338 THE HARMONIES OF NATURE. 



and manides, who have no other means of defence, it is covered 

 with a complete coat-of-mail, formed of transverse shelly zones or 

 of large imbricated scales, while in the porcupine and hedgehog 

 we find it bristling for a similar purpose with long sharp quills 

 or spines. How different the smooth oily skin of the cetaceans, 

 who evidently required neither bristles nor scales to protect them, 

 and who cleave the waters all the more readily from the slippery 

 nature of their naked integuments ! 



By far the greater number of the mammalians are more or 

 less thickly covered with hair, an excellent defence against the 

 inclemencies of the weather. A visit to a furrier's stores suffices 

 to show the variety, softness, and beauty of these hairy coverings, 

 at whose sight we might almost be tempted to complain of 

 Nature's stepmotherly neglect of man, to whom no such mantle 

 has been given. 



But when we reflect that his manual skill, guided by a'superior 

 reason, gives him every means of making up for this deficiency, 

 and that the necessity of providing himself with clothing is, in 

 reality, one of the chief promoters of civilization, through the sti- 

 mulus it gives to his industry and his inventive genius, we find 

 that we have as little reason to envy the fur-clothed quadruped 

 as the naked tropical savage, who, rendered almost independent of 

 raiment or exertion by the genial mildness of his skies, scarcely 

 rises above the level of the brutes with whom he disputes the 

 empire of the primeval forest or the boundless savannah. 



The masticatory organs of the mammalia exhibit as great a 

 variety of structure as the food on which they live. Instead of 

 pursuing the larger fishes, the whales, the giants of organic 

 creation, are satisfied with game of the humblest description 

 crustaceans, pteropods, medusae. Fancy how many millions of 

 these tiny worms must be required to satisfy the wants of a 

 colossus, whose heart at every beat sends whole tons of blood 

 in powerful streams through arteries thicker than the body 

 of a man ! Kows of sharp teeth would evidently have been 

 unable to perform the task, and thus we see their place supplied 

 by plates of whalebone or baleen, fixed in the upper jaw and 

 ranged side by side, so as to resemble a frame of saws in a saw- 

 mill. Their interior edges are covered with fringes of hair, and 

 from the palate are suspended many other small laminae of the 



