a notable example of evolution brought about by changed
conditions. When the sheep culture was introduced,
it presently brought famine to the parrot by exterminating
a kind of grub which had always thitherto been the
parrot’s diet. The miseries of hunger made
the bird willing to eat raw flesh, since it could
get no other food, and it began to pick remnants of
meat from sheep skins hung out on the fences to dry.
It soon came to prefer sheep meat to any other food,
and by and by it came to prefer the kidney-fat to
any other detail of the sheep. The parrot’s
bill was not well shaped for digging out the fat, but
Nature fixed that matter; she altered the bill’s
shape, and now the parrot can dig out kidney-fat better
than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or anybody
else, for that matter—even an Admiral.
And there was another curiosity—quite a
stunning one, I thought: Arrow-heads and knives
just like those which Primeval Man made out of flint,
and thought he had done such a wonderful thing—yes,
and has been humored and coddled in that superstition
by this age of admiring scientists until there is
probably no living with him in the other world by
now. Yet here is his finest and nicest work exactly
duplicated in our day; and by people who have never
heard of him or his works: by aborigines who
lived in the islands of these seas, within our time.
And they not only duplicated those works of art but
did it in the brittlest and most treacherous of substances—glass:
made them out of old brandy bottles flung out of the
British camps; millions of tons of them. It is
time for Primeval Man to make a little less noise,
now. He has had his day. He is not what
he used to be. We had a drive through a bloomy
and odorous fairy-land, to the Refuge for the Indigent—a
spacious and comfortable home, with hospitals, etc.,
for both sexes. There was a crowd in there,
of the oldest people I have ever seen. It was
like being suddenly set down in a new world—a
weird world where Youth has never been, a world sacred
to Age, and bowed forms, and wrinkles. Out of
the 359 persons present, 223, were ex-convicts, and
could have told stirring tales, no doubt, if they
had been minded to talk; 42 of the 359 were past 80,
and several were close upon 90; the average age at
death there is 76 years. As for me, I have no
use for that place; it is too healthy. Seventy
is old enough—after that, there is too much
risk. Youth and gaiety might vanish, any day—and
then, what is left? Death in life; death without
its privileges, death without its benefits. There
were 185 women in that Refuge, and 81 of them were
ex-convicts.
The steamer disappointed us. Instead of making
a long visit at Hobart, as usual, she made a short
one. So we got but a glimpse of Tasmania, and
then moved on.
Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops;
man would have made him with an appetite for sand.
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
