry to expand is in places like Africa and South America. In this view, GMOs will continue to cause social disruptions that are at least as harmful as their ecological disruptions. Just as they have in the United States, the GM soybeans spreading across countries like Argentina and Paraguay are already replacing diverse, traditional crops with less nutritious monocultures mostly being used to feed livestock for the expanding global market for beef. Just as in the United States, these larger and larger farms move from local control to industrial control.\n\nMonsanto boasts that it has already trained 4,000 farmers in South America to use the company's seeds and pesticides. Paraguay, where 80 percent of the land is controlled by 2 percent of the population, has become the world's fourth-largest exporter of soy, with more than 3 million hectares of fields producing more than 8 million tons of soybeans a year. Most of this is GM, and all of it is heavily doused with chemicals, which has contaminated local water supplies and caused public health scares. In 2013 alone, 914 square miles of pristine forest in a wilderness known as Gran Chaco was cut down and burned to create soybean fields.\n\nParaguay's former president Fernando Lugo took a firm stand against global food companies, at one point ordering his own agriculture department to destroy GM cornfields. The destruction of forests and traditional farming, he argued, was ecologically disastrous and destructive to both traditional farmers and the country's indigenous people.\n\nTwo years later, in 2012, Lugo was ousted in a coup he claimed was orchestrated in part by multinational food companies. His successor, Federico Franco, fast-tracked approval of seven GM soy, cotton, and corn strains; Monsanto, whose Roundup Ready soybeans are used in 95 percent of Paraguay's production, was authorized to sell its new GM seeds in Paraguay just seven months after Franco was sworn in.\n\nIn Argentina, meanwhile, a woman whose infant daughter died because of pesticide poisoning was given the 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize, one of the world's most prestigious, for her efforts to ban agricultural spraying. Argentina is the world's third largest exporter of soybeans; industry uses airplanes to spread more than 50 million gallons of pesticides, especially glyphosate and endosulfan, over GM crops. Going door-to-door to collect stories of families whose homes were surrounded by soybean fields, Sofia Gatica found cancer rates forty-one times the national average. Despite enduring threats from police and local business owners, she persuaded Argentina's health minister to investigate. In 2010, the country's supreme court banned agricultural spraying near populated areas, and\u2014reversing a tradition of forcing residents to prove harm\u2014required that companies prove their products were safe. Argentina banned endosulfan in 2013. Gatica and her colleagues are now pushing for a nationwide ban on glyphosate.\n\nIt is in this pot\u2014a world reconsidering both the Green Revolution and what GMOs might contribute to relieving (or worsening) global food problems\u2014that the debate over golden rice remains simmering.\n\nThere are two primary strains of rice grown in Asia: the short-grained _japonica_ (think sushi) and long-grained _indica_ (think jasmine or basmati). In Asia, farmers have been growing countless varieties of rice for thousands of years. Each strain is developed to accommodate both natural forces (like drought and flooding) and personal taste. It's not just that a grain that grows well (and is considered desirable) in Bangladesh is different from a grain in Japan or China; there are grains preferred in individual Bangladeshi villages that are different from grains grown just a few miles away.\n\nHere's the problem: Most of the original research done on genetically modified rice was done on _japonica._ Most of the poor in Asia eat _indica_. You can have short, fat grains that are stacked with all the nutrients on earth, but people won't eat it if they prefer grains that are long and skinny. Equally challenging, most people in Asia prefer white rice, despite the fact that it is considerably less nutritious than brown rice\u2014let alone rice of an unrecognizable golden color.\n\n\"Rice is white, not yellow or golden, and people are very specific about what they will eat,\" Alfred Sommer told me. \"So let's assume it's a yellow version of their local version. Assume it grows well. Will anyone eat yellow rice? Taste, flavor, what it looks like\u2014we don't know that. We haven't tested it out yet, so we don't know. If you gave golden rice to 10,000 people, would they eat it? We have no idea.\"\n\nSommer knows a thing or two about vitamin A deficiency. So successful were his early efforts to combat the problem that his name adorns an entire wing of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, where Sommer is a professor of epidemiology and former dean. Long before the invention of golden rice, Sommer figured out that solving vitamin A deficiency was as simple (and cheap) as getting people to swallow a couple of two-cent vitamin A capsules a year. The trick was getting the pills to the people. Early ideas included combining vitamin A with MSG or salt, but neither really worked. Sugar worked well in places like El Salvador and Guatemala, where people grow their own sugar and process it in factories where vitamin A can be distributed, but these conditions rarely exist in other countries.\n\nSome clinics combined vitamin A distribution with polio vaccinations, but not everyone who lived in the countryside made it into a clinic. Health workers (or volunteers) would have to trudge long distances to reach remote villages.\n\n\"The problem is that there are very few products that poor people consume widely that we can get to them through some kind of central processing,\" Sommer told me. Inserting vitamin A into a universal consumer food like rice seemed like the magic bullet\u2014provided it could be grown locally, would appeal to local tastes, and, critically, provide the nutrient in sufficient quantities. The original version produced a woefully inadequate 1.6 micrograms of beta-carotene per gram of rice; an improved version called golden rice 2 (and developed at Syngenta) replaced the daffodil gene with a gene from corn, and now delivers up to 37 micrograms per gram.\n\nWhen golden rice was first being touted in the mid-1980s, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had partially financed the research, asked Sommer to write a piece about it. Sommer wrote\u2014and maintains\u2014that although considerable research remains to be done, when all is said and done, golden rice can be an extremely useful tool for combatting vitamin A deficiency.\n\nTwenty years ago, the anti-GMO hysteria was already \"irrational, but well deserved, given what Monsanto's poor PR helped to create,\" Sommer told me. Golden rice was an attempt to bring something to fruition that \"clearly would address a major public health issue and would also help overcome the negative publicity that had been generated by Monsanto's approach to pushing GMO foods, which were not seen as beneficial to anyone but the agriculture industry.\"\n\nIf anything, the prospect of climate change has sped rice research generally into overdrive. In 2004, an international consortium mapped the entire rice genome; two years later, Pamela Ronald of UC-Davis isolated a gene called Sub1 that helps a plant survive even when submerged in floodwaters for two weeks (most plants die after being immersed for three days). The strain has proven popular in flood-prone places like India and Bangladesh, where some 4 million farmers now plant a version of this rice.\n\nIn 2015 alone, scientists published the genomes of 3,000 strains of rice, many focusing on drought- and salt-resistant strains that might survive hotter temperatures and rising sea levels. Researchers are also hoping to produce a photosynthetically enhanced rice grain that would increase yields 30 to 50 percent with the same amount of water and fertilizer. The Gates Foundation has given $20 million to the project, which has twenty-two teams of researchers from nine countries working on it.\n\nOn a hotter planet, with rising tides, growing populations, and diminishing supplies of fresh water, biotechnology will be more important than ever to produce enough food, especially in the developing world, the Danforth Center's Jim Carrington told me. Regions like Africa can have 80 percent of their population living on farms, but because of low productivity and poor infrastructure they can still be the least food-secure places in the world.\n\n\"It's simply not practical to turn all our farming into a Michael Pollan\u2013style idyllic agriculture,\" Carrington said. \"Especially in developing regions of the world like sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, food security crops like cassava, millet, and cowpeas have been produced in ways that would meet organic production standards. But the lack of tools, technology, transportation\u2014all the result of a lot of different things\u2014means that organic production has been exceptionally unproductive. It's a horrible, unfortunate situation.\n\n\"Our research aims are to improve the sustainability of agriculture, to improve the strength of plants to do as much of the work as possible, as opposed to using insecticides and fungicides,\" Carrington said. \"These are not organic versus conventional issues. These are universal issues. We just happen to include GMO in the toolbox. It is not a panacea, and it is not the only tool in the toolbox. It is just one of dozens. But removing that tool we do at our own peril. We don't gain anything; we actually lose the ability to solve a lot of important problems that affect real people.\"\n\nMichael Hansen, of the Consumers Union, has been hearing such arguments for two decades. Back in June 2000, around the time golden rice was on the cover of _Time_ , Hansen went to a congressional hearing to hear what people were saying about the technology's prospects.\n\n\"Right there on the invitation was the statement that golden rice was already saving the eyesight of thousands of children in Asia, and that was all false,\" he told me. \"Fourteen years later, it hasn't saved the eyesight of a single child.\"\n\nIf you go back to the early 1980s, when genetic engineering was in its infancy, everyone said GMOs could do all these wonderful things, Hansen said. Fast-forward to today, and genetic engineering has all been about herbicide tolerance. By now, some 94 percent of our soy is GE, along with 99 percent of our sugar beets, 93 percent of our corn, and 92 percent of our canola. All of these crops were designed to be herbicide tolerant.\n\n\"All those original claims really only led to an explosion of glyphosate, so they needed something to show that GE will benefit people,\" Hansen said. \"Golden rice is still being used to get good PR for industry, to show that they can do something that is clearly good. But look at the millions of dollars that have gone into golden rice, and contrast that with what they've done in the Philippines with the more traditional things they do. They give little pills to people as vitamin supplements, at a cost of about twenty cents a person per year. They have been fortifying noodles with vitamin A. All this was done with no money poured into it.\"\n\nHansen would like to see considerably more investment in traditional foods that support local growers rather than global conglomerates, and that have evolved over millennia to endure droughts and pests. In some places, this is happening. In Kenya, farmers have recently increased the area planted with such indigenous greens (rich in protein, vitamins, iron, and other nutrients) by 25 percent.\n\nYet in June 2016, more than one hundred Nobel laureates signed a letter urging Greenpeace to drop its opposition to golden rice. \"We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against 'GMOs' in general and Golden Rice in particular,\" the letter stated.\n\nGreenpeace refused to back down. \"Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered 'Golden' rice are false,\" the group said. \"'Golden' rice has failed as a solution and isn't currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research. As admitted by the International Rice Research Institute, it has not been proven to actually address Vitamin A Deficiency. So to be clear, we are talking about something that doesn't even exist.\n\n\"Corporations are overhyping 'Golden' Rice to pave the way for global approval of other more profitable genetically engineered crops. This costly experiment has failed to produce results for the last 20 years and diverted attention from methods that already work. Rather than invest in this overpriced public relations exercise, we need to address malnutrition through a more diverse diet, equitable access to food and eco-agriculture.\"\n\nMichael Hansen, who was trained as an evolutionary biologist, spends a great deal of time traveling around Asia teaching farmers and consumers about farming and food. Recently, in the Philippines, he saw an ad on the side of a bus for chicken tenders that had been fortified with vitamin A the old-fashioned way\u2014and not with GMOs. In the Philippines at least, vitamin A deficiency has plummeted, and it has had nothing to do with golden rice. \"If you want to get at these problems, you can deal with the symptoms or with the causes,\" Hansen said. \"This is basically an issue of poverty. All poor people can afford to buy is rice. So the way to get people out of that, you have to deal with poverty. What if all that money had been put into food-fortification techniques, or to teaching people to grow foods that are high in beta-carotene that people actually eat? Mangoes, yellow maize, papaya, yams, red peppers, spinach, cabbage\u2014all have high levels of beta-carotene, and these are all foods that are culturally appropriate.\n\n\"Golden rice is just a PR move,\" he said. \"Now they want to do golden bananas, engineered with vitamin A, and they want to do trials in Uganda. Nobody has published data that has shown these are safe. Yet they are already doing some kind of feeding trials. They're talking about golden corn.\"\n\nAlfred Sommer, the vitamin A expert at Johns Hopkins, takes a different view. To his mind, GMO critics oppose golden rice because they fear it would be a smashing success, and thus ruin their chances of opposing GMOs elsewhere.\n\n\"I've come to accept that GMOs are in fact just a more sophisticated version of hybridization,\" Sommer told me. \"This is just more rapid than crossbreeding things. It's not like there's a mad scientist out there trying to grow people out of corn.\n\n\"I can understand people being concerned, but the fact is that all our soy is GMO, and nobody seems to have been hurt by that,\" Sommer said. \"Big Ag will do what Big Ag does. Today, nobody notices that soy is all GMO, and in twenty years nobody will remember this.\"\n\n## 8.\n\n## The Plant That Started Civilization, and the Plant That Could Save It\n\n If you think about the GM grains that prop up the world's global food system, there is one leg in the stool that is mysteriously missing: wheat. How have corn and soybeans become almost entirely GM, and wheat\u2014the plant that started civilization 10,000 years ago, and that covers tens of millions of acres in the United States alone\u2014has not?\n\nIt has not been for a lack of desire. Monsanto began testing Roundup Ready wheat on experimental farms back in 1994, and in 2004, the FDA declared that the company's wheat posed no health or safety risks. But that same year, Monsanto abandoned plans to release its seeds onto the market, a dramatic decision that food safety advocates (who had long complained that the FDA's information had been provided by Monsanto and did not include the FDA's own tests) considered a \"watershed event.\"\n\nWhat happened? Why aren't we all eating GM bread, and bagels, and hamburger buns?\n\nOne reason has to do with the unimaginably intertwined global food system, which (when it works) can get grain grown on one continent to food processors on another continent to consumers on a third continent. When the system doesn't work, when something gets into the system that is unexpected, unapproved, and unwanted, the whole thing can come to a screeching halt.\n\nJust ask Larry Bohlen. In the summer of 2000, while working for the environmental group Friends of the Earth, Bohlen was spending his time looking over the EPA's approval process for GM crops. One day, he noticed something strange about the approval of a strain of GM corn called StarLink. The corn had been engineered by the company Aventis to carry the insecticide _Bacillus thuringiensis_ , or Bt, which kills the destructive European corn borer. Because the corn contained a protein called Cry9C, which the EPA suspected might cause allergies in people, StarLink had not been approved for human consumption, but Aventis had still been allowed to sell StarLink to farmers to grow corn for animal feed.\n\nGiven the complexity of the crop and food distribution systems, this seemed absurd to Bohlen. \"We were in conversations with farmers who were telling us that most farmers do not separate genetically engineered corn from conventional corn,\" Bohlen said. \"Given that very little of the corn is separated and there's a type of corn not approved for human consumption, I thought there was a good chance that it had made it into our food.\"\n\nBohlen decided to check for himself. He went to his local Safeway and bought twenty-three different corn-based products: boxes of cornflakes and taco shells, tortilla chips, a corn muffin mix, some cornmeal, a couple of enchilada TV dinners. He shipped them to a laboratory with a simple question: Did any of the products contain the unapproved protein Cry9C? If any did, it meant that an entire stream of the country's river of processed food might have been unintentionally contaminated by GM corn.\n\nThe results, in one case, came back positive: the lab found StarLink corn in taco shells branded by Taco Bell. All taco shells containing StarLink corn were recalled.\n\nInside the food industry, the revelation caused an explosion: this was the first GM food to be recalled nationally. Suddenly, food processors could no longer be sure the grain they were buying was free of unapproved GMOs. Although scientists had long assured them that GMOs were safe, the reaction was very much a fear of GM \"contamination.\" If consumers decided they wouldn't eat foods with GM ingredients, it wouldn't just be Monsanto (and the $20 billion biotech industry) that would suffer; it would be any company (in the $500 billion food industry) that made food from Monsanto's grain. If these two industries diverged, Bohlen told me, \"biotech would shift from being a growth industry to being a struggling commodity industry.\"\n\nFor consumers, the StarLink story offered a rare (and bewildering) look inside the mysterious system that delivers Americans processed food. The corn, it turned out, had come from farmers in six different states, who had shipped their grain to a miller in Texas, who had ordered conventional corn and (unwittingly) gotten GM corn instead. The cornmeal was then sent to Mexico, where it was processed into taco shells, then returned to the United States to be distributed everywhere by Kraft Foods.\n\nOnce the news broke in September 2000, food that had been contaminated by StarLink corn started popping up all over the place\u2014and not just in the United States. It was found in Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. Aventis officials said they had \"difficulty imagining how our corn could end up in the human food supply.\"\n\nTo Larry Bohlen, it was entirely obvious. \"Aventis made a big mistake by assuming that thousands of people making decisions every day on their farms would be able to separate the StarLink corn from conventional corn,\" Bohlen said. \"Harvest days last for fourteen hours. Farmers are driving late into the night. They're under a lot of pressure. Farm prices are really low. There's even pressure for some people to sell the StarLink into the food system to get a higher price. There are so many reasons that the StarLink corn can get into the food supply that it was a risk that wasn't worth taking.\"\n\nBohlen also considered the StarLink debacle evidence of the gaping loophole in the food-testing process. \"We've been saying for a long time that federal authorities should be doing this testing, but so far it's been left to groups like us,\" he said. Aventis ended up spending $500 million to withdraw StarLink from the corn market. But it proved much harder to undo the anxieties the contamination had caused\u2014among food manufacturers as well as consumers. Where once the food industry had been in lockstep with the biotech industry, the StarLink affair proved just how precarious this marriage could be.\n\nThings have only gotten rockier with the development of GM \"biopharm\" crops, which pharmaceutical companies are developing to create drugs. Though the USDA has approved more than 300 biopharm plantings around the country since 1995, both states and traditional farmers\u2014worried about StarLink-style contamination\u2014have been more suspect. In 2005, Arkansas-based Riceland Food, the world's largest rice miller, asked federal regulators to deny a permit to a company hoping to plant GM rice for the manufacture of an antidiarrheal drug. Anheuser-Busch, the country's top buyer of rice (as well as its largest brewer), said it would no longer buy any of the $100 million worth of rice grown in Missouri if GM rice was allowed to be grown anywhere in the state.\n\nCalifornia recently rejected a company proposal to grow rice engineered with human genes after traditional rice growers said even the _prospect_ of contamination would scare off international markets. In 2011, the German conglomerate Bayer (which now owns Aventis, the same company that made StarLink corn) agreed to pay $750 million in settlements to 10,000 farmers who claimed the company's GM Liberty Link rice contaminated their domestic crops and drove prices down; global markets just weren't buying it. \"What has really alarmed the food industry was the idea that they might get corn in their cornflakes that had someone else's prescription drugs in it\u2014either by getting mixed up or through cross-pollination,\" Bohlen told me.\n\nIt was right in the middle of all this that Monsanto\u2014despite spending a decade designing it, and despite FDA approval\u2014decided not to release GM wheat. The company still maintained a handful of experimental wheat plots, though, and in 2013, something strange happened. A farmer in Oregon\u2014trying to clear his field by spraying Roundup\u2014found he couldn't kill his own wheat. Some of Monsanto's experimental GM wheat seeds had somehow made their way into his fields.\n\nSuddenly, it was StarLink all over again. As the news of this contamination spread, Japan and South Korea immediately suspended U.S. wheat imports. European officials urged greater screening of U.S. grain. Lawyers for American farmers threatened to sue the company. And\u2014despite USDA assurances that American wheat remains GMO-free\u2014the global prospects for GM wheat were once again put on hold.\n\nAnd for a team of world-renowned scientists working in the middle of Kansas wheat country, that was just fine.\n\n### Reinventing the Plains\n\nSalina, Kansas, sits on the western edge of a thousand miles of corn and soy and wheat. Down at the end of Water Well Road, where the pavement runs out, a small group of plant researchers is leading the effort to overthrow the entire American agricultural system. The Land Institute looks nothing like the Danforth Center. There is no glass and steel here, no ornamental fountains, no multimillion-dollar laboratories. And there is no evidence of corporate agriculture.\n\nInside the president's office, a ramshackle affair with overstuffed wooden bookshelves and a small refrigerator filled with good beer, an eighty-year-old bull of a man named Wes Jackson is holding forth about GMOs, pesticides, and ridding the world of problems caused by \"that outfit in St. Louis.\"\n\nBy which he means Monsanto.\n\n\"The idea of Manifest Destiny\u2014of wiping out the Indians and going to the moon and building a supercollider\u2014it seems like humanity doesn't have the capacity to practice _restraint_ ,\" Jackson told me. \"So you say you can feed 7 billion people, then you can feed 9 billion, then what? A woman recently said to me, 'What about all these new planets?' I said, 'Good: buy one-way tickets, and pay for it yourself.' People have these escape clauses, and that's just being a dummy.\"\n\nJackson is one of the most influential thinkers on agriculture in the country, a renowned scientist with a vision for changing the face of American farming in dramatic, even radical ways. He is also a master of rhetorical flourish and pushes his vision with the stentorian voice (and the moral urgency) of a preacher. The way we grow our food is part of a much larger problem in the way we treat our land, our water, and our climate.\n\n\"There are too many of us, but our consumption is rapacious,\" he told students graduating from the University of Kansas in 2013. \"It is legal to rip the tops off mountains, get the coal and burn it. It is legal to drill for oil and natural gas\u2014from the Gulf to the Arctic\u2014and burn it. It is legal to engage in fracking that threatens groundwater to get natural gas and burn it. It is legal to have our soils erode and toxic chemicals applied, legal to allow our rural communities to decline and watch so much of our cultural seed stock disappear.\"\n\nJackson places much of the blame for this state of affairs on what he calls the \"industrial hero,\" the scientist (or more broadly, the corporation) claiming to have high-tech, silver bullet answers to highly complex problems.\n\n\"These technology fundamentalists are far worse than religious fundamentalists,\" Jackson told me. \"The ultimate fundamentalist doesn't even know he's a fundamentalist. If your efforts are clouded by the desire for financial gain, or clouded by a desire to be famous, then you are not available for the pursuit of wisdom. Where does responsibility come from? 'Feed the world' is a very poor veil to put around the desire to get rich or famous. Rather than think hard about problems, the industrial hero says, 'We must feed the world,' which has an easy move to a profit agenda. Contrast that with the phrase 'The world must be fed,' which carries a social agenda that has to do with social justice. You have two different breeds of cat.\"\n\nMention publicity-generating moves like Monsanto's recent announcement that it would contribute $4 million to study the decline of the monarch butterfly, and you can practically see Jackson's blood start to rise. Sure, the money is nice, he says, \"meanwhile 97 million acres of corn is going to be drenched with Roundup. That's the problem we allow ourselves.\"\n\nJackson has been thinking about feeding the world for five decades. He has published highly influential books, built an internationally recognized research station on a shoestring budget, and been showered with honors (including a MacArthur \"genius grant\") and recognition (he was named by both _Life_ magazine and the Smithsonian as one of the twentieth century's most influential people). All this for work he and his research team have been doing on a plant that has yet to reach the market. When it does, Jackson hopes, farmers may be able to grow vast amounts of food and begin repairing land that has been degraded for centuries.\n\nOne of the first things Jackson likes to show visitors is a pair of vertical posters, hanging above a stairwell in the institute's lab facility. To the left is a picture of a wheat plant, its thready roots extending just inches below the soil. To the right is a picture of a plant Jackson and his scientists have been developing for many years, something known as intermediate wheatgrass. Its roots drop down fully ten feet.\n\n\"The picture to the left is the plant that started civilization,\" Jackson told me. \"The one on the right is the plant that's going to save it.\"\n\n### The Problem with Annuals\n\nAlthough he is one of the country's leading thinkers about agriculture, Wes Jackson is not particularly interested in what's going on in the vegetable aisle. He wants to change the rest of the grocery store. Why? Because 70 percent of the calories we eat\u2014and 70 percent of our farmland\u2014is wrapped up not in fruits and vegetables but in grains. So are 70 percent of the soil erosion and 70 percent of the petrochemicals.\n\n\"You have all these showy images of green, leafy healthy stuff, but humans are grass-seed eaters first and legume-seed eaters second, and the rest is water,\" Jackson said.\n\nFor a farmer and a plant scientist, Jackson is rather cantankerous about the way people plant the land. He doesn't like to talk about problems in agriculture. He likes to talk about the problem _of_ agriculture\u2014a problem that has gotten more complex (and dangerous) since people first put plow to ground.\n\nThis is the story he tells. People have been sowing, reaping, selecting, and trading seeds since they first started growing food 10,000 years ago. If a certain plant did well in a certain soil in a certain climate, the farmer would save the seeds and plant the cultivated variety, or cultivar, again the next year. If a plant did poorly, it was discarded. Human selection mirrored natural selection, but with a twist: the only plants that got to pass on their genes were those that proved useful for the human appetite.\n\nThe trouble began when early farmers chose to breed plants that needed to be planted every year, rather than plants that remained in the ground for years at a time. Although the vast majority of plants on earth are perennials, annuals are far more easily manipulated by farmers (and later by genetic engineers). By choosing seeds from only the hardiest or most productive plants, Neolithic farmers (and many generations that followed) could develop crops that yielded more and more food with each passing year. Go to southern Mexico, the birthplace of corn, and you will see a vast variety of corn species: some are two feet high, some are fifteen. Some are blue, some are yellow. All of these crops were selected, over many generations, to achieve flavors and textures and hardiness unique to the specific places and cultures in which they are planted.\n\nAs breeding science got more and more sophisticated, farmers learned to speed up this process by crossbreeding (or hybridizing) annuals. These crops have an obvious advantage for growers: because they live only a year, they can push a higher percentage of their energy into producing big, high-calorie seeds. (Genetic engineers are correct when they say they have simply taken this one step further, configuring annual corn and soy to resist herbicides, or drought, or insect infestations.) Because all our mountains of annual corn, wheat, and soy can be ground up and turned into everything from breakfast cereal to cattle feed to soda pop, the food industry has turned these crops (for better or worse) into the staples of our national food system.\n\nBut all this efficiency, all this uniformity, has come at a significant cost.\n\nJared Diamond, the scientist and bestselling author of books like _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ , has called annual agriculture \"a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.\" If all of human history is represented by a twenty-four-hour clock, Diamond writes, humans were hunter-gatherers from midnight until 11:54 p.m. We've been _farmers_ \u2014let alone genetic engineers\u2014for only about six minutes. Not a long time, really, to get things right.\n\nLong before GMOs, farmers figured out how to grow lots of cheap calories. But this often came at the expense of poor nutrition, a fact that has become vastly exaggerated in our industrial food era. African Bushmen eat some seventy-five different wild plants, Diamond writes, and could never die of starvation in numbers like the Irish did during the potato famine because of the variety in their diets. The Irish were so dependent on this single crop that when, in 1845, a fungal blight knocked out 90 percent of the crop, a million people\u2014fully one-eighth of the country's population\u2014starved to death. Another 1.3 million people left the country, followed by 5 million more over the next several decades.\n\nIndeed, it has been argued that far from relieving famine, farming actually _contributes_ to it. When a culture's food supply becomes centralized\u2014dependent on a few crops, grown either by a few companies or by a central government\u2014bad things tend to happen. In the late 1950s, during China's Great Leap Forward, Mao dictated that both wheat and rice be planted at densities far beyond the soil's capacity to support them. The result was disastrous crop loss, and some 80 million people died of starvation. In the Soviet Union, Stalin subdued Ukraine (and killed 7 million people) by controlling Europe's breadbasket.\n\nSo consider that the United States' 320 million acres of farmland is planted with 80 percent annual, monoculture crops. (The other 20 percent is perennial\u2014mostly hay and alfalfa for animal feed.) Although these plants are perfectly designed to fit the industrial economy that designed them\u2014perfect for processed food; perfect for ethanol; perfect for feeding 10 billion cows, chickens, and pigs\u2014they are also freighted with serious drawbacks. Annual plants have very shallow root systems that tap into only the top few inches of soil. Add to this annual plowing and spraying, and the ground quickly becomes nutritionally depleted, even barren. Tim Crews, a Land Institute scientist, considers the soil beneath traditional monoculture crops to be \"just this side of a Walmart parking lot in terms of ecological health.\"\n\nDepleted soils, of course, force farmers to use enormous quantities of synthetic fertilizers, which are derived from petrochemicals. But since only about half of these fertilizers actually gets absorbed by plants, the rest ends up elsewhere. Some gets converted into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Some washes downstream where (if we're talking about the Midwest) it eventually ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, where it creates algae blooms. When these massive pulses of aquatic plant growth die back and decompose, they suck so much oxygen from the water that they leave dead zones that can be seen from outer space.\n\nBecause annual plants must be stripped out and replanted every year, the soil beneath them requires vast volumes of herbicides to control the weeds that sweep onto the bare soil. The bare ground is also terribly prone to soil erosion. Even though modern no-till farming has reduced soil loss by 40 percent since the 1980s, many farmers are still tilling extensively, and we are still losing some 1.7 billion tons of topsoil every year. This is a lot when you consider that, left to itself, soil replenishes itself at a rate of about a quarter inch per century. We're running things down in a few decades that took millennia to create.\n\nIt is for these reasons that Wes Jackson considers the GMO question to be something of a bait and switch. From the beginning, biotech companies have said they were developing technologies to \"feed the world.\" What they have in fact done is use the technology to ramp up an already destructive form of industrial farming.\n\nStan Cox, a plant breeder at The Land Institute, likes to show people a sheet with two columns on it: problems caused by conventional farming in 1990, and problems caused by conventional farming in 2015. The lists are exactly the same: soil loss and degradation, toxic chemicals, water pollution, monoculture, factory farming, corporate control. Except for one thing: the 2015 list includes GMOs.\n\nIn other words, even as we squeeze an incredible amount of food energy out of limited cropland, we are pushing plants, soil, and the environment as a whole to their ecological limits. And even if we get rid of GMOs, in other words, we would still have all the problems caused by large-scale farming. It's not the _technology_ that causes the real problems. It's the _system._\n\n\"Let's take the big picture for a moment,\" Jackson told me. \"This GMO thing prevents real thought. It's worse than a digression. It's a _distraction._ We are really interested in social justice and reducing greenhouse gases and reducing poverty. How do we meet a bona fide human need\u2014like reducing poverty as we reduce fossil fuel use\u2014how do we meet that need in a way that goes beyond GMOs? This pipsqueak thing of GMOs enters into the arena and tries to create balloons that fill the whole arena\u2014that's the problem. They de facto baited us to be pulled into a distraction, and we've taken the bait. Our role is to make the subject as complicated as it actually is.\"\n\n### The Promise of Perennials\n\nWhen he and his family started The Land Institute in 1976, Jackson saw in the Kansas landscape both a great problem and a great solution. By the 1970s, despite great federal conservation efforts and federal financing, the soil on monoculture farms was still eroding at about the same rate it had during the dust bowl of the 1930s. By dramatic contrast, Kansas's native prairies\u2014the few that had not been plowed under for crops\u2014were gems of sustainable growth.\n\nInstead of the ecological desert of the monoculture farm, prairies were \"perennial polycultures\": gorgeous, diverse tapestries of soil, plants, insects, animals, and birds that worked in a rich balance that kept the entire system healthy. Prairies did not require annual planting because the plants were virtually all perennials. They didn't require excess petrochemical fertilizers\u2014they just soaked up energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil. Plants that needed soil nitrogen, like wild grasses, were helped by legumes that provided it, like bundleflower. Prairies are not generally plagued by weeds, because their perennial leaf canopies and roots outcompete invasive species. Prairie soils do not wash away in the rain, because perennial plants have far more extensive and woven year-round root structures. Because they have evolved to survive for multiple years, they have developed better disease resistance and can withstand stress (like drought). And because they have evolved diverse relationships with both plants and animals around them, prairie perennials tend to survive (as a system) even if a single species declines.\n\nSo Jackson had an idea: Why couldn't a farm\u2014or even an entire country's farmland\u2014function more like a prairie? Would agricultural \"biomimicry\" work?\n\nThe idea seemed so obvious, Jackson couldn't believe no one had tried it before. If farms\u2014even large-scale farms\u2014mirrored prairies, they would solve a wide variety of intractable problems in industrial agriculture. Because they have permanent root systems, they could eliminate more than half the soil erosion in the United States, saving $9 billion worth of fuel for tilling equipment every year. They would also save nearly $20 billion worth of soil\u2014though how one puts a price on an essential, nonrenewable resource is a bit of a parlor game.\n\nDeep roots would also mean the efficient use of both water and soil nutrients, especially nitrogen\u2014which could radically cut back on the need for both irrigation and fossil fuels, especially synthetic fertilizers. Because perennials outcompete weeds, they would not require herbicides. Because they would not have to be torn up and planted every year, they would improve the land's biodiversity, both underground (in terms of microorganisms in the soil) and aboveground (in terms of food and habitat for everything from bees and monarch butterflies to migratory birds).\n\nWith so many obvious advantages, why hadn't farmers been planting perennials for 10,000 years? To Jackson's scientific mind, the answer lay in the way perennials are built. Because perennials must store energy in their roots to survive year after year, they cannot afford to put all their energy into producing seeds, as annuals do. On the other hand, perennials make up for some of this because they enjoy a much longer growing season.\n\nSo for Jackson's team at The Land Institute, the trick has been trying to figure out how to take the best traits from a perennial plant (deep roots) and combine them with the best traits of an annual (big seeds). How do you take a 10-foot-tall perennial grass and domesticate it to create bigger seeds and higher yields? How do you get wild plants to accept uniform planting and efficient harvesting?\n\nThe work has been slow and laborious. Jackson's scientists, who have been working on this for thirty years, say their work is \"like scratching off lottery tickets.\" But if they can figure it out, they might actually alter the course of agriculture that has been in place for 10,000 years.\n\n### Perennial Calories\n\nOne of the perennial plants Jackson and his team are betting on is a wild relative of wheat from Persia known as intermediate wheatgrass, which produces a (trademarked) grain called Kernza. If it strikes you as odd that the savior of American agriculture might come from Iran, consider that all American wheat\u2014all those \"amber waves of grain\"\u2014comes from Central Asia and the Middle East, where it has been grown for at least 7,000 years.\n\nIn the early 1900s, immigrant farmers like Central European Mennonites brought wheat seed and planted it across the middle and upper Midwest, initially for cattle forage. Now, the Midwest is blanketed with more than 60 million acres of wheat: hard winter wheat blankets Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and North Texas; spring wheat covers North and South Dakota, and eastern and central Montana.\n\nReplacing 60 million acres of annual grain with perennial grains would be an ecological coup of historic proportions. But this is hardly the limit of Jackson's imagination. Intermediate wheatgrass can also be used as a biofuel, which means it could replace some of the 40 million acres of corn American farmers currently grow not for food but for ethanol. (Claims from industrial corn companies that ethanol is a \"green\" substitute for petroleum have long since been discredited; they offer virtually no benefit in terms of reducing carbon emissions. And consider that Brazil is cutting down a million acres of rainforest a year to plant biofuel corn, then ships half of this fuel to Europe. The net effect of this transfer is 50 percent more carbon emissions than gasoline.)\n\nSo, just for starters (and not even counting the perennial rice the Land Institute's colleagues are developing in Asia or the perennial sorghum they are working on in the United States and Africa, or the perennial silphium, a sunflower relative that can be used for oilseed), that's 100 million acres of Walmart parking lot that could be turned into highly productive, ecologically diverse, carbon-sinking perennial polyculture.\n\nGiven the state of our food system, and the state of the climate, the stakes are high. \"The world is not going to be fine waiting around for thirty more years for crops that could be sequestering carbon,\" Tim Crews told me. \"It's not as though there's nothing to lose here.\"\n\nWith world-changing ambitions resting on just a couple of plants, the trick for scientists like Crews and his colleague Shuwen Wang is to take a wild plant (like intermediate wheatgrass) and persuade it to mate with a domestic plant (like wheat) to produce food and fuel that people will like so much they'll be willing to shift their entire approach to the way their land is planted. As is, the grain can be ground up and mixed with regular flour for things that don't need a big rise, like pancakes or cookies. It can be used to make beer. But so far intermediate wheatgrass produces less than half the yield of wheat and (left to itself) doesn't create enough gluten to make bread. One gold ring for The Land Institute's plant scientists is clearly a marriage between the perennial hardiness of intermediate wheatgrass and the big seeds, high yields, and gluten of wheat.\n\nJust as it does for genetic engineers, the secret to this marriage lies in the mysteries of genetics; the team at the Land Institute can't wait 7,000 years (the time it took domestic wheat) for intermediate wheatgrass to produce big, plentiful seeds that release easily during threshing.\n\n\"There's still a lot of things we don't know yet, and yields and seed size are still not where we want them,\" Lee DeHaan told me. \"But we thought it would take a hundred years to get domestication, and we have been surprised at how fast it's been coming along.\"\n\nDeHaan, who grew up on a farm in Minnesota, came to The Land Institute in 2001, armed with a PhD in agronomy and agroecology. He and his team are using two approaches to solve the domestication problem. The first is hybridizing wheat and intermediate wheatgrass to genetically nudge their offspring to express the best traits of both. The second is growing (and selectively breeding) enough generations of wild wheatgrass to get it to perform more like wheat. The goal is essentially the same: Create a plant that makes big, plentiful, easily harvested seeds and also comes equipped with deep roots\u2014and will come back year after year. They are doing this work without engineering any genes, which, especially compared with the relative glitz of engineering powerhouses like the Danforth Center, makes work at the Land Institute both slow and \"unglamorous,\" DeHaan said.\n\n\"It's hard to attract scholars, students, and funding. It looks so tedious and boring,\" he said. \"There's something about lab work that seems so much more attractive and prestigious. The excitement always is for what's new. Funders love that because it's always about what we couldn't do in the past, now we can do. You have all these expensive machines, data being calculated on computers\u2014all that versus slogging it out in the field.\"\n\nWhile DeHaan remains suspicious of the industrial-scale ends to which most GM technology is used, his goal is sustainability, not purity. He's looking for clues to what makes a domesticated plant's seeds nonshattering (meaning the seeds stay in the plant's seed head, rather than blow to the winds, as they do in wild plants) and also free threshing, which means they are easily separated from the chaff during harvesting. His work has long been fully engaged with the techniques of molecular biology\u2014gene sequencing, molecular marking, chromosome staining\u2014that help him figure out a plant's genetic structure. He's just not taking genes from one plant and putting them in another.\n\n\"If DNA is a book, we just want to read it. We're not cutting pages from other books and inserting them into this book,\" DeHaan said. \"Without molecular tools, perennial wheat will never be a reality. If you find a unique marker associated with something like free threshing, you can generate thousands of different segments and see where they lead. This is not GMO, just the ability to sequence genes, to stain chromosomes, track molecular markers, figure out the function of genes. Because these tools are relatively cheap, it doesn't make sense not to use them.\"\n\nBesides his work with wheatgrass, DeHaan and his Land Institute colleagues are also working with scientists in China to develop perennial rice, and with scientists from Africa on perennial sorghum. The day of my visit, he was pawing through a patch of sorghum plants, their seed heads drawn together inside slender paper bags. DeHaan was rather urgently asking the plants to mate.\n\nSorghum looks and acts a bit like corn: it is a large grass plant, with energy-rich seeds that can be used for food, forage, or fuel. Like corn, it has also become one of the world's most important crops; the world currently produces about 70 million tons a year, ranking behind only wheat, corn, barley, and rice. In the United States, 7 million acres of sorghum are planted yearly, mostly for animal feed and to produce biofuels. In Africa, however, sorghum is a critical source of calories on a continent with exhausted soil and the constant threat of drought. After a few weeks without rain, corn will shrivel up and collapse. Sorghum will just stand there and take it. When the rains return, sorghum will start growing again.\n\nAt a nearby lab table, Pheonah Nabukalu, a Land Institute scientist from Uganda, was measuring out sorghum seeds on a small scale and entering data into a computer. Around her, on the table, on nearby racks, were scores of brown paper lunch bags filled with seeds. She was poring over some 500 different experimental lines, all bred in temperate conditions, trying to decipher which plants have the highest yields, and selecting those that have perennial rhizomes. Even if she finds a promising candidate, there remains the challenge of getting a temperate-raised seed to grow in a tropical place like Uganda\u2014or the other places she thinks might benefit, like Mali, Ethiopia, and South Africa.\n\nArmed with a plant breeding PhD from Louisiana State, Nabukalu has been working on developing high-yield grains that are also resistant to pests, diseases, and drought. One project involves American seeds that have already been crossed with perennials, and then crossing these with varieties native to Africa. Using local seed lines has its benefits, since local seeds have already been bred to resist local pests and diseases. But regional specificity is also critical for developing crops that will fit well into the local environment. At field stations in Uganda, she is helping oversee experimental crops in arid, semi-arid, and rainy locations. And she is doing this work slowly, and without GM technology or corporate influence.\n\n\"Companies always want to do it fast because of the money,\" she said. \"The seed companies working in Uganda are mainly working with Monsanto and with corn. Corn is not even native to Africa. It's a colonial import from Mexico, and it's only been in Africa for a hundred years.\"\n\nShe is also suspicious of GM cassava\u2014the kind Nigel Taylor is growing at the Danforth Center\u2014but not for the usual reasons.\n\n\"I've never seen orange cassava,\" she said. \"Our sweet potato is also white fleshed. We cook it for three to four hours, but it holds up nicely. When you cook orange flesh for three hours, it breaks down. Making farmers switch is very hard. Taste is tradition.\"\n\n### Could Perennials Be GMO?\n\nDeHaan's and Nabukalu's ambivalence about biotechnology\u2014interested in some techniques, suspicious of others\u2014is shared by other scientists at The Land Institute. At one level, they can see the benefits: surely it might be easier (and faster) to nudge wheatgrass toward bigger seeds by stitching in a few genes from a wheat plant. And what if you could engineer a plant (like corn) to fix its own nitrogen, like a legume? Think how much petroleum-based fertilizers would no longer have to be applied to tens of millions of acres of nitrogen-fixing corn.\n\n\"The anti-GMO side is too fearful,\" Wes Jackson told me. \"It reminds me of something kids used to say on the playground: 'When in worry, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.' It's okay with me to look at sequenced gene segments, to help speed up the research process. The term 'GMO' is a _generic_ \u2014to come out against them is not to consider the _specifics_.\"\n\nThe anti-GMO movement \"sucks way too much bandwidth away from many other aspects of sustainable agriculture,\" Tim Crews said. \"If we somehow got rid of all GMOs\u2014if sustainable agriculture somehow reared up and achieved this Herculean feat\u2014we would still be back in 1990 with the same list of profound shortcomings in agriculture.\"\n\nSince GM research is so capital intensive (done almost exclusively in corporate laboratories, or in university labs funded by corporations), it has become almost entirely focused on what Crews calls \"patentable objectives\": crops that can make companies a lot of money.\n\nAnd it's this dynamic\u2014corporations getting their hands on technology, and then scaling it up\u2014that causes deep and unpredictable problems.\n\nBy this reckoning, GMOs are like pharmaceutical drugs: they are so expensive to design, and test, and market, that only the biggest corporations have the wherewithal to introduce them. Because of this capital investment, corporations will pursue only those crops that offer a return on their dollar.\n\nBut GMOs are like pharmaceuticals in another way as well. In the right hands, opioid pain pills, for example, can work a kind of therapeutic magic. They have made pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars. But as they have flooded into popular use, pain pills have also caused epidemics of addiction, black markets, and misery.\n\nThis is precisely the kind of \"cascading\" consequence that worries Crews about GMOs. Let's say scientists can figure out how to increase a plant's photosynthetic efficiency. What could go wrong by increasing a plant's energy production? Wouldn't that just make food crops that much more productive?\n\n\"If they could raise that ceiling\u2014that's the Holy Grail,\" Crews said. \"So then what? All of the other resources that are synched up in that ecosystem\u2014all of those things will get out of whack.\"\n\nTaking his cue from the Italian researcher Mario Giampietro, Crews offers a dark example: Consider a spider that can suddenly make a bigger web to catch more insects. Suddenly all spiders are doing this, making bigger webs and catching more insects, until the population of the insects crashes, which leads to a crash in spiders as well. Or consider the burning of fossil fuels: great power, great convenience\u2014and then the countless cascading effects of climate change. Entire natural systems get thrown out of balance.\n\n\"Right now, we have ecosystems that have evolved to be in sync with resources that are available through natural processes over the course of a year,\" Crews said. \"Cacti are in sync with the rain available in a desert, redwoods are in sync with the rain on the coast. When you tweak a plant's genes to make them more productive, you can stress the larger processes\u2014both the plant and its surrounding ecosystem.\n\n\"Let's say you take a grass like oats and make it more photosynthetically efficient. All of a sudden the plant needs all its nutrients in much greater quantities. Which leads to a dynamic like we had during the Green Revolution: all this new productivity requires a huge new increase in nitrogen or phosphorous fertilizer. All of a sudden these nutrients\u2014especially phosphorous\u2014become taxed, or even tapped out, or, if we're talking about nitrogen, require a massive increase in petrochemicals.\n\n\"Then, if those genes get out into the world through cross-pollination with wild plants, the same would be true for natural systems,\" Crews said. \"If the resources are there, these plants would immediately take over, becoming taller, using more resources, outcompeting other plants. Or you run into situations where an ecosystem that is already resource limited grows beyond what they had been before, and what that looks like I don't even know, but it would be a novel situation.\"\n\nLike Lee DeHaan, Crews is not dead-set against the use of GM technology. If GMOs could move genes between plants that already cross naturally (or cisgenically), \"why would we not go there?\" Crews said.\n\n\"There could be a marginal improvement with GMO traits, but it's still the wrong approach for addressing agriculture's shortcomings. The overall sociological phenomenon is not addressing agriculture in ways that need to be addressed. If you take an ecological approach that solves things on this list, then we're talking, whether it involves conventional breeding, or cisgenics, to develop ecological agriculture.\n\n\"The way we're doing things is long term and messy,\" Crews said. \"We are by no means simply trying to introduce a new species here or there to be the next superfood or fill some niche market. Our rather long-term ambition is to replace tilled agriculture with something that is far more ecologically complex and sustainable\u2014agriculture ecosystems that humans could be proud of rather than the most compromised ecosystems imaginable.\"\n\n## 9.\n\n## Can GMOs Be Sustainable?\n\n No matter where you stand on GMOs, it seems reasonable to ask if our food system hasn't somehow become too big to fail. If industrial farming is the real culprit in our national eating disorder, perhaps a solution can be found simply by scaling back. Not in the interest of purity, or in pursuit of utopian visions of food. Not to get rid of GMOs, or even to (completely) rid the world of pesticides. Perhaps it's enough to have food produced on a smaller scale, by farmers who take excellent care of their land.\n\nTo get to Jennie Schmidt's farm, you drive east across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, then hook a left and head north through an endless tapestry of some of the most fertile land on the Eastern Seaboard. Her Maryland farm is just beyond a shooting range, out along Sudlersville Cemetery Road. When I arrived on a cold February day, the Schmidts' dog Dozer met me out front. Jennie apologized for the carpet guys who were replacing the wall-to-wall carpeting that had been covering the floors of their modest home for thirty-seven years.\n\nThe Schmidts work 2,000 acres. It's not a huge operation, by Iowa standards, but consider this: Last year the Schmidts produced 12 million pounds of Roma tomatoes, enough to fill twenty tractor-trailers every day for two weeks. Over the years, the Schmidts have experimented with sweet corn, sweet peas, and lima beans, but given the risks\u2014the Eastern Shore gets forty-five inches of rain a year, much of it during spring growing season\u2014they have settled on their current mix: Tomatoes and green beans for the vegetable market. Soft red wheat, which they ship to a processor in Pennsylvania to make into crackers and pretzels. Twenty-two acres of grapes for local vineyards.\n\nAnd 1,500 acres of soybeans and corn, a good deal of it grown from GM seeds.\n\nAs third-generation farmers, the Schmidts have found a sweet spot between small-scale farms that survive by supplying farmers' markets, and industrial-scale operations that must invest millions into their own harvesting and canning infrastructure. Jennie Schmidt calls her farm a \"supermarket farm,\" but not because most of her crops go into the vegetable aisle. They don't. She and her husband, Hans, grow for canneries, which turn their tomatoes into \"value added\" products like salsa and tomato sauce. Tomatoes harvested at her farm in August are trucked to Pennsylvania and are in jars or cans less than forty-eight hours after they are picked.\n\nSitting as it does in the middle of the Eastern Shore\u2014a lobe of beautifully fertile land stretching from near Wilmington, Delaware, all the way to the bridge to Virginia Beach\u2014the Schmidt farm has had to adapt to the industrial agriculture that has grown up alongside it. Long considered to have some of the most productive soil on the Atlantic coast, the Eastern Shore is also situated near some of the biggest food markets in the world.\n\n\"I'm not a 'farmers' market farmer,'\" Jennie Schmidt told me. \"If I took 12 million pounds of tomatoes to a farmers' market, we'd flood the market. It wouldn't work. We get better income from vegetables than from grain production. But we have the markets for diverse crops. Where in Iowa are they going to sell cannery-grade tomatoes? A hundred miles from a farm in Iowa, you're still in the middle of nowhere. Here, in less than a hundred miles, we can be in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, or Philadelphia. We can be in New York City in three hours. Without the cannery and trucking infrastructure, we wouldn't even be in vegetables.\"\n\nThe Schmidts' farm, while not enormous, still sits at the very center of the industrial food system, and not just because of their tomatoes and the trucking infrastructure. Their corn and soybeans go straight into the maw of giant agribusinesses, overseen and orchestrated by some of the largest and most influential companies in the world. The Schmidts' GM seeds are engineered by companies like DuPont Pioneer, and they use chemical herbicides (like glyphosate) first designed by companies like Monsanto. And their harvested beans are sold to companies like Perdue, which, in addition to being one of the world's largest chicken producers, is also one of the country's largest grain companies. It has to be: the company has to feed most of the 569 million chickens that grow on the Eastern Shore alone.\n\nBut the Schmidts also win awards for environmental stewardship. They practice a wide range of soil conservation techniques that would please even the crankiest environmentalist. Rather than strip their fields bare after a harvest, they leave withered plants to serve as \"green manure.\" They rotate crops. They use integrated pest management. Because they spray their weeds, the Schmidts don't have to till their soil, which means they can reduce their carbon footprint\u2014both by driving their tractor less and by leaving carbon in the soil, where it belongs. They plant cover crops, which both hold their soil in place for future crops and prevent erosion. This prevents both soil and the nutrient phosphorous that attaches to it from running off into the Chesapeake Bay. To avoid StarLink-style contamination of their soybeans, they flush out their combines and grain elevators whenever they harvest to make sure none of the GM beans intended for the chicken feed market get into the seeds grown for the tofu market.\n\n\"The truth is, you will never get to zero,\" Jennie said. \"You can't get rid of every soybean in your combine. But there are those of us who take the time to meet that level of due diligence. Our tofu beans don't get labeled by the Non-GMO Project, but they get tested, and they are non-GMO. If they find half of 1 percent, they get sold on the Perdue market. If we can't verify that they are non-GMO, they don't get sold that way. Most people don't think we pay that level of attention. They think we're just blowing smoke, which is sad.\"\n\nGiven this level of scrupulous attention to soil health, conservation, and best weed- and pest-control practices, the Schmidts' farm has been certified by the state for its \"agricultural stewardship,\" meaning it has met high standards for preserving soil and water quality.\n\nThe Schmidt farm\u2014industrial but local, pro-GMO but pro-sustainability\u2014offers a glimpse at a kind of middle way farming that employs technology at a scale that minimizes many of the ills associated with corporate agriculture. Their approach doesn't answer all questions, like whether we really need to be raising 569 million chickens on some of Maryland's best farmland, or whether we need to be eating so many chicken nuggets in the first place. But until we tackle those larger questions, farms like the Schmidts' suggest that the secret to better food production may lie not with enlightened global agribusinesses, but with enlightened local farmers.\n\n### Providing the Crops That Industry Demands\n\nJennie Schmidt received her bachelor's degree in nutrition and food science, with a minor in international agriculture. She spent a couple of years with 4-H, teaching agricultural techniques to schools in Botswana. She later returned to graduate school for a master's degree in human nutrition; her thesis looked at food and biotechnology just as the GMO industry was finding its legs. Today, she is the only woman on the board of the Maryland Grain Producers Utilization Board, and now the first female president of the U.S. Wheat Foods Council. She is also past president of the Maryland Grape Growers Association and past chair of the Maryland Farm Bureau's Specialty Crop Committee.\n\nNow that her husband, Hans, has been appointed Maryland's assistant secretary of agriculture, Jennie relies more than ever on help from her in-laws and her brother-in-law. Still, Jennie herself has to do a lot more than just manage the family's twenty-two-acre vineyard, oversee the farm's crew, and keep the books. She also maintains a blog, _The Foodie Farmer_ , on which she spends a lot of time trying to disabuse people of their fears over GMOs. Given the intensity (and in Jennie's opinion, the ignorance) of opinions on the topic, Jennie got into the GMO debate reluctantly. \"I just started writing about biotech this last year,\" Jennie told me. \"I didn't want to bring that into my home. When you criticize a farmer for what they do or don't do, you're criticizing their home. In the blogosphere, it gets very personal.\"\n\nThe Schmidts' neighbors, who run a 350-acre farm across the way, sell their vegetables to local supermarket chains like Giant and Whole Foods. They run a farm stand. When people think about \"local farmers,\" it is the Schmidts' neighbors they have in their heads, not the Schmidts. This is a source of constant irritation.\n\n\"On Facebook, whenever a friend says, 'Support your local farmer,' I always chime in and say, 'You know, if you buy canned tomato products, I was one of the significant growers,'\" Schmidt said. \"That's the disconnect\u2014our faces are not on those products. People don't know who we are.\"\n\nThis \"disconnect\" between consumers and farmers lies at the very root of the GMO debate, Jennie Schmidt says. Forget about gene sequencing\u2014plenty of people don't even understand that potatoes and carrots come out of the ground.\n\nJennie's father-in-law, who still lives across the road, started farming in the 1930s, about ten years after the introduction of hybrid corn, which dramatically boosted the yields growers could get from their fields. Eighty years later, GMOs offer Schmidt Farms a similar boost. Using Bt corn, the Schmidts now get 221 bushels of corn per acre\u2014more than 35 bushels (and $100) per acre more than they get for non-GM corn. It would be hard to persuade a farmer to give up such advantages, and indeed, it is this margin\u2014more corn grown on the same acreage\u2014that has made farmers enthusiastic about GMOs since they were first introduced thirty years ago.\n\nIn recent years, the Schmidts have started planting a new GM soybean engineered by DuPont Pioneer called the Plenish. In addition to being good chicken feed, the Plenish beans, when processed for their oil, create a second market, for fast-food frying oil. Oil made from Plenish soybeans has zero grams of trans fat and 20 percent less saturated fat than hydrogenated vegetable oil, and is high in oleic acid. The oil is also \"shelf stable,\" and so is especially useful in the creation of processed foods that sometimes sit on store shelves for weeks or months. Perdue can use the soybeans to feed its chickens and then process the soybean oil to sell to the fast-food industry, which sees GM soybean oil as the future of fried food.\n\n\"High oleic soy can help reduce lots of health problems, because if you don't have high oleic oil, what you need to do is hydrogenate the oil to be suitable for frying and other cooking, and when you hydrogenate oils you end up with something that's conducive to cardiovascular disease,\" Paul Anderson from the Danforth Center told me. \"High oleic doesn't have the instability that requires hydrogenation. It's very beneficial.\"\n\nThe Plenish beans have clearly been a boon for the Schmidts: they clear $263 per acre for these beans, compared with $124 for feed beans and just $62 for the beans they grow for direct human consumption, like the tofu market.\n\nIn other words, GM seeds are good for the Schmidts. And because the grains they grow help form a significant block in the foundation of the country's industrial food system, from its chicken nuggets to its french fries, the GM seeds are also good for the many food industries that use them. With GM products like the Plenish bean, fast food and processed food will be a bit less unhealthy. To those overseeing this industrial food system, this is a good thing.\n\n\"We've had folks ask us, 'Why didn't the industry get started with a biotech product like this?'\" Russ Sanders, the director of food and industry markets for Pioneer, has said. \"We think it's a great opportunity to help illustrate the positive aspects of biotech that go beyond farmer benefits.\"\n\nClearly, the companies that both provide the seeds and buy the beans from the Schmidts think the system is working. In the fall of 2014, DuPont Pioneer and Perdue AgriBusiness announced that Perdue would more than double\u2014to about 50,000\u2014the acreage contracted to Eastern Shore and Pennsylvania farmers for growing Plenish beans \"with the intention of marketing the high oleic soybean oil by the food industry in 2015.\" Nationwide, the United Soybean Board has set a goal of 18 million acres of high-oleic soybeans by 2023, which would make the beans the fourth largest crop in the United States, behind corn, conventional soybeans, and wheat.\n\nThe move to expand Plenish beans in the Mid-Atlantic was hailed as \"an important milestone for Pioneer in its efforts to bring product innovation to the food industry and complements solutions offered by DuPont Nutrition & Health to address the world's challenges in food.\"\n\n\"We're always looking for ways to bring new market opportunities to our grower customers,\" a Perdue AgriBusiness vice president said. \"By working with DuPont Pioneer on the production of Plenish high oleic soybeans on the Eastern Shore, we're hoping to generate additional profit opportunities and long-term industry growth.\"\n\nSo here we are again: GMOs have always been pitched as \"good\" for farmers, and for farmers like the Schmidts, this is plainly true. They are also clearly good for the companies that make them. But are the foods these grains produce good for the rest of us? Processed foods fried in high-oleic-acid soybeans, after all, are still processed fried foods. Beyond this, are tens (or hundreds) of thousands of acres planted with these new seeds good for the environment?\n\nJennie Schmidt can't control the first question, but she can control the second. She has no interest in telling people what they should or should not eat. If the market demands Roma tomatoes, she will grow them. If the market demands high-oleic-acid soybeans, she will grow them. And she will do it in as sustainable a way as she can. And to her mind, GMOs help with this.\n\nJennie and Hans first started using GM seeds in 1998, and like many GM farmers, they maintain that the crops\u2014which are designed to withstand the herbicide glyphosate\u2014have allowed them to dramatically reduce their use of harsher pesticides, like atrazine. \"We've been farming with GMOs for seventeen years and have seen a real benefit,\" Jennie told me. \"A real reduction in the volume of pesticides for Roundup Ready crops. Using Bt corn has also eliminated a lot of insecticide use. We're using softer chemicals and using less of them.\"\n\nThe Schmidts consider their farm synergistic, in that it uses techniques from all three forms of agriculture: organic, conventional, and biotech. Because they plant GM crops and use synthetic pesticides, the Schmidts farm cannot be certified as \"organic.\" The Schmidts still use some atrazine on their corn, to suppress weeds, and\u2014given the forty-five inches of rain that falls during the growing season\u2014they have to spray their vegetables with fungicides \"just to deal with mold,\" Jennie said.\n\n\"There is no 'one' system that is 'best,'\" Jennie wrote. \"There is no 'one' way of doing things that should be done carte blanche by every farmer, everywhere. There is no 'cookie-cutter' system that should be applied to every farm. What we farmers should be doing is maximizing the synergies of all best management practices that meld together the best for our soils while preserving our inputs and natural resources.\"\n\nJennie Schmidt speaks with honesty and precision about all parts of the growing process on _The Foodie Farmer_. She explains the difference between spraying and dousing, noting (right down to the ounces per acre) exactly what kind and how much fungicide she and Hans apply to their fields. In one post, she showed her readers a photograph of a paper towel she laid down alongside a row of grapevines just before she drove by with her tractor-mounted sprayer. After passing over the towel with the sprayer, she snapped another photo. The towel is speckled, but far from drenched.\n\n\"Because this is spraying and not dousing, I do not need to soak the paper towel,\" she wrote. \"The plants do not get 'doused.' There is no dripping off of chemical solution. They do not need to be soaked in herbicide to achieve good weed control. There is no saturation. There is no dousing.\"\n\nThis is precisely the kind of transparency that activists tried (in vain) to wring from the big companies on Kauai and Maui. The gamble for farmers like the Schmidts is that consumers will be willing to buy produce grown with chemicals\u2014or with GMOs\u2014as long as they trust that their farmer is both skilled and forthcoming about the work that goes into growing their food. For the Schmidts, this approach clearly seems to be working.\n\nBesides, Jennie told me, it's not like the \"natural\" pesticides used by organic farmers are benign. The Schmidts have had as many as 100 acres of certified organic fields in the past, and even then (and even today) they still used \"organic\" fungicides like sulfur and copper sulfate that are, in the strictest sense, toxic.\n\n\"The copper and sulfur we use on our grapes are 'natural,' but they are still very toxic,\" Jennie told me, noting that nicotine, which tobacco plants generate to protect themselves from insects, is also a \"natural\" pesticide. \"If 'natural' were safe, then smoking would be good for us,\" she said. \"I would love a GMO grape. Sulfur is not a fun product to work with.\"\n\nEspecially for a farmer who has experience working organically, Schmidt has very little patience for the way some companies market the \"organic movement.\" She now considers the label \"organic\" to be little more than a cynical marketing ploy that ends up making food more expensive than it needs to be and\u2014worse\u2014pits one kind of farmer against another.\n\nTake Chipotle. In 2015, the fast-food burrito franchise received both praise and rebukes for announcing that it would provide GMO-free ingredients in its many restaurants. This was initially hailed as a victory by anti-GMO forces, until they learned that Chipotle would continue to sell both soda (made with GM corn syrup) and meat (raised on GM corn and soybeans). Pro-GM farmers and scientists were equally appalled, but for far different reasons.\n\nChipotle's campaign creates \"a disservice to American farmers,\" the Danforth Center's Jim Carrington told me. \"It creates the impression that there's evil farming and happy idyllic farming, and they source their meat from happy farms. That's simply marketing. Science has shown that the feelings they are marketing are not grounded in reality.\n\n\"In general, people who have not come from a farm have notions of farming and agriculture that are romantic,\" Carrington said. \"The wholesome farm with happy cows and all that. But the organic industry is a very advanced and well-organized industry that has grown in part by having a villain, and the villain is conventional agriculture. Organic claims to be much better than conventional and commands a price premium. It's a very lucrative premium and is in part defended by marketing campaigns, blogging campaigns, websites, and many other ways with the intent of seeing the organic industry increase in size. There is money to be made.\"\n\nIndeed, like virtually every farmer I spoke with\u2014organic, conventional, or GMO\u2014Jennie Schmidt practically spat when I asked her about the marketing campaigns that tout a food company's \"values.\" She laughed bitterly when I asked her about the posters in Whole Foods that inevitably portray farmers as beautifully tanned models with a bunch of carrots in one hand and a smiling baby in the other.\n\n\"When Whole Foods or Chipotle runs these ad campaigns saying they only use food from 'farmers with values,' it's just like, 'Really? You have to throw everybody under the bus to further your own marketing campaign?'\" Schmidt told me. \"Painting everyone as bad except for the people they do business with? That's really frustrating. That's led a number of us to become more vocal and more transparent. We have to say, 'That's not true for me.'\"\n\n### \"If All Farmers Used GMOs Like I Do, We Wouldn't Have These Problems\"\n\nLike Jennie Schmidt, Steve Groff is a third-generation farmer; he works his acres ninety miles to the west, in Pennsylvania's Amish country. Groff's grandfather started growing tomatoes in the 1950s; his father grew pumpkins in the 1970s. Like Jennie Schmidt, Groff has won awards for his environmental stewardship.\n\nAnd like Jennie Schmidt, Groff grows everything from non-GM sweet corn and tomatoes to (in his case) 165 acres of GM corn and soybeans.\n\nGroff plants Liberty Link soybeans and uses a sprayer mounted on a tractor to spray glyphosate to kill dandelions, Canadian thistle, hemp dogbane (a heavily rooted perennial weed), and annual rye grass. Glyphosate \"does a really good job,\" Groff says.\n\nGroff doesn't grow herbicide-resistant corn, but he has planted Bt corn, which stands up better because the corn borers can't get it. That's where you get the argument that GMOs help farmers use less pesticides, he said.\n\n\"The success of Bt corn\u2014they've really knocked down the corn borers nationwide,\" Groff told me. \"You'd really have to have your head in the sand to dispute that. So with GMOs, I can argue why you should use them, and why you shouldn't. I tend to think objectively and scientifically. I think we need to keep monitoring this, but it's my feeling that people are overreacting to every little sniffle.\"\n\nGroff, like Jennie Schmidt, thinks GMOs and synthetic pesticides have their places, provided they are used intelligently and as part of a larger, sustainable approach to farming. Groff also practices integrated pest management, which means (among other things) that he uses one-quarter of the usual amount of fungicides\u2014and almost no insecticides.\n\nGroff sprays some fields twice a year, and others once every two years. It depends on the rotation, he says, but probably rounds out to about once a year per field\u2014about a third as much as most farmers, he said.\n\n\"Let's get real about this: if all farmers used glyphosate and GMOs like I do, we wouldn't have these problems,\" Groff told me. \"They've been way, _way_ overused. Sure, it's made farming easier for farmers. It's easy to kill stuff. When Roundup first came out, your crops were really clean\u2014there were no weeds. Now you can see resistant mare's tail on this farm. It may have blown in from other farms, but so far they have not been an issue for me. I'm not sitting here worried about how to control weeds.\"\n\nSteve Groff's genius lies far beyond his limited use of GMOs and pesticides. What he is really interested in is radishes\u2014and not the kind people eat. Working with Raymond Weil, a soil and crop scientist at the University of Maryland, Groff has developed something called a tillage radish, which he considers a radically simple way to fix many of the problems created by industrial-scale agriculture.\n\n\"Farmers have nitrogen leaks,\" Groff told me. \"If you had a leak in your barn, you'd fix it. I tell farmers they should fix the leak in their fields.\"\n\nPlanted as a cover crop, tillage radishes perform all kinds of jobs now done with chemicals: they control weeds, so farmers can reduce their need for herbicides. They loosen soil compaction and prevent runoff. Since the radishes pull nitrogen out of the soil and store it in their tubers, they greatly reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers: when the radishes die and break down (without the need for chemical burn down), the nitrogen goes back into the soil, where it can be taken up and used by cash crops.\n\n\"I think generally speaking we've plateaued with where we can go with chemical management styles,\" Groff told me. \"We've seen that soils are not holding up during weather extremes. We _have_ to build up soil resiliency. I'm not saying we have to eliminate fertilizers and pesticides, but we've forgotten and ignored our soil for fifty or sixty years. Some farmers are blind\u2014they say, 'That's the way my granddad did it.' Maybe it served them well, but we're starting to see the limits of that way of thinking. That's where the younger generation of farmers can really help.\"\n\nFor farmers, there are no margins, Groff said; you either make it big or you go under.\n\n\"Once you understand cover crops and the value of taking care of your soil, it's like opening a savings account,\" he said. \"By the very nature of keeping green things in the field, collecting sunlight, changing it into organic matter, it's money in the bank.\"\n\nWhen he started planting radishes\u2014along with nitrogen fixers like hairy vetch and legumes\u2014Groff's soil contained just 2 percent organic matter. With cover crops now depositing up to 40 pounds of nitrogen a year into the soil, he's gotten it up to a very healthy 5 percent\u2014all without the use of petrochemicals.\n\nFarmers should be saving and creating nitrogen, not buying it, Groff said. \"The nitrogen is here. I own it. I'm reaping the interest. And by the way, I'm not polluting the Chesapeake Bay. I don't get paid to plant cover crops, but it's an investment in your soil health. Add it up over ten years, and it will begin to pay off. In extreme weather\u2014wet, dry, hot, or cold\u2014having more organic matter in your soil will make your crops much more biologically resilient. I've seen thirty to forty bushels per acre increase with corn in dry season. You can have soils that are working like an IV without the chemistry.\"\n\nGroff's research into cover crops is on the leading edge of a national trend. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, state officials have pledged to nearly double the amount of farmland planted in cover crops to 460,000 acres, or roughly half of all croplands in the state.\n\nAcross the country, cover cropping has grown 30 percent over the last couple of years and is being used on everything from small organic farms to large industrial operations.\n\n\"I don't know of any other concept that's sweeping agriculture like this,\" Groff told me. \"They're all getting into it. Eighty percent of the Amish farms around here have radishes in them. I had a guy in Illinois say he wanted to buy radishes for 1,000 acres. I said, 'Whoa\u2014you ought to start small.' But he said he had 40,000 acres, so I said okay.\"\n\nGroff's tillage radishes, which he now sells nationwide, have been so successful he now has twenty-two people working for him: selling seeds, doing marketing, conducting research, and influencing agriculture nationwide. Not bad for someone who never went to college.\n\n\"There was never a day I didn't think I was going to be a farmer,\" Groff told me. \"People ask me where I graduated from, I tell them I haven't finished learning yet.\"\n\nLike Steve Groff, Jennie Schmidt is willing to use any farming technique\u2014GM or non-GM, pesticides or no pesticides\u2014as long as it produces for the farm and doesn't run down the larger environment.\n\n\"We tried to tap into the organic market, but it wasn't sustainable for us,\" Schmidt told me. \"People can't believe it when I say that. I don't mean organic is not sustainable. It's just not sustainable for _us_. There's no universal cookie-cutter method for all soil types, or all regions, or all farming sizes. Maybe if we had been less diversified, and had been just in grains, we could have focused on organic farming.\n\n\"If we didn't have so many irons in the fire, and weren't trying to sustain a family farm, and had more time to focus on things like doing organic practices, maybe that would have worked for us. It's a balancing act: this is what works for our farm and our level of risk that we were willing to take. Soil types dictate a lot of it. Smaller organic operations can overcome that, because they plant a smaller variety of many different things and have smaller acres to take care of. When you have 200 acres and a variety of different crops going, you need a very different approach.\"\n\n### Organic? Sustainable? Or Regenerative?\n\nThese ideas sit very nicely with Brian Snyder, head of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and one of the country's leading voices for farming done with the health of the planet in mind. Snyder wonders whether produce grown by farmers like Jennie Schmidt and Steve Groff might be given its own label: not \"GMO\" or \"organic,\" but \"sustainable.\" Marking food as \"sustainable\" would reward farmers for preserving topsoil, for example, or building soil quality through the use of nitrogen fixers, cover crops, or composting\u2014even if they used GM seeds.\n\n\"People accept that 'organic' is never going to include GMO, but the question is whether the term 'sustainable' can include GMO,\" Snyder said. \"The problem is, none of these things are simple. Compared to 'organic,' 'sustainable' offers a bigger tent that includes more than organic produce. No-till agriculture would qualify, and no-till farmers mostly use GMO seeds. We might have to consider a world with GMOs, to save soil and build soil quality. Instead of labeling foods with a skull and crossbones, they'd rather have a 'sustainable' label that is a positive thing, even though it may have GMOs in it. That idea is not completely without merit.\"\n\nGMOs themselves will never cause a fraction of the problems caused by the industrial food system itself. \"We are going to waste a lot of time and energy on whether GMOs are helpful or harmful to people, when that's not the most important question,\" Snyder said. \"The most important question is what kind of _system_ do they generate and support? The most effective criticisms of GMOs are about the peripheral realities of this system. It used to be that farmers always retained a percentage of their crop for seeds for the next year. They did this for thousands of years. Now, in the last couple of decades, almost none do that.\"\n\nThese ideas also sit nicely with Blake Meyers, the University of Delaware geneticist, who thinks GMOs may one day be a key component in sustainable agriculture. \"I buy and eat organic food, and I don't like chemical residue on my food,\" Meyers told me. \"So the question is, why should you not have organically grown GM crops? So far the USDA has said you can't have GMOs and label them organic, but I would prefer to get rid of all the chemistry and confer the desirable traits with genetics. Petroleum won't be with us forever. I'm perfectly okay with transgenics: imagine if we could create a wonder crop that requires genetic modification but is grown organically, free of chemical inputs, and resists drought, resists pests, and outcompetes weeds. I'd be okay with that.\"\n\nSome of the critics of GMOs \"are the same people who spray copper or sulfur on their plants and say it's okay because it's 'organic,'\" Meyers said. \"They apply Bt to their crops, but God forbid you take the same genes they're eating in the bacteria and insert them into the plant. Ultimately, our agriculture has got to be sustainable, or we're not going to be here long term. GM will be a large part of that. Fifty years from now, we'll see that spraying anything on plants created a huge amount of waste and pollution. We'll see that 90 percent of the chemicals washed off, ending up in our soil and water. If you eliminate that waste, if you can use GMOs to replace these inputs, achieving similar yields, without all the chemical inputs, you've done a world of good.\"\n\nThere are legitimate worries, of course, that a comparatively loose term like \"sustainable\" could be distorted and abused\u2014\"greenwashed\"\u2014by industrial farms in ways that a strict, legally precise term like \"organic\" cannot. The word \"sustainable\" has been \"overused, misused, and it has been shamelessly co-opted by corporations for the purpose of greenwashing,\" write veteran food activists Andr\u00e9 Leu and Ronnie Cummins. Indeed, they note, the word is featured prominently on Monsanto's website, where the company boasts of a \"commitment to sustainable agriculture\u2014pledging to produce more, conserve more, and improve farmers' lives by 2030.\"\n\n\"Industrial agriculture today, with its factory farms, waste lagoons, antibiotics and growth hormones, GMOs, toxic pesticides and prolific use of synthetic fertilizers, doesn't come close to 'not using up or destroying natural resources,'\" Leu and Cummins write. Instead of \"sustainable,\" they would like to see foods affixed with one of two labels: \"degenerative\" or \"regenerative.\" Consumers could then choose food produced by chemical-intensive, monoculture-based industrial systems that \"destabilize the climate, and degrade soil, water, biodiversity, health and local economies,\" Leu and Cummins write. Or they could choose food produced using organic regenerative practices that rejuvenate the soil, grasslands, and forests; replenish water; promote food sovereignty; and restore public health and prosperity\u2014\"all while cooling the planet by drawing down billions of tons of excess carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil where it belongs.\"\n\nSuch rhetoric\u2014powerful, convincing, and justifiable as it may be\u2014is plainly directed at giant corporate farms, and the global food companies they serve. The question for midsize farmers like Jennie Schmidt and Steve Groff is: Can they operate inside this system in a way that is more benign? And can GMOs be a part of this? As with everything else in the American food system, there are no simple solutions: as enlightened as Jennie Schmidt and Steve Groff may be, they are still plugged into a larger food system that uses enormous amounts of chemicals on vast swaths of land to create huge quantities of unhealthy food. But it's a start.\n\nTo Jennie Schmidt, this global food system\u2014with all its downsides\u2014will continue to evolve because people will continue to enjoy foods they can't grow themselves.\n\n\"I'm not going to give up coffee or chocolate,\" she told me. \"I love the fact that we have so many food choices. Yes, there are downsides, but there are lots of upsides to it too. I like the fact that in February I can go to Millington, Maryland\u2014two miles away is the closest grocery store\u2014and get fresh produce. Think about what we'd have to do to grow that produce around here, in winter, in hoop houses, and at what cost? When you have to use so much propane to heat the hoop house, that can be more energy-intensive than getting it from Mexico.\n\n\"My concern with people's resistance to the technology of GMOs is that the next generation of products, and the next round of benefits for folks in developing countries\u2014for traits they need to resist certain diseases or yield\u2014don't come about because they are not _allowed_ to, because there has been so much pushback,\" Schmidt said. \"All of plant breeding, whether it's traditional or GMO, has benefits, and my concern is that science will be stifled because there has been so much resistance to it. Think of what we could do if we could get rid of food allergies from soy or peanuts. If you could silence the protein that causes peanut allergies, that would be a big deal. I'm afraid we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.\"\n\n## 10.\n\n## The Farm Next Door\n\n There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm,\" Aldo Leopold wrote in his landmark book _A Sand County Almanac_ , first published in 1949. \"One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.\"\n\nAlmost seventy years later, these dangers\u2014as Jennie Schmidt knows all too well\u2014are clear and present. As suburban sprawl has continued to eat millions of acres of the nation's prime farmland, fewer and fewer of us\u2014especially those of us living in and around large cities\u2014ever have a chance to connect with the way our food is grown.\n\nWhen it comes to our food, we are all blind, even if it is for different reasons. If we live in the city, we rarely have the chance to see where (or how) food is grown. Ditto for the suburbs: even if there were once crops occupying the fields where subdivisions now sit, they aren't there anymore. Even in rural America, where there are plenty of farms, it's hard to get your eyes on actual food: the corn and soybeans growing across America are sold to industrial food processors, feedlots, and energy companies, not on farm stands or in supermarkets.\n\nBut it's important to remember that industrial-scale farming (with or without GMOs) has been around for only a few short decades; before that, everyone ate what they\u2014or their local farmers\u2014grew for them. And today, in small places all over the country, this sort of farming\u2014small, local, often organic, and decidedly _not_ GMO\u2014is once again beginning to sprout. On small farms in the country, in the suburbs, even in run-down sections of industrial cities, small farmers\u2014responding to a growing unease with industrial food production\u2014are beginning to connect with the people they feed. In the process, consumers are not only paying more attention to their food, but paying more attention to their farmers and to their land.\n\n### Outside the City\n\nDrew Norman is entirely sick of hearing that GMOs are the future of food. Sure, he knows that by the end of the century, the world may well have to accommodate an additional 2 billion people, many of them in the developing world. He knows we will need to grow more food, on less land, in the most efficient way possible. So, are genetically engineered foods the answer?\n\n\"Fuck that,\" Norman told me.\n\nA lanky, graying man in a seed cap and leather boots, Norman is no dewy-eyed environmentalist. He is an avid deer hunter, with trophy heads mounted on his wall. He has few positive things to say about government regulators and considers local environmental groups to be obnoxious to farmers. His son is scaling up the family hog farming business from eight animals to several hundred.\n\nBut Norman is also the owner of One Straw Farm, one of the largest organic vegetable farms in Maryland. Norman started farming thirty years ago and has been running his farm as a community-supported agriculture (CSA) operation since 1998. Working a 65-acre vegetable farm, plus another 150 acres of forest and hayfields, he and his wife, Joan, now supply food to some 10,000 people a week, through their 1,900 CSA members and by delivering to a half-dozen Maryland farmers' markets. In his barn, the day I visited, there were stacks of crates filled with squash, tomatoes, and kale. Four large trucks were preparing to deliver to thirty-eight pickup CSA sites around the state, including some right in the heart of Baltimore.\n\nMargins are small for any farmer, and Norman has had to be nimble. His team has been selling canned tomatoes and peppers for years; they are now doing Bloody Mary mix and are about to market a tomatillo salsa. His son is planning to raise two hundred hogs that will feed on acorns in the farm's oak forest. Chickens may be next.\n\nNorman's counteroffer to corporate, monoculture, GM farming is simple: Buy local. When you buy a cabbage from your local (and preferably organic) farmer, you don't have to worry about whether it's been \"tested,\" because the food was grown the way food has always been grown (or _had_ always been grown, before petrochemicals and genetic technology entered the equation): with seed, soil, sun, and rain. You also don't have to worry about whether part of the cost of the cabbage is going to pay the salaries of seed company executives in an office building in St. Louis, or a political lobbyist in Washington, or a pesticide company in Wilmington. Your money goes to the farmer.\n\nIf there were more farms like his\u2014and until just a few decades ago, there were\u2014none of us would need to eat engineered food, Norman says. His food, organic and local as it is, is also cheap. I pay him $500 every winter for six months of produce in the spring, summer, and fall\u2014which works out to about $20 a week for a large canvas bag stuffed with everything from lettuce, spinach, and collards to acorn squash, sweet potatoes, and watermelon. This is routinely more than my family of four can eat.\n\nNorman runs a farm that is a model of sustainability. He intercrops (strawberries with oats, for example) to prevent erosion. He plants cover crops. He has enormous windrows of compost. His feelings about raising meat mirror his feelings about farming generally.\n\n\"There was an equal number of buffalo when we got here as there are cattle today,\" Norman told me. \"They were eating and doing their thing and providing meat in a pretty environmentally friendly way. If we planted our corn into grass and raised cattle on it, we'd probably have the most environmentally friendly way to produce protein there is.\"\n\nIn Europe, where small farms like Norman's have been the model for hundreds of years, opposition to GM crops has been intense since the beginning. Although typically framed as an issue of food safety, Europe's anti-GMO argument is also fundamentally built on anxiety\u2014or outright anger\u2014over the effect of large-scale farming on small-scale farmers. Italy, France, Spain\u2014they have all spent centuries stitching together small-scale farm economies and take well-earned national pride in the quality and integrity of the food these farms produce.\n\nBut given that by the end of the century less than 10 percent of the world's population will be living in Europe, is a European-style, small-scale agricultural model something the rest of the world can afford to emulate?\n\nDrew Norman, and many others, think the answer is unequivocally yes. Not only would the food this system creates be healthier, it would support local economies and curb the power of global food conglomerates. Regardless of whether GM foods are \"dangerous,\" they are definitely corporate, aggressive, and\u2014in every sense of the word\u2014monopolizing. They so dominate the agricultural, political, and cultural landscape that consumers\u2014here and abroad\u2014can't opt out even if they want to.\n\nTo Norman, the heart of the issue is trust. \"If something is being tested by the people making money from it, I don't trust the tests,\" he said. \"If there's no government oversight or independent testing on the safety of a product, I don't trust the company\u2014who's going to make millions or billions\u2014to be honest.\"\n\nBut can farmers like Drew Norman really feed all of us? Especially given our current eating habits\u2014more bags of chicken nuggets than bundles of organic kale\u2014does the world even _want_ what Drew Norman is growing? Local, organic food, to many people, seems like a yuppie indulgence: boutique, expensive, and\u2014in the end\u2014a lot less satisfying than a burger, some fries, and a Coke. And if this is true in the wealthy United States, isn't it also true in the developing world, where companies are hard at work pushing their GM corn and soy?\n\n\"Look,\" Norman said. \"The Third World can't afford to buy Stouffer's meals. The Third World needs to use local ingredients and cook in their own kitchens. A local food system is a really easy thing to do in the Third World. That's what they've always done, and that's what they're doing right now. Kenya is number three in the world in certified organic farms. They are pretty food sufficient, and they've done that by supporting local food systems and local agriculture.\"\n\nAs for American consumers, who claim they \"have no time\" to cook their own food\u2014let alone think about how (or where) it is grown: \"Quite frankly, by the time you drive to McDonald's and buy your burger and fries, you could have made your meal at home,\" Norman told me. \"Americans are so busy chasing an income to be two-percenters or whatever it is, they don't have time to look around at the environment or their health. All they have to do is look in the mirror, but they're so busy doing what they're doing they don't have time to do even this.\"\n\nI asked Norman about national trends in obesity, diabetes, and all the other ills associated with GMO-driven fast food and processed food, and the next-gen GM products that promise to deliver these same foods with less fat, salt, and sugar. \"It all goes back to money,\" Norman said. \"The likely solution is the stupid solution. GMO potato chips? That's not the solution. The solution is to eat more fruits and veggies, not the thousand-calorie coffee drink. That's where I just think Americans don't look at what they're doing.\"\n\nWe have to question a food system that puts way more energy into food production than we're getting out of it in food calories, Norman said. Conventional farms can use 10 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food\u2014and this is _before_ calculating the energy it costs to ship food around the country and the world. Food grown in the South and Midwest travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to plate.\n\nWith the exception of some feather meal he buys from nearby chicken farmers, Norman grows all his own fertilizer through the use of compost and nitrogen-fixing cover crops. A head of lettuce grown with petrochemicals and shipped from an industrial farm in California to Baltimore, in other words, is a far more polluting (and far less efficient) vegetable than lettuce grown with no chemical inputs and shipped twenty miles from Norman's farm.\n\n\"Scientists reduce everything to its simplest forms, but they are not looking at the big picture,\" Norman told me. \"You can do a lot in the laboratory, but it needs to be rounded out by people looking at the big picture, and talking to each other. If the world looked at the problems associated with industrial agriculture as a whole, they would realize the food is not inexpensive. We need ethicists and ecologists to be a part of this conversation. We have to stop looking at everything as only coming down to the bottom line.\"\n\n### In the Country\n\nThree hundred miles to the north, among the rolling hills and dairy farms of New York's Hudson River Valley, Steffen Schneider is doing everything he can to return farming to its rightful place as the center of community life. Schneider, like Drew Norman, thinks that GMOs are merely a symptom of the invisibility of food production.\n\n\"I always come to the conclusion that GMOs are an answer to the wrong question,\" Schneider told me. \"They always say, 'We have to feed the whole world,' but that's not the right way to approach it. Clearly, there is already enough food to feed more people than are alive right now, so that's not the right question. In my mind you would have to look back and reflect on agriculture's role as _humans in relation to food and to the planet_. When you have a compass and you're trying to figure out the way to go, you don't find out by taking the compass apart and breaking it down to its atomic structure. That's not going to get it.\"\n\nSchneider works 400 acres at Hawthorne Valley Farm, ten miles west of the Hudson River about two hours north of Manhattan. His farm includes 15 acres for vegetables and 40 acres for grain. He grazes sixty dairy cows and thirty beef cattle, and he keeps as many as forty hogs. Schneider runs Hawthorne Valley as a \"biodynamic\" operation, following principles put forward by the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner. Long before the modern organic farming movement, biodynamic farmers paid scrupulous attention to the intertwined ecological health of their entire agricultural system, from soil and weather to plants and livestock. Synthetic chemicals are anathema, as is the kind of mistreatment of animals that has become such a grim trademark of industrial-scale feed and slaughter operations.\n\n\"There needs to be an inner shift\u2014that's been my recognition these last few years,\" Schneider told me. \"People are looking and searching. A big part of our customer base here is mothers and young people worried about feeding their families. Hopefully, over time, we will make these changes. Otherwise, we're just going to stay stuck. What are our responsibilities? Everybody has to ask this of themselves. There is an amazing opportunity to ground this change in agriculture.\"\n\nSchneider got a degree in agronomy in Germany before coming to the United States in 1983 (he worked a dairy farm in Wisconsin for seven years before moving to Hawthorne Valley). Following Steiner's biodynamic ideas, he imports nothing to the farm except tractor fuel and electricity: his fallow fields are protected and enhanced with cover crops like rye, vetch, and red clover; he grows his own hay and produces all his own fertilizer from compost and animal manure. From April until late fall, his cows are in pasture, and his pigs are fed whey during the cheese-making season, food scraps from the Hawthorne Valley grocery store and deli, leftovers from his own sauerkraut, and milk by-products. The closest meat processor is just twenty miles away.\n\nFor Schneider, a farm should be the centerpiece of a local economy, not a cog in the global economic machine. His fields are part of Hawthorne Valley's larger vision for \"social renewal\" that includes\u2014right next door, in the same beatific valley\u2014not only a sizable farm store but also a K\u201312 Waldorf school, a Place-Based Learning Center, and a Farmscape Ecology Program. Schneider's farm provides work for eighty people on the farm itself, and two hundred if you include the store and the school. \"It's a great thing to be able to offer meaningful work to so many people,\" Schneider said.\n\nFarmers and teachers work closely with families throughout the region to connect them with their food as well as their bioregion. Living and eating near Hawthorne Valley, it would be impossible _not_ to know where your food came from, who grew it, or under what conditions. It would also be impossible not to understand the relationship of the farm to the larger landscape.\n\n\"However you define 'sacred,' essentially it's a place you love,\" Conrad Vispo told me. Vispo, a PhD wildlife ecologist, and his wife, Claudia, a PhD botanist, run Hawthorne Valley's Farmscape Ecology Program, an education center committed to documenting the human and natural history of the region's farms and wild landscapes. Teaching farmers, and children, and everyone else about the ways food production fits into a larger ecological context is a sure way to bring people closer to their food\u2014and to open their hearts to the places they live, Vispo told me.\n\n\"Why do you love a place? Your experiences as a people, your individual experiences\u2014you make your judgments based on facts, but also on your core feelings on what is right and wrong,\" Vispo said. \"What we hope to do with our program here is make the land sacred to more people, in the sense of getting more people to love the land. Then the way they think of the land will include more than just how to use the land. It will include how the land will be affected by their actions.\"\n\nIn other words, Hawthorne Valley is as far from an abstracted monoculture industrial farm as it can be. The food, and the farm, and the people\u2014they are all intimately connected. And intimacy, Steffen Schneider said, is the best way to ensure that both people and land will be properly cared for.\n\n\"In any country, the first thing they have to ask is, 'What do we have to do to develop farming systems that are successful _right here_?'\" Schneider said. \"The Green Revolution did a lot of good, but it was also extremely destructive because it destroyed a lot of traditional farming systems. Most people in the world are still eating local food, but these companies are saying this traditional way of farming and eating is not 'modern.' This is not helpful.\"\n\nNo matter where a farmer is working the land\u2014in New York, in Maryland, or in Kenya\u2014\"we need to figure out what local adaption means right there,\" Schneider said. \"We are one human community. We have to look at all of us as one human community. There will still be crops that we share\u2014coffee and chocolate won't happen unless we bring them in. But we need to feed our own communities. We have to envision things radically different. We can't just do it slightly better. Then maybe this whole GMO discussion might just go away.\"\n\nHawthorne Valley functions as a nonprofit, but its business model is still highly sensitive (and responsive) to market demands. The farm produced New York State's first organic yogurt, and now that educated foodies have gone in big for fermented foods, Schneider is producing eight different varieties of sauerkraut. The day I visited, Schneider took me down to the kraut cellar, where workers were producing kimchi from Napa cabbage using a \"vicious\" homemade hot sauce.\n\nThe market to which Schneider has to respond ranges from people in his own rural community to five different farmers' markets in Manhattan. He sells raw milk to locals (state law prevents him from selling it off-site) and sends trucks two hours to Manhattan every Thursday to feed 250 families who are members of his CSA. His organic yogurt makes it all the way to markets in Maryland. In the winter, his greenhouse\u2014heated by radiant hot water piped beneath the soil\u2014produces salad mix and microgreens, both of which collect high prices in the Manhattan markets. \"It's amazing what this stuff commands in NYC,\" Schneider said. \"It's not like any of us are getting rich off this, so I don't feel bad about it.\"\n\nSchneider is thinking about expanding his operation to a \"full-plate\" CSA, with bread and cheese and meat. For years, the farm did not raise chickens because the birds require \"inputs\" of feed, but now that Schneider is growing grain, he may add them. Again, it's all about balance.\n\n\"There would be _lines_ in New York City for our eggs,\" he said. \"People also want us to grow more veggies. We could, but then we would need more animals, and it might throw the whole balance out of whack.\"\n\nHandling the pressure to grow is a mixed blessing for Schneider: if it's forcing him to recalculate the balance more production would require, it's also confirmation that his style of farming is catching hold. He is constantly being asked for advice by young farmers, who see his integrated, even philosophical approach to farming as a far more exciting prospect than growing endless acres of GM soybeans. To the new generation of farmers, Schneider's approach offers more than a job\u2014it engages their imagination.\n\n\"With industrial agriculture, people practicing farming are looked at as having no social standing,\" Schneider said. \"Farmers have become cogs in this industrial system. They aren't happy about it, but they don't feel that they have a choice. We've forced them to produce as much corn and soybeans as cheaply as possible, and they just do it, because they're stuck. Entire communities have been wiped out in the service of industrial monoculture. What's going to happen in twenty years? Agriculture can offer so much by reinventing economic principles, and our relationship with the natural world, and with each other. It's a very exciting time for me to be in agriculture right now.\"\n\nSchneider's fierce commitment to local food production goes \"beyond organic,\" and mirrors Alika Atay's argument on Maui, where schoolchildren are still fed oranges grown in Florida rather than papaya grown next door. It also mirrors Drew Norman's argument in Maryland, where local producers still struggle to get their produce into conventional supermarkets. Their common push is to find ways to support food that is grown\u2014and eaten\u2014within individual communities.\n\nThe market for local food is plainly growing. Nationwide, the number of farmers' markets has increased 76 percent since 2008. In Delaware, where I work, farmers' markets have increased more than eightfold since the state Department of Agriculture began tracking them in 2007. Fresh produce now makes up 60 percent of local produce sales, with the remainder coming from value-added products such as meats, cheeses, jellies, breads, salsa, eggs, and honey.\n\n\"Over the last few years, we have seen an incredible rise in people wanting to eat healthy and buy fresh, local foods for themselves and their children,\" the state's secretary of agriculture said recently. \"Our farmers and producers are working to meet that demand by selling some of the best fresh produce, meats, cheeses and honey that any state can offer. Our farmers' markets also connect the people who eat with the people who grow their food, fostering conversations and friendships that can last a lifetime.\"\n\nThanks to a national surge in demand for both organic and local food, the federal government seems finally to be getting the message. The USDA announced in 2014 that it would spend $52 million to support local and regional food systems, including not just farmers' markets but local food distribution networks, and to do more to encourage research into organic farming methods. The Obama administration has also tripled\u2014to $291 million\u2014federal funding for organic farming, including $125 million for research and $50 million for conservation.\n\nAs helpful as this has been, it's worth keeping these numbers in perspective. The total federal farm bill in 2014 was $956 billion, including more than $44 billion for commodity crop programs. Compared with these numbers, the money given to local or organic farm programs is barely a rounding error.\n\nSteffen Schneider's sense is that for the local, organic sector to grow, it will have to find a way into the kitchens of people who aren't only in search of expensive microgreens. Hawthorne Valley accepts WIC stamps for their CSA. He is exploring ways to open a store in Hudson, a historic city that is popular among weekenders from Manhattan but which remains largely working class. His wife runs a program called Kids Can Cook, a three-week day camp that teaches local kids how to grow, harvest, and cook their own food.\n\nBut to think about the price of local organic outside the context of the way it is grown\u2014and outside the context of the way \"conventional\" food is grown\u2014is to miss a much larger point. In Germany, Schneider said, research has shown that as per capita spending on food goes down, health care costs go up. In other words, the cheaper your food, the worse (and more expensive) your health.\n\nIt may be true that organic farms have generally lower yields than farms that use petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, though recent studies indicate the differences may be smaller than previously thought. Organic corn, soy, and wheat can yield up to 97 percent of crops sprayed with chemicals, one study showed; other crops, in other places, fare almost as well. Gaps can be reduced further\u2014or eliminated completely\u2014by growers who \"mimic nature\" by creating \"ecologically diverse farms that harness important ecological interactions like the nitrogen-fixing benefits of intercropping or cover-cropping with legumes.\"\n\nA thirty-year study conducted by the Rodale Institute found that chemical-dependent farming may outyield organic farming during good years, but over the long haul (and especially during drought years), organic systems, with their vastly healthier soils, outyield conventional systems. Organic farming also reduces the use of fossil fuel energy by about 30 percent and significantly improves the organic matter in the soil itself.\n\nBut comparing yields\u2014pretty much the only metric that \"conventional\" farmers like to use\u2014is a puny way to think about the optimal way to grow food. So is \"convenience,\" the other word industry uses to pitch processed food.\n\n\"Agriculture is not just an economic activity designed only to produce cheap food,\" Schneider said. \"It is a multifunctional reality that underpins all culture and economics and has ecology as its foundation. Looked at that way, farming takes on a whole different meaning.\"\n\nIt is political dogma to say that food has to be cheap, Schneider said; such a stance devalues both food and the farmers who grow it. A far better parameter by which to decide how food should be grown? Health\u2014both human and environmental.\n\n\"Good food should be a right everyone has,\" Schneider said. \"Think how many millions of dollars people are spending to see a new movie. Some of this really requires a rejiggering of awareness. Food has been looked at as sort of an afterthought. It's only recently that people are beginning to realize that this isn't the right place to skimp. Only recently have people begun to think about the link between food and health, which is nuts. Health is really the only sensible outcome by which you can measure agriculture. And by health I mean the health of the earth, of communities, and of individuals. When you think about how effective this industrial agriculture has been, this has been a failure.\"\n\nA couple hundred years ago there was a Hawthorne Valley in every community, and as late as the mid\u2013nineteenth century, more than half of all Americans worked on a farm. Which poses the question: In our advanced technological age, and with our exploded population (thanks in no small part to expanded food production developed during the Green Revolution), is it in fact possible to live in a world without GMOs, or without industrial farming itself? Can there ever again be such a thing as community self-sufficiency, or are networks of enormous farms and global transportation systems here to stay?\n\nIn Europe, large cities like Rome and Lyon\u2014and countless smaller cities, like Orvieto and Avignon\u2014are ringed by hundreds of small, diverse farms. The answer in the United States lies in many more acres, in many more places, involving lots more people\u2014and not just in the middle of the country, said Craig Holdrege, the scientist and philosopher who runs the Nature Institute, an environmental and agriculture education center just down the road from Steffen Schneider's farm.\n\n\"If you think of metropolitan New York's 16 to 20 million people, you can't have a single Hawthorne Valley feed that whole population,\" Holdrege said. \"But the regionalization of food production\u2014that's really happening. You can have urban agriculture\u2014there is a big movement in Detroit\u2014and you can have a lot of farms around these population centers. There would be no problem feeding Chicago from right around the city if you took some of that land out of soybeans and corn. That's how it was done just a hundred years ago. The city was fed by its region.\"\n\n### The City Farm\n\nBaltimore City has 11,000 city employees. Guess how many of them are farmers?\n\nOne.\n\nHis name is Greg Strella, and his 33-acre farm\u2014situated behind a Popeyes chicken joint, a discount mattress warehouse, and a Pep Boys auto parts store\u2014is where Strella is teaching city kids how to grow and eat things most kids wouldn't be caught dead eating. Like beets. And sorrel.\n\nA couple of years ago, Strella, the manager of Great Kids Farm, noticed something strange as he led school kids on tours of his farm. As they walked between farm buildings, the kids kept bending over and sneaking handfuls of a perennial plant called sorrel. Sorrel grows easily along sidewalks, and Strella had planted small batches not as a crop but as a kind of edible landscaping.\n\n\"When you're standing outside with students eating lunch, and students are coming out of the lunchroom and sneaking sorrel and saying, 'Is it okay if I have more sorrel?,' it totally reverses the challenge of getting students to eat something they don't want to eat,\" Strella said.\n\n\"'Sure,' you say. 'You can eat more of this pure food.' It's a beautiful inversion.\"\n\nStrella was not trained as a farmer, he was trained as an artist at the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a student, wherever he went\u2014the classrooms where he studied, the restaurants where he waited tables or worked the kitchens\u2014he was confronted by his own ignorance about food. But he kept asking questions, and every chef he talked to responded with \"an endless willingness to share what they knew and already experienced.\"\n\nStrella has now been farming for more than ten years, ever since he got out of art school. He went to Chicago and volunteered at City Farm, near the Cabrini Green housing projects. He tutored under Will Allen, the legendary urban farmer whose Growing Power operation has become world famous for both feeding and employing people on the farms he's built in downtown Milwaukee. This led to an apprenticeship at a small CSA farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and then a job in Baltimore, as the first farmer the city had ever hired.\n\nThe piece of land he was given did not, at first, seem promising. There were busted-up greenhouses and soil that hadn't been properly cared for in years. And it wasn't like Strella himself was bringing generations of farming wisdom to the table. He had trained as a sculptor.\n\nBut Strella was taken by other things, like the old orphans' home with historic photos of young black teenagers helping black masons put the building's stones in place. The place had a history of craftsmanship and self-determination that Strella liked a great deal.\n\nUrban farming also drew him. Some 20 percent of the world's undernourished people live in cities, and urban \"food deserts\"\u2014where food can mostly be found in gas stations or convenience stores\u2014have become a focus of intense concern for public health experts. Millions of America's poorest city residents have little access to produce of any kind, let alone fruits and vegetables grown in their own neighborhoods. Much of this is due to the flight of middle-class residents (and the markets that served them) to the suburbs; Baltimore has lost fully 300,000 residents since 1950. Replacing supermarkets and vibrant residences, in Baltimore and Detroit and countless other cities, have been vacant lots.\n\nBut into this vacuum a new generation of inventive farmers has begun to break ground. Post-industrial cities like Detroit and Milwaukee\u2014which are now dotted with bona fide farms, not just garden plots\u2014have joined more prosperous places like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, as innovative hubs for young people trying to reinvent the way food is grown, and delivered, to the country's population centers. Detroit alone has some 1,300 community gardens; Portland has twenty-six farmers' markets; gardeners in Austin, Texas, provide the city with more than 100,000 pounds of local food a year. Baltimore's mayor recently started a Vacants to Value program, intended to nurture urban renewal and promote open space; neighborhoods can lease land to create gardens and green space.\n\nUrban farms provide local food and jobs to people who see too little of either. They also provide places of respite and natural beauty within caverns of concrete, especially for school-age kids who suddenly have recreational options beyond the pavement.\n\nWhich brings us back to the magic of sorrel. For his first three years at the farm, that became the most common question Strella got from his students: Can I please have more sorrel? So Strella did what any farmer does: he acknowledged the desires of the market and he provided. The following year, he and his students planted a thousand pounds of sorrel.\n\n\"No adult in their right mind would sit down and design a process to 'create curiosity and participation in eating salad' by serving a tart, lemon-flavored green,\" Strella said.\n\nBy listening to students\u2014and figuring out how to navigate the city's public school bureaucracy\u2014Strella had little doubt what he ought to add to the public school salad bar. \"That probably seemed outrageous to anyone who hadn't just seen thousands of four- to twelve-year-olds enjoying this food,\" Strella said. \"But to us it was the obvious decision, because we had watched our students and listened to our students.\"\n\nThat spring, Strella and his student farmers got sorrel into twelve inner-city lunch programs. Later, when the schools surveyed what the kids were eating, and what they would like to see at the school salad bars, 97 percent said they would eat more sorrel.\n\nAs Great Kids Farm began to take root, Strella and his shoestring staff began organizing visits from elementary and high school students into three parts: some time in a classroom, some time exploring the landscape around the farm, and a tasting experience, where students would sample the foods they were helping to grow on the farm.\n\nThis is where Strella introduced five hundred Baltimore city kids to beets.\n\nThe idea was to find a way to get root vegetables into school cafeterias, and to prepare them in a way the kids would eat.\n\nPotatoes, I could see. Carrots, sure. Even sweet potatoes. But beets? Aren't beets, for American kids, the universal symbol of disgust? In a bit of ironic serendipity, many of the students Strella was trying to convince didn't hate beets because they had never seen one.\n\n\"Part of the quirkiness of the urban environment is that it's almost like the preconception against beets isn't there,\" Strella said. \"This creates different opportunities for forming relationships with food. The kids could just as easily have been out playing basketball. Here they were, harvesting beets.\"\n\nStrella picked six high school seniors to plant, and tend, the entire crop. Once the beets had been harvested, Strella and his chef set up stations with the vegetables prepared five ways. (\"It was kind of like a wine tasting,\" Strella said.) He was sure that the most promising, since it offered the most sweetness, would be beets mixed with orange juice. Station Number Five was shredded raw beets, with nothing added: no sugar, no dressing, no nothing. Strella and his chef had set the station up as a kind of control, to see just how much more kids liked the other four recipes.\n\nTo his surprise, and by a large margin, the kids picked the raw beets.\n\n\"That's just one example of what happens when we put young people in a position to be collaborators, and give them the opportunity to make decisions for themselves and to take the risk of trying new things,\" Strella said.\n\nAs with the sorrel experiment, the beet test turned into something magical. That season, Strella and his student volunteers planted and harvested a lot of beets\u20143,300 pounds of them\u2014and sent them out to sixty schools, where students would serve them to their peers in their cafeterias. Strella's young farmers did all the marketing; they put posters up in their cafeterias\u2014\"What's a cucumber? You'll find out today!\" \"What's a beet? You'll find out today!\"\u2014and included a riff on lyrics from the rapper Drake: _Started from a seed, now we're here._\n\nWord started getting around that something special was happening in Baltimore. Strella and his student-farmers found themselves hosting a series of workshops for 146 food service directors from forty-eight states and Washington, D.C. The students toured visitors around the farm and shared some of the raw shredded beets they were growing for the city's school cafeterias.\n\n\"Here we have all these amazing food service directors from all around the country, and they are eating a raw vegetable that is simply a raw vegetable, not raw beets and sugar, or oil,\" Strella said. \"The directors would say, 'What do we have to do? Where are the labor costs that make it work? The production cost must be so onerous, that must be why I can't see raw shredded beets showing up in our cafeterias.'\n\n\"We said, 'All we can tell you is that we have a tiny little staff of a farmer, a teacher, a chef, and an incredible group of students,'\" Strella said. \"We don't know why this can't exist in your cafeteria. What we do know is that our students can grow them, harvest them, put them in the cafeterias, and eat them. We can tell you that this is what we have done. We don't have access to anything you don't have access to.\"\n\nFor Strella, teaching city kids how to grow and eat their own produce is part of the vision shared by Drew Norman and Steffen Schneider and Wes Jackson and Alika Atay: it is teaching them the value of autonomy, of caring for their bodies and their communities and their local landscape.\n\n\"We see our students change physically,\" Strella said. \"They develop shoulder muscles, a certain pace in how they walk, a certain confidence in how they work in teams, a certain resonance in their voice when they speak to young people, or in front of two hundred people for events. Those ripples, you can see them in the classroom and schoolyards and cafeterias. I'm talking about high school students growing food for their peers. These are seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, and they are planting the seeds and picking the vegetables, and that is something that profoundly changes what it means when those veggies show up in the school cafeteria.\n\n\"When we hear people talking about the world the next generation is going to inherit, where are they right now? What are they eating right now? We want them to take responsibility for participating in that world's creation.\"\n\nArguing that industrial agriculture has a fixed and immutable place in our world is like arguing that because highways are the most efficient mode of transportation, all we need is highways, Strella told me. The truth is, we need sidewalks and bike lanes and side roads too, because \"no one would discount the value of walking down a sidewalk and saying hi to your neighbors, and you can't do that from a highway.\n\n\"That's not to say we don't need highways. But it is to question the singular value of highways,\" Strella said. \"We've had fifty or sixty years to test out our highways and industrial ag, and we now have the vista to see things we couldn't see thirty years ago. So often the debate is an incredible narrowing to cost-benefit analysis. What we're taking about is holding ourselves in relation to a much fuller accounting of the role we play in the world. In the food landscape, even just to narrow it down to 'food' is already too narrow an accounting. In our homes, in our backyards, on our streets\u2014there is incredible value to having our food living with us, even before it gets to our plate. Once you start going up to levels of economy, you start to lose this.\"\n\nSeen from this vantage point\u2014teaching people to think as intimately as they can about the relationship between their bodies, their food, and their soil\u2014the prospect of giant agribusiness seems entirely counterintuitive, Strella said. There are far too many externalized costs\u2014from monoculture and pollution on the farms themselves to obesity and diabetes in the inner-city people who eat them\u2014for GMOs and industrial food generally to make any sense.\n\n\"It's absurd that we talk about industrial agriculture as 'conventional,'\" Strella said. \"As a tool within the industrial system, biotech is propping up systems that are already unraveling. Think of the dead zones in the water, the loss of topsoil, the health of our bodies\u2014biotech is right there at the center of all that. Is the thrill of the speeding train worth the crash that is inevitable? It looks to me like it would go a lot further if you would slow down a little bit, and certainly it would be safer for everybody who lives near the train tracks, which is everybody.\"\n\nWorking with disadvantaged students, on land that was neglected for a long time, has given Strella plenty to contemplate. He has recently turned his energies to the educational farm at Maryland's Pearlstone Center, which focuses on sustainable farming as well as spiritual and social justice work. His conclusions, which he says give him \"depthless hope,\" have been the result of watching both people and landscapes heal.\n\n\"In our fields, you will see dandelions, purslane, clover, chicory, amaranth\u2014two or three dozen edible plants that most people think of as weeds,\" he said. \"You can cut through them with knives, but even in spite of that discouragement, four weeks later, they will all be back. I see that as an extremely hopeful thing, that whatever we do next, we haven't exhausted the natural resilience of our soil to heal that land and maintain an abundant system.\n\n\"That's also how I see our students,\" Strella said. \"Even in circumstances that are a historical anomaly\u2014with young people growing up and not living close to animals or plants\u2014when the opportunity shows up, their curiosity springs forth. It is not exhausted. It's never exhausted. You can make an argument that their circumstances could have exhausted that, but it hasn't. Those human and ecological reserves that we don't create and can't create\u2014that we in fact get in the way of\u2014are still bigger than us. They are still bigger than our technologies.\"\n\n# EPILOGUE\n\n## Getting Our Hands Dirty\n\n So here we are, casting our eyes across the American food landscape, and everywhere we look, we see paradoxes. There is a surging interest in small-scale, local food production, and there is a furious consolidation of the biggest food industries in the world. There are powerful popular movements trying to force companies to reveal how they make their food, and highly financed corporate efforts to resist this disclosure. There are gathering efforts to toughen federal safety laws on GMOs and pesticides, and there are outspoken calls\u2014especially during presidential election seasons\u2014to dismantle the EPA altogether.\n\nThere are billions of dollars at stake in the United States, and potentially billions of lives at stake in the developing world. And underneath all of these trends is the constant forward march of food technology.\n\nUsing a gene-silencing technique called RNA interference, or RNAi, researchers have recently learned to keep apples or potatoes from browning after being harvested\u2014an exciting idea if you are a fast-food company hoping to keep billions of pounds of produce from spoiling on the way to the fryer. Even more dramatic, scientists have invented a new gene-editing technique called CRISPR to edit an organism's genome with ever more impressive precision. DuPont says it will use CRISPR to get drought-tolerant corn and soybeans in fields within five years.\n\nAnd then there are GM animals. Using cutting-edge gene-editing tools, scientists are learning to create cows without horns, pigs without testicles, and chickens that will produce only female egg-layers. In the Netherlands, researchers have discovered how to turn stem cells from cattle into lab-grown \"hamburger.\"\n\nA company called Aqua Bounty just received approval from the USDA to market a GM salmon, which will grow to marketable size in eighteen months\u2014half the time it would take in nature. Since most farm-raised salmon are fed GM corn and soybeans, we may now, for the first time, have GMOs eating GMOs.\n\n\"We're going to see a stream of edited animals coming through because it's so easy,\" says Bruce Whitelaw, a professor of animal biotechnology at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. \"It's going to change the societal question from 'If we could do it, would we want it?' to 'Next year we will have it, will we allow it?'\"\n\nThese advances have excited scientists, industry, and even some animal rights activists. They argue, for example, that creating cows without horns means the animals won't injure each other during confinement and calves won't have to have their horns burned off with a hot iron. Pigs without testicles will produce tastier meat and will mean pigs won't need to be castrated. The grand prize\u2014growing meat from cell cultures rather than from actual living livestock\u2014could mean all kinds of potentially powerful changes to industrial agriculture. We wouldn't need pesticide-laden GM corn, industrial slaughterhouses, or gasoline, because we wouldn't be feeding, slaughtering, or shipping animals around the country. We also wouldn't need to deal with the mountains (or lakes) of animal waste that contaminate our water, or the clouds of methane that contribute to climate change. And we wouldn't need to kill billions of animals to satisfy our bottomless desire for protein.\n\nIn 2008, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could make a chicken in a test tube. \"If you can grow the chicken flesh from a few cells, that's a lot of birds that won't be suffering,\" said Ingrid Newkirk, the group's leader, noting that Americans currently eat one million chickens an hour. Ditto for the lab-grown hamburgers. \"It is a real burger made of real meat,\" she said. \"It's as real as real can be. The thing that is different about it is that it is not from a filthy slaughterhouse, but from a sterile laboratory.\"\n\nOutside the kitchen, genetic engineers have been making global headlines breeding everything from mosquitoes to trees. By altering the genes of the _Aedes aegypti_ mosquito, a vector for a variety of dangerous diseases, scientists hope to stop the march of the Zika virus, which causes serious neurological damage and birth defects in babies. While the potential impact of GMO mosquitoes on broader ecological systems is still being explored, insects engineered to be sterile, for example, could eliminate the need to return to well-known dangers like aerial spraying South American swamps and jungles with DDT.\n\nFurther north, genetic engineers are hoping to restore the American chestnut, once a royal member of the Eastern forest, whose mid-century population\u2014thanks to a fungus from Asia\u2014was reduced by fully 4 billion trees. After nearly twenty-five years of experimenting, biologists may have finally achieved blight resistance by introducing a gene from a wheat plant. What impact GM trees will have on the American landscape remains unknown, but restoring chestnuts to their former range has long been seen as a kind of reforesting gold ring.\n\nAs with so many of the promises of genetic engineering, it's hard to argue with some of these possibilities. Changes that could make even incremental dents in our industrial food system\u2014or restore deep and broad damage to our ecosystem\u2014are certainly worth exploring. On the other hand, as Wes Jackson and many others have pointed out, it's worth remembering that most technology is designed to fix problems caused by previous technologies. We have had decades of very exciting agricultural innovation, and we have had decades of dramatically compromised environmental and human health. As inspiring as technological advances may sound, there is always the danger of developing a collective belief that\u2014no matter how badly we screw things up\u2014science will somehow manage to provide a safety net. Such thinking, whether it is conscious or unconscious, can serve to absolve us of taking responsibility for our own ignorance and our own behavior.\n\nTo my mind, our learned dependence on (not to say addiction to) industrial food technology has had consequences that are both ecological and philosophical, and include a growing detachment from some of the most fundamental components of life.\n\nLike where a potato comes from.\n\nNancy Bentley, a friend of mine who owns an organic farm near the Delaware\u2013Maryland line, brings potatoes to public schools to show kids something about what they eat. Very few of the kids have ever actually seen a potato before; to them, a potato is a \"chip\" that comes in a bag. Needless to say, when they see flecks of dirt on the potato, they recoil in disgust.\n\nIf a child thinks a potato is a fried, golden, symmetrical chip in a vacuum-sealed bag, then learns that a potato is actually a dirty brown malignancy that comes from underground, naturally they would prefer the former and reject the latter. And if they can eat the chip without ever having to confront the dirty malignancy, so much the better.\n\nAnd so it has become for most of us. Our food is now so uniform, so packaged, that if a potato\u2014or a carrot, or a hamburger\u2014looks even slightly different from the last one we tried, we either won't buy it or we will throw it away. In the United States, misshapen vegetables are thrown out in unimaginable numbers by consumers, line cooks, and supermarkets alike. Farmers discard potatoes too small to harvest mechanically. Supermarkets toss cases of hummus or chocolate one day past their expiration date. Kids throw away 40 percent of their school lunches. A recent story in _National Geographic_ reported in the United States alone, retailers and consumers throw away 133 billion pounds of food every year. That's \"billion\" with a _b_.\n\nSuch waste may not, in itself, be a \"GMO problem,\" but it is symptomatic of a food system that GMOs have dramatically amplified. In just a few short decades, as we have turned over the growing of our food to a handful of companies, and a handful of crops, we have chosen to be fed according to strictures of efficiency and marketing, not of taste, nutrition, or personal (or environmental) health.\n\nPesticides and herbicides are not (technically) \"GMO problems\" either, any more than food waste is, but these compounds are similarly symptomatic of industrial food and scaled up by GMOs. A new study reports that in the United States, the use of glyphosate\u2014sprayed on millions upon millions of agricultural crops\u2014has risen 300-fold since the advent of GMOs; Americans sprayed more than 2.4 billion pounds of the herbicide in the last decade alone. Glyphosate is now sprayed on crops closer and closer to the time of harvest, which means it is showing up in more food and in greater quantities. Rather than crack down on glyphosate, the EPA has approved a doubling of \"tolerable\" herbicide residues on soybeans, a 49-fold increase on tolerable residues on corn grain, and a 2,000-fold increase in residues on alfalfa grown for animal feed. Glyphosate routinely shows up in everything from soy sauce to breast milk, and new studies are finding links between the compound and cancer, as well as problems with liver, kidney, and metabolic function. Glyphosate has also, it's worth repeating, recently been declared a \"probable human carcinogen\" by the World Health Organization.\n\nIt seems plain that food technology like genetic engineering holds both great promise and great peril. But especially for a culture that has so completely taken its eyes off of farming and food production generally, there is another side to this equation, a side that more directly involves shifting our own role as food consumers.\n\nPerhaps, beyond advances in science and engineering, we need to remember our own traditions of growing and eating food. There was a time\u2014from 10,000 years ago until just a couple of generations ago\u2014when we managed to feed ourselves from a wide variety of plants and animals without the aid of huge companies, and without laying waste to our land or our communities. No matter what else you say about the way we eat today, one thing is clear: we eat differently from how any other people in the history of the world have eaten. Even if we accept the potential benefits of advanced technology\u2014and there are many\u2014we ought also to reintroduce ourselves to the simple act of making a meal.\n\nIn my own small way, I've been trying. For the last couple of years, I have required my students to spend time every week working on Fairweather Farm, an organic operation run by my friend Nancy Bentley. My students are mostly humanities majors, not food science majors; mostly future teachers, not future farmers. Admittedly, for my university, the project has been a bit eccentric. I'm not sure I can remember the last time an English professor asked for and received grant money to buy shovels, hoes, and rakes.\n\nMy students and I first showed up in Nancy's greenhouses in February 2015. We started by sifting soil and planting broccoli and cabbage and Swiss chard in dozens of plastic trays. March had us preparing beds outside and planting beets and carrots and peas. In April, we harvested asparagus and planted potatoes, and started moving seedlings from the greenhouse to the outside beds. By May, we were transplanting tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and tomatillos and summer squash.\n\nBy August and September, when a new crop of students returned to school, we were harvesting crates of vegetables, but we were also pulling up wagonloads of thistle, feeding the sheep, and tending the chickens. In October, we were baling hay, and in November, we were preparing beds for winter.\n\nWeek after week, my students wrote journals about their experiences. They talked about what it felt like to do manual labor, some of them for the first time in their lives. They talked about what it felt like to get thistle thorns in their hands, or hay in their eyes, or manure on their shoes. But mostly they wrote about the joy they experienced working outside, in the sun or the rain, talking to their friends and their farmer, and getting to know the sheep, and the chickens, and Waldo the goat. They learned about compost, and mushroom soil, and cover crops. They got to see what potatoes look like when they come out of the ground\u2014dirty!\u2014and how good green salsa tastes if you make it from tomatillos you grew yourself.\n\n\"The feeling that I got every time I went to the farm is unexplainable,\" a student named Danielle wrote. \"The satisfaction that I now have when I take a bite out of an organic tomato is something that I would have never experienced if I didn't take this class. This semester changed me as a person. I now think about everything I do, everything I see, and everything I eat in a completely new perspective.\"\n\nA student named Hannah wrote that before taking the class she was \"a huge foodie. I loved cooking, finding recipes, and even had a job at home where I got to do both of these things with relative freedom. I never once gave thought to where my food came from, and frankly I never even thought to care about it.\"\n\nHannah's sense, vividly confirmed by virtually all of her classmates, is that the gap that exists between people and their food is not just nutritional. It is existential. College students, like the rest of us, feel profoundly disconnected from some of the most fundamental components of their lives. Ask a roomful of twenty-year-olds how many of them can tell you precisely how or where their last meal was grown, and you will get a roomful of blank stares. Ditto if you ask them where the heat\u2014or the light\u2014in their classroom came from, or the water in their shower, or the wood in their homes.\n\nAsk them how many generations of human beings have been so ignorant about these things\u2014food, light, heat, water, and shelter\u2014and you will begin to have a real conversation. Nancy's farm, for these students, offers a chance to unplug from their electronic lives, to feel the warmth of the soil, to go home deeply tired and deeply renewed.\n\nWes Jackson calls this work\u2014physical, communitarian, and ancient\u2014\"walking the beans.\" Tally up all the labor that human beings have done in all our history\u2014building roads, constructing cities, fighting wars\u2014and you'll find that we have spent more time doing one thing than anything else:\n\nPulling weeds.\n\nStrange, given that most of us never do it anymore. We have no need, since we don't grow our own food. We live in an era when physical labor is broadly devalued: we hire other people to do our work _for_ us. Indeed, it may seem counterintuitive for Wes Jackson to recommend that we spend more time doing something as (literally) mundane as pulling weeds from vegetable beds. Isn't manual work what technology was invented to replace?\n\nBut for Jackson, persuading people to relearn the value of manual work is on a par with replacing 50 million acres of annual wheat with 50 million acres of perennial Kernza: it would be a paradigm shift, a game changer. Growing more of our own food would stitch us back to our land, reintroduce us to our physical bodies\u2014maybe even help repair decades of alienation from the most fundamental things in our lives.\n\n\"Nobody likes to walk the beans anymore,\" Jackson told me. \"Instead they use Roundup so\u2014what?\u2014they can go to the gym and jog on a treadmill? Walking the treadmill is okay, hoeing the beans is not? What we need is more eyes per acre.\"\n\nGetting \"more eyes per acre\" is precisely the goal of my Literature of the Land class. There is a whole lot more to learning than you can find in a book or in a classroom. Indeed, every small farmer I spoke to during the course of my research\u2014whether they supported GMOs or rejected them\u2014agreed that closing the gap between people and their food is very long overdue, both for our land and for ourselves.\n\n\"In our time, our consciousness has to keep evolving,\" Steffen Schneider, the farmer at Hawthorne Valley, told me. \"Unless we learn to work with this inner landscape, I think we will continue to have this huge gap. It's something that's bubbling up everywhere. People working on the land\u2014on the one hand, I know how difficult it is to do every single day, but I think if you work with living nature, there is tremendous inspiration to be gotten from reading and discovering natural phenomena. Once one starts looking at things that way, your work becomes very fruitful. It gives your work a whole different context and purpose.\n\n\"That's where we have to start. When I see this amazing enthusiasm to get back to the land\u2014there's this yearning that drives it. If you look at agriculture as a purely economic industry, then one of the primary parameters is efficiency. But this is clearly not complete thinking, because you are dealing with nature, with a living planet, and if you're trying to grow living food, with healthy qualities, it's different than making a shoe or a car. It's a qualitatively different environment. It would be therapeutic for both people and the land if more people did this sort of work.\"\n\nCertainly this has proved true for my students.\n\n\"I, as I imagine many of my peers did, found solace in the farm,\" a student named Kelsey wrote. \"This was where I found peace, where the only material goods I ever required were the occasional shovel or hoe. It was great to go home feeling sore because you had just spent the last two hours pulling weeds, leaving behind a clean bed ready for planting. It was here that I learned so practically the significance of food that you grow yourself. I learned the true meaning of patience and its reward. The joy of eating something picked just moments beforehand, planted perhaps weeks or months beforehand, is indescribable: only understood through experiencing it yourself.\"\n\nIn my class, the idea is not to turn students into farmers, though in recent years a surprising number of them have gone on to work on farms after they graduate. This was not happening five years ago. Now it is. The reason, as far as I can tell, is that students are hungry\u2014literally, hungry\u2014to know more about where their food comes from. They see their generation's relationship with food as emblematic of their engagement with the world generally. Eating microwaved chicken nuggets from the nearest fast-food joint seems considerably less appealing once you have spent dozens of hours tending an organic garden plot\u2014not to mention the friendships you may have developed with a flock of charismatic hens, who trail alongside you as you weed a bed of potatoes.\n\n\"Before this semester, I had never worked on a farm, just the occasional community garden or nature preserve,\" a student named Meghan wrote. \"Now, after these past fourteen weeks, it will feel bizarre to go even a week or two _without_ spending a few hours in that environment. For the first time, my understanding of environmental issues is not based only on articles I've read from newspapers and vague notions I have about sustainability, but also personal experience and several incredible works of literature.\n\n\"On a more interior level, my growth this semester can be harder to see. For me, it happened more slowly. But as I think about it, maybe it shows in the simple fact that feeding cows cabbage at eight-thirty a.m. was the highlight of my entire week, as was kneeling in a greenhouse pulling weeds, talking with Tanya, Rodger, and others about the philosophical things that always seem to come up when your hands are in the dirt.\"\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nConstructing a book about a topic as complex and diffuse as our industrial food system has required a great deal of assistance, and I am obliged to a long list of people for their help. During the course of my research, I spoke to dozens of scientists, farmers, activists, and philosophers, from Maryland to Kansas to Hawaii. I also dug deeply into the published work of scores of scientists and journalists who have wrestled with these questions for years, and whose work has shaped my own thinking a great deal.\n\nAt the University of Delaware, I have been blessed for twenty years with smart and imaginative students, who have helped me work through a long list of entangled environmental questions. This project owes a special debt to my students in the program in Environmental Humanities, and especially to my research assistants, Kerry Snyder, Tanya Krapf, and Molly Gartland.\n\nAlso at Delaware, Blake Meyers opened his plant science laboratory to me and offered far more patience and guidance than any writer deserves. He has since moved on to the Danforth Center in St. Louis, where he joins Jim Carrington, Nigel Taylor, and Paul Anderson, who generously shared their work and expertise with me. Karla Roeber graciously helped organize my visit to the Danforth Center.\n\nIn Maryland, thanks to farmers Drew Norman, Joan Norman, Nancy Bentley, Greg Strella, Jennie Schmidt, and Hans Schmidt; and to Sheila Kincaide, Larry Bohlen, and Alfred Sommer, professor emeritus and former dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. In Baltimore, my dear friend Arnob Banerjee, MD, PhD, offered his deep expertise on genetics.\n\nIn Pennsylvania, thanks to Brian Snyder, head of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, and to farmer and entrepreneur Steve Groff.\n\nIn Kansas, thanks to Wes Jackson, Tim Crews, Lee DeHaan, and Pheonah Nabukalu. Their work at The Land Institute remains a beacon of environmental integrity.\n\nIn Hawaii, thanks to Dennis Gonsalves, Alberto Belmes, Richard Manshardt, Paul Achitoff, Craig Malina, Gary Hooser, Elif Beall, Jeri DiPietro, Fern Rosenstiel, Klayton Kubo, Dustin Barca, Gerry Herbert, Nancy Redfeather, Margaret Wille, Alika Atay, Gerry Ross, Janet Simpson, and Autumn Ness.\n\nIn New York, thanks to Steffen Schneider, Conrad Vispo and Claudia Knab-Vispo, and Craig Holdrege, whose work at Hawthorne Valley Farm, the Farmscape Ecology Program, and the Nature Institute, respectively, serves as the very model of enlightened land stewardship.\n\nIn Chicago, thanks to Naseem Jamnia, who proved an astute and scrupulous copy editor.\n\nFor their help with my understanding of plant genetics and the history of industrial agriculture, I am indebted to a long list of scientists and science writers, whose personal counsel or published work has helped clarify my own. These include especially Evaggelos Vallianatos, John Fagan, John Vandermeer, Marion Nestle, Alfredo Huerta, Bruce Blumberg, David Pimentel, Philip Landrigan, David Mortensen, Steven Druker, Michael Pollan, Nathanael Johnson, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Carey Gillam, Tom Philpott, Peter Pringle, Pamela Ronald, Richard Manning, Marie-Monique Robin, and Michael Hansen.\n\nAt Avery, thanks to Caroline Sutton, Brittney Ross, Brianna Flaherty, and especially Brooke Carey for helping me envision and shape such an unwieldy project. Copy editor Jennifer Eck polished the manuscript's rough edges. And thanks, again and always, to my agent and old friend, Neil Olson.\n\nAt home, my deepest gratitude remains reserved for Katherine, Steedman, and Annalisa, who not only accompanied me on research trips to Hawaii and Kansas but also joined me for a 4,000-mile road trip across America's amber waves of grain. Their love, support, and goodwill sustain me every day. They are my life's greatest blessing.\n\n# NOTES\n\nPrologue\n\nTom Brokaw said the tomato: Michael Winerip, \"You Call That a Tomato?\" _New York Times,_ June 24, 2013, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/06\/24\/booming\/you-call-that-a-tomato.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1.\n\nGenetically modified wheat: Philip Jones, \"While Popularity Eludes GE Foods, AgBiotech Companies Shift Tactics,\" _Information Systems for Biotechnology_ (May 2014), http:\/\/www.isb.vt.edu\/news\/2014\/May\/Jones.pdf.\n\nIn fact, just one-half: Anne Weir Schechinger, \"Feeding the World: Think U.S. Agriculture Will End World Hunger? Think Again,\" Environmental Working Group, October 5, 2016, http:\/\/www.ewg.org\/research\/feeding-the-world.\n\nThis trend has given rise: \"Global Agrochemicals Industry 2014\u20132019: Trend, Profit and Forecast Analysis,\" _PR NewsWire_ (May 26, 2015), http:\/\/www.thestreet.com\/story\/12911088\/1\/global-agrochemical-industry-2014-2019-trends-profits-and-forecast-analysis.html; Marie-Monique Robin, _The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption and the Control of Our Food Supply_ (New York: The New Press, 2010), 5; \"Pesticides in Paradise: Hawaii's Health and Environment at Risk,\" Hawaii Center for Food Safety (May 2015), http:\/\/www.centerforfoodsafety.org\/files\/pesticidereportfull_86476.pdf.\n\nThe World Health Organization recently declared glyphosate: Lizzie Dearden, \"One of World's Most Used Weedkillers 'Possibly' Causes Cancer, World Health Organization Says,\" _Independent_ , June 23, 2015, http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/science\/one-of-worlds-most-used-weedkillers-possibly-causes-cancer-world-health-organisation-says-10338363.html.\n\nIn a nod to anxious mothers: Oliver Nieburg, \"Hershey's Milk Chocolate and Kisses to Go Non-GM,\" _Confectionary News_ , March 2, 2015, http:\/\/www.confectionerynews.com\/Ingredients\/Hershey-in-non-GMO-and-no-high-fructose-corn-syrup-pledge?utm_source=AddThis_twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=SocialMedia#.VPYk_vvu\u2014s.twitter.\n\nCheerios are made mostly of oats: \"Great-Granddaughter of General Mills Founder Urges Company to Stop Using GMOs,\" _Friends of the Earth_ , Oct. 1, 2014, http:\/\/www.foe.org\/news\/archives\/2014-10-great-granddaughter-of-general-mills-founder-urges-c. General Mills' position did not sit well with Harriet Crosby, an heir to the company fortune, who wrote to its board urging that the company stop using GMOs altogether. GMOs \"are only good for big biotech companies like Monsanto that sell both the genetically engineered seeds and the pesticides they are designed to tolerate,\" Crosby wrote. \"The promises of biotechnology are yet unrealized, especially the erroneous claim that they require fewer pesticides. Just the opposite is true. I believe that General Mills can become an even better, more profitable company by taking global leadership in producing healthy, wholesome, good food without GMOs.\"\n\nIn early 2015, thousands of Polish farmers: Sophie McAdam, \"Anti-GMO Protests Rock Poland as Farmers Demand Food Sovereignty Rights,\" True Activist, March 4, 2015, http:\/\/www.trueactivist.com\/anti-gmo-protests-rock-poland-as-farmers-demand-food-sovereignty-rights\/.\n\nChapter 1\n\nThese techniques are no more risky: B. S. Ahloowalia, M. Maluszynski, and K. Nichterlein, \"Global Impact of Mutation-Derived Varieties,\" _Euphytica_ 135, no. 2 (April 2014): 187\u2013204; Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak, _Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89.\n\nThere is truth on both sides of this debate: Tamar Haspel, \"Genetically Modified Foods: What Is and Isn't True,\" _Washington Post_ , October 15, 2013, https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/food\/genetically-modified-foods-what-is-and-isnt-true\/2013\/10\/15\/40e4fd58-3132-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story.html; Tamar Haspel, \"The GMO Debate: Five Things to Stop Arguing,\" _Washington Post_ , October 27, 2014, http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/food\/the-gmo-debate-5-things-to-stop-arguing\/2014\/10\/27\/e82bbc10-5a3e-11e4-b812-38518ae74c67_story.html. For more on Earth Open Source, see http:\/\/earthopensource.org. For more on \"GMO Answers,\" see http:\/\/GMOAnswers.com.\n\n\"The quest for greater certainty\": Nathanael Johnson, \"The Genetically Modified Food Debate: Where Do We Begin?\" _Grist_ , July 8, 2013, http:\/\/grist.org\/food\/the-genetically-modified-food-debate-where-do-we-begin\/.\n\n\"no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering\": National Research Council and Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, _Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods: Approaches to Assessing Unintended Health Effects_ (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004), http:\/\/www.nap.edu\/openbook.php?record_id=10977&page=8.\n\n\"Contrary to popular misconceptions\": American Academy for the Advancement of Science Board of Directors, \"AAAS: Labeling of Genetically Modified Foods,\" October 20, 2012, http:\/\/archives.aaas.org\/docs\/resolutions.php?doc_id=464.\n\n\"have passed risk assessments in several countries\": World Health Organization, \"WHO Answers Questions on Genetically Modified Food,\" http:\/\/www.who.int\/mediacentre\/news\/notes\/np5\/en\/.\n\n\"There is no more risk in eating GMO food\": Jeremy Fleming, scientific adviser to the European Commission, \"No Risk With GMO Food, Says EY Chief,\" EurActive.com, July 24, 2012, http:\/\/www.euractiv.com\/section\/science-policymaking\/news\/no-risk-with-gmo-food-says-eu-chief-scientific-advisor\/.\n\nA recent meta-analysis of studies: A. L. Van Eenennaam and A. E. Young, \"Prevalence and Impacts of Genetically Engineered Feedstuffs on Livestock Populations,\" _Journal of Animal Science_ 92, no. 10 (May 28, 2014).\n\n\"we all know what can happen\": John Vandermeer, \"Discovering Science,\" FoodFirst.org, January 8, 2013, http:\/\/www.gmwatch.org\/news\/archive\/2013\/14571-professor-john-vandermeer-challenges-lynas-on-gmos.\n\na short-term (thirty-one-day) study: Maria Walsh et al., \"Effects of Short-Term Feeding of Bt MON810 Maize on Growth Performance, Organ Morphology and Function in Pigs,\" _British Journal of Nutrition_ 107 (2012): 364\u2013371, http:\/\/journals.cambridge.org\/download.php?file=%2FBJN%2FBJN107_03%2FS0007114511003011a.pdf&code=c23ec46ee6bbe8ab3592b187924f0996.\n\nA two-year study of pigs: Judy Carman et al., \"A Long-Term Toxicology Study on Pigs Fed a Combined Genetically Modified (GM) Soy and GM Maize Diet,\" _Journal of Organic Systems_ 8, no. 1 (2013): 38\u201354, http:\/\/www.organic-systems.org\/journal\/81\/8106.pdf; Judy Carman, \"Evidence of GMO Harm in Pig Study,\" GMO Judy Carman, June 5, 2013, http:\/\/gmojudycarman.org\/new-study-shows-that-animals-are-seriously-harmed-by-gm-feed.\n\nHuerta's skepticism is well founded: See, for instance, Claire Hope Cummings, _Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds_ (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 41. See also Richard Lacey's testimony in Alliance for Bio-Integrity et al. v. Donna Shalala et al., U.S. District Court, Civil Action No. 98-1300 (CKK), May 28, 1998, http:\/\/www.saynotogmos.org\/scientists_speak.htm.\n\nresidues of the compound routinely show up in British bread: Arthur Neslen, \"EU Scientists in Row over Safety of Glyphosate Weedkiller,\" _Guardian_ , January 13, 2016, http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2016\/jan\/13\/eu-scientists-in-row-over-safety-of-glyphosate-weedkiller.\n\nA study by David Mortensen: Natasha Gilbert, \"Case Studies: A Hard Look at GMO Crops,\" _Nature_ 497, no. 7447 (May 1, 2013): 24\u201326, http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm-crops-1.12907.\n\na recent report by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment: \"The BfR Has Finalised Its Draft Report for the Re-evaluation of Glyphosate,\" Bundesinstitut f\u00fcr Risikobewertung, http:\/\/www.bfr.bund.de\/en\/the_bfr_has_finalised_its_draft_report_for_the_re_evaluation_of_glyphosate-188632.html.\n\nPresident George H. W. Bush appointed: Robin, _The World According to Monsanto_ , 187.\n\nDuring the Obama administration: Isabella Kenfield, \"Michael Taylor: Monsanto's Man in the Obama Administration,\" Organic Consumers Association, August 14, 2009, https:\/\/www.organicconsumers.org\/news\/michael-taylor-monsantos-man-obama-administration; Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, \"98 Organizations Oppose Obama's Monsanto Man, Islam Siddiqui, for US Agricultural Trade Representative,\" Organic Consumers Association, February 22, 2010, https:\/\/www.organicconsumers.org\/news\/98-organizations-oppose-obamas-monsanto-man-islam-siddiqui-us-agricultural-trade-representative.\n\n\"From the 1940s to the dawn\": E. G. Vallianatos with McKay Jenkins, _Poison Spring: The Secret_ _History of Pollution and the EPA_ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), ix.\n\nthe debate over the safety of farm chemicals: Dearden, \"One of World's Most Used Weedkillers 'Possibly' Causes Cancer.\"\n\nThe net result?: Wilhelm Klumper and Matin Qaim, \"A Meta-Analysis of the Impacts of Genetically Modified Crops,\" _PLoS ONE_ 9, no. 11 (November 2014): e111629, doi:10.1371\/journal.pone.0111629; Charles Benbrook, \"Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use in the US\u2014The First Sixteen Years,\" _Environmental Sciences Europe_ 24 (2012), doi:10.1186\/2190-4715-24-24.\n\n\"The majority of food\": David Pimentel, \"Environmental and Economic Costs of the Application of Pesticides Primarily in the United States,\" _Environment, Development and Sustainability_ (2005) 7:229\u2013252.\n\nof the six hundred pesticides now in use: Vallianatos with Jenkins, _Poison Spring_ , 29.\n\nAnd those numbers tabulate just: David Pimentel et al., \"Assessment of Environmental and Economic Impacts of Pesticide Use,\" in David Pimentel and Hugh Lehman, eds., _The Pesticide Question: Environment, Economics and Ethics_ (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1993), 51.\n\nSome scientists wonder: Anthony Samsel and Stephani Seneff, \"Glyphosate, Pathways to Modern Diseases II: Celiac Sprue and Gluten Intolerance,\" _Interdisciplinary Toxicology_ 6, no. 4 (December 2013): 159\u2013184, http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC3945755\/; Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, \"Glyphosate, Pathways to Modern Diseases III: Manganese, Neurological Diseases, and Associated Pathologies,\" _Surgical Neurology International_ 6 (March 24, 2015), http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC4392553\/.\n\nThis, then, is not a question: Nancy L. Swanson, Andr\u00e9 Leu, Jon Abrahamson, and Bradley Wallet, \"Genetically Engineered Crops, Glyphosate and the Deterioration of Health in the United States of America,\" _Journal of Organic Systems_ 9, no. 2 (2014), http:\/\/www.organic-systems.org\/journal\/92\/JOS_Volume-9_Number-2_Nov_2014-Swanson-et-al.pdf.\n\n\"It got to the point where some farmers\": Quoted in Gilbert, \"Case Studies: A Hard Look at GMO Crops,\" http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm-crops-1.12907.\n\nThe EPA's recent decision: Philip J. Landrigan and Charles Benbrook, \"GMOs, Herbicides, and Public Health,\" _New England Journal of Medicine_ 373 (August 20, 2015): 693\u2013695, doi: 10.1056\/NEJMp1505660 _._\n\nRelying on the seed and chemical companies: McKay Jenkins, \"Coming Soon: Major GMO Study (Shhh, It Will Be Done in Secret by Russians),\" _Huffington Post_ , December 18, 2014, http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/mckay-jenkins-phd\/coming-soon-major-gmo-stu_b_6344812.html.\n\nIn 1996, the German division: Diahanna Lynch and David Vogel, \"The Regulation of GMOs in Europe and the United States: A Case Study of Contemporary European Regulatory Politics,\" Council on Foreign Relations Press, April 5, 2001, http:\/\/www.cfr.org\/agricultural-policy\/regulation-gmos-europe-united-states-case-study-contemporary-european-regulatory-politics\/p8688.\n\n\"GMOs are dead\": Peter Pringle, _Food Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto\u2014The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 16.\n\nMore recently, nineteen members: \"Majority of EU Nations Seek Opt-Out from Growing GMO Crops,\" Reuters, October 4, 2015, http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2015\/10\/04\/eu-gmo-opt-out-idUSL6N0M01F620151004#qT5acaZpFMvUoIzp.97.\n\n\"The GMO issue is something\": Stephanie Strom, \"FDA Takes Issue with the Term 'Non-GMO,'\" _New York Times_ , November 21, 2015, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/11\/21\/business\/fda-takes-issue-with-the-term-non-gmo.html.\n\nCompanies have responded aggressively: Eric Lipton, \"Food Industry Enlisted Academics in GMO Lobbying War, Emails Show,\" _New York Times_ , September 5, 2015, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/09\/06\/us\/food-industry-enlisted-academics-in-gmo-lobbying-war-emails-show.html?_r=0; Jacob Bunge, \"Monsanto CEO: 'We Need to Do More,'\" _Wall Street Journal_ , January 28, 2014, http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/corporate-intelligence\/2014\/01\/28\/monsanto-ceo-we-need-to-do-more-to-win-gmo-debate\/.\n\nThe story repeated itself: Molly Ball, \"Want to Know If Your Food Is Genetically Modified?\" _Atlantic_ , May 14, 2014, http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2014\/05\/want-to-know-if-your-food-is-genetically-modified\/370812\/.\n\nAlmost 90 percent of scientists: Cary Funk and Lee Rainie, \"Public and Scientists' Views on Science and Society,\" Pew Research Center, January 29, 2015, http:\/\/www.pewinternet.org\/2015\/01\/29\/public-and-scientists-views-on-science-and-society\/.\n\nrecent Nielsen study . . . \"There's no doubt that the industry\": Stephanie Strom, \"Many GMO-Free Labels, Little Clarity over Rules,\" _New York Times_ , January 30, 2015, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/01\/31\/business\/gmo-labels-for-food-are-in-high-demand-but-provide-little-certainty.html.\n\n\"The sad truth is many\": \"GMOs and Your Family,\" Non-GMO Project, http:\/\/www.nongmoproject.org\/learn-more\/gmos-and-your-family\/.\n\nThe Non-GMO Project: Strom, \"FDA Takes Issue with the Term 'Non-GMO.'\"\n\nPro-labeling groups: Ronni Cummins, \"'QR' Barcodes: The Latest Plot to Keep You in the Dark About GMOs,\" Organic Consumers Association, October 28, 2015, https:\/\/www.organicconsumers.org\/essays\/%E2%80%98qr%E2%80%99-barcodes-latest-plot-keep-you-dark-about-gmos; Andrew Kimbrell, \"Obama's GMO Embarrassment: Why the New Labeling Bill Just Signed Into Law Is a Sham,\" _Salon_ , August 7, 2016, http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2016\/08\/07\/obamas-gmo-embarrassment-why-the-new-labeling-bill-just-signed-into-law-is-a-sham_partner\/.\n\nAs with the regulation: \"Big Food's 'DARK Act' Introduced in Congress,\" Environmental Working Group, April 9, 2014, http:\/\/www.ewg.org\/release\/big-food-s-dark-act-introduced-congress.\n\nOpponents of the measure: Ibid.\n\nthe law accomplished most of what Big Food desired: Kimbrell, \"Obama's GMO Embarrassment.\" See also Ramona Bashshur, \"FDA and Regulations of GMOs,\" _American Bar Association Health eSource_ 9, no. 6, February 2013.\n\nChapter 2\n\nIn the 1950s alone, some 10 million people: Adam Rome, _The Bulldozer in the Countryside_ (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 123; McKay Jenkins, \"The Era of Suburban Sprawl Has to End. So, Now What?\" _Urbanite_ , May 30, 2012; \"How Long Is the Interstate System?\" Federal Highway Administration, https:\/\/www.fhwa.dot.gov\/interstate\/faq.cfm#question3.\n\nThese new foods were cheap: Eric Schlosser, _Fast Food Nation_ (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 3; Katherine Muniz, \"20 Ways Americans Are Blowing Their Money,\" _USA Today_ , March 24, 2014, http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/money\/personalfinance\/2014\/03\/24\/20-ways-we-blow-our-money\/6826633\/.\n\nAs industrial farms continued to grow: \"Report: Number of Animals Killed in US Increases in 2010,\" Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM), http:\/\/farmusa.org\/statistics11.html.\n\nAs farms consolidated and grew: Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, _Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity_ (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 81.\n\nOver the course of the twentieth century: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, \"Field Crops,\" http:\/\/www.nass.usda.gov\/Charts_and_Maps\/Field_Crops\/.\n\nWallace was right: Jack Kloppenberg, _First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492\u20132000_ (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 283, cited by Max John Pfeiffer, \"The Labor Process and Capitalist Development of Agriculture,\" _Rural Sociologist_ 2, no. 2 (1982): 72\u201380.\n\nSuddenly, farmers (and their crops): Michael Pollan, _The Omnivore's Dilemma:_ _A Natural History of Four Meals_ (New York: Penguin, 2006), 45.\n\nA similar pattern emerged . . . Today, the six top: \"The World's Top 10 Pesticide Firms\u2014Who Owns Nature?\" Organic Consumers Association, November 1, 2008, https:\/\/www.organicconsumers.org\/news\/worlds-top-10-pesticide-firms-who-owns-nature.\n\nThis transition, from wartime chemicals: Pollan, _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ , 43; Jill Richardson, \"How Monsanto Went from Selling Aspirin to Controlling Our Food Supply,\" _TruthOut_ , April 21, 2013, http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/15856-how-monsanto-went-from-selling-aspirin-to-controlling-our-food-supply.\n\nTrue, it cranked up: Balu Bumb and Carlos Baanante, \"World Trends in Fertilizer Use and Projections to 2020,\" International Food Policy Research Institute, 2020 Brief 38, October 1996, http:\/\/ageconsearch.umn.edu\/bitstream\/16353\/1\/br38.pdf; Smil quoted in Carl Jordan, _An Ecosystem Approach to Sustainable Agriculture_ (New York: Springer, 2013), 51.\n\nSimilar changes were under way: Steven Lipin, Scott Kilman, and Susan Warren, \"DuPont Agrees to Purchase of Seed Firm for $7.7 Billion,\" _Wall Street Journal_ , March 15, 1999, http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB921268716949898331.\n\nMonsanto rejected the bid: Jacob Bunge, \"Monsanto Rejects Bayer Merger Offer, Says It's Open to Talks,\" _Wall Street Journal_ , May 25, 2016, http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/monsanto-rejects-bayer-merger-offer-says-its-open-to-talks-1464110057.\n\n\"This is an important moment in human history\": Quoted in Peter Pringle, _Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto\u2014The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 116.\n\nDNA was known to be: Ania Wieczorek and Mark Wright, \"History of Agricultural Biotechnology: How Crop Development has Evolved,\" _Nature, Education Knowledge_ 3, no. 3 (2012): 9\u201315.\n\nIn the late 1980s: Joe Entine and XioaZhi Lim, \"Cheese: The GMO Food Die-Hard GMO Opponents Love (and Oppose a Label For),\" GMO Literacy Project, May 15, 2015, http:\/\/www.geneticliteracyproject.org\/2015\/05\/15\/cheese-gmo-food-die-hard-gmo-opponents-love-and-oppose-a-label-for\/.\n\nMonsanto's most important push: Robin, _The World According to Monsanto,_ 138\u2013142.\n\n\"It was like the Manhattan Project\": Daniel Charles, _Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food_ (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2002), 67.\n\nIt took four years: Robin, _The World According to Monsanto_ , 139.\n\nAmericans have become very comfortable: Alyssa Battistoni, \"Americans Spend Less on Food Than Any Other Country,\" _Mother Jones_ , February 1, 2012, http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/blue-marble\/2012\/01\/america-food-spending-less.\n\nBecause this system has become: Luke Anderson, _Genetic Engineering_ , _Food and Our Environment_ (New York: Chelsea Green, 1999), 70; Stefan Lovgren, \"One-Fifth of Human Genes Have Been Patented, Study Reveals,\" _National Geographic News_ , October 13, 2005, http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/news\/2005\/10\/1013_051013_gene_patent.html; Matthew Albright, \"The End of the Revolution,\" Council for Responsible Genetics, 2002, http:\/\/www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org\/ViewPage.aspx?pageId=168.\n\nIt is also evident: \"U.S. Regulation of Genetically Modified Crops,\" _Case Studies in Agricultural Biosecurity_ , Federation of American Scientists, http:\/\/fas.org\/biosecurity\/education\/dualuse-agriculture\/2.-agricultural-biotechnology\/us-regulation-of-genetically-engineered-crops.html.\n\nBut in reality: Doug Gurian-Sherman, \"Holes in the Biotech Safety Net: FDA Policy Does Not Assure the Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods,\" Center for Science in the Public Interest, http:\/\/www.cspinet.org\/new\/pdf\/fda_report__final.pdf.\n\nU.S. policy \"tends to minimize\": Emily Marden, \"Risk and Regulation: U.S. Regulatory Policy on Genetically Modified Food and Agriculture,\" _Boston College Law Review_ 44, no. 3 (May 2003), https:\/\/www.bc.edu\/content\/dam\/files\/schools\/law\/lawreviews\/journals\/bclawr\/44_3\/02_TXT.htm. Marden gives an excellent summary of FDA, USDA, and EPA regulatory history.\n\n\"Our concern for the possible\": Paul Berg, \"Potential Biohazards of Recombinant DNA Molecules,\" _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ 71, no. 7 (July 1974): 2593\u20132594.\n\nAfter Berg's letter was published: Marcia Barinaga, \"Asilomar Revisited: Lessons for Today,\" _Science_ 28, no. 5458 (March 2000): 1584.\n\nJames Watson, one of the discoverers: James Watson and John Tooze, _The DNA Story: A Documentary History of Gene Cloning_ (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1981), 49.\n\nWatson had nothing but contempt: Quoted in Diane B. Dutton, _Worse Than the Disease: Pitfalls of Medical Progress_ (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 195, 327.\n\n\"In the 1970s, we were all trying\": Quoted in Steven Druker, _Altered Genes, Twisted Truth_ (Salt Lake City: Clear River Press, 2015), 37.\n\n\"As genetic engineering became\": Susan Wright, _Molecular Politics: Developing American and British Regulatory Policy for Genetic Engineering, 1972\u20131982_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 107.\n\nIf nothing else: Schlosser, _Fast Food Nation_ , 206.\n\n\"The unintended effects cannot\": Quoted in Druker, _Altered Genes, Twisted Truth_ , 135.\n\nThe director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine: Ibid., 133\u2013135.\n\n\"This technology is being promoted\": Suzanne Wuerthele, quoted in Jeffrey Smith, \"An FDA-Created Health Crisis Circles the Globe,\" quoted ibid., 186.\n\n\"it was clearer than ever that the careers\": Quoted in Druker, _Altered Genes and Twisted Truth_ , 132.\n\nDespite this backbeat: Memorandum from David Kessler to the Secretary for Health and Human Services, March 20, 1992, quoted in Robin, _The World of Monsanto_ , 259. For more on the effectiveness of federal oversight on GMOs, see William Freese and David Schubert, \"Safety Testing and Regulation of Genetically Engineered Foods,\" _Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Reviews_ 21 (November 2004), http:\/\/www.centerforfoodsafety.org\/files\/freese_safetytestingandregulationofgeneticallyebgineeredfoods_nov212004_62269.pdf.\n\nThe FDA policy made it official: \"Statement of Policy: Foods Derived from New Plant Varieties,\" Federal Register 57, no. 104, sec. VI (May 29, 1992): 22991.\n\nGenetic manipulation was no different: Kessler's comments are from Warren Leary, \"Cornucopia of New Foods Is Seen As Policy on Engineering Is Eased,\" _New York Times_ , May 27, 1992, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1992\/05\/27\/us\/cornucopia-of-new-foods-is-seen-as-policy-on-engineering-is-eased.html.\n\nThe victory of agribusiness: Kurt Eichenwald, Gina Kolata, and Melody Petersen \"Biotechnology Food: From the Lab to a Debacle,\" _New York Times_ , January 25, 2001, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2001\/01\/25\/business\/25FOOD.html.\n\nSuch policy \"will speed up\": Quoted ibid.\n\n\"What Monsanto wanted (and demanded)\": Druker, _Altered Genes, Twisted Truth_ , 138.\n\nIn 2002, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences: National Research Council, \"Environmental Effects of Transgenic Plants: The Scope and Adequacy of Regulation,\" National Academies Press, 2002, http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/books\/NBK207495\/. For more on the effectiveness of federal oversight on GMOs, see Freese and Schubert, \"Safety Testing and Regulation of Genetically Engineered Foods.\"\n\nThe agency's own policy states: Freese and Schubert, \"Safety Testing and Regulation of Genetically Engineered Foods.\" And take, for example, the letter the FDA sent to Monsanto about a strain of GMO corn the company hoped to take to market: \"Based on the safety and nutritional assessment you have conducted, it is our understanding that Monsanto has concluded that corn products derived from this new variety are not materially different in composition, safety, and other relevant parameters from corn currently on the market, and that the genetically modified corn does not raise issues that would require premarket review or approval by FDA,\" the FDA's letter said. \"As you are aware, it is Monsanto's responsibility to ensure that foods marketed by the firm are safe, wholesome and in compliance with all applicable legal and regulatory requirements.\"\n\nCompanies are not always forthcoming: Nathanael Johnson, \"The GM Safety Dance: What's Rule and What's Real,\" _Grist_ , July 10, 2013, http:\/\/grist.org\/food\/the-gm-safety-dance-whats-rule-and-whats-real\/.\n\nFor four decades, the American legal system: E. Freeman, \"Seed Police? Part 4,\" Monsanto.com (November 10, 2008), http:\/\/www.monsanto.com\/newsviews\/Pages\/Seed-Police-Part-4.aspx; E. Freeman, \"Farmers Reporting Farmers, Part 2,\" Monsanto.com (October 10, 2008), http:\/\/www.monsanto.com\/newsviews\/Pages\/Farmers-Reporting-Farmers-Part-2.aspx; Jessica Lynd, \"Gone with the Wind: Why Even Utility Patents Cannot Fence in Self-Replicating Technologies,\" _American University Law Review_ 62, no. 3 (2013): 681\u2013682; \"Why Does Monsanto Sue Farmers Who Save Seeds?\" Monsanto.com, http:\/\/www.monsanto.com\/newsviews\/pages\/why-does-monsanto-sue-farmers-who-save-seeds.aspx.\n\n\"The truth is Percy Schmeiser\": \"Percy Schmeiser,\" a case summary, Monsanto.com, http:\/\/www.monsanto.com\/newsviews\/pages\/percy-schmeiser.aspx.\n\nThis is in direct contrast: \"In-Depth: Genetic Modification: Percy Schmeiser's Battle,\" _CBC News_ , May 21, 2004; Phil Bereano and Martin Phillipson, \"Goliath vs. Schmeiser: Canadian Court Decision May Leave Multinationals Vulnerable,\" _GeneWatch_ 17, no. 4 (July\u2013August 2004); Roger McEowen and Neil Harl, \"Key Supreme Court Ruling on Plant Patents,\" _Ag Decision Maker Newsletter_ , March 2002, https:\/\/www.extension.iastate.edu\/agdm\/articles\/harl\/HarlMar02.htm.\n\nIt's not just that such company-directed: John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto, \"The AgroEcosystem: A Need for the Conservation Biologist's Lens,\" _Conservation Biology_ 11, no. 3 (June 1997).\n\nWithout broader research: \"Fields of Gold: Research on Transgenic Crops Must Be Done Outside Industry If It Is to Fulfill Its Early Promise,\" _Nature_ 497, no. 7447 (May 1, 2013). \"How FDA Regulates Food from Genetically Engineered Plants,\" U.S. Food and Drug Administration, http:\/\/www.fda.gov\/Food\/FoodScienceResearch\/GEPlants\/ucm461831.htm.\n\nChapter 3\n\nComplete sequences (the \"chapters\"): \"DNA, Genes, and Chromosomes,\" University of Leicester, http:\/\/www2.le.ac.uk\/departments\/genetics\/vgec\/highereducation\/topics\/dnageneschromosomes.\n\nAll together, an organism's chromosomal chapters: \"Learn.Genetics,\" Genetic Science Learning Center, University of Utah, http:\/\/learn.genetics.utah.edu. This website offers a useful interactive graphic showing everything from the size of nucleotides and other cellular material to the mechanics of epigenetics.\n\nA five-year project called ENCODE: Francie Diep, \"Friction over Function: Scientists Clash on the Meaning of ENCODE's Genetic Data,\" _Scientific American_ (April 2013), http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/friction-over-function-encode\/; Claire Robinson, Michael Antoniou, and John Fagan, _GMO Myths and Truths_ , 3rd ed. (London: Earth Open Source, 2015): 21\u201322.\n\nThe answer lies in the way genes are expressed: Eric Simon, Jean Dickey, and Jane Reece, _Essential Biology_ (Boston: Pearson, 2013). I have taken much of the description of gene transcription and translation from this excellent text.\n\nOnce the transcript of the RNA: Siwaret Arikit et al., \"An Atlas of Soybean Small RNAs Identifies Phased siRNAs from Hundreds of Coding Genes,\" _Plant Cell_ 26, no. 12 (December 2014): 4584\u20134601, http:\/\/www.plantcell.org\/content\/early\/2014\/12\/02 \/tpc.114.131847.abstract.\n\nSome research suggests that even mental health: Ronald and Adamchak, _Tomorrow's Table_ , 159.\n\nExploring these complexities: Adam Thomas, \"Maize Genomics,\" University of Delaware's _UDaily_ , March 2, 2015, http:\/\/www.udel.edu\/udaily\/2015\/mar\/maize-reproduction-030215.html.\n\nFagan is a molecular biologist: Brandon Copple, \"Scientist, Activist, Yogi?\" _Forbes_ , October 30, 2000, http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/forbes\/2000\/1030\/6612054b.html.\n\nHow you feel about GMOs: Joel Achenbach, \"Why Do So Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?\" _National Geographic_ , March 2015, http:\/\/ngm.nationalgeographic.com\/2015\/03\/science-doubters\/achenbach-text.\n\nThe study, by Gilles-\u00c9ric S\u00e9ralini: Gilles-\u00c9ric S\u00e9ralini et al.,\"Long Term Toxicity of a Roundup Herbicide and a Roundup-Tolerant Genetically Modified Maize,\" _Food and Chemical Toxicology_ 50, no. 11 (November 2012): 4221\u20134231, http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0278691512005637 (where it is now labeled \"Retracted\"); Druker, _Altered Genes, Twisted Truths_ , 302.\n\nJean-Marc Ayrault, France's prime minister: Andrew Pollack, \"Paper Tying Rat Cancer to Herbicide Is Retracted,\" _New York Times_ , November 28, 2013, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/11\/29\/health\/paper-tying-rat-cancer-to-herbicide-is-retracted.html; \"Smelling a Rat,\" _Economist_ , December 7, 2013.\n\nAlmost instantly, the journal was deluged: Jon Entine, \"S\u00e9ralini Threatens Lawsuit in Wake of Retraction of Infamous GMO Cancer Rat Study,\" _Forbes_ , November 29, 2013, http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/jonentine\/2013\/11\/29\/notorious-seralini-gmo-cancer-rat-study-retracted-ugly-legal-battle-looms\/; Kate Kelland, \"Journal Withdraws Controversial French Monsanto GMO Study,\" Reuters, November 29, 2013, http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/science-gm-retraction-idUSL2N0JE0FM20131129; \"GMO Study Retracted: Censorship of Caution?\" _Living on Earth_ , December 6, 2013, http:\/\/loe.org\/shows\/segments.html?programID=13-P13-00049&segmentID=2. See also letters to the editor posted at http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0278691512005637.\n\nA more in-depth look: \"Elsevier Announces Article Retraction from Journal _Food and Chemical Toxicology_ ,\" Elsevier.com, November 28, 2013, http:\/\/www.elsevier.com\/about\/press-releases\/research-and-journals\/elsevier-announces-article-retraction-from-journal-food-and-chemical-toxicology#sthash.KgeQj4lq.dpuf.\n\nMore than a hundred scientists . . . \"The retraction is erasing\": \"Scientists Pledge to Boycott Elsevier,\" _Ecologist_ , December 5, 2013, http:\/\/www.theecologist.org\/blogs_and_comments\/commentators\/2187010\/scientists_pledge_to_boycott_elsevier.html.\n\nThe decision was based \"not on the grounds\": Brian John, \"Letter to the Editor,\" _Food and Chemical Toxicology_ 65 (March 2014): 391, http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0278691514000040.\n\nGoodman's \"fast-tracked appointment\": Claire Robinson and Jonathan Latham, \"The Goodman Affair: Monsanto Targets the Heart of Science,\" _Independent Science News_ , May 20, 2013, https:\/\/www.independentsciencenews.org\/science-media\/the-goodman-affair-monsanto-targets-the-heart-of-science\/.\n\nBrian John offered a sharp answer: John, \"Letter to the Editor,\" _Food and Chemical Toxicology_.\n\n\"When those with a vested interest\": \"Seralini [ _sic_ ] and Science: An Open Letter,\" _Independent Science News_ , October 2, 2012, http:\/\/www.independentsciencenews.org\/health\/seralini-and-science-nk603-rat-study-roundup\/.\n\nThe issues raised by the S\u00e9ralini study: Jenkins, \"Coming Soon: Major GMO Study (Shhh, It Will Be Done in Secret by Russians).\"\n\nBlumberg's own work: \"Chemicals That Promote Obesity down the Generations,\" _Living on Earth_ , January 18, 2013, http:\/\/loe.org\/shows\/segments.html?programID=13-P13-00003&segmentID=1.\n\nLooking over one of Blumberg's: Author interview with Bruce Blumberg.\n\nChapter 4\n\nBy the early 1990s, ringspot: Dennis Gonsalves, \"Transgenic Papaya in Hawaii and Beyond,\" _AgBioForum_ 7, nos. 1 & 2 (2004): 36\u201340, http:\/\/www.agbioforum.org\/v7n12\/v7n12a07-gonsalves.pdf.\n\nThe mid-1980s was an exciting time: Harold Schmeck, \"Plants 'Vaccinated' Against Virus,\" _New York Times_ , May 6, 1986, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1986\/05\/06\/science\/plants-vaccinated-against-virus.html. Eventually, such work on virus resistance would lead to the discovery of \"RNA silencing,\" one of biology's major advances in the past two decades. Silencing RNA has been used to develop a treatment for macular degeneration and is considered a promising field for science leading to therapies for both plants and animals. The technique won a Nobel Prize for Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello in 2006.\n\nFollowing Beachy's lead: Ronald and Adamchak, _Tomorrow's Table_ , 159. For more on how silencing RNAs work.\n\n\"It is rather rare that a potential solution\": Gonsalves, \"Transgenic Papaya in Hawaii and Beyond,\" 37.\n\nOne year later: Jennifer Mo, \"The Man Behind the Rainbow,\" _Biofortified_ , June 21, 2012, http:\/\/www.biofortified.org\/2012\/06\/rainbow\/.\n\n\"a tireless innovator\" . . . \"is a model\": Quoted in Paul Voosen, \"Crop Savior Blazes Biotech Trail, but Few Scientists or Companies Are Willing to Follow,\" _New York Times_ , September 21, 2011, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/gwire\/2011\/09\/21\/21greenwire-crop-savior-blazes-biotech-trail-but-few-scien-88379.html?pagewanted=all.\n\nAs evidence of GMO contamination: Steven Layne, \"Thailand's GMO Experiment, Part 2,\" _Phuket News_ , June 10, 2014, http:\/\/www.thephuketnews.com\/thailand-gmo-experiment-part-2-46788.php.\n\nThere have also been problems: Melanie Bondera, \"Papaya and Coffee: GMO 'Solutions' Spell Market Disaster,\" in Hawaii SEED, _Facing Hawai'i's Future: Essential Information About GMOs_ , 2nd ed. (Koloa, Hawaii: Hawaii SEED, 2012), 48\u201350.\n\nThere are signs that Gonsalves's message: Voosen, \"Crop Savior Blazes Biotech Trail.\"\n\nChapter 5\n\nBecause the fields themselves: Pesticide Action Network, \"Television Show and Body Testing Confirm Children's Exposure to Neurotoxic Pesticide,\" February 4, 2016, http:\/\/www.panna.org\/press-release\/television-show-and-body-testing-confirm-children%E2%80%99s-exposure-neurotoxic-pesticide; Anita Hofschneider, \"Syngenta Workers Seek Medical Aid After Pesticide Use on Kauai,\" _Honolulu_ _Civil Beat_ , January 22, 2016, http:\/\/www.civilbeat.com\/2016\/01\/syngenta-workers-seek-medical-aid-after-pesticide-use-on-kauai\/.\n\nLand use on Kauai: Hank Soboleski, \"Pablo Manlapit and the Hanapepe Massacre,\" _Garden Island_ , September 10, 2006, http:\/\/thegardenisland.com\/news\/pablo-manlapit-and-the-hanapepe-massacre\/article_57bc7ca1-a576-5c2f-8ad9-1a7641eb4c21.html.\n\nThe \"experiments\" taking place: \"Pesticides in Paradise,\" Hawaii Center for Food Safety.\n\nKauai's sole pesticide inspector: Paul Koberstein, \"GMO Companies Are Dousing Hawaiian Island with Toxic Pesticides,\" _Grist_ , June 16, 2014, http:\/\/grist.org\/business-technology\/gmo-companies-are-dousing-hawaiian-island-with-toxic-pesticides\/; Sophie Cocke, \"Frustrated by State's Inactivity, Kauai County Takes Pesticide Fight Into Its Own Hands,\" _Huffington Post_ , October 8, 2013, http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2013\/10\/08\/kauai-county-gmo-fight_n_4064787.html.\n\nThe disclosure records \"are believed to contain\": Letter from Thomas Matsuda to Gary Hooser, July 22, 2014.\n\nA Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) log: State of Hawaii Department of Agriculture Inspection Log, Kauai, 2011\u20132012.\n\nState records show: Restricted Use Pesticides Sold on Kauai, 2010\u20132012, Hawaii Department of Agriculture.\n\nOther records show: \"Pesticide Use by Large Agribusiness on Kauai: Findings and Recommendations of the Joint Fact Finding Study Group,\" March 2016, http:\/\/www.accord3.com\/docs\/GM-Pesticides\/draft-report\/JFF%20Full%20Report%20-%20DRAFT.pdf.\n\nA study published in March 2014: Philippe Grandjean and Philip Landrigan, \"Neurobehavioural Effects of Developmental Toxicity,\" _Lancet_ 13, no. 3 (March 2014): 330\u2013338, http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/laneur\/article\/PIIS1474-4422(13)70278-3\/abstract.\n\nRecent hair sample testing: Pesticide Action Network, \"Television Show and Body Testing Confirm Children's Exposure to Neurotoxic Pesticide.\"\n\nBut it wasn't just chlorpyrifos: Ibid.\n\nAlso in the cocktail: permethrin . . . chlorpyrifos: See \"The Food We Eat: An International Comparison of Pesticide Regulations,\" David Suzuki Foundation, October 2006, http:\/\/www.davidsuzuki.org\/publications\/downloads\/2006\/DSF-HEHC-Food1.pdf.\n\n\"even more acutely toxic\": E. G. Vallianatos with McKay Jenkins, _Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA_ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 39.\n\nAnother ingredient in the cocktail: Rachel Aviv, \"A Valuable Reputation,\" _New Yorker_ , February 10, 2014, http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2014\/02\/10\/a-valuable-reputation.\n\n\"had their heads in their hands\": Amanda Gregg, \"'Stink Weed' Sends Some Home from Waimean School,\" _Garden Island_ , November 15, 2006, http:\/\/thegardenisland.com\/news\/stink-weed-sends-some-home-from-waimea-school\/article_5a66ba3d-2194-53dc-8bda-807e794625ae.html.\n\nThough it is eaten: Ibid.; Adam Harju, \"Odor Investigation Ongoing,\" _Garden Island_ , November 18, 2006, http:\/\/thegardenisland.com\/news\/odor-investigation-ongoing\/article_650db9f3-06a5-5960-8f47-97a433eac349.html; Amanda Gregg, \"Report Reveals Discrepancies in Spraying Incident,\" _Garden Island_ , March 12, 2007, http:\/\/thegardenisland.com\/news\/report-reveals-discrepancies-in-spraying-incident\/article_046c3b40-4ecb-54f6-a1b9-e90d3c032153.html.\n\nCompany claims about stinkweed: \"Pesticides in Paradise,\" Hawaii Center for Food Safety.\n\nThere was no questioning . . . There was no evidence: Memo from J. Milton Clark to Peter Adler, chairman of Task Force on Kauai Pesticides and GMO, May 19, 2015, included in \"Pesticides Use by Large Agribusinesses on Kauai.\" See http:\/\/www.accord3.com\/docs\/GM-Pesticides\/report\/JFF%20Report%20Errata.pdf.\n\nWhat the island needed: Paul Achitoff, \"GMOs in Kauai: Not Just Another Day in Paradise,\" _Huffington Post_ , March 5, 2014, http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/paul-achitoff\/gmos-in-kauai-not-just-an_b_4899491.html; \"AAP Makes Recommendations to Reduce Children's Exposure to Pesticides,\" American Academy of Pediatrics, November 26, 2012, https:\/\/www.aap.org\/en-us\/about-the-aap\/aap-press-room\/pages\/AAP-Makes-Recommendations-to-Reduce-Children's-Exposure-to-Pesticides.aspx.\n\n\"many qualitative examples\" . . . \"We all share a deep concern\": \"Doctors and Nurses Implore Mayor: Sign Bill 2491 into Law Now!\" Stop Poisoning Paradise, http:\/\/www.stoppoisoningparadise.org\/#!doctors-and-nurses-letters-to-mayor\/cs1m. Sample letters from doctors and nurses to Kauai County Council, delivered October 20, 2013.\n\nThe doctors' worries reflected: \"August 5, 2013 Kauai County Council Dr Evslin Kauai Pediatrician,\" YouTube video, 7:11, posted by \"Mom's Hui Kaua'i,\" August 10, 2013, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8g6D8xAz6fA.\n\nMargie Maupin, a nurse practitioner: \"Margie Maupin Nurse Practitioner in Support Bill 2491,\" YouTube video, 6:09, posted by \"Occupy Hawaii,\" November 16, 2013, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=FrqHU8Y-QCo.\n\nIn 2011, more than a hundred of Klayton Kubo's neighbors filed a lawsuit: For information on the trial and its issues, see Vanessa Van Voorhis, \"Waimea Residents Sue Pioneer,\" _Garden Island_ , December 13, 2011, http:\/\/thegardenisland.com\/mobile\/article_82ff2c3e-2632-11e1-9ca7-001871e3ce6c.html; Tom LaVenture, \"Waimea Residents Suing Pioneer Hi-Bred,\" _Garden Island_ , June 14, 2012, http:\/\/thegardenisland.com\/news\/local\/waimea-residents-suing-pioneer-hi-bred\/article_607adf66-b5ff-11e1-a19b-001a4bcf887a.html; Sophie Cocke, \"Does Hawaii's Failure to Enforce Pesticide Use Justify Action by Kauai?\" _Honolulu Civil Beat_ , October 8, 2013, http:\/\/www.civilbeat.com\/2013\/10\/20066-does-hawaiis-failure-to-enforce-pesticide-use-justify-kauais-action\/; Associated Press, \"Jury Awards Kauai Residents over $500K in Dust Lawsuit,\" _Maui News_ , May 10, 2015, http:\/\/www.mauinews.com\/page\/content.detail\/id\/597884\/Jury-awards-Kauai-residents-over\u2014500K-in-dust-lawsuit.html?nav=5031. A year later, residents filed a second suit, claiming Pioneer consistently failed to control the erosion and pesticide-laden dust from its GMO test fields.\n\nJervis reminded the court: Koberstein, \"GMO Companies Are Dousing Hawaiian Island with Toxic Pesticides.\" A 1,500-page report from the state Department of Agriculture concluded that although Syngenta did apply pesticides near the school, it did so correctly, and ruled out the chemical Hi-Tech as the culprit.\n\n\"Kaua'i produces more GMO seeds than anyplace\": Vanessa Van Voorhis, \"Large-Scale Die-off of Sea Urchins Discovered off Kaumakani,\" _Garden Island_ , February 23, 2012, http:\/\/thegardenisland.com\/news\/local\/large-scale-die-off-of-sea-urchins-discovered-off-kaumakani\/article_16081484-5a1b-11e1-bca7-0019bb2963f4.html.\n\nThat same winter . . . Vandana Shiva: Jon Letman, \"Opposition Crops Up to GMO Foods in Hawaii,\" Al Jazeera, February 16, 2013, http:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/indepth\/features\/2013\/02\/20132514512529904.html.\n\nIndustry executives claimed: Cocke, \"Frustrated by State's Inactivity, Kauai County Takes Pesticide Fight into Its Own Hands.\"\n\nCompanies dismissed complaints: Letman, \"Opposition Crops Up to GMO Foods in Hawaii.\"\n\nDuring the hearings on the bill: Kristine Uyeno, \"GMO Public Hearing on Kauai Draws Hundreds,\" KHON-TV, July 31, 2013, http:\/\/khon2.com\/2013\/07\/31\/gmo-public-hearing-on-kauai-draws-hundreds\/.\n\nYet within weeks: Carey Gillam, \"Anti-GMO Crop, Pesticide Ballot Initiative Launched in Hawaii,\" Reuters, February 24, 2014, http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2014\/02\/25\/usa-gmos-hawaii-idUSL1N0LU0A220140225.\n\nAn attorney representing: Nestor Garcia, \"Federal Judge Declares New Kauai GMO, Pesticide Law Invalid,\" KHON-TV, August 25, 2014, http:\/\/khon2.com\/2014\/08\/25\/federal-judge-declares-new-kauai-gmo-pesticide-law-invalid\/.\n\n\"The big question\": Keoki Kerr, \"State, Kauai Set Up Panel to Study GMO Pesticide Impacts,\" _Hawaii News Now_ , December 3, 2014, http:\/\/www.hawaiinewsnow.com\/story\/27532992\/state-kauai-set-up-panel-to-study-gmo-pesticide-impacts.\n\nFor local residents: Associated Press, \"Jury Awards Kauai Residents over $500K in Dust Lawsuit.\"\n\nTen days after the verdict: Anita Hofschneider, \"DuPont Pioneer Shuts Down One Kauai Facility,\" _Honolulu_ _Civil Beat_ , May 20, 2015, http:\/\/www.civilbeat.com\/2015\/05\/dupont-pioneer-shuts-down-one-kauai-facility\/.\n\n\"Syngenta did not want me there\": Gary Hooser, \"From Kauai to Switzerland\u2014Why We Went, What We Accomplished and What's Next,\" _GaryHooser's Blog_ , https:\/\/garyhooser.wordpress.com\/2015\/05\/03\/from-kauai-to-switzerland-why-we-went-what-we-accomplished-and-whats-next\/.\n\nChapter 6\n\nThe Big Island, basically, had one: Nathanael Johnson, \"Here's Why Hawaii's Anti-GMO Laws Matter,\" _Grist_ , November 20, 2014, http:\/\/grist.org\/food\/heres-why-hawaiis-anti-gmo-laws-matter\/.\n\nBig agricultural companies: Anita Hofschneider, \"Hawaii Farmers, Biotech Industry Challenge Big Island's GMO Ban,\" _Honolulu Civil Beat_ , June 9, 2014, http:\/\/www.civilbeat.com\/2014\/06\/hawaii-farmers-biotech-industry-challenge-big-islands-gmo-ban\/.\n\nIndustry representatives were elated: Associated Press, \"Federal Judge Rules Against Big Island GMO Law,\" _NewsOK_ , November 26, 2104, http:\/\/newsok.com\/federal-judge-rules-against-big-island-gmo-law\/article\/feed\/765175.\n\nDespite unparalleled weather . . . Hawaii's agricultural experts: \"Pesticides in Paradise,\" Hawaii Center for Food Safety.\n\nFor the benefit of present and future generations: The Constitution of the State of Hawaii, Article XI, http:\/\/lrbhawaii.org\/con\/conart11.html.\n\nIt was a safe bet: \"Hawaiians Take on Monsanto and GMOs,\" Pachamama Alliance, June 25, 2014, http:\/\/www.pachamama.org\/webcasts\/hawaiians-take-on-monsanto-gmos.\n\nThe petition also urged voters: \"A Bill Placing a Moratorium on the Cultivation of Genetically Modified Organisms,\" Chapter 20.39 of the Maui County Code, http:\/\/www.mauicounty.gov\/Archive\/ViewFile\/Item\/19197.\n\nThe ball was now: Wendy Osher, \"Maui Petition Filed Against GMO Industry, Monsanto Responds,\" _Maui Now_ , April 8, 2014, http:\/\/mauinow.com\/2014\/04\/08\/maui-petition-filed-against-gmo-industry-monsanto-responds\/.\n\nA Monsanto employee . . . Another Monsanto employee: \"Employees Rally in Support of Monsanto on Maui and Molokai\u20144\/3\/14,\" YouTube video, 3:13, posted by \"Maui Now,\" https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VOU7K7Fr5Zw.\n\nRather than try to convince: \"Maui County Genetically Modified Organism Moratorium Initiative (November 2014): Arguments Against,\" Ballotpedia, http:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Maui_County_Genetically_Modified_Organism_Moratorium_Initiative_(November_2014) #Arguments_against; \"Over 11,000 Maui County Citizens Stand Up and Say 'Nuff Already' to Biotech Experimentation with a History Making Social Action,\" PRWeb, April 14, 2014, http:\/\/www.prweb.com\/releases\/2014\/04\/prweb11758961.htm.\n\nThe companies also flexed: For the original language of the initiative and for the text of the final moratorium question, respectively, see \"Maui County Genetically Modified Organism Moratorium Initiative (November 2014): Full Text,\" Ballotpedia, https:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Maui_County_Genetically_Modified_Organism_Moratorium_Initiative_(November_2014),_full_text; \"Maui County Genetically Modified Organism Moratorium Initiative (November 2014): Ballot Question,\" Ballotpedia, http:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Maui_County_Genetically_Modified_Organism_Moratorium_Initiative_(November_2014)#Ballot_question.\n\nIndustry advertisements\u2014typically attributed: \"Maui County Genetically Modified Organism Moratorium Initiative (November 2014): TV Ads,\" Ballotpedia, http:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Maui_County_Genetically_Modified_Organism_Moratorium_Initiative_(November_2014)#TV_ads.\n\nThe campaign finance reports: For campaign spending reports, see \"Maui County Genetically Modified Organism Moratorium Initiative (November 2014): Campaign Finance,\" Ballotpedia, http:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Maui_County_Genetically_Modified_Organism_Moratorium_Initiative_(November_2014), #Campaign_finance.\n\nLorrin Pang, a Maui physician: \"Over 11,000 Maui County Citizens Stand Up and Say 'Nuff Already' to Biotech Experimentation with a History Making Social Action,\" PRWeb.\n\nAlika and the SHAKA Movement held: Anita Hofschneider, \"1,000 Votes: Maui GMO Farming Ban Squeaks By,\" _Honolulu Civil Beat_ , November 4, 2014, http:\/\/www.civilbeat.com\/2014\/11\/1000-votes-maui-gmo-farming-ban-squeaks-by\/.\n\nSure enough, when the final vote . . . just over 51 percent: \"Maui County Genetically Modified Organism Moratorium Initiative (November 2014): Election Results,\" Ballotpedia, http:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Maui_County_Genetically_Modified_Organism_Moratorium_Initiative_(November_2014)#Election_results.\n\nThe next day, Monsanto: Audrey McAvoy, \"Monsanto, Dow Unit Sue Maui County over GMO Law,\" Associated Press, November 13, 2014, http:\/\/www.ksl.com\/?nid=1200&sid=32342920.\n\nKurren reassigned the case: Audrey McAvoy, \"Maui Group Wins Ability to Intervene in GMO Case,\" Associated Press, December 15, 2014, http:\/\/www.stltoday.com\/business\/local\/maui-group-wins-ability-to-intervene-in-gmo-case\/article_99140705-b5df-55e9-9cf4-25a4ebc32f86.html.\n\nNo portion of this ruling: \"Maui County Genetically Modified Organism Moratorium Initiative (November 2014): Aftermath,\" Ballotpedia, http:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Maui_County_Genetically_Modified_Organism_Moratorium_Initiative_(November_2014)##Aftermath.\n\nChapter 7\n\nIn other words, the Danforth Center: \"Board of Directors,\" Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, https:\/\/www.danforthcenter.org\/about\/leadership\/board-of-directors.\n\nA cynic might claim: Doreen Stabinsky, \"Hearts of Darkness: The Biotech Industry's Exploration of Southern Africa,\" _GeneWatch_ 15, no. 6 (November\u2013December, 2002).\n\n\"a stalking horse for corporate proponents\": Phil Bereano, \"Bill's Excellent African Adventure: A Tale of Technocratic Agroindustrial Philanthrocapitalism,\" _GeneWatch_ 26, no. 1 (January\u2013February 2013): 16.\n\n\"If companies are going to claim\": Marion Nestle, _Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism_ (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 247.\n\n\"In the United States, we've seen\": Peter Rosset, Frances Moore Lapp\u00e9, and Joseph Collins, \"Lessons from the Green Revolution: Do We Need New Technology to End Hunger?\" _Tikkun_ 15, no. 2 (March\/April 2000): 52\u201356.\n\nPotrykus visualized peasant farmers: J. Madeleine Nash, \"This Rice Could Save a Million Kids a Year,\" _Time_ , July 31, 2000, http:\/\/content.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,997586,00.html.\n\nIn the end, Potrykus and his team: Pringle, _Food Inc_ , 31\u201335; Amy Harmon, \"Golden Rice: Lifesaver?\" _New York Times_ , August 24, 2013, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/08\/25\/sunday-review\/golden-rice-lifesaver.html?_r=0.\n\nThe journal Science announced: Mary Lou Guerinot, \"The Green Revolution Strikes Gold,\" _Science_ 287, no. 5451 (January 14, 2000): 241\u2013243.\n\nGreenpeace, which had taken: \"Field of Dreams: Potrykus' Golden Rice,\" _Financial Times_ , February 25, 2000; see http:\/\/www.genepeace.ch\/new\/2000\/fields_of_dreams_2002.htm.\n\nIn an article in The New York Times Magazine: Michael Pollan, \"The Great Yellow Hype,\" _New York Times Magazine_ , March 4, 2011, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2001\/03\/04\/magazine\/04WWLN.html.\n\n\"the 'selling' of vitamin A\": Vandana Shiva, \"Golden Rice: Myth, Not Miracle,\" GMWatch, January 12, 2014, http:\/\/www.gmwatch.org\/news\/archive\/2014\/15250-golden-rice-myth-not-miracle.\n\nAnd so it has gone: Christopher J. M. Whitty, Monty Jones, Alan Tollervey, and Tim Wheeler, \"Biotechnology: Africa and Asia Need a Rational Debate on GM Crops,\" _Nature_ 497 (May 2, 2013): 31\u201333.\n\nIn August 2013, hundreds of protesters: Harmon, \"Golden Rice: Lifesaver?\"\n\nSuch research mirrored work: Frances Moore Lapp\u00e9, Joseph Collins, and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza, _World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Food First_ (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 61.\n\nBorlaug has never been shy: _Harvest of Fear_ , PBS _Frontline\/NOVA_ , April 23, 2001, http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/harvest\/.\n\nM. S. Swaminathan, a renowned: M. S. Swaminathan, \"Perspective: The Challenges Ahead,\" _New Agriculturist_ 11 (April 1999), http:\/\/www.new-agri.co.uk\/99-4\/perspect.html.\n\nIndeed, for every plant scientist: David Pimentel, \"Changing Genes to Feed the World: A Review of _Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist's View of Genetically Modified Foods_ , by Nina Federoff and Nancy Marie Brown,\" _Science_ 306, no. 5697 (October 29, 2004): 815.\n\nCatherine Ives, the scientist: _Harvest of Fear_ , PBS _Frontline\/NOVA_.\n\nMonsanto boasts that it has already trained: Jonathan Gilbert, \"In Paraguay, the Spread of Soy Strikes Fear in Hearts of Rural Farmers,\" _Time_ , August 9, 2013, http:\/\/world.time.com\/2013\/08\/09\/in-paraguay-rural-farmers-fear-the-spread-of-soy\/; Christine MacDonald, \"Green Going Gone: The Tragic Deforestation of the Chaco,\" _Rolling Stone_ , July 28, 2014, http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/culture\/news\/green-going-gone-the-tragic-deforestation-of-the-chaco-20140728.\n\nTwo years later, in 2012: Simon Romero, \"Vast Tracts in Paraguay Forest Being Replaced by Ranches,\" _New York Times_ , March 24, 2012, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/03\/25\/world\/americas\/paraguays-chaco-forest-being-cleared-by-ranchers.html; Tracy Barnett, \"Paraguay Takes Hard Line on GMOs,\" _Huffington Post_ , September 1, 2010, http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/tracy-l-barnett\/paraguay-takes-hard-line-_b_701182.html.\n\nIn Argentina, meanwhile, a woman: \"Sofia Gatica,\" The Goldman Environmental Prize, 2012, http:\/\/www.goldmanprize.org\/recipient\/sofia-gatica\/.\n\n\"The problem is that there are very few\": Alfred Sommer, \"Vitamin A Deficiency Disorders: Origins of the Problem and Approaches to Its Control,\" _AgBioWorld_ , 2011, http:\/\/www.agbioworld.org\/biotech-info\/topics\/goldenrice\/vit_a.html.\n\nIf anything, the prospect of climate change: Felix Chung, \"The Search for the Rice of the Future,\" from a special issue devoted to rice in \"Nature Outlook,\" a supplement to _Nature_ 514, no. 7524 (October 30, 2014); Tim Folger, \"The Next Green Revolution,\" _National Geographic_ , October 2014, http:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/foodfeatures\/green-revolution\/.\n\nIn 2015 alone, scientists published: Leigh Dayton, \"Blue Sky Rice,\" from a special issue devoted to rice in \"Nature Outlook,\" a supplement to _Nature_ 514, no. 7524 (October 30, 2014).\n\nIn Kenya, farmers have: Rachel Cernansky, \"The Rise of Africa's Super Vegetables,\" _Nature_ , June 9, 2015, http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/the-rise-of-africa-s-super-vegetables-1.17712.\n\n**Yet** in June 2016, more than one hundred Nobel laureates: Joel Achenbach, \"107 Nobel Laureates Sign Letter Blasting Greenpeace over GMOs,\" _Washington Post_ , June 29, 2016, https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/speaking-of-science\/wp\/2016\/06\/29\/more-than-100-nobel-laureates-take-on-greenpeace-over-gmo-stance\/.\n\nChapter 8\n\nMonsanto began testing Roundup Ready wheat: Justin Gillis, \"Monsanto Pulls Plan to Commercialize Gene-Altered Wheat,\" _Washington Post_ , May 11, 2004, http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A15998-2004May10.html; Steven Mufson, \"Monsanto Shares Fall as South Korea Joins Pause in Wheat Imports,\" _Washington Post_ , May 31, 2013, https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/business\/economy\/monsanto-shares-fall-as-south-korea-joins-pause-in-wheat-imports\/2013\/05\/31\/5df79a3a-ca2c-11e2-8da7-d274bc611a47_story.html.\n\nJust ask Larry Bohlen: Marc Kaufman, \"Biotech Critics Cite Unapproved Corn in Taco Shells,\" _Washington_ _Post_ , September 18, 2000, https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/archive\/politics\/2000\/09\/18\/biotech-critics-cite-unapproved-corn-in-taco-shells\/e7973551-d518-47dc-9bdf-d7931e5e8b49\/.\n\nThe results, in one case: Andrew Pollack, \"Kraft Recalls Taco Shells with Bioengineered Corn,\" _New York Times_ , September 23, 2000, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2000\/09\/23\/business\/kraft-recalls-taco-shells-with-bioengineered-corn.html.\n\nTo Larry Bohlen, it was entirely obvious: _Harvest of Fear_ , PBS _Frontline\/NOVA_.\n\nThings have only gotten rockier: Francie Grace, \"Anheuser-Busch Starts Rice War,\" _CBS News_ , April 13, 2005, http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/anheuser-busch-starts-rice-war\/.\n\nSuddenly, it was StarLink all over again: Richard Vanderford, \"Bayer Settles Rice Contamination Suits for $750M,\" Law360, July 1, 2011, http:\/\/www.law360.com\/articles\/255594\/bayer-settles-rice-contamination-suits-for-750m; Steven Mufson, \"Unapproved Genetically Modified Wheat from Monsanto Found in Oregon,\" _Washington Post_ , May 30, 2013, https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/business\/economy\/unapproved-genetically-modified-wheat-from-monsanto-found-in-oregon-field\/2013\/05\/30\/93fe7abe-c95e-11e2-8da7-d274bc611a47_story.html; Jonathan Randles, \"Monsanto's Legal Risk Sprouts as Asia Shuns Modified Wheat,\" Law360, May 31, 2013, http:\/\/www.law360.com\/articles\/446381\/monsanto-s-legal-risk-sprouts-as-asia-shuns-modified-wheat; \"USDA Announces Close and Findings of Investigation in the Detection of Genetically Engineered Wheat in Oregon in 2013,\" September 26, 2014, https:\/\/www.aphis.usda.gov\/newsroom\/2014\/09\/pdf\/ge_wheat.pdf.\n\n\"There are too many of us\": Wes Jackson, \"Commencement Address: The Serious Challenge of Our Time,\" University of Kansas, May 19, 2013, https:\/\/landinstitute.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/WJackson-KU-Commencement-Addr_May2013.pdf.\n\nJared Diamond, the scientist and bestselling author: Jared Diamond, \"The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,\" _Discover_ , May 1987, http:\/\/discovermagazine.com\/1987\/may\/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race.\n\nAfrican Bushmen eat some seventy-five different wild plants: Ibid.\n\nThe Irish were so dependent: Richard Manning, _Against the Grain_ (New York: North Point Press, 2005), 72\u201379.\n\nInstead of the ecological desert: Lee DeHaan and David Van Tassel, \"Useful Insights from Evolutionary Biology for Developing Perennial Grain Crops,\" _American Journal of Botany_ 101, no. 10 (2014): 1801\u20131819.\n\nThe idea seemed so obvious: \"Biomimicry: Nature's Alternative to Genetically Engineered Foods,\" _Environment and Ecology_ (2015), http:\/\/environment-ecology.com\/biomimicry-bioneers\/372-biomimicry-natures-alternative-to-genetically-engineered-foods-.html.\n\nDeep roots would also mean: Robert Kunzig, \"Perennial Solution,\" _National Geographic_ , April 2011, http:\/\/ngm.nationalgeographic.com\/2011\/04\/big-idea\/perennial-grains-text.\n\nThe work has been slow: Richard Harris, \"Prairie Pioneer Seeks to Reinvent the Way We Farm,\" National Public Radio, October 21, 2009.\n\nIn the early 1900s: Lance Gibson and Garren Benson, \"Origin, History, and Uses of Oat ( _Avena sativa_ ) and Wheat ( _Triticum aestivum_ ),\" Iowa State University, Department of Agronomy (rev. January 2002), http:\/\/agron-www.agron.iastate.edu\/Courses\/agron212\/Readings\/Oat_wheat_history.htm.\n\nClaims from industrial corn companies: James Conca, \"It's Final: Corn Ethanol Is of No Use,\" _Forbes_ , April 20, 2014, http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/jamesconca\/2014\/04\/20\/its-final-corn-ethanol-is-of-no-use\/.\n\nChapter 9\n\nthe company has to feed most of the 569 million chickens: \"Look What the Chicken Industry Is Doing for Delmarva,\" Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., 2014, https:\/\/www.dpichicken.org\/faq_facts\/docs\/FACTS14.pdf.\n\nGiven this level of scrupulous attention: Jennie Schmidt, \"The Truth About GMOs,\" _Boston Review_ , September 6, 2013, http:\/\/www.bostonreview.net\/forum\/truth-about-gmos\/farmer-choose-gmos.\n\nThe Plenish beans have clearly been: Jennie Schmidt, \"GMO Versus Non-GMO: The Cost of Production,\" _The Foodie Farmer_ , December 29, 2014, http:\/\/thefoodiefarmer.blogspot.com\/2014\/12\/gmo-versus-nongmo-cost-of-production.html.\n\n\"We've had folks ask us\": Marc Gunther, \"GMO 2.0: Genetically Modified Foods with Added Health Benefits,\" _Guardian_ , June 10, 2014, http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/sustainable-business\/2014\/jun\/10\/genetically-modified-foods-health-benefits-soybean-potatoes.\n\nClearly, the companies that both: Sandy Bauers, \"DuPont Develops New Cooking Oil from Genetically Modified Soybeans,\" _Philadelphia Inquirer_ , January 4, 2015, http:\/\/www.philly.com\/philly\/columnists\/sandy_bauers\/20150104_GreenSpace__DuPont_develops_new_cooking_oil_from_genetically-modified_soybeans.html.\n\nIn the fall of 2014, DuPont Pioneer and Perdue AgriBusiness: \"DuPont Pioneer, Perdue Announce Doubling of Acreage for 2014 Plenish High Oleic Soybean Program,\" Pioneer press release, November 18, 2013, https:\/\/www.pioneer.com\/home\/site\/about\/news-media\/news-releases\/template.CONTENT\/guid.17F567F5-5AF2-7ED8-A7D6-27BAA176DEA2.\n\n\"We're always looking for ways\": \"DuPont Pioneer, Perdue AgriBusiness to Double Acreage for 2015 Plenish High Oleic Soybean Program,\" Perdue press release, October 24, 2014, http:\/\/www.perduefarms.com\/News_Room\/Press_Releases\/details.asp?id=1129&title=DuPont%20Pioneer,%20Perdue%20AgriBusiness%20to%20double%20acreage%20for%202015%20Plenish%AE%20high%20oleic%20soybean%20program; Sean Cloughery, \"Delaware Officials Get Behind Popular Plenish Beans,\" AmericanFarm.com, http:\/\/www.americanfarm.com\/publications\/the-delmarva-farmer\/events\/1705-delaware-officials-get-behind-popularity-for-plenish-beans.\n\n\"There is no 'one' system\": Jennie Schmidt, \"Farming Techniques Do Not Belong to One Farming System,\" _The Foodie Farmer_ , June 5, 2015, http:\/\/thefoodiefarmer.blogspot.com\/2015\/06\/farming-techniques-do-not-belong-to-one.html.\n\n\"Because this is spraying and not dousing\": Jennie Schmidt, \"Spraying Isn't Dousing,\" _The Foodie Farmer_ , June 15, 2015, http:\/\/thefoodiefarmer.blogspot.com\/2015\/06\/spraying-isnt-dousing.html.\n\nIn the Chesapeake Bay watershed: Timothy Wheeler, \"Sodden Fields Delay Planting of Cover Crops to Aid the Bay,\" _Baltimore Sun_ , November 21, 2009, http:\/\/articles.baltimoresun.com\/2009-11-21\/news\/0911200158_1_crop-program-planting-busy-harvesting.\n\nIndeed, they note, the word is featured prominently: \"Our Commitment to Sustainable Agriculture,\" Monsanto.com, http:\/\/www.monsanto.com\/whoweare\/pages\/our-commitment-to-sustainable-agriculture.aspx.\n\n\"Industrial agriculture today\": Andr\u00e9 Leu and Ronnie Cummins, \"From 'Sustainable' to 'Regenerative'\u2014The Future of Food,\" _Common Dreams_ , November 10, 2015, http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/views\/2015\/10\/28\/sustainable-regenerative-future-food.\n\nChapter 10\n\n\"There are two spiritual dangers\": Aldo Leopold, _A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There_ (1949; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6.\n\nBut given that by the end of the century: Whitty, Jones, Tollervey, and Wheeler, \"Biotechnology: Africa and Asia Need a Rational Debate on GM Crops.\"\n\n\"Over the last few years\": \"Del. Farmers' Market Sales Double in 5 Years,\" WBOC News, December 26, 2014, http:\/\/www.wboc.com\/story\/27709471\/del-farmers-market-sales-double-in-5-years.\n\nThanks to a national surge: Stephanie Strom, \"USDA to Start Program to Support Local and Organic Farming,\" _New York Times_ , September 28, 2014, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/09\/29\/business\/usda-to-start-program-to-support-local-and-organic-farming.html.\n\nAs helpful as this has been: Brad Plumer, \"The $956 Billion Farm Bill in One Graph,\" _Washington Post_ , January 28, 2014, http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/wonkblog\/wp\/2014\/01\/28\/the-950-billion-farm-bill-in-one-chart\/.\n\nGaps can be reduced further: Sarah Yong, \"Can Organic Crops Compete with Industrial Agriculture?\" _Berkeley News_ , December 9, 2014, http:\/\/news.berkeley.edu\/2014\/12\/09\/organic-conventional-farming-yield-gap\/.\n\nA thirty-year study: Bill Liebhardt, \"Get the Facts Straight: Organic Agriculture Yields Are Good,\" _Organic Farming Research Foundation_ 10 (Summer): 1, 4\u20135; Pimentel, \"Changing Genes to Feed the World,\" 815.\n\nBut into this vacuum: \"Mission 2014: Feeding the World,\" Massachusetts Institute of Technology, http:\/\/12.000.scripts.mit.edu\/mission2014\/solutions\/urban-agriculture; Trish Popovitch, \"10 American Cities Lead the Way with Urban Agricultural Ordinances,\" _Seedstock_ , May 27, 2014, http:\/\/seedstock.com\/2014\/05\/27\/10-american-cities-lead-the-way-with-urban-agriculture-ordinances\/.\n\nEpilogue\n\nUsing a gene-silencing technique: Tom Philpott, \"The Seven Biggest Food Stories of 2015,\" _Mother Jones_ , December 30, 2015, http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/tom-philpott\/2015\/12\/here-are-biggest-food-and-farm-stories-2015.\n\nAnd then there are GM animals: Maggie Fox, \"Lab-Grown Meat Is Here\u2014But Will Vegetarians Eat It?\" _NBC News_ , August 5, 2013, http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/health\/diet-fitness\/lab-grown-meat-here-will-vegetarians-eat-it-f6C10830536; Kat McGowan, \"This Scientist Might End Animal Cruelty\u2014Unless GMO Hardliners Stop Him,\" _Mother Jones_ , September\u2013October 2015, http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/environment\/2015\/07\/fahrenkrug-genetic-modification-gmo-animals.\n\n\"We're going to see a stream\": Amy Harmon, \"Open Season Is Seen in Gene Editing of Animals,\" _New York Times_ , November 26, 2015, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/11\/27\/us\/2015-11-27-us-animal-gene-editing.html.\n\nA recent story in National Geographic: Elizabeth Royte, \"How Ugly Fruits and Vegetables Can Help Solve World Hunger,\" _National Geographic_ , March 2016, http:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/magazine\/2016\/03\/global-food-waste-statistics\/.\n\nPesticides and herbicides are not (technically): See Charles Benbrook, \"Trends in Glyphosate Herbicide Use in the United States and Globally,\" _Environmental Sciences Europe_ 28, no. 3 (February 2016), http:\/\/enveurope.springeropen.com\/articles\/10.1186\/s12302-016-0070-0; Mary Ellen Kustin, \"Monsanto's Glyphosate Weed-Killer Is Pervasive, GMO Labels Nonexistent,\" Environmental Working Group, April 10, 2015, http:\/\/www.ewg.org\/agmag\/2015\/04\/gmo-weed-killer-pervasive-gmo-labels-nonexistent; Mary Ellen Kustin, \"Americans at Greater Risk of Glyphosate Exposure Than Europeans,\" Environmental Working Group, February 3, 2016, http:\/\/www.ewg.org\/agmag\/2016\/02\/americans-greater-risk-glyphosate-exposure-europeans.\n\n# INDEX\n\nThe page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.\n\nA (adenine), , ,\n\nAchitoff, Paul,\n\nADHD,\n\nAdler, Peter, \u201347\n\nADM,\n\nAdvisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations,\n\n_Aedes aegypti_ mosquito,\n\nAfghanistan,\n\nAfrica, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nAgent Orange, , , , , , ,\n\n\"agricultural stewardship,\"\n\nAgrigenetics Inc.,\n\n_Agrobacterium tumefaciens,_\n\nagrochemical's influence, , , \u20138, , , , , , , , \u201331, , , , \u201344, \u201349, , , , \u201361, \u201369, , \u201395\n\n\"agroindustrial philanthrocapitalism,\"\n\n_aina_ (that which feeds us) warriors, ,\n\nair pollution, , , , , , , , ,\n\nalachlor,\n\nAllen, Will,\n\nallergies, , , , , ,\n\nAloha da Vote festival,\n\n_Altered Genes, Twisted Truth_ (Druker),\n\nalternatives to industrial farming. _See_ fruit\n\nAmerica and GMOs, \u20134, , \u201310, , , \u201314, , , \u201324, \u201329, , , , , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ corn; genetically modified organisms (GMOs); soybeans\n\nAmerican Academy for the Advancement of Science,\n\nAmerican Academy of Pediatrics (AAP),\n\nAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science,\n\nAmerican Meat Institute,\n\nAmish, ,\n\nammonia,\n\nAmoco,\n\nAnderson, Paul, \u201384, , , ,\n\nAnheuser-Busch,\n\nanimals, GM, \u201377\n\nannuals, problem with, \u201319,\n\nanti-GMO movement,\n\nfruit (alternatives to industrial farming), , , , ,\n\nroots (basics about GMOs), , , ,\n\nseeds (front lines of GMO debate), , \u201320, , , , , , , , \u201351, , , , ,\n\n_See also_ genetically modified organisms (GMOs)\n\nAOL,\n\nAqua Bounty,\n\nArabidopsis, \u201390\n\nArgentina, , , , \u201399\n\nargonauts,\n\nArkansas,\n\nAsia, , , , , , , , , , , , \u20133, , ,\n\nAsilomar, California, ,\n\nAstraZeneca (Syngenta),\n\nAtay, Alika, , \u201359, , , , , , , , \u201376, ,\n\natrazine, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nAustralia, , , , ,\n\nautism, , , ,\n\nautonomy, value of,\n\nAventis, , \u201310,\n\nAyrault, Jean-Marc,\n\n_Bacillus thuringiensis_ (Bt). _See_ Bt crops\n\nBaltimore, Maryland, , , , , , , , ,\n\nbananas, , , , , , , , ,\n\nBangladesh, ,\n\nbanning GMOs, , \u201376\n\nBarca, Dustin, \u201343, , ,\n\nbarley, ,\n\nBASF, , , , , , , ,\n\nbasics about GMOs. _See_ roots\n\nBayer, , , , ,\n\nBeachy, Roger, \u201313, , ,\n\nbees, , ,\n\nbeets, \u201370,\n\nBelmes, Alberto, \u201311, , \u201317\n\nBenbrook, Charles, ,\n\nBen & Jerry's Ice cream,\n\nBentley, Nancy, \u201381,\n\nbenzene hexachlorides (BHCs),\n\nBereano, Phil,\n\nBerg, Paul,\n\nbeta-carotene, , , , , \u20135\n\n_See also_ vitamin A\n\nBhopal, India,\n\nBialic, Trudy,\n\nBicoy, Dawn,\n\nbifenthrin,\n\nBig Island, , , , , , , , , , , \u201357, ,\n\n_See also_ Hawaii\n\nBig Island Banana Growers Association,\n\nbiodiversity loss, \u20136, , , \u201375, ,\n\n\"biodynamic\" operation,\n\n\"biomimicry,\"\n\n\"biopharm\" crops, \u201311\n\nbiotechnology, , , , \u201364, \u201367, , , , \u20132, , , , \u20132, , , , , , , \u201373,\n\n_See also_ genetic engineering\n\nBiotechnology Industry Organization,\n\nblindness, , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ golden rice\n\nBloomberg School of Public Health,\n\nBlumberg, Bruce, , \u20135\n\nBohlen, Larry, , , \u201310,\n\nBondera, Melanie,\n\nbook metaphor, genes, \u201387,\n\nBorlaug, Norman,\n\nBotswana,\n\nbrain problems, , ,\n\nBrazil, , , , ,\n\nbreeding plants (traditional), \u201352, , , , , , , \u201316, \u201350\n\nBritain,\n\nBritish Royal College of Pathologists,\n\nBrokaw, Tom,\n\nbrown streak, , , , ,\n\nBt crops, , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ insecticides\n\nbundleflower,\n\nBurger King,\n\nBush, George H. W., , , , ,\n\nBushmen of Africa,\n\nButz, Rusty,\n\nCalgene, ,\n\nCalifornia, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\ncalories, perennials, \u201326\n\nCanada, , , ,\n\nCanadian Institute for Advanced Research,\n\ncancer, , , , , , \u201335, , , , , , , \u2013100, , , , , , , , ,\n\ncanola, , , , \u201375, ,\n\ncardiovascular disease, , , ,\n\nCargill,\n\nCarl's Jr.,\n\nCarrington, Jim, \u201325, \u201345, , , ,\n\ncarrots, , , , , , , , , ,\n\n\"cascading\" consequences, GMOs, \u201328\n\nCase, Steve,\n\ncassava, , , \u201382, , \u201390, , ,\n\nCavendish banana,\n\nC (cytosine), , ,\n\ncell function controlled by genes, \u201381\n\nCenter for Food Safety,\n\nCenters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ,\n\nCentral America,\n\nCentral Asia,\n\nCentral Dogma, \u201381, \u201384, \u201394\n\nCentral European Mennonites,\n\nCharles, Prince of Wales,\n\ncheese,\n\nchemicals sprayed on GMOs\n\nagrochemical's influence, \u20137, , , , ,\n\nconventional farming and,\n\nfeeding the world,\n\nGM crops and, ,\n\nKauai and, , \u201348, , , , , , , , ,\n\nmonarch butterflies and, , , , , , ,\n\nsafety question, \u20136, , , , , , , \u201336, , , , \u201344, , , ,\n\n_See also_ ecological problems; fertilizers; health problems; herbicides; insecticides; pesticides; roots (basics about GMOs); safety of GMOs\n\nChesapeake Bay, , , ,\n\nchestnuts, \u201378\n\nchickens, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nchildren and GMOs, , \u201342, \u201343, , , , \u201336, , , , , , , \u201394, , \u20133, ,\n\nChina, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nChina National Chemical Corp.,\n\nChipotle, , \u201341\n\nchlorpyrifos, , \u201333, \u201334,\n\nChristenson, Randy,\n\nchromosomes, , , , , ,\n\nChun, Malia,\n\nChung, Connie,\n\ncisgenics, ,\n\nCitizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban, ,\n\ncity, outside the, \u201357\n\ncity farm, , \u201373\n\nCity Farm, Chicago,\n\nClark, J. Milton,\n\nClean Water Act,\n\nClegg, Dan,\n\n_Cleome gynandra_ (stinkweed), \u201336\n\nclimate change, , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nClinton, Bill,\n\nclover, ,\n\n\"coat proteins,\"\n\nCoca-Cola, ,\n\nCohen, Ben,\n\nCollins, Joseph,\n\ncolonialism, \u201397\n\nColorado,\n\nColumbia University,\n\n\"communitarian,\" ,\n\ncommunity-supported agriculture (CSA), , , , ,\n\ncomplexity of DNA, \u201394, \u201397\n\ncomposting, , , , , ,\n\nConAgra,\n\nConnecticut,\n\nconsequences vs. process of GMOs, \u201319\n\nConsumers Union, ,\n\n_ContamiNation_ (Jenkins),\n\n\"contamination\" of food supply, \u201311\n\ncorn\n\nagrochemical's influence, , , , , ,\n\nAmerica and, , , , , , ,\n\nannuals, problem with, ,\n\nBt corn, , , , , ,\n\nfarm next door, \u201352, , ,\n\nfeeding the world, , , , , , ,\n\nfirst insecticide-producing corn,\n\ngene-editing technique (CRISPR),\n\nhybrid corn, , , ,\n\nKauai, , , ,\n\nmapping, engineering, Prometheus, , , \u201390, , ,\n\nMaui, , , , ,\n\nMonsanto and, , ,\n\nperennials, promise of, , ,\n\nreinventing the Plains, ,\n\nsafety question, , , , ,\n\nStarLink corn, , \u201310, ,\n\nsustainability of, , , , ,\n\nwartime chemicals to petroleum-based farm chemicals, ,\n\n_See also_ America and GMOs\n\nCornell, , , , , ,\n\ncotton, , , ,\n\nCouncil for Biotechnology Information,\n\ncounter campaign (Maui), \u201370\n\nCouric, Katie,\n\ncover crops, \u201334, \u201345, , , ,\n\ncowpeas, ,\n\ncows\/cattle, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nCox, Stan,\n\nCrews, Tim, , , , \u201329\n\nCrisco, \u201343\n\nCRISPR (gene-editing technique),\n\ncrop dependency and starvation, \u201375, \u201383, \u201317\n\n_See also_ monoculture\n\ncrossbreeding (hybridizing), , \u201316\n\ncross-protection, ,\n\nCry9C, \u20139\n\nCSA (community-supported agriculture), , , , ,\n\nCummins, Ronnie, \u201349\n\ndaffodil gene, , ,\n\nDanforth Center, St. Louis, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nDanielle's story, \u201382\n\nDARK Act (Deny Americans the Right to Know), \u201344\n\nDaymon Worldwide,\n\nDDT, , , ,\n\ndead zones, , ,\n\ndefoliants, ,\n\n\"degenerative,\"\n\nDeHaan, Lee, , \u201325, ,\n\nDelaware, , , ,\n\nDelaware Biotechnology Institute, \u201378\n\nDel Monte,\n\nDemeritt, Laurie,\n\nDenmark,\n\nDeny Americans the Right to Know (DARK Act), \u201344\n\nDetroit, Michigan, ,\n\nDeutsche Bank,\n\ndiabetes, , , , ,\n\nDiamond, Jared,\n\nDiPietro, Jeri, \u201327\n\nDNA, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nDNA Plant Technology, \u20133\n\ndousing vs. spraying, \u201340\n\nDow, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , \u201350, , , , , , ,\n\nDrake,\n\nDruker, Steven, \u201369\n\nDuPont, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nDuPont Pioneer, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nEarthJustice,\n\nEarth Liberation Front, \u201397\n\nEarth Open Source, ,\n\nEast Africa, ,\n\nEastern Shore, , , , , ,\n\necological problems\n\nair pollution, , , , , , ,\n\nbiodiversity loss, \u20136, , , \u201375, ,\n\nclimate change, , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nGMOs and, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nwater pollution, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ chemicals sprayed on GMOs; genetically modified organisms (GMOs); soil depletion\n\n\"egalitarian\" Americans,\n\nEl Salvador,\n\nENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements),\n\nendocrine problems, , , , ,\n\nendosulfan, ,\n\nEnlist Duo,\n\nEnvironmental Protection Agency (EPA), , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nEnvironmental Working Group,\n\nepigenetics, , ,\n\nerythropoietin (EPO),\n\nethanol, , ,\n\nEthiopia,\n\nEurope, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nEuropean Commission,\n\nevolution and GMOs, \u201319\n\nevolution of American culture and GMOs. _See_ roots (basics about GMOs)\n\nEvslin, Lee,\n\nFaber, Scott,\n\nFacebook, , ,\n\nFactor study,\n\nFagan, John, , \u201393\n\nFairweather Farm, \u201382, ,\n\nfamine. _See_ crop dependency and starvation\n\nfarmers (disappearance) and industrial food, , \u201311, , , \u201376, , ,\n\nfarmers' markets, , , \u201362, ,\n\n\"farmer's privilege,\" \u201374\n\nfarm next door, \u201373\n\nfast-food industry, , , , , , , , , , , \u201376,\n\nFDA. _See_ U.S. Food and Drug Administration\n\nfederal farm subsidies, , \u201349, ,\n\nFederal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, \u201365\n\nfederal government, watchdog or cheerleader, , , , , , , , , , , \u201371, , , , , , \u201334, , , , , , ,\n\nfeeding the world, , , , , , \u201379, , \u201368, \u2013205, , ,\n\nfertilizers\n\nannuals, problem with, \u201318\n\ncomposting, , , , , ,\n\nfeeding the world, , , ,\n\nlocal, organic farmers, , ,\n\nmonoculture caution, \u201375\n\nnitrogen, , , , , , , , , , , \u201344, , ,\n\nperennials, promise of, ,\n\nsafety question, , ,\n\nsustainability of GMOs, \u201344,\n\nwartime chemicals to petroleum-based farm chemicals, \u201354\n\n_See also_ chemicals sprayed on GMOs; _specific fertilizers_\n\nFilipinos, , ,\n\nfish tomatoes,\n\nFlavr Savr tomato, \u20132, , , , ,\n\n_See also_ tomatoes\n\nFlorida,\n\n\"flow cell,\"\n\n\"food additives,\" ,\n\nfood allergies, , , , , ,\n\n_Food and Chemical Toxicology,_ , , ,\n\nfood expenses, \u201360, \u201365\n\nfood fight, \u201314\n\n_See also_ genetically modified organisms (GMOs)\n\n_Foodie Farmer, The_ (blog), ,\n\nfood production, invisibility of, , , \u201314, , \u201352, , , \u201379, \u201383, ,\n\nfood waste, \u201379\n\nfossil fuel, \u201354, , , ,\n\nFoudin, Arnold,\n\nFrance, , , , , ,\n\nFranco, Federico,\n\nFreese, William,\n\nFriends of the Earth,\n\nfront lines of GMO debate. _See_ seeds\n\nfruit (alternatives to industrial farming), \u201313, \u2013273\n\nannuals, problem with, \u201319,\n\nanti-GMO movement, , , , ,\n\ncity, outside the, \u201357\n\ncity farm, , \u201373\n\nfarm next door, \u201373\n\nfeeding the world, , , , , , \u201379, , \u201368, \u2013205, , ,\n\nGreen Revolution, \u201397, , ,\n\nperennials, promise of, , , \u201329\n\nRainbow papaya, , , , , \u201398, \u201322, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nreinventing the Plains, \u201314\n\nsoil depletion, , , , , , , \u201318, , , , , ,\n\nsustainability of GMOs, , , \u201350\n\n_See also_ genetically modified organisms (GMOs); industrial food system; organic movement\n\nFukushima nuclear disaster,\n\nfunding for research, \u201396\n\nGates Foundation, , , ,\n\nGatica, Sofia, ,\n\ngene-editing technique (CRISPR),\n\ngene expression, , \u201384, , ,\n\n\"gene gun,\" , ,\n\nGenentech,\n\ngenerally regarded as safe (GRAS) policy, , , ,\n\nGeneral Mills, ,\n\nGeneral Motors, ignition switch debacle,\n\ngene sequencing, \u201387, , , , , ,\n\ngene-silencing technique (RNA interference, RNAi), , , \u201376\n\ngenetically modified organisms (GMOs)\n\nagrochemical's influence, , , \u20138, , , , , , , , \u201331, , , , \u201344, \u201349, , , , \u201361, \u201369, , \u201395\n\nevolution and, \u201319\n\nfirst (Flavr Savr tomato), \u20132, , , , ,\n\nglobal rejection of, \u20139\n\nprofit motive, , , , , , , , \u201364, , , , , \u201387, , , ,\n\n_See also_ America and GMOs; anti-GMO movement; ecological problems; food fight; fruit (alternatives to industrial farming); health problems; industrial food system; monoculture; roots (basics about GMOs); seeds (front lines of GMO debate); _specific GMO crops_\n\ngenetic engineering, \u201360, , \u201363, , , , \u201376, , , \u201394, \u201310, , \u201384, , , , , \u201378,\n\n_See also_ biotechnology\n\ngenetic equivalent of _War and Peace,_ \u201387,\n\ngenotype,\n\nGerman Federal Institute for Risk Assessment,\n\nGermany, , , , , , ,\n\nG (guanine), , ,\n\nGiampietro, Mario,\n\nglobal food system, , , , , , , , , , \u20138, ,\n\nGlobal ID Group,\n\nglobal rejection of GMOs, \u20139\n\ngluten intolerance, , ,\n\nglyphosate\n\nfeeding the world, , ,\n\nGM crops and, \u201380\n\npatenting our food (Schmeiser case),\n\nsafety question, , , , , \u201335, \u201336, , ,\n\nS\u00e9ralini (Gilles-\u00c9ric) affair, \u2013104\n\nsustainability of GMOs, , , ,\n\n_See also_ herbicides; Roundup\n\n\"GMO Answers\" website, \u201322\n\n_GMO Myths and Truths_ (Fagan), ,\n\nGMOs. _See_ genetically modified organisms (GMOs)\n\ngolden rice, \u201394, \u2013205\n\n_See also_ blindness; rice; vitamin A\n\nGoldman Environmental Prize,\n\nGonsalves, Dennis, \u201322, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nGoodman, Richard,\n\nGran Chaco,\n\nGRAS (generally regarded as safe) policy, , , ,\n\nGreat Kids Farm, Baltimore, ,\n\n\"Great Yellow Hype, The\" (Pollan),\n\ngreen beans,\n\ngreenhouse gases, ,\n\n\"green manure,\"\n\nGreenpeace, , , \u201393, \u20134\n\nGreen Revolution, \u201397, , ,\n\n\"greenwashed,\"\n\n_Grist,_\n\nGrocery Manufacturers Association,\n\nGroff, Steve, \u201345,\n\nGros Michel banana,\n\nGrove Farms,\n\nGrowing Power, Milwaukee,\n\nGuatemala,\n\nGulf of Mexico,\n\n_Guns, Germs, and Steel_ (Diamond),\n\nHaber-Bosch process,\n\nhamburgers, lab-grown, ,\n\nHanapepe Massacre,\n\nHannah's story,\n\nHansen, Michael, , \u20133, \u20135\n\nHartman Group,\n\nHarvard University, \u201373\n\nHawaii, , , , , , , , \u201398, , , , , , , \u201363, ,\n\n_See also_ Big Island; Kauai; Maui; seeds (front lines of GMO debate)\n\nHawaiian Indigenous Natural Farming Association,\n\nHawaii Crop Improvement Association, ,\n\nHawaii Floriculture and Nursery Association,\n\nHawaii Papaya Industry Association,\n\nHawthorne Valley, New York, \u201358, \u201360, , ,\n\nHayes, Tyrone, \u201335,\n\nHeacock, Don, \u201341\n\nheadaches, , ,\n\nhealth, measuring agriculture by,\n\nhealth problems, , , , \u201318, , , , , \u201334, , , ,\n\n_See also_ chemicals sprayed on GMOs; genetically modified organisms (GMOs); _specific health problems_\n\nHeisenberg's uncertainty principle,\n\nhepatitis B,\n\nheptachlor, ,\n\nHerbert, Gerry, , \u201352, ,\n\nherbicides\n\nannuals, problem with, ,\n\natrazine, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nfeeding the world, , , , ,\n\nperennials, promise of,\n\nsafety question, , , , , , , , \u201333, \u201335,\n\n\"stacked\" herbicides, \u201335\n\nsustainability of GMOs, , ,\n\n2,4-D, , \u201335, \u201336, , , ,\n\nwartime chemicals to petroleum-based farm chemicals, \u201354\n\n_See also_ chemicals sprayed on GMOs; glyphosate; Roundup; _specific herbicides_\n\nHershey Company,\n\n\"hierarchical\" Americans,\n\nhigh-fructose corn syrup, , , , ,\n\nhigh-oleic oil, \u201337,\n\nHirshberg, Gary,\n\nHoldrege, Craig, \u201397, \u201366\n\nHonolulu, Hawaii, \u201343\n\nHooser, Gary, , , , \u201336, , , , , , \u201348\n\nhormone problems, , , \u20135, ,\n\nhuanglongbing (citrus greening),\n\nHuerta, Alfredo, \u201328\n\nhuman genome, , , ,\n\nhuman growth hormone,\n\nhumans in relation to food and the planet, , , , ,\n\nHumboldt Prize, ,\n\nhumulin,\n\nhunter-gatherers vs. farmers, ,\n\nhybridizing (crossbreeding), , \u201316\n\nIllinois, , , ,\n\nIllumina HiSeq gene sequencer,\n\nImperial Chemical Industries,\n\n_Independent Science News,_\n\nIndia, , , , , , , , ,\n\nIndiana, ,\n\nIndia Rice ,\n\n\"individualistic\" Americans,\n\nindustrial food system\n\ndisappearance of American farmer and, , \u201311, , , \u201376, , ,\n\nGMOs and, , \u20134, , , \u201313, , , \u201373, \u201379\n\n_See also_ fruit (alternatives to industrial farming); genetically modified organisms (GMOs)\n\n\"industrial hero,\"\n\ninformation squeeze (labeling), , \u201346, , , ,\n\nInouye, Daniel,\n\ninsecticides\n\nfeeding the world, , ,\n\nGM crops and,\n\nsafety question, , , , ,\n\nsustainability of GMOs,\n\n_See also_ Bt crops; chemicals sprayed on GMOs; pesticides; _specific insecticides_\n\nInstitute of Medicine,\n\ninsulin,\n\nintegrated pest management,\n\nintercropping, ,\n\nInternational Agency for Research on Cancer,\n\nInternational Rice Research Institute (IRRI), , ,\n\ninvisibility of food production, , , \u201314, , \u201352, , , \u201379, \u201383, ,\n\nIowa, , , ,\n\nIran,\n\nIreland, , ,\n\nItaly, , ,\n\nIves, Catherine,\n\nJ. R. Simplot,\n\nJackson, Wes, \u201315, \u201319, \u201321, , , , , ,\n\nJamaica,\n\nJapan, , , , , , , ,\n\nJenkins, McKay,\n\nJennings, Peter,\n\nJervis, Gerard, ,\n\nJohn, Brian, \u20132\n\nJohns Hopkins, ,\n\nJohnson, Nathanael,\n\nJorgensen, Carl,\n\n_Journal of Organ Systems, The,_\n\njunk DNA, ,\n\nJust Label It,\n\nKagan, Elena,\n\nKahan, Dan,\n\nKansas, , , , , , , , , , , , \u201325,\n\nKantor, Mickey,\n\nKauai, , \u201348, , , , , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ Hawaii\n\nKelsey's story,\n\nKentucky Fried Chicken,\n\nKenya, , , , , , , ,\n\nKernza, ,\n\nKessler, David, \u201368\n\nKids Can Cook,\n\nKirin Brewery,\n\nKlee, Henry,\n\nKoch Industries,\n\nKona, Big Island of Hawaii, ,\n\nKorea,\n\nKraft Foods, ,\n\nKubo, Klayton, \u201339,\n\nKurren, Barry, , ,\n\nlabeling (information squeeze), , \u201346, , , ,\n\nLacey, Richard,\n\n_Lancet, The,_\n\nLand Institute in Kansas, , , , , , , , \u201325,\n\nLandrigan, Philip,\n\nland stewardship (Maui), \u201367\n\nLapp\u00e9, Frances Moore,\n\nlarge-scale farming, problems, \u201319,\n\nLatin America, ,\n\nlegumes, , , , , ,\n\nLeopold, Aldo,\n\nlettuces, , , , , ,\n\nLeu, Andr\u00e9, \u201349\n\nLiberty Link, ,\n\n_Life_ magazine,\n\nLiterature of the Land class, , \u201385\n\nlobbyists, , , , , , , , ,\n\nlocal, organic farming. _See_ fruit (alternatives to industrial farming)\n\nlocal food economy oppression (Maui), , \u201376\n\nlong-grained rice _(indica),_\n\nlorsban, ,\n\nLouisiana State,\n\nLugo, Fernando,\n\nMacArthur \"genius grant,\"\n\nmad cow disease,\n\nMaine,\n\nMalaysia,\n\nMali,\n\nMaluafiti, Alicia, \u201344\n\nManhattan, New York, , ,\n\nManhattan Project,\n\nManifest Destiny,\n\nManshardt, Richard, , \u201398, \u201315\n\nMao Tsetung,\n\nmapping, engineering, Prometheus, \u2013105\n\nMarden, Emily,\n\nMarquez, Emily,\n\nMaryland, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nMaryland Farm Bureau's Specialty Crop Committee,\n\nMaryland Grain Producers Utilization Board,\n\nMaryland Grape Growers Association,\n\nMaryland Institute College of Art,\n\nMaui, , , , , , \u201376, , ,\n\n_See also_ Hawaii\n\nMaupin, Margie,\n\nMcDonald's, , , ,\n\nmeat, raising, , , \u201377\n\nMeghan's story,\n\nMendel, Gregor,\n\nmessenger RNA (mRNA),\n\nmethomyl, ,\n\nmetolachlor, ,\n\nMexico, , , ,\n\nMeyers, Blake, , , \u201379, , \u201386, , , , , \u201392, \u201396, , \u201348\n\nMiami University in Ohio,\n\nMichigan, ,\n\nMichigan State University, \u201397\n\nMicronesians,\n\nMiddle East,\n\nmillet, ,\n\nMilwaukee, Wisconsin, ,\n\nMinnesota,\n\nMissouri, , ,\n\nmolecular biology, , , , , , , , ,\n\nMollway, Susan,\n\nMolokai, Hawaii,\n\nmonarch butterflies, , , , , , ,\n\nmonoculture, , , , , \u201375, , , , , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ crop dependency and starvation; genetically modified organisms (GMOs)\n\nMonsanto\n\n\"contamination\" of food supply, ,\n\nfeeding the world, \u201387, , , ,\n\nindustrial food, , \u201353, , , , , \u201369, , \u201372,\n\ninfluence of, , , ,\n\nKauai, , , , ,\n\nMaui, \u201350, , , , , , , , ,\n\nRainbow papaya, , , \u201321\n\nsafety question, , , , , ,\n\nsustainability of GMOs, ,\n\n_See also_ Roundup\n\nMontana,\n\nMortensen, David,\n\nmosaic virus, \u201313, , ,\n\nmosquitoes,\n\nMozambique,\n\nmutagenesis, ,\n\nNabukalu, Pheonah, \u201326\n\nNational Academy of Sciences, , , , \u201370,\n\nNational Cattlemen's Association,\n\n_National Geographic,_\n\nNational Institutes of Health, , ,\n\nNational Medal of Technology and Innovation,\n\nNational Research Council,\n\nNational Science Foundation (NSF), , ,\n\nNational Toxicology Program,\n\nnatural selection, \u201319, , ,\n\n_Nature,_\n\nNature Institute in New York, ,\n\n_NBC Nightly News_ (TV show),\n\nNebraska, , , , ,\n\nNeolithic farmers,\n\nNess, Autumn, \u201365, , , , , \u201371,\n\nNestle, Marion, \u201388\n\nNetherlands,\n\nneurological problems, , , , , ,\n\nNew Delhi,\n\nNewkirk, Ingrid,\n\nNew York, , , , , \u201358, \u201360, , , ,\n\n_New York Times, The,_ ,\n\n_New York Times Magazine, The,_\n\nNew York University, \u201317,\n\nnitrogen, , , , , , , , , , , \u201344, , ,\n\nNixon, Richard,\n\nNK603, ,\n\nNobel Prize, , , , \u20134\n\nNon-GMO Project, , ,\n\nNorman, Drew and Joan, \u201354, , , , ,\n\nNorth Dakota,\n\nno-till agriculture, \u201347\n\nnucleotides, , , ,\n\nOahu, Hawaii, , , , , , ,\n\nOasay, Lowella, \u201366\n\nObama, Barack, , \u201344,\n\nobesity, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nOhio, ,\n\nOklahoma,\n\n_Omnivore's Dilemma, The_ (Pollan),\n\nOncoMouse,\n\nOne Straw Farm,\n\noranges, , , ,\n\nOregon, , , ,\n\norganic movement, , , , , , , , , , , , , \u201364\n\n_See also_ fruit (alternatives to industrial farming)\n\nOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),\n\norphan crops, \u201390\n\nPacific Basin Agricultural Research Center,\n\nPang, Lorrin, ,\n\npapaya, , , , , \u201398, \u201322, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nPapaya Administrative Committee,\n\nParaguay, , \u201398\n\nparaquat, , , ,\n\nParkinson's disease, ,\n\npatenting our food, , , , , \u201374, , , , ,\n\nPauley, Jane,\n\nPBS,\n\nPCBs, \u201353\n\npeanuts, , ,\n\nPearlstone Center, Maryland,\n\npeas, , , , ,\n\nPennsylvania, , , , , , ,\n\nPennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, ,\n\nPennsylvania State University,\n\nPeople for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA),\n\nPepsi,\n\nPerdue, , , , ,\n\nperennials, promise of, , , \u201329\n\npermethrin, , ,\n\nPersia,\n\nPesticide Action Network,\n\npesticides\n\nagrochemical's influence,\n\nfarm next door, ,\n\nfeeding the world, , , ,\n\nGM crops and, , , , \u201377,\n\nKauai, \u201348,\n\nMaui, , , , , , ,\n\n\"pesticide drift,\" \u201340, , ,\n\nreinventing the Plains,\n\nsafety question, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nsustainability of GMOs, , , , , , , ,\n\nwartime chemicals to petroleum-based farm chemicals, \u201354\n\n_See also_ chemicals sprayed on GMOs; insecticides; _specific pesticides_\n\nPew Research Center,\n\npharmaceutical companies and \"biopharm\" crops, \u201311\n\npharmaceuticals and GMOs, \u201328\n\nphenotype, ,\n\nPhilippines, , , , , , ,\n\nPhillipson, Mark,\n\nphosphorous, ,\n\npigs\/hogs, , , \u201327, , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nPimentel, David, ,\n\nPioneer, , , , ,\n\nPioneer Hi-Bred, , ,\n\nPipeline Masters,\n\nPlant Breeders Rights Act,\n\nplant that started civilization and the plant that could save it, \u201329\n\nPlenish soybeans, , \u201338\n\nplum,\n\n_Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA_ (Vallianatos),\n\nPoland,\n\npolio vaccinations,\n\npolitical power of agrochemical market, , , \u20138, , , , , , , , \u201331, , , , \u201344, \u201349, , , , \u201361, \u201369, , \u201395\n\nPollan, Michael, , ,\n\nPolynesia,\n\nPompeo, Mike, ,\n\nPortland, Oregon,\n\nPortugal,\n\npotato blight in Ireland, , ,\n\npotatoes, \u201379,\n\nPotrykus, Ingo, \u201391, ,\n\nprairies, promise of, , , \u201329\n\n\"Precautionary Principle,\" \u201365\n\nPribyl, Louis,\n\nprocessed foods, , , , , , \u201350, , , , \u201354, , , , , , , ,\n\nproduce, , , \u201351, , , ,\n\nprofit motive, , , , , , , , \u201364, , , , , \u201387, , , ,\n\nPrometheus, mapping, engineering, \u2013105\n\n\"promoter,\"\n\n\"proprietary information\" shroud,\n\npublic relations (feeding the world), , , , , , \u201379, , \u201368, \u2013205, , ,\n\nPuerto Rico,\n\npulling weeds, \u201383,\n\npumpkins, ,\n\nPuna on the Big Island, ,\n\nPurcell, John,\n\nQuayle, Dan,\n\nradishes as cover crop, \u201345\n\nRainbow papaya, , , , , \u201398, \u201322, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nrainforest,\n\nrats study, \u2013104\n\nReagan, Ronald, , ,\n\nrecombinant DNA technology, \u201357,\n\nRedfeather, Nancy, , , \u201354, ,\n\nRegal, Philip, \u201367\n\n\"regenerative,\"\n\nregional food specialties,\n\nregionalization of food production, \u201366\n\nregulation, , , , , , , , , , , \u201371, , , , , , \u201334, , , , , , ,\n\nReimann, Carol,\n\nreinventing the Plains, \u201314\n\n_Remate,_\n\nrennin,\n\nrespiratory problems, ,\n\nRestricted Use Pesticides (RUPs),\n\nretraction of a peer-reviewed paper, \u2013103\n\nrice, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ golden rice\n\nRiceland Food,\n\nringspot virus, \u201311, ,\n\nRNA, , , , , \u201384, , , , , , , \u201376\n\nroad-building after WWII, , , , ,\n\nRockefeller Foundation, ,\n\nRodale Institute,\n\nRonald, Pamela, ,\n\nroots (basics about GMOs), , \u2013105\n\nanti-GMO movement, , , ,\n\nfederal government, watchdog or cheerleader, , , , , , , , , , , \u201371, , , , , , \u201334, , , , , , ,\n\ngenetic equivalent of _War and Peace,_ \u201387,\n\nindustrial food and disappearance of American farmer, , \u201311, , , \u201376, , ,\n\ninformation squeeze (labeling), , \u201346, , , ,\n\nmapping, engineering, Prometheus, \u2013105\n\npatenting our food, , , , , \u201375, , ,\n\nsafety of GMOs, , \u20138, , \u201346, \u201362, \u201371, , , \u2013105, ,\n\nSchmeiser (Percy) case, \u201374\n\nself-regulation, perils of, \u201371\n\nS\u00e9ralini (Gilles-\u00c9ric) affair, \u2013104\n\nsoil depletion, , , , , , , , , ,\n\ntinkering with the genetic machine, \u201398\n\n_See also_ chemicals sprayed on GMOs; genetically modified organisms (GMOs)\n\nroot systems, , , , \u201321, ,\n\nRosenstiel, Fern, , , , , ,\n\nRoslin Institute, University of Edinburgh,\n\nRoss, Gerry \"Farmer Gerry,\" \u201363,\n\nRosset, Peter,\n\nRoundup, , , , , , \u201389, , , , ,\n\n_See also_ glyphosate; herbicides; Monsanto\n\nRoundup Ready food crops, , , , , , , ,\n\nRural Advancement Foundation International,\n\nRussia (Soviet Union), , ,\n\nRussian National Association for Genetic Safety,\n\nrye, ,\n\nsacred land misuse (Maui), , \u201376\n\n_Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism_ (Nestle),\n\nsafety of GMOs, , \u20138, , \u201346, \u201362, \u201371, , , \u2013105, , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ chemicals sprayed on GMOs\n\nSalina, Kansas,\n\nsalmon,\n\nsalt-tolerant tomatoes,\n\n_Sand County Almanac, A_ (Leopold),\n\nSanders, Russ,\n\nSanford, John,\n\nSan Francisco, California, , ,\n\nSaudi Arabia,\n\nsauerkraut, , \u201361\n\nSchmeiser (Percy) case, \u201374\n\nSchmidt, Jennie and Hans, \u201336, , \u201340, \u201342, \u201346, \u201350,\n\nSchneider, Steffen, \u201359, \u201362, , \u201365, , \u201384\n\nSchubert, David,\n\n_Science,_\n\nscientific vs. anti-GMO arguments, \u201393\n\nseeds (front lines of GMO debate), , \u201376\n\nanti-GMO movement, , \u201320, , , , , , , , \u201351, , , , ,\n\nBig Island battle, , , , , , , , , , , \u201357, ,\n\nKauai, , \u201348, , , , , , , , ,\n\nMaui war, , , , , , \u201376, , ,\n\nRainbow papaya, , , , , \u201398, \u201322, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nsoil depletion, , , , , , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ genetically modified organisms (GMOs); Hawaii\n\nself-regulation, perils of, \u201371\n\nS\u00e9ralini (Gilles-\u00c9ric) affair, \u2013104\n\nSHAKA Movement, , , , , \u201375\n\nShake It for SHAKA,\n\nShapiro, Robert, , ,\n\nShiva, Vandana, , ,\n\nshort-grained rice _(japonica),_\n\nSiddiqui, Islam,\n\nsilphium,\n\nSimpson, Janet, ,\n\nsmall RNAs, , , , \u201384, , ,\n\nSmil, Vaclav, ,\n\nSmithsonian,\n\nSnyder, Brian, , \u201347\n\nsoda, , , , , , , ,\n\nsoil depletion,\n\nfruit (alternatives to industrial farming), , , , , , , \u201318, , , , , ,\n\nroots (basics about GMOs), , , , , , , , , ,\n\nseeds (front lines of GMO debate), , , , , , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ ecological problems\n\nSommer, Alfred, \u2013200, \u2013201,\n\nsorghum, , , , ,\n\nsorrel, , , ,\n\nSouth Africa, ,\n\nSouth America, , , , ,\n\nSouth Dakota,\n\nSouth Korea,\n\nSoviet Union (Russia), , ,\n\nsoybeans\n\nagrochemical's influence, , , , , , , ,\n\nAmerica and, , , ,\n\nannuals, problem with,\n\nfarm next door, \u201352, , ,\n\nfeeding the world, , \u201398, ,\n\ngene-editing technique (CRISPR),\n\nKauai,\n\nmapping, engineering, Prometheus, , , ,\n\nPlenish soybeans, , \u201338\n\nsafety question, , , , ,\n\nsustainability, , , , \u201338,\n\n_See also_ America and GMOs\n\nSpain, ,\n\nspecialty crops,\n\nspraying vs. dousing, \u201340\n\nsquare tomato. _See_ Flavr Savr\n\n\"stacked\" herbicides, \u201335\n\nStalin, Joseph,\n\nStanford, ,\n\nStarLink corn, , \u201310, ,\n\nstarvation. _See_ crop dependency and starvation\n\nSteiner, Rudolf,\n\nstinkweed, \u201336\n\nstomach problems, ,\n\nStonyfield,\n\nStrella, Greg, \u201367, \u201373\n\nstudent farming, , \u201373\n\nstudies and testing, \u201325, \u201327, , , , \u2013105, \u201315\n\nSubr gene,\n\nsub-Saharan Africa, , ,\n\nsuburb development, , \u201348, , ,\n\nsugar, \u201328,\n\nsugar beets, , , ,\n\n\"supermarket farm,\"\n\nsupreme courts, , , , , , ,\n\nsustainability of GMOs, , , \u201350\n\nSwaminathan, M. S., \u201396\n\nsweet potatoes, , , , , , ,\n\nSwitzerland, , , ,\n\nSyngenta, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nTaco Bell,\n\nTakata and exploding air bags,\n\nTaylor, Michael,\n\nTaylor, Nigel, \u201380, \u201382, , , , , ,\n\n\"terminator,\"\n\nTexas, ,\n\nTexas A&M University,\n\nThailand,\n\nThomas, Clarence,\n\ntillage radishes as cover crop, \u201345\n\n_Time,_ , ,\n\ntinkering with the genetic machine, \u201398\n\ntobacco, , , \u201313, , ,\n\ntomatoes, , , , , ,\n\n_See also_ Flavr Savr tomato\n\ntopsoil, , , ,\n\nToxic Substances Control Act,\n\nTrader Joe's, ,\n\n\"transcribed\" (DNA to RNA), \u201383\n\ntransgenic GM plants, \u201323, , , ,\n\n\"translated\" (RNA to protein), ,\n\nT (thymine), , ,\n\n2,4-D, , \u201335, \u201336, , , ,\n\nUganda, , , ,\n\nUK,\n\nUkraine,\n\nUltimate Fighting Championship (UFC),\n\nUnilever,\n\nUnion Carbide,\n\nUnited Kingdom,\n\nUnited Nations,\n\nUnited Soybean Board, \u201338\n\nUniversity of Caen,\n\nUniversity of California, ,\n\nUniversity of California, Berkeley, ,\n\nUniversity of California, Davis, , , , , ,\n\nUniversity of California, Irvine, ,\n\nUniversity of Cambridge,\n\nUniversity of Chicago,\n\nUniversity of Delaware, , , ,\n\nUniversity of Edinburgh,\n\nUniversity of Florida,\n\nUniversity of Hawaii, ,\n\nUniversity of Illinois,\n\nUniversity of Kansas,\n\nUniversity of Maryland, ,\n\nUniversity of Michigan, , ,\n\nUniversity of Minnesota,\n\nUniversity of Toronto,\n\nUniversity of Washington,\n\nurban farming, , \u201373\n\nU.S. Agency for International Development, ,\n\nU.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), , , , \u201370, , , , , \u201345, , , , ,\n\nU.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nU.S. Wheat Foods Council,\n\nUtah,\n\nVacants to Value program, Baltimore,\n\nVallianatos, E. G., ,\n\n\"values\" of a food company, \u201342\n\nVandermeer, John, , ,\n\nvegetative propagation,\n\nVermont, , , ,\n\nvetch, ,\n\nVietnam War, ,\n\n_Violence of the Green Revolution, The_ (Shiva),\n\nVirginia Beach,\n\nVispo, Conrad, \u201360\n\nvitamin A, , \u201391, \u201394, , , , ,\n\n_See also_ beta-carotene; golden rice\n\nvote (Maui), \u201376\n\nWaimea, Kauai, \u201341, ,\n\n\"walking the beans,\" ,\n\nWallace, Henry A.,\n\nWang, Shuwen,\n\n_War and Peace,_ genetic equivalent, \u201387,\n\nwartime chemicals to petroleum-based farm chemicals, \u201354\n\nWashington, D.C., , , ,\n\nWashington state, ,\n\nWashington State University, ,\n\nwater pollution, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nWatson, James,\n\nweeds. _See_ herbicides\n\nWeil, Raymond,\n\nwheat, , , \u201333, , , , , , , \u201312, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nwheatgrass, , \u201323, ,\n\nwhiteflies, \u201381\n\nWhitelaw, Bruce,\n\nWhole Foods, , \u201341, ,\n\nWille, Margaret, \u201356, \u201357\n\nWinnipeg, Canada,\n\nWisconsin, , ,\n\nWorld Bank,\n\nWorld Health Organization, , , , ,\n\nworldviews and GMOs, \u201398\n\nWorld War II, , , ,\n\nWright, Susan,\n\nWuerthele, Suzanne,\n\nYale University,\n\nZeneca,\n\nZika virus,\n\n# ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nMcKay Jenkins has been writing about people and the natural world for thirty years. His most recent book, _ContamiNation_ (Avery), chronicled his investigation into the myriad synthetic chemicals we encounter in our daily lives, and the growing body of evidence about the harm these chemicals does to our bodies and the environment. His book _Poison Spring_ (Bloomsbury, 2014), cowritten with E. G. Vallianatos, has been called \"a jaw-dropping expos\u00e9 of the catastrophic collusion between the Environmental Protection Agency and the chemical industry\" ( _Booklist_ , starred review).\n\nJenkins's other books include _Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands_ (Random House, 2005); _The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe_ (Random House, 2003); and _The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone_ (Random House, 2000). Jenkins is also the editor of _The Peter Matthiessen Reader_ (Vintage, 2000).\n\nA former staff writer for _The_ _Atlanta Constitution_ , Jenkins has also written regularly on environmental matters for _The_ _Huffington Post_ , _Outside_ , _Orion_ , _The New Republic_ , and many other publications.\n\nHe holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a PhD in English. Jenkins is currently the Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English, Journalism, and Environmental Humanities at the University of Delaware, where he has won the Excellence in Teaching Award. He lives in Baltimore with his family.\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9780698409835\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n\n## Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Also by McKay Jenkins\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Copyright\n  5. Dedication\n  6. Contents\n  7. Prologue | Square Tomatoes\n  8. Part One | ROOTS\n    1. 1. Are GMOs Safe? Is That the Right Question?\n    2. 2. The Long, Paved Road to Industrial Food, and the Disappearance of the American Farmer\n    3. 3. Mapping and Engineering and Playing Prometheus\n  9. Part Two | SEEDS\n    1. 4. The Fruit That Saved an Island\n    2. 5. Trouble in Paradise\n    3. 6. Fighting for That Which Feeds Us\n  10. Part Three | FRUIT\n    1. 7. Feeding the World\n    2. 8. The Plant That Started Civilization, and the Plant That Could Save It\n    3. 9. Can GMOs Be Sustainable?\n    4. 10. The Farm Next Door\n  11. Epilogue | Getting Our Hands Dirty\n  12. Acknowledgments\n  13. Notes\n  14. Index\n  15. About the Author\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Table of Contents\n  3. Start\n\n  1. i\n  2. ii\n  3. iii\n  4. iv\n  5. vi\n  6. vii\n  7. viii\n  8. ix\n  9. x\n  10. xi\n  11. xii\n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257. \n  258. \n  259. \n  260. \n  261. \n  262. \n  263. \n  264. \n  265. \n  266. \n  267. \n  268. \n  269. \n  270. \n  271. \n  272. \n  273. \n  274. \n  275. \n  276. \n  277. \n  278. \n  279. \n  280. \n  281. \n  282. \n  283. \n  284. \n  285. \n  286. \n  287. \n  288. \n  289. \n  290. \n  291. \n  292. \n  293. \n  294. \n  295. \n  296. \n  297. \n  298. \n  299. \n  300. \n  301. \n  302. \n  303. \n  304. \n  305. \n  306. \n  307. \n  308. \n  309. \n  310. \n  311. \n  312. \n  313. \n  314. \n  315. \n  316. \n  317. \n  318. \n  319. \n  320. \n  321. \n  322. \n  323. \n  324. \n  325. \n  326. \n  327. \n  328. \n  329. \n  330. \n  331. \n  332. \n  333. \n  334.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nHENRY REYNOLDS is one of Australia's best-known and most widely read historians. He is an adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania. His sustained and meticulous research has played a major part in the political and legal milestones: the Mabo and Wik judgements. Professor Reynolds' books include With the White People, Fate of a Free People, This Whispering in Our Hearts, Why Weren't We Told?, Fate of a Free People and Nowhere People.\n\n# Other Books by Henry Reynolds\n\nAborigines and Settlers   \nRace Relations in North Queensland   \nFrontier   \nThe Law of the Land   \nDispossession   \nWith the White People   \nFate of a Free People\n\n# THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FRONTIER\n\n# Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia\n\n# Henry Reynolds\nA UNSW Press book\n\nPublished by   \nUniversity of New South Wales Press Ltd   \nUniversity of New South Wales   \nSydney NSW 2052   \nAUSTRALIA   \nwww.unswpress.com.au\n\n\u00a9 Henry Reynolds 1981, 1982, 2006\n\nFirst published by James Cook University of North Queensland, 1981   \nPublished by Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1982   \nThis UNSW Press edition 2006\n\nThis book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.\n\nNational Library of Australia   \nCataloguing-in-Publication entry\n\nReynolds, Henry, 1938- .   \nThe other side of the frontier : Aboriginal resistance to   \nthe European invasion of Australia.\n\nRev. ed. Bibliography. Includes index.\n\n9781742240497\n\n1. Aboriginal Australians\u2013History. 2. Aboriginal Australians\u2013Wars. 3. Government, Resistance to\u2013Australia. 4. Australia\u2013Colonization\u2013History. 5. Australia\u2013Race relations\u2013History. I. University of New South Wales. II. Title.\n\nTypeset Thomson Digital\n\nCover design and illustration Di Quick (after J Macfarlane, Aboriginals surprised by a camel team, 1893)\nFor Isabelle Alice Reynolds\n\n# Table of Contents\n\nOther Books by Henry Reynolds  \nTitle Page  \nCopyright Page  \nDedication  \nNEW INTRODUCTION  \nChapter 1 \\- EXPLORERS AND BEFORE  \nChapter 2 \\- CONTINUITY AND CHANGE  \nChapter 3 \\- RESISTANCE: MOTIVES AND OBJECTIVES  \nChapter 4 \\- RESISTANCE: TACTICS AND TRADITIONS  \nChapter 5 \\- THE POLITICS OF CONTACT  \nChapter 6 \\- THE PASTORAL FRONTIER  \nChapter 7 \\- OTHER FRONTIERS  \nCONCLUSION  \nNOTES  \nSELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY  \nINDEX\n\n# NEW INTRODUCTION\n\nI wrote The Other Side of the Frontier 25 years ago and with some anxiety asked a handful of colleagues to read the manuscript. Their encouragement prompted me to send it to several publishers whose negative responses were deeply disappointing. One publisher observed that there were already too many books about the Aborigines; the other that my manuscript had left out many significant themes and that it would need substantial revision. Feeling that the readers had not appreciated how innovative the work was, I received the support of my head of department at James Cook University, the late B.J. Dalton, and we published the book ourselves and sold it entirely by post. The venture was far more successful than we could have imagined. For weeks the departmental office was overwhelmed with orders from all around the country. The secretaries spent much of their time packing and dispatching books. A year later Penguin was keen to take the book on and over 20 years it was reprinted numerous times.\n\nThe manuscript was the fruit of ten years' intense, if intermittent, research\u2013of the kind that was possible for a busy tertiary teacher. By the end of that time I had worked in the major archives and research libraries all over Australia and in London as well. In 1972 I published a collection of documents entitled Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience, 1788\u20131939, and assorted articles in academic and literary journals. It was an exciting time to be working on Aboriginal history. There was much international interest in race relations and I had taken several honours courses which looked at a number of settler societies and their relations with indigenous people. Young scholars all over Australia were beginning to research hitherto neglected aspects of the country's past. But living in Townsville, in a time before email, I only had limited contact with them. My most important professional associations were with an increasing number of honours and post-graduate students in my own department in Townsville.\n\nBy the end of the 1970s I had gathered together a great deal of material and had begun to feel a sense of urgency about the need to write a substantial book. My plans changed a number of times. Originally it was to be about Queensland in the nineteenth century, then eastern Australia and finally the continent as a whole from 1788 to the early twentieth century. It began to take shape as a study of the European settlers\u2013as much as, or more than, the Aborigines\u2013and of what they did to, planned for and thought of the blacks.\n\nIt was only when I sat down to write with several free months in front of me that I was forced to confront the stylistic problems involved in shifting the focus from settler to indigene and back again. Suddenly, and quite impulsively, I made a decision to write two books and begin with one about the Aboriginal side of the frontier and to put aside by far the larger part of my research for a subsequent book, which eventually appeared in 1987 as Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land. Even then there seemed to be more that needed to be said. In neither frontier books had there been much about the Aborigines\u2013and there were many of them\u2013who worked for and associated with the pioneer settlers. This required a third book, With the White People, which was published in 1990. The three books in the trilogy were, then, closely related and rested on research material quarried at much the same time from the same sources.\n\nWhen I decided to begin with a book about the Aboriginal experience I was not sure that there was enough evidence to support the story. Much of what was available to me had been found by chance and for at least the first five years of research had been collected more out of curiosity than with the idea of producing a book of the kind that eventuated. When writing an introduction to the 1981 James Cook edition I observed:\n\nThe decision to concentrate attention on the other side of the frontier was quite a recent one. Initially, I was convinced, like many previous Australian scholars, that such a study would be impossible to consummate, that the evidence was too fragmentary to sustain serious scholarship, or that the Aboriginal psyche was so different that it was uniquely resistant to the historical imagination. I became convinced that both propositions were awry and in fact they gave way together as the evidence piled up as slowly and inexorably as a sand-drift.\n\nI am sure that much of the momentum of the narrative derived from the sheer excitement of piecing together the small fragments of information and eventually finding that they made a plausible mosaic. Oral history carried out in and around Townsville provided some of the most compelling evidence, although the resulting material was probably less important in itself than the stimulation provided to the imagination and the concurrent growth of empathy.\n\nI recalled one occasion in particular. I was visiting a Murray Islander elder with my friends Noel Loos and Eddie Mabo. The old man orated in characteristic Island style with a loud commanding voice. He retold the stories that he had heard as a child: tales of European castaways, shipwrecks, pearl-diving and the arrival of the London Missionary Society's teachers in 1871. One of the stories was about the appearance of a sailing ship off Murray Island. The old man vividly described the scene. His ancestors were scrutinising the ship and its occupants. They had seen Europeans at the rail just as interested in them. Indeed they were looking through telescopes or what our informant called 'white men's eyes'. I think that may have been the moment when the idea of The Other Side of the Frontier first took root.\n\nThe book was clearly a product of north Australia and the experiences of life there in the 1960s and 1970s, which I was later to outline in Why Weren't We Told. But equally there were academic origins. I had been very impressed with the new social history and the work of English scholar E.P. Thompson with his commitment to see working-class history from below. But to write about Aborigines and their experience of white Australia was quite a different task. I attempted to explain the situation when I argued in the conclusion that the book sought to turn Australian history not upside down, but inside out.\n\nIt was only much later that I realised that what I was trying to do closely paralleled the contemporaneous work of the historians of south Asia who launched the school of subaltern studies. A month or two after The Other Side of the Frontier was published in Townsville, in Canberra Ranajit Guha wrote the preface to the first volume of Subaltern Studies, which he explained would deal with those who were subject to subordination whether expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender or office or in any other way. In Volume III of Subaltern Studies, which appeared in 1984, Guha emphasised his opposition to elitisms and the failure of traditional history to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destiny.\n\nIn Australia the impact of European colonisation was so varied and so powerful that it would be fanciful to claim that the Aborigines were ever in a position to make their own destiny. But what The Other Side of the Frontier showed was that by reading mainly European texts against the grain, as it is often called, it was possible to create a picture of an indigenous response that was far more varied and creative than had hitherto been supposed.\n\nIn a preface to the 1982 edition I argued that the book was a major challenge to conventional ideas about Aborigines and therefore to the way most Australians viewed important aspects of their past. Even sympathetic whites, I argued, spoke as though there was a single mode of black behaviour. I believed that I had shown that there was always diversity, contradiction, competing objectives; that Aborigines behaved politically even in the most unpromising and challenging circumstances. Previously European writers had depicted a rigid, unchanging Aboriginal society unable to cope with new challenges, which had collapsed suddenly and completely. What I thought I had been able to show was that the Aborigines were curious about white society and endeavoured to incorporate new experiences within the resilient bonds of traditional culture. They reacted creatively to European ideas, techniques, language and commodities. Nor, I argued, were they a particularly peaceful or passive people as conventional studies often suggested. Frontier conflict was apparent in almost every part of Australia, though it varied in duration and intensity. While suffering disproportionately, Aboriginal clans levied a considerable toll on pioneer communities\u2013not just in death and injury but in property loss and prolonged anxiety as well. The cost of colonisation, I argued, was much higher than traditional historical accounts had suggested.\n\nWhile seeking to make Aboriginal behaviour understandable to white readers I hoped to draw parallels with the well-known experience of pioneer settlers. I wrote:\n\nMany themes link the pioneers who looked inward to Aboriginal Australia and the tribesmen who looked outward towards the encroaching wave of European settlement. Like the white colonists the blacks were pioneers, struggling to adjust to a new world of experience and one even stranger and more threatening than the Australian environment was to the Europeans.\n\nIn my enthusiasm I hoped that my readers would find the other side of the frontier a new and exciting province providing fresh insights and forcing a radical reinterpretation of old themes. Aborigines who experienced the massive impact of European invasion with fortitude and courage were, I argued, people who demanded our attention and respect. I wondered if they might eventually earn as much, or even more, admiration than explorers, pioneers and other traditional heroes of nationalist mythology.\n\nThe response to my book was more positive than I could have hoped for. Even our small first edition was soon sold out, while the Penguin edition of 1982 was reprinted several times over the next few years. Over 20 years total sales have amounted to about 35 000 copies. There were many favourable reviews and several literary prizes. But in that time it has been the chance conversations with readers that have given me most encouragement. They have often said that the book allowed them to see Australian history through new eyes. Over the years, singers, composers, painters, poets and film makers have told me how they have drawn on material they found in The Other Side of the Frontier. Beyond a limited number of contacts of that kind an author can only speculate about how their book has been read and received. Certainly the most moving experience I can remember was when visiting Yarrabah, the Aboriginal community near Cairns, an old man showed me his copy of The Other Side of the Frontier. I had never seen a book so worn and so used. It had been passed around the whole community. Almost everyone had read it or had it read to them.\n\nIt is an interesting experience returning to a book written more than 20 years before. One immediate question is whether it should be rewritten or amended or left as an artefact of its time. It would have been tempting to add new evidence turned up in more recent years. But much of it would have merely added to and embellished existing interpretations. One thing that has happened since 1981 is the great expansion of oral history and the placing on the record of large amounts of Aboriginal testimony associated with land claims. There is now a significant body of evidence about the experiences and reactions of those Aboriginal people who had their first sustained experience of Europeans in the twentieth century. There is clearly another, important book to be written that would complement the nineteenth-century material that makes up the great bulk of the text of this book.\n\nSince it first appeared I have often referred to The Other Side of the Frontier, have quoted from it in many lectures, but I had not, until very recently, read it from beginning to end. What immediately struck me was just how much detail the nineteenth-century sources actually provided about the Aboriginal response to the European invasion. But what unfolds is not a simple story at all. On almost every page there is evidence of complexity. It is far from being a facile moral tale of black virtue and white turpitude. It just does not fit into that category stigmatised in the 1990s as black armband history\u2013if indeed such a phenomenon actually exists outside the imagination of conservative commentators.\n\nBut, in retrospect, some of the criticisms of the book do have currency. As any reader will be aware the evidence I used comes from all over Australia and is drawn from every period from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Underpinning the narrative is an assumption about an Aboriginal homogeneity that was never there\u2013and a tendency to treat European settlement as an unchanging presence. These points have to be conceded. They were always there in the back of my mind. But such is the scarcity and the fragmentary nature of much of the evidence that it always seemed to be a case of doing it in the way that I did or not doing it at all.\n\nThe sad fact about Australia is that there are only a few places, and a couple of moments, when much more detailed, specific studies are possible. There was no 'middle ground' in Australia\u2013that long era of American history described by Richard White when Indians, whites and mestizos mixed on terms of equality and left abundant documentary evidence behind. The early years at Sydney were a time when a group of capable Europeans both related closely with resident Aborigines and wrote and thought about the experience. Inga Clendinnen's book Dancing with Strangers illustrates how creatively such documentation can be used. But there were few other moments like that. The early years at Perth offer another example. The Van Diemen's Land journals and letters of George Augustus Robinson are a source still waiting for the researcher of the other side of the frontier, as are the journals and diaries of numerous nineteenth-century missionaries. But over much of the continent we are never likely to uncover more than small shards of evidence\u2013of the kind swept up to help construct the mosaic presented here.\n\nAnother criticism voiced now and then over the last 20 years is that the history of indigenous society is written with modern anthropology in mind; that ideas taken from that discipline are then projected backwards to provide an interpretive framework. It is a practice known as upstreaming. I was always aware of this problem but I'm not sure there is any easy solution to it. It would be unthinkable to approach Aboriginal history without at least a grounding in the principal anthropological works. Having absorbed that material, it cannot be rinsed from the mind before turning to the historical record and trying to interpret the past.\n\nAnother recurring question is that of the role of the historian in writing Aboriginal history. In both editions of the book I declared my position. The work, I explained, was a white man's interpretation, aimed primarily at white Australians. What I now presume about my family's Aboriginal ancestry\u2013as outlined in my recent book Nowhere People \u2014 does not significantly change my view on the matter. I have long believed that, while there are aspects of traditional society that are off limits to anyone without specific permission from elders and custodians, history since 1788 is the story of the interaction of indigenous people and the new settler society; and that the available and relevant records are overwhelmingly written by white men\u2013even when they were reporting and commenting on what Aboriginal informants told them.\n\nOver the years I have heard conflicting opinions from indigenous Australians. Indeed, some have told me in no uncertain terms that I have trespassed on their intellectual territory. Others have spoken up in my defence and many Aboriginal people have supported my work. In Townsville my friends found a different way to deal with the question. They insisted that, although I might not know it, I was actually a Murri\u2013an observation that returned to me with great force when my family began to uncover ancestral secrets.\n\nThe intellectual criticism of the book has long been overshadowed by attacks that are political in motivation. In fact many of them come from people who give the impression of not having actually read the text, yet don't like the idea of it. Some of the antagonism stems from my open avowal that the book could not escape the fate that awaits a political document. In the opening paragraph of both editions I nailed my colours to the mast observing that it was not 'conceived, researched or written in a mood of detached scholarship. It is inescapably political, dealing as it must with issues that have aroused deep passions since 1788 and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future'.\n\nIt is a declaration that may need a little exegesis. The book came out of Townsville, a place where race relations were a matter of everyday concern and discussion. As a lecturer in Australian history, I found that even to raise the subject created consternation\u2013whether expressed vociferously or in deep, thoughtful silence. Almost no-one seemed detached or dispassionate when race was considered, not even in everyday conversation. To talk openly about Aboriginal history was, in itself, a political act and was seen to be so. It would have seemed a complete misrepresentation to fail to mention the fraught context in which the book was conceived, researched and written. And no matter how the book was addressed to an Australian audience in the early 1980s it would inevitably be received politically. This seems to be even more the case today than it was 25 years ago.\n\nThe most common criticism of my work is that I make too much of frontier violence. I have never conceded this point. I think it plays a relatively small part in the text of The Other Side of the Frontier and for that matter in my work as a whole. And the conflict I refer to in chapters three and four is always placed in context in an attempt not to condemn anyone but to explain the circumstances in which violence arose. On re-reading this material I fail to find any tendency at all to moralise about specific violent incidents or to deliberately aggravate a tender white conscience.\n\nBut the section of the book that has acted like a lightning rod for continuing criticism is the one where I sought to determine how many people had died in frontier conflict. I began by mentioning the work of other scholars who had attempted to assess the death rate in specific regions of the country and then wrote:\n\nFor the continent as a whole it is reasonable to suppose that at least 20 000 Aborigines were killed as a direct result of conflict with the settlers. Secondary effects of the invasion\u2013disease, deprivation, disruption\u2013were responsible for the premature deaths of many more although it is almost impossible to arrive at a realistic figure.\n\nIt was the figure of 20 000 that has caused the greatest controversy. Several points need to be made. I debated with myself whether I should attempt to arrive at an estimate of the Aboriginal death toll. I had, after all, spent ten years researching all over Australia. I decided it was incumbent on me to report what conclusion I had arrived at as a result of that research. I thought it would be evasive to do anything else. I could scarcely pretend that I hadn't thought about the question. So it was an estimate and could not have been anything more than that. I did not think 20 000 was an excessive figure for a conflict that occurred continent-wide over a period of close to 150 years. It was a much smaller figure than other writers have suggested given the dramatic decline of the Aboriginal population after 1788. I still think it is reasonable to suppose that the death rate was somewhere near that figure. None of the detailed scholarly work over the last 20 years in books, articles and theses has persuaded me to change my mind on the matter. What still surprises me is that many Australians so clearly resist such a conclusion, despite our national obsession with our war dead in every conflict from the Boer War to the present.\n\nI thought in 1981, as I do now, that there are far more interesting questions than the actual number who died in frontier conflict, which will always have to be a matter of speculation. There is the abiding matter of the politics of the dead or, as I asked in the conclusion, How, then, do we deal with the Aboriginal dead? Are they best forgotten or should they be celebrated and memorialised? Should they receive as much attention and reverence as white Australian soldiers who fell in battle? Should they be celebrated as warriors who died defending their way of life against an all-powerful invader? I certainly thought 25 years ago that we would have made some progress in answering these questions. But they lie there still, quite unresolved. It is time, I believe, they were faced again. Such issues were often discussed during the 1990s, the decade of the Reconciliation movement, but they seem to have disappeared from public discourse.\n\nThe most severe criticism of my estimate of Aboriginal deaths has come from Keith Windschuttle, particularly in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which while focussed on early Tasmania has implications for Australia as a whole. Central to his argument is the proposition that, like many other historians, I had deliberately exaggerated the number of people killed in frontier conflict. He concluded that only about 120 Tasmanians died violently. He also reduced the conventional estimate for the pre-contact population from 5000 to 2000, the better to explain the rapid demographic decline after 1803. There is scarcely anyone familiar with Tasmanian history in the recent past who would agree with either of these figures. In his defence of his low estimate of frontier deaths, Windschuttle turned to already well-known features of the Black War. The rugged and forested terrain favoured the Aborigines, giving them advantages in both attack and escape. Convicts working in the bush were often denied guns and rarely had horses. Even when firearms were available they were cumbersome, inefficient and inaccurate.\n\nGiven these particular features of the conflict of the 1820s we would reasonably expect that the Aboriginal death toll would be greater in later decades in mainland Australia where frontiersmen were invariably mounted and armed with far better weapons. But, even if we leave these considerations aside and project Windschuttle's Tasmanian figures across Bass Strait and into the later years of the nineteenth century, we arrive at what, for many people, may be an unexpected result. Even if we take the lowest estimate of the pre-contact population of 300 000, the presumed death rate\u2013using Tasmania as our model for conflict\u2013would amount to between 18 000 and 19 000: a figure not far short of my estimate of 20 000. However the contemporary view is that 300 000 is much too low a figure, and that the original population might have been twice as large, suggesting further that my contentious estimate of frontier deaths was modest indeed.\n\nWith the assistance of the University of New South Wales Press we relaunch The Other Side of the Frontier. The climate of opinion and the general knowledge of the Australian community is quite different from that in 1981. I am as curious now as I was 25 years ago to discover how a new generation of readers responds to the book.\n\n# Chapter 1\n\n# EXPLORERS AND BEFORE\n\n# FIRST SIGHTINGS\n\nThey never seen a white man in their lives\u2013this is in the early time. There was one white man must've got lost and he followed the Murray River down and there was a big camp and a few dark ladies went out to pick the wild-bean\u2013they go out daily to get this wild food every day. When they went out and they looked up the river and they saw somebody moving and they got up and look again and someone was moving alright and they take it for\u2013they call it the witchcraft man\u2013the witchcraft man must be moving about. They left all their bean trees and they ran home to tell all the people back home in the camp\u2013'We saw something strange up there\u2013It's like a white man!\u2013a white man!!'\n\nThis is one of a number of traditional Aboriginal stories recorded in North Queensland a few years ago. It probably dates from the 1860s or 1870s but it has not been possible to relate it to a known historical event and the detail may have been significantly altered during a hundred years of currency. Similar stories were no doubt told in many parts of Australia during the nineteenth century, but when clans were dispersed and languages lost much of the Aboriginal record of their experience with Europeans was lost. Fragments survive; some in the written accounts of early settlers others embodied in Aboriginal oral tradition. The nineteenth century South Australian missionary George Taplin knew several men who remembered the arrival in 1830 of Sturt's expedition at the mouth of the Murray and the terror experienced as they watched the whale-boat cross Lake Alexandrina. Coastal tribes told European confidants about the awesome appearance of the first sailing ships off hitherto desolate coasts. In 1831 G. A. Robinson noted down in his diary the childhood recollections of a Tasmanian Aborigine who as a boy had first seen a ship anchored off Maria Island (probably the Baudin-Peron expedition of 1802). His perplexed kinsmen thought it looked like a small island but were left bewildered and ran fearfully away from the sea. Swan River Aborigines described with 'great vividness' their impressions on seeing the first ship approach the shore. They imagined it to be some 'huge winged monster' and there was 'a universal consternation'. One man ran fourteen miles inland breathlessly spreading the alarming news. Apprehension was general and women hid their children in the bush. A similar story was related by Port Fairy blacks who recalled that they thought sailing ships were either huge birds or trees growing in the sea. Old men in North Queensland still tell a story about the arrival of a sailing ship at Rockingham Bay:\n\nIn this Cardwell district there was many natives camped along that beach. And one morning they got up and looked out in the sea and they saw this ship was sailing out in the sea. And they wondering what this coming. It was so big!! And they watched it and watched it and watched it and gradually the ship came to the shore.\n\nFor coastal tribes the sudden and unexpected appearance of Europeans was often an awesome event but away from the sea white men did not arrive unannounced. News of them travelled inland well in advance of the encroaching wave of settlement while straying domestic animals and an assortment of European commodities long preceded the bullock drays into the interior.\n\n# EUROPEAN COMMODITIES\n\nTrade routes criss-crossed Aboriginal Australia. Shells, ochre, stone artifacts, spears, woven bags, gum, pituri and many other items were ceremonially exchanged at regular meetings, often hundreds of miles from their point of origin. European commodities gradually infiltrated traditional trade routes beginning within months of earliest contact. At the first settlement on the Tamar in 1804 local blacks gave a necklace to one of the soldiers who found to his surprise a white button threaded among the shells. Robert Dawson witnessed the trade of goods on the central coast of New South Wales in the 1820s. Tribes in the interior exchanged animal skins and fur artifacts with coastal blacks who through contact with Europeans were able to reciprocate with iron axes and pieces of glass along with such traditional objects as sea shells. Late nineteenth-century explorers of the remoter areas of the continent found exotic artifacts in isolated Aboriginal camps illustrating both the importance of traditional trading networks and the increasing use of European commodities. Carnegie found pearl shells in camps 500 miles in the interior of the Western Desert along with assorted European bric-a-brac\u2013an old iron tent peg, the lid of a tin matchbox and small pieces of glass carefully wrapped in covers of woven feathers. Warburton found a large sea-shell and an old butcher's knife in one camp and in another two shells, a steel axe and part of an iron dray tyre. Mulligan's Cape York expedition of 1876 came across a camp where traditional items mingled with an empty sardine box, a jam pot and a sharpened piece of inch-iron. A pioneer pearler on the northwest of Western Australia came across a small cannon in a deserted camp on an island in Vansittart Bay.\n\nThe random discoveries of explorers and pioneers illustrated a more general phenomenon. All over Australia at varying times traditional tool kits were augmented with bottles, glass, strips of cloth, pieces of greenhide, articles of clothing. Iron was particularly attractive. Aborigines were given, found, or scavenged scraps of iron and finished steel tools from camps, stations and homesteads in every district in Australia and traded them back beyond the frontier. Traditional stone artifacts were being rapidly supplanted among most Aboriginal communities even before the arrival of the first permanent white settlers. Aborigines from the far south-west of Queensland told a local pioneer that a few iron tomahawks had preceded the squatters into the district by a good thirty years. Explorers found abundant evidence of Aboriginal use of iron and steel in places well beyond the reach of European settlement. Near the farthest point of his 1846 expedition into central Queensland Mitchell saw a steel axe. 'Even here', he mused, in the heart of the interior 'on a river utterly unheard of by white men, an iron tomahawk glittered on high in the hands of a chief'. Knowledge of axes may have spread even more widely than the desired objects themselves. While on his voyage around Australia in the 1820s P. P. King saw Aborigines on several parts of the coast who came down to the shore making chopping signs with their hands as if asking for European axes. Hovell met a group of blacks in central Victoria in the mid-1820s who pointed in the direction of Port Phillip indicating that they had seen white men fell trees there. Taking an axe they illustrated the way in which the Europeans had used it, 'not forgetting the grunt or hiss which the men invariably do when they are striking anything with force'.\n\nLate in 1847 Edmund Kennedy was returning from an expedition along the lower, unexplored reaches of the Barcoo. As he advanced towards the outer fringes of white settlement he began to notice the increasing evidence of the European presence\u2013at one camp a bundle of spears tied up with a piece of cotton handkerchief, then at succeeding ones a pint pot, a fragment of a blue knitted Guernsey shirt, rags, a broken hobble strap and a buckle. But as well as such material objects Aborigines often had experience of domestic animals\u2013cattle, horses, dogs, cats, donkeys, camels and rabbits\u2013which strayed away from centres of European settlement.\n\n# STRAYING ANIMALS\n\nCattle escaped from the struggling community at Sydney cove within a few weeks of the first landing and many animals subsequently followed the example of these bovine pioneers. Explorers often found their tracks and dung far out beyond the nearest European settlement. Oxley saw tracks 80 to 90 miles west of Bathurst in 1817. During an expedition of 1831 from the infant Swan River settlement over the Darling Range G. F. Moore reported finding what he coyly termed 'symptoms of Cows' which had already ventured into the interior. When deep in the central desert in 1873 Warburton met a group of Aborigines who, he concluded, had heard of cattle both by the signs they made and their 'tolerably good imitation of lowing when they saw the camels'.\n\nThe sudden appearance of cattle must have been a terrifying experience. A few traditional stories that have been preserved refer to the large size of the new animals, their fearsome looking horns, their bellowing and often aggressive behaviour. Davis and Bracefield, convict escapees from Moreton Bay, related that the Aborigines of the upper Brisbane Valley and Wide Bay were terrified of two stray bullocks that rampaged through their country and they clambered up nearby trees at the sound of their approach. South Australian Aborigines told the missionary George Taplin of the fear experienced when a couple of bullocks wandered into their tribal territories. They dubbed the exotic animals 'windwityere', or beings with spears on the head. In the south-east corner of South Australia local blacks told a story about their first sight of European animals. They were terrified by strange sounds in the night that could not be accounted for. At daylight one of the men crept out to investigate the source of the noise but came back deeply perplexed saying that he did not know what the creatures were for they could not be compared with anything seen before in their country. The whole party cautiously approached the strange creatures. 'We had a peep through the bushes', they later recalled:\n\nand saw what we now know to have been sheep, cattle, and horses and a dray. The bullock's bellowing was a terror to us. We saw the tracks of the cattle, sheep and horses, and could not imagine what it could be that made them.\n\nCattle were probably the most common intruders into Aboriginal territory and consciousness but rabbits, cats, camels, donkeys and horses found their way out beyond the fringes of settlement in various parts of the continent. Both the Elder expedition of 1891\u201392 and that of Carnegie five years later discovered domestic cats in remote parts of the western desert. Horne and Aiston reported that a middle aged Aborigine from central Australia told them of his first meeting with a rabbit thirty years earlier. On leaving his camp one morning he saw the strange animal under a bush. He ran back to get his father and several other men and they decided to kill the exotic creature. It was knocked down with boomerangs and then speared and the carcase was carried into the nearest point of European settlement to be identified.\n\nHorses ventured out beyond European settlement as well. Leichhardt's party saw one on the Dawson River in 1844 several hundred miles beyond the nearest stations as did McKinlay at Coopers Creek in 1861. North Queensland blacks tell a story about their forebears' first meeting with a stray horse. The story may date back to the release of several horses by Kennedy's expedition in 1848:\n\nSomebody lost a horse - first time they ever saw a horse... and they got their spears and boomerangs and nulla-nullas and they chased this horse and they speared the horse and they put so many spears in the horse that the old horse fell down. And they walked up and had a look at him and they lift his head up and said, 'What sort of creature is this?' They never see an animal so big. They said, 'I wonder where this animal has come from, it's so big'.\n\nIt is clear then that pioneers were preceded into the interior by feral animals and a range of European commodities. But what about information? How much had Aborigines learnt about the white invaders before they were caught in the onrushing tide of settlement?\n\n# INFORMATION\n\nThere was widespread cultural exchange over large areas of Aboriginal Australia. Ceremonies, songs, dances, words and ideas all flowed back and forth along the traditional trade routes. In his late nineteenth-century study of Aboriginal life in Queensland Roth described how ideas were interchanged:\n\nsuperstitions and traditions [are] handed on from district to district, and more or less modified in transit... new words and terms are picked up, and... corroborees are learnt and exchanged just like any other commodities.\n\nThe large ceremonial gatherings of neighbouring tribes provided the venue for gossip, trade and cultural interchange. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner observed such a meeting while studying the Daly River tribes in the early 1930s. He noted that diffusion of ideas took place most propitiously in quiet moments punctuating the large, dramatic ceremonies, while little knots of men and women were resting under the trees or around campfires at night and the songs were chanted, 'the myths retold, the dances rehearsed, the little technological tricks explained.\n\nTribal messengers were widely used in traditional society. These 'living newsmongers' travelled quickly over long distances conveying information from clan to clan. Early European observers of Aboriginal life were impressed with the speed and spread of Aboriginal communications. G. A. Robinson concluded that songs and corroborees current around Melbourne in the 1840s had arrived 'with amazing celerity' from as far north as the Hunter River. At much the same time on the far side of the continent a member of the Port Essington settlement noted that information passed so rapidly from tribe to tribe that 'an event of any importance is known over a large extent of country in the course of a very few months'. Howitt made similar observations while camped near Coopers Creek in 1861. He discovered that messengers were continually coming in from up to 150 miles away with news for the local clans about the movements of McKinlay's contemporaneous expedition. Howitt was later able to confirm the accuracy of reports that his fellow explorer had been caught in flood waters and had consequently abandoned his dray.\n\nCastaways and convict escapees provided additional evidence about the passage of information. Davis and Bracefield reported that news of Europeans frequently passed back from the outer fringes of European settlement while James Morrell confirmed that news soon spread from tribe to tribe. Barbara Thompson found that information about white activities in the Cape York area 'went at once throughout the islands', a judgement supported by John Jardine the Government Resident at Somerset who wrote that:\n\nthe communication between the islanders and the natives of the mainland is frequent, and the rapid manner in which news is carried from tribe to tribe to great distances is astonishing. I was informed of the approach of HMS 'Salamander' on her last visit two days before her arrival here. Intelligence is conveyed by means of fires made to throw smoke up in different forms, or by messengers who perform long and rapid journeys.\n\nDid news of Europeans travel as far as their artifacts? Was the meaning and significance of information significantly altered as it passed from tribe to tribe? If shells could pass right across the continent from north to south could information do likewise? We may never have enough evidence to answer these questions satisfactorily but an interesting event was reported by Windsor-Earl in relation to the Port Essington settlement in the Northern Territory. To the surprise of the Europeans Aborigines visiting the encampment from the interior spoke of 'white people who dwelt in the country to the south, and who built houses of stone', referring, it was assumed, to the new colony in South Australia on the far side of the continent.\n\n# LINGUISTIC DIFFUSION\n\nExplorers were often convinced that previously uncontacted Aborigines had heard of Europeans. Oxley thought it evident from the behaviour of blacks he met that they had 'previously heard of white people'. Early Western Australian exploring parties used black guides to communicate with more remote tribes whose members confirmed that they had been told of the settlers, their behaviour and possessions. As news of Europeans spread a few words of pidgin English were probably carried back beyond the frontier\u2013notably yarraman for horse, jumbuk for sheep, bula or bulloki for cattle, wheelbarrow for dray. These words and one or two others found their way into Aboriginal vocabularies from Bass Strait to Cape York and west into central Australia. Yarraman for instance, which came from the Batemans Bay dialect, was used in a large number of Aboriginal languages all over eastern Australia. In the areas around Adelaide the term pindi nanto or literally the newcomer's or European's kangaroo was coined as a term for horse. The diffusion of these two words\u2013one from New South Wales, the other from South Australia\u2013is a fascinating study. Yarraman reached central Australia from the east to be ultimately borrowed by the Walbri from their neighbours in that direction the Warramanga. But they also used the term nantu which they had borrowed from the Aranda to the south. It would seem therefore, that two currents of linguistic borrowing met and merged in the centre of the continent.\n\nThere is a little evidence from the Aboriginal side of the frontier which helps establish a link in the chain of linguistic diffusion from the Adelaide region to central Australia and beyond. In the 1920s a South Australian pioneer published an account of a series of contact stories he had collected from an old Aborigine who had grown up in the region bounded by the Flinders Ranges and Lake Frome. The old man related how:\n\nsome of the tribe lower down south had seen these strange people, and they had sent a messenger on with news that these people were making up towards their camp, and to be on the lookout for them and their wonderful nantoes\n\nIn the early 1860s Howitt used the word nantoe when conversing with Dieri tribesmen on the shores of Lake Hope near Coopers Creek and was immediately understood. At some stage the term passed on beyond central Australia and eventually reached the far side of the continent entering the vocabulary of the Wagaidj clans around Darwin.\n\nEuropeans typically collected Aboriginal vocabularies after considerable contact, when numerous English and pidgin terms had been adopted directly from the settlers or acculturated blacks from districts of earlier settlement. This frontier pidgin has been studied by a number of writers since 1834 when L. E. Threlkeld published his pioneering work An Australian Grammar which listed over twenty 'barbarisms introduced by sailors and stockmen'. But there is some evidence which suggests that prior borrowing took place from Aboriginal contacts before the arrival of Europeans. In 1846 Mitchell met a group of Aborigines on the Belyando, a locality remote from the nearest white settlement. He was amazed when the blacks exclaimed Yarraman on coming up to the expeditions' horses. McKinlay had a similar experience in the far north-east corner of South Australia in 1861 where there was perhaps slightly more chance of prior European contact. Explorers and pioneer squatters came across Aborigines with no apparent previous contact who used the term white-fellow when speaking of the Europeans. This happened to Mitchell, Alan Macpherson and Leichhardt in different parts of Queensland in the 1840s and to Carnegie in the western desert in 1896. Mitchell commented on this phenomenon in his account of his first expedition in northern New South Wales in 1831\u201332:\n\nWe heard calls in various directions, and 'whitefellow' pronounced very loudly and distinctly. 'Whitefellow', or 'white-ma' appears to be their name... for our race, and this appellation probably accompanies the first intelligence of such strangers, to the most remote, interior region.\n\nHowitt provided the most substantial evidence of the diffusion of information about Europeans and of new terms to express it. He discovered that Aborigines over a wide area of central Australia were aware of the northward progress of McKinlay's expedition of 1861. McKinlay himself was called whilprapinnaru by the blacks living on the outlying cattle stations in South Australia, an expression which meant the old-man, or leader, of the dray, or wheelbarrow as it was termed in pidgin English. Howitt discovered that the word followed McKinlay 'on from tribe to tribe' certainly as far as the south-west corner of Queensland along with assorted information about the expedition's possessions and behaviour.\n\n# FIREARMS\n\nNews of the danger and mysterious power of firearms was almost certainly passed on to Aborigines before they came into physical contact with Europeans. Explorers often found that blacks were highly apprehensive of guns even before they had been fired. While surveying Port Phillip in 1803 Tuckey met local Aborigines who 'signified their knowledge and fear of the effect of firearms'. Oxley found that blacks immediately ran off if anyone picked up a musket and would only return when it was put down 'showing by every simple means in their power their dread of its appearance'. McKinlay, Stuart and Giles all reported similar reactions in remote parts of the interior. Tribesmen who met Stuart pointed meaningfully to the expeditions' guns making loud noises with their mouths; Searcey reported that when he met a group of blacks on a remote beach in the Northern Territory one man came up, touched his revolver and said 'Boom!, Boom!, Boom!' Oral history from Mornington Island confirms this picture. Roughsey related that his father heard about guns long before he had seen white men. Mainland Aborigines told him how the Europeans could kill a man 'with thunder that sent down invisible spears to tear a hole in his body and spill his blood in the sand'.\n\nLinguistic evidence supports the proposition of an early diffusion of knowledge about guns. Numerous Eastern Australian languages contained terms for gun which derived from the English word musket. This suggests that the word passed from tribe to tribe quite early in the history of settlement possibly before muskets became obsolete. None of the variations of the word in question appear in lists of frontier pidgin suggesting that they evolved on the Aboriginal rather than the European side of the frontier. The geographical dispersal of musket words is impressive. They appeared in several Victorian languages\u2013Madjgad in Wergaia and Matjkat in Wemba-Wemba\u2013but were more common in Queensland and the Northern Territory. Marrkin was used by the Budjara around Charleville and the Gugu-Badhun five hundred kilometres away on the upper-Burdekin. Marrgin was employed by the Gugu-Yalanji on Cape York, Makini by the Kalkatungu around Cloncurry, Mugadi by the Djingili at Tennant Creek and Daly Waters, Makati by the Walbri and Mukuta by the Aranda. Variations of the same word were used by Aboriginal tribes living 1500 kilometres apart scattered over an area almost half the size of the continent.\n\nThus while the evidence is fragmentary and widely scattered we can gain some impression of the impact of European settlement on Aboriginal society before face to face contact had occurred. Most clans would have already been using an array of European commodities when pioneer settlers appeared even if they did not always know precisely where the new articles had come from. Feral animals would also have entered their territories\u2013cattle, horses, dogs, cats and pigs from the earliest period; camels, rabbits and donkeys during the second half of the nineteenth century. Information about the Europeans would probably have filtered through from distant tribes especially about the power and danger of their weapons. Along with news of the whiteman a handful of new words would also have entered ancient vocabularies all over the continent.\n\n# A CASTAWAY\n\nMany of the themes discussed to this point were illustrated by the experiences of the English sailor James Morrell (there are various spellings of his name) of the ship 'Peruvian', wrecked on Horseshoe Reef in 1846, who lived with the Jurn and Bindal tribes of the Townsville-Bowen region for seventeen years. Morrell's reminiscences are sketchy and he was not as sharply observant as the contemporaneous castaway Barbara Thompson, but his tribal sojourn was much longer than hers spanning the period of early contact with sea-borne visitors, the first land expeditions, the appearance of feral animals and the eventual arrival of pioneer pastoralists and native police troopers which was a prelude to Morrell giving himself up to two frontier stockmen.\n\nMorrell's tribesmen did not see any of the land expeditions of the 1840s\u2013those of Leichhardt, Mitchell, Gregory\u2013which all travelled inland along the valleys of the Burdekin and its tributaries. However, news of the European parties filtered through to Morrell as he recalled in a letter published in the Rockhampton Bulletin in 1865. But his account presents the historian with some difficulties. He maintained that two reports of European parties were received by his kinsmen in 1855 although it is by no means certain that Morrell had been able to keep track of time during his seventeen years in the bush. Nor do we know how fresh the stories were, or how altered in transit, although it is clear that some information about Europeans did come in from distant tribes.\n\nOne of the reports referred to a party of Europeans seen to the north-west, accompanied by a large number of horses and cattle. The position tallies very well with the southward route travelled by A. C. Gregory's North Australia Expedition of 1855\u201356. The party set out with 50 horses and 200 sheep although the flock would have been much depleted by the time it reached Queensland. But apart from the absence of cattle the Aboriginal report measures up very well with the known facts. Morrell's second story is much harder to pin down. The white party was said to be to the north but that eventually all but one member had grown thin and died. There does not appear to be any obvious source for this story though it may have become significantly changed in its passage down the coast. It could have referred to survivors from shipwreck for there must have been many such unrecorded misadventures; it may have related to the fate of the members of Kennedy's disastrous 1848 expedition who starved to death at Weymouth Bay. There is a scrap of evidence suggesting that news of Kennedy's party passed down the coast at least as far as Townsville making it likely that Morrell would have picked the story up. In the 1880s an old Aboriginal man from the Townsville district told Archibald Meston that as a young man he remembered news of an expedition coming down the coast from the north (Meston assumed it was Kennedy's) and was able to relate considerable details about the party and its assortment of animals and equipment.\n\nFrom the late 1850s news began to filter through to Morrell about the pastoral occupation of central Queensland and the violence accompanying it. A distant tribe reported that they had seen a white man with two horses who shot at a funeral party killing one of the chief mourners. But the European was subsequently caught off-guard, was set upon and killed. A short time later four cattle strayed into Morrell's district and while he did not see them himself his tribal relatives showed him the tracks and carefully described the exotic animals mentioning their horns, teats and big ears. Morrell questioned his kinsmen closely and they said that:\n\nthree had teats and one had none; thus I understood three were cows and one was a bull. I told them they were what we ate, and they chaffed me about their great size, long tails, big ears and horns.\n\nWith the next report the intruders were closer and even more threatening. A party of both black and white men on horseback\u2013presumably the Native Mounted Police\u2013had shot down a group of the Cape Upstart people with whom Morrell had previously lived. His informants had closely observed the violent newcomers, telling him about the saddles, stirrups, bridles and other accoutrements as well as the noise and smoke when the guns were fired. From this time on Morrell received almost daily reports about the Europeans till eventually stockmen arrived in his neighbourhood with a large herd of cattle. Two old women were sent out to watch the white men and report on their activities. They did the job very well for they:\n\nbrought word back that there was a large hut, and that they had seen red and white blankets hanging on the stockyard fences and heard a dog bark, and an old sheep bleating tied to a tree; they also heard the report of a gun twice; but could not see where it came from.\n\nA few days later Morrell approached the stockmen bringing to an end his involuntary seventeen year exile. For his Aboriginal kinsmen the events were even more portentous; many thousands of years of freedom from outside interference were coming to an abrupt and bloody end.\n\nMorrell was one of the few Europeans who witnessed, from the other side of the frontier, the climactic moment as Aboriginal society felt the shock of the arrival of the first permanent settlers. Amongst the small group of Europeans who lived with the Aborigines only a few left any record of their experiences. But the voluminous writing of explorers contains a large amount of material useful to the scholar seeking to understand the Aboriginal response to the European invasion of their homelands.\n\n# MEETING EXPLORERS\n\nExplorers with wide experience beyond the frontiers of European settlement were impressed by the diversity of Aboriginal reactions they encountered. Mitchell found that the 'difference in disposition' between tribes 'not very remote from each other was very striking' while Stokes after circumnavigating the continent remarked that whereas some groups he met were 'most kindly disposed' to the white travellers, others manifested the 'greatest hostility and aversion'.  European and Aborigine met in such a wide variety of circumstances that the historian may never be able to reduce the diversity to simple patterns of behaviour. For the foreseeable future description may have to take precedence over analysis.\n\nIt is probable that a majority of Aborigines had about as much prior notice of the European approach as Morrell's tribesmen. Yet despite forewarning early meetings were still fraught with tension. So much about the whites\u2013their appearance, behaviour, possessions, accompanying animals\u2013were radically new; awesome; unexpected. News of the Europeans' weapons and their apparent control of powerful magic compounded the fear and anxiety. Horses were a further source of anguished curiosity, with their noise and size and speed. Aborigines often asked if horses bit. Gippsland blacks told Alexander McMillan that they had originally thought that the noise of gunfire came from the horses' nostrils. Morrell remarked that neighbouring blacks who had not had the advantage of his advice thought that horses as well as their riders could 'speak and do mischief to them. Elsewhere it was thought that horse and rider were one.\n\nMeetings with Europeans were often terrifying experiences even when violence was absent. Screaming, perspiring, shaking, involuntary urination and defecation\u2013all the normal human reactions to extreme fear were reported at one time or another by white observers. Eyre recalled coming upon an Aboriginal camp at night and provoking a 'wild exclamation of dismay' accompanied by a 'look of indescribable horror and affright'. P. P. King wrote of a party all members of which trembled with fright at the approach of the Europeans. Oxley met Aborigines who 'trembled excessively' being 'absolutely intoxicated with fear'. In the western desert Carnegie thought the 'trembling fear' of local blacks 'painful to witness'.\n\nBut perhaps the most notable feature of such meetings was less the terror induced than the courage displayed by people placed in situations of extraordinary tension. This was surely the hidden, perhaps the larger part, of the heroism of Australian exploration. Explorers often recognized the psychological strength of the blacks they came into contact with. Mitchell met an old man in central Queensland who, though perspiring profusely from terror; allowed no hint of anxiety to cloud his demeanour. Austin noted in Western Australia that although the Aborigines he came across were aware of the superiority of European arms their bearing was always fearless and manly. Sturt made similar observations about blacks he fell in with in central Australia. One man in particular called forth his admiration. 'His composure and apparent self possession', he wrote, 'were very remarkable':\n\nhis whole demeanour was that of a calm and courageous man, who finding himself placed in unusual jeopardy, had determined not to be betrayed into the slightest display of fear or timidity.\n\nBut while the courage of the men who went forward to meet the Europeans was clear it was probably surpassed by that of the young women who were frequently dispatched by their male relatives to appease the sexual appetite of the strange and threatening white men.\n\nAttacks on exploring parties varied considerably in tactics, size and seriousness. Sometimes spears were thrown from cover\u2013of the forest when Kennedy was transfixed, of darkness when Gilbert died. Occasionally large, well organized attacks were mounted like the one reported by Giles on his fourth expedition. But armed resistance to the explorers was less common than might have been expected owing no doubt to a prudent weighing of costs and benefits. The belief that Europeans possessed powerful and malignant magic may have been a crucial factor in limiting Aboriginal aggression. Clans were much more likely to carefully watch the Europeans than openly confront them. Indeed overlanding parties were rarely able to move across country without being seen by resident blacks and news of their movements was carried forward either by messenger or smoke signal. There are many examples of Aboriginal use of smoke signals. When Sturt's party was crossing Lake Alexandrina blacks on a headland lit a large fire as soon as the Europeans noticed them. It was answered from every point of the compass and in less than ten minutes the party counted fourteen different fires. Mitchell reported a similar experience. A fire lit close to the party was a sequel to a whole series of others, extending in 'telegraphic line far to the south'. A party which landed on the Yarrabah Peninsula in 1882 found that as they began to move back from the beach signal fires flared on every hill as far as the eye could reach. J. S. Roe reported that as his party passed across country smoke signals would suddenly rise up within a mile and a half of their line of march. Explorers may have never been out of sight, even of earshot, of local Aborigines even at times when they imagined themselves alone in the wilderness. Some sensed the ubiquitous black presence. Writing after his expedition into north-west Queensland W. O. Hodgkinson observed that the blacks were so expert at hiding that it was unsafe to 'accept their absence from view as proof of nonexistence'.  Oxley, the leader of one of the earliest inland expeditions, remarked that:\n\nit is probable that they may see us without discovering themselves, as it is much more likely for us to pass unobserved the little family of the wandering native, than that our party... should escape their sight, quickened as it is by constant exercise in procuring their daily bread.\n\nEuropeans sensitive to their surroundings felt they were being constantly watched. When landing on apparently deserted coasts Stokes believed that the eyes of the Aborigines were always upon him and that his 'every movement was watched'. Jukes cautioned that no matter how uninhabited a place might appear 'even for days together' the white man should always walk in the expectation that 'a native has his eye upon you'. Gilbert made a similar note in his diary shortly before he was to die from a spear thrown into the camp from the encompassing and apparently unpeopled darkness. The bushman, he fatefully wrote, must never forget that although no blacks could be seen 'they may be within a few yards of his camp closely observing every action'.\n\nExplorers occasionally stumbled on blacks who had been sent to watch them. Young women sentries kept up a constant surveillance of G. A. Robinson during his first expedition in Western Tasmania. Mitchell found that two women had sat in the bush throughout a cold, wet night without fire or water in order to observe his party. While on sentry duty one dark night Jukes nearly trod on an old man who with two or three others was crouching in the grass observing the camp. Expedition members who backtracked for one reason or another found clear evidence that vacated camping sites had been minutely examined and tracks followed for long distances. John Mann, a member of Leichhardt's party of 1844\u201345, observed that the Aborigines 'overturned' the camp sites as soon as they were vacated. Writing of the same expedition Gilbert noted the rush of blacks to search abandoned camps where they were to be seen 'busily engaged in searching about picking up any little thing which attracted their attention'. Aboriginal attraction to deserted European camp sites was emphasised in the contact stories of the Flinders Range-Lake Frome clans. They referred to the arrival of an expedition which entered their country from the south\u2013it was probably Eyre's abortive attempt to push up into central Australia in 1840. The local blacks carefully watched the Europeans from the security of the hills but as soon as the explorers set off in the early morning they rushed into the deserted camp:\n\none of the chief treasures found were parts of a bottle that had got broken... every scrap of bottle was picked up and handed over to the head 'doctor'. These same pieces were afterwards used in their rites in place of flint... Empty tins, a couple of horseshoe nails, bits of rope and twine\u2013every scrap was picked up and taken to camp.\n\nContact between explorers and Aborigines was often friendly and mutually satisfactory. The French navigator Labillardiere, for instance, wrote in praise of hospitable Tasmanians. The attentions, he observed:\n\nlavished on us by these savages astonished us. If our paths were interrupted by heaps of dry branches, some of them walked before, and removed them to either side; they even broke off such as stretched across our way... We could not walk on the dry grass without slipping every moment... but these good savages, to prevent our falling, took hold of us by the arm, and thus supported us.\n\nExplorers have left accounts of many meetings when both whites and blacks behaved with decorum and sensitivity thereby reducing the tension of contact. Flinders wrote of such an occasion on the Tasmanian coast. He gave a local Aborigine a ship's biscuit and in return accepted an old piece of whale flesh. Both parties politely put their presents in their mouths but surreptitiously spat them out when they thought the action would not be noticed.\n\nAborigines afforded significant assistance to white explorers in every corner of the continent supplying valuable, and at times life saving, information about waterholes and springs; fords and paths; mountain passes, easy gradients, short cuts. The West Australian explorer Austin noted the value of such intelligence when recounting his meeting with a local clan whose members gave him the name and position of all the significant places on his line of march as far as the boundaries of their country. He noted down the information and then enquired about the water, rocks, timber and feed to be found at each site. While summing up his extensive experience of Aboriginal Australia, Eyre wrote in appreciation of the hospitality so often afforded:\n\nI have been received by them in the kindest and most friendly manner, had presents made to me of fish, kangaroo, fruit; had them accompany me for miles to point out where water was to be procured, or been assisted by them in getting at it, if from the nature of the soil or my own inexperience, I had any difficulty in doing so myself.\n\nHow can we account for such hospitality? We may never know for certain although glimpses of the Aborigines provided by the explorers allow us to make tentative assessments of their motivation. It seems reasonable to assume that the clans themselves were often divided over the question of an appropriate policy to adopt towards travelling Europeans. On many, perhaps a majority, of occasions the decision was obviously made to watch carefully but avoid contact though this strategy was less likely to be noticed by the explorers. But the attraction of European goods provided a powerful incentive to establish friendly contact and awareness of firearms dampened enthusiasm for confrontation. The provision of guides was probably a deliberate policy to resolve the contradictory objectives of seeking access to the white men's possessions while hastening the departure of potentially dangerous sojourners. Guides may have been additionally motivated to take Europeans on guided tours through their country thereby avoiding sites of spiritual significance. Exploring parties were aware that they were often taken on circuitous routes and usually assumed that detours were made to circumvent unseen geographical hazards. But the objectives of their hosts may have been more religious than topographical. Interest in the strangers; even the simple desire to be hospitable may have encouraged the establishment of friendly contact. From their response to white visitors it is clear that clans were proud of their country, happy to recite its deeply understood amenity and to display their profound knowledge of the environment.\n\n# ABORIGINAL CURIOSITY\n\nHow curious were the Aborigines about the European invaders? Such a question would hardly arise if Australian scholars had not so often asserted that the blacks were a uniquely passive and incurious people, an assessment recently given new authority by Blainey who argued that Aborigines reacted to the sudden appearance of whites with the 'calm apathy' of a people who had lived so long in isolation 'that intruders were inconceivable'. But the historical record provides scant evidence for this view. While we lack detailed information about the social customs of many tribes from districts settled in the nineteenth century it is reasonable to conclude that across wide areas of Australia displays of overt curiosity were considered the height of rudeness. Among many tribes it was customary to totally ignore visitors when they first arrived in camp. Drawing on his experience at Port Phillip in the 1840s E. S. Parker observed that when:\n\nindividuals of other tribes thus arrived on a visit, the etiquette, if I may so term it, was remarkable! The visitor sat down at a little distance, but never spoke. He scarcely looked, indeed, at the parties he came to see.\n\nDecorum not apathy determined Aboriginal behaviour as the more perceptive explorers and settlers realized. Writing of desert Aborigines Giles remarked that 'of course they saw us, but they most perseveringly shunned us'. Eyre noted the 'innate propriety of behaviour' exhibited by blacks in their 'natural state' especially in the 'modest unassuming manner' in which they positioned themselves to watch the Europeans and the total absence of anything that was 'rude or offensive'. Sturt came across a desert Aborigine whose composure and self-possession were 'very remarkable' for despite the awesomeness of the meeting he was clearly determined to exhibit neither 'astonishment nor curiosity'.\n\nBut there were many occasions when curiosity became the over-mastering passion breaking through traditional restraint, overlaying fear and anxiety. Mitchell wrote of a group of Queensland Aborigines for whom 'intense curiosity' overcame 'all the fears of such strangers'. Leichhardt met some old men far in the interior who:\n\nobserved with curious eye, everything we did, and made long explanations to each other of the various objects presented to their gaze. Our eating, drinking, dress, skin, combing, boiling, our blankets, straps, horses, everything in short, was new to them, and was earnestly discussed.\n\nSturt found on his expedition down the Murray and Murrumbidgee that the party was obliged to submit anew to close examination by every group of Aborigines they met. They were pulled about and touched all over; their faces were felt; their fingers counted and their hands and feet measured against those of the investigators. Even the old and decrepit came down to the river to see them. 'The lame', Sturt wrote:\n\nhad managed to hobble along, and the blind were equally anxious to touch us. There were two or three old men stretched upon the bank, from who the last sigh seemed about to depart; yet these poor creatures evinced an anxiety to see us, and to listen to descriptions of our appearance.\n\nIn the early years of settlement the Aborigines were often intensely interested in determining the newcomer's gender. Clothing cloaked their sexual identity and clean shaven faces compounded the uncertainty. While surveying the coastline in 1819\u201320 P. P. King found blacks both curious and importunate demanding that one of his party undress and expose his genitals. Writing of the foundation of the Swan River Settlement, C. H. Fremantle noted that 'they think young men are women and so they want them to take their trousers off'. G. B. Worgan, a first fleet surgeon, described another such encounter:\n\nI must not omit mentioning a very singular Curiosity among the Men here, arising from a Doubt of what Sex we are, for from our not having, like themselves long Beards, and not seeing when they open our Shirt-Bosoms (which they do very roughly and without any Ceremony) the usual distinguishing Characteristics of Women, they start Back with Amazement, and give a Hum! with a significant look, implying. What kind of Creatures are these?!\u2013As it was not possible for Us to satisfy their Inquisitiveness in this Particular, by the simple Words. Yes or No. We had Recourse to the Evidence of Ocular Demonstration, which made them laugh, jump and Skip in an Extravagant Manner.\n\nThe desire to determine the sex of the Europeans may have had more important reasons than idle curiosity. Establishing the sex of a party could help explain its objectives; an all male group might presage conflict, one with women and children a more peaceful mission. Baldwin Spencer noted that in central Australia the fact that a party:\n\nis travelling with women and children is prima-facie evidence that their intentions are not hostile, but a party of men travelling without their women-folk is always looked upon with suspicion.\n\nAborigines with little previous experience of Europeans were often perplexed by their clothes and hats and footwear. It may not have been immediately apparent where the covering ended and the flesh began. Writing of his life while pioneering the Champion Bay district in Western Australia F. F. Wittenoom recalled that one wet night he pulled off his pyjama coat to dry it. A local black watching the procedure let out a shout on seeing the white skin and soon a crowd came round to witness the spectacle. Daniel Brock, a member of Sturt's central Australian expedition of 1844 noted the interest aroused by his clothes among a group of blacks camped close to the exploration party. A curious clansman was inspecting his boots when Brock drew up his trousers exposing the white skin to the amazement of those watching, a reaction which was intensified when he drew off both his boot and his sock. The Aborigines' reaction to European clothing was graphically related in a traditional story about the arrival of Europeans on the beach at Cardwell. The whites came ashore and offered various presents to the assembled clans. They threw clothes and blankets towards the blacks whose reactions of fears and wonder are still remembered:\n\nand they got a big long stick and they picked it up with the stick and they couldn't make out what that was. They thought this man was changing his skin. They said this man left his skin there. All the natives thought this man was taking his skin. They said this man has been peel himself like a snake and they got the stick and they picked it up with a stick and they looked and looked at this shirt and trousers. You know they couldn't make out and they pick up a blanket and have a look, some pretty colours, they couldn't make out and this fellow took his shirt out and threw it down on the ground. They see him how he took his shirt. Don't know what colour was the shirt. But when he took his shirt and he was white they thought he change his colour when he took his shirt off. They pick up that shirt with the stick because they was too frightened to pick it up with a hand because in our custom might be something very dangerous, witchcraft.\n\nAs they cautiously picked up the articles of clothing on the end of a long stick the Cardwell blacks illustrated the ambivalence which characterized the Aboriginal response to Europeans all over the continent, the amalgam of curiosity and fear, attraction to the new yet the resistance to change inherent in the ancient cultures of Aboriginal Australia.\n\n# Chapter 2\n\n# CONTINUITY AND CHANGE\n\n# GHOSTS\n\nThe sudden arrival of Europeans provoked more than fear and curiosity. It sparked intense and often prolonged debate as to the true nature of the white men, their origin and objectives. During the early years of settlement many blacks believed that Europeans were beings returned from the dead, an assessment confirmed by the testimony of the small group of Europeans who gained some insight into tribal attitudes and behaviour. Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, believed it was the 'universal impression' among blacks of that colony. Eyre thought the 'general belief' was that Europeans were 'resuscitated natives' while Stokes considered the view 'universally diffused' among the tribes. Writing of his experience at Port Essington Windsor-Earl noted that local clans recognized the spirits of the dead in all the strangers who visited their country. Castaways and escapees concurred, Buckley reporting that Port Phillip Aborigines were convinced that white men were Aborigines who 'had returned to life in a different colour'. Thompson found on Cape York that all the local blacks thought that white men were the 'spirits of black men come again in a new form'. When Davis, the Moreton Bay escapee, was 'rescued' by an exploring party his relatives said he was going back to join the dead. Linguistic evidence provides further confirmation. All over the continent in areas of early settlement the Aborigines applied to Europeans traditional terms meaning variously, ghost, spirit, eternal, departed, the dead. In north Queensland, settled in the second half of the nineteenth century, the same rule applied. The celebrated ethnographer W. E. Roth observed that in the many local dialects which he had recorded the same word was 'found to do duty for a European and a deceased aboriginal's spirit, ghost'.\n\nWhy was this idea so pervasive? To begin with it is important to stress that far from being an example of childlike fancy or primitive irrationality this view of the European was a logical conclusion premised on important and widely shared beliefs. What were they, then? The Aboriginal cosmos was geographically limited. Most, if not all people, of the known world were kin or potentially so. Outside the circle of known, and at least partially intelligible clans, was the 'cosmological periphery' which had little geographical definition. A contemporary scholar has written that:\n\nOwing to the Australian kinship system everybody is\u2013or can be \u2014 related to everybody else. If a friendly stranger approaches a camp, he is always finally recognized as being related to someone of the group. Consequently, for the Australians, only one 'world' and only one 'human society' exist. The unknown regions outside familiar lands do not belong to the 'world'\u2013just as unfriendly or mysterious foreigners do not belong to the community of men, for they may be ghosts, demonic beings, or monsters.\n\nWhile the secular world was circumscribed and populated by a few hundred, or even a few thousand individuals, the realm of the spirits was wide and vibrant with life. At death the spirit left the body, and unless correct ceremonial was followed it might remain moving about tribal territory, but in the normal course of events it would return to the land of spirits which was variously in the sky, beyond the horizon, or more portentously for many coastal people, beyond the sea. The spirit world was real, tangible and ever present. It was a much more likely starting point for the white strangers than unknown, even unsuspected, countries beyond the horizon.\n\n# COUNTRYMEN AND RELATIVES\n\nIn many cases whites were thought to be not merely re-incarnated blacks but actually returned countrymen. This conclusion was also a perfectly logical one given acceptance of a few basic assumptions. In Aboriginal Australia individuals were thought to belong to their country by powerful spiritual bonds. The unexpected arrival of Europeans caused many to conclude that they too must have belonged to the land in question, or at least know of it, in a previous life. The West Australian pioneer G. F. Moore reported that local blacks had decided that none but those who were 'already acquainted with the country could find their way to it'. Another early settler was asked if Europeans had not known of the country in an earlier existence: 'why should you come here with your wives, your ships, your flour, your cattle? How did you know there was plenty of water? George Grey sensed the logic implicit in the Aboriginal viewpoint. They themselves, he wrote:\n\nnever having an idea of quitting their own land, cannot imagine others doing it;\u2013and thus, when they see white people suddenly appear in their country, and settling themselves down in particular spots, they imagine that they must have formed an attachment for this land in some other state of existence, and hence conclude the settlers were at one period black men, and their own relations.\n\nOther available evidence appeared to support the view that Europeans had returned from the dead. White was a colour widely associated with death; pipe-clay was used extensively in mourning. When Daniel Brock displayed his white feet to inquisitive desert Aborigines they immediately associated the sight with death and sang a lament over him. In parts of the country corpses were peeled of the outer skin leaving them a pinkish colour reminiscent of northern European complexions. South Australian Aborigines in fact called white men grinkai the term for a peeled, pink corpse. A legend told to W. E. Roth on the Pennefeather River in north Queensland confirms the perceived link between the white complexion and the loss of the outer skin. The story concerned a boy who was playing in a lagoon and was swallowed by a big brown snake. The reptile expelled the boy in three or four days but by then he had lost his outer skin and had become a white fellow.\n\nCoastal clans in many parts of the continent believed that at death the spirit travelled across or through the sea to offshore islands or places far over the horizon. An early West Australian settler noted that local blacks 'inform us that the spirits of their departed traverse the great waters and then become white'. Aborigines from Cape Bedford on the far north-Queensland coast believed that spirits travelled east where they entered the bodies of white people. They actually called Europeans ganggal-nakawaraigo or babies coming from the east. West Australian Aborigines explained to the official Aboriginal interpreter that they attributed the pale colour of the Europeans to the influence of saltwater during the long marine journey to the land of spirits.\n\nWith apparently sound reasons for regarding Europeans as reincarnated countrymen it needed only the recognition of characteristics of appearance, mannerisms or gait to claim them as returned relatives. 'Likeness', Grey observed, 'either real or imagined completed the illusion'. Aborigines from around Perth were said to be able to recognize several hundred colonists by their 'countenance, voices and scars of former wounds'. G. W. Moore confirmed this picture. West Australian pioneers were, he wrote, frequently claimed as relatives by old people who treated them 'according to the love they formerly bore to the individuals supposed to be recognized'.  Stokes referred to the case of a settler who was visited by his supposed kin twice a year though it necessitated a journey of sixty miles. Dr S. W. Viveash noted in his diary in February 1840 that the Aborigine Mignet had told him that his real name was Muswite 'a York native who had died and jumped up a white fellow'.  Mrs Edward Shenton recalled that Perth Aborigines had called her grandmother Budgera saying she was a 'black woman jumped up white woman' and they always wanted to make friends with her. An early settler at Port Phillip noted that local blacks informed him that they recognized long lost relatives in the persons of white neighbours. A South Australian woman recalled that she was actually given the name of a deceased member of the local clan and nothing that she said would convince the blacks to do otherwise. Grey wrote of his experiences when claimed as the re-incarnated son of an old Aboriginal woman:\n\nA sort of procession came up, headed by two women, down whose cheeks tears were streaming. The eldest of these came up to me, and looking for a moment at me said... 'Yes, yes, in truth it is him'; and then throwing her arms around me, cried bitterly, her head resting on my breast; and although I was totally ignorant of what their meaning was, from mere motives of compassion, I offered no resistance to her caresses... At last the old lady, emboldened by my submission, deliberately kissed me on each cheek... she then cried a little more, and at length relieving me, assured me that I was the ghost of her son, who had sometime before been killed by a spear wound in his breast... My new mother expressed almost as much delight at my return to my family, as my real mother would have done, had I been unexpectedly restored to her.\n\nBut while the belief in re-incarnated relatives appeared to fit some of the objective circumstances problems constantly arose which required further explanation. Eyre remarked that South Australian Aborigines of his acquaintance could not understand why the settlers did not recognize their former relatives and friends. He had, he said, often been asked why the 'dead were so ignorant, or so forgetful so as not to know their friends'. Similar complaints were reported from other parts of the continent. A West Australian woman wrote in 1839 that the local blacks thought Europeans 'fools and blockheads to have forgotten everything that happened while we were sojourning with them'. Fifty years later Roth found that Cape Bedford blacks wondered how and why the Europeans had 'forgotten all about their aboriginal ancestors'.\n\nThe same problem arose with castaways like Buckley and Thompson who on introduction to tribal society were unable to speak a word of the local languages and were totally ignorant of their hosts' customs and manners. But with enough resilience this too could be explained. It was assumed in both cases that the traumatic experience of death and unexpected return to life had impaired the intelligence and expunged the memory. Thompson was treated with the slightly amused compassion reserved for the simple minded. Her gradual mastery of the local language was taken as a slow restoration of lost linguistic skills. Buckley was humoured and shielded in a similar way being kept out of quarrels and away from recurrent skirmishing. His kinsmen were highly amused when he was unable to eat a dog's leg. 'No doubt', he later reminisced:\n\nthey thought my having died and been made white had strangely altered my taste. My not being able to talk with them they did not seem to think at all surprising\u2013my having been made white after death, in their opinion, having made me foolish; however, they took considerable pains to teach me their language, and expressed great delight when I got hold of a sentence or even a word, so as to pronounce it somewhat correctly, they then would chuckle, and laugh and give me great praise.\n\n# 'NOTHING BUT MEN'\n\nFor how long did this view of the European prevail? Unfortunately, the evidence is so meagre that we must speculate. However, it is realistic to assume that the nature of the white man was a major question of debate within Aboriginal society and that the emergence of a more 'secular' view of the newcomers took place unevenly both between and within tribal groups. A writer in the Perth Gazette remarked in 1836 that it was impossible to dissuade the old people from their original view of the Europeans but the younger ones were beginning 'to have their faith shaken on this point'. Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, sensed the shift of Aboriginal opinion. Local blacks, he wrote, were concluding that white people were 'nothing but men'. There is some linguistic evidence which illustrates the changing view of the Europeans. In Miriam, the language of the Eastern Torres Strait, the original term for white-men which meant ghost or spirit was replaced by a word meaning 'bow-men' referring to the position characteristically taken up by white men in dinghies and luggers. Blacks from the Pennefeather River in north Queensland originally thought Europeans were spirits and called them kai-worda-ngai or bark-sap-spirits, white complexions being compared to the light colour found on the inside of bark on local trees. Eventually they concluded that the white men had nothing to do with the spirits so they dropped the relevant word Ngai and simply used the term Kai-worda on its own.\n\nIn other places attitudes to Europeans altered but ghost words survived while undergoing a subtle pejorative change to eventually mean devil, malignant spirit or simply evil doer. Having been applied to whites in one place ghost words were sometimes adopted elsewhere while the original connotations of spirituality were left behind. This seems to have taken place in central and north Queensland. The word miggloo (there are many variations) appears to have come from central Queensland where it meant both ghost and white man. But it spread throughout the north as the most common word for Europeans while losing its original meaning on the way. It is still widely used today as a derisory, even contemptuous, term for white Australian.\n\nIn areas of later settlement the illusion that Europeans were spirits may never have taken root. The 'secular' view probably arrived 'ready-made' from the other side of the frontier along with diverse information about the Europeans. This is strongly suggested by the linguistic evidence. In more remote areas there was a greater tendency for the blacks to use terms for Europeans which lacked any spiritual connotation. The widespread adoption of variants of 'white fellow' or 'white man' was symptomatic of the change in attitude. These were, after all, new words with no weight of traditional meaning, stemming from European rather than Aboriginal society. Many examples spring to mind\u2013walpala as used around Cloncurry, white-pella on the Georgina, weilbulea along the upper Darling, waelbela among the Aranda and wapala among the Walbri. Other terms were used, sometimes conjointly with 'whitefella' words, referring to physical or cultural attributes of the Europeans. The Walbri had one term meaning 'dusty coloured' and another which meant literally a 'house person'; the Djingili from the central Northern Territory used the generic word for red (sunburn perhaps); some Tasmanian tribes coined the term 'ugly head' for the white intruders.\n\nThe belief that Europeans were relatives returned from the dead had important consequences for the Aboriginal response to the invasion of their territory. It was clearly crucial in determining the fate of castaway mariners and convict bolters. Recognition meant acceptance and security, lack of it ensured death. The unexpected visitor had to be either kinsman re-incarnate or a dangerous spirit from the cosmological periphery. Davis, Morrell, Buckley and Thompson were all accepted and taken in; many others forgotten to history were no doubt killed. Davis observed perceptively that there was always considerable danger when first meeting a new tribe for 'should no-one recognize you as a relative returned to life you are sure to be speared'. When he appeared before a Parliamentary Select Committee he was questioned on this point:\n\nMr. Watts: How did the blacks receive and treat you in the first instance?\n\nDavis: First rate, nothing could be better.\n\nChairman: Knowing you to be a white man?\n\nDavis: Yes, they took me to be the ghost of a black fellow.\n\nBuckley noted that when whites had been killed it was due to the fact that the blacks 'imagined them to have been originally enemies, or belonging to tribes with whom they were hostile'. A traditional story from north Queensland about the first meeting with a white man details the reaction to a person who was considered a malignant spirit:\n\nand all the boys went down and took their spears and their swords and nulla-nulla and they went up to the river and they see this white man was coming down and he was putting his hands up\u2013was surrendering himself to them\u2013but these natives never seen a white man in their life and they run up to him\u2013and the blackfellows speared him because they didn't know he was a white man. They'd never seen a white man. They speared him and they killed him there and then they left him there and they run away for their life. They said this is a witch-craft man come to destroy us and they ran away...\n\nInitially many Aborigines endeavoured to absorb the experience of European invasion within the framework of traditional thought. They were successful to a surprising degree. The sudden appearance of white men could be explained although something had clearly altered the familiar cosmic processes with spirits re-entering the world of men in a radically new guise. But even this could be accommodated by minds made flexible, or gullible if you will, through intimate acquaintance with, and everyday acceptance of, magic. Some followed the apparent line of logic even further assuming that they too would henceforth follow the newly established cycle of death, spirit journey and return as a white man. How widespread this belief was is difficult to say although there were numerous reports of it from pioneer settlers. The Perth Gazette for instance, noted in 1838 that it was a superstition which was 'very general' among local black communities. Another observer believed that many Aborigines were actually looking forward to death in order to 'return with guns, arms and provisions'. At much the same time in Victoria the Aboriginal Protector James Dredge remarked that many local blacks thought that when they died they would 'jump up white men'.\n\nOne consequence of seeing Europeans as returned relatives was that they could be readily absorbed into kinship networks. This had potential advantages for Aboriginal society by defining the appropriate behaviour both by and towards the white people. It also created expectations concerning the Europeans' obligation to share their material abundance. A Western Australian pioneer observed that the blacks had concluded that as the whites were 'their relatives restored to them with plenty of bread and good things' they should 'have a right to share with us, as their law compels them to divide whatever they have'. Once the illusion of re-incarnation had been shattered other mechanisms were used in an endeavour to encompass settlers within the reciprocal sway of kinship. From being resurrected relatives the whites could be regarded as 'de-facto' kin through place of residence, sexual intimacy or mutual gift giving.\n\nAboriginal misconceptions about the white invader had important consequences for the early development of the Australian colonies, shielding infant and insecure settlements from latent black hostility. Perth Aborigines were asked why they speared the settlers if they genuinely looked upon them as ancestors and friends. Their answer was interesting. They said that in their view they had treated the whites with much greater consideration than would have been shown to strange blacks. If unknown Aborigines had attempted to intrude in the way the Europeans had done the local clans would 'have done all in their power to destroy them'. In South Australia Moorhouse noted that as long as the Aboriginal illusions about Europeans survived they 'seldom attacked the whites'. Consequently he wanted to preserve black misconceptions as long as possible otherwise they would come to realize that Europeans could be 'beaten, overcome and murdered by the same means as the natives themselves'.  Similar views were expressed in north Queensland a generation later. The editor of the Port Denison Times remarked in 1866 that local blacks were rapidly losing a portion of the 'awe of the white man, which is so great a safeguard to us'. He was concerned that they would 'very soon lose ... their superstitious dread' of the Europeans, that:\n\nthe less insight the blackfellows are allowed to get into the white man's habits the more awe they will have of him, and the more easy they will be to manage.\n\nThus the Aboriginal debate about the true nature of the white invaders, mirroring similar discussions on the European side of the frontier, had important consequences for both the settlers and the blacks themselves. But there were also many other ways in which Aboriginal society adjusted to the presence of the whites. Developments in language, music, dancing, painting and practically all aspects of material culture illustrated the linked themes of continuity and change, accommodation and resistance.\n\n# LINGUISTIC CHANGE\n\nIt was more common for Aborigines to learn English than for settlers to pick up indigenous dialects although there were notable exceptions. Edward Curr observed in 1880 that most blacks were accustomed from childhood to hear and often speak languages other than their own and consequently learnt new ones more readily than the average colonist. They were, he wrote, usually able to 'quickly pick up sufficient broken English to understand what is necessary, and to make themselves understood'. Communication was facilitated by the use of an Australian pidgin\u2013a melange of words from English, from Pacific creole and more especially from the dialects in use around the earliest settlements. A list of such words includes well known 'Aboriginal' terms like nulla-nulla, woomera, warrigal, coolamon, mia-mia, waddy, boomerang, gibber, gin, kangaroo, carbon, bail, boogery. A few dozen words like these became the linguistic core around which an Australian frontier pidgin was built with variations according to place and period. The origin of many of the words was soon forgotten and in the use of pidgin both blacks and whites laboured under 'the mistaken idea' that each was conversing in the other's language as the missionary Threlkeld perceptively observed.\n\nModern linguistic studies combined with Aboriginal vocabularies collected in the nineteenth century make it possible to chart some of the intellectual currents generated by contact with European society. Three basic developments can be observed\u2013the direct adoption of European words, the creation of new ones and the expansion of old to encompass novel circumstances, objects and concepts. The adoption of English words involved more than a simple linguistic transfer. Foreign terms had to be significantly modified to assimilate to local pronunciation and orthography often producing sufficient alteration to disguise the borrowing to all but the expert ear. In some cases words were borrowed while meanings changed. Thus the Jodajoda called sheep wulubua deriving from the English word wool. Elsewhere words continued to be used in Aboriginal society after they had become archaic in English. The widespread use of musket words in the late nineteenth century and twentieth has been documented above. There are numerous examples of the expansion of traditional words to encompass new meanings. In Kalkatunga sugar was given the traditional name for honey, coins were called pebbles and writing called patterns. In Yidin the word dama which meant anything dangerous like a snake or centipede was extended to include alcohol, opium and medicines. Nineteenth century word lists contain many similar examples. Compasses were called circles in South Australia; in the Burdekin Valley watches were given the same word as the sun. In South Australia pots and kettles, through identification by shape, were given the traditional word for bottle-tree, in Victoria bottles were referred to as being emushaped. Introduced animals were sometimes given traditional names. In Gippsland European cats were given the same name as native ones, in Tasmania pigs were called wombats.\n\nThe various new formations were even more interesting. A simple device was to preface a traditional word with an expression meaning whiteman's as in white man's kangaroo for horse and white man's maggots for rice. Perhaps the greatest variety was shown in the various words coined for policemen\u2013knot maker or tier in Kalkatunga, tie up hands in Wergaren, chainman in Wade-wade, tier or binder in Yutilda, with stripes in Yidin, jumping ant in Gugu-Yalanji, octopus in Gippsland, hatturned-up in Wandwurril, the bitter ones among clans around Boroloola, and in Walbri two words expressive of a significant emotional dichotomy, angry person and elder brother.\n\nEuropean animals called forth a variety of new words. Rabbits were called stand up ears and white bottom in Wembaweba and long ears in Wergaga. In various other Victorian languages sheep were called soft feet and feed on ground, pigs were termed turn ground and roosters call for day. There were several examples of onomatopoeic words\u2013boo.oo for cattle and ba.ba for sheep in Tasmania, gump-gump and neighit-neighit for horse in the Western District. A few other words illustrate the diversity of the Aboriginal linguistic response. In Kalkatunga wind-mills were called turn-turn water-fetchers while boots were termed foot-stinkers in Ngalooma. Clans around Newcastle called peaches tah-rah-kul or literally 'to set the teeth on edge'.\n\n# PAINTING\n\nChange and continuity in Aboriginal languages were paralleled by post-contact development of painting on both rock and bark. In many parts of Australia references to Europeans, their artifacts and animals can be found amid the vast assortment of traditional figures which cluster and overlap at rock-art sites. Around the northern coasts ships, recognizably rigged as schooners, praus or luggers sail incongruously through seas of alien iconography. Feral cats appear among massed marsupials on Hammersly Station; horse and bullock tracks are engraved on the walls at Goat Rock Site in Central Queensland; four horses appear on painted walls on the Cobar Pedeplain. At Laura a giant horse eleven feet long and seven-feet high bestrides the rock shelter. Rifles, revolvers and axes appear at a number of sites and here and there Europeans are depicted\u2013on horseback, with hats and clothes. In the rock shelter near Ingaladdi waterhole in the Northern Territory a nameless drover has been immortalized driving his horses and cattle across the sandstone wall. Painting on trees or bark have generally not survived but nineteenth-century reports leave a few valuable references like the tree painting of a ship in full sail seen on the Darling Downs or the charcoal sketches of a large party of natives spearing a white man seen by G. A. Robinson in Central Victoria. A Tasmanian settler discovered that inland Aborigines were in the habit of 'representing events by drawing on the bark of trees'. He reported that:\n\nthe march of a certain party over a country before unfrequented by us was found a short time afterwards drawn with charcoal on a piece of bark, by a tribe of natives who [had] been observed attentively watching their movements. The carts, the bullocks, the men, were distinctly represented, according to the exact numbers that really existed.\n\n# MUSIC AND DANCE\n\nEuropean tunes, words and themes were gradually introduced into secular songs and corroborees. In the early 1840s G. A. Robinson discovered that 'Italian melodies' were being adopted by Victorian blacks; were sung by the young people with considerable ability and were passing quickly from clan to clan while J. Mathew noted a little later in Queensland that English popular songs were often woven into corroborees. A settler from the Hume River told a government inquiry in 1849 that local blacks punctuated their songs with calls of 'Halleluyah' and 'Oh be Joyful'. Threlkeld heard groups around Newcastle singing and some had 'attempted with no bad effect to imitate the sacred music of the church'. When out in the bush Eyre frequently lay awake to listen to Aboriginal singing. A sentence or two of English, was, he wrote, often introduced by way of direct quotation while 'Europeans, their property, presence, and habits, are frequently the subject of these songs'. Corroborees were composed featuring dramatic events of settler society. Moreton Bay blacks created one about the wreck of the S.S. Sovereign in 1847. Murray River clans created one about the first steamship which sailed the inland waterway. The Rockhampton camp performed a train dance when the railway reached central Queensland; South Australian Aborigines were likewise inspired by the sight of the steam train and sang:\n\nYou see the smoke at Kapunda   \nThe steam puffs regularly   \nShowing quickly, it looks like frost   \nIt runs like running water   \nIt blows like a spouting whale\n\nBarbara Thompson described a white man, or 'ghost ship' dance created by the Mount Ernest Islanders in Torres Strait. Two men were dressed up as Europeans with masks made from light coloured bark and rind from coconut trees. She explained that:\n\nthey don't whiten the mask but put red on the cheeks and leave the other part their natural light yellowish colour... they rubbed white on their legs and wore shirts the white men had given them... they sing songs about ships, that they are gone away to their own land and will come again with biscuits, tobacco and knives and shirts\n\nAboriginal interest in and acute observation of European animals found expression in horse and cattle dances witnessed by Europeans in a number of places during the nineteenth century. There are several accounts of the horse dance of the Tasmanians. Robinson explained how the participants crawled around the fire upon hands and knees, shook their heads, stopped and then imitated horses feeding. A second account detailed how the dancers took hold of each other's loins, followed one another, and then simulated the prancing of the animals while a woman played the part of the driver gently tapping them with a stick as they passed. Several writers left accounts of Queensland cattle dances. The squatter G. S. Lang was most impressed with the accuracy of the imitation; the action and attitude of every individual member of the entire herd being 'ludicrously exact'\u2013some lay down chewing the cud, others stood scratching themselves with hind feet or horns, licking themselves or their calves while several rubbed against each other 'in bucolic friendliness'.\n\n# DOMESTIC ANIMALS\n\nAboriginal reactions to introduced animals is an important aspect of contact history although available evidence is scattered and inadequate. It seems appropriate to distinguish between the response to cattle and sheep, which will be discussed below, and to horses and dogs. One of the most impressive examples of successful adaption was the Tasmanian's utilization of dogs which in a few years became important in tribal society, both for hunting and a variety of other purposes. In a remarkably short time Island blacks had learnt how to control and employ large dog packs. Robinson found that 'the tact these people have in quieting their dogs' was 'truly surprising'.  Some lessons were undoubtedly learned from the settlers, the Launceston Advertiser reporting the discovery of several pieces of bullock-hide rope to which were attached little collars which Island blacks used for the purpose 'of securing their dogs'. But there was evidence of independent adaption as well. Hunting techniques were modified, huts were sometimes enlarged to accommodate the dogs and in southern Tasmania large bark catamarans were built to enable them to be transported across estuaries and out to off-shore islands. Rhys Jones observed that the Tasmanians sought dogs avidly:\n\nincorporating them into their culture with extraordinary rapidity. In so doing they adapted their hunting methods, and managed to make the profound social and psychological adjustments necessary in setting up an affectionate relationship with the new animal, a relationship radically different from anything that they had had with other animals.\n\nIt was much easier for blacks to acquire European dogs than horses which were many times more valuable and therefore closely guarded. Wild horses were hard to catch and domesticate and their size and speed made them objects of awe and fear. The rapidity of pastoral expansion precluded the possibility of a gradual acquisition of the techniques of horsemanship. Yet clearly Aborigines did sometimes succeed in taking horses from the settlers or catching stray ones and then experimenting in their use. In 1883 Edward Curr published a translation of an Aboriginal song relating to such a case although it is impossible to date the piece. Yet it clearly deals with a tentative approach to horse riding:\n\nHalloo! (a)-horse, (canst) thou wild ride?   \nNo! of -horses I (am) afraid.   \nThou why afraid?   \n(The) -horse (might) -throw -(me)   \n(my) bones (Might) -break.   \nTry thou, mount, (to see) whether   \n(he will) -buck.   \nThou-indeed for-the-horses-go, we   \n(shall) -lie in-the-scrub, i.e., camp out.   \nIn-a-little-while (we shall) -go, (the)   \nground (is) damp at-present.\n\nA native police officer in Central Queensland reported seeing a group of young Aborigines experimentally riding fat wethers round a bush clearing. There are accounts from north Queensland of horses being taken and used by blacks before they had 'come in' to European settlement. A Flinders River squatter complained to the Queensland Government that local clans took his horses and rode them sometimes three at once, while an early Cloncurry settler remarked that 'as an instance of their advancement by contact with the whites, the natives have discovered the adaptability of a sheet of bark as a substitute for a saddle'. Yet another outback squatter wrote in anguish to the Brisbane papers complaining that the blacks not only killed cattle and attacked stations but also stole the horses:\n\nto drive the cattle to wherever they may think fit to slaughter them; a thing probably not on record before. It is well known that the blacks in this district have now in their possession five saddle horses which they put to this use.\n\nIn 1884 a police constable found a stockyard in the bush containing two horses which were being regularly fed and ridden by the local Aborigines. A few years earlier a Queensland Native Police detachment followed a group of Aborigines who had speared a European and taken his horse. They led the animal through miles of broken country, hobbled it at night when they camped and practised riding during the day. The catching and corralling of European animals will be considered more fully below. But what of the impact of new commodities on Aboriginal material culture?\n\n# EUROPEAN ARTIFACTS\n\nThe early and widespread adoption of iron has been already mentioned. Its advantages were quickly apparent\u2013it was hard, durable, pliable and easily sharpened and maintained in that condition. It was used for a whole range of implements and weapons\u2013for spearheads, axes, knives and even for boomerangs. Blacks on the west coast of Tasmania collected rust from a shipwreck and after grinding and mixing with water used it as a substitute for ochre. Iron was absorbed into traditional technology and was usually hafted and secured with gum and sinews in the customary manner. It must have often been shaped and sharpened by many hours of grinding and hammering with stone tools. The Queensland explorer R. L. Jack observed that Cape York Aborigines fashioned 'with infinite pains' such 'unconsidered trifles' of old iron as shovels, broken pick heads, scraps of iron hoops, ship's bolts, telegraph wires, nails, cartwheel tyres into weapons and implements. The anthropologist Donald Thomson observed that by the 1920s iron had replaced wood or bone headed harpoons in the armoury of the dugong hunters on the coast of Cape York. 'When it is remembered', he wrote:\n\nthat the only iron available to the native is in the form of odds and ends discarded by the white man, and that his only tools are an unlimited quantity of pumice stone or coral limestone, and perhaps an old discarded file or two, the results he achieves are often remarkable. The bush Aborigine, even after he has learned to use iron for his weapons, has no knowledge of the working of iron hot... if an iron rod, or a piece of wire is to be straightened out, this is always done cold. For the rest he depends upon his natural deftness in technological matters, and an inexhaustible patience.\n\nDid Aborigines elsewhere learn how to use heat when working with iron? Cape York blacks had no direct contact with European settlements. Whites arrived, if at all, by boat. It is just possible that on the vast land frontier knowledge of metal technology passed back beyond the edges of white settlement. Clans in contact with European townships or stations would have soon become aware of the importance of the blacksmith and we can assume were curious about his function and methods. But the Wiradjuri of central New South Wales seem to have been the only people to coin their own term for the blacksmith whom they called burguin mudil or literally the beater out of tomahawks. Beyond that the evidence is very scarce. Europeans occasionally found iron weapons in Aboriginal camps which they assumed had been shaped while the metal was hot but their testimony is far from conclusive.\n\nAfter iron, glass was probably the most important addition to the traditional tool kit. Initially it may have been confused with quartz crystals and therefore assumed to possess magical powers, but its utilitarian properties were ultimately much more important. Glass was even more amenable than iron to the various stone-working techniques\u2013either chipping of flakes or the grinding and sharpening of solid spearheads from thick bottle glass. But successful working in glass could only come with a great deal of experimentation with the medium and accumulation of expertise about its unique properties. Despite the widespread adoption of iron and glass in Aboriginal society there seem to have been some who refused to accept innovation, persevering with traditional stone technology. Horne and Aiston reported that in Central Australia in the early twentieth century there were a few 'strictly conservative workers' who used stone even for the 'rough hewing of the boomerang' and who refused to use bottle glass for 'smoothing down the ridges'.\n\nThe Aborigines were intensely interested in European goods and they expertly pilfered from explorers and pioneers. Mitchell greatly admired their deftness, explaining one technique which involved treading softly on a desired article, seizing it with the toes, passing it up the back or between the arm and side to conceal it in the arm pit or between the beard and throat. Aboriginal camps often became curiosity shops of collected European artifacts. One in Gippsland in 1841 for instance was found to contain a large variety of clothing including shirts, trousers, frocks and a Mackintosh cloak; dress material, thread, thimble, blankets, tools, bottles, the tube of a thermometer, one seal-skin hat, muskets, tomahawks, a pewter two gallon measure, pewter hand basin, camp kettle, two children's copy books, one bible, London, Glasgow and Aberdeen newspapers.\n\nPerhaps few clans were as successful at collecting European goods as this one. Yet contact with the settlers often led to a rapid increase in the number of possessions in any one camp, creating novel problems of transport and storage. Often the newly acquired objects were simply left behind, being too heavy and cumbersome to be carried about from camp to camp. But the unique problem seems to have called forth creative attempts to provide permanent storage of a kind probably unknown in traditional society. Three European observers provided accounts of such structures. Robinson found that Tasmanian blacks had dug a hole to secure their new possessions, had laid grass and bark at the bottom, stones and bark around the stores and a wooden structure above-ground to mark the spot. In central Queensland a generation later a squatter came across a 'plant' of stolen goods. Logs had been placed on the ground to provide a platform for food of all sorts as well as clothes and tools and the whole cache\u2013a drayload and more\u2013had been carefully roofed with bark stripped from nearby trees. An even more interesting case was discussed by William Thomas the Assistant-Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip. In 1840 he followed up a party of Gippsland blacks who had attacked a station on the eastern fringes of European settlement. They had taken everything from the station that was moveable and on their return to their own country had constructed what Thomas termed, 'two devices'. At the ford of a river they had cut down trees and saplings and made a bridge 'to enable them to more rapidly convey their booty to yonder side'. On the far bank was another structure. Thomas' description is far from clear but he called it an 'artificial grove of saplings and tea tree' which extended for some yards and which had been used as a depot for storing the stolen goods.\n\nThere are two other references to modified building techniques during the period of early contact, one contemporaneous, the other resulting from recent archaeological work. Jorgenson observed in the 1820s that as the Tasmanians were increasingly forced out of the river valleys and into the mountains they began building 'stone structures, not the least resembling the usual wigwams'. In western Victoria scholars have found examples of stone houses with central fireplaces which it is assumed date from the period after contact as the sites yielded such traditional relics as stone flakes admixed with broken glass and clay pipes.\n\n# WHITE MEN'S FOOD\n\nTraditional patterns of cooking and eating underwent a change as well. In most parts of Australia mutton, beef and rabbit meat were added to diets diminished by the impact of settlement. Culinary practices were modified accordingly. There are numerous reports of the evacuation of large earth ovens to accommodate bullock carcases. Thomas Mitchell claimed that in the 1840s in one district of northern New South Wales ovens had been used for the consumption of up to twenty head of cattle a day. Some settlers thought that the blacks had adopted these methods after observing European boiling down works but it seems more probable that they simply adapted existing techniques for cooking the larger marsupials.\n\nChronic insecurity following the European invasion apparently increased the desire to preserve and stock-pile food. As old certainties vanished clans sought new ways to maintain their food supply. Beef and mutton fat was stored and carried in small bark bags or in the knotted legs and arms of European trousers and shirts. Central Australian blacks collected pieces of cow-hide which they soaked, cooked and then ground up before eating. Legs of lamb and mutton were preserved by smoking and apparently carried on walkabout for future use. A Western District pioneer reported that on raiding a local camp he found the remains of many sheep and 'a quantity cut up in hams, which had been smoked and hung up to dry'. In 1865 a central Queensland squatter came across what he called 'a perfect meat curing establishment' hidden in coastal mangroves. The meat had been cut up and portions of it were being smoked.\n\nEuropean flour rapidly won approval over the laboriously collected and prepared indigenous cereals and became one of the favoured targets for Aboriginal raids on stations, tents and drays. Traditional methods of cooking cereals merged with damper making techniques used by Europeans all over frontier Australia. In various parts of the continent blacks attempted to preserve and stockpile supplies of flour. In 1805 a European party was shown forty bushels of wheat 'secreted in a single cavity' on the fringes of white settlement. The hoarders were apparently blacks and not renegade Europeans. In 1830 Tasmanian settlers found a hundredweight of flour baked into dampers in an Aboriginal camp. Queensland police came upon a camp in the rainforest near Maryborough in 1867 and discovered a three hundredweight store of sweet potatoes and a two foot pile of damper and there were similar reports from other parts of Australia. Tea and sugar were also found in Aboriginal camps. In Tasmania the frequent discovery of tea-pots would suggest that the local clans had begun to brew the beverage in the approved European manner. Tobacco was also widely disseminated on the other side of the frontier; its addictive appeal was one of the more powerful forces attracting Aborigines to European settlement. Lumholtz reported that in north Queensland tobacco was bartered, wrapped up in leaves, and was consequently 'known among remote tribes who have never themselves come into contact with Europeans'. There seems no doubt that the desire to obtain tobacco drove many blacks in towards the nearest source of supply. A woman on the Etheridge gold field reported a typical incident. Two strange Aborigines suddenly appeared before her tent. They kept pointing to their mouths saying 'toomback' 'toomback'. When given a supply they quickly disappeared. At much the same time in central Australia Chewings observed that 'the craving for tobacco, in both sexes, is intense'.\n\nEuropean artifacts eventually affected almost every aspect of Aboriginal life. Even the practices and possessions of the 'clever men' or 'doctors' were influenced and the new commodities joined the stones and bones which they seemingly drew from injured or diseased bodies of ailing patients. In his memoirs Simpson Newland recalled that he had seen clever men in South Australia and western New South Wales produce, as the cause of sickness, a bullock's tooth, the bottom of a tumbler, a piece of the jawbone of a sheep, fragments of pottery. Horne and Aiston reported the case of a 'clever man' from central Australia who drew nails and wire out of a patient's chest while Howitt referred to a man who attributed acute rheumatism to the fact that an enemy had put a bottle into his foot. Blacks around Echuca were said to prepare powerful magic by mixing the dried and powdered flesh of a dead man with tobacco which was then given to the unsuspecting victim to smoke. It was a common practice in traditional society to apply heat to an object belonging to an intended victim thereby causing intense pain and even death. Howitt observed that blacks on the Wimmera River successfully adjusted their methods to the new circumstances which followed white settlement. They found the kitchen chimneys of the sheep stations unrivalled places where the object in question could be subjected to prolonged heat.\n\nBecause the Aborigines sought European possessions the settlers assumed they were full of admiration for the skill of white craftsmen and the ingenuity of their manufactures. Such beliefs were central to the European presumption that Aborigines were overawed in face of settler power and material abundance. But it may not have been like that at all. Manufactured goods were not intrinsically more complex or impressive than those occurring naturally. With no experience of European methods of production Aborigines assumed that the newcomers' possessions were organic products of an exotic natural environment. The tribal father of Davis, the Moreton Bay escapee, was given a pocket watch taken from a frontier shepherd. While it ticked he thought it was alive: when it stopped he 'took it for a stone'. Thompson noted similar reactions among her Cape York hosts. Having been on board the Rattlesnake they asked her if the cups and saucers they had seen walked about like shell-fish. As she told her chronicler, O. W. Brierly, the Aborigines thought:\n\nour bottles are shells and ask what kind of fish live in them and where they are found and wonder that there are none of them on their own beaches.\n\nContinuity and change thus ran like an intricate plait through the history of early contact. Aborigines were curious about Europeans, sought their artifacts and were innovative in a wide range of situations. Yet traditional beliefs and assumptions continue to display a strength and resilience resistant to even the most traumatic consequences of the invasion like firearms and epidemic diseases.\n\n# GUNS\n\nGuns were alarming weapons\u2013they made a noise that could be equated only with thunder, could kill and injure at great distance with an unseen missile that often left a wound apparently incommensurate with the resulting injury. Running parallel with the development of tactics to avoid exposure to the lethal firepower was the endeavour to understand the secret of the new weapons. The initial assumption seems to have been that guns were magic. The oral tradition of the Flinders Range-Lake Frome people contained reference to their first experience of firearms. While they were watching the progress of an early exploration party the Europeans shot two crows and a kangaroo, all at considerable distance:\n\nThis was the most startling thing they had seen. Just the bang and there were the things dead... there was much discussion again that night as to how the kangaroo and crows were killed and what killed them. Some suggested it was muldarpie [devil] that did it; it was some years before they could solve that problem.\n\nThe idea that guns were magical at least brought them onto familiar ground for the 'clever men' were almost universally thought to be able to kill at a distance by projecting missiles\u2013quartz crystals, pebbles and the like\u2013through the air and into the bodies of intended victims. In her study of the Euahlayi tribe Mrs K. L. Parker referred to the moolee or death dealing stone which was said to knock a person insensible or even 'strike him dead as lightning would by an instantaneous flash'. R. M. Berndt described the process more precisely while discussing the survival of magical practices in the twentieth century. The clever man, he explained:\n\nconcentrated upon the victim, and moving his chest and shoulders forced the crystal up so that it passed out of his mouth and, travelling at such a velocity that it escaped the notice of other men, entering the victim.\n\nA related belief was that it was possible for clever men to load spears, clubs and boomerangs so that they sped straight to the chosen victim, were unavoidable, and produced paralysis on contact.\n\nEuropean weapons were manifestly dangerous, but not necessarily more so, or more mysterious, than the magic of powerful clever men. Perhaps the most surprising thing about guns for those with little experience of the invaders was that every white man seemed to be able to activate the magic rather than a few select 'men of high degree'. The suggestion that European ballistics were seen in terms of traditional magic received some confirmation from the reminiscences of two elderly Aborigines recorded recently in southern inland Queensland. Both old people recalled the importance of corroborees in the camp life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the discipline imposed on women and children by the 'clever men' who had become the 'doctors' in the narrative. The old man recalled that 'no-one was ever to laugh or speak at the corroboree, or the doctor there'd give them the bullit'. The old lady confirmed that 'they'd say bullit hit you' if there was any defiance of taboos. Thus the ability of the clever men to kill those defying tribal lore had become closely related to the power of European firearms even down to the creation of the verb 'to bullit' to describe the process.\n\nYet the need to understand the mechanism of guns continued if only to allow the Aborigines to co-opt the European firepower. Knowledge of the range of firearms and frequency of fire was quickly learnt and may even have passed back beyond the frontier. Guns were stolen both to deny them to Europeans and to examine them more closely. Eventually some Aborigines learnt how to use and maintain stolen weapons even experimenting with local flints to provide the spark and with stones as projectiles. By the late 1820s the Tasmanian clans had mastered the mysterious weapons and their success was mirrored elsewhere. Robinson discovered that island Aborigines had hidden caches of well maintained guns which they could handle proficiently and shoot accurately. In 1832 he was shown a hollow tree armoury containing muskets which were primed, loaded and in 'good condition with a piece of blanket thrust into the muzzle'. One of the last island blacks to be brought in from the bush had in his possession:\n\na very excellent carbine for the preservation of which he had made a case from the skin of the kangaroo\u2013he stated further that numerous firearms were concealed in the woods.\n\nThe linguistic evidence concerning guns is of limited use because the widespread adoption of 'musket' words concealed rather than illuminated Aboriginal thinking on the subject. But in some languages there was an obvious attempt to relate gunfire to familiar experiences or objects. Port Lincoln clans used a word for gun meaning also club or stick; those around Perth coined the term winji-bandi. G. F. Moore explained that it meant:\n\nliterally an emu leg or shank, perhaps from the thin handle part of a gun resembling in its carving the rough grains of the skin of an emu's leg. A double-barrelled gun is described as having two mouths. A gun with a bayonet, as the gun with the spear at its nose.\n\nElsewhere words were used which related gunfire to making fire by friction or to banging, rattling or echoing noises. Teichelmann reported that South Australian Aborigines called guns pandapure which appears to have been formed by joining two other words\u2013parndendi meaning to crackle and sparkle and pure meaning a stone. James Gunther recorded that the Wiradjuri of northern New South Wales called muskets barrima from the word barrimarra which meant to get fire by rubbing. In the Gidabal dialect of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland guns were termed dululbi which derived from a word meaning rattling and echoing noises. The Aranda called bullets mukuta anna or the fruits or kernels of muskets while the Kalkatunga coined an even more graphic term for rifle which meant literally holemaker.\n\n# INTRODUCED DISEASE\n\nAborigines clung to their own theory of illness despite the traumatic impact of introduced disease. E. S. Parker, the Assistant-Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip, reported that the Loddon River blacks rejected the medical advice of the Government doctor despite the serious health problems facing them. They remained convinced that disease was caused by the malignant magic of distant tribes. The one exception which they would allow was venereal disease which they associated directly with sexual contact with the Europeans. More of this interesting case will be made later. G. A. Robinson met a group of Western District Aborigines in 1845 who were apprehensive about a dispute with a neighbouring tribe who, they said, had the power of inflicting a plague. They were in daily expectation of such a visitation. What little evidence we have suggests that the tribes of south-eastern Australia believed malevolent sorcery was the cause of the epidemic\u2013probably of smallpox\u2013which ravaged large areas of the continent in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Wiradjuri attributed the disease to a malignant deity who lived in the south-west, down the river systems. The Euahlayi people of northern New South Wales believed that their enemies sent it in the winds 'which hung it on the trees, over the camps, whence it dropped onto its victims'. In Victoria the source of the disease was believed to be the unleashing by distant tribes of the devastating power of Mindye the Rainbow Serpent. Smallpox was actually called moo-noole mindye, or monola-mindi, the dust of serpent, the skin eruptions lillipe-mindije or lillipook-mindi, the scales of the serpent. The missionary Teichelmann reported that South Australian Aborigines had a song called Nguyapalti, a smallpox song which they said was the only means of stopping the disease. They had learnt it from tribes in the east from whence the disease itself had come.\n\nThe implications of these attitudes are important. Epidemic disease \u2013perhaps the most dramatic consequence of European invasion \u2013was interpreted in traditional ways as being due to human agency and amenable to curative magic. The powerful sorcery of distant tribes was more awesome and devastating than anything the Europeans could do. The Aboriginal way still held the key to the great forces of the universe. These were things which few Europeans even guessed at. Belief in the power of the 'clever men', in their ability to impart and cure disease, to foretell the future, to embark on spirit journeys; all of these survived the invasion. The anthropologists Elkin, Berndt and Reay discovered the amazing vitality of the Aboriginal view of the world while working with fringe and mission-dwelling blacks in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1930s and 1940s one hundred years or more after the initial dispossession.\n\n# SELF-CONFIDENCE\n\nThe intimate relationship with the land was a factor of great importance. On one level this was a matter of practical bush skills and profound knowledge of the environment. Aboriginal self-confidence was noted by Europeans from the earliest years of settlement. While writing about one of the first expeditions inland from Sydney Tench observed that the 'perplexities' of the Europeans afforded accompanying Aborigines 'an inexhaustible fund of merriment'. Robinson found that his black companions were continually testing his ability to find his way in the bush because they entertained 'but a mean opinion of the white people's knowledge'. The Brisbane pioneer Tom Petrie remarked that Aborigines laughed at the inability of the whites to match them in bush skills but perhaps an even more interesting observer was Schmidt the German missionary at Moreton Bay. When giving evidence before the 1845 New South Wales Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines he was asked if in his experience the Aborigines were 'conscious of inferiority' to the Europeans or did they think their own mode of life 'most pleasant and best'. From some of their own expressions, Schmidt remarked, 'I judged that they consider themselves superior to us'. The exchange continued:\n\nDo you mean that they consider themselves superior to the whole of the white race... or only convicts? To the whole; they preferred their mode of living to ours...\n\nAboriginal self-confidence was not based solely on the mastery of practical skills but on the spiritual relationship with the land, the sense of belonging and responsibility for performing the increase ceremonies which ensured the proper ordering of nature, the coming of the rain and the renewal of plant and animal life. Belief in the necessity and the efficacy of increase ceremonies continued on well into the period of European settlement. Europeans brought change and damage to many local ecologies but the larger rhythms of nature remained constant and predictable to those who had learnt the signs. It remained possible despite the European presence to go on believing in the causal link between tribal ceremony and the turn of the seasons. In June 1899 W. E. Roth met a celebrated rainmaker called Ngamumarko on the McIvor River who it was widely assumed had caused the devastating cyclone of the previous March which destroyed the pearling fleet in Princess Charlotte Bay. Darling River Aborigines told Simpson Newland that 'rain never fell without the exercise of aboriginal power, and but for them, the white man, his cattle and sheep, would perish miserably'. While that faith remained even the arrogant white man appeared to be the unwitting beneficiary of Aboriginal wisdom and power. That most Europeans were ignorant of the 'secret life' of the Aborigines merely confirmed their seemingly unquenchable faith in their own moral worth even in the midst of desperate post-contact poverty.\n\nAborigines were neither apathetic in face of the European invasion nor incurious about the newcomer's lifestyle. The historical record indicates that they were not locked into a rigid unchanging culture. They showed themselves just as capable of adapting to altered circumstances as the European pioneers who were learning to strike their own balance between continuity and innovation in the new world. Yet there were aspects of Aboriginal culture and philosophy which proved remarkably resistant to change. Traditional society was, therefore, both more conservative and more innovative than standard accounts have suggested with their picture of a culture too rigid to bend collapsing suddenly and completely under the pressure of European invasion.\n\nThere may be an important clue to Aboriginal behaviour in the attitude of the Loddon River clans to the ravages of venereal infection. While continuing to believe unshakeably in the traditional theories of disease they regarded V.D. as a post-contact phenomenon due to physical contact with Europeans and, unlike other illness, amenable to white medicine. Implicit in this reaction was the acceptance of a realm of experience new to Aboriginal society outside the sway of customary belief and practice. It may have been such judgements that broke the seal of custom and opened the way for innovation, creating in the process the complex pattern of continuity and change discussed to this point. But emphasis on cultural change and adaption should not obscure the overwhelming importance of the violent conflict accompanying the invasion of the continent.\n\n# Chapter 3\n\n# RESISTANCE: MOTIVES AND OBJECTIVES\n\nAustralian historians have only recently rediscovered the violence used to secure the conquest and effect the pioneering of the continent. Yet almost every district settled during the nineteenth century had a history of conflict between local clans and encroaching settlers. Many of the Europeans who lived through the time of confrontation were quite realistic about the human cost of colonisation. A small town pioneer wrote in 1869 that his community 'had its foundations cemented in blood'. 'I believe I am not wrong in stating', observed another, that 'every acre of land in these districts was won from the Aborigines by bloodshed and warfare'. Black resistance in its many forms was an inescapable feature of life on the fringes of European settlement from the first months at Sydney Cove until the early years of the twentieth century. The intensity and duration of conflict varied widely depending on terrain, indigenous population densities, the speed of settlement, the type of introduced economic activity, even the period of first contact. Edward Curr, who had perhaps the widest overview of white-Aboriginal relations in nineteenth-century Australia, wrote the classical account of frontier conflict:\n\nIn the first place the meeting of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia and the White pioneer, results as a rule in war, which lasts from six months to ten years, according to the nature of the country, the amount of settlement which takes place in a neighbourhood, and the proclivities of the individuals concerned. When several squatters settle in proximity, and the country they occupy is easy of access and without fastnesses to which the Blacks can retreat, the period of warfare is usually short and the bloodshed not excessive. On the other hand, in districts which are not easily traversed on horseback, in which the Whites are few in numbers and food is procurable by the Blacks in fastnesses, the term is usually prolonged and the slaughter more considerable.\n\nWhile black resistance has gained increasing recognition discussion of Aboriginal motivation is still rudimentary. Nineteenth century writers frequently discussed Aboriginal action but rarely analysed their motives. Compulsions of savagery were often propounded as a satisfactory explanation of black behaviour. 'There are some who affect to believe', observed a humanitarian squatter, 'that it is unnecessary to ask why a black has committed a murder'. 'The cause, say they, is sufficiently accounted for by his savage and blood-thirsty nature'. Modern scholars documenting the resistance have assumed, perhaps understandably, that opposition to invasion is so basic and universal a reaction, that it scarcely warrants discussion, while others have referred to an elemental territoriality. 'All living organisms', wrote Bauer, 'jealously defend to the best of their ability whatever portion of the earth's surface they inhabit'. Regardless of the ultimate value of such generalizations, they offer little to the historian seeking to describe and explain the variety and complexity of Aboriginal behaviour. Yet while biological determinism should be eschewed it is clear that land is central to any discussion of white-Aboriginal relations whether in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Such an investigation must begin with the nature of traditional ownership but that takes the reader into the centre of a major and long running anthropological debate.\n\n# LAND OWNERSHIP\n\nThere are two basic positions. Radcliffe-Brown argued, and has been supported more recently by Tindale and Birdsell, that Aboriginal Australia was divided into clearly defined, discrete territories with fixed and known boundaries. In an essay of 1913 Radcliffe-Brown referred to a 'very rigid system' of land ownership backed up with strict laws relating to trespass. In his classic 1930 study of the social organization of Aboriginal Australia, he defined the horde as a 'small group of persons owning a certain area of territory, the boundaries of which are known, and possessing in common proprietary rights over the land and its products'. In 1974 Tindale argued that all tribes claim and occupy a 'discrete territory with finite limits beyond which members have a sense of trespass'.\n\nThe second view, advocated by Hiatt, Meggitt, Petersen and others, is that boundaries were far less clear and social organization more complex than traditional theories have allowed. The very concept of the self-contained tribe has been called into question with the suggestion that Aborigines identified themselves according to kinship, marriage, territory, totemism, language and ceremony and that these overlapped and intersected in complex ways. Sutton has argued that descent groups owned constellations of sacred sites rather than neat parcels of land. While most of the sites were clustered together a significant number were separated by sites belonging to other groups while some sites were owned by more than one descent group. Estates, he concluded, were not 'whole blocks or tracts of country in the sense of surveyed real estate' but were 'collections of points in a landscape'. Land-use patterns were complex as well. Neighbouring clans intermingled, foraging and hunting on each other's territory; easements were provided for travellers, temporary hospitality for sojourners. While discussing the ritual and economic life of the Yir-Yoront of Cape York Lauriston Sharp carefully defined tribal attitudes to ownership, access and trespass:\n\nA majority of the Yir-Yoront clans have multiple countries which are not contiguous, and which vary from an acre or two up to a number of square miles in area. The countries of a clan, with their natural resources, are owned by all clan members in common... The right of exclusion is exercised only in exceptional cases, in which there is an actual or pretended drain on the resources of the land, indicating that one of chief functions of clan ownership of land is the apportionment and conservation of natural resources. The natives state that a clan may even forbid a man crossing clan territory to get from one of his own clan territories to another, but no example of such extreme clan action could be cited. People gather and hunt, ordinarily, in whatever country they will. Thus there is practically a standing permission which opens a clan's countries to all, but this permission may be withdrawn by the clan for those who are persona non grata.\n\nThe second strand of interpretation seems more pertinent for the assessment of the Aboriginal response to European explorers and pioneers. As a general rule clans did not react immediately to European trespass although illusions about returning relatives or fear of guns may have significantly modified their behaviour. Indeed the history of inland exploration indicates that local groups tolerated the passage of European expeditions provided they behaved with circumspection. On many occasions Aborigines hospitably allowed squatting parties to establish themselves and even assisted them during the first few weeks of their occupation. Clearly white and black perceptions of what was taking place were very wide apart. Unless forewarned Aborigines probably had no appreciation of the European's determination to stay indefinitely and 'own' the soil. After all the first white intruders came and went again in a way that would have fully accorded with black expectations. Even Morrell had difficulty in explaining the objectives of the first squatting party to enter his district. He persuaded his clan to go on a hunting expedition to the hill overlooking the camp of the pioneer stock-men but his kinsmen were doubtful if they would find the Europeans in the same spot as earlier reports had placed them. Thinking that the white men were the 'same as themselves', Morrell explained, 'they were not sure whether they were there'. Initially the white intrusion may have seemed an event of merely transient importance. Cape York Aborigines told the anthropologist Donald Thomson how the appearance of the Europeans fitted in with their sense of history and continuity. 'After the Big Men', they explained, 'the Middle People lived, last we come and we find the white man'. The expectation that the settlers would eventually go away lingered for many years in some places. In the 1960s old Dyirbal people in north Queensland still had 'a solid hope that one day the white man would be driven out, and the tribe would once more be able to resume peaceful occupation of its traditional lands'. The Europeans had been in the district for ninety years.\n\n# DISPOSSESSION\n\nThroughout Aboriginal Australia the appearance of strange blacks carried the threat of revenge killing, abduction of women or the exercise of potent magic. But it did not portend forced dispossession or exile from the homeland. While conflict was ubiquitous in traditional societies territorial conquest was virtually unknown. Alienation of land was not only unthinkable, it was literally impossible. If blacks often did not react to the initial invasion of their country it was because they were not aware that it had taken place. They certainly did not believe that their land had suddenly ceased to belong to them and they to their land. The mere presence of Europeans, no matter how threatening, could not uproot certainties so deeply implanted in Aboriginal custom and consciousness. The black owners may have been pushed aside but many refused to accept that they had been dispossessed; they never conceded the major premise of the invasion. Yet for others ejection from cherished homelands was a shattering experience. The missionary Francis Tuckfield discussed the 'white problem' with Port Phillip blacks who visited his station and complained about being driven from their favourite camping grounds. He concluded that they were acquainted with the 'relative possessions of the Black and White population' and they asked him: 'Will you now select for us also a portion of land? My country all you gone. The White Men have stolen it.'\n\nThe white invasion often forced blacks into a more assertive and possessive stance concerning clan territories. E. S. Parker came to the conclusion that it was an 'important and unquestionable fact' that the Port Phillip Aborigines were 'not insensible to their original right to the soil'. He referred to the experience of a settler who was confronted by an old man who told the whites to leave the district because the land and water belonged to the Aborigines. Robinson reported a similar case in the Western District where a party of Europeans were ordered by local blacks to depart because, they said, 'it was their country, and the water belonged to them, if it was taken away they could not go to another country'. A very similar response was reported at much the same time from Ipswich in southern Queensland. A large party of blacks marched up to a recently established station and ordered the Europeans to be off 'as it was their ground'.\n\nBut Aborigines reacted less to the original trespass than to the ruthless assertion by Europeans of exclusive proprietorial rights often from the very first day of occupation. It was behaviour probably unheard of in traditional society. Increasingly the newcomers impinged on accustomed patterns of life, occupying the flat, open land and monopolizing surface water. Indigenous animals were driven away, plant life eaten or trampled and Aborigines pushed into the marginal country\u2013mountains, swamps, waterless neigh-bourhoods. Patterns of seasonal migration broke down, areas remaining free of Europeans were over utilized and eventually depleted of both flora and fauna. Food became scarcer and available in less and less variety and even access to water was often difficult. Attacks on sheep and cattle, made frequently in desperation, provoked violent retaliation: reprisal and revenge spiralled viciously.\n\nThe missionary William Ridley described the fate of a group of Balonne River blacks in the 1840s. Their situation was typical of what happened all over the country:\n\nOn this river the effect upon the aborigines of the occupation by Europeans of the country was forcibly presented. Before the occupation of this district by colonists, the aborigines could never have been at a loss for the necessaries of life. Except in the lowest part of the river, there is water in the driest seasons; along the banks game abounded; waterfowl, emus, parrot tribes, kangaroos, and other animals might always, or almost always, be found. But when the country was taken up, and herds of cattle introduced, not only did the cattle drive away the kangaroos, but those who had charge of the cattle found it necessary to keep the aborigines away from the river... After some fatal conflicts, in which some colonists and many aborigines have been slain, the blacks have been awed into submission to the orders which forbid their access to the river. And what is the consequence? Black fellows coming in from the west report that last summer very large numbers, afraid to visit the river, were crowded round a few scanty waterholes, within a day's walk of which it was impossible to get sufficient food... that owing to these combined hardships many died.\n\nCeremonial and religious life was disrupted by the settler incursion. Important sacred sites were desecrated, albeit unwittingly in many cases, access to them denied and large ceremonial gatherings often dispersed by anxious frontiersmen or officious police detachments. Cave paintings were daubed with graffiti, sacred boards stolen. Members of the Horn Scientific Expedition of 1894 found a cave of great religious significance in central Australia and took sixty wooden sticks and fifteen stone tablets but left axes, knives and other bric-a-brac in return. But dramatic events like desecration or dispossession were not the only sources of conflict; it often rose up out of bitter arguments between settlers and blacks who had lived in proximity and reasonable accord for some time before the outbreak of hostilities. Aboriginal women and European property were major causes of such confrontations. They were deceptively simple. Settlers caught blacks taking their property; angry shouting, blows, spearing and shooting followed. The pioneers usually assumed that Aborigines were compulsive pilferers and few historians have bothered to look any closer at the question although references to black greediness and cupidity abound in the literature. While it is true that European material abundance was a major focus of tension the assumption that Aboriginal envy was the principal cause of conflict is both superficial and ethnocentric.\n\n# RECIPROCITY VS PRIVATE PROPERTY\n\nAborigines could not help being struck by the quantity of possessions owned by even poorer settlers. But it is far from certain that they admired the whites for their abundance which must have appeared to lack any rationale. The jealous possession of large herds of animals would have seemed totally unnecessary especially when so few were killed for food. J. D. Wood, a settler who had shrewdly studied Aboriginal perceptions, commented that: 'greediness in us, is with them a great crime, their ignorance prevents them having a knowledge of the cost of our property.' The anthropologist Donald Thomson made similar observations about traditionally oriented people he studied in the 1920s. 'White men's meanness', he wrote, in hoarding great quantities of tobacco and other things which could not possibly be used in a day or two was 'hard for them to understand'.\n\nReciprocity and sharing were central to the social organization and ethical standards of traditional society. In her study of the Euahlayi tribe K. L. Parker illustrated how sharing was inculcated from the earliest age. Old women crooned charms over babies to make them generous in later life. She had often heard them singing a song which included the refrain:\n\nGive to me, Baby   \nGive to her, Baby   \nGive to him, Baby   \nGive to one, Baby   \nGive to all, Baby\n\nEuropean observers were struck by the importance of sharing in Aboriginal society. 'They are truly generous among themselves', wrote William Thomas of Port Phillip blacks in the 1840s. 'Meanness is rarely found among these people', noted Donald Thomson while on Cape York a hundred years later. Both men observed that reciprocity was so fundamental to Aboriginal society that the clans they knew had no word meaning 'thank you'. Thomas explained that while food was always distributed among those present it was not considered a gift in the European sense, rather as a right 'and no thanks to the giver'. He was, he thought, the first person 'that taught them the meaning of the word thanks'. European possessiveness was morally obnoxious especially as Aborigines assumed that whites had come by their goods without special effort or obvious virtue. J. D. Wood remarked that the blacks thought whites: 'had only to ask in order that we may receive anything we require and they think us culpable if we refuse them what they covet.' A pioneer squatter told a Queensland Parliamentary Select Committee in 1861 of a pertinent incident which had occurred some years before on the McIntyre River. Local blacks had killed a bullock and advanced on the hut of the beleaguered squatter with the animal's kidney fat stuck on their spears. They called out to the whites offering them a share of the fat saying 'that they were not like the whites themselves\u2013greedy'.\n\nAnger about European possessiveness was clearly one of the motives behind the taking and destruction of their stock and other property. Aborigines acted to make the whites share their goods; the motivation was as much political as economic. It was not so much the possessions that mattered as affirmation of the principles of reciprocity. The great disparity of property merely exacerbated tensions inherent in the situation. Innumerable small skirmishes over European possessions appearing to be little better than unseemly brawls, were in reality manifestations of a fundamental clash of principle, the outward showing of one of the most significant moral and political struggles in Australian history. The settlers were transplanting a policy of possessive individualism, hierarchy and inequality. Aboriginal society was reciprocal and materially egalitarian although there were important political and religious inequalities based on age and sex. Two such diametrically opposed societies could not merge without conflict. One or the other had to prevail.\n\n# SEXUAL COMPETITION\n\nConflict over women was a constant feature of relations between white and black, an aspect of contact stressed by nineteenth century observers and one much more familiar to Aborigines than the struggle for land and water. Women were a major focus of indigenous politics and control of their bestowal was perhaps the principal source of secular power in traditional society. The arrival of the Europeans saw the conjunction of an almost woman-less pioneer population and a society which allowed the ceremonial exchange of women and the offer of sexual favours as a means of hospitality or method of diplomacy. The resulting sexual symbiosis preceded, followed, even punctuated periods of interracial conflict. Some explorers reported the offer of women, others were discreetly silent on the matter, none admitted to temptation. Sturt noted that his camp was overwhelmed with offers of sexual accommodation while in the Centre; Giles found that attractive young women were brought up to his men one after another; while on his Lake Eyre expedition of 1874 Lewis observed that despite the fear his party evoked local clans sent 'as is customary with them six of their lubras as a peace offering'. When Moorhouse visited the tribes on the Lower Murray after intense conflict with the parties travelling from New South Wales to South Australia they told him that all the white people they had ever seen before asked for women to be brought up so they could have sexual intercourse with them.\n\nPhysical understanding, perhaps even mutual gratification, appears to have quickly bridged the gulf between the cultures but an understanding of the social and political ramifications of sexuality took much longer. For most frontiersmen an encounter ended abruptly with ejaculation and withdrawal; for Aboriginal women and their kin that was often just the beginning. The randy woman-less white man was not only encircled in warm flesh: he was also enmeshed in an intricate web of kinship. The acceptance by the settler of what seemed to be quick, casual copulation frequently involved him in expectations of reciprocity, and what was more, continuing reciprocity. Many apparently excessive demands for food, tobacco and the like came from blacks expecting European men to behave henceforth as classificatory brothers, sons and nephews. 'After that familiar intercourse', Moorhouse wrote, 'the Natives seem to claim a liberal and constant supply of food, and in case it is not given, they do not hesitate to use violence in obtaining it'. A similar situation was reported on the Gwydir River in northern New South Wales in the 1830s. Shepherds and stockmen had sexual relations with local Aboriginal women but when they subsequently 'refused the Blacks anything they wanted' attempts were made to kill them.\n\nBut beyond bad behaviour stemming from ignorance of Aboriginal custom European men deliberately cheated, raped and abducted black women. The emergent frontier custom of 'gin-busting' trampled over sexual customs and incest taboos. Moorhouse set out to unravel the reasons for black hostility on the overland route from New South Wales to South Australia and sought the help of a Sydney black who had made the trip several times. The riverine clans indicated that they were becoming enraged with the whites because they had:\n\nused the women... and much abused them. The abuse (they explained), consisted in the Europeans promising the Aborigines food, clothing and tomahawks for the use of their females, but the Europeans did not fulfil their promises, after gratifying their passions, the women were turned out late in the evening or in the night, and instead of the men having their promised rewards, they were laughed at and ridiculed.\n\nSexual relations between white men and black women were, then, a major source of misunderstanding, bitterness and conflict. But many Aboriginal attacks on Europeans were motivated by revenge for previous injury or insult whether there had been any sexual contact or not.\n\n# REVENGE\n\nRevenge was the mainspring of violence in traditional society, source of ever present anxiety about dangerous magic and surreptitious attack. Death was universally attributed to malevolent sorcery, necessitating an inquest to determine guilt and retribution which characteristically took the form of counter-magic or a revenge expedition aimed at the putative killer or a close relative. But while pay-back killing was endemic in traditional society it was usually contained within the resilient bonds of kinship for if clans were near enough neighbours to fight they were liable to be linked by at least classificatory, if not actual, blood relationships. Customary institutions and practices can be seen, therefore, to have promoted intermittent personal violence while at the same time inhibiting the development of widespread conflict. They fostered the feud but prevented escalation into warfare. Revenge killing was also related very closely to the dominant ethic of reciprocity. It was the means of restoring a status quo upset by prior death or injury; of reasserting the balance of rights and obligations. While discussing conflict in Murngin society the American anthropologist Lloyd-Warner observed that:\n\nthe fundamental principle underlying all the causes of Murngin warfare is that of reciprocity: if harm had been done to an individual or a group, it is felt by the injured people that they must repay the ones who have harmed them by an injury that at least equals the one they have suffered.\n\nHow did Europeans fit into this presumably age-old pattern of revenge and reprisal? Deaths resulting from frontier skirmishing could be directly attributed to Europeans and we do not know if inquests were considered necessary in such cases. It is distinctly possible that in the early period of contact Aboriginal enemies were thought to be implicated in marking down the particular victims to be killed by musket balls and bullets. White men may have been seen as unwitting agents of powerful black magic. Did blacks credit Europeans with the powers of sorcery attributed to their own 'clever men'? They initially assumed that guns were magic and may have associated death by European poison with sorcery. In several places in South-Eastern Australia the English word poison was borrowed to describe the powers of local 'clever men'.\n\nDespite the impact of the European invasion the whites may have appeared less formidable than they supposed. Western Australian blacks told the early settlers that they initially considered whites as inferior to themselves, that they saw the Europeans going about unarmed and open to attack, and felt sure of success. While guns were weapons to be reckoned with the Europeans were not necessarily perceived as being more dangerous than distant blacks whose potent magic was blamed for death by accident, disease, deprivation and exposure. At the very time that whites were shooting down blacks along the frontier more were also dying from other causes which were typically attributed to the malevolent sorcery of hostile Aborigines. Howitt related the story of a group of twenty-five Braidwood blacks\u2013men, women and children\u2013who died after drinking what was apparently poisoned alcohol. Blame for their deaths was attributed not to the whites, or even to misadventure, but to clans from Tumut or Goulburn who had put Gubburra or evil magic in their drink. Inter-clan fighting and revenge killing continued throughout the period of open conflict with the Europeans and indeed long after in some places. The pressure of the settlers on both Aboriginal society and the environment may have actually increased the amount of fighting between rival clans. In 1897 the German missionary Poland asked an Aboriginal informant how it was that so many local blacks had been killed in the previous twenty years. He was told that: 'Blacks have killed them, who are hostile towards us, or policemen or white men have shot them or the evil spirit got them.' However a pioneer New South Wales missionary argued that the growing tendency to attribute death to the whites had led to a decline of inter-clan feuding. It was, he wrote:\n\nformerly a custom, when any of their number died, to receive a challenge from another tribe to go to war, to vindicate themselves, from the imputation of having been the cause of his death\u2013but now, they usually attribute their visitations from death to the influence of white men. However unjust this may be to their white neighbours, it is certainly a blessing to themselves, as it saves them from many a desperate and bloody conflict.\n\nBut when Europeans were clearly responsible for the death of Aborigines the desire to exact due revenge remained strong although fear of guns and massive reprisals may have promoted caution and helped determine that sorcery rather than physical attack would be the preferred method of operation. A Western Australian pioneer wrote to the Perth Gazette in 1833 observing:\n\nthe doctrine of taking life for life seems perfectly established, and they avow their determination to act upon it, for though I expressed strong dissent they seemed thoroughly satisfied of its propriety.\n\nA generation later a Queensland squatter remarked that in his experience blacks took 'life for life in some shape or other' though it might take years to consummate and there is no doubt that Aborigines carried out carefully planned executions of specific Europeans for known crimes against kinsmen. Pioneer literature recorded many instances of the kind. In his reminiscences of early pastoral life in Queensland James Nesbit referred to the fate of one McLaren who was expertly tracked for a whole day and was eventually speared when incautiously putting down his gun. G. S. Lang recorded the death of a shepherd on Mt Abundance Station who, during twelve months, never relaxed for an instant while out on the run as he was aware of the determination of the local clans to kill him. A moment's inattention just before his contract expired was long enough to allow a spear to rip through his body. Then there was the case of Anthony Cox who was executed in the Maronoa in 1851. He had been under threat from local clans for three months; eventually an Aborigine walked boldly up to the shepherd's hut and drove a spear into him before the two other Europeans present could intervene although they subsequently shot the executioner.\n\nWhat happened when the guilty European was unknown or beyond reach? When dealing with other Aborigines the more experienced clan members could draw on their knowledge of kinship networks to determine who could appropriately be punished in particular cases. But with white men the situation was entirely different. The basic problem was that of accountability which was in turn dependent on Aboriginal perception of European social organization. Were whites to be considered as one people and thereby mutually responsible? They did speak the one language but on the other hand those in the bush were divided into small residential groups. This was one of those white problems probably widely discussed among Aborigines in contact with the settlers. Davis, the convict escapee, noted Aboriginal uncertainty when they were seeking to determine who to attack in revenge for the 1842 Kilcoy poisoning. They were considering an onslaught on the exploring party led by Thomas Petrie which ventured inland after landing in Wide Bay and asked Davis 'whether they belonged to the Whites who had poisoned their friends'. Davis deflected his kin from their projected attack by arguing that the explorers were totally different people because they had come from the sea and were therefore not accountable for the Kilcoy massacre which was perpetrated by shepherds who had arrived overland from the south.\n\nThe evidence provided by European pioneers underlines the variety of Aboriginal solutions to this problem. An experienced frontier squatter was asked by the 1861 Select Committee on the Queensland Native Police if he knew of any instance when blacks had taken revenge on members of one station for violence dealt out at another. He answered that his experience suggested that they confined their retribution to the family who had injured them. 'They do not make reprisals', he said, 'except to revenge themselves upon particular individuals'.  Twenty years earlier Swan River Aborigines 'seemed to intimate' that their revenge was limited either to place or person. They explained to a European confidant that they were 'very bad foes with respect to some districts' but very good or friendly 'with respect to others'. 'This shows', the settler concluded, 'they consider us devided [sic] into distinct tribes' although he endeavoured to show the blacks that Europeans were all the same; that 'to touch one offended all'.\n\nAs well as seeking to punish particular individuals Aborigines sought to keep revenge proportionate with the original offence as dictated by the principles of reciprocity. In at least some of their dealings with Europeans blacks sought to use violence to restore an equilibrium upset by previous conflict in a manner common in traditional society. This explains the often sporadic nature of Aboriginal attacks on Europeans, the way in which weeks or months of concord were succeeded by periods of antagonism. At Moreton Bay in 1843 the Commissioner for Crown Lands reported that local blacks boldly asserted 'their intention of having a certain number of lives of white men by way of compensation' for kin killed in conflict with the squatters. Blacks around Perth explained that after retaliation had been effected they considered that friendship had been restored. 'White man shoot black man, very bad', they said, 'black men spear white man, very good, very good, plenty shake hands'. Armstrong, the Aboriginal Interpreter, wrote to the West Australian Colonial Secretary explaining that local blacks said that because the settlers had shot one of them they had speared one of the white people and that consequently they were 'all friends now'. J. D. Wood, whose perceptions of Aboriginal behaviour were clearer than his prose, explained in a memo to the Queensland government in 1862 that:\n\nIf you (the Reader or Hearer) kill any Aboriginal his relatives catch me or any other White man supposed to be of the same nation, they will kill us, after which you, (the reader or hearer) may walk about amongst them in perfect safety.\n\nWhile discussing the consequences of the so called Battle of Pinjarra the Western Australian Advocate-General remarked that up until that event the local blacks had believed that, like themselves, Europeans balanced life against life and were 'content if we took a corresponding number of lives to those taken by them'. But the massive onslaught at Pinjarra had caused the 'complete annihilation of this idea'. These remarks are particularly pertinent because they relate to the impact of European violence on Aboriginal behaviour.\n\nTraditional society we can assume had been able to sustain the level of violence created by pay-back killing over long periods of time and inter-clan feuding continued undiminished until well after the Europeans arrived. Occasional fighting with whites may not have appeared a radical departure from these long accepted patterns of violence. But the settlers had no intention of allowing the continuance of a situation which challenged their monopoly of power and the absolute supremacy of the introduced legal code even though they frequently ignored it themselves when dealing with the Aborigines. Pioneer communities appeared to be unable to cope with the psychological tensions produced by even small amounts of inter-racial violence. The punitive expedition\u2013official and unofficial \u2013was the almost universal riposte. The objective was simple: the use of overwhelming force to crush resistance once and for all and drown in blood the Aboriginal determination to take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Terror succeeded in many places. Massive force did achieve peace for the pioneer, subjection for the blacks. But elsewhere an ascending spiral of violence forced Aborigines to shift decisively into new patterns of behaviour, to concentrate more and more on the struggle with the settlers.\n\nAborigines were often stunned by the numbers killed in encounters with settlers determined to bring an end to conflict 'once and for all'. The violence must have appeared both totally disproportionate and indiscriminate, sweeping away individuals and sometimes whole local groups who had not necessarily been involved in attacks on the settlers. The desire for revenge, to measure life for life, became increasingly difficult to consummate. The problem of accountability was compounded by the length of the casualty list. At this point some shunned further violence turning to sorcery or sinking into quiescence. But amongst other groups two crucial decisions were made\u2013that white people were mutually accountable and responsible for each other's actions and therefore fit subjects of Aboriginal attack. Colour alone was now enough to identify the enemy. When those conclusions had been reached a shift of decisive importance had been made. For the groups in question the constraints of custom had been circumvented, they had moved from feud to warfare.\n\nInitially, then, the blacks had dealt with Europeans as though they too were Aborigines. Their violence was judicial rather than martial, seeking revenge rather than military victory. But the settlers were determined upon radical changes. They had no interest in peace and equilibrium until the invasion was fully effected and all resistance crushed. Till then violence was bound to escalate. Many contingent factors turned events in the same direction. Misunderstanding, fear and anxiety merged and simmered in the volatile frontier environment. Violent death and succeeding violent revenge built up brutal momentum as the settlers pushed further into Aboriginal Australia.\n\n# THREE CELEBRATED ATTACKS\n\nThree celebrated Aboriginal attacks on Europeans can be examined to illustrate these themes\u2013the Maria 'massacre' in South Australia in 1840, and the successful Aboriginal attacks on Hornet Bank and Cullinlaringoe in Queensland in 1857 and 1861 respectively. Each case was seen at the time as evidence of Aboriginal savagery and treachery and although well reported in contemporary newspapers there have been few satisfactory historical accounts of them.\n\nThe events leading up to the Maria 'massacre' were deceptively simple. The ship travelling from Hobart to Adelaide was wrecked off the Coorong. Twelve survivors were eventually killed by Aborigines who had initially helped them travel along the beach towards the mouth of the Murray. Six months after the event the Aboriginal side of the story was presented by Dr Richard Penny who as surgeon to the whale fishery at Encounter Bay had learnt the local language and arrived at a sophisticated understanding of traditional society. The blacks explained that they had helped the whites travel by carrying their children and providing them with fish and water. When they came to the end of their own country they tried to explain that they could go no further and demanded clothes and blankets in recognition of the trouble taken up to that point. The Europeans refused to give them anything, saying that when they reached Adelaide the blacks would be fully rewarded. They probably did not understand what the Aborigines were trying to tell them. The blacks attempted to help themselves. The whites resisted. Scuffles ensued, tempers flared, and the weaponless Europeans were killed. Their deaths were not inevitable. With a little luck the survivors might have reached Adelaide full of praise for the friendly blacks of the Coorong.\n\nIn October 1861 nineteen Europeans were killed by Aborigines at Cullinlaringoe Station on the Nagoa River in central Queensland. The district had only recently been settled and initially relations between blacks and squatters were amicable. Daniel Cameron, the pioneer of the area, reported that local clans had constantly assisted him during twenty months of occupation and in June 1861 the Commissioner for Crown Lands remarked that the blacks were quiet and friendly on both the Comet and Nagoa. But Native Police patrols were already changing the situation. The Commandant explained to the Colonial Secretary why he had decided to send a large detachment into the district. Blacks were reported to be gathering on the Comet and while they had been peaceably disposed they could not be trusted when able to muster in large numbers. In March the police attacked blacks in the area. Frederick Walker, managing a local property, complained to the Government, warning that Native Police action would inevitably lead to serious conflict. The whole tribe he said was 'dreadfully excited and accused me and all the Europeans, with complicity in what they rightly termed treachery'. C. B. Dutton, a neighbouring squatter, took the matter up with the leader of the detachment, Lieutenant Patrick, speaking of it as an 'unfortunate and untoward event'. According to Dutton's testimony Patrick justified himself by saying that:\n\nother Police Officers before they had been in the force a fortnight had sent in dispatches (I use his own words) 'of lots of blacks shot. And here had he been in the force six months before he had shot a single black'.\n\nLike Walker, Dutton impressed on the Government that the blacks were moved by feelings of:\n\ndeep implacable revenge for unprovoked injuries. They ask me why they are shot. They say 'bail no me kill white fellow... bail take ration, what for shoot him?' How are they to be answered, how appeased?\n\nAnd he answered with venom, 'there is but one answer, you are black and must be shot'.\n\nBut not all the squatters opposed the actions of the Native Police. In his memoirs Jesse Gregson recorded his part in the events of 1861. He established himself at Mt Rainworth Station in May. The local clans persistently endeavoured to establish friendly relations but were rebuffed each time. Gregson believed firmly in the policy of 'keeping the blacks out'. One of his shepherds lost a flock of 500 sheep. It was found by the blacks who began to drive it away. Gregson arrived with Patrick and his detachment and, as he termed it, a brush took place. The Aborigines determined on revenge. They gathered men from the scattered clans and attacked the recently established Cullinlaringoe. The Wills family, who were not expecting trouble, may have died totally unaware of what had gone wrong with the peaceful pattern of contact established during their few weeks in the district. They may have been attacked because they were the closest Europeans to the gathering point of the clans or perhaps they were regarded as the least prepared to repel an attack.\n\nThe events at Hornet Bank are fairly well known. The Frasers were managing the property and had close, if not always amicable, relations with the neighbouring Aboriginal clans camped on or near the station. An apparently well planned and unexpected attack was made late at night and all but one member of the household were killed. It appears that the women were raped before death\u2013an unusual accompaniment of Aboriginal attack Various attempts were made at the time to explain Aboriginal motivation but none could compete with the insistent references to the savagery and treachery. However there are scattered pieces of evidence which enable us to advance beyond the folk-wisdom of the frontier. The Honourable M. C. O'Connell told the 1861 Select Committee on the Native Police that the killings were a consequence of the young men 'having been in the habit of allowing their black boys to rush the gins' in neighbouring camps. Archibald Meston, the Queensland 'expert' on Aborigines, heard from a friend of the surviving Fraser son that the white employees of the family had whipped and raped two local Aboriginal girls. This story was confirmed by W. Robertson who claimed to have discussed the events of 1857 with old Aborigines who as youths had been present at the time. They reported that after the women were raped the local clans attempted to use sorcery against the offending Europeans. When that appeared to have no effect they sent an old woman to the Frasers to explain the circumstances and seek redress. When no action was taken by the whites the clans determined on revenge. So the evidence concurs on the importance of sexual attacks on Aboriginal girls but attributes blame variously to black and white employees of the family. But one account directly implicates the young Fraser men. J. D. Wood explained in a memo to the Colonial Secretary that when arriving in Queensland he made enquiries about Hornet Bank. He was told by a Mr Nicol who had been in the Native Police in 1857 that Mrs Fraser had repeatedly asked him to reprove her sons 'for forcibly taking the young maidens' and that in consequence she 'expected harm would come of it, that they were in the habit of doing so, notwithstanding her entreaties to the contrary'. Several other informants told Wood that the Frasers were 'famous for the young Gins' and all agreed 'that those acts were the cause of the atrocity'.\n\nOf the three cases discussed above the Maria 'massacre' was clearly the most unpremeditated, even accidental event, arising out of the tension and misunderstanding inherent in the situation following the shipwreck. At Hornet Bank and Cullinlarin-goe Aboriginal action was carefully planned and thoroughly considered and followed months of provocation\u2013harassment by the Native Police on the one hand, sexual molestation by some, if not all, the young men on the station on the other. Even the raping of the Fraser women appears in retrospect to have been a deliberate, political act. But there were other aspects of the attack on Hornet Bank which call for comment. It appears to have been part of what Wiseman, the local Commissioner for Crown Lands, called an 'extensive conspiracy'. Writing at a time of extreme anger and anxiety he may have mistakenly seen connections between unrelated events. Yet he noted that many circumstances supported his interpretation. Two or three days before the attack the black women and children left the stations on the Dawson and went away in one direction while the men went in the other. News of the successful onslaught was, he believed, known to blacks a hundred and more miles away well before local Europeans had heard of it. On receipt of the intelligence in the camps 'rejoicing immediately commenced'. Several other attacks were launched in the district at much the same time but they were unsuccessful. Wiseman referred to many other circumstances 'too tedious to relate' which illustrated the Aborigine's 'feeling of hatred' towards the settlers.\n\n# OVERVIEW\n\nWe may never know enough to accurately chart the regional variations of frontier conflict and Aboriginal resistance in every area of Australia. But in a few places the documentary evidence is plentiful. This is true of Tasmania where voluminous official reports, newspapers and other records can be balanced up with the detailed diaries of G. A. Robinson written while travelling extensively in what was still Aboriginal Tasmania. Robinson understood the Tasmanian dialects and spent many hours talking with the blacks at a time when conflict with the whites had reached a bitter crescendo. He provided by far the most important European account of Aboriginal motivation and the cumulative effect of settler brutality. Robinson realized that the Tasmanians had experienced 'a multitude of wrongs from a variety of sources'. The accumulation of private injury and personal tragedy fused to produce the bitter racial hatred and desperate resistance of the Black War of 1827\u20131830. 'They have' wrote Robinson:\n\na tradition amongst them that white men have usurped their territory, have driven them into the forests, have killed their game... have ravished their wives and daughters, have murdered and butchered their fellow countrymen; and are wont whilst brooding over these complicated ills in the dense part of the forest, to goad each other on to acts of bloodshed and revenge for the injuries done to their ancestors and the persecutions offered to themselves through their white enemies.\n\nThe more observant settlers noted the change in Aboriginal attitudes which took place during the second half of the 1820s. One told an official committee that although he had been aware of black hostility in the past it had previously been 'excited by some temporary aggression of the Whites the Remembrance of which gradually gave way to better feelings'. The desire for revenge had not originally extended beyond the 'Tribe; or family, in which it originated'. But the situation had changed and he now detected a 'determined spirit of hostility' among the whole black population. He concluded with the observation:\n\nI think the Blacks look on the whole of the white population as Enemies and are not sensible of any benefit they might derive from living with us on friendly terms.\n\nThe escalation of conflict which occurred in Tasmania in the 1820s was mirrored in other parts of the continent. The occupation of the northern pastoral frontier of New South Wales and Queensland witnessed a similar burgeoning of racial violence as the pastoralists moved deeper into Aboriginal territory. Bloodshed in one district built up expectations about its probability in the next. Squatters came over the horizon with their guns loaded ready to keep the blacks out until they were willing to submit. Expectation of conflict was diffused on the other side of the frontier as well. The pastoralists followed the river valleys and open savannah, riding along those channels of Aboriginal communication where information was most rapidly disseminated. Conflict of the late 1830s and early 1840s took place in north-eastern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland where inter-tribal contact was strengthened by the large gatherings to harvest the bunya trees in the ranges north of the Brisbane Valley. Refugees from conflict with the whites almost certainly found succour among clans still beyond the settlers' reach 'relating to each other the history of their wrongs'.\n\nThere was no G. A. Robinson on the northern pastoral frontier but it is possible to gather a little evidence from a variety of sources. Davis provided important material about the Aboriginal reaction to the poisoning of a large number of blacks\u2013probably fifty or so\u2013on Kilcoy Station in the upper Brisbane Valley in 1842. News of the terrible deaths spread widely in Aboriginal society over a significant area of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. There was a large gathering in the mountains where, according to Davis, representatives of fourteen or fifteen different tribes were present. The suffering and terrible deaths of those poisoned were graphically mimed for the benefit of the visitors, a performance which Davis was later to repeat for his white rescuers. The anger of the assembled blacks was unmistakable. They were, said Davis 'much infuriated' by the news and swore to have vengeance. This decision was apparently widely and rapidly communicated. Schmidt, the German missionary at Moreton Bay was warned by friendly blacks that the tribes to the north had determined 'to attack and kill whites whenever they met any'.\n\nSimilar sentiments, relayed through intermediaries or expressed in frontier pidgin, were reported at various points from northern New South Wales to central Queensland. On the Mooney River in 1843 a group of blacks told beleagured shepherds holed up in their hut that they intended to 'kill or drive all the white fellows off the Mooney, McIntyre and Barwon Rivers'. At Wide Bay in 1851 a squatter reported that the blacks had sent messages through intermediaries to the effect that as soon as the bunya nut was ripe they intended to 'take all the sheep in the district and kill all the white men'. In 1856 when Charles Archer was about to cross the Fitzroy River the local blacks assembled in great numbers on the opposite bank and openly stated their determination to 'attack and destroy all the whites who might attempt the location of the country in that direction'. Two years later four shepherds were besieged in their hut on Camboon station. They offered their attackers all their possessions. But the blacks retorted that they wanted nothing but the lives of the white men and that they would also 'take the lives of all the b - y [sic] white men in the country'. In 1858 Wiseman wrote to his superior in Sydney about Aborigines who openly proclaimed that they would gradually murder all the whites and rid their land of the invader. He was an intelligent and experienced official and after fifteen years on the pastoral frontier had concluded that:\n\nno tribes will allow of the peaceable occupation of their country but, following the counsel of the boldest and strongest men amongst them, will endeavour to check the progress of the white men by spearing their sheep and murdering the shepherds. This I have known to be invariably the case... some solitary murder may occasionally occur owing to the wicked and foolish conduct of the white labouring man in his relations to the Blacks... but the greater number of murders which I know of in these districts I should attribute to the determination of the natives to pillage and murder till they can drive out the white men.\n\nThe evidence, then, suggests that Aborigines attacked and killed Europeans for a variety of reasons. At the time of earliest contact they struck down threatening beings who it was thought had come from the spirit world. Subsequently whites were killed in unpremeditated melees arising from the anxiety and tension inherent in frontier encounters. In many cases Aboriginal action was penal in objective, punishing Europeans as though they were fellow blacks in an attempt to impose on the newcomers the moral standards and social obligations of traditional society. The spear was used to assist the assimilation of the European into the Australian way of life. In many parts of the country, for at least some of the time, absorption of the small numbers of Europeans seemed the most practical solution to the white problem. It should not be seen as less realistic or less worthy than open confrontation which many must have realized from the start was bound to be both futile and suicidal. Assimilation was after all a policy premised on a self-confident belief in the value of Aboriginal society and culture. It was one method of defending them from the unprecedented challenge presented by European invasion. When this policy failed two alternatives remained\u2013acceptance of whatever corner could be found in the new order imposed by the settlers or an attempt to drive the invaders away. In many parts of the country the blacks fought a war against the Europeans. But it did not always begin when the whites first arrived. It was more common at the end of a considerable period of inter-action. In Tasmania, for instance, conflict did not climax for a generation after the first settlement. Elsewhere the shift from feud to warfare was more rapid but on the other hand there were districts where accommodation was achieved before the final stage of conflict was reached and others where massive retaliation crushed the black resistance almost before it began.\n\n# SORCERY\n\nThe role of sorcery is an important aspect of Aboriginal resistance hitherto overlooked by historians. Magic was, after all, widely used against enemies in traditional society, supplementing or supplanting physical attack. That it was similarly used against white foes is beyond doubt especially when open conflict carried such disproportionate danger for the Aborigines. Sorcery was probably employed in order to enhance the chances of success for attacks with spear and club during the earliest period of contact and continued to be used long after overt resistance had come to an end. In the Aboriginal mind this hidden side of the resistance may have been at least as significant as physical confrontation. Unfortunately for the historian magic was likely to have been performed in secret and kept hidden from intended white victims. Yet there is enough evidence to illustrate its importance. It comes from a variety of sources but the most valuable material was provided by officials of the Aboriginal Protectorate in Victoria and South Australia in the 1840s.\n\nIn October 1840 there was a crisis in white-Aboriginal relations at Port Phillip. Following widespread settler concern about black assertiveness in the districts around Melbourne a party of soldiers and border police under the command of Major Lettsom surrounded a large ceremonial gathering a few miles north of the town and captured the whole assembly. They were marched into town and imprisoned overnight. One man was shot at the time of capture and another while escaping from incarceration. The blacks were frightened and infuriated. G. A. Robinson reported that the most influential men amongst the tribes in Melbourne warned him that they intended 'returning to the mountains and forest ranges and killing every white man they could find unprotected'. E. S. Parker told a similar story. The blacks had said they would take to the mountains and try and 'drive the white fellows from the country'.  The Protectorate officials\u2013Robinson, Parker and Thomas\u2013worked hard to restrain the blacks and, given the lack of immediate physical retaliation, felt they had been successful in defusing the situation. But their accounts make it clear that the Aborigines channelled their anger into magic in order to unleash the horrifying power of Mindye the rainbow serpent on the whites and those blacks who were friendly with them, especially the Port Phillip clans. Thomas reported that the blacks from his station at Narre Narre Warren had fled because a celebrated Goulburn River 'clever man' had said the Mindye was about to come. Parker was even more specific. Several of the senior and influential blacks were, he observed, fully sensible of the injustices they had suffered. They warned that the dreaded Mindye would appear with the threat of a pestilence which was 'to sweep off the Port Phillip blacks and all the whites'. Reminiscing later he recalled that at the time of the Lettsom raid several old men told him confidentially that:\n\ndestruction was coming upon the white population not even excepting those whom they knew to be their friends. It was known that they were practising secret incantations with this object.\n\nMonths after the imprisonment Parker found that the Goulburn River clans were still furious about their treatment and were practising magic to call up the Mindye to destroy the Europeans and those Aborigines who had befriended them.\n\nThe reaction of Victorian Aborigines to capture and temporary imprisonment at the hands of Major Lettsom is of great interest. Their anger was intense and sustained. Direct physical retaliation was considered but rejected, whether owing to the advice of Robinson, Parker and Thomas, as they supposed, or to fear of retaliation is impossible to determine. The resort to magic illustrated a profound belief in their continuing power to counter the technological supremacy of the Europeans. It is ironic that they hoped to visit on the whites a pestilence similar to the great epidemic which had struck the Victorian Aborigines a generation earlier and which must have remained vivid in the memories of the older people. The hoped-for pestilence was described to Parker 'graphically enough as producing dreadful sores, dysentry, blindness and death' and he was later able to identify 'the threatened agent of destruction as smallpox'. Yet the action of Major Lettsom and his force was far less violent than the behaviour of whites in many other parts of the country. It is reasonable to assume that the only unique feature of the events in Victoria in 1841\u201342 was that there were three Europeans in close enough contact with the blacks to be able to report on their objectives and motivation.\n\nThomas noted a further but apparently unrelated case of anti-European sorcery at Port Phillip. An old and very celebrated 'clever man' was captured and imprisoned for sheep stealing. His incarceration caused great distress among blacks around Melbourne and news of it was carried to the corners of the Colony. Signal fires were lit and could be seen in all directions; messengers from seven different districts came in for urgent consultation; the Melbourne blacks pleaded with Thomas to let the 'clever man' go. When he explained that he was unable to secure the release the several hundred town blacks fled into the bush warning Thomas that the whites should leave for Sydney or Van Diemens Land because the sorcerer would unleash the Mindye. In 1849 there was a similar occurrence in Adelaide. The local Protector of Aborigines reported that four blacks had arrived from the north with the alarming news that 'clever men' were about to create havoc in the town. Many Aborigines fled to escape the threatened catastrophe. Edward Eyre referred to a similar situation a few years earlier when the appearance of a comet convinced South Australian blacks that powerful northern sorcerers were about to destroy Adelaide because a senior man of their tribe had been imprisoned in the local gaol. The comet, Eyre was told, was: 'the harbinger of all kinds of calamities, and more especially for white people. It was to overthrow Adelaide, destroy all Europeans and their houses'. Similar events were reported from New South Wales. During the 1830's there was a:\n\nsolemn ceremony of the Natives in the Country to the west of Bathurst in which all the tribes around seemed deeply interested, they had all met together to call upon the Great Spirit, they perceived how their ranks were thinning and no children born, they perceived the havoc civilization were [sic] making on their hunting grounds and they met together to implore the aid of the Great Spirit.\n\nAnti-European sorcery often merged with ceremony, dance and song and it was in this form that it was occasionally witnessed by white observers. Tasmanian Aborigines sang every night around their camp fires, their favourite songs those in which they recounted their assaults on, and fights with the whites. Widowson referred to a sort of dance and rejoicing, jumping and singing performed by island blacks when celebrating a successful attack on the Europeans. A Queensland pioneer who had wide experience of Aboriginal society in the post-contact period referred to what he called the death to the white man song which was sung frequently at corroborees with intense bitterness. On a North Queensland station in 1874 a large gathering of blacks was seen to make two effigies of white men and then all those present 'after exciting each other with war songs and dances, attacked the effigies with their tomahawks and cut them to pieces'.\n\nThere are four reports, widely separated in time and space, of a Queensland corroboree depicting a pitched battle between Aborigines and white stockmen. It is not clear if the dance was created in one place and then widely disseminated or if similar corroborees evolved separately although there is a close resemblance in the descriptions provided by the four European observers. The performance began with a group of dancers representing a herd of cattle. Bovine behaviour was minutely and exactly mimed, then a second group dressed as hunters carefully and slowly stalked the 'herd' and eventually attacked them with spear and club. Some 'cattle' fell to the ground, others stampeded into the darkness. The hunters began to prepare the fallen 'beasts' for cooking when a third troupe of dancers appeared from out of the trees. They were made up to look like Europeans with imitation cabbage tree hats, faces whitened with pipe-clay, bodies painted blue or red to represent shirts and legs done up to simulate moleskins and leggings. European behaviour was carefully depicted; the pseudo white men: 'bit the cartridges, put on the caps, and went through all the forms of loading, firing, wheeling their horses, assisting each other, etc, which proved personal observation.' After a protracted struggle with casualties on both sides the whites were ignominiously defeated and depending on the particular dance either all killed or driven away to the intense delight of the spectators.\n\nThe four reports in question all relate to the generation between 1860 and 1890 and to the eastern half of Queensland. It seems probable that such anti-white corroborees were frequently performed. They were obviously entertaining, embodied a good deal of accurate observation of frontier life and allowed the vanquished to experience in art the triumph and revenge no longer attainable in the real world. Whether the Queensland 'battle' dance was associated with anti-European magic is impossible to say. But sorcery was related to a sequence of corroborees danced in far-western Queensland in the 1890s. Roth described a series of dances performed over five successive nights which he called the Molonga corroboree. He determined that it had entered Queensland from the Northern Territory in the early 1890s and travelled from the headwaters of the Georgina River down through western Queensland in the space of two or three years. The German missionary Otto Siebert recorded it as performed by the Dieri in the northwest of South Australia and noted that by the early years of the twentieth century it had passed on as far as Port Augusta at the head of Spencer Gulf. Baldwin Spencer saw the cycle danced by the Arunta at Alice Springs while A. P. Elkin reported performances at Penong on the Great Australian Bight in 1915 and at Horseshoe Bend in 1930.\n\nRoth provided the earliest and most detailed description of the Molonga but he did not understand the meaning or the purpose of the sequence. Fortunately, Siebert provided a brief but fascinating account of the central theme and symbolism of the five nights of dancing. The corroboree had its origin in the desire for revenge against Europeans after the shooting of blacks presumably somewhere in the north-east corner of the Northern Territory. Prominent in the performance were dancers made up to look like Europeans who carried long forked sticks to represent their rifles. At the climax of the sequence a figure\u2013Siebert said a female water spirit\u2013suddenly appeared to devour all the 'European' dancers while the destructive magic was directed out in all directions to kill the settlers and the Aborigines who were friendly with them. Thus it is clear from Siebert's account that the Molonga corroboree was an intensely emotional performance directed specifically at mobilizing the most potent magic available in order to destroy the whites and their black allies.\n\nThere may have been other dance sequences created like the Molonga to turn back the tide of European invasion. Magic must have seemed the most realistic method to adopt given the weapons of the Europeans and their propensity to exact violent and disproportionate revenge. But did Aborigines continue to believe in the efficiency of their sorcery? Twentieth century studies make it clear that faith in magic and in the powers of the 'clever men' has been one of the most enduring features of traditional culture surviving longer than almost anything else, even language itself. There were in-built barriers to scepticism\u2013time-honoured methods of rationalizing failure and claiming authorship of the contingent. The obvious inability of 'clever men' to drive the Europeans away could be readily explained in ways well tried in traditional society. The failure of magic to immediately achieve stated objectives could be seen as being due to faults in the ritual or to the influence of counter-magic performed by other and often distant 'clever men'. As Europeans on the frontier were normally accompanied by strange blacks it was probably often assumed that their magic threw a protective ring around the white men. Violent hostility to such 'tame station blacks' may have stemmed in part from this perception of their role in the advance of the European settlers.\n\nBut we should not assume that Aborigines believed their magic was without effect. Pioneer settlers were often very vulnerable and must have appeared so to the blacks who may have often concluded that sorcery was responsible for the bad seasons, bad luck, and accidents which befell Europeans in every part of the continent. Many were, after all, financially ruined and abandoned farms and stations. Alluvial miners took up and deserted finds with frenetic speed while ships were wrecked all around the Australian coasts. The immediate cause of the white retreat or misfortune would not have been apparent giving scope to those who attributed European misfortune to the magic of the clever men of near or distant tribes. Aiston and Horne referred to a noted kurdaitcha man from central Australia who claimed to be able to make lightning strike where he liked and to have killed a white man with his power. Mrs K. L. Parker recalled that local Aborigines were convinced that a black from the north-west, beyond Euahalayi territory, had called up a storm which wrecked the stable and store on her station. She made an even more interesting observation about the famous rain maker who it was said was so angry with the white people:\n\nwho were driving away all emu, kangaroo, and opossums, the black-fellow's food, and yet made a fuss if their dogs killed a sheep for them sometimes, that he put his rain stone in a fire, and while he did that no rain would fall. He said that if all the sheep died the white fellows would go away again, and then, as long ago, the blackfellows country would have plenty of emu and kangaroo.\n\nSimpson Newland made a similar assessment of Aboriginal motivation observing that they made no attempt to make rain during long periods of drought. Their intention, he believed, was to drive the Europeans out of their country and given the devastating effect of drought on sheep and cattle stations it is reasonable to assume that blacks believed that their magic was often an effective weapon against the white invaders.\n\nR. M. Berndt collected a number of traditional stories at Menindee in western New South Wales in 1943 which illustrated the presumed ability of 'clever men' to unleash their powers on the settlers. One related to an old 'clever man' called Mulgadown Tommy who lived on the fringes of Cobar. His dogs were poisoned by the townspeople and in revenge he brought up the poison which sorcerers were thought to possess and spurted it out so that the fumes covered the nearby mine. The result was that he 'cleaned out a great number of people' until his own friends stopped him. Berndt did not suggest any source for the story but it may have related to a fatal mine accident which in the blacks' camp was thought to be a consequence of powerful magic unleashed to punish the Europeans. A second story referred to another old sorcerer called Billy who was working as a shepherd on a sheep station. One morning Billy woke up too late to take some rams out of their pen, a job which he was expected to do before breakfast. But as the meal was being served he went and got his food and took it into the yard to eat. When the white boss saw the rams still in their pen he abused the old man, grabbed his breakfast and threw it onto the ground. Old Billy got up and walked slowly towards his camp. On the way he let out his magic cord which, unknown to the Europeans, attached itself to the doors and windows of the bosses' house. Before he reached his camp he turned around and looked back at the house:\n\nhe could see all the string, although these were invisible to the ordinary person. Then he released his assistant totem, the lightning, at the same time pulling sharply on the strings, as he did so they went off like a loud report of thunder and an immediate flash of lightning igniting the house. The cook ran around throwing buckets of water upon the flames, but instead of extinguishing the fire it acted like kerosene and the flames flared up more fiercely.\n\nIt seems probable that there were many stories like these ones. They were obviously important because they allowed the seemingly powerless and abject blacks to go on believing in the potency of their culture and in the ability of the 'men of high degree' to harm and humble even the domineering white boss. Magic was then a crucial factor in the psychological resistance to the Europeans.\n\nFrontier conflict was then widespread in colonial Australia. Most districts saw fighting between resident clans and encroaching settlers although it varied greatly in duration and intensity. Conflict was triggered by tension and misunderstanding, by the possessiveness of Europeans towards the land and water, by competition over women and by diametrically opposed concepts of personal property. Once blacks had been injured or killed their relations were impelled to seek vengeance. Reciprocal violence quickly spiralled. Sorcery played an important part in the conflict although it was usually hidden from the Europeans. The problems arising from fighting with the white men demanded adjustments to customary ways as well as the development of new concepts and techniques.\n\n# Chapter 4\n\n# RESISTANCE: TACTICS AND TRADITIONS\n\nThe development of appropriate tactics was another aspect of the Aborigines' white problem which we can assume was widely discussed on the other side of the frontier. A critical issue was the degree to which known methods of fighting could be employed against the Europeans and the extent to which innovation was necessary. In his famous study of the Murngin, entitled A Black Civilization, Lloyd-Warner distinguished six varieties of conflict. How relevant these definitions are to traditional society elsewhere has never been determined but it is reasonable to examine the two major forms of fighting which the ethnographic record suggests were practically universal\u2013the large pitched battle and the small, secret revenge expedition.\n\n# MASSED WARRIORS\n\nPioneer literature contains many references to battles between large Aboriginal parties and they were still being waged years after the arrival of the Europeans. Typically the two sides met at a pre-arranged site and assembled in loose formations. After much shouting of abuse, spears and boomerangs were thrown back and forth between the wavering lines of warriors. After several hours, considerable minor injury and an occasional mortal wound, peace was restored and a corroboree held to mark the cessation of hostilities. Such large formations, with their obvious similarity to the animal drive, were often used against Europeans. But they presented problems, both tactical and logistic. Under normal conditions Aborigines could only gather in significant numbers on those occasions when there was some local and transient abundance of food. It is not clear if Europeans were confronted at times when large groups were already assembled for initiation and other ceremonies in which case clashes with whites were merely a by-product of the normal functioning of traditional society. Another possibility is that fear of Europeans led to the prolonging of customary meetings beyond their appointed time or to the calling together of unseasonal gatherings to deal specifically with the white problem. This seems to have been the case after the Kilcoy poisoning in 1842.\n\nSpecial meetings would present the problem of ensuring an adequate food supply which could be met by increased culling of fauna by way of large and co-ordinated drives or, more portentously, by turning to the flocks and herds of the European or even their supplies stored in buildings or in transit on drays. Frontier settlers were convinced that large gatherings of Aborigines inevitably led to increased attacks on animals and stations. The crucial step of commandeering European food led to escalation of conflict which in turn encouraged large groups to remain together even longer to seek the protection of numbers. Frederick Walker, the first commandant of the native police on the northern frontier of New South Wales, understood the situation well. It was, he wrote:\n\nthe hostile bearing of the settlers that causes the Blacks to keep in large numbers, for they cannot continue the assemblies customary to them for more than a few days at a time, on account of the want of food... They supply this want from the herds of the settlers, and are compelled so to do.\n\nThe many reports of large Aboriginal gatherings\u2013though no doubt often exaggerated by anxious pioneers\u2013emphasise the changes brought about on the other side of the frontier as a result of European pressure. Aboriginal clans coalesced to increase their power and to seek security and there is no doubt that large gatherings did over-awe white communities. Parties of armed settlers avoided conflict with Aborigines on many more occasions than is commonly supposed while the official determination of the New South Wales and later the Queensland government to use the Native Police to disperse any large tribal gathering was eloquent of official concern. But like people confronting armed whites in many parts of the non-European world Aborigines found that concentration merely increased the ability of their opponents to bring their superior fire-power into play.\n\n# GUNS\n\nEuropean accounts allow us to examine, at least in outline, the development of Aboriginal tactics to cope with guns. News of them spread widely but unevenly through traditional society ahead of the white invaders but the amount and sophistication of that knowledge varied considerably. Some clans greatly underestimated the power of firearms and were shot down as a result of their fatal miscalculation. In central Victoria in the 1840s a group of blacks confronted a party of 16 armed and mounted men. They held up shields to keep off the musket balls only to die with the bark, useless and shattered, in their hands. Christie Palmerston wrote of a similar incident in the northern rainforest forty years later. He was challenged by a small hostile party and reached immediately for his gun. 'Their shields may answer very well for the purposes of their wars', he wrote with brutal satisfaction:\n\nbut my rifle drilled them as if they were sheets of paper. Four of the old generals' [sic] comrades ran to his assistance when they saw him wrestling with death. I ceased firing for they seemed so helpless at my mercy on seeing a seam of blood oozing from the ghastly wound...\n\nElsewhere Aboriginal caution betokened prior warning of the danger and capacity of European weapons. G. A. Robinson reported that he had watched blacks cautiously approach overland parties when the least movement of the well armed Europeans would cause them to take shelter behind trees or throw themselves on the ground. Moorhouse, who witnessed some of the pitched battles along the lower Murray, remarked that although the blacks faced the whites in large formations they chose their ground so they could rapidly escape behind trees and into thick vegetation. Perhaps the single most important lesson to learn was the effective range of guns and often this may have been transmitted back beyond the frontier. Pioneers reported that blacks behaved as though they had a rough idea of the distance at which they were safe from ball or bullet. Eventually the Aborigines came to appreciate the limitations of the muskets used in the first half of the nineteenth century which were inaccurate at any appreciable distance, frequently misfired and took some minutes to reload in any but experienced hands. There are numerous reports of confrontations between Aboriginal clans and lone shepherds during which the blacks taunted the European to try and incite him to fire his single charge; the shepherd for his part stood for hours with his loaded musket knowing that his only safety lay in preserving it. Aborigines laughed, made faces and rude gestures when muskets misfired as often happened particularly in wet or misty conditions. When they did attack they chose the moment of total vulnerability when their European foes feverishly sought to reload discharged muskets. However there was far less scope for Aboriginal initiative when they faced settlers armed, as they were later in the century, with revolvers and repeating rifles although a writer in the Cooktown Herald in 1875 noted how Aboriginal tactics had changed in the face of European fire power. Initially their attacks had been 'daringly open' but as the 'knowledge dawned on their minds that the white race had a fatal superiority of weapons' their forays became stealthy, cautious and only made at 'great advantages of numbers and situation'. Thus the blacks in the Cooktown hinterland quickly learnt the lesson that European firepower and mobility made the massing of scattered clans a dangerous and self-defeating policy.\n\n# REVENGE PARTIES\n\nBut there were other traditions to fall back on and especially the revenge expedition or execution party, an institution widely reported in both pioneer and ethnographic literature. The 'stealthy sacrifices' of the Pinya, the Kadaitcha or the Maringo were typically carried out by small groups of men, usually at night and in operations which were well planned, based on good intelligence and timed to allow for the strike and return before dawn. Despite a degree of variation it was a traditional method of punishment, execution and revenge well adapted for use against the Europeans. The opprobrious comments elicited from the settlers were evidence of their unease. 'Their whole art of war', wrote a Tasmanian pioneer, was 'a concealed, silent and treacherous attack'. A contemporary in Perth argued that it was not the 'martial courage of a declared foe' that was to be feared but the 'dastardly duplicity of the secret assassin'. Fifty years later a Cooktown journalist remarked that there was not 'a particle of manhood or even brute bravery about the Aboriginals [sic]... their weapons being treachery patiently nursed'. Their mode of attack, wrote G. A. Robinson, 'is by surreption... they lay in ambush for some time before they make their attack, a sudden and unperceived invasion...' The hunter's skills\u2013expert tracking, stealth, self-control and patience\u2013could be turned to effect when attempting to execute individual Europeans. On returning from the bush Davis acted out an Aboriginal dance which mimed the successful spearing of a shepherd\u2013the creeping through the grass, 'the cat-like watching, the drawing nearer and nearer to the unconscious wretch; the spring, the rush, the fierce blow'.\n\n# SURVEILLANCE\n\nThe gathering of intelligence was one of the most successful aspects of Aboriginal campaigns. They carefully watched the movements of exploring parties, as indicated above, and continued to monitor the actions of pioneer settlers. Women, children and old people were often sent to observe and report on the Europeans. A traditional story from the Herbert River relates how young boys were regularly sent down to the edge of the rainforest to watch the whites and their Kanaka servants. Aborigines employed on stations and around other European settlements almost certainly provided information about the newcomers for kin still in the bush. Attacks on stations often gave indication of accurate information about household layout and domestic routines, raids being frequently mounted when the men had left home and were too far away to intervene. Houses, wrote a concerned Tasmanian settler:\n\nbecame an easy prey to these insidious depredators, who will, for days and weeks, watch a house that they have marked out for plunder, till they find the whole of the males absent, they then pounce upon the dwelling, and with a celerity incredible plunder it of every article they consider valuable.\n\nIt seems that as a general rule Aboriginal intelligence about Europeans was better than the settlers' knowledge of neighbouring clans. Even the Queensland Native Police had difficulty in tracking down blacks who kept a close watch on their movements at all times.\n\n# BUSHCRAFT\n\nApart from effective surveillance the other advantage possessed by the Aborigines was their knowledge of their own country which was intimate and detailed to an extent that no European could hope to match. It was often of great tactical importance. Knowledge of fords, passes, tracks and caves facilitated escape from pursuit, rapidity of march and speed of communication. Settlers were often unable to find the blacks they were pursuing or did not even prosecute the search through a sense of inadequacy in the bush. They were very reluctant to ride into forest, mountain or swamp where their horses were hampered and their mobility restricted. A South Australian settler explained that the blacks he was pursuing had disappeared into thick scrubs 'to which they invariably retreat, and whence they cannot be followed up'. In 1846 a party of police surprised an Aboriginal camp at the head of Spencer Gulf but it was decided that 'to follow them was out of the question from the rocky surface of the whole country'. In Tasmania where European parties usually travelled on foot the Aboriginal advantage was even more marked. 'They are seldom pursued by the settlers', lamented an island colonist, 'from a despair of finding them in the almost inaccessible fastnesses'. Almost despite themselves the Tasmanian settlers came to admire the bush skills of their black adversaries who had proved themselves 'a sagacious and wily race of people'. They were a most 'intricate set of people to capture'; no-one could conjecture how 'crafty and subtle they act in the bush'. Similar observations were made by a squatter on the Gwydir in 1839. He believed that the whole British army would be unable to apprehend one tribe in his district:\n\nso well acquainted are they with every thicket, reedy creek, morass, cave and hollow tree, in which they can secrete themselves, and so inaccessible to a horse of any white man.\n\nThere are several reports of Aboriginal groups expressing their self-confidence by turning and making faces at pursuing whites and shouting abuse at them in pidgin English. In Northern New South Wales a party of settlers confronted a group of blacks who:\n\ntook shelter behind the trees, and kept hooting and telling us they were not frightened, calling us white b ... s [sic] and telling us to come on; we left them as we found them, our force being unable to engage them in the scrubs.\n\nThere are a number of accounts of Aboriginal parties, confident of their superiority in the bush, turning their backs on pursuing Europeans and slapping their buttocks in derision. Reports of this sort came from Port Essington in the 1830s, the Darling Downs in the 1840s, the Maranoa in the 1860s and Central Australia in the 1890s. Writing from the Tempe Downs station in the Alice Springs district in 1891 the local police officer referred to a group of blacks who continued to elude him:\n\nthey kept a constant watch for me and when I passed, they came down on the flats below, and killed cattle, they were hard to get on account of so many ranges, therefore they got cheeky and slapped their behinds at my party.\n\nAboriginal action fell naturally into the archetypal pattern of guerilla warfare which was ideally suited to their loosely articulated clan organization and dispersed population, their hunting and foraging economy and highly developed bush skills. The Hobart Town Courier noted in 1830 that nature had instructed the Aborigine in her 'original language'; that the black man had adopted the 'natural weapons of his condition'. The writer concluded that while settlers might denounce the 'craft, the cunning and the murderous habits' they were but 'natural tactics of war with which providence has provided them'. Governor Arthur well expressed the anguish of the frustrated opponent of the guerilla, which is as fresh today as it was a hundred and fifty years ago: 'They suddenly appear; commit some act of outrage and then as suddenly vanish: if pursued it seems impossible to surround and capture them'.\n\nFor a while on the Australian frontier bushcraft and local knowledge almost equalled the range and power of guns, the speed and endurance of horses. But the balance tipped dramatically in favour of the Europeans as a result of the rapid improvement of their weapons, their growing confidence in the bush and, above all, their using the blacks themselves as guides, trackers and more formally in the para-military native police forces of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. The co-option of black bushcraft began with the earliest expeditions inland from the infant settlement at Sydney Cove, George Caley informing Sir Joseph Banks in 1801 that he intended to keep a 'native constant soon, as they can trace anything so well in the bush'. The use of 'friendly blacks' to counter the superior bushcraft of clans in conflict with the Europeans was formally proposed in the 1820s. George Frankland wrote to Governor Arthur arguing that it would be impossible to capture Tasmanian Aborigines 'without the agency of one or more Individuals of that Race'. If the 'peculiar tact' of the blacks could be employed by the Europeans it would at once 'remove the obstacles which exist to the capture of the Tribes'. Jorgenson was another perplexed by the 'superiority of the Blacks' in the bush which would never be overcome 'unless we are taught by them'.\n\nThe argument was accepted and mainland Aborigines were brought to Tasmania to assist in tracking down the hostile clans. The later history of the use of Aboriginal troopers in Port Phillip from 1842 and the northern frontier of New South Wales from 1848 is well known. They appear to have had an immediate and decisive effect in crushing concerted Aboriginal resistance in the Western District of Victoria in 1843 and in south-east Queensland in 1849. The Queensland Native Mounted Police continued to patrol the fringes of European settlement until the beginning of the twentieth century. Black fear of the native police is well documented. At one blow Aboriginal superiority in bushcraft was undermined leading to a serious loss of morale. The Aboriginal trooper combined the tactical advantages pertaining to both sides of the frontier; traditional bush skills were wedded to horsemanship and facility with rifle and revolver. Unwittingly the Europeans may have coopted another, unseen weapon: by hostile clans out in the bush the police troopers were thought to possess the potent magic of strange and distant Aboriginal tribes. The greatest dangers of the new white world fused in the figure of the black trooper with the most serious threat which traditional society could produce.\n\n# NEW TACTICS\n\nBut while traditional skills could be used to considerable effect against the Europeans there was also a need for innovation. The widespread use of European food increased the flexibility of Aboriginal organization allowing large gatherings to stay together for longer than usual or giving greater mobility to small groups released from the need for daily hunting and foraging. Clans in conflict with Europeans could hide away during daylight and concentrate their whole attention on the struggle with the settlers. Jorgenson noted how European food had enabled the Tasmanians 'in a great degree to subsist without hunting' which by compelling them to run over large tracts of ground had exposed them to 'capture and very great danger'. He was also aware of the link between altered patterns of food consumption and modification of methods of resistance. The island blacks, had, he wrote:\n\nin great measure changed the system of warfare and depredations... instead of resorting to their usual mode of obtaining subsistence, they have closed in upon the settlement, robbing the huts of flour and other provisions in very large quantities.\n\nTactics were developed to cope with European firearms and indeed some groups endeavoured to acquire them for their own use. Knowledge of their working was gradually gained particularly from individuals who had worked on pastoral stations or in maritime industries like sealing and pearling. There were frequent reports of blacks using guns to attack Europeans in Tasmania in the 1820s, Victoria in the 1840s and around Cape York in the 1880s and 1890s. The Port Phillip Herald reported in 1840 that several hundred Aborigines had assembled at a station to the north of Melbourne and had threatened to burn down the huts saying that they 'did not care for white men, as they had more muskets than them, showing at the same time nearly thirty guns of different kinds'. Robinson met numerous Aboriginal parties armed with guns during his expeditions around Tasmania. He was told they 'intended using them against the whites as soon as they could get ammunition, and that they often practiced with them'. But while guns were used by Aboriginal groups in various parts of the country they were never adopted on a large enough scale seriously to alter the balance of power between white and black and in fact did not compensate for European co-option of Aboriginal bushcraft.\n\n# ECONOMIC WARFARE\n\nBeyond the influence of European food and guns there was a clear change of objective from the pursuit of revenge or women which inspired traditional fighting to the development of a form of economic warfare. It began with the straightforward destruction of European property over and above animals taken for food. Sheep were run into swamps and over cliffs or killed and injured with spear and club; cattle were stampeded into rough country or caught and hamstrung. On the troubled McIntyre frontier the squatter Jacob Lowe lost seventy-five cattle in a single night raid. The local clans had clubbed and speared the herd but none had been taken for food. In fact only two carcases had been cut open. The hearts had been taken out and were placed on two poles stuck into the turf facing one another. The message was unmistakable. Lowe subsequently told a parliamentary committee that the Aboriginal objective was clearly not food but the desire 'to drive us away out of the district\u2013to frighten us'. Attacks on stations were often highly organized and devastating in effect leaving animals dead, everything moveable carried away and all else put to the torch.\n\nIn various parts of the country tactics were developed to attack and pillage loaded drays at the most vulnerable point of their journey. When a group of drays reached a steep gradient it was common practice for several teams to be combined to pull the drays over the rise one at a time leaving the others vulnerable to sudden attack. If done quickly the raiding party could be out of sight before the bullock drivers were able to intervene. But perhaps the most sophisticated attack on European communications was made on the dray road from Ipswich to the Darling Downs in 1843. The road was barricaded with logs and the stalled drays were attacked by blacks hiding in surrounding vegetation. Two separate sources suggest that the Aboriginal objective was to prevent all supplies reaching the properties on the Darling Downs thereby starving them out. The local Commissioner for Crown Lands was told by 'an intelligent Aborigine named Toby' that the mountain clans had 'formed a plan of intercepting all communications by the high road to the Darling Downs'. The Government Resident at Moreton Bay took the threat seriously and a military detachment was stationed in the area for three years. A pioneer Darling Downs squatter visiting Brisbane at the time was told by a friendly black not to return to his property because the Aborigines intended to fence up the road, cut off all communications and attack the stations.\n\nIn other places Aborigines came to appreciate the crucial importance of horses to the European economy. At the simplest level this meant choosing to carry out raids on sheep and cattle during heavy rain when boggy conditions kept horsemen at home and allowed operations to proceed without fear of attack. In one or two districts there appear to have been systematic attempts to kill all the horses in order to immobilize the Europeans. This seems to have been the case on the Palmer River where several massive raids were made on miners' horses. The Brisbane Courier estimated in 1883 that in the previous ten years over 200 horses had been speared though not all fatally. A recent study has determined that 133 horses were killed on the road from Cooktown to the Palmer in six years during the 1870s. But the evidence is even more specific in relation to the McIntyre River district in the 1840s. Not only were many horses killed\u2013one writer suggested 100 head between 1843 and 1846\u2013but local Aborigines specifically stated their intention. A northern squatter wrote to the Maitland Mercury in 1843 arguing that the blacks were well aware of the crucial role of horses and from what they had told him he had 'every reason to believe that they will destroy all our horses, and thus disable the men from attending to the cattle'. Five months later another writer referred to the continued attacks on European animals which were 'part of the plan of these fellows' which showed the 'premeditated and systematic manner in which they set about the work of plunder'. A further incident was reported at much the same time. A group of shepherds besieged in their hut were dared by their attackers to venture outside. The blacks said they had already 'killed all the horses' and would now kill the settlers. Five years later another McIntyre settler reported that the Aborigines had driven off all the horses and made massive attacks on the cattle:\n\nThe threats they used of killing all our horses first, and then the men, accompanied by the most dreadful yells and shouts, had the effect of striking terror into some of our party.\n\nAttacks on livestock in general and horses in particular were among the most effective tactics employed by the Aborigines in their struggle with the settlers. Fire was potentially an even more potent weapon. The blacks were, after all, experts in the use of fire in the Australian environment; traditionally they understood its value in regeneration of vegetation, its role in the control of undergrowth, the relative fire resistance of various plant species, the importance of such variables as wind, time of day, temperature and fuel build up. Given the expertise readily available the surprising thing is not that fire was used as a weapon but that it was not used more often. The settlers were particularly vulnerable given the general dryness of the climate and in fact they realized the destructive power latent in the simple fire stick. Fear of Aboriginal-induced conflagration was apparent from the early years of the first settlement on the Cumberland Plain. George Caley told Sir Joseph Banks that had the blacks 'been bent for to do us as much injury as we had done them' then the settlement would have been endangered 'for it was in their power for have done us almost an irreparable injury by fire'. Governor Hunter shared the unease about the possibility of Aboriginal attack by fire. In 1800 he wrote:\n\nthe mischiefs which these people can with ease to themselves do to us renders it highly essential to our own comfort and security that we should live on amicable terms with them. Fire in the hands of a body of irritated and hostile natives may with little trouble to them ruin our prospects of an abundant harvest, for that is the very season in which they might spread desolation over our cultivated lands, and reduce us to extreme distress; and they are not ignorant of having that power in their hands, for after the destruction of the above two boys they threatened to burn our crops as soon as it could be effected. I caution'd the settlers in consequence that they might be upon their guard. They did not, however, attempt it.\n\nAs a rule Aboriginal use of fire cohered with the level of conflict as a whole\u2013it was sporadic and used more against individuals and their property than the whole of the white community. But where, as in Tasmania in the 1820s, the struggle had escalated into racial warfare, fire was used more systematically and with much greater effect. After witnessing the burning of houses, fences, crops and haystacks throughout the district the settlers of the Clyde Valley met at Bothwell in 1830 and moved an address to the Governor warning that Aboriginal action was 'affecting not only the lives of the Colonists' but also 'threatening the extinction of the Colony itself by firing our Crops and Dwellings'.\n\n# DIMINUTION\n\nFrontier conflict was ragged, sporadic and uneven. It was uncommon for hostilities to embrace everybody even in relatively small districts. There were usually a few Aboriginal clans that avoided confrontation with the settlers and on the other hand a minority of Europeans who refused to be forced into open antagonism with their black neighbours. Complete racial polarization only occurred at times of very high tension. On the other hand hostilities rarely came to a sudden or complete conclusion. Instead conflict inched away uncertainly. Aborigines eventually decided that the cost of open attacks on Europeans was prohibitively high and only took life when the chances of discovery were low as in the case of lone travellers or solitary prospectors. They learnt to adjust the level of resistance to keep it below the assumed threshold of violent retaliation although European behaviour must have seemed dangerously unpredictable. Forecasting their probable reaction became one of the crucial skills of the emerging interracial politics.\n\nAttacks on property became more selective, secretive, surreptitious. The adjustment of objectives was noted by European observers. The Queensland squatter William Forster argued that after a period of open war the blacks reached a different stage altogether:\n\nwhen they understand our superior power, and at the same time their predatory habits are still in existence\u2013they will carry on small depredations and will no doubt take life at times, but their object is not to take life\u2013it is not war.\n\nThe Commissioner for Crown Lands on the Darling Downs noted a similar diminution of resistance. The local blacks, he wrote in 1845, were no longer at open war with the squatters driving off whole herds of cattle and flocks of sheep but had adopted instead\n\n'a system of pilfering that no foresight can prevent'. Thirty years later and over a thousand miles away the Cooktown Courier distinguished between districts where 'a state of warfare' still existed and those where the Aborigines had given up all avowed hostility 'their depredations if they commit any, taking the nature of larceny'.\n\n# THE IMPACT OF RESISTANCE\n\nConsidering the advantages possessed by the European the resistance was often surprisingly effective and unexpectedly prolonged. A high price was exacted from many pioneer communities in tension and insecurity as much as in property loss, injury or death. Aboriginal attacks on property had devastating effects on the fortunes of individual settlers and at times appeared to threaten the economic viability of pioneer industries\u2013squatting, farming, mining and pearling. There were occasions\u2013as in Tasmania in the late 1820s, New South Wales in the late 1830s and early 1840s and Queensland in the early 1860s\u2013when Aboriginal resistance emerged as one of the major problems of colonial society. An editorial in Queensland's leading newspaper in 1879 summed up the impact of Aboriginal resistance in the colony:\n\nDuring the last four or five years the human life and property destroyed by the Aboriginals in the North totals up to a serious amount... settlement on the land, and the development of the mineral and other resources of the country, have been in a great degree prohibited by the hostility of the blacks, which still continues with undiminished spirit.\n\nYet Europeans were only rarely willing to recognize the intelligence and courage which informed the resistance. When they did their comments were particularly interesting. In 1830 a writer in the Hobart paper The Colonial Times referred to 'a cunning and superiority of tactics which would not disgrace some of the greatest military characters'. Another island settler remarked that the blacks had 'oftentimes evinced superior tact and clearness of head'. The official Tasmanian Aborigines Committee thought the blacks a 'subtle and daring enemy', a 'sagacious and wily race of people'. A report of 1831 observed that the island blacks:\n\nnow conduct their attacks with a surprising organization, and with unexampled cunning, such indeed is their local information and quickness of perception, that all endeavours on the part of the whites to cope with them are unavailing.\n\nIn 1834 Governor Stirling informed his superiors in England that West Australian settlers had found the blacks 'very formidable enemies, and if they could avail themselves of the advantages of combination it would be useless to attempt a settlement in this quarter with our present numbers'. A pioneer colonist concurred, remarking in 1833 that if in addition to their knowledge of the country the local Aborigines had 'firearms and a little discipline' they would 'put an end to the settlement in less than a month'. The Commandant at Port Essington wrote in 1834 that local blacks had shown 'excessive cunning, dexterity, arrangement, enterprise and courage' in their attacks on Europeans. A generation later in north Queensland a writer in the Cooktown Herald remarked that the miners had difficulties enough to contend with:\n\nwithout having to enter into guerilla warfare, and risk their lives fighting their sable foes, who are immeasurably their superiors in tactics and bush fighting.\n\nBut perhaps the most generous tribute was paid by Edward Eyre who wrote:\n\nIt has been said, and is generally believed, that the natives are not courageous. There could not be a greater mistake... nor do I hold it to be any proof that they are cowards, because they dread or give way before Europeans and their firearms. So unequal a match is no criterion of bravery, and yet even thus, among natives, who were labouring under the feelings, naturally produced by seeing a race they were unacquainted with, and weapons that dealt death as if by magic, I have seen many instances of an open manly intrepidity of manner and bearing, and a proud unquailing glance of eye, which instinctively stamped upon my mind the conviction that the individuals before me were very brave men.\n\nThe long running debate endemic in pioneer communities between those who wanted to 'let the blacks in' and others equally determined to 'keep them out' was undoubtedly reflected on the other side of the frontier. 'Staying out' or 'going in' to white society was a major question for Aboriginal clans all over the continent. Either choice presented hazards. The unpredictability of European behaviour made any approach to station, farm, mining camp or township a dangerous and uncertain exercise. Yet life in the bush became increasingly hazardous and eventually 'staying out' became the greater of the two evils. Dwindling indigenous food supplies put enormous pressure on clans seeking to live in isolation from the Europeans. Malnutrition stalked many camps and children and old people may have often died of hunger in the bush. A western Queensland pioneer was told by local blacks after they had come in that during the era of frontier conflict the Europeans:\n\nused to starve numbers of the old men, women and children to death; for, being hunted into the desert, they had neither the means of carrying water nor of catching game... and of course the weaker members of the tribe felt it most.\n\nMany clans were faced with a simple, stark choice. They could take European animals and supplies to meet their immediate and pressing needs with the certainty of ensuing retaliation or they could move in to the fringes of the nearest European settlement to escape the tightening vice of hunger and violence.\n\n# DESTITUTION\n\nEvidence of destitution can be adduced from many parts of the country. The officials of the Port Phillip Protectorate wrote of the plight of Victorian blacks within a few years of the European invasion. After a journey through the Western District in 1841 G. A. Robinson reported that the condition of the blacks was deplorable, their poverty the 'extreme of wretchedness'. The missionary Francis Tuckfield was told by Aboriginal informants that there was scarcely anything left to eat in the bush while E. S. Parker observed that the earliest settlers acknowledged that:\n\nthe Natives are now in a much worse condition and present a far less robust appearance than when they arrived\u2013and that it is their decided conviction, that they must occasionally suffer great privations, from their altered and often emaciated appearance.\n\nThe picture was similar in other parts of the continent. In 1856 Wiseman saw a group of blacks on the banks of the Fitzroy River who appeared to be desperately hungry. They kept striking their bellies and crying out in broken English 'Plower, Plower'. He concluded that they were 'very probably starved' as fear had pinched them into an isolated and barren corner of their territory. In 1877 a correspondent of the Queenslander wrote of the fate of the blacks on the Palmer River. The country, he explained, was infertile and poorly stocked with game and the Europeans had occupied all the watercourses with the result that the local clans were half starved. In 1882 a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald spent a day with a small group of blacks in the coastal rainforest near Cairns. They complained that they found it 'very difficult to get food' and because the whites had taken all the good country 'they had to go to the mountains or rocky places on the coast, where the fish was not plentiful'. Near the Gulf of Carpentaria the blacks were driven away from the cattle stations and 'sent to starve along the coast or in the ranges'. 'The few I saw', wrote a correspondent to the Queenslander in 1886, 'are really being starved to death'.\n\n# 'GOING IN'\n\nMany of those who went into white settlement were refugees from the danger, deprivation and insecurity of life in the bush: they were pushed reluctantly towards European society. Yet in other cases blacks were attracted, or pulled, in the same direction giving rise to Stanner's aphorism that for every Aborigine who had Europeans thrust upon him, at least one other sought them out. Many aspirations combined to attract Aborigines to white settlement. Intellectual curiosity was obviously important \u2013an expedition from the homeland in to the nearest European outpost was an adventure to be equated with foreign and overseas travel in white society. The desire to experience new food, clothes, weapons, sights, sounds, textures, tastes had been apparent even before the arrival of the pioneer settlers. Writing of central Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chewings noted that many blacks living far from European settlements had: 'at some time or other journeyed in through some friendly tribes' country to some cattle, telegraph, or railway station, just to see what the white man really is like.' Like travellers anywhere Aboriginal sojourners did not necessarily intend to stay within the European orbit although return became progressively difficult as months and then years passed. Those who willingly but tentatively approached white settlements were not in a position to foresee the degradation which came to dwell in every fringe camp on the continent and the disease, malnutrition, alcoholism and social disintegration which followed inexorably and almost universally from the move into European society.\n\nDuring the twentieth century there have been many welldocumented examples of voluntary migration from tribal homelands in towards European settlements. This has been particularly important around the fringes of the central and western deserts although outstation movements of the last few years have partially reversed the trend. But twentieth century developments do not necessarily throw interpretive light back onto events of a hundred and more years ago. When applied to the nineteenth century, Stanner's aphorism is not so much wrong as anachronistic. However, it is true that voluntary migration was prevalent in the vicinity of the major towns. Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth all attracted Aborigines in from their hinterlands and authorities in Melbourne and Adelaide vainly endeavoured to keep distant clans away from the urban fringe. But outside the compass of major towns the situation was usually quite different. From the start of settlement the Aborigines were comparatively safe in the urban areas\u2013at least from powder and shot if not from fist and phallus. In the bush life was much more dangerous. Violence was so common that it must have seemed an ever present possibility. Aborigines were far less likely to move in towards white settlement because they feared for their lives. Curiosity and the attraction of a new world of experience could not counter the danger which encircled the Europeans like an evil penumbra. For their part the settlers were usually so insecure that they were highly suspicious of Aboriginal attempts to approach station, camp or farm. Tentative initial contact had so often been followed by bloodshed that frontiersmen decided that the only safe procedure was to keep the blacks beyond the range of their ever ready rifles.\n\n# ATTEMPTED NEGOTIATION\n\nThere were aboriginal groups which sought a political solution to their white problem, a middle way between the stark alternatives of staying out or going in. The desire for a negotiated settlement may have been far more widespread than the available evidence will ever suggest yet there are four relevant examples widely separated in time and place. At the height of conflict on the Hawkesbury River in 1804 Governor King met three local blacks who said they objected to the ever increasing spread of settlement along the valley. They were determined to hang on to the few places left on the river bank and told King that 'if they could retain some places on the lower part of the river they would be satisfied and would not trouble the white man'. King thought the request so 'just and equitable' that he assured the blacks that no further settlements would be made lower down the river. Forty years later in northern New South Wales the pioneer settler E.O. Ogilvie came across a group of local blacks living in hostile seclusion in the mountains following a period of conflict with the whites. A limited knowledge of the local dialect helped him exchange views on the existing state of relations between indigenes and settlers. The blacks told Ogilvie to return to his station in the valley. 'You have the river', they said, 'and the open country, and you ought to be content, and leave the mountains to the black people. Go back\u2013keep the plains and leave us the hills'. Ogilvie claimed that he wished to live in peace and wanted nothing in their territory except the grass. An understanding was reached which continued to exert a beneficial effect on race relations in the district. Howitt related an even more interesting story. He was returning from an expedition in central Australia and travelling towards the settled districts of South Australia. While at Lake Hope near Coopers Creek he met a celebrated Dieri called Jelinapiramurana who asked him if he would:\n\ntell the white men who were coming up to his country, according to the information sent him by tribes further down, that they should 'sit down on the one side (Lake Hope) and the (local clans) would sit down on the other, so that they would not be likely to quarrel'.\n\nJames Morrell, the Queensland castaway, was able to fully discuss the white problem with his clansmen. When the first few settlers arrived in the neighbourhood he explained that they were merely the harbingers of a much larger white population. He warned his black kin that 'there were a great many people, many more than themselves' and they had plenty of guns, and that if the blacks went near 'they would be killed'. Morrell told them quite bluntly that the white men had come to take their land away. 'They always understand', he explained 'that might not right, is the law of the world'. But the blacks told Morrell:\n\nto ask the white men to let them have all the ground to the north of the Burdekin, and to let them fish in the rivers; also the low grounds, they live on to get the roots.\n\nOnce restored to European society Morrell appears to have made little attempt to shield his companions of seventeen years from the onslaught of the frontier settlers. Their attempt at negotiation was swept aside as being unworthy of consideration.\n\nThere was no neat or decisive end to conflict between Aborigines and settlers; neither armistice nor treaty; no medals, no speeches, no peace conference. Black resistance did not conclude when the last stockman was speared although methods were modified and objectives altered. Sorcery was probably increasingly favoured over physical confrontation as a means of challenging white domination. Killing ceased but raids on European property continued. The most immediate motive was economic; blacks stole to survive. But there was always a political element in Aboriginal behaviour. They continued to believe that Europeans were under a moral obligation to share their abundance, both because sharing was so central to Aboriginal values, and to provide compensation for the loss of land, water and game. The settlers for their part often regarded Aboriginal depredation as a continuation of resistance in a new guise. They said so on many occasions. A typical remark was that of a writer in the Queenslander in 1871 who said that Aboriginal crime had assumed:\n\na different aspect from the old time spearing of cattle, or the massacre of station hands. The criminal black fellow of the present day frequents the town, gets drunk, robs houses, insults women and otherwise conducts himself like a civilized blackguard.\n\n# BANDITS\n\nAboriginal and part-Aboriginal bandits or bushrangers were common in the generation after settlement. Typically they were young men who had grown up in fringe camps and had worked in varying capacities for the Europeans. They were often competent horsemen and handy with guns while still proficient in the ancient bush skills. Though rarely a serious challenge to European society the black bandits created anxiety in small frontier communities and problems for colonial police forces. 'All settlers will agree with me', wrote a correspondent to the Port Denison Times, that the 'half-civilized blackfellow is a more dangerous and troublesome customer to deal with than the myall'. Queensland seems to have had the largest contingent of such men. The provincial papers of the 1870s and 1880s abound in reports of their careers, crimes and capture. In 1878 a Gladstone correspondent wrote of Billy Burmoondoo who had been 'a terror to the district for years'. Ten years later the Port Denison Times reported the capture of the notorious jimmy, an object of terror and alarm and in 1882 referred to the shooting of Murdering Harry. At Tambo in 1876 the notorious Saturday was taken after 'many depredations' as was Sambo at Wide Bay a few years later. The latter had defied the police for years and during 1875 the terror of 'club law' had become so great that the women accompanied their husbands into the fields 'rather than remain unprotected in their homes'. Sambo's career called forth a comment from the Maryborough correspondent of the Queenslander:\n\nIt is difficult to catch these blacks, who are very cunning, and some of them are noted for the number of successful robberies they have committed. One outlaw by the name of Sambo, is a regular Rob Roy, his stealings have been on such an heroic scale. He has been wanted for years past, and all they know is that he is in the district still. The other blacks shield him as sedulously as in some parts of Ireland they shield a gentleman who has had the misfortune to shoot his landlord.\n\nWhether other bandits received as much protection as Sambo is impossible to say. Some seem to have been outcasts from both black and white communities and there is as much evidence of Aboriginal betrayal as of support and sustenance.\n\nBetween 1878 and 1880 the part-Aborigine Johnny Campbell defied the police in a wide area of south-east Queensland during which time he was the 'sable terror of the whole Wide Bay District'. It is hard to find any detail about Campbell's life before he took to the bush. But it seems that he rejected his Aboriginal heritage taking pride in his command of English and his skill with horse and rifle. Campbell rode the watershed between the tribal resistance of his Aboriginal grandparents and the world of the white bushranger. He was, a writer in the Maryborough Chronicle argued the 'local representative of the Ned Kelly fraternity'.\n\nWith Jimmy and Joe Governor the watershed was crossed. The brothers were part-Aborigines and the white community reacted to their rampage by reference to deeply embedded racial stereotypes. They were dubbed the 'Breelong blacks', newspapers referred to the 'black horror' while the Mudgee Guardian argued that violence was to be expected from Aborigines 'when the inbred passions of the savage nature assert themselves'. There probably was some element of racial antagonism in the Governor's behaviour. A police sergeant at Wollar reported to his superiors that their mother Annie Governor was a woman 'with a grievance' who had 'encouraged her sons to do acts of violence, as she states that the Government took the poor blacks' country, giving them nothing in return'. But Jimmy Governor was, according to his wife Ethel, 'particularly touchy about his colour' and did 'not like to be called a blackfellow'.\n\nThe Governors wanted to be bushrangers. Their model was Ned Kelly not the tribal warrior. Ethel reported that Jimmy was an avid reader of stories about bushrangers. Several months after their marriage he said he would 'be a bushranger before long' and in the period before the murders of the Mawbey family the brothers were frequently 'talking about bushranging at night'. The desire to go out bushranging was a characteristic the Governors shared with many of the poor, rural working class youth of the time. Contemporaries greatly overemphasised the Aboriginal element in their behaviour. Those observers who remained free from racial hysteria realized this. A journalist who travelled with Jimmy Governor on the ship from the northern rivers to his trial in Sydney reported that:\n\nThe outlaw has no trace in his speech of the usual dialect of the Aboriginal. His language is just the same as that of any white Australian... and most of the 'black fellow talk' which has been interwoven with remarks attributed to him has either been introduced with an intention of lending supposedly needed colouring or has been insensibly conveyed from the mind to the lips or the pen of the narrator by reason of the fact that Jimmy Governor is usually spoken of as an aboriginal and is so dark skinned. His grammar is not, of course, of the most elegant description, but his only dialect is the dialect of the average bush labourer. Of the latest slang he is a master, and he freely uses 'flash' talk and slang in his conversation.\n\nWith Jimmy Governor the bushranger had supplanted the tribal warrior; class had superseded race.\n\n# DEATH TOLL\n\nHow many people died as a direct result of frontier conflict? It is a question which white Australians have rarely posed and never satisfactorily answered. The few official estimates made in the nineteenth century are of limited value and normally underestimate the numbers of Aborigines shot down by the settlers. However, recent research work in various parts of Australia provides a more satisfactory basis for assessment. It is much easier to determine the number of Europeans who died violently than to make comparable estimates for the blacks. Loos and Reynolds estimated that 850 Europeans and their allies\u2013Pacific Islanders, Chinese, acculturated Aborigines\u2013died by spear and club in Queensland between 1840 and 1897. Though the count was careful, precision was impossible and the figure may have been as high as 1000. Similar estimates were subsequently made in other parts of Australia. In Tasmania the official figure for European mortality was 160 but Ryan has recently argued that 200 is more realistic. Christie has suggested 200 as a reasonable estimate for Victoria; Green has accounted for 25 deaths in the south-west corner of Western Australia between 1826 and 1852 and Prentis 20 for the northeast corner of New South Wales. There is now enough regional accounting to make an intelligent guess about the country as a whole. It seems reasonable to suggest that Aborigines killed somewhere between 2000 and 2500 Europeans in the course of the invasion and settlement of the continent. There were many hundreds of others who were injured and carried both physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives.\n\nCalculating the Aboriginal death toll is much more difficult. Conflict is better documented in Tasmania than anywhere else in the country and Ryan's estimate of 800 is possibly more accurate than any other we can make. Green has accounted for 102 Aboriginal deaths in his segment of Western Australia and Prentis for 100 in the northern rivers district of New South Wales. Christie has recently argued that the whites killed 2000 blacks during their occupation of Victoria while Reynolds suggested that as many as 8000\u201310 000 Aborigines died violently in Queensland. For the continent as a whole it is reasonable to suppose that at least 20 000 Aborigines were killed as a direct result of conflict with the settlers. Secondary effects of the invasion\u2013disease, deprivation, disruption\u2013were responsible for the premature deaths of many more although it is almost impossible to arrive at a realistic figure. Many blacks were wounded but recovered. After an expedition to survey the Aboriginal population in central Victoria in 1846 G. A. Robinson reported that many of the adult men had gun shot wounds and 'other marks of violence on their person'. In 1969 an old Northern Territory black recalled that when he was a child a lot of his people had bullet marks on their arms, legs and backs and one had survived although half his mouth had been shot away.\n\nThe ratio between black and white deaths varied considerably from four to one in Tasmania up to ten to one in Queensland. Such a discrepancy demands explanation. The rugged island terrain undoubtedly assisted Aborigines in both defence and attack. Horses were less common on Tasmanian properties than on sprawling mainland stations and convict servants usually travelled on foot. They were often unarmed as well. The free settlers were unwilling to give guns to their workers because the 'black war' followed a period of serious conflict with gangs of bushrangers. The struggle in Tasmania was over before European weapons underwent their rapid mid nineteenth century improvement with the introduction of breech-loading, repeating rifles and six shot revolvers. Conditions in Queensland were much more favourable to the settlers. The introduction of responsible government in 1859 removed many of the political constraints that had previously held back the full force of white violence. The frontier was vast and in most places favoured the European on horseback while the Native Mounted Police developed into an efficient weapon to 'disperse' Aboriginal tribes.\n\nThere is then a marked discrepancy between the ratios of white deaths to black in Tasmania, the south-west of Western Australia and north-east New South Wales on the one hand and those in Queensland on the other. This may reflect a wider difference between settlement in the south and east of the continent in the first half of the nineteenth century and that of the second half in northern Australia. Christie's ratio of ten to one in Victoria may be anomalous. It is possible that his figure of 2000 Aboriginal death is too high although E. S. Parker kept a careful account of conflict in his area of north-central Victoria and estimated that Europeans killed seven Aborigines for every white man speared. Elsewhere he spoke of a fearful preponderance in the settlers' favour.\n\nThe figure of 20 000 Aboriginal deaths in frontier conflict will be thought too high by some, too low by others. However, the evidence concerning the ubiquity of conflict is overwhelming. It can be found in almost every type of document\u2013official reports both public and confidential, newspapers, letters, reminiscences. Settlers often counted black bodies either in anger or in anguish; members of punitive expeditions confessed to their participation in a spirit of bravado or contrition. Later observers came across bones and skulls; buried, burnt or hidden and occasionally collected and put proudly on display. In a few districts officials and settlers assessed the role of violence in the decline of local populations; others noted the disproportionate number of adult women following frontier conflict and the widespread and prolonged mourning for butchered men-folk. The evidence for a great loss of life is voluminous, various and incontrovertible.\n\nSome will think a figure of 20 000 dead too low considering the alarming decline of the Aboriginal population from about 300 000 in 1788 to not much more than 50 000 in a little over a century. Given ample evidence of massacres should we not significantly extend the death list? To answer this question several points should be made. They relate to both sides of the frontier. An overemphasis on the significance of massacres tends to throw support behind the idea that the blacks were helpless victims of white attack; passive recipients of promiscuous brutality. Such an argument runs easily along well worn channels of historical interpretation. Paternalism and sympathy have often merged in support of the view that the Aboriginal experience was a story 'infinitely pathetic\u2013children as they were, stretching out frail hands to stay the flood tide'.\n\nBut such an assessment parodies the Aboriginal role in frontier conflict. Blacks did not sit around their camp fires waiting to be massacred. They usually knew of the dangers accompanying white settlement even before the Europeans arrived and took action to minimize those perils. While the settlers normally had the advantage of guns and horses the blacks were far more competent in the bush and undoubtedly had a superior intelligence network. Aboriginal clans usually knew in advance what European parties were doing and simply avoided contact. White numbers were too small to scour the country thoroughly while settlers could not afford the luxury of long patrols which took workers away from productive work. Even the Queensland Native Police seems to have spent much of its time in fruitless patrolling without seeing any Aborigines. Clans were most vulnerable when they were in camp and punitive parties often endeavoured to advance on them in the darkness and attack at first light. White tactics succeeded sometimes but the failure rate was certainly very high. Aborigines were inured to fear of night attack from their tribal enemies. It was in consequence hard to take a camp by surprise especially for clumsy and heavy booted Europeans. Many measures were adopted to counter nocturnal danger. Fires were either not lit, kept so small they could not be seen in the distance or shielded by screens of saplings. Without the distant glow of camp fires sleeping blacks were almost impossible to find. Camp sites were chosen on the edges of rivers and swamps and forests or among broken and boulder strewn country to expedite flight and there are numerous accounts of European parties galloping into camps that had already been vacated. Aborigines were acutely observant and their camps were usually surrounded by dogs keen from hunger who provided an effective early warning system.\n\nThere were important constraints on European action\u2013legal, political and moral\u2013which operated even in Queensland where control of Aboriginal policy passed to the settlers while there were still large indigenous populations beyond the reach of the whites. But equally important in determining what happened along the frontier was the action of the Aborigines themselves. Their skills, intelligence and tactics were always a significant element in the equation of contact. The settlers may have wanted to kill more blacks than they did, may have dreamed of easy assassination, but counter-action by the blacks frequently frustrated them. The ratio of four or five deaths to one in favour of the Europeans may have been the best that they could achieve during the first half of the nineteenth century with their inefficient guns and fumbling bushcraft.\n\n# DEMOGRAPHIC DECLINE\n\nAnother fact of considerable importance when assessing the frontier death rate is that while the demographic evidence is far from complete it seems that there were still large Aboriginal populations in most areas when open conflict came to an end. The demographic decline did not cease when the shooting stopped and was equally significant in those few relatively peaceful districts where it scarcely began. Disease decimated Aboriginal communities\u2013colds, influenza, T.B., measles, whooping cough, dysentery, malnutrition\u2013all took their grim toll. Epidemic diseases were probably more lethal than punitive expeditions. While traditional culture provided skills to deal with guns there were no effective answers to introduced illness. Even a people like the Kalkatunga (or Kalkadoons) who stood up to the Queensland Native Police proved more vulnerable to measles than Martini-Henry rifles.\n\nThe catastrophic fall in the birth rate was another factor of demographic significance. Aborigines not only died at unprecedented rates; they were not born, or did not survive childhood, in anything like sufficient numbers to replace the loss by premature death. 'A child is now but rarely to be met with', wrote a white official in melancholy mood, 'a birth but seldom known'. The missionary Benjamin Hurst commented in 1841 that he knew of only two children under twelve within a forty mile radius of his station on the western side of Port Phillip Bay. A settler at Lake Colac noted that amongst one hundred or so local women there had not been more than six or eight children born in the previous three years. A contemporary could recall only two births in five years in his district and both children later died. William Thomas kept detailed records of the Port Phillip and Western Port clans. Between 1848 and 1858 the population fell from 92 to 56 and only one child survived. The story was similar all over the continent. In district after district children were found to be 'few beyond all proportion'. Many of the factors\u2013malnutrition, exposure, disease and especially V. D. in a variety of forms\u2013were only too apparent. But beyond even their lethal reach there was the loss of land, the dislocation of the known universe, a previously unthinkable disruption of the cosmic cycle of birth and death and reincarnation. Some groups exhibited an unquenchable determination to survive; for others the onslaught of invasion had destroyed everything. The future itself had been extinguished. Death from disease and chronic infant mortality merely proved that the times were irrecoverably out of joint. The Port Phillip Protectors reported Aboriginal comments eloquent with despair, leached of all hope. Thomas referred to 'this indifference to prolong their race, on the ground as they state of having no country they can call their own'. 'No country, no good have it pickaninnys', one Aborigine explained, while another lamented 'no country now for them... and no more come up pickaniny'. A contemporary of Thomas reported that he was asked: 'Why me have lubra? Why me have piccaninny? You have all this place, no good have children no good have lubra, me tumble down and die very soon now.' During the nineteenth century, European observers frequently argued that given the importance of disease and the plummeting birth rate that frontier violence was only a minor factor in the decline of the Aboriginal population. The argument was a perfect anodyne for the tender colonial conscience but nevertheless did contain an element of truth, certainly sufficient to convince those eager to be persuaded. But it ignored the European input into almost every source of Aboriginal misery and cloaked the full significance of frontier violence which was political just as much as demographic. Violence was used to force submission; the impact spread far beyond the actual casualties. Fear and insecurity ran like fire throughout Aboriginal Australia and the scars of that great conflagration have still not healed. The horror of the punitive expedition was graphically captured by a Victorian black who told James Dredge in 1840: 'Blackfellow by and by all gone, plenty shoot em, whitefellow\u2013long time, plenty, plenty.'\n\nThe memory of the dead, all 20 000 and more, lived on, stamped deeply and indelibly into the consciousness of the survivors, their children, and their children's children. It is probably the most politically potent folk memory in Australian society. Oral history has tapped a number of stories of massacre; sagas of sudden death, of unforgettable horror. Despite the lapse of time the terror is still alive coiled snake\u2013like in the awful narratives. The following story was told by an old black north Queenslander just before he died in the 1970s:\n\nBig mob come up from Atherton   \nall the native police come up   \nall got the rifle, all got handcuffs   \nfire for bullock, roast im, altogether   \nbullock is for tucker   \nshoot im altogether, shoot im altogether   \nchuck im in the fire   \nall the revolvers going on   \ntalk about smell   \nnobody gonna be alive   \nchuck im in the fire, half alive,   \nsing out   \nyou all finished no more   \nNative police shot im all   \nWidow come back cryin   \nshe lose im husband   \nall finished, they shot em live   \nall cryin come home   \nto this valley here\n\n# Chapter 5\n\n# THE POLITICS OF CONTACT\n\n# ATTRACTION\n\nAborigines reacted in complex ways to the European invasion; there was a variety of situation and diversity of motivation which will continually confound the over-confident or over-simple generalization. Yet patterns did recur. One was the interplay of attraction and resistance which ran through the politics of post-contact Aboriginal society. While Europeans were far more likely to notice the resister there were blacks who endeavoured to find a place in the new society. The missionaries and officials at Port Phillip noted several such cases. E. S. Parker claimed that many young blacks were willing to accept European ways and that they openly avowed 'their dislike for the wandering and comfortless habits of their own people'. He instanced the case of youths who established themselves on his station and built themselves 'permanent habitations of saplings and reeds in imitation of one built by Government men'. The Commissioner for Crown Lands in the Monaro in the 1840s reported the case of a local man and woman who separated themselves from their clan, cleared a block of land, built a hut and began farming. When the first Aborigines were recruited for the Port Phillip Native Police Force they 'broke unsolicited their spears and other native weapons' and throwing them into the river said 'they would no longer be black fellows'. The missionary Francis Tuckfield noted in his journal that young blacks had expressed themselves in the 'most decided and encouraging manner about becoming settled and adopting the European mode of living'. Some had made strenuous efforts to do so but had been compelled by their kin to return to the bush. He referred to the case of Kam-kam who built himself a house and when urged to join his clan hunting and skirmishing brought his 'instruments of war to the Missionaries that he might urge this as an excuse for not going'.\n\nTo explain the attraction of white society we must consider how it must have appeared to Aborigines coming in from the bush. We can assume that those young blacks who went willingly towards the Europeans fully expected to be able to participate in their obvious material abundance. Reciprocity and sharing were so fundamental to their own society that they probably expected to meet similar behaviour when they crossed the racial frontier. They presumably thought that residence alone would win them equality, that kinship and sharing would flow naturally from contiguity. Though Aborigines were accustomed to differences in power and status based on age and sex they had no experience of the extremes of wealth and poverty which existed in European society. Material equality was one of the central characteristics of traditional life throughout Australia. Those blacks who wished to live like Europeans can hardly have imagined that the desperate poverty of the fringe camp could sit so near the plenty of town or farm or station.\n\n# YOUNG VS. OLD\n\nBut misconceptions about white society and expectations of reciprocity were only one side of the story. Aspects of traditional life must also be considered. Aboriginal society was loosely articulated; during a typical year groups waxed and waned, clans coalesced and dispersed. Visits to European camps or stations could be easily encompassed within the normal pattern of movement about tribal territory. What is more the attraction of the white settlements worked on latent divisions within traditional society. Discipline was maintained by the older men who managed both the pace at which the young were initiated and the bestowal of women and girls as they became available for marriage. While the fully initiated men controlled the only possible, or conceivable, passes on to the plateau of full adulthood their authority over the young remained unshaken. The Europeans, often unwittingly, challenged that dominance. This was particularly true in the case of young men and women who had not been fully incorporated into traditional society. Still awaiting final initiation they were the group least firmly attached to customary mores. At the same time it was the young who were most useful to the Europeans. They learnt new skills and mastered rudimentary English before the old people and in the case of girls were more sought after as sexual partners by white frontiersmen. So beneath the over-arching clash between black and white there were subsidiary tensions between those who were attracted to and those who resisted the Europeans. This secondary conflict often coincided with lines of stress latent in traditional society and especially those between young and old.\n\nOne of the most interesting accounts of intra-tribal conflict was written by A. C. Grant in his unpublished account of life on a pastoral property in the Burnett district of southern Queensland. The old men, he observed, did not like the changes which gradually deprived them of their authority. The arrival of the Europeans had the effect of making the active young men 'of more importance than the old fellows, who were beyond learning English' and found it difficult to acquire the new skills. They never learnt to ride while the 'youthful generation became adepts'. The young men began to openly challenge traditional food taboos and scoffed at tribal custom although their new assurance rapidly fell away when they were sick. The tribal elders battled to retain their authority by means of 'sacred cor-roborees, incantations, magic bones and stones, etc'. Grant described how the Aboriginal camp was swept by a mania for marble playing and little circular rings of cleared ground could be found everywhere. Even in such a minor aspect of European culture the old were disadvantaged:\n\nOld men, grey headed warriors, Grand fathers, sage in council, valiant in war, played with little demons of grandchildren satanic in their nimbleness of finger, and sureness of aim, and superior in the jargon and tricks of the game... The amusing and saddening feature to me was the airs of equality which an English speaking, useful brat of nine or ten years, would assume towards his grey headed and battle scarred old grandfather.\n\nYet in many tribal groupings the old men managed to minimize the defection of the young. They were often helped by European violence which united the clans in hatred and temporarily closed off the option of going in to white settlement. Among the Walbri, for instance, the Coniston massacre reinforced the authority of the older men who had previously tried with only limited success to 'dissuade their juniors from becoming entangled with white men'. Many nineteenth century sources provide evidence of the effective assertion of tribal authority. The Commissioner for Crown Lands on the McLeay River observed in 1846 that many of the young people who worked casually for the Europeans would be happy to remain permanently about the settlements 'were it not that they were absolutely prevented by the old members of their tribe'. A Victorian settler noted similar developments in the Western District where the old men invariably took away any boys who manifested 'an inclination to leave their wandering habits'. On the far side of the continent Governor Hutt concluded that the older natives, both men and women, were opposed to innovations and expressed 'decided hostility against the youths... who indicate any inclination for civilized habits'.\n\nTribal leaders used an array of methods to preserve their authority \u2013threats, sorcery, ritual spearing, even execution. Howitt referred to the fate of a young Dieri man who accompanied his expedition north into central Australia. He deserted when the Europeans ventured into what to him would have been hostile territory and returned to his own country. However, Howitt learnt that he had been pursued by an armed party of kinsmen and executed because he had become 'too familiar with white men'. The Commissioner for Crown Lands in the Maranoa described the great animosity felt by blacks still in the bush for those working on the stations. 'Every effort and trick is resorted to', he wrote, 'to seduce them away, to destroy their fidelity and attachment'. He instanced the case of his guide Jemmy who had been indispensable to him. Jemmy returned to his tribe for a week only to reappear emaciated almost beyond recognition. He told the Commissioner that he had to immediately leave the white man's service because he had a stone in his stomach and the old men had told him he would die if he stayed with them. Taplin told a similar story of conflict among the Narrinyeri of South Australia. The old men began to complain to him because the young people would not conform to their customs. A youth called Tungeriol eloped with a girl he had no right to and went to live under the protection of Europeans on a nearby cattle station. Some months later he was decoyed into the bush, grabbed by five men and smothered. Taplin tried every means to discover the executioners but was never able to do so. But the fate of the defiant Narrinyeri youth illustrated an issue of much wider significance.\n\n# CONTROL OF WOMEN\n\nThe control and bestowal of women was a major focus for inter-clan conflict both before and after the arrival of the Europeans. Three aspects of traditional society fostered sexual competition and conflict\u2013a marked masculinity in Aboriginal populations, the widespread practice of polygamy and the control by old men over the bestowal of women. Elopement, adultery and abduction were, as a result, common occurrences. The sudden intrusion of an almost womanless white population added considerably to existing tensions. Frontiersmen abducted women and often took them away for considerable periods of time. On the other hand Aboriginal women may have gone to European men willingly and actually sought them out either to escape undesired marriage or tribal punishment or to gain access to the many attractive possessions of the Europeans. The disruption caused by the settlers provided the opportunity for young men to grab control of women from the elders and seek sanctuary among the white men in order to escape retribution. Such a situation was described by the West Australian Inspector of Aborigines on the north-west coast at the turn of the century:\n\nThe tribal laws and customs have been annulled through the natives coming into constant contact with Asiatics; where in former days old men had the young women, who supported them through hunting, to-day most women are in the hands of young men and boys (who by tribal law are not entitled to them), having stolen them from their rightful owners by brute force, leaving the old to fossick for themselves, whilst the young men, with their so-procured women, follow up the pearling boats or go into Broome.\n\nWhere the old men continued to exert their authority they were able to use their control over the bestowal of women to discipline the young men. F. J. Gillen reported the case of a young central Australian man who had lived with Europeans since childhood and so had missed out on initiation and the related operations of circumcision and subincision. Though he spoke good English and had practically forgotten his own language he eventually decided to accept initiation. Gillen explained the circumstances:\n\nOne day he came to me and said 'I think I will go and get cut'... and I said 'look here, Jim, you are a fool to submit to that'. He said in reply 'Well, I can't put up with the cheek of the women and children. They will not let me have a lubra, and the old men will not let me know anything about my countrymen.\n\nIn some cases the old men seemed to have welcomed the chance to send the young away to work for Europeans for the difficult and often prolonged period between puberty and marriage. They appear to have used the pastoral stations or pearling luggers as safety valves to relieve some of the pent up pressures of traditional society intensified by rapid change. Several perceptive observers of Aboriginal society noted this practice. Writing of South Australia in the 1840s Moorhouse noted that young men were persuaded to live with the Europeans in order to keep them away from the old men's wives. At the end of the century W. E. Roth, Queensland's Northern Protector of Aborigines, claimed that old men encouraged youths to ship with pearlers so as to retain their control over the young women. Europeans frequently tried to protect blacks threatened with tribal punishment and their power was often sufficient to provide effective sanctuary from physical violence if not necessarily from sorcery. When faced with interfering white men the blacks turned to secret and surreptitious methods to punish or execute those who continued to defy tribal authority. Governor Hutt endeavoured to uncover the hidden influence of the old men which 'paralysed and menaced' the attempt to assimilate the young, but he was continually frustrated because the 'threats were so vague, the influence so carefully concealed'.\n\n# WHITE PRESSURE\n\nBut the pressure of an assertive white legal system and the physical scattering of tribal populations progressively sapped the power of the old men. They looked on with impotent fury as European influence penetrated deeper into Aboriginal life. E. S. Parker wrote of a clash he had with two influential Loddon River blacks. They objected to Parker's assertive promotion of European culture and the continuous subversion of their children. Parker explained that one of them:\n\ncomplained in his anger that the white fellows had stolen their country, and that I was stealing their children, by taking them away to live in huts, and work, and 'read in book' like white fellows.\n\nSimpson Newland wrote of an old man from the upper Darling who remained intransigent in face of the pervasive influence of European culture. Although he recognized that further resistance was futile and acquiesced in the submission of his kin he refused to have any contact with the white man 'much less work for him, wear his clothes, or even eat his food'. At times the gap between the old people and the young grew so wide that the elders refused to pass on the traditions and beliefs of their tribes. F. J. Gillen saw it happen in Central Australia. No sooner, he wrote, do the blacks come into contact with the white man than the younger men:\n\nbreak away from the control of the older men, who, in normal conditions of the tribe are all powerful. It is only the older men who are really acquainted with the ancient customs and traditions, and these they will not reveal to the younger ones who have broken away from the tribal rules, and refuse to be governed by what to the old men are laws rendered sacred, because they have been handed down from the far past.\n\nThe decision of elderly Aborigines to reject the youth of their own clans was by no means a universal one. Yet in many camps across the continent old men and women drifted towards death, lonely, bitter and disregarded.\n\nClearly the European invasion put great pressure on indigenous political organization and undermined traditional authority. But did new patterns of leadership emerge as a response to the white challenge? It is by any reckoning a complex question and will take some time to answer. The problem is compounded because Europeans who provided most of the evidence often believed that either Aboriginal society had a system of chiefs or should acquire one. In the early period of contact settlers were frequently convinced that renegade Europeans\u2013escaped convicts and the like\u2013had taken control of the Aborigines out in the bush and were stirring up trouble. Thus an official notice of 1796 suggested that two escaped convicts 'direct and assist' attacks on the settlers. Five years later another Government report stated that there was reason to believe that 'some vagabonds' were living with the blacks and 'instigating them to commit many acts of violence on the settlers'. Similar suggestions were made in Tasmania and at Moreton Bay where the blockading of the road to the Darling Downs was attributed to the fact that 'pale faces were at work amongst them'.\n\nFrom what we know of traditional social organization and of the experiences on the other side of the frontier of people like Davis, Morrell, Thompson and Buckley there is little reason to suppose that stray Europeans had any significant influence on Aboriginal behaviour. G. A. Robinson thought the idea of renegade white leaders 'one of the most puerile inventions that was ever conceived'. Far from being thought worthy of emulation Buckley and Thompson were considered as rather simple souls whose minds had been affected by their journey back from the dead. We also know something of a European who lived for years on the islands of the Western Torres Strait. He was neither a powerful chief nor 'the Wild White Man of Badu' and was only able to survive by being both useful and circumspect. Barbara Thompson met him and reported that he was called Weinie by the islanders:\n\nand had no particular authority, being the joint property of two brothers, and was very useful to them in repairing their canoes. She had often heard her own people remark that they would be glad to catch a white man like Weinie to work at their canoes for them.\n\nThe idea that rogue Europeans were responsible for tribal resistance served two functions\u2013like any conspiracy theory it could be used to explain away black hostility while at the same time confirming white belief in Aboriginal incompetence.\n\n# LEADERSHIP\n\nSettlers' accounts abound also in references to powerful Aboriginal chiefs who it was thought directed the attacks of warrior bands on the lives and property of the Europeans. Names like Eaglehawk, Jupiter, Belba and Oromonde were coined for these largely fictitious figures. Much of the evidence concerning Aboriginal leadership was provided by people with little understanding of, or interest in, traditional society and must for that reason be regarded with great suspicion. Moorhouse, the South Australian Protector, carefully observed black methods during one of the large scale attacks on overlanding parties on the lower Murray in the early 1840s. These were possibly the biggest groups ever to confront the settlers but even then Moorhouse could detect no indication of military leadership in the European sense. He wrote that:\n\nthe natives had no chief or leader. They appeared to be arranging their intervals of distance with each other on their approach towards us. I have nothing to lead me to infer that they have chiefs.\n\nThere is more evidence to hand relating to a number of young men who became prominent by their resistance to the Europeans in and near the major colonial towns\u2013Pemulwy in Sydney, Yagan in Perth, Dundalli in Brisbane. They were certainly well enough known to be recognized by the settlers and they were clearly at the forefront of skirmishes with the Europeans although their motives may have been those of personal revenge rather than racial retribution. Each of the three created considerable anxiety among the Europeans who saw them as symbols of black resistance. Pemulwy was, according to Collins, 'said to be at the head of every party that attacked the maize grounds' and to others 'a riotous and troublesome savage', a 'most active enemy to the settlers'. Yagan was thought to be 'at the head and front of any mischief'. In the eyes of another he was 'the Wallace of the Age'. The evidence concerning such people as Yagan and Pemulwy is very much more substantial than what we have about any individuals on the pastoral frontier. But we are still no closer to the question of leadership. Clearly they were courageous and resolute in their reaction to Europeans but that does not mean that they were leaders of their own people especially as they seem to have been relatively young men. In traditional society the old men were paramount in matters of ritual and belief but in more secular areas the fundamental egalitarianism of Aboriginal society militated against the emergence of permanent leadership. Europeans who knew the Aborigines best were aware of this. Symmons, the West Australian Protector, remarked in 1841 that the blacks were a people 'owning no chief\u2013literally a pure democracy'. Writing of South Australian Aborigines Taplin noted that 'all members of the clan are held to be equal'. The early New South Wales missionary William Walker thought Aboriginal society would be better if there was more subordination. But if a man:\n\nwhom Englishmen have called chief, should in the least degree, offend one of those over whom he is placed in authority, he will raise his waddy and knock him down.\n\nDespite the cultural barriers to the emergence of strong secular leadership it is possible that Aborigines were influenced by what they saw of European society with its officers and overseers, governors and superintendents. Evidence for such cultural influence is very difficult to find although there are one or two suggestive scraps of information. The West Australian pioneer G. F. Moore was handing out Government rations to a group of blacks at York when one man came forward saying: 'Give it to me, I, Darrama am the Governor among the Yoongar, as your Governor is among the white men.' Many years later when Logan Jack was on his expedition across Cape York he met a young man who had worked on the pearling boats. Speaking in English he told the white explorer that he was captain of many canoes. Both these cases are interesting but it is impossible to know if the two men in question had merely borrowed English words or if they had also adopted the concepts which they expressed as well.\n\nThere is still another aspect of leadership to consider. It seems that in some places groups of mainly young Aborigines who had broken away from tribal authority coalesced into gangs, or as they might be termed, reconstituted clans, under powerful authoritarian leaders who based their power on personal charisma. Mosquito, the leader of Hobart's 'tame mob' is perhaps the best documented example. He was doubly an outsider\u2013a mainland rather than a Tasmanian Aborigine and considerably acculturated as well. Yet he seems to have exercised great authority over his companions although we will never be certain about the inner dynamics of these groups. A contemporary observed that the 'tame mob' consisted of twenty to thirty blacks who 'had absconded from their proper tribes in the interior' many of them having 'transgressed tribal laws in their own districts, and were obliged to live abroad for a season'. Mosquito, he explained, had power over them: 'in a sense superior to any known among the equality-loving Tasmanians, and governed them after the approved European model.'\n\nThe case of the Tasmanian woman Walyer is even more interesting although the evidence is more fragmentary. Like Mosquito she was considerably acculturated having lived with the Bass Strait sealers. She spoke English, could use guns and had presumably adopted other aspects of European culture. Robinson is the main source of our knowledge about her and he attributed his information to several other Aborigines. She was, he wrote, 'at the head of an Aboriginal banditti' and was known to issue her orders 'in a most determined manner'. As with Mosquito's tame mob her companions were 'the disaffected of several nations'. It was said of her that she:\n\nboasted to the other women how she had taught the blackfellows to load and fire a musket, and instructed them how to kill plenty of white people, and that she was wont to recount her exploits how she used to tell the blackfellows how to act when they used to rob a hut.\n\nThere may have been other 'banditti' like those of Mosquito and Walyer in other parts of the country and indeed the case of Pidgeon in the north-west of Western Australia in the 1890s springs immediately to mind. The members of these gangs seem to have shared many characteristics with Aborigines who rode on the other side of the white man's law, the trackers and troopers of the native police forces. Both outlaws and 'police boys' were typically young, having grown to adulthood after the arrival of the settlers, were considerably acculturated and often rebels against tribal authority. The parallels were underlined by the fact that many outlaws crossed from one side of the white man's law to the other. Mosquito, Pidgeon, the Dora-Dora brothers and many others began their careers riding with the European police and ended up trying to evade them.\n\n# THE DISCIPLINE OF LABOUR\n\nThe move from the bush into white society was not merely a spatial journey. Among other things it was a transfer from one economic system to another, from the domestic mode of production to the burgeoning capitalist economy of colonial Australia. When groups of blacks walked into camps and stations and townships they carried few material possessions. But their cultural luggage was very much richer and more important in determining their reaction to the new world. They came from a society where economic activity was geared to immediate use not to the creation of a surplus for exchange. Once the current needs had been met each day could be devoted to leisure\u2013to sleeping, gossiping, sexual intrigue, to politics, ritual or ceremony. Like hunters and gatherers elsewhere the Aborigines do not seem to have spent more than three or four hours in the field seeking food. Each family unit had direct access to the means of subsistence and each embodied all the various skills needed for survival, if not for sociability. This was the irreducible foundation on which the equality of traditional society rested. Thus Sahlins argued:\n\nPrimitive peoples have invented many ways to elevate a man above his fellows. But the producers' hold on their own economic means rules out the most compelling history has known: exclusive control of such means by some few, rendering dependent the many others.\n\nEuropeans were quite clear as to the economic and social role appropriate to Aborigines who came in from the bush. Governor Macquarie argued that when they had given up their 'Wild wandering and Unsettled Habits' they would become progressively useful to the country either as 'labourers in Agricultural Employ or among the lower Class of Mechanics'. A generation later Governor Gipps gave his attention to the means by which the Aborigines 'could be induced to become voluntary labourers for wages'. Though 'by nature wild' he believed that proof existed that they could be 'induced to submit to the restraints which are imposed on ordinary labourers'. Numerous plans were devised to impose the required discipline on Aboriginal workers. In Perth in the 1840s the Government issued a directive that blacks would only be admitted to the town if they were wearing a woollen shirt which had to be earned by labour, thus practically conveying the lesson 'of the value of acquiring property'. Education of the children was held out to be the great hope especially if they could be separated from their parents and brought up in institutions. A West Australian official put forward a scheme for the socialization of black children in 1840. He argued that an institution be set up to which the children be induced 'and even compelled' to go and enter upon a 'field of action which would gradually wean them from their present erratic habits'. This scheme was quite elaborate. He suggested the children should be taught to walk to and fro for a limited distance in 'Gangs merely to form a habit'. The next step would be to make each boy bring back any loose wood that might by lying about to be used for cooking. Subsequently they would be made to carry an axe to cut wood 'thus gradually bringing them on by steps to a habit of labour'. Other gangs would meanwhile collect ballast stones, grow vegetables, break up ground or make roads.\n\nSeveral attempts were made to encourage Aborigines to become gardeners or small farmers and thereby 'feel the sweets of property'.  In 1815 Macquarie endeavoured to settle a group of Sydney blacks on the shores of the harbour and provided them with huts, small patches of garden, rations, clothes and a European assistant in order that they would learn to prefer 'the productive Effects of their own Labour and Industry to the Wild and precarious Pursuits of the Woods'. The failure of this and similar schemes has usually been attributed to the Aborigines' total lack of understanding of agriculture. Yet traditionally they did harvest root crops and wild grasses and often from the very same patches of soil appropriated by the settlers for agriculture. The big difference lay in the fact that they did not see the need to sit around and wait for the crops to grow. Confident in their knowledge of the environment and their ability to ensure, by appropriate ritual, its continued flowering they arranged their timetable to return to an area when a new crop had matured and ripened. Clearly there was a big gap between the productivity of Aboriginal foraging and European horticulture even in the crude colonial environment. But the crucial difference was not in the use of the land but in the institution of private property. Small European farmers and gardeners remained in one place not just to nurture their crops but because they owned the land and all it produced and residence was required to effect and affirm that ownership.\n\nDuring the first half of the nineteenth century there were numerous settlers who appreciated that the difficulty of 'bringing in' the blacks 'to a habit of labour' was due to lack of motivation rather than incapacity, to the 'difficulty of finding some inducement sufficiently powerful to excite them to continuous labour'. Samuel Marsden remarked in 1825 that he was pessimistic about the future of the Aborigines. 'The time', he wrote:\n\nmay come when they may feel more wants than they do at present \u2013they seem to have all they wish for Idleness and Independence. They have no wants to stimulate their exertions and until they have, I fear they will remain the same.\n\nPerhaps the clearest analysis of the problems of attempting to impose the discipline, punctuality and regularity of wage labour on Aboriginal society was provided by Jack McLaren in his account of his life at the tip of Cape York at the turn of the century. He set out to establish a coconut plantation using the local blacks for labour. Being a solitary European the option of force was not available to him and he was required to use patience and diplomacy to extract the amount of work he required. The blacks sought access to his trade goods but otherwise they could continue to survive independently. He provided an interesting catalogue of his problems. It was, he wrote, no easy matter to persuade the natives to work on succeeding days:\n\nWe worked yesterday and are tired and would rest, they would say adding pointedly that in their habitual mode of life they worked not at all, and hunted only when the need for food was on them. Whereupon I would point out that in their wild life they had no tobacco, or flour, or coloured cloth, or tinned meats or tinned fish, or any other of the luxuries they coveted, and that the only way to obtain them was by working all day every day.\n\nTo his annoyance the blacks took a long time over their meals. Even their method of eating appeared unnecessarily time-consuming. After the midday meal the whole camp would sleep and if McLaren did not wake them they would doze the afternoon through. Even while they were working there were constant distractions. When they came across food they would immediately down tools to dig the yams, cut out the sugar bag, pursue the wallaby, causing disruption which might last several hours. Unless he supervised their work all the time they would sit down, smoke or go to sleep the minute his back was turned. 'Often in those early days', he reminisced:\n\ndid I return from a brief absence to find the whole of the labourers stretched like black shadows on the ground, I tried upbraiding them. It was no use. I tried ridiculing\u2013saying scornfully that they worked like women or children, that they had neither strength nor endurance. That was no use either... There were, in fact, no means by which I could persuade them into sudden acceptance of a daily routine of toil.\n\n# UNWILLING WAGE LABOURERS\n\nThe historical record bristles with colonists' complaints about their problems in trying to get Aborigines to behave as 'voluntary labourers for wages'. Governor Hutt concluded that black attitudes to labour were the 'chief and serious difficulty' which had hampered assimilation. They would not work regularly; would not settle; they were unpunctual. 'Every species of labour seems to be irksome to them', wrote the Commissioner for Crown Lands at Moreton Bay. 'Nothing', commented a woman settler from New England, 'can really repay them for performing any labour beyond that necessary to procure them enough game to enable them to exist from day to day'. Occasionally local blacks worked on her property but 'they all looked on working for us as a personal favour, and gave us to understand as much'. 'If they do service for others', wrote J. B. Walker of the Tasmanians, 'they do it through courtesy'.\n\nBut it was not just the habit of labour that had to be induced but also those concomitants the subordination of servant to master and the separation of the worker from the means of subsistence and production. The second was the most difficult because it was hard to convince the Aborigines that they were working for their own benefit and not for white employers. G. A. Robinson explained to the Superintendent at Port Phillip that on the stations of the Protectorate the blacks were 'taught to feel that their occupation is for their own advantage'. E. S. Parker was even more acutely aware of the problems of convincing the Aborigines of the advantages of wage labour and imbuing them with the ideology of capitalism. In a report from his station on the Loddon he explained how it was essential to bring the blacks 'under the influence of Christian principles' which would provide the fundamental underpinning for the socially desired behaviour. Even then it was essential:\n\nthat in all cases where they are employed they should be made to feel that their occupation is for their own benefit rather than for the advantage of the employer. They appear generally to feel that they owe us nothing and that they are under no obligation to work. If the suspicion therefore be aroused in their minds that they are working more for the benefit of the whites than their own advantage they will speedily recede from their employment.\n\nIt has often been assumed that the blacks were unable to acquire enough skills to compete successfully in colonial society. The evidence suggests otherwise. Aborigines displayed their adaptability within a few years of the settlement at Sydney Cove. Collins believed that if well treated they 'certainly might be made very serviceable people'; in a number of occupations they proved themselves 'as handy and as useful as any other persons could have been'. By the 1840s the catalogue of Aboriginal occupations had grown much larger. G. A. Robinson noted that:\n\nas far as they have been employed, they have been found faithful guides, able Bullock drivers, Efficient Shepherds, Stockkeepers and Whalers, good Boatmen, Horsemen and Houseservants, Husbandmen, Policemen, Handicrafts and other useful employments [sic].\n\nWhen they had only recently arrived on the fringe of white society Aborigines must have found many European occupations incomprehensible. As they lacked any immediate rationale they may have been thought to have ritual significance. Yet many jobs in the colonial economy required only limited formal skills and in some the blacks had distinct advantages. In much of rural industry they may well have been more immediately useful than new-chums from urban Britain. But while they were able to pick up the actual mechanical tasks associated with various jobs they were not willing to accept the social relations and cultural milieu in which they were set. While they might handle the tools of the labourer they were reluctant to accept the discipline that went with them.\n\n# TRADE, PROSTITUTION, BEGGING\n\nAborigines living in and around colonial towns did develop small scale trade in products gained by hunting, fishing or collecting. Fish, shell-fish, crustaceans, bark, sandalwood, skins, birds, feathers were at various times bartered with or sold to Europeans. But markets were uncertain and the blacks were regularly cheated. E. S. Parker noted in 1839 that Victorian Aborigines were the mainstays of a profitable trade in marsupial furs and lyre bird feathers yet the whites acquired them for almost nothing. He endeavoured to secure conditions which would obtain 'for them the just value of the produce of their hunting excursions' and drew up a scale of 'prices' for Aboriginal commodities which he vainly hoped the Protectorate could enforce. The basic unit was the pound of flour:\n\n1 Kangaroo skin\u20132 lbs flour, 3 lbs if large   \n2 Oppossum skins\u20131 lb flour   \n1 Basket, large\u20136 lbs flour   \n1 Basket, middle\u20134 lbs flour   \n1 Basket, small\u20132 lbs flour\n\nOne pound of flour was to be equivalent to 1 lb of rice and 1 lb of meat, \u00bc lb of sugar and \u00bc of rice and one knife. A tomahawk had the value of 2 lbs of flour.\n\nMany Aboriginal groups discovered that prostitution provided a more certain return than vestigial hunting and gathering. In some places a large and lucrative trade developed and especially around the northern coasts where prostitution became one of the essential service industries supporting the pearling fleets. From the critical comments of white authorities it is obvious that substantial sums of money were earned by black communities in towns like Broome and Thursday Island. 'The trading with young girls is very profitable to the natives', wrote the Inspector of Aborigines at Broome, 'as for one nights debauchery from ten shillings to two pounds ten is paid in rations and clothing'. The situation at La Grange Bay would, he said rather coyly, 'speak for itself'. For eight months of the year 'an average of 150 coloured men came into contact fortnightly with the natives'. Money and food earned by the women was shared in the fringe camps allowing most of the men to avoid the need to labour for the Europeans, to 'make a living in ease and idleness'. At Cape York at much the same time officials reported that the ex-trackers Waimara and James were the 'bosses' who organized labour for the luggers and women for the crews. Whether such indigenous entrepreneurs emerged elsewhere is impossible to say.\n\nOfficials in both West Australia and Queensland were determined to stamp out the trade. Waimara and James were deported to a Reserve; police in Broome drove the blacks out of town. Their motives were mixed. There was genuine official concern at the massive health problems accompanying a widespread epidemic of V.D. but it was equally clear that the colonial governments were determined to prevent the blacks from becoming economically independent. When the Western Australian Inspector of Aborigines visited a Broome purged by the local constables his first remarks were instructive. He noted that very few blacks could be seen about the town and residents told him 'they could now get hold of a native willing to work'.\n\nBegging was another means by which blacks could avoid the need for regular wage labour. The morality of the practice looked very different to blacks than to censorious whites. Moorhouse wrote in 1842 that he found it a difficult task to make Adelaide Aborigines believe that 'begging lessens them in the estimation of Europeans and that their supplies would be more certain and more creditable, if gained by cultivation of their own ground'. Begging was a natural response from people who shared without question and who believed that reciprocity was the greatest social good. The conviction that the white man owed a great debt for appropriated land merely strengthened their determination to continue a practice which helped to augment meagre diets and maintain a precarious existence on the rim of European society.\n\n# THE CASTE BARRIER\n\nMany Europeans believed that they genuinely offered their culture and religion to the blacks. Yet white society was less able than Aboriginal society to assimilate outsiders on terms of equality. The only entry point available was at the very bottom of the social hierarchy where resistance to assimilation was at its strongest. For all their fine words colonial elites were not offering equality to the blacks but merely space on the lowest rungs of society. Unskilled Europeans could not afford a similar generosity. They feared the economic competition of cheap labour and were never willing to concede equality to the black outsider who was 'a good deal bullied by the white labourer, who lost no opportunity of asserting his superiority over him'. Unfortunately, wrote E. S. Parker, 'there exists an aversion on the part of most European labourers to see the natives taught to work, avowedly for the reason that a successful result might interfere with the price of labour'. Similar arguments were presented in the Adelaide Examiner in 1842 by Dr. Richard Penny, one of the most perceptive European observers of Aboriginal society in nineteenth-century Australia. His comments are worth quoting at length:\n\nAll the efforts for civilizing the native, have been with the object of his becoming a portion of our labouring, civilized, population, and forming an integral part of it, and it has been this, that has caused all such attempts, to end in failure. The two races can never amalgamate\u2013the white labourer, and the native, (be he ever so useful), can not be brought to work together on equal terms. We could never succeed in incorporating the native with the mass of the labouring population, for there is always enough of that antipathy of races existing, to induce the settler to place the native, however deserving, in an inferior position to his white servants, and to give him the more menial offices to perform; but if the settler being a friend of the Aboriginal cause, were not disposed to make any distinction, but that of merit, the servants themselves would not perform those offices, whilst they could shift it on that of the blacks.\n\nWhen it came to sexual relations the caste barrier was raised even higher preventing almost all contact between black men and white women. 'No European Woman', wrote William Shelley in 1814, 'would marry a Native, unless some abandoned profligate'. Over sixty years later John Green told a Victorian Royal Commission that he had known of several cases where Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal children had been brought up with European families. All would go well, he remarked:\n\nuntil they came to an age that they would like to make love. As soon as this was known by mamma or papa, there must be something done to stop it, so the white daughter or son is told they must not make so free with the darky; they must remember that, although he or she has been educated in the family, it would be degrading to make love with them. So the cold shoulder is soon turned on the darky; they soon feel it, and a change is seen in the darky; instead of one of the most cheerful they will mope about until they can find a chance to join their friends the aborigines.\n\nWith neither property nor marketable skills the Aborigines were stranded, poverty-stricken and powerless, on the fringes of colonial society. A few individuals temporarily escaped the inexorable dictate of the market by being kept in social and even geographical isolation allowing them to achieve an elevated status which could not be sustained once the special circumstances were brought to an end. Guides on exploring expeditions often attained an importance unmatched by blacks elsewhere in the society as a consequence of their special skills, the paramilitary nature of the exploring party and the social limbo of the inland journey. Children and youths taken into the homes of the colonial elite were afforded a status dependent on their hosts' class position rather than their own. Native police troopers were deliberately kept in isolation from the wider community and encouraged to feel superior to the white working class. The original regulations for the force at Port Phillip specified that the troopers were to be prevented from 'associating with those who may instruct them in vicious and disorderly habits'. They must be made to 'discriminate between the differing classes of white people', avoiding the working class while showing 'respect to the upper and well conducted'. Settlers seem to have often adopted similar policies with their Aboriginal servants. The Tasmanian pioneer J. H. Wedge did not allow 'his blackboy' May-day to 'live with or associate with servants'. But once troopers left the native police, expeditions came back from the bush, upper-bourgeois protectors returned to England, the artificial platform was removed. The assertion of social reality, the sudden descent, was a harsh and often shattering experience. This may well explain why so many ex-trackers and ex-troopers ended up as renegades alienated from both white and Aboriginal society. These themes can best be illustrated by reference to the careers of a few blacks who suffered these experiences.\n\nBungaree was a New South Wales Aborigine who was well educated, could speak Latin and behaved 'as a gentleman in elegant society'. He entered the native police but found his position in society anomalous in the extreme and remarked to his superior officer in a 'melancholy tone':\n\nI wish I had never been taken out of the bush, and educated as I have been, for I cannot be a white man, they will never look on me as one of themselves; and I cannot be a blackfellow, I am disgusted with their way of living.\n\nMathinna was a young Tasmanian girl who was temporarily adopted by Governor and Lady Franklin. 'She had dwelt in the Colonial palace', wrote Bonwick, 'had been taught, petted, and trained to high hopes'. When the Franklins returned to England it was thought that Mathinna's health would not stand the journey. She was placed in an orphanage and virtually abandoned to eventually drown while drunk at the Oyster Cove settlement for the remnants of the Tasmanian tribes. At much the same time in South Australia a young Aboriginal girl called Maria was taken into Government House in Adelaide. Seduced by a prominent merchant she was sent away when her pregnancy became apparent and fell 'into disreputable habits of life' and was not even acceptable at the Poonindie mission. George Grey discussed the career of the West Australian youth Miago who sailed for several months on the Beagle and proved a 'temperate, attentive, cheerful' servant. But on his return to Perth he found European society uncongenial and went back to the bush. Grey considered the reasons why:\n\nMiago when he was landed, had amongst the white people none who would be truly friends of his\u2013they would give him scraps from their table, but the very outcasts of the whites would not have treated him as an equal\u2013they have no sympathy with him\u2013he could not have married\u2013he had no certain means of subsistence open to him... He had two courses left open to him\u2013he could either have renounced all natural ties, and have led a hopeless, joyless life amongst the whites\u2013ever a servant\u2013ever an inferior being\u2013or he could renounce civilization, and return to the friends of his childhood, and to the habits of his youth.\n\n# RESISTANCE TO ASSIMILATION\n\nBut most Aborigines were not frustrated guests waiting patiently to be admitted to an unwelcoming white society. Generally speaking blacks were not impressed by what was offered. 'They do not court a life of labour', wrote a Victorian Justice of the Peace in 1849:\n\nthat of our shepherds and hut-keepers\u2013our splitters or bullock drivers\u2013appears to them one of unmeaning toil, and they would by no means consent to exchange their free unhoused condition for the monotonous drudgery of such a dreary existence.\n\nIt was difficult to persuade Aborigines to accept the inequalities of white society. Taplin noted that Aboriginal men had 'quite a dignified bearing with an air of freedom altogether different from low class Europeans'. They do not 'understand exalted rank', wrote a Victorian clergyman, 'and, in fact, it is difficult to get into a blackfellow's head that one man is higher than another'. James Gunther, the pioneer New South Wales missionary, commented on the consequences of the blacks' 'peculiar form of government' which:\n\nadmitting of no distinction of rank, but allowing each man to share in their consultations and decisions as to any questions arising among them stamps a feeling of independence and even haughtiness with an appearance of dignity on the character of the men rarely to be met among differently governed natives. As they have no titles for distinction nor a proper name for a chief so they have neither a word in their language to signify a servant... no man has an idea of serving another, this idea of their own dignity and importance is carried so far that they hesitate long before they apply the term Mr. to any European even when they know full well the distinction we make (between master and servant).\n\nThe value of economic incentives was undermined by the egalitarianism and reciprocity of Aboriginal society. Increased wages awarded for improved efficiency were immediately shared with kin whether they were employed or not. It was difficult, a north Queensland missionary wrote, for Aborigines to 'understand individualism'.  Their system of socialism', commented another, was a barrier to progress because it hindered 'any improvement or rightful ownership'. Taplin observed that South Australian Aborigines 'always resent the payment of superior wages to one man because he is a better workman than another and never will allow he is more worthy of it than themselves.' This aversion, he wrote:\n\nto acknowledge superiority is a great evil when the Aborigines come in contact with the colonists. They will never permit one of their own people to be placed over them as a ganger or overseer.\n\nThomas Mitchell pondered on the problem of the Aboriginal response to white society when he returned to the settled districts after his Queensland expedition and was required to consider what should happen to the guides who had accompanied him into the interior. He appreciated the importance of equality in traditional society\u2013'all there participate in, and have a share of, Nature's gifts. These, scanty though they be, are open to all'. But among Europeans the 'half clad native finds himself in a degraded position... a mere outcast'. Experience in Australia and elsewhere, he argued, had shown the 'absurdity of expecting that any men' would leave their woods purely from choice 'unless they do so on terms of the most perfect equality'. Drawing on his experiences of white-Aboriginal relations in South Australia Richard Penny concluded that if the black was:\n\nto accept the terms of civilization that we offer him, everything would conduce to keep him in the lowest scale of society, he would be constantly subject to all sorts of oppression, and would make but a bad exchange for his native independence.\n\nPenny argued that not only was this the objective situation facing the Aborigines but that they were fully cognizant of it. 'These are things', he wrote, 'which the friends of the Aborigines overlook: but the natives themselves... are well aware of this, and it is a reason assigned by them for not remaining at the stations of the settlers.' Bonwick argued that young Aborigines were not content with their position when living with white families. 'However English lads may reconcile themselves with a life of subordinate servitude' the same could not be expected of the blacks as it was 'too opposite' to their instincts. Backhouse and Walker believed that many experiments with the Aborigines, had failed because they had been 'placed in situations where they felt themselves looked down upon by the whites'.\n\n# AFFIRMATION\n\nBy the middle of the nineteenth century many settlers had concluded that the Aborigines would never adopt European civilization, that they were incapable of 'improvement' and were indeed a doomed race. Yet a minority of whites appreciated that black behaviour manifested faith in their own culture, that it betokened strength not weakness, affirmation not failure. The problem they realized was not the incapacity of tribesmen but their 'intractableness', their 'martial spirit'. The present generation, wrote a Victorian settler, 'cling to confirmed habits and old associations with a tenacity which nothing can overcome'. From the Darling Downs the Commissioner for Crown Lands wrote in 1850 that the 'roving life' still had charms for the blacks 'far too powerful... to overcome'. The Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia observed that:\n\nthe bush has so many attractions, that they prefer the precarious subsistence it affords to the food of the white man which must be earned by labour. Their... roving life still has charms for them far too powerful for any inducement that the habits and customs of civilization can offer to overcome.\n\nA majority of Aborigines endeavoured to maintain direct access to their land both for its spiritual significance and the means of subsistence that it provided. They sought to preserve their independence from the labour market and the abject position that it assigned to them. This increasingly meant that hunting and foraging had to be supplemented by returns from casual labour, prostitution, begging and pilfering. 'Why should they vex themselves with the drudgery of labour' asked a New South Wales settler in the 1830s:\n\nthey are not labourers at all, and for the same reason that any other gentleman is not viz. that he can live without labour. So also can they, and as comfortably as they wish to live.\n\nClearly fringe-dwelling blacks did not live as comfortably as they would have liked but it is essential to stress the element of choice in their predicament. They chose to maintain the maximum degree of independence possible in the circumstances at the cost of their standard of living, even of their well being. They opted for Aboriginal values, settlement patterns, family life, rhythms of work even when that choice meant a miserable level of material comfort. Although Europeans increasingly imposed restraints, and on reserves and missions they were almost overwhelming, the blacks continued to exercise choice and thereby shape their own history. There were great penalties\u2013malnutrition, ill-health, despair, population loss\u2013but by retaining even a small area of autonomy nineteenth-century fringe dwellers ensured the survival of at least elements of Aboriginal culture in those parts of the continent where the impact of the invasion had been most devastating. It was a course of action fraught with risk yet the Aboriginal renaissance of the last decade suggests that ultimately the sacrifices were justified.\n\n# Chapter 6\n\n# THE PASTORAL FRONTIER\n\n# INITIAL ENCOUNTERS\n\nFor a majority of Aborigines their first experience of permanent settlers came when pastoralists arrived in their clan territories bringing with them horses and drays, cattle and sheep and the varied equipment of the pioneer station. The fear evoked by the white man, already discussed above, was soon matched by concern for local ecologies which quickly showed the impact of the exotic animals. The castaway James Morrell witnessed this process in north Queensland in the 1860s. His clansmen brought him news of a large herd of cattle which had suddenly appeared, surrounded a favourite waterhole and emptied it, leaving fish stranded in the mud. Though tempted to rush in and pick up the dying fish they were too intimidated to venture out of their hiding places. The explorer Thomas Mitchell was another who witnessed the impact of cattle herds travelling out beyond the fringes of European settlement in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland in 1846. An Aboriginal guide was taking Mitchell's party to a shallow creek where he expected to find water but on arriving on the bank he was disappointed to find that cattle had already been there and had drunk it all. The black showed Mitchell the 'recent prints of numerous cloven feet' and the explorer was made to feel 'in common with the Aborigines, those privations to which they are exposed by the white man's access to their country'. The experience was repeated the following day. The party approached a pond well known to local clans only to find once again that cattle had drunk the water and trodden the ground 'as dry as a market place'. Elsewhere Mitchell came across springs and ponds which local clans had tried to protect by cutting down nearby trees and placing the logs over the water. Thus it was, he mused, that the Aborigines 'first became sensible of the approach of the white man'. He wrote of the fate of the small man-made waterholes in dry stretches of bush which were like oases surrounded by lush green grass. Cattle, he wrote:\n\nfind these places and come from stations often many miles distant, attracted by the rich verdure usually growing about them, and by thus treading the water into mud, or by drinking it up, they literally destroy the whole country for the Aborigines.\n\n# WATER\n\nMitchell's experience illustrated the widespread conflict over water which arose in arid areas all over the continent and in well watered areas as well during dry seasons. It often began as soon as the Europeans appeared. This was certainly the case in the desert where thirsty camel trains and horse teams consumed huge amounts of precious water in Aboriginal wells and springs and soaks. The pioneer Queensland squatter George Sutherland related a similar experience which illustrated the competition for water in a parched environment. He was driving a flock of thirsty sheep through waterless country towards the Georgina River in western Queensland. The local clans, camping around the only available surface water, scattered in terror when the whole flock stampeded towards the billabong.\n\nConflict was sharpened by the widespread belief among frontier squatters that 'niggers and cattle don't mix'; that the half-wild herds were unsettled by the mere sight or sound of Aborigines. As a result the blacks were repeatedly driven away from river frontages and lagoons. They were shot at or ridden down and stock-whipped. Relevant evidence for this is voluminous, coming from all parts of the continent. 'All the freshwater is surrounded by cattle', wrote Burketown's policeman in 1897, and if a black was unfortunate to be seen by the station hands he was 'hunted, whiped [sic] and severely maltreated'. Inspector Foelsche of the Northern Territory police noted how local squatters kept the blacks away from the inland lagoons and billabongs which were important both as meeting places and sources of food. The Protector of Aborigines at Camooweal remarked in 1901 that the station owners and managers claimed that the sight of the blacks disturbed the cattle with the result that the blacks were 'dispersed by the station hands'. Writing of northern New South Wales in the early 1850s the Commandant of the Native Police noted that with the exception of a few stations the Aborigines were 'in a manner outlawed in their own country, being hunted from the river and creek frontages, and thus deprived of means of lawfully obtaining food'. The impact of these policies on black communities was graphically described by an old Roper River black who recalled in old age the hardships suffered by his people when he was a boy during the early years of the twentieth century:\n\nOh terrible days we used to had: We never walk around much 'mongst the plain country or groun'. We use to upla hill alla time to save our life. Our old people you know used to take us away from plain or river or billabong. Only night time they used to run down to get the lily, alla young men you know. Can't go daytime, frighten for white people.\n\nCattle and sheep were destructive of the environment in other ways as well. Their close cropping of the vegetation destroyed native flora while plants growing in or around water-holes or lagoons were eaten or trampled under hard hoofs. A north Queensland pioneer wrote of the impact of cattle along the Gulf of Carpentaria coastline:\n\nthey trample out the signs of turtles found in dried up swamps, the trail of the crocodile to his nest; they eat the tops of yams, and eat and destroy the lillies, all of which make their (the Aborigines') natural food scarcer and harder to find.\n\nOther introduced animals\u2013pigs, rabbits, camels\u2013damaged sensitive local ecologies as well. An Aboriginal woman from the north Queensland coast told a European visitor in 1895 that feral pigs had eaten large amounts of traditional food. 'I think altogether we die soon', she lamented, 'pig-pig eat him yams; plum fall down, wild pigs too much eat'.\n\n# BLACK SHEPHERDS\n\nPastoral settlement presented a massive challenge to Aboriginal society, altering ecologies and disrupting traditional economies. But clans responded creatively to that challenge all over the continent. They studied the Europeans and their animals and began to weave new ideas into long established patterns of social and economic life, co-opting sheep and cattle for their own use and learning the skills of the shepherd and herdsman. There was, after all, a considerable overlap between the methods of the hunter and the herdsman. Kangaroos and emus were driven long distances to be trapped in rudimentary stockyards made of logs and bushes. There are numerous references in the pioneer literature to the discovery of long races of sticks, boughs and bushes which had been used to control the movements of the larger marsupials. Thus Giles referred to what he termed dilapidated old yards, where the blacks had formerly yarded emu or wallaby; K. L. Parker observed that the Euahlayi tribe made bush yards and caught emus in them. Buckley recalled that the clans he had lived with pursued kangaroos in order to hunt them into corners like flocks of sheep. Writing of north-western Queensland Roth noted that local Aborigines mustered emus like cattle driving them into nets and palisades. G. F. Moore found that West Australian Aborigines used the word yekan meaning to drive or to chase to describe the European's herding of cattle. But while traditional methods overlapped with new we should not overlook the wide ranging adaption apparent in Aboriginal tactics to capture or kill sheep and cattle. There seems to be no doubt that these skills were consciously developed and deliberately improved and that the blacks were proud of their evolving mastery of the new techniques. Davis was told by his Aboriginal hosts in southern Queensland 'with much minuteness how dexterously they had succeeded in carrying off sundry sheep at different times without being even perceived by the shepherds'. How did the blacks so rapidly become efficient sheep stealers and adept shepherds?\n\nStragglers were driven away when out of sight of the shepherds or grabbed by blacks lying immobile in the grass; dogs were trained to rush in and cut out sections of flocks. An observer in southern Queensland noted that local blacks had well developed techniques which exploited the terrain. They waited until the flock approached the summit of a steep ridge, or the trench of a deep gully and then rushed in with their dogs to cut out twenty or thirty sheep and drive them into rough or broken country. The manoeuvre was executed so quickly that the blacks were beyond reach before the shepherds were aware of the raid. Some techniques seem to have been even more sophisticated. A report from the Western District of Victoria in 1842 described how local blacks enticed ewes out of their pens at night without arousing the suspicion of the shepherds:\n\nBreaking the leg of a lamb, the natives placed it at about 50 yards from where the sheep were penned. The bleatings of the poor little animal soon drew the attention of the ewes, and several of them leaped the hurdles, and made for the spot where it was lying. From this they were attracted by the cries of another lamb, placed at a little distance onwards. The same expedient was followed by the savages of mutilating lambs and placing them at distances from each other till they had succeeded in decoying the old sheep several hundred yards away from the hurdles. They then rushed between the hurdles and the sheep, and drove the latter from the station. So silently was the robbery accomplished, that the sheep were not missed till the following day.\n\nSkilful cutting-out was only a start. To avoid violent retaliation from the settlers, or at least the loss of the animals in question, it was essential that the flock be driven away as far and as quickly as possible without allowing the sheep to scatter. Consequently pursuing whites often came up with disputed flocks many miles from their station of origin. In the Portland district in 1843 a squatter and his men pursued a flock of 480 sheep across country for 250 miles. A few years later at Wide Bay in Queensland a settler reported that he had followed a group of Aborigines who had successfully taken 500 sheep over two mountains, through a mile and a half of rain forest and on to another mountain. The blacks quickly learnt that success depended on their ability to cover their tracks before the Europeans ventured in pursuit. Many of the methods employed were probably carried over from traditional society for clans were adept at hiding their movements from their enemies. A group of blacks from the Western District of Victoria were found with a flock of sheep twelve miles away from the station where they had been secured but they had been taken on a circuitous route of at least forty miles and through a series of swamps to confuse white pursuers. On the Glenelg River a flock was driven back on its own tracks to blot them out and was then divided into three lots which were driven in separate directions. Elsewhere the blacks burnt grass for a considerable distance around plundered pens to hide the tell-tale tracks.\n\nRivers presented a considerable problem to black shepherds. Europeans following the tracks of stolen flocks concluded that Aborigines often made repeated attempts to rush their newly acquired sheep down the river banks in order to force them across the water and there are several reports of blacks making log bridges to facilitate the movement of their flocks across stretches of water. In 1850 a party of Wide Bay squatters actually found local blacks in the process of building a bridge while a few years earlier in the Grampians, a native police detachment, pursued a group of Aborigines for eight days through gullies, over ridges and across mountain streams where the blacks had made bridges strong enough for the troop horses to pass over.\n\nBut even when blacks had escaped with their commandeered flocks and evaded pursuers there remained the need to prevent the sheep from straying. A common solution to this problem was to break or dislocate the sheeps' hind legs. The pioneer Victorian squatter Hugh Murray reported how the Colac Aborigines took their animals to some secure neighbourhood and feasted upon them, 'breaking the legs of those they did not at once kill, to detain them'. It was, wrote a fellow squatter 'a cruel sort of tethering resorted to in those days. But less drastic means of securing sheep were widely adopted. Naturally enclosed patches of grass were selected for use, squatters in Wide Bay for instance finding sheep high up on a mountain in a small space surrounded by rain forest which was, they realized, a 'natural paddock'.\n\nOf even greater interest was the widespread construction by Aborigines of folds and stockyards to secure captured flocks, a practice obviously adopted from European shepherds though owing something to traditional use of brush fences to control and corral native animals. There are many such reports and they come from widely scattered parts of the continent. Research to date has turned up over thirty separate eye witness reports from districts as far apart as Yorke Peninsula in South Australia, the upper Burdekin Valley in north Queensland and the Champion Bay district in Western Australia. A few examples will suffice for purposes of illustration.\n\nIn 1840 a party of Western District squatters followed a group of blacks into almost inaccessible mountains and discovered 'a very ingeniously constructed brush yard where the sheep had been kept during the night'. Six years later at the head of Spencer Gulf local blacks took a flock which they regularly folded 'whilst they were regaling themselves upon divers roasted legs and shoulders'. The South Australian Protector of Aborigines reported finding a yard made of branches and capable of holding from two to three hundred sheep. A party of Maranoa settlers following tracks of stolen sheep found that the blacks had made bough yards for them every night, 'as well as a white man could have done'. In the Burdekin Valley blacks drove 400 sheep into the ranges after a successful raid on a station and built a 'proper yard' and regularly shepherded the flock showing 'how closely and for what a length of time they must have watched the habits of Europeans'. The rapid development of Aboriginal sheep raiding techniques was noted by a writer in the Adelaide Observer in 1846. Attacks which were originally 'ill considered and accidental' had been superseded by 'well planned forays':\n\nthe flock is steadily driven, and carefully folded\u2013taken with dexterity and retained with determination. The captors feed upon the sheep until all are consumed\u2013then sally forth in quest of a fresh supply.\n\n# CATTLE HUNTERS\n\nCattle presented Aborigines with a different set of problems. The half-wild animals of frontier districts were larger, faster and more aggressive than sheep and much harder to kill. Indeed it was difficult to kill them at all with traditional wooden or stone-tipped spears. Numerous pioneer squatters reported cases of cattle coming in off the range covered with spear wounds or with the weapons still stuck in their bodies. A Western District settler found one of his bullocks still alive with thirty spears sticking into its tortured flesh. There is no doubt that one of the principal motives for the adoption of iron tipped spears was to facilitate the killing of the large European animals including draught bullocks as well as horses and cattle. The Portland Gazette reported in 1845 that local blacks were adopting iron spears and were systematically attacking cattle herds with them. Clans living close to the growing networks of telegraph lines adopted spear heads fashioned from porcelain insulators while the Loritja people of central Australia were said to have adopted a cruder and hence more expendable spear for killing cattle.\n\nThe greatest problem for the cattle hunters was to immobilize the large beasts long enough to be able to close in for the kill. Many different techniques were tried. The most common appears to have been to rush selected beasts into swampy or muddy ground and then attack them while they were unable to move quickly. 'They now proceed in a most systematic manner', wrote the Commissioner for Crown Lands at Moreton Bay in 1844, 'rushing the cattle into swampy ground during the wet weather and then hamstringing them'. The explorer Thomas Mitchell reported that in northern New South Wales local clans had driven off 800 head of cattle when the country was in flood and the horsemen were unable to travel. In such conditions the cattle stuck fast 'in the soft earth' and were thus 'at the mercy of the natives'. But swampy ground was only available to some clans and for limited periods of time. Elsewhere other techniques had to be developed.\n\nOn the Mulgrave River in north Queensland local blacks dug pits on well used cattle tracks and then speared the trapped beasts. Clans in the Western District rushed in and killed cows while they were calving; in the Bowen hinterland animals were driven through a narrow pass into an enclosed valley. A Riverina pioneer reported that he found a large party of blacks on his run and that they had driven his cattle into a tight circle and were 'ringing them around' and 'riddling them with spears all the time'.\n\nExperienced frontiersmen noted the development of Aboriginal techniques. The Commissioner for Crown Lands on the Liverpool Plains remarked in 1842 that local blacks had become 'much more expert and cunning in watching and hunting cattle' and had trained their dogs to be most efficient assistants to them'. A correspondent wrote to the Moreton Bay Courier in 1849 explaining that on the Pine Rivers the Aborigines had developed:\n\na new system of securing their prey, by wounding the beasts in such a way with their tomahawks that they are easily killed after being driven to the scrubs. This is a considerable improvement on their old system and shows the determined and systematic manner of their outrages. Previously, when the cattle were speared on the river there was a great chance that the savages would be disturbed before they could cut up the carcases and carry them off; and if they drove the herd to the scrubs they would no doubt have considerable difficulty in slaying the infuriated beasts. It was not gratifying... to find that many of their victims escaped after being speared or died too near to the stations for them to secure the anticipated feast. Their present plan has, therefore, been adopted in order that the maimed cattle may fall easily before their spears, when they reach the scrub, exhausted and faint from their previous wounds.\n\nIt appears that some groups killed cattle as near as possible to a river bank in order to use water transport for the large and heavy carcases. A Queensland pioneer reported that the blacks on the Burnett killed cattle on the north side of the river and then conveyed the meat in canoes across to the sanctuary of the rain forest on the south bank. Frederick Curr who settled in the Etheridge district in north Queensland recalled that he had to keep his herds away from the Einasleigh River because local blacks were able to kill the beasts while they were in the water and then tow the carcases downstream where they could be safely cut up and carried away.\n\nAborigines reacted quickly and creatively to the settlers' flocks and herds. They turned to good effect their traditional skills while accepting the need for innovation in both techniques and social organization. Ready access to large amounts of beef and mutton enabled groups to meet more frequently and stay together longer. Cooking methods were modified and diet changed with a probable decline in the collection and consumption of native plants. Yet reactions to cattle and to sheep were qualitatively different. When they pursued, killed and consumed cattle the Aborigines were still behaving like hunter-gatherers though they had modified traditional methods to cope with the introduced animals. But in their use of sheep many black clans had clearly travelled beyond the confines of customary experience. They had become effective herdsmen in their own right presenting a fundamental challenge to European pastoralists. All over the continent Aboriginal groups learnt to shepherd their sheep for long distances over difficult terrain, to train their dogs to assist rather than hinder their operations and to feed and water and corral their commandeered flocks. There are a few reports which suggest that the women took over the new role of shepherd while the men continued to hunt the larger indigenous animals as well as the introduced ones.\n\nThese developments were arguably the most striking examples of creative adaptation in the history of the Aboriginal response to the European invasion. Yet they have been almost completely overlooked by historians and anthropologists, due in part to the fact that the evidence is widely scattered and often in obscure sources. Another reason is that the Aboriginal venture into pastoralism was confined practically everywhere to a very short period of time coinciding with the moment of maximum conflict with the Europeans and coming abruptly to an end when black resistance was crushed and the survivors were let in to pastoral stations and frontier towns.\n\n# CO-ORDINATED ATTACKS\n\nBut the Aborigines also attacked and destroyed the European animals as part of their resistance to the invader as was indicated briefly above. A long list of such onslaughts could be compiled for each colony but a few examples will suffice for the purposes of illustration. In 1830 Tasmanian blacks beat 100 ewes to death on a Longford property; a few years earlier on the north-west coast a similar number of Van Diemens Land Company sheep were driven over cliffs into the sea. In 1816 in New South Wales 200 sheep of the Malgoa estate were destroyed; fifty were mangled and blinded, the rest thrown down a precipice. On the Liverpool Plains thirty years later four hundred young ewes were left dead in a heap on Cobb's Station. In 1842 McIntyre Aborigines killed a horse, cut off its head and two legs and hung the entrails out from bush to bush while on the New England plateau the local blacks burnt 1200 ewes and lambs. On a McIntyre River station local blacks killed eighty head of cattle in a single night and hamstrung others while some of the heads were cut off the carcases and put up on sticks. In 1848 forty cattle were drowned by Aborigines in the Brisbane River. Writing to his father from Bowen Downs in central Queensland in 1867 B. D. Morehead reported that the local clans had destroyed his sheep 'not to satisfy their hunger, but their spite, as in some of their camps there were more than fifty lying dead... or wounded lying about brutally murdered'.\n\nAborigines launched systematic attacks on individual properties which were quite devastating in their impact. Ovens river blacks attacked Dr Mackay's station in 1840 in the absence of the Europeans who returned to a scene of total devastation. Three valuable horses and a working bullock had been destroyed, all but seven of a herd of 1500 cattle driven away; a large barn and four roomed hut burnt to the ground along with forty bushels of wheat, agricultural implements, tools, bedding and clothes. Fifty years later and on the far side of the continent Northern Territory Aborigines burnt and looted Welleroo Station. They killed 30 or 40 fowls and threw them in a heap and carried away almost all moveable property including 20 bags of flour, 4 bags of rice, over 60 pounds of tobacco, all the pipes and matches, two dozen new dungaree suits, two dozen pairs of boots, all the clothes, rugs and blankets, 4 Winchester rifles and 300 cartridges.\n\nAboriginal attacks were occasionally massive enough to ruin pioneer squatters. Two men so affected petitioned the government for assistance leaving a record of their tribulations. In 1840 Victorian blacks raided David Waugh's Station killing the shepherds, running off most of the sheep and taking everything 'that could be, or supposed to be, of use to them'. Waugh's losses which he computed at \u00a31200 were crippling. A generation later John Yeates, one of the pioneer settlers of the Bowen district, assessed his losses while petitioning the Queensland government. The local clans raided his property on several occasions during a three month period in 1867. They took two flocks of sheep amounting to 1300 animals which he valued at 10s a head, 36 rams worth over \u00a32 each and stores worth \u00a355. His total loss of \u00a3800 could not be sustained and he abandoned the station.\n\nBut spectacular attacks on individual properties should not obscure the smaller, more typical Aboriginal operations, which were cumulatively important. Occasionally neighbouring squatters met to discuss their losses and petition distant governments for protection leaving a valuable record of frontier conditions. In 1842 Port Fairy settlers petitioned the Superintendent of Port Phillip computing their collective losses over a few months at 3600 sheep, 100 cattle and 10 horses. Seven years later the squatters on the Condamine wrote to the local Commissioner for Crown Lands complaining that during a four-month period the blacks had taken 6000 sheep and killed 8 shepherds while doing so. In 1851 the Magistrates of the Maranoa met at Surat and petitioned the local native police officer detailing the losses sustained by the squatters which amounted to 6000 cattle and 2000 sheep in the previous eighteen months.\n\nBut the violent and persistent retaliation by frontier squatters and their men forced the blacks to adjust the level of their assaults on European property and seek means to avoid imputation of responsibility. The Sydney Gazette reported in 1824 that the blacks living around the outer settlements had learnt to kill cattle by spearing them carefully in the skull, perforating a hole about the size of a musket ball subsequently claiming that white men were responsible for discovered carcases. In 1847 the Portland Gazette observed that local Aborigines were suspected of killing a bullock but that they had buried the head and skin in a pit in order to avoid detection. In the 1890s on the Diamantina local blacks cooked a bullock in a deep pit dug under a well worn cattle track in order to disguise their culinary operations. At Albany in 1842 a group of blacks devised a scheme to steal one or two sheep from their folds each night over a long period of time. So careful was the operation that the loss was not discovered for several months. A few years later on the Darling Downs the Commissioner for Crown Lands commented that 'everywhere' the blacks had adopted the 'same plan'. Visiting the stations in small numbers 'under the guise of friends' they allowed:\n\nno opportunity to escape of pilfering the huts or destroying any stray cattle they may meet on their way. In several instances they have killed milking cows close to the huts, without so much as being suspected till the Bones of their victims happen to be accidentally met with some days later; in one or two instances they have even buried the Bones...\n\n# ACCOMMODATION\n\nAccommodation between Aborigines and pastoralists was reached everywhere sooner or later, although it took place gradually and unevenly. Occasionally a group of neighbouring squatters made a collective decision to let the local clans in but more commonly it occurred fitfully, station by station, and over a considerable period of time. Aborigines responded tentatively. Typically a few individuals cautiously approached the Europeans and gradually over a year or two their kin began to spend a greater proportion of their time at station camp sites assigned by the squatter. Europeans kidnapped individual blacks for labour or sex; as hostages, even as tutors in local dialects. Equally the Aborigines sent women or young men into the white men's society to act as spies and go-betweens. A settler on the Gascoyne River told a government official in 1882 that he had 'no doubt the women kept by the whites act as spies for their friends in the bush'. Aboriginal shepherds and stockmen furtively fed their kin who had not come in. A government official investigating squatter complaints about sheep loss in the north west of Western Australia concluded that:\n\nin the great majority of cases the sheep have been given away by the shepherds at night. In the day time they allow them to go astray in order that their friends may pick them up.\n\nIn some cases it appears that small groups or individuals remained out in the bush refusing to accept European domination. Simpson Newland wrote of his experiences on the New South Wales-Queensland border with an old and recalcitrant black whom he called Baldy:\n\nOur new employees never gave us the least trouble, and as soon as they understood that neither the Queensland police nor our squatting neighbour would bother them while in our country we had the whole lot at our service\u2013good, bad, and indifferent\u2013all except the redoubtable Baldy. I had messages sent to him to come in, that no one should molest him, but all in vain. I never saw him in all my rides, drives, or walks, nor did the overseer, who was constantly on the run for many years. Much of the country was densely covered with thick polygonum swamps, and we were well aware Baldy lurked there during the day, and late at night often joined the shepherd's camps. Sometimes he went out in back country, away from the hateful white man, and lived the old hunter's life, obtaining water from the roots of the Kurrajong-trees growing on the dry tableland to the west of the Upper Paroo. On an excursion out there on one occasion I saw his tracks and the thick roots drained of their contents. Probably the untamable savage was close by, maybe our blackboy even saw him, but Baldy would hold no communication with the white race, though in return for the protection given and kindness shown to his people he kept the tacitly understood truce.\n\nOn some stations formal understandings were reached between squatters and neighbouring blacks. A Queensland pioneer explained to a Parliamentary Committee in 1861 that he had met the local clans and reached an understanding, telling them that he was 'master on the open ground and they were masters of the scrub and the mountains'. On Gamboola station on the Mitchell River Edward Palmer came to an agreement with the blacks of the district undertaking 'to protect them and give them a beast once a month or so\u2013and let them have one side of the river to hunt upon'. Blacks on Merivale Station in southern Queensland negotiated with the whites to secure the right to hunt and hold corroborees and similar agreements were reached on Woodstock and Jarvisfield Stations in north Queensland. On Strathdon in the Bowen district an Aboriginal woman who had lived on the station for a year acted as an intermediary between the local clans and Bode the resident squatter. The blacks agreed to stop killing cattle and threatening the stockmen while Bode promised his protection against the Native Police as well as hunting rights, free access to the river and supplies of blankets and steel axes. These examples are all from Queensland but it seems reasonable to assume that similar understandings were reached between pastoralists and blacks in many parts of the continent.\n\n# STOCKMEN AND CONCUBINES\n\nMost squatters were only too willing to exploit the labour of the Aboriginal camps. Within a very short time young men were working with the stock and women in and around station homesteads. It is probable that the blacks' eagerness to work for the Europeans varied widely. There are many reports of Europeans using force to recruit and keep their workers and all over Australia young women were forced in concubinage. The evidence for this is overwhelming. Mr Justice Dashwood, the Government Resident of the Northern Territory, told a Select Committee of the South Australian Parliament in 1899 that the 'forcible taking away of lubras' was a commonplace of outback life. Police officers who had spent their whole careers on the frontier had told him 'how men on stations seeing lubras in the bush will pursue them, run them down on their horses, and take them away'. A policeman based at Camooweal said that he felt sure:\n\nthat if half the young lubras now being detained (I won't call it kept, for I know most of them would clear away if they could) were approached on the subject, they would say that they were run down by station blackguards on horseback, and taken to the stations for licentious purposes, and there kept more like slaves than anything else. I have heard it said that these same lubras have been locked up for weeks at a time\u2013anyway whilst their heartless persecutors have been mustering cattle on their respective runs. Some, I have heard take these lubras with them, but take the precaution to tie them up securely for the night to prevent them escaping.\n\nYoung men were kidnapped too and taken to be 'trained up' for stockwork. But evidence of a voluntary acceptance of pastoral work can also be found. A squatter settled near Bowen explained in 1869 that he had allowed local clans to camp near water holes close to his head station and that on the following day a few men had come up on their own accord and joined his kanaka servants at their work, although 'they were more in the way than of service'. Cattle stations probably provided more congenial work for Aboriginal men than any other European undertaking with the possible exception of the maritime industries for sea-coast peoples. There was considerable overlap between the old economy and the new. Local knowledge, the ability to track and to live off the land; all of these were carried over into the life of the Aboriginal stockman. Knowledge of sheep and cattle gained before coming in was rapidly augmented in minds trained to closely observe animal behaviour. 'I don't know what we pioneers should have done without the blacks', wrote a Queensland pioneer cattleman in 1884, 'for they can't be beat at looking after horses and cattle'. Horse-riding was an exhilarating experience for people who had known no means of locomotion other than their own legs. 'Above all', a pioneer squatter wrote of the Burnett blacks in the 1850s, 'horse riding enchanted them'. 'They are ambitious to learn to ride' Chewings observed of young Aborigines in Central Australia, 'and do not mind a few falls in acquiring the art'.\n\nThe pastoral industry provided many young Aborigines with a role in the European economy in which they could find satisfaction and scope for both traditional and acquired skills. That it was not conducive to greater Aboriginal advance was due to the pull of traditional society on one side and the power of white prejudice on the other. Aboriginal workers were given little incentive to increase their efficiency. They were typically underpaid, given no formal training, were rarely praised and often bashed and kicked and whipped. Even when consideration replaced brutality the paternalism remained. The Thargomindah correspondent of the Queenslander provided an unblinking account of the situation of Aboriginal workers in the south-west of the colony in 1885. There were he wrote:\n\nOn all stations... in this western portion of Queensland a certain number of black boys and gins all employed, and it is difficult to see how stations could be worked without their assistance. The vast majority receive no remuneration, save tucker and clothes. They are, of course, bound by no agreements, but are talked of as my, or our... niggers, and are not free to depart when they like. It is not considered etiquette on the part of one station to employ blacks belonging to another. Cases have occurred where blacks belonging to both sexes have been followed, brought back and punished for running away from their nominal employers. For the main part they are fairly well treated, clothed and fed.\n\nThe pastoral industry was clearly a major determinant of the pattern of white-Aboriginal relations in many parts of the continent. Yet there were other areas where the first permanent white settlers were not squatters but farmers, miners, missionaries, sealers, pearlers and townsmen.\n\n# Chapter 7\n\n# OTHER FRONTIERS\n\n# SEA COASTS\n\nRelations between coastal clans and sea-faring Europeans provide an interesting contrast to contact on the land frontier. There were some important differences. Europeans who landed from ships were usually in quite small parties\u2013no more than could conveniently fit into a rowing boat. They were necessarily on foot and had little knowledge of the terrain beyond the tree line or the dunes. The journey by dinghy both to and from the shore was often hazardous, doubly so if potentially hostile blacks were standing on the beach. While stretching uncertain sea legs they could not hope to catch up with local blacks seeking to avoid them either by flight or concealment. When Europeans came upon parties of Aborigines we can assume that it was because the blacks had made a deliberate decision to meet the white men. Though there were violent skirmishes on every part of the Australian coast peaceful contact may have been more common on the shore than it was inland. Both parties stood to benefit from amicable meetings\u2013the Europeans could obtain water, local intelligence and perhaps sexual release; the Aborigines access to the white man's goods without the disadvantages of permanent European settlement. The belief that meetings on the coast were potentially peaceful seems to have been established among the Europeans sailing remote shores and may have influenced their behaviour. Searcey, the Northern Territory pioneer, wrote in 1905, that it was a 'well known fact' that whites from the sea were 'better received than those coming from inland'.\n\nAborigines participated in maritime industries from the early years of European settlement. They were involved in sealing and bay-whaling around the southern coasts during the first half of the nineteenth century and in pearling and b\u00eache de mer gathering around in the northern ones during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. Sea-based industries were probably less disruptive of Aboriginal life than either mining or pastoralism. The Europeans who harvested the sea had no need for land other than small plots for bay-whaling stations and b\u00eache de mer processing depots. Bay whaling fitted easily into accustomed patterns of life along the southern coasts. Coastal clans were used to gathering in large numbers to eat whales cast up on the beaches and may have assumed, as they had done in the past, that Aboriginal magic was responsible for bringing the whales into shore. The Europeans for their part were able to supply local Aborigines with large quantities of unwanted whale flesh. Around the northern coasts from the north-west of Western Australia to the Gulf of Carpentaria the European search for b\u00eache de mer would have been immediately comprehensible to clans who had seen for centuries the seasonal coming and going of the Macassar men.\n\nWhile sealers, pearlers and whalers had no hunger for land they often relied heavily on Aboriginal labour for the profitability, and even the survival, of their industries. Bass Strait sealers depended on Aboriginal women from northern Tasmanian clans while at some of the bay-whaling stations Aboriginal crews manned rowing boats, receiving the same pay, or share of the profits, as the whites. The Commissioner for Crown Lands in the Monaro wrote in 1842 of three boats crewed by blacks at Twofold Bay. They were:\n\nstationed on the opposite side of the bay to the other fishermen and they adopted the same habits as the whites. They lived in huts, slept in beds, used utensils in cooking, and made the flour into bread; but as soon as the fishing season was over, they all returned to their tribes in the bush.\n\nIn northern Australia Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were even more extensively employed. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century a thousand or more blacks a year worked during the pearling and b\u00eache de mer seasons.\n\nTraditional expertise was carried over into the maritime trades much as it was on the pastoral frontier. Local knowledge of the location of beds of shell launched the north-western pearling industry. Aboriginal skill and endurance in the water ensured its success on both the east and west coasts until the diving dress was generally adopted in the 1880s. The expertise of the Tasmanian women on both sea and land allowed the European sealers to survive on bleak Bass Strait islands. James Kelly observed their hunting techniques when on Tasmania's east coast in 1816. The women walked to the edge of the water and wet themselves all over to prevent the seals from smelling them. They swam to the rocks where the seals were lying and, keeping to the wind-ward, they crept up to the reclining animals and lay perfectly still allowing the seals to inspect them:\n\nThe women went through the same motions as the seal, holding up their left elbow and scratching themselves with their left hand, taking and keeping the club firm in their right ready for the attack. The seals seemed very cautious, now and then lifting up their heads and looking round, scratching themselves as before and lying down again, the women still imitating every movement as nearly as possible. After they had lain upon the rocks for nearly an hour, the sea occasionally washing over them... all of a sudden the women rose up on their seats, their clubs lifted up at arms length, each struck a seal on the nose and killed him.\n\nThe predominantly male work force of the northern maritime industries sought Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island women for sexual gratification. The degree to which blacks assisted them in this pursuit varied widely according to time and local circumstances. On some occasions Europeans abducted women and kept them by force just as their land-based counterparts did on the pastoral frontier. Torres Strait Islanders told a government official in 1882 that the white men had so ill-treated their women in the past that when a boat was sighted the young women were buried in the sand and kept there until the Europeans sailed away. Yet at other times local communities actively participated in the trade extracting the best possible deal for the services of their women. On both the northwest coast and around Cape York the pearling fleets supported a large and lucrative prostitution industry. Aboriginal clans reorganized their pattern of migration to travel down to the sea coast when the pearling luggers were laid up for the monsoon season and remained there until they sailed away again. The demand for the young women was such that all other clan members could live off the proceeds of their copulation for the duration of the layup season.\n\nThe complexity of Aboriginal motivation was apparent also in the recruitment of labour for the sea-based industries. Force and fraud played a major role in the beginning as it had done in the early years of the labour trade in Melanesia. There is considerable evidence of this from all parts of the continent. In the papers of the Tasmanian settler, J. E. Calder, there is reference to a group of island men who sailed to Port Phillip during the 1820s where they enticed a party of young women on board and then sailed for the Bass Strait Islands where the women were bartered for seal skins. A pioneer of the north-west coast of Western Australia remarked that the method of obtaining labour for the local pearling industry was 'better imagined than described'; it was 'sufficient to say that it was crude'. Having been obtained in diverse ways the blacks were kept for as long as possible. They were 'planted' on off-shore islands on both the north-west and north-east coast during the off-season and picked up when the luggers put to sea again; they were abandoned in coastal towns like Broome, or Thursday Island or Cooktown, far from home, where further recruitment was the only means of survival.\n\nBut force and fraud probably became less important with time. The Queensland and Western Australian Governments began to exercise some supervision around the northern coast from the 1880s and the blacks themselves rapidly grew wise to the ways of the white men. Force and fraud after all could only work once or twice. To suppose otherwise is to assume that the Aborigines were unable to learn from experience. The essential weakness of the European position must be re-emphasised, along with a realistic assessment of what had to be done to recruit labour by force. The white men had to come ashore on a little known coast; protect themselves against attack; catch observant and fleet footed blacks on their own intimately known territory; secure captives; and then take them off the coast in small rowing boats. If the trade were to continue in the use of force this operation would have to be repeated many times over.\n\nIt is apparent that many blacks chose to work on the pearling luggers and b\u00eache de mer boats\u2013incited by their own curiosity, a desire to gain European goods, or to escape punishment or other trouble at home. After recent research on the North Queensland coast Anderson concluded that the relationship between the Aborigines and the lugger captains was not entirely a matter of oneway exploitation. For the blacks employment on the boats was often 'a way out of strife and tension on the domestic scene'. He concluded that there was evidence 'of men escaping the consequences of an adulterous affair, and of men dissolving an unsuccessful or undesirable marriage by simply going out on a lugger'. The Europeans were, then, often used for Aboriginal ends. They provided a new means to implement an old custom\u2013the traditional device of 'resolution of conflict by fission'.\n\nThe experience of labour on the luggers seems to have been woven into traditional patterns of life in other ways as well. The missionary E. R. Gribble noted how at Yarrabah the return of the men from the pearling fleets at the beginning of the wet season was marked by a distinctive ceremony. They were, he wrote:\n\ngiven a great welcome by the natives, and a peculiar ceremony was gone through on the arrival, as they came along the beach in a compact body, they were met by John and an old man, who conducted them along until they sighted the camps, they then stopped short, and facing each other gave a shout, then facing about marched on, each man singing and beating time with a spear on a shield; getting close to the camps a woman met them, bearing in her hands two green boughs, and, dancing along in front of them, led them to a cleared space in front of the little huts... here they stopped, and standing in a circle continued singing, with the woman dancing round the circle, shaking the boughs over their heads until another woman from a group standing near rushed up, and putting her head over the shoulder of one of the men gave a yell and this concluded the ceremony.\n\nAnother important aspect of recruitment was the co-operation of influential older men with the Europeans in order to encourage young men, and young women in some places, to ship with the whites. There is evidence of this from several parts of the continent. In her study of white-Aboriginal relations in Tasmania Ryan has drawn a clear picture of the relations between the Bass Strait sealers and the clans of the north-east coast. The blacks altered their pattern of movement about their territory remaining on the coast throughout the summer in order to keep in contact with the Europeans who bartered hunting dogs and other commodities for the temporary use of young women for their labour and sexual favours. The coastal people abducted women from traditionally hostile clans to meet increasing demands from the Europeans. This picture of relations between the sealers and the Tasmanians was confirmed by such visitors to Bass Strait as James Kelly in 1817 and William Hovell and Dumont Durville during the 1820s. Hovell met sealers and their Aboriginal concubines and discovered that:\n\nthe way these men get those Girls and Women is by purchasing or more properly speaking bartering for them of the different chiefs along the East Coast of Van Diemens Land.\n\nSome girls, he believed, left without regret; others resisted strongly but were forced by the older men to go with the Europeans.\n\nThe situation on the north coast later in the century seems to have been very similar. Young men were encouraged to sail with the whites by the old men who received a commission from the lugger captains. When demand was high the elders could extract substantial rewards. During the 1902 season, for instance, officials at Thursday Island issued permits for 990 recruits but only 334 were forthcoming. W. E. Roth, the Northern Protector of Aborigines, noted how the blacks had taken advantage of this situation to demand large bonuses of tobacco and flour in advance. The desire of the old men to gain exclusive possession of the young women was possibly another reason to send the youths away with the Europeans. Roth concluded that about one third of recruits were married and on their return they usually found their wives living with one or other of the old men. Anderson's work on the oral history of Bloomfield River people led him to the belief that the old men had used the pearling luggers:\n\nto increase their own power and wealth by acting as recruiters of young males for work on the boats\u2013a service for which the old men received tobacco, flour and decreased competition for wives.,\n\nWorking conditions in the maritime industries were often harsh and there was a high mortality rate from disease, personal violence and work-related accidents. Yet many Europeans quickly appreciated that good conditions and fair treatment resulted in greater productivity and certainly less tension on the cramped and stinking luggers. On the other hand the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were more than passive units of labour. They could use the universal stratagems of forced and unwilling workers\u2013going slow, feigning sickness, losing and breaking equipment or simply refusing to find shell under the water. As Europeans rarely dived they were ultimately at the mercy of the blacks who did. A pioneer of the north-western pearling industry wrote in 1886 that 'a kind of freemasonry exists between the men'. At times they agreed amongst themselves not to bring up shell. He referred to a 'notable instance' when divers of four ships declared for days that they could find no shell. When eventually Malay divers were sent down they found the shell stacked in heaps on the bottom.\n\nAborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were in many respects the experts about coastal waters. European and Asian skippers often came to depend on their judgement. The blacks made many of the day to day decisions about diving in much the same way that Aboriginal stockmen determined many questions relating to the management of cattle herds. In fact European pearlers and b\u00eache de mer seekers were probably more dependent on their black assistants when out on the coral reefs than were the squatters on their inland pastoral stations. An official report of 1880 on the Torres Strait pearl fishery concluded that the Aborigines and Islanders were 'quite capable of taking care of themselves'. In fact the divers had:\n\nalmost entirely their own way, and will not bear any superintendence from the whites whilst fishing, so that the practical part of the getting of the shell i.e. the management of the boats, the locality of the fishing, the times of fishing, besides the actual gathering of the shell is entirely left to the divers.\n\nBut the prevalence of peaceful contact around the coasts should not obscure the significance of Aboriginal resistance to sea-faring Europeans. It took many forms. Ships lying at anchor in estuaries or close inshore were raided in many parts of the continent. This was particularly common along the Queensland coast where the sheltered, island studded, waters inside the Barrier Reef gave Aborigines an offshore mobility unmatched elsewhere. The use of outrigger canoes in Torres Strait and along the north-east coast increased the range of blacks living along shore lines and on nearby islands. Reef waters were hazardous at night and ships frequently anchored till dawn leaving them vulnerable to nocturnal attack. This was particularly so in such waterways as the Whitsunday and Hinchinbrook Passages.\n\nAborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (and Papuans as well) launched numerous attacks on Europeans living at isolated b\u00eache de mer stations. Many young men recruited for pearling or b\u00eache de mer voyages eventually turned on the white men killing them or throwing them overboard and then sailed the commandeered vessel back to their mainland or island homes. It was often done simply to get home, sometimes long after an agreed contract period had expired. But boats were also taken to run them ashore, strip them of everything useful and then scuttle or burn them. It appears that eventually groups of young Aborigines and Islanders set out systematically to recruit, kill the Europeans or Asians, take the boat and then if possible repeat the process.\n\nAttacks on the Europeans in the b\u00eache de mer and pearling industries around about Torres Strait were serious enough to create deep concern in coastal communities. A writer in the Cooktown Independent claimed in 1890 that in the previous sixteen years at least 100 Europeans who had sailed from the port had been killed by Aborigines, Islanders and Papuans and many others, as a consequence, had been 'driven back upon southern civilization'. The accuracy of this assertion is difficult to determine. Yet similar anxiety about Aboriginal resistance was voiced in official government reports. One on the fisheries of North Queensland published in 1890 was eloquent with European disquiet:\n\nOf late years, and in the Torres Straits district more particularly, outrages committed by these labourers; in which the boat-owners or their agents have been assaulted and lost their lives, or the boats with stores on board have been stolen, have become so frequent as to paralyse the industry to a very large extent.\n\n# FARMING DISTRICTS\n\nFertile, well watered river valleys notch the east coast of Australia. In most of them Aboriginal clans had their first prolonged contact with timber getters cutting cedar and other valuable trees in sub-tropical and tropical rain forest. They, in turn, were followed by small farmers who grew potatoes, maize, bananas and other crops in patches of cleared land. The overall pattern of race relations was similar to that on the pastoral frontier but there were some significant differences which require comment. Heavy forest provided food and sanctuary for resident clans for many years in some places and slowed down the impact of the Europeans although customary patterns of clan migration and local ecologies were disrupted. Water was normally much easier to find than in the dry inland and many local groups continued to have access to estuaries, stretches of coastline, and off-shore islands.\n\nConflict commonly arose over the question of access to European crops. Blacks not only refused to concede that white farmers had suddenly become the 'owners' of small pockets of clan territory, they also attempted to secure a share of the new vegetable foods which grew there. The increasing pressure on traditional food supplies intensified their determination to harvest the new crops growing on their land. Whenever they could they reaped 'by stealth the product of a tract of land they are themselves too indolent to cultivate' as the Sydney Gazette complained in 1805. Inter-racial tension was often seasonal, culminating when grain crops ripened and potatoes matured. 'These enormities', noted the same paper 'are periodical in their commencement'; the blacks were most threatening 'when the fields of ripened maize were open to their pillage'.\n\nAboriginal raids on the crops often involved many hands. Several acres of maize were taken in one night from a Moreton Bay farm in 1846 and there were similar raids on the corn crop on the Don River in the 1870s, farmers losing 100 bushels or more in a single week. On the Herbert River a few years later a farmer complained that he had lost all his banana crop, one half and one third of successive corn crops, and all of a third one, while from another property the local blacks took all the sweet potatoes, most of the corn and a hundred bunches of bananas. A Barron Valley selector wrote to the Herberton Advertiser in 1888 detailing the impact of black raids on his property:\n\nI deem it my duty to make known to intending settlers the losses, through blacks, I have suffered during the present year. On January 12th they visited my selection; stole corn, and were shot at leaving a dilly bag and bone bodkin, used for husking corn, behind them. On the 13th they again stole corn... on nine occasions between the 12th of January and April 5th the niggers stole corn. On the 14th April, 23rd and 30th May, and June 4th, they stole corn. Off 4 acres planted in July I gathered 10 bushels; off 4 acres planted in November 6 bushels; and off 2 acres in January I got nothing\u2013the niggers had the rest. They have now started removing English potatoes and pumpkin.\n\nDuring successful raids on European crops the Aborigines clearly employed many of their traditional hunting skills\u2013stealth, patience and the ability to move without sound. Farmers at Bowen complained in 1873 that the blacks had succeeded in taking crops growing within ten yards of their huts. The Wild River Times reported in 1887 that tents were raided while selectors were working only fifteen paces away. The Commissioner for Crown Lands at Maryborough explained in a letter to his superior in Sydney in 1852 that the local clans had taken his sweet potatoes despite a watchdog and a paling fence six and a half feet high. He had, he said, found blacks actually 'lying within five yards' of his sitting room at 8:00 o'clock in the evening. They had been watching him write at his table while their companions 'dug the potatoes at about twenty yards further off down the hill'. When Aborigines gathered potatoes they often carefully replaced the stalk and leaves. There were reports of this from places as widely separated as Albany, Portland and the Tasmanian Midlands. It is not clear if this was done simply to escape detection, as the Europeans assumed, or if it was related to the traditional practice of replacing parts of yam plants after harvest. But in his reminiscences of pioneering in Tasmania and Victoria G. T. Lloyd had no doubt about the deliberation involved in Aboriginal tactics. 'Potatoes were rooted up and carried off by the hundred weight', he wrote:\n\nwhilst the cunning fellows re-arranged the ridges so neatly as to hide all appearances of their having been disturbed, erasing their footmarks also with brushwood as they retired. In this manner many industrious farmers found themselves most unaccountably mistaken in their estimate of their crop.\n\nBoth Aboriginal and European population densities were higher in the fertile coastal valleys than on the pastoral frontier. Properties were very much smaller and European neighbours closer together. To be successful Aboriginal raids had to be stealthy and well organized and usually conducted at night. A writer in the Wild River Times observed in 1888 that the local blacks evinced 'a knowledge and cleverness in the manner in which they plan and carry out their raids', which, he concluded, 'could scarcely be rivalled by London cracksmen'. Trickery and deception were called into play to secure the crops of vigilant resident selectors. In 1804 the Sydney Gazette reported that blacks on the Georges River had made a social call on a farmer's wife and kept her talking while others cleared a whole acre of corn and carried the cobs off in canoes. Eighty years later Atherton Tableland clans found a way to rob a German selector who had up till then foiled every attempt made on his crops. An Aborigine approached his hut making rude and insulting gestures. He took the bait and chased his tormentor into the nearby forest. While he was gone a small party moved quickly into his hut and took everything\u2013food, clothes, tools and other personal possessions. The fate of the impulsive German selector illustrated the fact that in many respects the conflict between white and black in small farming districts was more evenly balanced than in all but the most marginal pastoral country and much more even than on the mineral fields of north Australia.\n\n# GOLD RUSHES\n\nIn most parts of Australia mineral discoveries were made after the initial phase of settlement. Miners typically entered districts where Aborigines had already undergone considerable acculturation and where overt resistance had been crushed. But in north Queensland and in one or two parts of Western Australia miners leap-frogged ahead of the most remote pastoral stations and came into contact with clans whose members had never experienced permanent white settlement. The Gilbert was probably the first such field to be followed by the Etheridge, Mulgrave, Palmer, Hodgkinson and Croydon Rushes. Of all forms of European economic activity mining was probably the most devastating in its effects on resident Aborigines. Numbers alone were of decisive importance. Hundreds of miners arrived en masse at sites of promising finds. Even on small fields the Europeans rapidly outnumbered local clans and prospecting parties fossicked their way into the remotest corners of Aboriginal territory. Innumerable sacred sites must have been desecrated as the Europeans scrambled across the ancient landscape in their frenetic search for mineral wealth. The impact of alluvial miners on the environment was massive and immediate\u2013they gouged up the soil, polluted the streams, pillaged nearby stands of timber. The average mining camp had relatively few animals which could have compensated local Aborigines for the destruction of vegetable food and the shooting and driving away of indigenous animals.\n\nMineral rushes put unrelenting pressure on the Aborigines forcing them to seek safety in whatever sanctuary of scrub or mountain left to them. The European impact was exacerbated by the long dry season of north Australia which must have been a lean time for local blacks even before the whites arrived. Of all the European activities mining must have appeared to be the least rational, the most incomprehensible. A correspondent writing from the Etheridge field believed that the local Aborigines were very curious 'as to what the white men were rooting up the sand and soil for'. Their first belief, he remarked:\n\nwas that the object was something to eat, and, as the prospectors proceeded further up the river, down they would come, and commence rooting also in the abandoned holes. This they did perseveringly as the prospectors could see on their way down the river again.\n\nMiners felt little need to accommodate the blacks. Unlike squatters and farmers who were settling on the land the diggers were transients without commitment to the soil they so industriously turned up. They had little use for Aboriginal labour and the preponderance of European numbers obviated the need for the sort of negotiation noted on the pastoral frontier. They often lived in canvas and galvanized iron packed in from the coast rather than in bark huts made from nearby trees; they ate and drank commodities produced in factories in Sydney or Melbourne or even the northern hemisphere and rarely developed the sort of relationship with the environment which elsewhere led Europeans to an appreciation of indigenous knowledge and expertise.\n\nBlacks in the mining areas were often forced into resistance from the earliest period of European intrusion. Violence did not escalate slowly out of personal vendetta as in many districts of older settlement; in many places it was open and indiscriminate from the start. The local clans developed tactics to deal with the specific problems of the mining frontier. They made frequent attacks on the bullock teams supplying the remote mine fields, choosing night time for raids at known staging points along the dray roads and they speared large numbers of horses both to immobilize the Europeans and to eat their large animals. Sudden, well organized raids were launched against prospecting parties in the remoter parts of the mineral fields. Tents were constantly robbed, silently and skilfully, while miners worked nearby claims. So persistent were these robberies that it became customary on northern fields for one man to remain in camp during working hours to guard the tent. But despite their spirited resistance mining pushed the Aborigines to the edge of starvation more rapidly than any other European activity giving their attacks a desperation not often matched in other parts of the continent. 'The white men occupy their only hunting grounds', wrote a Palmer River resident in 1877, 'and in default of the fish, roots and game of the waterholes and creek bottoms, they are in a manner compelled to eat horses and bullocks'. Aborigines presented, 'a very emaciated appearance, as a rule. They appeared to be in very great distress and were, in many cases, starving.'\n\n# MISSION STATIONS\n\nDuring the last quarter of the nineteenth century Aborigines in a number of localities in northern Australia had their first continuous contact with missionaries rather than with pastoralists, pearlers or miners. This was true at Yarrabah, Bloomfield, and Hopevale on the east coast of Cape York and Mapoon and Weipa on the Gulf of Carpentaria; of Daly River and Beagle Bay in the North West; and of Hermannsburg in the Centre. The relations between Aborigines and pioneer missionaries were exceptional enough to merit a brief mention.\n\nThe reaction of local clans to the sudden appearance of missionaries appears to have followed a common pattern. After cautious surveillance from a distance one or two men ventured to meet the white people. Gradually the numbers visiting the missionaries increased and when mutual confidence had been established women and children followed their men folk into the embryonic stations. Individual visits were prolonged till eventually semi-permanent camps developed on the mission reserves and young children and old people were left behind while their kinsfolk faced the rigours and dangers of the bush. The greatest advantage of the missions was that they provided a sanctuary from the depredations of white pastoralists, miners or pearl fishers and from those of traditional Aboriginal enemies as well. Both black and white foes were constrained from attacking clans actually camped within reach of the missionaries.\n\nBlacks who lived for part of the time on mission reserves seem to have carefully chosen the time of their visits to coincide with the leanest and least pleasant period in the bush\u2013the dry season around Hermannsburg, the time of the cool, wet south-easterlies on the east coast of Cape York. Poland, the German missionary from Hopevale, wrote realistically of what motivated local clans to come into the mission:\n\nApril! Australian Autumn. Not much more fruit to be gathered in the bush. The cold wind makes fishing harder and less rewarding. The natives and their dogs are getting thinner. They are beginning to feel cold, their tobacco is almost at an end. So they have to make the bitter decision to give up their free and easy life for a while and go to the mission station and work there.\n\nThe missionaries were important as a source of desired European commodities like steel axes, flour and especially tobacco. Work on the mission station and attendance at often incomprehensible prayer meetings was an accepted price to pay for access to them. But the blacks soon learnt how to bargain for more generous supplies. A local clansman told the Trappists at Beagle Bay that it was a case of 'no more tobacco, no more 'allelulia'.  The blacks were able to play the missionaries off against the other Europeans, quickly appreciating the political possibilities inherent in the situation where different groups of white men were pursuing irreconcilable objectives. 'They do not like working in the fields', noted a north Queensland missionary, and they consider that 'our issues of food and tobacco are not very generous'. The Aborigines asked him pointedly, 'Does the One up in Heaven tell you to give us so little?' The missionary retorted that the gospel taught that he who did not work would not eat. With that the blacks replied by praising the townspeople of Cooktown for their generosity to the blacks.\n\nWhatever success the missionaries had with Aboriginal children the adults strongly resisted the attempts to proselytise them. 'They hold so firmly to their fables', wrote Kempe of the Hermannsburg blacks, 'that they have already told us straight out that we tell them nothing but lies'. At about much the same time Poland was writing of his difficulties with the Aborigines at Hopevale. He had endeavoured to explain the significance of Christmas but the adults looked at him with an 'air of utter disbelief'. They said mockingly that their ears were blocked to his message because they had to sleep on the ground all the time.\n\nBut blacks often developed the ability to appease the missionaries and keep on good terms with them. Poland gave an account of an exchange he had with a group of men just returned from a fishing trip. They had explained how the eldest member of the party had tied up the wind to facilitate their journey and that he could also make rain. The discussion continued with the missionary exclaiming:\n\n'Oh, don't talk such rubbish, I am telling you the truth; only God can let the rain come'.\n\n'Of course he is right', says the rainmaker and looks mockingly at his friends.\n\n'Be quiet and don't mock him', says another one a little anxiously.\n\n'Don't make him angry', another one repeats.\n\n'He may not give us any tobacco otherwise'.\n\n'Now let him talk!', exclaims one man, 'haven't I been telling you all along? He talks well and we ought to stay with him'.\n\nPoland concluded ruefully that the 'bored look' on the face of the last speaker left him in no doubt about the total insincerity of the statement. On other occasions the Aborigines deliberately played down to the low opinions of their ability held by the missionaries. 'We blacks simply can't learn', missionary Hoerlein was told at Bloomfield, 'our heads are too hard. Nothing ever goes in. Learning is only for white people like you.' The missionary's task was all the more difficult because the Aborigines often thought that by letting their children receive instruction they were actually working for the benefit of the white men. The experience of the German missionaries at Moreton Bay in the 1840s was typical of misunderstanding apparent elsewhere. The mission diary for May 1842 contained the passage:\n\nthey consider still their attendance a labour for us, from which they suppose we derive advantage and threaten us sometimes, when they are not quite pleased, no more to work in the school for us.\n\nAborigines found many advantages in the missionary presence, especially in those areas where they continued to have ready access to their own country and the food it provided. But conflict emerged in regard to the education of the children and the questions of marriage and burial where Christian and Aboriginal traditions met head-on. The missionaries attempted to suppress traditional mortuary ceremonies and endeavoured to prevent the tribal marriages of young girls who had grown up on the stations, although it is quite likely that the girls sometimes used the missionaries in order to avoid the dictates of the old men. E. R. Gribble described the tension resulting from the struggle over who would bury the body of a little girl who died at Yarrabah in 1895:\n\nAfter placing it in the coffin I waited some time before putting on the lid; one old woman stepped up and put an old garment and several pieces of bark into the coffin. Then I placed the lid on, and as soon as I did so the old women set up a most fearful din, and acted in a truly disgusting manner, rolling in the sand, throwing it at the coffin and over each other... They did not want the whites to have anything to do with the dead.\n\nThe missions set up in remote localities in the late nineteenth century did shield the Aborigines from some of the worst excesses of frontier contact. It is probable that around the missions the decline of the population was less dramatic, and that demographic recovery occurred sooner, than in many other parts of the continent: health on the missions was normally better than in the typical fringe camp. But the missionaries mounted an intellectual challenge to Aboriginal society and culture far more deliberate, and consistent, than any other group of Europeans in colonial Australia. It was most apparent in the separation of children and parents by the establishment of dormitories which became common on Australian missions established during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Developments at Yarrabah during the 1890s illustrated a common trend. Gribble summed up his objectives in a number of reports written in the middle of the decade. In the first one of September 1895 he explained that the dormitory was nearing completion, an event eagerly awaited because the Europeans would 'then have the children more under control'. By having them 'under lock and key at night' the mission staff would be able to 'prevent the camp natives taking them off at all hours for corroborees etc'. The old people objected strongly to the incarceration of the children, complaining that the boys and girls were 'getting too much like white fellow.' News of the missionaries' behaviour spread quickly to clans living in the hinterland. Gribble described an incident which took place a few months after the opening of the dormitory. He was travelling in the bush with two black guides some distance away from Yarrabah. The party approached a camp on a creek bank just before sundown. The local men came up to the visitors and interrogated the two guides. Gribble described the following exchange:\n\nAt first little notice was taken of me, the people being busy questioning the two boys while I stood a little apart. Presently one man asked Harry who I was, and on his saying quietly the one word 'Missionary', the effect was wonderful to behold, the women gave me one look full of fear, then clasping their children tightly, vanished; the men stood their ground, but looked as if they would like the ground to open and swallow either me or themselves.\n\nGribble subsequently learned the reason for the hostile reception. Aborigines for miles around had heard of the mission, he wrote, and the idea was 'among them that we intend taking their children forcibly from them'.\n\n# FRONTIER TOWNS\n\nColonial towns played an important role in the history of contact and acculturation. Almost every European community on the continent had at least one fringe camp at some time in its history. Many blacks were driven into these camps just as Aborigines elsewhere were forced onto pastoral stations by the violence of the bush and dwindling indigenous food supplies. 'They are driven from many stations in the bush', wrote a government official in Rockhampton in the 1860s, 'and their dogs which they use for hunting are poisoned... so that the use of their own country is literally taken away from them'. A similar situation was outlined by an Aboriginal woman interviewed in the bush near Cooktown in 1899. She was camped with a small family group which had just returned from town with meat and bread. When asked why she and her kin did not go into the bush and live off the land she replied: 'White fellow along a yarraman, too much break him spear, burn yams, cut him old man with whip, white man too much kill him Kangaroo.'\n\nBut while some Aborigines were pushed in towards the towns others went willingly in the same direction. Curiosity enticed many as did the possibilities for gathering food and tobacco by scavenging, begging, casual labour and prostitution. The larger towns were able to supply a considerable amount of food for people who were accustomed to making use of almost everything edible in their environment. The outskirts of the pioneer towns became convenient locations for clans to meet and hold ceremonies, battles, corroborees and initiations. They could draw on both the town and neighbouring bush for food and were safer from attack than in the hinterland. It seems probable that clans frequently changed the venue of regular gatherings to take advantage of the towns and even altered ceremonial calendars to coincide with such European occasions as the distribution of blankets to Aborigines on Queen Victoria's birthday, 24 May. E. J. Eyre observed the movement of South Australian clans in towards Adelaide in the 1840s. He wrote that:\n\nLarge towns are frequently the centre of meeting for many, and very distant tribes. The facility of obtaining scraps by begging, small rewards for trifling jobs of work, donations from the charitable, and a variety of broken victuals, offal etc enable them to collect in large numbers, and indulge to the uttermost their curiosity in observing the novelties around them, in meeting strange tribes, and joining them either in war or festivity, in procuring tools, clothes etc to carry back and barter in their own districts... Thus, Adelaide is nearly always occupied by tribes from one part or another of the country: on an average, it will support probably six hundred in the way I have described, though occasionally eight hundred have met there.\n\nThe conviviality of fringe camps may have attracted Aborigines in from the bush. The interest was not the European settlement as such but the large Aboriginal gatherings which it made possible. As with so many other features of contact history the blacks appear to have used the Europeans and their towns for their own ends. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner remarked that in traditional society:\n\nthe most prized goods of life were to be found, and were deliberately sought, in large associations. Everywhere, it seems, there was a propensity for bands to foregather as long as physical conditions allowed and sociability persisted.\n\nComplaints from townspeople all over Australia emphasised the constant activity of the fringe camps; the succession of corroborees, ceremonies and fighting. 'One night there is a marriage, another a death, and another a pitched battle', wrote a Darwin resident in 1874, 'there is always some occasion for noise and riot'.\n\nThe acute problems which developed in the fringe camps\u2013disease, malnutrition, addiction to alcohol or opium, the psychological tensions of sedentary living\u2013were widely reported by European observers. Yet the dangers may not have been immediately apparent to the blacks who set up camp for the first time on the outskirts of colonial towns. Campsites rarely began as permanent homes, the transition from nomadism to sedentary living often took a generation or more. 'Townblacks' shifted camp regularly even though distances moved were increasingly confined within a shrinking circle of territory. Fringe dwellers continued to shift from places where kin had died in much the same way as they had done before the white men came and such sites may never have been re-occupied.\n\nThough European men wore deep tracks to the blacks' camps on their nocturnal search for sexual excitement the life of fringe-dwelling communities continued without much interference from the townspeople. The distance between town and camp probably suited both the whites and the blacks. The two or three miles typically separating the two settlements allowed the Aborigines to continue with many aspects of traditional life which would have been disrupted if they had lived closer to the Europeans. A recent study of a part-Aboriginal community in southern inland Queensland reported the recollections of old people about their earlier life in the camp on the outskirts of town. Despite the desperate poverty that had characterised their situation what they remembered was 'the warmth, lack of boredom, fewer responsibilities, having fun and being together away from the prying eyes of whites'.\n\nOne of the problems created for the blacks by the establishment of European towns was the degree to which the traditional owners of a town site could control the access of more distant clans to both the town itself and the food and tobacco available there. This issue was probably a major source of conflict all over the continent. The 'inside' clans appealed to tradition, the 'outsiders' felt that the arrival of the white men had radically altered the situation. Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines in Adelaide, noted the tension between the local blacks and those coming in from the Murray who told him they were 'intending to take over and expel Adelaide blacks from town'. For their part the local people abused children from the Murray clans who were going to school in Adelaide, accusing them of 'obtaining food in a territory to which they had no hereditary right'.\n\nConflict between Aborigines and settlers spilt over into the outskirts of a number of small pioneer townships. Blacks speared horses and cattle and occasionally the citizens themselves close to town and townspeople lived with high anxiety, loaded guns and barricaded doors. In places like Maryborough, Cardwell and Port Lincoln the fear of Aboriginal attack appeared to threaten the future of the settlements while acute anxiety about the local clans was probably the major reason for the desertion of Gilberton in 1873. Town blacks for their part appear to have used fringe camps as a base for raids on sheep and cattle in rural hinterlands. After such an excursion they returned quickly to the relative security of the town where even the most ruthless squatters were constrained from exacting revenge. 'The cunning fellows know they are safe in town' wrote a Maryborough resident in 1867 'where it is next to impossible to catch them, and dispersing is not permissible'.\n\nIn some towns the blacks became accomplished thieves and burglars combining their growing understanding of European society with the stealth and patience of the traditional hunter. This development can best be illustrated by reference to Maryborough during the first twenty years of its history. During the 1850s the resident Commissioner for Crown Lands made many complaints about the local black burglars. In 1855 he remarked that their movements were so stealthy and they were 'such adepts in the Commission of robberies which they perpetrate during the night' that it was impossible to detect them. The following year he noted that they were becoming 'very expert in house robberies'. They removed panes of glass to release window catches, cut away sections of wall to loosen bolts, put children through small openings to undo locked doors. The local paper observed some years later that black burglars behaved 'as though they had served an apprentership in London or New York'. Food was the main objective, stores and drays the most common target. During six weeks in November\u2013December 1855 there were twenty six separate robberies in Maryborough which netted the local blacks at least 1500 pounds of flour and 800 pounds of sugar as well as meat, tea, clothes, bedding and utensils.\n\nYet it is likely that many blacks in fringe camps would have preferred to come to a negotiated settlement with the Europeans ensuring them of adequate food and protection from arbitrary violence. There was an incident in Rockhampton late in 1865 which had direct bearing on this question. A group of 'town blacks' demonstrated outside the home of the Police Magistrate. The local paper reported that 'they signified that peace and safety was only assured by the payment of a blackmail in the shape of flour, tobacco and white money.' It is intriguing to consider if such overtly political action was common but merely unreported or not even recognized as such by the white community. The response of the Rockhampton authorities was predictable. On hearing of the occurrence the police sergeant and two mounted troopers 'dispersed the vagabonds'.\n\n# CONCLUSION\n\nThis is the first book to systematically explore the other side of the frontier, to turn Australian history, not upside down, but inside out. It establishes that it is possible to write Aboriginal history and present it to white Australians in such a way that they can understand black motives and appreciate the complexities of their tragic story. W. K. Hancock's judgement of 1930 that Aboriginal society was 'pathetically helpless' when assailed by Europeans can be seen now as a travesty albeit still an influential one. Even today sympathetic whites speak of the blacks as the passive objects of European brutality or charity. Indeed many of the major themes of white history were mirrored on the other side of the frontier.\n\nThe Aboriginal response to invasion was much more positive, creative and complex than generations of white Australians have been taught to believe. The heroes of nationalist mythology had their little known black counterparts. The courage of European explorers pushing out into the interior was matched by that of the Aborigines who met them on the way and by others who travelled in towards the white men's settlements to observe and evaluate the interlopers. Epic journeys of discovery were not the preserve of white men. The explorer's fear of black savages was echoed by Aboriginal alarm about evil spirits and malignant magic. The improvisation and adaption of Europeans settling the land was paralleled by tribesmen who grappled with a new world of experience on the fringes of white settlement. The stoical endurance of pioneer women was matched by that of their black sisters who bore children and battled to keep them alive in conditions of appalling adversity. All over the continent Aborigines bled as profusely and died as bravely as white soldiers in Australia's twentieth century wars.\n\nIn the long run black Australians will be our equals or our enemies. Unless they can identify with new and radical interpretations of our history they will seek sustenance in the anti-colonial traditions of the third world. If they are unable to find a place of honour in the white man's story of the past their loyalties will increasingly dwell with the 'wretched of the earth'. But if the Aboriginal experience is to be woven into new interpretations of Australian history changes will be necessary. We will have to deal with the blacks as equals or they will see our sudden interest in their history as merely another phase of our intellectual usurpation of their culture and traditions. We must give due weight to the Aboriginal perceptions of ourselves and they will not be flattering. Aborigines have seen so much of the dark underside of white Australia; they have lived with it for two hundred years. Blacks believe that Europeans are hypocrites. 'You are very clever people', an old tribesman told W. E. H. Stanner, 'very hard people, plenty humbug'. In Aboriginal eyes the whites were invaders who came preaching the virtues of private property; people who talked much of British justice while unleashing a reign of terror and behaving like an ill-disciplined army of occupation once the invasion was effected; forcinators who pursued black women in every fringe camp on the continent but in daylight disowned both lovers and resulting offspring. Major figures of our history will have to be reassessed\u2013frontiersmen who lavished lead on neighbouring clans; selectors who notched the handles of their Colt revolvers as readily as they ring-barked rainforest trees; jolly swagmen who at night became far from funny shagmen when they staggered into blacks' camps. The high evaluation of explorers needs amendment. They were usually dependent on the expertise of their black guides; they followed Aboriginal paths, drank at their wells; slept in their gunyahs and were often passed on from clan to clan by people who constantly monitored their progress through a landscape the Europeans chose to call a wilderness.\n\nFor many years white Australians have used Aboriginal words, symbols and designs to heighten their national distinctiveness and underline their separate identity. We can scarcely wonder if others judge us in this light and use our attitude to the Aboriginal historical experience as the acid test when they come to judge if white Australians have assimilated to the continent or are still colonists at heart. If we are unable to incorporate the black experience into our national heritage we will stand exposed as a people still emotionally chained to our nineteenth century British origins, ever the transplanted Europeans.\n\nMuch of Aboriginal history since 1788 is political history. Recent confrontations at Noonkanbah and Arukun are not isolated incidents but outcrops of a long range of experience reaching back to the beginnings of European settlement. The Tent Embassy of 1972 did not launch Aborigines into Australian politics but rather reminded white Australians of old truths temporarily forgotten. The questions at stake\u2013land, ownership, development, progress\u2013arrived with Governor Phillip and have been at the pivot of white-Aboriginal relations ever since. They are surely the most enduring issues of Australian politics and will in the long run prove to have been of much greater consequence than many questions which since the middle of last century claimed the attention of parliaments and public for a season or two.\n\nFrontier violence was political violence. We cannot ignore it because it took place on the fringes of European settlement. Twenty thousand blacks were killed before federation. Their burial mound stands out as a landmark of awesome size on the peaceful plains of colonial history. If the bodies had been white our histories would be heavy with their story, a forest of monuments would celebrate their sacrifice. The much noted actions of rebel colonists are trifling in comparison. The Kellys and their kind, even Eureka diggers and Vinegar Hill convicts, are diminished when measured against the hundreds of clans who fought frontier settlers for well over a century. In parts of the continent the Aboriginal death toll overshadows even that of the overseas wars of the twentieth century. About 5,000 Europeans from Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn died in the five wars between the outbreak of the Boer War and the end of the Vietnam engagement. But in a similar period\u2013say the seventy years between the first settlement in north Queensland in 1861 and the early 1930s\u2013as many as 10,000 blacks were killed in skirmishes with the Europeans in north Australia.\n\nHow, then, do we deal with the Aboriginal dead? White Australians frequently say 'all that' should be forgotten. But it will not be. It cannot be. Black memories are too deeply, too recently scarred. And forgetfulness is a strange prescription coming from a community which has revered the fallen warrior and emblazoned the phrase 'Lest We Forget' on monuments throughout the land. If the Aborigines are to enter our history 'on terms of most perfect equality', as Thomas Mitchell termed it, they will bring their dead with them and expect an honoured burial. So our embarrassment is compounded. Do we give up our cherished ceremonies or do we make room for the Aboriginal dead on our memorials, cenotaphs, boards of honour and even in the pantheon of national heroes? If we are to continue to celebrate the sacrifice of men and women who died for their country can we deny admission to fallen tribesmen? There is much in their story that Australians have traditionally admired. They were ever the underdogs, were always outgunned, yet frequently faced death without flinching. If they did not die for Australia as such they fell defending their homelands, their sacred sites, their way of life. What is more the blacks bled on their own soil and not half a world away furthering the strategic objectives of a distant Motherland whose influence must increasingly be seen as of transient importance in the history of the continent. Mother England has gone\u2013the Empire too\u2013yet black and white Australians have still to come to terms almost two hundred years after the British established their first beach-head at Sydney Cove.\n\n# NOTES\n\nAbbreviations\n\nBL | Battye Library  \n---|---  \nHRA | Historical Records of Australia  \nHRNSW | Historical Records of New South Wales  \nJRGS | Journal of Royal Geographical Society  \nML | Mitchell Library  \nNSW Col. Sec. | New South Wales Colonial Secretary, In Letters  \nNSWLAV&P | New South Wales Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings  \nNSWLC | New South Wales Legislative Council  \nNSWLCV&P | New South Wales Legislative Council Votes and Proceedings  \nQld Col. Sec. | Queensland Colonial Secretary, In Letters  \nQSA | Queensland State Archives  \nQVP | Queensland Votes and Proceedings  \nRGSSA | Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of Australia, South Australian Branch  \nSA Col. Sec. | South Australian Colonial Secretary, In Letters  \nSMH | Sydney Morning Herald  \nTas. Col. Sec. | Tasmanian Colonial Secretary, In Letters  \nTHRA | Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association  \nTSA | Tasmanian State Archives  \nVPRO | Victorian Public Records Office  \nWA Col. Sec. | Western Australian Colonial Secretary, In Letters  \nWAHS | Journal of the West Australian Historical Society  \nWALCV&P | West Australian Legislative Council Votes and Proceedings\n\n# New Introduction\n\nHenry Reynolds: Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, Allen and Unwin, Sydney 1987.\n\nHenry Reynolds: With the White People, Penguin, Ringwood 1990.\n\nHenry Reynolds: The Other Side of the Frontier, James Cook University of North Queensland 1981, p. 2.\n\nHenry Reynolds: Why Weren't We Told, Viking, Ringwood 1999; and Penguin, Camberwell 2000.\n\nSubaltern Studies I, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1981, p. vii.\n\nSubaltern Studies III, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1984, p. viii.\n\nHenry Reynolds: The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin, Ringwood 1982, p. 2.\n\nR. White: The Middle Ground, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991.\n\nInga Clendinnen: Dancing with Strangers, Text Publishing, Melbourne 2003.\n\nHenry Reynolds: Nowhere People, Viking, Camberwell 2005.\n\nHenry Reynolds: The Other Side of the Frontier, 1981 edition, p. 99; 1982 edition, p. 122.\n\nKeith Windschuttle: The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Macleay Press, Sydney 2002.\n\n# 1 Explorers and Before\n\nMurray-Upper tapes, Black Oral History Collection: History Department, James Cook University.\n\nG. F. Moore: A Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language in Common Usage Amongst the Aborigines of West Australia, London 1842, p. 108.\n\nMurray-Upper tapes, Black Oral History Collection: James Cook University.\n\nT. L. Mitchell: Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, London 1848, p. 325.\n\nW. Hovell, Journal of a Journey from Lake George to Port Phillip, 1824\u201325, Journal Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 7, 1921, p. 371.\n\nM. Doyle (ed.): Extracts from the Letters and Journals of George Fletcher Moore, London 1834, p. 110.\n\nP. Warburton: Journey across the Western Interior of Australia, London, 1875 p. 252.\n\nC. Smith: The Booandick Tribe of South Australian Aborigines, Adelaide 1880, p. 26.\n\nMurray-Upper tapes, Black Oral History Collection: History Department, James Cook University.\n\nW. E. Roth: Ethnographical Studies Among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines, Brisbane 1897, p. 137\n\nW. E. H. Stanner: Ceremonial Economics of the Mulluk Mulluk and Madngella Tribes of the Daly River etc, Oceania, Vol. 4, No. 2, December 1933, p. 174.\n\nN. Gunson (ed.): Australian Reminiscences and Papers of L. E. Threlkeld etc, 2 vols., Canberra 1974, Vol. 1, p. 48.\n\nG. A. Robinson: Report of an Expedition to the Aboriginal Tribes of the Interior, March-August 1846, p. 25; G. A. Robinson Papers, Vol. 60. Mitchell Library (hereafter ML), MSS\/7081.\n\nG. Windsor-Earl: 'On the Aboriginal Tribes of the Northern Coast of Australia', JRGS, Vol. 16, 1846, p. 248.\n\nD. R. Moore: The Australian & Papuan Frontier in the 1840's, unpublished mss, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, p. 99.\n\nJ. Jardine, Somerset, to Governor Bowen, 1 March 1865 in F. J. Byerley (ed.): Narrative of an Overland Expedition etc, Brisbane 1867, p. 85.\n\nG. Windsor-Earl, op. cit., p. 248.\n\nJ. Oxley: Journals of Two Expeditions, p. 289.\n\n'A Noted Blackfellow', Adelaide Observer, 14 June 1924.\n\nSydney 1834, p. xi.\n\nT. L. Mitchell: Three Expeditions into Eastern Australia, 2 vols, London 1834, I, pp. 71\u201372.\n\nA. H. Howitt: Native Tribes of South East Australia, London 1904, p. 695.\n\nJ. H. Tuckey: An Account of a Voyage to Establish a Colony at Port Phillip etc, London 1805, p. 168.\n\nJ. Oxley: Journals of Two Expeditions, London 1820, p. 328.\n\nA. Searcey: In Northern Seas, Adelaide 1905, p. 23.\n\nD. Roughsey: Moon and Rainbow, Sydney 1971, p. 13.\n\nJ. Morrell: Sketch of a Residence, Brisbane 1863, p. 14.\n\nIbid., p. 15.\n\nT. L. Mitchell: Three Expeditions, I, p. 248.\n\nJ. L. Stokes: Discoveries in Australia etc, 2 vols, London 1846, I, p. 252.\n\nJ. Morrell, op. cit., p. 14.\n\nE. J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions of Discovery etc, 2 vols, London 1845, 2, p. 213.\n\nJ. Oxley: Journals of Two Expeditions, p. 171.\n\nD. W. Carnegie: Spinifex and Sand, London 1898, pp. 239, 284.\n\nC. Sturt: Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, 2 vols, London 1849, I, p. 315.\n\nT. L. Mitchell: Three Expeditions, I, p. 129.\n\nReport of the North-Western Exploring Expedition; QVP, 3, 1876, p. 375.\n\nJ. Oxley: Journals of Two Expeditions, p. 163.\n\nJ. L. Stokes: Discoveries in Australia, 2, p. 297.\n\nJ. B. Jukes: Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of HMS Fly, London 1847, p. 56.\n\nJ. Gilbert: Diary, ML\/MSS 2587, p. 52.\n\nJ. F. Mann: Eight Months With Dr. Leichhardt, Sydney 1888, p. 30.\n\nJ. Gilbert: Diary, p. 51.\n\nAdelaide Observer, 14 June 1924.\n\nM. Labillardiere: Voyage in Search of La Perouse, 1791\u20131794, London 1800, pp. 300\u2013301.\n\nE. J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions etc, 2, p. 211.\n\nG. Blainey: Triumph of the Nomads, Melbourne 1975, p. 253.\n\nE. S. Parker: The Aborigines of Australia, Melbourne 1854, p. 22.\n\nE. Giles: Australia Twice Traversed, 2 vols, London 1889, 2, p. 282.\n\nE. J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions etc, 2, p. 216.\n\nC. Sturt: Narrative of an Expedition, 2, p. 315.\n\nT. L. Mitchell: Journal of an Expedition, p. 143.\n\nL. Leichhardt: Journal of an Overland Expedition, p. 494.\n\nC. Sturt: Two Expeditions etc, 2, p. 135.\n\nDiary & Letters of Sir C. H. Freemantle, London 1928, p. 55.\n\nG. B. Worgan: Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, Sydney 1978, pp. 6\u20137.\n\nB. Spencer: Wanderings in Wild Australia, 2 vols, London 1928, I, p. 239.\n\nMurray-Upper tapes, Black Oral History Collection: History department, James Cook University.\n\n# 2 Continuity and Change\n\nReport of Protector of Aborigines, 3 June 1842, Colonial Secretary Letters Received 1842, South Australian Archives (hereafter SAA), GRG\/24\/6\/483.\n\nE. J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions of Discovery, 2, p. 366.\n\nJ. L. Stokes: Discoveries in Australia, I, p. 60.\n\nJ. Morgan: The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, 2nd edition, London 1967 edited, C. E. Sayers, p. 21.\n\nD. R. Moore: Islanders and Aborigines at Cape York, Canberra 1979, p. 143.\n\nW. E. Roth: North Queensland Ethnography: Bulletin No. 5, QVP, 2, 1903, p. 492. See also C. W. Shurmann: Vocabulary of the Parnkalla Language, Adelaide 1844, pp. 72\u201373; L. E. Threlkeld: An Australian Language, Sydney 1892, Appendix D; G. F. Moore: A Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language in Common Use Amongst the Aborigines of Western Australia, London 1842, p. 28; W. Ridley: Kamilaroi and Other Australian Languages, 2nd edition, Sydney 1875, p. 17; C. G. Teichelmann: Outlines of a Grammar, Vocabulary and Phraseology of the Aboriginal Language of South Australia, Adelaide 1840, p. 39; E. Curr: The Australian Race, 3 vols, Melbourne 1883.\n\nM. Eliade: Australian Religions, Ithaca 1973, pp. 60\u201361. See also: E. Kolig: 'Bi:N and Gadeja' etc, Oceania, 43, I, September 1972.\n\nG. F. Moore: A Descriptive Vocabulary, p. 28.\n\nLetter by 'Delta', The Inquirer, 11 May 1842.\n\nG. Grey: Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery etc, 2 vols, London 1841, 2, pp. 302\u2013303.\n\nLetter of Mr. T. Dodds, Cobham, 1 February 1839 in E. D. Cowan: 'Letters of Early Settlers', WAHS, 1, 1, 1927, p. 57.\n\nG. Grey: Journals of Two Expeditions, 2, pp. 302\u2013303.\n\nF. Armstrong in Perth Gazette, 29 Oct. 1836.\n\nG. F. Moore: A Descriptive Vocabulary, p. 28.\n\nDiary of Dr. S. W. Viveash, 16 February 1840, Battye Library (hereafter BL) MSS, QB\/VIV.\n\nE. Shenton: 'Reminiscences of Perth 1830\u20131840', WAHS, 1, 1, 1927, p. 2.\n\nC. Grey, Journal of Two Expeditions, 1, pp. 301\u20132.\n\nE. J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions, 2, p. 367.\n\nE. D. Cowan: 'Letters of Early Settlers', p. 58.\n\nW. E. Roth: North Queensland Ethnography Bulletin No. 5, p. 493.\n\nJ. Morgan: The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, p. 31.\n\n29 October 1836.\n\nReport of Protector of Aborigines, 30 June 1842, Colonial Secretary, Letters Received, SAA, GRG\/24\/6, p. 483.\n\nSelect Committee on the Native Mounted Police, QVP, 1861, p. 56.\n\nIbid, p. 57.\n\nJ. Morgan: The Life of William Buckley etc, p. 21.\n\nMurray-Upper tapes, Black Oral History Collection: James Cook University.\n\n6 October 1838.\n\nPerth Gazette, 29 October 1836.\n\nJames Dredge to Bunting, 17 February 1840, James Dredge Notebook, La Trobe Library MSS, 421959.\n\nE. D. Cowan: Letters of Early Settlers etc, p. 58.\n\nManners and Habits of the Aborigines of Western Australia, Perth Gazette, 29 October 1836.\n\nReport of Protector of Aborigines, 30 June 1842, Colonial Secretary, Letters Received 1842, SAA, GRG\/24\/6\/483.\n\n21 July 1866.\n\nE. Curr: The Australian Race, 1, p. 26.\n\nL. E. Threlkeld: An Australian Grammar etc, p. xi.\n\nGeorge Frankland to Governor Arthur, 4 February 1829 in N. J. B. Plomley: Friendly Mission, p. 108.\n\nThrelkeld's Account of Mission to the Aborigines of New South Wales, ML. MSS, Bonwick Transcripts, Box 52.\n\nE. J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions etc, 2, p. 240.\n\nG. Taplin: The Narrinyeri, etc, Adelaide 1878, p. 30.\n\nD. R. Moore: Islanders and Aborigines, pp. 199\u2013200.\n\nG. S. Lang: The Aborigines of Australia, Melbourne 1865, p. 28.\n\nN. J. B. Plomley: Friendly Mission, Hobart 1966, p. 264.\n\n23 May 1830.\n\nRhys Jones: 'Tasmanian Aborigines and Dogs', Mankind, 7, 1970, p. 270.\n\nE. Curr: The Australian Race, 3, p. 193.\n\nQueenslander, 20 May 1871.\n\nIbid., 14 October 1871.\n\nReport on Explorations in Cape York Peninsula, QVP, 2, 1881, p. 239.\n\nD. F. Thomson: 'The Dugong Hunters of Cape York', Journal Royal Anthropological Institute, 64, 1934, p. 257.\n\nG. Horne & G. Aiston: Savage Life in Central Australia, London 1928, p. 11.\n\nThomas to Robinson, 15 October 1840; Aboriginal Protectorate\u2013Westernport; Victorian Public Records Office.\n\nJ. Jorgensen: 'A Shred of Autobiography', Hobart Town Almanach and Van Diemens Land Annual, 1838, p. 108.\n\nDeposition of Thomas Grant re Collisons with Blacks at Portland Bay, Port Phillip Papers, 1840, NSW Col. Sec. 4\/2510.\n\nMr. Newbolt in Rockhampton Bulletin, 5 August 1865. See also I. Henry to Col. Sec., Qld Col. Sec., 6952 of 1885, Col A\/437, QSA.\n\nSydney Gazette, 19 May 1805.\n\nC. Lumholtz: 'Among the Natives of Australia', Journal of American Geographical Society, 21, 1889, p. 11.\n\nC. Chewings: Back in the Stone Age, p. 30.\n\nH. S. Russell: The Genesis of Queensland, p. 281.\n\nD. W. Moore: Aborigines and Islanders etc, p. 150.\n\nW. Rogers: 'A Noted Blackfellow', Adelaide Observer, 14 June 1924.\n\nK. L. Parker: The Euahlayi Tribe, London 1905, p. 36.\n\nR. M. Berndt: 'Wuradjeri Magic and Clever Men', Oceania, 18, 1947\u201348, p. 71 and 17, 1946 47, p. 356.\n\nA. K. Eckermann: Half-Caste, Out-Cast, Ph.D. thesis. University of Queensland 1977, pp. 122, 124.\n\nG. A. Robinson to Col. Sec., 31 October 1831, 18 November 1831, 22 January 1835; Tas. Col. Sec. In Letters, Tasmanian State Archives (hereafter TSA), CSO\/1\/318.\n\nG. F. Moore: A Descriptive Vocabulary, p. 105.\n\nK. L. Parker: The Euahlayi Tribe, p. 39.\n\nW. Tench: Sydney's First Four Years, introduced by L. F. Fitzhardinge, Sydney 1961, p. 227.\n\nN. J. B. Plomley: Friendly Mission, p. 262.\n\nSelect Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines, New South Wales Legislative Council Votes & Proceedings (hereafter NSWLCV&P), 1845, p. 18.\n\nS. Newland: 'The Parkinjees or the Aboriginal Tribes on the Darling River', Proceedings Royal Geographical Society of Australia, South Australian Branch, 2, 1887\u201388, p. 26.\n\n# 3 Resistance: Motives and Objectives\n\n'Shall We Admit the Blacks'? No. 2, Port Denison Times, 1 May 1869.\n\nG. E. Loyau: The History of Maryborough etc, Brisbane 1897, p. 3.\n\nE. Curr: The Australian Race, 1, pp. 100\u2013106.\n\nC. B. Dutton: Letter in North Australian, 13 December 1861.\n\nF. H. Bauer: 'The Kartans of Kangaroo Island, South Australia' in A. P. Pilling and R. A. Waterman: Diprotodon to Detribalization, Michigan 1970, p. 198.\n\nA. R. Radcliffe-Brown: 'Three Tribes of Western Australia', Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 43, 1913, p. 137.\n\nA. R. Radcliffe-Brown: 'The Social Organization of Australian Tribes', Oceania, 1, 1930, p. 35.\n\nN. B. Tindale: Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Canberra 1974, p. 115. See also J. B. Birdsell: 'Local Group Composition Among the Australian Aborigines' etc, Current Anthropology, 11, 2, April 1970.\n\nP. Sutton: Language Groups and Aboriginal Land Ownership, Paper delivered to Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Conference, Canberra, May 1980, p. 8.\n\nL. Sharp: 'Ritual Life and Economics of the Yir-Yoront of Cape York Peninsula', Oceania, 5, 1934, p. 23.\n\nJ. Morrell: Sketch of a Residence, p. 15.\n\nD. F. Thomson: 'The Hero Cult, Initiation and Totemism on Cape York', Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 63, 1933, p. 461.\n\nR. M. W. Dixon: The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland, Cambridge 1972, p. 35.\n\nThe Journal of Francis Tuckfield, La Trobe Library, MSS 655, p. 176.\n\nE. S. Parker to G. A. Robinson, 20 June 1839, Port Phillip Papers, 1840 No. 39\/10026, New South Wales Archives, 4\/2510.\n\nAborigines: Australian Colonies, British Parliamentary Papers, 1844, p. 282.\n\nSydney Morning Herald, 7 October 1843.\n\nW. Ridley: Appendix in J. D. Lang: Queensland, London 1861, p. 439.\n\nJ. D. Wood: Remarks on the Aborigines, 10 April 1862, Qld. Col. Sec. 1118 of 1862, QSA.\n\nD. Thomson: 'In Camp With the Stone Age Men', Queenslander, 22 and 29 January 1931.\n\nK. L. Parker: The Euahlayi Tribe, p. 52.\n\nW. Thomas: Brief Remarks on the Aborigines of Victoria, 1838\u201339, La Trobe Library, MSS 7838, p. 3.\n\nIbid.\n\nJ. D. Wood: Remarks on the Aborigines, p. 2.\n\nJacob Lowe, Select Committee on the Native Police, p. 9.\n\nJournal of Mr. Lewis's Lake Eyre Expedition 1874\u201375, South Australia Parliamentary Papers, 2, 1876, p. 20. See also\u2013C. Sturt: Two Expeditions, 2, p. 194 and J. Oxley: Journals of Two Expeditions, p. 347.\n\nM. Moorhouse to A. M. Mundy, 12 July 1841, Protector of Aborigines Letterbook, 21 May 1840\u20136 January 1857, SAA GRG\/52\/7.\n\nJames Flinn to Thomas Scott, 21 November 1837, Papers Relating to the Aborigines, 1796\u20131839, NSW Archives, No. 1161.\n\nM. Moorhouse to Mundy, 12 July 1841, Protector of Aborigines Letterbook, 21 May 1840\u20136 January 1857, SAA GRG\/52\/7.\n\nW. L. Warner: A Black Civilization, New York 1958, p. 151.\n\nKirchliche Mitteilungen (Church News), 29 Sept. 1897.\n\nR. Mansfield, Sydney 28 Nov. 1821, ML. MSS Bonwick Transcripts Box 52.\n\n1 June 1833.\n\nJ. K. Wilson: Select Committee on Native Police, p. 74.\n\nReport of Return of Mr. Petrie etc enclosed in report of Commissioner for Crown Lands, Moreton Bay, 30 May 1842; NSW Colonial Secretary in Letters, (hereafter NSW Col. Sec.) 4284 of 1842.\n\nA. H. Brown: Select Committee on Native Police, p. 120.\n\nPerth Gazette, 1 June 1833.\n\nS. Simpson, Moreton Bay, HRA, Series 1, 24, p. 259.\n\nF. F. Armstrong, Aboriginal Interpreter to Colonial Secretary, West Australia Colonial Secretary, In Letters, (hereafter WA Col. Sec.), 53, 1837.\n\nJ. D. Wood: Remarks on the Aborigines, p. 2.\n\nSubmission of Advocate General to Executive Council, 7 October 1841, Aborigines: Australian Colonies, 1844, p. 396.\n\nWalker to Colonial Secretary, 3 April 1861, Qld. Col. Sec., 944 of 1861.\n\nNorth Australian, 13 December 1861.\n\nJ. D. Wood: Remarks on the Aborigines.\n\nWiseman to Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands, 16 November 1857, Qld. Col. Sec., 4319 of 1857.\n\nG. A. Robinson to Col. Sec., 30 January 1832, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/318.\n\nN. J. B. Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 88.\n\nR. Dry, Answers Given by Settlers . . . to Certain Questions etc, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/323, pp. 289, 291.\n\nQueensland Times, 15 November 1861.\n\nSimpson to Col. Sec., 13 July 1842, New South Wales Colonial Secretary, In Letters, (hereafter NSW Col. Sec.), 4284 of 1842. See also W. Robertson: Cooee Talks, p. 142; H. S. Russell: The Genesis of Queensland, p. 279.\n\nExtract from journal of W. Schmidt, Aborigines: Australian Colonies, p. 297.\n\nMaitland Mercury, 5 February 1843.\n\nJ. D. McTaggart to Col. Sec., NSW Col. Sec., 1530 of 1858.\n\nGovernment Resident, Port Curtis, to Col. Sec., NSW Col. Sec., 2128 of 1856.\n\nLetter, W. H. Wiseman to Attorney General, Camboon, 29 April 1858; Select Committee on the Murders by the Aborigines on the Dawson River, NSW Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings, 2, 1858, p. 909.\n\nW. H. Wiseman, Commissioner of Crown Lands, Leichhardt, to Chief Commissioner, Sydney, 28 August 1855; Letterbook of W. H. Wiseman, QSA, CCL 7\/61.\n\nPapers of G. A. Robinson, 57, 1845\u201349, ML, MSS A7078\/1.\n\nE. S. Parker, Quarterly Journal, 1 September-30 November 1840, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate; North Western District, VPRO.\n\nE. S. Parker: The Aborigines of Australia, Melbourne 1854.\n\nE. S. Parker: Quarterly Reports, 1 March 1841 31 August 1841, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate; North Western District, VPRO.\n\nQuoted in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown: 'The Rainbow Serpent Myth in South-East Australia', Oceania, 1, 1930\u201331, p. 346.\n\nM. Moorhouse to Col. Sec., 10 October 1849, Protector of Aborigines Letterbook, 21 May 1840\u20136 January 1857, SAA GRG\/52\/7.\n\nE. J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions, 2, pp. 358\u2013359.\n\nDiary, 1839. William Thomas Papers, ML. uncat. MSS 214.\n\nPort Denison Times, 18 April 1874.\n\nE. K. V.: 'Our Aborigines', Queenslander, 26 January 1884; An Ethnologist: 'The Australian Aborigines', Queenslander, 13 July 1895; W. Robertson: Cooee Talks, pp. 25\u201328; G. S. Lang: The Aborigines of Australia, pp. 28, 29.\n\nK. L. Parker: The Euahlayi Tribe, pp. 48\u201349.\n\nR. M. Berndt: Wuradjeri Magic and Clever Men, Part Two, Oceania, 18, 1947\u201348, pp. 73\u201374.\n\n# 4 Resistance: Tactics and Traditions\n\nF. Walker to Col. Sec., 1 March 1852, NSWLCV&P, 1852, p. 791.\n\nDiary of C. Palmerston, Queensland Heritage, 1, 8, May 1968, p. 29.\n\n8 December 1875.\n\nF. D. Browne: Respecting the Habits and Character of the Natives, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/323.\n\nPerth Gazette, 13 April 1833.\n\nCooktown Independent, 19 November 1890.\n\nN. J. B. Plomley: Friendly Mission, p. 553.\n\nH. S. Russell: The Genesis of Queensland, p. 281.\n\nCapt. Clark: Answers Given by Settlers... (to) the Aborigines Committee, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/323. See also: Police Magistrate, Bothwell to Col. Sec., Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/316, p. 39; A. Allingham: Taming the Wilderness, Townsville 1977, p. 157.\n\nF. A. Dutton to Col. Sec., 1 November 1844, SA Col. Sec., GRG\/24\/6, p. 1249.\n\nAdelaide Observer, 18 April 1846.\n\nCapt. Clark: Answers Given by Settlers... etc, Tas. Col. Sec., op. cit.\n\nA. Reid, Great Swanport, 2 January 1829, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/323, p. 77.\n\nT. Hooper, Black Marsh to T. Anstey, 18 August 1830, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/316, pp. 571\u2013574.\n\nIbid.\n\nThe Colonist, 16 February 1839.\n\nJ. Howe: 'Outrages by the Blacks', Hunter River Gazette, 12 February 1842.\n\nJ. Campbell: The Early Settlement of Queensland, Brisbane 1936, p. 11; A. Hodgson, P. M. to Col. Sec., NSW Col. Sec., 9744 of 1841; Native Police Incidents... etc by an ex-officer, Queenslander, 10 June 1899; Geographical Memoir of Melville Island and Port Essington, JRGS, 4, 1834, p. 153; M. Hartwig: The Progress of White Settlement in the Alice Springs District etc., Ph.D. Adelaide 1965, 2, p. 409.\n\n11 September 1830.\n\nArthur to Sir George Murray, 12 September 1829, HRA, 1, 15, p. 446.\n\nHistorical Records of New South Wales (hereafter HRNSW), 5, p. 514.\n\nMemorandum on the Means of Checking the Ravages of the Natives of Van Diemens Land; G. A. Arthur Papers, 19, ML, MSS A2179.\n\nQuoted by J. E. Calder: Tasmanian Aborigines, ML, MSS A612, p. 249.\n\nJ. Jorgensen to T. Anstey, 24 February 1830, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/320.\n\n5 May 1840.\n\nReports of Mr. G. A. Robinson to Col. Sec., Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/318, pp. 383, 511, 513; N. J. B. Plomley: Friendly Mission, p. 553.\n\nSelect Committee on Native Mounted Police, p. 7.\n\nCommissioner of Crown Lands, Moreton Bay to Col. Sec., 3 October 1843, NSW Col. Sec., 7448 of 1843 filed with 4122 of 1846.\n\n21 January 1843.\n\n3 June 1843.\n\nLetter of Mr B. Doyle to C. M. Doyle, 19 January 1843, Maitland Mercury, 28 January 1843.\n\nSydney Morning Herald, 28 November 1848.\n\nG. Caley: 'A Short Account Relative to the Proceedings in New South Wales', HRNSW, 6, p. 300.\n\nHunter to Portland, 2 January 1800, HRNSW, 4, p. 3.\n\nSee Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/316, pp. 127, 430\u2013443.\n\nSelect Committee on Native Police, NSWLCV&P, 1856\u201357, 1, p. 1209.\n\nHRA, 1, 25, p. 2.\n\nCooktown Courier, 1 January 1878.\n\nQueenslander, 15 February 1879.\n\n16 July 1830.\n\nIbid., 1 June 1831.\n\nReport of Aborigines Committee, 27 August 1830, Papers of Aborigines Committee, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO\/1\/319, also CSO\/1\/323, p. 77.\n\nReport of the Aborigines Committee, 20 October 1831; Papers Relative to the Aboriginal Tribes in British Possessions, BPP, 1834, p. 158.\n\nStirling to Aberdeen, 10 July 1835, Despatches to Colonial Office, 14 September 1834\u20136 December 1838, Letter 53, BL.\n\nR. M. Lyon, 'A Glance at the Manners and Language of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of W. Aus.', Perth Gazette, 30 March 1833.\n\nGeographical Memoirs of Melville Island, p. 153.\n\n24 June 1874.\n\nE. J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions... etc, 2, 216\u2013217.\n\nQueenslander, 10 July 1880.\n\nRobinson to La Trobe, 15 August 1841, Port Phillip Protectorate, In Letters, VPRO.\n\nF. Tuckfield, Journal, pp. 95\u201396; Report of Assistant Protector, E. S. Parker to G. A. Robinson, 20 June 1839, Port Phillip Papers, 1840, Part 1.\n\nW. H. Wiseman to Chief Commissioner, Crown Lands, 7 January 1857, NSW Col. Sec., 796 of 1857.\n\nJ. E. Tenison-Woods, 'A Day with the Myalls', 13 January 1882.\n\nT.S.B., 'The Niggers Again', 26 June 1886.\n\nC. Chewings: Back in the Stone Age, p. 131.\n\nKing to Hobart, 20 December 1804, HRA, 1, 5, pp. 166\u2013167.\n\nSydney Morning Herald, 8 July 1842.\n\nA. W. Howitt: Native Tribes... etc, p. 299.\n\nJ. Morrell: The Story... etc, p. 15.\n\n14 January.\n\n11 September 1880.\n\nQueenslander, 23 February 1878.\n\nIbid., 15 May 1875.\n\n25 September 1875.\n\n30 September 1879. See also Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 32, 1880, p. 306; speech by Mr Baynes, Queenslander, 16, 23 August 1879; Maryborough Chronicle, 16 March 1880; John Mathew Papers, Institute of Aboriginal Studies, MSS 950.\n\nMudgee Guardian, 23 July 1900.\n\nIbid., 3 September 1900.\n\nSydney Morning Herald, 23 November 1900.\n\nIbid., 29 October 1900. See also H. Reynolds, 'Jimmy Governor and Jimmie Blacksmith', Australian Literary Studies, 9, 1, May 1979.\n\nReport in Evening News, cutting enclosed in NSW Archives file, Police\/4\/8581.\n\nG. A. Robinson Papers, 60, ML, MSS A7081, p. 46.\n\nB. Threadgill: South Australian Land Exploration, 1856\u20131880, Adelaide 1922, p. 58.\n\nC. Rolleston, Darling Downs, 11 January 1851, Reports of Commissioners of Crown Lands on the State of the Aborigines for 1850, Colonial Office Papers, CO 201\/412.\n\nRev. J. Y. Wilson, Replies to Circular Letter from Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines, NSWLCV&P, 2nd Session 1846, p. 14.\n\nSelect Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines, NSWLCV&P, 1845, p. 55.\n\nI. Crawford: William Thomas and the Port Phillip Protectorate 1839\u20131849, M. A. Melbourne 1967, p. 22.\n\nW. Hull, Select Committee on the Aborigines, Proceedings of the Legislative Council of Victoria, 1858\u201359, D8, p. 12.\n\nDredge to Bunting, 17 February 1840, James Dredge Notebook, La Trobe Library, MSS 421959, Box 16\/5.\n\nMurray-Upper tapes, Black Oral History Collection: James Cook University.\n\n# 5 The Politics of Contact\n\nE. S. Parker, Quarterly Report 1 December 1840\u201328 February 1841, Port Phillip Protectorate, 11, North West District, VPRO. Also Parker to Robinson, 1 January 1845; Aborigines 1842\u201352, NSW Col. Sec., 4\/7153, NSW Archives.\n\nLonsdale to Deas Thomson, 28 October 1837, Aborigines and the Native Police, NSW Col. Sec., 4\/1135. 1, NSW Archives.\n\nThe Journal of Francis Tuckfield, p. 299.\n\nA. C. Grant: Early Station Life in Queensland, ML, MSS A858, p. 50.\n\nM. J. Meggitt: Desert People, Sydney 1962, p. 25.\n\nNSWLCV&P, 1846, p. 968.\n\nNSWLCV&P, 1849, p. 18.\n\nSelect Committee on the Protectorate, NSWLCV&P, 1849, p. 18.\n\nA. W. Howitt: Native Tribes, pp. 330\u2013332.\n\nReports of Commissioners of Crown Lands for 1850 on the state of the Aborigines, Colonial Office CO 201\/412, p. 239.\n\nG. S. Olivey, Le Grange Bay, 14 May 1901, West Australia Parliamentary Papers, 2, 1901, No. 26, p. 50.\n\n'Natives of Central Australia', Journal of Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australia Branch (hereafter RGSSA), 4, 1898\u20131901, p. 27.\n\nHutt to Stanley, 8 April 1842, Aborigines: Australian Colonies, BPP, 1844, p. 413 also C. Symmons to Col. Sec., 31 December 1842, Ibid., p. 418.\n\nE. S. Parker, quoted in M. F. Christie: Race Relations... in Early Victoria, p. 187.\n\n'Some Aborigines I Have Known', RGSSA, 1894 5, pp. 43\u201345.\n\nF. J. Gillen: 'Natives of Central Australia', p. 27. See also B. Spencer, F. J. Gillen: Across Australia, London 1912, p. 186; The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Dover edition, New York 1968, p. 8; The Arunta, London 1922, p. 7.\n\nGovernment and General Order, 22 February 1796, HRNSW, 3, p. 26.\n\nGovernment and General Order, 22 November 1801, HRNSW, 5, p. 628.\n\nMoreton Bay correspondent, SMH, 12 October 1843.\n\nRobinson to G. Whitcomb, 10 August 1832, Tasmanian Aborigines, ML, MSS A\/612, p. 133.\n\nD. R. Moore: Islanders and Aborigines, pp. 177, 231.\n\nPapers Relative to the Affairs of South Australia, BPP, 1843, p. 299.\n\nD. Collins: Account of the English Colony of New South Wales, 1798\u20131804, 2 vols, London 1802, 2, p. 96.\n\nIbid., 2, pp. 22, 28. See also B. Bridges: 'Pemulwy: A Noble Savage', Newsletter of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 88, 1970, pp. 3\u20134.\n\nPerth Gazette, 2, 16 March, 6 April, 4, 18, 22 May, 1 June, 13 July 1833. See also B. T. Haynes et al: West Australian Aborigines 1622\u20131972, Perth 1973, pp. 5\u20136.\n\nA. Hasluck: 'Yagan the Patriot', WAHS, 7, 1961, pp. 33\u201348. For Dundalli see J. J. Knight: In the Early Days, Brisbane 1895; T. Petrie: Reminiscences of Early Queensland, Brisbane 1932; T. Welsby: Collected Works, 2 vols, Brisbane 1907.\n\nC. Symmons, Protector of Aborigines, quarterly report to Col. Sec., 30 June 1841, WA Col. Sec., 95, 1841.\n\nG. Taplin: The Folklore, Manners, Customs etc, p. 12.\n\nW. Walker, Sydney, 5 December, 1821, Bonwick Transcripts ML:MSS Box 21.\n\nG. F. Moore to Col. Sec., 23 October 1837, WACSO, 56, 1837.\n\nRev. Horton, 1822, reported in J. Bonwick: The Last of the Tasmanians, London 1870, p. 93.\n\nReports of Mr G. A. Robinson whilst in pursuit of the Natives, Tas. Col. Sec., CSC.\n\nM. Sahlens: Stone Age Economics, London 1974, pp. 93\u201394.\n\nMacquarie to Bathurst, 8 October 1814, HRA, 1, 8, 368.\n\nAborigines: Australian Colonies, BPP 1844, p. 119.\n\nQuarterly Report of Protector of Aborigines, 31 March 1842, W.A. Col. Sec., 108\/1842.\n\nPeter Brown, York, 20 July 1840 to Col. Sec., W.A. Col. Sec., 89\/1840.\n\nSelect Committee on the Aborigines and the Protectorate, NSWLCV&P, 1849, p. 17.\n\nHRA, 1, 8, pp. 368\u2013369.\n\nSelect Committee on the Aborigines and the Protectorate, NSWLCV&P, 1849, p. 17.\n\nMarsden, Sydney, 21 November 1825, Bonwick Transcripts ML\/MSS Box 53.\n\nJ. McLaren: My Crowded Solitude, Sun Books, Melbourne 1966, p. 37.\n\nIbid., p. 40.\n\nHutt to Stanley, 8 April 1842, Aborigines: Australian Colonies, 1844, BPP, p. 412.\n\nS. Simpson, Moreton Bay, 31 December 1849, Commissioners of Crown Lands Reports on the Conditions of the Aborigines for 1849, Colonial Office, CO 201\/430.\n\nA Lady (pseud.): My Experiences in Australia etc, London 1860 in I. McBride (ed.): Records of Time Past, Canberra 1978, p. 249.\n\nJ. B. Walker: Early Tasmania, Hobart 1902, p. 249.\n\nAnnual Report of the Chief Protector of Aborigines, 1841, Port Phillip Aborigines Protectorate, Box 10.\n\nE. S. Parker, Statement without date, Loddon, Port Phillip Aborigines Protectorate, Box 12.\n\nD. Collins: An Account of the English Colony of New South Wales, London 1802, pp. 328\u2013329.\n\nRobinson to La Trobe, 14 December 1839, Aborigines and the Native Police, NSW CSO\/4\/1135.1.\n\nReport of Assistant Protector Parker, 20 June 1839, Port Phillip Papers, NSW Col. Sec., 1840, 4\/2510.\n\nG. S. Olivey, Inspector of Aborigines, La Grange Bay, 14 May 1901, WAPP, 2, 1901, No. 26, p. 50.\n\nIbid, p. 49.\n\nWAPP, 2, 1902 3, No. 32, p. 18.\n\nReport of Protector of Aborigines, 10 February 1842, S. A. Col. Sec., GRG\/24\/6.\n\nE. Curr: Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, Melbourne 1883, p. 299.\n\nAnnual Report, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, 1848, Box 11.\n\n3 December 1842.\n\nHRA, 1, 8, pp. 370\u2013371.\n\nVictorian Parliamentary Papers, 3, 1877\u20131878, No. 76, p. 532.\n\nAborigines and the Native Police, NSW Col. Sec., CSO\/4\/1135.1.\n\nQuoted in J. Bonwick: The Last of the Tasmanians, London 1870, p. 356.\n\nSelect Committee on the Native Police, QVP, 1861, p. 116.\n\nThe Last of the Tasmanians, pp. 382\u2013384.\n\nM. B. Hale: The Aborigines of Australia, London c. 1889, pp. 24\u201325.\n\nG. Grey: Journals... , 2, pp. 370\u2013371.\n\nSelect Committee on the Aborigines and the Protectorate, NSWLCV&P, 1849, p. 17.\n\nG. Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 8, 9.\n\nJ. Bulmer: Some Account of the Aborigines of the Lower Murray etc., Proceedings Royal Geographical Society of Victoria, 1, 5, March 1888, p. 30.\n\nJames Gunther Lecture, ML\/MSS B505.\n\nQuoted in The Mapoon Story, 2, Sydney 1975, p. 24.\n\nIbid.\n\nG. Taplin (ed.): The Folklore, Manners, Customs etc., p. 12.\n\nJournal of an Expedition, pp. 416\u2013417.\n\nThe Examiner, 3 December 1842.\n\nIbid.\n\nThe Last of the Tasmanians, p. 349.\n\nReports of J. B. Walker and G. W. Walker, ML\/MSS B706.\n\nSelect Committee on the Aborigines and the Protectorate, NSWLCV&P, 1849, pp. 14, 27.\n\nIbid, p. 25.\n\nReports of the Commissioners of Crown Lands..., Colonial Office, COL\/201\/442.\n\nR. H. Bland to Col. Sec., 4 January 1843, Aborigines: Australian Colonies, 1844, BPP, p. 417.\n\nG. Wyndham: Answer to Questionnaire of Immigration Committee re Aborigines, ML\/MSS A\/611.\n\n# 6 The Pastoral Frontier\n\nJournal of an Expedition, pp. 14, 16, 67, 69, 70.\n\nActing Sergeant J. Dunn, Burketown to Inspector of Police, Normanton, 15 May 1897, Qld Police Commissioner's File 412M, 17785 of 1897.\n\nReport of Northern Protector of Aborigines, 1902, QVP, 2, 1903.\n\nCommandant to Col. Sec., Callandoon, 1 March 1852, NSWLCV&P, 1852, p. 790.\n\nP. Sutton, L. Hercus, Barnabus Roberts in oral history collection pending publication with Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.\n\n'Bulleta': The Case for the Aboriginals, Queenslander, 12 November 1898.\n\nQueenslander, 20 July 1895.\n\nReport of Return of Mr Petrie from an excursion to the north, NSW Col. Sec., 4284 of 1842.\n\nPortland Mercury, 5 October 1842.\n\nT. F. Bride (ed): Letters from Victorian Pioneers, Melbourne 1969, pp. 103, 270.\n\nH. C. Corfield in NSW Col. Sec., 9029 of 1850.\n\nSMH, 5 October 1840.\n\nAdelaide Observer, 18 April 1846. Report of a Journey to Mt. Bryan, SA Col. Sec., GRG\/24\/6.\n\nA. MacPherson: Mount Abundance, London 1879, p. 32.\n\nC. Eden: My Wife and I in Queensland, London 1872, p. 221.\n\n16 April 1846.\n\nHRA, 1, 24.\n\nA Journal of an Expedition, p. 16.\n\nJ. Gormly: Exploration and Settlement on the Murray and Murrumbidgee [sic], Journal and Proceedings Australian Historical Society, 2, 2, 1966, p. 40.\n\nEdward Mayne, 3 July 1843, Aborigines: Australian Colonies, BPP, 1844, p. 229.\n\n6 January 1849.\n\nD. S. MacMillan: Bowen Downs 1863\u20131903, Sydney 1963, p. 22.\n\nAborigines: Australian Colonies, BPP, 1844, pp. 114\u2013116.\n\nHRA, 1, 25, p. 2.\n\nReports from Resident Magistrate... on Special Duty to the Murchison and Gascoyne Districts, West Australia Legislative Council Votes & Proceedings, 1882, No. 33, p. 10.\n\nIbid.\n\nSome Aborigines I Have Known, pp. 53\u201354.\n\nC. R. Haly, QVP, 1861, p. 80.\n\nE. W. Palmer to A. W. Howitt, 5 August 1882, Howitt Papers, National Museum of Victoria.\n\nSelect Committee on the Aborigines Bill, SAPP, 1899, No. 77, p. 26.\n\nIbid pp. 113\u2013114.\n\nI. F. Kelsey, Bowen to H.E. The Governor, 22 October 1869, Qld Col. Sec., 852 of 1870.\n\nA. S. Haydon, 'Slavery in Queensland', Queenslander, 12 April 1884.\n\nA. C. Grant: Early Station Life, p. 96.\n\nBack in the Stone Age, p. 44.\n\n23 May 1885.\n\n# 7 Other Frontiers\n\nA. Searcy: In Northern Seas, Adelaide 1905, p. 10.\n\nCommissioner of Crown Lands to Col. Sec., 14 January 1842, Aborigines: Australian Colonies, BPP, 1844. For Bass Strait see S. Murray-Smith: 'Beyond the Pale: The Island Community of Bass Strait in the Nineteenth Century', THRA, 20, 4, December 1973, p. 172.\n\nFirst Discovery of Port Davey and Macquarie Harbour by Captain James Kelly 1815 16 and 1824, Tasmanian Legislative Council Votes & Proceedings, 1881, No. 75, p. 14.\n\nA. C. V. Bligh: The Golden Quest, Sydney 1938, p. 35. See also Dispatches between the Governor and the Secretary of State, WALCV&P, 1872, No. 5.\n\nC. Anderson: Aboriginal Economy and Contact Relations at Bloomfield River etc, Newsletter Australian Institute of Aboriginal Affairs, 12, September 1979, p. 35.\n\nIbid.\n\nMissionary Notes, 15 January 1896.\n\nW. H. Hovell: Remarks on a Voyage to Western Port, 7 November 1826\u201325 March 1827, La Trobe Library MSS CY, 8, 1\/32C.\n\nC. Anderson: Aboriginal Economy and Contact Relations at Bloomfield River etc, p. 35.\n\nE. W. Streeter: Pearls and Pearling Life, London 1886, p. 158.\n\nReport on the Pearl Shell Fisheries of Torres Strait, QVP, 1880, 2, p. 1165. See also Streeter, p. 166 for the north-west.\n\nEditorial 'Aboriginal Murderers', 19 November 1890.\n\nW. Saville-Kent: Pearl and Pearl Shell Fisheries of North Queensland, QVP, 1890, 3, p. 731.\n\n21 April 1805.\n\n14 May 1814.\n\nE. C. Putt, Barron River, 13 July 1888.\n\nBidwell to Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands, Tenana, 14 October 1852, NSW Col. Sec., 9967 of 1852.\n\nThirty-three Years in Tasmania and Victoria, London 1862, p. 57.\n\n27 January.\n\nEtheridge correspondent of Cleveland Bay Express, 25 October 1873.\n\nQueenslander, 8 December 1877.\n\nA. C. Haldane, Mining Warden, Etheridge, QVP, 3, 1888.\n\nA Day in the Life of the Blacks, Church News, 29, 6 June 1897, pp. 46\u201347.\n\nM. Durack, The Rock and the Sand, p. 730.\n\nChurch News, 21, 3, March 1889, p. 21.\n\nM. Hartwig, The Progress of White Settlement in the Alice Springs District, Ph.D., Adelaide 1965, p. 514.\n\nChurch News, 21, February 1889, p. 12.\n\nIbid., 29, 8, August 1897, p. 63.\n\nIbid., 26, 8, 1894.\n\nJournal of W. Schmidt, 28 December 1842\u20136 January 1843, p. 123; Papers of J. D. Lang, Vol. 20, ML MSS A2240.\n\nMissionary Notes, 15 August 1895, p. 72.\n\nIbid., 15 November 1895, p. 72.\n\nIbid., 15 December 1895, p. 104.\n\nIbid., 22 June 1896, p. 44.\n\nIbid.\n\nW. H. Wiseman in Rockhampton Bulletin, 21 January 1871.\n\n'Live and Let Live', Cooktown 3 July, Queenslander, 20 July 1895.\n\n'Aboriginal Territorial Organization', Oceania, 36, 1, September 1965, p. 17.\n\nE. J. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions, 2, pp. 373, 445.\n\nLetter 'The Nigger Nuisance', J.N.W., Northern Territory Times, 13 February 1874.\n\nA. K. Eckermann, Half-Cast\u2013Out Cast, Ph.D., Queensland 1977, p. 130.\n\nQuarterly Report of Protector of Aborigines, 30 June 1843, SA Col. Sec., GRG\/24\/6 A(1843), p. 132; Quarterly Report of Aborigines Department, SA Col. Sec., GRG\/24\/6 A(1843), p. 812.\n\nMaryborough correspondent, Queenslander, 23 February 1867.\n\nMoreton Bay Courier, 3 July 1858; Maryborough Chronicle, 3 July 1858, 14 May 1863. A. E. Halloran, Commissioner for Crown Lands, Wide Bay to Chief Commissioner, 26 December 1856; Letterbook of Commissioner for Wide Bay and Burnett, QSA 30\/11.\n\nQueenslander, 6 March 1869.\n\nRockhampton News, 13 November 1865 quoted in Queensland Times, 23 November 1865.\n\n# Conclusion\n\nW. K. Hancock, Australia, Jacaranda edition, Brisbane 1960, p. 20.\n\nAfter the Dreaming, Sydney 1969, p. 49.\n\n# SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nOfficial Printed Sources\n\nBRITAIN\n\nHouse of Commons, Sessional Papers\n\n1831, 19, No. 259: Van Diemen's Land. Return to an Address... for Copies of all Correspondence between Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and His Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies, on the Subject of the Military Operations lately carried on against the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemens land\n\n1831, 19, No. 261: New South Wales. Return to an Address... dated 19 July 1831 for Copies of Instructions given by His Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies, for Promoting the Moral and Religious Instruction of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of New Holland or Van Diemens Land\n\n1834, 44, No. 617: Aboriginal Tribes (North America, New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and British Guinea)\n\n1836, 7, No. 538: Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements)\n\n1837, 7, No. 425: Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements)\n\n1839, 34, No. 526: Australian Aborigines... Copies or Extracts of Despatches Relative to the Massacre of Aborigines of Australia...\n\n1843, 33, No. 141: Port Essington: Copies or Extracts of Any Correspondence Relative to the Establishment of a Settlement...\n\n1843, 32, No. 505: Papers Relative to the Affairs of South Australia, (especially pp. 267\u2013340)\n\n1844, 34, No. 627: Aborigines (Australian Colonies)... Return to an address... for Copies or Extracts from the Despatches of the Governors of the Australian Colonies, with the Reports of the Protectors of Aborigines... to illustrate the Condition of the Aboriginal Population of said Colonies...\n\n1897, 61, No. 8350: Western Australia: Correspondence Relating to the Abolition of the Aborigines Protection Board\n\nNEW SOUTH WALES\n\nLegislative Council, Votes and Proceedings\n\n1838: Report from the Committee on the Aborigines Question\n\n1839, 2: Report from the Committee on Police and Gaols\n\n1841: Report from the Committee on Immigration with... Replies to a Circular Letter on the Aborigines\n\n1843: New South Wales (Aborigines). Return to an address by Dr Thomson... comprising details of Government Expenditure on Aborigines, 1837\u201343, and a large collection of correspondence relating to the protectorate and the missions\n\n1844, 1: New South Wales (Aborigines). Return to an address by Sir Thomas Mitchell... for numbers of whites and Aborigines killed in conflicts since the settlement of the Port Phillip District\n\n1845: Report from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines\n\n1850, 1: The Native Police, Report of the Commandant to the Colonial Secretary\n\n1852, 1: Letter from Mr F. Walker, Commandant, Native Police\n\n1853, 1: Return of Murders by Aborigines in the Northern Districts\n\n1855, 1: Report of Board of Enquiry Held at Moreton Bay regarding Commandant F. Walker Legislative Assembly: Votes and Proceedings\n\n1856\u201357, 1: Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force\n\n1858, 2: Report from the Select Committee on Murders by the Aborigines on the Dawson River\n\nSOUTH AUSTRALIA\n\nParliamentary Papers\n\n1857\u201358, 2, No. 156: Explorations of Mr S. Hack\n\n1857\u201358, 2, No. 193: Northern Exploration\n\n1858, 1, No. 25: Northern Exploration: Reports etc of Explorations... by Babbage, Warburty, Geharty and Parry\n\n1878, 4, No. 209: Journal of Mr Barlay's Exploration\n\n1884, 3: Quarterly Report on the Northern Territory\n\n1885, 4, No. 170: Report on the Pursuit of the Daly River Murderers\n\n1888, 3, No. 53: Government Residents Report on the Northern Territory for 1887\n\n1890, 2, No. 28: Government Residents Report on the Northern Territory for 1889\n\n1892, 3, No. 129: Report on the Mai-Nini Murder Trial\n\n1892, 3, No. 181: Government Residents Report on the Northern Territory for 1891\n\n1899, 2, No. 77a: Report from the Select Committee on the Aborigines Bill\n\n1899, 2, No. 77: Minutes of Evidence on the Aborigines Bill\n\n1900, 3, No. 60: Justice in the Northern Territory; Letter from Mr Justice Dashwood\n\n1901, 2, No. 45: Government Resident's Report on the Northern Territory for 1900\n\n1913, 2, No. 26: Report from the Royal Commission on the Aborigines\n\nTASMANIA\n\nLegislative Council Journals and Papers\n\n1863, No. 48: Half-Caste Islanders in Bass's Straits, Report by the Venerable Archdeacon Reibey\n\n1881, No. 75: First Discovery of Port Davey and Macquarie Harbour by Captain James Kelly in... 1815\u201316 and 1824\n\nVICTORIA\n\nLegislative Council: Votes and Proceedings\n\n1858\u201359, No. D8: Report on the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines\n\nParliamentary Papers\n\n1877\u201378, 3, No. 76: Report of the Royal Commission on the Aborigines\n\n1882\u201383, 2, No. 5: Report of the Board Appointed to Inquire into and Report Upon... the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station\n\n1873\u201384: Ninth to Twentieth Reports of Board for the Protection of Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria, presented to both Houses of Parliament\n\nQUEENSLAND\n\nVotes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly\n\n1860: Report of Select Committee on the Police\n\n1861: Report of Select Committee on Native Police Force\n\n1863: Papers Regarding the Dismissal of J. Donald Harris of the Native Police\n\n1867, 1: Copies of Correspondence... concerning the inquiry into the case of C. J. Blakeney, late Lieutenant of Native Police\n\n1867, 1: Charges Against the Native Police under the Command of Mr Sub-Lieutenant Hill\n\n1867, 2: Alleged Massacre of Blacks at Morinish Diggings\n\n1872: Report of Acting Commandant of Police for 1871\n\n1874, 2: Enquiry into the Claims of Patrick Corbett\n\n1875, 1: Report of Commandant of Police for 1874\n\n1876, 3: Report of the North-Western Exploring Expedition\n\n1876, 3: Report of Expedition in Search of Gold... in the Palmer District by Mulligan and Party\n\n1878, 2: Report of the Aborigines Commissioners\n\n1881, 1: Report of Explorations in Cape York Peninsula by R. L. Jack\n\n1881, 2: Further Reports on the Progress of the Gold Prospecting Expedition in Cape York Peninsula\n\n1883\u201384: Report of Police Magistrate, Thursday Island on Pearl Shell and B\u00eache de Mer Fisheries in Torres Strait\n\n1885, 2: Reports of Mr Douglas's Cruise Among the Islands of Torres Strait\n\n1886, 2: Visit of Inspection to Various Islands in the G.S.S. Albatross\n\n1888, 3: Annual Reports of the Gold Fields Commissioners\n\n1889, 3: Annual Reports of the Gold Fields Commissioners\n\n1890, 3: Report on the Pearl and Pearl Shell Fisheries of North Queensland by W. Saville-Kent\n\n1890, 3: Annual Report of the Government Resident at Thursday Island\n\n1894, 2: Annual Report of Government Resident at Thursday Island\n\n1896, 4: Report on the Aborigines of North Queensland by Mr A. Meston\n\n1897, 2: Report on the North Queensland Aborigines and the Native Police by W. Parry Okeden\n\n1900\u20131904: Annual Reports of Northern Protectorate of Aborigines\n\n1902, 1: Report of the Southern Protector of Aboriginals\n\n1903, 2: W. E. Roth: North Queensland Ethnography Bulletin No. 5\n\nWESTERN AUSTRALIA\n\nVotes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council\n\n1871, No. 2: Information Respecting the Habits and Customs of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Western Australia\n\n1872, No. 5: Despatches between the Governor and the Secretary of State for the Colonies\n\n1875\u201376, No. 12: Correspondence Relative to the State of Affairs on the North-West Coast\n\n1880, No. A16: Report of the Government Resident, Roebourne on the Pearl Shell Industries of the North-West Coast\n\n1882, No. 33: Reports from the Resident Magistrate... in the Murchison and Gascoyne Districts\n\n1884, No. 32: Report of a Commission to Inquire into the treatment of Aboriginal Native Prisoners of the Crown\n\n1885, No. A15: Report of the Select Committee... Appointed to Consider and Report Upon... the Treatment and Condition of the Aboriginal Natives of the Colony\n\nParliamentary Papers of Western Australia\n\n1901, 2, No. 26: Report on Stations Visited by the Travelling Inspector of Aborigines\n\n1902\u201303, 2, No. 32: Report of the Aborigines Department\n\n1903\u201304, 2, No. 32: Report of the Aborigines Department\n\n1905, No. 5: Report of the Royal Commission on the Condition of the Natives\n\nDOCUMENTARY COLLECTIONS\n\nHistorical Records of Australia, Series One, 1\u201325 and Series Three, 1\u20136\n\nHistorical Records of New South Wales, 1\u20137\n\nOfficial Manuscript Sources\n\nARCHIVES OFFICE OF NEW SOUTH WALES\n\nColonial Secretary's Correspondence: In Letters (special bundles)\n\nAborigines, 4\/7153\n\nAborigines 1833\u201335, 4\/2219.1\n\nAborigines 1836, 4\/2302.1\n\nAborigines 1837\u201339, 4\/2433.1\n\nAborigines 1849, 4\/1141\n\nAborigines 1849, 4\/2831.1\n\nAborigines 1852, 4\/713.2\n\nAborigines and the Native Police 1835\u201344, 4\/1135.1\n\nAboriginal Outrages, 2\/8020.4\n\nPort Phillip Papers, 1839, 4\/2471\n\nPort Phillip Papers, 1840, Part 1, 4\/2510\n\nPort Phillip Papers, 1840, Part 2, 4\/2511\n\nPort Phillip Papers, 1841, Part 1, 4\/2547\n\nPort Phillip Papers, 1842, Part 1, 4\/2588 B\n\nPort Phillip Papers, 1842, Part 2, 4\/2589 B\n\nPort Phillip Papers, 1846, 4\/2745-2\n\nLetters Received from and about Wide Bay, 1850\u201357, 4\/7173\n\nRaffles Bay, 4\/2060.2\n\nReports on the Border Police, 1843\u201346, 4\/7203\n\nLetters from Moreton Bay, 1843, 4\/2618.1\n\nBathurst 1815\u201323, 4\/1798\n\nBathurst 1824, 4\/1800\n\nBathurst 1826, 4\/1801\n\nBathurst 1824\u201326, 4\/1799\n\nSupreme Court Records\n\nPapers Relating to the Aborigines, 1796\u20131839, 1161\n\nMITCHELL LIBRARY\n\nAborigines MSS A\/611\n\nLetters from Government Officials, MSS A\/664\n\nQueensland Native Police: Answers to Questionnaire, 1856, MSS A467\n\nLetterbook, Commissioner of Crown Land, Darling Downs 1843\u201348, MSS A1764\u20132\n\nSomerset Letterbook No. 1, MSS B1414\n\nTASMANIAN STATE ARCHIVES\n\nPapers Relating to the Aborigines, 7578\n\nReports on the Murders and Other Outrages Committed by the Aborigines, CSO\/1\/316\n\nRecords Relating to the Aboriginals, CSO\/1\/317\n\nReports of Mr G. A. Robinson Whilst in Pursuit of the Natives, CSO\/1\/318\n\nPapers of the Aborigines Committee, CSO\/1\/319\n\nReports of the Roving Parties, CSO\/1\/320\n\nSuggestions Relative to the Capture of the Natives, CSO\/1\/323\n\nPapers Relating to the Black Line, CSO\/1\/324\n\nBATTYE LIBRARY, PERTH\n\nSwan River Papers, 9, 10\n\nColonial Secretary: In Letters, Volumes concerned with the Aborigines\n\n53, April, May 1837\n\n54, June, July 1837\n\n56, October 1837\n\n89, 1840\n\n95, 1841\n\n108, 1842\n\n173, 1848\n\nSTATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA\n\nGovernors Despatches GRG\/2\/6\/1\n\nLetterbook of the Government Resident, Port Lincoln 3\/379\n\nReport of Attack on Barrow Creek Telegraph Station GRG\/24\/6\/1874 Nos. 332, 347\n\nColonial Secretary: In Letters, 1837\u201341, GRG\/24\/1; 1842\u201345, GRG\/24\/6\n\nColonial Secretary's Letterbooks, GRG\/24\/4\/3; GRG\/24\/4\n\nProtector of Aborigines Letterbook 1840\u201357, GRG\/52\/7\n\nVICTORIAN PUBLIC RECORDS OFFICE\n\nRecords of the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, especially the boxes \u2014 Westernport, North-Western District, Mainly In-Letters, Mt Rouse\n\nQUEENSLAND STATE ARCHIVES\n\nNew South Wales Colonial Secretary, Letters Received Relating to Moreton Bay and Queensland, 1822\u20131860\n\nMicrofilm copies of material from State Archives of NSW, Reels A2\/1 \u2014 A2\/48 including the special bundles and A2\/48 which contains Commissioner of Crown Lands re Aborigines in the District, 1854 Government Resident, Moreton Bay re complaints about the Native Police 1857\n\nCorrespondence concerning the police firing on the Aborigines\n\nNative Police: Moreton Bay 1857, Reels A2\/47\n\nNative Police Papers QSA\/NMP 48\/100, 48\/111, 48\/120\n\nGovernment Resident, Moreton Bay, QSA\/RES\/2 and 3 48\/101, 48\/102\n\nLetterbook of Commissioner for Crown Lands, Wide Bay and Burnett, 24\/9\/53-30 \/12\/54, QSA\/CCL\/35\/889 and 1\/1\/55-13\/12\/57, QSA\/CCL\/30\/11\n\nLetterbook of W. H. Wiseman, 5\/2\/55-30\/5\/60, QSA\/CCL\/7\/61\n\nColonial Secretary: In Letters, 1860\u20131890, the QSA\/Col\/A files and the Special Bundles Relating to the Aborigines, QSA\/Col\/139-QSA\/Col\/144\n\nJAMES COOK UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, TOWNSVILLE\n\nMicrofilm collection of the Joint Copying Project of Colonial Office Files re New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia. Especially useful were the files: New South Wales, Original Correspondence, 1838\u20131849 and Queensland, Original Correspondence 1861\u20131900\n\nOther Manuscript Sources\n\nMITCHELL LIBRARY\n\nPapers of Sir George Arthur, especially Vol. 19, Letters received 1827\u201328, MSS A\/2179, Vol. 20, 1829\u201330, MSS A2180 and Vol. 28\n\nAborigines, 1825\u201337, MSS A2188, Tasmanian Aborigines, MSS A612\n\nPapers of G. A. Robinson, especially Vol. 14\n\nPort Phillip Protectorate, 1839\u201340, MSS A7035\n\nPort Phillip Protectorate: Correspondence 54\u201357a and other papers, 1839\u201349, MSS A7075-7078-2\n\nPort Phillip Protectorate, Official Reports, 59\u201361, 1841\u201349, MSS A7078-MSS A7082\n\nJ. D. Lang, Papers, 20, MSS 2240\n\nW. Gardner, Productions and Resources of the Northern Districts of NSW, 2 vols, 1842\u201354, MSS A176\/1, A176\/2\n\nWilliam Thomas Papers, especially his journal for 1844\u201347, uncatalogued MSS 214\/2 and 3\n\nE. J. Eyre, Autobiographical of Residence and Exploration in Australia, 1832\u201339, MSS A1806\n\nDiary of John Gilbert, 18\/9\/44-22\/6\/45, MSS A2587\n\nJesse Gregson Memoirs, MSS 1382\n\nA. Le Souef, Personal Recollections of Early Victoria, MSS A2762 Reminiscences of Mr James Nesbit, MSS A1533\n\nA. C. Grant, Early Station Life in Queensland, MSS A858\n\nTelfer, Reminiscences, MSS A2376\n\nJ. Backhouse, G. Walker, Report of a Visit to the Penal Settlement, Moreton Bay, MSS B706\n\nH. W. Best Diary, 20\/9\/62-15\/4\/63 MSS B515\/1\n\nArthur Bloxham Diary, May-July 1863, MSS B515\/1\n\nAndrew Murray, Journal of an Expedition 1859\u20131860, MSS 736\n\nR. B. Mitchell, Reminiscences 1855\u201366, MSS B575\n\nJ. Raven, Reminiscences of a Western Queensland Pioneer, MSS A2692\n\nJ. F. Stevens, Histories of Pioneers, MSS 1120\n\nTASMANIAN STATE ARCHIVES\n\nVan Diemens Land Company Papers, Letters and Despatches, 1828\u20131846, VDC 5\/1-7\n\nBATTYE LIBRARY, PERTH\n\nConstance Norris, Memories of Champion Bay or Old Geraldton, Q994.12\/ GER\n\nL. F. Clarke, West Australian Natives: My Experiences With them, PR 2766\n\nMr William Coffin, Oral History Tape, PR 9893\n\nReminiscences of Mr F. H. Townsend, PR 3497\n\nReport of the Rev. John Smithers re the Swan River Aborigines, 1840, PR 1785a\n\nExtracts from the Diary of Lieut. G. F. Dashwood in Perth, September 1832, PR 956\/FC\n\nDiary of Dr S. W. Viveash, QB\/VIV\n\nF. F. B. Wittenoom, Some Notes on his Life QB\/WIT\n\nJournals of Trevarthon C. Scholl, 1865\u201366 QB\/SHO\n\nL. C. Burgess: Pioneers of Nor'-West Australia, PR 40\n\nSTATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA\n\nLetters Written by John Mudge... whilst a trooper at Pt. Lincoln and Mt. Wedge, 1857\u201360, SAA 1518\n\nJ. B. Bull Reminiscences 1835\u201394, SAA 950\n\nExtracts from the Diary of Mary Thomas, SAA 1058M\n\nSimpson Newland, The Ramingaries (Encounter Bay) Tribe of Aborigines, A571\/A4\n\nResolution of the Bush Club, 9\/5\/1839, A546\/B8\n\nLA TROBE LIBRARY, MELBOURNE\n\nW. Thomas, Brief Remarks on the Aborigines of Victoria, 1839, 7838Lt\n\nJournal of Patrick Coady Buckley, 1844\u20131853, 6109, Box 214\/7\n\nDiary of Neil Black, typescript, September 1839-May 1840, Box 99\/1\n\nFoster Fyans Reminiscences, 1810\u20131842, 6940\n\nW. H. Hovell, Remarks on a Voyage to Western Port, 7\/11\/26-25\/3\/27 CY, 8, 1\/32 c\n\nThe Journal of Francis Tuckfield, 655\n\nThe Papers of James Dredge \u2014 Notebook, 421959; Letterbook, 421961 H. Meyrick, Letters to his family in England, 1840\u201347, 7959\n\nOXLEY LIBRARY, BRISBANE\n\nArcher Family Papers, including Durundur Diary, 1843\u201344, Some Letters Mainly from Australia, 1833\u201355\n\nDiary of Captain G. Griffin at Whiteside, 1\/1\/47-16\/5\/49, OM72-42\n\nLetter of T. W. Wells to H. C. A. Harrison, 24\/10\/61 OM66\/2\/f2\n\nReminiscences of Mrs Adelaide Morrison OM69\/8\/f1\n\nRobert Hamilton, Diary at Mt Auburn Station, 18\/11\/61-3\/9\/62, OM68\/28\/Q2\n\nHarry Anning, Thirty Years Ago, OM172\/123\n\nArchibald Meston Papers, OM64\/17\n\nNewspapers\n\nNEW SOUTH WALES\n\nAtlas, 1844\u20131845\n\nAustralian, 1824, 1840\u201341, 1848\n\nColonist, 1837\u20131839\n\nEmpire, 1851\u201352, 1855\u201358\n\nHunter River Gazette, 1841\u201342\n\nMaitland Mercury, 1843\u20131850\n\nSydney Gazette, 1803\u20131830\n\nSydney Morning Herald, 1834\u20131850 (Sydney Herald before July 1842)\n\nTASMANIA\n\nColonial Times, 1825\u20131831\n\nHobart Town Courier, 1827\u20131831\n\nHobart Town Gazette, 1819\u20131825\n\nLaunceston Advertiser, 1829\u20131831\n\nThe Tasmanian, 1827\u20131828\n\nWESTERN AUSTRALIA\n\nGeraldton Express, 1886\u20131890\n\nInquirer, 1840\u20131851\n\nNorthern Public Opinion, 1893\u20131898\n\nPilbara Goldfields News, 1897\u20131898\n\nPerth Gazette, 1833\u20131840\n\nSOUTH AUSTRALIA\n\nAdelaide Examiner, 1842\u20131843\n\nAdelaide Observer, 1844\u20131849\n\nPort Augusta Dispatch, 1877\u20131880\n\nSouth Australian Register, 1839\u20131844\n\nSouthern Australian, 1838\u20131840\n\nVICTORIA\n\nGeelong Advertiser, 1840\u20131844\n\nPortland Gazette, 1845\u20131847\n\nPortland Guardian, 1842\u20131843\n\nPortland Mercury, 1842\u20131844\n\nPort Phillip Gazette, 1838\u20131846\n\nPort Phillip Herald, 1840\n\nPort Phillip Patriot, 1841\u20131842\n\nQUEENSLAND\n\nCairns Post, 1885\u20131888\n\nColonist, (Maryborough) 1884\u20131888\n\nCooktown Courier, 1874\u20131879\n\nCooktown Herald, 1874\u20131877\n\nCooktown Independent, 1888\u20131891\n\nDarling Downs Gazette, 1858\u20131859\n\nHerberton Advertiser, 1884\u20131885\n\nMackay Mercury, 1868\u20131880\n\nMaryborough Chronicle, 1860\u20131880\n\nMoreton Bay Courier, 1846\u20131862\n\nMoreton Bay Free Press, 1852\u20131859\n\nNorth Australian, (Brisbane) 1856\u20131865\n\nPeak Downs Telegram, (Clermont) 1876\n\nPort Denison Times, (Bowen) 1867\u20131883\n\nQueenslander, 1866\u20131900\n\nQueensland Guardian, 1861\u20131863\n\nQueensland Times, (Ipswich) 1864\u20131866\n\nRockhampton Bulletin, 1865\u20131876\n\nWide Bay and Burnett News, 1881\u20131884\n\nWide Bay and Burnett Times, 1859\u20131860\n\nWild River Times, (Herberton) 1886\u20131889\n\nNORTHERN TERRITORY\n\nNorthern Territory Times, 1873\u20131883, 1890\u20131895\n\nMISSIONARY JOURNALS\n\nMissionary Notes of the Australian Board of Missions, 1895\u20131905 Kirchliche Mitteilungen, (Church News) 1886\u20131900\n\nNewspaper Cutting Books on the Aborigines and related topics in Oxley Library, Mitchell Library, State Library of South Australia\n\nA number of the papers listed above were used for periods other than for those specified. But they were in such cases only consulted for a few issues at any one time. Numerous other papers were used for an issue or two but they have not been listed. Reference has been made to a few of these in the endnotes.\n\nResearch Theses\n\nAllingham, A. J., 'Taming the Wilderness': The First Decade of Pastoral Settlement in the Kennedy District, B.A. Hons, James Cook, 1976\n\nBeckett, J., A Study of a Mixed Blood Aboriginal Minority in the Pastoral West of New South Wales, M.A., A.N.U., 1958\n\nBell, D., From Moth Hunters to Black Trackers. An Interpretive Analysis of the Black and White Experience, B.A. Hons, Monash, 1975\n\nBickford, R. A., Traditional Economy of the Aborigines of the Murray Valley, B.A. Hons, Sydney, 1966\n\nBiskup, P., Native Administration and Welfare in Western Australia 1897\u20131954, M.A., West Australia, 1960\n\nBrayshaw, H., Aboriginal Material Culture in the Herbert-Burdekin District, Ph.D., James Cook, 1977\n\nBridges, B., Aboriginal and White Relations in New South Wales 1788\u20131855, M.A., Sydney, 1966\n\nBlundell, V. J., Aboriginal Adaption in North West Australia, Ph.D., Wisconsin, 1975\n\nBrown, R. B., A History of the Gilbert River Goldfield, 1869\u20131874, B.A. Hons, James Cook, 1974\n\nBury, W. R., The Foundations of the Pt McLeay Aboriginal Mission, B.A. Hons, Adelaide, 1964\n\nCritchett, J. F., A History of the Framlingham and Lake Condah Aboriginal Stations, 1860\u20131918, M.A., Melbourne, 1980\n\nChristie, M. F., Race Relations between Aborigines and Colonists in Early Victoria, 1835\u201386, Ph.D., Monash, 1978\n\nCrawford, I. M., William Thomas and the Port Phillip Protectorate, M.A., Melbourne, 1967\n\nCurthoys, A., Race and Ethnicity: A Study of the Response of British Colonists to Aborigines, Chinese and non-British Europeans in N.S.W. 1856\u20131881, Ph.D., Macquarie, 1973\n\nDenholm, D., Some Aspects of Squatting in New South Wales and Queensland, 1847\u20131864, Ph.D., A.N.U., 1972\n\nDesailly, B., The Mechanics of Genocide, M.A., Tasmania, 1978\n\nEckermann, A. K., Half-Caste, Out Caste, Ph.D., Queensland, 1977\n\nEvans, G., Thursday Island, 1878\u20131914, B.A. Hons, Queensland, 1972\n\nEvans, K., Missionary Effort Towards the Cape York Aborigines, 1886\u20131910, B.A. Hons, Queensland, 1969\n\nEvans, R., European-Aboriginal Relations in Queensland, 1880\u20131910, B.A. Hons, Queensland, 1965\n\nGale, F., A Study in Assimilation: Part Aborigines in South Australia, Ph.D., Adelaide, 1956\n\nGraves, A. A., An Anatomy of Race Relations, B.A. Hons, Adelaide, 1973\n\nHardley, R. G., Some of the Factors that influenced the Coastal Riverine and Insular Habits of the Aborigines of South-East Queensland and Northern New South Wales, B.A. Hons, Queensland, 1975\n\nHarrison, B. W., The Myall Creek Massacre, B.A. Hons, New England, 1966\n\nHartwig, M. C., The Coniston Killings, B.A. Hons, Adelaide, 1960\n\nHartwig, M. C., The Progress of White Settlement in the Alice Springs District and its Effect on the Aboriginal Inhabitants, 1860\u20131914, Ph.D., Adelaide, 1965\n\nHoskin, G., Aboriginal Reserves in Queensland, B.A. Hons, Queensland, 1968\n\nJenkin, G., The Aborigines Friends' Association and the Ngarrindjeri People, M.A., Adelaide, 1976\n\nJohnston, S. L., The New South Wales Government Policy Towards the Aborigines, 1880\u20131909, M.A., Sydney, 1970\n\nKrastins, V., The Tiwi: A Culture Contact History of the Australian Aborigines on Bathurst and Melville Islands, 1705\u20131942, B.A. Hons, A.N.U., 1972\n\nLoos, N. A., Aboriginal-European Relations in North Queensland, 1861\u20131897, Ph.D., James Cook, 1976\n\nLoos, N. A., Frontier Conflict in the Bowen District, 1861\u20131874, M.A. Qualifying, James Cook, 1970\n\nMilich, C., Official Attitudes to the South Australian Aborigines in the 1930s, B.A. Hons, Adelaide, 1967\n\nMurray-Prior, J., Women Settlers and Aborigines, B.A. Hons, New England, 1973\n\nO'Kelly, G. J., The Jesuit Mission Stations in the Northern Territory, 1882\u20131899, B.A. Hons, Monash, 1967\n\nPearson, M., The MacIntyre Valley: Field Archaeology and Ethno-history, B.A. Hons, New England, 1973\n\nPrentis, M. D., Aborigines and Europeans in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, 1823\u20131881, M.A., Macquarie, 1972\n\nRosewarne, S., Aborigines in Colonial Queensland, M.A., Melbourne, 1976\n\nRule, M., Relations between the Aborigines and Settlers in Selected Areas of the Hunter Valley, B.A. Hons, Newcastle, 1977\n\nRusso, G. H., Bishop Salvado's Plan to Civilize and Christianize the Aborigines, 1846\u20131900, M.A., Western Australia, 1972\n\nRyan, L., The Aborigines in Tasmania, 1800\u20131974, Ph.D. Macquarie, 1976\n\nSabine, N., An Ethnohistory of the Clarence Valley, B.A. Hons, New England, 1970\n\nShelmerdine, S., The Port Phillip Native Police Corps as an Experiment in Aboriginal Policy and Practice, 1837\u20131853, B.A. Hons, Melbourne 1972\n\nShepherd, B. W., A History of the Pearling Industry of the North-West Coast of Australia, M.A., Western Australia, 1975\n\nSmith, P., Yarrabah, 1892\u20131910, B.A. Hons, James Cook, 1981\n\nTaylor, J. C., Race Relations in South East Queensland, B.A. Hons, Queensland, 1967\n\nTaylor, N., The Native Mounted Police of Queensland, 1850\u20131900, B.A. Hons, James Cook, 1970\n\nWalker, J. A., Aboriginal-European Relations in the Maryborough District, 1842\u20131903, B.A. Hons, Queensland, 1975\n\nWillmott, J., The Pearling Industry in Western Australia, 1850\u20131916, B.A. Hons, Western Australia, 1975\n\nContemporary Books, Articles and Pamphlets\n\nArcher, T., Recollections of a Rambling Life, Yokohama, 1897\n\nAtkinson, J., An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales, London, 1826\n\nAustin, R., Journal of Assistant Surveyor R. Austin, Perth, 1855\n\nBackhouse, J., A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, London, 1843\n\nBalfour, H., 'On the Method Employed by the Natives of N.W. Australia in the Manufacture of Glass Spear Heads', MAN, 1903\n\nBartlett, T., New Holland, London, 1843\n\nBarton, R. D., Reminiscences of an Australian Pioneer, Sydney, 1917\n\nBennett, M. M., Christison of Lammermoor, London, 1927\n\nBennett, S., The History of Australasian Discovery and Colonization, Sydney, 1867\n\nBeveridge, P., The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina, Melbourne, 1889\n\nBeveridge, P., 'On the Aborigines Inhabiting the... Lower Murray, Lower Murrumbidgee, Lower Lachlan and Lower Darling', Journal of Royal Society of New South Wales, 17, 1883\n\nBolderwood, R., Old Melbourne Memories, Melbourne 1884\n\nBond, G., A Brief Account of the Colony of Port Jackson, Oxford, 1806\n\nBonwick, J., The Last of the Tasmanians, London, 1870\n\nBraim, T. H., A History of New South Wales, 2 vols, London, 1846\n\nBreton, W. H., Excursions in New South Wales, Western Australia and Van Diemens Land, London, 1833\n\nBride, T. F., Letters from Victorian Pioneers, Melbourne, 1898\n\nBrock, D. G., To the Desert With Sturt, Adelaide, 1975\n\nBull, J. W., Early Experiences of Life in South Australia, Adelaide, 1884\n\nBulmer, J., 'Some Account of the Aborigines of the Lower Murray, Wimmera and Maneroo', Proceedings Royal Geographical Society of Victoria, 1, 5, March 1888\n\nBunbury, H. W., Early Days in Western Australia, London, 1930\n\nByerley, F. J., Narrative of an Overland Expedition, Brisbane, 1867\n\nByrne, J. C., Twelve Years Wanderings in the British Colonies, 2 vols, London, 1848\n\nCalder, J. E., The Native Tribes of Tasmania, Hobart, 1875\n\nCalvert, A. F., The Aborigines of West Australia, London, 1894\n\nCampbell, J., The Early Settlement of Queensland, Brisbane, 1936\n\nCarnegie, D., Spinifex and Sand, London, 1898\n\nCarrington, G., Colonial Adventures and Experiences, London, 1877\n\nCarron, W., Narrative of an Expedition of the late Assistant Surveyor Mr E. B. Kennedy, Sydney, 1849\n\nChester, E., Early Days in Albany: Reminiscences of Mr E. Chester, WAHS, 1, 1931\n\nChewings, E., Back in the Stone Age, Sydney, 1936\n\nCollins, D., Account of the English Colony of New South Wales, 1798\u20131804, 2 vols, London, 1802\n\nCurr, E., An Account of the Colony of Van Diemens Land, London, 1824\n\nCurr, E., The Australian Race; its origin, languages, customs, 4 vols, Melbourne, 1886\u201387\n\nCurr, E., Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, Melbourne, 1883\n\nDaly, D., Digging, Squatting and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, London, 1887\n\nDawson, J., Australian Aborigines; the languages and customs of several tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Melbourne, 1881\n\nDawson, R., The Present State of Australia, London, 1830\n\nDe Brebant Cooper, F., Wild Adventures in Australia and New South Wales, London, 1857\n\nDe Satge, E. and O., Pages from the Journal of a Queensland Squatter, London, 1901\n\nDoyle, M. (ed.), Extracts from the Letters and Journals of George Fletcher Moore, London, 1834\n\nDredge, J., Brief Notices on the Aborigines of New South Wales, Geelong, 1845\n\nDumont D'urville, M. J., Voyage de la Corvette L'Astrolabe, Paris, 1830\n\nEden, C., My Wife and I in Queensland, London, 1872\n\nEipper, C., Statement of the Origin, Condition and Prospects of the German Mission to Aborigines at Moreton Bay, Sydney, 1841\n\nEyre, E. J., Journals of Expeditions of Discovery, 2 vols, London, 1845\n\nFenwick, J., 'Diary of John Fenwick', Queensland Heritage, 2, 3, November, 1970\n\nFinlayson, Pastor: Reminiscences, RGSSA, 6, 1902\u201306\n\nField, B., Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales, London, 1825\n\nFlinders, M., A Voyage to Terra Australis, 2 vols, London, 1814\n\nFraser, J., The Aborigines of New South Wales, Sydney, 1892\n\nFremantle, C. H., Diaries and Letters of Admiral Sir C. H. Fremantle, London, 1928\n\nFroggatt, W. W., 'Notes on the Natives of West Kimberley, North West Australia', Proceedings of Linnean Society of New South Wales, 3, May 1888\n\nGiles, E., Australia Twice Traversed, 2 vols, London, 1889\n\nGillen, F. J., 'The Natives of Central Australia', RGSSA, 4, 1898\u20131901\n\nGrant, J., The Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery, London, 1803\n\nGray, R., Reminiscences of India and North Queensland, London, 1913\n\nGrey, G., Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery, 2 vols, London, 1841\n\nGribble, J. B., Black but Comely: Aboriginal Life in Australia, London, 1884\n\nGribble, J. B., Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, Perth, 1905\n\nHall, T., A Short History of the Downs Blacks, Warwick n.d.\n\nHale, M. B., The Aborigines of Australia, London, c.1889\n\nHawker, J. C., Early Experiences in South Australia, Adelaide, 1899\n\nHaydon, G. H., Five Years Experience in Australia Felix, London, 1846\n\nHaygarth, H. W., Recollections of Bush Life in Australia, London, 1848\n\nHenderson, J., Excursions and Adventures in New South Wales, 2 vols, London, 1851\n\nHenderson, J., Observations on the Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemens Land, Calcutta, 1832\n\nHives, F., The Journal of a Jackeroo, London, 1930\n\nHodgkinson, C., Australia: From Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay, London, 1845\n\nHogson, C. P., Reminiscences of Australia, London, 1846\n\nHorne, G & G. Aiston, Savage Life in Central Australia, London, 1924\n\nHovell, W., 'Journal of a Journey from Lake George to Port Phillip, 1824\u201325', JRAHS, 7, 1921\n\nHowitt, A. W., The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London, 1904\n\nHowitt, R., Impressions of Australia Felix, London, 1845\n\nHull, H. M., Experience of Forty Years in Tasmania, London, 1859\n\nIrwin, F. C., The State and Position of West Australia, London, 1835\n\nJack, R. L., Northmost Australia, 2 vols, London, 1921\n\nJorgensen, J., 'A Shred of Autobiography', Hobart Town Almanach and Van Diemens Land Annual, 1838\n\nJournals of Several Expeditions Made in Western Australia, London, 1833\n\nJukes, J. B., Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of HMS Fly, London, 1847\n\nKennedy, E. B., The Black Police of Queensland, London, 1902\n\nKennedy, E. B., 'Extracts from the Journal of an Exploring Expedition into Central Australia', JRGS, 22, 1852\n\nKennedy, E. B., Four Years in Queensland, London, 1870\n\nKing, P. P., Narrative of a Survey of the Inter-tropical and Western Coast of Australia, 2 vols, London, 1827\n\nKirby, J., Old Times in the Bush in Australia, Melbourne, 1894\n\nKnight, J. J., In the Early Days, Brisbane, 1895\n\nLabillardiere, M., Voyage in Search of La Perouse, 1791\u20131794, London, 1800\n\nLandor, E. W., The Bushman or Life in a New Country, London, 1847\n\nLang, G. S., The Aborigines of Australia, Melbourne, 1865\n\nLang, J. D., Queensland, London, 1861\n\nLindsay, D., Journal of the Elder Scientific Exploring Expedition, 1891\u20132, Adelaide, 1892\n\nLloyd, G. T., Thirty-three Years in Tasmania and Victoria, London, 1862\n\nLoyau, G. E., The History of Maryborough, Brisbane, 1897\n\nLumholtz, C., Among Cannibals, London, 1889\n\nLumholtz, C., 'Among the Natives of Australia', Journal of American Geographical Society, 21, 1889\n\nMcCombie, T., Essays on Colonization, London, 1850\n\nMcCombie, T., The History of the Colony of Victoria, Melbourne, 1858\n\nMcCrae, G. C., 'The Early Settlement of the Eastern Shores of Port Phillip Bay', Victorian Historical Magazine, 1, 1911\n\nMacGillivray, J., Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, 2 vols, London, 1852\n\nMackaness, G. (ed.), Fourteen Journeys Over the Blue Mountains of NSW, 1813\u201341, Sydney, 1965\n\nMackay, R., Recollections of Early Gippsland Goldfields, Traralgon, 1916\n\nMacKillop, D., 'Anthropological Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of the Daly River, North Australia', RGSSA, 5, 1893\n\nMcKinlay, W., McKinlays Journal of Exploration, Melbourne, 1862\n\nMcLaren, J., My Crowded Solitude, Sun Books edition, Melbourne, 1966\n\nMacPherson, A., Mount Abundance, London, 1897\n\nMajor, T., Leaves from a Squatters Notebook, London, 1900\n\nMann. J. F., Eight Months with Dr Leichhardt, Sydney, 1888\n\nMathew, J., Eaglehawk and Crow, London, 1899\n\nMathew, J., Two Representative Tribes of Queensland, London, 1910\n\nMeston, A., Geographical History of Queensland, Brisbane, 1895\n\nMeyrick, F. J., Life in the Bush, 1840\u201347, London, 1939\n\nMitchell, T. L., Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, London, 1848\n\nMitchell, T. L., Three Expeditions into Eastern Australia, 2 vols, London, 1834\n\nMoore, G. F., Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in West Australia, London, 1884\n\nMoore, G. F., A Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language in Common Usage Amongst the Aborigines of West Australia, London, 1842\n\nMorrell, J., Sketch of a Residence Among the Aborigines of North Queensland, Brisbane, 1863\n\nMorris, E. E., A Dictionary of Austral English, London, 1898\n\nMorgan, J., The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, London 1967 edition, edited C. E. Sayers\n\nMudie, R., The Picture of Australasia, London, 1829\n\nNewland, S., Memoirs of Simpson Newland, Adelaide, 1928\n\nNewland, S., 'The Parkinjees or the Aboriginal Tribes on the Darling River', RGSSA, 2, 1887\u201388\n\nNewland, S., 'Some Aborigines I Have Known', RGSSA, 1894\u201395\n\nNicolay, C. G., The Handbook of Western Australia, London, 1896\n\nOgle, N., The Colony of Western Australia, London, 1839\n\nOxley, J., Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales, London, 1820\n\nPalmerston, C., 'Diary of Christie Palmerston', Queensland Heritage, 1, 8, May 1968\n\nParker, E. S., The Aborigines of Australia, Melbourne, 1854\n\nParker, K. L., The Euahlayi Tribe, London, 1905\n\nPetrie, T., Reminiscences of Early Queensland, Brisbane, 1932\n\nPlomley, N. J. B. (ed.), Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829\u20131834, Hobart, 1966\n\nPridden, W., Australia, Its History and Present Condition, London, 1843\n\nReilly, J. T., Reminiscences of Fifty Years Residence in West Australia, Perth, 1903\n\nRidley, W., Kamilaroi and Other Australian Languages, 2nd edition, Sydney, 1875\n\nRobertson, W., Cooee Talks, Sydney, 1928\n\nRoss, J., 'The Settler in Van Diemens Land Fourteen Years Ago', Hobart Town Almanack, 1836\n\nRoth, H. L., The Aborigines of Tasmania, 2nd edition, Halifax, 1899\n\nRoth, W. G., Ethnographical Studies Among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines, Brisbane, 1897\n\nRusden, G. W., History of Australia, 3 vols, London, 1883\n\nRussell, H. S., The Genesis of Queensland, Sydney, 1888\n\nSadlier, R., The Aborigines of Australia, Sydney, 1883\n\nSchurmann, C. W., Vocabulary of the Parnkalla Language, Adelaide, 1844\n\nSearcey, A., In Australian Tropics, London, 1907\n\nSearcey, A., In Northern Seas, Adelaide, 1905\n\nSemon, R., In the Australian Bush, London, 1899\n\nShenton, E., 'Reminiscences of Perth 1830\u20131840', WAHS, 1, 1, 1927\n\nSiebert, O., 'Sagen Und Sitten Der Dieri Und Nachbarst\u00e4mme in Zentral-Australien', Globus, 47, 1916\n\nSinnett, F., The Rush to Port Curtis, Geelong, 1859\n\nSmith, C., The Booandick Tribe of South Australian Aborigines, Adelaide, 1880\n\nSmyth, R. B., The Aborigines of Victoria, 2 vols, Melbourne, 1876\n\nStevenson, J. B., Seven Years in the Australian Bush, Liverpool, 1880\n\nStokes, J. L., Discoveries in Australia, 2 vols, London, 1846\n\nStreeter, E. W., Pearls and Pearling Life, London, 1886\n\nStuart, J. M., Explorations Across the Continent of Australia 1861\u20131862, Melbourne, 1863\n\nSturt, C., Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, 2 vols, London, 1849\n\nSturt, C., Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, 2 vols, London, 1833\n\nSutherland, A. G., Victoria and Its Metropolis, Melbourne, 1888\n\nSutherland, G., Pioneering Days: Across the Wilds of Queensland, Brisbane, 1913\n\nTaplin, G., The Narrinyeri, their Manners and Customs, Adelaide, 1878\n\nTaplin, G. (ed.), The Folklore, Manners, Customs and Languages of the South Australian Aborigines, Adelaide, 1879\n\nTaunton, H., Australind, London, 1903\n\nTeichelmann, C. G., Outlines of a Grammar, Vocabulary and Phraseology of the Aboriginal Language of South Australia, Adelaide, 1840\n\nTench, W., Sydney's First Four Years, Sydney 1961 edition introduced by L. F. Fitzhardinge\n\nThrelkeld, L. E., An Australian Language, Sydney, 1892\n\nThrelkeld, L. E., Australian Reminiscences and Papers, edited N. Gunson, Canberra, 1974\n\nTuckey, J. H., An Account of a Voyage to Establish a Colony at Port Phillip, London, 1805\n\nWestgarth, W., Australia Felix, Edinburgh, 1848\n\nWestgarth, W., Australia, Edinburgh, 1861\n\nWestgarth, W., A Report on the Condition, Capabilities and Prospects of the Australian Aborigines, Melbourne, 1846\n\nWestgarth, W., Tracks of McKinlay and Party Across Australia, London, 1863\n\nWalker, J. B., Early Tasmania, Hobart, 1902\n\nWard, A., The Miracle of Mapoon, London, 1908\n\nWarburton, P., Journey Across the Western Interior of Australia, London, 1875\n\nWelsby, T., Collected Works, 2 vols, Brisbane, 1907\n\nWest, J., History of Tasmania, 2 vols, Launceston, 1852\n\nWidowson, H., The Present State of Van Diemens Land, London, 1829\n\nWillshire, W. H., The Aborigines of Central Australia, Adelaide, 1891\n\nWilson, T. B., Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, London, 1835\n\nWindsor-Earl, G., 'On the Aboriginal Tribes of the North Coast of Australia', JRGS, 16, 1846\n\nWindsor-Earl, G., Enterprise in Tropical Australia, London, 1846\n\nWithnell, J. G., The Customs and Traditions of the Aboriginal Natives of North-Western Australia, Roebourne, 1901\n\nWood, K. M., 'A Pioneer Pearler \u2014 Reminiscences of John Wood', WAHS, 2, 12\n\nWoods, J. D. (ed.), The Native Tribes of South Australia, Adelaide, 1879\n\nWorgan, G. B., Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, Sydney, 1978\n\nYoung, S. B., 'Reminiscences of Mrs Susan Bundarre Young', JRAHS, 8, 1923\n\nZillman, J. H. L., Past and Present Australian Life, London, 1889\n\nRecent Books, Articles\n\nAbbie, A. A., The Original Australians, Wellington, 1969\n\nAllen, J., 'The Archaeology of Nineteenth Century British Imperialism', World Archaeology, 5, 1, June 1973\n\nAnderson, C., 'Aboriginal Economy and Contact Relations at Bloomfield River, North Queensland', Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Newsletter, 12, September 1979\n\nAnell, B., 'Hunting and Trapping Methods in Australia and Oceania', Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensa, 18, 1960\n\nAnderson, R. H., 'The Effect of Settlement upon the New South Wales Flora', Proceedings, Linnean Society of New South Wales, 66, 1941\n\nBach, J., 'The Political Economy of Pearl Shelling', Economic History Review, 14, 1, 1961\n\nBaker, S. J., The Australian Language, Melbourne, 1966\n\nBarwick, D., 'Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga' in T. Epstein (ed.), Opportunity and Response, London, 1972\n\nBasedow, H., The Australian Aboriginal, Adelaide, 1925\n\nBates, D., The Passing of the Aborigines, London, 1938\n\nBauer, F. H., 'The Kartans of Kangaroo Island, South Australia', in A. Pilling and R. Waterman: Diprotodon to Detribalization, Michigan, 1970\n\nBennett, M. M., The Australian Aborigine as a Human Being, London, 1930\n\nBern, J., 'Ideology and Domination', Oceania, 50, 2, December 1979\n\nBerndt, R. M. 'A Preliminary Report of Fieldwork in the Ooldea Region', Oceania, 13, 1942\u201343\n\nBerndt, R. M., 'Surviving Influence of Mission Contact on the Daly River', Neue Zeitschrift Fur Missionswissenschaft, 8\/2-3, 1952\n\nBerndt, R. M., 'Wuradjeri Magic and Clever Men', Oceania, 17, 1946\u201347 and 18, 1947\u201348\n\nBerndt, R. M. & C. H., Arnhem Land: Its History and Its People, Melbourne, 1954\n\nBerndt, R. M. & C. H., The First Australians, 2nd edition, Sydney, 1967\n\nBerndt, R. M. & C. H., From Black to White in South Australia, Melbourne, 1951\n\nBerndt, R. M. & C. H., 'Some Recent Articles on Culture Contact', Oceania, 16, 1945\u201346\n\nBerndt, R. M. & C. H., The World of the First Australians, Sydney, 1965\n\nBerndt, R. M. & C. H., 'An Oenpelli Monologue', Oceania, 22, 1951\u201352\n\nBligh, A. C. V., The Golden Quest, Sydney, 1938\n\nBirdsell, J. B., 'A Basic Demographic Unit', Current Anthropology, 14, 4, October 1973\n\nBirdsell, J. B., 'Some Environmental and Cultural Factors Influencing the Structuring of Australian Aboriginal Populations', American Naturalist, 67, 1953\n\nBirdsell, J. B., 'Ecology, Spacing Mechanisms and Adaptive Behaviour in Aboriginal Land Tenure', in R. G. Crocombe: Land Tenure in the Pacific, Melbourne, 1971\n\nBirdsell, J. B., 'Local Group Composition Among the Australian Aborigines', Current Anthropology, 11, 2, April 1970\n\nBlainey, G., Triumph of the Nomads, Melbourne, 1975\n\nBlack, J., North Queensland Pioneers, Townsville, n.d.\n\nBlake, B. J., The Kalkatunga Language, Canberra, 1969\n\nBrandl, E. J., Australian Aboriginal Paintings in Western and Central Arnhem Land, Canberra, 1973\n\nBridges, B., 'The Colonization of Australia: A Communication', Teaching History, November 1977\n\nBridges, B., The Aborigines and the Land Question in New South Wales', JRAHS, 56, 2, June 1970\n\nBridges, B., 'Pemulwy: A Noble Savage', Newsletter of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 88, 1970\n\nBridges, B., 'The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria 1837-53', JRAHS, 57, 2, June 1971\n\nChaloupka, G., 'Pack-bells on the rock face: Aboriginal paintings of European contact in north-western Arnhem Land', Aboriginal History, 3, 2, 1979\n\nChadwick, N., A Descriptive Study of the Djingili Language, Canberra, 1975\n\nChaseling, W., Yulengor: Nomads of Arnhem Land, London, 1957\n\nCorris, P., Aborigines and Europeans in Western Victoria, Canberra, 1963\n\nCoutts, P. J. et al, 'Impact of European Settlement on Aboriginal Society in Western Victoria', Records of the Victoria Archaeological Survey, 4, August 1977\n\nCrawford, I. M., The Art of the Wandjina, Melbourne, 1968\n\nDixon, R. M. W., The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland, Cambridge, 1972\n\nDixon, R. M. W., A Grammar of Yidin, Cambridge, 1977\n\nDocker, E. C., Simply Human Beings, Brisbane, 1964\n\nDoolan, J. K., 'Aboriginal Concept of Boundary', Oceania, 44, 3, March 1979\n\nDouglas, W. H., The Aboriginal Languages of the South-West of Western Australia, Canberra, 1968\n\nDurack, M., The Rock and the Sand, Corgi edition, London, 1911\n\nEades, D. K., The Dharawal and Dhurga Languages of the New South Wales South Coast, Canberra, 1976\n\nEliade, M., Australian Religions, Ithaca, 1973\n\nElkin, A. P., The Australian Aborigines, 4th edition, Sydney, 1964\n\nElkin, A. P., Aboriginal Men of High Degree, Sydney, 1954\n\nElkin, A. P., 'Civilized Aborigines and Native Culture', Oceania, 6, December 1935\n\nElkin, A. P., 'Elements of Australian Aboriginal Philosophy', Oceania, 60, 2, December 1969\n\nElkin, A. P., 'Notes on the Aborigines of the Walgett District', Mankind, 3, 2, 1943\n\nElkin, A. P., 'Reaction and Interaction: A Food Gathering People and European Settlement in Australia', American Anthropologist, 53, 1951\n\nElkin, A. P., 'The Secret Life of the Australian Aborigines', Oceania, 3, December 1932\n\nEvans, R. et al, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination, Sydney, 1975\n\nGale, F., A Study of Assimilation: Part Aborigines in South Australia, Adelaide, 1964\n\nGeytenbeek, B. & H., Gidabal Grammar and Dictionary, Canberra, 1971\n\nGould, R. A., 'Subsistence Behaviour Among the Western Desert Aborigines', Oceania, 39, 1969\n\nGould, R. A., Yiwara: Foragers of the Australian Desert, London, 1969\n\nGould, R. A., 'Uses and Effects of Fire Among the Western Desert Aborigines', Mankind, 8, 1971\n\nGreen, N., 'Aboriginal and Settler Conflict in Western Australia, 1826\u20131852', The Push from the Bush, 3, May 1979\n\nGunson, N. (ed.), Australian Reminiscences and Papers of L. E. Threlkeld, Canberra, 1974\n\nHaddon, A. C., Head Hunters: Black, White and Brown, London, 1932\n\nHaglund, L., 'Dating Aboriginal Relics from the Contact Period', Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, 11, 3, October 1976\n\nHale, H. M. & N. B. Tindale, 'Aborigines of Princess Charlotte Bay, North Queensland', Records of South Australian Museum, 5, 1933\u201336\n\nHale, H. M. & N. B. Tindale, 'Observations on Aborigines of the Flinders Ranges', Records of the South Australian Museum, 3, 1925\u201328\n\nHall, H. A., A Partial Vocabulary of the Ngalooma Language, Canberra, 1921\n\nHallam, S., Fire and Hearth, Canberra, 1975\n\nHamilton, A., 'Blacks and Whites: The Relationships of Change', Arena, 30, 1972\n\nHamman, J., 'The Coorong Massacre', Flinders Journal of Politics and History, 3, 1973\n\nHancock, W. K., Australia, Jacaranda edition, Brisbane, 1960\n\nHasluck, A., 'Yagan the Patriot', WAHS, 7, 1961\n\nHasluck, P., Black Australians, Melbourne, 1942\n\nHaynes, B. T., West Australian Aborigines, 1622\u20131972, Perth, 1973\n\nHercus, L., The Languages of Victoria, Canberra, 1969\n\nHercus, L., 'Tales of Nadu-Dagali (Rib-Bone Billy)', Aboriginal History, 1, 1, 1977\n\nHiatt, B., 'The Food Quest and the Economy of the Tasmanian Aborigines', Oceania, 38, 2 and 3, 1968\n\nHiatt, L. R., 'Local Organization Among the Australian Aborigines', Oceania, 32, 1962\n\nHiatt, L. R., 'The Lost Horde', Oceania, 37, 1965\n\nHughes, I., 'A State of Open Warfare', Lectures on North Queensland History, second series, Townsville, 1975\n\nHutchison, D. E. (ed.), Aboriginal Progress: A New Era?, Perth, 1969\n\nInglis, J., 'One Hundred Years of Point Macleay, South Australia', Mankind, 5, 12, November 1962\n\nJones, R., 'The Demography of Hunters and Farmers in Tasmania', in D. J. Mulvaney and J. Golson: Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia, Canberra, 1971\n\nJones, R., 'Tasmanian Aborigines and Dogs', Mankind, 7, 1970\n\nKelly, C., 'Some Aspects of Culture Contact in Eastern Australia', Oceania, 15, 1944\u201345\n\nKolig, E., 'Bi:H and Gadeja', Oceania, 43, 1, September 1972\n\nLaver, P. K., 'Report of a Preliminary Ethno-historical and Archaeological Survey of Fraser Island', University of Queensland, Occasional Papers in Anthropology, No. 8\n\nMcBride, I. (ed.), Records of Time Past, Canberra, 1978\n\nMcCarthy, F. D., Rock Art of the Cobar Pedeplain, Canberra, 1976\n\nMcConnell, U., 'Social Organization of the Tribes of Cape York Peninsula', Oceania, 10, 1, 1939\n\nMcConnell, U., 'The Wik-Munkan Tribe of Cape York Peninsula', Oceania, 1, 1930\u201331\n\nMcMahon, A., 'Tasmanian Aboriginal Women as Slaves', THRA, 23, 2, June 1976\n\nThe Mapoon Story According to the Invaders, Sydney, 1975\n\nMeggitt, M. J., 'The Association between Australian Aborigines and Dingoes', American Association Advancement of Science, Publication No. 78\n\nMeggitt, M. J., Desert People, Sydney, 1962\n\nMeggitt, M. J., 'Indigenous Forms of Government Among the Australian Aborigines' in I. Hogbin and L. R. Hiatt: Readings in Australian and Pacific Anthropology, Melbourne, 1966\n\nMoore, D. R., Islanders and Aborigines at Cape York, Canberra, 1979\n\nMoorwood, M. J., 'Three Rock Art Sites in Central Queensland', University of Queensland: Occasional Papers in Anthropology, 6, 1975\n\nMulvaney, D. J. & J. Golson, Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia, Canberra, 1971\n\nMulvaney, D. J., The Pre-history of Australia, revised edition, Ringwood, 1975\n\nMurray-Smith, S., 'Beyond the Pale: The Islander Communities of Bass Strait in the Nineteenth Century', THRA, 20, 4, December, 1973\n\nOates, W. & L., Gugu-Yalanji and Wik-Munkan Language Studies, Canberra, 1964\n\nPetersen, N. (ed.), Tribes and Boundaries in Australia, Canberra, 1976\n\nPiddington, R., 'A Note on Karadjeri Local Organization', Oceania, 61, 4, June 1971\n\nPlomley, N. J. B., A World List of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Languages, Hobart, 1976\n\nRadcliffe-Brown, A. R., 'Black Australia', Australian Museum Magazine, 4, 4, October-December 1930\n\nRadcliffe-Brown, A. R., 'The Rainbow Serpent Myth in South-East Australia', Oceania, 1, 1930\u201331\n\nRadcliffe-Brown, A. R., 'The Social Organization of Australian Tribes', Oceania, 1, 1930\n\nRadcliffe-Brown, A. R., 'Three Tribes of Western Australia', Journal Royal Anthropological Institute, 43, 1913\n\nReay, M., 'Native Thought in Rural New South Wales', Oceania, 20, 1949\n\nReay, M., 'The Background of Alien Impact' in R. M. & C. H. Berndt (eds): Aboriginal Man in Australia, Sydney, 1965\n\nReece, L., Dictionary of the Wailbri (Walpiri) Language of Central Australia, Sydney, 1975\n\nReece, R. H. W., Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in NSW in the 1830's and 1840's, Sydney, 1974\n\nReece, R. H. W., 'Feasts and Blankets: The History of Some Early Attempts to Establish Relations with the Aborigines of NSW, 1814\u20131846', Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, 2, 3, October 1967\n\nReynolds, H., 'Jimmy Governor and Jimmie Blacksmith', Australian Literary Studies, 9, 1, May 1979\n\nReynolds, H., 'The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland', Race Relations in North Queensland, Townsville, 1978\n\nRoughsey, D., Moon and Rainbow, Sydney, 1971\n\nRowley, C. D., 'Aborigines and Other Australians', Oceania, 32, 4, 1962\n\nRowley, C. D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Melbourne, 1972\n\nRowley, C. D., The Remote Aborigines, Melbourne, 1972\n\nRowley, C. D., Outcasts in White Australia, Melbourne, 1972\n\nRyan, L., 'The Struggle for Recognition: part Aborigines in Tasmania in the Nineteenth Century', Aboriginal History, 1, 1, 1977\n\nSahlens, M., Stone Age Economics, London, 1974\n\nShaw, B. & J. Sullivan, 'They same as you and me': Encounters with the Gadia in the East Kimberley', Aboriginal History, 3, 2, 1979\n\nSharp, L., 'Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians' in E. H. Spicer (ed.), Human Problems in Technological Change, New York, 1952\n\nSharp, L., 'Ritual Life and Economics of the Yir-Yoront of Cape York Peninsula', Oceania, 5, 1934\n\nSharp, L., 'Social Organization of the Yir-Yoront of Cape York Peninsula', Oceania, 4, 1933\u201334\n\nSpencer, B., Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia, London, 1914\n\nSpencer, B., Wanderings in Wild Australia, 2 vols, London, 1928\n\nSpencer, B. & F. J. Gillen, Across Australia, London, 1912\n\nSpencer, B. & F. J. Gillen, The Arunta, London, 1922\n\nSpencer, B. & F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Dover edition, New York, 1968\n\nStanner, W. E. H., 'Aboriginal Territorial Organization', Oceania, 36, 1965\n\nStanner, W. E. H., After the Dreaming, Sydney, 1969\n\nStanner, W. E. H., 'Ceremonial Economics of the Mulluk Mulluk and Madngella Tribes of the Daly River', Oceania, 4, 2, December 1933\n\nStanner, W. E. H., 'Continuity and Change Among the Aborigines', Australian Journal of Science, 21, 1958\u201359\n\nStanner, W. E. H., 'The Daly River Tribes', Oceania, 3, 4, June 1933\n\nStanner, W. E. H., 'Durmugam, a Nangiomeri', in J. B. Casagrande (ed.), In the Company of Man, New York, 1960\n\nStrehlow, T. G. H., 'Aranda Phonetics', Oceania, 12, 1941\u201342\n\nStrehlow, T. G. H., Journey to Horseshoe Bend, Sydney, 1969\n\nThomson, D. F., 'The Dugong Hunters of Cape York', Journal Royal Anthropological Institute, 64, 1934\n\nThomson, D. F., 'In Camp with Stone Age Men', Queenslander, 22, 29 January 1931\n\nThomson, D. F., 'The Hero Cult, Initiation and Totemism on Cape York', Journal Royal Anthropological Institute, 63, 1933\n\nThorpe, O., First Catholic Mission to the Australian Aborigines, Sydney, 1949\n\nThreadgill, B., South Australian Land Exploration, 1856\u20131880, Adelaide, 1922\n\nTindale, N. B., Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Canberra, 1974\n\nTindale, N. B., 'Ecology of Primitive Aboriginal Man in Australia', in A. Keast et al: Biogeography and Ecology in Australia, Hague, 1959\n\nTindale, N. B., 'Natives of Groote Eyland and of the West Coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria', Records of South Australian Museum, 2, 1925\u201328\n\nTindale, N. B., 'A Survey of the Half-Caste Problem in South Australia', RGSSA, 42, 1940\u201341\n\nWade-Broun, N., Memoirs of a Queensland Pioneer, Sandgate, 1944\n\nWarner, W. L., A Black Civilization, New York, 1958\n\nWegner, J., 'The Aborigines of the Etheridge Shire' in H. Reynolds (ed.), Race Relations in North Queensland, Townsville, 1979\n\nWilley, K., Boss Drover, Adelaide, 1971\n\nWoolmington, J., Aborigines in Colonial Society, 1788\u20131850, Melbourne, 1973\n\nWorsley, P., 'Utilization of Natural Food Resources by an Australian Aboriginal Tribe', Acta Ethnographica, 10, 1961\n\nWright, B. J., Rock Art of the Pilbara Region, Canberra, 1968\n\nOral History\n\nConsiderable use has been made of tapes in the James Cook University Oral History collection and especially material collected by Caroline Strachan. During the last few years I have read with great interest two excellent oral history collections which have not been published to this moment. They are Jay and Peter Read's A View of the Past and Louise Hercus and Peter Sutton's This is What Happened.\n\n# INDEX\n\nAboriginal\n\nacquisition of European skills\n\nassistance to explorers\n\nattacks on Europeans\n\nattitudes to disease\n\nattitudes to labour\n\nattraction to European settlement\n\nbandits\n\nbegging\n\nbushcraft\n\n'clever men'\n\ncooking methods, post-contact\n\ncorroborees, post-contact\n\ncommunications\n\ncuriosity about Europeans\n\ndecline of population\n\ninfant mortality\n\ninitial beliefs about Europeans\n\ninitial meetings with Europeans\n\ninitiation\n\nkinship\n\nland-ownership, controversy concerning\n\nleadership\n\npainting, post-contact\n\nreaction to European animals\n\nreaction to European clothes\n\nreaction to European firearms\n\nreciprocity\n\nrevenge\n\nsacred sites\n\nsorcery\n\nsurveillance of Europeans\n\ntrade routes\n\nuse of European artifacts\n\nuse of fire\n\nuse of food\n\nuse of pidgin English\n\nuse of tea\n\nuse of tobacco\n\nviolence, in traditional society\n\nviolence, reaction to European\n\nwomen\n\nwomen and Europeans\n\nwomen and tribal elders\n\nAborigines, individuals\n\nBaldy\n\nBelba\n\nBungaree\n\nBurmoondoo, Bill\n\nCampbell, Johnny\n\nDarrama\n\nDundalli\n\nEaglehawk\n\nJames\n\nJelinapiramurana\n\nJemmy\n\nJimmy\n\nKam-Kam\n\nMaria\n\nMathinna\n\nMay-Day\n\nMiago\n\nMignet\n\nMosquito\n\nNgamumarko\n\nOromonde\n\nPemulwy\n\nPidgeon\n\nSaturday\n\nSambo\n\nToby\n\nTungeriol\n\nWaimara\n\nWalyer\n\nYagan\n\nAborigines, tribes\n\nAranda\n\nBindal\n\nBudjara\n\nDieri\n\nDjingili\n\nDyirbal\n\nEuahlayi\n\nGidabal\n\nGugu-Badhun\n\nJoda-Joda\n\nJurn\n\nKalkatunga\n\nLoritja\n\nMurngin\n\nNarrinyeri\n\nNgalooma\n\nWade-Wade\n\nWalbri\n\nWagaidj\n\nWandwurril\n\nWarramanga\n\nWembaweba\n\nWergaga\n\nWiradjuri\n\nYidin\n\nYir-Yoront\n\nYutilda\n\nAdelaide\n\nAiston, G.\n\nAlbany\n\nAnderson, C\n\nArthur, Governor G.\n\nArukun\n\nAtherton Tableland\n\nAustin, R.\n\nbandits, Aboriginal\n\nBass Strait Islands\n\nBattle of Pinjarra, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nBaudin, N.\n\nBauer, F. H.\n\nBeagle Bay\n\nb\u00eache de mer fishing\n\nBerndt, R. M.\n\nBirdselI, J. B.\n\nBlainey, G.\n\nBloomfield River\n\nBode, R.\n\nBonwick, J.\n\nBoroloola\n\nBracefield, D.\n\nBrierly, O.\n\nBrock, D.\n\nBroome\n\nBuckley, W.\n\nburglars, Aboriginal\n\nCalder, J. E.\n\nCaley, G.\n\nCameron, D.\n\nCape York\n\nCarnegie, D.\n\ncastaways, European\n\ncastaways, individuals\n\nBracefield\n\nBuckley\n\nDavis\n\nMorrell\n\nThompson\n\n'Weinie'\n\ncattle, Aboriginal reactions to\n\nChampion Bay\n\nChewings, C.\n\nChristie, M.\n\n'clever men', Aboriginal\n\nclothes, European, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nCollins, D.\n\nConiston Massacre\n\ncooking, Aboriginal, post-contact modification in\n\nCooktown\n\nCoopers Creek\n\ncorroborees, post-contact\n\ncrops, Aboriginal raids on\n\nCroydon Gold Field\n\nCullinlaringoe Station, Qld\n\ncultural exchange, Aboriginal\n\nCurr, E.\n\nDaly River\n\nDarling River\n\nDarwin\n\nDashwood, Mr Justice\n\nDavis, J.\n\nDawson River\n\ndisease, Aboriginal attitudes to\n\ndisease, introduced by Europeans\n\ndogs, European\n\nDredge, J.\n\nDurville, D\n\nDutton, C. B.\n\necology, European impact on\n\nElder Expedition\n\nElkin, A. P.\n\nEtheridge Gold Field\n\nEuropean skills, acquired by Aborigines\n\nEuropeans killed by Aborigines\n\nEyre, E.\n\nfarmers, Aboriginal relations with\n\nfire, Aboriginal use of\n\nfirearms, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nFlinders, M.\n\nFlinders Range\n\nflour, Aboriginal use of\n\nFoelsche, Inspector\n\nFraser family\n\nFremantle, C. H.\n\nfringe-dwellers\n\nghosts, Aboriginal beliefs about\n\nGilbert Gold Field\n\nGilbert, J.\n\nGiles, E.\n\nGipps, Governor G.\n\nGippsland\n\nglass, Aboriginal use of\n\nGovernor, brothers\n\nGrant, A. C.\n\nGregory, A. C.\n\nGregson, J.\n\nGrey, G.\n\nGribble, E. R.\n\nHancock, W. K.\n\nHermannsburg\n\nHiatt, L. R.\n\nHodgkinson, W. O.\n\nHodgkinson Gold Field\n\nHopevale\n\nHorn Scientific Expedition\n\nHornet Bank Station\n\nhorses, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nHorseshoe Bend\n\nHovell, W.\n\nHowitt, A. W.\n\nHunter, Governor\n\nHurst, B.\n\nHutt, Governor\n\ninfant mortality, Aboriginal\n\niron, Aboriginal use of\n\nJack, R. L.\n\nJardine, J.\n\nJones, R.\n\nJorgenson, J.\n\nJukes, J.\n\nKelly, J.\n\nKennedy, E.\n\nKilcoy Massacre\n\nKing, Governor\n\nKing, P. P.\n\nkinship, Aboriginal concepts of\n\nLabillardiere, M.\n\nLang, G. S.\n\nLeichhardt, L.\n\nLettsom, Major\n\nLewis, Mr\n\nlinguistic diffusion\n\nLloyd-Warner, W.\n\nLoos, N.\n\nLumholtz, C.\n\nMabo,Eddie\n\nMcKinlay, W.\n\nMcLaren, J.\n\nMcMillan, A.\n\nMacPherson, A.\n\nMacquarie, Governor L.\n\nmalnutrition\n\nMapoon\n\nMaria 'massacre'\n\nMaryborough\n\nMelbourne\n\nMeston, A.\n\nMiggloo\n\nmining, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nMiriam\n\nmissionaries, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nmissionaries, individuals\n\nGribble, E.\n\nGunther, J.\n\nHoerlein, Herr\n\nHurst, B.\n\nPoland, Herr\n\nRidley, W.\n\nSchmidt, W.\n\nSiebert, O.\n\nTaplin, G.\n\nTeichelmann, C.\n\nThrelkeld, L.\n\nTuckfield, F.\n\nMitchell, T.\n\nMolonga Corroboree\n\nMoorhouse, M.\n\nMoore, G. F.\n\nMorrell, J.\n\nmortality, Aboriginal\n\nMulligan, J. V.\n\nNantoe\n\nNative Mounted Police\n\nNative Mounted Police, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nnegotiation, Aboriginal attempts\n\nNewland, S.\n\nNoonkanbah\n\nOgilvie, E. O.\n\noral history\n\nOxley, J.\n\npainting, Aboriginal\n\nPalmer River\n\nPalmerston, C.\n\nParker, E. S.\n\nParker, Mrs K. L.\n\npearling industry\n\nPenny, Dr R.\n\nPerth\n\nPetrie, T.\n\npidgin English\n\npigs, feral\n\nPoland, Herr\n\nPort Essington\n\nPort Lincoln\n\nPort Phillip\n\npotatoes, Aboriginal use of\n\nPrentis, M.\n\nprostitution\n\nrabbits, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nRadcliffe-Brown, A. R.\n\nRainbow Serpent\n\nrape\n\nReay, M.\n\nreciprocity, Aboriginal\n\nrecruitment of Aboriginal labour\n\nrevenge, Aboriginal\n\nReynolds, H.\n\nRidley, W.\n\nRobertson, W.\n\nRobinson, G. A.\n\nRockhampton\n\nRoth, W. E.\n\nRoughsey, D.\n\nRyan, L.\n\nsacred sites, Aboriginal\n\nSahlins, M.\n\nSchmidt, W.\n\nsealing, Aboriginal participation\n\nSearcey, A.\n\nSharp, L.\n\nsheep, Aboriginal shepherding\n\nShelley, W.\n\nSiebert, O.\n\nsmallpox\n\nsmoke signals, Aboriginal\n\nsorcery, Aboriginal\n\nSpencer, B.\n\nStanner, W. E. H.\n\nsteel axes, Aboriginal use of\n\nStokes, J. L.\n\nStuart, J. M.\n\nSturt, C.\n\nSutton, Peter\n\nSydney\n\nTaplin, G.\n\ntea, Aboriginal use of\n\nTeichelmann, C.\n\nTench, W.\n\nThomas, W.\n\nThompson, B.\n\nThomson, D.\n\nThrelkeld, L. E.\n\nThursday Island\n\nTindale, N. B.\n\ntobacco, Aboriginal reaction to\n\nTorres Strait Islanders\n\ntowns, Aboriginal reactions to\n\ntrade routes, Aboriginal\n\ntribal messengers\n\nTuckfield, F.\n\nvenereal disease\n\nWalker, F.\n\nWarner, W. L.\n\nwater, conflict over\n\nWeinie\n\nwhaling, Aboriginal participation\n\nwhite-fellow words\n\nWills family\n\nWindschuttle, Keith\n\nWindsor-Earl, G.\n\nWiseman, W.\n\nwomen, Aboriginal\n\nWood, J. D.\n\nYarrabah\n\nYarraman\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}