This volume is a nineteenth-century American edition of a collaborative natural history, drawing on the writings of Buffon, Cuvier, Lacepede, and other naturalists, edited by John Wright and published in Boston in 1831. It is expository prose rather than narrative: a survey of the animal kingdom organized by kind, moving through bears, lions, tigers, hyenas, opossums, elephants, rhinoceroses, camels, sheep, goats, antelopes, giraffes, and smaller quadrupeds. The second volume opens mid-course, in the middle of the carnivorous animals, and proceeds outward through the great herbivores and the stranger mammals of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
“A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired.”
What holds the book together is not plot but a method: each animal is introduced through its physical form, its habits, its climate, and the accumulated testimony of travellers, keepers, and earlier writers. The text is as much a record of disagreement as of fact. Buffon’s own claims are corrected by later naturalists; the lion’s supposed magnanimity is dismantled; the giraffe is described from a living specimen sent to the King of England. The reader is watching a science in motion, revising itself in print.
How the Animal Portrait Is Built
The Digitization Notice and the Volume’s Frame
The book opens not with Buffon but with Google’s boilerplate: a statement that this is a scanned copy of a library book, preserved long enough for copyright to lapse, and now offered for discovery online. The notice defines public domain, warns that status varies by country, and explains that marginalia from the original volume will appear in the file as traces of the book’s passage from publisher to library to reader. Google calls itself a custodian of such works, asks for non-commercial use, forbids automated querying, and requests that the watermark and attribution be left intact. Then the title page proper: a “Natural History of the Globe, of Man, of Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, Insects and Plants,” drawn from Buffon, Cuvier, Lacepede and other naturalists, edited by John Wright of the Zoological Society, a new edition improved by Geoffrey, Griffith, Richardson and others, with five hundred engravings across five volumes. This is Volume II, published in Boston by Gray and Bowen in 1831, entered for copyright that same year by Samuel G. Goodrich.
The Contents of the Volume
The table of contents maps a march through the carnivora and their neighbours. Chapter XIII gives the bears—brown, white, American black, grizzly, Thibet, Bornean, large-lipped—then the beaver, racoon, coatis and agouti. Chapter XIV runs the great cats and their kin: lion in several varieties, tiger, leopard, jaguar, panther, chetah, lynx, caracal, the two hyenas, civets, genets and paradoxures. Chapter XV turns to the peccary, the bats and spectre, the ant-eaters, manis, armadillo, cavy, opossum and its relatives. Chapter XVI takes the elephant, rhinoceros, camel and dromedary, buffalo, urus, bison and zebu; Chapter XVII the sheep, axis, tapir, zebra, hippopotamus and deer. Chapter XVIII covers goats, the saiga, gazelles, the bezoar stone and a run of antelopes ending with the gnu and nylghau; Chapter XIX closes with the babiroussa, porcupine, hedgehogs, camelopard, llama and vicuna, and a crowd of small quadrupeds from the jerboa to the ichneumon.
The Bear and the Trouble with Species
Chapter XIII begins with a complaint: no animal is better known than the bear, yet none has caused more contradiction among naturalists, and the confusion comes from failing to separate the species. The land bear must be distinguished from the sea, or white Greenland, bear; the land bears divide again into brown and black. White land bears occur in Tartary and Russia, resembling the sea bear in colour but in nothing else—and their whiteness is not the seasonal blanching of hares and ermines, for they are born white and stay so. Some bears, mixed brown and black, mark an intermediate kind. The brown bear is common on the Alps, the black rare there; in the forests of northern Europe and America the black predominates. The black is fierce and carnivorous; the brown is fierce but steadily refuses flesh. The bear is savage and solitary, retreating to the least frequented places and the most dangerous precipices.
The Lion: Ambush, Appetite, and a Reputation Reconsidered
The lion stalks its prey crawling on its belly through thicket or tall grass, waits with patient expectation, then springs with such force that it often takes the victim at the first bound. Miss, and after two or three futile springs it stands motionless, seemingly sensible of disappointment, waiting for a better chance. It gorges at a sitting, filling itself for two or three days, and its teeth break bones that it swallows with the flesh. It bears hunger long but thirst poorly, its temperament being hot, and it laps like a dog, needing some fifteen pounds of raw flesh a day; it seldom touches putrefying bodies. Young and active, it lives by the chase in its native deserts; old and heavy, it comes near human dwellings and turns dangerous. Seeing men and animals together, it vents its fury on the animals—unless struck, when it abandons the prey for revenge. It is said to prefer camel flesh and to kill young elephants when the dam is away; only the elephant, rhinoceros, tiger and hippopotamus can oppose it. Mounted men with disciplined dogs can chase and dislodge it, its skin is no proof against a musket ball, and it is often taken in a baited pit, after which its fury subsides and it may be chained and muzzled. Its flesh is strong and disagreeable, yet some peoples eat it. Buffon and others praised its courage and magnanimity; later naturalists rate it lower—Burchell calls it indolent and skulking, Barrow cowardly and treacherous, Bennet resolves its forbearance into hunger and revenge, and a footnote insists it is no match for the Asian tiger and has less moral excellence than a poodle.
The Human Eye, and George of the Tower
It is well attested that neither lion nor tiger can bear the steady gaze of the human eye. The Bechuano chief Peyshow told a South African journal that the lion seldom attacks man unprovoked, but comes within a few paces and surveys him, sometimes trying to get behind him; to fight or fly is perilous, but to face it coolly without terror or aggression makes it retire. Major Macintosh told of an officer who, meeting a royal tiger in a jungle without firearms, fixed it in the face; the tiger slunk aside and for half an hour tried to take him by surprise before yielding, and the officer walked straight to the tents at double quick time. The engravings show animals then in the Tower menagerie: the pale tawny coat, the full-grown male’s mane running from the root of the nose to the shoulders, the blackish tuft on the tail; the Asiatic lion is smaller and more uniformly yellow, with a peculiar fringe of long hairs beneath the neck. The pictured lion, only five years old, was named George. He and his mate were taken in Bengal in 1823 by General Watson, who shot the male as it bounded from a thicket almost at his feet, wounded and tracked the female to her den and killed her, and found inside a pair of cubs not three days old. He reared them on a goat and presented them to the king, who sent them to the Tower. George is fed once a day, about eight pounds of beef without bone, which he seizes and tears and devours ravenously—unlike lions in nature, said to pause over the victim before feeding.
The Lioness, and the Tiger’s Gentler Side
The lioness has no mane, is smaller and more slenderly made, more graceful and agile; her head is carried level with her back, giving her a sullen, downcast look.
The Opossum’s Habits and Dr. Godman’s Account
Buffon closes his treatment of the opossum by dwelling on the female’s pouch, where the young are carried, and on the animal’s arboreal cunning: it climbs with ease, hides in foliage to seize birds, and hangs by a muscular, flexible tail that can grip and encircle a branch. Head downward, motionless for long stretches, it waits for prey and balances itself to leap between trees like a monkey, which it also resembles in the structure of its feet. Voracious and greedy for blood, it nonetheless eats reptiles, insects, sugarcane, potatoes, roots, and even leaves and bark. It tames easily and is neither wild nor ferocious, but its smell—stronger than a fox’s—repels, and its forbidding figure, with owl-like ears, serpent-like tail, and a mouth cleft to the eyes, matches the stench. The smell lodges in the skin, yet the flesh is eatable, and native hunters relish it. So tenacious is its hold on life that Carolina produced the adage that if a cat has nine lives, an opossum has nineteen.
Dr. Godman’s account adds the anatomical detail behind these habits: fifty teeth, hind feet turned into hands by short, fleshy, opposable thumbs that let the animal grasp objects and cling to silk or a few threads, and a prehensile tail that suspends it while it gathers fruit or seizes prey. Its membranous ears, moist sensitive nose, long whiskers, and bristled cheeks sharpen its nocturnal hunting; it drinks by suction rather than lapping, and a mother approached with young drops her jaw, retracts her lips, and snarls without snapping unless something is brought close. Whitish gray from mixed coarse hairs, thick black-scaled tail at the base, it is timid and cunning rather than strong, clumsy on the ground but secure on branches. It kills far more fowl than it eats, taking their blood like a weasel, and prizes the persimmon. Country people hunt it at night with dogs after the autumn frosts; the hunter shakes the branch until the animal drops, and a fallen opossum without dogs will gather itself small and feign death—the artifice behind the proverb “He is playing possum.” The female is often seen carrying twelve or sixteen cubs, each tail wrapped around her root, clinging to her back and sides—a trait once thought peculiar to another species, the dorsiger, but equally true of the Virginian opossum. Tamed young, it grows fond of human society and mischievous; captives frequently escape.
The Marmose, the Cayopollin, and the Flying Opossum
The marmose, or murine opossum, shares the common opossum’s climate, continent, body form, feet, and tail, but is smaller with a sharper snout; the female has no belly bag, only two loose skins near the thighs between which the young stick to the paps. The newborn are not so large as small beans; ten were seen each attached to a pap while the mother had four more. It probably brings forth a few days after conception, the young being then only fetuses not come to a fourth of their growth. The cayopollin, or Mexican opossum, found at Saint Fernandez, is a little larger than a rat and resembles the opossum in snout, ears, and tail—thicker and stronger than a rat’s—which it uses as we use our hands; its ears are thin and transparent, and when frightened the young embrace the mother, who lifts them on her legs. The flying opossum of New South Wales has a squirrel’s head, large erect ears, delicate dark glossy fur mixed with gray, white underparts, and a tan spot on each hip; its sailing membrane is broader than the flying squirrel’s, with five clawed toes on the fore legs and four toes plus a long thumb on the hind.
The Elephant at Geneva
The chapter on the elephant opens by ranking it, after man, the most respectable of animals: first in size among terrestrial creatures and inferior in understanding only to man. Of the brute creation, the elephant, dog, monkey, and beaver are most admirable for sagacity, but the dog’s genius is borrowed from man, the monkey has only the appearance of wisdom, and the beaver is sensible only regarding itself and its species. The elephant unites their most eminent qualities: its trunk serves as arms and hands, giving it the monkey’s dexterity plus the dog’s sentiments—gratitude, strong attachment, and intelligent service to man.
The narrative then turns to an elephant at Geneva, out of humour with his keeper, who pursued the man toward the city. The officer on guard opened the gate, reasoning it would be easier to secure the animal within the town than without, especially as it was market-day. The elephant re-entered without hesitation, pursuing rather than following his guides, all influence of attachment or fear at an end; from this moment he was his own master. He walked in the place de Saint Gervis, lay on a heap of sand prepared for pavement repairs, and played with the stones. Seeing one of his guides watching from a bridge over the Rhone, he ran at him and would have attacked him had he not escaped. Mademoiselle Garnier, informed of this, hastened to the spot, trusting to his attachment, approached with dainties he was fond of, spoke gently, and led him into an enclosure near the barrack he had inhabited, called the Bastion Hollande, adjoining a shed of caissons, waggons, and gun-carriages, with cannon-balls in an adjoining yard. Left alone, he raised caissons, turned wheels, tossed balls in his trunk, and ran about with vivacity attributable to gaiety or irritation.
At two in the morning the syndic of the guard went to the spot; Mademoiselle Garnier, in distress, entreated that the elephant be killed speedily and certainly. The syndic opposed this, saying the animal was now in security and his irritation would yield to proper regimen; but she remembered occurrences at Venice and persisted, the keeper and guides having refused to attend him again. The magistrate consented only when the demand was put in writing and signed. Chemists supplied drugs, and two breaches were made in the wall, each with a four-pounder, to be the last resort if poison failed. M. Mayor, a surgeon eminent in natural history and a director of the museum, who had visited the elephant and been shown affection by it, administered about three ounces of prussic acid mixed with about ten ounces of brandy, the animal’s favourite liquor. The elephant seized the bottle and swallowed it at one draught, but showed no sensible effect, walked backwards, lay down, rose, and played with the caissons. M. Mayor, presuming the acid had lost strength, prepared three bottles of an ounce of arsenic each with honey and water; the elephant took them all, and after a quarter of an hour was unaffected.
The Chamois and the Hunter’s Passion
The chamois occupies the most forbidding terrain, and the men who pursue it pay for the chase in hardship and sometimes in their lives. When the route home is too difficult, the hunter contents himself with skinning his kill; when the load is practicable, he shoulders the whole animal and carries it back undaunted by distance and precipices. The chamois itself, once it catches sight of a hunter, flees at speed into the glaciers, leaping frozen snows and pointed rocks. Approaching a herd is hardest of all: a sentinel posted on a commanding rock gives a sharp hiss, and the rest run to him to learn the danger. If they make out a beast of prey or a man, the most experienced leads and they bound one after another into the most inaccessible places. The hunter then crosses snows without reckoning the hollows beneath, plunges into dangerous passes, climbs and leaps from rock to rock without considering how he will get back. Night often catches him mid-chase, but he does not abandon it, trusting the chamois will halt in the dark as he does and that morning will let him resume. He sleeps on a naked rock or a heap of stones, without shelter, fire, or light, with a bit of cheese and barley bread so hard he must break it between two stones or split it with the knife he carries for cutting steps in the ice. A stone serves as his pillow, and he dreams of the route the chamois has taken. The freshness of the air wakes him; he rises pierced with cold, measures with his eye the precipices still to climb, drinks a little brandy, throws his bag over his shoulder, and presses on. Such men spend days in the dreariest solitudes of the glaciers while their families and wives endure the keenest alarm.
The chase amounts to a passion that overrides every other consideration. Saussure knew a young man of the Chamouni district, about to marry, who told him that his grandfather had been killed in pursuit of the chamois, and his father also, and that he was so certain he would be killed himself that he carried his winding-cloth in his bag, sure he would have no other; yet if a fortune were offered on condition that he renounce the chase, he would refuse. Saussure went out with this young man several times; he had skill and strength, but his temerity exceeded both, and two years later he met the death he had foreseen, by a fall from a precipice. Few who grow old in this career show on their faces the traces of the life they have led; they bear a wild, somewhat desperate air by which they can be picked out in a crowd. Many of the superstitious believe them to be sorcerers who hold intercourse with the evil spirit, and that it is he who hurls them over the precipices.
The Saiga and the Rocky Mountain Goat
The saiga is a sort of wild goat found in Hungary, Tartary, and southern Siberia, which the Russians call the seigák. In the shape of its body and its hair it resembles the domestic goat, but in the form of its horns and its lack of a beard it approaches the gazelle, so that it looks like a mixture of the two. Its habits lean toward the gazelle rather than the ibex or chamois, for it does not dwell in mountains but lives on hills and plains. It is agile and swift, and its flesh eats better than that of the ibex or any other wild goat. Buffon knew it only imperfectly; it is the Scythian antelope of Pennant and the Antelope saiga of Linnaeus. Grayish-yellow and the size of a fallow deer, it is found in numbers in the dreary deserts about Mount Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and Siberia. In autumn the herds gather and migrate south; in spring they separate and return north. Excessively fond of salt, they keep chiefly to countries with salt springs. Like the chamois, one of the herd stands sentinel when the flock moves off, and when he tires another relieves him.
The Rocky Mountain goat inhabits the loftiest peaks, seldom descending as near the low country as the Rocky Mountain sheep. Its manners closely resemble those of the domestic goat. The limits of its range have not been fixed, but it probably extends from the fortieth to the sixtieth or sixty-fifth degree of latitude, and it is common on the elevated ground that gives rise to the Mackenzie, Columbia, Nelson, and Missouri rivers. The fine wool it produces grows chiefly on the hind hips, mixed with long coarse hair. Because it bears wool, voyagers and even naturalists have sometimes called it a sheep, and confusion has crept into accounts of its habits published from traders’ information. Its flesh is hard and dry and little esteemed; the Indians make caps and saddles of its skin. The Hudson’s Bay Company lately presented a perfect specimen to the Zoological Society. The animal is the size of a domestic sheep, white except for the horns and mane.
Gazelles, the Urson, and the Tanrec
Gazelles can hardly be assigned with propriety either to the goat or the deer, yet they partake of both natures. Linnaeus in his earlier editions, and several other naturalists, ranked them with the goats; Pallas, Erxleben, and Pennant made them a distinct genus. Like the goat they have hollow horns, never shed.
The urson, placed by nature in the desert parts of North America east of Hudson’s Bay, lives independently of and far from man. It might be called the spiny beaver, being of the same size, country, and form of body, and like the beaver it has two strong, sharp incisive teeth at the end of each jaw. Its prickles are short and almost covered with hair; it wears a double coat of long soft hair over a softer felt beneath, and in the young the prickles are proportionably larger and more apparent. It dislikes water, is fearful, dwells under the roots of hollow trees, sleeps much, and feeds chiefly on juniper bark. In winter snow supplies its drink; in summer it laps water like a dog. Men eat its flesh and strip the bristles from the hide to use instead of pins and needles. Godman notes that it is still occasionally found in the unsettled parts of Pennsylvania but is unknown south of that state; by Catesby’s account it never ranged beyond Virginia; it is found in the Hudson’s Bay country, Canada, and New England, and between the Rocky Mountains and the great western rivers, where the natives prize it for flesh and quills, which they use to ornament dresses and pipes. The quills rarely exceed two or three inches, worked with a straight awl and deer sinew, the quill-end concealed so the whole appears a single line; the Philadelphia Museum boasts a splendid collection of such dress and implements.
The tanrec and tendrac are two small animals of the East Indies and Madagascar resembling the European hedgehog but distinct, notably because they do not roll themselves into a ball; where tanrecs are found, as at Madagascar, hedgehogs of our species are found too.
The Argument Over Animal Character
Running beneath the descriptions is a sustained quarrel about what animals are like—whether they possess courage, generosity, or reason, or only appetite and habit. The lion is the test case. Buffon and others had praised its magnanimity; the later naturalists in this volume will have none of it. Burchell calls it indolent and skulking, Barrow brands it cowardly and treacherous, and a footnote insists it is no match for the great tiger of Asia and has less moral excellence than a poodle dog. The tiger, by contrast, is granted a kind of pliant docility in captivity: a young tiger from China plays with a terrier, recognizes its old ship’s carpenter after two years, and submits to punishment like a dog. The book keeps returning to this gap between reputation and observed behaviour, and it treats the gap as a problem of evidence rather than of sentiment.
The same scepticism reaches the hyena, whose fabulous reputation—a neck of one bone, a voice that calls shepherds by name and drives shepherdesses to distraction—is met with the dry remark that all these things might surely happen without the intervention of a hyena. Fear, the text suggests, has drawn on credulity. What remains after the legends are stripped away is a set of observable traits: four toes, jaws that break the hardest bones, eyes that shine at night.
The Elephant and the Limits of Understanding
The book’s most sustained reflection on animal mind comes with the elephant, which it calls the most respectable of animals after man. The claim is carefully argued rather than merely asserted. The dog’s intelligence is borrowed from human instruction; the monkey has only the appearance of wisdom; the beaver is sensible only regarding itself and its species. The elephant, with its trunk serving as arms and hands, unites the monkey’s dexterity with the dog’s capacity for gratitude and attachment. Yet the volume immediately complicates this praise with the story of the elephant at Geneva, which turns on its keeper, is coaxed back by Mademoiselle Garnier, and then resists poison—three ounces of prussic acid, then arsenic—before being shot at the breach. The creature that seemed capable of affection is also capable of a fury that no attachment can reach. The portrait holds both facts without resolving them.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The volume’s lasting interest lies less in any single description than in its composite character. It is a palimpsest of authorities: Buffon’s sweeping claims, Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, the observations of Hudson’s Bay Company clerks, the testimony of a ship’s carpenter, the measurements of a Tower menagerie keeper. The giraffe arrives in England in 1827 and is described by an animal painter; the Rocky Mountain goat is presented to the Zoological Society by the fur trade. Natural history here is a social enterprise, assembled from hunters, sailors, and colonial officials as much as from men of science. Read today, the book is a record of how the animal kingdom was known before the modern disciplines settled its boundaries—curious, argumentative, and still willing to be surprised by what a tiger will do with a terrier in its den.
