The Evolutionist at Large

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'■ ■■

By the same Author.

PHYSIOLOGICAL .ESTHETICS : a Scien-
tific Tlieory of Beauty (London : C Kegan Paul
& Co.)

THE COLOUR-SENSE: its Origin and
Dcrelopment. An Essay on Comparative Psychology.
(London : TrUbner & Co.)

THE

EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE

LONDON : PRINTED BY
SrOTTlSWOODS AND CO., NBW-STREBT SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE

GRANT ALLEN

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

Ail rixhit Tiitroid

ir^ . (. ^ Zoh

PREFACE,

These Essays originally appeared in the
columns of the ' St. James's Gazette/ and I
have to thank the courtesy of the Editor for
kind permission to republish them. My ob-
ject in writing them was to make the general
principles and methods of evolutionists a little
more familiar to unscientific readers. Bio-
logists usually deal with those underlying
points of structure which are most really im-
portant, and on which all technical discussion
must necessarily be based. But ordinary
people care little for such minute anatomical
and physiological details. They cannot be
expected to interest themselves in the flexor

viii PREFACE,

polUcis longus, or the hippocampus major
about whose very existence they are ignorant,
and whose names suggest to them nothing
but unpleasant ideas. What they want to
find out is how the outward and visible forms
of plants and animals were produced. They
would much rather learn why birds have
feathers than why they have a keeled ster-
num ; and they think the origin of bright
flowers far more attractive than the origin of
monocotyledonous seeds or exogenous stems.
It is with these surface questions of obvious
outward appearance that I have attempted
to deal in this little series. My plan is to
take a simple and well-known natural object,
and give such an explanation as evolutionary
principles afford of its most striking external
features. A strawberry, a snail-shell, a tad-
pole, a bird, a wayside flower — these are the
sort of things which I have tried to explain.
If I have not gone very deep, I hope at least

PREFACE. ix

that I have suggested in simple language the
right way to go to work.

I must make an apology for the form in
which the essays are cast, so far as regards
the apparent egotism of the first person.
When they appeared anonymously in the
columns of a daily paper, this air of person-
ality was not so obtrusive : now that they
reappear under my own name, I fear it may
prove somewhat too marked. Nevertheless,
to cut out the personal pronoun would be to
destroy the. whole machinery of the work : so
I have reluctantly decided to retain it, only
begging the reader to bear in mind that the
/ of the essays is not a real personage, but
the singular niunber of the editorial we.

I have made a few alterations and cor-
rections in some of the papers, so as to bring
the statements into closer accordance with
scientific accuracy. At the same time, I
should like to add that I have intentionally

X PREFACE.

simplified the scientific facts as far as possible.
Thus, instead of saying that the groundsel is
a composite, I have said that it is a daisy by
family ; and instead of saying that the ascidian
larva belongs to the sub-kingdom Chordata, I
have said that it is a first cousin of the tadpole.
For these simplifications, I hope technical
biologists will pardon me. After all, if you
wish to be understood, it is best to speak to
people in words whose meanings they know.
Definite and accurate terminology is neces-
sary to express definite and accurate know-
ledge ; but one may use vague expressions
where the definite ones would convey no
ideas.

I have to thank the kindness of my
friend the Rev. E. Purcell, of Lincoln
College, Oxford, for the clever and appro-
priate design which appears upon the cover.

G. A.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

A Ballade of Evolution i

I. Microscopic Brains 3

11. A Wayside Berry i6

III. In Summer Fields 25

IV. A Sprig of Water Crowfoot . . 36
V. Slugs and Snails 48

VL A Study of Bones 59

VIL Blue Mud 67

VIII. Cuckoo-Pint 77

IX. Berries and Berries . . . . 87

X. Distant Relations .... 96

XI. Among the Heather . . . 105

XII. Speckled Trout 114

XIII. Dodder and Broomrape . . . . 124

XIV. Dog's Mercury and Plantain - ^33

xu

CONTENTS.

XV. Butterfly Psychology
XVI. Butterfly ^Esthetics .
XVII. The Origin of Walnuts .
XVIII. A Pretty Land-Shell .

XIX. Dogs and Masters

XX. Blackcock
XXI. Bindweed

XXII. On Cornish Cliffs

PACE

161

181
189
198

A BALLADE OF EVOLUTION,

In the mud of the Cambrian main

Did our earliest ancestor dive :
From a shapeless albuminous grain

We mortals our being derive.
He could split himself up into five,

Or roll himself round like a ball;
For the fittest will always survive,

While the weakliest go to the wall.

As an active ascidian again

Fresh forms he began to contrive.
Till he grew to a fish with a brain,

And brought forth a mammal alive.
With his rivals he next had to strive,

To woo him a mate and a thrall ;
So the handsomest managed to wive,

While the ugliest went to the wall.

At length as an ape he was fain

The nuts of the forest to rive ;
Till he took to the low-lying plain,

And proceeded his fellow to knive.
Thus did cannibal men first arrive,

One another to swallow and maul ;
And the strongest continued to thrive,

While the weakliest went to the wall

Envoy.

Prince, in our civilised hive,

Now mone/s the measure of all ;

And the wealthy in coaches can drive.
While the needier go to the wall.

->1

6

THE

EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

I.

MICROSCOPIC BRAINS.

Sitting on this little rounded boss of gneiss
beside the path which cuts obliquely through
the meadow, I am engaged in watching a
brigade of ants out on foraging duty, and
intent on securing for the nest three whole
segments of a deceased earthworm. They
look for all the world like those busy com-
panies one sees in the Egyptian wall-paintings,
dragging home a huge granite colossus by
sheer force of bone and sinew. Every muscle
in their tiny bodies is strained to the utmost
as they prise themselves laboriously against

B 2

4 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

the great boulders which strew the path, and
which are known to our Brobdingnagian in-
telligence as grains of sand. Besides the
workers themselves, a whole battalion of
stragglers runs to and fro upon the broad
line which leads to the head-quarters of the
community. The province of these stragglers,
who seem so bus)^ doing nothing, probably
consists in keeping communications open, and
encouraging the sturdy pullers by occasional
relays of fresh workmen. 1 often wish that
I could for a while get inside those tiny brains,
and see, or rather smell, the world as ants do.
For there can be little doubt that to these
brave little carnivores here the universe is
chiefly known as a collective bundle of
odours, simultaneous or consecutive. As
our world is mainly a world of visible ob-
jects, theirs, I believe, is mainly a world of
olfactible things.

In the head of every one of these little
creatures is something that we may fairly call
a brain. Of course most insects have no real

MICROSCOPIC BRAINS, 5

brains ; the nerve-substance in their heads
is a mere collection of ill-arranged ganglia,
directly connected with their organs of sense.
Whatever man may be, an earwig at least
is a conscious, or rather a semi-conscious,
automaton. He has just a few knots of
nerve-cells in his little pate, each of which
leads straight from his dim eye or his vague
ear or his indefinite organs of taste ; and his
muscles obey the promptings of external
sensations without possibility of hesitation or
consideration, as mechanically as the valve
of a steam-engine obeys the governor-balls.
You may say of him truly, * Nihil est in in-
tellectu quod non fuerit in sensu ; ' and you
need not even add the Leibnitzian saving
clause, ' nisi ipse intellectus ; ' for the poor
souls intellect is wholly deficient, and the
senses alone make up all that there is of him,
subjectively considered. But it is not so with
the highest insects. They have something
which truly answers to the real brain of men,
apes, and dogs, to the cerebral hemispheres

6 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

and the cerebellum which are superadded in
us mammals upon the simple sense-centres
of lower creatures. Besides the eye, with its
optic nerve and optic perceptive organs — be-
sides the ear, with its similar mechanism — we
mammalian lords of creation have a higher
and more genuine brain, which collects and
compares the information given to the senses,
and sends down the appropriate messages to
the muscles accordingly. Now, bees and flies
and ants have got much the same sort of
arrangement, on a smaller scale, within their
tiny heads. On top of the little knots which
do duty as nerve-centres for their eyes and
mouths, stand two stalked bits of nervous
matter, whose duty is analogous to that of
our own brains. And that is why these
three sorts of insects think and reason
so much more intellectually than beetles or
butterflies, and why the larger part of them
have organised their domestic arrangements
on such an excellent co-operative plan.

We know well enough what forms the

MICROSCOPIC BRAINS. 7

main material of thought with bees and flies,
and that is visible objects. For you must
think about something if you think at all ;
and you can hardly imagine a contemplative
blow-fly setting itself down to reflect, like
a Hindu devotee, on the syllable Om, or on
the oneness of existence. Abstract ideas
are not likely to play a large part in apian
consciousness. A bee has a very perfect eye,
and with this eye it can see not only form,
but also colour, as Sir John Lubbock's ex-
periments have shown us. The information
which it gets through its eye, coupled with
other ideas derived from touch, smell, and
taste, no doubt makes up the main thinkable
and knowable universe as it reveals itself to
the apian intelligence. To ourselves and to
bees alike the world is, on the whole, a
coloured picture, with the notions of distance
and solidity thrown in by touch and muscular
effort ; but sight undoubtedly plays the first
part in forming our total conception of things
generally.

8 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

What, however, forms the thinkable uni-
verse of these little ants running to and fro
so eagerly at my feet ? That is a question
which used long to puzzle me in my afternoon
walks. The ant has a brain and an intelligence,
but that brain and that intelligence must have
been developed out of something. Ex nihilo
nihil fit. You cannot think and know if you
have nothing to think about. The intelli-
gence of the bee and the fly was evolved in
the course of their flying about and looking
at things : the more they flew, and the more
they saw, the more they knew ; and the more
brain they got to think with. But the ant
does not generally fly, and, as with most
comparatively unlocomotive animals, its sight
is bad. True, the winged males and females
have retained in part the usual sharp eyes of
their class — for they are first cousins to the
bees — and they also possess three little eye-
lets or ocelli^ which are wanting to the wing-
less neuters. Without these they would never
have found one another in their courtship, and

MICROSCOPIC BRAINS. 9

they would have run their heads against the
nearest tree, or rushed down the gaping throat
of the first expectant swallow, and so effec-
tually extinguished their race. Flying animals
cannot do without eyes, and they always
possess the most highly developed vision of
any living creatures. But the wingless neuters
are almost blind — in some species quite so ;
and Sir John Lubbock has shown that their
appreciation of colour is mostly confined to
an aversion to red light, and a comparative
endurance of blue. Moreover, they are ap-
parently deaf, and most of their other senses
seem little developed. What can be the raw
material on which that pin's head of a brain
sets itself working ? For, small as it is, it is
a wonderful organ of intellect ; and though
Sir John Lubbock has shown us all too
decisively that the originality and inventive
genius of ants have been sadly overrated by
Solomon and others, yet Darwin is probably
right none the less in saying that no more
marvellous atom of matter exists in the uni-

lo THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

verse than this same wee lump of microscopic
nerve substance.

My dog Grip, running about on the path
there, with his nose to the ground, and sniffing
at every stick and stone he meets on his way,
gives us the clue to solve the problem. Grip,
as Professor Croom Robertson suggests,
seems capable of extracting a separate and
distinguishable smell from everything. I
have only to shy a stone on the beach among
a thousand other stones, and my dog, like a
well-bred retriever as he is, selects and brings
back to me that individual stone from all the
stones around, by ex^rrcise of his nose alone.
It is plain that Grip's world is not merely a
world of sights, but a world of smells as well.
He not only smells smells, but he remembers
smells, he thinks smells, he even dreams
smells, as you may see by his sniffing and
growling in his sleep. Now, if I were to cut
open Grip s head (which heaven forfend), I
should find in it a correspondingly big smell-
nerve and smell-centre — an olfactory lobe, as
the anatomists say. All the accumulated nasal

MICROSCOPIC BRAINS. ii

experiences of his ancestors have made that
lobe enormously developed. But in a man's
head you would find a very large and fine
optic centre, and only a mere shrivelled relic
to represent the olfactory lobes. You and I
and our ancestors have had but little occasion
for sniffing and scenting ; our sight and our
touch have done duty as chief intelligencers
from the outer world ; and the nerves of smell,
with their connected centres, have withered
away to the degenerate condition in which
they now are. Consequently, smell plays but
a small part in our thought and our memories.
The world that we know is chiefly a world
of sights and touches. But in the brain of
dog, or deer, or antelope, smell is a prevail-
ing faculty ; it colours all their ideas, and it
has innumerable nervous connections with
every part of their brain. The big olfac-
tory lobes are in direct communication
with a thousand other nerves ; odours rouse
trains of thought or powerful emotions in
their minds just as visible objects do in our
own.

12 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

Now, in the dog or the horse sight and
smell are equally developed ; so that they
probably think of most things about equally
in terms of each. In ourselves,, sight is highly
developed, and smell is a mere relic ; so that
we think of most things in terms of sight
alone, and only rarely, as with a rose or a
lily, in terms of both. But in ants, on the
contrary, smell is highly developed and sight
a mere relic ; so that they probably think of
most things as smellable only, and very little
as visible in form or colour. Dr. Bastian has
shown that bees and butterflies are largely
guided by scent ; and though he is certainly
wrong in supposing that sight has little to do
with leading them to flowers (for if you cut
off the bright-coloured corolla they will never
discover the mutilated blossoms, even when
they visit others on the same plant), yet the
mere fact that so many flowers are scented is
by itself enough to show that perfume has a
great deal to do with the matter. In wing-
less ants, while the eyes have undergone

MICROSCOPIC BRAINS. 13

degeneration, this high sense of smell has been
continued and further developed, till it has
become their principal sense-endowment, and
the chief raw material of their intelligence.
Their active little brains are almost wholly en-
gaged in correlating and co-ordinating smells
with actions. Their olfactory nerves give
them nearly all the information they can gain
about the external world, and their brains
take in this information and work out the
proper movements which it indicates. By
smell they find their way about and carry on
the business of their lives. Just as you and
I know the road from Regent's Circus to
Pall Mall by visible signs of the street-corners
and the Duke of York^s Column, so these
little ants know the way from the nest to the
corpse of the dismembered worm by observ-
ing and remembering the smells which they
met with on their way. See : I obliterate
the track for an inch or two with my stick,
and the little creatures go beside themselves
with astonishment and dismay. They rush

14 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

about wildly, inquiring of one another with
their antennae whether this is really Dooms-
day, and whether the whole course of nature
has been suddenly revolutionised. Then,
after a short consultation, they determine
upon action; and every ant starts off in a
different direction to hunt the lost track, head
to the ground, exactly as a pointer hunts the
missing trail of a bird or hare. Each ventures
an inch or so off, and then runs back to find
the rest, for fear he should get isolated alto-
gether. At last, after many failures, one
lucky fellow hits upon the well-remembered
train of scents, and rushes back, leaving smell-
tracks no doubt upon the soil behind him. The
message goes quickly round from post to post,
each sentry making passes with his antennae
to the next picket, and so sending on the
news to the main body in the rear. Within
five minutes communications are re-esta-
blished, and the precious bit of worm-meat
continues triumphantly on its way along the
recovered path. An ingenious writer would

MICROSCOPIC BRAINS. 15

even have us believe that ants possess a
scent-language of their own, and emit various
odours from their antennae which the other
ants perceive with theirs, and recognise as
distinct in meaning. Be this as it may, you
cannot doubt, if you watch them long, that
scents and scents alone form the chief means
by which they recollect and know one an-
other, or the external objects with which they
come in contact. The whole universe is
clearly to them a complicated picture made
up entirely of infinite interfusing smells.

i6 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

II.

A WAYSIDE BERRY,

Half-hidden in the luxuriant growth of
leaves and flowers that drape the deep side
of this green lane, I have just espied a little
picture in miniature, a tall wild strawberry-
stalk with three full red berries standing out
on its graceful branchlets. There are glossy
hart's-tongues on the matted bank, and yellow
hawkweeds, and bright bunches of red cam-
pion ; but somehow, amid all that wealth of
shape and colour, my eye falls and rests
instinctively upon the three little ruddy berries,
and upon nothing else. I pick the single stalk
from the bank and hold it here in my hands.
The origin and development of these pretty
bits of red pulp is one of the many curious

A WAYSIDE BERRY. 17

questions upon which modern theories of life
have cast such a sudden and unexpected
flood of light. What makes the strawberry
stalk grow out into this odd and brightly
coloured lump, bearing its small fruits em-
bedded on its swollen surface ? Clearly the
agency of those same small birds who have
been mainly instrumental in dressing the
haw in its scarlet coat, and clothing the
spindle-berries with their two-fold covering of
crimson doublet and orange cloak.

In common language we speak of each
single strawberr}'* as a fruit. But it is in
reality a collection of separate fruits, the tiny
yellow-brown grains which stud its sides
being each of them an individual little nut ;
while the sweet pulp is, in fact, no part of the
true fruit at all, but merely a swollen stalk.
There is a white potentilla so like a straw-
berry blossom that even a botanist must look
closely at the plant before he can be sure of
its identity. While they are in flower the
two heads remain almost indistinguishable ;

c

i8 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

but when the seed begins to set the potentilla
develops only a collection of dry fruitlets,
seated upon a green receptacle, the bed or
soft expansion which hangs on to the ' hull '
or calyx. Each fruitlet consists of a thin
covering, enclosing a solitary seed. You may
compare one of them separately to a plum,
with its single kernel, only that in the plum
the covering is thick and juicy, while in the
potentilla and . the fruitlets of the strawberry
it is thin and dry. An almond comes still
nearer to the mark. Now the potentilla
shows us, as it were, the primitive form of
the strawberry. But in the developed ripe
strawberry as we now find it the fruitlets are
not crowded upon a green receptacle. After
flowering, the strawberry receptacle lengthens
and broadens, so as to form a roundish mass
of succulent pulp ; and as the fruitlets ap-
proach maturity this sour green pulp becomes
soft, sweet, and red. The little seed-like
fruits, which are the important organs, stand
out upon its surface like mere specks ; while

A WAYSIDE BERRY, 19

the comparatively unimportant receptacle is all
that we usually think of when we talk about
strawberries. After our usual Protagorean
fashion we regard man as the measure of all
things, and pay little heed to any part of the
compound fruit-cluster save that which minis-
ters directly to our own tastes.

But why does the strawberry develop this
large mass of apparently useless matter ?
Simply in order the better to ensure the dis-
persion of its small brown fruitlets. Birds
are always hunting for seeds and insects along
the hedge-rows, and devouring such among
them as contain any available foodstuff. In
most cases they crush the seeds to pieces with
their gizzards, and digest and assimilate their
contents. Seeds of this class are generally
enclosed in green or brown capsules, which
often escape the notice of the birds, and so
succeed in perpetuating their species. But
there is another class of plants whose mem-
bers possess hard and indigestible seeds, and

so turn the greedy birds from dangerous

c 2

20 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

enemies into useful allies. Supposing there
was by chance, ages ago, one of these primitive
ancestral strawberries, whose receptacle was
a little more pulpy than usual, and contained
a small quantity of sugary matter, such as is
often found in various parts of plants ; then
it might happen to attract the attention of
some hungry bird, which, by eating the soft
pulp, would help in dispersing the indigestible
fruitlets. As these fruitlets sprang up into
healthy young plants, they would tend to re-
produce the peculiarity in the structure of the
receptacle which marked the parent stock, and
some of them would probably display it in a
more marked degree. These would be sure
to get eaten in their turn, and so to become
the originators of a still more pronounced
strawberry type. As time went on, the
largest and sweetest berries would constantly
be chosen by the birds, till the whole species
began to assume its existing character. The
receptacle would become softer and sweeter,
and the fruits themselves harder and more

A WAYSIDE BERRY, 21

indigestible : because, on the one hand, all
sour or hard berries would stand a poorer
chance of getting dispersed in good situations
for their growth, while, on the other hand, all
soft-shelled fruitlets would be ground up and
digested by the bird, and thus effectually pre-
vented from ever growing into future plants.
Just in like manner, many tropical nuts have
extravagantly hard shells, as only those sur-
vive which can successfully defy the teeth
and hands of the clever and persistent
monkey.

This accounts for the strawberry being
sweet and pulpy, but not for its being red.
Here, however, a similar reason comes into
play. All ripening fruits and opening flowers
have a natural tendency to grow bright red,
or purple, or blue, though in many of them
the tendency is repressed by the dangers
attending brilliant displays of colour. This
natural habit depends upon the oxidation of
their tissues, and is exactly analogous to the
assumption of autumn tints by leaves. If a

22 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

plant, or part of a plant, is injured by such a
change of colour, through being rendered
more conspicuous to its foes, it soon loses the
tendency under the influence of natural selec-
tion ; in other words, those individuals which
most display it get killed out, while those
which least display it survive and thrive. On
the other hand, if conspicuousness is an ad-
vantage to the plant, the exact opposite hap-
pens, and the tendency becomes developed
into a confirmed habit. This is the case with
the strawberry, as with many other fruits.
The more bright-coloured the berry is, the
better its chance of getting its fruitlets dis-
persed. Birds have quick eyes for colour,
especially for red and white ; and therefore
almost all edible berries have assumed one or
other of these two hues. So long as the
fruitlets remain unripe, and would therefore
be injured by being eaten, the pulp remains
sour, green, and hard ; but as soon as they
have become fit for dispersion it grows soft,
fills with sugary juice, and acquires its ruddy

A WAYSIDE BERRY. 23

outer flesh. Then the birds see and recog-
nise it as edible, and govern themselves
accordingly.

But if this is the genesis of the straw-
berry, asks somebody, why have not all the
potentillas and the whole strawberry tribe
also become berries of the same type ? Why
are there still potentilla fruit-clusters which
consist of groups of dry seed-like nuts ? Ay,
there's the rub. Science cannot answer as
yet. After all, these questions are still in
their infancy, and we can scarcely yet do more
than discover a single stray interpretation
here and there. In the present case a botanist
can only suggest either that the potentilla
finds its own mode of dispersion equally well
adapted to its own peculiar circumstances, or
else that the lucky accident, the casual com-
bination of circumstances, which produced the
first elongation of the receptacle in the straw-
berry has never happened to befall its more
modest kinsfolk. For on such occasional
freaks of nature the whole evolution of new

M THE EVOLUTION/ST AT LARGE.

varieties entirely depends. A gardener may
raise a thousand seedlings, and only one or
none among them may present a single new
and important feature. So a species may
wait for a thousand years, or for ever, before
its circumstances happen to produce the first
step towards some desirable improvement.
One extra petal may be invaluable to a five-
rayed flower as effecting some immense saving
of pollen in its fertilisation ; and yet the
* sport ' which shall give it this sixth ray may
never occur, or may be trodden down in the
mire and destroyed by a passing cow.

IN SUMMER FIELDS. 25

III.

IN SUMMER FIELDS,

Grip and I have come out for a morning
stroll among the close-cropped pastures be-
side the beck, in the very centre of our green
little dingle. Here I can sit, as is my wont,
on a dry knoll, and watch the birds, beasts,
insects, and herbs of the field, while Grip
scours the place in every direction, intent, no
doubt, upon those more practical objects —
mostly rats, I fancy — which possess a con-
genial interest for the canine intelligence.
From my coign of vantage on the knoll I
can take care that he inflicts no grievous
bodily injury upon the sheep, and that he
receives none from the quick-tempered cow
with the brass-knobbed horns. For a kind
of ancestral feud seems to smoulder for ever

26 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

between Grip and the whole race of kine,
breaking out every now and then into open
warfare, which calls for my prompt interfer-
ence, in an attitude of armed but benevolent
neutrality, merely for the friendly purpose of
keeping the peace.

This ancient feud, I imagine, is really
ancestral, and dates many ages further back
in time than Grip's individual experiences.
Cows hate dogs instinctively, from their
earliest calf hood upward. I used to doubt
once upon a time whether the hatred was not
of artificial origin and wholly induced by the
inveterate human habit of egging on every
dog to worry every other animal that comes
in its way. But I tried a mild experiment
one day by putting a half-grown town-bred
puppy into a small enclosure with some
hitherto unworried calves, and they all turned
to make a common headway against the
intruder with the same striking unanimity
as the most ancient and experienced cows.
Hence I am inclined to suspect that the

IN SUMMER FIELDS, 27

antipathy does actually result from a vaguely
inherited instinct derived from the days when
the ancestor of our kine was a wild bull, and
the ancestor of our dogs a wolf, on the wide
forest-clad plains of Central Europe. When
a cow puts up its tail at sight of a dog enter-
ing its paddock at the present day, it has
probably some dim instinctive consciousness
that it stands in the presence of a dangerous
hereditary foe ; and as the wolves could only
seize with safety a single isolated wild bull,
so the cows now usually make common cause
against the intruding dog, turning their heads
in one direction with very unwonted una-
nimity, till his tail finally disappears under
the opposite gate. Such inherited antipathies
seem common and natural enough. Every
species knows and dreads the ordinary ene-
mies of its race. Mice scamper away from
the very smell of a cat. Young chickens run
to the shelter of their mother's wings when
the shadow of a hawk passes over their heads.
Mr. Darwin put a small snake into a paper

28 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

bag, which he gave to the monkeys at the
Zoo ; and one monkey after another opened
the bag, looked in upon the deadly foe of the
quadrumanous kind, and promptly dropped
the whole package with every gesture of
horror and dismay. Even man himself —
though his instincts have all weakened so
greatly with the growth of his more plastic
intelligence^ adapted to a wider and more
modifiable set of external circumstances —
seems to retain a vague and original terror of
the serpentine form.

If we think of parallel cases, it is not
curious that animals should thus instinctively
recognise their natural enemies. We are not
surprised that they recognise their own
fellows : and yet they must do so by means
of some equally strange automatic and in-
herited mechanism in their nervous system.
One butterfly can tell its mates at once from
a thousand other species, though it may differ
from some of them only by a single spot or
line, which would escape the notice of all but

IN SUMMER FIELDS, 29

the most attentive observers. Must we not
conclude that there are elements in the butter-
fly's feeble brain exactly answering to the
blank picture of its specific type ? So, too,
must we not suppose that in every race of
animals there arises a perceptive structure
specially adapted to the recognition of its
own kind ? Babies notice human faces long
before they notice any other living thing.
In like manner we know that most creatures
can judge instinctively of their proper food.
One young bird just fledged naturally pecks
at red berries ; another exhibits an untaught
desire to chase down grasshoppers ; a third,
which happens to be born an owl, turns at
once to the congenial pursuit of small spar-
rows, mice, and frogs. Each species seems
to have certain faculties so arranged that the
sight of certain external objects, frequently
connected with food in their ancestral experi-
ence, immediately arouses in them the appro-
priate actions for its capture. Mr. Douglas
Spalding found that newly-hatched chickens

30 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

darted rapidly and accurately at flies on the
wing. When we recollect that even so late
an acquisition as articulate speech in human
beings has its special physical seat in the
brain, it is not astonishing that complicated
mechanisms should have arisen among ani-
mals for the due perception of mates, food,
and foes respectively. Thus, doubtless, the
serpent form has imprinted itself indelibly on
the senses of monkeys, and the wolf or dog
form on those of cows : so that even with a
young ape or calf the sight of these their
ancestral enemies at once calls up uneasy or
terrified feelings in their half-developed minds.
Our own infants in arms have no personal
experience of the real meaning to be attached
to angry tones, yet they shrink from the
sound of a gruff voice even before they
have learned to distinguish their nurse's
face.

When Grip gets among the sheep, their
hereditar)^ traits come out in a very different
manner. They are by nature and descent

IN SUMMER FIELDS. 31

timid mountain animals, and they have never
been accustomed to face a foe, as cows and
buffaloes are wont to do, especially when in
a herd together. You cannot see many traces
of the original mountain life among sheep,
and yet there are still a few remaining to
mark their real pedigree. Mr. Herbert
Spencer has noticed the fondness of lambs
for frisking on a hillock, however small ; and
when I come to my little knoll here, I gene-
rally find it occupied by a couple, who rush
away on my approach, but take their stand
instead on the merest ant-hill which they can
find in the field. I once knew three young
goats, kids of a mountain breed, and the only
elevated object in the paddock where they
were kept was a single old elm stump. For
the possession of this stump the goats fought

incessantly ; and the victor would proudly
perch himself on the top, with all four legs
inclined inward (for the whole diameter of the
tree was but some fifteen inches), maintaining
himself in his place with the greatest dififi-

32 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

culty, and butting at his two brothers until at
last he lost his balance and fell. This one
old stump was the sole representative in their
limited experience of the rocky pinnacle
upon which their forefathers kept watch like
sentinels ; and their instinctive yearnings
prompted them to perch themselves upon
the only available memento of their native
haunts. Thus, too, but in a dimmer and
vaguer way, the sheep, especially during his
younger days, loves to revert, so far as his
small opportunities permit him, to the un-
consciously remembered habits of his race.
But in mountain countries, every one must
have noticed how the sheep at once becomes
a different being. On the Welsh hills he
casts away all the dull and heavy serenity of
his brethren on the South Downs, and dis-
plays once more the freedom, and even the
comparative boldness, of a mountain breed.
A Merionethshire ewe thinks nothing of run-
ning up one side of a low-roofed barn and
down the other, or of clearing a stone wall

IN SUMMER FIELDS. 33

which a Leicestershire farmer would consider
extravagantly high.

Another mountain trait in the stereotyped
character of sheep is their well-known sequa-
ciousness. When Grip runs after them they
all run away together : if one goes through a
certain gap in the hedge, every other follows ;
and if the leader jumps the beck at a certain
spot, every lamb in the flock jumps in the
self-same place. It is said that if you hold a
stick for the first sheep to leap over, and then
withdraw it, all the succeeding sheep will
leap with mathematical accuracy at the corre-
sponding point ; and this habit is usually held
up to ridicule as proving the utter stupidity
of the whole race. It really proves nothing
but the goodness of their ancestral instincts.
For mountain animals, accustomed to follow
a leader, that leader being the bravest and
strongest ram of the flock, must necessarily
follow him with the most implicit obedience.
He alone can see what obstacles come in the
way ; and each of the succeeding train must

D

34 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE. ' -■'

watch and imitate the actions of their prede-
cessors. Otherwise, if the flock happens to
come to a chasm, running as they often must
with some speed, any individual which stopped
to look and decidie for itself before leaping
would inevitably be pushed over the edge by
those behind it, and so would lose all chance
of handing down its cautious and sceptical
spirit to any possible descendants. On the
other hand, those uninquiring and blindly
obedient animals which simply did as they
saw others do would both survive them-
selves and become the parents of future and
similar generations. Thus there would be
handed down from dam to lamb a general
tendency to sequaciousness — a follow-my-
leader spirit, which was really the best safe-
guard for the race against the evils of insub-
ordination, still so fatal to Alpine climbers.
And now that our sheep have settled down
to a tame and monotonous existence on the
downs of Sussex or the levels of the Mid-
lands, the old instinct clings to them still, and

IN SUMMER FIELDS. 35

speaks out plainly for their mountain origin.
There are few things in nature more inte-
resting to notice than these constant survivals
of instinctive habits in altered circumstances.
They are to the mental life what rudimentary
organs are to the bodily structure : they
remind us of an older order of things, just as
the abortive legs of the blind-worm show us
that he was once a lizard, and the hidden
shell of the slug that he was once a snail.

D 2

36 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

IV.

A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT.

The little streamlet whose tiny ranges and
stickles form the middle thread of this green
combe in the Dorset downs is just at present
richly clad with varied foliage. Tall spikes
of the yellow flag rise above the slow-flowing
pools, while purple loose-strife overhangs the
bank, and bunches of the arrowhead stand
high out of their watery home, just unfolding
their pretty waxen white flowers to the air.
In the rapids, on the other hand, I find the
curious water crowfoot, a spray of which I
have this moment pulled out of the stream
and am now holding in my hand as I sit on
the little stone bridge, with my legs dangling

A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT. yj

over the pool below, known to me as the
undoubted residence of a pair of trout. It is
a queer plant, this crowfoot, with its two
distinct types of leaves, much cleft below and
broad above ; and I often wonder why so
strange a phenomenon has, attracted such
very scant attention. But then we knew so
little of life in any form till the day before
yesterday that perhaps it is not surprising we
should still have left so many odd problems
quite untouched.

This problem of the shape of leaves
certainly seems to me a most important one ;
and yet it has hardly been even recognised
by our scientific pastors and masters. At
best, Mr. Herbert Spencer devotes to it a
passing short chapter, or Mr. Darwin a stray
sentence. The practice of classifying plants
mainly by means of their flowers has given
the flower a wholly factitious and over-
wrought importance. Besides, flowers are
so pretty, and we cultivate them so largely,
with little regard to the leaves, that they

38 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

have come to usurp almost the entire interest
of botanists and horticulturists alike. Dar-
winism itself has only heightened this exclu-
sive interest by calling attention to the
reciprocal relations which exist between the
honey-bearing blossom and the fertilising
insect, the bright-coloured petals and the
myriad facets of the butterfly's eye. Yet
the leaf is after all the real plant, and the
flower is but a sort of afterthought, an
embryo colony set apart for the propagation
of like plants in future. Each leaf is in truth
a separate individual organism, united with
many others into a compound community,
but possessing in full its own mouths and
digestive organs, and carrying on its own life
to a great extent independently of the rest.
It may die without detriment to them ; it
may be lopped off with a few others as a
cutting, and it continues its life-cycle quite
unconcerned. An oak tree in full foliage is
a magnificent group of such separate indi-
viduals — a whole nation in miniature : it may

A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT. 39

be compared to a branched coral polypedom
covered with a thousand little insect workers,
while each leaf answers rather to the separate
polypes themselves. The leaves are even
capable of producing new individuals by
what they contribute to the buds on every
branch ; and the seeds which the tree as a
whole produces are to be looked upon rather
as the founders of fresh colonies, like the
swarms of bees, than as fresh individuals
alone. Every plant community, in short,
both adds new members to its own common-
wealth, and sends off totally distinct germs
to form new commonwealths elsewhere.
Thus the leaf is, in truth, the central reality
of the whole plant, while the flower exists
only for the sake of sending out a ship-
load of young emigrants every now and
then to try their fortunes in some unknown
soil.

The whole life-business of a leaf is, of
course, to eat and grow, just as these same
functions form the whole life-business of a

40 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

caterpillar or a tadpole. But the way a plant
eats, we all know, is by taking carbon and
hydrogen from air and water under the
influence of sunlight, and building them up
into appropriate compounds in its own body.
Certain little green worms or convoluta have
the same habit, and live for the most part
cheaply off sunlight, making starch out of
carbonic acid and water by means of their
enclosed chlorophyll, exactly as if they were
leaves. Now, as this is what a leaf has to do,
its form will almost entirely depend upon the
way it is affected by sunlight and the ele-
ments around it — except, indeed, in so far as
it may be called upon to perform other
functions, such as those of defence or de-
fiance. This crowfoot is a good example of
the results produced by such agents. Its
lower leaves, which grow under water, are
minutely subdivided into little branching lance-
like segments ; while its upper ones, which
raise their heads above the surface, are broad
and united, like the common crowfoot type.

A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT. 41

How am I to account for these peculiarities ?
I fancy somehow thus : —

Plants which live habitually under water
almost always have thin, long, pointed leaves,
often thread-like or mere waving filaments.
The reason for this is plain enough. Gases
are not very abundant in water, as it only
holds in solution a limited quantity of
oxygen and carbonic acid. Both of these
the plant needs, though in varying quanti-
ties : the carbon to build up its starch, and
the oxygen to use up in its growth. Accord-
ingly, broad and large leaves would starve
under water : there is not material enough
diffused through it for them to make a living
from. But small, long, waving leaves which
can move up and down in the stream would
manage to catch almost every passing particle
of gaseous matter, and to utilise it under the
influence of sunlight. Hence all plants which
live in fresh water, and especially all plants
of higher rank, have necessarily acquired
such a type of leaf. It is the only form in

42 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

which growth can possibly take place under
their circumstances. Of course, however, the
particular pattern of leaf depends largely
upon the ancestral form. Thus this crowfoot,
even in its submerged leaves, preserves the
general arrangement of ribs and leaflets
common to the whole buttercup tribe. For
the crowfoot family is a large and eminently
adaptable race. Some of them are larkspurs
and similar queerly-shaped blossoms ; others
are columbines which hang their complicated
bells on dry and rocky hillsides ; but the
larger part are buttercups or marsh mari-
golds which have ^mple cup-shaped flowers,
and mostly frequent low and marshy ground.
One of these typical crowfoots under stress
of circumstances — inundation, or the like —
took once upon a time to living pretty perma-
nently in the watex. As its native meadows
grew deeper and deeper in flood it managed
from year to year to assume a more nautical
life. So, while its leaf necessarily remained
in general structure a true crowfoot leaf, it

A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT. 43

was naturally compelled to split itself up into
thinner and narrower segments, each of which
grew out in the direction where it could find
most stray carbon atoms, and most sunlight,
without interference from its neighbours.
This, I take it, was the origin of the much-
divided lower leaves.

But a crowfoot could never live perma-
nently under water. Seaweeds and their
like, which propagate by a kind of spores, may
remain below the surface for ever ; but
flowering plants for the most part must come
up to the open air to blossom, The sea- weeds
are in the same position as fish, originally
developed in the water and wholly adapted
to it, whereas flowering plants are rather
analogous to seals and whales, air-breathing
creatures, whose ancestors lived on land, and
who can themselves manage an aquatic exist-
ence only by frequent visits to the surface.
So some flowering water-plants actually
detach their male blossoms altogether, and
let them float loose on the top of the water ;

44 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

while they send up their female flowers by
means of a spiral coil, and draw them down
again as soon as the wind or the fertilising
insects have carried the pollen to its proper
receptacle, so as to ripen their seeds at leisure
beneath the pond. Similarly, you may see
the arrowhead and the water-lilies sending up
their buds to open freely in the air, or loll at
ease upon the surface of the stream. Thus
the crowfoot, too, cannot blossom to any
purpose below the water ; and as such among
its ancestors as at first tried to do so must of
course have failed in producing any seed,
they and their kind have died out for ever ;
while only those lucky individuals whose
chance lot it was to grow a little taller and
weedier than the rest, and so overtop the
stream, have handed down their race to our
own time. .

But as soon as the crowfoot finds itself
above the level of the river, all the causes
which made its leaf like those of other
aquatic plants have ceased to operate. The

A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT. 45

new leaves which sprout in the air meet with
abundance of carbon and sunlight on every
side ; and we know that plants grow fast
just in proportion to the supply of carbon.
They have pushed their way into an unoc-
cupied field, and they may thrive apace
without let or hindrance. So, instead of
splitting up into little lance-like leaflets, they
loll on the surface, and spread out broader
and fuller, like the rest of their race. The
leaf becomes at once a broad type of crow-
foot leaf. Even the ends of the submerged
leaves, when any fall of the water in time of
drought raises them above the level, have a
tendency (as I have often noticed) to grow
broader and fatter, with increased facilities for
food ; but when the whole leaf rises from the
first to the top the inherited family instinct
finds full play for its genius, and the blades
fill out as naturally as well-bred pigs. The
two types of leaf remind one much of gills
and lungs respectively.

But above water, as below it, the crow-

46 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

foot remains in principle a crowfoot still. The
traditions of its race, acquired in damp marshy
meadows, not actually under water, cling to it
yet in spite of every change. Born river and
pond plants which rise to the surface, like the
water-lily or the duck-weed, have broad float-
ing leaves that contrast strongly with the
waving filaments of wholly submerged species.
They can find plenty of food everywhere, and
as the sunlight falls flat upon them, they may as
well spread out flat to catch the sunlight. No
other elbowing plants overtop them and
appropriate the rays, so compelling them to
run up a useless waste of stem in order to
pocket their fair share of the golden flood.
Moreover, they thus save the needless ex-
pense of a stout leaf-stalk, as the water
supports their lolling leaves and blossoms ;
while the broad shade which they cast on the
bottom below prevents the undue competition
of other species. But the crowfoot, being by
descent a kind of buttercup, has taken to the
water for a few hundred generations only,

A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT. 47

while the water-lily's ancestors have been to
the manner born for millions of years ; and
therefore it happens that the crowfoot is at
heart but a meadow buttercup still. One
glance at its simple little flower will show
you that in a moment.

48 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

V.

SLUGS AND SNAILS.

Hoeing among the flower-beds on my lawn
this morning — for I am a bit of a gardener
in my way — I have had the ill-luck to maim
a poor yellow slug, who had hidden himself
among the encroaching grass on the edge of
my little parterre of sky-blue lobelias. This
unavoidable wounding and hacking of worms
and insects, despite all one's care, is no small
drawback to the pleasures of gardening in
propriA persona. Vivisection for genuine
scientific purposes in responsible hands, one
can understand and tolerate, even though
lacking the heart for it oneself ; but the use-
less and causeless vivisection which cannot
be prevented in every ordinary piece of farm-

SLUGS AND SNAILS. 49

work seems a gratuitous blot upon the face
of beneficent nature. My only consolation
lies in the half-formed belief that feeling
among these lower creatures is indefinite, and
that pain appears to affect them far less
acutely than it affects warm-blooded animals.
Their nerves are so rudely distributed in
loose knots all over the body, instead of
being closely bound together into a single
central system as with ourselves, that they
can scarcely possess a consciousness of pain
at all analogous to our own. A wasp whose
head has been severed from its body and
stuck upon a pin, will still greedily suck up
honey with its throatless mouth ; while an
Italian mantis, similarly treated, will calmly
continue to hunt and dart at midges with its
decapitated trunk and limbs, quite forgetful
of the fact that it has got no mandibles left
to eat them with. These peculiarities lead
one to hope that insects may feel pain less
than we fear. Yet I dare scarcely utter the
hope, lest it should lead any thoughtless

so THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

hearer to act upon the very questionable
belief, as they say even the amiable enthu-
siasts of Port Royal acted upon the. doctrine
that animals were mere unconscious automata,
by pushing their theory to the too practical
length of active cruelty. Let us at least give
the slugs and beetles the benefit of the doubt.
People often say that science makes men
unfeeling : for my own part, I fancy it makes
them only the more humane, since they are
the better able dimly to figure to themselves
the pleasures and pains of humbler beings as
they really are. The man of science perhaps
realises more vividly than all other men the
inner life and vague rights even of crawling
worms and ugly earwigs.

I will take up this poor slug whose mishap
has set me preaching, and put him out of
his misery at once, if misery it be. My hoe
has cut through the soft flesh of the mantle
and hit against the little embedded shell.
Very few people know that a slug has a shell,
but it has, though quite hidden from view ;

SLUGS AND SNAILS, 51

at least, in this yellow kind — for there are
other sorts which have got rid of it alto-
gether. I am not sure that I have wounded
the poor thing very seriously ; for the shell
protects the heart and vital organs, and the
hoe has glanced off on striking it, so that
the mantle alone is injured, and 'that by no
means irrecoverably. Snail flesh heals fast,
and on the whole I shall be justified, I think,
in letting him go. But it is a very curious
thing that this slug should have a shell at
all ! Of course it is by descent a snail, and,
indeed, there are very few differences between
the two races except in the presence or ab-
sence of a house. You may trace a curiously
complete set of gradations between the per-
fect snail and the perfect slug in this respect ;
for all the intermediate forms still survive
with only an almost imperceptible gap between
each species and the next Some kinds,
like the common brown garden snail, have
comparatively small bodies and big shells, so
that they can retire comfortably within them

£ 2

52 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

when attacked ; and if they only had a lid or
door to their houses they could shut them-
selves up hermetically, as periwinkles and
similar moUusks actually do. Other kinds,
like the pretty golden amber-snails which
frequent marshy places, have a body much
too big for its house, so that they cannot
possibly retire within their shells completely.
Then come a number of intermediate species,
each with progressively smaller and thinner
shells, till at length we reach the testacella,
which has only a sort of limpet-shaped shield
on his tail, so that he is generally recognised
as being the first of the slugs rather than the
last of the snails. You will not find a testa-
cella unless you particularly look for him,
for he seldom comes above ground, being a
most bloodthirsty subterraneous carnivore
who follows the burrows of earthworms as
savagely as a ferret tracks those of rabbits ;
but in all the southern and western counties
you may light upon stray specimens if you
search carefully in damp places under fallen

f
I
/

SLUGS AND SNAILS. 53

leaves. Even in testacellae, however, the
small shell is still external. In this yellow
slug here, on the contrary, it does not show
itself at all, but is buried under the closely
wrinkled skin of the glossy^ mantle. It has
become a mere saucer, with no more sym-
metry or regularity than an oyster-shell.
Among the various kinds of slugs, you may
watch this relic or rudiment gradually dwind-
ling further and further towards annihilation ;
till finally, in the great fat black slugs which
appear so plentifully on the roads after
summer showers, it is represented only by a
few rough calcareous grains, scattered up and
down through the mantle ; and sometimes
even these are wanting. The organs which
used to secrete the shell in their remote
ancestors have either ceased to work alto-
gether or are reduced to performing a useless
office by mere organic routine.

The reason why some mollusks have thus
lost their shells is clear enough. Shells are
of two kinds, calcareous and horny. Both

54 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

of them require more or less lime or other
mineral matters, though in varying propor-
tions. Now, the snails which thrive best on
the bare chalk downs behind my little combe
belong to that pretty banded black-and-white
sort which everybody must have noticed
feeding in abundance on all chalk soils. In-
deed, Sussex farmers will tell you that South
Down mutton owes its excellence to these
fat little moUusks, not to the scanty herb-
age of their thin pasture-lands. The pretty
banded shells in question are almost wholly
composed of lime, which the snails can, of
course, obtain in any required quantity from
the chalk. In most limestone districts you
will similarly find that snails with calcareous
shells predominate. But if you go into a
granite or sandstone tract you will see that
horny shells have it all their own way. Now,
some snails with such houses took to living
in very damp and marshy places, which they
were naturally apt to do — as indeed the land-
snails in a body are merely pond-snails which

SLUGS AND SNAILS. 55

have taken to crawling up the leaves of
marsh-plants, and have thus gradually accli-
matised themselves to a terrestrial existence.
We can trace a perfectly regular series from
the most aquatic to the most land-loving
species, just as I have tried to trace a regular
series from the shell-bearing snails to the
shell-less slugs. Well, when the earliest
common ancestor of both these last-named
races first took to living above water, he
possessed a horny shell (like that of the
amber-snail), which his progenitors used to
manufacture from the mineral matters dis-
solved in their native streams. Some of the
younger branches descended from this pri-
maeval land-snail took to living on very dry
land, and when they reached chalky districts
manufactured their shells, on an- easy and
improved principle, almost entirely out of
lime. But others took to living in moist
and boggy places, where mineral matter was
rare, and where the soil consisted for the
most part of decaying vegetable mould.

56 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

Here they could get little or no lime, and so
their shells grew smaller and smaller, in
proportion as their habits became more de-
cidedly terrestrial. But to the last, as long
as any shell at all remained, it generally
covered their hearts and other important
organs ; because it would there act as a spe-
cial protection, even after it had ceased to be
of any use for the defence of the animal's
body as a whole. Exactly in the same way
men specially protected their heads and
breasts with helmets and cuirasses, before
armour was used for the whole body, because
these were the places where a wound would
be most dangerous ; and they continued to
cover these vulnerable spots in the same man-
ner even when the use of armour had been
generally abandoned. My poor mutilated
slug, who is just now crawling off contentedly
enough towards the hedge, would have been
cut in two outright by my hoe had it not been
for that solid calcareous plate of his, which
saved his life as surely as any coat of mail.

SLUGS AND SNAILS. S7

How does it come, though, that slugs and
snails now live together in the self-same dis-
tricts ? Why, because they each live in their
own way. Slugs belong by origin to very
damp and marshy spots; but in the fierce
competition of modern life they spread them-
selves over comparatively dry places, pro-
vided there is long grass to hide in, or stones
under which to creep, or juicy herbs like
lettuce, among whose leaves are nice moist
nooks wherein to lurk during the heat of the
day. Moreover, some kinds of slugs are
quite as well protected from birds (such as
ducks) by their nauseous taste as snails are
by their shells. Thus it happens that at pre-
sent both races may be discovered in many
hedges and thickets side by side. But the
real home of each is quite different. The
truest and most snail-like snails are found in
greatest abundance upon high chalk-downs,
heathy limestone hills, and other compara-
tively dry places ; while the truest and most
slug-like slugs are found in greatest abund-

58 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

ance among low water-logged meadows, or
under the damp fallen Jeaves of moist copses.
The intermediate kinds inhabit the inter-
mediate places. Yet to the last even the
most thorough-going snails retain a final trace
of their original water-haunting life, in their
universal habit of seeking out the coolest
and moistest spots of their ^respective habitats.
The soft-fleshed moUusks are all by nature
aquatic animals, and nothing can induce them
wholly to forget the old tradition of their
marine or fresh-water existence.

A STUDY OF BONES, 59

VI.

A STUDY OF BONES,

On the top of this bleak chalk down, where
I am wandering on a dull afternoon, I light
upon the blanched skeleton of a crow, which
I need not fear to handle, as its bones have
been first picked clean by carrion birds, and
then finally purified by hungry ants, time,
and stormy weather. I pick a piece of it
up in my hands, and find that I have got
hold of its clumped tail-bone. A strange
fragment truly, with a strange history, which
I may well spell out as I sit to rest a minute
upon the neighbouring stile. For this dry
tail-bone consists, as I can see at a glance,
of several separate vertebrae, all firmly

6o THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

welded together into a single piece. They
must once upon a tinje have been real dis-
connected jointed vertebrae, like those of the
dog's or lizard's tail ; and the way in which
they have become fixed fast into a solid
mass sheds a world of light upon the true
nature and origin of birds, as well as upon
many analogous cases elsewhere.

When I say that these bones were once
separate, I am indulging in no mere hypothe-
tical Darwinian speculation. I refer, not to
the race, but to the particular crow in person.
These very pieces themselves, in their em-
bryonic condition, were as distinct as the indi-
vidual bones of the bird's neck or of our own
spines. If you were to examine the chick
in the ^g^ you would find them quite di-
vided. But as the young crow grows more
and more into the typical bird-pattern, this
lizard-like peculiarity fades away, and the
separate pieces unite by * anastomosis ' into
a single ' coccygean bone,' as the osteologists
call it. In all our modern birds, as in this

A STUDY OF BONES. 6i

crow, the vertebrae composing the tail-bone
are few in number, and are soldered together
immovably in the adult form. It was not
always so, however, with ancestral birds.
The earliest known member of the class —
the famous fossil bird of the Solenhofen litho-
graphic stone — retained throughout its whole
life a long flexible tail, composed of twenty
unwelded vertebrae, each of which bore a
single pair of quill-feathers, the predecessors
of our modern pigeon s train. There are
many other marked reptilian peculiarities in
this primitive oolitic bird ; and it apparently
possessed true teeth in its jaws, as its later
cretaceous kinsmen discovered by Professor
Marsh undoubtedly did. When we compare
side by side those real flying dragons, the
Pterodactyls, together with the very bird-
like Deinosaurians, on the one hand, and
these early toothed and lizard-tailed birds on
the other, we can have no reasonable doubt
in deciding that our own sparrows and swal-
lows are the remote feathered descendants

62 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

of an original reptilian or half-reptilian an-
cestor.

Why modern birds have lost their long
flexible tails it is not difficult to see. The tail
descends to all higher vertebrates as an heir-
loom from the fishes, the amphibia, and their
other aquatic predecessors. With these it is
a necessary organ of locomotion in swim-
ming, and it remains almost equally useful to
the lithe and gliding lizard on land. Indeed,
the snake is but a lizard who has substituted
this wriggling motion for the use of legs
altogether ; and we can trace a gradual sue-
cession from the four-legged true lizards,
through snake-like forms with two legs and
wholly rudimentary legs, to the absolutely
limbless serpents themselves. But to flying
birds, on the contrary, a long bony tail is
only an inconvenience. All that they need
is a little muscular knob for the support of
the tail-feathers, which they employ as a
rudder in guiding their flight upward or
downward, to right or left The elongated

A STUDY OF BONES. 63

waving tail of the Solenhofen bird, with its
single pair of quills, must have' been a com-
paratively ineffectual and clumsy piece of
mechanism for steering an aerial creature
through its novel domain. Accordingly, the
bones soon grew fewer in number and shorter
in length, while the feathers simultaneously
arranged themselves side by side upon the
terminal hump. As early as the time when
our chalk was deposited, the bird's tail had
become what it is at the present day —
a single united bone, consisting of a few
scarcely distinguishable crowded rings. This
is the form it assumes in the toothed fossil
birds of Western America. But, as if to
preserve the memory of their reptilian origin,
birds in their embryo stage still go on pro-
ducing separate caudal vertebrae, only to
unite them together at a later point of their
development into the typical coccygean bone.
Much the same sort of process has taken
place in the higher apes, and, as Mr. Darwin
would assure us, in man himself. There the

64 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

long prehensile tail of the monkeys has
grown gradually shorter, and, being at last
coiled up under the haunches, has finally de-
generated into an insignificant and wholly
embedded terminal joint But, indeed, we can
find traces of a similar adaptation to circum-
stances everywhere. Take, for instance, the
common English amphibians. The newt
passes all its life in the water, and therefore
always retains its serviceable tail as a swim-
ming organ. The frog in its tadpole state is
also aquatic, and it swims wholly by means of
its broad and flat rudder-like appendage. But
as its legs bud out, and it begins to fit itself
for a terrestrial existence, the tail undergoes
a rapid atrophy, and finally fades away alto-
gether. To a hopping frog on land, such a
long train would be a useless drag, while in
the water its webbed feet and muscular legs
make a satisfactory substitute for the lost
organ. Last of all, the tree-frog, leading a
specially terrestrial life, has no tadpole at all,
but emerges from the ^gg in the full frog-

A STUDY OF BONES. 65

like shape. As he never lives in the water,
he never feels the need of a tail.

The edible crab and lobster show us an
exactly parallel case amongst crustaceans.
Everybody has noticed that a crab s body is
practically identical with a lobster s, only that
in the crab the body-segments are broad and
compact, while the tail, so conspicuous in its
kinsman, is here relatively small and tucked
away unobtrusively behind the legs. This
difference in construction depends entirely
upon the habits and manners of the two
races. The lobster lives among rocks and
ledges ; he uses his small legs but little for
locomotion, but he springs surprisingly fast
and far through the water by a single effort
of his powerful muscular tail. As to his big
fore-claws, those, we all know, are organs of
prehension and weapons of offence, not
pieces of locomotive mechanism. Hence the
edible and muscular part of a lobster is
chiefly to be found in the claws and tail,
the latter having naturally the firmest and

66 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

Strongest flesh. The crab, on the other
hand, lives on the sandy bottom, and walks
about on its lesser legs, instead of swimming
or darting through the water by blows of its
tail, like the lobster or the still more active
prawn and shrimp. Hence the crabs tail
has dwindled away to a mere useless his-
torical relic, while the most important muscles
in its body are those seated in the network
of shell just above its locomotive legs. In
this case, again, it is clear that the appendage
has disappeared because the owner had no
further use for it. Indeed, if one looks
through all nature, one will find the philo-
sophy of tails eminently simple and utili-
tarian. Those animals that need them
evolve them ; those animals that do not need
them never develop them ; and those animals
that have once had them, but no longer use
them for practical purposes, retain a mere
shrivelled rudiment as a lingering reminis-
cence of their original habits.

BLUE MUD. 67

VII.
BLUE MUD.

After last night's rain, the cliffs that bound
the bay have come out in all their most bril-
liant colours ; so this morning I am turning
my steps seaward, and wandering along the
great ridge of pebbles which here breaks the
force of the Channel waves as they beat
against the long line of the Dorset downs.
Our cliffs just at this point are composed of
blue lias beneath, with a capping of yellow
sandstone on their summits, above which in
a few places the layer of chalk that once
topped the whole country-side has still
resisted the slow wear and tear of unnum-
bered centuries. These three elements give
a variety to the bold and broken bluffs which

F2

!

68 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

is rare along the monotonous southern
escarpment of the English coast. After rain,
especially, the changes of colour on their sides
are often quite startling in their vividness and
intensity. To-day, for example, the yellow
sandstone is tinged in parts with a deep russet
red, contrasting admirably with the bright
green of the fields above and the sombre
steel-blue of the lias belt below. Besides, we
have had so many landslips along this bit of
shore, that the various layers of rock have
in more than one place got mixed up with
one another into inextricable confusion. The
little town nestling in the hollow behind me
has long been famous as the head-quarters
of early geologists ; and not a small propor-
tion of the people earn their livelihood to the
present day by 'goin' a fossiling.' Every
child about the place recognises ammonites
as ' snake-stones ; ' while even the rarer ver-
tebrae of extinct saurians have acquired a
local designation as '^verterberries.' So,
whether in search of science or the pictur-

BLUE MUD. 69

esque, I often clamber down in this direction
for my daily stroll, particularly when, as is
the case to-day, the rain has had time to
trickle through the yellow rock, and the sun
then shines full against its face, to light it up
with a rich flood of golden splendour.

The base of the cliffs consists entirely of
a very soft and plastic blue lias mud. This
mud contains large numbers of fossils, chiefly
chambered shells, but mixed with not a few
relics of the great swimming and flying
lizards that swarmed among the shallow flats
or low islands of the lias sea. When the blue
mud was slowly accumulating in the hollows
of the ancient bottom, these huge saurians
formed practically the highest race of animals
then existing upon earth. There were, it is
true, a few primaeval kangaroo-mice and wom-
bats among the rank brushwood of the main-
land ; and there may even have been a species
or two of reptilian birds, with murderous-
looking teeth and long lizard-like tails-
descendants of those problematical creatures

JO THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

which printed their footmarks on the Ameri-
can trias, and ancestors of the later toothed
bird whose tail-feathers have been naturally
lithographed for us on the Solenhofen slate.
But in spite of such rare precursors of higher
modern types, the saurian was in fact the real
lord of earth in the lias ocean.

For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.
And he felt himself in his pride to be nature's crowning race.

We have adopted an easy and slovenly
way of dividing all rocks into primary, secon-
dary, and tertiary, which veils from us the
real chronological relations of evolving life in
the different periods. The lias is ranked by
geologists among the earliest secondary for-
mations : but if we were to distribute all the
sedimentary rocks into ten great epochs, each
representing about equal duration in time, the
lias would really fall in the tenth and latest
of all. So very misleading to the ordinary
mind is our accepted geological nomenclature.
Nay, even commonplace geologists themselves

BLUE MUD. 71

often overlook the real implications of many
facts and figures which they have learned to
quote glibly enough in a certain off-hand way.
Let me just briefly reconstruct the chief features
of this scarcely recognised world's chronology
as I sit on this piece of fallen chalk at the foot
of the mouldering cliff, where the stream from
the meadow above brought down the newest
landslip during the hard frosts of last Decem-
ber. First of all, there is the vast lapse of
time represented by the Laurentian rocks of
Canada. These Laurentian rocks, the oldest
in the world, are at least 30,000 feet in thick-
ness, and it must be allowed that it takes a
reasonable number of years to accumulate
such a mass of solid limestone or clay as
that at the bottom of even the widest pri-
maeval ocean. In these rocks there are no
fossils, except a single very doubtful member
of the very lowest animal type. But there
are indirect traces of life in the shape of
limestone probably derived from shells, and of
black lead probably derived from plants. All

72 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

these early deposits have been terribly twisted
and contorted by subsequent convulsions of
the earth, and most of them have been melted
down by volcanic action ; so that we can tell
very little about their original state. Thus
the history of life opens for us, like most
other histories, with a period of uncertainty :
its origin is lost in the distant vistas of time.
Still, we know that there was such an early
period ; and from the thickness of the rocks
which represent it we may conjecture that it
spread over three out of the ten great aeons
into which I have roughly divided geological
time. Next comes the period known as the
Cambrian, and to it we may similarly assign
about two and a half aeons on like grounds.
The Cambrian epoch begins with a fair
sprinkling of the lower animals and plants,
presumably developed during the preceding
age ; but it shows no remains of fish or any
other vertebrates. To the Silurian, Devo-
nian, and Carboniferous periods we may
roughly allow an aeon and a fraction each :

BLUE MUD. 73

while to the whole group of secondary and
tertiary strata, comprising almost all the best-
known English formations — red marl, lias,
oolite, greensand, chalk, eocene, miocene,
pliocene, and drift — we can only give a single
seon to be divided between them. Such facts
will sufficiently suggest how comparatively
modern are all these rocks when viewed by
the light of an absolute chronology. Now,
the first fishes do not occur till the Silurian —
that is to say, in or about the seventh seon
after the beginning of geological time. The
first mammals are found in the trias, at the
beginning of the tenth aeon. And the first
known bird only makes its appearance in the
oolite, about half-way through that latest
period. This will show that there was plenty
of time for their development in the earlier
ages. True, we must reckon the interval
between ourselves and the date of this blue
mud at many millions of years ; but then we
must reckon the interval between the lias and
the earliest Cambrian strata at some six times

74 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

as much, and between the lias and the lowest
Laurentian beds at nearly ten times as much.
Just the same sort of lessening perspective
exists in geology as in ordinary history.
Most people look upon the age before the
Norman Conquest as a mere brief episode of
the English annals ; yet six whole centuries
elapsed between the landing of the real or
mythical Hengst at Ebbsfleet and the land-
ing of William the Conqueror at Hastings ;
while under eight centuries elapsed between
the time of William the Conqueror and the ac-
cession of Queen Victoria. But, just as most
English histories g^ve far more space to the
three centuries since Elizabeth than to the
eleven centuries which preceded them, so
most books on geology give far more space
to the single aeon (embracing the secondary
and tertiary periods) which comes nearest our
own time, than to the nine aeons which spread
from the Laurentian to the Carboniferous
epoch. In the earliest period, records either
geological or historical are wholly wanting ;

BLUE MULK 7S

in the later periods they become both more
numerous and more varied in proportion as
they approach nearer arid nearer to our own
time.

So too, in the days when Mn Darwin first
took away the breath of scientific Europe by
his startling theories, it used confidently to be
said that geology had shown us no interme-
diate form between species and species. Even
at the time when this assertion was originally
made it was quite untenable. All early geo-
logical forms, of whatever race, belong to
what we foolishly call * generalised ' types :
that is to say, they present a mixture of fea-
tures now found separately in several different
animals. In other words, they represent
early ancestors of all the modem forms, with
peculiarities intermediate between those of
their more highly differentiated descendants ;
and hence we ought to call them *unspe-
cialised ' rather than ' generalised ' types. For
example, the earliest ancestral horse is partly
a horse and partly a tapir : we may regard

76 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

him as a tertium quid, a middle term, from
which the horse has varied in one direction
and the tapir in another, each of them exag-
gerating certain special peculiarities of the
common ancestor and losing others, in accord-
ance with the circumstances in which they
have been placed. Science is now perpetu-
ally discovering intermediate forms, many of
which compose an unbroken series between
the unspecialised ancestral type and the
familiar modern creatures. Thus, in this
very case of the horse. Professor Marsh has
unearthed a long line of fossil animals which
lead in direct descent from the extremely un-
horse-like eocene type to the developed Arab
of our own times. Similarly with birds,
Professor Huxley has shown that there is
hardly any gap between the very bird-like
lizards of the lias and the very lizard-like birds
of the oolite. Such links, discovered afresh
every day, are perpetual denials to the old
parrot-like cry of * No geological evidence for
evolution,'

CUCKOO-PINT. 77

VIII.
CUCKOO'PINT.

4

In the bank which supports the hedge, beside
this little hanger on the flank of Black Down,
the glossy arrow-headed leaves of the com-
mon arum form at this moment beautiful
masses of vivid green foliage. * Cuckoo-
pint ' is the pretty poetical old English name
for the plant ; but village children know it
better by the equally quaint and fanciful title
of * lords and ladies.' The arum is not now
in flower : it blossomed much earlier in the
season, and its queer clustered fruits are just
at present swelling out into rather shapeless
little light-green bulbs, preparatory to assum-
ing the bright coral-red hue which makes
them so conspicuous among the hedgerows

78 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

during the autumn months. A cut-and-dry
technical botanist would therefore have little
to say to it in its present stage, because he
cares only for the flowers and seeds which
help him in his dreary classifications, and give
him so splendid an opportunity for displaying
the treasures of his Latinised terminology.
But to me the plant itself is the central point
of interest, not the names (mostly in bad
Greek) by which this or that local orchid-
hunter has endeavoured to earn immortality.
This arum, for example, grows first from
a small hard seed with a single lobe or seed-
leaf. In the seed there is a little store of
starch and albumen laid up by the mother-
plant, on which the young arum feeds, just as
truly as the growing chick feeds on the white
which surrounds its native yolk, or as you
and I feed on the similar starches and albu-
mens laid by for the use of the young plant
in the grain of wheat, or for the young fowl
in the t,g^. Full-grown plants live by taking
in food-stuffs from the air under the influence

CUCKOO'PINT^ 79

of sunlight : but a young seedling can no
more feed itself than a human baby can ; and
so food is stored up for it beforehand by the
parent stock. As the kernel swells with heat
and moisture, its starches and albumens get
oxidised and produce the motions and re-
arrangements of particles that result in the
growth of a new plant. First a little head
rises towards the sunlight and a little root
pushes downward towards the moist soil
beneath. The business of the root is to
collect water for the circulating medium — the
sap or blood of the plant — as well as a few
mineral matters required for its stem and
cells ; but the business of the head is to spread
out into leaves, which are the real mouths
and stomachs of the compound organism.
For we must never forget that all plants
mainly grow, not, as most people suppose,
from the earth, but from the air. * They are
for the most part mere masses of carbon-
compounds, and the carbon in them comes
from the carbonic acid diffused through the

8o THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

atmosphere around, and is separated by the
sunlight acting in the leaves. There it mixes
with small quantities of hydrogen and nitro-
gen brought by the roots from soil and water ;
and the starches or other bodies thus formed
are then conveyed by the sap to the places
where they will be required in the economy
of the plant system. That is the all-import-
ant fact in vegetable physiology, just as the
digestion and assimilation of food and the
circulation of the blood are in our own bodies.
The arum, like the grain of wheat, has
only a single seed-leaf ; whereas the pea, as
we all know, has two. This is the most fun-
damental difference among flowering plants,
as it points back to an early and deep-seated
mode of growth, about which they must have
split off from one another millions of years
ago. All the one-lobed plants grow with
stems like grasses or bamboos, formed by
single leaves enclosing another ; all the
double-lobed plants grow with stems like an
oak, formed of concentric layers from within

CUCKOO'PINT. 8 1

outward. As soon as the arum, with its
sprouting head, has raised its first leaves far
enough above the ground to reach the sun-
light, it begins to form fresh starches and new
leaves for itself, and ceases to be dependent
upon the store laid up in its buried lobe.
Most seeds accordingly contain just enough
material to support the young seedling till it
is in a position to shift for itself ; and this, of
course, varies greatly with the habits and
manners of the particular species. Some
plants, too, such as the potato, find their
seeds insuflScient to keep up the race by
themselves, and so lay by abundant starches
in underground branches or tubers, for the
use of new shoots ; and these rich starch re-
ceptacles we ourselves generally utilise as
food-stuffs, to the manifest detriment of the
young potato-plants, for whose benefit they
were originally intended. Well, the arum
has no such valuable reserve as that ; it is
early cast upon its own resources, and so it
shifts for itself with resolution. Its big,

G

82 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

glossy leaves grow apace, and soon fill out,
not only with green chlorophyll, but also with
a sharp and pungent essence which makes
them burn the mouth like cayenne pepper.
This acrid juice has been acquired by the
plant as a defence against its enemies. Some
early ancestor of the arums must have been
liable to constant attacks from rabbits, goats,
or other herbivorous animals, and it has
adopted this means of repelling their ad-
vances. In other words, those arums which
were most palatable to the rabbits got eaten
up and destroyed, while those which were
nastiest survived, and handed down their pun-
gency to future generations. Just in the same
way nettles have acquired their sting and
thistles their prickles, which efficiently protect
them against all herbivores except the patient,
hungry donkey, who gratefully accepts them as
a sort of satue piqtuinte to the succulent stems.
And now the arum begins its great prepa-
rations for the act of flowering. Everybody
knows the general shape of the arum blossom

CUCKOO'PINT, 83

— if not In our own purple cuckoo-pint, at
least in the big white * Ethiopian lilies ' which
form such frequent ornaments of cottage
windows. Clearly, this is a flower which the
plant cannot produce without laying up a
good stock of material beforehand. So it
sets to work accumulating starch in its root
This starch it manufactures in its leaves, and
then buries deep underground in a tuber, by
means of the sap, so as to secure it from the
attacks of rodents, who too frequently appro-
priate to themselves the food intended by
plants for other purposes. If you examine
the tuber before the arum has blossomed, you
will find it large and solid ; but if you dig
it up in the autumn after the seeds have
ripened, you will see that it is flaccid and
drained; all its starches and other contents
have gone to make up the flower, the fruit,
and the stalk which bore them. But the
tuber has a further protection against enemies
besides its deep underground position. It
contains an acrid juice like that of the leaves,

G 2

84 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

which sufficiently guards it against four-
footed depredators, Man, however, that
most persistent of persecutors, has found out
a way to separate the juice from the starch ;
and in St Helena the big white arum is
cultivated as a food-plant, and yields the
meal in common use among the inhabitants.
When the arum has laid by enough starch
to make a flower it begins to send up a tall
stalk, on the top of which grows the curious
hooded blossom known to be one of the
earliest forms still surviving upon earth. But
now its object is to attract, not to repel, the
animal world ; for it is an insect-fertilised
flower, and it requires the aid of small flies to
carry the pollen from blossom to blossom.
For this purpose it has a purple sheath around
its head of flowers and a tall spike on which
they are arranged in two clusters, the male
blossoms above and the female below. This
spike is bright yellow in the cultivated species.
The fertilisation is one of the most interesting
episodes in all nature, but it would take too

CUCKOO'PINT. 85

long to describe here in full. The flies go
from one arum to another, attracted by the
colour, in search of pollen ; and the pistils, or
female flowers, ripen first. Then the pollen
falls from the stamens or male flowers on the
bodies of the flies, and dusts them all over
with yellow powden The insects, when
once they have entered, are imprisoned until
the pollen is ready to drop, by means of
several little hairs, pointing downwards, and
preventing their exit on the principle of an
eel-trap or lobster-pot. But as soon as the
pollen is discharged the hairs wither away,
and then the flies are free to visit a second
arum. Here they carry the fertilising dust
with which they are covered to the ripe pistils,
and so enable them to set their seed ; but,
instead of getting away again as soon as they
have eaten their fill, they are once more im-
prisoned by the lobster-pot hairs, and dusted
with a second dose of pollen, which they carry
away in turn to a third blossom.

As soon as the pistils have been impreg-

86 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

nated, the fruits begin to set. Here they are,
on their tall spike, whose enclosing sheath
has now withered away, while the top is at
this moment slowly dwindling, so that only
the cluster of berries at its base will finally
remain. The berries will swell and grow
soft, till in autumn they become a beautiful
scarlet cluster of living coral. Then once
more their object will be to attract the animal
world, this time in the shape of field-mice,
squirrels, and small birds ; but with a more
treacherous intent. For though the berries
are beautiful and palatable enough they are
deadly poison. The robins or small rodents
which eat them, attracted by their bright
colours and pleasant taste, not only aid in
dispersing them, but also die after swallowing
them, and become huge manure heaps for the
growth of the young plant. So the whole
cycle of arum existence begins afresh, and
there is hardly a plant in the field around me
which has not a history as strange as this
one.

BERRIES AND BERRIES. 87

IX.

BERRIES AND BERRIES.

This little chine, opening toward the sea
through the blue lias cliffs, has been worn to
its present pretty gorge-like depth by the
slow action of its tiny stream — a mere thread
of water in fine weather, that trickles down
its centre in a series of mossy cascades to
the shingly beach below. Its sides are over-
grown by brambles and other prickly brush-
wood, which form in places a matted and im-
penetrable mass : for it is the habit of all
plants protected by the defensive armour of
spines or thorns to cluster together in serried
ranks, through which cattle or other intrusive
animals cannot break. Amongst them, near the
down above, I have just lighted upon a rare

88 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

plant for Southern Britain — a wild raspberry-
bush in full fruit. Raspberries are common
enough in Scotland among heaps of stones
on the windiest hillsides; but the south of
England is too warm and sickly for their
robust tastes, and they can only be found here
in a few bleak spots like the stony edges of
this weather-beaten down above the chine.
The fruit itself is quite as good as the garden
variety, for cultivation has added little to the
native virtues of the raspberry. Good old
Izaac Walton is not ashamed to quote a cer-
tain quaint saying of one Dr. Boteler con-
cerning strawberries, and so I suppose I need
not be afraid to quote it after him. * Doubt-
less,* said the Doctor, *God could have
made a better berry, but doubtless also God
never did.' Nevertheless, if you try the
raspberry, picked fresh, with plenty of good
country cream, you must allow that it runs its
sister fruit a neck-and-neck race.

To compare the structure of a raspberry
with that of a strawberry is a very instructive

BERRIES AND BERRIES. 89

botanical study. It shows how similar causes
may produce the same gross result in singu-
larly different ways. Both are roses by
family, and both have flowers essentially
similar to that of the common dog-rose. But
even in plants where the flowers are alike, the
fruits often differ conspicuously, because fresh
principles come into play for the dispersion
and safe germination of the seed. This makes
the study of fruits the most complicated part
in the unravelling of plant life. After the
strawberry has blossomed, the pulpy recep-
tacle on which it bore its green fruitlets begins
to swell and redden, till at length it grows
into an edible berry, dotted with little yellow
nuts, containing each a single seed. But in
the raspberry it is the separate fruitlets them-
selves which grow soft and bright-coloured,
while the receptacle remains white and taste-
less, forming the *huir which we pull off*
from the berry when we are going to eat it.
Thus the part of the raspberry which we
throw away answers to the part of the straw-

90 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

berry which we eat. Only, in the raspberry
the separate fhiitlets are all crowded close
together into a single lanited mass, while in
the strawberry they are scattered about
loosely, and embedded in the soft flesh of the
receptacle. The blackberry is another close
relative ; but in its fruit the little pulpy fruit-
lets cling to the receptacle, so that we pick
and eat them both together ; whereas in the
raspberry the receptacle pulls out easily, and
leaves a thimble-shaped hollow in the middle
of the berry. Each of these little peculiarities
has a special meaning of its own in the history
of the different plants.

Yet the main object attained by all is in
the end precisely similar. Strawberries, rasp-
berries, and blackberries all belong to the
class of attractive fruits. They survive in
virtue of the attention paid to them by birds
and small animals. Just as the wild straw-
berry which I picked in the hedgerow the
other day procures the dispersion of its hard
and indigestible fruitlets by getting them

BERRIES AND BERRIES. 91

eaten together with the pulpy receptacle, so
does the raspberry procure the dispersion of
its soft and sugary fruitlets by getting them
eaten all by themselves. While the straw-
berry fruitlets retain throughout their dry
outer coating, in those of the raspberry the
external covering becomes fleshy and red,
but the inner seed has, notwithstanding, a
still harder shell than the tiny nuts of the
strawberry. Now, this is the secret of nine
fruits out of ten. They are really nuts,
which clothe themselves in an outer tunic of
sweet and beautifully coloured pulp. The
pulp, as it were, the plant gives in, as an in-
ducement to the friendly bird to swallow its
seed ; but the seed itself it protects by a hard
stone or shell, and often by poisonous or
bitter juices within. We see this arrange-
ment very conspicuously in a plum, or still
better in a mango ; though it is really just as
evident in the raspberry, where the smaller
size renders it less conspicuous to human
sight.

92 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

It is a curious fact about the rose family
that they have a very marked tendency to
produce such fleshy fruits, instead of the
mere dry seed-vessels of ordinary plants,
which are named fruits only by botanical
courtesy. For example, we owe to this single
family the peach, plum, apricot, cherry, dam-
son, pear, apple, medlar, and quince, all of
them cultivated in gardens or orchards for
their fruits. The minor group known by
the poetical name of Dryads, alone supplies
us with the strawberry, raspberry, blackberry,
and dewberry. Even the wilder kinds, refused
as food by man, produce berries well known
to our winter birds— the haw, rose-hip, sloe,
bird-cherry, and rowan. On the other hand,
the whole tribe numbers but a single thorough-
going nut — the almond ; and even this nut,
always somewhat soft-shelled and inclined to
pulpiness, has produced by a * sport ' the
wholly fruit-like nectarine. The odd thing
about the rose tribe, however, is this : that
the pulpy tendency shows itself in very dif-

BERRIES AND BERRIES, 93

ferent parts among the various species. In
the plum it is the outer covering of the true
fruit which grows soft and coloured : in the
apple it is a swollen mass of the fruit-stalk
surrounding the ovules : in the rose-hip it is
the hollowed receptacle: and in the straw-
berry it is the same receptacle, bulging out in
the opposite direction. Such a general ten-
dency to display colour and collect sugary
juices in so many diverse parts may be com-
pared to the general bulbous tendency of the
tiger-lily or the onion, and to the general
succulent tendency of the cactus or the house-
leek. In each case, the plant benefits by it
in one form or another ; and whichever form
happens to get the start in any particular
instance is increased and developed by natural
selection, just as favourable varieties of fruits
or flowers are increased and developed in
cultivated species by our own gardeners.

Sweet juices and bright colours, however,
could be of no use to a plant till there were
eyes to see and tongues to taste them. A

94 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

pulpy fruit is in itself a mere waste of produc-
tive energy to its mother, unless the pulpiness
aids in the dispersion and promotes the wel-
fare of the young seedlings. Accordingly, we
might naturally expect that there would be
no fruit-bearers on the earth until the time
when fruit-eaters, actual or potential, arrived
upon the scene : or, to put it more correctly,
both must inevitably have developed simul-
taneously and in mutual dependence upon
one another. So we find no traces of succu-
lent fruits even in so late a formation as that
of these lias or cretaceous cliffs. The birds
of that day were fierce-toothed carnivores,
devouring the lizards and saurians of the
rank low-lying sea-marshes : the mammals
were mostly primaeval kangaroos or low an-
cestral wombats, gentle herbivores, or savage
marsupial wolves, like the Tasmanian devil
of our own times. It is only in the very
modern tertiary period, whose soft muddy
deposits have not yet had time to harden
under superincumbent pressure into solid

BERRIES AND BERRIES. 95

Stone, that we find the earliest traces of the
rose family, the greatest fruit-bearing tribe of
our present world. And side by side with
them we find their clever arboreal allies, the
ancestral monkeys and squirrels, the primi-
tive robins, and the yet shadowy forefathers
of our modern fruit-eating parrots. Just as
bees and butterflies necessarily trace back
their geological history only to the time of
the first honey-bearing flowers, and just as
the honey-bearing flowers in turn trace back
their pedigree only to the date of the rudest
and most unspecialised honey-sucking insects,
so are fruits and finiit-eaters linked together in
origin by the inevitable bond of a mutual
dependence. No bee, no honey ; and no
honey, no bee : so, too, no fruit, no fruit-bird ;
and no fruit-bird, no fruit.

96 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

X.

DISTANT RELATIONS.

Behind the old mill, whose overshot wheel,
backed by a wall thickly covered with the
young creeping fronds of hart's-tongue
ferns, forms such a picturesque foreground
for the view of our little valley, the mill-
stream expands into a small shallow pond,
overhung at its edges by thick-set hazel-
bushes and clambering honeysuckle. Of
course it is only dammed back by a mud
wall, with sluices for the millers water-
power ; but it has a certain rustic simplicity
of its own, which makes it beautiful to our
eyes for all that, in spite of its utilitarian
origin. At the bottom of this shallow pond
you may now see a miracle daily taking

DISTANT RELATIONS, 97

place, which but for its commonness we
should regard as an almost incredible
marvel. You may there behold evolu-
tion actually illustrating the transformation
of life under your very eyes : you may
watch a low type of gill-breathing gristly-
boned fish developing into the highest form
of lung-breathing terrestrial amphibian. Nay,
more — you may almost discover the earliest
known ancestor of the whole vertebrate kind,
the first cousin of that once famous ascidian
larva, passing through all the upward stages
of existence which finally lead it to assume
the shape of a relatively perfect four-legged
animal. For the pond is swarming with fat
black tadpoles, which are just at this moment
losing their tails and developing their legs,
on the way to becoming fully formed frogs.

The tadpole and the ascidian larva divide
between them the honour of preserving for
us in all its native simplicity the primitive
aspect of the vertebrate type. Beasts, birds,
reptiles, and fishes have all descended from

II

98 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

an animal whose shape closely resembled
that of these wriggling little black creatures
which dart up and down like imps through
the clear water, and raise a cloud of mud
above their heads each time that they bury
themselves comfortably in the soft mud of
the bottom. But while the birds and beasts,
on the one hand, have gone on bettering
themselves out of all knowledge, and while
the ascidian, on the other hand, in his adult
form has dropped back into an obscure and
sedentary life — sans eyes, sans teeth, sans
taste, sans everything — the tadpole alone, at
least during its early days, remains true to the
ancestral traditions of the vertebrate family.
When first it emerges from its ^^^ it repre-
sents the very most rudimentary animal with
a backbone known to our scientific teachers.
It has a big hammer-looking head, and a set
of branching outside gills, and a short distinct
body, and a long semi-transparent tail. Its
backbone is a mere gristly channel, in which
lies its spinal cord. As it grows, it resembles

DISTANT RELA TIONS. 99

in every particular the ascidian larva, with
which, indeed, Kowalewsky and Professor
Ray Lankester have demonstrated its essen-
tial identity. But since a great many people
seem wrongly to imagine that Professor
Lankester's opinion on this matter is in some
way at variance with Mn Darwin's and
Dr. HaeckeFs, it may be well to consider
what the degeneracy of the ascidian really
means. The fact is, both larval forms — that
of the frog and that of the ascidian — com-
pletely agree in the position of their brains,
their gill-slits, their very rudimentary back-
bones, and their spinal cords. Moreover, we
ourselves and the tadpole agree with the
ascidian in a further most important point,
which no invertebrate animal shares with us ;
and that is that our eyes grow out of our
brains, instead of being part of our skin, as in
insects and cuttle-fish. This would seem a
priori a most inconvenient place for an eye
— inside the brain ; but then, as Professor
Lankester cleverly suggests, our common

H 2

100 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

original ancestor, the very earliest vertebrate
of all, must have been a transparent creature,
and therefore comparatively indifferent as to
the part of his body in which his eye hap-
pened to be placed. In after ages, however,
as vertebrates generally got to have thicker
skulls and tougher skins, the eye-bearing part
of the brain had to grow outward, and so
reach the light on the surface of the body : a
thing which actually happens to all birds,
beasts, and reptiles in the course of their
embryonic development. So that in this
respect the ascidian larva is nearer to the
original type than the tadpole or any other
existing animal.

The ascidian, however, in mature life, has
grown degraded and fallen from his high
estate, owing to his bad habit of rooting
himself to a rock and there settling down
into a mere sedentary swallower of passing
morsels — a blind, handless, footless, and
degenerate thing. In his later shape he is
but a sack fixed to a stone, and with all his

DISTANT RELATIONS. loi

limbs and higher sense-organs so completely
atrophied that only his earlier history allows
us to recognise hina as a vertebrate by descent
at all. He is in fact a representative of
retrogressive development. The tadpole, on
the contrary,, goes on swimming about freely,
and keeping the use of its eyes, till at last a
pair of hind legs and then a pair of fore legs
begin to bud out from its side, and its tail fades
away, and its gills disappear, and air-breathing
lungs take their place, and it boldly hops on
shore a fully evolved tailless amphibian.

There is, however, one interesting question
about these two larvae which I should much
like to solve. The ascidian has only one eye
inside its useless brain, while the tadpole and
all other vertebrates have two from the very
first. Now which of us most nearly repre-
sents the old mud-loving vertebrate ancestor
in this respect ? Have two original organs
coalesced in the young ascidian, or has one
organ split up into a couple with the rest of
the class f I think the latter is the true

I02 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

supposition, and for this reason : In our
heads, and those of all vertebrates, there is a
curious cross-connection between the eyes
and the brain, so that the right optic nerve
goes to the left side of the brain and the left
optic nerve goes to the right side. In higher
animals, this ' decussation,' as anatomists call
it, affects all the sense-organs except those of
smell ; but in fishes it only affects the eyes.
Now, as the young ascidian has retained the
ancestral position of his almost useless eye so
steadily, it is reasonable to suppose that he
has retained its other peculiarities as well.
May we not conclude, therefore, that the
primitive vertebrate had only one brain-eye ;
but that afterwards, as this brain-eye grew
outward to the surface, it split up into two,
because of the elongated and flattened form of
the head in swimming animals, while its two
halves still kept up a memory of their former
union in the cross-connection with the oppo-
site halves of the brain ? If this be so, then
we might suppose that the other organs

DISTANT RELATIONS. 103

followed suit, so as to prevent confusion in
the brain between the two sides of the body ;
while the nose, which stands in the centre of
the face, was under no liability to such error,
and therefore still keeps up its primitive
direct arrangement.

It is worth noting, too, that these tad-
poles, like all other very low vertebrates, are
mud-haunters ; and the most primitive among
adult vertebrates are still cartilaginous mud-
fish. Not much is known geologically about
the predecessors of frogs ; the tailless am-
phibians are late arrivals upon earth, and it
may seem curious, therefore, that they should
recall in so many ways the earliest ancestral
type. The reason doubtless is because they
are so much given to larval development.
Some ancestors of theirs — primaeval newts or
salamanders — must have gone on for count-
less centuries improving themselves in their
adult shape from age to age, yet bringing all
their young into the world from the egg, as
mere mud-fish still, in much the same state

104 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

as their unimproved forefathers had done
millions of seons before. Similarly, cater-
pillars are still all but exact patterns of the
primaeval insect, while butterflies are totally
different and far higher creatures. Thus, in
spite of adult degeneracy in the ascidian and
adult progress in the frog, both tadpoles
preserve for us very nearly the original form
of their earliest backboned ancestor. Each
individual recapitulates in its own person the
whole history of evolution in its race. This
is a very lucky thing for biology ; since
without these recapitulatory phases we could
never have traced the true lines of descent in
many cases. It would be a real misfortune
for science if every frog had been born a
typical amphibian, as some tree-toads actually
are, and if every insect had emerged a fully
formed adult, as some aphides very nearly do.
Larvse and embryos show us the original
types of each race ; adults show us the total
amount of change produced by progressive
or retrogressive development.

AMONG THE HEATHER, 105

XI.

AMONG THE HEATHER.

This is the worst year for butterflies that I
can remember. Entomologists all over Eng-
land are in despair at the total failure of the
insect crop, and have taken to botanising,
angling, and other bad habits, in default of
means for pursuing their natural avocation
as beetle-stickers. Last year's heavy rains
killed all the mothers as they emerged from
the chrysalis ; and so only a few stray eggs
have survived till this summer, when the
butterflies they produce will all be needed to
keep up next season's supply. Nevertheless,
I have climbed the highest down in this part
of the country to-day, and come out for an
airing among the heather, in the vague hope

io6 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

that I may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse
of one or two old lepidopterous favourites.
I am not a butterfly-hunter myself. I have
not the heart to drive pins through the pretty
creatures' downy bodies, or to stifle them
with reeking chemicals ; though I recognise
the necessity for a hardened class who will
perform that useful office on behalf of science
and society, just as I recognise the necessity
for slaughtermen and knackers. But I prefer
personally to lie on the ground at my ease
and learn as much about the insect nature as
I can discover from simple inspection of the
living subject as it flits airily from bunch to
bunch of bright-coloured flowers.

I suppose even that apocryphal person,
the general reader, would be insulted at being
told at this hour of the day that all bright-
coloured flowers are fertilised by the visits of
insects, whose attentions they are specially
designed to solicit Everybody has heard
over and over again that roses, orchids, and
columbines have acquired their honey to

AMONG THE HEATHER. 107

allure the friendly bee, their gaudy petals to
advertise the honey, and their divers shapes
to ensure the proper fertilisation by the cor-
rect type of insect. But everybody does not
know how specifically certain blossoms have
laid themselves out for a particular species

of fly, beetle, or tiny moth. Here on the
higher downs, for instance, most flowers are
exceptionally large and brilliant ; while all
Alpine climbers must have noticed that the
most gorgeous masses of bloom in Switzer-
land occur just below the snow-line. The
reason is, that such blossoms must be fer-
tilised by butterflies alone. Bees, their great
rivals in honey-sucking,' frequent only the
lower meadows and slopes, where flowers
are many and small : they seldom venture
far from the hive or the nest among the high
peaks and chilly nooks where we find those
great patches of blue gentian or purple ane-
mone, which hang like monstrous breadths
of tapestry upon the mountain sides. This
heather here, now fully opening in the warmer

io8 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

sun of the southern counties — it is still but
in the bud among the Scotch hills, I doubt
not — specially lays itself out for the humble-
bee, and its masses form about his highest
pasture-grounds ; but the butterflies — insect
vagrants that they are — have no fixed home,'
and they therefore stray far above the level
at which bee-blossoms altogether cease to
grow. Now, the butterfly differs greatly
from the bee in his mode of honey-hunting ;
he does not bustle about in a business-like
manner from one buttercup or dead-nettle to
its nearest fellow ; but he flits joyously, like
a sauntering straggler that he is, from a great
patch of colour here to another great patch
at a distance, whose gleam happens to strike
his roving eye by its size and brilliancy.
Hence, as that indefatigable observer. Dr.
Hermann Mliller, has noticed, all Alpine or
hill-top flowers have very large and con-
spicuous blossoms, generally grouped to-
gether in big clusters so as to catch a passing
glance of the butterfly's eye. As soon as the

AMONG THE HEATHER. 109

insect spies such a cluster, the colour seems
to act as a stimulant to his broad wings, just
as the candle-light does to those of his cousin
the moth. Off he sails at once, as if by
automatic action, towards the distant patch,
and there both robs the plant of its honey
and at the same time carries to it on his legs
and head fertilising pollen from the last of its
congeners which he favoured with a call.
For of course both bees and butterflies stick
on the whole to a single species at a time ;
or else the flowers would only get uselessly
hybridised instead of being impregnated with
pollen from other plants of their own kind.
For this purpose it is that most plants lay
themselves out to secure the attention of only
two or three varieties among their insect
allies, while they make their nectaries either
too deep or too shallow for the convenience
of all other kinds. Nature, though eager
for cross-fertilisation, abhors * miscegenation '
with all the bitterness of an American poli-
tician.

no THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

Insects, however, differ much from one
another in their sesthetic tastes, and flowers
are adapted accordingly to the varying fancies
of the different kinds. Here, for example,
is a spray of common white galium, which
attracts and is fertilised by small flies, who
generally frequent white blossoms. But here,
iagain, not far off, I find a luxuriant mass of
the yellow species, known by the quaint
name of * lady's bedstraw ' — a legacy from the
old legend which represents it as having
formed Our Lady's bed in the manger at
Bethlehem. Now why has this kind of
galium yellow flowers, while its near kinsman
yonder has them snowy white ? The reason
is that lady s bedstraw is fertilised by small
beetles ; and beetles are known to be one
among the most colour-loving races of insects.
You may often find one of their number, the
lovely bronze and golden-mailed rose-chafer,
buried deeply in the very centre of a red
garden rose, and reeling about when touched
as if drunk with pollen and honey. Almost

AMONG THE HEATHER. in

all the flowers which beetles frequent are
consequently brightly decked in scarlet or
yellow. On the other hand, the whole family
of the umbellates, those tall plants with level
bunches of tiny blossoms, like the fool's
parsley, have all but universally white petals ;
and Mliller, the most statistical of naturalists,
took the trouble to count the number of in-
sects which paid them a visit. He found
that only 14 per cent, were bees, while the
remainder consisted mainly of miscellaneous
small flies and other arthropodous riff-raff*;
whereas in the brilliant class of composites,
including the asters, sunflowers, daisies, dan-
delions, and thistles, nearly 75 per cent, of
the visitors were steady, industrious bees.
Certain dingy blossoms which lay themselves
out to attract wasps are obviously adapted,
as Mliller quaintly remarks, * to a less sesthe-
tically cultivated circle of visitors.' But
the most brilliant among all insect-fertilised
flowers are those which specially affect the
society of butterflies ; and they are only sur-

112 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

passed in this respect throughout all nature
by the still larger and more magnificent
tropical species which owe their fertilisation
to humming-birds and brush-tongued lories.

Is it not a curious, yet a comprehensible
circumstance, that the tastes which thus show
themselves in the development, by natural
selection, of lovely flowers, should also show
themselves in the marked preference for
beautiful mates ? Poised on yonder sprig of
harebell stands a little purple -winged butter-
fly, one of the most exquisite among our
British kinds. That little butterfly owes its
own rich and delicately shaded tints to the
long selective action of a million generations
among its ancestors. So we find throughout
that the most beautifully coloured birds and
insects are always those which have had most
to do with the production of bright-coloured
fruits and flowers. The butterflies and rose-
beetles are the most gorgeous among insects :
the humming-birds and parrots are the most
gorgeous among birds. Nay more, exactly

AMONG THE HEATHER. 113

like effects have been produced in two hemi-
spheres on different tribes by the same causes.
The plain brown swifts of the North have
developed among tropical West Indian and
South American orchids the metallic gorgets
and crimson crests of the humming-bird :
while a totally unlike group of Asiatic birds
have developed among the rich flora of
India and the Malay Archipelago the exactly
similar plumage of the exquisite sun-birds.
Just as bees depend upon flowers, and
flowers upon bees, so the colour-sense of
animals has created the bright petals of
blossoms ; and the bright petals have reacted
upon the tastes of the animals themselves,
and through their tastes upon their own
appearance.

114 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

XII.
SPECKLED TROUT.

It is a piece of the common vanity of anglers
to suppose that they know something about
speckled trout. A fox might almost as well
pretend that he was intimately acquainted
with the domestic habits of poultry, or an
Iroquois describe the customs of the Algon-
quins from observations made upon the speci-
mens who had come under his scalping-knife.
I will allow that anglers are well versed in
the necessity for fishing up-stream rather than
in the opposite direction ; and I grant that
they have attained an empirical knowledge of
the aesthetic preferences of trout in the matter
of blue duns and red palmers ; but that as a
body they are familiar with the speckled trout

SPECKLED TROUT. L15

at home I deny. If you wish to learn all
about the race in its own life you must abjure
rod and line, and creep quietly to the side of
the pools in an unfished brooklet, like this on
whose bank I am now seated ; and then, if
you have taken care not to let your shadow
fall upon the water, you may sit and watch
the live fish themselves for an hour together,
as they bask lazily in the sunlight, or rise now
and then at cloudy moments with a sudden
dart at a May-fly who is trying in vain to lay
her eggs unmolested on the surface of the
stream. The trout in my little beck are for-
tunately too small even for poachers to care
for tickling them : so I am able entirely to
preserve them as objects for philosophical
contemplation, without any danger of their
being scared away from their accustomed
haunts by intrusive anglers.

Trout always have a recognised home of
their own, inhabited by a pretty fixed number
of individuals. But if you catch the two sole

denizens of a particular scour, you will find

I 2

Ii6 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

another pair installed in their place to-
morrow. Young fry seem always ready to
fill up the vacancies caused by the involun-
tary retirement of their elders. Their size
depends almost entirely upon the quan-
tity of food they can get ; for an adult fish
may weigh anything at any time of his life,
and there is no limit to the dimensions
they may theoretically attain. Mr. Herbert
Spencer, who is an angler as well as a
philosopher, well observes that where the
trout are many they are generally small ; and
where they are large they are generally few.
In the mill-stream down the valley they
measure only six inches, though you may fill
a basket easily enough on a cloudy day ; but
in the canal reservoir, where there are only
half-a-dozen fish altogether, a magnificent
eight-pounder has been taken more than
once. In this way we can understand
the origin of the great lake trout, which
weigh sometimes forty pounds. They are
common trout which have taken to living

SPECKLED TROUT. 117

in broader waters, where large food is far
more abundant, but where shoals of small
fish would starve. The peculiarities thus
impressed upon them have been handed
down to their descendants, till at length
they have become sufficiently marked to
justify us in- regarding them as a separate
species. But it is difiicult to say what makes
a species in animals so very variable as fish.
There are, in fact, no less than twelve kinds
of trout wholly peculiar to the British Islands,
and some of these are found in very restricted
areas. Thus, the Loch Stennis trout inhabits
only the tarns of Orkney; the Galway sea
trout lives nowhere but along the west coast
of Ireland ; the gillaroo never strays out of
the Irish loughs ; the Killin charr is confined
to a single sheet of water in Mayo ; and other
species belong exclusively to the Llanberis
lakes, to Lough Melvin, or to a few mountain
pools of Wales and Scotland. So great is
the variety that may be produced by small
changes of food and habitat. Even the

Ii8 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

salmon himself is only a river trout who has
acquired the habit of going down to the sea,
where he gets immensely increased quantities
of food (for all the trout kind are almost om-
nivorous), and grows big in proportion. But
he still retains many marks of his early exist-
ence as a river fish. In the first place, every
salmon is hatched from the ^^g in fresh water,
and grows up a mere trout. The young parr,
as the salmon is called in this stage of its
growth, is actually (as far as physiology goes)
a mature fish, and is capable of producing
milt, or male spawn, which long caused it to
be looked upon as a separate species. It
really represents, however, the early form of
the salmon, before he took to his annual ex-
cursion to the sea. The ancestral fish, only
a hundredth fraction in weight of his huge
descendant, must have somehow acquired the
habit of going seaward — possibly from a dry-
ing up of his native stream in seasons of
drought. In the sea, he found himself sud-
denly supplied with an unwonted store of

SPECKLED TROUT. 119

food, and grew, like all his kind under similar
circumstances, to an extraordinary size. Thus
he attains, as it were, to a second and final
maturity. But salmon cannot lay their eggs
in the sea ; or at least, if they did, the young
parr would starve for want of their proper
food, or else be choked by the salt water, to
which the old fish have acclimatised them-
selves. Accordingly, with the return of the
spawning season there comes back an in-
stinctive desire to seek once more the native
fresh water. So the salmon return up stream
to spawn, and the young are hatched in the
kind of surroundings which best suit their
tender gills. This instinctive longing for the
old home may probably have arisen during
an intermediate stage, when the developing
species still haunted only the brackish water
near the river mouths ; and as those fish alone
which returned to the head waters could pre-
serve their race, it would soon grow hardened
into a habit engrained in the nervous system,
like the migration of birds or the clustering

I20 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

of swarming bees around their queen. In
like manner the Jamaican land-crabs, which
themselves live on the mountain-tops, come
down every year to lay their eggs in the
Caribbean ; because, like all other crabs,
they pass their first larval stage as swimming
tadpoles, and afterwards take instinctively to
the mountains, as the salmon takes to the sea.
Such a habit could only have arisen by one
generation after another venturing further
and further inland, while always returning at
the proper season to the native element for
the deposition of the eggs.

These trout here, however, differ from the
salmon in one important particular beside
their relative size, and that is that they are
beautifully speckled in their mature form, in-
stead of being merely silvery like the larger
species. The origin of the pretty speckles is
probably to be found in the constant selection
by the fish of the most beautiful among their
number as mates. Just as singing-birds are
in their fullest and clearest song at the nest-

SPECKLED TROUT, 12I

ing period, and just as many brilliant species
only possess their gorgeous plumage while
they are going through their courtship, and
lose the decoration after the young brood is
hatched, so the trout are most brightly
coloured at spawning time, and become lank
and dingy after the eggs have been safely
deposited. The parent fish ascend to the
head-waters of their native river during the
autumn season to spawn, and then, their glory
dimmed, they return down-stream to the deep
pools, where they pass the winter sulkily, as
if ashamed to show themselves in their dull
and dusky suits. But when spring comes
round once more, and flies again become
abundant, the trout begin to move up-stream
afresh, and soon fatten out to their customary
size and brilliant colours. It might seem
at first sight that creatures so humble as
these little fish could hardly have suffi-
ciently developed aesthetic tastes to prefer
one mate above another on the score of
beauty. But we must remember that every

122 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

species is very sensitive to small points of
detail in its own kind, and that the choice
would only be exerted between mates gene-
rally very like one another, so that extremely
minute differences must necessarily turn the
scale in favour of one particular suitor rather
than his rivals. Anglers know that trout are
attracted by bright colours, that they can
distinguish the different flies upon which they
feed, and that artificial flies must accordingly
be made at least into a rough semblance
of the original insects. Some scientific
fishermen even insist that it is no use offer-
ing them a brown drake at the time of year
or the hour of day when they are naturally
expecting a red spinner. Of course their
sight is by no means so perfect as our own,
but it probably includes a fair idea of form,
and an acute perception of colour, while
there is every reason to believe that all the

trout family have a decided love of metallic

«

glitter, such as that of silver or of the sal-
mon's scales. Mr. Darwin has shown that the

SPECKLED TROUT. 123

little Stickleback goes through an elaborate
courtship, and I have myself watched trout
which seemed to me as obviously love-
making as any pair of turtle-doves I ever
saw. In their early life salmon frj'' and
young trout are almost quite indistinguish-
able, being both marked with blue patches
(known as 'finger-marks*) on their sides,
which are remnants of the ancestral colour-
ing once common to the whole race. But
as they grow up, their later-acquired tastes
begin to produce a divergence, due originally
to this selective preference of certain beauti-
ful mates ; and the adult salmon clothes him-
self from head to tail in sheeny silver, while
the full-grown trout decks his sides with the
beautiful speckles which have earned him
his popular name. Countless generations of
slight differences, selected from time to time
by the strongest and handsomest fish, have
sufficed at length to bring about these conspi-
cuous variations from the primitive type,
which the young of both races still preserve.

124 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

XIII.

DODDER AND BROOMRAPE.

This afternoon, strolling through the under-
cliff, I have come across two quaint and rather
uncommon flowers among the straggling
brushwood. One of them is growing like a
creeper around the branches of this over-
blown gorse-bush. It is the lesser dodder,
a pretty clustering mass of tiny pale pink
convolvulus blossoms. The stem consists of
a long red thread, twining round and round
the gorse, and bursting out here and there
into thick bundles of beautiful bell-shaped
flowers. But where are the leaves ? You
may trace the red threads through their
labyrinthine windings up and down the sup-
porting gorse-branches all in vain : there is
not a leaf to be seen. As a matter of fact,

DODDER AND BROOMRAPE. 125

the dodder has none. It is one of the most
thorough-going parasites in all nature. Or-
dinary green-leaved plants live by making
starches for themselves out of the carbonic
acid in the air, under the influence of sun-
light ; but the dodder simply fastens itself
on to another plant, sends down rootlets or
suckers into its veins, and drinks up sap
stored with ready-made starches or other food-
stuffs, originally destined by its host for the
supply of its own growing leaves, branches,
and blossoms. It lives upon the gorse just
as parasitically as the little green aphides
live upon our rose-bushes. The material
which it uses up in pushing forth its long
thread-like stem and clustered bells is so
much dead loss to the unfortunate plant on
which it has fixed itself.

Old-fashioned books tell us that the mis-
tletoe is a perfect parasite, while the dodder
is an imperfect one ; and I believe almost
all botanists will still repeat the foolish say-
ing to the present day. But it really shows

126 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

considerable haziness as to what a true
parasite is. The mistletoe is a plant which
has taken, it is true, to growing upon other
trees. Its very viscid berries are useful for
attaching the seeds to the trunk of the oak
or the apple; and there it roots itself into
the body of its host. But it soon produces
real green leaves of its own, which contain
the ordinary chlorophyll found in other
leaves, and help it to manufacture starch,
under the influence of sunlight, on its own
account. It is not, therefore, a complete
drag upon the tree which it infests ; for
though it takes sap and mineral food from
the host, it supplies itself with carbon, which
is after all the important thing for plant-life.
Dodder, however, is a parasite pure and
simple. Its seeds fall originally upon the
ground, and there root themselves at first
like those of any other plant. But, as it
grows, its long twining stem begins to curl
for support round some other and stouter
stalk. If it stopped there, and then produced

DODDER AND BROOMRAPE. 127

leaves of its own, like the honeysuckle and
the clematis, there would be no great harm
done : and the dodder would be but another
climbing plant the more in our flora. How-
ever, it soon insidiously repays the support
given it by sending down little bud-like
suckers, through which it draws up nourish-
ment from the gorse or clover on which it
lives. Thus it has -no need to develop leayes
of its own ; and it accordingly employs all
its stolen material in sending forth matted
thread-like stems and bunch after bunch of
bright flowers. As these increase and mul-
tiply, they at last succeed in drawing away
all the nutriment from the supporting plant,
which finally dies under the constant drain,
just as a horse might die under the attacks
of a host of leeches. But this matters little
to the dodder, which has had time to be
visited and fertilised by insects, and to set
and ripen its numerous seeds. One species,
the greater dodder, is thus parasitic upon
hops and nettles ; a second kind twines

128 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

round flax ; and the third, which I have here
under my eyes, mainly confines its dangerous
attentions to gorse, clover, and thyme. All
of them are, of course, deadly enemies to the
plants they infest.

How the dodder acquired this curious
mode of life it is not difficult to see. By
descent it is a bind-weed, or wild convol-
vulus, and its blossoms are in the main
miniature convolvulus blossoms still. Now,
all bind-weeds, as everybody knows, are
climbing plants, which twine themselves
round stouter stems for mere physical sup-
port. This is in itself a half-parasitic habit,
because it enables the plant to dispense with
the trouble of making a thick and solid stem
for its own use. But just suppose that any
bind-weed, instead of merely twining, were
to put forth here and there little tendrils,
something like those of the ivy, which
managed somehow to grow into the bark of
the host, and so naturally graft themselves
to its tissues. In that case the plant would

DODDER AND BROOMRAPE. 129

derive nutriment from the stouter stem with
no expense to itself, and it might naturally
be expected to grow strong and healthy, and
hand down its peculiarities to its descend-
ants. As the leaves would thus be rendered
needless, they would first become very much
reduced in size, and would finally disappear
altogether, according to the universal custom
of unnecessary organs. So we should get
at length a leafless plant, with numerous
flowers and seeds, just like the dodder.
Parasites, in fact, whether animal or veget-
able, always end by becoming mere repro-
ductive sacs, mechanisms for the simple
elaboration of eggs or seeds. This is just
what has happened to the dodder before me.
The other queer plant here is a broom
rape. It consists of a tall, somewhat faded-
looking stem, upright instead of climbing,
and covered with brown or purplish scales
in the place of leaves. Its flowers resemble
the scales in colour, and the dead-nettle
in shape. It is, in fact, a parasitic dead-

K

I30 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

nettle, a trifle less degenerate as yet than
the dodder. This broomrape has acquired
somewhat the same habits as the other plant,
only that it fixes itself on the roots of clover
or broom, from which it sucks nutriment by
its own root, as the dodder does by its stem-
suckers. Of course it still retains in most
particulars its original characteristics as a
dead-nettle ; it grows with their upright stem
and their curiously shaped flowers, so specially
adapted for fertilisation by insect visitors.
But it has naturally lost its leaves, for which
it has no further use, and it possesses no
chlorophyll, as the mistletoe does. Yet it
has not probably been parasitic for as long a
time as the dodder, since it still retains a
dwindling trace of its leaves in the shape of
dry purply scales, something like those of
young asparagus shoots. These leaves are
now, in all likelihood, actually undergoing a
gradual atrophy, and* we may fairly expect
that in the course of a few thousand years
they will disappear altogether. At present.

DODDER AND BROOM RAPE. 131

however, they remain very conspicuous by
their colour, which is not green, owing to the
absence of chlorophyll, but is due to the
same pigment as that of the blossoms. This
generally happens with parasites, or with
that other curious sort of plants known as
saprophytes, which live upon decaying living
matter in the mould of forests.. As they
need no green leaves, but have often in-
herited leafy structures af some sort, in a
more or less degenerate condition, from their
self-supporting ancestors, they usually dis-
play most beautiful colours in their stems
and scales, and several of them rank amongst
our handsomest hot-house plants. Even the
dodder has red stalks. Their only work in
life being to elaborate the materials stolen
from their host into the brilliant pigments
used in the petals for attracting insect fer-
tilisers, they pour this same dye into the
stems and scales, which thus render them
still more conspicuous to the insects' eyes.
Moreover, as they use their whole material

K 2

132 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

in producing flowers, many of these are very
large and handsome ; one huge Sumatran
species has a blossom which measures three
feet across. On the other hand, their seeds
are usually small and very numerous. Thou-
sands of seeds must fall on unsuitable places,
spring up, and waste all their tiny store of
nourishment, find no host at hand on which
to fasten themselves, and so die down for
want of food. It is only by producing a few
thousand young plants for every one destined
ultimately to survive that dodders and broom-
rapes manage to preserve their types at all.

DOG'S MERCURY AND PLANTAIN. 133

XIV.

DOGS MERCURY AND PLANTAIN.

The hedge and bank in Haye Lane are now
a perfect tangled mass of creeping plants,
among which I have just picked out a queer
little three-cornered flower, hardly known
even to village children, but christened by
our old herbalists * dog's mercury/ It is an
ancient trick of language to call coarser or
larger plants by the specific title of some
smaller or cultivated kind, with the addition
of an animal's name. Thus we have radish
and horse-radish, chestnut and horse-chestnut,
rose and dog-rose, parsnip and cow-parsnip,
thistle and sow-thistle. On the same prin-
ciple, a somewhat similar plant being known
as mercury, this perennial weed becomes
dog's mercury. Both, of course, go back to

134 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

some imaginary medicinal virtue in the herb
Mhich made it resemble the metal in the eyes
of old-fashioned practitioners.

Dogs mercury is one of the oddest
English flowers I know. Each blossom has
three small green petals, and either several
stamens, or else a pistil, in the centre.
There is nothing particularly remarkable in
the flower being green, for thousands of
other flowers are green and we never notice
them as in any way unusual. In fact, we
never as a rule notice green blossoms at all.
Yet anybody who picked a piece of dogs
mercury could not fail to be struck by its
curious appearance. It does not in the least
resemble the inconspicuous green flowers of
the stinging-nettle, or of most forest trees:
it has a very distinct set of petals which at
once impress one with the idea that they ought
to be coloured. And so indeed they ought :
for dog's mercury is a degenerate plant ^
which once possessed a brilliant corolla and
was fertilised by insects, but which has now

DOG'S MERCURY AND PLANTAIN. 135

fallen from its high estate and reverted to
the less advanced mode of fertilisation by
the intermediation of the wind. For some
unknown reason or other this species and all
its relations have discovered that they get on
better by the latter and usually more wasteful
plan than by the former and usually more
economical one. Hence they have given up
producing large bright petals, because they
no longer need to attract the eyes of insects ,v
and they have also given up the manufacture
of honey; which under their new circum-
stances would be a mere waste of substance
to them. But the dog*s mercury still retains
a distinct mark of its earlier insect-attracting
habits in these three diminutive petals.
Others of its relations have lost even these,
so that the original floral form is almost
completely obscured in their case. The
spurges are familiar English roadside ex-
amples, and their flowers are so completely
degraded that even botanists for a long time
mistook their nature and analogies.

136 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

The male and female flowers of dog's
mercury have taken to living upon separate
plants. Why is this ? Well, there was no
doubt a time when every blossom had both sta-
mens and pistil, as dog-roses and buttercups
always have. But when the plant took to
wind fertilisation it underwent a change of
structur^. The stamens on some blossoms
became aborted, while the pistil became
aborted on others. This was necessary in
order to prevent self-fertilisation ; for other-
wise the pollen of each blossom, hanging out
as it does to the wind, would have been very
liable to fall upon its own pistil. But the
present arrangement obviates any such con-
tingency, by making one plant bear all the
male flowers and another plant all the female
ones. Why, again, are the petals green ? I
think because dog*s mercury would be posi-
tively injured by the visits of insects. It has
no honey to offer them, and if they came to
it at all, they would only eat up the pollen
itself. Hence I suspect that those flowers

DOG'S MERCURY AND PLANTAIN. 137

among the mercuries which showed any ten-
dency to retain the original coloured petals
would soon g^t weeded out, because insects
would eat up all their pollen, thus preventing
them from fertilising others ; while those
which had green petals would never be
noticed and so would be permitted to fertilise
one another after their new fashion. In fact,
when a blossom which has once depended
upon insects for its fertilisation is driven by
circumstances to depend upon the wind, it
seems to derive a positive advantage from
losing all those attractive features by which
its ancestors formerly allured the eyes of
bees or beetles.

Here, again, on the roadside is a bit of
plantain. Everybody knows its flat rosette
of green leaves and its tall spike of grass-like
blossom, with long stamens hanging out to
catch the breeze. Now plantain is a case
exactly analogous to dog's mercury. It is an
example of a degraded blossom. Once upon
a time it was a sort of distant cousin to the

138 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

veronica, that pretty sky-blue speedwell which
abounds among the meadows in June and
July. But these particular speedwells gave
up devoting themselves to insects and be-
came adapted for fertilisation by the wind
instead. So you must look close at them to
see at all that the flowering spike is made up
of a hundred separate little four-rayed blos-
soms, whose pale and faded petals are
tucked away out of sight flat against the
stem. Yet their shape and arrangement
distinctly recall the beautiful veronica, and
leave one in little doubt as to the origin of
the plant. At the same time a curious
device has sprung up which answers just the
same purpose as the separation of the male
and female flowers on the dog's mercury.
Each plantain blossom has both stamens and
pistils, but the pistils come to maturity first,
and are fertilised by pollen blown to them
from some neighbouring spike. Their fea-
thery plumes are admirably adapted for
catching and utilising any stray golden grain

DOG'S MERCURY AND PLANTAIN. 139

which happens to pass that way. After the
pistils have faded, the stamens ripen, and
hang out at the end of long waving filaments,
so as to discharge all their pollen with
effect. On each spike of blossoms the lower
flowerets open first; and so, if you pick a
half-blown spike, you will see that all the
stamens are ripe below, and all the pistils
above. Were the opposite arrangement to
occur, the pollen would fall from the stamens
to the lower flowers of the same stalk ; but
as the pistils below have always been fer-
tilised and withered before the stamens ripen,
there is no chance of any such accident and
its consequent evil results. Thus one can
see clearly that the plantain has become
wholly adapted to wind-fertilisation, and as a
natural effect has all but lost its bright-
coloured corolla.

Common groundsel is also a case of the
same kind ; but here the degradation has not
gone nearly so far. I venture to conjecture,
therefore, that groundsel has been embarked

140 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

for a shorter time upon its downward course.
For evolution is not, as most people seem to
fancy, a thing which used once to take place ;
it is a process taking place around us every
day, and it must necessarily continue to take
place to the end of all time. By family the
groundsel is a daisy ; but it has acquired the
strange and somewhat abnormal habit of
self-fertilisation, which in all probability will
ultimately lead to its total extinction. Hence
it does not need the assistance of insects ;
and it has accordingly never developed or
else got rid of the bright outer ray-florets
which may once have attracted them. Its
tiny bell-shaped blossoms still retain their
dwarf yellow corollas ; but they are almost
hidden by the green cup-like investment of
the flower-head, and they are not conspicuous
enough to arrest the attention of the passing
flies. Here, then, we have an example of a
plant just beginning to start on the retrograde
path already traversed by the plantain and
the spurges. If we could meet prophetically

DOG'S MERCURY AND PLANTAIN, 141

With a groundsel of some remote future
century, I have little doubt we should find
its bell-shaped petals as completely degraded
as those of the plantain in our own day.

The general principle which these cases
illustrate is that when flowers have always
been fertilised by the wind, they never have
brilliant corollas ; when they acquire the
habit of impregnating their kind by the
intervention of insects, they almost always
acquire at the same time alluring colours,
perfumes, and honey; and when they have
once been so impregnated, and then revert
once more to wind-fertilisation,, or become
self-fertilisers, they generally retain some
symptoms of their earlier habits, in the
presence of dwarfed and useless petals, some-
rimes green, or if not green at least devoid of
their former attractive colouring. Thus every
plant bears upon its very face the history of
its whole previous development

142 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

XV.

BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY,

A SMALL red-and-black butterfly poises sta-
tuesque above the purple blossom of this tall
field-thistle. With its long sucker it probes
industriously floret after floret of the crowded
head, and extracts from each its wee drop of
buried nectar. As it stands just at present,
the dull outer sides of its four wings are
alone displayed, so that it does not form a
conspicuous mark for passing birds ; but
when it has drunk up the last drop of honey
from the thistle flower, and flits joyously
away to seek another purple mass of the
same sort, it will open its red-spotted vans in
the sunlight, and will then show itself off" as
one among the prettiest of our native insects.

BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY. 143

Each thistle-head consists of some two hun-
dred separate Httle bell-shaped blossoms,
crowded together for the sake of conspicuous-
ness into a single group, just as the blossoms
of the lilac or the syringa are crowded into
larger though less dense clusters ; and, as
each separate floret has a nectary of its
own, the bee or butterfly who lights upon
the compound flower-group can busy himself
for a minute or two in getting at the various
drops of honey without the necessity for
any further change of position than that of
revolving upon his own axis. Hence these
composite flowers are great favourites with
all insects whose suckers are long enough to
reach the bottom of their slender tubes.

The butterfly's view of life is doubtless
on the whole a cheerful one. Yet his exist-
ence must be something so nearly mechanical
that we probably overrate the amount of
enjoyment which he derives from flitting
about so airily among the flowers, and pass-
ing his days in the unbroken amusement of

144 'THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

sucking liquid honey. Subjectively viewed,
the butterfly is not a high order of insect ;
his nervous system does not show that pro-
vision for comparatively spontaneous thought
and action which we find in the more intelli-
gent orders, like the flies, bees, ants, and
wasps. His nerves are all frittered away in
little separate ganglia distributed among the
various segments of his body, instead of
being governed by a single great central
organ, or brain, whose business it always is
to correlate and co-ordinate complex external
impressions. This shows that the butterfly's
movements are almost all automatic, or
simply dependent upon immediate external
stimulants : he has not even that small capa-
city for deliberation and spontaneous initia-
tive which belongs to his relation the bee.
The freedom of the will is nothing to him,
or extends at best to the amount claimed on
behalf of Buridan's ass : he can just choose
which of two equidistant flowers shall first
have the benefit of his attention, and nothing

BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY. 145

else. Whatever view we take on the ab-
stract metaphysical question, it is at least
certain that the higher animals can do much
more than this. Their brain is able to cor-
relate a vast number of external impressions,
and to bring them under the influence of
endless ideas or experiences, so as finally to
evolve conduct which differs very widely
with different circumstances and different
characters. Even though it be true, as de-
terminists believe (and I reckon myself
among them), that such conduct is the neces-
sary result of a given character and given
circumstances — or, if you will, of a particular
set of nervous structures and a particular set
of external stimuli — yet we all know that it
is capable of varying so indefinitely, owing to
the complexity of the structures, as to be
practically incalculable. But it is not so
with the butterfly. His whole life is cut out
for him beforehand ; his nervous connections
are so simple, and correspond so directly
with external stimuli, that we can almost

146 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

predict with certainty what line of action
he will pursue under any given circum-
stances. He is, as it were, but a piece
of half-conscious mechanism, answering im-
mediately to impulses from without, just
as the thermometer answers to variations of
temperature, and as the telegraphic indicator
answers to each making and breaking of the
electric current.

In early life the future butterfly emerges
from the egg as a caterpillar. At once his
many legs begin to move, and the caterpillar
moves forward by their motion. But the
mechanism which set them moving was the
nervous system, with its ganglia working the
separate legs of each segment. This move-
ment is probably quite as automatic as the
act of sucking in the new-born infant. The
caterpillar walks, it knows not why, but
simply because it has to walk. When it
reaches a fit place for feeding, which differs
according to the nature of the particular
larva, it feeds automatically. Certain special

BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY. 147

external stimulants of sight, smell, or touch
set up the appropriate actions in the man-
dibles, just as contact of the lips with an
external body sets up sucking in the infant.
All these movements depend upon what we
call instinct — that is to say, organic habits
registered in the nervous system of the race.
They have arisen by natural selection alone,
because those insects which duly performed
them survived, and those which did not duly
perform them died out. After a considerable
span of life spent in feeding and walking about
in search of more food, the caterpillar one day
found itself compelled by an inner monitor
to alter its habits. Why, it knew not ; but,
just as a tired child sinks to sleep, the gorged
and full-fed caterpillar sank peacefully into a
dormant state. Then its tissues melted one by
one into a kind of organic pap, and its outer
skin hardened into a chrysalis. Within that
solid case new limbs and organs began to
grow by hereditary impulses. At the same
time the form of the nervous system altered,

L 2

148 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

to suit the higher and freer life for which the
insect was unconsciously preparing itself.
Fewer and smaller ganglia now appeared in
the tail segments (since no legs would any
longer be needed there), while more import-
ant ones sprang up to govern the motions of
the four wings. But it was in the head that
the greatest changes took place. There, a
rudimentary brain made its appearance, with
large optic centres, answering to the far more
perfect and important eyes of the future
butterfly. For the flying insect will have to
steer its way through open space, instead of
creeping over leaves and stones ; and it will
have to suck the honey of flowers, as well as
to choose its fitting mate, all of which de-
mands from it higher and keener senses than
those of the purblind caterpillar. At length
one day the chrysalis bursts asunder, and the
insect emerges to view on a summer morning
as a full-fledged and beautiful butterfly.

For a minute or two it stands and waits
till the air it breathes has filled out its wings.

BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY. 149

and till the warmth and sunlight have given
it strength. For the wings are by origin a
part of the breathing apparatus, and they
require to be plimmed by the air before the
insect can take to flight. Then, as it grows
more accustomed to its new life, the heredi-
tary impulse causes it to spread its vans
abroad, and it flies. Soon a flower catches
its eye, and the bright mass of colour attracts
it irresistibly, as the candle-light attracts the
eye of a child a few weeks old. It sets off
towards the patch of red or yellow, probably
not knowing beforehand that this is the
visible symbol of food for it, but merely
guided by the blind habit of its race, im-
printed with binding force in the very con-
stitution of its body. Thus the moths, which
fly by night and visit only white flowers
whose corollas still shine out in the twilight,
are so irresistibly led on by the external
stimulus of light from a candle falling upon
their eyes that they cannot choose but
move their wings rapidly in that direction ;

ISO THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

and though singed and blinded twice or
three times by the flame, must still wheel
and eddy into it, till at last they perish in
the scorching blaze. Their instincts, or, to
put it more clearly, their simple nervous
mechanism, though admirably adapted to
their natural circumstances, cannot be equally
adapted to such artificial objects as wax
candles. The butterfly in like manner is
attracted automatically by the colour of his
proper flowers, and settling upon them, sucks
up their honey instinctively. But feeding is
not now his only object in life : he has to
find and pair with a suitable mate. That,
indeed, is the great end of his winged exist-
ence. Here, again, his simple nervous sys-
tem stands him in good stead. The picture
of his kind is, as it were, imprinted on his
little brain, and he knows his own mates the
moment he sees them, just as intuitively as
he knows the flowers upon which he must
feed. Now we see the reason for the butter-
fly's large optic centres : they have to guide

BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY. 151

It in all its movements. In like manner, and
by a like mechanism, the female butterfly or
moth selects the right spot for laying her
eggs, which of course depends entirely upon
the nature of the young caterpillars' proper
food. Each great group of insects has its
own habits in this respect, may-flies laying
their eggs on the water, many beetles on
wood, flies on decaying animal matter, and
butterflies mostly on special plants. Thus
throughout its whole life the butterfly's ac-
tivity is entirely governed by a rigid law,
registered and fixed for ever in the con-
stitution of its ganglia and motor nerves.
Certain definite objects outside it invariably
produce certain definite movements on the
insect's part. No doubt it is vaguely con-
scious of all that it does : no doubt it derives
a faint pleasure from due exercise of all its
vital functions, and a faint pain when they
are injured or thwarted ; but on the whole
its range of action is narrowed and bounded
by its hereditary instincts and their nervous

152 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

correlatives. It may light on one flower
rather than another ; it may choose a fresher
and brighter mate rather than a battered
and dingy one ; but its litde subjectivity is
a mere shadow compared with ours, and it
hardly deserves to be considered as more
than a semi-conscious automatic machine.

BUTTERFLY ESTHETICS. 153

XVI.

BUTTERFLY ^ESTHETICS.

The other day, when I was watching that
little red-spotted butterfly whose psychology
I found so interesting, I hardly took enough
account, perhaps, of the insect's own subjec-
tive feelings of pleasure and pain. The first
great point to understand about these minute
creatures is that they are, after all, mainly
pieces of automatic mechanism : the second
great point is to understand that they are
probably something more than that as well.
To-day I have found another exactly similar
butterfly, and lam going to work out with
myself the other half of the problem about
him. Granted that the insect is, viewed
intellectually, a cunning bit of nervous

154 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

machinery, may it not be true at the same
time that he is, viewed emotionally, a faint
copy of ourselves ?

Here he stands oti a purple thistle again,
true, as usual, to the plant on which I last
found him. There can be no doubt that he
distinguishes one colour from another, for you
can artificially attract him by putting a piece
of purple paper on a green leaf, just as the
flower naturally attracts him with its native
hue. Numerous observations and experi-
ments have proved widi all but absolute cer-
tainty that his discrimination of colour is
essentially identical with our own ; and I think,
if we run our eye up and down nature, ob-
serving how universally all animals are at-
tracted by pure and bright colours, we can
hardly doubt that he appreciates and ad-
mires colour as well as discriminates it. Mr,
Darwin certainly judges that butterflies can
ishow an aesthetic preference of the sort, for
he sets down their own lovely hues to the
constant sexual selection of the handsomest

BUTTERFLY ESTHETICS, 155

mates. We must not, however, take too
human a measure of their capacities in this
respect. It is sufficient to believe that the
insect derives some direct enjoyment from
the stimulation of pure colour, and is heredi-
tarily attracted by it wherever it may show
itself. This pleasure draws it on, on the one
hand, towards the gay flowers which form its
natural food ; and, on the other hand, towards
its own brilliant mates. Imprinted on its
nervous system is a certain blank form
answering to its own specific type ; and when
the object corresponding to this blank form
occurs in its neighbourhood, the insect blindly
obeys its hereditary instinct. But out of two
or three such possible mates it naturally
selects that which is most brightly spotted,
and in other ways most perfectly fulfils the
specific ideal. We need not suppose that the
insect is conscious of making a selection or
of the reasons which guide it in its choice :
it is enough to believe that it follows the
strongest stimulus, just as the child picks out

156 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

the biggest and reddest apple from a row of
ten. Yet such unconscious selections, made
from time to time in generation after gene-
ration, have sufficed to produce at last all
the beautiful spots and metallic eyelets of
our loveliest English or tropical butterflies.
Insects always accustomed to exercising their
colour-sense upon flowers and mates, may
easily acquire a high standard of taste in that
direction, while still remaining comparatively
in a low stage as regards their intellectual
condition. But the fact I wish especially to
emphasise is this — that the flowers produced
by the colour-sense of butterflies and their
allies are just those objects which we our-
selves consider most lovely in nature ; and
that the marks and shades upon their own
wings, produced by the long selective action
of their mates, are just the things which we
ourselves consider most beautiful in the ani-
mal world. In this respect, then, there seems
to be a close community of taste and feeling
between the butterfly and ourselves.

BUTTERFLY ESTHETICS. 157

Let me note, too, just in passing, that
while the upper half of the butterfly's wing is
generally beautiful in colour, so as to attract
his fastidious mate, the under half, displayed
while he is at rest, is almost always dull, and
often resembles the plant upon which he
habitually alights. The first set of colours is
obviously due to sexual selection, and has for
its object the making an effective courtship ;
but the second set is obviously due to natural
selection, and has been produced by the fact
that all those insects whose bright colours
show through too vividly when they are at
rest fall a prey to birds or other enemies,
leaving only the best protected to continue
the life of the species.

But sight is not the only important sense
to the butterfly. He is largely moved and
guided by smell as well. Both bees and
butterflies seem largely to select the flowers
they visit by means of smell, though colour
also aids them greatly. When we remember
that in ants scent alone does duty instead of

IS8 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

eyes, ears, or any other sense, it would hardly
be possible to doubt that other allied insects
possessed the same faculty in a high degree ;
and, as Dr. Bastian says, there seems good
reason for believing that all the higher insects
are guided almost as much by smell as by
sight Now it is noteworthy that most of
those flowers which lay themselves out to at-
tract bees and butterflies are not only coloured
but sweetly scented ; and it is to this cause
that we owe the perfumes of the rose, the
lily-of-the-valley, the heliotrope, the jasmine,
the violet, and the stephanotis. Night-
flowering plants, which depend entirely for
their fertilisation upon moths, are almost
always white, and have usually very powerful
perfumes. Is it not a striking fact that these
various scents are exactly those which human
beings most admire, and which they artificially
extract for essences ? Here, again, we see
that the aesthetic tastes of butterflies and men
decidedly agree ; and that the thyme or laven-
der whose perfume pleases the bee is the very

BUTTERFLY ESTHETICS, 15^

thing which we ourselves choose to sweeten
our rooms.

Finally, if we look at the sense of taste,
we find an equally curious agreement between
men and insects ; for the honey which is
stored by the flower for the bee, and by the
bee for its own use, is stolen and eaten up by
man instead. Hence, when I consider the
general continuity of nervous structure
throughout the whole animal race, and the
exact similarity of the stimulus in each in-
stance, I can hardly doubt that the butterfly
really enjoys life somewhat as we enjoy it,
though far less vividly. I cannot but think
that he finds honey sweet, and perfumes
pleasant, and colour attractive ; that he feels
a lightsome gladness as he flits in the sun-
shine from flower to flower, and that he
knows a faint thrill of pleasure at the sight of
his chosen mate. Still more is this belief
forced upon me when I recollect that, so far as
I can judge, throughout the whole animal
world, save only in a few aberrant types, sugar

i6o THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

is sweet to taste, and thyme to smell, and song
to hear, and sunshine to bask in. Therefore,
on the whole, while I admit that the butterfly
is mainly an animated puppet, I must qualify
my opinion by adding that it is a puppet
which, after its vague little fashion, thinks
and feels very much as we do.

THE ORIGIN OF WALNUTS. i6i

XVII.

THE ORIGIN OF WALNUTS,

Mr. Darwin has devoted no small portion of
his valuable life to tracing, in two bulky
volumes, the Descent of Man. Yet I sup-
pose it is probable that in our narrow anthro-
pinism we should have refused to listen to
him had he given us two volumes instead on
the Descent of Walnuts. Viewed as a ques-
tion merely of biological science, the one
subject is just as important as the other.
But the old Greek doctrine that ' man is the
measure of all things' is strong in us still.
We form for ourselves a sort of pre-Coper-
nican universe, in which the world occupies
the central point of space, and man occupies
the central point of the world. What touches

M

i62 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

man interests us deeply : what concerns him
but slightly we pass over as of no conse-
quence. Nevertheless, even the origin and
development of walnuts is a subject upon
which we may profitably reflect, not wholly
without gratification and interest.

This kiln-dried walnut on my plate, which
has suggested such abstract cogitations to
my mind, is shown by its very name to be a
foreign production ; for the word contains
the same root as Wales and Welsh, the old
Teutonic name for men of a different race,
which the Germans still apply to the Italians,
and we ourselves to the last relics of the old
Keltic population in Southern Britain. It
means ' the foreign nut,' and it comes for the
most part from the south of Europe. As a
nut, it represents a very different type of fruit
from the strawberry and raspberry, with
their bright colours, sweet juices, and nutri-
tious pulp. Those fruits which alone bear
the name in common parlance are attractive
in their object ; the nuts are deterrent. An

THE ORIGIN OF WALNUTS. 163

orange or a plum is brightly tinted with hues
which contrast strongly with the surrounding
foliage ; its pleasant taste and soft pulp all
advertise it for the notice of birds or mon-
keys, as a means for assisting in the disper-
sion of its seed. But a nut, on the con-
trary, is a fruit whose actual seed contains an
abundance of oils and other pleasant food-
stuffs, which must be carefully guarded against
the depredations of possible foes. In the
plum or the orange we do not eat the seed
itself: we only eat the surrounding pulp.
But in the walnut the part which we utilise
is the embryo plant itself ; and so the wal-
nuts great object in life is to avoid being
eaten. Accordingly, that part of the fruit
which in the plum is stored with sweet juices
is, in the walnut, filled with a bitter and very
nauseous essence. We seldom see this bitter
covering in our over-civilised life, because it is,
of course, removed before the nuts come to
table. The walnut has but a thin shell, and
is poorly protected in comparison with some of

M 2

i64 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

its relations, such as the American butter-
nut, which can only be cracked by a sharp
blow from a hammer — or even the hickory,
whose hard covering has done more to de-
stroy the teeth of New Englanders than all
other causes put together, and New England
teeth are universally admitted to be the very
worst in the world. Now, all nuts have to
guard against squirrels and birds ; and there-
fore their peculiarities are exactly opposite
to those of succulent fruits. Instead of at-
tracting attention by being brightly coloured,
they are invariably green like the leaves
while they remain on the tree, and brown or
dusky like the soil when they fall upon the
ground beneath; instead of being enclosed in
sweet coats, they are provided with bitter,
acrid, or stinging husks ; and, instead of being
soft in texture, they are surrounded by hard
shells, like the coco-nut, or have a perfectly
solid kernel, like the vegetable ivory.

The origin of nuts is thus exactly the
reverse side of the origin of fruits. Certain

THE ORIGIN OF WALNUTS. 165

seeds, richly stored with oils and starches for
aiding the growth of the young plant, are
exposed to the attacks of squirrels, monkeys,
parrots, and other arboreal animals. The
greater part of them are eaten and completely
destroyed by these their enemies, and so
never hand down their peculiarities to any
descendants* But all fruits vary a little in
sweetness and bitterness, pulpy or stringy
tendencies. Thus a few among them happen
to be protected from destruction by their
originally accidental possession of a bitter
husk, a hard shell, or a few awkward spines
and bristles. These the monkeys and squir-
rels reject ; and they alone survive as the
parents of future generations. The more per-
sistent and the hungrier their foes become,
the less will a small degree of bitterness or
hardness serve to protect them. Hence, from
generation to generation, the bitterness and
the hardness will go on increasing, because
only those nuts which are the nastiest and
the most difficult to crack will escape destruc-

i66 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

tion from the teeth or bills of the growing
and pressing population of rodents and birds.
The nut which best survives on the averaofe
is that which is least conspicuous in colour,
has a rind of the most objectionable taste,
and is enclosed in the most solid shell. But
the extent to which such precautions become
necessary will depend much upon the par-
ticular animals to whose attacks the nuts of
each country are exposed. The European
walnut has only to defy a few small wood-
land animals, who are sufificiently deterred by
its acrid husk ; the American butter-nut has
to withstand the long teeth of much more
formidable forestine rodents, whom it sets at
nought with its stony and wrinkled shell ;
and the tropical cocos and Brazil nuts have
to escape the monkey, who pounds them
with stones, or flings them with all his might
from the tree-top so as to smash them in
their fall against the ground below.

Our own hazel-nut supplies an excellent
illustration of the general tactics adopted

THE ORIGIN OF WALNUTS. I67

by the nuts at large. The little red tufted
blossoms which everybody knows so well in
early spring are each surrounded by a bunch
of three bracts ; and as the nut grows bigger,
these bracts form a green leaf-like covering,
which causes it to look very much like the
ordinary foliage of the hazel-tree. Besides,
they are thickly set with small prickly hairs,
which are extremely annoying to the fingers,
and must prove far more unpleasant to the
delicate lips and noses of lower animals.
Just at present the nuts have reached this
stage in our copses ; but as soon as autumn
sets in, and the seeds are ripe, they will turn
brown, fall out of their withered investment,

and easily escape notice on the soil beneath,
where the dead leaves will soon cover them
up in a mass of shrivelled brown, indistin-
guishable in shade from the nuts themselves.
Take, as an example of the more carefully
protected tropical kinds, the coco-nut. Grow-
ing on a very tall palm-tree, it has to fall a
considerable distance toward the earth ; and

i68 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

SO it is wrapped round in a mass of loose
knotted fibre, which breaks the fall just as a
lot of soft wool would do. Then, being a
large nut, fully stored with an abundance
of meat, it offers special attractions to ani-
mals, and consequently requires special means
of defence. Accordingly, its shell is ex-
travagantly thick, only one small soft spot
being left at the blunter end, through which
the young plant may push its head. Once
upon a time, to be sure, the coco-nut con-
tained three kernels, and had three such soft
spots or holes ; but now two of them are
aborted, and the two holes remain only in
the form of hard scars. The Brazil nut is
even a better illustration. Probably few
people know that the irregular angular nuts
which appear at dessert by that name are
originally contained inside a single round
shell, where they fit tightly together, and
acquire their queer indefinite shapes by
mutual pressure. So the South American
monkey has first to crack the thick external

THE ORIGIN OF WALNUTS. 169

common shell against a stone or otherwise ;
and, if he is successful in this process, he
must afterwards break the separate sharp-
edged inner nuts with his teeth — a perform-
ance which is always painful and often in-
effectual.

Yet it is curious that nuts and fruits are
really produced by the very slightest varia-
tions on a common type, so much so that the
technical botanist does not recognise the
popular distinction between them at all. In
his eyes, the walnut and the coco-nut are not
nuts, but 'drupaceous fruits,' just like the
plum and the cherry. All four alike contain
a kernel within, a hard shell outside it, and a
fibrous mass outside that again, bounded by
a thin external layer. Only, while in the
plum and cherry this fibrous mass becomes
succulent and fills with sugary juice, in the
walnut its juice is bitter, and in the coco-nut
it has no juice at all, but remains a mere
matted layer of dry fibres. And while the
thin external skin becomes purple in the

I70 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

plum and red in the cherry as the fruits
ripen, it remains green and brown in the
walnut and coco-nut all their time. Never-
theless, Darwinism shows us both here and
elsewhere that the popular distinction answers
to a real difference of origin and function.
When a seed-vessel, whatever its botanical
structure, survives by dint of attracting ani-
mals, it always acquires a bright-coloured
envelope and a sweet pulp ; while it usually
possesses a hard seed-shell, and often infuses
bitter essences into its kernel. On the other
hand, when a seed-vessel survives by es-
caping the notice of animals, it generally has
a sweet and pleasant kernel, which it pro-
tects by a hard shell and an inconspicuous
and nauseous envelope. If the kernel itself
is bitter, as with the horse-chestnut, the need
for disguise and external protection is much
lessened. But the best illustration of all is
seen in the West Indian cashew-nut, which
is what Alice in Wonderland would have
called a portmanteau seed-vessel — a fruit and

THE ORIGIN OF H'ALNUTS. 171

a nut rolled into one. In this curious case,
the stalk swells out into a bright-coloured
and juicy mass, looking something like a
pear, but of course containing no seeds ;
while the nut grows out from its end, secured
from intrusion by a covering with a pungent
juice, which burns and blisters the skin at a
touch. No animal except man can ever suc-
cessfully tackle the cashew-nut itself; but by
eating the pear-like stalk other animals ulti-
mately aid in distributing the seed. The
cashew thus vicariously sacrifices its fruit-
stem for the sake of preserving its nut.

All nature is a continuous game of cross-
purposes. Animals perpetually outwit plants,
and plants in return once more outwit ani-
mals. Or, to drop the metaphor, those ani-
mals alone survive which manage to get a
living in spite of the protections adopted by
plants ; and those plants alone survive whose
peculiarities happen successfully to defy the
attack of animals. There you have the
Darwinian Iliad in a nutshell.

172 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

XVIII.

A PRETTY LAND-SHELL.

The heavy rains which have done so much
harm to the standing corn have at least had
the effect of making the country look greener
and lovelier than I have seen it look for
many seasons. There is now a fresh verdure
about the upland pastures and pine woods
which almost reminds one of the deep val-
leys of the Bernese Oberland in early spring.
Last year s continuous wet weather gave the
trees and grass a miserable draggled appear-
ance ; but this summer s rain, coming after a
dry spring, has brought out all the foliage
in unwonted luxuriance ; and everybody
(except the British farmer) agrees that we
have never seen the country look more

A PRETTY LAND-SHELL. 173

beautiful. Though the year is now so far
advanced, the trees are still as green as in
springtide ; and the meadows, with their rich
aftermath springing up apace, look almost
as lush and fresh as they did in early June.
Londoners who get away to the country or
the seaside this month will enjoy an unex-
pected treat in seeing the fields as they
ought to be seen a couple of months sooner
in the season.

Here, on the edge of the down, where I
have come up to get a good blowing from
the clear south-west breeze, I have just sat
down to rest myself awhile and to admire the
view, and have reverted for a moment to my
old habit of snail-hunting. Years ago, when
evolution was an infant — an infant much
troubled by the complaints inseparable from
infancy, but still a sturdy and vigorous child,
destined to outlive and outgrow its early
attacks — I used to collect slugs and snails,
from an evolutionist standpoint, and put their
remains into a cabinet ; and to this day I

174 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

seldom go out for a walk without a few pill-
boxes in my pocket, in case I should happen
to hit upon any remarkable specimen. Now
here in the tall moss which straggles over an
old heap of stones I have this moment
lighted upon a beautifully marked shell of
our prettiest English snail. How beautiful
it is I could hardly make you believe, unless
I had you here and could show it to you ;
for most people only know the two or three
ugly brown or banded snails that prey upon
their cabbages and lettuces, and have no
notion of the lovely shells to be found by
hunting among English copses and under
the dead leaves of Scotch hill-sides. This
cyclostoma, however, — I must trouble you
with a Latin name for once — is so remark-
ably pretty, with its graceful elongated spiral
whorls, and its delicately chiselled fretwork
tracery, that even naturalists (who have per-
haps, on the whole, less sense of beauty than
any class of men I know) have recognised
its loveliness by giving it the specific epithet

A PRETTY LAND-SHELL. 175

of elegans. It is big enough for anybody to
notice it, being about the size of a peri-
winkle ; and its exquisite stippled chasing is
strongly marked enough to be perfectly
visible to the naked eye. But besides its
beauty, the cyclostoma has a strong claim
upon our attention because of its curious
history.

Long ago, in the infantile days of evo-
lutionism, I often wondered why people made
collections on such an irrational plan. They
always try to get what they call the most
typical specimens, and reject all those which
are doubtful or intermediate. Hence the
dogma of the fixity of species becomes all the
more firmly settled in their minds, because
they never attend to the existing links which
still so largely bridge over the artificial gaps
created by our nomenclature between kind
and kind. I went to work on the opposite
plan, collecting all those aberrant individuals
which most diverged from the specific type.
In this way I managed to make some series

176 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

SO continuous that one might pass over speci-
mens of three or four different kinds, arranged
in rows, without ever being able to say quite
clearly, by the eye alone, where one group
ended and the next group began. Among
the snails such an arrangement is peculiarly
easy ; for some of the species are very indefi-
nite, and the varieties are numerous under
each species. Nothing can give one so good
a notion of the plasticity of organic forms as
such a method. The endless varieties and
intermediate links which exist amongst dogs is
the nearest example to it with which ordinary
observers are familiar.

But the cyclostoma is a snail which intro-
duces one to still deeper questions. It
belongs in all our scientific classifications to
the group of lung-breathing mollusks, like
the common garden snail. Yet it has one
remarkable peculiarity : it possesses an oper-
culum, or door to its shell, like that of
the periwinkle. This operculum represents
among the univalves the under-shell of the

A PRETTY LAND-SHELL, I77

oyster or other bivalves ; but it has com-
pletely disappeared in most land and fresh-
water snails, as well as among many marine
species. The fact of its occurrence in the
cyclostoma would thus be quite inexplic-
able if we were compelled to regard it as
a descendant of the other lung-breathing
mollusks. So far as I know, all naturalists
have till lately always so regarded it ; but
there can be very little doubt, with the new
light cast upon the question by Darwinism,
that they are wrong. There exists in all our
ponds and rivers another snail, not breathing
by means of lungs, but provided with gills,
known as paludina. This paludina has a
door to its shell, like the cyclostoma ; and so,
indeed, have all its allies. Now, strange as
it sounds to say so, it is pretty certain that
we must really class this lung-breathing
cyclostoma among the gill-breathers, because
of its close resemblance to the paludina. It
is, in fact, one of these gill-breathing pond-
snails which has taken to living on dry land,

N

178 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

and so has acquired the habit of producing
lungs. All moUuscan lungs are very simple :
they consist merely of a small sac or hollow
behind the head, lined with blood-vessels ;
and every now and then the snail opens this
sac, allowing the air to get in and out by
natural change, exactly as when we air a
room by opening the windows. So primitive
a mechanism as this could be easily acquired
by any soft-bodied animal like a snail. Be-
sides, we have many intermediate links
between the pond-snails and my cyclostoma
here. There are some species which live in
moist moss, or the beds of trickling streams.
There are others which go further from the
water, and spend their days in damp grass.
And there are yet others which have taken
to a wholly terrestrial existence in woods or
meadows and under heaps of stones. All of
them agree with the pond-snails in having an
operculum, and so differ from the ordinary
land and river- snails, the mouths of whose
shells are quite unprotected. Thus land-

A PRETTY LAND'S HELL. 179

snails have two separate origins — one large
group (including the garden-snail) being de-
rived from the common fresh-water mollusks,
while another much smaller group (including
the cyclostoma) is derived from the opercu-
lated pond-snails.

How is it, then, that naturalists had so
long overlooked this distinction ? Simply
because their artificial classification is based
entirely upon the nature of the breathing
apparatus. But, as Mr. Wallace has well
pointed out, obvious and important functional
differences are of far less value in tracing re-
lationship than insignificant and unimportant
structural details. Any water-snail may have
to take to a terrestrial life if the ponds in
which it lives are liable to dry up during
warm weather. Those individuals alone will
then survive which display a tendency to
oxygenise their blood by some rudimentary
form of lung. Hence the possession of lungs
is not the mark of a real genealogical class,
but a mere necessary result of a terrestrial

N 2

i8o THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

existence. On the other hand, the possession
of an operculum, unimportant as it may be to
the life of the animal, is a good test of rela-
tionship by descent. All snails which take
to living on land, whatever their original
form, will acquire lungs : but an operculated
snail will retain its operculum, and so bear
witness to its ancestry ; while a snail which
is not operculated will of course show no
tendency to develop such a structure, and so
will equally give a true testimony as to its
origin. In short, the less functionally useful
any organ is, the higher is its value as a
gauge of its owner's pedigree, like a Bourbon
nose or an Austrian lip.

DOGS AND MASTERS. i8i

XIX.

DOGS AND MASTERS.

Probably the most forlorn and abject creature
to be seen on the face of the earth is a masr
terless dog. Slouching and slinking along,
cringing to every human being it chances to
meet, running away with its tail between its
legs from smaller dogs whom under other
circumstances it would accost with a gruff
who-the-dickens-are-you sort of growl, — it
forms the very picture of utter humiliation
and self-abasement. Grip and I have just
come across such a lost specimen of stray
doghood, trying to find his way back to his
home across the fields — I fancy he belongs to
a travelling show which left the village yes-
terday — and it is quite refreshing to watch

1 82 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

the air of superior wisdom and calm but mute
compassionateness with which Grip casts his
eye sidelong upon that wretched masterless
vagrant, and passes him by without even a
nod. He looks up to me complacently as he
trots along by my side, and seems to say
with his eye, * Poor fellow ! he's lost his mas-
ter, you know — careless dog that he is ! ' I
believe the lesson has had a good moral effect
upon Grip's own conduct, too ; for he has
now spent ten whole minutes well within my
sight, and has resisted the most tempting
solicitations to ratting and rabbiting held out
by half-a-dozen holes and burrows in the
hedge-wall as we go along.

This total dependence of dogs upon a
master is a very interesting example of the
growth of inherited instincts. The original
dog, who was a wolf or something very like
it, could not have had any such artificial feel-
ing. He was an independent, self-reliant
animal, quite well able to look after himself
on the boundless plains of Central Europe or

DOGS AND MASTERS. 183

High Asia. But at least as early as the days
of the Danish shell-mounds, perhaps thou-
sands of years earlier, man had learned to
tame the dog and to employ him as a friend
or servant for his own purposes. Those dogs
which best served the ends of man were pre-
served and increased ; those which followed
too much their own original instincts were
destroyed or at least discouraged. The
savage hunter would be very apt to fling his
stone axe at the skull of a hound which tried
to eat the game he had brought down with
his flint-tipped arrow, instead of retrieving it :
he would be most likely to keep carefully and
feed well on the refuse of his own meals the
hound which aided him most in surprising,
killing, and securing his quarry. Thus there
sprang up between man and the dog a mutual
and ever increasing sympathy which on the
part of the dependent creature has at last be-
come organised into an inherited instinct. If
we could only thread the labyrinth of a dog's
brain, we should find somewhere in it a group

"^

1 84 THE EVOL UTIONIST A T LARGE.

of correlated nerve-connections answering to
this universal habit of his race ; and the
group in question would be quite without any
» analogous mechanism in the brain of the
ancestral wolf. As truly as the wing of the
bird is adapted to its congenital instinct of
flying, as truly as the nervous system of the
bee is adapted to its congenital instinct of
honeycomb building, just so truly is the brain
of the dog adapted to its now congenital
instinct of following 'and obeying a master.
The habit of attaching itself to a particular
human being is nowadays engrained in the
nerves of the modern dog just as really,
though not quite so deeply, as the habit of
running or biting is engrained in its bones
and muscles. Every dog is born into the
world with a certain inherited structure of
limbs, sense-organs, and brain : and this in-
herited structure governs all its future actions,
both bodily and mental. It seeks a master
because it is endowed with master-seeking
brain organs ; it is dissatisfied until it finds

•/»■•

DOGS AND MASTERS. 185

one, because its native functions can have free
play in no other way. Among a few dogs,
like those of Constantinople, the instinct may
have died out by disuse, as the eyes of cave
animals have atrophied for want of light ; but
when a dog has once been brought up from
puppyhood under a master, the instinct is
fully and freely developed, and the masterless
condition is thenceforth for him a thwarting
and disappointing of all his natural feelings
and affections.

Not only have dogs as a class acquired a
special instinct with regard to humanity gene-
rally, but particular breeds of dogs have ac-
quired particular instincts with regard to cer-
tain individual acts. Nobody doubts that the
muscles of a greyhound are specially correlated
to the acts of running and leaping ; or that the
muscles of a bull-dog are specially correlated to
the act of fighting. The whole external form
of these creatures has been modified by man's
selective action for a deliberate purpose : we
breed, as we say, from the dog with the best

1 86 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

points. But besides being able to modify the
visible and outer structure of the animal, we
are also able to modify, by indirect indica-
tions, the hidden and inner structure of the
brain. We choose the best ratter among our
terriers, the best pointer, retriever, or setter
among other breeds, to become the parents
of our future stock. We thus half uncon-
sciously select particular types of nervous
system in preference to others. Once upon
a time we used even to rear a race of dogs
with a strange instinct for turning the spit in
our kitchens ; and to this day the Cubans
rear blood-hounds with a natural taste for
hunting down the trail of runaway negroes.
Now, everybody knows that you cannot teach
one sort of dog the kind of tricks which come
by instinct to a different sort. No amount
of instruction will induce a well-bred terrier
to retrieve your handkerchief : he insists upon
worrying it instead. So no amount of instruc-
tion will induce a well-bred retriever to worry
a rat : he brings it gingerly to your feet, as if it

r/'

DOGS AND MASTERS. 187

was a dead partridge. The reason is obvious,
because no one would breed from a retriever
which worried or from a terrier which treated
its natural prey as if it were a stick. Thus
the brain of each kind is hereditarily supplied
with certain nervous connections wanting in
the brain of other kinds. We need no more
doubt the reality of the material distinction in
the brain than we need doubt it in the limbs
and jaws of the greyhound and the bull-dog.
Those who have watched closely the different
races of men can hardly hesitate to believe
that something analogous exists in our own
case. While the highest types are, as Mr.
Herbert Spencer well puts it, to some extent
* organically moral * and structurally intelligent,
the lowest types are congenitally deficient.
A European child learns to read almost by
nature (for Dogberry was essentially right
after all), while a Negro child learns to read
by painful personal experience. And savages
brought to Europe and * civilised' for years
often return at last with joy to their native

1 88 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

home, cast off their clothes and their outer
veneering, and take once more to the only
life for which their nervous organisation
naturally fits them. *What is bred in the
bone,' says the wise old proverb, * will out in
the blood/

BLACKCOCK. 189

XX.

BLACKCOCK,

Just at the present moment the poor black
grouse are generally having a hot time of it.
After their quiet spring and summer they
suddenly find their heath-clad wastes invaded
by a strange epidemic of men, dogs, and
hideous shooting implements ; and being as
yet but young and inexperienced, they are fall-
ing victims by the thousand to their youthful
habit of clinging closely for protection to the
treacherous reed-beds. A little later in the
season, those of them that survive will have
learned more wary ways : they will pack
among the juniper thickets, and become as
cautious on the approach of perfidious man
as their cunning cousins, the red grouse of

190 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

the Scottish moors. But so far youthful
innocence prevails ; no sentinels as yet are
set to watch for the distant gleam of metal,
and no foreshadowing of man's evil intent
disturbs their minds as they feed in fancied
security upon the dry seeds of the marsh
plants in their favourite sedges.

The great families of the pheasants and
partridges, in which the blackcock must be
included, may be roughly divided into two
main divisions so far as regards their appear-
ance and general habits. The first class con-
sists of splendidly coloured and conspicuous
birds, such as the peacock, the golden phea-
sant, and the tragopan ; and these are, almost
without exception, originally jungle-birds of
tropical or sub-tropical lands, though a few
of them have been acclimatised or domesti- .
cated in temperate countries. They live in
regions where they have few natural enemies,
and where they are little exposed to the
attacks of man. Most of them feed more or
less upon fruits and bright-coloured food-

BLACKCOCK. 191

Stuffs, and they are probably every one of
them polygamous in their habits. Thus we
can hardly doubt that the male birds, which
alone possess the brilliant plumage of their
kind, owe their beauty to the selective pre-
ference of their mates ; and that the taste
thus displayed has beerr aroused by their rela-
tion to their specially gay and bright natural
surroundings. The most lovely species of
pheasants are found among the forests of the
Himalayas and the Malay Archipelago, with
their gorgeous fruits and flowers and their
exquisite insects. Even in England our
naturalised Oriental pheasants still delight
in feeding upon blackberries, sloes, haws,
and the pretty fruit of the honeysuckle and
the holly ; while our dingier partridges and
grouse subsist rather upon heather, grain,
and small seeds. Since there must always
be originally nearly as many cocks as hens
in each brood, it will follow that only the
handsomest or most attractive in the poly-
gamous species will succeed in attracting to

192 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

them a harem ; and as beauty and strength
usually go hand in hand, they will also be
the conquerors in those battles which are
universal with all polygamists in the animal
world. Thus we account for the striking
and conspicuous difference between the pea-
cock and the peahen, or between the two
sexes in the pheasant, the turkey, and the
domestic fowl.

On the other hand, the second class con-
sists of those birds which are exposed to the
hostility of many wild animals, and more
especially of man. These kinds, typified by
the red grouse, partridges, quails, and guinea-
fowls, are generally dingy in hue, with a ten-
dency to pepper-and-salt in their plumage ;
and they usually display very little difference
between the sexes, both cocks and hens
being coloured and feathered much alike.
In short, they are protectively designed,
while the first class are attractive. Their
plumage resembles as nearly as possible the
ground on which they sit or the covert in

BLACKCOCK. 193

which they skulk. They are thus enabled to
escape the notice of their natural enemies,
the birds of prey, from whose ravages they
suffer far more in a state of nature than from
any other cause. We may take the ptarmi-
gans as the most typical example of this
class of birds ; for in summer their zigzagged
black-and-brown attire harmonises admirably
with the patches of faded heath and soil
upon the mountain-side, as every sportsman
well knows ; while in the winter their pure
white plumage can scarcely be distinguished
from the snow in which they lie huddled and
crouching during the colder months. Even
in the brilliant species, Mr. Darwin and Mr.
Wallace have pointed out that the orna-
mental colours and crest are never handed
down to female descendants when the habits
of nesting are such that the mothers would
be exposed to danger by their conspicuous-
ness during incubation. Speaking broadly,
only those female birds which build in hollow
trees or make covered nests have bright hues

o

<■-.■

194 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

at all equal to those of the males. A female
bird nesting in the open would be cut off if
it showed any tendency to reproduce the
brilliant colouring of its male relations.

Now the blackcock occupies to some ex-
tent an intermediate position between these
two types of pheasant life, though it inclines
on the whole to that first described. It is a
polygamous bird, and it differs most con-
spicuously in plumage from its consort, the
grey-hen, as may be seen from the very
names by which they are each familiarly
known. Yet, though the blackcock is hand-
some enough and shows evident marks of
selective preference on the part of his ances-
tral hens, this preference has not exerted
itself largely in the direction of bright colour,
and that for two reasons. In the first place
the blackcock does not feed upon brilliant
foodstuffs, but upon small bog-berries, hard
seeds, and young shoots of heather, and it is
probable that an aesthetic taste for pure and
dazzling hues is almost confined to those

BLACKCOCK, 195

creatures which, like butterflies, humming-
birds, and parrots, seek their livelihood
amongst beautiful fruits or flowers. In the
second place, red, yellow, or orange orna-
ments would render the blackcock too con
spicuous a mark for the hawk, the falcon, or
the weapons of man ; for we must remember
that only those blackcocks survive from year
to year and hand down their peculiarities to
descendants which succeed in evading the
talons of birds of prey or the small-shot of
sportsmen. Feeding as they do on the open,
they are not protected, like jungle-birds, by
the shade of trees. Thus any bird which
showed any marked tendency to develop
brighter or more conspicuous plumage would
almost infallibly fall a victim to one or other
of his many foes; and however much his
beauty might possibly charm his mates (sup-
posing them for the moment to possess a taste
for colour), he would have no chance of
transmitting it to a future generation. Ac-
cordingly, the decoration of the blackcock is

o 2

196 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

confined to glossy plumage and a few orna-
mental tail-feathers. The grey-hen herself
still retains the dull and imitative colouring
of the grouse race generally ; and as for the
cocks, even if a fair percentage of them is
annually cut off through their comparative
conspicuousness as marks, their loss is less
felt than it would be in a monogamous com-
munity. Every spring the blackcock hold a
sort of assembly or court of love, at which
the pairing for the year takes place. The
cocks resort to certain open and recognised
spots, and there invite the grey-hens by their
calls, a little duelling going on meanwhile.
During these meetings they show off their
beauty with great emulation, after the fashion
with which we are all familiar in the case of
the peacock ; and when they have gained
the approbation of their mates and maimed
or driven away their rivals, they retire with
their respective families. Unfortunately, like
most polygamists, they make bad fathers,
leaving the care of their young almost en-

BLACKCOCK. 197

tirely to the hens. According to the vera-
cious account of Artemus Ward, the great
Brigham Young himself pathetically des-
canted upon the difficulty of extending his
parental affections to 131 children. The
imperious blackcock seems to labour under
the same sentimental disadvantage.

198 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

XXI.

BINDWEED.

Not the least beautiful among our native
wild flowers are many of those which grow,
too often unheeded, along the wayside of
every country road. The hedge-bordered
highway on which I am walking to-day, to
take my letters to the village post, is bor-
dered on either side with such a profusion
of colour as one may never see equalled
during many years* experience of tropical or
sub-tropical lands. Jamaica and Ceylon
could produce nothing so brilliant as this
tangled mass of gorse, and thistle, and St.
John's-wort, and centaury, intermingled with
the lithe and whitening sprays of half-opened
clematis. And here, on the very edge of

BINDWEED. 199

the road, half-smothered in its grey dust, I
have picked a pretty little convolvulus blos-
som, with a fly buried head-foremost in its
pink bell ; and I am carrying them both
along with me as I go, for contemplation and
study. For this little flower, the lesser
bindweed, is rich in hints as to the strange
ways in which Nature decks herself with so
much waste loveliness, whose meaning can
only be fully read by the eyes of man, the
latest comer among her children. The old
school of thinkers imagined that beauty was
given to flowers and insects for the sake of
man alone : it would not, perhaps, be too
much to say that, if the new school be right,
the beauty is not in the flowers and insects
themselves at all, but is read into them by
the fancy of the human race. To the but-
terfly the world is a little beautiful ; to the
farm-labourer it is only a trifle more beautiful :
but to the cultivated man or the artist it is
lovely in every cloud and shadow, in every
tiny blossom and passing bird.

Ill

. !

i

i;

200 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

The outer face of the bindweed, the ex-
terior of the cup, so to speak, is prettily
marked with five dark russet-red bands,
between which the remainder of the corolla
is a pale pinky-white in hue. Nothing could
be simpler and prettier than this alternation
of dark and light belts ; but how is it pro-
duced ? Merely thus. The convolvulus
blossom in the bud is twisted or contorted
round and round, part of the cup being
folded inside, while the five joints of the
corolla are folded outside, much after the
fashion of an umbrella when rolled up. And
just as the bits of the umbrella which are
exposed when it is folded become faded in
colour, so the bits of the bindweed blossom
which are outermost in the bud become
more deeply oxidised than the other parts,
and acquire a russet-red hue. The belted
appearance which thus results is really as
accidental, if I may use that unphilosophical
expression, as the belted appearance of the
old umbrella, or the wrinkles caused by the

BINDWEED, 20t

waves on the sea-sands. The flower hap-
pened to be folded so, and got coloured, or
discoloured, accordingly. But when a man
comes to look at it, he recognises in the
alternation of colours and the symmetrical
arrangement one of those elements of beauty
with which he is familiar in the handicraft
of his own kind. He reads an intention into
this result of natural causes, and personifies
Nature as though she worked with an aes-
thetic design in view, just as a decorative
artist works when he similarly alternates
colours or arranges symmetrical and radial
figures on a cup or other piece of human
pottery. The beauty is not in the flower
itself; it is in the eye which sees and the
brain which recognises the intellectual order
and perfection of the work.

I turn the bindweed blossom mouth up-
ward, and there I see that these russet
marks, though paler on the inner surface,
still show faintly through the pinky white
corolla. This produces an effect not unlike

302 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

that of a delicate shell cameo, with its dainty
gradations of semi-transparent white and in-
terfusing pink. But the inner effect can be
no more designed with an eye to beauty than
the outer one was ; and the very terms in
which I think of it clearly show that my
sense of its loveliness is largely derived
from comparison with human handicraft. A
farmer would see in the convolvulus nothing
but a useless weed ; a cultivated eye sees
in it just as much as its nature permits
it to see. I look closer, and observe that
there are also thin lines running from the
circumference to the centre, midway between
the dark belts. These lines, which add
greatly to the beauty of the flower, by marking
it out into zones, are also due to the folding
in the bud ; they are the inner angles of the
folds, just as the dark belts are the over-
lapping edges of the outer angles. But, in
addition to the minor beauty of these little
details, there is the general beauty of the
cup as a whole, which also calls for explana-

BINDWEED, 303

tion. Its shape is as graceful as that of
any Greek or Etruscan vase, as swelling and
as simply beautiful as any beaker. Can I
account for these peculiarities on mere natural
grounds as well as for the others ? I some-
how fancy I can.

The bindweed is descended from some
earlier ancestors which had five separate
petals, instead of a single fused and circular
cup. But in the convolvulus family, as in
many others, these five petals have joined
into a continuous rim or bowl, and the marks
on the blossom where it was folded in the
bud still answer to the five petals. In many
plants you can see the pointed edges of the
former distinct flower-rays as five projections,
though their lower parts have coalesced into
a bell-shaped or tubular blossom, as in the
common harebell. How this comes to pass
we can easily understand if we watch an un-
opened fuchsia; for there the four bright-
coloured sepals remain joined together till
the bud is ready to open, and then split

ao4 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

along a line marked out from the very first.
In the plastic bud condition it is very easy
for parts usually separate so to grow out in
union with one another. I do not mean
that separate pieces actually grow together,
but that pieces which usually grow distinct
sometimes grow united from the very first.
Now, four or five petals, radially arranged,
in themselves produce that kind of symmetry
which man, with his intellectual love for
order and definite patterns, always finds
beautiful. But the symmetry in the flower
simply results from the fact that a single
whorl of leaves has grown into this particular
shape, while the outer and inner whorls have
grown into other shapes ; and every such
whorl always and necessarily presents us with
an example of the kind of symmetry which
we so much admire. Again, when the petals
forming a whorl coalesce, they must, of course,
produce a more or less regular circle. If
the points of the petals remain as projec-
tions, then we get a circle with vandyked

BINDWEED, 205

edges, as In the lily of the valley ; if they
do not project, then we get a simple circular
rim, as in the bindweed. All the lovely
shapes of bell-blossoms are simply due to
the natural coalescence of four, five, or six
petals ; and this coalescence is again due to
an increased certainty of fertilisation secured
for the plant by the better adaptation to
insect visits. Similarly, we know that the
colours of the corolla have been acquired as
a means of rendering the flower conspicuous
to the eyes of bees or butterflies; and the
hues which so prove attractive to insects are
of the same sort which arouse pleasurable
stimulation in our own nerves. Thus the
whole loveliness of flowers is in the last
resort dependent upon all kinds of accidental
causes — causes, that is to say, into which the
deliberate design of the production of beau-
tiful effects did not enter as a distinct factor.
Those parts of nature which are of such a
sort as to arouse in us certain feelings we
call beautiful ; and those parts which are of

2o6 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

such a sort as to arouse in us the opposite
feelings we call ugly. But the beauty and
the ugliness are not parts of the things ;
they are merely human modes of regarding
some among their attributes. Wherever in
nature we find pure colour, symmetrical
form, and intricate variety of pattern, we
imagine to ourselves that nature designs the
object to be beautiful. When we trace these
peculiarities to their origin, however, we find
that each of them owes its occurrence to
some special fact in the history of the ob-
ject ; and we are forced to conclude that the
notion of intentional design has been read
into it by human analogies. All nature is
beautiful, and most beautiful for those in
whom the sense of beauty is most highly
developed ; but it . is not beautiful at all
except to those whose own eyes and emo-
tions are fitted to perceive its beauty.

ON CORNISH CLIFFS. 207

XXII.

ON CORNISH CLIFFS,

I AM lying on my back in the sunshine, close
to the edge of a great broken precipice,
beside a clambering Cornish fishing village.
In front of me is the sea, bluer than I have
seen it since last I lay in like fashion a few
months ago on the schistose slopes of the
Maurettes at Hyeres, and looked away across
the plain to the unrippled Mediterranean and
the Stoechades of the old Phocsean merchant-
men. On either hand rise dark cliffs of
hornblende and serpentine, weathered above
by wind and rain, and smoothed below by
the ceaseless dashing of the winter waves.
Up to the limit of the breakers the hard rock
is polished like Egyptian syenite ; but beyond

2o8 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

that point it is fissured by disintegration and
richly covered with a dappled coat of grey
and yellow lichen. The slow action of the
water, always beating against the solid wall
of crystalline rock, has eaten out a thousand
such little bays all along this coast, each
bounded by long headlands, whose points
have been worn into fantastic pinnacles, or
severed from the main mass as precipitous
islets, the favourite resting-place of gulls and
cormorants. No grander coast scenery can
be found anywhere in the southern half of
Great Britain.

Yet when I turn inland I see that all this
beauty has been produced by the mere inter-
action of the sea and the barren moors of the
interior. Nothing could be flatter or more
desolate than the country whose seaward
escarpment gives rise to these romantic coves
and pyramidal rocky islets. It stretches
away for miles in a level upland waste, only
redeemed from complete barrenness by the
low straggling bushes of the dwarf furze,

ON CORNISH CLIFFS. 209

whose golden blossom is now interspersed
with purple patches of ling or the paler pink
flowers of the Cornish heath. Here, then, I
can see beauty in nature actually beginning
to be. I can trace the origin of all these
little bays from small rills which have worn
themselves gorge-like valleys through the
hard igneous rock, or else from fissures
finally giving rise to sea-caves, like the one
into which I rowed this morning for my early
swim. The waves penetrate for a couple of
hundred yards into the bowels of the rock,
hemmed in by walls and roof of dark serpen-
tine, with its interlacing veins of green and
red bearing witness still to its once molten
condition ; and at length in most cases they
produce a blow-hole at the top, communi-
cating with the open air above, either be-
cause the fissure there crops up to the surface,
or else through the agency of percolation^
At last, the roof falls in; the boulders are
carried away by the waves ; and we get a
long and narrow cove, still bounded on either

p

2IO 777^ EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

side by tall cliffs, whose summits the air and
rainfall slowly wear away into jagged and
exquisite shapes. Yet in all this we see
nothing but the natural play of cause and
effect ; we attribute the beauty of the scene
merely to the accidental result of inevitable
laws ; we feel no necessity for calling in the
aid of any underlying aesthetic intention on
the part of the sea, or the rock, or the creep-
ing lichen, in order to account for the loveli-
ness which we find in the finished picture.
The winds and the waves carved the coast
into these varied shapes by force of blind
currents working on hidden veins of harder
or softer crystal : and we happen to find the
result beautiful, just as we happen to find the
inland level dull and ugly. The endless
variety of the one charms us, while the un-
broken monotony of the other wearies and
jrepels us.

Here on the cliff I pick up a pretty fern
and a blt)ssoming head of the autumn squill
— though so sweet a flower deserves a better

ON CORNISH CLIFFS. 211

name. This fern, too, is lovely in its way,
with its branching leaflets and its rich glossy-
green hue. Yet it owes its shape just as
truly to the balance of external and internal
forces acting upon it as does the Cornish
coast-line. How comes it then that in the
one case we instinctively regard the beauty
as accidental, while in the other we set it
down to a deliberate aesthetic intent ? I
think because, in the first case, we can
actually see the forces at work, while in the
second they are so minute and so gradual in
their action as to escape the notice of all but
trained observers. This fern grows in the
shape that I see, because its ancestors have
been slowly moulded into such a form by the
whole group of circumstances directly or in-
directly affecting them in all their past life ;
and the germ of the complex form thus pro-
duced was impressed by the parent plant
upon the spore from which this individual
fern took its birth. Over yonder I see a
great dock-leaf ; it grows tall and rank above

212 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.

all Other plants, and is able to spread itself
boldly to the light on every side. It has
abundance of sunshine as a motive-power of
growth, and abundance of air from which to
extract the carbon that it needs. Hence it
and all its ancestors have spread their leaves
equally on every side, and formed large flat
undivided blades. Leaves such as these are
common enough ; but nobody thinks of call-
ing them pretty. Their want of minute sub-
division, their monotonous outline, their dull
surface, all make them ugly in our eyes, just
as the flatness of the Cornish plain makes it
also ugly to us. Where symmetry is slightly
marked and variety wanting, as in the cab-
bage leaf, the mullein, and the burdock, we
see little or nothing to admire. On the other
hand, ferns generally grow in hedge-rows or
thickets, where sunlight is much interrupted
by other plants, and where air is scanty, most
of its carbon being extracted by neighbouring
plants which leave but little for one another's
needs. Hence you may notice that most

ON CORNISH CLIFFS. 213

plants growing under such circumstances
have leaves minutely sub-divided, so as to
catch such stray gleams of sunlight and such
floating particles of carbonic acid as happen
to pass their way. Look into the next
tangled and overgrown hedge-row which you
happen to pass, and you will see that almost
all its leaves are of this character ; and when
they are otherwise the anomaly usually admits
of an easy explanation. Of course the shapes
of plants are mostly due to their normal and
usual circumstances, and are comparatively
little influenced by the accidental surround-
ings of individuals ; and so, when a fern of
such a sort happens to grow like this one on
the open, it still retains the form impressed
Upon it by the life of its ance'stors. Now, it
is the striking combination of symmetry and
variety in the fern, together with vivid green
colouring, which makes us admire it so much.
Not only is the frond as a whole symmetrical,
but each frondlet and each division of the
frondlet is separately symmetrical as well.

214 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE,

This delicate minuteness of workmanship, as
we call it, reminds us of similar human
products — of fine lace, of delicate tracery, of
skilful filagree or engraving. Almost all the
green leaves which we admire are noticeable,
more or less, for the same effects, as in the
case of maple, parsley, horse-chestnut, and
vine. It is true, mere glossy greenness may,
and often does, make up for the want of
variety, as we see in the arum, holly, laurel,
and hart's-tongue fern ; but the leaves which
we admire most of all are those which, like
maidenhair, are both exquisitely green and
delicately designed in shape. So that, in the
last resort, the beauty of leaves, like the
beauty of coast scenery, is really due to the
constant interaction of a vast number of
natural laws, not to any distinct aesthetic
intention on the part of Nature.

On the other hand, the pretty pink squill
reminds me that semi-conscious sesthetic
design in animals has something to do with
the production of beauty in nature — at least,

ON CORNISH CLIFFS. 215

in a few cases. Just as a flower garden has
been intentionally produced by man, so
flowers have been unconsciously produced
by insects. As a rule, all bright red, blue,
or orange in nature (except in the rare case
of gems) is due to animal selection, either oi
flowers, fruits, or mates. Thus we may say
that beauty in the inorganic world is always
accidental ; but in the organic world it is
sometimes accidental and sometimes de-
signed. A waterfall is a mere result of geo-
logical and geographical causes, but a blue-
bell or a butterfly is partly the result of a
more or less deliberate aesthetic choice.

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