Doctor Dolittle's Garden by Hugh Lofting

Author:Hugh Lofting
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Classics, Animals, Childrens, Fiction
ISBN: 9781547119400
Publisher: Bottom of the Hill Publishing
Published: 2012-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

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13. MEMORIES OF LONG ARROW

For me one of the most interesting things in the Doctor's study of insect language was the hatching out of the moths and butterflies from the caterpillar or chrysalis forms. Throughout the previous Autumn and part of the Winter I had assisted him in the collection of caterpillars and chrysales and we had a fine stock in the hatching houses. The care of these required considerable knowledge and experience—of which I had not a great deal, though I was always learning. They had to be kept at the right temperature and moisture and each caterpillar had to be fed on a special kind of leaf till he had spun his web and retired into his chrysalis shell. But the Doctor who had studied butterflies ever since he was a boy of nine had a positively prodigious knowledge of the subject. He never seemed to make a mistake and in his hands a moth or butterfly could be made to hatch out with just as much ease and comfort as it would in the wild state. In fact conditions in the Dolittle hatching houses were rather more fortunate for these insects than those of the open; for they were protected from their enemies, which very frequently in the wild would devour a butterfly or moth almost directly it was born into the world.

"Each caterpillar had to be fed on a special kind of leaf"

With some of the rarer and more beautiful flies it was quite a thrilling thing to watch for their hatching. The Doctor usually gave each specimen at least a day's freedom in the little indoor flower-garden, which was prepared for his reception, before experimenting on him with the listening apparatus.

But one of the early discoveries we made was that the language, such as it was, had been apparently known to the insects before they were born into the fly state.

"I imagine, Stubbins," said the Doctor, when we were discussing this curious fact one day, "that one of the reasons for this is that the insects already have some life experience in the caterpillar form. Then the methods of conveying their ideas, which we call a language, cannot be called after all actual talking, in which the tongue has to be trained to make sounds. And for the rest there is no doubt that this form of life inherits a lot more experience and training than we or the larger animals do. Their memories go further back, beyond the short term of their own life, and carry over impressions and ideas that really belong to the herd—to the species."

This knowledge of things that lay outside their own experience in the moths and butterflies interested the Doctor a great deal. The case of the gentlemen visitors who mysteriously found their way to the Doctor's house to call on the lady Hawk was not by any means the only example of the astonishing things these creatures could do.

When it came to trying to find out how they accomplished these mysterious feats we discovered we were against a hard problem.

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