In his adult years he will almost to a certainty commit zoological blunders
similar to those which my gardener retails to me. Favier, an old soldier,
has never opened a book, for the best of reasons. He barely knows how to
cipher: arithmetic rather than reading is forced upon us by the brutalities
of life. Having followed the flag over three-quarters of the globe, he has
an open mind and a memory crammed with reminiscences, which does not
prevent him, when we chat about animals, from making the most crazy
assertions. For him the Bat is a Rat that has grown wings; the Cuckoo is a
Sparrow-hawk retired from business; the Slug is a Snail who has lost his
shell with the advance of years; the Nightjar (Known also as the
Goatsucker, because of the mistaken belief that the bird sucks the milk of
Goats, and, in America, as the Whippoorwill.--Translator's Note.), the
Chaoucho-grapaou, as he calls her, is an elderly Toad, who, becoming
enamoured of milk-food, has grown feathers, so that she may enter the byres
and milk the Goats. It is impossible to drive these fantastic ideas out of
his head. Favier himself, as will be seen, is an evolutionist after his own
fashion, an evolutionist of a very daring type. In accounting for the
origin of animals nothing gives him pause. He has a reply to everything:
"this" comes from "that." If you ask him why, he answers:

"Look at the resemblance!"

Shall we reproach him with these insanities, when we hear another, misled
by the Monkey's build, acclaim the Pithecanthropus as man's precursor?
Shall we reject the metamorphosis of the Chaoucho-grapaou, when people tell
us in all seriousness that, in the present stage of scientific knowledge,
it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some rough-hewn Ape? Of
the two transformations, Favier's strikes me as the more credible. A
painter of my acquaintance, a brother of the great composer Felicien David
(Felicien Cesar David (1810-1876). His chief work was the choral symphony