50 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



with longer intervals, and more tremulous — suggestive 

 indeed of the contrasts among higher non-luminous 

 creatures. The picture is dramatic. 



Family Life. — Why do the people thus strive and cry ? 

 the poet asked, and the wise answer came : ' They will 

 have food, and they will have children, and they will 

 bring up the children as well as they can.' This is true 

 for us ; it is also true for animals, and there often is a 

 dramatic element in nurture. The mind fills with all sorts 

 of illustrations of parental care — the kangaroo placing her 

 newborn babe — unable even to suck — into her skin-pocket ; 

 the mother crocodile who digs up the buried eggs when she 

 hears the restless young piping their slender signal from 

 within the egg — it would not be well to be born buried 

 aHve ; the father frog (Rhinoderma) who carries the eggs 

 and even the froglets in his croaking sacs, yet does not 

 swallow them — and so on ; down and down — to the skate- 

 sucker that mounts guard for months over its egg- clusters 

 laid in a shell, or the httle brook-leech that bears about its 

 young hanging on to the body. But there are instances in 

 which the dramatic element is more apparent than in these. 



Let us spread the wings of our imagination again and 

 travel to some warmer chme — ^Africa, Australia, but pre- 

 ferably India — ^to some place where hornbills are at home. 

 These birds, well known for the helmet on their head, are 

 tree-lovers, except when feeding ; though their bones are 

 more pneumatic than those of most birds, they fly heavily 

 and slowly, — most of them with a sound like that of a 

 steam-engine in the distance ; their characteristic note is 

 between the bray of an ass and the shriek of a railway 

 engine ; they are somewhat indiscriminating feeders, — 

 in many ways, in short, not very attractive. But in 



