The People's Republic of Reptiles

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

That's from Henry Beston's book The Outermost House.

Henry sounds like my kind of guy — fed up with editing magazines, he took a year to live in a small cabin on Cape Cod, observing everything he could about man's relationship to animals.

While some of this passage gets a bit Romantic for my taste, I love his introduction of an entirely original metaphor: Animals as other nations, a group seemingly familiar but ultimately foreign and unpredictable.

I can't wait to visit the zoo again, knowing now that it's a mini-Melting Pot, a micro-UN.

I found this quote in another book, The River That Flows Uphill: A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain, by William Calvin. It's a book that I loved for its big ideas back when I was 17 or 18, but I'm having a hard time reading it now — I spend too much time mentally rewriting Calvin's scattered prose. Still, he's a much better writer than I am a neurobiologist. Check out the author and the book through the link above; the full text of his book is available on-line, for free (as in beer).