The
distinguished naturalist has made himself an American citizen by
adopting our own expression, and should have the freedom of all our
cities presented to him in the shell of a box-TURTLE.
It is singular to recall the honors which have been bestowed on the
testudinates from all antiquity. It was the sun-dried and
sinew-strung shell of a tortoise that suggested the lyre to Mercury,
as he walked by the shore of Nilus. It was on the back of a tortoise
that the Indian sage placed his elephant which upheld the world.
Under the _testudo_ the Roman legions swarmed into the walled cities
of the _orbis terrarum_. And in that wise old fable which childhood
learns, and age too often remembers, sorrowing, it was the tortoise
that won the race against the swiftest of the smaller tribes, his
competitor.
And here once more we have his shell strung with vibrating thoughts
that repeat the harmonies of nature. Once more his broad back stoops
to the weighty problems which the planet proposes to its children.
Once more the great cities are stormed--by science--beneath his coat
of mail. Once more he has run the race, not against the hare only,
but the whole animal kingdom, and won it, and with it the new fame
which awaits him, as he leads in the long array of his fellows that
are to come up, one by one, in these enduring records.
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