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THE NATURALIST IN NICARAGUA

BY

THOMAS BELT

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANTHONY BELT, F.L.S.

HOC SOLUM SCIO QUOD NIHIL SCIO.

THE NATURALIST IN NICARAGUA

BY

THOMAS BELT.

EVERYMAN, I WILL GO WITH THEE, & BE THY GUIDE
IN THY MOST NEED TO GO BY THY SIDE.

LONDON: PUBLISHED BY
J.M. DENT & SONS LTD.
AND IN NEW YORK
BY E.P. DUTTON & CO.

INTRODUCTION.

In the "Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," edited by his son, Mr.
Francis Darwin (volume 3 page 188), the following passage occurs:--

"In the spring of this year (1874) he read a book which gave him
great pleasure, and of which he often spoke with admiration, "The
Naturalist in Nicaragua," by the late Thomas Belt. Mr. Belt, whose
untimely death may well be deplored by naturalists, was by
profession an engineer, so that all his admirable observations in
natural history, in Nicaragua and elsewhere, were the fruit of his
leisure. The book is direct and vivid in style, and is full of
description and suggestive discussions. With reference to it my
father wrote to Sir J.D. Hooker: 'Belt I have read, and I am
delighted that you like it so much; it appears to me the best of
all natural history journals which have ever been published.'"

Now that the book so highly recommended by such an authority is
about to be introduced to a public which has hitherto only known it
by hearsay, it will be interesting to inquire into the reason of
its appreciation by such men as Darwin and Hooker--and Lyell,
Huxley, and Wallace, with other leaders of the scientific world of
that day, might be quoted to the same effect--and to give some
particulars of the author's short active life.

The Belts were an old family which had been established at Bossal
in Yorkshire since the reign of Richard II. The main line died out
some twenty years ago, but about the beginning of the eighteenth
century a member of the family went to the Tyne to join the
well-known ironworks of Crawley at Winlaton. He and his descendants
remained with the firm for over a century, and he was the
great-great-grandfather of the grandfather of Thomas Belt born at
Newcastle-on-Tyne on November 27, 1832.

Thomas was the fourth child of a family of seven. His mother
possessed a singularly sweet and beautiful disposition; his father,
much given to hobbies, was stern and unbending, and he himself
combined an almost womanly gentleness with a quiet determination
that unflinchingly faced all obstacles. With a high sense of
personal honour, unassuming and even-tempered, he was only roused
to anger by acts of oppression or wanton cruelty. Then his
indignation, though not loud, was very real, and he acted with a
promptitude which would hardly have been expected from his usually
placid demeanour. A story is told of how one day sitting at table
he saw through the window a man belabouring a woman. Without saying
a word, he rushed out, pinioned the offender by the elbows and,
running him to the top of a steep slope in the street, gave him a
kick which sent him flying down the declivity. The incident is
recalled merely as an illustration of his practical way of dealing
with difficulties which stood him in good stead in many an
out-of-the-way corner of the world when contending with obstacles
caused either by the perversity of man or the forces of nature. He
never carried fire-arms even when travelling in the most unsettled
districts, and his firm but conciliatory manner overcame opposition
in a wonderful way. In ordinary life he was the kindest and most
considerate of men, and his transparent sincerity made friends for
him everywhere. Nor was he ever happier than when assisting others
in those pursuits which occupied his own leisure.

The interesting question as to what led Belt to become a naturalist
is difficult to answer. "Environment" nowadays accounts for much,
but none of his brothers--and all the family had a similar
bringing-up--showed any inclination for what with him became the
ruling passion of his life. And yet, in a wider sense, "environment"
had probably something to do with it. In the first half of the
nineteenth century Newcastle could boast of a succession of
field-naturalists unequalled in the country--Joshua Alder and
Albany Hancock, who wrote the monograph on British nudibranchiate
mollusca for the Ray Society; William Hutton and John Thornhill,
botanists; W.C. Hewitson, Dr. D. Embleton, and John Hancock,
zoologists; Thomas Athey and Richard Howse,
palaeontologists--these, and others like them, were
enthusiastically at work collecting, observing, recording,
classifying. Fresh discoveries were being made every day; what are
now commonplace scientific truisms wore then all the charm of
novelty; the secrets of nature were being unveiled, and modern
science was entering upon an ever-extending kingdom.

Into all this scientific activity Belt was born, and from his
earliest years it may be said of him, as in the well-known lines it
was said of Agassiz:--

"And he wandered away and away
With Nature, the dear old nurse,
Who sang to him night and day
The rhymes of the universe."

"And whenever the way seemed long,
Or his heart began to fail,
She would sing a more wonderful song,
Or tell a more marvellous tale."

"If happiness," he wrote in his twenty-second year, "consists in
the number of pleasing emotions that occupy our mind--how true is
it that the contemplation of nature, which always gives rise to
these emotions, is one of the great sources of happiness."

The earliest instance which has been remembered of his fondness for
animal life occurred when he was about three years old. He had been
in the garden and came running to show his mother what he had
found. Opening his carefully gathered up pinafore, out jumped two
frogs--to the great dismay of the good lady, for frogs are first
cousins to toads, the dire effects of whose glance and venom were
known to every one.

He received the best education the town could give, and was
fortunate in his schoolmasters--first Dr. J.C. Bruce of antiquarian
fame, and then Mr. John Storey, second to none in his day as a
north-country botanist.

Belt's father was much interested in horticulture; and, possessing
some meteorological instruments, entrusted him, when only twelve
years old, with the keeping of a set of observations which showed
not only the barometric and thermometric readings twice a day, and
the highest and lowest temperatures, but also the rainfall, the
state of the sky, the form of the clouds, and the force and
direction of the wind. The elaborately arranged columns, full of
symbols and figures, look very quaint in the careful boyish
handwriting, and must have absorbed much of his spare time.

Insects, however, had the greatest attraction for him. He writes in
his journal: "I have made a great improvement in the study of
entomology, to which I have an ardent attachment." And a little
later: "I find I have not time to study so many things. I am afraid
that I will not be able to carry on entomology and botany together;
but entomology I will not give up." He had been studying
"electricity, astronomy, botany, conchology, and geology." At the
age of sixteen he wrote: "I feel a longing, a natural desire, to
explore and understand the ways of science. I am ambitious of doing
something that will deserve the praise or excite the admiration of
mankind." When the praise and admiration came, no one could have
been more indifferent to them than himself. Nature, his "nurse,"
had become his queen; and never was there a more devoted,
whole-hearted subject, a more simple-minded follower of science for
its own sake without any thought of the honour or glory that might
accrue thereby.

On August 10, 1849, he records: "I have been thinking for the last
few days about fixing on some subject or pursuit on which to devote
my life, as it is of no use first starting one subject and then
another, thus learning nothing. After giving it a good deal of
consideration, I have determined on studying 'Natural History,' not
confining myself to any one branch of that vast subject. As this is
a subject on which I intend to devote my leisure hours during the
greater part if not the whole of my lifetime, I consider it to be
of the greatest importance that I should lay a good foundation for
it. I therefore intend during the ensuing winter to study the
English language and composition, so as to be able to describe
objects and explain my sentiments with greater clearness and
precision than I can at present." The last sentence illustrates the
systematic thoroughness of all his work which was one reason of his
success.

Belt's "leisure hours" were soon more numerous than he had
anticipated when recording his determination to devote them to
natural history. Already his health had shown signs of giving way,
and presently there was a nervous break-down which necessitated his
giving up all work and being out in the open air as much as
possible. But what appeared to be probably the wrecking of his life
provided the opportunity which might not otherwise have occurred of
encouraging and developing his inborn love of nature. Becoming a
member of the Tyneside Naturalists' Field Club, he interested
himself greatly in the local fauna and flora, and formed very
complete collections of the plants, insects, and shells. His name
occurs frequently in the "Transactions" of the Club as the recorder
of species new to the district. His health gradually improved, but
it was doubtful whether he would be able to bear the strain of any
indoor occupation, for which indeed he felt an ever-increasing
aversion.

It was the time of the discovery of gold in Australia, and after
much discussion he and his elder brother joined the stream of
adventurers and sailed in 1852 for Victoria. In this rough "school
of mines" he acquired that insight into the building-up of the
earth's crust and that practical knowledge of minerals which served
him so well in after-life as a mining engineer. But although the
whole colony was in the grip of the gold-fever, Belt retained the
same quiet habits of observation which had marked him at home--for
there, as to whatever part of the world his work subsequently
called him, the engineer was always at heart a naturalist. He
proved an excellent observer, and a certain speculative tendency
led him to group his observations so as to bring out their full
theoretical bearing.

Amid real hard work he found time to evolve a theory of whirlwinds
and to speculate upon the soaring of birds. A companion has
recorded in the following terms another matter which engaged much
of his attention at this time: "The boldest of his speculations,
and one of the soundest, as after-events proved, was his plan for
crossing the Australian continent. He proposed, at the time the
government expedition was mooted, to replace the costly plans of
the government by the following scheme:--That he and his brother
Anthony (who was unfortunately lost in the "Royal Charter") should
be conveyed to the Gulf of Carpentaria, with about twenty
pack-horses loaded with provisions and water; that an escort should
protect them for some twenty miles from the coast, and that then
the two voyagers only, with their pack-horses, should make their
way to Cooper's Creek, the farthest known accessible point from the
Victorian settled districts. Belt argued justly: 'If we fail, only
two lives will be lost, but all chances are in our favour; we are
provided with water and food more than ample to cover the distance
we have to travel. Every step of our road carries us homeward and
to safety. If we never find a drop of water on the road, our
animals have enough to carry those who have to bear the whole
journey to their goal, and as the animals succumb they will be shot
or turned adrift.' The event showed Belt's sagacity. The
unfortunate government expedition left Melbourne loaded with
camp-followers and impedimenta, and by the time they reached a few
stages beyond Cooper's Creek were well-nigh exhausted. Burke, the
leader of the expedition, in desperation started with his two men,
Wills and King, and bravely struck out for the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Through desert and fertile plains, not altogether destitute of
water, they reached in safety the northern shore of Australia; but
the energy, the courage, and the strength that took them this long,
weary journey did not suffice to carry them back over double the
distance to their camp. Brave hearts! they struggled on; but King
only, and as a worn-out man, ever saw Cooper's Creek again. Belt's
plan would have solved the problem without loss of life and at a
tenth of the cost." He always regretted that he had not the means
of carrying it out independently of government assistance.

After eight years in Australia Belt returned to England, married,
and was successively manager of mining companies in Nova Scotia,
North Wales, and Nicaragua, sandwiching in between these
appointments a visit to Brazil to report upon some gold mines in
the province of Maranham. In whatever part of the world his work
took him he turned for rest and relaxation to the branches of
natural science for which the locality offered the greatest
opportunity.

In Nova Scotia he began those investigations into the cause and
phenomena of the glacial period which were to be the study of the
last years of his life, and to which he himself attached the
greatest importance. In Wales he took up the question of the age of
the rocks in the neighbourhood of Dolgelly, and after much study of
their fossils proposed the now accepted classification of the
Lingula flags of the Lower Silurian system into the Maenturog flags
and slates, the Festiniog flags, and the Dolgelly slates. The
collecting of lepidoptera was his chief amusement in Brazil, where
he made his first acquaintance with the teeming life of the torrid
zone and laid the foundation for those observations on tropical
nature which his longer stay in Nicaragua gave rise to, and which
are recorded in this book.

After his return from Central America, his services were in great
request as a consulting mining engineer, and the succeeding years
of his life were spent in almost continual travel: over all parts of
Great Britain, to North and South Russia, Siberia, the Kirghiz
Steppes, Mexico, and the United States. It was on one of his annual
visits to Colorado that he was seized with sudden sickness and died
on September 21, 1878, at the early age of forty-five.

Thomas Belt was an accurate and intelligent observer possessed of
the valuable faculty of wonder at whatever is new or strange or
beautiful in nature, and the equally valuable habit of seeking a
reason for all he saw. Having found or imagined one, he went on to
make fresh observations, and sought out new facts to see how they
accorded with his supposed cause of the phenomena. "The Naturalist
in Nicaragua" has therefore a value and a charm quite independent
of the particular district it describes. As a mere book of travel
it is surpassed by scores of other works. The country and the
people of Nicaragua are too much like other parts of tropical
Spanish America, with their dull, lazy inhabitants, to possess any
novelty. There is little in the book that can be called adventure,
and still less of geographical discovery.

And yet, the many and highly diversified phases in which life
presents itself in the tropics enabled the skilled naturalist to
fill a volume with a series of episodes, experiences, and
speculations of which the reader will never tire. His keen powers
of observation and active intellect were applied to various
branches of scientific inquiry with unflagging ardour; and he had
the faculty of putting the results of these inquiries in a clear,
direct form, rendered the more attractive by its simplicity and
absence of any effort at fine writing. He does not obtrude his own
personality, and, like all genuine men, he forgets "self" over his
subject. Instead of informing us whether or not he received "the
salary of an ambassador and the treatment of a gentleman," he
scatters before us, broadcast, facts interesting and novel,
valuable hints for future research, and generalisations which amply
repay a close study. Not alone the zoologist, the geologist, but
the antiquarian, the ethnologist, the social philosopher, and the
meteorologist will each find in these pages additions to his store
of knowledge and abundant material for study.

With all this, the work is not a mere catalogue of dry facts: it is
eminently a readable book, bringing vividly before us the various
subjects with which it is concerned. Minutely accurate in his
description of facts and bold in his reasoning upon them, Belt
covered so much ground that some of his theories have not held
their own; but others have stood the test of time and been absorbed
into the world's stock of knowledge, while all bear witness to the
singular grasp of his mind and have stimulated thought and
observation--which is a great virtue in theories, be they true or
false.

It has been already stated that Belt devoted the scanty leisure of
his last years to the study of the glacial period, entering with
zest into the consideration of its cause, the method of deposition
of its beds, and the time-relationship of man to it--complex
questions on which his imagination had full scope, and which, had
his life been prolonged, his patient accumulation of evidence might
have ultimately led him to suggest answers that would have been
generally accepted by scientific men. But the cause of the
remarkable change of climate during those late Tertiary and
post-Tertiary times known as the glacial period is still without a
completely satisfactory explanation. In Belt's day geologists were
inclined to get over the difficulty of accounting for the phenomena
by any feasible terrestrial change by explaining them as the result
of cosmical causes, and Croll's theory of the increase of the
eccentricity of the earth's orbit was widely received among them.
Belt, on the other hand, held that the cold was due to an increase
in the obliquity of the ecliptic. But these astronomical
explanations have not met with much acceptance by physicists; and
so chemists have been turned to by some geologists for support of
the hypothesis of the variation in the amount of carbon dioxide in
the air, or of other alterations in the atmosphere, while others
have gone back to the idea of geographical changes. That
considerable oscillations of the relative levels of land and sea
took place during the Ice Age has been now clearly established, and
the general result of the investigations favours Belt's opinion
that the land during part of that period stood much higher than now
over the northern regions of Europe and North America. It would,
however, lead us too far away from the present book to enter into
even a cursory examination of his views upon the glacial period,
and those readers who desire to pursue the matter will find
assistance for doing so in the bibliography at the end of this
Introduction.

Of more immediate interest to us are the "observations on animals
and plants in reference to the theory of evolution of living forms"
which the title-page announces as a part of the narrative, and
which indeed form the main portion of the work. Upon the
publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species" in 1859, Belt had
become an ardent evolutionist, and was henceforth always on the
look-out for facts in support of the theories which had breathed
such new life into biological studies. In Nicaragua he devoted
special attention to those wonderful protective resemblances,
especially among insects, which Bates had explained by his theory
of "Mimicry;" and as the subject crops up again and again in this
book, the non-scientific reader will find it helpful to have before
him an outline of the expanded and completed theory--though he
should be warned that some writers have been too much inclined to
attribute to "mimicry" any accidental resemblance between two
species. How far such accidental resemblances may be carried is
probably well illustrated by the bee, the spider, and the fly
orchis of our own downs and copses.

"Mimicry" proper is often confused with "protective resemblance,"
and it will be advisable to begin with the consideration of the
latter.

Concealment, while useful at times to all animals, is absolutely
essential to some; and it is wonderful in what different ways it is
attained. In cases of "cryptic resemblance to surroundings" the
shape, colouration, or markings are such as to conceal an animal by
rendering it difficult to distinguish from its immediate
environment. In most cases the effect is PROTECTIVE; but in snakes,
spiders, mantids, and other preying animals it is termed
AGGRESSIVE, since it enables these animals to stalk their prey
undetected. It is probable that this power, when possessed by a
vertebrate animal, nearly always bears the double meaning, as in
the green tree frog, where the colouration is protective so far as
it provides concealment from snakes, which are particularly fond of
these frogs, and aggressive in that it allows flies and other
insects to approach without suspicion.

There may be either General Resemblance to surrounding objects or
Special Resemblance to definite objects. The plain sandy colour of
desert animals, the snow white of the inhabitants of the arctic
regions, the inconspicuous hues of nocturnal animals, the stripes
of the tiger and the zebra, the spots of the leopard and the
giraffe have all a cryptic effect which at a very short distance
renders the creatures invisible amid their natural surroundings.
Nor is it necessary in order to attain this invisibility that the
colouring should be really dull and plain. It all depends upon the
habitat. Mr. Wallace has described "a South American goatsucker
which rests in the bright sunshine on little bare rocky islets in
the upper Rio Negro where its unusually light colours so closely
resemble those of the rock and sand that it can scarcely be
detected till trodden upon." A little observation will supply large
numbers of instances of such protective colouration.

It is, however, in the insect world that this principle of
adaptation of animals to their environment is most fully and
strikingly developed. "There are thousands of species of insects,"
says Mr. Wallace again, "which rest during the day clinging to the
bark of dead or fallen trees; and the greater portion of these are
delicately mottled with grey and brown tints, which though
symmetrically disposed and infinitely varied, yet blend so
completely with the usual colours of the bark, that at two or three
feet distance they are quite undistinguishable."

In protective resemblances at their highest state of perfection the
colouring is not constant but, as Professor Poulton puts it in his
delightful book on "The Colours of Animals", "can be adjusted to
harmonise with changes in the environment or to correspond with the
differences between the environment of different individuals." The
seasonal change of colour in northern animals is a well-known
instance of the former, and the chameleon's alterations of hue of
the latter.

Besides General Resemblance, in which the general effects of
surrounding colours are reproduced, we have Special Resemblance, in
which the appearance of a particular object is copied in shape and
outline as well as in colour. Numerous instances will be found in
this book, and a "Leaf Insect" and a "Moss Insect" are illustrated.
But the classic example is the butterfly from the East Indies so
graphically described by Mr. Wallace, Kallima paralekta, which
always rests among dead or dry leaves and has itself leaf-like
wings spotted over with specks to imitate the tiny fungi growths on
the foliage it resembles. "It sits on a nearly upright twig, the
wings fitting closely back to back, concealing the antennae and
head, which are drawn up between their bases. The little tails of
the hind wings touch the branch and form a perfect stalk to the
leaf, which is supported in its place by the claws of the middle
pair of feet which are slender and inconspicuous. The irregular
outline of the wings gives exactly the perspective effect of a
shrivelled leaf." The wonderful "stick insects" in like manner
mimic the twigs of the trees among which they lurk. Nor need we go
abroad in search of examples, for among our own insects are
countless instances of marvellous resemblances to the inanimate or
vegetable objects upon which they rest. One of the most interesting
is that of the geometer caterpillars, which are very plentiful, and
any one can observe them for himself even in a London garden. They
support themselves for hours by means of their posterior legs,
forming an angle of various degrees with the branch on which they
are standing and looking for all the world like one of its twigs.
The long cylindrical body is kept stiff and immovable, with the
separations of the segments scarcely visible, and its colour is
obscure and similar to that of the bark of the tree. Kirby and
Spence tell of a gardener mistaking one of these caterpillars for a
dead twig, and starting back in great alarm when, on attempting to
break it off, he found it was a living animal.

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