We do not suspect how much
might be done to improve our relation to animated nature even; what kindness
and refined courtesy there might be.
There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least
suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of
bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the
sunbeams. All nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered
nature. There are Hymettus and Hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside?
There is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds, — their hum
like the faintest low of kine in the meads. A pleasant reviewer has lately
reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers
are most abundant. “Columella tells us,” says he, “that
the inhabitants of Arabia sent their hives into Attica to benefit by the
later-blowing flowers." Annually are the hives, in immense pyramids,
carried up the Nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by
night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks; and they
determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay,
by the sinking of the boat in the water. We are told, by the same reviewer,
of a man in Germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his
neighbors, with no apparent advantage ; but at length he informed them, that
he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having
two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. True, there
is treachery and selfishness behind all this, but these things suggest to the
poetic mind what might be done.
Many examples there are of a grosser interference, yet not without their
apology. We saw last summer, on the side of a mountain, a dog employed to
churn for a farmer’s family, traveling upon a horizontal wheel, and
though he had sore eyes, an alarming cough, and withal a demure aspect, yet
their bread did get buttered for all that. Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant
successes, the first rank is always sacrificed. Much useless traveling of
horses, in extenso, has of late years been improved for
man’s behoof, only two forces being taken advantage of, — the
gravity of the horse, which is the centripetal, and his centrifugal
inclination to go ahead. Only these two elements in the calculation. And is
not the creature’s whole economy better economized thus? Are not all
finite beings better pleased with motions relative than absolute? And what is
the great globe itself but such a wheel, — a larger tread-mill, —
so that our horse’s freest steps over prairies are oftentimes balked
and rendered of no avail by the earth’s motion on its axis? But here he
is the central agent and motive-power; and, for variety of scenery, being
provided with a window in front, do not the ever-varying activity and
fluctuating energy of the creature himself work the effect of the most varied
scenery on a country road? It must be confessed that horses at present work
too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses; and the brute degenerates in
man’s society.
It will be seen that we contemplate a time when man’s will shall be law
to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterred by such
abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but
shall indeed be the lord of creation.
