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February 2 marks the 185th anniversary of the birth of Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829-1884), a German scientist - zoologist, traveler, author of the popular science work "Animal Life".

Alfred Edmund Brehm was born in the village of Unterrentendorf in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, where his father served as a pastor. Father, Christian Ludwig Brehm, was a famous ornithologist. From an early age, under the guidance of his father, Alfred, together with his brothers, took part in natural-scientific and especially zoological observations and work. Even before entering the university, A. Brem made a great trip to Africa. After five years of wandering in Egypt, Nubia, Eastern Sudan, Brehm returned to Germany. In Jena and Vienna he studied natural sciences. His next journey took him to Spain, then to Norway and Lapland, and in 1862 to northern Abyssinia. Brehm then accompanied Duke Ernst of Saxe-Coburg on his travels. In 1863, Alfred Brehm accepted an offer to become director of the Zoological Garden in Hamburg, and in 1867 he moved to Berlin, where he founded the famous Berlin Aquarium. In 1877, Brem and his comrades toured Western Siberia and northwestern Turkestan. A year later, he accompanied Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria on a trip to the Middle Danube region, and in 1879 on a long trip to Spain.

Alfred Brehm wrote numerous scientific and popular science articles and works for special editions, which were distinguished by the thoroughness of the content, lively and fascinating presentation. His “Life of Birds”, “Life of Animals”, “Forest Animals”, “Illustrated Life of Animals”, “Journey to Western Siberia”, etc. were translated into Russian.

The Rare Book Fund has several editions of A. Bram's Illustrated Edition of Animal Life in Russian and German. It is known that the first volume of the book "Illustriertes Thirleben" was published in Germany in 1863, the last sixth volume - in 1869.

The fund contains scattered volumes in Russian of 1894, 1895, 1897, 1904 editions and a three-volume edition of 1992 edition, as well as scattered volumes of Animal Life in German of 1892, 1927, 1928 editions.

First, let's present the book by A. Brem, dedicated to birds. Unfortunately, there is no title page in it, so it is impossible to determine the exact title and year of publication of the book. The beginning is a touching dedication of the author to his father Christian Ludwig Brehm, written in the seventy-fourth year of his birth.

“I wrote this book out of pure joy and love for nature and wanted to communicate my love and joy to as many people as possible; I wanted to once again express the already stated request: “Protect the birds!” and reinforce it with a detailed presentation of the everyday relationships of my clients who need to be preserved.

Let us dwell in more detail on A. Bram's Illustrated Edition of Animal Life, the first volume of which was published in 1904. The book was published in St. Petersburg by the Public Benefit Partnership, which had an educational focus in its activities, publishing Russian and translated literature natural science and technology. Works by Russian and foreign classics, historical, educational and children's literature were also published.

The editor of the Russian translation, K. St. Hilaire, explains in the preface that this edition is printed from the third German work, Bram's Animal Life, which began to appear in 1890 and that it differs somewhat from the previous ones. In the third edition "we find a considerable amount of facts and observations which were unknown to Bram". However, “the nature of the publication remained the same, i.e. this essay should not be viewed as a scientific course in zoology…” and can be read in the family circle.

In addition to the portrait of Alfred Brehm, the book contains his biography, written by Dr. E. Krause. And he begins his description with the following words:

“Only a few natural scientists of our time enjoy such universal fame, especially in Germany, as the compiler of Animal Lives, Bram. His writings can be found not only in academic libraries and in the homes of all wealthy people, but also in schools, with poor landowners, and even in forest lodges. Therefore, it is interesting for everyone to know his biography in order to trace how this great lover of nature developed his acquaintance with the life of animals, which he observed both in the wild and in captivity.

Let us present some facts from the biography of the scientist.

Alfred Brehm's father, Christian Ludwig Brehm, was one of the experts on the life of birds, he loved to hunt and watch them. During hikes in the forest, little Alfred had to be attentive so that he could answer his father's questions: “Whose is this feather? Which bird is singing? Whose nest is this? What is the right way to approach a bird? Thus, from childhood, A. Brem developed an unusual keen eye, keenness, and the ability to distinguish the smallest signs of individual birds.

Mother Alfreda also greatly contributed to the development of curiosity in children, she read to him and her brother the dramatic works of Schiller and Goethe. Both brothers even wrote a comedy together, which was given on small German stages. Close people claimed that Alfred could become a wonderful actor or singer. All his life he retained an attraction to poetry and especially to drama.

When the time came to choose a practical activity for himself, Alfred Brehm decided to become an architect. From 1843 he studied this science for four years. The knowledge gained was later very useful when Brehm was entrusted with the construction of large zoological gardens and aquariums.

Due to circumstances in the first five-year journey, A. Brem had to live in Egypt for a long time, which gave him the opportunity to get acquainted in detail with the inhabitants, their customs and way of life. He learned to read and write Arabic, wore local clothes, visited coffee houses, Muslim mosques, and participated in religious processions. Arab friends advised him to adopt the nickname Khalil-efendi, which made it much easier for Brem to communicate with the natives.

E. Krause says that Alfred Brehm had an amazing ability to tame animals. This manifested itself in his second trip to Africa. The locals of Khartoum, where he was forced to stay, considered him a sorcerer. Brem set up a menagerie in the courtyard of the house, where tame ibises, several vultures, and a monkey lived. The tame lioness and the tame crocodile surprised everyone especially. The crocodile even went to Brem's call.

In 1876, the Bremen Society for the Study of the Northern Polar Countries invited Alfred Brehm to participate in an expedition to explore Western Siberia. "The funds for this expedition were delivered partly by the Bremen merchants, and partly by the famous Sibiryakov, who lives in Irkutsk." The expedition members, together with A. Brehm, were the naturalist Dr. Otto Finsch and the botanist Count von Waldburg-Zeil-Trauchburg. “The travelers arrived on March 19, 1876 in Nizhny Novgorod, and from there, on bad roads, still in a sleigh, they moved beyond the Urals. For several months, Brem and his companions explored part of Turkestan up to the Alatau mountain range, and they made a short walk to China beyond the Russian border; then they traveled a significant part of western Siberia up to the Kara Sea. For a number of reasons, the journey was difficult. The scientist managed to collect rich material on ethnography. Brehm investigated the peculiar fauna of the Central Asian steppes and the mountains adjacent to them. This journey was described in detail in the journal "Nature and Hunting" for 1880 and 1881. “Brem himself considered the trip to Russia the most interesting during his life and was going to publish his detailed diary, but did not have time to do it ...”.

In 1878, Alfred Brehm received from the Austrian Emperor the Order of the Iron Crown, which at that time gave the rights of nobility to his gentlemen, the following year - the commander's crosses of the Spanish Order of Isabella and the Portuguese Order - St. James. In addition, "the Duke of Meiningen awarded Brehm a large gold medal for special scientific merits."

Here is what the biographer A. Brem writes about his character: “... Brem was a frank, straightforward person; he did not like flattery and never flattered himself; he expressed his opinions sharply and decisively. These spiritual qualities brought him many enemies among people who do not like frankness and frankness. But it would not be fair to consider Brem as a proud and arrogant person: he never showed off, always spoke modestly about his own merits, and did not even like his children to listen to stories about his travels, saying that they should see him as the father of the family, and unknown traveler. He had a strong share of humor and gaiety, and he sometimes made his close acquaintances laugh with witty stories and antics.

The main and most famous works of Alfred Brehm have been translated into many languages of the world. The traveler's ill-wishers believed that there was very little scientific data in his writings. “This reproach is unfair if only because A. Brem himself did not consider his Life of Animals as scientific zoology, but, according to the title, as a collection of facts relating to the life of animals.” The biographer believes that with his writings Brehm "correctly guessed the requirements of an educated public, which for the most part cannot engage in scientific zoology, but is always interested in living creatures that inhabit the globe."

List of used literature:

Brem, A. E. An illustrated edition of A. E. Bram's Animal Life. With many polytypes and chromolithographs. [In 10 volumes]. Vol. 1: Mammals: monkeys. Half-monkeys. Chiroptera. Part of the predatory / A. E. Bram; ed. and [with a preface] M.S. Zoology K. K. St. Hilaire. - Translation from the 3rd German corrected and enlarged edition. - St. Petersburg: Publication of the Association "Public Benefit", 1904. - VIII, , 736 p. : ill.
Book science: encyclopedic dictionary / ed. N. M. Sikorsky and others - Moscow: Council. Encycl., 1982. - S. 378.
Encyclopedic Dictionary. T. 8: Bos - Bunchuk - Reprint. reproduction ed. F. Brockhaus - I.A. Efron 1890 - Moscow: Terra-Terra, 1990. - S. 776-777.

It is difficult to say when Brehm decided to write an encyclopedia of animals. It is unlikely that he thought about it during his first trip to Africa, although he kept (albeit very irregularly) a diary and made notes of his observations.

It is unlikely that he thought about The Life of Animals later, in his student years, when he wrote his memoirs about travels to Egypt, Sudan and other countries.

Perhaps the first impetus was cooperation in the "Garden Arbor", where essays were placed - distant pages of a future encyclopedia? It is possible that teaching at the gymnasium to some extent influenced the idea - his students and students were too little interested in the animal world, therefore they knew too little about him. Brem saw that a lively and vivid story could captivate them. Perhaps he was already thinking about capital work during his trip to Spain and then to the northern countries.

In 1861, Brehm had the opportunity to make a second trip to Africa: he was invited to his hunting expedition by Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha - the "shooter duke", as his contemporaries called him for his passion for hunting. The duke loved to travel in grand style - surrounded by a large retinue, accompanied by writers, artists, and scientists. So the duke invited the then-famous writer Gershtecker and artist Kretschmer to this expedition. Brem was "honored" to be sent ahead to select the camp of the future hunting expedition. Brehm agreed to this not only because in those days it was not at all considered shameful to carry out the orders of "noble persons" and travel at their expense, but also because he knew that he could not go to Africa with his own money. To go again to the country where he was ten years ago, and look at its nature with different eyes - not through the eyes of an enthusiastic young man, but through the eyes of an experienced, knowledgeable scientist. Brem believed that this trip would give him many new experiences, many new materials. And he was not mistaken: despite the short stay in Africa, he collected a lot of interesting information about elephants, mountain animals, and monkeys. He published them in the book "The results of a trip to Abyssinia", published in 1863. And so, apparently, while working on this book and on another - "Animal Forests", - he finally came to the idea of a major multi-volume work, which he later called "Animal Life".

Brehm undoubtedly knew the books of Buffon - in his works he referred to them more than once. But, obviously, he read them long before he first took up the pen: it is unlikely that such a passionate lover of nature could pass them by. And of course, Buffon's books played a significant role in the life of Brehm, as in the lives of other naturalists. No wonder Alfred Brehm always treated the French naturalist with sufficient respect.

But Buffon lived in the 18th century, during the time of Rousseau and Voltaire. Brem's time was the time of K. Marx and C. Darwin, and there was a huge difference between the worldviews of people of the 18th and 19th centuries, between their attitudes to phenomena, and finally, between the science of the 18th and 19th centuries. By the middle of the 19th century, Buffon's books were hopelessly outdated. New ones were needed. New and completely different. Brem was not going to follow in the footsteps of Buffon. And he couldn't do it either.

Brehm was a naturalist in the full sense of the word. Buffon's main tools of labor were books, pen and ink, while Brehm spent half his life with binoculars in his hands and a gun over his shoulders. If Buffon traveled in his youth, it was by no means through little-known countries, but in his mature years he never traveled further than his estate and saw animals only in the menagerie. Brem, on the other hand, has been observing animals all his life in one way or another - in zoo enclosures and in the rainforest, in the mountains, deserts, in the tundra and taiga. And, probably, quite often, while working on a book, Brem put down his pen and reminisced. And there was something to remember.

Perhaps he recalled how, during a trip to Scandinavia, he once lay in the snow for eighteen hours, watching birds. The appearance of people frightened them, they were flying in clouds with loud cries in the air and could not calm down. And Brem needed them to calm down and behave as they usually do - they warm the eggs, feed the chicks, fly away and fly to the nests. And he waited, waited patiently, waited eighteen hours. And he waited: the birds not only calmed down, not only stopped noticing the motionless man, but even began to walk almost near his very face. Even Brem's guide Swede Eric Schwenson - the "snow Indian", as Brem jokingly called him - a man who spent his whole life in the tundra and knew the habits and habits, tracks and voice of each animal here, was amazed at Alfred's patience and endurance.

Perhaps Brem recalled another incident that occurred during the same trip - about how he "talked" with the Arctic fox.

It is difficult to say what made the fox come very close to people - curiosity or a desire to find out if it is possible to profit from something near these two-legged creatures, but one way or another - the fox came up and relentlessly followed the travelers. It cost nothing to shoot him, but neither Brem nor his companion thought of taking advantage of the credulity of the animal. And he walked and walked after people, strictly keeping a certain distance. If people stopped - he stopped too, if they stood for a long time - the arctic fox sat down and carefully watched them.

Once Brem could not stand it and, turning to the fox, made a long and fiery speech, explaining to the animal what danger he exposes himself to. The arctic fox listened attentively, as if understanding something, tilting his head first to one side, then to the other, but when the people went on, he immediately followed them.

Brehm could have remembered both the “nightingale night” in Spain and the “monkey battles” that he saw in Africa.

One day, Brem saw a leopard attack a herd of baboons. Usually such attacks always end successfully for predators, and in a number of places monkeys constitute the main food of leopards. Monkeys never defend themselves, but flee, leaving their comrade in the claws of a predator. But this time everything happened differently: having heard the cry of a friend, all the male baboons, as if on command, rushed to the predator. The leopard was no longer up to his victim - he released the captured monkey and was ready to run away. But the baboons decided otherwise - having surrounded the predator, they attacked him, stabbing, scratching, biting the enemy. The leopard tried in vain to escape from the environment, fought back in vain - the monkeys calmed down only when he almost stopped breathing.

On another occasion, disturbed by a shot, the baboons brought down such a hail of stones on the hunters that they were forced to urgently take refuge under a rock canopy. Then the monkeys brought down an even greater hail of stones on the narrow exit from the gorge and blocked it so that the hunters had to go back.

Alfred Brehm could remember a lot while working on Animal Life, he could tell his readers about a lot. And told. Unlike Buffon, he talked about what he saw with his own eyes, what he knew firsthand and not from books.

No, he was not going to argue with Buffon. But he certainly argued with some.

At that time, there were already many books about animals - zoology made a significant step forward. However, these were special books that interested only scientists.

Brem thought otherwise.

“I am not satisfied with the possibility of describing the exterior and interior of an animal, although there is a view that this is the most necessary thing in science. I believe that it is necessary to spare no time and space to describe the life and behavior of animals. Our luminaries of science ... dismember and systematize a lot of material ... and there is no time left for observing animals. But animals are sentient and moving creatures, while dead ones, dissected or alcoholic, are their complete opposite,” Alfred Brehm wrote in the preface to his work, so he thought. And it is not by chance that he called his work “Animal Life”.

The first volume of Animal Life appeared in 1863, the last, sixth, in 1869. By that time, the first volume had not only been sold out and read by thousands of people in Germany - it had been translated into many other languages. The same thing happened with the following volumes. A second edition was urgently needed.

But Brem was in no hurry. The fact is that, starting this capital work, Brem believed that he alone could not do everything. Moreover, he did not know insects, and invertebrates in general, well. Therefore, Brehm invited the scientists Ernst Taschenberg and Oskar Schmidt, well-known at that time, to study these animals, while he took on all the others. Brehm understood that personal observations alone were not enough for such a book. He carefully studied and selected materials from the books of his predecessors and his contemporaries. However, despite the thoroughness, Brem showed excessive credulity - the trouble is not only him alone! - and a lot of dubious or unreliable information got into the book. But if only this! Considering that no one knows the life and habits of animals better than people who directly and constantly encounter them, Brem turned to fishermen and hunters, travelers and foresters, to acquaintances and strangers with a request to report everything they know, what they saw or watched. He received many responses. Experienced trappers and attentive observers, amateur naturalists and connoisseurs of nature told Brem a lot of interesting things, reported a lot of interesting information. But among this information there were invented stories, fictional episodes, what is commonly called "hunting stories." Unfortunately, Brem trusted people too much and took their word for it. Perhaps he, knowing that in the life of animals there is a lot of mysterious, not yet known and not understood, thought: nothing can be brushed aside, everything can be. Another thing is also possible: Brem himself was absolutely honest in everything, especially when it came to science, and could not imagine that someone wanted to mislead him, and with him hundreds of thousands of readers. But one way or another, quite a lot of such “hunting stories” got into the first edition of Animal Life. And despite its popularity, this edition brought Brem a lot of grief. That's why he abandoned the second edition and got back to work.

The second edition, this time no longer in six but in ten volumes, began to appear in 1876. Brem prepared it very carefully, withdrew most of the unverified and fictitious facts, and introduced many new materials.

It is impossible to retell the contents of Brem's books, there is no point in quoting excerpts - Brem must be read.

In the second edition, Brem mostly got rid of the "hunting stories", but nevertheless there are many errors in it. More precisely, now it became known that these are errors. Brehm's mistakes are the mistakes of time.

There are many examples of such errors. So, for example, in the time of Brehm, all predators were considered harmful animals. Still would! After all, they destroy other animals. The destruction of predators was credited to every hunter and much later than the time when Brehm wrote his books. And even more so at that time. In Germany, a monument was even erected in honor of the extermination of the last wolf. And it took decades of hard work of many scientists to understand this issue. Of course, if there are many predators, they should be fought, but they cannot be completely destroyed: it has now become known that predators are necessary to save the very animals that they destroy. Here are three examples: at the beginning of this century (that means half a century after the publication of Brem's books) in Scandinavia they decided to destroy birds of prey in order to increase the number of ptarmigans. Destroyed. And partridges really became many times more. However, the joy of the hunters did not last long: after a few years, the number of partridges decreased significantly, and soon they almost disappeared. The reason is the absence of birds of prey. It turns out that they destroyed first of all the weak and sick birds (not suspecting, of course, that this was the case - just the weak and sick were more likely to fall into the claws of predators) and thereby did not allow diseases to spread. There were no more birds of prey - there was no one to destroy the spreaders of diseases, and a pestilence began among the partridges.

Second example. To save the black-tailed deer, the Americans decided to destroy the wolves and cougars, which reduce the number of these rare deer. Modern means of animal extermination allowed hunters to quickly cope with the task. Indeed, there are more deer. Then there were so many of them that they already began to die of hunger, diseases spread among them, and in a short time there were much fewer black-tailed deer than there were before the extermination of predators.

Third example. In the countries of Africa and Asia, where leopards were destroyed, monkeys multiplied very strongly. They multiplied to such an extent that they became a serious enemy of farmers, began to cause colossal damage.

So Brem's mistakes are quite typical for people who lived much later and even live now.

But if time dominated some facts in the Life of Animals, then time did not dominate others - Brem went ahead of him. Even in relation to predators. So, for example, Brehm warned that the destruction of leopards leads to the reproduction of threatening numbers of baboons.

Brehm has been accused of having "often unconscious exaggeration or misleading embellishment of observable facts in his books, often obscuring them". So wrote one of the scientists of that time - Bergard Altum.

Yes, perhaps Brem was addicted, especially to birds, perhaps he often played out a fantasy - after all, he was an artist in the truest sense of the word. But that's not the point. The main thing is that Brem knew much more than his critics. One should not doubt the conscientiousness and goodwill of the critics of Animal Life - although at times they knew and saw less than Brem, their knowledge was more streamlined, and perhaps this to some extent prevented them from looking far ahead.

Brehm was often (and often rightly) accused of anthropomorphism, that is, of humanizing animals, that they think too logically in his work, they are too well oriented in the situation. For example, in Animal Lives, in one of the volumes devoted to birds, Brehm describes such a story. A tame parrot, who lived in the room and flew freely around the garden, saw a nest of finches in the garden and drew attention to how the parents feed the chicks. After watching the finches, the parrot also decided to feed the chicks. However, the finches did not accept his help, got scared and flew away. The parrot waited for some time to see if his parents would return, and, making sure that they were not there, and the hungry chicks were squeaking loudly, he began to bring them food alone. He did this day after day and was so used to the chicks, and those to their breadwinner, that, having feathered and flying out of the nest, sat on his head, on his back.

The parrot brought up the chicks safely, but even such a happy end did not suit the scientists-pedants. They reproached Brehm for making up or taking on faith someone's story about a parrot and finches.

Of course, we cannot become judges in this matter - whether such a case actually happened or not. But what he could be, now we have the right to say with confidence. The parental instinct in birds is so highly developed that many are ready to feed even other people's chicks. Don't birds, even with their own chicks, linger at the nest, where the cuckoo chick, who can hardly be fed by foster parents, yells at the top of its lungs, and give him food intended for their chicks? (By the way, this fact was already known to Aristotle, but he explained such behavior of birds by the beauty of the chick: “... the cuckoo is so beautiful that the birds begin to hate their own chicks.”) Is it only the cuckoo that is fed by foreign birds?

It is known that a robin can take care of a sick bird if it sees it in the forest, and of other people's orphaned chicks. It is known that starlings that have not found a couple or a suitable place for a nest in the spring and are thus left without their own chicks, furtively, secretly from their parents, feed other people's starlings. Many other similar facts are known. And not so long ago, a very curious photograph went around the whole world - a bird sitting on the edge of the pool feeds a fish leaning out of the water. This is not a falsification, this is an instinctive reaction of a bird to an open mouth - it reminds her of the mouth of a hungry chick. But all this has become known and understandable now - in Brehm's time it was a completely different matter.

The scientists who criticized Brehm could also be understood because many of them sincerely strove for truth in science, for the eradication of all sorts of “hunting fables” and fantastic stories that have surrounded animals for centuries and greatly hindered science from moving forward. But to Brem, they were often unfair.

One more thing. Zoopsychology was then just taking its first steps; no one had yet heard of ethology - the science of animal behavior. Brem was an observer, albeit often biased, but he saw a lot with his own eyes. He could not often explain this or that act of an animal (modern ethologists try to do this, but even that is far from always successful) and, having described it, left it without comment or explained it in his own way.

However, all the scientific disputes that took place around the Life of Animals, all the critical remarks did not concern the readers. And there were much more of them in the 19th century than in the time of Buffon.

Readers accepted Brem unconditionally, firmly and forever. The second, like the first, edition sold out at lightning speed and was also translated into many languages of the peoples of the world. Needed a third edition. The fourth came out after Brem's death, then the fifth, sixth, seventh appeared ... Each new posthumous edition was carefully edited by prominent scientists, amendments were made on the basis of the latest scientific data. Of course, the new edition benefited from this. But the style itself was also edited - Brem wrote in a bright, figurative language, temperamentally and excitingly. The editors made the text stricter, drier, and the books lost a lot because of this. The seventh German edition, published in 1933, although still called Animal Life and considered to be the work of Alfred Brehm, actually had little in common with the one that began to appear in 1876. But Brem was considered its author - otherwise it is impossible, otherwise the readers will not accept the book - they are used to the fact that "The Life of Animals" is Brem, and only him!

Brem's name has become symbolic, has become a household name. Buffon was once called "Pliny of the 18th century." In the 19th and 20th centuries, Pliny was often referred to as "The Burden of the Ancient World". And our contemporary - a remarkable German scientist who devoted his life to animals, their salvation, and the author of a multi-volume work telling the general reader about the animals of our planet from the point of view of modern science, Bernhard Grzimek is called the "Bream of the 20th century."

Brehm's books, even revised ones, are, unfortunately, not so common now. But the reader does not want to part with Brem himself - for him he continues to be a symbol of everything connected with nature. And it is no coincidence that the library now published in the German Democratic Republic, which, by the way, includes not only books on zoology, but also on botany, is called the Brehm Little Library.

In addition to The Life of Animals and several other popular books on zoology, Brehm wrote a number of scientific articles, published several serious scientific books, among which Birds in Captivity (2 volumes), which has not lost its value, has not lost its value. However, he cannot be considered a great scientist, such as, say, his father was.

Brehm traveled extensively and wrote about his travels. He visited not only Africa twice and Spain twice, not only Norway and Lapland - he traveled to many European countries, traveled along the Danube. Already after the publication of the first edition of Animal Lives, Brem was invited to take part in an expedition to Western Siberia. From St. Petersburg, through Moscow, on a sleigh along the Volga, they got to Kazan, from there they went to Perm. Then on tarantasses through Yekaterinburg - to Tyumen, and then to Omsk. From Omsk - along the Irtysh to Semipalatinsk. Brem also visited China, and when he returned to Russia, he traveled around Altai and reached Tomsk. From Tomsk - along the Ob - to Obdorsk, then on reindeer, on foot and in boats, he reached the very shore of the Kara Sea. Brem traveled no less than 15 thousand kilometers in Siberia alone, and, undoubtedly, this journey played a big role in his work on the new edition of Animal Life.

And despite the fact that Brem spent half his life on the road, crossed the equator and visited the Arctic Circle, a traveler explorer, such as Przhevalsky or Stanley, Potanin or Livingston, you can’t name him.

Perhaps Brem was hindered by his artistic nature, and he did not really strive to penetrate into the depths of the subject or explore a little-known country thoroughly, but only sought to create an artistic and scientific image of the animal world in general and its individual representatives, the country he visited, and what he saw there . If so, he got what he wanted. And his merit to science, to humanity is no less, and perhaps even greater, than even very prominent scientists and travelers. He was a passionate propagandist and ardent enthusiast of science, he opened before a huge mass of people the greatness and beauty of nature in general and the animal world in particular, thanks to Brem, attitudes towards animals have changed in many ways, thanks to Brem, hundreds of people have chosen their own path in life - they have become naturalists, zoologists, researchers and travelers. And who knows what is more important - to make a discovery in science or to open the door to this science before the people? It is difficult to answer this question. But it can be said differently: there were many wonderful scientists, Brem was the only one!

In Rentendorf at the beginning of February 1829, an event took place that the whole world still remembers. In the pious family of a pastor who is fond of ornithology - Christian Brehm - a son was born, in the future the world authority and love of all children in the world - Alfred Edmund Brehm. Who today does not know the results of his zoological observations, who did not hold the famous book "The Life of Animals" in their hands? Probably, there is no such person on any of the continents.

Start

Respect and mutual understanding reigned in the family, and the son's love for his father was almost limitless. Alfred Brehm willingly delved into his father's passion, therefore he began very early to substantiate his observations of the animal world. They traveled a lot around the region, around the country, and much earlier than entering the university, the young man managed to walk a lot in Africa for the first time, visit Egypt, Nubia, Eastern Sudan.

Therefore, further Alfred Brehm constantly traveled, studying the fauna of Norway, Spain, Abyssinia, Lapland. His whole life was connected with the animal world. In 1863 he was appointed director of the Zoological Gardens in Hamburg, and four years later Alfred Brehm became the founder of the famous Berlin Aquarium.

famous book

And all this time he accumulated, systematized his observations, systematically moving towards the goal set, probably, in childhood. How he longed to have such a book, where it would be described in an accessible way - in stories, in essays, with beautiful pictures - that same almost parallel reality, so incomprehensible, so interesting!

That is why Alfred Brehm decided to write about the life of animals on his own. It is necessary that the book be understandable not only to specialists, but also to any outsider, and especially to be interesting to children. He learned so much from his travels that already in 1863 the first volume of the most famous book was published. It was called Animal Life Illustrated. And Alfred Brehm was a pioneer on this path.

Helpers

The first volume was published in Hildburgthausen and immediately became a bibliographic rarity. The work that has been done is truly gigantic! A detailed description of animal species in the world did not yet exist, this book was the first to appear. Alfred Brehm "The Life of Animals" was able to publish thanks to assistants - Professor Tauschenberg, who prepared articles on insects and spiders, Oscar Schmidt, who developed materials on lower animals. The book was illustrated by two artists, here are their works. However, Alfred Edmund Brehm himself undertook the largest part of this exceptionally voluminous work. His books continued to be published until 1869. There were six huge volumes in total.

All bird lovers had a handbook called "Birds in Captivity", which Alfred Brehm compiled for four whole years, until 1876. In The Life of Animals, birds of the tree (forest birds) were described by him for that time in incredibly detailed and exceptionally reliable. However, the author turned out to be completely restless, because he considered this information insufficient. And in 1879 the second edition of this work was published - now in ten volumes, where the author revised and supplemented almost all the articles. His books were so in demand that the following expeditions were willingly sponsored by merchants and industrialists, even Russians. In 1877, Alfred Brehm studied the life of animals on a journey through Western Siberia and Eastern Turkestan.

Enlightenment

Unfortunately, this trip with scientific goals realized on such a large scale turned out to be the last one. For the next few years, he undertook only short trips. Including to North America, where for the most part he lectured about his observations of the flora and fauna of different continents. Do not count the universities that awarded Alfred Brehm with various honorary titles, scientific societies were created everywhere that invited him to honorary membership, the first persons of states awarded Brehm with orders. However, the famous naturalist did not even want to mention this, because he was modest and quickly transferred any conversation to his favorite topic of wildlife research.

He could talk for as long as he liked about the animals he saw, explored, tamed, about their habits, about their attitude towards humans. He spoke with exceptional eloquence, demonstrating an extraordinary mind, subtle manners, a great sense of humor, and therefore everywhere and immediately became the favorite of society. He enjoyed special love among the students: the youth adored him for the most interesting lectures, for his wit and cheerful disposition. Even outwardly, Professor Alfred Brem was beautiful: long hair fell like a truly lion's mane, his posture was just as proud and straight, and his eyes were cheerful, radiant and sky blue ...

Life of Alfred Brehm

In fact, not everything and not always went well with the professor in life. Joy, recognition - yes, do not take away. But in parallel, the sorrows are just as great. In 1877, his beloved mother died, a year later - the only and best wife in the world, a tireless companion on all expeditions. And the last drop of grief - his beloved youngest son died during a trip to North America.

On one of the expeditions, Alfred Brehm caught a cold, after which he plunged into enormous labors, in which he tried to drown his grief, and all this completely upset his health. In November 1884, kidney disease took away the most famous naturalist from this world. After his death, Professor Pehuel-Leshe published the third edition of Animal Life, once again supplemented and revised with the help of notes accumulated by Brehm on recent trips.

Writer

Why are his books so loved by readers? They were innovative in the fullest sense of the word. In them, the strict scientific nature of the descriptions was supplemented with such details that dry science considers superfluous, but the reader everywhere enjoys them.

In Alfred Brem's book Animal Life, each spider has its own habits and abilities, the reader sees his "family" and "social" life, is surprised at his daily menu, relations between brothers and influence on human life. It is precisely because of this absolutely alive, constantly moving character of each character that the reader of Brem's book has put it in the category of the most interesting and most beloved.

In Russia

"The Illustrated Life of Animals" was published in Russia almost immediately after the publication in Germany. Six volumes were completely translated and published in Kovalevsky's edition from 1866 to 1876. The second edition in Russia was taken from the third German edition (St. Hilaire's edition), and these ten volumes sold out still "warm" after the printing press, so the publication of the second additional edition immediately began in 1894.

Moreover, it was printed in parallel with the next German one, from where each sheet was immediately delivered to Russia. The text was only translated, and no additional processing, which would correlate with the Russian fauna, was done. Subsequently, what Alfred Brehm did not have time to classify in Animal Lives was studied and classified. Birds (especially cranes) are the face of Russia, about the same as its birch trees. Many articles clearly required additions, although Brem also set out all this most fully for those times.

How to raise children

In a few regional libraries, even today, miraculously preserved all ten volumes of this colorful edition are preserved like the apple of their eye. In Russia, the public immediately became very interested in the author of a remarkable study, and therefore articles were devoted to Brem in some journals, from which the inquisitive learned that their favorite author was born near Weimar, and his father was a fairly well-known ornithologist who corresponded with the most prominent scientists in the world. only Germany, but also France and England.

In every fairly wealthy family where children were taught to read, Alfred Brehm's books were sure to be. These illustrations and related information aroused curiosity for knowledge, the children simply loved to explore the world around them, making, like their favorite author, more and more distant walks and hikes through the surrounding fields and forests, studying all living things that they met on their way. . They distinguished birds not only by their voice and color, they knew how certain birds nest. It was Brem who could inspire the stories of Prishvin or Bianchi.

Hard choise

Of course, not every one of the local children of Russia became a naturalist after being carried away by Brem's books. And the author himself did not immediately choose his path, because he entered after the gymnasium to study as an architect. However, you can't fool fate! A year later, one of the friends of the family invited the studiousus to join him for the summer on a trip to the Black Continent, then still almost unexplored. Brem returned from there only three years later, when all passions for architecture had ceased in his soul. How could it not be possible not to overcome the longest river of the Earth, the Nile, on a rowboat? Was it possible to stop the organization of the menagerie in Khartrum, to tame wild animals? And then move the dengue fever ...

Being in Africa, is it possible to take this and leave it in order to return to architecture? The whole expedition has been in Europe for a long time, and Alfred Brehm is still in Africa. He could not leave research halfway, and therefore persuaded his older brother Oscar, and they went to places completely unexplored, to places where the foot of a European had never set foot. Oscar found his younger brother greatly changed: he spoke Arabic, wore local clothes, and the natives called him Khalil-Efendi. So they traveled for two years. And then the first real grief happened in Alfred's life - his brother Oscar drowned.

Track

Brem, of course, did not stop the expedition, although for a long time grief literally ate him up. Scientific materials were collected huge. The collection of little-known stuffed animals and birds was so impressive that the scientist was looking for money for a long time to ship it all to Europe. And yet - a menagerie, where there were not only birds, but also live crocodiles, lions, various monkeys. When the money for the move was found, Brem donated all this to the city of Vienna, where he settled for a while. The animals were transferred to the zoo, and the collections of stuffed animals, herbariums, entomological collections - to the university.

And so ended his every journey. But the most important, most significant result is, of course, books written in hot pursuit, saturated with the most vivid observations. These are "Life in the North and South", "Forest Animals", "From the Pole to the Equator", "Journey to Gabesh", "Forest (tree) birds" and many others. And how many articles in popular science magazines! That is why Alfred Brehm will forever remain the person who revealed to people all the beauty of the world around him, all its diversity. But Alfred Brehm did not write Plant Life. This, of course, turned out to be a good reference book, but the name on its cover is just PR, speculation on the research of a great scientist and a wonderful writer.

Alfred Edmund Bram

Life of animals

mammals

Foreword

Commentators Preface

BREM (BREM) (Brehm) Alfred Edmund (2. 02. 1829, Unterrentendor, Saxe-Weimar-11. 11. 1884, Germany) - German zoologist, traveler, educator, now known not so much for his brilliant work on organizing zoos of the "new type ”(in particular, it was he who reorganized the famous Hamburg Zoo and the Berlin Aquarium), not so much with his travels (and he did many of them, including visiting Siberia and Turkestan), but with his capital work“ The Life of Animals ”, published in 1863 -69 years Since then, this multi-volume work, translated into many languages, has remained a reference book for nature lovers.

It would never occur to anyone to edit, say, Dahl's explanatory dictionary, but since the beginning of the first Russian edition, the no less popular "Life of Animals" throughout its more than a century of history has been edited, truncated, corrected and supplemented; with the accumulation of new information in biology and zoology, or simply to please publishers and compilers. As a result, little is left of the authentic, Bremov's Animal Life. Brem became Brand.

In this edition, we decided to preserve not only the style, but also the factology of the "genuine Brem" - taking as a basis one of its first abridged translations of the beginning of the 20th century, edited by the famous Russian zoologist, Professor Nikolsky.

However, the reader who discovers the "genuine Brem" should remember this:

The 20th century was revolutionary for biology. Even such a seemingly traditional branch as descriptive zoology has undergone significant changes. Thanks to the emergence and development of molecular biology and genetics, the old taxonomy was revised, and ethology, the science of animal behavior, partially refuted many of the provisions of the "old" zoologists. As a result, Brehm's work, written at the dawn of modern biology, can now be regarded more as a literary monument than as a manual for the study of zoology or a source of reference material.

First, let's start with the fact that Brem, who spent a significant part of his life on expeditions, was still not able to fully rely on his own research - many of the data he cited are based on stories and travel notes of hunters and travelers - especially where it is concerns exotic animals. As a result, data on the size and weight of many species (especially tropical predators) are often overestimated, sometimes one and a half times (a well-known feature of “hunting stories”), and strange behavioral or anatomical features are sometimes attributed to the animals themselves.

Secondly, in the descriptions of animals, Brehm, according to the tradition of his time, pays attention to one or another species, not so much guided by systematics, but by the significance of this or that species in a cultural context. As a result, he talks about some animals in passing, while others he pays exorbitant attention and attributes extraordinary, sometimes completely implausible qualities.

Thirdly, in his work, Brehm again adheres to the characteristic of that time (and, as it turned out later, destructive) approach - to consider this or that animal from the point of view of its harm or benefit (practical or aesthetic). The descriptions given by him of the extermination of representatives of one or another species and, accordingly, the reaction of animals to the appearance of a man with a gun, are simply a list of hunting exploits, far from any zoology and are purely pragmatic in nature (up to reasoning about the taste qualities of this or that animal). Now such "feats" of hunters and travelers are perceived by us as ridiculous or even cruel.

Animals do not exist on the planet for our pleasure. They are an integral part of the most complex system - the biosphere, and the removal of one or another species from it can be detrimental to other species associated with it. Not to mention the fact that the genetic and biological diversity of living things is a guarantee of the stability of the system called "planet Earth", and hence our well-being.

Fourthly, Brehm's descriptions suffer from anthropomorphism (the tendency to attribute certain purely human qualities to animals). From this arise such purely emotional characteristics as “stupid” or even “stupid”, “evil”, “stubborn”, “cowardly”, etc. Nevertheless, these characteristics in relation to a particular biological species are inapplicable - each of them is unique in its own way and many of its properties are not manifested at all in relationships with a person. Moreover, animals with complex behavior and a highly developed nervous system have their own unique individuality and their own purely personal character traits, so it is difficult to apply a generalized “psychological portrait” to them in principle.

Many of the data that make it possible to judge the “character” of an animal are obtained on the basis of observations in captivity - in a closed, often cramped room: a cage, an aviary, where the behavior of animals (especially with pronounced territoriality) changes dramatically. Such misunderstanding by zoologists, scientists and zookeepers of the basic laws of behavior of their wards often led to fatal consequences, up to the death of the animal. Ethology as a science arose only in the 20th century, and is still developing, so that many of Brehm's provisions are now being revised, and sometimes completely refuted.

Of course, no one will reproach Brema with such an approach - he simply stood on the positions of the science of his time. And even now zoology (even, it would seem, in such a “stable” area as taxonomy) is constantly developing and revising many of its provisions. The taxonomy given by Brehm in his Life of Animals has since been supplemented and refined - and continues to be refined to this day. As a result, many species received other Latin names, began to be assigned to other genera, subfamilies separated into families, etc. The greatest confusion was formed in orders with numerous, often similar in many ways, species (for example, as in the case of songbirds) - and this confusion sometimes continues to this day, as a result of which different taxonomists offer a different classification of some species to this day. Therefore, it should be remembered that the systematic position of this or that animal is a rather arbitrary thing, and one should not be surprised to encounter such noticeable discrepancies in the current and “old” taxonomy.

However, oddly enough, Brem's shortcomings are just a continuation of his virtues. If his "Animal Life" was just a boring description of the information accumulated by that time, it would have been lying like a dead weight on the shelves of libraries. After all, it cannot be said that there were no zoological works at the time of Brehm - references to them can be found in his Life of Animals. Brehm presented not only the most complete collection of representatives of the animal world at that time - he created the first popular science encyclopedia of animals, and such a genre imposes its own specific requirements.

A brilliant lecturer and educator, Brem, thanks to his literary talent, created an amazing, vivid and changeable portrait of wildlife - it was the subjective, emotional, purely fictional approach that allowed this book to go into the category of bestsellers, and descriptions of animals, for all their "irregularity", are charming and more reliable to their own. "The Life of Animals" is not so much a reference book as a novel of education for youth, with all the didacticism and hidden romanticism characteristic of this genre. That is how it should be taken. That is why we propose to enjoy the "genuine Brem" with modern amendments and additions - in footnotes, so as not to violate the general style of the story.

Galina M.S. cand. biol. Sciences, journalist

Kornilova M.B., zoologist, member of the Department of Biological Evolution, Moscow State University

Foreword from the compilers to the volume "Mammals"

Modern urban man, if he encounters mammals "face to face", then, as a rule, either with domesticated species, or with those that made the urban landscape a habitat. First of all, these are cats and dogs - old companions of man, then, of course, mouse-like rodents. In parks and gardens, you can meet squirrels (though less and less), and in forest parks - moose. In cities, mammals play a modest role, in contrast to rural areas, where the diversity of domestic animals is noticeably higher. And yet, what can be called “wildlife” is practically not observed by modern people from developed countries - even in zoos, where for the most part they get acquainted with the animal world, animals are kept in conditions only remotely resembling natural ones.

Back in the Middle Ages, the situation was different - huge flocks of bustards, herds of tarpans ran across the endless steppes of Russia, powerful tours ran in the forests, and a unique animal, the desman, abounded in the rivers. Mighty forests arose on the territory of Europe, in which bison roamed, herds of whales plowed the seas, and Steller's cows basked in the shallows of Bering Island. Even in the time of Brehm (the second half of the 19th century), it was possible to observe the movements of animals, reaching a truly planetary scale - flocks of American passenger pigeons, blocking the sun for several days; countless herds of bison covering the prairies; in Africa, migrations of springbok antelopes rolled over the Kalahari in waves ... In Tasmania, one could still meet the rarest marsupial predatory mammal - a marsupial wolf or thylacine;

Current page: 1 (total book has 57 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 32 pages]

Alfred Edmund Bram
Life of animals
Volume I
mammals

Foreword

Commentators Preface

BREM (BREM) (Brehm) Alfred Edmund (2. 02. 1829, Unterrentendor, Saxe-Weimar-11. 11. 1884, Germany) - German zoologist, traveler, educator, now known not so much for his brilliant work on the arrangement of zoos of the "new type ”(in particular, it was he who reorganized the famous Hamburg Zoo and the Berlin Aquarium), not so much with his travels (and he did many of them, including visiting Siberia and Turkestan), but with his capital work “The Life of Animals”, published in 1863 -69 years Since then, this multi-volume work, translated into many languages, has remained a reference book for nature lovers.

However, the reader who discovers the "genuine Brem" should remember this:

First, let's start with the fact that Brem, who spent a significant part of his life on expeditions, was still not able to fully rely on his own research - many of the data he cited are based on the stories and travel notes of hunters and travelers - especially where it is concerns exotic animals. As a result, data on the size and weight of many species (especially tropical predators) are often overestimated, sometimes one and a half times (a well-known feature of “hunting stories”), and strange behavioral or anatomical features are sometimes attributed to the animals themselves.

However, oddly enough, Brem's shortcomings are just a continuation of his virtues. If his "Animal Life" was just a boring description of the information accumulated by that time, it would have been lying like a dead weight on the shelves of libraries. After all, it cannot be said that there were no zoological works in Brehm's time - references to them can be found in his Lives of Animals. Brehm presented not only the most complete collection of representatives of the animal world at that time - he created the first popular science encyclopedia of animals, and such a genre imposes its own specific requirements.

A brilliant lecturer and educator, Brem, thanks to his literary talent, created an amazing, vivid and changeable portrait of wildlife - it was the subjective, emotional, purely fictional approach that allowed this book to go into the category of bestsellers, and descriptions of animals, for all their "irregularity", are charming and more reliable to their own. "The Life of Animals" is not so much a reference book as a novel of education for youth, with all the didacticism and hidden romanticism characteristic of this genre. That is how it should be taken. That is why we offer to enjoy the "genuine Brem" with modern amendments and additions - in footnotes, so as not to violate the overall style of the story.

Galina M.S. cand. biol. Sciences, journalist

Kornilova M.B., zoologist, member of the Department of Biological Evolution, Moscow State University

Foreword from the compilers to the volume "Mammals"

Modern urban man, if he encounters mammals "face to face", then, as a rule, either with domesticated species, or with those that made the urban landscape a habitat. First of all, these are cats and dogs - old companions of man, then, of course, mouse-like rodents. In parks and gardens, you can meet squirrels (although less often), and in forest parks - moose. In cities, mammals play a modest role, in contrast to rural areas, where the diversity of domestic animals is noticeably higher. And yet, what can be called “wildlife” is practically not observed by modern people from developed countries - even in zoos, where for the most part they get acquainted with the animal world, animals are kept in conditions only remotely resembling natural ones.

Even in the Middle Ages, the situation was different - huge flocks of bustards, herds of tarpans ran across the endless steppes of Russia, powerful tours hosted in the forests, and a unique animal, the muskrat, abounded in the rivers. Mighty forests arose on the territory of Europe, in which bison roamed, herds of whales plowed the seas, and Steller's cows basked in the shallows of Bering Island. Even in the time of Brehm (second half of the 19th century), it was possible to observe the movement of animals, reaching a truly planetary scale - flocks of American passenger pigeons, blocking the sun for several days; countless herds of bison covering the prairies; in Africa, migrations of springbok antelopes rolled over the Kalahari in waves ... In Tasmania, one could still meet the rare marsupial predatory mammal - the marsupial wolf or thylacine;

Now some of these animals are completely exterminated (tarpan, tour, passenger pigeon, Steller's cow, marsupial wolf), some have survived thanks to the efforts of enthusiasts (bison, bison), some are still teetering on the brink of extinction (desman, springbok antelope, blue whale , several species of Australian marsupials and many others). But, although, for example, the same bison and bison were saved from complete extermination, no one will ever again see an approaching herd of bison on the horizon of the American prairies, from the tramp of which the earth trembles.

Many animals, as we noted, were exterminated back in the “pre-Bremov period” (dodos, Steller’s cow, wingless auk, aurochs, tarpan), but many - and in particular those whose resources seemed inexhaustible (bison, passenger pigeon, many species of antelopes, whales) completely disappeared or undermined their numbers precisely at the end of the 19th century, when the extermination of animals was put on an industrial basis. New means of transportation (steam-powered boats, which made possible the widespread extermination of whales), the railroad, which opened the way to the heart of the prairies and contributed to the complete extermination of bison (they were shot at for fun from train windows, leaving mountains of corpses to rot on the sides of the road), widespread development Africa and Australia, which allowed the destruction of local animals partly for the sake of meat and skins, partly for sporting interest, as a result, has led to the fact that we are now re-reading many pages of Brem's Animal Life with nostalgic longing.

In the 19th century alone, 70 species of wild animals were destroyed by man. And only in the last 50 years of the 20th century, 40 species of animals and birds disappeared from the face of the earth. More than 600 species are under threat. According to some reports, more than 100 species of birds have disappeared from the face of the earth through the fault of man.

If invertebrates and amphibians are threatened with death mainly due to the disappearance of their familiar environment (plowing virgin lands, draining swamps, cutting down tropical forests), then large vertebrates (birds and mammals) were purposefully exterminated by humans - either because of purely pragmatic meat, raw materials: ivory, walrus tusk, whalebone, ostrich feathers, eider down, etc.), or, on the contrary, because of the harm they bring (often exaggerated). This is how the Tasmanian marsupial wolf, the only large marsupial predator, was exterminated, large birds of prey were destroyed (the harm they caused to the poultry yard was incomparable with the benefits they brought by exterminating mouse-like rodents). In general, the concepts of "benefit" and "harm" in relation to representatives of the animal world are a typical product of the pragmatic ideology of the 19th century, of which Brem was the spokesman. Therefore, now the approach often demonstrated by his articles (a useless, harmful or useful animal that deserves extermination from a human point of view or, on the contrary, is beneficial in every possible way) seems outdated. An additional misfortune is that both "useful" animals and "harmful" animals were exterminated with equal ardor, albeit for directly opposite motives. Sometimes the same Brem slips notes of pessimism in relation to the future of this or that species (“No matter how cunning, no matter how furiously he fights off dogs, however, his extermination goes on as usual, and maybe soon the marsupial wolf will become like his ancestors , the property of only zoological and paleontological museums. It is completely unsuitable for captivity and is constantly angry and wild").

It must be said that such a “personal” approach (angry, wild, unsuitable for content, stupid, mentally undeveloped, etc.) often served as an indirect justification for the “poor quality” of one kind or another. Here, Brem sometimes comes to the point of absurdity - he calls some animals stubborn and stupid, because they are not afraid to desperately defend themselves “when attacked by a person”; some - "cowardly and cunning", because they deliberately avoid dangerous neighborhoods and prefer not to run into trouble. Of course, it is very difficult to find an animal that would not even show neutrality to a person, but absolute and complete gullibility, and it is difficult mainly because all such species have already been exterminated - Steller's cow, dodo, wingless auk. By the way, the same “daring agile predator” marsupial wolf never attacked a person, limiting himself to self-defense, although in principle he dealt well with dogs and was a really brave animal. Alas, tolerance towards a person did not save him from extermination.

However, Brehm can hardly be blamed for the fact that he simply adhered to the then dominant views on the purpose of the animal world solely as a source of food and raw materials for human society. In the factual part of his work, Brehm adheres to an amazing scrupulousness and accuracy of descriptions, and his balanced approach to many purely scientific issues could do credit to the current popularizers. Sometimes Brehm turned out to be more right than subsequent generations of biologists, and his discrepancies with modern reference books and popular books are mainly due to purely formal reasons. One of these reasons is systematics. Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that every major zoologist invents his own systematics, but this exaggeration is not so great - since the time of Brehm, many taxa have been enlarged, then again divided into smaller ones, species and generic names have changed, etc. In principle, the only inconvenience , which this may entail for the modern reader is confusion when comparing Brehm's data with modern reference books. In order to somehow cope with this, we give in the footnotes the modern version of the name of certain taxa of animals - where they diverge from the "Bremov" ones (again, the variant proposed by us is far from always the only one). However, the descriptions of animals made by Brehm are so colorful and accurate that even without a reference to modern Latin, the species described by him is easy to identify.

In contrast to the modern principle of presenting the material - in ascending order, from species that are the most "primitive" (having more ancient features) to "developed" species (the youngest evolutionarily), Brehm adheres to the opposite principle - descending, as a result of which he begins his description with monkeys, and ends it with marsupials and monotremes. Such a campaign is quite logical, although it is unusual for the reader of modern reference books.

Descriptive zoology over a hundred years (except for sections related to the abundance and degree of prosperity of a particular species), if it has changed, it has not changed much. Most of the data given by Brehm is quite credible. The exceptions are passages devoted to the behavior of representatives of a particular species (recall that ethology as a science arose only in the 20th century) and the complete absence of environmental aspects (which we have already mentioned). In essence, facts and their interpretation are often little dependent on each other, and when it comes to factology, Brem, we repeat, is surprisingly scrupulous. Nevertheless, where Brehm's views differ from the modern one, we have offered comments that allow us to assess the changes in the knowledge of the animal world that have occurred more than a century since the publication of the first edition of Brehm in Russian. The following scientific and popular publications helped us in this, which we recommend to everyone who is not indifferent to the history of life on the planet and the fate of certain animal species: Animal Life, vol. 7, M., “Prosveshchenie”, 1989 (ed. E. Sokolova); Jane van Lavik-Goodall, Hugo van Lavik-Goodall, Innocent Killers, M., Mir, 1977; HELL. Poyarkov. Wild relatives of dogs. Origin of the domestic dog. On Sat. What do dogs bark about? M., Patriot, 1991; E.V. Kotenkova, A.V. Severe. Smells in the life of dogs. On Sat. What do dogs bark about? M., Patriot, 1991; E.S. Neprintseva, M.B. Kornilov. Dialogue with a friend. On Sat. What do dogs bark about? M., Patriot, 1991; F. Wood. Marine mammals and humans. Ed. A.S. Sokolov. L., Gidrometeoizdat, 1979; Joan Palmer. Your dog. A practical guide to choosing and caring for a dog. M., Mir, 1988; F. Stuart. Seal world. Ed. A.S. Sokolov. L., Gidrometeoizdat, 1978; R. Perry. Walrus world. Ed. A.S. Sokolov. L., Gidrometeoizdat, 1976; D. Bibikov. Mountain marmots of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. M., "Nauka", 1967; E.V. Kotenkova, N.N. Baggy, M.I. Shutov. "About rats and mice" Publishing house "Erebus", 1999; J. Durrell. The path of the kangaroo. M., Mir, 1968; Systematics of mammals. High School, vols. 1, 2.3 M.: 1973, 1977, 1979; A. Romer, T. Parsons, Vertebrate Anatomy, vol. 1, 2. Mir Publishing House, 1992; Z.V. Spinar History of life on Earth. Artia, Prague, 1977; R. Barnes., P. Keilou, P. Olif., D. Golding. Invertebrates. New generalized approach. M., Mir, 1992; Fur hunting. "Forest industry", M., 1977; E.P Friedman. Primates, M. 1979; A. Kurskov. Bat hunters. M., Timber industry, 1978; BUT. S. Severtsev Fundamentals of the theory of evolution. Publishing House of Moscow State University, 1987; BEHIND. Zorina, I.I. Poletaev. Zoopsychology. Elementary thinking of animals. Moscow, Aspect-press, 2002; From molecules to humans. M., Education, 1973; K. Willi, V. Detje. Biology. M., Mir, 1974; Dmitriev Yu. Neighbors on the planet. Insects. M., Children's literature, 1977; Zedlag U. Animal world of the Earth. M., Mir, 1975; Sharikov K.E. Through the labyrinths of wildlife. "Urodzhai", Minsk, 1971; Geranium I. Amazing animals. M. Mir, 1985; J. Corbett. Leopard from Rudrayag. State. ed. geogr. literature., 1959; J. Corbett. Temple Tiger. M., "Path", 1991; D. Hunter. Hunter. M., Argus, 1991; N.F. Reimer. Popular biological dictionary. M., Nauka, 1991; A.M. Kolosov, R.P. Lavrov, S.P. Naumov. Biology of commercial hunting animals of the USSR. M., Higher School, 1979; D. Fisher, N. Simon, D. Vincent. Red Book. Wild nature of vopsanosnost. Progress, M., 1976

Biography of Alfred Bram 1
Compiled from a biography written by Dr. E. Krause for a large German edition.

Few natural scientists of our time enjoy such worldwide fame as the compiler of Animal Lives, Bram. His work, which so vividly and fascinatingly describes the customs of various representatives of the vast animal kingdom, has gained wide popularity among all educated peoples, among other things, here, in Russia. Every one of us has heard of Animal Life; in view of this, it will no doubt be of interest to everyone to acquaint themselves with the adventurous life of the author of a popular work and to trace how the acquaintance with animals developed in this great lover of nature.

Bram's homeland was a small duchy of the German Empire - Saxe-Weimar; his father, Christian Ludwig, was the pastor of the small village of Unterrentendorf. Here, on February 2, 1829, the future naturalist was born. Fate, apparently, favored little Alfred, as the future scientist was called, surrounding him from the very beginning of his life not only with tender parental care, but also with an environment suitable for his future activities. The fact is that "old Bram", as Alfred's father was called, was himself a great lover of nature and an expert on her life. It used to happen that from early morning, unless business on arrival delayed him, he, taking his sons with him, set off to wander with a gun through the surrounding forests. The immediate goal of these walks was to collect ornithological (bird) collections and observe the life of birds in freedom. But along the way, the venerable pastor drew the attention of his sons to other natural phenomena, explained their meaning, forced them to think about their meaning, in a word, gradually revealed to young souls that great book, which is called the “Book of Nature”.

In these walks, young Bram, from the age of eight, as his father gave him a gun, who did not part with this accessory of a hunter, acquired a keen eye and the ability to observe, and his father’s rich ornithological collections, reaching up to 9 thousand skins, gave him the opportunity to perfectly study the birds of the local fauna; and not only birds: there was no animal in general that lived in his native forests, which would remain unknown to him.

Gradually, the circle of his knowledge of the animal kingdom expanded more and more; first Germanic animals became the subjects of his study, then the fauna of other states, since the modest house of the village pastor was known to scientists not only in Germany, but also in England and France, and they came here or sent their collections of bird skins for identification. Some of these collections were usually left in the rectory, as a reward for the work of old Bram.

However, it would be a mistake to think that in the pastor's house they were engaged only in natural science. No, Alfred's educated parents developed in their children a love for other sciences, read them the best works of literature, mainly German, and tried to develop in them a love for the fine arts. Particular attention was paid to the brilliant works of Schiller and Goethe; these studies so fascinated Alfred that he himself set to writing; the fruit of his work, together with his brother Reingold, was a comedy, which at one time was often given on small German stages.

Close people testified that a good actor and even a singer would have come out of the young Alfred. However, he did not choose this career for himself after graduating from the gymnasium, and did not become a learned zoologist or doctor, as one might assume from his excellent natural science training: for some reason, Bram settled on architecture, which he began to study in Altenburg in 1843. However, he did not have to indulge in this occupation for long: in 1847, the wealthy Württemberg baron Müller, a great lover of nature, offered to accompany him on his planned trip to Africa, then still little explored "Black Continent". It was then that the true vocation of the young Bram showed up. Without a moment's hesitation, he enthusiastically accepted the offer.

The journey began in the summer of 1847, but it cannot be said that it was happy; no sooner had Müller and his companion arrived in Egypt than both, through negligence, suffered a sunstroke and took to bed in Cairo. And then another earthquake came - and they had to endure all the horrors of it. Finally, on September 28, they boarded a barge heading up the Nile. The ship dragged along slowly, but this did not bother our naturalists, since they had the full opportunity to spend a lot of time on the shore, observing the nature of a country little known to them.

On January 8, 1848, the travelers arrived in Khartoum, where they were hospitably received by Governor-General Suleiman Pasha. Here they decided to establish, so to speak, the main apartment of the expedition; hunting was brought here, a menagerie for tamed animals was set up here, from here Bram went hunting in the surrounding forests, especially along the Blue Nile. The prey was rich, but our naturalist did not come cheap: he fell ill with a local fever. Meanwhile, for some reason it seemed to Baron Muller that Bram did not get enough skins for his collections. This offended the young scientist. “I was deeply indignant,” he writes, “the ingratitude of a man who himself did not experience all the hardships of being in African forests, especially with a fever. Then I realized that the works of a naturalist are rarely recognized by outsiders. Only a strong love for science and a deep understanding of the pleasures that it brings, kept me from breaking with the baron.

In February, our travelers began an overland journey through Kordofan, in the White Nile basin, and stayed here for four months, collecting collections of local fauna. Especially a lot of them came across eagles, falcons and vultures. Here they also met the royal lions, as well as leopards and hyenas. For a hunter-naturalist, this country then represented a real paradise, but the hot, murderous climate forced our travelers to return sick to Khartoum, and from here, after some time, they went with all the collections and the menagerie to Cairo. On January 29, 1849, Baron Muller boarded a steamer in Alexandria to go to Europe, while Bram remained in Egypt to undertake a second trip to Africa at his expense; all the collections he collected went to the benefit of Müller. In the country of the pharaohs, Bram remained until May 1850, studying the life of the country and the customs of its inhabitants. At the same time, for a better acquaintance with the life of the inhabitants, he not only learned to speak Arabic, but also began to wear local clothes and even participated in Mohammedan processions, so that the Arabs considered him completely theirs; thinking that he had become orthodox, they assured that his real name was I-bre-em (Ibrahim), and did not want to recognize the name Alfred, similar to the Arabic word afreid (devil). On the advice of his Arab friends, the young scientist adopted the nickname Khalil-Effendi, which greatly facilitated his relations with the Arabs.

On February 24, 1850, having received money from Muller, Bram, in company with his older brother, Oscar, and doctor R. Firthaler, went up the Nile by barge, and then from the town of Wadi Galfa continued on their way to New Dongola. The places here were rich in all kinds of game, and travelers only rejoiced at seeing how their collections increased. But a great misfortune happened in Dongola: Oscar drowned while swimming. His death was a great loss for the entire expedition (not to mention Bram, who dearly loved his brother), since the deceased was an expert on insects, which were generally little known to Alfred Bram (that is why his descriptions rarely mention insects, except for those that rush into eyes by their color or size, for example, some beetles and butterflies). Oscar was buried in the desert, and on June 13 the caravan returned to Khartoum, where there was already a new governor, Abdul-el-Latif Pasha. However, he hospitably received travelers. Moreover, he even lent Bram money when he ran out of funds, and Baron Muller did not send new ones. From Khartoum, our naturalist made an expedition, first into the forests of the Blue Nile, then far beyond Sennar. Expeditions provided rich material for collections, especially the last one: travelers almost every night heard the roar of lions, saw whole herds of elephants and huge flocks of monkeys, hunted crocodiles and hippos, collected an extensive collection of skins of rare birds ...

In March 1851, the long-awaited letter from Baron Muller finally arrived in Khartoum, but its content was not happy for Bram: the baron wrote that he was completely bankrupt and therefore could not send money. Bram's situation was desperate: no money, far from home... What could be worse than this? It is also good that the local Muslim merchants, who had respect for him, lent him a small amount. But after all not all same him to live on someone else's account! Meanwhile, it was necessary to support not only the members of the expedition, but also the animals that a large menagerie had accumulated: there were birds, monkeys, crocodiles, a lioness. All these wild animals in the able hands of Bram turned into peaceful friends at home. The ability of our naturalist to tame animals so surprised the Arabs that they called Bram a sorcerer.

Not knowing how to cope with his situation, Bram spent the whole 14 months in Sudan, until, finally, the same kind governor helped him out of trouble, lending him money again. And then help came from the other side: a German merchant, who was then in Khartoum, offered him to deliver all the animals and collections to Cairo for nothing. Bram could only gratefully accept the offered help. Taking all his luggage, he went to Cairo, rested here during the winter and in the summer of 1852 went to Europe. In Vienna, he had to sell some of his treasures and even part with his beloved, faithful lioness Bakhida in order to pay off his debts. For this he had the pleasure of realizing that he was now completely independent, and with a light heart hurried to his native home, where he arrived on July 16, after an absence of five years.

It is clear that after spending so many years in the bosom of nature and observing animals, Bram had already stopped thinking about architecture, and devoted himself entirely to natural science, for which he entered first at Jena, then at the University of Vienna. At the same time, his literary activity began: he published ornithological essays in magazines and was one of the founders of the German ornithological society; in 1855 he published Travel Sketches from Northeast Africa. The next year he traveled to Spain, then visited Norway and Lapland. In 1861, all individual articles were collected into a book and published under the title "The Life of Birds."

The glory of a subtle observer and connoisseur of animals was already so established for him that when Duke Ernst of Saxe-Coburg decided to take a trip to Upper Egypt and Abyssinia with his wife, he invited Bram; the latter had recently married and also took his wife on a journey.

The result of the new journey of our naturalist was the appearance in 1863 of a book on African Switzerland, as Bram calls Abyssinia. In this work, for the first time, Bram's talent clearly stands out as an interesting storyteller and observer of the life of animals, that is, their external feelings, their way of life, spiritual inclinations, character, etc.

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Alfred Edmund Bram Life of animals Volume I mammals

Foreword

Commentators Preface

Foreword from the compilers to the volume "Mammals"

Biography of Alfred Bram 1 Compiled from a biography written by Dr. E. Krause for a large German edition.

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Alfred Edmund Bram
Life of animals
Volume I
mammals

Biography of Alfred Bram 1
Compiled from a biography written by Dr. E. Krause for a large German edition.