Once & Future King 05 - The Book of Merlyn by T. H. White Read Free Book Online Page B

species like a cannibal! Do you know that it has been calculated that, during the years between 1100 and 1900, the English were at war for four hundred and nineteen years and the French for three hundred and seventy-three? Do you know that Lapouge has reckoned that nineteen million men are killed in Europe in every century, so that the amount of blood spilled would feed a fountain of blood running seven hundred litres an hour since the beginning of history? And let me tell you this, dear sir. War, in Nature herself outside of man, is so much a rarity that it scarcely exists. In all those two hundred and fifty thousand species, there are only a dozen or so which go to war. If Nature ever troubled to look at man, the little atrocity, she would be shocked out of her wits."
    Literally, "now you send away" or "now you let depart," from the Canticle of Simeon, Luke 2:29. This has come to be used in a general sense, signifying "I've seen it all now; I can die happy."
    "And finally," concluded the magician, pulling up into a canter, "leaving his morals out of account, is the odious creature important even in a physical sense? Would neutral Nature be compelled to notice him, more than the greenfly or the coral insect, because of the changes which he has effected on the surface of the earth?"
    THE KING SAID POLITELY, stunned by such a lot of declamation: "Surely she would. Surely we are important from what we have done?"
    "How?" demanded his tutor fiercely.
    "Well, I must say. Look at the buildings which we have made on the earth, and towns, and arable fields..,"
    "The Great Barrier Reef," observed Archimedes, looking at the ceiling, "is a building a thousand miles long, and it was built entirely by insects."
    "But that is only a reef..."
    Merlyn dashed his hat on the floor, in his usual way.
    "Can you never learn to think impersonally?" he demanded. "The coral insect would have as much right to reply to you, that London is only a town."
    "Even then, if all the towns in the world were placed end to end.. ."
    41 Archimedes said: "If you begin producing all the towns in the world, I shall begin producing all the coral islands and atolls. Then we will weigh them carefully against each other, and we shall see what we shall see."
    "Perhaps coral insects are more important than men, then, but this is only one species..."
    Goat said slyly: "The committee had a note somewhere about the beaver, I think, in which he was said to have made whole seas and continents...."
    "The birds," began Balin with exaggerated nonchalance, "by carrying the seeds of trees in their droppings, are said to have made forests so large..."
    "Them rabbits," interrupted the urchin, "whatter nigh depopulated Austrylia..."
    "The Foraminifera of whose bodies the 'white cliffs of Dover' are actually composed..."
    "The locusts..."
    Merlyn held up his hand.
    "Give him the humble earth-worm," he said majestically.
    So the animals recited in unison: "The naturalist Darwin has pointed out that there are about 25,000 earth-worms in every field acre, that they turn over in England alone 320,000,000 tons of soil a year, and that they are to be found in almost every region of the world. In thirty years they will alter the whole earth's surface to the depth of seven inches. 'The earth without worms,* says the immortal Gilbert White, 'would soon become cold, hard-bound, void of fermentation, and consequently sterile.'"
    "IT SEEMS TO ME," said the king happily, for these high matters seemed to be taking him far from Mordred and Lancelot, far from the place where, as they put it in King Lear, humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep, into the peaceful world where people thought and talked and loved each other without the misery of doing, "it seems to me, if what you say is true, that it would do my fellow humans good to take them down a peg. If they could be taught to look at themselves as another species of mammal for a change, they might find the novelty a tonic.