VIGNETTES FROM
NATURE

LONDON : PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STRKET SQUARE

AND PARLIAMENT STREET

6

n

T

IGNETTES FROM NATURE

BY

GRANT ALLEN

.UTHOK OF 'the EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1881

A Hi rights reserved

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260d95

CAHISSIMyE

MUNUSCULUM INDIGNUM

PREFACE.

These little Essays first appeared In the
'^columns of the * Pall Mall Gazette,' and I
have to thank the Editor for his kind and
courteous permission to republish them here.
They were written in almost every case
exactly under the circumstances which they
describe, so that they form the record of a
single summers stray thoughts on Nature
from an easy-going, half-scientific, half-
resthetic standpoint. Some of them were
made up in Dorsetshire during early Spring ;
some were suggested among the Welsh hills
in July and August ; and a few were drawn
from Autumn scenes on the English South
Coast In September and October. They

a

^^ PREFACE.

have no pretension to be any more than
popular expositions of current evolutionary
thought, occasionally their author's, oftener
still other people's : but they may perhaps
do a little good in spreading more widely a
knowledge of those great biological and
cosmical doctrines which are now revolution-
ising the European mind, and which owe
their origin to the epoch-making works of
Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.

. G. A.

•i V

CONTENTS.

I. Fallow Deer

TI. Sedge and Woodrush

III. Red Campion and White .

IV. Butterfly-Hunting begins
V. Red Campion again

VI. The Hedgehog's Hole .

VII. On Musbury Castle .

VIII. A Big Fossil Bone .

IX. Veronica ....

X. Guelder Rose ,

XL The Heron's Haunt .

XII. A Bed of Neit-les .

XIII. Loosestrife and Pimpernel

XIV. The Carp Pond
XV, A Welsh Roadside

XVI. Seaside Weeds

XVII. A Mountain Tarn

1 A(;k
I

12

22

^'

61

70
81

102

113
125
136

T47
i66

^•^" • CONTENTS.

XVIII. Wild Thyme .

XIX. The Donkey's Ancestors . -. jg^

XX. Beside THE Cromlech . . . / j^g

XXI. The Fall of the Leaf

XXII. The Fall of the Year . . . . 220

■:■}'

IGNETTES FROM NATURE,

I.

FALLOW DEER.

■%:

Under the great horse-chestnut trees in
Woolney Park the broad circle of shade is
now pleasant enough to attract the does and
fawns of the fallow deer, who lie in pretty
groups upon the grass, or stray about, brow-
sing, beneath the heavy boughs thick with
scented blossom. To-day I have brought out
a few scraps of bread in my pocket, and the
fawns are tame enough to come and eat it
from my hand on the open ; for they have
less fear of man here than in any other place
I know of, except perhaps in the Magdalen

9 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

grounds at Oxford. They will even allow a
favourite acquaintance to stroke and fondle
their pretty heads. No doubt the long
domestication of their ancestors has made
them naturally prone to strike up a friendship
with human companions, just as is the case
with kittens and puppies ; and at Woolney
they have always lived very near the great
house itself, where children and visitors have
long been wont to pet and caress them.
There are, indeed, few more interesting relics
of the past in England than these stray herds
of dumb creatures, remnants of the native
woodland tribes which once spread over the
whole well-timbered country, and which now
carry us back in mind past the days of Robin
Hood and of William the Red to the old
forestine life of the Celtic and Euskarian
aborigines. For though some good authorities
will have it that the fallow deer date back no
earlier in this country than the days of the
Romans, who are said to have introduced
them for their pleasure grounds, I myself

FALLOW DEER.

m hardly doubt that they are a part of our
^d indigenous fauna, which now survives
nly in a few enclosed preserves. The wild
rhite cattle at Chillingham, the red deer on
le Scotch moors, and these pretty does and
Lwns in Woolney Park, all trace back their
[ncestry, I believe, to the time when England
^as clad by one almost unbroken sheet of
)aks and beeches, and still earlier to the time
rhen a great belt of land connected it with
[he Continent from Holland to Portugal.
!ven the veriest Red Radical like myself
lay well share John Mill's hope that the
[pread of agriculture and political economy
lay never succeed in improving these dear
lumb friends and pensioners of ours off the
Face of the earth. They are one of the beau-
[iful links which bind us to the prae-human
)ast ; and I hope we may hand them on as
)art of our common heritage to those who
ill follow us hereafter in a higher and more
luman future.

Evolutionism, it often seems to me, throws

B 2

4 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

a wonderful charm of this half-historical sort I
around every beast or bird or plant in the
meadows about us. These fallow deer are
no longer mere accidental animals happening
to live in the park here at the present day :
they are creatures with a whole past history
of their own, as interesting to the eye of the
evolutionist as a castle or an earthwork to the
eye of an archaeologist, and as a cathedral or
a temple to the eye of Mr. Freeman or Mr.
Fergusson. We have all been living all our
lives in the midst of a veritable prehistoric
Ilium, with all its successive deposits and
precious relics lying loose about us, and we
needed only a Schliemann to tell us what it
all meant. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert
Spencer have read the riddle for us, and in
doing so they have given us a key which will
help us to unlock, each for himself, a thousand
little secrets of nature that meet us every day,
on our way through the world, at every turn.
These fallow deer, for example, have a quite
^ recoverable pedigree, which shows us just by

FALLOW DEER, - . .$

I what steps they have been developed from an
early common ruminating ancestor ; and this
pedigree M. Gaudry has worked out for us in
detail as admirably as Professor Huxley has
worked out the genealogy of the horse, and
as Dr. Mivart has worked out that of the
cat

The very earliest ruminants whose re-
mains we meet with in the lower tertiary
strata were all hornless. They resembled in
this respect a few abnormal living kinds, such
as the camels, the llamas, and the alpacas,
though, of course, these kinds are far more
specialised in other ways than were their
primitive ruminant ancestors. But as time
went on, the wager of battle among the males,
common to so many races of mammals, pro-
duced singular results upon the whole rumi-
nating tribe. The nature of their food
prevented them for the most part from
fighting with their teeth, like carnivores, so
they took to butting with their heads instead.
Thus, either by accidental variations, as Mr.

-^W^ni

6 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

Darwin thinks, or by use and wont, as Mrl
Herbert Spencer rather believes (with morel
probability, as It seems to my humble judg.|
ment), aided in any case by natural selection
almost all the ruminants grew at last to have
horns or antlers of one kind or another.
But these weapons of rivalry — for they are
all but useless against other species — differ
greatly in their structure, and therefore in
their origin, between race and race. All that
is constant is the presence of some kind of
offensive butting instrument upon the fore-
head. In the bison and ox tribe, including
the antelopes and goats, the weapons take
the form of real horns — that is to say, of
hollow permanent dermal processes ; in the
deer tribe they appear as antlers — that is to
say, as deciduous bony, not horny, structures ;
and in the giraffe they exist in the shape of
permanent bosses of the skull, covered with
hair and skin, but used very fiercely in com-
bat, even in Regent's Park, where one giraffe
once actually drove his horn clean into the

i

FALLOW DEER, 7

skull of another. Only one very abnormal
ruminant, the musk deer (which is not really
a deer at all, but a specialised aberrant de-
scendant of the old undifferentiated ancestral
type) has weapons of a different character
— a pair of curved tusks in the upper jaw,
used in the same way as those of the wild
boar.

The historical development of antlers in
the deer tribe is very marked. While the
group was still young and dominant, with the
open grass-clad tertiary plains all before it,
and with plenty of elbow-room to spread and
multiply, it had as yet no weapons of offence
of any kind. But as the races grew thicker
and more numerous, and as space failed the
younger generations — for deer, like men, are
subject to the inexorable logic of the Malthu-
sians — the fathers of the herd began to fight
among themselves for the possession of the
does, and only the strongest survived to
become the parents of future deerkind
Butting naturally produces hard bosses or

8 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

protuberances of some sort ; and in the ances-
tral deer these protuberances took the shape
of bony projections on the forehead. Again,
those deer which had the most marked and
most pointed projections would best vanquish
their rivals, and so fare best in the struggle
for the hinds. Their descendants would in-
herit their peculiarities with more or less
variation ; and would similarly be selected by
the law of batde in accordance with their
fighting powers and the fitness of their
weapons.

Now this probability, set forth a priori by
Mr. Darwin, exactly tallies with the geological
record, as interpreted by M. Gaudry and
Professor Boyd Dawkins. The very vague
and unspecialised deer of the lower miocene
period had no antlers at all : they were some-
what like musk-deer without the tusks, or
like young fawns in their first summer. But
in the mid miocene, antlers make their first
appearance as mere short pointed knobs ;
next, they develop a single side tine ; and in

FALLOW DEER. 9

the upper miocene they come out as fully
evolved as in our modern species. Every
intermediate stage can be traced between the
mere nascent boss like that of a budding roe
in our own day, and the many-branched head-
piece of the existing reindeer. Indeed, one
late tertiary species had a pair of wonderfully
intricate antlers which far surpassed in com-
plexity those of any living elk ; but, like many
other highly specialised creatures, this over-
developed type seems to have fallen a prey
to the great extinct carnivores of the same
period. Before the advent of man, many
such high types existed, and they may perhaps
have been partly destroyed by his monopo-
lising all the most open and desirable plains
as his special hunting grounds. For we now
know that man is certainly a quaternary, and
probably a tertiary genus as well ; and, even
in his lowest and humblest form, his intelli-
gence must have made him from the very
first a dominant race and the real lord of
creation.

lO VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

It IS interesting to note, too, that the his-
torical evolution of antlers in the deer tribe is
exactly paralleled by the modern evolution of
antlers in every individual red deer. In the
first year a stag has no horns at all, and is
technically known as a calf. In his second
year he puts forth a pair of rounded bosses,
and is therefore called a knobber in the slang
of the gillies. With his third year the knobs
fall off, and are replaced by longer horns,
called dags, while the stag himself is now
known as a brocket. Thus, year after year,
the growing deer reproduces one stage after
another of the ancestral development, till at
length the top of the horn expands into a
broad crown, and the beast is then finally
dubbed a hart or *stag of ten,' from the
number of tines on each of his antlers. It
would be quite possible to pair the cast horns
of each year tolerably exactly with corre-
sponding adult horns from the successive ter-
tiary strata. Every deer in fact recapitulates

FALLOW DEER,

II

in his own person the whole evolution of his
race, the antler of each successive year being
different, not only in size but in form and
arrangement as well, from those of all pre-

vious seasons.

-.u-

12 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

II.

SEDGE AND WOODRUSH. '

Sitting here on the edge of the low wall that
banks up the meadow against Cannington
Lane, I can pick without stooping half a
dozen different kinds of grassy-looking weeds,
all within easy reach of my hand in the field
behind me. The sun is shining brightly
through the horse-chestnut branches, the
west wind is blowing gently over the valley,
and the day is warm enough to tempt a little
loitering under the scanty shade of the young
foliage overhead ; so I cannot do better than
pick and examine a few of these unnoticed
flowers, whose pale yellow spikelets are
hardly conspicuous enough to attract the

SEDGE AND WOODRUSIL If

notice of any save a botanical eye. Grass,
most people would call them ; and indeed
their leaves are grassy - looking blades
enough ; but a single close glance at their
reedy stems and clustered flower-heads would
suggest even to the unpractised observer that
their stalks and blossoms differed widely
from the little scaly panicles of the true
grasses.

To my thinking, there are few plants so
pretty as all these small insignificant-looking
unconsidered weeds, whose flowers need to
be examined somewhat minutely before we
can fully appreciate the real beauty of their
form and arrangement. Anybody can see
and admire at once a foxglove or an orchid,
but not everybody can see and admire at
once the delicate gracefulness of spurges and
quakegrasses, of little waving sedges and
tufted woodrushes. One feels that the beauty
of the larger blossoms is something flaunting
and meretricious — an Aphrodite Demosia
tricked out in gaudy colours to please the

14 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

most careless passer-by; whereas the tiny
green and brown flowers of the fields and
hedgerows appeal to a more esoteric circle — •
a select few who can sympathise with nature
in her more sombre as well as in her brighter
moods. L* Allegro is the world's side of
nature, but II Penseroso is the poet's.

Look, for example, at this tall stalk of
woodrush, its stem clasped by two or three
drooping and pensile leaf-blades, and its top
crowned by four or five thickly clustered
heads of small brown five-rayed flowers. At
first sight you would say it was merely a bit
of grass with a brownish top to it ; but gaze
a little closer and you will see that the heads
consist each of half a dozen tiny regular
blossoms of a very pretty fantastic sort.
Each blossom has six dry brown petals, with
silvery thin transparent edges ; and in the
middle, as many bright yellow stamens stand
out delicately against the brown background
of the corolla. Every one of them is like a
sombre copy in miniature of a lily or an

SEDGE AND WOODRUSH,

IS

amaryllis, not very striking to a careless
observer, but marvellously pretty and perfect
when you look attentively into the tiny
rosettes. And the history of these dry brown
flowers is in itself curious enough to make
them well worth a moment's examination.
For the woodrush is almost undoubtedly a
faded and colourless descendant of some
once coloured and brilliant ancestor. You
may be fairly sure of that from the mere look
of the dry brown petals. Every blossom
with petals, however small or green or incon-
spicuous, has once been a bright and flaunt-
ing flower ; for the sole object of petals is to
attract the eyes of insects, and they are
therefore found nowhere but among insect-
fertilised plants or their degenerate descend-
ants. Flowers which have always been
fertilised by the wind never have any petals
at a^^ brown, green, or otherwise ; but flowers
which are fertilised by insects have them red,
white, blue, or yellow ; and flowers which
have once been so fertilised and have after-

t6 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

wards relapsed almost always retain some
memorial of their old estate in the shape of
dwarfed and colourless petals, whose function
is gone, while the rudimentary structure still
survives. They point. back, like the fasces of
the Byzantine emperors, to the past glories of
their race in earlier times.

Our fields are full of such degenerate
flowers, with green or brown corollas, some-
times carefully tucked out of the way of the
stamens, so as hardly to be seen unless you
pull them out on purpose ; for, contrary to
the general belief, evolution does not by any
means always or necessarily res^ "it in progress
and improvement. Nay, the real fact is that
by far the greater number of plants and
animals are degraded types — products of
retrogression rather than of upward develop-
ment. Take it on the whole, evolution is
always producing higher and still higher
forms of life ; but at the same time stragglers
are always falling into the rear as the world
marches onward, anr' learning how to get

SEDGE A^D WOODRUSH.

17

their livelihood in some new and disreputable

manner rendered possible by nature's latest

achievements. The degraded types live

lower lives, often at the expense of the

higher, but they live on somehow ; just as

the evolution of man was followed by the
evolution of some fifty nev/ parasites, on

purpose to feed upon him. ,

It would be wrong to suppose, however,
that these dry brown petals in the woodrush
have now no function at all : they have
found out a new one to which they have
adapted themselves, although the old one of
attracting insects has passed away. When-
ever and however the woodrush took once
more to the primitive and wasteful method
of fertilisation by the wind we cannot say.
But it is a low, lithe, grass-like plant, growing
with the grasses in the wind-swept meadows ;
and almost all the plants of the same habit
and habitat are wind - fertilised as well.
Living, as they do, in great numbers close
together, with bending stems and often

If VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

feathery heads, they do not seem to waste so
much pollen as other, taller, and more
scattered flowers would waste, if obliged
to trust to the breezes alone for its disper-
sion. At any rate, almost all wind-fertilised
plants are obliged to have some plan for pre-
venting the pollen of each blossom from
falling upon its own pistil, and so produc-
ing poor, weak, self-fertilised seeds. They
almost always display some curious device,
to ensure a cross with the neighbouring
flowers. In the woodrush the thin papery
petals have been utilised in a manner sub-
sidiary to this new object. They were no
longer of any service in attracting insects, but
they have been very simply diverted to
another function. Here I have picked one
of the younger heads with the blossoms yet
unopened. From the top of each flower a
long white plume of three waving filaments —
a Prince of Wales's feather in miniature —
protrudes through the tightly closed petals.
These plumes are the sensitive surface of

SEDGE AND WOODRUSH.

n

the pistil ; and to them the pollen-grains are
blown from other surrounding blossoms,
already fully opened. As soon as the seeds
have thus been Impregnated, the little plumes
wither away, a ^d then the petals, which have
hitherto covered the stamens, open imme-
diately, releasing the stamens, as you see
them in the first head I plucked. The pollen
blown from them falls upon some other
flower still in the bud ; and so each head as
it opens fertilises in turn its unopened neigh-
bours. You can gather lots of them here in
every stage of blossoming, from the first
receptive period with hanging plumes and
tightly covered stamens, to the last distri-
butive period with open petals and stamens
shedding freely their golden pollen-grains.

This pretty nodding sedge, on the other
hand, shows us another way of solving the
self-same problem — how to prevent the
pollen from falling upon the pistil of its own
blossom. The sedge has done it very
simply, by putting all the stamens in one

C 2

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

head of flowers at the top, and all the pistils
in another head at the bottom. Look closely
into this plant again, and you will see at
once that it has gone even further than the
woodrush on the downward path of degrada-
tion. It has no trace of petals at all ;
indeed, It Is possible that It has never had
any ; though, judging from its close relations
and the numerous Intermediate forms, it Is
more likely that it once had them, but has
now hopelessly lost them — as hopelessly as
the snake has lost its legs. However this
may be, the flowers of the sedge are now
arranged in a thoroughly business - like
manner for wind fertilisation. Each stalk
bears three or four little branching spikelets,
the top spikelet consisting altogether of
yellow stamens, covered in groups of three
by single russet-black scales, while the lower
spikelets consist altogether of pistils, with
two or three white feathery plumes hanging
out to catch the pollen, and similarly covered
by dark sheathing bracts. The whole head

SEDGE AND WOODRUSH.

21

thus looks like a group of miniature catkins,
the upper catkins bright yellow and the
under ones delicately frosted with fluffy
white. The use of this arrangement is
obvious. When the wind shakes the heads
so that they bend and jostle against one
another, the tallest spikelet on each stalk
naturally strikes against the lower spikelets
of its neighbours. Thus each plant fertilises
the next in order ; and even if the heads do
not happen to touch, yet the pollen blown
froai the one fails forward upon the other, so
producing exactly the same result. Indeed,
cross-fertilisation is brought about in dif-
ferent plants by a hundred such devices ; and
to observe the various mechanisms by which
it is furthered, forms a fresh and almost
endless pleasure for every country walk.

22 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

III.

RED CAMPION AND WHITE.

I

The bank along the footpath that leads from
the village to Culverhole Cliffs is just at
present all aglow with a varied wealth of
fiowers and insect life. The yellow cabbage-
butterflies are flitting over the blue masses
of wild hyacinths ; the ladybirds are busy
among the wee green aphides on the bud-
ding sprays of honeysuckle ; and the bronzed-
mailed beetles are hunting for smaller insects
beside the matted stems and roots of the big
' white stitchworts. The gorse has burst into
, its wonted blaze of blossom, so bright that
one can hardly wonder at Linnaeus, who fell
upon his knees and thanked God with

RED CAMPION AND WHITE,

23

fervour when first he looked upon its golden
glory. Up to this morning I have counted
seventy-eight kinds of wild flowers in blos-
som, not including catkins or grasses. And
now to-day, for the first time this season, I
see the pretty pink clusters of the red cam-
pion adding their warmer tint to the blues
and yellows and greens of the tangled bank
beside me. Already the butterflies have
found out that its big swollen buds have
opened and made clear the way to the
nectaries ; and I can notice a great bustling
hairy bumble bee blundering about the
mouth of one flower on the stalk, while half
a dozen little flies are gathered around the
sticky calyx of another. Evidently the red
campion is very successful in its efforts to
attract the eyes of insects. I saw it distinctly
a hundred yards away, and the butterflies
seem to see it quite as well, and a great deal
more effectually. , .♦

The campions, indeed, are flowers in
which specialisation and adaptation have in

34 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

many respects been carried to an extremely
high pitch. True, they cannot compare in
complexity with the orchids or the dead-
nettles, nor even with the little daisies and
dandelions around them. Yet In their own
way they have found themselves a place in
nature which they are well fitted not only to
fill but also to adorn. There are two common
kinds in England, known to botanists as the
day and night lychnis respectively, but to
village children as red and white campion.
The correspondence of these two names is
full of significance. The day lychnis has a
bright pink blossom, quite scentless, and
opening in the morning. It is specialised
for fertilisation by bees and butterflies (more
particularly the latter), which are colour-loving
insects, and which hunt by sight mainly,
always during the hours of sunlight. The
night lychnis, on the other hand, has white
blossoms, opening in the evening, and faintly
scented with a vague but pleasant perfume.
It is specialised for fertilisation by moths.

RED CAMPION AND WHITE.

25

which fly at night, and which have sight not
adapted to the perception of colour. Mr. B.
T. Lowne has made some interesting micro-
scopical studies of insects' eyes, and has
shown that the eyes of moths correspond to
those of owls among birds, in the absence of
certain nervous elements supposed to be the
organs of the colour sense ; while the eyes of
bees and butterflies correspond to those of
day birds in the presence of such organs.
In fact, it is clear that a colour sense v/ould
be of little use to nocturnal or crepuscular
animals, because the amount of light in the
evening is seldom sufficient to show up the
distinctive colours of different objects.

Hence almost all the flowers which appeal
specially to the moths are either white or
pale yellow — good reflectors in the twilight
or moonlight — and they are invariably
scented, sometimes very strongly. Many of
these white and perfumed night blossoms are
great favourites in our gardens and conser-
vatories— for example, jasmine, stephanotis,

9$ VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

tuberose, and nIght-flowerIng cereus. Some
of them actually close up during the day, and
most of them emit their perfume only in the
evening when the moths on which they
depend for fertilisation are abroad. Moths,
indeed, hunt mostly by smell, though they are
also partly guided by sight, and perhaps
even in part by the faint phosphorescence,
hardly visible to human eyes, which, as the
daughter of the great Linnreus first observed,
plays lambent over certain of their favourite
blossoms in the early shades of night. I
have seen this phosphorescence myself (or
fancied I saw it) on the petals of the evening
primrose ; but only a few people have weak
enough vision to detect it, for, like negative
images, it cannot be seen by persons of
robust and vigorous sight. Women and
artists perceive it oftener than men of science,
which no doubt tells rather hardly against
its objective reality. Yet perhaps they and
the moths can see some things which are
hidden from the wise and learned ; at least.

RED CAMPION AND WHITE,

27

I like to believe so, and to persuade myself
that I too am in this matter on the side of
the poets.

The differences between the two campions,
to return once more to solid science, form a
very instructive study in the origin and
growth of specific distinctions. In most
points the two plants are absolutely alike,
and even the technical botanists, who never
miss a chance of manufacturing a new species
where possible, admit that they are perhaps
mere varieties of a single form. But then
these varieties, especially when so markedly
dependent upon difference in function, are
nothing less than new species in the making.
They are nascent stages of fresh types. An
accidental variety of leaf or flower, like the
monstrosities which we cultivate in our
gardens, means, as a rule, very little indeed,
because it is not correlated with any need or
habit of the plant. It affords no material
upon which natural selection can work. But
a variety like the white campion has of course

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

a distinct meaning, and is itself already the
product "of much selective action. That the
white form, not the red one, is the divergent
variety, we may infer from several peculiari-
ties, notably from the fact that most of the
lychnis tribe have pink flowers, and that no
other British species has white ones.

Suppose, however, that some of these
pink campions take (at first by some accident)
to opening at night, then they may perhaps
chance to attract the eyes of some passing
moth, and so to get fertilised by the Insect in
its search for honey carrying the pollen from
head to head. Thus a second generation of
night-flowering campions would be set up,
still with bright pink blossoms. But the
colour of petals is always more or less vari-
able, being only kept straight by functional
needs ; and so some of these evening varie-
ties would be pretty sure to have more faded
and whitish flowers than others, and these
would best attract the eyes of the fertilising
moths, and oftenest accordingly succeed in

RED CAMPION AND WHITE,

29

setting their seed. After long generations of
such unconscious selection, the white-petalled
individuals would establish themselves as a
permanent race ; though even to this day the
original pinkiness of their constitution has
not wholly died out. It reasserts itself from
time to time ; for you may often find scented
evening campions with very pale pink petals,
recalling the old type of the race, just as
amongst ourselves a particular bone, or tooth,
or eyebrow sometimes still recalls the ancient
anthropoid peculiarities. By somewhat the
same process the extra attraction of scent
must have been acquired. Even the date of
flowering has accommodated itself to the new
conditions, for the red campions are now all
coming into blossom and will soon be out in
every hedgerow, while the white ones do not
open for at least another fortnight. There
are plenty of butterflies now in the warm
sunshine at noon ; but the nights are still far
too chilly for moths to venture out as yet
from their comfortable cocoons. A white

30

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

lychnis flowering this week would therefore
find its life thrown away, with no friendly
insect at hand to help it in setting its precious
seeds. Thus all those which blossomed too
early have been slowly weeded out, and only
the late-flowering individuals have at last
been left to perpetuate their kind.

^-

■ ; >V

( ■ «'

31

IV,

BUTTERFLY-HUNTING BEGINS.

The Lammas Fields are now positively
thick with various butterflies, so I have come
out this brilliant afternoon to watch and make
notes, as my wont is, on their habits and
manners. The first of May is to the natural-
ist what the twelfth of August or the first of
September is to the sportsman — it is the real
opening of his year, the date when flower-
hunting and butterfly-hunting both begin.
On the 2nd, in spite of backward weather,
the cabbage butterflies were alroady airing
their sulphur-yellow pinions in the sun, above
the tall lilac sprays of the lady-smocks. Two
days later the dragon-flies were darting after

32 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

midges above the boggy hollows, and the
banded hedge-snails were congregating in
numbers among the young pale-green foliage
of the hawthorn bushes. On the 7th, we had
a cloudless blue horizon and warm sunshine,
and I saw an orange-tip plimming its un-
expanded wings and displaying its beautiful
markings on a blade of grass beside the
brooklet. This evening, under a mackerel
sky, like July weather, I have just been
watching a motionless bunch of dry brown
leaves on the hedge bank. Suddenly one of
the leaves gets up, flutters about in the air a
bit, and then settles down again on another
brown cluster a few yards off. I creep
slowly up towards it, and examine the loco-
motive leaf as it stands. It is a little brown
butterfly, with folded wings, fresh from the
chrysalis ; and the lower or outer surface,
which alone is visible as it sits, seems dappled
over with wee light spots, much like the spots
of decay upon the leaves among which it
hides. I clap my hands briskly, and it gets

BUTTERFLY-HUNTING BEGINS,

Z3

up hastily, opens its wings to the sunshine,
and shows itself off at once as a red- streaked
beauty in all its glory. It is not difficult to
see that the difference of colour in the two
sides of its wings must be designed for some
special purpose, and that the purpose of the
under side is to escape detection, while the
purpose of the upper side is to attract atten-
tion.

The protective use of the brown under-
wings is very simply explained. The insect
must be much exposed to birds and other
hostile creatures as it sits still, and so it
requires to resemble the ground, leaves, or
twigs, on which it usually settles, in order to
deceive the eyes of its enemies. To some
people it seems that so slight a protection as
this could scarcely be of any use to the
butterfly. Natural selection, they say, can
hardly work upon such petty differences.
But to talk so is really to show a misappre-
hension of what natural selection rightly
means. Every butterfly which is spotted by

D

34 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

a bird, and so devoured, is wiped out of

existence for ever, with all its possible pro-

* geny. Every butterfly which escapes, by

however slight a peculiarity, is enabled to lay

■ its eggs in peace, and to hand on its peculiar-

■ ities to its posterity. This sort of selection
is going on every day around us, and no
difiference is too slight for it to select, no
resemblance is too clumsy provided it once
for a moment aids the insect in avoiding
destruction.

Now, we all know that the eyes of birds
are very sharp and keen indeed. A hawk
soaring so high in the sky that human sight
fails to perceive it, will yet discriminate and
pounce down upon a lark in the fields below
— a small brown bird seated upon a brown
clod of earth exactly like itself in colour. In
just the same way the insectivorous birds
keep a sharp look-out foi moths and butter-
flies, upon which they swoop at once when-
ever they distinguish them upon the ground
beneath. Every day those insects whose

BUTTERFLY-HUNTING BEGINS.

35

colour betrays them get thinned out by their
watchful enemies, while those whose colour
protects them manage to lay their eggs in
peace, and hand on their own peculiar spots
and lines to their descendants. The con-
sequence in the long run is that the butterflies
get better protected from generation to
generation, as the chances of interbreeding
with badly protected individuals are
eliminated by the action of the birds, while
only the most imitatively coloured individuals
are left to mate with one another and to
become the parents of future swarms. Thus
the hostile birds are themselves the instru-
ments through which the insects have been
armed defensively against their depredations.
For the various individuals tend always to
vary a little in marking — no two plants or
animals of the same species are ever exactly
alike — but the picking off of the brightly
coloured individuals by the birds helps to
preserve the protected specific type intact.
And of course the same causes which now

D2

36 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

preserve it originally produced it. Ever
since birds and butterflies have existed, the
process must constantly have been at work ;
and the birds and butterflies themselves, in
the forms that we know, are the final out-
come of its perpetual interaction. ^

This sufficiently accounts for the imitative
colouring of the under surface, but it does
not sufficiently account for the brilliant and
attractive hues of the upper side. Those
hues were probably produced in a very
different manner. At this exact moment I
see two red admirals above the hedge yonder,
engaged in their pretty rhythmical courtship,
flying round and round one another, now on
top and now beneath, chasing each other in
graceful curves, and seeming to be engaged
for ten minutes at a time in a sort of aerial
quadrille. These two butterflies are helping
in their small degree to keep up and intensify
the beautiful colours of their race. They are
coquetting and flirting together, each eager
to display all its charms to the best advan-

BUTTERFLY-HUNTING BEGINS,

37

tage, and to attract the other by its own
beauty. If a third and prettier butterfly
happens to sail up, the belle will bestow her
affections upon the new-comer, and the
vanquished beau will slink away disgraced,
leaving her to her chosen mate. This second
sort of selection is going on for ever, side by
side with the first ; the prettiest, freshest, and
most daintily-marked insects being always
preferred in the pairing over duller, dingier,
or more battered rivals.

It is interesting also to note how the two
kinds of selection run parallel with one
another. While the butterflies are poised
motionless upon twigs or flowers they are in
the greatest danger from birds ; but in such
positions they close their wings and display
only the outer surface, which is imitatively
and protectively coloured. The constant
picking off of all those which can be distin-
guished when at rest suffices to keep the pro-
tective colours alvv'ays true. On the other
hand, when the insects are on the wing,

38 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

hovering about flowers or rising in the air to
pirouette and gambol with their mates, they
run comparatively little risk from the birds.
They are too nimble for their pursuers, and
they seem fairly secure by their power of
doubling as they flit rapidly along from spray
to spray. The birds are bad marksmen at a
moving target ; they cannot double like their
prey, and they prefer to aim at their butter-
flies sitting, as French sportsmen are said to
do at partridges. On the other hand, with
butterflies as with men, faint heart never won
fair lady. If the insects did not venture out
into the open to seek their mates and to
charm them with their painted pinions, some
bolder rivals would carry off the prize, and
so leave the cowards unrepresented in future
ages. Thus, in the course of generations, a
great many butterflies have come to have
two sets of colours — the . one set attractive
for their own kind, and the other set protec-
tive against their enemies. The lower sides
of the wings are coloured like the leaves or

BUTTERFLY-HUNTING BEGINS,

3».

twigs on which they sit with folded vans ; the
upper sides are beautifully dappled with
crimson, orange, or metallic sheen, and
flaunted boldly in the open sunlight as they
flit about to woo their dainty mates. On
the other hand, moths, whose habits of fold-
ing the wings are exactly reversed, also re-
verse the system of colouration. Many of
them which fly by day are quite as exquisitely
decked as any butterflies, especially in the
tropics ; but as a rule they have the upper
surface of the pinions imitative or protective,
while the under surface is bright and attrac-
tive. The one alone is seen from above, as
the insect sits with outspread but depressed
wings, close against the ground or the foliage ;
the other is turned to the insects mates,
flashing in the sunshine with iridescent hues,
as they chase one another fantastically in their
airy love-making. Sometimes, however, a
single set of colours answers both purposes
alike, as I have often noticed with the
Jamaican cactus butterfly — a bright yellow

40

VIGNETTES FROM NA TURE.

insect, which sits quite indistinguishable
among the yellow flowers of the common
wild cactus, while it becomes a very conspicu-
ous creature indeed when it raises itself into
the air on its large and brilliant golden wings.
Something of the same sort, on a smaller
scale, may be observed with our own yellow
cabbage-butterflies on the golden bunches of
flowering charlock in an English cornfield.

41

/

V.

RED CAMPION AGAIN.

Ecce itcrtim Crispinus! Another red cam-
pion In the hedgerow, hanging out so tempt-
ingly that I cannot refrain from picking it,
and, having picked it, from sitting here on
the stile between the meadows to pull it to
pieces. How ineffably vast and how hope-
lessly infinite is the study of nature ! If a
mere dilettante observer like myself — a saun-
terer who gathers posies and chronicles
butterflies by the wayside for pure love of
them— were to tell all that even he has
noticed in passing of the manners and habits
of a single English weed— of its friends and
Its enemies, its bidden guests and its dreaded

42 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

foes, its attractions and its defences, its little
life-history and the wider life-history of its
race — he would fill a whole book up with
what he knows about that one little neglected
flower ; and yet he would have found out
after all but a small fraction of all that could
be known about it, if all were ever knowable.
Happy days when an Admirable Crichton or
a Pico della Mirandola could offer to dispute
de omni scibili with every comer. In our
own degenerate times one would hardly like
to engage duly to describe the omne scibile of
a solitary little red campion. Yet the very
sense of this vastness makes it ridiculous pre-
sumption for any man to dispose of the red
campion altogether at a single sitting. I
must stop to look again at my pretty flower,
and to decide upon the meaning of at least
the most salient points in its structure and
arrangement.

The campions are pinks by family, and of
course share all the main peculiarities of the
pinks generally. But the habit of the family

RED CAMPION AGAIN,

43

as resrards its method of fertilisation differs
gready from plant to plant, and has impressed
itself markedly upon their forms. There is
one great group of pinks which lays itself
open to all the small flies and beetles of the
world, who come and eat its pollen freely to
their hearts' content. Of these, the common
chickweed and the white stichwort are familiar
examples. Most of them are petty, mean-
looking, inconspicuous, weedy plants, because
they lay themselves out for mixed small deer
of uncertain and undecided tastes, and do not
attempt specially to attract the colour-loving
bees and butterflies, the aesthetic aristocrats
of the insect world. Hence their petals are
small, ragged, and mostly white, and their
calyx consists of five separate spreading
pieces. They keep open house, as it were,
for all comers without inquiry, displaying
their pollen unprotected to whoever wants it,
on the chance of a stray grain or two being
carried by the insects from, head to head.
But the campions belong to a higher and

44 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

more specialised department of the pink
tribe. They and their ancestors have devoted
themselves to bees, butterflies, and other
developed flower-haunters, whose long pro-
boscis is peculiarly intended to aid them in
extracting the honey from deep tubular blos-
somr. Thus they have slowly acquired, by
long selection, a structure exactly adapted to
a surer and less wasteful mode of fertilisation
by means of ^hese higher insect allies.

The outer covering of this campion here
does not consist of separate green sepals, like
those of the stichwort which I have picked
for comparison with it : its five pieces are
welded together into a swollen bell-shaped
tube — a campanular calyx, as the systematists
call it. Within the tube, five large pink
petals rise on long claws, kept together in
shape by the pressure of the calyx. Inside
the inner passage formed by the petals lie the
pollen-bearing stamens or the ovary wir.h its
embryo seeds, each in a separate flower,
whereof * more anon.' Thus the pollen and

RED CAMPION AGAIN.

45

the honey are concealed out of sight of the
useless small insects, and they can only be
reached by the long proboscis of the bee or
the butterfly. To prevent ants, small beetles,
and other honey-eating intruders from creep-
ing up the stalk, and so rifling the nectaries
without doing any good to the plant in return,
the stem of the campion is covered with hairs,
and it exudes a sticky, viscid gum, both of
which peculiarities aid it in baffling the un-
welcome wingless visitors ; while the inflated
calyx and long tube effectually keep out all
flying insects, except the few for whose visits
the plant specially lays itself out. Nay, as if
so many precautions were not enough, the
mouth of the tube, above the stamens, is
furthermore obstructed by five little valves or
scales, one being attached to the claw of each
petal ; and these scales can easily be craned
over, like tiny walls, by the large and long
proboscis of the bees or moths, but not by
the little thieving flies against whose incur-
sions the flowers are so anxious to guard

46 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

themselves. Given the red campion, it is
easy enough to evolve the white from it ; but
who can say how many geological ages have
gone to the evolution of that parent form
itself from a simple open blossom like the
white stichwort ? - - •

^ All these precautions for due cross- fertili-
sation are now actually in course of being
followed up by another precaution yet more
efficacious than any. The head of blossom
which I hold in my hand, and which I have
pulled off in passing, consists wholly of male
flowers : every blossom contains stamens
only, without any pistils. On the other
hand, here in the hedge beside me stands
another plant of the same kind wh >se blos-
soms are all female : every one of them con-
tains a young capsule only, with the embryo
seeds distinctly visible when I cut it open,
but without a trace of stamens. This separa-
tion of the fructifying elements on different
plants is a very recent innovation in the cam-
pions, and it marks a very high degree of

RED CAMPION AGAIN,

m

differentiation — one not attained by the vast
majority of the most developed plant types.
The open pinks, such as chickweed, have
stamens and pistils in each flower, and trust
to chance for avoiding the evils of self-fertili-
sation. Even the other campions have the
same common arrangement ; but the red and
white campions are peculiar in the fact that
they have suppressed the stamens of some
flowers and the pistils of others, thus making
separate individuals wholly male or wholly
female. Such an arrangement of course
makes cross-fertilisation absolutely certain,
and gives the species a great advantage in
the struggle for life over its less differentiated
neighbours. But the recent date of the im-
provement is shown by its incompleteness ;
for you may still find some stray campions
with perfect stamens and fertile capsules in
the same blossom. *^:v. ^ v ... ^

Here, as in so many other cases, we catch
modification in the very act. For it is a fatal
habit to picture evolution to oneself as a

48 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

closed chapter ; we should think of it rather
as a chapter that goes on writing itself con-
tinuously for ever. The white campion is
even now in course of completing its develop-
ment from the red ; and red and white to-
gether are both even now in course of
transforming themselves from the hermaphro-
dite to the separate condition. The naturalist
can generally make a shrewd guess at the
age of various elements in every plant or
animal. He can say, * This is a peculiarity
which must date back before the ancestors of
A diverged from the ancestors of B, because
both of them share in it : this, again, is a
peculiarity which dates later than the diver-
gence, because A possesses it, while B does
not : and this, once more, is a peculiarity
which has hardly yet established itself, be-
cause it is sometimes found in A to-day, but
sometimes it is absent.* In such a manner
as this it would not be difficult roughly to
reconstruct the whole history of the red cam-
pion, if a busy world had leisure to hear it.

RED CAMPION AGAIN.

49

But what centufn linguce^ what ferrea vox,
would ever suffice to reconstruct the whole
history of all the plants and animals I can
see around me ? It is easy enough to catch
their episodes vaguely as one examines them ;
but to write them all down in definite language
is a task of which even science itself may
well despair.

K y:j

E

so

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

VI.

THE HEDGEHOGS HOLE.

The broken ground in the warren near Tom
Fowlers cottage is full of burrows of every
description, from the big badger's-nest by
Chimney Rock to the rabbits' holes and tiny
shrew-runs that honeycomb the soft mould
beside the landslip. Among them are some
which I know from the pattering tracks at
the mouth or entrance to be the haunts of
spiny hedgehogs — the long interval between
the prints of fore and hind feet, and the deep
toe-nail marks in the damp clay are quite
unmistakable ; and as we want a tame hedge-
hog to keep down the cockroaches in our
lower premises I have turned out to-day,

THE HEDGEHOGS HOLE,

51

armed with pick and shovel, to unearth and
carry off one of these uncanny brutes for my
kitchen folk. After a Httle digging in the
bank, using my pick carefully for fear of
injuring the poor timid beast, I have got to
the round warm nest, a mere hollow in the
ground roughly floored with leaves and dry
moss and lined on the top with a soft vault of
the same materials. And now the creature
lies motionless in my shovel, rolled tightly up
into a prickly ball, and absolutely unassailable
in its spherical suit of sharply pointed spike-
armour. No defensive mail could be more
effectual or more deterrent. I cannot even
lift him up to put him into my basket ; I am
obliged literally to shovel him in, and then
tie down the flap to keep him safely. There
I can see him now through the wattles, slowly
unrolling himself, and peering about with his
blinking, beady black eyes, as if to inquire
what Arabian Nights' enchantment has so
strangely transferred him against his will to
this curious locomotive prison.

E 2

52 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

>

Hedgehogs are really very common

animals in England, and yet few people have

any idea of their existence among half the

hedges and banks in the meadows and copses

around them. The little animals lie hidden in

their subterranean holes or open nests during

the daytime, and only come out in search of

slugs, grubs, and beetles at nightfall. Yet they

are a precious heritage of our age, for all that ;

for they and the few other remaining members

of the old insectivorous group form the last

survivors of a very early and undeveloped

mammalian type, the common ancestors of

all our other European quadrupeds, who have

diverged from them in various specialised

directions. They rank as interesting middle

links in that great broken but still traceable

chain which connects the higher mammals

with their lost and unknown semi-reptilian

ancestors. Indeed, if we had never heard of

the hedgehogs and their allies before, and if

one were now to be brought for the first time

by some intrepid explorer from Central Africa

THE HEDGEHOGS HOLE. 53

or the Australian bush, all our biologists
would be as delighted with it as they were
when the ornithorhynchus and the echidna
were discovered and recognised as links
between the reptile and the marsupial, or
when the supposed extinct fossil genus cera-
todus was found alive in the rivers of Queens-
land, thus connecting the ganoid fishes with
the transitional lepidoslren, and through it
with the amphibious newts, frogs, and sala-
manders. The unconscious black-fellow used
to devour as barramunda, and the colonist
used quietly to pickle as salmon, a marvellous
double-lived creature, provided with perfect
gills and perfect lungs, for one specimen of
which a naturalist would have given his right
eye ; and so too our own gipsies have been
in the habit for ages of baking in a ball of
earth the finest surviving representative of
the most ancient placental mammalian line.
They roll him up (dead, I am glad to say)
in a mass of kneaded clay, which they put
into the fire whole until it begins to crack ;

54 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

and then they turn out the steaming flesh by
breaking the ball, while the skin and the
spines stick in a body to the hardened lump
of earth. Yet the creature which they so
unceremoniously devour is actually the eldest
scion of the great mammalian stock, whereof
all the reigning houses in Europe are, after
all, but younger branches.

The insectivores, indeed, as Professor
Huxley has often pointed out, occupy the
central position among all placental mam-
mals— that is to say, among all mammals
higher than the pouched class of opossums
and kangaroos. Their brain is very small
and undeveloped, and their organs generally
are but little specialised. All the other com-
mon quadrupeds — the carnivores, the rodents,
the ungulates — have certain resemblances
towards them which they have not towards
one another. This shows that the hedge-
hogs, moles, and shrews, our representative
English insectivores, display as it were an
arrest of development — exhibit to us an early

THE HEDGEHOG'S HOLE. ' 55

Stage of mammalian life which the other
European animals have long passed by.
Time was when the ancestors of dogs and
deer and sheep and rabbits had risen no
higher in the scale of life than these small-
brained and stupfd little creatures. But
while the other races have for ages out-
stripped their hedgehog-like ancestors, the
hedgehogs themselves have remained always
at the same low level of development and
intelligence. Such arrests are not uncommon.
In the dim past of geological ages, we know
that there must have been at some time a
primitive forefather of the whole mammalian
stock who had some affinities to the true
reptiles and still more to the frogs. Of this
hypothetical progenitor of hedgehogs and
men we have now no trace; but of many
subsequent stages we have traces in abund-
ance. The ornithorhynchus and echidna,
which are mammals only by courtesy, still
preserve for us the intermediate step between
this frog-like creature and the true quad-'

$6 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

rupeds. The kangaroos, wombats, and
phalangers show us a still higher link. The
insectivores carry us a step further ; and
from them on to the highest embodiment of
all the great types — the cats, the elephants,
the buffaloes, the horse, and man — the stages
are all easy and gradual. . ,

Why, then, do such intermediate links sur-
vive ? Why have they not all developed alike ?
When some primitive insectivores grew into
nascent carnivores and nascent ungulates,
why did some still remain at the old low
insectivorous stage of hedgehogs and moles ?
The answer is, because their organisation was
quite high enough to fit them for the work
they had to do in life. They filled a place in
the world ; and because they filled it they have
lived on, while other types, adapted to higher
functions, have outstripped them, and taken
the upper seats in the hierarchy of animal life.

At the same time, there are some im-
portant considerations to be borne in mind in
endeavouring to understand the reason for

THE HEDGEHOGS HOLE.

57

the survival of such lowly organised groups
in the presence of more highly evolved and
better-endowed races. In the first place,
these straggling survivors are generally found
in out-of-the-way places, far from the fierce
competition of great continents or of thickly
populated districts. Thus the ornithorhyn-
chus and the echidna, the two lowest mammals
or quasi-mammals, live in Australia, long
isolated from the Asiatic mainland, and with no
higher animals of any sort than the kangaroos.
The marsupials are similarly confined to the
Australian region, with the solitary exception
of the opossum. The edentates, another low
and early group, including the sloths and
armadilloes, belong to South America, for
ages a separate island, and only lately invaded
by higher types across the newly-raised
isthmus of Panama. The lemurs, lowest of
the monkey tribe, are almost confined to
Madagascar, as are also some other primitive
forms. Among the insectivores themselves,
the greater number belong to such places as

58

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

Haiti, Mauritius, Java, and the Malay Archi-
pelago generally. Those which live upon
the continents, and indeed most of the old
types as a whole, are further enabled to drag
on their existence somehow by nocturnal,
subterranean, or water-haunting habits, as
well as by living upon small and innutritions
food. Thus the lemurs, hedgehogs, and
aye-ayes feed by night only ; the ornitho-
rhynchus, oared-shrew, and musk-rat live in
the rivers ; the mole passes all his time
underground ; and the whole set alike burrow
or hide away for the best part of their lives,
feeding upon insects, like the ant-eater, or
upon reptiles and carrion, like the armadillo.
Thus, in one way or another, these low forms,
by accepting the menial or dishonoured places
in the commonwealth of nature, have been
enabled to live on, in stealth and quie% as
well as their more highly developed and
intelligent relatives.

There is, however one other considera-
tion which it would be impossible to pass by

THE HEDGEHOGS HOLE. 59

without leaving a very false impression as to
these outcasts of animal life. Though they
all represent low and little developed types,
they are yet as a rule highly specialised
representatives of those types. They have
survived because they could fill some vacant
place or other : and for that place they have
become fully specialised. Thus, though the
brain, the skeleton, and the other organs of
an ornithorhynchus or an echidna are lowly
and poor, as judged by a general mammalian
standard, yet their external form is very much
more specialised than the external form of the
primitive mammal could possibly have been.
He could not have had the broad duck-bill,
the webbed feet, the burrowing and water-
haunting adaptations of the ornithorhynchus
on the one hand, nor the spiny coat and
curious digging paws of the echidna on the
other. So wath the insectivores. The
hedgehog represents the primitive insecti-
vorous type, plus the familiar sharp prickles,
which exactly recall those of the echidna :

6o VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

and indeed the tenrec of Mauritius is a
hedgehog in an early stage of evolution, with
the spines only half developed. The mole in
like manner represents the same primitive
insectivorous type, plus the peculiar powerful
shovel hands, the hidden eye, the covered
ear, and the close fur, which fit it so well for
its underground life. It Is just the same with
the scaly armour of the armadillo, and the
long snout or brush- clad hind feet of the
ant-eater. In every case these low forms
have only survived through a singular com-
bination of favourinor circumstances — Isolated
position, unusual habits, special protective
armour or concealment, immense adaptation
to peculiar needs. What can be more inter-
esting than to notice the Independent occur-
rence of the very same device of spiny mail in
two creatures so unlike in structure yet so
like in habit as the echidna and the hedgehog ?
But if I go on preaching in this way I shall
never carry my hedgehog home.

6l

VII.

ON MUSBVY CASTLE.

A STEEP pull up the hillside, through the
lanes cut for rabbit-shooting among the gorse
and bracken, leads us at last to the old pre-
historic earthwork or ' castle ' which crowns
the top of Musbury Hill. The glorious view
from the breezy summit rewards one well for
the trouble of climbing. In the foreground
the furze or heather on the slopes is quaintly
divided into formal squares of golden blossom
by the little parallel avenues, down which
innumerable white tails of rabbits disappear
twinkling into the burrows at every step we
take. Near the foot of the hill, just before
reaching the valley, an apple orchard stands

62 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

thick with pinky bloom, a good promise for
the cider season ; and the trunks, blown all
one way by the wind, are almost hidden from
sight by the lu;'iiriance of their lovely burden.
Beyond, again, the broad alluvial level
stretches away to westward, with the Axe
meandering in S's through its midst ; while
in the distance the russet ploughed fields
among the meadows on the opposite range
betray the red triassic soil of Devonshire.
Looking along the river s course, a glimpse
of sea closes the vista towards Seaton — a
mere blue bay, hemmed in between the red
cliff of Axmouth on the one hand and the
taller white chalk bluffs of Beer Head and
Branscombe on the other. But it is not
wholly for the sake of the view that I have
toiled up the abrupt gradient of Musbury
Castle this clear May morning. Among the
flinty piles of the old earthworks — once the
border fortress of the Durotriges against their
Damnonian foes — a little flower grows from
year to year, which is found nowhere else in

ON M US BURY CASTLE,

^l

the neighbourhood for many miles ; and it is
to get a few sprigs of this rare flower that I
have come up here to-day, as is my yearly
wont. I have just pulled It up, root and all,
out of a chink in the rubble this moment ;
and I shall take it home in my little tin case
by-and-by to examine It at my leisure here-
after, and make quite sure about some odd

small points in its mode of flowering whose
meaning and purpose I have not yet been

able thoroughly to understand.

Meanwhile, what a curious fact it is, this

regular recurrence of the same plants and

animals in the same situations from season to

season ! When once you have learned a

little district thoroughly, it Is wonderful how

constant the geographical distribution of its

fauna and flora always remains. In one

marshy spot hereabout, and one alone, I

find, summer after summer, the sundew and

the bog asphodel. In one lane, from time

Immemorial, th*^ green hellebore has flowered,

and nowhere else. On the cliffs to eastward,

64 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

the wood-pigeons always build their nest ; on
those to the west, I have never roused a
single bird. There are certain pools in the
little stream which rises on the castle where
a certain fixed number of smallish trout are
always found ; but in the branch that comes
down from the green-sand opposite only
stickleback and miller's- thumbs are to be
caught. In fact, every part of nature is
a constant equilibrium : there are certain
species fitted for certain places, and in those
places only they exist.

This balance of life is very seldom inter-
fered with in any way. Now and then new
obtrusive species push their way in ; now and
then fresh varieties develop and slowly oust the
older forms ; but on the whole the intricate
interdependence of all parts on one another
is so great that very little change ever takes
place. As in the village below there is always
a baker, and a butcher, and a doctor, and a
parson, and a grave-digger, each fulfilling his
own function, and each dependent upon the

ON MUSBURY CASTLE,

65

rest for support, so in the broader world of
plant and animal life upon the castle here
there is always a fairly fixed number of
species and individuals, all fitting in together
into the marvellously complicated scheme of
checks and counter-checks, of mutual services
and reciprocal needs. There are always just
enough bees to fertilise the heather, and just
enough heather to feed the bees, hedgehogs
to keep down the wire-worms, and dragon-
flies to chase the gnats. In every bit of
boggy ground you find boggy plants ; and
above them you find bog-haunting insects, on
which the waterside birds perpetually prey.
Wherever there is a chance for a plant or
animal to make a living for itself, there you
find some creature living and adapted to its
place. No nook in nature is too small or in-
considerable to be occupied. Countless seeds
and eggs and germs are being scattered
broadcast over the whole face of the earth
every day and all day long; and those of
them which find their fitting place live and

66

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

thrive, while those of them which fall on the
wrong ground die out and disappear at once
In such a complex balance of life as this
it might at first sight seem as though no
new forms could ever be evolved. Where
the conditions to be complied with are so
numerous, where the interaction is so all-
embracing, surely it must be hard enough
just to keep up the ordinary requirements of
each species, without ever rising to higher
and still higher complications again. But \l
we look a little closer into the problem, v e
shall see that this very complexity itself pro-
duces the necessity for further advance.
Every plant and every animal must succeed,
not only partially, but always and all along
the line. The seed must escape the attacks
of birds or animals, for if it is once eaten up
it can never grow to be a plant at all. The
young shoot must escape the grubs and
locusts ; the flower must open and secure its
fertilisation ; the fruit must set and ripen its
seeds ; the seed again must be dispersed and

ON MUSBVRY CASTLE, 67

reach its proper soil and position. Every
plant which faik, no matter how little, in any
one of these particulars, is utterly lost. Its
chance of producing posterity is wholly gone
from it. And the same is true of animals.
The butterfly, for example, must find food
as a caterpillar, and must escape the eyes of
birds ; it must hide itself away as a chrysalis ;
it must make itself proof against frosts and
rains ; it must hit upon sunny weather in its
full-fledged winged form ; it must find, woo,
charm, and secure its mate ; it must lay its
eggs on the proper plants, and in a safe posi-
tion. Thus every existing individual of every
species is the descendant of countless ances-
tors on each side, every one of whom must
necessarily have fulfilled all the complex
conditions of existence at every moment of
their lives. If they had not done so, it would
not be here en Evidence to answer for their
success.

However, as all individuals are liable to
vary a little individually — to be lighter or

F 2

68

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

darker, larger or smaller, longer in this limb
and shorter in that, than one anoriier — it
must follow that each individual must be
slightly better or worse adapted for surviving
in certain special circumstances than some
other. Such petty differences are for ever
being produced, and the better are constantly,
on the average, living down the worse, while
the worse are being constantly weeded out.
If at any moment we look at the world as a
whole, we see apparent balance, nay rather
real temporary balance ; every part fits in to
every other with absolute adaptation. But if
we compare widely different times we see
that the balance is always altering, that types
change indefinitely from age to age. Each
plant and each animal fulfils all the necessary
conditions of existence every day of its life,
or else ceases to exist, the survivors being
always those who have succeeded in fulfilling
them ; but then the conditions are always
slightly changing, and so the survivors from
time to time are slightly different. Every

ON MUSBURY CASTLE.

69

increase of speed in the pursuer is followed
by an increase of speed in the pursued, since
only the swiftest will now escape ; every
sharp-toothed squirrel opens still harder and
harder nuts, and thus leaves the very hardest
alone to produce future trees. The squirrel
survives because it can crack nuts which
other squirrels must refuse ; the nut survives
because it can baffle the squirrel which can
crack so many other nuts.

70 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

VIII.

A BIG FOSSIL BONE.

The cliff to eastward of the village consists
of soft blue lias strata, interspersed with
harder layers of concreted limestone ; and
both deposits are worked by the quarrymen
for different purposes. The soft sticky clay
of the banded belts is used in making blue
lias cement at the little mill beside the
harbour — our one solitary manufacturing in-
dustry— while the intermediate hard layers
are burnt for quicklime in the village kilns.
This morning, a message from one of the
navvies, who knows my taste for antiquities,
brought me up here in hot haste from the
breakfast table, for fear the rival collector

A BIG FOSSIL BONE, 71

should be beforehand with me in securing
a splendid prize. He had found, he said, a
lot of * verterberries * — that is our loca ^ ^ord
for vertebrae — and also what he took to be a
flint implement. One can never trust the
scientific diagnosis of a quarryman, so I was
not quite sure whether he had really hit upon
a big saurian in the secondary lias, or upon
some mammalian remains in the quaternary
gravel which caps the cliff, and which the
workmen have to clear away in the course of
their excavations. Fortunately for me, it
turned out to be the latter : for I do not busy
myself much about * dragons,' as our navvies
call the great saw-toothed saurians, but I am
always interested in a stone instrument, or
anything else which bears directly upon the
early history of mankind. The bones proved
to be three fragments of a mammoth
skeleton ; and close beside them in the gravel
lay the sharp flint knife m sitiiy with which
perhaps some palaeolithic hunter had scraped
the bones of his huge prey a hundred thou-

72 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

sand years ago, when the Httle river still
flowed at this higher level, thirty yards
above the bed of its existing channel. I
have pocketed the flint after a little com-
mercial transaction with the navvy offhand :
and now I am mounting guard over the
mammoth bones, waiting till a relay of
workmen arrives from the village below to
dig them all out for me carefully as they
stand.

It is common enough to hear visitors at
a geological museum say to one another,
' Ah, everything used to be so much bigger
in those days' — the exact period to which
they thus refer being no doubt the cosmical
equivalent of that familiar historical epoch,
the olden time. Looking about them at the
big fossils which form the most striking
features of the exhibition, they picture
to themselves a world where the sea
swarmed with gigantic enaliosaurians and
huge cetaceans, where the land was covered
with deinotheria and mastodons, where all the

A BIG FOSSIL BONE, . -jz

birds were moas, all the lizards were croco-
diles, and all the snails were monstrous
ammonites. Everywhere they seem to find
in fossil forms a bigger animal of each kind
than any now existing. They see here an
enormous Irish elk, there an immense extinct
sloth, yonder a vast prototype of the little
modern armadillo, and somewhere else a
turtle ten times as big as the greatest living
member of the tortoise group. They forget
that the huge saurians were secondary
animals, while the deinotherium was tertiary,
the mammoth quaternary, and the moa all
but modern. They forget that the age of the
great ammonites was almost over before the
age of the great lizards set in. They forget
that the glyptodon lived in South America,
while the big elk lived in Ireland. By that
kind of false historical perspective which
throws all the distant past into a single line,
they roll together millions and millions of
years ; and so they get a distorted geological
picture, which really quite reverses the actual

74 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

facts as to the relative size of animals in the
past and the present.

As a matter of fact, it seems probable
that our actual fauna and flora are on the
whole not only quite as big as any previous
ones, but even a great deal bigger. If we
take single instances, no known extinct animal
was as large as some of our modern whales ;
if we look at the ensemble of our existing
species, no known period comprised so many
large forms as we can show at the present
day in our three or four great cetaceans, our
two elephants, our hippopotamus, our rhino-
ceros, our bisons, our giraffe, our walrus,
and our horses. These would probably form
a total assemblage of larger average size
than any previous epoch could produce.
Similarly, in almost every special class, we
could apparently show larger species at the
present day than any which we know to have
existed in fossil forms. Our whale is the
biggest known mammal ; our gigantic sala-
mander is the biggest known amphibian ;

A BIG FOSSIL BONE, f%

probably our sun-fish, our tunnies, our sharks,
and our devil-fish are each in their way larger
than almost any previous fishes — one living
shark actually attaining a length of forty feet.
No fossil bivalve molluscs to my knowledge
are as big as the common Mediterranean
pinna, or as that giant clam, the tridacna,
whose shell is so commonly used as a basin
for fountains. In fact, there are only two im-
portant groups, the birds and the reptiles, in
which extinct species were much larger than
existing ones ; and in these two groups the
decrease is evidently due to the later supre-
macy of the mammalian type.

Similarly, if we take many comparatively
modern lines of descent, we shall find that
the horses, the deer, the elephants, and
several other now dominant groups of animals
have been steadily increasing in size from the
earliest epoch of their appearance to the
recent period. And among the great extinct
creatures, some — like the moa and the dodo
— have only quite recently been killed off;

76 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

Others — like the Irish elk and the mammoth
— belong to the very latest geological period ;
and yet others, though of somewhat higher
antiquity — like the animals of the Paris basin
— have left representatives nearly, if not quite,
as big as themselves. The teeth of what
seems to have been the biggest known fish —
a prodigious shark — are dredged up among
the modern ooze of the Pacific ; and though
no individuals quite large enough to have
owned them have ever been observed, yet
people who believe in the sea-serpent may
well expect one to turn up in the flesh at
some future period, while even more sceptical
persons must still admit that they have
become extinct at a very late date.

The explanation of the existence and
extinction of extremely large animals in each
group seems to be this. As a whole, evolu-
tion appears to tend towards an increase of
size in some members at least of every class.
But this increase is most noticeable amoni^^
members of what is, for the time being, the

A BIG FOSSIL BONE, 77

dominant class ; and, when another class out-
strips it in development, the new dominant
kinds are apt to live down the bigger species
among their predecessors. Ihus, in the
very earliest times, the molluscs were apparr
endy the dominant class ; and very big cuttle-
fish and other cephalopods were frequent —
though none of them, perhaps, were quite so
big as our own gigantic squids. At a later
date, the reptiles were developed, and grew
to be the leading race on earth ; and during
that period the bigger saurians attained to
extremely large dimensions. Ever since the
opening of the tertiary period, however, the
mammals have become the forefront of the
animal series, and big mammals have every-
where replaced big reptiles. But there were
some few insulated spots where mammals did
not penetrate for a long time, and here birds
were the leading class. In such cases terres-
trial birds grew to be very large indeed.

On this simple principle we can account
for almost all the big creatures now existing

78 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

upon earth. In the great continents they
are almost all dominant mammals ; for
example, the elephant, rhinoceros, hippo-
potamus, giraffe, and bison. Wherever we
get large species of lower mammals or of the
inferior classes, they are invariably found
either on insulated lands or on lands but
recently united to the continents. Thus, the
great fossil sloths, armadillos, and other
edentates belong to the insular fauna of
South America, where no higher mammals
existed ; as soon as the mammalian types of
the northern continent began to make their
way across the quite modern Isthmus of
Panama, all the bigger native forms became
extinct. Just in the same way, Australia still
possesses a very large marsupial in the great
kangaroo ; but if the Australian region had
ever been joined to Asia, the Asiatic car-
nivores would soon have exterminated this
stupid and defenceless herbivore. So, too, the
moa was developed in New Zealand, where
there were no mammals at all, and where the

A BIG FOSSIL BONE. 79

apteryx Is still the highest native animal, now
that the moa has been exterminated by man.
In like manner, the ostriches and rheas, the
cassowaries and emus, and all the other big
struthlous birds belong either to the Islands of
the Australian and Malay group, where they
have but little mammalian competition, and
that of a low grade, or to South Africa and
South America, both of which were long
equally insulated, and where most of the
fauna Is still of a very Inferior type. Similarly
with reptiles : the big saurlans are all dead
except in the case of the crocodiles and
alligators which haunt fresh waters alone ;
and fresh waters, we know, are almost as
insular In their way as islands themselves.
The Galapagos archipelago has for its highest
Inhabitant a monstrous lizard. Among am-
phibians, again, the gigantic salamander
belongs to Japan.

On the other hand, the two great con-
tinents which developed the higher mam-
malian fauna — Europe and Asia in the east,

8o VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

North America in the west — have no very
large birds, no very large terrestrial reptiles,
no very large amphibians ; and their lower
mammals are all small and skulking species
— mere rats, hedgehogs, shrews, and moles,
instead o( big sloths, kangaroos, or me-
gatheria. In the oceans, where mammals
are at some disadvantage, and where they
have not yet firmly established themselves,
big fish still abound. Nevertheless, even
here, the whales, porpoises, walruses, seals,
manatees, and other aquatic mammals are
pushing them hard ; and we know that the
sharks and rays, the monsters of their kind,
as well as many other big tribes of fish, are
now in their decadence. Thus it would
seem that everywhere some animals of the
dominant types are the largest, and that
mammals, therefore, now tend all over the
world to replace the large members of inferior
groups. •■ • > •

^ '■

8i

IX.

VERONICA.

This pretty little blue flower, growing so
abundantly beside the footpath, is called in
English speedwell, and in botanical Latin
veronica. Thereby hangs a sufficiently pretty
legendary tale. Everybody knows how the
napkin with which a compassionate maiden
wiped the face of Christ on the morning of
the crucifixion bore ever after the imprint of
the divine features. The miraculous portrait
thus preserved as the one genuine picture of
Our Lord was known in a mongrel Greek
and Latin phrase as the vera icon^ the true
eikon or image of the martyred Saviour. By
a natural transposition of sound and sense,

G ■

82 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

the unknown maiden was popularly canonised
as St. Veronica, just as the real blood of
Christ, the Sangre Real or Sang Reel, pre-
served by Joseph of Arimathea, became the
Saint Greal and the Holy Grail of mediaeval
legends. At some later period, by a pretty
conceit, some poetical botanist or other — I
think it was Tournefort, though I don't know
whether he invented the name himself or only
borrowed it from the early herbalists — trans-
ferred the title of veronica to this lovely little
blue blossom, because it seemed to him
exactly to mirror in its delicate hue the deep
azure colour of the sky above. It was the
vera ico7t of the open heaven, and so he called
it, too, veronica. The conceit is far-fetched,
no doubt ; but it is a pleasant one to me ; and
I can never see the first speedwells opening
their familiar blue flowers in the spring-time
without feeling that the legend throws an
added charm for my mind around their simple
native prettiness.

Our thoughts about nature are often too

VERONICA. 83

largely interwoven with hard technicalities
concerning rotate corollas and pedicellate
racemes ; and I for my part am not ashamed
to confess that, I like sometimes to see the
dry light of science diversified with some
more fallacious scintillations of the literce
Jmmaniores or even with some will-o'-the-wisp
of pure poetical imagination. After all, these
things too are themselves matter for the high-
est science ; and that kind of scientific man
who cannot recognise their use and interest
is himself as yet but a one-sided creature, a
chemical or biological Gradgrind, still spelling
away blunderingly at the weak and beggarly
elements of knowledge, instead of skimming
the great book of nature easily through, with
a free glance from end to end. Surely there
are more things in heaven and earth than are
dreamt of in Gradgrind's philosophy.

For example, there is the beauty of the
veronica. Even if the Gradgrinds do not
see it, you and I do ; and it is clearly the
business of science to explain this difference

G 2

84 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

between us and Gradgrind, as well as to
explain why we have the sense of beauty at
all. There are two kinds of one-sidedness
which the real man of science will do well to
avoid. Thoreau, who loved nature as few
men have loved it, nevertheless sneered at
geology as a lot of old broken shells : that
was the one-sidedness of the poetical and
artistic temperament. He thought he was
showing his own superiority of mind when he
was really showing only his narrowness of
view. On the other hand, Gradgrind and
Dryasdust sneer at the beauty of the
veronica ; that is the one-sidedness of the
practical, technical, and scientific tempera-
ment. The true man of science will reconcile
the two. He will see no incompatibility
between loving the birds and beasts as well
as Thoreau, and yet taking an interest in the
old broken shells as well as Lyell or Mur-
chison ; between knowing all about the con-
duplicate cotyledons with Dryasdust, and
admiring the autumn fields with Millet or

VERONICA. 85

with Ruskln. The two stamens and the
united petals of the veronica are facts which
demand explanation In one way ; the blue
colour and the touching prettiness of the
same veronica are facts which equally demand
explanation In another way : and I for my
part can see no reason why the one set of
facts should not be just as worthy of scientific
examination as the other.

Luckily for us, we have now at last got a
philosophy of life which enables us, as it
seems to me, to explain both on very similar
principles. The tubular shape of the speed-
well's corolla and the irregularity of Its
stamens, as well as the peculiar one-sldedness
of its petals, are all due to the necessities of
its fertilisation by insects. In that way, and
in no other. It secures the safe deposit of its
pollen on the head of the bee or the beetle,
and Its further safe conveyance to the pistil of
some neighbouring blossom. For just the
same reason it has bright blue petals to
attract the eyes of the Insect ; and those petals

8e VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

are streaked with dainty darker or lighter
lines, which guide the friendly visitor straight
to the honey-glands. That, put briefly, is
why the veronica is blue and delicately
veined.

The reason why we consider these colours,
meant to attract the insect, as pretty, seems
to me equally obvious. We are the descend-
ants of ancient arboreal ancestors, who them-
selves sought their food among bright orange'
and blue and crimson fruits in tropical forests ;
and those fruits were specially coloured to
allure their eyes, just as the speedwells and
primroses and buttercups are specially coloured
to allure the eyes of bee or butterfly. And
further, as the eyes of the bees are so
developed that these colours attract them, the
eyes of our pre-human ancestors must have
been so developed as to be attracted by the
similar colours of oranges and mangoes,
and tertiary plums or peaches. Flowers
and fruits alike depend upon animals for
fertilisation or dispersion ; and alike possess

VERONICA. 87

the same enticements of sweet juices, fragrant
scents, and bright colours. Hence it seems
natural to conclude that the senses of animals
have been evolved in strict correlation with
such stimulants, and that the thrill of pleasure
which we now derive from beautiful colours
is in some degree a vague and persistent
echo of feelings long since experienced by
our frugivorous ancestors.

And shall we therefore say with the writer
in last week's Nature, which I have brought
out in my pocket, * We are landed at the
rather humiliating conclusion that a sense of
the beautiful, and an admiration for the forms
and colours of nature, is only a strongly
developed instinct inherited from the lower
animals ? ' Oh no, surely far otherwise. We
have not so learned Darwin and Spencer.
As just now I read the writer's words, lying
here in the sunshine on the bank, I picked
this blue speedwell, and gazed closely at it,
and I saw denial looking at me from every
line on its face. We might as well say that

88 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

the artistic sense of a Burne Jones or a
Rossetti was a survival from the artistic sense
of the cave-men who etched reindeers in the
Perigord grottoes, or that the mechanical
genius of a Watt or an Edison was an instinct
inherited from the black-fellows who chipped
flints ages ago beside the Somme at St.
Acheul. Darwinism does not degrade our
race — it elevates it. For the fall of man it
substitutes the rise of man : for a hopelessly
degraded lapse from an imaginary Paradise
in the past it substitutes a hopeful progress
towards a perfectible and realisable Paradise
in the future.

The love for the blue colour in the vero-
nica is doubtless due in its Inception to the
primitive love for colour common to all frugi-
vorous races. But it is not only that. If it
were a mere survival it would be weaker in
us than in the monkeys ; whereas it is, as a
matter of fact, infinitely stronger. We all of
us — yes, including even Gradgrind himself —
love the little blue veronica with a love of

VERONICA. 89

which no lower animal is capable. We have
gone on increasing and widening our love for
colour — we have employed it first for personal
decoration, in flowers, feathers, "^ gems, and
pigment ; then for the decoration of our
houses and belongings ; then for painting
proper and true art. Thus at last the mere
beauty of colour by itself, apart from other
emotional associations, has become far more
potent with us, and especially with civilised
man, than with our early progenitors or with
our four-handed cousins. We can admire
sunsets and sunrises at which they would
gaze in stolid indifference. We can admire
autumn hues, and distant hills, and countless
effects of cloud or light on sea and sky and
landscape. And to all these we add a
thousand higher elements of the sense of
beauty. We feel at once that the speedwell
has symmetry of a beautiful sort, which we
have learned to appreciate more than any
other creatures in the slow growth of human
products, from the stone hatchet to Brussels

90 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

lace and Henri II. pottery, from the circular
hut to Salisbury and Chartres. We feel, also,
the beauty of Its home associations, of Its con-
nected legendary lore, of Its old English
name, of Its domestic familiarity. We feel
the reflection upon It of much poetical fancy
and dainty conceit. All these things go to
make up our sense rf beauty when we look
at a speedwell, just as much as the blue
colour and the primitive instinct of our semi-
human progenitors. Do not let us shut our
eyes, like Mr. Ruskin, to the elementary
facts disclosed by biology ; but do not let us,
on the other hand, try to resolve our whole
complex nature into quadrumanous elements.
Man is none the less man because we believe
that his very remote ancestor was a sort of
distant cousin to the gorilla. We to-day are
none the more gorillas for all that.

91

X.

GUELDER ROSE.

CoiMiNG out here into the alder copse this
bright breezy summer evening, in search of
the sweet-scented butterfly orchids which
grow so abundantly in the marshy spots
beside the bourne, I have not only gathered
a thick handful of those quaint green-tipped
spiky flowers themselves, but have also
lighted unexpectedly upon the first full-blown
guelder rose of the season. The bush hangs
out of the hedge which severs the copse from
the Four Acre ; and my eye was attracted a
hundred yards off by the great bunches of
snow-white blossom, drooping in massive
trusses from the long sprays that outgrow the

93 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

shorter and stiffer branches of the over-blown
hawthorns. Guelder roses are by no means
rare flowers, yet I always like to pick a piece
or two, because of the curious peculiarity
which causes them to be cultivated so much
in our shrubberies. Not that this real wood-
land bush-flower has any close resemblance
to the round balls of distorted blossoms that
our gardeners and florists have been at so
much pains to produce for the delectation of
tasteless patrons. In this its native state the ■
guelder rose has a bunch of small white, or
rather cream-coloured flowers, for the most
part a good deal like those of the elder ; and,
indeed, the very name is said to be a mere
philological blunder for elder-rose, and to
have no real connection with Guelderland in
any way. Still more closely do the little
cream-coloured flowers resemble the blossoms
of the wayfaring-tree, a member of the same
genus, whose mealy leaves and little blue-black
berries are familiar objects towards the close
of autumn in every tangled overgrown hedge-

GUELDER ROSE. 93

row. The guelder rose differs, however,
from the wayfaring-tree in one conspicuous
particular. It has a row of large snow-white
flowers on the outside of each bunch, at least
twenty times as big as the central ones.
They look almost as if they were the blossoms
of some other and larger plant, deftly ar-
ranged or pinned by some mischievous boy
around a bunch of elder blossom, so as to
hoax the unwary botanist with a cunning
deception. But they are real component ele-
ments of the flower-head for all that ; and it
is these self-same odd, overgrown outer
flowers which make the guelder rose so inte-
resting a plant in the eyes of the evolutionary
biologist.

Looking close at the small central florets
one can see at a glance that each has a little
tubular corolla of five united petals, with
stamens and pistil in the centre, enclosing the
germ of a future berry. But the big expanded
outer blossoms are built on quite a different
plan. They consist entirely of a large

94 VIGNETTE J FROM NATURE,

flattened corolla with four or fiw^ round-
edged lobes, milk-white instead of cream-
coloured, and measuring near an inch across,
instead of being hardly larger than a barley-
corn. Moreover, most significant of all, they
have no stamens, no pistil, and no ovary con-
taining an embryo fruit. They are barren
blossoms, without any other object in life
than that of bare display. What, then, is the
good of them ?

Weil, their purpose is, no doubt, to add
extra attractiveness to the bunches of which
they form part. All plants that depend upon
insects for their fertilisation are compelled to
make a great show in order to lure the insects
into paying them proper attention. In the
guelder rose a few outer flowers of each
bunch are sacrificed to this particular purpose.
They are specialised for the function of
attraction, as the philosophical botanists
would say. This is, indeed, a phenomenon
which occurs often enough in many plants,
though in few so conspicuously as in the

GUELDER ROSE, 95

guelder rose. In daisies and sunflowers, the
outer florets of each head have their petals pro-
longed into pink-tipped or golden rays, which
give the compound bunch much the appear-
ance of a single blossom. In cow-parsnip
and most other umbellates the two outer
petals of all the external flowers grow much
bigger than their three inner petals, so as
greatly to increase the total conspicuousness
of the whole bunch. Whenever the separate
blossoms of a plant have grown so small as
to be individually little attractive, they will
clearly gain an advantage by detailing some
of their number to do special duty as adver-
tisements. But it seems difficult at first
sight to see how natural selection can bring
about such a result. Mr. Herbert Spencer
has pointed out the way out of this difficulty.
If you look at a cow-parsnip, you will see
that the crowded central flowers of each head
are very small, with cramped petals, because
they have no room to expand without crush-
ing one another; but the freer external

96 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

flowers are much larger, with broader petals,
especially on the outer edge, because they
have plenty of room in which to spread, and
plenty of light and air on which to feed.
Thus, in all crowded trusses of blossom, the
outer flowers tend as a rule to grow larger
and more showy than the inner ones ; and if
this natural tendency happens to aid the plant
by giving it an extra chance of insect fertili-
sation, it will be increased and specialised by
constant selection of those individuals which
best display it. Our gardeners carry the
process one step further ; for they artificially
select such guelder roses as have the largest
number of barren flowers in each head, until
at last they produce a carefully cultivated
monstrosity with all the flowers barren and
broad-petalled, so as to form a great white
fluffy ball. Such a monstrous variety could
never be perpetuated in a state of nature, be-
cause it produces no seed : it can only be
propagated by slips and cuttings. But our
florists are fond of these distorted forms, their

GUELDER ROSE, 97

only object being to produce a mass of
coloured surface, irrespective of use to the
plant. So in double daisies they turn the
inner fertile flowers into barren rays; in I he
dahlia they cultivate out the central florets,
and make the others mere useless tubular
blossoms ; and in roses they degrade the
stamens into shapeless and supernumerary
petals. Such artificial flowers are never
beautiful to a botanical eye, because they
lack symmetry and order. When once you
have learnt to understand and admire the
simple and effective plan upon which all
flower architecture is based, these distorted
and monstrous blossoms have no more
attraction for your eye than the calf with five
legs or the two-headed nightingale has for
any cultivated taste.

Here is another curious point about the
guelder rose. If I cut open one of the very
young flower-buds, and look at it carefully
with my powerful little pocket lens, I can see
that in this early stage it has three cells in

H

98

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

the undeveloped fruit, whereas the ripe berry
has only one, with a single seed. Even in
the full-blown flowers here two of the cells
have atrophied, though there are still three
little stigmas or sensitive surfaces for the
pollen, as though the plant did not know
its own mind, and rather expected to have
three seeds in each berry, instead of one.
This curious indecision is doubtless due to a
certain historical fact in the ancestry of the
guelder rose. Once upon a time, no doubt,
the progenitors of the guelder rose had small
dry capsules instead of berries, with a number
of seeds in each cell. Such a plant as the
red campion still retains this habit; and,
therefore, as the seeds merely fall out loose
upon the ground, it is necessary to produce a
great number of them, in order to secure a
fair chance that one at least shall fall upon
a fitting spot for its germination. But in
some plants the seed-covering grows soft and
succulent, becoming what in ordinary parlance
we call a fruit or berry. Then a bird swallows

■

GUELDER ROSE. 5 r.^

the entire vessel, seed and all ; digests the
pulpy covering; and rejects the hard seed
in circumstances admirably adapted for its
growth. Plants of this sort, therefore, lay
themselves out to allure the dispersing
birds, and accordingly fill their fruits with
sweet juices and bright colouring, just as they
render their flowers attractive with honey
and surround them with brilliant petals to
allure the fertilising insects. Moreover, they
need not now produce much more than one
seed in each fruit, because the seeds have so
much a better chance of growling up than they
used to have. Hence most berries contain
very few seeds, often only one, and in many
cases the numerous cells of the dry ancestral
capsule get aborted in an early stage, because
they are no longer needed by the juicy modern
fruit. Almost all the honeysuckle tribe (to
which, though you would hardly think it, the
guelder rose belongs) have succulent fruits ;
and their seeds are solitary, or at least very
few in each cell. So that the three cells of

H 2

loo VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

these very young flowers keep up the memory
of a time when the guelder rose had not as
yet acquired its berry, but was obliged to
produce large numbers of small dry seeds in
a three-celled capsule. '

There are two more small matters con-
nected with this bush which one can hardly
afford to overlook. The first is that while the
flowers are white, the berries are blackish red,
and those of the nearly allied way faring- tree
are dark purple. Now, white is a common
colour for flowers, but very rare in fruits;
while black or dark blue and purple are
common colours for fruits, but very rare in
flowers. The plant is obliged to use one set
of hues to attract the proper insects, and
another set to attract the proper birds ; for
we now know that each species of insect and
of bird has a very decided taste of its own in
the matter of chromatics. The second point
is this : the leaves of the guelder rose have a
number of small swollen glands all along the
stalk, and a fringe of ragged-looking leaf-like

GUELDER ROSE, I loi

appendages where they join the branch.
These are very marked and obviously useful
structures : what is their meaning ? That I
do not know. I merely mention them because
their object seems at present insoluble. One
might say the same thing about a hundred
other points in every plant or animal one
picks up in a country stroll. The descrip-
tions of naturalists are apt to make one sup-
pose that we know all about them. In reality,
only a few small parts of their mechanism are
yet even partially understood. The very
idea of explaining the origin of organic
structure genetically is still a novel one. We
have only just begun to dig at the vast mine ;
and all we can do as yet is to unearth a solitary
little nugget or two and parade them before
the v/orld. The labour of the old-fashioned
naturalists has collected an enormous mass of
facts as to form and structure ; but as to use
and function we have still almost all the work

102

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

I ■ ■» . •. '

/

XI.

THE HERONS HAUNT,

Most of the fields on the country side are now
laid up for hay, or down in tall haulming
corn ; and so I am driven from my accustomed
botanising grounds on the open and compelled
to take refuge in the wild bosky moorland
back of Hole Common. Here, on the edge
of the copse, the river widens to a consider-
able pool, and coming upon it softly through
the wood from behind — the boggy, moss-
covered ground masking and muffling my
footfall — I have surprised^ a great, graceful
ash-and-white heron, standing all unconscious
on the shallow bottom, in the very act of
angling for minnows. The heron is a some-

. THE HERON'S HAUNT, ^ 103

what rare bird among the more cultivated
parts of England ; but just hereabouts we get
a sight of one not infrequently, for they still
breed in a few tall ash trees at Chilcombe
Park, where the lords of the manor in
mediaeval times long preserved a regular
heronry to provide sport for their hawking.
There is no English bird, not even the swan,
so perfectly and absolutely graceful as the
heron. I am leaning now breathless and
noiseless against the gate, taking a good look
at him, as he stands half-knee deep on the
oozy bottom, with his long neck arched over
the water, and his keen, purple eye fixed
eagerly upon the fish below. Though I am
still twenty yards from where he poises
lightly on his stilted legs, I can see distinctly
his long pendent snow-white breast feathers,
his crest of waving black plumes, falling loosely
•backward over the ash-grey neck, and even
the bright red skin of his bare legs just below
the feathered thighs, I dare hardly move
nearer to get a closer view of his beautiful

104 VIGNETTES FROM NA TURE, •

«

plumage ; and still I will try. I push very
quietly through the gate, but not quite quietly
enough for the heron. One moment he raises
his curved neck and poises his head a little on
one side to listen for the direction of the
rustling ; then he catches a glimpse of me as
I try to draw back silently behind a clump of
flags and nettles ; and in a moment his long
legs give him a good spring from the bottom,
his big wings spread with a sudden flap sky-
wards, and almost before I can note what is
happening he is off and away to leeward,
making in a bee-line for the high trees that
fringe the artificial water in Chilcombe
Hollow.

; . All these wading birds — the herons, the
cranes, the bitterns, the snipes, and the
plovers — are almost necessarily, by the very
nature of their typical conformation, beautiful
and graceful in form. Their tall, slender legs,
which they require for wading, their compara-
tively light and well-poised bodies, their long,
curved, quickly-darting necks and sharp beaks,

. THE HERON'S HAUNT. 105

which they need in order to secure their rapid-
swimming prey — all these things make the
waders, almost in spite of themselves, hand-
some and shapely birds. Their feet, it is true,
are generally rather large and sprawling, with
long, widespread toes, so as to distribute their
weight on the snow-shoe principle, and pre-
vent them from sinking in the deep soft mud
on which they tread ; but then we seldom
see the feet, because the birds, when w^e
catch a close view of them at all, are almost
always either on stilts in the water, or flying
with their legs tucked behind them, after
their pretty rudder-like fashion. I have often
wondered whether it is this general beauty of
form in the waders which has turned their
aesthetic tastes, apparently, into such a sculp-
turesque line. Certainly, it is very note-
wortny that wherever among this particular
order of birds we get clear evidence of orna-
mental devices, such as Mr. Darwin sets down
to long-exerted selective preferences in the
choice of mates, the ornaments are almost

io6

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

always those of form rather than those of
colour. ' ' . ; . ,,

•'- The waders, I sometimes fancy, only care
for beauty of shape, not for beauty of tint.
As I stood looking" at the heron here just

O J

now, the same old idea seemed to force itself
more clearly than ever upon my mind. The
decorative adjuncts — the curving tufted crest
on the head, the pendent silvery gorget on
the neck, the long ornamental quills of the
pinions — all look exactly as If they were de-
liberately intended to emphasise and heighten
the natural gracefulness of the heron's form.
May It not be, I ask myself, that these birds,
seeing one another's statuesque shape from
generation to generation, have that shape
thus hereditarily Implanted upon the nervous
system of the species, In connection with all
their Ideas of mating and of love, just as the
human form is hereditarily associated with all
our deepest emotions, so that Miranda falling
in love at first sight with Ferdinand is not a
mere poetical fiction, but the true illustration

THE HERON'S HAUNT, 107

of a psychological fact ? And as on each of
our minds and brains the picture of the beau-
tiful human figure is, as it were, antecedently
engraved, may not the ancestral type be
similarly engraved on the minds and brains
of the wading birds ? If so, would it not be
natural to conclude that these birds, having
thus a very graceful form as their generic
standard of taste, a graceful form with little
richness of colouring, would naturally choose
as the loveliest among their mates, not those
which showed any tendency to more bright-
hued plumage (which indeed might be fatal
to their safety, by betraying them to their
enemies the falcons and eagles), but those
which most fully embodied and carried
furthest the ideal specific gracefulness of the
wading type ? In some such way, it seems
to me, the herons, and cranes, and storks, and
marabous may have acquired their very dis-
tinct and noticeable crests or lappets, v? v.<
Forestine flower -feeders and fruit-eaters,
especially in the tropics, are almost always

io8

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

brightly coloured. Their chromatic taste
seems to get quickened in their daily search
for food among the beautiful blossoms and
brilliant fruits of southern woodlands. Thus
the hum.ming-birds, the sun-birds, and the
brush-tongued lories, three very dissimilar
groups of birds so far as descent is concerned,
all alike feed upon the honey and the insects
which they extract from the large tubular
bells of tropical flowers ; and all alike are
noticeable for their intense metallic lustre or
pure tones of colour. Again, the parrots, the
toucans, the birds of paradise, and many
other of the more beautiful exotic species,
are fruit-eaters, and reflect their inherited
tastes in their own gaudy plumage. But the
waders have no such special reasons for
acquiring a love for bright hues. Hence
their aesthetic feeling seems rather to have
taken a turn towards the further development
of their own graceful forms. Even the
plainest wading birds have a certain natural
elegance of shape which supplies a primitive

THE HERON'S HAUNT, . 109

basis for aesthetic selection to work upon.
Mr. Darwin has shown that birds in early
times were L^'.ss brightly coloured, and less
decorated than their modern descendants.
He might also have added that the most
central and least specialised modern members
of each great group are similarly wanting in
ornamental adjuncts. They represent the
earliest surviving forms of those into which
the original type has split up ; they have de-
parted least from the primitive organisation
of the class to which they belong. Con-
versely, the most highly developed and
specialised members of each group are those
among which we most often find extremely
marked aesthetic decoration. The dominant
creatures of every class can afford to pay most
attention to beauty ; the less advanced and
more skulking kinds are glad enough to eke
. out a prec'irious livelihood for themselves as
I best they may, and so run rather towards
. protective colouring and unobtrusive forms
than towards conspicuous ornainentation.

no VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

Among the waders this principle is very
fully exemplified. The most central and
least specially developed of the group are its
smaller members, such as the plover, the
woodcock, the snipe, and the sandpipers, all
of which are only half-developed waders,
without the full characteristic structure or
correlated habits of the class. They live by
the side of small streams ; they roam a good
deal on land in the fields ; and they have
only moderately long legs and necks. More-
over, they are coloured protectively to
resemble the dry grass or sand on which they
hop about, and so to deceive the eyes A
hawks. Many of them are more or less
: nocturnal, and all of them are timid, skulking
: birds. They seem to be half-way, so to
speak, on the road from the central undif-
; ferentiated group of birds, represented by
the larks and sparrows, to the thorough-going
waders, represented by the storks, cranes,
and herons. Not one of them has a single
patch of bright colour, a single ornamental

THE HERON'S HAUNT. in

plume, crest, or lappet. Close-fitting, incon-
spicuous plumage is their common charac-
teristic. «: :-\ ■• •■ ' .-./', .,r-.v

" On the other hand, those waders which
have taken to a thoroughly wading life have
consequently developed by natural selection
longer legs and necks, and more specially
adapted feet and beaks. Some of them are
even webfooted, and others boatbilled.
These larger, better developed, and more
dominant birds are generally distinguished by
aesthetic decoration. Wherever a chance
variation ran in the direction of heightening
and intensifying the natural grace of form
which is implied in their specialised wading
adaptations, it was seized upon and per-
petuated by selective preference. Hardly a
single dominant wader is devoid of some
marked decorative adjuncts, which set off and
interpret the native utilitarian beauty of his
slender figure. In many cases, as in that of
the ruff (whose name sufficiently describes his
ornamental character), these decorated birds

112

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

are polygamous — which of course allows of
only the very handsomest males in each
generation securing themselves a harem.
The decorati\'e crests and plumes are always
fully and ostentatiously displayed before the
hens during the pairing season, and in some
cases are produced at that time alone. But
as to bright colour, only a few outlying
southern waders, like the ibis and the
flamingo, living among the big waterlilies and
marsh-flowers of African valleys, ever have a
trace of it : and even these few cases cannot
compare in variety or richness of hue with
the typical fruit- eaters and flower-feeders.

i-'M

II ^

XII.

A BED OF NETTLES,

Reaching my hand into the hedgerow to pick
a long, lithe, blossoming spray of black
bryony — here it is, with its graceful climbing
stem, its glossy heart-shaped leaves, and its
pretty, greenish lily flowers — I have stung
myself rather badly against the nettles that
grow rank and tall from the rich mud in the
ditch below. Nothing soothes a nettle-sting
like philosophy and dock-leaf ; so I shall rub
a little of the leaf on my hand, and then sit
awhile on the Hole Farm gate here to philo-
sophise about nettles and things generally, as
is my humble wont. There is a great deal
more in nettles, I believe, than most people

I

114 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

are apt to imagine ; indeed, the nettle-
philosophy at present current with the larger
part of the world seems to me lamentably
one-sided. As a rule, the sting is the only
point in the whole organisation of the family
over which we ever waste a single thought.
That is our ordinary human narrowness : in
each plant or animal we interest ourselves
about that one part alone which has special
reference to our own relations with it, for
good or for evil. In a strawberry, we think
only of the fruit ; in a hawthorn, of the
flowers ; in a deadly nightshade, of the
poisonous berry ; and in a ^nettle, of the
sting. Now I frankly admit at the pre-
sent moment that the nettle-sting has an
obtrusive and unnecessarily pungent way of
forcing itself upon the human attention ; but
it does not sum up the whole life-history of
the plant in its own one peculiarity for all
that. The nettle exists for its own sake, we
may be sure, and not merely for the sake of
occasionally inflicting a passing smart upon
the meddlesome human fingers.

A BED OF NETTLES. 115

However, the sting itself, viewed philo-
sophically, is not without decided interest of
its own. It is one, and perhaps the most
highly developed, among the devices by which
plants guard themselves against the attacks
of animals. Weeds or shrubs with juicy
tender leaves are very apt to be eaten down
by rabbits, cows, donkeys, and other herbi-
vores. But if any individuals among such
species happen to show any tendency to the
development of any unpleasant habit which
prevents the herbivores from eating them,
then those particular individuals will of course
be spared when their neighbours are eaten,
and will establish a new and specially pro-
tected variety in the course of successive
generations. It does not matter what the
peculiarity may be, provided only it in any
way deters animals from eating the plant.
In the arum, a violently acrid juice is se-
creted in the leaves, so as to burn the mouth
of the aggressor. In the dandelion and

wild lettuces, the juice Is merely bitter. In

12

ii6 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

houndstongue and catmint, it has a nauseous
taste. Then again, in the hawthorn and the
blackthorn, some of the shorter branches
have developed into stout sharp spines, which
tear the skin of would-be assailants. In the
brambles, the hairs on the stem have
thickened into pointed prickles, which an-
swer the same purpose as the spines of their
neighbours. In the thistles, the gorse, and
the holly, once more, it is the angles of the
leaves themselves which have grown into
needle-like points, so as to deter animals from
browsing upon them. But the nettle pro-
bably carries the same tendency to the
furthest possible limit. Not content with
mere defence, it is to some extent actively
aggressive. The hairs which clothe it have
become filled with a poisonous irritating juice ;
and when any herbivore thrusts his tender
nose into the midst of a clump, the sharp
points pierce his naked skin, the liquid gets
into his veins in the very neighbourhood of
the most sensitive nerves, and the poor

A BED OF NETTLES. 117

creature receives at once a life-long warning
against attacking nettles in future.

The way in which so curious a device has
grown up is not, it seems to me, very diffi-
cult to guess. Many plants are armed with
small sharp hairs, which act as a protection to
them against the incursions of ants and other
destructive insects. These hairs are often
enough more or less glandular in structure,
and therefore liable to contain various waste
products of the plant. Suppose one of these
waste products in the ancestors of the nettle
to be at first slightly pungent, by accident, as
it were, then it would exercise a slightly
deterrent effect upon nettle-eating animals.
The more stinging it grew, the more
effectual would the protection be ; and as in
each generation the least protected plants
would get eaten down, while the more pro-
tected were spared, the tendency would be
for the juice to grow more and more stinging
till at last it reached the present high point
of development. It is noticeable, too, that in

Ii8 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

our warrens and wild places, most of the
plants are thus more or less protected in one
way or another from the attacks of animals.
These neglected spots are overgrown with
gorse, brambles, nettles, blackthorn, and
mullein, as well as with the bitter spurges
and the stringy inedible bracken. So, too,
while in our meadows we purposely propa-
gate tender fodder plants, like grasses and
clovers, we find on the margins of our pas-
tures and by our roadsides only protected
species, such as thistles, houndstongue,
cuckoo-pint, charlock, nettles (once more),
and thorn-bushes. The cattle or the rabbits
eat down at once all juicy and succulent
plants, leaving only these nauseous or prickly
kinds, together with such stringy and innutri-
tions weeds as chervil, plantain, and burdock.
Here we see the mechanism of natural selec-
tion at work under our very eyes.

But the sting certainly does not exhaust
the whole philosophy of the nettle. Look,
for example, at the stem and leaves. The

A BED OF NETTLES,

"9

nettle has found its chance in life, its one
fitting vacancy, among the ditches and waste-
places by roadsides or near cottages ; and it
has laid itself out for the circumstances in
which it lives. Its near relative, the hop, is
a twisting climber ; its southern cousins, the
fig and the mulberry, are tall and spreading
trees. But the nettle has made itself a niche
in nature along the bare patches which
diversify human cultivation ; and it has
adapted its stem and leaves to the station in
life where it has pleased Providence to place
it. Plants like the dock, the burdock, and the
rhubarb, which lift their leaves straight
above the ground, from large s.ubterranean
reservoirs of material, have usually big,
broad, undivided leaves, that overshadow all
beneath them, and push boldly out on every
side to drink in the air and the sunlight. On
the other hand, regular hedgerow plants, like
cleavers, chervil, herb-Robert, milfoil, and
most ferns, which grow in the tangled shady
undermath of the banks and thickets, have

I20

V'ICNEIIES FROM NATURE,

usually slender, blade -like, much- divided
leaves, all split up into little long narrow
pushing segments, because they cannot get
sunlight and air enough to build up a single
large respectable rounded leaf.

The nettle is just half-way between these
two extremes. It does not grow out broad
and solitary like the burdock, nor does it
creep under the hedges like the little much-
divided wayside weeds ; but it springs up
erect in tall, thick, luxuriant clumps, growing
close together, each stem fringed with a con-
siderable number of moderate-sized, heart-
shaped, toothed-and-polnted leaves. Such
leaves have just room enough to expand and
to extract from the air all the carbon they
need for their growth, without encroaching
upon one another's food supply (for It must
always be borne In mind that leaves grow out
of the air, not, as most people fancy, out of
the ground), and so without the consequent
necessity for dividing up into little separate
narrow segments. Accordingly, this type of

A BED OF NETTLES. 121

leaf is very common among all those plants
which spring up beside the hedgerows in the
same erect shrubby manner as the nettles.
It is almost exactly imitated in the dead-
nettle and the hemp-nettle, which are plants
of a totally distinct family, with flowers of the
sage and rosemary type ; and it is more or
less simulated by ten or twenty other species
of like habit. This peculiarity of external
resemblance, under identical circumstances,
between organisms wholly unlike in origin
and pedigree, is a common and natural one.
Thus, in the dry deserts of India, some of
the spurge tribe grow thick and succulent, so
as exactly to resemble the genealogically very
different cactuses of like dry deserts in
America ; and a gallinaceous bird, stranded
on the shores of the Antarctic Islands, has
acquired the long legs of the waders, together
with the characteristic colours of the gulls.
Whatever the original stock, natural selection
tends always under like circumstances to pro-
duce like results.

122 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

Then, again, there is the flower of the
nettle, which in most plants is so much the
most conspicuous part of all. Yet in this
particular plant it is so unobtrusive that most
people never notice its existence in any way.
That is because the nettle is wind-fertilised,
and so does not need bright and attractive
petals. Here are the flowering branches, a
lot of little forked antler-like spikes, sticking
out at right angles from the stem, and half
concealed by the leaves of the row above
them. Like many other wind - fertilised
flowers, the stamens and pistils are collected
on different plants — a plan which absolutely
ensures cross-fertilisation, without the aid of
insects. I pick one of the stam.en-bearing
clusters, and can see that it is made up of
small separate green blossoms, each with four
tiny leaf-like petals, and with four stamens
doubled up in the centre. I touch the
flowers with the tip of my pocket-knife, and
in a second the four stamens jump out elas-
tically as if alive, and dust the white pollen
all over my fingers. Why should they act

A BED OF NETTLES. 123

like this ? Such tricks are not uncommon in
bee-fertilised flowers, because they ensure the
pollen bein^^shed only when a bee thrusts his
head into the blossom ; but what use can this
device be to the wind-fertilised nettle ? I
think the object is somewhat after this
fashion. If the pollen were shed durinor
perfectly calm weather it would simply fall
upon the ground, without reaching the pistils
of neighbouring plants at all. But by having
the stamens thus doubled up, with elastic
stalks, it happens that even when ripe they
do not open and shed the pollen unless upon
the occurrence of seme slight concussion.
This concussion is given when the stems are
waved about by the wind ; and then the
pollen is shaken out under circumstances
which give it the best chance of reaching the
pistil.

Finally, there is the question of fruit. In
the fig and the mulberry the fruit is succu-
lent, and depends for its dispersion upon
birds and animals. In the nettle it takes the
form of a tiny seed-like flattened nut. Why

134

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

is this, again ? One might as well ask, why
are we not all Lord Chancellors or Presidents
of the Royal Academy. Each plant and
each animal makes the best of such talents as
it has got, and gets on by their aid ; but all
have not the same talents. One survives by
dint of its prickles ; another by dint of its
attractive flowers ; a third by its sweet fruit ;
a fourth by its hard nut-shell. As regards
stings, the nettle is one of the best protected
plants ; as regards flower and fruit, it is
merely one of the ruck. Every plant can
only take advantage of any stray chances it
happens to possess ; and the same advan-
tageous tendencies do not show themselves
in all alike. It is said that once a certain
American, hearing of the sums which Canova
got for his handicraft, took his son to the
great man's studio, and inquired how much
he would ask to make the boy a sculptor.
But there is no evidence to show that that
aspiring youth ever produced an Aphrodite
or a Discobolus. .

12:

XIII.

LOOSESTRIFE AND PIMPERNEL.

I HAVE picked this lor^^ delicate spray of
woodland loosestrife — a pretty, graceful,
small creeping flower — in the deep thickets
of Netherden Spinney, where its slender
trailing stems grow abundantly under the
damp shade of the young alder bushes** It
does not in the least resemble the big erect
purple loosestrife, that handsome tall water-
side plant, whose great bunches of brilliant
flowers hang so heavily over the banks of
brooks and rivers a little later in the season ;
for, indeed, the two species have no connec-
tion with one another except etymologically,
and derive their common name from different

I20

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

sources, the one truly English, the other as
a mere herbalist's translation of the Greek
lysimachia. The woodland loosestrife has
small yellow flowers, of a regular and simple
sort ; and it Is by family a primrose, though
it hardly looks much like one to a casual
observer. I have picked It now, however,
for comparison with this other allied plant,
the common little pimpernel, whose pretty
bright red blossoms are familiar friends In
every cornfield and waste patch of garden.
The two plants are very Interesting In their
way, as Illustrating a curious feature of evo-
lution ; and they are interesting, too, as
showing the sort of errors Into which people
were constantly led before the rise of evolu-
tionism by the old artificial way of regarding
the relationships between plants and animals.
' In all the books about botany, even, I
believe, to the present day, you will find the
woodland loosestrife classed as a species of
the genus Lysimachia, while the pimpernel Is
classed as a species of the genus Anagallls.

LOOSESTRIFE AND PIMPERNEL,

127

But in reality, looking at the matter from the
new standpoint of descent or actual pedigree,
there can be very little doubt that this par-
ticular loosestrife is far more closely related
to the pimpernel, which is thus placed in a
separate genus, than to the other yellow
loosestrifes which are included in the same
genus with it. The reasons that induced
the older botanists to make this classification
are clear enough, and they seemed at the
time perfectly cogent ; nay, they have not
yet been discarded, I fancy, by any of our
modern reformers, though no doubt they will
be so as soon as the question is once fairly
considered at scientinc headquarters. The
loosestrife genus was defined as having a
capsule opening at the top when ripe in five
or ten valves ; the pimpernel genus was
defined, on the contrary, as having a capsule
opening in the middle, by a line running
round it transversely instead of longitudinally.
If we consider the capsule as represented by
a common terrestrial globe, joined to the

128

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

Stalk at the south pole, then in the loose-
strifes this capsule may be figured as dividing
into several segments along the meridians
from the north pole downwards ; while in
the pimpernels it may be figured as dividing
into two hemispheres at the equator. It is
just the difference between letting an orange
burst open along the natural partitions, or
cutting it across the middle at right angles to
the partitions. Now, if you look closely at
the ripe capsules of the woodland loosestrife,
you will see that it splits asunder into
separate valves ; and, therefore, according
to this rule, it is a true lysimachia : while if
you look closely at the ripe capsules of the
pimpernel, you will see that the top lifts off
bodily in a hemisphere or cup, displaying the
seeds within as an uncovered sphere ; and
therefore, on the same principle, it is a true
anagallis. So far as this reasoning goes, it is
perfectly just and accurate.

But now, again, if we inquire into the
development and history of the two plants,

LOOSESTRIFE AAD PIMPERNEL.

129

we shall probably come to a very different
conclusion. Most of the primrose family, to
which both genera belong, have capsules
opening by valves ; only two or three pecu-
liar species, like the common pimpernel, the
bog pimpernel, and the tiny chaffweed, have
capsules opening by a lid which lifts off in a
single piece. Therefore the presumption is
that the latter forms are derived from the
former, and not vice versa y especially as the
valvular mode of opening is a common one
among all plants, while the transverse mode
is extremely unusual.

But we have something more than such
a presumption ; we have an actual relic of
the earlier habit impressed st'll upon the very
structure of the pimpernel. If you look care-
fully into its half-ripe capsules (with a small
pocket lens, or even without one) you will see
five dark brown lines traversing the top of
the sphere, from the pole towards the equator,
exactly like the meridians on a globe. These
are the marks of the valves by which the

I30

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

capsule used once to open. In the yellow
loosestrife you will find exactly similar
marks ; only in that case they are the lines
along which the capsule actually splits when
•ripe ; whereas in the pimpernel they only
simulate such a purpose beforehand, while
the actual mode of opening is by a transverse
division. There can be no doubt at all,
therefore, that the pimpernel is really directly
descended from an ancestor which closely
resembled the woodland loosestrife ; and that
the present peculiarity in its method of
opening is quite a modern or recently
acquired habit. Otherwise, it would not
still retain the five valve-marks on the half-
ripe capsule so very distinctly as it still does.
In every other respect except this one
point the woodland loosestrife much more
closely resembles the pimpernel than it
resembles the other members of its own
genus. Both are slender trailing plants,
with leaves of much the same character;
both have small flowers of the same general

LOOSESTRIFE AND PIMPERNEL. 131

type, on long thin stalks, which roll back as
the capsule ripens ; and both have a certain
indefinite likeness to one another in the vague
points of external appearance, which botanists
describe as * habit.' It is true, the blossoms
of the woodland loosestrife are a pale delicate
yellow, while those of the pimpernel are
bright orange-red ; but that is a small matter
mainly dependent upon their insect fertilisers
and their different distribution, the one plant
loving shady copses or moist woods, while
the other loves open cornfields and dry
barren places. In general shape, however,
and in all important characters, the tlossoms
are simply identical.

It is impossible, therefore, to resist the
conclusion that the pimpernel is descended,
either from the woodland loosestrife itself, or
from some common parent form extremely
like it. For almost all the distinctive pecu-
liarities of the pimpernel, except only its
trick of opening in the middle, must have
been acquired by the parent form before it

K 2

132

^'IGNETTES FROM NATURE,

began to split up into two separate species.
The woodland loosestrife, remaining in damp
tree-covered spots, has most closely retained
the general appearance of the common ances-
tor, since its flowers are yellow, like those of
the other loosestrifes, and its capsule still
opens in longitudinal valves. The pimpernel,
on the other hand, growing in those bare
patches which human tillage renders so
common, has become a frequent weed of
cultivation over all Europe and half Asia, and
has accompanied man in his various migra-
tions throughout nearly the whole globe.
For some reason or other — why, it is hard to
say — it has found the transverse mode of
opening its capsule suit it better than the
valvular, perhaps because this plan saved its
seeds in some unknown way from some
dangerous animal foe ; and so it has univer-
sally adopted the new principle in place of
the old one. It has also changed the colour
of its flowers, through the selective action of
the fresh insect fauna to which it was exposed

LOOSESTRIFE AND PIMPERNEL, 133

under the altered conditions of its life. And,
finally, it (or some similar form) has further
developed the bog pimpernel and half a
dozen other more separate species, as well as
the still further differentiated chaffweeds,
which depart progressively more and more
widely from the common loosestrife pattern.

The fact is, fruits and seeds are naturally
in one way the worst of all possible guides to
relationship by descent ; because, though
close likeness in fruits affords a fair presump-
tion of close kinship, unlikeness in fruits
affords no valid presumption against it. Two
plants may remain alike in their leaves, their
stems, their buds, and their flowers, and yet
when it comes to their fruit, new agencies
may be brought to bear upon them which for
the first time set up a slight difference
between them. This difference may often
be very conspicuous, and yet may be of ex-
tremely little genealogical importance. Thus
the almond and the nectarine are really so
much alike in all general points of structure

134 • VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

that one may say they are practically the
very self-same plant ; only In the almond, the
fruit has a hardish shell, while in the necta-
rine it has acquired a soft one through the
selective action of birds. Similarly, there is
a common English potentllla which exactly
resembles a strawberry in everything except
the fruit, and that is dry instead of being suc-
culent. Here we may fairly say that the straw-
berry is just such a potentllla, w'hose seed
receptacle has become juicy and red, through
having been eaten by birds, which aided In
dispersing its seeds. The old botanists made
the strawberry Into a separate genus because
of this conspicuous difference ; but In reality
the difference Is worth very little as an Indi-
cation of distinctness, for the potentllla had
already acquired every distinctive trait of the
strawberry, save only this one noticeable trait
of a succulent fruit-stem, long before they
diverged from one another; and that one
peculiarity might be and actually was easily
acquired without any change In the general
habit of the species.

LOOSESTRIFE AND PIMPERNEL,

13$

In all these cases a philosophical biologist
can but come to one conclusion. Not only
does the strawberry not differ generically
from the potentillas, but it is merely a slightly
divergent form of this particular potentilla,
which is much more closely related to it than
to the other members of the artificial genus.
And so, too, not only does the pimpernel not
differ generically from the woodland loose-
strife, but it is merely a slightly divergent
form of that particular loosestrife which is
much more closely related to it than to the
other members of the genus Lysimachia.

136 VrfiNETJES FROM MATURE,

XIV.

THE CARP POND.

» ■ ■

The little stretch of artificial water in Chil-
combe Hollow, put there to form an element
in the view from the drawing-room windows
of the manor-house, positively teems with
great, fat, lazy carp, whose broad dark backs
I can just distinguish through the pond when
they sail across slowly from one waving bunch
of weed to another in their heavy, lumbering,
overfed way. There is a certain natural con-
gruity between the carp and the pond — natural,
I mean, in the sense that both are highly
artificial, just as we might say that a shepherd-
ess in silk skirts with a pastoral crook was
perfectly natural in a fHe champHre of the

^ THE CARP POND, ' . 137

Watteau order. For carp are the most
absolutely domesticated of all fishes, except
their near relations the goldfish ; and they
have consequently undergone the usual
amount of distortion and degradation which
domestication brings in its train. Some have
lost their scales altogether ; some have grown
short and stumpy, others lean and low ; and
some have got their fins lengthened into a
perfect caricature of their natural selves.
Carp, in fact, come to us from China, where
they have been kept in artificial ponds from
time immemorial, after the usual Chinese
fashion ; and they have been carefully bred
and selected for their monstrosities and
oddities, which pleased the Celestial taste, '
exactly as in the case of those marvellous
varieties of the golden carp, with expanded tails •
and stalked eyes, known as telescope fish, that [
one sometimes sees in domestic aquariums. In
England, it is true, the carp are comparatively
modern denizens ; for, in spite of the popular '
notion that they were largely bred in mediaeval

138 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE^

monasteries, modern naturalists have decided
that they were first introduced here early in
the seventeenth century. Yet there is still a
certain artificial pond-bred look about them,
which makes them harmonise well with these
dammed-up sheets of ornamental water.
The swift speckled trout suits the stickles and
reaches of our own native becks ; but the lazy
carp suits the slow stagnant pools which are
forced upon our unwilling scenery by check-
ing the brooks midway on their course
through their proper sloping English
combes.

Originally, however, the habits and
manners of the carp family were very different
fiom those which this particular species has
acquired in the sluggish streams, broad lakes,
and banked up ponds of the Chinese low-
lands. Dr. Gunther, our greatest living
authority on the study of fishes, has traced
the migration and differentiation of the family
from its earliest form in its primitive home
to its numerous divergent branches over the

THE CARP POND. 139

whole northern hemisphere ; and his account
is one of the most instructive studies in the
geographical distribution of animals that has
yet been attempted. At the present day
these cyprinoids form one-third of all the
fresh-water species of fish known to science.
Yet they seem to be a comparatively modern
family, not being found in earlier geological
deposits than those of the tertiary age.
Apparently, the primitive ancestral carp was
evolved from some earlier species in the great
Himalayan range which divides the temperate
and tropical parts of Asia. This was a
splendid starting-place for a new family, since
the rivers which take their rise in the Central
Asian backbone ridge flow in every direction
towards the Arctic, the Pacific, and the Indian
Ocean, as well as towards the Aral Sea,
which once communicated with the Caspian,
and so gave access to the rivers of Russia.
The primitive cyprinoids accordingly set out
on their travels towards the plains on every
side ; and as they went they accommodated

I40 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

themselves step by step to the most varying
tropical or sub-Arctic conditions. Those
which descended the rivers into India became
the ancestors of the beautiful carp-like fishes
of the Ganges and the Indus. Those which
slowly made their way into China gave birth
to the domestic carp, the goldfish, and many
other species. And those which still more
slowly spread into the outlying peninsular
tract of Europe differentiated themselves into
our familiar barbels, gudgeons, tench, chubs,
dace, roach, and minnows.

' From Europe the carp kind made their
way into the New World. As early as the
pre-glacial epoch, fossil forms show us that the
cyprinoids had already migrated into America,
no doubt across the fresh waters in the belt
of land which once lay upon the high sub-
marine bank between Scotland, Iceland, and
Greenland ; and the descendants of these
primitive immigrants now form the suckers,
white mullets, shiners, whitefish, and red-fins
of the Canadian lakes and rivers. Thus the

THE CARP POND.

141

cyprinoids have spread over the whole of the
old Continent and of North America. But
the sea forms the great barrier in the way of
migration for fresh- water creatures ; so that
they have not yet been able to get beyond
the limits of this northern land-surface, long
united in a single continent by the elevation
of the Icelandic bank. Australia we know
has never been joined to Asia or the rest of
the world since the cretaceous period at least,
and therefore there are no cyprinoids in
Australia. South America has only recently
been linked to the northern continent by the
elevation of the narrow mountain belt at
Panama which causes so much trouble to
M. de Lesseps, and it still preserves for the
most part its own very antiquated and
isolated fauna of llamas, alpacas, armadillos,
sloths, and ant-eaters ; so that into South
America too the cyprinoids have not yet had
time to penetrate. Of course they are equally
absent from the islands of the Pacific, cut off
as those oceanic archipelago? are from all the

142 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

rest of the world by a broad and practically
impassable stretch of deep sea. If one might
hazard a guess as to the future, apart from
the interference of man, it is most likely that
the carps will first pass down the Isthmus of
Panama into the rivers of the Andes, and
thence, as the mountain species gradually
accustom themselves to lowland tropical con-
ditions, into the Amazon valley; that their
invasion of Australia must be deferred till
some slow secular elevation has done away
with Torres Straits and the Java Sea ; and
that in all human probability they will never
naturally get over the obstacles which seem
to shut them out for ever from the archi-
pelagos of the Pacific.

In their origin the cyprinoids were thus
Alpine fishes of the torrents, not lazy lurkers
on the muddy bottoms of inland ponds. It
is only the accident of their long residence
among the great alluvial levels of the Chinese
basins which has given our own domesticated
carp their distinctive specific features. Most

THE CARP POND.

i43

of the cyprinoids are still lovers of running
water, and many species still haunt the up-
land torrents of their native Central Asian
home. Another family, the siluroids, is by
descent the really typical group of muddy
water fishes. In England, we have no
siluroids — our streams are too pure and clear
and rapid for them — but in Germany the slow
rivers of the eastern plains support the big
wels, and in America the cat-fishes are found
abundantly in all swamps and shallow waters
of the great central level. Dr. Gunther has
traced the migrations of this important group,
as well as those of the carps — they form now
about one-fourth of all known freshwater
species — and has shown pretty certainly
whence they came and how far they have
gone. The siluroids are essentially fishes of
the sluggish waters in the plains, and they
seem to have had their origin in tropical
countries, where they still flourish best.
They have no scales, but are clad in a
slippery skin ; and they have always long

144 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

barbels, uhlch apparently fit them for a
marshy or muddy life. Probably they were
developed at a later date than the carps ; for,
while we find fossil cyprinoids abundantly in
the tertiary freshwater limestones of Oeningen
and Steinheim, in the lignites of Bonn and
Bilin, in the slates and shales of Sicily and
Sumatra, and even in the Idaho deposits of
North America, we find no fossil siluroids in
the European tertiaries at all, nor anywhere
nearer than the fresh-water strata of the
Malay Archipelago. Hence we may fairly
conclude that at a period when the carps were
already widely spread over the whole northern
hemisphere, the cat-fish were still mainly con-
fined to the neighbourhood of their original
tropical home. ^ - -

Nevertheless, the primitive siluroid had
some striking advantages on his side, which
have enabled his descendants to outstrip the
carps, considering their juniority in time, in
the race for the occupation of the fresh waters
of the world. Not only does their skeleton

THE CARP POND, , 145

show certain very special modifications,
adapted to their peculiar mode of life, but
they are also comparatively cosmopolitan in
their tastes, being able to enter the sea, to
which some species have taken permanently,
though still keeping for the most part to
shallow muddy bottoms. As they are thus
but little deterred by intervening oceans, they
were enabled to spread rapidly over the whole
of the tropics, reaching Northern Australia
from India, and even crossing from South
America to the Sandwich Islands. As yet,
however, they have not made their way into
the coral islands of the Pacific. Northward
they spread far more slowly, as they are no
lovers of cold water. Only one species has
penetrated into Europe, and but few into
temperate Asia. The North American
kinds, though more numerous, belong all to
a single group. Towards the south temperate
regions, where the land tapers slowly south-
ward, they spread slowest of all ; so that the
family is entirely wanting in Tasmania, New

146

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

Zealand, and Patagonia. Facts of dis-
tribution like these were utterly meaningless
before we obtained the key of evolutionism ;
but with that key to open their meaning they
become at once speaking evidence as to the
former migrations and relative descent of the
whole group of creatures to which they refer.

147

'/ •>

XV.

A WELSH ROADSIDE.

Beyond Pensani the walk begins to grow
tame and somewhat tedious. Half-way to
Dyffryn, it is true, the long low range of the
Llawllech hills is cleft by the little torrent
valley of the Artro ; and just there the view
opens up behind into the beautiful glen of
Cwm Bychan, backed by the grand bald
summits of the two Rhinogs and their sister
hills. But beyond this one glimpse of the
wild mountain country in the rear, the high-
way becomes decidedly dull and monotonous.
On one side stretches the lowland, protected
from the sea by a succession of blown sand
dunes, which almost hide the horizon with

L 2

148 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

their line of stunted mounds : on the other
side rises the dreary unbroken range of
Llawllech, a mere treeless slope of scanty
barley and stony pasture land. To right and
left, the lane itself — for it hardly deserves to
be called a road — is bounded by stone walls,
which often shut out what little view might
otherwise be obtained over flat shore, distant
sea, or barren hillside ; so that altogether, for
the mere lover of the picturesque, the six
miles* walk hence to Barmouth forms a very
uninteresting termination to a pleasant and
diversified day's tramp.

To the geological eye, however, even the
dullest scenery often presents objects of
special interest which would never strike the
casual unscientific observer. Railway cut-
tings, which appear to most people mere
blank interruptions of the general prospect,
assume for the enthusiastic geologist the
guise of delightful sections made on purpose
to display to him the nature and succession
of the strata. Just so this somewhat weary

A WELSH ROADSIDE,

149

bit of walled-in Welsh lane is fraught with
much interest of its own for those who choose
to look at it aright. For the boundary walls
are built, not of square-quarried stone, but of
round and shapeless boulders, often thickly
dappled with patches of grey or orange
lichen, and loosely piled together, in rough
primitive fashion, without cement or mortar.
If one examines them closely they prove also
to be scratched and grooved with parallel
lines ; and these lines the geologist at once
recognises as due to the grinding action of
glaciers. The boulders, in fact, were trans*
ported hither by the great ice-sheet which
once covered the whole country side here-
abouts, and which ran out far into the bed of
what is now the Irish sea.

Indeed, the entire side of Llawllech con-
sists for the most part of one huge moraine,
a mere mass of glacial debris, mainly made
up of fine mud, with ice-worn boulders and
pebbles disposed loosely through its midst,
like raisins and currants in a school plum-

ISO VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

pudding. That is what makes this low range
so monotonous and uniform in surface ; it
displays no jagged and weathered craggy
rocks, no deep glens cut by ice or rivers, but
it still shows for the most part only the long
rounded sloping contour of the original
moraine, slightly cut through in places by
uninteresting streams. In the railway cut-
tings below one can admirably see the com-
position of the moraine, with its ground-tone
of mud and its interspersed boulders ; while
here by the roadside one finds just the self-
same boulders, picked off the ground for the
sake of a clearance, and piled up loosely to
make a rude stone wall. In the Snowdon
district, especially along the pretty drive
through Nant Gwynant from Beddgelert to
Capel Curig, numbers of sections have been
made in the moraines for road metal, the
hard boulders being dug out and broken up
for this utilitarian purpose ; and on the slopes
above, near the mountain tarn of Llyn
Llydaw, one may still observe the huge

A WELSH ROADSIDE, 151

bossed surfaces of the native rock worn by
the glaciers which heaped up these refuse-
piles — roches moutonndeSy as they call them in
Switzerland — perfect domes of bare stone,
even now sharply grooved and marked with
the striae scratched upon them by the super-
incumbent ice-stream.

It is impossible to avoid noticing that the
walls are very much thicker than they need be
for any practical purpose ; indeed, in some
places they are as much as four or ^m^ feet
broad. The truth is, such walls are rather a
simple way of getting rid of the boulders
than a protective margin to the fields. In
trying to cultivate these glacial slopes, the
first thing to do is to w^eed out the surface
boulders ; and the easiest plan of doing so is
to pile them up all round the stubbed portion
of the field. The thickness of the wall
depends upon the number of the boulders.
Where they are many the field is small and
the wall big ; where they are few the field is
larger and the wall not quite so clumsy-

152 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

looking. In some places, however, even the
wall does not suffice to use up all the loose
fragments ; and then they are often packed
in the corners so as to cant the angles with a
small flat-topped triangular platform. Of
course the very stoniest bits are wholly unen-
closed, or given over to mountain sheep, who
find a scanty pasture in the chinks between
the boulders ; and the valleys of the little
rivulets are almost always mere gorges of
naked round stones, because here the water
has washed away all the soft earth between
them. Such denudation is always going on
more slowly, even in the other parts ; and
the plain or marshland which lies between
the foot of the hills and the sea has been
built up by the detritus thus carried down
from the moraines, and protected from incur-
sion by the hillocks of blown sand.

It is interesting, however, to think that
every one of these big round stones has been
once like ourselves a tourist, and has travelled
on the side or bottom of a glacier to its pre-

A WELSH ROADSIDE. 153

sent place, and that, too, at a date long sub-
sequent to the undoubted arrival of man upon
the earth. It was many ages after the low-
browed black-fellows hunted the rhinoceros
and the mammoth in the swamps of Gray's
Inn and the jungles of Fleet Street, that the
ice-sheet bore these boulders down the sides
of Llawllech to this big moraine. Some of
the smaller pebbles may even once have been
shapely stone hatchets of palaeolithic man,
long since ground down into indistinguishable
roundness by the enormous friction of the
moving glacier. In most cases, cne can go
so far as to decide actually where the boulders
come from by the nature of the rock from
which they are derived ; this bit must have
been broken off the side of Aran, that bit
must have been detached from the summit of
Rhinog, and this other again must have
travelled all the way from the slopes of the
Berwyns. But, if any of them ever bore any
trace of human workmanship, all semblance
of manufactured articles has long been worn

154

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

away from their surface by the grinding ice-
mill. It is only in the protected floors of
flooded caves or among the subsisting drift
of glacial and interglacial rivers that we can
now find any traces of man's early handicraft.
Everywhere else the ice-sheet has planed
everything bodily off the face of the land:
that is why we find few or no palaeolithic
skeletons. And we must never forget, in
estimating the past history or present fauna
and flora of England, that this total blank in
our geological and archaeological annals cuts
in like a complete interruption between the
two known ages of human life in this island.
Everything that existed in Britain before the
last great ice-age was cleaned utterly off the
face of the country by the vast system of
glaciers which then grew up ; everything that
now exists in it has come into the land since
the date of that gradual but all embracing
cataclysm. The men, the animals, the plants
which lived here before the ice covered the
country belonged to extinct types, or to

A WELSH ROADSIDF,

155

Species now confined to southern climates ;
when the ice cleared away it had swept off
almost every relic of their existence, and a
new race, a new fauna, and a new flora, came
to occupy the virgin soil.

- A

156 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

; • *^, »■

f .* ^ - '::'V'

XVI.

SEASIDE WEEDS,

Behind the bar which closes the wide throat
of the estuary here at Stourmouth a long ex-
panse of sand stretches away inland almost as
far as the weirhead that marks the highest
point of tidal action in the little river. Some
of this sand lies below the level of high water,
and is therefore very soft and smooth and
muddy ; but a large portion of it stands
always high and dry, blown about into uneven
ridges and hollows by the strong winds that
rush down the opening between the two
parallel ranges of neighbouring hills. As I
sit upon one of these ridges watching the
slow clouds drifting landward before the

SEASIDE WEEDS, 157

westerly breeze, I have picked from between
the sand a little creeping weed, root and all,
with thick, fleshy, cylindrical leaves, and a
stout thorn at the end of each. It is a
common seaside plant — saltwort or kali ; and,
like sand-loving plants generally, it has very
succulent and juicy foliage. The reason for
this fleshy habit under such circumstances
seems clear enough. Marshy plants, or
plants which live in ordinary moist soils, can
get plenty of water whenever they want it,
and so they need not store away any against
emergencies in case of droughts. Even dry
hillside shrubs, like the rosemaries and heaths,
can thrust their roots deep into the earth, and
so manage always to get a little supply of
moisture, sufficient to keep their hard crisp
foliage alive, and their sap slowly circulating,
even in the driest summer weather. But
weeds which live on sand must economise
water whenever they can get it. The rain
that falls upon the spots where they grow,
sinks rapidly through the surface, and in a few

158

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

hours the whole place is just as dry as it wa^
before the shower. Accordingly those plants
which have accommodated themselves to
such situations have necessarily acquired very
thick and fleshy leaves ; and this acquisition
was the easier to make, because proximity to
the sea produces in all plants a slight succu-
lent tendency. As soon as rain falls they
drink up all the waterthat comes in the way
of their spreading rootlets, and then they
store it away in their broad leaves or thick
stems till they require it for use. Just as the
camel takes one long drink before starting,
which supplies his wants for some days in
the desert, so the saltwort takes one long
drink at each shower and subsists upon that
till the next rainfall. . . . .

The history of this seaside weed can be
easily traced by means of its own existing
structure. By origin it is one of the goose-
foots, a family of small weedy-looking plants,
which grow abundantly in all waste places and
over heaps of rubbish near cultivated ground.

SEASIDE WEEDS. 1 59

The flower of the kali, indeed, is still essen-
tially a goosefoot flower — a mere incon-
spicuous little green blossom, hidden in the
angle between the stem and the leaves, after
the fashion of many plants which have not
learnt how to develop bright petals for the
attraction of insects. But the goosefoots, in
the course of their spread over the earth,
would often shed their seeds upon sandy
places ; and being as a rule originally rather
disposed to fleshiness, especially in the stems,
they must often have managed to live on even
in these unfavourable situations where most
other plants would starve or wither outright.
Of course only the very fleshiest specimens
would survive to blossom and set their seed ;
and these seeds, again, would produce young
plants, most of which would be just as succu-
lent as their parents, while a few would
doubtless surpass them in this respect. As
such natural weeding out of the least adapted
forms would occur with every drought, and as
the best adapted which lived through the

i6o

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

droughts by virtue of their superior fleshiness
would occasionally cross with one another,
either by wind-fertilisation or by stray visits
of pollen-hunting midges, it is clear that in
the course of time a new succulent species
would be slowly evolved. As a matter of
fact, the goosefoots have really given origin
to several such sand-loving weeds, each of the
principal groups having probably a separate
origin from some particular kind of strictly
terrestrial goosefoot.

After the saltwort had grown succulent it
began also to grow prickly. For sand-loving
plants are naturally exposed to very great
danger from herbivorous animals, against
which they are accordingly compelled to pro-
tect themselves by some hostile device. In
the first place, there is comparatively litde
vegetation on sandy spots, so that each plant
runs an exceptional chance of being eaten.
Then, again, the succulence and juiciness of
sand-haunting weeds make them particularly
tempting to thirsty animals, which are sure to

SEASIDE WEEDS. i6i

eat all unprotected specimens. Hence, as a
rule, only those survive which happen to have
developed some unpleasant personal peculi-
arity. Many sand-haunting or desert plants
are more or less pungent or have disagreeable
alkaline essences stored up in their leaves ;
and these alkaline constituents, which they
easily obtain from the soil, formerly caused
many of them (saltwort and glasswort among
the number) to be burnt for barilla. In
avoiding the Scylla of animal tastes such
plants fell into the Charybdis of human in-
dustrial usages. But most sand-loving weeds
have solved the difficulty in another way by
simply acquiring thorns or prickles. In the
saltwort, each leaf ends in a stout spine, which
of course runs into the nose of any too inquir-
ing cow or donkey. In many cactuses, again,
the leaves have been reduced to sharp thorns,
which cover the surface of the cylindrical
stem, and form the most effectual possible
protection against the attacks of animals. In
the West Indies, cactus hedges line all the

M

i62 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

roads in the plains, and rise in a solid wall to
a height of fifteen or twenty feet. No animal
on earth dare attempt to pass through such a
hedge; and the task of cutting one down,
when necessary, is extremely difficult. On
bare dry expanses, like the Mexican plain,
cactuses and agaves run wild in every direc-
tion, collecting what little moisture they can
in their thick stems or big succulent leaves,
and defending it against herbivorous enemies
by their formidable spines. To prevent eva-
poration, they are covered by a thick and
very firm epidermis, so that they lose very
little of their moisture even during months of
drought. .

What these great desert plants do on a
large scale, our little English saltv/ort does
on a much smaller scale. It has the same
strong prickles, the same thick, juicy leaves,
the same protective epidermis, and the same
general aspect or habit of growth as the
cactuses themselves. If one were to enlarge
it tvventyfold, every casual observer would

SEASIDE WEEDS, 163

set It down as " desert species at once.
Indeed, so naturally do all these peculiari-
ties result from the mode of life affected by
sand-haunting plants, that in India, where
there are no true cactuses, certain native
spurges are universally known by that name,
because they so exactly resemble them in
general external appearance. By pedigree
the two families are wholly unconnected ;
but in America certain weeds of a kind some-
thing like our own stone-crops and house-
leeks, having got loose on the sand-wastes
of the tropical belt, adapted themselves by
their succulence and their defensive prickles
to the necessities of their new situation, while
in Asia certain totally distinct weeds of a
kind closely resembling our spurges and
mercuries happened to establish themselves
on the similar sand-wastes of sub-tropical
India, and necessarily adapted themselves in
just the same manner to just the same sort
of situations.

In fact, we now know that these adaptive

M 2

1 64 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

and functional resemblances are the worst
possible guide to relationship by descent.
Almost all plants which grow under water
have very finely divided leaves ; but they are
all aberrant members of the most diverse and
widely separated families. They have been
compelled to acquire long, thin, waving
leaflets because there was so little carbonic
acid in the water where they lived that they
could not extract carbon enough from it to
build up a full, large, round type of leaf;
exactly as all aquatic animals have much-
branched gills to catch the stray floating
particles of free oxygen dissolved in the
water, while all land-animals have big in-
ternal lungs, into which the abundant free
oxygen of the atmosphere pours copiously at
every inhalation. Put any two distinct
groups of plants or animals into exactly
similar circumstances, and the chances are
that they will adapt themselves to those
circumstances in exactly similar ways, thus
V masking their original unlikeness. But if you

SEASIDE WEEDS. ' 165

examine their minute internal structure, you
will probably still find many small points of
deep-seated difference, underlying their ex-
ternal adaptive similarity ; and these points
are the important clues which aid us in
discovering their real relationship to unlike
groups elsewhere. Thus the humming-birds
of America and the sun-birds of India are
extremely similar in outer appearance, be-
cause they are both highly adapted to a
flower-feeding existence ; but their minute
anatomy shows that the one family are
modified swifts or swallows, while the other
family are modified tropical fruit-eaters.
Hence we are landed at last in the apparent
paradox so ingeniously pointed out by Mr.
A. R. Wallace, that the less functionally
useful ai y structure may be, the greater
becomes its value as a test of relationship by
descent.

i66 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

XVII.
A MOUNTAIN TARN.

One could not find many pleasanter seats in
England, or Wales either, than this big dry
boulder, with a niche that seems intentionally
designed to accommodate the contour of the
human backbone, overlookinsf the calm sur-
face and bare craggy sides of a little mountain
tarn. I have come up here this morning on
sport intent, to find a specimen of a peculiar
species of trout, which haunts this one tiny
sheet of water, and occurs nowhere else
in the whole universe. Not that I am an
active sportsman myself ; my portion of the
service is always confined to the attitude of
those who stand and wait ; and I don*t even

A MOUNTAIN TARN, 167

stand to-day, having found so comfortable a
seat in the water-worn hollows of a granite
boulder. But the young landscape painter
from Manchester, who is making such a
pretty picture of the glen from his tent close
by, can throw a fly as well as any man in Lan-
cashire ; and when I mentioned to him some
time since my wish to get one of these local
trout as a specimen for examination, he pro-
mised to entice one up for me on the very first
morning when the light was unpropitious for
sketching in the glen. To-day he dropped
in after breakfast to tell me he could spare
me a few hours for fishing ; so here we are
beside the tarn, and here is the Llyn Gwer-
nant trout in person, flapping and floundering
on the bare rock at my side — poor creature !
— in its last gasps, while I am calmly pre-
pared to watch and report upon its specific
peculiarities. I have certain compunctions
of my own about the morality of catching a
live trout for such a purpose ; but as my
artist friend still continues angling for more^

1 68 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

which, when caught, I shall doubtless eat for
supper with a clear conscience, I may as well
stifle my scruples now, and take notes of my
trout while he is still fresh and lifelike.
After all, it is just as legitimate, I suppose,
to catch a fish in the interests of science as
to catch it for the sake of dishing it up at
supper in a tempting brown case of ^^^ and
bread-crumbs.

There can be no doubt or hesitation
about the right of the Llyn Gwernant trout
to rank as a separate species. The marks
which distinguish it from the common
speckled trout of English brooks and rivers
are many and undeniable. But the question
how it came here is a very curious and in-
teresting one. We have in Britain altogether
some twelve kinds of trout, peculiar to our
own islands ; and most of them are limited,
as in this case, to a single station, usually a
mountain pool with only one precipitous out-
let. On the old theory, which represented
every species of plant or animal as the direct

A MOUNTAIN TARN, 169

result of a special creation, we could have
had no alternative but to suppose that each
of these kinds of mountain trout was specially
created in and for the particular little pool
where we now find it. But the new theory
of evolution simply teaches us that each trout
has been evolved under peculiar circum-
stances to suit the special conditions of these
isolated sheets of water in which they live.
Let us look a little closely at the position of
Llyn Gwernant, and consider why a unique
kind of trout should have been evolved just
there rather than elsewhere.

The tarn itself, one can see at a glance,
must be a glacial hollow. It was scooped
out by the grinding action of ice in the last
glacial epoch. Look up the glen, and then
down, and you will see that in either direction
the valley widens out from the lake as a
centre. But just about the neighbourhood
of the lake itself the sides trend inwards, so
as to enclose a small pass or gorge ; and
when the whole combe formed the bed of an

I70 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

ancient glacier, the ice in this part must have
been crowded together into a narrow com-
pass, and thus squeezed hard against the
sides and bottom of the gorge by the pressure
of the great ice-sheet in the rear. If you
look at the rock anywhere around the lake
you will see that it is worn quite smooth and
deeply scratched with ice-marks like those
which occur just below the summer level of
a glacier in Switzerland at the present day.
So the rock-basin in which the tarn lies must
itself be a product of the scooping action of
the glacier. When the ice melted away
under the genial climate of the post-glacial
period, a little stream took the place of the
vast frozen mass, and this stream expanded
in the hollow till it filled the small lake and
then ran out at the lower end. Hence the
arrival of the trout in Llyn Gwernant must
necessarily date from some period not earlier
than the end of the last ice age. Whatever
peculiarities they may display when compared
with the parent type must have been de-

A MOUNTAIN TARN, 171

veloped since that time. Indeed, even if
the lake had been here before the glacial
epoch, the ancestors of these trout could not
have dwelt in it ; for we know that every
species of animal now living in Britain must
necessarily have entered the island since the
ice-sheet cleared away.

How did the trout first get into the tarn }
That seems at first sight a difficult question,
for the only stream that communicates with
it is the little torrent, broken by a hundred
small cascades, which drains its waters into
the river below. No fish could now possibly
leap up these continuous waterfalls from
ledge to ledge, some of them as much as
twenty or thirty feet high. Hence local
naturalists have speculated not a little on the
origin of the trout, one theorist suggesting
that they were carried hither by a water-
spout, another that the eggs were brought
into the pool clinging to the feet of a water-
fowl, a thira that the ancestral fish were
placed in siltc by the finger of the Almighty

172 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

— which latter metaphor he does not deign
to explain for us in full. For my own part,
I do not incline thus clumsily to solve the
problem with a dens ex machind ; one cannot
fairly consider it a digmis vindice nodus. It
seems to me more likely that when the fish
first came here the little stream still flowed
in a moderately continuous basin, worn for it
by the glacier, down to the level of the
river, which then ran in a far higher channel
than at present. Up this gentle incline the
trout which were slowly spreading through
the unoccupied fresh waters of Britain, after
the thawing of the great ice-sheet, must have
made their way into Llyn Gwernant.

But when they had once got there, the
brook and the river went on carving their
basins through the rock and the glacial soil,
till at last they reached their present levels,
the three highest falls on the brook being
just those where it meets the newer valley of
the main stream by Dolserau Mill. So after
a while no more trout could reinforce the

A MOUNTAIN TARN, 173

small colony in the tarn, which would thus
have room to develop in their own way to
suit their own peculiar circumstances, without
any cross of fresh blood from the old stock
to keep them true to the general type of the
race in the lowland rivers. For, as Mr. A.
R. Wallace has ingeniously pointed out, such
isolated mountain pools are really the aquatic
equivalents or analogues of oceanic islands.
In all such limited and hermetically closed
habitats every stray denizen is liable very
rapidly to undergo considerable changes.
The nature of the food-stuffs is new, and
their variety but scianty ; the enemies, if any,
are fewer in number and different in kind ;
the conditions are in every way more re-
stricted and more absolute than elsewhere.
Hence we have here in an intense degree all
the known factors of species-making. On
the one hand, spontaneous variations are
more likely to occur through change of food
and circumstances ; on the other hand, selec-
tive action must be exerted in a very special

174 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

and peculiar way. In the rivers of the low-
lands, trout are exposed to the attacks of pike
and other savage predaceous fish ; here, they
need only fear the herons and the angler.
In the lowlands, they hide among weed or
under banks ; here, they are exposed in full
sunshine against a light weedless gravelly
bottom. In the lowlands, they feed largely
upon land worms and other straggling prey ;
here, they subsist almost entirely upon flies
and other winged insects. Accordingly, the
qualities which ensure success in the one
habitat are quite different from those which
ensure success in the other ; and as the suc-
cessful alone survive and propagate their like,
it is not surprising that ever since the end of
the last ice age — probably no more than
some 70,000 years since — as many as eight
or ten separate species of mountain-tarn trout
should have been evolved in the British Isles
alone.

At the same time, it must be borne in
mind that while the isolated colonies in these

A MOUNTAIN TARN, 175

little pools have been slowly altering in one
direction under the influence of changed con-
ditions and of a more specialised natural
selection, the trout of the lowland rivers have
also doubtless been altering in another
direction, under the influence of stronger and
fiercer competition. The divergence has
been double-sided. We must not take the
existing lowland trout for a true representative
of the common ancestor, and then measure
the deviations of this. Llyn Gwernant species
by that fallacious standard. If ever a young
Llyn Gwernant troutlet, in his desire to see
the world, leaps the cascades and ventures
down into the river, we may be sure he is
snapped up bodily by the first pike that meets
him ; and that is why this rare species has
never spread elsewhere. It is only suited to
its own habitat ; while the common speckled
trout of our rivers are adapted to avoid the
various greater dangers of their wider world.
If we were to compare together all the special
mountain trout of the various Welsh and

176

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

Scotch pools, we should probably find that
they all agreed in certain broad characteristics
which really re-called the original ancestor
more fully than the lowland species recalls
him. Only these broad characteristics would
be largely masked by the special adaptation
of the Loch S tennis trout to the pools of
Orkney, and of the Llyn Gwernant species to
this particular petty Welsh tarn.

177

XVIII.

WILD THYME.

Except only Scotch heather — that artistic sav-
ing grace in our cold grey Northern hills — I
know no English plant which produces such
brilliant masses of warm colour on a large scale
as the little creeping blossoms of the wild
thyme. Here on the hillside, between the
jagged and jutting edges of rock, the rich
black peaty soil is thickly overgrown with
tangled patches of its purple flowers ; and
the sweet scent and the hum of bees mingle
in one's mind with that indefinite literary
charm derived from faint suggestions of Puck
and Oberon to make this mellow autumn
afternoon seem for a moment like a little bit

N

178 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

of Shakespeare's dreamland. For wild thyme
is essentially a bee-flower, and wherever it
grows you may see the big burly humble-bees
and the slenderer little hive workers, with
their honey-bags well distended and their legs
clogged by pollen, bustling about eagerly
from head to head of the tempting blossoms.
The whole labiate kind, to which wild thyme
belongs, has been developed In strict correla-
tion with the shape and habits of bees. No
other family of plants (except the orchids) has
flowers more curiously shaped than those of
the salvias and horehounds ; certainly no other
family is so noticeable for sweet or aromatic
scents as this, which includes the sage, mint,
thyme, basil, rosemary, balm, hyssop, pat-
chouli, marjoram, lavender, and catmint.
Such scents are always due to the selective ac-
tion of the higher insects, and are found only in
the flowers which they most frequent. Indeed,
we know geologically of no labiates before
the late tertiary period, which is just the time
when highly-developed bees began to present

WILD THYME, 179

themselves. The honey-seekers and the
honey-producers seem to have evolved side
by side for one another^s mutual benefit.

There is another noteworthy point, how-
ever, about the wild thyme which marks it
off from the rest of the labiates in one respect
as a very special and peculiar form. If you
pick a little spray from the clump that covers
this hollow in the rock basin you will see
that it has some small unopened buds at the
top end of the spike, some full-blown blossoms
half-way down, and some overblown flower-
cups on the stalk below. Now, if you look
into these overblown cups you will see that
they are apparently very shallow — much
more shallow than in this bit of hemp-nettle
— another common labiate — which I have
picked for comparison with them. Moreover,
the cup in the hemp-nettle is filled by four
little flattened nuts or seeds, while that of the
thyme seems to be empty. Of course the
object of all flowering is the production of
seeds ; and one might at first sight be tempted

N 2

i8o VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

to suppose that the thyme was quite barren,
and so failed entirely of its function in life.
But if you cut open the calyx of the over-
blown thyme-blossoms with a sharp penknife
you will find that the barrenness is only pre-
tended, not real. What seems to be the
bottom of the calyx is really a thick wall of
interlacing hairs ; and beneath this wall lie
four little nuts, just like those of the hemp-
nettle, only on a smaller scale. If, again, you
cut open one of the full-blown blossoms, you
will find that these hairs may be seen inside
the calyx even while the corolla tube is
entire, but they are then pressed back against
the throat by the tube itself As soon, how-
ever, as the tube and the corolla wither and
fall out — which they do at once when they
have played their part in the economy of the
plant by inducing a bee to visit and fertilise
it — the little hairs, relieved of this pressure,
jump out by their own elasticity, and com-
pletely obstruct the entrance to the calyx,
thus forming, as it were, a false bottom.

• WILD THYME. i8i

Unless you were in the secret you would take
it for granted that the calyx was empty, and
had either shed its nutlets or else never con-
tained any at all.

Now this is exactly the impression which
the plant wishes to produce ; or, to "put it
more correctly, it is because the plant has
thus succeeded in producing a wrong impres-
sion on the minds of birds and insects that it
has acquired this false bottom of interlacing
hairs, and has so survived in the struggle for
existence. Why the wild thyme finds such
deception pay is simple enough to under-
stand. Here close at hand is a bit of mouse-
ear chickweed, well in fruit. The plant is
covered by numbers of little capsules, each
containing a dozen seeds or more ; but if you
cut them open, you will find almost every
capsule, in this district at least, has been
invaded by a perfect plague of little red or
orange worms, which devour most of the
seeds before they arrive at maturity. Hence
the chickweed, being unprotected against

1 82 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

their depredations, is obliged to produce an
enormous quantity of seeds, at a ruinous cost
to its constitution, most of which get eaten
up without doing any good at all to the
species. For aught we know to the con-
trary, these red worms may be now in course
of exterminating the chickweed, much as the
Colorado beetle would exterminate the
potato, or as the phylloxera would exter-
minate the vine, if we did not invent all kinds
of Paris greens and institute all sorts of
national quarantines to check their triumphal
progress. Every now and then some new
insect pest in this way sweeps across a con-
tinent, killing or threatening to kill some
particular species ; and when the plant which
it attacks is one useful to man we note and
chronicle its advance, which we are often
successful in arresting ; but when the invasion
is only directed against a common weed none
but naturalists observe its course, and even
they can hardly obtain the proper data for
estimating its advance, since nobody keeps a

WILD THYME. 183

record of the acreage under knotweed, or the
average yearly yield of the goosefoot crop.

Now if, in such a case, any particular
plants of the infested species happen to be
protected against the intruder by some small
peculiarity of structure, they will survive
when their fellows perish, and a new species
will tend to be set up, possessing the pecu-
liarity which saved the lives of its ancestors.
This, or something like this, is what must
have happened to the wild thyme and its
close relative the marjoram. They found
themselves exposed to some special danger
which did not threaten the other and larger
labiates ; and those alone survived which
possessed in a nascent form this fringe of
hairs concealing the nuts within. Perhaps the
selective agency at work was some small bird
or insect which could not tackle the larger
and harder nutlets of the dead-nettle and the
stachys : perhaps it was some creeping worm
against which the stiff and prickly stem hairs
of the bigger species formed an efficient

1 84 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

ckevatix de /rise. At any rate, the hairy
fringe in the throat of the calyx of the wild
thyme protected its seeds against some dan-
ger to which they would otherwise have been
exposed ; and only those individuals which
possessed it finally survived in the struggle
for life. • " ' '

Such special means of protection for
ripening fruits or seeds are common enough
in nature ; but it is curious how vast is the
variety of form or device which they assume.
Here, for instance, in the bit of boggy land
formed by the little rill on its way through
the rock basin, another small labiate grows in
profusion, the lesser skullcap. Now skull-
cap takes its name from a peculiarity of its
own, which answers in a different way just
the same purpose as the interlacing hairs of
the wild thyme. On the back of the calyx is
a large scale or raised spur, which looks
something like the shade of an old-fashioned
cap while the flower is in full bloom ; but as
soon as the corolla has withered, the upper

WILD THYME. 185

lip of the calyx closes over the four nutlets,
while this scale assumes its place and so pro-
duces the effect of an empty seed-vessel.
Any prying bird or insect which looked into
such a calyx on its foraging expeditions would
be sure to conclude that it had already shed
its seeds, and so go off to another plant.
Thus in two closely related species we see
two totally different plans for securing the
self-same end. In one group, the originally
accidental presence of a few hairs in the
throat gave rise to a new departure in one
direction ; in another group, the habit of
closing over the nuts, with perhaps the rudi-
ment of a scale on the back, gave rise to a
different departure in another direction.

The hop supplies us with a very similar
case in a widely unlike family of plants.
Hops, as Kentish farmers know only too
well, are liable to attack from * the fly * and
many other enemies. To protect their seeds,
the hope of future generations, from these
marauders, the vines have hit out the plan

1 86 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

of producing hops, that is to say, little leafy
imbricated cones which cover the blossoms.
After flowering, the scales of the cone be-
come much enlarged, and quite conceal the
small seed-like fruits ; and it is these protec-
tive organs which we Northern nations apply
to our own uses, corrupting corn with them,
as Tacitus naively remarks, in quandam vini
similiiudinem. Indeed, it may be said
roughly that human beings invariably defeat
the original intention of plants, by cultivating
and selecting them in order to eat up those
very seeds, fruits, roots, and tubers which the
plants themselves had richly stored with
starches, albumens, and other food-stuffs for
the use of themselves or their descendants.
We plunder the storehouses which the species
designed for its own benefit ; yet by saving
some for seed and sowing it in fitly prepared
places we keep up the life of the species far
more effectually than it could ever have been
kept up had the plant been left entirely to its
own devices. ,

187

XIX.

THE DONKEYS ANCESTORS.

He is a dear shaggy old donkey, with the
true pathetic donkey eyes, and that wonderful
donkey power of making himself perfectly
happy on a bare rocky hillside upon four
sprouting thistles, a bit of prickly carline, and
three square yards of wet turf at the outcrop
of the little spring, overgrown with rank bog-
asphodel and stringy goose-grass. Given
this delicious pabulum, with five minutes*
total freedom from beating or bullying, and
your shaggy donkey is in his seventh heaven.
That is what constitutes the true poetry and
pathos of his life. I am not ashamed to side
with Coleridge on that question, in spite of
the sneers in * English Bards,* or in * Rejected

1 88 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

Addresses/ A donkey is a really pathetic
and sympathy-rousing figure in nature,
because, with all his hard blows and buffeting,
he retains to the last a brave cheery philo-
sophy which teaches him to take an optimistic
view of things whenever it is possible — a
sort of monochronic hedonism under diffi-
culties— that contrasts favourably with the
despondent Hartmannic theories of the
universe so much in favour with well-fed and
bushy-bearded German professors. Scho-
penhauer's demonstrations trouble him not :
Mr. Mallock's doubts as to the abstract
desirability of existence enter not into his
thoughtful pate : let him but loose from his
hard day's work to a dinner of herbs of the
toughest, and he forgets the pessimistic prob-
lem forthwith in the delights of freedom and
the exquisite pungency of his tuft of thistle
head. Shall we not strive to make life a little
easier in the future for such a patient, hard-
working, brave-hearted, indomitable little
philosopher as this ? «

THE DONKEY'S ANCESTORS, 189

How, indeed, could the common and
universal notions about the stupidity of
donkeys ever have originated ? A sheep, if
you will, is stupid, and so is a rabbit ; but I
doubt whether there is really in all nature a
more careful, sensible, intelligent, and wide-
minded brute than the common donkey. I
have always admired the genuine penetration
of those South American mountaineers who
told Mr. Darwin that they would give him
the * most rational * mule on which to cross
a dangerous pass of the Andes. They knew
the capacities of the mule ; and I have no
doubt they knew those of the donkey too.
The fact is, every one who has watched don-
keys closely must have noticed innumerable
proofs of their unusual mental gifts. They
stand, with the horse, the elephant, the camel,
and the monkeys, at the head of the animal
world, intellectually considered. (Dogs of
course I put out of consideration, as products
of direct human teaching.) But donkeys are
the final flower of long ages of native evolu-

I90 . VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

tion, the natural head and crown of one great
line of mammalian development. To doubt
their intelligence is to impugn the whole con-
duct of nature, to upset the entire system of
evolutionary psychology off-hand. Donkeys
cannot help being clever, because they are
the final survivors in the struggle for existence
in one of the most specialised, most highly
developed, and most dominant mammalian
stocks. They do not represent mere stranded
and struggling relics of older types, like the
very silly kangaroos, and ant-eaters, and
hedgehogs, which drag on a miserable
existence behind the times in out-of-the-way
holes and corners of the earth : they are one
of the finest developments of one of the most
successful branches of the great progressive
ungulate tribe. I feel a genuine respect for
every donkey I meet when I remember that
it was the mere accidental possession of an
opposable thumb that gave my ancestors a
start over his in the race for the inheritance

THE DONKEY'S ANCESTORS, 191

of the earth towards the very close of the

tertiary period. • " ^ ;

Of course everybody knows the wonderful

I

pedigree of the horse and donkey family,
which has been discovered imprinted upon
the later formations of America by Professor
Marsh, and reconstructed for us in full by
Professor Huxley. The horses are an ex-
tremely aberrant form of the ungulate tribe,
and their very earliest recognisable ancestor
must have had some points of resemblance
with the tapirs, some with the pigs, some
with the deer — nay, some even with the pro-
totype of the lemurs and of man himself. In
the lowest eocene beds of New Mexico,
Professor Marsh has found the first shadowy
forerunner of my donkey — an equine quad-
ruped which he has appropriately called
eohippus, with five toes to each hind foot,
and probably to each forefoot as well.
Already, however, this very vague progenitor
of the horse family had begun to develop

192 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

towards the distinctive peculiarity of his race
— the soHd hoof, adapted to free scouring
over open grass-grown plains ; for one of his
five toes is, even at this early period, only in
a rudimentary condition. In the higher
eocenes of Wyoming and Utah we get a
rather more horse-like creature, orohippus, as
big as a fox, with four toes to his front feet
and three to his hind feet. Then, only about
a million years or so later, in the miocene of
Oregon and Nebraska, we find two more
specialised equine animals, miohippus and
mesohippus, as big as a sheep, with three
hoofed toes on the front feet, of which the
middle one is distinctly the largest, being, in
fact, the forerunner of the one final hoof in
our own horses. In the pliocene, again, we
come upon the bones of hipparion and proto-
hippus, as big as this donkey, with one stout
middle toe, much like our modern horse's
hoof, and a lateral one on each side which
does not reach to the ground. Side by side
with these very horse-like forms occurs

THE DONKEY'S ANCESTORS. 193

another even more specialised type, plio-
hippus, in which the lateral toes have become
reduced to mere splint-bones, as in our exist-
ing species. Here, we have all often been
told, we have probably preserved for us
several distinct steps in the evolution of our
horses and donkeys. One solid hoof on each
foot gives unarmed herbivorous animals of
their peculiar habits the best possible chance
in the struggle for life ; and so towards the
development of this one hoof they have been
slowly verging ever since eocene times, by
the gradual enlargement of the central toe,
and the gradual suppression of all the rest.
They have no horns like the bison and the
buffalo ; but by their swiftness and sureness
of foot wild horses are able easily to hold
their own against all carnivorous enemies on
the grassy pampas of South America, as
zebras do on the great South African plateau,
and onagers on the broad steppes of Central
Asia.

Most people, however, do not know that

o

194 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

pari passtt with this development of a special
form of hoof adapted to the free roaming
existence of the horse tribe there has gone on
a constant increase in the relative size and
weight of the brain. Our comparative
anatomists as a rule naturally attach most
importance to the development of the bony
skeleton, and especially of those parts which
are most characteristic of families and genera.
Psychology is a subject that interests them
comparatively little. Hence we lay-readers
are apt to get rather surfeited with descrip-
tions of changes In the supra-condylold
foramen or the lateral ethmoid, about which
the world at large is culpably indifferent;
while we hear hardly anything as to the
evidences of mental development, about
which the world at large feels a much more
genuine interest. As a matter of fact. In the
pedigree of the horse and the donkey there
is abundant proof of such progress. The
brain of the evolving horse tribe goes on in-
creasing (as we judge from the skulls) with

'1

THE DONKEY'S ANCESTORS, 195

every advance in structure through tertiary-
times, not only absolutely as the whole
animal grows bigger, but relatively also in
proportion to the other parts. Indeed, there
has been a regular increase in intelligence
and brain-power among all the mammalia
from the moment of their first appearance
upon the earth till the present time. . -, . .
Such an increase naturally results from
the very conditions of evolution. Not only
the strongest and the physically best adapted
have survived in the long run, but the
cleverest and the shiftiest as well. All very
early mammals, discovered sparsely in the
secondary formations, have extremely small
and ill-developed brains. All surviving
isolated archaic forms, preserved in special
and long insulated areas, far from the fierce
competition of higher types, as is the case
with the marsupials of Australia, the low
lemuroid animals of Madagascar, and the
edentates of South America, have brains

hardly better than these primitive species.

o 2

196 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

All ancient types which still linger on as
burrowers or nocturnal prowlers in the great
continents, like our own moles and shrews
and hedgehogs, have also a very low grade
of intelligence, and a very poorly developed
brain. But as we rise toward the summit of
each great specialised and differentiated line
of modern mammals, we find a constant
increase in intelligence and brain-power,
exactly analogous to that which we can trace
historically in the horse tribe. The central
and least developed forms, like the rodents
and still more the insectivores, are compara-
tively stupid and helpless ; but the highly
adapted creatures which represent the final
outcome of the main divergent branches, such
as the ungulates, the carnivores, and the
quadrumana, are all remarkable for their ex-
ceptional intelligence. Of these crowning
species, the horse and the donkey stand at
the head of their own line, just as man stands
at the head of the quadrumana, or as the
elephant and the tiger stand at the head of

THE DONKEY'S ANCESTORS. 1^7

their special genealogical trees. So that the
donkey really cannot well avoid being an
extremely clever brute. Not quite so clever,
to be sure, as the higher monkeys and the
elephants ; for, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has
pointed out, the opposable thumb and the
highly mobile trunk with its tactile appendage
give these creatures an exceptional chance of
grasping an object all round, and so of
thoroughly learning its physical properties,
which has put them intellectually in the very
front rank of the animal world ; but in the
carnivores, the ruminants, and the horse tribe,
a very delicate sense of smell seems almost
to make up for the want of a special grasping
organ. At any rate the leading members of
these groups — the cats, bears, camels, deer,
bison, horse, and donkey — are all of them
conspicuous among their compeers for the
relatively high quality of their intellectual

gifts. •. ':::■'•;-■,;;■-;: ■;. ::i,:::.%. .^

198 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

. . . 4 : , .■ ■ • ', • ' '

\

•

. . > • .. . . I + ';' • J

. ■ X'' . '

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■ ; , > ,

■ * ,' •

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XX.

• •' • ;

■ *

BESIDE THE CROMLECH.

,- ;..■;■;■.

> i

On the long spur where the path loses itself
among bracken and heather, just below the
summit of Mynydd Mawr, I met an Ancient
Briton, from whom I tried to learn the way
to the cromlech. Unfortunately, my Ancient
Briton * had not the English/ and so failed
to comprehend the questions I put to him.
But, by mustering all my stock of Welsh in a
supreme effort, I managed at last to make
him understand what it was that I wanted.
* Oh, ay,' he says, in his native Cymric,
politely swallowing down his rising smile at
my imperfect //'s and c/is, ' You mean the
Fairy's Grave. Cross past the llyn and up

BESIDE THE CROMLECH. 199

the ledge of Crib Goch, and you'll find It on
the very crest of Mynydd.' I will not assert
that I fully understood him in every word,
but that was certainly the gist of his direc-
tions, eked out by a good deal of gesture and
pantomime ; and, at any rate, here I am at
last, stretched out at full length under the
shadow of the great monoliths and looking
across the bay, whitened by the foam of Sarn
Badrig, to the long clear-cut blue range of
the Carnarvonshire mountains. The sky is
cloudless and the horizon very free from
mist, so that I am well rewarded for my
pains ; for I can see the whole peninsula
from Snowdon on to Braich-y-Pwll rising and
sinking in hill or lowland, and at the very
end of all, Bardsey, the Isle of Bards, stands
square and solid against the sky-line, with a
solitary ship under full sail showing in the
very centre of the sound, and the Irish Sea
stretching away to southward, distinct and
blue as far as the eye can reach.

The cromlech itself Is a fine specimen of

200 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

a megalithic structure, piled up of four large
boulders from the neighbouring hillside, and
but little squared or hewn by artificial means.
The boulders do not belong to the same
Cambrian rock as the underlying hill ; they
are fragments of Snowdonian granite, trans-
ported hither by the glaciers of the great ice
age, which scratched the grooves and furrows
on the naked limestone of the mountain
itself I can trace these grooves all around
me on every hand ; and indeed the bossed
and rounded surface of all the shoulders
would in itself suffice to suggest glacial action
immediately to any geological eye. Similar
markings occur on the sides of the three
upright stones in the cromlech, and on the
under front of the table-stone which lies
across them ; but here and there the original
striated surface has been cut away by the
rude tools of the primitive cromlech builders,
in order roughly to shape the irregular
masses for their present position. For of
course cromlechs, though very ancient from

BESIDE THE CROMLECH, aoi

the historical point of view, are quite modern
in the geological or even the anthropological
estimate. They have been erected a long
way on the hither side of the glacial epoch.
There were men in Britain before the last ice
age, and they have left their memorials in
the rough chipped flint implements of the
drift and on the hardened floor of caves ; but
every trace of their presence has of course
been planed off the actual surface of the
country by the great sheets of ice which,
during the last glaciation, ground down the
whole face of England into bare undulating
folds of naked rock. The prehistoric monu-
ments which we now find on the surface of
the land, like this Welsh cromlech or the
numerous barrows of our English downs,
belong to a much later race, as one can see
at once from the very fact that they are so
often built up of glacial boulders. Indeed,
the earlier preglacial men were mere hunting
savages of the rudest type, wholly incapable
of co-operation for works such as these ; so

202 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

that even if the ice had not swept away every
trace of them, as it has now swept over the
whole face of Greenland, we should still have
few monuments of such early date save only
the angular hatchets of the drift and the
shapelier bone harpoons of the whale hunting
cave-men.

Originally, this cromlech must have been
covered with a barrow. It formed, indeed,
the central chamber of a neolithic tomb ; and
over it the earth was once heaped up in a
great and conspicuous pile. In England, as
a rule, the barrows still survive, especially in
all the south-eastern plain and the lesser hills
or downs. But in Wales and Cornwall, and
in the more mountainous regions generally,
where soil is scanty and denuding agents act
more rapidly, the barrows have oftener been
washed away by rain and torrents or slowly
crumbled down by sun and wind. That, no
doubt, is pardy the reason why people
generally believe that * Druidical remains,'
as they choose to call them, are specially

BESIDE THE CROMLECH. 203

frequent in these Keltic regions. It seems
natural enough] to suppose that ancient
British monuments should be carefully
preserved In such outlying spots as these
where the Ancient Britons still survive in
almost unmixed purity. But, as a matter of
fact, the cromlechs are really less preserved
here than elsewhere, because their barrows
have mostly been washed away, and the body
within has long since disappeared. The best
preserved cromlechs are, of course, those
which you cannot see at all, because they are
still covered with their encloslnof mound of
earth and still contain the bones and relics
of the dead man within them. It is the
desecrated tomb that we call a Druidical
monument ; the undesecrated we only de-
scribe as a prehistoric barrow.

There can be very little doubt that this
cromlech, like all others, was once upon a
time the tomb of an early chieftain. From
the general character of its workmanship, and
the very slight extent to which the stones have

204 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

been dressed, I feel pretty confident that it
must belong rather to the neolithic than to
the bronze age. Hither, some day five
thousand years since — perhaps ten thousand
for all that science can say — a crowd of brown-
skinned, short-statured tribesmen bore up the
dead body of their chief from the village in
the clearing on the little stream below. Here
with wooden levers and round logs for rollers
they toilfully brought together by sheer force
of straining sinews these four great ice-worn
boulders which lay scattered upon the slope
around. On the crest of Mynydd Mawr they
hewed them into rough s^ nmetry, and built
them into a rude imitation of the royal hut,
first placing the three uprights in position,
and then prising up the flat roofing-stone with
their log rollers over an inclined plane of
loose earth. In the hut thus formed they
placed the dead body of their chief, with his
weapons, his ornaments, and his household
goods, that his ghost might eat, drink, and
fight in the world of ghosts as it had done in

BESIDE THE CROMLECH. 205

the valley below. Then they piled up the
great mound of earth above it, to keep the
body safe from beasts or birds ; and around
the fresh heap they performed I know not
what barbaric orgies of dancing and sacrifice
and human massacres. Perhaps the wives
and slaves of the dead man were slain and
buried with him, to attend him in the other
world ; perhaps the blood of human victims
was poured over the nev;-made grave as an
offering to the thirsty ghost. Sitting in this
peaceful industrial nineteenth century on the
dry heather under the shadow of these
picturesque old stones, one can hardly
realise what nameleiss horrors they may not
have witnessed on the day when the neo-
lithic dwellers in the Llanfair valley first
raised them above the summit of Mynydd
Mawr. We think of them only under the
softening and romantic influence of time ; we
look upon their lichen-covered surface through
the tinged halo of poetical imagination ; they
are to us the hoary remnants of our fore-

206

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

fathers' world, the titanic, archaic, immemorial
temples of a forgotten creed. We do not
remember how terrible and sickening were
the realities of which these grey and yellow-
stained granite bosses are the sole remaining
vouchers. Time has turned the relics of some
Dahomey custom into a pretty antiquated
landmark and a romantic spot for holding a
picnic. ; r :-^.:r%

Since then the rain has washed down every
particle of soil that formerly covered the dead
chieftain's grave. But still the memory of
what it all once meant has lived on uninter-,
ruptedly in the minds of the Ancient Britons
around the spot. While the doctors of the
eighteenth century were talking learned non-
sense about Druidical temples and Arkite
worship, the Welsh peasants of Mynydd
Mawr were speaking correctly every day of
the Fairy's Grave. For fairies and goblins
and all such Keltic superstitions are mainly
based upon stories about the ghosts of these
neolithic people, whom the Keltic Welsh

BESIDE THE CROMLECH, 20

overcame and enslaved. But they would not
touch the graves where lay the chieftains of
the conquered folk, lest harm should come
upon them for the desecration. Many of the
neolithic people lived on as serfs under the
Kelts, and much of their blood may be noted
in the Llanfair villagers at the present day.
The Briton who told me the road here was
himself indeed much more than an Ancient
Briton ; he was partly at least one of the
Ancientest Britons, a dark-haired, squat,
brown-skinned man, of the regular long-
headed Euskarian type. Professor Rhys has
heard men taunted even now at Carnarvon
with being the descendants of fairies ; that is
to say, I take it, with being members of the
servile race ; just as in America, supposing
blacks and whites to have amalgamated for
centuries, it might still be a term of insult to
call a man a nigger. When we remember
that in all popular tradition the fairies are
said to live inside green grass-grown hills,
and that their names are always connected

2o8

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

with the prehistoric neolithic moRuments of
each particular district, a cromlech such as
this, the Fairy's Grave, gains in our eyes a
double interest. For while on the one hand
it is the undoubted burial-place of a Euskarian
chief, on the other hand it is the almost
certain birthplace of a Keltic fairy tradition.

209

'/ : ■''^

:■, "XXI. ■■

THE FALL OF THE LEAF.

Already the trees on the hillside are begin-
ning to assume their autumnal tints. Down
in the valley, it is true, beside the artificial
water in the park, the oaks, the willows, and
the ash trees are still quite green ; but higher
up among the slopes, where the wind beats
harder and the nights even now begin to grow
chilly, the limes and chestnuts have put on
their first pale streaks of yellow, the beeches
have turned in places to a rich brown, and
the mountain ashes are faintly purpling
against the glowing bunches of their scarlet
berries. On all the deciduous trees, indeed,
one can see that the living protoplasm is just

p

2IO

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

beginning to withdraw from the foliage into
the permanent tissues, leaving only those
beautiful minor principles whose deficient
vitality produces the lovely colours of autumn
leaves. It is the fashion to say that our
English woodlands cannot compare In this
respect with American or Canadian forests ;
and, no doubt, if we look only at the general
effect in the two hemispheres the trite remark
is true enough. America has undeniably one
tree — the maple — whose foliage fades under
that particular climate into graduated tints of
crimson, scarlet, orange, yellow, and pale
green, in a way that no European leaves have
learned to imitate ; and the maples are often
abundant enough to give a general tone of
brilliant colouring to aa entire landscape such
as we seldom see in our damper and mistier
England. Besides, the change from summer
to autumn comes on more rapidly there than
with us : a few consecutive nights of dry,
clear frost alter the whole face of nature, as if
by magic, from green to gold and purple, in

THE FALL OF THE LEAF, 2ii

a fashion which would be impossible with our
slow, long-drawn, cliangeable seasons. Yet,
in spite of all this, I am not prepared to
admit that even on the St. Lawrence or the
Hudson you can often see anything more
brilliant in its way than the yearly September
display on our Thames about Nuneham and
Pangbourne, or the Founder's Tower at
Magdalen, clad from pinnacle to base in
crimson Virginia creeper during the first
fortnight of October term. Such outbursts
of pure warm colour are certainly rarer here
than in America ; but when once seen they
enable one at least to realise, if my memory
serves me right, what Canadian woodlands
are like when the maples are set ablaze with
red and orange in the mellow evenings of
that too rare season, a successful Indian
summer.

It is a curious phenomenon, this annual
fall of all the leaves from almost all the trees
in northern climates ; and yet use has so
dulled us to its strangeness that we seldom

P2

213

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

even think about Its origin or meaning in any
way. Indeed, until certain late investigations
of the tertiary floras by M. Saporta, Mr.
Starkie Gardiner, and others, it is doubtful
whether anybody had ever asked himself any
question upon the subject at all. But these
investigations have shown pretty clearly that
deciduous trees are quite a modern novelty
upon our planet, things of the last two hun-
dred millennia or so, entirely due to the
immense cooling of the earth's surface which
began in the early tertiary period and culmi*
nated in the great glacial epoch. They are a
special product of hard times at the Pole, like
the white bears, the woolly rhinoceros, the
mammoth, and the snow-buntings. In the
tropics all the trees are evergreens, or at least
suffer no regular periodical loss of their
foliage ; but in the north we have few native
evergreens except the pines and firs, with
their needle-like leaves : and the two or three
hardy, broad-leaved exotic evergreens culti-
vated in our gardens or shrubberies, such as

THE FALL Ob THE L.EAF. 213

the rhododendrons, the laurels, and the bay-
trees, together with our own smaller holly,
box, and privet, hardly suffice to convey a
notion of the great southern forest trees, clad
all the year round in thick green, such as the
mangoes, the star-apples, and the sand-boxes.
Up to the beginning of the tertiary period,
however, large evergreens of what is now the
tropical type covered the whole of the world,
as far as the very Poles themselves. Green-
land and Spitzbergen then supported huge
forests of the same general character as those
which now spread over Brazil and the Malay
Archipelago. But from the first dawn of the
eocene onward, some combination of astro-
nomical and geographical causes, such as
those suggested by Dr. Croll and Mr. A. R.
Wallace, began to produce a general chilling
of the temperature at either Pole. Perhaps
the effect was wholly due, as Dr. Croll be-
lieves, to the eccentricity of the earth's orbit
and the precession of the equinoxes ; perhaps
it was further aided, as Mr. Wallace suggests.

214 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE,

by the elevation of great mountain ranges
about the polar regions, which became
nurseries for immense glaciers, and so sup-
plemented the natural chilling due to the
cosmical cycles. At any rate, whatever
theory we may adopt for its explanation, the
fact itself remains certain that from the eocene
age up to the glacial epoch the climate of the
earth grew steadily colder, the change being
of course most marked at either Pole, and
least- noticeable in the equatorial district.

Concomitantly with the steady decrease
of temperature thus forced upon the earth, a
new forest vegetation developed itself in
adaptation to the altered circumstances.
This modern cold- weather flora of course first
showed its face in the polar regions, or, to
speak more correctly, about the North Pole.
Here the fresh conditions first made them-
selves felt, and here all the familiar trees of
modern English woodlands had their generic
origin. In the eocene days the arctic flora
was still of a temperate or even sub-tropical

THE FALL OF THE LEAF. 215

aspect. But in the miocene age this tem-
perate arctic flora was driven southward by
the advancing cold, while a more strictly
northern type of vegetation began to show
itself among the hardy survivors which could
accommodate themselves to the chillier win-
ters of the new epoch. In the pliocene period,
once more, the arctic miocene trees invaded
northern and central Europe, and a still
colder type appeared around the Poles.
Finally, with the pleistocene age, masses of
ice began to occupy the North Pole itself,
and drove even the hardiest and most arctic
vegetation down to the Mediterranean basin,
while England and half Germany were
covered by the enormous sheet of permanent

glaciers. . ■- ''•'■:,.•. :;.-,^:vr'-"..-'-v

Now though the conifers, with their tough
capillary leaves, did not suffer largely from
the change, the evergreen tropical trees were
clearly quite unfitted for conditions such as
these. Their big leaves could do no serious
work in the way of assimilating carbon from

2i6 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

the atmosphere in the cold and gloom of north-
ern winters ; and the wind would only tear
them off by thousands and waste the chloro-
phyll and starches laid up in their tissues.
To meet this difficulty the modern deciduous
oaks, ashes, and elms were developed.
These trees do not merely allow their leaves
to fall off with the wind, but they make
actual provision for such a contingency be-
forehand. Each leaf-stalk is provided with a
row of special empty cells, which are so con-
structed that as soon as the leaves begin to
die they rot away, and accordingly let the leaf
fall readily, leaving a clean, dry scar, instead
of waiting till some violent storm wrenches
them off, tearing the living tissues and
wasting the sap by bleeding. Moreover,
when autumn comes on, the living and utilis-
able material in each leaf is first withdrawn
into the bark and branches, where it is stored
up during the winter in order to feed the
young leaf-buds in the succeeding spring ;
and then the row of specialised division-cells

THE FALL OF THE LEAF. 217

begins to warp, and lets the now useless stele-
ton of the blade drop off with the wind. Those
large-leaved trees which thus learned to
economise their stock of food-stuffs were
alone able to compete advantageously with
the wiry and tough-skinned pines or firs ; and
thus many distinct families of forest trees,
such as the maples, the oak and beech tribe,
the elms, and the apple group, none of which
are at all related to one another, have quite
separately hit out the very same idea. Those
which did not hit it out went to the wall ; and
indeed our existing northern forest flora re-
presents, as it were, a mere fragment of the
original northern vegetation — the few scat-
tered species here and there among a vast
number which managed to adapt themselves
to the new and ungenlal conditions of the
northern zone.

It is to this withdrawal of the green
colouring matter and the other living princi-
ples from the dying leaves that we owe the
tints of autumn, as Mr. Sorby has carefully

2i8 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

and minutely demonstrated. But it is a sug-
gestive and striking fact that hues like these
should exist always unseen in the very struc-
ture of the living plant, ready to be developed
at any time by proper selective or accidental
circumstances. Some of the colours are pro-
duced by the oxidation of the green chloro-
phyll in person ; others are actually present
in the green leaf itself, though completely
masked during the period of vigour by the
preponderance of the natural pigment, which
owes its colour to a due admixture of them
all. When we consider, however, that
colours like these lie ready and waiting in the
tissues of every plant, showing themselves
wherever chlorophyll is not present in its
most active form, alike in the young leaves
or sprouting shoots of spring and in the
dying foliage of autumn, it is easier to under-
stand how the beautiful and brilliant petals of
flowers have been developed by the selective
action of insects. The red and orange and

THE FALL OF THE LEAF. 219

blue pigments were potentially there already ;
the insects' part was only to seize upon and
favour them whenever special circumstances
happened to bring them out into visible
actuality.

«

' ..i

. > "4

220 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

XXII.

THE FALL OF THE YEAR,

Up on the downs to-day the view is dreary
and gloomy enough. A grey mist hangs over
the horizon to seaward, while inland the
hollow combes and rounded shoulders of the
distant chalk range hardly stand out at all
through the foggy air. Sunlight throws up
their varied contour with splendid perspective
depths of black shadow ; but in dull wintry
weather like this, the outline merges into a
single, unbroken leaden-blue line against the
white background of the sky. There can be
no denying that chill October is really upon
us. Yet even now a few patches of colour
still remain — some golden heads of the

THE FALL OF THE YEAR, 221

autumnal hawkbit on the open, some strag-
gling bushes of the dwarf furze upon the
glen-sides, and a mass of rich foxy-brown
bracken among the tumbled and uneven
rockery of the undercliff. The season is not
quite so far advanced here on the south coast
as it was a few days since among the dry
heather-clad hills and yellow autumn woods
of North Wales. Every twenty miles south-
ward tells at this season of the year, and so
the passion-flowers are even now in blossom
down here on the trellis-work of the cottage,
with its southerly aspect, while the trees and
creepers are fast growing leafless among the
windy hills of the north and the midlands.

It was Buflbn, that half-unconscious pre-
decessor of our modern evolutionists, who
first pointed out the true importance of these
zones of climate, from pole to equator, in the
history of life upon the earth. For Buflbn,
with all his contempt for systematic classifica-
tion and for accurate scientific knowledge, was
a man of that wide philosophic grasp and that

222 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

intuitive insight which are often more valuable
after all than any amount of capacity for
remembering dry detail ; and he saw many
points accordingly which were hidden from
the wise and prudent artificial systematists of
his time. Organic life, he remarked, must
have begun at the Poles. For on the surface
of an incandescent planet the Poles would be
the first part to cool down sufficiently to allow
of the conditions under which alone life
becomes possible. This pregnant idea has
since been fully developed by later naturalists.
Not only is it true that life as a whole must
have started at its first beginning from the
Pole, but we now know that all fresh waves
of fauna or flora must in like manner have
set out from the self-same point, and occu-
pied the earth by migration in circumpolar
zones. Moreover, the great centre of all life
was in all probability the North Pole alone,
not the South ; for since Mr. Wallace s
luminous researches on the geographical dis-
tribution of animals, it has become almost

THE FALL OF THE YEAR. 223

certain that our existing continents have
been steadily growing up for a vast period
of time, and that our existing oceans have
been oceans and nothing else ever since the
aqueous vapour of our planet first condensed
and cooled into water. Hence it follows
. that the South Pole has always been isolated
in the midst of an enormous stretch of ocean,
while the North Pole has always been the
point from which the great land masses of
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America have
radiated southward. In both hemispheres
we find the land widening out towards the
North Pole, but tapering away towards the
South ; and we know that South America
and South Africa were till recently isolated
outliers of their respective continents, while
Australia remains an isolated outlier of Asia
to the present day. Thus, every great wave
of animal or plant population must have set
out always from the North Pole, must have
spread southward in concentric circles, and
must have but slowly reached the outlying

224 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

southern extremities. Hence, generally
speaking, we may expect to find the newest
and most modern types in the great northern
continents, and the oldest and most archaic
types in the tapering southern peninsulas and
islands.

The fact is, however, it is now autumn
with the whole of our planet, and the last
great cold spell from which the northern
hemisphere suffered — the glacial epoch — has
somewhat interfered with the literal truth of
this rough generalisation. Climatically speak-
ing, our earth has seen its best days. We
are now growing colder from age to age, and
we may look forward in the distant future to
an absolute winter extending over the whole
globe, when its surface will be as dead and
changeless as that of the moon actually is
before our own eyes. Life, indeed, viewed
cosmically, is but a superficial phenomenon
produced by arrested solar radiation on the
outer crust of a cooling nebula, and it will
disappear some day, from this earth at least,

THE FALL OF THE YEAR. 225

amid the universal chilling of an exhausted
world. Luckily for us, however — or unluckily
if the pessimists will have it so — the winter
has not so far really set in, and we are as yet
only at the premonitory stage of full autumn.
The time is still recent, as astronomers and
geologists reckon distance or nearness, when
the Poles were warm enough to support a
thoroughly tropical type of life. Trees dis-
tantly like those of Java and Brazil, animals
faintly suggesting those of Central Africa and
the Malay Archipelago, then formed the
fauna and flora of the extreme north. But
just as the Poles had been the earliest part to
cool from incandescence into a firm crust, so,
when worse times came, they were the earliest
part to cool from tropical heat to what we
European human beings complacently de-
scribe as temperate, and from temperate again
to arctic. And as life had first developed at
the North Pole, thence to spread southward,
so now the new types of life, adapted to the
altered conditions^ were each first evolved at

Q

226 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

the North Pole, and were each pushed south-
ward one after another, as the cold grew
intenser, in concentric rings, so that the
arctic fauna in one age becomes the parent
of the North European fauna in the next age,
of the Mediterranean fauna in the succeedinof
one, and of the Southern fauna in the epoch
after that again. So long as life remained
possible at the Pole at all, it was almost
absolutely true that the polar plants and
animals represented the most modern and
most highly evolved types at that moment
living upon earth. Spitzbergen, in fact, then
led the very van of progressive evolution.

But since the planetary autumn has
thoroughly set in, this principle has ceased to
be quite true, and has been to some extent
reversed by the occurrence of that great pre-
mature cold spell, the glacial epoch. Towards
the close of the tertiary period, a combination
of astronomical and geological causes set up
a long interval of intense cold in the northern
hemisphere, which made all life impossible,

THE FALL OF THE YEAR. 227

not only at the Pole itself, but even as far
south as London, Berlin, New York, and
Chicago. During that interval, all living
things were necessarily driven towards the
sub-tropical and equatorial regions ; and the
middle of the earth thus became for a while
the seat of the richest and most advanced
fauna and flora. Some seventy or eighty
thousand years since, if we may trust Dr.
Croll, backed by the almost unanimous
opinion of the greatest scientific authorities,
these unfavourable astronomical conditions
ended, and the vast glacial sheet cleared away
from the face of the northern hemisphere, at
least below the latitude of Greenland. But,
as Mr. Wallace believes, the geological con-
ditions remained unaltered ; and so, instead
of the Pole becoming once more habitable, it
still continues to be enveloped in perpetual
snow. From that time forward, the exiled
plants and animals, which had been driven
south by the advancing cold, have begun to
migrate northward once more, and to re-

Q2

228 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

occupy the deserted plains of temperate Asia
and America.

In the eastern hemisphere, however, the
conditions have been unfavourable to their
rapid northward progress. In Asia, the great
central region is occupied by the snowy
mountain ranges of the Himalayas and the
Hindu Kush, and by the high table-land of
Thibet, which cut off the cold Siberian plains
from the rich fauna and flora of the Indian
region ; in Europe, the Mediterranean and
the Caucasus similarly divide us from Africa,
which is itself cut almost in two, biologically
speaking, by the practically lifeless district of
Sahara. Hence it is only in America that
the fauna and flora have been free to make
their way back unimpeded from Carolina and
Georgia to New England and the St.
Lawrence basin. Even here, the re-peopling
has been far from complete ; while in isolated
portions of Europe, like Great Britain, and
still more markedly Ireland, where the fauna
and flora had hardly time to penetrate before

THE FALL OF THE YEAR. 229

the submergence which turned them into
islands, the comparative poverty of Hfe is
very noticeable. Nevertheless, the temperate
types have everywhere driven out the polar
species which preceded them, except on the
very summits of the principal mountains.
Near the top of Mount Washington, the
highest peak in the Eastern States, there
linger even now some few butterflies of a
species which is not found again till we reach
the arctic regions. Their ancestors were
stranded there by the receding glaciers, when
all the rest of their kind were driven north-
wards ; and there alone they have been able
to hold their own against the better adapted
southern kinds which came to occupy the
surrounding country.

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