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But some misjudging friend had cut down and cleared away without mercy, and divided the varied and sylvan scene, which was divided by a little rivulet, into the two most formal things in nature a thriving plantation, many-angled as usual, and a park laid down in grass; wanting therefore the rich graminivorous variety which Nature gives its carpet, and having instead a braird of six days' growth lean and hungry growth too of ryegrass and clover.
Vegetable fibrine and animal fibrine, vegetable albumen and animal albumen, hardly differ, even in form; if these principles be wanting in the food, the nutrition of the animal is arrested; and when they are present, the graminivorous animal obtains in its food the very same principles on the presence of which the nutrition of the carnivora entirely depends.
It is a curious fact that, during the winter in Canada, a large proportion of the food of cattle consists of fish." "Fish, papa! Cows eat fish?" "Yes, my dear boy, such is the fact. It is a remarkable instance of a graminivorous or grass-eating animal being changed for a time into a flesh-eating, or rather into fish-eating animal.
But neither is the vegetable food of herbivorous, frugivorous, and graminivorous animals regarded by them, as it is by us, as a material and unconscious satisfaction of their wants; these grasses, grains, and leaves appear to animals to be living powers which it is necessary to conquer, animated subjects endowed with life, but for the most part inoffensive, and which, unlike the living prey of carnivora, offer no resistance.
Vast forests of primeval pine slope to the very shores of the lake, to which descend great droves of bears brown, green, and bear-coloured while as the shades of evening fall, the air is loud with the lowing of moose, cariboo, antelope, cantelope, musk-oxes, musk-rats, and other graminivorous mammalia of the forest.
No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with a crumpled horn who tossed the dog, who worried the cat, who killed the rat, who ate the malt, or with that more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb. It had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous, ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.
"Because they are graminivorous," said the philosopher; "and to live upon grass, which is not highly nutritious, requires so close an attention to business that they have no time to think, or speak, or look at the scenery, or keep themselves clean." "Well," said the stranger, "that is one way to live, no doubt. But I prefer the people with the green heads."
I was astonished at this till Mr Fordyce pointed out to me that under the dense shade of the tall trees there could be no pasture for the graminivorous animals, and consequently no prey to tempt the carnivorous ones to invade those silent solitudes.
Would he forthwith be an imperial autocrat; turn tyrant or Thersites; or become critic, one of "those graminivorous animals which gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, robbing them of their verdure and retarding their progress to maturity"? Straws' anxiety was trouble's labor lost.
With this view he finds it advisable that one of his fundamental divisions should be into warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals; or into animals which breathe with lungs and those which breathe with gills; or into carnivorous, and frugivorous or graminivorous; or into those which walk on the flat part and those which walk on the extremity of the foot, a distinction on which some of Cuvier’s families are founded.
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